1. They have nice heads. Heads you can nibble on, steer them by if necessary, cover with kisses. Solo's is so great (probably just because he has less hair) that we can't stop grabbing it and saying, "I love your head!" to which he says, "I'm not! I'm Solomon!" Okay.

2. They put up with a lot. THIS CANNOT BE SAID ENOUGH. They have fluidly adjusted to having power for only ten hours a day, FOR EXAMPLE. We do a lot by candlelight. They love to light candles, (the big kids) they love using flashlights. They make everything more fun. Better.

3. Extension of 2: Recently Kid A and YaYa have become incredibly polite about people talking to them. They say Namaste in response politely, and YaYa even lets people touch her hair. If we are out, it can be twenty times a day. She wants to be so nice, suddenly. She doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I've explained to her that just reaching out and touching her hair is okay, but if they keep on playing with it, she can ease herself away or just ask people to stop. Anyways, it is the sweetest thing to see them becoming these polite people. It can be overwhelming; the amount of people who want to know our names or where we are from or whether our hair is "original" or "duplicate," but they handle it with grace.

4. They love to dance. The dancing that was going on with our Geography Songs when we were doing school the other day was just ridiculously fun. Singing and dancing about Equatorial Africa and the Middle East. How can I not have the best time teaching these kids? Listen. We have rough school days, too. YaYa has a panic button that keeps her from learning sometimes. And Kid A has focus issues. But schooling is like any practice (like meditation or prayer); you have good days and bad days and our good days are like diamonds. But beyond school even, the dancing is hysterical. Imagine walking past a club on the street and having all four of your children break out their best moves. It's awesome.

5. They love each other. With violence, at times. I admit, I sometimes feel that I have a pack of wrestling lemurs, crawling all over each other and tearing the peace and quiet to bits. But I have seen such genuine acts of love from each of them, as they struggle through all the giving that needs to go on with siblings, especially siblings so close in age. I don't think I realized how much giving they do until I went on that trip with only YaYa and saw how different it was for her to have ALL my attention.

6. They love beans. I love having kids who love beans. YaYa loves beans so much that she would write poetry about them, if she could. Lentils, pintos, garbanzos. They love them.

7. Imagination! If you could harness it, it could change the world. They always have something they are pretending. It doesn't stop. The hardest part about it is getting their attention during the midst of a crazy game of pretend. I have to stand there and holler, because they literally can't hear me. It can be dicey, at times, trying to decide whether Leafy's robots are allowed in the animal games. Each person's imagining is so strong that it doesn't leave a ton of room for the other's. I find myself embroiled in these debates about the positioning of pretend lands on pretend maps, whether a certain kind of animal is allowed on a certain kind of island. I enter in enthusiastically, but have to retreat with my arms over my head. The details are too much for me. (You'll be happy to know that in Leafyland, there is a Coffee Island, for grownups.)

8. They are kind to animals. And they know it. They often say, "This dog loves us because we're nice to him and other people aren't." YaYa is kind to everything. She gets heartbroken over a crushed snail, lets ants crawl over her arms (I know!), becomes furious about fly killing.

9. They have a lot of faith in us. It makes us better.

10. They make our games better. If we watch TV, Chinua likes to pretend that he is speaking for the characters, whether they are sharks on Animal Planet, or soccer players, or people on commercials. It's hilarious, and the kids play along and make us laugh. YaYa and Kid A are playing rummy now (yes! rummy players!) and well, I guess I just really want to say that they make life more fun.

Note: People are always mentioning that our kids must be a lot of work. ALL THE TIME. People on the street. "Four kids! You must be tired! A lot of work!" The other day, YaYa asked me, "Are we too much work? Is it hard to have kids if it's such a lot of work?"

Goodness. She's been listening. Well, this is my response. Life is so much richer with them. They make traveling richer for us, fun is better, and the quiet moments? They are a lot more precious.

PREDATORS		CANUCKS
	AT

What a glorious, no, frustrating series to watch. Please end it. Not a good idea to go back to Nashville for a Game 6.  Maybe the Canucks will stop blowing leads. Maybe the Sedins are going to break out. I don't think Ryan Kesler can continually carry this team. Yes he can.

FINISH THEM!

LINKS

-No Jerred Smithson for the Predators in Game 5 (The Province). He took an elbow to the snout from Kesler in Game 4 and was bleeding like a gutted pig. Something more is wrong there. Big loss for the Preds. That's their 3rd line checking center. The pesky dude was averaging 14:18 of ice time and led the team in the faceoff circle (58.3%). Pine-rider JP Dumont draws in.

-Preds frustrated? Weber and Suter wearing out? (The Province)

-"To me he's been like (Hall of Famer) Mark Messier."-Barry Trotz on Ryan Kesler (via TSN). Now Trotz needs a hero. But he'll be holding out for a hero till the end of the night.

-The strengths and weaknesses of Pekka Rinne (On The Forecheck). A must-read.

-The Preds are finished? Kaput? No way! (On The Forecheck).

PROJECTED FORWARDS DRESSED

CANUCKS

Daniel Sedin-Henrik Sedin-Alexandre Burrows

Mason Raymond-Ryan Kesler-Christopher Higgins

Raffi Torres-Maxim Lapierre-Jannik Hansen

Mikael Samuelsson-Cody Hodgson-Tanner Glass

PREDATORS

Martin Erat-David Legwand-Joel Ward

Sergei Kostitsyn-Mike Underwood-Patric Hornqvist

Colin Wilson-Nick Spaling-Jordin Tootoo

JP Dumont-Blake Geoffrion-Matt Halischuk

STARTING GOALTENDERS

Roberto Luongo

#1 / Goalie / Vancouver Canucks

Height: 6-3

Weight: 217

Born: Apr 04, 1979

Profile: Ass-kicker, critic-silencer

Pekka Rinne

#35 / Goalie / Nashville Predators

Height: 6-5

Weight: 207

Born: Nov 03, 1982

Profile: The Pred that worries me the most

WHO IS HOT / COLD

CANUCKS

HOT

-Ryan Kesler: 3 goals and 4 assists in his last 3. The beast has awoken!

-Christian Ehrhoff: 1 goal and 4 assists in his last 2 games.

-Henrik Sedin: 1 goal and 2 assists in Game 4. Finally.

COLD

-Maxim Lapierre: 1 assist in his last 21 games.

-Tanner Glass: 0 points in his last 22.

-Jannik Hansen: 0 points in his last 9. Tertiary scoring? NEED IT.

-Mikael Samuelsson: 1 goal and 2 assists in his last 13.

-Mason Raymond: 0 points in this series.

-Raffi Torres: 0 points in his last 14. Tertiary scoring? NEED IT.

PREDATORS

HOT

-Martin Erat: 3 assists in his last 3 games.

-Nick Spaling: 2 goals and 4 assists in his last 6 games. Impressive kid.

-Joel Ward: 5 goals and 4 assists in his last 9. Dangerous.

-Ryan Suter: 1 goal and 2 assists in his last 3.

-Cody Franson: 1 goal and 1 assist in Game 4.

COLD

INJURIES

CANUCKS

-F Manny Malhotra: eye, out for playoffs

PREDATORS

-F Steve Sullivan: knee.

-F Matthew Lombardi: concussion. Out all season

-F Cal O'Reilly: broken fibula, may return in this series.

-F Marcel Goc: shoulder

-D Francis Boullion: concussion

VIDEO

History Slays The Dragon. You gotta see this:

The KesLORD:

Title of the post brought to you by the Beastie Boys "No Sleep Till Brooklyn":

The image below was created by SteveNux and I had to get it into a preview because it is boss:

I'm still reading Grossman's Life and Fate (see here and here), and I'm here to report on another lexical item that required some interesting research. I was proud of myself for correctly analyzing начканц [nachkants] as начальник канцелярии [nachal'nik kantselyarii, 'chief clerk'] without assistance, but on the very next page I hit матчасть [matchast'] and was lost at sea. The sentence was "Вот уже месяц, как полк вышел из боев, пополнял матчасть, принимал взамен выбывшего летный состав" ['It had already been a month since the division had withdrawn from combat to replenish/restock its matchast' and replace its missing flight personnel']; it was clearly part of the makeup of a military unit, but what? It turns out it's short for материальная часть [material'naya chast'], which means 'equipment, matériel,' which makes sense. And in the course of googling it, I found it's commonly used in the phrase Учи(те) матчасть 'Learn your equipment,' and that led me to the wonderful site Луркоморье, "русский lurkmore"—i.e., a Russian version/equivalent of the English-language site lurkmore.com, which apparently deals with memes among other things. What's wonderful about the Russian site is not just the full explanation of things like the phrase I was researching, but the name, which is a beautiful pun on "lurkmore" and лукоморье [lukomor'e] 'cove, creek,' one of the best-known rare words in Russian because of its strategic presence in one of the best-known lines of Russian poetry, the beginning of Pushkin's Ruslan and Lyudmila: У лукоморья дуб зеленый 'By a cove a green oak' (see the first paragraph of this LH post for some context). This is further proof of the difference between America and Russia: even young Russian snarkmeisters of the type who create and classify internet memes are steeped in their poetic tradition in a way few Americans have been for a couple of generations now.

At any rate, the Луркоморье entry for the phrase not only helpfully equates it (in the appropriate context) to the English RTFM, it mentions that it entered popular culture in part from a 1973 movie «В бой идут одни „старики“» [Only old men go into battle] and it provides a "bearded joke" from WWII: The Germans carry out a raid on an airfield and capture a technician. The Gestapo torture him: "Give us the specifications of the Il-2!" He says "I don't know, leave me alone!" This goes on for a day or two, until the technician manages to escape. When he gets back to his unit, they, of course, start asking him about his experiences. He says, "Guys, learn your equipment! Over there, they just don't stop bitching about it."

'I really wanted to write a chaper in epic verse, because I thought epic verse and PowerPoint in one novel, come on. Irresistible!'

When Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad was first published in the United States, it got great reviews and sank like a stone. The publishers wondered if the title was a problem; what is a "goon squad"? It might be off-putting to women, they thought. Egan despaired. "It felt like a potentially colossal lost opportunity." A year later, Goon Squad is a bestseller, has been bought by HBO for TV adaptation and a few days after my interview with her, went on to win the Pulitzer prize for fiction. "Are you Jennifer Egan?" asks the waitress in the (very booky) part of Brooklyn where we meet for lunch. There is such a thing, says Egan, as over-exposure. "If I was a person observing it I would be, like, when will she stop?"

In person, Egan is slight, modest, at odds perhaps with the force of her prose, which is lit by a casual brilliance and so compacted as to be almost tangible. As well as the Pulitzer, she has won the National Book Award (beating Jonathan Franzen's Freedom), a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and yet, she says, "I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, I'm going to ace this. It's just not who I am."

Goon Squad is Egan's fourth novel. It breaks with the genre of her previous novel, as did the novel before that and the one before that, as is Egan's habit. Every time she starts a new project, she says, she is itching to relieve the exhaustion of the previous one. After her first novel, The Invisible Circus, a coming of age story, she wrote Look At Me, the satirical story of a model who loses her looks in an accident, and then a gothic novel, The Keep. It probably loses her readers. The Keep was enthusiastically received by people whom she suspects won't identify with Goon Squad – which is loosely set around the music industry, although don't let that put you off. Egan is guided only by what interests her at the time of writing. "I'm kind of looking for thrills, honestly. That's what it's about."

The new novel is broken into 13 interrelated stories, each focusing on a character seen out of the corner of one's eye in the previous chapter. If it sounds irksome, it is saved by pace and sheer readability. Egan is so swift and funny, so light on her feet, that her reputation lingers on the borders of chick-lit, which might explain her omission from the Orange prize shortlist in favour of more earnest titles. It's an absurd oversight, although Egan won't, of course, allow it as such. "The only thing I feel bad about is that it would have made my publishers so happy," she says. She is a great fan of Emma Donaghue's novel, Room, the favourite, which, she says, "is seriously good. It may be partly that I'm the mother of two boys, although I'm not generally interested in books that are about motherhood; I run a mile from that kind of thing. But I just found . . . it walloped me. I was in awe of what she pulled off."

Egan's writing habits are shaped by necessity. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, a theatre director, and their two young sons. Before she picks up the boys from school she strives for five to seven pages a day, by hand. "And that can happen really quickly; I can be done with that in an hour or two. But I sometimes spend a lot of time avoiding doing it, taking four hours to do what I could've done in one. I try not to write more than that, even if I'm tempted to, because if I go too far I'm really drained for the next day. I can't do more than seven or maybe eight without jeopardising the rhythm."

The desire to become a writer struck suddenly and without warning when she was a teenage backpacker in the early 1980s, traipsing across Europe, lonely and depressed, missing her family. This was the era of queuing for the public phone box: "There was a kind of intensity to the isolation of travel at that time that's completely gone now. You had to wait in line at a phone place, and then there weren't even answering machines. That feeling of waiting in line, paying for the phone and then not only having no one answer, but not being able to leave a message so that they would never know you called. It's hard to fathom what that disconnection felt like. But I'm actually very grateful for it. Because it was extreme. And that kind of extreme isolation showed me that I wanted to be a writer."

Why?

"I wish I knew the answer. I don't know. I think there was a kind of clarity to being reduced to myself in this extreme way. I was also really scared. I kept having what I think we would now call panic attacks. This would've been the summer of 1981 and I just thought I was flipping out. Somehow in that extreme state, I wrote constantly; harrowing journal pages where I'm narrating my own panic. 'I don't understand why I can't make it stop' – trying to understand what I was scared of." She smiles. "And I suppose the essentialness of writing for me was revealed in that experience." Egan eventually got hold of her mother on the phone, who told her to come home to California, which she did.

She could, I suggest, have written an early version of Eat Pray Love. Egan makes a face. (Reviewing that book for the New York Times, she wrote: "What's missing are the textures and confusion and unfinished business of real life, as if Gilbert were pushing these out of sight so as not to come off as dull or equivocal or downbeat.") She is a big fan of Gilbert's, she says, although not of that book.

Before leaving for Europe, Egan had had thoughts of being a medic, like her grandfather. "I loved the idea of being a doctor – plunging into the lives of different people – but also the investigative aspect of it. I was a sciency kid; I loved chemistry." Medicine fell by the wayside when she developed a squeamishness about blood in her teens. Then she wanted to be an archaeologist. "It was at that time when the Leakeys were making a lot of discoveries and it felt like archaeology was really in the headlines. My fantasy was 'wow, reconstructing lives from previous times using tiny artifacts'." She laughs to acknowledge the greater truth in this. But, "then I payed to go on a dig in summer, and found it to be kind of hot and dusty and not really what I had in mind. I realised that my fantasy had literally nothing to do with the reality."

She returned to southern California at a difficult time; her mother and stepfather had just split up; the house was sold and a lot of her stuff was gone. "I've always felt really sad about that. I'd saved so many things, for years and years. I know it's silly, but, all of my Barbie dolls with all of their clothes, preserved. It had been a terrible situation and they'd sold their house and my mother was in this apartment, and I didn't even want to be out of the room from her. I would call to her from a different room, that's how upset I was. But I recovered fairly quickly and went to college in the fall."

She used experiences from her trip around Europe for her first novel, The Invisible Circus, about a girl whose sister commits suicide on her gap year, and who retraces her steps to find out why. It's the most conventional of her novels. "It's the kind of book that makes some people cry. It's the kind of book that people say to me, gosh, when will you write another book like that?"

The idea for Goon Squad came to her after her reading group got stuck into Proust. It took them about seven years to plough through In Search of Lost Time, during which she became obsessed with how to represent entire lifespans, non-sequentially and in the way people actually experience them, that is as a constant negotiation between reflection and anticipation. Like the best satire, much of what Egan writes has already turned into reality; one of her characters is a hapless PR, employed by a dictator to rehabilitate his image: after the book came out, it was revealed Gaddafi had done something similar. (Public relations, in Egan's landscape, has come to manipulate human behaviour so egregiously as to be considered a branch of particle physics.) And she is experimental. The most arresting part of the novel is the chapter written in PowerPoint, by a teenage girl in the near-future, writing her online journal.

"I had a few chapters that I couldn't make work," she says. "I really wanted to write a chapter in epic verse, because I thought epic verse and PowerPoint in one novel, come on. Irresistible! But the problem is – I'd been reading Don Juan, which is just so fun and rollicking, very postmodern in that 19th-century way, where Byron is interjecting commentary about local events, making little digs at his enemies, then effortlessly flowing back into Don Juan's adventures. I thought, God, if I could do that it would be amazing. Of course, he was one of the greatest poets ever, that's why he could do it. And I'm not a poet at all. I got a couple of stanzas into that one and thought, this is a disaster."

The PowerPoint chapter manages, somehow, to be very moving and only works, she says, because the medium underlines a structural point she was trying to make about brevity: specifically, the awkward, silence-imbued relationship between a boy and his father. It's not merely a gimmick, although it looks startling on the page and I wonder that her publishers didn't protest. Yes, she says: "I thought they might say, no, this is too expensive, or too far out. And I was perfectly prepared to have that chapter be an url." She filed the first draft of the book without that chapter, and only slipped it into the final edit. "I did it sneakily. They were expecting light revisions. But I thought, all I'm going to do is make everyone frightened by telling them I'm writing in PowerPoint. And I was really possessed by the need to make it work." Inevitably, when she sent it to her agent and editor, neither could open the attachment and she had to print it out and fax it to them. She laughs. "They did not follow my instructions. My agent immediately called for technical support."

Partly as a reaction to this, Egan imagines that her next novel will be much more conventional. She's not fully into a new project yet – is at what she calls that "dangerous point" of fending off starting. Most years, she writes a couple of long magazine stories for the New York Times, and the two forms, the insularity of novel-writing, and the external movement of journalism, cross-fertilise, although she is wary of using the journalism as a displacement activity. "I always feel like I don't want to do it, and that it's getting in the way of what I want to do. I used to be able to do both at once when I didn't have kids, because I worked so much, but now I really can't. It feels like a bigger sacrifice, so I don't do quite as much journalism. But the two interact all the time. Being forced out in to the world is huge for me, it really broadens the possiblities of what I can write about."

Egan can accommodate the various roles in her life with relative ease. The difficulty she says is in the transitional moments. "When I first had a child I really had a hard time trying to figure out how it was all going to fit together. Because I felt like, when I was with him, I wanted to be writing and I should be writing. And when I was writing, I felt like I should be with him, and wanted to be with him. So I was unhappy a lot. But over time that conflict seems reduced. I can't quite explain it. They seem to intermingle more easily. It's often just getting from one to the other which is where the discomfort still lies.

"I'll walk to pick them up at school, it's 15-20 minutes, listening to music as I go, and often as I'm walking I'm uncomfortable. Miserable and depressed. But then when I see them I transfer to the other world. And their concerns are so immediate, which I find wonderful. As a writer, I'm not very interested in domesticity. But as a human, it's fantastic, because I find it so freeing. Accomplishing little domestic tasks can really give me satisfaction. I will be thrilled for having worked out some minor logistical problem with our schedule."

She finds publicity onerous. She used to be very bad at public speaking, she says, to the point where even holding the table at a dinner party would make her anxious – "six or seven people all listening to me; I didn't like that feeling of separation from them." This improved over time and she can address an audience, these days, with only occasional trouble, although in a limited way she finds fear can be useful. Working from a position of light pessimism is the thing that drives her, the thing she gets from starting each novel in a totally new genre. After Goon Squad, she is thinking around the possibility of historical fiction, a more straightforward form of storytelling, because "I'm tired of the fragmented approach, and crave a centrality."

Nonetheless, it will be new to her. "In a way, I'm always trying to do something I'm not qualified to do," she says. "So I feel that lack of qualification. And I'm scared. And I have a tendency to think things may not/probably won't work out. That's my basic mindset." It is one that, this week at least, will be difficult for Egan to maintain, although of course it's her job as a novelist to occupy multiple points of view simultaneously. She smiles. "I think the one thing that's changed over time is that I've come to realise, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don't think it will work out, doesn't mean that it actually won't."

When couples are torn apart by divorce or death, the link between children and their grandparents can be broken. Giulia Rhodes meets three women who endure the pain of not seeing their grandchildren

An estimated one million grandparents in Britain are currently denied access to their grandchildren, usually as a result of family breakdown or bereavement. Now, the government is considering making access a legal right. The Family Justice Review, to be published this autumn, may come too late to rebuild many of those broken relationships, and its details are as yet unclear, but it is hoped that it will help to curb the number.

Here two grandparents describe the pain of losing contact with their grandchildren, and a third explains how she eventually rebuilt her relationship with her granddaughters, with the help of the courts.

Sheila Thomas

Sheila, 66, lost contact with her only grandchild, Calvin, now 16, after her son's relationship failed.

The last thing Calvin ever said to me was that he was very lucky because he had three grandmas. He was five, and it was almost 11 years ago. A few days later, I got a letter from his mother's solicitor asking me not to have any more contact with him.

It was a horrendous shock. She was pregnant with her new partner, and they wanted to move away. I suppose she wanted a totally new start.

When she and my son first split up we seemed to muddle along fine. I often looked after Calvin while she was working, and he stayed over sometimes. I was very involved, and I felt that what went on between my son and Calvin's mother was their business. I had my own relationship with my grandson – he brought me so much joy.

After the letter arrived, I went to see a solicitor. He was sure I would be granted a contact order, but explained that I needed to think carefully about the impact on Calvin as well as on myself. He told me that often the opposing parent obstructs the agreement, saying the child is out or ill at the arranged meeting time. The stress and anger of the parent affects the child too. I knew that if that happened it would take its emotional toll on Calvin, and understood that it is very difficult to enforce court orders anyway.

A few years later, I saw another solicitor and he said I should have gone to court. He agreed that I would have been granted contact but in the end I didn't want to risk upsetting Calvin. I didn't know what else was going on at that time for him. I felt I had to put my own heartbreak aside.

About two years ago, I went round to her parents' house. I had always got on well with them and occasionally bumped into them around town. They used to tell me little things about Calvin – that he was doing well at school and lived in a nice house. I went in for coffee and spotted a lovely picture of him. It was so wonderful to see what he looked like because, of course, my photographs were all of a little boy.

After that I did drive to the town where he lives now in the hope of seeing him. Your imagination runs away with you, though. I was watching one boy who looked about the right age and wondering whether it might be Calvin and what he was doing. I wish he knew I was thinking of him.

As he gets older I feel more positive because he might decide to look for his father soon. He is 16 now. I make provision for his future – money for university and so on – but it would be lovely to know what he wanted to do with his life.

Losing Calvin was one of the worst things that has ever happened to me. It felt as if my heart had been ripped out. My other son and his wife can't have children, so in a way I have been robbed of my role as a grandmother, and it is such an instinctive one. I feel we humans live so long because we are supposed to be there to help the next generation. Listening to other people talking about their grandchildren is awful. Those who don't know about Calvin tend to go on and on about every little achievement. I just have to go away and do something else. I get rid of my tears in the shower.

Susan Stamper

Susan, 62, lost contact with the eldest of her nine grandchildren, Laura, now 16, after her son's relationship broke down.

Over the years I have learned to live with not seeing Laura, but there is a huge void in my life. It changed me. It isn't quite like bereavement because you don't have an ending – it's more like a living nightmare.

My son's relationship broke down when Laura was three, and shortly after that her mother just took her away. For about 18 months, we didn't know where they had gone. I was frantic with worry.

When we finally did trace them, my husband and I drove to their new town. We just needed to know where she was. We felt like criminals, which was ridiculous, but by chance we did see her on her way to school. She was five then and we haven't seen her since. She is 16 now.

Laura used to love coming round to our house and she was always very happy with us, but it was such a long time ago she may not remember any of it. The idea that she doesn't know how much we have missed her and love her is very hard.

The worst thing is the total helplessness. You can't even really talk about it much because people don't understand or they glaze over a bit. The Grandparents' Association did put me in touch with some other people in the same situation, and that helped a lot.

I write her a card each birthday, and I keep them all in a file for her. There is a bag upstairs with presents wrapped up from when we used to put things under the tree for her at Christmas. I've stopped sending anything now – her mother said she didn't want us to – but I put money in an account for her instead.

She has missed out on so much. I have five children so there have been weddings, births, christenings, parties. My grandchildren and family are my life really, but I feel Laura's absence very strongly on the big occasions.

My son applied for contact through the courts two years ago, but it didn't work out. I have wondered about trying in my own right but it costs so much money, and I have been out of her life for so long it would be very hard to make a successful case. I pin my hopes on her wanting to find us at some stage instead.

I have to stay positive. If I ever find myself thinking I might never see her again, I put the idea straight out of my mind. Hoping is the way to cope. I think a child has a right to know their extended family and their roots. I know it wouldn't be easy to pick the relationship up with Laura after all this time, but if she comes and looks for us one day, we are ready – and we will be able to show her that we never forgot.

Ann Jones

Ann, 72, lost contact with her only grandchildren Sarah, now 10, and Rosie, eight, after the death of her daughter. She was later granted a court order and re-established contact.

When I first held the girls in my arms I was overwhelmed with unconditional love for them. It was just wonderful. I felt so lucky to see my family growing like that. My daughter, Jenny, used to pop round with them a couple of times a week and I was very involved in their day-to-day lives. Then in 2005, when Sarah was four and Rosie was just two, Jenny died.

My relationship with her husband was always difficult, and my time with the girls was immediately restricted. I picked them up one afternoon a week for a few hours. It did feel very rushed – there was never time to sit and play a game – but the regular visits were so important.

It was a difficult time and they brought so much happiness into the house. Just cuddling up with them was wonderful. They were also a link with my daughter and my memories of her as a little girl.

Things went on like that until 2009 when my son-in-law remarried and moved away. I understood that they needed some time to settle into their new family life, but after a while I asked him when I could see the girls again.

He started to procrastinate and would only communicate by email. He said I couldn't go to his house and that he wouldn't bring them to mine. I told him that I would meet him anywhere he wanted, but he still wouldn't commit to a date. I had already suggested mediation twice to try to improve the situation, but he had refused, so after six months I decided to go to court.

I was determined to see Sarah and Rosie again. I would have moved heaven and earth. It was the most important thing in my life. I also knew I hadn't done anything wrong.

Those 15 months of not seeing the girls were terrible. I looked at pictures of them and my heart ached. I had lost my daughter and my grandchildren.

You find yourself remembering particular moments. For me it was having them wrapped up in a towel after a bath, all warm and cosy on my knee.

I sent them postcards of places we had been to together. I asked them about school and wrote about everyday things. I reminded them I loved them and thought of them all the time. I know they didn't see them all, but I kept photocopies in case they want them one day.

The legal process was stressful but the magistrate ruled in our favour and we now have a court order guaranteeing us one day each half term and a weekend in each of the school holidays. I was a bit apprehensive before the first visit. I was worried about overwhelming them, but I needn't have been. They ran up the path and hugged me so hard I almost fell over. They just didn't stop talking. Their next visit was in early December so we had our own Christmas Day with a tree, dinner and presents.

I feel sad there is so much bad feeling and I did ask my son-in-law in for coffee but he refused. They know he doesn't like me and that is hard, but I keep quiet. You have to bite your tongue. I never talk about him. They love him and I would never interfere in that. I just want what is best for them.

As their grandmother, I can give them space to talk about their mother. They like to hear stories about when she was a little girl and look at photos. I do think they need that background and a contact with that part of their past. In February I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I plan to beat it, but it has made seeing the girls more important than ever.

Last time they came I was watching them in the garden and it just looked so normal. Normal feels wonderful.

Some names have been changed. For more information and advice, visit grandparents-association.org.uk

Indianapolis, Indiana

12:10 P.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you, everybody.  Good to see you.  (Applause.)  Thank you so much.  Thank you, everybody.  Please have a seat.  Thank you.  It is good to be back in Indianapolis. (Applause.)  Hello, Hoosiers!  Sorry about the Pacers.  (Laughter.)  I'm sorry, Mr. Mayor.  (Laughter.)  Give the Mayor a big round of applause.  He’s doing a great job.  (Applause.)

Along with the Mayor, we've got Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood in the house.  Ray -- (applause.)  We've got your own member of Congress, André Carson, here.  (Applause.)  And I want to thank Larry Dewey and everybody here at Allison for their extraordinary hospitality.

It is wonderful to be here.  I just had a chance to see the hybrid systems that you’re working on at the plant.  I love to see high-tech machinery like this.  I stand there and people explain it to me and I pretend like I know what they’re talking about.  (Laughter.)  But it looked outstanding.  (Laughter.)     
What you’re doing here at Allison Transmission is really important.  Today there are more than 3,800 buses using hybrid technology all over the world -– buses that have already saved 15 million gallons of fuel.  And pretty soon, you’ll be expanding this technology to trucks as well.  And that means we’ll have even more vehicles who are using even less oil.  That means more jobs here at Allison.  Last month, you added 50 jobs at this company and I hear that you plan to add another 200 over the next two years.  So we are very proud of that.  We are very happy about that.  (Applause.)  

This is where the American economy is rebuilding, where we are regaining our footing.  We just went through one of the worst recessions in our history, worst in our lifetimes, the worst since the Great Depression.  But this economic momentum that's taking place here at Allison is taking place all across the country.  Today we found out that we added another 268,000 private sector jobs in April.  (Applause.)  So that means over the past 14 months, just in a little bit over a year, we’ve added more than 2 million jobs in the private sector.

Now, we’ve made this progress at a time when our economy has been facing some serious headwinds -- and I don't need to tell you about that.  We've got high gas prices that have been eating away at your paychecks.  And that is a headwind that we've got to confront.  You’ve got the earthquake in Japan that has had an effect on manufacturing here.  So there are always going to be some ups and downs like these as we come out of a recession.  And there will undoubtedly be some more challenges ahead.

But the fact is that we are still making progress, and that proves how resilient the American economy is, and how resilient the American worker is, and that we can take a hit and we can keep on going forward.  That’s exactly what we're doing.  (Applause.)  

Now, despite the good work that's being done in Allison, obviously here in Indiana and all across the country there’s still some folks who are struggling.  And a lot of people are thinking, where are those new jobs going to come from, that pay well, have good benefits, can support a family?  And how do we finally reduce our dependence on oil so that we’re not hostage to high gas prices all the time?

The reason I’m here today is because the answers to these questions are right here at Allison, right here in these vehicles, right here in these transmissions.  This is where the jobs of the future are at.  We’re going to have a lot of jobs in the service sector because we’re a mature economy, but America’s economy is always going to rely on outstanding manufacturing, where we make stuff -- where we’re not just buying stuff overseas, but we’re making stuff here, and we’re selling it to somebody else.  And that's what Allison is all about.  (Applause.)

This is also where a clean energy economy is being built.  This is the kind of company that will make sure that America remains the most prosperous nation in the world.  See, other countries understand this.  We’re in a competition all around the world, and other countries -- Germany, China, South Korea -- they know that clean energy technology is what is going to help spur job creation and economic growth for years to come.

And that's why we’ve got to make sure that we win that competition.  I don't want the new breakthrough technologies and the new manufacturing taking place in China and India.  I want all those new jobs right here in Indiana, right here in the United States of America, with American workers, American know-how, American ingenuity.  (Applause.)

And that's also how we’re going to get gas prices under control.  Now, I confess, it’s been a while since I filled up.  (Laughter.)  Secret Service doesn't let me fill up my motorcade. (Laughter.)  But it hasn’t been that long ago since I watched those numbers scroll up and I know how tough it is.  If you’ve got to drive to work, and you may not be able to afford buying a new car, so you’ve got that old beater that gets you eight miles a gallon, it’s tough.  It is a huge strain on a lot of people.

But if we can transition to new technologies, that's what’s going to make a difference over the long term.  That's how we’re going to meet the goal that I’ve set of reducing the amount of oil that we import by one-third by the middle of the next decade.
We can hit that target.  We can hit that target.

Now, in the short term, we still need to do everything we can to encourage safe and responsible oil production here at home.  In fact, last year, American oil production reached its highest level since 2003.  So I want everybody to remember that if people ask -- because sometimes I get letters from constituencies saying, why aren’t we just drilling more here?  We’re actually producing more oil here than ever.  But the challenge is we’ve only got about 2 to 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world’s oil.  So we can’t just drill our way out of the problem.

If we’re serious about meeting our energy challenge we’re going to have to do more than drill.  And that’s why the real solution is clean, homegrown energy.  The real solution is advanced biofuels -- and there’s a lot of good biofuel work being done here in Indiana.  It means that we’ve got to have natural gas vehicles.  We’ve got a lot of natural gas that can be produced here in the United States of America.  It means making our cars and trucks more energy-efficient, because if we use less oil, that reduces demand; that brings the price down; and you will see the impact at the pump.  That’s what’s going to make a difference and that’s why what you’re doing here is so important.

Now, it turns out even though they don’t let me go to the gas pump, I do have a lot of cars under my jurisdiction, as President.  The federal fleet is enormous, and we’ve already doubled the number of hybrids in the federal fleet.  And I’m directing every agency to make sure that 100 percent of our cars and trucks are fuel-efficient or clean-energy vehicles by 2015.  So you’re going to have a customer, hopefully in the United States government, because we want to make sure -- (applause) -- that we are making clean fuel-efficient cars and trucks.  (Applause.)   

We’ve also launched private sector partnerships with companies like FedEx, UPS, utility companies.  A lot of these companies that have trucks and delivery trucks that are used in urban areas with a lot of stops and starts are perfect for the technology that you’re building.  So we’re forming partnerships to make sure that you’ve got more customers.

And to spur the production of fuel-efficient cars and trucks across the country, we’ve reached an historic agreement with every major auto company.  Thanks to the leadership of Ray LaHood, they’re ramping up the fuel economy of their cars and trucks.  And that will not only save 1.8 billion barrels of oil, it’s going to save you, the average driver, about $3,000 at the pump as cars increasingly get better gas mileage.

And this July, we’re finalizing new fuel-efficiency standards for heavy-duty trucks for the first time in our history.  And that could actually end up saving us -- we were talking about this the other day -- it could end up saving us something like 500 billion barrels of oil, huge amounts of oil, because heavy trucks use so much.

We’re also promoting clean energy technologies in other ways, from investing in hybrid systems like the one Allison is developing for commercial trucks, to championing vehicles that run on clean-burning natural gas, to spurring the creation of next-generation batteries for electric vehicles.

You know, a few years ago, America only produced 2 percent of the world’s advanced batteries.  Those are the batteries that are going into these new electric cars.  Because of the investments that we made in the first two years that I was in office, we’re on track to produce 40 percent of the advanced batteries.  That is going to be a huge boon to American manufacturing.  (Applause.)  That’s an example of a big new industry that we can create right here in the United States of America.   

And to make sure we’re not only investing in clean energy technologies but encouraging people to use these new technologies, I’ve proposed a $7,500 tax rebate for electric vehicles.  So if you do have that old beater that you need to get rid of, and you decide that you’re going to buy a new car, choosing an electric car you can actually get a huge rebate that will save you money at the gas pump, but is also going to save money on your tax returns.  And that will make a big difference.
We should reward also communities that are making it easier for folks to use electric vehicles and leading the way when it comes to clean energy.  And that’s the kind of leadership that Indianapolis is showing.  You’re installing natural gas pumps around town and you’re taking other steps to promote clean energy.  And I hope cities and towns across this country follow in your example.

Of course, these investments in clean energy do cost some money, and we’re going to need to find a way to pay for them.  Part of the cost can be made up by putting an end to the unwarranted subsidies that we are giving oil companies right now through the tax code.  (Applause.)  I want everybody to listen here.  Oil companies over the last five years, through a recession, through ups and downs, the top five oil companies, their profits have ranged between $75 billion and $125 billion.  That's with a B -- not million; billion.  And yet, they still have a tax loophole that is costing taxpayers $4 billion every year.  Now, if you're already paying them at the pump, we don't need to pay them through the tax code.  We do not need to do it. (Applause.)  Especially at a time when we’re scouring every part of the budget to try to figure out how we bring down our deficit and our debt.

Now, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that even if we end these taxpayer subsidies, we’re still going to have more work to do in getting control of our deficit and debt.  And I know that in this difficult fiscal climate, it may be tempting for some people to say let’s stop investing in hybrid technology; let’s stop investing in basic research; let’s stop investing in the infrastructure that's needed to make sure that we can transition to new forms of transportation.  That's the temptation.  But I profoundly disagree with that approach.

If we’re going to win the future, we’ve got to cut out the things we don't need, but still make investments in the things that we do.  That's what you do at home.  If somebody in your family loses a job, if your hours get cut, what do you do?  You may stop going out to a restaurant to eat.  You may decide we’re going to put off buying that new furniture or taking that vacation.  But you’re not going to stop fixing the boiler or the hole in the roof.  You’re not going to stop making sure that you got enough money to help your kids go to school.  Those are the things -- that's like your seed corn.  You don't eat that.

The same is true for the federal government.  We can’t cut investments in clean energy that are going to help us out-innovate and out-compete and help America win the future.  We’re not going to stop making investments that allow plants like this one to find the new ways of doing business in the future.

I want to make sure the federal government is right here with you as a partner with you as you move forward, and we can do it and still get control of our debt and our deficit if we do it smart.

For nearly 100 years this company has made its way forward through ups and through downs, making advances that have transformed everything from buses to planes to tanks.  Jim Allison actually helped start the Indy 500 back in 1909 -- not just to race cars, but to test new racecar components.  And that same spirit of innovation and ingenuity is what I’ve seen in the workers that I talked to today.

And that's why I’m so confident in this country.  That's why I’m so optimistic about our economic future -- because I believe in all of you.  I believe in the American worker, and I believe in American business.  For all the challenges we face, this country is still home to the most entrepreneurial, most industrious, most determined people on the planet.  There is nothing we cannot do so long as we put our mind to it, so long as we keep our eyes on the prize.  (Applause.)

And I’m going to keep on working with you to make sure we do that so long as I have the privilege of being President of the United States.

Thank you, everybody.  God bless you.  God bless the United States of America.  (Applause.)

END
12:28 P.M. EDT

The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has just launched rNews, a consistent, machine-readable way of expressing news metadata in RDFa (a linked data language). This post explains some of the differences between rNews and hNews and why, if you publish news on the web, you ought to be using one or the other.

In a now infamous incident at Cambridge University back in October 1946, mid-way through a seminar, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is said to have threatened the philosopher Karl Popper with a red-hot poker (the exact circumstances and use of the poker are still disputed, 65 years on). The argument? Over whether there are, or are not, such things as philosophical problems. Popper said there were, Wittgenstein said there were only puzzles.

Step into the similarly rarefied world of online publishing languages and, though you might not be threatened with a red-hot poker, someone will almost certainly wave its online equivalent at you -- as we found when we were developing hNews -- a news microformat -- with the Associated Press.

We started, back in 2008, with a problem: Very few online news stories had consistent, machine-readable information about their provenance (i.e. basic stuff like who wrote it, who published it, when it was first published, etc.). This was a problem because without this information -- or metadata -- it was incredibly difficult to differentiate news from other content on the web, or to figure out where news had come from.

Two Solutions to the Problem

We searched about for a solution to the problem, thanks to grants from the Knight and MacArthur Foundations, and found not one but two. The first was microformats -- which are straightforward, open mark-up formats built on existing standards. The second was RDFa, a method of embedding full RDF, the linked data language of the semantic web.

We made a decision to use microformats. We did this for highly pragmatic reasons. We figured that most news organizations (and journalists and bloggers) were not yet ready to make the big leap to linked data. The easier we made it to integrate consistent metadata, we thought, the more likely news organizations were to do it. Our chief concern was less about exactly how people made the provenance of online news more transparent, just that they did it.

The Associated Press came to a similar conclusion, and together we developed hNews. Our pragmatism has so far borne fruit. The hNews microformat has since been integrated in about 1,200 news sites in the U.S. This means that there must now be a hundred-plus million news stories on the web with hNews. And, the AP has based its new news registry business and its forthcoming rights clearinghouse around hNews.

This did not stop some semantic web evangelists from waving their metaphorical red-hot pokers, or from suggesting we were not born of parents in wedlock or other less warm and fuzzy responses.

So, when we learned that the IPTC were launching an equivalent of hNews in RDFa we were over the moon. Hooray! Now people have a choice to mark up their news in microformats or in linked data.

The Ambitious rNews

"Equivalent" is not quite right. rNews is more ambitious than hNews. If hNews is like a ham sandwich then rNews is like a baked Alaska. rNews covers lots of aspects of provenance and content. You can, if you want to mark up additional aspects of news stories, mix-and-match rNews with other RDF ontologies (i.e. different linked data vocabularies). It's also more "correct" than hNews, but as a result more verbose and intrusive. It's a much bigger change to existing HTML pages than hNews. That said, it is, by RDF standards, pretty straightforward. All this makes it a very good alternative way of creating consistent, machine-readable mark-up for news.

The big difference between two is in their complexity. Making a ham sandwich is much simpler and requires less expertise than cooking a baked Alaska. The same goes for hNews and rNews. As a result, my prediction is that rNews will be the format of choice for big news organizations who want to do things fully and properly and are willing to commit the time and resources (like the New York Times -- which was central to the development of rNews). In the same way it will probably suit high end proprietary content management systems. For smaller news organizations, journalists and bloggers, hNews goes a good part of the way there and is much easier to integrate and lighter to use.

In other words, the two complement each other rather well, and ought to provide the foundations for consistent, machine-readable metadata for news.

Pros and Cons of Each Approach

The AP's Stuart Myles was one of the creators of hNews and worked with the IPTC on rNews.

"The fact that hNews and rNews have similar names is no coincidence," Myles told me via email. "To me, microformats and RDFa are two different technical approaches to the same challenge. Each approach has pros and cons and many tools that support one also work with the other."

Evan Sandhaus of the New York Times, one of the original authors of rNews, also emphasizes the compatibility of the two standards: "rNews was designed from the start to provide publishers with many of the same features offered by hNews.  And future versions of the rNews will likely bring the standards into even closer alignment," he told me via email.

Should you care about hNews and rNews? If you publish news on the web then you most certainly should. The arrival of rNews and the continuing take-up of hNews show that metadata is central to the future of digital news. Consistent, machine-readable metadata makes your news easier to find, more distinguishable, more straightforward to check, more programmable, more targetable, and less hard to track. If you are not yet publishing your news with metadata then don't be surprised if someone soon comes at you flailing a red-hot poker.

I have been on a similar product, Seasonale, in the past and I don’t remember if I dealt with any extra pounds as a result, but the whole “birth control causes weight gain” thing is hard to figure out because it’s different for different people. Plus, my gynecologist in college told me that a lot of the anecdotal data on the subject comes from college-aged women, who may be more likely to gain weight (the Freshman 15) right around the same time they start on birth control. This recent Los Angeles Times article claims the same thing: that weight gain from birth control, for the majority of women, is a myth. Some points that it makes:

• “Women who take the pills tend to be younger and unmarried with no children. Because they aren’t used to the weight fluctuations that pregnancy and hormonal changes cause, they tend to feel and notice the slight weight gain more”
• In one doctor’s experience, “one-third of women who start taking oral contraceptives quit within the first few months because of side effects, the chief one being weight gain — or the perception of it.”
• “For about 10% of women, those with polycystic ovary disease, birth control pills are a one-way ticket to weight loss — treating the underlying hormonal imbalance.”
• Another doc says, “Whether on oral contraceptives or not, women during their child-bearing years gain on average 10 pounds a decade.”

It sounds like your gyno might have a different opinion, but I just wanted to offer an opposing view, since it seems like there’s some disagreement, even within the medical community, about this subject. And regardless of what you decide, don’t let weight gain scare you off from trying new birth control, if you stop loving your current prescription. Every method is going to come with different side effects and advantages. If you’re looking to decrease the frequency or heaviness of your period, you might also want to look into the Mirena IUD. It’s less hormonal than the typical pill and can reduce or eliminate your period altogether.

More burning questions? Ask Lena.

I rarely go into the weeds when some clown who clearly doesn't watch this team feels obliged to pretend he does, but I'm not letting Roy MacGregor walk away unscathed. 

First off, the picture should tell you everything about the guy. No where in that profile do I see "hockey", "NHL" or "sports" as an accolade; I do see one his articles that fawns over Luongo in the first round which is a bit strange considering his latest contribution to the halls of journalistic excellence.

Let's set the record straight.

Given that there is a country song for every occasion, perhaps the Vancouver Canucks should consider a little Garth Brooks before each game – and take to heart that chorus that tells them to "Stand straight, walk proud, have a little faith. …"

What a delightful little colloquialism. By that same token there is a thrash polka christian song for every occasion. But since the opponent is Nashville and they're nothing more than a city full of country music slaves, let's open with that.

The Canucks spent so much of this week denying that there is any issue over confidence when it came to holding leads that, unfortunately, the talk only served to confirm that there must be.

Permit me to rephrase: "We kept asking you guys about your confidence since that's the shitty narrative we created, so because I saw a third period lead evaporate, that is proof positive you're all a bunch of fragile spider monkeys with sticks. [STICKS FINGERS IN EARS, SINGS LOUDLY TO SELF, WRITES ANOTHER CHILDREN'S BOOK]

They get a lead; they can’t hold it.

In eleven playoff games they've "held the lead" and won in regulation five times. That's 45%, so let's crucify them for needing OT twice? Chicago needed the OT three times last year and, as we know, they sure sucked. But don't let any of this stop your asinine theme.

They might win the game, but every time they play they lose a little more faith in their position as not only the best team in the National Hockey League, but the most effective third-period team the regular season produced.

You may be the only one around still thinking the regular season means something in May. The Canucks personnel, our plucky coach and every other team still playing are on record saying the exact opposite. I don't see them hauling the Presidents' Trophy around with them do you? In fact if the regular season was 100% applicable to now, why are the Capitals golfing? (Helpful hint Roy: The Caps play in red and are usually found in Washington D.C.).

They had a .927 winning percentage in games in which they led in the third period. They scored 100 third-period goals – tops in the NHL.

But that was then and this is now. And this is the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Ah ha, look at you correcting yourself one paragraph later. That, sir, deserves a snackpack of applesauce.

Twice this week against the Nashville Predators the Canucks let third-period leads slip away – both tying goals absolute groaners – and had to settle matters in overtime, losing once and winning once.

It happened again Thursday night when, up 2-1 heading into the third, yet another groaner – even if somewhat less egregious than the previous two – found its way between Roberto Luongo’s pads to tie a game in the final frame.

Saturday's goal was a gift from God, a shot from behind the net which found the right bounces. On Tuesday the game tying goal was a result of Ward causing havoc in front and the puck bouncing off Alberts' skate. Fransen's shot last night was a laser no one in the arena realized went in, the refs included. So of the three equalizers in the past week, one was a "groaner" and two were legit hockey plays that any goalie would have had trouble with. Follow up question: would Edler's goal last night qualify as "groaner" for Rinne? What goal doesn't qualify as a groaner?

The victory was gratifying, as Vancouver has been by far the better team, but the late goal simply raised, once again, that old bugaboo concerning Luongo – can he win the games that truly matter?

He's won two game sevens in his career, backstopped the only sweep this team has had in its history and is playing just as well - if not better - than that Vezina-nominated chap at the other end of the ice, sitting one win away from a conference final. If the Cup is the only thing that matters, there are precious few goalies in that club to say they've won "the games that truly matter." It's a team sport Roy: your goalie can't win the whole damn thing anymore (see, for example, the NY Rangers). Perhaps a better question for another mind numbing piece of yours would be examining how the team failed in front of him during the last two years against Chicago and again in two games during the first round, but that's already been examined by authors and bloggers who watch this team. So if you want to whip out the mallet and beat the shit out of this horse, please do it away from the keyboard. Won't you please think of the children, your normal audience?

It is the albatross around his neck, the gorilla on his back, the animal inside his head. It is a cruel knock that he has never been allowed to shed – not even with a gold-medal victory in last year’s Olympics, when Sidney Crosby’s goal allowed the thousands of Luongo doubters to take their first breath since the puck dropped in overtime.

"A cruel knock" from the guy writing the drive-by hit piece? What's your encore: lighting a house on fire just to bemoan condemning the building?

Such is the reality of ridiculous expectations. Such is the hidden price of a 12-year contract that makes you, at $10- million (U.S.) a year, the game’s highest-paid player. Such is what happens when you are 32, considered one of the game’s premier goaltenders – a finalist for the Vézina Trophy during the regular season – and you have been unable to deliver a championship.

I can only assume you have the same compelling material ripping Ovechkin (the previous most expensive player in hockey) a new one, yes? Wait, you don't? That's right, I just had to explain to you where the Capitals play.

Perhaps it is because Luongo is so good, as well as so big, that his errors also seem larger than life. When a weak goal goes in, it looks … awful.

...opps, fell to the floor and was spasming under my desk. Now he's "so big"? Have you been hanging out with Pierre McGuire?

Luongo’s teammates are acutely aware that he is both extremely talented and at times inexplicably vulnerable. When Kesler was on the United States team that met Canada in the Olympic final, he spoke openly of knowing that Luongo "has a couple of areas that I think we can exploit – and I’m sure not going to keep any secrets."

Dusting off another classic? If you'd like to point to any quote where anyone claimed Luongo was impenetrable, feel free to share the insight. Otherwise every goalie has their weaknesses. Kesler would have been an idiot not to share those secrets and with teammates like Backes and Kane, believe me they didn't need insider tips to beat Luongo.

Luongo struggled in the Olympics against Slovakia – allowing a harmless backhander from an impossible angle to begin a comeback that almost succeeded – but did win the game that counted. It has not, however, counted for enough, as the questions remain and his teammates are forced, day after day, to say any problem lies with the team, not the goaltender.

That's quite the segue: against Slovakia on an Olympic team to the second round of the playoffs a year later. Completely identical situations. Also is it even remotely possible that when the teammates suggest problems lie with the team that they're - put the applesauce down for a second Roy, I don't want you spilling - telling the truth? I know it doesn't fit with your story, but I guess neither does being objective or thorough.

Of the late goals that slipped into the Vancouver net and sent games into overtime, Vigneault argued that "both were tipped in our net.

"Those are hockey plays, lucky breaks."

Or unlucky, if you happen to be the one wearing the largest pads on the team.

Gotcha. Luongo isn't allowed to let in another goal the rest of his life because, should he dare to look human, it confirms he is also unlucky which Roy has now plainly redefined as being Roberto Luongo.

It just seems, Daniel Sedin said before Thursday’s Game 4 against the Predators, "you’re up one goal, there’s one shot, one rebound, and they tie the game."

It doesn’t matter how they go in – off skates, off bodies, off rebounds – the goalie wears it.

And will wear it until he proves, once and for all, that he can win the Big One.

Besides exposing he doesn't watch Canucks games, Roy is also proving he doesn't watch the Preds either. I'm far from a Nashville expert, but most people who follow the sport know their resiliency is one of their assets. They grind you down and force mistakes. But in Roy's world it's more important to assess blame down to the individual while ignoring the basic team chemistry of playoff hockey. I'm sorry Nashville, all those goals you scored on Vancouver? It's not the result of hard work or opportunistic play, it's allllll because our goalie is "unlucky."

What's a shame is Roy could have taken the title of his piece - "Spurts of vulnerability" - and shown how every team is guilty of this, from Vancouver & Washington to Phoenix, Los Angeles or Pittsburgh. That no matter how you made the dance, hockey is a game of ebbs and flows; a dramatic comedy that surges high and plummets low, from one shift to the next, fueled by the madness of the line-juggling coaches, the skill of the players and, yes, good old luck. Instead he ran off with a tired narrative that was barely relevant a few years ago. Anyone who can read a stat sheet or simply watch a game could have told him that.

Perhaps Roy should stick to children's stories where his audience won't haul his ass to task when he careens off the road into the absurd.

Over the course of the next week or so, Mitchell Maurer and I are releasing a study on the relative productivity of NBA Draft lottery prospects and the draft pick slots associated with those picks for the past decade. For the sake of simplicity and ease of inter-positional player comparisons, we opted to use John Hollinger's Player Efficiency Rating (PER) as our primary vehicle to evaluate player performance in our study. Our ultimate goal is to help demystify the process of reasonably projecting the careers of draft lottery talents. We hope the study will be entertaining, informative, and most of all, the start of a great conversation on the draft, so please think of PER as a convenient tool or a proxy for performance evaluation rather than our final word on the true value of each player.

Our study will be released in three parts. Part One (this article) will introduce PER and raise the most salient issues regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the metric. Part Two will introduce our methodology by analyzing the productivity of the current Bucks roster. Finally, our study will culminate in the massive Part Three NBA Draft Lottery analysis that applies the information and methodology set forth in the initial two posts. Enjoy!

In order to get the most out of our study it is important to understand what PER stat is trying to tell you and what PER cannot tell you. I have compiled the five most important things you need to understand about the strengths and weaknesses of PER as a performance evaluation metric, so let's get the discussion started.

(1) PER takes the events recorded in a traditional box score and attempts to assign value to each of these events to summarize a player’s statistical accomplishments in a single number. In Hollinger’s own words, PER accounts for "positive accomplishments such as field goals, free throws, 3-pointers, assists, rebounds, blocks and steals, and negative ones such as missed shots, turnovers and personal fouls." Although the actual formula is exceedingly complex, the basic point is that the value of these events are informed by Hollinger’s instincts (and probably a proprietary regression model) and then ultimately weighted against corresponding league averages.

(2) The resulting PER value is calculated on a per-minute basis and adjusted for team and league pace (the number of possessions used per game), purportedly allowing for apples to apples comparisons between players with otherwise unequal opportunities. Hollinger normalizes PER values such that the league average in PER is always 15. From there the values can vary significantly. For example, among players with at least 500 minutes in 2009-10, the highest rating was LeBron James (31.19), and the lowest rating was Quinton Ross (3.04). Here is an informal and un-official Wikipedia guide to interpreting PER values:

35.0 - A Year For the Ages

30.0 - Runaway MVP Candidate

27.5 - Strong MVP Candidate

25.0 - Weak MVP Candidate

22.5 - Bona fide All-Star

20.0 - Borderline All-Star

18.0 - Solid 2nd option

16.5 - 3rd Banana

15.0 - Pretty good player

13.0 - In the rotation

11.0 - Scrounging for minutes

9.0 - Definitely renting

5.0 - The Next Stop: D-League

(3) PER values below 15 are not necessarily bad, because sheer durability often has value in its own right in professional sports. For those of you baseball fans out there familiar with the concept of replacement level (in the case of basketball, it is the level of talent readily available to be signed out of the D-league), Hollinger has done an additional multi-season analysis of players who played less than 500 minutes in a season and determined positional replacement levels according to PER. The league average replacement level PER is 11.0, and the position-specific values are:

11.0 for PGs

10.5 for SGs/SFs

11.5 for PFs

10.6 for Cs

(4) PER most certainly does not value defensive contributions fully or properly, because it only takes inputs from traditional box scores (which only record blocks and steals). Hollinger has admitted this is a significant limitation of his model, saying this:

"Bear in mind that this rating is not the final, once-and-for-all answer for a player's accomplishments during the season. This is especially true for players such as Bruce Bowen and Trenton Hassell who are defensive specialists but don't get many blocks or steals… What PER can do, however, is summarize a player's statistical accomplishments in a single number. That allows us to unify the disparate data on each player we try to track in our heads so that we can move on to evaluating what might be missing from the stats."

Therefore, please keep in mind that PER is largely an offensive metric meant to be the start of a discussion on player value, not the final arbiter on the subject. My impression from the comments I excerpted above is that after seeing a player’s PER rating, further discussion and analysis is not merely recommended, it is mandatory. If you like PER for measuring offense, one way to make more complete observations is to use the information available at http://www.82games.com/. The site provides data on the PER of a player’s positional counterpart during their time on the court, so you can get a rough idea of how effective a player is on limiting the offensive production of opponents. However, this counterpart metric is also far from perfect, as it makes an initial assumption in assigning positions to players on the court (ex: who is the Center when Ilyasova and Sanders are on the floor without Bogut or Gooden?), it makes an additional assumption that a PG guards the opposing PG (and so forth), and it cannot account for zone defensive assignments, switches on picks, or the impact of help defense. A small consolation is that the site also provides other valuable counterpart stats such as eFG% and the percentage of shots the counterpart takes close to the hoop.

(5) There is a debate about whether PER inherently rewards shooting. This criticism has been made by David Berri, the author of Wages of Wins, who said the following:

"Hollinger argues that each two point field goal made is worth about 1.65 points. A three point field goal made is worth 2.65 points. A missed field goal, though, costs a team 0.72 points. Given these values, with a bit of math we can show that a player will break even on his two point field goal attempts if he hits on 30.4% of these shots. On three pointers the break-even point is 21.4%. If a player exceeds these thresholds, and virtually every NBA player does so with respect to two-point shots, the more he shoots the higher his value in PERs. So a player can be an inefficient scorer and simply inflate his value by taking a large number of shots."

This feature of PER should not simply be dismissed off hand. Berri believes that PER inherently rewards shooting, and based on those low thresholds the players with higher usage percentage (an estimate of the percentage of team possessions used by a player while he was on the floor) benefit merely from taking more shots than their teammates. For a more detailed study on the issue, check this out.

However, Hollinger has a pretty convincing counter-argument...by which I mean he says Berri has no idea what he is talking about.

Berri leads off with a huge misunderstanding of PER -- that the credits and debits it gives for making and missing shots equate to a "break-even" shooting mark of 30.4% on 2-point shots. He made this assumption because he forgot that PER is calibrated against the rest of the league at the end of the formula.

Actually, if we took a player was completely average in every other respect for the 2006-07 season -- rebounds, free throws, assists, turnovers, etc. -- and gave him a league-average rate of shots, and all of them were 2-pointers, and he shot 30.4%, he'd end up with a PER of 7.18. As long-time PER fans know, that would make him considerably worse than nearly every player in the league.

To end up with a league-average PER of 15,00, the actual break-even mark in this case is 48.5%, which is exactly what the league average is on 2-point shots this season.

So Hollinger says that his PER formula is actually calibrated against the rest of the league to create a break-even point exactly at the actual league average each season. I am inclined to agree with Hollinger, seeing as he created the formula and certainly understands its intricacies better than Berri. It seems pretty clear to me that Hollinger has a reasonable response to Berri, but I felt I should present the debate to you and let you make up your own mind because some people have sided with Berri on this issue, and even the Wikipedia page for PER presents Berri's argument as a valid criticism in a section called "Problems with PER." 

In any case, the question ultimately raised by this final point is how shot-creation should be valued, but I must emphasize that PER is unequipped to answer this question in any meaningful way. A player who creates a decent shot from a desired spot on the court while the shot clock is ticking down to zero has helped his team by doing so, but PER cannot and does not know when shots are taken in such a context. PER gets information exclusively from traditional box scores, but they make no record of context for shots. Box scores do not care when a player gets off a good shot at the end of the shot clock, or when a player mistakenly passes up a layup for a sub-optimal fade away jumper, or even when a player throws up a desperation half-court heave at the end of the half. Because box scores never record this information, PER simply cannot take the context of a shot into account.

Thanks for reading, make sure to check back for parts two and three of our PERfect Draft Study (we're pretty punny, aren't we?), and ignore these five points about PER at your own risk.

What is it about the rotating Sunset Foot Clinic podiatry sign on West Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, situated in a no man's land between Silver Lake and Echo Park, that so fascinates people—particularly artists and writers? On one side of the sign is a sad foot on crutches (in "biological turmoil," as LA Weekly once put it); on the other side is a happy foot in sneakers giving a thumbs-up. It's absolute dreck, but perhaps so bad it's good—even inspirational. As Laura Miller points out on Salon.com, Jonathan Lethem wrote about the sign in his 2007 novel You Don't Love Me Yet. The main character, who can see the sign from her apartment window, makes decisions based on which side of it she sees at a glance. Now, the sign has apparently shown up in David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel The Pale King, too. He relocates it to Chicago and gives it similar power over some students, who see it from their dorm room and make decisions based on it. The musician Beck also supposedly has been obsessed with it. Lethem wonderfully calls the sign "a non-Internet meme," locally famous if not exactly loved. "When I was researching my novel," he tells Miller, "I visited L.A., and at one point I was driving down Sunset Boulevard with someone who'd agreed to be a source on the area. I laid eyes on the sign, and asked about it, and that's when the Happy Foot/Sad Foot lore was unfolded for me." Silent fortune-teller or just shitty advertisement, the sign clearly holds some kind of sway. Lethem, for one, thinks other writers need to embrace it in their work, too. "It would be nice to see it become universal," he says. 

Filed under: Holidays, Opinions

Jaquelyn Mitchard and her daughter. Credit: Jaquelyn Mitchard

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This question is from a Group Therapy post in our TrèsSugar Community. Add your advice in the comments!

I am 28 and planning a wedding to the man of my dreams. We have been together almost two years, living together for one, and have the relationship I always dreamed of but never thought I would have. I have always had problems with depression and low self-esteem and it is showing itself in my relationship now as insecurity.

I trust my fiancé and have no problem with us doing things separately, we just got back from separate vacations (I went on a road trip with my sister and he went to the West Coast to visit his two best friends). I was looking on Facebook today, and his friend posted some pictures and one of my fiance's ex-flings had commented on a picture of him saying how great he looked and how much she missed all of them.

My fiancé isn't on Facebook so it's not like she was even talking directly to him but it still made me feel awful and I just don't understand why. I am a little touchy about this girl in particular because she has tried to reach out to him a lot since we have been together and he cheated on his last girlfriend with her. I just wish I could let it go and stop feeling insecure about his past. My best friend told me that insecurity somehow magically disappears when you get married, but I have a hard time believing that.

I think part of my problem is that I have always dated crappy guys in the past, and now that I am with someone who treats me well I almost feel like I don't deserve it. I constantly find myself comparing myself to his ex girlfriends and wondering if he is still thinking about them. I really want to move past this issue so I can be completely comfortable and happy in this relationship . . . can anyone relate? What can I do? I have been working out a lot and eating well lately to get in shape for the wedding and I think that is helping some. I have friends that I hang out with on my own and hobbies that I enjoy, it's really just a mental thing that has always been with me. Any advice would be welcome!

Have a dilemma of your own? Post it anonymously to Group Therapy for advice, and check out what else is happening in the TrèsSugar Community.

The President: OH NO MFer, don’t start crying like a bitch now, you started this shit. Your eyes my shine and you teeth my grin, but I’m tired of you diggin’ in my ass one mo again... you and all your friends. Hug me, love me, or leave me the fu*k alone, because I’m the HNIC up in this motherfu*ker.

Well my friends, that’s what the president would like to say. Yeah, he’d like to pull out his Johnson and slap some folks with it. See, as I said, some people are never going to change regardless of what we say or what names we call them. So we might as well lead with a good left hook and an uppercut while they keep on jabbing. Yeah, fuck’em and the Confederate horses they rode in on.

After more than six months, hundreds of witnesses and millions of words in evidence, the coroner is today delivering verdicts on the victims of the deadly 2005 terrorist attacks on London. What have we learned from the inquests?

1. The line between life and death is very thin, and very arbitrary

Patrick Barnes and Philip Beer travelled together from Borehamwood every morning, but on 7 July 2005, the service was slow and they got to the Piccadilly line 15 minutes later than usual. They were standing face to face, holding on to a bar, when Barnes felt as if he had been hit on the head with a brick. It was a moment or two until he came round to hear the screams. Barnes shouted through the smoke for his friend, whom he couldn't see: "Are we going to die?" "No," said Beer, "everything's going to be fine."

In the smoke and confusion, Barnes was able to stagger from the scene, but he couldn't find his friend. Beer, wedged tightly against him when the bomb exploded, died in the carriage.

Again and again, the shattering testimonies of the witnesses to 7 July have underlined how very thin the line was between life and death, and the apparent arbitrariness of who survived and who did not.

Catherine al-Wafai, sitting five feet from the suicide bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan on the Edgware Road train, walked off the tube in a daze and made it all the way home, wearing only one shoe. Philip Duckworth, standing next to Shehzad Tanweer near Aldgate, was blown from the carriage and staggered from the scene, with just a small piece of the bomber's shin bone in his eye. Others who were further away from the bomb sites, however, did not make it.

In some cases survival depended on the chance intervention of others. Martine Wright and Andrew Brown both lost legs in the Aldgate bomb but their lives were saved because they were sitting near the carriage door, and because Elizabeth Kenworthy, an off-duty police officer who climbed into the carriage, was able to reach them, tie tourniquets around their limbs and keep them calm. The young man rolling on the floor a little further into the carriage appeared much less badly injured, so she was "very, very upset" to learn that Richard Ellery had died.

Others made it thanks to reserves of will that they probably had no idea they had. Philip Patsalos, a university professor, recalled feeling his leg after the King's Cross blast and finding it "rather mushy". "I started thinking to myself, I've got to stay alive, I'm going to die here." He concentrated on counting his breaths in and out, keeping himself calm. When the emergency services arrived, he was so still they walked past him, thinking that he too was dead.

"I said, 'Sir, help me, I'm dying,'" he told the inquests. "Did he respond?" asked the lawyer. "Yes."

2. 7 July was a global atrocity

For much of the past five months, a number of news organisations have reported the 7 July inquest largely in their London news bulletins, as if only the capital had been attacked. But it is not merely the fact that this was the biggest terrorist assault in British history, barring Lockerbie, that makes 7/7 an atrocity against the entire country – and much further afield. The timing and location of the bombs, attacking commuters at rush hour on London's socially levelling transport network, meant that they killed both bankers and students, cleaners and consultants, many from far beyond the capital.

Ellery, a shop assistant at Jessops in Ipswich, was visiting for a one-day course. Michael "Stan" Brewster worked for Derbyshire county council and was in the capital for a conference. Jennifer Nicholson commuted from Reading, James Adams from Peterborough, Adrian Johnson from Nottinghamshire. Marie Hartley died on a day trip from Lancashire.

The attacks also acutely illustrated London's status as a global microcosm in which, with brutal irony, different cultures habitually live, work and travel together in peace, side by side. The dead of 7 July had origins in at least 23 countries: Montserrat and Mauritius, Kenya and Poland, Sri Lanka and New Zealand and Ghana.

Sam Ly's family had had fled Vietnam for Australia as refugees in the 1970s; he had travelled to London on a working holiday. Atique Sharifi's parents were killed by the Taliban when he was a child; he came to Britain in 2002, unable to speak any English, to earn money to support his younger sister in Afghanistan. Gladys Wundowa had worked in a salt mine as a child in her native Ghana to raise money for her siblings; she became a maid for a Lebanese family,  moved to London, found work as a cleaner and had embarked on a course in housing management when she died. Two thousand people attended her funeral in her home village in Ghana.

It wasn't only London that mourned.

3. Crises turn some people into heroes

How would you react if the railway carriage or bus in which you were travelling was destroyed by a suicide bomb? Would you flee, mindful of your family and your own survival? Would you dare walk down a tube tunnel towards a loud bang, not knowing whether the line's electric current was off? Would you climb into a smoke-filled carriage filled with scenes of unspeakable carnage? For those following the inquests, those questions have been unspoken but ever present.

It is not easy to predict what makes a hero. Certainly many of those who risked their lives to help on 7 July had experience, or some professional training, in trauma situations. Adrian Heili, whose intervention almost certainly helped to save the life of Danny Biddle, who lost both legs, an eye and his spleen in the Edgware Road blast, had served with the Austrian army in Kosovo. Group Captain Craig Staniforth, an RAF wing commander, smashed a window in his undamaged train, which had pulled up alongside the bombed Edgware Road carriage, and swung from the handrails to climb into the wreckage to help desperately injured survivors. He talked to John Tulloch, who had serious head injuries, telling him about his daughter's university applications in a desperate bid to stop him going to sleep.

Others, however, were not professionals. Events organiser Steven Desborough was being evacuated from the Aldgate train, when he turned – "I don't know why" – and climbed into the wrecked carriage. He cradled 24-year-old Carrie Taylor in the moments before she died.

"There were people that walked on and I don't blame them," Desborough was careful to say, and of course many of those who left may have calculated, rightly, that they were unable to help and would only be in the way. Others were in profound shock. It is difficult to explain the impulse that prompted a number of passengers at Aldgate to pause to take photographs of the scene even as Dr Gerardine Quaghebeur was fighting to save lives; they may not now be able to explain it themselves. But given the scale of the atrocity, and the challenges facing the emergency services in arriving at the bomb sites, there is no question that some, perhaps many, passengers' lives were saved directly because of the actions of their fellow commuters.

"I don't think you can sum up my debt of gratitude," Wright has said of Kenworthy. "People like that don't come around that often, and if it wasn't for her I would be dead."

4. The bombers were ordinary, silly young men, as well as evil murderers

Shortly before 1am on 6 July, Jermaine Lindsay, who the following day would murder 26 people on the Piccadilly line train, received a text message from Khan, the plot's ringleader. The message, though menacing in retrospect, is almost comical in its content. The pair, their texts showed, had taken to referring to each other as characters from the 1980s television programme The A Team, and riffing on tough guy BA Baracus's fear of flying.

"Yo BA big nackers," texted Khan, "you on dat plane or wat. fool."

Lindsay replied: "I ain't getting on no plane fool."

Khan may not have known at the time that Lindsay, who was married with a young child, had invited his 17-year-old girlfriend to spend the evening of 6 July in a hotel with him in London, where he promised her they would "spend some quality time together and . . . have some bad boy room service".

The pair had met at a boxing club in their home town of Aylesbury after he winked at her. They had been on a handful of dates, going for a drive to a nearby lake in his Fiat Brava, or to Milton Keynes to wander round a shopping centre. On that occasion he asked her if she knew how to get hold of a gun, since he was going to London with some mates "to teach some people a lesson".

Throughout the inquest a vivid and unsettling picture has emerged of the four bombers, who – as well as being murderous plotters directed by phonecalls from an as-yet unidentified terrorist mastermind in Pakistan – were also banal, sometimes silly, often very ordinary young men.

Tanweer also had a secret girlfriend whom he had met as a teenager, and courted by taking for late-night drives in his car. She knew of his obsession with cricket and jiu-jitsu, but thought he wasn't particularly religious. They had moved apart but stayed in contact, and got together again in early 2005. She felt he loved her, she said, and they made plans for the future, though she was puzzled by the blond tones in the hair on his head and arms – in fact, they had been bleached by the hydrogen peroxide he had been preparing in the bomb factory. The night before the bombings he played cricket with friends in a nearby park.

Khan, too, was a complicated character, greatly respected in the primary school where he was a learning mentor, though teachers had expressed concerns about his hardline views. The man regarded as a father figure was at the same time using his position to try to convert children as young as 11 to his brand of radical Islam.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the inquests heard, when he was still a young teenager, Hasib Hussain had passed a note to his fellow school pupils which read: "You're next."

Hussain, 18 when he died, had told his teachers that he wanted to go to university, but dropped out of school a week before it was due to finish at the end of June 2005. A week after that he murdered 13 people on the number 30 bus.

5. Though many individuals were heroic, the emergency response fell short

PC Dave Hill, normally employed as a diplomatic protection officer for the Metropolitan police, was driving with colleagues along the Thames when they heard reports of unexplained explosions at Edgware Road. They raced to the scene where Hill entered the tunnel and climbed into the mangled carriage – "because I was there". The officer, who wept while recalling the scenes he had witnessed, may have directly saved a number of lives through his actions; he was far from alone among emergency-service professionals in acting without a second thought to save others.

But, however inspiring the individual acts of heroism preformed by police officers, firefighters and paramedics, the uncomfortable truth is that the emergency services' response to 7 July was hampered by delays, communication failures, tactical confusion and a jobsworth adherence to protocol that at times defied common sense.

Again and again, survivors spoke of the appalling wait for rescuers, even as they felt themselves slipping ever closer to death. Fire crews did not arrive at Edgware Road until an hour after the attacks. The first paramedic on the scene called urgently for ambulances; he learned later that ambulances from two stations nearby had not been dispatched. Paramedics intended for Russell Square were sent to the wrong location, meaning they also arrived almost an hour after the attack.

Firefighters arrived at King's Cross station at 9.13am but did not go to the scene of the blast until 9.42am because of communication protocols. Police and firefighters were forced to use runners between tunnels and station concourses because their radio system at the time did not work underground.

Most worrying, perhaps, was what emerged at the inquest about the "Gold" command centre at London Ambulance Service headquarters. This was a scene of barely contained chaos, in which staff could not log on to computers, messages were scribbled on pieces of paper and subsequently lost, and a single operator was handling every 999 call and radio message relating to the four bomb sites. Three hours after the first attacks, the inquest heard, those in charge of the ambulance response were still unclear about how many bombs had exploded and where. Ambulances were not even dispatched to Tavistock Square, scene of the bus bomb, until 52 minutes after the blast.

The ambulance service was also forced to admit that it "did not provide a complete picture" to a London Assembly inquiry in 2006 into the emergency response, giving an account which suggested a speedier and more efficient response than had actually taken place. "There was no intent to deceive," insisted an ambulance spokesman.

6. We may never know how much MI5 knew before July 7

One of the most dramatic images to emerge from the inquests was not an image of a bomb scene, but a grainy, black-and-white surveillance photograph of Aldgate bomber Tanweer, which MI5 sent to US secret services in the months before the attacks to be shown to a key al-Qaida informant. The informant, Mohammed Junaid Babar, had not identified the image as being significant, it emerged in evidence – perhaps unsurprisingly since the original, which very clearly showed the bomber with Mohammed Sidique Khan, had been cropped so badly as to render Tanweer unrecognisable and cut out Khan altogether. Babar had been involved in training Khan in a terrorist camp in Afghanistan.

MI5 had no explanation for the poor quality of the image. "One of my children," tartly noted inquest counsel Hugo Keith, "could have done a better job."

Witness G, the security service spokesman giving evidence anonymously, acknowledged in court that MI5 had allowed a committee of MPs to be misled over its classification of suspects, and had not told the MPs about the original, good-quality picture.

But if the spokesman, under cross-examination, did shed some light on MI5's involvement, to many of the bereaved families his evidence was distinguished more by what it did not reveal. It was known before the inquest, for example, that Khan came onto MI5's radar on at least eight occasions before the bombings, dating back as early as 2001. The witness cited limited resources, unsophisticated computer systems, even Khan's common name, as explanations of why the dots had not been joined. Repeatedly, he said the service had improved its systems since the attacks and would be unlikely to miss such connections again. But he did not elaborate how and why.

At one point, almost as an aside, Witness G told the court that he was confident Khan could have been identified as a trained jihadist in March 2005, four months before the bombings, had agents chosen to investigate a major lead. They did not, he said, for a "proportionate and reasonable" reason. However, he was unable to disclose what that was, he said, "for national security reasons".

7. Inquests have their limits

After a process of more than six months, during which more than 300 people have given evidence in person and a futher 200 by statement, 1,173 pieces of evidence have been disclosed and at least 16 separate legal teams have had their say, all involved will hope that the coroner will have made significant strides towards uncovering the full story of 7 July.

But however admirable, in the minds of many bereaved families, Lady Justice Hallett's management of the inquest process has been, questions are certain to remain even after she delivers her verdicts. Legal rules tightly circumscribe the powers of coroners, whose principal role, of course, is to rule on cause of death. It is not yet absolutely certain how much scope she will consider she has under "rule 43" to make recommendations to prevent further deaths.

Some of the bereaved families believe that the end of the inquest should represent the close of the period of inquiry. But others have pressing questions that they insist still have to be answered. A number of family members feel that the security services were allowed to sidestep important questions during the inquest process, and that the witness who gave evidence on MI5's behalf was not pushed by the coroner or her barrister to give full answers.

Some relatives question Witness G's assertion that the failure to follow up intelligence about the 7 July bombers was due to limited resources, or question why Babar, who remains the only person to be convicted in relation to the bombings, served only four years in a US prison before being released.

Some years ago lawyers representing survivors and the bereaved families launched legal action to force the government to hold an independent inquiry into the attacks. Those proceedings were stayed while the inquest process was ongoing; they could be reactivated, dependent on the coroner's findings and potential recommendations. It may not be over yet.

My guys are great! When PASS started accepting abstract submissions for their Summit (in October this year), some of the LobsterPot employees immediately started looking into ideas for talks they could do. We rate communication as one of our key values at LobsterPot, and all my staff are keen presenters.

Roger Noble was at the PASS Summit with me last year, and has since spoken at both the Adelaide SQL Server User Group and Adelaide SharePoint User Group. Considering the work he’s done in data visualisation with PivotViewer over the past year, he was keen to be able to submit a session on that. This technology is seriously cool stuff – quite a few of our clients have been very interested in it and are now using PivotViewer to get at their data in new ways. You can see examples of Roger’s work at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au

Get even more from PivotViewer (Roger Noble)

With the release of the Silverlight PivotViewer control from Microsoft in June 2010 we saw the beginning of a new direction for data visualisation and interactivity, allowing data to be browsed and filtered in ways that highlighted information that could have easily been missed. This session will show you how to take the PivotViewer control and enhance it even further to provide even more ways to display your data, including placing information on maps, and showing extra information in the PivotViewer tiles according to the zoom level. From sourcing data from PowerPivot and SharePoint 2010, using Visual Studio 2010 to add new functionality and improvements in future versions this session will show the range of ways that PivotViewer can effectively be used in your organisation.

Like most of the team, Ashley Sewell has been doing a bunch of work with clients implementing cubes and reports. The talk he’s put in reflects a very common emotion that he gets from clients when they first start talking about Business Intelligence. They want to know that they’re not just getting their data in a different format, but that they’re going to be able to reach into the data themselves and realise that ‘Analysis’ aspect of SSAS. Ashley used to be tertiary lecturer, and understands the importance of giving presentations that are useful as well as at an appropriate technical level. This talk will be excellent, and I really hope it gets picked.

So you've got a Cube. What's Next? (Ashley Sewell)

Did you ever get to the end of an Analysis Services session thinking "Cubes sound great but what can I show the analysts and execs back at work to woo them?". If your answer is yes then this session is for you. You will be taken through some of the Business Intelligence reporting and dashboarding available using a combination of PerformancePoint Services 2010 and Reporting Services 2008 R2 with particular emphasis on combining the best of each offering to maximise the impact of your dashboards. You can expect to leave this session with a deep enough understanding (and a list of gotchas) to enable you to create your own dashboards and data visualizations that bring the data within your cube to life on the web.

As expected, I’ve put a few submissions – a pre-conference seminar and two regular sessions.

The pre-con is an enhanced version of the one I did at SQLBits 7. In that, I go through a bunch of T-SQL queries that could have been fixed using T-SQL that most people aren’t aware of. For example – many people would shy away from something like ORDER BY MAX(OrderDate) DESC, but if you understand what’s going on there, when it’s good and when it’s bad, then it can be just fine. This pre-con got excellent feedback at SQLBits, and I think it will please PASS Summit delegates as well.

Fixing Queries With Advanced T-SQL Constructs (Rob Farley)

Have you inherited queries that are not your own, and are finding that performance isn’t so great? Removing cursors in favour of set-based queries is useful, but even set-based queries can perform poorly. Understanding the impact that various constructs can have on a query plan could be key to resolving many of these issues. In this seminar, irrepressible SQL MVP Rob Farley will take a look at some real-life queries and take the audience through examples of constructs that can have significant effects on tuning. This will include complex nested joins, join simplification, procedural functions, SARGability v residuality with predicates, better execution plan reading, start-up parameters, force hints, complex sorting, ORs, effective Dynamic SQL, GROUP BY v DISTINCT, unique indexes, temporary tables, APPLY considerations, and more. You'll discover profoundness in things you thought you knew, and you'll even see when a covering index that returns a single row can be a bad thing. This will be a day spent in Management Studio, not PowerPoint. If you want to know how to persuade the Query Optimizer to do a better job of running your query, this day is for you. The examples will apply to a variety of versions, with most of it being useful even in a SQL 2005 environment.

Another talk that I’ve done in the past is one called “Understanding SARGability (to make your queries run faster)”. In fact, last year this talk was a ‘stand-by’ for the PASS Summit. I also gave it at SQLBits 7, with Brent Ozar (@BrentO) and Buck Woody (@BuckWoody) heckling me from the back. Brent tweeted “Okay, wow, @robfarley is a seriously good presenter”, and although he got my Twitter handle wrong (it’s @rob_farley), I was very flattered. It’s one of my second-favourite tweets still.

Over recent times, I’ve found that people really don’t seem to understand the significance of having predicates fall into the category of “Residual”. I wrote about it recently, and was quite interested to see some of the reactions that people had when they talked about it with me. Jack Li wrote a post last week about a query which took longer than expected because a Hash Match was putting a lot of data into a single bucket. This is a common problem that gets missed, because of the impact of having the selective predicate treated as residual. I’m going to write more posts on that in the coming weeks, and a lot of that will be covered in one of the talks I’ve submitted this year. Residualiciousness isn’t a real word, but I figure that shouldn’t stop me.

Joins, SARGability and the Evils of Residualiciousness (Rob Farley)

You wouldn't believe how often people just aren't using their indexes effectively, whether it be searching for data, or joining tables. Quite often, this comes down to predicates becoming residual. Yes, residuality is a problem, and once a predicate has become residualicious, you may as well be scanning instead of seeking. There’s so much more to SARGability than people think, and people can often miss out on significant performance benefits by not appreciating this – particularly with new and improved query hints becoming available in SQL 2008 R2 SP1 and Denali. SARGable means Search ARGument Able and relates to the ability to search through an index for a value. Unfortunately many database professionals don’t really understand it – especially in regard to joins – leading to queries which don’t run as well as they should. In this talk, you'll learn how to tell whether a predicate is being used correctly, and to evaluate what's really going on in your Seek or Join. You'll even learn to use new features in SQL 2008 R2 SP1 and Denali to affect the residuality of your predicates. This is a talk involving lots of demos, showing plenty of queries and execution plans.

The other talk I’ve submitted was inspired by a conversation with my friend Jamie Thomson (@jamiet), who unfortunately won’t be at the PASS Summit this year (he does have an excellent reason though). I happened to mention something which I considered an important consideration about queries used for SSIS, and he told me I had to write a blog post about it. I eventually did, and it got me thinking about a bunch of things that SSIS Tuning Talks (like those that Jamie gives) which are very relevant to tuning T-SQL, but yet almost never get mentioned by standard talks. Some of them get covered in the pre-con seminar too, and I’m sure I’ll have to get blog posts written on some of these things over coming months.

Tuning T-SQL Using Lessons Learned From SSIS (Rob Farley)

We see presentations telling us how to tune T-SQL, looking at things like how a covering index can help avoid an expensive lookup, and the importance of set-based thinking. But there can be a lot more to finding bottlenecks in an execution plan, and there are significant parallels with the kind of concerns we have when tuning SSIS Data Flows. This session will look at some of the things that SSIS gurus explain when in looking at how to make SSIS run faster, and draw strong parallels to things that many query tuners don't realise. If only they paid attention to the SSIS world! There will be a lot of examples in this session, explaining what's happening in query plans and the ways that you can persuade your queries to run more like your SSIS packages, and vice-versa.

Looking at the long list of abstract submissions this year (and right now there’s about three hours for more to come in), I think it’s going to be a great event. With buzz around Denali and a stronger community than ever, I think it’s going to be huge.

There will be handful of LobsterPot employees there, and I hope you will be too!

@rob_farley

Zimbabwean newcomer Nyasha Matonhodze sauntered into our offices with confidence, poise, and maturity that belies her 16 years of age. It's her statuesque grace (she's five foot eleven) and sweet-as-pie personality that's made her the new favorite of fashion editor Katie Grand, who kick-started Matonhodze's career during her debut spring 2011 season when she booked the young model for Louis Vuitton, Emanuel Ungaro, and Loewe — all shows that Grand styles. After those key catwalk sightings, Matonhodze shot spreads for Harper's Bazaar, Teen Vogue, and V magazine. Better yet, Matonhodze is now rumored to front the upcoming Louis Vuitton campaign, shot by Steven Meisel and, of course, styled by Grand.

Tell us a little about your childhood.
I was born in Zimbabwe and raised by my grandmother in a very cultural, traditional household. It's much different than the British culture where my mom lived. I moved to England when I was 8, so I do still have memories of Zimbabwe; falling asleep in the sand, bathing outside, the warmth of the sun, and just the way of living. Moving to England, I saw their perspective on Africa and what they think it's like, and it's completely the opposite. I went back to Zimbabwe three years ago and it's so lovely; they're happy with who they are and their traditions. I love going back home.

How did you get discovered?
My discovery wasn't a discovery. At 14, my mum and my stepdad went into Elite Models to see if I could actually model. Since I was 12, I was tall and thin so I would always get the whole "you should be a model," but I never really developed a serious interest about it until America's Next Top Model. Seriously, that’s when it all changed for me. Everything I wanted was pretty much based off that show. I went into this career thinking I could be a model, but I never thought I'd actually become one. Once I signed with Elite, I was entered into the Elite Model Look competition, where I became a finalist. As soon as I turned 16, I walked for Jonathan Saunders.

You've appeared in spreads for Harper's Bazaar and Teen Vogue, what do you make of it? Do you recognize yourself?
I find it difficult to see myself and think that I'm a model. I feel blessed and honored to keep getting that next step in my career. I've met amazing people that keep supporting me and pushing me further and further. It's like a dream, no matter how good I do; it's still so surreal for me.

A little birdie told us you shot for Louis Vuitton with Steven Meisel, can you confirm?
I'm going to surprise you. But I flew into New York for a job with Steven Meisel. Working with Steven is a dream because we all saw how he helped to launch Naomi Campbell's career, and just having your name next to his is incredible. Especially at age 16, I was so excited that I touched the roof when I got the job. I danced on the table, jumped on my bed, and was screaming from excitement. I must say that Katie Grand has to be one of the best people I've ever worked with, and I hope that I never stop working with her; she's genius.

Who are some of your best model friends?
Ajak. Usually you have to try hard to make friends, but with her, we found a comfort zone and just clicked instantly. She's talkative and bubbly, kind of the opposite of me. I adore her.

Let's play favorites, what's your favorite:
Music: I love soul and gospel music. Music affects people's moods. If you’re going to listen to loud, angry music, you might want to go punch somebody. I like to feel more grounded, earthy.
Books: The Bible because not only does it tell people how good they are, but what we can do for others.
Film: Sister Act II It's such a classic!
Artist: I love photography. I really liked working with Jason Kibbler and Daniel Jackson.
Foods: African foods like sada, especially if my aunts make it. But I also love seafood, and Chinese food with all their intricate spices.

Tell us a secret.
I'm goofy. Models are often thought to be these glamorous creatures, but I don't think I'm so glamorous with me sitting on my bum eating Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream at home.

What's the last thing you bought?
Well, I didn't really buy this, but I got an awesome trade from Malandrino: a navy jumpsuit, a V-top, and a little cute leather jacket.

What's your most favorite and least favorite feature about yourself?
My least favorite feature are my ears; they're so small! For positive, though, a lot of people tell me I have a lot of compassion for others. I care a lot about people and when I help others, God blesses me with other things. What I hate is seeing a person who doesn't appreciate themselves. Of course I have my insecurities; we all do, so I try my best to make people confident in who they are.

What scares you?
Oh my gosh, spiders. I have a little brother who's 12, and every time I see one I make him come over with his sneakers to squash them. He actually used to pick them in his palm and set them outside, and I would always tell him to just squash them. Spiders are just so creepy.

Describe your style.
Plain, but bold. I love prints: leopard or any animal print. If I'm wearing black, I want a little bit of pop to my outfit.

Life motto?
Morally, I think one should be nice to everyone. There's no reason for anyone to feel like they're on top of the world.

I'm sitting here talking to you and I can't believe you're only 16-years-old, as you seem incredibly mature for your age. Are you really 16?
[Laughs] Thank you. I think most of my wisdom comes from my dad and my mum. My dad always taught me the Christian way of life. And for my mother, she was a single mother at 18 who moved to London without knowing anyone. She's always worked hard and seeing her overcome so much in life has been an inspiration for me. She's so successful now, and I want to be like her.

Tell us something about modeling most people don't know.
If you're not strong-minded, modeling can knock your confidence quite harshly. Every day you're judged on your look, and more so today you're judged on your personality. With that said, a lot of us are 15 or 16 years old, so some girls could really take the criticism personally. What we have to understand is that there's not something wrong with us per se, we just aren't a right fit with the client.

If you could change one thing about the industry, what would it be?
I'd have to say the media's perspective on modeling. They always make it seem as if it's an easy task, like models don't have to work hard — I'd like to change that. I want people to see the real side of modeling, and not just the glamorous.

Lastly, any goals in modeling?
Enjoy it.

Model Profile: Nyasha Matonhodze

Explore other rising stars (plus all the big names) in our extensive Model Manual, featuring runway pics, glamorous editorials, model bios, career timelines, and more.

Read more posts by James Lim

Filed Under: model tracker, katie grand, louis vuitton, marilyn agency, nyasha matonhodze, slideshow, teen vogue

Lindsay LohanSo our most favorite outlaw Lindsay Lohan showed up for her first day of court-mandated community service at the Los Angeles Downtown Women's Center yesterday -- wearing short shorts and a sheer top without a bra. What? Did you expect something else? A lady's business suit? Oh, come now ... At least, she's toting the legal kinda of Coke along this time. Am I right? Baby steps, people, baby steps ...

So before I start in on my snarky mommish judgment of Ms. Lohan, let it be known that yes, I am just jealous of Lohan's ability to go braless in the first place -- since I cannot so much as blink my eyes braless without some discomfort. So yeah, the criticism you're about to hear is totally ripe with JEALOUSY. Alright? Okay.

So about the exposed nipples you brought to your first day of community service, Lindsay ...

Can't you just, for once, prove me and the whole world wrong about you? I've cynically watched all your public claims to do better next time and to "stay focused." Of course, while I'm rolling my eyes at your promises, I'm totally waiting for you to shock me, choose a better path, and then be all "IN YOUR FACE, SHERI!" But alas, you don't.

No, instead, you show up in a sheer top to serve your community. This isn't a nightclub, Lindsay. Come on!

In the end, I know you're just being you, Lindsay. You can't stop breaking the law, chasing trouble, or wearing inappropriate clothes in court or to your community service commitments. It's just not in you. But I'll never give up hope, Lindsay. I won't! Call me co-dependent. Call me stupid. But I can't stop holding out hope for you, girl. You're just like the reckless teen-aged daughter I never had -- or wanted ...

Does Lindsay Lohan's community services bralessness surprise you?

Image via SplashNews

Pierre McGuire is a fairly polarizing figure in hockey media. While he undoubtedly has experience as an NHL scout and coach, as well as some inside connections, he's prone to hyperbolic statements about whatever team he happens to be covering at the time, and never owning up when he's caught dead wrong. In fact, usually when McGuire's hyperbolic narratives are shown to be wrong, he claims he said the exact opposite at some point or another and was right all along. The best part is, he's probably not lying, because he changes his entire outlook on hockey depending entirely on who he's talking to.

While Pierre certainly has his fans, and I'm not one of them, I do sometimes enjoy listening to him on The Team990's 'Melnick in the Afternoon', as at times he can be very insightful about the game. However after listening to his borderline tirade the day after the Canadiens were eliminated from the playoffs this year, I think it's high time to take him down a notch. The clip is here; the one from April 28th if you fancy listening to it for context.

It's been fairly obvious for the better part of the last decade that Pierre McGuire is quite bitter about his services never being requested by the Montreal Canadiens organization, this vitriol becoming even more clear when the man who fired him in Ottawa was named general manager of the Habs last year. This inherent lack of professionalism in his commentary is further worsened by the fact that he's a huge Habs fan, and isn't able separate that from his commentary.

Franchise goaltender: Carey Price. Pass

Elite puck moving defenseman: P.K. Subban. Pass

Big stopping defensemen (what? I assume he means elite defensive defenseman): He sights Markov, but says basically the Habs won't get that from Markov again so there's a hole there. Questionable? McGuire says: Fail

Two elite centers: Pierre claims that Montreal has zero elite centers, yet cites Dave Bolland and Patrick Sharp (a natural RW) as elites. Now I don't consider any center on the Canadiens elite, but I don't think anyone in the world considers Dave Bolland to be a better NHL player than Tomas Plekanec. Maybe Dave Bolland's mom, and I think Sharp and Plekanec are very similar players. So if they count, Plekanec counts. Yet Pierre says: Fail x2

Power forward: McGuire states boldly that Montreal does not have a power forward anywhere in the organization. I guess he forgot that we have a budding one, he just had his neck broken in March is all. McGuire says Fail

Specialist (what? I've never heard this term pertaining to hockey before): Pierre says Gionta and Plekanec are both in this made up category that no one has ever heard of before. Pass

So overall Pierre McGuire gives the Canadiens a 3/7 mark on his incredibly simplified recipe for success in the NHL. Personally, looking over this list I don't think McGuire cares about the truth at all, he just wants to bash Gauthier. Looking at the Canadiens roster, excluding upcoming UFAs for the purposes of only looking at guaranteed players for next year, I would rank the Habs much differently, I'll look only at those spots where Pierre has given a failing grade:

Elite defensive defenseman: I'm assuming this is what McGuire actually meant, because if he meant what he literally said then the Habs had that this year in Gill. Hal is great but I wouldn't call him elite because of his limitations at even strength. Josh Gorges however, is easily an elite defensive defenseman. He's one of the best penalty killers in the NHL, has above average skating, plays above his size and occasionally chips in offensively. Pass

Two elite centers: By Mcguire's criteria, Plekanec fits here. He's an ideal #2 center of course, but here is where Pierre is correct, the Habs need more depth at center. Luckily Lars Eller was acquired in the trade for Jaroslav Halak last year that McGuire hated so much, and as evidenced by his play in the playoffs he could very well be a couple seasons from achieving this goal. 1 Pass, 1 Fail

Power forward: I'm not sure what Pierre was smoking on April 28th to forget Max Pacioretty, but this is perhaps the player I'm most excited to see don the CH next season. The characteristics that define a power forward are speed, strength, physicality, no fear and scoring ability. Max showed all of this last year, and at just 21 he's only going to get better. Ideally a power forward should contribute 30 goals and 50 points at the least, both marks Pacioretty was on pace for had he played all of the 2010-11 season. Pass

So it seems Montreal is only in need of an elite #1 center by McGuire's own criteria, something they've been looking for since Damphousse was ousted. This need ended up leading to the worst move of Bob Gainey's tenure as GM, acquiring Scott Gomez for a package including Ryan McDonagh, the only real loss of the trade, but a big one.

Even without a true #1 center however, depth at that position in the Canadiens organization is stronger than it has been in a long time. Plekanec, Gomez, Eller and David Desharnais are possibly good enough as a group to overcome the lack of a true #1, especially if Gomez has a bounce back year.

Surprisingly enough though, McGuire doesn't stop there in his rant, further offering Pierre Gauthier some advice on what to do with Scott Gomez:

"I'd try to trade him. I'd try to trade him. I'd try to package him with a draft pick and try to trade him."

"You've got to, you've got to find a way to package him and move him. I don't see how you can have him back and start the season in Montreal with him on your team with the money he's making. I just don't know how you can do it."

Yet another brilliant idea by the experienced NHL general manager rabid fan bombastic commentator. Much like many fans wanted to do with Carey Price last season, McGuire is suggesting the Canadiens deal Gomez at the absolute lowest his value will ever be. At this moment he's coming off the worst year of his career, and still making more money than his cap hit, automatically ruling out most teams in the NHL as potential trade partners. From a guy who's been whining about maximizing potential return on Halak for the last 10 months, he doesn't seem to be very consistent here. Not to mention he's suggesting the Canadiens lose an asset in a high round pick in order to jettison Gomez, and you're still left with a gaping hole on your second line.

After Melnick suggests the Canadiens need to get younger on defense, McGuire accuses the management of the Canadiens of cruising along using band-aid solutions. I suppose that's why the entire team was blown up 2 years ago.

Pierre then continues on, going through the Eastern Conference claiming that various teams are primed to get better, while insinuating that Montreal is not on that track. McGuire then goes on to make the same prediction he made last season, that if the Canadiens don't make big moves they'll miss the playoffs next season, again slandering Canadiens management saying he doesn't know if they'll be honest with the fans, and oddly enough predicting another Gomez-like trade. As he continues he claims that Canadiens management is so smug that they don't understand their own weaknesses.

Detailing why McGuire doesn't think the Canadiens will make the playoffs next year, it seems to come down to a lack of young "difference makers" in their top prospects group, citing players like John Tavares and Jeff Skinner, specifically who will make the team next year. Well Pierre, last time I checked the Canadiens have made the playoffs 4 years straight, so they haven't exactly had top 10 picks in the draft like Tavares (#1) or Skinner (#7). Yet despite this lack of high end picks the Canadiens still have a sparkling group from the 2007 draft class on the team next season in Subban, Eller, Pacioretty and Yannick Weber. Last I checked you don't need a high impact rookie coming onto the team every season to make a difference, you need young players to step up, and the Canadiens have that in spades.

When McGuire asks Melnick who will be a difference maker for the Habs, Mitch states that "We see who their prospects are, their prospects are pretty much 3rd and 4th line guys", to which McGuire responds; "Correct".

Really? That's odd because the next day Pierre went off about how great Chris Kreider is, and how he "ripped up and shredded college hockey the last two years." For those who don't know who Kreider is, he's an American center for Boston College who the Rangers took one spot after Louis Leblanc in 2009. Here are his stats:

I wasn't aware that 47 points in 70 games was ripping up and shredding a league. Now I don't want to diminish Chris Kreider, he's an excellent hockey player and he'll be good for the Rangers, but he's not Sidney Crosby. Still though, it's too bad our inept management passed him over for that 3rd or 4th liner Louis Leblanc, right? Let's look at his stats:

Hm, for a 3rd or 4th liner who'll never make an impact like Chris Kreider will, it's kind of weird that Leblanc was able to put up the same 23 points as a rookie in the NCAA while playing 7 fewer games, struggling with a broken wrist for half the season, and playing on a far inferior team. Damn, what a mistake by Gauthier!

In that same audio clip (April 29th now) McGuire also went on about how great the recently swept Washington Capitals would be with the young Dmitri Orlov possibly making the team next season. I've seen Orlov play, he's very good, and he played well in his 25 games with Hershey this season (including playoffs), but the comparison McGuire makes is so hyperbolic you have to question his sanity. He says Orlov will be the next Sergei Zubov, and to "trust me on that". I'm sorry Mr. McGuire, but I don't think I'll trust you that the 20th defensemen taken in the 2009 NHL Entry Draft will be an equal to perhaps the greatest Russian defenseman of all time. I especially won't "trust you on that" before Orlov plays a single minute in the NHL. Sergei Zubov recorded 771 points in 1068 NHL games, and another 117 points in 164 playoff games. This is a potential Hall of Famer we're talking about.

He also claims that Orlov is better than any prospect the Canadiens have, but that all depends on what you consider a prospect. Hockey's Future doesn't rate Orlov in it's top 40 prospects around the league, and on his player page they have him ranked as a 7.0 C, a good prospect that could be very good, but not great. According to Hockey's Future Montreal currently has 4 prospects who project to be as good or better players than Orlov; Danny Kristo, Louis Leblanc, Jarred Tinordi, and Yannick Weber. Combine this with the fact that in the last calendar year Montreal has graduated Lars Eller, Max Pacioretty, P.K. Subban, Benoit Pouliot, Tom Pyatt and David Desharnais, it's amazing we're still ranked in the middle of the pack as far as prospect depth goes.

In reality; the real one, not Pierre McGuire's delusional version, the Canadiens actually have very solid prospect depth. In fact they would likely rank a bit higher if Hockey's Future didn't criminally underrate the recently acquired Michael Bournival. In many ways Michael Bournival actually outplayed Louis Leblanc this season, and he's a year younger. However Leblanc being further developed and having a higher profile will lead to him getting the top billing among Habs prospects. Look for Bournival to up his profile in a big way next year for Canada's World Junior team, he was the final cut this year.

With the likely departures of Roman Hamrlik and Jeff Halpern this summer, and Spacek the year after that, this team is getting younger every year, contrary to the opinion of McGuire and many so-called pundits out there, who make snap judgments based on recent events, and don't ever bother to look at issues in-depth.

"It's deeply rooted at this point," Bynum said of the team's problems. "It's obvious we have trust issues. Unless we come out and discuss it, then nothing is going to really change. We have to come in and have a good session [Thursday], which I believe we will, and correct things. If not, we'll go home."

"I think it's quite obvious for anyone who is watching the games," Bynum said. "There's hesitation on passes, defensively not being there for your teammate because he wasn't there for you before, stuff like that."

"I stopped helping my teammates because my guys kept getting lobs and easy plays, so I succumbed to not helping my teammates, so that's something I can easily fix."

That's something we've talked about for the whole season -- that that's the only way we're going to win a championship, is that you know offensively and defensively we trust the system. We trust what we're trying to run. Defensively we're working hard, we're helping each other, we're talking to each other. I didn't hear what [Bynum] said, but I can't assume that he said we have a problem on our team. I just think he's expressing what all of us feel a little bit right now, that we have to stay together and remain strong as a team and not start to point fingers at each other.

Cleggster worries about what he'll do now that the Lib Dems have been certified as useless

Huhne: It's pretty bloody underhand to accuse the Lib Dems of breaking their promises in the Tory No campaign.

Cameron: Have I? I'm terribly sorry, old boy. I had nothing to do with it. All's fair in love and politics!

Clegg: And I do love you, Daddy.

Osborne: In any case, you have broken your promises, Chrissy Wissy.

Huhne: So have the Tories.

Osborne: Don't you talk to me like that chav Paxo. And we haven't broken our promises. We promised to fuck up the country and that's what we're doing.

The country: Fair point.

Cameron: Which is why we need to keep the first-past-the-post system. And why we need the Cleggster to campaign against it.

Clegg: I do so like being useful, Daddy.

Cameron: You are Cleggster.

Huhne: He's just using you, Clegg.

Clegg: He's not. He loves me. But even if he is, I don't care. At least I'm getting some attention. You've no idea how it feels to have the country either ignore you or treat you like a joke.

Huhne: Have I said how angry I am?

Cameron: That's great anger. I almost felt it was real. The Lib Dem voters will love the fact you're finally complaining I'm shafting you. But you can stop now the elections are over.

Huhne: Phew! I couldn't have kept it up much longer. Thank God I can go back to being pointless.

Clegg: Me too.

The country: You always were.

Clegg: What shall I do now the Lib Dems have been officially certified as useless, Daddy?

Cameron: You can concentrate on trying to get rid of some of your puppy fat. You've grown a second chin. Lay off the biccies.

Clegg: It's hard when I'm so lonely, Daddy. Give me a hug.

Cameron: Not now, Cleggster. Ozzy'll get jealous. Excuse me while I call Barack Obama . . . Is that Barry? Good to hear you. Congrats on slotting Osama bin Laden old boy. I bet you got a hell of a stiffy watching the hit on TV.

Obama: I should say. My cock has grown a couple of inches bigger.

Cameron: That's bloody marvellous.

Hague: You rang, my liege?

Cameron: Too bloody right, Baldy. I want you to organise a hit squad to take out Gaddafi.

Hague: Is that the SAS? I've got a mission for you in Venezuela.

Thou Shalt Not...

It's the off-season and as thoughts turn to playing golf and gardening all over Columbus, we continue to be hit with news about college football's shady side. Since the BSU faithful have probably had a few good laughs at OSU's expense over the past few weeks, it's somewhat satisfying to see them accused of "lack of institutional control" by the NCAA. Still, looking over the allegations, it causes my objective side to ask "is this really all that bad?" 

Boise State president Bob Kustra called the violations a "misunderstanding", and while a certain amount of skepticism must accompany that comment, I have a bit of sympathy. After all, my favorite football program is currently being put through the NCAA grinder and the full consequences won't be revealed for some time. I'm not quite ready to go Bosworth about the whole thing, but I have to admit that the byzantine NCAA rulebook sometimes leaves me baffled.

It is not difficult to understand some of these investigations. For example, the Colorado stripper scandal back in 2004 was a no-brainer. It does not take a legal expert or a compliance officer to know that a college cannot hire strippers to help with football recruiting. And receiving benefits from a potential agent seems like an obvious no-no. But it's not always that easy.

Going over all of this in my mind, I thought that I would try to see the logic in all of these rules and apply some kind of moral standard to it. Why is it bad to give room and board to a recruit on a visit? Why is it bad to sell memorabilia or trade it for services? What about other things that are not violations but smack of cheating or "gaming the system"? Is obeying the letter of the law while doing everything to win good enough, or should there be some higher goal that a program should shoot for?

Let's start with the idea of paying players, and giving benefits in general. Over the years, many pundits have tried to make the case for paying college football players, some more cogent than others. The moral argument here is that the players put out a tremendous amount of effort and everyone seems to make money on that effort except them. It almost sounds like a form of slavery. On the other hand, a pay-for-play scheme would surely favor the bigger schools (like OSU) over the smaller ones and this would conflict with the idea that the playing field should be level. Currently, the sportsmanship ideal is still winning out over the moral argument. It may not always be that way, but I think the college game is ultimately better for it.

Speaking of sportsmanship, there is one area where this ideal seems to be losing out, and that is in the area of rankings and the decision of who goes to bowl games, especially the BCS Championship game. I have felt strongly about this for the past few years, especially in 2008 when Oklahoma finished the regular season ranked #1 mostly because everyone was so impressed with how many points they scored. The fact that Bob Stoops relentlessly ran up the score on nearly every opponent that season was sometimes mentioned but usually dismissed as just petty jealousy. This was even more grating when Ohio State was accused of running it up against Northwestern because the 'Cats couldn't stop a late-game running play when OSU was trying to kill the clock. Obviously, there is no rule against scoring a lot of points, and the NCAA has no authority over slack-jawed poll voters who drool when they see a 62-21 win over Missouri in a conference championship game. It is just as obvious that this example of bad sportsmanship gives the less charitable programs an advantage over the more classy ones.

Another advantage would be extra practice time, and some schools have been caught trying to squeeze a little more from their players than the NCAA rulebook allows. This is also on the list of accusations against Boise State. The moral argument is that the NCAA has to draw the line somewhere, because these guys are supposed to be students. Besides, even the NFL has rules regarding team practice time over the summer. Making sure that every team does it the same way makes the game fair for everyone, and so sportsmanship is also on the side of these rules. 

The issue gets a little dicey when we begin to talk about benefits that do not come directly from the university. The OSU "Tat-gate" scandal has been compared to the A.J. Green agent scandal, but I'm not sure the comparison is valid. In the case of Green, the university was not penalized as far as I know (please correct me if I missed this) other than not having his services on the field for 4 games. This makes sense, because getting money from a potential agent means that the player is no longer an amateur and thus is ineligible to play the college game. Now try the same logic in the case of the Tat-5. It doesn't work because their benefits did not come from an agent, not even a potential one. They did violate rules, and I have no problem with whatever penalty the NCAA levies, but I wonder if there is any moral basis for the rule in the first place.  I don't think there is, and I also don't think it conflicts with the ideal of good sportsmanship.

I understand that a rule is a rule, and it applies to everyone. But why does the rule exist in the first place? The argument that I've heard is that a football player at a place like OSU has an opportunity to accumulate these trinkets solely because of his association with the university's athletic program, and this is a benefit that not all students have.  To that I say "so what?" Does college football really benefit from preventing these types of transactions? I suppose it's possible that if it is allowed to continue, some schools will start issuing trophies and plaques for every good play, every practice session, every look of enthusiasm a player shows, etc. and that this will constitute extra benefits. That argument makes some sense to me because it goes back to the issue of paying players. Still, that scenario seems unlikely to me and it sounds like just another overreach by the NCAA.

All this leads to one final question that has been on my mind: is college football more "shady" today than it was 20-30 years ago?  Or are we just finding out more because of the internet and sites like Facebook and Twitter? Does the ideal of sportsmanship even exist in college football anymore? I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this. I'd also like to know if you think I'm being too casual about some of this stuff.

The Lakers are done. I say this despite their championship pedigree, their coach's ability to guide teams through apparent calamity and a direct warning from a certain 6-foot-6 guard.

"Be careful what you write," Kobe Bryant said, knowing full well that I and the rest of the media pack walking through the Staples Center corridor were about to type the Lakers' death notice as soon as we returned to the Chick Hearn Press Room.

"Be careful what you write," Bryant repeated. He added an admonition for my ESPN.com colleague. "You too, Stein."

I told Bryant that the Lakers don't have the energy.

"True," he said.

And if you don't have energy, then the schemes or the intent or the pride don't matter.

"True," he said.

There's no way he was leaving it at that. I tried to draw more out of him.

"But?"

"But," he replied with a smile. "But. Dot-dot-dot. "

Jason Collins fouled once in 3:16 for a +1 and a 1:0 Madsen-level Voskuhl...

...while fellow dirty birds Josh Powell, Hilton Armstrong, and Pape Sy went 55 seconds as MARIO TRIPLETS! (Armstrong checked a board in and avoided true lacktivity).

In 15 fewer seconds, steakhouse master Omer Asik matched Collins's not-so-big-man numbers to a tee.

• A Confession and A Prayer to Remain Tailess
• Organic Foods: When to Splurge
• The CHG Guide to CSAs

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FERGIE BULLISHLY TALKS THE TALK ... AGAIN

Already the talk has started about how best Sir Alex Ferguson can "stop" Barcelona. It's as if this season's Big Cup is somehow there for his team to win rather than Pep Guardiola's to lose. Which is not to say Manchester United don't have a chance, because they do. Only last weekend the high-pressing tippy-tappy triangulistas from the Nou Camp proved their fallibility when they lost an actual football match to Real Sociedad. There have been other signs of weakness: a 2-0 home defeat at the hands of Hercules (the football team, rather than the Greek demigod of the same name), coming within a Nicklas Bendtner miskick into an opponent's goal of exiting Big Cup, and only scoring eight without reply in a League match against the Almerians of Almeria.

The Fiver and its readers know more than most that we all have bad days, and it seems that no matter how many big red arrows, circles and dotted lines Sir Alex Ferguson and his backroom team draw on their chalkboards between now and 28 May, Manchester United's best hope of victory lies in offering up as many decades of the rosary as is humanly possible in the hope that Barca pitch up at Wembley and have One Of Those Days, for the second Big Cup final in succession … which on the face of it seems highly unlikely.

Of course Fergie isn't allowed to say this, so he's been bullishly talking the talk about how there's no need for his players to be intimidated by the prospect of playing against Barcelona. "Their form has been very good, we're playing a fantastic team but there shouldn't be a sense of terror," he said, shortly after joking that he'd prefer if his side were facing Brechin City, who would probably put up more of a fight than Schalke 04. "We can't be frightened out of our skin. We've got to find a solution to playing against them."

Of course one solution to playing against them would have been to lose last night, exit the tournament and make playing against them somebody else's problem, but despite Fergie's best attempts to help United's German opposition overcome their two-goal first leg deficit by fielding a line-up that couldn't have been much weaker if he'd picked 11 random punters from the Stretford End, victory became unavoidable in the face of such astonishingly feeble resistance. Now the final beckons, so who better for Fergie to turn to for advice than the Special One.

"We'll take the information because José is very helpful that way. But it's not as if we haven't seen them before ourselves. We've watched [Barcelona] many times this season," said Fergie. Considering the Special One's Real Madrid side has only won one match out of five against Barcelona in that time (and the least important one at that), it's difficult to know exactly what useful advice he might have worth imparting. A cursory glance at Roy Hodgson or Carlo Ancelotti proves there are no shortage of managers who could benefit from a crash-course in blame deflection, conspiracy theories and breath-taking hypocrisy that are the Special One's current areas of expertise, but it's probably fair to say that Sir Alex Ferguson has forgotten more about all three dark arts than even Real Madrid's preening, strop-throwing touchline pouter will ever know.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"To use a sandwich analogy: sweet bread at the top, sour filling and more sweet bread at the bottom" - Michael Essien singularly fails to enlighten us as to whether Fernando Torres is the filling, the sweet bread or something else entirely while describing Chelsea's season so far.

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FIVER LETTERS

"Maybe it's plumetting [sic] education standards or summink at the Arsenal, but my season ticket for 2011-12 has gone up 9.64%, not 6.5% as promised. I guess that's an extra 1% for every domestic trophy we failed to quite complete the winning of" - John Young.

"Barrie Francis (yesterday's Fiver letters) wants to change Cardiff City's nickname from the Bluebirds to the Bluebottlers. Given the skill of some sections of their support in hurling projectiles at away fans and police, I think anyone who has visited Ninian Park will allow themselves a rueful smile at the new name" - Tom Hammett (and 1,056 other people who hope that Cardiff never play in the Premier League).

"Re: Manuel Neuer's love of AC/DC (Fivers passim). No doubt the Shalke team bus was rattling along to the sound of You Shook Me All Night Long after last night's Big Cup semi-final" - Dave Gillaiema.

"How to Stop Football (Fiver letters passim)? Send it to North Korea: they made a good start on that last summer" - JJ Zuca.

"Re: Osama Bin Laden never returning footballs kicked into his compound. Was he somehow aligned with the Fiver's Stop Football campaign? I've never been concerned for the Fiver's safety before (notwithstanding its weekend and weeknight escapades in various London alleyways), but now ... well, just watch out for yourself, OK?" - Mike Wilner (and 1,056 other readers who care for the Fiver's well-being).

"So Mumford & Sons are doing a benefit concert for AFC Wimbledon, who are one of the richest club in non-league football. Yet teams like Croydon continue to struggle to even get their players to away games. I wonder if Oasis would be keen to do a fundraiser for Manchester City next season?" - Tom Meadowcroft.

Send your letters to the.boss@guardian.co.uk. And if you've nothing better to do you can also tweet the Fiver.

BITS AND BOBS

So who owned Dirty Leeds? Everybody's asking it. It's the new craze. Today: Damian Collins, the Conservative MP for Folkestone and Hythe wants to know.

The Manchester United Supporters Trust has responded to the Glazer family's ticket price rises of a £1 a game with words instead of donning Norwich scraves and "marching" from pubs they were going to be in anyway to games they were going to anyway. "Their claim that average prices have increased less under the Glazers than the equivalent period under the PLC is laughable," fumed MUST chief executive Duncan Drasdo, who will almost certainly renew his season ticket anyway.

Patrick Vieira says he was "shocked" at the French Football Federation's alleged plan to limit non-white players. "This story is scandalous," he fumed. "I would never have imagined that the football chiefs in our country could have such conversations about the France team in the body of the federation. Never."

And West Ham have given Avram Grant every incentive to get the club relegated by drawing up a shortlist of seven managers to replace him, with Ian Holloway and Neil Warnock inked in at the top.

STILL WANT MORE?

Proper Journalism's David Conn has been declared an 'international enemy' of Dirty Leeds by Ken Bates, but that's not stopped him firing questions over the Elland Road ramparts from his catapult of truth.

Pep Guardiola may as well have grown an ironic moustache and gone to Brickhouse 2.0 last night, for all the good his trip to Old Trafford did him, sighs Richard Williams.

The race row that has engulfed French football goes deeper than clumsy comments that hint at racial stereotypes, it poses serious questions about nationality in an increasingly diverse world, says Paul Doyle.

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VOTE YES IF FOR NO BETTER REASON THAN THE TORIES DON'T WANT YOU TO

I will run the risk of sounding like a broken record, but I am loving this South Park year of the fan weekly creation cycle.

Our little friends in Colorado have always been the fastest scripted show, animated or non, to poke fun at current events, but including Bin Laden references just three days after his death!?

While I'm sure the main premise and script was written for "Funnybot" shortly after Stone and Parker begrudgingly accepted their award at The Comedy Awards last month, the Tyler Perry as Bin Laden and bringing Obama in all take to take place within the last 48 hours.

Just from a logistic standpoint alone, it's ridiculously impressive this show is able be animated and updated in such a short period. Then from a writing standpoint, either the guys lucked out and already planned on killing Perry in their script and simply needed to insert a few Obama scenes and references, or they really are that quick and impressive.

Sorry. I swear, that's hopefully my last Year of the Fan ramble. Now on to the actual content of the ridiculousness that was South Park's special ed department's 1st Annual Comedy Awards!

First off, I will say that the concept of an awards show just for comedy is a little silly, but I'm sure very few people share the hatred that Stone and Parker do.

Like most of the world, I didn't catch the ridiculous awards show, but I was told the guys compared winning an award for a show airing on the networking hosting the award show was the equivalent of winning student of the month when you're homeschooled.

Okay, maybe that wasn't an exact quote, but clearly you can see these guys had even more disdain built up.  Enough to devote an entire episode to mocking the Comedy Central's efforts and the state of comedy in general.  Imagine if they lost.

So while I prefer when the guys pick a target to satire that I share more in common with their beliefs, this episode luckily had enough on Tyler Perry and other forms of comedy that are destroying the genre, nay, humanity, to keep me entertained.

Making Token and Obama the only people to laugh at Tyler Perry?  Offensive for sure.  Hilarious?  You know it.  Even better was Token just directly handing him money. "Stop giving Tyler Perry money or he won't go away."  Please world, heed their advice so we don't ever get another Madea movie.

Tyler Perry as Bin Laden

While I won't claim to be quick enough to pick up on every type of comedy that Funnybot was parody of, I did love the generic substitution jokes and the "Awkward!" Claiming that our dumbifcation of comedy and taking it too seriously will lead to our destruction is obviously ridiculous.  But that's how South Park's satire works.

No, it wasn't the strongest episode of the show's history, nor was it my favorite topic they've ever took on, but the episode was still loaded with plenty of South Park quotes and jokes. And those jokes sure beat anything Funnybot could write.

What did you guys think?  And was anyone else rooting for the Yupik Eskimos?  How could you say a people with scientists that wear labcoats over their lederhosen aren't hilarious!?

An assassination has hijacked my brain. The television is telling me over and over and over minute details and wide ranging as they are, all I can hear is the nervous giggle that bubbles somewhere underneath the story. We got this guy, we finally got him, and now we reckon they might be coming after us.

I reckon an assassination is an assassination. Someone has gone after someone and killed them. I've grown up on an occasional media menu of assassination stories and I can't understand what makes it okay for this assassination to be good. As if there are good assassinations and bad assassinations.

I don't really understand why hiding behind a woman is something that makes this assassination a good assassination. I don't understand why, when women are something men know that other men should not hide behind, in this particular case it appears to have been okay to shoot holes in this woman and then not give her the dignity of a name.

I don't like to see public figures giving public interviews in which they crow about getting their boys to knock off the bad guy. Is this what we know now as a public moral? When is it okay to kill someone, and when is it okay to crow about it? Funny, I thought it wasn't really ever such a great thing to kill someone, and I don't really like my public figures to be so publicly excited about someone being blown away.

If someone's death is such a victory, how do we feel about our own potential deaths becoming the same? It was worth the risk, says Madeleine Albright. The risk of what? That the "other guys" may consider that we too are complicit in this public moral of assassination ambivalence? So we can become a target for them too? Or simply that we can understand that should we be considered to be evil by anyone, it would be reasonable for them to consider this to be reason enough to murder us. And there I was thinking that murder was not socially nor legally condoned.

But here, maybe we didn't like that guy either. There don't appear to be a lot of people who want to be standing up for him at the moment.

What about Julian Assange though?

Lots of people in America have voiced their determination to "bring him to justice". So do we switch on the TV over the next months and years wondering when helicopters of Special Operatives crash in on Assange's country hideaway and blow him (and any woman standing in between) away?

And should we understand then that although we have a legal system, and that legal system prohibits us crashing our way into someone's home and shooting them in the head, in some cases it's not only acceptable, but even something to dance in the streets about. And so, if we should find Julian Assange has had this happen to him, should we accept it then too?

Surely he's likely to be the "worst thing since Hitler" to someone. 

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, New York, 2001 resulted in a lot of deaths, destruction and fear. I can understand why New Yorkers have reason to desire some kind of "closure", as the television tells me they now have. I can understand that Americans feel a bit glad that their enemy lies dead. 

I still can't feel very good that Presidents and their staffers are in on the action, watching it in real time. I guess that in the past the heads of governments were reluctant to show their roles in such plots, but somehow this shift in moral behaviour makes it acceptable for them to be at the table.

There is something creepy about this. It's not surprising that 9-11 is so deeply embedded in this story. A terrorist attack that brought us how many wars. One local event that caused a global shift in international accountability.  How many morally and ethically murky situations? With renditiions, extra-legal imprisonments, assassination sit quite comfortably.

I feel uncomfortably that 9/11 really did cause some corruption of our moral identities.

Closure and Release is what we are told we should be feeling. Except that closure and release is not what we are being told is likely to come next. This week's assassination, they say, is likely to bring us more terrorist attacks. I'm sure that there are many people who believe that despite this possibility the world is a safer place. I have some doubt that it will make a huge difference, because these patterns of retaliation is long established.

And so I don't have much interest in the politics and effects of this event. But rather in this erosion of our moral identity.

Assassination, a dramatic term. A killing; to plot and execute a man. A man with a price on his head. The man, and others around him with no prices on their heads, executed by soldiers with no jurisdiction in that country nor over that man. The event authorised and observed by the secular head of those soldiers. The news spreading like wildfire around the world. They have killed him. The Americans have killed him. Because he killed Americans.

I don't like it.

I don't like hearing about it, this kind of behaviour from America, from Obama. I don't care how much difference they think it's going to do.

It's not the assassination that bothers me. It's the way it's not couched as immoral, not shown as immoral, not given some frisson of distastefulness, what it deserves. I don't think we should have to be a part of it.

I wish the news channels had held off until they had the full story; not indulged the crowing of the President of the United States. I wish we felt uglier and dirtier for having this story. I wish we had received it quietly, and felt reluctant to pass it on or talk about it much. If we were a bit ashamed, it might stop us from behaving quite as badly as we do. Because I think that it's from bad behaviour that the desire for retaliation and revenge comes.

On both sides, I mean.

Lehan Ramsay is an Australian artist and writer who has lived in Japan for 20 years.

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