By Rich Hansen, MMA Torch Columnist:

Dan Downes didn't need to fight last night, but he wanted to stay sharp. That decision almost cost him dearly, as little known Tory Bogguess locked in two very tight chokes early in the first round of their main event fight for the NAFC event in Milwaukee. Ultimately Downes was able to escape both submission attempts before submitting Bogguess at the 3:24 mark of round 1.

Downes (8-1) accepted this fight outside of the UFC while still under UFC contract in order to stay sharp. That gamble almost blew up in his face as the undersized Bogguess came out like a ball of fire. Bogguess came out charging from the opening bell, landing a flying superman punch within the first two seconds of the fight. After knocking the larger Downes against the cage, Bogguess was able to get Downes down and sunk in a tight rear naked choke.

After Downes managed to escape that choke, he found himself in an even more dire predicament as Bogguess managed to slap on an even tighter guillotine choke. After several seconds that seemed much longer to the partisan Milwaukee crowd, Downes managed to pop his head out and was able to turn the tables on his smaller opponent.

After controlling Bogguess up against the cage from side control, Bogguess tried escaping by walking the cage. Instead of escaping, Bogguess walked into the waiting legs of Downes and was forced to tap to a triangle choke.

Having fought for a smaller organization while under UFC contract, Downes told MMA Torch after the fight that he wants his next fight to be in the UFC, and that there's a 99 percent chance that his next fight will indeed be for the Zuffa owned company.

In the co-main event of the evening, Duke Roufus' newest up and coming star Joe Cason made quick work of veteran Sean Salmon. Cason needed a mere 74 seconds to dispatch the overwhelmed Salmon. After landing an uppercut early, Cason flattened Salmon with a standing knee. From there, Cason swarmed Salmon who had no way to stop the ground and pound attack of the much larger Cason. Referee Al Weickhardt stopped the fight, giving Cason his first victory since joining Duke Roufus' team last month. Cason, a college wrestling teammate of UFC Light Heavyweight Champion Jon "Bones" Jones, looks to have to skills to make a name for himself in the sport's light heavyweight division.

Complete results from NAFC: Mayhem below.

Dan Downes defeated Tory Bogguess via submission (triangle choke) at 3:24 of Round 1

Joe Cason defeated Sean Salmon via TKO at 1:14 of Round 1

Matt Brown defeated John Hosman via split decision (29-28, 28-29, 29-28)

Matt Masterson defeated Kyle Weickardt via submission (side choke)at 3:33 of Round 2

Jose Pacheco defeated David Rhoads via submission (rear naked choke)at 4:33 of Round 1

Thiago Veiga defeated Donald Ceri via submission (arm bar)at 2:50 of Round 2

Mike Santiago def Zach Underwood via unanimous decision (30-27, 30-27, 30-27)

Jeff Golden def Jim Bleau via submission (rear naked choke) at 4:35 of Round 1

In case many of us have not noticed, the number 9 is actually the biggest digit in the numerical system in use today.

Just in case many of us have also yet to notice, 9 always appears in the somewhat strategic and somehow oddest of places.

Firstly, 9 is the recorded strength on the Richter scale of the recent Japanese Earthquake that hit northeast Japan.

9 also appears in phone numbers which are essential all over the world, e.g. 911 in USA. In Singapore 999 for the police and 995 for the ambulance services.

Closer to home, where there has been an election fever for the longest time, this campaign has also been characterised also by the number 9, we have always had the customary 9 day campaign period for eons and until recently 9 single member constituencies used to house the braver of the PAP candidates.

The recent boundary changes have added 3 brave men [when i say brave i mean brave enough to be fielded in an SMC] into the PAP fold and seemingly the magical number 9 had disappeared. But interestingly as if by coincidence the number 9 reappeared in the form of 9 seats for NMPs and 9 seats for NCMPs. :)

On the subject of bravery, this election also saw the opposition display its fair share of brave men. SPP’s Sec-Gen Chiam See Tong joined his Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC team to try to take down that GRC. WP’s Sec-Gen Low Thia Khiang joined his Aljunied team to try to capture Aljunied GRC. This has been described by some as going into the mountain to get the tiger cubs. To go and get the tiger is of course a good thing but we should all remember that a cat has 9 lives. And a tiger is a big cat.

Besides extending the life of a cat, the number 9 also had some powers of coalescence and division. And this time  it was within Socialist Front backyard that the number 9 wrecked havoc.

I had again 9 aging men (myself included) in the council of the Socialist Front. There was a king cat in the mountain of Tanjong Pagar. Prior to the elections, no firm decision was made on going after the kingcat. It was only after our withdrawal that an attempt was made by some renegade members to go for Tanjong Pagar GRC. This last minute attempt naturally ran into problems. Now that the elections would be over, it remains to be seen whether the experience of sitting out this 9 days of election hustings would be a unifying or disunifying event.

Amongst the parties participating in this election, the 9 day hustings also exerted pressure to bring the parties in solidarity with each other.

In the past we had the fallen PAP candidates and walkover PAP ministers who cried. Then its those PAP ministers who were stepping down [Lim Boon Heng], then the last thing i heard was even Khaw Boon Wan was close to tears. We also had a Workers’ Party candidate who cried on his… erm… introduction as candidate. SJP’s Sec-Gen Desmond Lim Bak Chuan also shed some tears due to the stress of the campaign. The sensational Nicole Seah also fell prey to her emotions. As to how many more candidates will be left crying upon the revelation of the polling day’s results is for everyone to imagine.

The pressure of these 9 days also honestly did some good for the country, we have a humbled George Yeo, we have Vivian Balakrishnan finally apologising for his unkind remarks made in parliament, Lee Hsien Loong apologised as well.

If this is anything to go by, I must say that there must be more of such 9 day elections so that certain people can be brought down closer to mother earth.

This to me signals the maturing of politics. This is good for the country. This is how a ruling party should behave. Be willing to admit that you are wrong. Be willing to change and further our nationhood.

As usual, it will be unlikely that a single post on this blog is to come out of my fingers without making reference to SNSD. As explained previously before, SNSD is the acronym for So Nyuh Shi Dae – Girls’ Generation. They are to me the best girl group to have ever walked the face of this earth. SNSD is also made up of 9 members: TaeYeon, Jessica, Tiffany, Sunny, SeoHyun, HyoYeon, SooYoung, Yuri and Yoona.

The trouble with SNSD is that more often than not, Sones like us just cannot seem to get enough of them. SNSD videos are a mix of group shots, panned shots and close up shots of the group. This was the same for live broadcasts of their performances as well as their music videos. The beauty of SNSD is in their sychronised dancing. Given the way their videos are mixed, being able to see the entire action of a song is itself a miracle on its own.

Complete and unedited dance versions of their performances are very rare such that even leaked out practice videos have gained a following.

Samples of the practice videos are at the following links:

Genie (Tell Me Your Wish / I Just Wanna Wish) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKPxeS6uXt8

Oh! [This is the cheerleading song] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7SYWFeaSqc&feature=related

My Best Friend [watch for TaeYeon's mistake] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vmaa81tt9Wo

Now practice videos being practice videos, no one should expect them to be dressed to the 9s. These are not performances but leaked videos of their practices. The appreciation is not in the dressing but their dance moves, the choreography, their timing, their poise and gracefulness.

Some Sones were obviously dissatisfied when they started delving into making the videos more interesting and having organised fancam recordings so that they would not miss out on every move of each of their favourite SNSD member.

Some Sones having decided that one screen playing SNSD was not enough, pioneered the use of 9 screens (they wanted to look at all 9 fancams together so they split the screen into ninths – each playing one fancam). Later on some brought the game further, some wanted 9 different SNSD performances of the same song to be put on the same screen, then it was cast, someone mixed 9 videos into a super SNSD HD video sending some Sones to cloud 9 and giving some others sleepless nights.

Maybe I am reading too much,  if SNSD has nine members it would be apt to divide the screen into nine miniscreens for the screensaver. But i could have sworn that it was the Soshi fans did it first, it was only thereafter did the SNSD Daum Screensaver come along, then came the SNSD Woongjin Coway advertisement.

The 9th of March is also Kim TaeYeon’s birthday. And if you take a closer note of Kim TaeYeon and her cheerleader’s garb and oversized jersey in some of SNSD’s music videos, her jersey is always numbered ’9′. Someone said that my adulation for SNSD bordered on insanity and obsession….

Notwithstanding the above, it is clear that the power of 9 works its magic once again. As stated earlier, the number 9 appears not only just in the 9 days of campaigning, there is now the promise of 9 NCMP seats, the 9 parties contesting: PAP, WP, SDP, NSP, RP, SPP, SDA (SJP/PKMS)

but interestingly none of the 9 parties actually fielded 9 members…. the minimum number of candidates each participating party fielded is 7 which was obviously an attempt to qualify for the Party Political Broadcast on TV which required each party to field a minimun of 6 candidates. Now this sets me thinking… and incidentally, the polling day has also been fixed as 7th May 2011. What does that mean of the things that are to come?

On this polling day, it pays for each of us to sit down and think about the things happening around us and draw commonalities from the coincidences and the unexplained.

In any event, since Socialist Front had already decided to take a back seat for this round of elections, this 9 days to me have been a time of firefighting, deep thought, self-reflection and re-orientation. This blogpost is the product of these 9 days of detachment.

It would be heinously wrong for me to assert that I had come up with this post entirely on my own intellect and reflection. It would be apt for me to pay tribute to the original creators of the phrase that lent inspiration to this post.

“The Power of 9″ is actually the phrase used by the Soshified community in tribute to the South Korean Girl Group named So Nyuh Shi Dae – Girls’ Generation a.k.a. SNSD.

Shard-Query is an open source tool kit which helps improve the performance of queries against a MySQL database by distributing the work over multiple machines and/or multiple cores. This is similar to the divide and conquer approach that Hive takes in combination with Hadoop. Shard-Query applies a clever approach to parallelism which allows it to significantly improve the performance of queries by spreading the work over all available compute resources. In this test, Shard-Query averages a nearly 6x (max over 10x) improvement over the baseline, as shown in the following graph: One significant advantage of Shard-Query over Hive is that it works with existing MySQL data sets and queries. Another advantage is that it works with all MySQL storage engines. This set of benchmarks evaluates how well Infobright community edition (ICE) performs in combination with Shard-Query. Data set It was important to choose a data set that was large enough to create queries that would run for a decent amount of time, but not so large that it was difficult to work with. The ontime flight performance statistics data, available online from the United States Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) made a good candidate for testing, as it had been tested before: Another MPB post Lucid DB testing The raw data is a completely denormalized schema (single table). In order to demonstrate the power of Shard-Query it is important to test complex queries involving joins and aggregation. A star schema is the most common OLAP/DW data model, since it typically represents a data mart. See also: “Data mart or data warehouse?”. As it is the most common data model, it is desirable to benchmark using a star schema, even though it involves work to transform the data. Star schema Transforming the data was straightforward. I should note that I did this preprocessing with the MyISAM storage engine, then I dumped the data to tab delimited flat files using mysqldump. I started by loading the raw data from the BTS into a single database table called ontime_stage. Then, the airport information was extracted: create table dim_airport( airport_id int auto_increment primary key, unique key(airport_code) ) as select Origin as `airport_code`, OriginCityName as `CityName`, OriginState as `State`, OriginStateFips as `StateFips`, OriginStateName as `StateName` , OriginWac as `Wac` FROM ontime_stage UNION select Dest as `airport_code`, DestCityName as `CityName`, DestState as `State`, DestStateFips as `StateFips`, DestStateName as `StateName` , DestWac as `Wac` FROM ontime_stage; After extracting flight/airline and date information in a similar fashion, a final table `ontime_fact` is created by joining the newly constructed dimension table tables to the staging tables, omitting the dimension columns from the projection, instead replacing them with the dimension keys: select dim_date.date_id, origin.airport_id as origin_airport_id, dest.airport_id as dest_airport_id, dim_flight.flight_id, ontime_stage.TailNum, ... from ontime_stage join dim_date using(FlightDate) join dim_airport origin on ontime_stage.Origin = origin.airport_code join dim_airport dest on ontime_stage.Dest = dest.airport_code join dim_flight using (UniqueCarrier,AirlineID,Carrier,FlightNum); The data set contains ontime flight information for 22 years, which can be confirmed by examining the contents of the date dimension: mysql> select count(*), min(FlightDate), max(FlightDate) from dim_date\G *************************** 1. row *************************** count(*): 8401 min(FlightDate): 1988-01-01 max(FlightDate): 2010-12-31 1 row in set (0.00 sec) The airport dimension is a puppet dimension. It is called a puppet because it serves as both origin and destination dimensions, being referenced by origin_airport_id and destination_airport_id in the fact table, respectively. There are nearly 400 major airports included in the data set. mysql> select count(*) from dim_airport; +----------+ | count(*) | +----------+ | 396 | +----------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) The final dimension is the flight dimension, which contains the flight numbers and air carrier hierarchies. Only the largest air carriers must register and report ontime information with the FAA, so there are only 29 air carriers in the table: mysql> select count(*), count(distinct UniqueCarrier) from dim_flight\G *************************** 1. row *************************** count(*): 58625 count(distinct UniqueCarrier): 29 1 row in set (0.02 sec) Each year has tens of millions of flights: mysql> select count(*) from ontime_one.ontime_fact; +-----------+ | count(*) | +-----------+ | 135125787 | +-----------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) This should be made fully clear by the following schema diagram: Diagram of the ontime dimensional schema Test environment For this benchmark, a test environment consisting of a single commodity database server with 6 cores (+6ht) and 24GB of memory was selected. The selected operating system was Fedora 14. Oracle VirtualBox OSE was used to create six virtual machines, each running Fedora 14. Each of the virtual machines was granted 4GB of memory. A SATA 7200rpm RAID10 battery backed RAID array was used as the underlying storage for the virtual machines. Baseline: The MySQL command line client was used to execute the a script file containing the 11 queries. This same SQL script was used in the Shard-Query tests. For the baseline, the results and response times were captured with the \T command. The queries were executed on a single database schema containing all of the data. Before loading, there was approximately 23GB of data. After loading, ICE compressed this data to about 2GB. The test virtual machine was assigned 12 cores in this test. Scale-up: Shard-Query was given the following configuration file, which lists only one server. A single schema (ontime_one) contained all of the data. The test virtual machine was assigned 12 cores for this test. The same VM was used as the previous baseline test. This VM was rebooted between tests. A SQL script was fed to the run_query.php script and the output was captured with the ‘tee’ command. $ cat one.ini [default] user=mysql db=ontime_one password= port=5029 column=date_id mapper=hash gearman=127.0.0.1:7000 inlist=* between=* [shard1] host=192.168.56.102 Scale-out In addition to adding parallelism via scale-up, Shard-Query can improve performance of almost all queries by spreading them over more than one physical server. This is called “scaling out” and it allows Shard-Query to vastly improve the performance of queries which have to examine a large amount of data. Shard-Query includes a loader (loader.php) which can be used to either split a data into multiple files (for each shard, for later loading) or it can load files directly, in parallel, to multiple hosts. Shard-Query will execute queries in parallel over all of these machines. With enough machines, massive parallelism is possible and very large data sets may be processed. As each machine examines only a small subset of the data, performance can be improved significantly: $ cat shards.ini [default] user=mysql db=ontime password= port=5029 column=date_id mapper=hash gearman=127.0.0.1:7000 inlist=* between=* [shard1] host=192.168.56.101 db=ontime [shard2] host=192.168.56.102 db=ontime [shard3] host=192.168.56.103 db=ontime [shard4] host=192.168.56.105 db=ontime [shard5] host=192.168.56.106 db=ontime [shard6] host=192.168.56.104 db=ontime In this configuration, each shard has about 335MB-350MB of data (23GB raw data, compressed to about 2GB total data. then spread over six servers). Due to ICE limitations, the data was split before loading. The splitting/loading process will be described in another post. Complex queries Shard-Query was tested with the simple single table version of this data set in a previous blog post. Previous testing was limited to a subset of Vadim’s test queries (see that post). As this new test schema is normalized, Vadim’s test queries must be modified to reflect the more complex schema structure. For this benchmark each of the original queries has been rewritten to conform to the new schema, and additionally two new test queries have been added. To model real world complexity, each of the test queries feature at least one join, and many of the filter conditions are placed on attributes in the dimension tables. It will be very interesting to test these queries on various engines and databases. Following is a list of the queries, followed by a response time table recording the actual response times for each query. The queries should be self-explanatory. Performance, at a glance You will notice that Shard-Query is faster in nearly every case. The performance of the queries is improved significantly by scaling out, even more so than scaling up, because additional parallelism is added beyond what can be exploited by scale up. Scale up can improve query performance when there is enough resources to support the added parallelism, and when one of the the following are in used in the query: BETWEEN or IN clauses, subqueries in the FROM clause, UNION or UNION ALL clauses. If none of those features are used, then parallelism can’t be added. Q9 is an example of such a query. . Query details: -- Q1 SELECT DayOfWeek, count(*) AS c from ontime_fact JOIN dim_date using (date_id) WHERE Year BETWEEN 2000 AND 2008 GROUP BY DayOfWeek ORDER BY c DESC; -- Q2 SELECT DayOfWeek, count(*) AS c from ontime_fact JOIN dim_date using (date_id) WHERE DepDelay>10 AND Year BETWEEN 2000 AND 2008 GROUP BY DayOfWeek ORDER BY c DESC; -- Q3 SELECT CityName as Origin, count(*) AS c from ontime_fact JOIN dim_date using (date_id) JOIN dim_airport origin ON origin_airport_id = origin.airport_id WHERE DepDelay>10 AND Year BETWEEN 2000 AND 2008 GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY c LIMIT 10; The next queries show how performance is improved when Shard-Query adds parallelism when “subqueries in the from clause” are used. There are benefits with both “scale-up” and “scale-out”, but once again, the “scale-out” results are the most striking. -- Q4 SELECT Carrier, count(*) as c from ontime_fact JOIN dim_date using (date_id) join dim_flight using(flight_id) WHERE DepDelay>10 AND Year=2007 GROUP BY Carrier ORDER BY c DESC; -- Q5 SELECT t.Carrier, c, c2, c*1000/c2 as c3 FROM (SELECT Carrier, count(*) AS c from ontime_fact join dim_date using(date_id) join dim_flight using(flight_id) WHERE DepDelay>10 AND Year=2007 GROUP BY Carrier) t JOIN (SELECT Carrier, count(*) AS c2 from ontime_fact join dim_date using(date_id) join dim_flight using(flight_id) WHERE Year=2007 GROUP BY Carrier) t2 ON (t.Carrier=t2.Carrier) ORDER BY c3 DESC; -- Q6 SELECT t.Year, c1 / c2 as ratio FROM (select Year, count(*)*1000 as c1 from ontime_fact join dim_date using (date_id) WHERE DepDelay>10 GROUP BY Year) t JOIN (select Year, count(*) as c2 from ontime_fact join dim_date using (date_id) WHERE DepDelay>10 GROUP BY Year) t2 ON (t.Year=t2.Year); -- Q7 SELECT t.Year, c1 / c2 as ratio FROM (select Year, count(Year)*1000 as c1 from ontime_fact join dim_date using (date_id) WHERE DepDelay>10 GROUP BY Year) t JOIN (select Year, count(*) as c2 from ontime_fact join dim_date using (date_id) GROUP BY Year) t2 ON (t.Year=t2.Year); The performance of the following queries depends on the size of the date range: -- Q8.0 SELECT dest.CityName, COUNT( DISTINCT origin.CityName) from ontime_fact JOIN dim_airport dest on ( dest_airport_id = dest.airport_id) JOIN dim_airport origin on ( origin_airport_id = origin.airport_id) JOIN dim_date using (date_id) WHERE Year BETWEEN 2001 and 2001 GROUP BY dest.CityName ORDER BY 2 DESC; -- Q8.1 SELECT dest.CityName, COUNT( DISTINCT origin.CityName) from ontime_fact JOIN dim_airport dest on ( dest_airport_id = dest.airport_id) JOIN dim_airport origin on ( origin_airport_id = origin.airport_id) JOIN dim_date using (date_id) WHERE Year BETWEEN 2001 and 2005 GROUP BY dest.CityName ORDER BY 2 DESC; -- Q8.2 SELECT dest.CityName, COUNT( DISTINCT origin.CityName) from ontime_fact JOIN dim_airport dest on ( dest_airport_id = dest.airport_id) JOIN dim_airport origin on ( origin_airport_id = origin.airport_id) JOIN dim_date using (date_id) WHERE Year BETWEEN 2001 and 2011 GROUP BY dest.CityName ORDER BY 2 DESC; -- Q8.3 SELECT dest.CityName, COUNT( DISTINCT origin.CityName) from ontime_fact JOIN dim_airport dest on ( dest_airport_id = dest.airport_id) JOIN dim_airport origin on ( origin_airport_id = origin.airport_id) JOIN dim_date using (date_id) WHERE Year BETWEEN 1990 and 2011 GROUP BY dest.CityName ORDER BY 2 DESC; -- Q8.4 SELECT dest.CityName, COUNT( DISTINCT origin.CityName) from ontime_fact JOIN dim_airport dest on ( dest_airport_id = dest.airport_id) JOIN dim_airport origin on ( origin_airport_id = origin.airport_id) JOIN dim_date using (date_id) WHERE Year BETWEEN 1980 and 2011 GROUP BY dest.CityName ORDER BY 2 DESC; Finally, Shard-Query performance continues to improve when grouping and filtering is used. Again, notice Q9. It doesn’t use any features which Shard-Query can use to add parallelism. Thus, in the scale up configuration it does not perform any better than the baseline, and actually performed just a little worse. Since scale out splits the data between servers, it performs about 6x better as the degree of parallelism is controlled by the number of shards. -- Q9 select Year ,count(Year) as c1 from ontime_fact JOIN dim_date using (date_id) group by Year; -- Q10 SELECT Carrier, dest.CityName, COUNT( DISTINCT origin.CityName) from ontime_fact JOIN dim_airport dest on ( dest_airport_id = dest.airport_id) JOIN dim_airport origin on ( origin_airport_id = origin.airport_id) JOIN dim_date using (date_id) JOIN dim_flight using (flight_id) WHERE Year BETWEEN 2009 and 2011 GROUP BY Carrier,dest.CityName ORDER BY 3 DESC; -- Q11 SELECT Year, Carrier, dest.CityName, COUNT( DISTINCT origin.CityName) from ontime_fact JOIN dim_airport dest on ( dest_airport_id = dest.airport_id) JOIN dim_airport origin on ( origin_airport_id = origin.airport_id) JOIN dim_date using (date_id) JOIN dim_flight using (flight_id) WHERE Year BETWEEN 2000 and 2003 AND Carrier = 'AA' GROUP BY Year, Carrier,dest.CityName ORDER BY 4 DESC; Conclusion The divide and conquer approach is very useful when working with large quantities of data. Shard-Query can be used with existing data sets easily, improving the performance of queries significantly if they use common query features like BETWEEN or IN. It is also possible to spread your data over multiple machines, scaling out to improve query response times significantly. These queries are a great test of Shard-Query features. It is currently approaching RC status. If you decide to test it and encounter issues, please file a bug on the bug tracker. You can get Shard-Query (currently in development release form as a checkout from SVN) here: Shard-Query Google code project Full disclosure Justin Swanhart, the author of this article is also the creator and maintainer of Shard-Query. The author has previously worked in cooperation with Infobright, including on benchmarking. These particular tests were performed independently of Infobright, without their knowledge or approval. Infobright was, however, given the chance to review this document before publication, as a courtesy. All findings are represented truthfully, transparently, and without any intended bias.

Paul McCartney and Nancy Shevell are engaged, nearly four years after they were first spotted together. McCartney, 68, started dating the 51-year-old New York socialite and businesswoman after his bitter split from second wife Heather Mills . The marriage will be McCartney’s third; his first wife, Linda , died of cancer in 1998. His 2002 marriage to Mills ended in ...

You're forgiven if you can't figure out if the jobs picture from April is actually positive or negative. With a split decision from the Labor Department and conflicting surveys of small-business owners, a concrete answer is tough to come by.

Axommsoft Pdf splitter Merger software offers more quicker and convenient way to manage pdf pages. Users, who use pdf documents very frequently for sh...

Brahim Zaibat can say he rocked Madge’s world for nine months of his life. The Daily Mail is reporting that Madge has dumped her 24-year-old boy toy. It’s on to the next, bitches! But you may be interested to know WHY they split, right (other than the fact that Madge probably got bored)? Well in [...]

LONDON – Paul McCartney and his girlfriend Nancy Shevell are engaged, his publicist said Friday, nearly four years after they were first spotted together. McCartney, 68, started dating the 51-year-old New York socialite and businesswoman following his bitter split from second wife Heather Mills ...

At first glance, the Vikings selection of Kyle Rudolph may have seemed puzzling. They already have three veteran tight ends on their roster, including an established blocking behemoth in Jim Kleinsasser and a well-round pass-catcher in Visanthe Shiancoe. But as analysts dig to the second level of roster analysis, there are three primary reasons the Vikings second-round selection of Kyle Rudolph made sense.First, all three of the teams veteran tight ends Kleinsasser, Shiancoe and Jeff Dugan have expiring contracts after the 2011 season. Second, none of them has ever been in a Bill Musgrave offense that appears intent on featuring two tight ends on the field at the same time. And, third, Rudolph just presented too much value and too much of what the Vikings were looking for in a tight end to pass him up, despite other needs that may have been more pressing.He has a lot of different skill sets. You can split him out wide, you can put him as an H (H-back), or you can put him on the line of scrimmage, Vikings vice president of player personnel Rick Spielman said after selecting Rudolph 43rd overall one week ago. Hes going to develop into a starting tight end in this league. The most unique thing about him right now is his ability to catch the ball and his route-running ability. Hell develop as a blocker as we go along, but the skill set there, its hard to find guys like that.While the Vikings have been evasive in describing exactly what Musgraves offense will look like, the biggest clues may have come with the selection of Rudolph and the ensuing comments. Musgrave saw how effective a two-tight end offense can be in Atlanta when the Falcons acquired one of the leagues best pass-catching tight ends ever, Tony Gonzalez, prior to the 2009 season.Despite going through his 13th and 14th NFL seasons with a team other than the Kansas City Chiefs for the first time in a dozen years, Gonzalez continued to produce in Atlanta. In 2009, he had 83 catches for 867 yards and six touchdowns. Last year, he had 70 receptions for 656 yards and another six touchdowns.Rudolph has looked at how the tight ends are used in Atlantas offense and cant help but wonder about the possibilities created by having him and Shiancoe on the field at the same time.When I got the phone call (that he was drafted) and youre starting to look into things and I cant be more thrilled and more excited to be here and to be able to play for Coach Musgrave and be in the offense, said Rudolph, who was asked about being on the field simultaneously with Shiancoe.I think it would be tremendous for us. You see teams out there going to that two-tight end set. Having me and Shiancoe on the field at the same time, itll be tough because you dont know what were going to do. Both of us, big, athletic guys and can get down the field and we can run the ball as well. I definitely think thats something thats going to bring a lot to this offense.Rudolph didnt run at the NFL Scouting Combine because of a hamstring injury that required surgery in October, but the 4.64-second time in the 40-yard dash he produced at Notre Dame would have been a top-three time among the 16 tight ends at the Combine in February and thats coming from the tallest (6-foot-6) and fourth-heaviest (259 pounds) of them.He was also quite a basketball player. He was recruited by Brad Stevens at Butler to play basketball there, Musgrave said. He received scholarship offers in the ACC, Wake Forest and things like that, so clearly he has the traits to be a fantastic tight end in this league and have a bright future.Rudolph said he had his mind made up to play basketball during the early stages of the recruiting process, but after he received feedback while attending football camps that he might have an even brighter future in that sport, he decided on Notre Dame for football. He said he loves both sports the same, but this summer will be all about getting ready for his first NFL action.He already met the Vikings newest quarterback, first-round pick Christian Ponder, and the two may get together on their own if the NFLs lockout of players continues.Its hard to find guys like Kyle today. So many of those guys are playing basketball, it seems, so its a little bit different, head coach Leslie Frazier said. I was watching him and I kept going, Man, it sure would be nice to have guy like this.Now the Vikings have Fraziers top tight end in the draft and they plan on getting him involved, no matter the situation with their other tight ends.

Ghana and Nigeria split honours in Chess tournament Ghana News Agency Accra, May 6, GNA - Ghana and Nigeria split honours at an International Chess tournament, which ended at the Ohene Djan Stadium, Accra on Thursday, May 5. Ghana emerged winners in the Senior event with Nigeria grabbing the Junior's event at the ... and more »

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LONDON — Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney is engaged to girlfriend Nancy Shevell, his publicist said Friday. McCartney, 68, started dating the 51-year-old New York socialite and businesswoman nearly four years ago following his bitter split from second wife Heather Mills. McCartney publicist Stuart Bell confirmed recent media speculation over a proposal as true, but declined to give further details on when and how …

Patriotic nutjob Gary Faulker wasn't the only Angeleno to strike out alone on a mission to find Osama bin Laden before last weekend's big Navy SEAL takedown. Marina del Rey resident Mike Bruggin...

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• Please, no phone calls about this job!
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'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."

I've been playing fantasy baseball on Yahoo Sports for over a decade.  I think I've stuck with them and not switched to CBS or ESPN because they're constantly upgrading their pages and style and giving the users new stuff every year.  It's simple things too, nothing extravagant.  Not saying there's anything wrong with the other sites, I just don't use them because I don't have to.  I have no complaints with Yahoo.  

I can't recall if it was last year or this year, but they now let you look through a free agents last 7, 14, or 30 days.  I remember the 30 days because I would constantly look at a smaller sample size to see who is on a hot streak.  I know they've had the last week for a long time too.  But now you can basically split the difference and see the last 14 days.  I like that.

So today I've sorted through the highest ranked players over the last 14 days, and of course there are some interesting results.  Yahoo Ranking over the last two weeks in parentheses.  

Ben Zobrist (1) .347/.377/.755, 4 HR, 18 RBI, 13 R, 3 SB

Zobrist made headlines with his 8 RBI game and 10 total RBI day on April 28th.  He's ridden that to the #1 ranking in Yahoo over the last 14 days.  That streak started with an 0-for-5 game, so if you just look at his last 11 games he's hitting .387 with all those other pretty numbers.  He's raised his batting average by 78 points.

Adam Lind (2) .423/.439/.750, 5 HR, 16 RBI, 10 R

Lind broke out in 2009 and won a Silver Slugger award.  Then him and buddy Aaron Hill fell off a cliff last year and we were left wondering "What happened?"

Apparently Lind isn't a dead fish afterall.  (Same as Zobrist)  During one 8-game run Lind hit .531/.528/.1000 with the 5 HR and 13 of the RBI's.  You are probably wondering the same thing as I am.  "What's up with the walks Lind?"  Lind has never been patient at the plate, but his 5.3 bb% is far off from the 8.9% he put up in 2009.  At least he's doing the rest of the game well.

Jose Bautista (4) .464/.667/.1.214, 5 HR, 9 RBI, 13 R, 2 SB

Missing a few games hasn't hurt Bautista in the rankings at all.  Over just 10 games he smashed 5 HR and scored 13 times.  He even chipped in a couple stolen bases.  If you go back to "on pace for" that I wrote about yesterday, Bautista would be on an 82 HR, 65 double season pace with 211 hits and runs.  (In 2004, Ichiro had a streak of hits that lasted longer than two months which would have paced him for 325 hits over a full season.  And he did that for almost 2 and a half months.)

Bautista will be back to terrorize pitchers soon.

Jason Bourgeois (18) .481/.533/.667, 0 HR, 6 RBI, 5 R, 6 SB

Bourgeois is a 29 year old journeyman who played in 99 major league games coming into this season.  His speed is his greatest asset and he's using that to get more regular playing time in Houston.  Am I telling you to pick him up?  He's only 8% owned after all.  But he might only be good for a few stolen bases while he's hot.  He won't hit over .400 all year long.

Roy Halladay (5) 3-0, 1.46 ERA, 24.2 innings, 32 K's, 2 bb's

Just Roy being Roy, Halladay has won his last 3 starts and his 9.6 K/9 this season is the highest of his career.  So he's actually being better than Roy.  The future Hall of Famer has fine tuned his game to be the without-a-doubt best pitcher in the game.  Yes, he's pitched @SD, NYM, and WAS in his last 3 starts, but he mowed them all down just the same and his K/BB ratio is also the highest of his career.  Kickin' it with Cliff Lee may be helping him refine his own game.

James Shields (14) 1-0, .53 ERA, 17 innings, 19 K's, 3 bb's

Despite only having 2 starts in the time frame, and only winning one start (a large part of the rankings is predicated on wins for pitchers) Shields is ranked 15th in the game.  Against Toronto and LAA he gave up 10 hits and allowed 1 ER while walking just 3.  The Rays have won his last 4 starts and Shields has given up 4 ER in 33 innings during that time with 32 K's and just 6 bb's.  This is what many were expecting from Shields last season.

Ian Kennedy (27) 1-0, 1.99 ERA, 22.2 innings, 21 K's, 4 bb's

Kennedy shut out the Phillies with 10 K's and 0 bb's on April 25th and he's stayed hot.  A part of the big three-team trade with New York and Detroit, Kennedy was a disappointment in the Big Apple, but has been a solid starter in Arizona.  He got crushed by the Cardinals early in the season, but has been focused since then.  He still leads the league in wild pitches (4) which is something he also did last season (16)

Poll

Which hot streak do you most believe in?

• Ben Zobrist
• Adam Lind
• Jason Bourgeois
• Ian Kennedy

  8 votes | Results

Film News

Olivia Wilde opens up on the end of her marriage CNN (blog) "The mark of a good marriage is partnership and continuing to feel inspired by your spouse. I had that with Tao," she says. "But the end is not necessarily the tragedy. Staying in a relationship that is no longer working is the tragedy. ... Wilde talks about split from husbandRTE.ie Olivia Wilde: My Divorce Isn't A Tragedy — An Unhappy Marriage Is! Do You Agree?Hollywood Life all 85 news articles »

They've been trying to fire the guy for several years, and now at the 11th hour he resigns? I like Kool-Aid, but I'm not drinking this batch.  I've lived in the Washington D.C. area long enough to know that the last place Maryland Basketball Coach Gary Williams wants to be is off the sidelines.  Dude is part of the fabric of college basketball. 

Who else is gonna upset Duke and North Carolina in the ACC?

Williams has won way too many games to simply walk away.  He says his health is fine.  He says he still loves the game.  He says it was his decision.  But I have one question: Why now? If you were truly secure in the position and had a good recruiting class why would you abandon all of that?  Williams had some great young players on the team last season.  Were they the best in the ACC? Nope.  Did they have potential? Absolutely.  He had too much going for himself to roll out the way he did.

Is there more to the story? 

Are local media types in the Washington D.C. area drinking the Kool-Aid? Perhaps.  I know a lot of these reporters play golf with Williams.  A lot of journalists  in D.C. are good friends with Williams.  There's nothing wrong with that.  He's a great guy from what I'm told.  Very friendly. Smart. Reflective. Kind.  He's the kind of guy who you'd want to be your best friend—very loyal.  But are the right questions being asked about William's so called retirement?

I doubt it.

I'm not throwing my fellow journalism brothers and sisters under the bus, but you've got to admit:  It doesn't sound right.  It doesn't look right. Why?  Because the entire ordeal isn't right.  Something is missing here folks.  There's an underlying issue somewhere, some place. A guy with this much talent, experience, and skill simply doesn't turn in his coaches playbook while Coach K is gearing up for another national championship run.

It's well documented that former Maryland Athletic Director Debbie Yow wanted Williams out a couple of years ago.  It was a nasty experience that was never fully explained or resolved.  Yow wanted more from Williams.  She wanted another national championship.  She wanted CBS Sports crews roaming the campus in College Park reporting news about the Terps being back in the Final Four or the championship game.  But it wasn't to be.  Williams and his Terps had hit mediocrity.  They were no longer a factor in the chase for March Madness. They were no longer a a serious contender in the ACC. 

To put it bluntly, Williams' program was slipping.

Fortunately for Williams, Yow took another AD job in the Carolinas.  But the feud was well documented.  It got so bad that an assistant Athletic director under Yow also criticized Williams before Yow split. Williams defiantly asked Yow's deputy:  How many national championships have you won?  Good one Williams.  Score one for Gary.  Was she Yow's mouthpiece?  Perhaps. Good Cop, Bad Cop routine? Maybe. Yow never publicly trashed Williams.  She was smarter than that.

Heck, Williams is a basketball icon in the D.C. region.  He won a national championship in 2002 with current Lakers guard Steve Blake running the offense.  He resurrected the Terps Basketball program.  It was left in shambles following the death of Len Bias, the legendary Maryland basketball superstar who died of cocaine use shortly after being drafted number one by the Boston Celtics.

The line in the sand had been drawn, and even though Yow was history, the critics were already circling Comcast Center.  The doubters were present.  The vultures had set up shop in College Park, and they weren't leaving without some fresh or dead meat.  Williams didn't help his cause by not making the NCAA tournament field this past season.  He didn't help himself by refusing the recruit the talented "one and dones" who play one year of college basketball and then bolt for the NBA. 

He didn't play the game and that may have been another nail in his coffin.

More nails were soon to follow.  Namely, the announcement of Kevin Anderson as the new Athletic Director at Maryland.  Anyone with a little sense could see the handwriting on the wall in College Park.  Shortly arriving on campus, changes began happening quickly under Anderson.  Long time football coach Ralph Friedgen was replaced.  It didn't sound like he wanted to go, but he was out.  Questions began swirling about whether Anderson approved of the Fridges' coaching staff.  Should he hire this guy or that guy to bolster the staff? 

Next, Maryland took the unusual step of announcing Freidgen's replacement before he left.  You've heard it before: The coach in waiting.  I've always thought "the coach in waiting" must produce a lot of sleepless nights for the current coach.  But what's done was done. Unfortunately for the Terps the "coach in waiting" took another job, and Maryland was left hanging.  Lucky for Anderson, he found former Connecticut Football Coach Bobby Edsall waiting in the wings to accept the job.

Anderson never gave Williams a vote of confidence.  Call him Yow-light if you will.  Did he push Williams out?  Williams says no.  He says it was time to go. Too many years in one coaching job.  His tear-filled resignation speech carried "live" nationally was hard to watch.  Something didn't seem right.  Something seemed off.  I just didn't get the sense Williams was happy or in my humble opinion, happy about the way it ended on the Maryland Campus.  From where I sat, those joining him on the stage were simply going through the motions. 

Look, I don't know much about Anderson. But I respect the fact that he has to bring some national championships back to the basketball program.  I respect the fact that he has to make the Terps football team a national contender.  The Washington D.C area is too large not have a collegiate national contender in basketball and football. His plate is full.  The pressure is on.  He's made the changes. Now let's see if they were the right changes.

Despite what everyone is saying, including Williams, it feels like the Terps now former basketball coach was pushed.  Shown the door. Nudged out. 22 years at Maryland. 668 career victories at Maryland, American, Boston College, and Ohio State.  I'll tell you folks, 668 wins is a lot of wins.  If you're Maryland do you not lean on Williams for basketball advice after 33 years of roaming the sidelines?  Do you "find a place" for him?  Just askin'.  Or, do you simply hold the plastic news conference, read a few citations, trot out some former players, and say thank you?

Gary Williams had fallen on hard times in College Park.  The landscape of college basketball was changing.  It's a slippery landscape.  Loaded with influential AAU coaches directing high school superstars to a handul of college powerhouses around the country.  But did Williams deserve better treatment at the end? I beleive so.  Was he ready to retire? I doubt it.  At 66 years old, it's not like he uses a walker to enter the arena.  Physically he looks good. He sounds good.

I have two words for you: Bobby Cremins.  Cremins shocked the basketball world when he abruptly resigned from Georgia Tech in 2000 after 22 years and more than 450 wins.  Six years later he resurfaced at the College of Charleston.  Still gettin' it done.  Still one of the best.

Have we truly seen the last of  Gary Williams?

DJ Drama was in NYC earlier this week to shoot the video for his new single “Oh My” with Fabolous & Wiz Khalifa. The first offering off DJ Drama’s Gansgta Grillz 3: The Album is being split with parts shot in New York City and Miami. Loso’s MyFabolousLife & Nigel D. were on set, so [...]

LONDON — Paul McCartney and his girlfriend Nancy Shevell are engaged, his publicist said Friday, nearly four years after they were first spotted together. McCartney, 68, started dating the 51-year-old New York socialite and businesswoman following his bitter split from second wife Heather Mills.

I'm not a gym member, but I'd like to try and tone up everything. I'm not sure what to do, though, as the web seems to be split on the subject ("you should NEVER do crunches! They'll make your stomach bigger!"/ "You should ONLY do crunches! All other exercises are stupid!" etc :dizzy:). You...

LONDON (AP) -- Paul McCartney and his girlfriend Nancy Shevell are engaged, his publicist said Friday, nearly four years after they were first spotted together. McCartney, 68, started dating the 51-year-old New York socialite and businesswoman following his bitter split from second wife Heather ...

Ten days ago, Donald Trump was on top of the world.

President Obama had released his long-form birth certificate. Trump, touting the “birther” controversy as he sought momentum for a possible run at the GOP presidential nomination, was in New Hampshire crowing about it. Cable television showed the two men in a split screen! Everything was coming together.

Until it wasn’t. Last Saturday, Trump — or, more accurately, Trump’s hair — was the primary punching bag (can you punch hair?) in speeches by Obama and comedian Seth Meyers at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. (Trump, in keeping with his reputation, greeted the good-natured ribbing with a stone-faced stare.)

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In the age of instant news, when headlines last at most a few hours before being replaced by the next "big story," the death of Osama Bin Laden has unusual staying power. Ever since word started to leak late Sunday night -- first on Twitter, quoting a Congressional aide, then in confirmation from the White House itself -- the press corps, Washington, most of the nation and much of the world, has been riveted. The horrific nature of his crimes, the video of the planes flying into the World Trade Center, the reports of phone calls from airplane passengers to husbands and wives as they faced an awful death, the memory of loved ones wandering lower Manhattan for days searching for the lost. Not to mention the jagged face of the Pentagon and the crash scene in Shanksville, Pa. All those memories came rushing back, to give a fresh, raw quality to the news that al-Qaida's leader had not only been located, he had been shot and killed.

And the questions poured out: how long had the CIA suspected his presence there? (At least 6 months.) How had they discovered him? (Years of painstaking work, tracking down a courier based on a nickname.) If the evidence Bin Laden was in the house was "circumstantial" as White House counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan noted, why had the operation gone forward? Just how risky was this venture, compared to other operations Navy SEALS are used to carrying out? How could Bin Laden have been living in Pakistan without Pakistani officials knowing about it -- especially since it was so close to Pakistan's equivalent of West Point -- an elite military training academy? Who else was living in the compound? How many were armed when the raid took place? How much and what sort of resistance did they put up? Why didn't bin Laden try to escape, or was there no option to do so? What really went wrong with the "stealth" helicopter that U.S. officials said malfunctioned as it reached its destination? If there was only one person inside the compound using a gun - reportedly the courier - why were we first told it was a 40-minute firefight? What were President Obama and secretaries Clinton and Gates and others looking at in the White House Situation Room in that amazing photograph taken as the raid was underway?

Those were questions for the first and second days, but because it was an operation conducted in secret, and because of its success, more questions popped up by the hour: Why weren't neighbors around the compound in Abbottabad (named after a British major, James Abbott, who helped govern the area when it was part of India in the mid-19th century. See below for a poem Abbott wrote about the city.) Why weren't they more suspicious of a place with barbed wire, unusually high walls and tinted window glass? Had bin Laden ever emerged on the outside, with or without any sort of disguise? Why had the myth persisted so long that he was living in a cave or another remote, rugged location, when he was actually living comfortably in a city just 30 miles from Islamabad? What sort of material did the Navy SEALS, who pulled off the raid, take away? What has happened to bin Laden's three wives who reportedly were in the house at the same time, including the youngest, who was with him when he was found? (They're reportedly in custody of Pakistani security.) What sort of information are they providing? (One is saying bin Laden had been living in the house for at least five years.) How could bin Laden have been operationally directing the al-Qaida network if he had to rely on couriers traveling on foot to make contact with those on the outside?

Of course, the answers to many of these questions are emerging in a flood of news reports - reporters working overtime to get what details they can from their sources.

But still, new questions keep coming: How embarrassing is this episode for the Pakistani government - the fact that U.S. forces could swoop into their country and conduct such a daring operation without their knowledge? (This and the question of whether anyone in the Pakistani government knew that bin Laden was living in their midst, are under investigation, according to Pakistani officials.) How will U.S. relations with Pakistan change as a result, at a time when our country relies on Pakistan to help fight Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan? Will Congress want to reduce the now-billions of dollars in aid this country provides annually to Pakistan? And a different line of questions: Why did the U.S. government -- the Obama administration -- decide to announce that it had captured a "treasure trove" of documents, computer material, hard drives, thumb drives and other potential valuables from the compound, thus giving al-Qaida a "heads-up" that they have this knowledge, and signaling to them the need to change phone numbers, couriers, codes, plans, etc.? Why not leave them guessing about what was retrieved? In fact, why did the administration feel the need to say much of anything about the operation and what they found? Why not keep more of it secret?

And possibly the most enduring questions: What does bin Laden's death mean for al-Qaida and its affiliates? How many are mourning his passing, in private, or in the open, as hundreds of Islamist Salafists -- a group with fundamentalist beliefs -- did Friday in Cairo? Who will take bin Laden's place at the head of al-Qaida? Where is his second-in-command, Egyptian-born Ayman al-Zawahiri? For that matter, where is former Taliban leader Mullah Omar? Are reports of a split in al-Qaida accurate? Will Bin Laden's death inspire more young Muslims to join the cause, or will it discourage them from moving toward radicalism? Coinciding with the Arab Spring taking place in Muslim countries across the Middle East and North Africa -- will al-Qaida ever be able to pose the threat it once did? Its confirmation Friday morning that its own founder, Osama Bin Laden, was indeed dead was the acknowledgement many didn't expect. But it was accompanied by a warning that any happiness would soon be replaced by sadness, as it planned to retaliate.

It's these questions, and scores more still surfacing, that will keep this story alive. Osama Bin Laden in hiding has been such a giant presence in American life for such a long time that his death will continue to fascinate and puzzle us.

Will we ever know everything there is to know about him and his "evil empire," the term Ronald Reagan once used to describe the Soviet Union? Probably not, and that's the reason this story will not only outlast the usual short news cycle in American journalism, it'll keep historians occupied for some time to come.

In the meantime, there is some irony in the lines of the simple poem British Major James Abbott wrote about Abbotabad in 1853, when he left it to return to England:

"Abbotabad"

I remember the day when I first came here
And smelt the sweet Abbottabad air

The trees and ground covered with snow
Gave us indeed a brilliant show

To me the place seemed like a dream
And far ran a lonesome stream

The wind hissed as if welcoming us
The pine swayed creating a lot of fuss

And the tiny cuckoo sang it away
A song very melodious and gay

I adored the place from the first sight
And was happy that my coming here was right

And eight good years here passed very soon
And we leave you perhaps on a sunny noon

Oh Abbottabad we are leaving you now
To your natural beauty do I bow

Perhaps your winds sound will never reach my ear
My gift for you is a few sad tears

I bid you farewell with a heavy heart
Never from my mind will your memories thwart

Via New York Review of Books/Wikipedia

In the run up to the big day, bookies have been minting fortunes. Odds were offered on the music, the honeymoon venue, the color of the Queen's hat. Even the length of the sermon. Will the bride's wedding car break down before her prince whisks her off in a ceremonial coach? What shade of white will the dress be? Will Prince Harry remain sober for his best man speech? Will his trousers split? The gloomiest bets by far have been on how long the marriage will last. Some say a day. Some, a lifetime. One to 10 years seems to be the favorite.

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The English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-81) was among the most adventurous, controversial and innovative musicians of his generation. After an initial association with Stockhausen and the European avant-garde, he became engaged with the aesthetic ideas of John Cage and the New York school. A leading figure in the experimental music of the 1960s, Cardew is widely acknowledged as a pioneer of indeterminacy, graphic notation, free improvisation and performer involvement. As well as extending the boundaries of music in unprecedented directions, he enquired deeply into its social relevance and meaning. His passionate and untiring quest for wider social significance led him eventually to become a political activist.

The Austin New Music Coop plays Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning over two days on 6-7 May 2011 in honour of the 75th anniversary of the composer's birth on 7 May 1936

Motorola Mobility, the wireless division spun off from Motorola earlier this year, will put its new corporate headquarters in Illinois, according to an agreement reached between the company and the state. The new HQ will be located in Libertyville. The accord will keep approximately 3,000 jobs from leaving the state. In return for tax credits, Motorola Mobility will invest $500 million in R&D related to these jobs over the next three years....

Bellator's 2011 welterweight tournament concludes in Saturday's captivating headliner, which pits undefeated Judoka Rick Hawn versus Xtreme Couture hitman Jay Hieron.

The remaining match-ups on the card will be previewed briefly tomorrow, but this collision should be a doozy and called for a more detailed analysis.

It's rare to witness Olympic caliber Judo in the cage, and even more unusual to see it whittled into such a functional kickboxing package in such a short span of time.

Rick Hawn (11-0) has taken to MMA like Tank Abbott to cocktails, avoiding the aches and pains that normally plague singularly proficient fighters early in their career. The Dellagrotte product enters the welterweight finals with a perfect record after narrowly escaping the dangerous Lyman Good by split decision, propelled by his ever improving stand-up, strong top control in the 2nd, and a key takedown to close the fight.

Jay Hieron (21-4) has always been one of the highly respected 170-pounders outside of the Octagon, even though he went 0-2 inside it. He was once headed for a shot at Nick Diaz's Strikeforce belt, but some shenanigans involving medicinal Mary Jane, Armando Garcia and CSAC licensing unhinged the bout.

Hieron took out Jesse Taylor and Joe Riggs instead, then set up shop with Bellator for the welterweight tournament. The bracket favorite had a tough journey to the finish line courtesy of Brent Weedman, who had previously upset Dan Hornbuckle and almost pulled off a repeat. Their semifinal contest went to Hieron by unanimous decision, though the fans did not unanimously agree with the judges.

An in-depth look at how the main event fighters stack up follows in the full entry. 

SBN coverage of Bellator 43

Variables

Judging: There is a list of attributes that judges tend to favor in a fighter, and Rick Hawn has many of them. He's aggressive, he moves forward constantly, he throws big punches, and even one substantial throw or takedown often outweighs any number of unsuccessful attempts. This is like handing your teachers a shiny red apple with a twinkling smile right before they grade your paper.

The Unknown: Each fighter will threaten the other with some unknown elements. Hawn has yet to face a top-shelf wrestler, let alone a wrestler with the submission and striking abilities of Hieron. Conversely, Hawn's unparalleled Judo and Sityodtong striking is a tough union for anyone to accommodate.

Experience: At the elite level, Hieron has a lot. Hawn does not, and "The Thoroughbred" is easily Hawn's steepest test.

Free Movement / Striking Phase

I can't commend Hawn enough for the considerable advancements he's made with his stand-up game. He's displayed a strong grasp of overall fundamentals in a short amount of time; a tribute to his athleticism and malleability.

Against savvy striker Lyman Good, his most capable opponent to date, Hawn was understandably a bit gun-shy and fell back on his takedowns to even things out. In his early fights, Hawn was able to corner and contain his opponents, mashing them into the fence or to the mat where his ground-and-pound followed. Leading up to the Good fight, he showed unnerving comfort in his stand-up and waited for his adversaries to press before enforcing his clinch (shown to the right vs. LeVon Maynard), or more impressively, just beat them standing (see Hawn vs. Rough House scrapper "Judo" Jim Wallhead).

Happy to clinch at anytime, Hawn is somewhat immune to some of the striking tendencies that leave the average guy vulnerable (also depicted in the animation). Hawn's been broadsided with singles and doubles in the middle of throwing a combo, but was still able to recover and fend off the attempt. Whether intentional or not, his uncanny balance and ungodly powerful base have allowed him to get caught out of position and emerge unscathed, or even turn the situation to his advantage.

Lyman Good was the first solid striker that threw Hawn's rhythm off and stung with stiff counters while resisting the clinch, and Jay Hieron should do the same. Though he mixes in low, mid, and straight kicks, Hieron is mostly a proficient boxer with sharp counters and substantial power. Good might be the stronger specimen physically, but Hieron's experience, wrestling background, and tight boxing will yield the same problems that Good presented.

I don't think it's coincidental that Hawn's inexperience in other aspects became more apparent against Good. Forming a dual-pronged attack by adding efficient kickboxing to his Judo foundation was what carried him up to the big leagues, and though he's advanced at an alarming rate, I don't think it's been enough to catch up with Hieron. Jay has also settled nicely into the role of the counter-puncher, and should be able to drill some holes through Hawn's adequate but embryonic striking.

Advantage: Hieron

Clinch Phase

It's fascinating to watch a Judoka of Hawn's status adapt his background to MMA's environment. Where a freestyle or Greco-Roman wrestler has a smaller list of adjustments to make to implement their strengths, the lack of a gi and the preference to close distance and tie up makes the transition more difficult for Judo players.

Along with more intense acclimation comes a smaller range of techniques, as that jacket that was specifically designed for clenching and gripping is no longer there, now replaced by slippery skin.

That's why range and distance is a critical tool for Hawn. In close, his hips are still as deadly as ever, and a subtle ballet of footwork, balance, and momentum unfold in his fierce clinch game. There's a good chance the man could hip-bump the Eiffel Tower crooked.

Hieron was a high school state and JuCo national wrestling champion, but -- just as I feel it's unlikely for Hawn to match his experience standing -- I don't see Hieron matching Hawn's skill in the clinch, especially if Hawn can use the cage to restrict his movement. Hieron can survive if he's very escape-minded, stays away from Hawn's waist and doesn't get trapped against the fence.

However, when directly immersed in the clinch and tangling with Hawn, the Olympic-level Judoka gets the nod. With a gi, without a gi, or even in a clown costume, Hawn has spent more time training techniques in this position than fighters like Rory MacDonald have been alive. The disclaimer is that it's even harder to force a clinch when your opponent knows it's coming and doesn't want to play the game (see Machida vs. Couture), and it's no secret that this is where Hawn excels. Hieron is adept with infighting and can survive in the position for short periods of time, but unless avoided at all costs, it's only playing with fire.

Advantage: Hawn

Grappling Phase

If you re-examine the beautiful throw by Hawn above, but this time, replace LeVon Maynard's clumsy forward-lurch with a fine-tuned double leg, and we have an example of the different kind of threat Hieron brings to the table. I'm not sure Hawn can get away with some of his lackadaisical habits against Hieron and simply make up for it with his strength and skill, especially in a three rounder.

To my knowledge, we've yet to see Hawn on his back in MMA, and Hieron's tenacious top game might be overwhelming if he can impose it.

Hieron wreaks havoc with a litany of catches that are conducive to active wrestlers when shooting, sprawling, scrambling, and clinching. The attempts are usually low risk and maintain or improve position rather than sacrifice it.  Backed by Hieron's agile but hefty base:  D'arce, anaconda, and north-south chokes, arm-triangles, americanas and kimuras all punctuate his arsenal. Jumping for the guillotine is the one maneuver he's pursued in the past that will be ill-advised versus Hawn.

Hieron is also a great scrambler, so normally he's able to break loose and recover if he ends up on the bottom. Hieron clearly has the composure to hold his own in the guard, but as we saw against Lyman Good, one mistake against a potent control-and-pound fighter can cost exactly one-third of the fight on the score cards.

There's a little too much mystery for me to make a strong pick here. Weedman was able to take Hieron down, and I can picture Hawn flagging down the popcorn vendor while a small army of wrestlers attempting double-legs bounce off his legs completely unbeknownst to him. Hieron is much more proven with freestyle wrestling, but if Hawn can stuff the shot and wrap him up, it becomes his world.

With the right timing, Hieron could also nail a shot and test Hawn's guard, but in most scenarios, I see Hawn on top. Even though this is a close one with many unknowns and Hawn might be the favorite in a straight takedown war, Hieron's experience and comprehensive style should put him slightly ahead here, even though I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Hawn can muffle him and ride out the round.

Advantage: Hieron (slight)

Summary

Becoming a well-rounded martial artist is imperative, and Hawn's frightening assimilation in only two short years of pro competition is what carried him to the top so quickly. Being a "complete fighter" is a means to an end, and that end is having the ability to implement a system of tactics to exploit your biggest strength or your opponent's biggest weakness.

This is why I see Hieron negating Hawn's strength by staying elusive and peppering him with precise counters. If Hawn does get him in the clinch, Hieron should be able to escape and punish him on the way in and on the way out, stuffing underhooks and circling away with an array of tight hooks and uppercuts.

As with any MMA bout, Hawn could connect on the feet, score some takedowns or maintain top control, but Hieron has the more expansive inventory and should be smart enough to assemble and adhere to a poignant strategy.

My prediction:  Hieron by TKO

Hawn gif courtesy of Caposa

Hieron gif from Smoogy

Poll

Who wins the Bellator 2011 Welterweight Tournament?

• Rick Hawn
• Jay Hieron

  103 votes | Results

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Boom Fitness is the value leader in upscale fitness clubs. Our concept of a beautiful club at a value price has made a real impact in our markets. We have two clubs, Upper East Side, at Third Avenue and 81st Street; and Murray Hill, at Park Avenue and 34th Street.



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Madonna, 52, has split from her lover Brahim Zaibat, a hip-hop dancer, after nine months. A close friend of Zaiabat said sarcastically: 'Who's Madonna?'

My favorite Go To stitch is split but latest stitch fascination is a wheatear.

Don't know how many fans of this band exist here, but here's the story: http://www.spin.com/articles/darkness-reunite ---Quote--- After a five-year split, all four original members of the British outfit, including frontman Justin Hawkins and bassist Frankie Poullain, have reformed and scheduled their first gig -- an opening slot for Def Leppard on June 10 at England's Download Festival. Hawkins, 35, who quit the band in 2006 shortly after a stint in rehab for cocaine addiction, spoke to the BBC about the reunion: "The main thing for us is to make sure that musically we turn the experience into something positive again. We've been remembering why it was so much fun in the first place, just four men making loud music in a room." Hawkins added that for the past few years he's been working on tracks with his brother, the Darkness' guitarist Dan Hawkins, for an upcoming release. ---End Quote--- http://www.classicrockmagazine.com/news/darkness-offered-megabucks-to-reunite/ ---Quote--- (2008)The mock rockers have been offered ‘a small fortune’ to hit the road again and are now considering the deal....the US entrepreneur behind the Dubai Desert Rock festival has offered the boys megabucks for a huge American tour in 2009 – and a new album. ---End Quote--- This has been in the works apparently for about 3 years...glad to know it's finally happening... I'm guessing all members of the band are broke and this is why this is happening. Justin's solo career kinda went nowhere and I haven't heard too much about Stone Gods (the band the remainder of The Darkness formed). I'm just curious to know if Justin can stay off the cocaine this time around.

Rakim, On tour

Who could forget that immortal couplet: "Me and Eric B and a nice big plate of fish/ Which is my favourite dish"? Besides promoting the healthy benefits of an Omega 3-rich diet, Eric B & Rakim's 1987 album and single Paid In Full marked hip-hop's coming of age. Recorded in less than a week, Eric B's liberal use of 70s funk samples and the smoothly methodical lyrical contributions of Rakim marked it out as a turning point in the genre's evolution. To celebrate this influential album's 25th anniversary, Rakim (now sadly split from Eric B amid royalty wrangles) brings a night of highest quality old-school hip-hop to the UK on his own tour, before joining Mos Def's Black Star and De La Soul for two dates of hip-hop royalty. A fear of flying keeps him from playing here more often, so catch him while you can.

O2 Academy Bristol, Sat; Rescue Rooms, Nottingham, Sun; The Arches, Glasgow, Mon; with Black Star at HMV Hammersmith Apollo, W6, Tue & O2 Apollo Manchester, Wed

John Mitchell

Riffraff, Middlesbrough

Besides a few adventurous nights at The Empire, you couldn't say there was that much cool stuff going on in Middlesbrough's club scene. However, as with most places, scratch beneath the surface and you'll usually find something of worth, like Riffraff's cool house parties, helmed by Paul Bowen and Lee Pennington. They've had Berlin-themed evenings and hosted guests such as Benoit and Sergio, Miguel Campbell and Dyed Soundorom. Tonight's party sees them welcome Secretsundaze as Giles Smith and James Priestley make a rare joint appearance in support of their nomadic session's 10th anniversary.

The Medicine Bar, Corporation Road, Sat

Marc Rowlands

Field Day Night, London

With the eclectically awesome likes of James Blake, Omar Souleyman, Faust, Gruff Rhys, Wild Beasts and Warpaint all lined up for the Field Day festival on 6 Aug, it's fair to say this year's Victoria Park party will be worth a peek at the very least. There's no slouching from the organisers in the run-up to the event either, with tonight's Field Day Night giving a taster of things to come later this summer. DJ Omar-S – not to be confused with the aforementioned Omar, Mr Souleyman – will be playing an exclusive set of his own brand of deep Detroit goodness. Ramadanman collaborator Midland will also be making an appearance, as will Bloggers Delight's Casper C and Skull Juice's Benedict Bull. Further help in counting down the weeks until Field Day proper comes from Huntleys & Palmers and Secret Danger Society, who'll be adding to this squidgy house and "tech-yes" get-together.

XOYO, Cowper Street, EC2, Sat

Leonie Cooper

Highlife, Glasgow

Despite being big in the 1980s, thanks largely to the exposure given by Paul Simon's Graceland, the chances are that the last time you heard any actual South African music was during the World Cup, when it was honking out of the business end of a vuvuzela. Spurred on by the recent global successes of DJ Mujava's Township Funk and MC Okmalumkoolkat's Boomslang, Highlife's dedication to world music brings South African house to the fore at tonight's outing, with special guest Esa making an appearance. Born in Cape Town, Esa moved to Glasgow four years ago and is now a regular deckside presence at several local club nights, recently setting up his own label, Rememory Music. Esa's Sound Of South Africa at Highlife set contains a mix of music from his homeland that rarely gets aired at his usual residencies in the city.

La Cheetah, Queen Street, Sat

Patric Baird

Deptford Dub Club, London

It might sound like the sort of legendary happening that's been running for yonks and yonks, but rather than being as entrenched in SE8 lore as local branches of the WI and Neighbourhood Watch, it transpires that the Deptford Dub Club is a brand-new venture. In spite of this lack of anecdote-riddled musical history, the brains behind the party have picked two legendary talents to get the ball rolling. First up is record producer Adrian Sherwood, who's making the pilgrimage from north to south London to ply the punters with reggae, funk, R&B; and the cream of the Jamaican crop. He'll be followed by the unparalleled Mad Professor, a man who's worked with everyone from Lee Perry and Sly and Robbie to Horace Andy and Massive Attack. With both of tonight's acts boasting second-to-none dub credentials, expect to hear the very best the genre has to offer.

The Albany, Douglas Way, SE8, Sat

LC

Judd Trump caused a sensation this week when, aged just 21, he rocketed into snooker's World Championship final. So who is this new boy wonder?

Judd Trump can measure, precisely, when and how fast he got properly famous. Just over three weeks ago, on 14 April, he opened a Twitter account with the cheery "Hello twitter!!", swiftly followed by "In nandos tucking into half a chicken!!" (he is fond of exclamation marks. And food.) Initially @judd147t, "part time snooker player, full time international playboi!!" [sic] had some 200 followers – respectable, for a normal citizen. Then he went to Sheffield and played his first game in his second World Championship, which, after a wobbly – and duly tweeted – beginning ("Nervy start but gotta take 5-4 powwow!!"), he won, dispatching the title holder, Neil Robertson. The follower count jumped to 3,000. "I was shocked. And then I started publicising it a little bit, and said I'd love to get up to 10,000, or 20,000, and then one day, after, I think, my semi-final" – a game which, by fearlessly going for shots others might avoid ("If in doubt hit it as hard as you can?!!"), he both thrilled his audience and won – "it jumped from like 10,000 to 25,000, and I was really shocked. I overtook all of the rest of the snooker players." By the end of last week, over 51,000 followers were being informed that it was "time to put a dent in the bank balance in london today!!"

For said bank balance has swelled a lot in that time, too. On 3 April, the 21-year-old won the China Open, pocketing £60,000 and gaining his first ranking title; he didn't win the World Championships, but came a close second to three-time world champion John Higgins, pocketing £125,000. In some ways more important than the money, however, was the sense of a blistering new arrival in snooker, warmly welcomed. "Judd's greatest asset is his game terrifies people. Never seen anyone pot so well. Scary," tweeted Ronnie O'Sullivan, the game's last such arrival (who, incidentally, joined the Twitter-sphere on the same day as Trump). "Judd was by far the better player," said Higgins after the game. "He was playing a brand of snooker I've never seen in my life. We've got a new sensation, which is great for the game. It's just a fantastic feeling." Viewing figures peaked in the UK at 6.6 million, the best for the last five years, in no small part due to Trump's bravura showmanship (and boyband haircut); a total of 27.1 million watched the tournament overall. In China, 30 million people watched the semi-final, in which Trump beat Chinese star Ding Junhui. "The Juddernaut is the future," hyperventilated the Daily Mail, "and that future is now."

Although, right now, the future is late. When it finally pulls into the business centre car park on the edges of Romford, Essex, in a white BMW with a flamboyant spoiler, Trump, his childhood friend Ryan, and his manager Django Fung, a Hong Kong-born businessman in natty narrow trousers and velvet-lapelled jacket, are discussing the afternoon's prospective shopping trip. Fung suggests he might not come along; Trump's face falls. "Come with us?" The openness of his face, looking at his manager, the obvious, implicit trust in an elder, make him look very young. All ignore the journalist in the room.

So what was he up to this morning? He is watchful now, the vulnerabilty contained. "Sleepin'." Absently, he strokes the large, fake diamond-studded watch on his wrist. His tight white Gucci T-shirt is pristine, his belt and the obligatory band of striped underwear just so. He is fit, but incredibly skinny, a broomstick topped by an elaborately teased mop of hair. It's all very self-aware; when I mention that the swell in viewing figures seems largely to have been because of him, he says, "Yeah – I had a lot of people tell me that. A lot of younger kids and that – obviously because I'm more at their age and a little bit different to the rest of the snooker players, with my image and stuff." Image? "My whole hairstyle, the way I dress. Older people like to dress older. I dress in more flamboyant, stylish … " Has he always made this degree of effort? "More so now. I used to be quite laid back and that. But obviously the more you're in the public eye, the more you've got to … dress to impress." (There is also the fact that he simply loves to shop. "Love it. Absolutely love it." He can't wait, when the interview is over, to hit Gucci first, then Harrods.)

It's of a piece with the deliberate showmanship of his play – the supposedly impossible shots, the calculated recklessness of his pocketing, which, as he tells it, are a kind of evangelism. "I think I wanted – not to show off, but try and make [snooker] more popular, whereas other players maybe just want to play the game and don't really care about the fans as much. But I always want to go for certain shots that please the crowd, and stuff like that." Partly this is because it's just "a lot easier with them supporting you than with them against you. You enjoy it more." But also "I've just got the mindset of really wanting to open the game up to new people. I kind of want to create a massive attention around snooker."

He doesn't seem particularly arrogant, nor is there any false modesty. Snooker is almost a lone sport, played in many ways against yourself and in your head; an internal negotiation of skill and confidence practised, for hours, largely alone. Trump is obviously gregarious, as up for a laugh and night out with friends as any 21-year-old, but a lifetime of self-reliance and discipline (in the sport, at least) definitely shows. He hasn't ever had a coach, apart from the worried attentions of his father when he was much younger, and simply doesn't see the need for one. "I've just kind of learnt on my own. I literally know just by playing a shot, by the feel of it – I can tell, straight away. I don't really need anyone to tell me. Other people try and tweak their techniques and that, but I've just been exactly the same all my life, and I'd never change anything."

Trump was born in Bristol; his parents and most of his family come from either Bristol or Cornwall. His father is a lorry driver, and his mother a cook. It was all very "normal, really. Both doing quite normal jobs, nothing extravagant – just do their work, come home, eat, go to bed." He inherited his mother Georgina's shyness. "I've always been pretty shy. Unless I know someone really well" – or increasingly, if he is being interviewed – "I can't keep a conversation going more than 10 seconds, really."

He doesn't remember this himself, but his father has said that he bought him a mini snooker table when he was three, and could instantly tell that his toddler had talent and application; he played his first competitive game at six, standing on a cardboard box, and had his first sponsorship deal at eight. By nine he had been sufficiently noticed for World Snooker to arrange for him to meet his hero, Ronnie O'Sullivan, at the Welsh Open. "It was a bit weird, meeting your hero for the first time." (They have since become quite friendly, and share a manager in Fung). Trump won the national under-15s when he was 10 – "That was when I thought that I might have a future in the game" – and at 13 he beat Mike Hallett, a former world No 6, who, minutes later, saw the boy playing on some swings. "That made me feel a lot better," Hallett has said, wryly. Later in his teens Trump was playing, and winning, 40-50 tournaments a year.

He isn't oblivious to what this has cost his parents. "It was hard work for them. Obviously my dad never really had time out to go and do normal things. He was working all week, and then driving me on weekends. They've never really been on holiday. They spent all their money on me, growing up. So it would obviously be nice to repay that. I don't want to just throw money at them, I want it to be thoughtful. I'll have a think, and ask them, and see what we come up with."

It was a shock, when he turned pro, and moved to Romford (a hotbed of world-class snooker players, it turns out), to start losing games. There were far fewer tournaments at first, six or seven a year, so lots of time to brood on what went wrong. The sports press began to notch him up as a disappointment, an underachiever. Alone, and fending for himself for the first time – "I can just about use the oven. And it is hard, learning to use a washing machine and stuff" – he was, also for the first time, properly lonely. "I would come here" – to Grove Academy, where he practises; in competition season he is here for about five hours a day – "then go home, and just sit at home until the next day." Travelling, especially abroad, he sometimes now pays for a friend to come along, otherwise it is as it was in China last month: "Getting up, getting ready, playing my game, and just going back to my hotel, eating on my own, going to sleep, and that's it."

In China – where snooker is huge, even among the quite young, and he has been a pin-up, frequently mobbed by female autograph-seekers, since he was 17 – he broke up with his girlfriend of a year, a drama student. The way he describes it is somehow simultaneously honestly insightful and oblivious, both to the hurt he might cause, and to the fact that he's effectively diagnosing something fame might do to him if he's not careful. "We were never really seeing each other, because this is her last year at uni and obviously I've been travelling, nearly every two or three weeks, and so it just got to the point where it was like, 'There really is no point.'" It hasn't been too hard, though. "I won China straight away, and then I had the World Championships to concentrate on, and there's been so much attention from other people and that, it was kind of easy to put it to the back of my mind, and that was it, really. It was like a year of being with her was just gone. It was quite strange, because when I split up with my previous girlfriend [whom he had been with for a year and half] it was really hard to get over, for like, a month, but this time there was no emotion, nothing. I just kind of shut it off. I don't know – I could wake up one day and it might sink in, but obviously a year's a lot of time to just shut off, like that." In the meantime, he announced to a newspaper, with little hint of tongue-in-cheek, that "if there are groupies, bring 'em on, the more the merrier. I'm young, free and single."

And for the moment he's enjoying it. He gets recognised nearly everywhere he goes, asked for autographs and pictures; he basks in the attention. Is that what he really wants? He laughs. "Only from girls. No – obviously – when you're growing up, you kind of dream about being famous and that – but when you … I think … I won't mind it for maybe a couple of weeks, but I dunno how I'll take it after that. I think it could get quite annoying, But I'm enjoying it for the time being."

A couple of the elder statesmen of the sport have warned that he has a choice – dedication, sacrifice and world domination – or fun and fame and the occasional good tournament. What does he want? "Both. I think I dedicate myself to snooker – while I'm in season, it's just snooker, snooker, snooker – but when I'm away from it I'm completely the opposite – just go out and have fun." And what's your idea of fun? The answer is immediate. "Driving around in a supercar making as much noise as possible – getting as much attention and as much people looking at me as possible." He's definitely on his way to that particular goal.

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

I'm mostly known around here as the LA burger guy on A Hamburger Today. It's true, I am a burger devotee, but if you are asking me what food I cherish the most, the answer is easy: pizza. It is my first and greatest food love, and that's saying something. My favorite things in this life? A girl from Texas, my family, and then pizza.

As you might imagine, my New York City childhood is more than a little bit responsible for my pizza predilection. As a boy, my father and I would travel back and forth across the city in search of a slice. We'd ride the Belt Parkway out to his childhood stomping grounds in Bensonhurst to eat what I will always describe as the perfect Sicilian slice at L&B; Spumoni Gardens. Sometimes it was a ride up to Arthur Avenue in The Bronx to the strange stuck-in-amber stretch of mid-century Italian-Americana. Suffice to say, my earliest and best food memories are pizza-shaped.

So I am duty-bound to alert you, dear Slice'rs, to my impending public embarrassment. I'll be appearing on tonight's episode of Kitchen Nightmares (gulp)! The folks who produce Gordon Ramsey's tough-love, restaurant makeover show asked for a Serious Eater to sample the reworked menu at the LA area restaurant called The Capri and I stepped up (and opened wide).

I'd hoped this post could a treatise explaining how I was misrepresented through the editing process, but the truth is I just don't know. I'll be watching it for the first time tonight with the rest of the audience—it's on Fox at 8 (7 Central).

Maybe I'll get lucky and my screen time will amount to just a split second of me gorging on pizza, but however it goes down I'll write a follow up post reviewing the pizza so you can get a better sense of whether Capri makes a pie worth your time. Until then, please be generous with your judgments of my performance; I've never had to eat on TV before, let alone on TV with Gordon Ramsey yelling at a cuddly pair of twins who own an Italian restaurant!

In their Eastern semifinal series, Chicago was only able to garner a split with Atlanta, which now plays host to a pivotal Game 3. Can the top-seeded Bulls re-assert themselves? Follow here.

Citigroup Inc , which needed $45 billion in U.S. government handouts to survive the financial crisis, is about to paper over a visible remnant of its near-failure: its single-digit share price.

Horn, Clementi File Protests in Sweden; Bielkheden to Appeal Suspension Sherdog.com Both fighters competed in closely contested title bouts at the event, which emanated from Hovet in Stockholm, Sweden. Horn fell to fellow UFC vet Thales Leites by split decision, while Clementi was on the short end of a unanimous verdict following his ...

After the triumph of Revisitations Set 1 comes the eagerly anticipated second volume, this time around containing the Patrick Troughton escapade The Seeds Of Death, the Jon Pertwee romp Carnival Of Monsters and Peter Davison’s dark adventure Resurrection Of The Daleks. To give the set the coverage it deserves this review has been split into [...]

Lillian Dunbar commented on C. Dianne Zweig Editor's Desk's group 'Estate, Yard, Tag Sale Connection'

This is something I couldn't quite put my finger on until I read this, and it explains a lot. Rank-and-file Democrats simply do not indoctrinate themselves with liberal ideology the way the conservative base does with wingnut wisdom. That makes them distinctly more susceptible to the whole "split the difference" mentality so beloved of our bipartisan-loving Democratic leadership, and it puts progressives at a distinct disadvantage. So what are we going to do about it?

Matthew Yglesias flags the latest Pew survey, which attempts to provide a political typology to describe the different ideological groups that reside in each party. Looking at the extent to which Democrats are divided on social issues and immigration, Yglesias notes the ideological asymmetry between Democrats and Republicans:

This is a big contrast from the structure of opinion among Republican loyalists, who are pretty uniformly rightwing. A Republican politician starts with a base of conservatives, and then needs to add some less conservative people. By contrast, while some Democrats have a base of “solid liberals” many don’t. And nationwide, the solid liberals aren’t just a minority of the country, they’re a minority of the Democratic Party base vote.

What's more, it's not just that the Republican Party contains more conservatives than the Democratic Party contains liberals but that "solid liberals" are less intense in their preferences than their conservative equivalences. If you compare Pew's typology groups on "Politics & Elections" and particularly, "support for compromise," you'll find that 70 percent of solid liberals like elected officials who "compromise with those they disagree with." By contrast, only 17 percent of "staunch conservatives" agree. The rest -- or at least, 79 percent -- prefer elected officials who stick to their positions.

enian chess grand master Levon Aronian played a draw with Alexander Grischuk at the FIDE Candidates Match 2011 in Kazan, Tatarstan, on Friday.

This news is brought to you by HyeMedia | Armenian News where you can read balanced Armenian News from Armenia & the Diaspora as reported by various news agencies and freelance journalists

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