Pasadena, Food Demonstrator We love food! Is it your passion too?If you want to put your passion for food to good use, then we have possibilities. Who are we? Trader Joe's, your favorite neighborhood grocery store that originated in Southern California and now operates more than 300 stores (and growing) from coast to coast.Work in a fun, food-focused, fast-paced environment where friendly people are the nor

Leverage your existing car dealership relationships to make an incredible recurring income (case study below)...

Who are we?

We have a 6+ year, proven product that is sold to numerous car dealerships throughout the US and we're making our move into the Portland metro area. This year 2011 is shaping to be our best year ever, and we still have TONS of room to grow - so you have the chance to be at ground floor of a champion, rock-solid business. Our success stems from our fact that there’s a huge demand for our product from auto dealerships. We recently revamped all our marketing pieces, and to tell you the truth, they're gorgeous and kick ass.

Who is this for?

1) This is perfect for sales reps that already sell to and actively work with car dealerships. Just introduce them to our program (in person) and our marketing material sells itself. When GMs and part/service see this, they are instantly sold because the product makes perfect sense. It saves them time and money on a very common problem.

2) This is also perfect for anyone with ties to car dealerships who can introduce this product to the decision makers.

3) If you happen to know anyone else who is suitable, please email them this job description. Golden opportunities like this don’t come along every day.

IMPORTANT: We're only interested in speaking with you if you have an active customer base of more than 10 dealerships (or work with substantial auto groups) and rub shoulders and have rapport with the decision makers. This is found money for them, a substantial long-term profit center so it's an easy sell. You're more than welcomed to visit dealerships you've never met but get your network in first and brand new accounts will be a piece of cake. If you have less than 10 dealerships at your disposal, make your case and we'll consider.

NOTE: This is strictly a commission-only position. Once dealerships are in the program and ordering, we do need you to drop by the dealerships from time to time to check quality of installs, see how they're doing, get feedback, etc. because they’ll keep re-ordering and that is where your long-term earnings will come from. Keep them happy and your bank balance will be healthy. When you bring in enough dealerships, you'll have an unbelievable passive income because of consistent reorders and volume.

What our program is about

What's highly attractive about our program is that it's great for both dealerships AND car buyers:

For the car dealership:

* Eliminate lot damage that costs time and money
* Instantly increase dealership profits (average profit between $109 to $208 per vehicle, and that's AFTER Parts, Service, front-end/back-end sales get their cut)
* The first order pays for itself and after that, it's all profit.
* We offer both preload and non-preload versions of our program. (Preload means our product is installed on ALL vehicles of a dealership).

For car buyers:

* Lifetime warranty on our product
* Protects their investment and resale value for just a small cost

How you get paid

Your job is to introduce our product to dealerships using our "soft' sell marketing presentation and when they sign up, we take it all from there. We pay you commissions on EVERY order, for as long as a dealership is in the program. The money is made on volume and re-orders. There is no ceiling - the more dealerships you bring in, they more money you make - do the work once and get paid with recurring commissions.

True story

Right now, we have a sales rep up north who we send monthly checks to. He doesn't do anything, all he did was refer dealerships into our program. In 2010, we paid him around $60,000 for doing nothing. We're a bit aggravated because he's not aggressive enough and gets paid more than a lot of people.. haha.. but we're glad to pay him because he's making money since we're making money.

Your next step

If you’re the person we’re looking for, send us an email with some information about yourself, your relevant experience and the number of dealership contacts you currently have. If we believe you’re suitable, we will discuss in more detail and allocate territories. Act fast before your area is gone.

• Location: Portland and metro
• Compensation: Recurring commissions
• Telecommuting is ok.
• This is a part-time job.
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

Leverage your existing car dealership relationships to make an incredible recurring income (case study below)...

Who are we?

We have a 6+ year, proven product that is sold to numerous car dealerships throughout the US and we're making our move into the Seattle metro area. This year 2011 is shaping to be our best year ever, and we still have TONS of room to grow - so you have the chance to be at ground floor of a champion, rock-solid business. Our success stems from our fact that there’s a huge demand for our product from auto dealerships. We recently revamped all our marketing pieces, and to tell you the truth, they're gorgeous and kick ass.

Who is this for?

1) This is perfect for sales reps that already sell to and actively work with car dealerships. Just introduce them to our program (in person) and our marketing material sells itself. When GMs and part/service see this, they are instantly sold because the product makes perfect sense. It saves them time and money on a very common problem.

2) This is also perfect for anyone with ties to car dealerships who can introduce this product to the decision makers.

3) If you happen to know anyone else who is suitable, please email them this job description. Golden opportunities like this don’t come along every day.

IMPORTANT: We're only interested in speaking with you if you have an active customer base of more than 10 dealerships (or work with substantial auto groups) and rub shoulders and have rapport with the decision makers. This is found money for them, a substantial long-term profit center so it's an easy sell. You're more than welcomed to visit dealerships you've never met but get your network in first and brand new accounts will be a piece of cake. If you have less than 10 dealerships at your disposal, make your case and we'll consider.

NOTE: This is strictly a commission-only position. Once dealerships are in the program and ordering, we do need you to drop by the dealerships from time to time to check quality of installs, see how they're doing, get feedback, etc. because they’ll keep re-ordering and that is where your long-term earnings will come from. Keep them happy and your bank balance will be healthy. When you bring in enough dealerships, you'll have an unbelievable passive income because of consistent reorders and volume.

What our program is about

What's highly attractive about our program is that it's great for both dealerships AND car buyers:

For the car dealership:

* Eliminate lot damage that costs time and money
* Instantly increase dealership profits (average profit between $109 to $208 per vehicle, and that's AFTER Parts, Service, front-end/back-end sales get their cut)
* The first order pays for itself and after that, it's all profit.
* We offer both preload and non-preload versions of our program. (Preload means our product is installed on ALL vehicles of a dealership).

For car buyers:

* Lifetime warranty on our product
* Protects their investment and resale value for just a small cost

How you get paid

Your job is to introduce our product to dealerships using our "soft' sell marketing presentation and when they sign up, we take it all from there. We pay you commissions on EVERY order, for as long as a dealership is in the program. The money is made on volume and re-orders. There is no ceiling - the more dealerships you bring in, they more money you make - do the work once and get paid with recurring commissions.

True story

Right now, we have a sales rep up north who we send monthly checks to. He doesn't do anything, all he did was refer dealerships into our program. In 2010, we paid him around $60,000 for doing nothing. We're a bit aggravated because he's not aggressive enough and gets paid more than a lot of people.. haha.. but we're glad to pay him because he's making money since we're making money.

Your next step

If you’re the person we’re looking for, send us an email with some information about yourself, your relevant experience and the number of dealership contacts you currently have. If we believe you’re suitable, we will discuss in more detail and allocate territories. Act fast before your area is gone.

• Location: Seattle and surrounding areas
• Compensation: recurring commissions
• Telecommuting is ok.
• This is a part-time job.
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

Post by Julie Ryan Evans

Sonja Morgan took it as her responsibility on this week's episode of The Real Housewives of New York to enlighten Cindy Barshop and the world about the "pecking order" of the housewives' social circle. Yes, she used those words, and yes, she was serious. My DVR, which I rewound countless times to look for hints of humor in her voice, holds proof there was none.

Sonja was just as pretentious and condescending as it sounds, and Barshop was justifiably baffled by it. Sonja let her know that she fell down more than a few rungs too when she made some of the ladies trek to Quogue (gasp!) for her birthday party. Then she chastised Cindy for making the incredible, unforgivable gaffe of not having pinot grigio on hand when Ramona Singer arrived (quelle horreur!).

"No one would be there or know you if it wasn't for Ramona. There’s a pecking order, and if Ramona singer walks into your party, you have to respect that." And by respect, she means an endless flow of pinot grigio into Ramona's glass.

So let's see ... if Ramona is on the top and Cindy is on the bottom of this so-called pecking order, where do the rest of them fall? I have no idea how Sonja would rank them, but since pecking orders are so much fun, let's rank the housewives according to craziness, shall we? The order is certainly bound to shift and change a bit throughout the season, but we can make a pretty good call based on what we know so far. Starting with the craziest N.Y. housewife ...

# 1 -- Sonja Morgan. At first she seemed so sane and fun, kind of like the new, older, blonde Bethenny Frankel. Only she's not. She's bizarre, mean, pretentious, and seemingly drunk all the time. When she posed for the firemen's calendar in pigtails and nude pantyhose, it was craziness on parade. I will give her points for her impersonation of Ramona in the opening scene though-- it was spot on.

#2 -- Ramona Singer. I don't know if it's too much pinot grigio or just her, but Ramona is random and a little scary at times (like last week at the birthday party when she tried to bombard Cindy's brother). Her obsession with ALWAYS having pinot grigio is a little concerning too. The Real Housewives of Rehab, perhaps?

#3 -- Jill Zarin. Oh she's back from Australia and making amends by burning past grievances with Alex McCord, but she's still weaseley and can't be trusted. I'm confident she'll soon move up the crazy pecking order.

#4 -- Alex McCord. She's come a long way, and she's become more endearing than ever this season. Then there was that scene in which she and Simon gave their son Francois a piano for his birthday, and I remembered how odd she is again at heart. "This must be a magical moment," she said to Francois, who was clearly unimpressed by the whole thing and wigged out that a strange man was in his home playing it.

#5 -- Cindy Barshop. For the most part, she seems pretty normal, although she did lie to Sonja about the whole Kelly/Ramona incident, and she was acting bizarre at that confrontation dinner with Ramona. Not that Ramona was much better, but Cindy really wasn't making much sense.

#6 -- LuAnn de Lesseps. The Countess isn't really crazy, she's just annoying and condescending.

#6 -- Kelly Bensimon. Oh how quickly things change -- the first shall be last and the last shall be first; and all that good stuff. Kelly, who appeared in need of institutionalization last season, has emerged as the voice of reason. She's calm, in control, and even making sense ... most of the time.

What do you think of this pecking order of crazy -- agree or disagree? What do you think of Sonja Morgan's pecking order?

Image via bravotv.com



Muslim terrorists supposedly believe that when they reach heaven, they'll have the eternal company of 72 virgins, among other delights. From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houri#.2272_Virgins.22): ---Quote--- The concept of 72 virgins in Islam refers to an aspect of paradise. In a collection by Imam at-Tirmidhi in his "Sunan" (Volume IV, Chapters on "The Features of Heaven as described by the Messenger of Allah", chapter 21: "About the Smallest Reward for the People of Heaven", hadith 2687) and also quoted by Ibn Kathir in his Tafsir (Qur'anic Commentary) of Surah Qur'an 55:72, it is stated that: "It was mentioned by Daraj Ibn Abi Hatim, that Abu al-Haytham 'Adullah Ibn Wahb narrated from Abu Sa'id al-Khudhri, who heard Muhammad saying, 'The smallest reward for the people of Heaven is an abode where there are eighty thousand servants and seventy-two houri, over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and ruby, as wide as the distance from al-Jabiyyah to San'a. ---End Quote--- So, who will be among those 72 virgins waiting for Osama bin Ladin? Let's all take an educated guess, shall we? Image: http://i.imgur.com/dYK3k.jpg Image: http://i.imgur.com/Z4Z4T.jpg Image: http://i.imgur.com/xnS1q.jpg Image: http://i.imgur.com/IRVvR.jpg

Most studies of technology refer to the population of users as a whole, without regard to individual personalities. Yet we're all aware that there are many types and varieties of "Us."

So, what are the motivations that drive our fascination with electronic games, social sites, and online applications?

read more

Find out who else made the grade and watch 'Idol Party Live' for more of our performance analysis.
By Eric Ditzian

Haley Reinhart
Photo: Fox

It's all been building to this, we suppose, an episode of "American Idol" so chock-full of judges' clichés and producers' out-of-nowhere talking points that the show almost became a parody of itself. Suddenly and jarringly on Wednesday, the focus was on nothing but what type of recording artist each singer might become, at nearly the complete expense of critical performance evaluation. And goodness — the reality-show gibberish! All the night, the talk was about who's in it to win it, who's leaving it all up onstage, who's just having fun up there, who's not broke and thus not in need of fixing. Steven Tyler said "it's a beautiful thing" so many times, the phrase almost transcended its own vapidity and became a commentary of "American Idol" itself.

Yet all this is just background noise (however grating it is to hear) and shouldn't distract us from the main attraction: Haley Reinhart owned it last night. Boom! We'd end our "Idol" report card right there, giving her two "excellents" and the rest of the competition incompletes. But that's not the way things work around here. Nor is it the way things work out there in the land of finicky "Idol' voters. Everyone must stand up and be judged (even if the judges themselves don't understand that).

Excellent

Haley Reinhart, "The House of the Rising Sun": We'll get to the mind-boggling critique of her first song in a second, but for now let's just salute Haley for bouncing back and giving arguably her finest performance of the season with this Animals tune. As the song rose from gentle a cappella intro to full-throated emotional release, the human-hear-me-roar aggression in her voice gave us goose bumps. It was too good for even the judges to slam.

Haley Reinhart, "You and I": Here's the thing: This may have been a Lady Gaga song, but this was certainly not a Lady Gaga performance. And in the judges' insistence that Haley was attempting to reinvent herself as Gaga Lite, we saw the absurdity of their insistence to make the entire show about what kind of recording artist everyone will be. Haley was doing no such thing. If anything, she infused some heavy Janis Joplin into this beautiful and jazzy performance, bringing out Gaga's inherent bluesy-ness in the process. The judges should be ashamed of themselves for this one.

Good

Lauren Alaina, "Flat on the Floor": We're reluctant to say anything as formulaic as, "She's back, baby!," but it's hard to ignore how much more confident Lauren was on Wednesday, compared to her performances over the last month. She was in her country comfort zone with Carrie Underwood's song, stomping around the stage like a cowgirl, and sounding darn good doing it.

Scotty McCreery, "Gone": Look at good ol' Scotty getting his swagger up! This was a more hard-charging performance than we've ever seen from him. He jumped, he skipped, he engaged in a fun call-and-response with his backup singers. What is there to say about his vocals? Not much, since they're always on point.

Lauren Alaina, "Unchained Melody": While this familiar tune didn't outdo her first performance, it was very well done. She dropped the country twang and sang a straightforward ballad, hitting the notes she needed to but not reaching for ones outside her vocal range. And the judges? The judges threw up their hands, abdicated their responsibility and fawned over Lauren like she was one part Carrie Underwood, one part Jesus of Nazareth.

Satisfactory

Scotty McCreery, "Always on My Mind": We couldn't expect Scotty to get semi-experimental twice, could we? For his second song, he was back in familiar territory. Elvis Presley, again. We probably wouldn't complain if the song weren't so sleepy. He just plodded along, a bit drearily, a bit tenderly. After the top-notch first performance, this one was a letdown.

Jacob Lusk, "Love Hurts": Love, much like this performance, can be painful. There was something borderline schizophrenic about the way his vocals slipped and slid from one end of the musical scale to the other. And while the judges applauded the way he brought the song to a conclusion, we'll just say this: We're not sure what happened at the end of "Love Hurts," but it didn't correspond to recognizable human activity.

James Durbin, "Without You": This was a big improvement over his earlier performance, which we'll address below. We always like James better when he's going slow and sensitive. What we're unsure about is all that Lusk-like emotion he displayed during the performance. Is he laying it on too thick, or are we just being cynical? Perhaps both. What we are certain about is there's not a sharp note the judges can't dismiss with empty talk about artistry and emotion.

Unsatisfactory

James Durbin, "Closer to the Edge": In a word: weird! James' vocals began weak and low, then graduated to a sort of pitch-dizzy warbling. This was Adam Lambert with strep throat. We do, however, think 30 Seconds to Mars is a good artistic fit for James. Nonetheless, this performance just didn't work, even if Randy Jackson insisted that, yes, James is in it to win it.

Jacob Lusk, "No Air": As he has all season, Jacob struggled with his phrasing and his dance moves during "No Air." He was shouty, he was pitchy and his diva boogying — which, honestly, we've done our best not to comment on all season — was out of control as he undulated like one of those flailing inflatable men looming over used car dealerships. Thank goodness for Randy, who offered up a reality-based critique after Jennifer Lopez hailed the performance. Jacob, it's been a blast watching you each week, but I think even you can agree, it's time to pack your bags and head home.

Don't miss "Idol Party Live" every Thursday at noon on MTV.com for analysis, celebrity guests and even some karaoke — get in the conversation by tweeting with the hashtag #idolparty! In the meantime, get your "Idol" fix on MTV News' "American Idol" page, where you'll find all the latest news, interviews and opinions.

Related Videos

• 'Idol Party Live' With Kris Allen

Related Photos

• 'American Idol' Season 10 Performances

More people are talking openly about depression now than ever (even celebrities like Catherine Zeta-Jones are fessing up to severe emotional disorders like bipolar disease). It's uplifting to see that we've created a better support system for people who experience emotional and mental health problems — a far from negligible portion of the population — but at the end of the day, it's hard to see depression as anything but a downer. If we could eradicate it, we would. Or would we? According to a new study, there's an upshot to being down, at least for anyone who's experienced depression firsthand: Researchers found that depressed people perform better on sequential decision task tests than non-depressed people, exhibiting a possible positive side-effect of mental health disorders. ... More »

Post from: BlissTree

The Upshot of Feeling Down

The triumphalism after the American targeted assassination of Osama bin Laden is a sure sign that the US is incapable of understanding the significance of the painful years since September 11. We suffered and now you must, too.

“I’ve never been so excited to see the photo of a corpse with a gunshot wound through the head”, tweeted Emily Miller of The Washington Times.

Most in the mainstream press have simply regurgitated White House propaganda without question, including key details of bin Laden’s death and lifestyle.

The glee with which many in the American public, political and media elites have celebrated the murder of bin Laden may be unsurprising but it provides a welcome insight into an infantile and violence-obsessed culture. He used mayhem against Us and We must unleash overwhelming firepower against Him and His followers.

9/11 was slaughter on a huge scale and American hurt, confusion and anger was understandable. Finding the perpetrators of the crime was essential but it is difficult to cheer when a man receives bullets to the head unless, of course, we want to marinate in the juices of a John Wayne fantasy.

“We responded [to 9/11] exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond”, says former New York Times Middle East correspondent Chris Hedges. “They wanted us to speak the language of violence”.

The corporate media is filled with undeniably fascinating stories of how the US tracked bin Laden to his Pakistani hideout. The potential complicity of forces within the Pakistani intelligence services will be investigated but is unlikely to lead to a serious reduction in US funding for the corrupt elites there. The ongoing US-led war in Afghanistan guarantees Washington is joined at the hip to the Pakistani military. And once again, the Pakistani people will be killed without mercy.

But largely missing from the mountains of coverage in the last days are the profound changes 9/11 brought to the world, and the pyrrhic victories scored by bin Laden and his group of murderous thugs.

The militarisation of America and the engagements in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia and elsewhere has not made the US homeland any safer. In fact, the opposite is true. The thought that an old man sitting in an expensive compound in Pakistan with no internet or phone access is truly the most dangerous and wanted man in the world shows the skewed priorities of a brutal super-power hell-bent on revenge.

The murder of bin Laden wasn’t justice, as claimed by Obama and a range of commentators. It was a targeted assassination, an art perfected by Israel, and an illegal tool that has not made the Zionist nation any less likely to face attack from designated enemies. America will be no different.

The post 9/11 security state is now well and truly entrenched in our lives. The arrival of President Barack Obama did nothing to change that; it was merely accelerated with a nicer, kinder face. Privatised killing is now ubiquitous in Iraq and Afghanistan as an out-of-control and multi-trillion dollar industry finds ways to kill and make new foes in the process.

The US and its allies have provided over the last years an overwhelming range of weapons to murderers (former opponents now known as “allies”) in nations where conventional US forces have been unable to subdue a legitimate insurgency.

It’s grimly ironic that the Australian media obsesses over every word of supposed terrorism expert Australian David Kilcullen – described on Monday night’s ABC TV Lateline as “one of the world's top counter-insurgency specialists” - without asking whether his skills have actually succeeded and at what cost.

An insurgency still rages in Iraq and has never been stronger in Afghanistan, and the methods by which US forces tried to destroy resistance movements involved arming former enemies and unleashing horrific violence against those who wouldn’t accept US rule. That’s some victory that plays directly into the narrative articulated by bin Laden from the 1990s: Western forces only want to occupy and subjugate Muslims.

Besides, Kilcullen is closely associated with the likely next CIA director David Petraeus, whose military tactics against insurgents have been vicious and counter-productive. He will certainly bring a far more militarised mindset to America’s intelligence community.

But resistance to Western domination of the Arab world wasn’t achieved by Al-Qaeda. Their murder of countless Muslims and quasi-death cult ideology failed to connect with enough people looking for something more than just opposition to sclerotic Western-backed dictatorships across the region.

Hamas, Hizbollah head Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have succeeded where Al-Qaeda failed; they spent years cementing themselves in the fabric of societies that were being ignored by the state. These nationalist movements, with various degrees of aggression and repression, have far more successfully captured the spirit of the post 9/11 times than bin Laden’s superficially appealing dogma. And most Muslims worldwide haven’t bought the hardline Islamist line for years.

This year’s Arab revolutions have shown the almost irrelevance of Al-Qaeda. Millions of Arabs in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, Libya, Saudi Arabia and beyond have found ways to challenge despots and US-backed autocrats in ways unimagined and impossible for bin Laden. Freedom movements, partly religious and partly secular, have fundamentally transformed a region that most of its largely young population only associated with social and political stagnation. Al-Qaeda has been almost silent in the last while, a force that had no way to harness, let alone lead, grievances of the oppressed masses.

None of us will feel safer with the death of bin Laden and why should we? The arguments for his organisation’s force have only strengthened since 9/11, even if his tactics were abhorrent and failed to attract huge numbers of followers. America and its allies are now far widely engaged across the Muslim world, militarising lands in the name of “fighting terrorism”. Wikileaks has shown the futility of such actions, detailing US officials attempts to pressure autocratic nations to crack down on unwanted elements while stirring up hatred of citizens under the path of ever-increasing drone attacks (in Yemen, Pakistan and now Libya).

The West will never feel more secure with the murder of a terrorist leader. Almost nowhere in the media orgy of celebration (including, disappointingly, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show) was anything discussed about occupation. It didn’t exist, seemingly completely separate to the rise and once high popularity of bin Laden. Pakistan’s apparent protection of the Al-Qaeda leader will only deepen America’s desire to further occupy that nation’s mind. Obama is a war President, a badge he wears with pride, such is his escalation of covert missions in numerous nations in the last years.

There has been a deliberate conflation by a litany of politicians, corporate journalists and think-tankers in the last decade to frame every resistance to Western policy as terrorism. It is not. Take Afghanistan, where the Taliban has virtually no relationship with Al-Qaeda anymore and will continue to fight for the liquidation of foreign forces, whether we like or not. They’ll have no concern with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd mouthing platitudes about staying the course in Afghanistan with a warlord infested, Kabul government.

bin Laden died a man who had profoundly changed the landscape of the world. He failed to rally Muslims to his brutal cause but his shadow will continue to hover over Western policy towards the Islamic world. We have been sold a lie, one pushed by the Israelis for decades, that the killing of countless terrorists will bring peace. Colonising Muslim lands is seemingly irrelevant, or locking up innocent men in Guantanamo Bay or escalating a drone war in Pakistan.

The West has much to learn.


Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution.

• Read all responses to this article

How do you become the #1 Real Estate Agent in Northern Virginia? It's easy...you learn from someone who's done it.

So what's the secret to becoming a mega real estate agent? It all boils down to systems. (You might want to grab some popcorn... this is not your regular CL ad).

Below is an overview of various "phases" of mega agent advancement.

The BASICS - THE SALES PROCESS
1. Generate Tons of Leads
2. Convert a High Percentage of Leads

INTERMEDIATE - LEVERAGE OTHER PEOPLE
3. Hire Assistant(s)
4. Hire Buyer Agents

ADVANCED - LEVERAGE MORE PEOPLE
5. Hire Inside Sales Reps
6. Hire Listing Agent(s)
7. Hire CEO

So let's start with the first step. Generate Tons of Leads. Sounds easy enough. Here are your choices: 1. Sphere of Influence Marketing and/or 2. Guerilla Marketing.

Sphere of Influence marketing is basically networking. Going to clubs, church, friends, family, events, etc. Networking will only get you so far. You'd have to be an agent for decades to build a large referral base with this methodology. It is IMPOSSIBLE to become a mega agent with just networking (you might make $100K or maybe $150K after several years, but not $500K or more). Sadly, most real estate agents are completely dependent on this method, but it is not the way to generate a ton of leads, and in most cases, not enough to even keep you busy, let alone your team busy.

The next choice of generating a ton of leads is guerilla marketing. We use the term guerilla because it is stealth, under-the-radar-marketing. For example (this is just one out of hundreds of ways we use to generate leads), let's say you have an internet ad that offers free access to search the MLS database. The ad which is placed via google adwords sends the prospect to a landing page. In order to get past the screen to search the MLS database, they will have to register their name, phone number, and email address. We have our landing pages down to a science to the point where we get up to 30% of the visitors to leave their information (we call this lead capture rate - our lead capture rate is at least 5 times more effective than most agent websites). For our direct mail campaigns, we have it tweaked to the point we know exactly what words to use in the letter, the color and size of the envelop, the angle of the stamp, the exact best font to use, and more. It takes years of testing to get it figured out. Our process has become so successful that we generate listings over the phone at 7% commission! As a case study, one of our agents who recently joined us in March, and was previously doing about 1 deal a month prior to joining us, (which is admittedly already pretty decent for not having a system) actually just closed the month of April with 7 new listings using our system (that's well over $60K in commissions in just one month using our system). The secret to his huge increased success was the system. We helped another agent who was about to exit the business altogether and within a month of our training she generated 5 new listings. Talk about a change in attitude.

Before we go onto the next step, let's talk about technology. We use technology not only to generate leads, but if you have a few hundred leads coming in every month, post-it notes on your desk just aren't going to cut it. We have a custom built technology we use to help us manage all of those leads. Think of it as a safety net to make sure you don't drop the ball on one of those clients you are working with. A system to automatically send your prospects messages and reminders for you to contact them.

So let's continue with the next topic: Lead Conversion. Believe it or not, the hard part isn't lead generation. Lead generation is just a process. It all boils down to your budget, whether it is sweat equity of your time or dollar bills. Figure about $10 per lead with no upper limit of how many leads you can receive. So lead conversion is where the craft is. In our system, we have scripts from several years of testing that maximize your conversion rate. Depending on the type of lead, we have it down to a science as to how many clients you should get out of each type of lead.

We can go on and on, but let's digress.

So who are we? Our owner was the #4 agent by number of transactions in Northern Virginia (NVAR) his Rookie Year in 2003 . He did close to 300 transactions and $81M in sales volume that first year and doubled it each of the next two years (after the rookie year, he gave all the clients away to the agents in the office, but would have easily been the #1 Real Estate Agent under a team structure). Since 2003, he has led the team to produce over $2 Billion in sales volume and today is a personal coach to several mega agents across the US (a few are the #1 agent in their respective markets and paying him about $10K/month for his guidance). He has closely guarded his secrets...until now. We are now setting our sights to be the #1 real estate brokerage in Northern Virginia. He is freely sharing all of his secrets to our agents.

If you're sick of the plateau you've hit (or worse, a decline), then you need to do something about it. Learn from someone who is uniquely qualified to take you to the next level.

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

By David Spero

Gastric banding is all the rage. Seems like everybody's banding. But how safe and how effective is this surgery? Does it "resolve diabetes," as surgeons claim? I used to think so. But I was wrong. As years go by, complications and failure become more and more common.

Internet, television, magazines, and billboards advertise surgeries with slogans like "$2500 down!" "Comprehensive, Safe Weight Loss Surgery Program," or "Let Your New Life Begin," as one center in Beverly Hills claims. This clinic was in the news in 2009 and 2010 because of the deaths of several people receiving gastric bands at the facility shortly after surgery.

Who is all this marketing aimed at? You. Some studies are claiming dramatic improvements in diabetes and hypertension with banding. A study by the Dalton Surgical Group in Georgia (a group that does banding surgeries) found that "Dramatic improvement in — and frequent resolution of — diabetes and hypertension have been observed as a result of weight loss after Lap-Band surgery." People with diabetes are now receiving gastric bands at body-mass index of 35 or below, not especially overweight.

But the Dalton study, and some others showing benefit, only followed people for 1 to 2 years. Other studies show that gastric band problems increase over time. Bands may erode into the stomach. They may cause the stomach to become infected. They may slip out of place.

Some countries, such as Finland, no longer allow gastric banding surgery after studies concluded that as many as 40% of people had to have follow-up operations to treat complications. One study found that "The failure rate increased from 13.2% after 18 months to 23.8% at 3 [years], 31.5% at 5, and 36.9% at 7 years." It may well go much higher after that.

A study published this year in Archives of Surgery reassessed about 80 people who had gastric bands inserted between 1994 and 1997. They reported that "because nearly 1 out of 3 patients experienced band erosion, and nearly 50% of the patients required removal of their bands (contributing to a reoperation rate of 60%), [banding] appears to result in relatively poor long-term outcomes."

Even in people who had no major complications, many suffered pain and other serious discomforts. Dr. David Urbach of Toronto Western Hospital told CTV News he has treated patients who were "left in severe pain when their bands caused their stomachs to twist." In other cases, the band's plastic material had eroded into the stomach. In others, they slip because of vomiting or overeating, so the pouch size and shape changes, causing problems.

How does the surgery work? A band made of silicone, gortex, marlex mesh, or some other inactive substance is wrapped around the stomach near the esophagus. According to the British pro-surgery Web site Gastric Band, "The placement of the band will create a small pouch at the upper part of the stomach that will hold about 3.88 to 7.76 ounces of food for each meal." So you will fill up faster and eat less.

Comedian Stephen Colbert had a funny but accurate take on this procedure, complete with video animation, which you can see here.

According to About.com, the new mini-stomach cannot handlemany foods. [A person may] "not be able to eat high fiber vegetables such as celery and sweet potatoes, meats like steaks and pork chops, spicy foods, fried foods, possibly citrus fruits, and certain spices including cinnamon, pepper, onion or garlic salt."

About.com also says, "[Your medicines] may need to be adjusted following Lap-Band surgery since you will not be able to swallow pills that are aspirin-size or larger, or capsules or irregular-shaped pills."

Surgeons say the studies finding high long-term failure rates are based on older bands and older techniques. They say more recent surgeries are less likely to have problems. But we won't know for ten years, will we? We do know many people will experience nausea, vomiting, and constipation; many also experience hair loss, and infections are fairly common.

According to About.com writer Tracee Cornforth, who had a gastric band applied in 2010, "Eating after Adjustable Gastric Lap-Band surgery means taking tiny bites, and eating very slowly. You should think of your new stomach as a "baby" stomach. You'll be drinking protein shakes and relearning eating skills much the same way as a new baby eats formula (or breast milk), and slowly adds new foods from blended baby foods to chunkier baby foods." You also have to maintain a high protein intake (over 50 grams a day), which must be hard if you can't eat meat. The band, in the words of one Canadian woman who lost 100 pounds, but suffered several infections and needed two replacement bands, is "quite unpleasant to live with."

I used to think gastric bands were worthwhile for some people. They are less invasive and less dangerous than the bypass surgeries that change your intestinal plumbing. They are reversible if they cause too many problems. But if nearly 50% of them need to be reversed, and almost everyone is uncomfortable for life, they no longer seem worth it to me. What do you think?

------------------------

Copyright (C) 2011 R.A. Rapaport Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. See http://www.DiabetesSelfManagement.com/Terms/ for terms and conditions of reuse.

With most of our thoughts on the 2011 NFL draft still fairly fresh in our minds, the time seems right for my annual "Coolest Names in the Draft" column — "A" through "Z."

What makes the names cool?

Well, that's for me to decide.

It could be just the names' sound, or the funky way they roll off the tip of my tongue and challenge my somewhat suspect pronunciation skills.

Or it could be their similarities to other names that strike a chord with me, both in and out of the football world.

Don't worry, an explanation will accompany each of my selections, which, if presented in the proper fashion, might just elicit a badly needed smile or two.

The majority of articles pertaining to pro football in the coming days and weeks, I'm afraid, figure to be a great deal more somber — for reasons I don't think I have to explain.

So let's try to have a little fun, shall we?

A: Cardinals fourth-round OLB Sam Acho, Texas (103rd player selected)

Ken Whisenhunt, Acho's new head coach, immediately started having fun with his fourth-round pick's name when he indicated a strong effort was in the works to have Acho wear the number "5" so he could be called "Acho Cinco." Down the road, if Acho works out the way the Cardinals hope, perhaps his plentiful sacks will elicit "Acho! ... Acho! ... Acho, Acho All Day!!! " chants from approving fans on a regular basis. Then again, as my uncle Harry Benjamin used to say: "Aaaachh!!! What the hell are you talking about now, Danny?"  

B: Bucccaneers second-round DE Da'Quan Bowers, Clemson (51)

Talk about a fall from grace! When the offseason started, Bowers' name was at the top of most mock drafts, including Pro Football Weekly's. But serious medical concerns ultimately caused his stock to plummet well into the second round. By the way, don't you think "Da'Quan" is a rather unique first name?

C: Bears first-round OT Gabe Carimi, Wisconsin (29)

With apologies to Raiders fourth-round CB Chimdi Chekwa and Browns fourth-round TE Jordan Cameron — after being selected in the fourth round by Cleveland, the Browns' PR department mistakenly called Saints DE Cameron Jordan for biographical information on Cameron — my vote has to go to Carimi, who just happens to be the first Jewish Bears player since the great Sid Luckman. Don't be shocked if Carimi strikes up a fast friendship with Cubs pitcher and fellow tribe member Justin Berg.

D: Patriots second-round CB Ras-I Dowling, Virginia (33)

Not only is the first name "Ras-I" an interesting mouthful, but Dowling is also a very interesting selection by the Patriots, who many draft observers thought were more likely to trade the first pick in Round Two. Is Dowling another Brandon Meriweather? Hopefully, we'll find out soon enough.

E: Bears fifth-round QB Nathan Enderle, Idaho (160)

With only three players to pick from, Enderle beats out Jets third-round NT Kenrick Ellis and Packers sixth-round OLB Ricky Elmore. The initial reaction to Enderle's selection on Chicago sports-talk radio has been less than positive, as most fans would have apparently preferred that the Bears address a greater need with their fifth-round pick than quarterback.

F: Vikings sixth-round OG-C Brandon Fusco, Slippery Rock (172)

Sorry, Sione Fua (Panthers third-round nose tackle). But "Brandon" is my son's first name, and every year I have to have at least one guy in my "Coolest Draft Name" column that sounds like he could have been a character in "The Sopranos." And it doesn't hurt that the dude attended Slippery Rock, either.

G: Three-way tie between Bengals first-round WR A.J. Green, Georgia (4); Packers RB Alex Green, Hawaii (96); and Broncos TE Virgil Green, Nevada (204)

It just seemed like the right thing to do, acknowledging  the Green Boys —  three of the 11 players in this year's draft with a last name starting with the letter "G." Who knows? A.J. just might make Carson Palmer think twice about his retirement plans. But I did briefly consider Florida International CB Anthony Gaitor (to the Buccaneers in the seventh round), who remains based in Florida.

H: Steelers first-round DE Cameron Heyward, Ohio State (31)

He's the son of former NFL RB Craig "Ironhead" Heyward, who died way before his time of a recurring brain tumor. At this year's Scouting Combine, Ironhead's kid came off as a class act. Like father, like son.

I: Saints first-round RB Mark Ingram, Alabama (28)

Selected three picks before Heyward, Ingram is the son of former NFL WR Mark Ingram Sr., who is currently serving a jail sentence for bank fraud, money laundering and jumping bail. Ingram Jr.'s reaction — live on ESPN — to an email from his father after he was drafted by the Saints was easily the emotional highlight of this year's draft in this football commentator's humble opinion.

J: Falcons seventh-round OG Andrew Jackson, Fresno State (210)

Hmm! Wonder how many "Dead Presidents" will eventually be coming this kid's way? Considering my facial similarities to the late president Ulysses S. Grant having become a trademark among my longtime friends and fellow workers, I simply could not resist this selection.

K: Texans fifth-round SS Shiloh Keo, Idaho (144)

It was a close call between Keo and two more alliterate candidates — Niners second-round QB Colin Kaepernick and Titans fifth-round DT Karl Klug. Not only does Keo have a cool-sounding first name and last name, but I just thought it would be cool to pick two guys out of the University of Idaho (him and Enderle).

L: Chargers first-round DT Corey Liuget (18)

Liuget beats out Illinois teammate Mikel Leshoure, who was drafted in the second round by the Lions, and Seahawks seventh-round DE Lazarius "Pep" Livingston. Why? Because my daughter's first name is "Corey," and she lives in San Diego, and Liuget's name is pronounced like the word "legit," which the Chargers hope he turns out to be.

M: Eagles fourth-round MLB Casey Matthews, Oregon (116)

The lookalike brother of Packers third-year superstar Clay Matthews barely beats out Bengals third-round OLB-DE Dontay Moch, who has a last name that could not be more draft-oriented.

N: Panthers first-round QB Cam Newton, Auburn (1)

Next!!!

O: Texans seventh-round DE Cheta Ozougwu, Rice (254)

Not only is his name one of the draft's testiest tongue twisters, but he also made a name for himself as this year's "Mr. Irrelevant!"

P: Panthers fifth-round WR Kealoha Pilares, Hawaii (132)

Pilares' melodious monicker gets the nod over Dolphins first-round C Mike Pouncey, whose brother, Maurkice, turned out to be a first-round stud for the Steelers in 2010.

Q: Rams first-round DE Robert Quinn, North Carolina (14)

Even if he wasn't the only guy in this year's draft with a last name beginning with the letter "Q," Quinn would have been mighty hard not to pick. Quinn's stock just kept rising in one of the best D-end drafts in decades, despite being suspended by the NCAA his final year at North Carolina for improper association with an agent and a benign brain tumor.  

R: Falcons fifth-round RB Jacquizz Rodgers, Oregon State (145)

Put simply, he had me at "Jacquizz." Ravens third-round OT Jah Reid and Vikings sixth-round FS Mistral Raymond were also in the running.

S: Packers sixth-round OG Caleb Schlauderaff, Utah (179)

I could have gone with Jaguars fourth-round WR Cecil Shorts or Patriots fifth-round TE Lee Smith, who has the same name as my all-time favorite Cubs relief pitcher. But when I told PFW editor-in-chief Keith Schleiden my idea for this column, he immediately blurted, "For S, Caleb Schlauderaff." Hey, I know where my bread is buttered. This one's for you, Chief!

T: Ravens sixth-round QB Tyrod Taylor, Virginia Tech (180)  

You'd think there would have been more names that would have fit this spot to a "T," but that was sadly not the case. After great deliberation, I opted for Taylor, whose last name is also the first name of my brother Hub's daughter. And, in case you didn't notice, Taylor was selected one pick after Schlauderaff.

U: None drafted

V: Raiders third-round CB DeMarcus Van Dyke, Miami (Fla.) (81)

The first name just doesn't seem to go with the last name, which I find a bit odd. But on a team owned by Al Davis, who is undoubtedly one of the oddest birds on the planet, Van Dyke should fit in easily enough. And — at the risk of making it look like I've become increasingly punchy 22 letters into the alphabet — the "Dick Van Dyke Show" ranks right up there with the extremely underrated "Car 54 Where Are You?" as my all-time favorite TV comedy.

W: Raiders second-round C Stefen Wisniewski, Penn State (48)

He's the nephew of former Raiders great and the team's current assistant O-line coach Steve Wisniewski, one of the orneriest cusses to play the game. The younger Wisniewski looks like a perfect fit in "The Black Hole."

X: None drafted

Ahhh, I'm starting to exhale!

Y: Texans fifth-round QB T.J. Yates, North Carolina (152)

Yates beats out the only other player with a last name starting with the letter "Y," Lions second-round WR Titus Young. Why? Let's just say it's to pay homage to the great, late Richard Yates, perhaps our country's most underrated modern-day writer. Sorry, Titus.

Z: Panthers seventh-round OT Lee Ziemba, Auburn (244)

He's the 2011 draft's only player with a last name beginning with the letter "Z." But if he comes anywhere close to performing in the same manner as similar-sounding Packers 2010 undrafted rookie OLB Frank Zombo, Ziemba's name will certainly be worth remembering.

Before we delve into the celebratory festivities, here's an actual conversation we had early this morning:

We all need a pick me up from time to time. And what would be better than some of the most inspirational quotes on this beautiful blue planet of ours? There's something about inspirational and wise quotes that gets your mind churning and thinking about the positive instead of the negative.

I've collected 11 highly inspirational quotes below that will supercharge your day with positivity if you spend some time contemplating each and how each quote relates to your life.

Everyday it seems that one of my friends is whining about how tied up he is in his work and household chores, and how he wished he had more than 24 hours to accomplish things. As if they were placed on Earth with some lesser amount of time than the rest of us. Don't get me wrong, I have time management issues too. However, I'd like to think that I'm the one in charge of the schedule, not the tasks.

The best way to overcome this situation (and the never-ending frustration) is by doing a careful analysis of your daily schedule and figuring out how to save time by doing the same things you do every day in a slightly different way.

Post by Jeanne Sager

OK Gleeks, time to put a few "Rumours" to bed. Specifically the pile of craziness that rocked McKinley High as the New Directions got what April Rhodes (Kristen Chenoweth is back!) called "a touch of the Mac."

That would be Fleetwood Mac, power band of the 70s and 80s, mega selling artists of the "Rumours" album, and last people I'd ever take relationship advice from. Which, come to think of it,dovetails with a bunch of high schoolers, doesn't it? Glee is a TV show; it's expected that its portrayal of high school be a little "off." But the faster those Gleeksters jumped to ill-formed conclusions about their teammates, the trippier my high school flashbacks were getting. They hit the nail right on the head with this one!

So how about a quiz, shall we? Hey, we are talking high school. We'll throw you the "rumours" that flew through McKinley courtesy of Sue Sylvester and crew, and you figure out which 3 are the truth:

1. Santana "plays for the other team" in the bedroom, and Brittany is interested in joining her.

2. Kurt is cheating on Blaine with Trouty Mouth, I mean, Sam.

3. Hells to the no, Sam is straight. Don't believe him? He's been canoodling with Quinn!

4. Rachel Berry wants Finn back, and Quinn is so jealous she could spit . . . if Cheerios did that sort of thing.

5. Mr. Schue's kicking the kids to the curb and taking off for the bright lights of Broadway.

6. Sam's not interested in hooking up; he's hanging out with his little sibs . . . in a motel room while his out-of-work dad and mom pound the pavement to get the family back on track. 

OK, if you guessed 1, 4, and 6 were true, you're not one of those fairweather Glee fans who only pays attention when they sing. You actually watched the rest of it. Good for you! Although you'll never make it on the Sue Sylvester run newspaper, the Muckracker where "If I heard it, it's probably true or something."

But fret not, Mr. Schue said it best when he reminded his kids (as he announced he's not taking April Rhodes' bait to hit Broadway . . . even if Sue did bring April home to set the man trap for Butt Chin), "If there's anything we've learned this week, it's that you can't believe everything you read." Well, that, and Rachel does a mean "You Can Go Your Own Way," even if Lindsey Buckingham wrote it from a man's perspective, and even Glee can turn a downer like a homeless teen into something upbeat by bringing two little homeless kids (Sam's sibs) onstage for a rendition of "Don't Stop." Too bad real high school days don't end with a pick-me-up like that. I might have been more enthusiastic about pep rallies.

What was your favorite rumor of the evening? Did you believe any of them . . . or wish any were true?

 

Image via Fox

Here are some reviews from around the web, in no particular order, for the Fringe episode "6:02 AM EST":

• FringeTelevision.com: The Last Sam Weiss - Let's Not Assume The Worst
• Entertainment Weekly: 'The Last Sam Weiss' and the first glimpse of the future of 'Fringe'
• io9: Walter and Olivia form a support group for broken people, on Fringe
• LA Times: ‘Fringe’ recap: God helps those who help themselves
• AV Club: Fringe "The Last Sam Weiss"
• Spoiler TV: Fringe 321 – In Which Walter Flies A Kite and Peter Gets A Flash
• Television Without Pity: The Shock of the Lightning
• TV.com: Fringe: Where Are We?
• TV Fanatic: Fringe Review: Be A Better Man Than Your Father
• Boom Tron: Fringe: “The Last Sam Weiss” – review
• HitFix: Walter and Astrid struggle to revive Peter, while a familiar figure aids Olivia
• Polite Dissent: Fringe — Episode 21 (Season 3): “The Last Sam Weiss”
• Cordial Deconstruction: Deconstruction Review of Fringe, Episode 21 Season 3, The Last Sam Weiss
• Examiner.com: 'Fringe' 'The Last Sam Weiss' Recap and Review
• BuzzFocus: ‘Fringe’ Episode 321 Review: Sam’s Full Agenda Still Shrouded
• DigitalSpy: Recap - 'Fringe': 'The Last Sam Weiss'
• IGN: Fringe: "The Last Sam Weiss" Review - Let's do the time warp again!
• Creative Loafing: "Fringe," Season 3, Episode 21
• TV Squad: 'Fringe' Season 3, Episode 21 Recap
• Crave Online: FRINGE 321 'The Last Sam Weiss'

Have any favorite reviews, or reviews we should add? Let us know in the comments.

Authored by: Rishabh Kaul

Yes, it’s that time of the year when anyone who is even remotely interested in social enterprises/development in India experiences a strong gravitational pull towards Mumbai. The occasion, of course, is Sankalp Forum 2011, India’s largest social investment summit, set for May 5-6. This is also a big year for Sankalp, as the forum goes global with two forums lined in Africa and the USA later this year.

The forum, which is in its third edition and is hosted by Intellecap, a social advisory firm, promises to bring together more than 150 investors and 400-plus enterprises to Mumbai. This time around they also have a killer engagement platform set up to ensure that everyone is warmed up before the event. To check out and interact with all those who are attending, rush over to this page. See the entire agenda here.

Awards

The Sankalp Awards is yet another aspect of the forum that a lot of startups are looking forward to. With over 40 startups nominated (full list is at the end of the post) in five categories: education, sanitation, technology, clean energy and agriculture/food/rural business, the forum also doubles as an interesting enterprise showcase. I use the word enterprise instead of startup since some of the participating enterprises are well beyond the startup period; the oldest being a 105-year-old bank. I find this exciting because it shows us that even though the sector seems to be getting a lot of mainstream attention in the last decade or so, there are organizations that have been sustaining themselves for a long time before the social enterprise was deemed “sexy”. Besides this, there are quite a few enterprises from the mainstream sector that are seeking investment to expand their services towards the deeper end of the pyramid.

Panels & Keynote

Ah we love the panels don’t we? The National Innovation Council’s poster boy Sam Pitroda will be delivering the keynote address (via web conference). This will be followed by two days of panel discussions covering the themes mentioned in the awards section along with other critical issues such as “The Curious Case of Missing Indian Impact Investors”, moderated by Rohini Nilekani (check out her articles on philanthropy here) as well as “Analyzing the Government and Social Enterprise Overlap” which will be moderated by Vineet Rai, chairman, Intellecap.

Initiatives

Sankalp surely cares about the health of its attendees. I guess that’s why they have jam packed the event with so many side events that they will be running from one activity to another.

Here they are (via the Sankalp website):

Mentoring Pit Stop: Structured as a 20-minute shot of advisory adrenaline, the mentoring pit stop has been designed to provide an external perspective. Seasoned entrepreneurs/investors and experts commit their time to helping entrepreneurs address their roadblocks.

Deal Corner: A specially cordoned off section at the event, The Deal Corner will have prior designed entrepreneur-investor meetings running in parallel through both days at Sankalp 2011.

Garage: Building a social enterprise is hard work. Understanding how it impacts both locally and globally is even harder. Sankalp 2011 brings you several hands-on, engaging workshops and roundtables hosted by GIIRS/B Corp/IRIS, EdelGive Foundation, Center for Knowledge Societies, Asian Development Bank and Intellecap.

People

At the crux of it all - what makes Sankalp so powerful - is the attendee list. It’s nearly impossible to name everyone, but just to give you a taste of who is attending: Nick Hughes, founder mPESA'; Vijay Mahajan, chairman, BASIX; Shantanu Prakash, CEO Educomp; and possibly even Kishore Biyani, CEO, Future Group (who has been invited). I have already spoken to at least five startups who are attending the forum just to get in touch with the Dasra folks, who will be selecting this next cohort of social enterprise this September. With hundreds of entrepreneurs and investors, this really is the Woodstock of social investing in India. Our Nextbillion team (we are one of the official media partners) will of course be present at the forum, bringing to you the learnings and insight from this edition of Sankalp.

So this just leaves one question: Are you attending?

By the time I finish this, I'm sure a variety of draft "experts" will have placed grades on this year's draft. And, of course, I'll take a look at them all - I'm a sucker like that. However, I'll also know that they're absolutely meaningless. No one knows how all the young men (and Danny Watkins! Zing!) Will turn out in the NFL, not even the coaching staffs that coveted them and the scouts who spent a lot of sleepless nights watching and evaluating them.

 

(Two quick things that bug me: 1) Folks will say, "How could they take that guy there, he was #345 on the board!" What board are you talking about? The Steelers draft board only had around 140 guys on it, so I know you're not talking about that one. And 2) Folks that claim the Steelers need to take into account the draft boards of other teams and not just draft from their own - that way you know how to get maximum value for your pick. However, just how are the Steelers supposed to know how other teams value players? This isn't information that's just bandied about after all. End Rant.)

All this being said, I'd like to offer some of my very non-expert opinions on our brand spanking new Pittsburgh Steelers.

In general, I'm a big fan of this draft and actually expect most of these guys (at least 5 if not 6) to make the 53-man roster. I go into every draft thinking that the Steelers should just target players they covet and trade up for those because there's no way a winning, veteran laden squad is going to have room for all these new guys. And most years I'm wrong.

1^st Round #31^st Overall

Cam Heyward   Defensive End     THE Ohio State

I LOVE this pick. He was easily the best player on the board. Outstanding production, scheme fit, character, and positional importance. A pick like this one is why Kevin Colbert is one of the best GM's in the game.

Heyward is a powerful versatile lineman who's already got a lot of experience playing a DE in a 3-4 two gap system, which not a lot of college lineman can say. In other words, he's not nearly the projection at the position Ziggy Hood was or Muhammad Wilkerson still is. This probably means that the Steelers probably won't feel the need to keep a role player like Nick Eason around for another year; the Steelers will still have three DE's with starting experience (and starter quality talent) ahead of Heyward. They can and will bring him along slowly, but he can probably be inserted into the rotation around mid-season.

So, what does Heyward bring to the table? Well, first and foremost youth and talent. The Steelers look to have a good long-term starter in Hood and a guy with some tread left on the tires in Bearded Brett Keisel, but very little behind them. Nick Eason is a completely serviceable rotational DE, but he's on the wrong side of 30 and isn't a guy you want to see starting for you. Aaron Smith is a great player, but given his age and injury situation I don't think he can be counted on as anything but a rotational player himself.

Secondly, he brings power. Now, keep in mind that all the Steelers DL are powerful men, but Keisel and Hood's games are based less on their ability to bully the guy in front of them than on their natural athleticism and nonstop motors. I have my doubts that Hood is the long-term answer in Smith's old spot as the strong side DE - he just seems a more natural fit on the other side where he can rush the passer with more abandon. Heyward, on the other hand, is a bully - anyone who saw the Sugar Bowl had to feel for the completely overmatched Arkansas OL matched against him - who is going to command constant double teams once he understands his assignments and refines his technique.

Third, Heyward has the mentality to two-gap as a 3-4 DE for the Steelers. People talk about all of the physical requirements to play the position (they need to be tall, long arms, powerful frame, tough to move against the run, etc), but they rarely address one of the rare qualities that usually separates starters from busts at the position: Competitiveness. Lots of DL want to one gap, play up the field (behind the line of scrimmage), and rush the passer. And why shouldn't they? After all, the pass rushers are the guys that get all the glory as well as a lot of the cash on the defensive side of the ball. Every college defensive lineman wants to become a star and you don't become a star two-gapping in a 3-4.

(This is one reason I'll be really interested to see how Corey Liuget transitions to the Chargers 3-4. I don't doubt he has the physical skills for it, but does he have discipline and team first mentality to keep from freelancing? Ziggy is a similar player, but he had the right spirit for the position too.)

A lot of players would simply balk if you told them want something else, to do a job that will almost never bring him much glory or many ESPN highlights (or Pro Bowl invites or big contracts in FA) simply because it's what's best for the team. You can draft a physical prototype at 3-4 DE, but if he's not prepared to sacrifice personal glory for the good of the team then he's going to bust. This is what I mean by competitiveness; Heyward has the competitive spirit to think "My assignment is to hold the edge, occupy the RT and TE, and keep Woodley clean to make the tackle and I'll be damned if anyone's going to keep me from doing that." He's got to be a self-motivator because he's never going to see Rich Eisen talking about how he made it possible for Woodley to make a critical stop on 3^rd and short.  Eisen will just talk about what a great player LaMarr is, while treating Heyward as a mere bystander.

We all know better than that though. Playing DE for the Steelers is not a job for glory hounds. It's a job for competitors.

With Keisel, Smith, Hood, and now Heyward, I think it's fair to say that by season's end, the Steelers will have the best 3-4 DL rotation in the league.

2^nd Round #63 Overall 

Marcus Gilbert      OT     University of Florida

Around pick 40-41 Ed Bouchette tweeted out that the Steelers were trying to trade up. My initial thought was that they were trying to get up to grab Brandon Harris. However, Harris remained on the board long after that - when the value for him would have been better - and the Steelers never made any sort of trade. This leads me to suspect that the Steelers weren't actually attempting to trade up for Harris but for either Miami tackle Orlando Franklin (#46 to Denver) or Villanova's LT Ben Ijalana (#49 to Indy). I believe, and I want to emphasize how much inside information I don't have, that the Steelers were targeting a tackle in the 2^nd round. And if that's the case they certainly got one.

If Heyward is about as close as the Steelers are going to get to a plug and play 3-4 DE, Gilbert is a bit of a project with tremendous upside at tackle. He's not quite the nasty mauler Franklin is and he's not quite the finesse pass protect of Ijalana, but he has the ability it be a better all around player than either. Just take a look at Gilbert during his press conference at the South Side today (and listen to that deep voice. Wow!); he's a 330-pound guy that actually looks a little...thin? Gilbert has a huge frame that will allow him to add quite a bit of muscle without slowing him down.

Detractors will say that he's a classic underachiever and that while he's "ok" at everything, he doesn't excel at anything in particular. And certainly, they'll argue, he's not as good as he ought to be with his outstanding physical tools. Of course, you could almost say the same thing about Mike Pouncey - or any other member of the Florida line - who had a down 2010 season. Of course, that whole team was a mess by Urban Meyer standards - that offensive line lost both their longtime QB as well as their leader in Maurkice.

Rather than looking at the team record or even old fashioned statistics like yards per carry, sacks allowed etc, I think you have to look at the NFL qualities that each lineman posses and Gilbert has most everything you'd like in a starting RT for the Steelers.

Gilbert was talented enough to play multiple games inside and outside for the Gators, including left tackle. He's certainly got the physical tools - which are not close to being maxed out, I think - to be a dominating lineman in the NFL. If he can take Sean Kuglar's coaching and continue to develop his technique, there's no reason he couldn't be the Steelers starting RT for a long time to come.

Some people will compare the pick to the Tony Hills selection in 2008, since both are physically gifted players from big time programs that underachieved a bit. There are two major differences thought.

First, Hills was an LT only. He was always a finesse player who was never going to be much of a fit at either guard position or right tackle for the Steelers. It's tough to develop a guy that can't get on the field because he can only play one position for you. Gilbert, on the other hand, can (and already has) play either guard spot or, ideally, right tackle with some upside at LT. If Foster starts at RG next season, then it's very likely that Legursky and Gilbert are your game day roster backups.

Second, Gilbert simply has a better OL coach in Sean Kuglar than Hills had coming into the league. Kuglar - who looks like he could easily fill in for an injured tackle if it came to that - can provide the kind of motivation and education that could potentially make Gilbert a Pro Bowl caliber tackle. Gilbert's also got a friend in Pouncey that is more than will to show him both how it's done and get in his face when he's not doing it.

Chance to Make Final Roster: Gilbert has a little more boom and bust in him than a guy like Orlando Franklin, but the Steelers have better a better structure in place to help guide him than they've had for quite some time. He's almost certainly a lock for the final roster barring some sort of catastrophically bad camp.

I'm optimistic.

 

3^rd Round   #95 Overall

Curtis Brown      CB       University of Texas

4^th Round    #128 Overall

Cortez Allen        CB         The Citadel

Lets talk about the two bright new shiny corners together, shall we?

Curtis Brown was a guy that most people wanted for the Steelers at the bottom of the 2^nd round (or even with a trade up) with a few very credible folks calling for the Steelers to just got ahead and select him at the end of the 1^st. So, to get him (without trading up!) at the end of the 3^rd ought to seem like quite a bargain. In reality, Brown was probably a little overrated by draftnicks - as the whole CB crop was - and went pretty much where he should have gone. Still, he's a guy that the Steelers obviously liked and they got him at a point when they felt like he was of good value. That's just how good team's draft.

One of the interesting things in listening to Coach Lake (or "CLake") was how he emphasized both Brown's short area quickness and his ability to see the field in nickel and dime packages immediately. In my mind, this means the Steelers see Brown as a guy that can insert at nickel or dime this season. The fact that Brown has had four years of top flight college experience at a big time program (that won a lot) seems to have the Steelers think he can make a difference early, something not many defensive rookies get to do. He and Crezdon Butler may very well complete with each other for the nickel and dime spots if the Steelers can resign Ike. If so, then William Gay becomes expendable.

Brown isn't the fastest CB in the class, but he's an explosive athlete and in the Steelers zone based coverage system, his lack of straight-line speed will be minimized. He'll probably never be the kind of man-to-man press corner that Steeler Nation covets, but he could be a really nice matchup with slot receivers and #2's down the road. Also notice how Lake keeps throwing the word "cover" in when talking about Brown: This was a guy that was drafted primarily to match up with receivers, not as a large outside CB who will be expected to play the run first and foremost.

There's a certain safety to the Brown pick for me. Barring injury, I think we can reasonably assume he can be a good nickel back with starter potential, but with little chance of becoming a true #1 CB. On the other hand, 4^th round pick Cortez Allen is nearly the opposite: He's a raw player from a smaller conference who has all the physical tools to be a #1 in the Steelers system. He also has some serious bust potential.

In other words, he's going to draw a lot of comparisons to Ike Taylor, another raw but athletic small school guy the Steelers nabbed in the 4^th round. If he turns out like Taylor, the Steelers long-term situation at CB just got a lot rosier. If not, the Steelers will need to look early at CB (1^st or 2^nd round) in the next couple of years, which they may want to do anyway.

I can't claim to have seen Allen play a lot and I'm not trusting of highlight (or lowlight) videos that can be found around online, but even Lake admitted he was a raw height-weight-speed prospect that couldn't devote the time he would have liked to his craft because of all his duties at The Citadel. He needs some coaching up and needs to be exposed to better competition, but he's got the physical tools to play.

(The Citadel is, by the way, a military college. I didn't know that before this weekend. Now I do. Never stop learning kids.)

Chance to Make the Final Roster: What should we expect out of Allen this season? My guess is absolutely nothing. I'd honestly be surprised if he made the active roster on game day. The Steelers know he's a project though, and they think his upside is large enough to warrant getting no immediate production from a 4^th round pick. Lets hope it pays off.

One thing that I find interesting about both of these guys is that they're both guys who seem like they would take coaching well. Tomlin and Colbert gambled in 2008 with Keenan Lewis, a guy with all the physical tools needed to be a starter for the Steelers, but who hasn't shown he's willing to adjust his game when told to. They also picked up an undersized nickel back type in Joe Burnett who did take coaching well, but lacked the physical tools to make much of an impact. This year I think Colbert went out of his way to bring in two guys who avoid either trap; both Brown and Allen have the physical and mental abilities to play in the NFL.

Besides, Carnell Lake doesn't suffer fools. He makes fools suffer.

 

5^th Round        # 162 Overall

 

Chris Carter          DE/OLB       Fresno State University

Carter is a typical Steelers' tweener - an undersized college defensive end that will have to learn to stand up and be a rush linebacker in the league.

I can't say that I've seen Carter play much either, but most everyone seems to think he's a good value where he was drafted and he has the physical tools to become a decent pro.  He has the profile of a Steelers OLB (short, but explosive); one of the reasons he dropped may be that many other 3-4 teams prefer larger, taller rush linebackers (such as the Patriots). There's also going to be some concerns about his lack of a pass rush arsenal (he's a pure speed guy right now), and his level of competition. But the Steelers could (and have) done a whole lot worse in the 5^th round.

The Steelers also needed additional depth at OLB. Harrison is old and seems to end every season with the revelation of a major injury he played through, Woodley is on a one year Franchise tag (although he'll almost certainly be resigned), and Jason Worilds is still raw but did show a lot of promise as a pass rusher in limited action last season.  And Thad Gibbson was a guy that never really got a chance to learn the defense before training camp and, as coach Butler admitted, never really caught himself up after that.

There are arguments that the Steelers only really need a single reserve OLB since Timmons can be kicked over in a pinch. However, while Timmons can be an adequate 3-4 OLB, he's not a special player there. Myself, I'd rather keep Timmons where he is at ILB (and where he can be special) while training another guy for the position.  Given the low risk/reward ratio after the 4^th round, Carter is a nice pick here.

Chance to Make the Final Roster: Besides, LB's are always valuable special teams players and I think the sheer number of competent ILB's on the team might mean that Fox will head elsewhere during free agency. If so, Carter could make the roster for a couple of years as a special teamer contributor since he's not likely to see the filed otherwise this year. Given how productive he was in college as well as his upside as a 3-4 OLB, it's quite possible that someone will snatch him if the Steelers put him on the PS.

6^th Round     #201 Overall

 

Keith Williams       OG      University of Nebraska

When the Steelers were on the clock with this pick I actually thought they would grab a developmental NT like Chris Neild or Ian Williams. They had, I'd heard at least, been looking at grabbing one of those guys. And since you're unlikely to get a starter here anyway, you might as well find a solid reserve defensive lineman since you have absolutely no one to rotate behind Casey Hampton.

At this point, the Steelers may simply have thought that the guys left were no better than Steve McClendon anyway. In other news, Chris Hoke is almost certain to be brought back for another season. Hokie's a good guy who gives maximum effort on every snap, so it's hard to root for them to find somebody to replace him. Still, with future starters in place at both DE positions, the Steelers need to find somebody to at least give Hampton a break.

Back to this pick though. Williams is a big, aggressive brawler with pulling ability. And he played at a big time program that won a lot of games while he was there. His aggression and limited lateral mobility makes him a bit of a liability in pass pro, but there's hope that good coaching can temper that weakness somewhat. In other words, he's the prototypical late round Steelers guard. He's reportedly a bright guy, which gives him a leg up on the Steelers current 6^th round starter at LG.

Chance to Make Final Roster: Given that Trai Essex, Tony Hills, and Jon Scott are all free agents, I think there's a decent chance that Williams can make the 53- man roster, although probably not the game day squad. Kuglar has shown himself adept at developing late round/UFA guys into serviceable starters (Foster, Jon Scott, Jason Peters even the Big Legursky), so there's certainly a real possibility that Williams could become a valuable reserve on the interior. He's a project though and probably not better than anyone currently on the roster. He strikes me as a pure depth guy.

This is pretty much the kind of pick I've come to expect from Colbert in the latter rounds. When in doubt, grab a mauler with some upside and see what you can make of him.

7^th Round       #232 Overall

Baron Batch         RB       Texas Tech

People have already commented upon Batch's story, he's certainly a kid that is easy to root for and possesses the kind of intangibles teams covet. However, intangibles don't always get it done on the field. Luckily, Barton has a skill set and enough physical tools to become a good 3^rd down back for the Steelers.

People knock Batch because he doesn't have overwhelming speed for his size, played in a gimmicky offense that allowed for a lot of wide rush lanes, and has been nicked up from time to time. And by nicked up, I mean he had two ankle surgeries that he successfully came back from.

However, given what his role will probably be for the Steelers none of this much matters. The Steelers need a dynamic 3^rd down back who can run routes, do some pass blocking, and catch the ball with some potential YAC producing ability. He's not likely to see the field except in obvious passing situations (at first at least), when he'll probably see the kind of spread based or wide opening passing situations he was used to and excelled in at Texas Tech. In mind at least, projecting Batch as a 3^rd down back is pretty easy.

Since the Texas Tech version of the spread basically treats ever down as a 3^rd down with multi-receiver sets, QB in the shotgun, etc, the learning curve for Batch as a 3^rd down back will be minimal. And he has the advantage over a guy like Dwyer in that he has had plenty of exposure pass blocking and creating yards after the catch. He could also be an ideal guy to build a HB screen around, given his short stature he'll disappear or get lost behind the Steelers wall of humanity at offensive line.

Chance to Make Final Roster: I think there's a decent chance Batch could make the 53-man roster for the Steelers and even, if he proves to as valuable as I think he is, become the 3^rd tailback on the game day squad. Mendenhall is your every down starter, Redman is your short yardage/chief backup, and Barton is your quick, water bug 3^rd down specialist.

Dwyer may be a better physical talent than Batch, but I'm not sure what he brings that both Mendenhall and Redman don't already bring. And both of them are great pass blockers and better than average receivers. This alone may give Batch a better chance of seeing the field on Sundays.

In terms of a comparable recent draft pick, Batch reminds me a lot of David Johnson. Nobody paid much attention to him when he was drafted because they figured he'd be practice squad bound. But Johnson managed to stick to the active roster and has become a valuable role player as an H-back. Batch's career could have a very similar arch, I think.

***********

Overall, this was a vintage Colbert draft. That is, a draft without a lot of flash, but with a lot of guys that can become starters and contributors with proper coaching. Colbert is famous for letting the draft come to him and capitalizing on the mistakes of more daring (or, much more foolish) personnel departments. However, Colbert is also capable of taking a calculated risk after the 1^st round. Both Marcus Gilbert and Cortez Allen are unfinished products, they were drafted where they were not because of what they have already done, but based upon projections of what they could do with proper development.

This speaks to the strength of the Steelers organization though. Colbert is comfortable with taking a risk or two - or drafting on a projection or two - because he's got the trust of the owners and himself trusts the coaching staff. Of course, some of these picks are going to bust, no one bats a thousand. All Colbert can do is to pick up players with the physical and mental tools to succeed in the Steelers offensive and defensive schemes at the values he feels are appropriate. In fact, this is all any good GM can do.

However, it seems to me that both Heyward and Gilbert are going to be starters, that Brown has the ability to be an early contributor who may become a starter over time, and Allen is a raw guy with starter potential who could also wash out after two or three seasons. The rest of the guys are probably role players and reserve/special teamers, but its players like that who make up the bulk of everyone's roster.

Draftnicks make a big deal out of grabbing "blue chip prospects", but at the end of the day it's the try hard guys with some physical tools, the grinders, who provide the backbone to any successful NFL team. And Colbert is great at acquiring those.

And he can bring in a blue chipper every now and then to boot.

Post by Jill Smokler

Motherhood is one of those things that you just can't prepare for. No matter how many books you read or how many movies you watch, nothing compares to actually being a mother. It's simply amazing. Sometimes perfect, even. But it's not everything you may have thought. Let's debunk some myths about being a mother, shall we?

1. Mothers think their babies are beautiful. One of my first thoughts upon seeing my daughter for the first time was how massive her cone head was and how very much I hoped it was just temporary. Now, I do think my children are beautiful, but they have gone through some pretty questionable phases and I'm ready to cringe all the way through their adolescence.

2. Mothers love children. I've never particularly cared for children. Of course, my own children are miraculous, but the rest of them? No, thank you. Just because I've had my own doesn't mean I love the rest. Or even like them.

3. Mothers love reading. I love reading myself. I love the idea of reading to my children, all of us cuddled up in a cozy blanket, but the reality is never nearly as idyllic. Most nights, I just want story-time to be over.

4. Mothers love cooking. We may love cooking for an appreciative audience (maybe), but slaving away in the kitchen for a crowd who'd be just as happy with pizza kind of sucks. Say "yum" once in a while. We like that stuff.

5. Mothers don't need much sleep. Correction: Mothers don't get much sleep. Which is why we're always exhausted.

6. Mothers don't have favorite children. Sometimes we do. Personally, my favorite child is usually the one who is being the least of a pain in my ass at any moment in time, but I have friends who openly admit to having a favorite. We're only human.

7. Mothers don't find their children disgusting. Just because we have to clean up that explosive diaper or stomach bug incident doesn't mean we're not gagging over it. We totally are.

8. Mothers require no thanks. Of course we require thanks! Preferably in the form of a day at the spa.

9. Mothers love every moment of motherhood. We love being mothers, but sometimes we hate it, too. And that's totally normal.

10. Mothers love their children more than they thought possible. OK, never mind. That one is totally true.

Image via nationalmediamuseum/Flickr

I hate that the news stream is filled with news about Osama. Probably it will be all day. Such memories of helplessness it brings back for everyone.

I was four blocks from the World Trade Center, standing on the corner of Reade and Church at 8:45am. Dan asked me, is Air Force One coming to New York today? And he pointed out a plane coming in low. Then suddenly it was right above us. WHOOSH! And it went right into the building. A dad was videotaping his little boy cross the street. I always wondered if he then filmed the plane going into the building.

I didn’t know a single person in the buildings just four blocks away. My mind was telling me, for some reason, that nobody was hurt. My brain was telling me that an empty robot-controlled airplane had just gone into an empty building, since it was 15 minutes before 9am go-to-work clock rang. My mind refused to believe anything else for at least another hour (when the Pentagon got hit my mind started to believe the truth).

So my first thought: I have trades on! The market had been going down every day in the days prior to 9/11. I had been buying more and more stocks. I was probably 120% long. Futures had been up that day for the first time. It was going to be a good day. Dan said to me before breakfast, I wish we owned more stocks.

We ran one block away to where my home/office was. We went in the elevator, which was stupid. If the electricity went off then (it did an hour later) then the elevator would be dead.

My hands were shaking so I couldn’t sell anything. I called our broker and said a plane hit the World Trade center and he had to sell everything. He said, WHAT? And he hung up the phone. Their office was in the top of the Empire State Building. So they cleared out.

There was still time to sell. There was even a small bump up in the market because a rumor went out that it was just a helicopter.

Anyway, I didn’t sell anything. I’m going to skip ahead. Skipping past my daughter peeing on the floor because all the adults in the apartment were crying and she didn’t know what was happening. Skipping past firefighters passing Dan and me asking if we were firefighters also and we said, “no”. We found out later that every single one of those firefighters never came back.

Skipping past the black cloud surrounding the building while everything shook and the power went out. Nobody in my home knew what was happening or what would happen next or what would explode next. Would we? Everything was out of control but we started to realize that many many people had died, were dying, were going to die. Just a few feet away from us, as paper from the top of the WTC started to land on our roof along with the blackest ash.

I was terrified also for my family. I had no money. I had no way to support them. And I had all of our money in the stock market.  I didn’t want to lose this money. The markets were closed for the week.

Then they opened. I went over to Dan’s apartment uptown. My apartment was technically still part of the crime scene and , in any case, it had no water or electricity. The day of 9/11 we were supposed to get an offer on the apartment. I was desperate to sell it before I went broke. But that offer never came of course. Didn’t come for another 15 months after that.

When the markets first opened  a week later I went all in. 200% long. Then it went down 5%. Then the next day another 5%. I was buying options. Anything I could do to get more long. For some reason I kept buying Sonus Networks. I put all of my money on Sonus Networks at $7. I remember all the prices of every stock I bought that week.

Every day it went down. I’d take walks in Central Park to clear my head but every five minutes I’d call Dan. “Sonus up?” And he’d say, “No, another 18 cents down.” The market went down 5% a day all week.

I was staying by myself in a hotel on the Upper East Side. Everyone else in the the hotel was parents and relatives of victims. Everyone had photos. “Have you seen him?” “Have you seen her?” Nobody had any hope. Where are all those parents now? Are they still looking for the children they will never find? Everything was a nightmare and there was no way to wake up.

Finally, by the end of the week I was able to get into my apartment. Things are going to change now. I’m a winner.

I bought even more SONS.

Friday morning the market collapsed. I was on the phone with my broker, Gary. SONS was down to $4 and I had been totally leveraged 200%. “I’m going broke!” I screamed at him.

What a bad moment. The whole place smelled from 3000 dead bodies four blocks away and it would smell for six months. They couldn’t even put the fire out for months afterwards. The park I would take Josie to play in was covered in asbestos. Our roof was covered in asbestos and business cards and random stationary from the blown up buildings. But my body was shaking. I should not have gone home.  All I felt was the non-stop misery all around. I was 16 pounds lighter than two weeks earlier.

“Ok,” I said, “I have to sell everything.” And Gary sold everything at about 10:30am Friday morning. And at 10:31 the market went up. And at 10:32 the market went up more. And it kept going up every minute and every hour for the next several weeks. I had sold and gone broke at the very bottom.  If I had held for just a day it would’ve been an enormous sum of money. I deserved to lose it all.

What a sucky story. Watching the plane go into the building, watching people fling themselves off the roof just a block from where I stood as I watched helplessly. My eyes saw it but it was all out of my control. Things would never get better for those people. All hope had completely abandoned them. Today we remember those who died. We cry for them all day. Nothing can bring them back. Or the hope their families once instilled in them. The worst thing ever.

But I also remember that I damaged my family’s future in the weeks to come. I did everything I could to destroy my own family.

The day after 9/11 my entire area had been evacuated. My family, and Dan, were the only ones around. We had refused to leave the apartment when the army was clearing every building the day before. It was the most beautiful morning I had ever seen. Not a cloud in the sky. Tanks and guys in Hazmat suits were everywhere. Now today Osama Bin Laden is going to be in the news stream all day. What a stupid story this was. I wish none of it had ever happened.

Related Posts:

Osama Bin Laden, Stockpickr, and the Art of Negotiation

Read more posts on The Altucher Confidential »

For the latest finance news, visit Clusterstock. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

An Open Letter

Dear Guy Who Has The Midnight Slot On “Family Radio”: you deserve to treat yourself.

We don’t know who you are, Guy Who Has The Midnight Slot On “Family Radio”. We just know that your bosses are saying that on May 21st, 2011, the world is going to end. And we don’t want to step on any toes or anything, but based on trends so far… well, we’ll just have to see, won’t we?

But for you… man. It’s got to be hard for you. Because you’ve got the midnight slot, right? The end of the day? The day that supposedly is the last day on Earth? If it’s 10pm on May 21st, 2011… what do you do? Do you go in? Do you stay home? Either way, your boss could potentially be mad at you. There’s nobody else on the planet in your position, Guy Who Has The Midnight Slot On “Family Radio”. And we don’t envy your decision.

So we figure this new HP Pavilion Elite PC can help. Fill the 1 TB hard drive with all the information you can find. Fire up the Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS and use the powerful 8GB of DDR3 SDRAM to sort through it all. Maybe even rent a few movies about Armageddon and watch them on the SuperMulti Blu-ray player with LightScribe. We’re sure they’d look great when combined with a 23 inch 1080p monitor. You could even go online thanks to the 802.11 b/g/n wireless LAN or the Gigabit Ethernet and check the facts in the other time zones. Maybe that will help you decide how to proceed.

For most of us, the end of the world is just a thing. It’ll either happen or it won’t. All we can do is sit and wait, wine in hand, for the Armageddon or lack thereof. But for you? For you, it’s company policy. Stay home, and you might miss your shift. Go into work, you’re a poor brand ambassador. Never before in history has someone been put in this position, Guy Who Has The Midnight Slot On “Family Radio”. And that’s why you, in your time of personal crisis, deserve a HP Pavilion Elite PC of your very own.

…to update your resume. C’mon, dude, there’s a 15-in-1 Memory Card reader. Pop it on a card and get outta that dead-end job.

Authorized for SquareTrade Extended Warranty

&

Warranty: 1 Year HP

Condition: New

Features:

• Get serious about computing with the HP Pavilion Elite HPE-240F PC, a stylish, high-performance PC for your most demanding digital tasks
• Enjoy the performance of the Intel Core i5 650 3.2Ghz processor
• 8GB DDR3 SDRAM system memory (expandable to 16GB) gives you the power to handle most power-hungry applications and tons of multimedia work
• Huge 1TB SATA 3.0 hard drive - store 666,000 photos, 285,000 songs or 526 hours of HD video and more
• ATI Radeon HD 5570 Series Graphics with 1GB DDR3 dedicated graphics memory, DVI, HDMI and Display Port capabilities and support for Blu-ray and Microsoft DirectX 11
• Turn your PC into an HDTV with the Hauppauge TV tuner
• Watch Blu-ray and DVD movies in high definition with the SuperMulti Blu-ray Player with LightScribe Technology
• Premium performance levels enable an enhanced experience whether you're working, emailing, editing photos or videos, gaming or connecting with friends online
• Gigabit wired Ethernet connection or get rid of the wires with the wireless LAN 802.11b/g/n
• Quickly upload your photos and videos with the 15-in-1 memory card reader
• Includes an HP USB keyboard, HP USB optical mouse, and remote control for media center
• Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit operating system

Specifications
Motherboard:	MS-7613 (Iona-GL8E)
Motherboard Form Factor:	microATX – 9.6” x 9.6”
Chipset:	Intel H57 Express
Memory Sockets:	4 x DDR3 (all occupied)
Front Side Bus Speeds:	2.5 GT/s DMI
Expansion Slots:	1 PCIe x16 slot (occupied) 3 PCIe x1 minicard slots (2 occupied)
Processor:	Intel Core i5 650 @ 3.2GHz
Memory:	8GB
Memory Speed:	PC3-10600 MB/sec
Graphics Card:	ATI Radeon HD5570 with 1GB Memory
TV-Tuner:	Hauppauge ATSC (digital) NTSC (analog) QAM (HDTV for cable broadcast, does not require the use of a set-top box)
LAN:	Gigabit 10-base-GT
Wireless:	802.11 b/g/n
Supported Security Protocols:	WPA WEP
Data Transfer Speeds:	up to 300 Mbps
Supports Antenna Connections:	1 internal antenna
Computer Case:	Mid-Size ATX
Power Supply:	300W

Sound/Audio
Type:	Integrated Realtek ALC888S audio
Audio CODEC:	ALC88S
HD:	6-channel high-definition audio

Hard Drive
Size:	1TB
Interface:	SATA
Transfer rating:	3.0 Gb/sec
Rotational Speed:	7200 RPM

Optical Drive
Type:	SuperMulti Blu-ray Player with LightScribe Technology
Interface:	SATA
Data Buffer Memory:	2 MB minimum
LightScribe:	Yes
Disc Diameter:	120 mm

Memory Card Reader
Type:	15-in-1 memory card reader with passive infrared receiver
Supports:	CompactFlash I CompactFlash II IBM Microdrive  SecureDigital (SD) mini-SD MultiMediaCard (MMC) Reduced size MultiMediaCard (RS-MMC) MultiMediaCard Plus (MMC plus) MultiMediaCard Mobile (MMC mobile) Memory Stick Memory Stick Pro Memory Stick Duo Memory Stick Pro Duo Memory Stick Pro Duo xD-Picture Card

I/O Ports
Front:	3 USB Headphone Microphone Audio L-R S-video in Composite video in
Back:	6 USB S/PDIF optical out IEEE 1394 RJ45 LAN Microphone Center/subwoofer Rear speaker out Side speaker out Line in Line out Display Port HDMI DVI

Keyboard
Type:	HP USB
Interface:	USB
Cable length:	6 ft.
Dimensions:	1.1” x 6.3” x 17.3” (H x W x L)
Special Buttons:	Sleep Chapter back Play/pause Stop Chapter forward

Mouse
Type:	HP USB optical mouse
Interface:	USB
Cable length:	6 ft.
Buttons:	Left Right Clickable scroll wheel

Remote Control for Media Center
Type:	Infrared IR expansion card with IR ports Compatible with Windows Media Center IR extender cable IR blaster cable

Software
Operating System:	Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
CD/CD-RW/DVD/DVD+RW:	MediaSmart DVD premium BD Windows DVD Maker CyberLink DVD Suite 6
Entertainment, Music & Games:	HP Games HP MediaSmart Software Suite
Productivity:	Microsoft Works 9 Microsoft Office Home and Student Edition 2007 Trial Window Live Essentials
Security:	Norton Internet Security 2010 (60-day security update subscription) Norton Online Backup (30-day trial)
Support:	HP Advisor HP Hardware Diagnostic Tools HP Help & Support Center HP Support Assistant
Recovery:	HP Recovery Manager
Internet Solutions:	Microsoft Internet Explorer - ISP offers
HP Partner offers:	Snapfish PictureMover

 

Additional Photos:

• Optical Mouse
• Remote Control
• Keyboard
• Front I/O Ports
• Front-Loading Disc Drives
• Back of Computer
• Back I/O Ports
• Computer Interior
• Package Contents
• Packaging

In the box:

• HP HPE-240F Pavilion Elite Core i5, 8GB, 1TB, Blu-ray, TV Tuner, W7HP
• HP Optical Mouse
• HP Keyboard
• IR Remote Control (batteries included)
• Power Cord
• Remote Control IR Receiver Extender Cable (Airbrush)
• IR Blaster Cable
• DVI to VGA Adapter
• S-Video Adapter
• Documentation

 

Monday morning started early.  Gray was restless and at some point during the night ended up in bed with me.  Which meant I was only half sleeping while getting kicked and worrying about him falling off the bed.  That's the only reason I was coherent and awake enough to feel the large aftershock around 4:30 a.m.  I lay there with the room swaying back and forth thinking "yep, I'm back in Japan!"

That morning we went down for our complimentary Western and Japanese style breakfast.  After all the delightful breakfasts I'd just eaten, I'm not gonna lie...it was a little depressing.  But, I consoled myself with the memory of yummy french toast.

Next stop, a bus to Haneda airport about an hour and a half away where we had something wonderful waiting for us:
My cousin WENDY!!!
Wendy and her husband are super famous traveling photographers (Blue Lily) who, with their two adorable kids, are currently trotting around the globe taking pictures of people.

And they came to Japan!!!
And they were GOING to come to Misawa.
Yes, I was THIS --> <--CLOSE to having MY FIRST and only visitor.

But alas.  The bullet train from Tokyo still isn't running all the way up here.  And every flight was completely sold out for weeks.  And driving would have taken extra, EXTRA long to get around the detours.

So we had to settle for an hour visit at the airport.  Which was awesome, but also sorta heartbreaking.

SO CLOSE!!!

See, Wendy is not just any cousin.  When I moved from Salt Lake to Carlsbad when I was 16, I moved into Wendy's hood.  She is a year younger than me so we weren't in the same grade but she graciously welcomed me and shared all her awesome friends.  So I had an instant "in".  Wendy and I got to be great friends and we still are.  She is super funny, and silly, and genuine, and nice, and smart, and it turns out, now she's a great photographer.
(Kelly, your Christmas pictures taken by Wendy, get the most compliments.)

So I was really REALLY excited for Wendy to come so I could show her around up here, and make lots of yummy food for her, and stay up really late gossiping with her every night.  Me = :(

Let's take a walk down memory lane with the help of my totally awesome--decade-old--scrapbook pages, shall we?

We are soooo cute!

And so weird!

But mostly we're just awesome.

With the second day in the books, Colts fans have to be reasonably pleased with the draft so far.

• The trade up to take Ijalana took us all by surprise.  While we don't know everything the Colts were thinking, the timing was eerily similar to the trade up to take Tony Ugoh in 2007.  At the time, Ugoh was graded much more highly by the Colts than by other teams.  That lead Indy to believe they could get a second round steal.  Ijalana, however, only cost the Colts a fifth round pick rather than next year's number one.  We can only speculate, but the Colts obviously felt he was undervalued and couldn't wait any longer to snag him.  In that scenario, you can be sure of this: he's the guy they wanted.

• Not to put too fine a point on it, but reading that Ijalana's question marks may include 'physical and mental weakness' make the Ugoh comparison's terrifying.  Again, it's just a similarity, not a prophecy.

• The Colts took Ijalana in the spot the Jags sacrificed for Gabbert. If Ijalana becomes a serious player for Indy and Gabbert flames out in Jacksonville, that will be delicious.

• Some scouts were crazy high on Ijalana and think he could become the best tackle in the draft. If everything works out, the Colts might have nailed down the bookends for the next decade.  Let's think happy thoughts, shall we?

• I was initially disappointed, not with the player, but the position.  I never question the players Polian takes.  I have no idea if guys are good or bad.  I believe the team needs to take the best player available. I'm all for trading up to get an undervalued player.  However, my general hope is that the BPA will happen to fall into areas of greatest need.  I loved the look of Paea and when he dropped to the Bears at pick 21 (Indy's original pick), I was heartbroken.  Ijalana could turn out to be a 4 time All Pro, I have no idea.  I just wanted defense.

• The lockout is going to hurt the Colts as the minicamps will be critical to integrating Castonzo and Ijalana into the line.  Here's hoping the temporary stay is lifted next week.  The lockout ALSO keeps Indy from signing undrafted free agents.  It's ALSO awful for guys like Diem and Johnson who may well have seen their pink slips drafted yesterday.  They are likely unemployed and can't go find new jobs because of an illegal lockout.

• Doug Farrar of Yahoo Sports and the Footballoutsiders tipped us off to Nevis yesterday.  Echoing Polian's words after the draft, he called Nevis 'ideal' for Indy and said he reminded him of Booger McFarland.  Obviously, that would be incredible news. Booger's play radically altered the Colts line and if you watch tapes of the Kansas City playoff game or the Super Bowl, you see what a difference he made. His injury in training camp in '07 was part of the Curse of Corey Simon.  Nevis was thought by many to be a late second round pick at worst, so his slide to the Colts in the third round was coup.

• The praise for the Pats taking Ryan Mallett is hilarious. Essentially, they traded their third round pick for the possibility that in 2-3 years someone will want to give them more picks for Mallett. In the mean time, they have to pay him and use up a roster spot.  It's a long term investment.  It's not the worst move in the world, but it is a risk.  For a team with QBs on the roster already, I'm not sure it's a great risk. If Indy had done, it would have made more sense because they only have Painter behind Manning, and that's a roster spot that could be happily sacrificed.  The Mallett pick is defensible, but hardly an act of genius. Barring major injury, he'll never start for the Pats. He's just trade bait.  This is a reasonable risk for the Pats, but unless they trade him for two number 1s, there's no way it becomes anything more than a reasonable pay off in the future.

The push for equality stopped years ago. Women need to wake up to what has really happened

A year into the Tory coup, it is no great surprise that Cameron has the confidence to say in public what he really thinks. His "calm down, dear" remark to Angela Eagle clearly gave Gideon a cheap thrill. "Reactionary men think reactionary things," is not a shock. What is, though, is the view taken at face value that this is funny. It reveals the sense of humour of a 70-year-old guy trapped in the body of a 40-something. Icky! We look forward to some cutting-edge Benny Hill quips.

Nick Clegg winced during this discussion. He has his own problem with women. He can't get enough of them. If there there were an election now, on current polling there would be no female Lib Dem MPs, according to the Fabian Society. The men have all the safe seats. A party concerned with any kind of progressive politics has to be embarrassed about this. A party pushing for AV on the grounds we will end up with a more representative way of doing politics looks just daft if it cannot represent half of us.

As I keep saying, we are going backwards. The last election sidelined women as wives. As the Tories secure their position, there is an increasingly public anti-women rhetoric in situ. The mantra of conservative culture that "feminism has gone too far" is ringing in our ears.

Feminism acts as a convenient bogeywoman. It can even be blamed for the wrath of the gods of the free market. So it can blamed for everything from unemployment (Willets) to busting up families (Duncan Smith). We are a busy lot, as this is apparently a full-time operation. But in destroying what Tories hold dear, I want them to point to our great "gains", for when you look at the actual figures on the representation of women in public life for example, these gains are tiny.

The notion of even "the token woman" (PC gone mad!) seems to have evaporated recently. The AV campaigns have been pitiful. Newsnight excelled itself with a film about AV, which featured women doing pottery, whose husbands were going to explain it to them. Sweet. This was then followed by a discussion in which three squashed-up grey men argued with another three squashed-up grey men about fairer voting systems. In Scotland this was topped off by more argument about the constitution, which featured 16 men and not a single woman.

As in politics, so too in business. Given cover by the establishment, it is now perfectly OK to talk about the terrible "risk" of appointing women to the boardroom. The risk, of course, being that they might get pregnant. Some women can be intelligent, but don't worry yourselves about that. Simon Murray, chairman of Glencore, the largest commodities trader, floated at $60bn, offers us the benefit of his wisdom on women: "They have a tendency not to be so involved quite often, and they are not so ambitious in business as men because they've got better things to do." Such as? "Bringing up children and all sorts of things."

It must be our interest in all sorts of other things (Macrame? Meringues? Matriarchy?) that prevents half of the FTSE 250 companies having a single woman in the boardroom? Murray echoes Alan Sugar's remarks on the "problem" of employing women, which are seen by many as simply "realism".

Vince Cable then described Murray's comments as "unbelievably primitive" and talked tough, saying Murray had single-handedly made "the case for tough action to ensure that there are more women on boards and to ensure women's rights in the workplace are properly entrenched". Tough action? Oh Lib Dems, heal thyselves. Tough action means quotas, and you cannot sort out quotas in your own party because its structure means decisions cannot be imposed on local parties. Instead, the most under-representative party of them all has created a namby-pamby "leadership programme".

Quotas, women-only shortlists and any form of positive discrimination are often disliked equally by men and women, but they work. The alternative is waiting for the great promised land of meritocracy to start. I'd give it time. We are in fact still operating in the realms of hundreds of years of male-only shortlists and men giving people that remind them of themselves (other men) promotions. Rwanda has a bigger proportion of women in its parliament then we do. At the current rate of success the Fawcett Society estimates it will take Labour 20 years to get to 50% female candidates, the Lib Dems 40 years and the Tories 400.

The business community is also terrified of quotas, though Norway and Spain use them, and France is on the way. The great fear is that jobs will be given to less talented women, simply to make things look good. What is needed, all agree, are more enlightened attitudes. But quite where these enlightened attitudes are to come from is something of a mystery. Surely they come about by a change in culture, whereby men and women work alongside each other?

The idea that low-"calibre" women (Duncan Smith on Labour's women–only shortlists) will push out presumably high-calibre men is everywhere. We certainly wouldn't want a bunch of low-calibre guys running stuff, would we? I mean, look at the amazing results the high-calibre guys in the banking system have achieved.

This is not about women being inherently better. To say that we remain under-represented in politics, business, law, the academe and most of public life is simply a fact. Many see that this fact needs changing, but also resist the methods by which such change might come about.

Feminism is, in the end, about choices for women. Those choices are not expanding any more. It's not all about being a high-flying executive. Indeed, many younger women, having seen their mothers' generation over-stretched, may well opt out of the having-it-all means doing-it-all scenario. Nonetheless, young women cannot assume that the rights won by their mothers' generation are extended to them. Especially in the field of employment. The push for equality stopped years ago. We have stalled. Women need to wake up to what has really happened.

Listen to Sheryl Sandberg addressing a conference at TED. Sandberg is Facebook's chief operations officer, and talking about the situation in the US, but it applies here too: "My generation, really sadly, is not going to change the numbers at the top. They are just not moving. We are 50% of the population, but in my generation there will not be 50% of women at the top of any industry." This is from a woman in her early 40s who is hugely successful.

This is the context in which we celebrate the marriage of a woman who works part-time to be available for her man. This is the context in which we are voting for a more representative voting system. This is the context in which equality has not been achieved, yet a regressive, conservative establishment is bearing down on women's rights. This is the context in which Cameron tells a woman to 'calm down'.

I say, do the opposite. Dears.

Some good news from China as their labor movement continues to grow:

We'll never know the names of all the people who paid with their limbs, their lungs, or their lives for the goodies in my home and yours. Here's just one: think of him as the Unknown Worker, standing for them all. Liu Pan was a 17-year-old operating a machine that made cards and cardboard that were sold on to big-name Western corporations. When he tried to clear its jammed machinery, he got pulled into it. His sister said: "When we got his body, his whole head was crushed. We couldn't even see his eyes."

So you might be thinking – was it a cruel joke to bill this as a good news story? Not at all. An epic rebellion has now begun in China against this abuse – and it is beginning to succeed. Across 126,000 Chinese factories, workers have refused to live like this any more. Wildcat unions have sprung up, organised by text message, demanding higher wages, a humane work environment, and the right to organise freely. Millions of young workers across the country are blockading their factories and chanting, "There are no human rights here!" and, "We want freedom!" The suicides were a rebellion of despair; this is a rebellion of hope.

Last year, the Chinese dictatorship was so panicked by the widespread uprisings that it prepared an extraordinary step forward. It drafted a new labour law that would allow workers to form and elect their own trade unions. It would plant seeds of democracy across China's workplaces. Western corporations lobbied very hard against it, saying it would create a "negative investment environment" – by which they mean smaller profits. Western governments obediently backed the corporations and opposed freedom and democracy for Chinese workers. So the law was whittled down and democracy stripped out.

It wasn't enough. This year Chinese workers have risen even harder to demand a fair share of the prosperity they create. Now company after company is making massive concessions: pay rises of over 60 per cent are being conceded. Even more crucially, officials in Guandong province, the manufacturing heartland of the country, have announced that they are seriously considering allowing workers to elect their own representatives to carry out collective bargaining after all.

Just like last time, Western corporations and governments are lobbying frantically against this – and to keep the millions of Yan Lis stuck at their assembly lines into the 35th hour.

This isn't a distant struggle: you are at its heart, whether you like it or not. There is an electrical extension cord running from your laptop and mobile and games console to the people like Yan Li and Liu Pan dying to make them. So you have to make a choice. You can passively let the corporations and governments speak for you in trying to beat these people back into semi-servitude – or you can side with the organisations here that support their cry for freedom, like No Sweat, or the TUC's international wing, by donating to them, or volunteering for their campaigns.

Yes, if this struggle succeeds, it will mean that we will have to pay a little more for some products, in exchange for the freedom and the lives of people like Yan Li and Liu Pan. But previous generations have made that choice. After slavery was abolished in 1833, Britain's GDP fell by 10 percent – but they knew that cheap goods and fat profits made from flogging people until they broke were not worth having. Do we?

The U.S. can't effectively lecture China about human rights while helping corporations suppress workers rights. That won't stop them from trying, of course.

But this really is a welcome development, not only because we'd much rather have affordable consumer choices that don't involve purchasing items made by exploited, low wage workers, but also because so many of the economic policies in our own country are predicated on the notion that U.S. companies can always get dirt-cheap labor someplace else. Now? Maybe not so much.

[rodfather][poidog]when you think about it, who creates these "trophy" games, anyway? most of them have been around for a long time and were created back when times were different and people went out of their way to create such things. nowadays, people are too jaded in general to start cheesy trophy-themed games (which is very sad). but when it comes down to it, isn't it up to the fans to create such rivalries? i mean, the UHAD marketing department sure isn't going to start a "rivalry campaign", now is it? these ideas are created by fans. we're fans, aren't we? the "golden screwdriver" trophy is an idea that's been hanging on since the original "screwdriver game" back in the early June Jones days. This is as close as we'll ever come to manufacturing a trophy/rivalry game - if you guys want this to catch on, all it takes is some work to spread the word. i bet that in the weeks leading up to the next game against fresno that if enough of an effort was made to spread the word about the rivalry on blogs and other media outlets that it would catch on and stick. between Sportshawaii, Tsai's blog, Tombo Ahi's blog, and that sorry excuse of a newspaper called the Fresno Bee, i'm sure we could make it happen...[/] Uh, didn't this radio station in California create a screwdriver trophy a few years ago? I remember seeing a media report about it. I remember the report saying that Fresno did not recognize it or associate with it because it was based on the controversial screwdriver incident.[/] Yeah I was going to say the same thing about the push for the "screwdriver trophy", but Fresno shot it down because of the negativity the story brings about. Fans throwing tools at opposing coaches is not the imagery that any college would like to tie itself to. It's a shame because that is exactly the kind of "legends" that these trophy games are based on. This rivalry is more than deserving of a trophy to exchange hands. But seeing that JJ has moved on, and that Fresno is against the whole "screwdriver" thing, we need to come up with another idea. I'd like to submit for approval "The Poi-Dog Bowl" trophy. It would consist of a good sized koa poi bowl, attached bottom-to-bottom with a dog bowl, with our "H" logo carved into the poi bowl, and Fresno's bulldog emblazoned on the dog bowl. The winner of the game would flip their side upright and the loser's side would be upside down for the next year (or longer if a win streak occours). It would have to be pretty big (bigger than the normal poi bowl) so that the scores of all of the games could fit on the sides of the two bowls. What you guys think? Any other suggestions?

[poidog]when you think about it, who creates these "trophy" games, anyway? most of them have been around for a long time and were created back when times were different and people went out of their way to create such things. nowadays, people are too jaded in general to start cheesy trophy-themed games (which is very sad). but when it comes down to it, isn't it up to the fans to create such rivalries? i mean, the UHAD marketing department sure isn't going to start a "rivalry campaign", now is it? these ideas are created by fans. we're fans, aren't we? the "golden screwdriver" trophy is an idea that's been hanging on since the original "screwdriver game" back in the early June Jones days. This is as close as we'll ever come to manufacturing a trophy/rivalry game - if you guys want this to catch on, all it takes is some work to spread the word. i bet that in the weeks leading up to the next game against fresno that if enough of an effort was made to spread the word about the rivalry on blogs and other media outlets that it would catch on and stick. between Sportshawaii, Tsai's blog, Tombo Ahi's blog, and that sorry excuse of a newspaper called the Fresno Bee, i'm sure we could make it happen...[/] Uh, didn't this radio station in California create a screwdriver trophy a few years ago? I remember seeing a media report about it. I remember the report saying that Fresno did not recognize it or associate with it because it was based on the controversial screwdriver incident.

Post by Heather Murphy-Raines

This news just in, my friends. It seems that cursing to high heaven after cracking your baby toe on the door jamb will actually make it easier to bear. 

Of course, we already knew that, didn't we?

It seems, however, that some researchers weren't as clued in to the powers of yelling four-letter words for excrement. Instead, they constructed a study with the assumption that using profanity with pain would make it less bearable. They found the opposite.   

Swearing does in fact dull our perception of pain.

Well @#$%, as a woman, I could have told them they were wrong. We are queens of pain management starting with cramps and culminating in child birth. We may wash out our kids' mouth with soap for naughty language, but we all secretly know they learned it from us when we slammed our head into the @#$%lift gate of the minivan.

In fact, I think we mothers could start a revolution. Who needs epidurals when we can just scream yippee-ki-yay motha-f&^%$@. Peaceful births? Tom Cruise's silent births? Oh, hell no, let's f-bomb those babies into existence with a well deserved holy f**********cccckkk! 

I jest, but part of me says there is something to this phenomenon. Another part of me tries to cut out the bad habit I picked up in high school and the military. You know, the one that takes away the pain of driving behind the 95-year-old grandpa cruising a perfectly paced 26 MPH on the freeway with a well-placed word or two that my little ones absorbed like thirsty sponges.

So the next time your preschooler comes crying with a bloody knee, why not encourage a nice resounding shout of [insert cuss word of choice]? It's way better pain management than a lollipop in this nation of obesity, eh? Well, except when your toddler calls his brother a mutter-effer. (I'm not saying this actually happened or anything [whistling innocently].) Just promise me you won't think less of me -- I mean I truly do exist to make you look like a better mother. And my husband thinks the use of a well-placed, in-context epithet is pretty darn funny coming out of our kids' mouths.

So, yes, I do admit an occasional four-letter word. However, I kid you not, I actually sang the Mickey Mouse Club song during the labor of my last 10+ POUND baby. Yes, the Mickey Mouse Club. I don't know why. It just relaxed me and triggered an emotional shortcut to distance me from the pain. Some say the same occurs with a well placed f-bomb. In fact, there is research that links the brain's emotional shortcuts to why Tourette's sufferers use so much profanity. 

Back to the study results: "People withstood a moderately to strongly painful stimulus for significantly longer if they repeated a swear word rather than a nonswear word."

I find this sentence empowering. The next time you are suffering, I think a rather loud, resounding c@cksucking sonuvab$#tch would be a great deal better than a little too much wine or a handful of pills. 

I call it Cursing Therapy. Who's the @#$ is with me? What, you are worried about the neighbors?? !@#$ the neighbors.

 

Image via GranniesKitchen/Flicker

when you think about it, who creates these "trophy" games, anyway? most of them have been around for a long time and were created back when times were different and people went out of their way to create such things. nowadays, people are too jaded in general to start cheesy trophy-themed games (which is very sad). but when it comes down to it, isn't it up to the fans to create such rivalries? i mean, the UHAD marketing department sure isn't going to start a "rivalry campaign", now is it? these ideas are created by fans. we're fans, aren't we? the "golden screwdriver" trophy is an idea that's been hanging on since the original "screwdriver game" back in the early June Jones days. This is as close as we'll ever come to manufacturing a trophy/rivalry game - if you guys want this to catch on, all it takes is some work to spread the word. i bet that in the weeks leading up to the next game against fresno that if enough of an effort was made to spread the word about the rivalry on blogs and other media outlets that it would catch on and stick. between Sportshawaii, Tsai's blog, Tombo Ahi's blog, and that sorry excuse of a newspaper called the Fresno Bee, i'm sure we could make it happen...

Not Bad Meaning Good

All right, everyone, thank you for joining us on this Big Bad Wolf Wine Tasting weekend.

Now, first of all, let’s stay in a group, so we can find our way back to the van after we’ve had a few. Got to keep that bad reputation intact! Ha ha! That’s just a little joke, of course, we’ll all be responsible today. Today is just a chance for all us Big Bad Wolves to get together and enjoy some of the finest Pinot Noir that California has to offer. That’s why we’re here at Claiborne & Churchill, the vineyard behind the Claiborne & Churchill Pinot Noir 3 Pack!

Okay, now, come along, we’ll be headed to the winery building. See, since 1995, this permanent building has been made from bales of rice straw, making it well-insulated and at a constant temperature without any mechanical heating or cooling. Perfect for wine! Also, totally vulnerable to us Big Bad Wolves. Everybody ready? Deep breath now…

pppwhooooooo

Ah, there we are! You can see they’ve already set up the 2008 Edna Valley. The fruit here came from vineyards all a mile or two from the winery, handpicked and sorted right in the vineyard for the very best fruit. It’s won Best of Class and a Gold Medal in the 2010 Central Coast Wine Competition, and there’s a nice nose of violet. Mmm, isn’t that fantastic? Then there’s the hit of cherries and berries, some good woody notes, and a long finish. It’s perfect with cheese and truffles, maybe even lamb! That’s right, Paul, when you go back home, nobody’s going to be listening to that boy who keeps crying about you. Go on, take a bottle!

Okay, everyone finished? Another deep breath, and…

ppppwhoooooooooooooo

And here we are in building two, with the 2008 Runestone Pinot. Oh, no, don’t worry about those panicked screams, they knew I was bringing a group today. Probably just some pig-lovers or something. So, the Runestone won a Gold Medal at the 9th Annual Pinot Noir Shootout & Summit back in 2008, and that’s really something to be proud of, we think. Also, it’s a limited batch from about 150 barrels, so it’s exactly the thing you can use to impress a date. Jake, you’ve got that redhead hiding near your place in the woods, right? The one you repossessed from her grandmother? Yeah, this Runestone is the perfect excuse to have her for dinner… and then you can have her for dinner! Ha ha ha ha! She’ll go great with this one! I know, everybody says I should do standup, but wine’s really what I love most of all. Here, you take this bottle. With my compliments. Everyone set to move on?

Now this last one, we should probably go ahead and get to it before those security guards arrive. No, no, there’s no trouble, we just want to wrap up so they can get back to work. Deep breaths again, please! And a one, and a two-

pppwhoooooooooooooooooooooo

There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? Just a little taste of the 2008 Twin Creeks and it’s back to the bed and breakfast for supper. This pinot also won a Gold Medal at the 9th Annual Pinot Noir Shootout & Summit, plus the coveted Purple Showdown Ribbon. It’s got some cola behind it, making it very interesting, plus it’s spicy and tangy and… you got it dead on, Gunther, it’s perfect with a tomato-based Cioppino or really any Italian dish. No, I don’t actually know how it will pair with seven baby goats you’ve stolen from their mother, but… tell you what, you take this bottle and test it out, and then we’ll all know, won’t we?

Okay, well, it seems that there’s a helicopter and some guys with tranq guns, so we’d better wrap up here and get back on the road. Hope everyone enjoyed Stage One of our tasting, and I bet we have plenty to discuss once we’re safe and far away from the Claiborne & Churchill security team! Oh, one more thing, be sure to get lots of rest tonight, because the place tomorrow is built out of sticks, and it’ll be a little harder to blow down. Whoops! They’ve opened fire! Let’s go, let’s go! Everybody buckle up!

2008 Edna Valley Pinot Noir

The Runestone Pinot Noir is a barrel-select super-premium wine, much like a “reserve” wine. We literally select eight barrels to bottle that we think will yield an elegant, velvety smooth and succulent blend. The clones are typically the new Dijon clones, and the wine is not necessarily spicy or tannic.

2009 Twin Creeks Pinot Noir

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

In listening to a bunch of Mac-centric podcasts lately, especially on workflows with the Mac, I have come across a tool that has been around for a while but is still not extremely popular with everyone. The tool is called Markdown and was created by John Gruber (Daring Fireball fame). The best way to explain it is the first paragraph from Markdown’s description on Mr. Gruber’s page:

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

Yeah that is it in a nutshell. Before I jump in how to use this awesome tool on Mac and Windows, you may be wondering what the point of a tool like this actually is.

What’s the point?

At first I didn’t get the reason for using Markdown. Cool, you can transfer plain text stuff into HTML, but who the hell uses HTML anymore? Well, if you are a web writer you use HTML every single day whether you know it or not and if you have used WordPress or any other CMS for any length of time you have most likely had to tweak some HTML.

If you are using WordPress there is nothing more agrevating than the WYSIWYG editor becoming too helpful with HTML tags in the background essentially destorying your formatting. Markdown can help you by transforming your text file into valid HTML. This allows you to paste your HTML into the HTML editor thus keeping your hard-won formatting. So nice.

Also, there is something to say for document portability. HTML is an agnostic type of document markup and can be rendered in pretty much any crappy web browser. With the continued use of many different operating systems and devices out in the wild (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc) the need for a standard format for text is highly needed. Markdown helps this along by allowing you to standardized all your note formatting without locking you in to some proprietary format. Just HTML and txt files.

Let’s use it, shall we?

Markdown is pretty darn easy to use and if you have any experience messing aroudn with software and HTML it will be a snap. Markdown is written in Perl, so if you don’t have Perl on your Windows machine you can download and install Strawberry Perl from here. If you are a Mac user, Perl is already installed for you.

Next, go over to Daring Fireball and grab the Markdown.pl script, unzip it and put the Markdown.pl file in the directory that you will use to create and tranform your input text files.

Now the fun part; learning how to use the syntax and creating your input text file.

Markdown syntax

I am going to briefly explain some of the most used syntax snippets that will get you off an running with Markdown. If you want the whole shebang, head on over to Daring Fireball to get a detailed list of all the niceties of the Markdown syntax.

Headers

Headers tags (h1, h2, h3, etc) are simple to create in your text document. To signify the h1 tag, “underline” the text with the ‘=’ sign:

This is a h1 header
===================

or for h2 use the ‘-’ character:

This is a h2 header
-------------------

You don’t need to put the same amount of ‘=’ or ‘-’ characters under the heading; any number will due to produce the header tags.

Bullets and lists

I think in bullets and lists so it’s nice that Markdown handles them well. To insert a bullet append an asterisk to your line like this:

* This is my point

You can also use the ‘+’ or ‘-’ characters as bullets.

Ordered lists are easy too:

1. Number one
2. Number two
3. Number three... now you got it!

If you want multiple paragraphs under a bullet or number just indent the first line of each paragraph or indent all the lines if you want it to look nicer:

1. Here is the first point that I am trying to make about numbered lists.

   By the way, I should probably mention this too.

2. Next point

Links

One of my favorite things of Markdown is the easy way to insert links. First, bracket the word or phrase that you would like to be “clickable” and then follow that by a parenthesized URL:

[click here](http://www.google.com/)

Outputting to HTML

After you have created your text file it is now time to pass it to the Markdown.pl script to produce your HTML output. If you didn’t create a text file to test, you can download the quick text file that I created to try it out.

Place your text file in the same directory as the Markdown.pl script (you can pass the arguments with the correct path if you want to, this is just to make it easier). After that is done open up your command prompt in Windows or your terminal on your Mac or Linux and navigate to the folder with your input file.

To create the output directly in the terminal window use the following command:

perl Markdown.pl input.txt

This will then parse the text file and output the valid HTML markup to the terminal. If you want the ouput to be directed towards a totally seperate HTML file type the following command:

perl Markdown.pl input.txt > output.html

This will create the HTML file output.html in whatever directory you are currently in.

Wrapping it up

Let me just say that if you think Markdown is interesting and understand the utility of it, I highly suggest that if you write anything you should write it with Markdow

n syntax. It is cross-platform, open source, free, and compatible with everything. To me it is a game changer and I feel like I am a little behind in not utilizing it sooner. Once again, there is much more to the syntax than I have highlighted here, so check out Daring Fireball for more.

By the way, I wrote this entire article using Markdown and if you want to see the syntax you can download it here.

It's Americana Week!!!! And no, I have no idea why.

Now yesterday, it was tax day...which is often accompanied by anti-American government protests, but I'm guessing that's not why it was Americana Week.

I'm still waiting for the explanation, and if they explained it, and I somehow missed it, and you heard it, I would be so grateful if you could please leave it in the comments!

Let's dig in, shall we?

Image courtesy ABC

1. Ralph and Karina danced a Samba

RINGER!!! Who else could do a double pirouette at the end of a long routine? So, other than reviving, just slightly, my nightmares about the newest serial killer on the block, Spatula Hands (he'll scrape your aiiiiiyeeeees out!) this was perfectly fine. But it was all two-step, no Samba. He did all the steps adequately, and managed some really tough moves, but there wasn't a lot of earthy rhythm to it, I'll just say. Or as someone else would say: I can only echo Bruno and say "Give me sex, man!" Only I'd sound a lot less pervy saying it.

Bottom line: Still think he'll be safe, though.

2. Chris and Cheryl danced a Viennese Waltz

Last night we learned that Chris has a hidden impersonation talent! He imitated Len very well indeed, a natural performer. While Chris did a nice job, I did see a bit of a return of the stiffness from week one, but generally he was surprisingly graceful and has such great posture. I still like him and find him to be a favorite. But I'm afraid this was a bit stodgy for the voting public.

Bottom line: I'm a little concerned on his behalf.

3. Petra and Dmitry danced a Quick Step

That was OK, but she did seem a bit behind the beat on all the fastest sequences. After two strong weeks, this was a bad week to be weak. She has defied the supermodel odds thus far, but I fear her luck may be running out.

Bottom line: Think she's back at risk.

4. Romeo and Chelsie danced a Foxtrot

OK, we know Romeo did a good job with that because that was the first time I ever watched him while he was dancing with Chelsie, my current girl-crush. He totally got into the character of the dance, and the whole thing was pretty adorable. I loved it. First time, definitely, that I even liked him.

Bottom line: Safe, safe, safe.

5. Hines and Kym danced a Rumba

Once again, Hines doesn't pull me in at all -- or as far as he does the judges. I like it when he has a little uptempo booty-shaking to do, but I find him a bit stiff and awkward on the graceful stuff. I did not find it sexy and erotic at all. Although I may have been distracted by all the damn fringe.

Bottom line: Clearly I'm missing something. Help me understand.

6. Kirstie and Maks danced a Foxtrot

Hmmm. Can't say I loved that. For how rockin' the music was, the dance seemed a bit slow and plodding in comparison. Once again, don't feel like I was on the same page with the judges (or at least Carrie Ann and Bruno). I actually still think Kirstie's first week was her best. Instead of trying so hard to play on sexuality, they should let her return to grace and elegance.

Bottom line: Can't say I loved that, so I can't say I think she's totally safe there.

7. Kendra and Louis danced a Foxtrot

Too much marching, not enough Foxtrot. And while I think her face looked less frozen in fear than usual, she still does look a bit terrified. This was just a very badly choreographed piece. I have a theory that Louis is stressed out working with Kendra and choreographed something that would get him off the hook. And if youcheck out BlogHer's Facebook DWtS friends, they are WAY over Kendra!

Bottom line: She got saved last week after getting slammed...so if the usual holds true...she'll get eliminated this week.

8. Chelsea and Mark danced a Samba

He had a lot better hip action than she did, I will say that. Chelsea is a really good executor of dance steps, but she does need to loosen up. And one of our FB fans has a question: "Why do Chelsea/Mark get to do a bunch of butt shaking with a few dance steps thrown in while everyone else has to do an actual ballroom dance?" Good question, Cristina, why indeed!?

Bottom line: She's really clean, accurate and skillful, so I'm guessing she's safe.

Bottom line for the Bottom Two:

(And I say this as someone who was rooting for Kendra!)

Should be: Kendra and Kirstie with Kendra going home.

Will be: Kendra and Petra with Kendra going home.

So, what did you think?

Elisa Camahort Page
BlogHer
elisa@blogher.com
My BlogHer profile truly shows you everything I do online...Check it out!!

I’ll start with saying, I think there’s a memo I didn’t receive the last few months.  Seems there are some within our industry who feel the need to rename ‘Social Media.’

Although I understand this is a constantly evolving industry, why the big push? 

Whether you choose to call it social business, social marketing, human marketing, human business (oohh...awww...pretty titles) at their core, they seek to accomplish the same end result, socializing products or services through various types of media.  

As I stated before, I’m not absent to the fact that this is an evolving industry so over the course of its evolution, terminology must change to help establish standards, and build awareness.

 

Build & Grow Awareness

Consider this, The top 20 countries (see graph below) account for 76% of all Facebook users.  

  

 

via Amodiovalerio Verde

The above map of users by continent, notice all the conversations about renaming 'Social Media' are happening where there is wider acceptance of social media but we're not considering what 'Social Media' means to those outside the United States.

I say this from the perspective of a Community Manager for Social Media Club, where we’ve sustained some of our biggest growth over the last 8 months across our International chapters.  I’ve discovered the conversations, exploration and education around social media are only just occurring for people domestically and abroad.

Not to mention the number of brands who have only begun to adopt social strategies in the last year, which shows much of the marketplace is slow to change. 

Don’t forget social media is also about adopting a new way of thinking and new approaches aren’t learned overnight.  This mindset is slowly being learned and hasn’t seeped into every department within organizations.  

Some people and brands remain skeptical of social media, which means social media professionals and champions still have a long road ahead of them to advocate these new skills.

If we’re just gaining momentum and many are becoming comfortable with the term ‘Social Media’ and all it encompasses, seems hardly the right time to rename it.

 

Frankly we’re tired of “Social Media.” At this point, that term has lost all real meaning and importance.

 

via Roost

 

Who is we? The digital marketing folks who do this day-in and day-out? Is it necessary to rename to sexier title just because *we’re* tired of it?  

Now is the time for the real Professionals in our industry to help promote literacy in all things involving social media, not to walk away from it when it’s finally gaining traction.

SMC Founder, Chris Heuer, has some additional thoughts on this, where he ellaborates on the difference between Social Business and Social Media. 

 

Just what is lurking in the Playboy mansion's hot tub?

✤ Guys, I know you'll all be concerned about news of Legionnaires' disease bacteria found in the hot tub at the Playboy mansion, and the ramifications for all your favourite centrefolds. To our knowledge, no bunnies were harmed in the outbreak that struck down more than 100 people after a soiree in February, but one has to admit that the "sexy" reputation of the mansion's infamous Grotto (wherein the hot tub resides) is looking just a little bruised right now.

But let's look a little closer at this ill-fated party, shall we? The event in question was culmination of the DOMAINFest conference on internet business, which hosted 700 people from 30 countries, all of them, according to the DOMAINFest website, "individuals who understand that domain names are the 'real estate' of the internet". Sure, porn is one of the fastest-growing industries on the internet, but I'm still not wholly convinced a party at the Playboy mansion is an appropriate finale to a business conference.

✤ I also have conflicted feelings about Lady Gaga's recent comments regarding her brief relocation to Los Angeles before retreating home to New York: "It was Kegel-exercise vaginal reaction where I clenched and had to retract immediately," she told Harper's Bazaar. On one hand, give it a rest. On the other, thank you for reminding us all of the importance of pelvic-floor exercises.

✤ Eleven days until the royal wedding! I don't know about you, but heck, for me that's still 11 days too many. This week we hear [that Scotland Yard has been pre-emptively targeting people known to be obsessed with the royal family, warning them to stay away from the wedding. Whether this includes Clive Goodman and the entire staff of the Daily Mail remains unconfirmed.

Have you partied in the Playboy Grotto? Are you going to the wedding? Too much Gaga information? Do let us know.

What I'm reading: Snake Skin by C.J. Lyons, Wicked Becomes You, by Meredith Duran

Want to win 21 mystery books? Check the Deals and Steals tab.

One of the "perks" to getting the rights back to a previously published book, especially one you wrote years ago—and ever more especially, your very first published book—is that you can make changes. I've already talked—at length—about updating the book to make it more current. But what about just making a better book?

So, as I await getting the rights back to my first book, I'm working on improving it. I've gone back and looked at some early drafts, and parts I cut before submitting. The first draft of the book was 143,000 words long. The published version: just under 90,000. So there were a LOT of cuts.

I went back to some very early drafts. One scene showed my hero and heroine in a restaurant. In my efforts to paint clear pictures for readers, I'd spent several paragraphs on the waiter coming to the table, taking orders, and the usual "mundane" stuff that accompanies eating out.

I was tempted to include some of that scene. After all, aren't we supposed to include descriptions, involve the senses, and make things realistic for the reader? And I thought I'd done a halfway decent job, trying to Show, not Tell.

This was what I had (and I've not edited it at all—it's here for content only; this was written in 2003, so be kind with your thoughts.)



A young blonde waiter stepped to their table, lit the standard restaurant candle-in-a-jar and asked to take their drink orders.

Randy raised his eyebrow at Sarah.

"I'll have a glass of your house white, please," she said to the waiter.

"Club soda for me," Randy said.

The youth plopped a menu in front of each of them and walked away.

"Guess the new trainees work the slow nights," Sarah said. "I haven't been here in a couple of months. Do you know what's good?"

"Me? No, I don't think I've been here in a long time, either." He picked up his menu.

Sarah perused the offerings and closed her menu. "I'll try the salmon. They're supposed to do seafood very well here. I hope there's not a trainee in the kitchen, too."

Randy rewarded her with a small smile. "I'm going to stay away from fish. I'll have chicken tarragon."

The waiter returned with their drinks and they placed their food orders. "Thank you," he said as he picked up their menus.

"I can't understand why anyone would get his tongue pierced," Sarah said after he'd left.

Randy shook his head. "Neither can I."

Now, it's not humiliatingly awful, and with a little tweaking, could probably be slipped back into the scene. Except for one detail.

POV! No, I don't mean I've head-hopped. The scene is in Sarah's POV, and we're in her head. Or are we? What's not on the page is the setup—Randy has just been through a very emotional experience, and Sarah's been trying to help him through it. On top of that, she's dealing with business crises at her shop, and Randy is the officer on her case. In other words, they're both dealing with problems, and are emotionally distraught.

This is probably not a time they'd be noticing restaurant details, especially since there's nothing "non-restaurant-experience" going on. (I think in an even earlier draft, I'd spent more time with the wait staff—showed them being greeted, led to their table, had someone fill the water glasses, tell them, "Your server will be right with you," and described everyone in what for me is considerable detail, down to tats and piercings as well as hair and eye color. Not to mention filling in all the time where the waiter returns with drinks and takes their food orders, etc.) You get the picture.

It was unnecessary to show them entering the restaurant, Randy checking out the basketball game on the TV above the bar, making a point of wanting a booth in the back, etc., etc. Description has to be true to the character AND to the specifics of the scene. Randy is a cop—normally, he's very observant. But, 1) the scene is in Sarah's POV, and 2) given their emotional states, neither would be noticing all these little details.

Now, if you're writing shallow POV, then it's a different matter to step back and show lots of details. But I don't. To me, that's distancing. And, especially in an emotional scene, I want to be down deep inside the characters' heads. Needless to say, I didn't go back and flesh out the scene as it was published. I left it alone. There's enough "show" without going into too much detail. At least I think so.

A bored-looking waiter hovered by the table. "Getcha something to drink?"

"A glass of white wine for me," Sarah said. She looked up at Randy, who was staring at the table.

"Club soda," he said without raising his eyes.

"Gotcha. Be right back," the waiter said. He plopped two menus on the table and shuffled away.

Randy buried himself behind his menu, and Sarah studied hers without speaking.

Tomorrow, my guest is Jenyfer Matthews. She's recently returned from Egypt (not by choice) and has some very interesting things to share. And, she's giving away an advance reader copy of her next book. I'll continue with more about descriptions and POV on Wednesday. Make sure you come back.

It is interesting that with so many of the discussions and debates we have here on BTSC, invariably something will be posted to the effect that:

 "They know what they are doing...They do this 24/7 for a living...Hey, we've been in three Super Bowls in six years...  In (blank) we trust"

Let me be the first to step forward and claim that I am guilty of at least thinking, if not writing, comments along those lines.  I am especially vulnerable when the Bruce Arians lynching takes its normal course, but I don't want to digress here.  I think the interesting caveat is the old adage that "you stand where you sit."  In other words, if you initiate the criticism, or agree with someone else's, then you feel the freedom to talk about the situation.  If you disagree, then the instinct is to sometimes end the debate by simply claiming that we can't know as much as, or be as smart as, the inner sanctum.  How can a banker from Richmond, or whatever it is we all do, have enough insight to criticize people who spend their entire existence on this stuff?

The truth is, if we take that position, there would be no need to ever engage in any discussions or debates.  There would be no need for BTSC.  Why should we even talk about the Draft?  Kevin Colbert knows more than we do, so let's just go about our lives and wait for April 28, and then trust what he does.  Let us never question Dick LeBeau or Bruce Arians or Mike Tomlin about anything.  They are in the film room and at practice 18 hours a day.  Who are we to think we can possibly be more accurate than they?  The In-Blank-We-Trust card is the ultimate trump card.  It ends all debate.

To the contrary, I like to pretend that I am the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers.  I want to ask questions.  I want to throw out my opinions and ideas and I want feedback.  I don't know as much detail as the people I hire - if I did I wouldn't need to hire them in the first place.  So I will let them explain things and then I will be convinced or not convinced.  But under no circumstances am I going to simply live with the mantra that "They must know more than I, so I'll just stop thinking about everything."

I want to know why and why not.  As a follow-up to our fearless leader's astute column about Thaddeus Gibson, I want to know why we have enough linebackers to defeat a third-world country, while our secondary can't defend top-quality quarterbacks.   Did we over-do this BPA thing, like Mr. Bean alluded to?  Was Gibson just a Draft mistake or is he potentially a good player that was low man on a very large totem pole - either of which is bad.  As the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, I sign all the paychecks. You need to convince me, Kevin, why our secondary is going to be better this year, or I can assure you, we won't be taking any linebackers early in this Draft, and I don't care how good they are (Martez Wilson).  Thaddeus Gibson might be good too, but we're never going to reap that fourth-round seed, are we?  And we're not going to stop Manning, Brady, Brees or Rodgers unless we improve the defensive weaponry to cover their targets.

No matter how good Kevin Colbert is, or Mike Tomlin, or Dick LeBeau, or Bruce Arians, they are like the rest of us - they make mistakes.  These mistakes are indisputable and well-documented.  And as long as they make mistakes, they are vulnerable to being questioned.  I own this team, maybe just as a fan and in my own mind, but I have an emotional investment in the Pittsburgh Steelers that I am not going to apologize for.  I want to share my thoughts and hear yours on this web site.  I want discussion and debate.  I want you to convince me when I'm wrong.  And along this journey, I will try very hard not to trump debate by saying, "In the Steelers we trust; they know what they are doing; their success is proven; so they must be right."

By: Cynthia Gordy

To the relief of many on the political left, last week's budget negotiations ended in a compromise that spared funding for Planned Parenthood. Republicans targeted the family planning agency -- one of the largest recipients of Title X, the federal grant program dedicated to reproductive health services for low-income patients -- because it provides abortions, among other preventive health care services. Although no federal funds under the program are used for abortion, during the tense 2011 budget talks, more than $300 million in cuts to Title X were on the line.

On Thursday, House Republicans continued the fight by voting for a stand-alone resolution to defund Planned Parenthood, a measure that the Senate promptly voted down. But as bigger negotiations loom concerning the 2012 budget and the debt ceiling, conservatives in Congress have signaled that their mission isn't over. It's a political climate all too familiar to Dr. Joycelyn Elders.

Elders, who served as the first African-American U.S. surgeon general for 15 months during the Clinton administration, was a polarizing figure during her days in Washington. Although her advocacy of condoms in high schools rankled conservatives, she shocked much of the country when she was asked, at a 1994 United Nations conference on AIDS, about promoting masturbation to prevent young people from engaging in risky sexual activity. "I think that it is part of human sexuality," Elders replied, "and perhaps it should be taught." Amid ensuing outrage, she was forced to resign.

Today Elders, 77, is a retired professor emeritus of pediatric endocrinology at the University of Arkansas who continues to address sexual health on the lecture circuit. Feisty as ever, she spoke to The Root about the current battle over women's health, why she thinks she was right in the '90s, and why she's so tired of lawmakers "playing vaginal politics" that she could "just vomit."

The Root: When you were surgeon general in 1994, Republicans had just taken over the House of Representatives with a socially conservative agenda. Watching the current debate in the House over Title X funding, are you experiencing déjà vu?

Joycelyn Elders: It certainly does remind me of that time, and it's an indication of just how far we have not come. We're still in the same spot almost. But I think today women are more aware of what's at stake, and because of that we've got to stand up and fight back, especially African-American women.

TR: What do you think is at stake exactly?

Like The Root on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

JE: If you're rich and don't have to worry about it, then nothing. Except for the fact that you will have a lot more poor, uneducated women with children to support. What's at stake is that these women wouldn't have contraceptives, we would have less STD testing, less pelvic exams, fewer cervical-cancer screenings, less breast exams, less testing for diabetes. Planned Parenthood and Title X funding goes to women's health, not abortion. The mean income for most women who go to a Title X clinic is less than $10,830 a year. That's poor.

TR: As Congress moves on to debate over the 2012 budget, it's very likely that Planned Parenthood will be on the chopping block again. Is this a mostly symbolic debate to get the Republican base revved up, with no chance of passing?

JE: Any woman who has a congressperson who votes against women's reproductive rights is headed back to the Dark Ages, when they were owned by their husbands. The fact that we have these votes [in Congress] alone is a threat. We're still fighting. We've always had to fight. It wasn't until 1965 that we had the right to even use contraceptives, and even then you had to be married and get permission from your husband.

You bright young people -- and I love you -- but you don't know what it was like for us old folk, when you couldn't have birth control pills, when condoms were not as readily available and we didn't have all the other contraceptives that are now on the market. I think if the women of this country -- whether black, white, young, old, Democrat or Republican -- cause the reproductive rights of any of our citizens to be lost, then we should never forgive ourselves.

TR: Is this an issue that you think Democrats will go to the mat for and defend?

JE: If the Democrats do not go to the mat and defend women's reproductive health, I think that the loss will be greater than the loss of their jobs next election season. As old and tired as I am, even I would go out campaigning. I think they know that, too.

TR: What are your thoughts on the budget compromise that was reached last week, in which Planned Parenthood funding was spared, but Washington, D.C., lost the right to use local money to help women access abortions?

JE: I think that's a horrible compromise. It's another blow against poor women, young women or women who have very little control over their reproductive lives. For Congress to make that kind of recommendation makes no sense. We spend $9 billion a year taking care of children born to children, and then they talk about saving money. If they really wanted to save money, we would talk about comprehensive health education and make reproductive services, including abortion, available for women.

TR: Budget negotiations aside, do you think President Obama is doing enough to address the needs of women for reproductive services and health care?

JE: I think President Obama would like to do an awful lot more than he's done, but he's burdened down with three wars, a marked decline in our economic situation and the job losses. I think he's doing the best he can.

For example, [American political leaders had] been trying for 100 years to pass a health care bill of some sort. What President Obama signed was not complete, but I was very pleased that we at least got a bill that we can improve. And legislators are still out there trying to put riders on that so that the health exchanges in the states can't offer and pay for abortions. I'm so tired of them playing vaginal politics that I could just vomit.

TR: Do you think attitudes about sexuality and contraception have evolved since 1994?

JE: I think our attitude toward sexuality certainly is evolving, and that's because more people are better educated. We were operating under a theory at that time that ignorance is bliss. Now we know that by sitting around and saying our children aren't having sex, what we're doing is sacrificing them to unplanned pregnancies, HIV and [sexually transmitted infections].

A [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] study in 2008 said that 25 percent of all 14- to 19-year-old girls have an STI, and among black girls it's up to 49 percent. So we need to teach them how to protect themselves. Other countries can do it. Why can't we?

TR: Talking to teens about contraception is one thing. The last straw with you in 1994 was your remark about possibly teaching masturbation. I suspect that wouldn't go over much better today.

JE: I think you're right, but we're at least talking about it much more. Back then, everybody was acting like this was a word they'd never heard. Everybody does it, but nobody admits to it. If everybody in Congress who'd ever masturbated in their life would turn green, then we would have a green Congress. That's true for the whole country, and other countries, too.

TR: But given that you were the surgeon general in the midst of a culture war in Washington, did you ever think about toning down your ideas to avoid potential backlash?

JE: No. That never occurred to me in any way, shape or form. I felt that I was a surgeon general for the people of this country, and especially adolescents. I was doing what I thought had to be done at that time to improve education and access to services for adolescent youngsters, and I think we did some of that.

There was a lot of progress made. Not as much in the area of comprehensive health education as I would have liked, but I think we made progress in other areas. Over the past 20 years, teen pregnancy has dropped by almost 40 percent.

TR: What do you make of your firing then?

JE: I feel, even to this day, that President Clinton didn't have any real problems with anything I said or did. I feel that he was trying to get some other issues through, such as improving our economic situation and the environment. If he was having to spend all of his time defending Joycelyn Elders, well, then, it was better to let me go. He knew that I was not going to change -- I'd worked for him for six years [as director of the Arkansas Department of Health]. And I didn't really have any bad feelings in regard to what he did.

TR: Given that you're an older, Southern African-American woman, people might expect your attitudes toward sexuality and sexual health to be more conservative. What life experiences shaped your frank and open approach to discussing these matters?

JE: I grew up in a small, rural farming community, and nobody ever talked to me about sex or sexuality. My parents didn't sit me down at the kitchen table, but they demonstrated to me all the time the importance of honesty, integrity and treating everybody right. That was demonstrated to me every day in everything they did.

I realized as I got older how much I didn't know. But my thoughts about women's health come from the values that I grew up with. Reproductive rights are just an extension of every other kind of justice and right there is.

Cynthia Gordy is The Root's Washington reporter.

Like The Root on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

As of today, I've been blogging for 10 years. (I do believe that's the CPU enclosure anniversary.)

My first post (thank you, Blogger) was about the impending provincial election, an invasion of carpenter ants and how Sen. George Allen (R, VA) was such a n00b. (He has since had reason to revise his assessment of the Internet from "free way to read newspapers" to "destroyer of careers".)

I've tried to be a little more focused since then. But more and more of my attention has shifted to my business' blog and to the cartoon, and my personal blogging has ebbed accordingly. It hasn't stopped, but there are certainly some dry spells.

Others have more discipline. As appalling an industry as content farming is - something roughly like currency speculation in its overall level of social usefulness - I have to hand it to the people who work there. They crank out content day in and day out. Just not feeling it today? Couldn't give a rat's fuzzy behind about the topic? Doesn't matter - you still put fingers to keyboard and write, or you don't get paid.

Sponsor

That said, the results are usually... eugh. Occasionally, on a rare day when the stars align and the planets boink (that is the astrological term, right?), they might rise to the level of "meh". And to paraphrase Unmarketing author Scott Stratten, people don't fall in love with meh; they fall in love with awesome. Content farms just aren't in the awesome business.

Unfortunately, content farming isn't confined to the online world. A few days ago, I caught the movie Source Code (lots of fun, but don't pull too hard at that logical thread) after enduring what Cineplex Media calls their "pre-show": 21 minutes of breathless, vacuous, undifferentiated content, and by "content" I mean ads and advertorial.

This was the time I'd normally have spent in conversation with Alex and the friends we'd gone with. But conversation was impossible with the competition of a giant screen and a powerful sound system; we tried, but wound up spending much of the time mute and passive.

According to Cineplex, "Today's audiences want to be entertained the moment they take their seats. Cineplex Media fills that desire with dynamic Digital Pre-Shows that are integral to the overall moviegoing experience." That's a nice rationale, but it's hard not to feel like a content farmer would write that as, "Today's search-engine users want to see hastily-written fodder instead of substantive results. We fill that desire with keyword-laden copy that is integral to the overall frustration of trying to find something useful online."

Cineplex also provides that Overall Moviegoing Experience with an in-theatre magazine, but the big problem with a magazine is it's voluntary. Put all that content up on a big screen, on the other hand, and you have some pretty captive eyeballs. Yeah, you can try shutting it out or waiting in the lobby for the movie to begin... but that screen is like the first page of Google results: hard to ignore, and most people don't.

While I'm beginning to despair for the offline world, I'm beginning to have renewed hope for the online one. Google's moves to rejig their algorithm to discourage low-value content and allow users to block it from their search results hold some slender promise of a crop failure on the content farm.

Let's check in on that in another 10 years, shall we?

More Noise to Signal.

Discuss

One unlikely side-effect of the Japanese crisis has been a new critique of our use of honorifics

Shock, sympathy and a sense of national unity – these were the sentiments we felt in Japan after the triple tragedy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident. A month later, our attention has shifted to what caused the continuing Fukushima crisis. We are frustrated and angry.

Since this all began, Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, has become a fixture on televised press conferences as an articulate government representative. I shall not dwell on his efforts, now much criticised, to underplay the direness of the situation. What interests me is his constant use of honorifics.

Other languages make use of honorifics. In Japanese, they govern every aspect of the language: verbs, adverbs, adjectives, nouns and even pronouns. One tends to associate honorifics with social hierarchy, but they play another critical role: they mark who you regard as belonging to your own group and who you don't. And, as scholars have observed, this insider-outsider distinction is a fundamental aspect of Japanese society.

Suppose you are talking to your superior. You would naturally use honorifics. You would also use honorifics when talking about his mother. As for your superior, he would not use honorifics to you but he would use them when talking about your mother. He would do so, not because your mother is elderly, but because he regards her as an outsider to his own group, be it his company or his family.

This linguistic practice places Edano, who speaks on behalf of the government, in an awkward position. The Japanese language dictates that he uses honorifics even when he is referring to the Tepco executives, for they are outsiders. He cannot help it if, every time he talks about Tepco, it reminds us that our government did not swiftly take control of the accident and instead delegated the safety of our nation to an outsider with dubious safety records.

Yet, however irritating Edano's use of honorifics with Tepco may be, I'm willing to condone it, for it will not do to change how our language works even when faced with a nuclear disaster. What I find inexcusable is his extending the use of honorifics to other government agencies: "The honorable members of the self-defence army have most kindly agreed to send their tanks." The same with the nuclear and industrial safety agency. And the national police. The public cannot escape the thought that our government leaders regard these agencies as outsiders, and that they are hesitant to take command of them. The baffling delay of the army and the police to reach the site of the disaster comes to mind.

With or without irony, it has long been said that Japan doesn't need leaders because the bureaucrats take care of everything. Yet in time of national crisis, a true leadership is needed.

I have a proposition. If you are a civil servant, refrain from showering other civil servants with honorifics when speaking in public. After all, you are inside a group of civil servants; we the public, who pay taxes for your services, are outside that group. Stop addressing each other in deferential language and make way for the bold and wise to take true leadership.

The sole person in Japan who is not obliged to use honorifics, or rather, is prohibited from using them, is the emperor. On 16 March, he made history with the first televised speech to console and unite his people. The carefully scripted and sensitively delivered message, following imperial protocol, included not a single honorific. It sounded fresh, momentarily freeing us from the overuse of honorifics by our government officials. But, then, we don't want his highness back at his throne, do we?

From now on we're going to try and round up some of the mobile games news and upcoming games in the weekend. The mobile platforms have matured over the last couple of years, and it's easy for mobile games to get lost in the crowd -- even though some of you have indicated you don't want to be exposed to them.

However, sometimes there are interesting games that are worth highlighting but that we don't get around to during the week. That's what these weekend posts will be for. If people have sent us a code to try out their game and it looks good, we'll post short impressions. If there is only a video to go on but it still looks interesting, we'll highlight those.

We're going to play around with what works best and listen to what people want from these posts, so please leave your feedback in the comments! Keep in mind that we don't all have iOS or Android devices over here, so one week might be more platform-centric than the other, depending on what comes out and what we are able to play. Finally, this first weekend post is a bit on the long side because I had to go through hundreds of emails in our inbox to filter out the good and crazy ones.

Let's get this show on the road, shall we?

Weekend highlights:

Destructopus! (iOS, late April)



This is a promising side-scrolling "destruct-em-up" with an environmental 16-bit vibe. Destructopus -- a giant mutant octopus who is awoken by greedy oil-drilling industrialists -- is mad as hell about pollutiion, deforestation and cute animals becoming endangered. Using your tentacles and a laser eye (!!), you destroy buildings, people, tanks, soldiers and shoot down aircraft.

I was able to play a little bit of it, and it's good fun already. You have to get to the end of each level without dying while trying to destroy as much as possible within as short a time as possible. Basically it's a mix between a side-scrolling Rampage and a beat-up up, but with a giant octopus monster. Did I mention it has a laser eye?

Dodging shots and destroying enemies racks up a multiplier for the all-important highscores. As you rack up points, you can also purchase a ton of upgrades for things like dodging left and right, increased health and armor, eye-laser shots, and movement speed. There's an eco theme throughout the game, with some jokes about pollution and whatnot, but it's presented in a friendly manner without it becoming heavy-handed.

It's currently scheduled for the end of April for a price that developer GlitchSoft is still thinking about, but from what they've told me it should be cheap enough to pick up without putting too much thought into it. Also, it is called Destructopus! We'll have more about this one closer to its release date.

Burn It All (iOS, April 28th)

Can't see the video? Click here

The other day we posted a trailer about this upcoming puzzler from Pastagames, the devs that made Pix'n Love Rush, but it was a bit hard to understand the mechanics just from that video. I got some time to play it in the last couple of days, and there's a lot more to it than the trailer shows. Using flames, you have to burn all burnable material in a level before the time runs out. This can either be different ropes that burn at different speeds, or wooden figures.

The puzzle element comes into play by having to factor in how long a rope is and how fast it will burn. Sometimes you have to burn through some ropes before you can reach other ropes, so you have to experiment and think about the fastest solution. The three different flames behave in a different way: the red flame can only burn ropes from their ends, the blue flame just burns anything that it touches, and the green flame can burn through multiple things in a row.

After burning material(s), your flame has to recharge before it can burn again, which turns it into a very time-sensitive planning kind of puzzler. It's actually a lot of fun and I found the puzzle designs to be particularly creative. It's also hard as hell to get the maximum score of three gems in even the first batch of levels, so if you're into puzzle games and Angry Birds type of completionism, you should keep your eye on this one.

Hunters: Episode 1 (iPhone, $5.99; iPad, $7.99)

Can't see the video? Click here

Hunters might sound a bit pricey, especially with that "Episode 1" bit in the title. But that's until you find out that it's a mix of X-Com, Jagged Alliance and Space Hulk. Developer Rodeo Games includes former employees from Lionhead, Criterion, EA and Codemasters, and it kind of shows. The game has a ton of depth and complexity, and beside the X-Com/Jagged Alliance type of turn-based gameplay and upgrading, the game gives you new missions every day.

It's a very deep game so don't expect to understand everything straight away, or to play it on the go, until you master the basics. The missions also don't seem to have much structure in ways of a story arc or anything like that, although I've heard that's in the works. If you've been craving some classic turn-based squad strategy, this is the one you want. There is a free version you can try out, and the game unlocks through an in-App purchase, so go try it!

One Single Life (iOS, free)

Can't see the video? Click here

One Single Life is a free game with a nice art style where death is permanent. You touch once to start running across the roof of a skyscraper, and touch again to jump and land on the roof of another one. The idea is that you're supposed to feel more tension because of the permadeath thing, which you kind of do. Until you fall to your death, go "oh ok," and carry on with your life.

You could probably write interesting things about it if you wanted to, like how it's a metaphor for how corporate youth seek death-defying risky behavior to cope with the lack of depth in their life. Or you could just say it's worth a shot because it's free and you're not really going to play it more than once. Although if you want to, you can just remove the app and put it back on your device to retry it, defeating its purpose entirely.


Knights vs. Aliens (iOS, $2.99) / Knights vs. Bears (iOS, free right now)

Can't see the video? Click here

Knights vs. Things are strategy games where you clear maps by strategically taking over towers that spawn soldiers. Bigger towers take more units to take over, but spawn units faster once you do. And the more units you generate, the faster you can swipe across the map to win. It's pretty simple and fun, and the controls let you easily move multiple forces from tower to tower to clear a level of bears or aliens that try to take over towers themselves.

With different nations that each have their own powers, there is a ton of content here in terms of levels, but it can get a little repetitive if you play too much of it in one sitting. Having said that, I spent more than half an hour with it on the first run and missed most of what I was watching on TV, so it's pretty addictive. Try Knights vs. Bears first because it's free, and grab Knights vs. Aliens if you want more. Although it seems like they are mostly the same game.


Mos Speedrun (iOS, $1.99)

Can't see the video? Click here

This is a cute platformer with some awesome music. You tap and hold the left or right sides of the screen to run in that direction, and touch with two fingers to jump. Every level is a speedrun to collect coins and as many hidden items as possible within the shortest amount of time. It's a good mobile platformer and unlocking everything in the game's 20 levels will last you quite a long time.

The controls can take a little bit to get used to though, and sometimes it's hard to jump exactly how you want to, or you end up landing straight into enemies that kill you with one hit. But if you stick with it, it becomes a challenging cool platformer that can eat up a lot of your time. And is that a beedog!!??

WTF?

Upskirt (iOS)

Can't see the video? Click here

It's exactly what you think it is. It wasn't approved by Apple for some mysterious reason, but you can grab it through the Xsellize repository on Cydia here. Didn't try it out, and don't have any intention to. Seriously guys.

Girl Fart (Android!)

Can't see the video? Click here

Blastcow from Reallycoolguys tweeted me this the other day. You're a girl and you have to use traffic noise to mask your farts, lest some dude in a suit freaks out. If you don't fart enough you explode. Yep.


Weekly news highlights:

Games are the number 1 use for tablets, the guys behind Star Command had some things to say, D.A.R.K. could be interesting for Dead Space fans, High Flyer Death Defyer looks awesome, Streets of Rage 2 is now on iOS, and Dream::scape looks Unreal.


Notable updates:

Death Rally (iOS, $2.99)

We reviewed this the other week, but the game has since dropped to in price and has gotten an update with a new car, two new weapons and a nitro challenge for the speed freaks. It looks like it will get more updates over time, so if you were holding out before because of the price, this is pretty much a no-brainer now.

Good cause:

End Malaria (iOS, $0.99)

One of our readers sent this in, as one of his family members works for the Malaria Consortium. It's a $0.99 kind of educational game with a mix of mosquito-swatting gameplay and information about malaria and how you can help combat the disease. The proceeds go to a good cause, and once malaria is gone, you don't need to get those injections anymore if you travel to one of those countries. Think about it!

Tweet Land (iOS, Web)

Can't see the video? Click here

Last but not least, Dtoider AwesomeExMachina pointed us to Tweet Land, an upcoming iPhone and web browser project. The concept is to create games where random real-life tweets influence your gameplay. The first of the games is a pixel art racing game called Route 140 where certain words said on Twitter (like meteor or shotgun) will affect the game itself. It looks very interesting to say the least, and there's a Kickstarter page to donate to if you're interested!

That's it for this week. Let us know what you think and what you want to see more (or less) of in the future! Silly mobiles? More impressions? Different types of games? Top 10 mobile game sales?