Quotes, URL's, Links And References-by:older Femmes, Butches, Ftms, Mtfs, Queer, Etc.

[sweetlady]

:o :o :o


August 27, 2006 NYTimes

The Remix; Petro Dollies

By SAMEER REDDY

Who cares about a few Hiltons when your daddy owns the Ritz? Even New York's slickest socialites -- Tinsley who? -- have nothing on the oil heiresses of the Middle East. These Pan-Arab ''It'' girls don't borrow private jets to shuttle from Riyadh to the Riviera; they own them. That, and jewels, homes and haute couture on a monumental scale. But life isn't always a picnic in the dunes for these party animals. They're dogged by a press corps eager to play up their sensational provenance. And they can be the subject of merciless ridicule when their Anglo peers are not supping on their caviar. SAMEER REDDY

Wafah Dufour

(née bin Ladin), 30

Ancestry Saudi/Swiss/Iranian.

Net worth Unclear; mother's divorce pending.

American analogue Lauren Bush.

Born into the bin Ladin construction clan, whose estimated net worth is around $5 billion, this aspiring singer was an anonymous New Yorker until 9/11. After the attacks ordered by her half uncle Osama (who spells ''bin Laden'' with an ''e''), her last name made her an easy target for the press. While others might have dodged the spotlight, she invited the media in. From her Barbara Walters interview, in which she explained her decision to adopt her mother's maiden name, to a sexy spread in GQ, Wafah has made it clear that she's ready for her close-up; a Judith Regan-produced reality show is in the works. Sing, Wafah, sing.

Princess Deena Abdulaziz, 31

Ancestry Saudi.

Net worth Unknown.

American analogue Edie Sedgwick meets Audrey Hepburn.

Princess Deena Abdulaziz' story is straight out of ''The Arabian Nights.'' In 1996, this Saudi stunner was courted by Prince Sultan bin Fahad bin Nasser bin Abdulaziz after a chance meeting in London. They now live in Riyadh, where Deena is determined to build a fashion empire. Beneath the abaya she wears in public, she dazzles in Prada, Marni and Proenza Schouler. An inspiration to the likes of Behnaz Sarafpour and Christian Louboutin, she is set to open DNA, a members-only store in Riyadh, with fashion-forward labels like Martin Margiela and Veronique Branquinho, part of her plan to redefine the fashion world's idea of Saudi women.

Petrina Khashoggi, 26

Ancestry British.

Net worth Mum netted a reported $874 million in her divorce.

American analogue Barbara Hutton.

Poor little Petrina.

This beautiful Londonite grew up believing the billionaire arms broker Adnan Khashoggi was her father. But when, as a teenager, she befriended the twins Alexandra and Victoria Aitken, they noticed that all three looked eerily alike. Petrina's mother confessed: Me bad. Her real dad was Jonathan Aitken, the former Tory minister and convicted perjurer. In 2004 Petrina made her own confession, telling the press that she was a love addict. Suitors lined up, including her latest, Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill.

Jasmine, 25, and

Camilla Al Fayed, 21

Ancestry Egyptian/Finnish.

Net worth Father's fortune estimated

at $785 million.

American analogue The Hilton sisters.

In the past year, the London-based daughters of the Egyptian mogul Mohamed Al Fayed have set off a fashion-media stampede. The swanlike Camilla (right) is an unabashed glamour girl who makes the party rounds in New York, London and Paris. Her recent escapades, including a fling with the oil heir Brandon Davis, earned her a profile in Vogue. Jasmine, meanwhile, keeps a lower profile, focusing on her career as the designer of Jasmine di Milo (she's got a boutique in Harrods, her daddy's ''boutique'') as well as on her newborn. Jasmine's first show, held at the Ritz (Daddy owns that, too), was so packed during the last Paris collections that top-level editors were left begging in the lobby.

Mouna Ayoub, 49

Ancestry Lebanese.

Net worth About $500 million.

American analogue Elizabeth Taylor.

The long-reigning queen of Eastern excess, Mouna got her shekels divorcing the Saudi billionaire Nasser al-Rashid. Since then, Mouna has endowed her ''more is more'' style with a $30 million yacht, museum-quality jewels and a collection of haute couture that is housed in a French chateau purchased exclusively for that purpose. Her memoir, ''La vérité,'' a best-seller in France, revealed the daily frustrations of being a traditional Saudi wife. Ever outspoken, Mouna has always told her side of the story.


(*) (*) Now *there* are some amazing ladies, eh? Not my cup of tea at all - but definitely for some.

(k) 's,

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:) :)


www.wigs.com

Definitely fun! For bad hair days or traveling incognito....;-) Ash blonde definitely matches most closely but becoming a red head for an evening would be fun as well.

My favorite! (but in ash blonde)

http://www.wigshop.com/product.asp?nid=2&did=75&pid=172&mscssid=&adsrc=&pg=1&sort=1


Next best favorite:

http://www.wigshop.com/product.asp?nid=2&did=83&pid=164&mscssid=&adsrc=&pg=1&sort=1


http://www.wigshop.com/product.asp?nid=2&did=86&pid=355&mscssid=&adsrc=&pg=1&sort=1&color=84&attrid=84&dc=1


Kind of the 1980s pooffy:

http://www.wigshop.com/product.asp?nid=2&did=86&pid=55&mscssid=&adsrc=&pg=2&sort=1&color=84&attrid=84&dc=1



"Updated shag"...I love this!

http://www.wigshop.com/product.asp?nid=2&did=86&pid=173&mscssid=&adsrc=&pg=5&sort=1&color=84&attrid=84&dc=1


(y) (y) (y) (h) (h) (h) (h) (i) (i) (i) Why not? Especially for a special evening or as I mentioned before, a bad hair day. Or to sneek past a stalker.....:D :D :D

My hair is so long right now it touches my bra strap in the back like it did in high school. Definitely in healthy shape too - even more healthy than when I used sh*t products like "Sun In" and other things with peroxide that dried my hair - back in the 1970s..... And oh - those huge rollers and empty orage juice cans - didn't sleep well in those!

;) ;) 's,

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(h) (h) (h)


Salad Days

By Monica Bhide, September & October 2006 AARP Magazine

Gardens are overflowing with fresh fruits and vegetables at this time of year. Learn what to do with them all

You've been tending your vegetable crop all summer—watering, weeding, lovingly caring for your tomatoes, peppers, peas, eggplants, and squashes—and now, finally, the fruits of your labor have come in. Or maybe ye of the ungreen thumb crowd have instead been wandering the farmers' markets, salivating over all the greens (and reds and yellows). But how to put them all together? The answer: healthy, hearty salads.

Salads are the ultimate comfort food as summer gives way to fall. There's always plenty of fresh produce to choose from—whether from your own garden or the farmers' market. And there's no need to spend hours in the kitchen, as long as your produce is fresh and ripe. "The better tasting an ingredient is, the less time you have to spend trying to make it taste good," says Annie Wayte, author of Keep It Seasonal: Soups, Salads, and Sandwiches (William Morrow, 2006). "The ingredients speak for themselves."

Here, then, are a few tips for making the perfect salad, with a couple of recipes to get you started:

Venture beyond iceberg

Local farmers' markets often offer multiple kinds of greens, such as endives, escaroles, arugulas, maches, and sorrels. Try mixing a few of these with some fresh tomatoes from your garden and a little olive oil for a simple but scrumptious salad.

Think pairings:

Some foods naturally taste great when served together: tomatoes and cheese, corn and bell peppers, potatoes and herbs. A simple salad might include just those pairings, or you can use them as a base upon which to experiment with new flavors.

Be adventurous:

"One of the beauties of summer produce is the variety—not just the different types of produce but the variety of one particular fruit or vegetable," Wayte says. For example, summer squashes come in a range of colors and flavors. For that matter, so do eggplants. "There are so many varieties with differing amounts of sweet and bitter flavors. Bake them in the oven, then scrape out the flesh and purée with yogurt, lemon, garlic, cilantro, and chile for a great hors d'oeuvre."

Keep dressings balanced:

There's a saying that it takes four people to dress a salad: a wise one to add the salt, a mad one for the pepper, a miser for the vinegar, and a spendthrift for the oil. Dressings shouldn't overpower the salad; fresh produce needs no strong embellishment anyway.

Go herbal:

Fresh herbs can jazz up a dish with literally no effort. Experiment with various herb combinations to see what works best. And don't forget edible flowers. "I love to make an edible-flower salad with beautiful greens and herbs," Wayte says.


http://www.aarpmagazine.org/food/salad_days.html


(*) (*) Yummy. For the eyes, soul and tummy.


Sweetlady & wyatt the Boxer Pup (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(y) (y) (y) (y) (y)

Small Wonder

By Margaret Guroff, September & October 2006

For years she fought for respect. Now, as an empty nester, actress Sally Field is facing new challenges—and itching for new fights.

Sally Field sits cross-legged in an armchair in her airy, bougainvillea-draped Malibu ranch house. The actress's straight hair—dark, scattered with individual strands of gray—is clutched in a tortoiseshell clamp; her toenails are painted pink. At nearly 60, her forehead is laddered with expression lines, and yet she is such a cherub, and so tiny, that you kind of want to put her in your pocket for safekeeping.

That sense of fragility, friends say, is an illusion.

"You tend to feel like you need to protect her," says actress Jane Fonda, a dear friend. "Then you realize she is very strong and extremely smart and capable. You end up saying, 'She's the one who needs to help me.' "

And Field is doing a lot of helping these days, as an impassioned spokesperson on osteoporosis (a disease from which she suffers), a mentor to young filmmakers at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, a daughter, a mother, a grandmother, and a friend. "I'm becoming typical of women in my generation," laughs Field, a California native with an inherited Texas twang. "My last son is leaving to go to college; my grandchildren are being born. My mother is living with me."

Field's passion as a mentor is typical of how she approaches the projects and people in her life, says longtime friend Pat Mitchell, now president of the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City and a fellow Sundance board member. "She has this ability to absolutely focus on the person in front of her," Mitchell says. "They call her in the middle of the night; they call her crying. She is just in there grappling with them."

Such intensity can be intimidating. "She's like half my size, and she totally scared the sh-t out of me," says Michael Kang, a young director who studied with Field at Sundance in Utah. While filming, Kang wasn't getting the performance he needed out of a child actor, and Field wouldn't have it. "She grabbed me by the throat and said, 'Whatever you have to do to get a good performance out of the kid, do it. It doesn't matter if he ever wants to act again.' " (The results are visible in Kang's new film, The Motel, currently accumulating awards on the festival circuit.)

Field is famously driven. This quality explains her well-known passage from Gidget to Norma Rae: she's the teen surfer-chick sitcom star who studied Method acting by night and ended up with two Best Actress Oscars (that's one more than Meryl Streep has). But it also explains lesser-known aspects of Field's career, such as why, with nothing to prove, she still leaps at the toughest roles, recently winning raves onstage in The Glass Menagerie and onscreen in a recurring role as Dr. Abby Lockhart's bipolar mother on ER. (Her latest TV role is the mother on ABC’s drama Brothers & Sisters, which premieres in September.) Easy roles are embarrassing, Field says: "If it's too easy, you have time as a human being to stop and think, 'This is really stupid that I'm standing here pretending to be somebody else. Gosh, I feel like an idiot.' "

Though "the consummate professional" on the set, Field can be willful, says actress Joanna Kerns, a friend who directed Field in a recent episode of ER. "Talking her into something she doesn't want is a near impossibility." Frequently described as "fierce," Field has a temper—she once punished an unreliable dishwasher by "beating the crap out of it" with a hammer, she has said. And she admits to being spiteful: "If someone treats me with disrespect, I never forget it. If they try to call me, I pick up the phone and tell them 'Not in your wildest dreams.' "

To hear Field tell it, her forceful side emerged as a reaction to her stepfather. Her parents divorced when she was only four, and she rarely saw her father after that. Her mother, Maggie, married Jock Mahoney, a stuntman and TV cowboy who demanded worshipful obedience from Field, her older brother, and their younger half sister. "I would stand on the coffee table and scream at him," Field once told Playboy. "I was so frightened of him that the only way to get to myself at all was to be louder than he was, bigger than he was." But Field later admitted that learning to stand up for herself probably changed her life: "If I hadn't fought back, I might have been Gidget forever."

Field grew up in the San Fernando Valley and was cast as the lead in TV's Gidget after being discovered in an acting class. Next came The Flying Nun, a trifle. "You knew the minute you worked with her that there was this incredible talent bursting to come out," recalls actress Shelley Morrison, who played a fellow nun on the show but who is best known as Rosario, the maid on Will & Grace. Madeleine Sherwood, who played the mother superior, saw Field's promise and brought her to the Actors Studio, where Field studied at night with the acting coach Lee Strasberg, who became a sort of surrogate father for her.

Her breakout performance, as a woman with multiple personalities, came in the 1976 TV movie Sybil. She topped that by winning her first Oscar in 1980, for her portrayal of a union activist in Norma Rae. Field's second Oscar, and her life's most ridiculed (and misquoted) moment, came in 1985, when she reveled in her peers' approval of her performance in Places in the Heart. "You like me!" she sobbed. "Right now, you like me!" Next came producing—her first effort was Murphy's Romance, in which she starred with James Garner—and leads in high-grossing films such as Forrest Gump and Mrs. Doubtfire. Field also has directed one feature film, 2000's Beautiful, and a few TV dramas.

If Field's career has been about exceeding expectations, her love life (so far) may have been about not having any expectations. "I've never had my heart broken," she said recently. "I think that's very sad, that I haven't allowed my heart to be broken. I have broken a few." Field married her high-school sweetheart, Steven Craig, in 1968 and had two sons with him: Peter, a novelist and the father of Field's two granddaughters, and Eli, an actor and the father of Field's new grandson. Field and Craig were divorced in 1975.

Two years later, on the set of the car-chase romp Smokey and the Bandit, Field met Burt Reynolds, and the unlikely duo began a five-year romance. It ended when she got angry about her role in the relationship, as the perpetually sweet southern belle who "made brownies and rubbed his feet and never asked for any space," she once said. "It wasn't fair of me, because I had never professed to need anything."

In 1984, Field married the film producer Alan Greisman, with whom she has one son, Sam, a freshman at New York University. Field and Greisman were divorced in 1994, and she has not had a public companion since. "I'm not really good at that," she says. "I've allowed myself to be so busy with my grandchildren, my sons, and my family, and work, that I really don't know where I would fit anyone in."

Along with devoting time to work and family, Field has brought attention to political causes, from the antinuclear movement to V-Day, an annual February observance to protest violence against women. Says playwright Eve Ensler, the creator of V-Day and the author of The Vagina Monologues: "What's so moving about Sally is how committed she is to bringing people together. Women who are that powerful, that talented, that fierce—I think the world isn't fully ready for them yet."

Field's latest crusade is more personal. Last year she was diagnosed with osteoporosis, a dangerous bone-thinning disease that is common among postmenopausal women. Shortly after she began taking a drug to prevent bone fractures, she was approached about joining a campaign to raise awareness of this silent condition. As the face of the campaign, Field does ads for her drug, speechifies on the importance of bone scans and prevention, and keeps a monthly journal at www.bonehealth.com.

"People think, 'Oh, osteoporosis, that's when you get old and bend over, and everybody kind of has it.' Like it really isn't a big deal," she says. "But it's a very big deal. If you're not getting bone-density tests, you don't realize that your bones are like chalk. And they just crumble at the most insignificant stress."

Calling baby boomers to action on osteoporosis has allowed Field to reclaim membership in a generation that, in some ways, she missed out on. "I was in The Flying Nun and everybody was out eating granola"—she pronounces it "grain-ola"—"and protesting, and I was kind of stuck," she says. "I did miss a part of my young adulthood." So it is fitting, if also surprising, that she has lately grown so close to Fonda, a baby boomer icon of a completely different kind.

"She was flying as a nun while I was flying as Barbarella," jokes Fonda. "I didn't know her intimately, but I identified with her. What I sensed was a woman who was wounded, had scars, and instead of those scars making her disabled, they were making her stronger."

Lately the two and their group of friends have sought to understand a feeling of "becoming whole" that came unexpectedly with age, says Fonda. "You feel like you are starting to live wholly inside yourself, and it feels fabulous and new and strange," she says. "You need to talk about what it feels like, talk about what it means, talk about why it's happening, talk about what you need to do to keep it happening." One thing this has meant for Field and Fonda is a pact they made in 2005 to age naturally from then on, without plastic surgery.

This fall, as Field gets used to a child-free house for the first time in 36 years, she seems steeled for new challenges, though she doesn't know what they'll be. "Change is never easy," she says. "You lose your habitual behavior, which allowed you to sort of zone out. You have to be here, you have to be now, you have to be present." Her friends wonder whether life in an empty nest will make Field lonesome for a partner. "That's a real question mark," she says. A notorious hermit, Field says she can't imagine how or where she would meet someone new. "But maybe that will be one of the transitions that occurs now," she says.

"When you're old, you are more certain of who you are, and that may be a good thing or a bad thing," she adds. "Because you've lived your life, you're independent, you're not looking for anyone to 'complete you,' as the saying is. There isn't anybody who would complete me. I am so way completed."

http://www.aarpmagazine.org/entertainment/small_wonder.html


(h) (h) (h) (h) (h)

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(h) (h) (h)


Tour de Frantic

By Nancy Griffin, November & December 2006

Robin Williams’s kidlike curiosity has led him on a very grownup quest for life’s meaning.

Robin Williams plunks himself down for our "interview"—the term is used loosely—wearing striped pants, sneakers, and a T-shirt proclaiming himself a "human-animal hybrid." At first he's affable and soft-spoken, almost like a normal person, thoughtfully answering questions about new projects. Then, without warning, his brain shifts into free-association mode and he transforms into one screwball character after another—capping his performance with a special treat for AARP The Magazine readers: an ancient dude who burps loudly, making the sound "Aaaarp!"

"He bounces around a room like light off a mirror" is how Williams's close friend Billy Crystal describes his pal's trademark lunacy. "After all these years it's not gotten tired, and it's pretty wild to be around."

With a 30-year movie career that has included starring roles in Good Morning, Vietnam; Dead Poets Society; and Good Will Hunting (his Oscar-winning triumph), Williams is hotter than ever. He's showcased his exceptional range this year in the family comedy RV, the dark thriller The Night Listener, the political satire Man of the Year, the animated Happy Feet, and the kid-oriented Night at the Museum.

"It's wonderful," says Williams of life at 55. He's achieved an enviable balance of work, family, and giving back as a public figure, while still carving out time for voracious reading and other personal interests. A dedicated father of three, Williams and his wife (and occasional producer), Marsha, live in San Francisco, where he indulges his passion for cycling. The chaos of his younger years—which included hard partying, cocaine abuse, and tabloid headlines about him falling in love with his child's nanny after his first marriage crumbled—is behind him: he's been married to that former nanny for 17 years now. They have two teenage children, Zelda and Cody, along with his son Zak, 23, from his first marriage.

During this interview Williams betrays no hint that in two weeks he will check himself into an Oregon rehab facility to treat a relapse of his alcoholism after 20 years of sobriety. There had been no foreshadowing tales of unprofessional behavior emanating from his movie sets, no drunk-driving arrests. But he had quietly slipped back into drinking after making back-to-back movies and decided on his own to enter a sobriety program. "He realized, 'I'm drinking again and I'm not supposed to be,' " says a close acquaintance. " 'And I have to deal with it.' Marsha and the kids fully support him in this."

Beloved figure that he is, Williams has countless fans rooting for his recovery. He is a unique force in American culture, transcending divisions by making fun of everyone without seeming to offend anyone. His standup shows are blistering commentaries on the touchiest areas of contemporary life, from politics to race, from sex to religion. He's an antiwar lefty (on Bush: "We have a president for whom English is a second language"), but he doesn't flinch from skewering himself ("Cocaine is God's way of telling you you're making too much money").

"Robin can be provocative and edgy and inflammatory in his comedy," says Shawn Levy, the director of Night at the Museum, "but he's a fundamentally huge-hearted person. Even at his most manic and out there, there is a core sweetness. That's why he has family appeal."

Williams will chatter nonstop to amuse you, but he says little about his charity work. He's made three trips to Afghanistan and two to Iraq to entertain the troops, regularly visits sick children through the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and founded Comic Relief—which has raised $50 million for the homeless—20 years ago with Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg. Williams is also on the board of the Christopher Reeve Foundation (CRF), which is devoted to spinal-cord-injury research. He and Reeve were roommates at Juilliard, where they became lifelong friends. Now Williams and his wife are in constant touch with the Reeves' 15-year-old son, Will.

"I remember a few years ago when Chris was speaking at a fundraiser," recalls CRF president Kathy Lewis, "and Chris went into a spasm, which happens, and he couldn't control it. It was embarrassing. Robin was in the audience, and suddenly he leaped onto the stage, grabbed hold of Chris's arms, and said, 'Look! It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Superman! He's trying to fly!'

"Robin was able to make Chris comfortable, and the spasm passed. And that's the kind of friend Robin is."

Q: What does getting older feel like to you?
A: When I turned 50 and I got an AARP card in the mail, I went, "Hell! That's what I get? Thank you!"

Actually, it's been great. Hitting 50 was not a wall; it was like [eyes roll back blissfully]… Because I had my midlife crisis when I was about 30, so I got that over with. But when I hit 50, it was like "This is cool."

Q: How so?
A: It feels like the prime of your life, literally. Things are going great; you've come to the point where it's no longer a struggle. As Rodney Dangerfield said, "Why am I sweating? I own the club!" You're there, so you don't have to worry as much. And yet, the object is to keep working. Find interesting parts, and obviously it's skewed more for men than women to find character parts at my age. And, hey, supporting parts are just as interesting as the lead.

Q: Is that actually you singing "My Way" [as the voice of an animated penguin] in Happy Feet?
A: That's me. Yeah, we recorded "My Way" by the Gipsy Kings. I sang, and the other penguins came in behind me. It's pretty great, and the landscapes are amazing. The sad thing is, the landscapes are probably history now, given the fact that Antarctica is mostly melting.

Q: What is the movie about?
A: It's like March of the Penguins meets Riverdance. There's one young penguin named Mumble [voiced by Elijah Wood]. He can't sing, but he can tap-dance. He goes on a quest because all the fish are missing. Turns out they are being overfished by industrial fishing boats. Me and a bunch of Argentine Adélie penguins—we're smaller than emperors; we're like Chicano comics—help him on his quest.

There's a lot of music, a lot of big dance numbers. We'll sing at the drop of a feather. Because we are Latino penguins, we talk [smooth Antonio Banderas voice:] "like thees, because, as you see from Argentinean soccer, we are fierce, but very emotional. Although we are the leetle ones, we have the passion. I know the females—they know me."

Another character I play, the Reverend Lovelace, is kind of a Barry White penguin—with a six-pack ring around his neck that he treats as a talisman. [Deep, seductive voice:] "It allows me to have magic healing powers, especially with the females."

But it was fun. Good times.

Q: You segued from playing a penguin to playing Teddy Roosevelt in Night at the Museum.
A: Yes, he's a wax figure that comes to life. The great news is, I got to read about Roosevelt, and he was an extraordinarily gifted and courageous man. He was put into office by major industrialists who make Enron's leaders look like children, and they thought that as vice president he couldn't do any harm. Then President McKinley was assassinated, and as president, Roosevelt really broke apart the monopolies.

Q: Do you think that today a leader could buck the big corporations and prevail?
A: Yes, if you have a courageous individual, with luck and will. Today, people like that are targeted early on because they don't play the game. The Hill takes its toll. They come out of there worn down.

Q: I found a quote of yours: "Comedy is acting out optimism." Are you optimistic about our country?
A: Yes. There are still a lot of good people out there doing good things. And there exists the potential to turn things around, as people gain information and step outside the spin. It's a question of getting a system that will find someone and get him out in front of people and not worry about "Well, he's not that attractive" or "He doesn't have the cute factor down." But he's actually a very brave, intelligent man who will inspire us to do things that may not seem comfortable but may be necessary.

Q: Where do you think such a person might come from?
A: From someplace where you least expect it. I don't think anyone expected Teddy Roosevelt to do what he did. There may be a moderate Republican—maybe McCain will come back and regain the frontal lobe they took away from him when they ruined him, then said, "Come back to the party—we're just kidding." Because McCain was standing up against the military-industrial complex. He was the one that said, "You cannot allow torture. I have been the victim of torture, and we cannot condone it and still maintain our humanity."

Bush said, "You're either for us or against us." No, actually, we are all trying to make it through the same thing together. We're "us"—it's U.S.—red states and blue states.

Q: You play a "fake news" show host who runs for president in Barry Levinson's comedy Man of the Year.
A: It's not skewed to one party or the other; it's just basically saying that the system as it stands doesn't work. If you disagree, you are called unpatriotic. At one point my character makes a joke that if we didn't disagree, we'd still be English. Our country was founded by a bunch of very angry people throwing tea in the harbor, going [Cockney accent:] "F--- you and your tax! Here's your tea!" It was built on protest. Man of the Year is basically about a comic who runs for office because he's fed up with the system. Initially he talks very seriously about the issues, and no one listens. It's like the old Bob Crane joke: "How do you know when a politician is lying?" "When his mouth is moving." Eventually my character starts to go "Screw it; I'll use my tools. I'll start to be funny."

The movie is a satire, working off the idea that there's a computer glitch that elects him. [Conspiratorial whisper:] "Could it happen? A computer malfunction? No—not in Ohio!"

Q: Have you always felt that your brain works differently from other people's?
A: No, I thought my brain worked like everyone else's and sometimes was lazier. And then at a certain point I went "I've got to catch up!" [Neurologist and Awakenings author] Oliver Sacks thinks I have voluntary Tourette's, that it's just an excess of a neuro-stimulant and that I can turn it on. When it's working well it feels like an athlete when he is in the zone. All of a sudden it's like everything else slows down and you're just going…"Yeeaah."

Q: So you're observing it as it's happening?
A: Yeah, it's like a millisecond ahead or even a millionth of a second. It's just that oop! Because you are traveling at the speed of thought; you're just flying. But yet you still can connect it, when you are at the top of your game.

Q: Do you feel at the top of your game as much now as when you were younger?
A: Yeah, obviously as you get older there are times when you go [panicked voice:] "Oh, no—not now!" When it will slip.

Q: Like you can't remember someone's name?
A: Bigtime, once in a while: "I need more ginkgo biloba!" It's amazing that medical science can develop a drug to give you an erection but can't develop a drug to give you mental clarity.

Q: Do you do yoga?
A: No, I have friends who do it and love it. I ride my bike. For me, that's mobile meditation.

Q: You ride with your friend Lance Armstrong?
A: Oh, my God! He starts off going 25 miles an hour, he's on the phone, and I'm, like [panting and pedaling furiously:] "-kich-a, kich-a, kich-a—" [As Armstrong:] "Yo, homie—what's up?" He's flying. It's crazy.

Q: In San Francisco do you ride in the city?
A: The city is fairly bike-friendly. But the main thing for me is to go over the Golden Gate Bridge and head out to Marin. There's places you can go, in just 20 minutes you're, like, in incredible hills, with views for days—it's wonderful stuff.

Q: What are the kids and Marsha up to?
A: Cody is in Senegal right now, in a village with ten of his classmates, working and studying and helping the village. They are digging a well or something. It's a school project. Zelda is in London visiting friends. Zak is at home in San Francisco with his dog, Louis. Marsha just had her 50th birthday party.

Q: Did you throw it for her?
A: No, she had 39 women at a spa for a week—no men. They had a great time. By the end I think they were all, like [makes loony whistle]. You can spa out. Most spas, I last about three days, and then it's "Thanks, it's been great, time to keep going." So Marsha just hit 50, and she gets her AARP card!

Q: As a boomer, do you think our generation will redefine aging?
A: I don't think work defines us as much as it did our parents. For my father, work was everything. He had amazing hobbies, but even after he retired from the Ford Motor Company he worked again for a bank because that was still his modus operandi; that was the thing that kept him going. My mother was different, because she always had charities and tennis and other stuff. The boomers—I mean, work is incredible, but there's always been another level of something, other aspects of our lives. You can see in these new retirement communities, they are much more oriented toward outdoor activity—tennis, golf, basketball, gyms, and pools—all these different things.

Q: It will be interesting to see if boomers gravitate toward communal living arrangements.
A: They are already doing it on the right—there's that one community of heavily armed people somewhere in Arizona. [Laughs.] It's based around owning guns, and it has a shooting range. It's a "we're armed and proud of it" gated community. Smith & Wesson Village.

The other thing is that in the next five to ten years, if biological research continues, there will be an extension of life or at least an improvement in the quality of life.

Q: Although the full benefits of longevity technology might come too late for the boomers.
A: It could be. I imagine you are right. Because even with Chris [Reeve], he was hoping they would cure paralysis. [Pauses to think.] That's wonderful, just as we are fading, there will be amazing breakthroughs!

[Old guy, burps loudly:] "Aaaarp!"

[Doctor:] "What were his last words?"

[Old guy, rasps:] "Total cellular regeneration—when is it available?"

[Doctor:] "In an hour."

[Old guy:] "Oh, f---." [Expires.]

[Normal voice:] Yeah, I think that's why all these bioengineering companies, especially in San Francisco, are huge. That's our generation going "How shall we sustain?!"

Q: Exactly. "Us...die?"
A: Yeah, it's like those science-fiction novels where there's a wealthy guy saying [pompous rich guy:] "I will sustain myself—I will live on! Even if it's as a brain in a box."

[Secretary:] "Hello, Tim."

[Tim:] "Good morning, Susan. Would you open the box? I'm still here!"

[Secretary:] "I know you are, Tim."

[Tim:] "I'm 194!"

[Secretary:] "And you don't look a day over 200!"

[Normal voice:] Yeah, and it used to be when people retired, they went to warmer places. [Brooklyn accent:] "It's Miami for me! I want to be in a nice place, a warm place."

But as the climate changes, where are people going to go—where you won't get soaked, you won't get blown away, you won't get burned?

Q: After the attacks of 9/11 it seemed that just about everyone in Hollywood talked about buying ranches in New Zealand or Australia.
A: New Zealand is great, except it's still 1980 there. [Down under accent:] "If you want to go back and live the simple life, you can do it—just don't be looking for massive stimuli. And Australia is a long haul, if you're thinking it's a place you'll flee to. There's no ozone. F---ing great place to cook! Get a tan in an hour or so if you're a doer!"

Q: What are you looking forward to?
A: Still just working.

Q: Any significant "yets" in your life?
A: Yeah, travel. But first learn the languages, so you're not just like [loud American tourist:] "Oh, Margaret, what's thaaat?" Get to know more about this planet that's changing as we speak. With our generation I think a lot of people are continuing their education, not necessarily for work but to learn. Philosophy, theoretical science, history.…

Q: What would you like to study?
A: Languages: Spanish, Italian, Mandarin.

Q: But we know you speak Spanish!
A: ¡Un poco, si! I have to really learn to speak—not fake Spanish, not wrestling Spanish. And I'd take other courses, something useful and then one purely esoteric one, just for the mental exercise, especially history.

Q: Can you travel anonymously?
A: Fairly much so. If you are not afraid of looking slightly damaged, you can go anywhere. If I look like this [distorts face into a grimace; slobbers], people don't want to look at me.

Q: You don't really do that!
A: I do a version of that. Someone once described walking down the sidewalk in New York with Robert Redford, and no one was noticing. The guy said, "No one is bothering you." And Redford said, "Do you want to see Robert Redford?" Within two seconds people said, "Robert Redford!" He had just made a mental adjustment; he just turned it on. I can go anywhere. Some places people know me, but it's not intrusive. It's not like "Oh, my God—it's Brad!" People are sweet, except for drunks. Sometimes drunks can be mean. They will put you in a headlock and say "Kiss my wife." They can be scary.

Q: What was the last great thing that you read?
A: I haven't finished it yet; I'm reading this biography of Mao, a not very flattering portrait of old Chairman Mao, by a husband-and-wife team named—I can't remember their names. I'm having a senior moment. Aaaarp!

Q: You were so close to Chris and Dana Reeve. Do you miss them?
A: Yeah, bigtime.

Q: Talk about an inspiring guy.
A: Huge. And her, too. Both. All for people. It was that idea of take what you're given and go with it. He said, "Part of it is I want to walk—the other part is there's a whole group of people like me." He used to have a T-shirt that said "Find Another Hero."

Q: I suppose a comedian can be a hero. I talked with Jack Nicholson after 9/11, and he said he wanted to work exclusively on comedies for a while because the situation was so grim he felt people needed to laugh—he needed to laugh.
A: We did a show in Washington, D.C.—it was about two months after 9/11. And people said it was like we had broken a siege. With comedy you are allowed to laugh about the insanity. You realize how absurd it all is, the painful stuff and the wonderful stuff, too. For a brief moment everyone is connected, and you all go "Hey, we're human."

Nancy Griffin is West Coast editor of AARP The Magazine.


http://www.aarpmagazine.org/entertainment/robin_williams.html


(*) (*) Enjoy! Have a lovely evening and restful sleep.


({) (}) 's....however virtual,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer Pup (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:) :)

October 19, 2006

A Virtual World but Real Money

By RICHARD SIKLOS

It has a population of a million. The “people” there make friends, build homes and run businesses. They also play sports, watch movies and do a lot of other familiar things. They even have their own currency, convertible into American dollars.

But residents also fly around, walk underwater and make themselves look beautiful, or like furry animals, dragons, or practically anything — or anyone — they wish.

This parallel universe, an online service called Second Life that allows computer users to create a new and improved digital version of themselves, began in 1999 as a kind of online video game.

But now, the budding fake world is not only attracting a lot more people, it is taking on a real world twist: big business interests are intruding on digital utopia. The Second Life online service is fast becoming a three-dimensional test bed for corporate marketers, including Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Sun Microsystems, Nissan, Adidas/Reebok, Toyota and Starwood Hotels.

The sudden rush of real companies into so-called virtual worlds mirrors the evolution of the Internet itself, which moved beyond an educational and research network in the 1990’s to become a commercial proposition — but not without complaints from some quarters that the medium’s purity would be lost.

Already, the Internet is the fastest-growing advertising medium, as traditional forms of marketing like television commercials and print advertising slow. For businesses, these early forays into virtual worlds could be the next frontier in the blurring of advertising and entertainment.

Unlike other popular online video games like World of Warcraft that are competitive fantasy games, these sites meld elements of the most popular forms of new media: chat rooms, video games, online stores, user-generated content sites like YouTube.com and social networking sites like MySpace.com.

Philip Rosedale, the chief executive of Linden Labs, the San Francisco company that operates Second Life, said that until a few months ago only one or two real world companies had dipped their toes in the synthetic water. Now, more than 30 companies are working on projects there, and dozens more are considering them. “It’s taken off in a way that is kind of surreal,” Mr. Rosedale said, with no trace of irony.

Beginning a promotional venture in a virtual world is still a relatively inexpensive proposition compared with the millions spent on other media. In Second Life, a company like Nissan or its advertising agency could buy an “island” for a one-time fee of $1,250 and a monthly rate of $195 a month. For its new campaign built around its Sentra car, the company then needed to hire some computer programmers to create a gigantic driving course and design digital cars that people “in world” could actually drive, as well as some billboards and other promotional spots throughout the virtual world that would encourage people to visit Nissan Island.

Virtual world proponents — including a roster of Linden Labs investors that includes Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com; Mitchell D. Kapor, the software pioneer; and Pierre Omidyar, the eBay co-founder — say that the entire Internet is moving toward being a three-dimensional experience that will become more realistic as computing technology advances.

Entering Second Life, people’s digital alter-egos — known as avatars — are able to move around and do everything they do in the physical world, but without such bothers as the laws of physics. “When you are at Amazon.com you are actually there with 10,000 concurrent other people, but you cannot see them or talk to them,” Mr. Rosedale said. “At Second Life, everything you experience is inherently experienced with others.”

Second Life is the largest and best known of several virtual worlds created to attract a crowd. The cable TV network MTV, for example, just began Virtual Laguna Beach, where fans of its show, “Laguna Beach: The Real O.C.,” can fashion themselves after the show’s characters and hang out in their faux settings.

Unlike Second Life, which emphasizes a hands-off approach and has little say over who sets up shop inside its simulated world, MTV’s approach is to bring in advertisers as partners.

In Second Life, retailers like Reebok, Nike, Amazon and American Apparel have all set up shops to sell digital as well as real world versions of their products. Last week, Sun Microsystems unveiled a new pavilion promoting its products, and I.B.M. alumni held a virtual world reunion.

This week, the performer Ben Folds is to promote a new album with two virtual appearances. At one, he will play the opening party for Aloft, an elaborate digital prototype for a new chain of hotels planned by Starwood Hotels and Resorts. The same day, Mr. Folds will also “appear” at a new facility his music label’s parent company, Sony BMG, is opening at a complex called Media Island.

Meanwhile, Nissan is introducing its Nissan promotion, featuring a gigantic vending machine dispensing cars people can “drive” around.

And some of this is likely to be covered for the outside world by such business news outlets as CNet and Reuters, which now have reporters embedded full-time in the virtual realm.

All this attention has some Second Lifers concerned that their digital paradise will never be the same, like a Wal-Mart coming to town or a Starbucks opening in the neighborhood. “The phase it is in now is just using it as a hype and marketing thing,” said Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, 50, a member of Second Life who in the real world is a Russian translator in Manhattan.

In her second life, Ms. Fitzpatrick’s digital alter-ego is a figure well-known to other participants called Prokofy Neva, who runs a business renting “real estate” to other players. “The next phase,” she said, “will be they try to compete with other domestic products — the people who made sneakers in the world are now in danger of being crushed by Adidas.”

Mr. Rosedale says such concerns are overstated, because there are no advantages from economies of scale for big corporations in Second Life, and people can avoid places like Nissan Island as easily as they can avoid going to Nissan’s Web site. There is no limit to what can be built in Second Life, just as there is no limit to how many Web sites populate the Internet.

Linden Labs makes most of its money leasing “land” to tenants, Mr. Rosedale said, at an average of roughly $20 per month per “acre” or $195 a month for a private “island.” The land mass of Second Life is growing about 8 percent a month, a spokeswoman said, and now totals “60,000 acres,” the equivalent of about 95 square miles in the physical world. Linden Labs, a private company, does not disclose its revenue.

Despite the surge of outside business activity in Second Life, Linden Labs said corporate interests still owned less than 5 percent of the virtual world’s real estate.

As many as 10,000 people are in the virtual world at a time, and they are engaged in a gamut of ventures: everything from holding charity fund-raisers to selling virtual helicopters to operating sex clubs. Linden also makes money on exchanging United States dollars for what it calls Linden dollars for around 400 Linden dollars for $1 (people can load up on them with a credit card). A typical article of clothing — say a shirt — would cost around 200 Linden dollars, or 50 cents. As evidence of the growth of its “economy,” Second Life’s Web site tracks how much money changes hands each day. It recently reached as much as $500,000 a day and is growing as much as 15 percent a month.

On Tuesday, a Congressional committee said it was investigating whether virtual assets and incomes should be taxed.

But many inhabitants simply hang out for free. For advertisers worried about the effectiveness of the 30-second TV spot and the clutter of real world billboards and Internet pop-up ads, Second Life is appealing because it is a place where people literally immerse themselves in their products.

Steve F. Kerho, director of interactive marketing and media for Nissan USA, said the Second Life campaign was part of a growing interest in online video games. “We’re just trying to follow our consumer, that’s where they’re spending their time,” Mr. Kerho said. “But there has to be something in it for them — it’s got to be fun; it’s got to be playful.”

Projects like the Aloft hotel, an offshoot of Starwood’s W Hotels brand, are designed to promote the venture but also to give its designers feedback from prospective guests before the first real hotel opens in 2008.

The new Sony BMG building has rooms devoted to popular musicians like Justin Timberlake and DMX, allowing fans to mingle, listen to tunes or watch videos. Sony BMG is also toying with renting residences in the complex, as well as selling music downloads that people can listen to throughout the simulated world.

Sibley Verbeck, chief executive of the Electric Sheep Company, a consultancy that designed the Aloft and Sony BMG projects, said the flurry of corporate interest stemmed from the 10 to 20 percent growth in the number of people who had gone into virtual worlds each month for the last three years. Though exact numbers are difficult to come by, the figure should top a few million by next year, he said.

The spread of these worlds, however, is limited by access to high-speed Internet connections and, in Second Life’s case, software that is challenging to master and only runs on certain models of computers.

“If it doesn’t crash and burn then it will become real,” he said. “So now’s the time to start experimenting and learning ahead of your competition.”

As part of that process, businesses are learning that different rules apply when they venture into an arena where audiences are in control. “Users are the content — that’s the thing that everybody has a hard time getting over,” said Michael Wilson, the chief executive of Makena Technologies, which operates the virtual world There.com and helped build Virtual Laguna Beach.

For example, Sun Microsystems kicked off the opening of its Second Life venue with a press conference online hosted by executives and Mr. Rosedale of Linden Labs. But by the time the event was in full swing, several members of the audience had either walked or flown onto the stage, where they were running roughshod over the proceedings.

Even Mr. Rosedale got in on the act: he conjured a pair of sunglasses that he superimposed on a video image of a Sun representative talking on a screen behind the stage. (In virtual world lingo, such high jinks are known as “griefing.”)

Some corporate events have been met with protests by placard-waving avatars. And there is even a group called the Second Life Liberation Army that has staged faux “attacks” on Reebok and American Apparel stores. (The S.L.L.A. says it is fighting for voting rights for avatars — as well as stock in Linden Labs.)

Companies in this new environment have to get used to the idea that they may never know exactly who they are dealing with. Most of those in Second Life have chosen their names from a whimsical menu of supplied surnames, resulting in monikers like Snoopybrown Zamboni and Bitmason Pimpernel; males posing as female avatars and vice versa are not uncommon.

Another issue companies have to contend with is that their brands may already be in these virtual worlds, but illegally. Henry Jenkins, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, said one Second Life habitué created a virtual reproduction of the Ikea catalog to help people decorate their digital pads.

Mr. Verbeck of Electric Sheep said copyright infringement was rampant. His company runs an online boutique where Second Life residents sell each other pixelized creations of everything from body parts to home furnishings to roller skates — many of them unauthorized knockoffs.

So far, the boutique has not had many requests to stop selling fake products. But “we did have a request from the Salvador Dali Museum — which was great,” Mr. Verbeck said. “Second Life is so surreal that it was perfect.”


(*) (*) Interesting especially for branding and market research. It was not a surprise that the U.S. gov't will be trying to tax "virtual money". Talk about silly.:| :| Virutal taxation.


<sigh> Been doing lots of research for this week's unit posts. The assigned text book chapter didn't provide much of what I needed to better understand the topic.:o

A few more posts yet this early morning and I think some cold milk and a quick trip outside for Wyatt. and then under the covers! I have become more and more a night person - not lady of the evening...;)

Pleasant evening to the Left Coasters....but then it's only 1:00 am....

Adieu,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the sleeping Boxer Pup (S) (l) (&) (l) (S)

[sweetlady]

:| :|

Q U O T E D

"I did stick socks in my pants."

-- Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina recalls her days at Lucent and silently wonders how many HP board members were pulling the same stunt.


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/15807000.htm


http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=anakk7M.pCEM&refer=muse


(n) (n) There is absolutely no comparison between Fiorina's mis-steps with the Compaq acquisition HP did under her tenure and the lies HP attorneys told Dunn on pretexting.(n) I think HP's latest lady-CEO got a bum rap.

GRRR.

......and now back to the usual irreverent, strongly-opinionated programming......:) :)


Carpe Diem,

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:| :| :| :| :|


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZnxNfBVr0U



:o :o


;) 's,

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:| :| :|


http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/video-hydrogen-peroxide-powered-bicycle-0-60-in-6-seconds#more-5072



(*) (*) Have fun the rest of your evening and morning, wherever you are and where your travels might take you today.

(f) (f) Have a lovely weekend! (f) (f)


(k) (k) 's,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer Pup (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:| :| :| :|


Lightning exits woman's bottom


October 09, 2006 12:00am

A WOMAN has suffered severe burning to her anus after being struck by lightning which hit her in the mouth and passed right through her body.

Natasha Timarovic, 27, was cleaning her teeth at in her home in the Croatian city of Zadar when lightning struck the building.

She said: "I had just put my mouth under the tap to rinse away the toothpaste when the lightning must have struck the building.

"I don't remember much after that, but I was later told that the lightning had travelled down the water pipe and struck me on the mouth, passing through my body.

"It was incredibly painful, I felt it pass through my torso and then I don't remember much at all." Doctors at the city hospital where she was treated for burns to the mouth and rear said: "The accident is bizarre but not impossible."

She was wearing rubber bathroom shoes at the time and so instead of earthing through her feet it appears the electricity shot out of her backside," a medic told local newspaper, 24 Sata.

"It appears to have earthed through the damp shower curtain that she was touching as she bent over to put her mouth under the tap. If she had not been wearing the shoes she would probably have been killed by the blast."

24 Sata said the young woman had been released from hospital after being kept in overnight and was expected to make a full recovery.


http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20548077-13762,00.html


:o :o Only in Australia.......


;) 's,

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(h) (h) (h)


(p) (p) (p) Especially B-F's:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7dnGo_2tZA


(y) (y) (y) Definitely brought a big smile.


Adieu,

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(h) (h) (h)


http://www.foldabikes.com/CurrentEvents/Story/Photos/Tibet/Himalayas.jpg


http://places.mongabay.com/nepal/himalayas_1.jpg


http://www.thisisthelife.com/photos/experiences/large/trekking-himalayas.jpg


Take my breath away gorgeous:

http://www.goldenhilltravel.co.uk/everest-new-year-gallery/images/Thamserku%20Nepal%20Himalayas.jpg



http://www.nature.com/news/2003/030929/images/himalayas_180.jpg


(p) (l) (p) My favorite and HUGE! http://www.roadjunky.com/india/himalayas_india.jpg



(p) Another one: http://i1.treklens.com/photos/3873/himalayas-ii.jpg



(p) From a plane window:

http://www.studyatusa.org/gallery/asiantrip/Bhutan/images/himalayas%20from%20plane-0258_img.jpg



(*) (*) There....I have not only beautiful images in my head for bed....but will drift off to restful sleep thinking of these images and upcoming trip. (y) (y)


Sun thoughts,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer Pup (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:o :o :o :o

Microwave Cloaking is Now a Reality

01:45 PM, October 20th 2006

Scientists have made a breakthrough towards creating an invisibility device, as they succeeded easier than was thought possible to construct a microwave cloaking device. The device works only in two dimensions and only on microwaves. This first device is far from perfect in that it is barely 8-cm wide and can only reduce back scatter and forward scatter, the researchers said.

"By incorporating complex material properties, our cloak allows a concealed volume, plus the cloak, to appear to have properties similar to free space when viewed externally," said David Smith, a professor at Duke University who led the study.

Cloaking devices are built on the principle that radiation can be made to go around an object, by using special materials that are set in a circular pattern. The waves propagate through the material and to the other side, bending around the shielded object, partially the same way light can be directed through bent fiber optics with minimum losses.

The scientists at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering manufactured their cloak using "metamaterials" precisely arranged in a series of concentric circles that confer specific electromagnetic properties. Metamaterials are artificial composites that can be made to interact with electromagnetic waves in specific and controlled manner, which is impossible to realize with naturally occurring materials. Developed just seven years ago, the materials use a matrix of exceptionally tiny, sometimes nanoscale, metal wires and loops to control electromagnetic radiation in ways natural substances can't.

A metamaterial shell with the right gradient of metal elements should cause light of a particular wavelength to wrap around the shell's interior.

"The concept that you can cloak something and make something invisible can now be demonstrated by this method," said Duke University physicist David R. Smith. "This is the first time where we show that you can actually take electromagnetic waves and wrap them around some region that you want to conceal and restore them on the other side."

An uncloaked object would cause an interruption in the waves, creating a "shadow" behind the object. But the cloak succeeded in making the waves reconnect on the other side. The scientists say their invisibility cloak represents one of the most elaborate metamaterial structures yet designed and produced, as well as the most comprehensive approach to invisibility yet realized.

Engineers David Schurig and David Smith of Duke University say they were concealing something themselves last May when they and their colleagues reported their proposal: "We had a cloak we liked pretty well in May, and it got better from there," Schurig reveals. In the group's current version a central copper ring--the object to be cloaked--is surrounded by concentric rings of metamaterial standing one centimeter tall and spanning 12 centimeters. The rings are sandwiched between two plates so that microwaves can only travel through the cloak in the plane of the rings, as described in a paper published online October 19 by Science Express.

The team reports its findings in Science Express, the advance online publication of the journal Science.

The researchers sampled the electric field component of the microwaves at many points in the apparatus to see how the radiation was affected, and the results match well with their simulations, they report. "We don't say anything quantitatively about how well this is cloaking, but we've reduced both the reflection and the shadow generated by the object, and those are the two essential features of the invisibility cloaking," Schurig says.

To assess the cloak's performance, the researchers aimed a microwave beam at a cloak situated between two metal plates inside a test chamber, and used a specialized detecting apparatus to measure the electromagnetic fields that developed both inside and outside the cloak. By examining an animated representation of the data, they found that the wave fronts of the beam separate and flow around the center of the cloak. It was similar to river water flowing around a smooth rock, they said.

The challenge now resides in making a cloaking device which is able to handle a wide range of electromagnetic radiation. This poses exceptional difficulties, because for different wavelengths you theoretically need very different materials. To make an object literally vanish before a person's eyes, a cloak would have to simultaneously interact with all of the wavelengths, or colors, that make up light. That technology would require much more intricate and tiny metamaterial structures, which scientists have yet to devise.

However, the recent breakthrough should prove it's doable and worth financing, and as such we can expect rudimentary invisibility devices in the near future. Next, the researchers plan to develop a real three-dimensional cloak and further perfecting the cloaking effect.


http://www.playfuls.com/news_002596_Microwave_Cloaking_is_Now_a_Reality.ht ml



(y) (y) (y) Perhaps in my lifetime, I can actually be that little mouse in the corner observing undetected....;) ;) (h)

(h) (i) (i) On second thought, I'd get a long cape with hood for me and a fleece coat for my boxer pet so we could take walks in peace anywwhere we wanted. Ah! need the invisible poop-scoop bag as well....being a good citizen and all. ;)

(o) (o) I must be spending WAY too much time researching lately - I'm feeling punchy. ;)


Time to get outside again in that bracing air and wind with Wyatt.


Carpe Diem,

SWeetlady & Wyatt the Boxer Pup (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:) :)

If your imagination is stirred by the baby steps being made in quantum computing (see "Beam me half a meter to the left, Scotty"), you'll also want to keep an eye on another exotic form of calculation: biological computing. Today's mindbender comes from researchers at Columbia University and the University of New Mexico, who have just finished an upgrade to a DNA-based computer called MAYA that can whup your sorry, highly evolved butt at tic-tac-toe every time. OK, you do have to give it the first turn so it can claim the center square, and it does take 2 to 30 minutes to figure out each move, but still! As noble a pastime as it is, tic-tac-toe dominance is just a stepping stone to technologies that could refine DNA analysis and help identify the genetic markers associated with certain diseases. "MAYA-II moves bio-computation up to the next level of power," said Joanne Macdonald, one of the Columbia researchers. "It's similar to the invention of the first microchips with hundreds of logic gates."


http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2006/10/beam_me_half_a_.html


http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn10310-dna-computer-is-unbeatable-at-tictactoe.html


(y) (y) (y) (h)


SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:) :) :)

Ricky Gervais - "Animals"


http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7520848619246996399&q=Ricky%20Gervais


:D :D :D

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:| :| :|

In addition to the standard earphones, dock adapter and USB 2.0 cable, some of Apple's newer video iPods shipped with a Windows virus as well. This according to Apple, which Tuesday acknowledged a malicious file called RavMonE.exe had been discovered on a few of the iconic media players. "So far we have seen less than 25 reports concerning this problem. The iPod nano, iPod shuffle and Mac OS X are not affected, and all Video iPods now shipping are virus free," Apple said in a statement that predictably pinned the blame for the misstep on Microsoft. "As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it." Nice, eh? Your contract manufacturer plugs some of your video iPods into a Windows PC for testing, they contract a Windows virus that your QA fails to notice and you blame Microsoft? Classy, Apple. Classy.


Windows virus bites Apple iPods:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6062074.stm


What Apple Computer said:

http://www.apple.com/support/windowsvirus/


:| :| :| :| :| :| :|

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:o :o :o

Reuters' newest foreign correspondent didn't need to get any shots before traveling to his new posting (except, perhaps, for a shot of healthy skepticism). Adam Pasick is stationed in Second Life, the parallel universe where more than 850,000 users engage in community and commerce in the guise of their animated avatars, a place where you can live out your fantasy of being a polar bear in a tutu to enliven your mundane earthly existence as a cost-accounting specialist in a tutu. Pasick's avatar, Adam Reuters, will work out of a virtual bureau modeled to look like a hybrid of Reuters' London and Times Square buildings, and will write for and about Second Life residents and businesses. "The fact that it's in a virtual world doesn't change things as much as you'd think," Pasick told the New York Times. "It's not any different than when Reuters opens up a bureau in a part of the world that has a fast-growing economy that we weren't in before. The laws of supply and demand hold true, it has a currency exchange, people open businesses and get paid for goods and services." The impetus for the bureau came, somewhat surprisingly, from Reuters CEO Thomas H. Glocer, who has "been playing in Second Life since it was a relatively small community." "This is a very serious, old brand that stands for things and has principles, but that doesn't take itself so seriously that it wouldn't play in a gaming space," Glocer said. "This appeals to a younger demographic. Even for people who don't go in and play in Second Life, it shows Reuters has a certain with-it-ness."

Well, maybe. But with it or not, a growing number of companies are setting up shop on the islands that dot Second Life, including Adidas, Reebok, American Apparel and Toyota. Reuters isn't even the first media outlet to plant its flag; the BBC is there, as is CNet. Not quite Stephenson's Metaverse yet, but an interesting sandbox to watch.


http://secondlife.com/


http://secondlife.reuters.com/


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/technology/16reuters.html?ei=5088&en=44dcf39d0dbdfac2&ex=1318651200&adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1161003199-CITdyVWQTF0wWbH4RZXBCQ


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4766755.stm


http://www.3pointd.com/20060926/cnet-launches-second-life-site/


http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=755



(*) (*) For those without a life, I suppose. ;) Where's my virtual invisible cape when I need it? :) Technology - got to love it. (h) (h)


:) :) 's,

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:o :o :o

From the Be Careful What You Wish For file: Throughout the long history of the blogosphere, those who think seriously about new forms of communication have been urging corporations and their PR people to jump in and join an open conversation with their customers. Well, some companies seem to have gotten only part of the message, ignoring the "open" part. If you've already got a controversial reputation, open conversation can get messy and out of control. Much easier for some PR folk to use the blog phenomenon as just another arena in which to practice their weaselly ways. The latest to get tripped up is big-box punching bag Wal-Mart, which was getting much favorable and folksy play in a blog called Wal-Marting Across America, charting the travels of an ordinary couple making their way around the country by RV and staying nights in Wal-Mart parking lots. Unfortunately, the couple was a free-lance writer and a photographer from the Washington Post. An unfortunately, they never mentioned that the whole venture was paid for by Working Families for Wal-Mart, an organization that was formed in December by Wal-Mart's public relations firm, Edelman, to counter critics. Oops. "This is so foolish on so many levels, it makes me scratch my head," said corporate blogging consultant Debbie Weil, author of "The Corporate Blogging Book." Everyone involved violated the basic rule: Be transparent. If you're found out, it comes back as a slap in the face." And that may be the ultimate defense against such boneheaded blunders. The blogosphere is not the passive audience that marketers are used to; sooner or later, the truth will out.


http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/oct2006/db20061009_579137.htm?campaign_id=rss_topStories


http://walmartingacrossamerica.com/


http://www.forwalmart.com/


http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=49505&Nid=24192&p=82937


(y) (y) (y) (y) (y) (y) (y)

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:) :)


http://www.vnes.thatsanderskid.com/


(y) (y) For those who play. (versus those who are players.....) :o


;) ;) 's,

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:) :)


http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/italian-language/the-ultimate-game-desk-206083.php


(y) (y) Well done, but pretty silly. :)


SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:s :s

http://www.productdose.com/article.php?article_id=4534


:) :) Hmm, the crossword one looked kind of ungeeky to me. I really liked those wallets and purses made out of license plates.



Very Cool:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://us.st11.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/yhst-37299102709844_1909_2997952&imgrefurl=http://purseaholic.com/&h=295&w=250&sz=54&hl=en&start=5&tbnid=uK7kGqnqFo3g0M:&tbnh=115&tbnw=97&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dlicense%2Bplate%2Bwallets%26svnum%3D1 0%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26sa%3DN



(l) (l) (h) (h) :

http://a1512.g.akamaitech.net/f/1512/124/1h/images.ebags.com/img/6pm/Megas/30365.jpg



(f) (f) Have a lovely rest of your Saturday and weekend.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer Pup (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(h) (h) (h)

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/10/05/miracles-youll-see-in-the-next-fifty-years/?Qwd=./PopularMechanics/2-1950/next_fifty_years&Qif=next_fifty_years_00.jpg&Qiv=thumbs&Qis=XL

Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years

By Waldemar Kaempffert

Source: Popular Mechanics 2-1950

Science Editor, The New York Times

WHAT WILL the world be like in A.D. 2000? You can read the answer in your home, in the streets, in the trains and cars that carry you to your work, in the bargain basement of every department store. You don’t realize what is happening because it is a piecemeal process. The jet-propelled plane is one piece, the latest insect killer is another. Thousands of such pieces are automatically dropping into their places to form the pattern of tomorrow’s world.

The only obstacles to accurate prophecy are the vested interests, which may retard progress for economic reasons, tradition, conservatism, labor-union policies and legislation. If we confine ourselves to processes and inventions that are now being hatched in the laboratory, we shall not wander too far from reality.

The best way of visualizing the new world of A.D. 2000 is to introduce you to the Dobsons, who live in Tottenville, a hypothetical metropolitan suburb of 100,000. There are parks and playgrounds and green open spaces not only around detached houses but also around apartment houses. The heart of the town is the airport. Surrounding it are business houses, factories and hotels. In concentric circles beyond these lie the residential districts.

Tottenville is as clean as a whistle and quiet. It is a crime to burn raw coal and pollute air with smoke and soot. In the homes electricity is used to warm walls and to cook. Factories all burn gas, which is generated in sealed mines. The tars are removed and sold to the chemical industry for their values, and the gas thus laundered is piped to a thousand communities.

The highways that radiate from Tottenville are much like those of today, except that they are broader with hardly any curves. In some of the older cities, difficult to change because of the immense investment in real estate and buildings, the highways are double-decked. The upper deck is for fast nonstop traffic; the lower deck is much like our avenues, with brightly illuminated shops. Beneath the lower deck is the level reserved entirely for business vehicles.

Tottenville is illuminated by electric “suns” suspended from arms on steel towers 200 feet high. There are also lamps which are just as bright and varicolored as those that now dazzle us on every Main Street. But the process of generating the light is more like that which occurs in the sun. Atoms are bombarded by electrons and other minute projectiles, electrically excited in this way and made to glow.

Power plants are not driven by atomic power as you might suppose. It was known as early as 1950 that an atomic power plant would have to be larger and much more expensive than a fuel-burning plant to be efficient. Atomic power proves its worth in Canada, South America and the Far East, but in tropical countries it cannot compete with solar power. It is as hopeless in 2000 as it was in 1950 to drive machinery directly by atomic energy. Engineers can do no more than utilize the heat generated by converting uranium into plutonium. The heat is used to drive engines, and the engines in turn drive electric generators. A good deal of thorium is used because uranium 235 is scarce.

Because of the heavy investment that has to be made in a uranium or thorium power plant, the United States government began seriously to consider the possibilities of solar radiation in 1949. Theoretically, 5000 horsepower in terms of solar heat fall on an acre of the earth’s surface every day.

Because they sprawl over large surfaces, solar engines are profitable in 2000 only where land is cheap. They are found in deserts that can be made to bloom again, and in tropical lands where there is usually no coal or oil. Many farmhouses in the United States are heated by solar rays and some cooking is done by solar heat.

The first successful atomically driven liners began to run in 1970 after the U. S. Navy had carried on many expensive, large-scale secret experiments. Outwardly the liners are not much different from the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, but they have much more cargo and passenger space because it is no longer necessary to carry about 12,000 tons of fuel.

The metallurgical research that makes the gas turbines in the power plants and in the trans-Atlantic liners possible has influenced both civil engineering and architecture. Steel is used only for cutting tools and for massive machinery. The light metals have largely displaced it. Ways have been found to change the granular structure so that a metal is ultrastrong in a desired direction and weaker in other directions. As a result, the framework of an industrial or office building or apartment house is an almost lacelike lattice.

Thanks to these alloys, to plastics and to other artificial materials, houses differ from those of our own time. The Dobson house has light-metal walls only four inches thick. There is a sheet of insulating material an inch or two thick with a casing of sheet metal on both sides.

This Dobson air-conditioned house is not a prefabricated structure, though all its parts are mass-produced. Metal, sheets of plastic and aerated clay (clay filled with bubbles so that it resembles petrified sponge) are cut to size on the spot. In the center of this eight-room house is a unit that contains all the utilities—air-conditioning apparatus, plumbing, bathrooms, showers, electric range, electric outlets. Around this central unit the house has been pieced together. Some of it is poured plastic—the floors, for instance. By 2000, wood, brick and stone are ruled out because they are too expensive.

It is a cheap house. With all its furnishings, Joe Dobson paid only $5000 for it. Though it is galeproof and weatherproof, it is built to last only about 25 years. Nobody in 2000 sees any sense in building a house that will last a century.

Everything about the Dobson house is synthetic in the best chemical sense of the term. When Joe Dobson awakens in the morning he uses a depilatory. No soap or safety razor for him. It takes him no longer than a minute to apply the chemical, wipe it off with the bristles and wash his face in plain water.

This Dobson house is not as highly mechanized as you may suppose, chiefly because of the progress made by the synthetic chemists. There are no dish washing machines, for example, because dishes are thrown away after they have been used once, or rather put into a sink where they are dissolved by superheated water. Two dozen soluble plastic plates cost a dollar. They dissolve at about 250 degrees Fahrenheit, so that boiling-hot soup and stews can be served in them without inviting a catastrophe. The plastics are derived from such inexpensive raw materials as cottonseed hulls, oat hulls, Jerusalem artichokes, fruit pits, soy beans, bagasse, straw and wood pulp.

When Jane Dobson cleans house she simply turns the hose on everything. Why not? Furniture (upholstery included), rugs, draperies, unscratchable floors — all are made of synthetic fabric or waterproof plastic. After the water has run down a drain in the middle of the floor (later concealed by a rug of synthetic fiber) Jane turns on a blast of hot air and dries everything. A detergent in the water dissolves any resistant dirt. Tablecloths and napkins are made of woven paper yarn so fine that the untutored eye mistakes it for linen. Jane Dobson throws soiled “linen” into the incinerator. Bed sheets are of more substantial stuff, but Jane Dobson has only to hang them up and wash them down with a hose when she puts the bedroom in order.

Cooking as an art is only a memory in the minds of old people. A few die-hards still broil a chicken or roast a leg of lamb, but the experts have developed ways of deep-freezing partially baked cuts of meat. Even soup and milk are delivered in the form of frozen bricks.

This expansion of the frozen-food industry and the changing gastronomic habits of the nation have made it necessary to install in every home the electronic industrial stove which came out of World War II. Jane Dobson has one of these electronic stoves. In eight seconds a half-grilled frozen steak is thawed; in two minutes more it is ready to serve. It never takes Jane Dobson more than half an hour to prepare what Tottenville considers an elaborate meal of several courses.

Some of the food that Jane Dobson buys is what we miscall “synthetic.” In the middle of the 20th century statisticians were predicting that the world would starve to death because the population was increasing more rapidly than the food supply. By 2000, a vast amount of research has been conducted to exploit principles that were embryonic in the first quarter of the 20th century. Thus sawdust and wood pulp are converted into sugary foods. Discarded paper table “linen” and rayon underwear are bought by chemical factories to be converted into candy.

Of course the Dobsons have a television set. But it is connected with the telephones as well as with the radio receiver, so that when Joe Dobson and a friend in a distant city talk over the telephone they also see each other. Businessmen have television conferences. Each man is surrounded by half a dozen television screens on which he sees those taking part in the discussion. Documents are held up for examination; samples of goods are displayed. In fact, Jane Dobson does much of her shopping by television. Department stores obligingly hold up for her inspection bolts of fabric or show her new styles of clothing.
Automatic electronic inventions that seem to have something like intelligence integrate industrial production so that all the machines in a factory work as units in what is actually a single, colossal organism. In the Orwell Helicopter Corporation’s plant only a few trouble shooters are visible, and these respond to lights that flare up on a board whenever a vacuum tube burns out or there is a short circuit. By holes punched in a roll of paper, every operation necessary to produce a helicopter is indicated. The punched roll is fed into a machine that virtually gives orders to all the other machines in the plant. The holes in the paper indicate exactly how long a reamer is to smooth the inside of a cylinder, just when a stamping machine is to pass a sheet of aluminum along to its neighbor with orders to punch 22 holes in indicated places. There are mechanical wrenches that obediently turn nuts on bolts and stop all by themselves when the bolts are in place, shears that know exactly where to cut a sheet of metal for a perfect fit. Every operation in the plant is electronically and automatically controlled.

One of the more remarkable electronic machines of 2000 is a development of one on which hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent in the middle years of the 20th century by Dr. Vladimir Zworykin and Dr. John von Neumann. The purpose of this improved Zworykin-Von Neumann automaton is to predict the weather with an accuracy unattainable before 1980. It is a combination of calculating machine and forecaster. The calculator solves thousands of separate equations in a minute; the automatic forecaster carries out the computer’s instructions and predicts the weather from hour to hour. In 1950, meteorologists had no time to deal with the 50-odd variables that should have been mathematically handled to predict the weather 24 hours in advance.

Following suggestions made by Zworykin and Von Neumann storms are more or less under control. It is easy enough to spot a budding hurricane in the doldrums off the coast of Africa. Before it has a chance to gather much strength and speed as it travels westward toward Florida, oil is spread over the sea and ignited. There is an updraft. Air from the surrounding region, which includes the developing hurricane, rushes in to fill the void. The rising air condenses so that some of the water in the whirling mass falls as rain.

With storms diverted where they do no harm, aerial travel is never interrupted. And the Dobsons, like everybody else in Tottenville, travel much more than we do in 1950—that is, to foreign countries.

By 2000, supersonic planes cover a thousand miles an hour, but the consumption of fuel is such that high fares have to be charged. In one of these supersonic planes the Atlantic is crossed in three hours. Nobody has yet circumnavigated the moon in a rocket space ship, but the idea is not laughed down.

Corporation presidents, bankers, ambassadors and rich people in a hurry use the 1000-mile-an-hour rocket planes and think nothing of paying a fare of $5000 between Chicago and Paris. The Dobsons take the cheaper jet planes.
This extension of aerial transportation has had the effect of distributing the population. People find it more satisfactory to live in a suburb like Tottenville, if suburb it can be called, than in a metropolis like New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. Cities have grown into regions, and it is sometimes hard to tell where one city ends and another begins. Instead of driving from Tottenville to California in their car—teardrop in shape and driven from the rear by a high-compression engine that burns cheap denatured alcohol—the Dobsons use the family helicopter, which is kept on the roof. The car is used chiefly for shopping and for journeys of not more than 20 miles. The railways are just as necessary in 2000 as they are in 1950. They haul chiefly freight too heavy or too bulky for air cargo carriers. Passenger travel by rail is a mere trickle. Even commuters go to the city, a hundred miles away, in huge aerial busses that hold 200 passengers. Hundreds of thousands make such journeys twice a day in their own helicopters.
Fast jet and rocket-propelled mail planes made it so hard for telegraph companies all over the world to compete with the postal service that dormant facsimile-transmission systems had to be revived. It takes no more than a minute to transmit and receive in facsimile a five-page letter on paper of the usual business size. Cost? Five cents. In Tottenville the clerks in telegraph offices no longer print out illegible words. Everything is transmitted by phototelegraphy exactly as it is written—illegible spelling, blots, smudges and all. Mistakes are the sender’s, never the telegraph company’s.

When the Dobsons are sick they go to the doctor, in a hospital, where he has only to push a button to command all the assistance he needs.

In the middle of the 20th century, doctors talked much of such antibiotics as penicillin, streptomycin, aureomycin and about 50 others that had been extracted from soil and other molds. It was the beginning of what was even then known as chemotherapy—cure by chemical means. By 2000, physicians have several hundred of these chemical agents or antibiotics at their command. Tuberculosis in all of its forms is cured as easily as pneumonia was cured at mid-century.
It no longer is necessary in 2000 to administer the purified extracts of molds to cope with bacterial infections. The antibiotics are all synthesized in chemical factories. It is possible to modify their molecular structure, so that they acquire new and useful properties.

Even in 1950 physicians did not know exactly how a piece of beefsteak is converted by the body into muscle and energy —the process technically known as metabolism. The physician of 2000 knows just what diet is best for a patient. This knowledge, coupled with his knowledge of hormones, enables him to treat old age as a degenerative disease. Men and women of 70 in A.D. 2000 look as if they were 40. Wrinkles, sagging cheeks, leathery skins are curiosities or signs of neglect. The span of life has been lengthened to 85.

In 1950 little was known about a virus beyond the fact that it could slip through a filter so fine that it would hold back any microorganism visible in the optical microscope. The electron microscope, which magnifies from 30,000 to 100,000 times and which substitutes a beam of electrons for a beam of light, has changed all this. In the viruses, little bodies have been detected with this instrument. They are virtually protein molecules. By tying together what chemists have discovered about the struc-ture of protein and what the pathologists see in the electron microscope, such virus diseases as influenza, the common cold, poliomyelitis and a dozen others are cured with ease.

Even in the 20th century hospitals were packed with instruments and machines. The hospitals of 2000 have even more. Instead of taking electrocardiographs, doctors place heart patients in front of a fluoroscopic screen, turn on the X-rays and then, with the aid of a photoelectric cell, examine every section of the heart.

Cancer is not yet curable in 2000. But physicians optimistically predict that the time is not far off when it will be cured.
The nervous diseases are linked up with electrochemical processes in 2000 in a way that is impossible in our time. Such afflictions as multiple sclerosis or palsy are no longer regarded as incurable. There are electrochemical methods of stimulating and reactivating nerves, so that victims of Parkinson’s disease are no longer objects of pity. But these sufferers from damaged or degenerate nerves are somewhat like our diabetics who must take insulin regularly to remain alive. A little battery-driven apparatus must be carried in the pocket to provide the stimulus the nerves need.

Any marked departure from what Joe -Dobson and his fellow citizens wear and eat and how they amuse themselves will arouse comment. If old Mrs. Underwood, who lives around the corner from the Dob-sons and who was born in 1920 insists on sleeping under an old-fashioned comforter instead of an aerogel blanket of glass puffed with air so that it is as light as thistledown, she must expect people to talk about her “queerness.” It is astonishing how easily the great majority of us fall into step with our neighbors. And after all, is the standardization of life to be deplored if we can have a house like Joe Dobson’s, a standardized helicopter, luxurious standardized household appointments, and food that was out of the reach of any Roman emperor?


:) :) 's

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:o :o

Q U O T E D

"YouTube is a wholly user-created entity, and while I am happy for those guys, to declare yourselves the 'kings' of Internet video is like Bob Saget claiming he is the 'king' of 'America's Funniest Home Videos.' ''

-- Luke Wahl, a Los Angeles television production coordinator


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/15729649.htm


(y) (y) :D

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(y) (y)


http://eigelb.at/HP/Links/SpecialEffects/Grappa/BlueRandom/index.html



(h) (h)


SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:| :| :| :|

(h) (h)


http://triggur.org/costume/mech/


(y) (y)

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:| :| :| :|


http://search-desc.ebay.com/a_W0QQcatrefZC5QQfbdZ1QQfclZ3QQflocZ1QQfposZ94040Q QfromZR14QQfrppZ50QQfsooZ2QQfsopZ3QQfssZ0QQftrtZ1Q QftrvZ1QQftsZ2QQnojsprZyQQpfidZ0QQsaaffZafdefaultQ QsabdloZ1QQsacatZQ2d1QQsacqyopZgeQQsacurZ0QQsadisZ 200QQsargnZQ2d1QQsaslcZ0QQs


:o :o Whew! This gives me some idas though......;)


SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:) :) :)

http://www.cowabduction.com/


:o :o Wasn't this called cattle rustling in the 1800 and 1900s?


;) 's,

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:| :|


http://www.trevorvanmeter.com/flyguy/flyGuy.swf


:o :o :o Except it is more like "Waiting for Godot". How existential. :| :|


;) 's,

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:) :)

Every family has its traditions; in the Kornberg family, it's winning Nobel prizes. Back in 1959, Stanford prof Arthur Kornberg shared the Nobel medicine prize with Severo Ochoa for studies of how genetic information is transferred from one DNA molecule to another. He took his young son, Roger, along to Stockholm to collect the award. This morning, Roger Kornberg, now a Stanford prof himself, is planning a return trip, having won the Nobel in chemistry for his work revealing how how information is taken from genes and converted to molecules called messenger RNA. "The last five years have been really breathtaking in terms of the details of the structures that he's been producing and what they're revealing about the mechanism, as well as laying the groundwork for future studies of how gene regulation works,'' said Jeremy M. Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
If you're scoring at home, that's three Nobels for the Bay Area so far this year: Astrophysicist George Smoot of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory shared in the physics prize and Stanford's Andrew Z. Fire was a co-winner in medicine.


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/15676996.htm


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/15673522.htm


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/industries/biotech/15665719.htm


(y) (y) (y) (h) (h) (h)


Here's to great (i) (i) 's!!


(k) 's,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer Pup (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:s :s :s

Q U O T E D

"We're trying to embed entertainment experiences inside clothes. It's like HBO on your shirt."

-- Elan Lee, one of the co-founders of edoc laundry, whose line of clothes contains hidden coded messages that are clues in an online mystery.


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/15676543.htm


(n) (n) I think I'll pass on embedded entertainment inside my clothing.....and stop there before going down THAT path.....;)


:)

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:s :s

http://www.dvguru.com/2006/10/03/the-dvd-rewinder/


(n) (n)

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(h) (h) (h) (h)

http://shakespeare.clusty.com/


(y) (y) (h) (h)

(k) 's,

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(h) (h) (h) (h) (h)


We're going to have to trust the experts on this, but apparently Danish scientists have made a breakthrough by teleporting information from light into a cloud of atoms. Heretofore, experiments in teleportation via quantum entanglement had managed to send to send light or single atoms across a fraction of a millimeter. This experiment, which worked at a distance of half a meter, "is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium," said Professor Eugene Polzik of the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University. The aim of such study is not a revolution in the travel industry, but achieving fast and secure quantum computing. "It is really about teleporting information from one site to another site. Quantum information is different from classical information in the sense that it cannot be measured. It has much higher information capacity and it cannot be eavesdropped on. The transmission of quantum information can be made unconditionally secure," said Polzik. I won't even attempt to explain the details of the experiment here, but suffice to say it involved a pair of entangled states named "Bob" and "Alice." Everything after that leaves my brain in a similar state.


http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/10/04/teleportation.reut/


http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/11/3/9


http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=000E9691-0261-1524-826183414B7F0000


http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/10/6/1


(y) (y) (y)

;) ;) 's,

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:| :|


http://www.losanjealous.com/nfc/


:) :)

SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(y) (y) (y)


http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4199165.html


(h) (h)


SL & WTBP (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:| :| :|


Why does Big Business have such a slimy rep? Sure, there's the big stuff like stock option scandals and boardroom spying, but what really does it is the thousand little screw jobs that consumers endure day in and day out. The latest example, passed along by TheoDP, is U.S. Patent No. 7,120,591, granted today, for an online redemption system for product rebates. The patent describes "a system and method for computer-aided rebate processing ... which substantially eliminates or reduces disadvantages and problems associated with previous systems and methods. [Sounds great, right?] The present invention satisfies a need for a more consumer friendly method for processing rebates that maintains a breakage rate ..." Whoa ... hold it right there. "By requiring post-purchase activities," the patent description explains, "the rebate offerer attempts to reduce the number of successful rebate claimants. Breakage occurs when a product bearing a rebate is sold, but the rebate is not successfully claimed. ... Consumers, in contrast, desire the quickest and easiest process for receiving their rebates. This creates a tension between the manufacturer's desire to maintain consumer satisfaction and the need to sustain a sufficient level of breakage in rebate programs." Tension does not begin to cover it. The patent owner is Parago, which powers Circuit City rebates and others.


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/mercurynews/business/personal_finance/investing/stock_options/


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/15500749.htm


http://www.mouseprint.org/


http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,120,591.PN.&OS=PN/7,120,591&RS=PN/7,120,591


http://www.parago.com/


http://www.ccityrebates.com/promocenter/circuitcity/promo_search.html


:o :o


(o) (o) Time to take a break. At least all the assigned readings and assignments were posted earlier. Tomorrow? OLFB (other learner feedback) and hopefully get out and about with Wyatt before more rain comes in later in the afternoon. g*dammed rain.Better than snow, though, The chilly temps are lovely...... Brisk!

The aroma of smoke from neighbors' fireplaces was wonderful during an earlier walk with Wyatt. I loved it and wanted to stay outside a while longer.


(S) Restful sleep. (S)

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer Pup (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(f) (f) (f)


October 22, 2006

To Dance Beneath the Diamond Skies

By ALEX WITCHEL

Twyla Tharp has strong feelings about good coffee, just as she has strong feelings about dance, theater and the universe in general. So this particular moment, as she fished a dead fly from her coffee cup, was probably as good an introduction as any to Rule No. 1 in the World According to Tharp: Twyla Tharp is always right. Rule No. 2? See Rule No. 1. Rule No. 3? Yes, there is a 3. Though rare, it is possible for Tharp to be wrong. But only if she proves herself wrong. No one else need apply.

“Let me get you a fresh cup,” offered Artie Gaffin, the production stage manager of “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” the new Broadway musical conceived, directed and choreographed by Tharp, based on the music of Bob Dylan. Gaffin, among his other duties, had the unenviable job of coffee maker at Aaron Davis Hall, the theater in Harlem where the cast rehearsed during the summer. Located in a neighborhood improbably crammed with beauty salons, there was not a bodega to be found with a can of Maxwell House and a plug.

Tharp drank the coffee. “I don’t want you to remake it,” she told him. “I just want you to acknowledge that this coffee sucks.”

Once that was accomplished, Tharp turned her gaze on Kim Craven, the resident director who is her second in command. Craven was busy showing a dancer a change in steps that Tharp asked for the previous day.

“Thank you, Kimmy, for being so conscientious,” Tharp called. “That’s going to change again today.”

Craven kept her equanimity, which was impressive, considering that she had just given Tharp a note of her own, to which Tharp responded, “I understand what you’re saying, but I’m leaving it as it is.”

Bark, bark. You get the idea. But it is probably time to say this: There was not a person in that theater, including the 19 performers, musicians and production staff, who did not admire Tharp. Those new to her are scared of her, those used to her are over her, because they know that behind the barking lies a devotion to them, to the work — always, always the work — that is religious in its fervor. Yes, she is a control freak, a perfectionist, a zealot in forming a vision and stopping at nothing to see it

realized. But when it is realized, when her dances are good-better-best, flying off the stage like some biblical fire on a mountaintop, there is nothing in the world like them. Twenty-three years ago, Robert Joffrey said that Tharp’s work “didn’t look like anyone else’s.” It still doesn’t.

Tharp’s most recent success was the Broadway musical “Movin’ Out,” a danced narrative set to the music of Billy Joel, which won her a Tony Award for Best Choreography. The show ran for more than three years, and its touring company is still on the road. But Tharp is more than a Broadway baby; she’s an American artist of the first order. In her 41-year career, she has famously broken down the barriers between ballet and modern dance, fusing them into a genre specifically her own. She created 132 dances for her company, Twyla Tharp Dance, as well as for American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, the Royal Ballet, Martha Graham Company and others. This month, American Ballet Theater will perform her “Sinatra Suite” (1984) and “In the Upper Room” (1986), with music by Philip Glass. In November, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will perform “The Golden Section” (1983), and in February, the Bolshoi Ballet will also do “In the Upper Room,” its first work by an American female choreographer.

Like Jerome Robbins, her late friend and fellow perfectionist, Tharp has never mistaken provincialism for artistic purity, and she has pursued a wide range of commercial projects; her work was presented on Broadway as early as 1976. For the director Milos Forman, she choreographed the films “Hair,” “Amadeus” and “Ragtime,” and she won two Emmy Awards as choreographer and co-director of “Baryshnikov by Tharp.” She is the author of “Push Comes to Shove” (1992), an autobiography, and “The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life” (2003). She has received the National Medal of Arts, 17 honorary doctorates and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation award, more commonly known as the “genius” grant.

Maybe she’s always right, after all.

Standing in the audience near the lip of the stage, she watched the dancers warm up — some jumped on trampolines or twirled lassos while others performed a makeshift barre — and she looked even tinier than her 5 feet 1ð inches. Although it was Dylan who approached her, after the success of ’“Movin’ Out,” to make his music dance as she had Joel’s, the show is completely her invention. She listened to every song Dylan ever recorded and chose 25 around which to build a narrative. She conceived of a traveling circus run by an abusive father at odds with his artistic son; complicating things further is the woman who comes between them. Unlike in “Movin’ Out,” which literally split the stage in two, musicians playing on the top level, performers dancing beneath them, in “Times,” Tharp cast singers among her ensemble to fully integrate song and dance. The end result is a fable about growing up, love, death and acceptance, danced and sung to a Dylan hit parade, including “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” (“Everybody must get stoned”). It opens at the Brooks Atkinson Theater on Oct. 26.

As Tharp watched the cast members juggle, tumble and walk on stilts, she fooled incessantly with the beige snakeskin headband that is for her the kind of prop that cigarettes are for smokers. She pulled it on and off her cap of lank gray hair, managing never to disturb the round tortoise-shell glasses that make her look like a very earnest bug. She has a distinctive, clean smell, almost like pine. “No,” she said curtly. “Fig. Jo Malone Fig.”

Her dancer’s body, still limber and trim at 65, was mostly obscured under a loose blouse and pressed jeans. Her white New Balance sneakers are a size 6, quadruple E — her cartoonish bunions so grotesque they’re practically lyrical — and each time she clomped up the five steps to the stage to deliver a note in person, she walked stiffly. But if you put her sneakered foot in a lineup, you would immediately identify it as a dancer’s. Even in the blocky rubber encasement, there is a flex, an arch, some kind of angle that presents itself as eloquently as if she were barefoot.

“Not from the shoulder,” she said onstage to a gifted 19-year-old dancer, who had been knocking himself out all morning. This was not necessarily a good thing. As Tharp noted, “The fifth clown got a herniated disk,” and his replacement was to arrive the next day. To be a Tharp dancer is to master complex, intricate movements and steps that can defy gravity — in 1975 Baryshnikov told The Times: “It is very difficult to learn her steps.. . .One variation alone took me three weeks to learn, working a few hours every day” — but more than that, the idea is to stay safe, to last. She touched the middle of the boy’s back. “From here,” she said.

“O.K.,” he said eagerly. “I’ll work on it.”

“O.K.,” she answered. “But smartly.”

She came back down the stairs and watched him do another number with two other young men. Although it was late August, each dancer was swathed in layers of clothing; sweat pants, jackets, woolen leggings. The joy they took in the dancing was palpable, like children playing. Tharp herself danced professionally until she was 52, quite an achievement. But from the look on her face now, that didn’t seem to count. She eyed them, tasting it, missing it. Each jump was effortless, each ornate combination perfectly executed.

She took notes as she watched, her eyes fixed on the stage, the whisper of her pencil insistent on her pad. When the dancers finished, they looked eagerly for her praise.

She put down the pencil. “Better,” she said.

It should come as no surprise that Tharp’s penthouse apartment on Central Park West has no air-conditioning. If it did, it might be an appealing place to visit, especially in August. Instead, she had propped open a door to the terrace through which a wind blew hard enough to lift my pile of notes from the kitchen table and scatter them. Tharp’s face was pure innocence. “Is it too windy for you?” she asked solicitously as she closed it. Because even though the pretense was that we were going to spend three hours chatting intimately about her life and work, we both knew that that was not the goal. I had come here for Tharp to see me sweat.

The apartment is actually two joined together. She has lived in one half since 1972 and bought the other in 1992. On one side is an inviting kitchen — stone floors, hanging pots, cozy breakfast nook, though a quick peek inside the fridge showed it to be empty — and living room. On the other side is an office and her bedroom. But smack in the middle, where you would expect to find a dining room or den, is a dance studio. White walls, pristine floors, then two steps down to an adjoining area with a video camera where she records herself working.

“It’s maple,” Tharp said of the floor. “It’s the best floor, the floor Martha had. It used to be a bedroom and bathroom.” She gestured toward a floor-to-ceiling beam, the only interruption in the space. “It can be a tree, a tent pole, anything that distinguishes the space from a mere studio,” she said grandly. Small sigh. “And to take it down costs $40,000.”

Her living room is spare and elegant. Farm tools line the hallway floor that leads to it, many of them saved from her grandfather’s farm in Indiana, and inside, stacks of photographs and paintings lean against the walls. She gestured toward a photograph of Rudolf Nureyev’s bare foot on point, taken by Richard Avedon, Tharp’s close friend, who died in 2004. “He was supposed to have his full weight on the foot, but I don’t believe it,” she said dismissively.

Why isn’t anything hanging up? She half-smiled. “I had a very, very paranoiac mom,” she said. “We lived near the San Andreas Fault. So either earthquakes or fires were coming. We always had everything packed, ready to move at a moment’s notice.”

We settled in the breakfast nook in the former path of the wind tunnel, and she drank hot coffee from an enormous cup. I declined her kind offer to join her, sticking to a refrigerated bottle of water I had brought with me.

She was eager to talk about “The Times They Are A-Changin.” Her agreement with Dylan, as it was with Joel, was that she would go ahead and do what she does, then show him when it was finished.

“The narrative concept came from some very simple points,” she said. “Character-wise, because Dylan has had such a long career, you have the music of a young man, a maturing man and an older man. It seemed to me that I could most make sense of it by giving some of it to the younger and some of it to the older. Father-son.

“Early on, I realized two things about the piece,” she continued. “A setting for these characters, namely the circus and a mode of logic for the piece, being dreams. Because both Dylan and dance are nonliteral. Because of the father-son theme, I, being neither, thought about how to familiarize myself with this condition. I read a lot of Sam Shepard, ‘Buried Child’ in particular; Arthur Miller’s ‘All My Sons,’ ‘Death of a Salesman’; and Synge’s ‘Playboy of the Western World.’ The questions they raised of how the son is driven by the father and how the father is pursued by his own sense of responsibility, the thousands of issues between men who are fathers and sons, was very interesting for me. I’m not sure how much, ultimately, of it got in. But I think that it became clear, especially from Shepard’s work, that this content could be taken on without becoming terribly literal and fact-ridden. Because once you do that in dance, it is extremely difficult. I’m not sure it will ever work to have detail of that ilk because it becomes linguistic; it no longer is about the kind of gut and visceral brain where dance works best.

“Obviously a third character was needed, a female presence, to have some buffering. In all the father-son stories there’s always a female figure, usually a mother. This one is not a mother because the mother somehow can extend sympathy. And both of the men are behaving like idiots, is really how it works.”

Well, speaking of mothers.. . .

“I want to talk about the show,” she said sullenly.

Of course she does. Because like many great artists, Tharp didn’t happen by accident. As she so astutely writes in “The Creative Habit”: “Destiny, quite often, is a determined parent.” Her mother, Lecile, also known by her children as Lethal, was an Indiana-farm-girl-cum-thwarted-concert-pianist who named the eldest of her four children after Twila Thornburg, the 89th annual Muncie Fair Pig Princess. She changed the spelling to Twyla because she thought it would look better on a marquee. By the time her daughter was 2, she was studying piano. At 4, she was studying dance. When Tharp was 8, the family moved to Southern California, where her parents operated a drive-in theater. Tharp grew up working the concession stand and watching the movies without sound, learning to tell stories through action.

In addition to attending school, Tharp was driven regularly by her mother, within a hundred-mile radius of her home, for all sorts of lessons, including ballet, tap, flamenco, drums, elocution, baton, painting, viola, violin, French, German and shorthand. In school, if she failed to get an A, her mother, convinced the teacher was at fault, pulled her out. By the time Tharp graduated from high school, she had attended seven schools.

After a year and a half at Pomona College, Tharp went to Barnard, from which she graduated in 1963 as an art-history major, though she studied simultaneously at American Ballet Theater and with Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham. She became a dancer in Paul Taylor’s company, then started her own in 1965. Her first piece, “Tank Dive,” performed at Hunter College, was four minutes long. In 1966, her dance “Re-Moves” had its premiere at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. Clive Barnes wrote in The Times, “She is certainly not yet a good choreographer, yet she is bad in