Quotes, URL's, Links And References-by:older Femmes, Butches, Ftms, Mtfs, Queer, Etc. [Archive] - Page 6

sweetlady

05-22-2005, 03:05 PM

By Joe Jarrell http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?pagename=article&articleid=25284

Silicon Valley's image in the world of architecture is, shall we say, opaque. When considering the buildings that surround us, one is likely to conjure up visions of business parks, those unremarkable grids of reflective glass penning in teams of people who are themselves architects of information or computer components. Old-timers might recall Silicon Valley?s agricultural era, when the landscape from here to Gilroy was mottled with long buildings where farmers unloaded the sweet treasures of their orchards in the mists of dawn. But Silicon Valley also contains some true architectural gems of historical significance that are destined to be landmarks for future generations.

Two private homes are among Silicon Valley's most important architectural legacies. The first is Frank Lloyd Wright's Hanna House, nestled on a hill on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto. Built in 1936 as a "modest residence" for a Stanford professor and his family (although Wright's estimated budget ballooned from $15,000 to $37,000), it is a series of hexagon shapes clustered around a central fireplace. The hexagons repeat as a leitmotif in carpet and bathroom tiles, prompting the nickname "Honeycomb House." Noted by the American Institute of Architects as one of 17 landmarks that represent Wright?s significant contribution to American society, the Hanna House was really the first "outside the box" design for Wright, who craved to free himself from traditional rectangular structures. Greatly damaged by 1989's earthquake, it took nearly 10 years and $2 million to complete a seismic retrofit, but the house has been re-opened for public tours by reservation.

Another most unusual residence was built in the San Mateo Highlands in 1956, when that area was the rustic countryside. Called the X-100, it was merchant developer Joseph Eichler's showcase ?house of the future, replete with ultra-modern kitchen and a series of glass doors set in a steel-beam constructed frame. Sunset magazine's pictorial on the X-100 lured an estimated 150,000 viewers to the Highlands, and many of those ambling through its unique design - which included interior gardens glowing beneath a 32-foot skylight - were wowed enough to purchase one of Eichler's wooden home models in his nearby development. The X-100 is one of the masterpieces of Modernist architecture, which set out to cure America of its drastic housing shortage after World War II. The home is one of only two steel homes designed by Eichler, who built 11,000 homes in California. It's occasionally opened for tours; more information and a recent book on the project are available on www.eighlernetwork.com.

Visiting Filoli Center and Garden in Woodside is a great way to enjoy architecture in nature. Centered among Fioli?s radiant formal gardens is a uniquely Californian home designed in 1917 by noted San Francisco architect Willis Polk that blends Spanish and Stuart elements within a grand, Georgian-style mansion.

You can dine at Filoli's caf or enjoy a meal among the sweet Craftsman elements of MacArthur Park restaurant in Palo Alto. It's one of the few remaining buildings in the area designed by Julia Morgan, pioneering female architect and the first woman to graduate from the University of California School of Engineering. She designed nearly 700 buildings, including YMCAs up the Pacific Coast, but is best known for designing William Randolph Hearst's incredible mansion in San Simeon.

Downtown San Jose's ongoing cultural revival has architectural restoration and preservation at its core. The California Theatre, a 1927 former movie palace built by Weeks & Day Architects, enjoyed a grand re-opening last fall. (Total cost: $72 million.) The majestic theatre echoes with the arias of Opera San Jose and hosts major speakers, corporate events and classic films, as well. Across the street is another restored landmark building, the Hyatt Sainte Claire, with its fan-shaped, Art Deco entrance. One of just three Art Deco buildings remaining in San Jose, Vintage Towers (formerly the Medico-Dental Building) is a 1925 structure that officially re-opened in February. Its restoration was a collaboration of The First United Methodist Church and many others, and the property includes 57 low-income residences. An 1892 neoclassical mansion based on a building at Versailles, Le Petit Trianon survives as a frequent home to chamber music concerts.

Churches, majestic homes and theatres usually rank among a city's best-preserved architectural properties. Quiet moments under the resplendent stained glass windows in the multi-domed Cathedral Basilica of St. Joseph?s in San Jose will inspire thanks for the generations of workers who have maintained and restored the 1877 church to its current glory. Two of the region's oldest theatres, the 1904 Jose Theatre and Palo Alto's Art Deco-era Varsity Theatre, now house comedy and books, respectively. An agricultural landmark in Sunnyvale, the Historic Del Monte Building, moved from seed testing to hosting banquets, meetings, weddings and, appropriately, the local weekend farmers market.

These kinds of re-use are critical in saving valuable architectural artifacts, and The Preservation Action Council of San Jose is the region's primary watchdog. They encourage local governments, agencies, and developers to consider alternatives to demolition. Only one building remains from San Jose?s earliest history. Built in 1797, the Peralta Adobe stands as the last remnant of the area?s Spanish rule, when the area was named ?Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe.

Other historic buildings are scattered through the region, but Silicon Valley's architectural wonders aren't just old ones. The influx of wealth in the region over the last few decades has resulted in the creation of some great design projects. San Jose's Center for the Performing Arts (1965) was built by Taliesin West Architects, part of the atelier founded by Frank Lloyd Wright. The building's soft curves and graceful lines are testament to Wright's stylized, organic style, which was influenced by his visits to Japan in the early part of the 20th century. Bolder, modern buildings include the Children?s Discovery Museum (1980) and The Tech Museum of Innovation (1998), two large-scale works in San Jose designed by noted Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta in partnerships with The Steinberg Group. In both structures, Legorreta intersects large shapes to play with light and space and uses large areas of color to infuse the atmosphere with energy.

Some buildings are less about space and more about creating opportunities for communities to collaborate. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Library (2003), the largest new library west of the Mississippi River, is a unique joint project of San Jose State University and the City of San Jose, who pooled resources to create a state-of-the-art learning facility for students and citizens. Under construction at Stanford is their new "d.school" a collaborative learning environment that applies design knowledge among students across multiple disciplines to address and solve larger human problems in more innovative ways. It's these sorts of creative architecture projects - reconstructing the way we think ? that will likely redefine the future of Silicon Valley.

Of course, the grandeur of all these buildings may hold no match for the garage at 367 Addison Ave.in Palo Alto. A little building that housed a big idea, it's the birthplace of Hewlett-Packard. Perhaps it's wise to remember that the tallest temples crumble, but the structures that truly bind us - our personal relationships - are also the ones that support us more than anything made of brick and mortar.

****************************
The National Register Beckons: Riding the Wave of Opportunity that Lines an Eichler Bid for 'Historic' Recognition
From the pages of the Eichler Network newsletter
By Suzan Lindstrom

The Eichlers are in perfect planetary alignment to become distinguished as official historic neighborhoods.

Hundreds of thousands of single-family homes sprung up after World War II in subdivisions across the country. And as they are nearing that magic 50-year mark for eligibility on the National Register of Historic Places, a wave of activity to safeguard suburban developments is rousing them to "go historic."

A documented groundswell is beginning to take hold among preservationists and modernist-architecture enthusiasts to protect these and other so-called relics of the recent past. "No neighborhood stays good by default ... we are squandering a nonrenewable resource," pointed out Richard Longstreth, president of the Society of Architectural Historians, in a recent Newsweek article detailing the national movement. The only hope, he stressed, is preservation. "If we can do it with wetlands," Longstreth concluded, "we can certainly do it with our own habitat."

Nowhere is the struggle for protecting suburban neighborhoods more evident than in the Eichler communities of Northern California, and in particular those in Silicon Valley. Bay Area land values have climbed through the roof, bringing with them the ills of suburban sprawl -- demolitions, haphazard development of "monster" homes, and out-of-sync remodels -- that tear at the fabric and character of long-established neighborhoods; upsetting their look, feel, privacy, and sense of community.

The historic designation that ushered in the groundswell came from Arapahoe Acres, a modernist subdivision of 124 homes situated in Englewood, Colorado, a township near Denver. (See feature on Arapahoe Acres in the Fall 2000 issue of the Eichler Network newsletter.) In November 1998, Arapahoe Acres became the country's first post-World War II subdivision to become a nationally historic district.

"We are using the National Register listing as a marketing tool to make people understand that these homes are unique," explained Diane Wray, the Arapahoe Acres homeowner who guided their application. "It's like buying a production line consumer piece of plastic as opposed to buying a beautifully handmade jewel box."

Hollin Hills, a much larger modernist subdivision of 458 homes in Alexandria, Virginia is following in Arapahoe Acres' footsteps. Their community recently published Hollin Hills: Community of Vision, a 50th anniversary book that chronicles the development's history and supports the application for the National Historic Register that they are now preparing. Hollin Hills' motivation for going historic is a little different. They mainly want to protect their borders from encroachment and governmental intrusion -- for example, street widenings, vacated right-of-ways, and flood plane mitigation.

"It provides the cache for us to go and whine to the state if something they are proposing has an adverse effect on us," stated John Burns, a Hollin Hills resident and an architect with the National Parks Service who is leading their drive for national recognition. "We can go and say 'Well, look, you know we are historic. You just can't push us around like any other subdivision.'"

The National Parks Service, which manages the National Historic Register of Historic Places, has recognized the importance of preserving these suburban homes. It is presently redrafting its guidelines to include sections on the contemporary suburbs and the efforts of speculative merchant builders like Joseph Eichler, taking into account related multiple property contexts.

"Old requirements were that each and every house had to have a full sheet of deed research put into an application," explained Linda McClelland, an historian with the NPS. "That was almost a necessity in older historic districts because buildings were built at different times, and had different histories and builders."

"But when you get into the merchant builder suburbs, we are talking about a great big district built around the same period of time with similar construction."

The NPS is streamlining its suburban requirements in a new bulletin, to be released by the end of year for public comment, that will emphasize models rather than individual properties. At the same time, the State of California is updating its Comprehensive Statewide Historic Preservation Plan to include, by its own description, "suburban post World War II and Cold War-era structures."

But what about the Eichlers? If an Eichler community chose to go historic, its application representatives could pursue designation at the local, state, or national level. However, each designation has different benefits, requirements, and approaches.

A local designation offers the most protection for historic homes in terms of ordinances that limit remodeling and maintenance of exteriors; and it can throw a kink into the works on demolitions, with some cities either outlawing them completely or causing long delays. However, each city's historic ordinance is different. San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Redwood City, all of which contain Eichler communities, reportedly have historic ordinances in place; while others, such as Menlo Park, Atherton, and Palo Alto, have little or no built-in protection at all.

The flipside to a strong local ordinance, however, is that it can also raise the ire of certain neighbors, some of whom view such measures as unreasonable intrusions on their lives and rights. Palo Alto recently went through a rough battle when it decided to stiffen its outdated 1979 historic ordinance. Approved by the city in 1999, a later referendum barely overturned the ordinance in March of 2000 by 937 of the more than 19,000 votes cast. According to media accounts, it was a heated campaign marred by alleged underhanded tactics -- voting signs suddenly disappeared from front lawns; and misinformation to confuse voters was disseminated, according to reports, by a telemarketing firm hired by the opposition.

Carroll Rankin, a longtime resident of the Greenmeadow Eichler subdivision in Palo Alto and a member of a group of residents who had been eyeing the new ordinance to support an application for the Historic Register, showed his disgust at the time when he stated, "We've lost the war. It's all over. The barbarians are at the gates, and they are armed with the most formidable weapons you can have - ignorance, fear, and misinformation."

Now Palo Alto is left with little recourse, other than voluntary compliance, during a time when demolitions are on the rise at an alarming rate. More specifically, claims Dennis Backlund, an historic preservation specialist with the Palo Alto Planning Department, 70 demolition permits were issued in Palo Alto during 1999; and an additional 79 were already on the books through mid-August of this year. "And for the first time," he confirmed, "demolition requests are exceeding major remodels."

Another avenue for going historic is through the State of California, a maneuver that is less restrictive than the local route, and slightly easier to qualify for than its national counterpart.

According to Cynthia Howse, a state historian with the Office of Historic Preservation, California administers four programs: the National Register, through which the state plays point person processing National Register applications; the Landmark Program, which recognizes the state's more historically significant structures (like Sutter's Fort, for example); Point of Interest, a mini-landmark program, which recognizes significant local properties; and the California Register, a catchall category.

"The primary difference between the California Register and the National Register," explained Howse, "is that there is a lesser integrity requirement. So you might want to file in California if your property has some significance, but not enough to qualify for the National Register."

However, as most experts agree, it's going historic at the federal level, the direction of both Arapahoe Acres and Hollin Hills, that "gives the most bang for the buck." A national application is largely a symbolic designation that provides no restrictions, unless public funds are involved; carries enormous prestige; and seems to possess a number of benefits as well. It also sidesteps the political infighting of a local ordinance; and if a property or neighborhood qualifies nationally, they automatically receive state designation as well.

Possible economic benefits for Eichlers that go historic are increased property value; regulatory protection from the California Environmental Quality Act and preservation easements; tax savings from the Mills Act, the Historic Homeownership Assistance Act (presently before Congress), and the Federal Historic Preservation Tax Incentives program; code relief through the flexible California Historic Building Codes that govern renovations of historic properties; and finally, financial aid is plentiful for historic properties in the form of loans and grants.

Two Eichler subdivisions have taken strides toward historic designation -- Greenmeadow in Palo Alto and Balboa Highlands, a southern California subdivision in Granada Hills. While Greenmeadow, with the backing of Palo Alto Stanford Heritage (P.A.S.T.), has been investigating historic status for years, Granada Hills' campaign has stepped forward only recently.

Mary-Margaret Stratton, a new Eichler owner and an active Granada Hills neighborhood organizer, has proposed to her community that Balboa Highlands become an Historic Property Overlay Zone under the City of Los Angeles. She also has organized a grand tour of the retro neighborhood for an upcoming National Trust Conference in November.

"HPOZs provide important intangible benefits to neighborhoods that can be at least as valuable as the economic benefits," stated Stratton in her announcement to fellow owners. "HPOZs pull neighbors together, and build a sense of community that helps the neighborhood constructively address local concerns, qualify of life, and safety issues."

While not all of the Eichlers will qualify for historic designation -- nominations require significance, integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association -- it appears likely that every Eichler owner could benefit. There are intrinsic values to be derived from close association with historic districts, including a raised level of awareness of architectural preservation, more clout in dealing with governmental entities, and increased respect for Eichlers from the public at large.

According to the National Park Service, Joseph Eichler's 11,000 homes on the West Coast represent what is likely the largest modernist development in the United States -- all the more reason to ride the current wave of opportunity to prominence, and thereby ensure the preservation of the Eichlers for future generations.

"Certainly there's no question that the Eichler subdivisions, and Eichler [himself], are important," offered the NPS's McClelland. "...I think there will be the coming of an age where people will look at them as historic, and they certainly have high artistic value in terms of architectural design."

http://www.eichlernetwork.com/Quest_1.html

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(k) (k) 's,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-22-2005, 03:06 PM

Eichler-designed homes are Modernism at its best

By Patricia Leigh Brown
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

December 10, 2000

PALO ALTO -- About 50 years ago, the future touched down here in the
form of a house and decided to make itself comfortable.

Back in the 1950s -- before they became the Bay Area' s hot
collectibles -- the architect-designed houses that Joseph Eichler built brought
affordable Modernism to the masses. The houses' flat roofs, floor-to-ceiling
windows, covered carports and toasty radiant heating embodied the constant
search for happier, better living: postwar California optimism served sunny-side up on a concrete slab.

Even Joseph Eichler, a retired butter-and-egg salesman who was inspired to
begin a new career as a home builder after living briefly in a Frank Lloyd
Wright house, could not have foreseen the Eichler lifestyle, circa 2000, in
which moneyed young techies fight over original Zolotone kitchen cabinets,
and untouched Eichlers, built as low-cost starter homes, can go for $1.5
million.

"What we do in Silicon Valley is invent the future," said Christopher Dow, 35,
a software designer who recently moved with his wife, Leslie, a molecular
biologist, and three children into a frozen-in-time Eichler house here.
"Unfortunately, you have to move into a 40-year-old house to be modern,
because they don' t build modern anymore."

Dow, who remembers watching the first moon landing from his grandmother's Eames lounge chair, is one of the new breed who have to have an Eichler.
He and his wife were overjoyed to find a 1970s original, the dark brown
carpet bearing the distinct silhouette of a water bed. It was perfect.
"We wanted something that nobody had ruined yet," Dow said.

The couple restored much of the cathedral-ceilinged house themselves,
decorating it with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and other antiques and
mixing Ikea with items off eBay. Orchids now sprout in the atrium, where the
family dines alfresco beside an orange globe-shaped barbecue.

Network news

The Dows belong to the Eichler Network, an Ann Landers-style support
group with a newsletter and a Web site (http://www.eichlernetwork.com)
for the 11,000 or so owners of Bay Area Eichlers.

The network -- where it' s all Eichler, all the time -- counsels a new
generation on taking care of quirky, aging Modernist houses, from
ailing heat piping below the floor and taut, often-leaky roofs to kitchen cabinetry suspended from the ceiling and known affectionately as "the flying coffin."

Maintenance of Bay Area Eichlers is a $55 million-a-year cottage
industry, said Marty Arbunich, the network' s director. While the network
provides tips on atrium gardening and recipes for Eichler-era appetizers such as minimeatballs, it has a bigger mission. Recently, a call went out to Eichler
homeowners in little-changed tracts built 45 years ago to consider applying
for National Historic District status.

Another Northern California rallying point emanates from Eichler Homes
Realty (http://www.eichlerhomes.com), the Saratoga firm of Jerry Ditto.
He co-wrote "Eichler Homes: Design for Living" (Chronicle, 1996), the
first book on these Modernist houses, which features photographs by
Marvin Wax, and publishes a newsletter called "Eichler Insights."

Southern scene

Eichler houses are much less common in Southern California, with most
of them to be found in the city of Orange and the San Fernando Valley.
Stephanie Raffel of Oaktree Realtors in Orange specializes in Eichlers
and operates a Website (http://eichlersocal.com) with the latest listings
of houses for sale or rent, home improvement information and links to other
Eichler-oriented Web sites.

Raffel, who has at least 50 clients ready to jump at an Eichler house,
said it' s not uncommon for a home to sell within 24 hours of coming on the
market. Many Eichler fans willingly watch and wait a couple of years to get
their preferred floor plan, sun-and-street orientation and tract (there are
three Eichler neighborhoods in Orange), Raffel said. When one devotee learned that a particular house she coveted had sold shortly before she
arrived to see it, she ran off in tears.

In San Diego County, A. Quincy Jones, an architect who had worked for
Eichler in Northern California, designed homes cut from the same cloth,
including a tract in Oceanside. Others in San Diego picked up on Eichler
ideas and built knockoffs, so the Eichler name doesn't resonate in San Diego the same way it does up north.

Raffel said Northern Californians who are mobile are overjoyed to find
their dream houses can be had in Orange for roughly $300,0000, a small
fraction of the prices being paid in the Bay Area. And they are fiercely
protective of these icons of carefree suburban living.

The Eichler Network is becoming a political force, as the specter of
monster houses dwarfing and even replacing unpretentious post-and-beam Eichler pavilions grows.

The most crushing blow was the recent demolition of a custom Eichler in
Atherton, a Silicon Valley town that is so exclusive the new owners paid $6
million for the privilege. Purists want to protect their Eichlers from being
replaced by towering pink stucco palaces or ignobly transformed into
haciendas.

The city of Cupertino recently adopted the R1-e rule (the "e" stands for
Eichler), requiring a design review for any second-story addition to an
Eichler.

"We wanted to keep the neighborhood as Eichlerlish as possible," said
Nancy Burnett, 69, who watched her 1961 dream house in the Fairgrove
subdivision being built from the slab up. It was the house she had yearned for in Sunset magazine. "Before I' d ever seen one, I knew I wanted to live in an
Eichler," she said.

The houses today are poignant snapshots of an era in which progressive
design and planning were placed within reach of the average homeowner.
"They spanned a breach rarely crossed between ordinary suburban life and
avant-garde culture," said Paul Adamson, an architectural historian.
"Their ability to cross over is what makes them so compelling."

Committed

Joseph Eichler, a man fond of cigars and colorful language, took modern
architecture -- the realm of custom clients -- and turned it into a merchant
builder' s product. His experience of living in one of Frank Lloyd Wright' s
small, economic Usonian houses during World War II inspired him to become
a home builder committed to high design for ordinary people (including
members of minorities, whom he welcomed).

Although he started with generic designs, Eichler soon sought to
distinguish his products in the booming postwar market, hiring top-flight Modernist architects like Jones, his partner Frederick Emmons, and Robert Anshen.

In now nostalgic-feeling Greenmeadow, built in Palo Alto in 1954, and
Upper Lucas Valley, which went up in Marin County between 1961 and 1966 -- both neighborhoods still revolve around their own schools, swimming
pools and community centers -- he broke away from the typical subdivision
Cape Cod saltbox to forge a modern California style knit unassumingly into
the landscape. ("no meaningless brick," promised the sales literature, "no
dinky chimney.")

To original owners like Margaret and Jim Taylor -- she is now 77, he is
81 -- it wasn' t a matter so much of style as the $3,500 down payment. "We
thought it was quite a bit of room for the money," Taylor recalled. "He
was more than a contractor and builder. He had a vision of how he wanted
people to live."

Somewhat nondescript on the outside, the houses' real innovations were
in inner space: glass walls facing private outdoor living areas, including
atriums, two bathrooms (with doors to the outside so that dirty children could
be plunked directly into the bath), clerestories and an open kitchen (to allow "the lady of the house to share the fun and companionship of the family and
friends as she works").

***
Modern but homey

In model homes, Eames and Bertoia furniture mingled with hanging
salamis and the aroma of roasting turkey, making modernism homey. "We weren' t selling, we were educating," said Catherine Munson, a Marin County real estate broker who has sold some 3,000 Eichlers since 1958.

She began as an Eichler hostess, demonstrating the pull-out swivel tables and
giving prospective buyers' children chocolate milk.

Today, Eichler homeowners are divided among purists, realists willing
to make some changes and people bent on turning their Eichlers into
anything but. Nothing torments purists more than an Eichler decked out with
Victorian cut-glass doors, lace curtains and picket fences.

"Would anyone seriously consider putting carriage lamps and running
boards on a sleek convertible?" asked K.C. Marcinik, an architect who, with
her husband, Mark, specializes in saving Eichlers.

New owners like Chris and Kristen Loew are determined to right past
wrongs. Three years ago, Chris Loew, 37, an industrial designer, and
Kristen Loew, 33, a graphic designer, purchased a rare, all-steel prototype
Eichler here designed by the progressive Modernist architect Raphael Soriano.

Shingles had been applied to the exterior, a la ' 70s hippie house, and
an ungainly second story had been added. "From the outside it looked like
a bat cave," Chris Loew recalled. "I was about to storm in to tell the owners
how they had ruined it, but then I walked in and was speechless."

What he saw was an interior space with "unbreakable logic," a Modernist
gem with steel pillars and fluted ceiling, a glass wall overlooking a
courtyard and a concrete block fireplace with an exposed cylindrical flue.

The couple plan to remove the shingles and rescue the kitchen, once
open but now a dark galley ("completely deviant," in Loew' s words).

The Marciniks advocate the creation of hyper-Eichlers, much like their
own house in Greenmeadow. Replacing the original subdued hues, which bore names like Dawn Grey, Thatch and Bark, they painted each area a vibrant color, with contrasting white stripes in the grooves between the redwood wall planks.

At their own house and in houses for clients like Kurt Taylor, 43, and
B.J. Olson, 48, the Marciniks preserve the spirit but not the letter of
Eichlers, reconfiguring kitchens and replacing Philippine mahogany or redwood cabinetry with zoomy concrete counters and luxurious African wood. "When I go into other people' s houses that aren't Eichlers," Taylor observed, "I' m struck by how dark most houses are."

The blessing and curse of Eichlers is that many happen to sit in the
heart of Silicon Valley, where tastes among the newly rich often run to freshly
built Tuscan villas and medieval chateaus.

With their single stories and simple roofs and entrances, Eichlers are
particularly vulnerable to the tear-down syndrome. Some neighborhoods
have long-standing architectural controls, and five Eichler neighborhoods
here prohibit second-story additions. Other communities, like Balboa
Highlands in the San Fernando Valley, are considering similar rules.

Not everyone approves of such newfound glorification. "Eichler had
integrity, but his houses were indifferent to the street," said Daniel Solomon, an architect and professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
"They are single-use, low-density houses oriented toward the car. They shared many characteristics of suburban sprawl but gave it a mantle of respectability."

Even those who have rediscovered them find a certain irony in rhapsodizing about a subdivision. "If you had told me 15 years ago that I' d be living here,
I would have told you you were crazy," said Peter Schlosser, a
40-year-old architect.

He and his wife, Alison Hart Schlosser (also an architect), and children live
among rolling golden hills in Upper Lucas Valley, where strict architectural
controls judge everything from exterior paint colors to rooftop air conditioners
(prohibited). "But Eichlers are unique," he continued. "They have a common
flavor but aren' t cookie cutter."

High in the hills of San Mateo, Anna-Lise Pedersen, 77, owner of the
X-100, a radical all-steel house built as an Eichler promotion in 1956, is on
intimate terms with the future. She tends it daily, whenever she waters her
seven indoor flower beds, or steps onto the pebbled circle-patterned floors,
or parts the leaves of her Formica dining table to reveal two pristine Thermador burners perfect for grilling steak.

She hangs her laundry outside among the primrose-colored steel beams
and takes evening showers as the moonlight peers through the clerestories.
"I wouldn' t change a thing," she said of the house. "You feel like you're all
alone in a big world."

Union-Tribune architecture critic Ann Jarmusch contributed to this
report.

http://www.eichlersocal.com/NewsandArticles/News5.htm

(l) (l) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-22-2005, 03:08 PM

May 15, 2005
Saving the Tract House

By KARRIE JACOBS New York Times Magazine

Frank Nolan, casually dressed in an olive drab polo shirt and blue jeans, occupied a white leather Brno chair set off by the room's gleaming Philippine-mahogany paneling. ''One never wants to come across as a design snob, especially as it pertains to one's neighbors,'' Nolan said gingerly. ''We know that having a good neighbor is so much more important than what color they paint their house or how they choose to landscape. But there just seems to be a great disparity between the potential that we see in this neighborhood and then what you actually do see when you drive down the street.''

Nolan's house was one of 120 built in the 1960's by the developer Joseph Eichler in a San Fernando Valley subdivision called Balboa Highlands, 26 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Nolan and some of his neighbors want to have their neighborhood designated a historic district, which won't quite create an enclave of unsullied 60's modernity but will keep the threat of McMansions at bay.

It may also confuse some of the neighbors, who may not have thought that buying a 60's tract house would entail accepting a small role in Modernist architectural history. Stuart Frolick, who bought a house that had been radically altered by a previous owner, an engineer, told me, unapologetically, that he can't afford to return the house to its original state. Besides, his wife isn't into Modernism. ''She would like to gingerbread the place up,'' Frolick said, ''and I resist.''

"We clocked over 500 people coming through our neighborhood,'' Adriene Biondo said recently. ''We had vintage cars cruising up and down the street that day. People were tuned into the oldies station. It was a really exciting moment.'' Biondo, a short, roundish 49-year-old with the breathy voice of a chanteuse, was talking about the 2000 ''How Modern Was My Valley'' tour as if it happened yesterday. Sponsored by the Modern Committee, which she heads -- a furiously active branch of the city's dominant preservation organization, the Los Angeles Conservancy -- the tour brought a flood of tourists into the neighborhood. It also focused attention on the architecture about which Biondo is most passionate: the homes, including her own, built by Eichler.

Eichler, who was responsible for the construction of some 11,000 homes, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area, was the last and most successful of a breed now largely extinct. In the years after World War II, commercial home-builders all over the country, but particularly in the West, began experimenting with new methods of construction and new styles of architecture. Abraham Levitt and his sons applied mass-production methods to building thousands of tiny ranch houses and Cape Cods on Long Island. Other developers, trying to remake the American dream, combined ideas from European Modernists -- simple geometric forms, functionalism, flexible space -- with a New World elan.

Balboa Highlands was constructed as a solidly middle-class neighborhood -- the houses typically had several bedrooms and measured 2,200 square feet -- at a time when some California home-builders believed that buyers craved the drama of L.A.'s experimental Case Study houses, built between 1945 and 1966 under the direction of Arts and Architecture magazine. The most famous Case Study house -- the one made into an icon by Julius Shulman's photo of two young women, seated in an all-glass living room, who appear to be floating above the Hollywood Hills -- was built in 1960 on a budget of $13,500, roughly the price of a standard tract house at the time.

Eichler worked with a handful of prominent California architects, including A. Quincy Jones, who designed a Case Study house. But Eichler's success perhaps owed less to the architects he employed than to his crack publicity photographer, Ernie Braun, who concocted and promoted a sophisticated but casual lifestyle. Braun's photos of the Eichler houses showed families dividing their time between sunny rooms and perfectly groomed backyards, the adults seemingly as likely to skip rope as the children. What Eichler sold from 1948 until the late 1960's wasn't architecture but happiness.

Each housing development Eichler erected represented a variation on the same program for happy family life. In the Balboa Highlands tract, the clean wood-and-concrete-block facades were designed to conceal the interior from the street. But inside, a whole world opens up: behind the front door of each house is an open-air atrium. Frank Nolan and his partner, Jaime Flores, have transformed theirs into a Zen garden carpeted with smooth round stones. A door from the atrium leads into the house itself, and it is easy to grasp the appeal of Eichler's plan: light-flooded rooms, exposed beams that support an elegantly simple roof and floor-to-ceiling glass intended to further the notion that interior and exterior are one and the same, a central tenet of California Modernism. Out back are a verdant yard with a swimming pool, a giant bronze Buddha and, in the distance, the Santa Susanna Mountains, green from months of rain.

Nolan, an elementary-school teacher, and Flores, a graphic designer, so impeccably restored their house that it probably looks better than it did when it was completed in 1964. Biondo's house is equally well preserved, painted pistachio green to match her 1956 Oldsmobile Rocket. But just down the block are Eichlers that have been altered to suit a more conventional suburban aesthetic. At one address, Eichler's A-frame model, distinguished by an unenclosed peaked roof over the front door -- the architects intended it as a car port -- is covered with a new red-clay tile roof and a line of classical columns out front. Another house has been stuccoed over, the roof turned into a giant gable, like the prop from a lesson about the properties of isosceles triangles.

While pitched preservation battles in most cities are usually fought over beloved public buildings, in Southern California they often center on private homes -- especially when those homes were designed by California's great midcentury architects, like Richard Neutra, R.M. Schindler and John Lautner. These battles tend to get thorny, pitting as they do the sacred rights of the property owner against equally deep-seated, and often rather abstract, notions of historic value. The city's Historic Preservation Overlay Zone ordinance, which Biondo and Nolan said they hope will protect their neighborhood, tries to split the difference by rewarding, but not demanding, compliance from homeowners.

Enacted in 1979, the H.P.O.Z. ordinance makes it difficult, though not impossible, to alter the facade of a house that is considered a ''contributing'' part of a protected neighborhood; that is, one that preserves the building's original features. But it also allows for the continued existence of ''noncontributing'' buildings in the neighborhood. The owners of ''renovated'' houses don't have to change a thing if they don't want to -- but they get a break on their property taxes if they do.

There are currently 20 H.P.O.Z.'s in Los Angeles County. Some are clusters of Victorian houses or bungalows. Currently, just one consists of postwar architecture: Mar Vista, a tract of 52 modest, rectangular houses just east of Venice Beach, became an H.P.O.Z. in 2003. A 1948 collaboration between the populist architect Gregory Ain and the landscape designer Garrett Eckbo, Mar Vista is a lush oasis of 1,100-square-foot homes laid out as efficiently as cabin cruisers. The little houses originally sold for $12,000 and now fetch as much as $950,000.

The movement to preserve and restore Eichler homes has been going strong for at least a decade in Northern California, nurtured by a San Francisco-based organization known as the Eichler Network. But nationally, postwar tract houses are just beginning to receive the attention of the preservation community. As Ken Bernstein, director of preservation for the Los Angeles Conservancy, pointed out, ''Only about 15 percent of Los Angeles has ever been looked at.'' The Getty Conservation Institute, he said, is now working with the city planning department to survey the remaining 85 percent.

Bernstein said he strongly believes that the conservancy should back the H.P.O.Z. effort in Balboa Highlands, as it did in Mar Vista. ''Both were examples of really bringing the tenets of Modernism to the masses in an affordable manner,'' he explained. ''And both also are uniquely intact, surprisingly intact, given the vagaries of the real-estate market here in L.A. and the pressures that you see upon individual neighborhoods. And we also felt that if steps weren't taken soon, they could become more significantly threatened in the future.''

Some of the early Eichler-home buyers are still in Balboa Highlands. Edgar Law, who earned his degree in architecture, bought his house in 1969 because, he said, ''it has principles that I believe in.'' He was referring to the openness of the design, though he and his wife, Fay, as African-Americans, also benefited from one of Eichler's political principles: he had a nondiscrimination policy, which was not the norm in 1960's suburban Los Angeles. John Hora, a cinematographer, bought his house in 1966. ''It was so weird-looking that I wasn't going to get out of the car,'' he told me, taking a break from his yard work. ''But I walked in, and I was converted.''

Balboa Highlands was one of the last projects Eichler completed before his foray into urban development in the mid-60's nearly bankrupted him. Within a decade, the neighborhood he had envisioned had begun to change. The Valley's citrus groves gave way to ever more houses. By the 80's, the real money was in newer homes, mostly Mediterranean and Spanish models.

The buyers for Eichlers by this time were mainly immigrants from the Middle East, Asia or Russia. They had probably never seen those Ernie Braun photos, and they dealt with the idiosyncratic look of the Eichlers by hiding it. They wanted their houses to look like other houses in the area: stuccoed and columned.

Nolan and Flores, who bought their home in 1993, were among the first of an influx of design connoisseurs. They were also the ones, together with Biondo, who circulated the petition to have their neighborhood considered for H.P.O.Z. status. Most people, Flores said, even those whose homes had been significantly altered, ''were O.K. with the idea of the H.P.O.Z. as long as it was to improve the neighborhood.'' Hoping that some owners of extreme renovations would try to undo the damage, he tried to stress that ''contributing'' houses in the H.P.O.Z. would receive tax benefits. One couple, Flores recalled, didn't like the implication that houses in the original style were somehow more important: ''They were like, 'Why?''' But for many, the tax breaks just aren't enough of an incentive to pay for restoration.

Though roughly two-thirds of homeowners eventually signed the petition, the H.P.O.Z. status of Balboa Highlands remains uncertain. The ''historic resources survey,'' conducted for the city's Cultural Heritage Commission to determine how many of the houses in the district will be considered ''contributing,'' can't be done because the office in charge of the surveys recently lost its financing. And while Biondo holds out hope that the H.P.O.Z. designation is not far off, she is careful to modulate her zeal. ''I don't want people to feel pressured to do anything,'' she emphasized.

Economics may apply the pressure for her. Houses in Balboa Highlands were originally priced at $30,000. In 1966, Hora paid $42,000 for his, which, he noted, was not cheap. In 1993, Nolan and Flores paid $260,000. It was a pretty good deal. The Eichler cachet, combined with prevailing real-estate trends, has driven prices up to more than $600,000 for a fixer-upper and more than $700,000 for a house that has been well restored.

The H.P.O.Z. is meant to appeal to and attract a new type of homeowner. The designation doesn't just protect the look of the neighborhood; it's also an advertisement. ''I think bringing in like-minded people is really key,'' Biondo explained. ''That's been the change over the last eight years, wouldn't you say?''

''Oh, yes,'' Nolan agreed.

Biondo continued, ''We try very hard, when the house goes on the market. . . . ''

''The word goes out,'' Nolan said.

''It goes out,'' Biondo affirmed, nodding her head decisively.

Karrie Jacobs, an architecture and design critic, is writing a book about housing in America.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/magazine/15TRACT.html?pagewanted=print

({) (}) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-22-2005, 03:11 PM

A Homecoming, a Promised Land, a Long-Distance Call Cut Short
-- The Relics of Joseph Eichler's Derailed East Coast Fling of 1962

From the pages of the Eichler Network newsletter
By Marty Arbunich

Outside of family and friends, no one seemed to take notice when Joseph and Norma Goodman's real estate transaction cleared escrow in December. After all, could there really be anything unusual about the sale of a 40-year-old Eichler home by a pair of elderly owners looking to downsize in retirement?

We think so. Fully realized, the Goodmans' move is the kind of news that can send shock waves from coast to coast -- because the Eichler property in question stands in New York state, 3,000 miles from the nearest Eichler subdivision; and the Goodmans themselves are the last original owners of one of only a handful of Eichler homes ever built outside of California.

A myth has come to life; there are Eichlers -- all three of them -- in the heart of New York state. Built by Eichler Homes as the first phase of a planned 216-home subdivision, the three are now relics of the company's aborted 1962 expansion east, in a town once known as Spring Valley, 45 minutes north of New York City.

"In the beginning, people either loved our house or hated it," recalled Norma Goodman, whose recent departure with husband Joseph to an apartment a few miles away concluded the couple's 37 years together under the Eichler roof. "They didn't know what to think of this kind of place."

"Eichler brought a very strange reputation with him in 1962, in that people hadn't seen these kinds of houses here before. It was rather strange," added Joseph Goodman, a retired research microbiologist. "I don't think folks were intrigued by the houses. In fact, they were put off by them. There didn't seem to be any concern at all about what Eichler had done on the West Coast. It didn't make much of a dent at all."

Reinforcing Goodman's claim, the New York Herald Tribune's six-column-wide banner headline that summer -- "California Modern Invades Rockland County" -- seemed to signal an alien takeover; on the other hand, the exposé that followed took a supportive stand on builder Joe Eichler's proposed Dexter Park development, hoping that his arrival would positively affect, what the article termed, a "wasteland" of Colonial and contemporary homebuilding in the New York area.

"It is commonplace," the account boldly asserted, "that New York, sophisticated center of art, business, and culture, suffers from unimaginative home design that was architecturally and technologically obsolete decades ago...If anyone is to break the stolid conservatism of house designs in developments here, it is hard to think of better reformers than the Eichlers from California."

Presumably catering to the growing numbers of "artistic" and young professionals looking to exit the city over rising costs, overcrowdedness, and escalating strife, Eichler secured 140 acres in Rockland County, whose undeveloped, wooded terrain was a natural complement for his homes' indoor-outdoor persona. "There was nothing but woods all around, just acres of pristine woods," recalled Carmine Caponigro, another of the three original owners. "When we first moved there, we used to hear guns go off, because hunting was still allowed in the neighborhood. But our home's design sure fit the topography. It melded with the trees, and was beautiful."

Joe Eichler's return to New York, the roots of his raising, was met with mixed reception in the Bay Area, where a shift towards high-risk urban construction, including high-rise buildings, had become the critical focus of his company's West Coast operation.

"We thought it was really exciting that Eichler was expanding into the New York market," recalled Kinji Imada, then a young architect in the office of Claude Oakland, whose firm, together with Jones and Emmons, provided the designs for the first East Coast residences. "It was at a time of great growth for the company, and there was a great deal of optimism."

Maintaining that spirit of optimism among his own staff, even in trying times, was a strong suit of Joe Eichler. However, he had his in-house challengers; and Ned Eichler, Joe's son and, in the early '60s, executive vice-president of the company, was perhaps the most vocal. Ned was often opposed to projects that diverted Eichler Homes from the role that built it into a profitable, well-oiled machine: residential construction based around its original Peninsula hub. He saw the East Coast move, not unlike the high-rise operation and even the company's earlier Southern California departure, as simply another distraction.

While his business face in the press remained positive about New York, behind the scenes, recalled Ned, "We had some big fights about this kind of stuff for a couple years, but Joe didn't want to hear about it. To be honest, from a management point of view, New York really wasn't high on my list of things I was concerned about, and I knew it wouldn't go anywhere. It was a doomed idea from the beginning. It was always a semi-joke around the company. Everybody rolled their eyes about it."

Contributing to its fate was a string of bureaucratic snafus with the township's building department. One scrape developed over the proper course for sewage disposal, another over acceptable acreage per lot. "There was a lot of opposition to him," pointed out Joseph Goodman. "The town gave him a hard time, particularly on the zoning." In addition, the company's building superintendent, according to Ned Eichler, repeatedly was turned down for permits.

"We'd put the plans in, and they'd give us some critique that didn't make sense -- or they just wouldn't do anything," claimed Eichler. "So I asked the developer that sold us the lots: 'Do you think these guys are asking you to pay them?' We had never done that. Maybe a case of whiskey, or something like that. And the developer said, 'Of course they want you to pay them! That's standard practice here -- it's no secret anywhere.'"

Even after creatively restructuring the lot purchase price in a new contract with the developer, Eichler Homes still was unable to convert their plan into an efficient operation. Beginning in early 1962, they spent six months -- historically their houses were getting built in 45 days -- erecting the first three homes.

As delays piled up, Eichler Homes ultimately decided to pull out. Nonetheless, in the press Ned Eichler stood firm on the company's plan to rekindle the project. "There has been no decision to withdraw," he told a House & Home reporter. "The problems will be solved -- it's just a question of when." Of course that never happened; in fact, according to Eichler, the company lost $100 thousand in all, a relatively inconsequential sum for a merchant builder, even then.

Overall, Eichler Homes' cash-flow and profit picture during 1962, according to a report published in House & Home in early 1963, had been impaired by speculative projects, all in San Francisco, including the Laguna high rise and apartments, the Geneva Terrace townhouses, and a supermarket. Expenses had risen 24 percent over the previous year, yet net profit increased only four percent. The kind of risky projects that would eventually take the company down were already beginning to have an effect. Fortunately, in New York, the company cut its losses early.

Looking back, Ned Eichler dismisses the sewage, acreage, and permit issues as substantial reasoning for the termination of the company's plans for developing Dexter Park. "It's hard for me to believe that those kinds of things become a justification for failure," Eichler pointed out. "The reason the operation failed was simple. We just couldn't execute. We couldn't build the houses long distance. It took too long, and took too much money -- in a very competitive business."

"But my father, especially at that time," he continued, "was trying to do something somewhere that was new and different -- and fun, I guess you could say. I don't mean to say it was whim, but it was whatever struck him as something he wanted to do. New York was just one of them."

The three Dexter Park Eichlers, each an atrium-model design found in Bay Area subdivisions at the time, were priced near $30 thousand and sold off during the first few months of 1963. The Goodmans bought the larger, flat-topped Claude Oakland (model 94), and the Bartoluccis followed, buying the gable-roofed Jones & Emmons (1505). In May, the Caponigros -- Carmine, a young dental surgeon; Lydia, an interior designer -- discovered the smaller, 1,700-square-foot Claude Oakland (254), and fell for it.

"You got to remember, I'm a New York City boy, living in an apartment in Yonkers," Carmine confessed, his native pride still intact. "All of a sudden, we have freedom -- with our own house and backyard. It was exciting. We fell in love with the house."

The couple moved away in 1974, looking for more space for their family of five, and easier access to Carmine's New York City office. "But today we're retired, the kids are out of the house, and we have a home that's too big," Carmine added. "I'd really love to be able to move back there now."

Around the corner, now living in the Bartolucci house, are the Josephs -- television ad salesman Jerry and inventor Robin -- who, even after nearly 18 years, are still charged about their home and the embellishment they bring to it. In 1983, while the couple lived in a small apartment nearby, Robin toured 200 open houses, nearly losing her frustrated realtor in the process, before taking the plunge.

"As soon as I walked into this house, I said this is it," Robin said recently in an excited tone. "Everyone who comes here is in awe of this place -- friends, workmen, everybody. From the outside, you can't even imagine what's doing in here. It's very deceiving. As soon as people step into the atrium, a whole new world opens up."

By 1965, three years after Eichler shut down in the East, several other builders split up the Dexter Park acreage, bringing in a mixture of traditional ranch-style and contemporary designs. In the late 1980s, unincorporated Spring Valley was divided into several smaller towns. Today, the only three true Eichlers ever built outside of California -- each an anomaly year-round, and especially in winter when covered with snowfall -- huddle together on Grotke Road and adjacent Perth Avenue in the quiet village of Chestnut Ridge.

http://www.eichlernetwork.com/ENStry16.html

(*) (*) ....I promise that's the last one on Eichler.....those homes are so cool though, filled with lots and lots of light because of all othe floor to ceiling glass walls and most that I know of including mine have the front door which you have to cross an open square in the center of the home.......almost like a tiny hacienda..... (l)

Have a restful Sunday....... (f)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-22-2005, 03:14 PM

(*) (*) ....sometimes (okay, often), my simple search becomes a mini-paper....(okay, not so mini sometimes....) ;)

Lysistrata ( the third and concluding play of Aristophanes' War and Peace )

http://drama.eserver.org/plays/classical/aristophanes/lysistrata.txt

Guide: http://www.temple.edu/classics/lysistrata.html
The plot is about as simple as it gets: Athenian women, fed up with the Peloponnesian War, barricade themselves in the Acropolis and go on a sex strike to force their husbands to vote for peace with Sparta.

This plot demonstrates that the overriding mode of Aristophanic comedy is fantasy. In the Congresswomen women take over the assembly to save Athens from corrupt politicians. So consider that, while in tragedy assertive women cause catastrophe, in comedy they bring joy and harmony.

But Aristophanes is not content to turn the tables and present purely virtuous women and venal men; consider why, exactly, they are so upset about the duration of the war. To paraphrase Freud, what do these women really want? Note in the first scene how difficult Lysistrata finds it to interest other women in her plan.

Part of the original humorous effect derives from Greek staging practice. Remember that all the actors are male. Also, a prominent part of the comic costume was a large leather phallus. The male characters in this play would walk around the stage with huge erections. This is not a comedy that for prudes. Most of the sexual innuendo that you see in virtually every line is actually there.

The name of the play's heroine, Lysistrata, means "releaser of war," which typifies the Aristophanic tendency for an "outsider" hero whose indicates his or her function. Interestingly, there was an important priestess in Athens at that time whose name, Lysimache, meant "releaser of the battle." However, it is impossible to say this significance of this possible coincidence. Think about the character of Lysistrata and how the audience might have viewed her. What figure in mythology or tragedy does she most resemble?

page 356: If you have trouble understanding the Spartan woman Lampito, read her lines aloud, using a hillbilly accent. The translator is trying to imitate how the Athenians regarded the Spartans as hicks.

p382ff. Note how Aristophanes blends the slapstick scene of the women chasing of old men with weapons like weaving spindles and the intellectual humor of the commissioner's attempt to argue with Lysistrata's exposition of the incompetence of the men's pursuit of the war.

There are several references to Sicily in the play. Recently Athens had added to its problems by deciding to invade Sicily as well, an expedition that ended in disaster.

p408. Lysistrata and the women stage a parody of a typical tragic scene: does it look familiar to you?

p436: the koryphaios is the leader of the chorus. The leaders of the two male and female choruses attempt to make amends. Note that the play seems to hoping not just for an end to the Peloponnesian War, but to the proverbial war between the sexes.

p.444: note how Aristophanes undercuts the lofty sentiments of Lysistrata's speech to the men. What are the men doing while she is talking about peace?

The final pages are taken up with a revel (a typical comic ending) celebrating the new peace. For an audience still at war, this is the ultimate form of escapist entertainment.

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The Lysistrata Project: Good News for Women by Katha Pollitt from the January 12, 2004 issue of The Nation
"...Let's break out the champagne for good news around the world for women in 2003--accomplishments, activism, bold deeds and grounds for hope.

1. Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize...
2. Hormone replacement therapy was further debunked...
3. Antiwar activism got a feminist edge. The Lysistrata Project saw 1,029 productions of Aristophanes' hilarious, bawdy comedy performed all over the world on March 3..."

http://www.lysistrataproject.com/

What is Lysistrata Project?

The First-Ever Worldwide
Theatrical Act Of Dissent

On Monday, 03/03/03, Fifty-nine countries hosted 1,029 readings of Lysistrata, Aristophanes' anti-war comedy, to protest the Bush Administration's unilateral war on Iraq. Take a peek here to see the list of cities and countries where readings happened. -- You'll note there was a reading in every single U.S. state.

Readings were held in theatres large and small, schools, churches, libraries, in music halls, homes, cafes, community centers, clubs, subway cars, parks, and on street corners. More than 300,000 people attended readings organized by our 1,029 Lysistrata Project "spearheads." Readings raised an estimated $125,000 for non-profit organizations working for peace and humanitarian aid. Some readings didn’t raise money, but the fact that they occurred at all resonated as a powerful symbol of world citizens united for peace. For example, a secret reading in northern Iraq was organized by members of the international press corps, who had to keep quiet about it or risk losing their jobs. A reading in Patras, Greece was held by Greeks and Kurdish refugees in an abandoned factory. There were secret readings in China and Isreal. A group of activists in Mindanao braved volitility to present their reading. The list goes on...

Many of us are more politically active today due to our participation in Lysistrata Project. We felt inspired by the palpable unity with others around the world on that day of action. We value the thought-provoking conversations initiated by the readings, and the new friendships fostered there. Above all, Lysistrata Project participants discovered individual empowerment to speak out for what we believe.

The international Lysistrata Project participants earned the news coverage they received on and around 03/03/03. The Project was featured on multiple CNN news programs, PBS' Lehrer News Hour, and many network and local news programs. Dozens of radio programs featured stories about the project, including NPR’s All Things Considered and Dutch, French, German, Canadian, Japanese and Greek stations. Features appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Chicago Tribune, L.A. Weekly, The Village Voice, Ms. Magazine, American Theater, El Mundo, and thousands of other publications across the globe as the Associated Press offered the story, and as international Lysistrata Project participants dropped their own press releases.

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Exploring Ancient World Cultures: Readings from Ancient Greece: http://eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/lysistrata.htm

********************************

The Lysistrata Project

Peace in the world is attainable

What it takes is people who desire genuine Peace
rooted in spiritual values and social justice
raising our collective energy and combined economic power
in whole-hearted advancement of Peace

Together ~~in the U.S. alone~~ we are more than 50 million

http://www.lysistrataproject.org/

************************************************
SparkNotes (similar to those old "cliff notes".....http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/lysistrata/summary.html

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LYSISTRATA

an introduction to the play by Aristophanes

LYSISTRATA, the third and concluding play of Aristophanes' War and Peace series, was not produced till ten years later than its predecessor, the Peace, viz. in 411 B.C. It is now the twenty-first year of the War and there seems as little prospect of peace as ever. A desperate state of things demands a desperate remedy, and the Poet proceeds to suggest a burlesque solution of the difficulty.

The women of Athens, led by Lysistrata and supported by female delegates from the other states of Hellas, determine to take matters into their own hands and force the men to stop the War. They meet in solemn conclave, and Lysistrata expounds her scheme, the rigorous application to husbands and lovers of a self-denying ordinance--"we must refrain from the male altogether." Every wife and mistress is to refuse all sexual favours whatsoever, till the men have come to terms of peace. In cases where the women must yield 'par force majeure,' then it is to be with an ill grace and in such a way as to afford the minimum of gratification to their partner; they are to be passive and take no more part in the amorous game than they are absolutely obliged to. By these means Lysistrata assures them they will very soon gain their end. "If we sit indoors prettily dressed out in our best transparent silks and prettiest gewgaws, and all nicely depilated, they will be able to deny us nothing." Such is the burden of her advice.

After no little demure, this plan of campaign is adopted, and the assembled women take a solemn oath to observe the compact faithfully. Meantime as a precautionary measure they seize the Acropolis, where the State treasure is kept; the old men of the city assault the doors, but are repulsed by "the terrible regiment" of women. Before long the device of the bold Lysistrata proves entirely effective, Peace is concluded, and the play ends with the hilarious festivities of the Athenian and Spartan plenipotentiaries in celebration of the event.

The drama has a double Chorus--of women and of old men, and much excellent fooling is got out of the fight for possession of the citadel between the two hostile bands; while the broad jokes and decidedly suggestive situations arising out of the general idea of the plot outlined above may be "better imagined than described."

This article is reprinted from Aristophanes: The Eleven Comedies. Trans. Anonymous. London: The Athenian Society, 1922.

http://www.monologuearchive.com/a/aristophanes_002.html

http://www.theatrehistory.com/ancient/aristophanes.html

http://www.theatrehistory.com/ancient/aristophanes001.html

http://www.monologuearchive.com/a/aristophanes.html

http://www.poetry-archive.com/a/aristophanes.html

http://www.theatrehistory.com/ancient/aristophanes002.html

http://www.theatrehistory.com/ancient/aristophanes003.html

http://www.questia.com/SearchNoAuthMediator.qst?af=1&action=1&act=kwrdOnly&keywords=aristophanes&AID=10281310&PID=1112457

(*) (*) (*) I would love to see this play again as it's been about ten years. It's most definitely very funny in some parts, which is a surprise considering when it was written..... :| :| :| ;) (h) (h)

({) (}) 's and a few (k) (k) 's,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-22-2005, 03:20 PM

Top 8 Banned Plays

Dramatic works for the stage are banned too! Some of the most famous challenged and banned plays in history include "Oedipus Rex," Oscar Wilde's "Salome," George Bernard Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession," and Shakespeare's "King Lear." Read more about banned classics in theater history. Discover why these plays have been so controversial.

1) Lysistrata
by Aristophanes (c.448-c.380 BC). Written in 411 BC, "Lysistrata" was banned Comstock Law of 1873. The ban on "Lysistrata" was not lifted until 1930. An anti-war drama, the play centers around Lysistrata, who speaks of those who died in the Peloponnesian War.

2) Oedipus Rex
by Sophocles (496-406 BC). Written in 425 BC, "Oedipus Rex" is about a man who is fated to murder his father and marry his mother. When Jocasta discovers that she married her son, she commits suicide. Oedipus blinds himself. This play is one of the most famous tragedies in world literature.

3) Salome
by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). Written in 1892, "Salome" was banned by the Lord Chamberlain for its depiction of Biblical characters, and it was later banned in Boston. The play has been called "vulgar." Wilde's play is based on the Biblical story of Princess Salome, who dances for King Herod and then demands the head of John the Baptist as her reward. In 1905, Richard Strauss composed an opera based on Wilde's work, which was also banned.

4) Mrs. Warren's Profession
by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). Written in 1905, "Mrs. Warren's Profession" is controversial for its discussion of prostitution. The play was suppressed in London, but to the attempt to suppress the play in the U.S. failed.

5) The Children's Hour
by Lillian Hellman (1905-1984). Written in 1934, "The Children's Hour" was banned in Boston, Chicago, and London for its hint of homosexuality. The play was based on a law case, and Hellman said of the the work: "It's not about lesbians. It's about the power of a lie."

6) The Crucible
by Arthur Miller (1915-). Written in 1953, "The Crucible" was banned because it contains "sick words from the mouths of demon-possessed people." Centering around the Salem witch trials, Miller used the events of the play to shed light on current events.

7) A Streetcar Named Desire
by Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). Written in 1951, "A Streetcar Named Desire" features rape and the descent into insanity. Blanche Dubois relies on "the kindness of strangers," only to find herself taken away at the end. She's no longer a young girl; and she has no hope. She represents some bit of the Old South fading away. The magic is gone. All that's left is brutal, ugly reality.

8) http://erclk.about.com/?zi=12/XNg
by Pierre Augustin Caron De Beaumarchais (1732-1799). Written in 1775, "The Barber of Seville" was suppressed by Louis XVI. Beaumarchais was imprisoned, with charges of treason.

http://classiclit.about.com/od/bannedliteratur1/tp/aatp_bannedplay.htm

(*) (*) Ah, the maverick playwrites, authors, theater promoters and audiences! I feel the need to experience another play soon. Anyone have any suggestions? Although I prefer local or community theater, I also love off and off-off Broadway - you know, the ones with the ads in the New York Times and Village Voice that you need a magnifying glass to read..... ;) ;) (8) (8)

Enjoy the day and have an especially terrific next to last Monday in May. (l)

Tomorrow afternoon Doc and I go to his oncologist's for a CBC blood test for him. <crossing fingers that all will continue to be well> (f)

(k) (k) 's,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-22-2005, 03:24 PM

Most Significant Tech Invention Ever?

We'll give the award for the most significant invention ever to the cavemen and their wheel. But what is the most significant technical innovation of the past 200 years?

The BBC Radio's 2005 Reith Lecture series collected hundreds of nominations from listeners, which were evaluated by a team of five experts. They chose 10 inventions they deemed the most significant and then listeners were asked to vote on them to rank them in order.

According to the BBC Radio, these are the 10 most significant technical inventions since 1800:
1. Bicycle: 59.4 percent
2. Transistor: 7.8 percent
3. Electro-magnetic induction ring: 7.8 percent
4. Computer: 6.3 percent
5. Germ theory of infection: 4.6 percent
6. Radio: 4.5 percent
7. Internet: 4 percent
8. Internal combustion engine: 3.4 percent
9. Nuclear power: 1.1 percent
10. Communications satellite: 1.1 percent

Obviously, the bicycle was the runaway winner in this contest. The cavemen rise again! What a would a bike be without those wheels?

What about those inventions that we just hate?You know the kind. We need them, but they drive us nuts and we can't live without them. We are talking about the top three most hated inventions that we absolutely have to have, which are:
1. Cell phones
2. Alarm clocks
3. Television

That's the word from the annual Massachusetts Institute of Technology survey, known as the Lemelson-MIT Invention Index. Fully 30 percent of the 1,023 adults and 500 teenagers polled in this annual survey cited cell phones as the most hated, must-have invention, which placed it in the top spot. Alarm clocks followed closely at 25 percent, with television at 23 percent. (What? You don't like reality shows?)

Other hated, but must-have inventions:
Shaving razors
Microwave ovens
Coffee pots
Computers
Vacuum cleaners

What inventions make our lives easier?

Teens overwhelmingly said e-mail and voicemail, while more than half of the adults cited credit cards and debit cards.

We do agree on one thing. Almost all of us--95 percent--say inventions have improved the quality of our lives.

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/tech/package.jsp?name=computing/cpvert/bestinventionssince1800

(*) (*) Oh great!! Sunday night is Deadwood night!! The season ends tonight at 9:00 p.m. EDT. Can't wait to watch and then watch it again on COMCAST's free (well, not really as I pay for HBO and and other premium serivces) "On-demand" service later in the week....... (h) (h)

<eehaaa! as ladylike as I can muster>... ;) Where's my Joannie outfit? (6)

Carpe Diem!
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-26-2005, 05:15 PM

Q U O T E D

Blardinal Petrus writes: "As first Blardinal of the Holy Cathoblogic Church, I hereby announce that I am taking applications for BlogPope. Email your resume, your blog URL and 100 words on "Why I should be Blogpope" to blogpope@cathoblogic.blog. And good luck!"

Bloggus Torvalds writes: "Ever wanted to start your own nation? Now you can! BlogNation is a new association of Blogizens that are disassociblogging themselves from ordinary, land-based nationstates in favour of a new alliance of Blogs. Run for Blogident, Blog Minister, or Minister of Blogging by signing up on our blog!"

Bloggy Hilton writes: "Help! I've lost the password to my blog. It was right there on my SideKick (you know, the one with the special blog attachment), but it doesn't seem to be there anymore! Has someone taken it? I'm totally desperate here!"

-- A Slashdot reader imagines the sort of content the site might feature in the post-Blogebrity world.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=150682&cid=12637384

http://www.blogebrity.com/

(*) (*) :| :| :| ;) (h) (h)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-26-2005, 05:20 PM

The butler better watch his back. IAC/InterActiveCorp Chief Executive Barry Diller, who is buying Ask Jeeves for $1.9 billion, told the All Things Digital conference Wednesday that the search firm will probably get a new name. Under intense questioning from conference host and Wall Street Journal columnist Kara Swisher ("What will it be called?"), Diller crumbled like a stale cookie and blurted out that it "might be one of those words without the other.'' As aides rushed to muffle him, Diller quickly added that no decision had been made. You can imagine the internal debate over which of those words best says "search" -- the hard-nosed literalists pushing for Ask, the artsy creative types pleading for Jeeves. If convenience counts for anything, Ask.com is already actively used by the company, while Jeeves.com leaves its reason for existence unclear.

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/gmsv/11200606.htm

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/11737045.htm

http://ask.com/

http://jeeves.com/

(*) (*) One of the advantages of being a consultant for so long and having access (for which I am so grateful as I am sometimes impatient!) to wide bandwidth.....also known as broadband Internet - is knowing that this is only *one* search engine while there are thousands of specialty ones. If the information is out there in the public domain, people can find it if they know how. However with that typed, I must remark that I believe in privacy.

And so there's the rub. Access versus personal privacy.... :| :|

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-26-2005, 05:24 PM

Geoff Adams-Spink
BBC News website disability affairs correspondent

A portable, in-car lavatory has been launched by a British firm for use by people with medical conditions, as well as families with small children.

The Indipod, made by Bromsgrove-based Daycar, is aimed at people with bowel and bladder problems.

The chemical toilet is housed in an inflatable "bubble" which is powered from the car's cigarette lighter.

It is designed to be used in multi-purpose vehicles, four-wheel drives and estate cars.

The Indipod is on display at Naidex 2005, an exhibition of products for disabled people at the NEC in Birmingham.

When not is use, the Indipod folds away into a bag the size of a suitcase and weighs 8kg.

"When we developed it we thought it would be for families, kids going out for the day or on holiday," Daycar managing director, Barbara May, told the BBC News website.

"But we've had an excellent response from people with medical conditions."

European odyssey

To show of the potential of the Indipod, Daycar did a seven-day trip from John O'Groats to the southern tip of Italy without getting out of the car.

"For people with bowel disease, incontinence or bladder problems, this product is not a luxury, it's a necessity," said Mrs May.

"It's giving them back their social lives and their freedom."

The company says that the chemicals break down waste into a "sweet smelling, inoffensive liquid", which can be disposed of at the end of a journey.

It says that there is no residual smell in the vehicle once the Indipod has been used, and that one sachet of chemicals is enough for one person's use for about eight days.

The bubble or "private sanitary sanctuary" inflates to an area about 1.2m high by a metre wide and is sufficient to accommodate two people, according to Mrs May.

"You could have a parent and child or a disabled person with a helper," she said.

If there is luggage or shopping in the back of the vehicle the bubble expands around it and occupies only empty space.

Once it is no longer required, the power cord is disconnected and it can be packed away into its bag.

It is thought that up to a million people in Europe have either bowel or bladder problems. Daycar says it has already received interest from people in Belgium and Italy.

Perhaps the most far-flung and unusual order came from a man in Australia who wanted to buy an Indipod for his wife's birthday.

Naidex 2005 is at the NEC from 24 to 26 May.

(*) (*) I am familiar with the versions for folks who are pilots since my ex and I (many, many moons ago) had them when we were flying in one of our planes (antique "taildraggers"....look the term up on google.com) two to four hours and didn't want to stop for a pit-stop so to speak. But in a car?? But then I do remember more than once stopping to head for the bushes on the side of the road....but that was in my youth..... :o :o

Does this mean that I'm getting old......er?

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-26-2005, 05:30 PM

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) finally dropped the hammer on Elite Torrents, one of the first Torrent aggregators to distribute a stolen work print of the latest "Star Wars" movie before it appeared in movie theaters. Early Wednesday morning, ICE agents (aided and abetted by the Motion Picture Association of America, which somehow got hold of the site's server logs) seized the network's main server, took its Web site offline and in its place posted this friendly greeting:

It is unlawful to reproduce or distribute copyrighted material, such as movies, music, software or games, without authorization - even when done for free over the Internet. Individuals who willfully distribute or download copyrighted material risk criminal prosecution under 18 U.S.C. 2319. First-time offenders convicted of criminal felony copyright laws will face up to five years in federal prison, restitution, forfeiture and a fine.

The raid was the first by federal law enforcement officials against a BitTorrent network, and by their own accounts a great success. "Our goal is to shut down as much of this illegal operation as quickly as possible to stem the serious financial damage to the victims of this high-tech piracy -- the people who labor to produce these copyrighted products," said Acting Assistant Attorney General John C. Richter. "Today's crackdown sends a clear and unmistakable message to anyone involved in the online theft of copyrighted works that they cannot hide behind new technology." Well, we'll have to see about that. Because we're not talking about individual technologies here. We're talking about disruptive change, something a lot harder to go after than a site or a company, as Mark Pesce noted last year after the closure of two other Torrent aggregators, Suprnova.org and TorrentBits.com. "As Hollywood is so fond of sequels, it seems perfectly fitting that today's suppression of the leading BitTorrent sites bears an uncanny resemblance to an event which took place in July of 2000," Pesce wrote. "Facing a rising sea of lawsuits and numerous court orders demanding an immediate shutdown, the archetypal peer-to-peer service, Napster, pulled the plug on its own servers, silencing the millions of users who used the service as a central exchange to locate songs to download. That should have been the end of that. But it wasn't. Instead, the number of songs traded on the Internet today dwarfs the number traded in Napster's heyday. The suppression of Napster led to a profusion of alternatives -- Gnutella, Kazaa, and BitTorrent. ... Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you've screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation -- a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving birth to a system of digital distribution that you'll never, ever be able to defeat." Yep.

http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-torrent26may26,1,3465487.story?coll=la-headlines-technology&ctrack=1&cset=true

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,67645,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/11737028.htm

:| :| :| :| :| :| http://www.elitetorrents.org/ (Talk about BIG BROTHER!!)

http://www.ice.gov/graphics/news/newsreleases/articles/starwars052505.htm

http://susanmernit.blogspot.com/2004/12/mark-pesce-on-bittorrent.html

http://www.bittorrent.com/trackerless.html

(*) (*) If this is the omost important thing to worry about today, we're having a terrific day.... ;) ;) ;)

({) (}) 's,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-26-2005, 05:32 PM

There's little doubt that IBM's recently unveiled Cell processor will have a major impact on the video game market (see "Equip legions of Grand Theft Auto fans with supercomputers? Sure, what could go wrong?"), but its impact beyond that is unclear at best. Power hungry and difficult to program, Cell isn't exactly tailor-made for merchant market. So to move things along, the chip's creators -- IBM, Sony and Toshiba -- are releasing its specifications and software libraries. "Our intention is to open up the Cell software architecture. The idea is to get the industry to help us evolve the basic software layers," said IBM's Jim Kahle, the Cell team leader. "We're not yet sure about the right licensing terms for the libraries. It can be hard to give stuff away for free. Our plan is to open-source the software for Cell and productize different parts as we go along." A savvy move this, one that could see Cell popping up in set-top boxes and workstations more quickly than it might otherwise have. "IBM is eager to find other opportunities for Cell, but it's going to take a lot of software work," Kevin Krewell, editor in chief of the Microprocessor Report, told EE Times. "Going to the open-source community makes sense, because they could attract a lot of pretty smart programmers who could spin out software and applications for Cell."

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/gmsv/10839201.htm

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=163106213&pgno=2&print able=true

(*) (*) (l) (l) (l) ....I love open-source! Doesn't everybody??? ;)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer (f) (f)

sweetlady

05-26-2005, 05:36 PM

Academic publishers turn to RIAA for legal advice on Google library acquisitions: Like we didn't see this coming ... Google's ambitious plan to digitize the collections of some of the world's biggest libraries has been denounced by a group of academic publishers who complain that the project may violate copyright laws and hurt book sales. In a letter to Google, Peter Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses, called Google Print for Libraries a "broad-sweeping violation of the Copyright Act" and questioned the search leader's right to digitize the entirety of copyrighted works. It matters not, said Givler, that materials that are not out of copyright will not be full-text viewable (they will be full-text searchable). "The fact is Google Print for Libraries appears to be built on a gigantic fair use claim, which we think is questionable at best," Givler wrote. "If the fair use is not valid, it could be a gigantic copyright violation. ... Google's claim that it is fair use to make copies of every copyrighted work in even one major library, let alone three of them, is completely unprecedented in scale; it is tantamount to saying that Google can make copies of every copyrighted work ever published, period. Courts have never recognized a fair use claim of that magnitude." The association is hardly the first organization to object to Google Print. Back in March, Sally Morris, chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers -- an international association of more than 300 not-for-profit publishers -- registered the same complaint. "The law does not permit wholesale copying (which is what digitization is) by a commercial organization of works that are still in copyright," she told The Harvard Crimson. "It is also illegal to make those works available digitally once they have been copied."

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2005/tc20050523_9472_tc024.htm

http://print.google.com/googleprint/screenshots.html#excerpt

http://aaupnet.org/aboutup/issues/0865_001.pdf

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=506429

(*) (*) (*) ...hmmmm, what do the other propeller-head grrls and butches think? (and if anyone is offended that I didn't identify them by category, please accept my sincerest apologies.......since this is meant for everyone...)
(l) (l) (l) (l) (l)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady

sweetlady

05-26-2005, 05:40 PM

Q U O T E D

"Today I missed my Japanese class again, since I have gotten a bad throat. I only went to the class once this week, so I am probably so far behind now. I will catch up in the summer tho so no worries hehe. Anyway today has been weird, at 3 some guy ringed the bell. I went down and recognized it was my sister's former boyfriend. He told me he wants to get his fishing poles back. I told him to wait downstair while I get them for him. While I was searching them, he is already in the house. He is still here right now, smoking, walking all around the house with his shoes on which btw I just washed the floor 2 days ago!"

-- A murdered blogger's final entry reveals the indentity of his killer

http://www.xanga.com/sorry.aspx?type=item&user=ToTo247

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/nyc-slay0517,0,6738521.story?coll=nyc-homepage-breaking2

(*) (*) ....My goodness! This came directly from www.siliconvalley.com and I'd have no reason to think it was any kind of urban legend...... :| :| :( :(

<sigh> and on and upwards towards more postive things! (f) (f)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-26-2005, 05:41 PM

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/manifesto.html

(*) (*) ....huh? :|

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-26-2005, 05:42 PM

http://www.rifters.com/real/progress.htm

(*) (*) :o :o :| :| :|

(k) (k) (o) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-26-2005, 05:43 PM

http://www.ipodlounge.com/index.php/news/comments/ipodlounger-creates-ipod-coffee-table/

(*) (*) :o

(f) (f) ,.
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-26-2005, 05:45 PM

Romance novel cover remixes:

http://www.worldoflongmire.com/features/romance_novels/

http://www.worldoflongmire.com/features/romance_novels/readers_covers.htm

(*) (*) ...pretty silly and rather stupid but then the world need more smiles and belly laughs, right??

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-26-2005, 05:52 PM

http://mgrsti3030s.seamlesstech.biz/templates/frmTemplateR.asp?CatalogID=9835&SearchYN=N&subFold erID=179

(*) (*) .....what next? :o

(S) (S) Have a lovely Thursday evening!.......Doc is sleeping right now and his mama has been down with bronchitis all this week...... :( :( Getting back on-line seems to perk up my brain cells though and I feel better - perhaps since I have my mind on other things than "that a truck ran over me" :|.....and I've very much missed the "connection" that I feel here. I sure wish sometimes that I could hire a couple of teenagers to run errands.......my getting out and about to get stuff that I need has been a real challenge........ :| My chest and other parts hurt so badly from the coughing that I fantasize about someone taking care of me....... ;)

Which is not to be in my reality....at least in the foreseeable future that is. ;) And I accept and embrace that reality. (since I am *so* not a victim, rather the opposite in terms of taking care of myself.....) Some folks in the real as well as virtual worlds can come across as such victims in my view and that is their excuse for a life.

(l) (l) It's not a bad thing to try to take care of myself and a healing boxer dog.......and share that although I am hurting a bit, I'll heal soon. (which is great, so I can get on with picnics, walks and travel planning..... (a)

({) (}) virtual hugs across this digital tundra......<EeeHaaa!!!> in my best cowgrrl laugh!

(f) (f) (f)

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-26-2005, 05:59 PM

http://filebox.vt.edu/users/akemp/Portfolio/had/

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-26-2005, 06:01 PM

http://leftoverlunch.contagiousmedia.org/index.htm

(*) (*) ....there's always something to entertain or take one's mind off whatever is taking up unnecessary space..... ;)

Have a lovely evening,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-26-2005, 06:05 PM

http://www.daskeyboard.com/

(*) (*) Very, very cool for those grrl-propeller-heads like me..... ;)

I'm off now to make some soup or something equally comforting, feed the Doc'meister again and get comfortable on the couch under a fleece blanket with Doc the Boxer.

Have a terrific Friday and holiday weekend everyone! I'm around and not going anyplace so I can rest up and feel better for next week! (6) (6) ;) ;) ;)

(l) (l) (l) (l) (l),

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

Beaudyk

05-26-2005, 11:14 PM

Leonard Pitts
The Miami Herald
Aug. 4, 2003

So what is it you have against gay marriage.

I'm not talking to the guy next to you. He doesn't have a problem with it. No, I'm talking to you, who is fervently opposed.

The number of folks who agree with you is up sharply since June, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-sodomy laws in Texas. As recently as May, 49 percent of us supported some form of gay marriage, according to The Gallup Organization. The figure has since dropped to just 40 percent. That's a precipitous decline.

So what's the problem? What is it that bothers you about gay people getting married.

Don't read me that part in Leviticus where homosexuality is condemned. I mean, that same book of the Gospel mandates the death penalty for sassy kids and fortune tellers, by which standard the Osbourne children and Miss Cleo should have been iced a long time ago.

I read The Book. I believe The Book. But I also know that it's impossible to take literally every passage in The Book, unless you want to wind up in prison or a mental ward.
go to top
So don't hide behind the Bible. Let's just be honest here, you and me. Why do you oppose gay marriage, really.

It just feels wrong to you, doesn't it? At some visceral level, it just seems to offend something fundamental.

Hey, I understand. It's one of the emotional sticking points for us heterosexual types, this primeval "ick" factor where homosexuality is concerned. I won't try to talk you out of it.

I will, though, point out that once upon a time, the same gut-level sense of wrong – and for that matter, the same Bible – was used to keep Jews from swimming in the community pool, women from voting and black people from riding at the front of the bus. All those things once felt as profoundly offensive to some people as gay marriage does to you right now.

The issue has been vaulted to the forefront in the last few days. Political conservatives have been galvanized by it. President Bush says he wants to "codify" marriage as a heterosexual union. And the Vatican has told Catholic legislators that they must oppose laws giving legal standing to gay unions, unions the church describes as "gravely immoral."
go to top
Which is funny, given the level of sexual morality the church has demonstrated lately.

Anyway, the reasoning seems to be that gay people will damage or cheapen the sanctity of marriage and that this can't be allowed because marriage is the foundation of our society.

I agree that marriage – and I mean legal, not common law – is an institution of vital importance. It stabilizes communities, socializes children, helps create wealth. It is, indeed, our civilization's bedrock.

But you know something? That bedrock has been crumbling for years, without homosexual help. We don't attach so much importance to marriage anymore, do we? These days, we marry less, we marry later, we divorce more. And cohabitation, whether as a prelude to, or a substitute for, marriage, has gone from novelty to norm.

We say we shack up because we don't need a piece of paper to tell us we are in love. I've always suspected it was actually because we fear the loss of freedom. Or because we're scared to bet forever.

I'm not trying to beat up cohabitors. A long time ago, I was one.

But it strikes me as intriguing, instructive and poignant that gay couples so determinedly seek what so many of us scorn, are so ready to take the risk many of us refuse, find such value in an institution we have essentially declared valueless. There's something oddly inspiring in their struggle to achieve the social sanction whose importance many of us long ago dismissed.

So tell me again why it is you don't want them to have that.

I mean, yeah, some people say they are a threat to the sanctity of marriage. But I'm thinking they might just be its salvation.

Leonard Pitts Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2004.

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 10:21 AM

(*) (*) As for the article that you posted? I say "BRAVO!!!" What an amazingly well-written piece! I especially loved:

"But it strikes me as intriguing, instructive and poignant that gay couples so determinedly seek what so many of us scorn, are so ready to take the risk many of us refuse, find such value in an institution we have essentially declared valueless. There's something oddly inspiring in their struggle to achieve the social sanction whose importance many of us long ago dismissed.

So tell me again why it is you don't want them to have that.

I mean, yeah, some people say they are a threat to the sanctity of marriage. But I'm thinking they might just be its salvation. "

Leonard Pitts Jr. is ALL OVER the place when I googled his name:

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/columnists/leonard_pitts/

(*) (*) Rather than list a bunch of URL's here's the whole enchalada from which to pick and choose on Pitt's articles and web sites about him:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Leonard+Pitts+Jr.&btnG=Google+Search

(f) (f) Thanks again so very much for taking the time to post this astute, insightful and provocative (to hets) article. AND for another really talented columnist to add to my list of "absolute favorites" like Maureen Dowd, Dan Gilmor, Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail in Canada), Tom Friedman and a few others. ({) (})

Have a lovely Friday and weekend.

Cheers,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer (f) (f)

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 10:32 AM

:@ :@ Microsoft's B.S. once again....and it hangs my computer.....

Microsoft: New Netscape breaks IE
Netscape 8 disables XML rendering capabilities in Internet Explorer

by Robert McMillan

MAY 27, 2005 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Microsoft Corp. is advising users of Netscape 8 to either uninstall the software or edit their computer's registry files because of a bug in America Online Inc.'s new browser. According to a Microsoft engineer, Netscape 8 disables the XML rendering capabilities in Internet Explorer, meaning that some Web pages won't be visible in Internet Explorer after Netscape 8 is installed.

In a posting yesterday to the Internet Explorer Weblog, Microsoft's Dave Massy, senior program manager for Internet Explorer, said his company had confirmed the problem, which had previously been reported on Internet newsgroups and forums.

"If you navigate in IE to an XML file such as an RSS feed..., rather than seeing the data, you are presented with a blank page," he wrote. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format widely used to keep track of updates to Web sites.

Massy offered two work-arounds to the problem: uninstalling Netscape 8, or deleting the XML node from a registry file titled HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftInternet ExplorerPluginsExtension

According to AOL, however, these measures are unnecessary. "This issue affects a very small number of users who visit sites that require that advanced technology," said Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman.

The company some time next week plans to release a fix to the problem, which will be delivered to users via Netscape's autoupdate feature. "We would not encourage people to uninstall or effect their browser settings," Weinstein said. "It's a minor issue."

The bug is the second piece of bad news concerning Netscape 8 for AOL, which unveiled the eagerly anticipated browser last Thursday (see story). Within hours of the initial release, AOL found itself scrambling to patch more than 40 security holes in the software (see story).

The free browser combines many of the features of both IE and the open-source Firefox browser, and has been promoted as a secure and easy-to-use product. AOL laid off the bulk of its Netscape software development team in 2003, and the work on Netscape 8 was largely completed by Victoria, British Columbia-based Mercurial Communications Inc.

Netscape 8 is the first major upgrade to the once-dominant browser since 2002.

http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,102069,00.html

(*) (*) One of these days I am simply going to switch to a more open operating system for my desktop system and commit to buy the software applications that I really need. I do have a Mac laptop which I don't use often enough. At least NOW I know why my computer hangs up so often while researching...... :| And I thought it was a conflict between PDF files (many scholarly papers are in that format unfortunately) and Netscape and/or IE. I rarely use IE anymore. Netscape is most definitely a more stable browser. (h)

(*) Enough of this <stepping down gingerly off soapbox - got those three-inch granny boots on ya know...> ;) It's simply too nice a day and too short a life to spend more than a 30 second rant on what a creepy "computing and networking Hitler" Billy Gates truly is. I've met him and I had to count my rings after we shook hands to make sure he didn't steal any.... :|

Carpe Diem! (or whatever else you grab ahold of today)

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 10:36 AM

LEONARD PITTS JR.: Bush should own up to his mistakes

May 25, 2005

BY LEONARD PITTS JR.

Dear President Bush:

I see where your administration took Newsweek magazine to task last week over a report alleging that U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay defiled the Koran by flushing it down a toilet. Your spokesman declared you outraged. Who can blame you?

The item led to protests across the Middle East and rioting in Afghanistan that reportedly left at least 15 people dead. The Muslim world was infuriated at the supposed mistreatment of the holy book.

Sudden demonstrations

Frankly, the fury mystifies me a bit, given that there have been numerous similar reports over the last two years. The fact that this small item suddenly leads to demonstrations in the streets feels a bit ... orchestrated, if you know what I mean. It leaves me wondering if somebody over there didn't fan this fire specifically to embarrass the American military.

Which is not to take the onus off Newsweek. In retracting the offending item, the magazine said its source could no longer verify the information. That raises questions about the reliability of the magazine's sources and about its policy toward their use.

It is, I can promise you, a painful time at Newsweek. But in the news business, we believe nothing is more important than credibility. You correct mistakes forthrightly and level with readers about how they occurred.

My newsroom calls them "set-recs," short for "setting the record straight." Nothing I've ever written has led to rioting and bloodshed, but I've got a few set-recs on my record. Over the years, I have headquartered an electronics firm on the wrong continent, mislabeled a Bible quote and called a Robert, Richard.

Being open is good

I don't enjoy rereading those columns. But I console myself with the reminder that getting it wrong will occasionally happen so long as news outlets draw their workforce from the ranks of the human race. And also, with the reminder that being open about error is good for us in the long run.

Point being, I'm pleased by your concern for Newsweek's accuracy. And I'm wondering if this means you will soon evince concern for your own.

Because if there is one trait that has characterized your response to the errors that attended our invasion of Iraq, it's a refusal to concede that they happened. Indeed, asked during a news conference last year if you ever admitted mistakes, you got a look on your face like an unprepared fifth-grader called to work out a math problem in front of the class. You hemmed a little, hawed a bit and finally said you couldn't think of any.

Your admirers call that refusal to admit to error evidence of your resolve. But you know, it's a short leap from resolve to stubbornness and an even shorter leap from there to rigidity. So, Mr. President, I've taken the liberty of writing the following set-recs for you. Tell me what you think:

1. "In 2002 and 2003, my administration made the case for invading Iraq by claiming that nation had weapons of mass destruction. It did not. We regret the error." Or:

2. "In 2002 and 2003, my administration encouraged Americans to believe Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. It was not. We regret the error." Or:

3. "In 2003, my administration said Iraq's oil wealth was such that the invasion would pay for itself. It has not. We regret that error, too."

See how it works, Mr. President? It's not that bad, once you get the hang of it. OK, granted, it will never be fun. But in my business, we believe owning up to error ultimately makes you better.

http://www.freep.com/voices/columnists/pitts25e_20050525.htm

(*) (*) Seems like this Pulitzer-prize winner has alot to say and is my kind of writer in terms of leaning left........enjoy your Friday!

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 10:39 AM

Stop me if you've heard this before. Apple is considering using Intel microprocessors in its Macintosh computer line, the Wall Street Journal reported this morning, citing anonymous industry sources. Apple characterized the reports as "rumor and speculation," and it could be just that. Certainly, with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all using IBM's PowerPC-based processors in their next-generation game consoles, it's difficult to see Apple suddenly jumping ship and migrating its machines to the x86 processor platform. And it's even more difficult to see it shipping a Windows-based Mac. After all, what could it possible have to gain from such a move? "There might have been a time when Apple could have gained some leverage by shipping Windows-based PCs alongside the Mac, but that time -- if it ever existed at all -- is long past," Tony Smith writes in The Register. "You need to be as big as Dell to make a good stab at it these days, hence the Compaq/HP and IBM/Lenovo mergers. That Apple is using cheap Mac hardware -- the Mini -- to attract Windows users rather than cool-looking Windows boxes or a standalone version of Mac OS X for x86-based boxes is proof that it doesn't, for now, see a future in x86."

(*) "The Secret Weapon Apple Threw Away": http://www.geektimes.com/michael/techno/computing/hardware/products/apple/macintosh/misc/project-star-trek.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/23/apple_intel/

(*) (*) :o :o :| :| .....and waiting to see what develops.......

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 10:42 AM

That's all the time Microsoft has left to comply with the 2004 antitrust ruling by the European Commission that required the software giant to make changes to its business in Europe. EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes has given Microsoft until the end of the month to come up with satisfactory proposals to settle the landmark case or face punitive sanctions. "We made a deal that before the end of the month we would reach an agreement," said Kroes, whose patience with Redmond is clearly a bit threadbare these days. "We are waiting for the Microsoft people to do their homework." Should Microsoft fail to meet the EU's clearly stated requests to deliver a fully functional version of Windows without its media player and open up its software to work with rivals like RealNetworks and Apple, the company could face a fine of as much as 5 percent of its daily revenue.

(*) (*) "EU hits Microsoft with a deadline": http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4572799.stm

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=businessNews&storyID=857441 4

(*) (*) (h) (h) ... (o) .........

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 10:43 AM

In these days of retractable gossip, columnists' covert contracts and questionable interpretations of "fair and balanced," an independent media vetting service seems a worthy, but difficult, undertaking. So it's with no small degree of interest that we look forward to the debut of NewsTrust, an ostensibly non-partisan service that promises to rate news for its accuracy, fairness, credibility, and relevance. As Rob Hof notes, the effort will require a deft touch to really establish credibility with a wide audience. But NewsTrust has smart folks on board, and they may well pull this off.

http://www.newstrust.net/index.htm

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2005/05/update_on_news.html?campaign_id=rss_blog_techbeat

(l) (l) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 10:51 AM

OK, when you're on the plane, open your binder to these phony specs:

You would think Nintendo executives would know better than to peruse classified company documents while en route to E3. After all, Nintendo's not the only console maker with an office in Redmond, Wash. And given E3's size and importance, the chances are pretty good that someone from the competition could be on the flight. Case in point, this anecdote from one of Microsoft's Xbox Live engineers who found himself seated across from an insufficiently paranoid Nintendo exec on the way to L.A. last week.

As I am sitting here, he is flipping through a binder…but he's too far away for me to make anything out. Secret Plans? Dates? Specs? Screenshots? What could it be? I begin to curse my choice of window seat, since if I had taken the aisle seat, I'd be closer and I'd have a front row seat to this little voyeuristic exercise. ...

http://www.majornelson.com/2005/05/15/pre3-sunday/

(*) (*) Snooping on a rival: Rule No. 1 for business travelers: Don't read secret documents on the plane. To which you could add: Especially if you're a Nintendo executive flying out of Seattle, going to E3, with a nosy Microsoft Xbox employee sitting across from you.:

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/004859.html

(*) (*) ....and to think back in the good ole days of weekly travel throughout the 1980s and 1990s while working under employer or client NDA's (non-disclosure agreements) and I was SO, SO careful while reading documents, especially tech specifications and strategic business plans during those flights...... :| :| . It just goes to show that you never can be too careful...... :o :o Thank goodness for broadband-enabled video teleconferencing and white boards with audio voice-overs..... (h)

No frequent-user digits though.......

.....and now back to our irreverent and unscheduled programming...... ;)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 06:24 PM

;) coffee warning on some of them.......

(*) Interesting link on the challenges of graphics.....abusing Amazon images:

http://aaugh.com/imageabuse.html

****************************************
(h) Pretty cool gallery of images (and shows creativity on the part of the author as well...):

http://www.gertler.com/nat/abusedimages.html

****************************************
(*) And, because Monday's a holiday: video game theme mashups:

http://www.vgmix.com/song_list.php

******************************************
(h) Half-life to Dominos:

http://www.zippyvideos.com/212120745294215.html

*******************************************
:o Smoke a Glass of Beer?

http://www.kqed.org/weblog/food/2005/05/smoke-glass-of-beer.jsp

**********************************************
(h) (h) I'm not Gumby, dammit. I'm iGuy. What a great way to humiliate your iPod"

http://speckproducts.com/iguy.html

Meet iGuy- the first bendable, posable friend for you and your iPod! Not only is iGuy fun, he's fully functional- offering great rubberized protection, docking capability, and screen protection for your iPod or iPod Photo. (*) (*) (Nice animation.) (*) (*)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 06:26 PM

Gillmor's new gig: like The Huffington Post without the morons:Our friend and former colleague Dan Gillmor has finally taken the wraps off his new citizen journalism effort. It's called Bayosphere, and, appropriate to Dan's driving interests, will use connection and collaboration to focus on a geographic area. "At Bayosphere, we're going to create a community fueled by that notion," Dan writes. "We will reflect -- and reflect on -- the news, needs and ideas of the San Francisco Bay Area and especially the technology sphere that is the prime economic driver of the area." Definitely worth a bookmark.

http://bayosphere.com/

Gold mine of links to articles and other provocative tidbits: http://bayosphere.com/node/28

(l) (l) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 06:28 PM

Tools or Actions in Photoshop That, Were They Applicable to Real Life, Would Prove Useful at
Various Stages of a Relationship:

Stroke
Twirl
Pinch
Satin
Inner Glow
Make Path From Selection
Sharpen
History Brush
New Adjustment Layer
Sharpen More
Crystallize
Find Edges
Difference Clouds
Add Noise
Blur
Distort
Fragment
Blur More
Extract
Dodge/Burn
Undo

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/13MichaelLascarides.html

(*) (*) <smiling from ear to ear> ;)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 06:29 PM

EMBARRASSING THINGS THAT MIGHT HAPPEN TO YOU WHILE USING A LIGHTSABER.
BY PATRICK CASSELS
- - - -
You turn it on while holding it backwards.

You make that sharp crackling noise with your mouth each time you clash it with your opponent's lightsaber—having forgotten that the noise happens naturally.

You've given in to the Dark Side of the Force, so the beam is normally red. But you forget to replace the weak batteries in the thing, rendering it pink, and turning you into the laughingstock of the Empire.

You try to use it to cut your birthday cake, expecting the lightsaber to slice through the pastry as easily as it did Luke's hand. Instead, the cake vaporizes the instant the lightsaber touches it, à la Obi-Wan.

You mistake it for a Popsicle.

(*) (*) :o :o ;)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 06:32 PM

1 0 G R O U N D B R E A K I N G R E S E A R C H T I T L E S :

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/research.html

(*) (*) ....Definitely a web site run by 20-somethings, but still lots of great humor on some of their lists..... (h) Of course I liked this one since I'm working towards my own PhD, the dissertation which will remain untitled for awhile..... (a)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 06:34 PM

P O P U L A R B O O K S T I T L E D A S T H O U G H W R I T T E N IN AN
E N G I N E ERI N G, S C I E N T I F I C , A N D / O R
M A T H E M A T I C A L V E R N A C U L A R :

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/engtitles.html

<thinking to myself that I understand why folks like lists....> ;) (h)

(S) (S) Have a lovely Friday evening!

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 06:36 PM

Pickup Lines Used by Mario.
BY CHRISTOPHER DOODY
- - - -
"Are you a magic feather? Because my heart just grew a tail, and flew away."

"If you were a warp tube, I'd be in you all day."

"Are you a magic mushroom? Because you are making me grow."

"Are you a magic flower? Because you are burning me up."

"I'd rather ride you than Yoshi any day."

"If Princess Toad looked liked you, I would have killed Bowser years ago."

"If I had the choice, I would gladly spend my 100 coins on you instead of on an extra life."

"You don't have to turn on a game to play with me."

"They don't call me Super for nothing."

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/20ChristopherDoody.html

(*) (*) ...some funny, some pretty crass, but again this web site is run by much younger folks than myself, and so their humor is not what tickles my fancy especially, but then different strokes, right? ;)

({) (}) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 06:37 PM

Slave Leia Pet Costume:

http://shop.starwars.com/catalog/product.xml?product_id=2698;category_id=332;pcid1= ;pcid2=

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-27-2005, 06:38 PM

Home sells for £1m over asking price

ANGIE BROWN

A VICTORIAN house has sold for almost £1 million over its asking price, making it Scotland's most expensive urban home.

The six-bedroom home in Edinburgh's Whitehouse Terrace was bought this month for around £2.6 million by leading accountant Cahal Dowds within days of going on the market. It was advertised at offers over £1.8 million.

The estate agents Brodies, which conducted the sale, last night expressed surprise over the huge interest in the property, saying it had received nine offers, all more than £2 million.

Experts said the sale was proof that the top end of Edinburgh's property market was "alive and well".

Mark Atkinson, Brodies' development manager, said it was great news for Edinburgh and the wider Scottish economy. "In the early 1990s, if you had a large property it was quite hard to get someone who had enough money to buy it as there weren't the number of people with wealth as there are now.

"It is also encouraging that it sold so quickly. It's the nicest house I have ever worked with."

The house was built in 1855, and Mr Dowds, a senior partner with the accountants Deloitte, is only the fourth owner of the property.

It is only one of 12 homes in the street, which is just over a mile from the city centre.

It has three bathrooms, a billiards room and a further three attic bedrooms in an extension that was built on to the back of the house. John Brown, a director of DTZ Residential, said the same property would go for more than £20 million in London.

"There are very few homes like it so, when one comes up now in Edinburgh people see it as an unique opportunity and snap it up. In two years, the amount he has paid over the asking price won't seem much."

The Scotsman has learned that the property was valued at around £1.8 million making it even more surprising that bidders were prepared to offer so much. The valuation was reduced because the property requires extensive repairs, costing around £250,000.

Simon Fairclough, the marketing director of the Edinburgh Solicitors Property Centre, said: "The exciting thing is that there has been so much competition for this house, proving the top end of the market is alive and well."

A spokesman for Mr Dowds last night confirmed that he had bought the home.

It was revealed earlier this week that Deloitte partners earned an average of £621,000 last year, making them the highest paid accountants in the country.

Earlier this year, a similar Baronial-style mansion in the same street - but with a separate two-bedroom gatehouse - sold for £2.7 million.

http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=579072005

(*) (*) (l) (l) (l) (h) (h) (h)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 10:55 AM

Pope set for live link-up at Murrayfield

GETHIN CHAMBERLAIN CHIEF NEWS CORRESPONDENT AND EBEN HARRELL

BOB GELDOF has invited the Pope to Scotland to conduct a mass at Murrayfield stadium to coincide with the Make Poverty History march in the run-up to the G8 summit.

Talks with the stadium are believed to have already taken place with a view to staging the event on 2 July. The Vatican is understood to have told Mr Geldof that the Pope will be unable to attend in person, but that he could appear in a live link-up from Rome on a giant video screen set up in the stadium. There are also suggestions that Nelson Mandela could appear via a similar live link.

Sources at the Scottish Rugby Union last night confirmed that they had been approached with the proposal and they indicated that the Saturday event would be followed four days later by a massive music concert at the stadium as part of Sir Bob's proposed Live 8 event.

Catholic Church leaders are excited at the prospect of an event involving the new pontiff. Cardinal Keith O'Brien said: "So far as the bishops and people of Scotland are concerned, Pope Benedict will be welcome in Scotland if he accepts Sir Bob Geldof's invitation to come."

Sources in the Catholic Church said that Sir Bob had approached the Vatican with a proposal that the Pope should attend in person to conduct a mass that would be broadcast around the world. The Live Aid organiser was in Rome yesterday for talks with Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, his Italian counterpart.

One problem that organisers of both planned Murrayfield events must overcome is that the stadium currently has no pitch. The turf has recently been lifted and the SRU was intending to reseed the ground. If the events are to go ahead, it will have to be returfed at considerable cost. If that was to happen, the SRU would be expected to turn to the Scottish Executive, which is keen on the concert plan, for financial assistance to cover the cost.

Bands including Franz Ferdinand and Teenage Fanclub have expressed an interest in appearing at a concert and there has also been speculation linking Coldplay, Oasis, Travis and Robbie Williams with the show.

An announcement about the plans is expected from Sir Bob on Tuesday. Sources close to the star yesterday suggested that plans were at an advanced stage for the concert on 6 July, but they would not comment on the possibility of a Papal mass.

The last visit of a pope to Scotland was in 1982 when John Paul II went to Murrayfield for a Pilgrimage of Youth gathering of around 45,000 young Catholics from northern England and Scotland.

The Pope conducted a 45-minute ceremony, routinely interrupted by applause and football-style cheers and songs, memorably telling his audience: "Young people of Scotland, the Pope loves you. You are the Church for tomorrow; you are our hope for the future."

The visit to Murrayfield was followed a week later by a meeting with Ronald Reagan, in which the Pope pleaded for world peace and an end to poverty.

Since his election on 19 April, Pope Benedict XVI has been busy handling internal appointments and affairs at the Vatican. Less than a week after formally taking seat, he moved to have his predecessor John Paul II made a saint. He has spoken out on several international issues, most recently meeting with bishops from Rwanda to discuss a lasting reconciliation there. Despite that hectic schedule, he is still yet to leave Rome. He will make his first pilgrimage tomorrow when he leads a religious service in Bari in southern Italy.

(*) (*) (*) Pope John Paul II was a rock star. (h) It will be interesting to see if Pope Benedict XVI has the same charisma. So far, I think he's just coasting along in Pope John Paul II's slipstream....... (a) (a) (*) (*) (*)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 11:00 AM

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/features/webcams.html

(*) (*) Image quality is significantly better than consumer and even prosumer video cameras that many web sites use to show images of local geography and/or people. But of course it would be......the cameras are mounted on ABC's Owned and Operated Television stations at the cities listed.....it's also cool that the images can be auto-updated by the end user (me or you). (h) (h)

....except when I did it last night, the west coast web cams showed my lights at night rather than the sunset ones that I saw first...... :o

<eeeHaaa!> Feeling better today - when I don't speak that is.... ;) Then the coughing starts for a minute or two. I'm trying to go without cough medicine since it makes me feel like I'm in an Impressionist painting...you know....like through a fog of sorts..... :o

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 11:03 AM

!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN Maybe Netscape engineers really are weenies (see "Don Rickles apparently writing code at Microsoft"). First they ship Netscape 8 with several publicly known vulnerabilities (see "OK, now it's your best bet for secure browsing") and now Microsoft is claiming the newly launched browser breaks Internet Explorer's XML rendering capabilities. "We've just confirmed an issue that has started to be reported on newsgroups and forums that after installing Netscape 8 the XML rendering capabilities of Internet Explorer no longer work," Internet Explorer program manager Dave Massy wrote in a post to Internet Explorer Weblog. "That means that if you navigate in IE to an XML file such as an RSS feed or an XML file with an XSLT transformation applied then rather than seeing the data you are presented with a blank page." That's a major bug, one that I'm sure AOL will patch in short order. In the meantime there is a workaround: Uninstall Netscape 8 and delete its registry files. "Unfortunately, if Netscape 8 remains installed, then the registry key is continually rewritten, so this is an essential step if you are to be able to view XML content in IE."

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/gmsv/2579954.htm

http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2005/05/if_netscape_80s.html

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/05/25/421763.aspx

(*) (*) ....as Roseanne Rosannadanna on SNL (in the good old days!) always used to say, "It's always something!". Time to try a couple of new browsers I think..... (h) I like Firefox! (l) (l) (l) (l)

({) (}) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 11:16 AM

That Exotic, Deceptive London Smog

By HOLLAND COTTER Published: May 27, 2005 New York Times

YOU can see why museums keep playing the Monet card, as the Brooklyn Museum is doing in "Monet's London: Artists' Reflections on the Thames, 1859-1914," a polished and studious traveling show that gives much pleasure, yet causes some frustration.

Monet made the world look wildly, paradisically pretty at a time when it was anything but. He turned the eradicating grind and dishevelment of the industrial era into a lyrical music, bathing smokestacks and haystacks alike in a symphonic gauze of color and light. By painting an anti-Romantic reality in a Romantic way, he let his middle-class audience, the new art audience, have its illusions, and we continue to reward him with our loyal attention.

This attention is not hard to give because his art is omnipresent. Big museums own piles of his paintings, and smaller institutions have their share. The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Fla., has one - "Effect of Fog" (1904) from the "Houses of Parliament" series - that it values highly, so highly that it built "Monet's London" around it.

The painting is one of a dozen Monets in the exhibition, organized by Jennifer Hardin, chief curator at the St. Petersburg museum. And those are among the many dozens he produced, or sketched out, during three extended trips to London, the first as a political refugee from the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the other two in 1899 and 1900-1 when he came expressly to paint the city.

Once there, he zeroed in on just a few subjects - sections of the Thames, several of its bridges, the Houses of Parliament - and painted them repeatedly. The London paintings are famously gorgeous. The handful in Brooklyn, installed on two curving walls at the center of the show, certainly are.

They are surrounded, however, by many other images of London: more than 100 paintings, prints, drawings and photographs by 50 other artists. Some of the pictures - including those by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Winslow Homer, André Derain and Camille Pissarro - are knockouts. Others by American, French and British artists now known primarily to art historians range from very fine to blandly informational. As a group they quickly make clear that the show is not about Monet, but about London itself, a city with specific attractions for artists in the late 19th century.

One of the attractions was commercial. As the art historian Petra ten-Doesschate Chu points out in the catalog, patronage in France remained in the grip of an academy that sanctioned only by-the-book religious art and history painting, leaving nonconformists like the Impressionists out in the cold. London, by contrast, had a network of independent dealers and private patrons interested in genres from portraiture to landscape to still life. Here, the Impressionists reasoned, they might make some sales.

Equally important was the appeal of London as an image, a subject for art. The Victorian city was modernizing at almost reckless speed, a process particularly evident on the Thames. For centuries, the riverfront had been blighted terrain, its neighborhoods poor, its banks slippery with raw sewage.

During the broiling summer of 1858, the water gave off a stench so foul that Parliament had to shut down. As a result of the Great Stink, as it was called, a new sewer system was finally installed, with underground pipes along the river creating pedestrian embankments. The transition of the Thames from cesspool to modern scenic attraction was under way.

Modern meant making sweeping alterations to every aspect of the riverfront, including bridges. This is the subject of "The Last of the Old Westminster" (1862), an early Whistler painting that opens the show. It depicts a bridge indelibly associated with Wordsworth being dismantled as its replacement rises beside it.

Despite a tinge of nostalgia in the title, the image is clinically objective. For the American-born Whistler, child of an engineer, documenting urban demolition and construction was far less an occasion for Romantic meditations on time and change than an opportunity to graphically work out structural design in action.

Modern also meant an environmental crisis. Where Wordsworth in 1802 saw London "glittering in the smokeless air," Dickens half a century later saw a different scene: "Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city."

But where Dickens used London's smoke-generated fog - smog - as a symbol of moral blindness and political corruption in "Bleak House," Whistler and Monet exploited it as an exotic scenic effect, no comments attached. This was modern, too, the insistence that art was not a vehicle for social or sentimental edification, but a self-referential activity; a self-sufficient universe.

From this aestheticist standpoint, fog was ideal weather and night the perfect time of day, transforming toxic reality into soft-focus visual theater. Whistler, whose "Nocturne" paintings and "Thames Set" prints were in circulation in London in 1870, may first have inspired the younger Monet to see the city that way.

There is no question that the presence of Whistler and the example of Monet prompted many other artists to take London as a theme and to portray it in specific ways. The bulk of the exhibition, coordinated at the Brooklyn Museum by Elizabeth A. Easton, chairwoman of the department of European painting and sculpture, is basically a record of that influence playing itself out.

Several painters followed closely in Monet's track. The American Impressionist Childe Hassam is one; the neo-Impressionists Georges Lemmen, from Belgium, and Henri Le Sidaner, from France, are others. Whistler had an especially potent effect on a trans-Atlantic generation of printmakers, among them Clifford Addams, Henri Guérard, Bertha Jaques, Thomas Way and, most notably, Joseph Pennell.

The American-born Pennell (1857-1926), whose work is seen in some depth, worked with Whistler, and created an approximation in print media of his "Nocturne" painting style. So did another expatriate American, Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966), in another medium, photography.

But frankly, all of this is old information. The show finds novelty by ferreting out a number of now-obscure artists to flesh out its Monet's London - or Whistler's London - premise. But the premise itself is restricted primarily to stylistic affinity, demonstrated in an accumulation of illustrative examples, like data supporting a graduate thesis.

Meanwhile, certain other questions about London, art and modernity, specifically social and political questions, are skimmed over. And here I am thinking of the wealth of intriguing information suggested by James Tissot's painting "The Thames" (1876), which looks like nothing else in the show.

It depicts a man with two women of questionable respectability surveying the river from the deck of a boat, equipped with a picnic and Champagne. It is one of the few paintings in the show that actually situate us on the Thames, at water level. It is also one of the few pictures in which people play a significant role, and fogs and mists almost none.

Here we see, without filters, hard details of an insalubrious city, its water and air colored the same greasy gray-brown. The wall of ships in the background makes the reality of British sea power, the strength of the empire, look at once commanding and ignoble, even brutal. The same description might apply to the man stretched out on the boat in the foreground, a representative of the new urban culture whose view of the world is self-confidently proprietary, the opposite of soft.

True, there are hints of this London in other pictures, but how interesting it would be to have them drawn out. Most of the pictures in the show are about aesthetic distancing. Yet modern art and artists were an integral part of the new ruling culture, Whistler and Monet as much as Tissot. They are the ones who made its power look pretty, lyrical, romantic.

But of course, to have taken the show in that direction would have been to divert it from the uncomplicated focus on beauty that in the end, all exhibitions with the word "Monet" in their titles promise. That promise is what keeps us coming back to this artist. It is also what keeps us from seeing him, or the world he painted, with unmisted eyes.

(*) (*) I had the wonderful opportunity to experience the Impressionists' Show at San Francisco's esteemed and quite impressive art museum back in 1989 (while I was living in the redwoods south of the city at the time). What an extraordinary, memorable time it was to see paintings by Monet, Manet, Seurat and many others; bronze scuptures by Degas; it took hours to see everything! Talk about feeling a soul connection with some of those master artists! I would so love to experience such a smorgasbord of visual, emotional and spiritual delights again sometime.....since this was a once in a lfetime uplifting soul-gift in some ways... (l) (l) (l)

(l) Those two art history courses that I took my senior year back in my undergraduate days in the 1970's really came in handy in terms of having some familiarity with many of the artists' works shown at this unprecedented amassing of such a huge body of works at one time, in one place. Heaven!! (l) (l)

(f) (f) ,
SL &DTB

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 11:22 AM

With Popcorn, DVD's and TiVo, Moviegoers Are Staying Home

By LAURA M. HOLSON Published: May 27, 2005 NYTimes

LOS ANGELES, May 26 - Matthew Khalil goes to the movies about once a month, down from five or six times just a few years ago. Mr. Khalil, a senior at the University of California, Los Angeles, prefers instead to watch old movies and canceled television shows on DVD.

He also spends about 10 hours a week with friends playing the video game Halo 2. And he has to study, which means hours on the Internet and reading at least a book a week.

"If I want to watch a movie I can just rent it on DVD," he said. "I want to do things that conform to my time frame, not someone else's."

Like Mr. Khalil, many Americans are changing how they watch movies - especially young people, the most avid moviegoers. For 13 weekends in a row, box-office receipts have been down compared with a year ago, despite the blockbuster opening of the final "Star Wars" movie. And movie executives are unsure whether the trend will end over the important Memorial Day weekend that officially begins the summer season.

Meanwhile, sales of DVD's and other types of new media continue to surge.

With box-office attendance sliding, so far, for the third consecutive year, many in the industry are starting to ask whether the slump is just part of a cyclical swing driven mostly by a crop of weak movies or whether it reflects a much bigger change in the way Americans look to be entertained - a change that will pose serious new challenges to Hollywood.

Studios have made more on DVD sales and licensing products than on theatrical releases for some time. Now, technologies like TiVo and video-on-demand are keeping even more people at home, as are advanced home entertainment centers, with their high-definition television images on large flat screens and multichannel sound systems.

"It is much more chilling if there is a cultural shift in people staying away from movies," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of the Exhibitor Relations Company, a box-office tracking firm. "Quality is a fixable problem."

But even if the quality of movies can be improved, Mr. Dergarabedian said, the fundamental problem is that "today's audience is a much tougher crowd to excite. They have so many entertainment options and they have gotten used to getting everything on demand."

Last year Americans spent an average of 78 hours watching videos and DVD's, a 53 percent increase since 2000, according to a study by the Motion Picture Association of America, the film industry's trade group. DVD sales and rentals soared 676.5 percent during the same period, and 60 percent of all homes with a television set now also have a DVD player. DVD sales and rentals alone were about $21 billion, according to the Digital Entertainment Group.

Discs are now released just four months after a film's debut, and the barrage of advertising that accompanies the opening in movie theaters serves ultimately as a marketing campaign for the DVD, where the studios tend to make most of their profits.

By contrast, movie attendance has increased 8.1 percent from 2000 to 2004, according to the association. Many in the movie industry point to that figure as a sign of overall health. But attendance was down in three of those five years, and the sharp increase in attendance in 2002 is attributed to the overwhelming success of "Spider-Man" and "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones."

More recently, the number of moviegoers has dropped, sliding 4 percent in 2003, 2 percent in 2004 and 8 percent so far in 2005.

Time spent on the Internet has soared 76.6 percent and video game playing has increased 20.3 percent, according to the association. Last year, consumers bought $6.2 billion worth of video game software, an increase of 8 percent from 2003, according to the NPD Group, which tracks video game sales.

This does not mean that the $9.5 billion theatrical movie business is anywhere near its last gasp. It still plays a crucial role for the studios in generating excitement. But movie makers recognize they have to be more on their toes if they want to recapture their core audience.

"There are a lot of distractions," said Jerry Bruckheimer, who produced the "Pirates of the Caribbean" in 2003 as well as the successful "CSI" television franchise. "You need to pull them away from their computers. You need to pull them away from their video games."

Consider Matt Cohler, a 28-year-old vice president at Thefacebook.com, a Silicon Valley company that creates Internet student directories on college campuses. Mr. Cohler likes movies, but lately, he said, little has grabbed his attention.

He liked the new "Star Wars" and a documentary about the collapse of Enron. But of the Nicole Kidman-Sean Penn big-budget thriller, "The Interpreter," Mr. Cohler said, "It was only O.K." He has few plans to see anything else this summer, and said he was content to spend his free time online or writing e-mail.

"I feel quite strongly that, with a few exceptions, the quality of movies has been declining the last few years," he said.

Amy Pascal, the chairwoman of Sony Pictures Entertainment's motion picture group, said, "We can give ourselves every excuse for people not showing up - change in population, the demographic, sequels, this and that - but people just want good movies."

She predicted that "Bewitched," a romantic comedy about a producer who unwittingly hires a "real" witch for the lead role in a remake of the television show, would have a broad appeal. "If it was a straight-ahead remake of the show," she said, "we would have been guilty of doing the ordinary."

Jill Nightingale, 37, who works at IGN Entertainment in ad sales, is the type of moviegoer - older, female and important to studios - that "Bewitched" should appeal to. But video games increasingly have taken up time she otherwise might spend watching television or going to the movies. The last two theater showings she said she attended were "Star Wars" and "Sideways," which she viewed in December.

She plays a video game for 30 minutes each night before bed. Two weeks ago, five friends joined her at her San Francisco condo to drink wine and play "Karaoke Revolutions" on her Sony PlayStation, where the would-be American Idols had a competition, belting out everything from Top 40 hits to show tunes.

"Party games are great for dates," she said. "A few years ago I would have been at a bar or at a movie."

But what could well have the greatest impact on theater attendance is the growing interest in digital home entertainment centers, which deliver something much closer to a movie-style experience than conventional television sets.

Brian Goble, 37, a video game entrepreneur, said he had not been to a movie theater in two years, except to see "Star Wars" with his wife and four friends. Instead, he stays at his home in a Seattle suburb, where he has turned the basement into a home theater with a 53-inch high-definition television screen and large surround-sound speakers. He no longer has to deal with parking and jostling crowds, he said, a relief now that he has two children.

" It's really just not as comfortable and fun as being at home," he said. "You can pause, go to the bathroom, deal with a crying kid."

Mr. Goble rarely watches video-on-demand ("The quality is poor," he said.) Instead he has an account with Netflix and orders his movies online. When the Nicholas Cage movie "National Treasure" was released last November, for instance, he added it to his Netflix list so he would be sent a copy when it came out on DVD.

His prime regret about seeing the final installment of "Star Wars" was that he could not watch it at home. "The only reason to go to the theater these days," he said, "is because it is a movie you must see now."

(*) (*) Glad that I don't own or even own stock in the few big-theater firms.....this might be a trend that will take a technological cataclysm of some kind to get folks back into those movie theater seats. (or else a social-cultural one....although at the moment I can't "see" the usual demographics of families and Sat. night dates changing all that much to create a fast turnaround...) Your thoughts?

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 11:26 AM

It's All in How the Dog Is Served

By ED LEVINE Published: May 25, 2005 NYTimes

YOU know those hot dogs that you know and love, and can't wait to eat this time of year? The ones served at Katz's Delicatessen, Gray's Papaya, Papaya King, the legendary Dominick's truck in Queens and the best "dirty water dog" carts?

They're all the same dog, manufactured by Marathon Enterprises, of East Rutherford, N.J., the parent company of Sabrett. They may vary in size, preparation and condiment selection (and Papaya King has Marathon add a secret spice to its mixture), but they're the same ol' dog. In fact, until a few years ago, Marathon made Nathan's hot dogs.

So, you may think you would have to work to find a truly special hot dog, one that stands out because of the frank itself, its trimmings, the bun or the surroundings. But New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are full of standouts, as I discovered in a nitrite-filled hot dog blitz.

Let's define our terms. A kosher hot dog is all beef and made under rabbinical supervision. It is skinless or stuffed into collagen casings, because natural casings are not permitted. Hebrew National and Empire National are the kosher hot dogs most often found in delis and supermarkets. Hebrew National is better known, but Empire National is the best kosher hot dog I've found. It is meaty, garlicky and just salty enough. You can find it in New York at the Second Avenue Deli and at Ben's Best in Rego Park, Queens.

What I call kosher-style franks are also all beef with a lot of the same spices, but they have a natural casing, these days made from sheep's intestines. It is the natural casing that gives the best hot dogs their wondrous snap and bite.

Many hot dog lovers around the country love franks made with beef and pork, either stuffed into natural casings or skinless. I think they are mushy, soft and underseasoned, but Walter's, a beloved pagoda-shaped hot dog emporium in Mamaroneck in Westchester County, splits and grills a hot dog made from beef, pork and veal.

So what constitutes a great hot dog? To me, it's a grilled, kosher-style frank served on a lightly toasted bun with slightly spicy mustard and a homemade onion or pickle relish that is neither too sweet nor too hot. The Old Town Bar on East 18th Street not only toasts the bun that encases its grilled natural-casing all-beef Sabrett dog, it butters it as well. Sublime! Sauerkraut is also fine atop my dogs, though every once in a while I crave one prepared Southern style, with cole slaw. My ideal dog should fit neatly into its bun, sticking out by at most an inch on each end.

The New York-style hot dog I love has been around for well over a hundred years. According to Arthur Schwartz, author of "New York City Food" (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2004), in the 1870's a German immigrant named Charles Feltman opened his octagonal Ocean Pavilion beer garden on West 10th Street and Surf Avenue in Coney Island and sold frankfurters on buns by the thousands. Feltman had an employee, Nathan Handwerker, who, egged on by his famous friends Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor, opened a cheaper hot dog stand in 1916 that catered to the many poor and working-class people frequenting Coney Island.

Nathan's Famous hot dogs are still in Coney Island, but also in fast-food kiosks all over the country. The Nathan's in Coney Island still serves an excellent natural-casing all-beef hot dog. But it also makes a skinless all-beef dog that is a pale imitation of the real thing. These not-so-hot dogs are available in supermarkets, at many ballparks in the region and - gasp! - at some Nathan's franchises in the tristate area.

Papaya King has been serving its inexpensive yet exemplary natural-casing hot dogs since 1939, seven years after Gus Poulos, a Greek immigrant, opened Hawaiian Tropical Drinks at 86th Street and Third Avenue. The Gray's Papaya minichain was started by a former Papaya King partner in 1973. They each serve the Sabrett dog grilled, on a bun that isn't quite as toasted as I would like. I can't taste the extra spice in the Papaya King hot dog, but its mustard is spicier. Many other hot dog emporiums have opened with papaya in their name, and many of them, including Papaya Dog, serve the ubiquitous natural-casing Sabrett.

On the other end of the price scale, New York has hot dogs that approach the $20 barrier. The Old Homestead serves an 11-ounce footlong made from American-raised kobe beef for $19. I found it mushy and bland, and not redeemed by the white truffle mustard, the kobe beef chili, the Vidalia onions, the Dutch bell peppers and the Cheshire Cheddar sauce that accompanied it. For the same price you can have a Gray's Papaya special of two stupendous hot dogs and a papaya drink ($2.45) for a week and still have change in your pocket. If you insist on a haute dog, share the 15-bite hot dog ($13.50) at the Brooklyn Diner USA. It is an excellent, snappy all-beef hot dog from a secret source (not Marathon, I'm told), weighs almost a pound, and comes with excellent onion rings and sauerkraut studded with juniper berries.

Upscale grocery stores sell Fearless Franks by Niman Ranch, the purveyor known for its "humanely" raised cattle, but the all-beef and the beef-and-pork versions are skinless and therefore not as flavorful. On the other hand, Sparky's, a hipster eatery in a former trucking garage in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, serves Niman's Old Fashioned Franks with a natural casing.

For wurst purists, Rolf Babiel serves a German-style beef-and-pork wiener made by Karl Ehmer on a crusty oblong roll with very fine German mustard at his Hallo Berlin cart at 54th Street and Fifth Avenue as well as at his Hell's Kitchen storefront on 10th Avenue. And The Patio, in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, near the United Nations, serves a fine natural-casing all-beef footlong in an excellent toasted bun. It makes for a classy alfresco eating experience. Skip the canned chili offered as a topping.

Classic New York delis have a long and proud hot-dog-serving tradition. Sure, Katz's, on East Houston Street, serves that same old dog, but its 100-year-old trick is to leave the franks on the grill long enough so that the exterior is nice and crisp and the interior stays juicy. Artie's, on the Upper West Side, has been around for only six years, but savvy eaters know its dogs, made by Golden D, are slightly spicier than the competition's, and just chewy enough.

New Jersey has no one style of hot dog: the best establishments serve skinless pork-and-beef franks as well as kosher-style natural-casing beef ones. But many stands in the state deep-fry their dogs, with Rutt's Hut in Clifton varying its frying time depending on customer preference. New Jersey hot dog mavens speak of Rutt's dogs in hushed, reverent tones. I find them mushy and bland, though I do like the zesty relish. New Jerseyans looking for a snappy, garlicky all-beef hot dog should head to Syd's in Union.

Perhaps the most idiosyncratic version is the Italian hot dog served in and around Newark. At three places I visited, a quarter of a round, slightly crusty Italian bread was filled with Best brand skinless beef hot dogs and grilled or sautéed peppers and onions, then improbably topped by rounds of fried potatoes. When they are made right, as they are at Tommy's Italian Sausage and Hot Dogs in Elizabeth, they are an irresistible version of meat and potatoes.

My favorite Connecticut places are Top Dog in Cos Cob, which makes a fine grilled natural-casing Sabrett dog with a lovely, surprisingly complex chili topping, and Chez Lenard, a cart that sits in front of a dress shop on Main Street in Ridgefield. There, Chad Cohen uses Hebrew National hot dogs and serves them with unusual toppings. For example, one Mr. Cohen calls Le Hot Dog Épicié et Garniture Suisse is made with cheese fondue, horseradish sauce and chopped onions.

For those homesick for deep-fried beef-and-pork hot dogs, Crif Dogs sells them on St. Marks Place in the East Village.

Though the kosher-style all-beef hot dog is ubiquitous in Gotham, many other styles have been imported. Colombian immigrants eat lucky dogs topped with cheese, pineapple, mustard, crumbled potato chips and Thousand Island dressing at Los Chuzos y Algo Mas on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens. Enthusiasts for Chicago-style hot dogs can now sate their hunger at Shake Shack in Madison Square Park in Manhattan. It serves a classic Windy City dog, a steamed Vienna all-beef dog topped with diced tomatoes, mustard, onions, lettuce, green peppers, neon relish, cucumber, pickles, sport peppers and celery salt.

Context means a lot when it comes to hot dog eating in New York. A Nathan's hot dog does taste better in the salt air at Coney Island or the location in Oceanside on Long Island. The silly signs about all the tropical drinks and about the health benefits of drinking papaya contribute mightily to the hot dog eating experience at Papaya King. So do the conversations with the cops and the local businesspeople across from St. John's Cemetery in Rego Park, Queens, waiting in line at Dominick's hot dog truck, where Angelina D'Angelo serves a terrific steamed natural-casing Sabrett with sautéed onions. (Her husband, Gary, makes an estimable grilled skinless Sabrett dog with great grilled onions and peppers at another truck, D'Angelo's, about 100 yards south on Woodhaven Boulevard.)

But for hot dogs, there's no place like home plate.

The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council says baseball fans will eat 27.5 million hot dogs at major-league parks this year. Yankees fans have a choice of Hebrew National or Nathan's skinless all-beef franks. The same is offered at Shea Stadium, with the addition of glatt kosher Abeles & Heymann hot dogs, sold only in the food court down the right-field line.

The sauerkraut situation at both stadiums is dire. At Yankee Stadium there is nary a pickled cabbage shard to be found. At Shea I found sauerkraut available in one concession stand, the Nathan's booth halfway down the first-base line on the field box level. Shockingly, the sauerkraut is a dollar extra.

But when you are surrounded by screaming Mets fans at Shea or Cyclones fans at KeySpan Park in Coney Island, and the score is tied, and you bite into one of those less than exemplary franks slathered with mustard, you just might be having the peak hot dog experience of all.

(*) (*) This brought back memories of Memorial Day cookouts when I was much younger - those were the days when the biggest worry was.....hmmm, I have to say that I can't remember any "biggest worries"! Enjoy! (h) (h)

(l) (l) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 11:35 AM

Guest Columnist

Honor Thy Teacher

By MATT MILLER Published: May 28, 2005 (he's a guest columnist for Maureen Dowd who is on leave to write another book....)

A poll this week showed Arnold Schwarzenegger's approval rating at 40 percent, thanks to months of punishing ads that teachers' unions have run to blast his call for merit pay. In New York, meanwhile, teachers working without a new contract are campaigning to oust Mayor Michael Bloomberg for his "disrespect."

Around now, Arnold and Mike must be thinking: wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to soothe the savage union beast - while also reforming destructive union practices so that we could recruit a new generation of talent to the classroom?

There is a way: commit to making the best teachers of poor children millionaires by the time they retire. Done right, this idea would be a win for the kids, the teachers, the unions and the pols.

Researchers agree that one of the best things government can do to help poor children is raise teacher quality. Yet poor schools today attract the bottom third of the college class. Why? Compare a typical urban district with its affluent suburbs nearby. When the suburbs (1) pay more, (2) have better working conditions and (3) serve easier-to-teach kids who bring fewer problems to school, it's no surprise that the best teachers gravitate to the best suburban schools.

This isn't to diminish the many great teachers who work their hearts out for poor kids in trying conditions. But it's these teachers who've told me with passion how mediocre many of their colleagues are. We're essentially relying on missionaries to staff schools in poor neighborhoods. How many more years have to pass before we admit that the missionary "plan" isn't working?

Yet the problem with most pay reforms (like Arnold's) is that they're all stick and no carrot. Or they offer such small bonuses (say, $2,000) that teachers have no reason to rethink their aversion to pay differentials based on anything but seniority.

The answer is to think bigger. Consider this "grand bargain." We'd raise salaries for teachers in poor schools by 50 percent. But this offer would be conditioned on two major reforms. First, the unions would have to abandon their lock-step pay scale so that we could raise the top half of performers (and those in shortage fields like math and science) another 50 percent. Second, the unions would have to make it much easier to fire the worst teachers, who are blighting the lives of countless kids.

In many big districts, salaries start around $40,000 and top out, after 25 years, around $75,000. Under this plan, starting teachers would earn $60,000. The top performing half of teachers (and the shortage specialties) would average $90,000. The best teachers would earn up to $150,000. With the amount they could save, the best teachers of poor children could retire with $1 million in the bank.

A move on this scale would change how teaching is viewed by college students who are deciding how to spend their lives. We'd finally be acknowledging the massive "subsidy" schools lost once women were free to enter other professions after the 1970's. And there are environmental benefits, too; if a young couple thinks they could jointly earn $250,000 as teachers, we may well end up with two fewer lawyers!

This plan to make teaching poor children the most exciting career in America would cost roughly $30 billion a year. It's a 7 percent increase in the nation's K-12 spending, which would buy a 1,000 percent revolution in how teaching is viewed. Union leaders, superintendents and teachers have told me that while there are details to sort out, something like this could work. It could transform the teacher corps and its professional culture over the next decade.

If Schwarzenegger or Bloomberg were to scrap their current plans and declare such ambitious goals, unions would chuck their dogma and link arms to find the money.

Rep. George Miller (Calif.), to his credit, will shortly introduce a plan in this spirit at the federal level. But at $2 billion a year, it's not serious.

Why can't timid Democrats put up the full $30 billion national plan against the G.O.P.'s plan to eliminate the estate tax, which would shower the same $30 billion a year on heirs in the nation's 3,000 wealthiest families?

Billions for a handful of heirs whose lifestyles won't change an iota either way - or a new deal to recruit hundreds of thousands of great teachers to make equal opportunity a reality for millions of poor children? Now, that would be an edifying debate. And I'll bet Maria would make sure Arnold was on the right side of this one.

E-mail: mattmiller@nytimes.com; Matt Miller is the author of "The 2 Percent Solution." Maureen Dowd is on book leave.

(*) (*) Maureen might not have written such a piece as this one - which is nice that the NYTimes has these guest columnists in who provide "way" different perspective and ideas. Even for all that money, I still would not and could not teach K-12 in cities or anyplace else for that matter. I just don't have the interest in teaching kids. My preference is in coaching, instructing, facilitating, etc. learning among adults including the elderly. So few people are interested in those demographic groups - okay so maybe the huge drug companies... :o so they can continue to make those billions. I digress <stepping off that darn soapbox again and hiding it someplace...> ;)

(l) (l) Have a delightful holiday weekend for those in the U.S. and a lovely, restful one as well for those in other countries.......Have fun! (f) (f)

Virtual hugs across this digital tundra... ({) (}) ({) (}) ({) (}) .

Love,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 11:48 AM

by Ed Salvato, Gay.com Travel Editor

Memorial Day is right around the corner. This year's annual remembrance and celebration (and the unofficial launch of summer) is Monday May 30. Most of us will sneak out of work early on Friday or take the day off entirely, affording us a blessed three- or four-day weekend away from work and stress.

What are you going to do with this windfall of time? Gay and lesbian travelers have more options than ever before for the perfect homo-friendly getaway.

Click on any of our suggestions below for loads of articles and information. For more in-depth trip planning (where to stay, eat, play and meet) in the big gay summer resorts, be sure to click on the OUT&ABOUT TravelGuide to the right.

GAY TRADITIONS
Gay and lesbian travelers have four magnificent queer-friendly options to choose from. At each of these you can stroll around with your partner hand in hand, meet a new special someone or just relax with loads of like-minded, same-sex-lovin' individuals.

Provincetown is the mother of all summery gay getaway spots. Folks flock here from near and far to enjoy this charming village of historic houses (some close to 300 years old), world-class guesthouses, delicious cuisine, delightful entertainment, otherworldly dunes (which are federally protected) and a perfect combination of light, sun and clouds that has been inspiring artists for over a century. Note: Memorial Day weekend is typically very popular with lesbian visitors.

Not so well known outside Northern California, Russian River tempts visitors with its rustic surroundings and laid-back attitude, not to mention wallet-friendly lodging options. Pitch a tent or choose a cabin or stay in a fine lodge. What Russian River lacks in frou-frou amenities, it more than makes up for with friendly, relaxed service, as well as an almost embarrassing richness of natural beauty -- from verdant hills to aromatic vineyards to the cascading river and towering redwoods.

Also not so well known outside Southern California, Laguna Beach teams with gay men and some women mainly from Los Angeles, San Diego and surroundging communities flaunting those gym-hardened muscles and latest sunglass fashions. You'll find a handful of charming inns, some great gay restaurants -- try Woody's at the Beach ($9-19) -- and, of course, the locally famous and wildly entertaining Boom Boom Room.

Two East Coast options beckon visitors with offbeat charm. Ogunquit, Maine's only stretch of sea coast, attracts both regional gays and lesbians and French-speaking holidaymakers from Canada, ensuring both a good old time and a touch of class. Crack open a ruby-red lobster drenched in butter, then head to the surprisingly wide, deep, talcum-powder-white sand beach. Afterwards, follow the pink, sandy revelers to the local gay pub, where customers sing along with a piano player.

Our Mid-Atlantic friends flock to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware for their R&R. Though not as gay-gay-gay as the other resort areas, Rehoboth attracts loads of homo visitors who get along smoothly with the local non-gay population. Check out tasty restaurants, the rollicking beach and that super-quaint boardwalk.

HAVE A THIRST-QUENCHING PENSACOLA
Pensacola draws tens of thousands of gays and lesbians to this sleepy community. From Friday afternoon through Sunday in the wee hours, partiers hop from venue to venue, dancing in the balmy gulf air. Despite the devastation wrought by Hurricane Ivan -- many clubs and hotels are still damaged -- the party is still on. You won't see a little thing like a natural calamity stop gay and lesbian travelers!

MIDWESTERNERS SNAP TO IT
In-the-know leathermen and their admirers are heading to Chicago for International Mr. Leather (www.imrl.com), which is celebrating its 27th anniversary. The Hyatt Regency Chicago (151 East Wacker Dr; 312/565-1234) is the host hotel. So, pack your chaps, harness and head to the Windy City. Just be sure to pack everything in the bag you check on the plane. You don't want to have the TSA pawing through your new studded bracelet, right?

Many Chicagoans and other Midwesterners opt instead to head out to gay-popular Saugatuck/Douglas for some low-key summer fun. Dubbed the "Cape Cod of the Midwest," these diminutive twin towns comprise a gay-friendly haven on the languid shores of Lake Michigan. With all the quaintness and lack of pretense of small-town America, these resort towns are surprisingly diverse and tolerant, with a thriving artistic community and a very visible gay presence. Gay life is anchored at the Dunes Resort ($50-260), the Midwest's largest gay and lesbian resort. Wherever you head, just remember our fallen soldiers and kick off summer in fabulous gay style.

(*) (*) .......pondering the possibilities......however virtual right now. ;)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 11:56 AM

Attracted 140 years ago by the world's premier redwood groves, first loggers and then travlers came to see the ancient forests then called Big Bottom. Today, the Russian River area is a vacation destination offering fine restaurants, wineries and activities. The Russian River is made up of small eclectic hamlets and towns.

http://www.russianriver.com/ (l) Lots of links on this web page)

(*) Cool and interesting! http://cdec.water.ca.gov/river/russianStages.html

(l) (l) (l) (l) Pet-friendly get-aways: http://www.rrgetaways.com/

(8) (8) (8) (8) Two of my favorites: Russian River Festivals:

http://www.russianriverbluesfest.com/

http://www.rrfestivals.com/blues/

http://www.rrfestivals.com/jazz/

(8) (8) (8)

(a) (a) Russian River Winegrowers: http://www.rrvw.org/

(*) (*) OKay, you choose among the many links that I found:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Russian+River&btnG=Google+Search

(l) (l) Have a fun-filled, relaxed weekend. (f)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 12:01 PM

Women's Travel: Introduction

In the 1600s, intrepid traveler Lady Ann Fanshawe was so desperate to see the world that she disguised herself as a cabin boy to do so. Other women followed more openly in her footsteps. Adventurers such as the outspoken and flamboyant "Queen of the Desert" Lady Ester Stanhope; celebrated aviatrix Amelia Earhart; famed traveler-writer Freya Stark; and renowned traveler archaeologist and government officer Gertrude Bell have set a fine example, firmly staking out women's place.........

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=Women%27s+Travel&btnG=Search

(*) (*) ....I could spend hours from what I found here on google......I saw "Tuscany" and started to look for links there........and I don't even want to get started on my heroines Amelia, Lady Ester Stanhope, Gertrude Bell and others and imagining following in a few of their footsteps back in time..... ;)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 12:03 PM

http://zoom.gay.com/prepareAdvancedSearchAction.do?category1=77

(*) (*) There's got to be other places to search this out.....any suggestions?

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 12:09 PM

Sir Elton's only benefit appearance this year will be at this free, public event. Expected to be the world's largest AIDS Awareness event, it's a must-see.

On July 4th the landmark Philadelphia Freedom Concert will be taking over the City of Brotherly Love. Elton John will headline the event (naturally named for his Billy Jean King-inspired '70s hit). Slated to be the largest free HIV/AIDS awareness event ever held, it's not to be missed.

With an expected audience of over 1 million, the concert is already drawing comparisons to Live Aid. Performers in addition to Sir Elton will include Bryan Adams and Patti Labelle, and broadcasting legend Walter Cronkite will also make an appearance. The show starts at 8:30 on the steps of the renowned Philadelphia Museum of Art (perhaps best known for the steps where Rocky trained to Eye of the Tiger). A large fireworks display will follow the show.

The historic show will be preceded by the Philadelphia Freedom Ball fundraiser from 5 - 8 pm, in the main atrium of the museum. Tickets range from $500 - $2,500 and are being sold on a first-come, first-serve basis. Tickets can be purchased and donations can be made by calling 800/917-4389 or by visiting phillyfreedom.net.

With a fundraising goal of $2 million, proceeds from the event will be split between the Elton John AIDS Foundation and the Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld Fund, which will allocate funds to Philadelphia-area HIV/AIDS service organizations. For more information, be sure to check out their online event listing or visit their website.

http://zoom.gay.com/viewEvent.do?eventId=417

http://zoom.gay.com/www.phillyfreedom.net

(*) (*) Seen Elton four times back in the 1970's.....always sat up front and couldn't hear very well afterwards.... ;) Walked in three-inch platform shoes....the whole "bit". It would be lovely to see this upcoming event sans those platform shoes....okay, perhaps three-inch sexy sandal high heels.... (6)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 12:12 PM

by Aefa Mulholland, with Ed Salvato

Early summer is a fabulous time to be gay. The weather gets better every day, attire is skimpier and Gay Pride festivals festoon the calendar. While gay and lesbian film festivals lure us indoors, Pride events allow millions around the world to stand up and be proud. It's a time of drama and decadence, of politics and parties, when an amazing variety of people from the queer world celebrate our proud past, present and future.

As diverse as the community they represent, Pride festivities are an eclectic assortment, but whether a gargantuan branded extravaganza that makes the city screech to a standstill (see number 2 below) or a more diminutive event, brimming with small town charm (see number 6), summer's host of homo happenings bring to the forefront the serious issues that concern our community, while simultaneously delivering delicious doses of sun-saturated fun.

Here's our choice for North America's top 10 Gay Prides. See the "Honorable Mention" sidebar for two of the most exciting upcoming international Pride events.

1 New York City
New York City LGBT Pride Week 2005
June19-26
www.hopinc.org
Barely a week after the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival's curtains have swung down, Pride explodes into life. The city where it all began is a particularly joyful and poignant place to celebrate Pride. A plethora of social events take place, including Pier 54's Dance on the Pier and inaugural women's Rapture on the River. Other hot highlights are The March, PrideFest, Mothers March Against AIDS and a Youth Poetry Slam.

2 San Francisco
San Francisco Pride 2005
June 25-26
www.sfpride.org
Billing San Francisco Pride merely as a "parade and celebration" is like describing snow on the tip of the iceberg. This year's events are thrillingly diverse, with celebration stages and pavilions catering to everyone from radical faeries to bears. The parade is not to be missed -- simply being one of thousands packed 12 people deep as 500 motorcycles roar into sight is an experience of a lifetime.

3 Long Beach
Long Beach Pride Celebration: Equal Rights, No More, No Less
Typically held in May; check Web site for 2006 dates and get planning!
www.longbeachpride.com
Because of its pre-Pride events spicing things up, early May is a great month to explore this picturesque, friendly and diverse ocean-side community. This enthusiastic Pride week features book signings, an Equal Marriage Rights political rally and forum, a Pride Run and the energetic Blue and White Dance Party. Festival artists, including Macy Gray, Ultra Nate, Jai Rodriguez and Ru Paul, are more than enough reason for everyone to head for the coast.

4 Orlando
Orlando Gay Days 2005
May 31-June 5
www.gaydays.com
It's not exactly a bona fide Gay Pride day, but Disney's realms are awash with high-spirited gays, lesbians and their friends and family over this wild week. Both men and women have a trio of pool parties to choose from, in addition to events such as One Mighty Party, Beachball 9 and the Luscious Ladies Luau. The biggest day is June 4's 15th Annual Gay Day, when 60,000 queer merrymakers don red shirts and head out to experience Mickey and his magic.

5 Boston
Boston Pride 2005: Pride in Progress -- What's Your Fight?
June 11-June 12
www.bostonpride.org
617/520-3350
The 35th Annual Boston Pride Parade is the highlight of New England's largest Pride event. Flag Raising ceremonies, Pride tree lighting, Gay Day at Faneuil Hall Marketplace and the boisterous Boston Gay Idol pack in merrymakers. The parade isn't the only thing to requisition the streets -- the ever-popular Block Parties also stake claim to Boston's blacktop.

6 Minneapolis
Minneapolis Pride 2005: Liberation In Progress
June 17-26
www.tcpride.com; info@tcpride.org; 952/852-6100
Minnesotans celebrate in style with a Pride festival that consists of stages groaning with talent (including Ari Gold), arrays of food courts, beer gardens and old-style games in Loring Park, hot ticket events such as Uptown and Downtown Block Parties, a decadent day-long brunch/cruise/T-dance event, the fabulous Picnic at Como Zoo and, of course, the parade itself.

7 New Orleans
Southern Decadence
September 1-5
www.southerndecadence.net
While New Orleans has a trio of vast gay goings-on to get all steamed up about -- Pridefest, Mardi Gras and Southern Decadence -- it's Southern Decadence that sees the Big Easy at its most frenetic. Started humbly as a simple going-away party, it now lures 100,000 participants to the French Quarter for nonstop dance and street parties. With gay bars open 24 hours and events of Euphoria caliber, the celebration is only going to get bigger.

8 Atlanta
2005 Pride Festival: Unite and Act
June 24-26
www.atlantapride.org; info@atlantapride.org; 404/929-0071, fax 404/929-0056
The 35th Atlanta Pride, the largest in the Southeast, sees 300,000 exuberant people congregate in and around Piedmont Park for a slew of events, including a mass public commitment ceremony, Networking in the Park and the kickoff of the Dyke March. On the Main Stage, headliners, the Indigo Girls, warm up the hometown crowd on this hot summer night.

9 Vacouver
Vancouver Pride 2005: No Turning Back!
July 24-31
www.vanpride.bc.ca
This laid-back long-weekend event north of the border makes for much fun. While the parade makes its way down the long-trodden route through the West End, raucous Pride brunches take place in hundreds of apartments overhead. The Pride Fest at the water's edge and ensuing parties -- including the decadent Rapture series (for men) Chicas at the Mansion (for women) -- display delicious diversity seen only once a year.

10 Denver
PrideFest Denver
pridefestdenver.org
303/733-7743, fax 303/282-9399
It's the 30th anniversary of Pridefest Denver -- the Gay Rockies' demonstration of its celebratory spirit. The exuberance of this lofty city is infectious. Things sashay off in cheerful style at the first-ever Pride Family Field Day in Cheesman Park that offers contests and tournaments, from a wig relay and a bubble-blowing contest to the much-loved Dogs in Drag competition.

Honorable mention:
Oslo
EuroPride Gay and Lesbian Festival 2005
June 17-27
www.europride.no
Coinciding with the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (June 17-22), EuroPride is a fantastic opportunity to discover gay-friendly Oslo and the land of the midnight sun. A Pride Village and numerous cultural activities star, as well as diverse seminars and, of course, so many parties you couldn't possibly attend them all. Hot tickets events are Megaparty, held in an old post office hall, and Women's Special.

(l) (l) (l) Sounds lovely....... (h) (h) (h)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 12:16 PM

By Eva Leonard

While the legalization of same-sex marriage is a relatively recent development in Amsterdam, the city has long been known as a place where lesbians and other women could assert their independence. In the late 1600s a lesbian couple got married at City Hall (now the Royal Palace). One, a wealthy brothel owner, was disguised as a man and the couple and their guests enjoyed a lavish banquet. When the deception was discovered a few months later, trouble ensued, but only the woman who had posed as the groom was imprisoned. And she, fortunately, was able to bail herself out because of her vast reserves of wealth.

And even as far back as the 14th century, the city had a women-only space. The Begijnhof, a lovely, flower-filled village square in the middle of the city and one of Amsterdam's best-kept secrets, originated back then as a community of devout women who did not want to enter a convent. The Begijnhof is also home to the oldest house in Amsterdam. You'll find its main entrance on Spui.

Fast forwarding a few centuries, a legendary lesbian figure in Amsterdam, Bet Van Beeren opened Cafe Het Mandje in 1927. Although police surveillance kept the cafe from becoming a really gay/lesbian bar, same-sex dancing and kissing were allowed on one day of the year - Queens Day. Van Beeren was one of the original dykes on bikes, known for her fondness of zipping through town on her motorcycle. It is said that when she died, in true tough-girl fashion, her body was laid out on the pool table of her bar. Cafe Het Mandje closed in 1983.

For more juicy historical tidbits, pay a visit to the Lesbian Archive (le Helmersstraat 17). During Gay Games 1998 the Archive hosted an exhibition titled "Lesbian Culture on the Wall." The Homomonument, which commemorates gay men and lesbians who have suffered oppression, is located in the Westermarkt, close to the Anne Frank House. While the Homomonument is easily accessible at all times, there's usually a line to see the home where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis during World War II. Academic types could probably spend all day lost in the stacks at the Homodok (Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185. Tel. 020-525-2601), home to the most comprehensive collection of gay and lesbian periodicals in Europe.

Today, the city is a comfortable place for gay men and lesbians - especially during the Gay Pride celebration. A highlight of that event is the Pride Canal Parade, during which boats teeming with enthusiastic lesbians, drag queens, and musclemen fill the city's canals. Lesbian participation in this wildly popular event is usually quite strong.

Accommodations: Try Amsterdam's women-only B&Bs, such as Johanna's Bed and Breakfast (Tel: 020-684-8596) and Liliane's Home (Sarphastisraat 119. Tel: 020-627-4006). If you're willing to give up cozy Sapphic accommodations for room service and other big hotel amenities, the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky (Dam 9. Tel: 31-020-5549111) is a large, popular five-star hotel in the center of the city, near the Royal Palace. Rates range from about $200 for a single to $630 for a Royal Tower Suite.

Bars/Nightlife: The women's bar scene is nowhere near as bountiful as the men's, but Amsterdam lesbians are a fun-loving bunch. You'll enjoy Vive La Vie (Amstelstraat 7) and Saarein (Elandsstraat 19), which also welcomes men. And on Saturdays the "COC," the national office of the Dutch Gay and Lesbian Organization (Rozenstraat 14. Tel: 020-626-3087), holds a weekly women-only disco. There is also a once-a-month women's dance at the disco bar Ton. Getto (Warmoesstraat 51. Tel: 020-421-5151) is a lesbian-friendly restaurant and bar that sometimes hosts women's nights.

Restaurants: Although world-famous for chocolate, Amsterdam is not especially renowned for its cuisine (heavy on the fish and potatoes and somewhat bland; if you're looking for extraordinary cuisine, hightail it to the city of Maastricht). But do check out The Five Flies (Spuistraat 294-302. Tel: 020-624 8369) for a multi-course gourmet experience. Vandenberg at the Lindengracht is a low-key eatery run by women. For Italian with a Dutch twist, La Strada attracts both men and women. Lesbians should also check out Turkish writer Gunner Kaban's restaurant, bar and club, the Homolulu and the coffee shop Francoise (Kerkstr. 176). Baldur (76 Weteringschans. Tel: 020-624-4672) and Harvest (25 Govert Flinckstraat. Tel: 020-676 9995) both serve vegetarian fare and attract many lesbians.

Shopping: Close by the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky you'll find the indoor shopping center Magna Plaza, the popular department store de Bijenkorf, and the gay/lesbian bookstore Boekhandel Vrolijk (Paleisstraat 135. Tel: 6235142.) You can continue your literary shopping at Amsterdam's lesbian/feminist bookstore Xantippe Books (Prinsengracht 290). At Female & Partners (Spuistraat 100), located close to the Homomunument, you can pick up lingerie and make other playful purchases .

The Spiegelkwartier (conveniently located near the major museums) is mecca for lovers of art and antiques, with great finds from antique nautical and scientific instruments to art and ethnographics. The Spiegelkwartier is conveniently located near the major museums. Feeling romantic and generous? You can ply your companion with armloads of practically any flower imaginable bought at the flower market on the Singel or wow her with a diamond from one of the city's many diamond shops (Since the 16th century, Amsterdam has been the center of a thriving diamond industry).

Museums: Amsterdam is loaded with fantastic museums, but visitors with a fondness for felines should explore the Kattenkabinet or Cat Museum (Herengracht 497. Tel. 020-626-5378), the only museum in the world to showcase the art of the cat over the centuries. The Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art (Paulus Potterstraat 13) is rightfully popular. Science nerds and those who love them can get acquainted with the future at the new Metropolis Science and Technology Center (Oosterdok 2) where visitors can actively engage in experiments and computer games. While you're at the Center, be sure to take in the fabulous view of the city from the roof.

(*) (*) ....<sigh>........ah, wonderful imaginings......

(f) (f) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 12:23 PM

It's a rare gay person that doesn't know the pleasures of Amsterdam. But once you've experienced this gay hub, why not try a little more of the Netherlands? While other towns might lack the hopping action of the capital, you can count on the gay-friendliness that's the mark of this progressive and laid-back country, and there's an amazing amount of variety here. Maastricht, The Hague and Haarlem exemplify the pleasures of the Netherlands, but charming towns pepper the countryside (Leiden, Delft and Utrecht, to name a few) -- all gay-friendly, and most within day-tripping distance of the capital.

(l) Dutch treats: Maastricht:

Mellowness meets savoir-faire
Tucked in the southern tip of the country, this birthplace of the European Union is a truly inter-national city; it's actually closer to Brussels and Cologne than to Amsterdam, three hours away. While the gay scene is rather quiet, there's an easy acceptance here. From antique printers to ancient fossils, Maastricht offers a wide selection of museums. The most impressive is the Bonnefanten (Avenue Céramique 250; +31-43/329-0190; www.bonnefanten.nl; 7 EUR), at the heart of the thrillingly modern Céramique district. Check out its amazing collection of old masters and modern wonders, housed in a dramatic building designed by architect Aldo Rossi. At the opposite end of the archtectural spectrum is Maastricht's variety of imposing churches, from the lovely Onze Lieve Vrouwe, or "Our Beloved Lady," on the plein (plaza) that bears its name, to Sint Servaas and Sint Jans, both on the bustling square known as the Vrijthof.

Maastricht's splendors are myriad: Take a ride down the Maas River; explore the fascinating St. Pietersberg Caves, a subterranean maze forged from the excavation of building stones, just out-side of town; shop on elegant, car-free streets (Stokstraat is the most stylish). Or just wander the aged cobblestone streets of the Netherlands' oldest city, admiring elaborate gables and centuries-old city walls. But a walk through the edgy Céramique district will bring you from Maastricht's ancient past squarely to the here and now.

Stay
Sophisticated Maastricht offers a great choice of estimable lodgings, and as in all of Holland, they're totally gay-friendly. Check out Hotel Botticelli (Papenstraat 11; +31-43/352-6300, fax +31-43/352-6336; www.hotelbotticelli.com; $86-161), with an Italianate look, great Old Town location and fabulous breakfasts. Room 3, with its canopy bed, is perfect for lovers. Nearby Les Charmes (Lenculenstraat 18; +31-43/321-7400, fax +31-43/325-8574; www.hotellescharmes.nl; $87-118) lives up to its name with simple, cozy digs, wonderful staff and centuries-old streets right outside the door. Near the railway station, La Bergère (Stationstraat 40; +31-43/328-2525 or 800/337-4685, fax +31-43/328-2526; www.designhotels.com; $153-184) is a sleek "design hotel" near the train station, with an adjacent sandwich shop called, in trendy no-frills style, Simply Bread (Stationsstraat 36; www.simplybread.nl; sandwiches: 3-6 EUR).

Eat
Maastrichters love their food and drink. In warm weather, the plazas fill with tables, and year-round you'll find more pubs per capita than anywhere else in the Netherlands. This town of 120,000 has four Michelin-starred restaurants. Our favorites are Beluga (Plein 1992; +31-43/321-3364; dinner entrées: $28-51), where chef Hans van Wolde works culinary magic in the heart of the Céramique. From an appetizer of tuna with avocado cream and caviar jelly to desserts like chocolate biscuits layered with raspberries, lemon cream and champagne ice cream, each creation delights the senses. Château Neercane (Cannerweg 800; +31-43/325-1359; $26-44), in a verdant setting in the Jeker valley, offers such enchantments as goose liver with pears, caramel sauce and balsamic vinegar, or cod sautéed with truffles. For down-home pleasures, Café Sjiek (Sint Pieterstraat 13; +31-43/321-0158; $8-20) offers a great glimpse of local cuisine, while In`t Knijpke (Sint Bernardusstraat 13; +31-43/321-6525; $6-11), an atmospheric restaurant/bar/cheese cellar, lets you choose between such international favorites as mussels in garlic broth or a simple kaasplank (cheese board). On the Vrijthof, Café de Perroen/Eetcafé de Pallister (Vrijthof 34-35; +31-43/325-2073; $10-17), a pair of adjacent eateries, allures with its bustling outdoor terrace, particularly popular with young people, and quieter rooms to the side and upstairs.

Play
In a town where just about every spot is gay-friendly, there aren't a lot of specifically gay spots. Café Rosé (Bogaardenstraat 43; +31-43/321-8337), run by the gay organization COC, is our favorite, a congenial spot where gay men and lesbians, spanning the age spectrum, mix with ease. Café Rosé has regular special events for a variety of groups, including women, youth, 45+ and the handicapped. La Ferme (Rechtstraat 29; +31-43/321-8928), a men's bar, looks very traditional -- brick, stucco and timber walls, steins hanging from ceiling beams -- till you notice the leatherman doll and a brass figurine in a rather "excited" state. La Ferme has a tiny dance floor and an amiable staff; it gets more active past midnight. La Gare (Spoorweglaan 6; +31-43/325-9090), across the street from the train station, is a dance spot with train decorations: signals, stiles, railway signs. Locals express doubts as to how long it will remain gay, so call to check. Also on the scene are two gay parties: the Pink Party (+31-43/321-8337; www.pink-party.nl), twice a year (March and October) in the pub/cabaret space La Bonbonnière (Achter de Comedie 1; +31-43/350-0935, fax +31-43/325-9077; www.bonbonniere.nl), and the monthly Lavelöss (www.laveloss.nl, lavelossmaastricht@hotmail.com) at Café Mazzel (Achter de Molens 15; +31-43/325-6423). Both carry small cover charges.

Resources
COC (Bogaardenstraat 43; +31-43/321-8337; www.maastricht.coc.nl) is your best bet for the latest gay news (limited walk-in hours). The newsletter is available for free at the gay bars in town. For general information, visit the Maastricht Tourist Board (Kleine Staat 1; +31-43/325-2121; www.visitmaastricht.nl); ask for pamphlets outlining self-guided walking tours. For all towns, the Netherlands Board of Tourism (888/464-6552; www.holland.com) is an invaluable resource.

(l) (l) Dutch treats: The Hague

Elegance and exhilaration
The Netherlands' government center is often incorrectly pegged as a staid and boring city when, in fact, there are many pleasures here. Just 40 minutes from Amsterdam, a variety of hidden (and not so hidden) delights await visitors to this elegant, walkable and surprisingly active town. Museum lovers have a feast here, from the Mauritshuis (Korte Vijverberg 8; +31-70/302-3456), the town's premier art collection, to the Gemeentemuseum (Stadhouderslaan 41; +31-70/338-1111), an exquisite mansion with collections of fine and applied arts (particularly strong on Mondriaan). On the edge of town, don't miss Madurodam (George Maduroplein 1; +31-70/416-2400), acres of miniature buildings recreating all of Holland in fabulous detail. Just beyond lies Scheveningen, The Hague's popularseaside resort, 20 minutes from the center by streetcar; stop in the Panorama Mesdag (Zeestraat 65; +31-70/310-6665) for its circular view of Scheveningen in the late 18th century. Be sure to spend some time in the area around the Denneweg -- this street is at the heart of The Hague's answer to Greenwich Village, with wonderful antiques and design shops, chic restaurants and (naturally) most of the gay life.

Stay
Parkhotel Den Haag (Molenstraat 53; +31-70/362-4371, fax +31-70/361-4525; www.parkhoteldenhaag.nl; $143-246) offers a nice combination of classic and modern furnishings, a private garden and a prime location just steps from the Royal Palace. Des Indes Hotel (Lange Voorhout 54-56; +31-70/361-2345, fax +31-70/361-2350; www.desindes.com/ nederlands/nl.htm, desindes@desindes.com; $333) could use a little interior work to live up to its grand façade, but its location is perfect, just steps from the Denneweg (plus there's the very cute male staff). For beachside splendor, the venerable Kurhaus Hotel Steigenberger (Gevers Deynootplein 30; +31-70/416-2636 or 800/223-5652; fax +31-70/416-2646; www.kurhaus.nl; $200-322) is a grand choice, from its imposing exterior to the elegantly appointed seaview rooms.

Eat
True to the city's multi-national nature, there's about every kind of restaurant you could want here. Dekxels (Denneweg 130; +31-70/365-9788; $15-28) is one of the town's most sophisticated spots, with great food such as veal with lobster sauce or brill in mustard cream, chic minimalist decor and friendly staff (cuties of both genders). On a side street off Denneweg, Smal (Maliestraat 10; +31-70/346-2474; $10-14) is the only restaurant in town concentrating on Dutch food. The food at this cozy place is an urbane take on the local favorites: beet/herring salad, cheese croquettes, cod fillet with spring vegetables. Strass (Javastraat 132; +31-70/363-6522; $3-10) is the place to stop for a down-home lunch among a largely gay crowd. In a town renowned for Indonesian food, the best spots are the airy, saffron-walled Djawa (Mallemolen 12A; +31-70/363-5763; $8-12) and The Raffles (Javastraat 63; +31-70/345-8587; $15-26), all brocade, orchids and palms. Calla's (Laan van Roos en Doorn 51A; +31-70/345-5866; $29-35), a suave upstairs restaurant, is arguably the Hague's finest -- creative, satisfying and upscale without a hint of attitude.

Play
The Hague has some of Holland's most active gay nightlife, so enjoy! That said, there's not a whole lot for lesbians; only two places have a mixed male/female crowd. One is, of course, BastaCafé, the café at the redoubtable COC (Scheveningseveer 7; +31-70/364-2184; www.cochaaglanden.nl, info@cochaaglanden.nl), a low-key spot with a few booths and a semi-circular bar, serving light meals in addition to drinks. The other, connected to the restaurant Strass (see Eat), is the weekends-only dance club Strass Danscafé (Balistraat 1; +31-70/363-6522). Among the men's venues, Frenz (Kazernestraat 106; +31-70/363-6657) is one of the most fun, a big open space with dance floor and a young, international crowd socializing among the muscleman mannequins draped in glittery cloth. De Landman (Denneweg 48; +31-70/346-7727), a small bar with tons of art on the walls and located right on the Denneweg, is packed all evening. It's one of the few to open early, usually around 4 p.m. Triomfbar (Kettingstraat 4-6; +31-70/346-7107), one of the few spots not in the Denneweg neighborhood, is a long-standing favorite near many of the major shopping streets; look for the rainbow flag that signals this comfy, old-fashioned bar.

Resources
Check the COC (Scheveningseveer 7; +31-70/365-9090; www.cochaaglanden.nl) for gay information, or The Hague Visitors Bureau (Koningin Julianaplein 30; +31-70/364-9311; www.denhaag.com).

(l) (l) (l) Dutch treats: Haarlem

Hofjes and history
Just 15 minutes by train from Amsterdam, most people treat Haarlem as a day trip -- if they go at all. Do plan to spend some time there, as it's one of Holland's most intriguing towns. Haarlem is famed for its hofjes -- centuries-old courtyard apartments originally built as almshouses that, while private residences, are open for visits; check the Tourist Board for the helpful town map that includes many of these architectural and horticultural delights. The Market Square features a 13th-century Town Hall and the elaborate Great Church, behind which lies Spekstraat, Haarlem's best dining street. The Corrie Ten Boom House (Barteljorisstraat 19; +31-23/531-0823), devoted to this well-known World War II resistance fighter, and Teylers Museum (Spaarne 16; +31-23/531-9010), the Netherlands' oldest museum, with everything from Dutch paintings to fossils and coins, are also worth a visit. Or simply wander along the River Spaarne and through the twisting streets of this evocative town, just minutes (but a world) away from the bustling capital.

Stay
Decided not to return to Amsterdam for the night? Spaarne 8 (Spaarne 8; +31-23/551-1544, fax +31-23/534-2602; www.spaarne8.com; $297-358) is the hippest lodging, in a beautifully restored 1765 building with private garden. With only two (fabulous) rooms, it books up fast.

Eat
Car-free Spekstraat is a great spot for restaurants. Here you'll find Praag (Spekstraat 8; +31-23/551-7020; $15-20), Haarlem's trendiest eatery, where an international menu from bouillabaisse to pad thai is served in a setting of stylish gray walls, rows of spotlights and deep wood floors. Next door is another popular spot, de Karmeliet (Spekstraat 6; +31-23/531-4426; $13-18), also offering an eclectic menu (soba noodles in lobster soup, tagine, salmon tournedos) in a cozy atmosphere with yellow walls full of ceramics and wood ceilings. Both have outdoor tables for prime people-watching with your meal.

Play
Haarlem's gay nightlife is, to quote a COC spokesman, "in a bit of a drop," between the nearby bars of Amsterdam and the tendency of many Haarlem couples to be homebodies. The organization itself runs a bar, the COC Café (Gedempte Oude Gracht 24; +31-23/532-5453) that draws both men and women to the tiny upstairs locale on weekends; the second Sunday of each month is for women only. Nearby Wilsons (Gedempte Raamgracht 78, +31-23/532-5854) is also mixed, though predominately male; once a traditional "brown cafe," it now has a trendy metallic decor.

Resources
COC (Gedempte Oude Gracht 24; +31-23/532-5453; www.cochaarlem.tiscaliweb.nl) can update you on new openings; general Haarlem information is available at the VVV (Stationsplein 2; +31-90/616-1600, www.haarlem.nl).

(l) (l) (l) (l) Amsterdam chic: Java Island

So you think you've seen all Amsterdam has to offer? Check out the hippest new area in town: Java Island. This formerly industrial harbor island, just five minutes by bus 32 or 59 from the train station, now boasts some of the city's most fabulous architecture. Stroll along the four canals, designed by 20 young architects. Canal houses mirror traditional ones in wild ways: picture frames dangling from façades, lime-green studded doors, steel-mesh exterior stairways, concrete window borders surrounding open sky. Head down the pedestrian/bike path at the island's center for more wild buildings, created by a series of architects who were given 90 feet each to design. Drawing culinary fans is Voorbij het Einde (Sumatrakade 613; +31-20/419-1143; 3- to 7- course meals: 37-65 EUR), one of Amsterdam's hottest restaurants, where you'll enjoy such wonders as marinated scallops wrapped in smoked wild salmon in an atmosphere that's pure Java Island chic.

(l) (l) Come for the dykes, stay for the queens

Sure, there's plenty to do all around the Netherlands, but no trip to the low country is complete without at least a dip into Amsterdam. This sophisticated, sinful city offers boys and girls of all persuasions a variety of frolic and fun throughout the spring. April and May are ideal months to visit, as the city emerges from the chilly grip of winter and before it gets crushed under the hordes of summer tourists. But bring a jacket; this country has been pushing back the sea for centuries, and the damp, bracing ocean air is an ongoing reminder of nature's pres-ence. Sunny skies can yield a surprise shower at any time. One of the best ways to experience Amsterdam in all of its giddy glory is to come for Koninginedag, or Queen's Day (April 30; www.gayevent

(l) Amsterdam's Noordermarkt Is a Great Place for Bargain Shoppers

By Todd Savage

Amsterdam is rightly celebrated for its nocturnal attractions, but unless you take it easy on Sunday night, you may miss one of the best times of the week in Amsterdam: Monday mornings at Noordermarkt, the lively flea market in the Jordaan neighborhood. To my mind, there's no better way to experience a city than to visit one of its public markets, and this weekly event provides some of the best atmosphere in Amsterdam. While much of the old city has been claimed by the tourist industry, the Noordermarkt is one place in Amsterdam where you'll feel less like a tourist and more like a participant in one of the city's rituals. It's worth putting on your must-visit list, right along with the canal tour and the visit to the Anne Frank House.

For hundreds of years residents of the Jordaan have begun their week with a visit to this picturesque event. The gabled houses on the brick church square are dominated by the Noorderkerk, a church that dates to 1623 and is adorned with cows, chickens, and sheep -- mute witnesses to the market's traditional role. While the market at Westerstraat and Prinsengracht is less about life's necessities than it once was, it is a must for the intrepid antiques hunter, collector, or junker. For many visitors, shopping often seems beside the point when there are so many steaming hot egg rolls (loempia) to sample, accordion tunes to appreciate, and attractive Dutch citizens to gaze at.

Compared to most European cities, Amsterdam is easy for the monolinguists among us. The Dutch are amazingly adept with languages, and nearly everyone in Amsterdam speaks flawless English. Still, it's polite to begin a conversation by asking whether a native speaks English. It's another way of saying, "Do you mind if we speak English now?" Using a greeting or word of appreciation in Dutch will earn some goodwill that can't hurt once you get down to negotiating.

Be a Smart Shopper

When you're ready to match wits with the market's dealers, be forewarned: the Dutch have been sharpening their skill as savvy traders since their golden age in the 17th century. Today, buying, selling, and haggling over prices is a national pastime. On the April 30th holiday of Queen's Day, the Dutch government allows citizens to sell goods on the street, and the entire country turns into the world's biggest sidewalk sale. From morning to late at night, the Dutch celebrate by taking to the streets to drink, carouse, and browse the trinkets and treasures that citizens have purged from their houses. You'll find some of that feeling of good fun displayed on Mondays at the Noordermarkt.

The market is an intimate affair, in both size and spirit. The dealers are light-hearted and full of irreverent humor, and everyone seems to know everyone else. Friendly words are tossed back and forth among dealers and shoppers, regulars and newcomers. It's all about what the Dutch might call gezellig, a feeling of cozy good times.

The basic unit of Dutch currency is the guilder. "One guilder! A small little guilder! If you want to pay 2 guilders, that's OK too! Everything is 1 guilder!" was a dealer's call one crisp, sunny morning. The guilder is worth about half an American dollar, and it's a good idea to have a few coins on hand for smaller items. But you'll need paper guilders for anything substantial; keep them safely stored while you're mixing it up in the crowd.

Many items won't be priced. As one dealer advises, be cool. Don't get too excited or show too much interest in an item. Dealers know what they would like to get for a piece, but they may think they can get more if you're jumping up and down.

Some of What You'll Find

Because their homes are so cozy (i.e., small), Amsterdammers don't have room to be pack rats, and the steep, narrow stairways mean everything must be hoisted up and through the windows. The Dutch also are famously pragmatic. One dealer pointed to a wonderful old cane French recliner and said, somewhat facetiously, that the Dutch would rather have one in plastic because it would be easier to clean. Many of the unique antiques at the Noordermarkt are collected by dealers in Belgium and France.

The goods on sale span a wide range of quality and style, from carefully chosen vintage items (a 1920s French armoire) to serious junk (piles of old gym shoes, suitcases brimming with costume jewelry), and all are spread out on Oriental rugs or dumped on the ground. Look for the dozen or more dealers with home furnishings clustered on the northern side of the square under covered stalls. Much of the market (concentrated on Westerstraat) is devoted to dealers of secondhand fabrics and clothing, but there are other curiosities like handmade hats and African wood livestock-feed bowls.

One of the lovelier booths is run by Hans and Franny Willekes, regular vendors who make weekly shopping expeditions to northern France. They look for rural items from the late 19th century to the 1930s and have new things on display every week. On a recent visit, I especially liked an old mirrored cabinet, an Italian Neoclassical sculpture ($75), and a lovely painted photograph from the 1920s of a little girl with a sailboat ($32).

Another husband-and-wife team, also mainstays at the market, have a gleaming table of silverplate and silverware. I liked a 42-piece set priced at $375.

The market has few heavy furnishings, but you'll always find a sampling of chairs, tables, and light fixtures. There are plenty of things that will fit in carry-on space, from old tin tea boxes commemorating Queen Beatrix's coronation to pastel-colored 1950s dishware ($8.50 per piece). I always tell friends to look for a pretty, inexpensive vase. If you pick up a bouquet of flowers at another outdoor bazaar, the city's floating flower market on the Singel, you'll be able to spruce up your hotel room during your visit and carry the vase home as a memento.

Should you find something too big to carry home, visit one of the Amsterdam Tourist Offices (known as the VVV), which are at Centraal Station and in the Leidseplein entertainment district. Representatives there can put you in touch with an international shipping service.

Even when I don't buy anything, I like to fantasize about getting a studio apartment in Amsterdam, mentally furnishing it with wares on display at the market.

How to Get There, And a Word About the Weather

The Noordermarkt is located directly west of Centraal Station, a landmark for any traveler to Amsterdam, in the western ring of the city's canals.

Using the Anne Frank House as a marker, walk about five or six streets north along the west side of the canal called Prinsengracht until the church (the Noorderkerk) comes into view. If you're taking the tram from Centraal Station, board Nos. 13, 14, 17, or 20 and get off at the Westerkerk stop. Tram tickets (3 guilders or about $1.50) can be bought either on-board, at a tourism office, or at the metro office outside Centraal Station.

Your toughest adversary on market day may be the weather. Amsterdam is the Seattle of Europe, so rain often is part of the market ambiance. Some dealers say they do their best business on wet days. The serious shoppers still come out; the browsers stay away. If you're worried about melting in the rain, go indoors to the tony shops on Nieuwe Spiegelstraat or the largest enclosed antiques mall in Amsterdam, De Looier Antique Market, at Lijnbaansgracht 193.

Rain or shine, get to Noordermarkt early. The dealers arrive around dawn, and start making sales at 7 a.m. They start closing down around 1 p.m.

Time for a Break

That doesn't mean you have to leave at one o'clock. After you've spent a couple of hours picking through the market, settle on one of the cafes -- from the arty Cafe Finch, popular with many of the dealers, to the ladies-who-lunch crowd at Cafe Winkel, with its famed appeltaart -- huge chunks of apple, brown sugar, cinnamon, and whipped cream.

Even if you manage to walk away from the market empty-handed, you'll leave content. And if you still want to shop, or if you didn't find what you came for at the Noordermarkt, head over to Waterlooplein, next to City Hall. The city's old Jewish market, open Monday through Saturday, is filled with vendors selling vintage clothing, jewelry, books, and more fabulous junk.

How far will you go to find a bargain? Check out Louise Rafkin's article, Amsterdam for Thrifters and find out more about her scavenging adventures and bargain bliss.

Todd Savage, a Chicago-based free-lance writer, has written for a variety of travel guidebooks, including Frommer's Gay Europe and Frommer's Irreverent Guide to Chicago. His work has appeared in the Advocate, Travel & Leisure, Metropolis, Town & Country, and the Chicago Tribune.

(*) (*) ...Really nice list of links in my view as well as some valuable input from fellow travelers. I plan on visiting the Netherlands again since my first couple of visits were spectacular!! (h) (h)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-28-2005, 12:29 PM

When: September 3, 2005 - September 16, 2005
Location(s): Prague, Cesky Krumlov, Vienna, Budapest, Bratislava, Krakow

Hermes Tours
Phone: 514/486-4335 or 877-486-4335
Fax: 514/486-0242
www.hermestours.com
info@hermestours.com

Welcome to the long shrouded jewels of Central Europe. Travel and experience the cultures of these unique people, walk down ancient streets, and tread the same path of warriors and kings alike. This tour not only introduces you to the capital cities; Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Bratislava but takes you off the beaten path to cultural heritage sites like the UNESCO protected Cesky Krumlov; one of the most visited towns in the Czech Republic, Hungary's Eger region; home to the renown bull's blood wine and Krakow; a historic city that managed to escape the bombardments of WWII and keep its old world charm. Don't miss this opportunity to experience Central Europe in all its splendor!

(*) (*) Ah well, I couldn't find much going on in terms of gay/queer/"alternative, etc." travel for Krakow, Poland.....but I'll have to continue searching......perhaps another day. (o) (S)

I need a nap..... (S) (S)

Happy digital trails,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-29-2005, 09:21 AM

World School Photographs

http://www.worldschoolphotographs.com/

(*) (*) see if it works for you-pretty neat....... ;) ;)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-29-2005, 09:25 AM

Subject: Amazing Technology

It's unbelievable when you think about what can be done on a computer these days. Click this link.

http://www.thestatenislandboys.com/All_da_Crap_is_here/Sony%20Pic%20Taking.swf

(*) ......and follow the instructions on how to make your monitor a camera.....Sony has a real breakthrough here....... ;) ;)

(f) (f) Have a delightfully lovely Sunday wherever you are, and whatever you have going on, planned or otherwise. (a) (a)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-29-2005, 09:28 AM

Memorial Day is celebrated on the last Monday of May.

Memorial Day originated in the aftermath of the Civil War, during which more American soldiers died than in any other war before or since. It has become a day on which the dead of all wars, and the dead generally, are remembered in special programs held in cemeteries, churches, and other public meeting places. In 1971, Congress designated the last Monday in May as the national Memorial Day holiday.

Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day. After the Civil War, grieving citizens around the nation began holding memorial ceremonies, decorating the graves of Civil War soldiers with flags and tributes. Waterloo, New York, is officially considered the "birthplace" of Memorial Day because it was the first to make the practice of honoring the Civil War dead a citywide event when it held its first Decoration Day in 1866.

General John A. Logan, commander-in-chief of the veterans' group the Grand Army of the Republic, made a formal proclamation designating May 30, 1868, as a day of remembrance of the nation's war dead. The holiday was originally intended to honor the Civil War dead. Unfortunately, that was not the last conflict that American soldiers lost their lives in, and after World War I, the holiday's purpose was expanded to include all Americans lost to war.

Popular tourist attractions on Memorial Day include:
bullet

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC
http://www.nps.gov/vive/home.htm

Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC
http://www.arlingtoncemetery.org/

The General John A. Logan Museum in Murphysboro, IL
http://www.loganmuseum.org/

The Colonel Eli Lilly Civil War Museum in Indianapolis, IN. http://www.in.gov/iwm/civilwar/

Other popular ways to celebrate Memorial Day include visiting your local veteran's cemetery to lay flowers on a grave, or to visit a veterans hospital or VA association and talk to the veterans there. The tradition of wearing poppies in honor of America's war dead takes its origin from the poem "In Flanders Fields," written in 1915 by John McCrae.

******************
In Flanders Fields

written in 1915 by John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Flanders, in north-west Belgium, was the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the World War I. One of the few things said to have survived the bloodshed was the poppy. John McCrea, a Canadian doctor serving on the battlefield, wrote this poem after treating the battle wounded and burying the dead.
**********************

Origin of "Taps"

The earliest official reference to the mandatory use of "Taps" at military funeral ceremonies, is found in The U.S. Army Infantry Drill Regulations for 1891, although it was used unofficially prior to that time under the name "To Extinguish Lights."

The history of "Taps" dates back to the British Army's "Last Post," a similar bugle call which was sounded over soldiers' graves beginning in 1885. The music for "Taps" was composed by Gen. Daniel Butterfield in July 1862 for his unit, the 3rd Brigade, 1st Division, 5th Army Corps, Army of the Potomac. Maj. O.W. Norton, a member of Buttterfield's brigade, wrote in 1898:

One day, soon after the seven days' battles on the Peninsular...Butterfield sent for me and showing me some notes on a staff written in pencil on the back of an envelope, asked me to sound them on my bugle. I did this several times, playing the music as written. He changed it somewhat, lengthening some notes and shortening others, but retaining the melody as he first gave it to me...he directed me to sound that call for "Taps" thereafter, in place of the regulation call. The music was beautiful on that still summer night...

Source: The U.S. Army Ceremonial Band

http://www.calendar-updates.com/Holidays/US/memorial.htm

(*) (*) (*) (*) (f) (f) (f) (f)

Respectfully,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-29-2005, 09:29 AM

Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of an organization of former Union soldiers and sailors - the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) - established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared it should be May 30. The first large observance was held that year at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The cemetery already held the remains of 20,000 Union dead and several hundred Confederate dead.

Presided over by Gen. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant and other Washington officials, the Memorial Day ceremonies centered around the mourning-draped veranda of the Arlington mansion, once the home of Gen. Robert E. Lee. After speeches, children from the Soldiers' and Sailors' Orphan Home and members of the GAR made their way through the cemetery, strewing flowers on both Union and Confederate graves, reciting prayers and singing hymns.

Local Observances Claim To Be First
Local springtime tributes to the Civil War dead already had been held in various places. One of the first occurred in Columbus, Miss., April 25, 1866, when a group of women visited a cemetery to decorate the graves of Confederate soldiers who had fallen in battle at Shiloh. Nearby were the graves of Union soldiers, neglected because they were the enemy. Disturbed at the sight of the bare graves, the women placed some of their flowers on those graves, as well.

Today cities in the North and the South claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day in 1866. Both Macon and Columbus, Ga., claim the title, as well as Richmond, Va. The village of Boalsburg, Pa., claims it began there two years earlier. A stone in a Carbondale, Ill., cemetery carries the statement that the first Decoration Day ceremony took place there on April 29, 1866. Carbondale was the wartime home of Gen. Logan. Approximately 25 places have been named in connection with the origin of Memorial Day, many of them in the South where most of the war dead were buried.

Official Birthplace Declared
In 1966, Congress and President Lyndon Johnson declared Waterloo, N.Y., the "birthplace" of Memorial Day. There a ceremony on May 5, 1866, was reported to have honored local soldiers and sailors who had fought in the Civil War. Businesses closed and residents flew flags at half-mast. Supporters of Waterloo's claim say earlier observances in other places were either informal, not community-wide or one-time events.

By the end of the 19th century, Memorial Day ceremonies were being held on May 30 throughout the nation. State legislatures passed proclamations designating the day. The Army and Navy adopted regulations for proper observance at their facilities. It was not until after World War I, however, that the day was expanded to honor those who have died in all American wars. In 1971 Memorial Day was declared a national holiday by an act of Congress, and designated as the last Monday in May.

Some States Have Confederate Observances
Many Southern states also have their own days for honoring the Confederate dead. Mississippi celebrates Confederate Memorial Day the last Monday of April, Alabama on the fourth Monday of April, and Georgia on April 26. North and South Carolina observe it May 10, Louisiana on June 3 and Tennessee calls that date Confederate Decoration Day. Texas celebrates Confederate Heroes Day January 19 and Virginia calls the last Monday in May Confederate Memorial Day.

Gen. Logan's order for his posts to decorate graves in 1868 "with the choicest flowers of springtime" urged: "We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. ... Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic."

The crowd attending the first Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery was approximately the same size as those that attend recent observances, about 5,000 people. Then, as now, small American flags were placed on each grave - a tradition followed at many national cemeteries today. In recent years, the custom has grown in many families to decorate the graves of all departed loved ones.

The origins of special services to honor those who die in war can be found in antiquity. The Athenian leader Pericles offered a tribute to the fallen heroes of the Peloponnesian War over 24 centuries ago that could be applied today to the 1.1 million Americans who have died in the nation's wars: "Not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions, but there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men."

http://genealogy.about.com/library/blmemday.htm

(*) (f) (*) (f) (*) (f)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-29-2005, 09:32 AM

Memorial Day has become the most important day of recognition of our armed forces.

Memorial days were set aside during the American Civil War in both the United States and the Confederate States of America. Following the Civil War, also known as the War Between the States, various communities started having memorial services for the war dead. The city of Waterloo, New York was officially recognized as the place where the first memorial services were held after the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln pondered these thoughts in the late fall of 1863. His darkest fear was that he might well be the last president of the United States, a nation embroiled in the self-destruction of what he described as "a great civil war..testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure." He began his remarks with those words as he stood on the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on November 19th of that year.

The minute's speech that became known as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address turned into what might be called the first observance of Memorial Day. Lincoln's purpose that day was to dedicate a portion of the battlefield as a cemetery for the thousands of men, both living and dead, who consecrated that soil in the sacrifice of battle. Said Abraham Lincoln: "That from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause which they gave the last full measure of devotion...that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom..."

In 1865, a druggist in Waterloo, New York, Henry C. Welles, began promoting the idea of decorating the graves of Civil War veterans. He gained the support of the Seneca County Clerk, General John B. Murray, and they formed a committee to make wreaths, crosses and bouquets for each veteran's grave.

Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of an organization of Union veterans � the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) � established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared it should be May 30. It is believed the date was chosen because flowers would be in bloom all over the country. The first large observance was held that year at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

The ceremonies centered around the mourning-draped veranda of the Arlington mansion, once the home of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Gen. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant and other Washington officials presided. After speeches, children from the Soldiers� and Sailors� Orphan Home and members of the GAR made their way through the cemetery, strewing flowers on both Union and Confederate graves, reciting prayers and singing hymns.

In 1966, the federal government, under the direction of President Lyndon Johnson, declared Waterloo, New York, the official birthplace of Memorial Day. They chose Waterloo�which had first celebrated the day on May 5, 1866�because the town had made Memorial Day an annual, community-wide event during which businesses closed and residents decorated the graves of soldiers with flowers and flags.

By the late 1800s, many communities across the country had begun to celebrate Memorial Day and, after World War I, observances also began to honor those who had died in all of America's wars. In 1971, Congress declared Memorial Day a national holiday to be celebrated the last Monday in May.

By the end of the 19th century, Memorial Day ceremonies were being held on May 30 throughout the nation. State legislatures passed proclamations designating the day. The Army and Navy adopted regulations for proper observance at their facilities. It was not until after World War I, however, that the day was expanded to honor those who have died in all American wars.

In 1971 Memorial Day was declared a national holiday by an act of Congress, though it is still often called Decoration Day. It was then also placed on the last Monday in May, as were some other federal holidays.

As already mentioned this 1868 celebration was inspired by local observances of the day in several towns throughout America that had taken place in the three years since the Civil War. In fact, several Northern and Southern cities claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day, including Columbus, Mississippi; Macon, Georgia; Richmond, Virginia; Boalsburg, Pennsylvania; and Carbondale, Illinois.

Today, Memorial Day is celebrated at Arlington National Cemetery with a ceremony in which a small American flag is placed on each grave. Also, it is customary for the president or vice-president to give a speech honoring the contributions of the dead and lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. About 5,000 people attend the ceremony annually.

Several Southern states continue to set aside a special day for honoring the Confederate dead, which is usually called Confederate Memorial Day:

Mississippi: Last Monday in April
Alabama: Fourth Monday in April
Georgia: April 26
North Carolina: May 10
South Carolina: May 10
Louisiana: June 3
Tennessee (Confederate Decoration Day): June 3
Texas (Confederate Heroes Day): January 19
Virginia: Last Monday in May

Today, most states officially recognize the May Memorial Day as a legal holiday, but it is not celebrated on May 30th in every state. Over time the holiday has expanded to encompass our other national wars. Although Veteran's Day is celebrated as well, Memorial Day has become the most important day of recognition of our armed forces.

http://www.rumela.com/events/memorial_day_history.htm

(*) (f) (*) (f) (*) (f) (*) (f)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-29-2005, 09:35 AM

Memorial days did not start in Petersburg, Virginia; Waterloo, New York; or any other city in the United States. Memorial days upon which the graves of the communities' heroes were decorated with flowers and garlands are ancient customs originating in Greece 2,500 years ago.

Memorial days were set aside during the American Civil War in both the United States and the Confederate States of America.

Following the Civil War, also known as the War Between the States, various communities started having memorial services for the war dead. The city of Waterloo, New York was officially recognized as the place where the first memorial services were held after the Civil War.

Petersburg, Virginia, has a clear, unbroken, logical chain of events making it the inspiration for and origin of the NATIONAL Memorial Day.

http://www.memorialdayorigin.info/

(*) (f) (l) (f) (l) (*) (l) (*) (f) (l)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-29-2005, 09:47 AM

(*) (*) .....I suggest turning your speakers up a little bit:

http://www.progressivefarmer.com/fa...aces/index.html

http://www.progressivefarmer.com/fa...aces/top10.html

http://www.progressivefarmer.com/fa...ces/top100.html

Regional Top 20:

http://www.progressivefarmer.com/fa.../southeast.html

http://www.progressivefarmer.com/fa...es/midwest.html

http://www.progressivefarmer.com/fa...laces/west.html

http://www.progressivefarmer.com/fa.../southwest.html

http://www.progressivefarmer.com/fa.../northeast.html

The Rural Rebound: Why People Are Moving to the Country:

http://www.progressivefarmer.com/fa...,402682,00.html

(l) (l) (l) (l) (l)

(f) (f) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-29-2005, 09:49 AM

DRIVING; The New Word In R.V.'s: 'Residential'

By DENNY LEE

Published: May 13, 2005 New York Times

WHEN a motor home costs upward of $500,000, it's no longer a recreational vehicle, it's a rolling chunk of real estate. Which is precisely how Danny Adams furnished his U320, a 40-foot-long motor home built by Foretravel in Nacogdoches, Tex. It has a stainless-steel refrigerator and microwave, polished brass faucets, walnut cabinets, three surround-sound systems and five flat-panel televisions.

''It's like being in my house, just a little bit smaller,'' said Mr. Adams, 50, an engineering consultant from Tyler, Tex., who recently took delivery of the U320, a diesel behemoth. ''It has all the comforts of home.''

But since when does a home brandish expandable walls, air-operated doors and a satellite dish that aligns itself with every turn of the steering wheel? Not to mention a 37-inch plasma-screen TV that swings out for tailgate parties?

''It's a condo on wheels,'' said Jimmie Bergman, a Foretravel salesman, as he showed off Mr. Adams's motor home. ''Nobody wants a utilitarian camper anymore.''

Indeed, what R.V. shoppers seem to crave these days is not so much an R.V. as a portable version of their dream home, a roving castle as roomy as a rock star's trailer and as plush as a five-star hotel. And manufacturers are tripping over one another to comply. Spurred on by space-enlarging advances, they are slapping the term ''residential style'' on any feature that can be supersized.

Ceilings that were once a head-bumping 78 inches have been raised to seven feet and higher. Kitchens that were once limited to hotplates and dorm-style refrigerators have blossomed with four-burner gas ranges, wine coolers and granite-topped islands. Bathrooms that were once closet-size now have walk-in closets of their own. And the electronics onboard, from wireless Internet access to audiophile theaters, rival those of a Silicon Valley bachelor pad.

''Residential is the latest wave,'' said Sherman Goldenberg, the publisher of RV Business, a trade publication based in Ventura, Calif. ''Before, R.V.'s had rather classless-looking interiors. Now we're seeing upscale coaches with residential-style interiors done gracefully.''

But just because they look homey doesn't mean that people actually live in them. Unlike the classic Winnebago and its legion of road-trekking retirees, these souped-up R.V.'s are not necessarily being used as primary residences or even as second homes. Instead, the driving force behind the new R.V.'s are baby boomers looking for quick weekend thrills.

Just ask Mr. Adams, who is now on his third luxury motor home, each one nicer than the last. ''We take it down to College Station for Texas A&M football games,'' said Mr. Adams, who is accompanied on such jaunts by his wife, Sandy, and their 17-year-old son. ''I haven't missed a football game since the 1972 season.''

Like a giant bumper sticker, the entire R.V. is painted in Texas A&M's colors, maroon and white, and emblazoned with painted-on varsity letters. ''You're not tailgating from the back of a pickup truck,'' he said. ''You're tailgating from a half-million-dollar motor home with satellite reception, in front of a 37-inch plasma TV, under a shaded canopy. This is tailgating in its finest form.''

Lavish setups like this come in handy for Nascar races, outdoor concerts, rodeos, hunting trips and even as a guest suite for visiting relatives. Mary Greenwell, 44, of Hilton Head, S.C., uses her $600,000 R.V. when she travels to horse shows. ''We use it about half a dozen times a year,'' said Ms. Greenwell, who has a 45-foot Affinity made by Country Coach in Junction City, Ore. She spent two months selecting fabrics and tiles.

''We're kind of spoiled,'' she said. ''Sometimes we park it in a campground and check into a hotel.''

That's assuming she can find a campground that welcomes monster motor homes. The majority of the R.V. parks are not equipped to handle vehicles longer than 40 feet and also have trouble meeting the electricity demands of the largest R.V.'s. ''We need 50 amps,'' Ms. Greenwell said. ''That would blow their circuitry.''

THE metamorphosis from basic R.V.'s to motorized McMansions began in earnest in 1995, when an R.V. company named Holiday Rambler introduced the first mechanized slide-out. With a push of a button, the motor home sprouted a wing, adding precious width to the cramped, 8-foot-wide interior.

''Before slide-outs, you almost had a subway effect,'' said Patrick Carroll, the vice president for product development at the Monaco Coach Corporation in Coburg, Ore., which bought Holiday Rambler in 1996. The slide-outs, which pop out when the vehicle is parked and move the walls of some areas -- as well as couches, beds and even kitchen cabinets -- farther apart, can nearly double the usable floor space.

R.V. makers promptly started their version of the arms race, jockeying to see who could add the deepest, widest, tallest and most slide-outs. Now there are motor homes with a slide-out in the kitchen, one in the living area and a third in the bedroom. Some even have two in the bedroom to fit a king-size bed and still leave space to walk around it.

''Customers love it,'' said Adam Gudger, a Monaco salesman, during a tour of the company's 45-foot-long Executive motor home at the industry's annual trade show in Louisville, Ky. With its four slide-outs extended, the interior grows from 340 square feet to almost 430 square feet. ''Quad slides hit the marketplace last year,'' Mr. Gudger said. ''Now they're becoming standard.''

Not to be outdone, Fleetwood R.V. of Riverside, Calif., unveiled a motor home with a massive slide-out that extends from the driver's seat to the rear of the 36-foot-long cabin. ''We are the first company to come out with a full-wall slide,'' said Amy Coleman, a company spokeswoman.

All that extra space means that owners can now have double-door refrigerators, ottomans, overstuffed sofas, washer and dryers, coffee tables and other comforts of home. There seems to be no limit.

Designers are scouring their homes to see what else to add. ''Fireplaces are becoming very popular,'' said Rodney Lung, a salesman for Travel Supreme, a high-end manufacturer in Wakarusa, Ind.

All this does add a certain burden. So-called Class A motor homes, the largest of their kind, were once built to carry up to 17,000 pounds. Today's motor homes, loaded down by generators, slide-outs, marble tiles, granite countertops and air-conditioners, can weigh 50,000 pounds and more.

To carry all this stuff, motor homes have been retooled from the engine up. ''The real strength is in diesel-based motor homes,'' said Mr. Goldenberg of RV Business. As a sign of the sector's expanding waistline, nearly half the Class A motor homes shipped today are diesel-powered, compared with just 13 percent in 1996.

As weight has risen, fuel efficiency, not surprisingly, has plummeted. Motor home owners are lucky if they can squeeze out six miles a gallon. But despite stubbornly high fuel prices, high-end motor homes are selling better than ever. In 2003, 14,000 motor homes costing more than $200,000 were sold, a 20 percent increase over the year before. In 1992, fewer than 100 such vehicles lumbered off the showroom floor.

With R.V.'s this big and plush, why stop at larger living areas and bigger bedrooms? ''Having a second bathroom is just so handy,'' said Rex Browning, 65, a hair salon owner from Ottawa, Kan., who has a 42-foot-long Monaco Windsor kitted out to the hilt.

The second bathroom is usually reserved for guests, and, he said, ''We wouldn't have a motor home without it.''

(l) (f) (l) (f) (l) (f)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-29-2005, 09:56 AM

sweetlady

05-29-2005, 10:11 AM

by Shana Naomi Krochmal

When I was 7, I danced around the living room and made moony eyes at Jennifer Beals and her half a sweatshirt, pretending I liked her stripteases because she was such an amazing dancer. Twenty years later, newly single after moving cross-country to be closer to my now-ex-girlfriend, I went looking for "The L Word" in the mother of all the wrong places: Los Angeles.

L IS FOR LIES!
First off, the bad news: "The L Word" shoots in Vancouver. The one in Canada. Significantly to the north. And, Showtime glamour to the contrary, most of West Hollywood is not teeming with high-heeled, Prada-clad lesbian art curators or scorching Subaru-endorsed tennis stars.

WeHo is still first and foremost a boy's town, and no matter how much I worked the lesbian grapevine, I could not conjure a coffeehouse as central and communal as the Planet. What can I say? Television lies.

WHAT'S UP, PUSSYCAT?
The good news: You can't swing a pussycat in L.A. without hitting a crew of girls out looking for exactly the same thing. Whether you live in the area or are just cruising by, chances are if you pick the right night of the week and the right out-of-the-way location, you can cultivate your own personal dyke drama, too. As if we need help with that part.

From building-size billboards of the naked cast to the private "viewing" parties littering CraigsList's w4w forums, ladies in L.A. talk about "The L Word" just as much as other chicas across the country. Showtime didn't invent Sapphic surfer girls and East Side sisters, but if you're coming to town hoping to trip over the ladies who have come out of the woodwork, let me share a few of my hard-learned lessons.

The Falcon, an upscale restaurant that's usually closed on Sundays, has been hosting "L Word" parties for more than 500 ladies a week since the season two premiere. Make reservations for dinner, or expect to stand and mingle during the show, which is projected on a wall in the patio area. When the show is on hiatus, call to see if there are special events scheduled in its place.

TAKE THE "L WORD" PERSONALLY
The most important question to ask when looking for L.A. nightlife is which of the show's characters is most you -- or most your type. I actually heard this point being debated in four different bars on two nights, so while it may feel like a trite pickup ploy, there's a reason.

BETTE'S BAR
If long-legged lipstick lezzies are your thing -- Bette before she went all business Barbie, or Marina when she wasn't quite so psychotic -- all signs point to GirlBar, Friday nights at the Factory (go in through the Ultra Suede entrance at 661 N. Robertson Blvd.).

You'll find DJs (though none quite as hot as Carmen), go-go girls and a big, breasty crowd. It's a meat market, but it's our meat market. Go to www.girlbar.com before 5 p.m. on Fridays and get on the list for free entry. On Wednesdays, the same crowd is over at Mark's Restaurant & Bar.

SHANE ON YOU
Seeking a totally un-GirlBar scene, or just looking to get fucked and forgotten? Get your fill of Shane look-alikes and the women who love her at Shotgun at the Gauntlet II, a divey gay leather bar packed to the gills with twentysomething girls and genderqueers every Wednesday night. The beefy bartenders serve up $1.25 domestic beers and TVs showing decade-old fag porn with encouraging smiles. There's a pool table (with enough room around it so you can cheerlead without getting skewered by a cue) and a large patio where you can smoke or saunter.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND
When you're ready for a first or second date, or if you want to encourage the Alice to your Dana, head over to Murakami, which lives up to its local reputatin as "lesbian sushi." The night I was there, one gay-male couple was outnumbered by 10 or 11 pairs of women, including a newsboy-hatted soft butch and her chanteuse sitting at the sushi bar and loudly breaking up in full view of the restaurant and waitstaff.

TAKE SOME TINA
If you're feeling broken up and blue (Tina) or just plain naughty (Jenny), head to Cheetah's (4600 Hollywood Blvd.) for a lap dance. You'll find free admission, moderately priced drinks and strippers more likely to strut their stuff to the Psychedelic Furs or Green Day than to standard-issue rock'n'rap. The ladies on stage are generally super-friendly to ladies in the audience. (Remember, if you're just looking, tip a buck a dance.) Be warned: L.A. laws governing how much T&A is allowed on any given night change without warning.

Jenny and Dana, left to their own confused devices, wound up at The Palms, an old-school haunt that's still dominated by butches and femmes, including a much stronger contingent of gals of color. Most women seemed to be having at least a little fun. Give the bouncer a hard time and he might give your girl group a break on the cover charge, which may make up for the very mediocre DJ and go-go dancer.

Across the street and down a block is the Normandie Room, which is stuck in a shopping center but has a diverse set of dykes seven nights a week. There's a pool table, but also glass tables (how are you supposed to sneak in a grope with someone's girlfriend right there?) and completely inexplicable, ugly paintings of cats. I didn't care, though, because they were showing "Flashdance" on the TVs, and the crowd was mellow and the chicks behind the bar very hot. Parking sucks here, but there's valet service if you get desperate.

FIND YOUR OWN PLANET
If only Normandie turned into a coffeehouse during the day, you'd have your Planet. Until then, you can patch together a café-hopping schedule to take you from Psychobabble over in Silverlake (beware Sunday night open mic) to King's Road Café to Buzz to the Abbey to the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, all of which are mixed to mostly male but not entirely devoid of hot girls.

By the end of my whirlwind lesbian scenic tour -- personal highlights were the stripper wearing sparkles but not much else and the cheap booze-cool babes combo at the Gauntlet -- I'd remembered that there's life after breakups, and in L.A., there are ladies where you least expect them.

(*) (*) Although I admit to watching and enjoying the second season of the L Word, I feel kind of older than those depicted. Without the drama, the few scenes where at least the closest approximation of real intimacy is portrayed - THAT gets my undivided attention.

(*) I lived in the southern CA area for 7 years (and another 7 near San Francisco) and in my experiences, LA is extremely lonely - perhaps because anyplace worth going to is "at least a two-hour drive". LA area residents estimate travel by time it takes and at what time of day, rather than in miles. With such a car-culture, I found connecting with others on any personal level to be almost nonexistent - unless you included my hairdresser, nail lady and massage therapist - basically people I paid to perform services to touch me in some way. It was lonely there for me and I'd never, ever move back to CA. (I know, never say "never". AND way, way northern CA near Mount Shasta and north and west are still very beautiful.....) My preference is the high desert, always and forever.

(*) Deadwood is still by far my absolute favorite show. I must admit that I am a "closet L-Word fan" - with the caveat that I'd love to see a more realistic cast including more older women as regulars than the ones who were in only three episodes.

(*) (*) Well, haven't I got alot to say this morning? I must be feeling better!

({) (}) ({) (}) 's and a couple of (k) (k) 's,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

Lady_Di

05-29-2005, 10:12 AM

This should help clear up the differences between Sales, Marketing and
Public Relations.

Several women have asked for me an explanation of Marketing. Perhaps
the following analogies will help clear it up:

You see a handsome butch at a party. You go up to hym and say, "I'm
fantastic in bed."
-- That's Direct Marketing.

You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a handsome butch. One
of your friends goes up to hym and pointing at you says, "She's fantastic
in bed."
-- That's Advertising.

You see a handsome butch at a party. You go up to hym and get hys
telephone number. The next day you call and say, "Hi, I'm fantastic in bed."
--That's Telemarketing.

You're at a party and see a handsome butch. You get up and straighten
your dress. You walk up to hym and pour him a drink. You say, "May I," and
reach up to straighten hys tie brushing your breast lightly against hys arm,
and then say, "By the way, I'm fantastic in bed."
-- That's Public Relations.

You're at a party and see a handsome butch. Hye walks up to you and says,
"I hear you're fantastic in bed."
-- That's Brand Recognition.

You're at a party and see a handsome butch. You talk hym into going home
with your friend.
-- That's a Sales Rep.

Your friend can't satisfy her so s/he calls you.
-- That's Tech Support.

You're on your way to a party when you realize that there could be
handsome womyn in all these houses you're passing. So you climb onto the roof of one situated toward the center and shout at the top of your lungs, "I'm fantastic in bed!"
-- That's Spam

;) ;) ;) ;) ;)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

and whatever happened to attraction, not promotion~

lol

make em come to you, Bill W was right
make em say, I want what you have
make em curious enough to ask
how did you do that
or I want some of what you got
it looks sooooo damned good from here

though now I am thinking of fishing analogies
depending on what is on your hook, or even if you have a hook
thinking of Nets, or The Net, or a whole different way of catching fishes

still prefer the sacred dance of Fly Fishing, though I would not be adverse to Marlin Fishing.... guess it depends what you are after, eh?

I am buying the experience, the journey, not the destination
though sometimes you just need sustanance, food, fishes

though having a whole bunch of fish can be a good thing
especially if you are a professional fisherman
or you want to feed a whole lotta people

*giggling*

I love Marketing and Advertising~
Free Market Enterprise

there is definitely room for all kinds, yes?

beware of trollers,
d'who's best fishing trips never caught anything but sunshine

sweetlady

05-29-2005, 10:20 AM

Have a ball in Vienna

by Ed Salvato, Editor OUT&ABOUT

When you think of Vienna, you probably conjure up images of grand architecture, high art, Freud, waltzing at lavish balls and the opera. All of these things are quintessentially Viennese, and a trip to the city without experiencing them would be like going to Paris and not seeing Notre Dame.

But Vienna is working hard these days to shake off its classic and purely classy image and present itself as a hot option for the hipper, younger traveler or the tourist who cares as much about nightlife as high life.

While it's not as hopping as, say, New York City, Vienna is full of surprises, like the exciting new Gürtel nightlife district located beneath the tiled archways of a subway line.

And when she parties, watch out! Each May the city proudly promotes the Life Ball (www.lifeball.org), an AIDS fundraiser with a major fashion show, a costume party that has become as extravagant as any Halloween or Mardi Gras anywhere and performers including, in 2004, Elton John, Jimmy Somerville and Nina Hagen. This year's event takes place May 21 and features a fashion show personally staged by Donatella Versace.

At first, the city can seem overwhelming, particularly from an architectural point of view. But this is a city famous for relaxing, and you should do the same here — perhaps by sitting and soaking up the atmosphere in one of its many cafés, a hallmark of this city — and soon you will find you are as at home here as anywhere.

Waltz through gay Vienna with our Central Europe TravelGuide.

For a weekend in Vienna, download our 3-Day TravelGuide.

Deep Sleep
Das Triest (192-247 EUR) is near St. Stephans, Vienna's historic city center and a cluster of gay establishments, making it a wise choice for lesbian and gay visitors. Welcoming guests for 300 years, Das Triest was the departure and arrival point for travelers heading to the important seaport of Trieste (until the last century part of the Austrian empire). Redesigned in our century by famed architect Terence Conran, Das Triest features modern comforts, including spacious, airy rooms, free wireless Internet access and a fitness and sauna area.

The Pension Wild (38-57 EUR), also conveniently close to both the gay district and the cultural highlights, is well known among the budget-conscious. This is also truly what we would call a "gay hotel," with an almost exclusively gay clientele. Its rooms, however, are decidedly no-frills.

The Hotel Urania (49-89 EUR) is a two-star hotel that is gay-owned and operated, and has mostly gay visitors. It boasts large, comfortable rooms that have been newly redecorated and large, light-drenched windows. The price is definitely right. However, it's a long hike by foot from this hotel to the gay district.

Arcotel Hotel Wimberger (167-180 EUR) is establishing itself as a gay-friendly front-runner, advertising in local gay media and on Web sites. However, it is about 10 minutes by tram from the heart of Vienna.

Do Undo
Wanna look fabulous for Life Ball, Pride or just waltzing around Vienna? Head to Salon Erich. The salon is located inside the courtyard and upstairs. Erich has done the locks of many a celebrity, including Madonna, but he's down to earth and crazy (in a good way). Be sure to call as far in advance for an appointment as possible, since Erich is a local celebrity himself.

After the party, relax at Aux Gazelles, an authentic, Turkish-owned hammam. Clear your mind, relax on slabs of warm marble and let yourself be scrubbed, pleasantly pummeled and washed by a very cute attendant. There's nothing overtly sexual going on here; in fact, women attendants glibly saunter through the men-only areas. But for post-party peace, this is a rare treat.

Discover gay-popular spas the world over with our Guide to Gay-friendly Spas.

For a picture-perfect lazy Sunday, head to Vienna's so-called Old Danube (the lake resulting from the oft-redirected and reengineered Danube River), a collection of gardens, sunbathing areas, including a gay-popular nude area, restaurants with waterside terraces and bike paths that attract local swimmers, rowers, windsurfers and ice skaters in winter. This surprising urban oasis is best seen from the surface of the water, especially for glimpses of the toylike, miniature summer cottages surrounding the lake. Let the superfriendly folks at Segelschule Hofbauer, 22 (An der oberen Alten Donau 193; +43-1/204-34-35; www.hofbauer.at) take you out on a tour of the lake. Or just sit at their outdoor restaurant and watch folks swim, paddle, sail and float by.

Float on over to two other nearby gay-friendly city, Prague.

Eat Meet
Viennese cuisine is so much more than Wiener schnitzel and sacher torte (although those are divine here). First-time visitors may be surprised at the wide range of culinary options available in Vienna. It may even seem incongruous that landlocked Austria offers superb sushi at many eateries. Just be sure to make reservations or get to a restaurant pretty early; you'll be hard-pressed to find establishments serving after 10 p.m., especially during the week.

Dine like a local at Ra'mien Café & Restaurant (dinner entrées: 10-15 EUR), an in-the-know noodle and sushi joint in a funky neighborhood near a number of gay establishments. After dinner, head to the Ra'mien Lounge, located in the basement. It's all faux-lacquered walls and comfy benches surrounding a dance floor awash in funky soul vibes. It's predominantly straight, though it's becoming more gay popular; on a recent Sunday visit it was chock-full of sexy 20-something lesbians.

Where else can you find sexy lesbians? Our Womens' TravelGuide reveals all.

Several noteworthy dining spots are located in the up-and-coming Währinger Gürtel area. The "beltway" includes an elevated subway line whose formerly dark and forlorn arches sheltered all sorts of nefarious activities. Today those spaces are filled with lively restaurants and bars. Nothing like fighting vice with legal vice!

Your best dining option is babu (15-20 EUR). The vaulted, bricked ceilings define an ample space crisscrossed by upper-level catwalks with additional dining space. There's also a festively lit outdoor dining space. Try the sushi here; it's phenomenal.

From its nondescript exterior, you'd never know that Motto (8-18 EUR) is an übertrendy spot with excellent food, a mixed gay-straight clientele and gorgeous waiters and bartenders. A word to the wise: The serving fellows flirt fiercely, but most are straight. From the people that brought Motto is the new café/restaurant Halle (6-14 EUR) in the Museums Quartier. It's a noisy joint, but the best and potentially gayest spot in the must-visit neighborhood.

For lunch or dinner, rocket to ultradesigned Urania (12-18 EUR), a modern space in an office building overlooking the river. Service was leisurely, but each dish was well worth waiting for. The chocolate fondant dessert is particularly delightful here.

Rosa Lila Villa is the city's gay community center, offering a variety of groups, services and information; phone and in-person hours are 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday. At the same location, you can find Café Willendorf, a lively restaurant offering healthy choices and a large vegetarian selection.

More information
More information on Austria can be found at www.austria.info. Click on "Gay and Lesbian Travelers" (lower-left portion of screen) for gay-specific trip-planning information.

(*) It's Summer (well, not quite yet I know), and I have the whole month of June off! That must be why my fingers are tapping into these places of interest. Never been to Vienna but hear from "both sides of the fence" (as if life were that clearly defined) that it is truly a wonderful city.

Have fun today! (f) (f) (f) (f) (f) (f) (f)

Hopi Sun Thoughts,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

Lady_Di

05-29-2005, 10:20 AM

glad you are feeling better, sweetlady
hope the Doc has a great check up, too!

d

sweetlady

05-30-2005, 08:15 AM

glad you are feeling better, sweetlady
hope the Doc has a great check up, too!d

Good morning and thanks again for your very kind thoughts for Doc the Boxer and me.

I had a long night with coughing......I guess it might be a good idea to make and keep (!) a doctor appt. tomorrow if I don't feel better today. The two sides of my back (where my lungs are) really hurt - which sounds like it really is bronchitis again. (and I went for almost nine years without getting it.) :( Heck, if that's my biggest problem today - I'm having a pretty terrific day.

Have a lovely Memorial Day, Lady_Di!! (f) (f) (f) (f)

({) (})'s
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-30-2005, 08:18 AM

http://essential-facts.com/primary/Architecture_Arts_Styles_and_Places_DTOI/Feminism.html

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-30-2005, 08:21 AM

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=Renaissance+Women

(f) (f) ,
Sweetlady and doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-30-2005, 08:22 AM

http://www.ethologic.com/sasha/thinkers.html

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-30-2005, 08:24 AM

"Taken with a grain of salt, mystical world views present an inspiring intellectual dish... ;-) Don't consume too much on an empty mind - makes you dizzy and disoriented. "

;) ;)

(*) (l) (*) (l) (*) (l) (*)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

05-30-2005, 08:25 AM

Helen Hardin 1943/disabled due 2 spam/1984

A tribute to Tsa-sah-wee-eh, "Little Standing Spruce"

Beautiful, gifted Helen Hardin died much too young, leaving a world that would long to see what age might have brought to the powerful, intellectual paintings of her youth and young adulthood.

Helen was born in Albuquerque, the daughter of Pablita Velarde, an internationally recognized artist from Santa Clara Pueblo, and Herbert O. Hardin, an Anglo government employee. (Helen is shown here with her daughter Margarete Bagshaw Tindel on her left.)

Her early childhood was spent in the shadow of Black Mesa, at Santa Clara Pueblo, where her first language was Tewa and her first perspectives on the world were formed. Thus began what was to be a complex, brilliant, brief life.

Hardin left Santa Clara Pueblo with her family at age 6. She was never initiated into a clan, and her paintings reflect less authentic detail than was employed in her mother's more traditional work. In fact, strong-minded, individualistic Helen found the traditional style to be less of a challenge, less demanding than the complex styles she would develop in her own sophisticated, dynamic designs. Add to that, Helen's response to her heritage: According to Helen Hardin's friend, artist John Nieto (as told to Hardin biographer, Jay Scott) Helen dealt head-on with the pain of what it actually means to be an Indian in America. While most Indian artists deal with a tourist's idea of Indian imagery, Helen Hardin "dealt with the real thing. Even when it meant remembering the heritage they tried to take away from her. Even when it caused her hurt."

One of the milestones in Helen's artistic life came in 1968 in Bogota, Colombia. Until then, she had assumed that people purchased her paintings because she was the daughter of Pablita Velarde. But in Bogota, no one knew of her mother and, on the strength of the work alone, Hardin sold 27 of her paintings. From that point, she knew she could be an artist and would not have to paint in the shadow of her famous mother.

In the early days of her artistic life, Helen painted, in her own words, "cute little Indian paintings" and traditional realism while simultaneously she struggled with a personal and artistic revolution. Finally breaking free of the traditional mold, Helen's work became strongly geometric and increasingly abstract. Her work frequently incorporated Mimbres and Anasazi figures and kachina forms and masks; the rich inspiration of the Anasazi found unique—if not traditional—expression in Helen's paintings. Her intellectual women series of paintings—"Changing Woman," "Listening Woman," "Creative Woman," and "Medicine Woman"—expanded an artistic exploration that would continue until her death.

In 1982 it was discovered that Helen Hardin had terminal cancer. Not only did she continue to paint with a healing determination, but her work following the diagnosis became increasing spiritual and compassionate. Shortly before her death at age 41, Hardin said, "Listening Woman is the woman I am only becoming now. She's the speaker, she's the person who's more objective, the listener and the compassionate person." Helen Hardin was a consummate and complete artist at the time of her death, and one can only wonder where her art would have led her if she had been allowed more time to confront life.
Continuing...

Helen Hardin's daughter, Margarete Bagshaw-Tindel is an artist who lives in Albuquerque. While the grand-daughter and daughter of two women whose influence and stature could be daunting, Margarete is creating her own original path through her love of abstract form and design.

Helen Hardin's life and work is eloquently documented in a critical study written by Jay Scott and richly illustrated with photographs by Cradoc Bagshaw. The book is Changing Woman, The Life and Art of Helen Hardin, Jay Scott, Northland Publishing Company, Flagstaff, AZ.

Helen Hardin's original etchings and paintings are available at the Silver Sun, 656 Canyon Road in Santa Fe. A poster of Hardin's "Prayers of a Blue Corn Mother" is also available.

Our thanks to Cheryl Ingram, Inee Yang Slaughter and Margarete Bagshaw-Tindel.

By Pamela Michaelis, publisher of the Wingspread publications. Pamela also writes and hosts “Gallery News” a 6-times weekly radio show on KHFM 95.5, classical radio in Albuquerque.

Originally appeared in The Wingspread Collector’s Guide to Albuquerque Metro Area - Volume 7

Retrieved May 29, 2005 from: http://www.collectorsguide.com/fa/fa048.shtml

(l) (l) (l) (l) (l) (l) (l)

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-30-2005, 08:26 AM

Glossary of Indian Arts Terms: Short definitions to help collectors of Native American arts and crafts

Acoma A New Mexican Pueblo, famous for white pottery, most of which is painted with fine geometric lines; one of the oldest continually inhabited 'cities' in North America

Anasazi The Prehistoric Pueblo Indians of northern Arizona and New Mexico; sometimes referred to as the 'Ancient Ones', believed to be the ancestors of many of the Pueblo Indians

Avanu A popular design (the water serpent) often seen in Native American art of the Southwest, particularly pottery, signifying the prayer for and representation of water, critical for life in the desert

Beads: Silver Barrel - a design for silver beads which describes the barrel shape, often with stampwork; one of the more contemporary designs; a challenging made-by-hand process. Disc - a design for silver beads crafted by two separate discs, usually identical, then the silver is soldered. (See also: Heishi)

Bear A popular symbol in Southwest art, often seen as a fetish, in weavings, on pottery, and in silverwork, sometimes with a 'heartline', extending from the mouth to the center of the body

Bear Paw An often used design in potter and silverwork; often if the artist is of the bear clan, or, more generally, as a symbol of inner strength

Bezel That part of a ring which holds the stone; vertical wall holding gemstone

Black on black A style of pottery developed about 1919 by Maria and Julian Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo. It is characterized by two shades of black -- one highly polished, the other matte or dull

Burnishing A process of producing a polished, shiny surface by rubbing a smooth stone over the surface of pots or bowls after application of the slip

Chasing A metalsmithing term; the process of moving metal to achieve line or form; a silversmith may have as many as 100 chasing tools, each to achieve a particular effect; unlike stamping, the tool moves laterally

Cochiti A NM Pueblo, famous for figurative clay work

Coil method A pottery term; the potter rolls a long rope of clay, which is coiled around on top of itself, forming the desired shape. In the coil-and-shape method, the walls of the pot are thinned, shaped, and smoothed by scraping with a smooth tool

Concha The Spanish term for shell; may be oval or round, frequently with scalloped edges, with or without stones; may appear in rings, pendants, bolos, buckles and belts. Now most often a Navajo design for a belt

Corn A powerful symbol in many tribes, used as a design on jewelry, pottery and weavings as respect and a prayer for fertility and a good growing season; also used if the artist is a member of the corn clan

Embossing Process used in silverwork where the piece is decorated or shaped by a raised design

Engraved Ruts or lines scratched into a metal surface

Etched Design formed in pottery by removing surface of pottery, sometimes called sgraffito

Faceted Polished surface on a gemstone

Fetish Used and made by all Southwestern Indian tribes, fetishes are objects which represent the spirits of animals or the forces of nature. Original fetishes were simple stones (or shells, turquoise or bone) which seemed to resemble people or animals, sometimes made more realistic by a carver. The Zuni people have the reputation of being the most skilled at fetish carving. Zuni tradition has six directions, each with its guardian animal fetish: the mountain lion, north; the bear, west; the badger, south; the eagle, the sky, or up; the mole, underground, or down; and the wolf, east

Fire cloud An irregular marking on the exterior of pottery; usually resulting from burning fuel coming in direct contact with the vessel during firing

Firing The step at the end of the pottery-making process, literally baking the piece to harden. (Modern Pueblo pottery is generally fired for beauty rather than endurance; water will mar the surface and, if allowed to stand in an unprotected vessel of this type, may actually crumble it. To use as a container for flowers, etc, insert a glass container to hold the water.)

Fossilized ivory Petrified animal bones or teeth used as a substitute for elephant tusk, the demand for which made the elephant almost extinct

Heishi A Pueblo term literally meaning shell; discs or tubes with a hole in the center, usually of turquoise, coral, shell, or other materials, strung together to form a flexible strand, often of graduated size. The Santo Domingo Pueblo people are known for fine heishi

Hogan A traditional, one-room Navajo home of earth and wood

Hopi A tribe in Northern Arizona, known for distinctive "overlay" silver jewelry, pottery and Kachina dolls

Hubbell A well-known trading post, best known for the Ganado design of Navajo weavings

Incising In pottery, the cutting of closely-spaced lines and designs into the surface of the pot before it is fired

Jacklas (Jackclaws) string loop of turquoise beads hanging from turquoise necklace, originally used as earrings

Jemez A New Mexico Pueblo, in the Jemez mountains, known for pottery

Kachina dolls A form of religious folk art attributed mostly to the Hopi. The dolls are wooden images which represent the men who dance in costume, mask and paint as kachina spirits in Hopi villages from 21st December (winter solstice) through the third week in July. Kachinas represent supernaturals, the spirit or essence of animate and inanimate objects in nature who benefit the Hopi by bringing rain for a successful planting, fertility for animals and man, cures for illnesses, justice for lawbreakers, and humor for appropriate circumstances. Authentic dolls are carved from the root of the cottonwood tree only after it has broken away

Keresan A pueblo language

Liquid Silver A type of necklace or bracelet constructed of very thin, fine, small silver cylinders originally strung on catgut, now strung on fine wire

Matte or semi-matte A dull surface finish far less glossy than the burnished black or red ware. Most pottery from Hopi, Acoma, Zia and Picuris is matte

Micaceous Containing tiny flakes of mica. The clay of Taos and Picuris is micaceous, giving their pots a sparkling surface

Naja The centerpiece of a squashblossom necklace; crescent-shaped pendant, has Moorish derivation

Navajo weaving styles:

Burnham Contemporary style; intricate, geometric design, rare

Burntwater Contemporary style; very small geometric pattern within a band, or border; region was known for using natural, vegetal dyes in soft colors

Chief's Earliest established weaving style known to the Navajo. Three phases: first phase, simple horizontal stripes of blue, white, black and brown; second phase, weavers added short red bars to the design; third phase, most popular, more elaborate, with stepped triangles in addition to the stripes of the original

Crystal Borderless, sometimes vegetal, banded design goes across horizontally, initiated by JB Moore at Crystal Trading Post

Ganado A design which includes red as well as black, white and grey; at the time of its inception, a major departure for Navajo weavers, attributed to Lorenzo Hubbell of the Hubbell Trading Post in Ganado, Arizona

Pictorial Considered by many to be a true expression of Navajo folk art; not limited to any sector of the reservation: literally, a picture is in the design

Raised outline Contemporary style; double twill, which results in a three dimensional appearance; started in 1950s, described as Teec Nos Pos patterns but with Burntwater colors

Storm Pattern Central motif is the hogan, or domicile, with the four directions or four sacred mountains in each corner; 'lightning' is usually identifiable as well

Teec Nos Pos Named for the trading post from which it is believed to have originated, near the Four Corners area. Most intricate and difficult pattern to weave, heavy Persian influence

Two Grey Hills Typified by black, brown, beige and white colors usually all natural, undyed sheepùs wool, woven in a complex geometric pattern

Wide Ruins Named after the trading post from which it originated; usually soft colors in a simple, horizontal pattern

Pawn Jewelry that was used as cash, and 'pawned' to a trader for other goods; often, when the owner could, he would buy or trade to retrieve it. Old Pawn refers to pawn jewelry from the early 20s to the late 30s. Dead Pawn refers to jewelry not collected after the agreed date, often several years

Picuris One of the Eight Northern Pueblos, known for micaceous pottery

Potshard Also shard or sherd. A fragment of pottery

Polychrome A painted or glazed surface of three or more colors

Pueblo ('town dwelling') An alternate description for reservation, or exclusive domicile for Native Americans, used mostly as a descriptive in New Mexico; pueblos are communities, and life revolves around the plaza, where ceremonial dances are often held; pueblos also have their own government and law enforcement agencies

Sandcast A type of jewelry-making whereby metal is cast in stone molds for form

Santa Clara One of the eight Northern Pueblos, famous for its red and black pottery, mostly carved

Santo Domingo One of the eight Northern Pueblos, best known for heishi bead necklaces formed from turquoise and shells; also unique, traditional pottery and some silversmithing

San Ildefonso One of the eight Northern Pueblos, located south of Santa Clara, well known for red and black pottery, especially black on black technique

Slip A fine, liquid form of clay applied to the surface of a vessel prior to firing. Slip fills in pores and gives uniform color

Squashblossom A necklace design, composed of silver beads, incorporating 'squashblossoms' (a design based on the form of a pomegranate); includes a large center pendant called a Naja

Stamping or stampwork A term used in silversmithing to describe a process whereby a design is 'stamped' onto a piece of silver; in this process, the tool is stationary, unlike chasing, where the tool moves through the process

Storyteller The person acknowledged within the Native American community as the one who verbally passes on historical and cultural beliefs. Helen Cordero, Cochiti Pueblo, was the first to depict a storyteller, surrounded by children, in clay. Cordero's 'Storyteller' is on display at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe

Temper Sand, crushed rock, or ground-up potshards added to clay to reduce shrinkage and cracking during drying and firing

Tewa and Tiwa Two languages of pueblo people

Turquoise A semi-precious stone used in Indian jewelry, found in arid regions. Colors range from blue to green yellow; natural: the stone as it is mined; stabilized: chemically hardened; treated: color altered; reconstituted: dust chips and plastic made into jewelry

Warp The foundation in Navajo weaving; those threads which are vertical on a vertical loom

Wedding Vase A traditional, double-necked vessel used as a ceremonial wedding vessel

Weft The crosswise exposed threads (those forming the design) on a Navajo weaving

Yei A Navajo deity or spirit, often seen in weaving designs from the Shiprock area of New Mexico

Zapotec A style of weaving by native Mexican Zapotec Indians from Oaxaca

Zuni A Native American tribe, known for fetish carvings, delicate inlaid jewelry and multiple stone settings, often called 'petit point' or 'needlepoint'

Thanks to Richard and Carolyn Canon of Packards on the Plaza opposite La Fonda.

Originally appeared in The Collector’s Guide to Santa Fe and Taos - Volume 11

Retrieved May 29, 2005 from: http://www.collectorsguide.com/fa/fa063.shtml

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-30-2005, 08:28 AM

...including a 20-strand Zuni necklace that I display in a shadowbox with fabric and the piece is hanging - gorgeous! (l)

Indian Fetishes: Southwest tribal miniature carvings that some say are imbued with spirit forces

Indian fetishes are hand-carved objects, which represent the spirits of animals or the forces of nature. From the earliest times in North America, the Indians have used fetishes in an effort to master the arbitrary and unpredictable forces beyond their control. The earliest fetishes are called Ahlashiwe or stone ancients by the Zunis. They were naturally formed stones that seemed to resemble people or animals, sometimes made more realistic with the features accentuated by a carver.

They are considered more powerful and were formerly thought to be ancient animals or people turned to stone. All Southwestern tribes make and use fetishes. However, the Zuni people have developed a reputation for being the most skillful in carving elaborate fetishes, which are used in their religious rituals and are an integral part of their personal lives.

Fetishes may be used in many ways, either by the individual or by the whole tribe: for good luck in the hunt, initiation into a society, the diagnosis or curing of illness, fertility and propagation purposes, and/or for personal protection.

Zunis believe that animals, as well as inanimate objects and the forces of nature, have a spirit force, which can either help or hurt man. It is believed that the carved animal fetishes host that spiritual force and, if treated properly, will help their owners to overcome the problems facing them.

According to Zuni tradition, the guardian animals of the six directions are intrinsically involved in the kiva rites:

the mountain lion > north
the bear > west
the badger > south
the eagle > the sky (up)
the mole > underground (down)
the wolf > east

Exactly how fetishes are used in the kiva is known only to those initiated into the different kiva societies.

The characteristics of the fetish animals and their possible usefulness for the owner are the basis of their selection. For example, the mole fetish is to protect the fields from rodents; frog fetishes are valued for fertility because of the numerous tadpoles they produce and their association with water. The mountain lion, wolf, and other predator animal fetishes provide the owner with power over the deer and other game animals. Whenever a hunt is successful, the fetishes which gave that success are allowed the first ceremonial feeding of the game animal.

Fetishes are often seen with a bundle of coral, turquoise, or an arrowhead tied to the back or side. These are offerings made to the fetish for favors already received or hoped for in the future. If a carving is believed to have power, it is a fetish.

Some fetishes will have an inlaid turquoise or coral "heartline" extending from the mouth to the center of the body. One of the possible explanations for this heartline is that it represents a time in Zuni mythology when animals totally dominated man. The Great Spirit sent a bolt of lightning that turned all man-eating animals into stone. The lightning is represented in the stone fetish by an inlaid or painted line. Another possible interpretation is that the heartline gives the fetish healing or medicinal power.

Today Zunis carve fetishes not only for their own uses but also for the use of Indians of other tribes and for collectors.

The Zuni fetishes are given a place of honor in the Zuni home. Some receive special places on the family altar; others are kept in their fetish bowl when not in use. A fetish bowl is a hand-made pot, usually encrusted with turquoise chips, with the four directional fetishes attached to the outside. Inside the pot, fetishes are stored in a mixture of wood ash and corn pollen. If a mole fetish is in residence, it is usually kept in a leather bag because it doesn't like light. These fetishes are ceremonially fed through a small hole in the side of the pot.

The carving of miniature animals and fetishes is an important part of the Zuni economy today. While traditional natural materials such as turquoise, coral, shell, and jet are still being used, many new stones are also being carved. Some of these newer stones are malachite, marble, travertine, serpentine, and anything else that is carvable.
Questions to ask when selecting fetishes

What creature does it represent?
Often many of the older-style fetishes are not readily identifiable.

From what material is it carved?
Turquoise, coral, and amber are usually more expensive than more common dolomite, serpentine, jet or antler.

Who carved the fetish?
Was it carved by a Native American? To what pueblo or tribal people does the carver belong? Most fetishes today are not signed by the carver, but some Zuni carvers are beginning to sign their names on their creations.

But most important, buy what you like! The carvings are an art form and must be judged individually. Whether your tastes run to the finely detailed (and expensive) contemporary miniature sculptures, or to the more primitive older styles, when you purchase a Native American fetish, you are the owner of a representative part of the Native American culture.
Care of fetishes

Since most fetishes are made of stone, they require little or no care. Fetishes may be dusted with a soft, dry cloth. The leather sinew or feathers on the bundles should be kept dry or they may stretch or deteriorate. Older fetishes often appear soiled or dirty and should be left in their original condition to maintain their value.

References and further reading

Fetishes and Carvings of the Southwest, Oscar T Branson, Treasure Chest Publications, Tucson, Arizona, 1976.
A good book for photographs of fetish necklaces, contemporary fetishes, old fetishes.

Zuni Fetishes, Frank Hamilton Cushing, K. C. Publications, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1986.
This book, first published in 1883, has a recently added introduction by Tom Bahti. It is the definitive book on fetishes in Zuni culture.

Zuni Fetishism, Ruth F. Kirk, Avanyu Publishing Inc., Albuquerque, NM, 1988.
Reprinted from El Palacio magazine, June-October, 1943.

Written by Joe Douthitt.
Reprinted with permission by the Indian Arts and Crafts Association remote (IACA) Albuquerque, NM.

Photograph courtesy of Andrews Pueblo Pottery and Art Gallery remote Old Town, Albuquerque, NM.

Originally appeared in The Wingspread Collector’s Guide to the Albuquerque Metro Area - Volume 3

Retrieved May 29, 2005 from: http://www.collectorsguide.com/fa/fa025.shtml

({) (}) 's,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-30-2005, 08:29 AM

Women Artist Pioneers of New Mexico

We've been lucky since the late 1800s

Though Georgia O'Keeffe is the most famous woman artist to call New Mexico her adopted home, she is by no means alone. In the first half of the 20th century, the state was a haven for such women, a place where they could escape the overcrowding and social restrictions of more formal East-coast cities, don trousers and ride their horses across sage-dotted desert. Like their male counterparts, these painters, sculptors, printmakers and photographers found a welcoming network of like-minded pioneers who drew inspiration from the landscape and the spiritual life of the Hispanic and Native American people. But unlike the men, these artists' names are largely unknown.

"A tree dying next to a dazzling white yucca plant growing in the sun, the quick and the dead," is how Rebecca Salsbury James (1891/disabled due 2 spam/1968) described Taos. "New Mexico imposes itself upon its people and they impose themselves on me." Born in 1891 in New York City, James was introduced to O'Keeffe by her first husband, photographer Paul Strand. It was James who lured O'Keeffe to New Mexico in 1929 and who accompanied her on her annual summer pilgrimages to Taos. Eventually, both women relocated to New Mexico.

James' deeply felt response to the land and sky, churchyards and crosses, inspired O'Keeffe's paintings. In turn James was inspired, picking up O'Keeffe's habit of using a pane of glass as a palette. In this way, she accidentally discovered the reverse-glass painting at which she became a master. From a neighbor, she learned colcha stitching, a Spanish Colonial needlework style, and made it her own. During her lifetime, James' painting and embroidery were regular fixtures at Santa Fe's Museum of Fine Arts and the subject of a posthumous retrospective, in 1991, marking the 100th anniversary of her birth.

As Rebecca Salisbury James was settling in Taos, Olive Rush (1873/disabled due 2 spam/1966) was doing the same in Santa Fe. A native of Indiana, Rush left home at 16 to study at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C. and Art Students League in New York City. Her work as a magazine illustrator financed several trips to Paris and, in 1914, she escorted her father on her first trip to New Mexico. Six years later she returned to live. Citing Asian art and El Greco as major influences, Rush painted murals at the Santa Fe Public Library and at La Fonda hotel on the plaza, taught mural painting to students at the Santa Fe Indian School and watched her adopted town grow from what she called "a burro economy" into a modern city while she became one of its most treasured citizens. Though she exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts some 60 times and was the only woman to show with the 14-member group called the New Mexico Painters, Rush's artwork has only recently received widespread recognition. A devoted Quaker, she willed her home at 630 Canyon Road to the Religious Society of Friends where today it remains a Quaker meeting house.

A peer of Rush's in Paris and Washington was Catharine Carter Critcher (1868/disabled due 2 spam/1964). Born to a well-to-do Virginia family, Critcher was already an accomplished portrait painter when she arrived in New Mexico. During a 1922 visit she wrote, "Taos is unlike any place God ever made I believe and therein is its charm and no place could be more conducive to work, there are models galore and no phones, the artists all live in these attractive funny little adobe houses away from the world, food, foes and friends." Though never a permanent resident, Critcher was the only female member of the Taos Society of Artists.

Photographer Laura Gilpin (1891/disabled due 2 spam/1979) was born in Colorado Springs, a quintessentially Western woman. On camping and picture-taking trips in the 1920s she discovered New Mexico and moved to Santa Fe in 1946. "A strong, stocky woman, five feet seven inches tall, with clear blue-eyes, wavy sand-colored hair that later turned a brilliant white and a hearty laugh that suggested boundless energy," according to biographer Martha A. Sandweiss, Gilpin toted her camera equipment hundreds of miles to photograph the landscape and Navajo people of the Four Corners region. During her 60-year career, she authored four important photography books and was elected to the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain. Still, she often had to take commercial work, from publishing photographic postcards and lantern slides on archaeological subjects to operating a turkey farm with long-time companion Elizabeth Forster. Only weeks before she died at 88, Gilpin shot her last photographs of the Rio Grande Valley while leaning out of the window of a small plane.

Such daring was commonplace among the women artists who came to New Mexico in the early 20th century. Just to make one's way to what was then an outpost, a trip that involved a long train ride or a hair-raising drive over barely paved roads, took a certain fortitude, as did the decision to assume the sacrifices of an artist's life. Making a living was difficult and artists did whatever it took to support themselves. Agnes "Agi" Sims, for instance, (1910/disabled due 2 spam/1990) painted signs for Santa Fe's annual Fiesta and Barbara Latham (1896/disabled due 2 spam/1989) designed greeting cards for a Ranchos de Taos outfit. Though she'd studied with Rodin in Paris, Eugenie Shonnard (1886/disabled due 2 spam/1978) made furniture, textiles and ceramics to supplement her income from her sculpture.

The formula for their success was complex. Women who had established their reputations before arriving, such as the Taos printmaker Gene Kloss (1903/disabled due 2 spam/1996), had an easier time building their careers, and those who exhibited outside the state achieved greater recognition than those who focused on New Mexico. Those with well-connected husbands or families benefited from a form of support not available to single women. Of these, Henriette Wyeth (1907/disabled due 2 spam/1997), the daughter of N.C. Wyeth and sister of Andrew, is the best known. Already a recognized painter when she came to New Mexico as the young bride of artist Peter Hurd, Henriette fell in love with Hurd's ranch in San Patricio. "The Southwest gave me a whole new language, new vistas to paint," she said.

That any of these artists thrived was extraordinary given the invisibility of women in the art world in general and their geographic isolation in particular. It was a given that they support one another, as Museum of Fine Arts curator Dorothy Morang and patrons Mary Cabot Wheelwright and Florence Dibell Bartlett did for many of the female artists of the era.

Then, as now, New Mexico was an oasis for women, the ground having been laid by Pueblo artists, such as painter Pablita Velarde and potter Maria Martinez. The result was a place that offered, as Virginia Scharff put it in Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West,1890-1945, "the possibility of social support balanced by freedom of movement . . . . Women found that rare combination of sympathy and privacy necessary to make powerful art."

Thanks to Dottie Indyke, who lives in Santa Fe and regularly writes about the arts and culture of the region.

Originally appeared in The Wingspread Collector’s Guide to Santa Fe, Taos and Albuquerque - Volume 16

Retrieved May 29, 2005 from: http://www.collectorsguide.com/fa/fa093.shtml

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-30-2005, 08:34 AM

How the Santa Fe Art Colony Began

Today's arts tapestry in Santa Fe has a rich history

When "Anglo" artists began to settle in the Santa Fe area in the opening years of the twentieth century, they discovered a mother lode of images, esthetics and amenities. The main draw was the landscape. It was, and is, a matchless blend of shape, color and light. Its proportions are majestic, yet its scale is human.

These artists were charmed by the native inhabitants, who had lived in the surrounding pueblos for centuries. Their culture was beautiful to see and to paint, and their own artistic heritage was evident in pottery, weaving and architecture. A more recent society, the Spanish colonists who had settled the area in the sixteenth century, had brought in their own European traditions of furniture, wood carving, embroidery, tinwork and painted embellishments.

Finally, there were the Taos Founders who had arrived at the end of the nineteenth century. They formed a cohesive group of educated Easterners in a tiny, remote village seventy miles north of Santa Fe. They preceded the early Santa Fe artists by only a couple of decades. In many ways, their arrivals overlapped, for there was much cultural interchange between the village of Taos and the provincial capital of Santa Fe, and many artists visited both places before settling in one or the other.

Both groups consisted largely of artists who already had a considerable reputation before they came West. They were not entirely cut off from their Eastern markets, for many of them divided their time or made annual trips, thus importing New Mexico to the East Coast as well as exporting their talents to the frontier. John Sloan, one of several who had exhibited at the famed Armory Show of 1913 in New York, established a home on Garcia Street off Canyon Road and spent every summer for twenty years, while continuing to teach in New York in the winter.

Randall Davey, another Armory Show exhibitor, established a permanent residence high up Canyon Road where it enters the wilderness. He left it to the Audubon Society, where today's visitors may enjoy exhibits and nature trails in a spectacular setting. He, too, had taught in New York as well as Chicago, but he found a position at the University of New Mexico. He started every class with a rousing discussion of the road conditions between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and was especially interested to know if any of his students had managed a better driving time than he. Few ever did.

For many of the early artists, there were significant advantages to the dry desert climate. It gave Carlos Vierra, Sheldon Parsons, Gerald Cassidy, Theodore Van Soelen and a considerable number of others a major second career, their first one having been jeopardized by tuberculosis and other maladies contracted back east. Another amenity was the simple, gracious lifestyle that almost anyone could afford. Above all, there was the company of like minds. Such camaraderie was very satisfying for artists whose purpose was serious. And they were serious, if only by virtue of their acceptance of the isolation and simplicity they found in Santa Fe.

There were many such Edens in early twentieth century America. None of them had exactly the same charm, but charm alone was not the factor that created Santa Fe's art colony. The one element that tipped the balance was the Museum of New Mexico. The Museum was headed by Dr. Edgar L. Hewett, who was an artist as well as an archaeologist. He and his farsighted colleagues set up a support system aimed at attracting and keeping fine artists.

Studios were created in several rooms in back of the patio at the Governor's Palace, which by then was Museum headquarters. This afforded newcomers a place to get straight to work even as they looked for quarters for themselves and, frequently, for their families. Exhibition of their work was a matter of arranging shows right at the Museum. In those days, there was very little gallery or dealership activity, and artists would simply hang their paintings in order to show their colleagues and community what they were doing. Some of the work was purchased by local or visiting collectors and some of it was sent to galleries back East. In this manner, the artists were able to make a living.

In 1917, the Museum of New Mexico opened its Museum of Fine Arts on the northwest corner of the Plaza. No effort was spared to make the building elegant, expansive and, above all, authentic. The first exhibit, mostly donated by the pioneering local artists, became the core of the Museum's distinguished collection.

In the early twenties, the Santa Fe art colony enjoyed its first period of real greatness. One of the all time benchmarks, Los Cinco Pintores (the five painters), came together at that time. This was a group of five artists: Jozef Bakos, Fremont Ellis, Walter Mruk, Willard Nash and Will Shuster. A more diverse array of artistic style would be hard to imagine, and they only showed together for a few years. But their friendship was ongoing. They built adjacent houses on Camino del Monte Sol with the help of Frank Applegate, an artist and archaeologist who had already purchased a tract of land and built his own residence. The Cinco Pintores were among the most colorful fixtures of the early Santa Fe art scene, becoming known as "the five little nuts in the five adobe huts." The tag was more indulgent than derogatory, for the artists exerted an influence that was out of proportion to their numbers as well as their modest means.

Some of the New Mexico art contingent worked in traditional styles, while others kept abreast of world developments. A vigorous Modernist movement developed in New Mexico, with Cubist and Abstract elements infusing canvases with Southwestern themes and, sometimes, supplanting them altogether. Hewett's evenhanded policy of exhibiting all serious work at the Museum, particularly that of Raymond Jonson, ultimately led to his ouster as director.

It was too late. As the art colony developed further, it became evident that diversity was here to stay. A fledgling Modernist was William Lumpkins, a youngster who came to town in the 1930's, fresh out of the University of New Mexico. He went on to become the only person ever to receive a Governor's Award in both art and architecture. Today, in his late eighties, he continues to paint and exhibit. He may be seen out and about, fraternizing with other artists in the time-honored tradition. His presence is reassuring, for much of the art colony and all it stood for has changed beyond recognition. The distances from the great cities have been closed by modern transportation and telecommunication. The trappings of commerce have turned Santa Fe into a theme park about itself.

Yet, through it all, the art colony lives because the art itself remains the central focus. Change is inevitable and even desirable, and the freshest ideas in no way negate the ones that came before. Nostalgia for today will become the sentiment of tomorrow. Finding the true gems among the tinsel, and knowing that they will form the text of the future, is the Collector’s greatest reward.

Thanks to Suzanne Deats who has also authored for The Collector’s Guide Online a series called Art 101 article

Originally appeared in The Collector’s Guide to Santa Fe and Taos - Volume 11

Retrieved May 29, 2005 from: http://www.collectorsguide.com/fa/fa066.shtml

(*) (*) I really miss the first August weekend Sante Fe Art Show (called Indian Market, actually) where I got to experience (as well as meet some of the artists whose works I collected) extraordinary works of art of all types. (and see which were considered the best by the award ribbons placed by the judges...) Although Sante Fe has grown, I still love the small B&B's and sitting down with some of the Native artists at the Palace of the Governors. It's like time stands still at moments like that. (l) (l)

<sigh>

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-30-2005, 08:42 AM

Class Matters

The College Dropout Boom

By DAVID LEONHARDT Published: May 24, 2005 NYTimes

CHILHOWIE, Va. - One of the biggest decisions Andy Blevins has ever made, and one of the few he now regrets, never seemed like much of a decision at all. It just felt like the natural thing to do.

In the summer of 1995, he was moving boxes of soup cans, paper towels and dog food across the floor of a supermarket warehouse, one of the biggest buildings here in southwest Virginia. The heat was brutal. The job had sounded impossible when he arrived fresh off his first year of college, looking to make some summer money, still a skinny teenager with sandy blond hair and a narrow, freckled face.

But hard work done well was something he understood, even if he was the first college boy in his family. Soon he was making bonuses on top of his $6.75 an hour, more money than either of his parents made. His girlfriend was around, and so were his hometown buddies. Andy acted more outgoing with them, more relaxed. People in Chilhowie noticed that.

It was just about the perfect summer. So the thought crossed his mind: maybe it did not have to end. Maybe he would take a break from college and keep working. He had been getting C's and D's, and college never felt like home, anyway.

"I enjoyed working hard, getting the job done, getting a paycheck," Mr. Blevins recalled. "I just knew I didn't want to quit."

So he quit college instead, and with that, Andy Blevins joined one of the largest and fastest-growing groups of young adults in America. He became a college dropout, though nongraduate may be the more precise term.

Many people like him plan to return to get their degrees, even if few actually do. Almost one in three Americans in their mid-20's now fall into this group, up from one in five in the late 1960's, when the Census Bureau began keeping such data. Most come from poor and working-class families.

The phenomenon has been largely overlooked in the glare of positive news about the country's gains in education. Going to college has become the norm throughout most of the United States, even in many places where college was once considered an exotic destination - places like Chilhowie (pronounced chill-HOW-ee), an Appalachian hamlet with a simple brick downtown. At elite universities, classrooms are filled with women, blacks, Jews and Latinos, groups largely excluded two generations ago. The American system of higher learning seems to have become a great equalizer.

In fact, though, colleges have come to reinforce many of the advantages of birth. On campuses that enroll poorer students, graduation rates are often low. And at institutions where nearly everyone graduates - small colleges like Colgate, major state institutions like the University of Colorado and elite private universities like Stanford - more students today come from the top of the nation's income ladder than they did two decades ago.

Only 41 percent of low-income students entering a four-year college managed to graduate within five years, the Department of Education found in a study last year, but 66 percent of high-income students did. That gap had grown over recent years. "We need to recognize that the most serious domestic problem in the United States today is the widening gap between the children of the rich and the children of the poor," Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, said last year when announcing that Harvard would give full scholarships to all its lowest-income students. "And education is the most powerful weapon we have to address that problem."

There is certainly much to celebrate about higher education today. Many more students from all classes are getting four-year degrees and reaping their benefits. But those broad gains mask the fact that poor and working-class students have nevertheless been falling behind; for them, not having a degree remains the norm.

That loss of ground is all the more significant because a college education matters much more now than it once did. A bachelor's degree, not a year or two of courses, tends to determine a person's place in today's globalized, computerized economy. College graduates have received steady pay increases over the past two decades, while the pay of everyone else has risen little more than the rate of inflation.

As a result, despite one of the great education explosions in modern history, economic mobility - moving from one income group to another over the course of a lifetime - has stopped rising, researchers say. Some recent studies suggest that it has declined over the last generation. [Click here for more information on income mobility.]

Put another way, children seem to be following the paths of their parents more than they once did. Grades and test scores, rather than privilege, determine success today, but that success is largely being passed down from one generation to the next. A nation that believes that everyone should have a fair shake finds itself with a kind of inherited meritocracy.

In this system, the students at the best colleges may be diverse - male and female and of various colors, religions and hometowns - but they tend to share an upper-middle-class upbringing. An old joke that Harvard's idea of diversity is putting a rich kid from California in the same room as a rich kid from New York is truer today than ever; Harvard has more students from California than it did in years past and just as big a share of upper-income students.

Students like these remain in college because they can hardly imagine doing otherwise. Their parents, understanding the importance of a bachelor's degree, spent hours reading to them, researching school districts and making it clear to them that they simply must graduate from college.

Andy Blevins says that he too knows the importance of a degree, but that he did not while growing up, and not even in his year at Radford University, 66 miles up the Interstate from Chilhowie. Ten years after trading college for the warehouse, Mr. Blevins, 29, spends his days at the same supermarket company. He has worked his way up to produce buyer, earning $35,000 a year with health benefits and a 401(k) plan. He is on a path typical for someone who attended college without getting a four-year degree. Men in their early 40's in this category made an average of $42,000 in 2000. Those with a four-year degree made $65,000.

Still boyish-looking but no longer rail thin, Mr. Blevins says he has many reasons to be happy. He lives with his wife, Karla, and their year-old son, Lucas, in a small blue-and-yellow house at the end of a cul-de-sac in the middle of a stunningly picturesque Appalachian valley. He plays golf with some of the same friends who made him want to stay around Chilhowie.

But he does think about what might have been, about what he could be doing if he had the degree. As it is, he always feels as if he is on thin ice. Were he to lose his job, he says, everything could slip away with it. What kind of job could a guy without a college degree get? One night, while talking to his wife about his life, he used the word "trapped."

"Looking back, I wish I had gotten that degree," Mr. Blevins said in his soft-spoken lilt. "Four years seemed like a thousand years then. But I wish I would have just put in my four years."

The Barriers

Why so many low-income students fall from the college ranks is a question without a simple answer. Many high schools do a poor job of preparing teenagers for college. Many of the colleges where lower-income students tend to enroll have limited resources and offer a narrow range of majors, leaving some students disenchanted and unwilling to continue.

Then there is the cost. Tuition bills scare some students from even applying and leave others with years of debt. To Mr. Blevins, like many other students of limited means, every week of going to classes seemed like another week of losing money - money that might have been made at a job.

"The system makes a false promise to students," said John T. Casteen III, the president of the University of Virginia, himself the son of a Virginia shipyard worker.

Colleges, Mr. Casteen said, present themselves as meritocracies in which academic ability and hard work are always rewarded. In fact, he said, many working-class students face obstacles they cannot overcome on their own.

For much of his 15 years as Virginia's president, Mr. Casteen has focused on raising money and expanding the university, the most prestigious in the state. In the meantime, students with backgrounds like his have become ever scarcer on campus. The university's genteel nickname, the Cavaliers, and its aristocratic sword-crossed coat of arms seem appropriate today. No flagship state university has a smaller proportion of low-income students than Virginia. Just 8 percent of undergraduates last year came from families in the bottom half of the income distribution, down from 11 percent a decade ago.

That change sneaked up on him, Mr. Casteen said, and he has spent a good part of the last year trying to prevent it from becoming part of his legacy. Starting with next fall's freshman class, the university will charge no tuition and require no loans for students whose parents make less than twice the poverty level, or about $37,700 a year for a family of four. The university has also increased financial aid to middle-income students.

To Mr. Casteen, these are steps to remove what he describes as "artificial barriers" to a college education placed in the way of otherwise deserving students. Doing so "is a fundamental obligation of a free culture," he said.

But the deterrents to a degree can also be homegrown. Many low-income teenagers know few people who have made it through college. A majority of the nongraduates are young men, and some come from towns where the factory work ethic, to get working as soon as possible, remains strong, even if the factories themselves are vanishing. Whatever the reasons, college just does not feel normal.

"You get there and you start to struggle," said Leanna Blevins, Andy's older sister, who did get a bachelor's degree and then went on to earn a Ph.D at Virginia studying the college experiences of poor students. "And at home your parents are trying to be supportive and say, 'Well, if you're not happy, if it's not right for you, come back home. It's O.K.' And they think they're doing the right thing. But they don't know that maybe what the student needs is to hear them say, 'Stick it out just one semester. You can do it. Just stay there. Come home on the weekend, but stick it out.' "

Today, Ms. Blevins, petite and high-energy, is helping to start a new college a few hours' drive from Chilhowie for low-income students. Her brother said he had daydreamed about attending it and had talked to her about how he might return to college.

For her part, Ms. Blevins says, she has daydreamed about having a life that would seem as natural as her brother's, a life in which she would not feel like an outsider in her hometown. Once, when a high-school teacher asked students to list their goals for the next decade, Ms. Blevins wrote, "having a college degree" and "not being married."

"I think my family probably thinks I'm liberal," Ms. Blevins, who is now married, said with a laugh, "that I've just been educated too much and I'm gettin' above my raisin'."

Her brother said that he just wanted more control over his life, not a new one. At a time when many people complain of scattered lives, Mr. Blevins can stand in one spot - his church parking lot, next to a graveyard - and take in much of his world. "That's my parents' house," he said one day, pointing to a sliver of roof visible over a hill. "That's my uncle's trailer. My grandfather is buried here. I'll probably be buried here."

Taking Class Into Account

Opening up colleges to new kinds of students has generally meant one thing over the last generation: affirmative action. Intended to right the wrongs of years of exclusion, the programs have swelled the number of women, blacks and Latinos on campuses. But affirmative action was never supposed to address broad economic inequities, just the ones that stem from specific kinds of discrimination.

That is now beginning to change. Like Virginia, a handful of other colleges are not only increasing financial aid but also promising to give weight to economic class in granting admissions. They say they want to make an effort to admit more low-income students, just as they now do for minorities and children of alumni.

"The great colleges and universities were designed to provide for mobility, to seek out talent," said Anthony W. Marx, president of Amherst College. "If we are blind to the educational disadvantages associated with need, we will simply replicate these disadvantages while appearing to make decisions based on merit."

With several populous states having already banned race-based preferences and the United States Supreme Court suggesting that it may outlaw such programs in a couple of decades, the future of affirmative action may well revolve around economics. Polls consistently show that programs based on class backgrounds have wider support than those based on race.

The explosion in the number of nongraduates has also begun to get the attention of policy makers. This year, New York became one of a small group of states to tie college financing more closely to graduation rates, rewarding colleges more for moving students along than for simply admitting them. Nowhere is the stratification of education more vivid than here in Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson once tried, and failed, to set up the nation's first public high schools. At a modest high school in the Tidewater city of Portsmouth, not far from Mr. Casteen's boyhood home, a guidance office wall filled with college pennants does not include one from rarefied Virginia. The colleges whose pennants are up - Old Dominion University and others that seem in the realm of the possible - have far lower graduation rates.

Across the country, the upper middle class so dominates elite universities that high-income students, on average, actually get slightly more financial aid from colleges than low-income students do. These elite colleges are so expensive that even many high-income students receive large grants. In the early 1990's, by contrast, poorer students got 50 percent more aid on average than the wealthier ones, according to the College Board, the organization that runs the SAT entrance exams.

At the other end of the spectrum are community colleges, the two-year institutions that are intended to be feeders for four-year colleges. In nearly every one are tales of academic success against tremendous odds: a battered wife or a combat veteran or a laid-off worker on the way to a better life. But over all, community colleges tend to be places where dreams are put on hold.

Most people who enroll say they plan to get a four-year degree eventually; few actually do. Full-time jobs, commutes and children or parents who need care often get in the way. One recent national survey found that about 75 percent of students enrolling in community colleges said they hoped to transfer to a four-year institution. But only 17 percent of those who had entered in the mid-1990's made the switch within five years, according to a separate study. The rest were out working or still studying toward the two-year degree.

"We here in Virginia do a good job of getting them in," said Glenn Dubois, chancellor of the Virginia Community College System and himself a community college graduate. "We have to get better in getting them out."

'I Wear a Tie Every Day'

College degree or not, Mr. Blevins has the kind of life that many Americans say they aspire to. He fills it with family, friends, church and a five-handicap golf game. He does not sit in traffic commuting to an office park. He does not talk wistfully of a relocated brother or best friend he sees only twice a year. He does not worry about who will care for his son while he works and his wife attends community college to become a physical therapist. His grandparents down the street watch Lucas, just as they took care of Andy and his two sisters when they were children. When Mr. Blevins comes home from work, it is his turn to play with Lucas, tossing him into the air and rolling around on the floor with him and a stuffed elephant.

Mr. Blevins also sings in a quartet called the Gospel Gentlemen. One member is his brother-in-law; another lives on Mr. Blevins's street. In the long white van the group owns, they wend their way along mountain roads on their way to singing dates at local church functions, sometimes harmonizing, sometimes ribbing one another or talking about where to buy golf equipment.

Inside the churches, the other singers often talk to the audience between songs, about God or a grandmother or what a song means to them. Mr. Blevins rarely does, but his shyness fades once he is back in the van with his friends.

At the warehouse, he is usually the first to arrive, around 6:30 in the morning. The grandson of a coal miner, he takes pride, he says, in having moved up to become a supermarket buyer. He decides which bananas, grapes, onions and potatoes the company will sell and makes sure that there are always enough. Most people with his job have graduated from college.

"I'm pretty fortunate to not have a degree but have a job where I wear a tie every day," he said.

He worries about how long it will last, though, mindful of what happened to his father, Dwight, a decade ago. A high school graduate, Dwight Blevins was laid off from his own warehouse job and ended up with another one that paid less and offered a smaller pension.

"A lot of places, they're not looking that you're trained in something," Andy Blevins said one evening, sitting on his back porch. "They just want you to have a degree."

Figuring out how to get one is the core quandary facing the nation's college nongraduates. Many seem to want one. In a New York Times poll, 43 percent of them called it essential to success, while 42 percent of college graduates and 32 percent of high-school dropouts did. This in itself is a change from the days when "college boy" was an insult in many working-class neighborhoods. But once students take a break - the phrase that many use instead of drop out - the ideal can quickly give way to reality. Family and work can make a return to school seem even harder than finishing it in the first place.

After dropping out of Radford, Andy Blevins enrolled part-time in a community college, trying to juggle work and studies. He lasted a year. From time to time in the decade since, he has thought about giving it another try. But then he has wondered if that would be crazy. He works every third Saturday, and his phone rings on Sundays when there is a problem with the supply of potatoes or apples. "It never ends," he said. "There's a never a lull."

To spend more time with Lucas, Mr. Blevins has already cut back on his singing. If he took night classes, he said, when would he ever see his little boy? Anyway, he said, it would take years to get a degree part-time. To him, it is a tug of war between living in the present and sacrificing for the future.

Few Breaks for the Needy

The college admissions system often seems ruthlessly meritocratic. Yes, children of alumni still have an advantage. But many other pillars of the old system - the polite rejections of women or blacks, the spots reserved for graduates of Choate and Exeter - have crumbled.

This was the meritocracy Mr. Casteen described when he greeted the parents of freshman in a University of Virginia lecture hall late last summer. Hailing from all 50 states and 52 foreign countries, the students were more intelligent and better prepared than he and his classmates had been, he told the parents in his quiet, deep voice. The class included 17 students with a perfect SAT score.

If anything, children of privilege think that the system has moved so far from its old-boy history that they are now at a disadvantage when they apply, because colleges are trying to diversify their student rolls. To get into a good college, the sons and daughters of the upper middle class often talk of needing a higher SAT score than, say, an applicant who grew up on a farm, in a ghetto or in a factory town. Some state legislators from Northern Virginia's affluent suburbs have argued that this is a form of geographic discrimination and have quixotically proposed bills to outlaw it.

But the conventional wisdom is not quite right. The elite colleges have not been giving much of a break to the low-income students who apply. When William G. Bowen, a former president of Princeton, looked at admissions records recently, he found that if test scores were equal a low-income student had no better chance than a high-income one of getting into a group of 19 colleges, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Williams and Virginia. Athletes, legacy applicants and minority students all got in with lower scores on average. Poorer students did not.

The findings befuddled many administrators, who insist that admissions officers have tried to give poorer applicants a leg up. To emphasize the point, Virginia announced this spring that it was changing its admissions policy from "need blind" - a term long used to assure applicants that they would not be punished for seeking financial aid - to "need conscious." Administrators at Amherst and Harvard have also recently said that they would redouble their efforts to take into account the obstacles students have overcome.

"The same score reflects more ability when you come from a less fortunate background," Mr. Summers, the president of Harvard, said. "You haven't had a chance to take the test-prep course. You went to a school that didn't do as good a job coaching you for the test. You came from a home without the same opportunities for learning."

But it is probably not a coincidence that elite colleges have not yet turned this sentiment into action. Admitting large numbers of low-income students could bring clear complications. Too many in a freshman class would probably lower the college's average SAT score, thereby damaging its ranking by U.S. News & World Report, a leading arbiter of academic prestige. Some colleges, like Emory University in Atlanta, have climbed fast in the rankings over precisely the same period in which their percentage of low-income students has tumbled. The math is simple: when a college goes looking for applicants with high SAT scores, it is far more likely to find them among well-off teenagers.

More spots for low-income applicants might also mean fewer for the children of alumni, who make up the fund-raising base for universities. More generous financial aid policies will probably lead to higher tuition for those students who can afford the list price. Higher tuition, lower ranking, tougher admission requirements: they do not make for an easy marketing pitch to alumni clubs around the country. But Mr. Casteen and his colleagues are going ahead, saying the pendulum has swung too far in one direction.

That was the mission of John Blackburn, Virginia's easy-going admissions dean, when he rented a car and took to the road recently. Mr. Blackburn thought of the trip as a reprise of the drives Mr. Casteen took 25 years earlier, when he was the admissions dean, traveling to churches and community centers to persuade black parents that the university was finally interested in their children.

One Monday night, Mr. Blackburn came to Big Stone Gap, in a mostly poor corner of the state not far from Andy Blevins's town. A community college there was holding a college fair, and Mr. Blackburn set up a table in a hallway, draping it with the University of Virginia's blue and orange flag.

As students came by, Mr. Blackburn would explain Virginia's new admissions and financial aid policies. But he soon realized that the Virginia name might have been scaring off the very people his pitch was intended for. Most of the students who did approach the table showed little interest in the financial aid and expressed little need for it. One man walked up to Mr. Blackburn and introduced his son as an aspiring doctor. The father was an ophthalmologist. Other doctors came by, too. So did some lawyers.

"You can't just raise the UVa flag," Mr. Blackburn said, packing up his materials at the end of the night, "and expect a lot of low-income kids to come out."

When the applications started arriving in his office this spring, there seemed to be no increase in those from low-income students. So Mr. Blackburn extended the deadline two weeks for everybody, and his colleagues also helped some applicants with the maze of financial aid forms. Of 3,100 incoming freshmen, it now seems that about 180 will qualify for the new financial aid program, up from 130 who would have done so last year. It is not a huge number, but Virginia administrators call it a start.

A Big Decision

On a still-dark February morning, with the winter's heaviest snowfall on the ground, Andy Blevins scraped off his Jeep and began his daily drive to the supermarket warehouse. As he passed the home of Mike Nash, his neighbor and fellow gospel singer, he noticed that the car was still in the driveway. For Mr. Nash, a school counselor and the only college graduate in the singing group, this was a snow day.

Mr. Blevins later sat down with his calendar and counted to 280: the number of days he had worked last year. Two hundred and eighty days - six days a week most of the time - without ever really knowing what the future would hold.

"I just realized I'm going to have to do something about this," he said, "because it's never going to end."

In the weeks afterward, his daydreaming about college and his conversations about it with his sister Leanna turned into serious research. He requested his transcripts from Radford and from Virginia Highlands Community College and figured out that he had about a year's worth of credits. He also talked to Leanna about how he could become an elementary school teacher. He always felt that he could relate to children, he said. The job would take up 180 days, not 280. Teachers do not usually get laid off or lose their pensions or have to take a big pay cut to find new work.

So the decision was made. On May 31, Andy Blevins says, he will return to Virginia Highlands, taking classes at night; the Gospel Gentlemen are no longer booking performances. After a year, he plans to take classes by video and on the Web that are offered at the community college but run by Old Dominion, a Norfolk, Va., university with a big group of working-class students.

"I don't like classes, but I've gotten so motivated to go back to school," Mr. Blevins said. "I don't want to, but, then again, I do."

He thinks he can get his bachelor's degree in three years. If he gets it at all, he will have defied the odds.

http://www.president.harvard.edu/

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_03.html

http://www.radford.edu/

http://www.virginia.edu/president/biography.html

http://www.virginia.edu/

http://www.amherst.edu/~president/bio.html

http://www.amherst.edu/

http://web.odu.edu/

http://www.collegeboard.com/splash

http://www.so.cc.va.us/

GREAT Graphic!!! http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_04.html

http://www.mellon.org/Staff/Bowen/Content.htm

http://www.harvard.edu/

http://www.yale.edu/

http://www.princeton.edu/main/

http://www.williams.edu/

http://www.virginia.edu/

College Ranking by U.S. News and World Report: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankindex_brief.php

http://www.emory.edu/

http://www.vhcc.edu/

http://web.odu.edu/

(*) (*) Well. it's true....at least among some neighbors's kids. This one drops out after only one semester at WVU, her brother starts at the local community college and then he drops out, works at a shipyard and has a baby with but does not marry his girlfriend.......When I was their age, there was never any doubt about going to at least a four-year program at a college or university. I suppose that values have certainly changed for sure in terms of how critically important getting a good education is. But then, my parents both have (at least) a colege degree - my mom a registered nurse (now retired) and my dad a mechanical engineer (also retired...) and it was them who instilled the value of education in me and my three siblings - all younger of course. One younger brother is working on a PhD however in a much different field than I am.

(l) Oh well, it certainly will be very interesting to watch how these younger folks will make their way in the world without some kind of education..... :| :|

(k) (k)'s
SL &DTB

sweetlady

05-30-2005, 08:47 AM

May 29, 2005 New York times

When the Joneses Wear Jeans

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

BEACHWOOD, Ohio - It was 4:30 p.m., sweet hour of opportunity at the Beachwood Place Mall.

Shoppers were drifting into stores in the rush before dinner, and the sales help, as if on cue, began a retail ritual: trying to tell the buyers from the lookers, the platinum-card holders from those who could barely pay their monthly minimum balance.

It is not always easy. Ellyn Lebby, a sales clerk at Saks Fifth Avenue, said she had a customer who regularly bought $3,000 suits but "who looks like he should be standing outside shaking a cup."

At Oh How Cute, a children's boutique, the owner, Kira Alexander, checks out shoppers' fingernails. A good manicure usually signals money. "But then again," Ms. Alexander conceded, "I don't have nice nails and I can buy whatever I want."

Down the mall at the Godiva chocolate store, Mark Fiorilli, the manager, does not even bother trying to figure out who has money. Over the course of a few hours, his shoppers included a young woman with a giant diamond ring and a former airplane parts inspector living off her disability checks.

"You can't make assumptions," Mr. Fiorilli said.

Social class, once so easily assessed by the car in the driveway or the purse on the arm, has become harder to see in the things Americans buy. Rising incomes, flattening prices and easily available credit have given so many Americans access to such a wide array of high-end goods that traditional markers of status have lost much of their meaning.

A family squarely in the middle class may own a flat-screen television, drive a BMW and indulge a taste for expensive chocolate.

A wealthy family may only further blur the picture by shopping for wine at Costco and bath towels at Target, which for years has stocked its shelves with high-quality goods.

Everyone, meanwhile, appears to be blending into a classless crowd, shedding the showiest kinds of high-status clothes in favor of a jeans-and-sweatsuit informality. When Vice President Dick Cheney, a wealthy man in his own right, attended a January ceremony in Poland to commemorate the liberation of Nazi death camps, he wore a parka.

But status symbols have not disappeared. As luxury has gone down-market, the marketplace has simply gone one better, rolling out ever-pricier goods and pitching them to the ever-loftier rich. This is an America of $130,000 Hummers and $12,000 mother-baby diamond tennis bracelet sets, of $600 jeans, $800 haircuts and slick new magazines advertising $400 bottles of wine.

Then there are the new badges of high-end consumption that may be less readily conspicuous but no less potent. Increasingly, the nation's richest are spending their money on personal services or exclusive experiences and isolating themselves from the masses in ways that go beyond building gated walls.

These Americans employ about 9,000 personal chefs, up from about 400 just 10 years ago, according to the American Personal Chef Association. They are taking ever more exotic vacations, often in private planes. They visit plastic surgeons and dermatologists for costly and frequent cosmetic procedures. And they are sending their children to $400-an-hour math tutors, summer camps at French chateaus and crash courses on managing money.

"Whether or not someone has a flat-screen TV is going to tell you less than if you look at the services they use, where they live and the control they have over other people's labor, those who are serving them," said Dalton Conley, an author and a sociologist at New York University.

Goods and services have always been means to measure social station. Thorstein Veblen, the political economist who coined the phrase "conspicuous consumption" at the beginning of the last century, observed that it was the wealthy "leisure class," in its "manner of life and its standards of worth," that set the bar for everyone else.

"The observance of these standards," Veblen wrote, "in some degree of approximation, becomes incumbent upon all classes lower in the scale."

So it is today. In a recent poll by The New York Times, fully 81 percent of Americans said they had felt social pressure to buy high-priced goods.

But what Veblen could not have foreseen is where some of that pressure is coming from, says Juliet B. Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College who has written widely on consumer culture. While the rich may have always set the standards, Professor Schor said, the actual social competition used to be played out largely at the neighborhood level, among people in roughly the same class.

In the last 30 years or so, however, she said, as people have become increasingly isolated from their neighbors, a barrage of magazines and television shows celebrating the toys and totems of the rich has fostered a whole new level of desire across class groups. A "horizontal desire," coveting a neighbor's goods, has been replaced by a "vertical desire," coveting the goods of the rich and the powerful seen on television, Professor Schor said.

"The old system was keeping up with the Joneses," she said. "The new system is keeping up with the Gateses."

Of course only other billionaires actually can. Most Americans are staring across a widening income gap between them and the very rich, making such vertical desire all the more unrealistic. "There is a bigger gap between the average person and what they are aspiring to," Professor Schor said.

But others who study consumer behavior say that the wanting and getting of material goods is not just a competitive exercise. In this view, Americans care less about emulating the top tier than about simply having a fair share of the bounty and a chance to carve out a place for themselves in society.

"People like having stuff, and stuff is good for people," said Thomas O'Guinn, a professor of advertising at the University of Illinois who has written textbooks on marketing and consumption. "One thing modernity brought with it was all kinds of identities, the ability for people to choose who you want to be, how you want to decorate yourself, what kind of lifestyle you want. And what you consume cannot be separated from that."

Falling Prices, Rising Debt

Throughout the mall in this upscale suburb of Cleveland, high-priced merchandise was moving: $80 cotton rompers at Oh How Cute, $40 scented candles at Bigelow Pharmacy. And everywhere, it seemed, was the sound of cellphones, one ringing out with a salsa tune, another with bars from Brahms.

Few consumer items better illustrate the democratization of luxury than the cellphone, once immortalized as the ultimate toy of exclusivity by Michael Douglas as he tromped around the 1987 movie "Wall Street" screaming into one roughly the size of a throw pillow.

Now, about one of every two Americans uses a cellphone; last year, there were 176 million subscribers, almost eight times the number a decade ago, according to the market research firm IDC. The number has soared because prices have correspondingly plummeted, to about an eighth of what they were 10 years ago.

The pattern is a familiar one in consumer electronics. What begins as a high-end product - a laptop computer, a DVD player - gradually goes mass market as prices fall and production rises, largely because of the cheap labor costs in developing countries that are making more and more of the goods.

That sort of "global sourcing" has had a similar impact across the American marketplace. The prices of clothing, for example, have barely risen in the last decade, while department store prices in general fell 10 percent from 1994 to 2004, the federal government says.

Even where luxury-good prices have remained forbiddingly high, some manufacturers have come up with strategies to cast more widely for customers, looking to middle-class consumers, whose incomes have generally risen in recent years; the median family income in the United States grew 17.6 percent from 1983 to 2003, when adjusted for inflation.

One way makers of luxury cars have tapped into this market is by introducing cheaper versions of their cars, trying to lure younger, less-affluent buyers in the hope that they may upgrade to more prestigious models as their incomes grow.

Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi already offer cars costing about $30,000 and now plan to introduce models that will sell for about $25,000. Entry-level luxury cars are the fastest growing segment of that industry.

"The big new trend that is coming to the U.S. is 'subluxury' cars," said David Thomas, editor of Autoblog, an online automotive guide. "The real push now is to go a step lower, but the car makers won't say 'lower.' "

The luxury car industry is just one that has made its products more accessible to the middle class. The cruise industry, once associated with the upper crust, is another.

"The cruise business has totally evolved," said Oivind Mathisen, editor of the newsletter Cruise Industry News, "and become a business that caters to moderate incomes." The luxury end makes up only 10 percent of the cruise line market now, Mr. Mathisen said.

Yet today's cruise ships continue to trade on the vestiges of their upper-class mystique, even while offering new amenities like on-board ice skating and wall-climbing. Though dinner with the captain may be a thing of the past, the ships still pamper guests with spas, boutiques and sophisticated restaurants.

All that can be had for an average of $1,500 a week per person, a price that has gone almost unchanged in 15 years, Mr. Mathisen said. The industry has kept prices down in part by buying bigger ships, the better to accommodate a broader clientele.

But affordable prices are only one reason the marketplace has blurred. Americans have loaded up on expensive toys largely by borrowing and charging. They now owe about $750 billion in revolving debt, according to the Federal Reserve, a six-fold increase from two decades ago.

That huge jump can be traced in part to the credit industry's explosive growth. Over the last 20 years, the industry became increasingly lenient about whom it was willing to extend credit to, more sophisticated about assessing credit risks and increasingly generous in how much it would let people borrow, as long as those customers were willing to pay high fees and risk living in debt.

As a result, to take one example, millions of Americans who could not have dreamed of buying their own homes two decades ago are now doing so in record numbers because of a sharp drop in mortgage interest rates, a surge in the number of mortgages granted and the creation of the sub-prime lending industry, which gives low-income people access to credit at high cost.

"Creditors love the term the 'democratization of credit,' " said Travis B. Plunkett, the legislative director of the Consumer Federation of America, a consumer lobbying group. "Over all, it has certainly had a positive effect. Many families that never had access to credit now do. The problem is that a flood of credit is now available to many financially vulnerable families and extended in a reckless and aggressive manner in many cases without thought to implications. The creditors say it has driven the economy forward and helped many families improve their financial lives, but they omit talking about the other half of the equation."

The Marketers' Response

Marketers have had to adjust their strategies in this fluid world of consumerism. Where once they pitched advertisements primarily to a core group of customers - men earning $35,000 to $50,000 a year, say - now they are increasingly fine-tuning their efforts, trying to identify potential customers by interests and tastes as well as by income level.

"The market dynamics have changed," said Idris Mootee, a marketing expert based in Boston. "It used to be clearly defined by how much you can afford. Before, if you belonged to a certain group, you shopped at Wal-Mart and bought the cheapest coffee and bought the cheapest sneakers. Now, people may buy the cheapest brand of consumer goods but still want Starbucks coffee and an iPod."

Merchandisers, for example, might look at two golfers, one lower middle class, the other wealthy, and know that they read the same golf magazine, see the same advertisements and possibly buy the same quality driver. The difference is that one will be splurging and then play on a public course while the other will not blink at the price and tee off at a private country club.

Similarly, a middle-income office manager may save her money to buy a single luxury item, like a Chanel jacket, the same one worn by a wealthy homemaker who has a dozen others like it in her $2.5 million house.

Marketers also know that today's shoppers have unpredictable priorities. Robert Gross, who was wandering the Beachwood mall with his son David, said he couldn't live without his annual cruise. Mr. Gross, 65, also prizes his two diamond pinkie rings, his racks of cashmere sweaters and his Mercedes CLK 430. "My license plate reads BENZ4BOB," he said. "Does that tell you what kind of person I am?"

But a taste for luxury goods did not stop Mr. Gross, an accountant, from scoffing as David paid $30 for a box of Godiva chocolates for his wife. The elder Mr. Gross had been to a local chocolate maker. "I went to Malley's," he said, "and bought my chocolate half price."

Yet virtually no company that has built a reputation as a purveyor of luxury goods will want to lose its foothold in that territory, even as it lowers prices on some items and sells them to a wider audience. If one high-end product has slipped into the mass market, then a new one will have to take its place at the top.

Until the early 1990's, Godiva sold only in Neiman Marcus and a few other upscale stores. Today it is one of those companies whose customers drift in from all points along the economic spectrum. Its candy can now be found in 2,500 outlets, including Hallmark card stores and middle-market department stores like Dillard's.

"People want to participate in our brand because we are an affordable luxury," said Gene Dunkin, president of Godiva North America, a unit of the Campbell Soup Company. "For under $1 to $350, with an incredible luxury package, we give the perception of a very expensive product."

But the company is also trying simultaneously to hold on to the true luxury market, which has increasingly been seduced away by small, expensive artisan chocolate makers, many from Europe, that are opening around the country. Two years ago, Godiva introduced its most expensive line ever, "G," handmade chocolates selling for $100 a pound. Today it is available only in holiday seasons and only at selected stores.

The New Status Symbols

While the rest of the United States may appear to be catching up with the Joneses, the richest Joneses have already moved on.

Some have slipped out of sight, buying bigger and more lavish homes in neighborhoods increasingly insulated from the rest of Americans. But the true measure of upper class today is in the personal services indulged in.

Professor Conley, the New York University sociologist, refers to these less tangible badges of status as "positional goods." Consider a couple who hire a baby sitter to pick up their children from school while they both work, he said. Their status would generally be lower than the couple who could pick up their children themselves, because the second couple would have enough earning power to allow one parent to stay at home while the other worked.

But the second couple would actually occupy the second rung in this after-school hierarchy. "In the highest group of all is the parent who has a nanny along," Professor Conley said.

Status among people in the top tier, he said, "is the time spent being waited on, being taken care of in nail salons, and how many people who work for them." From 1997 to 2002, revenues from hair, nail and skin care services jumped by 42 percent nationwide, Census Bureau data shows. Revenues from what the bureau described as "other personal services" increased 74 percent.

Indeed, in some cases, services and experiences have replaced objects as the true symbols of high status. "Anyone can buy a one-off expensive car," said Paul Nunes, who with Brian Johnson wrote "Mass Affluence," a book on marketing strategies. "But it is lifestyle that people are competing on more now. It is which sports camps do your kids go to and how often, which vacations do you take, even how often do you do things like go work for Habitat for Humanity, which is a charitable expense people can compete with."

In the country's largest cities, otherwise prosaic services have been transformed into status symbols simply because of the price tag. In New York last year, one salon introduced an $800 haircut, and a Japanese restaurant, Masa, opened with a $350 prix fixe dinner (excluding tax, tips and beverages). The experience is not just about a good meal, or even an exquisite one; it is about a transformative encounter in a Zen-like setting with a chef who decides what will be eaten and at what pace. And it is finally about exclusivity: there are only 26 seats. Today, one of the most sought-after status symbols in New York is a Masa reservation.

And that is how the marketplace works, Professor Conley says. For every object of desire, another will soon come along to trump it, fueling aspirations even more.

"Class now is really like three-card monte," he said. "The moment the lower-status aspirant thinks he has located the nut under the shell, it has actually shifted, and he is too late. "

(*) (*) This series on class differences that the NYTimes published recently also included sections on medicine and other perspectives. The series was pretty comprehensive in my view, allthough could foretell troubling trends if I choose to worry about them. Not today.

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-30-2005, 08:50 AM

May 30, 2005 New York times

Woman Makes History at Indy 500 Without Checkered Flag

By DAVE CALDWELL

INDIANAPOLIS, May 29 - Danica Patrick, a 23-year-old rookie who does not drive like one, rocketed into the lead with 10 laps left Sunday in the 89th Indianapolis 500, chasing away earlier misfortune and storming toward a first with each left-hand turn.

No woman had ever led the race, let alone won it. About 300,000 fans at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway clapped, pumped their fists and screamed, urging Patrick to hang on. She would have loved to, she said, but she also had to save fuel merely to finish the race.

Forced to conserve fuel because of a gamble by her team that she could make it to the end without an additional pit stop, Patrick was passed with six laps left by Dan Wheldon, a 26-year-old Briton who held on for his first Indy 500 victory. Patrick faded and finished fourth, behind Vitor Meira and Bryan Herta.

Three women had driven in a combined 15 Indy 500's before Patrick, and Janet Guthrie was the only woman to finish in the top 10; she was ninth in 1978. Despite making two mistakes, Patrick did much better than that - achieving a rare distinction for a woman by competing against men at the highest level of a sport and almost winning.

Asked if she had made the point that female drivers could compete against men, Patrick quickly said, "I made a hell of a point for anybody, are you kidding me?"

Patrick, driving in only her fifth Indy Racing League event, had become a phenomenon at the speedway this month, posting the fastest speed in practice on May 12 and qualifying fourth, another best for a woman, for the 33-car starting grid.

Before this year, Patrick, a native of Roscoe, Ill., and a resident of Phoenix, was an accomplished driver in the Toyota Atlantic series. She finished fourth in the previous I.R.L. race, on April 30 in Japan.

The co-owners of her car are Bobby Rahal, the 1986 Indy 500 winner, and David Letterman, the late-night talk-show host. The team's top driver, Buddy Rice, won the Indy 500 last year. The consensus among race aficionados was that she had a good chance to win.

Patrick has been marketed by the I.R.L. as an ingénue. The I.R.L. took full advantage of her appearance, posing her for glamorous pictures. But she can also drive fast.

"She's not 23 years old," Letterman said in a television interview after the race. "She's no kid."

Wheldon's victory was the first for a British driver at the Indy 500 since Graham Hill in 1966. Wheldon, who has won four of five I.R.L. races this year, also chased away a speedway ghost for Michael Andretti, the co-owner of his car.

Andretti, who retired after the 2003 season, drove in 14 Indy 500's without a victory.

He led 426 laps in his races here, but never the last one. His father, Mario, drove in 29 Indy 500's and won only once, in 1969.

"No more talk of this stupid curse," Michael Andretti said. "It's dead. It's going to be nice coming back here next year and not talking about that. You know, it gets old, I'll tell you."

Patrick certainly had to overcome more to get to the front of the pack than Wheldon.

She fell to 16th from 4th when she stalled her engine after a pit stop on the 79th lap of the 200-lap race, then spent the next 70 laps climbing back into the top 10.

"I'm going to be mad at myself for the stall," she said.

The preceding caution period was caused by a crash involving Bruno Junqueira and A. J. Foyt IV, the grandson of the four-time Indy 500 winner. Junqueira hit the first-turn wall hard, his car disintegrating as it slid to a stop.

Junqueira, complaining of lower back pain, was taken by ambulance to nearby Methodist Hospital.

He was reported to be in fair condition, but he was kept overnight and is scheduled to have surgery on two fractured vertebrae Monday.

"I'm sure he was running a lot better than I was," said Foyt, who was running six laps off the pace at the time.

Patrick had a close call on Lap 132, clipping wheels with Kosuke Matsuura. Later, as the field reached race speed after a caution period, Patrick made a mistake, abruptly lifting her foot off the gas pedal on the 155th lap to avoid hitting a car driven by Scott Sharp.

Her car went into a spin and had its left front wing knocked off. Her crew replaced the wing.

"I can't believe that my car didn't completely demolish because I got hit, like, twice," she said. "I spun it around, and I can't believe I kept the engine running. Somebody is sitting by my side."

Patrick made another stop so her fuel tank could be refilled, and that decision gave her a chance to win the race. The drivers ahead of her had to stop one more time. If she ran a lower concentration of oil in her fuel, she would have enough to finish.

"Saving fuel had to override everything else," she said.

Patrick, who had become the first woman to lead the Indy 500 by going to the front in the 56th lap, passed Wheldon for the lead with 28 laps left because he had to make another pit stop. She led the next 14 laps before Wheldon caught her.

Wheldon beat her to the start-finish line by no more than three feet before a trailing car driven by Matsuura brushed the wall, bringing out a caution flag for the eighth and final time. The pass benefited Patrick more than Wheldon.

"Unfortunately, you're a sitting duck when you restart in the lead here," Wheldon said. "And she was able to get back by."

Rahal told Patrick that she needed to come up with the restart of her young career, and she blasted past Wheldon at the start-finish line with 10 laps, or 25 miles, left in the race.

"I thought for a second we were going to win this thing," she said.

But Andretti knew Patrick's tires were older and did not have as much grip as Wheldon's. Her car was also much closer to running out of fuel than Wheldon's. He passed her entering the first turn of the 194th lap.

Meira, her Rahal Letterman teammate, passed her, then Herta, another of Andretti's drivers, did the same.

Meira had been overshadowed by Patrick this month. Everyone else in the field had been.

"I would have liked to have had more attention and everything," Meira said, "but to have attention, you have to do credible things like everyone else is doing."

Wheldon won the race under caution, after Sébastien Bourdais's car slapped the wall on the next-to-last lap.

Denied for so many years as a driver at Indianapolis, Andretti took the bottle from Wheldon and tasted the milk.

"Never had a sip of that," he said.

Now, Patrick must wait. She did not seem to mind.

"I kind of screamed in my helmet a few times," she said. "But nobody could hear that, and you have to calm down and be smart and not make stupid mistakes. I think, as a result of that, you're in the game."

(*) (f) (*) (f) (*) (f) (*) (f) (*) (f) Excellent example to look up to for younger womyn and grrls! Shoot, for eveyone! Congratulations Danica! (f) (f)

(k) (k)
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-30-2005, 08:52 AM

May 29, 2005 NYTimes

Cowboy Culture

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

Q: Your new book about Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley and their famed Wild West Show credits Buffalo Bill with inventing American-style celebrity and ''the beginnings of superstardom,'' as the title puts it. But isn't that an exaggeration?

No. I meant it in show-biz terms. Ray Romano is a star. Brad Pitt is a star. And Buffalo Bill used the word ''star'' to refer to himself. In the 1870's, he figured out that you could process Western history almost instantly into show business.

What about Ben Franklin? I'm sure his many biographers would insist that he was America's very first international celebrity.

They can call him a great many things, but they can't call him a superstar in the theatrical sense.

Fair enough, but then what about P.T. Barnum? Didn't he have a popular traveling show a generation before Buffalo Bill?

In the 1840's, he had some buffaloes on Staten Island. But his show amounted to nothing, and he was only bringing people over because he had the ferry concession. It didn't work very well. The buffaloes all got scared and ran off into the meadowlands.

I presume Buffalo Bill's cast was more professional.

He had the most successful Wild West Show because he was the showman who had the most Indians -- real Indians -- in his show. Cowboys didn't excite people that much.

That's odd, because cowboys have excited our imaginations ever since, as you can attest as the author of ''Lonesome Dove,'' ''The Last Picture Show'' and 38 other books of fiction and nonfiction, most of which relate to the mythic West.

But cowboys aren't always popular. You can look at the rise and demise of the western movie. It's not like there are hundreds of westerns being made now, as there were in the 40's and 50's.

How do you explain their decline?

There's no money to be made in them anymore. It costs too much to deal with animals. If you want a bear in your movie, it costs you $60,000 for one day.

Still, there's ''Deadwood'' on HBO. And we now even have a White House West. You're a native Texan -- what do you think of the president's ranch in Crawford?

I find it hard to think of it as a ranch. Crawford is basically a suburb of Waco, and I have been through it a million times. The president has this obsession, which he inherited from Reagan, of brush clearing. I don't get it. What do you get when you clear brush? You get a photograph of yourself with a chain saw and a cowboy hat.

What, exactly, do you think cowboys represent, other than the triumph of alpha males?

Cowboys are a symbol of a freer time, when people could go all the way from Canada to Mexico without seeing a fence. They stand for good ol' American values, like self-reliance.

Maybe some American values, but you can't say that cowboys were ever interested in spreading democracy.

No, they were interested in spreading fascism.

If you put it that way, how do you explain your own fascination with Buffalo Bill?

I never thought about it.

You should probably come up with a better answer, because I'm sure you'll be asked the question many times on your book tour.

No, I won't. This is the only time I am talking about this book. Why write a book and then talk about it? It doesn't make any sense. I can get another book done in the time it takes to do a book tour. I don't want to sit around reliving last year's book in conversation.

(*) (*) I did like the point about going on book tours when he could take that time to write abother book - or in my opinion - if it were me? I'd head for one of my favorite places in nature or visit a new place...... (a)

Hopi Sun Thoughts,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

05-30-2005, 08:55 AM

May 29, 2005 NYTimes

The Comfort of Strangers

By G. WILLOW WILSON

I moved to Cairo from Colorado in 2003 to work as a teacher and journalist. I had recently converted to Islam and wanted to spend time close to the source of the language and culture that had given rise to my religion. The transition between life in red-state America and life in the Arab capital was at times overwhelming because of the traditional segregation of men and women in many public and private settings. Especially difficult to navigate at first was the Cairene metro, where choosing to ride in the wrong car could result in serious awkwardness.

Commuting women learn, however, to look on the first car -- jokingly referred to as the hareem, or women's quarters -- as a safe haven from the persistent scrutiny of men, who still dominate public life in Egypt. The first car, off limits to males above the age of 12 or so, is self-policing; should a man wander on, a quiet word is usually enough to send him out the door again. Few men risk so blatant a violation of a woman's first right in Egyptian society: privacy.

In my case, all it took was a single ride in a mixed car, where unescorted women are frequently targets of harassment and religious censure, to make me grateful for the decidedly un-Western amenity of the women's compartment.

One night a few months ago, I took the metro downtown to meet a friend. I rode in the women's car, as usual. The evening was balmy, and two little boys -- sons of a young mother sitting next to me -- were opening and closing the shutters over the car windows, to their great delight. Their mother called to them, but they were too engrossed in their project to pay attention. At the next stop, a woman in a niqab -- the face veil -- came and sat across from us. Noticing the commotion, she reached into her purse for a handful of hard candies and offered them to the boys in return for their good behavior.

''Take the candies from Auntie and say thank you,'' their mother said.

The boys turned away shyly.

''Take the candies and say, 'Thank you, Aunt,' or don't take them and say, 'No thank you, Aunt,' and then come sit here next to me and Auntie,'' their mother repeated. I was the second ''Auntie''; in the women's car, children become the communal responsibility of all present. Even so, I was a little surprised to be referred to in such a familiar way. Being a khawagga, or white Westerner, I was often kept at arm's length by other women in public. But I held out my hand to the little boy who was inching across the aisle toward us.

When the boys were settled and the train clattered along toward Tahrir Square, I noticed that my head scarf had begun to slip. I reached up to unpin it. As the layers of cotton gauze fell away, I felt air on my neck. The mother of the boys, noticing, perhaps, my comparatively light-colored hair, asked me where I was from. The United States, I told her.

''And you are a Muslim?'' she asked.

''Yes,'' I answered.

She praised God, and I dutifully repeated her words, smiling; I understood that a convert in a head scarf was unusual.

As I rewrapped my scarf, however, I heard a chorus of hisses. I looked up in alarm. A boy of 16 or 17 was making his way through the car, selling boxes of tissues. I blushed, feeling certain that the other women were reprimanding me for taking off my scarf in the presence of a man. After two years in Egypt, I had developed a sense of humor about my inevitable social gaffes, but they were still embarrassing. Looking around, however, I realized that the scolding wasn't for me after all. The tissue seller was the target of the women's censure.

''What are you thinking? Don't you have shame?''

''You're too old to be in the women's car, Son.''

''Look away, for God's sake.''

The tissue seller went red, muttered something in response and turned into the doorway, trying to appear casual. I hastily repinned my scarf. The boy was probably just trying to do better business: he would get more sympathy in the women's compartment than in the mixed cars. Nevertheless, he retreated down the train at the next stop.

At that moment, I was grateful to be part of the floating world of the women's car. In that small corner of a culture so different from my own, culture itself ceased to matter. For a few station stops I carried no baggage -- no problematic nationality, no suspect political agenda. I was simply a woman among other women and worth defending because we shared that much. Regardless of the many factors that might separate us on the street, in the women's car my fellow passengers felt I had the same right to privacy as they did. I left the metro feeling secure in much more than the arrangement of my head scarf.

G. Willow Wilson is a freelance journalist living in Cairo. Her work has appeared in Cairo magazine and several publications based in the United States.

(*) (*) Great POV in my mind.....and I never for a moment felt any anger about how Arab womyn are treated.....rather this article made the writer, certainly not an Arab - feel quite at home in the train cars......it wasn't her who was hissed at! ;) :o :o

(f) (f) (f) (f) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

Lady_Di

05-30-2005, 10:23 AM

sweetlady

06-01-2005, 06:29 AM

I have a feeling we have seen many of the same things. And I like your taste in art, btw.I also went to that archietect's webpage, the one where you said you thought that might be your old home. I was very impressed. What a forward thinker. I have a passion for building homes, permanent art, imo. Well... nothing is really permanent, but close enough to leave behind as a testament for a few good years.hasta luego d

Hi Lady_Di,

(f) Thanks for your posting......and shared thoughts about art and Eichler. His homes still amaze me to this day although there aren't any that I know of in PA. Your perspective on what constitutes artwork is intriguing - have you ever seen and/or visited some of the adobe homes built into the rocks northeast of Phoenix on I17 and then way out past the town of Carefree? I first saw some of them back in 1986 and was floored how some were partially underground, with the rocks used as part-foundation, part walls. I don't know how damp it would be although I suspect that the tiny amounts of humidity that Arizona does have would keep those underground spaces cool and dry - and not like the damp basements in East Coast homes..... :o ;)

I tried logging on last night and couldn't - seems as if the B-F web site was "down". Also - I still am fighting whatever the heck has ahold of me and still have that "whiskey voice" as my friends (sober ones too!) call it. I call it having a few frogs in my throat... ;) (like a teenager whose voice keeps changing octaves..... :o ...it is slightly embarrassing to speak....)

Have a really nice mid-week-day, and thanks again for your thoughtful feedback. "See" you soon in our virtual travels. (f)

Respectfully,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

06-01-2005, 06:41 AM

Honestly, officer, I couldn't help myself. He started streaming Yanni into my car and I just lost control. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are developing an ad hoc networking technology for cars that would allow music to be broadcast to properly equipped vehicles in a 30-mile radius. Dubbed Roadcasting, the system is largely theoretical right now. But with several automakers and the Department of Transportation planning to launch mobile ad hoc networks as early as 2007, it looks inevitable. "I definitely can see a carmaker jump in, just like General Motors jumped in with XM Radio," Autoblog author Walter Keegan told Wired. "Just to tout the next big thing or to have something different. ... That would be a big selling point."

http://roadcasting.org/

http://wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,67653,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_4

(*) (*) And to think that I more often have the radio/CD player off while driving..... :| Okay, so for the longer drives I do enjoy listening to my own collection of music, eclectic as it might be. I'm getting more and more interested in satellite radio - I get an opportunity to listen to a couple of channels when I get my hair colored once a month - since the salon has it. The owner and his wife have demonstrated their Syrius system to me (they view me as a grrl-propeller-head who loves techno things) and although the quality is tied to the weather, the "stations" are superb. I especially like two in particular - one called "Soul" and another called "Sinatra".

(*) At least those satellite stations are mellow - I remember many years going to salons that always had "non-music" or head-bashing music that frayed my nerves rather than put me at ease. (and what *is* the point of going to a hair or nail salon but to feel relaxed as well as "like a million bucks" when I leave?)

(f) (f)

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

06-01-2005, 06:54 AM

Posted on Tue, May. 31, 2005 San Jose Mercury News

Adobe sees video, mobile imaging as key to industry's future

By John Boudreau

To Bruce Chizen, the stylishly bald chief executive of Adobe Systems, a bottle of water is more than a bottle of water. It's Adobe water.

An action movie is more than a Hollywood hit. It's an Adobe hit. A magazine fashion spread? An Adobe magazine layout.

``We are everywhere you look,'' he says, referring to the San Jose company's design and digital video special effects software, used universally in creative fields. ``Whether it's a logo on a bottle label, an effect in a movie, a TV commercial, an image on a Web site, a layout in a newspaper or a picture in a magazine -- there is a high probability that the content was touched by Adobe.''

``We've had that kind of influence on society,'' says Chizen, who then takes a sip from a bottle of water.

The exuberant software executive looks and sounds like a man who has just collected on a winning bet.

Though lacking the name recognition of, say, Microsoft, Adobe has products that are almost as ubiquitous as those of the software giant.
Adobe's Portable Document Format, or PDF, which lets people create and view digital documents in their original form, sits on more computers than Windows does, the company likes to say. That's because it runs on all operating systems, not just Windows. Adobe estimates that between 500 million and a billion computers worldwide use PDF.

Adobe's move in April to acquire rival Macromedia of San Francisco for $3.4 billion in stock is designed to give it Microsoft-like dominance in software to produce, edit and display digital documents and video on a range of devices, from personal computers to cell phones. Macromedia's Flash technology, used for creating and playing animated Web pages, is ubiquitous on the Internet and is embedded in millions of mobile phones. The deal is expected to be completed in the fall.

By adding Macromedia's video technology, Adobe believes it will be able to exploit the new digital era -- which it says will be defined by digital video and mobile devices.

``I believe mobility will be one of the key trends,'' says Adobe President and Chief Operating Officer Shantanu Narayen. ``In China and India, you'll have a whole generation of people who will access the Internet without ever owning a PC.''
Revenue, profit grow

Adobe, whose products range from the more artsy Photoshop to business-document producing Acrobat, grew 29 percent last year. Revenue for its suite of software for creative professionals, such as those who design magazine covers, grew 66 percent. It got an unexpected boost from digital photography buffs willing to hand over as much as $600 for photo-managing software.
For the first quarter ending March 4, Adobe posted a profit of $152 million, up from $123 million for the first quarter in 2004, which was a week longer.

Company executives forecast 15 percent growth this year, or revenue of $1.9 billion, which does not include revenue from Macromedia. The acquisition has been embraced by investors, despite many analysts' belief that software industry mergers are prone to fail. Since the deal was announced April 18, Adobe's stock has jumped 21 percent, closing at $33.17 on Friday.

``I can sit here and comfortably say we are in a better position than any other software company in the world,'' says Chizen, 49, from his company's modern three-tower campus in downtown San Jose.

That's not to say, though, that Adobe, which has about 4,000 employees worldwide, doesn't face challenges.

An economic slowdown could put the squeeze on its software products as businesses pull back on marketing campaigns, the kind of work creative professionals depend on. Bringing Macromedia, which reported nearly $436 million in revenue last year and has about 1,400 employees, behind Adobe's fire wall could prove difficult and distracting.

``It's definitely not a small acquisition. You've got to watch out for the integration risks associated with that,'' says Steve Lidberg, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities.

Furthermore, Microsoft, which has long cast a covetous eye on the markets Adobe and Macromedia dominate, is preparing another assault with its own Acrobat-like product expected to be built into the next-generation of Windows operating system, dubbed Longhorn.
``Whenever another company controls a core standard of computing, that always gets Microsoft's attention,'' says Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg.

Complementary players

The merger brings together two companies with parallel but different strengths. ``Together, they are a much better player against Microsoft'' because of their respective strong market positions, says Stephen Jue, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets.
Adobe was founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who remain the company's co-chairmen. They first created Postscript, which enabled printers to replicate a computer screen's text or graphics. In the early 1990s, Adobe launched its Portable Document Format.

``We tried to charge for it initially and nobody wanted to buy it,'' Chizen says. ``So we started to give it away free and everybody said, `How will you make money?' ''

The move, though, provided a foundation that eventually paid off for Adobe. By creating a document format that can be viewed across a variety of operating systems, from Microsoft's Windows to Macintosh and Linux, Adobe had the perfect sales pitch to companies that want to distribute information to as wide an audience as possible. Adobe makes money from the companies that buy Acrobat to write and disseminate digital documents.

``Apart from HTML, there is more PDF out there on the Web than any other format,'' Chizen says. HTML, or Hyper Text Markup Language, is the language used to create documents for the Web.

The company also added Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, the core of its suite of creative software offerings that now account for about a third of its revenue. Its other group is digital imaging and digital video.

Chizen believes Adobe, which had revenue of $1.7 billion last year, can eventually become a $5 billion company.

He expects much of the growth to come from the company's intelligent documents software, a highly interactive version of Acrobat that features 3-D capabilities for engineers and architects.

The Web-enabled documents provide real-time information -- such as mortgage interest rates for loan applications -- and feature such security protections as digital signature capability. All that can save companies time and expense from errors that occur when documents are manually re-typed into a system.

Chizen, a former Microsoft sales director, believes Adobe's build-it-and-they-will-come business model will continue to pay off.
``Our mission hasn't changed over the past 23 years,'' Chizen says. ``The world around us has. That's why Adobe is as successful as it is today.''

(*) (*) Although I really hate to see what has been an extremely successful smaller multimedia software firm get gobbled up by yet another software bohemoth - that's the way to succeed against their competitors. Merger as pre-emptive strategic competitive positioning and differentiation. I'm still glad that I turned the job offer down and moved away from Silicon Valley - "through-the-roof" pricing on real estate on ground that's unstable? I prefer lots of acreage with old trees (and broadband Internet connection to "work") to every-house the same on land with all trees-cleared development-living and then sitting in gridlock on I101 or I280 twice a day! I wouldn't trade the last 13 years of having my own business for any demi or semi-executive position anyday! Viva-la-entrepreneur-ess! (h) (h) (h)

(a) Okay, enough of the rah-rah this morning.....where's that second cup of Breakfast Blend coffee........ (o) ;) Have a good one.

Carpe Diem!
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

06-01-2005, 06:57 AM

Posted on Tue, May. 31, 2005 San Jose Mercury News

Tech notebook: Addicts love their e-mail, sometimes in bathroom

By K. Oanh Ha, John Boudreau and Matt Marshall

Sleepless -- and on e-mail -- in the Bay Area.

The E-Mail Addiction survey of 4,000 users in 20 U.S. markets by America Online found the Bay Area was No. 2 in the nation as the metropolis most addicted to e-mail, behind Miami/Ft. Lauderdale.

The survey found that Bay Area technophiles were more obsessed than other Americans about checking their inboxes -- an average of six times a day. Nearly four in 10 of you -- 38 percent -- have checked your e-mail in the middle of the night. Six percent of addicts report checking e-mail even while they are in the bathroom, and 30 percent do so while in bed in their pajamas.

The area also took the prize for goofing off at work, with 76 percent admitting to checking their personal e-mail at work (compared with 61 percent nationally). Only 13 percent of users felt guilty about it and 13 percent have been busted by their boss for doing private e-mail.
Nationally, women are more likely than men to check their personal e-mail at work.

The survey also asked readers about fantasy e-mail features they'd want. Top of the list is being able to un-send a message which hasn't been read yet and tracking where an e-mail has been forwarded.

A pitch to business: Adobe Systems, long known among artists and creative professionals for its signature shrink-wrapped software, is pitching its software more often to big business.

It believes its franchise Portable Document Format, or PDF, which lets people create and view digital documents in their original form, could go gangbusters. The software is now highly interactive with features such as 3-D capabilities for engineers and architects.
Will the rough-and-tumble, name-calling world of business software change the company's ponytail-and-shorts culture? More Adobe executives may be in suits these days, says company Vice President Eugene Lee. But they won't play smash-mouth software.
``We are not the kind of people who send our executives out on a stage to say, `Those guys are idiots,' '' Lee says. ``So we can put on suits and still be nice.''

Secret bomber on map: Germany's Spiegel Online reported it has apparently found a Stealth bomber on Google Maps.
It should have been blurred out because it's on a secret part of a military base -- but Google must have missed that. As of this writing, the bomber is still there, in good ol' Palmdale. Pull up Google Maps and search for ``Plant 42 in Palmdale, California,'' and then zoom out. You'll see the metropolis of Los Angeles emerge just below it.

We stumbled on it via Google Blogoscoped, which translates Spiegel as saying that it's prohibited to get close to military bases, let alone photograph them -- at least that's what you'd assume in times of terror. To be clear, the images are obviously not taken real-time; they were taken several years ago. Still, it's got to be a breach to reveal where such bombers may be sitting.

Major contract snagged: Infinera, the Sunnyvale telecom company, has scored a major contract with Level 3 Communications, which analysts say may be valued at $50 million.

Infinera's technology aims to do the entire light-to-light conversion for network data switching on two chips -- replacing the 50 or so parts currently used by most carriers, for less than half the cost -- and taking up about one-tenth the space. That's impressed enough people for Infinera to attract $205 million in venture capital since 2001.

Chief Executive Jagdeep Singh compared the impact of Infinera chips to the shift to jet engines from turbo propeller engines.

The Level 3 deal is the second this year for the company. Still, some Silicon Valley observers are wondering whether Infinera can get enough deals to compensate for the hundreds of millions invested in it.

(*) (*) ;) (h)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

06-01-2005, 06:58 AM

Sonogram analyses of hit records:

http://www.airwindows.com/analysis/Dynamics.html

********************************
USB Fitness Center:

http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news_9655.html

*********************************

ABC (yes, the network) Podcasting:

http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news_9655.html

(*) (*) (h) (h)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

06-01-2005, 07:02 AM

Web Site Review

Bless Me, Blog, for I've Sinned

By SARAH BOXER Published: May 31, 2005 New York Times

Online confessors are like flashers. They exhibit themselves anonymously and publicly, with little consideration for you, the audience. Browse some of the confessionals on the Web: grouphug.us (a simple log), notproud.com (organized by deadly sin) or dailyconfession.com (where you can barely find the confessions for all the promotional stuff). You can see for yourself.

One online confessional, though, breaks the mold. At PostSecret, found at postsecret.blogspot.com, the confessions are consistently engaging, original and well told. How come? The Web site gives people simple instructions. Mail your secret anonymously on one side of a 4-by-6-inch postcard that you make yourself. That one constraint is a great sieve. It strains out lazy, impulsive confessors.

For PostSecret, you write, type or paste your secret on a postcard, and then, if you want, decorate the card with drawings or photographs. Next the stamp and then the mailbox. Yes, it's work to confess. And it should be, if only for the sake of the person who might be listening.

One message says: "I lied" under the word "oath." Another says, "I deleted the pope's funeral unwatched off my TiVO to make room for an episode of 'Survivor.' " The postcard picture - a split image, top half funeral, bottom half 'Survivor' - captures the moment of sin.

Some secrets cannot be separated from the cards they're on. One sad little postcard has a lineup of seven 3-cent stamps, each with a picture of a Conestoga wagon on it, plus one 2-cent stamp of a locomotive: "I found these stamps as a child, and I have been waiting all my life to have someone to send them to. I never did have someone."

The following typed message was pasted onto a card made out of a $50 parking ticket: "I got a parking citation and so did the car next to me. I replaced the ticket on the car next to me with mine. My ticket got paid. And the one I took? I mailed it to PostSecret." It isn't so much a confession as a live performance of sin.

PostSecret is simple to navigate. You scroll down to read one postcard after another. There's little else on the site. O.K., you will occasionally run into little self-congratulatory landmarks: announcements that PostSecret will be onstage in Melbourne, Australia, newspaper clippings from all over the world, scores of compliments from readers. But basically it's all secrets.

And the secrets are regularly refreshed. Each Sunday, Frank, the keeper of the secrets, posts a new batch straight from his mailbox in Germantown, Md., and removes some old ones from the site. One virtue of the resulting chronological lineup is that you can look for patterns emerging, certain kinds of confessions clumping together. And clump they do.

For instance, the most recent confessions tend to be the most graphically and ethically hip. They look like the work of Barbara Kruger, Damien Hirst or Sophie Calle. "I want to be anorexic," says one card with a photo of a skeletal woman, "but I can't stop eating."

And for some reason many of the secrets posted on May 8 follow a certain form, a confession followed by a coda with a dash more guilt: "I don't care about recycling. (But I pretend I do.)" "I had sex with strangers for money. And I liked it." "I hate loving families... Because I don't have one."

One odd thing about PostSecret is that there's a real disconnection between what the confessions are and what the readers think they are. One reader from Texas wrote, "Thank you so much for building a window into so many souls, even if it only shines light on the darkest part." A reader in Australia wrote: "Each is a silent prayer of hope, love, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, guilt, happiness, hatred, confidence, strength, weakness and a million other things that we all share as human beings... there is no fakeness here."

No fakeness? Oh, but there is. And it is the fakeness, the artifice and the performance that make this confessional worth peeking at. The secret sharers here aren't mindless flashers but practiced strippers. They don't want to get rid of their secrets. They love them. They arrange them. They tend them. They turn them into fetishes. And that's the secret of PostSecret. It isn't really a true confessional after all. It is a piece of collaborative art.

http://notproud.com/

http://dailyconfession.com/

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/ (h) (h) (h) !

(*) (*) "Collaborative art"....yea, yea, THAT's the ticket! (h)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

06-02-2005, 11:00 PM

Catch 12 episodes of the show the New York Times called "as absorbing and addictive as The Sopranos"-over four straight nights!

Episodes of Deadwood's second season air back-to-back-to-back, from 9pm to 12pm, starting Tuesday, June 7. Only on HBO2!

http://www.hbo.com/deadwood/

(l) (l) Season Two finale. As Deadwood readies for a celebration, George Hearst's arrival in camp brings upheaval. Swearengen's manipulations extract a counter-offer from Yankton. Hearst comes to separate arrangements with Farnum and Swearengen. Tolliver seeks to improve his position with Hearst at Wolcott's expense. Tensions in Chinaman's Alley boil over with violent results. Catch episodes of Deadwood's second season starting Tuesday, June 7. (l) (l)

(l) (l) (l) Costume Design and Set Tour in 3D animation and graphics.....much more has been added...... (l) (h) (l) (h) (l) (h)

:o :o (h) Best Lines from Episode 24 - Finale: http://www.hbo.com/deadwood/bestlines/season2/episode24.shtml

(*) (*) Every episode has its own dead count, best lines, etc. (h)

<eeeHAAA>

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

06-02-2005, 11:07 PM

Q U O T E D

"The church has to move with the times, and I wanted to make St John's a sanctuary for everyone, including business people with laptops and mobiles."

-- -- Rev. Keith Kimber of the Church of St. John the Baptist in Cardiff explains his decision to add a wireless node to the Stations of the Cross

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/31/wi_fi_church/

(*) (*) ...and to think I expected a place in Silicon Valley or some other high tech places here in the States......Still, it seems like a church would be the LAST place for individual communication devices......but then my God/dess places are ALL in nature where I leave all devices at home or better yet - like the Bellota Ranch where the wasn't ANY telephone, wired or wireless, TV or any other communiations......AND that's where there was also light pollution laws in Tucson. The starlit sky in those mountains northwest of Tucson was the most breathtakling I've ever seen!

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

06-02-2005, 11:09 PM

Vinyl anachronists who've refused to digitize their collections, citing the inferior quality of bits versus grooves, might want to pay a visit to the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, where two enterprising scientists have developed a novel means of making perfect digital reproductions of vinyl recordings -- with the same technology used to search for the Higgs boson. Discovery News (circa 2004, yes, I know) explains:

"A powerful microscope called a SmartScope with a digital camera collects images of the groove patterns on records or cylinders, which rest on a table moved with precision motors. A computer program allows the microscope/camera combo to travel forward along the grooves until it reaches the end of the recording. The captured image pattern transfers to a computer that translates the tiny, millimeter-sized lines into sound."

It's a fascinating technique and one that could preserve the thousands of aging vinyl and cylinder recordings in the Library of Congress. "There are many promising aspects of the research being conducted at the Lawrence Berkeley Labs," Sam Brylawski, head of the recorded sound section of the library's Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, told Discovery News back in 2004. "One is the development of non-contact playback of fragile sound recordings. Not only cylinders, but radio transcription discs and 78-rpm shellac pressings. If their work pans out to enable efficient and accurate transfers, we will be able to hear broken recordings; be able to restore deteriorating recordings without the addition of digital audio 'artifacts'; and play back obsolete formats without having to acquire or restore specialized machines and identify highly trained, i.e. costly, specialized engineers."

http://www-cdf.lbl.gov/%7Eav/

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20040719/recording.html

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

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

06-02-2005, 11:18 PM

Go tell Aunt Rodi, the golden goose is dead: It was just last week that we were talking about disruptive change and how the entertainment industry's ill-starred efforts to suppress it would likely continue to fuel the development of a system of digital distribution well beyond its control (see "Feds' redesign of Elite Torrents site falls short on usability"). Well, whaddaya know, the next phase of that distribution system may already be in the offing. It's called Rodi and it's an open source, fully decentralized P2P application that supports content searches and full anonymity. "Rodi is probably the most decentralized P2P network created so far," Rodi developer Larytet recently told IntegrityP2P. "Rodi can run without super nodes, GWebcashes, message boards, index servers, trackers; two peers can find each other even from behind firewalls and NATs. To my best knowledge this is the first P2P network functional requirements of which include things like faked RTP packets to circumvent traffic analyzers and firewalls." Rodi's currently in beta and still looks to be a little rough. But it does seem promising, especially if someone comes up with a nice GUI for it.

http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2005/05/elite_torrents_.html

http://methlabs.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-3650.html

http://larytet.sourceforge.net/btRat.shtml (h) (h) (h) (h) (h)

http://larytet.sourceforge.net/btRatDesign.shtml (h) (h)

http://www.p2pforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=91419

http://larytet.sourceforge.net/tryRodi.shtml (h) (h) (h) (h) (h)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

06-02-2005, 11:19 PM

http://www.davidlynch.com/dailyreport/

(*) (*) ;)

({) (}) 's,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

06-02-2005, 11:21 PM

http://www.cellpower.com/PhoneThong.cfm

(*) (*) :| ;) ;)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

06-02-2005, 11:28 PM

June 1, 2005

The Five-Bedroom, Six-Figure Rootless Life

By PETER T. KILBORN New York Times

ALPHARETTA, Ga. - Kathy Link is 41 with blond-streaked pigtails and, at 5-foot-9, straight as a spear. She is still in the red sun visor and tennis whites she wore leading her fitness class at the Forum Gym and winning at doubles afterward. Tucked by her seat is her color-coded itinerary.

Kaleigh, 8, is red. With school over this afternoon in late August, she has already been dropped off at her soccer practice blocks from home. Kristina, 11, is dark green, and Kelsey, 13, is yellow. Kristina must get to her soccer practice four miles to the north, and Kelsey to her practice 14 miles to the south.

Ms. Link (blue for work, light green for family and volunteering) surveys the clotted intersection at the mouth of her 636-house Medlock Bridge subdivision. After moving here four years ago and choking on traffic, she made a rule: "Wherever I'm going has to be within one mile of the house," she said. But she breaks the rule two or three times a day, driving 10 and 15 times the one-mile distance.

She squeezes the wheel of her white, eight-seat, leather-upholstered 2003 GMC Denali S.U.V. "Go, people," she pleads. Her knuckles go white. Twice she taps the horn. A timid driver in a gray van three cars ahead tiptoes into the Atlanta-bound avalanche along Highway 141. Ms. Link impatiently pulls abreast, saying, "I have to see who she is."

A rookie "relo," she decides, someone newly relocated to Alpharetta and to its traffic. She herself is a veteran relo, having moved three times in the past 10 years to help keep her husband's career on track. She admits she is beginning to feel the strain of her vagabond life. "It's like I'm on a hamster wheel," she says.

Ms. Link and her husband, Jim, 42, a financial services sales manager for the Wachovia Corporation of Charlotte, N.C., belong to a growing segment of the upper middle class, executive gypsies. The shock troops of companies that continually expand across the country and abroad, they move every few years, from St. Louis to Seattle to Singapore, one satellite suburb to another, hopscotching across islands far from the working class and the urban poor.

As a subgroup, relos are economically homogenous, with midcareer incomes starting at $100,000 a year. Most are white. Some find the salaries and perks compensating; the developments that cater to them come with big houses, schools with top SAT scores, parks for youth sports and upscale shopping strips.

Others complain of stress and anomie. They have traded a home in one place for a job that could be anyplace. Relo children do not know a hometown; their parents do not know where their funerals will be. There is little in the way of small-town ties or big-city amenities - grandparents and cousins, longtime neighbors, vibrant boulevards, homegrown shops - that let roots sink in deep.

"It's as if they're being molded by their companies," said Tina Davis, a top Alpharetta relo agent for the Coldwell Banker real estate firm. "Most of the people will tell you how long they'll be here. It's usually two to four years."

The Links bought their first home 15 years ago in what was then the master planned community of Clear Lake City, Tex., now a part of Houston. In 1994, they moved to the old Baltimore suburb of Severna Park and three years later to Pittsford, N.Y., near Rochester. In another three years they bought a five-bedroom, four-bath home here, 25 miles north of Atlanta, where Mr. Link started work at an office of the First Union Corporation, which became part of Wachovia.

The Population Sprawls

Still inching along, Ms. Link passes strip malls. She goes by the gym, chiropractors, nail shops, colonnaded stucco banks, hair salons, 16-pump gas stations, self-storage lots, Waffle Houses, a tanning place and a salon that tattoos on lipstick and eyeliner so they will not fade in the pool.

She dodges the orange barrels of road-widening crews spreading asphalt in a futile effort to keep up with a north Fulton County population that has swelled to 273,000 from 170,000 in the 90's, a decade when the city of Atlanta barely grew, to 416,000 from 394,000. Sidewalks start and stop. No one dares ride a bicycle or walk a dog. She crosses over Georgia 400, the clogged artery that pumps hundreds of thousands of commuters into Alpharetta's glass and brushed-metal office parks and, an hour's drive south, into downtown Atlanta.

She passes developments that from the air look like petri dishes of tadpoles, each head a cul-de-sac. In new subdivisions, signs in fancy script trumpet "price points," to show relos where to roost: Brookdale, $300's; Wildwood, $400's; Wolf Creek, $300's to $500's; Quail Hollow, $500's; Inverness, $600's to $800's; White Columns, $700's to $1.5 million; Greystone, $900's to $4 million.

The Hispanic landscaping crews are out with old Ford pickups tugging eight-foot flatbed trailers. They trim the edges of spongy Bermuda grass lawns and attack the grubs, fire ants and weeds. Toys and even garden hoses are tucked out of sight lest the subdivision homeowners' association issue warnings and fines. Garage doors, all motorized, must stay shut.

After dropping off Kelsey and Kristina, Ms. Link has to double back and pick up Kaleigh and take her to golf. She will wait for Kelsey to finish soccer before picking up Kristina and taking her to cheerleading practice. Another mother will have to retrieve Kristina so that Ms. Link can be home when Kaleigh's math tutor comes.

Jim (orange) cannot help. He is gone two to five days a week, to Boston, New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Dallas and most often Charlotte. Monday and Tuesday, the itinerary says, "Jim in meetings, Charlotte." For Wednesday, it says, "Jim in meetings, Philadelphia."

A Different Segregation

Today's relos are the successors of itinerant white-collar pioneers of the 1960's, like the computer salesmen for whom I.B.M. meant I've Been Moved. They are employees of multinational industry: pharmaceutical salespeople, electronic engineers, information technology managers, accountants, data analysts, plant managers, regional vice presidents, biotechnologists, bankers, manufacturers' representatives and franchise chain managers.

They are part of a larger development that researchers are finding: an increasing economic segregation. A Brookings Institution analysis of census data last year reported that the percentage of people living in affluent or poor suburbs in 50 metropolitan areas increased from 1980 to 2000, and the percentage living in middle-income areas declined.

Just how many relos there are is hard to determine. The tide rolls with corporate fortunes and the global economy, and relos are not singled out in census statistics. But in a survey from March 2002 to March 2003, the Census Bureau said that about three million people moved to another county, state or country because employers had transferred or recruited them. .

With the spread of global industry's new satellite office parks, the relos churn through towns like Alpharetta; Naperville, Ill., west of Chicago; Plano, Tex., outside Dallas; Leawood, Kan., near Kansas City; Sammamish, Wash., outside Seattle; and Cary, N.C., which is outside Raleigh and, its resident nomads maintain, stands for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees.

Converging on these towns, relos have segregated themselves, less by the old barriers of race, religion and national origin than by age, family status, education and, especially, income. Families with incomes of $100,000 head for subdivisions built entirely of $300,000 houses; those earning $200,000 trade up to subdivisions of $500,000 houses. Isolated, segmented and stratified, these families are cut off from the single, the gay and the gray and, except for those tending them, anyone from lower classes.

Unlike their upper-middle-class kindred - the executives, doctors and lawyers who settle down in one place - relos forgo the old community props of their class: pedigree and family ties; seats on the vestry and the hospital board; and the rituals, like charity balls. Left with the class's emblematic cars, Lily Pulitzer skirts and Ralph Lauren shirts, their golf, tennis and soccer and, most conspicuously, their houses, they have staked out their place and inflated the American dream.

"What is the American dream?" said Karen Handel, chairwoman of the Fulton County Commission in Alpharetta. "It's to have a house of your own, the biggest house you can afford, on the biggest lot you can afford, with a great school for your kids, a nice park to spend Saturday afternoon with your kids in, and deep in amenities that get into the trade-offs with traffic."

More so than the classes below and above them - the immobilized poor of old cities and rural backwaters, the factory-bound working class and the old- and new-money rich - this is a fluid, unstable group. Those who lose jobs or decline promotions to let the children finish high school where they currently are sometimes relocate in place. They call the midnight movers to haul them to cheaper subdivisions, or seize the equity gains on their homes to move up.

The Link house stands on a cul-de-sac, up a slight rise with tall young oaks raining acorns over a small front yard and a curtain of cedar and pine bordering the back. It is three stories tall, with beige stucco walls and wide fieldstone panels flanking a varnished oak front door with leaded glass.

The house has a two-story family room hung with folk art, a room for guests that holds the girls' upright piano, a master suite upstairs with a bathroom with a wide white vanity on each side of the door and a Jacuzzi enclosed in pinkish marble tiles. Three blocks away are the tennis courts, the pool, two soccer fields and the two-story community clubhouse.

Alpharetta may be deep in Dixie, but its accent is not. Of the 30,000 people who live in the Links' census tract, 75 percent were born outside Georgia. Six percent are black, and 12 percent are Asian. Fewer than 3 percent are over 65; fewer than 2 percent are poor or unemployed.

Two-thirds of the adults have had four or more years of college and earn more than $100,000 a year, twice the American family average. Their homes are worth an average of $400,000, twice the national average, and they have nearly twice as many rooms as the average house. "Everybody here is in the top 10 percent of what they do," Steve Beecham, a home mortgage broker, said, "or they desire to be in the top 10 percent."

In politics, Republican candidates are shoo-ins. Few Alpharetta lawns sprouted campaign signs in November because the area's four contenders for the state legislature and a new candidate for Congress were all Republicans and ran unopposed.

Just Passing Through

When the Links began house-hunting in early 2000, Mr. Link said, "school was No. 1." After settling on the best school districts, he said, "we looked within price points." At their $300,000 limit, all they could afford in a good district near Atlanta was a three-bedroom, two-bath ranch-style house. "I wanted four bedrooms, two and a half baths and a basement," Ms. Link said, "and I had to have a yard."

The house the Links eventually bought in Medlock Bridge, built in 1987, has 3,900 square feet and 1,100 more in a basement with a wall of windows facing the backyard. There is a recreation room with a bar, and a fifth bedroom. "The basement is approximately the same size as my parents' entire house," Mr. Link said. The Links paid $313,000 and took an 80 percent mortgage.

Pleased though they have been with the house, the Links never considered it permanent.

At the dishwasher one evening last September, Ms. Link said, "Jimmy has been saying, 'This travel is killing me.' I'm shocked we're still here. Every home we went to, I said, 'Could you sell this house?' I did not think we would be here four years. Early on, I told Jimmy, 'Wherever you choose to work, we will make a life.'

"Jimmy's the one making the money. I want him to be happy and successful. Every area you move into, you buy into the lifestyle. Alpharetta is very big on tennis and soccer. We chose to participate in that."

Ms. Linka's favorite place was Pittsford, an affluent apple-pie town outside Rochester with a congenial mix of transient families and long-settled ones. "Up there each town has its own little village and one main street where you can walk and ride your bike and get someplace safely," she said. Kelsey and Kristina started school and soccer there. Ms. Link became a certified personal trainer and began volunteering. She joined the Junior League.

Creating the Illusion of History

The actual city of Alpharetta covers only 23 square miles in the northern half of Fulton County, but many subdivisions in adjoining unincorporated areas, like Medlock Bridge, carry Alpharetta ZIP codes. The city has no real core, although it has a small downtown with a Main Street, City Hall, some restaurants, a Methodist and a Baptist church, two beauty parlors, a variety store, a new gift shop called Everything Posh and a cemetery.

Just off Main Street, flanking an alley between two small parking lots, a pair of white wooden arches proclaim "Historic Downtown." But they lead only to the back walls of stores. Nearby is the Alpharetta Historical Society, housed in a 100-year-old Queen Anne house. The house is a relo. A truck brought it up from Roswell in 1993.

"Illusionism is something that people have enjoyed for centuries," Diana Wheeler, the director of community development, said. "We're creating new applications. It's a matter of how it's carried out. It's a quality issue. You convert the illusion into something that has value to you. Maybe solid columns held up roofs, and hollow columns create the illusion they do. People will go to great lengths to impress others."

Tim Bryan builds illusions, designing million-dollar houses of at least 4,500 square feet. Mr. Bryan said clients "want it to look like a house that's evolved over a century, to appear to have been lived in for 100 years or more, with the look of having been added onto." To achieve the look, a Bryan house may have a section of brick and next to it one of stone, then one of cedar shake.

With their price-pointed subdivisions, developers create pecking orders. "We're all busy looking down on each other," said Neal Martineau, 74, a retired advertising man who last summer was getting ready to move from just outside Alpharetta to West Virginia. " 'I'm better than you are and I'm going to show you.' It's a kind of bullying. It's architectural bullying."

"I'm faking it here," Mr. Martineau said. "I have property that does not have enough meadow to feed a horse, but I call it a horse farm."

"The car may be the most visible sign of status," he said. "My Mercedes is indicative of who I am. I am also a bit of a fraud. I probably shouldn't have a Mercedes, but I'm happy to wear a Mercedes. It's a way I have of making myself feel important, to have someone look at the best car on the road and know I'm in it."

One result of Alpharetta's subdivision-dotted terrain is the isolation of families from people unlike themselves. Zoning and planning are partly responsible, and so is the traffic. Except for the commute to work, the orbit of Medlock Bridge residents consists of the schools, the community pool, the tennis courts, the clubhouse, the shops along Medlock Bridge Road and the St. Ives Country Club right across from the subdivision.

Atlanta seems so far away. "We haven't been to any cultural events or sporting events as a family because it's an all-night event," Mr. Link said. People shop on the Internet. Rather than go to the car wash, they can call Tony Lancaster, who comes around in his van and brings the water, too. "Anything a shop can do, I can do mobile," Mr. Lancaster said.

Their seclusion helps keep the neighborhood safe, which is important to the Links. "We'll get a little rash of golf clubs stolen," Mr. Link said. "Mailboxes have been hit or bent. We'll see where cars have gotten keyed. But that's about it."

"The good thing about it is that it is a very comfortable neighborhood to live in," Mr. Link said. "These are very homogenous types of groups. You play tennis with them, you have them over to dinner. You go to the same parties."

"But we're never challenged to learn much about other economic groups," he said. "When you talk about tennis, guess what? Everybody you play against looks and acts and generally feels like you. It doesn't give you much of a perspective. At work, diversity is one of the biggest things we work on."

Alpharetta employers say that the $250,000 starting point for a detached, single-family house freezes out their secretaries and technicians, janitors and truck drivers, cashiers and data clerks. The prices exclude the city's own teachers and firemen. Of Alpharetta's 365 full-time city employees last fall, 112, or less than a third, lived in the city. Of 74 police officers, just the chief and two sergeants lived here.

House cleaners, like Linda Bates, live 30 or 40 miles away. Ms. Bates works for Unlimited Cleaning Services, a company that supplies housekeepers with a checklist of the clients' requirements. A client may never speak to the cleaner or get the same one twice, and that is all right with Ms. Bates.

"If I have to be at a house at 8:30, I will leave my house at 7," she said. "We just clean the house and go, like the air-conditioning man. I never bother personal things. I never answer the telephone. I don't like being there when they get there."

Adjusting to Differences

Kathy Link came from Highland Park, an old planned community of what are now multimillion-dollar homes four miles north of downtown Dallas. Jim Link grew up in a Houston subdivision, Bellaire, in a house where his parents have lived for 34 years. They went to Texas A&M University in College Station, met at a student pub where Mr. Link tended bar and married three years later, in 1988. She found work as an editor for an aerospace company. Mr. Link went into the insurance and mutual fund business, and from there he made the switch to banking.

Hardy, trim and darker toned than his wife, in disposition still the affable bartender, Mr. Link mans the beer cooler at holiday parties at the Medlock Bridge clubhouse. Ms. Link is more reserved. Her tennis doubles partner's high-five is a slap. Hers is a tap. Often as she leaves the court one mother or another stops her and, taller than most, she settles an arm over the woman's shoulder as they walk. She pretends to have the time.

The Links agree on most things. In November, they voted for President Bush. They splurge on their children's sports and tutoring and piano lessons and deny them computers and televisions in their rooms and cellphones.

But her family was better off than his, and every now and then their views diverge on money. When he sees the occasional $140 charge for having her hair highlighted, she said, "he cringes."

"Kathy's goal for college for the kids," he said, "is like her mother's was for her, that they not have to work." He worked, and it is fine with him if his children do.

Ms. Link is happy in the $45,000 Denali that they financed. He is happy with the 2000 green Ford Taurus he bought used from CarMax for $10,000 in cash.

They are clear of the troubles with credit card debt that built up after Kelsey and Kristina were born. Mr. Link earns something over $200,000, with bonuses based on the strength of the economy and his sales staff's success. Ms. Link earns around $4,000 from personal training and fitness instruction and plans to build on that as the children get older.

They have about $100,000 equity in the house and about $10,000 in college funds they started for the girls last year.

"We do all the basic stuff out of salary," Mr. Link said. "Bonuses are free for everything else, like extra saving, big vacations and major repairs on the house." Bonuses last year bought the family their first ski trip, a week after Christmas in Steamboat Springs, Colo.

For all their moving, the Links try to carry on an upper-middle-class tradition of volunteering and knitting community ties. Barely settled in Medlock Bridge, Mr. Link ran for the board of the homeowners association and won. The board then made him president and, in effect, the mayor. He paid the $15,000 initiation fee for the family to join the St. Ives Country Club.

Ms. Link joined a neighborhood group to play bunko, a social dice game favored by Alpharetta women, many of whom think of it as an excuse to get together and have a few glasses of wine. She began editing the subdivision's newsletter and set up an e-mail chain that reaches 350 Medlock Bridge homes. She spends two hours on Tuesday mornings at a Bible study meeting.

And she has bored into the schools. She became a vice president of the elementary school PTA and took on its newsletter. She is a room parent for Kaleigh's third-grade class and organizes science projects there. At her kitchen computer command post, she tracks the girls' reports and test scores on school Web pages. Kelsey's October report showed a 97 average, but then she got a 78 on a Spanish test. In a week, she had a tutor.

"The women are like the rulers," Kelsey said on a drive with her father during a weekend soccer tournament in Columbus, Ga. "They have the big cars. The dads have the little cars and just go to work." She said her mother thought that her father was too relaxed on the road.

Mr. Link said, "Kathy becomes impatient with me when I'm going 70 in a 65 zone."

"No, Daddy," Kelsey said. "It's when you're going 60."

Lately, Ms. Link's frenzied schedule has been grinding her down. Early last summer she gave up bunko. In August she dropped her PTA jobs and the community newsletter. In October, she was asked to lead a fund-raising drive for Kristina's cheerleading squad and said no. "I had never done that," she said.

But something else always seems to come up. She resumed editing the community newsletter because her successor gave it up. In November she learned of a school redistricting plan and shook her e-mail chain to mobilize opposition.

All her activity began creating tension at home. On the sidelines of one of Kristina's soccer games in October, Mr. Link said: "The single biggest thing to change is, Kathy has to be more judicious about how she volunteers. She would never give up Bible study. But she's now playing in three or four tennis leagues."

She agreed. "I volunteer way too much," she said.

"It doesn't mean you shouldn't be involved," he told her, "but it doesn't mean you have to be the leader."

Unexpected Challenges

The Links are the first to say they have not really found a way to make their Alpharetta life work. They found good schools, safe streets, neighbors they like and a big house and a yard. But they did not count on the grueling traffic, on how far away everything seems, on how much is asked of volunteers to sustain the community, or on the stresses of a breadwinner's travels. They have no deep connections here, no old friends, no parents to sit for their children.

Ms. Link thinks about Highland Park, with her Presbyterian church and easy access to Dallas. She thinks about Rochester. "In Rochester," she said, "everything fell into place." In Alpharetta what weighs on her is just the daily grind.

"We haven't found a church," she said. "We went church shopping. I would find places my children liked and I didn't or that I liked and they didn't. We found one, but it's a half-hour drive away. We don't have that kind of time."

"It's all here," she said, "but it's an hour drive away. Here it's like, 'Get the heck out of my way.' It's like go, go, go. We're just going, going, going. I call it drowning. It's when you can't see the top of the water."

"In Rochester," she said, "you could go to festivals and street fairs, and museums and farms and pick your own apples and not have a death grip on your child."

"In Rochester I had two best friends," she added. "I don't have a girl best friend here in Alpharetta. There's no one person I can call up to confide in. I called up one girl, and I scared her."

Exploring a Change

In the summer of 2003, Jim Link and Wachovia considered some organizational changes that might have led to a move for the family, but nothing came of them. Last summer the discussions resumed, and in September he was promoted. Starting Nov. 1, he became national sales manager for a broader range of the bank's money management services than he had been selling.

"It rounds me out," he said, folding laundry in the family room and watching a Georgia Tech football game on television.

Whether to leave Alpharetta was left hanging, he said.

But they decided that the moving should stop for a while - nine years, at least, from the time Kelsey starts high school until Kaleigh finishes. With his BlackBerry, laptop and access to the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, Mr. Link could do his new job from here. Wachovia leaves the choice up to him but tells him that moving to Charlotte should help his career.

"I told my boss, 'If you're willing to fund a full relocation package, I'm willing to do it,' " he said.

Back home from the family ski trip to Steamboat as the year ended, the Links seemed to be leaning toward one more move.

"I will remake myself to be a better mother and a better wife," Ms. Link said. "I've paid my dues."

Mr. Link said: "We would try to be closer and more plugged in to the city. Kathy would continue volunteering, because that's how she gets involved. We would require that the kids be involved in something."

They were not telling friends, or the girls. Once word got around, they feared, teachers and coaches would start writing the girls off. Kelsey had figured it out. As they packed for Steamboat, Ms. Link said, "she asked, 'Are we moving?' Jimmy couldn't lie. He said, 'It looks like it,' " and told her to keep mum.

They worry about Kristina. The shyest of the three girls, she was slow to take to Alpharetta. Then she bloomed. In her special-education reading class, she got 100's all fall and in January moved to a regular class. She won her soccer team's Golden Boot award for scoring the most goals.

The Links called in Tina Davis, the real estate agent. Afternoons when the girls were in school, Ms. Link searched the Internet for homes and schools in Charlotte and found that it, too, was a sea of new subdivisions. The average commuting time is 24 minutes, the same as Atlanta.

Then she found Myers Park, a prosperous, close-in community of 8,700 where most of the houses are more than 60 years old and 10 minutes from downtown. She found the Myers Park Presbyterian Church.

"It's like the one I went to in Highland Park," she said.

Mr. Link got home on Feb. 9 after three days in Phoenix. He found a long e-mail message from Wachovia. "We got our paperwork," the relocation package, he said.

They told the girls after school. Kelsey took it easily, sad only that she would not be going to Northview High School with her friends. Kaleigh beamed, then frowned about losing friends and teachers.

Kristina was in the kitchen with Ms. Link when Mr. Link came in.

"Your dad's got something to tell you," Ms. Link said.

"We're moving to Charlotte," he said.

Kristina paused. She would be leaving Rebecca, a friend of five years

"I hate you," she said. "When?"

"In June," he said.

"What about soccer?"

She would keep playing here through May, they told her, and then get onto a team in Charlotte. She brightened a little.

That night Mr. and Ms. Link went to dinner at Sia's, their favorite restaurant, just across Medlock Bridge Road.

"I'm happy," she said. "It's finally over. For four years, it's been when, when, when."

She told Jim: "I'm wired to settle in wherever we move and make a life for you and the family. But I still want a one-mile radius. I'm not going to do another Alpharetta."

By Kristina's 12th birthday on April 16, pale green buds had broken out in the oaks in front of the Links' house. A landscaping crew was setting pink and white petunias into the new pine straw mulch around the shrubs. Inside, floors had been sanded and the master bath retiled in beige limestone. "Finished basement," the red headline on Tina Davis's sign out front said.

Mr. Link left early that day to take Kelsey to a soccer game 30 miles away. Ms. Link and Kristina watched Kaleigh's Green Gators near home.

"Go, Kaleigh!" Ms. Link shouted. "Get in the middle, Kaleigh. Go!"

On the sidelines, a father turned to her.

"Kathy, what's this I hear you're leaving?"

"We are," she said.

"Work stuff?"

"Wachovia," she said. "Charlotte."

"We're going to miss you," he said.

"It's kind of bittersweet," she said. "We want to be there nine years, but you never know."

•
In May, the Links sold their house in Alpharetta for $420,000 and bought a Cape Cod in Charlotte for $627,500. It is half the size of the one in Alpharetta, but it is in leafy old Myers Park. The Myers Park Country Club, the Presbyterian church and top-rated public schools are less than a mile away.

On a visit last week, the girls got library cards. They tried out for a soccer club and all three made the cut. They will move in July.

(*) (*) :| :| :| :| I'll take lots of land any day!!

(f) (f) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

06-02-2005, 11:36 PM

A rumored plan to take Sun Microsystems private that CEO Scott McNealy dismissed as "unsubstantiated" and designed to spike the company's share price has proven to be just that. Certainly San Francisco-based investment firm Silver Lake Partners is less apt to purchase Sun, now that the company has dipped deeply into its coffers, agreeing to pay $4.1 billion cash for StorageTek, a maker of data storage equipment. For Sun, which is working to regain market share and stem losses after slipping deeply into the mud, the acquisition promises to widen and boost annual sales to more than $13 billion. "Our customers will be thrilled to death with the increased scale and scope of our products,'' McNealy said during a conference call this morning. "Storage and data management and managing the critical assets of companies are becoming more important in solving network computing problems.'' The acquisition is Sun's largest in recent memory and according to McNealy, may be the first of many. "Sun's technical and financial strength puts us in a great position to act as a consolidator in the (information-technology) industry," McNealy said in the statement. "This acquisition is part of an ongoing strategy to respond to customers seeking to rationalize their datacenter purchases."

http://news.com.com/McNealy+dismisses+Sun+buyout+rumor/2100-7341_3-5689924.html?tag=nl

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_19/b3932153_mz027.htm

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/02/sun_buys_storagetek/

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/11796807.htm

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000006&sid=agk8o3rqLVbA&refer=home

(*) (*) Maybe, just maybe.......Sun and Storage Tech can effectively compete with firms that have integrated storage management and many of the custom applications required by folks like CNN, Disney/ABC, etc. Huge rooms of both robotic tape and near-line disk-based storage systems.... (*) SGI has been successfully selling into and growing a loyal base for many years with the Pixars, Digital Domains, and other 3D animation feature film companies - with Sun never getting in the door. Maybe now, who knows? :o :o

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

06-02-2005, 11:43 PM

Look, Bill, nobody's going to call it wincasting, so let's just get on with it: Looks like Microsoft's got a bit of podcast envy. During a recent Gillmor Gang broadcast, former MTV VJ and podcasting evangelist Adam Curry described his efforts to persuade Microsoft to build podcasting support into its Windows Media Player. According to Curry, Microsoft turned a deaf ear to his requests until Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced last week that iTunes 4.9 will support podcasting (see "Podcasting: It's party time, it's excellent"). Microsoft's attitude toward the subject changed rather quickly after that. "It was like 15 minutes after it showed up in the Wall Street Journal when Microsoft called, saying, 'Hey, how do we get in this?' " Curry recalled. "I don't know a lot about Microsoft. I do see they're a lot hungrier company than they used to be. But every single time you talk to them about anything that's new, or in this case iPodder functionality inside Windows Media Player, the almost standard answer is, 'Yeah we're going to have a lot of that in Longhorn.' That to me means there is this huge steamboat that is very difficult to steer left or right, and it's just harder to get stuff done at Microsoft."

http://gillmorgang.podshow.com/?m=200505

http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2005/05/podcasting_its_.html

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/004941.html

(*) (*) I still and will always think that Microsoft sux and that Billie Boy Gates is evil incarnate. GO, Podcasters, GO! And despite Jobs beiing a completely arrogant butthead recently - Apple still rocks when it comes to tools for artists, graphics' designers and other creative folks' platform and software - within reasonable range of many folks. Now the high-end software needs more power than a G5, and so SGI still is the black box of choice for more than a few post production facilities. (*) (*)

(S) (S) Seems to be getting late......sweet dreams and a lovely Friday. Doc and I are off to his vet oncologist tomorrow afternoon - blood test. Hopefully all is well and he is still in remission.

(f) (f) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

06-02-2005, 11:45 PM

http://j-walk.com/other/googlecb/index.htm

(*) (*) ????

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

06-02-2005, 11:48 PM

http://www.radaronline.com/web-only/style-slave/2005/05/they-all-scream.php

(*) (*) :| :| :| What some people will try......I guess too many brain cells destroyed during their teen years or something. :|

(l) (l) My favorites are sugarless mint chocolate chip, the darkest chocolate there is and coffee ice cream. Simple tastes. (a) (yea, yea, right.... ;)

Carpe Diem!
Sweetlady and Doc the boxer

sweetlady

06-02-2005, 11:49 PM

http://www.threadless.com/submission/40290/Darth_enjoyed_gardening

(*) (*) Huh? :|

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

06-02-2005, 11:52 PM

Posted on Thu, Jun. 02, 2005

The amalgam of technology and artistry

By John Epperheimer

In trying to understand an economic system as complex as Silicon Valley, it's always useful to have some archetypes of the workers who have been the backbone of technology companies.

At best, these symbols have helped us understand the attitudes of key members of the workforce: what motivates them, how they behave and how the cultures of companies have been built around them. Thus, each of us has some set of opinions about these archetypes.

There were the defense industry engineers, whom I saw as the ultimate rationalists.

The semiconductor designers, with their incredibly focused march toward building more capacity into less space, symbolized faith in engineering and logic.

Before manufacturing all but disappeared from the area, the production managers stood for process efficiency.

I've tended to view software developers as problem-solvers and individualists.

Biotech researchers have one foot in the world of scientific discovery, and the other in social service (improving or saving the lives of their ultimate customers).

Many more flavors

I could go on and on. I haven't even touched on sales and marketing workers, and there are many more flavors of technologists.

Lately, I've been focusing on observing the ``tech creatives.'' This is a relatively new major category of workers, created by the marriage of technology and art.

You'll find them at Yahoo, Electronic Arts and similar companies.

In those organizations, work is an interesting amalgam of nerd-dom and artistry. The products run on a backbone of storage and coding and algorithms that gets more powerful and sophisticated by the month. The lineage of these technologists can be traced back to coders and hardware engineers who built earlier industries.

But the interaction with the end user is all about design and visuals, drama and narrative, and user interface. In past decades, the people drawn to these jobs might have been found in advertising agencies or Hollywood studios.

What fascinates me is the marriage -- or the clash -- of these two camps.

Uneasy relationship

(As a former editor, I see an analogy to the newspaper industry, which has always been an uneasy working relationship between the creatives -- reporters, artists, photographers -- and a production machine -- printers, pressmen -- that turns out a new product every 24 hours.)

I've been thinking that the rise of these ``tech creatives'' symbolizes a shift in the general nature of the valley.

Product cycles are shorter, product design is more valued and regimentation is less prevalent. Much of the product is oriented less to business and more to consumers. What is being produced has a creative ``skin,'' and ease of use is a major objective.

In a sense, what's being attempted is the harnessing of creativity for commercial purposes. In the past, the emphasis was on harnessing technology for commerce.

Longevity not a factor

There's not much orientation to joining a company, or even an industry, with the idea of staying for a long time. It may turn out that Yahoo or Google or Electronic Arts enjoys the longevity of a Hewlett-Packard or an Intel, but that's not on the minds of the tech creatives.

In these hybrid companies, the ability to work with colleagues who are very unlike you is imperative -- maybe more so than ever before in technology companies.

(*) (*) I most-whole-heartedly agree!!! (h) (h)

(S) (S) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

06-03-2005, 12:02 AM

SBC ups ante in telecom war:

WITH BROADBAND A `WAY OF LIFE,' IT ROLLS OUT $14.95 MONTHLY DEAL

By Sam Diaz Mercury News Posted on Thu, Jun. 02, 2005

It's tough to beat $14.95 a month for high-speed Internet service.

SBC's broadband deal, announced Wednesday, is half the price of similar Internet access offered by Comcast and other cable companies and even cheaper than some dial-up services. But the SBC pricing plan is part of something bigger than just a monthly bill.
This is a strategic move in a telecommunications war. Broadband providers are hoping to attract and keep more customers as they launch other services -- from video mail and television programming to streaming music and on-demand movies.

SBC's limited-time promotion is only for new customers who order online. The company will not match it for existing customers.
``Broadband has become a way of life, as essential as a TV and telephone and other household conveniences we have,'' said SBC spokesman John Britton. ``What we've found is that nobody wants to be without it.''

At $14.95, it's hard to say no.

``For the crossover dial-up subscriber, someone who casually surfs the Web, I think this is a great value,'' said Bruce McGregor, a broadband analyst for Current Analysis. ``The price is great, but you have to know what you're getting into.''
First, there's a one-year commitment tied to the offer -- with the price jumping $5 a month after the first year. Second, it requires that subscribers also have SBC telephone service. That's a bit of a tougher sell these days as a growing number of consumers dump land-line phones in favor of their cell phones.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that high-speed Internet access from cable companies like Comcast is a better deal. Locally, Comcast charges $42.95 a month for its basic broadband service, though it does occasionally offer city-by-city promotions.
Residents in Alameda, for example, are being offered a $29.95 promotion for 12 months.

``The competition for the broadband home is not just about price,'' said Comcast spokesman Andrew Johnson. ``It's about a reliable, powerful, high-speed broadband connection and everything that customers can experience with it in and around their homes.''
He said Comcast has no plans to engage in a price war with SBC.

That means for consumers that it all comes down to speed vs. cost.

SBC's promotional $14.95 price for new customers delivers speeds up to 1.5 megabits per second, compared with Comcast's basic service, which delivers up to 4 megabits per second.

For $24.95, new SBC customers can surf at 3 megabits per second while Comcast's premium service, priced at $52.95, will deliver speeds up to 6 megabits per second.

The speeds the cable providers offer sound impressive, said McGregor. But in most cases, the experience of surfing the Web, downloading music or even watching a video stream is just fine at 1.5 megabits per second.

``I think they're marketing to the consumers' false perception that more is always better,'' McGregor said. ``What are you going to do with 4 megabits if you're just surfing the Web and checking e-mail? If you're a power user, maybe an online gamer, then you would have the applications that lend themselves to faster speeds. But if you're targeting the average consumer, I think they are more focused on price.''
McGregor said SBC is making a smart move if its hope is to take the No. 1 position for broadband subscriptions away from Comcast. The attractive pricing will encourage some cable customers to rethink their current service, and could persuade dial-up customers to switch to broadband.

``There is definitely a trend to switch over, and you can't ignore that price is a factor,'' he said.

Already, cable and DSL providers are selling consumers on all of the great things they can do with a high-speed connection -- download music, stream Internet video, send and receive video e-mails. And they're positioning themselves to become the all-in-one provider -- and biller -- for other things you already pay for, including home phone, cell phone and long-distance services.

Eventually, television shows, movies, music and other media will be largely delivered over broadband Internet connections rather than the airwaves. If consumers are locked into a package that includes so many facets of their lives, it's tougher to jump to a competitor, McGregor said.

``Bundling packages are appealing but there are terms and conditions,'' he said. ``Consumers are being offered a price. They need to know the catch for that price.''

(*) (*) (l) (l) I LOVE seeing pricing for broadband drop - maybe the telecom firms' pressure will force companies providing cable modems like COMCAST to lower their monthly pricing. C'mon DBS (Direct Satellite Broadcasters) folks - let's get those DirectPC systems to actually WORK, so folks who want to live in remote areas can do so AND telecommute. Yes, yes, that would make my heart sing for sure! (8) (8) (h) (h) (l) (l) (l)

<"Say Goodnight", Gracie.>

(S) (S) Restful evening to all. (f) (f)

(k) (k) ,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

sweetlady

06-03-2005, 04:53 PM

June 2, 2005
A Town's Struggle in the Culture War
By BRUCE WEBER
MUHLENBERG, Pa. - In April, at an otherwise mundane meeting of the school board here, Brittany Hunsicker, a 16-year-old student at the local high school, stood up and addressed the assembled board members.

"How would you like if your son and daughter had to read this?" Miss Hunsicker asked.

Then she began to recite from "The Buffalo Tree," a novel set in a juvenile detention center and narrated by a tough, 12-year-old boy incarcerated there. What she read was a scene set in a communal shower, where another adolescent boy is sexually aroused.

"I am in the 11th grade," Miss Hunsicker said. "I had to read this junk."

Less than an hour later, by a unanimous vote of the board (two of its nine members were absent) "The Buffalo Tree" was banned, officially excised from the Muhlenberg High School curriculum. By 8:30 the next morning all classroom copies of the book had been collected and stored in a vault in the principal's office. Thus began a still unresolved battle here over the fate of "The Buffalo Tree," a young adult novel by Adam Rapp that was published eight years ago by HarperCollins and has been on the 11th-grade reading list at Muhlenberg High since 2000. Pitting teachers, students and others who say the context of the novel's language makes it appropriate for the classroom against those parents and board members who say context be damned, it is a dispute illustrative of the so-called culture war, which, in spite of its national implications, is fought in almost exclusively local skirmishes. The board was set to meet the evening of June 1 to reconsider its decision.

"We're absolutely middle-American," said Joseph Yarworth, the schools' superintendent for the last nine years. "And we're having an argument over our values."

According to the American Library Association, which asks school districts and libraries to report efforts to ban books - that is, have them removed from shelves or reading lists - they are on the rise again: 547 books were challenged last year, up from 458 in 2003. These aren't record numbers. In the 1990's the appearance of the Harry Potter books, with their themes of witchcraft and wizardry, caused a raft of objections from evangelical Christians.

Judith Krug, director of the library association's office for intellectual freedom, attributed the most recent spike to the empowerment of conservatives in general and to the re-election of President Bush in particular. The same thing happened 25 years ago, she said. "In 1980, we were dealing with an average of 300 or so challenges a year, and then Reagan was elected," she said. "And challenges went to 900 or 1,000 a year."

Muhlenberg is a township of modest homes and 10,000 people or so, a bedroom community for the city of Reading, in the southeastern quadrant of the state. It is conservative politically and almost entirely white, and there are a growing number of evangelical Christians. Miss Hunsicker had just returned from a two-week church mission in Honduras when, encouraged by her mother, she made her public complaint.

But the town is not militantly right wing. It is significant that even the more vociferous opponents of the book did not insist it come off the school library shelves (though thieves apparently took care of that). In fact, on April 14, as soon as Dr. Yarworth discovered that an overzealous underling had had copies of the novel stored in the school vault, he ordered them returned to storage in classrooms so it could still be read by students who sought it out.

"I wanted us to comply with the narrowest possible interpretation of the board's decision," Dr. Yarworth said.

What followed was a period of unusual activism here. Students circulated petitions. Teachers prepared defenses of the book, and their local union prepared a defense of the teacher who had assigned it. Letters on both sides appeared in the local newspaper, The Reading Eagle, which published a number of articles about the dispute. In May a column appeared headlined "The Upside of Censorship," by a regular columnist, John D. Forester Jr., who wrote that after reading only "passages" of "The Buffalo Tree," "I am actually applauding the efforts of parents to have books banished in their school libraries and classrooms." A few days later, an editorial took the opposing view.

On May 4, the school board met for the first time since banning "The Buffalo Tree" and about 200 people attended, 10 times the usual number, Dr. Yarworth said. The president, Mark Nelson, apologized for his vote to ban the book, not because he approved of it in the curriculum - he admitted later he had not read it - but because he felt the decision had been hasty and in violation of the board's policy for book challenges, which says a challenge should first be heard by a committee of teachers and administrators before the issue goes before the board.

Another member, Otto Voit, who had read the novel, responded that the board, as the ultimate authority, was within its rights in removing the book from the curriculum.

Over the next two hours, some of the rhetoric on both sides became inflated. Some declared that dirty words are dirty words, and that with novels like "The Buffalo Tree" being taught it's no wonder American society is going down the tubes. And others, not allowing for the genuine discomfort that some readers of "The Buffalo Tree" feel, invoked the specter of Nazi book-burning.

Several students spoke with more reasonable passion about the value of the novel, and one high school senior, Mary Isamoyer, offered to replace the missing library copies of "The Buffalo Tree" with her own.

"Do not insult our intelligence by keeping this book from us," she said.

Tammy Hahn, a mother of four and perhaps the most outspoken of the book's opponents, responded that the students' view was irrelevant. She was not about to let her daughter take part in a classroom discussion about erections, she said, adding that it amounted to harassment to subject a girl to the smirks and innuendoes of male classmates who would have no sympathy for her discomfort.

"This is not about a child's opinion," she said of the students' defense of the book. "This is about parents."

Afterward, Joan Kochinsky, a board member who had not been at the previous meeting, moved that the ban be rescinded. But wary of making another decision in haste, the board postponed the vote for a week.

On May 11, it met for another tense, well-attended session that lasted until nearly midnight. This time there was much discussion about the particulars of Miss Hunsicker's unhappiness with the book.

School policy allows for alternate reading assignments when a student or a parent objects to a book on religious or moral grounds, but Miss Hunsicker never did that; her mother, Tammy, said she would have made those specific objections if she had known it was necessary. Miss Hunsicker had simply asked for something else to read because she didn't like "The Buffalo Tree," and her teacher, Luana Goldstan, refused.

"No one is more critical of literature than English teachers," Stacia Richmond, a colleague of Ms. Goldstan's, told the board. "Do you really think we as educators choose literature in terms of its titillation? Do you not realize we are battling the same immorality you are?"

Dr. Yarworth then suggested that confusion could be avoided if a more explicit policy for book challenges were given to parents, including a synopsis of all books on the required reading lists. If that were done, he asked, would the board consider rescinding the ban on "The Buffalo Tree"?

An informal poll was taken, and by a 5-to-3 vote the board indicated it was ready to reverse itself. It was unclear how many members had finished "The Buffalo Tree"; at least two had, at least three had not. But the lengthy debate seemed to prepare them to change their minds.

After the meeting, however, Mrs. Hahn said she felt her arguments had been given short shrift, and she met privately with Mr. Nelson, the board president, to push the idea of a rating system for schoolbooks, similar to what the Motion Picture Association of America does for films. And on May 18, the board rejected the English department's new policy for book challenges and asked that Mrs. Hahn's requests be accommodated: that reading lists made available to parents include a ratings system, plot summaries of all assigned books, and the identification of any potentially objectionable content.

Teachers adamantly opposed these strictures, Michael Anthony, chairman of the English department, said, adding that they would undoubtedly result in more frequent challenges. Dr. Yarworth, who is trying to broker a compromise between the board and faculty, said he had already heard a few grumbles about "Of Mice and Men" and "Catcher in the Rye."

In any case, Mr. Anthony said, " 'The Buffalo Tree' isn't coming back anytime soon."

(*) (*) :@ :@ THIS REALLY SUCKS!! Glad to know however, yet another search set of criteria for researching potential places to move to eventually - hopefully in 2006 or before. (like I would stay in PA - the 44th worst place to get old and die....). Stuff like this just pisses me off - especially since they ARE taking advantage of the Village Idiot's second term and ultra-conservatives getting their agendas prioritized while the time is ripe.....GRRR. Definitely would not live in this PA town for sure. :@ :@

:o ....and now off the soap box to other, lighter topics..... ;)

(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

sweetlady

06-03-2005, 04:55 PM

June 3, 2005

Immaculate Destruction

By FRANCES FITZGERALD

FOR some time now the Air Force has been pressing the White House for a new national-security directive that would permit the deployment of space weaponry. A decision could come within weeks. Most space-to-ground weapons remain futuristic, but previous presidents and Congresses have chosen not to deploy anti-satellite weapons, fearing that doing so would set off an arms race and endanger the information systems the United States relies on. The new directive, if approved, would constitute a historic change in policy as radical as President Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive war.

Yet the idea of putting weapons in space has its roots in American national mythology and in a strain of 19th-century strategic thinking that, curiously enough, seems quite close to that of the Bush administration.

In January 2001 the National Space Commission, which had been led by Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense designate, warned the incoming President Bush of the potential for a "space Pearl Harbor." The bumper-sticker phrase dramatized a real concern for American defense planners. Over the years the military has become more and more dependent on satellites for navigation, targeting, command-and-control and other essential functions, yet satellites are highly vulnerable. They can be shot down with guided missiles, their ground transmitters can be attacked and the communication links between the two can be jammed.

The space policy of the Clinton administration emphasized defensive measures and arms control to deal with these threats, but the Rumsfeld commission called for "the option to deploy weapons in space" and a new policy to guide their development. In 2002 President Bush withdrew from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which banned space-based missile defenses, and ordered a policy review. Since then the Air Force and other military commands have called for deploying weapons that could cripple other countries' orbiters, a space-based missile defense system and other weapons that could rapidly attack targets anywhere on earth.

The strategic advantage of some of these systems, however, is difficult to discern. A space-based ground attack system would require dozens of satellites and cost 50 to 100 times as much as ballistic missiles that can do the same job. As for antisatellite weapons, they would do nothing to defend our satellites. Whatever utility such weapons might have, the problem with all of them is that spacecraft in orbit are vulnerable to relatively low-tech countermeasures. And if other countries, particularly Russia or China, were faced with a space weapon that could cripple their communications or strike them without warning, they might react just as the United States would under similar circumstances.

Air Force reports speak of establishing "space control" or "space superiority," defining both as "freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack" in space. The metaphors that surround these assertions tend to come from old-fashioned conventional warfare. "The first principle that should guide air and space professionals is the imperative to control the high ground," a policy paper, "Counterspace Operations," tells us.

Yet space is not so much a high ground as it as a highway - and in some orbits it is as crowded as the New Jersey Turnpike, mostly with commercial satellites and space debris. Any space-based weapon would have to join this procession and roll along with the rest of the traffic. How putting more or better weapons in orbit would end their vulnerability Air Force officials have yet to explain. But clearly they have faith that technology will find a way. "Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny," Gen. Lance Lord, chief of the Air Force Space Command, said at an Air Force conference last September. "Simply put, it's the American way of fighting," he told Congress recently.

The Air Force's enthusiasm for space weaponry accords with the Bush administration's preference for military superiority over arms control and with Mr. Rumsfeld's view that the United States should fight with high-tech weaponry and as few troops as possible.

As General Lord's rhetoric suggests, these approaches are hardly novel. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Midwestern Republicans, among them Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana and Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, promoted similar strategies. They were isolationists in regard to Europe, which they considered the corrupt Old World, but they rivaled Theodore Roosevelt in their enthusiasm for American imperial adventures to the south and the west. They therefore became advocates of a powerful navy, for it could defend American shores against European powers and extend American reach through the Caribbean and into the Pacific. Later they resisted plans for enlarging the Army because the only function of a large army, as they saw it, would be to intervene in European conflicts. With the advent of the airplane, they championed the air force as a substitute for boots on the ground.

In effect their strategy was to project power while remaining isolated: in terms of the national mythology, they wanted America to pursue its God-given mission abroad while remaining the virgin land. While the Democrats would fight land wars, compromise and negotiate, Midwestern Republicans would preach the American way of life and command the world from the heights of the air and the distances of the sea. Their ideal would surely have been space weaponry. But the record of the last century suggests that, like long-range bombers and aircraft carriers, killer satellites will not save the United States from the messy realities of international engagement.

Frances FitzGerald is the author of "Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War."

(*) (*) Nice title.....and scary thought of how we've all come to depend on satellite communications........ :| :| :| (h) (h) (h)

;) ;) .
SL & DTB