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Archive for December, 2011

This Is Almost As Bad As Suddenly Discovering You’re A Tory.

I mean, it’s not as if I have anything against greetings cards in the abstract. I even quite enjoy choosing them sometimes – especially for birthdays. My personal taste runs towards deliberately incorrect age-milestones and the ones with the kind of joke you don’t want to have to explain to your children. But I’m also quite fond of cards with arty pictures and no words on the front (and the ones with no words on the inside either are a godsend for those chilling 3am oh-shit-it’s-TOMORROW-and-I-FORGOT-to-buy-a-CARD moments of clarity). I also like the ones that have glitter and ribbon and buttons – so cute! So crafty! So nicely made! And if you get me drunk and trap me in a corner, I’ll probably confess to really quite liking the ones where cute animals are wearing hats, sitting in things, or wearing hats while sitting in things.

Christmas cards, on the other hand, I struggle with. In a good year, I get it together enough to send them to the people I love, but know I have no chance of seeing in the two-month window on either side of the milestone. In an average one, I’ll remember to buy a box of cards for the kids to send laborious greetings to their classmates. But cards for people I’m going to actually see on Christmas Day? Maybe not so much.

If they all looked like this I could probably get into it more.

I felt this way for all of my life until I met my husband, and until I met my husband it never occurred to me that anyone else would feel differently. And then I was introduced to a whole other way of doing cards. I got my first inkling of this when our first wedding anniversary rolled around, and to my amazement, we got an anniversary card…from his parents.

This was a total shock to me. In my family, wedding anniversaries are marked by the following ritual: some time towards the end of September, my mum and dad will look at each other in the kitchen and one of them will say, “Wasn’t it our wedding anniversary last week?” And the other one will say, “Yeah, I think it might have been actually,” and they have an amiable argument about whether they got married in 1970 or 1971, and what date it had taken place on, and whether this corresponded to last Tuesday or last Thursday, before moving onto more important things, like whether it’s too late in the evening to make a cup of tea.

Do you see what I’m saying here? I was raised in a household where the notion of remembering to buy a card that commemorates the day you, yourself, married the personal love of your life was considered a bit of a challenge. The notion of remembering to send a card to mark the day someone else did it was simply unimaginable. And then, out of the blue…an anniversary card from my husband’s parents. Clearly I had married into a family where these things were done differently. In this family, cards mattered. It was time I started shaping up and taking notice.

I lack the critical judgement needed to tell whether or not this is worthy of mockery.

And then I started to notice other little signs. Signs that maybe the matter of Card Specialness wasn’t just confined to personal milestones. Like the way that, even before our children were old enough to make cards at playgroup, my husband always bought me a Christmas card from each of them and got them to put a bit of pre-literate scribble in them. Or the fact that the Christmas cards we received from his parents had, at the appropriate times, morphed from “To Our Son And His Girlfriend” through “To Our Son And His Fiancee” to “To Our Son And His Wife”. Also, the fact that (rather than cards with double-entendre jokes and stupid pictures of ducks favoured in my family), these cards tended to be several pages long, and to have a great deal of printed text included in them. Finally, the Apocalypse; a conversation with my mother-in-law about Christmas cards.

We’d gone round for a Christmas Eve dinner, and she and I were having one of those kitchen conferences you always have after a big event, and she mentioned how much the cards we’d given them mattered to her. “All those special words,” she told me. “I’m not bothered about presents at all, it’s lovely of people to remember but I wouldn’t mind a bit if they hadn’t – but the cards are what makes it really special. I get all choked up reading the verses inside them, and knowing you’ve chosen those words just for us.”

Reader, I almost expired on the spot with shame, because (and I’m not proud of this. In fact I’m mortified) the only time I ever read the verses written in greetings-cards is so I can laugh at them. It was actually possible I might have had a little chuckle at some of the more florid greetings in front of my mother-in-law. I felt like I’d just been to church and openly laughed at the sermon – except that even in my most fiercely unbelieving moments, I’ve never sunk that low. Or as if, after watching a friend leave the steak I’d just served her and laughing at her fussy eating habits, I’d realised several years after she finally stopped coming round that she was, and had always been, a vegetarian. Or as if I’d just got into my late thirties and only just discovered it actually wasn’t okay to go to work in just your underwear.

I feel his pain.

Christmas cards for people you’re going to see on Christmas Day. I just don’t get it, and I never have. Thing is, now I know I’m the weird one here. As a result, my Christmas-cards-for-near-relatives obliviousness has been replaced with Christmas-cards-for-near-relatives blind panic. I spend hours worrying about cards, and looking at cards, and buying cards, and writing cards, and watching cards being opened, and scrutinising the reactions to see if I’ve got it right. I suspect I’m madly over-compensating, but that’s because I have no internal compass telling me where to draw the line. I once actually cried in WHSmiths because I couldn’t find a card whose front featured the correct conjunction of the words “Granny”, “Grandad” and “Grand-daughter” for my (pre-literate) child to present to my in-laws.

How much does this stuff matter? I don’t know. Everyone else in my family knows; but I don’t. Is it a huge deal, to get a card printed with the word “Grannie” instead of “Granny”? Is it worse to get a card which spells their title wrong, or is it worse to jib out altogether and opt for “To my grandparents at Christmas”? And, when inspecting the verses inside, what exactly am I looking for? How do I assess the poetry of the Christmas-card? Is it better to have one that rhymes, or is blank verse preferable? What sort of themes should I look for? How do I grade the ones that go on and on over several pages, with each section of text separated from the rest by pretty golden ellipses? And how about the font – is the font important?

I have absolutely no idea. I am Christmas-card blind; I am deaf to the music of their meaning. I am a freak and an outsider and a social klutz. All I know is that half my family see things in these cards that I just don’t, and getting the right card matters.

Which gets me on to the point of this post, which is what you’re supposed to do with the damn things afterwards. Clearly these cards matter, but how much? Am I allowed to put them in the recycling, or is that as crass as cutting up my wedding-dress for dishcloths? And how far down the family tree am I expected to go? Do I have to keep cards from relatives I couldn’t even pick out of a police line-up?

I’ll say it again; I have absolutely no idea. And, in a pathetic over-compensation for my total absence of social knowledge on this question, I keep all of them. Every single last one.

This is not a consequence-free decision. Because of my inability to instinctively know what to do about cards, we have an entire antique wooden chest that lives on our landing, looks pretty nice until you open it up, and mostly contains cards. Am I getting this right? I have no idea. When we both die and our kids have to clear out the house, will they find the card archive and nod wisely and say, Ah. This is where she kept them, and then take them away to store them somewhere else? Or will they merely wonder what the hell I was thinking?

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I have to confess that I actually don’t have any words to explain how amazing this feels. Just a huge, enormous grin that can probably be seen from space. 😀

Oh oh oh – and the links to buy it, of course! It’s available direct from the Salt website, and also for pre-order from Amazon.

Wishing everyone a wonderful Christmas. xxx

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Here’s a lovely piece of Point Of Sale that really adds value to the lives of today’s young adults:

“The best reading for teens”. That’s quite a bold claim, but, okay, we’ll go with it.

Ready for the payoff?

Let’s all just contemplate the significance of that for a minute, shall we?

“The best reading for teens is a genre that posits sexual relationships as a physically dangerous transaction between impossibly powerful male predators and passive, helpless female prey. In this genre, sexual fulfilment is entirely within the gift of the male, to be awarded or withheld entirely as he sees fit; and the great physical beauty of the protagonists is the sole, entire basis for any romantic relationship.

As the poster-child for this genre, we will pick the series where a delusional and possibly even mentally-ill heroine is stalked by a moody control-freak who climbs in through her window every night to count her eyelashes while she sleeps. Furthermore, we won’t even pick the good one of the series, where there is at least some narrative drive and a semblance of romantic entanglement. Instead, we’ll pick the one where the heroine gets married at eighteen instead of going to college, the hero gives the heroine a C-section with his teeth and the second male lead falls in love with a pre-verbal toddler.

Definitely the best reading for teens. Yeah.”

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All Christmas Gift Dilemmas Are Now Solved.

THIS is what I want for Christmas. Nothing else. Just this.

This, and possibly the materials needed to make a start on the first of 55 marvellous, magical…Christmas Balls.

Christmas Balls. When I have fifty-five of them, my life will be as perfect as Arne and Carlos’s life is already. That’s definitely worth a little hard work and knitting yarn.

The more I look at this book, the more I love absolutely everything about it. I like its hardback, durable nature (this, like the 55 Knitted Balls, will clearly become an important heirloom). I like the high-quality paper the publishers have clearly insisted on. I like how big it is. And I especially like how much the cover photo says about Arne and Carlos’s relationship;

Carlos looks shyly pleased with their accomplishment, as if, with the publication of “55 Christmas Balls To Knit”, everything he had ever hoped for has now come to pass. Arne, on the other hand, has the wild-eyed sadness of a man who is trapped and drowning in loneliness. On the surface, he and Carlos seem like any other Christmas-ball-knitting couple; content, happy, well-matched. But inside his head, Arne screams silently for someone – anyone – to ride over the horizon and rescue him.

But nobody ever comes.

I found this in Hobbycraft, and spent a good ten minutes pointing and laughing before finally putting it on the floor so I could take a photo. Meanwhile, my mother-in-law (who is lovely. Have I mentioned before that she is lovely? I’m sure I must have done somewhere. Ah, yes, here we are) waited patiently for me to stop making a show of myself so we could go back to obsessing about felt and sewing boxes. However, if you don’t have a Hobbycraft nearby, you can also get it on Amazon, where it will cost you £9.09, plus a large portion of your street-cred if anyone ever finds out that you own it. Fortunately I think we can all agree that it’s worth it.

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So as it turns out, I have a short story accepted for this month’s issue of Beat Magazine. I didn’t even know in advance that this one was coming*, so it was a lovely surprise when it flashed up on my husband’s Google alerts**.

A lot of you will already know that November is National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. NaNoWriMo. The idea is to write 50,000 words in a month, which in theory will then give you the germ of the Next Big Thing in novels. (In theory. I have also seen December referred to as “NaNoReMo”, or “National Novel Rejection Month”, in which agents and publishers have to clear their slush-piles of all the badly-written first drafts sent in at the end of November.)

I’ll admit that when it comes to NaNo, I have yet to come to terms with my fear and desire. Part of me wants to do it, because I hate turning down writing challenges. Even the gorgeous little writing seeds that appear like small, magical presents on the #amwriting hashtag make me feel guilty when I don’t act on them. The guilt of not taking up the challenge of producing fifty thousand words in a month and validating them on the NaNo website can make me break out in a cold sweat.

I actually did NaNo once, and I even hit the 50k target. Unfortunately, the words I wrote were so utterly horrible that I managed to almost destroy an idea I’d been gently nurturing into existence for about two years. So great was the train-wreck that was my NaNo project, it’s taken me another two years to go back to it and start work again. This involves binning off every single word of the original manuscript, and re-writing the entire thing from scratch at a more sensible speed. From this, I have taken the painful lesson that, as a writing tool, NaNo does not work for me.

But then you get to November and it feels like the whole world’s doing it, and they’re all working insanely hard, hitting their daily targets, while you plod slowly through the editing of one novel and rack up another few thousand words on another, and feel a vague sense of non-achievement and failure to participate in the prevailing zeitgeist, and…you know?

This year, I managed to find a compromise. I didn’t do NaNo. But I did find a writing buddy on Twitter (his name is Ed Fraser and his pleasingly eclectic blog is here). We decided that instead of one novel, we’d go for a target of six short stories.

Sometimes, every word of a story is about as hard to get out of your brain as your teeth are to get out of your jaw. Your characters won’t talk to you and your setting doesn’t look right and nothing about it turns out the way you want it to. Sometimes it actually feels as though you are physically wrestling with the text, rather than just attempting to get it down on paper.

Sometimes, you conceive the belief that your words are actually fighting with you. They are not your friend; they do not want to play nicely. Instead, they would much prefer you to go away and leave them alone and get on with something dull but useful, like folding washing or something, while they lie on the sofa and watch cartoons with their mouths open. (I think I’m still talking about words here. It’s possible I’m now getting them confused with “my children”.)

Sometimes it’s like that. And sometimes, it just…happens. The only limit on how fast you can turn your story into reality is how fast your fingers can move. Stephen King has found the perfect image for this in the title story of his brilliant collection, “Everything’s Eventual“; he calls it the “river of fire in your head”. That’s exactly how it feels. The river of fire is rare. Most of the time, you’re writing without the help of the river of fire; most of the time, you have to make do with hard graft and bloody-minded stubbornness instead. But when you get one of those days, nothing beats it. The river of fire is what writers pray for.

“Shaggy Bear Story” was the first of my collection of six. One more is finished, one more is in the works, and three more are little more than vague floaty ideas that I am attempting to pin down, so I think it’s fair to say I am going to crash and burn in a fairly drastic fashion on my six-in-a-month target.

But on the other hand, NaNo finished on 30th November. The new issue of Beat Magazine, complete with “Shaggy Dog Story”, hit the virtual stands on 1st December. So maybe just for once, I am being a little bit efficient after all?

* Of course I was aware of having submitted to Beat, and was very very keen to be accepted – I just didn’t know in advance that they’d decided to go with my submission. Definitely the very best sort of surprise.
** This is the traditional way for me to find out anything. All marriages have their own unique dynamics and traditions: in our house, the rule is, I always know stuff second. Also, he is in charge of putting the bins out.

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War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. This Customer Service Centre Is Terrifying.

Thing is, the East Riding is a pretty rural county. Unlike Londoners – who live in densely-packed proximity to each other and are perfectly happy to spend an hour each morning with their heads wedged in each others’ armpits – we Yorkshire folk like to spread out a little, and give ourselves room to breathe.

I can understand that this gives our local council some headaches to deal with. Since we’re inconsiderately scattered all over the place, providing public transport usable by more than three people at a time is a nightmare. Our bin lorries have to travel many, many miles further than the bin lorries of other, more compact, administrative areas. We complain when our small local hospital doesn’t have all the latest equipment and services, and then we complain when you consolidate all our hospital services into one big regional centre.

When buses go past our house, I get the kids to stand outside and point in open-mouthed wonder

I can even believe (damn, I’m good) that some of us living in the East Riding have no phone, no internet access, and no friends with phones or internet access. I don’t know how many of us there might be in this position. But I’m willing to believe that there are at least some. And clearly, the numbers are sufficiently big to merit a whole new access-your-Council-services solution. This must be the case, or they wouldn’t have gone and built it. (Would they?)

I’m just not quite convinced they’ve got it 100% right this time. I feel that using it would be a disturbing experience, not conducive to a sense of well-being. There are one or two things about this proposition that I would tweak. Just saying.

In case it’s not clear from the photograph, this is a small, locked hut which sits by the side of the main street of Holme-On-Spalding-Moor, which is one of the many small rural villages in the East Riding. As it happens, Holme-On-Spalding-Moor is a very nice example of the genre, and is well worth a visit if you happen to be passing. Sadly, my mental picture of it will from now on consist entirely of the building pictured above.

No-one is inside this locked hut. But outside it there is a sign:

It was the word “CitizenLink” that really caught my attention when I first drove past. The word “citizen” worries me far more than it should. It makes me think of “1984” and “V for Vendetta” – something I’ll happily admit is my own personal problem, rather than the world’s.

My cultural reference point for the word "citizen". I know, I know.

I’m aware that most people are unlikely to be all that freaked out by the simple inclusion of the word “citizen” in the context of a piece of Council signage. I get this; I really do.

However, I really don’t feel I’m going out on too much of a limb by taking a dislike to the notion of a “member of staff on screen”.

“Member of staff on screen.”

Let’s just all take a moment to contemplate that thought, shall we?

Okay, you’re right. I’m over-reacting here. (I’m blaming the word “citizen”. You know how some people run out of the room with their coat over their head if they hear the word “gusset”? Yeah? Yeah.) Our council are nothing like a Nineteen-Eighty -Four oligarchy. However cross it might make us when the bins aren’t collected on time, that’s really nothing like living under the ruthless pressure of a monolithic and oppressive regime. “1984” – while remaining a brilliant, powerful piece of writing – tells us more about the long shadow of Totalitarianism in the nineteen-forties than it does about the way we live now.

There’s nothing to be afraid of here.

Nothing at all. It’s all absolutely – holy shit, what’s that I can see through the doorway?

Is that – could that be – is it possible we’re looking at a telescreen?

In the interests of journalistic enquiry (and also because I had been hanging around and taking pictures for a good ten minutes, and the locals were starting to look at me funny) I thought this would be a good moment to conquer my fears, and try and access some council services via the CitizenLink.

This is how you get in:

Totally the access button for a Bond Villain's lair.

At this point, I evolved an alternative explanation for the locked CitizenLink Hut. I admit Holme-On-Spalding-Moor is an unlikely choice for a Supervillain to base his lair in, but, you know, there are only so many inhabitable semi-dormant volcanoes to go around, right?

Reader, I pressed that button. I was fully prepared to go inside that Customer Service Centre. But instead of the door opening, all that happened was that an alarm went off. It was quite loud and frightening and it was coming from the intercom beneath the button. And by now, a couple of Holme-On-Spalding-Moor citizens (that word!) were quite openly watching me over their garden fence, in a way that was starting to make me think of the word “henchmen”. And I just couldn’t shake the conviction that if I stuck with the programme and went into the Customer Service Centre, I might get sucked down into a nightmarish underground complex of tunnels and shark-pools and bald men with grey suits and British accents, and I would never be seen ever, ever again.

So, yeah; I ran away. I’m not proud of this. But at least I’m still alive to tell the tale.

I think he's more disappointed than angry.

Independent of my frivolous fantasies, I have so many, many questions about this Customer Service Centre. Is this the only one of it, or are there more of them? Have any of them ever been used? Is there a special member of staff whose entire function is to sit in a locked room somewhere, waiting for The Call That Never Comes, or are East Riding staff members expected to fit in their remote-control-supervillain duties into their normal working day? And why is this one on the main street of Holme-On-Spalding-Moor?

Maybe there are some questions we’re just not meant to know the answers to.

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The Crew

Mary Ratliff Writer/Director

Mary is a third year MFA student at American University in Washington D.C. and is expecting to graduate in 2011.  She earned her bachelor’s degree in Film from Hollins University in 2002.   She was part of the team that created Cookies, winner of the 2009 TIVA-DC Peer Gold Award for Student Narrative Short.

Mary has also worked on two feature films, serving as set costumer on Below the Beltway and assistant script supervisor on The Dead Ones, both in 2009.  She wore many hats during the production of the web series Stage Fright, serving as a writer, editor, production designer, and script supervisor.    Most recently, she directed Extraction, a short film starring Katie Foster and Maya Jackson.

John Malis Cinematographer

From his former life as a newspaper photojournalist to his work on feature films, cinematographer Jon Malis has accumulated over 10 years of combined experience in photography, lighting, cinematography and color grading.

Based in Washington, DC, he has served as Director of Photography on projects ranging from local/indie narrative shorts to international documentary features, with recent projects ranging from mental healthcare in America to a multinational Brazilian drum band and a narrative homage to the mechanical Bolex 16mm movie camera.

When not capturing the world at 24 fps, Malis is also known as an artist, concentrating in the abstract representation of memory through photography and everyday imagery.

His cinematographic work can be viewed at, and his personal work at

Other crew members include:

Jason Fraley First Assistant Director

Cody Gallo Second Assistant Director

Jan Sanders Script Supervisor

Autumn Moran First Assistant Camera, Car Unit Camera Operator

Katie Neff Second Assistant Camera

Vanessa Bradchulis Casting Director

Anne Coburn Production Manager

Drew Louis Gaffer

Silvio Carillo Best Boy

Colin Foster Best Boy

Jeremiah Horan Grip

Matthew Pickett G&E Production Assistant

Daniel Lerch Sound Mixer/Boom Operator

Kelley W. Coleman Makeup and Hair

Jason Wicksell Art Director and Production Designer

James Dunson Production Assistant/Smoke Effects

Cindi Weatherington Craft Services/Production Assistant

John Goad Driver

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Thursday – May 2, 2013

7th grade

HW & Announcements:
  1. HW1: MV #11-15 pics due tomorrow
  2. HW2: MV Video Project due Monday
  3. HW3: MV Test #1 (on location of verse and what each verse says) on Tuesday
  4. HW4: MV Test #2 (on class notes and what we covered in class) on Thursday
In Class:
  1. Showing and explaining MV Video Project HW
  2. Finishing Memory Verses #14 and #15 notes and discussion

8th grade

HW & Announcements:
  1. No HW
In Class:
  1. Reviewing CST notes and discussion from Tuesday
  2. Finishing rest of CST notes as a class

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Solar Eclipse – Will You Watch it?

Yes, I knew it was coming; they’ve been talking about it for months. That once in a lifetime event on Monday August 21, 2017, a solar eclipse coming to a neighborhood near you!  Once in a lifetime, counting from when the last total solar eclipse crossed the contiguous USA in 1918.  But those from the Northwest may recall the eclipse in 1979, something of a non-event in the Seattle area because of cloudy skies. Clear skies are in the forecast for Monday, so this will be something to see.  Or not, read on.

No, Seattle is not in the path of totality;  for that we’d have to travel to Oregon, along with the other billions so headed, resulting in unprecedented traffic, which for this area is saying a lot. Honestly, I’m not that desperate.

Still, according to those in the know, we will experience 93% totality here, that time when the moon will almost completely block out the sun, starting at 9:08 am and bringing darkness at 10:20 a.m.  Silly girl, don’t you want to see that??  Of course I do!  Oh why then did I wait so long to get those eclipse glasses?  The event of a lifetime overhead but I can’t look up!

There are still a few places this weekend where they will be handing out the coveted glasses until supplies run out. I will head to one of them and hope for the best.  We shall see (no pun intended.)  If I’m not one of the lucky ones, I guess I could build my own viewing device no matter how hokey it may appear; instructions abound on the internet. But is watching a shadow on a piece of cardboard really the same? I think not.

For a planner like me, I sure blew this one.  How about the rest of you?  Do you have plans to watch the solar eclipse?

~ Susanne

21 Comments on “Solar Eclipse – Will You Watch it?

  1. Not in my neck of the woods, unfortunately. I agree though, the reflection idea is just not the same.
    Best wishes, Pete.

  2. I will be at home and think I will watch the eclipse on TV or social media? I don’t think it will be so much in Seattle although it might get a little bit dark, like a cloudy day. Although I am a Seattle native I was not here for the eclipse in 1979, I was busy getting married in another state of the USA…… I am expecting a new grandchild any minute now, it would be fun to have an eclipse baby!

    • If I don’t get the glasses I will at least go out to see whatever level of darkness occurs (without looking up.) Otherwise I will probably watch on social media too. ☺ And congratulations on your new grandbaby!

  3. We drove down to Goldendale for the 1979 one. I think it was kind of a non-event as seeing it with the box thing is just not the same. I don’t remember there being any glasses back then?

    • I think I was in Bellingham during that time and it was cloudy and uneventful. I don’t remember glasses either and certainly none of the hype we have today. Will you watch this one?

  4. Being in Florida, we don’t get full percent like you guys. We were thinking of going up-state to get a little more percentage, but every single hotel north of us is booked full on the 21st. 😦
    We don’t have the glasses either, and we plan to get some over the weekend (hopefully). The best part of this eclipse will be the sun will go away for three seconds and cool down everything. (Right now it’s probably 900,000,000,000,000,000,000 degrees outside right now. Okay, maybe not that much. Maybe 95 Degrees F. With the sun it feels like much more.)
    What I’m wondering is, will everyone’s’ pets freak out as the sun suddenly goes away? We’ll have to see…

    • Hi Grace! thanks for your comment. It will be interesting to see how dark it gets Monday. I also wonder how the kitties will do and the birds and other wildlife. I hope we both get the glasses! 😎

  5. I don’t know how much we will see here in Fresno, but I did hear on the radio that there was a scam where people were selling fake glasses that don’t really protect your eyes so make sure you get the real ones! (#RaisedBySwedes)

    • I also have heard about the fake glasses so will be careful about where I get them (If I do.) One of my local libraries has a session today about the eclipse and will have some glasses to give away. I plan to attend. If they are already out at least I will learn something. I also learned of another option at the Boeing Museum of Flight during the event on Monday which sounds exciting. 1000 pairs of glasses as well as live streaming and the presence of NASA scientists!

  6. I saw the 1999 eclipse in Somerset UK. No glasses, though they would have helped. Tried the camera thing because we wanted to show our girls (aged 8, 7 and 5). Sort of worked. Also had the odd ‘peek’ with the naked eye at maximum coverage because the sun was lightly veiled in cloud. It was 98% coverage where we were, with 100% further south in Cornwall. However, we got a better view than some folks who travelled miles to see it, because the sun was completely obscured by cloud where they were.
    To be honest, I found it all a bit underwhelming. I was expecting it to be darker than it was. However, the birds did go quiet. And there was this eerie kind of light that felt like neither cloud nor dusk. Just odd. And it’s that memory that sticks with me. So, yes, glad to have experienced it, but not quite what I expected.

    • Interesting. I may be underwhelmed too watching alone. My best bet would probably be to attend the viewing at Boeing’s Museum of Flight where they will have free glasses for viewing outside and live streaming of the event from the path of totality as well. It’s about 30 minutes from where I live. Not sure about facing the traffic and crowds. We’ll see. 😊 Thanks for your comment.

      • Yes, I can understand your dilemma. We chose somewhere where there would be some people, but not a huge crowd. As for the total eclipse, it was all over the TV for the rest of the day – and is still on YouTube! So you get to see what you missed, anyway.

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A Nation Smothered by God: Paranoid Musings and Late Night Fears.

As I sit here enjoying the benefits bequeathed unto me from a first world birth I cannot help but feel something is wrong. Something big is moving in the shadows, just beyond the yellow haze of the back yard spotlights, a pair of eyes glow, no pupils, and teeth, teeth climbing the jagged upward curl of what could only be called an overconfident snarl… I can feel it, just outside the blue-green glow of the LCD universe here in middle America, just pulling at the cords, the sound of its fingers sliding and creaking as they close; somewhere I hear dripping sounds. It wants so dearly to pull those thin ethernet cables, to bend them over like a garden hose and stop the cascading ones and zeros; if it could only control the flow it could stop the little thing in my mind from feeding, the little thing that knows its there, it could finally kill it.

Something is there, I know you feel it too, everyone does. You feel it when the perfectly manicured face on the screen tells you everything is OK, you feel it when you read about massive censorship bills passing through the government, slaughters abroad, and massive tax exemptions for mega corporations too big to fail. Yet on the nightly news, nothing, nothing but the glassy eyed stares with too few blinks as the teleprompters are read, scripted and spun they are sending but no one is receiving…

I feel it every time I see two men kiss, I feel it when I see the reflection of the camera in their eyes as they turn and smile, the shadow growing over their happiness, fears baked in an air of those who would destroy everything that makes their life worth living. I feel it every time I pull open a drawer in a hotel, the burnt offerings, blood sacrifices, and infinite jealousy bleeding from the Gideons film thin pages onto the spotted carpet, stained from years of sin, sins of the believers when they couldn’t push the smile in the darkness away for one more night.

I feel it every time I think “who is speaking for me” who represents me and those like me, basking in our tiny vote, at once a significant tally yet at the same time all but ignored. The mark that makes us an unbelieving part of a system increasingly blurry in the distance as it grows taller and taller, further and further from the people who check that box… The inescapable choice between my jailer and my executioner for a choice of two evils reeks of its perfume…

“A chrissstian nation” the teeth hiss,

“Run by a nation of chrissstian people”

“yourrr equality isss limited, limited by the limitlesss majority for they sssay what I tell them” the cheeks crinkle as the grin grows impossibly further

“They think I left them in the garden but I’ve alwaysss been with them, from humble beginningsss”

The sounds of something receding direct my attention to a small fire, a single page brown with age, curled at the edges with fire, ashes float upwards towards the blackened sky, my eyes follow the smoke downward, stopping at the top of the page… slowly reading the burning paper left behind, I mouth the words slowly, silently. “We The People…”

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Book your group trip

Welcome to our new website -a must visit for all student groups travelling to Ireland

Welcome to our new website -a must visit for all student groups travelling to Ireland

We’ve upped our game here at Celtic Group Hostels. In case you haven’t noticed (shame on you!), we have a brand, spanking new website to show off our wares. As Ireland’s largest group hostel specialists, we were running out of room in the old place and it was time to pack up and move on to our new digital home. Visit our new site here

Moving house on the Internet is a bit like moving home normally. Add in the regular stress, the constant feeling you’ve forgotten something and the nagging worry that the new house will not be as great as you think it will. And then you get there, and you wonder what all the fuss was about. Our new home is fantastic and it gives us the ideal platform to tell you everything you need to know.

With our personalised group booking system, you need never be in doubt whether or not we can fit you in. Our Activities & Tours guide and blogs give you the full picture of what’s going on – wherever you are. And now with a growing family of ten hostels country-wide, we have to be on our toes and keep you informed about what’s happening all over the country. You can even sign up for our newsletter online and if you have a soft spot for social media, our tweets are there for all to see. In fact, why not follow us on twitter and complete your Celtic Group Hostels online experience.

With tips on planning your trip and ideas for things to do and see, our new website is really a one stop shop for groups coming to or travelling within Ireland. And our new site coincides with the arrival of three new hostels in to our clan. You can now book your group hostel with us whether you want to stay in Dublin, Cork, Galway City, The Cliffs of Moher and Connemara. Our range of locations means you can now book different parts of the country as part of a multi stop tour.

And if you’re the type that prefers to pick up the phone, instead of going through our website please do so. With us, you get local knowledge, attention to detail and most importantly, a commitment to make your stay with us as enjoyable, informative and hassle-free as possible.

I mentioned Facebook right ? No? Sorry Facebook addicts, you can of course join us there too …..in fact wherever you turn in the digital world, you’ll find us there too !

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Chemistry matters. Join us to get the news you need.

If you have an ACS member number, please enter it here so we can link this account to your membership. (optional)

ACS values your privacy. By submitting your information, you are gaining access to C&EN and subscribing to our weekly newsletter. We use the information you provide to make your reading experience better, and we will never sell your data to third party members.

To find hacks for greening your lab, start with the freezer

Temperature adjustments are only one way to reduce a lab’s environmental footprint, but change takes a little outside-the-box thinking

by Carmen Drahl
September 1, 2018 | APPEARED IN VOLUME 96, ISSUE 35

Credit: BlurryMe/Shutterstock
Researchers might name freezers according to their temperature set point, but their temperatures can be changed.

Not many nightmare scenarios grip Kristala Jones Prather’s imagination. But one that haunted her for a long time involved the –80 °C freezer in her Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab. Freezer temperatures can vary by a degree or two, especially when researchers constantly open and close doors to pull out or store precious samples. But what if the freezer warmed up over a long weekend because of a mechanical failure or power outage?

Prather and her team need ultralow temperatures to stash microbes they have engineered to make biofuels and other valuable chemicals. A warmed, suboptimal freezer might ruin work, thwart grant proposals, and delay thesis defenses. Little wonder that the idea of the Prather lab’s freezer temperature hitting –70 °C felt, she says, “like the end of times was coming.”

Until Prather had what she calls her revelation. Her lab became a pilot case for MIT’s Green Labs Program in April 2016. During the certification process, she learned that setting the freezer to –80 °C was overkill for her lab’s cultures and a waste of energy besides. “We call them minus-80 freezers, but you can set them to whatever you want,” she says. She chuckles at the thought that since summer 2016, her freezer has been set to –70 °C, the very temperature that used to trigger panic.

Greening a laboratory—applying sustainable strategies to reduce a lab’s impact on the environment—isn’t a new concept. But the tale of the low-temperature freezer illustrates a challenge in this field. Some not-so-sustainable practices are culturally driven rather than based on necessity. And the activation barrier to behavior change can be intimidating, even for an intervention as straightforward as adjusting a touch pad or dial.

The go-to ultralow-temperature freezer setting was not always –80 °C, says Allen Doyle, an independent consultant and longtime sustainability manager who’s worked at the University of California’s Santa Barbara and Davis campuses. He’s encountered more senior scientists who call ultralow-temperature freezers “the minus 70” instead of “the minus 80.” Doyle and other sustainability managers who spoke with C&EN suspect marketing campaigns got the concept of –80 °C stuck in researchers’ heads. As freezer technology improved, companies offered ever-colder operating temperatures. Scientists simply came to believe that colder was better for every sample, whether or not that was the ads’ intent. “I call the trend ‘cold creep,’ or ‘freezer wars,’ ” Doyle says. It would take scientific curiosity to reverse it.

Kathryn Ramirez-Aguilar hadn’t been this excited about a phone call in some time. It was early 2010, and a researcher had phoned her to relate how she was squeezing more life from a struggling –80 °C freezer. Ramirez-Aguilar, an analytical chemist by training, was relatively new to her job as Green Labs Program manager for the University of Colorado, Boulder. As Ramirez-Aguilar recalls, the lab had called a freezer technician, who, after some tinkering, suggested going easy on the machine by adjusting the temperature to –70 °C. That sounded risky to the researcher. Uncertain, she contacted the lab’s principal investigator to ask permission for the change. To everyone’s surprise, the group leader had no problem with increasing the temperature and even mused, like Doyle’s senior scientists, that he wasn’t sure why folks ever changed to –80 °C in the first place.

The phone call inspired Ramirez-Aguilar to act. She started asking around the Colorado campus and found a handful of labs that had never gotten caught in the cold-creep trend. These teams had stored sensitive samples at –70 °C successfully, sometimes for many years. Ramirez-Aguilar built a spreadsheet to track the anecdotal information.

When Ramirez-Aguilar got that game-changing phone call, Doyle was at least two years into searching the peer-reviewed literature for any publications demonstrating a difference in sample preservation at –70 versus –80 °C. To this day, he’s found scant evidence for a difference. Most studies show excellent storage at both temperatures and indicate that the freezing process itself—which in aqueous samples can lead to harmful ice crystals and dramatic pH changes because of buffer precipitation—is where damage can occur. At about the same time, other researchers began reporting case studies at bioscience conferences demonstrating that –70 °C is enough to keep samples such as antibodies and antioxidant assays stable, with even –20 °C being sufficient for certain applications, such as storing extracted RNA for one month.

Doyle and Ramirez-Aguilar joined forces in spring 2010. She contacted him to discuss his comprehensive green labs website, and they soon realized they were working on complementary freezer projects. “Allen and I worked together and shared information between us, and we also shared it with colleagues,” Ramirez-Aguilar says.

Credit: Yang H. Ku/C&EN/Shutterstock
Kathryn Ramirez-Aguilar created motivational posters to encourage researchers to adjust freezers to –70 °C. To create this poster, C&EN took inspiration from her and from the World War II era.

Those colleagues started looking to the duo for help with their own efforts. For instance, in summer 2015, Quentin Gilly, senior coordinator at Harvard University’s Green Labs Program, found himself in Colorado, where he made a point to reach out to Ramirez-Aguilar. She helped him set up meetings with lab managers who’d made the switch to –70 °C so he could learn about their implementation experiences. He started encouraging the practice at Harvard in the second half of 2016.

Today, the case for setting ultra-low-temperature freezers to –70 °C is stronger than ever. The daily energy consumption for just one standard-efficiency freezer at –80 °C can equal the daily average electricity consumption for one U.S. single-family home, according to a 2016 report from lead author My Green Lab, a California-based nonprofit that has certified over 200 green labs. Tests by Doyle, My Green Lab, and others suggest that freezers use up to 40% less energy when they’re set to –70 rather than –80 °C.

At the University of Colorado, Boulder, roughly 50% of the approximately 160 ultra-low-temperature freezers operate at –70 °C today, compared with 3% in 2010. Ramirez-Aguilar’s Google spreadsheet of sample storage experiences gets new entries multiple times each year. The University of Edinburgh is conducting a five-to-10-year study to examine the impact of different storage temperatures (–80, –70, and –60 °C) on sample durability.

My Green Lab consults for a number of pharmaceutical and biotech companies, where the situation differs somewhat from academic institutions. Executive director Allison Paradise explains that cold storage of drug products and precursors is subject to standard operating procedures and guidelines, some set by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, which still require a –80 °C set point. For R&D labs, however, a company may decide to switch all its freezers to –70 °C at once, subject to researcher approval.

And freezer vendors are very aware of the new data. Thermo Fisher Scientific, for instance, offers brochures and product notes about the option to run freezers at –70 °C. “I don’t know if in the not-too-distant past we would’ve had a technical note that says ‘Consider minus 70,’ but today we do,” says Alex Esmon, senior product manager for cold-storage laboratory equipment at Thermo Fisher. Esmon says that for some years he and his colleagues have collaborated with Ramirez-Aguilar, Doyle, My Green Lab, and others. “We have tried to do things that have less of a footprint,” including developing products that consume less energy and implementing environmentally friendly refrigerants, he explains, “while empowering customers to do what they need to be successful, at whatever temperature necessary.”

We call them minus-80 freezers, but you can set them to whatever you want.
Kristala Jones Prather, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Researchers naturally want to ensure that a temperature change won’t harm their samples—frequently their life’s work. Sometimes friendly competition is a way to encourage them to do some freezer research. My Green Lab cohosts an annual Laboratory Freezer Challenge with the International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing green laboratory design. Over five months, individual labs and institutions earn points for implementing best practices for cold storage, with winners receiving awards and a mention in the journal Nature.

Doyle finds that changes in phrasing can also alter researchers’ perceptions. “I say ‘Chill up.’ It sounds less threatening than saying ‘Warm up your freezer,’ ” he explains. He designed a campaign called “Just Call Me Ultra-Low” to discourage scientists from associating a specific temperature with a freezer.

Green lab specialist Christine Alencar started her work at the University of Virginia in 2016, and she’s made strides with freezers by figuring out what drives individual researchers and delivering her message in different ways. For example, a lab might not pay for its own electricity, so the incentive to save electricity might not resonate right away.

Alencar reminds those researchers that the 10-degree difference puts less stress on a freezer’s compressor. When every dollar of funding counts, extending the lifetime of a piece of equipment for which an investigator is financially responsible starts to sound appealing.

Sometimes a lab has two freezers, and in these cases she suggests raising the temperature on only one freezer and reorganizing samples so that the most important ones are still at –80 °C. That way, labs can test their samples for degradation and determine for themselves whether moving that one freezer to –70 °C permanently is a good option. She also encourages teams to share ultra-low-temperature freezer storage if possible, to organize samples so that researchers can find them without keeping the freezer door open, and to replace old, energy-inefficient freezer models.

“I never take a ‘you must do this’ tone. I provide information and try to be a facilitator,” Alencar says. Some labs decide that –80 °C is best for them. Others, however, may come around in a year or two after conducting small tests or discussing the idea with peers who have made the switch. “With sustainability, it’s kind of a long game,” Alencar says.

“People establish certain practices, and everybody forgets why,” MIT’s Prather says. She hasn’t had any problems since changing her freezer’s temperature. The only time her lab sets the freezer temperature to –80 °C or below is during deicing, which requires leaving doors open for longer than normal. “The biggest thing we’re afraid of is changing and having things not work anymore,” she says, “and that’s not really the scientific method.”.

Green case studies

Increasing your freezer’s temperature isn’t the only way to green your lab. Here are some other methods scientists have adopted.

To rising-fourth-year graduate students Jacob Burman and Caitlin Farr, it seemed inefficient to use aspirators hooked up to the water faucets to pull vacuum for filtrations. The vacuum arises from the aspirator’s narrow tube as water gushes into the drain. Water—lots of it—gets wasted.

So when their adviser, Simon Blakey, asked his group to think of green lab ideas, the duo obtained funding for a vacuum pump from Emory University’s sustainability office. The shared pump travels the lab by cart and features a solvent trap for harmful chemicals so they can be disposed of in the proper waste streams. Although vacuum pumps use electricity, Burman suggests that the benefit of saved water outweighs the cost. A challenging filtration can take up to 20 minutes of flushing water or under a minute with the vacuum pump.

At Emory, Burman and Farr replaced mineral oil and silicone oil baths, commonly used to heat chemical reactions to temperatures over 100 °C, with metal heating blocks. Oil baths brown with time and accumulate contaminants, and the oils must be disposed of and replaced every two to three months. “Developing new reactions is my passion, but I don’t want my passion to affect the environment I live in,” Farr says.

At pharmaceutical company Amgen, a chemical inventory system tracks every reagent from the day it’s ordered to the day it runs out. In a 12-month period across four research sites, the system flagged nearly 700 requests for chemicals already in stock. Reducing duplicate orders reduced waste and saved over $124,000.

Fume hoods

Fume hoods can be among the worst offenders in terms of energy consumption because they constantly remove cooled or heated air. This wastes energy. Some advanced hood designs can both keep volatile compounds contained and slow airflow down considerably with the sash partially raised, but every chemist can benefit by closing the hood sash when the hood is not in use. This action shields lab occupants from ongoing or unexpected reactions and in many cases can conserve airflow.

When he was working at the University of California, Davis, sustainability manager Allen Doyle codesigned stickers that can be affixed to hood sash frames to promote proper placement. “It’s a 50-cent solution to a thousand-dollar problem,” he says.

At Cornell University, design and environmental analysis graduate student Kristin Aldred Cheek, laboratory ventilation specialist Ellen Sweet, and their colleagues are experimenting with a smiley-face emoji sticker that is cut in half and lines up when researchers properly close a fume hood sash.

The National Institutes of Health offers in-house distillation to purify and recover ethanol; acetone; formalin, commonly used in specimen preservation; and xylene, commonly used in microscopy studies of biological tissues, says Bani Bhattacharya, who leads NIH’s sustainable labs working groups. This service reduces not only costs but also waste.

Electronic equipment

At the University of Edinburgh, lab sustainability coordinator Andrew Arnott purchased inexpensive plugs that put laboratory equipment such as ice makers, drying ovens, and water baths on timers. The equipment saves energy by shutting off at night; it turns back on early enough to be ready when the first scientists arrive in the morning.

When Daniel Nocera’s lab moved from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Harvard University, Nocera lab staff scientist Dilek Dogutan saw an opportunity. “We were buying solvent in 4-L bottles” in the MIT lab, she recalls. That generates a pile of packaging waste and carries a risk of spills with every solvent transfer. So she helped design a solvent-dispensing system with refillable 20-L containers. “They look like beer kegs,” Dogutan explains. When a solvent runs dry, the lab ships the bar-coded stainless-steel container to Sigma-Aldrich for a refill, no packing material required.

Amgen’s research facility in Massachusetts processes laboratory plastics such as pipette tips and gloves that waste management companies don’t typically recycle. The technology converts the plastic waste into recycled plastic lumber that can become construction material for buildings or speed bumps for roadways.

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Tom C. (Sun Sep 02 19:10:37 EDT 2018)
Great article Carmen!
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sweeping change

Anti-voucher slate in Douglas County cruises to victory

The nation's second largest teachers union is spending $300,000 to support a slate of candidates running for the Douglas County school board. Those candidates posed for pictures at their campaign kick-off event are from left, Krista Holtzmann, Anthony Graziano, Chris Schor, and Kevin Leung. (Photo by Nic Garcia/Chalkbeat)

An aligned group of Douglas County school board candidates seeking to reverse many of the district’s most controversial policies — including a private-school voucher program — cruised to victory early Wednesday.

As of 12:30 a.m., with all ballots counted, members of the “CommUnity Matters” slate were ahead of their opponents by about 16 percentage points in unofficial results.

“We’re feeling really thankful,” said Krista Holtzmann, one of the members of the slate. “We heard our community speak loud and clear tonight that they believe in and support our public schools.”

The victory by members of the CommUnity slate comes eight years after a group of candidates backed by the local Republican Party took control of the Douglas County school board. The CommUnity slate opposed many of the board’s recent initiatives — including a private-school voucher program.

Four seats on the seven-member board were up for grabs this year, putting the controversial voucher program, which has been stalled for years in the court system, and the philosophical direction of Colorado’s third largest district on the line. Members of the CommUnity slate oppose vouchers and will likely end the district’s defense of the program.

That move would be a blow for national conservative education reform advocates who wanted to see the district’s voucher program prevail in court. A court victory could have set a national precedent for private-school vouchers by eliminating so-called “Blaine Amendments,” which forbid tax dollars going to religious institutions, from dozens of state constitutions. If the district withdraws its defense, the legal fight will end without resolution — one reason why the Douglas County race drew national interest.

The CommUnity Matters slate includes Holtzmann, Chris Schor, Anthony Graziano, and Kevin Leung. Their opponents, the “Elevate Douglas County” slate, were Debora Scheffel, Randy Mills, Ryan Abresch, and Grant Nelson. As of 10 p.m., the Elevate slate had not conceded the race.

“There’s nothing to do but keep fighting for educational opportunity,” Ross Izard, policy director for ACE Scholarships and a voucher proponent who supported the Elevate slate, said in a statement Tuesday evening. “There are still thousands of kids whose needs are not being met by the current system. I don’t think parental choice advocates have any plans to stop pushing for policies that would expand options for those students.”

The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union, poured $300,000 into the race to help the CommUnity slate, the most recent records show. The union is one of the loudest national critics of charter schools, which receive public tax dollars but are run independently of school districts, and of private school vouchers. The union lost its collective bargaining agreement with the district in 2011 after the conservative board decided to stop negotiations.

“Douglas County voters have chosen a school board that places students at the center of every decision and believes in the value of an accountable, transparent public education system, not an ideology that fails our students and educators,” said Kallie Leyba, president of the Douglas County Federation of Teachers, the local AFT affiliate. “We are eager for teachers to have the opportunity to work with the board on issues that will restore and propel our public schools forward in preparing our students for school, college and career.”

Kerrie Dallman, president of the Colorado Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, also celebrated the slate’s win in Douglas County.

“Voters spoke out against misguided and ineffective reforms that aren’t helping our children, and have rejected attempts to divert public dollars to private schools,” Dallman said in a statement. “This is a great election result for all students in Colorado, preventing the spread of harmful voucher schemes.”

The differences between the two groups of candidates were stark.

The CommUnity slate promised to end the district’s defense of the 2011 voucher program. The slate, which was backed by the Douglas County Parents political committee and the teachers union, also pledged to seek more local tax dollars to repair school buildings and pay educators more.

The Elevate slate candidates wanted to continue to defend the voucher program, but stopped short of saying they’d restart the program if given the OK by the courts. The slate, which was endorsed by the Douglas County Republican Party and received hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial support from deep-pocketed school choice advocates, said it wanted to rebuild trust in the district before asking voters for more money.

However, there was some agreement among all candidates. Both slates promised to revisit the district’s unique “market-based” pay structure for teachers.

After the results are certified, the CommUnity slate will join three board members who also had the backing of the Douglas County Parents group. Some worry they could create a 7-0 board where dissenting views do not get heard.

Leung said late Tuesday that the premise doesn’t hold up.

“To assume we’ll have one voice is inaccurate,” he said.

Leung added that the board will work with the district’s charter school community, which was uneasy during the election.

“We have all the kids’ interests at heart,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if they go to a charter school. We will try to bring everyone together.”

Earlier on Tuesday, candidates, supporters, and observers said they hoped that regardless of the outcome they hoped the district, which has been roiled by controversy since 2009, could heal and move forward.

“Tomorrow, winners or losers, we have a really big effort to work toward asking voters for more money,” said Kerrie Riker-Keller, a Douglas County parent who sits on a number of district committees. “Everyone’s going to need to put aside their differences to work toward that.”

Schor, a member of the CommUnity slate who ran to represent Castle Rock, said she hopes everyone who has been engaged in the election continues to work to improve the district’s schools.

“I think if everyone who is involved in this election continues to use this energy to focus on children, we’ll be all right,” she said.

Randy Mills, a member of the Elevate slate who opposed Schor, said earlier in the evening that he and his teammates expected a close race.

“We feel confident that we left everything in the arena,” he said in a statement before the polls closed. “I, my slate-mates, and our volunteers have canvassed the district with our conservative vision for transparency, accountability, stability, education excellence, and broadened vocational education. We are hopeful we will be entrusted to carry out that vision.”

According to the Secretary of State’s office, 79,841 Douglas County ballots were counted by 9 p.m. More than 92,000 votes were cast in 2015, the last time seats on the school board were up for grabs.

dotting the i's

Group that supported Douglas County anti-voucher candidates fined in campaign finance case

The Douglas County school board on Monday voted to end the district's voucher program and directed the district to seek an end to the protracted legal case. (Nic Garcia/Chalkbeat)

A political committee that supported a slate of anti-voucher candidates in the Douglas County school board race has been ordered to pay a $1,900 fine related to campaign finance violations.

Back in the fall, the group Campaign Integrity Watchdog filed a complaint against Douglas Schools for Douglas Kids that alleged the group failed to properly report donations and expenditures.  Douglas Schools for Douglas Kids is an independent political committee, which can spend an unlimited amount of money to advocate for candidates.

The Douglas County race was one of the most high-profile school board races in the state, and outside money from all sides flowed into the campaigns. The union-backed CommUnity Matters candidates won all four open seats, and as promised, they promptly ended the school district’s years-long defense of a controversial voucher program.

An administrative law judge ruled that some of the allegations in the complaint were not actually violations and that others were mistakes that the independent expenditure committee quickly corrected. For the most part, there was no intent to deceive the electorate, the judge found, and interested voters had ample opportunity to learn that teachers unions had donated to Douglas Schools for Douglas Kids and that the group had spent money on campaign materials.

But in one instance, the judge found that Douglas Schools for Douglas Kids waited too long to report spending on digital communications sent in the weeks right before the election. That’s the violation for which the group must pay a $50 a day fee, adding up to the $1,900.

The complaint from the elections watchdog group, which has previously filed complaints against Democrats and Republicans, alleged that Douglas Schools for Douglas Kids:

  • Failed to report a $1 donation used to open a bank account
  • Failed to report a $300,000 donation from American Federation of Teachers Solidarity
  • Failed to disclose more than $50,000 spent on campaign mailers within the 48-hour window required when money is spent in the last 30 days before an election

The judge found that the failure to disclose the $1 donation for the bank account was not a violation at all because the amount was so small. The $300,000 donation, meanwhile, was reported as coming from American Federation of Teachers. According to the judge’s ruling, when someone on the union side tried to correct the entry, they accidentally made a new entry for American Federation of Teachers Solidarity, giving the appearance of an additional unreported donation. While the failure to report the full correct name was a technical violation, the judge wrote that little harm was done, and the mistake was quickly fixed.

The purpose of campaign finance law is transparency, the judge wrote, and that was accomplished “by disclosing the key fact that a large national union of teachers was attempting to influence the election.”

On the spending side, the independent committee erred, the judge ruled, in not reporting expenditures on mailers within 48 hours of obligating the money. However, most of the spending was reported soon after the committee received invoices and again more than a week before the election. And because the committee’s name appears on the mailers, there was little concern that voters would have been deceived, the judge wrote.

However, in one instance involving roughly $1,800 for digital communications, the group did not disclose until its final campaign finance report in December, well after the election. It was this violation that prompted the judge to impose the fine.

Follow the money

Final Denver school board campaign finance reports show who brought in the most late money

PHOTO: Denver Post file
Victoria Tisman, 8, left, works with paraprofessional Darlene Ontiveros on her Spanish at Bryant-Webster K-8 school in Denver.

Final campaign finance reports for this year’s hard-fought Denver school board elections are in, and they show a surge of late contributions to Angela Cobián, who was elected to represent southwest Denver and ended up bringing in more money than anyone else in the field.

The reports also showed the continued influence of independent groups seeking to sway the races. Groups that supported candidates who favor Denver Public Schools’ current direction raised and spent far more than groups that backed candidates looking to change things.

No independent group spent more during the election than Raising Colorado, which is affiliated with Democrats for Education Reform. In the week and a half before the Nov. 7 election, it spent $126,985. That included nearly $57,000 to help elect Rachele Espiritu, an incumbent supportive of the district’s direction who lost her seat representing northeast Denver to challenger Jennifer Bacon. Raising Colorado spent $13,765 on mail opposing Bacon in that same period.

Teachers union-funded committees also were active in the campaign.

Individually, Cobián raised more money in the days before the election than the other nine candidates combined. She pulled in $25,335 between Oct. 30 and Dec. 2.

That includes a total of $11,000 from three members of the Walton family that founded Walmart: Jim, Alice and Steuart. The Waltons have over the years invested more than $1 billion in education-related causes, including the creation of charter schools.

Total money raised, spent by candidates
  • Angela Cobián: $123,144, $105,200
    Barbara O’Brien: $117,464, $115,654
    Mike Johnson: $106,536, $103,782
    Rachele Espiritu: $94,195, $87,840
    Jennifer Bacon: $68,967, $67,943
    Carrie A. Olson: $35,470, $35,470
    Robert Speth: $30,635, $31,845
    “Sochi” Gaytan: $28,977, $28,934
    Tay Anderson: $18,766, $16,865
    Julie Bañuelos: $12,962, $16,835

Cobián was supported in her candidacy by donors and groups that favor the district’s brand of education reform, which includes collaborating with charter schools. In the end, Cobián eclipsed board vice president Barbara O’Brien, who had been leading in contributions throughout the campaign, to raise the most money overall: a total of $123,144.

The two candidates vying to represent central-east Denver raised about $5,000 each in the waning days of the campaign. Incumbent Mike Johnson pulled in $5,300, including $5,000 from Colorado billionaire Phil Anschutz. Teacher Carrie A. Olson, who won the seat, raised $4,946 from a host of donors, none of whom gave more than $500 during that time period.

The other candidates raised less than $5,000 each between Oct. 30 and Dec. 2.

O’Brien, who staved off two competitors to retain her seat representing the city at-large, spent the most in that period: $31,225. One of her competitors, Julie Bañuelos, spent the least.


text:
Free for All

on the money

research update

the portfolio push

spring breakthrough

value added?

turnover paradox

Teaching teachers

false choice

a high-stakes evaluation

evaluating evaluation

mind the gap

charters on the hill

unintended benefit

can Uteach?

unequal childhoods

testing vouchers

feeling the heat

vouching for vouchers

study says...

testing takeaways

salary slump

more school less crime

school cloning

out-of-school factors

research shows

thrown for a loop

bias in the classroom

new neighbors

intended consequences

Show me the money

research whiplash

study up

school rules

DACAmented results

good news in golden state

curriculum conundrum

hiring help

Unintended consequences

Behind the numbers

money matters

Choice and consequences

Classrooms without teachers

the merit of merit pay

2017 in review

choice challenge

teacher trap

war on teachers?

research shows


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Questions, The Fine Line

Will You?

Will you come and find me? Will you come into my room in the darkness of the night and peel away my layer of protection? Will you lay beside me?

Or will you stay away? Will you remain on the other side of the door that I closed between us? Will you refrain from taking further action?

Will You?

Creative Writing, Poetry, The Fine Line

Too Late

He held me tight, but for too long,
Held me just right, it was so wrong.
The time was way off, he was too late, or maybe he was early. He was definitely late.

He is the man I long for in this moment. He was the man of my mind, the man of my dreams, the companion of my soul, the essence of my being. Maybe I’m being a little extreme but these are the thoughts he gives to me. I won’t have him though, I know that now.

And do you hear my heart? Can you hear it scream?
He is the love of my past, and my lover at last. But it won’t last. No, it won’t last.


text:
Home / General News / 7 ways to be Ignored in Social Media “Debates”

7 ways to be Ignored in Social Media “Debates”

People love to be morally outraged at, well pretty much anything. Social media outlets such as Facebook, twitter, Tumblr are rife with Virtue Signalling over petty topics that make most people forehead palm slap.

hipster girl on laptop
I will Wow them with my 400 word opinion how we can save spider monkey’s from terrible abuse.

I have partaken in many keyboard warrior conversations over the years. So far everything I have achieved was wasting an inordinate number of hours I could have been productive at work. Significantly trimming down my Facebook friend list (granted I rarely post SJW/Politics on my page) and pissing off an entire group of snowflakes. Actually the last part was awesome. They screen printed the conversation and acted like victims and got bullied harder.

So here’s the list, I may add to as time goes on and i can think of more.

1: TL;DR

Seriously, no one cares about your 400 word opinion in a facebook comment. Chances are you copied it from another rant somewhere else. Most of these are filled with crap we already read from the media talking points. All you achieved was copying other people’s words.

2: Posting a Fricken Meme

 In a more innocent age of social media, memes were 2 liner jokes. Now they’re poorly researched line items and an irrelevant picture to portray a biased political view. Chances are the meme you posted is someone else’s words. You are not smart, nor clever for posting it. Posting political memes as your main wall post is just asking for trouble. Posting it as a reply to a debate, lacks any sensibility and you’ll be ignored. Well the only appropriate time is when the other people have exhausted everything and you just want them all to shut up. make it yourself, make it snarky.

3: Posting a Link with no summary

Girl posting links in coffee shops.
This link I just found will surely win the argument!

Yes, seriously. How absolutely lazy can you be? Every single day I witness someone dive bombing a debate with 1-2 links to something just barely on topic. They say nothing, not even “I read this link and thought it really illustrated the plight of the Angora Rabbit”. They might be busy. They may have no ability to formulate their own words. They might be an advanced AI. Who knows. All I know is it’s annoying and wastes my time. They get dismissed with haste.

4: Arguing against facts with your “feels”.

The worst of the bunch and they’re everywhere. Facts are usually indisputable. They happened, they’re real and you cannot change them. They are the immutable golden edge against all argument. Until you have “feelings”, the frack facts. A lot of people don’t like how Thomas Edison electrocuted animals in park centers during the “Current Wars”. So they choose to “not believe it ever happened”. What? Sorry snowflake, it happened. It’s real.  Edison wasn’t the role model you want him to be. Benjamin Franklin too. Total misogynist. He loved to bone woman of all ages. In dark rooms, wrapped in a bag if they were ugly.  But he is a founding father and a great inventor and person. But people want to pick and chose facts they “believe in”. This gets you ignored faster than anything on my shortlist.

5: Creative name calling

It all started with Micro$oft. Like adding a dollar sign was insulting. Then comes the “Trumpkins, Dumbocrats, Libtards, Obummer” and a billion other “cute and creative” insults. Sorry, you lose. (if you read this far, you caught a few of my own snuck in above). Point is, I don’t care what side of the fence you’re on, you look dumb and your point, no matter how awesome loses value. Talk like a mature adult and stop copying monikers like it’s smart and witty. It’s really not.

6: Holy cow I got 6! Being nasty

I understand this one. You’re trying to express a failed opinion that’s been rebutted 100 times with facts. But you’re digging in because you’re wrong, but you don’t want to admit it and can’t accept defeat. So you start calling people “Stupid”, lashing out and giving personal attacks “Oh, you must have a small penis, that’s why you’re so smart”.

The psychology behind this one is actually quite interesting. It comes back to our tribal ways. Back then, disagreements were solved by stabbing each other with spears until someone died. In the digital age we’re all super confrontational online and extreme wimps offline. So a differing opinion triggers that tribe mind as a physical attack on you and your beliefs. You almost can’t help from getting angry nor can you turn off the threat detection. So the only way to retaliate is to fight with words and get mean.

7: Inability to articulate why you dislike/disagree with someone

I ran out of ideas at 3, then went on to Facebook for inspiration. People are great in that their capacity towards stupidity never lets me down. (See that, I snuck in an insult.) I just ran across this gem. The “You’re wrong!” Or the “Lies” or even the “Never go to that website it sucks”.

When asking one person just a few minutes ago, why they do not like the educational website “Udemy” their response was:

“Because Udemy is absolute garbage i prefer to code games with logic gates, than open that damn website.”

All it shows is you hate something. There’s no reason why, it’s just pure hate.

I could probably write an entire blog on this one point. Maybe another day when there’s time in the day.

In Closing

While everything I mentioned above is quite literally the “Staple” of social media debate, they don’t have to be. It’s not helpful to raising our intelligence, it just makes us hate each other further. I had great memories with some people, but then the election came and their demon side came out. Their chosen candidate was it, the one that would win and they wouldn’t hear anything about the bad. My wall was flooded with that crap.

Now Facebook is flooded by the fake news on Illegal Immigrant Children being separated from their family by ICE agents. I get it, you’re upset, stop flooding my wall.

Tell us how you really feel!


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The Diamond Age

I had a very interesting exchange with a friend on Facebook this week, who was – rightfully – bemoaning the high cost of good daycare, and irritated that more than half of her paycheck was gone just to take care of her child while she was at work. She made a comment regarding the fact that this seems to be just another cultural universal in the modern day, something everyone contends with, and as a long stream of her friends and acquaintances chimed in with their agreement, I felt like I owed a voice to the conversation.

“Not everyone,” I said, “uses daycare.”

The immediate response was a mass eyerolling – silence your mind, and you can practically hear the sclera rolling slickly in a million sockets with an unpopular post – and some rock-throwing, including questioning whether we had a nanny, or parental help, or simply had children old enough to be at home on their own.

“None of the above,” I replied. “We watch our own kids. Simple as that.”

When we fired our nanny for good in 2007, having experienced a string of nanny experiences that would turn your hair white, we decided – at that moment – that we were done with the concept of outsourcing our children’s care. From that point on, it would be us, with the attendant challenges that created. So we threw everything we had on the table, Apollo 13-style, and attempted to build a new life going forward.

First to go was the idea of two full-time careers outside the home. Home was to be the primary venue for raising our kids, so we weren’t interested in having our children grow up in full-day Accenture summer daycare, for example, or coloring listlessly in an office all summer, shushed at every ring of the desk phone.  So part-time and home-based work became the planks for this new life; I cut back my consulting practice to focus on distance work and local client on-site projects only, while Kath cut back her patient hours and switched to a flexible position. Together, we could just do it – with some expense-cutting and heightened fiscal scrutiny.

It started, though, with a very specific perspective: building from the family up to our careers, rather than building down from our careers to our family. It wasn’t a case of ‘this is what we do for a living; how can we accommodate three gifted and intense children within that framework?’ It was ‘these are our family realities; how can we make a living while respecting our kids’ needs?’

Something in our life, we decided, needed to be a diamond; it should cut all other things. And not everyone has options in choosing their diamond surface; for some of us, a Diamond Age is thrust upon us – we’ve got a serious illness of our own (or that of a parent) to contend with in our lives, or perhaps our kids have special needs (2E or not 2E, that would be the question). But for those of us lucky and blessed enough to have broad familial health intact, the next step is deciding what the diamond surface is in your life. For us, the growing level of intensities in our house, and the specific needs that each of our children was beginning to show us, made the choice an obvious one.

When we positioned our family as the diamond surface in our life, other things got cut – literally and metaphorically. Vacations have a lot more laughing in the tent, and a lot less beachhouse rent – and the TV we bought five years ago seems to be holding up fine. Monopoly, it turns out, has an ageless quality of fun, and stroking your daughter’s hair while she reads pegs the happiness needle; no objects or debit cards required. What’s interesting is that the cuts are visible ones; I can see, in our bank account, every place that earning less and spending more time with my family impacts us. They’re easy cuts to see, and maybe that’s a dangerous thing. The fact that they are so obvious, so quantitative, makes me doubly sure that those cuts would be happening somewhere else if we’d made something else – career, self, hobbies or collections – our diamond surfaces. But those cuts, I fear, wouldn’t be nearly as easy to spot. Some of them, I’m confident, would have been made on my childrens’ hearts.

As the Diamond Age unfolds in our household, I find that I don’t have the life that society tells me I should have or want, and that feels strange sometimes. Things are just different for us, and I have to shrug that off occasionally. Our decision has been our own, and it doesn’t always lead to the easy, tangible reward or the societally-blessed lifestyle. I’ll probably post more about those feelings as they come up.

But right now, I’ve got to go. E’s got a hotel on Boardwalk that she just can’t wait for me to land on.

2 responses to this post.

  1. Posted by Juley Allee on July 18, 2012 at 10:49 am

    You and K have a wholesome, heartfelt, wondrous view of life and its importance.

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text:
The AMS-IX Chicago price structure is straightforward, unless mentioned otherwise we only apply monthly port prices.

  • Unless mentioned otherwise all prices are in USD per month, excluding Sales tax.
  • Invoicing is done on a quarterly basis unless you choose for annual payment for which a 3% discount can be applied. Charging starts on the production date, with a maximum of 30 days after assignment.
    • Assignment date: the date when the AMS-IX USA Inc. communicates the connection details to customer, after the signed paperwork has been received back by us.
    • Production date: the date the AMS-IX USA Inc. defines the connection in production in consultation with customer.
  • The payment term is 30 days from the invoice date (as listed on the invoice).
  • The prices do not include colocation or cross-connect fees. These charges depend on the colocation and they are separate from the AMS-IX Chicago fees, charged to you by the colocation operator.
  • We do not charge any fees for a change (relocation/upgrade/downgrade), although a change in port capacity will affect the monthly charges according to the price list below.

Port prices Internet Peering VLAN (ISP Unicast)

Please see the service overview of our Internet Peering VLAN (ISP Unicast)  service for more details on the service.

Port Monthly fee in USD**

  *The GE has a similar redundancy as the 10GE, being connected through the photonic cross connect.
**POA = Price on Application

To make the initial decision to start peering at AMS-IX Chicago somewhat easier we have promotions at times. Find out if it is applicable by sending an email to

Other Pricings

Annual payment - 3% discount
AMS-IX Chicago gives customers the option to choose for annual payment of the monthly port charges in which case they receive a 3% discount. Annual payment can start on the beginning of any month and will be extended automatically every year until requested otherwise by the customer. As with the quarterly invoices, the payment term for annual charges is 30 days from the invoice date (as listed on the invoice). Since the discount is only applicable on annually paid charges, any changes made in the running year have the following effects:

  • Changes that result in increased charges will generate a separate invoice (including the 3% discount) for the difference over the remainder of the 12-month period. After that, the annual payment will include the upgraded charges (and the 3% discount).
  • Changes that result in decreased charges will result in a credit of the discounted charges. This included the case where AMS-IX Chicago decreases port charges.
(For disconnects in the running year, the non-applicable discount is subtracted from any credit.)

Just to clarify further, the annual payment should not be seen as a credit account or "bucket of money" from which the charges are financed until empty (and then triggering a new invoice).


text:
Updated 09/14/11 – 6:47 p.m.

CHICAGO (CBS) — Texting and driving has been a hot-button issue for years, and now, the Chicago City Council is going to take up distracted bicycle riding.

As CBS 2’s Dana Kozlov reports, on most days – especially non-rainy days – many of Chicago’s streets are packed with cyclists getting around the city.

Occasionally, you’ll see them talking on a phone or even trying to send a message. Ald. Margaret Laurino (39th) wants to put a stop to that – before it becomes a big problem.

In Chicago, bikes are everywhere and cell phones are like fifth appendages. But if the two come together, it could mean trouble.

“Clearly, it’s a bad idea. Not a good idea,” said Ron Burke, executive director of the Active Transportation Alliance, which promotes biking. Burke said the group is throwing its support behind Laurino’s idea.

Under the proposal, bicyclists would operate under the same rules as drivers – no texting, no e-mailing, no surfing, no phone conversations, while riding. The only exception would be with the use of a hands-free device.

“We’re meeting with the alderman and her staff on Monday to go over the language and offer some, I think, relatively minor suggestions for improving it, but on the whole we like it,” Burke said.

Some avid bikers were quick to put the brakes on the idea.

“It’s pretty stupid. I mean people can do whatever they want to do,” one cyclist said.

But others said, why not?

“I think if it’s a problem there should be something done about it. An ordinance is a good idea, but how are you gonna enforce that,” Robert Gonzalez said.

It’s a valid question. Spend a few minutes on any corner and you’ll easily spot drivers using cell phones without hands-free devices – with no police car in pursuit. If that’s still a regular occurrence, is enforcing a new bike law even feasible?

“Anything that has to do with public safety, we would take a look at and probably endorse,” said Police Supt. Garry McCarthy.

As proposed now, cyclists would get a $50 ticket if texting or talking. If the violation occurs during a crash, the fine would then rise to $500.

The proposal still has to go through committee before the full City Council would even vote on it, so if it becomes a law, it likely wouldn’t happen for at least another couple of months.


text:
What got you hooked on rock & roll as a kid?  Listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd. Those powerful vocals of Ronnie Van Zant drew me in.

What was the first concert you ever attended and what strikes you about it today? Jakyl opening for ZZ Top! I was 17 years old and the energy of that show was overwhelming!

What was your first public performance? how did it go?  Well my dad (Oliver Smith) was a southern gospel bluegrass singer and performed in different churches so I would say my first performance was more than likely with him at one of those churches. As far as the first real performance that I remember; I was in the 5th grade and performed Lee Greenwoods “God Bless the USA” for a school program. There is a video of that out there somewhere …lol

Musicians are funny about their instruments, sometimes even superstitious — tell us about your relationship with guitars over the years; what is your stand by go-to 6-string today?  I’ve never really considered myself a guitar player. I’m more of a vocalist but a good guitar is key in having a good performance. I played a Taylor guitar for a while and I beat it to hell playing the honky tonks in Nashville. When it was time for a new one I went with the Seagull that I currently play. It is a great sounding guitar without the hefty price tag.

How does the song-writing process work for you? has it evolved over time or do you have a tried & true formula you try to stick with?  I haven’t really been writing that much the last few years. Just a line or two here and there but when I was writing consistently it was just a matter of what I was feeling mostly. Occasionally someone would say something that would spark an Idea and I would use my corny sense of humor to write something like “Nothing but your snuggie on”

Do you have any advice (cheap tricks) for your artists looking to connect more with the audience when playing live?  Be true to who you are as a musician and you are going to connect with someone or a group of people. Don’t be surprised if someone asks you to sing something that just doesn’t fit you and if you can bare to sing it then sing it and get right back to what you love. They will appreciate you for it.

What’s the craziest thing that’s ever happened at one of your shows?  The craziest thing that ever happened at one of my shows other than having the drummer bring a dancing Zombie Doll on stage would have to be being interrupted by Jermaine Jackson while playing at Legends Corner in Nashville so he could promote a tv show that he was filming.

Given your experience as a finalist on CMT’s Can You Duet in 2008 , what advice would you give to a young artists looking to take a shot on a similar live contest like American Idol or The Voice?  I would say if you’re gonna go for one of shows just be prepared to take some criticism and don’t let a “no” answer stop you from moving forward with your career. Sometimes being true to who you are isn’t always what they are looking for so you just have to keep on keeping on.

Some artists hate the question but who do folks liken you too most and how do you feel about it? You know it’s been a while since someone has compared me to another artist but I use to get Billy Dean a lot when I was in Nashville. I’ll take that as a compliment.

What are you working on and what’s your view of 2018 from here?  Right now I’m just working on being a better performer and trying to gig as much as possible. I’m working with a group of great players and we call ourselves the Douglas Fine Line. I would like to play more with these guys this year and get into some bigger venues and festivals. Right now I’m just working on being a better performer and trying to gig as much as possible.