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San Francisco Day Trip: Healdsburg

Explore wineries and nostalgic treats 90 minutes from the ‘City by the Bay’
Willis Seafood Raw Bar

Willis Seafood Raw Bar

Willis Seafood Raw Bar

Roughly an hour-and-a-half from San Francisco lies Healdsburg, considered by many to be the crown jewel of Sonoma County. With small town charm and big city amenities, the community is home to 11,000 people and 147 wineries plus many fantastic small town restaurants worth the drive from San Francisco.

Start your day in this countryside community with breakfast at Costeaux, an open-air French bakery known for its artesian breads and French toast stuffed with berries.

Next, head to Williamson Wines in downtown Healdsburg, the only winery with a tasting room that pairs food with its wines, said Kelly Rogers, marking coordinator at Kunde Family Estates and a long-time resident of Healdsburg. The tastings are free.

Immerse yourself in the local community by pulling up a stool at Bear Republic. Bear Republic’s brews are hand-crafted using traditional brewing methods. Pair one of the microbrews with a juicy burger.

”We want to create and cultivate a Brew Pub and Restaurant that the locals can call their own and that make visitors feel at home,” said Master Brewer Richard G. Norgrove, who recommends visitors try the Racer 5 IPA, a full-bodied American India Pale Ale heavily hopped with Chinook, Cascade, Columbus and Centennial.

For a more formal dining experience, Willi’s Seafood & Raw Bar is a must. With a welcoming ambiance and lively décor, the restaurant serves small-plates designed for sharing. The menu features grilled skewers like barbecue bacon-wrapped scallops; warm Maine lobster rolls with garlic butter; and various kinds of ceviche and crudos. Since you are in wine country, there is an extensive wine list too.

Top your day off in Healdsburg with something sweet from Powell’s Sweet Shoppe. Stocking every kind of candy imaginable, sorted by decade, Powell’s also serves gelato, chocolates, and gifts in a shop that blasts tunes from Willy Wonka.

“Powell’s Sweet Shoppe is an old-time, old-fashioned, old-world candy store taken from America’s imagination,” said owner Michael Powell, “We want to walk our customers down memory lane and remind them of good things and good times.”

Kat Ernst is the San Francisco Travel City Editor for The Daily Meal.

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Photos: Pierick Jeannoutot

Kiwi crews to the fore

The latest from the Seiko 49er & 49erFX World Championships in Marseille

Saturday September 28th 2013, Author: Andy Rice, Location: France

New Zealand crews sit at the top of both leaderboards going into the final day of the Seiko 49er & 49erFX World Championships in Marseille.

In the 53-boat women’s FX fleet, Alex Maloney and Molly Meech took a firmer grip on the Seiko yellow jerseys after a masterful display of strong-wind boathandling in four Semi-Final races on a gusty, shifty course close to the shore.

The Kiwi girls scored 15,3,3,1, moving them further ahead of France’s Sarah Steyaert and Julie Bossard. Inspired by the girls’ performance, Pete Burling and Blair Tuke went out on to the same race course for four men’s 49er races and racked up 2,1,9,2. This moved them into the lead of the 97-strong men’s division, 12 points in front of another Kiwi crew in 2nd place, Marcus Hansen and Josh Porebski.

Good to stretch our legs today and a couple of opportunities to do better today, but all in all a good day,” said Tuke. “We're just getting the boat shipshape and ready for tomorrow. We're happy with how we're going in theatre-style racing and how we're sailing. We're both really excited about the chance of winning a world championship. We haven't won a world title since our junior days so we're very motivated.”

The Kiwis were good today, but the Australians were better, and they needed to be. Nathan Outteridge and Iain Jensen started the day in 18th place, a long way from the 9th place or less that would guarantee their place in the Final. As it was, a score of 1,3,3,1 rocketed them up to 6th overall. The Aussies’ downwind speed also earned them the purple jerseys for Kings of the Downwind, coming in at almost a minute faster than the second boat across all of today’s eight downwind legs.

“It was a massive snakes and ladders day,” said Outteridge. “Everyrace was very different in terms of where you had to go, so there was no pattern to it, which we like.” But with 25 points still to make up on the Kiwi leaders, can Outteridge really hope to make Marseille his fifth 49er World title? “I think with the format we've got I'd say anything is possible. We haven't done any of the theatre style racing, but it's three double-points races. If you get it wrong you get 60 points. Pretty easy for it to go bad.

“I think tomorrow will be lighter, will be shifty and ugly racing, and we're going to have to fight pretty hard. But at least we might have a chance of fighting back enough to get on the podium.”

If Burling and Tuke look a little out of reach for the reigning World and Olympic Champions, the others look very catchable. The second Kiwi
team are just 13 points ahead of Outteridge, with France’s Manu Dyen and Stephane Christidis 3 points further back in 3rd overall. In the
game of snakes and ladders, the previous series leaders slid down more snakes than they would have liked. Dylan Fletcher and Alain Sign have slipped to 4th overall. “A day we don't really want to remember but still one you have to learn from,” said Sign. “You have to debrief
from it, pick up a few points then bounce back tomorrow. Today, everything was happening pretty quickly and we weren't that great at
reacting to that today. Tomorrow we’ve got to come back fighting and show we can win a world championship.”

It was far worse for another British team, John Pink and Simon Wheeler, who started the day in 3rd. Some sub-par performances saw them drop down the rankings to the point where they were in danger of missing top 9 qualification. In the final race they surged into the lead, and although Outteridge caught them on the final beat, they were second as they gybed for the finish line. Then, a massive gust and a capsize saw them tumble to 13th in that race, and down to 11th overall. “A bit gutting,” said Pink. “I think that puts us in the repechage.” Tomorrow the teams from 10th to 21st overall compete in the Petit-Finals for one coveted place in the Final. So Pink might yet find redemption from that capsize. “We have it all to do again tomorrow, a mini-series to get ourselves back in the Final, and see where we go from there.”

For the women, that Petit-Final might allow sailors like Australia’s Olivia Price and Caitlin Elks to get back into the Final. Like Pink, they capsized in today’s really tough conditions, and the Olympic silver medallist Price will be working hard to get back in for the FX Finals.

Gold fleet results for the 49er and 49erFX

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Naw, tall people are just easier to spot on stage and have an easier time looking down their noses at everyone- hence the villain role. XD

I was nearly cast as villain for the one school show I tried for, but they chose the senior instead, for obvious reasons (she was amazing AND it was her last year). I got the snobby reporter role, which was very fun indeed!

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AP test takers on the rise

Some minorities may be deterred from taking AP tests, a recent report found

Penn’s Class of 2015 contributed to a nationwide growth of Advanced Placement test takers.

The College Board — which administers AP exams — released the eighth annual AP Report to the Nation earlier this month, detailing statistics of students who took AP tests.

According to the report, the number of high school students taking an AP exam continued to rise. However, the proportion of those students who score a 3 or higher has decreased from 64.3 percent in 2001 to 59.8 percent today.

With these numbers in mind, the Office of Admissions is making a push to focus more on academic rigor, as well as grades and AP test scores, in applicants’ transcripts, according to Dean of Admissions Eric Furda.

“We need to hold students to the standard that they’re taking advantage of the opportunities that they find, but not disadvantage them if they don’t have these opportunities,” he said. “However, we also need to recognize what level of preparation they have for classes at Penn.”

The report also noted that four out of five black students who were deemed qualified to succeed on an exam — based on their PSAT scores — did not take an AP test.

According to the report, this trend was also present in other underrepresented minorities.

“Access to Advanced Placement coursework remains a concern, particularly among underserved minority and low-income students, who are underrepresented in AP classrooms,” College Board Executive Director of Communications Kathleen Steinberg wrote in an email.

Furda said this gap between potential and achievement is a concern in Penn’s admissions process.

“There is this national disconnect between talented students who have the potential to go to Penn and schools like Penn, but some of them aren’t even thinking about applying to Penn,” he said.

Looking more generally at the AP exams, some have questioned the value of the AP curriculum once applicants are admitted to a school like Penn.

Top Colleges Educational Consultant Steven Goodman, a 1989 Graduate School of Education alumnus, said academic rigor does not always equal college readiness and that there is a large gap between where the AP exams leave off and where the introductory courses at Penn begin.

Associate Dean of the College and Director of Academic Affairs Kent Peterman said this puts Penn in the position of having to work around the different levels of readiness among incoming students.

“We need to find ways for students who haven’t had the best opportunities in their secondary education to come to Penn and succeed,” Peterman said. “That’s really important to us so that we are accessible to students from all kinds of backgrounds, and not just students who come from privileged backgrounds.”

He added that one of the concerns with the AP tests is that at some schools, students may earn a good score on the exam without having truly mastered the material.

“One of the problems the [College Board] has had in trying to spread AP more broadly across the country … is that they’ve introduced AP in schools that don’t have the resources to support it and to do anything more than ‘teaching to the test,’” he said.

College senior and Black Student League President George Hardy said he was not surprised by the report’s findings about minority students and AP exams.

“Given that a lot of minorities come from low-income backgrounds that lack the resources that would prepare them for AP exams, it’s not surprising,” he said, adding that the high cost of the tests may be another deterrent.

Though Hardy took AP courses in high school, he pointed to his experience in AP Calculus as one that is indicative of some of the problems with the College Board’s program.

In the course, “we were so far behind so [our teacher] started teaching toward the test, which is never effective,” he said. “We became very stressed out — many people gave up [and] a lot of people wanted to drop out, but there was nowhere for us to go.”

INTERACTIVE: 2011 AP Report examines race, increasing test-takers

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The Ecologist

Sea Lion entangled in fishing gear. Photo: Kanna Jones / Marine Photo Bank via Lauren Packard /
Sea Lion entangled in fishing gear. Photo: Kanna Jones / Marine Photo Bank via Lauren Packard /
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  • Could America's greatest fishery go the way of the Freighter-fishing boat-whaler-tug Mary D Hume (1881-1978), a veteran of the Bering Sea now enjoying a long rest in Gold Beach? Photo: mike via
    Could America's greatest fishery go the way of the Freighter-fishing boat-whaler-tug Mary D Hume (1881-1978), a veteran of the Bering Sea now enjoying a long rest in Gold Beach? Photo: mike via

The decline and fall of America's last great fishery

Jeffrey St. Clair

13th May 2014

The Bering Sea is America's biggest fishery - but factory trawlers are ripping the guts out of the ecosystem, writes Jeffrey St.Clair, as they have already devastated fishing communities. Mix in nuclear bomb test fallout - an unlikely savior?

The arrival of the industrialized super-trawlers spelled an almost immediate cultural and economic disaster for the communities of coastal Alaska.

The SS Gijon cuts through the slate-colored swells, trailing a white V in the waters of the Bering Sea. The trawler lowers its giant pelagic net from the stern of the ship and it unfurls into the waters below.

The vast net, thousands of yards of nylon mesh, sweeps in a lethal curtain across the depths.

Hours later, the nets are cranked up to the piercing whine of straining engines. Inside: more than 400 tons of fish, crabs and squid. A Stellar's sea lion and a few fur seals, indiscriminately snared while foraging for salmon, are also part of the haul.

The sea lion and seal are not spared. Indeed more than 40% of the haul is considered worthless by-catch and will simply be ground up and spewed in bloody currents of saturated chum from the bilges of ship back out into the sea.

Some 500 million pounds of marine life are wasted in this way in the North Pacific every year.

Floating factories in America's most productive fishery

The Bering Sea is now the most productive fishery in North America. More than one-third of the United State's commercial catch come from these frigid waters near the top of the world.

Among the species sought by the fishing fleets of the North Pacific are yellowfin, sole, herring, halibut and ocean perch. But the most cherished target is pollock, the tofu of fish. Pollock, craved by the Japanese for surimi, turns up in American markets as fish sandwiches at Burger King and McDonalds and as imitation crab in the fish freezers at Safeway.

The SS Gijon is registered to the Seattle-based American Seafoods Corporation, a subsidiary of Resource Group International, a Norwegian conglomerate. The ship is a floating factory, longer and wider than a football field. The $40 million trawler can process 80 tons of fish mass a day, turning sole into fish meal and pollock into surimi. The catch is stored in huge freezers, where it can linger for months.

Resource Group International's primary competitor in the lucrative Pollock fishing grounds of the North Pacific is the Arctic-Alaska Fisheries Company, another Seattle-based outfit. Arctic Alaska was acquired in 1992 by Don Tyson, the chicken mogul and Clinton patron from Springdale, Arkansas.

Since then Tyson's company has bought up three other Alaska seafood operations and, as a consequence, began fending off anti-trust investigations by the Federal Trade Commission.

For Alaska - economic and cultural disaster

The incursion of the big factory trawlers into the icy waters of the North Pacific began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 2000, there were 45 factory trawlers operating in the Bering Sea fishery.

The big ships are powered by super-charged diesel engines fed by massive fuel tanks that permit the trawlers to remain at sea for months without returning to home ports to refuel or off-load their catch.

Often the processed surimi is simply transferred at sea to smaller ships owned by Japanese fish merchants. The long range of the factory ships allows them to operate in several distance fisheries in a single season and evade the catch quotas that saddle smaller operations.

The arrival of the industrialized super-trawlers spelled an almost immediate cultural and economic disaster for the communities of coastal Alaska.

For decades the flourishing Alaskan fishing industry had been characterized by independent ship owners and small processing plants, sprinkled down the coast in towns like Kodiak, Cordova and Ketchikan.

Jobs destroyed on land and on sea

In the 1970s, nearly 80% of the Alaskan pollock catch was made by small operators. Now the situation is almost entirely reversed. More than 70% of the Pollock in Alaskan waters is taken by factory trawlers and dozens of independent boat owners have gone bankrupt.

But it's the shore-based factories, making value-added fish products, that have been hit the hardest by the new generation of trawlers. The canneries, surimi plants and frozen fish processing factories provided year-round high wage jobs, an important stabilizing force for rural Alaska's predominantly season economy.

Today many of those plants and jobs are gone, replaced by the factory trawlers, which increasingly tend to employ Mexican and Vietnamese laborers at sweatshop pay rates.

Many of the Artic-Alaska Company's ships unload their catch not in Seattle, but in Shanghai, China, where Tyson purchased a fish factory in 1994 from the Chinese government.

And it was all funded by ... the US Treasury

The deal was brokered with the help of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and was back by federal government insurance and loan guarantees from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC).

In fact, the growth of the American factory trawler fleet was heavily underwritten by the US treasury, thanks to effective inside work by the congressional delegation from Washington state.

Tyson's company alone swept up more than $65 million in low-interest loans to fun the construction of 10 factory trawlers. In total, the Seattle-based factory trawler fleet raked in more than $200 million in so-called Fisheries Obligation Guarantees and other federal subsidies.

As people have suffered, so have the oceans

The economic dislocation brought about by the invasion of the mega-trawlers into Southeast Alaska is grimly paralleled by an ecological catastrophe in the waters of the Bering Sea and North Pacific.

Again most of the blame can be laid squarely on the industrial behemoths. Using sophisticated sonar and electronic tracking devices, factory trawlers like the Gijon can swiftly zero in on new spawning grounds and fish them to near extinction. This is called pulse trawling.

A particularly outrageous example of this genocidal method occurred in the 1980s in the Shelikoff Strait off the Aleutian Islands, when a newly discovered pollock stock was relentlessly fished to the point of collapse.

According to a report on factory trawlers by Greenpeace, in less than a decade the Shelikof pollock fishery had declined from an estimated biomass of 3 million tons in 1981 to less than 300,000 tons in 1988.

Every since the factory trawlers began flocking to the Alaskan waters the pollock season has closed earlier than planned. In the late 1970s, the pollock fishing season regularly ran for 10 months. In 1994, it closed after 70 days.

Even the sea lions are starving

It's not surprising. The annual harvest capacity of the trawler fleet may well be greater than the entire Pollock population of the Bering Sea. The ramifications of this dire situation were contemplated in an internal assessment by executives at the American Seafood Company:

"The catching capacity of vessels operating in the Bering Sea fishery appears to be double or triple the annual quota."

And these were quotas that most marine biologists considered to be dangerously inflated.

It's not just the species targeted by the trawlers, such as pollock and sole, which are depleted. Crab, halibut and arrowtooth flounder are also in trouble. The consequences extend even to fish-eating seabirds, such as puffins, thick-billed murres and black-legged kittiwakes, as well as marine mammal, such as Stellar's sea lions, fur seals, and sea otters.

Pollock, for example, accounts for nearly 70% of the rare sea lion's diet. A report by the National Research Council warns:

"It seems extremely unlikely that the productivity of the Bering Sea ecosystem can sustain current rates of human exploitation, as well as the large populations of all marine mammals and bird species that existed before human exploitation-especially modern exploitation-began."

Dracula in charge of the blood bank

The trend toward over-exploitation of the Alaskan fishery will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. For one thing, even the most stringent federal fishing laws have often served only to exacerbate the problem.

Take the Magnuson Act, passed in 1976 as a way to protect American off-shore fishing grounds from growing incursions by foreign fishing fleets. The measure, rammed through Congress by the acerbic Senator Warren Magnuson, a Democrat from Washington, extended the federal government's jurisdiction over fish matters from 3 miles to 200 miles off the US coastline.

The move was bitterly denounced by the Japanese and Norwegians as an act of ecological imperialism. In reality, it was simple economic protectionism.

The Magnuson Act established regional 'fish management councils' to determine fishing seasons and allocate catch quotas. These councils, which soon came to be dominated by fishing industry lobbyists, were expressly exempted from federal conflict-of-interest laws, allowing industry flacks to direct as much of the haul back to their own companies and clients as they could get away with.

And they did just that.

Ecological ignorance

Exacerbating this situation is the archaic management philosophy of the federal agency charged with maintaining the health of ocean fish stocks: the National Marine Fisheries Service, which, curiously enough, is under the purview of the Commerce Department.

Instead of viewing marine ecosystems as vibrant, diverse and inter-connected environments, NMFS attempts to manage ocean fish stocks through a species-by-species approach. This benefits the bottom lines of the fishing fleets, but flies in the face of current ecological thinking.

By focusing only on the commercial fish stocks, NMFS ignores the toll industrial fishing methods exact on non-target species and on the marine habitat itself.

Health benefits, yes - but what about the hazards?

Medical researchers, backed by hefty grants from companies like Arctic-Alaska, continue to churn out reports touting the health-enhancing benefits of diets laden with Pollock, salmon and perch.

Fish seems to lower bad cholesterol, reduce heart attack risks (especially for men) and suppresses the advance of free radicals, those frenzied compounds that stimulate cancer cell growth.

All this is undoubtedly true. Yet there are also health dangers associated with fish consumption. Fish can be contaminated with heavy metals, pesticides and other chemical toxins. One recent study estimated that consumption of PCB-laced fish from the Great Lakes may lead to 40,000 new cases of cancer over the next 25 years.

Seafood products also carry a host of food-borne pathogens, including listeria, vibrio vulnifcus and, yes, salmonella. Testing for such dangers is even more lax and rudimentary than that in the beef industry. One local seafood merchant in Portland, Oregon told me:

"What it comes down to is smell. When it starts to stink, we yank it off the shelf. What else can you do?"

Don't mention the radiation

But even the most accomplished sole sniffers would be unable to detect that there is something terribly wrong with many of the fish being hauled out of the Bering Sea.

Thousands of tons of pollock, perch and black sole taken by ships like Gijon may - metaphorically, at least-glow. They may make Geiger counters erupt into a chilling stutter of clicks. In short, a considerable part of the haul from this last, great productive fishery may be radioactive.

What's going on here? The story dates back to 1971, during the glory days of the Nixon administration and the nuclear sabre-rattling leading up to Henry Kissinger's détente with the Soviets.

In order to send a message of "American resolve", Nixon ordered the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense to detonate the largest underground nuclear explosion in US history on Amchitka Island, a volcanic extrusion in the Bering Sea, halfway down Alaska's Aleutian Islands - declared a National Wildlife Refuge in 1913.

The five-megaton hydrogen 'device' detonated on November 6, 1971 exploded with such shattering force that the middle of Amchitka Island fractured and collapsed, forming what the mad scientist Edward Teller delicately termed a "nuclear-excavated lake".

In the wake of the blast, hundreds of dead puffins were found with their legs driven through their chests, while sea lions, resting on sea rocks miles from the test site, were discovered with their eyes blown out of their sockets.

The group of activists that sailed into the test zone in an attempt to stop the explosion went on to found Greenpeace.

The leaky cauldron

Within months, there was ample of evidence that the test site, called Cannikan Lake, had begun to steadily leak radioactive waste, despite assurances from James Schlesinger, then head of the Atomic Energy Commission, that it would take "a thousand years or more" for transuranic uranium to dribble into the sea.

Thousands of pages of recently declassified documents released by the Department of Energy to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation reveal that Amchitka blast site began to leak Iodine 131 and Crypton 85 within two days of the nuclear explosion, draining into the groundwater and then to the sea through underground fissures in the island.

Soon after the disclosure of these damaging documents, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens discreetly told Clinton's Energy Secretary, Hazel O'Leary: "Madame Secretary, we've got a real problem up here. There's leaking from the Amchitka test site and it might endanger our North Pacific fisheries."

In 2002 a study published in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity warned: "Based on geohydrological testing and modeling, leakage from the Amchitka Underground Nuclear Tests is projected to occur to the marine environment."

We've never once found any radioactive fish - but nor have we ever looked

Now disturbing levels of Americium, Plutonium and Tritium are showing up in plants samples on the island. "If we're finding these levels of radioactive waste, then the potential for severe harm is there", said Pam Miller, a Greenpeace scientist who wrote a detailed report on the radioactive leakage on Amchitka.

"This stuff appears to be leaking into the most important commercial fishery in the world."

Even so executives at Arctic-Alaska Seafood remained tranquil. "We've never once found any radioactive fish", a company spokesman told me. Moments later, however, the PR man admitted that the company had never tested its fish for radioactive waste and had no plans to start.

No wonder the surrealists adopted the fish as a symbol of their movement.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the editor of CounterPunch. He is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of NatureGrand Theft Pentagon and Born Under a Bad Sky. His latest book is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.   He can be reached at:

Author's note: This week CBS News devoted a rare segment to the rapidly deteriorating ecological conditions in the world's oceans. The report cited new research from the University of Halifax in Nova Scotia predicting that the world's oceans will be largely depleted of fish by 2048. The report quoted lead scientist Dr. Boris Worm as saying: "This isn't predicted to happen. It's happening now."

In fact, some scientists have been predicting an oceanic apocalypse for nearly 20 years. In 1997, I spent several months investigating the shocking decline of fish populations in the North Pacific and Bering Sea, including a short stint on several factory trawlers, including the SS Gijon, based out of Seattle.

I filed dozens of articles for CounterPunchIn These Times, the San Francisco Examiner and other publications on the looming disaster. This article is a slightly revised chapter from my book Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me on the economics and politics driving the looting of the North Pacific fisheries.

This article is based on those articles and is not up to date in all points of detail, however the overall situation has not improved - the fishery is in considerably worse shape right now than it was all those years ago.

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

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The Ecologist

Professor David Mackay

Professor David Mackay

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Renewables expert David Mackay appointed to Government

3rd September, 2009

In a surprise move, the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has appointed Cambridge Professor David Mackay as its Chief Scientific Adviser

Mackay, author of the highly influential book Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air, has won plaudits from both environmentalists and policymakers alike for his no-nonsense, science-based approach to dealing with renewable energy technologies.

Environmentalists will hope that Mackay's appointment heralds a new phase of thinking at DECC on coal power, particularly because Mackay is adamant in his book that avoiding dangerous climate change will require the end of unabated coal burning:

'Solving climate change is a complex topic,' he writes, 'but in a single crude brush-stroke, here is the solution: the price of carbon dioxide must be such that people stop burning coal without capture.'

Track record

Mackay was one of eight renewable energy experts brought together by the Ecologist in April for a roundtable discussion on the future of clean power technologies.

At the meeting, Mackay argued that our current attitude towards heat generation was seriously flawed, saying that it is 'a crime to take a chemical and set fire to it simply to generate low temperature heat'.

In place of the inefficient combustion of fossil fuels, Mackay advocates the widespread use of ground-source heat pumps, which concentrate residual heat in the soil using electrical pumps to generate hot water for domestic heating.

Mackay also recommended at the meeting that a new political body be established 'with long-term responsibility for renewable energy' - avoiding the four-year politics and promises of the electoral cycle.

Many will hope that his role at DECC may allow him to push forward such policies.

Some environmentalists may worry however that nuclear power plays a significant role in most of the scenarios of the UK's future energy mix which appear in Mackay's book.

When challenged on this position during the Ecologist roundtable, Mackay said:

'The only thing that really scales up apart from nuclear is solar power from other people’s deserts. If we imagine having a choice between 50 nuclear power stations – 50 Sizewells – which would cover current electricity consumption in Britain… If we say “No, we don’t want that”, the alternative is we go to Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and talk about building five Greater Londons’ worth of solar power stations.'

Scientific Advisers

The role of the Chief Scientific Adviser is defined as ensuring 'that the Department’s policies and operations, and its contributions to wider Government issues, are underpinned by the best science and engineering advice available'.

Previous Scientific Advisers, such as Sir David King, have proved highly influential in shaping Government policy. Sir David's legacy was world-leading policy on climate change, but also building the case for weaker regulation on GM crops.

See also

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Golly, This Is Bolly
FSJ February, 2012

Whisper: Rockstar girl Nargis Fakhri faces a major visa problem and cannot enter India to work here because she’s of Pakistani origin.

Truth: Hear it from her discoverer Imtiaz Ali who is in touch with her on a daily basis. “The Pakistani origin bit only means that she gets interrogated a little more than others,” Imtiaz told FSJ. “She is asked if she has visited Pakistan and the answer is ‘no’.”

Background: Nargis’ father is of Pakistani origin but he met and married her Czech mother in USA where Nargis was born. Her parents divorced each other when she was barely 6 or 7 years old and Nargis has always been a US citizen with no links at all to Pakistan.

“Nargis didn’t have a multiple fi lm contract with us. She had a contract for only one fi lm and once that film was completed, her work permit expired,” remarked Imtiaz. Now all that Nargis needs is a letter from any fi lmmaker who has a fi rm offer to make her, a letter undertaking that he is making a fi lm with her. “That will happen soon, it shouldn’t be a problem,” Imtiaz
optimistically stated. In other words, it’s only when someone really wants to make a fi lm with Nargis Fakhri that she can get a work permit again.

Until then: Nargis is back in the US. “She has gone home because she knows that once she starts another fi lm and comes here, she won’t be able to go back for maybe another two years,” Imtiaz explained. Hmm, anybody in fi lmland ready to bell this cat?

Hello, Good Morning, Ganpati Allah

Pranam Walekum, folks! Oops, it’s got nothing to do with secular feelings being whipped up after the recently concluded Republic Day. It’s the name of accomplished character actor Sanjay Mishra’s debut fi lm as director. What’s with the catchy title? “I had a Muslim friend whom I introduced to a Sadhubaba. He touched the Sadhu’s feet saying, ‘Baba, Pranam Walekum’. And that’s how I got my title for this fi lm!” offered Sanjay Mishra. Reminds us of little Aryan, Shah Rukh Khan’s son, who’d coined  the name Ganpati Allah for the gods worshipped inside Mannat.

Curiously, Mishra’s satirical tongue-in-cheek fi lm starring Irrfan Khan boasts of scenes directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia (of Saheb, Biwi Aur Gangster fame). Now how did that happen, Tishu? Says Tigmanshu, “Sanjay is a very good friend and batch mate from NSD. When I heard the script of Pranam Walekum I fell in love with it immediately.” A classic old boys’ reunion

The Pregnant Pause After The Dirty Picture

After Entertainment, Entertainment,  Entertainment, it’s going to be Vidya, Vidya, Vidya in Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani. The toast of the year 2011 is determined to keep up the wow work  (and the resultant accolades and awards), this time heavier than before. Playing a six-month pregnant Vidya (her name in the fi lm), she is doing the promotional requisites looking pregnant, very pregnant.

With the first trailer out, there are two things you’ll get to see throughout the mysterious Kahaani – plenty of grimy Kolkata (the entire fi lm is shot there) and frames full of Vidya (it’s another of her full-on woman-oriented films).

Turning up looking full-blown preggers, Vidya epitomised the term ‘getting into the character’. Now don’t be surprised if it stirs up a trend. It is after all, only a matter of time before the ape game starts!

Stay Away From My Funeral

The bhel puri of religions in the Mahesh Bhatt family (mom: Muslim, dad: Hindu, wife: Christian) has sometimes led to a stand-off as it did between the Bhatt brothers and their late sister Sheela’s husband, Darshan Sabarwal.

Popular fi lmmakers Suneel Darshan (Andaaz that launched Priyanka Chopra and Lara Dutta) and Dharmesh Darshan (Raja Hindustani, Dhadkan) are the sons of Sheela and Darshan Sabarwal, making Mahesh Bhatt their mama. Err, make that their estranged mama since the Bhatts and the Sabarwals were renowned to be not on speaking terms.

Recently, when Suneel and Dharmesh’s  father passed away, the mourners at the chautha (prayer meeting) were many including Juhi Chawla and Raveena  Tandon. Uncle Mukesh Bhatt stood with the family while the word that went out was, Mahesh Bhatt is so unforgiving, he kept away even during his brother-in-law’s death. But Mahesh is a quiet operator. When he heard that his brother-in-law had passed away, he went straight to the cremation ground and stood with his two nephews. He later explained, “I went to the funeral because there was an animosity in our relationship with the nephews. I went there, met the boys, felt a certain amount of emotion for them and came away. But when they asked me to come for the chautha I said, no, it’s a public event. I don’t want to be a part of it, it doesn’t draw me in.”

In true Mahesh Bhatt manner, he not only stayed away from the chautha (he never ever attends any) but also announced to everybody at his brother-in-law’s funeral, “I told all of them, none of you are invited for my funeral, stay away!” A deadly silence followed, we presume.
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Sunday, August 19, 2007

New Semester

We just began our fall semester and there are lots of exciting things happening. First, I get to teach genetics in our brand new technology building. Lots of new equipment to learn and more keeps on coming. New books as well! I switched over to Griffith et al's book, Modern Genetic Analysis (9th edition). I am not sure all my students will be able to handle it but I am hoping the clear illustrations and engaging writing grab them.

In biology, we switched to Campbell et al's Biology: concepts and connections after several tries to get away from the more encyclopedic texts that seemed to intimidate our students. Personally I found myself handicapped by the smaller texts since they typically leave out the sorts of examples that I like to use.

Oh and our college now has a Second Life island. Not much there yet but I am ready-complete with office, or at least a prototype office. Looks a lot like my RL office but the aim is to have this be to offices like telephone booths are to Dr. Who's space ship.

The views and door are from my RL office. Here is a peek inside:

the office

Oh! Are You Food???

I do love insects that come pre macro'd so to speak. This lady was on my porch railing and she was just a tad over 4 inches not counting the raptorial front legs.

Oh! Are you food?

Clicking on the image will take you to my flickr case you want to get a bit more intimate with her.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Well bummer...

The latest entry on Poetry Thursday says that the blog is going to cease operation at the end of August. This is too bad, but it does get hard to maintain a popular site such as that one. I wish Liz and Dana luck. I have met lots of great poets on the their blog and I will miss it. Liz and Dana provided a safe space to write and a chance to meet lots of wonderful poets.

All is not lost; there is a move to resurrect the idea under another name, hopefully with Liz and Dana's blessing.

In Wildness...

Yesterday driving to Doug's
I saw how the soybeans
Were so enriched green it was erotic
Like my eyes were hands laid
Upon your Jewel.

Then there was the corn,
Each ear at exactly the height
To be picked by some machine
Rumbling under a billboard that says:
Food from farms, not big Pharma.

The farmer is at least rotating
Corn with legumes with weeds.
But never enough time between
For anything to go native,
Let alone remember what wild was.

The past is said to be a foreign country.
O what hope is there for me
So lost in the present?
What hope for this weed lost
Among the stalks of the corn.

This poem coalesced in response to a brief prompt at a writer's workshop at school this week. The prompt was something about the past being a foreign country, but I forgot to write the actual quote down. The images and observations about corn and soybeans and the sign for the poem had been rattling around in my brain since the weekend when we went to visit a friend, Doug Patterson (AKA "The Gambling Geek").

I am not a luddite, and the point of the poem at one level is that people fear biotechnology "Big Pharma" and yet when we do something as mundane as grow crops we alter the evolution of the plants. For instance we select plants that are best suited for harvesting by machine. What we do, of course, makes the plants less and less suitable for more natural environments including unmechanized agriculture. So not only are we becoming more dependent on technology, but we are forcing the biosphere into a similar sort of dependence- forcing other creatures to specialize along with us.

Maybe that is inevitable but we ought to go into this sort of change with our eyes open as to the risks as well as the benefits. Are we getting ourselves as a species into an evolutionary trap that will doom us should there be some lapse in technology?

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Roses in Second Life...

Made with sculptypaint. Each rose is 2 prims, one for the rose and one for the stem. The vase is one prim made by torturing a sphere. So the whole arrangement is 9 prims. Maybe a bit excessive, but I am still learning to manipulate sculpted prims.

High summer is here and the warm
Annual grasses spider across the earth.
Sedums in the garden wilt.
You have to be a master gardener here
My neighbor said today at market.
We talked of worms
Wrapping her red bud in brown webs
Just a week after spraying.
The eggs were there I said
Or laid just after the chemical
Had broken down.
Kansas webworms waving
Under their palace of threads.

I pull the annual grasses from my beds
But save the Datura which wander
From year to year.
These are my plants, leaves blue
In the thick stemmed August days.
The flowers are white dresses
Worn freely in the night,
Only a surprise flash of cotton
In the rising sun.
But more buds swell greedily
Await their turns to be worn
In the August night,
More buds swollen in the invisible hand
Of persistence.

Commentary. This is the third poem that I have written over my life a poet about Datura. I am not sure why the fascination with this plant. I guess because it is so surprising. Seeing the plant in the day, flowers shriveled one might not guess just how wonderful its night blooming flowers are. I still remember the first time I saw this plant in New Mexico. We had been traveling a poorly marked dirt road and ended up winding down a steep canyon. As I came around a bend in the shadows there was this plant full of these wonderful pure white flowers. I guessed Datura, and realized that we had been driving by lots of these plants. Only the flowers were shriveled in the sun.

Sometimes we make a big deal of persistence. It is one of those American half truths. If you are persistent you can do anything or realize your dreams. Well the truth is many times you can't. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be persistent. I am not a fatalist after all. Instead the point of the poem in part is that persistence really is no big deal-it is part of our Darwinian legacy. After all, do you have any genes that were contributed by organisms who were not your direct ancestors? Granted, new forms of genes and new genes arise like buds and are passed on if persistent enough in a metaphorical sense. But these arise from mutations in genetic material passed from generation to generation. There are even so called immortal genes involved in critical biological processes which are basically unchanged, persisting today in all organisms from deep sea vent Archea, to starfish, Datura and humans. Persistence then is not always heroic, but happens quietly at a very basic level.

Indeed DNA as noted by Brenda Maddox in her biography of Rosalind Franklin "reverses the tendency of matter to become disordered and allows new molecules to be the same as the old." True, this is the persistence from which all other forms of persistence are derived from. And yet note, just as the Datura opportunistically self sow (wander from year to year), the persistence embodied in the fidelity of the DNA copying process also makes possible the natural selection of mutations best suited for particular environments. So persistence and change, opportunism if you will, are each required for the other to happen.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

The Globe Theatre and a Second Life Coincidence

Last night I decided to do some prowling around Second Life and realized that I had not spent much time exploring literature in Second Life. Since I write poetry I entered poetry in the SL search engine. One of the entries was for the Globe Theatre so I decided to take a look.

If you have Second Life installed on your machine, most links will be Second Life URLs, called "SLURLS". These call up a map of Second Life and if the SL client is installed, to teleport to the location. Click the images to see larger versions to get some sense of the immersive quality of this sim.

The Globe Theatre is a nice mock up of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre complete with stage and scaffolding so that you can sit in any of the levels. I can't judge the accuracy of the details, and there isn't any offal on the floor as I suspect was the case for the original.

Globe Theatre

The entry to the theatre...

An advertisement for an obscure play...

Globe theatre in Second Life-advert for an obscure play

A shot of the second level showing the seats. By the way the cushions are scripted and are very polite...

View from the stage...

The theatre is part of a larger SL literature themed sim run by a group called SLiterary (website and events). The sim includes rental spaces for writers and other artists as well as several coffee houses including this one which periodically has poetry readings and competitions that you can enter online. Now that Second Life has voice, this may turn out to be a fun thing to try.

Here you can dine on sushi: virtual sushi that is.

Sushi in Second Life

The sim isn't all serious. For example here is a whimsical tableau of a group of aliens jump starting their flying saucer from a couple of batteries, called "Greenie's Jumpstart. This object has over 100 prims. In comparison, Simeon's Home in Carmine is a 512 square meter plot with a 120 prim limit.

Greenie's Jump Start

While exploring the sim, I bumped into resident Calliope Delgado who graciously showed me around and explained about how renting space in the sim works.

meeting a friend

Turns out she is not only from Lawrence Kansas, but I also know her in RL. We didn't make the connection until after she had checked out this blog.

So a very happy coincidence indeed!

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

A Summer Lull

I haven't been posting or reading much this summer. Sometimes the brain just needs to do other things or be quiet. So aside from teaching and gardening I have been on hold for a bit blog wise. My main online activity has been getting a bit more into Second Life since my school is planning to get an Island. That doesn't mean I haven't been taking in some real life.

One routine we have in the summer is spending Saturday morning at the Lawrence Farmer's Market. I believe this is one of the best markets around and there is always something new. This week the Free State Fly Fishers had a booth. Now I don't fish, but I was fascinated by the flies and fly making equipment they had available.

Here are the members of the club...

fly making equipment...

fly making equipment

and some flies...

some flies

My son fishes and I actually think his fishing style is suited to fly fishing. But he figures he would get his line tangled all the time. He may be right but I did steer him toward these jolly fishers. So we will see.

By the way, the Free State Fly Fishers have web site with an appropriately Kansas logo, so hop (or flop) on over for a visit at:


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Crave: Morning-After Makeup Bag

Chelsea Kaplan / July 25, 2008

When he wakes up next to you tomorrow morning, you don’t want his first reaction to be “Damn! Who the hell let Alice Cooper into my bedroom?”. To emerge looking fresh as a daisy (even if you feel anything but) the morning after, pack your purse with these touch-up essentials. In no time flat, you’ll transform yourself from strung-out Kate Moss to her glowier, dewier alter-ego.

1. Sephora’s Pretty Minty
Banish dragon breath with these teeny tiny yet totally powerful (and sugar-free) breath fresheners. They’re housed in a cute little tin whose lid conceals a mirror, preventing you from having to go all MacGyver in order to get a peek at your much-improved reflection. [$2, Sephora]2. Psssssst Volume + Color Instant Spray Shampoo
If your scalp’s just begging for some vinegar and salad greens, a spray or two of this dry shampoo will eradicate all that nasty oil. [$7.99,]

3. Nickel Morning After Rescue Gel
Like a venti triple-shot for your skin, slather on this fast-absorbing, soothing salve to wake up your face, restore radiance and softness, and provide a temporary de-puffing fix (so don’t skip your “Saw ex with his new Swedish girlfriend” eye bags). [$40,]

4. Clean Hair Fragrance
Nothing’s worse than hair and clothes that reek of stale beer and Marlboros. A few spritzes of this not-just-for hair odor-masker will replace your existing Eau de Dive Bar scent with a subtle, shower-fresh fragrance. [$39,]

5. Revlon Eye Makeup Eraser Pen
You can’t wash away last night’s sins, but with a few swipes of this handy makeup remover-soaked pen, you can erase last night’s mascara, eyeliner and shadow. [$8.49,]

6. Tarte Natural Beauty Cheek Stain
Apply this smudge-proof rosy stain to lips and cheeks to fake a “Really, I wake up orgasmically gorgeous every morning, darling!” flush. [$28,]


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Rihanna’s Bumps And Bruises Speak For Themselves

Amelia McDonell-Parry / February 20, 2009

I don’t even know what to say about this photo, leaked by someone within the LAPD (sparking an internal investigation) and obtained by TMZ. Sickening.

After thinking about it, and seeing the first comment in the post, I decided to put the full image after the jump. My rationale is that this photo has been leaked and it’s now everywhere, from Perez Hilton to the cover of my morning newspaper. It’s a story we’ve been covering on the site, and while it certainly brings up issues about privacy, Rihanna is also a public figure, one many women and girls look up to. Seeing it is going to be unavoidable, so I’ve decided to give Frisky readers a forum to talk about it, including whether the leaking/posting of this photo upsets you.


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How To Go Casual With Summertime Sexy

Leonora Epstein / July 12, 2010

American Apparel may be going bankrupt, but recently the retailer’s new styles have been right on the money. Take, for example, this simple jersey tank dress with a sexy scooped back. Our minds are racing with a myriad of ways to use and wear this item. Beach cover-up? Comfy nightgown, perhaps? Trying going risqué with the look: pair the dress with a fun-colored bra that peeks out the back. Or go hipster-retro with spandex biker shorts underneath. Convinced? We’re already planning our AA lunch break shopping trip.


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TV Station Staffed By Fully Veiled Women Launches In Egypt

Jessica Wakeman / July 31, 2012
  • A new TV station called Maria recently debuted in Egypt which employs and is run by women who wear the face-covering niqab veil. Journalism students say they couldn’t find jobs in television, even ones where they would not appear on camera, because they are covered except for their eyes. Maria launched on July 20 and airs four hours a day on parent channel Al-Omma. So far it is all volunteer-run. [CNN]
  • Companies with women on their boards outperformed similarly-sized companies by 26 percent, according to a study by Credit Suisse. [Think Progress]
  • Artist Marina Abramovic is holding a women-only lecure at the Melton 2012 music festival in London, which will be entitled “The Spirt In Any Condition Does Not Burn.” Although she hasn’t explained what the lecture will be about or why it will be women-only, she has indicated it may be about exploring femininity. [Huffington Post]
  • Why have teen pregnancy rates dropped? [Slate]
  • New study looks at the wage gap between women and men in the workplace. [New York Times]
  • “Women and children first”? That’s actually been a myth, according to a new study of ship disasters. [U.S. News & World Reports]
  • Why does Food & Wine’s ‘Best New Chefs’ list keep snubbing women? [The Jane Dough]
  • Thelma Glass, who helped organize the Alabama bus boycott after the incident with Rosa Parks, died last week at age 96. Glass was a professor of geology at Alabama State University. [New York Times]

  • A Saudi Arabian judo fighter (called a judoka) will be allowed to perform wearing a special form of headscarf that the Olympics’ committee has deemed safe for competition. [Seattle Times]
  • A judge in Namibia has ruled that three HIV+ women were sterilized without their informed consent. [CNN]
  • County Cork in Ireland is honoring Mother Jones, a labor rights activist and feminist, on the 175th anniversary of her birthday. The liberal magazine Mother Jones in America is named after her. [Irish Central]
  • Buried in this story about online dating in China is this nugget about “Unwanted Girls,” or unmarried, educated women over age 27. [Raw Story]
  • Irish novelist and journalist  Maeve Binchy died yesterday at age 72. [Telegraph UK]
See a story that belongs in Today’s Lady News? Send it to me at Follow me on Twitter and Tumblr.


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Posts tagged "brad pitt"

Hot Links: Jennifer Aniston Insists She Is Not Feuding With Brangelina

Jennifer Aniston tells the latest issue of InStyle that the biggest misconception about her is that she’s still involved in some sort of love triangle (with ex Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) and that there’s a feud between them. [theBERRY]
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. If you’re not in a “real” relationshi…

Amelia McDonell-Parry / February 6, 2012

Evening Quickies: Newt Gingrich Wants To Schtup Angelina Jolie

… at least that’s why I assume Newt Gingrich said he would like to be portrayed on film by Brad Pitt. Because they sure as hell don’t look a damn thing alike. [Newser]
Gwyneth Paltrow says she had an ex-boyfriend who used to cheat on her “all the time.” Uh oh. Was she…

Jessica Wakeman / February 1, 2012

Brad Pitt Discusses The Likelihood He’ll Marry Angelina Jolie

“We’d actually like to … and it seems to mean more and more to our kids. We made this declaration some time ago that we weren’t going to do it till everyone can. But I don’t think we’ll be able to hold out. It means so much to my kids, and they ask a lot.

Rachel Krause / January 26, 2012

The Future Jolie-Pitt Acting Troupe?

When asked by E! if he envisioned the Jolie-Pitt brood becoming Hollywood royalty like their parents, Jon Voight didn’t hesitate in his answer:
“I do actually … I don’t want to say, but I have a feeling that they will. I have no doubt … Hollywood should be afraid of them. These guys are really…

Rachel Krause / January 19, 2012

Brad Pitt And Angelina Jolie Go To The White House

Yes, Brad and Angelina are Hollywood royalty, but it looks to me like they might just have some political connections as well. The gorgeous couple stopped by the White House this week, while in town for the D.C. fête of Angelina’s new film, In the Land of Blood and Honey. Apparently, Obama extended the invitatio…

Rachel Krause / January 13, 2012

The Good, The Bad & The Meh At The Palm Springs Film Festival

This weekend, the 23rd Annual Palm Springs International Film Festival Awards Gala was held, honoring actors like Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Michelle Williams, Jessica Chastain, Octavia Spencer, and Glenn Close. But were their outfits as laudable? Let’s find out!

Amelia McDonell-Parry / January 9, 2012

24 Rare & Retro Photos Of Celebs

The folks over at theBERRY have kind of an epic gallery of rare celeb photos, including the four above. By the looks of that photo of Jude Law, he and I both shopped at Wet Seal during the early ’90s. Oh, and there is an even better photo of Brad Pitt photo at the link,…

Amelia McDonell-Parry / December 15, 2011

8 “Wait, They Dated?!” Former Celeb Couples

I pride myself on my vast knowledge of celebrities, particularly their love lives. Ever since my grandmother handed me a tattered issue of The National Enquirer as a young lass and affectionately called it “The Trash,” celebrity gossip has been my guilty pleasure. So, I’m always more than a little surprised when I find out…

Amelia McDonell-Parry / December 2, 2011

Angelina Jolie’s Naughty Side Belongs To Brad

“I’m still a bad girl. I still have that side of me. It’s just in its place now. … It belongs to Brad.”
Angelina Jolie’s public image may have settled down, but she’s still got a wild side reserved for Brad Pitt’s eyes only. I find this sentiment super hot and romantic because…

Amelia McDonell-Parry / November 23, 2011

7 Crucial Pre-Marriage Questions (That These Celeb Brides Failed To Ask)

I definitely don’t consider myself an expert on marriage, but by virtue of being a semi-expert on celebrity marriages — with an emphasis in “rumors surrounding the cause of their demise” — I have learned some valuable lessons about matrimony. For example, part of figuring out your compatibility in the long-term with your potential spouse requires asking…

Amelia McDonell-Parry / November 1, 2011

Stars Who Started In Horror Movies

Some of today’s biggest stars had some seriously scary starts — by kicking off their careers with horror movies!
Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin Bacon, Jamie Lee Curtis, Goerge Clooney and more all had early roles battling Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, vicious furballs, creepy serial killers and, in Jennifer Aniston’s case, even evil leprechauns.
Looking for a scary flick to watch this Halloween? Check…

TooFab / October 30, 2011

Adam Levine’s Missing Torso & 12 Other Guys Who’ve Suffered At The Hands Of Photoshop

Photoshop is usually used as a weapon of mass destruction on perfectly lovely and natural photographs of female stars — but even men have not escaped the wrath of an overeager art department dork with a mouse! Just look at poor Adam Levine in Vogue Russia! Either he had a few ribs removed or Photosho…

Amelia McDonell-Parry / October 19, 2011

15 Celebs Couples Biking Together

The couple that bikes together, stays together? Perhaps not with 100 percent assurance, but most of these 15 celebs couples prove that going for a spin outside may just help your relationship go the distance!

Amelia McDonell-Parry / September 27, 2011

Don’t Worry, Brad Pitt Hates Baseball

“It’s shameful how little I know about baseball … I’m amazed they let me do this movie. Baseball and I didn’t get along that well. I wrestled one year [in high school]. I dove one year. Everything but baseball.”
Brad Pitt talks to Sports Illustrated about his new movie, “Moneyball” (which opens this weekend), the…

Kate Torgovnick/ / September 24, 2011

Brad Pitt Says Life With Jennifer Aniston Wasn’t “Interesting” [UPDATED!]

“I spent the ‘90s trying to hide out, trying to duck the full celebrity cacophony. I started to get sick of myself sitting on a couch, holding a joint, hiding out. It started feeling pathetic. It became very clear to me that I was intent on trying to find a movie about an interesting life,…

Amelia McDonell-Parry / September 16, 2011

Celine Dion’s Burglar Draws Bath, Eats Food From Her Fridge

I’m pretty fascinated by the tale of the 36-year-old man who broke into Celine Dion’s house in Montreal. The dude apparently got in the house by jumping a fence, opening an unlocked car door, and rummaging for a garage door opener. (Note to Celine: Always lock your car doors, lady. Seriously.) Interestingly, this guy didn’t…

Kate Torgovnick/ / September 8, 2011

Brad Pitt Thinks Angelina Jolie’s Script Is “Not That Bad”

“I had the flu. I had to be quarantined from the children for two days. I was in the attic of a house in France. I was isolated, pacing. I don’t watch TV and I wasn’t reading anything. So I started writing. I went from the beginning to the end. I didn’t know any other…

Kate Torgovnick/ / August 31, 2011

10 Suggested Names For Brad Pitt’s New Hairdo

The lovely Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill are on the latest cover of New York magazine, talking about their movie “Moneyball” that opens on September 23rd. Brad looked kinda sexy on the cover—sort of a reversion to his “Legends of the Fall” self. However, inside, I was deeply troubled with this image. What the heck…

Kate Torgovnick/ / August 23, 2011

Maddox Jolie-Pitt: Movie Star?

Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith aren’t the only parents in town who can turn their oldest son into an action star before his 12th birthday. Apparently, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have the same path in mind for Maddox Jolie-Pitt. Brad has apparently named Maddox for the lead role in “Battling Boy,” his production company’s adaptatio…

Kate Torgovnick/ / August 16, 2011

New Book Reveals Intimate Details On Jennifer & Brad Pitt’s Split

Nowadays, things have been looking up for Jennifer Aniston in the love department. She’s been dating Justin Theroux for a little while now, going on vacations and what not, and things seem to be going pretty good for the both of them.

Of course, about six years ago, in the midst of discovering her… / August 14, 2011
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 Accommodation

The Full Moon, Lower Rudge, Frome, Somerset BA11 2QF

Email: info@thefullmoon.co.uk

Tel: 01373  830936

Family room

From  £89.00

Single occupancy

From  £65.00

Family room (sleeps 3)

From  £99

Family room (sleeps 4)

From  £135

Cot hire

All rooms have  en-suite showers (one family room has a bathroom instead), WiFi, tea/coffee making facilities, LCD TV with FreeView, DVD player, iron, ironing board &  hairdryer.

Tariffs  All prices are per room per night and include breakfast.

The Full Moon has eighteen en-suite bedrooms altogether, five in the main building and the rest in the courtyard cottages. We have three family rooms, and several of our double rooms can take a z-bed for children.  Two rooms are wheel chair accessible.

Twin roon with wheelchair access
Standard double room


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Air Date: Thursday, December 10, 2009
Time Slot: 8:30 PM-9:00 PM EST on NBC
Episode Title: (#212) "CHRISTMAS SCANDAL"
[NOTE: The following article is a press release issued by the aforementioned network and/or company. Any errors, typos, etc. are attributed to the original author. The release is reproduced solely for the dissemination of the enclosed information.]

12/10/2009 (08:30PM - 09:00PM) (Thursday) : LESLIE BECOMES THE CENTER OF A HOLIDAY SCANDAL-- LOUIS C.K. ("LUCKY LOUIE") GUEST STARS-Leslie (Amy Poehler) designs the Pawnee Winter Wonderland Festival, but has to hide from the press when a meeting with a disgraced Councilman lands her in the middle of a sex scandal. Meanwhile, Ron (Nick Offerman) offers to cover for Leslie for the day, and quickly discovers how much work she really does. Aziz Ansari, Rashida Jones, Aubrey Plaza and Chris Pratt also star.

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[11/06/12 - 10:43 AM]
TBS and TNT Rank as Basic Cable's Top 2 Entertainment Networks in Primetime Among Key Adult Demos
Turner spins the numbers for the week of October 29-November 4.

[10/02/12 - 12:30 PM]
truTV Ready to Turn Up the Heat this Winter After Scoring Best Third Quarter Ever in Key Demos
Among the newcomers: "Killer Karaoke," now premiering premiering Friday, November 23.

[04/30/12 - 12:32 PM]
truTV Goes "Bigger, Bolder and Broader" with Original Programming Slate
"Killer Karaoke," "Guinness World Records Gone Wild," "Hardcore Pawn: Fort Bragg" and "Container Wars" are due later this year.

[04/10/12 - 11:15 PM]
Q1 in Review/Q2 in Preview: TBS, TLC, TNT, truTV, TV Land, USA & VH1
A look at what's ahead on the cable channels, plus a recap of their ratings to date this year.

[12/14/11 - 08:58 AM]
truTV Scores Best Year Ever with Young Adults and Men as Median Age Drops to Youngest Ever
truTV spins the numbers for the year to date.

[07/26/11 - 11:14 AM]
"The Closer" and "Rizzoli & Isles" Lead the Charge as Basic Cable's Top Scripted Shows for the Week
Turner spins the numbers for the week of July 18-24.

[07/19/11 - 10:44 AM]
"The Closer" Ranks as Basic Cable's #1 Scripted Program for the Week
Turner spins the numbers for the week of July 11-17.

7/17/11 - 12/17/12
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Out of sight

An exhibition of photographs chronicling 20th-century Europe tells a familiar story - but their real power lies in what they leave hidden, says Adrian Searle
Untitled, by Ed van der Elsken
Seeing double ... Untitled, by the Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken PR

'A camera is inert, innocent and amoral," writes Martin Harrison, pithily, in the catalogue to the Barbican art gallery's exhibition In the Face of History: European Photographers in the 20th Century. He adds that the camera is also "a witness to nothing, other than the scene in front of its operator at the time he or she releases the shutter". Which is to say that people, rather than cameras, take photographs, and that the photographer is always implicated in the image, even if he or she never strays in front of the lens.

Nor, it seems to me, is the viewer a mere bystander, watching from the wings. Whenever we find ourselves caught up in the scene the photographer puts before us, whenever we start telling ourselves a story and concocting a past and a future for this mysteriously arrested slice of reality, we implicate ourselves. This exhibition is but one more attempt to tell a story about both photography and the century itself. The story concerns photographs and the situations of the people who take them; it concerns aesthetics as well as the things, the people and places photographers have either chosen or have been compelled, for one reason or another, to record. History is inescapable.

Some of the images in the exhibition of 22 photographers will be familiar, even if we don't remember quite where we saw them last, or in what context. Some I have known for so long that they have become muddled with events I remember having witnessed or experienced. It seems to me that I have known Eugène Atget's Paris almost all my adult life - all those half-familiar shopfronts and balconies and cobbled courtyards, peopled by characters from Zola and by translucent ghosts, the aberrant juddering doubles and human smears who moved too fast for the chemicals on Atget's photographic plates.

Other ghosts populate Cafe Lehmitz, the end-of-the-world bar near the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, where the Swedish photographer Anders Petersen hung out at the end of the 1960s. The place feels inevitable, a terminus for lost souls. There is always a bar like this somewhere, either in one's dreams or in one's nightmares little wonder Tom Waits borrowed one of Petersen's images for the cover of his Rain Dogs album). Cafe Lehmitz remains Petersen's best known work, just as Petersen's mentor, Christer Strömholm, will always be identified with his photographs of the glamorous transsexuals of Place Blanche, in northern Paris, around 1960.

If, like painting, photography holds up a mirror to the world, it is a mirror that has always been broken. Photographs are nothing but shards. A prison wall, a proud hunter with a deer he has shot, a baby, a yellow star sewn on a jacket, an aerial shot of a couple having sex in a flat landscape, a close-up of a begrimed miner in Silesia, a farmer smoking: we may feel that photographs capture a world entire but they are always figments and fragments, however iconic they may become. And if, like the smiling whores in some of Brassaï's photographs, we feel as though we've seen it all, how come we are never satisfied, and always want to look again? What more do we hope to see?

Between 1968 and 1975, the Ukrainian Boris Mikhailov took every random sighting of the colour red as his subject: red flags at party marches, a red skirt, a red bra being removed, a red carnation in a conscript's hand, red sunburn, red armbands and a red boil that has burst on a woman's thigh. From these random flashes of red, a world begins to coalesce. Tease any thread and the world unravels.

Like a long interrogation, or a painful psychoanalysis, the works gathered here take us over much of the same old material, the same old ground we always traverse whenever we think of the history of photography in the 20th century. It is as though we were searching for a break: the flaw, the way in, the final explanation. But there isn't one, and history will never give us a break.

Henryk Ross's scenes inside the Lodz ghetto will always be terrible, their unexpected moments of humour and happiness making the story even more bleak. The grinding entropy of Emmy Andriesse's photographs of the 1944-45 "Hunger Winter" in Amsterdam has nothing to offer but more of the same: the uniformed, top-hatted gravedigger will always be there waiting, the wool balled in his hand, biding his time. The boy fishing at Arnhem in 1945 will always be scouring the bank for a worm, the river running beyond him swollen with reflections of ruin and devastation.

In the Face of History aims to concentrate on the photographer's proximity to his or her subject. In fact, the curators talk of each of the photographers here as engaged "philosophically and emotionally, in an act of self-portraiture". I am not sure this gets us very far, although there are portraits of relationships, communities and whole cities here, as well as of individuals, things, places. Seiichi Furuya photographed his Austrian partner, Christine Gössler, throughout their relationship, up until her suicide after years of mental illness. But I don't know what I see beyond the surface, the moments of calm, happiness, apprehensiveness and melancholy. Nor can I tell very much about Annelies Strba's familial relationships, even after watching her long, three-carousel slideshow - though I like to imagine a story. Inta Ruka gives her intimate photographs of rural life in Latvia long, descriptive titles, but one is never certain what is true and what the photographer has invented.

Some photographers here, such as SI Witkiewicz (or "Witkacy"), made all sorts of melodramatic, sometimes silly and or spooky-seeming portraits and self-portraits, but they reveal little about the man, over and above the obvious. Witkiewicz was a painter, dramatist, critic, theoretician and philosopher as well as an amateur photographer. On learning that he committed suicide the day after Soviet troops invaded eastern Poland in 1939, it is hard to resist reading his work backwards, and seeing in it all sorts of intimations of personal as well as national fragility.

Whether or not we think of ourselves as such, almost everyone today is an amateur photographer. The point is not to take one great or circumstantially telling individual photograph - such accidents happen all the time - but to create something more. If Josef Sudek had taken only one intriguing photograph of a tree, seen through the window of his Prague studio, it wouldn't detain us for long. That Sudek went on taking photograph after photograph of the same subject deserves our attention rather more. Often, the tree is more or less obscured. Rain runs down the window, the glass is fogged by condensation or ice. Serial photographs of the same view, the same tree with the brickwork and railings beyond, and beyond that a street on whose far side are more buildings, more windows. It is relentless. Perhaps the tree itself matters less than the fall of the light in the ramshackle room where the photographer spends his days. For a long time, Sudek was best known for his panoramic views of Prague, but his real panorama was this studio, the desk with its avalanches of paper, a landscape on the sill with broken eggshells. The mess of inconsequential things and the narrow view out of the window reared up at him as though all of it had urgent significance.

What matters here is the cumulative as much as the individual shot - even when, as in Chris Killip's black-and-white images of the north-east of England in the 1970s and 80s, almost every image appears iconic. His photograph of the detritus of a street party on the day of Charles and Diana's wedding - the paper plates, the abandoned sandwiches and sausage rolls, the poster on the wall and the wilting balloons - says everything.

The absence of people is most telling of all. It is as though they have walked out in protest or disgust.

Almost none of Michael Schmidt's photographs aim for this kind of status, except as a record of things the eye has seen. Thawing snow in the street, sallow light, stretches of weeds and waste ground, a face, wallpaper or a shower curtain: the things Schmidt photographs often appear random or meaningless. Taken together, they become a fugue.

Not long after he had started wandering his native Berlin with a borrowed camera, Schmidt joined a club for amateur photographers. He observed of his fellow hobbyists: "When I took pictures of rain, it looked like rain. When they took pictures of it, it looked like glass pearls." Knowing that rain is rain, and not pearls, is important. It's one historical fact we can be certain of.

· In the Face of History: European Photographers of the 20th Century is at the Barbican, London EC2, until January 28. Details: 020-7638 8891