Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Could Fukushima Be Lurking In Your Fish Tin? ? Pets. Safety ...

There is growing evidence that thousands of tons of cooling water dumped into the ocean after the Fukushima disaster are having an impact on fish life:

?The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that?s still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the US and Japanese governments.

Previously, smaller fish and plankton were found with elevated levels of radiation in Japanese waters after a magnitude-nine earthquake in March 2011 triggered a tsunami that badly?damaged the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors.?

The risk is posed by microscopic radioactive particles washed out of the reactor with the cooling water. These particles can be absorbed by plankton and other microscopic sea creatures. Tuna is carnivorous fish and can concentrate radioactivity by ingesting smaller fish. It is also a very fast-swimming fish and can reach the coast of USA within months.

Although the Government is dismissing the concerns, I think those consuming a lot of tuna should consider using other fish species, like sardines. Radioactive particles tend to accumulate further up the food chain, and humans are on top of it.

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Tags: diet, education, environment, fish, Fukushima, nature, news, photo, radioactivity, safery, science, tuna

About Dr Vadim Chelom

Dr Vadim Chelom is a Registered Veterinarian, a writer and an educator

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Talking to Your Loved One About In Home Care Part 2











In Talking to Your Loved One About In Home Care Part 1, we discussed a number of key things to consider when approaching the subject of assisted living or in-home care with a loved one who needs it. The beginning of this process -- and possibly the most important initial steps -- include educating yourself about senior care and discussing the idea with other family members first. In this installment of the series we'll detail 5 more steps in the process of talking to your loved one about in home care.

Make the Object of the Discussion Known

Once you've collected all of the relevant information and discussed the idea with other family members, it's time to mention the idea to your loved one. The best way to do this is to not "beat around the bush," and just let your family member know what you'd like to talk about. Asking for a discussion without telling them the subject will probably only serve to stress or irritate them, so do them the courtesy of being forthwith in your request:

"I'd like to talk to you about getting a little help for you/us around here." "I was thinking that we could have someone come in to lend a hand with things." "We should talk about getting a little assistance with your daily care."

Even if the idea isn't warmly received right away, your loved one will appreciate you being up-front about the issue, and letting them know what you want to talk about in advance will give them some time to think about it.

Set a specific time for the discussion

This is important because it's the beginning of a commitment process; first a commitment to the talk, then a commitment to think about it, and hopefully a commitment to try in-home care. Make sure you let your loved one know that you value your time and theirs by setting a time and expectation for the conversation.

Allow a Natural Exchange

A natural dialogue is critical if you expect to make positive progress. State a point, be brief with it, and let your family member respond. Even if their mental state doesn't appear to you to warrant such an exchange, you need to allow for it, as this is an important discussion. The more your loved one feels that they are being empowered to make a healthy, independent decision to get a little assistance, the more likely it is that they'll agree to try it.

Don't Force It

Unfortunately, some of our elders may see in home care as a loss of independence and might be naturally resistant to it. Forcing the issue is only going to make things worse. Be patient. Listen to what they have to say and try to put yourself in their situation.

Try again

Ultimately, in home care, senior care and/or assisted living can help to improve the quality of life of everyone in your family involved in providing care for your loved one. So if they're not receptive to the idea right away, give it some time and try again. Patience and understanding will go much farther than trying to rapidly make such an important change.

To learn more and to get an immediate consultation about care for your family member, contact a professional in home care provider now. They can help you develop a solution for your family that will have you all living a better quality of life.

Click here for an immediate consultation from our Pittsburgh Senior Care firm; a member of the Comfort Keepers agency. Click here for the original source of this article: http://www.pittsburghseniorcare.org/talking-to-your-loved-one-about-in-home-care-part-2/

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A Third Party Review of A Sandy Clough Tea | Sandy Utah Homes

A Sandy Clough Tea is a business company which is located in Powder Springs, Georgia, the United States of America. A Sandy Clough Tea is on offer of specialty and foods in the category of gourmet food pr drinks. Available also are crystal or china giftware. Sandy Clough, known in international circles as an artist and an author, founded the A Sandy Clough Tea together with Rick Clough. The businesses enterprise is aimed at making you not miss the most satisfying time with the family while building a business for yourself. Ladies are encouraged by the company to make friends and establish friendships in the presence o f a cup of tea.

The system of compensation is a multi0level while the pay plan is based on a single level or is said to be unilevel. The strategy for sales is the party plan. The company is allowing its representatives to do business from home with convenience for both the agent and customers in mind.

The business company has on its inventory several types of wares suitable for the drinking of tea.

The transactions are usually undertaken while there is a serving of tea. This is why, one of the reasons, the company is known for its products for tea servings. The company is an artist driven. Flavored tea is sold through wholesale or direct selling.

Sandy Clough personally is making the designs of the several products the company are selling. These products are promoted and sold through the famous home tea parties. The taste for tea is used in combination with the potential of a minimal income with a business opportunity.

Family values are the beliefs of the Clough couple as well as the belief of a free enterprise business system. The tea ladies, the independent agents of the company, are trained personally or through correspondence or email on Biblical principles.

The company business is centered on the value of a family. The home tea party settings are used to promote the ideals of the business targeted at women as females are the guardian of family values in a home. Earning a modest amount of income is possible for ladies who have all the time satisfactorily devoted for the family and at the same enjoying a business with potentially a good source of income for the whole family. The company indeed is offering business opportunity for ladies who are centered in the protection of family values.

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Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Discussing Sci-Fi Storytelling & World Building with Writer Jon ...

by Brandon Lee Tenney
May 21, 2012

Prometheus is coming. It's merely weeks away. And to say my hopes are interstellar-ly high would still, somehow, be an understatement. Thankfully in this interim before I get to soak my brain in Ridley Scott's latest sci-fi odyssey, I've had something in my back pocket to get me by, that today, with this article, I'm going to share. It's a taste of the very beginnings of Prometheus from the man in the very engine room of the ship itself. Screenwriter Jon Spaihts speaks more clearly and deftly about writing than almost anyone I've heard. He's the credited writer of The Darkest Hour and co-credited with Damon Lindelof on Prometheus, but it's his unproduced sci-fi work for which he's most known and for which he has become so sought after.

One of his unproduced scripts, Shadow 19, is a big, bold sci-fi head-trip that toys with the basest notion of man versus self versus nature while exploring a side of teleportation that no other film has even attempted to traverse. And then there's Passengers. Passengers is one of the best scripts I've ever read. It's beautiful. It's simple and complex at once. It's the story of a man who's awoken too early from suspended animation in the middle of a 120+ year interstellar journey. He's alone. But it's his decision whether or not to awaken another for company that sets this story apart. The small, laser-focused character story, the relationship drama of that moral dilemma, set in relief against the huge, sci-fi spectacle is awe inspiring.

That's what Jon Spaihts does best. He creates worlds. Worlds we haven't seen before or have only seen in passing, but haven't yet truly explored. He builds environments for his characters to inhabit that mean just as much as the characters themselves. When we first sat down to discuss Prometheus and his science fiction work, it's that knack for world building and set-up that I was most curious about. So, to kick things off in our discussion, I asked Jon just where he starts his stories when a new story needs starting. Let's begin:

When you are ready to write something, do you look at characters first or do you look at the world you are writing in? (When you are creating a new story.)

Jon: It's a good question. And I think, for me at least, a story is never born the same way twice. But if I had to guess the form the process most often takes, it would be that I begin with a predicament. And almost instantly that predicament calls into being a character who answers that predicament appropriately.

In Shadow 19, a soldier sends essentially clones of himself on a suicide mission again and again, each clone knowing a little bit more, having trained a little bit more, armed a little bit better, until finally one of those clones completes the mission and comes home again, which was never supposed to happen. The character you need to send into that predicament must be a superlative soldier, because that's the virtue on the basis of which he's been called, and he must be arrogant and unwounded, untouched, a perfect solider so that in this crucible, this hell world to which he's sending copies of himself, he is humbled, he is broken, he is wounded, he becomes wiser and comes home a better man than he left.

So, to some extent, the predicament dictates the character. In Passengers, a colony ship is flying to another world on a 120-year voyage and 30 years in, while everyone else is sleeping in suspended animation, one man wakes up too soon. And he's got to live out his life alone on this ship and die of old age before they arrive at their destination. What kind of man should that be? That guy needs to be the fellow who struggles a little bit with his own feelings so that the experience of isolation and solitude bear on him and sort of force him to become a philosopher over time. But he can't begin a philosopher, or he wouldn't have a sufficiently difficult time.

He needs to have a yen in his heart for love so that his isolation weighs on him so that he will go and seek love, which leads to the moral crisis of the film. And he should be a guy who will try to fix his predicament technically and fail. He needs to try to get out of his problem and be unable to, which boxes him into his moral dilemma. So he's a mechanic, but not at a gifted starship-building level. He's not a nuclear physicist or a rocket scientist. He is just a mechanic. So he's got a shot of improving his lot in some ways. And maybe, if everything breaks right, at saving his life somehow. But it won't be easy. His tool set is insufficient to the task. And so he's far outside his comfort zone.

And there again, I feel like the kind of guy that hero needed to be was called for, summoned out, really, of thin air by the predicament itself.

He'd have to be someone who's willing to leave earth behind, too.

Jon: Right, exactly. He's got to be somebody who'd go get on a colony ship, leaving his entire life behind so that everyone he knows will age into old age and die before he arrives. It's a grand kind of geographical suicide. And it takes some kind of break, some kind of... more than an impulse. Some real need and a yearning to lead someone to such breaks. And yet, people have done it all the time. In older days of immigration, many people from poor families in Europe came to the United States for the first time. They came a long ship's journey that took every penny they had, with no prayer that they would ever be able to afford the journey home or that any of their relatives would follow.

They might receive a few letters, but many of those early immigrants from poor families were essentially committing suicide out of their own world to be reborn in a new world. And that impulse fascinated me. And it becomes a through line of Passengers. And that's the feedback cycle that, if you tap into it the right way, will deeply enrich your story. The predicament gives birth to a protagonist. Your protagonist character then informs a story. And if you just map the predicament without giving thought to that character, you come up with a certain scaffold. But following that character's heart, that character's bliss, that character's fear and flaws through the course of the story, you generally come up with surprising events and shapes you didn't expect when you were first outlining your technical predicaments. The two things interweave in a really beautiful way if you've got the balance right.

I think no matter how dazzling a cinematic background you lay behind a story, you are only going to invest to the extent that you connect to the characters you are watching. There are three motives of story that matter: having something that you hope for, having something that you fear, or having a burning question that you need answered. Any one of them is sufficient. If you can have more than one of them running at one time, or all three?you can be afraid of one thing and fearful of another and desperate to understand some mystery that's been dangled in front of you, then you are maximally engaged, all three motors running.

Lacking those three motors, what you've got is idle curiosity. "What's going to happen next? And now what's going to happen?" And idle curiosity is a very weak form of engagement. I guess you can sprinkle a little salt on that if you are putting a technological spectacle in front of the audience where they say, "Well, what can they do now? Now what can they do?" And you sort of see planets cracking in half and things transforming into robots, and what have you.

But you bleed for a story when you see someone striving to rescue someone they love, or someone making a horrified realization that they are not who they thought they were, or that they have to make a devastating moral choice. You get into a story when it shows you a horrible new fate that can befall someone. And suddenly, a hero you've come to know is fleeing a kind of fate you never imagined before. That's investment, where you are given things to hope for, things to fear, things to wonder at.

The other thing science fiction gives you is the emotional correlative. We all experience the daily events of life rather cataclysmically. We're fired from our jobs, we get dumped by someone we love, we chase some dream and it falls into our hands, we kiss someone we've had a crush on for a long time, something irreplaceable breaks. These experiences we have, we experience cataclysmically. It's as if one thousand-foot chasms opened up in front of us or colossal tidal waves crush us and the moon fell from the sky. We feel like that. We feel transformed into monsters.

And science fiction allows you to externalize those commonplace emotional experiences, those commonplace emotional extremes with comparatively extreme macro events; the world can reflect your internal experiences proportionally. And I think that's what science fiction does when you are doing it best.

I don't mean to jump into discussing Prometheus too early because this is such a great topic. But I asked Jon, because the way he is describing it is perfection in designing a script. But I wonder, with Prometheus, did the world come first? Did he have to say, "We exist in this Alien universe. How do we build around it?" Or did you go into it with that predicament and those motors first. And obviously, I don't want to ask what it was specifically, because we'll eventually find out...

Jon: The universe of Alien comes with rules of two kinds. It has a certain technical lure, which has become canonical and was very well known by large population of fans. So you have to play according to those rules. It also comes with narrative archetypes. You can't return to that world and do a musical comedy, or a western, or a straight detective story, because what's the point? The world contains not only trappings of science fiction, but trappings of narrative. There are archetypes, dualities.

In the universe of Alien, you look hard at the duality between humanity and the beast. You look hard at the duality between humanity and artificial man, the android. And that duality is always present in an Alien film. You look hard at the duality between humanity and the corporation. And that duality is always present, that rift. I think those forces need to be active in any story you tell in the Alien universe or you are breaking the franchise.

So without tipping my hand about the nature of the dilemmas that called the characters forth, there definitely was a landscape of narrative that was kind of binding. There was going to be a corporation. There was going to be artificial humanity. There was going to be an alien menace. And there was going to be remote interstellar travel. There are also things that I think are hallmarks of Ridley's seminal first Alien film that you want to pay homage to in any film that returns that that universe.

I think the story properly told in that universe, the menaces should be few in number but very terrible. The world should be dark and claustrophobic, and there should be many shadows and hiding places. You should be removed and isolated with no hope that help will come. You should be confronted by a sense not just of menace, but an ancient menace of stories set in motion long before your arrival that are bigger than you. I think all of those are qualities of that first film that it was very important to me to honor going forward, or in this case, going back.

So, from his answers so far we have the very seed of Spaihts' worlds: the predicament that calls forth the characters most?and, at first, least?suited to deal with that particular predicament, which then leads to the motors of placing those characters in situations where they will, if done correctly, hope for one thing while fearing another all while attempting to answer a burning, fathomless question. (Continues below.)

Michael Fassbender in Prometheus

What, then, does Spaihts look to for his inspiration? What is the world inside his head populated with so that he can then populate the worlds before our eyes? And what about the world of science fiction (and movies) in general: what has changed? How is it evolving? Will we see more "space operas" again?

Jon: Well, the stuff that is most evocative for me is the science fiction that I was reading when I was a kid, which was the postwar short fiction and Cold War short fiction that was written in a world still trembling from the aftermath of WWII and the Cold War that followed.

And in that time we saw one of the most monumental depictions ever of humanity's ability to be utterly inhuman to other human beings. The possibility of genocide at an industrial or planetary scale. We saw atomic bombs used in war, weapons of mass destruction that beggared the imagination. And then we saw even greater weapons tested. The hydrogen bomb became real and two vast super powers scrawling over the globe, arming themselves with these weapons, and the possibility of destroying our entire planet became not just believable but real.

And, at the same time, the space race began in a technological push that was inextricably tied up with the arms race between the Soviet Union and the US. We put men on the moon and looked outward at Mars and the prospect of space travel became grippingly real at the same time. And Star Trek is born in that era. So, there was this incredible tension in the psyche of every thinker in the world between the yawning abyss that had just opened up, the possibility of real destruction, real evil, civilization ending cataclysms. It put the end of the world in everybody's mind. And, at the same time, this infinitely beckoning of possibility of outward flight, new worlds, infinite future was opening up.

So we felt the pull in both directions. And I think it created vast science fiction. I think the science fiction of that era remains some of the most powerful that's ever been written. Since then, we've become less macrocosmic.

Unfortunately.

Jon: Yeah. We went through John Varley to William Gibson and Neal Stephenson; we looked inward. We looked inward at hacking the body, inward at hacking the brain. We dove into cyberspace. We got into the micro rather than the macro. We tunneled down into the code, into the dysgenic spiral, into the cells. And there are great questions there of identity, of the soul, of what's biological real, what the nature of humanity is precisely. But we lose the scale of the space opera that preceded it.

I suppose what I am striving toward is a revival of the scale of the space opera in the light of all these newer developments. So I don't want to lose cyber punk and I don't want to lose web head thinking. I don't want to lose hacking the body and all of the rich questions those things bring. But I want to bring back the macrocosmic space opera with high concept driving that story.

Is there a certain amount of hope in space opera as well?

Jon: Yes. It has that techno-optimism.

Something like Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is all about that hope of new life and discovery, but the insidious nature of the unknown. And that's what space opera is, and that's what I've been missing. And it's so refreshing and wonderful to hear that want to revive it.

Jon: When you look at Rendezvous with Rama, you see a tremendous tale of hope. Here's the work of a civilization far greater than ours capable of manufacturing artificial worlds and sustaining life in one way or another for eons between the stars, and are presumably engaged in travel and colonization of new worlds.

And, at the same time, the spacecraft explored in Rendezvous with Rama is utterly alien, and unknowable, and unfamiliar, and therefore frightening. It existed on a scale that suggests terrifying things about its creators.

Just in its potency makes it plain that there is, or at least was, some race of beings out there that could swat us like fruit flies, against whom our best tricks would be the tricks of children. And that's terrifying. Even if they are benevolent, that's terrifying.

Not to get too off topic, but at the end of that book, what's so powerful is that they could swat us away like flies, but they don't even care to.

Jon: Yeah, we are literally flies.

They don't even... we think they are here for us. But we're just another blip for them. They're going somewhere else we can't even know...

Jon: And we just crawl around like bugs on their spacecraft for a pinprick of time and disappear again. We're not even a glitch in the program.

Is that more terrifying? I mean, I think so.

Jon: The great fear and great dream of science fiction is that we long to be significant. The Matrix?fantastic high concept science fiction?and the horror in The Matrix is of office-cubicle insignificance of a rat race of anonymity, of being lost in the hum of modern life somewhere in an office building, in a cubicle, facing a laptop; you are nobody. And then, of course, the great fantasy of The Matrix is rising to upmost significance, to world altering messianic significance. What if you were not just someone, but "the one"?

He's referenced some amazing works, both on the page and screen so far. But so then how does he tackle the unknown in writing sci-fi? (The unknown being such an important part of the Alien franchise, after all.) I next asked Jon specifically: "How do you display... how do you make your readers and then potentially the audience in the theater, feel the unknown if it is in fact the unknown?"

Jon: Well, in many ways I think the less said the better when you are walking in those fields. If you want to scare people, you do so more effectively with the implied than with the shown, very often, in the same way that a noise in the dark is frightening because it engages the imagination. An incomplete story or a thing incompletely shown more readily begets fear, terror, and a sense of granger.

So you use the tools of cinema and storytelling to set the scale of events. You show them a vast space. You give them a great noise. You let someone speak about terrifying ideas, colossal spans of time; things that are not necessarily big spatially or temporally, but can be big in their significance. The ability to make blasphemous alterations in the human essence, the human spirit, the human body. Those are horrific things. The ability to alter your memories, your soul, your character, your nature, to hack inside your head, to tamper with the input of your senses?those are terrifying things.

You set that stage and then you signify what's happening in a way that allows the imagination of the audiences to complete the experience. And you don't over tell, you don't over show.

So, then, how does one know what to show? And when one knows what to show, how does one avoid or build upon what others have already shown? Can science fiction avoid repetition anymore? Should it?

Jon: It's a split answer because one utterly true answer is that you can't. No one does. It's all been done before. There's nothing new under the sun. I do believe that's true. You can find some parallel to anything in some other work. But what people object to is not some fanatic resonance with another work or some literary parallel with another storybook film. What people object to is the sense in their gut and the visceral feeling that we've been here before, that this is just that place again; a kind of d?j? vu.

And that, I think, is mostly a danger when there is a confluence of cues lined up together to feel like you are looking at a scene you've looked at before. That means not just a similar chain of events in a similar rule set, but also treated with a similar style, maybe framed in a similar language, maybe even lit or colored or musically backed the same way. When a filmmaker is consciously or unconsciously leaning hard on specific material, the audience can smell that. If you're just seeing similar patterns emerge in storytelling, it's sort of mythical resonance, and that's in the nature of storytelling itself.

The trick is to be alert... I think really the unconscious quotation is really more dangerous than the conscious. The critical thing is to audit yourself always for inadvertent borrowing, because that's where you are going to get in trouble?when something comes to you naturally and you feel ownership of it because it's down in your bones, and you fail to realize that it came to you because someone gave it to you one, or five, or ten years ago, and it lives in your subconscious now. And that is a tricky process.

Everybody's heard stories of a songwriter who wrote a brilliant tune and then had a friend tell them that that was a Sinatra song, you asshole. As storytellers, we are subject to that same pitfall all the time. All you can do is be alert, try to be awake to it.

That's the delicate ground Spaihts walked on while writing Prometheus and then, later, while working with Damon Lindelof and Ridley Scott to actually see the movie to fruition. But Prometheus is not just another Alien film. It's of its own accord, called by its own name for a reason. Jon Spaihts is hyper-aware of that. And, well, after talking with him?and hopefully after reading what he said, above, you do too?I trust him explicitly. Is it?June 8th, yet? Why the hell does it even matter, then?!

We'll find out all the answers in just a few more weeks. Thanks for reading this discussion of worldbuilding, science fiction, and, really, screenwriting craft with writer Jon Spaihts. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed discussing with Jon. Look out for more coverage of Prometheus and, specifically, more from our in-depth conversation with Jon Spaihts in the coming weeks. Yes, there's more! You'll want to read all about his breakdown of just what the Alien franchise means to us today, the archetype of the android throughout sci-fi film and literature, and just how this journey with Ridley Scott all got started. Then,?of course,?once you've read all that, look for Prometheus in theaters June 8th. Unless you plan on entering?hyper-sleep between now and then. But careful, I hear the process still has a few bugs to work out.

Explore tags: Editorials, Featured, Interviews, SciFi

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Wednesday, May 16, 2012

2 Days Left To Comment to FCC About Ham Radio Usage In ...

FCC logoTo all my friends and readers who use amateur (ham) radio, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is seeking comment on the use of Amateur Radio in emergency communications such as disaster response.

THE DEADLINE FOR COMMENT IS TOMORROW - May 17, 2012.

As the FCC public notice states:

the Federal Communications Commission?s (FCC or Commission) Wireless Telecommunications Bureau and Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau seek comment on the uses and capabilities of Amateur Radio Service communications in emergencies and disaster relief. As set forth below, comment is sought on issues relating to the importance of emergency Amateur Radio Service communications and on impediments to enhanced Amateur Radio Service communications. Stakeholder entities and organizations, including the Amateur Radio, emergency response, and disaster communications communities, are particularly encouraged to submit comments.

The public notice goes on to pose a series of questions around the importance of amateur radio in emergency communications - and a series of questions around the impediments to enhanced amateur radio communications.

Later in the document it explains the filing process, including the manner in which comments can be filed electronically over the Internet.

I'm not a ham radio user myself, although I've always had an interest but just never made the cycles to go through the process. I have, though, seen the incredible use that has been made of ham radio in emergency situations.

If any of you have opinions on the questions raised by the FCC, they'd like to hear from you!


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Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Kids Birthday Parties | The Next Family

By: John Jericiau

It?s been twenty-four hours and my ears are still ringing. I have a headache and I feel like my body has been through extreme boot camp. Did I just complete a triathlon? Nope! Did I just climb Mount Whitney? ?No, I just survived another birthday party.

Devin and Dylan are in two separate preschool classes, each with 20 or so classmates. Throw in a sibling or two for each of those classmates, and you?re looking at a birthday party every weekend! And that?s exactly what we?ve been doing! Private homes, public parks, indoor gyms, outdoor venues, movie theaters, and bowling alleys ? you name it and we?ve been there.

Don?t get me wrong ? most of the birthday parties are valiant attempts at a good time. The hosts of the party are the haggard, stressed-out looking adults with smiles on their faces that quickly go south at the first fight, spill, or injury. They?ve tried their best to have a range of activities, food, and prizes for the kids, while keeping the adults in the party comfortable, fed, and feeling stress-free for at least these two short hours of their day. Best-case scenario would be for the parents to be there physically but able to detach mentally. You want to make the parents who are present happy, because you are fully aware that at some point in the year they will be trying their best to make you happy too. As you look around a party you see some parents enjoying each other?s company as if they?re at a cocktail party munching on hors d?ouevres, while others are alone in a quiet corner curled up in a ball, trying to regain some sanity before their kid becomes their responsibility again.

Yesterday?s party was another good attempt at a fun time, but it was not for me. Even I was excited to go since it was at a place we?d never been, hosted by parents I really like, and celebrating the birthday of one of Devin?s closest friends as well as his younger sister, who Dylan really likes. I knew almost everyone there, it required very little travel time, and I was hungry by the 11:30am start time. The boys were in really good moods, and they looked sharp in their outfits.

Within the first half hour of the party I found myself making a mental note of the things I don?t like about kids? birthday celebrations, since this one happened to have most of them. In no particular order, these include:

THE NOISE
I have never stepped foot in an insane asylum, but if I did, I?m pretty sure it would sound like this party. How can little mouths produce such big noises? You don?t realize just how loud the rumble is inside the place until you try to talk to someone next to you, use the phone, or call out to your child who has selective hearing anyway. The loudness of the children is only momentarily taken over by the shriek of a parent yelling across the room for their child to stop pummeling their classmate. You?re almost startled by the silence when you escape inside the restroom.

THE FIGHTING
Do these kids actually get along at school? Are they really friends? Most of them are not playing ? they?re surviving! Fists are flown and toys are thrown. No one wants to share the mini roller coaster, and the box full of plastic balls ? the one that?s meant for them to sink into like quicksand ? becomes ground zero for an epic battle of the boys. Parents just naturally rotate at officiating these battles, depending on who is the closest. The curled up parents get a pass.

THE FOOD
I?ve learned that the only thing kids eat is gooey pizza from wherever delivers, and the only thing they drink is juice from an envelope that each parent must learn to pierce with a sharp straw that can also be used as a weapon in the fighting described above. Yes, most hosts provide sliced and diced fruit to fill in the spaces on the table around the pizza and drinks, but most of the fruit ends up on the plates of the adults, since it feels so good to eat fruit without having to prepare it ourselves. Besides the fruit, the parents find themselves eating things we never ever eat outside of birthday parties, such as circular pita bread sandwiches or cold cut croissants. Of course, most of us get our calories from finishing the slice of pizza abandoned by our child. We just can?t let food go to waste, no matter how bad it is?

THE PI?ATA
I?m not sure who made this a staple of the birthday party, but it?s a bad idea. More often than not the child swinging the weapon (I mean stick) trying to chop in half their favorite action figure or Nickelodeon character (and then will go home and mimic this with their younger sibling) has no clue how dangerously close they are getting to the face of the spectating children. More often than not a child will wander in the path of the swinging stick, while the parents freeze in fear and cringe until the inevitable happens. Finally the pi?ata will mercifully split, and out pours thousands of pieces of amphetamines and uppers (I mean candy and chocolate) that will never be divided evenly and will evoke more of the above-mentioned fighting and noise.

Don?t even get me started on the goodie bag, the cake, or the bacteria-laden cesspool of toys. I?m going to refrain from talking about the condition of the available restroom. Anyway, I really don?t have the time. I?ve got to get the invitations out for Devin?s birthday party.

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For women in the workplace, it's still about looks

Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks to students at Dhaka International School.

By Eve Tahmincioglu

For women and their careers, it?s often not about what they do but how they look. More proof of that came last week.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made headlines around the world not for anything she did but because she appeared without makeup on a trip to Bangladesh.

?Hillary Clinton addresses ?au naturale? liberation,? said?political blog The Drudge Report, while trend site Styleite.com declared that Clinton ?just wants to be normal and do things like wear her hair in a scrunchie, party with her girlfriendsand go out without a stitch of makeup.?

The kicker was England?s Daily Mail, which said Clinton?s moment?sans makeup?made her look ?tired and withdrawn.?

Similarly former News International CEO?Rebekah Brooks?drew angry comments Friday not just for her role in a phone hacking scandal but for her appearance, especially her curly red hair, when she testified before a British government inquiry led by Lord Justice Leveson.

AFP/Getty Images

Former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks, testifies at the Leveson Inquiry.

Here are some of the popular Brooks tweets for the day:

  • A?date?for?your?diary?/?Rebekah?Brooks,?at?the?inquiry?/?Hair?and temperament,?fiery?/?Words,?liary
  • Rebekah?Brooks. We get it. You have lots of curly red hair, but wearing Orphan Annie's dress to the Leveson hearing? Seriously?

There?s even a Facebook page dedicated to Brooks' hair, called Rebekah Brook's hair is so big because it's full of secrets.

It goes to show that no matter how high up in business or politics a woman gets ??or how hard she falls ? in the end the focus is often about how she looks and not what she does.

?We?re still held to a double standard,? said Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who produced the 2011 documentary ?Miss Representation??about the underrepresentation of women in powerful positions.

?It?s tragic,? she said. ?We have an obsession with women?s looks. Unfortunately our culture has bought into this whole double standard that a women?s value is her beauty not her capacity to lead.?

The Look: Hillary Clinton doesn't care if you see her without makeup

Women certainly feel the pressure to look good. Nearly half of women don?t feel good about themselves unless they?re wearing makeup, according to a study released this year by the Renfrew Center Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on eating disorder research and treatment.

The online study, conducted by Harris Interactive for Renfrew, polled nearly 1,300 adult women and found 44 percent "have negative feelings when they are not wearing makeup," including feeling self-conscious, unattractive or that something is missing. Only 3 percent said going without makeup made them feel more attractive.

?Wearing makeup to enhance one?s appearance is normal in our society and often a rite of passage for young women,? said Adrienne Ressler, national training director for Renfrew and a body image expert. ?There is concern, however, when makeup no longer becomes a tool for enhancement but rather a security blanket that conceals negative feelings about one?s self-image and self-esteem.?

Many women trying to climb the ladder of success believe they need to enhance their looks or face career doom.

?This goes to the heart of what we still see in the work world today,? said Nancy Mellard, general counsel for business services company CBIZ, which offers a program to?develop of women professionals through focused leadership, mentoring and networking. ?Whether you?re coming up the career path or at the height of your career like Clinton, we still see women, certainly more than men, judged on appearance not accomplishments.?

While blatant discrimination in the workplace is less common than it was 20 years ago, she said, there are still subtle biases that may be hardest to combat.

TODAY Style: Kathie Lee, Hoda dare to bare (their faces)

One study sponsored by the Women?s Media Center and She Should Run,?a group advocating for more women in public leadership, found that sexist comments about female candidates, including critiques on appearance, lead voters to question how effective they would be.

Often the people bashing how women look are other women. ?We?re some of the worst,? Mellard said.

Newsom agreed. ?It speaks to our own insecurities. We are complicit and have also bought into this, and the only way to change things is for women to start seeing each other more as sisters and supporting, not judging each other.?

TODAY's Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb have nothing to hide. The co-hosts bare it all and wear no makeup on the show. See who else is exposed without makeup.

Judging each other based on looks, however, is a reality we all have to face because there?s a "beauty benefit" for men as well as women in the workplace.

?Research by economists has shown that ?beautiful people?, both men and women, have higher pay than less attractive people, holding constant many other factors about the individuals,? said Anne York, associate professor of economics at Meredith College?s School of Business. ?So it really does pay for everyone to look good for work.?

?In the case of Hillary Clinton, though, it was quite ridiculous to me that when she went with a natural face, which millions of men do every day, that it made the news with close-up photos of her face," she added. " While her appearance made a lot of news, I don?t think that is necessarily bad if it can start a conversation on accepting more women with a natural appearance.?

Of course, men can?fall victim to image-bashing as well.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg?s hoodie has been a hot topic on social media lately. But unlike attacks on Clinton?s face or Brooks? hair, there?s little fear hoodiegate will undermine the main power base in the business world today ? rich white guys.

Related:

Have you and your spouse ever competed for the same job??

Facebook IPO pits Wall Street suits against the hoodie

Are women still judged by their looks in the workplace?

?

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AMD reveals Trinity specs, claims to beat Intel on price, multimedia, gaming

AMD reveals Trinity specs, claims to beat Intel on price, multimedia, gaming

Itching for the details of AMD's latest Accelerated Processing Units (APUs)? Then get ready to scratch: Trinity has arrived and, as of today, it's ready to start powering the next generation of low-power ultra-portables, laptops and desktops that, erm, don't run Intel. The new architecture boasts up to double the performance-per-watt of last year's immensely popular Llano APUs, with improved "discrete-class" integrated graphics and without added to the burden on battery life. How is that possible? By how much will Trinity-equipped devices beat Intel on price? And will it play Crysis: Warhead? Read on to find out.

Continue reading AMD reveals Trinity specs, claims to beat Intel on price, multimedia, gaming

AMD reveals Trinity specs, claims to beat Intel on price, multimedia, gaming originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 May 2012 00:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Must See HDTV (May 14th - 20th)

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This week we're completely overrun by season finales -- if there's a winter show that you watch that is still airing, it's a safe bet that it will be wrapping up its run this week. Check after the break break for the dates and times on those as well as NBA and NHL playoffs action plus Blu-ray and videogame releases (we couldn't ignore Diablo 3), but there's just one finale we're highlighting this week.

Community
Even with the good news that NBC has ordered up (at least) 13 more episodes for next season, we'll be sad to see Greendale's study group leave for the summer. Season three wraps up Thursday night with an oddly disjointed three episode finale broken up by 30 Rock in the middle. While the only thing we know for sure is that they're never doing paintball again, it seems certain the finale will include healthy amounts of Officer Chang, a doppleDeaner, the appearance of Evil Troy, Jeff and Abed, and possibly a return trip to the Dreamatorium.
(May 17th, 8, 9 & 9:30PM, NBC)

Continue reading Must See HDTV (May 14th - 20th)

Must See HDTV (May 14th - 20th) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 May 2012 18:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Monday, May 14, 2012

Data Killer turns hard drives into blank slates with the push of a button (video)

Image

Let's say you're embroiled in an international tale of espionage and intrigue, and you've got hard drives filled with incriminating evidence and top secret information. You could dispose of that potentially dangerous data by manually wiping each disk with multiple passes of a disk erasing app or, you could pop them in the Data Killer and be done with it in seconds. Platform of Japan demonstrated the information obliterating devices at the Information Security Expo. A large powerful magnet realigns the bits on the surface of the drive's platters eliminating all trace of the data that existed before, without physically damaging the hardware. With just the push of a button a Data Killer can wipe practically any magnetic media, including tapes or an aging floppy disk. The data disposals even come in different sizes, allowing you to kill just a single 3.5-inch disk or up to 14 at a time. The larger models can even accept an intact laptop. Check out the video after the break to see it in action.

Continue reading Data Killer turns hard drives into blank slates with the push of a button (video)

Data Killer turns hard drives into blank slates with the push of a button (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 May 2012 10:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tyson Beckford Sex Tape: On the Way?


An alleged Tyson Beckford sex tape said to feature male supermodel enjoying himself is being shopped around the adult entertainment community, insiders say.

What does the purported porn of the amateur variety contain?

The seller insists the 45-minute tape shows the former Polo model pleasuring himself during a recent Internet video chat with a female model.

Seriously ... that's according to the seller.

Tyson Beckford Photo

During the hot chat session, Tyson Beckford supposedly makes references to some of the movies he's appeared in, and talks about some of his co-stars.

He also says his pet peeve is being mistaken for Tyrese Gibson. That we believe.

A rep for Beckford says his camp has not seen the footage and will not release any statement until they can view the material being shopped around.

Slow year for these things so far. Other celebrity sex tape stars in the news in recent months? Hulk Hogan, John Edwards, Gordon Ramsay and 2Pac.

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