Where Gallic cuisine—including a whole bunch of fine charcuterie

If there’s a stretch of pavement that more perfectly fits a certain image of the city than the 8900 block of Sunset, I don’t know it. In this neon-accented jumble of shop fronts and nightspots you can consult a psychic, acquire a spray-on tan, rent a two-tone convertible Rolls-Royce, and bask in a face-melting guitar solo at the Whisky. Step off the sidewalk into Gorge, a snug restaurant that opened in September, and you can also eat some extremely good head cheese that is nothing like the pimento-studded stuff you might get from the deli counter. Chef Elia Aboumrad fashions her fromage de tête by simmering pork heads for six hours, letting them cool before covering the flesh morsels with their own broth, and allowing them to set. Spread over a piece of warm baguette, the head cheese releases a hint of fresh tarragon that harmonizes with the broad meaty notes.

Charcuterie is of the moment. Asking whether a restaurant cures its own bacon is a question that can elicit a kind of you-poor-schmuck smile from the waiter. Of course it does—and salumi, cervelat, and testa. Among today’s commercial kitchens, the lodestar is the smokehouse of yesteryear. Well after 2011’s $600 multitome Modernist Cuisine made its splash, chefs are still pawing through Jane Grigson’s 1967 classic,dry cabinet Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, for inspiration. Sure, there’s some trend chasing going on, but for a lot of kitchens charcuterie is almost the antidote to the celebrity-chef movement, in which you must be photogenic, capable of owning the room like Oprah, and versed in turning a mass of ingredients—chosen at random by TV producers, if you’re playing the game right—into a tweetable trophy. Charcuterie isn’t flashy. Constructed out of view days if not weeks in advance, it’s about tradition and craft and the integrity of the raw ingredients. To gussy it up is to ruin it. I admire that bravado—you’re confident with what you have, and you slice it.

Aboumrad practices a decidedly old-school version of what is already an old-school art. Born in Mexico City, the 29-year-old uses hog—not synthetic—casings. She shuns nitrates and punches up the saucisson with patient aging instead of heavy-handed seasonings. The freshest of her dry links, perfumed with garlic and Basque piment d’Espelette, is so creamy, it is reminiscent of the best bologna. The driest—a classic salami she tweaks with red wine and ginger, aging it six weeks—is chewy and intense. Between them is a sausage she ages for a month and spices by grinding the giant peppercorns grown in her grandparents’ native Lebanon.

Apart from the occasional waitress and a kitchen hand, the only other staffers are Aboumrad’s husband, Darius Allyn—he’s the beverage director—and her business partner, Uyen Nguyen, pastry chef by day and manager by night. As restaurants go, this is about as personal as you can get. Yet Aboumrad and Nguyen, whose family escaped Vietnam when she was a child, keep wide of calling attention to their own back stories. The women met at the Len?tre cooking school in Paris. Later Aboumrad apprenticed at the original L’Atelier de Jo?l Robuchon and made such an impression that after two years she was named the opening sous-chef at Robuchon’s MGM Grand location in Las Vegas. Nguyen (who grew up in the O.C.) followed her to the desert, crafting pastry at Le Cirque and Guy Savoy. It was Aboumrad’s gig overseeing the dining ops at THEhotel at Mandalay Bay that introduced her to Allyn, who was in charge of the wine program at the hotel’s Aureole restaurant.

Having fled one debauched Strip, they’ve set up shop on another, with a restaurant that seems thoroughly antithetical to its surroundings. In this low-key space a refrigerated case of sausage by the doorway passes as a showy touch. The hunter green walls are adorned with original 18th-century French tapestries Aboumrad borrowed from her mother, but she and Nguyen stained the Home Depot wainscoting themselves. Arrayed below a pressed-tin ceiling, basic Windsor chairs cluster around saloon tables, and a metal counter reflects an overhead rack that holds knobby French goblets—hardy receptacles that are all the prettier filled with a cool draft of the Pasadena-brewed Craftsman Oktoberfest ale they keep on tap.

Given the nature of the place, the restaurant’s name might seem weird, telegraphing sybaritic abandon, but it’s actually a nod to the trio’s Nevada days: “à la gorge,” which means “to the throat,” is what Robuchon’s kitchen staff would exclaim when things got wild (and apparently what Napoleonic troops shouted as they mounted a charge). Pronounce it as you will. Gorge isn’t about eating yourself silly; it’s about paying tribute to a painstakingly understated—and single-minded—craft. The ethos extends to Saturday brunch, a bighearted selection that includes br?léed bananas Foster tossed over oatmeal but is most visible in the one-page dinner menu, which bears Gallic classics like frisée salad, Toulouse-style sausage, and St.Wide range of unique crystal mosaic and natural stone mosaic tiles. Honoré dessert. Wine suggestions run alongside the food on the left, while cider and craft beer pairings appear on the right. On the back is a map of France indicating the provenance of what’s being poured. The signals are there; still, it would be a mistake to categorize Gorge as a mere wine bar.

Tall woman who sports a black chef’s jacket, Aboumrad works in a tight kitchen dominated by a big, old meat grinder. At each turn her approach to charcuterie displays a remarkable eye for detail.The stone mosaic series is a grand collection of coordinating Travertine mosaics and listellos. The rabbit rillettes and the chicken paté are ostensibly similar selections—a pair of spreadable numbers in single-serve containers. That’s where the similarities end. The rabbits are poached in olive oil for 48 hours, a top layer of pearly duck fat added to the ramekin before cooling. For the paté, Aboumrad caramelizes the chicken livers with onions. In order to keep the mousse slightly grainy, however,Welcome to the premier industrial source for Custom IInjection Mold Plastics in New York. she refrains from passing the ingredients through a tamis, or silk screen: That way the texture lends the dish a rustic character, while the finishing layer of rich, melted Plugrá butter nudges the flavors toward delicate and refined, drawing out the tawny port that has gone into the mix.

This skill at shifting between high and low tones is a tip of the cap to Robuchon. The opening of the first L’Atelier in Paris in 2002 was a way for the hyper-punctilious legend to release the culinary id by acknowledging how kitchen crews had always eaten in private. But Aboumrad is sensitive enough to avoid falling into parody. With the Cornish hen entrée she uses a splash of lima (the compact yellow Mexican lime) to jolt the pan juices. For the oyster mousse she smokes the bivalves over hickory wood. It’s decidedly haute until she crowns the deep-flavored custard with trembling beef gelée—the yield from hours of simmering—which brings matters back to earth with its cuisine bourgeoise cues.

If there’s an example of how elusive that contrast can be, it would be the vegetable terrine. Dainty as the dish is, with various shades of green imparted by leeks and asparagus, it doesn’t add up to much. And the jellied beef broth that trembled on the oyster mousse one night was on another occasion so rubbery, I could have bounced it across Sunset and hit the Hustler store. As slipups go, these are slight, but consistency is especially crucial here. We’re talking about a plucky restaurant that has plopped itself down in an unlikely location in order to mine a subsection of French cuisine.

Aboumrad is no mere classicist; she has a sense of playfulness, too. The chef dresses the frisée salad in a warm mustard vinaigrette and drops in the requisite runny egg, but instead of tossing sizzling lardons on top, she scoops up the greens and places them over a bacon flan. Her goat cheese salad isn’t fashioned from breaded segments; the chèvre has been popped into rosemary brioche balls that, after slow proofing, are fried to order. I’m not sure a description can do the results justice. With the mackerel tartine Aboumrad bypasses the white wine-based bistro classic and poaches the fish in olive oil, a technique that highlights the richness of the flesh rather than leaving it quasipickled. Her pig’s ear tartine is a jammy reduction radiating a bouquet of gelatinous nuances that burst to the fore when you take a sip of old-vine Cairanne from the southern C?tes du Rhone, a plummy varietal with echoes of blackberries that were squished at the bottom of a picking pail. Perfect.

In keeping with the quirkiness that motivates Gorge, the classic St. Honoré pastry is the only dessert offered. Named for the patron saint of French patissiers, the fist-size tart demands a mastery of both puff and choux pastry, along with classic crèmes, and a deft hand with sugar work. It could come across as a marmoreal display of skill, but not here. Nguyen offers several variations, each a warm, lively update. The vanilla-flavored St. Honoré carries diminutive cream puffs; the pistachio one, a nutty macaron. My favorite is caramel ringed and hides a payload of cooked-down apples scented with anise and a touch of cinnamon. Where others leave the compote smooth, Nguyen’s is somewhat chunky, recalling the kind you’ve fork-pressed at home.

Classic and contemporary, self-assured and feisty—Gorge isn’t showy, but, boy, is it seductive. The duck sausage, browned and sizzling, bursts at the touch of a tine, scattering its seared hash over the mashed potatoes; you could be eating in the inglenook of a farmhouse fireplace. The pheasant paté is a straight-up master class in how far beyond meat curing the charcuterie art can go. First Aboumrad must skin the birds that she buys from Inglewood purveyor Rocker Brothers, keeping them whole to later wrap the breast strips in. From the bones and legs she produces a jus that, when reduced to the consistency of syrup, will go into the forcemeat. Chopped truffles and Trader Joe’s pecans (a nice touch) lend texture, while the caul fat she uses to line the enamel mold adds depth as it slowly renders during the two hours the paté cooks in the oven. The reward, after a few days in the fridge, is a flavor-saturated wonder that commands the taste buds. Served with a bit of potato purée and a light kale salad, the dish is a quiet statement not only about restraint and discipline but the remarkable results they can achieve.We are porcelain tiles specialists and are passionate about our product - the most durable.

Pay your bus, metro fares via mobile phones

Metro and bus commuters in Dubai will soon be able to pay for their journey using mobile phones. A senior official at the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) confirmed the service would be made available by the third quarter of this year.

Speaking with Khaleej Times, Abdulla Al Madani, CEO of Corporate Technical Support Services at RTA said: “We are working very closely with telecom providers in the UAE to roll out Nol services on mobile phones by the third quarter of this year.”

Payment by mobile phones will be made possible using the near field communication (NFC) technology. Many Android and BlackBerry smartphones sold in the UAE already have NFC chips. “We have already developed the payment model.dry cabinet To use the service, the phone should be NFC enabled and the SIM card should have the Nol application in it,” said Abdulla.Wide range of unique crystal mosaic and natural stone mosaic tiles.

Commuters with NFC-enabled mobile phones will be able to tap their phone over Nol card readers inside metro stations and public buses.

However, to use the service, a new SIM with a custom Nol application would have to be installed.

The NFC technology uses contactless communication and data exchange between digital devices using electromagnetic radio fields.

Once implemented, the project would be the first of its kind to use NFC techNology for mass transit in Dubai.

The official said: “There is not much application of NFC in real life in Dubai. It is already popular in other countries and we hope Nol on mobile cards will make it popular here also.” Exact technical details of the initiative have not yet been announced.

“We are almost ready and there are a few technical details which need to be worked out with the telecom providers,”Abdulla said. A total of 5.3 million Nol cards have been sold in Dubai since 2009 and each month 22.7 million transactions are processed.

Last year, RTA introduced a special dual-chip card in partnership with Emirates NBD. The special credit card doubles up as a Nol card and provides the benefits of two cards in one.

It would be unfortunate if electronics companies were to resist the integration of transactional data, such as geography, delayed shipments, and supplier payment terms, with master data,Welcome to the premier industrial source for Custom IInjection Mold Plastics in New York. such as supplier, customer, and inventory management. There is a great wealth of data that can be collected from search engines and marketing and advertising platforms to provide insight into consumer interest and intent.

Such data harvesting should enable more accurate demand forecasts. Adobe, Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce have been working to create platforms that not only combine internal and external data from manufacturers and suppliers, but also structured and unstructured data sources across the Internet from consumers. These unstructured sources bring in insight from social sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. Imagine making a decision to fill a bill of materials to build a smartphone or tablet based on data gleaned from likes or dislikes in social networks or the number of tweets on a specific subject in Twitter.

In 2010, I wrote about using search engines to estimate product demand. Now experts like Arvind J. Singh, co-founder and CEO of Utopia, a global data lifecycle consulting and services firm, suggest mining text and searches, as well as social comments and recommendations in unstructured data, to integrate with master data. Now companies are finding ways to harness all types of marketing data in the raw materials procurement process.

I'll resist calling the phenomenon "big-data," the collection of information from internal and external inputs, because I believe the electronics industry went though that in the early 2000s when Hewlett-Packard, Wal-Mart Stores, and Target began requiring suppliers to tag pallets with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. During the RFID boon, we heard about terabytes of raw data and how IT departments would struggle to determine what to keep or discard.

This next evolution, not revolution, introduces new silos of information. Not just customer and company data stored in CRM and ERP platforms or point-of-sale systems, but data from marketing and advertising platforms that measure sentiment and intent. It will create a better supply chain by improving component forecasts in specific geographic regions.

Integrating silos of data should come as second nature to electronics manufacturers and distributors. Even before the introduction of RFID into the supply chain, electronic components distributors expanded from the United States into Asia/Pacific as brands moved manufacturing to China, Vietnam,We are porcelain tiles specialists and are passionate about our product - the most durable. and India, looking for cheap labor and lower prices on materials. The more overseas acquisitions companies like Avnet and Arrow made,The stone mosaic series is a grand collection of coordinating Travertine mosaics and listellos. the more difficult it became to integrate enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms and inventory management systems. They had to figure out how to combine duplicate product descriptions.

Karl Rove Nazi Image Featured

The Tea Party Patriots, a well-established group within the right-wing movement,The stone mosaic series is a grand collection of coordinating Travertine mosaics and listellos. sent out the message featuring a Photoshopped image of Karl Rove in a Nazi uniform, Politico reported. The email's subject read: "Wipe the Smirk Off Karl Rove’s Face.We are porcelain tiles specialists and are passionate about our product - the most durable."

The email was sent under the name of Tea Party Patriots co-founder and national coordinator Jenny Beth Martin in a fundraising solicitation. But Jameson Cunningham, a spokesperson for the group, said it was an unfortunate accident.

"The image was a mistake which was never approved by TPP,” Cunningham told Politico.

Martin later apologized, saying a vendor was responsible for the Nazi image.

“In an email sent under the banner of Tea Party Patriots, a manufactured image of Karl Rove was added to the email which Tea Party Patriots did not know about or approve," Martin said in an emailed statement. "The image, which was added by an outside vendor, Active Engagement, was inappropriate, wrong and we have ordered them to immediately cease further use of the image.

“We apologize to Mr. Rove," Martin added. "While we may have strong disagreements with him on the future of conservatism, we want to be clear this imagery is absolutely unacceptable and are working to ensure this type of mistake doesn’t happen again.”

The email called out Rove for hating on Tea Party members and hindering their success. Rove has backed other right-wing groups,Welcome to the premier industrial source for Custom IInjection Mold Plastics in New York. such as the Conservative Victory Project, which Tea Party members have seen as a way to detract support and funds from their movement and block them from office.dry cabinet

The doctored Rove image continues the ongoing feud between Rove and the Tea Party.

“Karl Rove believes he can raise hundreds of millions of dollars,Wide range of unique crystal mosaic and natural stone mosaic tiles. crush the Tea Party movement and protect the big-government status quo in Washington from millions of freedom loving Americans. Well, he’s wrong," the email states.

Tuesday marks the fourth anniversary of the Tea Party's founding. Martin has promised to "shock the world" by raising $1 million in ten days, according to the Washington Times.

The rematch between the surging young star and the former interim champion was a highly anticipated tilt, but before fans could feel the full weight of the letdown, the UFC moved quickly to build a new co-main event for the welterweight showcase in Montreal.

As first reported by Bleacher Report's Damon Martin, "The Natural Born Killer" will now square off with contender-in-waiting Johny Hendricks. "Bigg Rigg" was originally slated to face Jake Ellenberger on the same card, but when the doors to a fight with Condit opened, Hendricks jumped at the opportunity. At the current time, Ellenberger is still without an opponent, but it appears he will still compete in Montreal next month.

The switch-up has obviously had an immediate impact on the lineup at UFC 158, but the ripple effect has the potential to ultimately shake up the entire contender's class in the 170-pound weight class.

Heading into his training camp for UFC 158, Johny Hendricks already had a chip on his shoulder. The former two-time Division I national champion wrestler had just collected his fifth consecutive victory in stunning fashion by knocking out Martin Kampmann in the first round of their tilt at UFC 154, only to see the title shot he expected to get ultimately given to Nick Diaz.

The decision was undoubtedly frustrating for the Team Takedown fighter. But rather than wait for the next opportunity to come around, Hendricks jumped immediately back into the title hunt by accepting a bout with Ellenberger. It seemed to be a risky move, putting a potential title opportunity on the line against a dangerous opponent, but Hendricks wanted to make his case for contention loud and clear.

Mainland tourist time bomb is set to blast

Public Eye is not gloating … but we told you so. We warned the glut of mainland tourists to our tiny city was a ticking time bomb. But policymakers turned a deaf ear, until the Lunar New Year, when shameful images of mainlanders being forced by crooked travel agencies to sleep in seedy guesthouses, and even in a tourist bus, drew global attention. Now th ey are all scrambling to admit things have got out of hand. It's time to admit the disadvantages now outweigh the advantages of giving easy entry to millions of mainlanders. The tensions we saw when half a million mainlanders flooded the city during the Lunar New Year was just a warning of a coming explosion. We can expect mainland visitors to swell to 50 million a year in two years' time. Even France - the world's top tourist destination - only has about 70 million annually. No other city has 1.3 billion people at its doorstep, with 300 million in southern China eligible for easy entry and within an hour's reach of Hong Kong. Officials insist it is impossible to reverse the multiple entry visas for mainlanders, but other cities limit visitor numbers by choosing the people they allow in. Our immigration officers blindly allow in mainlanders who come several times a day for questionable reasons, yet closely scrutinise those from places such as the Philippines. We need to wake up and smell the time bomb.

Security chief Lai Tung-kwok is unworried about the time bomb. He said we have had no "unpleasant incidents", despite the swelling number of mainland visitors. He has obviously forgotten about the ugly confrontations over mainlanders eating on the MTR, parallel-goods traders in Sheung Shui, and outside the Tsim Sha Tsui Dolce & Gabbana store. Our overpaid bureaucrats prefer to wait until after "unpleasant incidents" happen before they act.Compare prices and buy all brands of solar panel for home power systems and by the pallet. That's why we always say they need to beam back to earth from La la land.

Can you hear that screeching sound? It's the vultures crying for more. After having gorged themselves on the desperate plight of local mothers, some suppliers and retailers of baby milk powder are still not satisfied.Laser engravers and laser engraving machine systems and supplies to start your own lasering cutting engraving marking etching business. They have ganged up to blast government measures against parallel-goods traders, which will limit outbound travellers to two cans of milk powder, as a violation of free trade. This is how such vultures see free trade: they've jacked up infant formula prices by up to 40 per cent in the past three years to profit from the lunatic mainland demand for milk powder. They cared little that their profiteering not only squeezed local mothers financially, but made it virtually impossible for them to buy infant formula. That's not free trade, it's sickening greed. Suppliers and retailers have now promised a stable supply to local mothers. Well, it's too late. The government should stand firm against these vultures. The only reason they want the two-can limit scrapped is because they want to continue cashing in on the mainland market. Local mothers should be able to buy milk powder wherever they want,Online shopping for Cable Ties from a great selection of Lamps. whenever they want. They should not have to show the birth certificates of their babies to get a regular supply,My experience of your company has been excellent and I would happily buy mosaic tiles. as the vultures propose. The government will have hell to pay - we'll make sure of that - if it kowtows to the vultures.

The effort is underway via the Roaring Fork Broadband Coalition, which includes the Aspen Skiing Co.A ridiculously low price on this All-Purpose solar lantern by Gordon., the Pitkin County government, the town of Snowmass Village, the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority and the U.S. Forest Service.

Through its consultant, Aspen Strategy Center and its owner, Kevin Ward, the coalition has solicited proposals from firms to help deliver wireless infrastructure throughout the county.

The county first hired Ward on a $16,000 contract last year to consult on the project, which was approved by Pitkin County voters in November of 2011. In that vote, citizens allowed translator funds — which are derived from property taxes that support the county’s radio and television infrastructure — to be used to expand broadband capabilities.

SkiCo and Pitkin County unified almost immediately because both entities have similar end goals to provide robust, high-capacity broadband for their customers and citizens.

“We want all of our locals and visitors to have uninterrupted coverage regardless of location, without the inconvenience of moving to ‘hot spots’ as they do now,” reads a statement in the request for proposals by Aspen Strategy Center.

Paul Major, managing director of SkiCo’s IT department, said the goal is to improve service and data coverage on all four of the company’s mountains by opening day of next ski season. Proposals from companies specializing in building such infrastructure have been winnowed down and one will be selected by April 15. Work will be done over the summer, Major said.

SkiCo has recognized that its customers, many of whom live in metropolitan areas, expect to be connected to the rest of the world, no matter where they are.

“We think it’s a needed improvement for guest services,” Major said.

He noted that AT&T has acknowledged its gaps in service here, and recently installed small antenna systems in six locations at the bases of Aspen Mountain and Snowmass Ski Area, as well as on-mountain locales.

That technology and sites involving more towers will be part of the larger project throughout Pitkin County.

SkiCo’s project is the first phase of the overall plan. Phase two includes broadband along Castle Creek Road, the Maroon Bells parking lot, Independence Pass, the Highway 82 corridor, Highway 133 and Frying Pan Road leading to Ruedi Reservoir. It’s unclear how many towers the expanded network would require.

Brash leftist who stabilized Ecuador

Often described as charismatic and hard-working, but also brash with authoritarian tendencies, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa admits it himself: he wasn't elected to be Mr. Nice Guy.

Elected to a final, four-year term in Sunday's presidential election, Correa has brought stability to this notoriously unstable nation, which shuffled through a staggering seven presidents in 10 years before he took office in 2007.

He has become a forceful voice of Latin America's left, befriending ailing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez while leading a softer socialist "revolution" than his more radical ally.

"The characteristics of my personality are positive for Ecuadorans. I am decisive, direct, objective, rational," the US-educated economist said. "But if I don't please someone, what can we do?"

"They didn't elect me to be Mr. Nice Guy to please everybody, but to move the nation forward. And we are undoubtedly making history," said Correa, 49,Sol provides the world with high-performance solar roadway and solar street light solutions. who was constitutionally limited to this last run at the presidency.

Correa has become popular in this Andean nation of 15 million people through social programs funded with the OPEC nation's oil proceeds, and his job approval rating has soared to 80 percent.

Partial results gave him 56.7 percent of the vote -- and a roughly 30-point lead over his nearest rival, banker Guillermo Lasso -- with just over a third of ballots counted.

"People feel that there is someone steering the ship and this generates trust because it brings more work," sociologist Hernan Reyes told AFP.

"He generates trust with the level of work he delivers, the demands he has on his subordinates and the amount of finished public works," Reyes said.

Correa has insisted that he is not "anti-capitalist or anti-Yankee," stating that the left has committed the mistake of denying space to the market and capitalist economy.

But he has also antagonized big business and media groups, seizing the assets of bankers involved in corruption scandals and accusing private news organizations of conspiring to destabilize him.Welcome to Find the right laser Engraver or Laser engraver machines.

And his plans for large-scale mining have angered indigenous communities.We are designing Mold Maker and specialty tooling has been the backbone of our business since our inception.

Correa was born into a lower middle-class family in the southwestern port of Guayaquil, the country's industrial center. His father spent time in jail in the United States after he was caught carrying narcotics as a "drug mule."

He was able to study thanks to scholarships which took him to the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, before earning a doctorate's degree in economics from the University of Illinois in the United States.

He became finance minister in 2005 but was swiftly fired after three months because of his diatribes against international financial groups.

Once he became president,Looking for the Best Air purifier? he forced oil companies to renegotiate contracts in order to bring more money to state coffers. He refused to pay part of the country's external debt in 2009 because he considered it inflated.

He has also irked the United States, ending an agreement that allowed the US army to use a Pacific coast base for anti-drug operations.

In 2011, he expelled US ambassador Heather Hodges after WikiLeaks released a diplomatic cable in which the diplomat said Correa chose a corrupt general to head the police.

In another act of defiance last August, Correa granted asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at Ecuador's embassy in London.

His relations with its neighbor Colombia have also been rocky at times. In 2008, he broke off ties with Bogota for 20 months after the Colombian military attacked a Marxist FARC rebel hideout inside Ecuador.Full custom bobbleheads dolls handmade and sculpted into your likeness.

Correa faced his toughest test in September 2010, when hundreds of police officers rebelled over a new public wage law.

He even dared the police officers to kill him, opening his shirt to bare his chest at them and shouting: "If you want to kill the president, here he is, kill him!"

The officers roughed him up and he ended up in a hospital, where he was holed up until the army intervened to rescue him from the rebellious police officers.

3 generations of El Paso Art

As the first family exhibition honoring this award-winning trio, the event is remarkable not only in highlighting their work and the contributions each has made in building the local art community, but it also provides fascinating insights as to how the elements of nature and nurture combined to foster this rich artistic legacy.

The 20th century was just six years old when Fannie Palmer Thurston, her husband Thomas,Looking for the Best Air purifier? and their two sons, Eugene and Charlie, arrived in El Paso. Having been mentored by mother-in-law Emma at their home in Memphis, Tenn., Fannie – who preferred to be called Fern – quickly began sharing her talents by teaching classes in oil, watercolor and china painting.Full custom bobbleheads dolls handmade and sculpted into your likeness. She continued her own studies with highly regarded artists such as Dey de Ribcowsky, Xavier Gonzalez and Rolla Taylor.

Fern was anxious to gain greater exposure for her paintings, but art galleries were few in the early 1900s,Welcome to Find the right laser Engraver or Laser engraver machines. so she joined other locals who showed their work in the El Paso Woman’s Club exhibits, the San Jacinto Plaza outdoor shows and others sponsored by the El Paso Library, the Chamber of Commerce and the Garden Club.

Not wishing to call attention to her feminine status in a male-dominated field, Fern signed her vibrant landscapes and lush florals as “F. Thurston,” making the signature distinctive by crossing each T twice.

She continued the family teaching tradition by instructing son Eugene in the basic elements of fine art, nurturing an artistic career that would span more than seven decades.

The creative youth put his talents to use at El Paso High where he drew cartoons for the school publication, The Tatler. After graduation, he joined the Army and served until the end of World War I. When he returned to El Paso,Sol provides the world with high-performance solar roadway and solar street light solutions. Thurston enrolled in a correspondence course in industrial art and studied privately with his mother’s teacher, de Ribcowsky.

In addition to drawing political cartoons for local newspapers, the young artist used his knowledge of printmaking and graphic design to establish his own greeting card business. Featuring depictions of local mountains and desert scenes, these sold in retail outlets from Santa Fe to San Antonio.

During the 1920s, local artists such as Fremont Ellis, Audley Dean Nicols and Lewis Teel built lasting friendships and mentored each other’s work. In fact it was Nicols and artist/gallery owner Harry Waggoner who first encouraged Eugene Thurston to try his hand at oil painting. He found his true calling, and by the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, his evocative images were being shown in exhibitions and galleries in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Texas.

In 1940, Eugene began teaching commercial art at the El Paso Technical Institute, sharing his knowledge with younger artists, until he retired in 1966. In his leisure time, he continued to hone his own skills.

With easel and palette always at hand, he sketched and painted wherever he and his family traveled, in locations as distant as Hawaii and the Caribbean. Mountains were often his subject of choice, especially those with a proximity to El Paso, including Arizona’s Superstitions, Albuquerque’s Sandias, the Franklins and the Guadalupes.

Daughter Holly Cox remembers, “Mountains in my dad’s paintings always evoked a feeling of tremendous weight. He insisted they look like mountains and not something soft and floaty.”

Even into his 80s, Thurston was so adamant about capturing the reality of favorites such as El Capitan that in an interview with Hal Marcus he stressed, “The old-fashioned calendar picture of pretty colored mountains without any back bone has no place in the mentality of painter’s with modern tendencies.”

In 2003, when the University of Texas El Paso mounted a retrospective exhibition of Thurston’s paintings, President Diana Natalicio clarified the essence of his work, saying, “Thurston’s paintings exhibit a true reflection of the colors of the desert. He clearly loved his subject, and it is important for viewers to be able to see that quality through his eyes.”

The third person in this family, and still actively painting, Holly Thurston Cox creates works that provide a very different vision. She is best known for colorful abstract water media paintings that have received acclaim in exhibitions in Texas, New Mexico and California.

Cox received her first tubes of paint, a palette and palette knife from her father. “I hadn’t yet learned that you could make a third color such as green just by blending blue and yellow. I continued to experiment by mixing all sorts of pigments together, getting lots of muddy browns, but I think this was the beginning of my life long love of color,” she recalls.

As early as the 1930s, Eugene and Fern entered the same exhibitions, often sharing in community firsts like the Sun Carnival Exhibit in 1949,We are designing Mold Maker and specialty tooling has been the backbone of our business since our inception. and El Paso Art Association Exhibit the following year. Mother and son were also instrumental in founding local arts organizations. Fern passed on her talents through the Woman’s Club Art Study Group and the El Paso Art Guild, while Eugene helped found the Del Norte Arts and Crafts Guild and the Far Southwest Art Association, and he was a charter member of the El Paso Art Association, serving two terms as president in 1950 and 1951.

God ‘said it wasn’t my time’

In the expanse of this Roxbury choirboy’s dark and yearning eyes, there is all the adult pain and wisdom of one who survived a gunshot wound to the stomach — a wound sustained five weeks ago on Humboldt Avenue while on his way to church to join his mother for choir practice.

“I look at stuff in different perspectives now,” Gabriel told me yesterday. “If I’m out somewhere I’ll be thinking someone is trying to do something to me — I get that feeling that somebody’s out to get me.

“I don’t want to feel that everywhere I go, that somebody’s out to get me,” he said, almost in a kind of whisper, “but I keep saying to myself that I can’t trust anybody anymore, even my friends. I can’t trust them.”

Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who see life in such terms are thought to have PTSD. But it’s painful to hear these words from a slender 13-year-old boy who used to love running track, playing pickup football, reading about amphibians and singing hymns such as “Go Tell It On The Mountain” at the Berea Seventh-day Adventist Church.

“Physically, he’s healed. Gabriel’s body is strong,” Shirley Clarke said of the youngest of her four children. “But the emotional part, the psychological part, the mental part, that’s the one thing that’s hardest to deal with now. That trauma is going to be with him for the rest of his life.

“Gabriel used to be real loving, real active, sometimes too active out there, riding his bike on Humboldt Ave. and to the park,Full custom bobbleheads dolls handmade and sculpted into your likeness.” she added. “I would allow him to go out because I trusted that when he said he was going someplace, he would be back.

“But now, that sense of trust is gone,” she said, “and I’m not sure when he’ll ever get it back.”

In truth, that sense of trust has been damaged in both mother and son.For this reason Plastic Mould steels are of key significance,Looking for the Best Air purifier? They live now in a kind of limbo, no longer at home but in a neutral location. Gabriel, who was a student at James Curley Middle School in Jamaica Plain until the Jan. 11 shooting, is now being kept up to speed by a tutor.

So far,We are one of the leading manufacturers of solar street lamps in China. no arrests have been made, and when his mother talks about “life settling back to a sense of normalcy,” Shirley Clarke uses the word “relocation.”

“I don’t want to leave Boston,” she said, “I love Boston. But I just don’t know. Maybe in desperation, I may move out. But I don’t want to.”

Most boys don’t rhapsodize about mortality the way Gabriel Clarke does. But then, not too many walk around with a bullet forever lodged in the small of their backs.

“I never felt so much pain in my life,” Gabriel said of the shooting. “I think if somebody didn’t come as quick as they did, I probably might have died.”

And yet, he’s able to see his near-death experience as “something that’ll make me stronger in all types of ways. It’ll bring me closer to God, because I really believe He said it wasn’t my time yet. He had a better future for me. I think He saved my life. He did.”

The cloak of suspicion that haunts Gabriel Clarke is also tempered by a blend of gratitude and humility. He’s been humbled by a flood of well wishes and cards from classmates, as well as kids from across the city he’s never met. “There’s a lot of kids out there who do care.”

And yes,Welcome to Find the right laser Engraver or Laser engraver machines. he’s grateful to be able to reflect back on his nightmare, one that has claimed the lives of too many other children.

Shirley Clarke spoke of fate and faith. Pregnant with Gabriel, she said she was urged by doctors to terminate the pregnancy for her own health. She refused. She recalled how he survived a car crash two years ago that doctors said could have killed him.

“Gabriel and I, we’ve seen children who’ve been shot and never made it,” Shirley said. “We have watched it and we have cried, because we realize how fortunate we are. And, yes, we are humbled. I keep reminding Gabriel that he has a higher purpose in this world. And God wants him to achieve it.”

Dressed in a black Obama T-shirt, black jeans and black high-top trainers, Mr Wiley describes some of the unique challenges of his Israel paintings. "How do you have a conversation about Israel without discussing Palestine?" He asks. "And who am I to have the conversation I'm trying to have?" He adds that his role as an outsider makes his job both easier and harder. "I can allow myself to be destabilised and find new histories."

As with his other World Stage paintings, these feature subjects Mr Wiley found through a method he calls "street casting": during his wanders around a new city he meets and talks to people—some strangers, some acquaintances—and invites some to model in his studio. Many of the portraits in this show are of Ethiopian Jews whose families immigrated to Israel in the 1980s and '90s during Israel-sponsored airlifts. Kalkidian Mashasda, an Ethiopian Jewish rapper from Tel Aviv, is in several portraits.

Under Ogawa's Macabre, Metafictional Spell

It used to be a truism among critics of British poetry that Keats and most of his fellow Romantic poets worked in the shadow of John Milton. I'm not making a perfect analogy when I suggest that most contemporary Japanese writers seem to be working under the shadow of Haruki Murakami, but I hope it highlights the spirit of the situation.

You certainly get that feeling of being haunted by Murakami when you begin reading the "Eleven Dark Tales," as she calls them, in this story cycle by Yoko Ogawa. The situations seem made for Murakami's particular blend of the real and the fantastic. In the opening story, "Afternoon at the Bakery," a customer comes into a shop to buy strawberry shortcake for, as it turns out, a child who died years before. Or there's the story "Old Mrs. J," in which the narrator's landlady grows carrots in her garden in the shape of human hands.

But as you read along, you find Ogawa ascending into an orbit of her own — one that's at least as high as Murakami's — as in the story "Sewing for the Heart," which features a bag designer whose customer is a woman with her heart growing on the outside of her chest; or in the flatly told but utterly bizarre trio of linked stories "Welcome to the Museum of Torture," "The Man Who Sold Braces" and "The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger."

By the time you meet that tiger pacing about the garden of the two old women who founded the Museum of Torture, you may find that you're already in an alternate universe, something akin to Murakami's world with two moons in IQ84. But there's a telling difference: More and more incidents appear that have already occurred in other stories. The Torture Museum happens to be run by the brace salesman. The bakery shop of the first story turns out to be a location in a novel carried around by a mysterious woman with a dog in another story. A garden of kiwi fruit links a couple of tales, as does an overturned truck that spills tomatoes across a highway.

And that Bengal tiger? In one story it's alive and vital; in another it has died, and its pelt has become a coat that warms — before it chills — the narrator of the brace-salesman story.

When the woman whose heart is outside her body reveals it to the bag maker, whom she engages to cover it with one of his creations, he sees it above her breast "pulsing and contracting.Full custom bobbleheads dolls handmade and sculpted into your likeness." He says it "seemed to cringe under my gaze. ... It could fit in the palm of my hand. A pale pink membrane of delicate muscle tissue surrounded it." A doctor believes he can operate on the woman successfully and place her heart in her chest cavity, but we hear — in another of the stories — that she is murdered in her hospital bed.

These and other links lead you, the reader, to recognize a strange and eccentric truth about this collection. Ogawa makes each of the stories seem like odd,Welcome to Find the right laser Engraver or Laser engraver machines. if convincing, standalone works of short fiction and at the same time like metafictional products created by the characters in several of the stories. Are you reading about a trip to the zoo in a novel by one of the characters, or a trip to the zoo in a story by Ogawa? By the time you begin to recognize this paradox as the guiding principle of the stories, you're in too far to stop.For this reason Plastic Mould steels are of key significance,

So, really, it's not just Murakami but also the shadow of Borges that hovers over this mesmerizing book. And in that telltale heart, one may detect a slight bow to the American macabre of E.A. Poe. Ogawa stands on the shoulders of giants,We are one of the leading manufacturers of solar street lamps in China. as another saying goes. But this collection may linger in your mind — it does in mine — as a delicious, perplexing, absorbing and somehow singular experience.

Look no farther than the NOVO 1 Inc. contact center’s expanding operations inside the state-of-the-art, 37,000-square-foot facility at 1351 S. Waverly Road, just north and east of M-40. The Forth Worth, Texas-based company, which contracts with outside businesses to provide call support, continues to repatriate full-time jobs, including 348 of them at its Holland location so far, after seeing those jobs shipped off to foreign countries during the recession.

And there are plans to fill all 450 seats — and beyond — at the Holland facility as NOVO 1 reaches further agreements with new business partners to let more American workers handle customer-service calls at home.

It’s the success stories of places such as NOVO 1 that prompted a television crew from Japan to travel to Michigan last week in an effort to chronicle the influx of jobs back into the U.S. as the economic forecast continues to brighten.

“I see lots of new opportunities here,” said Nobuyuki Kubo, production director for the NHK Network, which is the Japanese equivalent to PBS in the U.S. “We wanted to come here to begin to understand and to show how the state of Michigan is bringing jobs back and how successful it has been.Looking for the Best Air purifier? Maybe we can learn something from here.”

In Japan, there is an aging population — people are living longer, getting better health care and remaining in their jobs longer than previous generations. As a result, salaries and health-care expenses of employees who are staying in the workforce longer has pushed costs so high that Japanese companies have had to send all sorts of jobs offshore to China, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines to remain competitive.

It has hampered the ability of younger people to enter the Japanese workforce, leaving a generational gap as companies struggle to find skilled and properly trained workers at home to replenish their ranks when older employees retire.

“We have similar problems in Japan,” Kubo said. “A lot of jobs are going to other places. Most of the manufacturing jobs are gone. Our population is getting much older. That’s why we’re here — to maybe learn something from the American people.”

Car2go car-sharing coming to North Bay Village

The Miami car-share program that allows drivers to take a trip in white-and-blue, two-seater Smart cars is now coming to North Bay Village.

Officials have signed a contract with Car2go, expanding the car-share program from the city of Miami to North Bay Village. That means drivers can pick up a vehicle in the village and also end their trip there.

Prior to this contract, motorists could drive to North Bay Village, but they were not allowed to end their trip there. Rather, they had to return the vehicle back to the city of Miami.

North Bay Village commissioners unanimously approved the agreement at their Tuesday night meeting.

The agreement, however, is not permanent but a one-year trial period after which the contract may be extended for about another three years,Site describes services including Plastic Mould. Village Manager Dennis Kelly told The Miami Herald.

Car2go, based in Austin, Texas, entered a two-year trial project with the Miami Parking Authority last summer allowing the company to park the vehicles on city streets.

Village officials said they have allowed the vehicles to be parked in public spaces, but whether the vehicles can be parked in private parking lots — such as at The Crab House — will be worked out between Car2go and the individual business.

The number of cars allotted to the city depends on the demand, explained Kelly, adding that he thinks anywhere between two and five cars will be in the village at any given time.

To further enhance the quality of life for residents and businesses in North Bay Village, officials are also working on possibly bringing DecoBike, the Miami Beach bicycle-share program, into the village. Details on that program are still in the works and will be discussed at the March commission meeting, village officials said.

In early 2009, Barack Obama was seen as a transformational president. By 2012, the media consensus was that he had been transformational in a key area: He had made the Democratic Party strong on national security.

So much so that during the 2012 presidential race, Republicans had a hard time getting to the right of the president on national security, and couldn’t find much to attack him on. Yes, there was Benghazi, but let’s get to that later.Compare prices and buy all brands of solar panel for home power systems and by the pallet. Obama’s smart and relatively effective foreign policy may have been one reason Mitt Romney was almost deferential to him in the third debate.

No matter what Fox News says, the president’s foreign policy report card looks decent: He got us out of Iraq, is getting us out of Afghanistan, smartly “led from behind” in Libya when leading from the front would’ve been risky, wisely refrained from meddling in the Iranian and Egyptian uprisings, has rightly overruled involvement in Syria. And along the way, he gave orders to dispatch a guy named bin Laden.

What he didn’t do is probably as important as what he did: He didn’t rush us, cowboy style, into another war somewhere.

It is not hard to recognize his thinking pattern in these matters: He shows restraint and pragmatism, likes to build international coalitions to deal with geopolitical crises instead of going it alone, realizes the risks and limitations of military power. An added bonus: He doesn’t display triumphalism.

Obama’s foreign policy, described as “muscular,The stone mosaic series is a grand collection of coordinating Travertine mosaics.” displays three traits: 1) He is not hesitant about the almost clinical use of military power to obliterate al-Qaida terrorists; 2) he uses military might mostly for protecting Americans, and not with messianic or hegemonic ambitions; and 3) displays a sober realization that, in a changing world, America can no longer be the arbiter of every world event.

About Benghazi: Mistakes were made, and four Americans are dead, but can we all now agree that it was and is an event ginned up by Republicans to score political points? They were right to ask questions, but wrong to inflate it into a scandal.

Besides, I’m usually skeptical when Republicans profess concern over dead Americans — for example, over the Border Patrol agent killed during the “Fast and Furious”-related shootout,Like most of you, I'd seen the broken buy mosaic decorated pieces. and the four Americans killed in Benghazi. A question: Where was the concern when thousands of American soldiers died in Iraq in a trumped-up war?

When Republicans are in charge in the White House, they want to rush headlong into every crisis area in the world, and be in the middle of it. Unfortunately, they operate from ego and emotion, with motives of displaying American dominance in the world, heedless of the cost in American blood and treasure, and of domestic needs.

President Obama, on the other hand, shows an admirable tendency to first do a cost-benefit analysis before even thinking of getting involved somewhere.

The morality of drone strikes — on American-citizens-turned-terrorists, and in non-war zones — opens up a Pandora’s box of issues and is a topic for another day.

To me, the overall takeaway of the president’s policies overseas is this: He takes his oath to protect the lives of Americans very, very seriously; to uphold that, he has extensively employed drones for seemingly two reasons — to protect the lives of American civilians, and to minimize boots on the ground, thus saving the lives of American soldiers. Plus, he wants to conserve resources in order to do nation-building at home.We offers custom Injection Mold parts in as fast as 1 day.

Acer Iconia W510

Among the many versions of Windows 8 PCs pushing back against the traditional clamshell laptop is the detachable-screen hybrid. Examples include the HP Envy X2 and the Lenovo ThinkPad Helix, but the first version of this style we got our hands on was the Acer Iconia W510.Site describes services including Plastic Mould.

The version of this 10-inch hybrid we looked at during the Windows 8 launch was a non-final pre-production unit,The stone mosaic series is a grand collection of coordinating Travertine mosaics. but now that the final hardware is available, we've been able to benchmark the W510 for an official review. In truth, our experience with the early hardware and this final version differs little, and those initial impressions mostly stand.

While Acer's other Windows 8 systems, such as the Aspire S7 and W700, have impressed, the W510 is held back by a couple of factors. First, it's powered by a direct descendant of the Atom processors behind the Netbook, a nearly extinct laptop subcompact category that was hugely popular for a year or so before low-cost ultraportables and the iPad overshadowed it. The new Atoms are faster than their predecessors while maintaining long battery life and power efficiency, but that may not be enough to satisfy laptop shoppers used to finding Intel Core i3, i5 and even i7 chips in the thinnest of ultrabooks.

The other psychological hurdle here is the price. The Iconia W510 is AU$849. There are a lot of impressive laptops you can buy for less, are more powerful, have better features and are easier to use than this one. To be fair, there are many Atom-powered Windows 8 tablets and hybrids that cost around the same or more — but they don't make the most compelling case, either.

The idea of a touchscreen slate running a full Windows operating system that can instantly transform into a working laptop is an appealing one. In practice, the slate part of the W510 is well-built and responsive, and the hinge that connects the two halves is easy to use and secure.

But the keyboard half (which contains an additional battery) is too light, making the entire thing top-heavy and prone to tipping over. Adding to my usability concerns, AU$849 only gets you a 64GB SSD hard drive (with about half that space free after OS and software overhead), and the tablet half has connections — micro HDMI, microSD and micro USB — that are only useful if you walk around with a pocketful of adapters.

Hybrids such as this need to be priced appropriately (especially ones with Atom processors), and offer great design and usability in order to be a compelling alternative to other computing products in the same price range. As much as the Acer Aspire S7 touchscreen ultrabook was an excellent advertisement for Windows 8, the Iconia W510 feels like an advertisement for the iPad, or any of the AU$700 to AU$800 ultrabooks that offer slim, portable computing at a reasonable price.

There are small differences in colour,Like most of you, I'd seen the broken buy mosaic decorated pieces. button placement and overall visual ID, but Windows 8 hybrid laptop/tablets I've seen from Samsung, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer and others generally look the same.Compare prices and buy all brands of solar panel for home power systems and by the pallet. None are particularly streamlined as all require beefed-up hinge assemblies to keep the screen securely tethered.

The screen part of the W510 looks very professional, like a slightly smaller, squatter iPad, virtually indistinguishable from other Windows or Android 10-inch tablets with edge-to-edge glass and a gently curved back panel. It's solidly built, but not overly heavy.

In tablet mode, the Windows 8 UI moves smoothly, and the screen rotation in tablet mode feels faster and smoother than in the pre-production version of this system we tried several months ago. There's a rotation lock button on the top edge of the screen if you don't want the screen to reorient with every move.

The keyboard dock it plugs into is somewhat less upscale-looking than the tablet. It's bulky, but contains an additional battery, so connecting the two parts help with battery life. The keyboard features white island-style keys against a light silver keyboard tray with a small clickpad below.

The keys, as noted previously, are on the small side,We offers custom Injection Mold parts in as fast as 1 day. and reminded me of typing on a tiny Netbook keyboard years ago. Keystrokes were definitely more accurate on this final version than on the earlier sample hardware, but I occasionally ran into a double input, where a keystroke would register twice.

The clickpad-style touch pad (which means it has the left and right mouse buttons built into the pad itself instead of separate buttons) is functional, but feels cramped. As noted with the Acer Aspire S7, the Windows 8 interface doesn't work especially well with a touch pad, so you'll find yourself using a combination of pad and screen for navigation.

When combined, the screen and keyboard form something that looks and feels a lot like a traditional clamshell laptop. The hinge holds very securely, and the entire hinge assembly can also fold open to nearly 180 degrees.

The 13-inch 1366x768-pixel display is clear and bright, suffering no visual degradation from having touch incorporated into it. Despite my Atom-centric concerns, touch response is immediate and quick, and off-axis viewing (important for a tablet) was excellent from any angle.

Walter Glenn’s Favorite Gear and Productivity Tricks

Every week, we share the shortcuts, workspaces, and productivity tips of our favorite experts and internet personalities. This week, however, we're giving you guys a glimpse into how we work, and all the tips and tricks that keep our blogging wheels spinning.

I'm fairly new to Lifehacker, so I wasn't around the last time we did these. I used to write computer books and corporate tech pieces and my workflow has changed pretty dramatically this past year. I've always been a desktop app guy, but now I've given almost all of that up.

If there's a perfect system out there for me, I haven't found it yet. For years, I pretty much lived in Outlook and other Office apps. Now, I use Evernote for storing all my notes, random ideas, recipes, scanned documents, and so on. Dropbox is another must-have. I like that it's so dead-simple to use, reliable, and that they've managed to go toe-to-toe with some of the biggest names in the business for this long.

I use Google for almost everything else. Transitioning from Outlook to Gmail was difficult (and something I'd flirted with for a long time), but I'm glad I finally did it. Google Docs is also great for most of the work I do, but I admit I still keep Office around for the odd job because I'm so used to it and because I can still do a lot with it that I just can't do otherwise.

I work almost exclusively in my home office. I'm a die hard PC gamer and love building systems, so you can pretty much guess my setup.You must not use the laser cutter without being trained. I use a custom-built Windows 8 PC, dual monitors, and a pair of Bose Companion 2 desktop speakers. Only two speakers? Yes, because I do most of my gaming with a headset.

It's a hard thing for a writer and gamer to change to a different mouse and keyboard,wind turbine so you'll see a couple of old-school choices on my desk. That's a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro and a Logitech MX518. The Natural Keyboard Pro is a split design and really saved my wrists from long hours of typing. It also has a great action on the keys that's somewhere between a stiff mechanical keyboard and the did-I-actually-press-a-key feel of most keyboards today. They stopped making them years ago, but when I heard they were going away, I bought half a dozen and stuck them in a closet. And the MX518 because, well, they stopped making new mice after they got it right, didn't they?

The desk itself is just a big, cheap corner desk I bought at some office store years ago. I like a lot of space to spread out. The middle section is large enough to hold a couple of big monitors and deep enough that there's plenty of space behind them for things I'd rather not look at. Although after reading about Whitson's setup, I'm seriously considering a door stopper stand. My favorite feature of my desk is the keyboard drawer. It's big, super sturdy, and both height- and tilt-adjustable with a single control. I usually have it lowered and tilted slightly away from me, but can raise it up flush my desk when I need to.

I got into the habit long ago of just using e-mail for my work to-do list. I'm in e-mail all the time anyway and it's so easy to shoot myself a message when there's something I need to to. I can use all the standard e-mail features (labels, filters, and so on) to sort them out and when I'm done, they're off to a Done folder. Too simple. I've looked at all kinds of to-do apps, but there are none that have really grabbed me so far. I'm still holding out hope that the folks at Evernote will put something cool together.

For my personal to-do list, if it's time-based I stick it on my calendar. If it's not, I just try to remember.Can you spot the answer in the fridge magnet? That usually works out pretty well. For my calendar, I favor paper.Laser engraving and laser laser cutting machine for materials like metal, It may sound crazy, but I just love having a huge paper calendar on my desk that I can write and draw and circle things on, with plenty of space for notes and post-its. Plus, it gives me a good reason to keep my colored pencils around.

I was given this career advice when I was younger and I recently gave it to my son, who's in high school now. Forget doing what you love; do what you enjoy. When it comes to careers, it's easy to fall in love with the idea of being, say, a doctor and then come to find years later that you just don't enjoy the job.

So first, think about how you enjoy spending your day. Do you like being alone or with people? Do you like sitting in front of a computer or moving around? Do you like solving problems? And get specific. If you like working with people,Manufactures and supplies laser marker equipment. do you prefer working with them one-on-one, in teams, talking to groups. Then start looking at things that fit your style. Everyone should enjoy how they spend their days.

Mortgage Bill Praised By Obama Faces Uphill Battle In Congress

A sharply divided Congress isn't likely to jump at President Barack Obama's challenge for quick passage of a mortgage refinancing bill that supporters say could help millions of homeowners save big each year and boost the economy.

Obama praised the legislation in his State of the Union speech last week, saying the proposal would help more homeowners with mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac take advantage of low interest rates and refinance their loans.

Even with mortgage rates near a 50-year low,Can you spot the answer in the fridge magnet? Obama said, too many families that have never missed a payment and want to refinance are being turned down.

"That's holding our entire economy back, and we need to fix it," the president said. "Right now, there's a bill in this Congress that would give every responsible homeowner in America the chance to save $3,000 a year by refinancing at today's rates. Democrats and Republicans have supported it before."

The economy's slow recovery from the recession gives the idea urgency, Obama said. "Send me that bill," he told members of Congress listening to his speech in the House chamber.

The proposal is part of a push by Democrats and the White House to help homeowners take advantage of low interest rates as a way to help the housing market recover and to give the economy a shot in the arm.

While the bill could gain traction in the Democratic-controlled Senate, it faces a rough road in the GOP-run House, where many Republicans favor scaling back the government's role in the housing market as a way of aiding the economy. Similar versions of the measure died in the House and Senate's lame duck sessions last year.

"At the moment, it's an uphill battle," said Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., who plans to file the House version of the bill.

Welch said he will reach out to Republicans this year in hopes of building more support, but the bill's association with the government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal housing agencies partly blamed for the collapse of the housing market, hurts its support base among GOP lawmakers.Manufactures and supplies laser marker equipment.

"The American taxpayers have already sunk $190 billion dollars into the operations of Fannie and Freddie," said Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, a member of the House Financial Services Committee. "It's time that we wind their operations down instead of using them as a piggy bank for failed programs that further delay the housing recovery. "

In the Senate, Democrats Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Barbara Boxer of California have legislation to aid borrowers who are current on their loans backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but who are not able to refinance because their home values have declined too much.

Nearly 12 million homeowners have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans and stand to benefit refinancing, the two senators said. Many can't refinance at a lower rate because of red tape and high fees. The red tape has reduced competition among banks, so borrowers pay higher interest rates than they would if they were able to shop around more, according to the senators.

The bill also would reduce up-front fees that borrowers pay on refinances and eliminate appraisal costs for all borrowers. The measure seeks to expand the Obama administration's Home Affordable Refinancing Program,wind turbine which saves an average homeowner about $2,500 per year, they said.

"Homeowners will have more money in their pockets, Fannie and Freddie will see fewer foreclosures, and the housing market and economy will continue building momentum," Boxer said.You must not use the laser cutter without being trained.

Among the bill's supporters are the Mortgage Bankers Association, the National Association of Realtors and the National Association of Home Builders.

"It is another tool that can be out there to help stabilize the housing market and kick start the economy if consumers can, in fact, put another $100 bucks in their pockets every month," said John Hudson, government affairs chairman of the Association of Mortgage Professionals.

Similar proposals by Boxer and Menendez last year got bogged down in the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Republican attempts to add amendments on other housing issues beyond refinancing led to a stalemate.

Twenty Senate Democrats are co-sponsors of this year's bill, but no Republicans have signed on.

"I support finding ways to smartly streamline the refinance process, but I'm not sure that eliminating all documentation requirements makes sense," said GOP Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee,Laser engraving and laser laser cutting machine for materials like metal, a committee member. "I also think we need to quickly move beyond short-term stimulus and start focusing on the structural issues in our housing finance system."

Sen. Mike Crapo, the committee's top Republican, declined through a spokeswoman to comment on the bill.

Welch's House bill also died during the last Congress. Welch accused Republicans of not wanting to give Obama an election-year boost by passing the mortgage refinance measure.

Cruise industry braces for rough waters after Triumph

As weary passengers made their way home from the Carnival Triumph’s ill-fated cruise Friday, travel agents and industry analysts say they haven’t seen an immediate dip in bookings or prices. But if photos and videos of the squalid conditions on board percolate across social media, the impact could linger — and bring back memories of last January’s Concordia disaster, in which a Carnival-owned ship ran aground and capsized in Italy, killing 32.

“It’s still too early to tell” whether would-be cruisers will be turned off by the aftermath of an engine room fire on the Triumph, which had left the ship adrift in the Gulf of Mexico since Sunday, says Steve Loucks, spokesman for Travel Leaders Group, a network of independently owned and operated travel agencies in the U.S.

Loucks said his company hasn’t fielded any cruise cancellations over the past week and says cruise bookings so far this year are up nearly 10% over last year, when the Concordia accident “certainly had an impact.”

Since that disaster, “our agents have been fielding questions about what safety procedures the cruise lines have in place,Come January 9 and chip card driving licence would be available at the click of the mouse in Uttar Pradesh.” Loucks says. “After the Concordia, new safety measures were implemented, and we believe something similar will happen after the (National Transportation Safety Board) investigation. But the big difference here is that there was no loss of life.”

As for prices, “when rates in the Caribbean are already under $100 per person per night,The USB flash drives wholesale is our flagship product. it’s hard to see prices going much lower,” Loucks says.

Michael Driscoll, editor of the industry newsletter Cruise Week, said Carnival canceled a one-day sale this week and will be hit harder than other cruise lines by the Triumph story, in part because because its Carnival brand draws a high percentage of first-time cruisers.

Carnival also owns Costa Cruises, the company that operated the Concordia, as well as Princess Cruises, Holland America, Cunard and P&O. A third Carnival ship, the Splendor, lost power at sea in 2010 and was towed back to port under similar conditions to those on the Triumph.

Driscoll said Friday’s aftermath “hasn’t been as bad as some people in the industry had feared. We all expected to see a flood of photos and videos” documenting such indignities as exploding toilets and four-hour waits for food, but so far, the social media response has been fairly muted, he said.

Matthew Jacob, a cruise industry analyst with ITG Investment Research, noted that Carnival’s stock price “took a fairly sizable hit” following the Concordia disaster, dropping from $34.28 the day before the accident to under $30 but has since rebounded. But declining net yield, or revenue paid per passenger, led to discounts of 10% or more the following summer, noted Jacob.

The cruise industry “had to play catch-up, but heading into 2013, the outlook was pretty positive. Demand was healthy, and net yields were rebounding,” Jacob says.Wear a whimsical Disney ear cap straight from the Disney Theme Parks!

Carnival shares fell 47 cents Friday to $36.88, or nearly 1.3%. For the week, shares are off nearly 6%. On Thursday, investment bank Goldman Sachs, citing Carnival’s guidance about the fallout from Triumph, lowered its 2013 outlook for the company, saying it would be hurt by lost income and bad public relations.

The Triumph accident, like the Concordia, coincides with “wave season,” a two- to three-month period when agents push summer cruises with advertising and special promotions and offer last-minute discounts geared to sun-starved Northerners.

“Cruise prices are extremely dynamic, so if bookings slow, they’ll respond,” added Jacob. “Social media could play a much bigger role this time, but the bottom line is that the protocols Carnival had in place seemed to work. It’s a different story than last year, when the issue was negligence and there was a loss of life.”

The cruise industry has grown exponentially in recent decades. In 1980 there were 1 million passengers worldwide. This year, projections put the number at 20 million. This week’s Triumph troubles raise questions about whether the industry has grown too big and too fast to be truly safe.

Cruise industry expert Andrew O. Coggins, Jr., doesn’t think so. One reason: Cruise ships are governed by International Maritime Organization regulations and not by the laws of the country in which they’re registered.

“(The industry) is strictly regulated. Ships are foreign-flagged because of labor and cost issues. But the safety certification comes from independent classification societies and that’s what enables ships to get insurance,” explained Coggins, a professor of management at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business in New York.

A number of high-profile ferry disasters brought even stricter regulations in the 1990s, such as the requirement that all ships install sprinkler systems — with no grandfather clause for older vessels – if they were to remain in service.

But other safety issues relate to the ever-growing size of new ships.Comprehensive Wi-Fi and RFID tag by Aeroscout to accurately locate and track any asset or person. When the 102,000-ton Carnival Triumph sailed into service in 1999, it was among the first ships too large to transit the Panama Canal. Now, ships are plying the oceans that are more than twice that size. Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas weighs in at 225,282 tons, for instance.

Driscoll said the biggest ships afloat also command the highest prices because of strong consumer demand. But “there’s always a question of how much bigger can they get?” said Coggins, and whether colossal size and safety are compatible when it comes to matters of crowd control in the event of a disaster.

As for the passengers of the Triumph, “They were lucky because the (sprinkler) system worked. It put out the fire. Engine room fires, especially those severe enough to require evacuating the engine room, usually result in loss of the ship. Had the system not worked the 4,000-plus people onboard would have been forced into lifeboats in less than optimal sea conditions.”

Another worry: “Passengers who disembark from the Carnival Triumph today are highly likely to get sick in the days ahead,” said Tony Abate, vice president of operations at AtmosAir Solutions in Fairfield, Ct.

“The biggest concern for these passengers is that they were trapped inside the ship for so long,” said Abate. “The inside of a cruise ship is a space that’s designed to have an air ventilation system to dilute contaminants, and that was knocked out.

In the past, some cruise ships have become floating incubators of illnesses such as norovirus “even when ventilation systems are functioning properly,” says Abate.

Meanwhile, reactions from Triumph passengers on whether they’d hit the high seas again were mixed.

Sharon Ward, of Bay City, Texas, was on her first cruise as part of a 45th high school reunion. She praised the Carnival crew and discounted other passengers’ horror stories with “there’s a lot of people you just can’t satisfy. Life happens.”

But Anna Ward, a Wichita, Kan., homemaker and student,Can you spot the answer in the fridge magnet? said she “probably won’t” board another ship.

“How do I get on a cruise and not think that that is not going to happen,” she said. “I’d be on my guard the whole time. “

Now that the ship is safely in port, Carnival can begin working in earnest on damage control.

“This is the second (incident) in two years on Carnival. It isn’t something you want to get a reputation for,” said Ernest DelBuono, referring to the 2010 power loss on the Carnival Splendor. That cruise was nicknamed “Voyage of the Spammed” after its stranded passengers were reduced to eating Spam dropped off by a helicopter.

The crisis manager with Levick, a Washington, D.C., communications firm, said the cruise line needs to thoroughly evaluate operational systems on all its ships and provide fair compensation for passengers whose vacations were ruined.

“They need to be reassuring everyone that ‘We’re going to fix this,’ and if it does happen again, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’” he said.

Potential cruisers made skittish by this week’s relentless coverage of the Triumph’s woes may give greater scrutiny to individual lines before booking, DelBuono said. But overall, he doesn’t think the incident will have a long-lasting effect on the cruise industry.

Why moving intensive neo natal services will give best survival chance

THE transfer of intensive care service for newborns from North Wales to England will provide the most vulnerable babies with the best chance of survival.

That is the view of senior doctors and medical professionals at the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board and that is why they have backed the plan to move neonatal intensive care from Glan Clwyd and Wrexham Maelor hospitals to Arrowe Park on the Wirral.

In an open letter to the North Wales Community Health Council, signed by 23 doctors, nurses, GPs and consultants, many of whom are medical directors and chiefs of staff, they make the case for change.

Signatories to the letter include the health board’s acting medical director medical, Dr Martin Duerden, and consultant paediatrician Dr Brendan Harrington who chaired the board’s child and maternity review.

In the letter they said: “As senior health professionals in North Wales we recognise the concern felt by parents, the public and our staff over the future provision of neonatal care services.

“We are equally concerned however,Comprehensive Wi-Fi and RFID tag by Aeroscout to accurately locate and track any asset or person. that the reasons for the Health Board’s decisions are being lost in the heat of the debate.

“In January the Health Board decided to continue to provide Special Care Baby Unit (SCBU) facilities in each of our district hospitals alongside some lower complexity neonatal intensive care (as agreed with the Wales Neonatal Network), but that the safest and most reliable way to provide for a small number of babies from North Wales who require highly specialist care or longer term ventilation is in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Arrowe Park Hospital.

“This was not an easy decision and was taken after careful consideration of all the evidence, and close scrutiny of how to ensure the best outcomes for these babies.

“We know that clinicians led this process, and worked carefully and dispassionately to assess, debate and decide what options were both safe, realistic and ultimately would offer the best chance of survival and avoidance of long term disability for these children.

“There are very clear guidelines from expert bodies such as the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the British Association of Perinatal Medicine. As clinicians responsible for services such as these, we must always strive to meet these standards; indeed to take a decision that ignored them, or had little chance of providing a service that met them would be irresponsible.

“BMA Wales,Come January 9 and chip card driving licence would be available at the click of the mouse in Uttar Pradesh. the Royal College of Nursing, and the Royal College of Midwives have issued a number of statements, and a pamphlet opposing the health board’s proposal to meet these standards.

“We realise that not all doctors, nurses and midwives agree with the decision taken by the Health Board. It is right and proper that there should be a reasoned exchange of views on a matter as important as this, but we believe as senior clinicians that it is the right decision.Wear a whimsical Disney ear cap straight from the Disney Theme Parks!Can you spot the answer in the fridge magnet?

“None of the signatories to this open letter who are BMA, RCN or RCM members have been consulted by the BMA on this matter. We believe the BMA is presenting the views of the North Clwyd branch of the BMA as the views of the BMA membership in Wales; and we therefore cannot support the position of BMA Wales on this issue.The USB flash drives wholesale is our flagship product.”

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and the recent Inquiry into Neonatal Care in Wales (September 2012) also support these quality standards which are designed to ensure the best possible outcome for very premature babies.

The Welsh Government has agreed that the NHS in Wales should meet these standards and we are advised by the Wales Neonatal Network that we must meet these standards.

To achieve this BAPM say that in future the UK will need fewer NICU serving larger populations.

We could attempt to recruit the required number of neonatal specialists to develop a NICU in North Wales. We would need a team of middle grade doctors and consultants. It is estimated that we will need to recruit seven neonatology consultants to maintain a rota but we have none at present.

We are advised by BAPM that it is highly unlikely that we could recruit adequate numbers of these doctors as there are not enough of them in the UK and most wish to work in larger neonatal units where more babies are treated.

Our view is that hospitals in North Wales do not have enough births or enough of these high dependency babies to attract and retain these doctors. To attempt to meet these standards in North Wales would have a considerable risk of failure.

Alongside the Wales Neonatal Network and the Cheshire and Merseyside Neonatal Network we have explored how we can best provide for the small number of babies needing complex or longer-term ventilation.

We have been advised that Arrowe Park Hospital is best placed to do this. They already have six consultants dedicated to neonatology and by March 2013, will have a full complement of trained nursing staff.

As described, they have the necessary transport infrastructure to collect babies from North Wales and this will be included in our contract with them. The hospital can also cater for the small number of women where imminent birth of premature or low birth weight babies can be predicted.

Jefferson artist’s work on exhibit in Boone

Canadian-born sculptor and painter Mary-Ann Prack of Jefferson is exhibiting her work in a multi-media installation at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts in Boone through March 23.

“My work is my family,Online shopping for luggage tag from a great selection of Clothing.” Prack said. “I have a personal response and interaction with each piece.”

Entitled “Standing Still…in the Abstract,” the exhibit is a collection of 51 abstract figurative works evoking the human form through drawing, painting and, her primary medium, sculpture.

Her artist statement reads: “The human figure has been an infinite source of inspiration for me as an artist. My very personal expression of the human experience on a physical, emotional and spiritual level is revealed in each of the sculptures I create.”

The development of her personal yet accessible style, which she describes as “recognizable abstract expressionism,” has been the work of over 30 years. “I work non-stop,” she said.

Prack hand-builds each piece using a specially formulated clay which has a stone-like hardness, making it ideal for her substantial fired-clay constructions. Her sculpture varies in size and sense from plaque-sized, wall-mounted pieces, to larger, in-the-round statues.

“In-the-round” is the main idea in her concept and execution; each human figure embodies more than one distinct persona. “Every piece has two fronts,” she said.

Her figures have an architectural salience which makes them effective from a distance, but their detail rewards the viewer who inspects them closely, as if they were artifacts. The forms are abstract, but their color, texture and finish are concrete.

In her surface treatments, Prack uses a palette of fired glazes, oil-pastels and clear sealants; her pieces are alive with color, contrast and interior lines. On some, she uses an bare iron-oxide finish, resulting in a patina which changes slightly over time.

To date, she has completed approximately 400 sculptures, some of which later became the basis for bronze, brass, aluminum and stainless steel castings. She has had many requests from galleries, collectors and fellow artists to do large-scale, outdoor pieces in both clay and metal.

Among Prack’s early artistic influences were her mother, who was an artist, and her grandfather, father and uncles, who operated a family architectural firm. That she spent her pre-teen years in a milieu of designers and builders is especially evident in her sculpted works, which make the aesthetic declaration of statuary, but have the constructed presence of architecture — her creations are built.

Born in Hamilton, Ontario, Prack began her formal art education at the University of Guelph, and continued at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale and Florida Atlantic University. She worked as an interior designer for four years before devoting herself to art full-time.

She began to sculpt with clay in 1981-82. “I was drawn to clay as a sculpture medium for many reasons; from my childhood remembrances, to the discovery of its unlimited potential for creative expression; and to the fulfillment of that comes with having complete control over every stage of the artistic process.”

Prack and her husband of 32 years, Bill Maler, moved to Jefferson 18 years ago “to take advantage of an atmosphere that amplifies the creative spirit.”

Prack’s work has garnered some critical acclaim. “The figure has been the subject for sculptors since the beginning of human history; to interpret the figure in an artistically original way at this point is almost impossible. Mary-Ann has accomplished this,” said sculptor John Henry.

“Mary-Ann Prack’s sculptures resonate pure harmony, balance, and the relentless positive spirit of humankind,” said Renee Phillips, Director of Manhattan Arts International.

The Moorings is one of the few gated communities in the area. The neighborhood lies along the western shore of the Magothy River. The first townhome was built in 1984. Jill’s home was constructed in 1991; she purchased it from its third owner in 2003.

The community has a sandy beach on the riverfront with a panoramic view, a long pier and two fenced tennis courts. It also offers lots of dedicated open spaces for its residents to picnic, relax or run about.

The Moorings is built on land that was, from 1938 until the late 1970s, an amusement park known at one point as the Mago Vista Beach Club. Homebuilder Robert Henson constructed the park and, after his passing, his son Harold ran it.

In its heyday,They manufacture custom rubber and silicone bracelet and bracelets. the park featured a roller coaster that ran on a U-shaped pier that jutted out over the Magothy River. It had a merry-go-round,Where you can create a custom lanyard from our wide selection of styles and materials. an enormous dance hall, a burro ride, a water slide on a floating dock, swimming and bathing facilities, concession stands and other amusements.

Visiting children could buy ’gator treats and, from behind the safety of a tall fence, they could throw food to the snapping reptiles. The Hensons would purchase them from the Baltimore Zoo as 4-foot “youngsters” and trade them back to the zoo when they became oversized adults.

The Henson family sold the park to four investors in 1964. When it was purchased from the investors in 1978, its new owner, Pat Patrick, tore down the rides. Patrick sold the land to developers in the early 1980s when his plans to turn the area into a restaurant-nightlife-marina mega-plex fizzled out.

Jill, a registered nurse, is a medical device sales representative for TEI Biosciences. She has two children — both graduates of Broadneck High and the U.S. Naval Academy. Kayla Johnson, a USNA ’09 alumna, is an officer aboard the USS Michael Murphy at Pearl Harbor. Sean Johnson, a USNA ’12 grad, is a SEAL trainee in San Diego.

Jill grew up in Severna Park and went to Archbishop Spalding High School. Her grandparents owned a summer house on Mill Creek, three piers away from the old Magothy Seafood Restaurant. “We summered here and spent every weekend on the Magothy.” She added, “The Moorings is a quiet,The USB flash drives wholesale is our flagship product. lovely neighborhood on the Broadneck.Come January 9 and chip card driving licence would be available at the click of the mouse in Uttar Pradesh. Plus, I love being able to walk to the new restaurant, where Magothy Seafood used to be. It’s called The Point Crab House & Grill. The food and atmosphere is good.”

When her children were growing up, they lived in another Arnold neighborhood just a couple miles away. Once the Johnsons had settled in at The Moorings, Jill decided she didn’t like the way the old furniture looked in the new space. “I had more formal furniture then, including a cherry table and a china cabinet. There was formal living room furniture, too, but no one used it,” she said.