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I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about when I picked Donnie Darko
as the next Cinematical Movie Club film. It's the first-time cinematic anomaly,
the super-weird flick that found cult adoration, the one that worked when all the flicks that
followed it did not. At all. In retrospect, I've always wondered what made Donnie Darko
what it became. If it was a some wild stroke of luck, if Richard Kelly sapped up all
traces of perfect editorial mojo with his first foray, if the films that came after were too
harshly judged because of the fame of the first outing, or if Donnie was the only film
that brought it all together in a palatable way.
The reality, of course, is probably a combination of them all...
I'd like to
do something new with our weekly trailer roundup. Simply put, it's now a sort of contest. Not for
you, but rather for the marketers attempting to get us into theaters for their product. After the
jump I've listed ten trailers in order of best to worst, three of them embedded for your viewing
pleasure. After that is a poll for you to vote on your own favorite, so we can see how my judgment
compares to you readers. First prize is nothing more than an utmost interest in the film that's
best advertised. And maybe as a result also a great box office return. Last place is a message that
something's wrong, nobody's going to see this movie and it's time to go back to the drawing
board.
This week's definite winner is the trailer for Predators,
not because the movie looks awesome (though it does), but because the spot introduces us perfectly
to the premise and gets us excited for something that could have very well come off as a cheap
cash-grabbing sequel. I almost missed the fact that this installment is set on the Predators' home
planet, but it doesn't matter. I'm sure later trailers will expose more (maybe too much). All we
needed was some bad-ass looking humans (Danny Trejo, Laurence Fishburne -- even Adrian Brody seems
pretty tough), lots of action involving a variety of weaponry and of course a very minimal
showcasing of the alien hunters. I'm far more excited about this movie now than I was prior to
viewing the trailer.
Second place goes to the unnecessary but still excellent fourth trailer for Kick-Ass, continuing the
sell that this is the must-see movie of the season. Some are telling me they're confused by the
film's marketing, that it looks too much like a kids' movie. Maybe, as my girlfriend says, there
should be more emphasis in these green band trailers and TV spots that say this cute superhero
movie is not for kids. Regardless, everybody from my baby niece to my grandmother seems excited
about this one. My niece will just have to wait a little longer to see it than the rest of us.
This year's Emerald City Con was... an extraordinary experience.
Truthfully, I'm still trying to get my head wrapped around some of it. Doing our Artist's Alley
table as a fundraiser for the Cartooning Class was very much a last-minute, spur-of-the-moment
decision, we weren't organized about it at all... and I was very moved, and a little awed, at how
well the kids came through. Not just the current students but many of our grads, as well.
The experience could be summed up in this exchange between our friend Lorinda and myself. At one
point, I shook my head and muttered, "This is so amazing... I mean, teaching, it's like putting a
note in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean, you never really know how it's going to work out."
Rin replied, "Well, you sure had a lot of bottles come back this weekend."
We took a lot of pictures and I think I'll just run those for you and talk a little bit about
each one.
*
This is what it looked like before we opened.
And another.
This is the last time we would experience quiet until Sunday evening. LATE Sunday evening. My
ears are still ringing a little.
Outside, the crowd was milling around panting to get in.
Clearly, convention security was going to be overtaxed so the stormtroopers thought they'd assist
with crowd control.
And then we were off....
This may give you a little bit of an idea of the swarms that descended once the doors were open.
Saturday, in particular, was Hell Day.
Fortunately, we had a great crew. I honestly don't know how Julie and I ever used to do this by
ourselves. It takes a teenage metabolism to keep up with the Saturday hordes at a convention.
In the rear we have Rachel, Aja, and that's Katrina under the mop, with our friend Rin in the
front. Rachel decided to be Rogue again this year, as you can see. Katrina wanted to dress up too
but couldn't decide on an outfit (she'd brought a couple.) This is the one she started with, a
character of her own named Connor, but Connor only lasted till noon or so.
Once again this year, we won the lottery by having awesome neighbors. One one side we had Jeffrey
Ellis and the crew from Cloudscape
Comics, a small-press artists-collective outfit based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
I bought their anthology book EXPLODED VIEW partly to say thanks for putting up with us but it
turns out that I really like it.
It looks a lot like a grown-up version of what we do in class, actually -- every member of the
group contributes a few pages' worth of work and then there's bios in the back. Same basic
format, just with real production values. A lot of good stuff in here.
They do a raunchy humor self-published book and a podcast as well.
I'm so embarrassed I can't remember their names -- I know I introduced myself at some point, but
I couldn't really hear them very well. The echo chamber in the hall, once the crowds were in,
made it nearly impossible to converse on Saturday. But they were great, swore up and down they
loved being next to us and claimed we brought them a lot of extra traffic. They were especially
hilarious about pretending to almost-swear in front of the kids but they never actually did.
Since we were doing a for-real fundraiser, and thus actually accepting money, our setup changed a
little this year.
The idea was that we had students on the left, alumni on the right. As people would approach, the
kids would offer them a giveaway book, and if they stopped, then they'd volunteer to sign it.
Ben, Marie, and Eileen, working hard.
Then Katie or myself would explain about the budget shortfall and collecting for donations, and
add that anything over $10 got you a custom sketch from an alum. More often than not, they'd at
least stop and admire the sample sketches we had up, and put a couple of bucks in the box.
Here's a customer getting The Spiel. Marie, especially, was really good at explaining to people
what we were doing.
Many did in fact commission sketches.
Once we were set up it went fairly smoothly despite being a bit cramped, up against the wall as
we were.
That's me and my boss, Katie. For the last seven years I've exhorted my various supervisors at
school to come to the convention and really see how hard the kids work, but this was the
first time anyone took me up on it. It really was a lot of fun having Katie there as she knew
nothing about comics, conventions, or geek culture in general. But she adapted quickly. Watching
her take in the experience was a lot of fun, and by the end of her day there she was a complete
convert. At one point Katie was even speculating on the possibility of doing this kind of thing
more often and wondering what other shows there were that we could attend as a class. The
Stumptown Festival in Portland, especially, was a possibility we talked about quite a bit. (Katie
was also interested in hearing about WonderCon and APE, but I told her, "Baby steps. I'm only
just now getting to a place where I think I know how to get us to THIS show.")
The alumni were kept very busy sketching all day both days.
Fortunately they love to draw but my GOD they worked hard. I wish I'd gotten more shots of their
work, it was of an extraordinarily high level, especially the high school kids. I was so proud of
all of them and the way they've all kept learning and growing as artists, years after leaving my
charge.
I did get a few. Here's one of Aja's.
And this is one of Katrina's custom commissions. She asked the lady what she wanted and the woman
said, "Well, I like octopuses." (Yes, I know it's octopi but that's what she said.)
For a second I thought Katrina was going to be stuck but then she blew out this caricature of the
woman herself with an octopus on her head. Yeah, the kids are THAT good.
Some people were kind of crass about it. This mother, especially, was really annoying. First she
wanted to know what she'd be getting for her ten dollars.
It takes a special kind of chutzpah to haggle with a sixteen-year-old volunteer over your
CHARITABLE ACT.
Katrina rather helplessly pointed to the samples, but it developed that this woman wanted to see
the actual sketch before she would pay for it.
And this woman wanted something special, too-- a caricature of her two boys... an action pose of
the two of them in their martial arts class. Geez lady, demanding much?
Here's Katrina working on the commission -- I cropped her out, but cheapskate Mom is hovering
just out of frame, watching like a hawk to make sure she gets her money's worth.
Katrina was amazingly diplomatic about it. I thought Rin was going to go ballistic on the woman
and I had to squelch a few sharp remarks myself. She deserved some kind of smack.
The two boys with the final product. I think they were a little embarrassed over how their mother
treated Katrina.
Fortunately, the finished product satisfied everyone and we got the ten bucks.
But most of our visitors were much nicer. You remember Rachel's shot of the X-Men at the beach?
Guess who got that one.
Yeah, that's Matt Fraction, proud new owner of Rachel's X-Men Beach Party. This may be my
favorite photo from the show. Only in comics do moments like this happen: my former student
Rachel, the world's most ardent fan of the X-Men, posing with Matt Fraction, current writer of
the X-Men comic, who's just told her that her cartoon is brilliant, that he would love to do a
scene of the team at the beach and that she's caught all their personalities perfectly.
Matt was great with all the kids. He signed autographs, talked with them about comics, and
generally was awesome. Here he is signing an autograph for Emma.
It was only a couple of minutes out of his day but I know how hard it can be to
get away from your table when you're working a show, and it really meant a lot to the students to
have a pro take such an interest. Even my students, whose comics fandom usually begins and ends
with manga, know who Iron Man and the X-Men are. They were thrilled that he stopped by.
Michael Alan Nelson also visited our table briefly.
The kids loved him too, though they had only the vaguest idea of who he was -- I explained he
worked for Boom! Comics and I think many of them had the idea he worked on the Muppets or
something, since that was always where the line was over there. I enjoyed getting to meet him at
last -- I interviewed him here a while back, but it was via e-mail and we'd
never met in person. I am a big fan of his Fall Of Cthulhu series, and I got
Swordsmith Assassin at the show as well, since Chip Mosher sent us the first issue for
review and I liked it quite a lot, I'd been meaning to pick it up for a while now... though I
forgot to ask Mr. Nelson to sign it. Too busy chitchatting.
I was mostly at our table all weekend, but Julie got out some. There was no way she was missing
Leonard Nimoy.
She was actually in panels for most of Saturday, she also went to see Wil Wheaton and Stan Lee.
Of them all, I think Julie was the most impressed with Nimoy's, she said he was "inspiring."
As for me, well, I was enjoying my time at the table because it was turning into old home week.
We had many visitors from past classes -- Amethyst, Jessica, Shane, Andrew, and Jay, among
others. Some I hardly recognized because they're, you know, adults now. (The
last time I saw Jay he was a scrawny little soft-spoken kid. Today he's in his twenties, six feet
tall and ponytailed, very outgoing with an infectious laugh. And of course his voice is an octave
lower.)
Some even volunteered to put in some time sketching for us, which melted me. Lindon popped up out
of nowhere and immediately wanted to put in some table time. Of course I agreed.
A lot of the kids dressed up this year, too. Saturday Lindon was in street clothes, but Sunday
she was Pikachu.
I took this one just because it made me laugh.
That's right, Pikachu supports Cartooning in schools!
This is Lindon and Devon. I shot this because when Lindon has her head down -- even today, she
always draws with her nose to the paper like that, it can't be comfortable but she always has to
get way down there -- anyway, it tickles me because it looks like Pikachu is sitting at the
table.
Lots of parents volunteered time too.
That's Marie, Ben, and Eileen, under the watchful eye of Gus' mother Marilyn. She looks a little
annoyed, not because of the three kids but because her own son has abandoned his post again.
I get three kinds of students -- the ones who want to write, the ones who want to draw, and the
ones who just want to geek out and be surrounded by comics. Gus is one of the geeks. He will
produce drawings if you lean on him, but for him the point of being at a con is to get
cool stuff. All I ask of the kids is to put in a ninety-minute shift at our table on the
day they attend, but Gus could hardly bring himself to even do that much, he'd brought money and
it was burning a hole in his pocket. First it was Leonard Nimoy's autograph -- even if you
brought your own item for him to sign it was still a wince-worthy forty dollars -- and then he
negotiated an advance on his allowance to go buy some comics.
Marilyn has always been one of my favorite parents and her reaction to this was completely
charming. She ordered Gus to stay at the table and do his job. Then she went off to go
get her son's comics herself. Naturally, not being an expert, she consulted me.
"Randy's Readers," I told her. "He's your guy. He sells comics that aren't collectible, just in
average shape... his market is people that don't really Collect with a capital C, but only want
to read comics. If I ever get a chance to take a break I was thinking of stopping over there
myself, to be honest."
Marilyn agreed that was the place to go and the girls were exhorting me to take some kind of a
break, and Marie wanted to come too, so off we went.
Marilyn explained that Gus wanted war comics. "So violent," she said, ruefully.
Gus did the tank for the group poster. He's all about the war comics.
I laughed. "Well, I grew up on blood and thunder myself, it's not all that damaging really. The
key is that there has to be a story, I try to make sure they aren't just doing a videogame
shoot-'em-up. There's a fine old tradition of war comics that did great stories, Sgt. Rock,
G.I. Combat, Unknown Soldier.... we'll find him some of the good stuff."
Marilyn perked up. "Yes, I know Gus liked that Unknown Soldier book you loaned him. I
was going to try and find some of those."
I brought this to class to show the boys that even hardcore shoot-em-ups still had to have a
STORY. For Gus it was love at first sight.
Mission defined, we now moved with a clear purpose. Once we were at Randy's booth Randy himself
stepped in and was very helpful, explaining to Marilyn that there was the Unknown Soldier series
from Star-Spangled War Storiesand then there were the ones in his own book.
"What's the difference?" Marilyn wanted to know.
"Later ones are probably cheaper," I told her, smiling. "But I don't think Gus will care that
much, he'd enjoy any of them."
As for me, in showing the various war series to Marilyn I stumbled across this one and decided I
couldn't pass it up for six bucks.
Sorry, Gus, I got this one.
Our Army At War #269, a reprint of stories featuring work by Joe Kubert, George Evans,
John Severin, Russ Heath, and even Mort Drucker (!) I could spend hours just looking at the
pictures in this one.
I also fell for a couple of Superboy Giant reprint collections from my childhood that
I'd been trying to replace for a while. Mostly these days I'm a trade paperback guy, but
nostalgia can still get me.
Marie said curiously, "I know who Superman is, but I never heard of Superboy."
"It's like Smallville, only he actually wears the costume," I heard myself say, and
suddenly felt a hundred years old as i realized there's probably two generations of schoolkids
now who know Smallville as 'their' Superman the way I think of Bates-Maggin-Swan
Bronze-Age Superman as 'mine.'
When we got back I told Gus he had the coolest mother ever. "At your age I'd have killed
for a mom who said, 'you finish your work, I'll go make sure you get your comics.' That's unheard
of."
Gus blushed, grinned sheepishly, and gave his mother a hug. Marilyn beamed and said, "I have my
moments."
There wasn't time for me to do a whole lot of shopping -- there never is -- but Rin found a
dealer who had a big box full of graphic novels and trades for $5 and I fell for a couple of
those, too.
Empire is one of those late 1970s Byron Preiss productions where he was deliberately
trying to move comics into a bookstore market -- about twenty-five years too soon, it turned out,
but he produced some handsome books when he was trying. This one was an original piece by Samuel
Delany and Howard Chaykin, hoping to scoop up some of that newly-minted SF audience that Star
Wars created back then. I'd never actually read it and I've always been curious about it.
Holliday I've never heard of, but I'm always up for a Western comic, and for a $5 trade
paperback it's hard to go wrong.
Most of our shopping, though, we tried to do in Artist's Alley itself as much as possible. We
like to support the creators. Julie picked up the new Muppet book from Boom! where Amy Mebberson
was -- you should pardon the expression -- doing a BOOMing business.
Possibly the most popular artist at the show this year.
She was kept busy all weekend. A lovely lady, she was great with all the kids that came up to her
and sketched Kermits and Animals and Miss Piggys till her hands were raw, most likely. I don't
think a single kid went away empty-handed.
And I made it a point to pick up a bunch of stuff from Camilla d'Errico on Sunday morning. I was
able to catch her a few minutes before the show opened, when it was actually possible to have a
conversation.
Camilla's a favorite with my kids.
Camilla has been a great friend to my students for many years now... they don't remember her name
but they all know the Awesome Manga Lady From Vancouver. I bought about $25 worth of stuff from
her because A) I can use it in class and B) she deserves to be rich and I do what I can. She had
a line all weekend but I did get to chat with her for a few minutes on Sunday morning. Largely on
what became the typical Sunday conversation topic in Artist's Alley, "Great to see you, sorry I
didn't come by earlier, we were stuck at the table.... My God! Wasn't yesterday hell? How many
people did YOU get?" Everyone loved the increase in business but hated fighting through the
crowds on Saturday.
Sunday afternoon I did get around a little bit. I got a couple of books signed from Kurt Busiek
and Len Wein, and I had a flattering couple of minutes with Les McClaine, original artist on
The Middleman. He saw my badge and said, "Hey, Greg Hatcher! I love your column!"
Seriously. I was shocked speechless. I spluttered and fumfuh'd and blushed like a schoolgirl,
finally managing to choke out that I was a huge fan of his, that my students and I all adored
The Middleman. This pleased him, and we agreed that it was a shame it didn't last but it
was great to have something that cool exist at all.
And I got to say hi to Pete and Rebecca Woods, from Periscope Studios. We hadn't seen Rebecca in
about six years, she hadn't come to ECCC in a while, so it was great to catch up. Rebecca
immediately wanted to know how Brianna was doing, since when Bri was my student years ago she
practically camped out at the Periscope Studios table, and Rebecca happily adopted her. I told
her that Bri wanted desperately to come this year but she had finals up at Bellingham, she was in
college up at Western. Then we had a mutual groan about how old we are getting.
Because Bri couldn't make it to the convention this year, we wanted to at least let her know she
was missed.
When I got the idea to recruit additional Cartooning alumni to do charity sketches for our
fundraiser, my first two thoughts were Brianna and Nadine. They're both in college now, and
they've kept up with their comics work as well. They were pretty amazing in the seventh grade,
and they've only gotten better.
Here's what Bri was doing when she was in my class...
...and here's a more current piece.
Sadly, Brianna had finals or she'd have been there with bells on, she assured us.
Nadine had finals too but she did make it down, which delighted me. She was probably the single
most gifted student I've ever had. Her serial "Mermaid's Touch" still gets gasps of awe when the
kids go through the old books.
In fact, when Katrina joined my class when she was in middle school, she was so inspired by
Nadine's work that she took the same pen name, "KittyBell."
So, what would
you imagine to be included in a special edition version of Capcom's upcoming pseudo-expansion pack,
Super Street Fighter IV?
Perhaps a FightStick emblazoned with the personas of the game's new characters? That's a pretty
good guess, but the correct answer was, of course, a USB flash drive, a gym bag, a head band, a
Dudley T-shirt and an aluminum water bottle. Sorry! You were so close.
Capcom recently began
taking pre-orders on the "Dojo Edition" of SSFIV, which retails for a crisp $79.99.
Yes, that's double the price of the standalone game -- however, the standalone game won't make you
the envy of all the folks at your local workout center. We think that notoriety would be worth the
extra cash.
So, what would
you imagine to be included in a special edition version of Capcom's upcoming pseudo-expansion pack,
Super Street Fighter IV?
Perhaps a FightStick emblazoned with the personas of the game's new characters? That's a pretty
good guess, but the correct answer was, of course, a USB flash drive, a gym bag, a head band, a
Dudley T-shirt and an aluminum water bottle. Sorry! You were so close.
Capcom recently began
taking pre-orders on the "Dojo Edition" of SSFIV, which retails for a crisp $79.99.
Yes, that's double the price of the standalone game -- however, the standalone game won't make you
the envy of all the folks at your local workout center. We think that notoriety would be worth the
extra cash.
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Can a luxury resort ever be green? A new hotel on the Maldivian island of Hadahaa is a true
eco-paradise
With great pride, our "butler" Atheef is describing the utter deliciousness, the supreme
sweetness, the irresistible flavour and vast superiority of the Maldivian mango. When I offer the
Indian mango in comparison, he snorts with derision: the Maldivian variety is clearly in a much
higher league. It's also only available in this island paradise for two months of the year, and
as Atheef speaks I have a flashback to childhood and the giddy excitement of strawberries coming
into season – a delight wholly unknown to my own children, for whom such
exotic delicacies are these days pedestrian staples thanks to the global food market.
The Maldives, however, is not the place to get radical about eating only local, or indeed
seasonal, foodstuffs: these idyllic islands rely on imported produce, and working out how to feed
themselves while striving to become the first carbon-neutral nation on earth is one of the many
conundrums facing the inhabitants of this breathtaking collection of islands. There are 1,190 of
them in all, scattered among some of the most pristine coral reefs in the Indian Ocean, and at
two metres above sea level this vacation paradise is one of the most threatened nations on earth.
The most pessimistic estimates suggest that they will be underwater by the beginning of the next
century, a danger their energetic new president, Mohamed Nasheed, is striving to publicise to the
international community – last October the entire cabinet donned scuba gear
and met underwater.
As a result of the very real threat on their doorstep, words like "sustainability", whispered
among a very few of the forward-thinking hotels a decade ago, are now littered generously
throughout their brochures. The bonanza that took place in the 1980s and 90s, turning the area
around the capital, Malé, into a resort metropolis with barely a care for preserving reefs
or local livelihoods, has thankfully all but come to a halt.
If the Maldives are a dot on the world map, the island of Hadahaa is a mere grain in an enormous
oceanic expanse, as far south as you can go without crossing the equator. It lies in the utterly
unspoilt and second largest atoll in the world, Huvadhoo. Until recently the whole area was off
limits to visitors, the result of a government policy that sought to protect its ecosystem but
also discouraged mingling between tourists and the local population, which put many travellers
off these islands because they felt them to be a cultural void.
Since 2007 a small clutch of hotels has been allowed to set up among the native islands under the
strictest environmental supervision, bringing employment and visitors to a region previously
ignored. The contrast between this gloriously underpopulated, development-free atoll and the
frenzy of the resort scene around Malé is extraordinary.
The latest arrivals, such as the one I'm visiting, pay more than lip service to environmental
concerns. At Alila Hadahaa, which opened in August, they have their own desalination plant to
create drinking water, hold a Green Globe Certification for planning and construction, and use
wood certified sustainable from Malaysia. Most commendable of all is the presence of so many
local staff; Maldivians make up 65% of the workforce. For a people in search of a homeland
– as their president has described them – they couldn't be
doing a better job of the audition. Staff such as Atheef – in his roving role
of villa butler – and Shamin (snorkeller, babysitter, football expert and
purveyor of popcorn) are proud of their country, eager to help you to experience more of it and
so good with the kids that I feel surplus to requirements.
For a resort so clearly not imagined with children in mind – from the lavish
luxury of the super-chic rooms to the glass and stone-hewn bathrooms – they
couldn't cater for them better. Chicken curry sans spices, jelly made to order, babysitting on
request and everywhere waiters happy to build "volcano land" in the sand, dive masters who long
to take them snorkelling. I virtually have to wrestle the staff to get the children back for a
couple of hours a day.
Alila's new resort is certainly architecturally adventurous. The two-storey state-of-the-art
restaurant with its Bauhaus severity is slightly wasted on an ageing barefoot boho like myself,
but the luxury beach bungalows and water villas make it a positively elemental experience. Of
course it's an irony that is hard for the arriving tourist to ignore that the popular wooden
water bungalows strung out on stilts above the aquamarine shallows at most resorts could, in the
course of our children's lifetime, be all that's left of this island nation.
FOR THOSE WHO stray as far south as Hadahaa, the reward is a pewter evening ocean with a hazy
shadow of islands on the far horizon, bearing no sign of human habitation. Ears pump with the
complete silence we so rarely get to hear. When I take my four-year-old son snorkelling 5ft off
the beach and find a lionfish swaying in the swell, a couple of Moorish Idols guarding the reef
and as many small yellowtails as I can count, Dan starts to choke on his snorkel in excitement.
To say the ocean is still stocked biblically here would be to underestimate what lies below.
Visiting the local villages is also now actively encouraged, as we discover when we are taken on
an afternoon trip to Gadhdhoo, where hand-weaving straw tablemats and fishing offer the only
alternative employment to the hotel and tourist sector. Despite obvious poverty and very basic
amenities, the village looks like it is auditioning for a Best Kept Town award: no rubbish,
well-tended homes with immaculate front yards and trees adorned with colourful strips of the
Maldivian flag.
Shamin explains that every evening at sunset the women and children take to street cleaning in
order to keep their collective home in good order. If only a similar civic spirit could be
nurtured in the UK. During our amble around town an elderly lady in a headscarf (since 9/11 the
Maldivians, previously relaxed Muslims with a little bit of local magic thrown in, have
increasingly been embracing a stricter Islamic code) stops me to enquire whether Molly and Dan
are my only children. When I reply that they are, she looks at me pityingly before declaring that
she has produced 14. Patting my meagre contribution to the population on their heads, she wanders
off chuckling in amusement at my uselessness as a woman.
This is my fourth trip to the Maldives and the first where I get to meet local people in their
own environment and also to eat their cuisine. Along with western delights that include breakfast
croissants the finest Parisian pastry chef would be proud of, Alila Hadahaa boasts a local
restaurant – sand-floored, trestle-tabled and musically themed
– offering the spiciest of curries, the tastiest of pumpkins, the crunchiest
papaya and chilli salads on poppadoms, and pancakes with caramel bananas or fresh coconut rice
pudding to follow. Where other Maldivian resorts can seem hell bent on ignoring their
surroundings, this one is utterly committed to celebrating them.
On our last night, as the great fiery disc of the sun begins its exhausted slide into the sea, we
spot a pod of dolphins gliding in and out of water thick as oil, feeding on the plentifully
stocked and carefully protected home reef. The children, who have been weaving coconut-frond
tapestries with Shamin, run shrieking toward the ocean, dropping clothes along the powder-white
sand as they race into the sea in pursuit of each other. The dolphins make a hasty exit to open
water, but in their absence a familiar figure steps into the frame: Shamin, waist deep in the
ocean, still in uniform shorts and polo shirt, initiating a game with the kids.
It's my abiding image of our brief sojourn on this entrancing island. Thanks not to the
cutting-edge design of the resort nor the fantastic food but to the seductive charm of the local
staff, the five nights here number among the best vacations of my life.
HOW TO GET THERE... Elegant Resorts (01244 897 515; elegantresorts.co.uk) is offering seven nights at
Alila Villas Hadahaa for the price of five, from £2,280 per adult, £2,070 per child
(based on four sharing), including breakfast, British Airways flights and all transfers.
The Maldives is engaged in an ambitious plan to become the world's first carbon-neutral country.
By 2020 all its power will come from the wind and the sun, plus a biomass plant burning coconut
husks. But the Maldives' biggest industry is tourism, so what about all the carbon emitted by the
flights? There is no magic solution, but the government's plans include offsetting the emissions
of all flights. Several offsetting methods are being examined, including buying "European
emissions permits" which reduce pollution from Europe's factories. Until the scheme is
operational, tourists have to arrange their own offsets. Mariella Frostrup did so with Climate
Care (jpmorgan climatecare.com).
Gordon Brown's officials in close contact with union chiefs as Tories try to stoke row over
party's funding
Desperate attempts to end the BA cabin crew strike were being mounted by government ministers
last night as Labour battled to prevent the dispute from wrecking its preparations for the
general election.
Gordon Brown's officials were in close touch with Tony Woodley, joint general secretary of the
Unite union, throughout yesterday amid hopes that a settlement could be reached that would
prevent the action spreading into next weekend. But sources close to the dispute said last night
there was no basis for a deal and that no further talks were scheduled.
Yesterday the Tories turned up the pressure on Labour over the strike and its links with Unite by
launching a new advertising campaign showing Brown dressed as a BA pilot under the headline
"Gordon is doing sweet BA".
The political row surrounding the dispute deepened last night after it emerged that Unite is to
give the Labour party £4m to help fund its general election campaign. The union agreed the
deal with the Labour leadership a few weeks ago as Labour desperately sought the cash to mount an
effective campaign against the Conservatives. The £4m represents half of the money that the
unions have been asked for by Labour. Up to £2m is said to have been requested from Unison,
the public services union, and another £2m from the GMB general union. Eric Pickles, the
Conservative party chairman, told the Observer: "When travellers are facing the effects
of Unite's militant action it is beyond belief that Brown can have the brass neck to keep his
crumbling Labour government afloat with cash from these union barons."
Labour concerns about the strike will be reinforced by an ICM poll for BBC Radio 4's
Broadcasting House, which shows only 25% of people say the action is justified, 60% say
it is unjustified and 15% are undecided.
BA launched a strike-breaking operation of unprecedented scale yesterday, although Unite claimed
that the airline had managed to fly only a third of its normal scheduled departures.
The airline claimed that half of the cabin crew rostered to work yesterday had turned up for
their shifts and announced the reinstatement of more flights.
But one Unite official said the disruption caused, with hundreds of flights cancelled over the
weekend, would be a wake-up call to BA's chief executive, Willie Walsh. "The next three days will
determine whether or not we get back around the table," the official said.
Passengers at BA's Terminal 5 base at Heathrow airport were greeted by an array of unusual
airline names on departure boards, as the likes of Transavia, Astraeus and Titan were brought in
to carry passengers to their destinations.
The airline expected to fly 65% of passengers, or about 120,000 people, over the course of the
weekend. A spokesman said that operations at Heathrow were "continuing to go well", with a full
schedule operating at Gatwick.
BA customers at Terminal 5 were divided about the strike. "I am not anti-trade union
– I have been a member of one for 20 years – but I don't
understand what Unite is trying to achieve at a time when so many people are losing their jobs,"
said Barbara Bond, a consultant waiting for her flight to Hyderabad. Her return flight next week
could be cancelled due to the next wave of strikes, with a four-day walkout scheduled to start
next Saturday if no agreement is reached by then.
Hundreds of BA cabin crew attended a rally yesterday at their temporary strike headquarters at
Bedfont football club, a few hundred metres away from Heathrow's southern runway.
The mood at Bedfont's packed social club was defiant and upbeat. One air stewardess, speaking on
the condition of anonymity, said: "This can continue. It will go into the summer if necessary,
until we get back round the table."
Unite's assistant general secretary, Len McCluskey, accused Walsh of behaving like an "industrial
dictator" in the dispute over reductions in staffing levels on board British Airways aircraft.
"He is more like a 19th-century mill owner than a 21st century chief executive."
Police said that the protests, including four picket lines at Heathrow, had been peaceful.
The favourite new drug of clubbers and schoolchildren hit the headlines last week when two young
men died after taking it. Sold under a range of street names – meph, miaow
miaow, MC, drone and bubbles – and easily available on the web, mephedrone is
not illegal. But should it be? Here, four people from different sides of the debate
– a user, a mother, a dealer and a doctor – have their say
on 'the poor man's cocaine'
The user: Jack Starks
The first time I encountered mephedrone, meow meow, plant food or whatever you want to call it,
was about a year ago at a friend's house in south London. We were back from a night out at the
student union and all wanting to continue the party when my friend's flatmate, Brandon, got back
from work and, with a sly smile, disappeared into his bedroom, to return with a huge box. He
dumped the biggest pile of powder I had ever seen on the table. "This, my friends, is
mephedrone," he said with relish. "And this is the future."
Like many students, I've never been one to say no to a new experience. We all end up running into
drugs at some point, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about. I've always enjoyed a
spliff and, on occasion, a little more, so I assumed this was just another casual substance I
would be bumping into.
Nicknamed by users as "poor man's cocaine", mephedrone has swept through our nation's youth like
a strong dose of salts, permeating every aspect of the party and night club scene. In less than
six months, it has come from obscurity; everyone knows someone who's on it. Paradoxically, it was
given a chance to become popular because of an EU restriction that prevented the importation of
two substances necessary to the production of MDMA (ecstasy to the layman) that made it
impossible to make or purchase any MDMA in Britain from late 2008. Mephedrone filled the gap in
the market, and at half the cost of MDMA; it was everywhere.
You can snort it, drop it in "bombs" (rolling papers filled with it), and I've even come across
people who eat it. The effect is euphoric, in some ways similar to ecstasy but much
shorter-lived; you need to take a lot more of it a lot more often. The first time I took it, I
could feel my heart pounding; everything seemed as if it was about to explode into life and I was
up till the early hours in a wild rampage of excitement. But there any comparison ends. With
mephedrone, the romance period is very short: after taking it just a couple of times, your
tolerance increases dramatically, to the point that you're doing three or four times more than
you were in the beginning to get high. Your appetite for the stuff also increases.
Brandon was well ahead of the curve. He was importing it from China at about a £1 a gram
and selling it to students at £15. By mid-October, when our student loans had still failed
to appear and finance was getting tight, we hit on the idea of doing the same. We could simply
make a trip down to a seedy office in Victoria where we could buy it in bulk at wholesale price
and then sell it on to our friends at a profit. Doing this you could turn £100 into
£400 in a weekend and have a bit left on the side for yourself.
It became a crash course in drug dealing for beginners, and we weren't the only ones at it.
Hundreds of students had spotted the gap in the market. You couldn't set foot in a club or
house-party without someone walking past offering you "drone".
Whether or not this was legal is a good question, because although mephedrone isn't covered by
the Misuse of Drugs Act, it is illegal to sell it for human consumption. Companies get round this
by putting stickers on their product saying just that. When selling it, we would always tell
people that it was not to be used to get high – it was almost a running joke.
A very dangerous joke indeed.
When on it, you get very edgy (hence the comparison to cocaine) and you constantly crave more. It
is possibly the most addictive substance I have ever come across. What makes it far more
dangerous is that it is the first of a new breed of designer drugs, made purely to evade the laws
surrounding controlled substances.
No one has considered what this will do to people in the short or the long term, and no one
cares. Mephedrone might be called "plant food", but it is a plant decomposer, so what it does to
your insides I dread to think. I once accidentally left a spoon in a bag of the stuff and came
back three days later to find it had stripped off the outer coating and my mephedrone scattered
with tiny silver bits of spoon. We still snorted it.
My stance was changed dramatically by my experience of prolonged use. After three or so months of
using it at least a couple of times a week, I found myself in the darkest depression. I stopped
taking it and suddenly found myself looking round at my friends with their eyes rolling in their
heads and realised how much rubbish we had all been talking to each other. Good, straight-edge
kids who barely used to drink have become crazed drug fiends, sitting in their house snorting
plant food five days a week.
One friend of mine took it once and now has to use an inhaler, because he has permanently damaged
his lungs. Another has almost ceased to be a friend, and is now a socially apathetic zombie,
chasing mephedrone around London with his girlfriend, no longer able to interact without it,
constantly asking if he can borrow 20 quid.
We've always been happy to get wasted on a night out, but I've never seen anything creep into so
many everyday lives like this. I am horrified by the effect this drug has had on the people
around me, and would urge anyone thinking about taking some tonight to change their plans.
Jack Starks is a student in his early 20s who lives in south London
The mother: Sophie Radice
For all those parents who have read with sadness about the deaths of an 18-year-old and a
19-year-old in Scunthorpe, but allowed themselves to be even slightly reassured that their own
teenagers can't have come across mephedrone because they are so much younger, not yet clubbing
and living very different lives, think again.
I first heard about mephedrone six months ago, at first from another north London mother whose
son had ordered this "plant food" off the internet and who had roused her suspicions when he
couldn't explain why he had suddenly developed an interest in gardening.
Then from my own daughter, aged 14 at the time, whose friends had discovered this legal high. She
described them as "talking rubbish as if it is the most interesting thing in the world, and that
they dribble and lick their lips and gurn and grind their teeth".
She said that people shook, bit holes in their lips and cheeks, were unable to feel their legs,
were frightened because their heart was beating too fast and that their skin looked grey.
This might seem like any teenage group that has discovered harder drugs. It is rather like a
description of my own group of friends at that age. What is different is that, in those six
months, those friends who thought they were just experimenting seemed to need to take greater
amounts of mephedrone on more and more occasions. Mephedrone is often sold in five gram bags and,
as it is so "more-ish", it seems to be easy – even common –
for a user to go through a whole bag.
Surely that kind of ever-decreasing, short-lived high is what makes dealers extremely rich and
leads to the kind of desperate endless addiction of the crack-user?
Should all of this mean that we should immediately ban it? Well, I have always had a liberal view
about drugs, believing that the criminalisation of drugs just creates an underground. I look at
how making ketamine (a horse tranquilliser) a class C drug didn't stop its use among the young.
On an intellectual level, I agree with Professor David Nutt's measured suggestion of creating a
"holding" class of D drug category. Within this category, sales would be limited to over-18s; the
product would be quality-controlled, at doses limited as far as possible to safe levels; and it
would come with health education messages. I also agree with Nutt that what we should look into
is why teenagers are so drawn to taking drugs and why binge-drinking is so prevalent in this age
group.
On a much more visceral, instinctive level, this "let's wait and see how harmful this drug is" D
category doesn't comfort me at all. For this younger age group, the legality of mephedrone is a
real attraction. While they can get hold of "weed" to smoke (mostly through older siblings, and
even parents), because they are not yet going to clubs but to each other's houses or private
parties they are rarely able to get their hands on harder drugs.
They can buy mephedrone off the internet or from headshops (shops selling drug paraphernalia) or
stalls. Teenagers of this age seem to think that its legality means that it is safer than other
drugs, which might also contribute to the wild abandon with which it is taken.
Health warnings wouldn't do a thing (my daughter says that, perversely, the deaths in Scunthorpe
have made her friends even more determined to take the drug) and surely an over-18s rule on the
net would be just like those porn sites that ask you to click a button to say that you are over
18 and that's all the proof you need. Prosecution of those selling to under-18s would be almost
impossible in cases of website dealing.
For this age group, making mephedrone a class B drug would at least put up some sort of
substantial hurdle and make it much harder for them to get hold of.
Just making it so much more difficult to track down may cause enough of a pause for some sort of
easing-off from the enthusiastic consumption of what seems to be a particularly addictive drug.
Oh, and while we are waiting for a decision on this, look out for a fishy smell in your
teenager's sweat, nose bleeds, restlessness, headaches, insomnia and a traces of yellowy powder
on the surfaces in their room.
Sophie Radice is a journalist and mother of two who first came across the drug last year
The dealer: Mark
I have no background in narcotics. My worst offence is a puff on a joint in college, which I
found unpleasant. I am at heart "anti" substance abuse, though I am in favour of free choice.
I own and run three normal, legitimate businesses, all of which, thanks to the recession, have
had their troubles. Have you ever laid off a loyal member of staff? It's the worst feeling in the
world. I was looking for a lifeline.
I first heard of mephedrone in September. A friend heard about a new chemical that was originally
a kind of plant food. It was legal and its effects mimicked cocaine and MDMA. I started searching
for information on Google and within an hour I knew this would be a winning business.
From the start, I wanted to run this completely legitimately. No shady cash deals, pay tax, give
excellent service with a quality product at the right price. Was I comfortable with the concept?
No. Did I want to lose my home to the bank? No. Decision made.
In the first weeks, I bought my stock inside the UK, but very quickly I began buying direct from
a manufacturer in China. I registered a company and contacted a web designer.
This is where the problems started. Even before the press discovered mephedrone, it was not
possible to find good professional help. Undaunted, I built my own website. No banks would touch
the credit card side of the business. I fudged round this and I was up and running. I launched
the website and within an hour had five sales. My first week I turned over £8,000; the
second, £10,000.
Then, last November, mephedrone hit the headlines. Its use was blamed for the death of a
14-year-old girl, although this turned out not to be the case. I thought it was the end. How
wrong I was. That week, sales doubled. When mephedrone is in the news, demand rockets. Last week
came the death of two boys. (I cannot comment on this tragedy, except to say I do not believe
mephedrone was the cause.) One of my websites, which usually gets around 1,200 hits a day,
received more than 20,000. The media have made mephedrone what it is.
Before you leap to judgment, do you drink alcohol? It is deadly, with 8,000 deaths directly
attributed to it in the UK in 2008. There is a huge trade in illegal drugs in the UK. But people
do not have to be criminals. They don't have to buy bags of drain cleaner from dodgy blokes in
pub car parks.
The process of importing has become difficult lately, as UK Customs has begun withholding
shipments. I have had 40kg seized. No explanation has been given and Customs has made no contact.
This is surely illegal.
Mephedrone looks likely to be banned. This is the most dangerous thing that can happen. It is
essentially a very safe substance. There is no addiction and to date I know of no deaths directly
attributed to it. There are suppliers online such as me who treat this as a genuine business and
supply a quality product pure to the customer.
The day mephedrone is banned, I will shut up shop. The taxman will lose hundreds of thousands of
pounds and the criminals will step in. Prohibition has always failed. And the genie is really out
of the bottle this time. Millions have used mephedrone in the UK. If they are stopped from
getting it legally, they will either buy illegally or, even worse, try something new.
No British government would have the courage to exercise the level of common sense needed to keep
it legal, what with an election looming and swarms of horrified Daily Mail readers to
impress. This government has already sacked the moderate, sensible and knowledgeable Dr David
Nutt. Mephedrone will be banned – and be dammed.
Mark is a businessman and owner of several websites that sell mephedrone
The doctor: James Bell
I first heard about mephedrone last July. The young man sitting opposite me told me that it had
just arrived on the nightclub scene. He had tried it at once. He was well-educated and from a
prosperous and stable family (who knew nothing about his drug use). He was in my clinic to
withdraw from another "legal high", GBL. After using GBL for a few months, he had been dismayed
to discover that he had become dependent. His lament "I didn't know it was addictive" could have
been uttered by most doctors and policy-makers.
We are all playing catch-up as new compounds are recognised, banned – and new
drugs appear, the risks of which slowly become apparent. Legal highs are mostly compounds closely
related to known (and banned) psychoactive drugs. Mephedrone is chemically very similar to
ecstasy. The slight variation in structure makes it legal, but also means that mephedrone has
different pharmacological effects and toxicity.
This makes difficulty for the advisory council on the misuse of drugs, which advises the
government on whether a drug should be banned, as it has little information to go on. It takes
experience to find out about the harms of particular drugs. It was only in the late 1990s, after
years in which cannabis was regarded as a fairly harmless drug, that studies demonstrated it
caused the development of psychosis in some vulnerable adolescents. News that two people died
after using mephedrone suggests it may be dangerous, but we don't know enough. Mephedrone can
cause cardiovascular problems, but I suspect that the post-mortem findings will identify other
contributing drugs.
GBL, which was classified in December 2009, is a case study in legal highs. Many users overdose
inadvertently and a small proportion progress to dependence. On trying to stop, users can
experience severe withdrawal symptoms. Throughout 2009, most GPs and drug services knew nothing
of GBL, and were unable to offer treatment. It was to catch up with this need that a "party
drugs" clinic was established in south London . Attendees have reported that, since being banned,
GBL is still readily available for same-day delivery, from internet sites outside the UK.
Mephedrone and GBL both enhance confidence and sociability and reduce sexual inhibitions.
However, it is easy to lose the plot. The first dose of mephedrone produces intense euphoria, but
repeated dosing produces decreasing pleasure and increasing paranoia and irritability
– yet some people keep chasing the initial high until exhausted. This binge
pattern of use maximises risks and minimises benefits of drug use.
A pre-election environment is a bad time to initiate a discussion about drugs policy, as there is
a risk that any debate will degenerate into which party is going to ban more drugs, more rapidly.
"Legal highs" are an easy target for moral outrage, precisely because they are legal and
something can be done about that. More difficult is trying to address Britain's prodigious demand
for drugs, legal and illegal. A non-partisan debate about reducing the harm would be valuable.
Dr James Bell is an addictions consultant at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust
Unite and Labour are in an abusive relationship that stops any chance of worthwhile change
Success hasn't spoiled Charlie Whelan. He was a character assassin and thug long before he became
famous. I last met the political director of Unite in the autumn of 2008 as he was encouraging compliant journalists to go after
Alistair Darling. I thought I had witnessed all varieties of political hypocrisy, but Whelan
still shocked me because he was attacking the chancellor for a crime that was no crime at all to
anyone in the centre-left tradition.
Darling had correctly identified that allowing speculators to run riot had left Britain facing
the worst financial crisis in 60 years. Gordon Brown had to betray a friend and denigrate an ally
for this statement of the obvious because he was the bedazzled dupe who had borrowed as if the
riotous market could roar on forever and told City bankers at the Mansion House in 2007 that
Britain needed more, rather than less, of their "vigour, ingenuity and aspiration". Despite their
loudly professed left-wing principles and equally suspect mockney accents, Whelan and Damian
McBride went for Darling for honestly admitting that boom and bust had not been abolished after
all. Lobby correspondents behaved like children egging on the playground bully, and allowed
"government sources", hiding behind the coward's cloak of anonymity, to tell their readers that
the chancellor's job was on the line.
The Thick of It does not give you the half of it. Before Darling, Whelan's
target was Martin Bright, the New Statesman's political editor. He boasted to Bright's
wife at the 2008 British Press Awards that he had the power to instruct Geoffrey Robinson, the
magazine's Brownite owner, to fire her husband and father of her children for not showing due
respect to Gordon Brown and for making a documentary about Ken Livingstone's indulgence of the
Islamist far right. "He can't allow this. He can't allow criticism of Gordon. If Geoffrey's got
any sense, he'll listen." Bright was duly forced out, although the paper insists that it remains
a part of the free press, and that its compliance with Downing Street's publicly declared wishes
was a coincidence.
I drag up these ugly scenes because the Tory attack on Whelan and Unite is missing the point.
Conservatives claim that by making Brown's spin doctor its political director, Unite is using its
powers of patronage to take over the Labour party. Unite officers are getting Labour nominations
for plum seats – John Cryer in Leyton, Jack Dromey in Birmingham Erdington – while Unite money is funding the
fight against the Tories in the marginals.
The money matters, of course, but the story isn't quite right. Manufacturing Birmingham was
always going to look favourably on Dromey, who has been involved in industrial disputes since the
1970s. Meanwhile, far from being a Whelan placeman, Cryer was another of his targets. Along with
fellow Unite officials, Cryer went on long-term sick leave after Whelan came to the union, the
cause of which may be guessed by the grievance procedures they brought against him citing stress.
Unite isn't running Labour. Both are caught in an abusive relationship, and it is hard to know
who is the abuser and who is the victim. The union is hurting Brown's cause by dragging him into
air strikes just before an election, but the union movement and British politics is suffering as
badly.
From the narrow trade unionist point of view, the BA cabin crew are not benefiting from having Whelan, the supposed master of spin, as a
comrade. The media always turn on strikers, because managers briskly deunionised most of the
industry in the 1980s, and because editors know that more readers will complain about a strike
than support it. Even if you accept that bias, you ought to be surprised that Unite is putting
its case so poorly. The public does not know that air hostesses and stewards are not
revolutionary militants, but reasonable men and women who made a conciliatory offer to accept a
pay cut instead of redundancies which extremist managers refused to countenance.
More widely, an opportunity to change the terms of public debate is being missed. Commentators
announce that the recession and strikes herald a return to the 1970s, and cannot see that today's
crisis is nothing like the collapse of social democracy a generation ago. Margaret Thatcher won
three election victories because enough voters believed that exorbitant wage demands had wrecked
the economy. This time, no one can plausibly maintain that the unions brought ruin to the
country. The folly of the financial elite, and the neglect of the public officials and
politicians who should have been regulating, brought us low in 2008. Trade unions ought to be
agitating for causes which are close to their hearts: how to create a new Britain which is not so
fatally dependent on the manipulation of money markets; how to revive manufacturing; and how to
regulate the City so that never again do working- and middle-class taxpayers have to bail out the
super-rich.
If they did, they would find that many Mail and Telegraph readers would support
them, because they know that their taxes will rise and services will be cut to pay for the City's
blunders. Yet Britain's largest union cannot begin an urgent conversation because it is not just
tying itself to Labour but to the Brownite faction, which Unite's leaders dumbly believe to be a
left-wing alternative to the hated Tony Blair. They don't understand that the Brownites are not
rough yet honourable street fighters in the Labour movement, but the Westminster equivalent of
Mafia enforcers who try to eliminate anyone who stands in their don's way regardless of their
political beliefs. They assail the chancellor for knowing a classic crisis of financial
capitalism when he sees it and journalists for criticising politicians who court religious
reactionaries. When Brown is gone, they hope to extend the Brownite reign by persuading the
unions to put the unprepossessing Ed Balls in his place, even though as Brown's deputy at the
Treasury he was as culpable for the regulatory failure as his equally unprepossessing patron.
Outsiders look at our clannish politics and ask why the Conservatives cling to Lord Ashcroft and
Labour continues to listen to Whelan when they bring nothing but disrepute to their parties. More
striking is the torpor of the trade unions, which ought to be seizing the chance to create a new
political consensus, but are letting it slip away.
Charles Arthur investigates how the ways in which we watch sport, read magazines and do business
with each other could change for ever
Don't act too surprised if, some time in the next year, you meet someone who explains that their
business card isn't just a card; it's an augmented reality business card. You can see a collection
and, at visualcard.me, you can even design your
own, by adding a special marker to your card, which, once put in front of a webcam linked to the
internet, will show not only your contact details but also a video or sound clip. Or pretty much
anything you want.
It's not just business cards. London Fashion Week has tried them out too: little symbols that
look like barcodes printed onto shirts, which, when viewed through a webcam, come to life.
Benetton is using augmented reality for a campaign that kicked off last month, in which it is trying to find models from among the
general population.
Augmented reality – AR, as it has quickly become known –
has only recently become a phrase that trips easily off technologists' lips; yet we've been
seeing versions of it for quite some time. The idea is straightforward enough: take a real-life
scene, or (better) a video of a scene, and add some sort of explanatory data to it so that you
can better understand what's going on, or who the people in the scene are, or how to get to where
you want to go.
Sports coverage on TV has been doing it for years: slow-motion could be described as a form of
augmented reality, since it gives you the chance to examine what happened in a situation more
carefully. More recently cricket, tennis, rugby, football and golf have all started to overlay
analytic information on top of standard-speed replays – would that ball have
hit the stumps, the progress of a rally, the movement of the backs or wingers, the relative
flights of shots – to tell you more about what's going on. Probably the most
common use is in American football where the "first down" line – the distance
the team has to cover to continue its offence – is superimposed on the picture
for viewers.
But those required huge systems. AR took its first lumbering steps into the public arena eight
years ago: all that you needed to do was strap on 10kg of computing power –
laptop, camera, vision processor – and you could get an idea of what was
feasible. The American Popular Science magazine wrote about the idea in 2002 – but the idea of being permanently
connected to the internet hadn't quite jelled at that point.
"AR has been around for ages," says Andy Cameron, executive director of Fabrica, an interactive
design studio which works with Benetton, "maybe going back as far as the 1970s and art
installations that overlaid real spaces with something virtual." He mentions in particular the
work of pioneering computer artist Myron Krueger.
What's changed in the past year is that AR has come within reach of all sorts of developers
– and the technology powerful enough to make use of it is owned by millions of
people, often in the palms of their hands.
The arrival of powerful smartphones and computers with built-in video capabilities means that you
don't have to wait for the AR effects as you do with TV. They can simply be overlaid onto real
life. Step forward Apple's iPhone, and phones using Google's Android operating system, both of
which are capable of overlaying information on top of a picture or video.
Within the small world of AR, one of the best-known apps is that built by Layar, which – given a location, and
using the iPhone 3GS's inbuilt compass to work out the direction you're pointing the phone
– can give you a "radar map" of details such as Wikipedia information, Flickr
photos, Google searches and YouTube videos superimposed onto a picture you've taken of the scene.
For Americans, it will also pull in details from the government's economic Recovery Act
– so that if you're on Wall Street and want to see how many billions went into
which building, it will show you.
Or, more usefully, Yelp offers an augmented reality
application that will show you ratings and reviews for a restaurant before you walk in
– the sort of thing that could make restaurants quiver with delight, or
shudder in horror.
Or maybe it wouldn't need to know where it is; only who it's looking at. A prototype application
demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February took things a little further
again. Point the phone at a person and if it can find their details, it will pull them off the
web and attach details – their Twitter username, Facebook page and other facts
– and stick them, rather weirdly, into the air around their head (viewed
through your phone, of course). "It's taking social networking to the next level," says Dan
Gärdenfors, head of user experience research at The Astonishing Tribe, a Swedish mobile software company.
And there are fabulously useful applications: at Columbia University, computer science professor
Steve Feiner and PhD candidate Steve Henderson have created their Augmented Reality for
Maintenance and Repair (Armar) project. It combines sensors, head-up displays, and
instructions to tackle the military's maintenance needs: start working on a piece of kit, and the
details about it pop up in front of
you. Imagine if you could put on a pair of special goggles when you needed to investigate
your car's engine, or a computer's innards, and the detail would pop up. That's the sort of idea
that Armar is trying to implement, though for the military at first..
Yet it's fashion which seems to have leapt quickest into this technology. The T-shirt with AR in
London Fashion Week was developed by Cassette Playa, a label that has been worn by Lily Allen,
Rihanna and Kanye West. Carri Munden, who designed it with the Fashion Digital Studio at the
London College of Fashion, described it as "mixing reality and fantasy". Adidas, too, has
launched trainers with AR symbols in the tongues: hold them to a webcam and you are taken to
interactive games on the Adidas site.
The process by which the strange symbols get translated into images is simple enough: the website
takes the feed from your webcam (you have to explicitly allow it to do so, so there are no
security worries) and analyses it for the particular set of symbols that the program is looking
for. (Some easy calculations mean the symbols can be detected whichever way up you hold the
item.) Videos and pictures are then sent back to you.
Andy Cameron says that the arrival of an open-source, hence free, AR tool kit has let companies
build their own AR applications, using Flash – the pervasive animation and
video technology used for many online ads and YouTube's videos – "which
immediately meant you had huge penetration, because Flash is everywhere". (Something like 98% of
all computers are reckoned to have Adobe's Flash Player installed.)
"If you build your AR application with Flash, then you can get it out to everybody in the world
with a computer with a webcam," says Cameron.
Benetton is using AR in its latest campaign, called "It's My Time" which aims to get members of the public to put themselves forward as
potential models, and uses AR to show more details about existing models. But its first most
visible use of AR was last year in issue 76 of Benetton's Colors magazine, a quarterly
fashion product. Dozens of pages have AR symbols: hold the page up to a webcam, and you see film
and more photos of the person on the page. "The Colors editor and the creative director
of Fabrica got very excited about it," says Cameron.
Cameron can see huge potential which could even revive the fortunes of print advertising. "Think
of a commercial page, an advert, in a fashion magazine. It's pretty expensive. With this
– and this is the way that the more hard-nosed people in Benetton saw the
advantage – it means that you can get more products on the page." Print an AR
code, get people to come to the site, and you can show them so much more, while measuring the
return from your effort.
The technical cost is a tiny part of the overall effort. "The printing and photography cost [of
the advert] is the same. And the development cost is pretty small."
And of course where advertisers go, the publications that house them are sure to go as well.
Esquire magazine in the US and Wallpaper* in Europe have done "augmented
reality" editions, with Robert Downey Jr coming to life on the cover of the former, and AR text
providing videos and animation in the latter. But there are more possibilities for journalism
using AR: for example if you "geotag" newspaper articles (so that you say that an item relates to
a particular place) then someone visiting a site could learn about events relevant to the area
via their smartphone.
Book publishers too are leaping in: Carlton Publishing will release an AR book in May, featuring
dinosaurs that pop out of the pages when viewed, yes, through a webcam. Future releases include
war, sport and arts titles which will also have extra AR elements.
Yet in media it's the advertisers who are most excited. The possibilities of geotagged, targeted
adverts – which in effect hang in the air until someone comes along to find
them with a smartphone – or of AR adverts which open up a whole new world of
opportunities (and perhaps discounts or loyalty bonuses) when you follow them through
– are yet another glimpse of the holy grail ofads that know exactly who and
where you are.
Is there a risk that we'll all become AR'd out – that it will become boring as
advert after advert invites us to hold it up to a webcam? "What's hot today is ancient history
tomorrow," says Cameron. "There have been a lot of bad uses of this technology with a rush to use
it. We have had the chance to reflect on what it means and how to use it. The key is that it
should be an enhancement of the stuff on the printed page."
Even so we're still in the early stages, he argues. "It's very primitive –
having to use a webcam, holding a magazine up to it. Obviously we're really interested in the
opportunities with handheld devices. It's very frustrating that the iPhone doesn't allow access
to the live video stream." (Nor does it run Flash, another problem for would-be AR designers.)
"People in design are very annoyed with Steve Jobs," he observes. "We don't really understand why
Apple won't allow that."
Given that access, he says, "you could hold your iPhone up to a billboard and get something
amazing right there". What about the alternative, such as Google's Android-based Nexus phone? "It
looks like you could do it on that," he says. But of course the iPhone is a target market. "Maybe
Apple wants to keep that for itself," Cameron says. "Maybe they're lodging patents. Or maybe the
processor on the iPhone isn't fast enough."
Yet there are some who think that AR has already had its brief time in the sun. At the Like Minds
conference in Exeter at the beginning of March, Joanne Jacobs, a social media consultant,
described an AR application that demanded you buy a T-shirt and then go and sit in front of your
webcam – so you could play Rock, Paper, Scissors. By yourself.
"It's hopeless," Jacobs said.
Cameron admits to some uncertainty about AR's measurable impact. "I don't know if it sells more
things, but it seems clearly a good thing if we can get people who may be customers to
participate in the adverts." But, he adds: "If people start to play with the adverts in a way
that exposes them to more products, that's got to help bring a commercial return."
With a new collection of short stories to his name and two of his plays currently showing in New
York, the notoriously private Pulitzer prize-winner discusses masculinity, his battle with drink
and his 'tumultuous' relationship with Jessica Lange
Where do you even begin with Sam Shepard? With his Pulitzer prize? His Oscar nomination? The fact
that he's routinely described as "America's greatest living playwright?" Or if you're going to be
superficial about it – and I am, just for a moment – maybe
the place to start is with the image of him as the tall, taciturn test pilot, Chuck Yeager, the
cowboy-ish character he played in The Right Stuff; a man whose life was spent exploring
the outer edge of what is and isn't possible.
But then I speak to Patti Smith on the phone and ask her what her impression was of Sam Shepard
the first time she met him back in 1970 (shortly before they began an affair), and it's the first
thing she says too: "He was just everything that one could want. He was –
still is – a very handsome man. And he had this animal magnetism. It was
almost visceral. He was so high energy and had a real glint in his eyes. He was born for
rock'n'roll. I had no idea who he was when I met him. He was a drummer in a band, the Holy
Modal Rounders, at the time and he just had something in him that made him a great, great
performer. I just thought he was the future of rock'n'roll. I had no idea that actually he
was this great writer too." If you had to invent an all-American literary hero, he'd be something
like Sam Shepard. With his slow, western drawl, and his love of the open road and the empty
badlands way out west, he's always seemed like the authentic voice of a certain sort of American
manhood; telling stories – of suffocating families and wretched lovers
– from the forgotten, inbetween places of the American outback. He wrote the
screenplay for Paris, Texas, the great, atmospheric Wim Wenders film, and played another
cowboy-ish character in Robert Altman's adaptation of Shepard's stage play Fool for
Love, fixing an image in the public imagination of both him and a remote, fly-blown America
a world away from the metropolises on either coast. But then Sam Shepard is that man. He
comes to New York for work but his heart is with his horses back at the ranch in Kentucky that he
shares with the actress Jessica Lange, his partner now for nearly 30 years.
All this, then, and a literary reputation that it's hard to overstate. According to Christopher
Bigsby, professor of American literature at the University of East Anglia, who I consult on the
matter, he's simply the most significant playwright of the past 50 years. His biography groans
with accomplishments, he's written nearly 50 plays, acted in dozens of films, directed others,
and written the screenplays for still more. And then there's the books about him, the academic
treatises on his art, a Cambridge companion to his work, critical exegeses of his themes,
analyses of his stagecraft... oh, the list goes on and on.
The one thing he isn't, though, is much of a talker. He doesn't often give interviews but when he
does he's routinely described as "taciturn" and "private"; his answers are "curt" or "terse".
He's "famously press-skittish". Worse, I read time and again of how he's "notoriously protective
of his privacy" and won't answer personal questions. Which is a shame because there are so many
personal questions I want to ask him. About his relationship with Jessica Lange, and his time
with Patti Smith, and his three children, and being on the road with Bob Dylan. He's spoken
extensively about his relationship with his alcoholic father before, but not about his own
drinking: last year he was arrested for driving under the influence and ordered to attend an
alcohol rehabilitation programme.
He'll talk about the work but there's nothing I read which gives much sense of him as a man. I
can't help but feel a pang for the journalist who asked him if, one day, he might turn their
conversation into dialogue in one of his plays. "We're not having a dialogue, this is question
and answers," he says curtly. "Dialogue is like jazz. Dialogue is creative.'"
I am prepared for the worst, then, and when he ambles into the restaurant he's chosen near New
York's Times Square, it seems this is probably just as well.
How long have we got, I ask, while fumbling with my tape recorder.
"Well," he says sitting down and ordering tea, "that all depends on the questions."
It's a heart-sinking moment and, as it turns out, a completely misleading one. Because it
transpires that Sam Shepard isn't actually cold or taciturn or intimidating at all. Or at least
the Sam Shepard I meet isn't, because it turns out that there seem to be several different
Shepards co-existing side by side. At one point, he says of Jessica Lange that her greatest
quality, or the one that struck him most acutely when he first met her, was her modesty. "I'd
never met anybody like her," he says. "She was astounding. One of the great things about her,
aside from her natural beauty, which was remarkable, was her humbleness."
But he has it too. He's dressed in country clothes – a checked shirt and a
nondescript jacket – and, unlike most writers, he has an outdoors complexion;
a lived-in face. But what's most noticeable is his sense of humour. It's a lovely, gentle thing;
he pokes fun at me, at himself; and when I listen back to the tape, I realise something more
shocking still: he doesn't just laugh, and on occasion guffaw, he actually giggles. Sam Shepard
is a giggler.
The private, difficult Sam Shepard is nowhere to be seen. Or at least not for a good three hours
of tea drinking and conversation that is remarkably relaxed. The restaurant, an unpretentious
place he's chosen, is deserted when we arrive. It gradually fills with the pre-theatre dinner
crowd, becomes loud and noisy, and has started to empty again by the time I finally blow it
and ask a question too far. Nice, easy Sam vanishes instantly, replaced in a second by cautious,
wary Sam. "Oh, he's a very charming guy," Patti Smith tells me. "Very compassionate and
thoughtful about other people's feelings. But he's not one for bullshit either."
But then I ought to know something of the idea of two Sam Shepards, existing side by side,
because it's how he wrote himself in his most famous play, True West: as two warring
brothers, Austin the Hollywood screenwriter, and Lee the desert drifter, two sides of the same
Sam Shepard coin, intellect versus instinct locked in an eternal battle for supremacy.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing of all about Shepard's talent is the sheer range of it. He's
risen to the top of his field in almost everything he's tried his hand at, but, despite all the
diversions, the acting and the directing and the music playing, he is, at heart, a writer. Who
simply can't stop writing. Not one but two of his plays are currently playing in New York
– Ages of the Moon, a new work, and A Lie of the Mind, a
modish revival directed by Ethan Hawke. On top of which, a new collection of short stories,
Day Out of Days, has just been published. It's the kind of success that most writers
would maim and kill for, although it's largely beside the point, says Shepard.
"The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible
emptiness. All this stuff is happening. And yet it is not what you are after as a writer. Even
though they are relatively successful. Ages of the Moon has sold out, the book is doing
well, and yet it's not The Thing. And then you're left... there's this feeling... what is it,
then? And, I guess, it's the writing itself which is important."
His sheer output is evidence of Shepard's drive to write. He burst on to the off-off-Broadway
scene in 1964, writing in his off-duty hours from waiting tables in the Village,
enthralling his audience with his exotic tales of the badlands way out west, puncturing the
greatest American myths, and he hasn't stopped writing since. It's the process, I say, not the
results, that makes you happy?
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although happy isn't the exact word. It makes you feel that you're not
useless. That you're at least putting your hand in. I think without writing I would feel
completely useless."
These days he seems to have it all: as much professional success as he can handle, a long and
steadfast relationship, three children, the ranch in Kentucky and bolt holes in New York and New
Mexico. And, in some ways, he's the American dream personified: he was born Samuel Shepard Rogers
in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, the son of a second world war bomber pilot. As a child he was "Steve
Rogers" but after a short stint at college studying animal husbandry he lit off across America,
finally landing in New York, where he emerged as "Sam Shepard". His life is the ultimate act of
self-creation; he came from nowhere, was little-read and poorly educated, and he turned himself
into one of America's leading literary lights.
"And yet still feel so unfulfilled?" he says, and ponders on it for a moment or two. But then
anyone with even the slenderest acquaintance with Shepard's work knows that "the American dream"
is to be treated with circumspection; in Shepard's universe it's a false concept to be blown wide
apart and splattered across all surfaces.
"The great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more interesting. Not just as a
craft but as a way into things that are not described. It's a thing of discovering. That's when
writing is really working. You're on the trail of something and you don't quite know what it is."
He writes on a manual typewriter, and refuses to so much as look at the internet. "I have a
cellphone but I have no Google, I have no gaggle."
Really? But everything you've ever wondered, ever, is out there, I say.
"No, no, no! The things that I wonder about most are not on the internet, I promise you that."
He's still, even after all these years, he says, an outsider. "I'm inhabiting a life I'm not
supposed to be in... and at certain times in my life I have felt a wrongness. And not a moral
wrongness but a sense that this isn't what I was born to be doing." The writers who he responds
most to are those who seem to share a sense of "aloneness", and "writing is almost a response to
that aloneness which can't be answered in any other way".
For Shepard, the heart of this, seemingly, and a recurring theme in his work, is bound up with
the relationship he had with his alcoholic, abusive father. It's there in True West,
Fool for Love, Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child and A Lie
of the Mind, and even now, at the age of 66, it troubles him still. In Fool for
Love, written almost three decades ago, the main character is haunted by the chilling
possibility that he is turning into his father. Back then it was a fear; now, he says, it has
become a fact.
"You think about it, you talk about it, analyse it, and then all of a sudden you have become the
thing that you were most vehement against. It's very Greek. They invented this shit. Or at least
gave it a name."
He's been sober, he says, since the drink-driving incident a year ago. "And prior to that I was
sober for four years and then I relapsed. It's a constant struggle. It's such a knucklehead
disease because you refuse to see it. It wasn't until the 90s that I actually started going to AA
and made a real compact with myself to quit. And I did quit for four years. And then I picked it
up again. It's like being a junkie. I think I have that sort of thing in my blood, in my psyche.
I can become addicted very easily, although the curious thing is that I have two sisters who are
not. So I don't know. Maybe it's just a toss of the dice."
It's the sort of thing a Sam Shepard character might say. In the new book, Day Out of
Days, characters wander through the pages, lost within their own lives (one of the most
memorable features a man trapped in a public toilet who is literally driven mad when he's forced
to listen to Shania Twain on an endless loop). They struggle for personal agency or a sense that
they're in control of their own lives.
"And they never are," he says. "That's the one thing about being an author as opposed to being in
one's life is that you have the illusion that you can bring some form to it. Which is the
beautiful part of it. You don't feel that you are so much in chaos. I don't know what it would be
like if I didn't have some form, short stories or plays or whatever."
He feels "blessed", he says, to have discovered writing. "It fulfils something in me that I don't
know how I'd serve otherwise." His father was a bright man, the winner of a Fulbright
scholarship, a fluent speaker of Spanish, but he never found that outlet. Or at least the outlet
he found was drink. He struggled with the return to civilian life after the war, moving his
family from airbase to airbase, training as a Spanish teacher, until he was sacked for drinking,
and then moving the family to Duarte, California, where he attempted to farm, his drinking
increasing year by year. "The alcohol just completely deranged him," says Shepard.
Roxanne, his younger sister, told People magazine back in the 80s: "There was always
this kind of facing off between them [Shepard and his father], and it was Sam who got the bad end
of that. Dad was a tricky character because he was a charismatic guy when he wanted to be. And at
the other side he was like a snapping turtle. With him and Sam it was that male thing. You put
two virile men in a room and they're going to test each other."
It's this quality, of a simmering, barely controlled violence that disrupts and distorts all of
Shepard's families, that is at the heart of much of his best work. In Shepard's world, romantic
love as the meeting of two souls and the family as the nurturing heart of American life are
nothing but delusions. "They're wonderful retreats from the illusion of being protected from
spinning off the planet. But I don't believe it. And I never did."
So you didn't celebrate Valentine's Day then?
"Oh yes. We just did. I bought her a couple of bottles of wine. I don't drink."
It's not the most romantic gift, I say.
"They were two really good bottles of wine. Really good ones. Oh, and a tape measure. Because she
was putting up a painting."
Love in Shepard's universe is never straightforward, never wholly life-enhancing; it's
life-destroying, too, a struggle for power or control; a curse as well as a blessing. He and
Lange have survived but the relationship was "tumultuous" from the outset. "I mean, we have long
periods of relative calm. But then you know..."
But you've always seemed like such an incredible match.
"Yeah, well, we're definitely an incredible match. But, you know, not without fireworks...
although at this point, you know, she's the only woman I could live with. Who could live with me!
What other woman would put up with me?"
She is, he says, the most honest person he's ever met. "I've never known her, ever, to lie about
anything. And I couldn't say that about..."
Yourself?
"About myself. About anybody. Men lie all the time."
Really?
"You don't know that?" he says and raises his eyebrows. "Whereas Jessica has this absolute
honesty. I think it's a direct quality of the midwest, of that background that she's from."
While the children were growing up, that's where they lived, in Jessica's hometown in Minnesota,
down the road from her mother (and with Jessica's daughter from her relationship with Mikhail
Baryshnikov, Shura). It's the equivalent, today, of Brad and Angelina deciding to settle in a
suburb of Wisconsin. But then, although Shepard and Lange have both appeared in movies, and been
nominated for Oscars – Shepard, one; Lange, six (and she's won two)
– they've always refused to be movie stars.
There's a couple of great quotes from Jessica about you, I say.
"Is there? My God. What? Actually, no. Just give me the good ones."
She said: "No man I've ever met compares to Sam in terms of maleness."
"Well, that's a double-edged sword."
Really? I took it as a compliment.
"This morning she had a conversation with me about France, because she was in Paris in the 70s,
about the gay scene in Paris, which she was very enchanted with. She was talking about a couple
of incidents, and at the end of it I said: 'Well, that's very charming.' And so I think she now
thinks I'm a homophobe because she said: 'Asshole!' and stormed out of the room. I thought, 'Oh
my God, well obviously I'm not sophisticated enough to talk about the gay 70s in Paris.'"
He was married once before, to another actress, O-Lan Jones. She was 19 at the time, he was 26.
Their son, Jesse, was born shortly after the wedding, and then Shepard met Patti Smith. The
attraction was instantaneous, as was their affair, an intense, full-throttle romance, conducted
mostly at the Chelsea Hotel. It was Shepard who encouraged Patti Smith to become a performer.
"She already had this incantatory, lyrical, chanting way of talking, all she needed was a little
shove. She was inhibited by not knowing guitar. I said: 'Guitar is just a back-up for your voice.
You're not going to be Jeff Beck, don't worry about it. Just learn these chords and you'll be
able to back yourself up.' And then it turned out she has this extraordinary voice too."
Reading about the Jones-Shepard-Smith triangle, it all seems very 60s somehow, an amicable
bohemian ménage à trois. When I speak to Patti Smith, though, she puts me straight:
"It was the early 70s. And it wasn't that amicable."
Shepard had decided to return to his wife and baby. "And it was painful," says Smith. "We knew it
was going to end and we were in a room at the Chelsea Hotel. And instead of sitting around and
moping, Sam said: 'Let's write a play.' And I said: 'I don't know how to write a play.' And he
said: 'I'll be one character, and you can be the other.' And we just sat up all night, him
writing a line and then pushing the typewriter across the table to me, and then I'd write a
line."
The result was Cowboy Mouth, which opened at the American Place Theatre with Sam Shepard
and Patti Smith playing themselves, in a double bill with Shepard's play Back Bog Beast
Bait in which O-Lan played a character based on Patti. It was too much, and without warning,
Shepard quit, and fled with O-Lan and Jesse to London.
There are so many of these ruptures in the story of your life, I say to Shepard. You're doing one
thing and then suddenly you're doing something else.
"I know. I don't why it had to be so traumatic. It very definitely felt like these were
earthquakes when they happened. They're terrible and yet on the other side of the coin they're
ecstatic. Like when I met Jessie. It was terrible leaving my oldest boy at that time. He was 13,
which is a really hard age. And, in one way, I can't forgive myself for that. And, in another
way, I'm glad of the life that I've had with Jessie. What's the trade-off? It's always felt like
that. The other thing that's kind of amazed me is that I've had absolutely no qualms about
setting off into unknown territory. I've never been afraid to just start something new."
It was on the set of the film Frances that he met Lange. I tell him that one critic I
read claimed that after meeting Jessica his depiction of male-female relationships became more
complex and interesting. He says that you started writing meatier parts for women.
"Hmm. I guess that's true. Fool for Love came out of my relationship with Jessica and
that's pretty powerful."
Fool for Love features a tumultuous relationship between two characters, Eddie and May,
who both attract and repulse each other. And who, it turns out, are half-brother and sister.
I was looking at photographs of you and Jessica next to each other and I was struck by how
similar you look, I say.
"We do, kinda."
Is the theme of incest in Fool for Love in some way borne out of that?
"I'm sure there's something about that. I'm sure when you're looking for someone, you're looking
for some aspect of yourself, even if you don't know it... What we're searching for is what we
lack. You lack something and your hope is that it'll be fulfilled by who you find."
His relationship with his father has had such a profound effect upon his life, his work, it's
inevitable that he must have reflected upon his own effect upon his children, Jesse, 39, Hannah,
24, and Samuel Walker, 22.
He hesitates when he replies. "I would like to think... you can never determine how you are going
to influence someone, particularly your children. I mean, they are all musicians in some way or
another, so I feel as though... I think that's a result... And my daughter is also a really good
writer. Really good."
The thing about your children compared to you, I say, is that they had a very stable...
"Stable?"
Oh, is that the wrong word?
"Well, relatively stable."
They haven't had the childhood that you had...
"They haven't had an abusive childhood. On the other hand, they have a different set of
problems."
Having a father who is very successful..."
"And a mother," he says. "Yeah. There's a lot of stigmas. My youngest boy is very, very shy. He
doesn't want anything to do with celebrity. And my daughter, she's not crazy about it. None of
them covet fame."
He shies away from speaking about his sons but he seems happy enough to talk about Hannah, his
daughter, currently studying for a PhD at the University of Galway.
"I never thought about having a daughter and then I had a daughter and it was a remarkable thing.
It was very different from having a son and your response to it. With a son, it's much more
complex. And it's probably because of my stuff in the past. With a daughter, I was surprised at
how simple it is."
It's to her, he says, that he intends to leave his notebooks, "because she's the one who's asked
for them."
He's obsessed with his notebooks, he says; they travel with him wherever he goes, "like
gremlins". And he fishes his current one out of his coat and shows it to me. On the inside back
cover he's written the places it's been to with him over the year – Sicily,
Kentucky, New Mexico – and then he flicks through the pages and says, "Look at
this! Look at these drawings." And he shows me some stick men, riding the sort of horses I drew
aged eight. "You know, I was sitting in the University of Texas where they have the original
manuscript of Watt by Mr Beckett and it was amazing because there were all these
drawings on them, so I sat there one afternoon and copied them!"
It's almost as if Sam Shepard has spent his life circling around Samuel Beckett. It was
discovering his plays as a young man that first inspired him to write, and Patti Smith says that
in those days he never went anywhere without a copy of one or other of his plays on him. "Of
course, now he's read everything. He's always discovering something new, whether it's Japanese
death poetry or some new Venezuelan writer or whatever."
Not meeting Beckett is his greatest regret, he says. "My greatest literary regret."
Do you think you're starting to look like him, I say, tongue-in-cheek, although there's an
element of truth to it; he's still recognisable from his cinematic glory days but his face is
craggier now, crisscrossed with experience. He guffaws, enjoying the joke.
"No! It'd be flattering if I did but I think my features are a little bit more savage."
Themes of regret and remorse, of time passing and humans ageing have started to creep into his
work. "I don't believe people who say, 'I have no regrets'. How can you not have regrets?"
Death, he says, changes all perspectives. When I ask him how old his father was when he died, he
replies immediately. "A year older than I am. He was 67."
Does that weigh on you?
"I think about it. But it doesn't weigh on me because of the way in which he died." His father
was run down by a car while drunk. "So I don't worry about it that way. I don't worry about the
way I'm going to die...
But do you think about death?
"Yeah. There's not a day goes by. But that has always been the case. We're all haunted by it in
one way or another. And it's the easiest thing in the world to push it away, you just get a
cappuccino. But, yes, you're haunted by it in a different way [as you get older]. I feel its
presence. I feel it in sleep, in dreams, in waking. Particularly in the morning."
Do you think about the things that you would lose?
"No. You feel that you're diminishing in some way. You feel that your senses are diminishing. I
don't see as well. I'm not as quick as I used to be. Things like that. Knock on wood, I'm not
sick. I don't how people deal with that... I mean life is tough enough. And now you're going to
die! Wow!"
In Ages of the Moon his central character, Ames, has been unfaithful to his wife. "She
discovers this note, this note from this girl, which to this day I cannot for the life of me
remember," says Ames. "Some girl I would never in a million years have ever returned to for even
a minor blow job."
"Minor?" asks his friend, Byron.
In his earliest plays, Patti Smith says, his characters had to act. "They had to do something,
kick a door down or whatever. Now they tend to be more introspective. They're more likely to
examine what they're doing and why."
And Shepard too. His life is in his plays, he's always said that. And so I ask him. About Ames's
infidelities. About whether that's been a source of regret for him too.
"I'm not going to talk about that. You're not going to sucker me into that one! When did you
think I was born?"
Oh dear. It's a classic interview mistake: the question too far. He's amicable enough, and we
carry on for five or so more minutes, but I've got the other Sam. He looks the same but I
can tell he's scanning the horizon for an escape route; it's Sam Shepard, the cowboy, the
character in all his plays; the desert drifter, shifty, cautious, suspicious of strangers.
The giggles are over. And then he's gone, with the briefest of handshakes and a rush to the
door. It's not an entirely inappropriate ending. Shepard's world is a place of blundering people
and blundered words; where plots are never neatly tied up and truths are only ever hinted at,
never fully revealed, least of all to the characters themselves.
La troisième aura été la bonne ! Après deux premières tentatives
avortées en 2008 et en novembre dernier, Franck Cammas est finalement parvenu à
déposséder Bruno Peyron du Trophée Jules-Verne. Une récompense
méritée pour un skipper qui, en quinze ans de carrière, a
révolutionné le monde de la course au large, contribuant largement à sa
professionnalisation. A 37 ans, l'Aixois, redoutable compétiteur, n'a pas fini d'enrichir
son palmarès, lui qui va désormais ouvrir la page d'un nouveau tour du monde en
équipage, la Volvo Ocean Race.
La troisième aura été la bonne ! Après deux premières tentatives
avortées en 2008 et en novembre dernier, Franck Cammas est finalement parvenu à
déposséder Bruno Peyron du Trophée Jules-Verne. Une récompense
méritée pour un skipper qui, en quinze ans de carrière, a
révolutionné le monde de la course au large, contribuant largement à sa
professionnalisation. A 37 ans, l'Aixois, redoutable compétiteur, n'a pas fini d'enrichir
son palmarès, lui qui va désormais ouvrir la page d'un nouveau tour du monde en
équipage, la Volvo Ocean Race.
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A
trois heures de l'arrivée, les deux Peugeot contrôlent la course à Sebring. La
N°07 (Gené/Wurz/Davidson) a pris la tête devant la N°08
(Minassian/Lamy/Bourdais). L'Acura Highcroft (Brabham/Pagenaud/Franchitti) a perdu la
première place en P2.
La Peugeot N°08 (Minassian/Lamy/Bourdais) avait une grosse avance sur la N°07
(Gené/Wurz/Davidson) mais les drapeaux jaunes ont réduit les écarts. Une
stratégie décalée a même fait perdre la tête à la
N°08, qui a récupéré son bien lors d'un nouveau drapeau jaune.
(...) - ALMS /
Sébastien
Bourdais, Anthony
Davidson, Alexander
Wurz, Peugeot 908,
Marc Gené, Andy Priaulx, Simon Pagenaud
FRANCE / ESPAGNE Dans le cadre de l'enquête judiciaire en cours concernant le meurtre d'un
policier français en région parisienne, cinq hommes ont été
identifiés samedi 20 mars sur des images vidéo comme étant des membres
présumés de l'ETA. Les autorités espagnoles et françaises
étaient sur une fausse piste. Les cinq pompiers catalans, en stage d'escalade en France,
avaient été filmés par la vidéo-surveillance alors qu'ils faisaient des
courses dans un supermarché de Dammarie-les-Lys. Reuters
I was trying to make PhpStorm shortcuts behave like ReSharper's. I've been using ReSharper for
severeal years now and I like PhpStorm. Now I'd like to use the same shortcuts, of course. So,
I'd like to use "Ctrl+R, R" for renaming a variable and so on. I did not find a keymap
"ReSharper" but only the keymap "Visual Studio".
The problem is that the keymap "Visual Studio" is different from the real Visual Studio with
ReSharper.
Some examples:
* "Visual Studio" has "Refactor Rename" as Shift+F6, while real ReSharper uses "Ctrl+R, R".
* "Surround with..." command can be invoked with "Ctlr+Alt+T" in the KeyMap "Visual Studio" while
in ReSharper the shortcut is "Ctrl+E, U".
I was trying to make PhpStorm shortcuts behave like ReSharper's. I've been using ReSharper for
severeal years now and I like PhpStorm. Now I'd like to use the same shortcuts, of course. So,
I'd like to use "Ctrl+R, R" for renaming a variable and so on. I did not find a keymap
"ReSharper" but only the keymap "Visual Studio".
The problem is that the keymap "Visual Studio" is different from the real Visual Studio with
ReSharper.
Some examples:
* "Visual Studio" has "Refactor Rename" as Shift+F6, while real ReSharper uses "Ctrl+R, R".
* "Surround with..." command can be invoked with "Ctlr+Alt+T" in the KeyMap "Visual Studio" while
in ReSharper the shortcut is "Ctrl+E, U".
Keep your eyes
tuned to this post -- because at 5:00 PM ET, we'll be starting The Engadget Show
live, with Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab and OLPC Project, Dr.
Richard Marks showing off Sony's PlayStation Move, commentary from Joystiq editor
Chris Grant, plus much, much, more! You seriously don't want to miss
it!
Of course, if you're in NY we'd love to have you attend the show in person at the Times Center.
It's absolutely free! We'll start handing out tickets at 2:30PM, open the doors for seating at
4:30PM, and the show itself starts at 5PM. There will also be giveaways from Sony
after the show, but you obviously have to be here to participate! All the info about attending
can
be found here.
Can't make it? We forgive you, and there's a live video stream that can be found after the break.
In the spirit of awesome, we've enabled tweeting directly to the live stream! To be a part of The
Engadget Show broadcast, just include the hashtag "#engadgetshow" and watch for your tweet on the
ticker at the bottom of the screen. One thing to note, The Engadget Show is a family program, so
any single instance of swearing or trolling will force us to turn off the
ticker... and it won't come back on. So, keep it clean and have fun!
Rose Martin has been visited by police some 50 times in eight years, stemming from her involvement
in crimes ranging from robbery to murder. Of course, she's not actually involved, but the NYPD's
computers continue to think otherwise.
More »
Rose Martin has been questioned by police some 50 times in eight years, stemming from her
involvement in crimes ranging from robbery to murder. Of course, she's not actually involved, but
the NYPD's computers continue to think otherwise.
More »
Rose Martin has been questioned by police some 50 times in eight years, stemming from her
involvement in crimes ranging from robbery to murder. Of course, she's not actually involved, but
the NYPD's computers continue to think otherwise.
More »
Harman International is back with a new range of products across a trio of divisions this spring
– we’re talking about home entertainment, mobile/in-car and multimedia. For those of
you who do plenty of movie watching at home, Harman has just the tonic with spanking new 5.1 home
entertainment solutions, where they include the Harman Kardon HKTS 20 and HKTS 30. Both models
will feature exceptional audio performance and classy design complete with a 200W powered, 200mm
subwoofer and two-way loudspeakers, virtually making them a firm favorite with action movie fans.
Apart from that, this home theater system will also merge a dual-driver center-channel speaker
for distinct movie dialogue, a quartet of compact satellites to pull every viewer into the
exploding action and a powerful subwoofer for heart-stopping bass. They do bear the signature
Harman Kardon form factor as well as functionality to maintain its brand image.
Of course, this pristine audio experience is not limited to the home only, as it will also appear
in-car as well courtesy of the JBL MS-8. Touted to be a highly anticipated, game-changing product
for the mobile category, the MS-8 will feature a one-of-a-kind system integration digital
processor which supposedly optimizes any vehicle’s performance in just a mere 10 minutes.
All you need to do is go through the relatively idiot-proof step-by-step procedure in order for
the MS-8 to maximize frequency response, bass performance, dynamics, clarity, detail and stereo
imaging, regardless of the combination of factory-installed or aftermarket components that your
vehicle sports.
When it comes to classic multimedia, Harman revives the old by offering new, improved versions of
time-honored favorites such as the brand-new Harman Kardon Go + Play Micro, the JBL On Time 200P,
the JBL On Time Micro and the JBL On Stage Micro II. These devices will offer an even greater
versatility and iPod and/or iPhone compatibility, all without compromising on the similar
world-class audio quality which is synonymous with the Harman brand name.
Les deux Peugeot sont en tête des 12 Heures de Sebring à la mi-course, avec la
N°08 (Bourdais/Lamy/Minassian) devant la N°07 (Davidson/Gené/Wurz).
L'Aston Martin est toujours troisième mais le classement a bougé derrière.
La Peugeot N°08 domine depuis la deuxième heure de course et elle a creusé
l'écart sur la N°07, dans laquelle Anthony Davidson a fait un petit
tête-à-queue sans conséquence.
Peugeot est largement au dessus du lot et l'absence de drapeaux jaunes aide l'équipe
française à creuser l'écart : (...) - ALMS / Anthony Davidson, Alexander Wurz, Peugeot 908, Marc Gené, Simon Pagenaud, Sébastien Buemi
Déjà défaits par Paris-Levallois et Poitiers lors de ses
précédentes sorties à Antarès, Le Mans s'est de nouveau incliné
à domicile, face à Lyon-Villeurbanne (54-62) samedi soir, lors de la 23e
journée de Pro A. Un résultat qui relance l'Asvel dans la course aux play-offs, mais
qui n'a pas de conséquence au classement pour le MSB, toujours leader grâce à
la défaite de Cholet à Poitiers (76-71).
In the
next few weeks, the ReadWriteWeb events guide will take you from New York City, to San Francisco,
to Portland, Oregon. Along the way you'll find a conference on search engine strategies, a
showcase for startups, an in-depth look at the freemium business model, and a day filled with of
social media case studies.
How do you like your events calendar? As a
world map? As an
iCal (and Google Calendar-importable) file? You can also import individual events using the
link beside each entry. Know of something cool taking place that should appear here? Let us know
in the comments below or contact us.
Go beyond search at Search Engine
Strategies New York. Learn the newest trends, strategic action plans, and technology that
industry leaders are employing today. Our experts will trace the natural evolution of search
exploring topics such as: digital asset optimization, mobile application development, transition
from search to discovery and more.Book your pass today. Enter RWW15 to save 15% off the
registration. Sessions include:
After a long winter's hiatus, S.F. Beta is back, for its forth year straight! Join
hundreds of founders, investors, developers, and technologists for a lively evening of demos,
drinks, conversation, and new connections. Early bird
tickets are available, and they're going fast. Register now for discounted admission. As
always, we feature startup demos all night. This time around, the theme is Search &
Discovery. If you're building the next Google (or the next Google acquisition), we want you here!
Email cperry@sfbeta.com for more info.
The first Freemium Summit is a one day
event focused on exploring what it takes to succeed under the freemium business model. Across all
segments of the media landscape, entrepreneurs and executives are pioneering models that combine
a free offering with a premium, paid offering. This hybrid business model is one of the most
exciting areas of business model innovation impacting the world of media and the Freemium Summit
will explore the most important topics on the minds of leading practitioners.
Confirmed Speakers: Toni Schneider, Automattic (WordPress); Matt Brezina, Xobni; Aaron Levie,
Box.net; Phil Libin, Evernote; Tom Conrad, Pandora; Drew Houston, Dropbox; Ranjith Kumaran,
YouSendIt; Ben Chestnut, Mailchimp; Lance Walley, Chargify; Isaac Hall, Recurly; and Lincoln
Murphy, Sixteen Ventures.
The social media conference for marketers, Social Fresh is not about concept, but focused purely on
case studies from the front lines. Learn what social media can really do for business bottom
lines. Over the course of the day, you'll hear from 35 speakers from companies like Intel, Ford,
Comcast, Nike and many more, as well as keynote Peter Shankman. Register now and use coupon code RWW15 for 15% off.
4 April 2010: Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania
TEDx CMU is an independently
organized TEDx event that will be held on April 4th, 2010 at Carnegie Mellon University and will
feature a full day of talks by prominent speakers as well as recorded videos from past TEDTalks.
Confirmed speakers include Jonathan Fields (author, blogger and entrepreneur), Stacey Monk
(founder of Epic Change, a startup nonprofit), Chase Jarvis (photographer, director and social
artist) and Nathan Martin (CEO of Deeplocal, an innovation studio in Pittsburgh).
The theme of the event is "Fearless", and we are inviting speakers from cross-disciplinary
backgrounds to talk about their experiences, and tell us a little about what inspires them to be
fearless in the pursuit of goals. We hope to spark discussions and foster connections between
participants, encouraging aspiring individuals to follow their dreams and make a difference. The
event is free to attend, and the application deadline is March 21, 2010.
For more information about the event, visit tedxcmu.com or email
info@tedxcmu.com. You can also find TEDx CMU on Facebook
or follow us on Twitter.
ConnectNow brings together international
specialists and thought leaders in social media, emerging technologies and their intersection
with business. Learn how the realtime web, location based services, augmented reality, ubiquitous
computing and personalised services are changing marketing and communications. Understand the
importance of trust in relationship marketing and what is "social currency". For more info email
info@connectnow.net.au.
PubCon, the premier search
and social media conference, features the industry's biggest names and key players shaping the
future of the Web. PubCon South will include
cutting-edge panel sessions exploring tracks dedicated to search, social media and affiliate
marketing, an intensive professional search and social media training program, and some of the
world's top keynote speakers. PubCon South at Dallas will also hold a one-day, two-track slate of
intensive educational training programs led by some of the industry's most respected search
professionals. The event takes place at the Richardson Conference and Civic Center. Register
here.
Under the Radar: Cloud is must-attend
event for dealmakers and heads of IT from large enterprises, SMBs, service providers, carriers
and media companies who are responsible for helping their companies leverage new technology and
innovation in the fast-evolving IT ecosystem. Join us for the 15th Under the Radar conference,
featuring a hand-picked selection of the world's most innovative cloud startups among 350 top
tech, media, telcom and finance executives. For ticket and more information, visit http://undertheradarblog.com.
FutureMidwest is the region's largest technology and knowledge
conference. Founded by Adrian Pittman, Jordan Wolfe and Zach Lipson, FutureMidwest is the fusion
of two successful conferences held in Michigan in 2009 - the Module Midwest Digital Conference
and TechNow.
Both conferences highlighted how technology and digital tools have dramatically changed the way
we do business and the effect this transition has had on companies. FutureMidwest kicks things up
a notch with presentations, group breakout sessions, relationship-building opportunities and
influencers who are taking action to redefine business in the digital age. Register here.
The social media conference for marketers, Social Fresh is not about concept, but focused purely on
case studies from the front lines. Learn what social media can really do for business bottom
lines. Over the course of the day you'll hear from 35 speakers from companies like Ford, Best Buy,
Scottrade, Hardees, CMT and many more. Register now
and use coupon code RWW15 for 15% off.
DrupalCon is
the premier conference focused on Drupal, the award-winning open source content management
framework that is galvanizing social publishing and web development today. For a registration fee
of $195, attendees get three full days of sessions led by the best and brightest Drupal
experts.
Drupal has been downloaded over 2 million times since its inception, and project growth has
doubled annually for several years. Drupal is used to deliver a wide variety of application types
including blogs, wikis, community networks, digital media portals, and web content publishing and
management.
The Future of Money & Technology
Summit will bring together the best and brightest thinkers around money, including
visionaries, entrepreneurial business people, developers, press, investors, authors,
solution/service providers, and organizations who work where cash and commerce collide. We meet
to discuss the evolving ecosystem around money in a proactive, conducive to dealmaking
environment. Featured speakers include Jolie O'Dell from ReadWriteWeb, as well as representatives
from Wells Fargo Bank, Kiva, SharesPost, Jambool, Founders Fund, Outright.com, SoftTech VC, and
many more.
Use discount code "rww" to get 10% off registration.
The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010
will be an exploration of the latest Mobile development trends - both the technology and the
emerging business applications. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of Mobile with
the brightest in the industry, your peers! As in our last Summit, The Real-Time Web, the
ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit is an unconference.
An unconference is a participant driven conference where the agenda is created
on the day, in real-time and discussions are lead by conference participants. Read about the history of unconferences.
We will have two main tracks at this Summit - Development and Business - so the Summit will be of
interest to managers, marketers, developers, innovators, entrepreneurs and thought leaders alike.
Here's a sample of some of the topics we'll explore in both of these tracks.
FinovateSpring 2010 will again showcase the most cutting-edge
financial and banking technology innovations to Silicon Valley and the world. With Finovate's
signature mix of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) from handpicked
companies and intimate networking time with their executives, this conference packs a ton of
unique value into a single day.
Come see the cutting edge of banking and financial technology and network with hundreds of the
leading financial executives, venture capitalists, press, industry analysts, bloggers and fintech
entrepreneurs. Early bird registration
rates are available.
The SF MusicTech Summit
will bring together 700-plus visionaries in the music/technology space - the best and brightest
entrepreneurs, developers, investors, service providers, journalists, musicians and organizations
who work with them at the convergence of culture and commerce. We meet to discuss the evolving
music, business and technology ecosystem in a proactive, conducive-to-dealmaking environment.
Enter the discount code "rww" to get 10% off.
Glue is the only conference devoted
solely to exploring the problem-sets facing architects, developers and IT professionals in a
"post-cloud" world. Glue focuses on the APIs and protocols (Twitter, Facebook, Websockets,
PubSubHubBub, XMPP), formats and standards (RDF/Linked Data, JSON, Microformats, HTML5),
platforms and providers (Amazon, Rackspace, Google App Engine, Salesforce.com, Eucalyptus),
Identity Protocols (OAuth/WRAP, SAML, OpenID, SPML) emerging NoSQL data models (Cassandra,
CouchDB, MongoDB, Riak, HBase), and other mechanisms that are building the post-cloud world.
ReadWriteCloud will be blogging live from Gluecon and CloudCamp, and ReadWriteWeb's Alex Williams
will be moderating the "Managing Complexity in the Cloud" session. Please join us May 25-27 in
Denver, Colorado. ReadWriteWeb readers can receive 10% off of
registration by using the code "RWW12".
The Corporate Social Media Summit is a
two day conference focused exclusively on how big businesses can take advantage of social media
to enhance their marketing/comms strategy. Featuring:
Practical and relevant insights from peers who have already used social media successfully
20-plus corporate speakers (including
PepsiCo, Whole Foods, Dell, McDonald's, General Motors, Citi, Johnson & Johnson),
Best practice, benchmarks and practical next steps you can use to take advantage of social
media in your business
A tightly-focused agenda with 14 in-depth,
practical workshops giving you knowledge on only the most critical business issues surrounding
corporate use of social media
Save $400 if you quote RWW400 when booking. Book here.
The 2nd annual Cloud Computing World Forum is
the perfect event to learn and discuss the development, integration, adoption and future of cloud
computing and SaaS. Building on the success of the 2009 show, this two day conference and
free-to-attend exhibition will provide a focused platform for the global cloud and SaaS industry.
Show highlights include:
Co-located with CloudCamp London
Co-located with Green IT conference
Free-to-attend exhibition with seminar and scenario theatre
FinovateFall will return to Manhattan on Tuesday, October 5 to
showcase dozens of the biggest and most innovative new ideas in financial and banking technology
from established leaders(...)
When we were writing our book, it occurred to us that there was a kind of misinterpretation of
which a very incautious reader might be guilty, and which we ought to do our very best to block. We
did do our very best; but to no avail. Ned Block and Philip Kitcher make precisely the mistake that
we’d dreaded. Worse, they then proceed to commit several other misreadings, the possibility
of which, we admit, had not occurred to us. We’ll now do our very best to correct their
mistakes, but time and space are pressing, and the opportunities for misinterpretation are, it
appears, boundless. First misreading: Block and Kitcher think we argue, erroneously,
that ”with respect to correlated traits in organisms—traits that
come packaged together—there is no fact of the matter about which of
the correlated traits causes increased reproductive success.” They then
speculate that we are making ”the very ambitious claim that whenever there are correlated
traits there is no fact of the matter about which of the traits causes any
effect.” But, of course, we don’t believe, still
less endorse, either of these theses. In fact, we think both are preposterous. ...cc: the Science
is not an orthodoxy files Chapter 2 --- Eppur, like the Earth, si muove Link to the Kitcher and Block critique of What
Darwin Got Wrong that prompted the exchange
In 76 regions of Russia people went to voting stations on March 14 to cast their votes for local
mayors and regional legislature representatives. The ruling party “United Russia” has
won in most of those elections. However, the victory of the party in power wasn't absolute: in
Irkutsk people preferred opposition candidate Viktor Kondrashov but this was the only case.
Despite the increasing wave of protests (like in Irkutsk [RUS] itself,
Kaliningrad, Moscow and others), “United Russia” managed to keep its dominance in
all Russian regional legislatures as well as city administration offices.
One of the secrets of such “political stability” (besides state-controlled mass
media) is a range of alleged numerous fraud techniques used both by party members and public
officials during the elections. These elections were the first to show the power of Web 2.0. in
uncovering them. Bloggers gathered evidence of fraud with their cell phone cameras and published
them online.
Particularly members of the election observer association
“Golos” [EN] (”A Voice”) were quite active in promoting election
transparency and exposing fraud. The association installed a fraud hotline website
“88003333350.ru” where everyone could post a
fraud report. So far, 561 fraud cases have been noted.
Anti-Fraud Hotline, 88003333350.ru
Telephone Voting, Yekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk region
Blogger leonwolfmade a
capture of the local TV programme where a head of the regional election committee was
inviting people to vote by using a phone line and without signing any papers (which is illegal).
“You can just call, tell your passport details and if they match those in the database your
vote will be counted,” the head of election committee said on TV.
Protocol Rewriting, Stanitsa Dinskaya, Krasnodar region.
Russian oppositional newspaper Novaya Gazetaposted a video [RUS], where an employee of the
local election committee was allegedly rewriting the election protocol (a document presenting the
final result of the election).
Vote For Relatives, Yekaterinburg
In the video below two women confess they were brought to the election station to vote for their
parents (probably unable to get to the election station by themselves). Such procedure is legal
if a person possesses an absentee ballot. But these two women, as well as the whole bus (can be
seen on the background) of their “colleagues,” do not have it. And still they're
allowed to vote. Not to mention that their transfer was paid by the regional government, as well
as a sightseeing excursion after the election.
Mass Preliminary Vote, Ivanovo
The most popular fraud technique is a directed at a preliminary vote. It's been practiced among
soldiers, policemen and sometimes students. In other words, regional authorities try to mobilize
as many people as they can, especially if they have channels of pressure. For students such
channel of pressure are various: grades, scholarships, ability to passing an exams, etc.
This video
shows a woman checking the absence of students, while these
pictures depict a huge crowd at the college hall.
Ballot Insertion, Astrakhan
The video captures two people putting packs of ballots into the ballot box.
All these cases represent current situation with the Russian electoral system. The dominance of
the ruling party is based on numerous illegal actions that result in the “expected”
election results. At the same time, it shows the weakness of the political system that fails to
conduct its political course without such anti-democratic and unlawful measures. But as the
bloggers become more and more powerful and as the evidence of the fraud is being more efficiently
distributed among Russian netizens, the government's failure to provide free and fair elections
can become a real, not virtual, problem.
Turns out, that the check valve in the fuel vapor evaporative emissions control system of 1990-1992
Daihatsu Rockys might crack, causing
fumes to fill the cabin. Gasoline fumes inside your Rocky's cabin are bad (think fire, explosions),
especially if you smoke. Of course, if you own a convertible Rocky, this won't be too much of an
issue. Still, might as well take advantage of this NHTSA recall at your local Daihatsu dealer.
Wherever that might be.
A website that sorts everyday the most relevant information to you.
Vote for the news and Matoumba will learn your tastes and the information that you like the most.
It is all FREE!
Find here the history of the stories you found interesting.
Show this to people who share the same interests as you,
and if they use Matoumba, their own votes will fine recommandations to you.
I'd like to
do something new with our weekly trailer roundup. Simply put, it's now a sort of contest. Not for
you, but rather for the marketers attempting to get us into theaters for their product. After the
jump I've listed ten trailers in order of best to worst, three of them embedded for your viewing
pleasure. After that is a poll for you to vote on your own favorite, so we can see how my judgment
compares to you readers. First prize is nothing more than an utmost interest in the film that's
best advertised. And maybe as a result also a great box office return. Last place is a message that
something's wrong, nobody's going to see this movie and it's time to go back to the drawing
board.
A
trois heures de l'arrivée, les deux Peugeot contrôlent la course à Sebring. La
N°07 (Gené/Wurz/Davidson) a pris la tête devant la N°08
(Minassian/Lamy/Bourdais). L'Acura Highcroft (Brabham/Pagenaud/Franchitti) a perdu la
première place en P2.
Les cinq pompiers catalans, en stage d'escalade en France,
avaient été filmés par la vidéo-surveillance alors qu'ils faisaient des
courses dans un supermarché de Dammarie-les-Lys. Reuters
Les deux Peugeot sont en tête des 12 Heures de Sebring à la mi-course, avec la
N°08 (Bourdais/Lamy/Minassian) devant la N°07 (Davidson/Gené/Wurz).
L'Aston Martin est toujours troisième mais le classement a bougé derrière.
In the
next few weeks, the ReadWriteWeb events guide will take you from New York City, to San Francisco,
to Portland, Oregon. Along the way you'll find a conference on search engine strategies, a
showcase for startups, an in-depth look at the freemium business model, and a day filled with of
social media case studies.
Go beyond search at 
After a long winter's hiatus, 
The first 
The social media conference for marketers, 
The social media conference for marketers, 
The 
The 
The 
The 2nd annual 
Recommandations
)
and reject those that you are not interested in
(
)
