Here’s an update on the Samsung tablet we just talked about yesterday. New rumors have surfaced suggesting that it will actually run on the Android platform and not on Windows. As for its hardware, it’s now being reported that it will sport an ARM-based processor as opposed to an Intel Atom chipset, and will feature call functionality via a headset over some sort of VoIP implementation via 3G with 4G connectivity also being a possibility.

Granted that this new rumor is more attuned with modern mobile tablet devices as compared to its initially reported specs, there’s still no degree of certainty that this is actually true. Anyway, we’re pretty sure there will still be a handful or more so rumors that’ll surface before everything’s all said and done with this Samsung tablet, but let’s hear it from you guys first. What do you want this upcoming Samsung tablet to feature?

[via bgr]

Any rodeo fans out there? Having been exposed to the culture a little during my trips to Vegas while the Professional Bull Riding circuit was in town. So I was curious to learn a bit more about it from Meredith Danluck who has made a documentary about it having its world premiere at this year's South by Southwest Film Festival,

Cinematical: The mythos of the cowboy is something suggested during the opening monologue. But what is the idea of the modern cowboy that all these guys are chasing that is either in sync or contradicts the Old West paradigm that we fall in love with as little boys?

MEREDITH: I think these guys arent necessarily "chasing" the idea of the cowboy, but rather are cowboys. Growing up outside of the ranching community, the mythology of the cowboy was propped up mainly by whatever Hollywood dictated; courtesy, pride, strength etc. These guys grew up with those values. I think, like with any archetype, there are evolutions of the characteristics that maybe on the surface seem contradictory. Winning a million dollars might not make sense with our idea of a cowboy, but once you strip away all the superficial layers, the core is the same.

Filed under: SXSW, Interviews

Continue reading SXSW Interview: 'The Ride' Director Meredith Danluck

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Le Fun flock vous permettra d’apporter une touche velours à toutes vos créations. Il s’agit d’une poudre constituée de particules très fines de fibre velours. Elle s’applique avec de la colle sur toutes les surfaces . J'ai d'abord fait un test avec du glossy accent. J'ai étampé ma fleur avec du versamark afin de l'embosser noire. J'ai mis du glossy et comme on ne peut pas trop appuyer le fun...

Source : Blog DT Chez Gwen-Dia Scrapbooking (s'abonner)

Explorer : Flock, Internet, Navigateurs

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 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

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

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

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

• Drugs
• Drugs policy

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.

Day Out of Days is published by Knopf

• Sam Shepard
• Fiction
• Theatre

Continue reading Details surface about Left 4 Dead series' upcoming expansions

Details surface about Left 4 Dead series' upcoming expansions originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 20 Mar 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Details surface about Left 4 Dead series' upcoming expansions

Details surface about Left 4 Dead series' upcoming expansions originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 20 Mar 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

People love easter eggs. There are a number of humorous yet undocumented features hiding beneath the surface of some of the most popular open source software applications. We ran down five of our favorites.

For years, we've heard complaints about using the term "piracy" to describe the online copyright infringement—but most have come from Big Content's critics. Some of those concerned about online copyright infringement now realize that they may have created a monster by using the term "piracy."

Read the comments on this post

People love easter eggs. There are a number of humorous yet undocumented features hiding beneath the surface of some of the most popular open source software applications. We ran down five of our favorites.

For years, we've heard complaints about using the term "piracy" to describe the online copyright infringement—but most have come from Big Content's critics. Some of those concerned about online copyright infringement now realize that they may have created a monster by using the term "piracy."

Read the comments on this post

Filed under: Crossover, Ford

Gallery: 2011 Ford Edge Ordering Guide

Gallery: First Ride: 2011 Ford Edge Sport

2011 Ford Edge ordering guide hits the Intertubes originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Twitter appears set to tweak search results to return the most popular tweets first — instead of the most recent — for any given search query.

This according to Twitter Developer Advocate Taylor Singletary, who has just updated the developer Google Group announcing the yet-to-be-released product. Singletary says, “This is a beta project, but an important first step to surface the most popular tweets for users searching Twitter.”

The announcement is geared towards developers to prepare them for changes in the search API. The implication, however, is that the appearance of Twitter Search will also be altered to highlight popular tweets. Ultimately, it appears that the revamped search experience will be available on both Twitter.com and third-party applications and clients that move to support it.

While there’s no word on how “popular” is defined by Twitter, we can assume that the popular tweets will be identified by attributes such as quantity of retweets, or potentially tweets coming from a user with a high level of followers and engagement.

We think the new feature is an important evolution of the Twitter search experience and one we’re looking forward to seeing in action.

Tags: twitter, Twitter Search

Take this as you will, but we’ve been told the images floating around of “BlackBerry OS 6.0″ are nothing more than concept mockups that were originally made for RIM’s MWC presentation.

You might remember a similar looking one… Additionally, we’re told that the group working on OS 6.0 is so secretive that many RIM employees have never even seen the new OS so far. Lastly, we have heard that RIM is skipping right past OS 5.2 and will release OS 6.0 instead. Whenever that may be.