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Annually in October Where: Graham also hosts other retreats throughout the year, including one for memoir writers. In previous season auditions were tackled Kolkata, Delhi and also Mumbai but for various other place of India they gave the number to call and register for joining the auditions. I also feel absolutely accepted as an indie, with no judgement around my business choices.
Nineteen fifty-six was quite a year. The week begins and ends with public readings — which your family is welcome to attend! They draw pros, students and educators for networking and training in topics ranging from writing skills to using new technologies.
Annually in July Where: Get an opportunity to meet and mingle with budding and successful romance authors, as well as workshops and events to boost your author career.
Unless otherwise noted, the prices include workshops, accommodation often sharedactivities and most meals — but not airfare to and from the destination. This is a complex topic, with many exceptions, and there is no consistency we can rely on among blogs, books, newspapers, and magazines.
In the previous season the judges selected 30 home chefs from auditions. Try this women-only retreat in Taos, New Mexico, hosted by author Jennifer Loudon from October 28 to November 3 who also hosts additional sessions in the spring and summer.
This retreat — now in its 16th year — will take place on the island of Andros from June 27 to July 7, I can fangirl like a geek with big name authors who are actually just a load of bookish geeks too.
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Home Blog Archive by category "Be Amazing On The Set"
While working on Castle last week, I started making a list of all the things I love to bring to the set, in hopes it might help you to make your own list (or copy mine!) so you are prepared physically, mentally + emotionally to do your best work.
I had such a wonderful time working on this show with the actors, the director and the crew. So many gracious people doing what they love + warmly welcoming me to their community. I also realize (in life or on a TV show) you get what you give. When you bring a feeling of joy + gratitude to each person with whom you interact, it is often reciprocated.
You've trained for years, auditioned for many roles, and finally booked a job!
Congratulations! But in all your training, has anyone ever taught you what to do and not do once you're actually on the set?


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Stephen Kimber > Bio > Journalism > Profile of Sobeys CEO Bill McEwan
From the Globe and Mail's Report of Business Magazine, 2003
Bill McEwan is like a kid in a candy shop. His candy shop. "Stand here," he tells me, pointing to a spot just inside the entrance of this airy, modern, less-than-year-old Sobeys supermarket in Vaughan, a fast-growing suburban community north of Toronto. "We call this the vista." His arm sweeps across the store from right to left. "A customer should be able to see every department in the store from this one spot."
I can. Almost.
Directly in front of me there's a Sobeys Ready to Go, a food counter filled with a cornucopia of prepared, plunk-on-the-table meals, salads and snacks for the too-busy-to-cook consumer who's also too busy to wander the supermarket aisles looking for something for dinner. "Look over there," he urges. To my right, the greens, reds and yellows of the fresh fruit and vegetable section stand out against a complementary, colour-coded backdrop in shades of green. "Every department is colour-coded," McEwan enthuses. I follow his arm leftward past the bakery (earthy shades of brown) to the butcher's counter, which is strategically located at the back of the store just to the right of the Ready to Go, so it too is visible from the vista.
Suddenly, McEwan's arm smacks up against a visual barrier. The top of the florist's kiosk to the left of the store entrance is too high. You can't see past it to the dairy, frozen foods and general merchandise sections. McEwan lowers his arm. "This store," he allows ruefully, "was completed before the new store prototypes were completed. But you get the idea."
The idea, quite simply, is that Sobeys, the venerable, family-controlled east coast grocery chain that — under nearly two dozen different names from Sobeys to Food Town to IGA Market Express to Price Chopper — is Canada's second largest supermarket chain, wants to be number one. That's why it hired McEwan, the former president of A&P Canada, as its president and chief executive officer in 2000. That's why it's refocusing, refurbishing and re-branding its more than 1,350 stores. And, perhaps most importantly, that's why the company has been quietly paying down its debt and building up a growth nest egg.
But, like the too-tall florist's kiosk in this Vaughan store, there's still work to be done.
Until five years ago, what passed for Canada's grocery industry was really little more than a series of regional fiefdoms. Loblaws and A&P duked it out for pre-eminence in Central Canada, Safeway was the dominant force in its Western Canadian market, Metro Richelieu staked its claim to Quebec and the Sobey family ruled over the Maritimes and Newfoundland.
That changed dramatically in the 1990s after Loblaw gobbled up Bolands-IGA and began expanding into the Maritimes, and then acquired Provigo to give it a toehold in the Quebec market. In1998, Sobeys countered in spectacular fashion by buying the Ontario-based Oshawa Group, a grocery and food distribution operation twice its size, for $1.5 billion, nearly quadrupling its annual sales from $3 billion to $11 billion and instantly making it the second largest food company in Canada.
But a distant number two, still only half as big as Loblaws.
Sobeys post-Oshawa challenge — to digest its elephantine acquisition while closing its market share gap with Loblaws — would turn out to be a crossroads moment for the family business and its aging third generation of operators.
In the second generation, Frank Sobey, a legendary Nova Scotia entrepreneur, had transformed his father's hometown grocery store in Stellarton, NS, into a regional business empire (see sidebar). Since taking over the company's day-to-day operations in 1971, his three sons had slowly built the supermarket chain into what was now finally a national retailing force.
But Frank's son, William Sobey, the head of the company's real estate wing, was dead now, and Bill's two brothers, Donald, the Chair of Empire Company Limited, the family holding company that controlled 62 per cent of Sobeys, and David, the Chair of Sobeys Inc., were nearing retirement. So were John R. Sobey, Frank's nephew and the president and COO of Sobeys, and Doug Stewart, one of the few key non-family members in the corporate hierarchy, who'd just completed 10 years as Sobeys Vice Chairman and CEO.
While David's chartered accountant son, Paul, had become president of Empire, and Bill's son, Frank C., chaired Empire's Atlantic Shopping Centres subsidiary, and while various fourth and fifth generation family members held lesser positions in the family enterprises, there were no young Sobeys currently waiting in the wings to take over the grocery business that bore their name. For the first time in its history, it seemed, none of the people running the Sobeys' day-to-day grocery business would soon be Sobeys.
That wasn't the only way in which the company was changing. After the Oshawa acquisition, it became clear Sobeys had outgrown its Maritime roots. Ontario Premier Mike Harris even wooed the company to move its head office there. While the Nova Scotia Government effectively gave Sobeys $3.5 million just to stay put, it was clear that, wherever its titular head office, real corporate power in Sobeys was tilting westward.
Sobeys couldn't even count on regional loyalty to maintain its traditionally dominant position in the Maritimes. For close to a decade, Loblaws had been quietly poaching Sobeys' Maritime customers with an aggressive expansion program. By 2002, it would finally nudge past Sobeys and claim 35 per cent of the region's grocery market compared with Sobeys' 34 per cent share.
In the spring of 2000, the Sobey family had some important decisions to make. The most important was figuring out who should run its grocery operations. Which was why David Sobey quietly telephoned a friend of a friend of Bill McEwan's to enquire whether the newly appointed Canadian-born president of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company's U.S. Atlantic Division might be interested in a job back in Canada.
Bill McEwan was not a Sobey to the manor, or the manner, born, but he had come of age in a family-owned grocery business. As an adult, however, he'd spread his business wings, getting a feel for the industry from the suppliers' side and had learned to navigate his way around in a much larger corporate grocery enterprise.
When he was just 15, McEwan lucked into a part-time job bagging groceries at Ferraro's Super Valu in his hometown of Trail, BC. There, he quickly discovered what would become a lifelong passion for the peculiar rhythms and routines of food retailing. "I fell in love with everything" about the food business, he recalls, from packing groceries to carrying out orders to stocking shelves. Recognizing that, Jimmy Ferraro, the imposing six-foot, 270-pound Italian-Canadian who co-owned the nine-store regional supermarket chain with his two sisters, took the young McEwan under his wing and not only taught him the art of buying, pricing, advertising and merchandising groceries but also passed on his own outsized passion for the business.
After high school, McEwan spent a year-and-a-half studying Arts at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver before Jimmy lured him back to the business fulltime. There was a crisis at Ferraro's Cranbrook, BC, store, he explained, and he needed someone he could trust to manage it for him. "You can go back to school later," he said. Bill McEwan was 20 years old. He never returned to university.
"I felt like I'd arrived," McEwan says now. Over the next 13 years, he played career hopscotch through Ferraro's informal management ranks. In 1983, Jimmy sent him to Calgary as general manager of merchandising though "that wasn't my title. . . Jimmy didn't believe in titles."
McEwan might have stayed on at Ferraro's indefinitely if Jimmy hadn't died in 1988. "Jimmy was the greatest influence on my business career," McEwan allows today. "The guy was magic. " He was also the "glue" that held the family business together. After he died, the business was divided among the remaining family members.
"It wasn't the same," McEwan says. So the next year, he took a job as a Toronto-based national marketing manager for Coca Cola Ltd. Facing an increasing challenge from supermarket house-brand soft drinks, Coca Cola decided it wanted someone who understood retailing. For his part, McEwan wanted to understand the grocery business from the supplier side.
Though he was eventually promoted to Vice President, Market Development, McEwan's five-year sojourn at the soft drink company wasn't an entirely satisfying one. McEwan is reluctant to get into specifics. "I don't want to badmouth Coke or downplay its importance as a learning experience for me, but it was just a different corporate culture and I didn't fit in."
So, in 1994, McEwan returned to the grocery business as Canadian Senior Vice President of Grocery and Non-Food Merchandising for Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company Limited. After Coke, he jokes, A&P "felt like coming home, but coming home to a much bigger house."
At A&P Canada, which at the time was in need of a turnaround, McEwan gained a reputation as a problem solver. So much so that, three years later, A&P CEO Christian Haup tapped him to head up an important company-wide "total supply chain re-engineering initiative" to figure out how to deal with the messy fallout from dozens of corporate acquisitions.
He did such a good job the company rewarded him by appointing him president of its newly formed U.S. Atlantic Division in March 2000. For McEwan, it represented a major promotion — he'd be in charge of 435 stores and 37,000 employees — but it came with a personal price tag. It would mean moving permanently to the U.S. while the three children from his first marriage remained in Toronto.
Through the friend of a friend, he sent a message back to David Sobey. Yes, he was interested in talking.
It was raining heavily in White Plains, NY, on the late June morning in 2000 when Bill McEwan boarded Sobeys corporate jet for a flight to Stellarton to meet The Family.
He'd already passed muster with the presidential search committee in Toronto, so today's visit to the company's head office was a critical test. Could McEwan work with the Sobey family who, after all, still controlled more than 60 per cent of the supermarket chain? And, almost as important, could McEwan really live in Stellarton, a tiny — population 4,600 — mining town an hour-and-a-half from Halifax? The portents weren't promising. While working for Coke, McEwan had visited Stellarton three times, each time in a blinding snowstorm. When he and his second wife Donna, a former marketing executive at Coke, talked about the idea of moving to Stellarton, she joked that "she'd miss him."
Those thoughts were still rumbling around in his head as the jet approached the Bay of Fundy. Suddenly, he recalls, the sky cleared and the sun shone. "It turned out to be a glorious day." In more ways than one.
Stellarton, a smokestack community, reminded McEwan of Trail. Better, David Sobey, who took him on a tour of local Sobeys stores, reminded him of Jimmy Ferraro. "David had the same instincts, the same passion and focus on the business as Jimmy did. It seemed like going from one great merchant to another great merchant. It felt like I was coming full circle." As for the rest of the family, McEwan was struck by how "unbelievably respectful" the Sobeys were of the interests of non-family shareholders. David Sobey, for his part was equally enthusiastic. "I only wish I'd had a guy like Bill around to work with me when I was in my 40s and 50s."
When they offered him the job, Bill McEwan was quick to say yes. And so was Donna.
Value? Bill McEwan stared out into the icy void, rolled the word around in his head. No, value wasn't quite the word he was looking for. Value-added? Shareholder value? The whole idea of value had somehow become debased, a cliché of modern business-speak. And too top-down for his liking. No, the word he wanted needed to be more serviceable, more inclusive. . .
It was bloody cold at Melmerby Beach today. The temperature hovered on the wrong side of zero and a face-numbing wind whipped in from the Northumberland Strait. Wrapped in a parka he'd bought years ago to attend a winter Olympics, Bill Mc Ewan unfolded a lawn chair and sat down in the middle of the empty beach. Six months before, he remembered first glimpsing this beach — a spectacular mile-long mile crescent of white sand and warm sea water that is among Nova Scotia's most popular summer destinations — from the air as the Sobeys jet made its approach to Trenton airport. Today, on this bleak, late-December day, the beach seemed like the right place to "clear my head."
Bill McEwan had been Sobeys' president and chief executive officer for just over a month. It had not been a good month. On Nov. 28, just three days after he officially took charge, Sobeys much-ballyhooed, two-year-old computerized inventory control system had cacked. The $89-million SAP Retail software system simply couldn't cope with the Christmas rush in Sobeys' still complex, cumbersome post-Oshawa operations. The system stayed down for five days. In supermarket terms, that put Sobeys operations five weeks behind in the middle of the busy Christmas period. Worse, it quickly became clear to McEwan that the problem was systemic. An enterprise-wide inventory system that had worked well for a homogeneous regional supermarket chain, which is what Sobeys was when it bought the software, simply couldn't handle what it was being asked to do for 1,300 stores operating across the country under more than 20 different names. The system would have to go. And that would cost the company plenty, not only in actual dollars but also — and more importantly — in street credibility.
McEwan had explained all of that to Sir Graham Day, the new Chair of the Sobeys Board, the first non-company executive, non-Sobey to hold that title. Day, a Nova Scotia-born entrepreneur, had earned his reputation — and his fortune — in England as Margaret Thatcher's favourite corporate troubleshooter during the late seventies. "I think it's fair to say that Bill's predecessor (Doug Stewart, who was largely responsible for the Oshawa acquisition) didn't fully understand the consequences of integrating the two companies," Day notes, adding that the majority of corporate mergers ultimately fail because the "integration isn't handled properly. I think Sobeys was on the cusp of that happening when Bill came along. He grasped the problems pretty early on and he also immediately understood what needed to be done."
Day had called a special Board meeting for Jan. 24, less than a month from today, so McEwan could make his report directly to the Board. What should he tell them? Aside from the obvious, of course. That the company would have to take a $49.2 million dollar after-tax writedown in the fourth quarter to make the computer mess go away. McEwan didn't want to just be the bearer of such bad news. Since this was to be his first real board meeting as president he wanted to give his new bosses a sense of where he saw the company heading.
That's why he'd been sitting on this lawn chair on the beach in the middle of winter for close to three hours. He was trying to articulate his vision of Sobeys' future.
He stood up, walked up and down the beach, then sat back down again. Worth? What was it that made shopping at Sobeys worth it? For customers, of course, but not just for customers. Perhaps he was on to something. What made it worth an employee's time and talent to come in and do the job every day? McEwan had put in enough time in his youth humping bags of groceries from checkouts to car trunks to know what a difference an employee's attitude could make to a customer's shopping experience. The same with franchisees. And Sobeys had more than 900 of them. And what would make it worthwhile for suppliers to go that extra mile to service Sobeys and its customers? Retailers' relationships with their suppliers, McEwan had discovered during the four weeks he'd spent on delivery trucks just after he'd joined Coca Cola in 1989, were often defensive or arrogant. If Sobeys became worth it for its shoppers, its staff, its franchisees and its suppliers, wouldn't that inevitably make it worthwhile for shareholders too? Worth it for their net worth? Their sustainable worth.
McEwan got up, folded his lawn chair and headed back to his car. He knew now what he wanted to tell the Board.
It is two-and-a-half years later, and Sobeys is at yet another crossroads in its corporate evolution. Thanks to Bill McEwan.
Though the Sobeys' Board supported McEwan's decision to abandon the SAP inventory program and his plan to focus on what he called "sustainable worth," his first year at the helm seemed to careen from crisis to crisis.
The company's stock price took a major hit — losing 15 per cent of its value — after McEwan announced the writedown. It absorbed still another blow a month later when the company issued a terse press release announcing the resignation, "effective immediately," of its long-time chief financial officer. Though it was a logical first step in a makeover that would transform the Sobeys management team into the McEwan team, the suddenness of the resignation so soon after the computer debacle spooked investors.
Things didn't finally begin to look up, in fact, until April 2002 when McEwan announced Sobeys had sold SERCA, for $440 million. Ostensibly, selling SERCA, a high-volume, low-margin hotel and restaurant supplier thath had been part of the Oshawa Group, was part of the process of refocusing the company on its core retail grocery business. But the deal also helped Sobeys pay down $700 million worth of debt, giving it the wherewithal to possibly buy its way to within striking distance of Loblaws.
Most analysts now credit the sale — and McEwan — for turning around the company's fortunes. As Jonathan Norwood, a retail analyst with Beacon Securities, puts it: "He fixed all the things that needed to be fixed. He doubled the share price, he doubled the bottom line and the balance sheet is in great shape. He's done a great job of picking the low-hanging fruit from the tree." He pauses. "But from here on, his job becomes much harder."
It does.
We are back on Bill McEwan's guided tour of the new, fresh faces of Sobeys stores. We've already visited the full-service Vaughan store, where the customers are mainly commuters and the emphasis is on convenience; the downtown Young and St. Clair store, where high-rise and Rosedale customers tend to buy what they need almost daily so the store's focus is freshness and more exotic fare (the butcher's section, for example, features fresh buffalo, quail, venison and duck); and now we are pulling into the parking lot of a strip mall in working-class, ethnically diverse Scarborough where the name above the recently renovated and refurbished store — Price Chopper — says it all. "It's a game of niches," McEwan says.
Over the course of the next few years, he wants to consolidate Sobeys confusing collection of 22 operating banners into five main ones — Sobeys Full Serve (IGA Extra in Quebec), Sobeys Fresh, Price Chopper, Sobeys Express convenience stores and IGA community stores — each tailored in size, products, hours of operation and service to the desires of its specific customers.
Last year, Sobeys — which rang up fiscal 2003 sales of $10.41 billion, seven per cent higher than the year before and had net earnings of $179 million ($2.72 a share), 11 per cent higher than in 2002 — poured $546 million into renovating and expanding its own chain of stores, and will spend another $600 million this year.
Today, inside the Scarborough Price Chopper which got its makeover less than a year ago, McEwan shakes hands with the franchise associate, Carmen Sprovieri. "How's it going?" he asks. "Are you getting the support you need?" They talk for a while. "Is Sheri around?" McEwan asks. Sheri is Carmen's wife and business partner.
McEwan spends much of his time on the road these days, encouraging employees, quizzing customers, checking what's on offer in the bakery. While Stellarton is still the company's official head office and McEwan and his wife Donna maintain a house in the community, more than half of Sobeys nearly 300 corporate staff now work out of a non-descript office tower on the edge of Toronto's Pearson airport, so McEwan has a Toronto condo too. When he's not at his offices in Stellarton or Toronto, he's visiting Sobeys stores across the country. He's been to 850 so far and, if he could squeeze out the time, he'd says he'd visit even more.
Today, after leading me on a whirlwind tour of the Scarborough store's warehouse-style aisles and pointing out how this store differs from the others we've seen — "There's less variety and you don't get the same services, like a butcher on site, that you do at other stores, but the price is right and, in these stores, price equals worth" — we finally find Sheri, who is talking with a customer near the checkout.
Sheri introduces him to McEwan who asks how he likes the renovated store. The man does. "It's brighter but the value's still the same, still good," he says. After he leaves, McEwan turns to Sheri. "The store looks very good," he tells her. "You're doing a great job." She beams. He reaches into his suit pocket and pulls out a small gold pin. It features an image of a key beneath the Sobeys logo. "I want you to have one of these," he says as he pins it on her. "I've been handing these out to people just to say thanks for what you've done. We appreciate it." He pauses. "You know what the pin means?" he asks her. Sheri shakes her head. "It means, 'I'm the key to the business.' So I want you to tell yourself that everyday when you put it on. 'I'm the key to the business.'"
It will take more than cheerleading and key pins to overcome Sobeys' most glaring weakness: anaemic sales per square foot in its stores, which are 18 per cent below the industry average.
Consolidatiion and "worth" strategies notwithstanding, Cynthia Rose-Martel, an analyst with Jennings Capital Inc., says Sobeys still hasn't demonstrated it has a viable strategy for increasing sales productivity in its stores. Largely as a result, she pegs Sobeys' stock as a "grudging hold."
Jonathan Norwood, who remains bullish on Sobeys, is more sanguine. With more than 22 million square feet of under-performing retail space under its collective roof, he says "the company can continue to grow its bottom line in double digits each year for the foreseeable future just by continuing to find more efficiencies and doing what it does better."
But will that be enough to overtake Loblaws, which, of course, isn't waiting for Sobeys to get its sales act together. Canada's biggest supermarket chain is embarked on its own bigger-is-better strategy, building 120,000 square-foot behemoth megastores and peddling general merchandise — everything from clothing to home furnishings, to gasoline and financial services — along with its traditional grocery lines.
McEwan professes not to be concerned. "We don't believe our customers necessarily want to shop in those huge warehouse-type stores," he adds. "They want to be able find what they're looking for when they need it. They want convenience, and they want a worthwhile shopping experience."
Analysts are divided on that. While many see the big box stores as de rigueur for serious retail players, Norwood, for one, believes "there is still a real opportunity for a pure grocery store."
McEwan is also bucking Loblaws — and industry trends — with his approach to private label products. Loblaws changed the dynamics of the supermarket industry in the early eighties by introducing the President's Choice line of premium private-label products. It now offers more than 5,000 private label products, even services like personal banking and mortgages, and the program now accounts for close to 30 per cent of its annual sales. At Sobeys, where private label products make up less than 15 per cent of sales, McEwan is actually planning to reduce the number of separate private labels it stocks. While that may simply be a response to the crazy-quilt of house brands McEwan inherited in the Oshawa takeover, some analysts believe it could also help the company develop better relations with — and perhaps get better deals from — suppliers whose own national brands were squeezed off Loblaws' shelves to make room for the company's private label products.
McEwan will need all the support he can get. As a Globe and Mail report starkly summed up the state of the industry recently, Loblaws still boasts "twice the market share, twice the profit margin and twice the expansion budget" of Sobeys.
The fastest way for Sobeys to catch up to Loblaws, of course, would be for it to buy one of its competitors, preferably one with strengths to offset Sobeys weaknesses.
It almost happened. In October 2002, McEwan's former employer, Montvale, NJ-based A&P, announced it was re-evaluating its business strategy and was prepared to take "tough decisions," including selling off some of its stores, in order to return to profitability. Most observers saw that as a signal that A&P's profitable Canadian assets were on the block.
At first blush, a Sobeys-A&P marriage, which analysts estimated would have cost Sobeys $1–1.5 million, seemed made in corporate heaven. While Sobeys now operates in all 10 provinces, its weak retail link is in Ontario, especially Toronto, where it is virtually invisible and where prime downtown real estate it could use to build its own stores is almost impossible to find. A&P's 220 stores, on the other hand, are concentrated in Canada's most populous province where it boasts a 34 per cent share of the Toronto market. And, of course, Bill McEwan, who was credited with A&P Canada's turnaround in the nineties, also knew A&P's Canadian assets as well as anyone. As McEwan told a CIBC World Markets conference, Sobeys would be a "willing purchaser" if A&P was prepared to sell. "I'll say that up front."
But the deal never happened. Why not? Bill McEwan shakes his head. Despite A&P's earlier signals, he says, "they've now told us it's not for sale."
Even if it had been, of course, there's no guarantee Sobeys would have been the successful suitor. Safeway and Metro, Sobeys' next closest rivals, were reportedly interested in bidding as well.
And the industry is still rife with rumours of other possible mergers, takeovers and consolidations that could threaten Sobeys' hold on second place, or even, ultimately, its very survival. There was speculation, for example, a non-food company — Wal-Mart or Zellers perhaps — might decide to try to buy out Sobeys, not only to gain access to the grocery business for its own sake but also to counteract Loblaws growing presence on their turf.
"I've heard all of those rumours," Graham Day says, "and while I never would say never, I can tell you with my hand on my heart that, so far as the Sobeys are concerned, the idea of selling has never even been on the fringes of any conversation I've had with them. They believe in the business and they're in it for the long term."
As for McEwan, he says the company remains open to the idea of buying A&P, or any other company that would be a strategic fit, but he isn't sitting around waiting for it to happen. "We have our own strategy and we're implementing it."
There's still plenty to do.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Lovingly printed on white American Apparel blanks with seven screens! Each square measures 1.5 inches in height and width. Designed by Stephen Wildish! Read more about his work at our blog, It Goes to 11.


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Study Aims to Dispel Rhetoric about Black Men's Success
By Jennifer Bihm
photo courtesy of The Institute for Family Studies
Findings from a recent study suggest that Black men in America may be more successful than what people think. Members of The Institute for Family Studies released the results last Tuesday in Washington DC, hoping to dispel common rhetoric, they said, about Black men that is often negative. The study addressed the economic standing of Black men, avenues to success for them and how much of a sense of control individuals felt they had over their own lives.
"Over the last decade, much of the racial news in America has been sobering, if not downright depressing," said IFS members.
"Trayvon Martin. Tamir Rice. Walter Scott. Ferguson. Baltimore. Charleston. And, of course, Charlottesville. Writers and scholars like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander have underlined the enduring character of racial inequality and racism in America, and the ways in which America's racial divide has exacted a particular kind of toll on Black men and Black boys."
Authors of the report; W. Bradford Wilcox, Wendy R. Wang, and Ronald B. Mincy said that more than one-in-two Black men (57%) have made it into the middle class or higher as adults today, up from 38% in 1960, according to a new analysis of Census data. And the share of Black men who are poor has fallen from 41% in 1960 to 18% in 2016. So, a substantial share of Black men in America are realizing the American Dream—at least financially—and a clear majority are not poor.
Furthermore, they said, "as expected, higher education and full-time work look like engines of success for Black men in America. But three other institutions that tend to get less attention in our current discussions of race—the U.S. military, the Black church, and marriage—also appear to play significant roles in Black men's success. For instance, Black men who served in the military are more likely than those who did not to be in the middle class when they reach mid-life (54% vs. 45%), according to our new analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). Black men who frequently attended church services at a young age are also more likely to reach the middle class or higher when they are in their fifties: 53% of those men who attended church as young men made it, compared to 43% who did not.
"Finally, about 70% of married Black men are in the middle class, compared to only 20% of never-married Black men and 44% of divorced Black men…"
The authors presented their findings to a group of Black panelists that included Michelle Singletary, financial columnist for The Washington Post; Bradley Hardy of American University and senior fellow at Brookings Institution, and social entrepreneur Ian Rowe, the CEO of Public Preparatory Network.
"This marries the data with what all of us know with our values," Singletary told The Spectrum.
"The military launched my husband's father into middle-class status, which helped my husband go to college, which helps my kids."
The authors used a cohort of men born between 1957 and 1964 from their early years to ages 50 and older. The data they said, indicates that almost half of Black men (48%) are at least in the middle class by the time they reach their fifties, judging by their total family income (adjusted for their family size).
Correcting overly negative depictions and attitudes regarding Black men is important because they shape how Black men are treated, and how Black men view their potential, authors said.
"Research and experience show that expectations and biases on the part of potential employers, teachers, health care providers, police officers, and other stakeholders influence the life outcomes of millions of Black males," said Alan Jenkins, executive director of Opportunity Agenda, a social justice organization.
Meanwhile, the study also found that having contact with the criminal justice system at a young age was a major setback to success for Black men.
"Contact with the criminal justice system more than doubles men's odds of being poor in their fifties, although this effect seems to be mediated by its impact on their work and marital status," authors said.
"Education and full-time work also dramatically reduce the odds that Black men experience poverty in midlife. And, again, we find no evidence that childhood family structure affects Black men's odds of being poor as middle-aged adults."
The findings, the authors wrote, suggest that more should be done to boost the probability for success among Black men in the country.
Specifically, they said:
"Since cognitive skills begin to develop in early childhood, public efforts to improve and expand early education programs focusing on disadvantaged children, from programs modeled on earlier efforts like the Perry Preschool Project to today's Nurse-Family Partnerships, could prove particularly helpful to Black boys, who hail disproportionately from lower-income families.
"When it comes to college, which is clearly of benefit to Black males, more needs to be done to increase the pipeline of Black men into higher education and to increase their graduation rates. This should involve targeting students from lower-income backgrounds, including Black men, with efforts—such as summer bridge programs—that boost their odds of attending college and graduating from college."
"Efforts are also needed to reduce racial profiling and over-incarceration in the criminal justice system—from scaling back mandatory sentences to increasing funding for public defenders—in light of our findings. Given that the effects of contact with the criminal justice system appear to be mediated by factors such as work and marital status, more needs to be done to make sure that Black men preparing to leave prison receive adequate vocational training and the job placement they need to get a firm financial footing. For instance, a year of transitional employment coupled with optional drug treatment would be a step in the right direction, as would efforts to expand tax incentives to hire ex-prisoners."
Categories: Business | Lifestyle | Local | National | News | News (Business) | News (Family)
Tags: Black America | Black men | Jennifer Bihm | study | The Institute for Family Studies
Tonya Renee Banks Brings L'Tonya Renee' Red Blend To Your Glass
Uncle of Prime Suspect in Tupac Shakur Case Claims to Know Identity of Shoo...
Opponents of New Jail Expansion Say It's a Waste of Over $2 Million
L.A. County Gets $40 Million for Housing and Infrastructure
The Inner City Capital Connections (ICCC) Program
GLAAACC Partners With SCE to Offer Free Business Workshops


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Twin Cities Orthopedics is proud to build upon its partnership with the Minnesota Vikings to serve as the naming rights partner for the team's new headquarters and home campus in Eagan, Minnesota. The Twin Cities Orthopedics Performance Center is slated to open in March 2018, and will include the Vikings' front offices as well as state-of-the-art training and practice facilities. Anchoring the campus will be TCO Stadium, a 6,000-seat venue for Vikings training and community youth sports events. The Vikings' Eagan complex will also include a new TCO care facility featuring clinic, orthopedic urgent care, surgery center, therapy and sports performance center. Click to check out progress of the new home of the Vikings – Twin Cities Orthopedics Performance Center. Read full story below.
Eagan, MN (August 2, 2016) – The Minnesota Vikings, along with partners Twin Cities Orthopedics (TCO), the City of Eagan, Crawford Architects and Kraus-Anderson Construction Company, today celebrated the official groundbreaking of the Twin Cities Orthopedics Performance Center and TCO Stadium – the Vikings new practice facility and team headquarters slated to open in March 2018.
The TCO announcement builds on an existing Vikings-TCO relationship, as the two have long-partnered on the annual TCO Vikings 5k race and TCO has been the team's Official Orthopedic Provider.
The performance center and stadium will serve not only as the home of the Vikings but also will be available to youth, high school and amateur athletics and other community events. The destination will serve as an anchor to a total 200-acre development expected to transpire over the next 10-15 years, the first piece of which was unveiled today with TCO's announcement of a new 88,000 square-foot, full-service orthopedics center on the Eagan campus.
For more information, please contact Vikings Executive Director of Communications Jeff Anderson at 952.828.6570 or andersonj@vikings.nfl.net or TCO's Nathan Bowie at 612.677.2250 or nathan.bowie@onesimpleplan.com.
d speed rooms, a hydrotherapy room, and post-workout recovery rooms; a broadcast studio and media center; and administrative offices for Vikings staff. Located off I-494 at the intersection of Dodd Road and Lone Oak Parkway, the performance center and stadium will serve not only as the home of the Vikings but also will be available to youth, high school and amateur athletics and other community events. The project is the first phase of an overall 200-acre development expected to transpire over 10-15 years and set to include offices, retail, residential, hospitality and a conference center.
Twin Cities Orthopedics is an all-inclusive orthopedic, sports medicine and wellness provider. For more than 70 years, TCO has proudly provided a full spectrum of orthopedic care devoted to the diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation and prevention of injuries and conditions that affect the body's muscles, joints and bones. TCO's expertise includes services such as imaging, outpatient care, orthotics and prosthetics, and custom research based sports performance programs.
TCO's integrated team led by 110 orthopedic physicians strive to provide superior quality care for people of all ages and abilities at 39 state-of-the-art facilities in the Twin Cities and at six orthopedic urgent care clinics. Visit TCOmn.com to learn more.


In this classic puzzle you need to draw a path that passes through each blank square exactly once. The path can only change direction when it hits an obstacle, a square that contains part of the path so far, or the edge of the grid. Each puzzle has a unique solution.


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From the "Fallout" games to food storage... from Emergency Preparedness to the Post-Apocalyptic genre... your source for all things "wasteland" from that intro/skit-guy from the "Through the Aftermath" podcast...
Now Available: "The Online Gamer's Anthology" Podcast Episodes!
Back in 2007...before I would later be on the "Through the Aftermath" podcast talking with Shawn about emergency preparedness, avoiding suicide after watching the movie "Threads", and doing intro skits about cold-war propaganda, I started in the podcast world with an online-game podcast called "The Online Gamer's Anthology". To this day, it's one of the things I look back on the most fondly.
For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, here's the internet description:
Hosted by Jonathan Morris, "The Online Gamer's Anthology" was a podcast that focused on massively-multiplayer online games of the past and the games that influenced the genre. Featuring interviews with industry greats such as "Dragonlance" author Tracy Hickman and "Pool of Radiance" developer Brad Myers, it took a nostalgic look back at online game originals like "Meridian 59" and "Dark Age of Camelot" and early influences such as the "Fallout" series, the Commodore 64 computer, and INFOCOM's ground-breaking "ZORK" text adventure series.
"The Online Gamer's Anthology" ran for a total of 21 Episodes between 2007 and 2008 . It was also the first podcast to feature Jonathan's signature comedy "intro-skits" that parodied the gaming world.
Jonathan later went on to co-host the post-apocalyptic-themed "Through the Aftermath" podcast with "Guildcast"-host Shawn Shuster, and ironically STILL yells "ding" whenever someone uses the phrase "Back in the day".
It's hard to believe that was 6 years ago when I was talking about all my gaming memories and interviewing people like Tracy Hickman. Who would have thought the moment I chose to do a podcast for the first time would later explode into a second show and a lifelong friendship with so many good people...anyone from my Aftermath co-host, Shawn Shuster...to Brent, Darren, Troy, Karen, Julie, and all the other fantastic people from the VirginWorlds podcast collective. And who would have thought a crazy little idea to do a comedy "intro-skit" to start each episode would later become one of the main trademarks of how people would remember the shows.
And, of course, my friendship with all of you, my listeners-friends. For without you, the show would never have had an audience. No seriously, it would have just been a badly-edited MP3 with people yelling "DING" every time someone used the phrase "Back in the day". I kneel humbly before you for listening to my shows all these years. I hope they brought you entertainment and a some good laughs along the way.
Okay...the way I'm wording this sounds like I'm about to cry. I better show you where this is going.
I've had quite a lot of you ask for copies of the original podcast episodes of "The Online Gamer's Anthology" since they were no longer available through iTunes. Well, your patience has paid off, my stalwart friends, because that day has finally come! In the same way that our good friend Megaton of PostApoc.net archived the episodes of the "Through the Aftermath" podcast, I have now done the same for the Anthology episodes as well.
So, my friends, here all 21 episodes of "The Online Gamer's Anthology" in all their original glory:
THE ALMIGHTY LINK
So go and download them! And enjoy!
And try not to laugh at how inexperienced I totally sound or the fact that I sound like I may wet my pants at any given moment as I interview Tracy Hickman. I mean, DUDE!! It was TRACY HICKMAN!! Seriously, people wait in line for hours at DragonCon just to get his autograph and somehow I got an interview because he just happened to live a few miles away from my house and I run into him at a Del-Taco! The odds are so scary, I have to believe there was divine intervention there or something!
You know, as I listen to these episodes of the Anthology, it's sad to see so many of those games and subjects I spoke of in the show are either now gone or fading away. Pretty soon, those eras will just be a faded memory. I guess that's why I look back on that show so fondly. It's like freezing my own memory in time or something. Here's to hoping it did its job.
(wait, that sounded really sappy)
So enjoy, my friends!
And may the memories of the old days of goofy-looking sprite characters of "Meridian 59", the hardcore fun of waiting for the boat to arrive in Freeport in the original "Everquest" days, and the long hours of typing "KILL TROLL WITH SWORD" in text-adventures like "ZORK" never die! ;)
Posted by AftermathJonathan at 10:29 AM 956 comments:
Labels: introskits, nostalgia, podcast, theonlinegamersanthology, toga
"Through the Aftermath" Podcast Episode 47?! WHA-WHA-WHAAAT?!?!
Episode 47?! We were done with the show!! What new devilry IS THIS?!
Fear not, my friends. You aren't dreaming. You aren't being punk'd by Demi Moore's seemingly-under-aged-late-husband. There is indeed a new episode of "Through the Aftermath" we just released! Thanks to the encouragement of some of our listeners, Shawn and I decided to go ahead and do a "catch-up" episode to let you know what we've been up to, talk a bit about the upcoming "Wasteland 2", and a ton of info on the upcoming "Through the Aftermath Mega-Mod" for Fallout: New Vegas.
There's also a new intro-skit of course. Just wouldn't be right without one, you know. ;)
You can listen to it HERE or download it from our blogsite HERE. And a special thanks to our friend, Megaton, at PostApoc.net for helping host it.
So give 'er a listen. And rejoice in the fact that I talk too fast when I'm talking about mods, and pronounce the word "homage" like "HOMage". No, seriously. Someone pointed it out. I totally did that. It's totally reminiscent of that time in 4th grade when you realized you were inadvertently swearing when you held your tongue in your fingers and said "my uncle works in a shipyard" and then the kids laughed and you got in trouble and...
...Wait. What was I talking about...?
Posted by AftermathJonathan at 8:28 PM 6 comments:
Labels: throughtheaftermath
Making the Aftermath Mod - Part 1: "The Power of Detail"
As we get close to the mod's release here, I thought it would be a cool idea to show a bit of "Behind-the-Scenes" on what I've been doing with it, and how I actually made the mod. For one thing, it gives me a chance to finally show you all of the things I've been up to with it and why I've been...well..."off the grid", if you will...and also shows you what kind of work goes into making a mod.
Like a psycho amount of work. Like a SERIOUSLY psycho amount. Like, I forgot what the sun looks like. (What month is it, by the way? And now that you mention it, I don't recognize my neighbors, either.)
So as we get closer to our ever-glorious moment I release the mod to you, I'm going to take you behind-the-scenes of what I did to make the mod and some cool stories on how it all came to be.
For the first part of my "Behind the Mod" series, I thought I'd take you for a look at the kind of detail I've added to the mod. When I first sat down to design the mod, I had some pretty specific ideas of what I wanted to have in it and it quickly became clear that most of the ideas were going to require a boat-load of custom artwork and textures. Sure, anyone could just taken the easy way out and simply limit themselves to using only the stock-resources that Fallout: New Vegas already had and just redo them into some new area and call that a mod.
I could have said "See?? It's a vault with all the same enemies, sure, but this time the hallway goes LEFT!"
But I have a belief that if I'm going to do this, I want to do it right. And I'm a sucker for details. I'm apparently also a sucker for pain as well, since it's taken a crazy amount of time to do it all. But I did it anyway. And I have high-hopes that you'll agree that my choice was the right one. See, you aren't just getting a plain-jane looking mod. You're getting a full-fledged world I've added its own life to. It's got it's own story to tell, its own background. You'll get a glimpse of what some of these new areas were like before the nuclear war took place. Heck, it's even got details down to the custom store-front signs...I kid you not!
I know, right? It's crazy!
You know I've always been a fan of both the 1950's-era and the whole Cold-War-era (hence why I love the Fallout-series) so I wanted to make sure I added my own creativity reflecting that, into the world I built. I have a good time with this stuff! So, I'll show you a glimpse of how I did it. You'll also get a sneak-peek at the backstory in the mod, which is cool. I hope you enjoy this look at what I've done.
Now I need to give you a bit of the mod's background story, so you can understand what you're looking at. I'll give you a quick, "Reader's Digest" version of the mod's background. Some of this backstory you may have already already heard, so forgive me if this is a recap in certain parts. I'm going to only touch briefly on the story since the story probably almost deserves its own "Behind the Mod" entry.
As you know, the primary goal of the mod is unravel the mystery of who is trying to shut down Aftermath Radio, trying to kill Shawn and I, and also help us rebuild the radio station so it can be listened to while you are out in the wasteland. Along the way, you'll visit quite a few new locations.
You've probably heard me mention this before, but one of the main locations you'll visit is what's left of the city of Barstow, California. In real-life, Barstow is not only a main hub between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, it's also houses the Marine Corps Logistics Base and is the closest city to the Fort Irwin Military Reservation. In the Fallout-world (I wanted to this mesh perfectly with the Fallout canon) this would have been a major tactical target for all those reasons. The Chinese would definitely have seen this as a way to take out 2 major military bases and also cut off the travel route to Los Angeles (which was one of their biggest targets, as you see firsthand in Fallout 1 and 2).
In Barstow, the people would have been well-aware of just how big of a target they were, much like the people who lived in the town of Hopeville in FO:NV's "Lonesome Road" DLC. In "Lonesome Road", the developers did a great job of portraying this, by what you saw there. Hopeville is where the U.S. military houses one of its largest nuclear stockpiles and its people went about their lives well-aware they were likely a major target to the Chinese. Just by seeing the posters and billboards, you get a sense of what their lifestyle was like.
Barstow follows this very same mentality. In our mod-story, the people of Barstow went about their normal lives with the constant threat of nuclear war shadowing everything they did. They were a prime candidate for attack and they were all-too-aware of this fact. If the escalating war against the Chinese ever came, they weren't going to live to see the day after. And sadly enough, as the Fallout-canon describes, that's exactly what happened on October 23, 2077 for most of the world.
Since the Fallout world is an "alternate universe" based on what the people in the 1950's pictured their future would be like, the Civil Defense program is still very much alive in Barstow. In fact, because the people know they are going to likely be a main target, Civil Defense is commonplace. There are public shelters in case the attack finally comes, and posters on the walls of the city's buildings reminding the people of Barstow to be prepared and "Be Vigilant!" if the attack ever does take place
Of course when you play this mod, you're looking at it from the point-of-view of knowing all of this happened just as they feared. You're seeing this 200 years after the bombs fell. I wanted you to really feel that. I wanted you to be able to stop and really get a glimpse of what the world was like in Barstow, and really SEE this city for more than just a radioactive ruin. To get a sense of what these people thought and did, and especially what went through their minds when that dark hour finally came.
Sure, it's an extra layer of realism beyond the normal layer of the game (and yeah, most of the time you're in the city, you have a bigger problem looming anyway) but it gives you a connection to that world that makes it THAT much more believable.
It's like that part in Fallout 3 when, despite the dark-humor of the world you've been in, you find that diary of a Red Cross nurse that just saw the bombs fall and is now witnessing, first-hand, what the horrors of nuclear war are like. You're reading the account of a woman who was dying of radiation sickness 200 years ago, and are now looking out at the very same ruins that used to be her city. It gave you that connection! It was impossible to not feel a sense of overwhelming sadness as you read that Red Cross nurse's diary. But that's the brilliance of the way the Fallout game are done. And I made sure my mod followed those same rules. The trick is to be able to tell you the story of a world-that-was as you play the game, both in the things you see, read, and witness.
Now you see why the details matter.
Now I get to show you what I mean. And to show you the scope of the details I've added to this mod, I'm going to show you 3 specific examples.
The first example is one of a few of the newspapers you may come across in some of the locations you visit. Sure, you might just pass by it in a hurry, but if you're looking close, you'll find there's alot of information to be gained by stopping to look. I wanted newspapers to be a main source of backstory because it does such a good job of showing exactly what these people were reading the day the bombs fell. By watching these, you can really get a sense of what was happening in the world at the time.
Here's a picture of the newspaper:
It took a crazy amount of time, but I actually put this together by hand. I used elements based on real newspapers, and used Microsoft Expression and some stock pictures to create the "Barstow News", their local newspaper. You can even read the fine print if you look close (click for the big screenshot). There's even some humorous "Easter Eggs" all over the place in this mod if you look close. I do so love that stuff. :)
To portray the "Civil Defense" mentality that the people of Barstow all share, I went for the real-world examples. I'm an avid fan of the cold war-era posters and the media they had back then. I scoured the Internet for good examples that would fit the setting and set to work remaking them our own Fallout-world. In some of the posters or papers, I just re-worded or restructured parts and added new pictures...in other instances, I did all of the design from scratch.
Here's a small example. This is an actual Civil Defense poster from 1959:
Here's my own "re-done" version of it.
Again using Microsoft Expression (I LOVE that program for this kind of thing), I redid the poster with a new picture and new font-work. In this case, the poster is very close to the original, but in other cases -- like the one I'm about to show you -- it's all new.
In this particular case, I created a poster for the fictional "Junior Civil Defense Cadet Corps", which -- in my mod's world -- would have been the equivalent of the Civil Air Patrol. In my mod's backstory, the people of Barstow would definitely be aiming recruitment at the younger generations, so this would be the group that a 15-year-old boy would join to help his local Civil Defense chapter...almost like a Civil Defense-themed "Boy Scouts". It's even entirely possible that the people in our version of Barstow would possibly have foregone the Boy Scouts altogether in lieu of Civil Defense, since they likely knew how close to nuclear war they were at the time.
Now I just needed someone to be our "poster boy" for the Corps. Tammy -- a friend of mine at work -- has a son named Tyler who is currently in the Air Force ROTC program at his school. One day, I noticed one of the pictures she had on her desk was one she'd taken of him standing proudly in his uniform. He looked like he was right out of a 1950's recruitment poster. With their permission, I redid the picture and a few hours later had Tyler on a recruitment poster adorning the walls of Barstow's city buildings, proudly telling all of the young people in 2077 Barstow that they could still "Do Their Part!" for their city. Pretty cool, eh?
While these are just 3 simple examples, you can see that each of them has their own purpose and way of showing Barstow's backstory. All of them make the world much more tangible and real to the player. I've always believed in that kind of immersion is an extremely important piece of the player's experience and one that many triple-A titles still screw up. Sure it takes alot of time to add detail like that, but I think the pay-off far exceeds the time it takes. Even for a one-man team like me.
They say the devil is in the details, but I think they have it backwards.
- Detail succeeded when you first laughed after noticing the "TPS Reports" on the desk in the office-map in "Counterstrike".
- Detail succeeded when you shivered when a face-hugger started running along the ceiling at you in "Aliens vs Predator", when you never saw a game try that before.
- On the flip-side, detail did NOT succeed when someone thought it would be amusing to have your life-meter be a tattoo on the cleavage of your female character in "Jurassic Park: Trespass".
Well...then again, maybe it DID succeed there, depending where you're coming from on that one.
Yeah, crap...maybe that last one wasn't a good example...
So at the end of all this, I hope you've gotten a taste of what this mod has in store. Not so much to build "hype", but more to give you a bit more insight into the world I've tried to create. If you're the type of player that blows through a game fairly quickly just to get to the end, you'll still enjoy this mod. The story is a hoot and you'll still get a kick out of all of it.
But if you're the kind of player who can appreciate the details you see -- the posters on the wall...the newspaper on the table -- then you'll get a much bigger sense of the world that Barstow once was. And maybe you'll see why this project took so long, but that taking that long was definitely a necessary thing.
If not, I think I'm probably going to hurl.
I'm looking forward to showing you even more "Making the Aftermath Mod" features very soon.
Stay tuned, my friends. And Stay Alive Out There!
Labels: fallout, mod, throughtheaftermath
"Aftermath Mod" Status Update! Be A Hit At Parties!
Yes indeed! As by request, I do believe it's time for some updates and to bring you all up to speed on the "Aftermath Radio" mod for Fallout: New Vegas.
Ah hold on...I saw that look on your face. You were bracing for some bad news, weren't you? You were concerned the lack of news lately meant something had happened or maybe the mod was on hold.
No, you won't hear any bad news at all, in fact, just the opposite. The mod is totally cranking full-speed right now. I kid you not when I say I've been working each and every day (sometimes until 3am, no joke) on getting it complete and locking everything in. Even on Christmas Day. Trust me...my 5-year-old had Hexbugs and Minecraft...he didn't mind!
As most of you who ever have done modding know, it takes a sick amount of time to make one. In this case, it's kind of a "double-mod" because it's a fully features radio station AND a full-blown side-questline. It's crazy how much time it takes to make this all work. I mentioned last time we were close. We're even closer now. So here's the status:
- THE RADIO STATION: Ohhhhh nelly, was THIS a project.... I essentially revamped the entire radio flow. You ever notice how Radio New Vegas starts to repeat fairly early on and kind of loses its flow after a bit? I wanted to avoid this. Some of the repetition I'm sure can't be helped but I wanted to try to push the bar way higher. It was a pain in the arse, but I think I pulled it off. Even despite a few GECK kit bugs. Right now, almost all the dialog is recorded and locked. All of this was the majority of the time that this mod has taken. This is why I've been off the grid for 2 months. I had to take around 80 hours of recorded show and dialog, convert and re-edit them, and link them piece by piece into the GECK. That's a frightening amount of editing. I think you'll really dig what the extra effort went into, though. I wanted this radio station to be done right. I could have settled for having it just play non-stop podcast replays back-to-back, but I wanted this radio station to be something you want to listen to constantly. Not something you'll get bored of after hearing the same thing a few times. I wanted it to be dynamic enough to actually sound like Shawn and I are out there in wasteland broadcasting to you. There are commercials, podcast episodes (I've divided each episode into 4 parts to help break it up a bit), random clips, and also the news reports. And even some new intro skits.
Oh, the news reports...speaking of other things that took alot of work. This radio station has almost 70 news stories that play based on your current quests. Not just like Radio New Vegas, but even more. Some of them will be similar, since they involve the major quest parts, but I've even added a bunch for smaller questlines such as the "Sunset Sarsaparilla Legend" quests and the "Tops Talent Quest". You'll get a kick out of them. You'd swear it was our podcast and we were reacting to what you were doing. Like I said, I think you'll appreciate all the extra effort.
- THE QUEST LINE: I tweaked the questline a bit...that's also been part of what took longer. This story quest has essentially been a real-time version of our podcast intro skits. It's insanely trickly to put an intro skit into an interactive form that keeps the action going without being annoying. Things on paper don't always play well in-game. Some of them you don't actually realize until you see it in the game and think "Frak, saying I'm not wearing pants sounded funny on paper but in-game I'm frightened." When I ran the questline through, I felt like it was missing some things (no, they weren't pants). So I went back and made some adjustments. I feel alot better about it now. I wanted it to have alot of the same humor as our intro skits, but also have an element of seriousness to the overall feel. You'll really like the quests, if for any other reason than they fit into the overall Fallout lore and make sense. I didn't want to just do a "kill the raiders" quest with jokes and all and be done...I wanted to add a bit of new content to the Fallout world. All of the locations are based on real-life locations and are new ones you haven't been to yet in Fallout. More on this soon.
Recording the dialog is almost done on this as well. We had to record dialog for not only the overall script, but also the sounds Shawn and I do when we travel with you and fight. So you have a ton of sounds just to have us be companions with you, like the "hit the deck!" things companions yell when you throw a grenade. I also scripted alot of interaction to make things feel more realistic. We'll be recording dialog with our post-apocalyptic guru-friend Megaton in the next week. If you don't already know who he is -- and shame on you if not -- he oversees the almighty "postapocalypticforum.com" and "postapoc.net"...so repent now and check the sites out.
Oh, I didn't tell you Megaton is a main character did I? Well, there's some teaser info for you. Megaton is one of the main characters who helps start the questline and a big part of the story.
So now the big question you're probably thinking.... how long till you can play it? What's our release date? Tough to say, since it's insanely hard to predict a timeline on a mod you're building (especially when you're a one-man-team) so I'm not sure I can give a definitive answer to that. That said, I'll try. I'll tell you what my personal goal is:
I want to have this in beta-testing within the next month or so. And hopefully, in your hands, dear gamer, right after that. So let's say.... hmmm...why don't we try for "before Easter" as a release date. The majority of the mod is done, and it's just a matter of fine-tuning the rest, but you never know how long that can take.
Does that mean something could happen that stalls the release goal? It's possible. Do I anticipate it? I don't think so. I'm hopeful this is going to click together just fine in this last stretch. I've gone to some crazy lengths to make sure this mod plays nicely with a minimal fuss. I'm hoping it pays off in the end with a smooth testing phase. I suppose the main bugs that could likely pop up would be ones where I still continually have to work around actual bugs in the GECK kit and FO:NV engine itself. But I remain optimistic after all I've done so far. Heck, I've got 4 times more dialog than Wayne Newton did in the game and that's sounds cool when I say that to people who don't know what that means!
The whole project has taken a while but that's always the game-design world, isn't it? It's mainly because I want this mod to shine and I hope you all feel the same when you play it. I think you'll feel that way. If not, I'll throw up in my mouth a bit.
Watch for some more updates here in these last few weeks. I've got more things planned to show you. Also, if you have any requests for things you'd like to see, let me know.
We'll talk again soon.
In the meantime...Stay alive out there!
Questions or Comments? Email us at:
aftermathjonathan@gmail.com
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Heading north on I-5, just as Mt. Shasta comes into view, there is something that looks a bit like a massive pile of dirt in comparison.
At the summit, there is the foundation of what used to be a more complete fire lookout tower, long since airlifted away. The views are breathtaking, though the graffiti made me a bit sad. Leave only footprints, people. Leave only footprints.


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Heat continues to build in Pahrump region
Residents of Southern Nevada can expect higher than average temperatures into next week.
Alex Boothe, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Las Vegas, said triple-digit temperatures will continue until Tuesday when temperatures drop down to a balmy 109 degrees.
"Right now we are forecasting this heat wave to last through early next week," he said. "On Tuesday we will start to come down a little bit below 110 degrees. We are expecting for at least the next five to six days to be still pretty hot with little relief overnight. There will be above- average temperatures pretty much across our entire area, including Death Valley and Pahrump."
Boothe noted that the average temperature for this time of year hovers around 100 to 102 degrees.
"But we will still be about seven degrees above normal on Tuesday," he said. "It will be a little bit more relief compared to Tuesday and Wednesday of this week where we saw temperatures of 116 and 117 degrees."
Record high temperatures
Boothe also noted that two all-time high temperatures were broken this week in the region.
"As far as any records being broken, Las Vegas has tied our all-time high record of 117 on Tuesday," he said. "Also on Tuesday, Death Valley actually broke a record high temperature for that day. Last year, the record was set at 126 degrees, and on Tuesday they broke that record with 127 degrees. Kingman, Arizona also broke a record on Tuesday, coming in at 113 degrees. It was previously set back in 2016, at 111 degrees."
Boothe also said the current heat wave is substantial in terms of longevity.
"The last big one we had was back in 2013," he said. "Actually last year, around the same time, we had a pretty good heat wave but it's not as strong as the current one we are experiencing. In meteorological terms, we can attribute this current heat wave to a dominant upper-level ridge, and this ridge is kind of building a high-pressure loft."
It's a 'dry heat'
Adding to the oppressive heat, Boothe noted, was a lack of moisture in the air.
"It is also very dry, but when monsoon moisture starts to get pulled in, it will cool down a little bit in July," he said. "Right now this is kind of our drier, in-between time, where we are getting the summertime heat, without much of that moisture coming in to alleviate some of that heat and take it out of the air."
Supplier meeting the demand
In spite of the oppressive heat wave, it appears Valley Electric Association (VEA) is meeting the demand of power usage among the valley's homes and businesses.
"We have not had any issues meeting the supply demands of our members and have adequate power available during the high demand," said Angela Evans, executive vice president of operations for Valley Electric Association, Inc.
Evans also noted that VEA experiences peak power usage during the coldest and hottest times of the year.
"We have a peak usually in January because we do not have natural gas for heating in the areas VEA serves, most of our members use electric heat," Evans said. "Winter peak is usually in the early morning. Summer peak usually happens in late June or early July. The peak time of day is usually the middle of the afternoon during the hottest time of day."
Additionally, Evans offered some tips on how to conserve energy during this month's heat wave.
"Members should set their air-conditioning thermostat at 78 to 80 degrees, you can also help to cool homes with fans and draw drapes and turn off unnecessary lights and appliances," she said. "If you must be out in the heat, drink plenty of water, rest and take advantage of shade."
Cooling the masses
Despite the discomfort the scorching heat is bringing to area residents, local air-conditioning companies are experiencing a big boost in business.
On Wednesday, John Benedict, service manager for Pahrump's JonAire Heating and Cooling said crews are working around the clock just to keep up with requests for service throughout the valley.
"We have seen a big increase in service calls, so we are booked for two solid weeks straight," Benedict said.
"We have about 10 new installs for people who are replacing their old units right now. From our service calls, people are experiencing the normal stuff that occurs with their air-conditioning units this time of year. With the fan motors, the bearings go bad, and there are also refrigerant leaks and compressors that go bad."
Regular AC maintenance
Additionally, Benedict suggested that residents should have their air-conditioning units serviced on a regular basis.
"I've noticed that a lot of people don't maintain their AC units and they let them get dirty and let things fail," he said.
"After that, it just multiplies and causes more problems. "It's always best to have your units checked regularly rather than waiting to have something go wrong with them. You can keep ahead of the game because it's kind of like changing the oil in your car and checking the fluids regularly."
Benedict also noted that crews are working both day and night just to keep up with the amount of service calls.


Championing a holistic approach to spirituality and physical well-being.
Welcoming a random group of Palestinian women to an Israeli dance session is not an everyday occurrence in our folk-dance world. That said, there was something extraordinarily beautiful about the unexpected opportunity that had presented itself in this nondescript, mid-western hotel.
Who Knows One? My Legs Know One.
Lisa Silverstein Tzur is a renowned spiritual leader, yogini, musician, and Israeli dancer. Her ongoing work in the areas of spirituality, yoga, music, wellness, dance, and Jewish culture has earned her a reputation as a thought leader and cultural icon. She is founder and executive director of Positive Jewish Living, a post-denominational organization that encourages a holistic, spiritual approach to physical and emotional wellness. Rabbi Tzur received her undergraduate degree from Brandeis University and rabbinic ordination from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. After serving Arizona-based congregations for nearly fifteen years, she now divides her time between homes in San Francisco and Tel Aviv.


Swanton senior Gunnar Oakes rounds third base and scores a run in a game last season. Oakes finished first team All-NWOAL as a junior.
Michael Lawniczak is one of seven letter winners returning for the Swanton baseball team in 2017. He made second team All-NWOAL a season ago.
Roman Epley of Swanton throws out a base runner at first base in a game last season. He made honorable mention all-league as a freshman.
The Swanton baseball team has a bulk of its roster back from a team that finished 14-10 overall and 5-3 in NWOAL play in 2016.
They only lose two letter winners off last year's team, and of those, Jordon Nyler was the only all-league performer as he was honorable mention All-NWOAL. Bryce McComb is the other letter winner gone to graduation.
There is a lot to be encouraged about with the Bulldogs according to their coach.
Key returnees for the Dogs are Oakes who was first team all-league, Lawniczak who was second team all-league, and Epley who made honorable mention all-league.
Also back are Jonny Shanks, Josh Adcock, Duyane Goings and Zach Bloom. They also add Austin Luce, Dylan Cook, and Xavier Williams who hope to compete for a position.
In the batter's box Swanton has their top four hitters returning in Oakes, Lawniczak, Epley and Adcock.
McCarthy likes the Bulldogs chances at making a run for a league title, but he knows that the NWOAL slate will be a rough one.


text:
Scott Dunn
It is with great sadness that we mark the passing of a member of the W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Center family. Scott Dunn, son of former director Norm Dunn, passed away March 22, 2021.
Scott literally grew up among the barns and horses here at Cal Poly Pomona. He closely followed the horses, staff and program throughout his life. He would often stop by just to visit or chat, and often arrived bearing fresh strawberries or other goodies. That was typical of Scott's kind and caring nature.
Scott was an invaluable member of the President's Arabian Horse Advisory Committee, especially having lived through a lot of the Center's history and we always appreciated his input and help. He will be deeply missed, and all of us wish to send our heartfelt thoughts and care, especially to his wife, Lynette and all who knew and loved Scott Dunn.
Photo: Scott Dunn presenting Cal Poly Pomona President, Dr. Soraya Coley with a gift from the AHC.


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text:
Chaetozone maotienae är en ringmaskart som beskrevs av José María Alfono Félix Gallardo 1968. Chaetozone maotienae ingår i släktet Chaetozone och familjen Cirratulidae. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.

Källor

Havsborstmaskar
maotienae

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
The oval ball takes centre stage as England Rugby World Cup looms
access_time14th November 2014
folder_openSports & Leisure, Temporary Events
While football fans across the land switch off as the Premiership programme gives way to Euro qualifiers, rugby union takes centre stage with the autumn internationals and the run-up to next year's Rugby World Cup in England.
And with just 44 weeks today, until England kick off the whole show at Twickenham on 18 September 2015 against Fiji, looking to repeat their sole World Cup win of 12 years earlier, rugby fever will be ramping up across the land.
Defeat by three points to current world champions and world No 1s New Zealand last Saturday won't have dampened that ardour. That will increase with games to come tomorrow against world No 2 South Africa, then Samoa and Australia on the following two Saturdays.
The focus then switches to the RBS 6 Nations from February to March next year before England do battle in the World Cup in September and October, hopefully culminating in a famous win on 31 October, back at 'Fortress Twickenham.
That presumes we negotiate the 'pool of death', in which we're pitted against old enemy Australia and perennial Six Nations foe Wales – who have managed three Grand Slams since England's most recent one in 2003, intriguingly our World Cup-winning year – for just two places in the quarter-final knockout stages, along with relative minnows Uruguay and Fiji.
But at Zaun, we're just as interested in the business of hosting the Rugby World Cup, which will generate billions of pounds for the country.
The most recent report from financial services company Deloitte forecasts an overall £2bn economic impact for England as a result of hosting the tournament, according to England Rugby 2015 Chief Executive Debbie Jevans.
She is overseeing preparations for next year's event. She has urged businesses looking to offer their services for the tournament to get involved, especially since a record level of demand for tickets during September's general sale has England 2015 set to become the best supported Rugby World Cup to date.
She said: "The benefits of hosting a tournament of this scale will be huge, not just for the cities and venues that will stage the 48 matches, but also for the countless businesses and suppliers that will be directly or indirectly involved in the delivery of rugby's showcase event in 2015."
That's why we're just one of 32 organisations booked to exhibit at the second IRB Rugby Conference & Exhibition next Monday and Tuesday at the Hilton London Metropole.
Rugby legends Sean Fitzpatrick, Brian Moore, Agustín Pichot and Thomas Castaignède, will kick off and set the tone for ConfEx by discussing the future of rugby.
The IRB World Rugby ConfEx provides a unique environment for the global rugby community to share knowledge, network and develop relationships with leading figures and decision-makers across rugby and the wider world of sport and business.
Let's hope we manage to drum up some business as well as getting an autograph from surely England's greatest hooker of all time, the 'Pitbull', Brian Moore!


Show your dogs flirty side in this adorable denim and tulle dress!
Featuring an adjustable denim bodice with tulle floral applique and daisy tulle embroidered straps. The skirt is decorated with a light top layer of delicate laser cut daisies embroidered on tulle over an underskirt of eight additional sheer pink tulle layers.


Today, SafariLink becomes the sixth airline to operate in the Kisumu International Airport airspace.
Did you know that Kisumu hosted the first air flight in the whole of East and Central Africa?
The event was graced by both the Rt Honorable Raila Amolo Odinga, CS Tourism Najib Balala, the CEO Kenya Tourism Board Betty Radier, the Deputy Governor Kisumu County Dr Mathews Owili, among other dignitaries.
This launch exhibits the status of Kisumu as a favorable business destination and the opportunities in Kisumu and the region and easier travel and communications connections available.
"The arrival of SafariLink to Kisumu airspace should be seen as offering a welcome relief to travellers who contribute to the general economic well-being of the region. This am sure is going to come with stabilization of the pricing regime in the industry which has been very erratic as well as spreading flight durations evenly through the day, " County Minister of Transport Thomas Ondijo is quoted as saying.
#FlySafariLink to the City of Kisumu.
Kisumu and Eldoret Airports Underutilized?


Kudos to Ms, Norris for bringing the kindling for when it comes to race there have been, are, and will be fires figurative and literally of every imaginable combustion. Growing up I watched and was part of the Civil Rights Movement from the first time I was stopped and frisked by a white cop at 8 years old to watching my family grow and expand into a multi-racial AND ethnic polyglot so diverse as to believe that my family is more representative of America than America herself is represented by the white controlling media and political factions that attempt to keep the oppressed suppressed. I would love to check back as often as possible and I will attempt to shake the branches of said tree to get them to play their cards.