text:
Joseph William Kappen (30 October 1941 – 17 June 1990), also known as the Saturday Night Strangler, was a Welsh serial killer who committed the rape and murder of three teenage girls in Llandarcy and Tonmawr, near his home town of Port Talbot, in 1973. Kappen is also suspected of committing a fourth murder in February 1976.

Kappen's confirmed victims were all 16-year-old females whom he lured into his car on Saturday evenings in Briton Ferry and Swansea respectively. All three were driven to rural locations where they were subsequently raped, then killed by strangulation. Kappen was never arrested for his crimes, and died of lung cancer in 1990.

Kappen is notable for being the first person ever to be posthumously identified as a serial killer via familial DNA profiling. He was also the first documented serial killer in Welsh history.

Background
Joseph Kappen was born on Thursday, 30 October 1941 and raised in Port Talbot, a heavily industrial town in Wales dominated by its large steelworks. His parents' marriage broke up when he was young and he was raised by his stepfather. He was one of seven siblings.

Kappen began eliciting police attention for petty offences at age 12. He went on to accumulate over thirty convictions for car theft, petrol theft, burglary and assault, and spent years in and out of prison. Kappen alternately worked as a lorry or bus driver, and then as a bouncer. He was known to never stay employed for long and was described as a loner.

In 1962 Kappen met his first wife, 17-year-old Christine Powell, and they married in February 1964. Ten days after their nuptials, Kappen was sent to prison for burglary. Christine then gave birth to a daughter and then to a son, Paul, after she was raped by Kappen after his release from prison. Christine later testified that Kappen was physically abusive towards her and would rape her every two weeks. At one point he fatally strangled the family dog in front of his son while walking it on a nearby beach because it was "too old".

Kappen was known to regularly pursue local teenage girls during the marriage, with his job as a bouncer giving him an opportunity to interact with them. When working as a bus driver he was known to use his rest breaks to approach teenage girls on the village green at Llandarcy. In 1964 Kappen attempted to force himself on a 15-year-old schoolgirl in his Sandfields housing estate, but she escaped. In February 1973 a man resembling Kappen picked up two female hitchhikers and drove them to a nearby isolated road before attempting to rape both of them, but they also managed to escape; the victims did not report the incident as one thought she would get into trouble with her father.

1973 murders
On Saturday 14 July 1973 Sandra Newton, aged 16, went missing after a night out in Briton Ferry. Three days later her body was found raped and strangled in a rural location some miles away. Newton had been abducted after trying to hitchhike home after visiting a nightclub that night. She was strangled with her own skirt and dumped in a ditch near a coal mine in Tonmawr. Little attempt had been made to hide the body, with it being left at the entrance of a culvert. Police suspected a local man was responsible due to the detailed knowledge of the area the killer would appear to have needed to be aware of the remote dump site.

Two months later in the early hours of Sunday 16 September 1973 Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Floyd, both aged 16, hitched a lift home after a Saturday night out at a nightclub in Swansea. The next morning they were found dead, their bodies being found raped and strangled in Llandarcy woodland five miles away. It appeared that one girl had attempted to escape from her attacker and had made it yards from the road near to where her father had worked, but had been caught by her attacker and killed. The murders created a sense of fear in the community over whether the attacker would strike again. Although they occurred nearby, at the time the murders of Hughes and Floyd were not linked to the similar murder of Newton.

Initial investigation
Police soon established that Hughes and Floyd had been seen getting a lift home in a white Austin 1100 on the night of their disappearance. Police followed up numerous lines of enquiry but, as was the case in police investigations at the time, all intelligence and information was collected on large amounts of paperwork, which complicated the inquiry. The Port Talbot steelworks employed 13,000 men, all of whom had to be considered as potential suspects. Both the construction of the nearby M4 motorway and the ongoing Neath fair meant hundreds of itinerant workers had to be considered, as well as the countless strangers these events brought into the area. Detectives attempted to trace men who owned an Austin 1100 in the area, but it meant that more than 10,000 drivers had to be visited and questioned. A miners' strike forced the British government to implement a three-day working week for everyone across the country, which further reduced the resources of the enquiry and hampered the investigation.

However, one of the men who was investigated as part of enquiries concerning the Austin 1100 was Kappen, who owned that model of vehicle. When police turned up at his home to speak to him, they found his Austin was on blocks with its wheels removed, with Kappen claiming that he could not have committed the murders as his car was not roadworthy. However, in the days after the killings, Kappen's car was logged as being on the road by police carrying out stop and check operations. This would have disproved this claim, but without a computerised system for cross-referencing, this fact was not noticed by detectives at the time. Kappen also claimed to have been at Neath fair on the night of the murders and his wife gave him a false alibi, which she later said was common for her to do when police investigated her husband. Ultimately, therefore, Kappen was not pursued further as a suspect at the time. In mid-1974 the investigation was scaled down.

Re-opening of investigations
Police hoped that advancements in DNA testing would help solve the murders, and in 1998 there was a significant development when a profile of the killer's DNA was isolated via testing on the clothing of Hughes and Floyd. In 2000 the profile was uploaded to the DNA database to see if it matched any person arrested or charged since 1995 (the year in which DNA started to be taken from people arrested of crimes), although no match was made. However, the developments in DNA led to a full reinvestigation of the murders, titled Operation Magnum. In January 2001 the Llandarcy murders were reconstructed on BBC One's Crimewatch.

Around this time there was media speculation linking serial killer Fred West to the murders as he once worked in Llandarcy, but this was swiftly ruled out by police after the DNA was checked. 35,000 persons of interest were initially identified for DNA testing, but a psychological profiler was employed to reduce the number to a priority list of 500. Fifty of these were witnesses, relatives of the victims, stepfathers, boyfriends and anyone who had featured prominently in the initial investigation, and the others were known criminal suspects. Kappen was listed as suspect number 200, and detectives visited what they believed to be his address in Port Talbot in August 2001 but they discovered that he had died of lung cancer in June 1990, although his former wife still lived there.

Two months later, testing on the clothes of Sandra Newton revealed that she had been a victim of the same killer as Hughes and Floyd, meaning that the three murders were officially linked for the first time and revealing that all three had been murdered by the same unidentified individual.

Familial DNA enquiries
Due to the period of time that had elapsed since the murders, South Wales Police decided to employ a previously unknown tactic of searching for the DNA of possible living descendants of the murderer as their genetic profiles would be similar to the killer's.Fifty percent of an individuals' DNA is inherited from each parent, so investigators believed that they could discover who the killer was by making a partial match between the killer's profile and that of any children they may have had. Investigators therefore examined local individuals' profiles that matched part of the killer's profile and created a list of 100 potential suspects. One of these was local car thief Paul Kappen, whose DNA was already on police files but who was only seven years old at the time of the murders. Paul's profile showed a distinctive similarity to that of the killer's, prompting police to make his deceased father Joseph, known to have been investigated in the original enquiry, the prime suspect.

Exhumation of body and positive DNA match
The findings of the DNA testing led detectives to apply to Home Secretary David Blunkett to exhume Kappen's body in order to confirm through DNA that he was the murderer, which was granted. In 2002 the body was exhumed from Goytre Cemetery on the outskirts of Port Talbot, with it being said by witnesses that a thunderstorm suddenly passed over as the exhumation began and that a large thunderclap was heard when the ground was first dug up, suggesting to them that they had "unearthed evil".
Kappen's family consistently denied that he could have been responsible for the murders and claimed he was innocent despite the evidence.

Forensic testing on Kappen's remains subsequently established a perfect match to the murderer's sample, finally proving beyond doubt that Kappen was responsible for the murders. South Wales Police declared the case closed. The now-elderly surviving parents of the victims expressed relief that they had finally received a form of closure, with the mother of Hughes stating, "Now we can close the book on that hell forever."

After the findings, Kappen's former wife Christine Powell, who had previously insisted that Kappen was innocent, stated that "our first thoughts are with the families of the victims. Our concerns are protection from hurt for our children. We are all deeply shocked by the revelations."

Historical significance of the case
The Kappen investigation was the first in the world to utilise familial DNA tracing in order to posthumously identify a serial killer, and to solve a previously unsolved murder with familial DNA. It was also reported that the exhumation of Kappen's body made history as the first time a serial killer was exhumed to ascertain his guilt. In 1996 a deceased suspect had been exhumed in the Bible John case for DNA testing, but he was subsequently found to not have been the perpetrator. Kappen is also considered the first documented serial killer in Welsh history.

The outcome of the case created hopes of solving other unsolved historical murders through DNA testing, and South Wales Police subsequently embarked on DNA screening in order to solve the murder of Lynette White, which was subsequently solved in 2003 when Jeffrey Gafoor was convicted in the killing. In 2004, another similar attempt to identify a serial killer through familial DNA was made by Strathclyde Police in the Bible John case when they announced their intention to test a number of men after the discovery of a DNA sample at a minor crime scene in 2002. This sample showed an 80% match to the profile they had from the killer, which implied that the offender was a relative of Bible John.

Other suspected crimes
It is not known if Kappen ever killed again after September 1973, but he remains a suspect in the unsolved murder of Maureen Mulcahy, aged 23, in February 1976. Mulcahy was similarly strangled after a Saturday night out, being found dead the following morning in wasteland very close to the Sandfields estate, where Kappen was living at the time. Witness testimony points to Kappen having abducted her in a manner similar to the 1973 murders. As soon as Kappen had been identified in the 1973 cases, detectives announced their intention to speak to Mulcahy's family. However, there was no available DNA evidence to examine or potentially link to Kappen and thus Police were unable to prove or disprove his involvement.

Police also reexamined the 1973 disappearance of nine-year-old Christine Markham from Scunthorpe, after learning that Kappen had worked as a lorry driver in Scunthorpe and had lived in lodgings in the Humberside area soon after the girl vanished. However, serial child abductor and killer Robert Black remains the prime suspect in the Markham case. After he was finally imprisoned in 1994, police announced their suspicions that Black committed a number of other murders and their intention to investigate him for murders including Markham's.

Kappen has also been suspected of having committed numerous other unsolved rapes.

In popular culture
The Kappen case has featured in a number of documentaries:
 In 2002, a two-part documentary titled "Digging for the Truth - The Full Story of the Llandarcy Murders" was shown on ITV Wales.
 In 2016 another documentary on the case was released on ITV Wales as part of the Crimes Files series.
 In 2018 a series 2 episode of Sky UK's Robbie Coltrane's Critical Evidence featured the case. The episode was titled "The Saturday Night Strangler: Joe Kappen".
 Also in 2018 a series 1 episode of Evidence of Evil was released that focused on the case titled "The Saturday Night Strangler".
 In 2019 a series 1 episode of Jackie Malton's documentary series The Real Prime Suspect was released on CBS Reality which covered the case, titled "The Saturday Night Strangler".
 In 2020 BBC One Wales released its documentary on the unsolved murder of Maureen Mulcahy in Port Talbot in 1976 and the suspected links between the case and Kappen. The documentary was part of the Dark Land: Hunting the Killers series.
 In 2022 the case was featured on Sky UK's series Forensics: Catching the Killer.

See also

 Joseph James DeAngelo, an American serial killer who was captured through familial DNA profiling
 Bible John, an unidentified 1960s Scottish serial killer who has also been the subject of identification attempts through familial DNA profiling
 Murders of Harry and Megan Tooze, some of Wales' most notorious unsolved murders
 Cold case
 Familial DNA profiling
 List of murderers by number of victims
 List of serial killers in the United Kingdom
 List of serial killers by number of victims
 Unsolved murders in the United Kingdom

Notes

References

Cited works and further reading

External links
 Murders Suspect in UK Crime Probe: A 2002 BBC News article focusing upon the murders committed by Joseph Kappen
 2003 Guardian news article pertaining to Kappen

1941 births
1973 murders in the United Kingdom
1990 deaths
20th-century Welsh criminals
British male criminals
British people convicted of burglary
British people convicted of robbery
British people convicted of sexual assault
British people convicted of theft
Fugitives
Fugitives wanted by the United Kingdom
Fugitives wanted on murder charges
Male serial killers
Murder in Wales
People from Port Talbot
Unsolved murders in Wales
Violence against women in the United Kingdom
Welsh rapists
Welsh murderers of children
Welsh serial killers


Today on MY MUSIC!, we featured a compilation album featuring various artists from New Orleans. The album is titled "Our New Orleans: A Benefit Album for the Gulf Coast" recorded after the Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
N' Diale is a multicultural album by Jacky Molard Quartet & Foune Diarra Trio whose members are from Bretagne and Mali.
"What We Did on Our Holidays" is a Fairport Convention's 1969 album. The album is produced by Joe Boyd.


text:
Q: Two state UI component with "can be checked" functionality I need two state (checked / default) UI component which can be validated from code, is it possible to check it.
Checkbox is ok, but I do not have any way to check is it ok to check it.
So something like that:
checkBox.setOnCheckedChangeListener(new CompoundButton.OnCheckedChangeListener() {
    @Override
    public void onCheckedChanged(CompoundButton buttonView, boolean isChecked) {
        if(isChecked) {
            // Check if it is possible to check this
            // e.g return false, not possible to check
        }
    }
}

A: You can do smth like this: checkbox detect on click and than check if checked
In your layout:
<CheckBox
    android:id="@+id/item_check"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:onClick="itemClicked" />

And after it in code:
public void itemClicked(View v) {
    CheckBox checkBox = (CheckBox)v;
    if(checkBox.isChecked()){
        // logic
    } else {

    }
}

Inspired by this answer.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Given(/^following service definition$/) do |code|
  pretext="require 'restful_mapper'\n"
  @module.module_eval "%s%s" % [pretext,code], "cucuber", 1
end

Given(/^the service endpoint at port (\d+) responds with following http response:$/) do |port, response|
  server=TCPServer.new port.to_i
  go! do
    connection=server.accept
    connection.readline
    connection.write(response)
    connection.close
    server.close
  end
end

When(/^I call service "(.*?)"$/) do |code|
  @result=@module.module_eval(code, "input",1)
end

Then(/^the result should be equal to:$/) do |expected|
  @result.should == @module.module_eval(expected)
end

Given(/^the service endpoint at port (\d+) is running$/) do |port|
  server=TCPServer.new port.to_i
  response = "HTTP/1.1 201 OK\n\n"
  channel=channel! String,1
  response_channel=channel! String, 1
  headers_channel=channel! Hash, 1
  @server_channel=channel
  @response_body_channel=response_channel
  @response_headers_channel=headers_channel

  go! do
    connection=server.accept
    channel << connection.readline()
    content_length=nil
    headers={}
    while (line=connection.readline()) != "\r\n"
      # puts "line: %s" % line
      name, value=line.split(":",2)
      if name == "Content-Length"
        content_length=value.to_i
        # puts "content length: %s" % content_length
      end
      headers[name]=value.gsub(/\n|\r/,'').strip
    end

    headers_channel << headers

    # puts "content length: %d" % content_length

    data=(content_length ? connection.read(content_length) : "")

    # puts "data: %s" % data

    response_channel << data

    connection.write(response)
    connection.close
    server.close

  end
end

Then(/^the endpoint should receive request$/) do |request|
  @server_channel.receive.first.gsub(/\r|\n/,'').should == request.gsub(/\r|\n/,'')
end

When(/^request body should be$/) do |expected|
  @response_body_channel.receive.first.should == expected
end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Q: QML force delegate instantiation I have a ListView inside Scrollview and a delegate which instantiates items of ListView.
After model change I want to force instantiation of delegates for all items in the model. I use cacheBuffer, so instantiated items won't gone.
So the question is how can I achieve that?


text:
Harlem Pol Rallies to Stop Truck Depot, But Won't Meet Site Developer to Seek New Plan
Manhattan Council Member Kristin Richardson Jordan at a rally to stop the truck depot on Saturday at the site where a developer wanted to build two towers (inset). Photo: Julianne Cuba
Manhattan Council Member Kristin Richardson Jordan rallied on Saturday with a few dozen community members at the newly opened truck depot in Harlem, decrying the developer's brazenness in bringing more pollution-spewing trucks to a low-income community of color that's already been forced to bear other environmental injustices.
The freshman pol promised to fight the depot — where developer Bruce Teitelbaum had hoped to get a rezoning to build a pair of 32-story buildings comprising more than 900 units of housing and a Museum of Civil Rights until Richardson Jordan opposed the development. She says she still has no plans to meet with real-estate bigwig even as the trucks roll.
"My theory of change is based in people power so I believe that if we organize, if we lobby the state legislature around this truck depot and we shut this down, and then we put pressure on this developer that they will come back and build something that this community actually needs," Richardson Jordan said. "I don't believe in private back-door deals with developers, I don't see it as something where I need to individually coax him, I see it as not personal but community. We have seen our community displaced, rejected, a dumping ground for environmental waste like this truck stop."
Teitelbaum claims he was "forced" to withdraw his application in April to rezone the site at W. 145th Street and Lenox Avenue after Richardson Jordan doubled down on her opposition to his proposal, called One45. According to the city's 1961 citywide zoning code, only "automative and other heavy commercial services" as well as market-rate housing is permitted on the site.
And on Wednesday, Teitelbaum opened parking for commercial trucks, instead of housing for people. A sign bearing the words, "Park Your Fleet," now looms above 145th Street. In addition to the truck depot, Teitelbaum says he's now also looking into building a self-storage facility as well as market-rate and luxury housing.
The new truck depot opened on Wednesday in Harlem. Photo: Henry Beers Shenk
As part of the rezoning, Teitelbaum — once an aide to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani — says he also would have reconstructed the playground within Brigadier General Charles Young Playground and redesigned the street. Though exactly what his plans were for a street redesign remain unclear, and he declined to comment further.
But bringing more gas-guzzling trucks to an area that already disproportionately suffers from environmental injustice harms high rates of child hospitalizations associated with pollution-induced asthma. According to city health data, that section of Harlem adjacent to the 145th Street bridge to the Bronx had an annual rate of 39.2 per 100,000 children, more than double the citywide average.
"[The developer] should be embarrassed, but they're not," said Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who was also on hand on Saturday. "We should look at the needs and what communities like Harlem are dealing with, intersections of lack of housing and environmental issues like asthma that are connected of course to trucking. So why would you bring to Harlem a truck depot? What you're saying is you never really cared about this community."
In Harlem today where Council Member Kristin Richardson Jordan and @JumaaneWilliams are rallying with community members against the new truck depot pic.twitter.com/91Scso7pmZ
— Julianne Cuba (@Julcuba) January 21, 2023
At the heart of Richardson Jordan's opposition to Teitelbaum's original proposal is the income-level brackets of the units in the buildings. Richardson Jordan says she still, and has always, demanded a minimum of 30 percent of the units set at 30 percent of the area's median income, and 60 percent to be set at 60 percent AMI and below.
"That's the bare minimum. This developer didn't want to meet those standards," she said.
But Teitelbaum had proposed many levels of below-market-rate housing: Out of 915 units, 112 units would be pegged at 30 percent AMI and 255 units at 50 percent AMI. Another 91 units were scaled to 125 percent AMI. The rest would be reserved as market rate and luxury units, Patch reported last May, according to information from Richardson Jordan's office.
Richardson Jordan also alluded to some kind of illegality of the truck depot operating on the site since it sits within the state Department of Environmental Conservation's Brownfield Cleanup Program, which encourages the cleanup and redevelopment of contaminated sites.
"The truck stop is a nonstarter that our state officials should be acting upon as there should be no state business license permitted of an environmentally hazardous business in an environmentally protected area," Richardson Jordan said in an e-mailed statement to Streetsblog last week.
A sign at the rally on Saturday. Photo: Julianne Cuba
But a DEC spokesperson said a truck depot is a permitted use of the site.
And now that the truck depot is up and running and luxury housing is a possibility, Richardson Jordan still refuses to meet one-on-one with the developer to reach a new deal that works for her and the community.
"I was very happy to have a meeting that involved members of the community," she added on Friday. "I have never turned down having a meeting as long as we are involving community members as well."
In a statement to Streetsblog after the rally on Saturday, Teitelbaum called Richardson Jordan a "grandstand[er]" and blamed the council member as the reason there are trucks, not apartments on that site.
"We acknowledge that siting a truck depot where affordable housing should be is not the best result, but that's CM Richardson's fault, not ours. She knew that her decision to sabotage One45 would mean trucks, not homes, for Harlem," he said. "We are not unmindful of our neighbors who we respect and whose concerns and needs we pledge to address in good faith as we move forward with our plans. Instead of always protesting and yelling, maybe Richardson should do her job and start talking to us, which she refuses to do."
Filed Under: Delivery trucks, Kristin Richardson Jordan, Trucks
'Park Your Fleet': Harlem Residents Decry Newly Opened Truck Depot On Site of Proposed Housing
By Julianne Cuba and Henry Beers Shenk | Jan 19, 2023
A neighborhood that needs more housing and less pollution got the opposite.
Harlem Environmental Justice Group Blasts Developer for Truck Depot
By Julianne Cuba | Oct 14, 2022
Members of the Harlem community are decrying a developer's plan to build a controversial truck depot, warning that the decision to put profit over people's health will send more pollution-spewing big rigs into the low-income community of color and worsen the environmental injustice already borne by the neighborhood.
ANALYSIS: Developer Blasts Harlem Pol Over Rejecting Housing, As He Plans Truck Depot Instead
By Julianne Cuba | Sep 19, 2022
A developer wanted to build housing, affordable units and public space, but was turned down by the local Council member, so now he's making housing ... for trucks. Is there a greater symbol of New York's dysfunction?
Thursday's Headlines: Support for School Streets Edition
The parent company of Streetsblog wants to help communities make their school house streets safer by creating the first-ever "School Streets Toolkit," plus a webinar next week. Plus other news.
Black History Matters: The Case for an Arturo Alfonso Schomburg Subway Station
By Wilfredo Florentino and Kristin Richardson Jordan | Jul 3, 2020
It's time to start honoring the heroes of our past. Arturo Schomburg is certainly one of them.
STREETFILMS: A Great Day in Harlem as Neighborhood Comes Out for Fun, Safety
Scores of riders joined Transportation Alternatives on Saturday's tour of Harlem — and called once again for a bikeway through a neighborhood long neglected for safe cycling infrastructure by city officials.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


WIN BIG and HAVE A BLAST ON TUESDAY NIGHT ON MOMTV LIVE at MomTV.com!
It's MomTV Live with Jess, let's begin!
Get into the pre-show spirit by leaving a comment here letting me know that you're going to "be there" and name your favorite new product to look hot this fall!
Disclosure: Some products featured on MomTV I received as samples, others I purchased myself. Some prizes are provided by the brands featured, other prizes are purchased by me for you.
Woo hoo! So glad you're back! I'll be there and my fave fall fashion for looking hot are my cowboy boots! I bumped up my soccer mom fashion this week by wearing them to my daughter's game on Saturday and got lots of compliments!
THERE!!! I'm not with out my Olay CC cream!!!
I need some motivation. My closet is STILL a disaster after moving !
Can't wait…. Need to step,it up for fall!


Hmmmm….this sounds vaguely familiar. So glad IBC is getting out there, so sorry someone had to experience this to be on the show.
I'm definitely watching…..and I think I'll get the dx right, how 'bout you? Don't miss it starting August 10th.


text:
Q: How to loop in PostGIS to add the next lat long to a route I want to loop over the results of a query and then pass row(n)'s longitude, latitude and row(n+1)'s longitude and latitude to another function.
I have a query which returns a set of coordinates from a way-point table with no geometry field.
SELECT longitude, latitude FROM way-points ORDER BY date

I am also using the pgRouting extension and I have replicated the pgr_fromAtoB function to allow me to generate a route between two coordinates.
Essentially, I have a table of waypoints (GPS lat/lon) and a separate table of roads. I need to get each GPS lat/lon, then get the road (or roads) that make up the route to the next waypoint.
My idea is for each waypoint pair (row(n) origin, row(n+1) destination) in the waypoint query, call the pg_Routing function to find the nearest road vertices's (NNS), then route between the two.
All I have to do is pass the input: x1,y1,x2,y2 and I get back the list of geometries.
SELECT geom FROM pgr_fromAtoB('road_table',-122.662,45.528,-122.684,45.514);

Ideally I would like to have this automated so that instead of specifying the values of x1,y1,x2,y2 I can just use a SELECT query that returns the coordinates.
So maybe something like:
BEGIN
-- Generate x1, y1, x2, y2

-- Set origin and remember start point
    x1 := 0;
    y1 := 0;

    FOR rec IN EXECUTE 'SELECT * FROM waypoints WHERE user_id = 5 ORDER BY waypoint_timestamp'
    LOOP
    -- first iteration sets x1, y1
    IF ( x1 = 0 AND y1 = 0 ) THEN
        x1 := rec.longitude;
        y1 := rec.latitude;
        geom1 := rec.geom;
    ELSE
        -- If the origin and destination geom are the same don't route
        IF geom1 = rec.geom THEN

        ELSE
            -- geoms are different so furuther iterations set x2, y2
            x2 := rec.longitude;
            y2 := rec.latitude;
            -- call the pgr_fromAtoB function (road table hard coded)
            EXECUTE 'SELECT ST_Union(f.geom) FROM pgr_fromatob(''roads''' || ',' || x1 || ',' || y1 || ',' || x2 || ',' || y2 || ') AS f' INTO geom;
            -- now set our new start point equal to the previous destination
            x1 := x2;
            y1 := y2;
        END IF;

        RETURN NEXT;
    END IF;
    END LOOP;
    RETURN;
END;

Do you know how to write loops in SQL and can help me refactor this into something that actually performs well in PostGIS?
Perhaps you know a faster way to do this without loops. Performance is my biggest consideration.

A: You can do your own function in PostgreSQL like this (Example taken from the docs) :
CREATE TABLE foo (fooid INT, foosubid INT, fooname TEXT);
INSERT INTO foo VALUES (1, 2, 'three');
INSERT INTO foo VALUES (4, 5, 'six');

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION get_all_foo() RETURNS SETOF foo AS
$BODY$
DECLARE
    r foo%rowtype;
BEGIN
    FOR r IN
        SELECT * FROM foo WHERE fooid > 0
    LOOP
        -- can do some processing here
        RETURN NEXT r; -- return current row of SELECT
    END LOOP;
    RETURN;
END
$BODY$
LANGUAGE plpgsql;

SELECT * FROM get_all_foo();


Five 30 minute programmes consisting of intimate portrait of young Africans who express themselves through some form of creative activity.
Five 30 minute programmes consisting of intimate portrait of young Africans who express themselves through some form of creative activity. Each film blends artistic expression and social context to show a vibrant and positive picture of Africa.
Doug E. Tee & Didier Awadi shows two young rappers from Senegal with their group Positive Black Soul.
Ruth Motau & Themba Hadeve are photographers with a weekly newspaper in Johnnesburg. The want to confront the image of violence in the townships with an alternative view of dignity, aspiration and achievement.
Melanie Jones is a drama student at the New Africa Theatre Project in Cape Town, working mainly with Xhosa people newly settled in the town.
Richard Kabiito is a young painter in Uganda who draws his inspiration from the countryside and village traditions.
Alois Magwenya is a dancer with the Tumbuka Company in Zimbabwe, a group which has maintained it attachment to rural traditions.


text:
Trip Recap: Great Smoky Mountains National Park - October 2015
We just couldn't stay away from the Smokies for long. As we were planning a trip with two of our good friends, Jenny and Jake for October 2015, we decided to return to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. After our amazing trip last year from Alum Cave to Greenbrier Cove (check out the Trip Recap here) by way of the famous Appalachian Trail (or AT as it's called up there), we knew it would be a great experience, and it was.
One of the best parts of this trip was the fact that one of our hiking partners, Jenny, was a beginner! Jenny had been camping many times before with her family, and has spent time in the Rockies, so she's no stranger to the great outdoors. But backpacking through the wilderness was a completely new idea for her, and she did an amazing job. Jenny is a dental hygienist in the Indianapolis region, and a good friend of Katie and Mark's. She's a perfect person to have on the trail - she always brings a smile to your face, even on long hikes up a mountain in the heat, and has a pretty good singing voice too.
Our other participant, Jake, is a law student at Valparaiso University. Jake has a lot of backpacking experience. He's been camping in a wide variety of areas and conditions, and has among other accomplishments, hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu with his father. Jake is always a great guy to have in the group - he's a strong hiker, a reliable partner on the trail, and makes the best French press coffee east of the Mississippi.
It was a great group of people, and as we've said before - much more important than what you bring backpacking is who you bring backpacking.
This was a 4-day, 26-mile loop from Clingmans Dome, the highest peak in the Smoky Mountains Park, south along the Noland Divide and Noland Creek, west over Forney Ridge, and north along Forney Creek back to the mountain.
Southeast from Noland Divide Trailhead along Noland Divide Trail to Noland Creek Trail, 5 miles.
We began about 1.5 miles southeast of the Noland Divide trailhead, parking our car at Clingmans Dome Visitor Center. It was very cloudy this first day, and we hiked up to the Clingmans Dome observation platform only to find ourselves completely surrounded by dense clouds.
We walked along the Clingmans Dome Access Road to the trailhead, where we started southeast down Noland's Divide. While backpacking uphill certainly can be tiring, starting a long hike downhill at a fairly steep incline has it's own hardships.
Our feet and ankles, as well as our knees and hips were sore after this first day. Downhill is tough before you get your trail legs.
We started seeing signs of bears almost immediately (we would see four bears this trip!),
and our relatively short hike ended when we got to Backcountry Campsite #61, Bald Creek.
Jenny and Katie were pretty tired, Jake and I were all right, but everyone would sleep well tonight.
We set up tarps as rain was expected, and while exploring the area around camp, we saw some bear scat and prints. Neither the scat nor the tracks looked fresh, and there were no apparent food scraps or garbage around, so we decided it wasn't a bad place to camp regardless of the bear signs nearby. Bears are everywhere in the Smokies and they normally don't bother people; more on that later.
South on Noland Creek Trail, 4.5 miles.
It rained all night and didn't stop in the morning. We woke up to a steady light rain and used the InReach satellite communicator to contact Mark's mother and determine the weather report. Our thinking was this: If the rain was going to stop at all during the day, we would wait until then to pack up camp. That way we could keep our things as dry as possible and avoid packing an extra 10lbs each of water weight. If it was not going to stop raining all day, however, we would pack up and get to the next camp as soon as possible. The rain was projected to stop around 5:30PM, which was too late to leave camp, but we figured if we arrived at our next camp at 5:30PM, at least we would unpack while it was not raining.
Our luck turned out to be better than that. Around 2:45PM, the rain finally started clearing up. We were already packing up and were able to keep most of our things dry using tarps.
We saw the sun for the first time around 4:30PM, and it was a welcome sight. We crossed Noland Creek several times on our way to our next camp, getting our feet wet. This wasn't a big deal to Katie and I, but to Jenny, who had never done this type of hiking before, it wasn't a pleasant experience.
We explained that as long as you have a good pair of wool or synthetic socks, the wetness really wont bother you too much. Of course, everyone was looking forward to drying off next to a fire nevertheless.
The skies were blue above us on this hike, and we all hoped we might see some of the famous National Park stars this night. We wouldn't be disappointed.
When we arrived at camp, we spotted an odd wire box with a trap door that read "National Park Property, Do Not Disturb". We quickly realized this was a black bear trap, and we hoped it wasn't there because there was a problem bear in the area. We had checked the reports right before we left, and there had been one attack not too far from our camp, but the rangers believed they killed the bear responsible. There was another problem bear on Mt. LeConte, but that was a fair distance from our campsite. Bears can be a nuisance, and they can be dangerous if they loose their fear of people. Fortunately, the National Park Service, through the capable hands of the Rangers, keep the bears in the Smokies at bay from most campsites and most campers. It's usually people who cause human-bear conflicts.
We set up camp at Backcountry Campsite #64, Mill Creek.
We started a fire, dried off our gear, and played some charades with Jake's phone. We usually bring a light-up Frisbee with us on these types of group trips - it's a good way to get up from sitting around the campfire at night, stretch, and have some fun. We realized this trip it was also a great tool to fan the campfire.
North then southwest on Springhouse Branch Trail to Forney Creek Trail north, 10 miles.
After a fun night around the campfire, we packed up and got ready for our longest day of the trip.
We had a pretty good uphill section on this day, but the second half of our 10-mile trek was considerably downhill. As we had our French pressed coffee courtesy of Jake, we were approached by a National Park Service employee who politely notified us that there would be a cemetery visitation today adjacent to our campsite. We had no idea there was even a cemetery there. It makes sense though, since the Park was previously inhabited by American settlers, and inhabited by Native Americans long before that. A lot of people have lived and died in those mountains, and some of their relatives were going to be there to pay their respects. We thought it was pretty cool.
We hit the trail at about 10:00AM and had a great hike. We saw a total of 4 black bears this day. The first noisily ran down a tree about 75 yards from us. We were talking loudly on the trail and must have spooked the bear. It had a healthy fear of us humans and ran away quickly. This was the first time Jake and Jenny had seen a bear in the wild. Jake was shocked and commented, "That thing ran down that tree like a squirrel!" It was true - black bears are master climbers and they have no trouble running up and down trees, even if there are no branches to hold.
We would see three more bears, two in a tree (see the image above - can you spot them?) and one which came out of a tree a little too close to us, prompting Mark to ask the group to back up. This was a larger bear, a sow, and she certainly was aware of our presence. She wasn't fearful, but did casually walk down the tree and take a route away from us. She was heading back towards the other two bears we saw - the ones in the tree - which were probably her cubs.
It was only 3:15PM and we already saw 4 bears. What a great day. It was sunny and warm, and we were having a great time.
There was no rain expected for the rest of our trip - all sun and good weather. We decided to take a break next to a "babbling brook" as Jenny liked to call them. It was a shady area and we were all sweating from the uphill climb and the general humidity of the forest.
Jake offered the group some beef jerky - Firehouse brand - which was some of the best jerky we had ever had. Jake washed his face in the creek inlet, which had a small waterfall, and Mark wrote in his journal. Jenny and Katie talked and laughed, and we all had that "lucky to be alive and well" feeling that is too often lost in our society. We got back on the trail and headed for camp #69 for our final night in the mountains.
After exploring some old settler's home sites at Backcountry Campsite #68,
we had several stream crossings, some of which were a little more complicated than the earlier crossings. We ran into two women - one younger and one older - who were heading towards camp #68, where we had passed earlier. They told us there were three more stream crossings between us and our camp, so we decided to hike the last 1-2 miles in our camp sandals.
We arrived at Backcountry Campsite #69, Huggins, which is situated at the base of two huge ridgelines and sits next to a noisy part of Forney Creek.
There was a massive hill on one side of the camp, and the creek on the other. Really a great campsite for our last night. Whoever stayed there the night before left the fire ready to go - a common and wonderful practice in the wilderness - and we took advantage, building one of the best bonfires we had ever had out in the woods.
It is customary for us to build a large fire our last night on the trail, and this night was no exception. We passed around a bit of moonshine to toast the trip, and had a great night under the stars and next to the warm fire.
Northeast on Forney Creek Trail to Forney Ridge Trail back to Clingmans Dome, 8 miles.
We woke up early in the morning and Mark rekindled the fire so everyone could get warm and get ready quickly.
We had to hike out and drive back to Indiana all in one day. Our fourth and final day on the trail would be all uphill - from camp at the base of the ridgeline to the tallest peak in the Park - Clingmans Dome. It was a strenuous hike, and Jenny amazed us all with her ability to conquer the uphill trails with ease.
She's definitely a natural at this sport. Jake was a little more tired, probably because he was carrying the heaviest pack by far.
Mark and Katie took their normal "uphill pace" and the group made it up the mountain by early afternoon by following Forney Creek and the adjacent ridgelines. We took in the wonderful views from Clingmans Dome, which was fortunately not foggy this time around as it was when we started, and we were in consensus that no one had spent their weekend better than we had. What a great trip.
#TripRecap #GreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark #NorthCarolina #Rain
Trip Recap: Canyonlands National Park
Haleakalā National Park: Trip Recap
Mary Beth Skylis: Top 5 Hikes in Breckenridge, Colorado


Also, in honor of Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday they consider The Gipper's influence on music. Did you know he and Robert Johnson were born the same year? Jessica and J.R. determine once and for all whose influence was greater.
What are you waiting for? HIT IT!
or download them at the Chicago Public Media iTunes Store. You can follow us on Twitter, become our friends on Facebook, or drop us an email.


DANIEL BEAHM A true Renaissance man, Daniel Beahm owns an advertising/design firm in Denver, has traveled the country performing music, started his own record label and designs and restores houses; only recently has he added filmmaking to his to-do list. Beahm also composed songs for the 1999 film Chillicothe.
A graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy, Erika Randall Beahm went on to attend the Juilliard School. Beahm received her BA in dance from the University of Washington and her MFA in choreography from Ohio State University. She now teaches dance at the University of Colorado and has founded several dance workshops and studios.
Once a star, Sheri Campari is now a struggling yet controlling stage mom who lives vicariously through her daughter Tasi, the perfectionist darling of the amateur ballroom circuit. Wallflower older sister Toni, the backbone of the family, helps Tasi maintain a sense of humor in the face of Sheri's overblown expecta- tions. And then there's Cedric—Tasi's flamboyant dance partner, Toni's best friend and the only person with the confidence to stand up to Sheri.
This nutty family's world gets turned upside down when Tasi confronts an unwanted pregnancy in the midst of rehearsals for the big ballroom competi- tion—and Toni meets Mona, who becomes her leading lady both on and off the dance floor, encouraging her to take the lead and fall in love. As Tasi prepares to becomes the mother she wished she'd had, Toni and Mona's relationship blooms, and the members of this unconventional family learn to let love lead them as they accept the starring roles in their own lives.
A little bit Strictly Ballroom, a little bit Hairspray—yet wholly itself—this impres- sive first feature from Colorado-based duo Erika Randall Beahm and Daniel Beahm is as wonderfully heartfelt as it is campy and gently subversive. Drawing on their own experiences of growing up in the Midwest, cowriters Erika Randall Beahm and Jennifer Bechtel have filled quite a void with their uplifting, song- and-dance-filled, gay-themed and family-oriented romantic comedy. Among the stars are such real-life dance divas as Melanie LaPatin (Sheri), herself a ballroom champ and a choreographer for popular reality TV series So You Think You Can Dance—on which Benji Schwimmer (Cedric) was a winning contestant in 2006. The cast is rounded out by Nicole Dionne (Mona), Shannon Lea Smith (Tasi) and Laurel Vail (Toni)—who learned to dance for her role—along with other alumni from So You Think You Can Dance, who shimmy through a delight- fully surreal musical number set in a supermarket.


text:
Q: Getting cookies values cross domain using jsonp not working for IE I am having trouble getting cookie information from domain A to domain B, using jsonp. I've got it working for Chrome and Firefox et al., but for IE it does not work. I am doing a jsonp request from domain B to domain A that sets a cookie there through php on domain A and then I do a check for that same cookie from B again. The information in the cookie is then printed to screen (domain A), so that I can pick that up from domain B and set a cookie there that mirrors that information (I am aware of the security risks, I am not trying to sync sensitive information here, just a setting).
So, as said, this is working on FF, Chrome etc. But on IE, I see that only session cookies are returned, which the cookie that I set isn't (and shouldn't be).
Any clue what's wrong here? Or isn't this even possible? I also briefly tried CORS, but that has the same problem.
I have the following test setup:
Domain A: (central domain)
login.php
<?php
//below line solves the problem. See accepted answer
header('P3P: CP="Facebook does not have a P3P policy. Learn why here: http://fb.me/p3p"');
setcookie("loggedin","5",time()+3600);
echo 1;

check.php
<?php
//below line solves the problem. See accepted answer
header('P3P: CP="Facebook does not have a P3P policy. Learn why here: http://fb.me/p3p"');
$cookies = implode('; ', array_map(function ($v, $k) { return $k . '=' . $v; }, $_COOKIE, array_keys($_COOKIE)));

if(isset($_COOKIE['loggedin'])&&($_COOKIE['loggedin'] == "5")) {
        echo "alert('logged in, ".$cookies."');";
} else {
        echo "alert('not logged in, ".$cookies."');";
}

Domain B:
jsonp.html
<!DOCTYPE html>

<meta charset="UTF-8">

hi!

A: In the end, this all came down to adding a p3p policy header to the scripts. For that I used the p3p hack used by facebook:
header('P3P: CP="Facebook does not have a P3P policy. Learn why here: http://fb.me/p3p"');

An important thing to note is that I thought a P3P gave you access to cookies on another domain. That is not entirely true. You only have access to cookies that are also set with a P3P header. My live setup is a little more complex, and in some cases the cookies were set on domain A without a P3P and not via a secondary domain (like B in my example). In this case, I could not read the cookies from domain B.
I changed the example above to reflect the solution. Of course, change the text to something appropriate, and make sure you don't accidentially use words that are equivalent to the compact codes (e.g. LAW, NON etc.).
In my case I can do this, as we are only storing information client side, and we do not even know what it is ourselves. We are not storing any data.


An old boyfriend of Hammerlock's was hired to wipe out the Stalker population and tried to write a book about his adventures. Hammerlock wants you to find the chapters of this book, so he can plagiarise them for his own. The pages of the book will be found in the Stalker piles, similar to the ice things you likely broke during your encounters with Bullymongs.
There is also an optional objective in this mission, which is to simply kill a total of 15 Stalkers. Since you will be going into the territories of Stalkers, you will come across many of them, although you may get the five chapters rather quickly. Also, it should be noted that you can kill Stalkers anywhere you can find them and not just in The Highlands, such as in the Captain Scarlett DLC. You can turn in the mission at a mailbox in Overlook.


KACE™, the systems management appliance company, today announced new technology breakthroughs for its KBOX™ family of systems management and deployment appliances. KACE's appliance-based architecture allows organizations to avoid the cost of additional hardware and software required by today's management solutions to support the Mac platform. With this release, KACE is creating an IT environment where Mac OS can be supported as an "equal citizen" alongside Windows, without added cost or complexity.


text:
Q: Is there a keyboard shortcut to change a element into a dialogue? In Final Draft, when I paste text into the editor, it defaults to an action.
If I select the text or put my cursor on a spot in the text, then I can go to the menu and choose Format > Change Element to > Dialogue. There is also a dropdown menu at the top of the editor that does this.
Is there a keyboard shortcut that will let me do this?

A: It looks like Command + Option + 1 through 9 will reformat a paragraph to another element type. On Windows it uses the Control key.


I noted with interest the passing this week of Julia Grant Dietz, the last remaining great grandchild of Ulysses S. Grant. Ms. Dietz was the daughter of Ulysses S. Grant III and Edith Root. Grant III was a military aide in the Theodore Roosevelt Administration. Among many other things, he later ran the Civil War Centennial Commission before stepping down midway through the commemoration. Edith Root was the daughter of powerbroker Elihu Root.
I often wonder what life is like for these descendants of historical figures. It must be a balancing act between protecting the family legacy and being honest and faithful to the historical record. This past Saturday a Roosevelt descendant dropped into the TRB. He was a man in his late 20s who lives now in Colorado. He told us he was in New York CIty on business, happened to be walking past the site, and so came in. A few months back he attended the Roosevelt reunion in Warm Springs, Georgia.
Ms. Dietz seemed to be active in preserving the Grant family memory. For one thing she was a trustee of the Grant Monument Association. Her son is Ulysses Grant Dietz, the eminent curator at the Newark Museum of Art. I noticed that she was long active in Planned Parenthood. One wonders how that must have gone down in the extended family. Her parents and grandparents were quite conservative after all.


The joyous refrain of the summer playground. You're eight, and the neighbour-kids are coming over after school for a game of show-me-yours. Things are all a-buzz.
It's summer, and the York MFA students have brought a sample of their work downtown, this is their group exhibition. Herded together over the course of the year in a dark windowless room, we, a group of moaning rabble-rousing malcontents have come together one last time for a game of you-show-me-yours-and-I'll-show-you-mine.


text:
Q: Systemd not setting RUNTIME_DIRECTORY env when it should? I have a pretty simple test service.
Ultimately I'll be running a node daemon, but debugging this problem with env for now...
$ systemctl cat http-endpoints
# /etc/systemd/system/http-endpoints.service
[Unit]
Description=HTTP endpoints for triggering events
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
;PassEnvironment=RUNTIME_DIRECTORY
RuntimeDirectory=endpoints
Environment=TEST=asdf
ExecStart=/usr/bin/env

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

I'm trying to use the RuntimeDirectory= feature of systemd.
I am expecting the environment variable RUNTIME_DIRECTORY.
It is not getting set.
systemd[1]: Started HTTP endpoints for triggering events.
env[26794]: LANG=en_US.UTF-8
env[26794]: PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/snap/bin
env[26794]: INVOCATION_ID=fb24db240f454722b847ab7cefd5eb59
env[26794]: JOURNAL_STREAM=9:8063338
env[26794]: TEST=asdf

I have tried a few things.
If I manually set it, Environment=RUNTIME_DIRECTORY=/run/endpoints, it works.
But that config should not be necessary.
The /run/endpoints directory is created as expected (and promptly deleted because env exits, but that's not the problem).
$ systemd --version
systemd 237
+PAM +AUDIT +SELINUX +IMA +APPARMOR +SMACK +SYSVINIT +UTMP +LIBCRYPTSETUP +GCRYPT +GNUTLS +ACL +XZ +LZ4 +SECCOMP +BLKID +ELFUTILS +KMOD -IDN2 +IDN -PCRE2 default-hierarchy=hybrid

A: Ubuntu 18.04.3 does not have the lastest systemd.
The support for the environment variables was added in v240.

CHANGES WITH 240:
    * When the RuntimeDirectory=, StateDirectory=, CacheDirectory=,
      LogsDirectory=, ConfigurationDirectory= settings are used in a
      service the executed processes will now receive a set of environment
      variables containing the full paths of these directories.
      Specifically, RUNTIME_DIRECTORY=, STATE_DIRECTORY, CACHE_DIRECTORY,
      LOGS_DIRECTORY, CONFIGURATION_DIRECTORY are now set if these options
      are used. Note that these options may be used multiple times per
      service in which case the resulting paths will be concatenated and
      separated by colons.

I hope this saves someone the time I spent trying to figure this out.


text:
HomeFREEDOM20 Years of Keeping Lehigh Valley Vaccinated
20 Years of Keeping Lehigh Valley Vaccinated
November 3, 2017 TLB Staff FREEDOM, HEALTH, Spotlight, Tyranny 2
Preface by TLB Staff Writer: Christopher Wyatt
WOW! I am not sure I have the strength to comment on the following propaganda piece that is masquerading as news but I am going to try. How on earth can they possibly think a drive through clinic where people receive an irreversible medical procedure is possible safe? I knew the pro vaccine liars were pushing hard but a drive through vaccine clinic is insane even by their standards. What if the driver has an adverse reaction such as seizure or death while on the road? Do these people even care?
I am urging all local activist to be at this flu shot clinic and to distribute as much truth as possible about the dangers of vaccines. The only way we can end the vaccine lie is to educate others and put the truth out there as loudly as possible.
We The People NOT They The Elite (CW)
By Binghui Huang
The 450 volunteers and staff who run the annual Lehigh Valley Health Network community influenza campaign have seen it all.
When they open at Dorney Park & Wildwater Kingdom Saturday morning for the 20th year of the campaign, the staff will have jumper cables to restart cars, stop signs to prevent cars from missing the vaccine stations, emergency staff for unexpected health problems and trained workers who can keep children still while administering the shot.
The campaign grew from a small clinic where about 50 people got vaccines to a two-day event at Dorney Park and Coca-Cola Park, where hundreds of practiced staff vaccinates more than 10,000 people at no charge. Every volunteer is a well-tuned part of a fast-running operation, vaccinating up to 1,000 people every hour. The convenient setup, which gets people moving through the lines and vaccinated in 15 to 20 minutes — without having to get out of their cars — attracts many who may otherwise opt out, hospital staff said.
The elderly, babies and sick people are most vulnerable to the flu. When former CEO Dr. Elliot J. Sussman came up with the drive-through clinic idea, he had vulnerable people in mind, said Terry Burger, LVHN's director of infection control and prevention and flu shot weekend organizer.
He wanted people with disabilities to easily get the flu shot, she said.
"It was just a challenge for them to get wherever they were going, let alone stand in line," Burger said.
And at the time, the idea seemed somewhat radical, said Dr. Luther Rhodes, chief of hospital epidemiology at LVHN.
"People driving up and putting an arm out to get a shot. That sounded dangerous and potentially chaotic," he said.
And the first few times were logistically difficult, he said. But the team soon proved skeptics wrong, successfully giving out 150,000 shots in 19 years.
"That's got to count and save lives," Rhodes said.
A lot has changed since the first clinic.
"Every year we've tweaked it, changed this or changed that, or added this. Every year, there's something new," said Burger.
Hand and foot warmers and propane tanks to keep volunteers warm. A DJ to keep the energy high. Hot chocolate and cupcakes to make 400 volunteers happy. Colorful Band-aids to placate crying kids. EpiPens to deal with allergic reactions. Color-coded vests to easily identify doctors, nurses and other volunteers.
Mass vaccination also prepares hospital staff for pandemics, such as the swine flu of 2009, or even potential bioterrorism such as an anthrax attack, hospital staff said.
"It's like a puzzle, and we put the puzzle together within hours," said Dr. Tibisay Villalobos-Fry, an LVHN pediatrician and infectious disease specialist who helps organize the flu shot event.
At the height of the swine pandemic, the flu shot event attracted 14,000 people, according to hospital data. It freed up doctors' offices to treat sick patients, Burger said.
"Our doctor's offices couldn't handle the volumes of phone calls or the people asking for flu shots. So they needed to redirect them somewhere so their offices can continue seeing sick people," she said.
The campaign even caught the attention of the U.S. military, prompting them to send representatives to observe the operation, Burger said.
Vaccine Skeptics
Organizing thousands of people is a challenge, but getting people to doctor's offices or the drive-through flu clinics may be a harder job. Despite the annual education campaign, most adults don't get the vaccines, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Reasons vary from myths about the danger of the vaccine to fear of needles and the inconvenience of going to a doctor's office.
A recent Morning Call story about the flu season elicited many Facebook responses from vaccine skeptics. Some claimed the vaccine causes the flu, which is false. Some say it's ineffective, which is also untrue. Others claim their immune system is strong enough to withstand the flu, to which doctors say even healthy people die from the flu.
Skepticism may be rooted in the difficulty of making a flu vaccine that protects against all forms of the flu virus.
Unlike some other vaccines that can almost eradicate the disease, such as the polio vaccine, the flu vaccine changes every year to match the fast-evolving strains of the circulating virus and is about 60 percent effective in a good year.
Last year, the vaccine was about 42 percent effective, according to the CDC. But still, the flu vaccine is the best tool to combat the virus. Plus, annual vaccinations build the body's immunity to all strains of the flu over time, said Villalobos-Fry.
One of the most well-known flu deaths in the Lehigh Valley happened more than a decade ago. Martin McGowan, a healthy teenager from Bushkill Township was rushed to the hospital after he woke up weak and hurting. That same day, he passed away from complication from the flu.
Since then, his family began a vaccine advocacy organization and has volunteered at LVHN's flu shot weekend to raise awareness about the importance of vaccines.
In past years, flu cases ranged from 3,000 to more than 6,000 in the Lehigh Valley. Influenza, commonly known as the flu, is a viral respiratory illness with symptoms that include fever, cough, sore throat and fatigue. From October 2016 to September, the state recorded more than 71,000 flu cases and 149 deaths. The vast majority of deaths were among senior citizens. And a nasty flu season in Australia — where flu cases more than doubled this year — could signal a bad flu season here, health experts say.
In the first four weeks of October, there has been 29 documented cases of the flu in the Lehigh Valley. The actual number may be higher because many flu cases are not reported, health officials say.
Typically, flu cases spike from December to February, when hospitals can see hundreds of people monthly for the virus.
People hospitalized for the flu often never got vaccines, Villalobos-Fry said. Even if the vaccine doesn't stop the flu, it makes symptoms milder, she said.
FREE FLU SHOTS
Lehigh Valley Health Network holds its 20th annual drive-through clinic this weekend.
When: 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday
Where: Dorney Park in South Whitehall Township on Saturday; Coca-Cola Park in Allentown on Sunday.
Who: Anyone over 6 months old
What kind of shots: Those between 6 months and 64 years old will receive the quadrivalent vaccine. Older people can get the trivalent high-dose vaccine.
What else: Volunteers will collect non-perishable food items to benefit local charities.
Bhuang@mcall.com
Twitter @Bhuang2012
Visit Christopher Wyatt on Facebook, Twitter, and his personal blog to learn more about him and the anti vax / natural immunity documentary SPOTTING THE TRUTH
anti-vaccine
Christopher Wyatt
drive through vaccine clinic
Flu Shot Dangers
forced vaccines
pro vaccine propaganda
The Liberty Beacon (TLB)
vaccine reactions
Trump's Fed Picks? More of the Same! [Ron Paul Commentary]
What Is Coming Through That Needle? The Problem Of Pathogenic Vaccine Contamination
Court Ruling Confirms Gardasil HPV Vaccine Kills People!
2 Comments on 20 Years of Keeping Lehigh Valley Vaccinated
TLB Staff November 3, 2017 at 8:52 pm
People have to be very careful because the medical system is corrupt and they are out to prescribe and vaccinate–those are the only things they know. We have traded mild illnesses such as measles and chickenpox for true disease. Mumps outbreaks are happening because nature is desperate to fix itself. These people know all of this and know the harm they are causing.
Joel Walbert November 3, 2017 at 6:42 pm
I'm from the Lehigh Valley. Let me tell you a little something about Lehigh Valley Health Network. For anybody familiar with occult-type symbolism, the logo they adopted a few years ago is representative of '666'. Never, and I mean truly NEVER, go to that hospital or any doctor attached to the network. They care of nothing but profits. True patient care is pretty much non-existent. Even more so than most in the Medical Cartel. If ever in that area and need medical care, St.Lukes University Network, or Easton Hospital Network ONLY. Trust my words.


The 2016-17 First Interim Budget estimated over 91% of revenue will be provided by the State (LCFF and Other State).
The 2016-17 First Interim Budget estimates employee salaries and benefits to be approximately 77% of the General Fund expenditures.
The First Interim Budget represents the total revenues and expenditures anticipated in the current fiscal year, including prior year carryover and deferred revenue.
Hawthorne School District General Fund income projected in 2016-17 is $98.2 million, with $77.3 million from LCFF Sources. Total General Fund expenditures for the year are estimated at $103.8 million, with $79.5 million spent on employee salaries and benefits. Overall, the decrease in fund balance is projected to be $5 million with an ending Unrestricted Fund Balance of $3.8 million. The district will be able to meet the required 3% reserve for economic uncertainty of $3.1 million.
The First Interim Budget includes anticipated expenditure increases in both STRS and PERS, which when combined, equal an increase of over $1 million absent salary increases for the 2016-17 fiscal year. This increase represents the statutory employer required contribution as exists under current law or is projected by PERS.


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Our take: We'll let you know during our drive, but it looks promising. It's the most efficient 5-seater in the U.S., and the first EV to be built on an existing platform. That's key: the strategy will ultimately make EV's less pricey. But it doesn't really scream "I'm electric!"—which some buyers groove on.
Our take: Quite possibly the most perfect commuter-car in existence. Light, fun to drive, and with just enough range to make it great for daily average use. Weekends adventures? Might be a problem, thanks to its sluggish charge time. A new 6.6 kW onboard charger, due later this year, will help significantly.
Our take: The Fit EV will be another existing-platform electric, and one of the smartest-looking EV's out there, with its already great styling and versatility. It'll be slightly more expensive than the Nissan Leaf, but will charge much faster.
Our take: Cars like this—lightweight, efficient—are called "kei" cars in Japan. Thanks to its limited range and power, the i will take a special sort of early adopter to adopt early. (Though it'll be huge with the anime-and-cosplay set!) But if you drive less than 40 or 50 miles a day, it's a great, inexpensive option.
Our take: Now we're talking—an electric car backed up with the engineering cred of BMW? We'll take it. Early reviews suggest the car is a blast, and one of the first to truly maximize all the comfort and performance qualities electric cars usually skimp on. It's a BMW, through and through.
Our take: Coda's strategy is to import a "glider"—that is, a car without a powertrain—and add on all the electric bits itself. Their glider is built in China. While plenty of terrific tech products come from there, U.S. buyers are deeply skeptical of Chinese-made cars. The fact that this one looks like it was designed in Soviet Russia won't help.
Our take: This new electric is shaping up to be a home run—if you can afford it. It's oozing tech wizardry and has lots of surprising capabilities. For instance, it can seat 5 adults and 2 kids. Tesla proved itself with its now-discontinued Roadster, and this car is pushing the envelope even harder.


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As the days begin to shorten and evening chills set in, there's no doubt that winter's blanket is slowly settling on the Mother City! The forests that punctuate the city treat us to kaleidoscopic displays. Leaves transform from emerald green to the riotous reds and yellows of autumn. The scenery in the Winelands is particularly striking at this time of year. Quilt-like patchworks of colourful vines create landscapes that could easily be mistaken for oil paintings.
The first Southern Right Whales in Table Bay signal the onset of the famous annual spectacle known as the Whale Season. Over the from June to November, thousands of whales will arrive from their feeding grounds in the icy waters of the Antarctic to give birth and nurse their young calves in the relative calm of our protected bays. The viewing is nothing short of spectacular!
Winter months in the Cape are synonymous with wild ocean storms, good red wine enjoyed in front of crackling wood fires and… great white sharks. These behemoths of the deep concentrate in unusually high numbers around Seal Island, False Bay. This small island is home to over 60 000 Cape fur seals, the favourite prey of the Great White.
It's one of only a few locations on the planet where guests can witness the sharks 'breaching'. The term describes an extraordinarily unique hunting technique. The sharks launch themselves from the water, often somersaulting through the air, in pursuit of their agile prey. A descent into the cage to view these super-predators underwater is an awe-inspiring experience and one that will not soon be forgotten. This is a bucket list experience!
Insider tip: This once-in-a-lifetime activity is only offered in False Bay, Simonstown in the winter months and differs from the 'all-year-around' Gansbaai shark-diving experience in that the sharks in Gansbaai are not likely to breach.
Guests travelling along the West Coast in August may be treated to the brilliance of the annual flower season. A blanket of flowers begins to blossom in unison, covering vast tracts of land. It is a sight that will not soon be forgotten.


When the O.J. Simpson trial finally came to an end, you can bet the family of Jack Ford did a lot of celebrating.
Ford spent the last nine months covering the trial in Los Angeles for NBC and was there when the verdict of not guilty was announced. And if that hadn't been time-consuming enough, Ford continued to co-host with Giselle Fernandez the Saturday and Sunday editions of the "Today" show during the run of the trial.
"It's been a real rocky ride," Ford said during a recent telephone conversation. "It got hectic to get up at 3 a.m. in L.A., do a report for the (weekday) `Today' show, then try to grab a few hours' sleep, and then go over to the trial."
A graduate of Yale and and the Fordham University School of Law, Ford was a practicing lawyer for 18 years.
He became one of the best-known trial lawyers in his home state of New Jersey. Perhaps his most famous case was the successful defense of New Jersey's first death penalty case. In 1983, New York's WCBS-TV hired him to moonlight as its legal commentator.
His relaxed on-air manner and ability to explain court cases in layman's terms earned him more and more airtime. NBC named Ford its chief legal correspondent in September 1994, and this past May he also added the "Today" job to his duties.
Ford decided to give up law practice a couple of years ago to devote more time to his budding television career.
"The funny thing is, one of the reasons I left law was so I could have a more normal existence," Ford said with a laugh. "Then the O.J. thing came along. As I'm running out the door at 3 in the morning, my wife says to me, `Normal existence, huh?' "
Ford admits that because of his legal background he often found himself second-guessing those involved in the Simpson case.
"I'd be saying to myself, `Why did you do that?' And sometimes I think about how I would have done it differently."
Despite his busy schedule, Ford goes out of the way to set aside time for his family, which consists of wife Dorothy and their two children, Ashley, 13, and Colin, 9.
"During the football season, the little guy and I will go to several college games," Ford said. "We'll fly to Michigan one week and maybe Chapel Hill the next."
If there is something he seems to enjoy as much as football, it's his current weekend stint on "Today." He and Fernandez have quickly become an enjoyable team to watch.
The weekend edition of "Today" comes off as a bit more laid-back than the weekday show. And Ford likes it that way.
"I suppose it's a little like that because it is the weekend," Ford said.
"I sometimes can't believe I get paid for doing it. You know, I'll be interviewing some world figure, then talking with some famous musician and then sampling all those good things to eat during our food segment.
"I think it has worked out pretty well."


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Photos: Circus Arts at the Friday Night Market
Posted By Jared Wickerham on Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 5:30 PM
CP Photo: Jared Wickerham
Members of Iron City Circus Arts and Pittsburgh Circus Arts Collaborative performed in Market Square on Fri., July 12.
Our friends at Iron City Circus Arts and the Pittsburgh Circus Arts Collaborative, who will be performing at Pittsburgh City Paper's Best of Pittsburgh party on Thu., Aug. 8 at Nova Place, gave us a little taste of their talents during the Friday Night Market in Downtown's Market Square. Aerialists, jugglers, stilt-walkers, and fire-breathers showed off for a great crowd.
It's impossible to make a bad photo of these performers, but here's my visual interpretation of the evening.
Tags: Iron City Circus, Pittsburgh Circus Arts Collective, Market Square, Friday Night Market, Image
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How much do you know about the Fourth of July?
Posted By Hannah Lynn on Wed, Jul 3, 2019 at 6:20 PM
How well do you know your facts about the Fourth of July? Maybe not as well as you think! Take this quiz to find the incorrect fact in each question.
Tags: fourth of july, 4th of july, quiz, Image
Meet Rhythm, the 25-year-old furry from Carnegie
Posted By Lisa Cunningham on Wed, Jul 3, 2019 at 12:39 PM
This week's cover model: Rhythm the Mouse
We decided to combine one of the city's most anticipated events with some of the best summer treats in town and invite a local furry to pose as our cover model in honor of Anthrocon, the annual furry convention coming to town this week.
April, a 25-year-old from Carnegie, answered our call to bravely pose in her yellow mouse fursuit while holding an ice cream cone outside Klavon's Ice Cream Parlor in the Strip District during a hot June weekend.
Tell me about your fursona.
Rhythm is a happy, yellow mouse who loves to groove! I usually carry around a speaker in my backpack and play electronic dance music, and I love to dance while wearing her! I designed Rhythm to reflect myself — someone who's small, bubbly, and loves music as much as I do.
What's your favorite part about the convention?
Shopping! There's a large room called the "Dealer's Room" and "Artist Alley," where artists and vendors sell artwork, plushies, T-shirts, fursuit accessories, and more. It's always a blast to walk around and buy cool stuff.
Who made your fursuit?
My mom and I made most of my fursuit. The foam skeleton of my fursuit head (called a foam base) was made by Splinter Fox Productions and my mom and I finished the rest. We finished the head, and we made the tail, body, and handpaws. My feet were made by Lemonbrat.
How long have you been a furry?
I've been a furry for six years. I discovered furries through a friend when I was in college. I thought furries were a little unusual at first, but my friend told me to come down to Anthrocon and give it a chance, so I did, and I loved it! I love the artwork and costume creation so much. Plus, I've met so many awesome people through this community through the years, and I've made lifelong friends.
Do you dress up year-round or just during Anthrocon?
Year-round! We have a lot of local Pittsburgh furry events where we all get together and hang out. Some of us dress up in fursuits and some [don't]. Sometimes I'll wear my fursuit, but most of the time I'll just go as a person and hang out with my friends. We have a monthly meetup at the Mount Lebanon AMF bowling alley where we sometimes have more than 30 fursuiters and more than 100 people! We also have a not-as-well-known, local furry convention called WPAFW (Western PA Furry Weekend) in autumn where we'll all get together in North Park, with an attendance of more than 300 people. It's awesome to be a furry in Pittsburgh!
What do you wish more people in Pittsburgh knew about furries?
Furries are just people who love art, cartoons, movies, games, costumes, and having fun!
What's your favorite flavor of ice cream?
Cookies and cream! Or if it's available, Cinnamon Bun. Yum!
Photos: People's Pride Parade
Posted By Jared Wickerham on Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 5:25 PM
Mayor Bill Peduto walks with the People's Pride march.
Pittsburgh City Paper staff photographer Jared Wickerham documented the People's Pride parade as they marched from Freedom Corner in Uptown all the way to Allegheny Commons Park in the North Side in unity with all LGBTQ+ groups.
Tags: People's Pride, Pride Week, Pittsburgh, Ciora Thomas, Jared Wickerham, Iron City Circus, Bill Peduto, Sara Innamorato, Summer Lee, Carmel Ricketts, Jaboukie Young-White, Comedy Central, The Daily Show, parade, Image
Photos: Pittsburgh Pride Equality March
CP Photo: Jared Murphy
The 2019 Pittsburgh Pride Equality March takes place in downtown.
Pittsburgh City Paper photo intern Jared Murphy took to the streets to photograph the 2019 Pittsburgh Pride Equality March that made its way through Downtown Pittsburgh on Sun., June 9.
Tags: Jared Murphy, 2019 Pittsburgh Pride Equality March, downtown, pride, parade, Image
Pittsburgh City Paper wins three honors at 2019 Golden Quill awards, including best-in-show for photography
Posted By Lisa Cunningham on Thu, May 30, 2019 at 8:09 PM
CP photo: Lisa Cunningham
Pittsburgh City Paper 2019 Golden Quill award winners Tereneh Idia and Jared Wickerham
Last July, Jared Wickerham approached our editorial team with the idea of photographing the Pittsburgh Pirates with a Polaroid camera soon after he was hired as Pittsburgh City Paper's full-time staff photographer. It turned out to be an award-winning idea.
On Wed., May 29, he was awarded with two Golden Quill awards from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania for his work: one for Craft Achievement – Photo Essay and the best-in-show Ed Romano Memorial Award: Photography, selected from all of this year's winners in photography categories.
A seasoned local sports photographer, Wickerham wanted a new way to capture the baseball games so many others have documented over the years. Every Sunday home game, the Pirates wore retro uniforms like the team wore in the 1970s. Wickerham decided to join them in that theme, armed with a vintage Polaroid SX-70 Model 1.
The players themselves were as excited to see the images as the rest of us. "Starling Marte, a guy who has undoubtedly been photographed a million times by hundreds of photographers, wanted to make sure he could get a copy of the Polaroid," wrote Wickerham in his intro to his essay.
You can see his award-winning photo essay here: Sunday Afternoons at PNC Park.
Another big winner from the evening was City Paper contributing writer Tereneh Idia, who took home the award for Excellence in Written Journalism, Daily – Columns/Blogs for her important columns on topics like race and adversity. Idia recently reached her first anniversary as the writer of City Paper's weekly Voices column, crediting popular Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman as the one for first encouraging her to start a column.
Read one of Idia's columns that helped earn her the award here: Who Gets to Be the (S)hero?
This was the first year that City Paper competed in the daily category against larger publications like Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. In previous years, CP competed in the non-daily category but was bumped up for producing original content at least five days a week.
City Paper also had three Golden Quill finalists:
• News writer Ryan Deto in Excellence in Written Journalism, Daily – Business/Technology/Consumer for his story: Is the Pittsburgh Airport Building up a Flight Bubble?
• Music writer Jordan Snowden in Excellence in Written Journalism, Daily – Arts/Entertainment for her story: What Was It About Mac Miller That Connected With Pittsburghers?
• And, contributing writer Jessie Sage in Excellence in Written Journalism, Daily – Columns/Blogs for her column: Peepshow, a sex and social-justice column
For a full list of the winners and nominees, visit westernpapressclub.org.
Meet the staff: Senior writer Amanda Waltz gets spooky (and sexy) on Ghoul on Ghoul podcast
Posted By Lisa Cunningham on Tue, May 7, 2019 at 11:53 AM
Several months after Amanda Waltz came on board as our senior A&E writer at Pittsburgh City Paper, and just a few days after I was named editor, she came to my desk and confided a secret, whispering the words Generation X bosses overseeing millennial staffs are most fearful of: "I have a podcast."
I soon realized why she hadn't confessed this to our former male editor. It wasn't just any podcast, she explained. It was about ghosts ... and sex. Ghoul on Ghoul, which Amanda records each week with her co-host, Sarah, promotes itself as "a supernatural sex-positive horror comedy podcast featuring first-person encounters with the paranormal."
It wasn't totally a shock. While Amanda is talented at writing both heavily reported news stories or diving head first into a multifaceted art review, she's also become known as the office deviate — the kind of person who will say anything on her mind without thinking twice. I mean that quite affectionately. She's refreshingly honest and also unashamed to have serious conversations about her sexuality. In the realms that an office environment allows, of course, though I'll admit that an alt-weekly newsroom is probably much more lax than others.
My first response when she told me about her podcast was to beg her to let me promote it. We've been aiming to increase diversity at the paper over the past year, introducing sex and social justice columnist Jessie Sage to our pages, and including even more feminist and social justice causes in our news coverage. Showing our readers that our senior writer also is a sex-positive horror junky is good press! But while she's talked openly about it in the office since, Amanda asked me to keep it a secret to the public, wanting to keep her personal life separate from her professional life.
But months later, after immersing herself more and more in the local arts and nightlife scenes as a reporter, she realized it was getting harder not to mention it when asked, so I now officially have permission to out her as a Ghoul.
The podcast itself is more charming than shocking. Yes, it's NSFW unless you're wearing headphones — or working at an alt-weekly, and the women swear. A lot. A fucking lot. But listening to the podcast is largely like eavesdropping on a conversation between two girlfriends sharing a large bottle of wine.
They laugh frequently at themselves and each other, share secrets about their own sex lives, and both have a tendency to break into voices and impressions, from Björk to Bon Jovi. Basically, they're not afraid to sound like giant dorks.
Each podcast is nearly an hour, and guests keep the show interesting. They've had on everyone from CP's own Jessie Sage to Tobin Seastedt of Crickets to Betsy, who brought on mealworms and grasshoppers for the hosts to eat on air before talking about all-natural lube. If transitioning from discussing the crunch of a bug leg in a cookie to an admission that it's harder to get wet as you age sounds weird, just trust me. They make it work.
Ghoul on Ghoul also specializes in ghost stories and local horror folklore; serial killers and cults; true crime and hauntings. And sometimes, it combines both. There's at least one episode where the women discuss sex with ghosts, and on the episode with Sage, they discuss ovipositors, a sex toy that allows women to deposit an egg inside their vaginas so they can experience the joy of giving birth to an alien.
Tonight, Amanda and Sarah celebrate their first anniversary with the Rate / Review / Subscribe / Imbide: A PGH Podcast Party at Spirit in Lawrenceville. The night includes DJ MB from the In Bed by Ten dance party and tarot readings. In addition to Ghoul on Ghoul, the pair have also invited other local podcasts to join the fun. Guests are encouraged to subscribe to any of the podcasts — Give Me Murder or Give Me Death, Neon Brainiacs, THRIFTY Podcast, Start The Beats w/SIKES, and Werewolf Ambulance — for a chance to win prizes.
The event is free and starts at 7 p.m., with the live show recording starting at 9 p.m.
Pittsburgh City Podcast, April 17: Life as a student journalist
Posted By CP Staff on Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 6:13 PM
City Paper's Janine Faust, Ryan Deto, and Alex Gordon
In this episode of Pittsburgh City Podcast, we're discussing the daily life of a student journalist. CP managing editor/podcast host Alex Gordon and CP staff writer Ryan Deto are joined by news intern Janine Faust, who, this fall, will take over the Pitt News as editor in chief. We're also joined by students/future journalists from Mount Pleasant High School.
The Pittsburgh City Podcast is brought to you by Pittsburgh City Paper and the Point Park University Center for Media Innovation.
Meet this week's Pittsburgh City Paper cover artist: Ellissa Nicholle Schatz
Posted By Abbie Adams on Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 1:06 PM
Ellissa Nicholle Schatz
This week's colorful hand-lettered Marijuana Issue cover was created by Pittsburgh artist Ellissa Nicholle Schatz. Pittsburgh City Paper asked her a few questions over email about her artwork after completing the cover illustration.
How did you get into illustrating?
I went to SCAD [The Savannah College of Art and Design] for illustration and printmaking, and now am working to amp up my freelance career alongside my graphic design 9-to-5. I'm just having fun and figuring out what/how I like to draw.
What is your dream job? Dream client?
I'd love to be doing creative direction for an art and fashion publication, something where I could have my eyes and hands in a lot of different projects.
Freelance-wise, I've been dying to work with Bitch Magazine since I first found out about them. Doing a mural is also on my list of goals for the next couple years.
Ellissa Schatz's CP cover illustration
Your cover illustration this week includes a lovely moody person, scrolling hand lettering, lots of plants, and an interpretive and vibrant use of color — all of which are seen throughout your larger body of work. Where do you gather inspiration from?
Honestly, Instagram, like everyone else, mostly. I love big Versace-ish fashion prints and bright colors that maybe don't go together and girls that have inches-long bejeweled acrylics. Also other illustrators like Laura Callaghan and Caleb Boyles (I went to school with him and you should really check him out … he's so good).
You work in a lot of different mediums including silkscreen, digital illustration, works on paper, animation, and zines. Do you have a favorite? Do you go to a particular medium for creating different subject matter, mood, or message?
When I feel like I haven't made something in awhile, or having a day where I can't draw, I like to paint or silkscreen (both using very low-tech setups on top of my drafting table). Making something that is probably going to be kind of messy by nature makes me loosen up a lot and gets me in the mood to have more ideas for projects way more organically than staring at an empty Photoshop document would.
Digital is cool for most client work just because you can change things so fast and colors can be so fun to play with, but there also is a pressure to make things extra perfect because you have the ability to do so. I think painting and screen printing are more of an experimental personal project way of working for me, and then drawing and animating in Photoshop is more "professional" I guess. I'd loooooovvveeee to start doing more animations for work just to get better at it.
Do you have any big or exciting projects coming up?
I'll be in a show with a bunch of other artists in the fall, so I'm starting to work on paintings for that. That's going to be super fun. And then I'm also in the works for something with a really cool publication later on in the spring. For more on that you'll have to check my Instagram because it's not entirely ironed out yet.
Where can people buy and see more of your artwork?
I'll have some work for sale in Small Mall this summer! I'm thrilled about that. And then you can check out my Instagram, I sell prints on there sometimes. Or my website. I also have a Redbubble and Society6 that are up to date (for now) if you want different sizes!
Pittsburgh City Podcast, April 10: The many roads that lead to a job in journalism
Posted By CP Staff on Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 8:09 AM
This week on the Pittsburgh City Podcast, we're joined by students from Urban Pathways. The topic today is the many roads that lead people into careers in journalism (hint: it's not necessarily getting a degree). Host Alex Gordon talks with Pittsburgh City Paper digital media manager Josh Oswald (who now has a column at CP), and office coordinator Maggie Weaver (who is now a staff writer and food critic).
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Q: Two ways of assigning a button's onclick method I'm watching/reading some tutorials these days about Android app development. And I've learnt two different ways of assigning a button's onclick method. One is to declare it in XML:
<Button
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:text="@string/button_send"
android:onClick="sendMessage" />

The other is by finding the id the button:
Button myBtn = (Button) findViewById(R.id.button1);
myBtn.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {

    @Override
    public void onClick(View v) {
        //do something...
    }
});

My question is: what's the difference (advantage and disadvantage) of each method, and if the efficiency is different, one is faster than other so it's usually preferred?

A: The efficiency difference is not going to matter because it would be so small, but my guess is that the XML method is slightly faster since it avoids object creation.
However, this assumes the overhead from whatever linking is done through the XML is smaller than the object creation overhead.
My advice: don't worry about small efficiency advantages in cases where something is executed very few times.

A: Usually it's easier to just put the button in the layout and then code the method in the activity class. You can also use  button.setOnTouchListener and detect if the button has been pressed down or unpressed (to implement sounds change the buttons background when it is pressed).
As for the 1st method you described, I only used it when I had a listview and each item in the list was made up of a textview and a button. So I needed each of those many buttons to call a single method.
 I hope that answers your question.