Dell launched revamped 2011 versions of their XPS laptops in India. As you all might know, Dell XPS series includes high-end laptops with latest processors and technologies. The new XPS range has a refreshing look and the best hardware available in the market. Most of the Studio XPS models were pulled out from Dell online store, and they will be replaced with XPS 15, XPS 14 and XPS 17 laptops. Like in the Dell R series, each XPS model got its name from the screen size.
All the machines support DDR3 memory up-to 8GB and latest NVIDIA graphics card with up-to 2GB video memory. They can be customized with Core i3, Core i5 or core i7 processors with a maximum clock speed of 3.2 GHz, and 3MB-8MB cache options. The 2011 Dell XPS range comes with Silver Anodized Aluminum back cover and that is extended towards sides and under the keyboard. Its gives a solid matte finish to the machine and protection against fingerprints and dirt. Dell XPS 15, 14 and 17 inch models have JBL speakers on two sides of the keyboard which along with MaxxAudio 3 sound processing technology – and it gives out crystal clear sound. There is also a 12W JBL sub woofer for better bass reproduction. The display and video rendering is another plus point of the new XPS 2011 series. There is an option to choose from 14, 15 or 17 inch high clarity HD WLED monitors. Dell XPS 14, XPS 14 and X17 uses the latest NVIDIA GT mobile graphics chips with NVIDIA performance graphics and NVIDIA Optimus technology. The NVIDIA 3D play software included in the package lets you play 3D games, watch 3D Blue-ray movies when used with an external HD hardware. Dell XPS 14, 15 and 17 models include an HD cam that supports 720p video calls through Skype, Yahoo and other software.
These are the prices in India for the base model, and it may change further based on configuration chosen at the Dell store.


text:
Making Concessions
A Tale of Capitalism, Control, and Snacks
Movie theaters have asked us to submit to search on entry or spend exorbitant amounts of money on popcorn — or to become food smugglers — to see The Fast and the Furious on a big screen. And we do! What does it mean to tie film to food? What would we gain if that changed — and what would we lose?
words by Marsha Gordon | art by An Chen | 6,359 words (a 26-minute read) | Winter 2022
It's any given weekend in the early 80s, and my mother is prepping. She pulls the air popper out of the woodgrain kitchen cabinets, puts it on the white tile counter, and measures out a quarter-cup of kernels. The machine whirs and popcorn jitters down the chute into a stainless-steel bowl, some spilling onto the counters and floor. She portions the popped corn into three standard-issue brown paper lunch bags — one for her, one for me, one for my younger sister — neatly folds their tops, and secures each one with a single central staple.
She loads a canvas tote bag with three cans of juice, bendy straws wrapped in flimsy white paper napkins, and the bagged popcorn before announcing that it's time to go. She doesn't bother to conceal the tote's contents; should anyone ask to look inside, the cat — and the popcorn — will already be out of the bag.
We pile into the car to commit our first petty crime of the day. We're going to the movies.
My mother refused to participate in what seemed like a trap: you pay to enter a space for one experience (a movie) and are encouraged, perhaps even compelled, to incur an even greater cost for another (eating and drinking). Buying concessions — or sneaking them in — is now fully wedded to the act of moviegoing. It's a presumed part of the experience despite the fact that it's a distraction from the reason we're in a theater in the first place. We fully associate the sensory experiences of smell and taste with the sights and sounds of watching movies, even though we sacrifice a degree of appreciation for each activity for the sake of the combined pleasure.
"I don't want to prop up my laptop on the
end table and open Netflix, not even with
a bowl of homemade popcorn by my side — I
want to go to the movies, any movie, an art
house movie or a superhero movie or a spy
thriller, something that would root me in
a slightly staticky seat for two hours, in
a room of people sharing the same experience,
all glaring at the person crunching during
the quiet scenes and gasping at the
same moments."
s.e. smith can't wait to go back.
Read their full essay.
This was not inevitable. Buying a movie ticket wasn't always an upsell opportunity, a chance to exploit decadent impulses in the permissive darkness of the theater. You might say that the movie industry, over the course of almost a century, exerted its influence over our minds, bodies, and pocketbooks to convince us that watching and eating were twinned activities. You might also say that we, the watchers and eaters, were complicit in our gradual descent into the snack bar rabbit hole.
The push-pull between making moviegoing about seeing movies — projected on a big screen, in a comfortable or even luxurious setting, in the midst of others with whom we laugh, scream, and cry — and making moviegoing about nachos and super-sized sodas may have reached its breaking point. As streaming services keep more people at home than ever before and when going to the movies remains tinged with the risk of contagion (and seems likely to be for the foreseeable future), what will happen to the seemingly indestructible marriage of movies and snacks consumed by groups of people in a public space? Will movie theaters survive, with or without concessions? And if we lose the ritual of moviegoing, what else will we lose?
Movies have always promised to transport us to other universes. Going to see a movie is a break from daily life without the effort, time, and expense of travel— a vacation in a seat, usually within minutes of where we live or work. It's an unusual combination: a transportive, emotionally immersive activity achieved with little effort and at minimal cost. The temporary break from reality feels even more like an occasion when accompanied by food we don't normally eat, in excess of amounts we usually consume.
"Every day, I heard my mother and her
friends talk about another young woman
who had been dragged into a van by the
morality police, beaten, her head shaved.
And every day, another boy came home from
war and sat at whatever gathering we were
at, staring blankly into space. Or didn't
come home at all. And so I prayed at the
altar of films."
From Naz Riahi's ode to the transformative
power of film. Read more.
Before the lobby concession stand became an architectural component of every movie theater in America, going to the movies involved food and beverages purchased outside of the theater, or — are you sitting down? — did not involve food at all. In the nineteen-teens and twenties, ticket buyers might have stopped by a local confectionary, drug store, or street vendor to buy snacks that they would, usually without subterfuge, bring into the theater. As increasingly luxurious theaters tried to class up moviegoing over the course of the 1920s, especially in cities, popcorn, peanuts, and hot dogs were barred. These snacks were associated with "low-class" amusements like fairs, burlesque shows, and circuses, and they made a mess. Who wants to pick chewing gum and peanut shells out of their velvet seats?
The increasingly sophisticated experience big-city theaters were cultivating didn't jive with the habits of many moviegoers. In early 1932, a Mr. J.E. Harris wrote a chiding letter to the editor of the New York Times in which he schooled the newspaper's citified readers that at movie theaters in the "Middle West," from whence the writer originally came, people regularly brought in bags of popped corn bought for a nickel from street carts or drug stores. Harris mocked New Yorkers for not having "the wit" to sell popped corn for this purpose, if not for their own enjoyment then for the sake of the many "Middle Westerners there hungry for the homey smell." New York City was, for once, behind the curve. But movie theater operators there and everywhere soon joined in the concessions act; popcorn, as Mr. Harris predicted, became the star of the show. As theaters sought to make money during the sustained financial hardship of the Great Depression, all but a few holdouts began selling inexpensive food for profit, starting a slow but decisive transformation of the movie theater from a place in which to watch a movie into a business that is as much about selling food and beverage as it is about anything else.
Many movie theaters began their concessions game modestly with a lobby candy stand or vending machine selling sweets to customers on their way in, or by contracting with popcorn vendors who set up shop just outside. Eventually, candy "jobbers" or "butchers" started paying theaters for access to their customers and strolled the aisles hawking treats during the show. It didn't take theaters long to realize that there was more money to be earned by making and selling concessions themselves — a small tradeoff for the inconveniences of machine maintenance and additional staff. Movie theaters embraced the cheap-to-produce, lucrative universe of popped corn, along with soda, chewing gum, cigarettes, hot dogs, and eventually much more. In 1932, the industry magazine Variety reported that in Birmingham, Alabama, a dime bought a ticket, a "handful of popcorn […], a cup of coffee and a ham sandwich" — dinner and a movie. Five years later, the magazine announced that food and drink sales had "grown to be an important and widespread adjunct of theater operation" despite the fact that local merchants, whose businesses relied on selling these items to moviegoers, were crying foul. The ecosystem that had developed between movie theaters and outside food sellers broke down as theater operators awoke to the dazzling profits of the concession stand; nearby retailers were left out in the cold.
Some fought back. In the late 1930s, a coalition of Austin, Texas, businesses claimed that movie theaters had illegally exceeded their operations licenses by selling candy, popcorn, peanuts, ice cream sandwiches, and soft drinks plus a litany of other things even less related to watching a movie: ashtrays, canes, umbrellas, clocks, dolls, aspirin, perfume, razor blades, records. Lobbies were starting to look like drug stores, although the theaters weren't paying chain store or vending machine taxes. Theaters even found revenue streams in the restroom, installing penny machines for paper towels, electric hand-drying, perfume, and sanitary napkins. If they could sell it, they did. Theater proprietors had, in other words, gotten hep to the fact that they had a captive audience. During the darkest Depression years, savvy theaters dramatically dropped admissions prices "just to get more people in to buy popcorn," as one manager recalled. Thirty years into the history of showing movies to audiences, the prioritization of the sale of something other than film was complete.
"Maybe he knew what he was talking about.
Or maybe I would have died from scratching
myself to death as a teenager. Maybe we'll
never know. But I'll still take a handful
of movie popcorn where I can get one."
For some people, movie popcorn is dangerous —
like Arikia Millikan, who's allergic to corn.
Today, there is no food more associated with an activity and place than popcorn is with movie theaters. When we see a lighthearted movie and want people to know that we know it was for pure entertainment, we need only say that we took in a "popcorn movie." Popcorn, the flagship profit item for movie theaters, is staged to assail our senses. Popping always takes place just before and between showings to maximize the tantalizing aroma greeting patrons as they walk in the door. The staccato pitter-patter of pops and the sight of those aquarium-style machines conspire to trigger a dopamine response that urges us to get in line as we imagine the pleasurable crunch and Flavacol™-enhanced taste, butterier and better than butter itself.
My mother's modus operandi was to conceal our healthy, unbuttered, low-cost movie snacks in her maxed-out tote bag, held close to her body, and walk confidently into the movie theater with her two smiling but slightly anxious kids in tow. The tote always contained that air-popped-just-before-departure popcorn and cans of unsweetened juice to wash it down. On special occasions — a home run in the softball game, a new merit badge on the Brownie sash, a report card littered with A+s — a homemade carob chip oatmeal cookie or health-food store fruit roll-up requiring beef-jerky-level gnawing made it into the mix.
"We come to AMC Theaters to laugh, to cry,
to care, to cough loudly during the quiet-
est part of a film, to crane our necks up
to look at the screen because we got there
late and the only open seats were in the
front row, to smuggle loose M&Ms in our
pants pockets and two cans of Coke Zero
in the big winter coats we're wearing even
though it's July."
Mia Mercado writes the ad script the
public was never meant to see.
My budget- and health-conscious mother would scoff at the suckers waiting in the long popcorn line as we sashayed past. She tried to convince my sister and I to pity the patrons who had grossly overspent their hard-earned money on toxic garbage. But for us kids, moral superiority and economizing were a poor match for envy. I wonder how much time we spent thinking about what the kids around us got to eat — was that rustle behind me a bag of M&Ms or a box of Whoppers? — instead of watching what was happening on the big screen forty feet away.
Unlike everyone else, we had to wait for the theater to be dark, trailers in progress and sufficiently noisy, before unrolling our bags crinkle by crinkle as ushers strolled the aisles, alert for smugglers. We held our snacks low in our laps, never sure that we'd escape detection. Our modestly portioned brown bags contained cold, dry comfort that we ate while marinating covetously in the theater's butter-flavor haze.
Although theater operators initially had concerns about selling food and beverages, it was often customers who complained. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, patrons protested in 1940 "that the atmosphere of the [motion picture] houses was contaminated by the odor of popping corn and melting butter, the aroma of varied spilled drinks, the smelly crunch of peanut shells and a haze of drifting cigarette smoke." Later in the decade, a group of Oregon state senators tried to legislate concessions out of movie theaters by introducing an anti-noise bill proposing a whopping thirty days in jail or $100 fine for owners who allowed eating in their theaters, ejection without refund for snacking offenders, and refunds of triple the admission price for annoyed patrons — all in an effort to stem the tide of distraction caused by "popcorn and peanut munchers." The bill was killed in committee, but the point was made: eating was at cross purposes with the reason people went to the theater in the first place.
But by this point, concessions were most theaters' revenue driver. Not only did movie theaters not collectively decide to limit food consumption, they did everything they could to amplify it no matter the impact on the viewing experience. The successful 1940 run of Gone With the Wind was partly to credit (or blame) for the mainstreaming of intermissions. Necessary because of the movie's almost four-hour runtime, it became a great way to sell a second round of snacks. Intermissions were so successful at driving patrons to the snack bar that theaters started adding them regardless of a film's length, chopping up films never intended to have a pause. One Milwaukee theater got so greedy that they added a second intermission during regular features, driving patrons to demand a stop to all intermissions. But intermissions, along with substantial breaks between double features, were too lucrative to give up and so became part of the experience — eating changed the way people experienced movies. As one theater owner told Saturday Evening Post readers in 1949, "we allow plenty of time in the break between shows for people to come out and get their second boxes" of popcorn. On-screen ads and animated shorts encouraged people to open their wallets and fill their bellies. Drive-in patrons weren't exempt either — their customers spent even more money on concessions than regular theater patrons, liberated by the ability to indulge with abandon in the comfort and relative seclusion of their own cars.
"I remember my best friend carrying those
Diet Coke bottles around school, but that
wasn't the reason we drank so much pop.
It wasn't the reason we consumed so much
junk food in general. That was because
of the movies."
Soraya Roberts grew up in Calgary but didn't
ski or skate — she went to the cinema.
In the 50s and 60s, as post-war, middle-class white families beat a retreat to suburban living rooms and televisions — complete with stove-popped popcorn and TV dinners — movie theaters got more aggressive about driving up snack sales for those who were still coming in the doors. Two United Artists theaters in Los Angeles experimented with inserting the words "Buy Popcorn" in their features to test the efficacy of subliminal messaging. Others installed candy vending machines or stands in the back of the auditorium to facilitate spontaneous purchases. If machines were lit with the recent innovation of fluorescent lights, they would not "detract from the illumination of the screen" or "distract persons actually seated and watching the screen," theater owners were advised, an admirable if delusional goal.
Concessions eventually became so successfully linked with moviegoing that most people accepted that there was no alternative — you ate when you went to the movies and unless, like our family, you were willing to risk possible humiliation or ejection by bringing it in yourself, you purchased whatever was on offer.
My mother came by her D.I.Y. concessions praxis honestly: popcorn smuggling ran in my family. She'd been raised to live a life of careful thrift by parents who came of age during the Depression and believed that food was never to be wasted. Fish heads from my grandfather's catch on Lake Erie fertilized the vegetable garden, apples were eaten down to seeds and stem. My grandparents used mayonnaise for as long as a decade after its expiration date without worry (theirs, not mine) or adverse consequences.
When I was a graduate student at the University of Maryland in the mid-90s, I took a road trip to Ohio to visit my grandparents, during which I ate some of that vintage mayo on a Waldorf salad before going to see Mission Impossible with my grandfather. As we headed out the door, I was mortified to see him carrying a very large plastic bag of bright yellow store-bought popcorn, no doubt purchased on clearance based on a calculus of how many years of movies it would last. By very large, let me be clear: we're talking three feet high by one foot wide. My mother's brown paper bags seemed restrained, even respectable, by comparison.
My grandfather was unabashed. I can picture him — his close-shorn silver hair and goatee; thick-lensed, unfashionable, brown plastic glasses over steely grey-blue eyes; guayabera shirt with white ribbed tank top and institutional black shoes, one an inch taller than the other because of a horse-riding accident in his teens — casually walking up to the ticket window. He placed the popcorn silo on the ground to buy our tickets, then picked it up to waltz past the teenage ticket-taker and into the theater with his flagrant policy violation.
Nobody said a word.
In an effort to staunch the losses incurred at the hands of smugglers like us, patrons were routinely subject to bag searches in the 1970s and 1980s. This invasion of privacy was the non-monetary price ticket buyers had to pay for the experience of seeing a movie in public. In our present age of terrorist threats and mass shootings, we are routinely compelled to open our bags, go through body scanners, or undergo physical inspection to gain access to spaces and experiences, ostensibly for our safety. But we've been primed to accept this by movie theaters hoping to disincentivize people from opting out of the concession stand.
"People would go for the carpets, which they
often did not have at home. Cinemas were some-
where to be warm, and to have fun collectively.
When women were not welcome in pubs — in the UK,
it was legal to refuse to serve women in pubs
until 1982 — cinemas were also spaces where
people of all genders could mix and sit in
the dark together, perhaps touch, perhaps
share food or a kiss."
When the cinema is more than a cinema:
read more from Rebecca May Johnson.
Rules about what can or cannot be done in commercial spaces have long coexisted with theater-goer subterfuge. In late-1930s Los Angeles, the City Council was in the midst of a heated debate about the fate of the all night "flop" movie theaters lining Main Street. After a long day wandering the city, homeless men (mostly) and women could pay a nickel for a ticket that granted them a seat to sleep in, with movies running like an externalized dream (or nightmare) all night long and an usher selling ice cream sandwiches and popcorn for an additional five cents. Dinner, movies, and a place to sleep, all for a dime. When the City Council threatened to shut down the theaters to break up the concentration of "bums" and "indigents," profit-minded theater operators argued that the 5,000 people who paid their nickel to get off the streets every night had nowhere else to go. Plus, they maintained, going to the movies wasn't against the law, even if people weren't actually watching them.
"Maturity and understanding do not emerge
from legislation or policed language, but
from community, and conversation over Spades,
Dominoes, fried fish and hot sauce, or a
Netflix standup special and a bag of
microwave popcorn."
Read Breai Mason-Campbell on comedy,
community, and resistance.
Movie theaters — like malls, public libraries, parks, and subways — provide a place for people to pass the time with relative safety. Dino Everett, the Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archivist at the University of Southern California, was raised in the 1970s by a single mother who worked all day on weekends. She'd drop him and his sister off at the Bedford Mall in Goffstown, New Hampshire, with $5 that had to last the entire day. $3 went for movie tickets, and the remaining $2 for a box of popcorn and "the worst tasting soda you ever imagined."
Dino and his sister bounced between the theater's two screens watching and re-watching films until they "couldn't stand it anymore," and then cruised the mall until pickup time. Like the 1930s Angelenos who took refuge in movie theaters, Dino and his family relied on the theater as a safe haven, utilizing it in unintended ways. Theaters were always meant to be commercial but totally accessible to the public, notwithstanding exclusionary, discriminatory policies at various points in history. They are love nests and homeless shelters and babysitters and more.
"As an adult, I usually keep almonds with me,
plus peppermint essential oil and a few Advil.
But as a kid, I didn't know what was going on
or how to deal with it. And you could get kicked
out of our small, sticky-floored theater if you
got caught bringing food in. The concession
stand was my drug store."
Sara Benincasa fought movie motion sickness
with snacks. Read her worst-to-best snack ranking.
Such uses have little or nothing to do with appreciating the movies on offer and don't contribute much to theaters' profitability, so it's not surprising that there were occasional examples made of rule-breakers. In November 1981, one Colorado couple's "cost saving move to smuggle their own popcorn into a movie theater cost them $103" — in bail money. Protesting the "high cost and general low quality" of theater popcorn, the couple "were repeatedly warned that a house rule prohibited anything but concession stand popcorn inside." When they refused to give up their home-popped corn, four policemen arrived and arrested one of them for disturbing the peace. Both were charged. After a four-day trial, they were found innocent.
Some theater chains, like Carmike, were firm about their no outside food and drink policy, though they urged employees to be diplomatic when dealing with customers, with no desire for the spectacle of police officers descending on patrons. Others tolerated outside food in their lobbies, as General Cinema explained to employees in a training video, produced around the time of the Colorado couple's arrest:
John Munson, who ran the Rialto theater in Raleigh, North Carolina, a single screen that dates to the 1940s, cut his teeth in the 70s and 80s at a chain theater with a "very strict, zero tolerance policies on outside food." When he managed the Rialto in 1990, Munson's policy was that "if you were discreet and did not abuse my indifference, you generally got a pass." Some patrons were pretty brazen, though, bringing in whole pizzas, foot long subs, or full pasta-and-salad combos, none of which could be concealed under clothing or in a handbag. Signposted warnings about "No Outside Food and Drink" and "Bags Subject to Search" were an adequate deterrent for most people. When confronted with accusations about the perceived anti-family unfairness of these policies or the high price of concessions, theaters have long maintained that they need every nickel to stay afloat. Plus, their rules and costs are no different than that of sports stadiums, concert venues, or theme parks, so why pick on them?
But in addition to theaters being quasi-public spaces, movies themselves are a kind of community property. "Did you see Star Wars last weekend?" "The Blair Witch Project was horrifying—I didn't breathe!" Or, as my grandmother put it a diary entry from 1938, went "to see Robin Hood this afternoon!! A splendid picture also in technicolor. A marvelous production!" Historically, we have shared the experience of going to the movies with friends, family, and strangers; it is part of the fabric of our memories. Characters and lines from films become part of our cultural shorthand, like society-wide inside jokes.
"At worst, I sneak stuff in — Cokes,
Reese's peanut butter cups — that I
have bought from the outside, where
prices are less inflated. But the
fact that I have to think at all
about what used to be a relatively
small unspoken pleasure feels like
a burden."
For Soraya Roberts, high concession
prices taint the cinema experience.
We pay for the privilege and the pleasure of this experience, and we used to have no other alternative than to buy a movie ticket if we wished to have the experience at all. Now, with ready access to vast quantities of streaming content at home, only a small fraction of which are actually movies (whatever that means anymore), that sense of a shared cinematic imagination — from "There's no place like home" to "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse" to "Wakanda Forever!" — has fractured and become significantly more diffuse. Should we wish the shows to go on, at least in shared public spaces, we have to consider how we contribute to the cost of making movies and of maintaining the places in which we see them. Nine dollars is a hefty sum for a bucket of popcorn, but a small price for social cohesion and a break from the isolation of our couches.
For the record: when I go to the movies, I buy drinks and popcorn. But I always — always— feel guilty about it, as if I'm squandering some essential aspect of my inheritance.
From Boxoffice magazine, 1978.
In 1949, an Indiana theater owner told Life magazine that "Poor quality popcorn hurts business more than poor quality movies." Over the arc of the past hundred years, popcorn sales have done an extraordinarily good job of cushioning the financial blows caused by mediocre movies that few people went to see and recessions during which fewer people could afford movies no matter what was playing. In April 2013, Boxoffice Pro magazine reported that Americans ate 16 billion quarts of popcorn every year ("that's 51 quarts per person") with the bulk of those kernels being consumed in movie theaters. Popcorn is the industry's bread and (fake) butter.
"The distinct odor of popcorn was so deeply
infused in the carpet-covered walls that one
might forgive patrons for skipping the con-
cession stand out of olfactory disgust alone,
if not the absurd prices."
Corey Atad remembers his days at the
multiplex: Read "The Projectionist."
In the early 2000s, movie theaters were charging nearly thirteen times the cost of materials for popcorn — corn kernels, oil, flavorings, paper containers — to offset routinely handing over anywhere from 55% to 80% of box office receipts to producers and distributors. Starting with Return of the Jedi in 1983, studios demanded ever-higher percentages of ticket sales; theaters had to raise ticket prices and make more off food and beverage sales to keep the lights on. The concession stand became the only way theaters could actually make money — no concessions success, no movie theaters. Markups on popcorn now regularly average 1,275%.
"I have been criticized and even mocked by a
few men for my movie motion sickness, but all
of these men were ultimately mediocre and a
waste of my time and energy. You know what
was never a waste? Spending half a month's
rent on movie snacks. Those overpriced boxes
of garbage are like Xanax and Dramamine, but
tastier. They smell better, too."
Can you medicate movie motion sickness with
snacks? Sara Benincasa says yes.
For those who can't pay inflated concession prices or find anything they're willing or able to eat on offer, there are two choices: abstinence or smuggling. When film studies professor Carlos Kase was in middle school, he'd get dropped off at the Shoppers World Mall in Framingham, Massachusetts. He and his friends would stop at the drug store to load up on candy and soda, stashing the goods under their jackets or in their pants before entering the mall's movie theaters. He wouldn't have known, at the time, that this was how eating at the movies began, minus the concealment. By the 1970s, this reverse shoplifting was attributed largely to cash-poor teenagers, who were blamed for the bulk of movie theater smuggling and, one suspects, received the most surveillance-level attention.
Up in New Hampshire, Everett, too, had figured out that he could go to a candy store and make $2 go farther buying licorice ropes, chocolate bars, and candy cigarettes that his sister would hide in her purse, along with collapsible Cub Scouts plastic cups for free drinks from the water fountain. I did a version of the same when I segued into my San Fernando Valley mallrat days in the mid-to-late 1980s. Despite the fact that these were the years of purse-search-on-entry, the policing did little to dissuade my friends and I from maximizing our entertainment dollars. I can only recall being caught on one occasion, my candy confiscated at the door. I imagined the ticket-takers divvying up the loot at the end of a shift the same way I'd later imagine TSA screeners enjoying their bounty of perfumes and mini-bar booze in the early post-9/11 period.
Collectively, we were the industry's worst nightmares. This was a bigger problem than bad movies — at least those still sold popcorn if the right people were in the seats. Boxoffice sounded the alarm in 1979 during a short-lived recession when only one out of every six movie patrons was buying refreshments. The magazine predicted that "unless theatre owners quickly awaken to the realities of their own totally predictable futures, their end may be at hand."
There was another doomsday scenario that Boxoffice may not have seen coming, but that also took its toll: the ever-expanding ubiquity of diet cultures and the growth of restrictive styles of eating, whether medically necessary (for example, to manage Celiac disease or high blood pressure) or by choice (Weight Watchers, Atkins, South Beach, Paleo, and other popular eating plans that cut out entire food groups, especially carbs). Diet sodas are relatively easy to throw into the concessions mix; ice milk and apples are harder to imagine.
"I was put on my first restricted-calorie
diet at age 8. Slim-fast at 10, Weight
Watchers at 12. Jenny Craig at 15. Treats
were eaten furtively, alone, and as fast
as possible to not get caught, the wrappers
hidden under the bed."
Michelle Weber meditates on the unique joy
of eating in the darkened movie theater.
When she lived in New York City in the 1990s, screenwriter Margaret Maloney was enrolled in Weight Watchers and knew there were no theater concession options low in points, the WW-calculated values of foods that adherents used to guide their eating decisions. "Eating Milk Duds would blow all your points for the day and leave you ravenous, so we'd each bring an entire bag of 94% fat-free microwave popcorn in a Ziploc bag," which cost a mere three WW points. Because she and her girlfriends were "nervous concession criminals," they'd go to one of the big multiplexes carrying extra-large purses, the popcorn stashed beneath wallets, makeup bags, and the forcefield of bulky pashminas. They also put on a performance in the lobby, talking volubly about what they planned to buy at the concession stands while their tickets were taken with the hopes of avoiding the dreaded bag search, which worked every time.
"Taking tickets, sweeping, checking theaters
for talkers and texters and outside food of
course, sweeping, tidying the washrooms,
sweeping. Did I mention the sweeping?"
Corey Atad remembers life at the multiplex
in "The Projectionist."
Most movie theater employees witnessed a shift from casual, small-item smuggling to more and different kinds of food over the course of the 1980s — candy, diet food and sodas, bags of fast food for the whole family, Tupperware containers of homemade spaghetti dinners. The resulting food waste would have mortified the picture palace operators of Hollywood's Golden Age. For theater employees, it meant no more fast sweeping up of popcorn and candy wrappers between shows. As Everett, who graduated from all-day screen jumping to managing a fourplex in Orlando, Florida, told me, "we had to attack the theater between showings with brooms, mops, and air fresheners." Theatergoers became increasingly brazen: Everett remembers a man who walked into the lobby holding a can of Vienna Sausages (an Atkins dieter, perhaps?). When the ticket taker informed him that the can could not accompany him into the theater, the man peeled open the lid and quickly placed each of the dripping little meat tubes into his mouth. He "sucked the remaining juice off his fingers and tossed the little can into the waste bin and then used those wet slimy fingers to hand the ticket to the poor teenager, who simply replied 'Theater Three on your left, sir.'"
In recent decades, movie theaters have reshaped themselves to sell more foods to more people, trying to capture the total evening's expenditure for dinner, drinks, and a movie. This move towards a combination of classed up, all-inclusive, and more costly experience started in earnest in the 1990s, when chains like General Cinema Corp. launched its Premium Cinemas concept. Its first location, in a Chicago suburb, offering luxury concessions, promising that "guests can enjoy good champagne, fine wines and gourmet food." Their Washington, D.C., Mazza Gallerie location was conceived as an "upscale, exclusive theater … a place where fashion meets the movies." Lower down the epicurean scale, Loews began offering gourmet pizza and popcorn shrimp for grown-ups and Coke-branded Beanie Baby Snax Paks for kids. Like the fast food restaurants they were emulating, movie theaters encouraged kids to beg their parents for their "free" toy.
The upscaling of menus came with a significant increase in expense for the consumer, wresting the moviegoing experience farther away from the realm of low cost, family friendly entertainment. Maybe this was always in the cards; Sid Grauman, who built Hollywood's opulent Egyptian and Chinese theaters, unveiled plans for a chain of theaters in the 40s meant to draw an increasingly suburban crowd with reserved seats, live music, and restaurant-quality food. "Where others sell their audience peanuts, I will provide a theatrical dinner," he told the Los Angeles Times. More recently, the Alamo Drafthouse chain has rethought the underutilized space in movie theater lobbies to create full bars, café seating, and gift shops (in addition to providing seat-side service during screenings). This is a significant reinvention of what had been a fairly stable space, and remains so for many multiplexes: ticket window on the outside, ticket takers on the way in, lobby with concession stand. It's increasingly common for theaters to sell cocktails, craft beer, and wine in addition to meals and snacks.
Popcorn is now one of many options, available with flourishes like parmesan cheese or truffle oil. The price tags are commensurate with the upgrades.
Get more thrifty theatergoer pro tips from Sarah Oh.
Movies are meant to hold our attention and keep us in our seats. Everything about concessions works against that.
"There's truly nothing like the movie
theater…That smell of popcorn that'll
stay underneath your fingernails for days.
That taste of all the fountain drinks mixed
together into one brown sugar mess. That
all-consuming panic when you're 15 minutes
in and your bladder is already full. Maybe
you shouldn't have chugged both Coke Zeros
during the trailers."
Mia Mercado's alternate ad concept for AMC
theaters is too honest to get made.
The sounds and smells of eating take us out of the world of the film we are watching. Getting and consuming snacks is disruptive, as is the inevitable aftermath: What happens when you run to the bathroom and come back to realize you've missed something important, or someone returning with a popcorn refill blocks the screen while squeezing by? You ask someone what happened, to the chagrin of everyone around you. We've all been shushed for this transgression, or been the shusher.
"Popcorn is a playful and unruly food.
Popcorn refuses work — it occupies the
hands with amusement. Popcorn is workshy
and loves it. Popcorn is the right food
to eat while dreaming of life beyond the
drudgery of work."
Can popcorn kick off the revolution?
Maybe: more from Rebecca May Johnson.
When he ran the Rialto, which has a history of showing art house and foreign films attended by cinephiles (in addition to boisterous Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings), John Munson "tossed a dude once for bringing in McDonald's. Not for smuggling per se, but the rascal rustled his wrappers so loudly it annoyed the other patrons." Even the diminutive bags my mother packed for us — intended to emulate the experiences of those around us, however poorly — had small openings that made conspicuous crinkling sounds no matter how carefully they were unfolded or how dexterously one tried to extract their contents.
Those Milwaukee ticket buyers and Oregon legislators were not entirely wrong. Although popcorn is relatively easy to consume in the dark, hand to mouth, it compromises the viewing experience. Anyone who's ever sat next to someone with an extra-large tub of popcorn, a tray of nachos, or a bag of candy and a loud chew knows exactly what I'm getting at (if you don't, you're probably the chewer).
More interactive and raucous entertainments like circuses and live sports can incorporate eating and drinking without significant interruption. Experiences requiring quiet contemplation — museums, opera, classical music, dance— either exclude food or limit its consumption to set intermission times in designated areas away from the main event. This isn't great for sales, but is deferential to audiences' collective experience of the work.
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"I once smuggled in a huge Whole Foods
salad, a drink, and a dessert. It turns
out it's hard to put on salad dressing
in the dark."
See the favorite movie snacks of people
from around the world in the bonus features.
There are the popcorn movies, of course — the ones that have audiences laughing and screaming, films that are a party we're all at together. But what about the many movies that tackle more serious subject matter and benefit from attentive viewing? It seems pretty obviously inappropriate to chomp on Reese's Pieces while newsreel footage of concentration camp liberations play out, as audiences experienced at the close of World War II, or as a drama about families being wrenched apart by slavery, spousal abuse, or cancer unfurls on the screen. To indulge in food and drink while being immersed in a world of suffering undermines our ability to thoughtfully connect with human tragedy. And upgraded eating experiences are as much if not more of a disruption than a jangly box of Raisinets. As much as I enjoy a good cocktail, a good meal, and a good movie, I'm not willing to delude myself into thinking that when I indulge in these things simultaneously — servers coming and going, silverware clanking, trying not to drop a forkful of food on myself — I'm not missing out on at least some of the movie I came to see.
These gustatory indulgences over the course of a movie can also easily hit $50 with tax and tip. With servers coming around to seats before and during the movie, I've wondered about the implicit shame some people might feel if they just order a glass of water, or nothing at all. In a restaurant, it would be unthinkable to take up space that a paying customer would otherwise have. But people do have the ability to sit for two hours without eating. You don't need fuel to make it through a movie, but there's psychological pressure that may compel some people to either avoid seatside-service theaters or spend money they can't afford to spend.
In 2019, I saw at least thirty movies in the theater. In 2020, I saw four. In 2021, it was one — an unprecedented year in the life of a usually-avid moviegoer.
I watched many dozens of movies these years on disc or by streaming. There I would be — in loungewear, curled up on the couch, looking at a not-too-big but not-too-small-screen, bowl of homemade popcorn at the ready and refillable with the flick of a pause button — incredibly comfortable but acutely aware that I was not seeing movies where and how I loved seeing them the most: in the theater. I had my cellphone, laundry, or an occasional package delivery to add to the list of things that took me away from the screen. I'm embarrassed to say that my intermissions now veer dangerously close to half a dozen per film.
"I think about the older man who cried
silently through The Fault In Our Stars
as a teenager with pink hair leaned
forward from the row behind to hand him
napkins. I think about shoes crackling on
sticky floors and that delicious taste of
movie theater butter, about how we cannot
have these things in isolation at home.
How we need to live in a world of movie
theaters, kind teenagers, and fellow
audience members, and instead, we are
terrified behind our front doors."
s.e. smith on what we miss when we
don't have movies. Read the essay.
The conditions for easy, if far from ideal, home viewing were all in place before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, when going to the movies ceased almost overnight. Streaming was already threatening the box office, not unlike television once did and VHS and DVD after that. At home, people can watch and eat what they want when they want to. But I am here to tell you that it is both not the same and nowhere near as good as going to see a movie on a big screen in a space meant for this purpose, surrounded by people with similar intentions. You really can't get lost in a movie from the comfort of your own couch. Laughing aloud and alone is nowhere near the same as being part of a chorus of chuckles and smiles. It feels good to feel things with other people. Although both imperfect and illusory, social cohesion emerges from shared experiences, even when we complain afterwards ("was that whole movie really just about leading up to the sequel?").
Movie theaters are reckoning with an uncertain future. In November 2021, AMC announced plans to launch mall kiosks selling its proprietary popcorn and other concession stand favorites independent of a movie. Their theaters will offer takeout and home delivery, and their branded microwaveable popcorn will be sold in grocery stores. One Washington D.C. theater owner, himself a financial beneficiary of concessions sales, saw the writing on the wall in 1953: "The over-emphasis on concessions has become a Frankenstein monster that will, in time — if it hasn't already done so — take away all the glamour, all the romance of moviegoing and turn movie theaters into nothing more than glorified popcorn and candy joints with the film feature's value based only on its appeal as an adjunct to selling concessions."
Seventy years later, this moment has arrived. If you ask people to tell you about their memories of going to the movies, they almost always talk about concessions. The candy their grandmother bought them, how many pumps of butter flavoring they put on their popcorn, that time they ate so much they were sick, the snacks they sneaked in. Movie theaters are, indeed, about so much more than the movies we see in them.
"The psychic toll of this shift in the
very form of cinema is reflected in the
habits of moviegoers, presenting an
existential dilemma for the medium,
for the art itself."
Cinemaphile Corey Atad worries about
the future of film: read "The Projectionist."
Are we witnessing the final teeter in a century-long balancing act, a last gasp from a branch of an industry that is starting to imagine itself as a food purveying business? At best, it seems unsustainable to think of people paying movie theater prices for concessions-to-go; the nostalgia driving these purchases won't exist in twenty years unless people keep going to and eating their way through the movies. Capitalism's tug of war in the movie theater is facing down the endgame, the industry's hopes resting on an Avengers-worthy rescue. Eating in theaters has its issues, especially in our seemingly never-ending age of masks. But we need to figure out what we're all willing to do — and to pay — for keeping movie theaters alive, or we will lose another public space where memories are made.
Words by Marsha Gordon. Marsha Gordon is Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, a recent Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and an NEH Public Scholar. She is the author of Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller's War Movies and Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age, and has co-directed three documentary shorts, Nesting, All the Possibilities… and Rendered Small, which have played at film festivals around the world She is currently completing a book about now-forgotten early twentieth century writer Ursula Parrott and the reinvention of the modern woman, which will be published by the trade division of University of California Press in 2023.
Art by An Chen. An Chen is a Taiwanese illustrator who enjoys using color blocks and shapes to draw. After graduating from Cambridge School of Art with a Master's degree in Children Books illustration in 2019,her work has mainly focused on editorial illustrations, and she has also self-published zines and pop-up books.
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The House Lights Will Come Down Again

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Cape Breton > News
Gordon Sampson: Parsons outlines experiences aboard CN ferries
SaltWire Network | Posted: March 24, 2018, 6 p.m. | Updated: March 24, 2018, 6 p.m. | 3 Min Read
John Parsons is shown with photos of most of the ferries from Newfoundland to North Sydney including the SS Bruce, SS Glencoe, Cabot Strait, SS Kyle, SS Random, MV Nautica, SS Caribou, John Hamilton Grey from PEI, Leif Erikson, Springdale, Patrick Morris, Lucy Maude Montgomery from PEI, MV William Carson (the first superferry built in Canada in 1954), and the sinking of the Patrick Morris painted by Aubrey Wells of Port aux Basques. Gordon Sampson. - Submitted
When I was a boy living at 397 Purves Street, our kitchen window looked out on the harbour, and we thought we knew the name of every boat and ship that came into the harbour.
But, thinking about those Newfoundland ferries today I had no idea how extensive John Parsons experience was with these ships.
I knew John had been in the union at CN then (Marine Atlantic today) so I visited him to find out more.
John was president of the CBRT &GW (Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Transportation and General Works) union from 1984 to 1989. Later, he became IGF Inspector for the International Transportation Workers Federation from 1990 to 2006.
Through the years, he worked on the William Carlson, Leif Erikson, Ambrose Shea, Frederick Carter, Bona Vista, Hopedale, Stena Carrier, Jud Atlantica, Sea Trader, the Princess of Tasmania from Australia better known to the men as "the Pot" and the Atlantic Freighter.
During his career, he was an assistant steward and finished up as chief steward as well as able-bodied seaman, quarter master and bosun.
At this time, he was president of the local, Union 285. He finished working with the vessels in 1984 when he went full-time with the union and he retired in 2006. Presently, he is the pension board representative for the pensioners of Marine Atlantic.
As ITF Inspector (International Transportation Workers Federation) from 1990 to 2006, John travelled to Halifax every Monday and returned home to Cape Breton every Friday.
It was an international job, inspecting flag of convenience vessels with foreign crews, making sure the crews got paid, clothed, ships safety and so forth.
For example a Filipino crew might not get paid for a year so John would intervene. One crew received a total of $305,000 paid in USA dollars.
"It was a very interesting job, helping your fellow seafarers," he says.
Doing this work, he travelled to countries such as Russia, India, South Africa, Europe (England, France, Germany, Cyprus) and to the USA for seminars and conventions.
He inspected about 100 ships a year from 1990 to 2006 all over Atlantic Canada.
A short history of John's family reveals deep nautical roots. His first cousin George Parsons, his father George and his brothers Brian and Lloyd all worked aboard ship for a total of more than 200 years of service with his family and George's. John's father, John, his brothers Bob, Myles, John and two sisters Beth and Cathy and his young brother Gerard have all worked for the company, mostly CN at the time, which became a crown corporation in 1986.
John had some vivid memories during his career aboard ship. He remembers being on the Atlantic Freighter. She was 65 feet from the waterline to the bridge, and believe it or not, they were looking up at the waves rolling in on them in the Gulf on a voyage from Newfoundland to North Sydney.
When he was sailing on the Joseph and Clara Smallwood, they left Port aux Basques with a good breeze of wind and high seas. By the time they got around Channel Head there was $250,000 in damages, but they still made it to North Sydney.
Another memory is also connected to his time on the Atlantic Freighter. The Canadian Coast Guard reported the body of a skidooer from Prince Edward Island that had been lost in the ocean in February. The Atlantic Freighter sailed to the area and picked up the body but it was quite an ordeal since the body had been missing for five months, from February to June. It was a very difficult operation and John didn't want to go into the details.
Note: In 1985 we had the new Caribou II and the Joseph & Clara Smallwood. Now they have been replaced by the MV Atlantic Vision, the MV Blue Puttees, the MV Highlanders and the MV Leif Ericson.
Gordon Sampson founded the North Sydney |Historical Society on January 7, 1980 and selected the library as the centennial project out of 10 possible projects in 1985. He was an educator and administrator for 38 years, the last 28 at the Canadian Coast Guard College. He can be reached at [email protected]


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'Jumanji 3' Will Have Nick Jonas Returning to the Cast
by Jacob Tyler
Sony's untitled third 'Jumanji' film will see the return of Nick Jonas. Jonas played the role of Jefferson "Seaplane" McDonough, a young aircraft pilot who was stuck in Jumanji for 20 years.
But, he is not the only one returning. Just this week it was announced Ser'Darius Blain, Alex Wolff, Madison Iseman, and Morgan Turner, the four teen actors from 'Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,' were returning as well.
They join the already returning quartet of actors from the previous film: Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart and Karen Gillan. Additionally, Awkwafina, Danny DeVito and Danny Glover are part of the cast as franchise newcomers.
The premise of 'Welcome to the Jungle' had a more updated approach to the concept. The classic board game transformed into a video game, and four teens were sucked into its world. Those teens were played by Blain, Wolff, Iseman and Turner. There they became avatars portrayed by Johnson, Black, Hart and Gillan.
Moreover, Jake Kasdan, who directed the feature that made $962 million worldwide, is back to helm the sequel. Also, Kasdan co-wrote the script with returning screenwriters Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg.
Further, filming is currently underway on the film. Sony Pictures will release the film on December 13.
News, Omega Underground
casting dwayne johnson Jumanji Jumanji 3 movies news Nick Jonas sony Sony Pictures


On November, 2008, in culture, economics, Japan, Learning, politics, Women.
Thanks to the guys over at Freaknomics, specifically Ian Ayers editorial in the Los Angeles Times by the Police Commissioner, I have found a new tool.
Ayers did a study on who gets stopped by the LA PD. Minorities are stopped much more often, searched, frisked and questioned much more than whites, even when violence is controlled for. His study also shows that these minority searches and questionings turn up far fewer results than when questioning and searching whites.
So the Police Commissioner complained in an editorial about Ayers study. The link above is the response by Ayers to those remarks. Very telling, and very scientific. Clear thinking, as opposed to the blustering of the Police Commissioner.
In any case, near the end of the post, Ayers suggest that to begin to alleviate the problem, every officer on the force should take the Implicit Association Test, developed at Harvard and free online. These tests measure whether you have a prejudice (prejudging) toward some group of people or ideas. I took the Fat/Thin test as an example. It showed fat people and thin people in pictures. I had to quickly identify by pressing one of two keys on the keyboard (one on the right, the other on the left) as quickly as I could, without thinking. Then I had to match vocabulary to the words GOOD and BAD. Then the pictures and words were combined in different orders. I had to match faces or vocabulary quickly, without thinking.
It takes about 10 minutes to do a test, and it takes your full concentration. Try it out for a number of possible unconscious (or pre-conscious) leanings. I am going to get my students to do the gender one. They have versions in many different languages.


Based on John Carpenter's 1982 remake of the 1951 sci-fi/horror classic, The Thing. Since the alien creature had no real form (it took the shape of whatever creature it consumed), McFarlane Toys created two separate figures, packaged individually. The first is the Blair monster, the main creature at the end of the film.Blair Monster is 7 inches tall with 11 points of articulation.
Based on John Carpenter's 1982 remake of the 1951 sci-fi/horror classic, The Thing. Since the alien creature had no real form (it took the shape of whatever creature it consumed), McFarlane Toys created two separate figures, packaged individually. The first is the Blair monster, the main creature at the end of the film.
Blair Monster is 7 inches tall with 11 points of articulation.


I write today to bring to your attention a severe physiological affliction of epidemiological proportions that will, undoubtedly, bring about the end of all matter and time unless acted upon accordingly. I speak, naturally, of Vitamin D deficiency of the common mountain troll (Trollus Clubbus), which has led to severe musculoskeletal wasting and weakness, mental retardation, and flammable spontaneous combustion among the species.
However, their diet of nutritionally deficient humans and dwarves, along with their limited sun exposure, predisposes them to vitamin D deficiency. As such, we expect for the number of active trolls in the woodland area to decline exponentially over the next decade, resulting in a lack of predation and, thusly, deterrence over the area. This will allow mindless zombies, werewolves, and rambunctious bunny rabbits to run amok, burning down villages and chomping on peoples' guts for sport (see Monty Python and the Holy Grail).
I recommend we develop a moisturizing cream that allows mountain trolls to traverse the lands in daylight and then politely encourage them to use it on a daily basis, at least twice.
Thank you, Ice, for bringing the plight of the common mountain troll to our attention. Certainly, the effects of this affliction are far reaching and very concerning. We currently only have to deal with widespread hordes of zombies one month out of the year, for which we are very prepared, however the potential increasing lack of predation as the mountain troll population is predicted to decline must be taken very seriously. Additionally, the Rabbit of Caerbannog is currently only rarely sighted on the Minecraft server where it is said to guard a legendary black beast. Your argument that we must not allow these predator-prey relationships to fall out of balance is most compelling.
That said, we are but humble bakers whose mission is to take over the world with delightfully sweet pastries. Unless you can alter your proposed delivery mechanism to function as part of one of the pastries we specialize in, perhaps the powder on powdered donuts or a filling of some kind, I'm afraid we simply are not equipped to mass-produce such an item. Additionally, we must consider the fact that there may be unexpected side-effects of such a treatment. You claim that the affliction has lead to "severe musculoskeletal wasting and weakness, mental retardation, and flammable spontaneous combustion" among the species, but have you considered that these effects may factor into the predator-prey relationship we are so concerned with maintaining? It may be possible that the mitigation of these afflictions itself may alter the natural balance in the wild. Do we really want more intelligent trolls roaming our forests?
Thus, by a majority vote of the board of trustees of the School of Cake, your motion concerning the development of a moisturizing cream is hereby denied and you are ordered to conduct further research and study before revising your proposal to include possible unforeseen side-effects and potential alternative treatments more in keeping with the School's specialties.
Now I just feel bad for these mountain trolls. Maybe some high spf sunscreen might do the trick?
And one thing we really don't need are more rambunctious bunny rabbits!


WHERE YOUR SMILE IS A WORK OF ART!
LET THAT SUN SHINE ON YOUR SMILE!
Dr. Teresa Bello-Burgos, DMD, AAACD, Accredited Member of the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry, AACD, specializes in Family and Aesthetic Dentistry providing Sedation Dentistry or Nitrous Oxide Sedation for pain-free dentistry.
VENEERS SPECIALIST, THAT'S WHO WE ARE.
Do you want to enhance your "Smile Zone?" Veneers, sometimes called dental veneers or porcelain veneers are used to correct discolored teeth, close gaps, restore chipped teeth, straighten misaligned or crooked teeth. Think of them as your normal teeth, veneers require brushing and flossing as well as regular dental check-ups.
WE WELCOME YOU AND YOUR FAMILY!
Dr. Teresa Bello-Burgos, DMD, AAACD, & Associates are a diverse multi-lingual team with advanced dental education. Our facilities and equipment are state-of-the-art, and we offer a variety of dental care services to all of our patients.
Our Associate Dental Specialists are available to suit every patient's Dental Smiles Design needs! Our Specialists include; Orthodontics, Endodontists, Periodontists, Pediatric Dentists, and Oral Surgeons. Our roster of specialists allows us to complete all services in-house, we never have to refer patients out!
E-mail: info@belloburgos.com and learn how our office can help you get the smile you've always wanted!
Our offices provide smile makeovers to achieve the beautiful, natural look you seek. We can reshape your natural teeth to make them straighter or more youthful in appearance. A smile makeover is waiting for you!
Teresa J. Bello-Burgos, DMD has earned the Accredited Member credential in the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry (AACD). She joins an elite group of dental professionals who have achieved Accreditation in the Academy.
Since 1986, the AACD Accreditation process has provided an opportunity for dentists and laboratory technicians to enhance their professional skills and knowledge in cosmetic and restorative dentistry. Accreditation is an honor requiring a dedication to continuing education and responsible patient care.
The AACD is the world's largest non-profit member organization dedicated to advancing excellence in comprehensive oral care that combines art and science to optimally improve dental health, esthetics, and function.
Cosmetic dental procedures are often thought of as being a dental service that is reserved for Hollywood. Today, this is no longer the case! Because each dental case requiring porcelain veneers is unique, our office will work closely with you to ensure the best fit for you.
Our primary focus is on the health and cosmetic appearance of your smile. New dental procedures allow us to whiten teeth in a single visit, create straight, perfect teeth without braces.
Our approach to straight teeth is braces-free! There have been many advances in obtaining straight teeth without the hassle of braces, brackets, bands, etc.
We focus on the dental health and oral functionality of your entire family. We can care for your teeth no matter what their condition or age.
Veneers and smile design specialist, an accredited member of the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry (AACD). The AACD is the world's largest non-profit member organization dedicated to advancing excellence in comprehensive oral care that combines art and science to optimally improve dental health, esthetics, and function.
Graduated from NOVA Southeastern University, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 2001, Major, Doctor of Dental Medicine, D.M.D.
Graduated from the University of Autonoma of Santo Domingo, UASD, 1988 Major, Doctor of Dental Surgery, D.D.S.; practicing as a general practitioner for several years in the Dominican Republic.
We always welcome a new smile in our office! Using our website, you can conveniently download, print and fill out dental forms at home. Then swing by our office and you're ready to go.
A new smile can change your life.
It is with great pleasure that I write this review today for my dentist Teresa Bello Burgos. I have literally been a loyal and content patient since she first opened her Doral office years ago.... and have referred many friends, and acquaintances to her throughout the years based on my sole experiences.
Dr. Bello-Burgos is probably one of the most caring and compassionate dentists I have ever met. I did have to wait a little but after my appointment time to see her but it was totally worth it because her consultation was thorough and she took her time to answer all my questions.
Really clean and modern office. It smelled so good when I walked in, I was surprised. Usually dentists have a funny smell. Friendly receptionist and the doctor's assistant was nice too. I asked if the office was new but apparently it has been there for 10 years.
No wait time! Staff was very professional and nice. Office is very clean. Bibian did my cleaning and Dr Gonzalez did the exam. I will definitely be back and recommend this dental office.


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A Writing Guide
A look into the nuances of writing.
The revolution will be inscribed in cuneiform
Disturbing the Sound of Silence
Modernist and Medieval Art
George Steiner and post-modern dialectic as improv
Writing (and composing): Mahler, Beethoven, Faulkner, House of Dawn, & the Wundt curve
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Stories With and Without Meaning: The Urban Fantasy Anthology
You can find a lot of writing advice about grammar, and a lot of advice about style, but very little advice about meaning. Style may be the hardest thing to master, but meaning is the thing least-often mastered. I'm going to explain what I mean by taking a collection of urban fantasy stories by modern masters, and saying which stories I think have meaning and which don't, and why.
Fiction is about people. Mainstream fiction is nothing but character studies; genres are characters plus something else. A mystery isn't about a mystery; it's about a detective: Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poroit, Monk, Sam Spade, Mma Precious Ramotswe—they're all outlandish, fascinating characters, and most readers remember them long after they've forgotten what the mystery was. Horror is about emotion, and life, and our true fears. Comedy is about character, as any stand-up comedian can tell you. And romance—well, it's about romance.
But fantasy and science fiction are funny.
As a writer, you'll be told that all stories, even science fiction stories about sentient wristwatches and fantasies about animals, must really be about the emotions of early 21st-century humans. I believe this less than almost any other author, but I break this rule less than most genre authors.
Most authors don't think they're breaking this rule when I think they are. That's because they have a different opinion of what "about" means. They think that "about X" means "the story contains X". I think that "about" means "the story makes me feel X or think about X".
I might write a story where someone drives a car, flies a kite, and whittles a carving. That wouldn't mean the story was about driving, kites, or whittling. In the same way, just because a story has people in it doesn't make it about people. Suppose a monster in a horror story chases two people, and they run away, and one of them makes it and the other doesn't. What is the story about?
If the story makes me feel their horror, then the story is about that fear. But what if it doesn't? What's it about then?
Nothing. The story isn't about anything to me, because it doesn't make me feel and it doesn't make me think. It doesn't matter how many zombies and beheadings it has, it isn't about anything. It just has stuff in it. Like cars, kites, and beheadings.
The funny thing about fantasy and science fiction is that it's especially easy to unwittingly write a story that isn't about anything. You can flash dragons and unicorns or ray guns in front of the reader, and hope that each time you do that, it tugs on the emotions that each of those things were connected to by the real stories about dragons and unicorns and ray guns that your readers read in the past. You can pile so many of these trappings on that you don't notice your story isn't about anything.
You can even become famous and win awards doing that. Literary types these days are keenly attuned to style. All the stories in this book are written with a mastery of style that makes me salivate with hunger and lust. But style doesn't create meaning. Some of these stories have meaning. Some don't. Hopefully, telling you which of these stories I think are about something, and which aren't, will explain what I mean.
Stories that are about something
"A Bird That Whistles", Emma Bull
This story is about a faerie (the old, dangerous kind) who loves to play the fiddle. His love for the fiddle brings him into close contact with humans, and he can't help but observe and be puzzled by love and friendship. The viewpoint character loves a woman, and she loves the faerie, and the faerie loves no one and doesn't know how. He starts getting friendly with the viewpoint character, because they share a love of music. But this closeness seems to frighten him. So he has sex with the woman and leaves, breaking everyone else's hearts, and doesn't care. Years later, he returns. He thinks he's after the music. But it's through music, not love or sex, that he can understand friendship. I'm not sure, but I think the story is about what love and friendship are, why we love the wrong people, the unfairness of life, and/or the power of music.
"The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories", Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman writes a hopefully-fictitious story about himself, going to Hollywood to write a screenplay. Everything happens in a haze, with a continually-changing cast of studio executives whose titles and real authority are never clear, none of whom ever read any of the scripts or summaries that he writes for them. Story decisions are made by the executive's assistants. Meanwhile, he forms a kind of friendship with an old hotel employee, who likes to talk about the movie folks who used to stay there back in the day, back fifty and sixty years ago, and the grandness of character they had.
The story is about a lot of things. Mostly, what people value, and what they give up for it. The old man who cleans the pool is the only man in Los Angeles not trying to play the game. Neil tries to play the game, but finds himself distracted by the germ of a story, a real story that he can write down and tell to people without butchering it for ignorant executives whose only reason for mangling the story is to prove that they're somebodies. The virtuous, contented old man dies and Neil leaves, and the Los Angeles game goes on. It's a little simplistic and moralistic, and I don't understand why the old big movie stars are being held up as anything different from today's big movie stars. But Neil's choice to leave isn't easy, so the story is still about something.
"Hit", Bruce McAllister
God hires a hit-man to kill a vampire who's the son of the Devil. In exchange, God will forgive him everything. Or at least that's what the angel offering the deal claims. The problem is that the old vampire wants to change his ways and become good. Our guy just has to kill the old vampire before he can repent, so that God doesn't have to take him in, but doesn't have to kill him Himself. Something about maintaining the balance. It sounds a little fishy.
But, why not condemn an ancient vampire to Hell to save your own soul? Am I right? 'Course I'm right.
Except that it ain't right.
The story has some mystery, and some tension, and some violence. But it's about this hit man and how he feels about what he does, and about selfishness, love, right and wrong, and grace. It's a hell of a story.
"The Bible Repairman", Tim Powers
Torrez has a special kind of soul—one that he broke himself. This makes him valuable to the witch-doctors who can use pieces of his broken soul or vials of his blood for their magic. His soul is doomed to hell anyway, so he might as well sell it off bit-by-bit, until he loses his mind.
But he has stopped. He's trying to hang on to what he has left of his soul and his mind. Then someone comes to him with a plea for help, a chance to save a real live girl. He brings as a gift the stolen soul of Torrez' own little girl. This gift does not have its intended effect, as Torrez is more interested in reconnecting with the ghost of his daughter than in doing the job. But he can't reconnect; the ghost is just a ghost, empty and selfish, not worth saving. And he feels he, too, is empty and not worth saving, and he goes to his death to save the stranger's daughter.
This is a puzzling story, but it makes you think. It is about selfishness, relationships, duty, and identity.
Stories that might be about something
Then we have the stories that are like modern art: You know that they might be too deep for you to understand, or they might be con-jobs, and you can't tell which.[1]
"Make a Joyful Noise", Charles de Lint
Zia and her sister are crow spirits, or something like that. They are ancient and powerful and witless and generally well-intentioned, if not overly concerned about mortals. Zia helps the ghost of a boy resolve his issues with his mother and move on, to whatever comes next.
There are stories within this story. The boy's story is about how children can fail to understand their parents' love, and how parents can fail to express it. I have a suspicion the story about Zia might be about something too, though I can't tell what.
"On the Road to New Egypt", Jeffrey Ford
You know Loki, the Norse trickster god? Imagine a world where Satan is Loki. Imagine Jesus is also Loki. Imagine Jesus makes a bet with Satan for shits and giggles, and offers your soul as the stakes. What's that story about?
Maybe it's about how religious people take themselves way too seriously, and whoever the forces are behind this world, they're probably jerks. Maybe it's about how Good and Evil, saints and demons, have a lot more in common with each other than with ordinary folk. Or maybe it's just the result of too many drugs.
"Julie's Unicorn", Peter S. Beagle
Julie finds a unicorn in a 500-year old tapestry, captive to a knight and a maiden. She feels so sorry for it that she calls on her grandmother's magic and lets it out of the tapestry. But it remains tiny, and she finds herself its custodian.
The unicorn wants something. She and her ex-lover, who was involved by chance, puzzle out that the unicorn is looking for a monk, who must be in the tapestry. They return it to the tapestry, but into the care of the monk, almost hidden in one corner.
Like many Peter Beagle stories, it's hard to say what the story is about, but I have the feeling that it's about something.
"Companions to the Moon", Charles de Lint
A woman thinks her husband is cheating on her. She follows him, and discovers he has a secret life as a prince of Faerie. The old, dangerous kind. Now that she knows, he must leave her.
Maybe the story is about trust? It would have been an indictment of the woman, if it had been written 400 years ago. But the modern author is, if anything, accusing the man of keeping secrets. Maybe it's about how you can know someone for years, and suddenly find a side of them that you never knew existed.
"On the Far Site of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks", Joe Lansdale
A nasty, vicious, vulgar criminal is chased by a slightly-less-nasty bounty hunter, in a world where zombies are a commodity. He captures the criminal, then they're both captured by some weird religious cult that wants to kill them. They agree to work together until they escape. They do. Then they kill each other. The end.
Maybe this story is about how even the most vile, selfish people can have a code of honor. I don't know. It's well-written, but I don't know if there's anything more to it than an adventure story with a couple of revolting yet fascinating protagonists fighting zombies and dominatrix nuns.
Stories that aren't about anything
Finally, sadly, we have the stories that aren't about anything. They have plots and witches and stuff, and they may combine them in new ways, but they don't touch on anything deep or controversial, they don't suck you in and make you identify with a character, and they don't introduce any new genre trappings novel enough for that to be interesting on its own.
"A Haunted House of Her Own", Kelley Armstrong
In this story, Nathan and his wife Tanya buy a "haunted" house in order to renovate it and charge tourists high prices for staying there. But the townsfolk believe the stories about the house, and Nathan finds increasingly-convincing evidence that the haunting is real. He finally dies in a construction accident. The townsfolk assume it was the ghost. We then discover the whole thing was a scheme of Tanya's to kill her husband.
So what? We can't feel Nathan's fears, at least not after finishing, because we find out that his fears were the wrong ones. We can't feel anything for Tanya. And there is nothing very interesting about a scheme to kill a husband by blaming it on a ghost. I'm not saying it's about nothing because there was no ghost. I'm saying it's about nothing because the author thought that having spooky events and a plot and a twist made it a horror story.
"She's My Witch", Norman Partridge
Boy and girl are lovers. They take revenge on the school bullies. Who murdered him. He's dead, you see. She's the witch who revived him. They plan to go back to school. The end.
"Kitty's Zombie New Year", Carrie Vaugn
Kitty's new year's party is crashed—by a zombie. Not a brain-eating zombie, but the real thing, a woman whose ex-lover damaged her brain with drugs he ordered on the internet, hoping to stop her from leaving him. The zombie confronts him, kind of. His crime is exposed. The police take him away. The end.
You could say this story was about love, and what you might do to keep it. But it isn't, because it doesn't make you think about those things. Maybe he loved her? But the reader never thinks, "Gee, I see his point. I see how, in the same situation, I might do that." The reader never sympathizes with him, and can't very well identify with the zombie. The whole horror/zombie/supernatural angle was just a really long, convoluted way of saying "He abused his woman to make her stay," and the reader condemns him and approves as the police take him away.
"Boobs", Suzy McKee Charnas
A woman is taunted by male school bullies who want her body. She becomes a werewolf. She pretends to be willing to have sex with them, then eats them. She enjoys it. The end.
"The White Man", Thomas M. Disch
A little girl from Africa is taught by a lunatic that white people are vampires. Jesus was the first vampire. She knows about vampires from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eventually, she kills a white man, who may or may not have been a vampire. The innocent? man's death only strengthens the community's belief in vampires, since the death was a thing that happened. The end.
If anything, the story is about how stupid people are, and how insane beliefs can seem perfectly reasonable. Mostly, though, it was a "What the hell?" story. Why did the white man in the story put creepy vaguely-racist messages in his window? What was the point of having the girl's school exploit her to hand-write scam letters?
"Gestella", Susan Patwick
A woman is a werewolf. She marries a man who only wants her for her body. She grows old as quickly as a dog. After a few years with him, she is old. He takes her to the pound to get rid of her. The end.
The story is supposed to be about how sad it is that some men don't value women when they get old. Yes, that's sad. But I couldn't identify with her, since it was obvious almost from page one that her husband didn't love her. When you find yourself screaming repeatedly at a character, "Don't go into that basement!", it makes you more aware that they are not you, and destroys identification. Then the story can't be about feeling what they're feeling.
The story could have been about why she stayed with him when he was a jerk, or why she didn't realize that he was a jerk. But it never explains why she doesn't go back to where she came from, or when she realizes why his affection for her is diminishing.
So we're left with the story trying to be about the fact that some people are jerks. But I already knew that. A story where a jerk behaves exactly as you expect him to behave isn't about the fact that some people are jerks, like a story where a fire hydrant works as expected isn't about fire hydrants.
If it's about anything, I'd say it's about the tragic, hopeless situation all women are in, because men love them only for their beauty, which fades quickly, and there aren't any other options or possibilities for love. But, whoops, that's false in at least five ways.
You might notice I listed only five stories by women, and four of them are stories where either a man kills his woman or a woman kills her man, and I put all of those in the "not about anything" category. Maybe I don't appreciate these stories because I'm a man, and I just don't relate to these stories the same way. Maybe emotional rapport is more important, and justification less-important, in women's fiction. I don't know. I just call 'em as I see 'em.
(1. The secret to modern art, BTW, is that you're not supposed to look at a single piece and evaluate it. You're supposed to look at an artist's entire career and see it as a philosophical argument, and decide whether you agree. Post-modern art is similar, except that instead of a philosophical argument, it's a sociological argument.)
Saving The World vs. Kissing The Girl
A Three-Second Mistake That Ruined An Entire Movie


I woke up on Saturday morning so excited for football. It was Homecoming Saturday in Muncie, there was a winnable game on the BSU schedule, things could get no better. That line of thought served me for roughly 38 seconds until I stood up, took about three steps toward the bathroom, and felt that weird feeling in your mouth that says something is about to happen, none of which you are going to enjoy. Twenty minutes later, after I had seemingly purged all that I could possibly have in my system and was ready to attack my Homecoming journey with renewed vigor and energy, it happened again. And it was in the next ten minutes as I laid on the cold tile floor in my family's southern Indiana homestead that I thought perhaps a Homecoming journey wasn't in the cards for me.
There was reason to be excited, you know. Western Michigan was far from a world beater and the Cardinals needed a win in the worst possible way. 1-4 starts aren't in CPL's make up and 1-5 starts damn sure aren't. There was a new quarterback under center, Quake was still ready to chew up yards in the backfield, and perhaps most importantly, across the field stood perhaps Ball State's biggest advantage: Western Michigan's head coach PJ Fleck. Boat oars be damned, if it came down to coaching, I'll take my shot with CPL.
The too long, didn't read version of events: Ball State dropped their fifth consecutive game to fall to 1-5 on the season and now sit at 0-2 in MAC play. Were there positive things to take away from Saturday? Of course, and we'll get to those below. But there was a sizable takeaway as well, and speaks to a much larger issue at play for this year's dreadful start. Most notably: "This is not the BSU team that we are used to under Coach Pete Lembo in any way, shape, or form." There is nothing to be giddy about when Ball State gives up a 28-7 lead with 3:36 to go in the 2nd quarter. There is nothing to be giddy about a defensive effort that allowed thee touchdown drives of four plays or less. There is reason to be excited about the offense not being so pedestrian and vanilla, but mired in a 5-game losing streak with some significant defensive woes sort of brings all facets back to Earth.
It was great to see Jordan Williams get back to his old self with 11 catches, 179 yards, and 2 TDs. That is the kind of effort that we all thought was the norm for JW and I'm thrilled to see the little nagging injuries no longer hamper his ability to make a statement kind of stat line.
Scott Secor perfect again on his five extra points and one field goal.
Punter U may be back in action as Kyle Schmidt and Secor combined for a 50.3 yard average on their punts for the day.
When the defense gives up 161 yards and 3 scores to a single player as they did on Saturday in the case of Jarvion Franklin, that makes it quite difficult to get a W.
The Cards are on the road this Saturday against Central Michigan. The Chips come in at 4-3 overall and 2-1 in the MAC. Kickoff is at 3:30 and Vegas opened the line at CMU (-6.5), where it was quickly bet up to CMU (-9) at some books. We open the CMU festivities around these parts tomorrow in earnest, so fire up for that.


Our local club is going out for the Holiday weekend and we plan on riding the Windy 9 routes.
Room rates start a $88 + tax and are held under Johnstown Motorcycle Group.
You'd all be welcome to join us if you'd like.
Re: Marietta Ohio, July 4.5.6.


Lance Piantaggini has resigned as 2008 Percussion Caption Head for the New York Skyliners. Due to unexpected pressures, Lance will be leaving the New York area and returning to his home state of Massachusetts, concentrating on graduate work and an eventual career teaching Latin. Already a part of the family, Lance hopes to once again be part of the Skyliner team sometime in the future. He wishes the corps all the best.
The New York Skyliners invite anyone interested in joining the 2008 Percussion educational staff and learning under the expertise of 2008 Battery & Ensemble Composer, Keith Warfield, to contact Keith Warfield at Bakstik2 [at] aol [dot] com ASAP. Further, the Skyliners are looking to complete their 2008 instructional staff with the best talent available. Go to the N. Y. Skyliners website for additional information about the corps: http://www.nyskyliners.org.
For additional information about the New York Skyliners, please go to: http://www.nyskyliners.org or contact Harry Eldridge, Sr. at director [at] nyskyliners [dot] org.
Posted by News Editor on Sunday, November 25th, 2007. Filed under DCA News.


Grabcery is a unique online grocery destination from Wrinkle-IT, a pioneering B2C market solution provider registered under the ministry of corporate affairs. Grabcery was founded with a mission to redefine India's online grocery shopping experience with its unique and special features. Our aim is to enlighten every customer who places an order with a mind-blowing experience which is accomplished by providing exactly what they need. The idea of "Grabcery" was stimulated by the thought of providing a quick delivery grocery solution to the busy urban shoppers. We bring flexibility for customers by allowing them to customize their items anytime during the order. Our personal shopper carries one order at a time which ensures reliable and fast delivery.


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Urban Resource Institute Promotes Angela Thompson to Vice President of Programs for Homeless Families
NEW YORK (September 7, 2022) — Urban Resource Institute (URI) is proud to announce the promotion of Angela Thompson to Vice President of Programs for Homeless Families, reporting to Dr. Amanda Eckhardt, Chief Program Officer. Thompson is a standout performer at URI, where for the past four years she has provided exceptional leadership and dedication to our client-centered services for families experiencing homelessness. In this new role, Thompson will serve on URI's Senior Team, partnering across departments to drive the URI mission to end cycles of violence, homelessness, poverty and trauma.
Thompson brings over 25 years of experience to the role, with expertise in homeless services, mental health, developmental disabilities, and geriatrics. She was previously a Program Director, overseeing two of URI's sites offering transitional housing for homeless families, a position she held since 2018. As the Vice President, Thompson will lead the strategic direction, design, implementation, and operation of URI's nine current shelters and comprehensive programs for homeless families, as well as help lead URI's continued growth in serving the homeless community. URI's nine shelters for homeless families provide transitional housing for 1,000 adults and children every night, and the client demographics reflect a striking New York City reality: children on average represent 75% of unhoused individuals.
"Angela Thompson brings commitment, passion, and expertise to her work with homeless families, and we are thrilled to recognize and reward her impactful leadership. At URI, we prioritize and foster employee growth, and it is a key pillar of our organizational values to encourage and uplift talented team members like Angela," noted Eckhardt. "This promotion is well-deserved, and I look forward to having Angela as a partner in the delivery of our high standard of service to clients across our entire portfolio of shelter and services for homeless families, as well as at new sites and programs in the future."
In addition to her valued role within URI, Thompson is highly regarded by city and state agencies overseeing homeless programs, including the New York City Department of Homeless Services (DHS) and Human Resources Administration (HRA).
As a leading service provider for homeless families and the largest provider of domestic violence shelter services in the U.S., URI's direct services, prevention, and intervention programs impact more than 40,000 individuals annually. URI is poised to increase the number of sites serving homeless families in the coming years, and Thompson will play a significant role in that expansion by building partnerships with the community and implementing trauma-informed frameworks.
Thompson holds a Master's in Social Work from Lehman College.
Urban Resource Institute (URI) transforms the lives of domestic violence survivors and homeless families by empowering individuals, families, and communities, particularly communities of color and other vulnerable populations, to end cycles of domestic violence, homelessness, poverty, and trauma by increasing safety and resiliency. As the largest provider of domestic violence shelter services in the US and a leading provider of homeless services, URI's programs impact more than 40,000 individuals annually through prevention, intervention, education, and direct services in both residential and non-residential settings in New York. URI is recognized as a thought-leader with influence across the U.S. and beyond. For more information, visit www.urinyc.org or follow on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
If you or someone you know needs immediate assistance, call NYC's 24-hour Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-621-HOPE or the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE.


The building of Meridian Business Center is located in the vicinity of Moskovskaya and Leninsky Prospekt Metro Stations, as well as has access to the Ring Road, which allows shoppers to travel conveniently to Pulkovo Airport and in any other direction around St. Petersburg.
A very convenient location, well-developed infrastructure and stylish building design inside and outside, as well as a comprehensive range of services comprise a harmonious ensemble of the best attributes of any modern office. A guarded parking lot for 230 cars is located in front of the building. The parking lot is open not only during the business hours from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., but also around the clock.
What do you need to take into consideration when you want to rent a comfortable office at a reasonable price? St. Petersburg is a megalopolis, and people try to minimize their time en route so as not to waste precious time. This is why it is very important to have everything you need literally at your fingertips. Here in Meridian you will find a range of the most diverse services, from restaurants to banks, and from stores to fitness centers. You and your staff will appreciate all the nearby amenities, the quality of services they provide and many varied conveniences.
If you are still at the crossroads, consider: do you really need an office downtown with its eternal traffic jams and crowds of tourists? Instead, rent your office directly from the owner, in a convenient location, accessible in every sense and at a reasonable price – isn't that what you are looking for? Meridian is waiting for you. Welcome!


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Q: How to call ajax on jsp page load to fetch data from database with the help of servlet (not on form submit) I want to fetch data from database on jsp page with the help of servlet using ajax call.
ajax call
$(document).ready(function(){
         var sid = $('#surveyId').val();
          alert(sid);
          $.ajax({
                    url: "getEditSurvey",
                    data:{
                        sid:sid
                        },
                    success: function(data){
                        alert(response);
                        $("#displayEdit").html(response);
                }

          });
  });

jsp file
<input type="hidden" name="surveyId" id="surveyId" value="<%= request.getParameter("sid") %>" >
    <div id="displayEdit">

    </div>

My problem:
I am using this method to fetch data but it is displaying nothing Is this is right way to do this. I am new to ajax.

A: Your ajax code looks right except there is a small mistake in your success function of your ajax code
The code inside your success function should be
alert(data);
$("#displayEdit").html(data);

If you see the success functions parameter the name is "data". That parameter will hold the data that your servlet will return.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Follow up to yesterday's Trust Your Divine Dance Partner post, which featured the great advice given to Belinda Carlisle earlier this week on Dancing With the Stars. Here she is with her band the Go Go's, singing the song Head Over Heels. These days this song speaks to me about the busyness, craziness and deceit of religion - and its ultimate failure - and the finding of freedom in our rest in Christ and in the new heart we've been given.
Oh yeah, and it's just a fun song!
"I'd forgotten about my heart"
This band of females sure was a lot of fun, and I followed Belinda Carlisle and Jane Wiedlin into their solo careers as well.
Richard, you've caught the essence of what I saw in this song as well. Living by rules can perhaps have a good outward appearance for some people, but it totally takes away from the heart relationship we have with the God who gave us that new heart!


Maneko Japanese Restaurant is a cosy, 30-seater eatery that serves premium Japanese cuisines at super affordable rates. Their menu selections range from udon, sashimi to sushi and dons.
Besides these classics, Maneko also sells a GIANT Maki! Stay tune for the video at the end.
There are 2 dishes in the menu you guys definitely MUST TRY! The first one's their Truffle Tamago; hands down the most decadent Japanese Tamago dish I have ever tasted! I really enjoyed the deep aromatic flavours of the earthy truffles, paired with the sweet tamago omelette.
2nd dish; One of Maneko's signatures and without a doubt one of the best mentaiko dishes we have ever tried is their Mentaiko Udon (S$11.90). I don't usually have udon with creamy sauces because these are usually too rich. However, this dish hit all the right notes of cream & umami! Udon is cooked perfectly, pairing it with the onsen egg is just heavenly!
They advertised: Giant Maki – That's no joke! This maki is 10 times the size of a regular maki. It weighs approximately 2kg and is to be shared among 4 people.


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Q: NodeJS and JS Timestamps Differ by 45 Seconds I'm using NodeJS as my server-side language, and am using new Date().getTime() to generate a new millisecond timestamp.  I'm then using a client-side JS function to calculate the time ago, which also uses new Date().getTime() to generate a timestamp with which to compare the server timestamp to.  However, on new items the time ago is inaccurate, and calling new Date().getTime() in my client console and my node console at the same time results in timestamps differing by ~45 seconds.  I'm using AWS for my server hosting, if that could affect it in any way.  Why could this be happening?  I know it isn't code-related since even the consoles differ from one another.

A: I figured out that the issue did in fact lie within my AWS instance.  My system also had the incorrect timestamp, which I discovered using the command date +%s.  Virtual machines tend to have a lot of problems with maintaining the correct system time, and AWS runs its non-dedicated systems (and possibly its dedicated ones, too) on virtual machines.  I resynced my time with the command sudo ntpdate pool.ntp.org.  It can be, however, dangerous in production to create such an instant jump in time, so I found a guide that shows how to set up NTP to slowly readjust your system clock when it is out of sync.  This solved all timestamp issues I was having!

A: Use single source of truth, don't check client-side time, as it executes on browser of user(who can live in China with 6 hours difference)
For server, use time as it is, no magic. But for client-side, make ajax request to server to get server-time, so that all clients over the world and your server are synced correctly, obviously http-request needs some time, average 50ms, but it's worth it. Even if your server time is incorrect, all clients will be synced to your server-time