Trinity Church, Roslyn is an open-hearted, open-minded Christian community that welcomes all people. Central to our mission is seeking to meet needs in our surrounding community, which we are equipped to address, with love and compassion. We have identified being a spirited place for all children, a center for arts and music and service and advocacy for and on behalf of those in need as the central components of who we are in this mission. Our childcare center is an offering to the families (in all their configurations) of our area to meet the need for high-quality, safe, flexible, affordable childcare for the whole child.
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Jonathan Thomas joined Power Rogers & Smith, L.L.P. as an associate in 2011. Mr. Thomas' primary areas of practice in personal injury matters include; product liability, premises liability, automobile liability, and aviation litigation.
Mr. Thomas was selected to The National Trial Lawyers: Top 40 under 40, a professional organization which requires superior qualifications, trial results, and leadership as a young lawyer.
Mr. Thomas graduated from Loyola University Chicago School of Law in 2011 after earning an undergraduate degree in Business at Cedarville University in 2006. He is admitted to practice law in the State of Illinois and the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
While at Loyola, Mr. Thomas clerked for Power, Rogers & Smith, L.L.P. He was also a judicial extern for both Chief Justice Thomas R. Fitzgerald of the Illinois Supreme Court and Chief Judge James F. Holderman of the United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois.
Mr. Thomas is an active member of various professional organizations, including the Chicago Bar Association, Illinois Bar Association, Illinois Trial Lawyers Association, American Bar Association, and the American Association for Justice.
Power Rogers & Smith represented a number of individuals who were involved in a commercial airplane crash. The firm's attorneys recovered over $93 Million on behalf of their clients. Notable settlements included a $16,900,000 settlement on behalf of a 36-year-old female who suffered multiple fractures and ultimately required the amputation of her left leg; an $8,000,000 settlement on behalf of a 32-year-old female who suffered numerous cervical and lumbar vertebrae fractures requiring a posterior surgical fusion of C1-C2; a $7,500,000 settlement on behalf of a 54-year-old male who died as a result of the crash; a $5,800,000 settlement for a 52-year-old female who suffered multiple vertebrae fractures causing nerve damage and requiring multiple past and future spinal surgeries, pain management, and rehabilitative therapy; and a $3,750,000 settlement for a 49-year-old woman who fractured her Th11 and Th12 vertebrae and required a surgical spinal fusion of the TH11 to L1 vertebrae. Co-counsel, Todd A. Smith and Brian LaCien.
Plaintiff was driving his vehicle eastbound on the Northwest Tollway, I-90. Driver of a Con-way, Inc. tractor-trailer, was also travelling eastbound on the Northwest Tollway, I90. The drivers were preceding in stop and go traffic, at which point, Con-Way's driver disregarded the stopped traffic and caused his vehicle to collide with Plaintiff's vehicle. Plaintiff suffered multiple injuries including closed head injury with memory loss, physical lacerations, contusions, and fractured bones. Co-Counsel with Larry Rogers, Jr.
A motor vehicle accident which resulted in injuries to 3 Plaintiffs. B.S. was driving, A.T, a minor, and B.C. were passengers in her vehicle. Complete Fleet Trailer Repair, Inc.'s driver was traveling in the lane next to plaintiffs. The driver changed lanes to be traveling directly B.S's vehicle. B.S' vehicle had stopped, however, Complete Fleet Trailer Repair, Inc.'s driver was unable to hit his brakes prior to the collision with B.S's vehicle. The driver was traveling approximately 40 miles per hour at the time of the collision. The minor suffered a traumatic brain injury, bilateral skull fracture, and cervical nerve root avulsion. B.C. suffered a traumatic brain injury, had a parietal subgaleal hematoma, and a disc protrusion. Defendants tendered policy limits for the injuries sustained in this action. Co-Counsel with Larry R. Rogers.
Medical Malpractice: 30 year old female presented to Loyola University Medical Center for a scheduled C-section. The delivery proceeded and was uneventful and without complication.
Plaintiff's obesity, prolonged bed rest, and large fibroid tumor placed her at an increased risk of venous thromboembolism. Despite this increased risk, only SCDs were provided and they were not consistently used during Plaintiff's time in the hospital. Plaintiff developed a saddle pulmonary embolism, approximately 36 hours after delivery. Plaintiff died leaving a husband and minor daughter. Co-Counsel with Larry Rogers, Jr.
Medical Malpractice: 44 year old male presented to the Emergency Room at Ingalls Memorial Hospital complaining of abdominal pain. Plaintiff was placed on routine IV fluids and was admitted to the medical surgical floor with a diagnosis of acute pancreatitis, and possible small bowl obstruction. Defendant doctor recommended that pain medications be increased; CT Scan of the abdomen and pelvis with oral contrast. Plaintiff died the next day as a result of defendants' failure to aggressively resuscitate Plaintiff with fluids and from the CT scan with contrast further which further compromised Plaintiff's kidneys. Plaintiff died leaving a minor daughter. Co-Counsel with Larry Rogers, Jr.
Trucking: Plaintiff, 49 year old female, was travelling southbound on Illinois Route 394 near Glenwood Lansing Road. Defendant, a driver for P.I.&I. Motor Express, Inc., was traveling northbound on Illinois Route 394, in a construction zone, when he lost control of his tractor trailer, veered into several sand barrels and a concrete barrier in a construction zone and veered across the left shoulder, into the grassy middle median and into the southbound lanes of traffic where his tractor trailer struck Plaintiff's vehicle in a head on collision. Plaintiff was fatally injured and died instantly. Plaintiff, a 49 y/o single female, who lived alone, was survived by four adult siblings who live out of state. Co-Counsel with Larry Rogers, Jr.
Trucking: Plaintiff was operating his motorcycle in an eastbound direction, Defendant was operating a semi-tractor and trailer traveling northbound and approaching an intersection. Plaintiff passed through the intersection and was continuing eastbound when Defendant failed to stop at the intersection and turned northbound causing a collision between the two vehicles. Plaintiff was knocked to the ground and rolled under the tractor and part of the trailer. Plaintiff suffered hip, lower back, and cervical injuries. Co-counsel with Joseph A. Power, Jr.
Auto: 62 year old was pedestrian who was struck while crossing Stockton Street near the intersection of Wrightwood, in Chicago. Plaintiff had gotten off the bus at the rear door and was crossing the street behind the bus. As he was crossing, he was hit by a vehicle of an uninsured driver. Plaintiff fractured skull in multiple places. Plaintiff pursued uninsured motorist claim. Co-counsel with Joseph A. Power, Jr.


The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe. DES began searching the Southern skies on August 31, 2013.
According to Einstein's theory of General Relativity, gravity should lead to a slowing of the cosmic expansion. Yet, in 1998, two teams of astronomers studying distant supernovae made the remarkable discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. To explain cosmic acceleration, cosmologists are faced with two possibilities: either 70% of the universe exists in an exotic form, now called dark energy, that exhibits a gravitational force opposite to the attractive gravity of ordinary matter, or General Relativity must be replaced by a new theory of gravity on cosmic scales.
DES is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. More than 400 scientists from over 25 institutions in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia are working on the project. The collaboration built and is using an extremely sensitive 570-Megapixel digital camera, DECam, mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, high in the Chilean Andes, to carry out the project.
Over five years (2013-2018), the DES collaboration is using 525 nights of observation to carry out a deep, wide-area survey to record information from 300 million galaxies that are billions of light-years from Earth. The survey is imaging 5000 square degrees of the southern sky, with 3400 sq-degrees overlapping the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich CMB surveys conducted by SPT, in five optical filters to obtain detailed information about each galaxy. A fraction of the survey time is used to observe smaller patches of sky roughly once a week to discover and study thousands of supernovae and other astrophysical transients.
PhD Thesis Defense, Ross Cawthon, "Effects of Redshift Uncertainty on Cross-Correlations of CMB Lensing and Galaxy Surveys"
PhD Thesis Defense, Alan Zablocki, "Constraining Neutrinos and Dark Energy with the Angular Clustering of Galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey"


We belive that everybody has the right to see. There is almost 500 milions people in the world with sight problems, who don't have acces to proper medical help. We can't help all of them. But we have the knoweledge and experience which allows us to provide eyeglasses to thousands who live on small, hard to reach islands spread across seas of Indonesia and in the mountains of East Timor.


It's good to know we can have hope when the world's mess surrounds us. But what about when the mess is our fault? We aren't perfect. So sooner or later we are going to be the cause of the trouble and pain in our lives and even for those close to us.
The instant we recognize the mess is our fault, we face a moment of decision. There are two options. Will we surrender our hope, dooming ourselves to the darkness of despair? It's a dark fate and it never ends well. Or will we hold on to the faintest glimmer of hope, believing good is still possible?


text:
Q: How to build/concatenate strings in JavaScript? Does JavaScript support substitution/interpolation?
Overview

I'm working on a JS project, and as it's getting bigger, keeping strings in good shape is getting a lot harder. I'm wondering what's the easiest and most conventional way to construct or build strings in JavaScript.
My experience so far:

String concatenation starts looking ugly and becomes harder to maintain as the project becomes more complex.

The most important this at this point is succinctness and readability, think a bunch of moving parts, not just 2-3 variables.
It's also important that it's supported by major browsers as of today (i.e at least ES5 supported).
I'm aware of the JS concatenation shorthand:
var x = 'Hello';
var y = 'world';
console.log(x + ', ' + y);

And of the String.concat function.
I'm looking for something a bit neater.
Ruby and Swift do it in an interesting way.
Ruby
var x = 'Hello'
var y = 'world'
print "#{x}, #{y}"

Swift
var x = "Hello"
var y = "world"
println("\(x), \(y)")

I was thinking that there might be something like that in JavaScript maybe something similar to sprintf.js.
Question

Can this be done without any third party library? If not, what can I use?

A: With ES6, you can use

*

*Template strings:
var username = 'craig';
console.log(`hello ${username}`);

ES5 and below:

*

*use the + operator
var username = 'craig';
var joined = 'hello ' + username;

*String's concat(..)
var username = 'craig';
var joined = 'hello '.concat(username);

Alternatively, use Array methods:

*

*join(..):
var username = 'craig';
var joined = ['hello', username].join(' ');

*Or even fancier, reduce(..) combined with any of the above:
var a = ['hello', 'world', 'and', 'the', 'milky', 'way'];
var b = a.reduce(function(pre, next) {
  return pre + ' ' + next;
});
console.log(b); // hello world and the milky way

A: I think replace() deserves mentioning here.
During some conditions, the replace method can serve you well when building strings. Specifically, obviously, when your injecting a dynamic part into an otherwise static string. Example:
var s = 'I am {0} today!';
var result = s.replace('{0}', 'hungry');
// result: 'I am hungry today!'

The placeholder which to replace can obviously be anything. I use "{0}", "{1}" etc out of habit from C#. It just needs to be unique enough not to occur in the string other than where intended.
So, provided we can fiddle with the string parts a bit, OPs example could be solved like this too:
var x = 'Hello {0}';
var y = 'World';
var result = x.replace('{0}', y);
// result: 'Hello World'. -Oh the magic of computing!

Reference for "replace":
https://www.w3schools.com/jsreF/jsref_replace.asp

A: You could use the concat function.
var hello = "Hello ";
var world = "world!";
var res = hello.concat(world);

A: You could use Coffeescript, it's made to make javascript code more concise.. For string concatenation, you could do something like this:
first_name = "Marty"
full_name = "#{first_name} McFly"
console.log full_name

Maybe you can start here to see what's offered by coffescript..

A: I'm disappointed that nobody in the other answers interpreted "best way" as "fastest way"...
I pulled the 2 examples from here and added str.join() and str.reduce() from nishanths's answer above. Here are my results on Firefox 77.0.1 on Linux.

Note: I discovered while testing these that if I place str = str.concat() and str += directly before or after each other, the second one always performs a fair bit better... So I ran these tests individually and commented the others out for the results...
Even still, they varied widely in speed if I reran them, so I measured 3 times for each.
1 character at a time:

*

*str = str.concat(): 841, 439, 956 ms / 1e7 concat()'s

*............str +=: 949, 1130, 664 ms / 1e7 +='s

*.........[].join(): 3350, 2911, 3522 ms / 1e7 characters in []

*.......[].reduce(): 3954, 4228, 4547 ms / 1e7 characters in []
26 character string at a time:

*

*str = str.concat(): 444, 744, 479 ms / 1e7 concat()'s

*............str +=: 1037, 473, 875 ms / 1e7 +='s

*.........[].join(): 2693, 3394, 3457 ms / 1e7 strings in []

*.......[].reduce(): 2782, 2770, 4520 ms / 1e7 strings in []

So, regardless of whether appending 1 character at a time or a string of 26 at a time:

*

*Clear winner: basically a tie between str = str.concat() and str +=

*Clear loser: [].reduce(), followed by [].join()

My code, easy to run in a browser console:

{
  console.clear();

  let concatMe = 'a';
  //let concatMe = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz';

  //[].join()
  {
    s = performance.now();
    let str = '', sArr = [];
    for (let i = 1e7; i > 0; --i) {
      sArr[i] = concatMe;
    }
    str = sArr.join('');
    e = performance.now();
    console.log(e - s);
    console.log('[].join(): ' + str);
  }

  //str +=
  {
    s = performance.now();
    let str = '';
    for (let i = 1e7; i > 0; --i) {
      str += concatMe;
    }
    e = performance.now();
    console.log(e - s);
    console.log('str +=: ' + str);
  }

  //[].reduce()
  {
    s = performance.now();
    let str = '', sArr = [];
    for (let i = 1e7; i > 0; --i) {
      sArr[i] = concatMe;
    }
    str = sArr.reduce(function(pre, next) {
      return pre + next;
    });
    e = performance.now();
    console.log(e - s);
    console.log('[].reduce(): ' + str);
  }

  //str = str.concat()
  {
    s = performance.now();
    let str = '';
    for (let i = 1e7; i > 0; --i) {
      str = str.concat(concatMe);
    }
    e = performance.now();
    console.log(e - s);
    console.log('str = str.concat(): ' + str);
  }

  'Done';
}

A: var descriptor = 'awesome';
console.log(`ES6 is ${descriptor}!`);

More: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/01/ES6-Template-Strings?hl=en

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Dec 03, 2012 · Incoterms – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The eighth published set of pre-defined terms, Incoterms 2010 defines 11 rules, …CPT – Carriage Paid To (named place of destination) The seller pays for carriage.
Guides » Legal » Child Labour Law & Regulations in India Child Labour Law & Regulations in India. Child labour deprives children of their childhood and is harmful to their physical and mental development.
Entrepreneur India - Industrial project consultant for new business startup. We provide Industrial Project Consultancy Services, Project Report and Technology Books.


Black progressives suffered major disillusionment with white progressives when our experiences of working with them revealed that they could want to be with us (even to be our sexual partners) without divesting of white supremacist thinking about blackness. We saw that they were often unable to let go the idea that whites are somehow better, smarter, more likely to be intellectuals, and even that they were kinder than black folks.
And this is the sense of the word "grammar" which our inaccurate student detests, and this is the sense of the word which every sensible tutor will maintain. His maxim is "a little, but well"; that is, really know what you say you know: know what you know and what you do not know; get one thing well before you go on to a second; try to ascertain what your words mean; when you read a sentence, picture it before your mind as a whole, take in the truth or information contained in it, express it in your own words, and, if it be important, commit it to the faithful memory. Again, compare one idea with another; adjust truths and facts; form them into one whole, or notice the obstacles which occur in doing so. This is the way to make progress; this is the way to arrive at results; not to swallow knowledge, but (according to the figure sometimes used) to masticate and digest it.
While the patriarchal boys in hip-hop crew may talk about keeping it real, there has been no musical culture with black men at the forefront of its creation that has been steeped in the politics of fantasy and denial as the more popular strands of hip-hop.
Everybody has a different idea of love. One girl I know said, "I knew he loved me when de didn't come in my mouth.


text:
Home News The 5 Safest Electric Cars You Can Buy
The 5 Safest Electric Cars You Can Buy
The revolution of electric driving is just around the corner. More and more manufacturers are launching new cars, and some are even offering electric versions of popular models they already sell. If you are looking for an electric car, but also put safety first, then this article is for you.
Today we bring you the list of the 5 safest electric cars you can buy.
1. Tesla Model Y 2020
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) tests vehicles for overall safety in the event of an accident.  NHTSA used a simple star rating, with five stars being the maximum awarded to a vehicle in each category being rated.  Five stars is also the maximum awarded to a vehicle's overall impact resistance.
Tesla's Model Y achieved a five-star global safety rating, NHTSA's Highest Safety Rating.
In addition, the Model Y has a five-star safety rating for the overall assessment of frontal impact (passenger and driver side), side crash and rollover test (with only 7.9% rollover risk).
According to the NHTSA website, the 2020 Model Y they tested also features standard forward collision warning technology and imminent collision braking.  These technologies help make Model Y a safe vehicle even if the driver is unable to react in time.
2. Tesla Model 3 AWD 2021 - the safest electric car
The Model 3 is also an extremely safe electric car.  It is the safest of all crash safety tests.  It achieves a five-star overall frontal impact rating, which combines the driver and passenger ratings into one score.
The Model 3 also passes a five-star side impact rating.  This EV also scores five stars in the rollover test, with a rollover risk of just 6.6% (even better than the Model Y).
The tested Model 3 also comes with the technology Forward Collision Warning and Dynamic Brake Supportwhich detects whether the driver is not exerting sufficient force on the brake pedal and is applying additional pressure in an emergency situation.
3. Nissan Leaf 2020
The Nissan Leaf is a relatively cheap electric car with a starting price of approximately € 27,000.  It is also a very safe vehicle, proving that there is no need to spend a lot of money to buy an extra safe electric car for everyday life.
Nissan Leaf gets a global safety rating NHTSA's Five Star.  In addition, it has a 4-star rating for frontal impact and 5-star for side impact.  It passed the rollover test with a four-star rating and a 10.7% rollover risk.
The Leaf doesn't perform as well as the Model 3 in some tests, but it's still excellent.  The rollover test isn't as robust as the Teslas, but anyway, the Nissan Leaf is an affordable and extremely safe option.
4. Audi e-tron 2022 - stylish electric car
Audi's range of electric cars offers some of the friendliest electric vehicles.  Take the e-tron for example. It is one of the most stylish EVs currently on sale..  The great thing about this Audi is that it not only looks great, but it is also a very safe car.  It was awarded a top Safety Pick+ by the IIHS.  The e-tron is certainly not cheap, with the 2023 model starting at around €70,000.
This machine is equipped with Audi's famous Quattro AWD system, that ensures inspiring and confident driving.  The e-tron also comes standard with Audi's pre-sense front.  This system can slow down the car if the vehicle detects that a collision is imminent.
The e-tron also comes standard with rear pre-sense, which prepares the vehicle to detect a rear-end collision.  The system closes the windows and fastens the front seat belts to increase passenger safety during a potential collision.
5. Ford Mustang Mach-E 2022
The Mustang Mach-E is a top IIHS safety choice.  This means the Mustang Mach-E looks good, offers great performance and is also very safe.  The Mach-E is probably the best looking electric on sale right now.
The only downside of Mach-E is that you cannot order the 2022 model.  Ford says that due to high demand for its electric, the Mach-E is no longer available to order.  Don't worry though;  You can still order the 2023 model.
Electric cars are just as safe as conventional cars
This list provides proof that the latest generation of electric vehicles is as safe as any conventional offering.  So if you're considering an electric car but have doubts about the safety of these vehicles, rest assured there's plenty of choice.
Read also...
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cheapest neighborhood is inland
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


For me, bringing atheism and humanism more into the mainstream marketplace of ideas has been one of the most important aspects of atheist activism. This is why I love being a freelance writer for Publishers Weekly. This gives me the opportunity in interview atheist and humanist authors and help them put atheist books and humanist books into that marketplace of ideas.
The faith picture of America is changing as more people each year reject traditional religious affiliations and publishers have taken note.
Magic and occult spiritually attract devout following in our modern scientific age and political climate.
If you value what I do, please consider supporting my work through Patreon and use my Amazon Affiliate link for all your online purchases.


text:
/* ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 * This file was automatically generated by SWIG (http://www.swig.org).
 * Version 3.0.7
 *
 * Do not make changes to this file unless you know what you are doing--modify
 * the SWIG interface file instead.
 * ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- */

package com.badlogic.gdx.physics.bullet.softbody;

import com.badlogic.gdx.physics.bullet.BulletBase;
import com.badlogic.gdx.physics.bullet.linearmath.*;
import com.badlogic.gdx.physics.bullet.collision.*;
import com.badlogic.gdx.physics.bullet.dynamics.*;
import com.badlogic.gdx.math.Vector3;
import com.badlogic.gdx.math.Quaternion;
import com.badlogic.gdx.math.Matrix3;
import com.badlogic.gdx.math.Matrix4;

public class SoftBodyNodeData extends BulletBase {
	private long swigCPtr;

	protected SoftBodyNodeData(final String className, long cPtr, boolean cMemoryOwn) {
		super(className, cPtr, cMemoryOwn);
		swigCPtr = cPtr;
	}

	/** Construct a new SoftBodyNodeData, normally you should not need this constructor it's intended for low-level usage. */
	public SoftBodyNodeData(long cPtr, boolean cMemoryOwn) {
		this("SoftBodyNodeData", cPtr, cMemoryOwn);
		construct();
	}

	@Override
	protected void reset(long cPtr, boolean cMemoryOwn) {
		if (!destroyed)
			destroy();
		super.reset(swigCPtr = cPtr, cMemoryOwn);
	}

	public static long getCPtr(SoftBodyNodeData obj) {
		return (obj == null) ? 0 : obj.swigCPtr;
	}

	@Override
	protected void finalize() throws Throwable {
		if (!destroyed)
			destroy();
		super.finalize();
	}

  @Override protected synchronized void delete() {
		if (swigCPtr != 0) {
			if (swigCMemOwn) {
				swigCMemOwn = false;
				SoftbodyJNI.delete_SoftBodyNodeData(swigCPtr);
			}
			swigCPtr = 0;
		}
		super.delete();
	}

  public void setMaterial(SoftBodyMaterialData value) {
    SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_material_set(swigCPtr, this, SoftBodyMaterialData.getCPtr(value), value);
  }

  public SoftBodyMaterialData getMaterial() {
    long cPtr = SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_material_get(swigCPtr, this);
    return (cPtr == 0) ? null : new SoftBodyMaterialData(cPtr, false);
  }

  public void setPosition(btVector3FloatData value) {
    SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_position_set(swigCPtr, this, btVector3FloatData.getCPtr(value), value);
  }

  public btVector3FloatData getPosition() {
    long cPtr = SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_position_get(swigCPtr, this);
    return (cPtr == 0) ? null : new btVector3FloatData(cPtr, false);
  }

  public void setPreviousPosition(btVector3FloatData value) {
    SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_previousPosition_set(swigCPtr, this, btVector3FloatData.getCPtr(value), value);
  }

  public btVector3FloatData getPreviousPosition() {
    long cPtr = SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_previousPosition_get(swigCPtr, this);
    return (cPtr == 0) ? null : new btVector3FloatData(cPtr, false);
  }

  public void setVelocity(btVector3FloatData value) {
    SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_velocity_set(swigCPtr, this, btVector3FloatData.getCPtr(value), value);
  }

  public btVector3FloatData getVelocity() {
    long cPtr = SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_velocity_get(swigCPtr, this);
    return (cPtr == 0) ? null : new btVector3FloatData(cPtr, false);
  }

  public void setAccumulatedForce(btVector3FloatData value) {
    SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_accumulatedForce_set(swigCPtr, this, btVector3FloatData.getCPtr(value), value);
  }

  public btVector3FloatData getAccumulatedForce() {
    long cPtr = SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_accumulatedForce_get(swigCPtr, this);
    return (cPtr == 0) ? null : new btVector3FloatData(cPtr, false);
  }

  public void setNormal(btVector3FloatData value) {
    SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_normal_set(swigCPtr, this, btVector3FloatData.getCPtr(value), value);
  }

  public btVector3FloatData getNormal() {
    long cPtr = SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_normal_get(swigCPtr, this);
    return (cPtr == 0) ? null : new btVector3FloatData(cPtr, false);
  }

  public void setInverseMass(float value) {
    SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_inverseMass_set(swigCPtr, this, value);
  }

  public float getInverseMass() {
    return SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_inverseMass_get(swigCPtr, this);
  }

  public void setArea(float value) {
    SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_area_set(swigCPtr, this, value);
  }

  public float getArea() {
    return SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_area_get(swigCPtr, this);
  }

  public void setAttach(int value) {
    SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_attach_set(swigCPtr, this, value);
  }

  public int getAttach() {
    return SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_attach_get(swigCPtr, this);
  }

  public void setPad(int value) {
    SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_pad_set(swigCPtr, this, value);
  }

  public int getPad() {
    return SoftbodyJNI.SoftBodyNodeData_pad_get(swigCPtr, this);
  }

  public SoftBodyNodeData() {
    this(SoftbodyJNI.new_SoftBodyNodeData(), true);
  }

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Watts Construction has developed, designed, and constructed facilities for industrial, commercial, office, retail and apartment community clients throughout the Inter-mountain West. With their personal, hands-on approach to each project, they provide unparalleled service and support to their clients. Moreover, with the addition of a full civil/design team, Watts Construction can deliver the highest level of expertise and value by giving the customer the comfort of one single entity to provide all development services.


text:
Home Immigration News Post-Brexit immigration rules revealed
Post-Brexit immigration rules revealed
Author: GRACE WHELAN
Skilled workers will have to enter the UK on temporary visas post-Brexit under proposals in a new immigration white paper.
Home secretary Sajid Javid has announced proposals for immigration after the UK leaves the European Union next year whereby skilled workers will be required to apply for 12-month visas that will provide access to the labour market but no benefits.
Workers under these visas will not be able to bring family members with them or settle in the UK, and will have a 12-month "cooling off" period after expiry.
The white paper proposals place no limit on the number of international students entering the UK, and extend the time they can stay after they complete their studies. If accepted, those who have studied for a bachelor's or master's degree will be granted six months to find employment. Those who have completed a PhD will be given 12 months.
Javid said: "Today's proposals are the biggest change to our immigration system in a generation.We are taking a skills-based approach to ensure we can attract the brightest and best migrants to the UK. These measures will boost our economy and benefit the British people."
Source: https://www.drapersonline.com/news/latest-news/post-brexit-immigration-rules-revealed/7033689.article?blocktitle=Latest-News&contentID=15725
UK ORGS SLAM "CLUELESS" POST-BREXIT IMMIGRATION PLAN
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Synopsys DesignWare ARC Sound IP Solution First to Support the Dynamic Resolution Adaptation Audio Standard
DesignWare ARC Sound DRA Decoder Supports the Chinese National High-Definition Audio Standard and Enables an Enhanced, High-Quality Audio Experience
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 11, 2011 -- Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNPS), a world leader in software and IP for semiconductor design, verification and manufacturing, today announced the availability of an optimized version of the Dynamic Resolution Adaptation (DRA) decoder software for the widely used DesignWare® ARC™ Sound AS211SFX and AS221BD audio processors. The DesignWare ARC Sound DRA decoder supports the Chinese National HD audio standard that is included in the Blu-ray™ Disc specification and is the first optimized implementation available as part of a comprehensive, commercial audio IP solution. The highly efficient AS211SFX and AS221BD audio processors require 18 MHz to run the optimized DRA decoder for Chinese Digital Broadcast (2.1 channel) and only 134 MHz for Blu-ray Disc (7.1 channel). The DesignWare ARC Sound DRA codec together with the DesignWare ARC Sound audio processors enable original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and system-on-chip (SoC) designers to deliver an enhanced, high-quality, high-definition audio experience in a wide variety of applications used in Chinese digital broadcasting, digital home theater systems, internet streaming and personal media players.
"As a leading manufacturer of high-definition multimedia solutions for automotive applications, it is essential that we are able to easily integrate IP into our designs to address the needs of emerging applications," said Christian Schwarz, project manager of Hirschmann Car Communication GmbH. "By leveraging Synopsys' DesignWare ARC Sound processors and optimized DRA decoder in our latest premium automotive TV receiver, we were able to extend our device's audio capabilities to support the domestic Chinese CMMB radio services."
"As the authorized certification body for the DRA audio standard, we recognize Synopsys' thorough understanding of this unique audio specification," said Nan Deng, Technology Development Director at Digital Wave Co., Ltd. "By providing an optimized version of the DRA codec that runs on the DesignWare ARC Sound AS211SFX and AS221BD audio processors, Synopsys enables OEMs and SoC designers to deliver HD audio for Chinese consumer electronic products."
Synopsys' DesignWare ARC Sound IP solution is designed by a unique combination of both processor architects and audio engineering professionals to deliver an undeniably high-quality listening experience. The single core AS211SFX audio processor incorporates a powerful dual-MAC DSP optimized for audio processing that minimizes the bandwidth and power consumption needed to support the full range of audio applications. The DesignWare ARC Sound AS221BD dual-core audio processor is optimized for HD audio SoCs targeting Blu-ray Disc and High Definition, Multi-Channel digital audio streaming applications. These highly configurable audio processors are easily integrated and can be optimized for each instance on an SoC. The DesignWare ARC Sound solution also includes a media software framework that provides a unified software interface to the extensive library of DesignWare ARC Sound audio codecs and audio post-processing functions. Synopsys' DesignWare ARC Sound IP is capable of delivering studio quality audio using Synopsys' Sonic Focus™ post-processing technology while simultaneously supporting long hours of playback time using Energy PRO active power management.
"The emerging Chinese audio markets and their associated standards, including DRA for Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting and Blu-ray Disc, are enabling the delivery of a high-quality audio experience in a growing number of applications," said John Koeter, vice president of marketing for IP and Systems at Synopsys. "As a leading provider of 32-bit processor cores with more than 700 million units shipped annually, Synopsys continues to help designers incorporate proven technology into emerging markets such as HD digital audio. Synopsys' DesignWare ARC Sound IP solution of silicon-proven audio processors, codecs and software provides designers with a comprehensive, end-to-end audio solution for a full range of audio standards."
DRA is an audio coding and decoding technology used to implement the Multi-channel Digital Audio Codec Specification, which was approved as China's electronic industry standard (SJ/T11368-2006) and National Audio Standard (GB/T 22726-2008). DRA is included in the Blu-ray Disc BD-ROM specification and was selected as the audio coding format for Chinese Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting (CMMB). The DesignWare ARC Sound audio processors and DRA decoder is the first commercial IP solution to support this standard, enabling 24-bit precision for all channels along with multichannel configuration support, including stereo and 5.1/6.1/7.1 surround. They also provide support for various sample rates from 8 kHz to 192 kHz. The DesignWare ARC Sound IP solution enables OEMs and SoC designers to implement HD audio in their designs, providing extended audio capabilities in applications supporting the unique audio requirements of the Chinese market.
The DesignWare ARC Sound DRA decoder, optimized for the AS211SFX and AS221BD audio processors, is available for early access customers now and is planned to be generally available in July 2011. The AS211SFX and AS221BD processors are available now. For more information, visit: http://www.synopsys.com/arc_audio.
About DesignWare IP
Synopsys is a leading provider of high-quality, silicon-proven IP solutions for SoC designs. The broad DesignWare IP portfolio includes complete interface IP solutions consisting of controllers, PHY and Verification IP for widely used protocols, analog IP, embedded memories, logic libraries, embedded test & repair IP and configurable processor cores. In addition, Synopsys offers SystemC™ transaction-level models to build virtual prototypes for rapid, pre-silicon development of software. With a robust IP development methodology, reuse tools, extensive investment in quality and comprehensive technical support, Synopsys enables designers to accelerate time-to-market and reduce integration risk. For more information on DesignWare IP, visit: http://www.synopsys.com/designware.
Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq:SNPS) is a world leader in electronic design automation (EDA), supplying the global electronics market with the software, intellectual property (IP) and services used in semiconductor design, verification and manufacturing. Synopsys' comprehensive, integrated portfolio of implementation, verification, IP, manufacturing and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) solutions helps address the key challenges designers and manufacturers face today, such as power and yield management, system-to-silicon verification and time-to-results. These technology-leading solutions help give Synopsys customers a competitive edge in bringing the best products to market quickly while reducing costs and schedule risk. Synopsys is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and has approximately 70 offices located throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Asia and India. Visit Synopsys online at http://www.synopsys.com.
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The U.S. Bomb's "Covert Action" is reviewed by Pastepunk.com
I have to give the U.S. BOMBS a lot of credit. Not only are most of the guys in this band probably old enough to be your father, they've been amazingly consistent, if not derivative, for the duration of their career, which now goes four albums deep on Hellcat, plus plenty of other side releases. "Covert Action" is more of the same mid-to-slow paced punk rock from these guys, with one new addition: a gnarly ska/dub sound on "The Gow." The U.S. BOMBS have always brought grit along with them on whatever release, and this style has been well saved with the Darian Rundall production quality. I've previously faulted this band for writing competent, but forgettable tunes, but such thumpers as "John Gottie" (sic), and the rampantly grueling "Croatia Breaks" linger around in my mind for days at a time. Carrying 13 songs in just over 30 minutes, the 'BOMBS don't waste any time in getting their struts across. Finally, the artwork on here is fabulous - and I especially dig the "docket folder" theme of the insert booklet to match the whole "top secret" thing.
While the mainstream world might all croon along to the same tune about the "return to rock" from THE WHITE STRIPES, THE HIVES, or THE LIBERTINES (the latter is actually worth the hype), it's the toe-tapping bastion of snarl that embodies "Covert Action" which gives it its punk rock pedigree. This disc might not fix my need for speed, nor it be a ground breaking release for a bunch of veterans, but it is what it is, and fans of the U.S. BOMBS should be ready with open arms.
-Jordan A. Baker
href='http://www.pastepunk.com' target='_blank'>www.pastepunk.com
New Thrice Album 'Palms' Is Out Now
The Menzingers 'Hello Exile' Out Now
Bad Religion's New Album 'Age of Unreason' Out Now


Dedicated To Helping Orphans Become Productive Adults Through Education And Mentoring.
We work within the State run Orphanages to disciple and help children. We have daily and weekly activities. We help with jobs, education, medical care, Orphanage support, transitioning. We have a Youth Center which also operates as an office and our Directors home.
Our future plans are to provide more permanant solutions for the Orphans. We believe a loving Christian home is God\'s best plan for children. We are working on encouraging the local Church to begin to become foster parents or adopt. We have recently started a program called Family Weekend where families at Church invite one or two Orphans to stay at their house for the weekend once or twice per month. We believe this will expose the Church to the needs of the Orphans with whom we work.


A limited edition LOGSAC t-shirt for a cause is out now for sale. This is basically the club's strategy to generate funds for conservation and rehabilitation of Sibulan River as an offshoot to GASA SA SUBA Sibulan River Conservation Project.
The t-shirt costs 165 each for LOGSAC members and 175 for non-members. Certain percentage of the proceeds will be used to purchase materials and other supplies for next year's LOGSAC Anniversary celebration Tree Growing at Sibulan River dated February 19, 2010.
For orders, please contact Mr. Julius R. Paner thru Mobile Phone number 09208567991 or email at logsac_adventure@yahoo.com. Please indicate the sizes of your orders and also have it paid upon order.


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Steven Bertoni Forbes Staff
Jared Kushner (Jamel Toppin for Forbes)
It's been one week since Donald Trump pulled off the biggest upset in modern political history, and his headquarters at Trump Tower in New York City is a 58-story, onyx-glassed lightning rod. Barricades, TV trucks and protesters frame a fortified Fifth Avenue. Armies of journalists and selfie-seeking tourists stalk Trump Tower's pink marble lobby, hoping to snap the next political power player who steps into view. Twenty-six floors up, in the same building where washed-up celebrities once battled for Trump's blessing on The Apprentice, the president-elect is choosing his Cabinet, and this contest contains all the twists and turns of his old reality show.
Winners will emerge shortly. But today's focus is on the biggest loser: New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who has just been fired from his role leading the transition, along with most of the people associated with him. The episode is being characterized as a "knife fight" that ends in a "Stalinesque purge."
The most compelling figure in this intrigue, however, wasn't in Trump Tower. Jared Kushner was three blocks south, high up in his own skyscraper, at 666 Fifth Avenue, where he oversees his family's Kushner Companies real estate empire. Trump's son-in-law, dressed in an impeccably tailored gray suit, sitting on a brown leather couch in his impeccably neat office, displays the impeccably polite manners that won the 35-year-old a dizzying number of influential friends even before he had gained the ear, and trust, of the new leader of the free world.
"Six months ago Governor Christie and I decided this election was much bigger than any differences we may have had in the past, and we worked very well together," he says with a shrug. "The media has speculated on a lot of different things, and since I don't talk to the press, they go as they go, but I was not behind pushing out him or his people."
The speculation was well-founded, given the story's Shakespearean twist: As a U.S. attorney in 2005, Christie jailed Kushner's father on tax evasion, election fraud and witness tampering charges. Revenge theories aside, the buzz around Kushner was directional and indicative. A year ago he had zero experience in politics and about as much interest in it. Suddenly he sits at its global center. Whether he plunged the dagger into Christie--Trump insiders insist the Bridgegate scandal did him in--is less important than the fact that he easily could have. And that power comes well-earned.
Kushner almost never speaks publicly--his chats with FORBES mark the first time he has talked about the Trump campaign or his role in it--but interviews with him and a dozen people around him and the Trump camp lead to an inescapable fact: The quiet, enigmatic young mogul delivered the presidency to the most fame-hungry, bombastic candidate in American history.
"It's hard to overstate and hard to summarize Jared's role in the campaign," says billionaire Peter Thiel, the only significant Silicon Valley figure to publicly back Trump. "If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer."
"Jared Kushner is the biggest surprise of the 2016 election," adds Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, who helped design the Clinton campaign's technology system. "Best I can tell, he actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources."
No resources at the beginning, perhaps. Underfunded throughout, for sure. But by running the Trump campaign--notably, its secret data operation--like a Silicon Valley startup, Kushner eventually tipped the states that swung the election. And he did so in manner that will change the way future elections will be won and lost. President Obama had unprecedented success in targeting, organizing and motivating voters. But a lot has changed in eight years. Specifically social media. Clinton did borrow from Obama's playbook but also leaned on traditional media. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, delved into message tailoring, sentiment manipulation and machine learning. The traditional campaign is dead, another victim of the unfiltered democracy of the Web--and Kushner, more than anyone not named Donald Trump, killed it.
That achievement, coupled with the personal trust Trump has in him, uniquely positions Kushner to be a power broker of the highest order for at least four years. "Every president I've ever known has one or two people he intuitively and structurally trusts," says former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who has known Trump socially for decades and is currently advising the president-elect on foreign policy issues. "I think Jared might be that person."
JARED KUSHNER'S ASCENT from Ivanka Trump's little-known husband to Donald Trump's campaign savior happened gradually. In the early days of the scrappy campaign, it was all hands on deck, with Kushner helping research policy positions on tax and trade. But as the campaign gained steam, other players began using him as a trusted conduit to an erratic candidate. "I helped facilitate a lot of relationships that wouldn't have happened otherwise," Kushner says, adding that people felt safe speaking with him, without risk of leaks. "People were being told in Washington that if they did any work for the Trump campaign, they would never be able to work in Republican politics again. I hired a great tax-policy expert who joined under two conditions: We couldn't tell anybody he worked for the campaign, and he was going to charge us double."
Kushner's role expanded as the Trump ticket gained traction--so did his enthusiasm. Kushner went all-in with Trump last November after seeing his father-in-law pack a raucous arena in Springfield, Illinois, on a Monday night. "People really saw hope in his message," he says. "They wanted the things that wouldn't have been obvious to a lot of people I would meet in the New York media world, the Upper East Side or at Robin Hood [Foundation] dinners." And so this Harvard-educated child of privilege put on a bright-red Make American Great Again hat and rolled up his sleeves.
A power vacuum awaited him at Trump Tower. When FORBES visited the Trump campaign floor in the skyscraper a few weeks before Kushner's Springfield epiphany, there was literally nothing there. No people--and no desks or chairs or computers awaiting the arrival of staffers. Just campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, spokesperson Hope Hicks and a strategy that centered on Trump making headline-grabbing statements, often by calling in to television shows, supplemented by a rally once or twice a week to provide the appearance of a traditional campaign. It was the epitome of the super-light startup: to see how little they could spend and still get the results they wanted.
Kushner stepped up to turn it into an actual campaign operation. Soon he was assembling a speech and policy team, handling Trump's schedule and managing the finances. "Donald kept saying, 'I don't want people getting rich off the campaign, and I want to make sure we are watching every dollar just like we would do in business.'"
That structure provided a baseline, though still a blip compared with Hillary Clinton's state-by-state machine. The decision that won Trump the presidency started on the return trip from that Springfield rally last November aboard his private 757, dubbed Trump Force One. Chatting over McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, Trump and Kushner talked about how the campaign was underutilizing social media. The candidate, in turn, asked his son-in-law to take over his Facebook initiatives.
Despite his itchy Twitter finger, Trump is a Luddite. He reportedly gets his news from print and television, and his version of e-mail is to handwrite a note that his assistant will scan and attach. Among those in his close circle, Kushner was the natural pick to create a modern campaign. Yes, like Trump he's primarily a real estate guy, but he had invested more broadly, including in media (in 2006 he bought the New York Observer) and digital commerce (he helped launch Cadre, an online marketplace for big real estate deals). More important, he knew the right crowd: co-investors in Cadre include Thiel and Alibaba's Jack Ma--and Kushner's younger brother, Josh, a formidable venture capitalist who also cofounded the $2.7 billion insurance unicorn Oscar Health.
Jared Kushner: The FORBES cover story
"I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff," Kushner says. "They gave me their subcontractors."
At first Kushner dabbled, engaging in what amounted to a beta test using Trump merchandise. "I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting," Kushner says. Synched with Trump's blunt, simple messaging, it worked. The Trump campaign went from selling $8,000 worth of hats and other items a day to $80,000, generating revenue, expanding the number of human billboards--and proving a concept. In another test, Kushner spent $160,000 to promote a series of low-tech policy videos of Trump talking straight into the camera that collectively generated more than 74 million views.
By June the GOP nomination secured, Kushner took over all data-driven efforts. Within three weeks, in a nondescript building outside San Antonio, he had built what would become a 100-person data hub designed to unify fundraising, messaging and targeting. Run by Brad Parscale, who had previously built small websites for the Trump Organization, this secret back office would drive every strategic decision during the final months of the campaign. "Our best people were mostly the ones who volunteered for me pro bono," Kushner says. "People from the business world, people from nontraditional backgrounds."
Kushner structured the operation with a focus on maximizing the return for every dollar spent. "We played Moneyball, asking ourselves which states will get the best ROI for the electoral vote," Kushner says. "I asked, How can we get Trump's message to that consumer for the least amount of cost?" FEC filings through mid-October indicate the Trump campaign spent roughly half as much as the Clinton campaign did.
Kushner and his father-in-law Donald Trump, America's President-Elect. (Photo: Taylor Hill/Getty... [+] Images)
Just as Trump's unorthodox style allowed him to win the Republican nomination while spending far less than his more traditional opponents, Kushner's lack of political experience became an advantage. Unschooled in traditional campaigning, he was able to look at the business of politics the way so many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have sized up other bloated industries.
Television and online advertising? Small and smaller. Twitter and Facebook would fuel the campaign, as key tools for not only spreading Trump's message but also targeting potential supporters, scraping massive amounts of constituent data and sensing shifts in sentiment in real time.
"We weren't afraid to make changes. We weren't afraid to fail. We tried to do things very cheaply, very quickly. And if it wasn't working, we would kill it quickly," Kushner says. "It meant making quick decisions, fixing things that were broken and scaling things that worked."
This wasn't a completely raw startup. Kushner's crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee's data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change. Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions--say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration. Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface.
Soon the data operation dictated every campaign decision: travel, fundraising, advertising, rally locations--even the topics of the speeches. "He put all the different pieces together," Parscale says. "And what's funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this little piece or that, they didn't pick up that it was all being orchestrated so well."
For fundraising they turned to machine learning, installing digital marketing companies on a trading floor to make them compete for business. Ineffective ads were killed in minutes, while successful ones scaled. The campaign was sending more than 100,000 uniquely tweaked ads to targeted voters each day. In the end, the richest person ever elected president, whose fundraising effort was rightly ridiculed at the beginning of the year, raised more than $250 million in four months--mostly from small donors.
As the election barreled toward its finale, Kushner's system, with its high margins and up-to-the-minute voter data, provided both ample cash and the insight on where to spend it. When the campaign registered the fact that momentum in Michigan and Pennsylvania was turning Trump's way, Kushner unleashed tailored TV ads, last-minute rallies and thousands of volunteers to knock on doors and make phone calls.
And until the final days of the campaign, he did all this without anyone on the outside knowing about it. For those who can't understand how Hillary Clinton could win the popular vote by at least 2 million yet lose handily in the electoral college, perhaps this provides some clarity. If the campaign's overarching sentiment was fear and anger, the deciding factor at the end was data and entrepreneurship.
"Jared understood the online world in a way the traditional media folks didn't. He managed to assemble a presidential campaign on a shoestring using new technology and won. That's a big deal," says Schmidt, the Google billionaire. "Remember all those articles about how they had no money, no people, organizational structure? Well, they won, and Jared ran it."
CONTROLLED, UNDERSTATED and calm, Jared Kushner couldn't be more different from his father-in-law in personality and style. Take Twitter. While Trump's impulsive tweeting to his 15.5 million followers reportedly forced his staff to withhold his phone during parts of the campaign, Kushner--who has had a verified account since April 2009--has never posted a single tweet.
And whereas Trump's office is wall-to-wall Donald, a memorabilia-stuffed shrine to ego, the headquarters for the Kushner Companies is sparse and sober. A leather-bound copy of Jewish teachings, the Pirkei Avot, sits on a wooden pedestal in the reception room, and identical silver mezuzahs adorn the side of each office door. The only decoration in his large, terraced boardroom is an oil painting of his grandparents, Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the U.S. after World War II. But enter Kushner's corner office and you see--under a painting with the words "Don't Panic" over a canvas of New York Observer pages--two critical commonalities that unite the pair: columns of real estate deal trophies and framed photos of Ivanka. If you are looking for a consistent ideology from either Kushner or Trump, it can be summarized in a word: family.
Kushner and his wife, businesswoman Ivanka Trump. (Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Jared and Ivanka met at a business lunch and started dating in 2007. During the courtship Kushner had met Donald only a few times in passing when, sensing the relationship was getting serious, he asked Trump for a meeting. Over lunch at the Trump Grill (which Trump briefly made a household name with his infamous taco bowl tweet), they discussed the couple's future. "I said, 'Ivanka and I are getting serious, and we're starting to go down that path,'" Kushner says and laughs.
"He said, 'You'd better be serious on this.'"
"Jared and my father initially bonded over a combination of me and real estate," Ivanka Trump says in her Trump Tower offices as dark-suited Secret Service agents stand watch in the halls. "There's a lot of parallels between Jared as a developer and my father in the early years of his development career."
Like Trump, Kushner grew up outside Manhattan: New Jersey in Kushner's case, versus Trump's Queens. Also like Trump, Kushner is the son of a man who created a real estate empire in his local market--Charles Kushner eventually controlled 25,000 apartments across the Northeast--and steeped his children in the family business. "My father never really believed in summer camp, so we'd come with him to the office," Kushner says. "We'd go look at jobs, work on construction sites. It taught us real work." Raised with three siblings in an observant Jewish home in Livingston, New Jersey, Kushner went to a private Jewish high school and then to Harvard (a 2006 book about college admissions would later single out Kushner as a prime example of how children of wealthy donors get preferential treatment; administrators quoted within that work later challenged its accuracy, calling it "distorted" and "false"). Next came New York University, for a joint J.D. and M.B.A.
His father was a huge supporter of Democrats, giving $1 million to the Democratic National Committee in 2002 and $90,000 to Hillary Clinton's Senate run in 2000, and Jared largely followed suit, with more than $60,000 to Democratic committees and $11,000 to Clinton. During grad school Kushner interned for Manhattan's longtime district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, before a family scandal upended his life. In 2004 Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions and witness tampering. The latter charge brought national tabloid attention. Angry that his brother-in-law was talking to prosecutors, Charles had paid a prostitute to entrap him--a tryst that he secretly taped and then mailed to his sister.
Just 24, Jared, as the elder son, suddenly found himself charged with keeping the family together. He saw his mother most days and flew to Alabama to visit his father in prison on most weekends. He also developed a deeper bond with his brother, Josh, who had just started Harvard when the scandal broke. Says Josh, who considers Jared his best friend: "He is the person that I turn to for guidance and support no matter the circumstance."
"The whole thing taught me not to worry about the things you can't control," Kushner says. "You can control how you react and can try to make things happen as you want them to. I focus on doing my best to ensure the outcomes. And when it doesn't go my way I have to work harder the next time."
That applied to the family business, too, which Kushner now led. To start fresh, he took aim at Manhattan, just as Trump did 40 years before, determined to play in America's most lucrative and competitive real estate market.
The timing couldn't have been worse. His first big purchase as CEO of the Kushner Companies, 666 Fifth, for a record-breaking $1.8 billion, closed in 2007--just in time for the financial crisis. Rents fell, leases broke, funding vanished. To stay solvent, Kushner sold 49% of the building's retail space to the Carlyle Group and others for $525 million and seemingly restructured every loan agreement possible, showing a willingness to pay more down the road for room to breathe in the short term. In the end he avoided the kind of bankruptcy maneuvers that Trump pulled in the 1990s and weathered the storm.
Kushner had learned a lesson. Rather than chase top-dollar, blue-chip addresses around New York, he would try to ride up with cooler, up-and-coming neighborhoods, which he has done to the tune of $14 billion worth of acquisitions and developments, in places like Manhattan's SoHo and East Village and Brooklyn's Dumbo. "Jared brings a youthful perspective, an innovative mind-set, to a very traditional industry that's comprised of predominantly 70-year-old men," Ivanka Trump says. He has also pushed into resurgent areas--Astoria, Queens, and Journal Square in Jersey City--that were once the stomping grounds of Fred Trump and Charles Kushner, respectively.
PART OF THE REASON Jared Kushner has engendered such public interest, besides the power he suddenly wields and the curiosity generated by his near-invisible media presence, is the paradoxes that he represents.
He brought the Silicon Valley ethos, which values openness and inclusiveness, to a campaign that promised closed borders, trade protection and religious exclusion. He is the scion of prodigious Democratic donors yet steered a Republican presidential campaign. A grandson of Holocaust survivors who serves a man who has advocated a ban on war refugees. A fact-driven lawyer whose chosen candidate called global warming a hoax, linked vaccines to autism and challenged President Obama's citizenship. A media mogul in a campaign stoked by fake news. A devout Jew advising a president-elect embraced by the alt-right and supported by the KKK.
Kushner's answers to these conflicts come down to one core conviction--his unflagging faith in Donald Trump. A faith that, ironically, given his role in the campaign, he defends with the "data" he's accumulated about the man over a decade-plus relationship.
Gallery: Donald Trump Through The Years
"If I know somebody and everyone else says that this person's a terrible person," he says, "I'm not going to start thinking that this person's a terrible person or disassociating myself, when my empirical data and experience is a lot more informed than many of the people casting these judgments. What would that say about me if I changed my view based on what other people think, as opposed to the facts that I actually know for myself?"
Regarding Trump's worldview: "I don't think it's very controversial in an election to become the president of the United States to say that your position is to put America first and to be nationalist as opposed to a globalist."
As for Trump's endless stream of statements that insulted and threatened Muslims, Mexicans, women, prisoners of war and U.S. generals, among others? "I just know a lot of the things that people try to attack him with are just not true or overblown or exaggerations. I know his character. I know who he is, and I obviously would not have supported him if I thought otherwise. If the country gives him a chance, they'll find he won't tolerate hateful rhetoric or behavior."
On his political affiliation, he defines himself thus: "To be determined. I haven't made a decision. Things are still evolving as they go." He adds: "There's some aspects of the Democrat Party that didn't speak to me, and there are some aspects of the Republican Party that didn't speak to me. People in the political world try to put you into different buckets based on what exists. I think Trump's creating his own bucket--a blend of what works and eliminating what doesn't work." (Though in using the GOP-favored pejorative "Democrat Party" over the traditional "Democratic Party," Kushner gives a hint about the contents of his bucket.)
The allegations of anti-Semitism hit closer to home. In July, Trump tweeted a graphic of Hillary Clinton against a background of dollar bills and a six-pointed star that contained the words "most corrupt candidate ever," an image that had allegedly originated on a white supremacist message board. Dana Schwartz, a reporter for Kushner's Observer, wrote a widely read piece for the paper's site urging her boss, given the prominence he places on his faith and family, to denounce the tweet. Kushner responded with an opinion piece that defended Trump using the same old line: that he knows Trump. "If even the slightest infraction against what the speech police have deemed correct speech is instantly shouted down with taunts of 'racist,' then what is left to condemn the actual racists?"
Kushner insists today that there will be no hate element in the Trump Administration, starting at the top. "You can't not be a racist for 69 years, then all of a sudden become a racist, right?" he says. "You can't not be an anti-Semite for 69 years and all of a sudden become an anti-Semite because you're running."
His reaction to fringe elements, like the KKK and the white nationalist alt-right, who have embraced Trump? "Trump has disavowed their support 25 times. He's renounced hatred, he's renounced bigotry, and he's renounced racism. I don't know if he could ever denounce them enough for some people." He then paraphrases a quote he attributes to Ronald Reagan: "Just because they support me doesn't mean that I support them."
Kushner's support extends to Steve Bannon, Trump's strategic advisor, who had been accused by his ex-wife of making anti-Semitic comments (he denies it) and whose website, Breitbart, has often published articles that dog-whistle racist, anti-Semitic sentiments. "Do you hold me accountable for every single thing that the Observer' s ever written, like they came from me?" Kushner says. "All I know about Steve is my experience working with him. He's an incredible Zionist and loves Israel. He was one of the leaders in the anti-divestiture campaign. And what I've seen from working together with him was somebody who did not fit the description that people are pushing on him. I choose to judge him based on my experience and seeing the job he's done, as opposed to what other people are saying about him."
And that seems to reflect how Kushner feels about friends upset by his role in electing someone who offends their values, to the point where, before the election, several wrote to him in fits of pique. "I call it an exfoliation. Anyone who was willing to change a friendship or not do business because of who somebody supports in politics is not somebody who has a lot of character.
"People are very fickle," he adds. "You have to find what you believe in, challenge your truths. And if you believe in something, even if it's unpopular, you have to push with it."
MANY OF THOSE fickle friends are likely to return now that Kushner, after masterminding Trump's stunning victory, has the ear of the future president. What he will do with that power is anyone's guess.
For now, Kushner plays coy: "There's a lot of people who have been asking me to get involved in a more official capacity. I just have to think about what that means for my family, for my business and make sure it'd be the right thing for a multitude of reasons."
It's unlikely that he can hold a formal position in the Trump White House. Nepotism laws established after President Kennedy made brother Bobby attorney general bar the president from giving government roles to relatives--including in-laws. Reports have stated that the administration is exploring every legal angle to get Kushner into the West Wing--including adding him as an unpaid advisor, though even that may be covered by the law, which was written to ensure fealty to the Constitution rather than the individual.
But it may be a moot point. With or without a government title or a $170,000 federal salary, there's no law that bans a president from seeking counsel from whomever he wants. It's clear America's tech and entrepreneurial leaders, who heavily backed Clinton and collectively denounced Trump, will use Kushner as a go-between and that Trump will lean on him just as heavily.
"I assume he'll be in the White House throughout the entire presidency," says News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch. "For the next four or eight years he'll be a strong voice, maybe even the strongest after the vice president."
Steven Bertoni
I cover the Forbes Under 30 franchise, technology, entrepreneurs, billionaires and VC's. When I get the chance I write about food and booze too. Previously I edited Forb...


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Father who drowned with children in hotel pool was London pastor
Dec 26th 2019 9:44AM
A British father who drowned along with two of his children in a swimming pool in the Costa del Sol on Christmas Eve was a Christian pastor.
Gabriel Diya, 52, his daughter Comfort Diya, nine, and his son Praise-Emmanuel Diya, 16, are understood to have died in the triple tragedy at the Club La Costa World holiday resort.
Reports suggest Comfort struggled in the water before her brother and father jumped in, in a failed attempt to rescue her.
A neighbour of the family told the PA news agency she was "really devastated" to learn of the deaths, describing the Diyas as "very religious, very friendly, very humble".
Speaking outside her home in Charlton, south-east London, Lara Akins, 59, added: "I still can't comprehend it, it's still shocking.
"They are so nice, that is why everybody is shocked... we are very friendly with each other."
Local reports said Spanish police were investigating the pool pump for a possible failure, with a report in Malaga's Diario Sur newspaper saying Comfort's swimming cap was found in the pool's suction system.
Inquiries have found "no concerns relating to the pool in question" and the incident appears to be a "tragic accident", according to hotel operator CLC World Resorts and Hotels.
In a statement the firm said: "The Guardia Civil have carried out a full investigation which found no concerns relating to the pool in question or procedures in place, which leaves us to believe this was a tragic accident which has left everyone surrounding the incident in shock."
Local freelance journalist Gerard Couzens told the BBC the pool has since re-opened after being given the all-clear by Spanish police.
Mr Diya's Facebook account lists him as a pastor at Open Heavens London, a Christian religious group with origins in Nigeria, based in Charlton.
In a post celebrating new year 2018, he wrote: "I am so grateful to the ALMIGHTY GOD, the OWNER of my life, my Maker, my Shield, my Exceeding Joy & my Sustainer for everything and for all things since all these years."
No-one from the organisation was immediately available to comment.
Emma Morris, 38, daughter of another neighbour of the Diyas, said her mother Pauline Morris, 64, knew them as "really nice people".
The hotel group said there had been no concerns about the pool (AP)
She told PA: "They were just a really nice family, they spoke to everyone here.
"It's so sad, it's such a shame."
A witness said Mr Diya's wife prayed as CPR was performed on her husband and children at the Mijas resort, near the town of Fuengirola, according to a report in the Mirror.
Father-of-three Josias Fletchman was quoted as saying: "The mum was praying for them to come back to life.
"She was calm. She was touching their bodies. She continued praying even after the ambulance people arrived and had stopped trying to revive them."
Another daughter was reportedly on the family holiday but unharmed.
It is understood Mr Diya and Comfort were British citizens, while Praise-Emmanuel was an American citizen.


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text:
Q: Simplifying Factorial This is my code for displaying factorial. But I think it's too long. How can I make my code shorter? Feedback will be appreciated. Thank you!
This is the sample output:
6! = 5*4*3*2*1 = 720
This is my code:
import java.io.*;
public class Factorial {

   public static void main (String args[]) throws IOException
   {
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));

int f = 1;

System.out.print("Enter number: ");
int num = Integer.parseInt(br.readLine());
int temp3 = num;
String temp [] = new String [num];

while (num >= 1)
{
    f = num * f;
    num = num - 1;
}

   for (int x=1; x<temp3; x++)
   {
    temp[x]= "" + Integer.toString(x);
   }

StringBuffer result = new StringBuffer();
for (int i = temp3 - 1; i >= 1; i--) {
    result.append(temp[i]);

    if (i > 1)
    {
        result.append("*");
    }

}

   System.out.print(temp3 + "! = " + result.toString() + " = " + f);

   }

}

A: Rather than making your code shorter, focus on readability
Some things that you need to fix before making it shorter

*

*Indendation

*Variable naming: temp, x, f etc. do not make sense

*Using correct data types: int will cause an overflow

Also try to write code yourself rather than copying snippets
for (int i = temp3 - 1; i >= 1; i--) {
    result.append(temp[i]);

    if (i > 1)
    {

As far as I understand, there are 2 types of people in this world

*

*Who start the curly braces on the same line as the condition

*Who start on the next line

How can you use both within a gap of 3 lines?


text:
Gilmore Girls' silly little dance contest has some serious repercussions
Erik Adams,
Noel Murray,
Donna Bowman,
Emily Todd VanDerWerff,
Phil Dyess-Nugent,
and Ryan McGee
Welcome to the TV Roundtable, where some of TV Club's writers tackle episodes that all deal with a central theme. The theme for the next eight installments is "competition."
"They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?" (Gilmore Girls, season 3, episode 7; originally aired 11/12/2002)
In which the Gilmores hop 'til they drop…
Erik Adams: It's telling that one of television's most revered half-hours is called "The Contest." For much of its existence, TV has been a medium driven by condensed storytelling, and few devices can catalyze the conflict necessary for such storytelling (or organically draw conflict out of existing characters) like a contest or competition that suddenly becomes the center of a show's universe—if only for one week. Scenarios like a fundraiser or an interoffice Olympiad instantly and painlessly raise a show's stakes, giving its characters a palpable focus for their wants and needs. The members of the Seinfeld gang want to prove they're "masters of their domain"; Jim Halpert needs to stave off the boredom of another day at Dunder Mifflin (and give himself a daylong chance to flirt with Pam); Lorelai Gilmore wants, just once, to win the annual Stars Hollow dance marathon.
A dance marathon is a very Gilmore Girls setting, and Lorelai's all-consuming desire to win the thing is a very Lorelai goal. And for a character-driven series like Amy Sherman-Palladino's perpetually undervalued small-town dramedy, a dance marathon is the ideal method of introducing a little structure into a series where the quips are often better defined than the stories. As such, it's ideal viewing for Gilmore Girls novices and experts alike. I can't recall if "They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?" is one of the first episodes I saw, but it's certainly the one that stood out from the afternoon-rerun cycle and loudly declared, "This show is onto something."
Re-watching the episode, the way Sherman-Palladino's script balances ongoing plots and one-off concerns is as staggering as any of the swing choreography (and the swooping camera moves to match it) from first-time Gilmore Girls director Kenny Ortega. Stars Hollow stands with Mayberry, Springfield, Wellsville, Dillon, and Pawnee as one of those TV towns that's more a living organism than a spot on the map, and the relationships that define our impression of the sleepy Connecticut town go a long way toward informing "They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?" The Main Street rivalry between town muckety-muck Taylor and loveable local sourpuss Luke gives us the cold-open negotiation in Luke's Diner; the dominance over the dance marathon by eccentric loser Kirk makes Lorelai strive for victory all the more; the long-standing tension between brooding bad boy Jess and boy-next-door Dean finally comes to a head in the waning hours of the dance marathon.
Ultimately, Jess and Dean's struggle for the affections of young Rory Gilmore is the competition whose outcome holds the most weight. Jess' arrival in Gilmore Girls' second season signaled a significant challenge to Rory and Dean's puppy-dog romance, and the extended love-triangle plot that ensued was a dance-marathon-like endurance test for the characters (and, occasionally, the viewers). After 24 hours in a pressure cooker where neither Jess nor Rory will cop to gazing longingly at one another, Dean calls the whole thing off. It's a hollow victory for Jess, however, as he can't be with Rory without letting down the girl he spent all night making out with to prove he didn't want to be with Rory. In the highly affecting epilogue of "They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?," where an exhausted mother and daughter prop each other up for one final dance—to the strains of Kirk's traditional victory anthem, the theme from Rocky—Rory's in tears because she's lost something far more important than a silly little dance contest.
In addition to the sudsy relationship material on the episode's surface, "They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They" has a lot of fun teasing out the type of customs bred by TV-world competitions like the Stars Hollow dance marathon. Sherman-Palladino's dialogue-heavy scripts lead to a unique balance of telling as well as showing, so while the introduction of the dance marathon requires a fair degree of expositional catch-up, there's a tremendously satisfying sense of payoff when the episode ticks off each of the boxes on Rory's "happens at every dance marathon" check list. Taylor does, in fact, lose his marbles around hour 15, kicking off a drowsy lament about never becoming a magician. Events like this show us a whole other side of characters we've come to know.
But the thing about tradition is that it often sets up lofty expectations that are rarely met; this dance marathon was never going to live up to the previous one, which would pale in comparison to the one before that. And that sense of compounding disappointment dovetails nicely with Lorelai's disappointment at losing, once more, to Kirk—a loss that is itself a type of tradition. Fortunately and unfortunately, we never get to see if a "They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?" sequel could go broken-toe-to-broken-toe with the original.
Are any of you newbies to the series? If so, I'm interested to hear if "They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?" does its job to immerse you in the world of Stars Hollow. And for those who've seen the episode before: Does the dance marathon loose any of its charm on rewatch? As funny as Taylor's magician fantasy is, Michael Winters' slap-happiness now comes off as a touch cartoonish.
Ryan McGee: Count me in as a newbie to the series. I know. Don't shoot me. I'm one of those people who have the weird experience of comparing this show to Bunheads, vs. the other way around. (Then again, my first encounter with Zach Gilford was on the première of Off The Map, so wrap your mind around that for a moment.)
I think you touch on something important about the idea of tradition superseding its actuality. The dance contest dovetails nicely with the subplot (which is summarily forgotten after the first half of the episode) concerning Paris' attempts to work over the weekend to complete the school newspaper's 75th-anniversary issue. Celebrating something like the 75th anniversary only makes sense if you don't think too closely about the manmade nature of that event. That's not to say every tradition breaks down upon close analysis. But traditions do depend on how much people invest importance in them.
Stars Hallow feels, by extension, as important as people perceive it to be. The city feels constructed, but in a way in which its denizens seek to maintain it as an enclave from the rest of the world. Having this dance contest is just one way to maintain the façade of the town's exceptional nature; perhaps "façade" is the wrong word, since that has negative connotations. But it's weird to hear Rory talk about New York City as Jess' home, especially because it's hard to believe New York City and Stars Hollow actually exist in the same universe, never mind geographically close to each other.
Still, what makes Stars Hollow work in my initial foray into the town is the way in which characters and events seem interrelated. Perhaps this is the first episode of the show to nail this, or perhaps it did it on a weekly basis. (That unfortunately isn't something upon which I can comment with authority.) But there's a tendency for shows in the time since Gilmore Girls to equate "world-building" with "sticking a shitload of people in disparate parts of the world and passing it off as a panorama." You can definitely build a successful show out of that latter model, but it takes either great skill as a writer or great patience as a viewer to make it work. I'd rather see world-building through constant overlapping of characters' interests in ways that produce unique obstacles that can only come from the intersection of seemingly unrelated interests. That's what made a show like Deadwood so successful, and what stood out so strongly in this episode.
Donna Bowman: Very little makes me happier these days than having Sherman-Palladino back on television. So it was entirely a joy to revisit Gilmore Girls, a reliable delight that is, as Erik said, something special and distinctive in the syndication spectrum. "They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?" would be a lovely introduction to the series for the way it's clear on what drives Lorelai—not that she's ever altogether explicable, but she does seem powered by an internal flywheel or gyroscope. As she careens through Stars Hollow, she absorbs as much of her eccentric surroundings' energy as she ricochets off them in bemused frustration.
Sherman-Palladino has always understood that the essence of comedy is specificity, and she peppers her scripts with so many indelible details that I'm tempted to undervalue them for their bounty. Just look at the mileage she gets out of Andrew repeating Liam Neeson's name several times in the space of a few seconds. Or the way dinner with Grandma becomes a riff on making your food talk.
The dance contest is all about the past. For the town, it's an old tradition; for Lorelai, it's the unmerited, infuriating streak of victories Kirk has racked up. And that's the optimal setting for a Sherman-Palladino script that relies, as she so often does, on references to anecdotes and memories. When sadistic Taylor (whose slavishness to the way things have always been done constitutes the kind of sputtering conservatism that can be rendered more harmless in this kind of small town, with these kind of low stakes) blows the air horn for the "runaround," Lorelai apologizes to dead-on-her-feet Rory: "I'm so, so sorry… Every year I block this part out." For Sherman-Palladino, every memory hides three or four deeper ones with contrary messages, and every character is a weekly opportunity for wholesale reinvention.
Phil Dyess-Nugent: I watched the show faithfully up until its final season—the one after Sherman-Palladino left—but I didn't specifically remember this episode from its title. When Erik picked an episode of Gilmore Girls as part of a roundtable devoted to the theme of "competition," my first reaction was that it sounded a little off. I never thought of Stars Hollow as a place where much competitive tension was expressed. Gilmore Girls is one of those shows—like Northern Exposure, which I liked a lot, and Picket Fences, which I never quite got the hang of—that trade on the appeal of a small town draped in whimsy. Characters can enjoy the low-pressure enticements of being part of a small community that still makes room for people with offbeat personalities and exotic cultural interests, like Rory's passion for books and her friend Lane's encyclopedic knowledge of the rock music that her mom won't allow in the house. These places are basically college campuses, except there are no classes, and nobody ever has to break the spell by graduating.
What I'd forgotten was how intense the romantic rivalry for Rory could get, and how badly it could churn up viewers' emotions. That image of Milo Ventimiglia sitting miserably in the stands, glowering with longing, sums up the aching heart of the show like nothing else, and reminds me that Rory's love life was as responsible as the mother-daughter bond for keeping the show from choking on its own cuteness, as it sometimes threatened to do. It also made me realize that Lorelai's romantic life, which was also a constant thread running through the show, was comparatively easy on the nerves, just because it was more a case of serial boyfriends without anyone smoldering on the sidelines—at least until she completely lost her goddamn mind and fell back into bed with that piece of shit Christopher. (Sorry, some wounds don't heal.) Of course, Luke was supposed to be smoldering, or at least keeping a warm torch for her, through most of the series, but I never knew anybody who didn't think that relationship was a non-starter. Which I was kind of grateful for. If that show had had two frustrated romantic triangles going at blast-furnace temperature at the same time, I'm not sure I could have taken it.
Noel Murray: As I recall, Donna and I watched the first four seasons of Gilmore Girls over the course of a single summer, one a day on ABC Family, finishing up right around the time the fifth season started. That was pretty much the perfect way to experience the show, in my opinion. Besides being Gilmore Girls' creative heyday—seasons two through four especially—the show just works best as a place to drop by every day, to catch up with friends and escape the real world for 44 minutes. Like Donna, I've been impressed by how quickly and (almost) completely Bunheads conjured that Stars Hollow feeling, though after re-watching this Gilmore Girls episode, I realized there was so much about the world of Stars Hollow I'd forgotten, like Taylor's insanely over-organized local events, and Lane's comprehensive rock fandom, and Babette just in general.
I hadn't forgotten Luke's pancakes, though. (The No. 1 way Gilmore Girls established itself as something of a fantasy world was the way Lorelai and Rory could pack away so many carbs without gaining a pound.) And I hadn't forgotten the way the show could use a comic situation to advance its more dramatic story arcs. Given what I know about the future direction of these characters' love lives, it was hard for me to get too caught up in the Jess-vs.-Dean drama here; and knowing the rumors about Lauren Graham and Scott Patterson's chilly on-set relationship, I'm less invested in the Luke-and-Lorelai flirtation now, too. (Though I still dig the way Luke expresses his affection for Lorelai through deeds, not words.)
But I love the way this episode uses the dance contest as a metaphor. It isn't heavy-handed about it, but there's still something perfect about all these characters feeling compelled to drive themselves to the point of collapse doing something that should be much more natural and romantic. (Taylor's air horn and Lorelai envying the way Kirk flips his partner are just two examples of how these characters' choices are driven by other people's demands.) And it's telling, too, that Lorelai and Rory are dancing with each other, while the men in their lives look on, shut out.
Plus it's a TV episode about a dance marathon. I mean, who does that? God bless Gilmore Girls.
EA: Who does that? None other than The Muppet Show, which in 1981 rightly picked up its final Emmy for Outstanding Writing In A Variety, Music, Or Comedy Program for the fifth-season episode where Gonzo The Great stages a dance marathon around Carol Burnett's visit to The Muppet Theater. It's a testament to The Muppet Show's love of old-timey, outdated entertainments, as well as the second point in my crackpot "Want to make a great episode of TV? Throw a dance marathon into it!" theory.
Todd VanDerWerff: Way back when we talked about The Andy Griffith Show, I said that my wife always jokes I grew up in Mayberry. Here's the thing, though: I always wished I could have grown up in Stars Hollow, Connecticut or Cicely, Alaska, or Everwood, Colorado, or one of those wonderful, too-good-to-be-true TV towns. (I actually worked in one for a summer, but that's a story for another time.) Gilmore Girls comes from that time when The WB could do no wrong, when it was one of the chief creative forces in television, and the network seemed like it had the perfect idea of what teenagers (and their parents) were interested in. Furthermore, this episode comes from what's probably the show's strongest season, though I'm also fond of the fifth, which has some of the show's best dramatic moments. (Sherman-Palladino is so renowned for her comedy skills that it's easy to forget how easily her stories could pack an emotional gut-punch.)
What's most impressive to me about this episode is the way the competition aspects of the story are simultaneously foregrounded and backgrounded. The dance marathon is highly important to the story, but it's also essentially just the way to get the story moving, the thing that's going on so the emotional conflicts can play out in front of it. What's most interesting to me this time through is that I'm not sure I buy Rory's badmouthing of Jess to Dean, so he's increasingly aware of her crush on the other guy. It feels a touch forced, as if Sherman-Palladino isn't sure how to bring all this out in the open. Then again, this is a show about people who talk and talk, who substitute conversation for everything else. In that respect, it makes perfect sense.
Stray observations:
EA: It's weird how time affects certain allusions—some get more relevant, like Andrew's vexation at the news that his date once went out with Liam Neeson. In the light of Neeson's semi-recent emergence as a bankable action star, that piece of biographical information becomes all the more intimidating.
RM: Good God, who isn't in this show? I knew about the leads, even without having seen it. But I didn't know Melissa McCarthy, Jared Padalecki, and Milo Ventimiglia were, too. It's hard not to imagine a spin-off in which Peter Petrelli travels back in time with Sam Winchester to prevent Beth Dawes from ever meeting Pete Campbell on Mad Men.
EA: …though they'd risk running into young Don Draper, who trips into the future (possibly using an inter-dimensional rift opened by Shelly Johnson when she left Twin Peaks for the Boston of Earth-Gilmore Girls) to wear bad three-button suits, invite Lorelai to a David Bowie concert, and bore her with an endless description of his Jaguar (!!!) in one of the episodes that precedes "They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?" on the season-three DVD set. Which is to say I totally blame Amy Sherman-Palladino for the way my brain is forever weaving intertextual TV quilts.
PDN: So long as other people are pointing to actors who were on this show before going on to bigger things, I'd just like to put in a kind word for Liza Weil, who I last saw on Scandal, which has maybe the best dramatic cast of any new show this year—though only Weil was able to come across as an actual (and interesting) human being. One thing I always admired about the show, and the actress, was the way Paris was introduced as a raging bitch on wheels, and then gradually, convincingly developed into one of Rory's best friends (and one of the show's most sympathetic characters) without ever backtracking on the qualities that made her seem dislikable at first glance. She's still young, to put it mildly, and I hope that this won't be the last show she's ever part of that a sane person would want to look at twice. (For those of us who followed Paris' character arc across six of Gilmore Girls' seven seasons, it's a treat to hear her wondering if a boy might possibly be interested in her when he could have his pick of all those "college girls" who are so much "more experienced," knowing that within a few years, she'll be spending Friday night in the hospital emergency room, waiting to learn whether Professor Michael York has survived their big date.)
NM: I miss Paris Geller, and the way she's compartmentalized her life to such a degree that she can shrug off a former crush-object by saying, "I already wrote his name in my revenge notebook."
NM: I know some folks are driven to distraction by Amy Sherman-Palladino's rapid-fire, quirky patter, but so long as her characters say things like "find a pirate to sit on" to people who repeat themselves, I'll be a fan.
NM: Even the defiant broodiness of Jess meets its match in Mrs. Kim, who glares him into calling her "ma'am."
NM: There's no location in Stars Hollow that the characters can't get to or from in under a minute.
TV: Choice Sookie line: "Wait 'til you see Jackson's suit. It makes me want to ration sugar."
Next week: Meredith Blake says "farewell" to the roundtable, but not before making us watch an episode of Laguna Beach. Then, Ryan McGee works us into a psychotic frenzy over "awesome" Veridian Dynamics merchandise with Better Off Ted's "Swag The Dog." (Available streaming on Netflix, here.)