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Nadia Comaneci


Sonic Palette


"Sonic Palette," a machine that paints by sound, a "fusion of man and machine -- the only positive statement in art that is being made today!"

Globe Trekker




Babi Yar, Ukraine

Amy Winehouse

Mapping Eliza

The Waste Land

Rebecca Jarvis


Rebecca Jarvis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born Rebecca Ann Jarvis
December 14, 1981 (age 31)
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Occupation Correspondent
Years active 2003–present
Title Financial journalist, former Reporter for CNBC

Rebecca Ann Jarvis (born December 14, 1981 in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is a financial journalist and was a finalist on Season 4 of The Apprentice. Jarvis graduated from the University of Chicago in 2003 and from St. Paul Academy and Summit School in 1999.


Jarvis is a daughter of Gail (née Marks) Jarvis and James T. Jarvis. Her father is a lawyer and business consultant in Chicago. Her mother is The Chicago Tribune’s nationally syndicated financial columnist.


Known to her friends as "Becky," Jarvis was one of Teen People's "20 Teens Who Will Change the World" in February 2000. She was honored for raising over $750,000 for her own non-profit children's charity - a project that also involved Al Gore and Colin Powell, which she set up at 15. She was also awarded a "Point of Light" for her advocacy of disenfranchised children and teens. During high school, Jarvis worked with the "National Youth Leadership Council" on their Youth Project Team, getting one of the few interviews granted by then Secretary of State Colin Powell while serving as an NYLC Youth Reporter at National Youth Summits.


The Apprentice

On the second week of The Apprentice 4, she broke her ankle while playing hockey as a task-winning reward. She was on crutches for the rest of the competition, which took 39 days to tape in the spring of 2005, but was fully able to walk by the time of the live season finale seven months later. On the season finale of the Apprentice, Randal Pinkett was hired instead of her. Donald Trump asked Randal if he should hire Rebecca as well and Randal replied that there should only be one Apprentice, and Trump let Randal's decision stand.

Professional career

Jarvis has worked in both investment banking and foreign currency trading, but left financial services to pursue a career in journalism. She’s written for publications ranging from Crain’s Chicago Business to Business 2.0 and is currently a governor on the board of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

On March 7, 2006, the business news channel CNBC announced it would be hiring Jarvis as an associate reporter for the network. She was a general assignment reporter, based at CNBC’s world headquarters and covered NASDAQ and the NYMEX. She last appeared on CNBC on September 18, 2009, and on October 21, 2009 TVNewser quoted CNBC spokesman Brian Steel as confirming that "Rebecca is no longer with CNBC, and we wish her the best."


Jarvis joined CBS News, primarily as a financial reporter, starting on April 1, 2010, and later became the co-anchor of CBS This Morning Saturday, as well as Business and Economics Correspondent for CBS News. On the March 30, 2013, broadcast of CBS This Morning Saturday, she announced that she was leaving CBS News, but did not say where she was going. On April 2, it was announced she was joining ABC News later that month.


Personal life

Jarvis married Matthew Hanson on January 28, 2012 at Mcnamara Alumni Center in Minnesota. They both are graduates of University of Chicago. She was proposed to on La Salle street in Chicago. Rabbi Barry Axler officiated the ceremony with the bridegroom’s father, the Rev. Craig Hanson, the lead pastor at Roseville Lutheran Church in Roseville, Minnesota, taking part.

Savion Glover

Tap


Gregory Hines, Savion Glover, Jimmy Slyde, Harold Nicholas, Steve Condos, Sammy Davis Jr., Sandman Simms, Bunny Briggs, and Arthur Duncan.

We are Family

The People's Filibuster

Peace Out, Voyager 1

Wired

700,000-Year-Old Horse Genome Shatters Record for Sequencing of Ancient DNA
BY JOE HANSON 06.26.13 1:30 PM



Two pieces of the 700,000-year-old horse metapodial bone, just before being extracted for ancient DNA. Credit: Ludovic Orlando

By piecing together the genetic information locked inside a frozen, fossilized bone, scientists have deciphered the complete genome of an extinct prehistoric horse that roamed the Yukon more than 700,000 years ago. The work rewrites the evolutionary history of the horse and smashes the previous record for the oldest complete genome ever sequenced. In doing so, it redefines how far back in time scientists can travel using DNA sequences as their guide.

Every time a cowboy throws a leg over the saddle and gallops off on his horse, he’s riding on top of 4 million years of evolutionary history. But this history is mostly a mystery. We know surprisingly little about how natural selection and thousands of years of selective breeding by humans have shaped these animals on the genetic scale.

Horses were once considered a textbook example for the smooth transition of one species into another, a perfect illustration of Darwin’s theories. Ancient equine species — dog-sized animals with five toes –  gradually evolved into towering, hooved thoroughbreds. Or so the story went. But with every fossil that was unearthed, a more tangled picture emerged.

Then DNA sequencing came along, allowing scientists to reconstruct how organisms change over time down to the resolution of single letters in the DNA code.

In the new study, a multinational team of scientists led by Ludovic Orlando and Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen used what’s become a common approach: comparing the DNA of  modern species to DNA recovered from fossil remains, in this case a fossil bone fragment found near Thistle Creek, Canada. By pushing DNA sequencing technology to its limits, they were able to rewind the evolutionary clock back further than ever before.



Late Pleistocene horse skull, Equus lambei, from the Klondike region, Yukon. Credit: D.G. Froese

The previous record for oldest genome was an 80,000-year-old ancient cousin of humans whose genome was sequenced from a single finger bone found in Siberia. The Thistle Creek horse appears to be nearly ten times as old, which provided new challenges for the scientists. DNA sequencing technology is constantly improving, but the information that researchers get in the end is only as good as the DNA that they start with. And that’s where scientists like Orlando are fighting a losing battle against nature.

Recent technological advances, several developed solely for this work, allowed the horse genome wranglers to read their DNA sequences with as little as a single molecule of starting material. And beefed up computing power meant they could rebuild genomes stretching billions of bases from chunks as small as 25 individual letters. “It is a 12.2 billion-piece jigsaw puzzle,” said Mike Bunce, a paleogeneticist at Murdoch University, who was not involved in the study.

Not only was the DNA heavily degraded, the bone itself had adopted a host of microbial residents, the tiny engines of decomposition, each full of their own DNA. The team again turned to powerful computer programs to pick out which sequences belonged to the horse and which belonged to the bacteria.

The final product of all this work was a complete rough draft sequence of the Thistle Creek horse’s genome.

In order to place the Thistle Creek Horse on the evolutionary timeline, the researchers compared its genome to those of a younger extinct species, several modern domestic horses, a donkey, and a wild Asian horse. The results of this comparison, reported today in Nature, push back the origin of the Equus lineage, which includes all living horses, zebras and donkeys, to a common ancestor living 4 million years ago.

As part of their analysis, the team sequenced the genome of the Przewalski’s horse, an endangered species native to the Mongolian steppes. Their results confirm that the Przewalski’s horse is Earth’s last remaining truly wild horse population, highlighting a critical need for species conservation. Finally, along the way, the researchers assembled the first complete genome of the donkey, a creature that seems forever doomed to life in the horse’s shadow.

The team also uncovered other chemical secrets locked within the Thistle Creek bone. Using machines designed to smash proteins into their amino acid building blocks, the researchers decoded the sequence of 73 prehistoric horse proteins. Orlando says they originally looked at the proteins as a way to gauge how well the sample had been preserved, but were surprised to find so many untouched. Studying the proteins that flowed through the bloodstream of this horse provides a snapshot of molecules in action taken three quarters of a million years ago.

But the most fascinating question raised by the work is this: How damaged and scarce can ancient DNA be before scientists will be unable to weave a genome from its frayed strands?

Last year, Bunce and colleagues squashed the dreams of Jurassic Park fans when they demonstrated the frustratingly short half-life of DNA. Every 521 years or so, about half the DNA in any particular sample will break down into its chemical components. Even when buried in permafrost, Earth’s cold-storage freezer, long DNA molecules become short ones and individual DNA bases are erased forever. While this spells a huge setback for scientists aiming clone extinct species, it doesn’t rule out sequencing extinct genomes.

Bunce predicts that in the coming years, there will be a race to sequence even more degraded prehistoric genomes using less DNA.



Przewalski horses, the last remaining species of wild horse, in Khomyntal, Western Mongolia. Photo: Claudia Feh, Association pour le cheval de Przewalski

Eddy Rubin, director of the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute, predicts a shift in how researchers study these ancient species. “DNA is really a very accurate predictor of what happened,” he says, “much more so than bony structures.” Rubin suggests that a warming climate and thawing permafrost means “there may be other samples that reside in friendly environments out there that could push back what we know about the origin of species.”

That includes our own. The ability to reconstruct fossil genomes is already revolutionizing the study of human origins.

Until recently, scientists trying to retrace our evolution have focused primarily on bones uncovered in tropical environments, such as the famous Australopithecus skeleton known as Lucy. But important human relatives like Neanderthals and Denisovans lived alongside our ancestors as far north as Siberia.

This new research provides a scaffold to build upon as genome detectives push the one million year threshold. And as DNA sequencing technology marches forward, geneticists are able to reach further back in time. But the Thistle Creek horse reminds us that decoding a DNA sequence only tells part of the story. Researchers around the world continue to analyze the genetics of horses past and present using this data as their guide, perhaps one day identifying the changes that molded modern horses.

As scientists amass more and more sequencing data from less and less starting material at an ever faster pace, they promise to keep their colleagues busy figuring out what it all means for many years to come.

Google, Saul Bass, Brubeck

Carl

Monsanto


Ray Kelly


Voting Rights Act

June 26, 1963



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner

Jelly doughnut misconception

There is a misconception that Kennedy made a risible error by saying Ich bin ein Berliner (emphasis added): the claim is made that Kennedy referred to himself not as a "citizen of Berlin" but as a "jelly doughnut", known in Berlin as a "Pfannkuchen" ("pancake") but as "Berliner" [8][9] in the north and west and as "Krapfen" in the south of Germany and in Austria. Kennedy should, supposedly, have said Ich bin Berliner to mean "I am a person from Berlin", and so adding the indefinite article ein to his statement implied he was a non-human Berliner, thus, "I am a jelly doughnut".[10] However, while the indefinite article ein is omitted when speaking of an individual's profession or residence, it is still necessary when speaking in a figurative sense as Kennedy did. Since the President was not literally from Berlin but only declaring his solidarity with its citizens, "Ich bin ein Berliner" was not only correct, but the only way to express what the President wanted to say.[10]

An early reference to this misconception appears in Len Deighton's spy novel Berlin Game, published in 1983, which contains the following passage, spoken by Bernard Samson:

'Ich bin ein Berliner,' I said. It was a joke. A Berliner is a doughnut. The day after President Kennedy made his famous proclamation, Berlin cartoonists had a field day with talking doughnuts.[11]

In Deighton's novel, Samson is an unreliable narrator and his words cannot necessarily be taken at face value. However The New York Times review of Deighton's novel appeared to treat Samson's remark as factual, and added the detail that Kennedy's audience found his remark funny:
Here is where President Kennedy announced, Ich bin ein Berliner, and thereby amused the city's populace because in the local parlance a Berliner is a doughnut.[12]

Four years later it found its way into a New York Times op-ed:

It's worth recalling, again, President John F. Kennedy's use of a German phrase while standing before the Berlin Wall. It would be great, his wordsmiths thought, for him to declare himself a symbolic citizen of Berlin. Hence, Ich bin ein Berliner. What they did not know, but could easily have found out, was that such citizens never refer to themselves as 'Berliners.' They reserve that term for a favorite confection often munched at breakfast. So, while they understood and appreciated the sentiments behind the President's impassioned declaration, the residents tittered among themselves when he exclaimed, literally, "I am a jelly-filled doughnut."

—William J. Miller, "I Am a Jelly-Filled Doughnut", The New York Times
The doughnut claim has since been repeated by media such as the BBC (by Alistair Cooke in his Letter from America program),[13] The Guardian,[14] MSNBC,[15] CNN,[16] Time magazine,[17] and The New York Times;[5] mentioned in several books about Germany written by English-speaking authors, including Norman Davies[18] and Kenneth C. Davis;[19] and used in the manual for the Speech Synthesis Markup Language.[20]

Tina Brown

Tina Brown's Must-Reads: On Media, The People, And Strife
by NPR STAFF
June 26, 2013 3:28 AM

Sometimes when there's a daily drumbeat of news — war, protest, unrest — it's good to find those moments to pause, dig deeper, and find layers of the story that are easy to miss.

Tina Brown, the editor of The Daily Beast, joins NPR's David Greene to help us do just that, as part of a recurring series Morning Edition calls Word of Mouth. This month, it's stories of global conflict and the media that — for good and for ill — cover those stories.

Her first pick comes from Foreign Affairs magazine. It's about Turkey's Prime Minister, Reccep Tayyip Erdogan, and how he's been manipulating news coverage of political unrest in that nation. It's entitled "The Turkish Media's Darkest Hour" — and as Brown notes, the article suggests that press freedom is very much at stake there.

"One of the most tangible outcomes of the protests in Turkey," Brown says, is the way they've laid bare "the full extent to which the Erdogan government there has brought the Turkish media to heel."

That regime has long had "a terrible record" on media freedom and free-speech issues, Brown notes. Dozens of journalists have been jailed, according to Reporters Without Borders, and as a result "the press has been absolutely cowed. But what happened in these demonstrations was that social media took over — social media would not be cowed.

"While the mainstream media was absolutely disgracing itself by not covering the riots" — at one point during the heat of things, Brown says scornfully, a Turkish broadcaster was showing nature footage of penguins — "social media ... was just alive with the truth of what was happening.

And what was happening, Brown suggests, might eventually add up to "the seeds of a revolution being sown."

"So, the mainstream media in the end was kind of shamed by social media — and now they, too, are having to think about how they cover all of this. ... Which is a very, very good outcome, frankly, for Turkey."

That's true despite what Brown and Foreign Affairs point out is a problematic conflict between the business interests of media conglomerates and their duty to cover the news for the public.

"Sheer self-interest," she says. "They want to be in business with the government, and so they don't want to offend everyone. ... They want to get contracts. A lot of these big media people own other things, other than newspapers, and [so] the papers become a kind of mouthpiece of the government so they can flatter the Erdogen regime and thereby get the other deals that they want.

"This has become a huge tipping point for the press in Turkey, and I'd like to feel that — I think all of us would like to feel — that this is a sign of the future, that actually the press will start to protect democracy, instead of become a tool of totalitarianism. ... [The Foreign Affairs article highlights] how important it is that this free press be allowed to flourish, and how social media has now made mainstream media stiffen its resolve — and grow a pair, frankly."

Brown's second pick is a New York Times Magazine article, "The Price of Loyalty in Syria," in which reporter Robert F. Worth looks at the story of that country's roiling politics from the viewpoint of the Alawites, the religious minority affiliated with embattled Syrian President Bashsar Assad. It's a perspective rarely employed by Western media.

"What he really discusses is how the rebels have been overly romanticized, perhaps, by the West," Brown explains. "He interviews some very, very interesting people in the piece, who strongly feel that the Western media has become too captive to the rebels. The whole idea of the Arab Spring — the righteousness of the street rising up against a brutally repressive regime, which it is.

"But the mainstream media ... have really failed to acknowledge ... how radically violent and jihadist the rebels became at a very early point," Brown says. "To demonstrate this, [Worth] interviews this very interesting woman, Aliaa, and he tells the story through the prism of her and her friend, a Sunni who's on the other side and who is anti-Assad."

The young women were the best of friends, Worth's article notes. But when Syria erupted into unrest and then civil war, they were forced apart. Their friendship completely broke down.

Again, social media plays a crucial role.

"Aliaa is tracing her friend's increasing radicalism on Facebook," Brown explains. "The Facebook posts begin to change. She starts [quoting] Islamic slogans. She marries a man in Iraq who posts a photograph of a black al-Qaida banner. And you see these close people were actually estranged by what happens. It's a very moving piece."

The article deftly evokes a certain measure of sympathy for both sides of a deeply complicated conflict, suggesting ultimately that both sides are aggressors and victims.

"As the main woman he interviews says, 'We used to live side by side,'" Brown says. "But now they've been driven apart by Assad. Because recognizing that this was a way to create division, and the way to create loyalty, he has exploited [the conflict]. So it's an Arab Spring that became a poison chalice for these people who just wanted social change, and suddenly find themselves in a hideous, brutal ethnic strife."

Brown's last selection is a book with a mouthful of a title: A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel: Murder, Money, and an Epic Power Struggle in China. It's written by Wenguang Huang, who follows an interesting case from a few years back about a British man, Neil Hayward, who was found dead in a hotel in China.

"At first it was said that he had died from excess alcohol," Brown explains. "But gradually, it emerged that in fact he had been poisoned — it was alleged by the wife of the party chief Bo Xilai."

"You can't suppress this kind of information anymore," Brown says. "[Even] in a country where the government operates in secrecy and the media serves as a mouthpiece, we now have Weibo, which is the Chinese Twitter, and which is tearing down the walls that block the information flow across the country."

And Weibo, as the book details, was telling the Chinese people that the Neil Hayward story wasn't what the government was saying it was — "that Bo Xilai was a despot ... that there was a power struggle going on in Beijing," as Brown puts it.

"It's a fascinating story that really gives you the atmosphere of a very scary modern China where you can declare somebody corrupt, you can have them thrown into jail, and they just disappear," she says. "And they very often die in custody. So this is the new stick to beat people with — to declare them corrupt. None of these so-called reforms that we're hearing about are, in any sense, what they seem."

The Princess Bride

Bugs the Beautician

Boy, that was some good peein'

Night of the Iguana

Hobson

Kevin

Christmas Day


"Christmas Day" (December 20, 2000)


The Anipals tap Doug's spine to extract his Christmas Cheer. After one of Chickie's sons helps to turn the cheer into powder, the Anipals snort it and get addicted to powdered Christmas cheer.

Jonathan Larson



Montgomery Clift


Born Yesterday



When We Grow Up

Mission Impossible

Lee Grant

The Kennedys





MISSING: Rusty the Panda

'Rusty The Panda' Is Missing From The National Zoo
by MARK MEMMOTT
June 24, 201312:47 PM

There's a red panda missing from the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., zoo officials announced Monday morning.

So if you're in the nation's capital, keep an eye out for Rusty. But don't approach him, they warn 

"Remember: red pandas are wild animals, & will bite if cornered or scared."

His most likely whereabouts:

"Red pandas typically spend the warm daytime hours resting, so it's likely Rusty is somewhere in or near the Zoo hiding in a tree."
What to look for:

— A little guy from "the mountains of Nepal, Myanmar, and central China" who probably weighs less than 20 pounds and is about 40 inches long from his head to the tip of his tail. (National Geographic)

— An "engaging, bamboo-eating" fellow who resembles a raccoon. (The National Zoo)

Oh, and he may have a smart phone or tablet. Following the trails blazed in 2011 by "Bronx Zoo Cobra" and "Bronx Zoo Peacock," a "Rusty the Panda" popped up Monday on Twitter, as did 

"@Rusty_thePanda."

@RustyThePanda's first tweet:

"Sorry @NationalZoo, it's just such a beautiful day out. I'm hitting the town! @BronxZoosCobra let's meet up?"

@Rusty_thePanda, if that is indeed his real name, seems to know a bit about Washington:

"Does anyone else think that Jay Carney and I kind of look alike? #pandasfromanothermother"

Bronx Zoo Cobra, by the way, was found sssafe and sssound.

Carlos Fuentes

Book News: The FBI Monitored Mexican Writer Carlos Fuentes
by ANNALISA QUINN
June 24, 2013 7:27 AM


The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

A recently released FBI file calls legendary Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes a "communist writer" and refers to a "long history of subversive connections." The dossier, which starts in the 1960s and spans decades, also reveals that the FBI had informants track his movements while in the U.S., and details the agency's attempts to delay and deny his visa applications. Asked whether Fuentes, who died last year, was a communist, his biographer and former colleague Julio Ortega told NPR via email: "Not at all! He was critical of Communism, and a close friend and supporte[r] of [Milan] Kundera [a writer whose works were banned in communist Czechoslovakia] in difficult times for him. It is true that Fuentes supported the Cuban revolution as well as the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, but because both were rooted in Latin American history of utopian will and emancipatory ideals." Fuentes became a vocal critic of Fidel Castro after the poet Heberto Padilla was arrested in Cuba, and he once called the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez a "tropical Mussolini." Fuentes was no less harsh toward the U.S. — he once turned down a teaching position at Columbia University in protest of American air attacks in Vietnam, writing that it would be "impossible to talk serenely about literature while American imperialists murder women and children." But in a 2006 interview, Fuentes said, "To call me anti-American is a stupendous lie, a calumny. I grew up in this country. When I was a little boy I shook the hand of Franklin Roosevelt, and I haven't washed it since."

Daniel Handler, the grown-up alter-ego of Lemony Snicket, speaks with NPR's Neal Conan about his latest book, The Dark: "I can't think of a story that doesn't have something terrible in it, otherwise it's dull."

Seven writers, including Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes and Will Self, reflect on failure for The Guardian. Self writes, "[T]o continue writing is to accept failure as simply a part of the experience — it's often said that all political lives end in failure, but all writing ones begin there, endure there, and then collapse into senescent incoherence."
The literary critic Terry Castle writes about Sylvia Plath for The New York Review of Books: "I find her tasteless, grisly — unbearable, in fact — precisely because, even five decades after her suicide, she and her corpse-infested verses hold on with such ghoulish tenacity. She seems never to tire of creating tragic inhuman mischief from beyond the grave."

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

A.S.A Harrison's The Silent Wife is a clean, understated thriller about a philandering husband and his murderous wife. The suspense comes not from twists and turns — you find out on page 2 that the placid, WASPy wife becomes a killer — but from the quiet force of her writing.

Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine was written by a psychoanalyst and a philosophy professor (who also happen to be married to each other). Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster take on the writings of Nietzsche, Lacan and other thinkers on Hamlet in this thoughtful, elegant work of criticism.

Homey Don't Play That

The Rockefellers


Watch The Rockefellers on PBS. See more from American Experience.

Desert Chase

A-ha

Coppola and Watson

Coppola And Watson On Teens, Fame And 'Bling'

Emma Watson, who shot to global fame as the level-headed, resourceful Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films, admits there's a certain irony in her playing a teenager who burgles the homes of celebrities.
Emma Watson, who shot to global fame as the level-headed, resourceful Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films, admits there's a certain irony in her playing a teenager who burgles the homes of celebrities.
Merrick Morton/A24
Sofia Coppola is no stranger to filmic explorations of fame, privilege and self-loathing in the modern age. In her newest movie, The Bling Ring, she considers the case of a gang of well-off L.A. teenagers whose obsession with celebrity took them to some unexpected places — including the homes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and other stars, where they stole millions of dollars worth of jewelry and clothes and shoes.
Emma Watson, who plays an airheaded gang member named Nicki, has been in the limelight since the age of 13; you'll know her as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films. So she has a few thoughts on the irony of being a celebrity playing a celebrity-targeting burglar.
"I definitely have my part in that ...tabloid culture, whether I like it or not," she tells NPR's Scott Simon. "I've been in the public eye for almost 10 years now. So there was something ... slightly ironic for me, being in the other seat. And it really made me look at it all in a new light. L.A. especially is ... fed so much of those images, so much fashion, so much reality TV, I can see how easy it could be to become obsessed."
But her mom and dad prepared her carefully for the pros and cons of notoriety," Watson says.
"My parents were always realistic with me about what fame meant, that basically it has these amazing upsides, opportunities, experiences," she says. "But at the same time, it restricts your freedom in some ways. I'm not able to just do whatever I want, spontaneously."
Watson and Coppola joined Weekend Edition to talk about teenage impulsivity, adapting a real-life event and telling a story that, as Coppola puts it, "is so contemporary; it's really a story that could only happen today."

Interview Highlights

Coppola on the specificity of Watson's accent
"I was so impressed that Emma didn't just do a California accent — that she got really specific with the Calabasas accent. All us Californians were really just blown away."
Watson on mastering that particular sound
"I watched hours of the Kardashians, and The Simple Life, and The Hills, and then I worked with a dialect coach, too. That was part of what was so fun for me — not just the accent, but also the way of speaking is so different. It's much more nasal and much more pronounced."
Watson on improvisation and preparation
"Sofia really encourages improvisation, so that meant I also had to think like the character. That's what the journaling was about, not just memorizing the lines; think like Nicki. I actually did a blog as Nicki, with a Tumblr page. It had pink leopard skin background, and tons of shoes."
Coppola on how audiences might respond
"I really tried to make the movie in the experience of the kids, so the audience goes along on the ride. And then by the end of the film, they can think about what's important to them. And I tried to not tell them what to think; I tried to leave it for the audience to decide how they feel about it."
Coppola on why her characters don't question their ringleader
"It's a gang mentality. I mean, if you remember anything about peer pressure, or being that age, you want to be part of the group, go along. You do things you'd never do now, on your own. So I think they were caught up in the excitement. ... No one wanted to be the drag."
Watson on the parenting choices that fueled her character's
"Nicki ... could come in at 4 in the morning, and the biggest reprimand she would get would be for her mother to say, 'Oh well, try better next time.' For Nicki there's never any real consequences in her life for anything that she does. And if you don't experience that in your home, then in the larger world, if you steal something, I just think — they genuinely believed there weren't going to be any real consequences."
Coppola on whether teens might get the wrong idea about 'Bling'
"I give teenagers more credit. I think that they're smarter and more sophisticated than people [think]. Of course they're not always thinking about the consequences — and that's what happens in the story. But, you know, we show what they did, and then they go to jail. And ... if you look into the real kids and see what happened to them, it's really sad."

People's Park

Photo of Christopher L.
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 9/25/2011
a piece of green, a little piece of green...

Some parks grow plants, and tree's of all shapes and sizes. Encircled with fresh lit lamps, and lights to guide your path...

From the dark  patches of abominable plant life, lay a man who's been there before.

behind the trees that have beheld the slaughter of mens dreams behind a picket line. Beneath the dirt, is the sweat stained earth of those who fought for her freedom.

The concrete entrapment that encircles this drug filled forest, serves as a platform from the desolate on lookers. The peoples park peekers. Water cries the park red. Lightning shaped cracks form the courts and paths round-about.

Inhaled dreams, and lines of centered vertigo abound.

National Velvet

Citizen Twain

James Gandolfini


*Sobs, just absolutely sobs*