#Dating 101: Current #GenZ college #students are uniquely clueless

Sad.... for all the social media they consume, GenZ has no social skills. 

Dating 101, for the Romantically Challenged Gen Z

Educators say the current generation of college students is uniquely bad at dating. One professor is taking matters into her own hands.

Peter Huynh, a 19-year-old college freshman, panicked when he learned the details of an unusual class assignment. As part of a lesson in "social courage," his professor instructed her students to ask someone of "legitimate romantic interest" out on a date. "I retched," says Mr. Huynh, who attends Boston College. 

He drew up a list of 10 fellow freshmen, with pros and cons for why he should ask each one out. He solicited advice from a teaching assistant. Then he decided on a cute girl in one of his classes whom he hardly knew. 

One evening after class, he pumped himself up. "I can do this. Just ask her. The worst thing she can say is no," he told himself. Quickly, he walked up to the young woman, tapped her on her shoulder, and blurted out: "Hey, do you want to go on a date?"

Welcome to Gen Z dating. Educators say the current generation in college is uniquely bad at romance. Online dating has created a (false) feeling of an endless buffet of romantic choices. And mobile technology—which this generation has never lived without—has been a security blanket of sorts that has kept them from developing solid in-person communication skills.

Read the rest here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/dating-101-for-the-romantically-challenged-gen-z-11552318023?

Bit.ly/MasterLiving

Gene Simmons of KISS on Obama, the UN, AND JUSTICE ! :-)

Gene Simmons of KISS on Obama, the UN, AND JUSTICE ! :-)




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrHf7HWtLDY&feature=player_embedded

Share

________________________ The MasterLiving Blog

Jewish Texts Lost in War Are Surfacing in New York

Jewish Texts Lost in War Are Surfacing in New York
NY Times
By SAM DOLNICK
March 7, 2011

In 1932, as the Nazis rose to power in Germany, a Jewish librarian in Frankfurt published a catalog of 15,000 books he had painstakingly collected for decades.

It listed the key texts of a groundbreaking field called the Science of Judaism, in which scholars analyzed the religion’s philosophy and culture as they would study those of ancient Greece or Rome. The school of thought became the foundation for modern Jewish studies around the world.

In the tumult of war, great chunks of the collection vanished. Now, librarians an ocean away have determined that most of the missing titles have been sitting for years on the crowded shelves of the Leo Baeck Institute, a Manhattan center dedicated to preserving German Jewish culture.

The story of how the hundreds of tattered, cloth-bound books with esoteric German titles ended up in New York includes impossible escapes, careful scholarship and some very heavy suitcases. And while the exact trails of many of the volumes remain murky, they wind through book-lined apartments on the Upper West Side, across a 97-year-old woman’s cluttered coffee table and into a library’s cavernous stacks.

For Jewish scholars, the collection of Science of Judaism texts (in German, Wissenschaft des Judentums) is a touchstone marking the emergence of Jewish tradition as a philosophy and culture worthy of academic study.

The Curious Journey Of Curious George

The Curious Journey Of Curious George
Intelligent Life
curiousgeorge.jpg


The little storybook monkey had many big adventures, but none so dramatic as what his German Jewish creators experienced, writes Erica Grieder ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE
The little monkey had a happy life in Africa—eating bananas, swinging on vines. When he was captured, by a man in a yellow hat, his distress was written on his face. He gaped at his body, clearly shocked to find it trapped in a brown sack, winched at the neck. But the little monkey quickly recovered his equanimity. By the time he boarded the rowboat, he was sad to be leaving Africa, but a little curious, too.

Thus began the adventures of Curious George, one of the most popular and enduring children’s characters of all time. During the course of seven original stories by H.A. and Margret Rey, he moved to America, joined the circus, and became an astronaut. Those are big adventures for a little monkey. But none was quite as dramatic as what had happened to his creators in real life. “Curious George Saves the Day”, an exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco through March 13th, makes that much clear.

Hans Augusto Reyersbach and Margarete Waldstein were German Jews from Hamburg. Hans, born in 1898, lived near the zoo and taught himself to draw there (also, how to bark like a seal). After the first world war he tried to scrape together a living drawing posters for the circus, but soon packed up and moved to Rio de Janeiro. He was there, selling bathtubs, when Margarete arrived. She was working as a photographer, and knew Hans as a family friend.

Hans and Margarete married in 1935, and shortened their name to make it easier in Portuguese. The next year, they packed up their pet marmosets for a honeymoon in Paris. Louise Borden, in her short biography of the couple, mentions that the marmosets died during the cold and rainy crossing, even though Margarete knitted them a pair of sweaters.

They planned to stay for two weeks. That turned into four years. The Reys, working together, were becoming established as the authors of children’s books. He drew the pictures, and she wrote the text (and occasionally modelled the animal poses). The monkey who would become world-famous made his first appearance as Fifi, in stories about a giraffe called Raffy who made friends with nine little monkeys. There was a brave one, a strong one, a good one; all were without tails, the Reys explained, because the illustrations were already cluttered with the monkeys and the gangly giraffe. Fifi was the curious and clever one. The Reys decided he should have his own book.

As the decade drew to a close, no Jews in Europe felt safe. The Reys were working, but in letters to his publisher H.A. made it clear that progress had slowed. In September 1939 the couple left Paris for the Chateau Feuga, tucked away in the Dordogne region. 'It feels ridiculous to be thinking about children's books,' wrote H.A. Rey. At one point French police turned up at the castle—they were suspicious about what the strangers were up to—but finding the illustrations scattered around, left them in peace.

The Reys returned to Paris several months later to find that the situation had grown more ominous. Refugees were streaming into Paris, and streaming out for safer destinations farther south. Ms Borden describes the preparations the Reys made for their escape: they tried to buy bicycles, but the only one they could find was a broken tandem. Hans bought spare parts, and spent an anxious few days fixing up a couple of single bikes. On June 12th 1940, the couple left Paris. The Nazis arrived less than two days later.

The 727 that Vanished | History of Flight | Air & Space Magazine

The 727 that Vanished A case pursued by the FBI, the CIA, the U.S. Departments of State and Homeland Security, CENTCOM, and the sister of Ben Padilla. By Tim Wright Air & Space Magazine, September 01, 2010 Seven years after her brother disappeared from Quatro de Fevereiro International Airport in Angola, Benita Padilla-Kirkland is trying to persuade the FBI to re-open his case. She believes she has the “new information” agents told her they require. But she suspects that the agency already has more information than agents will admit to. Kirkland’s brother, Ben Charles Padilla, a certified flight engineer, aircraft mechanic, and private pilot, disappeared while working in the Angolan capital, Luanda, for Florida-based Aerospace Sales and Leasing. On May 25, 2003, shortly before sunset, Padilla boarded the company’s Boeing 727-223, tail number N844AA. With him was a helper he had recently hired, John Mikel Mutantu, from the Republic of the Congo. The two had been working with Angolan mechanics to return the 727 to flight-ready status so they could reclaim it from a business deal gone bad, but neither could fly it. Mutantu was not a pilot, and Padilla had only a private pilot’s license. A 727 ordinarily requires three trained aircrew. According to press reports, the aircraft began taxiing with no communication between the crew and the tower; maneuvering erratically, it entered a runway without clearance. With its lights off and its transponder not transmitting, 844AA took off to the southwest, and headed out over the Atlantic Ocean. The 727 and the two men have not been seen since. Who was flying 844AA? Had something happened to make Padilla take that desperate chance? Or was someone waiting inside the airplane? Leased to deliver diesel fuel to diamond mines, the 727 carried 10 500-gallon fuel tanks and a few passenger seats in its cabin. Less than two years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the 727’s freakish departure triggered a frantic search by U.S. security organizations for what intelligence sources said could have been a flying bomb. Retired U.S. Marine General Mastin Robeson, commander of U.S. forces in the Horn of Africa when 844AA went missing, says word of the 727 “came up through the intelligence network.” According to Robeson, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) considered moving U.S. fighter aircraft to Djibouti on the Red Sea coast, where the Combined Joint Task Force shares a base with the French military. Robeson continues: “It was never [clear] whether it was stolen for insurance purposes&hellipby the owners, or whether it was stolen with the intent to make it available to unsavory characters, or whether it was a deliberate concerted terrorist attempt. There was speculation of all three.” Speculation that the theft of 844AA posed a terrorist threat ended, though it’s unclear why. Perhaps National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency technicians saw signs of a crash in satellite imagery—debris or an oil slick in the Atlantic, for example—or evidence that a large aircraft had landed on one of a half-dozen unpaved, 8,000-foot runways in the Congo, north of Angola. Agency spokesperson Susan Meisner would not comment, saying that the NGIA was not the lead agency in the case. (A CIA spokesperson also declined comment, as did a spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security. FBI agents also refused comment, citing national security concerns.) Perhaps the speculation ended more gradually, after weeks without clues or sightings stretched into months. The disturbed hornet’s nest of a global security alert—the searches, bulletins, and interrogations—quieted, and in 2005, the FBI closed its case. I have filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the CIA and FBI and have followed in at least some of the FBI’s footsteps, interviewing the people who flew 844AA to Angola and worked with it there, hoping to understand how a 727 could just disappear. “IT REALLY WAS in beautiful condition,” Keith Irwin says of the airliner he acquired in Miami in February 2002. Irwin, 57, a South African entrepreneur who ran a series of information technology companies and, until 2000, a small tourist airline with flights from South Africa to Mozambique, had come to Miami to pick up a different aircraft altogether. Representing a joint venture with a South African company called Cargo Air Transport Systems, Irwin had arranged to lease a 727 and two flight crews—pilot, first officer, and flight engineer—for a year. The air transport company had signed a contract to supply fuel to diamond mines in Angola, where a long civil war had made transporting goods by road almost impossible. The 727, therefore, was to have been delivered with fuel tanks installed in the cabin. The joint venture was backed by a single investor, who had deposited $450,000 in a U.S. bank. Irwin’s job was to manage the flight operations, but the deal for the airplane fell through. Irwin ended up with fuel tanks and no airplane. That failure stranded six crewmen who had assembled in Miami. “The guys then were desperate for work,” says Irwin. “Most of those guys had not flown in a long time because of the 9/11 story. I said, ‘Look, I can take you on if we can find another aircraft.’ ” And Irwin met Maury Joseph, president of Aerospace Sales and Leasing, Inc. Joseph owned three 727s that had recently been retired by American Airlines. “All three aircraft were almost in mint condition,” says Irwin. “American Airlines had a very good maintenance program.” New deal: Joseph sold 844AA to Irwin for $1 million and change. According to his records, he received a down payment of $125,000, and says he stipulated that the balance be paid within 30 days. He agreed to remove the passenger seats from the cabin and to allow Irwin to take the airliner to Africa. Irwin says he cannot remember the details of the agreement, but recalled it to be a lease arrangement. In any case, the joint venture made only two payments and defaulted. Though the two men now differ over the terms of the contract, they agree on one detail: As a condition of the agreement, Irwin was required to take along one of Joseph’s employees, Mike Gabriel, whose job was to make sure that the deal was concluded. “I gave Mike $10,000 and told him to fly with them,” says Joseph. “Stay with the plane till you get the money, and then come on home, and if not, bring the plane home.” On February 28, 2002, with most of the passenger seats removed and the 10 fuel tanks loaded, 844AA, still in the livery of American Airlines, with a blue stripe down the side and an AA logo fading on its tail, took off for Africa. Because Irwin’s partners had not arranged a landing permit, it took two weeks for the crew to make their way to Quatro de Fevereiro International Airport, where they arrived on March 14. Irwin, who had not worked in Angola before, realized immediately that the deal was in trouble. The company hiring his partners for deliveries, Kuwachi Dundo, was supposed to pay $220,000 when the airplane and crew landed, but instead the company’s representative made excuses. (Irwin lost almost $140,000 in the first deal and had burned through the rest of the $450,000 by March.) The crew endured accommodations in a dismal apartment without electricity or drinkable water, near an open sewer. (Gabriel and Irwin didn’t stay with the crew; they had rented an apartment in the back of a house owned by an Angolan air force general.) The only one of the men not troubled by the circumstances they found in Angola was Mike Gabriel. Gabriel, a dealer in aircraft parts and engines, had spent a considerable amount of time in West Africa, and was accustomed to the AK-47s the men saw everywhere, including stacked up behind the bar of a club they frequented. Most worrisome to the crew was that they were required to surrender their passports on arrival. Irwin explains that Kuwachi needed the passports to obtain Angolan licenses for the pilots and flight engineers. “I was scared to death. I really thought I was going to die,” says Art Powell, one of the flight engineers with the project. Powell had been to Angola before and had spent a year working in Nairobi, Kenya, but this experience was different. He felt intimidated by the people who had hired the crew for the fuel-delivery job. His anxiety was intensified by the presence of a local “helper” who toted an AK-47. The helper was a guard whom Mike Gabriel says he hired because the crew repeatedly voiced concerns about safety. When Kuwachi got wind of the crews’ unrest (several crew members have admitted that they were planning to steal the aircraft to escape to South Africa or return to the States), the company refused to return the passports. Irwin and members of the crew went to the U.S. Embassy; only then were the passports returned. By Angolan regulations, Irwin says, 844AA was controlled by the clients who hired it. Prohibited from flying the aircraft out of the country, Irwin booked airline seats and flew the crew members to South Africa. From there, two of the men immediately flew home to the United States. One says he is still owed $17,000. The other four crewmen, still hoping for the money they’d been promised, stayed on. By April, Irwin was extricating himself from the deal made by Cargo Air Transport Systems and had found a new backer, an Angolan who arranged deliveries for a different client. Irwin and the remaining crew returned to Luanda and began flying the shipments for the new company. Mike Gabriel placed the total number of flights made at 17. “It’s the most dangerous flying in the world,” says a crewman who asked that his name be withheld because he fears for his career. A U.S. Air Force veteran, he likened the deliveries to flying into a combat zone. When they approached the airfields, the crew tried to stay at an altitude above small-arms fire for as long as possible, then spiraled down to land. “I’ve been a [flight deck crew member] for 30 years,” he says. “For me, it was an opportunity to make a couple of bucks... and when everything started falling apart, I probably hung on twice as long as common sense dictated. But I had too much invested at that point to bail out.” Many of the runways, says Mike Gabriel, aren’t paved and aren’t like the ones U.S. crews are accustomed to. “On some, you land uphill, then go downhill, then uphill again,” he says. At one airstrip, the anonymous crewman says, just before 844AA arrived, a 727 flying for a competing company crashed on landing and skidded off the runway. Although the crew survived, he says, some local residents were killed. “We gave [the other flight crew] a lift out of there but not before going over to their airplane and stealing some parts that we needed. That’s when I decided it was time to go home.” Before he left, he says, a “big African showed up with a briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills. It was payday.” Besides paying the crew, the money was supposed to pay off accumulated airport fees and fuel costs. “After that,” the crewman says, “I created a family emergency&hellip. I said, ‘My mother is sick.’ ” He promised he’d return in two weeks and left. “I had no intentions of going back, of course. I didn’t get anywhere near full pay, but I got enough that I could pay my bills and make it not completely worthless.” By the end of April, all of the Americans except Mike Gabriel had left. Irwin hired a local crew and continued to deliver fuel to the mines, but he was ready to leave too. The civil war in Angola had ended. Competition among fuel haulers, Irwin says, had intensified, and he was growing more uncomfortable with the delivery deals. His partners were claiming part ownership of the aircraft, but Maury Joseph had not been paid. Joseph, meanwhile, sent a crew to swap an engine from the 727. Finally, Irwin says, he was being followed—by a local man named Antonio, who, Irwin believes, was working for one of his partners. “I would turn around,” Irwin says, “and spot Antonio watching me from a car.” Irwin began wedging a chair under the door handle of his hotel room “just like you see in the movies.” One night, he heard a key card slide into the slot on the door. The lock released. “I started yelling and whoever it was ran,” he says. The hotel security guards questioned the night clerk and learned that he had accepted a bribe to provide the key card. Irwin left the country the next day and didn’t go back. Maury Joseph fired Mike Gabriel some time that spring. “He kept convincing me that next week, next month…,” Joseph says, referring to the outstanding balance owed on the airplane. In May 2002, the only part of the original 844AA project left at the Luanda airport was 844AA. THE SON OF A FLORIDA MILLWRIGHT, Ben Charles Padilla Jr. was always mechanically gifted, says sister Benita Padilla-Kirkland, and from the time he was a boy, he loved airplanes. In his mid-20s he learned to fly and became certified as an airframe-and-powerplant mechanic. He lived in south Florida with two children, one his own, and a fiancée of 15 years. (Efforts to contact her were unsuccessful.) Though the two weren’t married, Padilla gave her power of attorney in his absence and made her the executor of his estate, according to Padilla-Kirkland, and left her almost everything in his will. “He certainly knew the airplane,” says Maury Joseph. Padilla was a freelancer, who had worked for Joseph on two jobs before traveling to Angola to repossess 844AA. Padilla had worked extensively in Africa. He helped Joseph ferry a 727 to Nigeria for a sale and during the negotiations stayed to explain the aircraft systems. “If you said, ‘Go to Cambodia and do this’ or ‘Go to Indonesia and do this’ or ‘Go to South America and do this’ he would do it. [When in Nigeria] I was with Ben daily for a month or more,” says Joseph. “You become fairly close to somebody when you’re with them day and night.” Joseph trusted him. But another employer formed a different opinion. Jeff Swain, who works near Miami in international aircraft sales and leasing, had hired Padilla in the late 1990s for an airline he was operating in Indonesia—and fired him. “We had certain standards of conduct we expected from flight engineers,” Swain says, adding, when pressed, “He was too involved in chasing the local girls. It was an unstructured environment, and he just went bad.” Swain says that after Padilla was fired, he stayed on in Indonesia for two months and racked up a $10,000 bill that he told the hotel the airline would pay. “We finally had him deported,” says Swain. Padilla once showed Swain a photograph of a woman with small children and told him it was his wife in Mozambique, but Swain says, “I never believed it was real. Ben was always marveling everyone with his bullshit stories.” One of Padilla’s friends also saw a photograph of a wife, but insists that she lived in Tanzania. Another acquaintance was told that Padilla had a wife in Indonesia. Benita Padilla-Kirkland says she’s heard the stories, but believes her brother would have told her if he’d had another family. She doesn’t doubt the relationships, but is convinced that Padilla was helping to support people he’d befriended. “There might have been more than one of those situations,” she says. WHAT IN FEBRUARY 2002 had been a retired airliner in excellent condition had by fall become a junker worth only the price of its engines. And Maury Joseph found a buyer for them: Jeff Swain. Swain says that Irwin and the crews had ruined the airplane. “It would never be of any value again,” he says. “You can’t put water tanks full of fuel in an airplane and expect it to be good. Totally stupid. But it had really good engines on it—maybe 1,000 cycles since new.” In November 2002, Joseph and Ben Padilla flew to Nigeria to deliver a 727, and Joseph hired Padilla to fly to Angola the following April to pay the outstanding fines and hire mechanics to return the 727 to service. “If [the company that contracted for fuel deliveries] wasn’t paying Mr. Irwin, you can assume he wasn’t paying anybody,” says Joseph. “He probably hadn’t paid the fuel bill. He didn’t pay the navigation fees, the landing fees, and certainly wasn’t paying the parking fees at the airport. So all of those became things that we had to resolve and I had to pay all those.” Padilla worked with Air Gemini, a Luanda-based airline that operated a repair station. The return-to-service process was progressing steadily, according to Joseph, and in May 2003, acting as Joseph’s agent, Padilla hired a pilot and copilot from Air Gemini to help him deliver the aircraft to Johannesburg, South Africa, where Joseph was waiting with his new customer. A day or two before the aircraft was to leave Luanda, Padilla made plans with Air Gemini to take the aircraft from the company hangar out to the main runway, where he intended to run the three engines up to full power for a systems check. Late in the morning on May 26, when Joseph and Swain were expecting 844AA to land, Joseph took a call from an Air Gemini employee, who demanded to know why another crew had flown the airplane out of Luanda. “He was kind of hard on me,” Joseph says. After the shock wore off, he telephoned the U.S. Embassy in South Africa to report the disappearance, then called his wife back in Florida to tell her to call the FBI. From Washington, D.C., the Department of State, notified by the U.S. Embassy in Angola, sent a message to every American embassy in Africa: Alert aviation officials that an airliner has been stolen, and call every airport with a runway long enough to handle a 727. For the U.S. government, fraud was one theory that could explain the aircraft’s disappearance. “Part of the intelligence was that the airplane was in a bad state of repair,” says General Robeson. “That was one of the speculations, that it was an insurance fraud situation. You know, ‘Oops, my plane was hijacked/stolen by terrorists and now I can do an insurance claim on it.’ So, that was probably as valid of an explanation when all was said and done as anything. But we just left it as an unknown.” Among intelligence officials, the suspicions of fraud may have been aroused by knowledge of an incident in Maury Joseph’s past. During the 1990s, Joseph was CEO of a cargo airline named Florida West (which later went bankrupt). The Securities and Exchange Commission charged him in a civil case with falsifying financial statements and defrauding investors. The court imposed a fine and barred Joseph from acting as an officer in a publicly held company. But Joseph, when contacted by the FBI, volunteered to take a lie-detector test, and Swain, who was there when Joseph took the call from Air Gemini, is certain that Joseph had nothing to do with the airplane’s disappearance. “Look, nobody was more amazed by this situation than Maury,” Swain says. He describes Joseph as utterly confused by the information that the airplane was gone. The suspicion that Ben Padilla could have played any part in an insurance fraud angers his younger brother. “If anybody would say to me that my brother was involved with this,” says Joe Padilla, his voice tightening, “they’re full of it. ’Cuz I know my brother. He’s not gonna do nothing crooked. I know that for a fact.” He is convinced that more than one person was already on board, waiting, and that they forcibly took the aircraft, and killed Ben and John Mutantu. “I keep hoping against hope that maybe he’s tucked away somewhere,” says Benita Padilla-Kirkland. The new information she passed along to the FBI was a possible sighting of the aircraft, one of many reported over the years. Mike Gabriel believes the airplane crashed in the Atlantic Ocean soon after takeoff. One crew member from the fuel delivery operation thinks the Angolan air force shot it down with a missile. A Luandan pilot says the word there is that the aircraft went north and vanished near Kinshasa, Congo. One of Ben Padilla’s friends says the airplane was disassembled for parts in Bujumbura, Burundi, on Tanzania’s western border. Picking through the fragments of 844AA’s history, I found a story of broken deals, disappointments, and betrayals, but no real clues to the aircraft’s destination that day in 2003. We may never know for sure where it went. It is the largest aircraft ever to have disappeared without a trace. Tim Wright is a writer living in Richmond, Virginia.

© Smithsonian Institution

The 727 that Vanished | History of Flight | Air & Space Magazine

Share this|

________________________

Check out this great MSN Video: Fast paced work at World Trade Center site

Check out this great MSN Video: Fast paced work at World Trade Center site

David Bowie - FT

The importance of David Bowie

By Paul Morley FT.com
Published: September 3 2010 21:59 | Last updated: September 3 2010 21:59

David Bowie on stage in Rotterdam in 1976, the year he made ‘Station to Station’

How much do you like David Bowie? You will have to like him a lot to want to spend more than £80 on a deluxe box set edition of his 10th studio album Station to Station (1976), an ostentatious souvenir collection of memorabilia, outtakes, live concerts, photography, essays, remastered versions, exclusive mixes and heavyweight vinyl inspired by the mere six tracks that made up the original record.
It is a mesmerising album, one of Bowie’s best, which is saying something, as he made many, most of them during the 1970s, that were sold as entertainment but contained the moving detail and mysterious, transformative depth of art.
It may well be one of rock’s very greatest, as a comment both on where the smart, neurotic artist who made it was, psychologically, creatively and commercially, but also where rock music itself was, on its compelling journey from Sinatra, Presley and the Beatles to Prince, Jay-Z and Gaga, from the Velvet Underground, the Kinks and Kraftwerk to Madonna, Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails. It is one of those Bowie albums, like Hunky Dory (1971), or Ziggy Stardust (1972), or Low (1977), or Lodger (1979), that are at times my favourite of his, because they demonstrate with such elan what a sparkling, mischievous mind he had, and what ambition, and what a stupendous ego, and how dangerously charming he was.
His impact as a musician, as a brand, as a sign of the times, has been as great as Dylan and the Beatles, his influence as an otherworldly pop star actually greater, and if you just want one example of what he got up to as this erudite pop combination of shaman, singer, thinker and shameless self-promoter, then Station to Station is as good a place as any. But is all of that worth £80? And does wrapping it up inside such technological and geeky paraphernalia clarify its position as a musical masterpiece, or turn it into a banal collector’s item, a nicely designed object of desire for committed Bowie fetishists and connoisseurs?
There’s no obvious anniversary marking the release of the deluxe edition. It’s a non-special 34 years since Station to Station was produced, coming between the Americanised soul-funk slickness of his Young Americans (1975) album and the radiant, challenging Euro-bleakness of Low. He was working on Nic Roeg’s dark film fable The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Peter O’Toole was not available to play Thomas Jerome Newton, an exiled visitor from outer space, a role that seemed perfect for the lost, distracted, preternaturally bright Bowie. Station to Station was a soundtrack that never was to the film as Bowie was strangely not asked to compose the movie’s music. Roeg just wanted the cracked, emaciated Bowie that was falling apart in real life, the wired, burnt-out pop star playing the baffled but brilliant spaceman from the future, part new-born innocent, part ancient guru.
Playing an alien, and having lost sight of his real self after years of relentless shapeshifting, Bowie constructed a new character, the Thin White Duke. Inside six years, since 1970, he’d been a psychedelic music hall singer channelling Syd Barrett and Anthony Newley, a whimsical novelty specialist, surreal folkie, risqué glam rock starman, cosmic wizard, apocalyptic androgynous Diamond Dog and blanked-out white soul man flirting with superstardom. Now, he would play a transparently autobiographical, ghostly, narcissistic, cocaine obsessed, existential adventurer, anxiously yearning for deeper meaning in a superficial, chilling world.
Bowie would kill off the damaged, demented Thin White Duke a little quicker than he killed off Ziggy Stardust, just in case the Duke took over like Ziggy appeared to. The soundtrack to this character showed Bowie withdrawing from his fascination with the expressive, penetrating showmanship of American soul and turning to more enigmatic and forward looking European music. Young Americans, containing hits such as “Fame” and an appearance by John Lennon, was the calculatedly commercial Bowie response to achieving the American fame he had set his heart on. He was becoming so successful he was peering into some form of the middle of the road, a fixed place Bowie wasn’t quite ready for.
Station to Station – feeling hunted, he was moving from place to place, character to character, fixation to fixation, charade to charade – was where he faced his demons, and made a kind of baroque soul music where it is not quite clear if there is soul involved. It retains the iced funk and post disco groove of Young Americans, alongside decaying traces of the kinky folk, metal, glam, and cabaret melodrama he’d passed through in the early 1970s. But it was already anticipating his less obviously commercial next destination, abstract and minimalist European electronic music. Station to Station contains echoes of everything Bowie had done, or was about to do. Previous characters re-dream themselves. It becomes the link, the tunnel, through which Bowie crawled – spent, emptied out – from fraying pop star decadence to the three classic made in Berlin albums he released next. On Low, Heroes (1977) and Lodger, Bowie and close collaborators Brian Eno and Tony Visconti created a stark, pulsating post-pop soundtrack to personal and historical tensions where Bowie broke out into the wider spaces of the universe. On this trilogy, Bowie refrained from entering the worlds himself, and losing himself in all the offbeat theatre. Station to Station was where he recovered himself, or at least enough of himself that he could continue his search for new extremes, and new experiences, and the kind of unusual, unforced new pop music he craved, music that produced worlds all of his own.
. . .
Depending on your age, you might already have bought a few versions of Station to Station. First of all, pretty much on the day it came out, the original RCA vinyl disc, released when the deliciously unstable Bowie dominated the pop planet in a way that makes Gaga, Beyoncé, Florence and co seem a little lightweight. Then, a few years later, the CD version, and then perhaps, depending how much you loved Bowie, a remastered CD version, even a Japanese import. Or two.

The original 1976 cover

Digging through my record cupboard, preparing the space for the big box of Station to Station, I find I have the vinyl version, with original black and white cover, and the bright orange RCA label that induces Proustian pangs of feeling for those days when a male teenager could fall in love with Bowie because he seemed so alive, and so scandalously full of himself. I’ve also got a CD version bought at full price, and then one bought for less than a fiver when I thought I’d lost the first one. The music business survived well into the 1990s following a policy of blind greed persuading people to buy albums they already owned all over again on CD. Now, perhaps at the end of its tether, devastated by the arrival of such alternative music sources as iTunes, the music industry is hoping to persuade people to buy once more in a gorgeous new format the same thing yet again, still relying on its back catalogues for sustenance. Or, depending on your point of view, ensuring that in a world where music can be so easily distributed through the air, the album can still exist in tempting solid form, as a tangible thing, something that you can hold, not merely store, and place in a sterile list of your favourite music.
The vinyl version is something that I have clearly held a lot, and loved, and still love, prized like a hardback first edition, now looking strangely oversized and florid in a world where even the miniaturised CD has been replaced by essentially the featureless, soulless, click-click nothing of the download. The CD versions look less powerful, more paperback, and more clinical.
Somehow, an old collection of music that could recently be bought for a few pounds, on the verge of being something you could get on tap, is now on sale, admittedly smartly done up, for almost £90. This is a lavish way of pointing out that a big part of the appeal of a pop record in the last few years of the vinyl era was the combination of the music and the art, the image, the design – the overall story, a constantly developing context – that went with it.
It calls into question just what is going to happen to all those albums that have been made and that artistically deserve to endure now that the era of this kind of vinyl-shaped album is more or less over. What was an album, what is Station to Station, how will we remember it? As a complete, significant work, as a series of loosely connected songs that will just randomly flow off into space and time, separated from each other, available on demand until they just fade away into silence, or some kind of work of art that needs to be celebrated and dissected in this way?
It seems right that David Bowie is at the forefront of such consideration of how vinyl era music – songs and stardom that existed because of the nature of the 45rpm single and the 33⅓ album – will survive this new period in music. He may not have been especially active for the past 20 years or so but he’s never stopped thinking, and plotting, and fastidiously nurturing his image.
After making his extraordinary albums in the 1970s, and inevitably running out of energy in the 1980s, he then settled down into his reputation, his history, with a knowing, Dylan-like acceptance, and an occasional Dylan-like reminder of his unique powers. He wasn’t as aloof and inscrutable as Dylan, but had his own ways of protecting, and projecting, his mystique. In Bowie’s case, this meant not just an occasional good new album, or a memorable tour. It also meant a strategic understanding of how entertainment itself was changing because of the technological progression that meant there would be more and more music, less and less originality, and newer ways of receiving and playing that music. He ended his formal alliances with record labels at the beginning of the century, set himself up as web location, turned himself into a sort of bank, and in 1997 sold his future royalties to the Prudential Insurance Company as Bowie Bonds, leading some wags to suggest he invented derivatives and was directly responsible for the latest recession. A confirmed futurist, he anticipated a breakdown in music industry and media certainties, and prepared himself for the science fiction future he always craved. A future where his 20th-century music could still exist, and still sound contemporary.
Albums such as Station to Station are from the past. Boxing them up in expensive deluxe editions is essentially a commercially based nostalgic act, extending their life as product, to some extent one last mad music industry fling. But the music itself, six songs, expertly weaving their enchanting phantom spell, from the opening title track, an extended montage of despair and determination, lunacy and sorrow, to the final track, a precious, caressing version of “Wild is the Wind” first sung in 1957 by Johnny Mathis, where Bowie appears to repair his self-control, via the tricky, nervily jaunty big hit “Golden Years”, is thus given yet another lease of life. The music is strong and intriguing enough to resist the vulgarisation of being repackaged and resold one more time. Somehow, the ornate deluxe edition of Station to Station says: the album is dead, long live the album.
..................................................
From Ziggy Stardust to SpongeBob SquarePants
1947 David Robert Jones born January 8 in Brixton, south London. Shares same birthday as Elvis Presley.
1953 Family moves to Kent. Attends Bromley Technical High School where Peter Frampton, later a rock guitarist, is a friend.
1961 Fight with friend leaves one pupil severely dilated, causing illusion his eyes are different colours.
1963 Leaves school with art O-level. Becomes junior paste-up artist at ad agency.
1964 First release, under the name of Davie Jones, is “Liza Jane/Louie Louie Go Home”. Interviewed on TV as founder of Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-haired Men, he complains, “It’s not nice when people call you darling and that.”
1966 Changes name to Bowie to avoid clash with Davy Jones of the Monkees.
1967First solo album, David Bowie, an odd, jolly mix of pop and psychedelia.
1969 “Space Oddity”, song set in outer space, released to coincide with moon landing
1970 Marries Mary Angela (Angie) Barnett for whom the Rolling Stones song “Angie” was written. Begins unequalled run of 11 studio albums from Man Who Sold The World (1970) to Scary Monsters (1980).
1972 First appearance of glam group Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Produces Lou Reed’s Transformer.
1973 Breaks up Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.
1975 Re-release of “Space Oddity” is first UK number one.
1977 Bing Crosby records “The Little Drummer Boy”, with Bowie, a month before crooner’s death. Appears on old friend Marc Bolan’s ITV music show, duetting on “Heroes”. Bolan dies in car crash two days later.
1980 “Ashes to Ashes” is second UK number one.
1981 “Under Pressure”, with Queen, is third number one.

In ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ (1976)

1983 Releases Let’s Dance, produced by Nile Rodgers; title track fourth number one
1985 Having won praise as actor in films The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), The Hunger (1983), Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983) and on Broadway in The Elephant Man in 1980, turns down role in Bond film A View to a Kill. Duet with Mick Jagger on “Dancing in the Streets” leads to fifth number one.
1989 Forms Tin Machine. Critics sneer, live album does not chart.
1992 Marries Iman Abdul Majid in Switzerland.
1996 Plays Andy Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat.
1997 Releases internet-only single “Telling Lies”. Predicts time when music will be freely available at click of a switch. Sells back catalogue for $55m, creating Bowie Bonds, planning to pay back money from future royalties.
2003 Declines knighthood.
2004 Suffers heart attack, undergoes triple bypass.
2006 Receives lifetime award at Grammys.
2007 Voices Lord Royal Highness on TV cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants.
2010 Lady Gaga says Bowie is her biggest influence and she wants to work with him

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

"FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times. Privacy policy | Terms

© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2010.

FT.com / Arts - The importance of David Bowie

Share |

________________________

A Crash. A Call for Help. Then, a Bill.

By CHRISTOPHER JENSEN
NYTimes.com
Published: September 3, 2010

ABOUT a year ago Cary Feldman was surprised to find himself sprawled on the pavement in an intersection in Chicago Heights, Ill., having been knocked off his motor scooter by the car behind him. Five months later he got another surprise: a bill from the fire department for responding to the scene of the accident.

Enlarge This Image

Steve Kagan for The New York Times

VICTIM Cary Feldman paid for the dispatch of a fire truck he didn't request.

“I had no idea what the fire truck was there for,” said Mr. Feldman, of nearby Matteson. “It came, it looked and it left. I was not hurt badly. I had scratches and bruises. I did not go to the hospital.”
Mr. Feldman had become enmeshed in what appears to be a nascent budget-balancing trend in municipal government: police and fire departments have begun to charge accident victims as a way to offset budget cuts.
Ambulance charges have long been common and are usually paid by health insurance, but fees for other responders are relatively new. The charge is variously called a “crash tax” or “resource recovery,” depending on one’s point of view. In either case, motorists are billed for services they may have thought were covered by taxpayers.
Sometimes the victim’s insurer pays. But if it declines, motorists may face threats from a collection agency if they don’t pay.
The AAA opposes such fees, said Jill Ingrassia, managing director for government relations and traffic safety advocacy. “Generally, we see that public safety services are a core government function that should be properly budgeted for with general taxes and not addressed by fees after the fact,” she said.
Ms. Ingrassia says such charges can place an “undue burden on motorists who can’t choose the size or duration of an emergency response,” which means they cannot control the size of the bill they may get. “We also really don’t want to discourage any motorist involved in a crash from calling for police or rescue services if they fear they are going to be billed for it,” she said.
Mr. Feldman received a bill for $200. The Chicago Heights Fire Department told him the fire truck had responded in case there was a fire at the scene.
But Mr. Feldman, 71, had another question: “Why are you charging me? I didn’t do anything wrong. Charge the other guy.”
Neither Mr. Feldman’s insurance company, nor that of the man who struck him, would pay. Mr. Feldman finally paid the bill with some of the money he received from the insurance company of the person who hit him.
“This is my personal opinion: it is a rip-off and a scam,” he said.
The Chicago Heights fire chief, Thomas Martello, referred inquiries to the mayor’s office, which did not respond to three phone messages in early August or to another on Thursday. (Mayor Alex Lopez died of a heart attack on Aug. 27. )
There appears to be no group that tracks the jurisdictions charging such fees or the number of bills sent. But police or fire departments are charging in at least 26 states, said Robert Passmore, senior director for personal lines at the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America. The group has lobbied against the fees, saying they amount to double taxation. It also says on its Web site, “The role of police and fire departments should be to serve and protect, not serve and collect.”


But Regina Moore, the president of Cost Recovery, a billing company in Dayton, Ohio, that tries to collect the fees for municipal departments, said property taxes paid for fire crews to be “on ready standby” and for police to “protect property and citizens from crime.” She argued that “traffic crash response is outside the scope of the primary function of both law enforcement and fire services.”
The people who cause the problems should pay for such services, she said, not other taxpayers or accident victims who are not at fault.
Jeffrey Johnson, president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs, said that some fire departments had charged for service calls for years, but that it was happening more often as departments tried to avoid reducing services.
“It is more prominent recently as economic times drive responders to look for ways to pay for their services,” said Mr. Johnson, who just retired as chief of Tualatin Valley Fire and Rescue in Aloha, Ore. People are accustomed to bills for ambulances, which are routinely paid by health insurance, he said. “So what we are really talking about is the leap from paying an ambulance fee, which people expect, to paying a first-responder fee.”
Mr. Johnson said the fire chiefs’ association had taken no position on such charges. “We believe that is a local decision,” he said.
But the association does have what it calls a partnership with Fire Recovery USA of Roseville, Calif., another billing company.
In an e-mail, Ann Davison, a spokeswoman for the fire chiefs’ association, said that relationship was focused on helping to explain the pros and cons of the practice to fire departments. Fire Recovery does donate “a portion” of its revenue to the association, she said.
Often departments charging fees are in communities with busy Interstate highways, where crews often respond to crashes involving travelers who do not pay local taxes, Mr. Johnson said.
That is the case with Salina, Kan., which responds to accidents on Interstates 70 and 135. In 2008, the city’s fire department received permission to start billing people involved in accidents to help cover costs, said Mayor Aaron Peck.
In about two years the department has sent out bills for 63 accidents, averaging about $390 each. He said the city sent about $10,000 a year in bills and received payments amounting to about half that much. The rest of the money is lost to the city because some people refuse to pay and some of the money goes to a billing agency.
The billing services make money by taking a portion of the funds they collect. “The average is 10 percent, and if they don’t get paid, we don’t get paid,” said Ms. Moore of Cost Recovery.
Rick Benner, chief financial officer for Fire Recovery, said that for his company about 20 percent would be “a fair representation.”
Billing agencies like these have made it easier for fire departments to charge for services, and that has the effect of encouraging more departments to send bills to motorists involved in crashes, said Mr. Johnson of the fire chiefs’ association.
The insurance industry argues that billing companies trying to drum up new business are a main reason the practice has been spreading.
But Mr. Benner says Fire Recovery is simply trying to help departments avoid service cuts.
Typically, departments send billing firms copies of accident reports and information on how many people and how much equipment responded. On average, the bill is about $200 for police and $600 to $800 for fire departments, Ms. Moore said.
Whether taxpayers are billed for crashes in their own jurisdictions varies by location.
There are also variations in whether the bill goes only to the motorist at fault or to all the parties involved, in which case the billing companies say the insurers determine fault.
If the insurance company refuses to pay, whether the motorist is billed depends on the jurisdiction, Ms. Moore and Mr. Benner said. If the motorist declines to pay, some departments drop the claim. Others take legal action.
Whether an insurance company will pay depends on the language in the policy, Mr. Passmore said, adding, “There are a lot of shades of gray.”
After adopting such programs, some jurisdictions — including Radnor Township, Pa. — later backed off in response to complaints from residents and visitors, news reports and lobbying by the insurance industry. In recent years 10 states have prohibited such collections, according to the property casualty association: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. But some of those prevent only the police, as opposed to fire departments, from charging fees.
Ms. Moore of Cost Recovery says these are examples of “big insurance” working against “innocent taxpayers” and public safety.
The insurance industry says it is protecting consumers and trying to hold down premiums.
The finger-pointing has left cities like Denver trying to figure out what to do. This year, the city considered fees for nonresident, at-fault drivers, said Eric Brown, a spokesman for Mayor John W. Hickenlooper. Mr. Brown said the city stood to recover about $500,000 a year for fire services.
But the proposal was criticized by taxpayers and the media. In an editorial, The Denver Post described the idea as unfair and unwise, saying it would put taxpayers “financially on the hook for supporting emergency services twice.”
The city decided not to decide.
“We shelved it for this year,” Mr. Brown said.

A version of this article appeared in print on September 5, 2010, on page BU9 of the National edition.

A Crash. A Call for Help. Then, a Bill.

Share |

________________________

5 surprising facts about strippers - The Week

5 surprising facts about strippers

A new study says strippers earn as much as lawyers — and that's just one interesting recent finding about the profession

posted on August 30, 2010, at 7:30 PM

Strippers make around $74,000 a year, and many of them have undergraduate degrees. 
Photo: Corbis
 

Best Opinion: Newsweek, Independent, Foreign Policy...

A new British study into the lives of strippers has come up with some interesting figures, so to speak — concluding, for instance, that about one in four are college graduates. That's just one of several recent research claims about those who take their clothes off for a living. Here's a round-up:

Strippers earn more when they're ovulating
Strippers make an average of $30 per hour more when they are ovulating than when they are menstruating, according to a study by the University of New Mexico. Women on the pill — who generally do not ovulate — made significantly less. Researchers said this was proof men react to female ovulation, a claim that had some critics scoffing. But, then again, maybe "a stripper who feels sexy gives a more tip-worthy lap dance than one who feels uncomfortable during her period," said Sharon Begley at Newsweek.

Some say they make as much as lawyers...
How much money does a stripper typically earn? According to a new study from the University of Leeds in the U.K., it's around $74,000. That's approximately as much as an American attorney, according to salary experts PayScale. "I congratulate the women who make more money than I do out of a job they say they enjoy," says Katy Guest at the Independent. But that doesn't mean I don't "viscerally object to lap dancing."

... and are quite happy with their jobs
According to the same study, strippers reported very high levels of job satisfaction. The researchers found the women were overwhelmingly motivated by "career and economic choices" rather than drug addiction or coercion. "These young women do not buy the line that they are being exploited, because they are the ones making the money out of a three-minute dance and a bit of a chat," says study author Teela Sanders.

Sweden is being shortchanged by strippers
The Swedish government is cracking down on online strippers for failing to reveal their assets. Internet stripteases are legal in Sweden, and the government says that strippers may be dodging up to $5 million in taxes. "The bottom line" here, says Andrew Swift at Foreign Policy, is that "the Swedish tax authority has apparently never heard of the phrase 'not safe for work.'"

Canada has a stripper shortage
So few Canadian girls are willing to strip that Ontario strip-club owners were forced to hire legal consultants in 2008 to find a way for get foreigners to staff their clubs. Until 2004, the Canadian authorities would give foreign women visas allowing them to strip in the country — but a crackdown prompted a widespread stripper shortage that continues to this day. "The government's putting a real squeeze on the industry," said Tim Lambrinos, of the Adult Entertainment Association of Canada. "It really is affecting our ability to find dancers."



5 surprising facts about strippers - The Week

Share

1933 Delage Wins Best of Show at Pebble Beach - NYTimes.com

1933 Delage Wins Best of Show at Pebble Beach

By JERRY GARRETT

Kimball Studios/Courtesy of Pebble Beach Concours d’EleganceA 1933 Delage D8S De Villars Roadster from the Patterson Collection in Louisville, Ky, was named Best of Show at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Élégance. More Photos | Readers’ Photos.

MONTEREY, Calif. — A week of intense automobile worship on the Monterey Peninsula concluded with more than $100 million worth of classic cars changing hands at auctions, several new models being introduced by manufacturers and a 1933 Delage winning the coveted title as Best of Show.

The Delage’s distinction came at the prestigious Pebble Beach Concours d’Élégance on Sunday, against a field of more than 200 exquisitely presented classic autos — and it was something of an upset because this vehicle was painted white.

“A white car has never won at Pebble Beach,” said the vehicle’s owner, Jim Patterson, of a streak extending back some six decades at this, the world’s premier automotive beauty contest.

Mr. Patterson, of Louisville, Ky., had acquired the Delage, a D8S Roadster with coachwork by the custom builder De Villars, at a Pebble Beach auction in 2007 for $3.74 million. He had it meticulously restored to its original condition, which was as a Delage debutante at the 1934 Paris motor show.

The auctions at Pebble Beach are, along with the swank concours, among the signature events in a week that includes more than 50. Several auction companies, including Gooding & Company, RM Auctions, Russo & Steele andBonhams & Butterfields, held high-dollar events.

The Gooding auction alone sold more than $64 million worth of classics in two star-studded nights of bidding. (Celebrity sightings included Jay Leno, Bill Murray and Patrick Dempsey.)

The biggest sale of the weekend was $7.26 million paid for a 1959 Ferrari 250 GT long-wheelbase California Spider Competizione at the Gooding auction. However, a bid of $10.7 million for a 1958 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa, at the RM auction, was spurned by its seller. Each of the Ferraris had earned acclaim in their past lives as winning racecars.

Fittingly, the weekend also included a slate of racing events, in actual classics, at the Monterey Historics event at nearby Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. The earnestness with which these classics are put through their paces was illustrated by a fearsome crash on Saturday involving a veteran driver, John Morton. Mr. Morton was uninjured, but his one-of-a-kind 1958 Scarab was destroyed in the rollover accident.

Manufacturers also use the concours weekend to unveil special limited-edition models. Jaguar, Aston Martin and Bentley were among those seizing on the opportunity to do so this year. An example was the Jaguar XK175, which is limited to 175 copies. It is also so designated because of its reported top speed of 174 miles per hour. Yes, that’s not the same as 175, but Richard Beattie, executive vice president of Jaguar North America, said the company’s legal department had insisted on the discrepancy for undisclosed reasons.

Finally, the weekend was also a chance for the automobile world’s counterculture to be heard. And at the second annual Concours d’Lemons, haters of some of the worst autos ever produced assembled at a park well outside the city limits to crown a shortened 1958 Volkswagen Microbus, owned by Donna and Frank Atkinson of Atascadero, Calif., as Worst of Show.

Jerry Garrett for The New York TimesDonna and Frank Atkinson, of Atascadero, Calif., were the more-or-less proud owners of a 1958 Volkswagen bus that won “Worst of Show” honors at the second annual Concours d’Lemons at a park outside the Monterey city limits.

1933 Delage Wins Best of Show at Pebble Beach - NYTimes.com

Share|

_______________________________________

Space tourism jet has trouble during test run - Technology & science - Space - msnbc.com

Space tourism jet has trouble during test run

 

MOJAVE, Calif. — The left main landing gear on Virgin Galactic's space tourism jet collapsed as it landed after a test flight in the Mojave Desert Thursday, federal aviation authorities said. No injuries were reported.

Two Federal Aviation Administration inspectors were on the scene to examine WhiteKnightTwo, a four-engine jet that will serve as the mothership for Virgin's passenger-carrying spaceship.
"The left main landing gear is damaged, but we don't yet know if that's the extent of the damage," FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said.
The problem occurred around 11:15 a.m. PT at the Mojave Air and Space Port.
In a statement, aircraft builder Scaled Composites described the event as a "minor incident." The company said there was a mechanical problem with the left landing gear.
Scaled did not describe the problem in any detail, but said there were no injuries. The rocket-powered spaceship, known as SpaceShipTwo, was not attached to the jet at the time.
WhiteKnightTwo is designed to carry Virgin's spaceship to high altitude and then release the rocket, which will then fire its engine for a brief dash into space.
Virgin has said the test program is expected to run through next year before commercial operations begin. About 300 clients have paid for a $200,000 ticket or placed a deposit.
Seven years ago, SpaceShipOne — the predecessor of the rocket plane currently being developed — suffered a partial landing gear collapse and ran off the runway at Mojave at the end of its first powered test flight . The plane went on to make three successful spaceflights in 2004, winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize in the process.
This report includes information from The Associated Press and msnbc.com.

© 2010 msnbc.com




Space tourism jet has trouble during test run - Technology & science - Space - msnbc.com

Share|

_______________________________________

did Lisa Simpson finally get Married Sunday? Funny Stuff

Funny Stuff: "Lisa Simpson is Getting Married Sunday"

The Clinton-Mezvinsky nuptials took place about two hours before the end of Shabbat.

The Clinton-Mezvinsky nuptials took place about two hours before the end of Shabbat.

July 31, 2010, 5:22pm

Rabbi James Ponet (click to enlarge)

Meet the Rabbi Who Officiated at Chelsea's Wedding

By Gabrielle Birkner

Ponet is Yale’s Jewish chaplain and heads the university’s Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. Read his bio here. At Yale, he’s taught a seminar on “The Family in Jewish Tradition,” with sexpert and Bintel Brief guest columnist Dr. Ruth Westheimer.The New York Times is reporting that Rabbi James Ponet officiated, alongside Reverend William Shillady, at the Saturday evening wedding of Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky.

He has written about the Hanukkah story for Slate, and, back in 2003, the Forward reported that Ponet was among those who voiced concerns about controversial poet Amiri Baraka’s visit to Yale. During that visit, Baraka offered “evidence” that Israel was forewarned about the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

A Reform rabbi, Ponet received ordinationin 1973 from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

The Clinton-Mezvinsky nuptials took place about two hours before the end of Shabbat.