вторник, 9 октября 2012 г.

Racing: Light duties for Nicholls' top two-mile team - The Independent (London, England)

IT WAS a race to bring a tremble to the hand and the voice, asgood as anything Sandown has seen for years, and whatever theattendance figure was at the course on Saturday, 10 times thatnumber will claim in years to come that they were there whenFlagship Uberalles beat Direct Route in the Tingle Creek Chase.

And who could blame them for a little white lie? It was somethingthat anyone would want to have been a part of, as two of the finestchasers in training went at it mercilessly up the hill. By the timethey reached the post, both had mined seams of courage that had notbeen touched before. Punters who thought about a trip to Esher butdecided to do some shopping or DIY instead may never forgivethemselves.

Unlike many of life's big mistakes, though, there might yet be away to claw something back from this one, since the first two homecan be expected to do it all over again in the Queen Mother ChampionChase in March. With Call Equiname, the defending champion, alsoexpected to take his chance, tickets for the middle day of theFestival, which generally attracts a slightly smaller crowd thanthose either side, may suddenly become the hottest in town.

Only these three horses are now quoted at best-price odds of lessthan 10-1 for the Champion Chase, with Flagship Uberalles outrightfavourite with two of the leading firms.

What most punters will want to know before taking a view, though,is whether Paul Nicholls prefers the champion or the youngpretender, both of whom are stabled in his yard. Yesterday he couldsay only that both horses are well, and may have only one more runeach before Cheltenham.

'Flagship Uberalles has come out of the race in cracking order,he's as tough as old boots,' Nicholls said. 'He won't run overChristmas as I don't want to overface him with Cheltenham very muchin mind. The Emblem Chase at Kempton or the Game Spirit at Newburyin the new year are his most likely targets, and the latter isprobably favourite as it's a month before the Festival and would fitin nicely.'

Call Equiname, meanwhile, will probably head to the VictorChandler Chase at Ascot in January, a race he won last year, and isapparently in good health despite his poor run in the Murphy's GoldCup last month. 'His work since Cheltenham has been good so I'mignoring that race as if he didn't run in it and training him asnormal even thought the whole affair remains a mystery,' Nichollssaid.

Direct Route, too, seems none the worse for Saturday's race,according to Sue Johnson, wife of his trainer, Howard. It is worthremembering, though, that you can only be sure a hard race has notleft its mark when the horse concerned runs close to his best in hisnext race. And even the best horses will be beaten eventually, asRisk Of Thunder discovered at Punchestown yesterday. The winner ofall 10 of his previous races over the track's cross-country course,Risk Of Thunder, who runs in the colours of Sean Connery, couldmanage only second there yesterday, behind Little Len, a 50-1chance.

Brother Of Iris, another of Saturday's winners, was the onlymover in the Gold Cup market yesterday, down to 20-1 with WilliamHill, although Coral still offer 33-1. His owners have vouchers at100-1, but it is still hard to see them being anything more than anovelty come the race itself.

A better bet is that Tony McCoy will overtake both John Francomeand Stan Mellor in the all-time winners list well before theFestival. McCoy has four rides at Ayr today, and needs three morewinners to reach 1,000 in his career. Another 39 after that willleave him adrift of only Richard Dunwoody (1,699) and PeterScudamore (1,678), and no bookie would offer anything less than longodds-on about him overhauling both before he hangs up his boots.

RICHARD EDMONDSON

Nap: Naughty Future

(Ayr 2.00)

NB: Quick March

понедельник, 8 октября 2012 г.

KATRINA DESTROYS YEARS OF RESEARCH.(News) - The Cincinnati Post (Cincinnati, OH)

Byline: Charles Piller Los Angeles Times

For more than 30 years, Tulane University researchers have conducted one of the most exhaustive heart disease studies in the country, tracking the diets, habits and blood chemistry of 16,000 people in Bogalusa, La.

Then Hurricane Katrina hit. Most of the Bogalusa Heart Study's tissue samples were destroyed when freezers lost power.

'You can't just regenerate 30 or 40 years of material,' said Dr. Paul Whelton, Tulane's senior vice president for health sciences. 'A great international treasure was lost.'

Amid the damage from Hurricane Katrina, universities along the Gulf Coast are reeling from the loss of scientific research and the scattering of hundreds of scholars across the country.

Although many facilities escaped damage, the experiments within often did not fare well.

Many of Tulane's 148 research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health, for example, are in a shambles, university officials said.

The scientific losses have cast a cloud over the future of the city as an educational and research hub.

'We are not UCLA. We are not an Ivy League school,' said Dr. Nicolas Bazan, head of Louisiana State University's Neuroscience Center of Excellence. 'But this is a wonderful part of the country. ... I'd like them to have faith that we will be able to regroup and continue.'

To scientists, failed freezers are Hurricane Katrina's ruinous emblem.

Bazan said the storm destroyed frozen brain tissues from scores of Alzheimer's disease patients and wiped out hundreds of unique cell cultures.

Before the storm, Bazan was seeing his dream come to life after nearly a decade of fund-raising, recruitment and research. The Neuroscience Center in New Orleans was gaining prominence with a flurry of research findings, including evidence that fish oil might combat the ravages of Alzheimer's.

LSU had agreed to build a new laboratory for his 110-member staff studying stroke, epilepsy and other brain disorders.

Now, with the campus trying to recover from massive flooding, and Hurricane Rita looming, his building is on hold.

Paul Fidel, a microbiologist and dean of research at LSU's dental school, had stored frozen samples from patients suffering from yeast infections collected over much of his career -- an exceptional biological databank.

'Fifteen years of work, gone,' he said with resignation.

Thousands of LSU's experimental animals, including unique transgenic mice, died or had to be killed -- a setback for many of its 117 NIH-funded projects.

When hospitals and labs went dark, researchers also scrambled to prevent a larger public heath disaster. LSU, Tulane and the state of Louisiana all conduct biodefense research in New Orleans in biosafety level 3 laboratories -- specially sealed facilities used for work with potential bioterrorism agents, such as the microbes that cause anthrax and plague.

None of the biosafety labs was breached by wind or water, and all were protected by layers of locked doors, officials said.

Amid the disruption, there were also signs that, barring new flooding, some researchers soon might be back at work.

Most university labs are above ground level in strong, modern buildings, so much of the equipment was unharmed.

воскресенье, 7 октября 2012 г.

SCHOOL HONORS FALLEN ALUMNI - The Record (Bergen County, NJ)

JEAN RIMBACH, Staff Writer
The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
11-28-2001
SCHOOL HONORS FALLEN ALUMNI -- PA COPS GRADUATED FROM NORTH BERGEN `NO WORDS
TO EXPRESS THE GRIEF'
By JEAN RIMBACH, Staff Writer
Date: 11-28-2001, Wednesday
Section: NEWS
Edition: All Editions -- Two Star B, Two Star P, One Star B

As teenagers, Robert Cirri and Christopher Amoroso walked the halls
of North Bergen High School. Both graduated with the desire to help
others. Both went on to join the Port Authority police.

But on Sept. 11, the two officers perished in the ruins of the
World Trade Center.

On Tuesday, North Bergen remembered Cirri and Amoroso in a service
held in front of their alma mater. Cirri, 39, graduated in 1980 and
Amoroso, 29, in 1990.

'It wasn't long ago that both young men were here as students --
they spent their time here, they grew here, they had friends here. And
there are no words to express the grief that is felt by all of us,'
Mayor Nicholas J. Sacco, also an assistant school superintendent, said
before unveiling a memorial engraved in their honor.

Dozens gathered on the sidewalk and grass in front of the school.
Family and friends, police, teachers, and administrators took time to
celebrate these two lives, mourn their passing, and laud their heroism.

'I think it was a very good idea to remember Christopher and my dad
for being good cops and helping people and putting their lives before
others,' said Jessica Cirri, 13, of West New York, one of Cirri's
children.
'He wouldn't have picked any other job. He always put people first. He
always wanted to help people.'

As cars whizzed by on Kennedy Boulevard, poems were read and some
eyes grew red. Peter J. Fischbach, district superintendent, noted that
many survived the tragedy because of the actions of Amoroso, Cirri, and
many others.

'Unselfishly they searched to save the lives of those trapped
inside the Twin Towers,' Fischbach said. 'And as they went about the
saving of other lives, Chris and Robert along with many of their
colleagues, lost their lives.'

Sixteen American flags hung from the chain-link fence in front of
the school, each given to a family member after the service. Red, white,
and blue ribbons adorned the trees flanking the flagpole in front of the
school.

Etched into a small stone monument at the base of the flagpole is
an American flag, the image of the Twin Towers, and this inscription:

'In memory of the North Bergen High School graduates who perished in
the line of duty at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.'

It includes the two men's names, their graduation year, and a
notation that it is dedicated to all those who 'suffered as a result of
the attack on America's freedom.'

'They have left with us an example of dedication, compassion, and
sacrifice,' said the Rev. Howard Wilcomes.

After the service, Edward Sahagian, the district math supervisor,
fondly recalled teaching geometry to Amoroso, who lived on Staten
Island with his wife and 18-month-old daughter at the time of his death.

'He was just a good kid,' he said. 'He would give you his right arm
if you needed it. It showed in what he did at the World Trade Center. He
had a great personality. What a kibitzer he was. We would be discussing
a topic in math and he always had a way of . . . turning it into a fun
type of project. He was a special kid in every sense of the word.'

Mike Boyle, a high school guidance counselor, said that as a teen,
Cirri was a hospital volunteer, on the ambulance squad, and was
president, vice president, and secretary of the health careers club,
where he received a service award.

Boyle said a guidance counselor at the time made note of Cirri's
ambition, hard work, and dedication in his school file. He said Cirri's
school records show his 'wanting to help other people.'

Cirri's son Robert, 17, said that was second nature for his dad,
who would even stop to help fellow officers when he wasn't on duty.
Cirri, a Nutley resident with two children and three stepchildren, was
also a paramedic at Hackensack University Medical Center.

He called his dad 'a great guy, a loving father who always put
people's lives before his own.' Like his sister, Robert was dressed in a
dark blue sweatshirt that included the words 'Never Forget' and a police
emblem. He said he had talked with his dad about pursuing a career as a
police officer and paramedic -- a plan he intends to complete.

'This makes it mean more,' he said.

Cirri had been on the force since 1986, served at the police
academy as executive officer and was promoted to lieutenant last year.
Amoroso was in his third year with the force and was with the tactical
response bureau.

Charlie Amoroso described his son as a 'big marshmallow.' He said
at 6 feet, 2 inches and 235 pound,s he was an anomaly in a generally
more diminutive family. He said children 'flocked to Chris like a
magnet,' and his little cousins loved to wrestle with him on the floor.

He recalled playing softball with his son in various leagues and
going with him to the shooting range. More recently, they had talked
about what it's like to be a dad.

On Sept. 11, Amoroso was on a team that had evacuated lower trade
center levels. After gathering up oxygen packs and hard hats, he headed
back inside shortly before the building collapsed, Charlie Amoroso said.

'Chris was doing what he wanted to,' the elder Amoroso said. 'He
waited 5 1/2 years to get into the academy to do a job he wanted to do --
he always wanted to be a police officer and help people.'

Staff Writer Jean Rimbach's e-mail address is rimbach(at)northjersey.com

Illustrations/Photos: 2 THOMAS E. FRANKLIN PHOTOS 1 - Noreen Smith, left, Christopher
Amoroso's mother, being held by daughter Justine Amoroso at Tuesday's ceremony
in North Bergen. 2 - The memorial honoring Christopher Amoroso and Robert Cirri
was unveiled Tuesday in front of North Bergen High School's flag pole. 3 - PHOTO
- CIRRI. 4 - PHOTO - AMOROSO.

Keywords: NORTH BERGEN. SCHOOL. MONUMENT. STUDENT. NEW YORK CITY. BUILDING.
TERRORISM. DEATH

Copyright 2001 Bergen Record Corp. All rights reserved.

суббота, 6 октября 2012 г.

As Triple Crown beckons Big Brown still not tested - The Charleston Gazette (Charleston, WV)

BALTIMORE - Rick Dutrow Jr. insisted there was no specialmotivation to wear this specific hat.

The cap was simply available for the trainer's trip to the barn.Still, the message on his hat conveyed the same thought on the mindsof all those racing fans who saw Big Brown dominate the Preakness:

Triple Crown.

Two down, Big Brown. One more to go.

No one believes the big bay colt can win the Belmont and claimracing's first Triple Crown in 30 years more than his blunt and boldtrainer.

'If he comes out of it good and trains good, I'm not going to seea problem,' Dutrow said Sunday. 'He looks like he's ready.'

Big Brown had the stakes barn at Pimlico pretty much all tohimself Sunday, a day after jockey Kent Desormeaux rode him to a 51/4-length victory at the Preakness to set himself up for a TripleCrown try in three weeks. He heads to Belmont positioned to becomethe first horse to win the Triple Crown since Affirmed in 1978.

'Everybody is going to find out where he belongs,' Dutrow said.'If he wins this next race, he's going to be up there with any goodhorse that has ever run. He'll be in the same breath as Secretariat,Affirmed, all those good ones.'

All those horses were tested. Big Brown has yet to find a coltthat can push him down the stretch.

Secretariat had Sham. Affirmed had Alydar.

Big Brown has no true rival. Dutrow has openly maligned thetalent of the rest of the 3-year-old field and no other horse hascome close to pushing Big Brown to the limit. That's just fine byDutrow.

'I don't want anybody to come out of the woodwork and start arivalry,' Dutrow said. 'I like things just the way they are.'

One colt that could derail the Triple Crown bid is Casino Drive.

Casino Drive waits at the Belmont as the wild card in Big Brown'sride toward immortality. Japan-based Casino Drive won the Peter PanStakes at Belmont by 53/4 lengths in his second career start withDesormeaux aboard. Casino Drive won his only other race in Japan by111/2 lengths.

Casino Drive is related by blood to the last two Belmont winners,Jazil and Rags to Riches.

'He's the only one that can even entertain Big Brown's stride,'said Desormeaux, who will ride Big Brown in the Belmont. 'He canrun. He's a nice horse.'

In typical Dutrow bravado, he said he'd love to own Casino Drive -but said the import can't beat Big Brown.

'What I saw of him, he doesn't have that quick turn, where hejust turns it on,' Dutrow said.

Big Brown might have to turn it on at the demanding 11/2-mileBelmont. Smarty Jones (2004), Funny Cide (2003), War Emblem (2002)and Point Given (2001) are among the more recent horses to win thefirst two jewels of the Triple Crown series, then fall short at the'Test of Champions.'

'The way he's been running his last two races, it certainlydoesn't seem like the mile-and-a-half is an obstacle, but you neverknow,' Dutrow said. 'But I'm not afraid of the distance.'

Don't bet the stable on this, but winning the 12th Triple Crownin history might end Big Brown's career.

IEAH Stables co-owner Michael Iavarone has said Big Brown won'trace as a 4-year-old, and Saturday's multimillion dollar deal withThree Chimneys Farm in Midway, Ky., for the colt to stand at studcould possibly lead to his retirement after the Belmont.

Dutrow, however, expects Big Brown to race in the Travers Stakesand the Breeders' Cup Classic. Dutrow would love a showdown withCurlin, last year's Preakness winner, at the Breeders' Cup, whichoffers hope for fans to enjoy Big Brown for at least a few moremonths.

Then again, Smarty Jones' owners wanted their red chestnut coltto keep racing as a 4-year-old until a bruised left front hoof madePat and Roy Chapman retire him two months after he lost the Belmont.

No sense in jeopardizing the horse's health - or a big bucks deal- with a horrific misstep.

Big Brown deftly has avoided any rough spots. Desormeaux didn'teven need his whip Saturday and twice sneaked a peek down thestretch to see if anyone was gaining on Big Brown. The victory wasnearly as easy as the 43/4-length margin two weeks earlier at theKentucky Derby.

'It almost looked like a replay of the Kentucky Derby,'Desormeaux said.

Dutrow slept for only a couple of hours because of a Saturdaynight spent celebrating. Those extra winks can wait. Dutrow opted tohit Pimlico early Sunday morning to visit his prized colt instead ofsleeping in.

Big Brown will be shipped Monday morning to New York.

Then the real fun - and big city pressure - begins.

'I'm ready for anything,' Dutrow said. 'As long as the horse isOK, nothing else matters.'

Dutrow will wait about two weeks before Big Brown gets a lightworkout again and will stick to the same plan of letting the colthit the track for a short run through the stretch the morning of therace.

Every move Dutrow made so far has worked to perfection. No sensechanging direction now.

'Everybody wants to see something great,' Dutrow said. 'Maybewe're going to see that. It would be a lot of fun.'

пятница, 5 октября 2012 г.

MOVERS & SHAKERS: Bill Burges - Campaigns & Elections

Bill Burges, president of Burges & Surges Strategists, a Democratic general consulting firm based in Cleveland, OH.

Career Background

'I've spent the last 20 years building a terrific team at a regional community, political, and educational consulting company 'they said could never happen.' Before that: teacher, researcher, author, planner, college dean and vice president.'

Personal

'Bachelor's, Colby College; Masters and Doctorate, Boston University. Great wife, brilliant grown son and two terrific dogs. Politics: Lifelong Democrat and a 'liberal-leaning toward libertarian.' '

Claim to Fame

'Navigating Ohio's vicious undertow for schools, higher education, and other community institutions for 25 years.'

Best Day

'The day I married my future business partner and media director (in 1983 before there was a business).'

Worst Day

'9/11. I'm a native New Yorker and I think New Yorkers knew then that implications for America were incalculable.'

Ten Years From Now

'I'd like to be working with my colleagues to write the book on the politics of local public and educational administration. I hope to see a much better educated America, as the digital divide narrows. And ideally, I look forward to spending more time in the mountains, on the golf course and at the racetrack.'

Immediate Goals

'Keep winning for our clients. And stay healthy for our family and company.'

Political Heroes

Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Ohio Justice Alice Robie Resnick

Secrets of Success

'Work on what you believe in because as Yoda said, 'Do or do not. There is no try.' Never get too high or too low, the situation is already changing. When your common sense fails, you're probably over thinking the problem.'

Biggest Gripe

'Those 'dumb smart' people who consistently overcomplicate situations.'

Predictions

'Single-payer national health care happens in the next 10 years, but....Most politics (and policy) becomes more local. War Emblem wins Breeder's Cup Classic in '02. Cheney dumps Bush in '04.'

Favorite Books

Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand; The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley; The Power Broker by Robert Caro.

Favorite Movies

'Star Wars (A New Beginning),' 'The Hustler,' 'Remember the Titans.'

Best Moment in a Campaign

'Winning the impossible Cleveland Municipal School District levy in 1983 that launched our company.'

Worst Moment in a Campaign

'Just last year, an electronic phone bank we hired to make tens of thousands of GOTV calls in the Eastern Standard Time zone mistakenly made them on Pacific Standard Time - meaning people received GOTV calls at midnight and later. We won anyway, thank goodness, but the little things can kill you.'

If I Were President for a Day

четверг, 4 октября 2012 г.

Julia Styles - The Independent (London, England)

Champion of GP practice nurses and women's cancer campaigner

Julia Styles was a nurse from the valleys of South Wales. Awardedan MBE in the New Year's Honours for her work in healthcare inWales, she received the award just a month before she died. She leftschool without O-levels but eventually gained an MA from SwanseaUniversity, lecturing there and at the University of Glamorgan,becoming along the way a champion of practice nurses and thecontribution they could make to general practice. She also developedall-Wales training programmes for cervical screening.

Julia Jones was born in 1950 in Blackwood, South Wales, one ofseven children of the owner of an ice-cream business. She became anursing cadet as soon as she was old enough and trained for theassistant grade of State Enrolled Nurse at St James Hospital,Tredegar, while studying for O-levels at the same time.

She made the then-unusual career choice of becoming one of thefirst nurses in Wales in a family doctor's practice at Abertillery.She was eventually to develop the first academic programme forpractice nurses and the first electronic learning packages.

In 1971 she married Granville Styles, and while their threechildren were small she worked nights at Neville Hall hospital,later going to the University Hospital, Cardiff, to qualify as aState Registered Nurse. As soon as she was on the register, she wasawarded a scholarship to study part-time for a master's degree innursing at Swansea University.

She became assistant director for primary care at the Universityof Cardiff, a deputy director of the National Science course atSwansea University, and a lecturer at the University of Glamorgan.She joined the staff of the Royal College of Nursing, and was alwaysparticularly encouraging of mature students.

As head of nursing at Blaenau Gwent local health board, shetransformed nursing in Ebbw Vale. She initiated a partnership withthe University of Glamorgan with local courses being accredited.

It was while in this post, in 2007, that she became ill withovarian cancer. When, two years ago, funding was withdrawn fromspecialist cancer nurses, she campaigned and wrote to the HealthMinister.

The 500 mourners at her funeral at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church,Blackwood, where she had been baptised, were each given a daffodil -emblem of Marie Curie Cancer Care as well as the Welsh nationalflower.

Julia Styles was a good negotiator, who always had a plan. Herinterests outside nursing included line dancing and walking,particularly in the Gower Peninsula, and she was a member ofPontllanfraith Methodist Choir.

среда, 3 октября 2012 г.

Making kitsch from AIDS: a disease with a gift shop of its own. - Harper's Magazine

AIDS may be the first disease to have its own gift shop. Housed in the Workshop Building of the AIDS Memorial Quilt--the acres of fabric that commemorate the deaths of thousands of AIDS victims--Under One Roof is at the epicenter of the burgeoning industry of AIDS kitsch. Catering to an upscale clientele beaming with good intentions, the store, on Market Street in San Francisco's Castro District, peddles memento mori as shamelessly as tourist traps peddle souvenirs: 'Cuddle Wit' teddy bears that sport tasteful red ribbons; Keith Haring tote bags; and T-shirts stenciled with the words 'We're Cookin' Up Love for People With AIDS.' The boutique also sells a unique line of AIDS-related sympathy cards, including one picturing a seductive man leaning inconsolably against a tombstone angel. Inside an unctuous caption that smacks of an undertaker's condolences reads: 'I wonder at times why some are chosen to leave so soon. Then I remember who has left, and I know. God must have wanted them home because he missed them.' One of the store's best-selling items is a macabre coffee-table book of the Quilt itself, lavishly illustrated and presumably meant for bored guests to casually thumb through while ignoring the presentation of death as political knickknack.

Although Under One Roof donates its profits to a variety of AIDS-relief organizations, commercial businesses have not hesitated to wrap their products in the shroud of AIDS to promote their own merchandise. Benetton, in the early 1990s, placed in glossy magazines an ad that featured a skeletal male figure, obviously dying of AIDS. Stretched out in a hospital bed, beneath a print of Jesus Christ, he is attended by a sobbing father, who clutches him like a rag doll, and a grief-stricken another, who sits crumpled in despair. In the ad's left-hand comer several words sit quietly in mourning, like unbidden guests maintaining respectful silence in the company of the family's anguish; they read, 'United Colors of Benetton ... For the nearest Benetton store location call 1-800-535-4491.'

AIDS kitsch now appears in mind-numbing variety: as rap songs and safe-sex brochures, as the panel in the Quilt representing an enormous airmail envelope addressed to 'A Better Place,' and as Andre Durand's painting Votive Offering, which depicts an ethereal Princess Di, amid saints and bathed in celestial light, placing her hands on an emaciated AIDS patient while dying men in surrounding hospital beds strain at their dripping IVs as if pleading to touch the hem her skirt. AIDS has been so thoroughly sentimentalized that it inspires such publicity stunts as Elton John flying Ryan White to Disneyland or Miss America haunting AIDS wards, where she consoles dozens of victims like a beauty among lepers. Whoopi Goldberg has turned up at displays of the Quilt pushing around a man in a wheelchair, an image that serves as the allegorical emblem of the kitschification of AIDS; just as politicians dandle babies, so celebrities use patients in wheelchairs as props for photo opportunities that dramatize their generosity and humanitarianism. There now exists an entire social circuit of well-advertised benefits--like the dusk-to-dawn dance-a-thons held by New York City's Gay Men's Health Crisis--each of them masterminded by an expensive breed of charity-ball impresario. The events provide celebrities on the order of Marky Mark, Madonna, and Liza Minnelli with venues to shore up their credentials for tolerance or bolster their flagging careers.

Although terminal illnesses have often been sentimentalized--who can forget Love Story or Brian's Song?--the AIDS epidemic in particular encourages the production of kitsch, inviting the abuse of activists, yellow journalists, New Age healers, pop psychologists, holistic chiropractors, and Hollywood producers. Manufacturers of kitsch use gaudy cosmetics and stagy lighting to make the pathetic more pathetic, the sad sadder, transforming AIDS into a trite melodrama, a cozy bedtime story narrated in a teary singsong for the American public.

The proliferation of AIDS kitsch can be linked to the unusual conditions under which activists were initially forced to raise money for research, treatment, and education. Given the minimal federal response to the disease in the 1980s and the public's hostility to the epidemic's first casualties, homosexuals and IV drug users--activists used a barrage of cheap images specifically designed to elicit pity in order to persuade the private sector to bear the financial burden. The epidemic was sold to the public, like the red-ribbon paperweights and ruby brooches sold at Under One Roof. The marketing campaign has proved highly successful; last year the Gay Men's Health Crisis and the American Foundation for AIDS Research, two of the larger AIDS organizations, together raised more than $45 million.

The propaganda surrounding AIDS has embraced kitsch precisely because of the means by which the disease is transmitted. Because AIDS has ravaged communities of people toward whom Americans have shown little compassion, the marketing of the AIDS 'product' has involved considerable ingenuity, including a full-scale revision of the image of AIDS sufferers. Unlike less controversial illnesses, like multiple sclerosis or leukemia, AIDS is vulnerable to kitsch in part because of the urgent need to render the victim innocent. In order to thwart the demonization of gay men, activists have attempted to conceal sexual practices that the public at large finds unacceptable behind a counter-iconography that has the unfortunate side effect of filling the art and writings about AIDS with implausible caricatures of the victim as a beseeching poster child. The infantilization of the epidemic's victims has come to play an increasingly important role in AIDS propaganda, whether as the uplifting tendentiousness of a coloring book en. titled It's OK to Be ... Me: A Cool Book About Life and Being HIV+ or as the mawkishness of the songs of HIV-positive children on the album Answer the Call, where piping choruses of quavering sopranos recite such plaintive lines as 'We need love/We need compassion to live/ We've got hugs/We've got kisses to give.'

Among mainstream magazines, People has responded most strongly to the imperative to supply sanitized portraits of AIDS victims in the name of fostering an atmosphere of tolerance and understanding. The magazine played a pivotal role in the beatification of Ryan White, whom its editors transformed into a living Hallmark card, a modem version of Dickens's Tiny Tim wasting away on the hearth, racked by chills and a hacking cough. People's bathetic accounts included tear-jerking scenes of mother and son kneeling in bedside prayer, and seemed to relish the gruesome decay of his frail body, which was described in prurient detail, from his dainty feet in 'huge, furry |Bigfoot' slippers' to 'his tiny blue fingers,' which he constantly warmed over the coils of his mother's electric stove. White appeared in People's frequent profiles as an anachronistic piece of Victoriana, a poetic wraith who enjoyed wandering among the tombstones of his future burial place, the cemetery in Cicero, Indiana, which he preferred hands down--or so we were told--to the cheerless plots of Kokomo, the home of those despicable bigots who railroaded him from their ranks because of his disease.

Almost from the inception of the epidemic, AIDS propagandists have found themselves in a peculiar moral bind. On the one hand, they attempt to elicit compassion by portraying the victims of the disease as seraphic innocents, as Sylvia Golstaub does in her memoir, Unconditional Love, when, after returning to Florida from her son's funeral, she imagines that she sees him soaring like an angel outside of the window of the plane, waving his hand and saying, 'Hi Mom! Hi Dad! Don't Worry! Be Happy!' At the same time, the epidemic's salesmen must avoid portraying HIV-positive people as bedridden invalids unable to fight for their own interests. Those who die are often embalmed in their obituaries in heroic cliches: 'foot soldiers in the war against AIDS' who die after 'beautiful battles' and 'long and courageous struggles,' exhibiting 'tenacious spirit' and a 'brave refusal to surrender.' The representation of the AIDS victim thus oscillates between two extremes of stylization: the childish image of the guiltless martyr clutchug his teddy bear and warming 'his tiny blue fingers,' and the 'empowered' image of the stouthearted hero whose gutsy brinkmanship in the face of death is held up as a model of unshakable resolve and pitiless optimism--a punitively high standard of behavior, it should be noted, for people suffering from a deadly disease.

If the propaganda of AIDS. activists targets the housewife in Topeka, another variety of kitsch addresses the AIDS victim himself. It is he who buys the distinct and highly 'niched' line of the AIDS product sold by marketers exploiting not the lucrative emotion of pity but the more profitable one of panic. Taking advantage of the desperation of people grasping at straws, New Age healers and human-potential gurus have rushed to fill the void created by the failure of traditional medicine to resolve every health crisis it encounters. AIDS has been overrun with kitsch also because it has breathed new life into moribund New Age fads. Channelers now serve as conduits for the pronouncements of ancient 'Beings of Disincarnate Intelligence,' who, in certain circles, are touted as leading AIDS experts. Kevin Ryerson, for instance, is a 'fully accredited' clairvoyant who channels a spirit known simply as Spirit, a sagacious entity who advises victims of the epidemic to tune their unbalanced chakras like musical instruments, using as a basis not '|C' of the major scale, but |B,' and to proceed up the scale from there to A flat [since] this pitch is closer to the |A' of 438 vibrations per second which is the note that is sounded if one strikes the sarcophagus in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid.' Spirit also encourages AIDS sufferers to buy his friend's meditation tapes.

The loss of faith in conventional medicine has generated intense nostalgia for a pre-medical era of witch doctors and medicine men. Contemporary internists have been rejected and replaced by anachronistic figures decked out in the costumes of modern medievalism-magicians and alchemists who perform primitive rituals. One of the masterpieces of AIDS kitsch, the independent film Men in Love, is suffused with the longing for an Edenic world without science, a peaceful land of docile lotus-eaters where grieving Californians spurn traditional medicine for moonlit healing circles in Maui at which they don grass skirts, mutter incantations, and dance like savages around a bonfire.

Even more appalling is the mindless optimism of the self-help and human-potential movements. A bizarre dissonance occurs when the bleak prognosis for the victims of the disease collides with the indiscriminately happy-go-lucky, can-do attitudes of pop psychology's euphoric rhetoric, a dissonance perhaps best expressed in the testimonials by gay men with AIDS who deny the imminence of their death and even claim that the disease is, as one Bay Area patient put it in an interview in the San Francisco Examiner, 'the most wonderful thing that ever happened in my life.' This remarkable statement is echoed in a letter that a disciple of the reigning messiah of alternative medicine, Louise Hay, wrote to an anthropmorphized image of his disease:

Dear AIDS,

For so long now I've been angry with you for being

part of my life. I feel like you have violated my

being. The strongest emotion thus far in our relationship

has been anger!!

But now I choose to see you in a different light.

I no longer hate you or feel angry with you. I realize

now that you have become a positive force in

my life. You are a messenger who has brought me

a new understanding of life and myself. So I thank

you, forgive you, and release you.

Never before has anyone given me such great opportunity

... Because of you I have learned to love

myself, and as a result I love and am loved by others.

I am now in touch with parts of my being that

I never knew existed. I have grown spiritually and

intellectually since your arrival .... So again I thank

you for giving me this opportunity to have insight

into my life. How could I not forgive you, when so

many positive experiences have come from your

visit.

But you have also led me to the realization that

you have no power over me. I am the power in my

world.

With love,

Paul

In the self-help treatment guide Immune Power, Dr. Jon D. Kaiser even advises his clients to open up a regular correspondence with their virus. The patient, playing the role of the disease, writes back like a pen pal or a well-bred guest to thank its 'hosts' 'for sharing your feelings with me' '[that l] have overstayed [my] welcome,' adding that 'I appreciate your thoughts and I am not offended by the bluntness of your attitude toward me.'

The banal euphemisms of pop psychology have turned much of the self-help literature on the epidemic into black comedy. Prophets like Hay and Kaiser attempt to incorporate their clients' illnesses into their upbeat programs for self-actualization, as if the disease were simply another hurdle to be surmounted in the quest for personal growth. The demagogues of what might be called the 'empathy industry' promote the notion that we have full control of our lives, that there is no problem so overwhelming that a simple act of self-assertion will not ultimately lead to its resolution. The modem therapeutic paradigms from which AIDS profiteers derive their methods thus fail spectacularly to acknowledge tragedy and refuse to admit that anything could evade the resourcefulness of the human will.

Given the abundance of kitsch generated from AIDS profiteering, it is surprising that the genre in which you might expect to find kitsch remains relatively free of it: fiction. It is not that such authors as David Feinberg, Edmund White, Paul Monette, Robert Ferro, John Weir, and Christopher Coe are (or were) actually all that good; they simply avoid being all that bad. Their novels present few overwrought scenes of tearful bedside farewells, shocking expulsions by heartless parents of their ailing children, or much of the melodrama that so appeals to American tastes. (Not incidentally, perhaps, these novels have never hit the best-seller list.) In fact, it is precisely the fear of sentimentality that defines the fiction about AIDS and makes the literary depictions of the epidemic case studies in authorial restraint. Fiction writers' fear of kitsch is so strong that contemporary literature is in many ways immune to the tragedy of AIDS, inoculated against it by a tendency toward flippant ironizing, like the compulsive jocularity found in John Weir's The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket. Here, the dying protagonist struts and poses through his illness, embracing theatrical attitudes he self-consciously plagiarizes from Hollywood B films, like the addled femme fatale in Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Where AIDS novelists fear to tread, however, journalists and docudramatists go without hesitation, demonstrating a ghoulish fascination for the narrative richness of the disease. In accounts as different as Dominique Lapierre's 'epic story' Beyond Love, an absurd potboiler that turns the history of AIDS into a soap opera, and Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On, the journalism about the epidemic is paradoxically far more fictional than the fiction. The reporting relies on the need to invent scenes, re-create internal monologues, manufacture suspense, devise artful foreshadowings, and evoke menacing atmospheres. The mainstream media have found these methods so profitable that their impulse to novelize the disease has prevailed over their obligation to document it.

Nowhere do the kitschifying effects of narrative appear more clearly than in the HBO movie version of And the Band Played On, itself a tissue of reconstructed dialogues and internal soliloquies. Common sense might suggest that the book should have been interpreted as documentary, with footage from newsreels and interviews; instead, Hollywood created a fictional reenactment with an all-star cast headed by a soulful Richard Gere, an earthy Lily Tomlin, and a brooding Ian McKellen--slow death as entertainment.

While telling the story of the epidemic, journalists have often given readers an improbably intimate point of view. Assuming the perspective of an omniscient third-person narrator, reporters minimize our awareness of the necessarily secondhand nature of the facts they convey, allowing us to imagine that we are viewing the scene through a hidden camera. Thus, for instance, we are literally in the hospital when the grief-stricken wife described in the Ladies' Home Journal article entitled 'AIDS & Marriage: What Every Wife Must Know' paces frantically up and down the echoing corridor keeping 'a silent and solitary vigil' before her dying husband's quarantined room. Likewise, we become eavesdroppers in the mobile home--indeed, in the very mind--of the victim of the bigoted Southern town portrayed in U.S. News & World Report's article 'AIDS: When Fear Takes Charge,' who prays as a teenager for God to make him straight ('|Please, dear Lord, change me,' Steve prayed nightly, as he lay in bed as a youth his father's trailer').

Where the media have sold the epidemic as lurid melodrama, as medical theme park, or as morbid peep show, the organizers of the AIDS Memorial Quilt have sold their product as a nostalgic piece of folk art. The Quilt, a patchwork of cloth that can be visited like a grave site or a war memorial, is an extraordinary and often moving device that is in part intended to manipulate the way the disease is judged by the uninfected. Just as activists attempt to make the disease appealing to the consumer by counteracting homophobic stereotypes with desexed images of AIDS martyrs, so the Quilt wraps the epidemic's infantilized victims in what amounts to a macabre security blanket, an ideological shield. According to Cleve Jones, the Quilt's founder, this embodiment of 'pure good,' which emanates 'coziness, humanity and warmth,' 'touch[es] people's hearts with something that is so pure and so clear in its message' that it creates an outpouring of compassion that helps fight discrimination.

We are meant to discuss this sacrosanct artifact in hushed tones of reverence, but in fact the Quilt is the sublime expression of AIDS kitsch. It evokes nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent time, a pastoral world of buggies and butter churns--an America that never existed. 'From our earliest days,' the jacket copy of the coffee-table book The Quik proclaims, 'the quilt and the quilting bee have been part of American life.' Jones, his 'eyes glisten[ing] with both sadness and pride,' with the 'tears that flow constantly,' describes the Quilt--whose panels are individually stitched by the friends and families of those who have died of AIDS--as 'a way for survivors to work through their grief in a positive, creative way.' 'We sew and ... cry and ... hold each other,' a Quilt volunteer explains. Thus the merchants of the disease place its primary commemorative monument within the context of a wholesome tradition of American history, to create a kind of faux antique, the memento of an apocryphal Arcadia. In this mythic, prelapsarian America, AIDS sheds its stigma as the scourge of depraved homosexuals and is endowed instead with the integrity of our industrious Pilgrim forefathers. Nostalgia, the longing for a legendary, small-town America, is a fundamental component of AIDS kitsch, and the selling of the Quilt obeys one of the primary rules of marketing: the romanticization of handmade goods. The Quilt effectively exudes an aura of the homestead, of kindly old grannies in bifocals and bonnets stitching up a storm, plying a trade that harks back to the naive primitivism of American Gothic.

The images of folk art also provide a substitute for the iconography of the Christian Church. Almost from the onset of the disease, AIDS propagandists have urged us to vent our pent-up grief as part of a regular program of mental hygiene, as well as a means of publicizing the tragedy and rallying new supporters to the cause. Therapists, members of the activist group ACT UP, and other leaders of the gay community now teach us that the suppression of sorrow and rage is both psychologically damaging and politically retrograde, at once interfering with the 'grieving process' and encouraging passivity and resignation.

вторник, 2 октября 2012 г.

'Boot camp buddies' move on. - Worthington Daily Globe (Worthington, MN)

Byline: Kari Lucin

Sep. 2--WORTHINGTON -- They are the best of the best, proud possessors of the Eagle, Globe and Anchor, topped with the motto 'Semper Fidelis' -- the emblem of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Jonathan Sickmeyer and Jesus Sanchez, both 2008 graduates of Worthington High School, joined the ranks of 'the few, the proud' to become U.S. Marines, graduating from boot camp Aug. 22.

'I personally wanted to serve this country and repay this country for what it's given me and my family,' Sanchez said of his decision to enlist.

The two men were co-workers at Hy-Vee when they realized they both intended to join the Marine Corps after graduating from high school.

They then signed up as 'boot camp buddies,' a system allowing people to stay together throughout boot camp, allowing them to encourage each other and adjust to their new lives more easily.

Sickmeyer, the son of James and Genie Sickmeyer of Worthington, always wanted to go into the military, and opted for the Marine Corps because it is considered the best of the best and offers the toughest training.

And the training was tough.

'They try to break you in any way they can,' Sanchez said.

'To build you back up into Marines,' Sickmeyer added.

Physical strength was not enough to get by, either -- boot camp demanded from the prospective Marines a high level of mental resilience and the ability to cope with constant challenges.

'Discipline -- discipline above all,' Sanchez said, describing what he learned from his time at boot camp. 'It shows you how to keep your bearing. Honor, courage, and commitment.'

Marine boot camp is divided into three phases that last a total of 13 weeks. The first week is called 'receiving,' during which the recruits work on their medical records, bank accounts and wills. Then the work begins.

'The first phase is mentally challenging. They're always screaming at you, seeing how you'll react,' Sickmeyer said. 'In the second phase there's more responsibility, and if you screw up they'll get on you a little harder.'

Sanchez, the son of Marisela Sanchez of Worthington, compared it to the difference between a high school freshman and a high school senior.

Four men in their platoon of 72 did not graduate to become Marines, with health issues holding a few back and another stopped by a failed test, which he will be allowed to attempt again in a different company. One man quit.

Although Sickmeyer, Sanchez and their brother-Marines graduated Aug. 22, they became Marines earlier, after they passed through the Crucible -- a grueling 54-hour test of obstacles, challenges and hikes, which must be completed while carrying a 90- to 95-pound pack.

The Crucible culminated in a charge up 'The Reaper,' a mile-high hill shaped like a sickle. The men were told that when they reached the top of that hill, they would be considered Marines.

'I never realized how physically, your body could get tired,' Sickmeyer said, recalling the long trip up the hill. 'You'd see guys passing out left and right. I started seeing little red lights.'

Even at the top of the hill, where they received an apple and a Gatorade -- 'the best thing in your life,' Sickmeyer said -- and became Marines, the trial wasn't over. They still had to go back down, considered the harder of the two trips by many of the new U.S. Marines.

'You've completed the toughest training the U.S. has to offer. It's a great feeling,' Sickmeyer recalled. 'You almost feel like you could do it again.'

Their families and friends are also proud of Sanchez and Sickmeyer.

'My mom personally said she was the proudest on earth. I was first in my family to graduate... it made me a better person. It opened doors,' Sanchez said.

After the long months of boot camp, from May 22 to Aug. 22, Sanchez and Sickmeyer will finally be separated in their careers when they report in at Camp Pendleton, Calif., again Tuesday. Sickmeyer will attend infantry training, and Sanchez will go to combat training and learn construction and remodeling.

Neither is sure yet if he wants to become a career Marine or exit the service after the first four years of duty. They expect to be deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan after they finish the rest of their training.

'They're big on integrity,' Sickmeyer said.

'On doing the right thing, even when no one is looking,' Sanchez agreed. 'We try to set an example and just be the best.'

Sickmeyer advised anyone interested in joining the Marines to listen carefully to what instructors say and listen and obey them.

'If you don't have a path, the Marine Corps is the best place to go to show you a path,' Sanchez agreed. 'I'm proud to be called a Marine, a devil dog.'

To see more of The Daily Globe, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.dglobe.com.

Copyright (c) 2008, The Daily Globe, Worthington, Minn.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

понедельник, 1 октября 2012 г.

Cautious Hoteliers Converting Existing Properties, Not Building New Ones. (Originated from The Orange County Register, Calif.) - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Dec. 7--In the twilight of the struggle to nurse the hotel industry back to health, some glimmerings of hope are visible from Andy Theodorou's office at the Holiday Inn Express in Santa Ana.

Engaged in perhaps the greatest challenge of his 22-year hotel career, Theodorou is trying to resurrect the 10-story hotel, acquired last year by Los Angeles-based Chicksands Corp. and converted in May to a Holiday Inn Express.

It is the fifth 'flag' the 150-room hotel has worn in its 20-year life and its third in the past five years; changes that reflect the hard-scrabble life to which the recession has consigned many hotels. In Orange County, the recession caught the industry just as the last nails were being driven on an expansion that added 100 hotels, bringing the total to 382 and unleashing ferocious competition.

How to grow in such a market? 'There is no lending money around and no one is building anything, so there is a lot of reflagging,' said Melissa Mills, who tracks hotel occupancy and room rates in Southern California for Los Angeles-based PKF Consulting.

Consider: New Jersey-based Days Inn opened a new hotel somewhere in the world almost every day last year, 93 percent of them conversions.

Choice Hotels of Maryland hopes to add 3,300 hotels in the next eight years, upping its worldwide total to 10,000.

Holiday Inn hopes to nearly double its Holiday Inn Express chain to 200 locations by the end of next year.

Holiday Inn Express is Atlanta-based Holiday Inn's fewer-frills nameplate, with Expresses typically lacking a restaurant and bar.

Theodorou is betting his career that Holiday Inn Express will be the winning emblem for his hotel, which is on East First Street near the Santa Ana (I-5) Freeway. The building was erected 20 years ago as a Royale Inn, then became a Howard Johnson's, then a Ramada Inn, and then a Days Inn. Chicksands spent $2 million refurbishing the building before putting up the Holiday Inn Express banner.

The building may get yet another banner next year. Chicksands is considering connecting the adjacent restaurant to the hotel, a move that will enable the hotel to become a full-fledged Holiday Inn.

Fueling the scramble for flags has been a near street brawl among hotel companies for business. 'Competition is so stiff that if you are selling a room for $50, a competitor will sell at $49,' said Theodorou.

That's being reflected in the price of hotel sales, which fell 5 percent through the nine months of 1993. California's lingering recession and the sale of foreclosed properties contributed to the downturn, said the Hotel & Motel Brokers of America.

Through August, average room rates in Orange County were off 1.5 percent compared with the prior year, according to PKF Consulting.

That competition has meant travelers to Southern California get some of the best hotel bargains in the nation. For hoteliers, it has meant extremely

rely surviving,' Theodorou said.

That may be an exaggeration, but in recent months, at least four county hotels have trudged into bankruptcy court, bearing petitions for reorganizations.

Elsewhere in the country, more lights are coming on in dark hotel rooms, fueling hopes for a recovery that soon will spread to California.

Occupancy at U.S. hotels neared pre-recessionary levels for the first half of the year, according to the recently completed Host Report, a semi- annual publication of Arthur Andersen & Co., the accounting firm.

Average room occupancy rose 1.8 percent, to 62.4 percent in the first half of 1993.

However small, those gains are prompting executives in the $61 billion hotel industry to begin whispering about building again.

Southern California's hotel industry probably was the hardest hit in the nation by the recesssion, said Bill Weatherford, Choice Hotel's regional vice president for development. 'California is recovering ever so slowly,' he said. Enough, though, that the company is considering new construction again in California.

Theodorou won't want to hear that. Showing a visitor a room, he fusses over a lampshade turned so the seam is visible to guests. The current $39 room rate is a 'gimmick' the property can't long sustain, he acknowledges.

But with few experts predicting real recovery in the hotel industry before 1995, can the Holiday Inn Express hold on that long?