November 29, 2005






  • Billy Joel




    Billy Joel
    Oh, the squandered genius!
    By Jody Rosen
    Posted Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2005, at 1:21 PM ET




    There was a time in my demented youth when I believed that Billy Joel was the greatest musician in the world. I spent seventh-grade classes scrawling the lyrics to "Play MediaScenes From an Italian Restaurant" on the back of a three-ring binder. I shelled out $30 for a bootleg copy of Joel's debut LP Cold Spring Harbor at a used record store. I recall an argument with a junior-high classmate in which I maintained that Joel was a better songwriter than Bob Dylan. In a moment of acute identity crisis, I attempted to fuse my newfound love of hip-hop culture with Joel fandom by adopting the graffiti tag "Stiletto 121." The "121" was for the Upper West Side street where I spent my early childhood, "Stiletto," of course, was for Joel's Play Mediaboogie-woogieing 1978 song about a femme fatale.



    All this came to a head in my freshman year of high school when I discovered Elvis Costello, who, a friend informed me, "writes songs about why people like Billy Joel are just so bad." I didn't want to believe it; surely, I told myself, it was possible to be a fan of Costello and Joel, both of whom, after all, had a way with a tune. Later that year, I went to my first Costello concert. Midway through the show, Costello sat down at an electric piano and began playing a series of cheesy cocktail-jazz chords. "I'd like to sing a Billy Joel song for you now," he said dryly, as laughter rippled through the audience. "It's called 'Just the Way You Are.' " When I returned home that night, all the Joel albums got stuck away in the back of a closet.


    It's now more than 20 years later and the new Billy Joel box set, My Lives, sits on my desk—a four-CD-plus-bonus-DVD behemoth whose 80 tracks offer ample reminders of why I loved Joel in the first place, and why, indeed, he's just so bad. Give Joel credit for quirkiness. Rather than release a greatest-hits rehash, he's put out a collection packed with B-sides, oddball cover songs, obscure album tracks, and rarities from his pre-solo-career bands, including the preposterous Attila, a "heavy metal power-duo" that the Piano Man led briefly in the late '60s. Some of the alternative takes of familiar songs are even weirder. There may never be a more spectacularly wrongheaded genre experiment than the Play Mediareggae version of "Only the Good Die Young," Joel's 1977 anthem about deflowering a Catholic schoolgirl—perhaps the whitest reggae track ever recorded.


    Joel is one of pop's special cases: The essence of his badness lies in his squandered excellence. He is a fluent pianist, a singer of deceptive versatility and range (listen to his vocal overdubs on the doo-wop homage "Play MediaThe Longest Time"), and one of the more gifted tunesmiths of his generation, right up there with Costello. The least of his album tracks are catchy little melody bombs; his big singles—"Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)," "My Life," "Uptown Girl"—have the same savant's knack for hooks and harmonies that you hear in Paul McCartney's best.


    For some musicians, virtuosity—and upward of 78 million albums sold—might be accomplishment enough. But Joel's tragic flaw is a classic one: hubris. The guy desperately wants to be an artiste. Listening to My Lives, it's clear that these ambitions began early, back in the Attila days, when he was given to creating minisuites with titles like "Amplifier Fire (I. Godzilla; II. March of the Huns)." As a lyricist, Joel has never stopped straining for significance. He's tried to be a Dylan-style poet-troubadour ("Piano Man"), a jaundiced social satirist a la Randy Newman ("Los Angelenos"), and a Springsteenesque working-class bard ("Allentown"). Lately, he's reinvented himself as Claude Debussy: My Lives features several forays into classical composition, including a tremulous piece of glop called "Elegy: The Great Peconic," performed by members of the London Symphony Orchestra.


    The truth is that Joel was born at the wrong time. Were he a decade older, he might have wound up in the Brill Building crafting perfect little pop songs and gone down in history with Burt Bacharach, Carole King, and company. But Joel came of age in the post-Beatles era, when songwriters grew self-conscious about rock's aesthetic and social significance, and felt compelled to make statements. Alas, Joel is a leaden lyricist with nothing to say; the result is songs like the 1989 hit "We Didn't Start the Fire," a laundry list of historical events—"Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge on the River Kwai"—that Joel tried to pass off as a panorama of postwar American life, or a portrait of baby boomer ennui, or something. Joel's self-seriousness has been painfully evident on his recent co-headlining tours with Elton John, who never lets artistic pretension stop him from donning a feather boa and throwing a party. Which Lite FM legend would you rather have over to dinner?


    Elton John, in addition to being infinitely gayer and more fabulous than Joel, seems at peace with his status as a god of the adult contemporary charts, which Joel decidedly is not. Forget punk rockers and gangsta rappers: Billy Joel is pop music's angriest man. He was a welterweight boxer in his early 20s and that pugnaciousness has never left him—for two decades he has ended his concerts by telling audiences "Don't take any shit from anybody." His songs have poured wrath on women ("Big Shot"), mom and dad ("My Life"), and virtually everyone else, including, curiously, angry young men ("Prelude/Angry Young Man"). Even his gentlest songs leak bile. "Honesty" seems tender enough until you listen closely and realize it's about how everyone in the world is a liar and a hypocrite.


    Joel, of course, is Long Island's favorite musical son, and it's tempting to write off his fuck-everyone attitude as a regional tic: The Song of the Bridge-and-Tunnel Tough Guy. But the chief source of Joel's resentment is his place in the musical pantheon. He's never stopped moaning about rock critics dismissing him as a lightweight. In the late '70s he famously ripped up Village Voice critic Robert Christgau's reviews on stage. He recorded Glass Houses (1980) in a fruitless attempt to answer his detractors and prove that he was a real rocker, undeserving of relegation to soft-rock radio, a format he's referred to as "soft-cock." The irony is that Joel was running away from his strength: He makes good cheese. A comparison with McCartney is revealing. Sir Paul is at his finest when he gets arty and ambitious. The Beatles' songwriting experiments and sonic questing brought out the best in him; when he writes sweet and sentimental, the results can be gruesome. (All together now: We're simp-ly hav-ing a won-der-ful Christmas time!) But Joel is actually quite good at writing saccharine love songs, big lush ballads, and lounge music.


    The ur-Joel ballad, of course, is "Just the Way You Are," which is an expertly constructed song, the kind of thing that urbane Tin Pan Alley types were writing back in the 1950s. Joel has said that when he wrote the song, he envisioned Ray Charles singing it in Yankee Stadium, and, sure enough, "Just the Way You Are" has become a standard, recorded by everyone from Wayne Newton to Isaac Hayes to opera diva Jessye Norman. Play MediaBarry White gave it the disco boudoir treatment; Play MediaSinatra swung it. Even Mrs. Elvis Costello herself, Play MediaDiana Krall, gave a tender reading on her 2002 Live in Paris album, proof positive that art—even schmaltz-drenched art—is longer than snark. And the song really is artful: If you can get past the production dreck of Play MediaJoel's original, you just might find yourself surrendering to its dreamy tiptoeing between minor sixth and seventh chords and to the spare elegance of its lyric. Joel croons those words—a plea not to put on airs—to a lover. But the old-fashioned balladeer who fancied himself a poet-genius-rebel-rocker would have done well to heed them himself: "Don't go trying some new fashion/ Don't change the color of your hair."


    Jody Rosen is The Nation's music critic and the author of White Christmas: The Story of an American Song.

  • Las Vegas Style Capital




    Mark Thomas, wine director of the Mix restaurant in the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, holds his restaurant's 38-page wine list. The wine case behind him is 45 feet wide.
    (Lawrence K. Ho / LAT)



    Strong demand for palms by Vegas hotels and housing developments has meant fewer of the trees for Los Angeles. Nearly all of the date palms sent to Vegas are grown in Indio.
    (Lawrence K. Ho / LAT)



    The Oscar de la Renta store in the Wynn Las Vegas resort is one of the city’s new boutiques.
    (Lawrence K. Ho / LAT)



    Inside the Oscar de la Renta store at the Wynn. Many wealthy visitors from Seoul, Hong Kong and Tokyo, so cherished by L.A.-area tourism officials, are skipping Rodeo Drive altogether.
    (Lawrence K. Ho / LAT)



    Newly planted palm trees line Las Vegas Boulevard in front of the Fashion Show, a high-end retail shopping area.
    (Lawrence K. Ho / LAT)



    The lush gardens of the Mirage Hotel and Casino are full of palm trees.
    (Lawrence K. Ho / LAT)

    STYLE & CULTURE
    Vegas Stripping L.A. of Its Luxury Luster

    For boutiques, dining, stage shows and even palm trees, the desert city has become a rival.
    By Gina Piccalo
    Times Staff Writer

    November 24, 2005

    Piero Selvaggio calls it his "Las Vegas experience." It was opening night at Valentino, the Venetian hotel version of his successful Santa Monica restaurant, when a high roller sent his butler to buy some wine to go with dinner. Twenty minutes later, Selvaggio had sold the man more than $4,000 worth of rare Burgundy and vintage Bordeaux.

    "In less than half an hour," said Selvaggio, one of the Los Angeles area's leading restaurateurs, "I was able to see things I would never have imagined possible."

    And that was just the beginning. Las Vegas' appetite for the luxe life has grown so ravenous in the last few years that it is stunning veterans of the hospitality industry — and nibbling away at the good life all over the country, nowhere more than in Los Angeles.

    Call it the Vegas Effect. The city's relentless demand for luxury has contributed to a rise in prices for Kobe beef and palm trees, wiped out exclusive wine stock, lured wealthy Asian tourists away from Rodeo Drive with more exclusive boutiques and kept touring Broadway shows such as "Avenue Q" and "Spamalot" out of Los Angeles.

    It is siphoning top talent and thousands of workers from throughout Southern California. And everything — from specialty produce from the Santa Monica Farmers Market to ordinary items such as toilet paper and lumber — has to be imported from somewhere, usually Southern California.

    "When you go to Las Vegas, you have a sense that spending — it's almost easier, looser — and you feel that it's part of the pleasure," Selvaggio said. "The opulence and the variety and quality at the high end in Las Vegas is much, much bigger than Los Angeles. Los Angeles cannot even vaguely compete with this."

    Of course, Las Vegas has long been a city of superlatives. It has for years been the nation's fastest-growing city. It has the largest job growth rate: 7.4% in 2005 with more than 62,000 jobs created this year. More hotel rooms than any city in the world: 133,000. More conventions and trade shows than any in the United States. Fashion designers, restaurateurs, hoteliers, superstar chefs and Broadway producers all want a presence in Las Vegas, because as L.A. nightlife impresario Amanda Demme said, "If you're known in Vegas, you're known everywhere."

    Lee Maen, a partner in Innovative Dining Group, which owns trendy restaurants in L.A. and Las Vegas including Boa and Sushi Roku, agreed: "As much as L.A. influences the Vegas market, the Vegas market influences other restaurants across the country."

    Las Vegas' glittering shopping concourses now house so many exclusive boutiques that the L.A. luxury market looks almost second tier by comparison. When Oscar de la Renta looked west, he opened his third store in the world in Las Vegas, not L.A. The Manolo Blahnik and Dior Homme boutiques in Las Vegas are the second locations outside New York. Overall, Las Vegas experienced four times the retail and trade growth that L.A. did in the last year, according to Ross DeVol, director of regional economics at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica.

    More wealthy visitors from Seoul, Hong Kong and Tokyo, who are so cherished by L.A.-area tourism officials, are skipping Rodeo Drive altogether. "Over the past two years, Asian visitations have grown more to Las Vegas than to Los Angeles," DeVol said. "These are high rollers, who stay multiple nights at high-end hotels."

    "This would be a direct challenge to Beverly Hills and South Coast Plaza," said Jack Kyser, the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.'s senior vice president and chief economist. "And now there's direct airline service from Asia. The high-rolling Asian tourists might just choose to overfly L.A."

    Los Angeles also lost out on at least two popular Broadway shows. This year, billionaire hotel mogul Steve Wynn is leading the city's efforts to bring first-run Broadway productions to Vegas permanently.

    Thanks to his exorbitant offers — $5 million for "Avenue Q" and $10 million for "Spamalot" — the shows won't tour the region, blacking out theaters in the L.A. area. In addition to Cirque du Soleil's wild success in Las Vegas, "Mamma Mia!" and "We Will Rock You" have become Vegas hits.

    "We're selling so many tickets to so many shows that there's room for a lot of diversity [in productions]," said Alan Feldman, MGM Mirage's senior vice president of public affairs. "That in turn has prompted some producers to look at their economic model and say, 'What happens if I don't tour?' "

    Settling down in Las Vegas means getting the benefits of touring without the expense, Feldman said: a fresh audience that comes through every three days, no enormous expenses of a traveling cast or setting up and tearing down the sets, and being able to say to employees, "You can have a family. You can get a house, an animal, live your life."

    While the restaurant scene is going through a cool period in L.A., where more than a dozen trendy spots closed this fall, just about 250 miles to the east, Vegas is sizzling. The list of celebrity chefs with Vegas outposts reads like a Who's Who of the culinary world: Alain Ducasse, Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Julian Serrano, Thomas Keller, Michael Mina, Tom Colicchio, Charlie Palmer. Just this fall, French three-star chef Joel Robuchon joined the lineup at the MGM Grand. Another French three-star chef, Guy Savoy, is on the way to Caesars Palace.

    This year, more restaurants opened in Nevada than any other state in the nation, according to the National Restaurant Assn., thanks in large part to the competition among Las Vegas' luxury hotels. Once there, restaurateurs often find the city provides a near nonstop supply of big spenders.

    "Obviously there's an advantage when you have 15,000 people every night going to a show, a 400-room hotel that's booked all year round at 100% occupancy," said celebrity chef Bradley Ogden, who moved to Las Vegas from the Bay Area to open his namesake restaurant in Caesars Palace in 2003.

    Even home cooks are competing with Vegas hotels, whose chefs shop for the region's best produce at the Santa Monica Farmers Market. L.A. Specialty Produce, a buyer and distributor, takes orders from nearly every hotel and restaurant along the Strip, then ships them locally grown fruits and vegetables, said Greg Bird, the director of business development.

    "We usually have two to three people at the Santa Monica Farmers Market every Wednesday," Bird said. "We're in communications with them throughout the course of the week. Some of that stuff never hits the display because we automatically take it."

    Although the company also sells to chefs in Southern California, Arizona and Hawaii, Las Vegas represents 15% to 20% of its total business.

    Likewise, Kobe beef — the rich, Japanese-style delicacy — is in short supply all over the United States, thanks in part to demand in Las Vegas, where tourists consume tons of the luxury meat each week. Snake River Farms in Idaho, the largest American Kobe producer, has watched its Vegas business explode in the last five years, said Shane Lindsay, the general manager of sales. "It's grown from a minor player to perhaps our most significant market," he said.

    "Every casino down the Strip has Kobe on its menu," said Mark Hoegh, marketing specialist for Kobe Beef America of Redmond, Ore. "Vegas has become quite a Kobe town. Even New York — per capita — does not buy as much as Vegas."

    There are 14 master sommeliers in Las Vegas; Los Angeles has none, according to the Court of Master Sommeliers. And the casinos, with their 50,000-bottle cellars and deep pockets, said Selvaggio, "have literally wiped out the finest Burgundy and Bordeaux, the finest of California, the finest of Italy, the finest of Australia and Spain."

    Las Vegas casinos can buy rare wines in such large quantities, said sommelier Mark Mendoza of Sona restaurant in L.A., that Los Angeles restaurants often miss out. "One hotel might get four or five cases of the rare white Burgundy Domaine Ramonet Batard-Montrachet where I might get three bottles when I ask for a case," he said. "There's only a certain amount earmarked for the Southern California market when those really hard-to-get wines come out."

    "In terms of niche wines," said Jack Robertiello, editor of Cheers, a restaurant trade magazine, "a lot of it ends up in Las Vegas because of the buying power of the casinos and places like Aureole or other destination restaurants."

    Something similar has been happening with palm trees, specifically the date palm, one of the signatures of Southern California. Vegas hotels and housing developments require so many of the lush species — nearly all are grown in Indio — to create a pseudo-oasis, that they have helped drive up the price 50% in the last two years, from $1,800 to $2,700 per tree.

    "Demand has been steadily rising since 2003, particularly in Vegas, by double digits every year," said Jack McClary, secretary treasurer of the Southern Nevada Landscape Assn.

    For L.A., that has meant living with fewer date palms — disease has killed off hundreds of the trees, and cities can no longer afford to replace them.

    "In those communities where the trees are predominant, such as Hancock Park, San Pedro and Van Nuys, we have not been able to replace those trees; we've had to replace the species," said George Gonzalez, chief forester for the city of Los Angeles.

    About the only thing that's not booming in Las Vegas is manufacturing: The city still imports nearly all its resources from California.

    Ogden and many other chefs said most of their fresh produce and fish comes from the Santa Monica Farmers Market and the Santa Monica Seafood Co. The seafood company's Las Vegas business has grown so rapidly in the last five years, said its director of sales, Tim Metro, that the company now trucks fresh food from L.A. six nights a week to 75 chefs along the Strip.

    "Clearly, there's a symbiotic relationship between Los Angeles and Las Vegas," said the Milken Institute's DeVol. "Las Vegas is going to do better if L.A. does better simply from a travel and tourism perspective."

    But does L.A. do better if Vegas does better?

    "It's not clear."




     











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  • Blogging and Commercial Potential






    Can Bloggers Strike It Rich? 

    By Adam L. Penenberg

    Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68934,00.html



    02:00 AM Sep. 22, 2005 PT


    When it comes to the profit potential of blogs, Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media, calls himself a skeptic.


    It's a surprisingly pessimistic perspective coming from the Brit who has launched a network of 13 theme blogs -- including Fleshbot (porn), Gawker and Defamer (gossip), Gizmodo (gadgets) and Wonkette (politics). His most popular properties (Defamer, Gizmodo and Gawker) report between 4 million and 6 million visits per month and millions more pageviews, he and his top talent have been featured in articles in the ink-and-pulp press (Wired, The New York Times Magazine) and Denton rarely misses an opportunity to trumpet ads on his sites for blue-chip companies like Absolut, Audi, Sony, Nike, Viacom, Disney and Condé Nast.




    Media Hack columnist Adam Penenberg
    Media Hack

    So you can forgive his competitors for not buying into his deflationary spin: As David Hauslaib, founder of Jossip and the newly launched Queerty, put it: "Nick infamously downplays the profit potential of blogging the same way Tom Cruise's sister-slash-publicist Lee Ann DeVette pretends his relationship with Katie Holmes is authentic. Even people outside the industry know it's a sham."


    Hauslaib credits part of Denton's success to his ability to keep mainstream publishers away from his medium, guaranteeing he'll be the biggest player when media buyers come knocking. But Hauslaib believes there are plenty of seats left in the arena. There could an additional handful of gossip sites to compete with Gawker (and Jossip, for that matter), and ad dollars would continue to flow in.


    "I'd love to see another half-dozen professional gay blogs surface that, in theory, would compete with Queerty," Hauslaib said, "but more importantly, they'd be validating the space and attracting even more ad dollars for everyone."


    This is a theory that Jason Calacanis -- the founder of Weblogs, who Denton refers to as his "endlessly entertaining rival" -- subscribes to. Calacanis is perhaps the blogosphere's biggest booster. I half expect him to claim that blogs will one day provide the cure for world hunger, cancer and bad hair. But he deserves credit for spotting a business opportunity at a time when many people viewed blogs as a digital wasteland (complete with typos, bad grammar and lowercase letters running amok).


    Calacanis employs 120 bloggers and publishes 90 blogs -- including Engadget (which covers consumer electronics) and Blog Maverick, typed by billionaire entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks' owner Mark Cuban -- with his writers making anywhere from $200 to $3,000 a month. (One presumes Cuban doesn't do it for the money.) On average, Weblog salaries are about a quarter to half what a mid-level editorial job would pay, without the daily office commute.


    "Not to mention (bloggers) get to write about the topic they are most passionate about," said Calacanis, who claims to be on track to collect more than $1 million in Google AdSense payments over the next year. "So, for our folks, it is like they are making money off their hobby. Think a scuba diver or video-game player making $500 to $1,500 a month writing about scuba diving or video games."


    What do you have to do to earn $500? Publish 125 entries a month, monitor comments, respond to readers and delete offensive comments -- all for about $4 a post. At least, according to a contract leaked to the internet last month.


    Naturally, Denton, for one, isn't impressed with Calacanis' wage scale ("We pay rather more than that") or his business model ("It's easy to launch hundreds of websites, but much harder to establish brands, online as much as off").


    Whether you are Calacanis, Denton or Hauslaib, to create a profitable blog requires much more than a keyboard, an internet connection and too much caffeine. You need a talented writer entertaining enough to hold an audience, a consistent publishing schedule, content worth linking to by other bloggers and worthy of press coverage, marketing savvy to sell advertising or enlist third-party networks and, as a culmination of all of this, plenty of traffic.


    Says Hauslaib: "If a blog debuted with virtually zero startup costs, then it takes little to earn a profit. One ad will do it. But at the bare minimum, a lone blogger will likely need to attract high four- to five-figure daily visitor figures to even attempt a blog-based livable wage."


    Which led me to ask Nick Denton how much he earns from his blogs.


    "We've never gotten into the numbers," he said. "We're a private company, and we prefer the focus to be on the stories (rather) than on the business model."


    Well, how much does he pay his bloggers? The amount floating around the internet is $2,500 a month per blogger plus traffic bonuses, courtesy of a talk Lockhart Steele, Gawker Media managing editor, gave at New York University last spring.


    Denton claims that was supposed to be off the record, "which is why we haven't done any more events at NYU since. But whatever." Patrick Phillips, the adjunct instructor who organized the event, supplied me with two e-mails he had sent Gawker that stipulated the talk would be tape-recorded and used as a basis for an interview to be posted on his website, I Want Media.


    "The most common number quoted has indeed been $2,500 per month," Denton continues, adding that it's wrong because some writers produce more than others and get paid accordingly -- "but it's not embarrassingly wrong."


    I run some numbers by him that I picked up about his pay structure.


    I say the two bloggers at Gawker earn about $5,000 a month.


    Defamer: Between $7,000 and $10,000 a month.


    Gizmodo: $7,000 to $8,000.


    And Fleshbot: $7,000 to $8,000 a month.


    "Your numbers for the individual writers are particularly wild guesses," Denton replied. "And they are embarrassingly wrong. If you're making them up -- nice try! If not, you've been misled. Badly."


    Or there's a third possibility. Perhaps I've just experienced the Denton deflationary spin machine.


    - - -


    Adam L. Penenberg is an assistant professor at New York University and assistant director of the business and economic reporting program in the school's department of journalism.


    End of story






















  • Steven Spielberg




    November 28, 2005


    So, What's the Spielberg Magic Worth?


    By LAURA M. HOLSON


    LOS ANGELES, Nov. 27 - As NBC Universal closes in on a likely deal to acquire the live-action film business of its longtime partner DreamWorks SKG, one of the transaction's more intriguing questions remains: What will the media conglomerate really get if it picks up one of DreamWorks's most significant assets, the services of the co-founder Steven Spielberg?


    Executives with both companies are reluctant to describe the precise extent of Mr. Spielberg's role in a NBC Universal-owned DreamWorks, though insiders for months have privately called the filmmaker's involvement an essential reason for any buyer's interest in the 11-year-old studio.


    That is especially true for NBC Universal, where the presence of the director-mogul, who has been making movies there since 1974, has become something of a signature - and where he owns an unusual stake in revenue from the company's theme park operation.


    "He is, in himself, a brand name," Ron Meyer, president of Universal Studios, said recently of Mr. Spielberg's reach in the movie, television and, now, video game businesses.


    While avoiding public comment, Mr. Spielberg, for his part, has signaled a certain comfort with the notion of sticking close to the studio that has become his home base, if not quite an exclusive one. Even as DreamWorks flirted with other potential buyers in an effort to get a better price, the three-time Oscar winner was quietly renegotiating the lease on his famous, Santa Fe-style offices on the Universal lot, according to a Hollywood executive who has talked to him. (The executive and others spoke on condition of anonymity to minimize disruption of the talks. Mr. Spielberg declined to be interviewed for this article.)


    Kathleen Kennedy, a longtime friend and producer at Universal Pictures who helped start Amblin Entertainment (a company Mr. Spielberg has used to continue to produce movies throughout the DreamWorks era), said she was working closely again with him. And the two are looking to a future that assumes continuing ties with the ministudio, which Mr. Spielberg founded with David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg in 1994.


    "Steven is extremely committed to DreamWorks," Ms. Kennedy said. "He doesn't want it to go away."


    Ms. Kennedy suggested that a revised DreamWorks, even if owned by NBC Universal (which currently handles some movie and home-video distribution functions for the much smaller company), might reflect Mr. Spielberg's personal taste. "I'm a big believer that the creative process should be in service to a point of view," she said. "He knows my opinion on this because I have told him. But until the structure is defined, we don't know."


    In any deal, NBC Universal and one of its corporate parents, the General Electric Company, will almost certainly have to grant Mr. Spielberg wide latitude. Never professionally monogamous, he will most likely remain free to play the field - something he's done for decades, and sometimes at much greater profit to himself than to the company he was working for.


    Of the 23 films Mr. Spielberg has directed in his career, 9 of them were for Universal Pictures, according to the studio. Only two, "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and the coming "Munich," were directed since DreamWorks was founded. By contrast, as a producer or executive producer, he has been involved with 39 films, 20 of those for Universal.


    This year, Mr. Spielberg had a hand in four theatrical releases, which involved a tangle of Hollywood companies. He directed "War of the Worlds" for Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks; produced "Memoirs of a Geisha" for Columbia Pictures with some DreamWorks involvement; and produced and directed "Munich" for Universal Pictures with DreamWorks. Meanwhile, he was also executive producer of "The Legend of Zorro" for Columbia, but this time through Amblin without DreamWorks.


    In television, Mr. Spielberg was an executive producer (uncredited) for NBC's hit series "E.R.," again without DreamWorks, and for the television mini-series "Into the West," one of three mini-series with him as executive producer since 2001, this time with DreamWorks. In addition, Mr. Spielberg was hired last month by Electronic Arts to help develop three video games, working now apart from DreamWorks.


    If NBC Universal indeed buys DreamWorks, it will clearly have to accommodate Mr. Spielberg's prior commitments and his tendency to roam. And when he does work for the home team, the filmmaker won't come cheap, if he insists on pricing levels he has established in recent years.


    Consider the case with "Minority Report," the science-fiction movie directed by Mr. Spielberg that starred Tom Cruise as a futuristic cop. In the mid-1990's, 20th Century Fox owned the rights to the movie, having bought them from Carolco Pictures, which was in bankruptcy proceedings at the time. Mr. Cruise was to star in the film and he approached Fox with the idea that Mr. Spielberg should direct, according to two executives involved in the movie.


    Released in 2002, "Minority Report" was a hit, bringing in $358 million at the worldwide box office and selling 6.3 million copies on home video. But the biggest winners were Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Cruise, who, as participants in the picture's income, earned at least $70 million combined, the two executives said. By contrast DreamWorks and Fox, a division of the News Corporation, earned less than $20 million each. Both Fox and Mr. Spielberg declined to comment on the terms of the deal.


    One reason Mr. Spielberg is paid so well is because his involvement brings creative input and marquee value that is perceived as enhancing prospects. In the early 1990's, for instance, Walter F. Parkes and Laurie MacDonald developed "Men in Black" while they were producers at Sony Pictures Entertainment. After they joined DreamWorks in 1994, Mr. Spielberg was asked to be executive producer, and joined the pair in reaping a small fortune when the picture went on to make $587 million in 1997 at the worldwide box office.


    That gave Mr. Spielberg rights to participate in the sequel, and yielded the participants (the director, actors and producers) an even greater share of its income, according to Mr. Parkes. The deal helped compound the trend of Mr. Spielberg's being tied to companies all over Hollywood, with a finger in dozens of prospective films.


    "Once he's involved with a project, he doesn't like to get rid of it," said Sidney J. Sheinberg, a producer and former president of MCA Inc., which owned Universal Pictures when it first established ties with Mr. Spielberg.


    Such stickiness can pull the filmmaker deeply into projects that do not ultimately yield a full-blown Steven Spielberg movie. That happened recently with "Geisha." In that case, Mr. Spielberg was first scheduled to direct the movie in 1997, but complications ensued. At one point, the author Arthur Golden was sued over rights to material in the underlying book.


    Then, other projects consumed Mr. Spielberg's attention. And at one point, said an executive involved in the film's early development who insisted on anonymity fearing retribution from DreamWorks, Mr. Geffen warned that "Geisha" was too costly for DreamWorks to make. Mr. Geffen did not return two calls seeking comment.


    Instead Rob Marshall, the director of "Chicago," was hired and Mr. Spielberg remained a producer. "I know he's the 100-pound gorilla, or, what do you say? The million-pound gorilla," Mr. Marshall said. "But here is where Steven is helpful. A lot of producers I work with work from fear. Steven is an artist as well as producer, and he thinks about whether you've served the story."


    In one area, at least, NBC Universal has a clear call on Mr. Spielberg's services - as a consultant to Universal's theme parks. In 1995, Mr. Spielberg struck a rich deal with MCA, which then owned Universal Studios, to help create theme park rides based on his movies. In Orlando, Fla., there are several, including rides based on "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," "Men in Black," and "Jaws."


    The terms were generous even by Hollywood standards. MCA agreed to give Mr. Spielberg 2 percent of the revenue earned on ticket sales at the theme parks in Orlando and Japan, said two people apprised of the terms. (The deal is tied to licensing agreements.)


    Neither Mr. Meyer nor Mr. Spielberg would comment on how much the director makes from the arrangement, though the amount is clearly sizable: according to a theme park spokeswoman, revenue from the Orlando resort (which includes food, merchandise, parking and other items excluded from Mr. Spielberg's take) totaled $865 million in fiscal 2004.


    Last year, Universal and its venture partner in Orlando, the Blackstone Group, unsuccessfully sought to sell the theme parks. But they hit a snag when, among other things, they could not come up with an amount large enough to buy Mr. Spielberg out of his contract, according to two people who were told of those talks. (Mr. Meyer declined to comment; executives for the Blackstone Group did not return a call seeking comment.)


    Whether or not NBC Universal ultimately buys the DreamWorks movie unit, it seems likely to have Mr. Spielberg around, not only as tenant, but as a business partner in the theme parks.


    "My advice to him is never sell it at any price," Mr. Sheinberg, who made the parks deal with Mr. Spielberg in 1995, said of the arrangement. "It's a steady stream of income for him."







     


    Monday, November 28, 2005







    Common Ground


























    		    Resources Home

    Basic Facts About Conflict


    How to live together in a world of differences is one of the most critical challenges facing us today. So much depends on our ability to handle our conflicts peacefully - our happiness at home, our performance at work, the livability of our communities, even our very survival. How we deal with conflict affects every other major issue we're dealing with, either directly with specific consequences, or indirectly, through our inability to reach consensus and work together productively.


    • With regard to hunger and poverty, 16 out of 20 of the most destitute countries in the world have recently suffered civil wars.


    • With regard to education and literacy - not only are they the lowest in conflict zones, but global military spending is 170 times greater than what we spend on basic education.


    • With regard to the environment, some of our worst disasters are the result of violent conflict:



      • 17 million gallons of Agent Orange was used in Vietnam


      • 40 tons of depleted uranium were left behind in Kuwait and Iraq after the Gulf War


      • 90 countries are still heavily affected by landmines that endanger human lives and render large areas of land unusable



    In our increasingly high-tech, globalized world the nature of violent conflict has changed drastically. In today's armed conflicts, less than 10% of the casualties are soldiers - more than 90% are civilians and half of those are children. This ratio is virtually the opposite of 100 years ago. In absolute terms, the 20th century was the most violent century in history, with more casualties than all the preceding centuries combined.

    When you look out at the current strife-ridden state of the world, an understandable response is to feel frustrated, if not hopeless. Although violent behaviour much too prevalent, our fundamental view is that the world is evolving in positive directions. One hopeful sign is that the whole field of conflict resolution has grown rapidly over the past 20 to 30 years. We've made tremendous progress in our understanding of how to deal with conflict constructively, and that momentum is growing.


    • There are over 100 degree programs in conflict resolution at universities and colleges across the U.S.


    • It is increasingly common for peer mediation courses to be taught in elementary and high schools in America.


    • Mediation is becoming more and more an accepted option to litigation.


    • There is a greater awareness of the cost of conflict in the workplace, and many trainings and programs are now being offered to businesses that weren't available very long ago.


    • Awareness of domestic violence has increased, as well as the creation of programs to support those at risk.



    More and more people are becoming determined to be part of the solution. Just as it seems that our world is becoming increasingly polarized, there is a groundswell of enthusiasm and commitment for working toward peace around the world. Many signs are pointing to a major shift in consciousness with regard to dealing with conflict more constructively and learning to live with one another more harmoniously.


    Sources of Statistics


    Please click here if you would like to make a donation to support our projects.


    Search for Common Ground (Washington DC)
    1601 Connecticut Ave. NW, #200
    Washington, DC 20009-1035
    Phone: (202) 265-4300
    Fax: (202) 232-6718
    E-mail: search@sfcg.org


     







    Beach Time




    Michael P. Whelan soundly sleeping, or attempting to do so, at Torrey Pines State Beach, San Diego County, California







    Bush, Iraq, and Eventual, Inevitable Withdrawal



    November 28, 2005



    Military Analyst Martin van Creveld Calls for Bush's Impeachment




    Martin van Creveld is really shrill!



    Forward Newspaper Online: Costly Withdrawal Is the Price To Be Paid for a Foolish War By Martin van Creveld November 25, 2005: The question is no longer if American forces will be withdrawn, but how soon -- and at what cost.... Confronted by a demoralized army on the battlefield and by growing opposition at home, in 1969 the Nixon administration started withdrawing most of its troops in order to facilitate what it called the "Vietnamization" of the country.... [T]his is not a pleasant model to follow, but no other alternative appears in sight.


    Whereas North Vietnam at least had a government with which it was possible to arrange a cease-fire, in Iraq the opponent consists of shadowy groups of terrorists with no central organization or command authority.... [S]imply abandoning equipment or handing it over to the Iraqis, as was done in Vietnam, is simply not an option.... [T]he new Iraqi army is less skilled, less cohesive and less loyal to its government than even the South Vietnamese army was.... Washington might just as well hand over its weapons directly to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Clearly, then, the thing to do is to forget about face-saving and conduct a classic withdrawal....


    American forces will have to fall back on Baghdad. From Baghdad they will have to make their way to the southern port city of Basra, and from there back to Kuwait, where the whole misguided adventure began.... A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge -- if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not.... A continued military presence, made up of air, sea and a moderate number of ground forces, will be needed.


    First and foremost, such a presence will be needed to counter Iran, which for two decades now has seen the United States as "the Great Satan." Tehran is certain to emerge as the biggest winner from the war -- a winner that in the not too distant future is likely to add nuclear warheads to the missiles it already has.... [A] divided, chaotic, government-less Iraq is very likely to become a hornets' nest. From it, a hundred mini-Zarqawis will spread all over the Middle East, conducting acts of sabotage and seeking to overthrow governments in Allah's name....


    Maintaining an American security presence in the region.... will involve many complicated problems.... Such an endeavor, one would hope, will be handled by a team different from -- and more competent than -- the one presently in charge of the White House and Pentagon.


    For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.


    Now this is, even by my standards, very shrill. Has Martin van Creveld simply caught an extreme case of the madness to which we have all succumbed as a result of the incompetence, malevolence, mendacity, and stupidity of George W. Bush and his administration? Or is van Creveld hearing things about the White House--through his own military-academic and Israeli-security networks--even more terrifying and devastating than I am hearing through my networks.


    The Bush administration: worse than you can imagine, even after taking account of the fact that it is worse than you can imagine.


    Posted by Brad DeLong on November 28, 2005 at 10:09 AM in Bushisms, Iraq, Utter Stupidity |



     







    Cheat Sheet for Phone Calls



    Here are some solutions for when you are put on hold in your attempts to get something accomplished on the telephone.


    Could save valuable cell minutes from time to time.






    IVR Cheat Sheet by Paul English



    The IVR Cheat Sheet is a free service from Paul English of Kayak.com.

    Here are the secret numbers and tips to bypass IVRs to get to a human. Do you know a new cheat? Tell me.



























































































































































































































































































































































































































































































    finance phone steps to find a human
    American Express 800-528-4800 0
    ATT Universal 800-950-5114 ###
    Bank of America 800-900-9000 1 loan; 2 account; 3 investing; 4 info; or 00 to human
    Bank One 877-226-5663 0,0
    Capital One Visa 800-867-0904 ignore prompts and invalid entry warnings; press #0 four times
    Charles Schwab 800-435-9050 3 then 0
    Chase 800-CHASE24 5 pause 1 4
    CitiBank 800-374-9700 1 online support; 2 billpay; 3 non-online; 4 credit card; or 0 to human
    Discover 800-347-2683 ****
    E-Trade 800-387-2331 ####
    Fidelity 800-544-6666 ignore prompt for social security number, just enter ###
    MasterCard 800-MC-ASSIST 000 on each menu
    MBNA 800-421-2110 00# when menu starts
    Paypal 650 864-8000 cf http://paypalsucks.com/PayPalPhoneNumbers.shtml
    Sovereign Bank 800-SOV-BANK 1 english; 1 personal; 3 then social#; passcode, #; then 0 (1-3x)
    Sun Trust Banks 404-588-7815 Yes
    US Bank 800-US BANKS 0000
    Visa 800-847-2911 000 (ignore prompts saying that it's an invalid entry)
    Wachovia 800-922-4684 accounts personal banking
    Washington Mutual 800-756-8000 At any time after the announcement(s) press 0,0.
    Wells Fargo 800-869-3557 0,0,0
    Western Union 800-325-6000 * then ##
    government phone steps to find a human
    INS 800-375-5283 After selecting English, (with a 2 second delay between) 2 6 2 4
    Social Security 800-772-1213 00 will confuse computer and send you to an agent
    Veterans Affairs 800-827-1000 1,0
    insurance phone steps to find a human
    Aetna 800-537-9384 "2, then say ""operator"" (check this)"
    Aetna 800-680-3566 * then 0 anytime
    AFLAC 800-99-AFLAC ***
    Ameritas 800-745-1112 0,0,0
    CIGNA 800-516-2898 REGARDING A BILL
    Cigna 800-849-9000 ##
    GEICO 800-841-3000 Wait for prompt then 6, 1, 5
    Humana 800-4-HUMANA After entering insurance number and details, 0.
    Medicare 800-633-4227 "After the opening prompt say ""agent""."
    Principal Life 800-247-4695 1 for english, 2, then 0 several times until it redirects you to an operator.
    pharmacy phone steps to find a human
    CVS local listing dial local store, after promt. press 6 will connect to store manager
    Eckerd 800-eckerds 0 for pharmacy, 8* for manager
    Rite Aid Local Store Press 3 to speak to the pharmacy
    Walgreens local store 0 for a pharmacy employee
    products phone steps to find a human
    Bose 800-444-2673 Direct to human!
    Sonos 800-680-2345 1 sales; 2 support
    Sony 800-222-7669 "When prompted by the automated voice system to answer ANY questions, just say ""Agent"""
    retail phone steps to find a human
    Advance Auto 800-314-4243 0 when the automated message begins
    Amazon.com 800-201-7575 see http://clicheideas.com/amazon.htm
    Best Buy 800-365-0292 00*
    Best Buy local store wait for extension prompt (sometimes must 4), then ext. 2021
    Circuit City local store 0 for customer service or 218 for store manager
    eBay 800-322-9266 0,0
    Home Depot 800 677-0232 "When asked for account number, keep hitting ""#"". After 5 or 6 times, a human appears!"
    Home Shopping Net 800-284-3100 0
    Ikea 800 434-IKEA "0000000 (hit ""0"" many times fast, if you do it once, or too slow, it will merely repeat the menu)"
    K-Mart local store 0
    Kohl's 800 5645740 After providing account info, press 0 three times
    Lowes local store 0 for customer service or #450 for commercial sales
    Old Navy 800-OLD-NAVY 0
    Overstock.com 800-843-2446 At the main menu, 0 three to four times to bypass the menu
    QVC 800-367-9444 0
    Safeway local store As soon as voice prompt starts type 1200 to get human
    Sears 800-4-MY-HOME Silence don't push numbers just sit there and you will be placed at front of queue.
    Target local store 0 during greeting.
    "Toys ""R"" Us" local store 0
    Wal-Mart 800-925-6278 1 for directory
    shipping phone steps to find a human
    DHL 800-225-5345 press 1, press 5, press 0, enter your phone number.
    FedEx 888-GO-FEDEX "At message say ""Representative"""
    UPS 800-pick-ups 0,0
    USPS 800-275-8777 7-3-2-0-0 or send them some junk mail
    technology phone steps to find a human
    AOL 800-827-6364 0
    Apple 800-275-2273 "000; if virtual rep answers, say ""operator"""
    Compaq 800-652-6672 No easy escape
    Dell 888-560-8324 2 order; 3 support; 4 purchase help; or 00 to human
    Dell Service 800-624-9897 option 1, xt 7266966, option 1, option 4, option 4
    Earthlink 888-earthlink 1 find a dialin number; 2 billing; 3 sales; 4 support
    Epson 800-922-8911 yes
    Gateway 800-846-2301 00#
    HP 800-474-6836 "Say ""agent""."
    HP 888-560-8324 00
    IBM 800-IBM-4YOU You go into a hold queue immediately
    Microsoft 800-936-5700 Always 0. This is true for just about any MS number.
    QuickBooks 888-729-1996 1 purchase; 2 billing; 3 registration; 4 tech support or 0 to human
    Symantec 800-441-7234 00
    telco phone steps to find a human
    AT&T 800-222-0300 #### then 1 if for current phone, else 2 to enter other, else 3
    AT&T Wireless 800-888-7600 No easy escape
    BellSouth 877-678-2355 *0
    Cellular One 888-910-9191 "4, say ""agent"", then #"
    Cingular 800-331-0500 For faster service, the option that you are looking to close your account, You get the same ppl but an immediate answer
    Nextel 800-639-6111 0 five times
    SBC 800-585-7928 Again, an (intelligent, this time) IVR wants YOUR phone number first.
    Sprint PCS 888-788-5001 "If live person does not answer, 00, then say ""agent"""
    T-Mobile 800-TMOBILE "Say ""representative"" at any time."
    Verizon DSL 800 567 6789 "Say ""I don't know it"" then ""technician"""
    Verizon Wireless 800-922-0204 #00 or enter phone # then 0 then 4
    travel phone steps to find a human
    American Airlines 800-433-7300 "00, then say ""agent"""
    Amtrak 800-872-7245 "0 or say ""agent"""
    Delta 800-221-1212 "say ""agent"" four times - every time it asks for a response from you"
    jetBlue 800 JET-BLUE 1 flight status; 2 reservations; 3 vacation packages
    Kayak.com 203 899-3120 0
    Northwest 800-225-2525 Star, 0,0 after initial greeting
    Southwest 800-435-9792 Calls answered by operator; during busy times you might have to hold
    United 800-864-8331 Do nothing, wait for human.
    US Airways 800-428-4322 4, wait, 1
    Walt Disney World 407-824-4521 Direct line to Magic Kingdom Guest Relations
    tv/satellite phone steps to find a human
    Comcast 800-266-2278 Customer service, but an IVR wants your number first.
    Direct TV 800-347-3288 0 repeatedly
    Dish Network 800-333-3474 0 during menu
    Sirius 888 539-7474 0
    TiVo 877-367-8486 "Say ""Live Agent"""
    Xm Radio 800-998-7900 Direct to human!

    108 companies as of Sat 26-Nov-2005 11:58 AM. Copyright 2005 by Paul English of Kayak.com.

    See more information. Know a new cheat? Tell me.



     



     







    Blogging In Contretemps



    November 15, 2005


    Can Bad Blogs Be Good?


    Not to long ago now we saw a giant melee erupt in the blogosphere over a Forbes piece (I won't link to the piece and give it any more juice), which suggested in one sidebar that when a company deems it has been treated unfairly by a blog(s), they simply go on the attack against the blogger(s).


    So what actually makes a blogger post negative commentary about a company? Let's take a look at a recent experience I had and see if it is justified.


    -------


    This past Sunday I was catching a flight on an airline that will remain nameless. Always the good traveler, I arrived plenty early to check my bags and catch my flight. When I got into the airport I found a line that would put amusement parks to shame. At the end of the line was one surly customer service agent, and at the beginning, another.


    Due to the way they managed the line, (people further down the line actually had to inform others at the beginning when a machine opened), it not only moved very slow, but it caused several travelers to miss the 45 minuted bag checking cutoff...including myself. I was told that I would have to miss my flight. And after I suggested they simply check my luggage on a later flight and allow me to catch my current flight, I was told this was not possible due to security regulations.


    So I was put on standby at 7:45am.


    I was then bumped from two more flights and I spent 8 hours hoping to catch anything going west. All this time I found the customer service reps to be curt and impolite and were always willing to point out I could simply secure my seat with a payment of $100. I was determined not to reward the airline for their own bad service. When I asked about the standby list and how that was compiled, I learned it was by order of importance...are you a member of our miles program? Is your ticket full fare? Although I was put on the list near the top, I had dropped to #6.


    What really put me over the edge was arriving in San Francisco, waiting 25 minutes for my luggage, which never showed, and finding it already waiting. Yes, it arrived hours before me on another flight.


    Wait a minute...you told me I couldn't check my baggage without actually being on the same flight...so you let me sit for an additional 8 hours when I actually could have flown on my original flight?


    ---------


    And there you have it corporate America...all of this adds up to a bad blog post about a company. And one bad post gets linked to by another...and on and on it goes.


    A simple Feedster index search shows me that I'm not the only person to complain about the service at this airline. Now if I were the airline and I was reading the Forbes piece, I might consider going on the attack against the blogs that had bad things to say about my service. Maybe I should dig some dirt up on them...or even sue them?


    And that would be a HUGE mistake.


    We are entering a new realm of corporate transparency. You can no longer keep your customers and their complaints private. And why should you? Instead of fearing what bloggers can do to your company, you should embrace the medium and join the discussion. I've read tens of thousands of blog entries, by thousands of different bloggers. There is a lot of commonality you can learn from.


    Here's what the Forbes piece should have said:


    1. Bloggers do not suffer fools lightly. If you say or do something stupid, expect to be called on it. Instead of going on the defensive or on the attack...take your lumps, start a dialogue, and engage people. Your critics in the blogosphere aren't a focus group from the local mall. They aren't a consumer poll you take over the phone. You are dealing with pure, naked, unedited commentary which usually stems from a person or group of people who feel wronged. And odds are...you wronged them. Make it right.


    2. While bloggers can potentially break a company, they can also make a company. I can't tell you how many things I've seen on Boing Boing or Engadget that have ended up in my house. I'm sure many small and large companies out there can tell you that a positive blog post directly translates into a spike in sales. This does not translate into paying bloggers for positive postings. A shill is a shill...it does you more damage in the long run.


    3. People respect feedback. Complaints within a blog entry are usually borne from frustration. Instead of silencing it, research it. Address the issue instead of getting defensive. Get out there in the comments sections and start learning from your mistakes, and more importantly, talk to people.


    4. Attacking bloggers only makes you look like a bully and it does nothing for your image. It doesn't silence your critics and instead creates more bad juju in the blogosphere. Instead of bloggers talking about your service, you now have hundreds or thousands of bloggers talking about your tactics.


    5. Time is not your friend. You can't just wait and hope it will all go away. Address a concern early on. Sunday night, at about 12am (PST) Google launched Google Analytics. Within 2 hours there were over 8,000 feeds on our index about it.


    Wow!


    So imagine if you had a bad PR incident happen in regards to your company and you give it time to fester. Bloggers start building links and those bloggers are people...and people have real issues and concerns. You do not have time to do a focus group. You need to be out there in the sphere and you need to start talking.



    Okay...slight plug:
    BTW...this is where our own index becomes a very valuable tool. Creating a search and then subscribing to it as a feed with Feedster can help you stay on top of what people are saying about you or your company.


    ------


    Negative blog posts are a legitimate way for people to comment on things that are distressing and an opportunity for you or your company to right those wrongs. You can no longer keep the bad at arms length. In the past, you were insulated from the world around you. This has changed.


    It is time to change with it.




    Alan Graham
    Email: agraham AT feedster.com
    .. agrahamfeedster
    Phone: coming soon




    Posted by bparenti at November 15, 2005 09:22 AM

November 26, 2005








  • Student Athletes ?
    Chris Livingston for The New York Times

    University of Tennessee's Demetrice Morley graduated from University High with a grade point average of 2.75, precisely what he wound up needing to qualify for a scholarship

    November 27, 2005
    The Quick Fix | Easy Grades for Athletes
    Poor Grades Aside, Athletes Get Into College on a $399 Diploma
    By PETE THAMEL and DUFF WILSON

    By the end of his junior year at Miami Killian High School, Demetrice Morley flashed the speed, size and talent of a top college football prospect. His classroom performance, however, failed to match his athletic skills.

    He received three F's that year and had a 2.09 grade point average in his core courses, giving him little hope of qualifying for a scholarship under National Collegiate Athletic Association guidelines.

    In December of his senior year, Morley led Killian to the 2004 state title while taking a full course load. He also took seven courses at University High School, a local correspondence school, scoring all A's and B's. He graduated that December, not from Killian but from University High. His grade point average in his core courses was 2.75, precisely what he wound up needing to qualify for a scholarship.

    Morley, now a freshman defensive back for the University of Tennessee, was one of at least 28 athletes who polished their grades at University High in the last two years.

    The New York Times identified 14 who had signed with 11 Division I football programs: Auburn, Central Florida, Colorado State, Florida, Florida State, Florida International, Rutgers, South Carolina State, South Florida, Tennessee and Temple.

    University High, which has no classes and no educational accreditation, appears to have offered the players little more than a speedy academic makeover.

    The school's program illustrates that even as the N.C.A.A. presses for academic reforms, its loopholes are quickly recognized and exploited.

    Athletes who graduated from University High acknowledged that they learned little there, but were grateful that it enabled them to qualify for college scholarships.

    Lorenzo Ferguson, a second-year defensive back at Auburn, said he left Miami Southridge High School for University High, where after one month he had raised his average to 2.6 from 2.0.

    "You take each course you failed in ninth or 10th grade," he said. "If it was applied math, you do them on the packets they give you. It didn't take that long. The answers were basically in the book."

    The N.C.A.A. has allowed students to use correspondence school courses to meet eligibility requirements since 2000. That year, the N.C.A.A. also shifted the power to determine which classes count as core courses to high school administrators. In doing so, it essentially left schools to determine their own legitimacy.

    "We're not the educational accreditation police," Diane Dickman, the N.C.A.A.'s managing director for membership services, said in September.

    But last week, Myles Brand, president of the N.C.A.A., said he would form a group to examine issues involving correspondence courses and high school credentials. Brand acted partly in response to a letter sent on Nov. 2 from the Southeastern Conference that highlighted cases similar to Morley's and Ferguson's.

    The man who founded University High School and owned it until last year, Stanley J. Simmons, served 10 months in a federal prison camp from 1989 to 1990 after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud for his involvement with a college diploma mill in Arizona. Among the activities Simmons acknowledged in court documents were awarding degrees without academic achievement and awarding degrees based on studies he was unqualified to evaluate.

    In interviews last week, he said he should never have pleaded guilty and that he operated legitimate correspondence schools for adults.

    In 2004, Simmons sold University High to Michael R. Kinney, its director. Kinney, 27, who was arrested on a marijuana possession charge in 2003 and is wanted on a bench warrant, declined to comment, despite requests by phone, fax and visits to his apartment.

    Several University High graduates said they found the school through Antron Wright, a former XFL and Arena Football League player who is prominent in Miami's high school athletic circles. He is considered a savior by some players, but one principal has barred Wright from his building for luring athletes to a rival school and introducing them to University High.

    Miami has ideal conditions for academic-athletic exploitation. It is fertile recruiting ground: 38 players from Dade County were on N.F.L. rosters at the start of the 2004 season, more than any other county. Also, Florida's public schools require an exit examination for graduation, but private schools have no such requirement, and operate under a law that prohibits any state regulation. That allows University High to operate essentially unsupervised.

    Pat Herring, the interim admissions director at the University of Florida, looked into University High after admitting one of its graduates, Dane Guthrie, a former Killian tight end. "We found that University High School was kind of a storefront operation," Herring said. "It didn't seem to have much in the way of an academic program."

    While Florida officials were discussing whether to allow Guthrie to remain, he transferred to Arizona State.

    Other colleges that have admitted University High graduates say they know little about it.

    Auburn admitted Ferguson in 2004 and a fellow University graduate, Ulysses Alexander, this year. "The bottom line is they were both qualifiers by the N.C.A.A.," said Mark Richard, a senior associate athletic director at Auburn.

    A four-member academic panel at Tennessee admitted Morley after sending an athletic department official to Miami to investigate University High. Morley has thrived on the field at Tennessee, but Philip Simpson has stumbled at Temple.

    Simpson, a standout quarterback at Southridge High, said Wright had met with him and his parents and offered a sure alternative from high school to college, telling him: "You either stay there and bust your behind and hope and pray that at the end you don't get short-handed. Or you can do this."

    Simpson said his mother called the N.C.A.A. to check whether University High courses would be accepted. He said he graduated in three weeks by taking four classes, improving his average to 2.3 from 2.0.

    He now says he lacks the educational skills for college. For a basic math class at Temple, Simpson said, he studied at least three hours every day, got help from tutors and met regularly with the professor. He still did not score higher than 53 out of 100 on any test.

    Simpson said Temple ruled him academically ineligible to play. He watched this season from the sideline.

    A Quick Diploma

    University High School consists of two small rooms on the third floor of an office building wedged between a Starbucks and an animal hospital on Route 1 in south Miami. Inside are three desks, three employees and two framed posters from art museums on the wall.

    Promotional brochures say diplomas can be earned in four to six weeks, with open-book exams, no classes and no timed tests. A diploma costs $399, no matter how many courses.

    In paperwork filed with the state of Florida, the school says it has six teachers. None of the school's graduates interviewed, however, mentioned dealing with anyone besides Kinney, the current owner, and none said they had received any personal instruction.

    John M. McLeod, a Miami-Dade Community College educator, is identified as the University High principal on a letter welcoming new students. McLeod said he met Simmons in the 1970's, but that he had no connection to University High. He said his signature had been copied.

    "I've never seen this letter," he said. "I know nothing about University High School."

    Simmons said he did not know why McLeod's signature was on the letter.

    Former students said in interviews that courses consisted of picking up work packets from University High and completing them at home. Grades they received on the packets counted the same on their transcripts as a yearlong high school course.

    "If it was history, they had the story with the questions right next to it," Simpson said. "They were one-page stories. It wasn't really hard."

    University High says its textbooks are the Essential Series from Research and Education Association of Piscataway, N.J., but their publisher describes them as study guides.

    "You wouldn't describe them as textbooks," Carl M. Fuchs, president of Research and Education, said. "You would say they're more supplemental, but they can be used on their own. A textbook is certainly going to have a lot more text, a lot more information."

    University High's literature claims it is accredited by the National Association for the Legal Support of Alternative Schools. The association's Web site says it is "not meant to represent an evaluation and/or approval of the materials, teaching staff or educational philosophy employed by the applicant program." It says "only one standard is applied: consumer protection."

    The Florida Department of Education's Web site lists accreditation for University High by the National Coalition of Alternative and Community Schools and by the Association of Christian Schools International. But the alternative schools coalition does not accredit high schools, and David Ray, the Florida regional director of the Christian schools association said, "University was never accredited and has never sought accreditation with us."

    To Some, a Second Chance

    Simmons said that he opened University High School in 2000 to serve adults; and that the average age of about 400 current students is 36. Football players from public schools in poor neighborhoods began enrolling around March 2004, when University applied for membership to the N.C.A.A. Clearinghouse, which determines if a student is eligible and can qualify for a scholarship. Several players said Wright led them to University High.

    Philip Simpson said that when he went to University to enroll, Kinney was expecting him because Wright had called. Ferguson and Simpson said they worked on their University High packets at Wright's apartment.

    Wright, 30, could relate to talented athletes with academic struggles, some of the players said. A former star at Southridge and Palmetto High Schools in Miami, he did not attend a Division I-A university because of poor grades, local players and coaches said. He graduated from junior college, then played two years at Division I-AA Bethune-Cookman.

    Wright later rooted himself in the Miami football community, serving as an assistant coach at three schools and as a substitute teacher at Dade County football powers. He developed a strong bond with his players.

    "I thank God every time I step on the practice field for Tron," said Keyon Brooks, a former Killian player and University High graduate now playing for South Carolina State. "He got me here. He helped me succeed in life. I look at him as a role model."

    Tavares Kendrick, a top-rated quarterback from Homestead High, credits Wright for helping him get to Florida International University, where he is a backup quarterback. Kendrick said his average improved to 3.0 from about 2.1 in about seven weeks by taking nine classes at University High.

    "Antron is a great guy," he said. "He helps kids that have great talent but don't have the smarts for school."

    Yet Wright is barred from Southridge, partly because he lured players to Killian and to University High. In January 2004, five football players left Southridge and later played crucial roles on Killian's state title team.

    "He can't come into my building," Carzell J. Morris, the principal at Southridge, said. "Just for the fact he comes in and takes my kids out. Kids that could probably make it if they weren't looking for the easy way out."

    Southridge Coach Rodney Hunter said Wright also encouraged Damaso Munoz, who is now at Rutgers, to leave for University High early this year. Robert E. Mulcahy III, the athletic director at Rutgers, said Munoz was enrolled at the university and was paying his own way. He was admitted by a committee of faculty and deans.

    Thirteen of the 38 seniors on Killian's 2004 state title team did not graduate with their class. Many, including Morley and Brooks, wound up at University High.

    "How legitimate is it?" Otis Collier, the athletic director at Killian, said about Morley's improvement at University. "I don't know. I guess it's because of me. I probably should want to know, but I don't want to know. I don't want to know anything about it."

    Wright declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this article.

    By transferring to University High, students can bypass the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which is mandatory for public school graduation, and focus on passing through the N.C.A.A. Clearinghouse.

    N.C.A.A. minimum standards require the completion of 14 core courses. Grade-point average in those courses and standardized test scores are rated on a scale. Students with high averages can qualify with lower test scores and vice versa.

    For example, after Morley's junior year at Killian, a computer program used to project eligibility showed him graduating with about a 2.1 G.P.A., meaning he would need at least a 960 on the SAT. At University, he raised his average to 2.75, so his 720 SAT score was exactly what he needed to qualify.

    Although the standardized testing services flag suspicious jumps in scores, there is no similar alarm for grade-point averages that suddenly go up. Assuring the legitimacy of high school credentials is one reason Brand says he is forming the N.C.A.A. panel, which will make recommendations by June 1.

    "We see the problem accelerating," he said. "We want to stop it as soon as possible."

    Doing Something About It

    When Morley was preparing to enter college, Tennessee and the Southeastern Conference questioned his University High transcript. Brad Bertani, the associate athletic director for compliance at Tennessee, went to Miami to investigate.

    Bertani, who met with Simmons for three hours, said he determined that Morley had done his own work. But Bertani refused to comment on University High's curriculum.

    "There's all kinds of schooling out there, whether you think it's legitimate or not," Bertani said. "That's for the admissions people at each school to evaluate."

    Copies of Bertani's handwritten notes from the visit, obtained through a freedom of information request, say that there were no records of University's teachers and that no lab was required for the chemistry course for which Morley received a B.

    Tennessee's research showed that University High School sent transcripts from 28 athletes to the N.C.A.A. Clearinghouse.

    Bertani also spent weeks investigating Morley's connection to Wright, who accompanied Morley on his recruiting trip to Knoxville and kept in contact with Trooper Taylor, an assistant football coach at Tennessee. Bertani said he found no improprieties with Wright or any connection between him and University High.

    Morley, who played defensive back and returned kicks this season, did not respond to repeated attempts for comment by e-mail and through Tennessee officials. His mother, Felicia Henry, demanded to know who had told a reporter he had attended University High and said she knew nothing about the school's academics.

    Morley took a full course load at Killian while playing football, along with seven other core courses - half the N.C.A.A. minimum for a high school career - at University. Transcripts obtained by The New York Times show he received four A's and three B's from University. At Killian, he received C's in English all four years, but he got an A in classical literature from University. Grades like that helped his G.P.A. in core courses improve to 2.75 from 2.09 from August to December.

    Three of the four members of Tennessee's admissions panel expressed reservations.

    "I didn't see anything fraudulent or out of line," Richard Baer, the dean of enrollment at Tennessee, said of his initial reaction to Morley's transcript. "It looked like it could have been another student's transcript from another institution. I didn't see anything that struck me as saying: 'You know what? We need to look carefully at this.' "

    The other panelists reacted differently. "All of this was in my mind very, very questionable," Anne Mayhew, the vice chancellor for academic affairs, said.

    Todd Diacon, the head of the history department, said, "Anytime I see a transcript like a University High School, it concerns me."

    Ruth Darling, an assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs, said, "I always had reservations about this type of school, if students are actually learning."

    In the end, the panel never voted, accepting the transcript because the N.C.A.A. approved University High and Bertani found that Morley had done his own work there. But when told of Simmons's fraud conviction, Mayhew said Tennessee should have been more careful.

    "I think we need to add a new layer of caution to deal with high school diploma mills," she said.

    Tennessee Coach Phillip Fulmer lauded the university, pointing out that no other college had visited University High.

    "I'm a Tennessee graduate as well," he said. "I want the university to be represented in the right way."

    At What Cost a Degree?

    When describing his reasons for transferring to University High, Simpson recalled a Southridge basketball player with Division I potential who failed his last chance at Florida's mandatory graduation exam.

    "I still remember to this day him walking around the hallways crying," he said. "He was ready to fight every principal and teacher in Miami."

    That image stuck with him as he struggled academically. Simpson said he still has his ninth-grade report card showing a 0.6 grade point average. He said he relied heavily on others to do his work.

    "The basic skills I'm supposed to have from way back then," he said, "none of them are there."

    Mark Eyerly, Temple's chief communications officer, said, "It is in the best interests of our students and of the university for us to offer admission to students whom we believe can succeed here academically."

    Simpson said that his problems at Temple made him more determined.

    As a freshman, Simpson played defensive end and made seven tackles for a 2-9 team. Temple completed an 0-11 season this month.

    When his football career ends, he said, he sees himself in only one place.

    "I believe that my fate is to go back to Miami and change things," he said. "My job is to go into school systems like Miami and be a coach and teach kids right from wrong."

    E-mail: thamel@nytimes.com

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  • Average American ???




    Kevin O'Keefe

    November 18, 2005
    Books of The Times | 'The Average American'
    Winnowing the Field of America to One Representative
    By WILLIAM GRIMES

    All Americans can be average some of the time, but only one American, apparently, can be perfectly average all the time. Kevin O'Keefe, a marketing consultant, set out to find that person five years ago, armed with fresh data from the 2000 national census and a burning desire to pursue and comprehend the very thing he had spent most of his time avoiding: life as lived, defined and loved by the vast majority of his fellow citizens. "The Average American" is the logbook of that quest.

    Mr. O'Keefe tries, somewhat feebly, to put a philosophical gloss on his statistical journey. "If I could find the numbers, I could find the person, and if I could find the person, maybe I could find a piece of myself," he writes, but "The Average American," from start to finish, is nothing more (or less) than a clever game. The author starts with a pool of candidates that embraces all 281,421,906 official residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia counted in the 2000 census, and chapter by chapter, using the census and other statistical sources, introduces new categories of averageness that gradually whittle that number down to one. His eventual winner, and the community he lives in, comes the closest of all Americans to matching 140 criteria, from average height and weight to average annual rainfall.

    As a piece of statistical analysis, "The Average American" is wobblier than a three-legged table. A multitude of numbers are thrown around, some from official government sources like the Census Bureau and others from opinion polls and marketing surveys. The author does not actually insist that his winning candidate match each and every criterion. In many cases, it's enough that he belongs to the statistical majority. For example, the average American has 12.7 years of education, but Mr. O'Keefe decides that a high school diploma, which the majority of Americans have, would be sufficient.

    No one is likely to look too closely at the methodology, just as no one, listening to a joke, wonders why a rabbi and a priest would walk into a bar. "The Average American" is really just an excuse to play with numbers and overturn commonly held notions of what the average American does and thinks. It's also a golden opportunity for the author to hit the road, always traveling in a midsize car, and spend time with people like Myklar the Ordinary, a magician who carefully explains to his audiences that there is no such thing as magic, and Rich Bean, the first politician to run under the banner of the Average American Party. Not to mention an 88-year-old Brooklynite named Harry Average.

    It is not surprising to learn that most American families do not consist of a working father, stay-at-home mother and children. It is surprising to learn that such families account for only 7 percent of the population. In 1948, 4 percent of American said they were in favor of marriages between blacks and whites. In 2002 the number was 65 percent, and in 2003, 72 percent. The majority of Americans say they do not want to become famous.

    Mr. O'Keefe, ruthlessly swinging his statistical scythe, eliminates vast populations at a single go. Since most Americans live in a one-unit owner-occupied detached dwelling, or private home, more than 50 percent of Los Angeles County and 99.5 percent of Manhattan disappear from contention. The majority of American towns get at least some snowfall. Residents of those that do not fall off the list of contenders. So long, Florida, except for a few thousand residents near the Georgia and Alabama borders, as well as large parts of Texas, and all beachside residents in California from Santa Monica to Mexico. City dwellers and country folk also fall by the wayside, since most Americans live in suburbs.

    Gradually, the average American takes form. He (or she) spends 95 percent of the time indoors, thinks abortion is morally wrong but supports the right to have one, owns an electric coffeemaker, has nine friends and at least one pet, and would rather spend a week in jail than become president. He (or she) lives within a 20-minute drive of a Wal-Mart, attends church at least once a month, prefers smooth peanut butter to chunky, lives where the average annual temperature is between 45 and 65 degrees, and believes that Jews make up 18 percent of the population (the actual figure is between 2 and 3 percent).

    Mr. O'Keefe, a Manhattanite who married late in life, expresses more than average astonishment that most Americans, even though they do not live in Manhattan or mingle with powerful and famous people, describe themselves as happy and place a higher value on family than on work. He also comes across as a lot more average than he thinks he is. He's a lot less interesting than most of the people he meets, but his project is intriguing, combining as it does the elements of a detective story and the trivia interest of Ripley's Believe It or Not.

    With the clock ticking, Mr. O'Keefe narrows his search to 94 houses, and diligently makes contact with one adult resident in each, probing with his list of questions. "This is a joke, right?" one woman asks. Not on your life. One by one, his prospects flunk the test. One has too many cars. Another lacks a pet. And so it goes, down to the wire.

    Fittingly, the book's final chapter lies midway between a foregone conclusion and a twist ending. The author winds up in a strangely familiar place, talking to a strangely familiar figure. And average, even when distilled to its quintessence, turns out to be exactly what you'd expect. What's wrong with that?

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    Children and Divorce




    Dave Calver

    November 27, 2005
    More Options to Answer 'What About the Kids?'
    By MIREYA NAVARRO

    IN the new film "The Squid and the Whale," the Berkmans announce their breakup to their 16- and 12-year-old sons and proceed to put them in the middle of their fight. The dad tells the kids that their mother is to blame and confides to the older son that she has cheated. The mother asks the younger boy to keep secrets from the father and soon starts dating the children's tennis instructor.

    The scenes draw audible gasps from the audience. In the decades since the divorce boom of the 1960's and 70's, and even since the mid-80's, when the film takes place, many divorcing parents have struggled to avoid such disastrous events; the trend has been toward agreeing to agree early in the divorce for the sake of the children. Increasingly, say lawyers, psychologists, educators and other professionals who deal with divorce, ex-spouses are showing a willingness to try new or little known strategies to lessen the damage to children from a fracturing household.

    These strategies include interactive Web sites where parents communicate with each other through message boards and calendar postings instead of arguing; a "collaborative law" movement in which parents and their lawyers commit to come to terms without going to court; and, for the highly contentious who can't even agree by e-mail, "parenting coordinators" available for hire to make decisions for them.

    The increased role of fathers in child rearing, divorce lawyers and mediators say, has also led to more creative joint-custody living arrangements. In one example, known as bird-nesting, children stay in the family home and parents take turns living there.

    "The one thing you can say is that when parents are communicating and getting along and putting the kids first, the kids are more likely to thrive and do better," said Peter Salem, executive director of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts, a group of judges, mediators and others involved in the resolution of family conflict that has grown 50 percent over the last four years, to 2,600 members.

    These efforts go on despite a recent, much-publicized challenge to the "good divorce" movement in the form of a book, "Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce." The book, by Elizabeth Marquardt, a scholar with the Institute for American Values, a pro-marriage organization, is based on a national study that found that even in amicable divorces children suffer more isolation and feelings of being torn between two worlds than children from intact families. The pain of divorce is lasting even when efforts are made to minimize it, Ms. Marquardt argues. The study has drawn criticism from those who say it does not address what they argue is a more apt comparison: how the children of divorce would have fared if their parents had stayed in troubled marriages.

    But Ms. Marquardt, 35, a child of divorce herself, concludes that parents in "low conflict" marriages - those not involving violence or serious fighting, for example - should stick it out.

    "When parents are married," Ms. Marquardt said in an interview, "it is their job to first deal with conflict. When the parents get divorced, it becomes their children's job to make sense of the two worlds."

    But what constitutes "low" conflict for some is unbearable for others. Hundreds of thousands of couples continue to divorce annually - with some government surveys showing about a million children experience divorce each year in the United States - and get down to the business of raising their children separately, hoping the way they handle themselves, not the act of separation, will determine how well their children fare.

    With four children, KatRyn Howell, 47, a piano teacher, and Roger Bowerman, 48, a community college professor, devised a bird-nesting solution requiring a level of cooperation that belied the tensions of the marriage. Since January, when the couple separated, the kids have lived in the four-bedroom family home in the San Fernando Valley, while the parents each went back to their own parents' homes, the same homes where they grew up about five miles apart.

    They now take turns living with the children - she every Monday, Tuesday and Friday; he every Wednesday and Thursday. They alternate Saturdays and Sundays.

    It allows the children "to have a fairly normal life," explained Mr. Bowerman. "Their lives haven't changed that much except Mom and Dad are not around at the same time - and we're not fighting."

    The shift to more equitable custody arrangements over the last decades, a reflection of the changing role of fathers, has propelled many couples into more contentious divorce proceedings, as they fight over equal time with their children, some divorce lawyers say. Yet the resulting financial and emotional toll of protracted litigation is at the same time creating a powerful incentive for many separating couples to look for ways to agree.

    Judges are increasingly mandating that parents play nice, sending them to child-rearing classes and requiring them to draw up plans. This year the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers put out a "model parenting plan" that spells out responsibilities and contingencies at different ages, including whether parents must confer before allowing piercing and tattooing, access to the Internet or viewing R-rated movies.

    Divorcing parents seeking to avoid warfare can also find tools that they didn't have before. Erica Laughlin, 35, an outreach program director at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, logs on to OurFamilyWizard.com, a Web site created in 2001 by Paul Volker, an airline mechanic with three children and a stepdaughter.

    Ms. Laughlin uses the site to hash out the scheduling and expenses of her two young sons with her ex-husband. The couple, who split custody 50-50, pay $100 a year to use the Web site, which has features that allow them to request trading days with their kids and to keep an expense log.

    "The things that are difficult to discuss - who gets the kids when, who owes who money - that's handled electronically," Ms. Laughlin said. "The kids don't have to listen to talk about all that. Our conversations are focused on the kids. They're about the school conference or Christmas."

    The site, used by more than 4,000 parents, is growing steadily, adding up to 150 new accounts a month, Mr. Volker said. Like e-mails, the system not only helps by keeping emotions out of communications but also by keeping a record.

    Tracking how many divorced parents are exploring such novel strategies to improve their relations is difficult because states and courts vary in what they mandate, divorce experts said. And while some strategies have helped cut down on return visits to court by quarreling couples, mediators and others say, the long-term influence on children is more subjective and harder to gauge.

    But the growth of some organizations suggest an increased attitude of cooperation. The International Academy of Collaborative Professionals has trained more than 7,000 lawyers, child specialists and other professionals in the workings of a nonadversarial divorce proceeding, known as collaborative practice, over the last five years, its incoming president, Susan Hansen, said.

    And Mr. Salem of the courts association said surveys show that parent education programs for divorcing couples number in the thousands, compared with just a few hundred in the mid-90's.

    On a recent Thursday night Jayne A. Major, a parent educator in Los Angeles who gets referrals from family court, gathered half a dozen parents at an Indian restaurant in Brentwood for a session of her "breakthrough parenting" program, which teaches separating or divorced couples how to minimize conflict. The husbands and wives often attend different sessions; the conversation underscored the ugliness that can emerge in marital discord. One man asked how he could protect himself if his ex-wife was not cashing his child support checks so that she could later claim he was not paying it.

    One woman, 53, who had been divorced for several years, said the classes were helping her communicate better with her ex-husband.

    "Even in my communication by e-mail I turn everything into 'I' statements," she said, singling out one lesson from the workshops. " 'I want this to be done because I believe this is best for the child,' " she explained, "instead of saying, 'You are wrong,' and pointing out the negative. It takes the sting off everything." She asked not to be named because she is in the middle of a custody fight over her 12-year-old son.

    For high-conflict cases, some parents are turning to a third party to make decisions for them. Bruce Copeland, a clinical psychologist who serves as a "parent coordinator" in Bethesda, Md., said parents hire him to decide which holidays their kids will spend with which parent, who buys school uniforms and other day-to-day issues.

    "You can get involved in absolute minutiae," he said.

    Joan Kelly, a psychologist and researcher on children's adjustment to divorce, said that options like parent coordinators are gaining ground as the emphasis in many divorces shift away from the combative route.

    "The approach," she said, "has been to use the research that has been developed over the last 25 years to make post-divorce arrangements appropriate for kids, so they don't experience longing and loss."

    But Ms. Marquardt, who conducted a survey of 1,500 adults from 18 to 35 whose parents divorced during their childhood, said longing and loss are inevitable.

    In publicizing her research, Ms. Marquardt has pointed at her survey and to movies like "The Squid and the Whale" as representing the increasingly vocal opinions of adult children of divorce. In an interview Noah Baumbach, who wrote and directed the movie and was 14 when his parents divorced, insisted that his film is not meant to judge the parents, even when it portrays their joint custody arrangement as hard on the two brothers.

    "Some kids are affected much more than others, and it has to do with the dynamics of the family beforehand," he said. "A lot of families never break up, and there's this underlying tension and anxiety. Each situation is so specific."

    He seemed reluctant to discuss his own family and the effect divorce had on him. "I almost don't know," he said. "Obviously it was very hard at the time, and you adapt, and it becomes an experience for you."

    Many parents say they can plainly see how hard divorce is on children. But of those interviewed for this article, all said they thought their children were better off.

    "It's equally unhealthy to not see an open display of love," said Sherwin Bryant, 33, a college professor in Evanston, Ill., who separated six months ago from his wife and now spends half of the week with his two young daughters. "The absence of love is very loud."

    In Los Angeles the bird-nesters Ms. Howell and Mr. Bowerman plan to divorce, although they have not filed papers. "We stayed together for many years because of the kids," Ms. Howell said of her 23-year-old marriage. "Finally you ask, Is it better to see happy parents or parents who are always arguing?"

    The couple have four children, three girls, ages 17, 15 and 11, and a 9-year-old boy. One of their children, Deanna Bowerman, 15, said she preferred living in her house while her parents came and went to having to move between two separate homes. "It'd be a hassle to move all of us," she said. "They're still both around."

    The couple keep most of their belongings and receive mail at their old address. They switch off stays under certain rules: each will leave the house tidy, each is responsible for his or her own groceries, and neither will bring dates. Mr. Bowerman said the arrangement "makes it more difficult" for both parents "because you don't get closure."

    But he added, "Right now I see it as the best thing for the kids."

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    Dave Chappelle




    David Lee

    The comedian Dave Chappelle in a bongo mood at Dave Chappelle's Block Party, in September 2004.


     


    November 27, 2005


    Dave Chappelle Is Alive and Well (and Playing Las Vegas)


    By DAVE ITZKOFF


    LAS VEGAS


    IN a cavernous corner of Caesars Palace, flanked by six giant television screens broadcasting three horse races, two basketball games and a hockey match, a massive electronic board provides precise odds on the most doubtful propositions. A one-dollar bet, for example, would earn you $75 if the beleaguered New York Knicks should win the N.B.A. championship, and $200 if the lowly Green Bay Packers could somehow win the Super Bowl. And if you knew whom to ask, and promised to use the information for entertainment purposes only, you could obtain odds on an even more uncertain outcome: that Dave Chappelle would actually show up to his Nov. 19 gig as a headliner of the city's three-day Comedy Festival.


    He clearly had the support of the locals. "I'd say it's a thousand to one in favor that he'll make it," said the casino's chief line-maker, Chuck Esposito, two days beforehand. "Dave is an overwhelming favorite. It's a lock."


    Bob Crestani, the festival's chief executive officer, seemed just as certain. "He's our anchor position," Mr. Crestani said. "He gets the punch line to end all punch lines."


    Just six months ago, Mr. Chappelle seemed dangerously close to becoming a different kind of punch line - starring in the kind of spectacular career flameout normally reserved for philandering clergymen and disgraced politicians.


    In August 2004, with his Comedy Central series, "Chappelle's Show," surging in the ratings and a first-season DVD compilation of the program on its way to becoming the best-selling television-to-DVD release of all time, he signed a new development deal with Comedy Central that could have yielded him as much as $50 million.


    But at the end of 2004, with several episodes' worth of material for "Chappelle's Show" already completed, Comedy Central was forced to push the series' premiere back three months, amid rumors that its star was suffering from either writer's block, the flu or walking pneumonia.


    Production resumed again in the spring, but on April 28, Mr. Chappelle disappeared from the set. He resurfaced a few weeks later in Durban, South Africa, where, he said, he was on a spiritual retreat. As the rescheduled premiere date of his show came and went, and Comedy Central began replacing promotions for the program with advertisements for other coming series, it became clear that "Chappelle's Show" was no more.


    Then, as abruptly as he had departed, Mr. Chappelle returned. On June 1, he performed a pair of unannounced sets at two stand-up clubs in Los Angeles, the Improv and the Comedy Store, where he riffed on his recent troubles and thoroughly startled the clubs' promoters, who had had less than a day's notice. "Boy, I'd love to take credit for it, but all I did was answer the phone," said the Improv's director of talent, Erin Von Schonfeldt. "What happens is, when Dave wants to do something, I just say, 'O.K.' " In the weeks that followed, Mr. Chappelle took on a full calendar of stand-up dates, performing across the country in everything from 325-person nightclubs to 14,000-seat college auditoriums.


    Yet the reasons for Mr. Chappelle's dramatic reappearance remain even murkier than the reasons for his departure; he declined to comment for this story, as did several of his former "Chappelle's Show" colleagues. His friends and associates who speak about him tend to choose their words carefully, but what emerges from the accounts of those who have seen Mr. Chappelle since his return from South Africa is a portrait of a performer who, at least on the surface, appears unfazed by the controversy he created and invigorated by his newfound freedom.


    "Right now he seems pretty happy," said Jason Steinberg, a talent manager who has known Mr. Chappelle for more than 15 years. "He seems like he's trying to figure out exactly what he wants to do, and put it out there the way he wants to." Without the obligations of a television series, Mr. Steinberg said: "He could say, 'All right, I'm going to play tonight in San Francisco,' and it will sell out that moment. To decide that and know the place will be full of fans coming to see you, it's such a powerful thing."


    But another confidant, the rapper David Banner, wondered if Mr. Chappelle might still be struggling with the consequences of his drastic professional choices. "He looked better than he ever looked to me," said Mr. Banner, who appeared with Mr. Chappelle in a series of Hurricane Katrina benefits. "But he's the one who decides whether he can look at himself in the daytime. The one thing you have to understand about comedians is, the more they make people smile, the more pain that they usually feel inside."


    At an HBO-sponsored charity poker tournament the evening before Mr. Chappelle was scheduled to perform, comics spoke with less hesitation. Jeffrey Ross, one of the hilariously vulgar talking heads from the film "The Aristocrats," was unqualified in his admiration for Mr. Chappelle, a longtime friend. "He chose art over commerce," said Mr. Ross, who had affixed himself to an hors d'oeuvres table. "He decided the quality of his emotions was more important to him than a fear of burning bridges."


    Bill Maher, the acerbic host of HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher," was more skeptical about Mr. Chappelle's motivations. "He certainly created a huge sense of anticipation among people for his performance," Mr. Maher said. "I don't think anybody ever was angry with him - except maybe his network."


    Jon Stewart, almost unrecognizable in a T-shirt and slacks, joked that he and other Comedy Central stars had formed a support group to help them cope with the loss of Mr. Chappelle. "Me, the kids from 'Strangers With Candy' and 'Mind of Mencia,' we meet every Sunday and have brunch, and we cry," he said. Then, in a more candid tone, he said: "People have the wrong idea about that dude. He's just a normal, nice, thoughtful guy."


    If anything, Mr. Chappelle's recent notoriety has deepened his mystique and burnished his image as an unpredictable, iconoclastic artist. Upon being introduced to Mr. Chappelle the night before his show, even the formidable talent manager Bernie Brillstein could only muster a "hello." "I really don't like people who bother people," said Mr. Brillstein, who was walking through the Caesars Palace lobby in a blue-and-yellow tracksuit. "And who knows what Dave has on his mind?"


    As the possibility that Mr. Chappelle might finally answer that question drew tantalizingly closer, speculation about his show became commonplace. At a question-and-answer session, Chris Rock said that he had heard that Mr. Chappelle's show would be three hours long. "Only if he talks very slowly," Jerry Seinfeld replied.


    At the Mesa Grill restaurant in Caesars Palace, at least one veteran comedian was still skeptical that the concert would happen at all. "I think the greatest thing he could do is not show up," said George Wallace, a former writer for "The Redd Foxx Show." "Wouldn't that be something? It'd be the greatest press he ever got."


    There was no doubt, however, in the minds of the more than 4,000 fans who were assembling at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace for Mr. Chappelle's sold-out 11 p.m. show. "Look at what a diverse crowd he can draw," said Jarod DeAnda, 27, who drove more than 300 miles, from Gilbert, Ariz., to see Mr. Chappelle. "You've got stoner rock 'n' roll dudes and you've got guys in dreads."


    On a stage built expressly for Celine Dion's standing engagement, the dynamic young comedian Al Madrigal, who is of Mexican and Sicilian descent, was the first to take the microphone, joking that he and his half-Korean, half-Greek wife were "the interracial 'Blade Runner' couple of the future."


    At midnight, Mr. Madrigal left the stage. And there in his place appeared Mr. Chappelle, a lanky exclamation point of a man, in a green zippered sweater, black jeans and sneakers.


    "Thank you very much for welcoming me back to America," he said, as his first standing ovation of the night subsided.


    "In case you haven't heard about me, I'm insane."


    In a move that would set the tone for the rest of the evening, he opened with remarks that seemed to address his conflict with Comedy Central, but elliptically, and in racially polarizing terms. "Whatever you do in your life," he said, "do not stand up for yourself, because these white" - let's just substitute the word "people" here - "will beat you down."


    But then he slowly backed off from the fight he had picked, joking about how his recent career maneuvers had put a strain on his marriage ("Don't think you can walk away from $50 million and your wife will be cool with it"), before segueing into a long riff about marital fidelity and the temptations he faced as a comedian on the road.


    Mr. Chappelle is gifted with a wonderfully elastic, childlike voice, but it comes with several adolescent fixations, and he peppered his routine with extended bits about masturbation and gynecology. They got laughs, but they seemed like filler, coming from a man who can brilliantly tease out the racial overtones in the language of television newscasters or the remake of "Planet of the Apes."


    For as much as Mr. Chappelle appeared to be tackling issues of race head-on, he was often keeping them, and his audience, at a distance. When he spoke about his experience watching "Hotel Rwanda," he was really talking about an embarrassing bathroom encounter he had at the movie theater and how it made him giggle inappropriately during the film. And to the extent that he discussed his retreat to Africa, he was trading in old stereotypes. " 'You know what you should always remember, Dave?' " said Mr. Chappelle, impersonating a local who tried to comfort him on his trip. "What's that, Mbutu?," Mr. Chappelle asked him. The response: "I ate a dog today."


    Perhaps Mr. Chappelle feels he must soften his identity as an astute, slightly radical observer of politics, who already has his eye on a potential presidential match-up between Hillary Clinton and Condoleeza Rice ("You know who's going to win? Ralph Nader by a landslide"), and who essentially agrees with the controversial assertion of President Vicente Fox of Mexico that Mexicans would work jobs that not even African-Americans would take.


    By far, Mr. Chappelle's most illuminating observation of the night occurred as he was discussing the rap star Kanye West's nationally broadcast remarks that President Bush does not care about African-Americans. "I don't know if you agree with him or not, but give it up for him," Mr. Chappelle said. "I've got a lot of respect for him. And," he added, "I'm going to miss him." Then, almost as an aside, he continued, "I'm not risking my entire career to tell white people obvious things."


    It's a wise calculation. After all, it is only when he confronts the subjects he knows intimately that he has an act worth staking his professional reputation on. That's when he has the greatest capacity to be incisive and even poignant. The room went almost completely silent when he mentioned that his mother was half-white, and again when he said that his wife was Filipino, and a third time when he added that "our kid is Puerto Rican, somehow." That last line, the audience eventually figured out, was a joke.


    Mr. Chappelle really did risk his career this year. But as he smoked his way through a pack of American Spirit cigarettes, he never really discussed the factors that led to the disintegration of "Chappelle's Show," which in any given episode was more daring than his current routine. He did not explain what ultimately compelled him to travel to Africa, except to say that it was a childhood dream, and he never expressed so much as a hint of remorse about how his actions might have affected the lives of former colleagues who did not have producing fees and DVD royalties to fall back on. After performing for almost exactly 60 minutes, Mr. Chappelle wrapped up a surreal bit about having sex with a woman who was wearing nothing but a motorcycle helmet, thanked his crowd, and bid them goodnight.


    In typical Las Vegas fashion, most audience members filed out of the auditorium as quickly as Mr. Chappelle had departed it, though a few remained in their seats, as if they expected him to come back onstage and send them off with a parting insightful thought. But Mr. Chappelle did not return this time. Once again, comedy's most visible invisible man had eluded them.

























  • Macy's Parade 1997




    Carlton Roberts, 1997

    The balloon accident in this year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was similar to this 1997 incident, in which the Cat in the Hat balloon hit a lamppost at 72nd Street and Central Park West, hitting four people.



     

    Macy's Parade 2005






     




    Brendan McDermid/Reuters

    Rescue workers gather around an injured woman in Times Square after a streetlamp hit her. The lamp was knocked down by a passing parade balloon.







     




    Julie Jacobson/Associated Press

    A gust of wind sent a giant balloon crashing into a lamppost along the crowded parade route, knocking the lamp onto spectators below.







     




    Librado Romero/The New York Times

    One of two injured sisters is taken to an ambulance in Times Square after being hit by a streetlamp



     







     




    Librado Romero/The New York Times

    A streetlight sits on the ground after it hit two spectators at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was knocked down by a passing parade balloon



     







     




    Jeff Christensen/Associated Press


    The M&M's candy balloon fell onto the street after it hit a lamppost during the parade. A lamp fell from the post and injured two people.



     







     




    Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times


    Handlers worked to keep the Uncle Sam balloon upright in the wind as the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which started in 1924, passed through New York's Columbus Circle.

November 25, 2005






  • A tribute to George Best: "The greatest"



    George Best sadly passed away on Friday after a long-standing battle with alcoholism. Eurosport.com pay tribute to a man whose undoubted football talent was overshadowed by a drink problem that ultimately cost one of Manchester United's greatest ever players his life.







     GEORGE BEST: Send us your tribute
     NEWS: Best dies after booze battle

    George Best - widely recognised as one of the greatest footballers to ever play the game - finally paid the ultimate price for his addiction to alcohol when he died on Friday in a London hospital at the age of 59.


    Best had been in hospital since the beginning of October and had an alcohol problem for much of his adult life and underwent a liver transplant in 2002 after years of heavy drinking.


    The former Northern Ireland and Manchester United legend bravely battled complications from internal bleeding that developed from a lung infection but his deteriorating condition worsened dramatically overnight and he passed away at Cromwell Hospital surrounded by his closest family and friends.


    "Unquestionably the greatest!" said current United manager Sir Alex Ferguson.


    TRAGIC


    "There was simply no-one to compare with him, he had all the attributes. It's so tragic circumstances led to such an early retirement from the game," Ferguson added.


    Most remembered for his 11 years in a dream United side that included Bobby Charlton and Denis Law and was coached by Matt Busby, the team hit their peak in 1968 when they became the first English club to win the European Cup and Best won the Ballon d'Or as the continent's best player.


    However his glorious career, that began as a 17-year-old when a United scout rang Busby to say "I think I've found a genius", spiralled out of control when his love for booze and women sent him on a slippery path and would eventually destroy his health.



    BOOZE AND BIRDS


    "I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered," he once quipped.


    What promised to be a brilliant career ended prematurely when he failed to turn up for training at United in January 1974, quitting the highest level of the game at 27 and the sport was a sadder place in his absence.


    "The complete player. He could ride tackles, hit the ball with either foot and send superb long or short passes," reflected Law.


    "He made a tremendous impression on young people with his ability. As a person I always liked him and we've travelled the world together for matches and on the after dinner speaking circuit," he added.



    He reappeared at a number of less fashionable clubs including a spell in North America in the now defunt NASL before retiring for good in 1983.


    REGRET


    Another regret for his numerous fans around the world was that he never graced the ultimate stage as Northern Ireland failed to qualify for the World Cup during his short but colourful career.


    One of his lowest points was in 1984 when he spent two months in jail for drink driving and assault on police.


    Another of his nicknames was the 'Fifth Beattle' with his moppy hair, good looks and pop icon image, the beginning of his career coinciding with the arrival of televised football in Britain which threw him even more into the spotlight.


    He almost singlehandedly destroyed opposing defences with his skills including a memorable display against Benfica which prompted the Portuguese press to christen him 'El Beatle'.


    Despite his health and problems, it was not until 2000 that he was finally ordered to give up the bottle and two years later underwent a life-saving liver transplant.


    PERSONAL PROBLEMS


    His wife Alex divorced him in 2004 when she found Best in bed with another woman and claimed his drinking binges and violence was destroying their marriage.


    He built a career as a television commentator and appeared to have kicked the demon drink but in the end he simply couldn't say no and despite doctors orders that one more drink might be his last, he started again.


    He diced with death on more than one occasion in the later stages of his life and in typical fashion fought his illness against the odds right to the bitter end.









    Eurosport - Gregory Fraser 25/11/2005   *Send this story

  • A Deflating Parade
    By Eric Umansky
    Posted Friday, Nov. 25, 2005, at 2:49 AM ET


    The Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox and Washington Post lead with the violence in Iraq, where 30 people were killed by a bomb that targeted an American unit giving toys to children. Another roughly 20 Iraqis were killed in other attacks, and the military announced that five GIs have been killed over the past two days. USA Today leads with the Small Business Administration still lagging in processing Katrina and Rita-related loans. The SBA has only processed half the number of loans it did in a similar period after last year's Florida hurricanes, despite having hired more staff. USAT has previously suggested the culprit was a glitchly computer "upgrade." Another potential factor not explored by USAT: The head of the SBA is a former GOP fund-raiser who appears to have little relevant experience and previously headed up the SBA's bumbling response to 9/11. The Los Angeles Times' lead says California stands to lose "billions" of dollars in aid as a result of the Republican-pushed budget cuts that just passed in the House. Among the cuts would be $3.2 billion over 10 years for a popular child-support enforcement program. The New York Times' lead notices that states' revenues are soaring, a trend USAT led with last week.


    The bombing near Baghdad happened outside a hospital and, according to the NYT, "shattered the facades of buildings for blocks around." Doctors were so overwhelmed they had to send some victims to another hospital 30 miles away. The Times also says the number of suicide bombings appears to be holding constant: The military counted 52 in October, about the same number as the monthly average early this year.


    The NYT fronts a trend this TPer has been noting for months: The number of prisoners being held by the U.S. in Iraq is surging. With double the number of detainees there were last year and little oversight, detainees have been held for months without review. Another piece inside the Times details how the military mistakenly released a prisoner it had connected to a bombing.


    The LAT mentions that scientists have drilled the largest core of Arctic ice ever sampled and found that two greenhouse gases are currently at their highest levels in 650,000 years. "This is saying, 'Yeah, we had it right.' We can pound on the table harder and say, 'This is real,' " said one geophysicist not affiliated with the research.


    The NYT mentions that New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, once a baseball prospect, acknowledged that—contrary to what he has long said—he was never drafted. A newspaper reported that there is no record of Richardson being picked. "After being notified of the situation and after researching the matter," said the governor, "I have come to the conclusion that I was not drafted by the A's."


    The NYT fronts two people injured after an M&Ms balloon at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade was buffeted by a gust of wind and knocked over part of a light pole.


    The Times points out that when the M&Ms balloons went wild, parade broadcaster NBC was quick on its toes. In the words of a spokeswoman, "We rolled with some previously recorded footage," namely the M&Ms balloons from last year. And then the crack team covering the parade—Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, and Al Roker—continued their witty repartee, without mentioning the incident. "Will these classic candymen get out of this delicious dilemma?" said Roker, referring not to accident but to the original balloon concept in which one M&M was trying to save the other. "Hard to say," Roker continued, "but when it comes to sweetness, Yellow and Red continue to melt your heart, but not in your hand."

    Eric Umansky (www.ericumansky.com) writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.