“Defense proves dominant as Pingree wins fourth straight - Salem News” plus 4 more |
- Defense proves dominant as Pingree wins fourth straight - Salem News
- Beverly municipal calendar - Salem News
- Care giving's rewards - Press & Sun-Bulletin
- Neil Simon Flop May Be a Case of the Missing ‘Wow’ - New York Times
- Latest Articles - Dissident Voice
| Defense proves dominant as Pingree wins fourth straight - Salem News Posted: 01 Nov 2009 09:26 PM PST HAMILTON — It was a day that will long be remembered by the Pingree School football seniors and head coach Chris Powers. In front of their home crowd for the final time of the season Saturday, the Highlanders dismantled Hyde School, 28-10, to improve to 5-1, marking the emergence of a new powerhouse in the Evergreen conference. "Give the credit to the guys who have been here from the start," said Powers of his senior class, whose freshman season was Pingree's first in the Evergreen Conference. "They believe in our system and allowed us to establish a good culture that really sets the tone for the program." How does coach Powers explain the success his squad has had in just its fourth year as a varsity program? Defense, defense and more defense. "I have said it before, the strength of our team is the defense," explained Powers, whose club extended its winning streak to four games. "And it starts with our terrific linebacking core. Those four (Brian Rogers, Brendan Oliver, Will Walfield, and Evan Perkins) are athletic, hard-hitting guys who make plays for us." Senior defensive linemen Charlie Taft, who had a big sack on a fourth down play in Saturday's contest, believes that it's the Highlanders defensive quickness that gives opposing quarterbacks so much trouble. "We have a ton of speed, even on the inside with our defensive tackles that we are constantly getting pressure (on the quarterback)," Taft noted. In a game that saw 21 second half Pingree points, it was the defense that helped open the flood gates for the Highlanders in Saturday's bout with Hyde school. After a rough first quarter and a half in which dropped passes plagued the Pingree offense, the Highlanders found themselves trailing 3-0. To make matters worse the Pingree defense faced a fourth and short, deep in its own territory, needing someone to make a stop. On the ensuing play Hyde's Trevor Magloire got the ball on a reverse and was stopped 6 yards deep in the backfield by defensive back Jack Williamson. "It was like we were looking for a spark," noted Powers, whose defense is allowing a stingy 11.6 points per game, "and (Williamson) is a guy we can count on to give us that spark. Once that play happened, all our previous miscues seemed to go away." Williamson also provided Pingree with a clear special teams advantage as the punter/kicker pinned Hyde inside its own 20-yard line four times and even added two touchbacks by way of booming kickoffs. After the big fourth down stop, quarterback Brendan Oliver orchestrated a seven-play, 64-yard drive punctuated with a 25-yard touchdown strike to senior wideout John St. Pierre. From that moment on Pingree stayed in complete control of the contest. "Ollie (Oliver) has a cannon, and he put it up there between the safeties," St. Pierre said, recapping the touchdown. "He is a very versatile QB. He is big, runs hard, and throws a very nice deep ball." St. Pierre wasn't the only senior receiver to catch a touchdown pass as Oliver connected with Ehab Hamdan on a 15-yard toss in the fourth quarter for the Highlanders final score of the game. Oliver, who finished 13 of 28 for 184 yards, spread the ball around nicely as four different receivers had multi-catch days. "It's a pick your poison situation for opposing defenses," said Powers about his wide receiving core. "They all want to make the big play, but at the same time they get excited when one of their teammates makes the big play. They rally around each other." On what was the most exciting play of the game junior Will Walfield returned a Ted Cercos third quarter punt 36 yards to the promise land behind the excellent blocking of Brian Rogers. Rogers would add a touchdown of his own in the fourth quarter on a 7-yard scamper. "Will is a quick, shifty guy," explained Powers. "Any time he gets in the open field he has the ability to break it for a long one. His speed is outstanding." This content has passed through fivefilters.org. |
| Beverly municipal calendar - Salem News Posted: 01 Nov 2009 09:11 PM PST Monday, Nov. 2 Briscoe School Council, 4 p.m., Briscoe Middle School, 7 Sohier Road. City Council, 7 p.m., City Hall, 191 Cabot St. Tuesday, Nov. 3 Cultural Council, 7 p.m., Beverly Public Library, 32 Essex St. Ayers Ryal Side School Council, 7 p.m., Ayers Ryal Side School, 40 Woodland Ave. Wednesday, Nov. 4 Council on Aging, 2:30 p.m., Senior Center, 90 Colon St. School Committee's Committee on Negotiations, 6:15 p.m., Memorial Building, 502 Cabot St. School Committee's Policy Review Committee, 6:30 p.m., Memorial Building. School Committee's Curriculum, Instruction and Student Life Committee, 7 p.m., Memorial Building. Thursday, Nov. 5 Licensing Board, 6 p.m., City Hall. Board of Assessors, 6 p.m., City Hall. Design Review Board, 6:30 p.m., City Hall. Parks and Recreation Commission, 7 p.m., Beverly Public Library. Open Space and Recreation Commission, 7 p.m., City Hall. This content has passed through fivefilters.org. |
| Care giving's rewards - Press & Sun-Bulletin Posted: 01 Nov 2009 09:04 PM PST In 1998, I lost my father to his 10-year journey with Alzheimer's disease. Before his passing, I had heard Alzheimer's called "the long goodbye." I knew no better description of the experience. With every change - losing his way home, no longer knowing my name, losing his ability to speak, and then, to walk - I watched the father I knew slip away. Each day, each moment, there was only something more to lose. As Dad's caregiver, I centered my attention on doing the title justice. It was all about me giving to him. I so strongly identified with being a caregiver that I hadn't really taken in the ways that he gave to me in return. One particular morning with Dad showed me that gifts of care come in the most unexpected packages. I found him wild-eyed and rowdy, chanting nonsensical syllables. No longer using words, this was Dad's new language of choice. Unable to walk anymore, he writhed on his bed while he sang. Overwhelmed at first, I began to envy him as I watched him dance between the worlds. I no longer saw him as the victim of a debilitating disease, but rather, as an inspired messenger. He was entirely in the moment - full of unfettered playfulness and joy. How long had it been since I'd stopped to celebrate a moment so exuberantly? So I joined in and chanted with him, delighting in the sweetest connection I had ever shared with him. We were no longer caregiver and care receiver; we had become care partners. What I gained was this: When care receivers experience that they have something to offer, and caregivers recognize the many gifts they gain, amazing shifts occur in the care dynamic. Focusing on reciprocity naturally shifts the energy away from disabilities to abilities and enables us to build on what works right now, because it implies that everyone has something to give. Care partnership implies a balance of care - an acknowledgement that opportunities to give as well as receive are abundant and experienced by everyone involved in the care relationship. As we welcome the largest aging population ever, we need creative grassroots solutions for enhancing quality of life for older Americans and their care partners. The most effective approaches will be those that include shifting cultural perspectives about aging and how we value what our elders have to offer. Being deeply known and having the opportunity to give as well as receive are vital antidotes to the loneliness, helplessness, and boredom that impact the lives of so many frail elders. This content has passed through fivefilters.org. |
| Neil Simon Flop May Be a Case of the Missing ‘Wow’ - New York Times Posted: 01 Nov 2009 09:26 PM PST Neil Simon was the crossover comedy king of Broadway and Hollywood for three decades, beginning when "Barefoot in the Park" and three other major shows overlapped in New York in the 1960s. But comedy is changing on Broadway, and on Sunday one of Mr. Simon's most-produced plays in the last 25 years, "Brighton Beach Memoirs," became one of the biggest commercial flops on Broadway in recent memory. It closed a week after it opened, shocking many in the theater world, not least the writer himself. "I'm dumbfounded," Mr. Simon, 82, who has won a Pulitzer and three Tony Awards, said in an interview. "After all these years, I still don't get how Broadway works or what to make of our culture." What went wrong with "Brighton Beach Memoirs" is a case study in success and failure on Broadway today. There were no big stars like Jude Law in the current commercial hit "Hamlet," there was no marketing campaign that framed the Simon play as a can't-miss theatrical event, and there was no wow factor that brought the period piece to life, like the breakneck pacing of the popular farce "Boeing-Boeing" last year. But the failure also reflects America's evolving sense of humor and taste. Broadway shows rarely close a week or less after opening. Those that do — like "Glory Days" in 2008 or "Carrie" in 1988 — were usually killed by reviews that were far worse than those for "Brighton Beach Memoirs." It actually received good reviews, but the play was shuttered because people, for whatever reason, did not want to see the Simon show about a Depression-era family laughing through the tears. The show cost $3 million to produce but never grossed more than $125,000 a week in ticket sales during preview performances — or 15 percent of the maximum possible — an amount that did not even cover running costs. As for revivals of acclaimed American works like "Brighton Beach Memoirs," they are hardly out of fashion with Broadway audiences. "South Pacific," "Hair" and "West Side Story" are doing well, though musicals are stronger sellers than plays. "There will always be an audience for a well-done revival of a great musical, but reviving a period-piece play now takes a special alchemy," said André Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, home to "South Pacific." "A play revival needs to have a strong vision and to give people a reason why they should see it. What's strange is that everyone I know thought this 'Brighton Beach' was wonderful." Ben Brantley, the Times theater critic, praised the spontaneity of director David Cromer's production and "Mr. Simon's snappy, streamlined dialogue." Mr. Simon was a forefather of situation comedy writers, and his scripts for stage and screen were embraced by actors like Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. But sitcoms have given way to reality shows like "American Idol," one-liners to the sardonic humor of "The Office," and the heavily plotted comedy of Mr. Simon's film "California Suite" to the animated wit of "Up" and the fratty banter of "The Hangover," two of the summer's biggest hits. "American sensibilities about comedy change so rapidly, especially in the cultural centers on the East Coast and West Coast where people are always looking for the next new style of humor, whereas Neil Simon's brand of humor is pretty unchanging," said Susan Koprince, author of "Understanding Neil Simon" and a professor of English at the University of North Dakota. Mr. Simon's signature has always been the well-written, straightforward punch line, but new and revived comedies have done best on Broadway lately when they have been dark, satiric and outrageously narcissistic. The recent revivals of the plays "Boeing-Boeing," "Speed-the-Plow" and "The Norman Conquests" took flight because of fast-paced timing but also had frissons of fear and panic just beneath the surface humor. A mix of comedy and pain also proved potent for the original play "August: Osage County," while two other new plays, "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" and "The Little Dog Laughed," were sharp satires of political terrorism and Hollywood. While reality shows like "American Idol" and forensic dramas like "NCIS" dominate television today, popular comedies like the traditionally plotted sitcom "Two and a Half Men" and the character-driven "Desperate Housewives" also share sharply written dialogue and recognizable modern characters like those found in "God of Carnage." "It's clear from the ascendancy of certain types of comedy, like the trend exemplified by Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, Steve Carell, 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin,' 'Knocked Up,' that what audiences are seeking in humor is getting more raw and edgy than Simon's work," said Matthew Maguire, a playwright who is director of the theater program at Fordham University. This content has passed through fivefilters.org. |
| Latest Articles - Dissident Voice Posted: 01 Nov 2009 08:14 PM PST Uninterrupted, sustainable economic growth is impossible. Those who support it are "Impossibleists". They practice, preach, and defend to the death at times, "Impossibleism". It is a universal phenomenon, practiced across economic, political, cultural, and social spectrums around the globe. Impossibleism is an umbrella philosophy that captures the insanity of any system that is completely unsustainable and obviously so, but charges forward regardless. Systemic insanity, if you will. We are all living at the thin sharp point of always more, always bigger, always better, always new, improved and disposable. That much should be obvious, even though it is not. We want our homes to be worth more today than yesterday, we demand it to be so. Prices must always fall, wages must always rise, and our wealth must always increase. We must have more than our parents and we must ensure more again for our children. Standing still is failure. Going backwards is unthinkable. This is simply impossible to sustain, we all know it, but we carry on regardless. Impossibleism. It's a math problem, or more correctly, it is our collective ignorance of natural forces, and the tyranny of arithmetic behind them. In our civilized hubris, certainty is something malleable, something which we can and will in time conquer. A war on 2+2=4. The inevitable as the enemy. Invisible, exponential terrorists whose design it is to take away our cherished free markets, destroy our twin towers of freedom and democracy, and bust us all back to the dark ages before cars, coke, and plasma TV's. Absolutely nobody alive today wants that. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), world output "collapsed" by 1.1% in 2009. That data point the official manifestation of what everybody already knew — that our world was in trouble and we were living with less. The value (in US dollars) of everything produced on our small blue planet in 2009 was about 60 trillion dollars — give or take a fish in Indonesia or the occasional bribe in Saudi Arabia. The American GDP is about 14 trillion dollars, where a ham sandwich is about five bucks — for purposes of scale. A contraction in production was both cause and effect of a serious economic "meltdown", one which has squeezed our societies and cultures in fundamental and dramatic ways. It was, and is, a catastrophe. 1.1 % it turns out, is a lot. The IMF forecast for 2010 is much rosier, as they predict a "return to growth" of about 3.1%. The consensus is that this is a good thing of course, growth being the only acceptable state of affairs, and by any measure. Absolutely nobody wants contracting production of stuff, nor do they want piddling increments of same. No, we all alive today want increasing production of stuff and nothing less, Amen. The only caution the IMF reserves is that our recovery is weak, and we must all be on our guard lest it slip back or sideways. And again, Amen to that. In fact, it won't be long before we just simply assume, as we had before, that growth is the natural order of things and forget completely the lessons of the great economic collapse. We will expect that growth is constant, and pay no heed to the annual IMF reports, just so much wallpaper in their dull, never changing prognosticating. A constant line of 2% growth our just reward for taming the earth and making it our own. Sustainable growth as many economists say, sustainable in the "we can keep this sucker moving" kind of way, not in the antithetic "can we keep this up?" heretical kind of way. So we have a 60 trillion dollar world and it isn't good enough it appears. We want a bigger world, a better world, and 2% a year should give it to us. That's 2% compounded of course — we want our 2 % added to our current amount of stuff, and we want this to happen every 365 times the earth rotates on its axis — per annum, once a year. In 2010, we will be expecting to produce about 1.8 trillion dollars worth of "wealth" above and beyond the 60 trillion we have now (my apologies to economists who normally demand footnotes and qualifiers for this kind of thing. You get the point regardless). Maybe another 1.2 trillion or so the year after. We couldn't be happier when our world GDP grows to 63 trillion USD's in just two years. Good, sustainable progress we all can believe in, the effects of which we intuitively know will make us all healthier, happier, and richer. A lot of us anyway, or at least those of us who matter. What is a 63 trillion dollar world going to look like? More jobs, more cars, more I Pods and I Phones. More people perhaps, more food we would expect, more industries and factories and technology. More of everything: poverty, stress, and Hollywood plastic. Three trillion doesn't seem much against sixty, and it seems manageable. Certainly compared to a 120 trillion dollar world, which would be twice the amount of productivity we are churning out today. It's much harder to imagine that. Spend a day out in the workaday world we all inhabit, and we can see what 60 trillion dollars looks like. Spend the same day trying to picture a 120 trillion dollar world… and it confounds the senses. Of course, it is easy to forget that our current world is powered by the resources of the planet, and once reminded it makes for perfect common sense. More cars, industry, and flip flops require more coal, iron, and oil. It is reasonable to consider that a 3 trillion dollar increase in production worldwide will require additional stuff dug, scraped, or pumped out of the ground. This is concerning to many, as there is common understanding that raping the earth is morally and ethically to be avoided. We do it anyway of course, depending on our children to figure out a way to fix the imbalance for us. But a 120 trillion dollar world? Twice the oil pumped at twice the rate, twice the fish killed at twice the rate, twice the consumption with twice the debt. What about a 240 trillion dollar world? Four times the wealth, based on four times the resources our current world is built upon. Four times the rate and amount of extraction and consumption of oil than today. 85 billion barrels of oil in 2008, 340 billion barrels of oil consumed every day in a 240 trillion dollar world. And rising by design. Impossible. Impossibleists want unrestrained sustainable growth in the face of its inevitable impossibility. It is a mystery how they think this way, knowing as they surely do that eventually the bill will come due, and the engine will run out of gas — literally. Think about it — growth that never stops, ever. Even with limitless resources, it is simple intuition that eventually, somewhere, sometime…. But of course we don't have infinite resources, another intuitive understanding even though it seems to us every day that we do. We know we don't. Impossibleists will not reconcile these two basic intuitions, that all growth must eventually end, and that all resources must eventually tap out. Impossibleism is a form of insanity, a shared delusional neurosis. It's a party game of trick or treat all humans are invited to, a game where treats are redeemed by us in the present, and tricks are reserved for the ghosts of future people we will not know, and of whom we do not care. Not our children, nor theirs. The legacy of Impossibleism is the certain destruction of the future, the hope of the Impossibleist that he will not have to face the damned. Pop quiz. How long will it take, at 2% annual growth compounded, to turn our 60 trillion dollar world into a 120 trillion dollar world? 35 years. If we do exactly what we plan to do, and everything goes swimmingly, and we have sustainable growth of 2% a year, our children will have a 120 trillion dollar world to deal with, and most of us alive today will live to see it. Children today of ten years of age will be alive and drowning in a 240 trillion dollar world, which by deliberate and calculated design will arrive in a single lifetime of 70 years. It's a tyrannical feature of unflinching math called "doubling time", a feature of exponential growth hidden in plain view. The future ghosts are not just real, they are alive today and are our very own children. We have met — and love, and cherish, and protect — the very people we are cashing in the chits on, on whom we are knocking out the jams. Think about it, we are nurturing the very people — people who carry our names, our genes, and paradoxically our dreams — who will watch and live in and deal with a world four times larger than our own. We ourselves will breathe our last on a small blue planet that has to produce twice as much as today's planet. Progress, as we all define it, is impossible to sustain. Why? Leave the dogmas, politics, and bullshit aside and do the math. That's why. Impossibleism. This content has passed through fivefilters.org. |
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