Without 'this' cast, it would be a mediocre time-waster. It would be
easily dismissed and quickly forgotten. But director Fisher Stevens (the
actor-turned-filmmaker) managed to get Al Pacino, Christopher Walken
and Alan Arkin to headline his ensemble of aging gangsters. Pacino is
72, Walken is 69 and Arkin is 78. With these legendary dudes on duty,
this otherwise dark and dingy movie has some geriatric electricity to
turn the lights on.
The simple-minded story was penned by Noah
Haidle, earning his first writing credit for a feature film. Stand Up
Guys kicks off when retiree Walken, an amateur oil painter who
specializes in exploding sunrises, picks up Pacino at a maximum security
prison. Walken's pal has just served 28 years for a violent crime they
were all involved in.
Mark Margolis as the psychotic thug
Claphands -- wants Pacino dead anyway for past sins. Who is the
designated triggerman? This is not hard to figure out and this plot
twist is soon divulged to us. Stand Up Guys is not about suspense, it is
about character development and banter.
The rest of the
made-in-Hollywood movie takes place over the rest of the day, into the
night, and onto the explosive events of the next morning. Along the way,
the story is played as a buddy comedy and occasionally as a sappy
melodrama about Walken's long-lost granddaughter and Arkin's devoted
daughter (Julianna Margulies). Pacino's character has no family, so he
is the wild one who brazenly indulges in drugs, booze, steak dinners and
sleazy (if amusing) hookers. After all, 28 years is a long time.
Pacino
chews up scenery like a troll. It is fun to watch. Arkin is sly and
sarcastic. Nicely done. Walken sends up Walken, using that famously
stilted voice to make a mockery of the thousands of actors who imitate
him. Love the guy! Everyone else in the movie -- even those we come to
like -- are just superficial types. The good people are too good to
believe. The bad people are total a--holes who deserve to be punished.
Some
are punished, especially thugs who sexually assault a young woman. Our
anti-heroes wreak revenge on her behalf and establish their moral
credentials with us, the audience. They may be criminals, but our
old-school guys have ethics.
It should now be obvious that you do
not go to this movie expecting an action classic. Stevens is a hack
director when he is doing diction. This is not something in the league
of Heat, Michael Mann's 1995 heist drama which sets Pacino up against
Robert De Niro. Instead, use Walken's painting as a metaphor. In the
movie, Walken is no Rembrandt -- and neither is Stand Up Guys. But his
vivid yellow sunrises bring us a little cheer on a winter's night.
“I
think the bills right here, conceptually, I agree with,” Sen. Smith
said before adding that he questions whether a 2 percent tax could
generate as much as the current system. “But I do appreciate their
efforts about trying to get some discussion and debate for legitimate
tax reform.”
The plan would affect everything that is sold,
purchased and rented in New Mexico and eliminates the personal income
tax, the corporate income tax, the compensating tax and nearly all of
the state’s special sales taxes such as the vehicle excise tax and taxes
on insurance premiums.
The few existing taxes that would remain
would be the property tax, the gasoline tax and severance taxes — such
as the ones on the oil and natural gas industries that supply nearly
one-third of New Mexico’s total tax revenues.
Under the plan, local governments will be able to add up to a 1 percent gross receipts tax for the towns and cities.
“This
basically goes to the true definition of a gross receipts tax, Rep.
Taylor said. “For a long time we have talked about a broad-based tax
with very low rates.”
Taylor says the plan would allow poorer New Mexicans to obtain tax refunds of up to 100 percent.
Sharer introduced the bill Thursday in the Senate and Taylor introduced a companion bill in the House of Representatives.
New
Mexico has a complex tax structure that relies heavily on a gross
receipts tax that has developed into a system filled with credits,
exemptions, deductions and outright exceptions.
2013年1月31日星期四
2013年1月29日星期二
The Inside Pitch
The grass runs the entire stretch of the outfield and diamond; its fertility uninterrupted by players or unsightly patches of decay. The baseball field, moist from lazy coastal showers, bounces the refracted sunlight back onto the thin December cloud cover overhead with an almost artificial emerald hue, lending the grass the miraculous contrast of abrupt color in an otherwise monochrome world. In a bout of synesthesia, one smells the color in the fecund waft of freshly sown seed. Given the recent planting, the blades shoot up tall and wild – at least by the standards of a well-manicured baseball field like this one. While the grounds crew must patiently wait for the right moment to trim the verdure to code, it is by no means unkempt. This grass is still short enough to satisfy even the residents of the orderly Pleasantville planned around the university.
Nestled in a corner past the empty third base dugout, beyond the fence that runs to the outfield wall, standing parallel to the left field line, there is a batting cage. The University of California, Irvine’s Anteater Ballpark is in full off-season dormancy except for the periodic cracks, thwocks and thuds issuing from within the cage. The stadium’s massive analog clock beyond the center field wall remains on Daylight Savings Time through the first Monday of the month, marking the last resistance of this men’s game of spring, summer and autumn to winter’s dominion — such that it is in mild Orange County. Despite the general lack of cold, the last few weeks have brought persistent precipitation that has kept the players off the raw, healing grassland and inside the shelter of the cage.
Two adjacent vertical strips, separated only by safety netting, run the length of the cage. On one half, a pair of hitters take turns tossing each other sets of easy lobs from a short distance, ensuring solid contact on each drive. In the other half, junior right-hander Phil Ferragamo is the first member of the pitching staff to put in his time today fulfilling the day’s mandatory, but officially “non-mandatory,” supervised “unsupervised” workout.
Year round, the players train six out of seven days a week under the watchful eyes of their coaches, who are technically supposed to be absent during offseason workouts but unable to resist monitoring their burgeoning talent. The pitchers stay tuned with practice throwing sessions without a batter — simply known as “bullpens” — on half of these days. Ferragamo towers over the mound at six-foot-eight-inches and hurls the ball with intensity commensurate to his massive frame, sometimes wildly out of play but mostly in line with the target set by the catcher’s mitt.
Newly hired pitching coach Danny Bibona paces behind the batting cage pitching rubber, offering a gentle guiding voice to Ferragamo and spitting on the ground frequently as baseball players are known to do. He periodically calls out a number, challenging Ferragamo to hit the corresponding pitch location, following the attempt with positivity no matter the outcome. An even-keeled guy, Bibona earnestly hopes he doesn’t have to have a blow-up this season and that his pitchers stay in line and put in the work he expects of them.
The mold for what constitutes a pitcher at the highest levels of baseball varies widely, perhaps more than any other position in sports. The good fortune of major league pitching success has been visited upon the nearly obese, the freakishly tall and the impossibly old — but not so often diminutive, unassuming guys like Bibona. Although he stands 6 feet tall, he possesses a narrow and wiry build that, in a generic warm-up top and windbreaker pants, casts the image of a soccer player or cross country runner, lean and humble enough to last through endless miles of running. He certainly doesn’t strike you as a two-time college All-American pitcher and eighth round major league draft pick, and as a soft-spoken 24-year-old, he’s also not your typical Division I pitching coach.
Bibona was the smallest player on all of his teams growing up. As a freshman in high school, he stood just five feet tall and weighed ninety-five pounds. He didn’t elicit much attention, as he was not one to throw blazing fastballs past hitters or smash home runs from a young age. As an eight-year-old who loved pitching, he pestered his coach to let him pitch every game only to be repeatedly rebuffed. When he finally had his chance on the mound, he did well enough to earn a spot pitching every week. From there, Bibona made all-star teams, but didn’t garner significant playing time.
At private Santa Margarita High School in nearby Lake Forest, he had the fortune of a growth spurt, as well as playing alongside four teammates bound for Division I careers. They pushed each other, practicing at night after official practice, taking extra batting practice and hitting the weight room, addicted to doing whatever work was necessary to rise to the top of the game.
UC Irvine recruited Bibona as a two-way player to split time between the outfield and pitching, but a senior year injury to his non-throwing arm gave him pause. By the time he arrived at school, his right arm was better and he was hitting again, but the jump to a higher level of play led him to focus his efforts solely on pitching. Without the physical gifts of power to hit home runs out of college ballparks and speed to run the bases and patrol the outfield, Bibona saw it wise to focus his energy on pitching. While he was recruited by the Irvine coaches, he had to walk on to the program and earn his scholarship by proving himself as a freshman in 2007.
Bibona fought to prove to himself and everyone that he deserved the label and buzz given to top recruits. Being left-handed certainly helped. The world is predominated by righties, so increased competition demands they throw harder and simply be better. For the same reason, hitters don’t have the luxury of practicing against left-handed pitching, so lefties are a valuable commodity in the baseball world, proving to be more difficult for their opponents with perhaps less objective talent than their right-handed counterparts.
Bibona struggled his first season, despite holding his own in the preseason against teammates from a recruiting class that was one of the best in the nation and veterans that would lead the team to the cusp of a national championship. His successful, mature performances in fall intrasquad scrimmages translated into the coveted Saturday starter role once the season rolled around in February. During the season, important conference games are scheduled in series of three weekend games, with non-conference filler games left to Tuesdays.
The first Saturday start threw him right into the fire against a big name opponent: Cal, shorthand for Irvine’s big-brother UC branch in Berkeley. It was mind-boggling for Bibona to step up from high school competition to facing a school from the big-time Pac-10 conference whose football team he watched on Saturdays. He strayed from what made him successful in the fall. He tried to pitch beyond himself and struggled mightily, giving up four runs in the first inning and leaving the game early after surrendering a fifth score.
Of course, he would have liked to do well, but making the roster for all the road trips and sitting in the dugout held its own value. Bibona was able to watch a lot of well-played baseball.
Bibona went on to pitch out of the bullpen for most of his first season, coming on in relief towards the end of games for short appearances. Despite his struggles, he was handed the ball on college baseball’s biggest stage — the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska — the season-ending tournament that crowns the national champion.
Having already lost once to Arizona State in a tournament where a second loss sends a team home, Irvine was down 4-3 heading into the eighth inning, leaving them only six outs at bat to save their season and no margin for error on the defensive side of the ball. Star reliever Blair Erickson had just allowed three runs and recorded only two outs. With a runner on second sure to score on a base hit, Danny was tasked with ending the damage and preserving his team’s slim hopes for survival. As if the tension was lacking, he had to subdue the Sun Devils’ star player Brett Wallace — the best hitter in college baseball.
In front of a crowd of 29,034 people — the second largest in College World Series history —Bibona emerged from the bullpen knowing he was going to get Wallace out. In the regional tournaments leading up to Omaha, he acclimated to the gravity of 10,000 fans at games in Round Rock, Texas and Wichita, Kansas. The local University of Texas fans didn’t play a factor in Round Rock, but Wichita presented an entirely different atmosphere.
Without a nearby team making up one of the eight World Series participants, the fans of Omaha adopted the upstart squad from Orange County making their first appearance in the tournament, energized after witnessing them pull off a dramatic extra-innings victory against Cal State Fullerton the night before. Nonetheless, as Bibona threw his warm-up pitches, he had nerves inching up the back of his neck.
Head coach Dave Serrano watched him loosen and had some last words before he headed back to the dugout, “You’ve put in the hard work in the bullpen, just have fun. And happy birthday.”
On the biggest stage, against the most formidable opponent, the last thing running through Bibona’s mind was his 19th birthday. But hearing that relaxed him a little bit. His first pitch was a curveball — ball one. The second, a fastball away from Wallace — called strike one. Then, on a curveball that he recalls as not very good, he jammed Wallace into a fly ball that center fielder Ollie Linton secured with a diving catch to end the inning.
The Anteaters rallied to tie the game in the bottom half of the eighth inning with a four-run surge, and Linton concluded the improbable comeback in the 10th inning with a game-winning walk-off single to right field. This, their second extra-innings win in as many nights, was a College World Series first and revived their feel-good story with a push into the national semifinal game.
A sobering six-run rout at the hands of eventual champion Oregon State quickly followed and brought their run to an abrupt conclusion. A loss so close to the national championship surely meant heartbreak for those leaving because of graduation or entry into the Major League amateur draft, but for freshmen like Bibona, this deep run in Omaha was an inspiring preview of the next few years.
Nestled in a corner past the empty third base dugout, beyond the fence that runs to the outfield wall, standing parallel to the left field line, there is a batting cage. The University of California, Irvine’s Anteater Ballpark is in full off-season dormancy except for the periodic cracks, thwocks and thuds issuing from within the cage. The stadium’s massive analog clock beyond the center field wall remains on Daylight Savings Time through the first Monday of the month, marking the last resistance of this men’s game of spring, summer and autumn to winter’s dominion — such that it is in mild Orange County. Despite the general lack of cold, the last few weeks have brought persistent precipitation that has kept the players off the raw, healing grassland and inside the shelter of the cage.
Two adjacent vertical strips, separated only by safety netting, run the length of the cage. On one half, a pair of hitters take turns tossing each other sets of easy lobs from a short distance, ensuring solid contact on each drive. In the other half, junior right-hander Phil Ferragamo is the first member of the pitching staff to put in his time today fulfilling the day’s mandatory, but officially “non-mandatory,” supervised “unsupervised” workout.
Year round, the players train six out of seven days a week under the watchful eyes of their coaches, who are technically supposed to be absent during offseason workouts but unable to resist monitoring their burgeoning talent. The pitchers stay tuned with practice throwing sessions without a batter — simply known as “bullpens” — on half of these days. Ferragamo towers over the mound at six-foot-eight-inches and hurls the ball with intensity commensurate to his massive frame, sometimes wildly out of play but mostly in line with the target set by the catcher’s mitt.
Newly hired pitching coach Danny Bibona paces behind the batting cage pitching rubber, offering a gentle guiding voice to Ferragamo and spitting on the ground frequently as baseball players are known to do. He periodically calls out a number, challenging Ferragamo to hit the corresponding pitch location, following the attempt with positivity no matter the outcome. An even-keeled guy, Bibona earnestly hopes he doesn’t have to have a blow-up this season and that his pitchers stay in line and put in the work he expects of them.
The mold for what constitutes a pitcher at the highest levels of baseball varies widely, perhaps more than any other position in sports. The good fortune of major league pitching success has been visited upon the nearly obese, the freakishly tall and the impossibly old — but not so often diminutive, unassuming guys like Bibona. Although he stands 6 feet tall, he possesses a narrow and wiry build that, in a generic warm-up top and windbreaker pants, casts the image of a soccer player or cross country runner, lean and humble enough to last through endless miles of running. He certainly doesn’t strike you as a two-time college All-American pitcher and eighth round major league draft pick, and as a soft-spoken 24-year-old, he’s also not your typical Division I pitching coach.
Bibona was the smallest player on all of his teams growing up. As a freshman in high school, he stood just five feet tall and weighed ninety-five pounds. He didn’t elicit much attention, as he was not one to throw blazing fastballs past hitters or smash home runs from a young age. As an eight-year-old who loved pitching, he pestered his coach to let him pitch every game only to be repeatedly rebuffed. When he finally had his chance on the mound, he did well enough to earn a spot pitching every week. From there, Bibona made all-star teams, but didn’t garner significant playing time.
At private Santa Margarita High School in nearby Lake Forest, he had the fortune of a growth spurt, as well as playing alongside four teammates bound for Division I careers. They pushed each other, practicing at night after official practice, taking extra batting practice and hitting the weight room, addicted to doing whatever work was necessary to rise to the top of the game.
UC Irvine recruited Bibona as a two-way player to split time between the outfield and pitching, but a senior year injury to his non-throwing arm gave him pause. By the time he arrived at school, his right arm was better and he was hitting again, but the jump to a higher level of play led him to focus his efforts solely on pitching. Without the physical gifts of power to hit home runs out of college ballparks and speed to run the bases and patrol the outfield, Bibona saw it wise to focus his energy on pitching. While he was recruited by the Irvine coaches, he had to walk on to the program and earn his scholarship by proving himself as a freshman in 2007.
Bibona fought to prove to himself and everyone that he deserved the label and buzz given to top recruits. Being left-handed certainly helped. The world is predominated by righties, so increased competition demands they throw harder and simply be better. For the same reason, hitters don’t have the luxury of practicing against left-handed pitching, so lefties are a valuable commodity in the baseball world, proving to be more difficult for their opponents with perhaps less objective talent than their right-handed counterparts.
Bibona struggled his first season, despite holding his own in the preseason against teammates from a recruiting class that was one of the best in the nation and veterans that would lead the team to the cusp of a national championship. His successful, mature performances in fall intrasquad scrimmages translated into the coveted Saturday starter role once the season rolled around in February. During the season, important conference games are scheduled in series of three weekend games, with non-conference filler games left to Tuesdays.
The first Saturday start threw him right into the fire against a big name opponent: Cal, shorthand for Irvine’s big-brother UC branch in Berkeley. It was mind-boggling for Bibona to step up from high school competition to facing a school from the big-time Pac-10 conference whose football team he watched on Saturdays. He strayed from what made him successful in the fall. He tried to pitch beyond himself and struggled mightily, giving up four runs in the first inning and leaving the game early after surrendering a fifth score.
Of course, he would have liked to do well, but making the roster for all the road trips and sitting in the dugout held its own value. Bibona was able to watch a lot of well-played baseball.
Bibona went on to pitch out of the bullpen for most of his first season, coming on in relief towards the end of games for short appearances. Despite his struggles, he was handed the ball on college baseball’s biggest stage — the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska — the season-ending tournament that crowns the national champion.
Having already lost once to Arizona State in a tournament where a second loss sends a team home, Irvine was down 4-3 heading into the eighth inning, leaving them only six outs at bat to save their season and no margin for error on the defensive side of the ball. Star reliever Blair Erickson had just allowed three runs and recorded only two outs. With a runner on second sure to score on a base hit, Danny was tasked with ending the damage and preserving his team’s slim hopes for survival. As if the tension was lacking, he had to subdue the Sun Devils’ star player Brett Wallace — the best hitter in college baseball.
In front of a crowd of 29,034 people — the second largest in College World Series history —Bibona emerged from the bullpen knowing he was going to get Wallace out. In the regional tournaments leading up to Omaha, he acclimated to the gravity of 10,000 fans at games in Round Rock, Texas and Wichita, Kansas. The local University of Texas fans didn’t play a factor in Round Rock, but Wichita presented an entirely different atmosphere.
Without a nearby team making up one of the eight World Series participants, the fans of Omaha adopted the upstart squad from Orange County making their first appearance in the tournament, energized after witnessing them pull off a dramatic extra-innings victory against Cal State Fullerton the night before. Nonetheless, as Bibona threw his warm-up pitches, he had nerves inching up the back of his neck.
Head coach Dave Serrano watched him loosen and had some last words before he headed back to the dugout, “You’ve put in the hard work in the bullpen, just have fun. And happy birthday.”
On the biggest stage, against the most formidable opponent, the last thing running through Bibona’s mind was his 19th birthday. But hearing that relaxed him a little bit. His first pitch was a curveball — ball one. The second, a fastball away from Wallace — called strike one. Then, on a curveball that he recalls as not very good, he jammed Wallace into a fly ball that center fielder Ollie Linton secured with a diving catch to end the inning.
The Anteaters rallied to tie the game in the bottom half of the eighth inning with a four-run surge, and Linton concluded the improbable comeback in the 10th inning with a game-winning walk-off single to right field. This, their second extra-innings win in as many nights, was a College World Series first and revived their feel-good story with a push into the national semifinal game.
A sobering six-run rout at the hands of eventual champion Oregon State quickly followed and brought their run to an abrupt conclusion. A loss so close to the national championship surely meant heartbreak for those leaving because of graduation or entry into the Major League amateur draft, but for freshmen like Bibona, this deep run in Omaha was an inspiring preview of the next few years.
2013年1月17日星期四
Have Family Dinners Prepared Teddy Turner to Be a Politician?
Teddy Turner, the son of media titan and avowed liberal Ted Turner, gets the question all the time: How did he become his family’s only card-carrying Republican? And journalists aren't the only ones asking it. “It’s amazing how many times my dad’s asked me that question,” says Turner, who is running for Sen. Tim Scott's vacated House seat in South Carolina. Then, in his good-natured Southern drawl, he recalls one of the experiences that helped form his politics: “While I was in the Soviet Union, I was in a car wreck that broke most of the bones in my face. I hit the dashboard from the backseat. The hospital I went to didn’t have an X-ray machine; they didn’t have CAT scans, MRIs. … They had glass-and-steel reusable needles, and about all I did was live on a cot for a week. But it was free.” He pauses deliberately, as if to say, Get it? “Free. Healthcare.”
A finely tuned answer with an Obamacare-themed punch line—not bad for someone who, at 49 years old, is completely new to electoral politics. This inexperience, Turner feels, is his best asset. The Republicans likely to run against him in the March 19 primary include such practiced pols as Mark Sanford—the former governor best remembered for claiming he was hiking the Appalachian Trail when, in fact, he was having an extramarital affair in Argentina—state Rep. Chip Limehouse, and state Sen. Larry Grooms. In their company, Teddy Turner, whose curriculum vitae includes television news producer, amateur maxi-yacht skipper, tech entrepreneur turned scam victim, bison meat purveyor, and high school teacher, is the definition of a political outsider. It's a role he's comfortable with, having grown up as one, too.
If Teddy Turner is blazing a path his father could never fathom—running for Congress as a Republican—it may be because his adult life began squarely in his father’s shadow. After completing college at the Citadel, a military academy in Charleston that his father required him to attend, Turner became a producer for the Moscow bureau of the Ted Turner–owned CNN, for which he spent six hours a day learning Russian. He worked on and off for his father’s media empire until he was 33, when the 1996 merger between Time Warner and Turner Broadcasting System eliminated his position. Over a family dinner, he casually asked his father whether he was safe, figuring he was. The elder Turner curtly replied, “You’re toast.”
In his late 20s and early 30s, Turner cultivated interests and ambitions that he hoped would earn him his father’s admiration. He briefly left his television consulting job in the early '90s, for instance, to train to sail in the 1993-1994 Whitbread Round the World Race, a nine-month, 30,000-mile competition among maxi-yachts (sailboats of 70 feet or longer). The race attracted him, he told the Miami Herald at the time, because it was longer, more grueling, and more reliant on skill than the America’s Cup race, which his father had won in 1977. For the Whitbread, Turner paid $700,000 for an 80-foot practice yacht and hired two sports-marketing experts to raise the millions it would take to build a brand new model. But in a recession, he tells me, the money never materialized.
“That was a time in my life where I felt I needed to compete with Ted, that I needed to be bigger and I needed to be better, that I needed to prove myself,” Turner says, referring to his father, as he often does, as “Ted.” “When you are raised in greatness’ shadow, you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what you’re worth, what your value is. I struggled with that for a long time, but I got over it.”
After being told he was toast, Turner became less involved with his father’s business, though there were occasional engagements. In 1997, for instance, Ted Turner founded U.S. Bison to try to monetize the herd of 17,000 bison that roamed his various ranch properties “like pets,” as he described it to the Associated Press. The idea was to create an upscale U.S. market for bison meat, and he put his son in charge of the effort. (The most notable outcome was a chain of restaurants, Ted's Montana Grill, that boasts “the biggest bison menu in the world.”) But mostly, Teddy Turner's ventures were his own—and they were not, on balance, terribly successful.
In 1997, along with three other partners, he founded a company, Zekko, to mass-produce a box that somehow converted ordinary telephone wires into high-speed data lines. According to the Florida Times-Union, “His name—his father's name, really—conferred legitimacy on the unknown company and its unknown genius, giving many investors confidence.” Teddy Turner gave the inventor of the device, Madison Priest, workspace in a CNN building to produce a prototype. However, after collecting about $1.5 million from investors, Turner and his partners learned that Priest had faked all his demonstrations of the box’s near-magical properties. When confronted in a board meeting, Priest pleaded that he’d been faking his results until he could reverse-engineer how to build the box—a crash in his Corvette had wiped his memory of how to do so. The technology, Priest explained further, had initially come to him from a “hopper,” a species of alien that spread technological knowledge from planet to planet. Until that moment, Turner says, “It was an extremely well-orchestrated illusion.” At the end of the meeting, Turner resigned.
His political positions remain vague. When pushed for his stance on issues, Turner mostly waxes worried about how “the system is very broken,” how Washington “needs new faces and fresh minds” who can “reach across the aisle and do some commonsense stuff,” and that unspecified spending cuts, not higher taxes, are the answer to our nation’s debt. The closest he gets to an actual policy proposal is this: “How about, if you pass one law, you take one off?”
His tenor, though, is just right for someone running in a state that regularly sends Tea Party politicians (in name or spirit) to Washington. Turner is working on his folksy male chauvinism: “If my wife goes out and buys a pair of shoes that were $100 but are marked down to $50, she’ll say, ‘I saved $50!’ I’ll say, ‘No you didn’t, you spent $50.’ But politicians think that’s how you cut a budget.” He’s mastered his political doomsday predicting: “Those people who flew the hammer-and-sickle tried to stage an economy, and we saw how that went. Socialism, which we move closer to in this country every day, scares the heck out of me.” And his opposition to government regulations, while generally unspecific, is well-suited to the 1st Congressional District’s well-to-do and conservative audiences: “Well, I have a friend in the cruise industry. And they keep putting regulation upon new regulation on that industry, not to make the cruise industry any safer, but to raise money for the government.”
How Teddy Turner will fare is difficult to predict. Opinions are split over how much Sanford’s fundraising prowess and name recognition are worth, considering that his second term as governor ended in disgrace. And Turner, who is not self-financed, has access to many of the same deep-pocketed circles as some of his opponents. In fact, just three weeks ago, he went hunting with Sanford and Sanford’s son—but this doesn't make him an insider, Turner insists. The closest that he's come to politicking in the past has been among family. “I’ve sat across the dinner table from Ted Turner and Jane Fonda and discussed politics,” he says, in the course of explaining why he belongs in Congress. “And everybody’s come away happy.”
A finely tuned answer with an Obamacare-themed punch line—not bad for someone who, at 49 years old, is completely new to electoral politics. This inexperience, Turner feels, is his best asset. The Republicans likely to run against him in the March 19 primary include such practiced pols as Mark Sanford—the former governor best remembered for claiming he was hiking the Appalachian Trail when, in fact, he was having an extramarital affair in Argentina—state Rep. Chip Limehouse, and state Sen. Larry Grooms. In their company, Teddy Turner, whose curriculum vitae includes television news producer, amateur maxi-yacht skipper, tech entrepreneur turned scam victim, bison meat purveyor, and high school teacher, is the definition of a political outsider. It's a role he's comfortable with, having grown up as one, too.
If Teddy Turner is blazing a path his father could never fathom—running for Congress as a Republican—it may be because his adult life began squarely in his father’s shadow. After completing college at the Citadel, a military academy in Charleston that his father required him to attend, Turner became a producer for the Moscow bureau of the Ted Turner–owned CNN, for which he spent six hours a day learning Russian. He worked on and off for his father’s media empire until he was 33, when the 1996 merger between Time Warner and Turner Broadcasting System eliminated his position. Over a family dinner, he casually asked his father whether he was safe, figuring he was. The elder Turner curtly replied, “You’re toast.”
In his late 20s and early 30s, Turner cultivated interests and ambitions that he hoped would earn him his father’s admiration. He briefly left his television consulting job in the early '90s, for instance, to train to sail in the 1993-1994 Whitbread Round the World Race, a nine-month, 30,000-mile competition among maxi-yachts (sailboats of 70 feet or longer). The race attracted him, he told the Miami Herald at the time, because it was longer, more grueling, and more reliant on skill than the America’s Cup race, which his father had won in 1977. For the Whitbread, Turner paid $700,000 for an 80-foot practice yacht and hired two sports-marketing experts to raise the millions it would take to build a brand new model. But in a recession, he tells me, the money never materialized.
“That was a time in my life where I felt I needed to compete with Ted, that I needed to be bigger and I needed to be better, that I needed to prove myself,” Turner says, referring to his father, as he often does, as “Ted.” “When you are raised in greatness’ shadow, you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what you’re worth, what your value is. I struggled with that for a long time, but I got over it.”
After being told he was toast, Turner became less involved with his father’s business, though there were occasional engagements. In 1997, for instance, Ted Turner founded U.S. Bison to try to monetize the herd of 17,000 bison that roamed his various ranch properties “like pets,” as he described it to the Associated Press. The idea was to create an upscale U.S. market for bison meat, and he put his son in charge of the effort. (The most notable outcome was a chain of restaurants, Ted's Montana Grill, that boasts “the biggest bison menu in the world.”) But mostly, Teddy Turner's ventures were his own—and they were not, on balance, terribly successful.
In 1997, along with three other partners, he founded a company, Zekko, to mass-produce a box that somehow converted ordinary telephone wires into high-speed data lines. According to the Florida Times-Union, “His name—his father's name, really—conferred legitimacy on the unknown company and its unknown genius, giving many investors confidence.” Teddy Turner gave the inventor of the device, Madison Priest, workspace in a CNN building to produce a prototype. However, after collecting about $1.5 million from investors, Turner and his partners learned that Priest had faked all his demonstrations of the box’s near-magical properties. When confronted in a board meeting, Priest pleaded that he’d been faking his results until he could reverse-engineer how to build the box—a crash in his Corvette had wiped his memory of how to do so. The technology, Priest explained further, had initially come to him from a “hopper,” a species of alien that spread technological knowledge from planet to planet. Until that moment, Turner says, “It was an extremely well-orchestrated illusion.” At the end of the meeting, Turner resigned.
His political positions remain vague. When pushed for his stance on issues, Turner mostly waxes worried about how “the system is very broken,” how Washington “needs new faces and fresh minds” who can “reach across the aisle and do some commonsense stuff,” and that unspecified spending cuts, not higher taxes, are the answer to our nation’s debt. The closest he gets to an actual policy proposal is this: “How about, if you pass one law, you take one off?”
His tenor, though, is just right for someone running in a state that regularly sends Tea Party politicians (in name or spirit) to Washington. Turner is working on his folksy male chauvinism: “If my wife goes out and buys a pair of shoes that were $100 but are marked down to $50, she’ll say, ‘I saved $50!’ I’ll say, ‘No you didn’t, you spent $50.’ But politicians think that’s how you cut a budget.” He’s mastered his political doomsday predicting: “Those people who flew the hammer-and-sickle tried to stage an economy, and we saw how that went. Socialism, which we move closer to in this country every day, scares the heck out of me.” And his opposition to government regulations, while generally unspecific, is well-suited to the 1st Congressional District’s well-to-do and conservative audiences: “Well, I have a friend in the cruise industry. And they keep putting regulation upon new regulation on that industry, not to make the cruise industry any safer, but to raise money for the government.”
How Teddy Turner will fare is difficult to predict. Opinions are split over how much Sanford’s fundraising prowess and name recognition are worth, considering that his second term as governor ended in disgrace. And Turner, who is not self-financed, has access to many of the same deep-pocketed circles as some of his opponents. In fact, just three weeks ago, he went hunting with Sanford and Sanford’s son—but this doesn't make him an insider, Turner insists. The closest that he's come to politicking in the past has been among family. “I’ve sat across the dinner table from Ted Turner and Jane Fonda and discussed politics,” he says, in the course of explaining why he belongs in Congress. “And everybody’s come away happy.”
2012年12月12日星期三
Recovery Centre being temporarily relocated to deal
Eastern Health announced today that services normally provided by the Recovery Centre at Building 532 in Pleasantville will be temporarily offered from the Waterford Hospital effective Thursday at 3 p.m.
A news release notes the move is a precautionary measure while air quality testing is completed at Building 532 to test for levels of creosote vapour in the building.
“Based on the information we have currently, there is no need to be concerned as the levels of creosote exposure at the building have been low and employees have never been in direct contact with the source of the creosote,” Vickie Kaminski, President and CEO of Eastern Health, said.
“However, since it could be early in 2013 before we receive the results of the air quality testing, we have made the prudent decision to relocate our staff and clients.”
Individuals needing assistance or access to the Recovery Centre are asked to call 752-4980 for assistance.
Creosote is a substance that was used as a wood preservative on the structural beams, joists and underside of the subfloor of Building 532 when it was first constructed over 50 years ago.
Eastern Health discovered possible exposure to creosote vapour in Building 532 in 2007, after employees reported an odour.
Air quality testing in 2008 and 2009 indicated levels of creosote vapour below the minimal acceptable level for people working out of the building during a normal work day and work week.
Over the last six months, several employees working at the Recovery Centre have developed rashes from an unknown origin. As a result, Eastern Health launched an Occupational Health and Safety Inspection in November. This inspection was conducted by an Industrial Hygienist with Service NL. It was concluded that there was a possibility that exposure to low levels of creosote vapour may be responsible for the rashes.
“Infrastructure Support has also begun work to improve the ventilation system in Building 532, which will further help reduce the smell created by the creosote and exposure to creosote vapour,” said George Butt, Vice-President responsible for Infrastructure Support.
“We will continue to do what is necessary to address this issue and ensure that Building 532 is environmentally safe for further use once we have received the results of the air quality testing.”
Eastern Health made the decision to move inpatients and staff as a precautionary measure while extensive air quality testing is completed and a toxicology expert is consulted, which could take up to eight weeks. Employees who have presented with rashes have been seen by a dermatologist.
Once Eastern Health receives the results of the air quality testing, it will make a permanent decision on the location of the Recovery Centre.
Jung has also said, “Energy storage can be computerized to use real-time information, connect to and optimize other grid systems and assets, and behave as an intelligent device or network of devices. Instead of thinking about energy storage as batteries in a box, it might be more productive for the industry to visualize energy storage as an intelligent computer that contains batteries and inverters“
We discussed the analogy of analog vs. digital power as a difference between the standard solutions for ES based on just better batteries (analog) vs. Greensmith’s computerized and software –centric approach (digital).
Greensmith solutions will manage the many thousands of energy storage systems customers may have out there; provide fleet management by orchestrating with versatile management of all the ES blocks with a versatile solution; provide a resilient network that can take out 100 failed ES and still work up to the customer’s expectations.
The company holds several patents in the areas of intelligent control, integration and storage of electricity, which enable the electric power industry to efficiently leverage existing resources and facilitate the deployment of renewable energy sources.
Their proprietary control software and Battery Operating System (BOS3) technology enable distributed energy system deployments with centralized operations through an online user portal or via machine-to-machine integration. All of Greensmith's turn-key DESS units include the latest BOS3 communication technology and software. In addition, each DESS unit is configurable, modular, and scalable from residential to commercial to utility scale deployments.
BOS3 is built on an open information architecture modeled after the “Open Automation Demand Response Standard” approved by the Department of Energy. This event-based asset management architecture easily integrates into any utility framework. Average installation time is under three hours.
End-users have access to the BOS3 software through an online web-portal interface. This interface provides users with central control and highly flexible distributed deployment, tailoring DESS groups to specific applications (i.e. frequency regulation, PV load following) while still retaining the ability to centrally control any or all of the units.
A news release notes the move is a precautionary measure while air quality testing is completed at Building 532 to test for levels of creosote vapour in the building.
“Based on the information we have currently, there is no need to be concerned as the levels of creosote exposure at the building have been low and employees have never been in direct contact with the source of the creosote,” Vickie Kaminski, President and CEO of Eastern Health, said.
“However, since it could be early in 2013 before we receive the results of the air quality testing, we have made the prudent decision to relocate our staff and clients.”
Individuals needing assistance or access to the Recovery Centre are asked to call 752-4980 for assistance.
Creosote is a substance that was used as a wood preservative on the structural beams, joists and underside of the subfloor of Building 532 when it was first constructed over 50 years ago.
Eastern Health discovered possible exposure to creosote vapour in Building 532 in 2007, after employees reported an odour.
Air quality testing in 2008 and 2009 indicated levels of creosote vapour below the minimal acceptable level for people working out of the building during a normal work day and work week.
Over the last six months, several employees working at the Recovery Centre have developed rashes from an unknown origin. As a result, Eastern Health launched an Occupational Health and Safety Inspection in November. This inspection was conducted by an Industrial Hygienist with Service NL. It was concluded that there was a possibility that exposure to low levels of creosote vapour may be responsible for the rashes.
“Infrastructure Support has also begun work to improve the ventilation system in Building 532, which will further help reduce the smell created by the creosote and exposure to creosote vapour,” said George Butt, Vice-President responsible for Infrastructure Support.
“We will continue to do what is necessary to address this issue and ensure that Building 532 is environmentally safe for further use once we have received the results of the air quality testing.”
Eastern Health made the decision to move inpatients and staff as a precautionary measure while extensive air quality testing is completed and a toxicology expert is consulted, which could take up to eight weeks. Employees who have presented with rashes have been seen by a dermatologist.
Once Eastern Health receives the results of the air quality testing, it will make a permanent decision on the location of the Recovery Centre.
Jung has also said, “Energy storage can be computerized to use real-time information, connect to and optimize other grid systems and assets, and behave as an intelligent device or network of devices. Instead of thinking about energy storage as batteries in a box, it might be more productive for the industry to visualize energy storage as an intelligent computer that contains batteries and inverters“
We discussed the analogy of analog vs. digital power as a difference between the standard solutions for ES based on just better batteries (analog) vs. Greensmith’s computerized and software –centric approach (digital).
Greensmith solutions will manage the many thousands of energy storage systems customers may have out there; provide fleet management by orchestrating with versatile management of all the ES blocks with a versatile solution; provide a resilient network that can take out 100 failed ES and still work up to the customer’s expectations.
The company holds several patents in the areas of intelligent control, integration and storage of electricity, which enable the electric power industry to efficiently leverage existing resources and facilitate the deployment of renewable energy sources.
Their proprietary control software and Battery Operating System (BOS3) technology enable distributed energy system deployments with centralized operations through an online user portal or via machine-to-machine integration. All of Greensmith's turn-key DESS units include the latest BOS3 communication technology and software. In addition, each DESS unit is configurable, modular, and scalable from residential to commercial to utility scale deployments.
BOS3 is built on an open information architecture modeled after the “Open Automation Demand Response Standard” approved by the Department of Energy. This event-based asset management architecture easily integrates into any utility framework. Average installation time is under three hours.
End-users have access to the BOS3 software through an online web-portal interface. This interface provides users with central control and highly flexible distributed deployment, tailoring DESS groups to specific applications (i.e. frequency regulation, PV load following) while still retaining the ability to centrally control any or all of the units.
2012年11月26日星期一
Google Street View Set for Launch in Indonesia
The latest fleet of cars to hit Indonesia’s roads will carry an unusual logo, but one that the country’s wired population is more than familiar with: that of Google, as the Internet giant prepares to introduce Google Street View to the sprawling archipelago.
The project, launched Friday by Indonesia’s Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy and Google Inc., will be one of the tech giant’s largest initiatives in Asia. Custom Google cars fitted with cameras have already been deployed across the country with the end goal of allowing anyone with an Internet connection a panoramic view of key cities through street-level images, not expected to be ready for a few years.
Indonesia will be the third Southeast Asian country to get Google’s Street View service, after Singapore and more recently Thailand, where Google also partnered with the country’s tourism authority. Like many other Street View initiatives, the primary target audience is tourists and other visitors, allowing them to check out hotels and other attractions before planning itineraries, as well as serve the potential market within Indonesia’s 250 million people.
This could be especially useful in Indonesia where infrastructure bottlenecks have hidden some of the most beautiful tourist destinations – including secluded beaches, pristine dive sites and legendary temples – away from keen visitors. Businessmen, too, are now flocking to Jakarta and other key cities in the hope of tapping into Indonesia’s strong growth, but often need to strategically plan meetings close to hotels and offices to avoid Jakarta’s notorious traffic jams.
“With these digital tools, hotels, tourism sites and businesses can be more creative in making it easier for visitors to find their stores, location and websites,” said Mari E. Pangestu, Minister of Tourism and Creative Economy, at the sidelines of an exhibition where the service was launched.
Google said in a press statement that the project will be a “long-term investment,” without giving a specific date for the introduction of Street View, though it expects some images to be online in the next few years.
The company has run into privacy issues elsewhere when capturing Street View data, which involves real-time panoramic images, allowing anyone to scope out various locales without leaving their screens. Though some find the service convenient, others have expressed strong sentiments against having their faces, car license plate numbers and the like potentially exposed to millions.
Her daughter arrived in 2009, and when Lori returned from maternity leave, even more leadership changes had occurred. She found the company was taking her lab in a completely new direction. She was also being asked to report to a colleague who she felt was not the right resource to lead the business unit. Lori reached out to leadership at the larger parent company where she had great relationships and explained her frustration. They created a new role for Lori: chief technology catalyst at a different business unit.
The big change for Lori was that travel used to be mainly for industry trade shows, speaking at events and meeting clients. But with this newly created position, Lori had to work with leadership and senior resources who were on the east coast while she was living on the west coast. For the better part of the next two years, her job focused on constant travel, and it was overwhelming.
The job was interesting, and Lori still desired to be the self described "powerful innovation girl," so she traveled with her nanny and her young daughter. She found this at least gave her more time together with her daughter, and she felt like she was balancing both worlds that she enjoyed. But the company wasn't funding her daughter's travel or the nanny's, so it became very expensive.
She says that she really felt the need to have the nanny in tow unless she traveled to a location where she had family.
Lori was exhausted after each trip and frustration was mounting. Then, after two years of non-stop travel, her role at the company was changing yet again and becoming very undesirable. Her mentor at the parent company who created the job left the company, and she could see her role's focus dissipating.
During 2011, her daughter started school at age two and Lori couldn't take her on trips anymore. The balance had shifted. She missed her daughter when she was traveling, even for just two or three nights. Lori says "It was a strong chemical reaction that I couldn't ignore."
The tipping point was in January/February 2011 when all of the tech conferences take place between Las Vegas, Florida and Barcelona. Lori says "While it sounds romantic and exciting and I was enjoying the intellectual stimulation during the day, I was miserable underneath. I was this strong business woman during the day and I cried at night."
Neither happy in her personal nor business life, Lori knew it was time to make the transition to something more balanced with motherhood. "This New York based role was definitely not working, and I had come to the tough realization that the job I signed up for was no longer there. So I began discussions with HR. I had a severance package that would give me some time to figure things out on my own."
In June 2012, Lori become a Mompreneur. She wanted this balance desperately, and she was determined to find a way. During her tenure at McCann, Lori was very active in her industry; she sat on boards, did many speaking engagements and moderated panels, making terrific contacts along the way. She believed she could find opportunity, but there was no guarantee of income and only six months of severance pay.
The first two months of being her own boss were a major adjustment. She bought a new computer, set up her home office, dealt with insurance and got a new phone plan. All the things that corporate had always taken care of for so long were now her responsibility. She struggled with being at home and learning how to balance being relaxed and enjoying her daughter while being productive and starting a business.
The project, launched Friday by Indonesia’s Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy and Google Inc., will be one of the tech giant’s largest initiatives in Asia. Custom Google cars fitted with cameras have already been deployed across the country with the end goal of allowing anyone with an Internet connection a panoramic view of key cities through street-level images, not expected to be ready for a few years.
Indonesia will be the third Southeast Asian country to get Google’s Street View service, after Singapore and more recently Thailand, where Google also partnered with the country’s tourism authority. Like many other Street View initiatives, the primary target audience is tourists and other visitors, allowing them to check out hotels and other attractions before planning itineraries, as well as serve the potential market within Indonesia’s 250 million people.
This could be especially useful in Indonesia where infrastructure bottlenecks have hidden some of the most beautiful tourist destinations – including secluded beaches, pristine dive sites and legendary temples – away from keen visitors. Businessmen, too, are now flocking to Jakarta and other key cities in the hope of tapping into Indonesia’s strong growth, but often need to strategically plan meetings close to hotels and offices to avoid Jakarta’s notorious traffic jams.
“With these digital tools, hotels, tourism sites and businesses can be more creative in making it easier for visitors to find their stores, location and websites,” said Mari E. Pangestu, Minister of Tourism and Creative Economy, at the sidelines of an exhibition where the service was launched.
Google said in a press statement that the project will be a “long-term investment,” without giving a specific date for the introduction of Street View, though it expects some images to be online in the next few years.
The company has run into privacy issues elsewhere when capturing Street View data, which involves real-time panoramic images, allowing anyone to scope out various locales without leaving their screens. Though some find the service convenient, others have expressed strong sentiments against having their faces, car license plate numbers and the like potentially exposed to millions.
Her daughter arrived in 2009, and when Lori returned from maternity leave, even more leadership changes had occurred. She found the company was taking her lab in a completely new direction. She was also being asked to report to a colleague who she felt was not the right resource to lead the business unit. Lori reached out to leadership at the larger parent company where she had great relationships and explained her frustration. They created a new role for Lori: chief technology catalyst at a different business unit.
The big change for Lori was that travel used to be mainly for industry trade shows, speaking at events and meeting clients. But with this newly created position, Lori had to work with leadership and senior resources who were on the east coast while she was living on the west coast. For the better part of the next two years, her job focused on constant travel, and it was overwhelming.
The job was interesting, and Lori still desired to be the self described "powerful innovation girl," so she traveled with her nanny and her young daughter. She found this at least gave her more time together with her daughter, and she felt like she was balancing both worlds that she enjoyed. But the company wasn't funding her daughter's travel or the nanny's, so it became very expensive.
She says that she really felt the need to have the nanny in tow unless she traveled to a location where she had family.
Lori was exhausted after each trip and frustration was mounting. Then, after two years of non-stop travel, her role at the company was changing yet again and becoming very undesirable. Her mentor at the parent company who created the job left the company, and she could see her role's focus dissipating.
During 2011, her daughter started school at age two and Lori couldn't take her on trips anymore. The balance had shifted. She missed her daughter when she was traveling, even for just two or three nights. Lori says "It was a strong chemical reaction that I couldn't ignore."
The tipping point was in January/February 2011 when all of the tech conferences take place between Las Vegas, Florida and Barcelona. Lori says "While it sounds romantic and exciting and I was enjoying the intellectual stimulation during the day, I was miserable underneath. I was this strong business woman during the day and I cried at night."
Neither happy in her personal nor business life, Lori knew it was time to make the transition to something more balanced with motherhood. "This New York based role was definitely not working, and I had come to the tough realization that the job I signed up for was no longer there. So I began discussions with HR. I had a severance package that would give me some time to figure things out on my own."
In June 2012, Lori become a Mompreneur. She wanted this balance desperately, and she was determined to find a way. During her tenure at McCann, Lori was very active in her industry; she sat on boards, did many speaking engagements and moderated panels, making terrific contacts along the way. She believed she could find opportunity, but there was no guarantee of income and only six months of severance pay.
The first two months of being her own boss were a major adjustment. She bought a new computer, set up her home office, dealt with insurance and got a new phone plan. All the things that corporate had always taken care of for so long were now her responsibility. She struggled with being at home and learning how to balance being relaxed and enjoying her daughter while being productive and starting a business.
2012年11月25日星期日
18 seasons of teaching players
It’s a Friday night and the lights are on over the Souhegan High School football field.
There are no more home games for the Sabers, but there are still about a dozen players in full uniform, running around the field. They’re taking turns throwing passes and kicking field goals, and doing something that their football coach has always wanted them to do – be kids and have fun.
The real reason the Souhegan players are out there is for a photo shoot, something they’ve done at the end of the last two seasons. A photographer has set up a few flashes, and a machine pumps out fog that envelopes each player as they pose for photos.
And they’re about be joined by a special guest.
The photo shoot followed the team’s first practice in almost a week, as the Sabers rested for a few days before preparing for the Thanksgiving game against Merrimack. A week before, Souhegan was knocked out of the playoffs in a heartbreaker to Goffstown, and after the game, head coach Mike Beliveau told the team he’d be stepping down at the end of the season.
The field grows quiet as the players realize their special guest is about to arrive. At the sound of clicking cleats, they turn and watch as a familiar figure, donned in a white Souhegan jersey and pads, makes his way on to the field.
Beliveau has suited up to join his players, and they greet him with a round of cheers and laughter.
Not many coaches would like having his players laughing on the football field. Not many coaches are Mike Beliveau.
“Mike is a guy who likes to have fun and he wears his emotions on his sleeve,” assistant coach Paul Landau said. “My first year here, I was coming out of UNH, and football was always a serious thing. Here we stopped practice one time for a sunset. That’s his personality.”
And that’s why so many players have enjoyed playing for Beliveau. Sure, there have been some who haven’t appreciated the coach’s unique ways, but there have been many more, players and coaches, who have.
Include the 2012 New Hampshire Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl team among them.
“It was a magical week,” said Merrimack coach Joe Battista, who was an assistant at Souhegan from 2002-07. “It was one of the best moments of my life. To see kids from different backgrounds, the way he was able to bring them all together and get them to play as a family, I think that team, per player, would come back and play for him in a heartbeat.”
Beliveau’s coaching career at Souhegan began the same year the school opened, in 1992. He spent that season as an assistant under Jim Mullaney, and after a year off, Beliveau returned to the sideline in 1994 as an assistant under Scott Laliberte. When Laliberte returned to Bishop Brady, his alma mater, for the 1995 season, Souhegan athletic director Bill Dod decided to stay inhouse and tapped Beliveau as the next coach.
“I think he believed in me more than I believed in me at the time,” Beliveau said. “It probably showed in the first year. I wasn’t as confident as I should have been.”
The Sabers went 2-6 in that first season, the only losing season in Beliveau’s 18 years. In 1998, they finally made it into the postseason, the first of 10 Division III championship appearances for Beliveau. But it would take until 2004 – and four title game losses – for Souhegan and its coach to get its first title.
That season, the Sabers were loaded, both on the field and on the sideline. Two players from that team – Sean Jellison (UNH) and Rich Lapham (Boston College) – went on to play Division I college football. And three of the assistant coaches – Battista, Kurt Hines (Bedford) and Justin Hufft (Goffstown) – moved on to become head coaches. Another assistant, Scott Prescott, was with Beliveau for 14 years, including this year.
At one point, four of Beliveau’s former assistants were running their own programs in New Hampshire. Milt Robinson, who had coached at Hollis Brookline for 10 years, also stepped down at the end of the 2012 season.
“I think his record speaks for itself, and not just record in wins and losses,” said Hines, who was an assistant from 1999-2006. “Look at the coaches he has mentored. He gave me my first coaching job, and I’m forever grateful for that.”
But before that group, the one coach who helped Beliveau right the ship was Vinny Perroni, who also coached at Manchester Central and at Milford.
“Vinny really did a heck of a job with my defense and got us over the hump of not being able to beat the Kennetts and Laconias,” Beliveau said. “It’s like Vinny jump-started us, the next group got the ball rolling, and the last group kept the ball rolling.”
That next group – Prescott, Hines, Hufft and Battista – helped the Sabers win a championship in 2004, but when Souhegan won three straight from 2008-10, it was the later group of Landau, J.T. Anderson and Mark Ginnard on the sidelines.
Ginnard is now an assistant with Hufft at Goffstown, but it should surprise no one if any of that group become head coaches.
“That staff, there was magic there, and we were all football junkies,” Battista said. “Coach B would give us assignments and ask us to do things and then let us run with it. I think that’s what molded us into head coaches, and allowed us to take on our own programs.”
Not long after becoming a head coach himself, Beliveau realized there were two things he needed to do if he was going to have success. One was to be himself; the other was to admit that his assistants might know things he didn’t.
“A long time ago, I decided that I have to be me when I coach,” Beliveau said. “I can’t fake it and be like other coaches who have different styles. Maybe they’re military style, or attention to every detail. Yeah, everyone wants those, but I made a decision to just be who I am, and either that’s going to work, or it’s not going to work. If it didn’t work, I was ready to accept that and let another style come in and lead the program.
“For me to sit there and say ‘I’ll take the defensive line and teach them great technique and they’ll play out of their minds,’ that would be not true. But Joe Battista could. That was his strength. He was a college lineman. I said ‘Joe, here is your space, here are your kids, here is the time I’m giving you.’ I might give some direction. Same with Justin, and even Kurt, coaching the freshmen, put your thumbprint on it. Give the kids a great foundation coming forward.”
It was Hufft who suggested the biggest change for the Sabers. After years of running the wing-T, Hufft, who graduated from Souhegan in 1995, told Beliveau he thought Souhegan should switch to a spread offense. It took a little coaxing, but Beliveau agreed and in 2006, the Sabers started running the spread.
“I can attribute most of that to Justin Hufft,” Beliveau said. “That young creative mind saying this is the way the game is evolving, Mike, will you give it a look and me being flexible and saying yeah. I had to be convinced that the spread running game would be as effective as running the ball out of the wing-T. I learned you can run it as equally as well.”
Hufft took the spread with him to Goffstown, but, just like the others, he also brought a little bit of Beliveau with him.
“The overriding majority of stuff was stuff I got from being around Mike for that long, especially dealing with kids, making it a fun experience for them,” said Hufft, who was an assistant from 1998-2008. “Football is a tough game and not everyone can do it. If at the end of the day, it doesn’t have a reward, other than wins and losses, it’s not worth it.”
In all, Beliveau estimates that the number of players he’s had go on to play in college is over 50, including two of this year’s seniors, Jake Kennedy, who committed to UNH in September, and Tyler Ford, who is being recruited by several schools. Going through the process with Beliveau was something that made Kennedy’s high school experience more enjoyable.
“I love the guy,” he said. “He is one of the greatest guys I know, on and off the field. He gets it. He did so much for me recruiting-wise, I’ll never be able to repay him for that. He always stuck his neck out for me. And not just for me, for every guy who wants to (play at the next level).”
With seven years between Division I recruits, Believau was able to understand and savor the experience of helping Kennedy find the right fit.
“Jake had verbal scholarship offers coming in in February of his junior year,” he said. “By the start of the summer, he had like eight. It’s been a while since we’ve had someone with that much scholarship interest.”
Beliveau also played a major role in Lapham’s recruitment, helping the offensive lineman land at Boston College. But it was something else that happened during his senior year at Souhegan that stands out.
“He had a way of motivating you, a way of keeping your head on straight that you don’t really see from the oustide,” Lapham said. “We were playing Kingswood in one of the first games of senior year, right after my collar bone injury.
“There was a big hit and I saw a kid laying on the ground. I had a tough time reliving what I went through, seeing it happen to another kid. People don’t pick up on that, but I had a conversation with Coach B about getting my head back in the game. He gave me the time of day and heard me out.”
It all goes back to treating the players like a part of the family, according to Battista.
“Treat them like you’d want your own son to be treated if he was playing for another coach,” he said. “It goes back to the way he molds young men. He gets them to play to their full potential and he takes advantage of what they do best. He doesn’t put them in situations where they aren’t going to excel.”
While he was close to the teams that won titles in 2008-09, Beliveau feels like this year’s group of seniors has been one of the tightest he’s ever coached.
“This group, they all hang around with each other and they like each others’ company,” he said. “They do things that kids should do. We made football fun and we proved that we could win at the same time.
There are no more home games for the Sabers, but there are still about a dozen players in full uniform, running around the field. They’re taking turns throwing passes and kicking field goals, and doing something that their football coach has always wanted them to do – be kids and have fun.
The real reason the Souhegan players are out there is for a photo shoot, something they’ve done at the end of the last two seasons. A photographer has set up a few flashes, and a machine pumps out fog that envelopes each player as they pose for photos.
And they’re about be joined by a special guest.
The photo shoot followed the team’s first practice in almost a week, as the Sabers rested for a few days before preparing for the Thanksgiving game against Merrimack. A week before, Souhegan was knocked out of the playoffs in a heartbreaker to Goffstown, and after the game, head coach Mike Beliveau told the team he’d be stepping down at the end of the season.
The field grows quiet as the players realize their special guest is about to arrive. At the sound of clicking cleats, they turn and watch as a familiar figure, donned in a white Souhegan jersey and pads, makes his way on to the field.
Beliveau has suited up to join his players, and they greet him with a round of cheers and laughter.
Not many coaches would like having his players laughing on the football field. Not many coaches are Mike Beliveau.
“Mike is a guy who likes to have fun and he wears his emotions on his sleeve,” assistant coach Paul Landau said. “My first year here, I was coming out of UNH, and football was always a serious thing. Here we stopped practice one time for a sunset. That’s his personality.”
And that’s why so many players have enjoyed playing for Beliveau. Sure, there have been some who haven’t appreciated the coach’s unique ways, but there have been many more, players and coaches, who have.
Include the 2012 New Hampshire Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl team among them.
“It was a magical week,” said Merrimack coach Joe Battista, who was an assistant at Souhegan from 2002-07. “It was one of the best moments of my life. To see kids from different backgrounds, the way he was able to bring them all together and get them to play as a family, I think that team, per player, would come back and play for him in a heartbeat.”
Beliveau’s coaching career at Souhegan began the same year the school opened, in 1992. He spent that season as an assistant under Jim Mullaney, and after a year off, Beliveau returned to the sideline in 1994 as an assistant under Scott Laliberte. When Laliberte returned to Bishop Brady, his alma mater, for the 1995 season, Souhegan athletic director Bill Dod decided to stay inhouse and tapped Beliveau as the next coach.
“I think he believed in me more than I believed in me at the time,” Beliveau said. “It probably showed in the first year. I wasn’t as confident as I should have been.”
The Sabers went 2-6 in that first season, the only losing season in Beliveau’s 18 years. In 1998, they finally made it into the postseason, the first of 10 Division III championship appearances for Beliveau. But it would take until 2004 – and four title game losses – for Souhegan and its coach to get its first title.
That season, the Sabers were loaded, both on the field and on the sideline. Two players from that team – Sean Jellison (UNH) and Rich Lapham (Boston College) – went on to play Division I college football. And three of the assistant coaches – Battista, Kurt Hines (Bedford) and Justin Hufft (Goffstown) – moved on to become head coaches. Another assistant, Scott Prescott, was with Beliveau for 14 years, including this year.
At one point, four of Beliveau’s former assistants were running their own programs in New Hampshire. Milt Robinson, who had coached at Hollis Brookline for 10 years, also stepped down at the end of the 2012 season.
“I think his record speaks for itself, and not just record in wins and losses,” said Hines, who was an assistant from 1999-2006. “Look at the coaches he has mentored. He gave me my first coaching job, and I’m forever grateful for that.”
But before that group, the one coach who helped Beliveau right the ship was Vinny Perroni, who also coached at Manchester Central and at Milford.
“Vinny really did a heck of a job with my defense and got us over the hump of not being able to beat the Kennetts and Laconias,” Beliveau said. “It’s like Vinny jump-started us, the next group got the ball rolling, and the last group kept the ball rolling.”
That next group – Prescott, Hines, Hufft and Battista – helped the Sabers win a championship in 2004, but when Souhegan won three straight from 2008-10, it was the later group of Landau, J.T. Anderson and Mark Ginnard on the sidelines.
Ginnard is now an assistant with Hufft at Goffstown, but it should surprise no one if any of that group become head coaches.
“That staff, there was magic there, and we were all football junkies,” Battista said. “Coach B would give us assignments and ask us to do things and then let us run with it. I think that’s what molded us into head coaches, and allowed us to take on our own programs.”
Not long after becoming a head coach himself, Beliveau realized there were two things he needed to do if he was going to have success. One was to be himself; the other was to admit that his assistants might know things he didn’t.
“A long time ago, I decided that I have to be me when I coach,” Beliveau said. “I can’t fake it and be like other coaches who have different styles. Maybe they’re military style, or attention to every detail. Yeah, everyone wants those, but I made a decision to just be who I am, and either that’s going to work, or it’s not going to work. If it didn’t work, I was ready to accept that and let another style come in and lead the program.
“For me to sit there and say ‘I’ll take the defensive line and teach them great technique and they’ll play out of their minds,’ that would be not true. But Joe Battista could. That was his strength. He was a college lineman. I said ‘Joe, here is your space, here are your kids, here is the time I’m giving you.’ I might give some direction. Same with Justin, and even Kurt, coaching the freshmen, put your thumbprint on it. Give the kids a great foundation coming forward.”
It was Hufft who suggested the biggest change for the Sabers. After years of running the wing-T, Hufft, who graduated from Souhegan in 1995, told Beliveau he thought Souhegan should switch to a spread offense. It took a little coaxing, but Beliveau agreed and in 2006, the Sabers started running the spread.
“I can attribute most of that to Justin Hufft,” Beliveau said. “That young creative mind saying this is the way the game is evolving, Mike, will you give it a look and me being flexible and saying yeah. I had to be convinced that the spread running game would be as effective as running the ball out of the wing-T. I learned you can run it as equally as well.”
Hufft took the spread with him to Goffstown, but, just like the others, he also brought a little bit of Beliveau with him.
“The overriding majority of stuff was stuff I got from being around Mike for that long, especially dealing with kids, making it a fun experience for them,” said Hufft, who was an assistant from 1998-2008. “Football is a tough game and not everyone can do it. If at the end of the day, it doesn’t have a reward, other than wins and losses, it’s not worth it.”
In all, Beliveau estimates that the number of players he’s had go on to play in college is over 50, including two of this year’s seniors, Jake Kennedy, who committed to UNH in September, and Tyler Ford, who is being recruited by several schools. Going through the process with Beliveau was something that made Kennedy’s high school experience more enjoyable.
“I love the guy,” he said. “He is one of the greatest guys I know, on and off the field. He gets it. He did so much for me recruiting-wise, I’ll never be able to repay him for that. He always stuck his neck out for me. And not just for me, for every guy who wants to (play at the next level).”
With seven years between Division I recruits, Believau was able to understand and savor the experience of helping Kennedy find the right fit.
“Jake had verbal scholarship offers coming in in February of his junior year,” he said. “By the start of the summer, he had like eight. It’s been a while since we’ve had someone with that much scholarship interest.”
Beliveau also played a major role in Lapham’s recruitment, helping the offensive lineman land at Boston College. But it was something else that happened during his senior year at Souhegan that stands out.
“He had a way of motivating you, a way of keeping your head on straight that you don’t really see from the oustide,” Lapham said. “We were playing Kingswood in one of the first games of senior year, right after my collar bone injury.
“There was a big hit and I saw a kid laying on the ground. I had a tough time reliving what I went through, seeing it happen to another kid. People don’t pick up on that, but I had a conversation with Coach B about getting my head back in the game. He gave me the time of day and heard me out.”
It all goes back to treating the players like a part of the family, according to Battista.
“Treat them like you’d want your own son to be treated if he was playing for another coach,” he said. “It goes back to the way he molds young men. He gets them to play to their full potential and he takes advantage of what they do best. He doesn’t put them in situations where they aren’t going to excel.”
While he was close to the teams that won titles in 2008-09, Beliveau feels like this year’s group of seniors has been one of the tightest he’s ever coached.
“This group, they all hang around with each other and they like each others’ company,” he said. “They do things that kids should do. We made football fun and we proved that we could win at the same time.
2011年5月25日星期三
PowerPivot for the Data Analyst: Microsoft Excel 2010
PowerPivot is an exciting free add-in to Excel 2010 - is this the book you need to get you started with it?
Bill Jelen's Introduction starts with "I am a PowerPivot FanBoy" and he goes on to share the story of how he first heard about it and his enthusiasm for this add-in for that lets you work with far more data than in Excel.
Banner
This is a hands-on treatment of PowerPivot and to get the most out of it you do need to follow it step by step. Chapter 1 walks you through the preliminaries of using PowerPivot - and that's not as straightforward as you might imagine. First you need Excel 2010. This entails choosing between the 32-bit and 64-bit version so there's some advice about which to opt for. If you already use Excel 2010 you may be surprised that you haven't come across PowerPivot - but it's not on the Office DVD and you have to go to some effort to finding and installing it - which this chapter guides you through.
The benefit of PowerPivot is that it allows you to work with huge datasets. So the next problem is obtaining sample data - and this problem is solved in that data can be downloaded from the author's MrExcel.com website. Again this isn't entirely straightforward and involves importing data in CSV format from a text file. It may not be the easiest way to work with data but it is realistic and if you follow the steps by the end of the chapter you will have merged data from two sources to produce an asymmetric report that would not have been possible using pivot tables.
Chapter 3 looks at both the benefits and the drawbacks of PowerPivot. It starts with the plus points: creating a single Pivot Table from multiple sources, using massive amounts of data and fitting more data into memory, building asymmetric pivot tables and a list of more technical ones. It then sets out the downsides starting with losing Undo - which it explains is a disadvantage of add-ins in general. While Jelen has a long list of shortcomings on the whole he presents workarounds and so this chapter ends up being pretty positive.
Chapter 4 covers the various methods of getting data into PowerPivot. It looks at working with existing Excel data, SQL Server, and then goes back to importing from a text file - this time using filters to load a subset of the same data we encountered in Chapter 2. It then mentions working with data from ATOM Feeds which it points out are commonly encountered when working with SharePoint - and of course SharePoint has its own PowerPoint capability.
Chapter 5:Creating and Managing Relationships is where we come to the "massive benefit" of PowerPivot - being able to create pivot tables from multiple tables. It is also the first point at which we encounter PowerPivot's new formula language DAX which, as explained in Chapter 6 stands for Data Analysis expressions and handles various operators and 135 functions, some of which are similar to Excel functions while others are completely new. In Chapter 6, which is about adding calculated columns in the PowePivot data sheet, Jelen looks at 71 DAX functions while others are introduced in Chapter 10: Using DAX for Aggregate Functions and Chapter 11: Using DAX for Date Magic.
On the whole readers of this book are likely to have already worked with Excel's Pivot Tables and in this case they will find themselves on familar ground in the next two chapters: Chapter 7: Building Pivot Tables and Chapter 8: Cool Tricks Native to Pivot Tables which gives Jelen an opportunity to demonstrate some clever capabilities.
Then in Chapter 9: Cool Tricks New with PowerPivot he shows how to work with the multiple pivot table layouts that let you do things such as building a report with two pivot charts. This is followed up by the two chapters that introduce the "massively powerful" DAX measure you can add to pivot tables.
Chapter 12:Named Sets, GetPivotData and Cube Formuals returns to techniques that are available in Excel's Pivot Tables and again demonstrates some advanced features including some for report formatting. However, PowerPivot adds some powerful reporting structures and Chapter 13:Final Formatting: Making the Report Not Look Like Excel shows how to produce an impressive and informative report that looks like a dashboard.
Up till this point the book has covered the free Excel client-side add-in. Microsoft also has a server version and the final chapter briefly looks at the benefits of upgrading to it - mainly to access its Reports Gallery. The book concludes with an Appendix that lists some PowerPoint resources - including an add-in to this add-in!
This book it is fast-paced and is on a mission - to get those who are already Excel Power Users to adopt PowerPivot. This makes it a niche book - but one that will appeal to the right reader.
Bill Jelen's Introduction starts with "I am a PowerPivot FanBoy" and he goes on to share the story of how he first heard about it and his enthusiasm for this add-in for that lets you work with far more data than in Excel.
Banner
This is a hands-on treatment of PowerPivot and to get the most out of it you do need to follow it step by step. Chapter 1 walks you through the preliminaries of using PowerPivot - and that's not as straightforward as you might imagine. First you need Excel 2010. This entails choosing between the 32-bit and 64-bit version so there's some advice about which to opt for. If you already use Excel 2010 you may be surprised that you haven't come across PowerPivot - but it's not on the Office DVD and you have to go to some effort to finding and installing it - which this chapter guides you through.
The benefit of PowerPivot is that it allows you to work with huge datasets. So the next problem is obtaining sample data - and this problem is solved in that data can be downloaded from the author's MrExcel.com website. Again this isn't entirely straightforward and involves importing data in CSV format from a text file. It may not be the easiest way to work with data but it is realistic and if you follow the steps by the end of the chapter you will have merged data from two sources to produce an asymmetric report that would not have been possible using pivot tables.
Chapter 3 looks at both the benefits and the drawbacks of PowerPivot. It starts with the plus points: creating a single Pivot Table from multiple sources, using massive amounts of data and fitting more data into memory, building asymmetric pivot tables and a list of more technical ones. It then sets out the downsides starting with losing Undo - which it explains is a disadvantage of add-ins in general. While Jelen has a long list of shortcomings on the whole he presents workarounds and so this chapter ends up being pretty positive.
Chapter 4 covers the various methods of getting data into PowerPivot. It looks at working with existing Excel data, SQL Server, and then goes back to importing from a text file - this time using filters to load a subset of the same data we encountered in Chapter 2. It then mentions working with data from ATOM Feeds which it points out are commonly encountered when working with SharePoint - and of course SharePoint has its own PowerPoint capability.
Chapter 5:Creating and Managing Relationships is where we come to the "massive benefit" of PowerPivot - being able to create pivot tables from multiple tables. It is also the first point at which we encounter PowerPivot's new formula language DAX which, as explained in Chapter 6 stands for Data Analysis expressions and handles various operators and 135 functions, some of which are similar to Excel functions while others are completely new. In Chapter 6, which is about adding calculated columns in the PowePivot data sheet, Jelen looks at 71 DAX functions while others are introduced in Chapter 10: Using DAX for Aggregate Functions and Chapter 11: Using DAX for Date Magic.
On the whole readers of this book are likely to have already worked with Excel's Pivot Tables and in this case they will find themselves on familar ground in the next two chapters: Chapter 7: Building Pivot Tables and Chapter 8: Cool Tricks Native to Pivot Tables which gives Jelen an opportunity to demonstrate some clever capabilities.
Then in Chapter 9: Cool Tricks New with PowerPivot he shows how to work with the multiple pivot table layouts that let you do things such as building a report with two pivot charts. This is followed up by the two chapters that introduce the "massively powerful" DAX measure you can add to pivot tables.
Chapter 12:Named Sets, GetPivotData and Cube Formuals returns to techniques that are available in Excel's Pivot Tables and again demonstrates some advanced features including some for report formatting. However, PowerPivot adds some powerful reporting structures and Chapter 13:Final Formatting: Making the Report Not Look Like Excel shows how to produce an impressive and informative report that looks like a dashboard.
Up till this point the book has covered the free Excel client-side add-in. Microsoft also has a server version and the final chapter briefly looks at the benefits of upgrading to it - mainly to access its Reports Gallery. The book concludes with an Appendix that lists some PowerPoint resources - including an add-in to this add-in!
This book it is fast-paced and is on a mission - to get those who are already Excel Power Users to adopt PowerPivot. This makes it a niche book - but one that will appeal to the right reader.
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