When the ban came in effect, I was away, in the UK. Obviously I expected change when I came back.

And what a change! It is now seen in the eyes of every person who watches me smoke. What would have been perceived as simple disgust before, has now changed to complex hostility. And I am no exception. There may be a few good reasons why the ban was called in -- one purpose it has served however, unfortunately, is the creation of two classes opposed in personal choice.

The response to my previous post, for example, is an insignificant example. You'd almost think that one side was avoiding commenting on the post to discourage any further attention on written matter related to tobacco.

I am drawn to Asuph's post about Homosexuality: a meta (or non) normative take. The last piece in that post -- the "no rules" are the most interesting. While he writes that with a specific context, it is fairly universal. I would add a fourth category to Asuph's post:

D. De-normalisation through legislation.

I have observed the ban being brought into force the world over, the initial reactions and eventual resignations. The moment these things are legislated, there is potent belligerence in the air. For example, even some of the tolerant non-smokers have been swayed to extremism (and thankfully, both sides of the extremes -- but those are negligible) by these bans.

Someday, you will be on the wrong side of the legislation according to the Recurrently Dividing Set Theory. To borrow and build upon Oscar Wilde's thoughts, even if I disagree, I'll defend to death your right to choose; question is, will you?

The British indie scene has never been so divided, and the two sides are facing off across a sticky dancefloor over the issue of class. Just ask Coventry Britrockers the Enemy. An interview with singer Tom Clarke last year saw him berating rival bands whose backgrounds he considered to border on the aristocratic. "I think having working-class roots does mean better songs as they are songs the majority can relate to," he told the Sun. "If you live in a castle, you're going to write about living in a castle and who wants to hear a fucking song about a castle?"

Those supposedly up in the turrets were never going to take that lying down, and so, sure enough, earlier this year Observer Music Monthly ran an article featuring the privately educated Foals, Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man and These New Puritans, proclaiming the arrival of "a new class of smart, literate British bands challenging the lumbering louts of indie rock" and deriding bands whose members look like "plumbers". This in turn provoked NME features editor James McMahon to fire off an enraged letter to the paper warning that "the views expressed by the privately educated bands reeked of an inherent fear of the working classes".

We do indeed seem to be seeing a divergence of indie music between arty middle-class indiedisco and laddish working-class garage rock. Personally I like both, and have never been taken with the notion that art should be judged on the class nature of the artists involved. In fact, the tension that occurs due to class differences in pop music can be fascinating. (Radiohead are a fine example- a band who shortly after completing their expensive private education reportedly saw a TV programme about public (i.e. private) schoolboys and had a moment of Zen-like insight- "That's us! And we're a bunch of wankers!" This self-deprecation, and a social awkwardness and liberal guilt informed by it, has formed the basis of their worldview ever since.) The problem with such a zero-sum equation of 'lads vs. toffs' is that it ignores the spectrum which exists between these extremes, and the fact that the bands which do exist at the extremes are often not terribly good.

Nethertheless a polarisation is occuring and this is largley due to the way the development of indie in recent years reflects the development of post-punk music in the 1980s. Punk drew in people from all sorts of backgrounds, from football hooligans to socialists to National Front thugs to art students and fashion designers. Once the initial energy of 1977 faded away the remaining components forged in different directions, creating two souls of punk.

On one side was the US Hardcore and UK Oi! scenes, with their parady of working-class yobbishness, championed by figures such as International Socialist turned English Democrat Gary Bushell. On the other side was the new wave art collective approach, which somtimes exhuded middle-class privilege. Pere Ubu, for example, claimed that only the borgeoise could make revolutionary music, as unlike the working-class they could create without worrying about the financial consequences of artistic decisions.

If in the 'post-punk revival' of the early 2000s the Libertines were the new Clash, then the Strokes were the new Television. Since then modern indie has eveloved along similar lines to eighties post-punk, bringing us to the stand-off described in this article. If the Enemy are the new (albeit Northern) Cockney Rejects, then Foals are the new Talking Heads. But there's more to it than that...

The spectre of Oasis looms large over any discussion of class and today's indie scene. For the cultural commentator Jon Savage, the Gallaghers' "class fundamentalism" delivered a crushing blow to the idea of aspirational working-class music. "Oasis were so big that they could have done anything they wanted to - they could have done incredible things with their position, but they chose to put themselves in a box and be a malign influence," he says. "There was that famous quote of Noel Gallagher saying that he never reads books. Compare that to the Manic Street Preachers - they came from a South Walian valleys tradition, an old Labour tradition of education and hard work and self improvement, which is a very strong part of working-class history, but something Oasis always rejected. Oasis are a very fundamentalist act, in their attitude to class and their attitude to music. In a way they're very reactionary."

Bands like the Manic Street Preachers subvert the media created perception of an ignorant, dangerous and violent working-class, and this is why they are important. Likewise, Radiohead illustrate that not everyone who comes out of a fee paying school is actually a wanker, despite the best efforts of the private education system. It's important to recognise that- as with the 'Battle of Britpop'- the music press fuels this sort of class war narrative for it's own entertainment, and we should avoid taking sides when both are defined in such a stereotyped way.

Read the whole article by clicking here.

Input:

• vUser: your username at StatCounter
• vPass: the password for your account
• vProjectId: the project ID of your web statistics project

Output:

An CSV text string, you can use CSV2Array function change it to an array

What is StatCounter

A free and reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats. Insert a simple piece of our code on your web page or blog and you will be able to analyze and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time!

Function Code

Function kDownloadStatCounterLog(vUser, vPass, vProjectId)
	Dim oHttp, vStr, vCookie, vHost, vHost2
	kDownloadStatCounterLog = ""
	If Application("aCookieStatCounter-" & vUser & "-Host")<>"" Then
		vHost = Application("aCookieStatCounter-" & vUser & "-Host")
		vCookie = Application("aCookieStatCounter-" & vUser & "-PHPSESSID")
		vStr = kUrlGet("http://" & vHost & ".statcounter.com/project/standard/csv/download_log_file.php?project_id=" & vProjectId, "http://" & vHost & ".statcounter.com/project/standard/download_log.php?project_id=" & vProjectId, "PHPSESSID=" & vCookie)
		If inStr(LCase(vStr), "you are not logged in.") = 0 Then
			kDownloadStatCounterLog = vStr
			Exit Function
		Else
			Application("aCookieStatCounter-" & vUser & "-Host") = ""
			Application("aCookieStatCounter-" & vUser & "-PHPSESSID") = ""
		End If
	End If
	vStr = kUrlGet("http://www.statcounter.com/", "", "")
	vHost2 = kGetString(vStr, "<form action=""http://", ".statcounter.com/project/")
	'Response.Write "<pre>" & vHost2 & ":"
	If Not kCheckRegExp("^my\d+$", vHost2) Then vHost2 = "my2"
	'Response.Write vHost2 & "</pre>"
	vCookie = ""
	vStr = kUrlGet("http://" & vHost2 & ".statcounter.com/project/", "http://" & vHost2 & ".statcounter.com/project/", vCookie)
	'Response.Write "<pre>" & Server.HTMLEncode(vCookie) & "</pre>"
	vCookie = LCase(vCookie)
	vCookie = kGetString(vCookie, "set-cookie: phpsessid=", ";")
	If Len(vCookie) = 32 Then
		vStr = "PHPSESSID=" & vCookie & "&form_user=" & vUser & "&form_pass=" & vPass
		Set oHttp = CreateObject("WinHTTP.WinHTTPRequest.5.1")
		oHttp.setTimeouts 10000, 10000, 120000, 30000
		oHttp.open "POST", "http://" & vHost2 & ".statcounter.com/project/"
		oHttp.setRequestHeader "User-Agent", Request.serverVariables("HTTP_USER_AGENT")
		oHttp.setRequestHeader "Accept", "image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/x-shockwave-flash, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, */*"
		oHttp.setRequestHeader "Accept-Language", "en-us, en; q=0.8"
		oHttp.setRequestHeader "Connection", "Keep-Alive"
		oHttp.setRequestHeader "Pragma", "no-cache"
		oHTTP.setRequestHeader "Referer", "http://" & vHost2 & ".statcounter.com/project/"
		oHTTP.setRequestHeader "Cookie", "PHPSESSID=" & vCookie
		oHttp.setRequestHeader "Content-Length", Len(vStr)
		oHttp.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
		oHttp.Option(6) = False
		oHttp.send vStr
		If oHttp.Status = 200 Then
			vStr = Byte2Str(oHttp.responseBody, "UTF-8")
			Set oHttp = Nothing
			If inStr(LCase(vStr), "invalid username or password")>0 Then
				Response.Write "<h1 class=""red"">ERROR:DownloadStatCounterLog</h1><p class=""red"">Invalid Username or Password (" & vUser & ":" & vProjectId & ")</p>"
				Response.End
			Else
				Response.Write "<li><b class=""red"">ERROR:DownloadStatCounterLog: Unknown</b></li>"
			End If
		ElseIf oHttp.Status = 302 Then
			vStr = LCase(oHttp.GetAllResponseHeaders())
			'Response.Write "<pre>" & Server.HTMLEncode(vStr) & "</pre>"
			vStr = Replace(vStr, vbLf, vbCr)
			vStr = Trim(kGetString(vStr, "location: http://", vbCr))
			If vStr<>"" Then
				vHost = kGetString(vStr, "", ".")
				vStr = "http://" & vStr
				'Response.Write "<pre>" & vStr & "</pre>"
				vCookie = "login=deleted"
				oHttp.open "GET", vStr, False
				oHttp.setRequestHeader "User-Agent", Request.serverVariables("HTTP_USER_AGENT")
				oHttp.setRequestHeader "Accept", "image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/x-shockwave-flash, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, */*"
				oHttp.setRequestHeader "Accept-Language", "en-us, en; q=0.8"
				oHttp.setRequestHeader "Connection", "Keep-Alive"
				oHttp.setRequestHeader "Pragma", "no-cache"
				oHTTP.setRequestHeader "Referer", "http://" & vHost2 & ".statcounter.com/"
				oHttp.Option(6) = False
				oHttp.send
				vCookie = LCase(oHttp.GetAllResponseHeaders())
				'Response.Write "<pre>" & Server.HTMLEncode(vCookie) & "</pre>"
				vCookie = kGetString(vCookie, "set-cookie: phpsessid=", ";")
				If Len(vCookie) = 32 Then
					vStr = kUrlGet("http://" & vHost & ".statcounter.com/project/standard/csv/download_log_file.php?project_id=" & vProjectId, "http://" & vHost & ".statcounter.com/project/standard/download_log.php?project_id=" & vProjectId, "PHPSESSID=" & vCookie)
					If inStr(LCase(vStr), "you are not logged in.") = 0 Then
						kDownloadStatCounterLog = vStr
						Application("aCookieStatCounter-" & vUser & "-Host") = vHost
						Application("aCookieStatCounter-" & vUser & "-PHPSESSID") = vCookie
					Else
						Response.Write "<li><b class=""red"">ERROR:DownloadStatCounterLog: Cookie Lost (" & vHost & ")</b></li>"
					End If
				Else
					Response.Write "<li><b class=""red"">ERROR:DownloadStatCounterLog: Cannot Get Cookie (" & vHost & ")</b></li>"
				End If
			Else
				Response.Write "<li><b class=""red"">ERROR:DownloadStatCounterLog: Cannot Get Location</b></li>"
			End If
		Else
			Response.Write "<li><b class=""red"">ERROR:DownloadStatCounterLog: " & oHttp.Status & "</b></li>"
		End If
		Set oHttp = Nothing
	Else
		Response.Write "<li><b class=""red"">ERROR:DownloadStatCounterLog: Cannot Get Cookie</b></li>"
	End If
End Function

Mrs. Breaux

Weekly Schedule

Due Dates at a glance:

Mon. 10/6 – Beowulf Prompt given in class (to outline at home)

Tues. 10/7- Lit. Terms Test (!!!!!)

Thur. 10/9- Beowulf Test (!!!!)

Mon. 10/13- Beowulf In-Class Prompt

Tues. 10/14 - Check of  How to Read Like a Professor…Project (first 10 chapters must be complete)

Weekly CW/HW Schedule:

Mon. 10/6- 1. Oates Revision Essay Notes   2. Beowulf prompt passed out.  3. Group presentations on lines of Beowulf.

HW: Study for Lit. terms test; Finish lines 2250-2500 in Beowulf

Tues. 10/7 – Lit. Terms Test ; Annotations in Beowulf lines 1-2225 checked

HW: Finish Beowulf and annotate rest of poem.

Wed. 10/8 – Mrs. Breaux’s fabulous Beowulf lecture; Notes in notebook on lecture.

HW: Study for Beowulf Test: all notes given in class; all notes taken in class; review of entire poem

Thur. 10/9 – Beowulf Test

Weekend HW: Read Ch. 8-12 How to Read Lit. Like a Professor; Work on Project; prepare Beowulf Outline for prompt.

Mrs. Breaux

Weekly Due Dates:

Tues. 10/7 – Unit 1-3 Vocabulary Test

Wed. 10/8 – Poem Due

Thur. 10/9 – Reading Logs 4-7 due (quiz grade); Warm-up Notebook 11-18 Due (quiz grade)

Weekly CW/HW:

Mon. 10/6 – 1. Warm-up #17 – the adjective in Elements of Language book – The adjective pages __________ to _____________: copy definition, examples, sample questions

2. Background to Crucible/Mcarthyism/Arthur Miller pages 1228;1230-1231 – take annotations on post-it notes

3. Review for Voabulary Test Units 1-3 test tomorrow

Hw: Study Units 1-3 --- know definitions, part of speech, and context clues for how to use vocabulary word in a sentence.

Tues. 10/7 – Vocabulary Test Units 1-3 (30 words), then silently read pages 1234-1238 in your textbook.

HW: Finish Poem (minimum 15 lines) tomorrow. Make sure you use the handout I gave you last Thursday with all instructions on it as a guidline.

Wed. 10/8 – 1. Poem turned in.  2. Warm-Up #18 – Poem on board; copy with questions. 2. Poetry readings in class  3. Character List handed out.  4. Parts assigned Act I and II.  5. Participation points explained. 6. If time, pags 1234-1238 performed.

HW: Reading Logs 4-7 due (quiz grade)(minimum for EACH 30 pages: five bullet point summary or five point paragraph, a quotation in MLA style, a PARAGRAPH of 4-5 sentences explaining the quotation. If you are re-doing logs #1-3 because you didn’t like your grade, turn in #1-7 together and your quiz grade will be given for #1-7 doubled (counting for 1-3, 4-7).

Also, Warm-Up Notebook #11-18 due = quiz grade

Thur. 10/9 – 1. Collection of Warm-up Notebooks and reading logs   2. Performance of The Crucible pages 1238-1248

Have a great three day weekend!

I was pricing out Speak and Spell's on Ebay. I thought they would be cheap, but they're kinda pricey.  I just want one so I can spell out bad words. I'm a bad speller, so what?

Damn its hard, 4 toons, 1 well geared, 1 reasonable, and 2 new 70s. The expansion offers the opportunity to level without there being a gear unbalance, and change my selection of "main".

Currently I'd say Warlock is my main, if only because he has the best gear of the four. But then I've been spending serious hours on my Paladin as Tank and its really starting to show. But then I got distracted by Druid and Priest, and found that things in those new classes were advantageous and interesting. The dilemma is made worse because the two new classes might be interesting only because they are new.

The choices are:

Warlock

For: High damage output, pets for soloing, some benefit to groups, wipe recovery 1/hour, only one gear set needed.

Against: Squishy, no stealth/mob avoidance, being silenced makes you useless, multi-mob encounters can be tough.

Paladin:

For: Plate wearing, 3 hybrid roles, bubble and run, good burst healing, AoE tanking, multi-mob encounters are ok,

Against: Multipe gear sets, hybrid roles require full respec, can't kill quickly unless Ret.

Druid

For: High damage, 4 hybrid roles (melee dps, heal, tank, range dps), stealth,

Against: Gear sets for each role,

Priest

For: Very good healing, reasonable damage, 2 roles, Shadowform is cool,

Against: Squishy, no stealth, no wipe recovery, being silenced makes you useless,

My plan is to play each of them solo and do some questing. For each I'll watch how easy it is to get groups, complete quests, and generally survive and prosper in WoW. Part of what I wish to consider is what I'll bring to my Guild in the expansion too, but that is secondary at the moment. This might be the best time to experiment with a comparison, being that  many players are also playing a round on alts. I'll get to see how players run characters when they are slightly less proficient, and watch to see the differeneces in thier class too.

Lastly as a sidebar: Why on earth does the LFG tool not allow me to flag for multiple characers? It would be so good to mark what I'm after on each toon, then grab the first group for any of it. Sheesh.

             The interesting thought I came up with was that the children are not trusted to behave nicely when there isn't an adult around. 

            In Japan the students are often left alone to do work, or to play, and no one seems to really worry.  There aren't lunch duties to watch the students as they eat, or play outside.  Maybe that is because often the teachers (me included) would go outside and play with them, and sometimes they didn't, and the students played with no supervision.  Often the Teachers' office had an outside door that opened to the play ground area, not that the teachers watched from the doorway.  But really they never had need of a teacher or adult to watch them during free time. Sometimes I would get to a class a few minuets early and the students would be working, and the teacher would be gone.

          If that happened in America the students, for the most part would not be working, but would be talking or playing in the class room.  So, thinking of why this would be I think,  if teachers started trusting the students more, I wonder then if there would be a different attitude in the classrooms, and a different attitude about school in general.........

         But then maybe it wouldn't make much of a difference because society as a whole would have to change, and not only teachers but parents and general people would have to trust children, and I think that would be hard for some people.  I think we should give children more of a chance.  Their pretty smart in their own way.

The first was my local Barista Girl, who is apparently, in my class, and the other is the Book Store Clerk who again, is in my class...

I just find it weird that I come across them and that they recognize ME but I have NO idea that I've ever seen them before.

Does this make me less observant than they are?

Obviously, I may have perhaps dropped the ball a bit in blogging this month, but I've been busy exploring Paris. Can you really blame me? Just kidding!

Honestly though, this month has been crazy busy and also really calm. I feel like I've finally settled in with my host family and I just finished my first week of real classes after surviving through a hellish month of orientation at two different universities. I've also taken my first trip outside of Paris, with my program, to the Loire Valley, but more on that later.

And now, a crazy long post with lots of pictures (there are way more on my flickr, if you're interested), about what I've been doing for the past month. When I last left you, Champagne and I had pretty much just visited the Eiffel Tower. Since then we have:

Eaten pain au chocolat while strolling through the gorgeous Jardin du Luxembourg on a gorgeous Sunday morning. (I think I may have to make this more of a habit.)

Seen Notre Dame (the day before the Pope visited, so it was crazy and covered in scaffolding). I anticipate a return trip to hear the bells ring at night fall.

Visited Versailles and seen the super cool Jeff Koonz exhibit there. We had an amazing picnic to which we brought pastries from Ladurée, this amazing patisserie near Sciences Po.

I went on a sweet night time cruise (which I have a great story about...ask me if you're interested) of the Seine and made new Sciences Po friends.

Gone to the Louvre (which I sadly have no pictures for, but will later as I have a sweet student card(!) that lets me in free when ever I want).

Spent a weekend in the Loire Valley, visiting many chateaux, bonding with our fellow Smithies, eating so much fondue, having a blast at wine tastings, entertaining our associate director's adorable son, François, and going on a 13 km bike ride around a forest, afterwhich I promptly got incredibly sick and spendt most of the last week in bed.

We also went to Nuit Blanche last night, which actually turned out pretty crazy and I'm going to try to blog about later this week.

And now that I am a for reals Parisian university student, at not one, not two, but three universities, I'm pretty busy with classes. Here's what I'm taking for the semester, just in case you're interested (with both French and English titles so you can be impressed at my mad language skillz):

• Changement global et développement durable - Global change and sustainable development
• Langue et composition I - Language and composition I
• Phonétique - Phonetics
• Femmes et politique: régression ou révolution - Women and politics: regression or revolution
• Mai 68 - May 68 (if you don't know about the student revolutions in Paris of May 68, wikipedia it because they are wicked interesting and started the student revolutions in the US of the late 60s/early 70s)
• Danse moderne - Jazz
• Danse contemporaine - Modern dance (hopefully, this is not totally official yet)

So that's pretty much what will be keeping me busy until the end of January/beginning of February. I promise I'm going to try harder to be better at blogging, especially when cool stuff has been going on. I also have a couple of posts floating around about stupid and embarassing language mistakes I have made as well as French fashion. There is also a potential question and answer session about what Paris is really like coming up. Comment if you would be interested.

In social studies we started a project and concentrated on oceans of the world, the equator, and the prime meridian. We will complete the project after the break.

In Islamic studies we started hadith #3 about telling the truth. We also started the aqeedahtul-awaam poem.

Please review these topics with your children.If you have any questions or concerns please email me at abu_nmrah5@yahoo.com.

Important Reminders: Spelling Tests will be given every Friday. Starting Monday, students will receive homework logs detailing their daily homework assignments. Parents must sign the homework logs daily.

If you have any questions or concerns please email me at abu_nmrah5@yahoo.com.

Siddique

Visit the website at theyrule.net

What an adventure packed 2 days I've had. Friday and Saturday were spent in Belgium as part of a trip that IES arranged for us as a large group. It was pretty sweet. Also, there is something really satisfying in going to another contry with your bookbag as your only piece of luggage (and for those of you who have ever travelled with me you know that is a major thing for me, since I normally bring at least 2x what I'll need).

Friday morning started at the unholy hour of 5.45 am (ok, so I know it isn't really that early, but when you are used to getting up between 8 and 9 am, its a bit of an early morning) so that I could shower, eat, and make sandwiches for the bus ride. We left at 7 on the nose, which I was impressed with and began the bus trip down to Dover so that we could depart for the port of Calais in France. It was uneventful and most everyone on the bus slept most of the way down. So we arrived in Dover and proceeded through the most lax immigration check in the world. And by lax, I mean the driver stopped at the little window, told the French immigration people it was a bus fll of American students and we were waved through. No one checked to see if we were smuggling bad things in. No one looked at a single passport. We didn't get stamps in the passport to enter. Nothing.

So we get on the ferry to cross the English Channel. That was pretty neat. It is definately the biggest boat I've ever been on and the longest distance I've ever travelled on a boat. The water in the channel was an interesting green colour, but prettier than the greyish blackish colour of the water on the majority of the South Carolina coast. The crossing was quick and easy. A bunch of us sat in the kiddie lounge because they were showing a dvd of old Tom and Jerry cartoons. It was like being a kid on Saturday mornings again. We had a ball. Finally we got back on the bus, drove off the ferry and into France! We kept driving until we got to Ypres/Ieper. I have no idea where the border between France and Belgium actually is. I never saw a sign and we were never stopped for any sort of immigration controls. It was a nice ride through the country side.

Finally we arrived, only to discover that the road in front of the hostel was closed so we had to find a nice street to unload on and walk to it. Thankfully Ieper is a tiny town. The hostel was literally a stone's throw from the Menin Gate. Seriously. A little kid could have stood in the doorway of the hostel and hit the monument with a rock. It was kind of surreal driving through and then walking back through the Menin Gate. It is the largest and most important of the British Memorials for WWI in Belgium. On the various panels of the gate are engraved the names of about 55,000 men who died in and around Ieper during the war who have no known resting place. They are either buried in one of the cemetaries under a stone that says "Here lies a soldier of the Great War" or their bodies were never found because they were blown to bits by incoming shells or their bodies sunk into the mud, etc. Even 90 years later they are still finding human remains around Ieper when they do construction.

The scale of death and destruction of Ieper is incredible. It was the first town to be completely and totally destroyed by modern warfare. Literally millions of shelles rained down on this tiny town over the course of the war and when it was over, they rebuilt it exactly as it had been before. Even the cloth hall, which upon first glance appears to be easily 600 years old, dates from the 1920's. More than half a million men were killed in and around Ieper during the First World War. It works out to 30 dead per square metre. Per square metre. It is incredible. The shells destroyed the land so that it was just a giant expanse of water holding clay. Men, horses, machinery sunk into it. Bodies dissappeared into it, never to be found again. The Menin Gate commerates 55,000 of them. There are another 45,000 commerated on memorials around the town. 100,000 men that couldn't be identified or found. That's double Vietnam and in the course of really 4 battles (there were 4 battles of Ieper). Ok anyway, thats a little bit of background on why we went to Ieper (which was often called Wipers by the English soldiers who weren't students of French and saw the French spelling of Ypres).

We got settled into the hostel, which was really nice (actually nicer, cleaner, and FAR more comfortable than the dorms we are housed in in Chelsea).  Then we did what everyone who visits Belgium should do, we went in search of waffles and chocolate. I combined the two and had a waffle covered in powdered sugar and drenched in chocolate sauce. It was absolutely incredible. Oh it was so good. You haven't had waffles unless you've been to Belgium. Yum!

After our midafternoon waffle extravaganza we met up with the larger group and toured the In Flanders Fields Museum which is located in the Cloth Hall. It was a small museum, but it was really powerful. It also had a large interactive component. Much like the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, at the entrance you are given a name on a card with a barcode. Through out the museum you follow your person and see what happens to them, and see if they survived it. I did not. My guy was killed at the Battle of Passchendaele. He is one of the many whose bodies was never found. It was heavy, but informative. I really liked the room that had "In Flanders Fields" on the walls and had it playing in the loudspeakers. If you aren't an English major and aren't really familiar with WWI poetry, "In Flanders Fields" was written by a Canadian doctor John McCrae in 1915 in Ieper after the death of his close friend. This poem has come to be a symbol of WWI and is largely responsible for the association of poppies with WWI. It is a beautiful poem, and reads as follows:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us tho die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields

It is quite a powerful poem, and one of my favourite WWI poems.

As we got out of the museum it was pouring, so we just ran from shop to shop exploring and looking for chocolate until we gave up and went back to the hostel with the purchases. IES had arranged a big dinner for us, so we all went to a local resturant and had chicken and french fries, or freits as they are called there. It was delicious and we were all hungry despite having had waffles about 3 hours earlier. It was nice to sit around a table and visit and have a good time, and we did.

Following dinner, we went back to the Menin Gate and were given a talk by a local expert who had written a book on it and was a friend of our tutor Julian. It was interesting. Then we saw The Last Post. It is a breathtakingly simple, but beautiful ceremony that has been performed every night since 1928 at 8 pm, except when the town was occupied by the Nazis in WWII. The members of the fire brigade come and play their bugles and people lay wreaths at the memorial. The only thing that I can compare it to is the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemtary in DC. It was short, simple, but incredibly moving.

Then we ventured back out in the rain for a quick tour of Ieper that ended in the 12 Apostles Pub. The guide bought a round for the group (which was like 40 people) and we all just hung out for a couple of hours. I had some cherry beer, which was pretty good considering I don't care for beer. It was a little weird drinking though, in a room that was decorated with tons of religious iconography like crucifixes and paintings of saints, lol. Not that it stopped us, it was just odd. When everyone decided they had had enough we went back to the hostel and about 6 of us ended up in the room I was in laughing and goofing off for another hour or so. Then it was bed time. The bed was heaven compared to the piece of crap I'm used to at the res hall.

On Saturday morning we all got up, had breakfast, and then went to the market that they have on Saturday mornings in the town centre. It was fun. I bought a little scarf and a bunch of people bought chocolate or related things. It was fun, and thankfully, beautiful. At about 9:40 we had to be back at the hostel to get on the bus again and do more exploring.

We picked up a guide and she took us around several of the major British cemetaries in Ieper (I think that there are 11). We went to Essex Farm Cemetery first, which had a dressing station and about 1200 graves. It was near that spot where McCrae wrote his poem.  It was very powerful. The War Graves Commission keeps the place in immacculate condition. From there we visited the German cemetery at Langermarc. While the Belgians gave the land for the cemetaries to the British in perpetuity, they only leased it to the Germans for 30 years. Had WWII not happend, it is possible that they would have extended the lease, but it didn't, so after WWII was over and the lease expired, the Belgians told the Germans that they had to move the cemetaries. They let them keep 4, so the Germans combined all their cemetaries into those 4. One of them is at Ieper because of how important the place was. We saw one area, it couldn't have been more than 50 feet by 50 feet where some 25,000 German soldiers were buried. Then she passed around a photograph of Adolf Hitler visiting the cemetery during the Second World War. As I was looking at it, I realised with horror that I was standing exactly where Hitler was standing when the photo was taken. Needless to say, I moved. Quickly.

We also went to the Yorkshire Trench, which they discovered and decided to keep because it had big dugouts with it. You can walk through the trench, which is TINY. It really gives you a sense of being stuck in them, althought not how terrifying it must have been.

From there we went to Tyne Cot Cemetery, which is the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world. There are some 12,000 graves there and about 70% of them are unknown. It was really powerful. It was like looking over sections of Arlington and realising that, Oh my God, this is all from ONE battle. It is sobering. The whole visit was really.

From there we made our way out to Poperinge, which was another town closley related to the battles of Ieper. It was far enough away that it was out of range of the German shells, but close enough to be the main British base. This was there they had the hospitals and command centres and stored ammunition and stuff. We visited the Talbot House which was basically a place where soldiers could come, both officer and enlisted, and visit, have tea, go to a chapel, etc. It was a great place. After that finished, me and a couple of friends killed some time having hot chocolate in a pub until it was time to meet up with the group.

When we did meet up with the group, we went to see the site where the British army executed deserters and people who had committed military offences. Our tutor is an expert on this subject and has done lots of research and written books on the subject. He was instrumental in getting the government to admit that many of these men had been suffering from shell shock and shouldn't have been executed. About 2 years ago, many of them were pardoned and recognised as victims of the war. That was pretty intense.

Then it was back on the bus and back to Calais to board the ferry to come home! We even managed to get through immigration (which was not lax. They checked us out and questioned us about stuff and most assuredly checked everyone's passport) in time to get on a ferry that was leaving an hour earlier than we thought we were going to catch. Unfortunately, the weather in the Channel was rotten and the 90 minute crossing ended up lasting 3 and a half hours because we had to wait in a queue to dock and escape.  Finally, finally, we got off and came home. By the time I we got here, I was exhausted and just went to bed.

It was a great weekend. I really had a good time, and although some of it was really depressing, I feel like I have a much better understanding of World War One and that sort of thing. Plus, I got to go to Belgium and have waffles. Most awesome.

Jerry Silberman, Oct. 2, 2008

The Wall St. Rescue bill which gained new life with the Senate rubber stamp yesterday will neither halt the decline of the US economy nor penalize the financial gamblers who have been the most immediate cause of this disaster.

Here are two important historical comparisons --

In the late 70's and early '80's, the offensive by big business against workers took the form of demanding concessions in wages and benefits mostly from industrial unions, claiming that if factories weren't made more "competitive" through reduction of labor costs, they would go out of business. Of course, no employer guaranteed the future of the plant of the job, we were supposed to trust them. Of course, it was a scam. Plants that took concessions closed. Plants that didn't closed. The economic transformation was based in much larger issues. In plants that closed after concessions, the bosses simply walked away with more, and the workers were left with less. The money stolen by the bosses as a result of concessions helped fund the elimination of thousands of jobs through automation, as well as the transfer of manufacturing plants out of the country. The labor movement at the time was unprepared to fight back, since it bought into the general principles of the bosses, and is still suffering, despite renewed energy in certain unions.

The several "bail outs" that have happened over the past year are identical to those concessions -- big business is threatening us with dire consequences if we don't protect them, while making no promise that anything will get better if we do. Each bailout is bigger than the last, and more futile -- except for the corporate executives who are continuing to stash the cash. Each bailout imposes more costs on us, now and in the future, as positive government programs are sacrificed and more debt is imposed on our tax dollar. Right now about 51 cents of every tax dollar goes to the military. Interest on the national debt, that is tax dollars which go directly to pay the government bond holders is the third largest item in the federal budget, right now one half trillion per year. Since about 140 million people file federal income tax returns annually, this means that on average, about $2000 of your taxes are already going to pay off bondholders on Wall St, in Saudi Arabia, China, and many other countries. This number will jump as a result of this bailout. That's all money not available for schools, health care, environmental protection, etc.

In the early '30's the economy collapsed in what is commonly referred to as the Great Depression. Unlike this collapse that began early in the term of Herbert Hoover. By the time of the next presidential election, millions of Americans were impoverished and beginning to organize to fight back. They were marching in the streets for unemployment insurance, refusing to allow people to be evicted from their homes by blockading homes from the sheriff, WWI vets marched on Washington demanding relief and were fired on by current troops under the command of Gen. MacArthur (later of WWII fame) Radical political movements were growing. The new president recognized that some concessions had to be made to the working class by big business or the US would risk a revolutionary situation. Roosevelt, pressured by those movements of ordinary people who couldn't take it any more, finally convinced Congress to enact several reforms, including unemployment insurance, Social Security, and tough banking regulations (repealed in the Reagan and Bush administrations) to stabilize the economy.

Although there are many very important differences in the current situation from those historical times, there are some very important common threads, the most important being that collective action by working people to challenge the rich and powerful is the key to any change which can create a more stable, secure and healthy life for us. And our goal must be based on a comprehensive vision of a just society, not just trying to protect a niche for ourselves.

Finally, he ended his lecture, sat on his chair, and another young lecturer who assist switched to be in charge. And she started her lecture about Interpersonal Relationship. I directly lifted my head, pointed my eyes to the power point presentation and imagined that ‘love’ will be the most commonly used word in the class. And hell yes, I was right!

I hope the next class would be that fun! Hahaha..

But why is it fun in a way it has been created before video games are invented? In a sentence, it is important to make commands and functions in order to tell the computer what to do and most of all, type in messages for a program to understand. Inform 7 is that kind of program. It lets the authors of the text story games to write their stories in a unique interface. To do that, an author creates a file in the system and save it on a hard drive, then they are greeted from the program itself with the user manual that explains everything about the program's features and the directions. On the left hand side of the window, there are four buttons: Go, Replay, Stop and Release. The Go button allows the program to rewrite the code in the game interface on the opposite end.

Now throughout the project, I am told that I will be working as well as the whole class individually that we have to think about a game and probably share some sort of ideas about the project. It is like creating a program from DOS format because we are writing the codes out of the stories that we are still working in the weekend, but hey I we have to start somewhere. Anyway, I know little about the application until I worked it on Monday and it's going to take some luck to work it out.

You are about to spend the next four hours of your life here.

JacksonPollock.Org

Students in my Multimedia Journalism class were assigned to Twitter as we were watching the debate. You can read everyone's comments here.

Instead of being defined by Senator McCain's plan for the economy or why Barack Obama's judgment on the Iraq War was correct in 2002, the talk about the debate focused on McCain's poor body language and Obama's clear confidence. Huffington Post compiled videos of McCain's angry expressions during the debate in story called "The Smirk: Could McCain's Facial Gestures Define a Debate?"

Some students that were twittering also picked up on McCain's attitutide. One user, benjaminswill, wrote, "I like McCain's plan- when you get slammed with something just smile. He looks a little uneasy, keeps shifting his weight n'stuff."

The debate was originally meant to be entirely about foreign policy, but with the recent economic crisis facing the U.S., the first 45 minutes were dedictated to the candidates' plans for fixing a rapidly failing economy. However, many students seemed to start Twittering more as the discussion turned to foreign policy.

As the McCain and Obama argued over experience v. judgment, many of those twittering reacted to their responses, as well as wrote their friends reactions that they were watching the debate with. User kletourno wrote, "Heidi says that McCain keeps saying Obama is "naive" instead of saying what he really means: too young and inexperienced."

At the end of the discussion, most users expressed their excitement for the upcoming Vice Presidential debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin.

An interesting way for journalism students to cover the debate, or any journalists for that matter. Read everyone's twitter responses here.