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April 7 - 13, 2011
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The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
Fortuño $6 Billion Windfall Offset With Tax Credits Likely
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he Obama administration says it can’t decide whether U.S. taxpayers should be on the hook for $6 billion in tax increases levied by Puerto Rico, but businesses are eligible for the disputed tax credits in the meantime. And, if the IRS eventually decides the credits were improper, those firms won’t have to pay back the billions of dollars they already received. Critics have charged the highly unusual arrangement would comprise an indirect bailout that lets Puerto Rico bolster its sagging fiscal conditions by levying taxes on international firms those firms don’t actually have to pay. The IRS is deciding whether to approve the tax credits or deem it a “soak up tax” that targets firms which can offset their tax increases with U.S. tax credits. Then, a decision was supposed to come any day, but the IRS shirked from the controversy, waiting three months before quietly announcing it is not making a final decision. “The provisions of the Excise Tax are novel. The determination of the creditability of the Excise Tax requires the resolution of a num-
ber of legal and factual issues,” the IRS said in a notice issued. In the meantime, IRS says it “will not challenge” businesses seeking tax credits for the excise tax and, if it ever did decide the arrangement was improper, they wouldn’t need to pay back the Treasury for the credits. “Any change in the foreign tax credit treatment of the Excise Tax after resolution of the pending issues will be prospective, and will apply to Excise Tax paid or accrued after the date that further guidance is issued,” the notice says. The Fortuño administration desperate for revenues in the midst of the recession, surprised industry with a $6 billion tax on foreign firms – including a significant bloc of U.S. pharmaceutical firms – late October in a rare weekend legislative session without any public debate in advance. Gov. Luis Fortuño signed the new tax into law Oct. 25. That day, the Washington, D.C.-based white shoe law firm Steptoe & Johnson issued him a legal brief arguing U.S. firms should receive money from the U.S. government to offset the Puerto Rico tax increase, which Fortuño sent to the IRS. The international tax law in question is complicated, but experts agree the tax, and the request, are an unusual use of portions of the tax code intended to avoid double taxation on U.S. firms in countries that have reciprocity treaties with the U.S. “We would call it creative,” said James Hines, an expert on international tax issues and the L. Hart Wright Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. “It’s an unusual tax for sure.” It’s an “indirect bailout,” said Dan Mitchell, an international tax expert and senior fellow at the Cato Institute. We called the move a brilliant bold act by Governor Luis Fortuño when it was undertaken. It is an overwhelmingly an ingenious
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Exquisite Cuisine in an Oppulent Setting solution to econimic tsunami. No former administration had thought of it. There is a 200 year old Persian saying which says “Sometimes you need a genious to solve the trouble smart people would not have gotten into”. Puerto Rico’s past administrations
from all parties have financially burdened and wasted our futures consistently. We have all suffered because of the spend and borrow policies. This $6 billion windfall should be applanded, but lets not return to past bad habits to reach a new crisis precipice.
The Great Moonbuggy Race NASA 22 States, Canada, Germany, India and Russia Competed
In the competition they run through similar obstacles to those in the Moon. (Astronomical Society of Puerto Rico)
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he team of students from the Vocational School of Yabucoa Teodoro Aguilar Mora swept the Great Moonbuggy Race NASA winning both first and second places. “In the competition obstacles similar to those in the Moon, such as sand and gravel traps & craters. You had to make the trip in a limited timeframe”, said Carlos Medina a teacher from the school. The lunar rovers competition was held on April 1 and 2 in the Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. It was attended by six students from Teodoro Aguilar Mora, who were accompanied by teachers Viviel Sánchez, Víctor González Rivera and Angelica.
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The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
Racial Identity Shifting in Puerto Rico T
he racial identity of the Puerto Rican population may be changing, say experts, who point to census figures in which those identifying solely as American Indian or black jumped about 50 percent in the last ten years. Both the experts and the islanders were surprised to see that the island’s population appears to be identifying with more specific ethnicities as apposed to the previously “blurred racial mosaic” that had been the norm in previous years. A University of Puerto Rico anthropology professor Jorge Duany said, “It truly breaks with a historic pattern.” The increase was mostly seen in those that reported themselves as being either black of American Indian. Over 461,00 thousand islanders identified as black, a 52 percent increase, and 20,000 claimed an American Indian racial identity, seeing a nearly 49 percent increase. Due to these increases, the island’s population of those identifying as white dropped about 8 percent. Duany believes President Obama’s election could have swayed some of the population to call themselves black as he proved negative stereotypes to be false with his successful run. The seemingly increased number of the island’s black population also coincided with the push to highlight that part of the population (i.e. the Department of Education offing a high school book solely
about their history). Barbara Abadia-Rexach, a sociology and anthropology professor at the University of Puerto Rico, said, “There is no authentic or pure race. We are all mixed.” Puerto Ricans are often called “boricuas,” which is a name derived from the island’s Taino Indians’ word for the island, “Borikén.” The Taino people were the preColombian inhabitants of the Caribbean. A possible reason for the increase in the number of
people that identified themselves as American Indian is the fact that, this year, the U.S. Census Bureau allowed them to write down their tribe, where as, for previous censuses, many would select “other” as their ethnicity, because there was no way to select “American Indian” then “Caribbean.” Identifying ethnic identities is importan because many Federal benefits are often earmarked for specific disadvantaged such as American Indians.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
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Religious Sterilize to Avoid Pills T
Caribbean’s First Electric Car N issan has delivered the “Leaf” to Puerto Rico, the Caribbean’s first 100% electric car. Nissan’s Latin American Director Kenneth Ramírez reported the car is 34% cheaper to run than a typical gas using vehicle. The “Leaf” travels 100 miles for $5 versus $15 for a gas vehicle. It will cost $30,000 before federal incentives which could lower the cost to as low as $15,000. Bayamón Mayor Ramón Luis Rivera, announced the first recharging sites will be located near the Rubén Rodríguez Coliseum in Bayamón.
he Catholic Church’s opposition to the use of birth control pills makes sterilization a morally acceptable alternative for religious catholics. Using the “pill” was characterized as a continual sin that required the constant withholding of communion. Submitting to “the operation,” on the other hand, was a one-time offense that could be confessed and then regular communion allowed. Proponents of sterilization view the need to reduce childbirth per family as a way of minimizing the economic burden on the poor as well as repeated underage pregnancies. The Catholic Church inadvertently created an environment in which women were more willing to be permanently deprived of their right to bear children rather than risk committing a continuous offense against the Church. This environment also made it easier for medical authorities to recommend the method in order to reduce large poverty stricken house-
holds. The Church’s position resulted in more sterilizations. With huge imbalances in the current budget where the poor and declining middle-class face cutbacks in jobs and services, population control is an economic goal to alliviate poverty. Promoting irreversible methods does prevent the retention of reproductive rights. Catholics must choose between the religious beliefs and their right to retain reproductive capability.
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The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
Puerto Rico Airports to Receive $285 million Over Next 5 Years
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he U.S. House of Representatives today approved legislation that expressly guarantees equal treatment for Puerto Rico’s airports with respect to federal funding, after Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi successfully offered an amendment on the subject. The amendment filed by Pierluisi, and adopted by the House, ensures that Puerto Rico’s 11 public-use airports will be treated equally to airports in the States with regards to both formula and discretionary funding allocated by the federal government under the Airport Improvement Program. These funds are used to maintain and upgrade airports across the country. The Resident Commissioner defended his amendment
on the House floor, and it obtained the support of Chairman John Mica (R-FL) and Ranking Member Nick Rahall (D-WV), the lead Republican and Democrat on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, which has jurisdiction over the bill, the FAA Reauthorization and Reform Act of 2011. “There is no reasonable basis to treat Puerto Rico lessthan-equally when it comes to obtaining federal funds under the Airport Improvement Program, especially since aviation serves such a critical role on the Island,” said Pierluisi. “Puerto Rico is heavily dependent on safe and reliable air service to carry passengers and transport goods to and from the U.S. mainland. The Island’s main airport, the Luis Muñoz Ma-
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rín International Airport in San Juan, is ranked among the top 50 commercial service airports in the United States in terms of the number of passenger boardings, averaging over four-and-half million boardings each year,” explained the Resident Commissioner in his floor speech. Apart from Luis Muñoz Marín, Puerto Rico is home to five other commercial service airports, located in Aguadilla, Ponce, Mayagüez, Isla Grande and Vieques, as well as to five other general aviation airports that serve smaller communities. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, Puerto Rico needs $285 million over the next five years to bring its airports up to current design standards, to add capacity to meet projected needs, and to improve safety. In addition, the House Committee on Rules, which determines those amendments that will be considered on the House floor, accepted for debate a second amendment filed by Pierluisi, related to the Essential Air Service (EAS) program, which was created to help maintain airline service at approximately 140 smaller and more rural airports throughout the nation. The EAS program, administered by the U.S. De-
partment of Transportation, currently provides subsidies to carriers serving Mercedita Airport in Ponce and Eugenio María de Hostos (“El Mani”) Airport in Mayagüez. The House bill would phase out the EAS program by October 2013, but would authorize the Secretary of Transportation to continue the program in Alaska and Hawaii past that date. The amendment filed by Pierluisi would add Puerto Rico to the list of jurisdictions where the EAS program can be continued beyond 2013. “The sound arguments that militate in favor of allowing the Secretary this discretion with respect to Alaska and Hawaii apply with similar force with respect to Puerto Rico,” Pierluisi argued. In response to Pierluisi’s amendment, Chairman Mica committed to working with the Resident Commissioner as the House and Senate deliberate over the future of the EAS program in the coming weeks. “Thanks to Chairman Mica’s pledge, I feel confident that the EAS program will continue in Puerto Rico. This program is of great importance to my constituents, especially those who reside in Ponce and Mayagüez,” said the Resident Commissioner.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
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The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
El Sueño de Dali at Bellas Artes
By Max Gonzålez
T
he producer Adriana Pantoja, surely didi quite some research. A few years back I got a book in Madrid by the same title, Dalí, Lorca and Buñuel. I can’t think of the authors name. He based his book on the letters written to each of the so famous artists.. Salvador Dalí, the most eccentric of the trio is depicted as a paranoid, jittery personality. Among the so many eccentricities, the author quotes a letter by Dalí in which he talks about his new invention., the “pedometer”, a device to measure the intensity of the gases expelled by humans from the rear organ. To mention another of his maniac depressive reactions; he decided to practice his own death by resting in a coffin for days. The main stream in Pantoja’s work is the homosexual affair between the aspiring artists, in their youth as students. It all happens in the dream. A very poetic dream, as a matter of fact, only those poems by Lorca about love are quoted and read to the audience. None of his folkloric works which are Lorca’s best known works, The Andalusian way of living, such as bull fighting, gypsies, and their behavior are not mentioned. Only the motivation of the moon that was like an obsession to both Lorca and Dalí. The play runs from the beginning to end with no intermission. A little over two hours. Lorca as the sensitive young poet is introduced by his friend luis Buñuel. Lorca fell in love with Dalí at first sight. he is very much impressed by Dalí’s ideas over art, his revolutionary style in painting and opinion about poetry, In a way, he reciprocates Lorca. Both actors, José Luis Gutierrez as Dalí and Nelson del Valle, as Lorca, are well casted. Dalí frequently suffering from his peculiar tamtrums, and idiotic
sotto-voce way of laughing seems to motivate Lorca. They only disagree in the political situation in Spain under Franco’s regime. Luis Buñuel is played by José Brocco, being a good actor his voice is not suitable for the stage. He also joins the euphoric plans for the future. They are willing to join forces and make a film of Lorca’s play Mariana Pineda. As a film producer Buñuel has many extravagant ideas about film making so he decides to go to Paris. He soon gets suspicions that Lorca is homosexual; as a homophobic he accuses Lorca openly and decides to break up his friendship. Buñuel is obsessed with the idea of being French; he wants to be called Louis from then on. Eight years went by, heart broken Lorca, stayed in Spain. In the meantime getting involved in the political situation; that brought the Civil war. After his return from Paris, Dalí meets Gala. She is an ill-famed woman ten years older. Dalí calls her mother, sister, and his muse, he is absolutely infatuated by the experienced wordly whore, as Buñuel calls her. Gala’s performance was very poor. Definitely she is not the castrating, domineering slut who indulges in fortune telling by reading the cards. Her acting is not forceful, carrying no impact. Buñuel tries to force Lorca into Gala, nevertheless his knowledge of Lorca’s sexual inclinations. He has also apologized to Lorca, who was hurt and aggravated by the film so successful in Paris based on Lorca under the title “El Perro Andaluz”. No other than Lorca. Pantoja’s production has a happy ending. Contrary to the real facts, Lorca doesn’t die during the excecution. Bearing a wounded arm he comes in to visit dejected Dalí, that couldn’t believe his eyes. Lorca pampers his friend like a bay. At the same time he sings to his nicely like in the old days. Pantoja’s work is done accurately and well inspired. She should take it abroad. It is worth in every aspect.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
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New Flights From Spain to Aguadilla
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U.S. charter airline has begun flights between Spain and Puerto Rico in a venture that officials predict will bring thousands more tourists to the island’s west coast. In the past european travel to the Caribbean has been focussed on the Dominican Republic and Cuba. This is a tremendous opportunity for Puerto Rico to showcase its tourist attractions to a large, but as yet untapped market. The Fortuño Administration focussed significant efforts in order to achieve this first step.A The flights operated by the Air Transport International company will run from Madrid and Barcelona to a tiny airport in the northwestern coastal town of Aguadilla.
The first chartered Boeing 767 arrived carrying tourists from Spain on Saturday. The aircraft was emblazoned with the logo “Porta del Sol,” or “Gateway to the Sun,” a nickname for the western coast. The flights are scheduled to run four times a week to and from the Spanish cities.
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The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
Obama Sets Goal of One-Third Cut in Oil Imports By JOHN M. BRODER
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ith gasoline prices rising, oil supplies from the Middle East pinched by political upheaval and growing calls in Congress for expanded domestic oil and gas production, President Obama on Wednesday will set a goal of a one-third reduction in oil imports over the next decade, aides said Tuesday. The president, in a speech to be delivered at Georgetown University, will say that the United States needs, for geopolitical and economic reasons, to reduce its reliance on imported oil, according to White House officials who provided a preview of the speech on the condition that they not be identified. More than half of the oil burned in the United States today comes from overseas and from Mexico and Canada. Mr. Obama will propose a mix of measures, none of them new, to help the nation cut down on its thirst for oil. He will point out the nation’s tendency, since the first Arab oil embargo in 1973, to panic when gas prices rise and then fall back into old gas-guzzling habits when they recede. He will call for a consistent long-term fuel-savings strategy of producing more electric cars, converting trucks to run on natural gas, building new refineries to brew billions of gallons of biofuels and setting new fuelefficiency standards for vehicles. Congress has been debating these measures for years. The president will also repeat his assertion that despite the frightening situation at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex in Japan, nuclear power will remain an important source of electricity in the United States for decades to come, aides said. He will respond to members of Congress and oil industry executives who have complained that the administration has choked off domestic oil and gas production by imposing costly new regulations and by blocking exploration on millions of acres of potentially oilrich tracts both on shore and off. The administration is not prepared to open new public lands and waters to drilling, officials said, but will use a new set of incentives and penalties to prod industry to develop resources on the lands they already have access to. The Interior Department on Tuesday issued a paper saying that more than twothirds of offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico and more than half of onshore leases on federal lands are unused. Oil industry officials called the paper a smokescreen to cover the administration’s stingy approach to drilling permits. “This is an effort to distract the American people from rising gas prices and the fact that the administration has been delaying, defe-
rring or denying access to our oil and natural gas resources here at home,” said Erik Milito, the director of exploration policy at the American Petroleum Institute. “Lease sales have been delayed or canceled, and this year, for the first time since 1957, we may not have a single offshore lease sale.” White House officials indicated that Mr. Obama was turning to energy issues after a period of intense focus on turmoil in Libya and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East. He will link them by saying the United States cannot be secure as long as it depends on potentially unstable monarchies and dictatorships for a large part of its daily petroleum diet. The reduction in oil imports he has set as a target — roughly three million barrels a day over 10 years — corresponds roughly to current import levels from the Middle East and Africa. Presidents since Richard M. Nixon have made this point, and American oil imports have continued to rise, except when slowed by recession. Republicans in Congress have grown increasingly vocal about the administration’s energy and environment policies, saying they discourage domestic oil and gas development and impose heavy costs on industry in a period of economic angst. On Tuesday, House Republicans introduced three bills to reverse the administration’s offshore oil drilling policies, calling for vast new tracts of offshore territory to be opened to deep-water drilling and for speedier approval of drilling permits. On the Senate floor, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, denounced the president for a variety of alleged energy sins, including telling Brazilian officials last week that the United States would be an eager consumer for its offshore oil.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” Mr. McConnell said. “Here we’ve got the administration looking for just about any excuse it can find to lock up our own energy sources here at home,” he said, “even as it’s applauding another country’s efforts to grow its own economy and create jobs by tapping into its own energy sources.” The administration imposed a moratorium on most deep-water drilling activities in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed 11 rig workers and sent nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The Interior Department wrote new safety and environmental rules for offshore drilling and officially lifted the moratorium in October. The department has now issued seven permits for activities that were halted under the suspension, with 12 other deep-water permits pending. An additional 24 permit applications have been returned to applicants for more information. Mr. Obama is also expected to renew his call from the State of the Union address to increase the percentage of electricity produced from so-called clean sources to 80 percent from the current 40 percent by 2035. The president’s definition of clean energy includes renewable sources like wind, solar, hydro and geothermal, as well as nuclear, natural gas and coal with carbon capture and storage, an as-yetunproved technology. On Friday, the president will appear at a United Parcel Service depot in Landover, Md., to talk about ways to make commercial truck and bus fleets more fuel-efficient and to make greater use of domestically produced natural gas in transportation.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
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The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
Where the Bailout Went Wrong By NEIL M. BAROFSKY
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WO and a half years ago, Congress passed the legislation that bailed out the country’s banks. The government has declared its mission accomplished, calling the program remarkably effective “by any objective measure.” On my last day as the special inspector general of the bailout program, I regret to say that I strongly disagree. The bank bailout, more formally called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, failed to meet some of its most important goals. From the perspective of the largest financial institutions, the glowing assessment is warranted: billions of dollars in taxpayer money allowed institutions that were on the brink of collapse not only to survive but even to flourish. These banks now enjoy record profits and the seemingly permanent competitive advantage that accompanies being deemed “too big to fail.” Though there is no question that the country benefited by avoiding a meltdown of the financial system, this cannot be the only yardstick by which TARP’s legacy is measured. The legislation that created TARP, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, had far broader goals, including protecting home values and preserving homeownership. These Main Street-oriented goals were not, as the Treasury Department is now suggesting, mere window dressing that needed only to be taken “into account.” Rather, they were a central part of the compromise with reluctant members of
Congress to cast a vote that in many cases proved to be political suicide. The act’s emphasis on preserving homeownership was particularly vital to passage. Congress was told that TARP would be used to purchase up to $700 billion of mortgages, and, to obtain the necessary votes, Treasury promised that it would modify those mortgages to assist struggling homeowners. Indeed, the act expressly directs the department to do just that. But it has done little to abide by this legislative bargain. Almost immediately, as permitted by the broad language of the act, Treasury’s plan for TARP shifted from the purchase of mortgages to the infusion of hundreds of billions of dollars into the nation’s largest financial institutions, a shift that came with the express promise that it would restore lending. Treasury, however, provided the money to banks with no effective policy or effort to compel the extension of credit. There were no strings attached: no requirement or even incentive to increase lending to home buyers, and against our strong recommendation, not even a request that banks report how they used TARP funds. It was only in April of last year, in response to recommendations from our office, that Treasury asked banks to provide that information, well after the largest banks had already repaid their loans. It was therefore no surprise that lending did not increase but rather con-
tinued to decline well into the recovery. (In my job as special inspector general I could not bring about the changes I thought were needed — I could only make recommendations to the Treasury Department.) Meanwhile, the act’s goal of helping struggling homeowners was shelved until February 2009, when the Home Affordable Modification Program was announced with the promise to help up to four million families with mortgage modifications. That program has been a colossal failure, with far fewer permanent modifications (540,000) than modifications that have failed and been canceled (over 800,000). This is the well-chronicled result of the rush to get the program started, major program design flaws like the failure to remedy mortgage servicers’ favoring of foreclosure over permanent modifications, and a refusal to hold those abysmally performing mortgage servicers accountable for their disregard of program guidelines. As the program flounders, foreclosures continue to mount, with 8 million to 13 million filings forecast over the program’s lifetime. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has acknowledged that the program “won’t come close” to fulfilling its original expectations, that its incentives are not “powerful enough” and that the mortgage servicers are “still doing a terribly inadequate job.” But Treasury officials refuse to address these shortfalls. Instead they continue to stubbornly maintain that the program is a success and needs no material change, effectively assuring that Treasury’s
most specific Main Street promise will not be honored. Finally, the country was assured that regulatory reform would address the threat to our financial system posed by large banks that have become effectively guaranteed by the government no matter how reckless their behavior. This promise also appears likely to go unfulfilled. The biggest banks are 20 percent larger than they were before the crisis and control a larger part of our economy than ever. They reasonably assume that the government will rescue them again, if necessary. Indeed, credit rating agencies incorporate future government bailouts into their assessments of the largest banks, exaggerating market distortions that provide them with an unfair advantage over smaller institutions, which continue to struggle. Worse, Treasury apparently has chosen to ignore rather than support real efforts at reform, such as those advocated by Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, to simplify or shrink the most complex financial institutions. In the final analysis, it has been Treasury’s broken promises that have turned TARP — which was instrumental in saving the financial system at a relatively modest cost to taxpayers — into a program commonly viewed as little more than a giveaway to Wall Street executives. It wasn’t meant to be that. Indeed, Treasury’s mismanagement of TARP and its disregard for TARP’s Main Street goals — whether born of incompetence, timidity in the face of a crisis or a mindset too closely aligned with the banks it was supposed to rein in — may have so damaged the credibility of the government as a whole that future policy makers may be politically unable to take the necessary steps to save the system the next time a crisis arises. This avoidable political reality might just be TARP’s most lasting, and unfortunate, legacy. Neil M. Barofsky was the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program from 2008 until today.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
13 Mainland
Foreclosure Aid Fell Short, and Is Fading By MICHAEL POWELL and ANDREW MARTIN
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ast summer, as President Obama’s premier plan to save millions of Americans from foreclosure foundered, the administration tossed a new life preserver to homeowners. Officials unveiled a $1 billion program to offer loans to help the jobless pay their mortgages until they could find work again. It was supposed to take effect before the end of the year, but as of today, the program has yet to accept any applications. “We wait and wait, and they keep saying it’s coming,” said James Tyson, 50, a Philadelphia homeowner who lost his job a year ago. That could be an epitaph for the administration’s broader foreclosure prevention effort, as tens of billions of dollars remain unspent and hundreds of thousands of homeowners have been rejected. Now the existence of the main program, the Home Assistance Modification Program, is in doubt. Saying it is a waste of money, the Republican-controlled House voted on Tuesday night to kill the foreclosure relief program. The Senate, which the Democrats control, will pursue a rescue. But Democrats, too, consider the program badly flawed. The effort has failed to stanch a wave of foreclosures and a decline in home prices, which have fallen for six consecutive months and are now just barely above their recession low, according to a key index updated on Tuesday. All of this threatens the fragile economy, which is also being buffeted by foreign crises. “The banking industry fought us tooth and nail, and we ended up with a program that is failing homeowners,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California. “The administration doesn’t give us real enforcement or answers; we just get the old yokeydoke.” Yet the need remains great. There were 225,000 foreclosure filings in February, according to RealtyTrac. About 145,000 homeowners are in trial modifications under the Obama program. An examination of federal documents and lawsuits, and interviews with legislators, state attorneys general, housing counselors, homeowners and regulators, reveal a federal mortgage modification program crippled by weak oversight, conflicts of interest, mind-numbing complexity and poor performance by many participating banks.
For example: Congress set aside $50 billion for foreclosure prevention, amid administration projections that three million to four million homeowners would benefit from modifications. So far, the Treasury Department, which oversees the program, has spent slightly more than $1 billion, and just 607,000 homeowners have received permanent loan modifications (of those, 11 percent have defaulted). The companies that service mortgages, typically large banks, continually lose homeowner paperwork and incorrectly tell homeowners that they must be delinquent to qualify. Treasury officials have not fined any servicers, and the government-controlled company hired by the Treasury to oversee the program has expressed reluctance to crack down on banks. Interviews with a dozen homeowner applicants in four states reveal a familiar pattern: Banks deny many who, by income and credit scores, appear to qualify. And homeowners end up weighed down by legal fees and facing foreclosure. “I call constantly, they lose all my paperwork, and the same guy never gets on the phone,” said Ada Caceres, 53, who owns a modest home in Staten Island. Ms. Caceres has struggled to make mortgage payments since her hours as a bartender were cut. She applied for relief, and her bank, JPMorgan Chase, twice granted temporary modifications. She made every payment. Last August, Chase promised a permanent modification. Then it rescinded the offer, documents show. “I love my house,” said Ms. Caceres, who is still negotiating. “It’s a good neighborhood. But oh my God, you want to just give up.” Homeowners can appeal denials, but the odds are not in their favor, says the program’s inspector general. A first step is a hot line providing counseling, from an agency created by mortgage servicers.
even as it protected taxpayers. “We tried to bring some order out of the chaos,” said Mr. Barr, now a University of Michigan law professor. “Taxpayer money was only used for successful modifications. I think that was directionally the right thing to do.”
Trouble at the Start In the winter of 2009, the Obama administration’s urgency to address foreclosures was palpable. Hundreds of thousands of families had lost homes, and in towns from Florida to California to Ne-
vada, foreclosure slums took root, marked by boarded-up homes and uncut grass. Treasury officials invited Neil M. Barofsky, the special inspector general for the bank bailout, to discuss a rescue plan. They told him details of the plan were still weeks away. “That night, I was driving home and I heard on the radio that the president was going to announce it next Wednesday,” Mr. Barofsky recalled. “It was a ‘ready, fire, aim’ approach.” Ready or not, President Obama an
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Mainland 14
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
Comes from page 13 nounced the housing assistance program on Feb. 18, 2009. Banks and mortgage brokers could extend mortgages, or cut the amount of the loan or the interest rate. A monthly payment could not exceed 31 percent of gross income. In return, the administration offered payments to banks and servicers. “It will give millions of families resigned to financial ruin a chance to rebuild,” Mr. Obama said. “By bringing down the foreclosure rate, it will help shore up housing prices for everyone.” None of those hopes came to pass. In fairness, Mr. Obama confronted a daunting challenge: a foreclosure crisis without precedent since the Great Depression. The Bush administration already had tried several weak foreclosure relief programs. In October 2008, as financial calamity loomed, President Bush signed the $700 billion bank bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. At the insistence of Congressional Democrats, he agreed to plow billions of dollars into foreclosure prevention. When the newly elected Obama administration drew up program guidelines, officials concluded they could neither force servicers to participate nor fine them for poor performance. This, critics say, was a mistake. “The banks were so despised, and TARP was so front and center, you could have actually done something,” said Katherine M. Porter, a visiting law professor at Harvard. “In the midst of real boldness in bailing out the banks, we get this timid, soft, voluntary conditional program.” Treasury officials say this is an unfair accounting. In those harried days in early 2009, no one knew how much stress near-insolvent banks could withstand. And officials tried to fine-tune the mortgage program, adding elements and redirecting unused billions of dollars into the most distressed regions.
Each new version, however, added layers of complication. Administration officials also cite unrealistic expectations, saying they underestimated the complexity of modifying millions of troubled loans. “I wish the three to four million had never been uttered,” said Peter Swire, a former special assistant to Mr. Obama for economic policy. Critics wave off such arguments. The Obama administration, they say, could have flexed its muscles. The president could publicly challenge bank officials. Treasury officials could withhold payments. The administration could buy troubled mortgages at a discount and modify loans on its own. “We needed to go out and fine the five worst offenders,” said a former administration official familiar with internal discussions, who was not allowed to talk publicly given his current position. “In hindsight, I’m almost certain we would have been well served by taking the risk and being challenged in court.”
Dysfunctional System To listen to a handful of Bank of America employees speak candidly about the mortgage program is to hear deep frustration with their bank’s performance. Their accounts, offered on the condition of anonymity as they are not allowed to talk to the press, dovetail with lawsuits filed by state attorneys general in Nevada and Arizona. (A coalition of state attorneys general is pushing an expanded foreclosure rescue plan that would impose fines on recalcitrant banks.) Bank of America, these employees say, routinely loses documents. One department does not talk to another. Applications drag on for more than a year. Sometimes the bank forecloses while homeowners are paying modified loans. And homeowners who are denied face an imposing bundle of late fees and backpayments.
A bank employee says she often advises homeowners not to apply, given the slim chances for success. “Many of these people are losing their homes,” she said. “The paperwork that sets them up is not detailed enough. It does not tell the customer the consequences of going forward with this.” Dan B. Frahm, a Bank of America spokesman, acknowledged that the bank had made its share of mistakes, including losing too many documents. But it faced a narrow window to carry out a complex and ever-changing program, he said. “We have completed more modification under HAMP (106,000) than any other participating servicer, and have more active modifications than other participants as well,” Mr. Frahm wrote in an e-mail, using the program’s shorthand name. “We continue to improve performance.” For years, loan servicing departments acted as money machines for banks. They collected payments and foreclosed on the occasional delinquent homeowner. But a foreclosure flood rolled in by 2007, and servicers all but drowned. The government’s program added to the problem. At first, Treasury allowed homeowners to apply without proof of income, figuring that quick relief might save homes. It later demanded income verification, loosing another flood, as homeowners sent in piles of documents by fax. Federal regulators added their own confusion of overlapping authority and conflicts of interest. Treasury hired Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-controlled mortgage finance giants, to oversee the program. This decision was problematic. As the Congressional Oversight Panel noted, these agencies “are highly conflicted because they hold the credit risk on most mortgages in the United States and have their own operational concerns.” As if to underscore that point, Freddie Mac filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission noting that imposing penalties on banks could “negatively impact our relationships with these sellers/servicers, some of which are among our largest sources of mortgage loans.” Treasury has paid the agencies a combined $212 million to administer the program. The Treasury Department, too, was a reluctant enforcer, declining to impose fines or demand repayments. “This was structured as a voluntary program,” said Timothy Massad, acting assistant secretary. “We do not have the power to impose fines.” Mr. Barofsky, the special inspector
general, waves off protestations of powerlessness. How, he asked, could Treasury sign agreements to pay billions to banks without penalties for failure to comply? “Treasury wasn’t willing to kick them in the only place that matters: in the pocketbook,” he said.
Mortgage Problems In private conversations, senior Treasury officials offer an often-heard critique: Homeowners failed the program. That is, Americans were in far worse shape — jobless, underwater on mortgages and with terrible credit — than anyone realized in 2009. Daily encounters in county courthouses suggest this is overstated. Homeowners bring in foot-high piles of paper documenting income, credit reports and loan payments. Some missed a payment or two, but many are not deadbeats. Yet they cannot obtain a modification. In Staten Island, The New York Times examined eight cases where homeowners seemed to possess the income and credit scores to qualify for the program. Yet after months of trying, even with the help of Staten Island Legal Services, not one has obtained a permanent modification. Any single case speaks as eloquently as another. Eric and Annette Padilla bought their home in 2003. Then Mr. Padilla fell ill and Ms. Padilla quit her job to care for him, and the couple fell behind on their mortgage in 2009. (Their income dropped to less than $60,000, from $96,000.) They applied for the program through their bank, HSBC, and received a three-month modification. They made the payments on time. In August 2009, they requested a permanent modification. The Padillas called the bank every week. One representative said their file was incomplete, another asked for more documents, a third said the documents were there all along. In September, the bank said their documents had “become stale” and told them to resubmit. Eventually, they were given a new temporary modification. Once again they made every payment on time. In January 2010, they sought another permanent modification. Then they heard back from HSBC: denied. The reason? The couple had overpaid one month. Last summer, HSBC filed papers to foreclose against the Padillas. For Mr. Padilla, 41, the house was his step out of the housing projects; he has no intention of surrendering. “I ask myself sometimes, why is this happening?” he says. “Wasn’t this program set up for hard-working people like us?”
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
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Pet Stylist By JED LIPINSKI “
W
hat does a doggie stylist do?” Wendy Williams asked Dara Foster on a recent episode of her syndicated daytime talk show. “Basically the same thing as a human stylist,” Ms. Foster replied. “I dress dogs, and I show people how to live together with their dogs in a stylish way.” Moments later, a fashion show commenced; a longhaired Chihuahua named Mei Mei scampered down the studio’s AstroTurf runway. “Mei Mei is wearing the ’80s-inspired punk look,” Ms. Foster narrated, pointing out the dog’s tiny plaid kilt and rhinestoneskull tank top. The look, she added, is “giving way to a grunge movement in dog fashion — I swear to God.” It was an average day in the life of Ms. Foster, who has lately become television’s go-to style expert for all things pet-related. She appears regularly on the “Today” show on NBC, E!, TV Land and ABC News, dispensing advice on topics like pet home furnishings and baking your own organic dog biscuits. Not bad for a former fashion magazine editor, who started with a small line of dog collars and a Web site called PupStyle.com eight years ago. “At some point I realized that there was no real face for the $47 billion pet market in this country,” she said the other day, while browsing at Trixie & Peanut, a pet boutique on East 20th Street in New York. Petite
with sparkling blue eyes and a bright blond bob, Ms. Foster, 39, radiated a puppylike sense of optimism. “I figured I could curate the cool up-and-coming products and have an influence on what other pet designers were making.” Some of these products were on display at Trixie & Peanut. Dressed in a flowing black V-neck, Paige jeans and knee-high Italian leather boots, Ms. Foster drew attention to a synthetic mullet wig for dogs (“Can you believe it?” she said) and racks of dog apparel that included bridal gowns, bathrobes and denim jumpsuits. She admired a snowball-shaped chew toy from Planet Dog, an ecofriendly design company in Maine. “Toy makers are finally seeing dog toys as aesthetic objects, as things that look good in your home,” she said. But like a true style arbiter, she can also be frank in her criticisms. She recently declared the Fab Furcedes Pet Bed a “Doggie Don’t” on PupStyle. (Puns are rampant in this market segment — see the brands Bark Jacobs, Chewy Vuiton and Manolo Barknik.) “It looks cheap, and the joke is over in about four seconds,” Ms. Foster said coolly, running her hand over the car-shaped bed’s plush red taillights. Ms. Foster stays abreast of emerging pet trends (precooked meals and fluorescent styling gel are hot right now, she said). She also keeps tabs on dog fashion capitals like Korea and Tokyo, where fads can reach absurd heights. “I’ve heard of owners and their dogs getting matching tattoos,” she said. “There’s an element of craziness in pet fashion, obviously, but that’s
going way, way overboard. That’s abuse.” It was the abuse of animals that led to her current career. After graduating from Hunter College in New York, Ms. Foster was a volunteer coordinator for Animal Care and Control of New York City, a nonprofit pet rescue agency. Perky and camera-ready, she served as its spokeswoman, advocating for animal adoption and foster care on television. But the center also euthanizes unwanted pets, which weighed heavily on Ms. Foster. She took an “emotional break” from the pet world in 1995 and went to Seventeen magazine, where she worked as a retail editor and organized fashion shows at Midwestern shopping malls, before becoming a freelance fashion stylist for magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Marie Claire. Her transition to pet stylist came in 2002, when she designed a white dog collar with red leather whipstitching for her dying Jack Russell terrier, Tulip. It drew raves on the sidewalk. In response, she and her husband, Jonathan Spooner, the owner of a boutique Web agency, introduced a brand of dog collars called Dara Foster New York. “The luxury dog market was in its infancy back then,” Ms. Foster said. “So we thought, ‘Let’s just go crazy.’ You know — solid silver buckles, 24-karat gold-plated leash hooks.” Around that time, she started PupStyle, a Web site devoted to dog fashion. The site gained national attention in 2003 for its “Free Tinkerbell” dog shirts, which displayed a graphic of Paris Hilton and her newly acquired Chihuahua. But it wasn’t until Ms. Foster co-
vered the first New York Pet Fashion Week, a dog fashion trade show started in 2006, that the news media outlets started to call. Video clips of her chatty interviews went viral, showing up on trend-spotting Web sites like Coolhunting.com and JoshSpear.com. Soon, she hired a publicist, Alanna Zahn of the Azure Group, who represented Cesar Millan (a k a the “Dog Whisperer”) and who introduced her to a producer at the “Today” show. “At that point it was just on,” Ms. Foster said. TV, print and Web media now call at least once a week. For a recent segment on E! titled “Insanely Pampered Hollywood Dogs,” Ms. Foster flew to Los Angeles to outfit the actress and singer Taryn Manning’s Maltese mix, Penguin. In March, on another episode of “The Wendy Williams Show,” she hosted a red-carpet-inspired runway show, in which an Italian greyhound named Rosie modeled a dress based on Natalie Portman’s Victor & Rolf gown from the Golden Globes ceremony. Ms. Foster also has a new book, “Now You See It! PupStyle” (Scholastic Paperbacks), a children’s flipbook with photographs of styled and “naked” dogs, that is being released on Friday. Meanwhile, she remains committed to animal rights. Ms. Foster is active with the Humane Society, using her semi-celebrity status to raise money. Her dream, she said, is to start a national pet food bank, for people who can’t afford to feed, let alone dress, their pets. “If that could make a difference between hanging onto your pet and dropping them off at a shelter,” she said, “we could save a lot of lives.”
Wine
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The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
Unfamiliar, but Worth Getting to Know By ERIC ASIMOV
F
EW things are simple in northeastern Italy, least of all lagrein, a red grape that can produce fresh, aromatic, highly seductive wines. Why, just last week, I asked a linguistically minded friend who is fluent in Italian for the proper pronunciation of lagrein. Here is his response, or part of it: “Lagrein is a tough one,” he said, “in part because it’s pronounced using a Germanic, as opposed to an Italianate vowel system.” He went on to offer his preference, lahGRAH’EEN, but allowed that lahGRINE and lah-GREYE’NE (where greye rhymes with eye) were also acceptable. Well, linguists are nothing if not perfectionists. But even allowing for such hairsplitting, lagrein comes with ample grounds for confusion. It is grown primarily in Alto Adige, a region so far to the north in Alpine Italy that it practically touches Austria and Switzerland. There, the culture is more Tyrolean than Italian, and the first language is often German. Many wines from the region are labeled in both Italian and in German. Even the name of the region, Alto Adige, does not speak for itself; it is generally rendered bilin-
gually with its German counterpart, Südtirol (South Tyrol, using the Germanic vowel system, of course). Whatever you want to call it, the region is a good source for crisp whites, including the much-maligned pinot grigio, which takes on more substance and character when made there with serious purpose. Not unexpectedly, the Germanic grapes gewürztraminer and riesling do very well, and I am partial to the pinot neros of Alto Adige, that is, pinot noirs. But I am particularly interested in lagrein, a grape that, like its counterpart teroldego in nearby Trentino, is grown almost nowhere else. For such an unusual grape, though, it produces congenial, straightforward wines that can be deliciously plummy, earthy and chewy, dark and full-bodied but not heavy, with a pronounced minerally edge. But it is unfamiliar, which is an understandable obstacle for consumers. Why risk money on mysterious unpronounceable bottles when so many good, satisfying known quantities are available? It’s a battle I fight with myself every time I go out to eat. I know I love the twice-cooked pork, I say to myself at the Sichuan place. Why or-
der anything else? But then I remember how much I also love the smoked duck with shredded ginger, and the bean curd with minced pork, and even the beef tendon in chili oil, and I realize that all these dishes were once unknown, until I tried them. As gratifying as it is to know one thing deeply, it’s at least as satisfying to know and enjoy many things, no? Naturally, if you want to experiment, it helps to pick a good bottle. To examine the selection of lagreins available to American consumers, the wine panel recently tasted 20 bottles, from vintages going back to 2004, all found in retail outlets. For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Lacey Burke, a sommelier at Del Posto in Chelsea, and Shin Tseng, wine director at Lupa in Greenwich Village. Both Del Posto and Lupa have deep, eclectic wine lists, with at least several lagreins available. But both Lacey and Shin conceded that they don’t move a lot of bottles. “It has to be a real hand-sell,” Lacey said, meaning the sommelier has to take the initiative to talk up a lagrein. We all found the lagreins to be appealing wines that managed to combine richness and delicacy and that seemed to be delicious both young and with five or more years of aging. Shin, though, said she preferred lagreins with some age, as the youthful fruitiness becomes more complex. “With 5 to 10 years, a gaminess comes out,” she said. “They can be really elegant, as well.” The wines we liked best had a savory side, along with floral notes and lively acidity, which Florence suggested makes them versatile with food. On the down side, Lacey thought too many of the wines lacked sufficient structure. Our No. 1 wine was among the youngest in the tasting, a 2009 Merlau from Thürnhof, bright, refreshing, minerally and delicate, with long, lingering flavors. Although our top wine was an ’09, it was the only one of six 2009 wines in our tasting to make our top 10, suggesting that at least a couple of years of age do benefit the wines. That said, a 2008, the light-bodied, gentle Castelfeder Rieder, did come in at No. 2.
The 2004 Lindenburg from Alois Lageder, our No. 4 wine, was the oldest in the tasting, and Shin guessed at first sniff that it had some age to it. It was spicy and mineral, with a touch of chocolate, and the fruit clearly had mellowed. Seven of the 20 bottles were less than $20, and 13 were less than $30, but lagreins are not always inexpensive. Our No. 3 bottle, the opulent, well-structured, complex 2006 Porphyr Riserva from Cantina Terlan, was $60, by far the most expensive wine in our tasting. At the other end of the price scale, our best value was the 2008 San Pietro for $13, a pleasingly juicy wine that delivers straightforward pleasure. Other producers to consider include Elena Walch, who makes a delicate entry-level lagrein and a deeper riserva; Hofstätter, whose lagreins are long on charm and spice; Niedrist, whose lagreins are sumptuous, and Nusserhof, who makes soulful lagreins, but whose entry in our tasting sadly was corked. As for where lagrein fits into the panoply of wine grapes, it’s hard to say without resorting to other obscure grapes of northeastern Italy. It sometimes shows a chocolate flavor reminiscent of refosco, a grape of Friuli Venezia-Giulia and a subject for further research. And in size and weight, it certainly suggests teroldego. Try it for yourself and see what you think. And as for the pronunciation, don’t worry about it. Just rhyme it with wine.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
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ART
Big Crowds, Big Names Visit Dali Museum E
ven those who work there sometimes can’t believe the buzz surrounding the new Salvador Dalí Museum. The museum’s deputy director, Kathy White, was on the phone with a reporter explaining how the Dalí had shattered its attendance record in the last two months. Then she gasped. “Oh, my, Jeff Koons just walked in,” she whispered. That would be Jeffrey Koons, the American artist whose work fetches prices north of $20 million and can be found in some of the most exclusive collections in the world. He visited the Dalí with his family to peruse paintings that have influenced his work. Koons was just the latest proof of the global pull the Dalí’s new $36 million museum has had since opening Jan. 11 along the city’s waterfront, a mere six blocks away from its old home on Third Street S. It’s not that museum officials didn’t expect big crowds. They did, estimating that the new digs would attract 400,000 visitors in its first year, double the museum’s average annual attendance. But on March 18, the museum hit the 100,000 attendance mark, a pace that, if it continues,
would put it ahead of projections by 50 percent. “Our goal was to double attendance,” White said. “But we’re ahead of that. Everyone’s feeling excited and pleased. It’s been exhausting and exhilarating.” The weekend’s Grand Prix race dampened attendance, she said. And the concrete barriers and construction pylons from the race still block the entrance to the museum. But visitors keep coming. “We didn’t have trouble making our way here. We just followed the signs,” said Claude
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Comes from page 17 Roy, who came with his wife, Violet, from Montreal. “The architecture is so nice. We really enjoyed it.” That Dalí appeals to an international audience is what has hotel operators hoping the museum can soften a slump in global tourism. “Our international numbers are down,” said Keith Overton, president of TradeWinds Island Resorts. “Dalí is pretty well known in Europe, so who knows? We need an international boost big time.” Overton said the impact of the Dalí has already been obvious since mid January, where his hotel has sold 200 packages that include Dalí tickets. “We’ll take it,” he said. The pace at the museum may slow once the summer heat arrives, but Cindy Cockburn, the museum’s spokeswoman, said she expects the crowds to persist. They’re coming partly because of an ambitious public relations effort. For the past three years, museum representatives and state and local tourism officials have flown to New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington,
and London to meet with media executives to stoke interest. Recent articles or mentions of the new Dalí have run in a wide variety of national, international and local publications, including Conde Nast Traveler, Marie Claire, W, Southern Living, Modern Bride, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, London Times and USA Today. All that attention helped spread the word to visitors like Judy Williams of Nashville . “I read about it somewhere,” Williams said. “I don’t know where exactly, but I’m here now.”
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
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New York Times Editorials THE HIGH PRICE OF RIGIDITY
H
House have demanded everything: not just some of their cuts but almost all of them, and not just a reduction in spending but a reduction only in the programs they don’t like. Many are insisting Democrats also agree to nonbudgetary riders, like ending the financing of Planned Parenthood or health care reform. They simply will not accede to anything that looks like a compromise with President Barack Obama. Caught in this position, Speaker John Boehner knows the public is likely to blame Republicans for the pain of a shutdown, once it sees that the Democrats offered difficult compromises that his caucus rejected. That is the price he pays for riding to power on the backs of people who don’t understand that government cannot be built out of ideological rigidity.
If Boehner cannot persuade his members that the public does not want a government shutdown and will blame them, then much of the government will close its doors April 8, when the current stopgap funding measure runs out. So far, the Republicans have wrung $10 billion in cuts from earlier deadlines, but their bill to butcher the current year’s budget with $61 billion in radical cuts was voted down in the Senate. Democrats have put together a package of $20 billion in cuts, on top of the $10 billion already agreed to. They have not released the details, but officials say they could include some current spending and some mandatory programs, like agriculture subsidies. This package is likely to be far more painful than the last one and will almost certainly pull back
the reins much further than is prudent when the economic recovery is still sputtering. But in the split-thedifference culture of Washington, it will get them halfway toward the Republican goal line, further than imaginable just a few weeks ago. Does that mean the House will end the week-by-week bloodletting that is already hampering many federal agencies? So far the signs do not look promising. Republicans have told Democratic negotiators that the cuts can only come from their original, rejected bill. Many are still clinging to the ideological riders that will certainly draw a presidential veto. One way or the other, Tea Party lawmakers are about to learn a lesson in how government operates; the only question is whether the public must suffer for their education.
THE FIRST WAR ON OBAMA’S WATCH
that we believe in.” We jumped to the topic of U.S. relations with Latin America. I asked about the controversy that has broken out in Mexico over “Operation Fast and Furious,” in which agents of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, TobaccoFirearms and Explosives reportedly allowed hundreds of illegal firearms to pass into Mexico in order to later track the weapons to Mexican drug lords. Did Obama authorize the operation? Was Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon notified? “First of all, I did not authorize it. Eric Holder, the attorney general, did not authorize it,” he replied. “So what (Holder has) done is he’s assigned an I.G. – inspector general – to investigate what exactly happened.” Was Obama not even informed about the operation? “Absolutely not. This is a pretty big government; it’s got a lot of moving parts.” “Calderon was not informed, then?” I asked. “Well, if I wasn’t informed, I assure you that Mexico wasn’t, either.” We also spoke about his five-day visit to Latin America. Throughout his travels, he spoke of improving cooperation in the fight against the drug trade, fostering better trade re-
lations and reforming immigration. Obama met with three presidents – Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, Chile’s Sebastian Pinera and El Salvador’s Mauricio Funes – who, regardless of their political leanings, are pragmatic leaders who have helped consolidate democracy in their respective countries. “Ideology is no longer important,” Obama told me. ‘’People just want to find out what works. They’re less interested in ideology – ‘Is this right or left?’ They want to know: ‘Are our kids getting educated? Are businesses developing? Are standards of living improving? Are people more secure and more safe?’ I think it is an enormous opportunity for both the United States and Latin America to think in those practical terms to help the people.’’ Given Japan’s nuclear crisis and the outbreak of yet another military conflict, some people had assumed that Obama would cancel or postpone his trip to Latin America. But he persevered. And after following the president throughout his tour, it became apparent to me that Obama is indeed bettering the U.S. image in the region. This is, no doubt, a brand new day – for both the U.S. and the world.
ouse Republicans have already won so much in this year’s federal budget standoff that they could easily declare victory and put an end to the maddening and dysfunctional cycle. Previous Congresses would have noticed that millions of people are still struggling in an economic downturn and tried to help, but Republicans have succeeded in shutting off that conversation. They have won the philosophical war, compelling Democrats to agree to tens of billions in spending cuts. Yet that does not seem to be enough for the Republicans who now control the federal steering wheel. With a hard deadline looming, talks to prevent a government shutdown have been stymied for a week because Tea Party members of the
A
s President Barack Obama adjusted his microphone before my interview with him last week, I told him what we journalists accompanying him on his first tour through Latin America were thinking: how difficult it must be to launch a military operation a world away. The difficulties greatly increase when the commander-in-chief must make decisions about bombing Moammar Gadhafi’s military installations while traveling in Brazil, Chile and El Salvador. I started my interview by asking the president about the U.S.led attacks on Libya – essentially, his first war. He immediately corrected me. “Unfortunately, this is not my first war,” Obama said. “I inherited two.” I asked about the military objective in Libya. In addition to protecting civilians and promoting democracy, was getting rid of Gadhafi also a goal of the allied military intervention? “This is a very specific military action that’s time-limited, that is in support of an international effort to prevent a humanitarian crisis in
Libya,” he said, “and to establish a no-fly zone so Gadhafi cannot use his armed forces against his own people.” What happens, I asked, if despite attacks from the allied coalition, Gadhafi remains in power? “A land invasion is out of the question, absolutely,” Obama said. “Now, as I’ve said before, we believe it’s in the world’s interest and, even more importantly, the Libyan people’s interest, that Gadhafi steps down – and there are a range of tools to accomplish that.” I asked him about past U.S. challenges to dictators_ namely Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Panama’s Manuel Noriega – and pointed out that the U.S. maintains excellent diplomatic relations with other authoritarian regimes, like those in China and Saudi Arabia. Why this double standard in foreign policy? “I don’t think there is a double standard,” the president told me. “This (Libya) is a unique situation ... We deal with countries all the time who don’t have the same kind of government that we would like, and we will use diplomatic tools – and we will express the universal values
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The San Juan Weeekly
LETTERS Yet More Fortaleza Trickery Fortuño to UPR students: We’ll help you pay the $800---maybe---but you have to enroll for the semester first, sign up for the payment schedule. Then we’ll let you know in a few weeks whether or not the money’s run out by the time we got to you. If so, well, we’ve clipped you for the $800, you should’ve skipped the semester, silly. And remember what Ygrís and I did to you for trusting us last time, how I unforgettably packed the Council of Higher Education, just like I did to the Supreme Court. Yes, Mussolini would be proud of me. And the joke’s on you. Jennifer Contreras, Condado
Sharks Devour Their Own
Gentlemen would’ve allowed Sen. Héctor Martínez a few days to catch his bearings and do the right thing. Instead it was an immediate feeding frenzy of political opportunism. For a narrative of how such an affair is handled in a dignified manner, read Octopussy by Ian Fleming. No, the movie doesn’t have it. Bob Harris, Condado
At Least a Cop Won’t Kill You The “revised” Penal Code says up to 50 years for “sexual assault.” The undeniable outcome is such attackers will now murder their victims, it’s become worth it to not risk leaving the witness behind. And when police deliberately grab and squeeze the breasts of UPR coed strikers, like we all saw on TV, no prosecutor will press such a charge, as won’t happen now. Don’t you know selective enforcement of the law is tyranny? Caramelo Rodríguez, Old San Juan
Means, Consequences & Hipocrisy You want to get rid of the rats, but you hate cats. Like if you’re ruffled by ants, you gotta love anteaters. My mother wanted to clear the dining room of flies, so I brought her flypaper and that sent her up the wall, such a porquería. The Catholic Church is dead set against contraception. All because in Genesis God
tells Adam to populate the earth. But that was 6 billion people ago. And if everybody used contraception, there’d be no abortion, would there? And who’d be more likely to set up a euthanasia routine? Private insurers, who would then rush to exclude from coverage anything where the afflicted should select a vial of cyanide instead, and thus make even more money, or a democratic socialist government? Ergo, an advocate of Catholicism and capitalism is inevitably a promoter of both abortion and euthanasia. Juan Vega, Caparra
When Truth Is the Opposite of What Is Said To Gov. Fortuño: I must truly thank you for a good laugh, I giggled all day. You announced on TV that you “intend to strengthen even more the professionalism of the Puerto Rico Police.” Anita Roig, Santurce
Learning From Your Elders You’re 19. At UPR you’ve read Plato, Dante, Descartes, Marx, Freud. The basics you get as a prepa. And you know all about Ghandi. Who got his way with the Brits cleverly without much bloodshed. Maybe you’re an honor student or an athlete. That earns you free tuition. Only one good day that de la Torre fellow and his sidekick Ana Guadalupe take it from you because you get a fraction of a Pell Grant. Theft pure and simple. They do it to many others too, so you all go on strike. You and your classmates made a big stink. I mean, that’s what a strike is all about. If you keep to a corner, poster in hand, and mouth some songs, did anybody ever make it like that? Nevertheless you hurt nobody and you respect property. And what does that get you? Gigantic apes in uniform (was it the anabolics?) then beat you all, even the girls, with those shiny black nightsticks with two handles that hurt so much because the have a lead core. And they pin you to the floor and torture you with electricity. Or a police lieutenant kicks you repeatedly into the groin. Or they spray the toxic pepper stuff straight into your eyes
while you’re seated. And it’s all on TV. Then the evening news tells that the cops expressed over the Internet their enjoyment of inflicting pain. And you see they broke the windshield of a car because someone from within called them criminals, and got away with even this. You’re relieved when Ana Guadalupe says you won the strike, that you can keep the tuition exemption you earned. So you all go back to classes. But the Governor packs the Board of Trustees with penepeísta hacks, just as he did to the Supreme Court, and instructs them to renege, to charge each of you $800 for your trouble. Retroactive to the strike, he adds facetiously. So come December, with a heavy heart you’re at it again. Only this time the police have new tricks. When you pull a Ghandi-style sit-in, they strangle you in a way that can kill you and only stop when a cardiologist attests to this on TV. And they take your girls, perhaps your girlfriend or your sister, drag them into police pick-ups and with visible relish squeeze both their breasts with their hands. Again, all on the screen. The ACLU cries out, priests, civic groups, churches, artists, Congessman Luis Gutiérrez in Washington. Even Fidel Castro! To scant effect. The Governor speaks vaguely of an administrative inquest, yet at the time of the electrocutions and the kicking he congratulated the police, the Superintendent, that Heinrich Himmler lookalike, all very publicly. And now there’s a shiny new monument to the police in Puerta de Tierra and Fortuño gives a smiley speech praising the “professionalism” of the Puerto Rico Police. When you were a todler your parents told you you’d been born under freedom. That there was a Constitution. Two of them here. That you had natural rights, the right to be secure in your person, to speak out, to assemble, to strike even. But that’s hardly what happens on our politician-despoiled island. One good afternoon, as fate would have it, you get the chance to rough up none other that Ana Guadalupe, you’d sure love to scare the daylights out of here and pull her hair. Why not? Mara Andere, Miramar
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April 7 - 13, 2011
San Juan Weekly
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modern love
Revenge of the Friend By CHRISTI CLANCY
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HEY kissed! Nobody kisses in spin class. A roomful of sweaty people panting atop steel bikes with 30-pound flywheels is no place for romance, and certainly no place for my friend’s ex-husband to show up with his girlfriend, the woman he left her for. It was just a few weeks into the new year, and I had a packed class of weekend warriors perched on their saddles waiting for me to help them fulfill their resolutions to become skinny and fit. My friend’s ex was the last person I expected to see. In the two years since they had split up, I’d gone out of my way to avoid him. But here he was, looking as ridiculous as most middle-aged men do in tight Lycra shorts. I couldn’t have imagined a better scenario to let him have it. I had a microphone strapped around my head and a captive audience. The problem was that I used to like him. I attended his children’s baptisms and helped plan his 40th birthday party. We had spent countless hours together drinking wine and commiserating about child-rearing, long Wisconsin winters and interrupted sleep. He could be charming, and that morning his familiar charm disarmed me before I could remind myself that I wasn’t supposed to like him anymore. My smile was a reflex that he misinterpreted as a welcome. A small woman with a tight ponytail and a toothy smile walked in and stood next to him. He introduced her as his “friend.” It was hard for me to reconcile this flesh and blood woman with the home-wrecking diva I had imagined the past few years. She seemed so harmless and normal. “We decided to give spinning a try,” he said. “Can you help us get set up?” We. Us. What could I do? I led them to a pair of bikes. I’ve taught spin for over a decade, so even though their presence had thrown me, I could still mindlessly check their settings and offer instructions. She must have known who I was because she went out of her way to kill me with kindness. I wanted her to stop chirping so I could wrap my brain around the fact that she was in my class. Then he called her Sweetie (the same thing he used to call his wife) and I snapped back to attention, shut the door, dimmed the lights, and cranked up the music. I got on my bike and looked out at my class. I usually love teaching on Satur-
day mornings, but now I was distracted and unsettled, remembering how he had initiated their split. They were drinking coffee on their front porch when he said, “I’m leaving, and I don’t want to work things out.” He was apologetic but firm. It didn’t take long for him to confess there was someone else. “Don’t judge,” my husband warned me, but I couldn’t help it. If this could happen to them, could it happen to us? Their breakup made everything I considered solid seem vulnerable, like a bone riddled with stress fractures. In the aftermath, my friend couldn’t sleep or eat, and she worried constantly about their children and her finances. To make matters worse, a year or so after they split, she was given a diagnosis of cancer. There were other spin classes and other instructors. Why had they come to mine? Did he think this would make things “normal” again? Was he cruel, or clueless? I tried to focus. I followed my planned profile, leading us up some imaginary hills and sprinting past invisible riders. I was just getting my groove back when I looked up and saw him lean toward her, and there it was: the kiss. That’s when I decided that if they came back to my class next week, I’d be ready. The following Saturday I showed up early. My regulars filed in with towels and water bottles, barely awake. And then, sure enough, in they walked, holding hands, wearing big smiles and matching powder-blue jerseys. “Good morning,” exclaimed Mr. Spin Class Kisser, looking fresh and robust. I led the lovers toward the middle row of bikes. The easiest bikes have big, comfortable seats and magnetic resistance. The toughest are the Pros, with narrow saddles that are hard as concrete. With fixed gears, the Pros require the kind of pedal efficiency that only comes with a lot of practice. Most people are too intimidated to attempt them. When the Pros first arrived, I found them so difficult to ride that I thought they must be broken. Even after training on them for months, the longest I could stand up out of the saddle without losing control or combusting was about a minute. So, naturally, that’s what I set him up on. The lights on the bike’s computer flickered on, showing watts, KJs, HRs, RPMs: numbers I knew meant nothing to him. He looked confused. “Oh, you’ll love this,” I said.
I put her right next to him on the Sunday cruiser, a bike so gentle she may as well have had a straw basket with flowers attached to the handlebars. I turned away and cued the music. I like making themed playlists for my classes: Irish music for St. Patrick’s Day, songs about food for Thanksgiving. I’ve got playlists for rain, snow, summer, peace and revolution. For this occasion, I created a new playlist: music for cheaters. I had spent the week going through my iTunes library and settled on songs like Rihanna’s “Unfaithful,” Jewel’s “Till It Feels Like Cheating,” and some classics: “Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” and “Tempted.” I know spin instructors have a reputation for being sadistic, but I never saw myself that way. I tell people to ride at their own pace and take breaks. That morning, however, I offered no such assurances. “Thirty-second sprint out of the saddle,” I barked. “Go! Grab it, nail it!” (Whatever “it” was.) “Come on, hammer it! Your legs should be like eggbeaters! Boil your quads!” I got off my bike and walked around the room, lingering behind the lovers to make them feel my presence. I watched sweat drip onto the floor around his bike, so much that I could practically see my reflection in it. I thought of my friend’s quivering hands and pained expression when she told me about their breakup. I thought of the hours I’d spent with her in the clinic while the chemo pumped into her arm, and the nights I slept at her house when she didn’t want to be alone. It didn’t seem fair that she had to suffer through so much while her ex seemingly got everything he wanted. I liked to think I was doing this for my friend, but this was my own revenge. I hadn’t even told her about them showing up at my class. I didn’t want to hurt her, and in truth, I’m not sure she would have
cared. She and her ex had reached a certain peace I found hard to imagine. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they were friends, but they got along well enough. I knew I was acting childish and petty. It wasn’t me he had left, but it felt as if he had broken a pact we had made as couples. After two years of biting my tongue, this felt necessary, cathartic. I got back on my bike and watched as he strained, his face red and hair drenched. Yet he was managing. I almost couldn’t believe it. It was hard for him, but not impossible. I don’t think either of them paid any attention to the lyrics I’d so carefully selected. At the end of the class I turned down the music and led some stretches. The spinners wiped down their bikes and drank from their water bottles. O.K., so I hadn’t broken him, but I was still feeling pretty pleased with myself. Until he walked up with a towel around his neck and gave me a pat on the back with his large, damp hand. “I got to tell you,” he said. “That was the best workout I’ve had in a long time.” “Oh, it was wonderful,” she added. “We loved it.” A FEW weeks later, I met my friend for a glass of wine. Her hair used to be straight, but it had grown back curly and looked nice that way. Her cancer had been caught early, and she had a good prognosis. I decided to tell her what I had done — or at least tried to do. As I sheepishly related the story of my clever (if unnoticed) playlist and punishing (but welcomed) routine, she listened with an expression that seemed to be a mixture of curiosity and horror. When I stopped talking, she didn’t say anything at first. I worried I had hurt her, or that she disapproved. Then I saw a small smile tug at the side of her mouth. “You’re a good friend,” she said.
Kitchen
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April 7 - 13, 2011
The San Juan Weekly
Onion Pizza With Ricotta and Chard By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN
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his luxurious pizza is topped with tender caramelized onions spread over a creamy mixture of ricotta, Parmesan cheese and chopped Swiss chard. 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 1 1/4 pounds onions, sliced 1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme leaves 2 garlic cloves, minced Salt and freshly ground pepper 1/2 pound chard, stemmed, leaves washed 1 14-inch pizza crust (1/2 batch pizza dough) 3/4 cup ricotta (6 ounces) 2 ounces Parmesan, grated (1/2 cup, tightly packed) 1 egg yolk 1. Thirty minutes before baking the pizza, preheat the oven to 500 degrees. Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a large, heavy skillet. Add the onions. Cook, stirring of-
ten, until tender and just beginning to color, about 10 minutes. Add the thyme, garlic and a generous pinch of salt. Turn the heat to low, cover and cook another 10 to 20 minutes, stirring often, until the onions are golden brown and very sweet and soft. Remove from the heat. 2. While the onions are cooking, stem and wash the chard leaves, and bring a medium pot of water to a boil. Fill a medium bowl with ice water. When the water comes to a boil, salt generously and add the chard. Blanch for one to two minutes, just until the leaves are tender, and transfer to the ice water. Drain and squeeze out excess water. Alternatively, steam the chard for two to three minutes until wilted, and rinse with cold water. Chop the chard medium-ďŹ ne. 3. Roll out the dough, oil a 14-inch pizza pan and dust with cornmeal or semolina. Place the dough on the pan. 4. In a medium bowl, combine the ricotta, egg yolk, Parmesan and
chard. Spread over the pizza dough in an even layer, leaving a 1-inch border around the rim. Spread the onions over the ricotta mixture. 5. Place in the hot oven, and bake 10 to 15 minutes until the crust and bits of the onion are nicely browned. Remove from the heat, and serve hot or warm. Yield: One 14-inch pizza (eight slices). Advance preparation: The co-
oked onions and the blanched or steamed chard will keep for three or four days in the refrigerator. Nutritional information per slice: 227 calories; 4 grams saturated fat; 1 gram polyunsaturated fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 41 milligrams cholesterol; 25 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary ďŹ ber; 375 grams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 10 grams protein
April 7 - 13, 2011
The San Juan Weekly
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Kitchen
An Easter Treat From the ‘Cake Boss’ By ALEX WITCHEL
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L’ BLUE EYES is gone, so these days in Hoboken, they’re lining up for someone else. On a recent Monday morning, brown-eyed Buddy Valastro, the owner of Carlo’s Bakery and the star of TLC’s “Cake Boss,” “Kitchen Boss” and “Cake Boss: Next Great Baker,” stood in his office on the second floor surveying the hundred or so people waiting to get in. He opened the window and waved. “Look! It’s Buddy! Oh my God!” Cameras flashed, people applauded. “Buddy, how’s your baby?” “He’s good,” Mr. Valastro called. “Thanks for coming.” The window closed. Not for long, though; never for long. “Cake Boss,” which debuted in 2009 (it is now seen in 160 countries), is a reality show that follows most days in the life of Mr. Valastro, a preternaturally talented baker, as he decorates 50 wedding cakes in a week (black stencils on white fondant, try that at home) or takes on challenges like repli-
Pizza Rustica Adapted from Carlo’s Bakery Time: 21/2 hours, plus time for cooling FOR THE DOUGH: 6 cups all-purpose flour, plus more as needed 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 pound chilled salted butter, cut into large pieces 5 large eggs, beaten FOR THE FILLING: 12 ounces prosciutto, in 1/4-inch dice 8 ounces boiled ham, in 1/4-inch dice 8 ounces pepperoni, in 1/4-inch dice 8 ounces soppressata, in 1/4-inch dice 8 ounces mozzarella, in 1/4-inch dice 8 ounces provolone, in 1/4-inch dice 2 pounds ricotta 4 ounces grated pecorino Romano 10 large eggs, beaten 1 teaspoon pepper 1 large egg, beaten, for brushing crust. 1. For the dough: In a large bowl, whisk together 6 cups flour and the salt. Using a pastry cutter, large fork, or two knives, cut the butter into the flour until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add eggs and knead for 1 minute. Add about 1 1/4 cups ice water, a little at a time, to form a cohesive dough. Knead the dough
cating the Tuscan villa where Rachael Ray spent her honeymoon — in cake. He constructed a confectionary Sesame Street for the show’s 40th anniversary, with all the characters sculptured out of modeling chocolate, and reproduced the Leaning Tower of Pisa as a 4 ½-foot-tall wedding cake. Along with Mr. Valastro, a show biz natural with a personality that’s winning without being cloying (at least most of the time), the consistent draw is his crew. This, as he says at the top of each show, consists of “mia famiglia.” Think the Loud family, only louder: His four older sisters, who run the bakery counter when they’re not screaming at him or at one another (two of their husbands are among the bakers); his mother, who likes to scold her 34-yearold son for his penchant for practical jokes (“You may be the cake boss, but I’m the real boss!”); his three adorable children under the age of 7; and his remarkably goodnatured wife, Lisa, who gave birth to their fourth child on Valentine’s Day. Actual footage of Carlo Salvatore’s birth was inon a lightly floured surface until it forms a large smooth ball, about 5 minutes. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside for 30 minutes. 2. For the filling: Mix the meats, cheeses, the 10 eggs and pepper in a large bowl. 3. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Divide the dough into two pieces: two-thirds for the bottom crust and one-third for the top. On a lightly floured surface, roll out the larger portion of the dough into a rectangle to line the bottom and sides of a 10-by15-inch glass baking dish, with some overhang. Add the filling and smooth it lightly. Moisten the edges of the dough with a little water. 4. Roll out the remaining dough to cover the top of the dish with some overhang. Trim off excess dough and crimp the edges to seal. Poke several sets of holes across the top with a fork. Bake for 45 minutes. Remove from the oven and brush top and edges with the beaten egg, then return to the oven until golden brown, another 45 minutes. Let pie cool completely before serving. Yield: One 10-by-15-inch pie.
cluded in a new episode, along with tears, congratulations, back slapping and 3-yearold Marco trilling, “Is it out?” “It’s a show about family; how could I not have included it?” Mr. Valastro said. I had come to Carlo’s so he could show me how to make pizza rustica, a traditional Italian-American dish for Easter, or as his family calls it, cold-cut pie. It is a deep-dish cousin to quiche, packed with deli meats and cheeses, and it is the only savory item the bakery makes. It is available there for just three weeks, from March 30 through Easter (April 24 this year). First, we sat in his office, drinking coffee. Mr. Valastro is alternately low-key and laser-focused. His television persona is all hugs and cupcakes, punctuated by strategically placed fits of temper. But in person, he is deliberate and systematic, thinking three steps ahead; if his eyebrow even lifts, there are plenty of staff members available to interpret his needs. An exacting bakery boss who is also a star who is also an entrepreneurial businessman is a dangerous person to disappoint. His television shows aside, Mr. Valastro is in the midst of a major expansion, outfitting a factory in Jersey City so he can move the baking out of this building to make room for more customers; he can also increase his volume and sell his products nationally. He plans to move Fior d’Italia, the pizzeria owned by Lisa’s father in Union, N.J., to a spot around the corner from Carlo’s, augmenting the menu with family recipes of the sort he prepares on “Kitchen Boss.” And on April 12, a Cake Boss cafe will open at Discovery Times Square, an exhibition space on West 44th Street in Manhattan. Buddy (né Bartolo) Valastro is a fourth-generation baker whose father was born on Lipari, an island near Sicily, where the family was so poor they resorted to eating other people’s garbage. They emigrated, and once Buddy Sr. was in his 20s he started working at Carlo’s, which he bought in 1963. By the time Buddy Jr. was 11, he was working there on weekends. When he made the football team, his father forbade him from joining because games were played on the weekends. His son did not resent this; the two were unusually close.
Buddy Sr. died of cancer at 54. Buddy Jr., who was 17, dropped out of vocational high school to take over the bakery. “Losing my father, my best friend, idol, mentor, was crushing,” he said. “I didn’t know if I wanted to live or die at that time. And people were mean. They’d say, ‘The bakery isn’t the same, it’s going to go under.’ I wanted those people to eat their words. I had to step up. I was a good kid. The problem was that I was expected to be my father. I talk to 17-year-old kids now and I’m dumbfounded. How could I do what I did? “I had to learn things the hard way,” he continued. “People look at me now and say, ‘He’s lucky,’ like I hit the Lotto. This has been years in the making. Getting into bridal magazines, showing up at bridal events. I was my own P.R. person, I marketed myself. I’ve always been driven. When I started doing cakes, I would take them apart five or six times or throw them in the garbage and start from scratch.” We went into the kitchen where he assembled the cold-cut pie, rolling out the dough, leaning often on his forearms. Mr. Valastro’s hands are his fortune and he knows it. “My hands? Forget about it,” he said. “I don’t cream them, though. They’re in butter all day.” At the first cut of the pie, the other bakers dropped their work and lined up. Delicious. “People eat it at room temperature for lunch or brunch,” Mr. Valastro said, “but we eat it out of the oven.” By 11 a.m. we were done, but his day was jammed with meetings on the bakery, its expansion, the restaurant and the three TV shows (“Next Great Baker” is a competition; the winner works at Carlo’s). “It’s like an avalanche that started that I can’t stop,” he said. “How many people have three shows on the air that get renewed? I’m doing cakes I should think are crazy, but fans want to see me pushed to brink of insanity. It’s part of my job and I embrace it. I believe if I do something it’s not going to fail, if I put my heart into it and try my hardest.” Um, really? He allowed himself a smile. “I’m not talking about world peace,” he said. “But certain things, I get.”
Kitchen
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April 7 - 13, 2011
The San Juan Weekly
No-Fear Phyllo Torte By MELISSA CLARK
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FEW years ago, when my then-boyfriend-nowhusband took me to a dinner party, I expected to be intimidated. The host, Roger, is an esteemed professor of French literature, and I’d heard his parties were multilingual, highly intellectual affairs. Memories of graduate school still throbbing, I worried that I couldn’t keep up. But, I figured, if the conversation became entrenched in the minutiae of postmodern theory, I could hang out in the kitchen, where I’m always comfortable. I had it all wrong. Roger and his friends were warm and chatty, and they barely even mentioned Derrida. The intimidation came in the kitchen, where I caught Roger’s wife, Sonia, unmolding a magnificent domed pastry creation with a gilded crust. “It’s a feta cheese torte,” she said, slicing it into pieces. “It’s my mother’s recipe from Athens.” The pale, soft center was nubby-textured and flecked with herbs; the phyllo shattered into glistening shards when it met the knife. I snatched a stillwarm morsel from the pan. It was savory from the cheese, sweet from spice and crunchy from the brittle, buttery phyllo layers. The torte, Sonia said, is a specialty for Greek Orthodox Easter. She said it was easy, but I didn’t believe her. Sonia spent her early childhood in Greece. Phyllo-wrangling is in her blood. It isn’t in mine. So assuming the torte would be too labor intensive, I didn’t ask for the recipe. Since then, it has haunted me every spring, when I remember its rich, tangy filling, fragrant with pungent sheep’s milk feta, nutmeg and dill. Maybe it was coming off a month of doctor-enforced dairy deprivation, but this year, I craved that torte so fiercely that
nothing short of having to make my own phyllo would stop me from making it. I called Sonia for the recipe. “Do you have to make your own phyllo?” I asked tentatively. “Absolutely not,” Sonia said. “You don’t even have to butter the layers. You just pour melted butter over the top.” That did seem easy. The only hard part was finding a Greek (not domestic) feta to meet Sonia’s exacting standards. “Make sure to taste it first, it shouldn’t be too salty,” she counseled. Not being a connoisseur of feta cheese, I bought the only Greek one in the store. When I got home, though, I realized it was on the salty side even when mixed with the cottage cheese and seasonings in the recipe. So I added a little more cottage cheese to balance things. Then I spooned it into the phyllo-lined Bundt pan, poked some holes into the pastry and poured a river of butter on top. An hour and change later, I pulled the torte from the oven. It had puffed and browned gloriously. I immediately left the kit-
chen; it was all I could do not to tear into the torte before it cooled enough to unmold. Finally, I cut a small piece.
It was melting, luscious and just salty enough — just as I recalled, minus the intimidation factor. And all the sweeter for that.
Sonia’s Phyllo and Feta Torte With Dill and Nutmeg Time: An hour and a half, plus cooling 1 pound Greek feta cheese, crumbled 3 cups cottage cheese 3 large eggs 1/3 cup chopped fresh dill 1/4 cup grated Romano cheese 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 1 1-pound box phyllo dough, thawed overnight in refrigerator if necessary 1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) unsalted butter, melted Greek honey, for serving (optional).
1. Heat oven to 375 degrees. In a food processor, combine feta, cottage cheese, eggs, dill, 2 tablespoons Romano, the nutmeg and pepper and pulse just to combine (you can also use a large bowl and a fork). Mixture should be well combined, but still chunky, not smooth. 2. Sprinkle remaining 2 tablespoons Romano into a Bundt pan. Drape a sheet of phyllo on top of Bundt pan, poke a hole into phyllo where center tube is and push phyllo into pan to line it. Do this with another phyllo sheet, but place it perpendicular to first sheet. Continue adding phyllo sheets in this crisscross manner until all sheets are used. Edges of phyllo should hang
over edges of pan. 3. Scrape cheese filling into pan, and fold edges of phyllo over filling. Using a sharp knife, poke many holes (at least 20) in dough that reach all the way to bottom of pan. Slowly pour melted butter over torte; some butter will seep through holes and some will remain on top of dough. 4. Place Bundt pan on a baking sheet and bake for about 1 hour 15 minutes, or until torte is puffy and golden brown. Allow torte to cool in pan for 1 to 2 hours before inverting onto a plate and slicing. Serve warm or at room temperature, with honey if desired. Yield: 10 to 12 servings.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
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Thomas Alva Edison T
homas Alva Edison, whose development of a practical electric light bulb, electric generating system, sound-recording device, and motion picture projector had profound effects on the shaping of modern society. His greatest invention may not have been his products but the funding and impotence he placed on his company’s research and development efforts. Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, on February 11, 1847. He attended school for only three months, in Port Huron, Michigan. When he was 12 years old he began selling newspapers on the Grand Trunk Railway, devoting his spare time mainly to experimentation with printing presses and with electrical and mechanical apparatus. In 1862 he published a weekly, known as the Grand Trunk Herald, printing it in a freight
car that also served as his laboratory. For saving the life of a station official’s child, he was rewarded by being taught telegraphy. While working as a telegraph operator, he made his first important invention, a telegraphic repeating instrument that enabled messages to be transmitted automatically over a second line without the presence of an operator. Edison next secured employment in Boston and devoted all his spare time there to research. He invented a vote recorder that, although possessing many merits, was not sufficiently practical to warrant its adoption. He also devised and partly completed a stock-quotation printer. Later, while employed by the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company of New York City he greatly improved their apparatus and service. By the sale of telegraphic appliances, Edison earned $40,000, and with this money he established his own laboratory in 1876. Afterward he devised an automatic telegraph system that made possible a greater speed and range of transmission. Edison’s crowning achievement in telegraphy was his invention of machines that made possible simultaneous transmission of several messages on one line and thus greatly increased the usefulness of existing telegraph lines. Important in the development of the telephone, which had recently
been invented by the American physicist and inventor Alexander Graham Bell, was Edison’s invention of
the carbon telephone transmitter.
Continues on page 26
AT A GLANCE:
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he modern world is an electrified world. The light bulb, in particular, profoundly changed human existence by illuminating the night and making it hospitable to a wide range of human activity. The electric light, one of the everyday conveniences that most affects our lives, was invented in 1879 by Thomas Alva Edison. He put together what he knew about electricity with what he knew about gas lights and invented a whole of electrical system.
Milestones: 1868 Edison’s first invention was a Vote Recorder 1869 Printing Telegraph 1869 Stock Ticker 1872 Automatic Telegraph 1876 Electric Pen 1877 Carbon Telephone Transmitter 1877 Phonograph 1879 Dynamo 1878 Thomas Edison founded the Edison Electric Light Company
1879 Incandescent Electric Lamp 1880 223,898 Thomas Edison 1/27 for Electric Lamp and Manufacturing Process 1881 Electric Motor 1881 238,868 Thomas Edison 3/15 for Manufacture of Carbons for Incandescent Lamps 1881 251,540 Thomas Edison 12/27 for Bamboo Carbons Filament for Incandescent Lamps 1883 he observed the flow of electrons from a heated filament—the
so-called “Edison effect” 1886 Talking Doll 1889 Edison Electric Light Company consolidated and renamed Edison General Electric Company. 1890 Edison, Thomson-Houston, and Westinghouse, the “Big 3” of the American lighting industry. 1892 Edison Electric Light Co. and Thomson-Houston Electric Co. created General Electric Co. 1897 Projecting Kinetoscope 1900 Storage Battery
capS: Edison, Thomas Alva Edison, Incandescent Electric Lamp, electric lamp, electric light bulb, light bulb, General Electric, most U.S. patents, electric industry, inventor, biography, profile, history, inventor of, history of, who invented, invention of, fascinating facts
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Comes from page 25 In 1877 Edison announced his invention of a phonograph by which sound could be recorded mechanically on a tinfoil cylinder. Two years later he exhibited publicly his incandescent electric light bulb, his most important invention and the one requiring the most careful research and experimentation to perfect. This new light was a remarkable success; Edison promptly occupied himself with the improvement of the bulbs and of the dynamos for generating the necessary electric current. In 1882 he developed and installed the world’s first large central electric-power station, located in New York City. His use of direct current, however, later lost out to the alternating-current system developed by the American inventors Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. In 1887 Edison moved his labo-
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
ratory from Menlo Park, New Jersey, to West Orange, New Jersey, where he constructed a large laboratory for experimentation and research. (His home and laboratory were established as the Edison National Historic Site in 1955). In 1888 he invented the kinetoscope, the first machine to produce motion pictures by a rapid succession of individual views. Among his later noteworthy inventions was the Edison storage battery (an alkaline, nickel-iron storage battery), the result of many thousands of experiments. The battery was extremely rugged and had a high electrical
capacity per unit of weight. He also developed a phonograph in which the sound was impressed on a disk instead of a cylinder. This phonograph had a diamond needle and other improved features. By synchronizing his phonograph and kinetoscope, he produced, in 1913, the first talking moving pictures. His other discoveries include the electric pen, the mimeograph, the microtasimeter (used for the detection of minute changes in temperature), and a wireless telegraphic method for communicating with moving trains. At the outbreak of World War I, Edison designed, built, and operated plants for the manufacture of benzene,
carbolic acid, and aniline derivatives. In 1915 he was appointed president of the U.S. Navy Consulting Board and in that capacity made many valuable discoveries. His later work consisted mainly of improving and perfecting previous inventions. Altogether, Edison patented more than 1000 inventions. He was a technologist rather than a scientist, adding little to original scientific knowledge. In 1883, however, he did observe the flow of electrons from a heated filament—the so-called Edison effect—whose profound implications for modern electronics were not understood until several years later. Edison died in West Orange on October 18, 1931.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
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Seeking Closure in Lybia I
t was just 100 years ago that Italy decided to join the exclusive club of American and European colonial powers by attacking Libya. Indeed, the first bomb ever dropped in anger was tossed over the side of an Italian airplane onto Libyan tribesmen in an attempt to break their will in 1911. Today, Italy is just part of an uneasy coalition trying once again, if not to conquer Libya, at least to bend the country’s government to its will. Beyond that there doesn’t seem to be much agreement on just what the coalition’s war aims are. Some say it is supposed to be simply a noflight zone, strictly for humanitarian purposes. Others say it is to break Muammar el-Qaddafi’s war machine so that he cannot attack the rebels attacking him. Yet others say the true war aim is regime change. And no one seems to know when or how the conflict will end. War from the air has evolved considerably since it was first introduced over Libya. The French developed a “Type Colonial” aircraft, which was designed to kill North Africans by a traversing machine gun in the rear. Later, German, American, British and Italian airplanes battled over the skies of Libya in World War II, but that was a fight between the Allies and the Axis powers, not a war against Libyans. Today we are back to a form of fighting in which airplanes, as in colonial days, are unopposed by any
serious threat in the air, but can deliver a thousand-fold more damage than in 1911. President Obama has now entered his own war of choice. Having inherited two wars in Muslim countries, he has now involved America in a third conflict in a Muslim land, the consequences of which no one can foresee. Dress it up as you like in humanitarian robes, the attack on Libya, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates famously told Congress, is an act of war. When Britain was the premier military power there was considerable vacillation between what came to be called a “forward policy,” i.e. an aggressive desire to extend British control over the world’s surface, against a less aggressive imperial stance. In the 19th century, the forward policy would advance whenever Benjamin Disraeli was primminister, and recede when William Gladstone was back in power. Obama would like to play Gladstone to George W. Bush’s Disraeli, but, like Gladstone, he can be talked into military adventures that
he probably would have liked to avoid. Obama hopes to soften the edges of intervention by saying the U.S. will not be in charge, but that is not likely to be persuasive. All the coalition powers hope this will be a very short, surgical operation that will be over very soon so that democracy wiWll flourish and all foreign forces can go home. However, since there is no real agreement on how this will end, or what the mission is, or what will happen if Qaddafi doesn’t fold, there can be no clear exit strategy. Nor do we know that the Libyan rebels would install a true, functioning democracy. As the terrorism expert Jessica Stern has written, most countries overthrowing autocrats end up in a kind of halfway place somewhere between democracy and autocracy. In reality, there really are very few exit strategies that have actually gone as planned. I am sure Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, never thought the attack on Iraq that he helped organize would see American troops still on the ground there eight years later. Nor did he perceive that his lightning, and successful, attack on Afghanistan would end 10 years later in the very “quagmire” that he
so mocked when it was predicted. These conflicts are easier to get into than get out of. It is hard to imagine that those who are attacking Libya now won’t feel the pressure to just put a few boots on the ground if it looks like Qaddafi is going to hang on for the long run, or if Libya looks in danger of becoming a failed state like Somalia, another former Italian colony in which the United States became involved for humanitarian reasons. And what if we do tip the balance of power in Libya and the rebels begin massacring Qaddafi’s supporters? Qaddafi, who portrayed himself as a bulwark against Al Qaeda, is now using the language of Osama bin Laden by calling his attackers “crusaders.” He would like to frame the conflict as Christendom versus Islam. Until now the Al Qaeda narrative has been absent from the Arab Spring, as the West has had nothing to do with the uprisings against autocracy. That may change now that Obama and the West have chosen a military option.
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The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
Japan Slips in Efforts to Control Nuclear Plan Crisis By KEN BELSON and HIROKO TABUCHI
A
fter workers switched on the first set of control room lights at Japan’s crippled power plant in Fukushima last week, the Japanese government offered its strongest assurances yet that its nuclear crisis was close to being under control. But less than a week later, a deluge of contaminated water, plutonium traces in the soil and an increasingly hazardous environment for workers at the plant have forced government officials to confront the reality that the emergency measures they have taken to keep nu-
clear fuel cool have themselves had a variety of dangerous side effects. And the prospect of restoring automatic cooling systems anytime soon has now faded. “The earthquake, tsunami and the ensuing nuclear accident may be Japan’s largest-ever crisis,” the Japanese prime minister, Naoto Kan, told Parliament on Tuesday, in his most sober message to date on the nuclear crisis. “We find ourselves in a situation where we can’t let down our guard. We will continue to handle it in a state of maximum alert.” The setbacks have raised questions about how long, and at what cost, Japan can keep up what experts call its “feed and bleed” strategy of cooling the reactor’s fuel rods with emergency infusions of water from the ocean and now from freshwater sources. That cooling strategy, while essential to prevent full meltdowns, has released harmful amounts of radioactive steam into the atmosphere and triggered leaks of highly contaminated water, making it perilous for some of the hundreds of workers at the plant to complete critical repair work. Moreover, the discovery of radioactive elements that experts say could only come from the core of a reactor suggests that the government’s strategy may not be working
and that partial fuel melting has not been completely halted. Hiroto Sakashita, an associate professor in nuclear reactor thermal hydraulics at Hokkaido University, said the Japanese government was in for a long fight. He said although the fuel rods in the nuclear reactors had already lost more than 99 percent of their heat, they were still giving off enough heat to evaporate 200 tons of water a day. And the remaining heat, from isotopes with long half-lives, will take months to cool further. “There is some trial and error,” said Kuni Yogo, a former atomic energy policy planner in Japan’s Science and Technology Agency. “But this is the beginning of a three- to five-year effort to seize the damage.”
Global Turbulence as the Norm
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atural disasters, nuclear meltdowns, financial chaos, terrorist attacks, youth uprisings, counterrevolutionary clampdowns, commodity scarcities, social media disruptions, corporate competition from emerging nations, deepsea oil rig explosions – it’s clear that the early 21st century is turning out to be far different from the late 20th century. But why exactly? The answer is the sharp and unexpected rise of existential risk. Every half century or so, the risk assumptions underlying our economic, social and political foundations change dramatically. For a number of reasons, the size, complexity and symmetry of risk are vastly different in 2011 than they were in 1991. As a result, the risk-reward ratios that we take for granted, such as tight global supply chains, may no longer make sense. In particular, an increase in asymmetrical risks means that we need to re-evaluate key global issues, from farmland to financial instruments, from nuclear power to the nationstate.
In order for leaders to deal successfully with this new era of radical uncertainty they must reset their organizations, reframe their perceptions of problems and opportunities, and, most important, learn to think differently. Old efficiency thinking based on engineering and rational market models needs to be replaced by a creative intelligence based on imagining and then building new futures. Nowhere is this better expressed than in the 2010 IBM Global CEO Survey, “Capitalizing on Complexity.” The survey notes that “events, threats and opportunities aren’t just coming at us faster or with less predictability; they are converging and influencing each other to create entirely new situations. These firsts-of-their-kind developments require unprecedented degrees of creativity.” In a first-of-its-kind world, modeling past events to predict the future simply won’t work. These models work with an “if-then” construct where there is only one correct answer to a known problem. But few,
if any, such models contain examples of what we’re seeing in Japan and elsewhere in the world today – multiple natural and human catastrophes overlappinto generate entirely new, unforeseen outcomes. While working on my upcoming book, “CQ – Creative Intelligence,” I came to the conclusion that we need to start focusing our thinking on a field of possible problems and generating not one, but many possible answers and outcomes. It’s not a matter of training to choose option “A” or “B.” We need to learn how to create option “C” to fit problem “Z.” For example, in Japan, the utility company responsible for the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant believed that the problem was fundamentally about water – as in it couldn’t provide enough water to cool the reactors. Trained for 40 years to think this way, technicians from the Tokyo Electric Power Company wasted days pumping massive amounts of water into the reactors. If these workers had been able to reframe the problem and see that it
was about electricity, not water, they might have prevented the release of radioactive gas. Installing gas-fueled generators the day after the tsunami hit on March 11 – as General Electric, the reactors’ designer, suggested – might have prevented the future explosions and mitigated any further damage to the reactors. In the end, after the reactors had already suffered significant damage from the barrage of seawater pumped through them, TEPCO did decide to bring electricity back to Fukushima, but it accomplished this task slowly over several days. Agility of mind, organizational flexibility and redundancy in capacity will be critical factors in mastering the increasingly complex risks and opportunities we now face. The kind of thinking generated by scenario planning and war-gaming needs to move from the margins of corporations and government organizations to become their core tactical positions. Leaders must embrace these strategies in order to succeed in a world of radical uncertainty.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
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Injustice in Bangladesh W
e’re all focused right now on Libya and budget battles at home, but this story from Bangladesh just broke my heart and outraged me -- and offers a reminder of the daily human rights struggles of so many women and girls in villages around the world. A 14-year-old Bangladeshi girl, Hena,allegedly was ambushed when she went to an outdoor toilet, gagged, beaten and raped by an older man in her village (who was actually her cousin). They were caught by wife of the alleged rapist, and the wife then beat Hena up. An imam at a local mosque issued a fatwa saying that Hena was guilty of adultery and must be punished, and a village makeshift court sentenced Hena to 100 lashes in a public whipping. Her last words were protestations of innocence. An excellent CNN blog post, based on interviews with family members, says
that the parents “had no choice but to mind the imam’s order. They watched as the whip broke the skin of their youngest child and she fell unconscious to the ground.” Hena collapsed after 70 lashes and was taken to the hospital. She died a week later, by some accounts because of internal bleeding and a general loss of blood. The doctors recorded her death as a suicide. (Women and girls who
are raped are typicallyexpected to commit suicide, to spare everyone the embarrassment of an honor crime.) I’ve covered enough of these kinds of stories to know that it’s difficult to know exactly what happened unless you’re on the scene talking to everyone who was there; maybe the imam has a different version of events. But all accounts that I’ve seen such that this was a brutal attack on a helpless girl in the name of sharia and justice. Fortunately, Bangladesh has a robust civil society, which has reacted with outrage to the case. A court ordered the body exhumed after word leaked out, and an examination revealed severe injuries. Lawsuits are now underway against the doctors who had called her death a suicide, and several people have been rounded up -including the alleged rapist. The Bangladesh press is on the case. But Hena’s family is under police protection because of concern that
other villagers will take revenge at them for getting the imam and others in trouble. Let’s hope that the public reaction and punishments are so strong that the word goes out to all of Bangladesh’s villages that such misogynist fatwas are not only immoral but also illegal. And that the crime lies not in being raped, but in raping.
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April 7 - 13, 2011
The San Juan Weekly
Arriving as Pregnant Tourists, Leaving With American Babies By JENNIFER MEDINA
T
he building inspectors and police officers walked into the small row of connected town houses here knowing something was amiss. Neighbors had complained about noise and a lot of pregnant women coming and going. And when they went into a kitchen they saw a row of clear bassinets holding several infants, with a woman acting as a nurse hovering over them. For months, officials say, the house was home to “maternity tourists,” in this case, women from China who had paid tens of thousands of dollars to deliver their babies in the United States, making the infants automatic American citizens. Officials shut down the home, sending the 10 mothers who had been living there with their babies to nearby motels. “These were not women living in squalor — it was a well taken care of place and clean, but there were a lot of women and babies,” said Clayton Anderson, a city inspector who shut down the house on March 9. “I have never seen anything like this before. We really couldn’t determine the exact number of people living there.” For the last year, the debate over birthright citizenship has raged across the country, with some political leaders calling for an end to the 14th Amendment, which gives automatic citizenship to any baby born in the United States. Much of the debate has focused on immigrants entering illegally from poor countries in Latin America. But in this case the women were not only relatively wealthy, but also here legally on tourist visas. Most of them, officials say, have already returned to China with their American babies. Immigration experts say it is impossible to know precisely how widespread “maternity tourism” is. Businesses in China, Mexico and South Korea advertise packages that arrange for doctors, insurance and postpartum care. And the Marmara, a Turkish-owned hotel on the Upper East Side in New York City, has advertised monthlong “baby stays” that come with a stroller. For the most part, though, the practice has involved individuals. The discovery of the large-scale facility here in the San Gabriel foothills raises questions about whether it was a rare phenomenon or an indication that maternity tourism is entering a new, more institutionalized phase with more hospital-like facilities operating quietly around the country. The San Gabriel town houses are nestled in a small street lined with modest houses, small apartment buildings and palm trees. A construction crew was at work late last week, closing up walls that had been knocked down between units, in violation of the housing code. Signs of a makeshift maternity house were evident everywhere. In one kitchen, stacks of pictures showing a mother holding her days-old baby sat next to several cans of formula. In another, boxes of prenatal vitamins were tucked into rice cookers. Several bedroom doors had numbers on them. Some rooms were rather luxurious — B9, for instance, had a large walk-in closet, a whirlpool and a small personal refrigerator. The Center for Health Care Statistics estimates
that there were 7,462 births to foreign residents in the United States in 2008, the most recent year for which statistics are available. That is a small fraction of the roughly 4.3 million total births that year. Immigration experts say they can only guess why well-to-do Chinese women are so eager to get United States passports for their babies, but they suspect it is largely as a kind of insurance policy should they need to move. The children, once they turn 21, would also be able to petition for their parents to get United States citizenship. Angela Maria Kelley, the vice president for immigration policy and advocacy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning research group, said the existence of businesses helping foreign women give birth in the United States had only just begun to enter the public consciousness. “If this is something that was really widespread and happening all over, you would have expected it to really have revealed itself,” Ms. Kelley said. “I think it deserves a lot more study and a lot more attention. But to say that you want to change the Constitution because of this feels like killing a fly with an Uzi.” The State Department, which grants tourist visas, is not permitted to deny visa applications simply because a woman is pregnant. “These people aren’t doing anything in violation of our laws,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates tougher immigration controls. “But if anything, it is worse than illegal immigrants delivering a baby here. Those kids are socialized as Americans. This phenomenon of coming to the U.S. and then leaving with people who have unlimited access to come back is just ridiculous.” San Gabriel, about 20 miles east of Los Angeles, has grown rapidly in recent years and is now a hub of businesses catering to Asian immigrants — tea shops
fill the strip malls and for-sale signs in Chinese and Vietnamese are planted in front of several homes. Mr. Anderson said a kind of “semitransient” community had a strong presence in this suburb. It is not uncommon for a single residence to be home to as many as 40 people. But as in other cities, the boarders are usually men, often working to send money to their families back home. City officials asked basic questions to the women they found in the maternity house: how did they get here and who paid for them to come? The answers: on a tourist visa, and our family paid. The house’s owner, Dwight Chang, was fined $800 for code violations. Mr. Chang did not return several phone calls, and one worker at the building said he was traveling and not available. “We didn’t do an extensive interview of the women; that wasn’t their job nor should it be,” said Jennifer Davis, the director of community development for the city. The city did alert public health officials, she said, who found nothing wrong with the babies. Ms. Davis said city officials had also alerted the immigration authorities. Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the agency had investigated a similar situation in another Southern California city last year, but it yielded no evidence of any federal violations. She declined to say whether federal officials were investigating the San Gabriel operation, citing agency policy. Yolanda Alvarez, who walks her dog past the town houses twice each day, said neighbors had complained among themselves for nearly a year, noticing “many, many young women” going in and out of the house. Several pictures of a nurse posing with new mothers were scattered on the counters Friday. A framed tile was collecting dust amid the construction. “Home,” it said, “is where your story begins.”
San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
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FASHION & BEAUTY
The Cat in the Hat Comes Back By GUY TREBAY
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HERE was a time when only beggars went bareheaded. This was some while ago, a century or so. But up until World War II and the period just after, a gentleman was not considered properly dressed without a hat. Even the names of hats were rich in character and historical association. The bowler, or derby, with the rigid shape of an upended bean pot, was named for a 19th-century English earl who popularized the style. The fedora’s name came from a play of that title, written for Sarah Bernhardt by the otherwise largely forgotten French dramatist Victorien Sardou. Then the hat went the way of the dodo. Social historians are divided about the cause of the sartorial die-off, although an often repeated canard attributes it to President Kennedy and his rarely covered thatch of luxuriant hair. The real blame probably belongs to automobiles, though. Hats were knocked off when you entered a car and inevitably got squashed beneath a passenger’s wayward behind or went into orbit when you lowered the top to a convertible. Whatever the reason, there is no arguing with the facts of the hat’s decline. In 1940, there were 180 independent major manufacturers of hats operating in the United States. Today there are 10. And while it is true that the headwear business is not altogether on the skids (retail sales of hats in the United States are estimated at $1.75 billion annually, roughly 40 percent of that figure being hats sold to men), it would be stretching things to say the future looks bright. Or it would have been before the recent men’s-wear shows in Paris and Milan. Who knows what happened in Europe? Was it that the stingy-brim trilby, so popular in Williamsburg that no Halloween hipster costume would be complete without one, made it safe for men to experiment again with broader brims? Was it the influence of a fine museum show sponsored
by the Borsalino Foundation at the Triennale in Milan demonstrating cinema’s long love affair with the hat? Or was it, as Don Rongione — the president of the Bollman Hat Company, a Pennsylvania manufacturer founded in 1868 — said, that hat-friendly entertainers like Justin Timberlake, Usher and Neo have helped acquaint a generation of consumers with the idea that hats might be cool? Anyone who has seen Douglas Keeve’s 1995 documentary “Unzipped” knows better than to second-guess the telepathy that causes designers to arrive at the same idea at the same time. In that film, about Isaac Mizrahi, there was an inexplicable run on inspirations derived from the 1922 silent film “Nanook of the North.” “The stigma of looking like your father, or even your grandfather, if you wear a hat is gone,” Mr. Rongione said. “A young person doesn’t relate to a hat that way anymore.” Designers must certainly think so because the runway shows in Europe looked as if everyone had visited the same hatters’ convention. At the Armani and Emporio Armani shows, the designer’s favored slouchy berets were replaced with a modernized rendition of the trilby: duotone, high-crowned and often with a pert midsize brim. At Etro, the hats had crowns so high they lent the models a resemblance to Rastafarians or
coneheads. At Dsquared, a latent Sergio Leone theme was suggested by the designer twins Dean and Dan Caten’s deployment of broad-brimmed Stetsons in requisite badguy black. At Dai Fujiwara’s show for Issey Miyake, the cocked hats with their midsize brims were pure James Cagney (“Made it, Ma! Top of the world!”), while at Massimiliano Giornetti’s show for Ferragamo the slouch-brimmed Borsalinos in muted jewel tones seemed like a loving, although perhaps unintentional, homage to George Raft. “For sure, we can say that hats are having a fashion moment,” said Elisa Fulco, the curator of the Borsalino Foundation. “But filmmakers have always understood the power of the hat,” added Ms. Fulco, who, together with the film critic Gianni Canova, viewed more than 1,000 films to find the 400 clips on view at “Cinema Wears a Hat,” a show at the Milan Triennale museum through late March. “There are funny hats, magical hats, eccentric hats, erotic hats, hats that are disturbing,” Ms. Fulco said. “Hats are different from other articles of clothing because they are so close to your face; they create a strange link between your appearance and your interiority. Each time you put on a hat, you create an entirely different story.” Having exhausted the usual narratives of power and gender as expressed through clothing, and wary of runway stunts unlikely to produce much cash register action, designers may have merely been casting about for new tools and communally fell upon the hat. How else to explain the use of hats by designers as unalike as Angela Missoni and Thom Browne? To her show of subdued knits that looked a lot like pj’s, Ms. Missoni added flowerpot hats with brims pulled so low over the models’ faces that it wasn’t obvious
how they knew which way to walk. For Thom Browne’s show, a single hat became the signifying design gesture: flat-crowned, the color of ground nutmeg, the modified boater made from feathers was a testament to Mr. Browne’s affection for the fast-disappearing skills of artisans everywhere, in this case of the feather craftsmen known as plumassiers. At the Roberto Cavalli presentation, which owed a lot to Jim Morrison in the guise of the Lizard King, a literal crowning touch was provided by Borsalinos with brims as broad as pizzas. At Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci outfitted his models in caps with looping flaps above the ears that made it seem as if you could hoist one like a sixpack. At Yohji Yamamoto, models came out wearing the steep-crowned brimmed hats that the designer himself has favored for years. There were stunt toppers, of course, and hats that looked as if they’d been yanked from the bottom of the costume trunk, most predictably those at Galliano, where the heavily rouged models wore cartwheel-shaped fur trapper caps and lamé turbans reminiscent of Madame, the Wayland Flowers marionette. But the best uses of hats in a season that is far from over — the men’s shows in New York begin next week — came at the Paris shows of Dior Homme and Lanvin. While Kris Van Assche, the Dior Homme designer, favored handsome but austere flatbrimmed hats right out of “Witness,” Lucas Ossendrijver, who designs men’s clothes for Lanvin, seemed to have fallen in love with the way a broad-brimmed Borsalino with a suggestively pinched crown instantly sexualized an ordinary two-button suit. “The theory used to be that in difficult economic times, when a man couldn’t afford to buy an overcoat and a suit, he would pick up his wardrobe with a hat,” Mr. Rongione said. That’s not what’s happening now. Some of the hats on European runways would look perfectly fine on an Average Joe. (O.K., an Average Joe who happens to hang out at the Smile or in the lobby of the Ace Hotel.) “A regular guy could actually pull off some of these hats,” Mr. Rongione added. “As opposed to something no one in his right mind would wear out of the house.”
FASHION & BEAUTY
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San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
The Circle of White
By DAVID COLMAN
Z
EROING in on the most basic materiel in the men’s wear arsenal — white T-shirts, blue jeans, khakis — has made hip and happy campers out of clothing makers and their customers alike. It has done wonders for big companies like Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and American Apparel and small players like Jean Shop and Save Khaki, all of which have created items that have, in turn, created repeat customers. In the little-discussed realm of retail known as “replenishment” or “replacement shopping,” the goal is to perfect basic garments expressly so that the time-crunched or shopaphobic guy can whiz in and out of a store as if on a jet-fueled sortie, halting only briefly behind enemy lines to grab three/six/ nine of his tried-and-true chinos/briefs/ socks. In, out, nobody gets hurt. So it seems something of a surprise that no one has ridden to glory on the tails of one of man’s most basic garments, the plain white dress shirt. The white Tshirt’s gainfully employed big brother,
the white dress shirt has for decades been the leader, color-wise, of the overall dressshirt market, according to NPD Group, which tracks retail sales. “Ask any guy what he has the most of, and the odds are he’ll tell you, ‘Socks, underwear and white shirts,’ ” said Marshal Cohen, NPD’s chief analyst. “It’s the universal garment. It takes no brains and no style to make a white shirt look good — as long as it’s clean and it fits.” He added that the white shirt was even due for a comeback, having taken a back seat in professional circles in the last decade or so to more casual-looking light blue shirts. If anyone deserves credit should a comeback materialize, it would be Thom Browne, for years the white shirt’s most
visible fan. “It’s the only shirt that guys should wear,” he said flatly. “It’s always appropriate, and there’s something easy about it that makes it look perfect.” While Mr. Browne is best known for his 1920s Ivy League-style and shrunkenlook suits, his best-selling item for years has been his plain white oxford cloth button-down shirt, which, in the highpriced world of fancy shirting, is a relative bargain at $195. He is himself a replacement shopper, pilfering his own stock each season for new white shirts. While he sells them in a more expensive broadcloth, he prefers oxford cloth, which is rougher and less dressy-looking than broadcloth. “I’m not a big fan of really refined dress shirts,” he said. “It’s too much. This
you can wear with something fancy, and it helps tone it down a bit.” Others have also taken pains to knock some of the C.E.O. stuffing out of the white shirt, making it ideal to wear with or without a tie. Band of Outsiders cuts its white oxford shirts so slim that fat cats, or even husky ones, are out of luck. Steven Alan has cultivated a following for his white dress shirts by removing the placket and fitting it with a softer, smaller collar. Some, like Ralph Lauren, have gone the other direction — toward chairman emeritus — with Anglo-formal touches like spread collars and French cuffs. Some will do either: Proper Cloth, a two-year-old shirt maker in Greenwich Village, creates a custom pattern for every customer and lets him choose from a multitude of collars, cuffs, pockets and more than 80 different fabrics, including six in white. And with a base price of $89, buying three or six at a time will not break the bank. If nothing else, it’s just nice to hear the words “looking for a replacement,” and not worry about your job security.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
Fernando Hidalgo By: Daniel Morales Pomales
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ernando Hidalgo’s name is no stranger to Puerto Rico. Still, many remember him as the dynamic host of game and variety shows in the late Rikavisión, Channel 7, in the first half of the 70’s. The best remembered is undoubtedly “ Casados felices”, in which several couples tried to show how much they know. One half of the couples had to answer a question about the other half and write the answer on a poster. Then he asked the same question to the other half and verified answers. Tremendous problem when husbands raised the banner with the wrong answer. “I left Puerto Rico with sorrow in my heart,” he said in America TeVe Studios in Miami, where he exclusively met with The San Juan Weekly. In that same drive his own television program El Show de Fernando Hidalgo from Monday to Friday at 7:00 pm The show airs live in Puerto Rico by CV-24.
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34 Fernando pointed out that he came with his parents to borincana land at a very young age in early 1965. “We left Cuba and went to Chicago and then New York. We were stranded in a huge snowstorm in February and soon we reached the warmth of Puerto Rico. His first big break in TV was La Taberna India, but he also participated in a local soap opera in the role of child. “I spent more time in Puerto Rico than in Cuba, lived in Villa Mar in Carolina in front of Pablo Casal’s home. There were none of the buildings in Isla Verde. Mine was the last house in that street. Then I lived in Country Club Gardens and later at Vista Mar Marina because I love the sea and boats”, he said. The struggles of television in Puerto Rico led Ferdinand to try his luck in Venezuela, were he had a cousin, and then in U.S. Hispanic television. On Venezuelan TV he starred in “Cómo Tener un Matrimonio Feliz,” which became a smashing success and was distributed in over twenty countries in Latin America. In the U.S. it aired on Univision. During the last five or six years, Fernando has focused on producing, directing and animating for America TeVe in Miami. Its combination of comedy, live musical performances, celebrity interviews, political and cultural reviews, and his body of beautiful dancers have become a unique show that appeals to all ages and all ethnic groups. “We have more audience in Puerto Rico than in Miami. On the Island we have a 3 to 3.5 in a universe of 4 million through CV 24. In Miami we have 7 points from a million and a half. Now we are more excited because we are broadcasting live and that is sensational, the errors committed stay there, not like a program prepared, or recorded, “he said. “I come to work to the station at 1:00 p.m. organizing everything. We
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
have a rundown on the comedies with a script, but the rest of the program depends on the guests and the pulse we are feeling. I run the program as I feel that viewers will want. I have lots of freedom to do so because I asked the channel not have an outside producer. I work alone with my wife Nereida Corona, which is the general producer.” Guests are an important part of the program, as stated. “Among our guests we have a person who speaks of extraterrestrials, others may be naturopathic doctors, artists, celebrities, politicians, including former President of Venezuela Carlos Andrés Pérez, who was with us before he died, and Congressman Lincoln Diaz Baralt” said Hidalgo, who recently was invited to another much-loved Cuban Puerto Rican legend the baseball and boxing storyteller Felo Ramirez. Since its establishment in Miami, Fernando has attended twice for work with the channel. Hopes to return soon,
but this time with a show for the Puerto Rican public. “We are preparing many live shows to bring to the island, with comedy, poetry, dance, and interviews. Soon we will be there. It’s all written, but we are still organizing. I am pleased to return to a place for which I have great affection, “he said. Fernando has rolled the nest with his book ‘Sobreviviente del Infierno’, which explores aside from self-taught studies in metaphysics and other challenges the religious concepts instilled in him as a child. By ensuring that no one shall burn forever in hell, even Fidel Castro or the Islamic terrorist Osama Bin Laden, said that history began at age 7 when he began taking classes in the Catholic catechism. “It’s an existential shock myself, because a child says ‘you’re good, you go to heaven, you bad go to hell, to burn forever’ This is completely illogical. I believe in reincarnation and that everyone pays for what he does, but nobody will be damned eternally. There is always a new opportunity, and it seemed more logical. The book is a discussion between a spiritualist and a priest. There are real things, but also a bit of fantasy that I encounter with an alien who no longer had to reincarnate and suggests that the plan is to be subdivided. It may sound complicated, but what does one do after a further improvement? Then continue to cooperate with God in the creation of the universe! “He said. Addressing the issue of reincar-
nation, we investigate the actor if you know who or what he was in past lives and “I do not care what was in past lives. I have many problems in this life to deal with past problems. I am apprentice to the lodge of the Masons. Freemasonry as far as I got are steps and secret codes. I like the precepts. Great men like Marti and Bolivar were Masons. These are people who have done great things and is an institution that is right. “ Fernando stressed that God has nothing to do with religions. “God has nothing to do with that. Religions were invented by men, often to manipulate. There are many good people but there are bad people within religions. I know people who became atheist by the vengeful God of which we have spoken and it has nothing to do with reality. I am convinced that God does exist. The book attacking religions but defends God above all things. “ At the insistence of some that the most recent disasters worldwide are a sign of the Bible about the end of the world being met, Hidalgo reacts asserting “I do not believe in the Bible” ... “It is inconceivable even as a first time to an end. Like the universe has no end, man will one day conquer immortality. Joaquin de Posada said that this century will come to pass that at some point, although race is destroyed, will be reincarnated. And in an infinite time this man will know all natural laws and universal “highlighted the animator. “Sobreviviente del Infierno” is available through www.amazon.com
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
35
Japan’s Nuclear Crisis Revives Debate Over Iodide Tablets By MATTHEW L. WALD
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he space for potassium iodide supplements at a pharmacy in Los Angeles was cleared out after a run on supplies days after a tsunami hit Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The nuclear calamity at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan has reopened a 30-year debate about how to stockpile potassium iodide, a drug that protects the human thyroid gland from radioactive iodine emitted in reactor accidents. Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, pointed out on Tuesday that he held a hearing on this subject in March 1982, after the commission that investigated the Three Mile Island accident recommended stockpiling the drug. Twenty years after that, Congress approved a law including a provision that he wrote requiring the federal government to provide the drug to state and local governments for people within 20 miles of reactors, if the governors requested it. But the Bush administration held up the program because the White House decided it was not necessary. Now, with the United States embassy in Tokyo distributing potassium iodide to Americans who are more than 100 miles from Fukushima, Mr. Markey is trying again to get his law enforced.
There is a glitch, though. Even in areas within 10 miles of a nuclear plant, 10 states have not requested the drug. Those are Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin, according to Mr. Markey. A staff member said that Mr. Markey had written to the governors in 2002 to advise them that the potassium iodide was available, and contacted them again last week — although the people occupying the governors’ offices had changed over the years. Fukushima’s experience, Mr. Markey said, shows that potassium iodide can be needed beyond 10 miles of a nuclear reactor. “Hoping for the best is not the same as preparing for the worst,’’ he said. Mr. Markey has waged a mostly lonely crusade on this topic for 30 years, but he attracted many television cameras at a news conference near the Capitol on Tuesday. Frank von Hippel, a Princeton physicist who was a witness at the 1982 hearing, appeared with Mr. Markey on Tuesday. Fukushima, he said, demonstrated that potassium iodide might be needed in a bigger radius than could be evacuated. For example, he said, Indian Point is about 25 miles from New York City’s northern border, and there were more people there than could be moved.
Also speaking was Dr. Irwin Redlener, a professor at Columbia and president of the Children’s Health Fund. (Children are especially vulnerable to radioactive iodine.) He said that American preparation for reactor accidents was “erratic in the extreme.” Potassium iodide tends to be either a low priority or desperately sought-after. Retailers do not like to stock it because it is not something that consumers buy regularly. The nuclear industry, perhaps mindful that it can only raise bad associations, has never been enthusiastic about the drug.
Alan Morris, whose company, Anbex, manufactures the drug in blister-packs, like allergy pills, said that his stock was quickly cleaned out after the March 11 accident began. “We can make the product,’’ he said. “Our problem is that there’s a shortage of pharmaceutical-grade potassium iodide.” He recently resumed shipping. Anbex has been in business since 1982. The surge after Fukushima Daiichi’s crisis was so large that the company’s computer servers crashed, he said.
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The San Juan Weekly
An Older Generation Succums to Eating Disorders By TARA PARKER-POPE
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ore than 10 million Americans suffer from anorexia, bulimia and other eating disorders. And while people tend to think such problems are limited to adolescence and young adulthood, Judith Shaw knows otherwise. A 58-year-old yoga instructor in St. Louis, Ms. Shaw says she was nearing 40 when she decided to “get healthy” after having children. Soon, diet and exercise became an obsession. “I was looking for something to validate myself,” she told me. “Somehow, the weight loss, and getting harder and firmer and trimmer and fitter, and then getting recognized for that, was fulfilling a need.” Experts say that while eating disorders are first diagnosed mainly in young people, more and more women are showing up at their clinics in midlife or even older. Some had eating disorders early in life and have relapsed, but a significant minority first develop symptoms in middle age. (Women with such disorders outnumber men by 10 to 1.) Cynthia M. Bulik, director of the Eating Disorders Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says that though it was initially aimed at adolescents, since 2003 half of its patients have been adults. “We’re hearing from women, no matter how old they are, that they still have to achieve this societal ideal of thinness and perfection,” she said. “Even in their 50s and 60s — and, believe it or not, beyond — women are engaging in extreme weight- and shape-control behaviors.” Younger or older, patients tend to engage in the same destructive behaviors: restricted eating, laxative abuse, excessive exercise and binge eating. And the trigger is often a stressful transition — in a young person, perhaps going away to college or living through her parents’ divorce; in later years, having a baby, sending a child to college or going through her own divorce. “I think there is a probably much higher percentage than we’ve been able to identify,” said Tamara Pryor, clinical director of the Eating Disorder Center of Denver, who has been studying about 200 cases
of midlife eating disorders. “I think out there in the workaday world there are a large percentage of women who just fly under the radar. They are subclinical and you don’t question them, because in so many other areas of their life they look so functional.” One concern, she and other experts say, is that as women get older they are more adept at concealing the problem, and symptoms may be attributed to aging rather than to an eating disorder. For instance, when a thin adolescent stops menstruating, doctors typically raise questions about weight and eating habits. But in Ms. Shaw’s case, they assumed it was early menopause. When she developed anemia and osteoporosis, they didn’t guess that the true cause was years of malnourishment. And though one doctor suggested that Ms. Shaw looked as if she needed to “eat a cheeseburger,” most praised her efforts to keep her weight down and her commitment to exercise. “One of the things we’re working very hard to do is to make sure this stays on physicians’ radar screens so they can recognize and distinguish between menopause-related changes, real health problems and eating disorders,” Dr. Bulik said. “Often they don’t ask the question because they have in their mind this stereotypical picture of eating disorders as a problem of white, middleclass teenagers.” For Ms. Shaw, diet and exercise
overtook her life. She spent more and more hours at the gym — even on family vacations, when she would skip ski outings with her husband and sons in favor of workout time. “None of my friends, my ex-husband, no one ever said anything,” she said. “It was no one’s job to fix me, but I wish someone had said to me: ‘I miss you. You’re gone. You’re so obsessed.’ ” Finally, a yoga instructor sounded the alarm after Ms. Shaw had twice fallen, breaking an elbow and then later her pelvis. “There’s nothing left of you,” the instructor told her. “Only you can decide if you’re going to change that by feeding yourself.” At 53, carrying just 85 pounds on her 5-foot-3 frame, Ms. Shaw checked herself in to an eating disorders program. In treatment, she struggled with writing exercises aimed at helping her identify the origins of her illness. Instead, she began creating art, starting with a life-size silhouette of her body, covered with cut-out newspaper headlines like “Help Wanted,” “Conceal” and “Find Real Value.”
Later, she created a plaster cast of her thighs. Like many others with anorexia, she had thought her legs were too big; now she could see how thin she had become. Last year Ms. Shaw’s art went on display at Washington University in St. Louis, and now her exhibition, “Body of Work: The Art of Eating Disorder Recovery,” can be seen through mid-April at the Center for Eating Disorders at Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan. “It’s certainly not the typical story, but we’re hearing about it more commonly,” said the center’s director, Dr. Evelyn Attia. “We need to let everybody know that it’s possible to develop these illnesses across the life span.” Ms. Shaw says she often notices women who appear to be too thin or obsessed with exercising, and she hopes that telling her story will help others see the problem in themselves. “In the course of my day, I can spot it,” she said. “I am 25 to 30 pounds heavier, but I feel lighter. The weight of those emotions is what it was really all about.”
Cavities Can Be Contagious By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
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veryone knows you can catch a cold or the flu. But can you catch a cavity? Researchers have found that not only is it possible, but it occurs all the time. While candy and sugar get all the blame, cavities are caused primarily by bacteria that cling to teeth and feast on particles of food from your last meal. One of the byproducts they create is acid, which destroys teeth. Just as a cold virus can be passed from one person to the next, so can these cavity-causing bacteria. One of the most common is Streptococcus mutans. Infants and children are particularly vulnerable to it, and studies have shown that most pick it up from their caregivers — for example, when a mother tastes a child’s
food to make sure it’s not too hot, said Dr. Margaret Mitchell, a cosmetic dentist in Chicago. A number of studies have also shown that transmission can occur between couples, too. Dr. Mitchell has seen it in her own practice. “In one instance, a patient in her 40s who had never had a cavity suddenly developed two cavities and was starting to get some gum disease,” she said. She learned the woman had started dating a man who hadn’t been to a dentist in 18 years and had gum disease. To reduce the risk, Dr. Mitchell recommends frequent flossing and brushing, and chewing sugar-free gum, which promotes saliva and washes away plaque and bacteria. Cavities can be transmitted from one person to another.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
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Finding a Balm for Frequent Nosebleeds have trouble breathing or your heart races; or if your nosebleed is accompanied by a rash or fever.
Prevention and Treatment
By JANE E. BRODY
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osebleeds, like noses, come in varied forms, and the number of sufferers is growing as the population ages. Millions of them rejoice at this time of year, when the most frequent cause — winter’s dry, heated indoor air — begins to yield to the warm, moist air of spring. Four years ago Charles Kingson, a New Yorker in his 70s, experienced a frightening series of nosebleeds that initially proved hard to control. Eventually Mr. Kingson found a doctor who stopped the bleeding, and he has since learned how to prevent it from recurring. But Mr. Kingson also found that several of his friends also were similarly plagued, and none knew why — or what to do about it. Nosebleeds most often afflict older adults and young children. Among the young, Dr. Alan Lipkin, an otolaryngologist in Denver, told me, “digital and other manipulation” is the usual cause. Translation: nose-picking or putting foreign objects in the nose, behaviors that most parents are eager to discourage. Of course, some adults also engage in “digital manipulation,” especially when winter dryness turns nasal mucus into irritating crusts that can impair breathing. And nosebleeds in young children may be caused by nasal dryness, as they often are in older adults. Among both adults and children, however, there are many other causes worth knowing about. And while most nosebleeds can be self-treated or prevented with simple home remedies, frequent nosebleeds should never be taken lightly. They can be a sign of a more serious problem, like leukemia, a nasal tumor or a blood clotting disorder, and should be brought to a doctor’s attention.
Two Major Types Most often, nosebleeds originate in the front of the nose, where many small blood vessels near the surface of the nasal septum (the tissue that divides the two nostrils) warm the air you inhale. These so-called anterior nosebleeds are annoying, and they
can be frequent and frightening, on occasion producing several ounces of blood. But anterior nosebleeds are rarely dangerous. Of greater concern are the severe, potentially dangerous nosebleeds that originate in larger blood vessels far back in the nose. So-called posterior nosebleeds are relatively uncommon, and home remedies are ineffective. They require prompt medical attention and more involved treatment, perhaps under anesthesia in a hospital.
Here are some common causes: • Medications that “thin” the blood, like warfarin (Coumadin); clopidogral bisulfate (Plavix); nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or Nsaids, like ibuprofen and naproxen; and aspirin, including “baby” aspirin that many older adults take to help prevent heart disease and colon cancer. • Topical medications that irritate the nasal passages, like corticosteroid and antihistamine sprays, and overuse of decongestant nasal sprays. • Allergies and their consequences — frequent sneezing and overly aggressive nose blowing. • Upper respiratory infections involving the nose or sinuses. • Nasal trauma from a direct or indirect blow to the nose, including a broken nose. • A deviated septum, which can impede breathing through one nostril and overwork the other. • Abrupt changes in air pressure. • High blood pressure and atherosclerosis, which are more common with age, can be a contributing factor in adults. • Other disorders, like liver or kidney disease, chronic abuse of alcohol and sniffing cocaine, also can result in nosebleeds. In most cases, nosebleeds affect only one nostril, though if the problem is severe, blood can sometimes come from both nostrils (or even from an eye). Seek medical care if you experience repeated nosebleeds, bleed heavily or bruise easily; if you take medication or have an underlying disease that can interfere with blood clotting; if you vomit blood, become dizzy or faint; if you
Moistening the air you breathe and staying well hydrated, especially during the winter months, is a good place to start. Mr. Kingson’s otolaryngologist suggested that he use a cold-mist vaporizer in the bedroom, take hot showers and drink lots of water, as often as every 15 minutes. Nosebleed sufferers might also consider using absorbent cotton or gauze to coat the interior of the nostrils with a gel or petroleum jelly, Dr. Lipkin said. Nasal saline sprays are also helpful. Avoid forceful nose blowing, and do not try to clear the nose with an object like a Q-tip. To keep undue pressure from building up in nasal vessels, children and adults should be taught to sneeze with their mouths open. To control nose-picking in children, keep their fingernails cut short. If you must take a medication that can cause bleeding, ask your doctor whether a lower dose or different drug might be used. For pain control, try acetaminophen (Tylenol and many generics) instead of an Nsaid, but be sure not to exceed the recommended daily dose. Most minor nosebleeds can be easily controlled at home. Do not lie down. Sit upright, and bend forward slightly from the
hips to keep blood from running down the back of the throat. Swallowing blood can cause vomiting. Placing your thumb and index finger on the soft part of the nose, just below the bony bridge, pinch the nostrils closed for 10 minutes without interruption, Dr. Lipkin recommended. Do not stuff anything into the nostril, but short-term use of a decongestant nasal spray may help constrict the culprit vessel, he said. To keep the bleeding from restarting, do not blow your nose soon afterward. Do not bend over, and avoid strenuous activity and heavy lifting for a few hours. If self-treatment is not effective and bleeding continues for more than 20 minutes, or if a nosebleed resulted from an injury to the face, see a doctor. Something else might be wrong, perhaps a fracture. Medical treatment of challenging nosebleeds may require cauterizing the bleeding vessel with a chemical like silver nitrate or with a laser beam. Nasal packing, which is what ultimately stopped Mr. Kingson’s nosebleeds, may be used to apply pressure to the bleeding vessel and promote clotting. If the problem involves a posterior vessel, hospitalization and sedation or anesthesia may be necessary. Posterior nasal packings are left in for two or three days, and should be removed only by a professional. If that procedure doesn’t work, surgery or arterial blockage may be needed.
An Herbal Alternative to Creams for Pale Skin By SINDYA N. BHANOO
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irror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? In some Asian cultures, snow-white skin is considered a sign of beauty, and many women resort to lightening creams that can have destructive side effects. Some of them cause itching, redness and inflammation; others contain potent steroids that can cause serious damage over time. And still others contain mercury, which is poisonous. Now, Taiwanese researchers claim that an ancient Chinese herb used in traditional medicine might allow those in search of snowy white skin a way to inhibit the production of melanin. The scientists are reporting their findings on Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim, Calif. The Chinese herb, which comes from the bush Cinnamomum subavenium, appears to be safer than whitening
creams, the researchers say. It is a close relative of the cinnamon tree and contains two chemicals that are able to block tyrosinase, which generates melanin. Since melanin is the pigment that causes coloring of the skin, hair and eyes, inhibiting tyrosinase is one strategy to whiten skin, said the lead author, HuiMin Wang, a scientist at Kaohsiung Medical University in Taiwan. Dr. Wang and his colleagues tested the chemicals on zebra fish embryos. Exposure to the chemicals reduced melanin production in the fish by about 50 percent in four days, and the embryos lost their stripes and turned white. However, just because the chemicals are natural and plant-derived doesn’t mean that they are safe for human use. Although they appear to be nontoxic in low doses, researchers will be conducting sensitivity, allergy and toxicity tests. The project has received financing from the government of Taiwan and support from cosmetic companies.
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The San Juan Weekly
F.D.A. Panel to Consider Warnings for Artificial Food Colorings By GARDINER HARRIS
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fter staunchly defending the safety of artificial food colorings, the federal government is for the first time publicly reassessing whether foods like Jell-O, Lucky Charms cereal and Minute Maid Lemonade should carry warnings that the bright artificial colorings in them worsen behavior problems like hyperactivity in some children. The Food and Drug Administration concluded long ago that there was no definitive link between the colorings and behavior or health problems, and the agency is unlikely to change its mind any time soon. But on Wednesday and Thursday, the F.D.A. will ask a panel of experts to review the evidence and advise on possible policy changes, which could include warning labels on food. The hearings signal that the growing list of studies suggesting a link between artificial colorings and behavioral changes in children has at least gotten regulators’ attention — and, for consumer advocates, that in itself is a victory. In a concluding report, staff scientists from the F.D.A. wrote that while typical children might be unaffected by the dyes, those with behavioral disorders might have their conditions “exacerbated by exposure to a number of substances in food, including, but not limited to, synthetic color additives.” Renee Shutters, a mother of two from Jamestown, N.Y., said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that two years ago, her son Trenton, then 5, was having serious behavioral problems at school until she eliminated artificial food colorings from his diet. “I know for sure I found the root cause of this one because you can turn it on and off like a switch,” Ms. Shutters said. But Dr. Lawrence Diller, a behavioral pediatrician in Walnut Creek, Calif., said evidence that diet plays a significant role in most childhood behavioral disorders was minimal to nonexistent. “These are urban legends that won’t die,” Dr. Diller said. There is no debate about the safety of natural food colorings, and manufacturers have long defended the safety of artificial ones as well. In a statement, the Grocery Manufacturers Association said, “All of the
major safety bodies globally have reviewed the available science and have determined that there is no demonstrable link between artificial food colors and hyperactivity among children.” In a 2008 petition filed with federal food regulators, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group, argued that some parents of susceptible children do not know that their children are at risk and so “the appropriate public health approach is to remove those dangerous and unnecessary substances from the food supply.” The federal government has been cracking down on artificial food dyes for more than a century in part because some early ones were not only toxic but were also sometimes used to mask filth or rot. In 1950, many children became ill after eating Halloween candy containing Orange No. 1 dye, and the F.D.A. banned it after more rigorous testing suggested that it was toxic. In 1976, the agency banned Red No. 2 because it was suspected to be carcinogenic. It was then replaced by Red No. 40. Many of the artificial colorings used today were approved by the F.D.A. in 1931, including Blue No. 1, Yellow No. 5 and Red No. 3. Artificial dyes were developed — just as aspirin was — from coal tar, but are now made from petroleum products. In the 1970s, Dr. Benjamin Feingold, a pediatric allergist from Cali-
fornia, had success treating the symptoms of hyperactivity in some children by prescribing a diet that, among other things, eliminated artificial colorings. And some studies, including one published in The Lancet medical journal in 2007, have found that artificial colorings might lead to behavioral changes even in typical children. The consumer science group asked the government to ban the dyes, or at least require manufacturers to include prominent warnings that “artificial colorings in this food cause hyperactivity and behavioral problems in some children.” Citizen petitions are routinely dismissed by the F.D.A. without much comment. Not this time. Still, the agency is not asking the experts to consider a ban during their twoday meeting, and agency scientists in lengthy analyses expressed skepticism about the scientific merits of the Lancet study and others suggesting any definitive link between dyes and behavioral issues. Importantly, the research offers almost no clue about the relative risks of individual dyes, making specific regulatory actions against, say, Green No. 3 or Yellow No. 6 almost impossible. The F.D.A. scientists suggested that problems associated with
artificial coloring might be akin to a peanut allergy, or “a unique intolerance to these substances and not to any inherent neurotoxic properties” of the dyes themselves. As it does for peanuts and other foods that can cause reactions, the F.D.A. already requires manufacturers to disclose on food labels the presence of artificial colorings. A spokeswoman for General Mills refused to comment. Valerie Moens, a spokeswoman for Kraft Foods Inc., wrote in an e-mail that all of the food colors the company used were approved and clearly labeled, but that the company was expanding its “portfolio to include products without added colors,” like Kool-Aid Invisible, Capri Sun juices and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Organic White Cheddar. The panel will almost certainly ask that more research on the subject be conducted, but such calls are routinely ignored. Research on pediatric behaviors can be difficult and expensive to conduct since it often involves regular and subjective assessments of children by parents and teachers who should be kept in the dark about the specifics of the test. And since the patents on the dyes expired long ago, manufacturers have little incentive to finance such research themselves. Popular foods that have artificial dyes include Cheetos snacks, Froot Loops cereal, Pop-Tarts and Hostess Twinkies, according to an extensive listing in the consumer advocacy group’s petition. Some grocery chains, including Whole Foods Market and Trader Joe’s, refuse to sell foods with artificial coloring.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
39 SCIENCE / TECH
Romantic Distress Causes Physical Pain M
aybe words can hurt you as much as sticks and stones: Romantic rejection, at least, causes physical pain, according to a new study of brain activity. Past studies have shown that simulated social rejection may be connected to a network of brain regions that processes the meaning of pain but not the sensory experience itself. Now MRI brain scans of people jilted in real life show “activation in brain areas that are actually tied to the feeling of pain,” said study co-author Edward Smith, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York City. Smith and colleagues recruited 40
participants via flyers posted around Manhattan and through Facebook and Craigslist advertisements. All the volunteers reported going through an “unwanted romantic relationship breakup” within the past six months. While in an MRI machine, the subjects were asked to look at photographs of their ex-partners and think about being rejected. When they did so, the parts of their brains that manage physicalpain – the secondary somatosensory cortex and the dorsal posterior insula, to be exact – lighted up, according to the study. Breaking Up Is Hard to Do The study isn’t a “true perfect experiment – we couldn’t control who had the
Ancient Farming S
cientists have come up with new evidence in support of the controversial idea that humanity’s influence on climate began not during the industrial revolution, but thousands of years ago. Proposed by paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman in 2003, the theory says that human influences offset the imminent plunge into another ice age and helped create the relatively stable climate that we are familiar with today. It has been repeatedly panned as implausible by paleoclimate researchers, but eight years on, Ruddiman and others say that they have the data to support early anthropogenic climate change. The argument centers on a curious trend in atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane levels since the last ice age ended about 11,000 years ago and the current Holocene epoch began. In previous interglacial periods, CO2 levels spiked early and then gradually declined until the globe went into another ice age. The Holocene began by following this trend, but then CO2 levels changed course and began to rise around
8,000 years ago. The same thing happened with methane levels around 5,000 years ago. These trends align with the expansion of human agriculture, and Ruddiman, of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, argues that it is no coincidence – the clearing of land and expansion of irrigation released huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Critics say that human populations were probably too small to support such a hypothesis, and recent studies have raised serious questions about early anthropogenic carbon and methane emissions. But rather than backing down, Ruddiman and several other researchers will present their supporting evidence in a series of papers scheduled for publication in a special issue of The Holocene journal later this year. Researchers presented some of the work this week at the American Geophysical Union’s Chapman Conference on Climates, Past Landscapes and Civilizations in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “I’m of course hopelessly biased, but
rejection experience and who didn’t,” Smith noted. “This is true of any study that takes advantage of an activity that happened outside of the laboratory,” he said. “There’s always the possibility that there’s (some unknown element) about these people who were rejected that was causing the special pattern of what we’re seeing.” Yet the results are striking, Smith said, especially because the team analyzed 150 other brain-scan experiments on negative emotions – fear, anxiety, anger, sadness – and found that none of these emotionally painful experiences activate the brain’s physical sensory areas in the same way as an undesired breakup.
“There may be something special about rejection.” The painful-rejection study appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
this year is going to be a good year for the early anthropogenic influence hypothesis,” Ruddiman said as he presented his overview study. Slow and steady One of the studies, led by Jed Kaplan at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne, Switzerland, suggests that agriculture had a much larger impact than previously believed as it expanded in Europe and beyond. Kaplan built a detailed model to analyze landuse change over time, building in historical and archaeological data where possible. In contrast to most previous estimates, the model assumes that humans cleared more land early on, with only gradual intensification as agriculture improved. “People are basically lazy,” he says. “They only intensify their land use when they are forced to.” The result is roughly double the carbon emissions compared with earlier estimates. Ruddiman also took issue with a highprofile Nature studypublished in 2009 by a team at the University of Bern, Switzerland, led by climate modeler Thomas Stocker, who is co-chairman of Working Group I for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The study takes advantage of the fact that plants preferentially take up the isotope carbon-12, subtly altering the ratio between carbon-12 and carbon-13 in the atmosphere. Stocker and his team analyzed an Antarctic ice core and found no evidence of a change in the ratio, which would have been expected if carbon from cleared vegetation were released back into the atmosphere. But that study underestimated the amount of carbon-12 taken up by peatlands, say Ruddiman and Kaplan. It assumed that just 40 gigatons of carbon were buried in peatlands during the late Holocene, whereas other estimates come in at 280 gigatons or more. That number would have to be offset by terrestrial emissions to maintain the atmospheric carbon isotope ratio. In an e-mail to Nature, Stocker said that Ruddiman’s latest paper merely “reite-
rates in extenso all of the points made earlier”. Although Stocker acknowledges that peatland estimates need to be better quantified, he cited a recent analysis by his institute suggesting that carbon emissions from land-use change are neither sufficient nor properly timed to explain the rise in CO2 levels in the Holocene. The rise of rice Kaplan says that Stocker’s land-use analysis contains some of the same problems and assumptions as others that have come before. Another study in The Holocene by Dorian Fuller, an archaeologist at University College London, explores methane emissions from livestock and the spread of rice agriculture in southeast Asia. Fuller says that the expansion of rice could account for up to 80 percent of the additional atmospheric methane as of 1,000 years ago, and suggests that the expansion of livestock could help to plug the gap in previous millennia. Palaeoclimatologist Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, U.K., acknowledges that whereas no one can refute the idea that humans played a significant part in influencing the Holocene climate, no one can prove that they did. Wolff points out that a modeling study that appeared in Nature in February this year, led by Joy Singarayer at the University of Bristol, U.K., shows that orbital variations and tropical sources can explain the Holocene methane trends. “This does not prove there was not an anthropogenic influence, but it removes the need for one,” Wolff explains. Both Kaplan and Fuller say that their focus is not so much on Ruddiman’s specific hypothesis as on the idea that humans might have influenced climate well before the industrial revolution. “The human influence is there,” says Fuller. “We can see that.” Researchers have plenty of work to do in terms of quantifying early human emissions, adds Kaplan, “but it is getting hard to support the idea that anthropogenic influence was negligible before the industrial era”.
SCIENCE / TECH 40 April 7 -13, 2011
The San Juan Weekly
Fall of Satellite is Major Loss I
n a serious blow to Earth observation and solar science, NASA’s Glory mission crashed shortly after lift-off. “All indications are that the satellite and rocket are in the southern Pacific Ocean somewhere,” said a visibly upset Omar Baez, NASA’s launch director for the mission, at a press conference held that morning at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, where Glory launched shortly after 2 a.m. local time. The failure is the second major loss for NASA’s Earth-observation program in as many years. In February 2009, NASA lost its Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) – intended to track atmospheric carbon dioxide levels – in a strikingly similar incident. Both satellites were launched on a Taurus XL rocket built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, a commercial rocket developer based in Dulles, Va. Both Glory and the OCO apparently suffered the same fate: the fairing, which is the protective clamshell surrounding the satellite, failed to separate from the spacecraft. The extra weight of the fairing dragged both rockets into the icy waters near Antarctica. Telemetry data from the rocket are still being processed, but Baez told reporters that he is already sure that Glory landed at the 2009 OCO crash site: “Physics says it’s likely in the same spot, or close to it,” he said glumly.
Confidence blown Glory was designed to give a global
picture of the effects of airborne particles on climate, by collecting data on clouds and on the distribution and chemistry of particulate matter in the atmosphere. Without the mission, scientists will struggle to separate the various effects of dust, sulphates, black carbon and other particulates on climate change. “A uniform data product is really key to having confidence in your models,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who follows rocket launches closely. “This is a real blow.” The mission also carried a solar irradiance monitor to measure the total energy output of the Sun. This does not vary by much, but changes in the amount of ultraviolet light andX-rays the Sun produces may affect atmospheric chemistry, says Jean-Yves Prado, a project scientist at the French space agency CNES in Toulouse, who works on a similar solar-monitoring mission known as PICARD. Because solar irradiance missions are notoriously difficult to build and operate, Prado says that the Glory mission would have provided a valuable cross-check for existing satellites. It would also have ensured that there were no gaps in monitoring when existing missions end “It’s a pity,” he says.
Crash and burn Engineers determined that the most likely culprit for the OCO failure in 2009
was the initiating system used to separate the fairing from the rocket body. That original system used pyrotechnics to generate hot gas, which drove two pistons to push the fairing halves from the rocket body. In the new design, the system used pressurized cold nitrogen gas instead. “We really felt like we had the problem nailed,” said Richard Straka, deputy manager of Orbital Science’s launch system group, at the press conference. Managers from Orbital Sciences who were present at the launch could not explain the apparent similarities between the Glory and OCO launch failures. “It’s not good for Orbital and not good for climate science,” says McDowell. The Glory launch failure is the third out of the past four for the Taurus rocket, and raises serious questions about the program’s management, he says.
A Taurus XL rocket was scheduled to be used in 2013 to launch the replacement to the lost OCO satellite, but Mike Luther, deputy associate administrator for science programs at NASA, says that plan is now on hold until the investigation into the latest failure is concluded. Orbital Science’s Pegasus and Minotaur rockets use fairings and fairing-release systems that are similar to those on its Taurus rockets, says McDowell. “My guess is that this is going to turn out to be a wiring error.” He adds that fairing and stage separation are among the trickiest bits of rocketry to get right. Straka, meanwhile, says that Orbital Sciences put additional telemetry apparatus on the rocket that was used to launch Glory, and that they have already begun “crunching the data” to see if they can work out what happened.
New Earthquakes Forecast Soon By Geologists G eologists suspect that Friday’s quake in Japan was actually an aftershock of a much weaker magnitude-7.2 quake on March 9. They warn that seismic stress has not yet relaxed in some particularly vulnerable parts of Japan, including the Tokyo region, 400 kilometers south of today’s epicenter. Both quakes are the result of the Pacific tectonic plate sliding beneath the Japanese islands. At eight centimetres per year, convergence along this subduction zone is extremely fast in geological terms.
Increased stress “Although certainly very big, today’s quake was not totally unexpected,” says John McCloskey, a geophysicist at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, U.K. “Technically, it was in fact an aftershock of the weaker quake earlier in the week – even though it may sound odd that an aftershock
can be stronger than the main shock.” McCloskey’s group had just completed computer calculations of the changes in seismic stress caused by the March 9 quake when the big one struck. They quickly detected the seismic causality between the two events. “The previous quake, although much smaller, significantly increased stress in the fraction of the fault zone that ruptured today,” says McCloskey. The sequence of quakes has probably also affected the stress field further south along the fault zone, critically increasing the earthquake risk in the Tokyo region, he says. “There is a strong interaction of quakes along a subduction zone, and we can certainly expect a number of major aftershocks in the next weeks,” he says. “Some may be as large as, or even stronger than, the quake thatlast month devastated
Christchurch in New Zealand. And chances are that another very large shock could occur to the south near Tokyo.” The Friday quake seems to have abruptly displaced the seafloor off Japan by a few meters, which caused the tsunami. “This was the largest tsunami ever measured by U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tsunamographs in the open ocean, with maximum crest height of over 2 meters,” says Costas Synolakis, director of the University of Southern California’s Tsunami Research Center in Los Angeles. According to local reports, the tsunami reached up to 10 meters in height when it hit Japan’s Sanriku coast barely 30 minutes after the quake. Along flat coasts, the tsunami propagated hundreds of meters inland, sweeping away homes, cars and roads. Sendai airport was completely flooded. The number of people killed in the
tsunami is as yet unclear, but reports suggest it could be several hundred. “Sanriku is probably the best-prepared coast in the world,” says Hermann Fritz, a tsunami expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Savannah. “But I am afraid it was not enough, despite tsunami gates and vertical evacuation structures and signs and everything else.” Thanks to the wave’s long travelling time across the Pacific Ocean, and the existence of a sophisticated tsunami early-warning system in the region, the water seem to have caused no casualties or major damage anywhere else around the Pacific. A Pacific-wide tsunami last occurred after a magnitude-8.8 earthquake that killed 521 people in Chile in February 2010. And Dec. 26, 2004, a tsunami triggered by a record 9.2 quake off Sumatra in Indonesia killed more than 220,000 people around the Indian Ocean region.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
41 SCIENCE / TECH
Cosmological Constant O
ur limited view of the cosmos obscures the identity of the mysterious forces that are responsible for the accelerating expansion of the Universe. Physicists at the University of Cambridge, U.K., now say in two papers that the “cosmological constant” – which is used to represent the Universe’s expansion in cosmological equations – depends on the time and location where it is measured. This could explain longstanding problems with the constant and help physicists to explain the Universe’s expansion. The most convenient explanation for the observed expansion is that empty space has a “vacuum energy” that generates the force necessary to push matter apart. It is this energy that the cosmological constant accounts for in equations. But physicists have struggled to reconcile the observed expansion with their theoretical explanations. One difficulty, for example, is the mismatch between the observed expansion and the predictions of many quantum field theories. These predict that pairs of quantum mechanical particles constantly popping out of the vacuum and disappearing again produce a repulsive force – known as quantum vacuum repulsion – that is at least 1056 times larger than the cosmological constant. Any theory accounting for the expansion would not only need to predict the constant correctly, but also cancel out the huge expansion predicted by such theories. A second difficulty is that when the cosmological constant is expressed in units of time, it is equivalent to
9.7 billion years – surprisingly similar to the age of the Universe, which is about 13.7 billion years old. Physicists have long been puzzled by this “coincidence problem” of two supposedly unrelated numbers being roughly the same. Cosmologists John Barrow and Douglas Shaw of the University of Cambridge have now created a model that explains the time coincidence and naturally cancels out just enough of the quantum vacuum repulsion so that vacuum energy can account for the accelerating expansion of the Universe.
Making waves Barrow and Shaw started by considering the entire Universe as a quantum mechanical wavefunction, which keeps the total energy of the Universe constant but varies other
quantities such as its mass, age and shape, as well as the cosmological constant itself. The one important constraint was causality: anything that factors into these equations must also be consistent with what an observer on Earth can see. For instance, a contribution to the wavefunction from Alpha Centauri – a binary star system about four light years (1.34 parsecs) away from our Sun – would have to be consistent with the properties of the star as it was four or more years ago, inferred from current observations. The researchers also weighted the different possibilities represented in the wavefunction according to how consistentthey were with the predictions of general relativity and the standard model. Like optical and acoustic waves, these alternate realities or different “histories” interfere with one another, some canceling each other out and others overlapping and reinforcing each other. In the surviving histories that weren’t canceled out, the authors found that the cosmological constant was fixed even though other properties of the Universe fluctuated. Then, they plugged in measurements for these properties and found that the predicted cosmological constant matched observations.
Rewriting history Barrow and Shaw’s calculations showed that in each surviving history, the constant is the same everywhere in the Universe throughout all of time – as had been assumed by
physicists. But they found that the wavefunction’s dominant histories can change. “As time goes by, the longer photons have to arrive, and the more of the Universe we see,” says Shaw. This alters the weighting of the different histories, bringing new combinations to the fore and resulting in a changing cosmological constant that is tied to the age of the Universe we inhabit. “I certainly find the premise interesting but cannot agree with the logic,” says astrophysicist Niayesh Afshordi of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He says that different observers at different times and places in the Universe seeing different values of the cosmological constant seems paradoxical when the rest of the Universe obeys classical laws. Shaw argues that because different observers are in different histories, their inability to communicate means that they each perceive a consistent, classical Universe. Although the shifts in the cosmological constant are not observable, Shaw and Barrow used the wavefunction that now dominates to predict the curvature of space by plugging in the measured cosmological constant. This number indicates that the Universe is sphere-like if the parameter is greater than one, a flat Universe if it is exactly one, and a saddleshaped curvature if less than one. In their upcoming paper in Physical Review Letters, the authors place the value at 1.0056, predicting a very slight spherical curvature. This is consistent with observations from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) – a NASA mission launched in 2001 to measure the properties of the oldest light in the cosmos and use it to deduce fundamental properties of the Universe – which puts the curvature between 1.0133 and 0.9916. But the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, launched in 2009, could prove or disprove Barrow and Shaw’s idea within two years. Planck is WMAP’s successor, and will be able to give an even more precise value for the curvature of the Universe. “There’s no wiggle room with our model; it’s either right or wrong,” says Shaw. And if they’re right, it looks like cosmological history can indeed be rewritten.
SCIENCE / TECH 42 April 7 -13, 2011
The San Juan Weekly
Carbon Date Stamps A Bone’s Telltale Shape
Eases Weight Estimates
By C. CLAIBORNE RAY
Q
. Is it true that because of radiation, people born after about 1950 can’t be carbon-
dated? A. Forensic scientists say that cold war radiation makes it easier to make a close estimate of the birth date of someone living since the middle of the last century. “The rationale behind using radiocarbon analysis is that aboveground testing of nuclear weapons during the cold war (1955-1963) caused an extreme increase in global levels of carbon-14, which has been carefully recorded over time,” wrote the authors of a study published in May 2010 in the journal Molecular & Cellular Proteomics. The decrease since such testing ceased has also been tracked. The study used both radiocarbon dating of tooth enamel and analysis of the conversion of aspartic acid in teeth from 41 deceased Swedes. “Radiocarbon analysis showed an excellent precision,” the researchers said, with an overall absolute error of 1 year, plus or minus 0.6 of a year. A federally financed study of
By SINDYA N. BHANOO
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various tissues from American cadavers with known birth and death dates, made available online in 2009 by the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, said carbon could also help determine death dates, as the radiocarbon content of tissues is fixed at death. Accuracy depended on the year of measurement, with precision highest for the 1960s and 1970s and progressively decreasing. “Barring future nuclear catastrophe, it would be reasonable to expect the method could be used for year-ofbirth determinations for people born within the next one or two decades,” the researchers said.
hen a human skeleton is found, forensic scientists create what is called a biological profile. By studying the bones, they can guess the person’s height, sex and age. Estimating weight, however, is difficult. Now researchers report that they have found a strong clue: the shape of the femur bone. For their study, in the March issue of The Journal of Forensic Sciences, the scientists looked at the skeletons and records of more than 100 white men at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and found that the femurs of those with a higher body mass index had a wider shaft. (The authors used the remains of white men for uniformity, since genetics and sex can affect bone shape.) The researchers speculate that femurs tend to widen as they bear more weight, and as the weight shifts from side to
side during activities like walking. The finding is important because Americans have been getting heavier in the past 30 years, said the lead author, Gina Agostini, a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts. (She worked on the research as a master’s student at North Carolina State University.) “It’s important to know how the body is responding to weight as the prevalence of obesity increases,” she said. In the future, weight estimations may be particularly useful in forensic biological profiling. “Weight is an important identifying characteristic,” she said. “It’s something that people notice.”
Slip-Sliding Birds Show How to Avoid Human Falls By TARA PARKER-POPE
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everal guinea fowl running confidently across a track. Then one takes a step and — whoops! — the bird slips and lands on its feathered backside, beak agape and wings flailing as it skids out of the picture. This may look like something from a bird blooper reel, but it’s really a study, published in The Journal of Experimental Biology, on the biomechanics of falling. The goal of the research, by investigators at Clemson University, is to better understand why some people fall and others don’t when they step on a patch of slippery ice. “Recruiting humans to run across slippery surfaces is not safe, so we don’t do studies like that,” said Timothy E. Higham, assistant professor in the department of biological sciences at Clemson. “We needed something that runs on two legs like a human.” Enter the helmeted guinea fowl, a large bird with a round body and small head that is prone to run rather than fly. The bird’s keen running ability makes it a favorite among researchers studying lo-
comotion, but the Clemson research takes it a step further. “No one has ever looked at the birds’ slipping,” Dr. Higham said. To conduct the experiment, the researchers created a six-meter track. The surface in the middle of the track was varied. Sometimes it was rough sandpaper, and other times it was a super-slippery polypropylene liner. The birds were released one at a time and allowed to trot at their own pace down the track. The birds navigated the sandpaper surface easily. But on the slick surface, some birds slipped slightly but stayed on their feet. Other birds slipped a lot and fell backward. The Clemson researchers studied the differences between birds that fell and those that stayed on their feet and found that the more stable birds typically crossed the slippery patch in a more upright position, with the feet under the body. Falling birds took bigger steps out in front of their bodies. The lesson for people is that many of us approach icy roads the wrong way. Instead of pushing a foot out in front of us to test the ice as
we walk, the better approach is to lift the foot and keep it underneath our body as we are navigating a slippery patch. Imagine a low-key marching step rather than a stride. Dr. Higham says ongoing research will try to determine which muscles are most important in keeping a bird stable on a slippery surface, a finding that could potentially be used in physical therapy programs for older adults to prevent falls.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
43 SCIENCE / TECH
Tools Suggest Earlier Human Arrival in America By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
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or many years, scientists have thought that the first Americans came here from Asia 13,000 years ago, during the last ice age, probably by way of the Bering Strait. They were known as the Clovis people, after the town in New Mexico where their finely wrought spear points were first discovered in 1929. But in more recent years, archaeologists have found more and more traces of even earlier people with a less refined technology inhabiting North America and spreading as far south as Chile. And now clinching evidence in the mystery of the early peopling of America — Clovis or pre-Clovis? — for nearly all scientists appears to have turned up at a creek valley in the hill country of what is today central Texas, 40 miles northwest of Austin. Archaeologists and other scientists report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science that excavations show hunter-gatherers were living at the Buttermilk Creek site and making projectile points, blades, choppers and other tools from local chert for a long time, possibly as early as 15,500 years ago. More than 50 well-formed artifacts as well as hundreds of flakes and fragments of chipping debris were embedded in thick clay sediments immediately beneath typical Clovis material. “This is the oldest credible archaeological site in North America,” Michael R. Waters, leader of the discovery team, said at a news teleconference. Dr. Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University, and his colleagues concluded in the journal article that their research over the last six years “confirms the emerging view that people occupied the Americas before Clovis and provides a large artifact assemblage to explore Clovis origins.” If the migrations began at earlier, pre-Clovis times, moreover, extensive glaciers probably closed off ice-free interior corridors for travel to the warmer south. Archaeologists said this lent credence to a fairly new idea in the speculative mix: perhaps the people came to the then really new New World by a coastal route, trooping along the shore and sometimes hugging land in small boats. This might account for the relatively swift movement of the migrants all the way to Peru and Chile. The first of the distinctive Clovis projectile points represented advanced skills in stone technology. About a third of the way up from the base of the point, the artisans chipped out shallow grooves, called flutes, on both faces. The bifacial grooves probably permitted the points to be fastened to a wooden spear or dart.
Other archaeologists pointed out that the Buttermilk Creek dates, more than 2,000 years earlier than the Clovis chronology, are not significantly older than those for other sites challenging the Clovis-first hypothesis. In recent years, early human occupation sites have been examined coast to coast: from Oregon to Wisconsin to western Pennsylvania and from Maryland and Virginia down to South Carolina and Florida. James M. Adovasio, an archaeologist who found what appears to be pre-Clovis material at the Pennsylvania site known as Meadowcroft Rockshelter, was not involved in the Buttermilk Creek excavations but has visited the site and inspected many of the artifacts. These pre-Clovis projectile points were also bifacial but not as large and well turned as the later technology. The most striking difference was the absence of the characteristic fluting. Dr. Adovasio, a professor at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., said some of the Buttermilk Creek material resembled tools at his site and others at Cactus Hill, Va., and Miles Point, Md. “It would appear the assemblage of artifacts is enough different from typical Clovis to be a distinct technology,” Dr. Adovasio said in an interview. “But it is not as much different as not to be ancestral to Clovis material.” That is another likely implication of the new findings, also noted by Dr. Waters and his team. It would appear that the Clovis technology was not an Asian import; it was invented here. No one knows exactly who these migrating people were, scientists said. Genetic studies of ancient bones and later Native Americans indicate their ancestors came from northeast Asia, possibly across the Bering land bridge at a time of low sea levels during the last ice age. But it has puzzled scientists that nothing like the Clovis technology has ever been found in Siberia.
The new findings, the Waters group reported, “suggest that, although the ultimate ancestors of Clovis originated from northeast Asia, important technological developments, including the invention of the Clovis fluted points, took place south of the North American continental ice sheets before 13,100 years ago from an ancestral preClovis tool assemblage.” Among other implications of the discoveries, the Texas archaeologists said, a pre-Clovis occupation of North America provided more time for people to settle in North America, colonize South America by more than 14,000 years ago, “develop the Clovis tool kit and create a base population through which Clovis technology could spread.” The Texas archaeologists said the new dig site has produced the largest number of artifacts dating to the pre-Clovis period. The dates for the sediments bearing the stone tools were determined to range from 13,200 to 15,500 years ago. Given the lack of sufficient organic material buried around the tools, the radiocarbon dating method was useless. Instead, earth scientists at the University of Illinois, Chicago, used a newer technique known as optically stimulated luminescence. This measures light energy trapped in minerals to reveal how long ago the soil was last exposed to sunlight. Steven L. Forman, who directed the tests, said that 49 core samples were drilled from several sections of the sediments associated with the tools. When the data were analyzed, they consistently yielded the same ages. “This was unequivocal proof of pre-Clovis,” he said at the news conference. Other scientists examined the flood plain geology at the site and determined that the clay sediments showed virtually no sign of having been disturbed during or after the burying of the tools. Lee C. Nordt, a geology professor at Baylor University, said that the traces of previous cracks in the sediment were few and too narrow to have allowed more recent artifacts from above to have settled into the deeper pre-Clovis layers. Until recently, Dr. Waters said, archaeologists had probably overlooked earlier artifacts because the Clovis points are so distinctive and, in contrast, the pre-Clovis material has no hallmark style calling attention to itself. “Finally, we are able to put Clovis-first behind us and move on,” he said. A few scientists, even among those who endorse the presence in the Americas, said they had some reservations about aspects of excavation methods at the Texas site. One who did not want to be quoted or identified questioned whether the reported artifacts justified such a fanfare. He considered the whole issue settled years ago when
a panel of experts judged that the Monte Verde site in southern Chile was indeed pre-Clovis. Dr. Adovasio noted that the Clovis model had been “dying a slow death.” He recalled that “Waters himself was a Clovisfirster, but changed years ago.” At a conference in 1999, the conventional hypothesis seemed to be on its last legs after a review of the Monte Verde data; still a few holdouts stood fast in opposition. “The last spear carriers will die without changing their minds,” Dr. Adovasio said.
First Look at Mercury’s Surface By KENNETH CHANG
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ASA’s Mercury Messenger took this photograph of the surface of Mercury. The bright pockmark in the upper half of the image is a 50-mile-wide crater called Debussy. (Craters on Mercury are named after artists, musicians and writers.) The spacecraft then took 363 more photographs before sending the images to Earth; more will be released to the public on Wednesday, when NASA will hold a news conference about what it sees on Mercury. The Messenger began its trip through the inner solar system six and a half years ago, and it entered orbit around Mercury on March 18. Since then, engineers have been checking out the spacecraft before turning on the instruments, including the camera. During the mission, expected to last at least a year, the Messenger is to take 75,000 more photographs, allowing scientists to map out the planet’s entire surface and study its geology and atmosphere in detail.
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44 April 7 - 13, 2011
The San Juan Weekly
Iran’s Museum of Contemporary Art talented artists and saw daring and progressive work. The good news is that Iranian art is alive and well. The bad news is that so much of the work cannot be shown publicly, or can be exhibited only for a few hours during an opening before being whisked into storage. The Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance keeps a tight rein on what can and cannot be displayed, and every gallery owner I met had a story about being called in to the ministry and asked to explain and subsequently remove the artworks on their walls. Pieces deemed offensiveor blasphemous expose dealer and creator to prosecution.
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he paradoxes of Iran are visible at the Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by the Iranian artist and architect Kamran Diba as an inverted version of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In the central atrium hangs an Alexander Calder mobile bought for the museum’s inauguration, in 1977, two years before the Islamic Revolution. To the right is an untitled 1966 sculpture by Donald Judd consisting of a vertical array of nine panels of what the wall label describes as “galvanized iron” stacked from floor to ceiling. The Judd, probably worth $5 million today, is just one of hundreds of Impressionist, modern, and contemporary artworks acquired at the institution’s founding. But it and the Calder are among the few Western pieces still on view; the rest, including works by Monet, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Renoir, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Magritte, Miro, Braque and Pollock, are buried in storage. A close look at the Judd sculpture reveals scratches and solvent stains on several of the panels, which are spaced unevenly on the wall and fixed badly – some askew. Until the revolution, Iran was among the most cultured, cosmopolitan countries in the region. It had a progressive movement in art and literature and a sophisticated film and television industry. The mostly Shiite Muslim population was pious but not fanatical. “We used to drink in public and pray in private, but today we pray in public and drink in private,” said my guide, who has an engineering degree and whose job was to accompany me everywhere, reporting on my movements. Having him around was a condition of my entry into a country where foreigners are largely unwanted and unwelcome. Officially, Iran reports that it receives
around 10,000 tourists annually, a staggeringly low number considering its cultural attractions; Persepolis, capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, is one of the great archaeological sites in the region. Dubai, with little to offer beyond shopping and an annual art fair, gets about a million visitors a year. These are anxious times for artists in Iran. Some have simply decided to remain outside the country. In spring 2009, the brothers Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh were en route to Tehran after a brief trip to Paris for their first show at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac when, according to an interview published recently in Wmagazine, “they got a call from a friend warning them not to return home.” Their work had been confiscated during a raid on the home of a Tehran collector, and it was feared that they would be arrested. The brothers applied for residency in the United Arab Emirates and now live in Dubai. Culture is valued here. There are numerous public theaters, museums, galleries and both public and private art schools in Iran. The country annually turns out about 40,000 art-school graduates, including graphic artists. But since the end of Mohammad Khatami’s relatively liberal presidency in 2005, numerous artists, editors, writers, and filmmakers have been jailed. According to Hamid Keshmirshekan, editor in chief of Art Tomorrow, a new Iranian contemporary art magazine, Tehran has more than 60 private galleries – 100 if you include all the “public” spaces – spread around the city but mostly clustered in the wealthier northern suburbs. Many are in private houses, so the scene has an ad hoc feel. A handful of private individuals back the arts. Most gallery owners are women, as they are elsewhere around the world. In the course of my stay in Tehran, I visited about a dozen galleries, met many
Younger artists are especially daring. Many of them employ humor as a weapon in their work, obliquely poking fun at the ruling clique of mullahs or pointing out the absurdities and contradictions of contemporary life in Iran. It is at once heartening and unnerving to see these young people embracing art-making as a mode of protest. In April, several Tehran galleries hope to stage an impromptu joint exhibition of about 70 artists’ works devoted to flower imagery, an act of solidarity with Mehraneh Atashi, a photographer who was detained in January 2010 for documenting Tehran’s street protests. She was released on the condition that she start taking pictures of something more suitable, like the beauty of local horticulture. Indeed, photography has emerged as a particularly vital means of social and political engagement. Shirin Aliabadi and Shadi Ghadirian are known for exploring women’s issues in Iranian society. Both have exhibited abroad, and their work is in American and European museum collections. Ms. Ghadirian has recently established an Internet registry of Iranian photographers, fanoosphoto.com, which presents online exhibitions. Nazila Noebashari, a collector, opened Aaran gallery on the second floor of a family-owned building in central Tehran two years ago. She has her office on the upper level, which doubles as the gallery storage. Artworks lean against walls, lie
on makeshift shelves or rest on the floor among books. Ms. Noebashari is a curator as well, recently organizing a show of Iranian artists at the 18th Street Art Center in Los Angeles. Her gallery shows mostly experimental artists and is one of the few in Tehran that is not overtly commercial. When “Eshgh,” or “Love” – a Popstyle work in acrylic, Swarovski crystals and glitter on canvas by Farhad Moshiri – fetched $1.048 million at Bonhams Modern & Contemporary Arab, Iranian, Indian & Pakistani Art auction in Dubai in 2008, a proliferation of galleries began looking for ways cash in on a perceived growth market for Iranian works. But leading contemporary artists in Tehran, including Mr. Moshiri, refuse to exhibit with these galleries, who they say lack professionalism. Another mode of expression that is popular among young, progressive artists is performance. Azad, established a decade ago by Rozita Sharafjahan and Mohsen Nabizadeh, the most avant-garde gallery in Tehran and a frequent venue for such pieces, is in a hard-to-find basement space with black-painted walls and a concrete floor in a quiet residential neighborhood. There, I met Amir Mobed, a 37-year-old conceptual artist. Mr. Mobed earned a name for himself with a performance at Azad, inspired by the American artist Chris Burden, in which he stood in front of a target with a protective metal box over his head and invited gallery visitors to shoot at him with a pellet gun. It was, he says, a symbolic execution, with a message about freedom of speech and the hopes of artists of his generation being silenced. Most of the best art I saw contained guarded metaphors for national and social issues. Among the country’s emerging stars is Barbad Golshiri, the 29-year-old son of the late Iranian writer Houshang Golshiri. Barbad Golshiri’s powerful 2005 series of postcard-size photographs, “Civil War,” uses the many political, religious and commercial billboards around Tehran as none-too-subtle metaphors for the ideological conflicts at the heart of Iranian society. An experience at the Silkroad Gallery perhaps best summarizes the perverse position of artists in Iran today. Perusing a portfolio of prints by Peyman Hooshmandzadeh, an artist and prize-winning writer (whose book was just banned), I paused at one showing young people in a Tehran cafe looking though a book of reproductions of photographs by Shirin Neshat, the Iranian expatriate contemporary artist. I asked the gallery owner, Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, why they are so interested in Ms. Neshat’s work. “Because it has never been shown in her own country,” she replied.
April 7 - 13, 2011
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PEOPLE
Assad, Ruler of Syria by Inheritance W
here has President Bashar al-Assad of Syria been this past week? Thousands of Syrians across the country have staged demonstrations against the government, and dozens of protesters have been reported killed by security forces. The cabinet was dismissed on Tuesday, although that’s a meaningless gesture unless it’s followed by real reform. Through it all Assad has remained so quiet that rumors were rampant that he had been overthrown. But while Syrians are desperate for leadership, it’s not yet clear what sort of leader Assad is going to be. Will he be like his father, Hafez al-Assad, who during three decades in power gave the security forces virtually a free hand to maintain order and sanctioned the brutal repression of a violent Islamist uprising in the early 1980s? Or will he see this as an opportunity to take Syria in a new direction, fulfilling the promise ascribed to him when he assumed the presidency upon his father’s death in 2000? Assad’s background suggests he could go either way. He is a licensed ophthalmologist who studied in London and a computer nerd who likes the technological toys of the West; his wife, Asma, born in Britain to Syrian parents, was a banker at J.P. Morgan. On the other hand, he is a child of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Cold War. Contrary to American interests, he firmly believes Lebanon
should be within Syria’s sphere of influence, and he is a member of a minority Islamic sect, the Alawites, that has had a chokehold on power in Syria for decades. In 2004 and 2005, while writing a book on him, I had long interviews with Assad; after the book was published, I continued to meet with him as an unofficial liaison between Syria and the United States when relations between the two countries deteriorated. In that time I saw Assad evolve into a confident and battle-tested president. I also saw him being consumed by an inert Syrian system. Slowly, he replaced those of questionable loyalty with allies in the military, security services and in the government. But he does not have absolute power. He has had tobargain, negotiate and manipulate pockets of resistance inside the government and the business community to bring about reforms, like allowing private banks and establishing a stock exchange, that would shift Syria’s socialist-based system to a more market-oriented economy. But Assad also changed along the way. When I met with him during the Syrian presidential referendum in May 2007, he voiced an almost cathartic relief that the people really liked him. Indeed, the outpouring of support for Assad would have been impressive if he had not been the only one running, and if half of it wasn’t staged. As is typical for authori-
tarian leaders, he had begun to equate his well-being with that of his country, and the sycophants around him reinforced the notion. It was obvious that he was president for life. Still, I believed he had good intentions, if awkwardly expressed at times. Even with the escalating violence there, it’s important to remember that Syria is not Libya and Assad is not Col. Moammar Gadhafi. The crackdown on protesters doesn’t necessarily indicate that he is tightening his grip on power; it may be that the secret police, long given too much leeway, have been taking matters into their own hands. What’s more, anti-Assad elements should be careful what they wish for. Syria is ethnically and religiously diverse and, with
the precipitous removal of central authority, it could very well implode like Iraq. That is why the Obama administration wants him to stay in power even as it admonishes him to choose the path of reform. Today, Assad is expected to announce that the country’s almost 50-year emergency law, used to stifle opposition to the regime, is going to be lifted. But he needs to make other tough choices, including setting presidential term limits and dismantling the police state. He can change the course of Syria by giving up that with which he has become so comfortable. The unrest in Syria may have afforded Assad one last chance at being something more than simply Hafez al-Assad’s son.
PEOPLE
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Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse T
here are things we know about Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, 2nd Baronet, of England: He was one of few Europeans to live among the Chinese in the early 20th century, and his writings greatly influenced the way the West saw Peking. Then there are fuzzier facts, like his claim that he had affairs with both Oscar Wilde and the Empress Dowager Cixi. At the peak of his career, Backhouse was a respected expert in the field of Orientalism. He worked for The Times of London as a researcher and translator, and his books on China were best sellers. Two works he wrote with the British journalist J.O.P. Bland, “Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking” (1914) and “China Under the Empress Dowager” (1910), shaped 20th-century views of the empress. But some of his sources and claims have since been proved fraudulent (he was roundly criticized after it was discovered that a diary he quoted turned out be a forgery), and historians are divided on the significance of his contribution to Western understanding of Chinese life – and whether it is significant at all. Next week, two Hong Kong companies will release English and Chinese versions of a previously unpublished manuscript by Backhouse that purports to be a memoir. The sexually explicit “Decadence Mandchoue,” written in 1943, when Backhouse was 70 and dying, recounts his time as a young man as he explored Peking’s gay haunts and what he described as wanton practices within the Imperial Court. Set largely from 1898 to 1908, the book starts in the ironically named House of Chaste Pleasures, where princes and other high-ranked officials buy the services of young men. The memoir will primarily be distributed in Hong Kong, with a limited number of copies also available in the United States and Europe, but not widely in mainland China. Beijing has not explicitly banned the book, but the publishers are reluctant to do battle with censors. Bao Pu, the head of New Century Press, which is publishing the Chinese translation, said there had been an attempt to contact mainland publishers. “They were all fascinated, but they would have to cut out of the sex parts, and that’s a third of the book,” he said. Backhouse (who claimed his name was pronounced “Bacchus”), however, is a footnote in history. The real figure of historical interest in “Decadence” is the Empress Dowager Cixi, the de facto ruler of the Middle Kingdom for 47 years. According to Backhouse, he met the aging empress after he helped restore looted works to her palace. He was then called in for a private audience, during which the empress complained about the barbaric behaviors of foreign di-
plomats. While there is documentation linking Backhouse to political life in Beijing, it is not known whether he actually returned treasure or had this conversation. What seems really far-fetched is an alleged affair that began when Backhouse – or the Backhouse-like character in this book – was washed and perfumed by eunuchs and called up to the 69-year-old Empress’s bedchambers to perform like a slave girl in a harem. According to his manuscript, the liaison lasted until the Empress’s death in 1908 at the age of 73. “Decadence Mandchoe” was written several months before Backhouse died. His Swiss physician, Reinhard Hoeppli, commissioned the memoir, but then never published it. The manuscript was eventually passed to the British historian HughTrevor-Roper, who also chose not to publish. Instead, Trevor-Roper wrote his own biography, “Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse” (1976), which cast Backhouse as a fraud and which has, until now, been the last word on him. Backhouse’s original texts from 1943 gathered dust on a shelf at the Bodleian library in Oxford until Derek Sandhaus, the chief editor of Earnshaw Books, which is producing the English-language edition of “Decadence,” found them while researching another book. “There are two reasons the manuscript was never published,” Mr. Bao of New Century Press said. “The first is that Trevor-Roper destroyed his reputation. The second is because of the greasy paragraphs about sex.” Trevor-Roper had called Backhouse’s memoirs “worthless historic documents,” as well as snobbish and pornographic. In the first paragraph, Backhouse manages to drop in Shakespeare, Wilde and Verlaine. He is a writer who will never say “rickshaw” if “charrette chinoise” will do. The famously multilingual author uses a mish-mash of French, Latin and Chinese, rendering a few parts hard to read, even if one has a background in those languages. As for its historical merit, even the new publishers admit that the book may not be entirely true. Instead, they say, its value comes in its details of that era. “These descriptions are historically significant because these accounts are not found in other sources,” Mr. Sandhaus said. “While there may be some inconsistencies, it is fundamentally based on fact. Even if he didn’t experience everything personally, this book may have been a way for him to relay things he had heard.” Bret Hinsch, a history professor at Fo Guang University in Taiwan and the author of “Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homo-
sexual Tradition in China,” added that documents about gay life in that period were scarce. “Compared to Japan, where there are hundreds of books documenting homosexuality at this time, there’s very little such material from China,” he said. “Writing personally about sex was seen as improper, even shameful, especially if one was describing an emotional dependence with the socially inferior, which is what these relationships were between rich patrons and the young opera singers who worked at these places.” Ultimately, “Decadence” does not clear up confusion over whether anything Backhouse wrote was believable. “It’s not an easy book to classify,” Mr. Sandhaus admitted. “Is it autobiography, fiction or non-fiction?” The same question could be asked of most of Backhouse’s work. When he was writing, there was little information about China available in the West. Backhouse, who was fluent in Mandarin, Manchurian, Mongolian and Japanese, had a certain amount of clout – and it was almost impossible for his readers to verify his claims. The critical modern reader would probably see “Decadence” as a fictionized memoir, with accurate details drawn from real life, but an outrageous plot. Backhouse knew full well European stereotypes of China – as an exotic, and erotic, fantasy world of empresses and opium smoke – and he gave his readers exactly what they wanted. “Why were Westerners so willing to believe these outrageous stories?” Mr. Hinsch said. “Would anyone believe a Chinese guy who said he went to England and had sex with Queen Victoria?”
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Lago Dos Bocas T
ake a Boat Ride to Lunch at Lago Dos Bocas Looking for a nice off the beaten path way to spend a weekend afternoon? You can always hop in the car and head to Lago Dos Bocas toward the center of the island, where you can enjoy a free boat ride around the lake or, to make a longer day out of it, go to one of the lakeside restaurants and enjoy drinks or a meal while admiring the views. Lago Dos Bocas (Dos Bocas Lake) is a man-made lake (as are all of the lakes in Puerto Rico) located between Arecibo and Utuado. It was constructed in 1942 by what is now the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) by blocking the Arecibo and Caonillas Rivers where they meet. There, they made a dam and installed a hydroelectric power plant. I am pretty sure the dam is still used to generate electricity, and the beautiful lake is used as a potable water reservoir and for public enjoyment (mainly on weekends). We recently stopped here for lunch with my brother John and his wife Chris after our Cueva Ventana adventure on a Sunday in March. The lake is just about 15 minutes away from the cave and it was lunch time — so it was a perfect plan! The route to the lake is easy to follow — there are large signs pointing the way to the embarcadero (pier) parking area. Here you will be helped by attendants into finding a spot to park. Parking was free when we went, though there was a booth (so maybe they charge sometimes?). From there, just walk to the left toward the water. In the parking lot, representatives
from the restaurants had sample menus and pictures of their places. They all serve typical Puerto Rican cuisine, or comida criollo. All of the restaurants looked good — it was difficult to choose which one to go to!
The Restaurants All of the restaurants are lakeside, though some higher up and some close to water level. Each one has their own boat that picks up customers at the boat dock and ferries them them to their restaurant. Once you decide which restaurant to go to, the rep will call the boat and they will meet you at the dock. The boats range in size, but most can hold 10 to 12 people. The lake was much larger than imagined it would be. The boat ride, going at a nice fast clip with a great breeze, took about 10 minutes each way.
Along the way, there were great views of the mountains and water fowl. All of the restaurant have open-air, covered seating areas for meals. Some also have indoor seating. Keep in mind that these restaurants are only open on the weekend, usually from 10 or 11am until 6 or 7pm. They are sometimes open on Monday holidays. The may be open mid-week in July. It’s best to call ahead just to make sure. All of the restaurants have similar prices — appetizers run about $3 to $7, main meals about $12 to $17. I believe all the restaurants take Visa, MasterCard, ATH (debit) and (obviously) cash. A few may take American Express. You may want to check with the representative before boarding the boat. There are 5 restaurants located at
the lake, but we were only able to get information from 4 of them. If anyone has information on the fifth one, let us know in the comments below. (9/10Thanks Francisco!) We decided to go to El Fogon de Abuela just because of the name (it means Grand-mom’s cooking stove/ area). We tried the mofongo (one with with rabbit & one with shrimp), the churrasco (skirt steak) and filete de chillo (snapper fillet). They were all very good! The Ferry RideIf you don’t want to eat, but just want nice (free!) boat ride, the Department of Transportation & Public Works (DTOP) has some ferries (lanchas) that can take from 15-40 people around the lake at one time.
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Comes from page 47 This boat ride is generally intended for residents of the lake area, however anyone is free to take it if there is room on the trip. The schedule is 9:10am, 10am, 11am, 1pm, 3pm, and 4pm. The 45-minute trip goes all around the lake and returns to the boat dock. These are free rides, and they don’t take reservations or even guarantee you can get onto a boat. You just go down to the boat ramp (the larger one on the right, not the one the restaurants use) and wait. Ask the DTOP employee if they can fit you on. When we went, they were having trouble with the motors and only lake residents were going on a reduced schedule. The DTOP web site says they are open daily from 6:30am-5:30pm. I don’t know if that is true and there was no answer when I called them (787-879-1838). I wouldn’t count on it, I assume it may only be available on weekends. The Department of Natural Resources (DRNA) is also on-hand to help maintain and secure this beautiful area. Other Activities on the LakeThey allow fishing at the lake, with a permit. I believe you can rent a boats and kayaks to enjoy on the lake, also. Other Things to do NearbyIf you’re going to make the drive to the Arecibo/Utuado area for Dos Bocas, you might as well visit one of the many nearby attractions and make a full day out of it. Some nearby attractions include • Rio Camuy Caves Park • Arecibo Radiotelescope • Cueva Ventana • Caguana Indigenous Ceremonial Center • Arecibo Lighthouse Park • Fun Valley Park • Cave of the Indian • Prime Outlets Mall
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A Paris Farewell By AMY M. THOMAS
I
’ve always been one of those girls. A die-hard Francophile. An American helpless in the face of Parisian charms and pleasures. A New Yorker who could never seem to shake the City of Light. I went for a college semester, I went with boyfriends, I went to eat chocolate. And finally, for a twoyear period beginning in 2009, I went to live my dream. Now that I’m back home, my vision of Paris has been altered. What was once mysterious is now intimately understood. What was once mythical is now more real (although, admittedly, still magical). To some extent, Paris will always belong to the Truffauts, Fitzgeralds and Bernhardts of the world. But now some of my own history runs through its streets too. Weaned as I was on “A Moveable Feast” and “Memoirs of Montparnasse,” when I moved to Paris, I saw it clearly divided between the artsy Left Bank and the buttoned-up Right Bank. The Left Bank was for thinkers and dreamers; artists and musicians; students and stargazers who famously sought inspiration – and, peut-etre, absinthe. It’s where Josephine Baker shimmied, where Hemingway feasted and where Sartre and de Beauvoir had endless philosophical debates. The Right Bank was for bankers at the Bourse and flaneurs on the grand boulevards. It was where manicured gardens, symmetrical squares and majestic monuments reigned supreme; a melange of foreign embassies, tony boutiques and chichi cafes, all steps from where King Louis XVI and thousands of others were guillotined at the Place de la Concorde during the French Revolution. I made my home in the center of the Right Bank, off the Rue Montorgueil. On an amazing market street filled with patisseries, fromageries and boucheries, nothing made me happier, or feel more Parisienne, than meandering up and down the pedestrian blocks, inhaling the irresistible smells of roasting chickens, stinky cheeses and
warm, yeasty baguettes. On more occasions than warranted, I’d treat myself to a creme-filled pain aux raisins from Stohrer, one of the oldest bakeries in Paris. Not too far away in the Marais, at a bread stand inside the Marche des Enfants Rouges, the Cornet Vegetarien – a sandwich of fresh greens, grated carrots and fennel, marinated onions and thinly sliced avocado, dressed with olive oil and honey and dusted with chives and lime zest – was like nothing I’d ever eaten. And the man who prepared it, Alain, a barrel-chested maestro who was given to bursts of song and dance, always made my day. For macarons, I learned there was only one place to go: Pierre Herme on the Left Bank. If I was alone, I took the delicate ganache-filled meringue cookies to the Square des Missions Etrangeres, a small spot of green in the center of the well-to-do Rue du Bac neighborhood, and ate them in gleeful silence. But if I were bringing friends from out of town for the petites douceurs, we’d savor them together near the central basin in the Jardin du Luxembourg, where tourists and Parisians alike crowded around to watch the motorized sailboats skate across the water. Back over on the Right Bank, inside the Palais Royal, I found a welcome solitude among the rows of trees pruned into perfect squares. I loved the Technicolor flowerbeds during late summer and how the rosebushes miraculously bloomed in winter, the buds like drops of blood against the white snow. And in the spring, the green fields and gold dome of Les Invalides opening
before me when I zipped across the Pont Alexandre III to the Left Bank never failed to make me sigh. As my circle of exploration expanded from the city center, I started seeing Paris itself growing in new ways. Cashmere emporiums and Costes brothers cafes were infiltrating the Left Bank, nudging it away from “bohemian” into the realm of “haute bourgeois,” while neighborhoods like Belleville and the Haut Marais, with their emerging artists and galleries, infused the Right Bank with creative juice. Apparently, my staunch division of Paris based on riverbanks wasn’t so black and white. And by the time my two-year stint was up, two other sides to Paris were luring me: the east and the west. THE EDGY EAST I was first introduced to Canal St.Martin on Paris’s east side by a friend who lived there and took me on my maiden Velib’ bike ride, guiding me past the waterway’s peaked iron bridges and enchanting locks – where Amelie had skipped stones – to the flat and sprawling Parc de la Villette just north of the neighborhood. The boomerang-shaped canal was once Napoleon’s conduit for supplying fresh water to Paris. Later, the surrounding area became home to the working classes. But since the millennium, as my friend pointed out – and I couldn’t help but notice as we wended our way through picnicking Parisians flaunting Ray-Bans, iPhones and flashy baskets (sneakers) – the quartier has attracted more and more artists and writers, young couples and hipsters (or bobos – “bourgeois bohemians” – in Parisian parlance). “When I moved to the neighborhood in 2002,” Elizabeth Bard, author of “Lunch in Paris: A Love Story With Recipes,” wrote in an e-mail, “they called our street the ‘rue des squatters’ because of all the illegal squats and an infamous ‘tent city’ that had been set up by tenants of a crumbling building down the street.” Today, as Bard points out, you’re just as likely to see potted geraniums and bamboo gardens as you are pilfered shopping carts and homeless camps. The more time I spent in this gentrified quartier, the more I realized how fitting it was that a fashionable New York writer
had made her home there with her Parisian boyfriend (now husband). Like the Mission in San Francisco or the Lower East Side in Manhattan, Canal St.-Martin is gritty with dirt and makeshift tarp shelters. But it‚Äôs also alive with creative energy. At Chez Prune, perhaps the neighborhood‚Äôs most popular cafe, with a lively terrace, I started making a game of counting the scruffy bearded men with fabulously disheveled coifs ‚Äì the way only French men can wear their hair. They always seemed to be engaged in nicotine- and wine-fueled debates over their latest film or art projects before they hopped onto their Vespas, mobile phones cleverly tucked inside their helmets. It seemed like the epicenter of artsy intellectualism ‚Äì the way I imagined Cafe Select on the Left Bank might have been in the ‘60s. This buoyant energy was everywhere I went in the east. Following a hairpin turn behind the stellar wine bar Le Verre Vole ‚Äì where I‚Äôd devoured sauteed squid with oranges and green olives and a delicious bottle of Cotes du Rhone, with help from a friend ‚Äì I discovered La Galerie Vegetale, an airy, industrial space selling black-andwhite photography and an impressive variety of potted succulents. Peering into the steamed-up windows of Voy Alimento, a beatnik-y cafe next door, I made a mental note to go there if I needed exotic herbs and organic teas by the gram. Around the corner on the Rue Lucien-Sampaix, I watched a steady stream of waifish girls shuffle by in their distressed booties and hand-knit caps at Bob‚Äôs Juice Bar, which was opened by Marc Grossman, a New Yorker, in 2006. As I sat at the communal table, sipping carrot and apple juice with a fresh ginger kick, I realized that eating in the east was an international adventure. You could swing a baguette and find pizza topped with baba ganouj at Pink Flamingo Pizza, Cambodian noodles at Le Cambodge or humble bio (organic) carrot soup at Zuzu‚Äôs Petals. As I became familiar with these neighborhood anchors, there was one address I knew I needed to conquer: Le Chateaubriand. Since Fred Peneau opened the bistro with the chef Inaki Aizpitarte in 2007, it‚Äôs earned a reputation as Paris‚Äô pinnacle
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50 Comes from page 49 of “bistronomy.” As tough as reservations are to come by, it also accepts walkins. So by 9 every night, there’s a train of fashionable foodies pressed against the zinc bar, eyeing the diners already gorging on the five-course, 50-euro (about $68) menu. Sure enough, the night of my reservation, the fashionable crowd gathering at the bar added to the evening’s excitement. As my dishes got more complex – moving from a dollop of mozzarella dusted with black pepper and vanilla to a deliciously juicy duck breast to pear crumble served with buckwheat ice cream and grapefruit compote – the din from the crowd flooding the entrance grew louder, until the whole interior seemed to vibrate. When I ventured a few weeks later to Le Dauphin, the modern all-marble wine bar opened by the Chateaubriand team, I saw the same cool kids snacking on tapas like oyster tapioca with blood sausage and dried duck meat. As I was happily sinking my teeth into the quartier’s dining scene, other new ventures were infiltrating. Art was creeping up from the not-too-distant Haut Marais, including Galerie Chantal Crousel’s second Parisian exhibition space on the Rue Leon Jouhaux. And as a sign that the bobos might soon be ceding their territory to tourists – already appearing on boat tours of the canal – Le Citizen, the quartier’s first boutique hotel, made its debut. “So many people are fed up with the conventional Sixth Arrondissement,” Sophie Berdah, a real estate developer who opened Le Citizen, explained as I sat with her in the hotel’s sun-flooded lobby, looking out at the prime stretch of Quai de Jemmapes. “This neighborhood is very off the track, so clients are people who know Paris a little.” I appreciated how in tune Berdah was with the quartier’s spirit that is still more shabby than chic. I spent a night in one of the 12 rooms, enjoying personal touches like hand-delivered carafes of sparkling water; artwork from the California-based Creative Growth Art Center, which supports artists with mental and physical disabilities; and books from Berdah’s private collection as well as Artazart, the exhaustive design bookstore across the street. Mostly though, I contented myself bytaking in the views overlooking the canal – knobby chestnut trees, vagrant homeless camps and all. THE REFINED WEST It was a hotel opening on the other side of town that drew me deeper into Paris’s western elegance. Temporarily working in an office on Avenue Hoche, one of the grand arteries that shoots away from the towering Arc de Triomphe at the head of the Champs-Elysees, I would often stroll on my lunch breaks down to Parc Monceau, a relaxed expanse of green where schoolchildren and joggers run free. As I walked by the quartier’s harmonious rows of limestone town houses, past storefronts for Nicolas Feuillatte Champagne and Franck Sabet carpets, I noticed the scaffolding that would soon be dismantled to reveal the newly re-
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furbished Royal Monceau. Paris is a city filled with five-star hotels, each with its own history and style. The Royal Monceau is one of the artiest, having attracted guests from Maurice Chevalier to Ray Charles to Madonna since opening in 1928. In 2008, it was shuttered for a much-ballyhooed redesign by Philippe Starck. Then one autumn day in 2010, voila, the scaffolding came down, and a coterie of suited doormen appeared, flanking a plush ruby carpet that extended from the hotel’s interior onto the sidewalk. Inside, the vast salon was filled with guests lounging in intimate groups of saddle-stitched leather chairs, nibbling club sandwiches and leafing through international newspapers. I spent 40 minutes browsing the bookstore’s hundreds of contemporary art, architecture and design titles and limited-edition accessories, like
the signed and numbered .38 Special bullet ring by the French artist Jacques Monory. Then I found my way to the hotel’s gallery, and caught the debut exhibition of 50 original Jean-Michel Basquiat works. Since I couldn’t afford one of the 139 rooms or suites that start at 730 euros a night, I figured I’d do the next best thing: splurge on lunch. I had two gorgeous options: Il Carpaccio, the upscale Italian restaurant tucked in the back corner under a vaulted ceiling, and La Cuisine, where Laurent Andre and Gabriel Grapin serve elevated classics according to the season. When in Rome, I told myself, and went directly to the French side. My smoked herring starter, marinated in olive oil and served with pickled onions, was rich enough to call it quits. But I didn’t. From there, I moved on to the daily special of steamed cod and baby spinach and, being a sweet freak, couldn’t resist finishing the meal with a bespoke millefeuille (I chose pistachio cream and fresh raspberries), dreamed up for the hotel by the cult patissier Pierre Herme. Inspired by my Royal Monceau experience, I embraced this new code of western luxury. I knew my time in Paris would soon draw to a close and was all too happy to see the city in a different light. Just as the edgy east had drawn me in throughout my first year, as autumn turned to winter during my second year, I eagerly soaked up its more sophisticated side. I went to see the giant green and orange neon Cy Twombly canvases that were fetching millions of dollars at Larry
Gagosian’s new gallery, in a former hotel particulier. At the nearby contemporary auction house, Artcurial, I was entertained by the modelesque black-suited servers at the new Gilles & Boissier-designed cafe as they briskly trotted down the restaurant’s central artery to deliver burrata salads and salmon tartares to the well-coiffed, middleaged patrons in their camel-colored cashmere. Since I was so close, I couldn’t resist the pull of the historic salon de the Laduree. I left with a rectangular pastel green box filled with rose and chocolate and pistachio macarons: a perfect Parisian memento. My edible explorations in the west came to an exquisite finale at L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon. To the dismay of epicures worldwide, Robuchon had shuttered his gastronomic mecca, La Table, in November 2010 but then quietly popped up the next month in the brand-new shiny red and black basement of Publicis Drugstore at the head of the Champs-Elysees. With my Parisian tour drawing to a close – pourquoi pas? – I made a reservation. As soon as I arrived, I spied Robuchon, who has more Michelin stars than any other chef in the world, supervising in the open kitchen. I knew it was going to be a special lunch. “Une coupe de Champagne?” I was asked as soon as I was situated at my corner perch at the bar, seated between two pairs of men. I accepted. Having never been to any of Robuchon’s restaurants, I commanded a feast. I started with a basic salad, which was
anything but: the endive, walnut, Stilton and apple combination was light and effervescent, beautifully refined. As were the procession of other small plates: John Dory with coriander, lime and a tomato compote; delicate black cod with daikon; and brochettes of creamy Parmesan-covered salsifis – a root vegetable (salsify to the Englishspeaking) that I had never heard of but was given to me by Robuchon himself as un cadeau, and something I’ll now forever seek on menus. As the lunch rolled on, I discovered the two pairs of men I was seated between included Michelin reviewers and members of the Club des Cent, a distinguished, if not clandestine, organization of 100 French gastronomes. The gentlemen pointed out many others in the restaurant I should have recognized but didn’t, including the actor Jean Reno and the singer Charles Aznavour and the former French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. The atmosphere was electrifying, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the food. By the time I finished my golden caramel souffle, most everyone in the restaurant was gone, and there I sat, “Mademoiselle Amy,” befriended by the staff, if only for the day. Antoine poured me a glass of Vouvray, and Patrick insisted I have a second dessert that the pastry chef, Francois Benot, wanted to share: a melange of banana, passion fruit, rum, granite and cream that he dreamed up in the Seychelles. When I finally left the opulent den, parting with repeated handshakes, smiles and “enchantees,” I was beyond sated, beyond charmed. But I couldn’t help but also feel a tinge of melancholy: If only I could pack up this moment and a hundred others – biking across the Pont Alexandre III, admiring the rosebuds in the wintery Palais Royal gardens – and place them alongside the boxes of macarons and photos of Alain in the Marche des Enfants Rouges. Then I stepped out onto the Champs-Elysees, into the buoyant heart of Paris, and the wistfulness vanished, just like that.
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Advertising
When the Marketing Reach of Social Media Backfires By STUART ELLIOTT
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OCIAL media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been embraced by Madison Avenue as effective new ways to reach consumers. But what happens when behavior on social media is deemed antisocial? Two large marketers, Aflac and the Chrysler Group, are struggling to answer that uncomfortable question in the wake of incidents that took place within days of each other. The incidents, involving remarks on Twitter that were judged to be tasteless, inappropriate and insensitive, point out some inherent risks of social media. One challenge is the “amplified effect” of social media, said Ian Schafer, chief executive at Deep Focus, a digital agency in New York, citing how, on Twitter, “you put something out and it can be retweeted thousands of times.” “It’s an age when anybody can communicate to an audience,” he added. “It didn’t used to be that way.” The relative newness of that phenomenon, said George E. Belch, a marketing professor at San Diego State University, means “there are people in your company who forget when they post on a blog, on Twitter, on a Facebook page, that it’s out there — and it’s out there at warp speed.” Another risk with social media is how many users vie to be first with what they consider clever comments on news stories and other subjects their friends and families care about. “I’m concerned,” said Daniel Khabie, chief executive at Digitaria in San Diego, an agency that is part of the JWT division of WPP. “I think you should think before you speak, and you should think before you tweet.” “We, as people, have a social responsibility,” he added. “What you say in social media shouldn’t be just a chain of thoughts.” Brands need to “establish a social media policy,” Mr. Khabie said, because without such precautions, “we’re giving people loaded guns to do incredible harm.” The first incident began, when an employee of New Media Strategies, an agency handling the Twitter account
for the Chrysler brand that is aimed at consumers (@ChryslerAutos), posted a comment there that read, “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to drive.” Between “to” and “drive” was a vulgarity. • The comment was deleted, the agency dismissed the employee and Pete Snyder, chief executive at New Media Strategies, wrote in a post on the company’s blog that the agency “regrets this unfortunate incident.” Chrysler said it would not renew the agency’s contract. In a post on a corporate blog, Ed Garsten, a spokesman for Chrysler, cited a new advertising campaign for the Chrysler brand, which carries the theme “Imported from Detroit,” as a reason. “This company is committed to promoting Detroit and its hardworking people,” Mr. Garsten wrote, adding: “Inside Detroit, citizens are becoming even more proud of their town, and outside the region, perception of Detroit is rapidly improving. With so much good will built up over a very short time, we can’t afford to backslide now and jeopardize this progress.” Professor Belch said he believed that “we’re going to see more of this” because “I don’t think people can always turn off their personal lives and say, ‘I’m crossing over to corporate brand communications now.’ ” The Aflac incident began when Gilbert Gottfried, the comedian who supplies the voice for the squawking duck character in most Aflac commercials, started to post at least 10 jokes to his personal Twitter feed (@RealGilbert) about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan — a market that accounts for 75 percent of Aflac’s revenue. Mr. Gottfried was dismissed, effective immediately. “Gilbert’s recent comments about the crisis in Japan were lacking in humor and certainly do not represent the thoughts and feelings of anyone at Aflac,” Michael Zuna, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Aflac, said in a statement. “Aflac Japan — and, by extension, Japan itself — is part of the Aflac family,” he added, “and there is no place for anything but compassion and con-
Gilbert Gottfried was fired by Aflac after certain comments about the crisis in Japan on his own Twitter account. cern during these difficult times.” The Kaplan Thaler Group in New York, an agency owned by the Publicis Groupe that creates ads for Aflac, and also created the duck character, referred inquiries about Mr. Gottfried to Aflac. Laura Kane, a vice president at Aflac, said the company had stopped running television commercials using the voice of Mr. Gottfried, including one that had been introduced only last week. “We are re-voicing them temporarily,” she added, as the company makes plans for “a nationwide casting call to find a new voice for the duck.” Aflac invoked a morals clause in Mr. Gottfried’s contract in dismissing him, Ms. Kane said. The jokes can no longer be found on Mr. Gottfried’s Twitter account. He posted two comments there. In the first, he wrote, “I sincerely apologize to anyone who was offended by my attempt at humor regarding the tragedy in Japan.” The second comment read: “I meant no disrespect, and my thoughts
are with the victims and their families.” • In considering the Aflac and Chrysler incidents, John Diefenbach, chairman at MBLM in New York, an agency that specializes in tasks like brand strategy, said: “I come down in favor of the company. They took the action they needed to take.” “The liberties that have been created by the Internet, by social media” must be balanced against “the idea that there’s an accountability and a responsibility if you’re being paid by someone to do a job,” Mr. Diefenbach said. Craig Macdonald, chief marketing officer at Covario in San Diego, an agency for search advertising and social media advertising, said he would recommend that marketers pursue a strategy of “controlled chaos” in social media. “Offer employees some sort of certification course and tell them, ‘We’ll tolerate some negativity and dumb stuff, and we’ll course-correct as we go along,’ ” Mr. Macdonald said. “Then monitor what they say, course correct — and do better next time.”
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Food Inflation Hidden in Tinier Bags By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and CATHERINE RAMPELL
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hips are disappearing from bags, candy from boxes and vegetables from cans. As an expected increase in the cost of raw materials looms for late summer, consumers are beginning to encounter shrinking food packages. With unemployment still high, companies in recent months have tried to camouflage price increases by selling their products in tiny and tinier packages. So far, the changes are most visible at the grocery store, where shoppers are paying the same amount, but getting less. For Lisa Stauber, stretching her budget to feed her nine children in Houston often requires careful monitoring at the store. Recently, when she cooked her usual three boxes of pasta for a big family dinner, she was surprised by a smaller yield, and she began to suspect something was up. “Whole wheat pasta had gone from 16 ounces to 13.25 ounces,” she said. “I bought three boxes and it wasn’t enough — that was a little embarrassing. I bought the same amount I always buy, I just didn’t realize it, because who reads the sizes all the time?” Ms. Stauber, 33, said she began inspecting her other purchases, aisle by aisle. Many canned vegetables dropped to 13 or 14 ounces from 16; boxes of baby wipes went to 72 from 80; and sugar was stacked in 4-pound, not 5-pound, bags, she said. Five or so years ago, Ms. Stauber bought 16-ounce cans of corn. Then they were 15.5 ounces, then 14.5 ounces, and the size is still dropping. “The first time I’ve ever seen an 11-ounce can of corn at the store was about three weeks ago, and I was just floored,” she said. “It’s sneaky, because they figure people won’t know.” In every economic downturn in the last few decades, companies have reduced the size of some products, disguising price increases and avoiding comparisons on same-size packages, before and after an increase. Each time, the marketing campaigns are coy; this time, the smaller versions are “greener” (packages good for the environment) or more “portable” (little carry bags for the takeout lifestyle) or “healthier” (fewer calories). Where companies cannot change sizes — as in clothing or appliances — they have warned that prices will be going up, as the costs of cotton, energy, grain and other raw materials are rising. “Consumers are generally more sensitive to changes in prices than to changes in quantity,” John T. Gourville, a marketing professor at Harvard Business School, said. “And companies try to do it in such a way that you don’t notice, maybe keeping the height and width the same, but changing the depth so the silhouette of the package
materials like corn, cotton and sugar creespokesman, in an e-mail. And Procter & Gamble is expanding ping up and expected to surge later this its “Future Friendly” products, which it year, companies are barely bothering to copromotes as using at least 15 percent less ver up the shrinking packs. “Typically, the product manufactuenergy, water or packaging than the stanrers are doing this slightly ahead of the dard ones. “They are more environmentally perceived inflationary issues,” Ms. Rosenfriendly, that’s true — but they’re also sma- blum said. “Lately, it hasn’t been subtle — I ller,” said Paula Rosenblum, managing mean, they’ve been shrinking by noticeable partner for retail systems research at Focus. amounts.” That can work to a company’s benefit. com, an online specialist network. “They announce it as great new packaging, and in In the culture of thinness, smaller may be a fact what it is is smaller packaging, smaller selling point. It lets retailers honestly claim, for example, that a snack package contains amounts of the product,” she said. Or marketers design a new shape and fewer calories — without having to change size altogether, complicating any effort to the ingredients a smidge. “For indulgences like ice cream, chocomparison shop. The unwrapped Reese’s Minis, which were introduced in February, colate and potato chips, consumers may say are smaller than the foil-wrapped Miniatu- ‘I don’t mind getting a little bit less becaures. They are also more expensive — $0.57 se I shouldn’t be consuming so much anan ounce at FreshDirect, versus $0.37 an yway,’ ” said Professor Gourville. “That’s a harder argument to make with something ounce for the individually wrapped. At H. J. Heinz, prices on ketchup, like diapers or orange juice.” But even while companies blame the condiments, sauces and Ore-Ida products Nabisco’s Fresh Stack package of have already gone up, and the company is recession for smaller packages, they rarely saltines, top, contains about 15 percent selling smaller-than-usual versions of con- increase sizes in good times, he said. He traced the shrinking package fewer crackers than the old package. diments, like 5-ounce bottles of items like Heinz 57 Sauce sold at places like Dollar trends to the late 1980s, when companies like Chock full o’ Nuts downsized the General. on the shelf looks the same. Or sometimes “I have never regretted raising pri- one-pound tin of ground coffee to 13 ounthey add more air to the chips bag or a sco- ces in the face of significant cost pressures, ces. That shocked consumers, for whom op in the bottom of the peanut butter jar so since we can always course-correct if the a pound of coffee had been as standard a it looks the same size.” outcome is not as we expected,” Heinz’s purchase unit as a dozen eggs or a six-pack Thomas J. Alexander, a finance pro- chairman and chief executive, William R. of beer, he said. fessor at Northwood University, said that Johnson, said last month. Once the economy rebounds, he said, businesses had little choice these days when While companies have long adjusted a new “jumbo” size product typically emerfaced with increases in the costs of their package sizes to appeal to changing tastes, ges, at an even higher cost per ounce. Then raw goods. “Companies only have pricing from supersizes to 100-calorie packs, the re- the gradual shrinking process of all packapower when wages are also increasing, and cession drove a lot of corporations to think ge sizes begins anew, he said. we’re not seeing that right now because of small. The standard size for Edy’s ice cream “It’s a continuous cycle, where at the high unemployment,” he said. went from 2 liters to 1.5 in 2008. And Tro- some point the smallest package offered Most companies reduce products picana shifted to a 59-ounce carton rather becomes so small that perhaps they’re phaquietly, hoping consumers are not reading than a 64-ounce one last year, after the cost sed out and replaced by the medium-size labels too closely. package, which has been shrunk down,” he of oranges rose. But the downsizing keeps occurring. With prices for energy and for raw said. A can of Chicken of the Sea albacore tuna is now packed at 5 ounces, instead of the 6-ounce version still on some shelves, and in some cases, the 5-ounce can costs more than the larger one. Bags of Doritos, Tostitos and Fritos now hold 20 percent fewer chips than in 2009, though a spokesman said those extra chips were just a “limited time” offer. Trying to keep customers from feeling cheated, some companies are introducing new containers that, they say, have terrific advantages — and just happen to contain less product. Kraft is introducing “Fresh Stacks” packages for its Nabisco Premium saltines and Honey Maid graham crackers. Each has about 15 percent fewer crackers than the standard boxes, but the price has not changed. Kraft says that because the Fresh Stacks include more sleeves of crackers, they are more portable and “the packaging format offers the benefit of added Lisa Stauber keeps careful records of grocery prices. freshness,” said Basil T. Maglaris, a Kraft Her 1-year-old daughter Alianna is one of nine children.
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Less than 50 Years of Oil Remain By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF
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he world may have no more than half a century of oil left at current rates of consumption, while surging demand from the developing world threatens to create “very significant price rises” before substitutes like biofuels can serve as viable alternatives, the British bank HSBC warns in a new report. “We’re confident that there are around 50 years of oil left,” Karen Ward, the bank’s senior global economist, said in an interview on CNBC.
The bank, the world’s second largest in assets, further cautioned that growth trends in developing countries like China could put as many as one billion more cars on the road by midcentury. “That’s tremendous pressure on oil to power all those resources,” Ms. Ward said. Substitutes, such as biofuels and synthetic oil from coal, could fill the gap if conventional supplies fall short, but only if average oil prices exceed $150 per barrel, the report notes. Increasingly tight global supplies, meanwhile, are likely to cause “persistent and painful” price shocks, it says.
Some oil industry observers take a more optimistic view of future supplies, arguing that further development of Canadian tar sands, offshore discoveries in the Arctic and an expected surge in supply from Iraq will keep oil markets well-supplied for decades. Shale drilling has also managed to boost domestic oil production in the United States after years of decline. Yet in a clear illustration of the vulnerability of world oil markets to even minor disruptions, the war in Libya — which has taken a little more than 1 percent of global supply offline — is considered a key factor
in the rapid run-up in oil prices since the beginning of the year. The HSBC report further notes that even without a shortage in oil supplies, the uneven distribution of remaining energy resources will probably shift the balance of economic power globally in the coming decades. It estimates that the biggest loser in this regard will be Europe, where energy scarcity may significantly hinder economic growth by midcentury. “They could be losing their influence on the world stage just at the time when they are most vulnerable,” the report says.
As Regulators Weigh AT&T Bid, a Look at Wireless Markets Abroad By JENNA WORTHAM and KEVIN J. O’BRIEN
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or Americans, complaining about big cellphone bills that seem to only get bigger is standard practice. But they may actually be getting a pretty good deal — globally speaking. While cellphone customers in the United States tend to pay more every month than consumers in other developed countries, they get more for their money in terms of voice and data use. For example, Americans pay an average of 4 cents for a minute of talk time, while Canadians and the British pay more than twice that, according to recent data from Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. In Japan, where the top three wireless carriers control 97 percent of the market, locals pay 22 cents a minute. “Pricing is what sets the U.S. apart from the rest of the world,” said Sam Paltridge, an analyst at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. “Americans spend less than average on communications.” The question for regulators in Washington is how AT&T’s $39 billion bid to buy T-Mobile might change that. Analysts and industry experts worry that the deal could hurt consumers, in particular by eliminating T-Mobile’s low-cost phone plans. Some are urging regulators to block the acquisition, which would leave two major companies, AT&T and Verizon, with nearly 80 percent of the wireless market, followed by the much smaller Sprint. AT&T has said the merger will benefit consumers, in part by improving network quality and reach. As they consider the deal, regulators may look abroad to see how competition affects wireless markets. With only three major network operators, the market in the United States would function similarly to some European markets, like France, which also has three operators, said J. Scott Marcus, the former chief technology officer at the telecommunications company GTE and former Internet policy adviser at the Federal Communications Commission. “It will definitely become an oligopoly market,” Mr. Marcus said. “That will be less good than what one had before, but not awful.” Of course, using other countries as a guide to how consolidation may play out is tricky, because every market is shaped by local cultural and business factors. In Japan, for example, the average amount that consumers spend on data is the highest in the developed world — but not because of a lack of competition in the mobile industry. Japanese cellphone owners like to do a
lot of browsing on their cellphones, and they are prepared to pay for that, said Steven Hartley, an analyst at Ovum, a research firm in London. Mr. Hartley said over 40 percent of mobile operators’ revenue in Japan comes from data services, compared with 25 percent in the United States. Americans tend to talk nearly twice as much as people in most other developed countries, which led to the popularity of bigger buckets of voice minutes. And plans that offer nationwide calling with no roaming fees have also kept prices low. In Europe, which in theory is one market but is actually divided into many smaller national markets, roaming charges are a frequent and bothersome reality. Europeans and Asians were quicker than Americans to embrace so-called prepaid phone service, in which customers do not have a contract and pay for chunks of voice minutes and data capacity as they go. This means phone owners are generally not tied to a single wireless company and have more flexibility to switch among services. Some even carry around multiple SIM cards, the fingernail-size chips that activate a cellphone for use, and decide which one to install based on which offers the cheapest rate for the country they are calling or visiting. For example, someone living in Spain who often visits family in France might purchase SIM cards for wireless services in both countries. And phone customers outside the United States tend to have more handset choices, since cellphones are less likely to be “locked” for use with one particular carrier. But they have fewer opportunities to upgrade cheaply, because carriers are less likely to offer a free or discounted phone to those who commit to a one- or two-year contract. Some of that is beginning to change, said Chris Jones, an analyst at Canalys. “Smartphones are beginning to get more popular in the U.K., so more people are buying smartphones and the contracts that come with them,” he said. Even so, those contracts can cost around £30 or £35 a mon-
th, or $48 to $56, and they do not include data, he said. In general, the breadth of options in Europe has not yet led to significantly cheaper service, said Roger Entner, an analyst at Recon Analytics in Dedham, Mass. “It only drives down prices if competitors are willing to compete on price,” he said. “The market is more or less equally divided up, so there isn’t the same hypercompetitiveness that we have in the U.S.” Heike Troue, the director of a public policy institute in Berlin, said that she was satisfied with the range of mobile choices available there. An iPhone 4 owner, she pays T-Mobile 90 euros a month, or $127, for her all-inclusive contract, which provides 1,000 calling minutes, three gigabytes of data transfers and 1,500 text messages. Since she signed up for the plan last November, she has never hit those limits. “One can only talk so much,” Ms. Troue said. At times, high costs abroad have prompted lawmakers and regulators to step in. European and British telecom companies are bowing to such pressure by lowering or planning to lower termination fees — the fees that the caller’s carrier must pay to the recipient’s carrier. The goal is to give carriers more flexibility to compete by selling more generous packages with larger chunks of talk time, text allotments and cheaper data services. European regulators have also ordered that limits be placed on roaming charges for calling and texting, and are working on a similar limit on data roaming charges. In South Korea, the government has put pressure on the three major carriers — SK Telecom, KT and LG Telecom — to cut rates on text messages and calls, and it also limits the amount of subsidies the companies can offer on new phones. Regulators in the United States could require AT&T to make some concessions for the T-Mobile deal to be approved, like giving up wireless spectrum in some cities. The review by the Justice Department and the F.C.C. could take several months, and analysts say it could be a year before the full effect of the deal is clear. Some analysts say that the combined company might actually lower prices to better compete with Verizon. But others warn of side effects. Mr. Paltridge of the O.E.C.D said that the overall consequence of combining AT&T and T-Mobile might be broader than most consumers think. For example, it would leave only one American carrier using GSM, the world’s most common cellular standard. That means AT&T could raise rates for Americans using their phones overseas and for foreigners visiting the United States. “If the two merged, there would be an international angle to the competition issue,” he said.
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Justices Take Up Crucial Issue in Wal-Mart Suit
By ADAM LIPTAK
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he Supreme Court appeared closely divided during arguments over the theory put forth by the plaintiffs in an enormous sex discrimination classaction case against Wal-Mart. Even some justices who seemed sympathetic to the plaintiffs expressed qualms about how to administer a lawsuit involving as many as 1.5 million women seeking back pay that could amount to billions of dollars. Others appeared worried about the consequences for other businesses of a ruling that would allow the case against Wal-Mart to go forward. The mere certification of a class-action suit can prompt defendants to settle in light of the sums at stake, and the justices struggled to find a way to distinguish between gaps in pay that might have benign explanations and those caused by unlawful discrimination. The court of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has recently issued a series of rulings in favor of plaintiffs suing for employment discrimination that cut against the court’s pro-business reputation. The Wal-Mart case dwarfs those rulings in importance. It is the largest employment discrimination class action in history, and the court’s decision, expected by June, will probably be its most important business ruling this term. The issue before the justices at Tuesday’s arguments was not whether Wal-Mart, the country’s largest retailer and biggest private employer, discriminated against women who worked there. For now, the question in the case, WalMart Stores v. Dukes, No. 10-277, is whether hundreds of thousands of female workers have enough in common to join together in a single lawsuit. The plaintiffs’ theory is that a centralized companywide policy gave local managers too much discretion in pay and promotion decisions, leaving WalMart vulnerable to gender stereotypes.
The plaintiffs have presented sworn statements and statistics to support their claim. Wal-Mart calls that evidence unrepresentative and unreliable. The company says its policies expressly bar discrimination and promote diversity. In any event, the company says, the plaintiffs — who worked in 3,400 stores in 170 job classifications — do not have enough in common to warrant class-action treatment. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the theory about how the company discriminated — through a central policy conferring local discretion — was internally inconsistent. “Your complaint faces in two directions,” he told a lawyer for the plaintiffs. But Justice Stephen G. Breyer said Wal-Mart could be held accountable if it failed to take action in the face of reports of discrimination from its stores. “Should central management under the law have withdrawn some of the subjective discretion in order to stop these results?” Justice Breyer asked. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed, saying that companies had a responsibility to make sure that women were treated fairly in local workplaces. And Justice Elena Kagan said that “excessive subjectivity” may be a policy that violates the civil rights laws. But Justice Antonin Scalia was unconvinced. “I’m getting whipsawed here,” he told the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Joseph M. Sellers. “On the one hand, you say the problem is that they were utterly subjective, and on the other hand you say there is strong corporate culture that guides all of this. Well, which is it?” Mr. Sellers responded that “there is this broad discretion given the managers” but that “they do not make their decisions in a vacuum.” Managers, he went on, “are informed by the company about how to exercise that discretion.”
That did not satisfy Justice Scalia. “If somebody tells you how to exercise discretion,” he said, “you don’t have discretion.” Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a lawyer for Wal-Mart, said the handful of women named as plaintiffs who seek to represent the entire class did not have typical experiences at the company. “Each of the plaintiffs have very different stories,” he said. “One of them was promoted into a managerial position. One was terminated for disciplinary violations. One was promoted and then had a disciplinary problem and then was demoted.” He added that “this class includes at least 544 store managers who are alleged to be discriminators and victims.” Several justices had practical concerns. “What seems to me a very serious problem in this case is, how do you work out the back pay?” Justice Ginsburg asked. Mr. Sellers said the trial court could rely on statistics culled from company databases, which he said were more reliable than the evidence that might be presented in individualized hearings given the available information about particular pay and promotion decisions. Memories have faded, he said, and Wal-Mart did not keep good records. Given that, Mr. Sellers said, WalMart’s personnel decisions were “standardless” and “recordless.” Justice Kennedy responded with a point about the suitability of the case for class-action treatment. “If it’s standardless and recordless,” he said, “then why is there commonality?” Mr. Boutrous said Mr. Sellers was trying to have it both ways. “The problem here, Mr. Sellers says, is that the records are not available,” Mr.
Boutrous said. “Then he says we’re going to have a proceeding where the district judge relies only on the records that he says are inadequate, to allow a reconstruction of the decision. That is not a process known to our jurisprudence. It doesn’t comport with due process. Several justices voiced concerns about how many companies could be subject to class-action suits if they allowed the case against Wal-Mart to go forward. “Is it true,” Chief Justice Roberts asked Mr. Sellers, “that Wal-Mart’s pay disparity across the company was less than the national average?” Mr. Sellers said that was not the appropriate comparison. “The comparison that’s relevant,” he said, “is between men and women and Wal-Mart.” He added later that “Wal-Mart was behind the other large retailers.” The chief justice also asked Mr. Sellers “how many examples of abuse of the subjective discrimination delegation need to be shown before you can say that flows from the policy rather than from bad actors?” After all, he said, “you’re going to have some bad apples” given Wal-Mart’s thousands of stores. Mr. Sellers responded that “there is no minimum number” in court decisions. Justices Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they were concerned about companies whose pay and promotion gaps mirror national numbers where there is no proof of a discriminatory policy. “So, you have the company that is absolutely typical of the entire American work force,” Justice Alito said. “Then you would say every single company is in violation of Title VII” of the Civil Rights Act? “That could very well be the case,” Mr. Sellers said.
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ARCHITECTURE & HOME DECOR
House Hunting in ... Hong Kong By LISA KEYS
18.6 MILLION HONG KONG DOLLARS ($2.385 MILLION)
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his high-floor apartment with bamboo floors is in a high-rise building in Pokfulam, a mostly residential neighborhood popular with foreigners near Hong Kong’s central business district. The apartment building, called Aqua 33, has environmentally friendly features like a water-filtration system and reverse-cycle heating and cooling systems. Common amenities include a rooftop garden and a children’s play area. The building has 42 units and was completed in March 2010. The owners, who moved in last November, created an open kitchen and increased the amount of storage space throughout. All windows are doublepaned. The apartment opens up into an entry foyer with a large mirrored cabinet. Down a spacious hallway, a left turn leads to the guest bathroom and a utility room, a right turn to the master suite. It has a corner closet and a built-in wood-laminate desk that extends the length of one window; the bathroom has stone tiles. At the end of the hallway is a lar-
ge living-dining area with a separate media center. The room has floor-toceiling windows; one wall has a concrete finish. The kitchen has a stone tile floor, a wine refrigerator, white laminate cabinetry, a granite countertop and a large island with a white Corian countertop. The second bedroom, currently a very large children’s room, is off a major play room. The development is about 15 minutes from Central, as Hong Kong’s central business district is known. The airport is about 40 minutes away.
MARKET OVERVIEW The economic downturn depressed housing prices in Hong Kong about 25 percent between the end of 2008 and the middle of 2009, said
Marcos Chan, head of research for the Greater Pearl River Delta at Jones Lang LaSalle, a professional services firm specializing in real estate. Since mid-2009, however, prices have rebounded about 60 percent, he said. Low interest rates, limited supply and an influx of buyers from mainland China have contributed to this increase, Mr. Chan said. A rapidly strengthening economy in China and Hong Kong is also a factor, said Renu Budhrani, the executive director of residential agency at the Hong Kong office of Knight Frank, a global real estate firm, in an e-mail.
WHO BUYS IN HONG KONG Foreign buyers come from all over the globe; Asia and Europe in particular, said Chris Liem, principal at the Hong Kong office of Engel
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The San Juan Weekly yers. Owner-occupied properties valued below 12 million Hong Kong dollars have a limit of 70 percent financing; those priced higher have a limit of 60 percent; and apartments used as rentals have a limit of 60 percent financing, he said. Interest rates are about 1 percent, he said.
WEB SITES Hong Kong government: gov. hk/en/residents/ Hong Kong tourism board: discoverhongkong.com/login.html
LANGUAGES AND CURRENCY English, Chinese; Hong Kong dollar (1 Hong Kong dollar = $0.13)
TAXES AND FEES The common charge is approximately 3,900 Hong Kong dollars a month and covers parking, said the listing agent; quarterly taxes are about 7,000 Hong Kong dollars.
Comes from page 55 & Voelkers. Buyers from mainland China account for about a quarter of Hong Kong’s market, said Ms. Budhrani. Pokfulam in particular is a popular choice for foreigners because of its good schools, open spaces and proximity to the central business district, Mr. Liem said. Other upscale areas favored by foreigners include the Peak, Mid-Levels and Repulse Bay, he said.
BUYING BASICS There are no restrictions on foreign buyers in Hong Kong.
All buyers pay a stamp duty, on a scale ranging from 1.5 percent to 4.25 percent of the purchase price, said Simon Reid-Kay, a partner who specializes in Asia-Pacific property law at Allen & Overy, an international law firm. (The stamp duty on this property would be 3.75 percent, Mr. Reid-Kay said.) Lawyers’ fees vary, but usually run 0.25 to 0.5 percent of the purchase price, Mr. Reid-Kay said, and real estate agent fees, paid by the buyer, are typically 1 percent. Financing is available, he said, though the Hong Kong Monetary Authority imposes restrictions on the amount of funding for all bu-
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Sports
Baldwin Hosts 9th Annual Basketball & 1st Annual Soccer Invitational Tournaments and 12 rebounds. Fabian Rial finished with 19 points and 6 rebounds. In Indoor Soccer, the St. John’s Hurricanes beat the Baldwin Bulls 4-3 on a last minute goal. While the Boys team from
Schools Participating LAMEPI (4th, 5th, & 6th grades)
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uring the weekend of April 1-2, 2011 Baldwin School of Puerto Rico hosted the 9th Annual mini basketball Invitational Tournament along with the 1st Indoor Soccer invitational Tournament. The tournament featured over 25 mini basketball teams and 4 indoor soccer teams from the LAMEPI (Liga Atlética Mini de Escuelas Privadas) and PRHSAA (Puerto Rico High School Athletic Alliance). Also in attendance was the Escuela Rafael Hernandez,
a local public school, informed Dirk Moran, Athletic Director of Baldwin School of Puerto Rico. The weekend’s games were very exciting culminating with Escuela Rafael Hernandez winning the Mini Girls Basketball category with a victory over the host Baldwin Bulls. In Mini boys, Baldwin finished as tournament champion defeating the Marista Seahawks in the final. Leading scorers for Baldwin were Javier Perez with 17 points
Same .270 Average By BEN SHPIGEL
O
f the 151 players who qualified for batting titles last year, five hit exactly .270 and two of them patrolled the left side of the Yankees’ infield. For Derek Jeter, the .270 average was the lowest of his 16-year career, a 64-point dropoff from the season before, and sparked concerns that his decline had begun as he moved toward his 37th birthday. The plunge was not as drastic for Alex Rodriguez, and neither was the perception. Although his .270 was also his worst average over a full season — he batted .286 the year before — it was mitigated somewhat by his 30 home runs and even more by his 125 runs batted in. The consensus was that lingering physical issues had limited him at the plate more than age, although he is just a year younger than Jeter. Jeter came to spring training to continue working on a new stance that essentially eliminates his stride. He has hit well, but the scrutiny of him will increase as the regular season unwinds and baseball people look for proof he can restore some of his lost offense. Rodriguez showed up in camp looking and feeling lighter and better. Now two years removed from his hip surgery and free of the tightness that restricted him at the plate, he also weighs 10 pounds less, and his body fat is down to 9
American Military Academy Antilles Middle School Antilles Military School Baldwin School Bonneville School Colegio Católico Notre Dame Colegio Marista de Guaynabo Colegio Puertorriqueño de Niñas Colegio Rosa-Bell Cupeyville School Dorado Academy Escuela Elemental de la UPR Nuestra Señora de la Providencia Parkville School Perpetuo Socorro Robinson School Saint John’s School San Ignacio de Loyola TASIS Dorado Wesleyan Academy
percent. Perhaps as a result, Rodriguez has been an offensive dynamo in exhibition games, batting .388 with six home runs. As the Yankees get ready to open the season at home against the Detroit Tigers, he probably has fewer skeptics than Jeter does and some very confident supporters. “His body is working in perfect order. I see explosion in his core. His hips are clear and they’re explosive. There aren’t many times when I’m not seeing him take his A swing, and when he does take his A swing and hits it on the barrel, extreme damage is going to happen. When he’s able to do things physically and his life is in order — and it is — it’s scary just how great this guy is.” Rodriguez’s stock answer to how he is doing is that he feels good, strong, happy, ready. No reason to complicate things by being more expansive than that, although he does bristle at the perception that he is a designated hitter in waiting. “I just don’t buy into it,” Rodriguez said, exhibiting a similar sentiment that Jeter no doubt feels about giving way at shortstop. “I’ve seen other players play the field into their 40s, and if I continue to remain in great shape. Anything is possible. It’s not like I’m playing center field.” Still, third base is a demanding position, especially for bigger players like Rodriguez. According to the Web site Baseball-Reference.com, six players his size (6 feet 3 inches and about 222 pounds) or larger have played at least 135 games in a season at that position: Rodriguez (four times), Miguel Cabrera (twice), Troy Glaus (six), Scott Rolen (seven), Jim Thome (once) and Ryan Zimmerman (four). Only two — Rodriguez in 2007 and Glaus in 2008 — did so as old as 31. In that 2007 season, Rodriguez played 158 games, 54
Commonwealth high School came back from a goal down to earn the championship trophy 5-3 over the host Bulls. It was a great weekend experienced by everybody said the athletic director.
PRHSAA (7th grade through 12th) Academia del Perpetuo Socorro Academia María Reina Academia Nuestra Señora de la Providencia American Military Academy Antilles High School Antilles Military Academy Baldwin School Boneville School Colegio Beato Carlos M. Rodríguez Colegio Católico Notre Dame Colegio Marista de Guaynabo Colegio Nuestra Señora de Belén Colegio San Antonio Abad Colegio San Ignacio de Loyola Colegio San José Commonwealth-Parkville School Cupeyville School Dorado Academy Ramey School Robinson School Saint John’s School The Palmas Academy University High School (UHS) Wesleyan Academy
homers, 156 runs batted in and his third Most Valuable Player. He said the most important statistic to him this season was games played. His goal is 150 (he played 137 last year). If he achieves that, he said, the production will follow. “Being as big and strong as Alex is, it would be much easier for a smaller man to maintain quickness. But you watch him now, and you have no idea that he’s 35. He’s moving great.” So much of playing in the infield depends on quick, decisive movements — charging bunts or slow rollers, making throws on the run, diving on the dirt, starting and stopping in a flash. Ranging to the left gave Rodriguez trouble last season, but it did not take long for Kelleher to detect a difference this spring. Rodriguez focused on increasing his flexibility as soon as his surgeon, Dr. Marc Philippon, cleared him in the offseason to resume his normal workout routine. On a cool, rainy morning in Miami last month, Long watched Rodriguez run sprints barefoot in a sand pit. To conserve energy, Rodriguez scaled back his routine off a tee and in the batting cage because he finds taking hundreds of swings a day, as he once did, counterproductive. “When you’re 23, 24, you can get to the stadium 10 minutes before stretch, and you’re already warm and loose,” Rodriguez said. “There’s a little bit of a process now.” He arrives early for workouts and cage work and often leaves later than his teammates. “I feel like I’m right in the middle of my prime,” Rodriguez said. “I’m right where I want to be.” At third base, next to Jeter at shortstop, with both of them hoping to leave last season’s .270 behind.
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The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
Retooled Mets at Fraction of the Cost
By DAVID WALDSTEIN
F
or the first time since March 6, and for only the second time in spring training, Carlos Beltran played in a Grapefruit League game, signaling he is ready to rejoin the Mets and open the season in right field. But the team he comes back to will be far different from the one he finished last season with. A new front office has taken over the Mets and remade the roster with a dozen players acquired at discount prices. The turnover includes 11 or 12 players, depending on the health of the backup catcher Ronny Paulino, whose combined salaries are less than that of pitcher Oliver Perez, who was released March 21 with $12 million remaining on his salary and barely more than half of what Beltran ($18.5 million) will make in the final year of his contract. Spending just $10,873,000, a budget-conscious group of executives led by General Manager Sandy Alderson revamped half the roster, including the back end of the starting rotation, the bulk of the bullpen and virtually all of the bench. “We haven’t played well the last couple of years,” Mets third baseman David Wright said. “When you don’t win, it means there’s going to be some turnover. For us, there’s been a lot of turnover, and I think they’ve done an excellent job of bringing in not only good players, but quality people as well.” Alderson came to the Mets with
a reputation for seeking maximum return from undervalued players, and said after he was hired that the team’s payroll was too high and that he intended to bring it down permanently. Since then, the Mets’ severe financial struggles have been revealed, but Alderson has never stated that the Mets’ debt problems were driving his strategy, although it would seem to have played a real role. But regardless, he has not spent much. Having taken over a team last fall with $135 million already committed for the 2011 payroll – depending on incentive clauses, trades and other roster moves – Alderson was committed to filling out the roster with extreme fiscal restraint. Theoretically, he could have spent as little as $4,968,000 for 12 players making the minimum. He ended up spending a little more than twice that, which is still less than half of the $22.5 million the injured Johan Santana – the team’s highest-paid player – will make this season. “You can do it for that amount of money,” Alderson said of the $10.8 million he did spend. “The question is, how good are the players coming in? Right now, we think that our guys have performed pretty well. ” The most money Alderson guaranteed to any one player acquired from outside the organization was $1.5 million for the No. 5 starter Chris Capuano. Of the 12 new players who are expected to spend time on the 25-man roster (including Paulino),
half of them are guaranteed less than $1 million for 2011. In looking for bargains, Alderson first addressed his biggest need – the rotation – by finding pitchers still coming back from arm surgery who were intent on demonstrating that they were now durable and deserving of bigger contracts a year from now. In a sense, the Mets would be the hosts of a season-long audition. Those pitchers turned out to be Capuano, who had Tommy John elbow surgery in 2009, and Chris Young, who made three starts for San Diego last September after he had shoulder surgery in 2009. Young signed with the Mets for a $1.1 million base salary. Alderson enticed both pitchers in part by stressing that their auditions would be enhanced in a pitcher-friendly park like Citi Field. And both pitched well this spring, with earned run averages less than 2.50. As for the bullpen, Alderson found five new relievers, including one selected in the Rule 5 draft. Their cost: D.J. Carrasco ($1.2 million), Taylor Buchholz ($1 million), Tim Byrdak ($900,000), Blaine Boyer ($725,000) and the Rule 5 draftee Pedro Beato ($414,000). Their combined salaries are $4,239,000, or less than half the amount owed to closer Francisco Rodriguez, who is guaranteed $11.5 million. The only starting position player Alderson sought was a second ba-
seman to replace Luis Castillo. That ended up being another Rule 5 pick, Brad Emaus, who, like Beato, will also make baseball’s minimum. Paulino, who will probably start the season on the disabled list with an unspecified digestive illness, was signed for $1.3 million. “When we sat down in November to talk about our roster, we weren’t really happy with a lot of spots,” Alderson said. “We did an analysis of above the line, and below the line, of players we were happy with, and said these are areas we think we can improve. We end up opening day with a 50 percent turnover.” Still, the season will depend largely on players who were signed by former general managers like Steve Phillips, who was there when Wright was drafted in 2001 and when Jose Reyes was signed in 1999; or Omar Minaya, who was responsible for the big money given to Bay, Santana, Rodriguez and Beltran and for the drafting of Ike Davis and Josh Thole. As Beltran, he went 1 for 3 and made a nice sliding catch in right field – whether his knees will hold up under the rigors of the regular season remains to be seen. He spoke confidently about the Mets’ everyday lineup, and said: “We’re going to surprise people, that’s for sure.” Maybe so, maybe not. The real surprise so far is how economically the team has been turned over.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
59
Sports
Behind the Plate, a Cut Above By BEN SHPIGEL
T
he morning of Gustavo Molina’s first day in the major leagues, Joey Cora, the Chicago White Sox’ bench coach, spotted him in the clubhouse and playfully admonished him. “You’re not in the big leagues yet,” Cora, sensing his enthusiasm, told Molina in Spanish. And he wasn’t until his name was announced, and he would jog from the dugout to the third-base line at U.S. Cellular Field and gaze at the capacity crowd clapping and cheering, a season bursting with promise. Nearly four years have passed since Molina felt that singular sensation, and when workouts began six weeks ago, his odds of feeling it again before Thursday’s opener against Detroit at Yankee Stadium were longer than the California coastline. But, he said recently, “spring training’s about surprises,” and around 5:10 p.m. Monday, he e-mailed his wife, Clara, to give her one: “I made it.” The Yankees will break camp with Molina backing up Russell Martin at catcher, an outcome unforeseen as recently as last week but one that gained momentum as prospects Montero and Romine struggled. For Manager Joe Girardi, defense trumps offense in that role, and Molina, with a .122 average in 41 career major league at-bats but superior skills behind the
plate, emerged as the catching equivalent of Freddy Garcia, supplying what the Yankees expected: solid receiving abilities, a quiet presence and minimal production. “You never know,” said Molina, a 29-year-old from Venezuela not related to other Molinas in the major leagues. March 2 at the cost of an injured teammate, Francisco Cervelli, who fractured his foot. Molina got his chance in 2007 from a similar situation, when Toby Hall hurt his shoulder. The competition here was fiercer. As top prospects, Montero and Romine started games. Molina never did and collected only
one hit, a single on March 3, in 18 at-bats. His experience convinced the Yankees, and it left an impression on Martin, who noticed that in some drills, Molina would use a smaller mitt. He said it helped improve his catching technique, trying to catch the ball in the same spot every time — in the middle, against the left index finger. “It’s like practicing hitting with a broomstick and a smaller ball,” Martin said. “You have to be perfect. He puts his defense first because he understands how important catching is. You can tell, he’s worked at it”. The Yankees expect Romine to attract that sort of praise, and hope Montero will, too. To accelerate their developments, the Yankees split them up once more, returning Montero, 21, to Class AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre to concentrate on his defense, and Romine, 22, to Class AA Trenton to get more at-bats. They said they understood the decision. “It’s a tough thing, you want to move up whenever you can,” Romine said. “They said as of right now, you can catch in the big leagues right now. It’s a phone call away, so go down and get ready, work on your bat.” An indication of the Yankees’ thinking materialized last Thursday, when Montero was scratched from catching Garcia in a minor league game in favor of Molina. The clearest sign came Saturday: after handling C. C. Sabathia for three innings on the minor league side, Molina was asked to rush across Dale Mabry Highway to Steinbrenner Field, where he caught seven relievers
— including five bullpen regulars — in the Yankees’ game against Pittsburgh. As cuts were made, and players with lockers near him disappeared, Molina understood the implications. But when speaking with Clara, he would choose his words carefully. “She knew that if she heard it from me, I’d tell it to her straight,” Molina said. “I couldn’t lie to her.” After meeting with Girardi and General Manager Brian Cashman, Molina emailed her because, due to catch a simulated game from A. J. Burnett, he did not have time to talk yet. When he returned, there were 10 e-mails from her and his mother on his cellphone. “It’s awesome,” Molina said. “Just awesome.” With Cervelli expected back within a month, the job could be only temporary, but it is most certainly a job, and it comes with a healthy bump in salary. As long as he is on the roster, Molina will earn slightly more than the minimum of $414,000. And he knew exactly what to do with some of that extra money. His family has never visited a major league ballpark, let alone watched him play in one, and he was planning on pricing flights to New York from Venezuela. His daughter, Andrea, 6, is in school, but, he said with a smile, there is a good reason to pull her out for a few days. “It’s a special occasion,” Molina said. “There’s no price for that.”
Rookie Endures Multiple Sclerosis
By JACK BELL
D
emitrius Omphroy is unlike any player in the history of Major League Soccer. He has multiple sclerosis. Toronto F.C. drafted Omphroy, a 21-year-old defender, in the second round of this year’s draft, the 26th pick over all, not knowing of his condition. The club signed him the week before the start of the season, but Omphroy has yet to see action through the first two games of the season. He played four years at the University of California, Berkeley, starting 35 of 70 matches, and also spent time training with Sporting Club de Portugal Juniores in Lisbon in 2006-7, when he was 17. “I loved Portugal, it was a dream,”
Omphroy said in a telephone interview. “They said they loved me and would follow through once I turned 18. But within a couple of weeks, I got sick. I started losing vision and some feeling in one foot. It didn’t prevent me from playing; it was just annoying. But I had to pack up and leave. My parents said my health was more important and that I needed to come home to be seen by my doctors. It was pretty devastating. If I lose my vision I can’t play soccer at all. “As corny as it sounds, M.S. prevented me from signing my first contract, but I have been able to overcome the disease so far and still sign a professional contract.” M.S. is a notoriously difficult disease to diagnose. Omphroy learned he had it in February 2010. In addition to vision problems and numbness in his foot, he soon began to experience neck pain, what he called barberchair syndrome. A magnetic resonance imaging scan led a neurologist to say quickly that Omphroy had M.S., an unpredictable autoimmune disease that affects the brain and central nervous system. It is caused by damage to the myelin sheath, which protects and surrounds nerve cells. When the myelin sheath is damaged, nerve impulses are slowed down or stopped.
Omphroy gives himself a daily injection of the drug Copaxone in one of seven spots around his body. “It’s very uncertain what your body could end up making you deal with. I don’t know if something could randomly happen or when I’m going to have an episode. You just can’t predict it.” On the field, Omphroy sees himself as a right-side defender with a lot of attacking qualities. But during preseason training in Turkey and Florida, Toronto’s new coach, Aron Winter, had Omphroy playing as an attacking central midfielder, his position in college. During his club and college career, Omphroy also spent time with several United States youth national teams. But since his mother’s parents are from the Philippines and his father’s family is from Panama, his international future is probably elsewhere. He trained with Panama’s under-21 national team last June and is awaiting citizenship from that country. “I definitely think playing in M.L.S. and getting some exposure will bring opportunities, especially because those two countries don’t get many experienced players,” he said of Panama and the Philippines. “I
see more opportunity with Panama.” For now, Omphroy is focused on cracking Toronto’s lineup. “I’ll just have to push myself a little bit harder in training and make sure the coach notices me,” he said. He added: “M.S. shouldn’t prevent you from living your life to the fullest. I’m going to keep going. It’s not going to stop me. If they ask me to be the poster boy to talk about M.S., I will accept it with open arms.” M.L.S. For the second consecutive year, stars from Major League Soccer will play Manchester United of the English Premier League. The game will be played at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, N.J., on Wednesday, July 27. United’s return marks the seventh consecutive season in which the M.L.S. All-Star team has faced a British club (2005 Fulham, ’06 Chelsea, ’07 Glasgow Celtic, ’08 West Ham United, ’09 Everton, ’10 Manchester United). Last summer more than 70,000 fans attended the All-Star Game at Reliant Stadium in Houston, a 5-2 win by Manchester United that ended M.L.S. All-Stars’ fivegame streak without a loss against British opposition.
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The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
The Endless Game of a Lifetime, Recalled by a Baseball Lifer
By DAN BARRY
O
ur planning went no further than to meet at the ballpark. Simple in theory but madness in practice, given the thousands of others with similar plans. My only hope was to find a white-haired man exuding boyish wonder; who looked as if he was about to see a baseball game for the 10,000th time — and for the first. There! In the red shirt and sunglasses: Joe Morgan, the former Boston Red Sox manager, whose baseball credentials date to the 1940s, when wily pitchers in New England’s old Blackstone Valley League would snap off 12-to-6 curves to teach the college kid not to be too impressed with himself. No time for idle banter; just instant ruminations about the rules of the game, the historical data, the personalities come and gone. This is why our sudden discussion about the astounding consistency of the Hall of Fame member Stan Musial — who had 1,815 hits at home and 1,815 hits on the road — seemed as natural as a chat about the weather. And why these Musial musings segued seamlessly into recollections of baseball’s longest game, begun 30 years ago next month and witnessed by Morgan himself — often through a backstop peephole, though, after his ejection in the 22nd inning. Here was Tito Francona, the good-hitting player from the ’50s and ’60s who is the father of Red Sox Manager Terry Francona. “From New Brighton, Pa.,” Morgan said as Francona walked away, because he knows these things. And here was Rich Hill, 31, a left-handed pitcher who has ricocheted between the minor and major leagues for several years now, and was trying, again, to stay up. Lately, he has been tinkering with a new delivery — something Morgan clearly knew. Committing his life more than 60 years ago to the endeavor of baseball, Morgan remains in thrall of its narrative. He is revered in New England for leading Boston to the 1988 and 1990 playoffs with a management style that was equal parts sachem, gunslinger and eccentric uncle. At 80, he continues to apply an irreverent, Jesuitical rigor to his study of the game. Our dialogue began two years ago. Nestled in an armchair, his feet shod in Red Sox slippers, he reflected on everything from the worst ball field he ever played on (Keokuk, Iowa) to the best all-around player in history (Jimmie Foxx) — to the time he got thrown out of a game in Columbus, Ohio, and refused to leave the field until a sheriff’s deputy arrived to provide humorless escort. The cop later declined his offer of a clubhouse beer. Morgan’s laconic recitation of his many minor league ports of call that day sounded like Hank Snow’s “I’ve Been Everywhere,” as sung by a salty Robert Frost: the Hartford Chiefs, the Evansville Braves, the Jacksonville Braves, the Atlanta Crackers, the Wichita Braves, the Louisville Colonels, the Charleston Marlins, the Raleigh Pirates. Sprinkled here and there were major league stints with the Milwaukee Braves, the Kansas City Athletics, the
Philadelphia Phillies, the Cleveland Indians and the St. Louis Cardinals. Morgan hovered somewhere between cupof-coffee guy and journeyman, collecting a .193 career batting average and a deep repository of baseball knowledge and anecdotes. For example, he keeps an index card inscribed with the names of prominent baseball players who spent just one year with the Boston Red Sox: Jack Chesbro, Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, Tom Seaver. ... After retiring as a player in 1966, Morgan continued his peregrinations as a manager and a coach, returning to Walpole every fall to find work that would carry him through the off-season. After all, he had a wife, a family, a mortgage. He held so many jobs over the years, from bill collector to coal man, that he compiled a list. Kept, of course, on another index card. In 1974, Morgan became the manager of Boston’s Class AAA team in Pawtucket, R.I., a short drive from Walpole. At the time, the impoverished Pawtucket Red Sox were playing before sparse but caustic crowds at McCoy Stadium, a rusting Depression-era hulk that was doubling as a city public-works garage. The aroma of popcorn commingled with the fumes of gasoline. But Morgan endured, charming fans and annoying umpires with his antics: shinnying up a foul pole, say, to point out why that ball was fair. To New Englanders, he was a regular Joe, plowing snow for the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority in the off-season, and never too proud to pick up the errant coins found at the toll plazas. Morgan worked for three owners in Pawtucket. The first would pack up the unsold bags of popcorn at the end of homestands and drive them to Connecticut to be hawked at another ballpark. The second would make several poor business moves, including his declarations that he was a Yankees fan. And the third, a wealthy retiree and baseball neophyte named Ben Mondor, would methodically rebuild the PawSox franchise — and McCoy Stadium — into the minor league gem that it is today. Of the hundreds of games that Morgan managed during his nine years in Pawtucket, and of the thousands he participated in over the decades, none lingers in memory as much as an otherwise insignificant game that began on the night of April 18, 1981. It was Passover, and Holy Saturday, and miserably cold. That night, in reciting the two lineups, the publicaddress announcer delivered to the 1,740 huddled fans a kind of anthem to the Americas. For here were young men from other places — New England mill towns and West Coast suburbs, Midwest housing projects and Caribbean sugar-cane fields — brought together on Pawtucket grass by their shared pursuit of glory. For the first several innings, the game between the PawSox and the Rochester Red Wings followed familiar baseball rhythms. At one point, Pawtucket’s superstitious third baseman, Wade Boggs — not greatly valued by the Boston front office — and first baseman Dave Koza — at 26, getting baseball old — collided while chasing an infield pop fly. At another point, Rochester’s third baseman, a lanky kid named Cal Ripken Jr., grounded out to end a scoreless half-inning, yanked off his red helmet and pounded it once into the ground. Just one at-bat. Just one out. In the sixth inning of an early-season game in Class AAA. Yet to the young Ripken, it was as if he had made the last out in the seventh game of the World Series. Rochester scored a run in the seventh; Pawtucket tied it in the ninth. Then, sometime around the 15th inning, the umpires informed the principals that the 1981 Internatio-
nal League rulebook made no allowance for curfews — a one-time clerical foul-up, apparently — so the game would have to continue. No matter that it was now Easter Sunday morning, and the stadium was a quiet canyon, and the mischievous wind was toying with anything hit into the air. Keep playing ball. Rochester took another one-run lead in the 21st inning, but Pawtucket immediately tied it up — again. The next inning, the home-plate umpire ruled a Rochester batter’s failed bunt attempt to be a foul ball. Morgan argued (and still argues) that the batter was out. Soon his song of ire was being heard 400 miles away, in Rochester, where those following the radio play-by-play were suddenly treated to an Easter Sunday hymn of the profane. “O.K., Joe Morgan has just been thrown out of the ballgame,” the radio announcer said, chuckling. “And I think it’s because he said, ‘I don’t give a darn.’ ” Once ejected, Morgan retreated to a familiar hiding place behind the backstop and continued to watch a game that remained tied at 2-2 through the 22nd, the 23rd, the 24th, the 25th. ... Finally, around 4 a.m., the umpires suspended the game after the 32nd inning on the strong advice of the International League president, who had been rousted from his bed in Ohio by repeated telephone calls from panicked PawSox officials. They could think of no other way to pause a baseball game from its eternal potential. That Was All There Was The game resumed two months later, in late June. With major league baseball on strike, a baseball-hungry nation turned its eyes to the hardscrabble mill city of Pawtucket. The 32nd inning had been played in the unforgiving cold, before 20 fans; the 33rd was played in the summer’s evening warmth, before 6,000 fans and reporters from as far as Japan. And it took just 18 minutes. In the bottom of the 33rd, Koza hit a bases-loaded teaser that floated over Ripken’s head to kiss the left-field grass. Pawtucket players danced, Rochester players trudged off, and Peggy Lee’s vexing question played over the sound system: is that all there is? For a select few, the answer was no; two of the players, in fact, would join Musial and Foxx in the Hall of Fame. For others, though, the answer was yes, at least in baseball terms. Very good would never be good enough for the major leagues. As for Morgan, who watched that 33rd inning from his backstop peephole, his baseball life would continue to this day: adviser, coach, major league manager, ever-matriculating student. Dave Koza ending baseball’s longest game with a bases-loaded single in the 33rd inning.
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
Games
61
Sudoku How to Play: Fill in the empty fields with the numbers from 1 through 9 Click the “check sudoku” button to check your sudoku inputs Click the “new sudoku” button and select difficulty to play a new game
Sudoku Rules: Every row must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every column must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every 3x3 square must contain the numbers from 1 through 9
Crossword
Wordsearch
Answers on page 62
w
62 April 7 -13, 2011
The San Juan Weekly
HOROSCOPE Aries
(Mar 21-April 20)
Libra
(Sep 24-Oct 23)
You will have to take the rough with the smooth as things unfold. Focus on things one at a time. Get on with what needs to be done and you will be more than pleased at how it all turns out. Tap into your sense of adventure and enjoy the surprises life has in store. You must not take anything for granted. Let everyone else get on with their thing
The Universe will provide you with more than a plateful! Can you handle it? The more work you have to do, the more you will get done. So don’t be intimidated by what you have to do. Try to stop fretting about your circumstances. It is not the moment to act quite yet. Reserve judgement and don’t be too hasty. The correct approach works.
Taurus
Scorpio
(April 21-May 21)
You can achieve a lot; so stick to those resolutions. It is important to let life unfold organically. You may sabotage your own progress if you force anything. What more can you do? There is no point denying the Truth. Things will come out in the wash as always. A clean slate and fresh vision brings peace of mind. Make adjustments.
Gemini
(May 22-June 21)
Look on the bright side and give yourself half a chance. Not everyone understands you and you can be hard work. Definite changes made now will work well, but save the big decisions for later. Keep as many balls in the air as you can. Keeping your options open may be a tiring idea. Never mind; it’s a good one, too!
Cancer
(June 22-July 23)
Spot your luck and take your chances. You possibly need to calm down a little and leave the complex stuff til later. A straight, methodical approach will work well at the moment. Keep your integrity intact and you will come out the other side of a challenge, laughing! The answer to a riddle is easy enough when you open your eyes.
Leo
(July 24-Aug 23)
Do appreciate what is right under your nose. Clarity of judgement and a fresh attitude serve you well. Be gracious enough to admit it when someone has helped you. Pride is all very well, but it tends to come before a bit of a tumble. So don’t be clumsy out there! If you need support; just ask. Do not withhold your appreciation.
Virgo
(Aug 24-Sep 23)
Life’s too short for needless nonsense. Be organised as you pull things together. Brace yourself and you will cope with what is on the way. Someone may be slow to get back to you. However, be assured they are thinking about it. Don’t try to rush things along. Answers come through when they are meant to. Don’t block natural abundance.
(Oct 24-Nov 22)
Prepare for a shake- up. Don’t make definite plans, for what you least expect is bound to happen. Just don’t start expecting the least likely scenario! Remain relaxed and open, for rigidity won’t serve you well at this point. Steer a balanced, middle course and stand your ground. Your intuition will show you the way. Don’t be swayed.
Sagittarius
(Nov 23-Dec 21)
It is what you think that counts. Take the initiative in love. Follow a strong feeling through to its logical conclusion! Spread your wings and fly. Be nice to you for a change and give yourself a break. Reassess your priorities, giving personal issues more attention. Be the true, sunny character you know you are. There is no need to fret.
Capricorn
(Dec 22-Jan 20)
Life is for living! Leave nonsense behind and place negativity firmly in the past. Don’t be a slave to fear. It’s time to kick back and enjoy yourself. You have passed every test going with flying colours. Dark thoughts, moments and people should have no place in your reality. Steer clear of all that! Leave what you don’t understand alone.
Aquarius (Jan 21-Feb 19) Cope, as always, in your own fashion, but ditch the uptight demeanour. A more laidback attitude will serve you well. Things may indeed be tense if you have been left dangling. However, you won’t help matters by ruminating. Stay cool and sit loose! Maybe tidy up a bit? It won’t help to sweep things under the carpet. Face up to it all.
Pisces
(Feb 20-Mar 20)
You are on the brink of discovery, not breakdown. Don’t worry - there is no imminent disaster! What you were nervous about can be diverted. Simply trust that you are looked after. There IS now reason to be optimistic. You have played your circumstances well. Life may have dealt you a mixed deck, but it is now all okay.
Answers to the Zudoku and Crossword on page 61
The San Juan Weekly
April 7 - 13, 2011
Herman
Speed Bump
Frank & Ernest
BC
Scary Gary
Wizard of Id
Two Cows And A Chicken
Cartoons
63
Ziggi
64
April 7 - 13, 2011
The San Juan Weekly