NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...

NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART
A Thermostat That's Clever, Not Clunky ... By DAVID
POGUE
The Nest Learning Thermostat can save on heating a
nd cooling costs for your home. It even looks pret
ty on your wall.
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Steve Jobs may have transformed a bunch of industr
ies, but his great skill wasn’t really inventing.
Instead, he was the world’s greatest makeover wiza
rd. He’d look at some industry, identify what had
been wrong with it for years, and then figure out
how to make it beautiful and simple and joyous.
Now that Steve’s gone, who will look around for wor
lds that need changing?
Well, how about Tony Fadell? He seems to have the
pedigree. He helped design the iPod. He ran the iP
od and iPhone divisions of Apple for years.
He’s got that spot-what’s-wrong-with-it gene.
With his new company, Nest, he has decided to rein
vent a tech item that hasn’t seen much innovation
in decades: the thermostat.
Don’t snicker. This isn’t trivial. According to Ne
st, there are a quarter of a billion thermostats i
n this country alone; 10 million more are bought e
ach year.
Half of your home’s energy is controlled by this u
gly, beige tool. Most people never even bother to
program their programmable thermostats. As a resul
t, their houses actually use more energy than home
s without them. Two years ago, the federal governm
ent eliminated the entire programmable thermostat
category from its Energy Star program.
The Nest Learning Thermostat ($250) doesn’t introd
uce just one radical rethinking of the thermostat;

it introduces four of them.
RADICAL CHANGE 1 The look. The Nest is gorgeous. I
t’s round. Its screen is slightly domed glass; its
barrel has a mirror finish that reflects your wal
l. Its color screen glows orange when it’s heating
, blue when it’s cooling; it turns on when you app
roach it, and discreetly goes dark when nobody’s n
earby.
Sweating over attractiveness makes sense; after al
l, this is an object you mount on your wall at eye
level. A thermostat should be one of the most bea
utiful items on your wall, not the ugliest.
RADICAL CHANGE 2 The Nest has Wi-Fi, so it’s onlin
e. It can download software updates. You can progr
am it on a Web site.
You can also use a free iPhone or Android app, fro
m anywhere you happen to be, to see the current te
mperature and change it — to warm up the house bef
ore you arrive, for example. (At this moment, vaca
tion-home owners all over the world are wiping dro
ol off their keyboards.)
RADICAL CHANGE 3 Learning. The Nest is supposed to
program itself — and save you energy in the proce
ss. When you first install the Nest, you turn its
ring to change the temperature as you would a norm
al thermostat — at bedtime, when you leave for wor
k, and so on. A big, beautiful readout shows you t
he new setting and lets you know how long it will
take your house to reach that temperature. That in
formation, Nest says, is intended to discourage pe
ople from setting their thermostats to 90 degrees,
for example, thinking that the temperature will r
ise to 70 faster. (It doesn’t.)
Over the course of a week or so, the thermostat le
arns from your manual adjustments. It notes when t
hat happened, and what the temperature and humidit

y were, and so on. And it begins to set its own sc
hedule based on your living patterns.
RADICAL CHANGE 4 Energy savings. Let’s face it, $2
50 is a lot to pay for a thermostat. But Nest says
that you’ll recoup that through energy savings in
less than two years.
The mere act of having a correctly programmed ther
mostat is the big one, of course. Why should you w
aste money heating or cooling the downstairs when
you’re in bed upstairs? Or when you’re away at wor
k all day?
But the Nest’s smartphone-based components offer o
ther goodies, like Auto Away. The Nest contains tw
o proximity sensors (near and far), which detect w
hether anybody is actually in a room. If the senso
rs decide that nobody’s home, they let the tempera
ture drop or rise to an outer limit you’ve defined
— say, 65 in winter, 80 in summer — even if that
absence isn’t part of your normal schedule.
This feature is useless, of course, if your thermo
stat can’t see the room — say, if it’s in a closet
or behind an open door. But often I’ll return fro
m a day trip, having forgotten to turn down the he
at, and see Auto Away on the screen. Good ol’ Nest!
Nest says that turning down your thermostat by eve
n a single degree can save you 5 percent in energy
. To that end, it offers a little motivational log
o: a green leaf. It glows brighter as you turn the
ring beyond your standard comfort zone. As a posi
tive-reinforcement technique, it’s a lot more effe
ctive than an exhortation from Jimmy Carter to put
on a sweater.
This all sounds spectacular, of course, and mostly
, it is. But feathering my Nest wasn’t all smooth
sailing.

First, of course, you have to install the thing. N
est goes to extraordinary lengths to help you out.
The elegant package includes a screwdriver and th
e Nest itself has a built-in bubble level. YouTube
how-to videos and tech support are available.
But in the end, replacing a thermostat is not a jo
b for a novice. It involves cutting power to your
existing thermostats (after figuring out which cir
cuit breaker is responsible); removing your old th
ermostat (revealing an ugly, gaping maw in your wa
ll); hooking up about four colored wires (nasty-lo
oking and very short); covering up the gaping maw
with the included rectangular base plate (necessar
y only if the maw is larger than the Nest, which i
s likely); and snapping the Nest into place.
Nest’s installer performed the surgery on my downs
tairs thermostat as I watched; I did the deed myse
lf on the upstairs one. It took about half an hour
to install each thermostat. If you don’t feel up
to the task, Best Buy will send somebody to do it
for you at $120 (plus $25 more for each additional
Nest).
Second, my test Nests were cuckoo for the first co
uple of weeks. They’d decide for themselves to bla
st the heat to 73 degrees — at 4 a.m.
That was a little alarming. You know those sci-fi
movies where our machines turn on their human over
lords? Yeah, like that.
The company chalked my problems up to first-releas
e bugs, and had me reset my thermostats. (The soft
ware is very iPod-like. You turn the barrel to cho
ose from the colorful on-screen menus, and you cli
ck inward to make a selection.) After two such res
ets, the Nests are now working perfectly and savin
g me money.
The software has room to improve. For some reason,

the Nest’s own screen shows you a lot more about
what’s going on with your thermostat than the Web
site or the phone apps. For example, the Web and t
he app don’t show you when Auto Away kicked in or
when you manually adjusted your thermostats. (The
company says it will remedy that situation soon.)
The Web site is beautiful, but programming your Ne
sts using its Schedule tab is clumsy and tedious.
It takes too many unnecessary clicks to introduce
a change in the schedule.
I found some bugs, too. For example, if you have m
ultiple Nests, just coming back home doesn’t disen
gage the Auto Away mode automatically; you have to
click each thermostat’s screen within two minutes
. (Bizarre.)
Fortunately, software is fixable.
Goodness knows there are cheaper thermostats. And
there are other learning thermostats with color sc
reens and Internet connections. But they don’t hav
e the sensors that let them self-adjust. They don’
t look like pieces of art. They’re sold and packag
ed for contractors, not humans.
And they actually cost more: for example, similar
models of the Honeywell Prestige and Ecobee Smart
Thermostat go for more than $300 on Amazon.com. (C
an you imagine what the arrival of the Nest and it
s team of former Apple superstars must be doing to
morale at those companies? The Friday beer blasts
must be a bummer these days.)
The Nest is gorgeous, elegant and very, very smart
. It will keep your house at the right temperature
, save you money and do some good for the planet.
Put another way, it can make you comfortable in mo
re ways than one.
E-mail:pogue@nytimes.com

~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1201
12 Things You Didn't Know Facebook Could Do ... By
PAUL BOUTIN
The social network has been adding functions to ma
ke it more useful, although many on the site are u
naware of them.
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The designers and engineers who build Facebook are
anything but complacent about their success. They
face a constant threat from the career-centric Li
nkedIn, specialized upstarts like Instagram’s mobi
le photo network and now Google’s fast-growing Goo
gle+, an attempt to improve on Facebook’s core des
ign that has picked up tens of millions of users i
n its first few weeks.
So Facebook has been adding features to make the r
eigning social network more useful and convenient.
As the number of features grows, though, so does a
corresponding problem: Most of Facebook’s 750 mil
lion users don’t know these features exist. Some d
on’t know how to find them, some don’t go hunting
for them in Facebook’s ever-growing interface of c
ontrols and many don’t even think of them in the f
irst place. A few minutes of exploration can uncov
er functions that make Facebook not just an addict
ion but a pleasure to use.
EDIT LINK NAMES AND DESCRIPTIONS If you want to po
st a link to your Facebook page but don’t like the
title or description that Facebook automatically
pulls from the linked page, you can change it. Bef
ore you click the Share button, click on the title
or description in your pending post. They will ch
ange into editing boxes, like those to rename a fi
le on your computer desktop. When you’re done edit
ing, press Enter to save your changes.
TAG FRIENDS IN UPDATES AND COMMENTS If you type th

e name of a Facebook friend while editing a status
update or a comment, Facebook will automatically
create a link to the friend’s page. In fact, it wi
ll pop up a list of possible completions for names
like "John." Once you’ve entered a name, you can
backspace over it to erase the last name for infor
mality’s sake, or click in the middle to edit the
first, turning "Kenneth Smith" into "Kenneth" or "
Smith." Sorry, you can only shorten names — you ca
n’t edit "Kenneth Smith" into "Snuggles."
POST A PLAYABLE MP3 If you paste a link that ends
in ".mp3" into a status update, Facebook will crea
te a player in the middle of the update that lets
other users play the music file without having to
click through to its host site.
MAKE A PHOTO YOUR PROFILE PICTURE Any photo on Fac
ebook that has been tagged with your name includes
an extra blue link at the lower-left corner of it
s page labeled Make Profile Picture. Click that, a
nd Facebook pops up an editing page in which you c
an crop the photo to be just right for your profile.
CREATE A POLL Hiding in plain sight above the box
to enter status updates is a Question button. Post
ing a question looks just like posting an update,
except that it takes the first three answers from
your friends and turns them into a poll to keep th
e discussion focused. You can also set up the poll
with your own answers, or add more to those Faceb
ook creates.
COLLABORATE ON A DOCUMENT Within a Group page, cli
ck on Docs at the top of the page and then the Cre
ate a Doc button on the right-hand side to create
a text-only document that everyone in the group ca
n edit. When you save the document, it will be pos
ted to the group’s feed, just like a status update
, with an Edit button in the upper-right corner. T
o see previous revisions, click Recent Changes.

INVITE NON-FACEBOOKERS TO AN EVENT When you are cr
eating an event on Facebook, the Select Guests men
u shows your existing friends, but it also lets yo
u enter the e-mail addresses of people who do not
have Facebook accounts. Type one or more e-mail ad
dress, separated by commas, into the Invite by E-m
ail Address box. Your invitees will receive a mess
age with a link to your event page that, unfortuna
tely, prompts them to sign up for Facebook before
they can look at it.
GET THE TICKER OUT OF YOUR WAY Facebook recently a
dded a constantly scrolling window on the right si
de of the screen that shows your friends’ updates
as they come in. Fun for some, agitating for other
s. You can’t turn it off entirely, but you can mak
e the moving ticker as small as possible. Using yo
ur cursor, grab the bar that separates the Ticker
from your Facebook Chat window. Drag it upward unt
il the Ticker is as small as possible — the size o
f two status updates. That will reduce the level o
f unwanted distraction it causes while you’re tryi
ng to read the rest of the page, while still letti
ng you see new updates.
ADD A CALENDAR TO YOUR PAGE If you’re a business o
wner, a team coach or a performer who wants to kee
p everyone on Facebook apprised of your coming eve
nts, simply creating separate Facebook events for
each one can be ineffective. These can get lost in
the stream of events, making it hard for people t
o check for, say, your next game. As an alternativ
e, use the Social Calendar app, which was not deve
loped by Facebook. Go to facebook.com/SocialCalend
ar and click the Add to My Page link in the lower
left corner. That will pop up a menu of pages you
manage. Click Add to Page next to one or more page
s, then click Close. Those pages will now include
a Calendar link in their upper left corner, just b
elow Wall, Info and Photos. Social Calendar is pre
tty smart — it will autocomplete the names of even
ts you’ve already created, and if you type in an A

ddress field, it will add a map link to the locati
on on the calendar. But for maximum attendance, yo
u should still post status updates announcing an event.
TRACK YOUR PAGE’S SUCCESS On any page you own, whe
ther it is for your business or your clog-dancing
club, click View Insights in the upper right corne
r. Facebook will display charts of user informatio
n and page interactions. Beyond the number of Like
s and comments, it will plot a graph of page views
and user feedback, plus a breakdown of which Web
domains are sending traffic to your page, and the
demographics of your visitors. If you want to do y
our own number-crunching, you can export the data
into an Excel-compatible file.
KEEP A BIRTHDAY PARTY A SECRET Do you want to let
everyone except one or two people know what you’re
up to? Edit a status update as usual, but before
you post, click the lock icon below the editing bo
x. That will pop up a menu with options for specif
ying who can see your update. By default, it’s set
to Everyone. Choose Customize instead, and in the
dialog box that pops up, enter one or more names
in the box near the bottom that says Hide This Fro
m. There’s another button to make this your defaul
t setting for future updates, so you needn’t worry
about accidental oversharing.
BLOCK ANNOYING COMMENTERS Do you have a friend who
constantly posts inappropriate comments on your u
pdates but whom you can’t bring yourself to unfrie
nd? In the uppermost right corner of Facebook, cli
ck Account and choose Privacy Settings. That will
take you to a page labeled Choose Your Privacy Set
tings. Near the bottom is a section labeled Sharin
g on Facebook. Hiding at the bottom of that sectio
n is a link labeled Customize Settings. Scroll dow
n to Things Others Share. There’s a setting for "P
ermission to comment on your posts." It works just
like the filter for sharing status updates: click
Customize, and enter names of people to keep Face

ook from presenting them with comment features wh
en they look at your posts. Maybe they’ll get the hint.
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1201
Brilliant and Bold, in Any Language ... By DAVID WA
LDSTEIN
What makes Bobby Valentine's selection as Boston's
new manager so intriguing is his curiosity and hi
s daring, best exemplified by his time spent manag
ing in Japan.
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Early in his tenure as manager of the Chiba Lotte
Marines in Japan, Bobby Valentine decided to run a
drill to practice pickoff moves at second base. H
e instructed his pitchers to throw behind the runn
er, but for some reason they refused to do as he a
sked.
As Valentine grew frustrated over the inability of
his pitchers to follow his instructions, Satoru K
omiyama, a veteran who had played for Valentine wh
en he managed the Mets, came forward to offer an e
xplanation.
"We will be happy to do it in games," he told Vale
ntine. "But in practice we don’t want to injure ou
r teammates by throwing the ball at their behinds."
It was not the first problem with translation that
Valentine encountered in Japan, nor would it be h
is last. But he would eventually learn 2,042 kanji
characters out of an instructional book, practici
ng them in the dirt with the toe of his cleats dur
ing practice, and by the time he made his tearful
goodbye speech to the team’s fans in 2009, he did
so in Japanese.
"There’s a lot of guys who go over there just look
ing to get a paycheck," said the current Mets mana
ger Terry Collins, who managed the Orix Buffaloes
for two seasons in Japan and competed there agains

t Valentine. "Bobby completely embraced everything
about it and had the mind-set to succeed there. I
wish I had listened to him more."
When the Boston Red Sox began courting Valentine i
n early November to replace Terry Francona as thei
r next manager, he was cited for his baseball bril
liance. Valentine is indeed smart and observant, b
ut so are some other people in major league dugouts.
What sets Valentine apart from his peers, what mak
es his selection as Boston’s new manager so intrig
uing, is his curiosity. And maybe his daring. And
those traits are probably best exemplified by his
willingness to not just manage in Japan, but to pl
unge headfirst into its culture, both accepting an
d challenging it all at once.
"There is no question that he is more worldly than
other managers," said Steve Phillips, who was Val
entine’s former boss with the Mets, went to the Wo
rld Series with him and now accepts responsibility
for the friction in their relationship.
"It’s not even close," Phillips added of Valentine
’s one-of-a-kind approach. "His enthusiasm for new
concepts, new ideas is unparalleled, and he wants
them to succeed."
Valentine became an adored figure in Japan, which
will not be an easy feat to duplicate in Boston, w
here the baseball culture is intense and entrenche
d, where the current roster contains a lot of vete
ran players, not all of whom may want to do things
any differently.
But that is unlikely to deter Valentine, or inhibi
t him. He took on Japan. Why not Beantown?
"I think he’ll be great in Boston," said John Blak
e, a longtime Texas Rangers executive who was with
Valentine when he managed that team and who has a

lso worked for the Red Sox.
"Bobby brings incredible passion and energy," Blak
e said. "In Boston, the Red Sox are such a religio
n. He will revel in that, and the fans will pick u
p on it."
The Red Sox will go into spring training trying to
shake off their historic collapse in September. I
t is a talented team with leftover issues — includ
ing players consuming beer and chicken during game
s — and Valentine will have plenty to deal with ri
ght from the start.
As was the case in Japan. Having already managed t
he Marines in Japan’s Pacific League for one year
in 1995, Valentine knew what would greet him when
he arrived there for his second stint in 2004 — a
lethargic fan base, a team expecting to again fini
sh dead last. Faced with that challenge, Valentine
over the next six years transformed the club, its
stadium and, to some extent, Japanese baseball.
By the time he left, the Marines had won their fir
st championship in 31 years, he had become the fir
st foreign recipient of the prestigious Shoriki Aw
ard for service to Japanese baseball, and attendan
ce at Marine Stadium had grown 400 percent.
When traditional Japanese baseball strategies work
ed, Valentine left them alone. "He told me, don’t
mess with relays, they know how to do it," Collins
said.
But Valentine also shortened workouts, told player
s to wear shorts during batting practice in hot mo
nths and instituted a day off every fourth day in
spring training — all unheard of in a baseball env
ironment where hard work is the bare minimum. He e
ncouraged players to grow their hair longer if the
y wished and even pose a little bit after a home r
un. Have some fun.

"Bobby is a baseball genius," said Matt Franco, th
e former Met who played for Valentine in Queens an
d in Japan. "Sometimes that gets under people’s sk
in. But the players loved him. They could see he w
as out for them."
Before he made any changes in Japan, Valentine wou
ld first take on what he wanted to alter, particul
arly the rigorous workouts. He fielded so many gro
und balls he felt his arm was going to fall off. "
It has to be right," he would say to his bench coa
ch, Frank Rampen, as he thought about what to chan
ge.
Valentine wasn’t always right, though. He institut
ed changes with the team draft that sometimes back
fired, and offended others with the new uniforms h
e helped design. But he kept going.
In 2005, when the young third baseman Toshiaki Ima
e asked for three days off to be with his wife as
she gave birth, Valentine’s Japanese coaches said
it was out of the question. Valentine gave him the
three days, and when Imae returned he went on a h
itting tear and was eventually named the most valu
able player of the Japan Series.
Perhaps the biggest change that Valentine brought
about involved the fans’ access to the players. He
insisted that the eight-foot chicken-wire fences
that extended from foul pole to foul pole and sepa
rated the fans from the players should come down.
He wanted his players to sign autographs. Accordin
g to Larry Rocca, a former sportswriter who became
a Marines executive, Valentine’s reasoning wasn’t
only about building good will. When Valentine fir
st returned in 2004, the players were lacking in s
elf-esteem. Why would anyone want their autographs
? The team was no good. But Valentine reasoned tha
t if the players saw fans asking for autographs, t
heir confidence might get a boost and so might the

ir performances on the field.
He encountered resistance. At first a slit was cut
into the fence, for fans to pass papers to the pl
ayers to sign. Only after two years did the fences
come down.
But Valentine had made his point. A year after he
returned, the Marines won the championship, with t
he young players he promoted leading the way. Vale
ntine’s popularity soared. A beer, Bobeer, would b
e named after him, as well as a street in Chiba, V
alentine Way.
But by 2009 the adventure was over as the front of
fice said it could no longer afford his high salar
y. The fans organized large in-game protests and c
ollected thousands of signatures on a petition. Th
eir pleas went unanswered.
At the airport the day he left, hundreds of fans a
ssembled to see him off, waving flags with his lik
eness on them and singing the "Bobby" song they wr
ote for him. As his plane taxied down the runway,
they ran out on a roof after it, waving their flag
s and shouting his name as a tearful Valentine wat
ched from the plane.
This time, nothing was lost in translation.
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1201
Judy Lewis, Secret Daughter of Hollywood, Dies at 7
6 ... By PAUL VITELLO
Ms. Lewis, the daughter of an unwed Loretta Young
and Clark Gable, was 31 before she confronted her
mother and learned the truth of her upbringing.
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Her mother was Loretta Young. Her father was Clark
Gable.
Yet Judy Lewis spent her first 19 months in hideaw

ays and orphanages, and the rest of her early life
untangling a web of lies spun by a young mother h
ungry for stardom but unwilling to end her unwed p
regnancy.
Loretta Young’s deception was contrived to protect
her budding movie career and the box-office power
of the matinee idol Gable, who was married to som
eone else when they conceived their child in snowe
d-in Washington State. They were on location, shoo
ting the 1935 film "The Call of the Wild," fiction
al lovers in front of the camera and actual lovers
outside its range.
Ms. Lewis, a former actress who died on Friday at
the age of 76, was 31 before she discerned the sco
pe of the falsehoods that cast her, a daughter of
Hollywood royalty, into what she later described a
s a Cinderella-like childhood. Confronted by Ms. L
ewis, Young finally made a tearful confession in 1
966 at her sprawling home in Palm Springs, Calif.
Young was 22 and unmarried when she and Gable, 34
and married to Maria Langham, had their brief affa
ir. She spent most of her pregnancy in Europe to a
void Hollywood gossip. Ms. Lewis was born on Nov.
6, 1935, in a rented house in Venice, Calif. Soon
she was turned over to a series of caretakers, inc
luding St. Elizabeth’s Infants Hospital in San Fra
ncisco, so that Young could return to stardom.
When Ms. Lewis was 19 months old, her mother broug
ht her back home and announced through the gossip
columnist Louella Parsons that she had adopted the
child.
Ms. Lewis grew up in Los Angeles, cushioned in the
luxury of her mother’s movie-star lifestyle even
as she endured what she later described as an outs
ider’s isolation within her family and the teasing
of children at school.

They teased her about her ears: they stuck out lik
e Dumbo’s. Or, as Hollywood rumors had it, they st
uck out like Clark Gable’s. Ms. Lewis’s mother dre
ssed her in bonnets to hide them. When Ms. Lewis w
as 7 her ears were surgically altered to make them
less prominent.
Until Ms. Lewis, as an adult, confronted her years
later, Young did not acknowledge that Ms. Lewis w
as her biological daughter, or that Gable was Ms.
Lewis’s father. When Young married and had two chi
ldren with Tom Lewis, a radio producer, Judy took
his name but remained the family’s "adopted" daugh
ter.
And though conceding the story privately to her da
ughter — and later to the rest of her family — You
ng remained mum publicly all her life, agreeing to
acknowledge the facts only in her authorized biog
raphy, "Forever Young," and only on the condition
that it be published after her death. She died in
2000.
But Ms. Lewis revealed the story of her parentage
in her own memoir, "Uncommon Knowledge," in 1994.
She described feeling a powerful sense of alienati
on as a child. "It was very difficult for me as a
little girl not to be accepted or acknowledged by
my mother, who, to this day, will not publicly ack
nowledge that I am her biological child," she said
in an interview that year.
After Ms. Lewis released the memoir, her mother ref
used to speak to her for three years.
The lightning bolt that gave Ms. Lewis the first h
int about her parentage came during an identity cr
isis before her wedding day. Two weeks before her
marriage in 1958, Ms. Lewis told her fiance, Tom T
inney, that she did not understand her confusing r
elationship with her mother and that she did not k
now who her father was. "I can’t marry you," she s

aid she told him. "I don’t know anything about mys
elf."
Mr. Tinney could offer little guidance about her m
other, she wrote, but about her father’s identity
he was clear.
"It’s common knowledge, Judy," he said. "Your fathe
r is Clark Gable."
She had no inkling, she wrote.
In interviews after her book was published, Ms. Le
wis was philosophical about the secrecy in which s
he grew up. If Young and Gable had acknowledged he
r in 1935, she said, "both of them would have lost
their careers."
Much of Ms. Lewis’s account was painful to recall,
she said. She quoted Young as saying, "And why sh
ouldn’t I be unhappy?," explaining her decision to
give birth. "Wouldn’t you be if you were a movie
star and the father of your child was a movie star
and you couldn’t have an abortion because it was
a mortal sin?"
Young was a Roman Catholic.
After graduating from Marymount, a girls’ Catholic
school, Ms. Lewis left Los Angeles to pursue acti
ng in New York. She was a regular on one soap oper
a, "The Secret Storm," from 1964 to 1971, and had
featured parts on numerous others. She appeared in
several Broadway plays, produced television shows
, and in her mid-40s decided to return to school.
She earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degr
ee in clinical psychology from Antioch University
in Los Angeles, and became a licensed family and c
hild counselor in 1992.
Ms. Lewis, who was a clinical psychologist special
izing in foster care and marriage therapy, died of

lymphoma at her home in Gladwyne, Pa., her daught
er, Maria Tinney Dagit, said.
Besides her daughter, Ms. Lewis is survived by two
grandsons and her half-brothers, Christopher and
Peter Lewis. Her marriage to Mr. Tinney ended in d
ivorce.
In a 2001 interview on CNN with Larry King, Ms. Le
wis recalled speaking to her mother about her earl
y life.
"I was also asking her about being adopted," she s
aid, "as adopted children do. They say, ‘Where are
my ... ‘’ "
Mr. King interjected, " ‘Who’s my mother?’ "
"Yes," Ms. Lewis said. " ‘Who’s my mother? Who’s m
y father?’ And she would answer it very easily by
saying, ‘I couldn’t love you any more than if you
were my own child,’ which, of course, didn’t answe
r the question, but it said, ‘Don’t ask the questi
on.’ "
But at that point Ms. Lewis was wistful about her
past. "Call of the Wild," she said, was one of her
favorite movies. The love scenes between her pare
nts, she said, "show the love they feel for each o
ther."
Mr. King asked if she ever fantasized about the li
fe she might have had if her parents had married a
nd brought her up.
"I would have liked them to have," she replied. "B
ut that is just my dream, you know. Life is very s
trange. Doesn’t give us what we want."
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1202

Sneaking Up on Defenses, Until He's Past Them ... B
y PAT BORZI
Two weeks ago, Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers o
ffered a theory on why receiver Jordy Nelson wasn'
t drawing double coverage: because Nelson is white.
===== notyet
GREEN BAY — Eleven games into his breakout season,
Green Bay Packers receiver Jordy Nelson did not n
eed a calculator or even his fingers to count the
number of times that he had faced double coverage
this year.
"I would say never," he said this week. "Not that I
know of."
It seems improbable. Nelson, remember, had nine ca
tches for 140 yards and a touchdown in Green Bay’s
Super Bowl victory last season. His 21 postseason
catches earned him a share of the franchise recor
d with Greg Jennings. This season, Nelson has deve
loped into a serious threat for the undefeated Pac
kers, with more receiving touchdowns (nine) than i
n his previous three seasons combined (six). Two h
ave gone for more than 80 yards.
So why are opposing defenses not focusing on him mo
re?
Two weeks ago, Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers o
ffered a frank theory on his Tuesday afternoon rad
io show: because Nelson is white.
Rodgers recounted a conversation he had with Packe
rs cornerback Charles Woodson, who is black, after
Nelson’s two touchdown catches in a 45-7 win over
Minnesota on Nov. 14.
"I was talking to Wood in the fourth quarter and h
e said: ‘When you see Jordy out there, you think,
oh well, he’s a white wide receiver. He won’t be v
ery athletic,’ " Rodgers said on his radio show. "
But Jordy sort of breaks all those stereotypes. I’

m not sure why he keeps sneaking up on guys."
The next day, Nelson went along with Rodgers’s ass
essment. So did Jennings. The subsequent commotion
, with people from ESPN analysts to Rush Limbaugh
weighing in, embarrassed Nelson, and neither Rodge
rs nor Jennings chose to revisit the issue this we
ek.
"He’s a hard worker, he practices well, he’s a pro
fessional," Rodgers said. "And for some reason or
another, he’s just not respected, maybe, as some o
f our other pass-catching threats.
"When you put a third or fourth corner on him, we
like that matchup. He’s been consistently getting
open and making the plays when they present themse
lves."
The rugged Nelson, a middle child of Kansas farmer
s, goes into Sunday’s game against the Giants rank
ed third in the N.F.L. with an average of 17.8 yar
ds a catch. Among Packers receivers, only Jennings
exceeds Nelson’s 44 catches for a career-high 782
yards. Nelson’s growing rapport with Rodgers, who
is having one of those seasons where he can seemi
ngly hit a bumblebee in the thorax from 50 yards,
has played a big part in his production.
Beginning with the penultimate regular-season game
last year, Nelson caught three touchdown passes o
f more than 80 yards in an eight-game stretch — th
e only player to do so since the 1970 merger, acco
rding to the Elias Sports Bureau. All this from a
former college walk-on with a crew cut who bears a
resemblance to Yankee outfielder Brett Gardner.
Packers receivers coach Edgar Bennett, who is blac
k, smiled at the suggestion of race but declined t
o cite that with Nelson. "He’s a good player, bott
om line," he said.

Instead, Bennett said Nelson benefitted from defen
ses respecting the playmaking abilities of Jenning
s and tight end Jermichael Finley. The 6-3, 217-po
und Nelson often draws a smaller, less-skilled def
ensive back, especially in multiple receiver sets.
"With those two guys on the field, that certainly
helps the situation," Bennett said of Jennings and
Finley. "And I think he’s been able to continue t
o improve and get better and take advantage of tho
se one-on-one situations."
Nelson’s family raised and bred cattle near Manhat
tan, Kan., and as a child, he helped out with all
the chores, even the much less glamorous ones. Whe
n Packer wideouts Jennings, James Jones and Brett
Swain visited the farm with their wives two summer
s ago, Nelson demonstrated how to artificially ins
eminate a cow. All three then took a turn at it.
A quarterback and defensive back in high school, N
elson walked on at Kansas State as a safety but sw
itched to wide receiver as a sophomore. He led the
team in receptions that season. When he was a sen
ior, Nelson broke the team record with 122 catches
and was one of three finalists for the Biletnikof
f Award, which goes to the nation’s top receiver.
"He killed us my last year at Texas," Finley said,
referring to a 41-21 Wildcats upset of the Longho
rns in 2007. Nelson caught 12 passes for 116 yards
with one score, and returned a punt 89 yards for
another touchdown. The Packers drafted him in the
second round in 2008.
"He’s been doing what he does since he got here, a
nd he did it before he got here," Packers General
Manager Ted Thompson said. "He runs. He gets open.
He’s got quickness. I just think sometimes people
tend to take him for granted."
Why?

"I don’t know," Thompson said. "He doesn’t beat his
chest a lot. Or try to get out in front."
Finley does not understand it, either. In describi
ng why opponents underestimated Nelson, Finley see
med to feel the need to invent a new word.
"People downlook him, but he’s the strongest, most
underrated receiver in the league," Finley said.
"That’s why you see him getting plays like that, b
ecause guys look down on him, and A-Rod just keeps
feeding him."
Greg Bishop contributed reporting.
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1202: ART REVIEW
Unfurling a Thousand Years of Gods, Demons and Roma
nce ... By ROBERTA SMITH
"Storytelling in Japanese Art" at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art reveals the narrative side of Japan
ese art in a lavish assortment of hand scrolls, ha
nging scrolls, screens and books.
===== notyet
"Storytelling in Japanese Art," at the Metropolita
n Museum of Art, is a captivating combination of s
how and tell, read and look. Curatorially speaking
, the exhibition takes us gently in hand and, thro
ugh text panels, captions and diagrams, reveals th
e narrative side of Japanese art with memorable cl
arity.
It has been organized by Masako Watanabe, a senior
research associate in the Met’s Asian art departm
ent, and while installed in the museum’s Japanese
permanent-collection galleries, it is a temporary
show full of significant loans. Illuminating the t
ales played out in a lavish assortment of hand scr
olls, hanging scrolls, screens and books, the exhi
bition, with its explications and elucidations, gi
ves didacticism a good name. It deserves return vi

sits, especially for its second rotation, starting
Feb. 8, when, due to fragility, several hand scro
lls will be wound to different scenes and five scr
eens will be replaced by others.
The show contains more than 100 works that span mo
stly from the 13th to the 19th centuries. At its c
ore are some 20 hand scrolls, or emaki, an ingenio
us medium evolved from the illustrated sutras that
began landing in Japan from China in the eighth c
entury as part of the spread of Buddhism. While fu
ll of wonderfully observed natural details, Japane
se hand scrolls, unlike their Chinese precedents,
developed less as vehicles for pure landscape than
as stages on which to unfurl human dramas of all
kinds, in something like real time and space. In t
he hands of Japanese artists the scrolls were tant
amount to primitive films. Their fluidity, emotion
al expressiveness and sense of action and lived ex
perience give them an uncannily contemporary immediacy.
This is established at the start of the show with
a masterpiece: the five scrolls known as the "Illu
strated Legends of the Kitano Tenjin Shrine," a su
blime example of Chinese-style ink painting highli
ghted with translucent washes of color from the 13
th-century Kamakura period. Acquired in 1925, thes
e scrolls constitute one of the Met’s great painti
ngs, but they have never been exhibited together b
efore, and this alone makes "Storytelling in Japan
ese Art" a must-see.
With seductive intimacy the scrolls recount the li
fe and turbulent afterlife of Sugawara Michizane,
a ninth-century poet-statesman said to have died o
f a broken heart after being unjustly slandered. T
he tale includes the destruction unleashed by his
angry spirit (floods, fire, shattered buildings, s
ome of it delivered by a magnificent black-clad th
under god) and the dangerous journey to hell and b
ack by Nichizo, an intrepid acolyte sent to divine
how to placate Michizane. (It takes a temple.)

Nichizo’s pictorially breathtaking odyssey involve
s help from both monks and demons, a pause to pray
in a cave (dragon notwithstanding) and braving a
fabulous fire-breathing monster with eight heads a
nd nine tails who guards the fiery furnace that is
hell. All this is played out in a sparsely limned
landscape whose mutations from gentle to spiked t
o lunar make it a star in its own right.
A similarly spare, evocative landscape also figure
s in "A Long Tale for an Autumn Night," another in
k-and-color painting from around 1400. Its anguish
ed plot concerns an aspiring monk’s love for a bea
utiful boy and ends, as this genre usually did, wi
th the death of the boy, who is revealed to be a m
anifestation of the bodhisattva Kannon.
"Storytelling in Japanese Art" is not a historical
ly thorough survey. Its main goal is to follow the
mingling of different narrative and pictorial gen
res and styles. Its arrangement is as much themati
c as chronological, with groupings of different wo
rks from different centuries attesting to the cont
inuing attraction that certain stories exerted on
the imagination.
In the section devoted to "The Tale of Genji," the
12th-century novel that is among Japan’s greatest
contributions to world literature, for example, m
odest books and hand scrolls are grouped around a
pair of Edo-period screens by the 16th-century mas
ter Kano Soshu like small craft around a magnifice
nt ocean liner.
And early in the exhibition En No Gyoja, the legen
dary founder of a mountain-based asceticism combin
ing aspects of Shinto and Buddhist beliefs known a
s Shugendo, moves through several mediums, includi
ng intentional hanging scrolls and what might be c
alled accidental ones, those made from fragments e
xcised from hand scrolls and mounted on textiles,

as well as intact hand scrolls. He is especially a
ppealing in a Kamakura-period hand scroll fragment
about the history of the Jin’oji Temple. It shows
him in a garden with low-flying clouds conversing
with a local deity, while a visiting Korean god a
lights on the top of a pine tree, causing one of E
n No Gyoja’s loyal servant-demons to fall to his knees.
From there the show traces the pictorial life of v
arious cherished narratives from medium to medium.
Sacred tales about building temples or the spirit
ual evolution of semidivine beings give way to cel
ebrations of rulers’ lives, epic military battles
or endlessly triangulating romances whose female p
articipants usually pay the price. In the late-16t
h-century hand scroll "The Tale of Gio" the title
character, a dancer, generously allows another wom
an to perform for her patron in a green-carpeted p
avilion, and of course her life ends up in ruins.
Here, as in later works throughout the show, freehand
ink painting gives way to stiffer figuration
and bright opaque colors, and open landscapes are
more and more punctuated by steeply tilted buildin
gs whose sumptuous interiors become central.
Partly because of the exhibition’s placement in th
e permanent-collection galleries, Ms. Watanabe has
supplemented the scrolls, books and screens with
works in other mediums. A lacquer box and a kimono
decorated with images of books suggest the high v
alue placed on literature, and lacquer stirrups an
d saddles are placed near several screens recounti
ng historic battles that had assumed mythic status
in Japanese culture. They teem with mounted soldi
ers and archers and, according to the label, can d
epict up to 80 separate episodes.
If you wonder what a six-legged red-lacquer storag
e case is doing in the show, look no farther than
the pair of painted screens next to it. On one a n
early identical case is boldly outlined in ink. Ac
cording to the label a brave samurai cut off the a

m of a wicked demon and hid it the case, until th
e demon returned in the guise of the warrior’s mot
her and tricked him out it. On the second screen t
he demon, rendered larger than life with exaggerat
ed vigor, is shown speeding away, clutching her li
vidly red arm. The work’s creator, Shibata Zeshin
(1807-91), was known internationally during his li
fetime as a master of lacquer; a nearby preparator
y study for the image is just as large, but less s
trained.
The same storage case, this time in black, appears
in the show’s final gallery in "Night Parade of 1
00 Demons," where it is being torn apart by one of
the hand scroll’s wonderfully grotesque creatures
in an effort to free several more of his ilk trap
ped inside. This final gallery is dominated by dep
ictions of anthropomorphized animals, among them t
he frolicking creatures on a 12th-century hanging
scroll that was excised from a set of 12th-century
hand scrolls revered in Japan as one of the start
ing points of manga. Also here is "The Tale of Mic
e," one of several impressive loans from the New Y
ork Public Library, with its cast of well-dressed
white rodents. One wonders if Art Spiegelman knew
of its existence when he undertook "Maus," his gra
phic novel of Jewish mice and Nazi cats.
"The Tale of Mice" is one of many points in "Story
telling in Japanese Art" where you may find yourse
lf wondering if Japan, despite its small size, has
contributed far more than its share to today’s po
pular culture. There is no hard science by which t
o arrive at a definitive answer. Still, this fasci
nating show reverberates with that tantalizing pos
sibility.
"Storytelling in Japanese Art" is on view through
May 6 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535
-7710, metmuseum.org.
~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1203
Center of Penn State Scandal, Sandusky Tells His Ow
n Story ... By JO BECKER
In an extensive interview, Jerry Sandusky, the for
mer assistant football coach, insisted that he had
never sexually abused any child.
===== notyet
The former Penn State assistant football coach Jer
ry Sandusky, in his first extended interview since
his indictment on sexual abuse charges last month
, said Coach Joe Paterno never spoke to him about
any suspected misconduct with minors. Mr. Sandusky
also said the charity he worked for never restric
ted his access to children until he became the sub
ject of a criminal investigation in 2008.
The failure by Mr. Paterno to act more aggressivel
y after being told in 2002 that Mr. Sandusky had m
olested a 10-year-old boy in the showers of the un
iversity’s football building played a role in Mr.
Paterno’s firing last month after 62 years at Penn
State. Mr. Sandusky, in the interview, said that
Mr. Paterno did not speak to him or confront him o
ver the accusation, despite the fact that Mr. Sand
usky had been one of his assistant coaches for thr
ee decades and was a regular presence at the footb
all team’s complex for years after the 2002 episode.
Mr. Sandusky, in a nearly four-hour interview over
two days this week, insisted he had never sexuall
y abused any child, but he confirmed details of so
me of the events that prosecutors have cited in ch
arging him with 40 counts of molesting young boys,
all of whom came to know Mr. Sandusky through the
charity he founded, known as the Second Mile.
Mr. Sandusky said he regularly gave money to the d
isadvantaged boys at his charity, opened bank acco
unts for them, and gave them gifts that had been d
onated to the charity.
Prosecutors have said Mr. Sandusky used such gifts

as a way to build a sense of trust and loyalty am
ong boys he then repeatedly abused.
Mr. Sandusky, after repeated requests, agreed to t
he interview because he said his decades of work w
ith children had been misunderstood and distorted
by prosecutors.
“They’ve taken everything that I ever did for any
young person and twisted it to say that my motives
were sexual or whatever,” Mr. Sandusky said. He a
dded: “I had kid after kid after kid who might say
I was a father figure. And they just twisted that
all.”
Yet over the course of the interview, Mr. Sandusky
described what he admitted was a family and work
life that could often be chaotic, even odd, one th
at lacked some classic boundaries between adults a
nd children, and thus one that was open to interpr
etation — by those who have defended him as a gene
rous mentor and those who have condemned him as a
serial predator.
He said his household in State College, Pa., over
the years came to be a kind of recreation center o
r second home for dozens of children from the char
ity, a place where games were played, wrestling ma
tches staged, sleepovers arranged, and from where
trips to out-of-town sporting events were launched
. Asked directly why he appeared to interact with
children who were not his own without many of the
typical safeguards other adults might apply — show
ering with them, sleeping alone with them in hotel
rooms, blowing on their stomachs — he essentially
said that he saw those children as his own.
“It was, you know, almost an extended family,” Mr.
Sandusky said of his household’s relationship wit
h children from the charity. He then characterized
his close experiences with children he took under
his wing as “precious times,” and said that the p

hysical aspect of the relationships “just happened
that way.”
Wrestling, hugging — “I think a lot of the kids rea
lly reached out for that,” he said.
Mr. Sandusky said his wife, Dorothy, known as Dott
ie, ultimately had some concerns about the househo
ld dynamics. He said she had warned him not to neg
lect his own children — the Sanduskys had adopted
six children, including one from the Second Mile —
“for the sake of other kids.” Mr. Sandusky recall
ed one scene after a Penn State football game that
underscored her concerns.
“I remember the kids were downstairs, and we alway
s had dogs,” he said. “And Dottie said, ‘You bette
r go down and check on those kids, you know those
Second Mile kids after football games.’ I went dow
n, and I look, and there goes a kid flying over a
couch, there goes a dog flying over a couch. And I
go, ‘I don’t think she wants to see this.’ ”
He said of his household: “Yeah, I mean it was turm
oil. It was turmoil.”
During the interview, conducted at the home of his
lawyer, Mr. Sandusky was at times subdued, but oc
casionally capable of humor — some of it awkward l
aughter about his legal jeopardy and ruined reputa
tion, some of it bright amusement at a recalled an
ecdote about his own father, who himself had worke
d with disadvantaged and disabled children, or a m
oment of remembered comedy at one of the many summ
er camps he helped run for children.
He grew most animated when talking about his relat
ionships with children, and he grew most disconsol
ate when he, with a touch of childlike reverence,
spoke of Mr. Paterno and Penn State, and the damag
e his indictment had caused them. “I don’t think i
t was fair,” he said.

During the interview, Joseph Amendola, Mr. Sandusk
y’s lawyer, captured what he asserted was his clie
nt’s predicament:
“All those good things that you were doing have be
en turned around,” Mr. Amendola said, speaking to
his client, “and the people who are painting you a
s a monster are saying, ‘Well, they’re the types o
f things that people who are pedophiles exhibit.’ ”
Prosecutors, in their indictment of Mr. Sandusky,
charged him with a horrific array of abuse, includ
ing the repeated assaults of young boys.
Mr. Sandusky, in the interview, confirmed aspects
of what prosecutors have said was a manipulative s
cheme: he gave money and gifts to Second Mile chil
dren, including computers and golf clubs. However,
Mr. Sandusky presented his actions in a benevolen
t light.
“I would call kids on the phone and work with them
academically,” he said. “I tried to reward them s
ometimes with a little money in hand, just so that
they could see something. But more often than not
, I tried to set up, maybe get them to save the mo
ney, and I put it directly into a savings account
established for them.”
Sometimes, he said, he found work for the children
at his football camps. Sometimes he bought them s
hoes or a shirt with his money. And sometimes, he
passed along gifts to them that had been given to
the charity by donors. “I never bought a computer
for any kid; I had a computer given to me to give
to a kid,” he said. “I never bought golf clubs. Pe
ople gave things because they knew there would be
kids. They wanted to get rid of things.”
It is unclear whether the supervisors or directors
of the charity knew of Mr. Sandusky’s setting up

ank accounts or giving away donated gifts. Invest
igators with the Pennsylvania attorney general’s o
ffice have subpoenaed the financial records of the
charity, but say they have been alarmed to learn
that some records from some years are missing.
Jack Raykovitz, the executive director of Second M
ile, resigned after Mr. Sandusky’s indictment.
Mr. Sandusky, in the interview, said Penn State of
ficials had contacted Mr. Raykovitz after the epis
ode in 2002. An assistant football coach has told
investigators that he saw Mr. Sandusky raping a yo
ung boy in the football building’s showers, and th
at he told Mr. Paterno some version of that scene
the following day. Mr. Paterno has testified that
he then informed the university’s athletic directo
r, Tim Curley, that Mr. Sandusky had done somethin
g sexually inappropriate with a young boy.
Mr. Sandusky, in the interview, said word of an ep
isode with a young boy in the shower reached Mr. R
aykovitz. He said he talked with Mr. Raykovitz, an
d identified the boy he thought Penn State was con
cerned about. Mr. Sandusky, though, said Mr. Rayko
vitz did not see fit to limit his interaction with
youths, in part because he was aware of the natur
e of Mr. Sandusky’s mentoring relationship with th
e boy, and in part because he knew Mr. Sandusky ha
d undergone repeated background checks clearing hi
m to work with children.
Mr. Raykovitz’s lawyer, Kevin L. Hand, called Mr.
Sandusky’s account inaccurate, but refused to say
more.
As for Mr. Paterno, Mr. Sandusky said the two neve
r spoke about any incidents, not the episode in 20
02 or an earlier complaint of child molestation ma
de against Mr. Sandusky in 1998 that was investiga
ted by the Penn State campus police.

“I never talked to him about either one,” Mr. Sand
usky said of Mr. Paterno. “That’s all I can say. I
mean, I don’t know.”
Mr. Paterno, through his son, Scott, has denied kn
owing about the 1998 investigation at the time it
happened.
“He’s the only one who knows whether anybody ever
said anything to him,” Mr. Sandusky said of Mr. Pa
terno.
In the interview, Mr. Sandusky, the longtime defen
sive coordinator at Penn State, said that his rela
tionships and activities with Second Mile children
did cause some strain with Mr. Paterno, but only
in that Mr. Sandusky worried that having some of t
he children with him at hotels before games, or on
the sideline during games, risked being seen as a
distraction by the demanding Mr. Paterno.
“I would have dreams of we being in a squad meetin
g and that door fly open and kids come running thr
ough chasing one another, and what was I going to
do?” he said. “Because, I mean, Joe was serious ab
out football.”
Mr. Sandusky, despite expressing concern about tal
king about the formal charges made against him, di
d talk about his relationships with several of the
eight people cited as victims by prosecutors last
month. He said his relationships with more than o
ne of them had extended for years after the suspec
ted episodes of molestation or inappropriate behav
ior.
In 1998, the mother of a child reported concerns t
o the Penn State campus police when she learned he
r son had showered with Mr. Sandusky at the univer
sity. After an investigation, Mr. Sandusky admitte
d to the police and child welfare authorities that
he had most likely done something inappropriate,

according to prosecutors. The local district attor
ney declined to prosecute.
In the interview this week, Mr. Sandusky said the
boy and his mother remained a part of his life for
years. He said that the mother had sought him out
for tickets to Penn State games for her son, and
that Mr. Sandusky had contributed financially year
s later, when the young man, interested in the min
istry, went on a mission.
“He went to Mexico in the poverty-stricken areas a
nd worked with the kids and things like that,” Mr.
Sandusky said of the young man. “He showed me, he
sent me pictures of he and the kids.”
In the grand jury report, prosecutors cited Mr. Sa
ndusky’s attempts to reach some of his accusers. H
e acknowledged that he reached out to at least one
, but said he thought the young man might be a cha
racter witness on his behalf, and was unaware that
prosecutors had listed him as a victim.
Asked how he came to be involved more closely with
some children rather than others, Mr. Sandusky sa
id he got to know many of them at Second Mile summ
er camps.
“Some of them sought me out,” Mr. Sandusky said.
Mr. Sandusky, facing grave charges and the possibi
lity of imprisonment, discussed how much was now m
issing from his life, and how much more might be m
issing in the future.
“I miss coaching,” he said. “I miss Second Mile. I
miss Second Mile kids. I miss interrelationships
with all kinds of people. I miss my own grandkids.
I miss, I mean you know I’m going to miss my dog.
So, I mean, yeah, I miss, yeah. Good grief.
“I used to have a lot of contact with a lot of peo

ple and so that circle is diminished, and as it di
minished, you know Bo is still there,” he said of
his dog. “And I swear he understands. I swear he k
nows. And you know I love him dearly for that.”
Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1203
Oh, for the Good Old Days of Rude Cellphone Gabbers
... By NICK WINGFIELD
When virtual assistants like Apple's Siri are used
in public places, the results can be annoying, ev
en creepy, to unwilling listeners.
===== notyet
Is talking to a phone the same as talking on it?
The sound of someone gabbing on a cellphone is par
t of the soundtrack of daily life, and most of us
have learned when to be quiet — no talking in “qui
et cars” on trains, for example.
But the etiquette of talking to a phone — more pre
cisely, to a “virtual assistant” like Apple’s Siri
, in the new iPhone 4S — has not yet evolved. And
eavesdroppers are becoming annoyed.
In part, that is because conversations with machin
es have a robotic, unsettling quality. Then there
is the matter of punctuation. If you want it, you
have to say it.
“How is he doing question mark how are you doing q
uestion mark,” Jeremy Littau of Bethlehem, Pa., fo
und himself telling his new iPhone recently as he
walked down the street, dictating a text message t
o his wife, who was home with their newborn. The m
achine spoke to him in Siri’s synthesized female v
oice.
Passers-by gawked. “It’s not normal human behavior
to have people having a conversation with a phone

on the street,” concluded Mr. Littau, 36, an assi
stant professor of journalism and communication at
Lehigh University.
The technology behind voice-activated mobile phone
s has been around for a few years — allowing peopl
e to order their phones around like digital factot
ums, commanding them to dictate text messages, jot
down appointments on their calendars and search f
or nearby sushi restaurants. Apple, though, has ta
ken it to another level with Siri.
“Happy birthday smiley face,” was what Dani Klein
heard a man say to his phone on the Long Island Ra
il Road, using the command to insert a grinning em
oticon into a message.
“It sounded ridiculous,” said Mr. Klein, 28, who wo
rks in social media marketing.
Talking to your phone is so new that there are no
official rules yet on, say, public transportation
systems.
Cliff Cole, a spokesman for Amtrak, said the train
line’s quiet-car policy applied to any use of voi
ce with cellphones, though it explicitly bans only
“phone calls,” not banter with a virtual assistan
t. “We may have to adjust the language if it becom
es a problem,” Mr. Cole said.
Voice-activated technology in smartphones first ap
peared a few years ago when mobile phones running
Google’s Android operating system and other softwa
re began offering basic voice commands to do Web s
earches and other tasks. Apple’s Siri, introduced
this fall, is a more sophisticated iteration of th
e technology; it responds to natural-sounding phra
ses like, “What’s the weather looking like?” and “
Wake me up at 8 a.m.”
Apple gave Siri a dash of personality, too, reinfo

cing the impression that the iPhone’s users were
actually talking to someone. Ask Siri for the mean
ing of life, and it responds, “I find it odd you w
ould ask this of an inanimate object.”
Technology executives say voice technologies are h
ere to stay if only because they can help cellphon
e users be more productive.
“I don’t think the keyboard is going to go away, b
ut it’s going to be less used,” said Martin Cooper
, who developed the first portable cellular phone
while at Motorola in the 1970s.
Another irritant in listening to people talk to th
eir phones is the awareness that most everything y
ou can do with voice commands can also be done sil
ently. Billy Brooks, 43, was standing in line at t
he service department of a car dealership in Los A
ngeles recently, when a woman broke the silence of
the room by dictating a text message into her iPh
one.
“You’re unnecessarily annoying others at that poin
t by not just typing out your message,” said Mr. B
rooks, a visual effects artist in the film industr
y, adding that the woman’s behavior was “just ridi
culous and kind of sad.”
James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile C
ommunication Studies at Rutgers, said people who u
se their voices to control their phones are creati
ng an inconvenience for others — noise — rather th
an coping with an inconvenience for themselves — t
he discomfort of having to type slowly on a crampe
d cellphone keyboard. Mr. Katz compared the behavi
or with that of someone who leaves a car’s engine
running while parked, creating noise and fumes for
people surrounding them.
While Apple has tried to enable natural-sounding c
onversations with Siri, they are often anything bu

t. Nirav Tolia, an Internet entrepreneur, was ridi
ng a crowded elevator down from his office in San
Francisco recently when a man tried to use Siri to
find a new location of a cafe, Coffee Bar. The ph
one gave him listings for other coffee houses — th
e wrong ones — forcing him to repeat the search se
veral times.
“Just say ‘Starbucks,’ dude,” another passenger sa
id, pushing past the Coffee Bar-seeker when the el
evator reached the ground floor.
When talking to their cellphones, people sometimes
start sounding like machines themselves. Jimmy Wo
ng, 24, was at an after-hours diner with friends i
n Los Angeles recently when they found themselves
next to a man ordering Siri to write memos and dic
tate e-mails. They found the man’s conversation wi
th his phone “creepy,” without any of the natural
pauses and voice inflections that occur in a discu
ssion between two people.
“It was very robotic,” he said.
Yet the group could not stop eavesdropping.
People who study the behavior of cellphone users b
elieve the awkwardness of hearing people in hotels
, airports and cafes treating their phones like ad
ministrative assistants will simply fade over time.
“We’ll see an evolution of that initial irritation
with it, to a New Yorker cartoon making fun of it
, and then after a while it will largely be accept
ed by most people,” said Mr. Katz from Rutgers.
But, he predicted, “there will be a small minority
of traditionalists who yearn for the good old day
s when people just texted in public.”
~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1204
A Second Arrival for 'Once' ... By PATRICK HEALY
The stars of the film "Once" and those of the stag
e musical discuss what is similar - and what is no
t - about the two versions.
===== notyet (2 pages)
WHILE preparing for the lead role of Girl in the n
ew Off Broadway musical “Once,” Cristin Milioti ma
de a choice common among performers in screen-to-s
tage adaptations: She avoided watching the origina
l film, a 2006 indie romance from Ireland that won
an Academy Award for the song “Falling Slowly.” H
er concern was that she might slip into mimicking
Marketa Irglova, the spirited young Czech musician
who became a fan favorite as Girl in the movie.
It turns out Ms. Milioti’s decision did not sit we
ll with Glen Hansard, who played Guy in the pictur
e. (Guy, Girl — get it?) He and Ms. Irglova fell i
n love while filming “Once,” a real-life consummat
ion of longings between their characters, two lost
souls wandering around Dublin and playing guitar
(him) and piano (her). They had since broken up, b
ut the 41-year-old Mr. Hansard felt protective of
Ms. Irglova, who is 18 years his junior. He though
t any other actress playing Girl needed to watch t
he genuine article.
“I wanted Cristin to know how good Mar is in the m
ovie,” Mr. Hansard recalled. “I had a hard time at
first with someone else playing Girl, because Gir
l to me was Mar.”
Mr. Hansard didn’t blink as he revealed these feel
ings last month at a table across from Ms. Milioti
, during an interview at an East Village brasserie
. Nor was she fazed. After more than a year of wor
kshops and out-of-town tryout performances, everyo
ne involved with “Once” has become reconciled to t
he complexities of art’s imitating life in the mus
ical, which opens Tuesday at New York Theater Work
shop.

With few original musicals opening on Broadway thi
s season, the producers are considering a transfer
in the spring. Some Broadway executives are alrea
dy betting on “Once” as a contender for the Tony A
ward for best musical, seeing it as a prestige pro
ject. Ms. Milioti said she was glad that the two s
tars of the movie felt invested in the stage versi
on, even in her acting choices, “because there wou
ld have been a cold void in the project otherwise.
” She added, “We’re here because they made this be
autiful music.”
Also at the interview were Ms. Irglova and the act
or Steve Kazee, who plays Mr. Hansard’s role onsta
ge. It quickly became hard not to view the foursom
e in two distinct pairs.
On one side of the table were the Guy and the Girl
with European accents, who memorably infused thei
r vaguely written movie characters with their own
personalities. These were the Guy and Girl who spo
ke so winningly in accepting their Academy Award —
they wrote the songs for the movie that form the
score for the musical — and they were the Guy and
Girl whose breakup was painfully rendered in a fol
low-up to “Once,” the 2011 documentary “The Swell
Season.”
On the other side were the Guy and the Girl who we
re still working with a dialect coach. If their lo
oks were camera ready, this Guy and Girl also spok
e nervously about balancing their desire to take o
wnership of the characters with an awareness that
admirers of the film might buy tickets to the musi
cal expecting to see the other Guy and Girl they r
emembered.
Mr. Kazee and Ms. Milioti inevitably lack the sort
of chemistry born out of actual love, but they ha
ve worked on “Once” long enough that they evince a
n openness and respect toward each other. Mr. Kaze

e has seen the movie, and Ms. Milioti said she cou
ld vouch that it is among his top five favorite fi
lms of all time.
Mr. Kazee’s affection for the film proved unnervin
g, however, when he was offered the role of Guy, h
e said. He recalled an earlier experience playing
Lancelot in the Broadway musical “Spamalot,” which
was based on the film “Monty Python and the Holy
Grail.” John Cleese had played Lancelot in that mo
vie, but Mr. Kazee said he was determined “to do m
y own thing.”
“I did, and you could hear crickets in the audienc
e every night, I think because people expected me
to be word-perfect Monty Python,” Mr. Kazee said.
“You have to balance being yourself and paying som
e tribute to the original. Still, when we started
working on this musical, I was scared I’d muck it
up. I didn’t want to be the guy who was responsibl
e for doing the first bad thing to ‘Once.’ ”
The movie, which was shot in 17 days on a $150,000
budget, was rejected by several film festivals un
til a scout for the Sundance Film Festival picked
it up after a screening in Galway. “Once” emerged
as an unexpected audience favorite at Sundance and
was bought for $500,000 by Fox Searchlight Pictur
es; the movie went on to gross more than $20 million.
The musical adaptation follows the plot of the fil
m and its frustrated romance (when they meet, both
Guy and Girl have other love interests), but the
stage version fleshes out several characters and s
ubplots that were barely featured in the movie. Su
ch adaptations as “Shrek the Musical” and “Catch M
e if You Can” have struggled on Broadway in recent
years, especially when they have hewed too closel
y to the films.
Mr. Kazee and Ms. Milioti said trying to recreate
the loose, casual feel of the film scenes would be

particular folly, and their counterparts seconded
them. Ms. Irglova said most of those scenes had b
een either improvised or shot with little rehearsa
l, and that she and Mr. Hansard — neither of whom
had acting training — basically riffed on their ow
n personalities.
“Girl was a kind of woman I would aspire to be som
eday, because she had great honesty and integrity,
which are important to me,” Ms. Irglova said. “If
part of the character isn’t in you, I don’t think
it’s believable.”
Ms. Milioti took a somewhat different point of view
.
“I like acting because you have so many things you
can do in performance to hide behind, when you’re
nervous during a moment onstage,” said Ms. Miliot
i, who has appeared in dramatic roles at New York
Theater Workshop in “The Little Foxes” and “The He
art Is a Lonely Hunter.” “I often paint my charact
ers in broad colors, big expressive moments, where
as in reality I’m pretty direct and unsentimental.”
Those two adjectives, as it happens, are good desc
riptions of Ms. Irglova’s performance in the film.
During one scene, in both the movie and the music
al, the two main characters sit in his bedroom and
Guy suddenly asks Girl to spend the night. It was
one of the hardest scenes for Mr. Hansard, he rec
alled, but relatively easy for Ms. Irglova.
“I felt the proposition came out of nowhere,” Mr.
Hansard said, “but Mar was grand. She just sat on
the bed in that scene and held my gaze and looked
like someone you could say anything to. No pretens
e.”
Mr. Kazee said he and Ms. Milioti were performing
the scene in a similar way, but not because they w
anted to ape the film.

“It’s a delicate, quiet story — both the movie and
the musical — and you risk disrupting that if you
overplay the emotion,” he said. “Cristin is a nat
ural at that. She’s got this quiet drive to her, a
n intense power in a tiny package,” he added, refe
rring to the actress’s relatively small frame.
Transforming the intimate atmospherics of the film
to a theater — especially a large, multilevel one
if the show moves to Broadway — is a concern for
all four performers.
“I thought a live musical would ruin what was spec
ial about ‘Once,’ ” Mr. Hansard said. “So I went t
o see the show ‘In the Heights,’ to try to feel be
tter, and I loved the energy, but I still thought
that musicals were bigger and louder and more perf
ormance driven than two reserved people just talki
ng and singing to each other.”
Speaking for Ms. Irglova, as he did with her seemi
ng assent a few times in the interview, he added:
“Mar is not a nostalgist. She just moves forward,
so I thought she’d be more O.K. with the show.”
“Yeah,” said Ms. Irglova, who has gone on to marry
a studio engineer. “As long as there wasn’t anybo
dy saying I want to re-edit our movie, I was O.K.
But still, you want to make sure the story works o
nstage.”
Mr. Kazee too said he had worried about what would
happen to Guy, who first connects with Girl by of
fering to fix her vacuum cleaner. “I imagined a da
ncing chorus of vacuum cleaners and other big Broa
dway showy stuff,” he said. But then he learned th
at the director was John Tiffany, who blended emot
ional intensity and steadfast friendships in the I
raq war play “Black Watch,” and that the book writ
er was the Irish playwright Enda Walsh, known for
lyrical prose in plays like “Penelope.”

A brief tryout run at the American Repertory Theat
er in Massachusetts last spring, however, allayed
Mr. Hansard’s qualms. He recalled watching Ms. Mil
ioti’s Girl telling Mr. Kazee’s Guy “to shape up,
to live life, and everything would be all right” —
moments that sent frissons through him.
“The essence of the characters was still there,” Mr
. Hansard said.
Backstage afterward, Mr. Kazee recalled, he anxiou
sly awaited Mr. Hansard’s review. “When Glen arriv
ed, I stuck out my hand, and he just put his arms
around me and gave me a big hug,” Mr. Kazee said.
“He offered to tell me anything I wanted, anything
about what he was thinking when he and Marketa wr
ote the songs.
“And who wouldn’t want that? Looking at the Mona L
isa is great, but wouldn’t it be better if you cou
ld actually talk to da Vinci while looking at it?”
“That’s very generous,” Mr. Hansard said grandly, d
rawing laughter.
“But it’s true,” Mr. Kazee said. “Glen and Mar wer
e at rehearsal the other day. We were singing ‘Fal
ling Slowly’ in this tiny little room, and they we
re there watching us, and it was the first time th
at everything felt truly right.”
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1206: SCIENCE TIMES
Creating Artificial Intelligence Based on the Real
Thing ... By STEVE LOHR
Facing the physical limits of conventional design,
researchers work to design a computing architectu
re that more closely resembles that of the brain.
===== notyet
Ever since the early days of modern computing in t

he 1940s, the biological metaphor has been irresis
tible. The first computers — room-size behemoths —
were referred to as “giant brains” or “electronic
brains,” in headlines and everyday speech. As com
puters improved and became capable of some tasks f
amiliar to humans, like playing chess, the term us
ed was “artificial intelligence.” DNA, it is said,
is the original software.
For the most part, the biological metaphor has lon
g been just that — a simplifying analogy rather th
an a blueprint for how to do computing. Engineerin
g, not biology, guided the pursuit of artificial i
ntelligence. As Frederick Jelinek, a pioneer in sp
eech recognition, put it, “airplanes don’t flap th
eir wings.”
Yet the principles of biology are gaining ground a
s a tool in computing. The shift in thinking resul
ts from advances in neuroscience and computer scie
nce, and from the prod of necessity.
The physical limits of conventional computer desig
ns are within sight — not today or tomorrow, but s
oon enough. Nanoscale circuits cannot shrink much
further. Today’s chips are power hogs, running hot
, which curbs how much of a chip’s circuitry can b
e used. These limits loom as demand is acceleratin
g for computing capacity to make sense of a surge
of new digital data from sensors, online commerce,
social networks, video streams and corporate and
government databases.
To meet the challenge, without gobbling the world’
s energy supply, a different approach will be need
ed. And biology, scientists say, promises to contr
ibute more than metaphors. “Every time we look at
this, biology provides a clue as to how we should
pursue the frontiers of computing,” said John E. K
elly, the director of research at I.B.M.
Dr. Kelly points to Watson, the question-answering

computer that can play “Jeopardy!” and beat two h
uman champions earlier this year. I.B.M.’s clever
machine consumes 85,000 watts of electricity, whil
e the human brain runs on just 20 watts. “Evolutio
n figured this out,” Dr. Kelly said.
Several biologically inspired paths are being expl
ored by computer scientists in universities and co
rporate laboratories worldwide. But researchers fr
om I.B.M. and four universities — Cornell, Columbi
a, the University of Wisconsin, and the University
of California, Merced — are engaged in a project
that seems particularly intriguing.
The project, a collaboration of computer scientist
s and neuroscientists begun three years ago, has b
een encouraging enough that in August it won a $21
million round of government financing from the De
fense Advanced Research Projects Agency, bringing
the total to $41 million in three rounds. In recen
t months, the team has developed prototype “neuros
ynaptic” microprocessors, or chips that operate mo
re like neurons and synapses than like conventiona
l semiconductors.
But since 2008, the project itself has evolved, be
coming more focused, if not scaled back. Its exper
ience suggests what designs, concepts and techniqu
es might be usefully borrowed from biology to push
the boundaries of computing, and what cannot be a
pplied, or even understood.
At the outset, Dharmendra S. Modha, the I.B.M. com
puter scientist leading the project, described the
research grandly as “the quest to engineer the mi
nd by reverse-engineering the brain.” The project
embarked on supercomputer simulations intended to
equal the complexity of animal brains — a cat and
then a monkey. In science blogs and online forums,
some neuroscientists sharply criticized I.B.M. fo
r what they regarded as exaggerated claims of what
the project could achieve.

These days at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center i
n San Jose, Calif., there is not a lot of talk of
reverse-engineering the brain. Wide-ranging ambiti
ons that narrow over time, Dr. Modha explained, ar
e part of research and discovery, even if his earl
ier rhetoric was inflated or misunderstood.
“Deciding what not to do is just as important as d
eciding what to do,” Dr. Modha said. “We’re not tr
ying to replicate the brain. That’s impossible. We
don’t know how the brain works, really.”
The discussion and debate across disciplines has h
elped steer the research, as the team pursues the
goals set out by Darpa, the Pentagon’s research ag
ency. The technology produced, according to the gu
idelines, should have the characteristics of being
self-organizing, able to “learn” instead of merel
y responding to conventional programming commands,
and consuming very little power.
“We have this fantastic network of specialists who
talk to each other,” said Giulio Tononi, a psychi
atrist and neuroscientist at the University of Wis
consin. “It focuses our thinking as neuroscientist
s and guides the thinking of the computer scientis
ts.”
In early 2010, Dr. Modha made a decision that put
the project on its current path. While away from t
he lab for a few weeks, because of a Hawaiian vaca
tion and a bout of flu, he decided to streamline t
he work of the far-flung researchers. The biologic
ally inspired chip under development would come fi
rst, Dr. Modha said. That meant a lot of experimen
tal software already written was scrapped. But, he
said, “chip-first as an organizing principle gave
us a coherent plan.”
In designing chips that bear some structural resem
blance to the brain, so-called neuromorphic chips,

neuroscience was a guiding principle as well. Bra
ins are low-power, nimble computing mechanisms — r
eal-world proof that it is possible.
A brain does its computing with a design drastical
ly different from today’s computers. Its processor
s — neurons — are, in computing terms, massively d
istributed; there are billions in a human brain. T
hese neuron processors are wrapped in its data mem
ory devices — synapses — so that the brain’s paths
of communication are extremely efficient and dive
rse, through the neuron’s axons, which conduct ele
ctrical impulses.
A machine that adopts that approach, Dr. Modha sai
d, would represent “a crucial shift away from von
Neumann computing.” He was referring to a design w
ith processor and memory physically separated and
connected by a narrow communications channel, or b
us, and operating according to step-by-step sequen
tial methods — the von Neumann architecture used i
n current computers, named after the mathematician
John von Neumann.
The concept of neuromorphic electronic systems is
more than two decades old; Carver Mead, a renowned
computer scientist, described such devices in an
engineering journal article in 1990. Earlier biolo
gically inspired devices, scientists say, were mos
tly analog, single-purpose sensors that mimicked o
ne function, like an electronic equivalent of a re
tina for sensing image data.
But the I.B.M. and university researchers are purs
uing a more versatile digital technology. “It seem
s that we can build a computing architecture that
is quite general-purpose and could be used for a l
arge class of applications,” said Rajit Manohar, a
professor of electrical and computer engineering
at Cornell University.
What might such applications be, 5 or 10 years fro

m now, if the technology proves successful? They w
ould be the sorts of tasks that humans find effort
less and that computers struggle with — the patter
n recognition of seeing and identifying someone, w
alking down a crowded sidewalk without running int
o people, learning from experience. Specifically,
the scientists say, the applications might include
robots that can navigate a battlefield environmen
t and be trained; low-power prosthetic devices tha
t would allow blind people to see; and computerize
d health-care monitors that watch over people in n
ursing homes and send alerts to human workers if a
resident’s behavior suggests illness.
It is an appealing vision, but there are formidabl
e obstacles. The prototype chip has 256 neuron-lik
e nodes, surrounded by more than 262,000 synaptic
memory modules. That is impressive, until one cons
iders that the human brain is estimated to house u
p to 100 billion neurons. In the Almaden research
lab, a computer running the chip has learned to pl
ay the primitive video game Pong, correctly moving
an on-screen paddle to hit a bouncing cursor. It
can also recognize numbers 1 through 10 written by
a person on a digital pad — most of the time. But
the project still has a long way to go.
It is still questionable whether the scientists ca
n successfully assemble large clusters of neuromor
phic chips. And though the intention is for the ma
chines to evolve more from learning than from bein
g programmed, the software that performs that magi
c for any kind of complex task has yet to be writt
en.
The project’s Pentagon sponsor is encouraged. “I’m
surprised that we’re so far along, and I don’t se
e any fundamental reason why it can’t be done,” sa
id Todd Hylton, a program manager.
If it succeeds, the project would seem to make pea
ce with the “airplanes don’t flap their wings” cri

tique. “Yes, they are different, but bird wings an
d plane wings both depend on the same aerodynamic
principles to get lift,” said Christopher T. Kello
, director of the Cognitive Mechanics Lab at the U
niversity of California, Merced. “It’s the same wi
th this project. You can use essential design elem
ents from biology.”
~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1207
Japan Split on Hope for Vast Radiation Cleanup ...
By MARTIN FACKLER
Japan hopes the cleanup near the tsunami-ravaged F
ukushima Daiichi nuclear plant will allow the disp
laced to return home.
===== notyet (2 pages)
FUTABA, Japan — Futaba is a modern-day ghost town
— not a boomtown gone bust, not even entirely a vi
ctim of the devastating earthquake and tsunami tha
t leveled other parts of Japan’s northeast coast.
Its traditional wooden homes have begun to sag and
collapse since they were abandoned in March by re
sidents fleeing the nuclear plant on the edge of t
own that began spiraling toward disaster. Roofs po
ssibly damaged by the earth’s shaking have let rai
n seep in, starting the rot that is eating at the
houses from the inside.
The roadway arch at the entrance to the empty town
almost seems a taunt. It reads:
“Nuclear energy: a correct understanding brings a p
rosperous lifestyle.”
Those who fled Futaba are among the nearly 90,000
people evacuated from a 12-mile zone around the Fu
kushima Daiichi plant and another area to the nort
hwest contaminated when a plume from the plant sca
ttered radioactive cesium and iodine.

Now, Japan is drawing up plans for a cleanup that
is both monumental and unprecedented, in the hopes
that those displaced can go home.
The debate over whether to repopulate the area, if
trial cleanups prove effective, has become a prox
y for a larger battle over the future of Japan. Su
pporters see rehabilitating the area as a chance t
o showcase the country’s formidable determination
and superior technical skills — proof that Japan i
s still a great power.
For them, the cleanup is a perfect metaphor for Jap
an’s rebirth.
Critics counter that the effort to clean Fukushima
Prefecture could end up as perhaps the biggest of
Japan’s white-elephant public works projects — an
d yet another example of post-disaster Japan rever
ting to the wasteful ways that have crippled econo
mic growth for two decades.
So far, the government is following a pattern set
since the nuclear accident, dismissing dangers, of
ten prematurely, and laboring to minimize the scop
e of the catastrophe. Already, the trial cleanups
have stalled: the government failed to anticipate
communities’ reluctance to store tons of soil to b
e scraped from contaminated yards and fields.
And a radiation specialist who tested the results
of an extensive local cleanup in a nearby city fou
nd that exposure levels remained above internation
al safety standards for long-term habitation.
Even a vocal supporter of repatriation suggests th
at the government has not yet leveled with its peo
ple about the seriousness of their predicament.
“I believe it is possible to save Fukushima,” said
the supporter, Tatsuhiko Kodama, director of the
Radioisotope Center at the University of Tokyo. “B

ut many evacuated residents must accept that it wo
n’t happen in their lifetimes.”
To judge the huge scale of what Japan is contempla
ting, consider that experts say residents can retu
rn home safely only after thousands of buildings a
re scrubbed of radioactive particles and much of t
he topsoil from an area the size of Connecticut is
replaced.
Even forested mountains will probably need to be d
econtaminated, which might necessitate clear-cutti
ng and literally scraping them clean.
The Soviet Union did not attempt such a cleanup af
ter the Chernobyl accident of 1986, the only nucle
ar disaster larger than that at Fukushima Daiichi.
The government instead relocated about 300,000 pe
ople, abandoning vast tracts of farmland.
Many Japanese officials believe that they do not h
ave that luxury; the evacuation zone covers more t
han 3 percent of the landmass of this densely popu
lated nation.
“We are different from Chernobyl,” said Toshitsuna
Watanabe, 64, the mayor of Okuma, one of the town
s that was evacuated. “We are determined to go bac
k. Japan has the will and the technology to do thi
s.”
Such resolve reflects, in part, a deep attachment
to home for rural Japanese like Mr. Watanabe, whos
e family has lived in Okuma for 19 generations. Th
eir heartfelt appeals to go back have won wide sym
pathy across Japan, making it hard for people to o
ppose their wishes.
But quiet resistance has begun to grow, both among
those who were displaced and those who fear the c
ountry will need to sacrifice too much without gua
rantees that a multibillion-dollar cleanup will pr

ovide enough protection.
Soothing pronouncements by local governments and a
cademics about the eventual ability to live safely
near the ruined plant can seem to be based on lit
tle more than hope.
No one knows how much exposure to low doses of rad
iation causes a significant risk of premature deat
h. That means Japanese living in contaminated area
s are likely to become the subjects of future stud
ies — the second time in seven decades that Japane
se have become a test case for the effects of radi
ation exposure, after the bombings of Hiroshima an
d Nagasaki.
The national government has declared itself respon
sible for cleaning up only the towns in the evacua
tion zone; local governments have already begun cl
eaning cities and towns outside that area.
Inside the 12-mile ring, which includes Futaba, th
e Environmental Ministry has pledged to reduce rad
iation levels by half within two years — a relativ
ely easy goal because short-lived isotopes will de
teriorate. The bigger question is how long it will
take to reach the ultimate goal of bringing level
s down to about 1 millisievert per year, the annua
l limit for the general public from artificial sou
rces of radiation that is recommended by the Inter
national Commission on Radiological Protection. Th
at is a much more daunting task given that it will
require removing cesium 137, an isotope that will
remain radioactive for decades.
Trial cleanups have been delayed for months by the
search for a storage site for enough contaminated
dirt to fill 33 domed football stadiums. Even eva
cuated communities have refused to accept it.
And Tomoya Yamauchi, the radiation expert from Kob
e University who performed tests in Fukushima City

after extensive remediation efforts, found that r
adiation levels inside homes had dropped by only a
bout 25 percent. That left parts of the city with
levels of radiation four times higher than the rec
ommended maximum exposure.
“We can only conclude that these efforts have so fa
r been a failure,” he said.
Minamisoma, a small city whose center sits about 1
5 miles from the nuclear plant, is a good place to
get a sense of the likely limitations of decontam
ination efforts.
The city has cleaned dozens of schools, parks and
sports facilities in hopes of enticing back the 30
,000 of its 70,000 residents who have yet to retur
n since the accident. On a recent morning, a small
army of bulldozers and dump trucks were resurfaci
ng a high school soccer field and baseball diamond
with a layer of reddish brown dirt. Workers burie
d the old topsoil in a deep hole in a corner of th
e soccer field. The crew’s overseer, Masahiro Saku
ra, said readings at the field had dropped substan
tially, but he remains anxious because many parts
of the city were not expected to be decontaminated
for at least two years.
These days, he lets his three young daughters outd
oors only to go to school and play in a resurfaced
park. “Is it realistic to live like this?” he ask
ed.
The challenges are sure to be more intense inside
the 12-mile zone, where radiation levels in some p
laces have reached nearly 510 millisieverts a year
, 25 times above the cutoff for evacuation.
Already, the proposed repatriation has opened rift
s among those who have been displaced. The 11,500
displaced residents of Okuma — many of whom now li
ve in rows of prefabricated homes 60 miles inland

— are enduring just such a divide.
The mayor, Mr. Watanabe, has directed the town to
draw up its own plan to return to its original loc
ation within three to five years by building a new
town on farmland in Okuma’s less contaminated wes
tern edge.
Although Mr. Watanabe won a recent election, his c
hallenger found significant support among resident
s with small children for his plan to relocate to
a different part of Japan. Mitsue Ikeda, one suppo
rter, said she would never go home, especially aft
er a medical exam showed that her 8-year-old son,
Yuma, had ingested cesium.
“It’s too dangerous,” Ms. Ikeda, 47, said. “How ar
e we supposed to live, by wearing face masks all t
he time?”
She, like many other evacuees, berated the governm
ent, saying it was fixated on cleaning up to avoid
paying compensation.
Many older residents, by contrast, said they should
be allowed to return.
“Smoking cigarettes is more dangerous than radiati
on,” said Eiichi Tsukamoto, 70, who worked at the
Daiichi plant for 40 years as a repairman. “We can
make Okuma a model to the world of how to restore
a community after a nuclear accident.”
But even Mr. Kodama, the radiation expert who supp
orts a government cleanup, said such a victory wou
ld be hollow, and short-lived if young people did
not return. He suggested that the government start
rebuilding communities by rebuilding trust eroded
over months of official evasion.
“Saving Fukushima requires not just money and effo
rt, but also faith,” he said. “There is no point i

f only older people go back.”
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1207: DINING & WINE - SPIRITS OF THE TIMES
From Scotland, Fog and Smoke and Mystery ... By ERI
C ASIMOV
The panel tasted 2o single malts from Islay, smoky
whiskies that demand a sense of wonder.
===== notyet
TASTING whiskies can be a clinical, prosaic task,
nosing and assessing, jotting notes, reconsidering
, lips compressed in concentration, brow furrowed.
Yet, as the spirits panel tasted 20 single malts
from Islay, we reminded ourselves to step back a m
oment, to contemplate with no small amount of awe
the magic of what was in the glass. Islay demands
a sense of wonder.
I’ve never visited Islay, that island off Scotland
’s western coast with the evocative pronunciation
EYE-lah. But sipping a good Islay single malt, wit
h its astounding range of complex expressions, tra
nsports you to an Islay that seems as mythical as
it is real.
It’s a world unscarred by modernity’s claws, an is
land of fog, smoke, brine and mystery, where ancie
nt distilleries, after years of throbbing producti
on, go dark when demand wanes. There they sit, aba
ndoned on the green and craggy landscape, their di
stinctive pagoda roofs intact, yet silent like pha
ntom freighters.
Some remain that way, their sites revered like anc
ient stone circles by whisky lovers. For others co
mes reincarnation when market conditions change ag
ain. The ghostly cobwebs are cleared away, the pot
stills rejuvenated, and once more they will yield
the precious distilled vapors of malted barley, p
eat, yeast, crystalline water and air.

If it seems odd to consider air an ingredient, you
have to stick your nose in a glass of Islay singl
e malt. Along with all the other components, a sav
ory whiff of salty sea breeze is unmistakable.
The sense of mystery in the terrain is palpable as
well. “As you explore you can see how it compress
es its secrets into tight parcels: dune-fringed be
aches, remote hills, cliffs, caves, peat bogs, sta
nding stones, lost parliaments, abandoned township
s and Celtic memories,” Michael Jackson wrote in “
Whiskey: The Definitive World Guide” (DK, 2005). “
It is a tapestry of geographical and historical tr
easures through which whiskey runs like a golden t
hread.”
It’s this air of mystery, along with a reputation
for the smokiest, most robust and challenging malt
s, that seems to set Islay apart from Scotland’s o
ther whisky regions. Most experts, however, agree
that whiskies can no longer be classified geograph
ically. Production methods have become so homogeni
zed that they no longer reflect local eccentriciti
es as much as they do a distiller’s predilections.
The smokiness comes from the tradition of using pe
at — bog soil made of decomposed vegetable matter
that was harvested to fuel kilns used for drying b
arley. Assertive peating has long been a trait of
famous Islay malts, like Laphroaig, Lagavulin and
Ardbeg, but it is not exclusive to Islay. And just
as much a part of the Islay tradition are gentler
malts like Bunnahabhain (BUN-na-hah-ven) and Brui
chladdich (brook-LAD-dy), which are lighter in bod
y and more floral than peaty. Another tradition, s
hared throughout Scotland, seems to be names that
are impossible to sound out phonetically.
Our 20 Islay single malts included bottles from ea
ch of the eight working Islay distilleries. Indeed
, two of the eight, Bruichladdich and Ardbeg, were
dormant for years, only to be reawakened to disti

ll again. The revival of another distillery, Port
Charlotte, is planned.
With 20 whiskies, we tried to mix in widely availa
ble, well-known bottles with some of each distille
ry’s more esoteric malts. We also included one mys
tery malt, a bottle packaged by a whisky merchant
who does not reveal the actual distiller.
For the tasting Florence Fabricant and I were join
ed by Flavien Desoblin, an owner of the Brandy Lib
rary in TriBeCa, which has more than 250 single ma
lts on its list, including 50 from Islay. Also wit
h us was Pete Wells, who next month takes over as
the restaurant critic.
The gathering of 20 samples from Islay made it as
clear as a Scottish spring that whatever traits th
e whiskies had in common were overshadowed by thei
r differences.
“To pull utterly different characters out of essen
tially the same material is stunning,” Pete said.
“It’s a wonderful demonstration of range and diver
sity.”
The tasting also testified to the high level of qu
ality in Islay malts. Seven of the eight distiller
ies were represented among our top 10, and the eig
hth did not miss the cut by much. Islay malts are
not cheap. With a cap at $100, our 20 bottles rang
ed from $36 to $97, with 16 of them $50 or over.
Our No. 1 bottle was one of the easiest Islay malt
s to find, the Laphroaig 10-Year-Old. It was one o
f the smokiest of the group yet one of the subtles
t and most complex as well, with all of the rich m
edicinal, waxy, savory and saline flavors that peo
ple associate with Islay, but with an underlying s
weetness, too. At $45, it was also our best value.
By contrast, the Laphroaig 18-Year-Old, our No. 5

ottle, was less bracing and mellower. The smokine
ss was more of an undercurrent, amplifying its flo
ral, honey and meadowlike qualities.
We found similar distinctions in comparing two oth
er pairs of bottles that made our list. Our No. 2
bottle, the Ardbeg Corryvreckan, was huge and robu
st, with layers of complex flavors. Smokiness was
only a small part of the majestic picture. Its 10year-old
sibling, the No. 4 bottle, was likewise c
omplex, but emphasized a briny, smoky, almost ocea
nic quality.
Our No. 3 bottle, the Lagavulin Distillers Edition
1993, showed the warm, burnished complexity of ag
e with a spicy, raisiny fruitcake quality that per
haps attests to time spent in barrels previously u
sed for sweet sherry. The basic Lagavulin 16 Years
, our No. 10, though not appreciably younger, was
much less complex, mildly smoky with both savory a
nd sweet flavors. I must say that, as a fan of Lag
avulin 16 Years, which I remember as so robust it
demanded a bit of water for sipping, this example
seemed a bit meek.
The bottles rounding out our list show the range o
f Islay. Bruichladdich, No. 7, was the gentlest, m
ost delicate malt, with sweet notes of butterscotc
h. Caol Ila, No. 9, was huge and oily in texture,
smoky yet fresh, too. In the middle was Bowmore, N
o. 8, rich, balanced, moderate, delicious nonethel
ess.
That leaves the new guy, Kilchoman, which began pr
oduction in 2005. Its Spring 2011 Release was one
of the youngest in our tasting, if you do the arit
hmetic, yet it was superb, fresh and complex with
plenty of smoke.
Bunnahabhain was the only Islay distillery not on
our top-10 list, and although Florence and Flavien
loved the 18-year-old (the $97 bottle), it barely

missed the cut. Other bottles worth recommending
that did not overcome the stiff competition includ
e Bowmore’s 15-Years-Old Darkest, which Flavien an
d Pete especially liked, and the Laphroaig Triple
Wood, which we all liked.
And the mystery malt? It was simply called Smokehe
ad, a whisky that, judging by its busy graphics an
d aggressive packaging, is being marketed to young
single-malt newcomers. It was powerful and smoky,
and Pete and I liked it more than Flavien and Flo
rence did.
“It’s for peat freaks,” Flavien said.
Guilty. But I will allow that, while I liked it, I
would not classify Smokehead among the more conte
mplative malts in the bunch. No, for woolgathering
and armchair voyaging, preferably in front of a f
ire, I would be most happy with any of our favorit
es. I prefer them straight, with maybe a spoonful
of water and an equal amount of wonder. As the son
g goes, thinking is the best way to travel.
Tasting Report
BEST VALUE
Laphroaig Islay, $45, *** ?
10 Years, 43%
Heavily smoked, richly medicinal, savory, subtle,
complex and deep. (Laphroaig Import, Deerfield, Il
l.)
Ardbeg Islay, $80, *** ?
Corryvreckan, 57.1%
Lightly smoky and sweet with rich citrus, soy and s
aline flavors. (Moet Hennessy, New York)
Lagavulin Islay, $90, *** ?
Distillers Edition 1993 Double Matured, 43%
Complex and mellow with flavors of smoke, wax, citr
us and fruitcake. (Diageo, Norwalk, Conn.)

Ardbeg Islay, $50, *** ?
10 Years, 46%
Multidimensional and oceanic with smoky, briny, med
icinal flavors. (Moet Hennessy)
Laphroaig Islay, $75, ***
18 Years, 48%
Like a meadow, with aromas of flowers, honey, spic
es and a light touch of smoke and citrus. (Laphroa
ig Import)
Kilchoman Islay, $65, ***
Spring 2011 Release, 46%
Fresh yet complicated with aromas of smoke, butter
cream and citrus. (Impex Beverages, Burlingame, C
alif.)
Bruichladdich Islay, $52, ***
12 Years Second Edition, 46%
Gentle and mild, with aromas and flavors of citrus
, honey, flowers and butterscotch. (Winebow, New Y
ork)
Bowmore Islay, $45, ***
12 Years, 40%
Rich and well balanced with aromas of flowers, for
est and beeswax, and an underlying smokiness. (Sky
y Spirits, San Francisco)
Caol Ila Islay, $57, ** ?
12 Years, 43%
Big, broad and almost oily in texture, with ample
citrus and smokiness yet a freshness as well. (Dia
geo, Norwalk, Conn.)
Lagavulin Islay, $57, ** ?
16 Years, 43%
Pleasant and mildly smoky, with savory flavors but
also a creamy sweetness. (Diageo, Norwalk, Conn.)
~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1207: DINING & WINE
With Rude Names, Wine Stops Minding Its Manners ...
By WILLIAM GRIMES
A growing army of budget-priced wines with names l
ike Bitch and Fat Bastard have shoved their way in
to stores.
===== notyet
IT’S peppery and full of fight. The tannins have g
rip. The nose takes no prisoners. This shiraz is a
bitch.
It says so on the label. Royal Bitch is the name o
f the wine, one of a teeming sisterhood of caberne
ts and chardonnays from a variety of producers wit
h labels like Sassy Bitch, Jealous Bitch, Tasty Bi
tch and Sweet Bitch. They’re reinforcements for a
growing army of rude, budget-priced wines that hav
e shoved their way into wine stores and supermarke
ts in the past few years — most recently Happy Bit
ch, a Hudson Valley rose that made its debut last
month.
The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, an a
gency of the Treasury Department, approves about 1
20,000 applications for wine labels every year. Mo
st names are traditional, often genteel, especiall
y at the lower price points. It’s natural for a ch
ardonnay or cabernet priced below $15 or even $10
to buff the image a bit. Woodbridge, Coastal Estat
es and Turning Leaf could be suburban subdivisions.
Then there are the others. Wines like the Ball Bus
ter, a beefy shiraz-cabernet-merlot blend from the
Barossa Valley in Australia. Or BigAss Red, from
Milano Family Winery in California. Or Stench, an
Australian sparkler from R Winery, the company tha
t collaborated with the American importer Dan Phil
ips of the Grateful Palate in 2004 to get the post
feminist ball rolling with a grenache named, simpl
y, Bitch.
Like a slap across the face, Bitch grabbed the att

ention of a certain type of consumer, primarily yo
ung women en route to a bachelorette or divorce pa
rty, or looking for a special way to say, “I love
you” on Mother’s Day.
“They can buy it and say, ‘Here, bitch, I bought y
ou a present,’ ” said John F. Umbach, the owner of
Joseph Victori Wines, which distributes Royal Bit
ch and Sweet Bitch.
Chatham Imports sensed the appeal of an irreverent
women’s drink in 2005 when one of its distributor
s developed a promotional rum cocktail called Jeal
ous Bitch and shopped it around, diffidently, to b
ars and nightclubs. The sales representatives were
a little nervous about how the name might go over
. But young women loved it, and the company develo
ped a wine to match the name.
“The thing is, if you come out with a conservative
label, it’s hard to separate yourself from the he
rd on the shelf,” Mr. Umbach said. “The competitio
n is just brutal.”
The competition is especially keen at the lower en
d of the market, where winemakers clamor for the a
ttention of consumers looking for a drinkable char
donnay or cabernet for under $20.
For years, winemakers and marketers have been fran
tically popularizing their products, shedding the
chateau image and embracing a blue-collar beer aes
thetic. Last year, the top-selling wine brand in t
he United States was Barefoot. The label shows not
a stately mansion among the vines, but the footpr
int of one of the winery’s former owners.
That irreverence reflects an evolution in the cult
ural presentation of wine that the San Francisco M
useum of Modern Art mapped in the recent exhibitio
n “How Wine Became Modern: Design and Wine 1976 to
Now.” Traditionally, wine labels were purely info

mational. “Around 1980, however — earlier in the
New World, somewhat later in Europe — labels becam
e surfaces for communication, projecting a brand i
dentity for the wine and trying to reach a target
audience,” said Henry Urbach, an architectural cur
ator who organized the exhibition with the archite
cts Diller Scofidio & Renfro.
Casual became cheeky. Now, cheeky has given way to
saucy. In 2005, Brandever Strategy, a Vancouver b
rand consultancy, was hired by Scherzinger Estates
, a sleepy winery in British Columbia, to create a
new image and name. It came up with Dirty Laundry
Vineyard — an allusion to a Chinese laundry and b
ordello that flourished nearby during the gold rus
h era.
“Your immediate reaction is, this is not a good na
me for a wine, but that’s why it is a good name,”
said Bernie Hadley-Beauregard, a principal in Bran
dever. “It has a scratchy hook to it.”
Highway workers posted a new sign along the local
wine route. Traffic into the winery increased tenf
old. “The owner called me and said, ‘We haven’t do
ne any advertising, but suddenly we’re the toast o
f the Okanagan Valley.’ ”
The newer, racier-sounding wines are unlikely to d
isplace Barefoot, but they all chase the same drea
m. On the golden horizon, they see Fat Bastard, a
line of wines from the Languedoc-Roussillon region
that was introduced in the United States in 1998.
Imported by Peter Click of Click Wine Group, the l
ine sold just over 2,000 cases at $10 a bottle in
its first year. By 2004, Fat Bastard was selling 4
25,000 cases, making it one of the most popular Fr
ench wines in the United States.
The other wines do not come close to those numbers
, but they have their little niche. Jim Knight, a

salesman and buyer at the Wine House in Los Angele
s, which stocks about 7,000 labels, says he sells
about five cases of Bitch and the Ball Buster ever
y month. “We carry them because people ask for the
m,” he said. “They’re good wines that people can g
ive with a smile on their face.”
John Gorman, the vice president of sales and marke
ting at Southern Starz, which imports the Ball Bus
ter, said, “The wine makes its way to a lot of law
yers from their clients.”
Under the rules of the federal alcohol bureau, lab
els cannot contain incorrect or misleading informa
tion, disparage a competitor’s product, or have a
statement or image that is obscene or indecent. Bu
t the agency routinely gives the go-ahead for tast
eless or risque labels, which was not always the c
ase.
“It’s actually a good place to see the cultural fa
ult lines shift,” said Robert C. Lehrman, whose co
mpany, Lehrman Beverage Law, advises clients on go
vernment regulations. “Because of a series of comm
ercial speech decisions, not many things are off l
imits anymore.”
Winemakers have some way to go before equaling the
shock value of Jersey’s Toxic Waste, a specialty
spirit. But the bitch category may yield dividends
. Take Rae-Jean Beach, a blended white wine. (The
name needs to be said aloud.) She’s got a husband,
a zinfandel. Sorry, but the name is not printable
here.
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1207: OP-ED
A Reluctant Enemy ... By IAN W. TOLL
The architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor had be
en against going to war with the United States at
all.
===== notyet

San Francisco - ON a bright Hawaiian Sunday mornin
g 70 years ago today, hundreds of Japanese warplan
es appeared suddenly over Pearl Harbor and laid wa
ste to the United States Pacific Fleet. The Americ
an people boiled over in righteous fury, and Ameri
ca plunged into World War II. The “date which will
live in infamy” was the real turning point of the
war, which had been raging for more than two year
s, and it opened an era of American internationali
sm and global security commitments that continues
to this day.
By a peculiar twist of fate, the Japanese admiral
who masterminded the attack had persistently warne
d his government not to fight the United States. H
ad his countrymen listened, the history of the 20t
h century might have turned out much differently.
Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto foresaw that the struggle wo
uld become a prolonged war of attrition that Japan
could not hope to win. For a year or so, he said,
Japan might overrun locally weak Allied forces —
but after that, its war economy would stagger and
its densely built wood-and-paper cities would suff
er ruinous air raids. Against such odds, Yamamoto
could “see little hope of success in any ordinary
strategy.” His Pearl Harbor operation, he confesse
d, was “conceived in desperation.” It would be an
all-or-nothing gambit, a throw of the dice: “We sh
ould do our best to decide the fate of the war on
the very first day.”
During the Second World War and for years afterwar
d, Americans despised Yamamoto as an archvillain,
the perpetrator of an ignoble sneak attack, a pers
onification of “Oriental treachery.” Time magazine
published his cartoon likeness on its Dec. 22, 19
41, cover — sinister, glowering, dusky yellow comp
lexion — with the headline “Japan’s Aggressor.” He
was said to have boasted that he would “dictate t
erms of peace in the White House.”

Yamamoto made no such boast — the quote was taken
out of context from a private letter in which he h
ad made precisely the opposite point. He could not
imagine an end to the war short of his dictating
terms in the White House, he wrote — and since Jap
an could not hope to conquer the United States, th
at outcome was inconceivable.
In fact, Yamamoto was one of the most colorful, ch
arismatic and broad-minded naval officers of his g
eneration. He had graduated from the Japanese Nava
l Academy in 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War.
As a 21-year-old ensign, he fought in one of the m
ost famous sea battles in history — the Battle of
Tsushima, in 1905, a lopsided Japanese victory tha
t shocked the world and forced Czar Nicholas II to
sue for peace. Yamamoto was wounded in the action
and wore the scars to prove it — his lower midsec
tion was badly pockmarked by shrapnel, and he lost
two fingers on his left hand.
In the course of his naval career, he traveled wid
ely through the United States and Europe, learning
enough English — mostly during a two-year stint a
t Harvard soon after World War I — to read books a
nd newspapers and carry on halting conversations.
He read several biographies of Lincoln, whom he ad
mired as a man born into poverty who rose to becom
e a “champion” of “human freedom.”
From 1926 to 1928 he served as naval attache in Wa
shington; while in America, he journeyed alone acr
oss the country, paying his way with his own meage
r salary, stretching his budget by staying in chea
p hotels and skipping meals. His travels revealed
the growing power of the American industrial machi
ne. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Det
roit and the oil fields in Texas,” he would later
remark, “knows that Japan lacks the national power
for a naval race with America.”
Yamamoto didn’t drink; for vices, he preferred wom

en and gambling. He played shogi (Japanese chess),
poker and bridge aggressively, and for high stake
s. In Tokyo, Yamamoto spent his nights among the g
eishas of the Shinbashi district, who nicknamed hi
m 80 sen. (A manicure cost one yen, equivalent to
100 sen; since he had only eight fingers he demand
ed a discount.)
When Yamamoto appeared in uniform, on the deck of
his flagship or before Emperor Hirohito, he was th
e picture of hatchet-faced solemnity. But in other
settings he was prone to sentimentality, as when
he freely wept at the death of a subordinate, or p
oured out his heart in letters to his geisha lover.
During the political turmoil of the 1930s, Yamamot
o was a leading figure in the navy’s moderate “tre
aty faction,” known for its support of unpopular d
isarmament treaties. He criticized the mindlessly
bellicose rhetoric of the ultranationalist right a
nd opposed the radicals who used revolutionary vio
lence and assassinations to achieve their ends. He
despised the Japanese Army and its leaders, who s
ubverted the power of civilian ministers and engin
eered military adventures in Manchuria and other p
arts of China.
As navy vice minister from 1936 to 1939, Yamamoto
staked his life on forestalling an alliance with N
azi Germany. Right-wing zealots condemned him as a
“running dog” of the United States and Britain an
d vowed to assassinate him. A bounty was reportedl
y placed on his head. He received letters warning
him of an impending punishment “on heaven’s behalf
,” and authorities discovered a plot to blow up a
bridge as he passed over it.
In August 1939, Yamamoto was named commander in ch
ief of the Combined Fleet, the highest seagoing co
mmand in the Japanese Navy. (As it placed him beyo
nd the reach of his enemies, the appointment proba
bly saved his life.) From his flagship, Nagato, us

ually anchored in Hiroshima Bay, Yamamoto continue
d to warn against joining with the Nazis. He remin
ded his government that Japan imported around four
-fifths of its oil and steel from areas controlled
by the Allies. To risk conflict, he wrote, was fo
olhardy, because “there is no chance of winning a
war with the United States for some time to come.”
But Japan’s confused and divided government drifte
d toward war while refusing to face the strategic
problems it posed. It signed the Tripartite Pact w
ith Germany and Italy in Berlin in September 1940.
As Yamamoto had predicted, the American governmen
t quickly restricted and finally cut off exports o
f oil and other vital materials. The sanctions bro
ught events to a head, because Japan had no domest
ic oil production to speak of, and would exhaust i
ts stockpiles in about a year.
Yamamoto realized he had lost the fight to keep Ja
pan out of war, and he fell in line with the plann
ing process. But he continued to ask critical ques
tions. Two decades of strategic planning for a war
with the United States had envisioned a clash of
battleships in the western Pacific — a decisive ba
ttle like that at Tsushima. But Yamamoto now asked
: What if the American fleet declined to play its
part? What if the Americans instead chose to bide
their time and build up their strength?
IN 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered t
he fleet to Pearl Harbor. He had intended to signa
l that the United States Navy was in striking dist
ance of Japan — but “conversely,” Yamamoto observe
d, “we’re within striking distance, too. In trying
to intimidate us, America has put itself in a vul
nerable position. If you ask me, they’re just that
bit too confident.” Therein lay the germ of his p
lan to launch a sudden carrier air attack on the H
awaiian stronghold.
Adm. Osami Nagano, chief of the Naval General Staf

f, stiffly resisted the proposed raid. His planner
s worried that it would expose the Japanese aircra
ft carriers to devastating counterstrikes. Yamamot
o countered that the American Fleet was a “dagger
pointed at Japan’s heart,” and surmised that the a
ttack might even cause the Americans to recoil in
shock and despair, “so that the morale of the U.S.
Navy and the American people goes down to such an
extent that it cannot be recovered.” At last, he
threatened to resign unless his operation was appr
oved, and Admiral Nagano capitulated: “If he has t
hat much confidence, it’s better to let Yamamoto g
o ahead.”
Yamamoto appreciated the irony: having risked his
life to prevent war with the United States, he was
now its architect. “What a strange position I fin
d myself in,” he wrote a friend, “having been assi
gned the mission diametrically opposed to my own p
ersonal opinion, with no choice but to push full s
peed in pursuance of that mission. Alas, is that f
ate?”
And yet even in the final weeks of peace, Yamamoto
continued to urge that the wiser course was not t
o fight the United States at all. “We must not sta
rt a war with so little a chance of success,” he t
old Admiral Nagano. He recommended abrogating the
Tripartite Pact and pulling Japanese troops out of
China. Finally, he hoped that the emperor would i
ntervene with a “sacred decision” against war. But
the emperor remained silent.
On Dec. 7, 1941, all eight battleships of the Paci
fic Fleet were knocked out of action in the first
half hour of the conflict. More than 180 American
planes were destroyed, mostly on the ground, repre
senting about two-thirds of the total American mil
itary aircraft in the Pacific theater. The Japanes
e carriers escaped with the loss of just 29 planes.
The Japanese people exulted, and Yamamoto was lift

ed in their eyes to the status of a demigod. Now h
e could dictate his wishes to the Tokyo admirals,
and would continue to do so until his death in Apr
il 1943, when American fighters shot down his airc
raft in the South Pacific.
And yet, Pearl Harbor aside, Yamamoto was not a gr
eat admiral. His strategic blunders were numerous
and egregious, and were criticized even by his own
subordinate officers.
Indeed, from a strategic point of view, Pearl Harb
or was one of the most spectacular miscalculations
in history. It aroused the American people to wag
e total, unrelenting war until Japan was conquered
. Yamamoto was also directly responsible for Japan
’s cataclysmic defeat at the Battle of Midway, and
for the costly failure of his four-month campaign
to recapture the island of Guadalcanal.
But perhaps the most important part of Yamamoto’s
legacy was not his naval career at all, but the pa
rt he played in the boisterous politics of prewar
Japan. He was one of the few Japanese leaders of h
is generation who found the moral courage to tell
the truth — that waging war against the United Sta
tes would invite a national catastrophe. As Japan
lay in ashes after 1945, his countrymen would reme
mber his determined exertions to stop the slide to
ward war. In a sense, Isoroku Yamamoto was vindica
ted by Japan’s defeat.
Ian W. Toll is the author of “Pacific Crucible: War
at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942.”
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1208: OPINION: OPINIONATOR - THE STONE
Intellectuals and Politics ... By GARY GUTTING
Good politicians don't need to be intellectuals, b
ut they should at least have intellectual lives.
===== notyet

The Stone is featuring occasional posts by Gary Gu
tting, a professor of philosophy at the University
of Notre Dame, that apply critical thinking to in
formation and events that have appeared in the new
s.
The rise of Newt Gingrich, Ph.D.— along with the a
pparent anti-intellectualism of many of the other
Republican candidates — has once again raised the
question of the role of intellectuals in American
politics.
In writing about intellectuals, my temptation is t
o begin by echoing Marianne Moore on poetry: I, to
o, dislike them. But that would be a lie: all els
e equal, I really like intellectuals. Besides, I’
m an intellectual myself, and their self-deprecati
on is one thing I really do dislike about many int
ellectuals.
What is an intellectual? In general, someone seri
ously devoted to what used to be called the “life
of the mind”: thinking pursued not instrumentally,
for the sake of practical goals, but simply for t
he sake of knowing and understanding. Nowadays, u
niversities are the most congenial spots for intel
lectuals, although even there corporatism and care
erism are increasing threats.
Intellectuals tell us things we need to know: how
nature and society work, what happened in our past
, how to analyze concepts, how to appreciate art a
nd literature. They also keep us in conversation
with the great minds of our past. This conversat
ion may not, as some hope, tap into a source of en
during wisdom, but it at least provides a critical
standpoint for assessing the limits of our curren
t cultural assumptions.
In his “Republic,” Plato put forward the ideal of
a state ruled by intellectuals who combined compre
hensive theoretical knowledge with the practical c

apacity for applying it to concrete problems. In
reality, no one has theoretical expertise in more
than a few specialized subjects, and there is no s
trong correlation between having such knowledge an
d being able to use it to resolve complex social a
nd political problems. Even more important, our t
heoretical knowledge is often highly limited, so t
hat even the best available expert advice may be o
f little practical value. An experienced and info
rmed non-expert may well have a better sense of th
ese limits than experts strongly invested in their
disciplines. This analysis supports the traditio
nal American distrust of intellectuals: they are n
ot in general highly suited for political office.
But it does not support the anti-intellectualism t
hat tolerates or even applauds candidates who disd
ain or are incapable of serious engagement with in
tellectuals. Good politicians need not be intell
ectuals, but they should have intellectual lives.
Concretely, they should have an ability and inter
est in reading the sorts of articles that appear i
n, for example, Scientific American, The New York
Review of Books, and the science, culture and op-e
d sections of major national newspapers — as well
as the books discussed in such articles.
It’s often said that what our leaders need is comm
on sense, not fancy theories. But common-sense id
eas that work in individuals’ everyday lives are o
ften useless for dealing with complex problems of
society as a whole. For example, it’s common sens
e that government payments to the unemployed will
lead to more jobs because those receiving the paym
ents will spend the money, thereby increasing dema
nd, which will lead businesses to hire more worker
s. But it’s also common sense that if people are
paid for not working, they will have less incentiv
e to work, which will increase unemployment. The
trick is to find the amount of unemployment benefi
ts that will strike the most effective balance bet
ween stimulating demand and discouraging employmen

t. This is where our leaders need to talk to econ
omists.
Knowing how to talk to economists and other expert
s is an essential skill of good political leaders.
This in turn requires a basic understanding of h
ow experts in various fields think and what they m
ight have to offer for resolving a given problem.
Leaders need to be intelligent “consumers” of expe
rt opinions.
Our current electoral campaigns are not very good
at determining candidates’ understanding of releva
nt intellectual issues. “Pop quizzes” from interv
iewers on historical or geographical facts don’t t
ell us much: those who know the answers may still
have little grasp of fundamental policy questions,
whereas a good grasp can be consistent with a lac
k of quick factual recall. Nor does reading sophi
sticated policy speeches that others have written
or reciting pre-programmed talking points in inter
views or news conferences tell us much about a can
didate’s knowledge. Even quick-thinking responses
in debates may indicate glibness rather than unde
rstanding.
The best evidence of how capable candidates are of
fruitfully interacting with intellectuals would b
e to see them doing just this. Concretely, I make
the follow suggestion for the coming presidential
election: Gather small but diverse panels of emi
nent, politically uncommitted experts on, say, une
mployment, the history of the Middle East, and cli
mate science, and have each candidate lead an hour
-long televised discussion with each panel. The c
andidates would not be mere moderators but would b
e expected to ask questions, probe disagreements,
express their own ideas or concerns, and periodica
lly summarize the state of discussion. Such engag
ements would provide some of the best information
possible for judging candidates, while also enormo
usly improving the quality of our political discourse.

A utopian fantasy? Very likely — but imagine a ra
ce between Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich, two for
mer college professors, and who knows?
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1208
Military Flexes Its Muscles as Islamists Gain in Eg
ypt ... By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Gen. Mokhtar al-Molla of Egypt's ruling military c
ouncil said it would manage the writing of the cou
ntry's new constitution in order to insure against
an Islamist takeover.
NYT-1208
Plot to Smuggle Qaddafi Son Into Mexico Is Disrupt
ed, Government Official Says ... By RANDAL C. ARCH
IBOLD
Saadi el-Qaddafi and his family were going to rece
ive false documents identifying them as Mexican, t
he interior minister said.
NYT-1208
Drone Crash in Iran Reveals Secret U.S. Surveillan
ce Effort ... By SCOTT SHANE and DAVID E. SANGER
High-altitude flights of stealth C.I.A. drones fro
m bases in Afghanistan had been among the most sec
ret of many American intelligence-collection effor
ts against Iran.
NYT-1208
New Orleans Struggles to Stem Homicides ... By CAMP
BELL ROBERTSON
The mayor says the problem is so bad that a studen
t at a certain city high school was more likely to
be killed than a soldier in Afghanistan.
NYT-1208
Democrats See a Two-Horse G.O.P. Race, Adding a Whi
p ... By JEFF ZELENY and JIM RUTENBERG
The White House and its allies hope to help stretc
h the Republican presidential nominating contest i

nto a longer and bloodier battle between Mitt Romn
ey and Newt Gingrich.
NYT-1208
2 Character Models for a Single Cinematic Point: W
inning Elections at Any Cost ... By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Two political movies seem likely to fuel debate ov
er what is done in the name of winning elections.
NYT-1208
New Romney Ad Turns Up Heat on Gingrich ... By MICH
AEL D. SHEAR
Mitt Romney's campaign has shifted gears with a ne
wly aggressive phase, less than a month before the
Iowa caucuses.
NYT-1208
G.O.P. Candidates, at Jewish Coalition, Pledge to
Be Israel's Best Friends ... By RICHARD A. OPPEL J
r.
Most candidates suggested they would differ substa
ntially from previous Democratic and Republican ad
ministrations on critical elements of the Middle E
ast peace process.
NYT-1208
Frenzy of Year-End Activity for Congress ... By JEN
NIFER STEINHAUER and ROBERT PEAR
While the first session of the 112th Congress was
defined by bruising fiscal battles, Democrats and
Republicans have now moved to the election-year st
age of governing.
NYT-1208
From Vacant to Vibrant ... By NICK BUNKLEY
Developers, drawn by lower property values, have b
een purchasing closed auto plants, which have help
ed communities regain considerable tax revenue.
NYT-1208
Phones Get Game Power in the Cloud ... By NICK WING
FIELD

The Silicon Valley start-up OnLive is introducing
software to bring the power of its game service to
mobile devices via so-called cloud computing.
NYT-1208
White House Pushes Vote on Consumer Agency Chief ..
. By EDWARD WYATT
President Obama is trying to sway enough Republica
n Senators to allow a vote on the nomination of Ri
chard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Prote
ction Bureau.
NYT-1208
Cellphones Test Strength of Gym Rules ... By CATHER
INE SAINT LOUIS
The versatility of smartphones is a challenge to g
yms, who seek to block users who want to make a ca
ll, text or send e-mail.
NYT-1208
Central Park, the Soundtrack ... By JAMES C. McKINL
EY Jr.
The music duo Bluebrain created Central Park (List
en to the Light), an app responding to a strolling
visitor's location and movements.
===== notyet
Clamp on headphones, start up the iPhone app by th
e musical duo Bluebrain and walk into Central Park
. The music does not begin until you pass through
an entrance and head into the trees. Then it sound
s like an orchestra tuning up, a chaotic jumble of
wind chimes, electronic moans and discordant stri
ngs. Push farther into the park, and a sweet violi
n melody emerges over languid piano chords.
As you walk, new musical themes hit you every 20 o
r 30 steps, as if they were emanating from statues
, playgrounds, open spaces and landmarks. At the B
ethesda Fountain a string quartet plays a hopeful
march. The Kerbs Boathouse, with its tranquil pond
full of model sailboats, triggers a soothing Pach
elbel-like motif with a descending bass. Strolling

across Sheep Meadow you hear a pastoral piano the
me with a bubbling undercurrent of electronic arpe
ggios.
The themes layer over one another, growing in volu
me as you approach certain points on the map and f
ading out as you move away. It’s a musical Venn di
agram placed over the landscape, and at any time y
ou might have two dozen tracks playing in your ear
s, all meshing and colliding in surprising ways. T
he path you take determines what you hear, and the
biggest problem with what the composers call a “l
ocation-aware album” is that you may get blisters
on your feet trying to hear it all.
“It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure album,” sai
d Ryan Holladay, who forms this Washington electro
-pop duo with his brother Hays.
They released the app, called Central Park (Listen
to the Light), for the iPhone and iPad in October
. The app is free, but the brothers hope the music
al format will become a commercially viable medium
. It uses a global positioning network to activate
different themes as the listener wanders through
the park. The app contains more than 400 tracks, e
ach tied to a location. They were written to fit t
ogether harmonically like a sonic jigsaw puzzle.
The Holladays are not the only musicians harnessin
g such technology on iPhones, iPads and their imit
ators. Bjork turned her most recent album, “Biophi
lia,” into an audio-visual game of sorts for the i
Phone, letting listeners rearrange and mix musical
elements on some songs.
A few others have experimented with music shaped b
y the listener’s movements. In 2006 Jesse Stiles a
nd Melissa St. Pierre of the Baltimore musical gro
up Face Removal Services hitched a car’s global po
sitioning system to a computer containing hundreds
of dance beats on loops and created what they cal

led the Beatmap. As they drove the car across the
Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, the beats overlappe
d, creating complex mash-ups.
But Bluebrain’s project goes further, creating mus
ic that not only must be listened to in a specific
place but also is inspired by the landscape itsel
f.
“It’s not just that they are using this as a novel
delivery mechanism,” said Peter Kirn, an electron
ic composer who edits the Web site Create Digital
Music. “It’s part of their musical process. They a
re forcing you to go to a place because that place
for them is musically meaningful.”
The idea for such a project came to the Holladay b
rothers more than two years ago, as they brainstor
med about ways to use new applications available f
or the iPhone. “Wouldn’t it be cool if there were
an album that you would interact with in Central P
ark?” Hays recalled saying. “Then we started think
ing about what would you be controlling, and we ca
me to the idea of: What if it were your movement?”
It was easier said than done. It took months to fi
nd Brian Feldman, a Brooklyn software developer wh
o was willing to work for little money up front. T
hey worked out bugs in the program as they compose
d their first location-aware piece of music for th
e National Mall in their hometown; they released t
hat app in May.
Mr. Feldman wrote a new software engine, which he
named Sscape, for the application, borrowing ideas
from video games that have different sound effect
s and background music tied to places in their vir
tual worlds. To use the program, the composers est
ablish map coordinates for each track, and those t
racks, usually loops of several minutes, are set o
ff as the listener approaches. Last month the brot
hers hired a second software firm, Zamtools, in To

onto, to improve and compress the program.
“We didn’t want something to sound like a machine,
” Mr. Feldman said. “We wanted it to sound like th
ese guys were conducting an orchestra and watching
where you are walking.”
For Central Park the Holladays went for a classica
l feeling. The melodies are mostly stately, slow m
arches played on strings or the piano, usually inv
olving a simple two- or four-chord progression, wi
th some electronic chirps, loops and ambient sound
s added in the higher registers or rumbling beneat
h the melody.
Josh Stewart, a 25-year-old publicist, who writes
a blog about alternative music, was recently part
of a group of 100 Bluebrain fans who came up from
Washington to New York by chartered bus to try the
new app.
At the Lake, Mr. Stewart recalled, he heard paddle
s in water keeping time to a string melody and had
to take off the headphones to make sure the swish
ing rhythm was on the recording and not coming fro
m boaters.
“You are walking around, and you are experiencing
the park in your own way, and the music is kind of
adapting to you,” he said. “I have never experien
ced anything else like that.”
The Holladay brothers grew up in Virginia, but say
they fell in love with Central Park when they wer
e going to college in New York in the late 1990s,
Ryan at New York University and Hays at Columbia.
While still students, they formed a five-piece ele
ctro-pop band, the Epochs, and made two albums bef
ore disbanding in 2008. In New York they were infl
uenced by the works of the avant-garde composer Ph
il Kline and participated in his boom-box walks in
Greenwich Village, during which dozens of people

carry tape players carrying different recordings t
hat complement one another.
They moved back to Washington in the fall of 2009
and began performing as Bluebrain, playing offbeat
electronic music and pursuing experimental projec
ts. They have financed the two location-aware albu
ms — which together have been downloaded more than
10,000 times — out of their own pockets, cajoling
friends to play the string and percussion parts a
nd recording the tracks at the Iguazu recording st
udio in Arlington, Va., where Hays, 27, works. Rya
n, 29, is an art curator.
Mr. Feldman said the Central Park album only uses
a fraction of his program’s potential. The program
can create a virtual world of sound, with sources
of music that move through the park and tracks th
at change depending on factors like the weather an
d the speed of the listener’s gait. “These guys ar
e only scratching the surface,” he said.
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1208
BlackBerry Maker Changes New Operating System's Nam
e ... By IAN AUSTEN
Less than two months after Research in Motion anno
unced that the new operating system to revive the
BlackBerry brand would be called BBX, the company
was ordered by a court not to use the name.
===== notyet
OTTAWA — Less than two months after Research In Mo
tion announced that its new operating system to re
vive the BlackBerry brand would be called BBX, the
company has changed its mind. Now, it will be cal
led BlackBerry 10.
The late change followed the granting of a restrai
ning order on Tuesday by a federal court in New Me
xico to a small Albuquerque-based software maker,
Basis International, that has long used the name B
Bx.

In a statement on Wednesday about the name change,
RIM did not address the trademark infringement ac
tion by Basis International. “The BlackBerry 10 na
me reflects the significance of the new platform a
nd will leverage the global strength of the BlackB
erry brand while also aligning perfectly with RIM’
s device branding,” the statement said. RIM did no
t respond to questions about whether it has abando
ned the BBX name.
The sudden rebranding is the latest in a series of
setbacks, both small and large, for RIM recently,
including having to restate its financial guidanc
e for the current quarter because of steep discoun
ts on its tablet computer as well as the firing of
two executives whose drunken outbursts forced the
return of a Toronto-to-Beijing flight and led to
criminal charges. The new financial guidance furth
er depressed RIM’s already battered stock price.
The new phone operating system was developed by QN
X Software Systems, a company based in Ottawa that
RIM acquired last year. The BBX name appeared to
be an attempt to meld the BlackBerry and QNX names.
Basis has been using both the BBX and BBx names fo
r several years on products that allow developers
to create apps that can work on any operating syst
em.
“Even the more cursory search for the BBX trademar
k would have shown that we hold it,” said Nico Spe
nce, the chief executive of Basis.
After RIM announced the BBX name at a developers’
conference in San Francisco in October, Basis soug
ht a permanent injunction under trademark laws. It
also asked for the temporary order, which is vali
d for only 14 days, to prevent RIM from using the
name at its developers conference in Singapore thi
s week.

Mr. Spence said Wednesday that he had not heard an
ything from RIM or its lawyers about the company’s
new brand. He said that Basis would continue to s
eek a permanent injunction as well as damages from
RIM. “Their announcement is certainly encouraging
in that it looks like they are abandoning it, but
it may only be temporary,” he said.
The new name follows RIM’s traditional practice of
naming operating systems using numbers. The opera
ting system it will replace is called BlackBerry 7.
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1208: REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK
Constantly Checking In, Without Ever Checking In ..
. By HOWARD BECK
For Howard Beck, the Times reporter who covered th
e N.B.A. lockout, the 149-day ordeal was spent ins
ide and outside some of New York's finest hotels.
===== notyet
This summer and fall, I spent 156 hours in some of
New York’s finest hotels. I did not sleep, or sho
wer, or earn rewards points. I was not, in the ver
nacular of the service industry, a “guest.” At tim
es, I felt more like a hostage, subsisting on a di
et of stale pizza, trail mix and anonymous sources.
To be a reporter covering the N.B.A. lockout was t
o enter a parallel universe, where normalcy was su
spended, truth was pliable and time had no meaning
. Absurdity reigned.
There were news conferences at 4 in the morning, B
etty White sightings, a Gregg Popovich jog-by and
a cameo by former President Bill Clinton.
Bargaining sessions stretched for 15 hours while w
e stood on sidewalks or loitered in chilled lobbie
s, or sweated in stuffy conference rooms with bad
wallpaper.

Twitter turned into a newswire, a lifeline to the
outside world and a catchphrase machine, all in on
e. A player’s inadvertent text message became a un
iversal lockout greeting: “How u?”
For the dozen or so reporters who covered every me
eting, it often felt like we were living in our ow
n twisted reality show: “Survivor: Lockout Edition
.”
The show mercifully ended at 3 a.m. Nov. 26, when
owners and players at last agreed to a new labor d
eal, on the lockout’s 149th day. That deal is expe
cted to be ratified Thursday, at yet another Midto
wn hotel, the final chapter of a dizzying stakeout
saga.
To our great surprise, thousands of people joined
us for the ride via Twitter, clicking and “retweet
ing” every trivial nugget (“Talks have broken for
dinner”), every news conference quote (“Enormous c
onsequences”) and every punch-drunk riff by report
ers (“Mutant pizza”), no matter the hour.
During one late-night session at the Waldorf-Astor
ia, I heard from a Twitter follower in Australia.
He was just getting out of work. My friend David A
ldridge of TNT said he received Twitter responses
from six continents that night. Everywhere but Ant
arctica, where I’m guessing the Wi-Fi is a little
sketchy.
Covering a professional sports labor battle can be
a thankless task. No one wants to hear about mill
ionaire athletes and billionaire owners fighting o
ver a $4 billion pie, especially in a depressed ec
onomy. The average fan wants to know only three th
ings:
Is it over?
Who won?

How does it affect my team?
The rest is just posturing and mind-numbing jargon
: escrow tax, BRI, repeater tax, the cliff, nontax
payer midlevel exception.
Somehow, these issues and phrases found a dedicate
d audience which, through the beauty of modern tec
hnology, could respond to all of us in real time a
s we drifted into a late-night stupor at the Waldo
rf, or the Sheraton, or the Lowell Hotel.
Twitter provided instant gratification — Look, peo
ple care! — reassuring us in 140-character bursts
that the endless stakeouts were worthwhile.
The fans helped keep us sane — along with reruns o
f “Seinfeld” streaming on the touchpad screens of
Ken Berger of CBSSports.com and Alan Hahn of Newsd
ay.
The fans kept us fed, too. A network of generous b
loggers, coordinated by the salary-cap savant Larr
y Coon — out of pity or support — regularly sent u
s stacks of pizza. Marc Cornstein, a New York-base
d player agent, sent two massive deli platters (th
us inspiring a new sandwich title, the Cornstein o
n rye). The Brooklyn-bound Nets also sent pizza on
e afternoon, to the chagrin of the Waldorf securit
y staff, which harrumphed at the stack of cardboar
d boxes in their pristine lobby. (That lobby was r
outinely chilled to what felt like 55 degrees, whi
ch at least helped keep us awake.)
The various hotel staffs generally tolerated us as
we gradually took over every couch, every table a
nd every wall outlet, our own little Occupy moveme
nt.
It was while waiting in the Waldorf lobby, on Oct.
26, that we had our Betty White sighting. She was

eing honored at the 21st annual Broadcasting & C
able Hall Of Fame awards. She left around 5:15 a.m
., presumably after a solid night of sleep. I was
still typing.
Clinton passed through after a Nov. 8 player meeti
ng at the Sheraton. He stopped long enough to shak
e hands, hug the union president Derek Fisher and
hand out copies of his book, before heading to a “
Daily Show” taping.
Along the way, I learned that the Cole Porter pian
o, in the Waldorf lobby, is a major tourist attrac
tion. (We resisted the urge to plank it.) I learne
d that the Lowell, a boutique hotel on East 63rd S
treet, makes amazing chocolate-chip cookies. The L
owell also provided my back rest, as I sat on the
63rd Street sidewalk on the night of Oct. 4, and w
rote that the N.B.A. had just canceled the first t
wo weeks of the season.
The hotels were chosen, often at the last minute,
based on the availability of conference rooms. N.B
.A. officials had a particular affinity for the Lo
well, which had a tiny lobby, forcing us to wait o
utside.
Passers-by, many of them walking tiny dogs, often
asked if we were waiting for someone famous. No, w
e told them, just David Stern.
During one of the early stakeouts, Popovich, the S
an Antonio Spurs coach, jogged by and seemed start
led to find N.B.A. reporters on the sidewalk. He c
laimed to have no idea that negotiations, which in
volved the Spurs owner Peter Holt, were going on n
earby.
On another night, I watched a man surreptitiously
videotape a couple having dinner at the French bis
tro across the street. Apparently, someone was abo
ut to get divorced.

That same night, two TV cameramen fought – poorly
— after angrily wrestling for position during Ster
n’s sidewalk press conference. That was the last t
ime the sides used the Lowell.
We thought the odyssey would end much sooner. For
a minute, we thought it had. On Sept. 8, Roger Mas
on Jr., a member of the players’ executive board,
sent out a Twitter message: “Looking like a season
. How u.” Mason said the message was inadvertent a
nd was not intended as a prediction.
Mason’s misstep spawned a lockout meme, later join
ed by “marathon session,” “mutant pizza” and “enor
mous consequences” in the lockout lexicon. An N.B.
A. blog, Outside the Arc, immortalized them in a l
yrical tribute, put to the tune of Billy Joel’s “W
e Didn’t Start the Fire.”
The last night was the longest. I filed an article
announcing the lockout’s end around 6:30 a.m. The
sun was rising as a cab took me over the Manhatta
n Bridge. The New York Times was already on my sto
op. The most surreal chapter in my N.B.A. reportin
g career had reached its weary conclusion.
With a vote by N.B.A. owners on Thursday afternoon,
a sense of normalcy will return.
It is, finally, looking like a season. How u?
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1208
Millions? Private Jet? Columbia Offers New York ...
By ANDREW KEH
Columbia, which is searching for a new coach after
a 1-9 season, can't compete with the likes of Ohi
o State, but it does have its advantages.
===== notyet
Early one morning last week, inside Columbia’s sub
terranean athletic center in Upper Manhattan, M. D

ianne Murphy leaned over a conference table and wr
apped her fingers around a disposable cup of coffe
e. There was no time to sleep these days, she said
.
Murphy, the university’s athletic director, was in
the midst of a nationwide hunt for a new football
coach, a circumstance shared by a high number of
top-flight programs this fall. Earlier that week,
Ohio State made headlines by hiring Urban Meyer, t
he former coach at Florida, enticing him with a co
mpensation package that included a base salary of
$4 million per year, a country club membership, a
$12,000 automobile stipend and the use of a privat
e jet.
As Murphy, bleary-eyed yet cheerful, prepared for
another day of telephone interviews, the situation
in Columbus seemed a far cry from the situation a
t Columbia. The quirks of coaching Ivy League foot
ball — not to mention finding a coach in the first
place — are well known, but the idiosyncrasies fe
el multiplied at Columbia, a university in the hea
rt of a bustling city with a football program famo
us for losing 44 straight games in the 1980s. And,
of course, Murphy does not have an airplane to us
e as a bargaining chip.
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Murphy said with a laugh.
“Yeah, that would be nice. But the right person f
or us is probably sitting in coach somewhere.”
Murphy arrived at Columbia in 2005 with the task o
f revitalizing a floundering athletics department,
and in many respects she has seen success. Sports
at Columbia have found some new respectability. T
his past season, the men’s cross-country team qual
ified for the N.C.A.A. nationals for the first tim
e and the men’s soccer team came within a goal of
its first league title since 1993.
Football, though, has continued to lag. This year,

the team did not win a game until the final day o
f the season. The next morning, the coach, Norries
Wilson, was fired. He finished with a record of 1
7-43 in six seasons.
For decades, the football team has been at best a
punch line and at worst an object of scorn. Last w
eek, the Columbia Spectator, the campus newspaper,
ran a column questioning whether the team should
exist at all, painting the program as antithetical
to the university’s academic values.
Jim Pagels, one of the newspaper’s sports editors,
said the views did not represent the majority of
the student body, but that the football team in hi
s view was indeed marginalized. “There is not a re
al resentment or a call to disband the football te
am,” he said. “But I think in general there is wid
espread apathy and indifference.”
Taken together, these factors might at first glanc
e afford Murphy’s search a measure of quaintness.
Yet, there are indications that the vacant job — t
hough lacking in outward glamour — might be an une
xpectedly enviable one.
The average salary for the head coaches of Columbi
a’s 14 men’s teams last year was $93,984, accordin
g to a report from the United States Department of
Education. The same report showed the university
had spent $2,670,238 — far less than Meyer’s new a
nnual salary — to cover the combined expenses of t
he entire football program.
The football coach, however, is compensated at a l
evel comparable to senior administration officials
and top faculty members, according to people fami
liar with the program, and his base salary is actu
ally closer to $250,000. Other benefits can includ
e an apartment in Manhattan and assistance in enro
lling a coach’s children in the competitive, unive
rsity-run elementary school on the Upper West Side.

And the bonuses, many say, run deeper than that.
“The perks in the Ivy League are more intangible t
han they are material,” said Tom Beckett, the athl
etic director at Yale. “The perks and salaries at
these other big schools, that’s not going to happe
n. But there are wonderful things that do happen.”
Ivy League universities emphasize the prestige of
their institutions to coaching candidates. This ye
ar, Columbia was No. 4 in U.S. News and World Repo
rt’s annual ranking of national universities, and
people at the university consider its alumni netwo
rk to be particularly strong.
The athletic department in 2007 received pledges o
f $10 million from William V. Campbell, the chairm
an of the board of Intuit, and $5 million from Rob
ert K. Kraft, the chairman of the Kraft Group and
the owner of the New England Patriots. Both played
football at Columbia. Campbell is also the chairm
an of Columbia’s trustees, giving the team a power
ful advocate on campus.
“Even successful alums from other areas of the sch
ool don’t have the same affinity for the school th
at athletes do,” said Jake Novak, a senior produce
r at Fox Business who chronicles Columbia athletic
s on a widely read blog. “They can open so many do
ors for a coach and give him entree into a differe
nt world in New York.”
Novak and others said that for a savvy coach, the
Columbia job was a sparkling opportunity. The admi
nistration has shown a new commitment to athletics
, as evidenced by recent increases in operating bu
dgets, the opening next year of a new primary faci
lity for the athletics department and efforts to h
elp athletes in areas like class scheduling.
“Fifteen years ago, there was a long list of thing

s needed for the program to even begin to be compe
titive, and that list has now largely been elimina
ted,” said Mike Griffin, who was an assistant athl
etic director from 1996 to 2004.
And the endless losing seasons, combined with thes
e recent advances, creates a sort of job security,
where a handful of victories would be a major suc
cess and losses would not create undue pressure.
“There’s a certain hope-springs-eternal quality wi
thin the job,” said Jim McMenemin, the director of
principal gifts and senior adviser to the dean of
the college. “This is particularly true now, as u
niversity leadership is fully behind the football
program being successful and believes it to be com
patible with the academic and intellectual culture
of the university.”
Murphy acknowledged the futility of Columbia footb
all, pointing out that it had only five winning se
asons since 1956. She disputed, though, the charac
terization of Columbia as apathetic toward footbal
l. As an example — one she said she was disappoint
ed to see — she said Wilson’s wife had been subjec
ted to rude comments from angry fans at recent hom
e games.
She believes steadfastly that football is a core e
lement of the college experience, even in New York
.
Murphy said in the past she had been “naive” about
the influence of the city on the job, discounting
such factors like the cost of living and where a
coach would send his children to school. Now, she
said, the city was one of her strongest selling po
ints and that a candidate’s enthusiasm for it woul
d be a primary concern as she looks to hire a coac
h before a self-imposed Dec. 15 deadline.
“There’s nothing like New York,” Murphy said. “And

if you’re going to be frustrated because the subw
ay is slow, you’re not going to do well here.”
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1208
To Sleep on the Subway, Maybe, but to Dream? Poor C
hance ... By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
A sleep researcher, with the aid of a drowsy strap
hanger, set out to discover whether dozing undergr
ound was worth its while.
===== notyet
A ride on the New York subway can be a sensory ove
rload: musicians perform for change; conductors pl
ead to those who hold open train doors to relent;
and passengers, often in unimaginably close proxim
ity, subject one another to all sorts of sights, s
ounds, smells and touches, preferably inadvertent.
Amid all of that, some New Yorkers nevertheless ma
nage to fall asleep. Seats are found, trains begin
their rhythmic rattles of movement, and eyelids f
lutter closed. Gritted jaws loosen, furrowed brows
release and heads nod.
People outside of New York may wonder how in a cit
y that never sleeps, so many New Yorkers manage to
doze on the subway. There is no law against it, b
ut those who take subway catnaps do so at their ow
n risk; a recent Metropolitan Transportation Autho
rity committee meeting featured a presentation on
how criminals seeking iPhones slice open the pocke
ts of dozing passengers.
So are these naps really worth the trouble?
Dr. Carl Bazil, director of the Epilepsy and Sleep
Division at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columb
ia University Medical Center, offered to try to fi
nd out.
After Dr. Bazil stepped into an uptown A train on

a recent morning, he tried to guess what stage of
sleep the nappers onboard were in. He said that to
reach Stage 1 sleep, the least restorative of the
five stages, riders must be able to slow down the
ir eye movements. To get Stage 2 sleep, riders mus
t relax their muscles and stop moving their eyes e
ntirely.
As Dr. Bazil watched the riders sitting across fro
m him, the nappers’ eyelids fluttered when train d
oors opened. The riders also seemed to clench thei
r messenger bags and backpacks with death grips.
“I suspect all you get is Stage 1 sleep; it’s not
going to be restorative,” he said. “It’s kind of w
asted sleep.”
At a reporter’s request, Dr. Bazil wired up a slee
py subway rider to study his brain waves as he tri
ed to nap. He enlisted Dr. Brandon Foreman, a 30-y
ear-old neurology fellow, whose 2-year-old son, Ju
de, still does not sleep through the night. Neithe
r does Dr. Foreman.
But he has observed how the subway lulls his son t
o sleep, so he tries to replicate the train’s stop
s and jerks when he puts his son to bed. Dr. Forem
an is no stranger to subway napping: He began doin
g so when commuting from Brooklyn during his resid
ency, and said he coveted any sleep he could get.
“Lectures, classes, I can pretty much sleep anywhe
re,” Dr. Foreman said. “But it’s not usually a gre
at sleep. It’s more the nodding off.”
Both doctors met at the end of a long workweek aft
er Dr. Foreman had been up every night dealing wit
h his son’s cold. As Dr. Foreman yawned, Dr. Bazil
had a technician attach 25 multicolored plastic w
ires to Dr. Foreman’s head, connecting them to a m
onitor slightly larger than an iPod to track his b
rain waves. Then Dr. Foreman covered the wires wit

h a long sock and a winter hat.
The pair got onto a southbound A train at 207th St
reet. After Dr. Foreman chose a corner seat, Dr. B
azil sat across from him to take notes. When the t
rain left the station at 6:09 p.m., it seemed unli
kely that Dr. Foreman would get any sleep. The tra
in’s operator screeched the cars along as if she w
ere training for Formula One. She shouted into the
loudspeakers that her train was late, and peeled
from stop to stop.
Dr. Foreman yawned, folded his arms, crossed his l
egs and shut his eyes. He opened his eyes when the
train stopped. His eyes fluttered when several ne
urologists boarded and chatted over his shoulder.
The train jostled. He opened his eyes and yawned d
eeply.
By 6:18 p.m., two minutes after Dr. Foreman left t
he 168th Street station, he looked as if he was fa
lling asleep. He first held his head up and kept h
is arms crossed. But he let his head nod back and
forth slightly. Then his head fell, and he dozed u
ntil 59th Street — no doubt aided by the uninterru
pted run from 125th Street. As the doors opened at
59th Street, Dr. Foreman jumped up and hopped off
the train.
After they briefly celebrated what looked like a s
uccessful subway nap, the doctors boarded an uptow
n train to see if Dr. Foreman could fall asleep ag
ain. Dr. Foreman found a seat lodged between two p
assengers. He put on his jacket hood, crossed his
legs, folded his arms and let his head fall. While
the conductor was quieter on this train, Dr. Fore
man could not get back to sleep. At 145th Street,
when a vendor stood before him and shouted that he
was selling four DVDs for $10, Dr. Foreman opened
his eyes widely.
“No luck,” he said.

Dr. Bazil was more pleased with the results. After
downloading the data about Dr. Foreman’s brain wa
ves, Dr. Bazil found that Dr. Foreman had slept fo
r 10 minutes out of a 23.5-minute ride. For three
and a half minutes, Dr. Foreman reached a Stage 2
level of sleep.
“It looks like it is definitely possible to get sm
all amounts of restorative sleep on the subway, bu
t only very small amounts,” Dr. Bazil said. He add
ed that some studies show “even a brief nap that i
ncludes Stage 2 sleep can improve performance.”
But Dr. Foreman was less persuaded that he got any
productive sleep.
“I don’t feel rested,” he said. “It’s not like I to
ok a nap in bed.”
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1208: EDITORIALS
Not What Mr. Putin Planned
The lesson of this week's election is that Russian
s' patience is not unlimited and a surprising numb
er can imagine a world after Vladimir Putin.
===== notyet
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of Russia has cynica
lly dominated his country’s politics for the last
11 years and intends to do it for many more years
to come. Given the way he has muzzled independent
media and hobbled opponents, it looked as though n
othing could challenge his reign. Then came Sunday
’s parliamentary election in which a surprising nu
mber of voters made clear that they are tired of t
he status quo and Mr. Putin.
Mr. Putin’s party, United Russia, received just un
der 50 percent of the votes. By Russian standards,
that’s a stunning rebuke. What makes the numbers
even more extraordinary is that Western election o
bservers reported blatant and widespread fraud by

Putin supporters, including brazen stuffing of bal
lot boxes. Not only did United Russia barely secur
e a legislative majority — 238 seats out of 450, d
own from 315 now — it had to cheat to do it.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in E
urope said election administrators lacked independ
ence and there was no free media to cover the camp
aign. Some opposition parties were barred, and Uni
ted Russia was given huge advantages over those th
at could run.
The United States needs Russia’s cooperation on a
host of issues, most notably Iran, and the Obama a
dministration made the right decision to try to “r
eset” the relationship. But that can’t mean giving
Mr. Putin’s authoritarian ways a pass. So it was
good to hear Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Cli
nton express “serious concerns” that the voting wa
s neither free nor fair.
Since then, Washington has said nothing about the
government crackdown on protestors who have turned
out by the thousands to denounce the electoral fr
aud. More than 1,000 people have been detained, am
ong them a number of prominent opposition figures.
The administration needs to keep speaking out. It
would certainly help to have an American ambassad
or in Moscow, but Senator Mark Kirk, a Republican
of Illinois, is still blocking the confirmation of
Michael McFaul.
Mr. Putin has promised to shuffle the government n
ext year. What he really needs to do is listen to
voters who are demanding a real chance at politica
l competition and economic opportunity. Unfortunat
ely, he has long ago made clear his disdain for de
mocracy. And while his approval ratings have decli
ned, they remain, for now, above 60 percent. But t
he lesson of this week’s election is that Russians
’ patience is not unlimited — and a surprising num
ber can imagine a world after Putin.

~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1208: OP-ED
Bring the Iron Lady Back ... By RICHARD VINEN
Margaret Thatcher was tough, decisive and widely d
isliked. At a moment of crisis, Britain needs her
type of adversarial politics, not consensus.
===== notyet
London
MARGARET THATCHER has long been reviled by the Bri
tish left, so much so that the singer Elvis Costel
lo once fantasized about stomping on her grave in
his 1989 song “Tramp the Dirt Down.” But Mrs. That
cher achieved more than any other British peacetim
e prime minister of the 20th century. It is rumore
d that, when she dies, she will receive a state fu
neral — an honor rarely accorded to anyone except
monarchs. There are also plans for a public celebr
ation.
Her life is the inspiration for a new movie that o
pens later this month, starring Meryl Streep as “T
he Iron Lady.” It chronicles Mrs. Thatcher’s divis
ive policies as prime minister as she led Britain
through the economic doldrums of the 1980s. It was
a time when the country faced financial ruin and
politicians were compelled to make hard choices.
Mrs. Thatcher was a tough, adversarial leader. She
was never liked, even by those who supported her
policies, and she was hated by those who opposed h
er.
Yet her political style may be just what Britain n
eeds right now. The country is in the midst of an
economic crisis that will force the government to
make difficult, unpopular decisions. And that is w
hat Mrs. Thatcher did so well. Facing long-term ec
onomic decline and the brooding menace of the Sovi
et Union, she broke the trade unions, sold off nat
ionalized industries and helped imbue British capi

talists with a confidence that they had not felt s
ince the death of Queen Victoria.
She was at her best when the odds seemed against h
er or when she had clear enemies. In 1982, she sen
t an armada to fight the Argentines in the Falklan
d Islands. And in 1984-85, she held out against a
strike by the National Union of Mineworkers, which
had been powerful enough to bring down a governme
nt 10 years before.
Although Mrs. Thatcher has become a respected symb
ol of statesmanship outside Britain, she remains a
reminder of social division within it. In 2008, t
he future foreign secretary, William Hague, sought
to reassure American officials that he and David
Cameron, soon-to-be prime minister, were “Thatcher
’s children.” When his comment leaked, the Labour
opposition seized upon it, keen to circulate the q
uote in the hopes that it would stir up old anti-T
hatcher feelings. And despite being in power today
, Conservative leaders still worry that they are a
ssociated with the bitterness of the Thatcher year
s. They speak of changing their image as “the nast
y party” and the need to “detoxify the brand.”
One reason British politicians feel uncomfortable
with Thatcherism is that Britain has been relative
ly prosperous in the last two decades, at least in
part because of things the Thatcher government di
d: tax cuts, financial-sector deregulation and wea
ker unions all made Britain a more attractive plac
e to do business.
A new generation of politicians who grew up in an
age of prosperity has ceased to think of politics
in terms of hard choices and scarce resources; Mr.
Cameron belongs to that generation. He was just 1
2 years old when Mrs. Thatcher came to power in 19
79 and he became leader of the Conservative Party
in 2005, when the current economic storms seemed a
lmost unimaginable. Even when Mr. Cameron became p

ime minister last year, the financial crisis stil
l felt, to most of the British electorate, like so
mething short-term and vaguely unreal.
But British politics has lost something with its p
ost-Thatcher embrace of consensus and optimism. Th
atcherism was a galvanizing force. It mobilized ri
ght-wingers to do things, such as selling off huge
state-owned corporations, that many of them would
once have considered impossible. It also mobilize
d the left to develop radical alternatives: during
the 1980s, the Labour Party veered toward support
for unilateral nuclear disarmament and increased
state intervention in the economy.
Unlike today, voters in 1983 faced clear choices.
A vote for Thatcher’s Tories was a vote for largescale
privatization; a vote for Labour was a vote
for socialism. A Conservative vote meant keeping B
ritain in the European Economic Community; a Labou
r vote meant withdrawal. A Tory vote meant station
ing American cruise missiles in Britain; a Labour
vote meant that they would be stopped.
There are no longer such clear-cut choices. Explic
it talk of class interests and inequality have bee
n replaced by a vaguer and less divisive language
of “fairness” and “equal opportunity.”
The major political parties look remarkably simila
r today. All are led by clean-cut 40-somethings wh
o blend social liberalism (support for same-sex ma
rriage and opposition to the death penalty) with a
cceptance of the free market. Indeed, the Conserva
tives now find themselves governing with strange b
edfellows, in a coalition with the small Liberal D
emocrat Party, whose president recently described
Thatcherism as “organized wickedness.” Mrs. Thatch
er hated coalitions. She most likely would have pr
eferred to lose an election than to govern without
an outright parliamentary majority.

Unlike Mr. Cameron, Mrs. Thatcher came to power at
a time when people felt desperate. This desperati
on, and the sense that she might be the last chanc
e to restore Britain’s fortunes, accounted for muc
h of her success.
Thatcherism was not an alien invasion. It reflecte
d a consensus by many members of the British estab
lishment that things could not go on as they were.
This is why so many supported Mrs. Thatcher’s pol
icies, even when they disliked her personally.
Mr. Cameron is certainly a more likable figure tha
n Mrs. Thatcher, but likability may not be enough
when the British people realize that their current
predicament — requiring government spending cuts
at a time of rising unemployment and financial cha
os in Europe — is actually worse than the crisis w
hen Mrs. Thatcher came to power in 1979.
In these circumstances, it will take a bracing dos
e of Thatcherite ideological confrontation to revi
ve British politics.
Richard Vinen, a professor of history at King’s Co
llege, London, is the author of “Thatcher’s Britai
n: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s.”
~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1209: U.S.: VIDEO
An Unexpected Debut
Boyd Lee Dunlop found his musical talent during th
e Great Depression. But after years of playing in
bars and nightclubs, it took a damaged piano in a
Buffalo nursing home for him to be discovered.
---
NYT-1209: U.S. - THIS LAND
Rhythms Flow as Aging Pianist Finds New Audience ..
. By DAN BARRY
After a chance encounter, Boyd Lee Dunlop, living
in a nursing home in Buffalo, got a chance to reco

d a CD and headline a concert.
===== notyet
BUFFALO - For years, the donated piano sat upright
and unused in a corner of the nursing home’s cafe
teria. Now and then someone would wheel or wobble
over to pound out broken notes on the broken keys,
but those out-of-tune interludes were rare. Day a
fter surrendering day, the flawed piano remained m
ercifully silent.
Then came a new resident, a musician in his 80s wi
th a touch of forgetfulness named Boyd Lee Dunlop,
and he could play a little. Actually, he could pl
ay a lot, his bony fingers dancing the mad dance o
f improvised jazz in a way that evoked a long life
’s all.
The lean times and the flush. The Saturday night h
op and the Sunday morning hymn. Those long drives
in a Packard to the next gig. That fine woman Adel
aide, oh Adelaide, down in North Carolina. The dea
ths of a beloved aunt and a difficult marriage. So
me things you don’t forget, so Mr. Dunlop keeps a
white towel handy to wipe his eyes dry.
And so Mr. Dunlop would have remained, summoning t
ranscendence from a damaged piano in the Delaware
Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, his audience a
couple of administrators, a few nurses and many pa
tients beset with dementia, loneliness and age — w
ere it not for a chance encounter and some cheesec
ake.
Instead, Boyd Lee Dunlop, 85, is the featured perf
ormer at a concert on Saturday night at the Hallwa
lls Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Buffalo.
Admission is $10. And if you want to buy his debut
CD, that will cost you another $15.
Sitting at Table 8, guarding the cafeteria piano b
eside him like a jealous lover, Mr. Dunlop accepts
all of this with boastful humility. He thanks God

for the talent, shares a few unprintable thoughts
, and turns to play a soulful take of “Come Back t
o Sorrento.”
“I got to be Boyd,” he says, as aides scrape the r
emnants of pork fried rice from plastic dinner pla
tes. “If I die Boyd, I’m still Boyd.”
Mr. Dunlop arrived at the brown-brick nursing home
nearly four years ago, a strong-willed but slight
ly bent half-note. He had 50 cents in his pocket,
too much sugar in his blood, and a need to be arou
nd others. He liked to sit in the lobby and greet
people, especially the women.
After a while, Mr. Dunlop let it be known that he
was a musician. This did not distinguish him in a
place where someone might claim to be a retired co
ncert violinist or President Obama’s mother, and,
in the first case at least, be telling the truth.
Also, music here usually meant something to be end
ured — the weekly sing-along, say, with a resident
armed with his own electric keyboard.
The broken cafeteria piano was a tease that Mr. Du
nlop could not resist. He played when no one else
was around, between meals, early and late. He lear
ned how to dodge the piano’s flaws, how to elongat
e the good notes and suffocate the bad.
Nothing like his music had been heard in these cle
anser-scented halls. The sounds of Boyd, including
the occasional yowl, would flow from the empty ca
feteria to greet Kate Wannemacher, the director of
nursing, as she arrived early in the morning. “He
plays right out of his heart,” she says.
Life kept time to a nursing home’s beat. Breakfast
lunch dinner, breakfast lunch dinner, with occasi
onal riffs of bingo, sing-alongs, insulin shots, p
aranoia, and more bingo. Mr. Dunlop had his bellic
ose moments, but mostly he was charming away in th

e lobby or, more likely, entranced by the cafeteri
a piano.
Then came that chance encounter.
In the spring of 2010, a freelance photographer na
med Brendan Bannon arrived to discuss an art proje
ct with nursing home administrators — and Mr. Dunl
op greeted him at the door. Mr. Bannon is balding,
so Mr. Dunlop assumed for some reason that he was
a doctor. “Hey doc!” he shouted. “Take my tempera
ture.”
A bond quickly developed, and before long Mr. Dunl
op invited his new friend to hear him play what he
referred to as “that thing they call a piano.” Mr
. Bannon, who knows his Mingus from his Monk, coul
d not believe the distinctive, vital music emanati
ng from a tapped-out piano missing a few keys.
“He was a beautiful player,” Mr. Bannon says. “He
was making it work even though it was out of tune.
”
Now for the cheesecake.
Sensing Mr. Dunlop’s growing frustration with the
damaged piano, two nursing managers, Pete Amodeo a
nd Sue Cercone, came up with an idea: a bake sale.
He made several Italian cheesecakes, she baked so
me cookies and other staff members helped out to r
aise more than $100 — enough to pay for a visit by
Vinny Tagliarino, a blind piano tuner.
The tuner healed the piano. “And that moved me,” M
r. Dunlop says, which means his white towel got a
good workout that day. “The notes by themselves —
they were sharp.”
The crisp sounds now rising from the cafeteria’s c
orner, that haunting take on “The Man I Love,” wer
e so distinctive that Mr. Bannon sent cellphone re

cordings to his childhood friend Allen Farmelo, no
w a music producer in New York. His question: Is t
his any good?
What Mr. Farmelo heard were snippets from the ongo
ing composition of a black man who was born poor i
n Winston-Salem and raised poor on Buffalo’s East
Side. Whose mother cleaned houses and whose father
is mostly clean from memory. Whose younger brothe
r, Frankie, would become a world-famous jazz drumm
er whose work is featured in more than 100 recordi
ngs.
Young Boyd found his own calling in a discarded pi
ano in a neighbor’s backyard (“I got to play you!”
he remembers thinking). He learned his chords fro
m a Czerny guide and took five lessons from a loca
l teacher. By 15 he was playing in church and in a
downtown nightclub, where crowds came to listen a
nd prostitutes chipped in to buy him a new suit.
He was cocky, but then the great, lightning-fast A
rt Tatum stopped at the house while passing throug
h Buffalo to hear the kid, drink some beer, and pl
ay a little. “So many keys being sounded off at on
e time,” Mr. Dunlop recalls, awed still, partly be
cause Tatum could play with a beer bottle in one h
and.
Mr. Dunlop played in the Army, he played in long-g
one Buffalo nightclubs, he played after his shift
at Bethlehem Steel, the soot coming off his hands
to stain the ivory. Then, after a gut-check moment
— “What am I doing here?” — he decided to play fu
ll-time, traveling to New York, Chicago, Los Angel
es.
“Mr. Boyd, you have to get your insulin,” interrup
ts a young nurse, Portia Pratt, who jokes that she
loves to hear him play because it means he’s stil
l alive.

“There’s my girlfriend,” Mr. Dunlop shouts. “Stick
it in!”
Seattle, with Big Jay McNeely. Green Bay, Wis., wh
ere he won a $500 bet with a customer who said he
couldn’t play 50 songs the customer named. Above a
nd below the Mason-Dixon line, where he didn’t tak
e kindly to being called the n-word. Outside Jones
ville, N.C., where Adelaide worked as a waitress:
“The way she walked, the way she moved. She glided
! ‘Oh God, can I glide with you?’ ”
All this was in the music Mr. Farmelo heard. The d
aughters. The broken marriage. The gunshot wound i
nflicted by a nephew. Church. Diabetes. Old age. “
Come Back to Sorrento.”
“I was pretty blown away,” Mr. Farmelo says.
So, in late February, Mr. Bannon and Mr. Farmelo r
ented a recording studio and hired two first-rate
musicians: the drummer Virgil Day and the bassist
Sabu Adeyola, who knew Mr. Dunlop from the still-o
pen Colored Musicians Club in downtown Buffalo. Wh
en Mr. Dunlop arrived for the session, he didn’t e
ven take off his coat. He went right to the Steinw
ay, and started to play a riff that would become p
art of the CD, called “Boyd’s Blues.”
“What I remember is how happy he was,” Mr. Adeyola
says. “How extremely happy he was.”
At the nursing home the other day, the remains of
another chicken lunch were scraped from plastic pl
ates, and another round of bingo was played. But n
ot for Boyd Lee Dunlop.
He put on a black winter coat over the shirt and s
weatpants he’s been wearing for days, walked past
an honor guard of wheelchairs, and headed for the
door. He had to get to rehearsal, for that gig he’
s got Saturday night.

~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1209: EDITORIALS
As Russians protest their fraudulent elections, th
e prime minister wants to blame the United States
instead of acknowledging voters' dissatisfaction.
===== notyet
Twenty years after the fall of communism, Prime Mi
nister Vladimir Putin of Russia seems determined t
o resurrect the Soviet playbook. His United Russia
Party tried to steal a parliamentary election on
Sunday, and, when the results still delivered a st
inging rebuke, he claimed the United States was wh
ipping up protests and demonstrations.
Mr. Putin could have acknowledged voters’ dissatis
faction — his party’s parliamentary majority plumm
eted from 315 to 238 seats — and tried to address
it, like democratic leaders might do. Instead, on
Thursday, he accused Secretary of State Hillary Ro
dham Clinton of instigating street protests. He wa
rned that Russia must protect against “interferenc
e” by foreign governments and hinted darkly at rep
risals against demonstrators.
The charges are bizarre. After international obser
vers reported widespread fraud by Putin supporters
, Mrs. Clinton expressed “serious concerns” on Mon
day and Tuesday that the vote was neither free nor
fair. It was ludicrous for Mr. Putin to claim tha
t that was a “signal” that brought Russians to the
streets three days running despite a heavy police
presence and more than 1,000 detentions. The prot
esters were clear what motivated them: They were o
utraged by the fraud and tired of the status quo a
nd Mr. Putin.
It’s true that Golos, Russia’s only independent el
ectoral monitoring group, receives grants from the
United States and Europe. But, as a member of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Euro

pe, Russia agreed that foreign and domestic electi
on observers enhance the electoral process. The So
viet Union also signed a series of agreements on h
uman rights that it ignored.
Mrs. Clinton and the White House did the right thi
ng on Thursday by repeating their criticisms of th
e vote. She also expressed support for the “rights
and aspirations” of the Russian people. They will
need to keep speaking out; government opponents p
lan another protest for Saturday.
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1209: OP-ED
A United Russia? Far From It ... By VALERY PANYUSHK
IN
Strategies to protest what are viewed as skewed pa
rliamentary elections: a cartoon pig and a vote fo
r any party but Putin's.
===== notyet
Moscow
A FEW months before this week’s parliamentary elec
tions, around 10 of us gathered in a small room at
the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center, a p
lace meant to honor freedom of thought, a place th
at no one visits.
Boris Nemtsov was there, a former deputy prime min
ister whose opposition party was one of the many e
xcluded from the elections. And so was Viktor Shen
derovich, who hosted a popular satirical TV show a
nd now performs only rarely in tiny clubs. There w
ere entrepreneurs with no business opportunities a
nd lawyers kept from the courtroom. And then there
was me: a disenchanted former political reporter.
During the many years of Vladimir V. Putin’s rule,
we lost our jobs and so much more. So our luckles
s gang had met to ponder what to do about the comi
ng elections, all too aware that nothing could be
done about them.

This is how parliamentary elections work in Russia
: Mr. Putin’s party, United Russia, faces off agai
nst collaborating parties — which would never dare
to criticize him. And the real opposition parties
are banned. But one cannot simply vote against ev
ery party involved. Nor is there any use in boycot
ting, because the election would be considered leg
itimate even if no one but the prime minister and
president showed up.
The only solution, we decided, was irreverent prot
est. And so we came up with a cartoon pig called N
ah-Nah, a name that, in Russian, evokes an unprint
able version of “get lost!” — an expletive for wha
t we’d like to say to those in power. We made post
ers and animated cartoons depicting Nah-Nah at the
polls, destroying the ballot. He would check the
box for every party running and draw an X across t
he ballot. He would do this not in hopes of changi
ng anything, but to illustrate how nauseating thes
e pretend elections are. We posted them online and
called on real voters to follow Nah-Nah’s lead. M
ostly, we wanted to laugh and misbehave a little,
even as United Russia kept its throne.
At the same time, a young activist and very well-k
nown blogger, Aleksei Navalny, offered a different
protest strategy for the elections. He proposed v
oting for any of the collaborating parties in orde
r to avoid casting a vote for United Russia — for
the Communists, for A Just Russia, for Yabloko.
These two protests — Nah-Nah and Navalny — gained
attention, and for the first time in the history o
f the anti-Putin movement, there was a real debate
about methods, a conversation with substance and
without enmity, taking place on the Internet, in c
afes, in Moscow and the suburbs.
Mr. Navalny’s supporters argued that destroying th
e ballot would simply split the anti-Putin vote, g

iving United Russia a bigger victory.
“Nonsense!” Nah-Nah’s fans insisted. “Nothing depe
nds on the vote. Our only option is protest.”
The Navalny faction thought there was hope for the
collaborating parties. “If they could get enough
seats in Parliament, you would see how quickly the
y would move away from Putin.”
The Nah-Nah enthusiasts disagreed. “The moment the
y get to Parliament, they will obey Putin like wel
l-trained puppies.”
Though no one could convince anyone else, more and
more people entered the conversation, more and mo
re people abandoned the apathy that is the very fo
undation of the Putin government.
A few days before the election, I heard a rumor th
at United Russia would be satisfied with only a si
mple majority, as opposed to the two-thirds majori
ty it has now — the party’s main concern is that t
he presidential election in March appear legitimat
e, so that Mr. Putin can replace Dmitri Medvedev,
his underling and the current president, and stay
in power until 2024. But in the end, when the gove
rnment said that United Russia received half of th
e vote, most Russians knew the results were manipu
lated, and suspected the party got even less.
That is because voters, fueled by the debate betwe
en Nah-Nah and Navalny, came to the polls armed wi
th cameras. There was footage of abuses and many a
ccounts of corruption: witnesses said that the hea
d of the Election Commission had thrown packaged b
allots into a voting bin and that pro-Putin youth
voted multiple times with fraudulent IDs; impossib
ly different results from incredibly similar polli
ng stations have been posted online. And the gover
nment-controlled television stations said nothing.

On Monday, the day after the election, there was a
protest in the center of Moscow; despite the rain
, thousands assembled — a sight unseen since the t
ime of Perestroika. The leaders of the Nah-Nah mov
ement and Mr. Navalny’s supporters stood together.
The police arrested nearly 300 people. Among them
was one of the authors of the Nah-Nah strategy, I
lya Yashin, as well as Aleksei Navalny himself. Th
ey were held by the police all night, prevented fr
om meeting with their lawyers. In the morning, the
y were brought to court and sentenced to 15 days f
or disobeying police orders and obstructing traffi
c, respectively.
An even larger protest is planned for Saturday. It
seems that the government has decided to turn the
two into heroes.
Valery Panyushkin is the author of “12 Who Don’t A
gree: The Battle for Freedom in Putin’s Russia.” T
his essay was translated by Yevgeniya Traps from t
he Russian.
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1210: THE SATURDAY PROFILE
Rousing Russia With a Phrase ... By ELLEN BARRY
Aleksei Navalny has aroused Russians angry over wh
at they say were fraudulent parliamentary election
s, rebranding Vladimir V. Putin's United Russia pa
rty as "the party of swindlers and thieves."
===== notyet
MOSCOW — The man most responsible for the extraord
inary burst of antigovernment activism here over t
he past week will not speak at a rally planned for
Saturday, or even attend it, because he is in pri
son.
Cut off from the Internet, Russia’s best-known blo
gger will have to wait until the next morning, whe
n his lawyer will take him a stack of printouts te
lling him what happened — whether the protest fizz

led, exploded into violence or made history. At a
final coordinating meeting for the protest on Frid
ay evening, where a roomful of veteran organizers
were shouting to make themselves heard, a young en
vironmental activist turned toward the crowd, sudd
enly grave.
“I’d like to thank Aleksei Navalny,” she said. “Th
anks to him, specifically because of the efforts o
f this concrete person, tomorrow thousands of peop
le will come out to the square. It was he who unit
ed us with the idea: all against ‘the Party of Swi
ndlers and Thieves,’ ” the name Mr. Navalny coined
to refer to Vladimir V. Putin’s political party,
United Russia.
A week ago, Mr. Navalny, 35, was famous mainly wit
hin the narrow context of Russia’s blogosphere. Bu
t after last Sunday’s parliamentary elections, he
channeled accumulated anger over reported violatio
ns into street politics, calling out to “nationali
sts, liberals, leftists, greens, vegetarians, Mart
ians” via his Twitter feed (135,750 followers) and
his blog (61,184) to protest.
If Saturday’s protest is as large as its organizer
s expect — the city has granted a permit for 30,00
0 — Mr. Navalny will be credited for mobilizing a
generation of young Russians through social media,
a leap much like the one that spawned Occupy Wall
Street and youth uprisings across Europe this year.
The full measure of Mr. Navalny’s charisma became
clear after protests on Monday night; an estimated
5,000 people materialized, making it the largest
anti-Kremlin demonstration in recent memory, and M
r. Navalny was arrested on charges of resisting th
e police and sentenced to 15 days in prison.
All that night, as temperatures dipped below freez
ing, Mr. Navalny’s disciples stood vigil outside t
he precinct where he was being held, their eyes on

their Twitter feeds. Someone had spread a rumor t
hat he was dead, and even his lawyers were unsure
of his whereabouts, adding to the sense that Mr. N
avalny — who has been reluctant to present himself
as a political leader — was at the center of ever
ything that was happening.
“He is the only man who can take all the common hi
psters and make them go onto the street,” said Ant
on Nikolayev, 35, who spent much of Tuesday outsid
e courtrooms hoping to see Mr. Navalny. “He is a f
igure who could beat Putin if he was allowed.”
This assertion may sound far-fetched. Mr. Putin, n
ow in his 12th year as the paramount leader, has a
pproval ratings of above 60 percent, according to
the independent Levada Center. As recently as two
weeks ago, Levada found that 60 percent of Russian
s surveyed were not willing to consider any figure
from the anti-Putin opposition as a presidential
candidate. Only 1 percent named Mr. Navalny, whose
exposure is through Twitter and his blogs, Navaln
y.ru and Rospil.info.
But the aftermath of last Sunday’s parliamentary e
lections has shaken political assumptions, largely
because the authorities seem unable to regain con
trol of the public discourse. For a decade, Russia
’s political agenda has been determined inside the
Kremlin, where strategists selected and promulgat
ed themes for public discussion, said Konstantin R
emchukov, editor of the daily newspaper Nezavisima
ya Gazeta.
“And now, just a few days after the elections, the
political agenda is being determined by other peo
ple,” like the longtime opposition leader Boris Y.
Nemtsov and Mr. Navalny, he said. “This is shocki
ng, and totally unpredictable.”
MR. NAVALNY has Nordic good looks, a caustic sense
of humor and no political organization.

Five years ago, he quit the liberal party Yabloko,
frustrated with the liberals’ infighting and isol
ation from mainstream Russian opinion. Liberals, m
eanwhile, have deep reservations about him, becaus
e he espouses Russian nationalist views. He has ap
peared as a speaker alongside neo-Nazis and skinhe
ads, and once starred in a video that compares dar
k-skinned Caucasus militants to cockroaches. While
cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says
that in the case of humans, “I recommend a pistol.”
What attracts people to Mr. Navalny is not ideolog
y, but the confident challenge he mounts to the sy
stem. A real estate lawyer by training, he employs
data — on his Web sites he documents theft at sta
te-run companies — and relentless, paint-stripping
contempt. “Party of Swindlers and Thieves” has ma
de its way into the vernacular with breathtaking s
peed and severely damaged United Russia’s politica
l brand.
He projects a serene confidence that events are co
nverging, slowly but surely, against the Kremlin.
“Revolution is unavoidable,” he told the Russian e
dition of Esquire, in an interview published this
month. “Simply because the majority of people unde
rstand that the system is wrong. When you are in t
he company of bureaucrats you hear them talking ab
out who has stolen everything, why nothing works a
nd how horrible everything is.”
He was less definitive about the future he envisio
ned for the country, saying only that he hoped it
would “resemble a huge, irrational, metaphysical C
anada.”
Mr. Navalny had become less obscure by the end of
the week. On Wednesday, the former mayor of Moscow
, Yuri M. Luzhkov, said he would consider appearin
g at a protest if Mr. Navalny invited him. A few h

ours later, a blindingly profane reference to Mr.
Navalny was reposted from President Dmitri A. Medv
edev’s Twitter account, prompting his press office
to release a statement explaining that the messag
e had been sent out by a member of the technical s
upport staff “during a routine password change.”
On Thursday, United Russia published an attack on
Mr. Navalny, describing his activism as “typical d
irty self-promotion,” and Secretary of State Hilla
ry Rodham Clinton issued a statement about his cas
e. The consulting firm Medialogia documented a sud
den leap in the number of mentions of Mr. Navalny
in the Russian news media, from several hundred a
day to around 3,000. On Friday, people started cir
culating a Web site promoting him as a candidate i
n the March presidential election. Mr. Navalny, ev
en skeptics admit, managed to knit together a crow
d that had not previously existed.
“They had never gathered anywhere together before,
” wrote Grigory Tumanov, a reporter for Gazeta.ru.
“They just read Twitter, and to them it was clear
that in this situation you have to go somewhere,
do something, unite around someone, because it was
intolerable. Let this be Navalny, with all his pl
uses and minuses.”
BY his appeals hearing on Wednesday, Mr. Navalny l
ooked tired and disgusted. His supporters had foun
d amateur video showing that he had not resisted a
rrest, and that the officers who testified against
him were not the ones who had arrested him, but t
he judge refused to review it. A photograph taken
from outside the detention center showed him gripp
ing the bars on his window and staring out with a
fierce, fixed gaze.
“There are people standing here who were not recru
ited by anyone,” said Viktor Masyagin, 28, outside
a courtroom earlier in the week. “No one drove us
here in buses, no one paid us anything, but here

we are anyway, and we have been here for more than
a day.”
“That should tell you something,” he said.
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1210
Tracing a Mother's Vagabond Path to Murder and Suic
ide in Texas ... By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Denied food stamps, Rachelle Grimmer, who had live
d a wandering existence in recent months, took a h
ostage at gunpoint at a social services office bef
ore shooting her two children and herself.
===== notyet
LAREDO, Tex. — Months after being denied food stam
ps, Rachelle Grimmer grabbed her two children, a .
38-caliber revolver and 50 rounds of ammunition an
d walked into the state social services office her
e on Monday to demand answers.
But Ms. Grimmer’s troubles were far deeper than a
lack of food stamps, and neither the police nor th
e employee she held hostage could resolve them.
Divorced and living a vagabond existence in Texas
in recent months, Ms. Grimmer, 38, told the police
she was frustrated that she had been denied benef
its in other states. She said that her former husb
and was affiliated with the Russian mob and the Ku
Klux Klan, a situation she said led to government
harassment that prevented her from receiving publ
ic assistance.
Her hostage, Robert Reyes, a supervisor who had of
fered himself in trade for two other employees Ms.
Grimmer had taken hostage, granted her the food s
tamp benefits she had requested — $3,050 worth, re
troactive to July, the month she had first applied
. The police slipped the paperwork under the door
to show Ms. Grimmer it was for real. But she refus
ed to leave the small office in the Texas Health a

nd Human Services building, at times sitting in a
chair with her daughter on her lap and communicati
ng with the police on an office phone.
About 10 minutes before midnight, about seven hour
s into the standoff, she hung up on hostage negoti
ators. Moments later, three shots were heard. Ms.
Grimmer had shot both of her children in the head,
and then herself. She died at the scene. The chil
dren were taken to University Hospital in San Anto
nio. Her daughter, Ramie Marie Grimmer, 12, died o
n Wednesday. Her son, Timothy Donald Grimmer, 10,
died a day later.
Carlos R. Maldonado, Laredo’s police chief, said t
hat the denial of benefits was only one of a serie
s of issues that had been troubling Ms. Grimmer, b
ut that investigators had more questions than answ
ers about her motive. The police were not certain
if she was being treated for mental health problem
s and did not know why she moved several months ag
o to Laredo, a border city of 236,000, where she h
ad no family.
“Unfortunately in these situations, there’s a lot
of questions that we have and a lot of those quest
ions may never be answered,” Chief Maldonado said.
“I think we did everything that we possibly could
to resolve the situation. We heard people say, wh
y didn’t the tactical team intervene and do someth
ing about the mother and save the children? There
was never any inclination, any information availab
le to us, that the children were in any danger at
all.”
But Ramie appeared to have known her life was in d
anger. At one point during the standoff, using an
office computer, she updated her Facebook page, wr
iting “may die 2day” in the section for posting wh
ere she worked. Later, she wrote, “tear gas serias
ly,” though none was used by the police.

Ms. Grimmer grew up in Montana and had been living
in Ohio in 2005 when she divorced her husband and
the children’s father, Dale R. Grimmer. By 2010 s
he had moved to Texas, and in recent months she an
d her children seemed to have no permanent address.
In September 2010, the family was staying in a ten
t on a beach on the South Texas coast. In Laredo,
they lived at a mobile home park in a small traile
r with a cracked wall. Neighbors and park workers
would help them with groceries and cash. Ms. Grimm
er sold her truck, forcing the family to walk long
distances around town.
Janie Rodriguez, the manager of Towne North Mobile
Home and RV Park, said that Ms. Grimmer often tol
d her she was frustrated by the state’s refusal to
give her benefits and that, one day weeks ago, sh
e showed her a fax receipt for documents she had s
ent the social services office. “I do blame the st
ate,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “She was a very intellig
ent person and a very wonderful person, a very goo
d mother. She was not mentally ill. The state neve
r came to see how she was living.”
The children were not enrolled in local schools, b
ut were being home-schooled. The state’s child wel
fare agency, the Department of Family and Protecti
ve Services, had come in contact with the family a
t least twice before.
After receiving a report of possible neglect, inve
stigators from the agency checked on the family in
September 2010, when they were living on the beac
h. But the children appeared to be taken care of,
and Ms. Grimmer had food and money, so the case wa
s closed, a department spokesman said. In June, Ms
. Grimmer told the police in Corpus Christi that s
he had been a victim of domestic violence. The age
ncy checked on her and the children but had no con
cerns, said the spokesman, Patrick Crimmins.

Ms. Grimmer had first applied for food stamps at t
he Laredo social services office on July 7. She di
d not meet the criteria to receive benefits within
24 hours because she was receiving child support.
But an employee scheduled a time with Ms. Grimmer
for someone to call her the next day to review he
r case, a spokeswoman for the Texas Health and Hum
an Services Commission said. A caseworker called t
wice but was unable to reach her, the spokeswoman
said.
A letter was sent to Ms. Grimmer asking her to res
chedule, and the appointment was set for July 22.
On that day, a caseworker interviewed Ms. Grimmer
by phone and explained what information was needed
, said the spokeswoman, Stephanie Goodman. Though
Ms. Grimmer turned in some of the paperwork, she d
id not supply materials verifying the amount of ch
ild support she had been receiving monthly, Ms. Go
odman said.
On Aug. 8, the case was closed, and Ms. Grimmer wa
s sent a letter informing her that she had been de
nied food stamp benefits because of the missing in
formation, Ms. Goodman said.
In Texas, benefits applications are approved more
often than they are denied: in the past six months
, 85 percent of cases statewide were approved, and
the median number of days to process an applicati
on was 12, the agency said.
In mid-November, Ms. Grimmer called the agency’s o
mbudsman office, saying that she disagreed with th
e reason she was denied benefits. A supervisor cal
led her on Dec. 1 but could not reach her. No one
in the Laredo office heard from her until she walk
ed in on Monday.
The agency is reviewing its handling of Ms. Grimme
r’s case. “I think we did everything we could,” sa
id Thomas M. Suehs, the commissioner of health and

human services. “It’s a tragic situation.”
Outside the Grimmers’ trailer on Thursday, neighbo
rs gathered to pray for the family. Standing next
to a memorial of balloons and teddy bears, one mot
her spoke of the sunflower bookmark Ms. Grimmer ha
d drawn for her. Santiago Morantes Jr., 16, recall
ed seeing Ms. Grimmer, Ramie and Tim walking to th
e post office one morning. He remembered it becaus
e he noticed all three of them were barefoot.
~~~~~~~~~~
NYT-1210: VENTURES
Everyone Speaks Text Message ... By TINA ROSENBERG
Is technology killing indigenous languages or savi
ng them? Well, you may soon be able to text in N'K
o.
===== notyet (long)
When Ibrahima Traore takes his sons to a park in M
ontclair, N.J., he often sits on a bench and reads
. He reads English, French and Arabic, but most of
the time he reads N’Ko, a language few speakers o
f those languages would recognize. N’Ko is the sta
ndardized writing system for Mande languages, a fa
mily of closely related tongues — among them Traor
e’s language of Mandinka, but also Jula, Bamana, K
oyaga, Marka — spoken, for the most part, in eight
West African countries, by some 35 million people
. N’Ko looks like a cross between Arabic and ancie
nt Norse runes, written from right to left in a bl
ocky script with the letters connected underneath.
Traore types e-mail to his family on his laptop i
n N’Ko, works on his Web site in N’Ko, tweets in N
’Ko on his iPhone and iPad and reads books and new
spapers written in N’Ko to prepare for the N’Ko cl
asses he teaches in the Bronx and for his appearan
ces on an Internet radio program to discuss cultur
al issues around the use of N’Ko.
For years, the Web’s lingua franca was English. Sp
eakers of French, Hindi and Urdu, Arabic, Chinese

and Russian chafed at the advantage the Internet g
ave not only American pop culture but also its lan
guage. For those who lived at the intersection of
modern technology and traditional cultures, the pr
oblem was even worse. “For a long time, technology
was the enemy,” says Inee Slaughter, executive di
rector of the New Mexico-based Indigenous Language
Institute, which teaches Native Americans and oth
er indigenous peoples how to use digital technolog
ies to keep their languages vital. Heritage langua
ges were being killed off by increasing urbanizati
on, the spread of formal education and the shift t
o cash crops, which ended the isolation of indigen
ous communities. Advances in technology seemed to
intensify the decline. “Even in 1999 or 2000, peop
le were saying technology killed their language,”
Slaughter says. “Community elders worried about it
. As television came into homes, English became pe
rvasive 24/7. Mainstream culture infiltrated, and
young kids want to be like that. It was a huge, hu
ge problem, and it’s still there. But now we know
ways technology can be helpful.”
For many tiny, endangered languages, digital techno
logy has become a lifeline.
When Traore was born, N’Ko had already been in use
for several years. But growing up, he did not kno
w it existed. At 6, he was sent from his village o
f Kiniebakoro in rural Guinea to live with a broth
er in Ivory Coast, where he learned to read and wr
ite in French, the language taught in school in bo
th countries. He never saw a book, newspaper, medi
cine label, store name or street sign in N’Ko.
And yet, N’Ko was invented to allow Mande speakers
like Traore to read and write in the languages th
ey spoke at home. In 1943, Solomana Kante, a teach
er’s son who worked as a merchant in Ivory Coast,
resolved to develop a written form for the Mande l
anguage family. (N’Ko means “I say” in Manden lang
uages; speakers of Manden languages can typically

understand one another even if they don’t use all
the same words for the same things.) He tried usin
g the Arabic alphabet, then the Roman alphabet, bu
t found that neither one could express the tonal v
ariations of spoken Manden languages. So in 1949,
he invented his own script — one flexible enough t
o capture any Manden language in writing. Among th
e first books he translated into N’Ko was the Kora
n. He later compiled a history of Manden languages
and culture.
At the time, Guinea had a close relationship with
the Soviet Union, and Kante managed to have two ty
pewriters made in Eastern Europe with N’Ko letters
. (He was given another one by the president of Gu
inea, according to a Guinean newspaper.) “If there
was a typewriter, ink and ribbons were hard to fi
nd,” says Baba Mamadi Diane, a student of Kante’s
who now teaches N’Ko at Cairo University. Almost a
ll of the books and papers in N’Ko in Guinea were
copied by hand by Kante’s students, like medieval
monks, but with several sheets of carbon paper below.
Designed as a language for the common man, N’Ko se
emed destined to remain a code used by an elite. T
hen came the digital revolution.
Heritage languages like N’Ko are taking on new lif
e thanks to technology. An Internet discussion gro
up, Indigenous Languages and Technology, is full o
f announcements for new software to build sound di
ctionaries and a project to collect tweets in Tok
Pisin, a creole language spoken throughout Papua N
ew Guinea, or Pipil, an indigenous language of El
Salvador. “It’s the amplification of Grandma’s voi
ce,” Slaughter says.
Whether a language lives or dies, says K. David Ha
rrison, an associate professor of linguistics at S
warthmore College, is a choice made by 6-year-olds
. And what makes a 6-year-old want to learn a lang
uage is being able to use it in everyday life. “La

nguage is driven from the ground up,” says Don Tho
rnton, a software developer in Las Vegas who speci
alizes in making video games and mobile apps in Na
tive American languages. “It doesn’t matter if you
have a million speakers — if your kids aren’t lea
rning, you’re in big trouble.”
Of 6,909 catalogued languages, hundreds are unlike
ly to be passed on to the next generation. Thornto
n, who has worked with more than 100 Native Americ
an tribes, says that some are already using sophis
ticated programs to preserve their languages. “Oth
er groups,” he says, “we ask about their language
program, and they say, ‘You’re it.’ We look at it
from their standpoint — what are the coolest techn
ologies out there? We start programming for that.”
For the vast majority of the world, the cellphone,
not the Internet, is the coolest available techno
logy. And they are using those phones to text rath
er than to talk. Though most of the world’s langua
ges have no written form, people are beginning to
transliterate their mother tongues into the alphab
et of a national language. Now they can text in th
e language they grew up speaking. Harrison tells o
f traveling in Siberia, where he met a truck drive
r who devised his own system for writing the endan
gered Chulym language, using the Cyrillic alphabet
. “You find people like him everywhere,” Harrison
said. “We are getting languages where the first wr
iting is not the translation of the Bible — as it
has often happened — but text messages.”
Traore, who left Guinea for New York in November 1
988, did not discover N’Ko until a 2007 trip to vi
sit his parents in his native village. When his wi
fe, Greta, a software developer, went into his bro
ther’s room, she noticed books in N’Ko on his shel
ves. Puzzled, she called her husband in. “You said
your language was not written. So what are these
books?” Traore was shocked. (He and Traore did not
grow up together.) When he came back to New York,

he googled N’Ko. “That was the big wow,” he said.
He found a teacher in Queens. “When I listened to
the alphabet, I listened to our history. Now I ca
n read the same words my mother would say to me.”
N’Ko first moved from hand-copied manuscripts into
the digital age two decades ago. In the early 199
0s, Diane, the teacher of N’Ko at Cairo University
, was collating an N’Ko text in a copy shop when h
e was approached by an employee. “Why are you kill
ing yourself?” the man asked him. “Don’t you know
about DOS?” The employee explained to Diane that u
sing computer software, he could write a new scrip
t and generate as many copies as he wished. Togeth
er with information-technology experts at Cairo Un
iversity, Diane developed a rudimentary font to us
e on his own computer. But creating a font that an
yone could use was a much more complicated task.
First, it meant getting N’Ko into Unicode — the in
ternational standard that assigns a unique number
to each character in a given writing system. Then
Microsoft picked up N’Ko for its local language pr
ogram — sort of. N’Ko was included in Windows 7, b
ut the ligatures were misaligned, and the letters
were not linked from below as they should have bee
n. “The original plan was to fully support it, but
we just didn’t have the resources,” said Peter Co
nstable, a senior program manager at Microsoft. Fo
r Windows 8, which is still being tested, Microsof
t has fixed the problem. Most writers of N’Ko down
load the font for use with Open Office’s Graphite
program, developed by SIL International, a Christi
an group with an interest in seeing the Bible reac
h every hut and yurt on the planet.
Digital technology has already transformed how Tra
ore communicates with his family. When his father
died in 1994, his family in Kiniebakoro sent news
of the death to cousins in Ivory Coast by going to
the bus station and looking for a passenger headi
ng toward their city; the cousins then mailed a le

tter to Traore in New York. It took two months. No
w communication with Kiniebakoro takes a day: Trao
re sends an e-mail in N’Ko. His nephew, who works
in the nearby town of Siguiri, checks his e-mail a
t the town’s Internet cafe, prints Traore’s letter
and then goes down to the dock where canoes ferry
people across the Niger River to Kiniebakoro. He
asks someone on the boat to take the letter to Tra
ore’s family’s house.
For Traore and others, the most pressing reason fo
r making N’Ko available to Mande speakers is that
only a small percentage of Guineans can read and w
rite. The United Nations puts the rate of adult li
teracy at 39 percent, but that figure counts mostl
y those who live in major cities — in rural areas,
it is much lower. Schooling in rural Guinea is of
ten conducted in the open air, with no chairs, per
haps a blackboard, maybe one book. But most discou
raging to students, it takes place in French, a la
nguage they don’t speak at home.
“The only hope for literacy in Guinea is N’Ko lite
racy,” Traore says. For Mande speakers, he says, N
’Ko is extremely simple to learn. He and his fello
w N’Ko advocates have sponsored hundreds of inform
al schools throughout Guinea that teach in Manden
languages and N’Ko. This year, for the first time,
N’Ko will be taught side by side with French in a
n official school — the pilot program will be in K
iniebakoro, Traore’s hometown.
People had been working on breathing life into N’K
o for years, but they found out about one another
only when they began to put up N’Ko Web sites. The
re is Traore’s site, kouroussaba.com, Diane’s kanj
amadi.com and fakoli.net, the project of Mamady Do
umbouya, a Guinean who worked as a software engine
er in Philadelphia and is devoting his retirement
to N’Ko. He also runs a small organization called
the N’Ko Institute of America. Diane’s students in
Cairo are subtitling DVDs for West Africa in N’Ko

. Among the first was a season of the TV show “24.”
If you have an iPhone, tweeting and e-mailing in N
’Ko is now easy. Eatoni, a company based in Manhat
tan that has created software for cellphone keyboa
rds in some 300 languages, released an N’Ko app ea
rlier this year. The iPhone keyboard app works on
the iPad too. Eatoni’s C.E.O., Howard Gutowitz, de
veloped it after months of tests and advice from T
raore, Diane and other N’Ko users. But iPhones are
too expensive to be widely used in rural Africa.
Almost every African villager owns or aspires to o
wn a conventional cellphone (equipped with only a
number pad) — even if he or she has to travel to t
own to charge it.
Africa is the world’s fastest-growing cellphone ma
rket. Texting allows farmers to check crop prices.
Nurses can send health information. People can do
their banking. With airtime prohibitively expensi
ve, texting is the preferred mode of communication
. “Text messages would be a lifesaving tool for us
in Guinea,” Traore said. He also says he believes
that the ability to text in their own language wo
uld give people a powerful reason to learn to read
. “Before, men in my village used to brag about th
eir wristwatches,” Traore said. “Now they brag abo
ut their cellphones.” When he shows N’Ko speakers
his iPhone and tells them, “This is your language,
” they are dumbstruck. An N’Ko newspaper published
in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, recently crowed: “D
on’t look for N’Ko under a cabbage leaf any more.
It’s on the iPhone now.”
Those old cellphones don’t have apps, of course. Y
ou use the language the phone comes with; in West
Africa, that is French. The market for an N’Ko pho
ne would be, potentially, tens of millions of peop
le. But getting manufacturers to add new alphabets
to cellphones isn’t easy. Gutowitz has had a long
and frustrating experience trying to do so. “Most
manufacturers roll their eyes,” he said. “I spent

a decade running around the world talking to cell
phone manufacturers — everyone I could think of —
saying, ‘Look, we can support 100 languages, it’s
a big market.’ They didn’t care. People say, ‘Why
don’t you go talk to Nokia?’ I have talked to Noki
a. Again and again and again.”
Lamine Dabo and Nouhan Sano, Guineans who live in
Bangkok, where there is a prosperous and close-kni
t Guinean community, have had a similar experience
. They have been trying to persuade manufacturers
to develop an N’Ko cellphone since 2007. Dabo and
Sano’s gem-importing businesses take them all over
Asia, and all over Asia they bring their list of
more than 17,000 N’Ko words. Dabo says it’s possib
le to build a cheap cellphone with N’Ko as its lan
guage, a camera and slots for two SIM cards — a ne
cessity in Africa, where reception is often spotty
. When he went to Guinea and Mali to discuss the p
hone with distributors, he said, he was mobbed wit
h interest. But his briefcase was filled with reje
ctions from manufacturers. Some asked him to put u
p the money himself. “Everyone says it’s possible,
but the money is not enough for them to make it a
priority,” he said.
Dabo and Sano are still trying. It might seem stra
nge that the fortunes of N’Ko and of indigenous la
nguages around the world should depend on the abil
ity to subtitle “24,” to write with Windows and, a
bove all, to text. But for hundreds of heritage la
nguages, a four-inch bar of plastic and battery an
d motherboard is the future of the past.
~~~~~~~~~~