Madame Butterfly

summer pajamas.

JRK interview on Mugglenet regarding HBP

http://www.mugglenet.com/jkrinterview2.shtml

Perhaps it is more optimistic to think

"one more star shines over Hollywood"

April 2005 issue

Saving civil war battlefields on page 61

There's even a map to go along with it.

I still have it in my living room

I look up what issue it was tonight while making dinner.

It's raining!!! YAY!!!

We haven't had rain in weeks!!

But the wind.

There's some sort of warning out there but I can't tell for what.

'Batman' DC Comics Illustrator Dies

Aparo Also Drew Other Action Heros

SOUTHINGTON, Conn. (July 20) - James N. Aparo, an illustrator for DC Comics for more than 30 years who drew Batman, the Green Arrow and other action heroes, has died.

Aparo died Tuesday at home after a short illness, said his daughter, Donna Aparo. He was 72.

Aparo, who grew up in New Britain, brought characters to life in his home studio in Southington, corresponding with DC Comics through the mail. He retired about four years ago, his daughter said.

Besides Batman and the Green Arrow, Aparo also did illustrations for Aquaman, the Brave and the Bold, Phantom Stranger and Spectre.

His big break came in the late 1960s when he was working for Charlton Press and his editor got a job at DC. The editor, (Please stop me from cursing) Giordano, brought Aparo with him to the comic book maker.

In a 2000 interview with Jim Amash for Comic Book Artist, Aparo said he went to Hartford Art School for a semester, but was mostly self-taught.

"I just drew as a kid and went with it," he said. "I studied and copied comic strips and comic books. I grew up with Superman, Batman, and Captain Marvel. I really liked Captain Marvel Jr. by Mac Raboy. That was beautiful stuff. I liked Alex Raymond, Milton Caniff ... all of those guys."

Aparo is survived by his wife, Julieann, and three children.

07/20/05 04:11 EDT

A friend of mine lost her daughter last May.

She was 10.

She'd been battling leukemia, and it wasn't the cancer that killed her, it was the lack of immunities.

Most horrible experience I have ever been a part of.

Sadly, her father lost his brother to the same cancer at the same age.

The way his body rocked with tears and anguish will make me cry any time it comes to memory for the rest of my life.

it's an image hosting site.

www.photobucket.com

It's thundering!!!

And the sun is shining no more.

Please please please let it rain like crazy!!!

Getting ready to go to the local county fair

I take it you haven't been pee'd on yet then?

 

-soft pink summer dress

342076[/snapback]

Pee'd on poo'd on thrown up on you name it Mandy has throw it all at me....once i got all 3 at once

342079[/snapback]

Ahhhhhhhhhh the joys of a new baby. Never having clean clothes for yourself!!

Enjoy it Hang.

Before you know it the boys will be calling her to go to the movies "as friends"

I take it you haven't been pee'd on yet then?

-soft pink summer dress

Got that off of photobucket.

Loads of things like that there.

New homes will soon cover much of Point Peter. But the developer, the Land Resource Companies of Atlanta, plans to include a memorial park as a reminder of the long-forgotten fort.

I think that's sad.

In a recent National Geographic they had a story on how old war sites are disappearing to development.

It was amazing how quickly the developments occurred and of how many knew so little of their local history.

Feeling sad and confused.

Who's Fighting Cancer in Kids? Drug Firms Not Interested

By Liz Szabo, USA TODAY

(July 20) -- Fourteen-year-old Max Levine owes his life to experimental cancer therapies. Yet a drug that helped keep him alive might never reach the market.

University pharmacists mix the medication, called 131I-MIBG, for patients who have no other options, says his doctor, John Maris, an associate professor at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Max's disease - neuroblastoma, a tumor of the nervous system - afflicts just 650 children a year and is too rare to attract drug developers, Maris says. The tumor, like all childhood cancers, is considered an "orphan" disease.

"If our trial is successful, and we prove this drug cures patients, there is no guarantee that anyone is going to make it," Maris says. "We could say, 'We've proved this drug works, but we don't have any.' " (Related story: Kids' cancer drugs run short)

Maris is one of many doctors who are frustrated by the lack of interest in developing drugs for young cancer patients. A government report in April found a "near absence" of research into pediatric cancer drugs. About half of the oncology drugs used to treat children are at least 20 years old, according to the report by the Institute of Medicine, a non-profit group that advises the government on health policy.

Most drugs given to children were developed for adults, then passed down to children. In the past 10 years, only one cancer drug, Clolar, has received initial approval for children.

Stephen Sallan, chief of staff at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, says adults attract more cancer research than children because they are a far larger and more lucrative market. Patients younger than 20 make up 12,400 of the nearly 1.4 million Americans stricken with cancer each year. Drug companies are generally unwilling to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into such a small market, he says.

Why adults instead of kids

Drug companies say there are sound reasons to focus on adults. Susan Desmond-Hellman, president of product development at Genentech, says she's compelled by the opportunity to help large numbers of patients. Not only does cancer strike far more adults, but their disease is less curable: 64% of adult cancer patients can be cured, compared with 80% of kids.

Organizing clinical trials for children also is difficult, Desmond-Hellman says. Because doctors are reluctant to try experimental drugs in kids who might be cured by standard ones, only a fraction of pediatric patients are eligible for early clinical trials. Enrolling enough kids to test a new drug can take years.

There are financial risks, as well. Companies typically invest more than 10 years and $800 million to bring new medicines to market, according to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development.

Companies fear that if problems surface during pediatric trials, an otherwise promising drug might never be approved at all, even in adults. "It's a big risk for a small reward," Sallan says.

Because new, patented drugs are the most profitable, relatively few companies are interested in the older, generic drugs on which young patients depend, says Mary Relling, pharmaceutical department chair at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis.

Production problems at one plant can disrupt the entire supply of a drug. Recently, doctors have struggled with shortages of at least five key oncology drugs. In one case, some children have had to go without a leukemia drug.

Doctors such as Sallan say they don't want to give up on children with cancer, who have perhaps more to lose from the disease than other patients. Young survivors pay a high price, their bodies scorched for up to three years with therapies so toxic that many are left permanently disabled.

New "targeted" therapies, which mostly spare patients from the ravages of conventional chemotherapy, might allow young survivors to lead normal, healthy lives, Sallan says. These breakthrough drugs are being tested almost exclusively in adults, however. Only one, Gleevec, has been tested in children and approved for their use.

Targeted drugs developed for adults might not help children, says Mitchell Cairo, chief of pediatric hematology and bone-marrow transplantation at the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital at Columbia University.

Chemotherapy works for all ages because the drugs act broadly, poisoning growing cells - healthy and malignant - throughout the body. Today's "smart drugs" target only cells with particular genes, Cairo says. But the genes targeted in common adult cancers may not be the same ones that drive pediatric tumors. And targeted therapies often work for only a fraction of patients with particular types of cancer, which could shrink the market even further.

Maris says what children really need are drugs designed just for them.

The Food and Drug Administration has created a number of incentives to encourage companies to make pediatric drugs.

Through its orphan drug program, the FDA awarded Genzyme seven years to sell Clolar without competition from generics. Because Genzyme tested the drug in children, the FDA extended that exclusivity by six months. The FDA also gave Clolar "accelerated approval" in December, based on a study of 49 patients.

Yet such incentives haven't done enough to promote new pediatric drugs, according to the IOM report. Businesses have no incentive to test drugs in children early, because they receive the same benefits if they conduct trials before or after approval, the report concludes.

"There's a reason these drugs haven't gone forward," says David Parkinson, who collaborated on the report and heads the oncology development at Amgen. "They cost more to develop than they will potentially earn."

Promising strategies

Some doctors say they're starting to see progress. Researchers are testing more than 20 targeted therapies in children, says Malcolm Smith, associate branch chief of pediatrics for the National Cancer Institute's cancer therapy evaluation program. Several medications such as Velcade, Rituxan and Iressa already have been on the market for adults for several years. Many doctors would like to see drugs tested in children earlier.

That's why the NCI recently created a program to screen 10 to 15 promising drugs in the lab against common pediatric tumors.

Advances in molecular biology also may help. At Dana-Farber, scientists enroll patients in studies based on the biology of their tumors, not on their age, Sallan says. Doctors are planning to test a drug in adults and children with a type of leukemia.

St. Jude has launched a $10 million effort to begin testing drugs earlier. The hospital's director, William Evans, hopes industry eventually will collaborate with St. Jude, which recently opened a drug-making facility, to develop new therapies.

More coordination is needed

While such steps are encouraging, they are still far too rare, Parkinson says.

He suggests a more systematic approach: Government, university scientists, industry leaders and patient advocates could form a "public-private partnership" to jump-start drug development. Through this kind of partnership, biotech firms might share their "libraries" of experimental compounds, Parkinson says.

The NCI could help coordinate trials, and companies could keep the right to sell successful products. The partnership, acting like a non-profit corporation, could shepherd drugs through the approval process, then commercialize them.

"We will need someone to drive this process, to say, 'Our mission is to develop new cancer drugs for children,' " says Peter Adamson, an editor of the IOM report and chairman of the developmental therapeutics program of the Children's Oncology Group, a national research consortium. In the case of abandoned drugs, the IOM report calls on the NCI to step in as "developer of last resort."

Families say they are willing to do their part. Nearly half of child cancer patients participate in NCI-sponsored clinical trials, compared with only about 4% of adults, Smith says.

Max's mother, Sue Levine, says she's counting on scientists to come up with new drugs. Experimental therapies have given Max two years. Although 131I-MIBG stopped working after six months, it kept the Cherry Hill, N.J., boy alive long enough to become eligible for another experimental drug, which has controlled his cancer for a year and a half.

"The fact that my son is here playing with his GameBoy is a miracle," Levine says. "If my son can give these doctors some knowledge, he's willing to try it."

Archaeologists find relics at Georgia fort

Final battle of War of 1812 fought at Point Peter

Updated: 7:53 p.m. ET May 20, 2005

SAVANNAH, Ga. - On a narrow peninsula along Georgia's marshy coast, archaeologists have uncovered relics from a forgotten piece of American history — the fort where British and U.S. troops waged the final battle of the War of 1812.

Point Peter, where cannons once pointed from the city of St. Marys toward Cumberland Island, fell to British forces days after Gen. Andrew Jackson's victory in the Battle of New Orleans on Jan. 8, 1815.

The fort was burned down by British troops and its remains had been buried until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers required an archaeological survey by developers of Cumberland Harbour, a 1,014-acre waterfront subdivision being built on the site. Only a state historical marker, placed on the site in 1953, pointed out the fort's location.

"A few historians knew about this. But this event, which is really significant in the War of 1812, is mostly forgotten to the public," said Scott Butler, who led the excavation for the Atlanta archaeology firm Brockington and Associates. "We're trying to change that."

Six months of digging in Georgia's southeast corner turned up more than 67,000 artifacts from Point Peter's barracks, latrine and well.

Butler's team found an 1803 rifle missing only its barrel, musket balls, uniform buttons, pocket knives, bone dice used for gambling, spoons and forks as well as many shards of pottery.

Animal bones found in a buried trash pile indicate soldiers at Point Peter spiced up their diet of military rations by catching fish, rabbits, raccoons and possums.

"This is certainly nationally significant because of the events at St. Marys, but also because we know so little archaeologically about the War of 1812," said David Crass, Georgia's state archaeologist. "And it was such a different war from the American Revolution and the Civil War."

Built in 1796 at St. Marys, then the southernmost U.S. city on the eastern seaboard, Point Peter was armed with a battery of eight cannons at the tip of a 2-mile-long peninsula less than a mile wide. While defending the coast from invasion, the fort also trained American militiamen.

In the War of 1812, which actually lasted until 1815, America waged its last conflict against foreign invaders and settled any doubts about the fledgling nation's permanent independence from Great Britain.

Point Peter became a little-known footnote compared with battles at Chesapeake Bay and New Orleans, the torching of Washington and the bombardment of Baltimore that inspired Francis Scott Key to write "The Star Spangled Banner."

Butler's team pieced together the history of Point Peter from documents scattered from Washington's National Archives to the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah and papers kept in St. Marys.

"It took a lot of digging for us to come up with these specifics," said Connie Huddleston, who is compiling the team's findings for an exhibit in St. Marys. "I think it was just overlooked because the Battle of New Orleans was so embedded in everyone's mind as the end of the war."

Two days after Jackson's victory at New Orleans, as many as 1,500 British troops landed on Cumberland Island off the Georgia coast on Jan. 10, 1815. Though the British had signed the Treaty of Ghent on Christmas Eve, officially ending the war, word had not yet spread to commanders in the U.S.

On Jan. 13, about 600 British troops attacked Point Peter, overwhelming its 130 soldiers. The British seized St. Marys, looted jewelry and fine China from its residents, and burned the fort. It was never used again as a military outpost.

"They burned all the buildings at Point Peter, they took the cannons," Butler said. "It was described by an American officer who came there in 1818 as a poor and dreary, miserable place."

Butler and his team wrapped up its excavation in December. After cleaning and cataloging artifacts in metro Atlanta, they hope to have the St. Marys exhibit ready for the Fourth of July.

New homes will soon cover much of Point Peter. But the developer, the Land Resource Companies of Atlanta, plans to include a memorial park as a reminder of the long-forgotten fort.

Peruvian ‘writing’ system goes back 5,000 years

Ancient culture used knots and strings to convey information

By Jude Webber

Updated: 8:00 p.m. ET July 19, 2005

LIMA, Peru - Archaeologists in Peru have found a “quipu” on the site of the oldest city in the Americas, indicating that the device, a sophisticated arrangement of knots and strings used to convey detailed information, was in use thousands of years earlier than previously believed.

Previously the oldest known quipus, often associated with the Incas whose vast South American empire was conquered by the Spanish in the 16th century, dated from about A.D. 650.

But Ruth Shady, an archaeologist leading investigations into the Peruvian coastal city of Caral, said quipus were among a treasure trove of articles discovered at the site, which is about 5,000 years old.

“This is the oldest quipu, and it shows us that this society ... also had a system of ‘writing’ (which) would continue down the ages until the Inca empire and would last some 4,500 years,” Shady said.

She was speaking before the opening in Lima Tuesday of an exhibition of the artifacts which shed light on Caral, which she called one of the world’s oldest civilizations.

Found among offerings

The quipu, with its well-preserved, brown cotton strings wound around thin sticks, was found with a series of offerings including mysterious fiber balls of different sizes wrapped in ”nets” and pristine reed baskets.

“We are sure it corresponds to the period of Caral because it was found in a public building,” Shady said. “It was an offering placed on a stairway when they decided to bury this and put down a floor to build another structure on top.”

Pyramid-shaped public buildings were being built at Caral, a planned coastal city 115 miles (185 kilometers) north of Lima, at the same time that the Saqqara pyramid, the oldest in Egypt, was going up. They were were already being revamped when Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Cheops (or Khufu) was under construction, Shady said.

“Man only began living in an organized way 5,000 years ago in five points of the globe — Mesopotamia (roughly comprising modern Iraq and part of Syria), Egypt, India, China and Peru,” Shady said. Caral was 3,200 years older than cities of another ancient American civilization, the Maya, she added.

Caral ‘advanced alone’

Shady said no equivalent of the “Rosetta Stone” that deciphered the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt had yet been found to fully unlock the language of the quipus, but said their existence pointed to a sophisticated, organized society where such information as production, taxes and debts were recorded.

“They came up with their own system becausem unlike cities in the Old World which had contact with each other and exchanged knowledge and experiences, this (city) in Peru was isolated in the Americas, and advanced alone.”

Caral’s arid location at an altitude of 11,500 feet (3,500 meters) has helped preserve its treasures, such as piles of raw cotton — still uncombed and containing seeds, though turned a dirty brown by the ages — and a ball of cotton thread.

The exhibition includes some of the 25 huge whale bones fashioned into chairs found at the site, as well as a cotton-soled sandal and flutes and pipes made from animal horns, pelican or condor bones or reeds.

The remains of jungle fruits, cactus fiber and shells revealed trade with distant regions and a block of salt the size of a small laptop computer was found in Caral’s main temple, suggesting salt may have had religious as well as commercial value.

Shady said representations on clay figurines had helped show that nobles wore their hair in two long ponytails each side of the face, with a fringe at the front and the hair on the top of the head cropped close to the skull.

Super-speed broadband seen coming in 2006

Internet services over cable-TV line could get 50 times faster

Updated: 9:10 a.m. ET July 20, 2005

HELSINKI, Finland - Broadband Internet access via TV cables can reach 100 Megabits per second as early as next year, 50 times faster than the average broadband speeds now offered to cable TV homes, a Finnish firm said on Wednesday.

Similar data transmission speeds are possible over fibre networks, but these cost much more for the operators to build.

“This is a cost-efficient technology as we use the cable TV networks which are already in place,” Jukka Rinnevaara, Chief Executive of small-cap Finnish broadband equipment maker Teleste, told Reuters.

Teleste, whose rivals include big U.S. firms Scientific Atlanta and Cisco Systems Inc., said it would early next year bring to the market its Ethernet to the Home product which will give consumers access to 100Mb/s speed.

The sector is closely followed by big technology firms. Last month Sweden’s Ericsson offered $51 million to buy Norwegian firm AXXESSIT, which makes broadband ethernet access equipment for telecom operators.

To accelerate the transmission speed Teleste fits ethernet — a cheap and standard transport method for Internet data over broadband networks — into cable television networks.

It said it expects first rival technology to be on the market at the earliest in the second-quarter of 2007.

Teleste is running a field-trial with cable TV service provider Essent in Netherlands, but not yet at the top speeds it expects most homes will need in a few years time.

“Based on our research 30 Megabits per second is the absolute minimum in future homes. Just one TV program would take 10-20 Megabits per second of this alone. So, very fast we would reach a need for 30 Megabits, and also for 50 Megabits per second,” Pekka Rissanen, a Teleste executive told a news conference.

Rissanen said the cost of connecting a home with the new ethernet-to-the-home technology can vary between 50 euros ($60.28) and 200 euros ($241).

CEO Rinnevaara declined to say how much the new technology could boost Teleste’s sales or profits in the next 12 months

pink boxers with loud green hybiscus print

pink tank top

Trying to wake up

Getting ready to go for a walk

Then off to bed to read.

Ancient Aryan civilization achieved incredible technological progress 40 centuries ago

07/16/2005 18:32

Scientists discovered mysterious circles on the area of the ancient Russian town of Arkaim, which is the same age with Egypt and Babylon

President Putin has recently visited one of the most mysterious places on planet Earth - the ruins of the ancient town of Arkaim, which is situated on the outskirts of the city of Chelyabinsk. Historians, archaeologists and ufologists have spent many years trying to unravel the secrets of the town. Which nation was living in Arkaim more than 40 centuries ago? How did people of such ancient civilization manage to accomplish incredible technological progress, which still seems to be unachievable nowadays? A group of Russian researchers, with Vadim Chernobrovy at the head, has recently returned from the mysterious region. The scientist said that specialists and students had built numerous tent camps around Arkaim.

The Arkaim valley in the south of Ural was supposed to be flooded in 1987: local authorities were going to create a water reservoir there to irrigate droughty fields. However, scientists found strange circles in the center of the valley: the authorities gave archaeologists 12 months to explore the area. Scientists were shocked to find out that Arkaim was the same age as Egypt and Babylon, and a little older than Troy and Rome.

Gennady Zdanovich, the chairman of the archaeological expedition in Ural had to prove the scientific significance of Arkaim to regional officials. "We achieved what seemed to be absolutely unreal: the multi-million construction project in the region was shut down," the scientist said.

Archaeological excavations showed that the people, who inhabited Arkaim, represented one of the most ancient Indo-European civilizations, particularly the branch, which is referred to as the Aryan culture. Arkaim turned out to be not only a town, but also a temple and an astronomic observatory.

"A flight above Arkaim on board a helicopter gives you an incredible impression. The huge concentric circles on the valley are clearly visible. The town and its outskirts are all enclosed in the circles. We still do not know, what point the gigantic circles have, whether they were made for defensive, scientific, educational, or ritual purposes. Some researchers say that the circles were actually used as the runway for an ancient spaceport," Vadim Chernobrovy said.

Researchers discovered that the ancient town was equipped with the storm sewage system, which helped Arkaim's residents avoid floods. The people were protected against fires as well: timbered floorings and houses themselves were imbued with fireproof substance. It was a rather strong compound, the remnants of which can still be found in the ruins of the town.

Each house was outfitted with "all modern conveniences," as they would say nowadays. There was a well, an oven and dome-like food storage in every house. The well was branching out into two underground trenches: one of them was directed to the oven and the other one ended in the food storage. The trenches were used to supply chilly air to the oven and to the food storage. The cool air from the trenches was also creating a very powerful traction force in the Aryan oven, which made it possible to smelt bronze there.

The central square in Arkaim was the only object of square shape in the town. Judging upon traces of bonfires that were placed in a specific order on the square, the place was used as a site for certain rituals.

Arkaim was built according to a previously projected plan as a single complicated complex, which also had an acute orientation on astronomic objects. While archaeologists are meticulously brushing dust off ancient stones trying to recreate the lifestyle of Arkaim's residents, ufologists study mysterious phenomena, which they register in the town: inexplicable fluctuations of voltage, magnetic field tension, temperatures and so on.

Natalia Leskova