Method Acting 101
There was a time when "committed" actors swore by method acting for really nailing roles, really living in the skin of the characters they portrayed. It's a technique wherein the actor aims for total emotional identification with the part, and once they're in the zone, they don't leave it. They don't break character when the director yells cut. If the character is angry and volatile, the actor will be angry and volatile for the whole 4 months. If the character is needy and vulnerable, then so will be the actor. You can understand why it's difficult to work with such an actor - it must feel like working with a toddler, one who doesn't take naps and won't be sent to time out.
Lots of actors have taking method acting so far it makes my eyes roll around in their sockets but it was Jared Leto's method approach to the Joker in Suicide Squad that led
Angelica Jade Bastien of The Atlantic to declare "Method acting is over." Thanks to its overuse in Oscar-baity screeners by those actively seeking accolades, the method has lost its appeal, but Leto's over-the-top zeal revealed the "technique" as more marketing tool than anything else and the prestige is all but gone. Jared Leto sent his fellow costars screwy gifts of used condoms, dead pigs, and live rats, apparently because he felt that's the kind of thoughtful gesture the Joker would make, or at least that it would play well as an anecdote on Jimmy Kimmell. He also watched footage of brutal crimes online because apparently pretending to be a bad person isn't enough, one must actually become reprehensible.
Going "method" is really just a new way for an actor to show off; it makes the creation of a character more visible and signals to the Academy "I'd like my Oscar now." This identity branding is indulged by Hollywood but often divisive if not downright disruptive on set.
Practiced by Hollywood heavyweights like Paul Newman, Montgomery Clift, Dustin Hoffman, and Jack Nicholson, method acting was revolutionary in its time, and idealized in the performances of Marlon Brando. James Franco recently wrote that "Brando's performances revolutionized American acting precisely because he didn't seem to be 'performing,' in the sense that he wasn't putting something on as much as he was being." But Brando never took it to the extremes that we see today.
Leonardo DiCaprio has used method acting to rebrand himself as a "serious actor" after being mistaken for a hearthrob in his early career. His recent Oscar campaign for The Revenant emphasized the grueling ordeal he went through, including eating bison liver (despite being vegetarian), risking hypothermia by striding into freezing rivers, and sleeping in an animal carcass. But doesn't this sound more like an episode of Fear Factor? Isn't acting really about pretending? The Revenant isn't a documentary about frontiersmen. I'm sure it would have played just as well had he shot the scene in a lukewarm stream instead. CGI in some breath clouds and it's all the same to me.
Christian Bale seems to be a practitioner of the method in order to add machismo to his work. "I have a very sissy job, where I go to work and get my hair done, and people do my makeup, and I go and say lines and people spoil me rotten. This is just not something to be quite as proud of as many people would have you believe." So Bale counters this by really losing himself in a role. For The Machinist, he lost 70lbs and got down to a very unhealthy 120 (on a 6′ frame), and then turned around and gained 100lbs to play Batman just 4 months later.He went on to stay in Bruce Wayne's American accent not just for the duration of the filming, but for all the press as well.
Shia LaBeouf went 4 months without washing on the set of Fury, where he played a soldier in the trenches (this got him banished to a bed and breakfast far away from the hotel where the other cast and crew stayed). He also cut his own face with a knife, and pulled his own tooth. His co-star, Brad Pitt, non-Method, injects roles with his natural charisma rather than stunts and overly-studied contrivances. Whose performances do you prefer?
Daniel Day-Lewis may be the most over-the-top Method actor of his time. While filming My Left Foot, he refused to get out of his wheelchair, forcing crew to carry him around, and spoon-feed him dinner. He lived in the wild while shooting Last of the Mohicans, and ate only what he shot himself. He insisted that everyone address him as "Mr President" on the set of Lincoln, and forbade people from speaking to him unless it was in language (and accents) from the time period. He refused a winter coat on the set of Gangs of New York, and when he inevitably caught pneumonia, he refused "modern day" medical treatment.
DeNiro got a real cab license while filming Taxi Driver, and picked up fares around NYC between takes. Pacino made an actual citizen's arrest while filming Serpico. Adrien Brody starved himself and sold his apartment to feel "lost" while playing a Holocaust survivor in The Pianist. If you're getting the feeling that this so-called Method is about ego more than art, you're not alone. And I wonder if you're seeing the other pattern here...that all the names on this list are men.
There are plenty of Method actresses as well: Marilyn Monroe, Ellyn Burstyne, and Jane Fonda all studied the technique. They just never adopted the crazy stunts. Gena Rowlands is probably the best Method actor you'll ever come across, but she does it without resorting to tricks. Sadly, when we hear a woman is "immersed" in a role, it almost always means she's altered her physical appearance. So it's pretty obvious that not only is method acting obnoxious and ridiculous, it's also pretty sexist. But what else is new?
This entry was posted in Behind the Scenes and tagged Christian Bale, Daniel Day-Lewis, discussion, jared leto, Leonardo DiCaprio, Shia LaBeouf on January 6, 2017 by Jay.
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22 thoughts on "Method Acting 101"
gumusdis.com January 6, 2017 at 1:14 pm
Wonderful post and movies I like especially fury and suicide squad.
Widdershins January 6, 2017 at 1:48 pm
Another name for narcissistic wanking!
Henry Chamberlain January 6, 2017 at 3:09 pm
I did not know that Shia pulled out one of his teeth for the sake of his role in a movie. Who is going to notice or care about such demented dedication? Between Shia and Brad Pitt, I might not choose either one. I would definitely go with Paul Dano. Whatever he's doing, it's working.
BroadBlogs January 6, 2017 at 5:11 pm
Wow! Christian Bale's method acting is freaking scary. A little sanity, please!
Liz A. January 6, 2017 at 7:30 pm
I get the trying of things to get a feel for the role, but then there is going too far. Moderation is key. But some people are going to go to extremes no matter what.
ninvoid99 January 6, 2017 at 8:05 pm
Method acting used to be cool as I like it when people Christian Bale and Charlize Theron would do something to create something that is real whereas Jared Leto just makes it uncool. It is just now a method for vanity where it's not about the performance but rather "look at me, I can act" bullshit.
Christopher January 6, 2017 at 10:02 pm
Even for some of the earlier actors method acting seems unnecessary. Coppola did screen tests with Brando for The Godfather and Brando slipped into the character of Don Corleone with just a few moments preparation and shoe polish in his hair.
Robert DeNiro did incredible preparation for Bloody Mama-he even corrected the speech coach's accent-but had trouble in a scene where he drives a car because he didn't know how to drive.
And then there's the story I've heard that on the set of Marathon Man Dustin Hoffman said "This role is killing me" and Olivier said, "Why don't you try acting?"
And I just saw the picture of Olivier...never mind!
fragglerocking January 7, 2017 at 6:44 am
It all sounds a bit bonkers and unnecessary. Must be really annoying for the proper actors in the movie. Brad Pitt acted his socks off in Fury I thought. Shia The Buf didn't impress me as much.
Brittani January 7, 2017 at 7:59 am
Great post. Method acting it mostly ridiculous to me, but there are some cases where it works. Robert DeNiro driving a cab? Fine. Living alone for a month to feel isolated, sure. But when your method acting starts affecting other people, that's when you're going overboard. I remember during the Lincoln press tour, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was talking about how Daniel Day-Lewis wrote him a letter as Abraham Lincoln and had studied his handwriting, I thought the interviewer was going to burst out laughing. If I were an actor or crew member, I'm not sure I'd want to work with someone who was going to be full on method to the point of never leaving character and possibly disrupting others.
Jay Post author January 7, 2017 at 5:01 pm
Yes, I heard Sally Field saying he would always text her in character, and demand she reply back in proper old English, and he even signed the texts "A" - but hello - texting wasn't exactly period!!! It's idiotic.
Harlon January 7, 2017 at 2:06 pm
I always thought that it was a great quote contrasting two great actors when Sir Lawrence Olivier said to Dusting Hoffman during the filming of The Marathon Man - 'Why don't you try acting dear boy?' So I really enjoyed this posting about acting styles and I think you also made a very astute observation that there is a double standing for Method Acting between men and women, over time for women it really has evolved more so into their appearance. Even if you may be assholes, it's nice to read stuff from someone who gets into movies as much as I do. If I worked behind the snack counter, I'd supersize your combo snack and not charge you extra. 🙂 Harlon
That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me all week!!!
J. January 7, 2017 at 4:12 pm
Wait, Leto and method acting for the part of Joker? How did I miss that? Anyhoo, I think my favourite method acting story is Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison. For those not familiar with that one, apparently he spent a year walking around as Jim, then folks had to refer to him as Jim, and it's said that after filming had wrapped up he was still in Jim mode. Apparently he needed therapy! I don't know how true it is, or how much of it has been exaggerated, but that's a whole different level of method acting, eh?
Yeah, I read a lot about him doing that role. As a counsellor I suppose I get uncomfortable thinking about anyone getting that obsessive about it. Seems unhealthy, and I think you need better boundaries not just between work and not work, but between self and not self!
Hazzieandsof January 9, 2017 at 1:17 pm
I feel a bit better knowing I'm not the only one that thought some method acting was a bit over the top but didn't even stop to think about it being mostly men. Thanks for the perspective.
Jay Post author January 23, 2017 at 1:37 pm
It's just gotten ridiculous and there's so much bravado in it.
Lloyd Marken January 10, 2017 at 10:26 am
I'm all for method acting to a point. De Niro boxed for Raging Bull, Bale did great work in Rescue Dawn and looks the part in The Fighter and American Hustle. I get his motivation and revel in the physical transformations. Day Lewis too I'm a huge fan of and think the work pays off on screen. I think it would be nice if more actresses were recognised for method acting. Naomi Watts for example worked with a nurse for Eastern Promises but that tends to get forgotten next to what Viggo Mortensen did in the same film. I think a lot of it as passed off as routine research or training but actually I think more preparation work done by actresses should get recognised. Gene Hackman once said to young actors 'Whatever you need to get into that moment you do." Old hands like James Garner were of the school of thought 'show up, know your lines and hit your mark' show clearly that acting does not need to be laborious to be great and natural. Yet short of annoying others or endangering yourself I'm all for it if it works for you. For example Day Lewis refusing modern medical treatment is stupid. Not leaving his wheelchair during the shooting of My Left Foot while annoying I can see the benefit of. Just another opinion brought to you nobody in particular. 🙂
Jeff the Chef January 12, 2017 at 10:18 pm
All of this leaves me wonder how Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal prepared for Brokeback.
Ashley Lily Scarlett January 24, 2017 at 2:07 am
I think this is interesting. It seems to me to be a matter of degrees. Some immersion would be research and presumably the acting would be better for it, but walking around 'being' The Joker? I'm glad I wasn't there!
littlefish4 February 28, 2017 at 7:35 pm
Very interesting read 🙂
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Leftists Fear Some Success Stories, Cheer Others
In Opinion on September 25, 2012 at 10:08 am
The commentary from the left about Mitt Romney's financial success and tax rate causes me to wonder: How do they really feel about success in America?
Dear Leftists,
Is Mitt Romney's version of success acceptable to you? After a comfortable childhood and an Ivy League education, he spent 25 years building wealth for himself, his family, and his partners. He supported and created business enterprises that employ thousands, enabling them to buy food, clothes, housing, medicine and education for their families. He has given exceedingly generously to the Mormon Church and other charities. He is 65, wealthy and running for the presidency at a point in his life at which most men would prefer to coast to the finish line.
Or, is Barack Obama's life a better version of successful? He and Michelle, we're told, paid off their student loans just 8 years ago, so he was not financially successful before he made his way up the political ladder. Now he's the President of the United States, after serving in the Illinois state senate and briefly in the US Senate. He has made millions from two autobiographical memoirs (yes, two, already - he turned 51 this summer) and assuredly will make millions more when he is relieved of his duty as commander in chief of the US military.
Or, let's take Bill and Hillary Clinton; maybe you admire their version of success. Their combined resumé contains Ivy League law school degrees, a law firm partnership (after her husband was elected governor), a stint as a congressional committee lawyer, three terms as the governor of Arkansas, two as the President of the United States, one and 1/2 terms in the US Senate, the title First Lady of the US, and four years as Secretary of State. Sometime between her 'First Lady-ship" and her service in the Senate, she made millions from a book deal. After his presidency, Mr. Clinton cashed-in big with book deals and on the lecture circuit. The couple are in their mid-60s and reportedly has a net worth in excess of $100,000,000, and they can't seem to grow tired of being political celebrities.
Or, maybe your version of success is Sheldon Adelson's humble beginnings followed by enormous self-made wealth. Mr. Adelson was born in 1933 to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who lived in a Boston suburb. After selling toiletries, he opened a charter bus business. Later he created billions of dollars of wealth for himself and numerous investment partners in the convention and casino businesses that employ thousands of people who support their families with the paychecks they earn from those businesses. He's 78 years old, has donated 100s of millions of dollars to various charities and recently has spent some of his fortune to express his views about certain political matters, i.e. to exercise his First Amendment rights.
So, we have a couple of guys who made loads of money in the private sector contrasted with a couple other guys (+ one wife each) who, we're told, decided to forego big-money careers and pursue a life of "public service" (a.k.a. exercising power over other people's lives) and then, upon reaching the pinnacle of that version of career success, turn their rolodex and access to power into a money machine that lines their pockets while they produce nothing but noise and hot air.
The American left praises and reveres the public-service version of success. They treat the other version with suspicion and disdain and constantly insinuate that, where there's private success, there's likely much malfeasant activity.
Want to know how a person's mind works? Notice what they fear and what they cheer.
What do you fear/cheer?
I say "Three Cheers for what the Leftists' Fear!"
And, Cheers!
" Before The movie of the year September 24, 2012
AfterDon't Apologize for ME Anymore, Mr. Obama September 26, 2012 "


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Steph Riley-Schafer
Email:
Year: Sixth Season
Previous College: Temple '07
2016 NSCAA Regional Coaching Staff of the Year | 2016 NEWMAC Coach of the Year
Steph Riley-Schafer, who touts five winning seasons and NEWMAC tournament appearances, brings a 55-28-14 (.639) record into her sixth season at the helm of the Engineers in 2018.
Kristen McCrea repeated as an All-NEWMAC first teamer and United Soccer Coaches All-Region selection to go along with a CoSIDA Academic All-District nod in 2017. Gabi Hoops, Sophie Gomarlo and Karina Larson were also recognized by the conference head coaches. As a team, Women's Soccer boasted a program-record 13 NEWMAC Academic All-Conference honorees.
The 2016 season featured a number of program firsts culminating with their first NEWMAC Championship, NCAA tournament appearance and NSCAA Regional Coaching Staff of the Year honors. The 16-2-3 club boasted the best single-season winning percentage (.833) while being the first to host any round of the conference tournament, as well as the semifinals and finals following a 8-1-1 conference schedule. The Engineers traveled to Geneva, NY and played a double overtime draw with Trinity (CT), who advanced via penalty kicks.
Individually, Gabi Hoops was named as the first-ever NEWMAC Defensive Player of the Year while Kristen McCrea was tabbed as the second in program history to garner NEWMAC Rookie of the Year honors and Schafer was selected by her peers as the NEWMAC Coach of the Year. Susannah Gray joined McCrea on the All-NEWMAC first team.
The 2015 season (11-5-3, 5-3-2 NEWMAC) was successful on the field and off with Emily Doherty racking up a number of All-America honors, including a pair of academic accolades from CoSIDA and the NSCAA. The team also bested Springfield for the first time in program history. Doherty was an All-NEWMAC first teamer while Gray was a second team honoree for the second consective year.
In 2014, the team went 8-7-4 overall, with a conference record of 5-2-3 making it to the NEWMAC quarterfinals for the second year in-a-row. With the success of 2014 campaign the team posted back-to-back winning seasons for only the third time in program history and first time since 2003-04.
In her first season at WPI, Schafer posted a 10-7-2 record (4-5-1 NEWMAC) which qualified the Crimson and Gray for the NEWMAC tournament for the first time since 2010. Megan Forti was the lone WPI All-NEWMAC representative with a first team nod.
Prior to Riley-Schafer coming to WPI she was the top assistant at Division I Wagner College. She was heavily involved with the Seahawks in designing and implementing practice and training sessions as well as in recruiting. Riley-Schafer also took an active role in academic monitoring, scheduling, team travel and fundraising. Prior to her time at Wagner, she spent three seasons as an assistant at Curry College where she helped the Colonels reached the CCC Tournament in 2008 and 2010.
Riley-Schafer also spent five seasons with the Boston Breakers serving as the Senior Team Coordinator, Equipment Manager, Team Manager and Director of Operations over those five seasons. Among her many duties, Riley-Schafer managed player personnel, coordinated practice and game schedules, organized team travel and oversaw the host family program that places 20+ athletes in rent-free housing.
A native of the Philadelphia area, Riley-Schafer played collegiately at Division I Temple University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in sports and recreation management with a minor in business. In 2013, she graduated from Wagner with her master's in secondary education with a social studies concentration.


DREAM CHILDREN, THE
October 27, 2013 Renee Pimentel
A haunting and provocative film about Steven Evans, a troubled TV personality who struggles to find meaning in his life in the face of the superficial world he has created. When his long-time partner hurls him headfirst into fatherhood, Steven's initial reluctance is gradually replaced with love, as he discovers in his new family a bond stronger than any he has experienced before. But the return of an unexpected visitor triggers off a series of events that thrusts Steven and his family into a vortex of loneliness, self-destruction and grief.


Reinforcing Nuclear-Test-Ban With Security Council Resolution
Viewpoint by Shervin Taheran*
This article appears in cooperation with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), as part of the initiative 'Youth for CTBTO'. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the CTBTO. - Editor
WASHINGTON. D.C. (IDN) - Following mass protests against Soviet nuclear weapons testing in Kazakhstan on August 29, 1991, the Kremlin was forced to close the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, where over 460 nuclear tests were conducted, and declare a moratorium on nuclear testing. This, in turn, opened the way for the United States to halt testing and for negotiations on a global, verifiable Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which were concluded in 1996.
August 29 is now recognized by the United Nations as the International Day against Nuclear Tests to raise awareness about the devastating health and environmental effects of the over 2,000 nuclear tests since 1945, the value of a global ban on all nuclear testing to curb the development of new types of nuclear weapons, and the pursuit of a world free of nuclear weapons.
Two decades later, nuclear testing is taboo. Only one state, North Korea still threatens to conduct nuclear tests.
But the door to the possible resumption of nuclear testing remains open because the CTBT still has not entered into force. Although 183 states have signed and 164 have ratified the treaty, there are still eight key states that need to ratify it to trigger the treaty's formal entry into force.
The longer the CTBT's entry into force is delayed, the higher the odds that one or more states will try to conduct a nuclear test explosion, openly or in secret, which would trigger a new round of nuclear testing and arms racing.
At the biannual Article XIV Conference of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) in 2015 to encourage the early entry into force of the CTBT, Kazakhstan's Foreign Minister and Co-Chair of the conference Erlan Idrissov declared that "business as usual" would not do. He emphasized that after nearly 20 years of this treaty, creative and "more aggressive" approaches were necessary to stimulate action by key holdout states - China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, and the United States.
Now, ahead of the September UN Security Council meeting and the 20th anniversary of the opening for signature of the CTBT on September 24, we have that opportunity.
The United States and other UN Security Council member states are considering a resolution designed to reinforce the global norm against nuclear testing and stigmatize those who continue to test, as well as call for continued support for the International Monitoring System, which is designed to detect and deter prohibited nuclear test explosions.
Also under consideration is a statement from the permanent five (P5) members - China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States - that would declare that a nuclear test explosion would defeat "the object and purpose" of the CTBT.
Contrary to some reports, neither the resolution nor the statement will impose any new legally binding limitation. All signatories to the CTBT are bound by customary international law not to take actions that would defeat the purpose of the treaty, which is clearly to bar nuclear test explosions.
Nevertheless, this high-level reaffirmation of national commitments in support of the CTBT and the global norm against nuclear testing is an important insurance policy against renewed nuclear testing pending the formal entry into force of the CTBT.
By reaffirming the value of the CTBT and support for the de facto global nuclear test moratorium, the resolution can also provide a strong impetus for the eight holdout states to ratify and accelerate entry into force.
In the Middle East, for example, ratification of the CTBT by Egypt, Israel, and Iran would build confidence in a troubled region and contribute to the realization of the elusive goal of a Middle East zone free of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.
India and Pakistan, each of which have declared unilateral national nuclear testing moratoria, should also welcome the resolution and actively consider joining the international nuclear nonproliferation mainstream by signing the CTBT.
Russia, which has signed and ratified the treaty, should welcome the resolution and a P5 joint statement against nuclear testing as a reaffirmation of their position and a lever on moving the United States and China to finally ratify the treaty.
Finally, the resolution, without naming North Korea's specifically, would reinforce the international community's push for Pyongyang to end to nuclear testing, which could allow it to perfect smaller nuclear warheads that could be delivered on ballistic missiles.
The resolution will also help bolster support for the maintenance and operation of the CTBTO's global network of more than 300 monitoring stations, which verifies compliance with the treaty.
Today, the International Monitoring System is over 90% complete. The CTBT has successfully carried out two on-site inspection exercises to demonstrate one of the most invasive verification measures allowed by the CTBT, which will only be available when the treaty enters into force.
However, there is still much more to be done to improve the test monitoring system. For example, Iran has yet to begin sending its data from its International monitoring stations to CTBTO's International Data Centre. This action would be a key confidence-building step towards its eventual ratification of the treaty. Pakistan and India could begin building their monitoring stations so they can begin to provide data useful to detect and deter nuclear tests.
The UN Security Council resolution could also guard against the possibility of erosion of support for the CTBTO, which would adversely affect the maintenance and effective operation of the IMS and IDC. Dr. Lassina Zerbo, executive secretary of the CTBTO, has stated numerous times that he fears states will suffer from "treaty fatigue".
"My issue is the risk that the longer the entry into force of the CTBT is, the more risk we have with regard to treaty fatigue that could lead to people saying, 'Why are we investing in something if we don't know when the treaty will come into force?' That's the biggest risk for this treaty," he said in an IDN-INPS interview in February.
The proposed UN Security Council resolution on nuclear testing and the test ban is a win-win for the international community. It will help refocus international attention on the value of the CTBT, the importance of the de facto test moratorium, and recommit states to continue to support the CTBTO's international monitoring regime.
*Shervin Taheran is the Program Associate with the Washington-based Arms Control Association and Project for the CTBT () and is also a member of the CTBTO Youth Initiative. [IDN-InDepthNews - 26 August 2016]
Photo: Kazakhstan citizens gather to demand a nuclear test ban at the Soviet nuclear test site near Semipalatinsk in August 1989. UN Photo/MB
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Christa Hodapp
By Leah Bayens
Photos by Mark Cornelison
Philosophy doctoral candidate Christa Hodapp is sorting out an issue most people superficially acknowledge before returning to business as usual: humans are animals.
"The traditional, neo-Lockean claim is that you're fundamentally a person, which is a rational, thinking being, and you happen to be related to an animal in some way," Hodapp explained. Thus, many people imagine that personhood separates us from the likes of dogs, horses, and ants. In the process, they also tend to place humans on a higher rung than our nonhuman counterparts.
Hodapp, however, refuses to split nature and mind in this way. Instead, her dissertation, Personal Identity and the Biological View of Human Persistence, foregrounds the notion that human beings are not simply related to animals; they are, in fact, "not separate from the animal in any way. They are identical to that animal," she has argued. As such, our chief classification is human animal.
This biological viewpoint is difficult for some people to swallow. "Even to place human beings on the spectrum in a very obvious way [with animals] tends to be disturbing to people." She notes that some critics find the human animal identification "degrading because they claim that this places humans on the same ontological level as a cockroach." Far from claiming humans and roaches are of exactly the same ilk, Hodapp nonetheless underscores the importance of understanding ourselves as animals first. To do otherwise is to miss an opportunity to take full account of the properties with which we can talk about human beings.
Given the thorny nature of her project, it is clear Hodapp does not shy away from controversy easily. Her bachelor's and master's degrees in Gender and Women's Studies prepared her for just this sort of prickly conversation. In fact, the identity issues she wrangled with while researching performative and social aspects of gender at Denison University as an undergraduate and at Florida Atlantic University as a graduate student led her to the deeper, ontological status problems she currently theorizes.
First developing an expertise in the nature and reality of gender, Hodapp ultimately began to see these qualities as "a concern with a philosophy of human nature." She became interested in "dealing, in a very rigorous way, with the fundamental, ontological status of human beings." Now, after having earned a second master's degree before embarking on her doctorate in philosophy at UK, she strives to get at the root of how we theorize being human animals.
In the process, Hodapp has determined an especially controversial application of her theory, one that deals with knotty bioethical issues like the status of fetuses and of people in persistent vegetative states.
She compellingly moves from the animal concept to stage of life issues. First, she posits that person is a phase in the life of the human animal, just as athlete, infant, or student are terms we use to describe ourselves at certain stages. A human animal doesn't need to be identified as a person at all times because we do not always have the capacity for cognition and rational thought throughout our lives.
In this way, person "denotes some kind of ability of a human animal that it has at a specific time" rather than the defining ontological category. By the same token, we can classify ourselves as being in multiple phases simultaneously, such as person, student, athlete, a status strand Hodapp currently claims by virtue of her roles as philosophy scholar and rugby player.
In phases that do not involve the qualities we associate with personhood (i.e., cognition), we have the freedom to talk about the human being in more exact ways. Thus, Hodapp's work holds important implications for "the ways we talk about issues in biomedical ethics and applied ethics, particularly in terms of the fetus problem and persistent vegetative state issues." Though she is not establishing a system of ethics with Personal Identity and the Biological View, Hodapp is beginning to provide a language with which biomedical ethicists can name "the entity we're dealing with in a metaphysically clear way."
These kinds of heady concepts constitute the bulk of Hodapp's research as well as teaching: "In ethics classes, I tell students, 'You should be worried about [these issues] because not everyone has the same religious, cultural or social backgrounds as you, so we need to find reasons why people should be moral - above and beyond social factions.'"
In an effort to pique students' interest in philosophical conundrums, she encourages them to figure out how concepts apply to a range of issues. Classes often start from pop culture references and proceed to parallel instances involving deeper race, class, gender, and spiritual matters. In lower division courses, Hodapp aims to show students that "philosophical issues are the issues they really do care about; they just haven't conceptualized them in that way." When they "start assessing their everyday experiences from a different viewpoint," Hodapp feels she's doing her best work in the classroom.
Some of her best scholarly work is the result of relationships she developed with peers and professors in graduate courses. "When I first got here, I didn't have a philosophy background, and there have been some really key older graduate students who took very good care of me," she said. Likewise, philosophy professors proved available, helpful and interested in her work, particularly her dissertation advisor, Brandon Look.
"I can send him work whenever I have it, and he never is opposed to reading it, meeting with me, giving me notes, and being really constructively critical." Hodapp recognizes Look and committee member Anita Superson as having been instrumental in strengthening her capacity as a job candidate and philosopher, making sure that she does more than just finish a dissertation and graduate.
Like her mentors, Hodapp wants to change the terms of how we conduct "business as usual." She's starting by encouraging each of us to embrace our membership in the Kingdom Animalia. In so doing, we begin "reordering the bias we have toward identifying ourselves as animals," and ultimately, we "clarify the status of beings." The implications of Hodapp's proposal are far reaching. From biomedical ethics to gender roles to our essential identities, her project expands the ways we talk and think about being human.


Archive for the 'Cedric Poline' Category
Pioline Wins in London's Albert Hall.
Categories: Cedric Poline and Pete Sampras
Tags: Blackrock Masters, Poline
Cedric Pioline came from a match point down today to overhaul Greg Rusedski and win his first ever BlackRock Masters Tennis trophy. A packed Royal Albert Hall crowd watched enthralled as the Frenchman took three Tie-Break sets to overcome his dogged opponent in 6-7(4), 7-6(3), 11-9 (Champions' Tie Break) in one hour and 45 minutes.
In a match that saw Pioline and Rusedski hit a total of 22 aces, there was little to choose between the two men in the first set. In the end the decisive moment came when Pioline double-faulted in the Tie-Break to hand the set to his opponent. The second set was equally nail-biting as both men held serve with ease to take it to a second Tie-Break. This time though the momentum swung quickly the way of the Frenchman, as Rusedski double-faulted at 2-2 offering Pioline a mini-break and the chance to level up the match at one set all. It was a chance that he duly took and in the deciding Champions' Tie-Break it was the Frenchman who played the more aggressive tennis when it mattered. Facing a match point at 8-9 down, the 39-year-old Pioline aced his way out of trouble and went on to take the following two points, clinching the match with a scorching forehand winner down the line.
"I took my chances and it worked," said Pioline. "It was really close and it came down to a few points and I think at the end maybe I just returned a little bit better than him."
Rusedski was disappointed not to convert his chances today, but admitted he had lost to the better player on the day.
"I was just one or two points short," he said. "I had one match point in the second set tie break but Cedric played great and I think he's a deserving champion.
For Pioline, today's win was the perfect way to round off one of his favourite tournaments of the year. He reached the final by beating Pete Sampras for the first time in his career, a taste of revenge for his loss in the Wimbledon final some years ago.


The BalikBayani Blog
Weaving stories, building identity
Bernard Badion: Sharing Experiences Through Film
Posted by Heidi Carreon on July 18, 2016 July 18, 2016
There is a lot of talk these days about diversity in Hollywood and the rest of the film industry. The hashtag #oscarssowhite, for instance, encouraged many fans and industry workers to discuss the lack of diversity in film. Filipino-American filmmaker Bernard Badion recognizes this and "can pretty much count" the other Filipinos who worked around Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City. But he also adds that being in the film industry is difficult for everyone trying to get their foot in the door.
"This is a hard business and if you want to make a living doing it, no matter what it's going to be hard," Bernard says. Because of this, he advises all people aspiring to the film industry to work hard at their craft, whether it be writing, directing or filming.
"If you keep going, you'll get better...I know I'm not Aaron Sorkin, but if I keep writing it's kind of impossible to not be good at it."
But before he was working on films in Los Angeles, Bernard was tricking his elementary school teachers in Sunnyvale. The first in his family to be American-born, Bernard recalls that he was "spitting Tagalog like crazy" when he was younger, but he could speak English fluently. Yet, Bernard pretended to not know English at six years old as a joke to his teachers. They placed him in a program at his school that taught English to students who spoke another language at home.
"They notified my mother and she told me, 'They think you don't know what you're talking about,'" Bernard laughs a little in our phone conversation, "After a year they figured out that I could actually speak English."
Even so, Bernard stayed in the program until sixth grade because he was able to get out of class for an hour. Being a "English Second Language" student, however, had lasting effects. Bernard's mother kept him from speaking Tagalog at home so he would be a better English speaker. As such, his Tagalog is at an elementary level.
"I feel like I'm an idiot when I'm in the Philippines...my cousins speak to me in English," Bernard says, "But Tagalog is still in my head somewhere, just as long as I have someone to speak to me."
Even though Bernard lost his fluency in Tagalog, he kept his connection to Filipino culture through Cal Poly San Luis Obispo's Filipino club during his undergrad years. His interest in technology and background in high school broadcast journalism led him to making videos for the club to promote their culture night show.
Producing promotional videos encouraged Bernard to make films with his friends in the Filipino club. He made a rom-com film his senior year, and there was large crowd at its screening; it was even covered by the student newspaper. The confidence Bernard gained from the screening and the support from his friends in the Filipino club encouraged him to pursue a career in film.
"I didn't know who those people where [at the screening]. But I was in the [Filipino] club and I made things and the response was positive." Bernard says, "And it was really where it started."
Bernard worked in various shows and projects in the industry, and got his Master's of Fine Arts in Writing and Producing Television from Loyola Marymount University. Two of his more recent films, I Won't Miss You and Sounds We Have No Letters For, have been screened around California and feature Filipino leads. Although Bernard doesn't nessecarily write to cast Filipino actors, "if it fits, I'll go after them."
"If I don't cast them, it's kind of like, who will?" Bernard asks.
Even though it's a tough industry, Bernard doesn't see himself doing anything else, and believes that film can do much for the Fil-Am community. Good films, according to Bernard, can affect even viewers who are having a bad day. Through that same vein, films can be used to empower viewers or to help them learn about other cultures.
It's for this reason he tries to connect with and support other Fil-Ams working in film, because many Fil-Ams opt for high-salary jobs. Bernard stays in the industry "because I'm not trained for anything else." But he also creates films because he hopes that they would resonate with people, especially Fil-Ams.
"It's good to have more stories from people who look like you and have the same experiences as you," Bernard says, "I feel like it's important."
If you want to see Bernard's work for yourself, Sounds We Have No Letters For will be screening in Little Tokyo this Thursday, July 28. See more details here.
american borncommunityculturediasporadiversityentertainmentfil-amFilipino-Americanfilmnarrativessecond generationstory telling
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2019-06-21 17:31 books blog
High Weirdness | The MIT Press
High Weirdness is the first book in a very long time that's given me the feeling of discovering a secret truth - a set of corridors through the maze of consciousness, existence, anomaly, and synchronicity. It's the sense of complete novelty yet utter familiarity, like suddenly remembering a dream that you've been having every night and then forgetting. Davis is describing, perhaps even retrieving, the strange attractor driving the visionary seventies. It's a sensibility all but lost to the utilitarian, conformist predictability of the digital age. Yet it's also precisely the terrifying and awesome novelty we need to recover if we're going to preserve the uniquely human ability to embrace paradox, celebrate ambiguity, and laugh at death. Don't be afraid. It's just the weird.
author of Team Human and Present Shock
2019-05-25 15:35 nature blog
Karl Blossfeldt's Urformen der Kunst (1928) - The Public Domain Review
From 1898, and for the next three decades, Blossfeldt taught design at Berlin's School of the Museum of Decorative Arts. It was here, using a homemade pinhole camera with custom magnifying lenses, that he first began to take his remarkable photographs, for the purpose of teaching his students about the patterns and designs found in natural forms. Through the technology of photography Blossfeldt was able to reveal to his students details difficult to see by the naked eye.
Gallery: Weegee's New York City Crime Scene Photos
Earlier this year, he pulled it out for a look. The prints had, over the years, curled up into a tight roll, and he had to slide them apart from one end. That's when he noticed that most of them bore a photographer's stamp on the back: PHOTO BY A. FELLIG.
Why 'Slaughterhouse-Five' Resonates 50 Years Later - The Atlantic
Fifty years have passed since the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five. It's the same age as me. And the older I get, and the more lumps fall off my brain, the more I find that rereading is the thing. Build your own little cockeyed canon and then bear down on it; get to know it, forward and backward; get to know it well. So I don't know how many times I've read Slaughterhouse-Five. Three? Four? It never gets old, is the point. It never wanes in energy. This book is in no way the blossom of a flower. Slaughterhouse-Five is more in the nature of a superpower that the mutant author had to teach himself to master - and then could use, at full strength, only once.
2019-03-13 21:45 history books blog
A Brief History Of The White Horse Tavern, NYC's Legendary Literary Watering Hole: Gothamist
In the mid-20th century, literary luminaries including James Baldwin and Anaïs Nin frequented the watering hole, and Jack Kerouac was a particularly unruly patron. The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation notes that Kerouac was ejected from the bar so many times that someone took it upon themselves to carve "JACK GO HOME!" on a bathroom stall. Legend has it that the idea for the Village Voice (RIP) was born over drinks at the bar, known colloquially as "The Horse." And most famously, the White Horse is where Welsh poet Dylan Thomas swilled his final drinks before his death; his portrait still hangs by his usual seat.
Is This the Greatest Photo in Jazz History? - The New York Times
A friend gave Bob Parent a tip: be at the Open Door on West 3rd Street on Sunday.
Mr. Parent, a photographer with a knack for showing up at the right time and place, didn't need much encouragement. He arrived at the jazz club early in the evening of Sept. 13, 1953. It was unseasonably cool for late summer. The New York Times front page detailed the marriage of Senator John F. Kennedy and the glamorous Jacqueline Bouvier in Newport, R.I. The Brooklyn Dodgers had just clinched the pennant in Milwaukee.
Tomi Ungerer, Brash Illustrator for Young and Older, Dies at 87 - The New York Times
"Americans cannot accept that a children's-book author should do erotic work or erotic satire," he told The New York Times in 2008, when some of his children's books began to be republished in the United States and Britain. "Even in New York it just wasn't acceptable."
Jonas Mekas, 'Godfather' of American Avant-Garde Film, Is Dead at 96 - The New York Times
"I can't understand why people prefer the grossness and banality of a Hollywood or a European Art movie, as against the illuminations and ecstasies of an Avant-garde Film," Mr. Mekas wrote in an essay in The New York Times in 1969. "The Hollywood film deals with gross, simplified realities, banalized feelings, ideas, thoughts. The Avant-garde Film deals with the subtler nuances of experience, emotions, ideas, perceptions  -  it illuminates them  -  it deals with things that make you finer.
"I do not understand," he continued, "by what logic the public, film critics and educators choose to spend thousands of hours of their lives with second-rate art, while at the same time making fun of the Avant-garde Film."
'Sonic attack' on US embassy in Havana could have been crickets, say scientists | World news | The Guardian
But a fresh analysis of the audio recording has revealed what scientists in the UK and the US now believe is the true source of the piercing din: it is the song of the Indies short-tailed cricket, known formally as Anurogryllus celerinictus.
"The recording is definitively a cricket that belongs to the same group," said Fernando Montealegre-Zapata, a professor of sensory biology at the University of Lincoln. "The call of this Caribbean species is about 7 kHz, and is delivered at an unusually high rate, which gives humans the sensation of a continuous sharp trill."
The 'Godfather of Animated Cinema' Makes More Than Just Movies - The New York Times
The movie he was working on at the time, "Castle of Otranto," came under greater scrutiny, and censors demanded he make many changes. Mr. Svankmajer refused and as a result was banned from filmmaking. He could not finish his movie until 1979 when the prohibition was lifted.
"I never was a political artist," Mr. Svankmajer said "but I am an engaged artist, because Surrealism was always an engaged art. The idea of Surrealism is to change the world  -  that's Marx  -  and to transform life  -  that's Rimbaud," he added, referring to the 19th century French poet.
Mixtape: Métron Records - Masahiro Takahashi - Visual Melt
I think it's important for me to keep my own pace by creating music as if I'm slowly tending a miniature garden after coming home from my day job. However, I'm not sure if my music is defined as ambient music. For now, I feel soothed when I listen to or make music that is quiet and calming or takes me to some faraway place.
2018-12-14 09:04 mind blog
Bertrand Russell's Advice For How (Not) to Grow Old: "Make Your Interests Gradually Wider and More Impersonal" | Open Culture
The best way to overcome it [the fear of death] - so at least it seems to me - is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.
We Are Drowning in a Devolved World: An Open Letter from Devo - Noisey
Forty-eight years ago, on May 4, 1970, as a member of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), I was front and centre being fired on by my fellow Americans in the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, as we peacefully protested President Nixon's expansion of the cancerously unpopular Vietnam War into Cambodia without an act of Congress. I was lucky and dodged the bullet, both literally and figuratively, but four students were killed, and nine more were seriously wounded by the armed, mostly teenaged, National Guard troops. Two of the four students killed, Alison Krause and Jeffery Miller, were close acquaintances of mine.
2018-12-05 17:55 space blog
Falling in Love With the Dark - Nautilus - Pocket
For roughly the past two decades, at least two-thirds of the U.S. population have not been able to see the Milky Way at all, and it will get worse before it gets better. The dawn of light-emitting diode (LED) lighting is expected to significantly lower costs and spur consumption. In addition, LED lighting produces light with a bluer cast, which is more effectively scattered by the atmosphere. "This has the potential to be the nail in the coffin for seeing stars in most communities," Nordgren tells me.


Now browsing in: BIOGRAPHY General biographies Serving The Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain
Arts & entertainment bi... General biographies Memoirs Sport biographies True stories
by Goldberg, Danny Paperback / softback, pages
Drawing on Danny's own memories of Kurt, files which previously have not been made public, and interviews with, among others, Kurt's close family, friends and former bandmates, Serving the Servant sheds an entirely new light on these critical years. Casting aside the common obsession with the angst and depression that seemingly drove Kurt, Serving the Servant is an exploration of his brilliance in every aspect of rock and roll, his compassion, his ambition, and the legacy he wrought - one that has lasted decades longer than his career did. Danny Goldberg explores what it is about Kurt Cobain that still resonates today, even with a generation who wasn't alive until after Kurt's death. In the process, he provides a portrait of an icon unlike any that have come before.
It's So Easy (and Other Lies)
by: McKagan, Duff
'It's So Easy (and Other Lies)' is the explosive autobiography of Guns N' Roses and Velvet Revolver bass guitarist Duff McKagan.
by: Domino, Christophe
A detailed study of Francis Bacon - the man and the artist - looking at his influence on 20th-century art and providing a fascinating insight into his childhood, influences, intentions, methods and sources. This book presents his work in six...
by: Nietzsche, Friedrich
In late 1888, only weeks before his final collapse into madness, Nietzsche (1844-1900) set out to compose his autobiography, and 'Ecce Homo' remains one of the most intriguing yet bizarre examples of the genre ever written.


Upcoming Events and Shows
A Talent for Murder
A Talent For Murder is an original play written by Katie Welch when she was in high school.
"The students at Riverton High School is getting ready for the annual school Talent Show. Everyone is so excited, until someone murdered last year's winner Amanda during the Talent Show. The audience will be the detectives and try to figure out who killed last year's winner in "A Talent for Murder."
The audience will have a chance to solve the case and win the prize. There will be interaction between the cast (who are still alive) and the audience during intermission. In your playbill, there will be a paper. You write your name and the character's name of who you think the murder is. If you are correct and your name is pulled out of the basket, you will win the prize.
Copyright © 2019. Broadway Everyday Star Theater


Tag: Indiana high school basketball
"All for Lebanon!": A Retrospective of the 1917 Indiana High School Basketball Championship Season
In 1917, basketball was only twenty-five years old. Indiana high school basketball was a bit younger than that, and the state tournament was only in its seventh year (its sixth under Indiana High School Athletic Association control). Hoosier Hysteria was quickly taking root, as year after year more high school teams entered sectional tournaments with dreams of hardwood glory. Basketball in Lebanon began a bit later than other communities, but it quickly became a favorite sport of the town's teenage boys. The school team's reputation and skill-level improved year after year and culminated in a state title in 1912. Many influential figures in basketball's development in the state walked the halls of Lebanon High School in the 1910s. The following narrative provides an overview of some of those people, and their accomplishments that culminated in Lebanon winning a second state basketball title in 1917.
Lebanon High School's coach Ward "Piggy" Lambert was among the best Indiana high school coaches in the nineteen-teens. He came to Lebanon after their first state championship, and started coaching in the fall of 1912. He won 79% of his games in four seasons on the bench. His teams were perennial title contenders. Perhaps the best team that he coached at Lebanon was the 1914 squad, which due to an unfortunate draw in the state tournament played six games in a little over twenty-four hours before succumbing to fatigue and the well-rested, Homer Stonebraker-led, Wingate team, which won the 1914 crown. In 1915, Thorntown's team surprised Coach Lambert's squad in the sectional, and went on to win the 1915 title. Lambert and his boys reclaimed the sectional in 1916, but suffered a narrow, and disappointing defeat to Martinsville in the second round of the state tournament.
Lebanon coach Ward "Piggy" Lambert. Photo from Lebanon High School yearbook, The Cedars, 1915. Accessed via Ancestry.com
Lebanon projected to return most of its team the following season, including two impressive underclassmen who were first and third on the team in scoring. Unfortunately, Coach Lambert would not return for a fifth season. In the summer of 1916, he became the head basketball coach at Purdue University where he would go on to a hall-of-fame career, and positively influence generations of players, including John Wooden. Lebanon's high school administrators hired Wabash College graduate Alva R. Staggs to replace Lambert, and teach English. However, Lambert's coaching in the years before had honed athletic skills, developed high basketball IQs, and created a winning culture in his high school charges, and set the stage for Staggs' successful season.
THE REGULAR SEASON
Due to injuries and eligibility issues, the 1916-17 Lebanon squad did not start the season as anticipated. Three year letterman and team captain Frank "Doc" Little, who played back guard, would miss most of his senior season due to a hip injury. Gerald Gardner, who the Indianapolis News described as "evasive as a mosquito," had been a third team all-tournament player in '16 after accounting for 42% of Lebanon's points. Yet, academic eligibility issues erased most of the forward's junior season.
Don White, floor guard, led the team in scoring with 11.4 ppg during the regular and post season. His scoring accounted for 30% of the team's offense. Photo from Lebanon High School yearbook, The Cedars, 1917. Accessed at Ralph W. Stark Heritage Center, Lebanon Public Library.
Even with these personnel losses, the Lebanon coach and players adapted. Staggs cycled through six different starting line-ups in the first ten games of the season. The two constants in the line-up were floor guard Don White and back guard Clyde Grater. White, a junior, was the team's leading scorer as a sophomore and would retain the honor for the rest of his high school career. Grater, a sophomore, was in his first year on the varsity. At 5' 8½" in height, he was much shorter than the prototypical back guard who was at this time the tallest and heaviest player on the team. Despite his average stature, Grater played the defensively-obsessed role very well. Other players who started for Lebanon in the early part of the season were George White (Don's older brother), Charles "Dutch" Frank, Bob Ball, Harry "Peck" DeVol (the Whites' first cousin), and Fred "Cat" Adam (the second-leading scorer from the previous season).
Lebanon rolled through the first half of the season. They compiled an 9-0 record against Veedersburg, Advance, Rockville, Washington, New Richmond (twice), Thorntown, Lafayette Jefferson, and Martinsville. The squad averaged ten points better than their opponents during this span. The game against defending state champ Lafayette Jeff was such an anticipated early season event that a Jeff physics teacher sent in-game updates via wireless to an amateur radio operator in Lebanon. The Lebanon receiver subsequently relayed updates of the game to local businesses via telephone.
Clyde Grater, defensive ace. Photo from Lebanon High School yearbook, The Cedars, 1918. Accessed at Ralph W. Stark Heritage Center, Lebanon Public Library.
After the triumph over Jeff, a few cracks appeared in the quality of the team's play. A revenge-hungry New Richmond team played a physically rough game in which Lebanon escaped with a five point lead. In the next game, Lebanon had to go into overtime to defeat Martinsville by a last second field goal. They returned home to play Advance, and the wheels fell off. The up-start Boone County rival shellacked Lebanon, 28-6. A week later Lebanon lost to another Boone County team in Thorntown, 30-20.
Although on a two-game losing streak, the "Black and Gold" had a 9-2 record and a favorable schedule ahead against Frankfort (twice), Crawfordsville (twice), an away game against Rochester, and home games against Jeff, Washington, Martinsville, and Bedford. Over the final ten games, Coach Staggs settled on a regular line-up of DeVol and Adam at forwards, Ball at center, and White and Grater in the back court. With this line-up, Staggs fielded a trio of his best scorers. White was the team's most consistent scorer all season with ten points per game. Ball and Adam disappointed over the first ten games with averages of less than three points. However, once inserted into the starting line-up the duo averaged ten points a piece over the final 10 games. With five games left in the season, "Doc" Little and Gerald Gardner returned to the team. Their immediate contributions were minimal, but they bolstered the bench of a booming Lebanon team. Over the final nine games, the Lebanon cagers routed their opponents by over 26 points a game. On the season, the team compiled an 18-2 record, with an offensive average of 33.15 points a game, and a defensive average of 17.9 points against.
THE SECTIONAL TOURNEY
Fred "Cat" Adam, forward/center, averaged 7.5 ppg as a junior in '17. Photo from Lebanon High School yearbook, The Cedars, 1917. Accessed at Ralph W. Stark Heritage Center, Lebanon Public Library.
The Indiana High School Athletic Association selected Lebanon as a district host for a sectional tournament, which was held on March 9 and 10, 1917. The townsfolk welcomed squads and fans from Boone, Carroll, and Clinton counties, including: Advance, Bringhurst, Burlington, Colfax, Cutler, Delphi, Flora, Frankfort, Jamestown, Kirklin, Thorntown, and Zionsville. Don White and company had little trouble with their first two sectional opponents, Cutler and Delphi, and defeated the Carroll County teams by an average margin of victory of 59 points.
Their next challenger, Thorntown, would present a much tougher match-up. The friendly rivals had split their regular season series. Thorntown also had the advantage of having three players and a coach from their championship season in 1915. The scores were close throughout the sectional game. Thorntown held a 10-9 lead at intermission. This was only the third time all season that Lebanon trailed at half time, and they lost on the previous two occasions. Don White determined to not let it happen again. He came out white hot in the second half with seven unanswered points. His scoring whipped the fans into a frenzy. Thorntown was down seven with a quarter to play. They clawed back, and cut Lebanon's lead to three, but a series of miscues including two missed free throws sealed the fate of the Sugar Creek Township team.
Prognosticators picked the sectional final between Lebanon and Advance to be another tough contest, especially after Advance's surprise victory over Lebanon at mid-season. However, Advance lost their star player to injury in the semi-final. To compound matters for Advance, Lebanon's bench depth allowed Coach Staggs to flex his line-up to rest his regular starters and give "Doc" Little and Gardner some additional playing time. In the final, White's 17 points almost outscored Advance single-handedly as Lebanon powered past Advance, 37-18.
THE STATE FINALS
On March 16, twenty sectional winners convened at Indiana University to vie for the state title. Lebanon played three uncompetitive contests in the early rounds to advance to the finals. They sank Trafalgar in their first contest, 34-14. In the quarterfinals, the Lebanonites left Kendallville tilting at windmills, 43-8. In the semis, the Boone County boys sent Martinsville packing, 36-12.
The final pitted Lebanon against the speedy Gary Emerson team. The majority of the crowd of 4,000 rallied behind the underdogs from Gary at the start. Yet the crowd grew silent as Lebanon built a 25-15 lead by half time. The Steel City team went on a run in the second half to make it a three point game. With the score at 25-22, Lebanon surged ahead with a 9-4 run to ice the game, 34-26. White and Adam tied for team highs with ten points a piece.
With the win, Lebanon won its second state championship. White was a consensus all-state tournament first team member. Adam, Little, and DeVol appeared on various all-tournament lists either on the first or second teams.
1917 Indiana basketball champion team from Lebanon. Photo from Lebanon High School yearbook, The Cedars, 1917. Accessed at Ralph W. Stark Heritage Center, Lebanon Public Library.
Coach Staggs left Lebanon after the school year to accept a job at Anderson High School. Little, DeVol, and Frank would join mid-season graduate George White in the ranks of Lebanon alumni. Bob Ball although technically a junior would leave high school and enter DePauw University, depriving the team of its second leading scorer. Yet the core of White, Grater, and Adam would return for the 1917-18 season. Under the tutelage of a new coach, Glenn Curtis, and a younger cast of supporting characters they would win the state tournament again, and join the historical annals with Wingate as back-to-back state champions.
After graduating in 1918, Don White reunited with his old coach, Ward Lambert, and continued his athletic career at Purdue. He was second in the Big Ten in scoring as a sophomore, and led the conference in scoring as a junior while also leading the university to the conference title in 1921. After college, White entered the coaching ranks where he had a thirty-five year career at Washington University (St. Louis), the University of Connecticut, and Rutgers. He even coached Thailand's Olympic team in 1956.
After high school, Adam and Grater teamed together again at Wabash College where they were multi-sport athletes, and fixtures in the basketball line-up. After graduation they both became high school teachers and coaches.
Learn more about Lebanon High School basketball history with a presentation by IHB Director Chandler Lighty at the Lebanon Public Library. The talk takes place Monday, March 20, 2017 from 6-8 p.m. and includes a special viewing of an LHS 1967 basketball film.
Author S. Chandler LightyPosted on March 16, 2017 March 17, 2017 Categories 20th century, Boone County, Sports HistoryTags 1917 state basketball championship, Alva Staggs, basketball, Clyde Grater, Don White, Fred Adam, Fred Cat Adam, Homer Stonebraker, Hoosier Hysteria, IHSAA state basketball champs, Indiana basketball tournament, Indiana high school basketball, Indiana high school champions, John Wooden, Lebanon, Lebanon High School, Piggy Lambert, Purdue University basketball, Thorntown basketball, Ward Lambert


Tag: Miami County
The Indelible Ross Lockridges
Ross Lockridge Sr. and Jr. camping, photographed by three-year-old Ernest (son of Sr.) in the summer of 1942, image courtesy of Evansville.edu.
Ross Lockridge Sr. and Jr. left an indelible mark on Indiana history through traditional history publications and fictional depiction. However, the father and son have yet to be cemented in the annals of state history. We hope to contribute to that reversal.
The senior Lockridge was born in Miami County, Indiana in 1877 and went on to graduate from Indiana University in 1900. He married and returned to his north central Hoosier home. He became the principal of Peru High School, and later earned a law degree from IU in 1907. Not long after, he moved to Fort Wayne and worked as employment manager and welfare director at Wayne Knitting Mills. He also served three years as executive secretary of the Citizen League of Indiana, which lobbied for a new state constitution and advocated for women's suffrage.
Wayne Knitting Mills, 1910, courtesy of History Center Notes & Queries.
While in Fort Wayne, Lockridge Sr. helped organize the Allen County Fort Wayne Historical Society. During this time his reputation grew as a writer of pioneer Indiana history. According to Larry Lockridge, his grandfather, Ross Sr.,"developed his own brand of 'Historic Site Recital,' combing public speaking, drama, and local history." Between 1937 and 1950, Lockridge Sr. served as a director of IU Foundation's Hoosier Historic Memorial Activities Agency. Some of his published works include: George Rogers Clark (1927), A. Lincoln (1930), LaSalle (1931), The Old Fauntleroy Home (1939), and Labyrinth (1941), Theodore F. Thieme (1942). His The Story of Indiana (1951) was primarily used as a text in Indiana at the junior high school level.
The historian also wrote about Johnny Appleseed, the Underground Railroad, and Indiana's trails, rivers, and canals. Another extended work, which continues to aid transportation history researchers, is Historic Hoosier Roadside Sites, commissioned in 1938 by the Indiana State Highway Association. He worked tirelessly to mark the state's landscape with monuments and markers, preserve records, and execute historical pageants. His clear and concise writing style has added to Hoosier's knowledge of their past.
The Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, IN), March, 23, 1936, courtesy of Newspapers.com.
According to Larry Lockridge, his grandfather "didn't exactly whitewash history," but he "certainly edited it. He attempted to bind people to their own local history through heroic narrative." After the tragic drowning of Ross Sr.'s 5-year-old son, Bruce, in Fort Wayne, his dedication to historical work intensified. Larry contends:
"Preaching history as resurrection of the worthy dead was his idealistic, nonmetaphysical challenge to time and mortality, grounded in the tragedies of his own life and the pettiness of the contemporary scene."
Ross Jr. assisted his father with historical projects, but according to Larry was "not his father's puppet at such performances" and "never approached his father's ease of performance and lack of self-consciousness."
Ross Jr. was born in Bloomington, Indiana and moved to Fort Wayne. When he was 9-years-old the family returned to Bloomington and his literary dreams took root.
According to an Indiana Public Media article (IPM), Junior attended Indiana University, where he was known as "A+ Lockridge," graduating with the highest GPA ever awarded by the school (4.33). Scarlet fever precluded his plan to join IU's English Department, leaving him bedridden for eight months. He was later accepted as at doctoral student at Harvard University, where he began his famed novel.
Raintree County cover, courtesy of Goodreads // Ross Lockridge Jr. signing copies of Raintree County in Indiana, courtesy of Altered Book Arts.
According to an Altered Books Arts article, he withdrew from his studies and taught at a nearby college, so he could focus on his literary magnum opus. The IPM article reports that he studied abroad in Europe in 1934, where he "first had the vision of writing a novel that would draw upon the would-be literary heritage of his maternal grandfather, a schoolteacher and poet who had lived in Indiana's Henry County." This evolved into the character of John Shawnessy, who after losing his wife went on to fight in the Civil War, attempted to write the Great American Novel, and ended up in the fictional Raintree County.
Photo of a raintree planted in honor of Ross Jr. behind the Lockridge house, image courtesy Larry Lockridge, accessed IPM.
Although Johnny had his successes, the character flashed back in memory wondering about the country's future. He is influenced by several cultural concepts, one of which is to find the legendary Rain Tree, supposedly planted somewhere in the Raintree County by the celebrated Johnny Appleseed, who is buried in Allen County. The tree Lockridge sought to feature is based on a real Golden Rain Tree, which blooms in the summer with subtle yellow flowers that drop like a raining of yellow pollen dust.
In addition to Allen County, Monroe County is represented in the book. Larry noted, "We have county fairs and patriotic programs and outdoor sex and footraces and weddings and temperance dramas and rough talk . . . all of this he picked up in the culture of Bloomington" (IPM). Ross Jr.'s wife, Vernice, did the final typing of the novel, an 18 month endeavor and, unlike many writers, her husband gave her full credit for her help in constructing the 1060-page novel.
Altered Books Arts summarizes the novel's themes, stating:
"In the course of its thousand pages philosophy, religion, sex, and history all flow together in a narrative that spans 40 years, recollected in a single day. In some ways it is an Indiana Ulysses, though Lockridge said that whereas Joyce wished to make the simple obscured, he wished to make the obscure simple. When it came out Thomas Wolfe and Walt Whitman were frequently cited for comparison, but it seems closer to in technique and feeling to the panoramic narrative of John Dos Passos' U.S.A."
Ross Lockridge Jr. by river, image courtesy of Larry Lockridge, accessed IPM.
Ross Jr.'s labor of love was met with much anticipation from his publisher, Houghton Mifflin. However, in order to win MGM's high-profile contest for best new literary work, an award of $150,000, he was pressured to revise and cut several sections from his masterpiece. His likely selection as Book of the Month club winner, meant that he had to make many more extensive cuts. He conceded reluctantly and worked tirelessly to trim it for publication. His publisher Dorothy Hillyer wrote "Ross was quite capable of fussing eighteen hours a day over that manuscript. He was in love with it, almost sexually." (He ended up cutting out a 356-page dream sequence, which is retained at Bloomington's Lilly Library).
These compromises, the killing of his darlings, so to speak, and the completion of his life's work plunged him into a deep depression. Despite generally rave reviews about the novel and winning MGM's literary award, Lockridge's depression worsened and he returned to Bloomington. His son regarded this as a mistake, "not because of Bloomington's particular atmosphere but because it felt to him as if he had come full circle. . . . It was the symmetry of fate that he was returning home to die."
Larry noted that his father began exhibiting bizarre behavior, inspecting knives in the kitchen and opening and closing cupboards, claiming he was "looking for a way out." Public backlash about the book's sexuality and irreverence, especially by his Bloomington neighbors, made him doubt the quality of his work and worsened his fragile state. (According to IPM, the publication of his neighbor Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male promoted Lockridge to quip "It seems Mr. Kinsey and I have succeeded in making Bloomington the sex center of the universe").
The cover of Mary Jane Ward's autobiographical novel about her own struggles with mental illness, image courtesy of IPM.
Ross Jr.'s father hoped to combat his son's malaise with recitation, the memorization of the Declaration of Independence, hearkening back to their old historical endeavors. Ross Jr. reluctantly entertained his mother's Christian Science ministrations, but remained in a debilitated state. Ross Jr. was not alone in his distress; his cousin Mary Jane Ward suffered from mental illness, which she depicted in her successful autobiographical novel The Snake Pit.
Witnessing her husband's ongoing suffering, Vernice convinced him to seek treatment at Indianapolis's Methodist Hospital, where he underwent electroshock convulsive therapy and insulin-induced coma. Further distressed and embarrassed by the procedures, he gave staff the impression he had recovered and was released.
According to Larry, his father tried to write a second novel, a "thinly disguised autobiography, from Fort Wayne days to the present." He had planned to begin the story with his young brother's tragic death and,
"the tranquil Avenue of Elms, Creighton Avenue in Fort Wayne, whose backdrop was the Great War. It is in this city that his brother Bruce drowns, that his house catches fire, that there is a great strike at the mill, that he falls in love with Alicia Carpenter, that he decides to become a writer, and that through 'the brutality of fate' his personality is set by the age of ten."
He was never able to finish a second novel. On March 6, 1948, the day after Raintree County was declared a number one best seller, Ross Lockridge, Jr. took his own life at age 33 in Bloomington. Unable to locate her husband, Vernice went out to their garage. There she discovered his limp body in the running car, a vacuum cleaner hose piping exhaust into the car. The death of the new literary star stunned the nation, attracting over 2,000 to his funeral and prompting an obituary on the front page of the New York Times.
Movie poster, courtesy of Imdb.com.
In 1957, MGM produced a big screen depiction of Raintree County, featuring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Eva Marie Saint.
Weeks after the death, Vernice found a note written by her husband, stating "'Dearest, Have gone for early morning walk to clear head. Love, Ross." On the back side he wrote:
"The purpose of Raintree County is to present life in its many-sided variety with idealism triumphant. An irreverent character in a book does not mean an irreverent book. In any event it is an old and good rule that every reader is entitled to his own opinion of a book."
Surviving the death of a second son, Ross Sr. passed away a few years later in 1952.
Henry County plaque, courtesy of IU Press Typepad.
Learn more about the remarkable Lockridges with Larry Lockridge's 1994 Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr., author of Rain Tree County.
Author Tom CastaldiPosted on September 2, 2016 September 6, 2016 Categories 20th century, Allen County, Cultural history, Literature, Monroe County, UncategorizedTags Alfred Kinsey, Allen County Fort Wayne Historical Society, Bloomington, Citizens League of Indiana, Elizabeth Taylor, Fort Wayne, Henry County, Historic Hoosier Roadside Sites, historical marker, History, Hoosier Historic Memorial Activities Agency, Houghton Mifflin, Indiana, Indiana University, John Shawnessy, Larry Lockridge, MGM, Miami County, Montgomery Clift, novel, Peru High School, Raintree County, Ross Lockridge Jr., Ross Lockridge Sr., suicide, The Snake Pit, Vernice Lockridge, Wayne Knitting Mills


Phishing Protection vs Privacy in Firefox and Chrome
February 05, 2017 by Thomas Leplus in Computer Security
A decade ago when anti-phishing mechanisms started to be added to web browsers, I remember disabling these features immediately thinking sarcastically: "Great, now every site that I visit will be sent to a third-party for validation. Thank you but no thank you!" I thought that the privacy trade off was not worth the price and that I was better off simply being careful about the site I visit and the links I click.
You could say that I was arrogant but in those days, phishing attacks were not very sophisticated and fairly easy to detect. In particular they were usually not targeted. I was living in France at the time and since most phishing campaigns were aimed at Americans, it was obvious to me that the US Internal Revenue Service did not really owed me any money or that I did not need to reset my Bank Of America password since I did not have any account there!
However things have changed since then. Phishing attacks have become cleverer, leveraging the trove of information stolen from Yahoo!, LinkedIn, DropBox and many other widely used online services. Spear phishing attacks against high value targets are becoming frequent. And I now live in the US, meaning that I fall right into the target audience of scammers. Wonderful!
So I've decided to see what I could do be about it. My first idea was to revisit the anti-phishing options in Firefox. How does it work? Here is what this Firefox support page has to says:
There are two times when Firefox will communicate with Mozilla's partners while using Phishing and Malware Protection for sites. The first is during the regular updates to the lists of reporting phishing and malware sites. No information about you or the sites you visit is communicated during list updates. The second is in the event that you encounter a reported phishing or malware site. Before blocking the site, Firefox will request a double-check to ensure that the reported site has not been removed from the list since your last update. This request does not include the address of the visited site, it only contains partial information derived from the address.
Using a locally downloaded list is a great start but it leaves a few open questions. Certainly Firefox cannot refresh the entire list of phishing and malware URLs regularly, there must be millions of entries in that list by now and it is probably growing at an exponential rate. Is it why they need to "double-check" online, to query a more up-to-date or comprehensive list? But then are we back to square one where the "partners" get the URLs of at least some of the sites you visit? And who are those partners anyway? The first clue to the answer of these questions is at the end of Firefox's page: "The Google Policy Privacy explains how Google handles collected data." That seems to indicate that Google is somehow involved in this. And this is confirmed further down the page when it says: "To request removal from the list of reported phishing sites, use this form provided by Google." Now we are going somewhere. Firefox is using the same mechanism as Chrome, known as "Google Safe Browsing". The service's API documentation explains how it works pretty well but an even better summary can be found in this Chromium Blog post. I am going to try to summarize it even further. When anti-phishing is enabled, the browser downloads from Google a list of 32-bit hashes of normalized URLs for know phishing sites. 32-bit is not enough to prevent collisions with legitimate sites URLs but it is enough to be downloaded regularly without requiring a lot of bandwidth or storage. Also it is enough to avoid the need for an online check for the vast majority of pages that you visit.
However, when a visited page's 32-bit hash has a match in the list, your browser cannot be certain that it is one of the URLs flagged by Google due to the hash collision risk explained before. So what the browser does is that it sends the 32-bit hash to the Safe Browsing server which returns the 256-bit hashes of the bad URLs. If 256-bit hash of the URL that you were about to visit matches one of the 256-bit hashes received, the browser can pop a warning confidently since the risks of collisions with 256 bits is dramatically reduced, not to say inexistent. Of course you have given some information to Google, 32 bits of information to be precise, but what does that amount to? 32 bits represent about 4.3 billion possible values. It is hard to know for certain how many pages are in Google's index but this site claims that there were around 30 trillion indexed pages in 2014 and that the number back then was almost doubling every two years. So now that we are starting 2017, it gives us a rough estimate of more than 10,000 pages per 32-bit hash. Of course not all these pages have an equal probability to be the one that you are visiting, and Google could probably significantly reduce the number of candidates by using the rest of the information it knows about you (location, language etc.). But my point is that they do a fairly good attempt to anonymize your private data in this instance. In the end it is up to you to decide if you want to trust this browser feature or not. But given that the alternative is being exposed to phishing attacks, I personally chose to re-enable this feature to defend myself against a risk that I know exist, rather than preventing a privacy violation that could exist.
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February 05, 2017 /Thomas Leplus
Firefox, Chrome, Google, privacy, phishing, spear phishing, malware, spam
iPhone apps are not magically secure
July 15, 2011 by Thomas Leplus in Computer Security, Software
I have been wondering about the iPhone apps security for a long time. Most apps are connected to some sort of web service but are they using SSL? We spent so much time educating users to check the security icon in their web browser and now the iPhone comes out and nobody cares anymore! That bugs me so I decided to find out.
LinkedIn, Squarespace, Tumblr, iOS, iPad, iPhone, network, password, privacy, security
Computer Security, Software


Business Groups Say Cuomo's Prevailing Wage Plan a 'Death Sentence' for Development
Jan 17, 2019 | Announcements
By Samantha Christmann Published 5:00 a.m. January 17, 2019 The Buffalo News
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo wants to change the state's prevailing wage mandate, expanding its requirements to include contractors doing work on projects receiving state funds. But critics said the change could raise construction labor costs by an estimated 20 percent and put a damper on development.
The prevailing wage in Western New York is set by the State Department of Labor. It varies by job position and location, but usually mirrors the pay scale in collective bargaining agreements negotiated by trade unions.
Contractors are already required to pay the prevailing wage on public works projects. But Cuomo said in his State of the State address Tuesday that he wants to expand the public works definition to include private-sector projects assisted by tax breaks from industrial development agencies.
The Buffalo-Niagara Partnership was among 18 business groups that sent a letter to the governor last March asking him not to expand the prevailing wage requirements. Calling the mandate "already flawed and miscalculated," it said the change would hurt smaller community-based projects that are driven by private dollars. Those projects break even at their current wage rates and increasing costs would "make many of them financially unfeasible," the groups said.
"For most projects, such a drastic increase in total project cost dwarfs the incentives and economic benefits bestowed," the letter said.
The letter pointed to a report from the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank, which compared the prevailing wage to the regional medians of occupational wages for all non-residential building construction workers, including those paid union scale. It found the prevailing wage increased construction labor costs by 20 percent in the Buffalo region.
Unshackle Upstate, a business advocacy group, said the prevailing wage expansion would "severely weaken our economy and hurt taxpayers."
"The proposal to apply prevailing wage to all projects that receive state funding is a death sentence for upstate economic development initiatives. Under this mandate, efforts to fix our crumbling infrastructure would be far too expensive to pursue," the group said in a statement.
The National Federation of Independent Business, a small business association, said expanding the mandate would harm small businesses.
"NFIB and our members remain concerned that some proposed employer mandates contained in the Governor's address appear to embrace a flawed, one-size-fits-all regulatory model that severely limits the autonomy and flexibility small businesses need to attract talent and remain competitive," Greg Biryla, the group's New York State director, said in a statement.


President Trump's Proposal to Eliminate Federal Support for Certain K-12 Programs Would Hurt Economically Disadvantaged Students in Every Part of California
Education · April 18, 2017 · By Jonathan Kaplan
The underlying data for this post are available for download. Download the Supporting Effective Instruction (SEI) grants funding by congressional district or by K-12 school district. Special thanks to Budget Center Senior Policy Analyst Sara Kimberlin for her assistance in preparing these data sets.
As we blogged about recently, President Trump's budget blueprint for federal "discretionary" spending proposes significant cuts to a range of key public systems and services. While this so-called "skinny budget" lacks important details, it calls for eliminating two K-12 education programs and, by doing so, would reduce the funding available to every California school district as well as to many community-based organizations across the state. California is estimated to receive more than $365 million for these two programs in federal fiscal year (FFY) 2017, which began October 1, 2016: $252 million for Supporting Effective Instruction (SEI) State Grants (also known as "Title II, Part A" funds), which aim in part to increase the number of educators and advance their quality and effectiveness; and $114 million for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, which supports before- and after-school as well as summer school programs. Although these two federal funding streams represent just a fraction of the $74.5 billion overall that is budgeted for K-12 education in California in 2016-17 (the state fiscal year that began July 1, 2016), their elimination would disproportionately affect students from low-income families because dollars for these programs are targeted to these learners.
A closer look at the SEI State Grants helps show why. Federal funding for SEI grants provides California with more dollars than does any other federal K-12 program aside from grants for special education and Title I funds, which support students from low-income families. SEI grants are provided to states based on a formula weighted toward the number of students living in poverty. As a result, nearly half (47 percent) of Title II, Part A dollars in 2015-16 were allocated to the highest-poverty districts in the nation, according to a US Department of Education (USDOE) survey. What's more, changes to the allocation of SEI dollars, made by the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, will increase the proportion of funds provided for children in poverty starting in FFY 2018. This all means that the Trump administration's proposal to eliminate the SEI grants would cut funding specifically intended to help students most in need.
The USDOE survey also shows that more than one-third (35 percent) of school districts use SEI dollars to hire teachers and reduce class sizes. This strongly suggests that the Trump administration's proposal would eliminate funds that help mitigate California's worsening teacher shortage crisis  -  a shortage that disproportionately affects school districts with large shares of students from low-income families. And the fact that, nationwide, nearly half (45 percent) of teachers paid with SEI dollars to reduce class sizes are in the highest-poverty districts means that disadvantaged students are likely to be hurt substantially by ending the SEI grants.
Recent reports indicate that certain areas of the state  -  including the San Joaquin Valley  -  have been hit especially hard by the state's teacher shortage. And underqualified teachers are employed at a higher rate than the statewide average in many parts of the state that receive the most SEI grant funding. Elimination of the SEI grants would reduce funding for K-12 schools in every California congressional district, but some districts and certain areas of the state would lose more than others (see maps below). For example:
Among congressional districts that are in the "top third" (the top 18 of all 53 California congressional districts) in terms of losing the most SEI dollars, half are in the San Joaquin Valley or other inland parts of the state. In addition to these nine districts  -  1 (R-LaMalfa), 3 (D-Garamendi), 8 (R-Cook), 9 (D-McNerney), 16 (D-Costa), 21 (R-Valadao), 22 (R-Nunes), 23 (R-McCarthy), and 51 (D-Vargas)  -  eight congressional districts in the Los Angeles area and one in San Diego would lose the most SEI dollars.
Among the one-third of congressional districts that would lose the least SEI dollars, nearly half are in the Bay Area, the Sacramento Valley, or further up the northern California coast. In addition to these eight districts  -  2 (D-Huffman), 7 (D-Bera), 11 (D-DeSaulnier), 12 (D-Pelosi), 14 (D-Speier), 15 (D-Swalwell), 17 (D-Khanna), 18 (D-Eshoo)  -  10 congressional districts located in the Los Angeles region or further down the southern California coast would lose the least SEI dollars.
Download SEI grants funding by California congressional district.
Download SEI grants funding by California K-12 school district.
Although President Trump's budget blueprint provides only limited details, it does point toward his overall approach to funding K-12 education. That approach includes depriving public schools of federal dollars that can be used to reduce class sizes throughout California. Eliminating funding for these programs will make it even harder for California schools to address growing teacher shortages  -  and in a cruel irony, cuts to federal funding would be the greatest in many of the same areas of the state where the impact of these shortages are felt the most.
 -  Jonathan Kaplan
Summer Financial Aid: A Tool for Boosting Low-Income Students' Graduation Rates
Trump Administration Proposal to Shrink the Poverty Line Means More Hardship for Californians
Key Investments for Low-Income Californians in 2019-20 Budget Bill, CalEITC Still Unresolved
California College Students Are Increasingly Experiencing Mental Health Issues and Need Improved Support


Alberta legislature begins session under NDP, and everyone is watching the money
Dean Bennett, The Canadian Press
Premier Rachel Notley, right, and her caucus applaud following the swearing-in ceremony in the house of the Alberta Legislature June 1, 2015. Dan Riedlhuber / The Edmonton Journal
Alberta's Opposition Wildrose party is urging Premier Rachel Notley's NDP not launch its new era Monday by spending billions of dollars with little explanation.
The first session of the legislature under Notley's team will run for the next couple of weeks and focus on an interim supply bill to keep the money taps flowing in Alberta until the NDP can bring in a full budget in the fall.
Wildrose finance critic Derek Fildebrandt said the bill will be, in effect, a "mini-budget" to cover about half-a-year's payments for a budget already well over $40 billion in spending.
"You can't be pulling this money from thin air," said Fildebrandt.
"We need a big picture of the finances with the details to see if the numbers actually add up."
The original budget for the 2015-16 fiscal year was introduced, but never passed, by the former Progressive Conservative government before the Tories were defeated in the May 5 election.
Notley won a majority government on a platform that promised a radically different budget. It included a hike to corporate income taxes, more spending for health and education and a rollback of proposed PC hikes to taxes and user fees.
She said Finance Minister Joe Ceci and his staff will be working through the summer to bring in a revised budget in the fall to match those promises.
In the meantime, said Notley, it's not realistic for the Wildrose to expect a line-by-line breakdown in spending by a government that was sworn in a less than three weeks ago.
"When we introduce (the bill) there will be some detail about the changes that we are proposing to make, and there will be a lot of opportunity to debate it then and much more in the fall," said Notley.
The session begins with a speech from the throne Monday by Lt.-Gov. Lois Mitchell outlining the goals and plans of Notley's new government.
The NDP has promised to introduce several other bills during the session but will not reveal details until Monday.
Government House Leader Brian Mason, in an interview, would only say the flagship session legislation, known as Bill 1, "will have to do with changes to fulfil a small part of our platform for democratic reform."
Mason would not confirm or deny Bill 1 would focus on banning corporate and union donations to political parties, as promised in the election campaign.
Ceci, in an interview, would not confirm or deny that legislation to hike the corporate income tax to 12 per cent from 10 per cent, as promised in the election, will be part of the session.
Ceci would only say, "We're going to put in place some instruments that will help us smooth out our revenue situation so that we're not relying on oil and gas revenues and royalties."
The session will also be the first test for Notley's government on questions in the chamber from its own backbenchers.
Notley, and other opposition leaders, criticized the former Tory government for using such questions not to hold the government to account, as per their intended historical purpose, but rather as scripted "puffballs" to spotlight government achievements.
Mason said he expects the NDP backbenchers, technically not part of the government, will ask what they want of the cabinet ministers.
"I don't anticipate that (puffballs) will happen," said Mason.
He said he expects some of the new NDP backbenchers will want to have the questions written down for convenience, but said, "that doesn't mean it's written for them."
10:00ET 14-06-15
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B.C. introduces law to require cars, trucks sold by 2040 be zero emission
Zero-emission vehicles are part of the B.C. government's $902 million CleanBC program.
VICTORIA  -  All light-duty cars and trucks sold in British Columbia would have to be zero-emission by 2040 under legislation tabled Wednesday.
Energy Minister Michelle Mungall says the Zero Emission Vehicles Act aims to fight climate change by phasing out gas-powered vehicles.
She says the legislation would set target dates of 10 per cent zero-emission sales by 2025, 30 per cent by 2030 and 100 per cent by 2040.
The legislation would apply to new vehicles for sale or lease.
Mungall says zero-emission vehicles are part of the government's $902 million CleanBC program to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent by 2030 based on 2007 pollution levels.
She says the CleanBC plan includes incentives for zero-emission vehicle purchases up to $5,000 on a new battery electric or plug-in hybrid electric vehicle and up to $6,000 for a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle.
"British Columbians are eager to make the switch to zero-emission vehicles," said Mungall in the legislature. "We have the highest per capita adoption of zero emission vehicles in Canada, with over 17,000 zero-emission vehicles on the road, averaging four per cent of new light-duty vehicle sales in 2018."