How a Boat-Plane Hybrid Shattered the Sound Barrier of Sailing

Seen from across Walvis Bay, the windswept patch of Atlantic Ocean known as Speed Spot is barely more than a sparkle of whitecaps against a long, low sandbar. As we get closer to what is one of the world’s most perfect speed-sailing areas, I scan the shore. It’s featureless save for two small shelters. We motor our zodiac toward the remote beach until we have to kill the outboard and tilt it up to spare the prop. The five of us jump overboard into the waist-deep water, following our guide, Paul Larsen, who is wading toward the shore. The wind howls in our faces, blowing so much sand that it runs down the beach in rivulets, like rain across a windshield. We climb up on the beach, jellyfish at our feet as thick as paving stones. “This is it. This is the Bonneville Salt Flats of speed sailing!” Larsen shouts, gesturing to the water just off the sandbar. The flying sand sticks to our teeth, turning the insides of our mouths to 600-grit with every word. “We’ll have to shovel out the timing hut,” Larsen says, peering into the primitive shelter he built years ago and pointing out animal tracks inside. “Jackal,” he concludes.

There is a shipping port on the far side of the bay, but over here the landscape is so desolate, so extreme, that we could be on an alien planet—Frank Herbert’s Arrakis, George Lucas’ Tatooine. In fact, we are in Namibia, a roughly Texas-sized country at the southwest corner of the African continent. Walvis Bay is one of the Atlantic’s great natural harbors, but it’s surrounded by emptiness: 31,000 square miles of desert. The dunes march right into the sea, setting up an elemental cycle that repeats itself nearly every day of the antipodal summer. Mornings break as clear and sunny as a Baywatch shoot, but in the afternoon, near-gale-force winds descend on the bay. The desert heat meeting the cool Benguela Current coming up from the Cape of Good Hope creates a powerful natural wind machine. It arrives like clockwork, steady and relentless. “No ruffles,” Larsen says, feeling the wind with his hand. The featureless landscape—no vegetation, no terrain, no fences, no buildings apart from the shelters—makes for perfectly organized air. “Attached flow,” he calls it, using the jargon of an aerodynamicist evaluating a successful wind-tunnel test.

Larsen is originally from Australia, but he searched the world for years to find this spot, a perfect natural runway to test a sailboat so radical that it is more at home in an airplane hangar than in any harbor—a futuristic craft that, if he can make it work, will not only capture the outright world speed-sailing record but also open up a new, no-limit era in sailing. “A hundred knots, maybe?” Larsen speculates from inside one of the huts, looking through a sandblasted window at the watery speed-sailing course just beyond the beach. The current record is just over 50.

Floating behind the zodiac is the boat that has brought Larsen to Speed Spot for the tenth time in as many years in pursuit of sailing’s speed record: the Vestas SailRocket Mark 2. Its aeronautical DNA is obvious at a glance. There’s a rigid carbon-fiber “wing” that functions as a sail, an ultra-streamlined 40-foot-long “fuselage,” and even something like landing gear—three pod-shaped floats that keep the wing and fuselage above the chop. Yet what looks at first glance like a water-striding sailplane is, on closer inspection, pure crazytown. For one thing, its wing is inclined at a 30-degree angle to the water and is nowhere near the fuselage. Instead, it’s mounted on the end of a 30-foot-long beam. The pole is, in a sense, an odd sort of mast—except that it runs horizontally. On the opposite side of the boat is a bladelike carbon-fiber fin. Technically this is the keel, or as Larsen calls it, the foil. SailRocket’s foil sprouts from the side of its fuselage, then turns to cut 3 feet down into the water. Critical to any sailboat, a keel keeps a boat from blowing over—or, in this case, from flying away.

“She’s 50 percent plane, 50 percent boat,” Larsen explains. Indeed, if SailRocket were dropped from a great height, it would glide down rather than fall. Larsen designed in aerodynamic stability as a safety measure. “If for some reason she lost the keel at speed,” Larsen explains, “than she really would be a plane, wouldn’t she?” The prototype version of SailRocket, Mark 1, actually did take off into the air, and Larsen survived what may be the most spectacular crash in sailing history.

It was 2008 and he was at Speed Spot putting the Mark 1 through its paces when a gust got under the boat and launched it clear into the sky. The half-plane/half-boat hit an altitude of between 40 and 50 feet while cartwheeling through a flip—before crash-landing upside down and backward. “It just kept going up and up,” Larsen said at the time, “then it hit bloody hard on my head.”

Larsen is confident enough about the stability of his revised design, the Mark 2, that he included a passenger cockpit behind the driver’s seat. It’s never held a passenger, however. “I haven’t installed the seat yet,” Larsen says, “but I’m going to have to test it out sooner or later …” He cocks an eyebrow in my direction. “Would that be good for your story?”

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 View All

Read More..

Appeals judges: Anti-paparazzi law appears legal

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An appeals panel says California’s anti-paparazzi statute appears to be constitutional based on a brief filed by prosecutors.

A preliminary statement by three judges in Los Angeles requires a judge who dismissed charges aimed at a paparazzo who authorities say was driving recklessly to review his order. The judge may stick to his ruling, which would trigger a full appeal, or he could schedule further arguments on the case against freelance photographer Paul Raef.

Raef was the first person charged under the new law after a high-speed chase involving Justin Bieber last year.

Superior Court Judge Thomas Rubinson dismissed two charges in November, ruling the law is too broad and is unconstitutional.

Raef’s attorney David S. Kestenbaum says he is asking Rubinson to stand by his ruling and allow a full appeal.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: Appeals judges: Anti-paparazzi law appears legal
Url Post: http://www.news.fluser.com/appeals-judges-anti-paparazzi-law-appears-legal/
Link To Post : Appeals judges: Anti-paparazzi law appears legal
Rating:
100%

based on 99998 ratings.
5 user reviews.
Author: Fluser SeoLink
Thanks for visiting the blog, If any criticism and suggestions please leave a comment

Read More..

The New Old Age Blog: Caregiving, Laced With Humor

“My grandmother, she’s not a normal person. She’s like a character when she speaks. Every day she’s playing like she’s an actress.”

These are words of love, and they come from Sacha Goldberger, a French photographer who has turned his grandmother, 93-year-old Frederika Goldberger, into a minor European celebrity.

In the photos, you can see the qualities grandson and grandmother have in common: a wicked sense of humor, an utter lack of pretension and a keen taste for theatricality and the absurd.

This isn’t an ordinary caregiving relationship, not by a long shot. But Sacha, 44 years old and unmarried, is deeply devoted to this spirited older relation who has played the role of Mamika (“my little grandmother,” translated from her native Hungarian) in two of his books and a photography exhibition currently underway in Paris.

As for Frederika, “I like everything that my grandson does,” she said in a recent Skype conversation from her apartment, which also serves as Sacha’s office. “I hate not to do anything. Here, with my grandson, I have the feeling I am doing something.”

Their unusual collaboration began after Frederika retired from her career as a textile consultant at age 80 and fell into a funk.

“I was very depressed because I lived for working,” she told me in our Skype conversation.

Sacha had long dreamed of creating what he calls a “Woody Allen-like Web site with a French Jewish humor” and he had an inspiration. What if he took one of the pillars of that type of humor, a French man’s relationship with his mother and grandmother, and asked Frederika to play along with some oddball ideas?

This Budapest-born baroness, whose family had owned the largest textile factory in Hungary before World War II, was a natural in front of the camera, assuming a straight-faced, imperturbable comic attitude whether donning a motorcycle helmet and goggles, polishing her fingernails with a gherkin, wearing giant flippers on the beach, lighting up a banana, or dressed up as a Christmas tree with a golden star on her head. (All these photos and more appear in “Mamika: My Mighty Little Grandmother,” published in the United States last year.)

“It was like a game for us, deciding what crazy thing we were going to do next, how we were going to keep people from being bored,” said Sacha, who traces his close relationship with his grandmother to age 14, when she taught him how to drive and often picked him up at school. “Making pictures was a very good excuse to spend time together.”

“He thought it was very funny to put a costume on me,” said Frederika. “And I liked it.”

People responded enthusiastically, and before long Sacha had cooked up what ended up becoming the most popular character role for Frederika: Super Mamika, outfitted in a body-hugging costume, tights, a motorcycle helmet and a flowing cape.

His grandmother was a super hero of sorts, because she had helped save 10 people from the Nazis during World War II, said Sacha. He also traced inspiration to Stan Lee, a Jewish artist who created the X-Men, The Hulk and the Fantastic Four for Marvel comics. “I wanted to ask what happens to these super heroes when they get old in these photographs with my grandmother.”

Lest this seem a bit trivial to readers of this blog, consider this passage from Sacha’s introduction to “Mamika: My Might Little Grandmother”:

In a society where youth is the supreme value; where wrinkles have to be camouflaged; where old people are hidden as soon as they become cumbersome, where, for lack of time or desire, it is easier to put our elders in hospices rather than take care of them, I wanted to show that happiness in aging was also possible.

In our Skype conversation, Sacha confessed to anxiety about losing his grandmother, and said, “I always was very worried about what would happen if my grandmother disappeared. Because she is exceptional.”

“I am not normal,” Frederika piped up at his side, her face deeply wrinkled, her short hair beautifully coiffed, seemingly very satisfied with herself.

“So, making these pictures to me is the best thing that could happen,” Sacha continued, “because now my grandma is immortal and it seems everyone knows her. I am giving to everybody in the world a bit of my grandma.”

This wonderful expression of caring and creativity has expanded my view of intergenerational relations in this new old age. What about you?

Read More..

DealBook: Doubt Is Cast on Consultants Hired to Fix Banks’ Abuses

Federal authorities are scrutinizing private consultants hired to clean up financial misdeeds like money laundering and foreclosure abuses, taking aim at an industry that is paid billions of dollars by the same banks it is expected to police.

The consultants operate with scant supervision and produce mixed results, according to government documents and interviews with prosecutors and regulators. In one case, the consulting firms enabled the wrongdoing. The deficiencies, officials say, can leave consumers vulnerable and allow tainted money to flow through the financial system.

“How can you be independent if you’re hired by the entity you’re reviewing?” Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, said.

The pitfalls were exposed last month when federal regulators halted a broad effort to help millions of homeowners in foreclosure. The regulators reached an $8.5 billion settlement with banks, scuttling a flawed foreclosure review run by eight consulting firms. In the end, borrowers hurt by shoddy practices are likely to receive less money than they deserve, regulators said.

On Thursday, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Representative Elijah Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, announced that they would open an investigation into the foreclosure review, seeking “additional information about the scope of the harms found.”

Critics concede that regulators have little choice but to hire outsiders for certain responsibilities after they find problems at the banks. The government does not have the resources to ensure that banks follow the rules. Still, consultants like Deloitte & Touche and the Promontory Financial Group can add to regulators’ headaches, the government documents and interviews indicate. Some banks that work with consultants continue to run afoul of the law. At other times, consultants underestimate the extent of the misdeeds or facilitate them, preventing regulators from holding institutions accountable.

Now, regulators and lawmakers are rethinking their relationship with the consultants. Officials at the Federal Reserve, which oversees many large banks, are questioning the prudence of relying on consultants so heavily, said two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

When the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency penalized JPMorgan Chase last month for breakdowns in money-laundering controls, it imposed stricter requirements, ordering the bank to hire a consultant with “specialized experience” in money laundering and to ensure that the firm “not be subject to any conflict of interest.” In a separate action against the bank related to a $6 billion trading loss last year, the agency opted not to mandate an outside consultant at all.

While the comptroller’s office will continue requiring consultants in certain cases, some agency officials are worried about the quality of the work, as well as the consultants’ independence, according to three government officials briefed on the matter.

Since the financial crisis, regulators have increasingly relied on consultants. The comptroller’s office ordered banks to hire consultants in more than 130 enforcement actions since 2008, or nearly 15 percent of the cases.

It can be a lucrative business. In 2011, regulators mandated that 14 banks employ consultants to determine whether homeowners were wrongfully evicted. Over 14 months, the consultants collected about $2 billion in fees, according to regulators and bank officials.

Those fees amounted to more than half of what homeowners will receive under the $8.5 billion settlement that ended the review. As part of the deal, officials will disburse $3.3 billion to 3.8 million borrowers in foreclosure.

According to consultants and regulators, the broad review was plagued with inefficiencies. For example, Promontory initially instructed employees to calculate lawyers’ fees for each loan, to assess if borrowers were overcharged. Later, it scrapped the original procedure, only to reverse the policy again two weeks later, according to two reviewers who worked for Promontory.

“From Day 1, Promontory strove to conduct its review work as thoroughly and independently as possible,” a spokesman for the firm, Christopher Winans, said in a statement. “Our overarching concern at all times was to serve the best interests of borrowers.”

Some lawmakers question whether a consultant’s regulatory connections helped it secure contracts. PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has a stable of former Securities and Exchange Commission officials, won much of the foreclosure review work, signing deals with four banks, including Citigroup. Promontory, the firm examining loans for Wells Fargo, Bank of America and PNC, was founded in 2000 by the former head of the comptroller’s office, Eugene A. Ludwig.

When the contracts were initially awarded, some housing advocates complained that consulting firms could not objectively evaluate banks with which they had pre-existing business relationships. The comptroller’s office said it vetted the firms to spot such potential conflicts, and argued that the process provided swifter relief for homeowners than if the government had hired the companies directly through a lengthy contracting process.

But concerns persisted. Deloitte, which won the contract to review JPMorgan’s loans, had previously audited Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns, two firms JPMorgan acquired during the financial crisis. In May, the comptroller’s office replaced Allonhill, the consultant for Aurora Bank, after the firm disclosed that it had already reviewed some “of the same pool of loans” as part of an earlier contract.

“It’s clear from the foreclosure settlement that oversight over consultants was inadequate and the review process was deeply flawed,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, who recently pressed regulators to detail how consultants were paid. People close to the review say consultants relied on a process that the comptroller’s office designed in 2011, under previous leadership.

“This was a very complex process,” a spokesman for the comptroller said. “Throughout the process, regulators provided continuous oversight, guidance and were available to discuss issues.” The agency also performs spot checks on the consultants.

Still, the foreclosure review highlighted broader concerns about the role consultants play.

Since the financial crisis, the comptroller’s office has issued nearly 20 enforcement actions against banks that had already hired consultants to help iron out problems, according to government documents. While consultants cannot be expected to remedy every last issue at the banks, the actions raise questions about the effectiveness of their work.

When HSBC, the British bank, was sanctioned in 2003 over porous money-laundering controls, the bank turned to Deloitte to review its compliance, an official briefed on the matter said. Deloitte also worked for HSBC from 2006 to 2008, the person said, building a system to monitor money flows more effectively. But the bank ran into trouble in 2010 over similar issues, as highlighted in a recent scathing report by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

As part of a regulatory order, HSBC again hired Deloitte, this time to assess the number of times the bank failed to report suspicious transactions. Deloitte, three officials said, generously bundled hundreds of missed transfers into a single report. That helped save the bank from some government fines.

Despite the undercounting, HSBC still paid a record $1.9 billion last year to settle accusations that it enabled drug cartels to move money through its American subsidiaries.

In a statement, a spokesman for the firm said, “Deloitte fully stands behind the quality and integrity of its work on behalf of regulatory authorities.”

Deloitte has also been suspected of helping institutions cloak illicit transfers of money to rogue nations around the globe. In August, New York’s top banking regulator, Benjamin M. Lawsky, accused Deloitte of helping the British bank Standard Chartered flout American sanctions.

The consulting firm was hired to flag suspicious transfers routed through Standard Chartered’s New York branches. Instead, it instructed bankers on how to escape regulatory scrutiny, according to state court documents.

Deloitte turned over “highly confidential information” from which the bank gleaned insight into “regulators’ concerns and strategies,” the court documents said. The firm later doctored its report to regulators, Mr. Lawsky said, deliberately removing some illegal transfers on behalf of Iranian clients. In an e-mail, a Deloitte partner admitted that a report on the transactions was a “watered-down version.”

The authorities never took legal action against Deloitte, and federal officials noted in a separate settlement agreement that Standard Chartered employees withheld critical information from the consulting firm.

Despite these concerns, regulators are turning to a familiar source to help Standard Chartered. As part of a $327 million settlement last year, the bank is required to hire “an independent consultant.”

Read More..

Man behind Manti Te'o hoax wants to 'heal'

The 22-year-old Palmdale man who created Manti Te'o's fake girlfriend broke his silence for the first time, saying he perpetrated the elaborate hoax to build a relationship with the football star.

Ronaiah Tuiasosopo pretended to be Te'o's girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, for months, communicating on the phone and through social media. Tuiasosopo went so far as to disguise his voice to sound like a woman's when he spoke to Te'o on the phone, his attorney, Milton Grimes, said in an interview with The Times.

Grimes said his client decided to come clean about the hoax in an attempt to "heal."

"He knows that if he doesn't come out and tell the truth, it will interfere with him getting out of this place that he is in," Grimes said.

TV talk show host Dr. Phil McGraw, who spoke with Tuiasosopo for an interview set to air this week, described the 22-year-old as "a young man that fell deeply, romantically in love" with Te'o. McGraw, speaking on the "Today" show, said he asked Tuiasosopo about his sexuality, and Tuiasosopo said he was "confused."

In a short clip of the "Dr. Phil" interview, Tuiasosopo told McGraw that he wanted to end his relationship with Te'o because he "finally realized that I just had to move on with my life."

"There were many times where Manti and Lennay had broken up before," Tuiasosopo said. "They would break up, and then something would bring them back together, whether it was something going on in his life or in Lennay's life — in this case, in my life."

Tuiasosopo's comments add another twist to a story so bizarre that reporters from across the country have converged on Tuiasosopo's home in the Antelope Valley. News of the hoax was first reported earlier this month on the website Deadspin.com.

Tuiasosopo, the report said, was the mastermind behind the hoax and used photos from an old high school classmate and social media to connect Kekua with Te'o.

During the college football season, Te'o repeatedly spoke to the media, including The Times, about his girlfriend, the car accident that left her seriously injured and the leukemia that led to her September death. The tale became one of the most well-known sports stories of the year as Te'o led his team to an undefeated season and championship berth.

Te'o has denied any role in the ruse, saying he spent hours on the phone with a woman he thought was Kekua.

Those who know Tuiasosopo said they were baffled when they first learned of his involvement in the hoax. Neighbors and former high school coaches described him as popular, faith-driven and family-oriented.

"I've done a lot of thinking about it," Jon Fleming, Tuiasosopo's former football coach at Antelope Valley High, said in the days after the ruse was revealed. "It's all speculation. He's goofy just like any other kid. The question that comes up in my mind is: 'What could he possibly gain from doing something like this?' It would really surprise me. What would he gain?"

Te'o said in an interview with ESPN that Tuiasosopo called to apologize for the hoax.

"I hope he learns," Te'o said. "I hope he understands what he's done. I don't wish an ill thing to somebody. I just hope he learns. I think embarrassment is big enough."

Diane O'Meara, the Long Beach woman whose photos were used to represent the fake girlfriend, said in an interview with The Times that Tuiasosopo was a high school classmate.

She said he repeatedly asked her for photos and videos of herself.

O'Meara, 23, said that during a six-day period in December, Tuiasosopo contacted her through social media, texting and phone calls about 10 times, asking her to send a photo of herself. Then, after she sent the photo, in part to "get this guy off my back," she said Tuiasosopo messaged her asking for a video clip or another photo.

By that time, his requests were "kind of annoying, kind of pestering," O'Meara said.

Tuiasosopo is seeing a medical professional and "feels as though he needs therapy," Grimes said.

"Part of that therapy is to … tell the truth," he added. "He did not intend to harm [Te'o] in any way. It was just a matter of trying to have a communication with someone."

Grimes said he warned his client that he could face legal consequences for admitting that he falsified his identity on the Internet. But Tuiasosopo insisted that going public was something he had to do.

"This is part of my public healing," Grimes quoted Tuiasosopo as saying.

matt.stevens@latimes.com

ann.simmons@latimes.com

kate.mather@latimes.com

Times staff writers Kevin Baxter and Lance Pugmire contributed to this report.

Read More..

<em>New York Times</em> Hacked Again, This Time Allegedly by Chinese

In a dramatic announcement late Wednesday, the New York Times reported that hackers from China had been routing through the paper’s network for at least four months, stealing the passwords of reporters in an apparent attempt to identify sources and gather other intelligence about stories related to the family of China’s prime minister.

The hackers breached the network sometime around Sept. 13 and stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee, using them to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, according to the report.

The hacking coincided with an investigation the Times published last October that looked into a fortune that the family of China’s Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had amassed. The hackers breached the network while the paper was in the process of concluding its reporting for the investigation.

The hackers broke into the email account of the newspaper’s Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who conducted the investigation, as well as the email account of Jim Yardley, the paper’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who had previously worked out of Beijing.

Executive Editor Jill Abramson said, however, that forensic experts with Mandiant, the computer security firm hired to investigate the breach, found “no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied.”

It’s not the first time that the paper has been hacked. In 1998, a group known as HFG — or H4acking for Girl13z — hacked the paper’s web site to protest the arrest of hacker Kevin Mitnick and accuse Times reporter John Markoff of helping to catch him.

In 2002, former hacker Adrian Lamo, famously hacked the paper’s network after discovering multiple vulnerabilities and accessed a database containing the details of 3,000 contributors to the paper’s op-ed page, among other things.

In 2011, former executive editor of the Times, Bill Keller, hinted that WikiLeaks or someone associated with the group had hacked into the accounts of some of the paper’s staff. During a period of heightened tension between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the paper, which was then a publishing partner of WikiLeaks, the e-mail accounts of at least three people at the Times were apparently hacked. Keller suggested that Assange and WikiLeaks were behind the intrusions but never offered evidence to support this.

In the latest hack, the attackers, in an attempt to hide their tracks, routed their attacks through computers that they hacked at universities in North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin and New Mexico, as well as at small companies and internet service providers. They apparently used the same university computers that hackers working for the Chinese military used previously to attack Defense Department contractors.

During the three months they were in the paper’s network, the attackers installed 45 pieces of custom malware, though nearly all of it went undetected. Although the newspaper uses antivirus products made by Symantec, the monitoring software identified and quarantined only one of the attacker’s tools during that time, according to the report.

The attackers increased their activity in late October after the paper published its investigation of the prime minister’s relatives, and were also particularly active the night of the Nov. 6 presidential election.

The paper noted that there were concerns the hackers would try to shut down its publishing system that night, but they turned out to be unwarranted since the attackers apparently showed interest only in the paper’s reporting about the prime minister’s family.

“They could have wreaked havoc on our systems,” said Marc Frons, the Times’s chief information officer said in the report. “But that was not what they were after.”

The Times had been on alert for suspicious activity after learning that Chinese officials had warned that the paper’s reporting would have consequences. The paper asked AT&T, which monitors its network, to be on the lookout for suspicious activity.

After AT&T reported finding such activity, the FBI was notified, and the Times called in Mandiant to investigate.

Evidence showed that the hackers installed three backdoors and routed their way through the network for two weeks before uncovering a system containing the computer usernames and hashed passwords for all of the paper’s employees. The hackers apparently cracked a number of passwords to gain entry to employee computers.

“They created custom software that allowed them to search for and grab Mr. Barboza’s and Mr. Yardley’s e-mails and documents from a Times e-mail server,” the paper revealed.

The intrusion is apparently part of a wider campaign directed by Chinese hackers against western media outlets since 2008. Hackers from China also attempted to hack into the network of Bloomberg News last year after publishing stories about the relatives of China’s vice president.

Mandiant has investigated many of the breaches and found evidence that Chinese hackers had stolen e-mails, contact lists and files from more than 30 journalists and executives working for western media outlets.

Read More..

‘How I Met Your Mother’ gets final season – and reveals the mother

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – “How I Met Your Mother” will be back for a ninth and final season that will reveal – finally – who the mother is.

CBS and 20th Century Fox Television announced Wednesday that the series would be back for one final go-round with series regulars Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, Cobie Smulders, Neil Patrick Harris and Alyson Hannigan, as well as series creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas.

For eight years, viewers have wondered about the identity of the titular mother – and she will finally be revealed in the final season.

“Through eight years, ‘How I Met Your Mother’ has mastered the art of leading-edge comedy, emotional water-cooler moments and pop culture catch phrases,” said Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment. “We are excited for Carter, Craig, Pam Fryman and this amazing cast to tell the final chapter and reveal television’s most mysterious mother to some of TV’s most passionate fans.”

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: ‘How I Met Your Mother’ gets final season – and reveals the mother
Url Post: http://www.news.fluser.com/how-i-met-your-mother-gets-final-season-and-reveals-the-mother/
Link To Post : ‘How I Met Your Mother’ gets final season – and reveals the mother
Rating:
100%

based on 99998 ratings.
5 user reviews.
Author: Fluser SeoLink
Thanks for visiting the blog, If any criticism and suggestions please leave a comment

Read More..

Well: Waiting for Alzheimer's to Begin

My gray matter might be waning. Then again, it might not be. But I swear that I can feel memories — as I’m making them — slide off a neuron and into a tangle of plaque. I steel myself for those moments to come when I won’t remember what just went into my head.

I’m not losing track of my car keys, which is pretty standard in aging minds. Nor have I ever forgotten to turn off the oven after use, common in menopausal women. I can always find my car in the parking lot, although lots of “normal” folk can’t.

Rather, I suddenly can’t remember the name of someone with whom I’ve worked for years. I cover by saying “sir” or “madam” like the Southerner I am, even though I live in Vermont and grown people here don’t use such terms. Better to think I’m quirky than losing my faculties. Sometimes I’ll send myself an e-mail to-do reminder and then, seconds later, find myself thrilled to see a new entry pop into my inbox. Oops, it’s from me. Worse yet, a massage therapist kicked me out of her practice for missing three appointments. I didn’t recall making any of them. There must another Nancy.

Am I losing track of me?

Equally worrisome are the memories increasingly coming to the fore. Magically, these random recollections manage to circumnavigate my imagined build-up of beta-amyloid en route to delivering vivid images of my father’s first steps down his path of forgetting. He was the same age I am now, which is 46.

“How old are you?” I recall him asking me back then. Some years later, he began calling me every Dec. 28 to say, “Happy birthday,” instead of on the correct date, Dec. 27. The 28th had been his grandmother’s birthday.

The chasms were small at first. Explainable. Dismissible. When he crossed the street without looking both ways, we chalked it up to his well-cultivated, absent-minded professor persona. But the chasms grew into sinkholes, and eventually quicksand. When we took him to get new pants one day, he kept trying on the same ones he wore to the store.

“I like these slacks,” he’d say, over and over again, as he repeatedly pulled his pair up and down.

My dad died of Alzheimer’s last April at age 73 — the same age at which his father succumbed to the same disease. My dad ended up choosing neurology as his profession after witnessing the very beginning of his own dad’s forgetting.

Decades later, grandfather’s atrophied brain found its way into a jar on my father’s office desk. Was it meant to be an ever-present reminder of Alzheimer’s effect? Or was it a crystal ball sent to warn of genetic fate? My father the doctor never said, nor did he ever mention, that it was his father’s gray matter floating in that pool of formaldehyde.

Using the jarred brain as a teaching tool, my dad showed my 8-year-old self the difference between frontal and temporal lobes. He also pointed out how brains with Alzheimer’s disease become smaller, and how wide grooves develop in the cerebral cortex. But only after his death — and my mother’s confession about whose brain occupied that jar — did I figure out that my father was quite literally demonstrating how this disease runs through our heads.

Has my forgetting begun?

I called my dad’s neurologist. To find out if I was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, he would have to look for proteins in my blood or spinal fluid and employ expensive neuroimaging tests. If he found any indication of onset, the only option would be experimental trials.

But documented confirmation of a diseased brain would break my still hopeful heart. I’d walk around with the scarlet letter “A” etched on the inside of my forehead — obstructing how I view every situation instead of the intermittent clouding I currently experience.

“You’re still grieving your father,” the doctor said at the end of our call. “Sadness and depression affect the memory, too. Let’s wait and see.”

It certainly didn’t help matters that two people at my father’s funeral made some insensitive remarks.

“Nancy, you must be scared to death.”

“Is it hard knowing the same thing probably will happen to you?”

Maybe the real question is what to do when the forgetting begins. My dad started taking 70 supplements a day in hopes of saving his mind. He begged me to kill him if he wound up like his father. He retired from his practice and spent all day in a chair doing puzzles. He stopped making new memories in an all-out effort to preserve the ones he already had.

Maybe his approach wasn’t the answer.

Just before his death — his brain a fraction of its former self — my father managed to offer up a final lesson. I was visiting him in the memory-care center when he got a strange look on his face. I figured it was gas. But then his eyes lit up and a big grin overtook him, and he looked right at me and said, “Funny how things turn out.”

An unforgettable moment?

I can only hope.

---

Nancy Stearns Bercaw is a writer in Vermont. Her book, “Brain in a Jar: A Daughter’s Journey Through Her Father’s Memory,” will be published in April 2013 by Broadstone.

Read More..

Royal Dutch Shell Posts $5.6 Billion Profit

LONDON — Royal Dutch Shell, Europe’s largest oil company, disappointed the markets Thursday with fourth-quarter earnings of $5.6 billion after one-time items and inventory changes.

The results were 15 percent above the previous year but well below analysts’ expectation of around $6.3 billion.

Stuart Joyner, an analyst at Investec Securities in London, described the results as “a substantial miss.” Shell’s stock price was down about 1 percent in morning trading in London.

The company’s earnings for the year were $25.1 billion, up 2 percent over 2011.

The disappointment was largely due to lower earnings in Shell’s core exploration and production business, mainly because of weak performance in the Americas, where Shell’s multibillion Alaska drilling program has encountered multiple snafus and delays.

Exploration and production earnings were $4.4 billion compared to $5.1 billion the previous year, with the U.S. exploration and production business reporting a $69 million loss, partly due to low natural gas prices.

In another disappointment Shell estimated that it only replaced 44 percent of the reserves of oil and gas that it produced in 2012. That indicated that the company’s exploration effort, despite increased emphasis and spending in recent years, is still not performing well.

The capital investment forecast for 2013 was increased by 10 percent to $33 billion — another worry for the markets, as it suggests that Shell may be having trouble controlling costs.

On the positive side, Shell’s huge Pearl gas-to-liquids plant in Qatar is now fully operational and adding a hefty 235,000 barrels per day of oil equivalent to Shell’s production for the quarter.

Shell said that it was likely to increase its dividend in the first quarter of 2013 to 45 cents a share, a 4.7 percent increase over the first quarter of 2012.

“Shell is competitive and innovative,” the company’s chief executive, Peter Voser, said in a statement. “We are delivering on a strategy that others can’t easily repeat.”

Shell also had cause for relief on Wednesday when a court in The Hague dismissed most aspects of lawsuits brought against it by Nigerian farmers and fishermen seeking damages for pollution from oil spills in the Niger Delta.

Read More..

Toyota recalls nearly 1 million Corollas, Lexus IS sedans

Toyota is recalling 907,000 vehicles, mostly Corolla models, around the world for faulty air bags and another 385,000 Lexus IS luxury cars for defective wipers.

Toyota Motor Corp. spokesman Naoto Fuse said Wednesday there have been no accidents or injuries related to either of those defects, but the Japanese automaker received 46 reports of problems involving the air bags from North America, and one from Japan.

There were 25 reports of problems related to the windshield wipers.

Being recalled for air bags that can improperly inflate are 752,000 Corolla and Corolla Matrix cars in the U.S. as well as thousands of similar vehicles in Japan, Mexico and Canada, manufactured between December 2001 and May 2004.

The problem windshield wipers can get stuck if there is heavy snowfall, according to Toyota.

Read More..