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We all know that Brazilians are demostrative and are outgoing. Here is a cute little story and video of a famous Brazilian fighter who "accidently" kissed his opponent when their face got too close. This event took place prior to the fight last night in Las Vegas where the former champion got defeated and no longer holds the title of champion. The fighter owns several gyms in Brazil. His defeat last night might put a damper on the number of new customers he can get to join one of his Brazilian gyms. http://fansided.com/2013/07/05/anderson-silva-chris-weidman-kiss-at-weigh-in-video/

Macedoine and Other Eccentric Jellies A Jelly made using a macedoine mould in my collection By Ivan Day http://foodhistorjottings.blogspot.com I am an independent social historian of food culture and also a professional chef and confectioner. I run practical courses on all aspects of British and Italian food history at my home in the English Lake District. I am also the author of a number of books and many papers on the history of food and have curated many major exhibitions on food history in the UK, US and Europe. The main aim of this blog is to attempt to expose and correct many of the fairy stories that are written about the history of our food. I am assisted in this task by the Food History Jottings researcher Plumcake. Perhaps the most singular culinary expression of the advance of the Industrial Revolution in Victorian Britain was the extraordinary popularity of mass-produced copper jelly moulds. By the middle of the nineteenth century the fashion for this kind of kitchen kit had accelerated into a gastronomic craze. This was the result of the convergence of two emerging phenomena - the availability of cheap factory made gelatine and the increasing use of powerful pneumatic presses to stamp out copper into ever more intricate shapes. After a hundred years of being an unloved, even despised children's party food, a jelly revival has once again recently hit the fashionable food sector. This was started about twenty years ago by my dear genius friend Peter Brears and to a lesser extent by myself, when both of us started running country house events where we recreated jellies and other moulded foods for the public using original period moulds. I also started running courses on the subject in the early 1990s. More recently, Sam Bompas and Harry Parr, both attendees of my courses who have always kindly acknowledged the debt they owe to Peter and myself, have made a career for themselves out of the genre. However, despite modern computer 3D printing technology, the moulds available to the contemporary aspiring jelly maker just cannot compete with those of the Victorian kitchen. Just look at these! A few nineteenth manufacturers designed and produced highly specialised multi-part moulds for creating very unusual jellies with mysterious internal components, such as spiral columns and pyramids of fruit. Some of these striking British designs were even admired from afar by important chefs on the other side of the English Channel. In Cosmopolitan Cookery (London: 1870), the great Second Empire French chef Felix Urbain Dubois illustrated two of these extraordinary English inventions together with recipes he designed for them. He probably encountered them in London when he was exiled there during the Franco-Prussian War. One he illustrated was the macedoine mould, a fancy copper mould with a dome shaped internal liner, both clipped together with three metal pins. Here is Dubois's illustration - This mould was utilised by pouring a transparent jelly into the gap between the mould and the liner. Once the jelly had set, warm water was poured into the liner, which enabled it to be removed. Small pieces of fruit (the 'macedoine') and more jelly could then be used to fill up the resulting cavity. The finished dish was a striking hollow jelly containing a mosaic of coloured fruit, which distorted into an abstract pattern because of the effects of refraction caused by the flutings on the mould. I am fortunate enough to own a complete macedoine mould and used it to make the jelly at the top of this posting. However, my example is a different design from that which Dubois illustrates, though in principle it functions in exactly the same way. Although macedoine moulds are extremely rare - I have only ever seen two others, which lacked their liners. My example is the only one I have ever encountered which is complete. Here are some photographs. Macedoine Jelly from above Another Macedoine Jelly made with this mould The chained pins ensure that the inner liner is kept stable and at an equal distance from the outer mould. Macedoine jellies were also be made in plain moulds. The striking example above is from Jules Gouffé, The Royal Book of Pastry and Confectionery (London: 1874). A large plain charlotte mould would have been used to make this. It has been garnished with jelly croutons to create the crest around the top and is surmounted by a gum paste or nougat tazza filled with real or ice cream strawberries. Although a very weak jelly with a light 'mouth feel' was used to make a macedoine, the fruit inside acted as a very strong armature which could support a decorative structure like the tazza above. Even rarer than the macedoine mould illustrated by Dubois is this remarkable and lovely version, which reminds me of a Maya pyramid or ziggurat. It has a liner very similar to the other one and makes the most wonderful jelly filled with a pyramid of fruit. I have never ever seen another in this design. A Jelly containing a pyranid of apricots made in the stepped macedoine mould above The second English mould illustrated by Dubois in Cosmopolitan Cookery (1870) is a version of a very popular novelty mould first marketed by Temple and Reynolds of Belgravia in 1850. The location of their shop gave the name to this particular dish, the most extraordinary of all Victorian novelty jellies, the Belgrave. The outer copper moulds are quite common, but a complete set with a full compliment of pewter spiral liners is a rare find. Two versions were made, the round and the oval, the latter being very scarce now, especially with liners. The liners were placed into a jelly mould which was filled with clear jelly. When the jelly had set, the liners were literally 'screwed' out of the jelly by pouring hot water into them. This resulted in a number of spiral cavities which could then be filled with a coloured jelly or blancmange. Urbain Dubois's 1870 illustrations of the Belgrave Mould An illustration and instructions for making a Belgrave Jelly from a very late edition of Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery (London: 1905) My very rare oval Belgrave mould with pewter liners Oval Belgrave Jelly made with the mould above The more orthodox round Belgrave Jelly The two most common jelly moulds which included liners to create striking internal features were the Alexandra Cross and Brunswick Star. These were designed to celebrate the wedding of Queen Victoria's eldest son Edward Prince of Wales to Princess Alexandra of Denmark. The Alexandra Cross jelly had the Danish Flag running all the way through it, while the Brunswick Star had a white Garter Star running through it, both rather like a stick of rock. Here is an advertisement from the 1890s published by the cookery teacher and mould retailer Mrs Agnes Marshall. Surviving liners are almost unknown. To make both, coloured jellies were poured into the mould in a particular order and then the liners were inserted. The rest of the jelly was poured in around the liner, which was removed by pouring hot water into it. The cavity was then filled with white blancmange. A finished Alexandra Cross jelly A finished Brunswick Star jelly Slices of Brunswick Star jelly Jelly extravaganza in Harewood House. There is an oval Belgrave jelly in the centre of the table About three years ago I manned the wonderful period kitchen at Harewood House and demonstrated period jelly making to the general public. As the jellies came from the moulds, I dressed the dining room with a typical Victorian entremet course using Princess Mary's priceless Venetian glass dessert service. Last week I was at Harewood again, this time dressing the kitchen and gallery (the most wonderful room in England) with Regency period food for a major forthcoming BBC drama production, which I will tell you more about after it has been transmitted at Christmas. I made a large number of jellies and blancmanges for this production using Staffordshire ceramic moulds made in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. To whet your appetite, here are a few photos. As you can see, the Victorians were not the only ones to have beautiful moulded foods - the late Georgians could give them (and Bompas and Parr) a real run for their money... Still more at http://foodhistorjottings.blogspot.com/2013/06/macedoine-and-other-eccentric-victorian.html

Inside the multimillion-dollar essay-scoring business Behind the scenes of standardized testing By Jessica Lussenhop Minneapolis CityPages published: February 23, 2011 After three years working as a scorer, Dan DiMaggio says he's a skimming machine. "It's ugly," he says. "You just go as fast as possible." Todd Farley worked for 15 years in the testing industry before quitting to write a tell-all book about his former employer's scoring procedures Dan DiMaggio was blown away the first time he heard his boss say it. The pensive, bespectacled 25-year-old had been coming to his new job in the Comcast building in downtown St. Paul for only about a week. Naturally, he had lots of questions. At one point, DiMaggio approached his increasingly red-faced supervisor at his desk with another question. Instead of answering, the man just hissed at him. "You know this stuff better than I do!" he said. "Stop asking me questions!" DiMaggio was struck dumb. "I definitely didn't feel like I knew what was going on at all," he remembers. "Your supervisor has to at least pretend to know what's going on or everything falls apart." DiMaggio's question concerned an essay titled, "What's your goal in life?" The answer for a surprising number of seventh-graders was to lift 200 pounds. Although DiMaggio had been through a training process, he found himself tripped up as he began scoring the essays. What made the organization "good" as opposed to "excellent"? What happens when the kid doesn't answer the question at all, but writes with excellent organization about whatever the hell he wants? Did it matter that it was insane for seventh-graders to think they'd be benching 200 pounds? DiMaggio had good reason to worry. His score could determine whether the school was deemed adequate or failing—whether it received government funding or got shut down. DiMaggio soon learned that his boss was a temp like him. In fact, the boss was only the team leader because he'd once managed a Target store. DiMaggio found out that the human resources woman who'd hired them both was a temp. He realized that their office space—filled with long tables lined with several hundred computer monitors and generic office chairs—was rented. Eventually, DiMaggio got used to not asking questions. He got used to skimming the essays as fast as possible, glancing over the responses for about two minutes apiece before clicking a score. Every so often, though, his thoughts would drift to the school in Arkansas or Ohio or Pennsylvania. If they only knew what was going on behind the scenes. "The legitimacy of testing is being taken for granted," he says. "It's a farce." THOUGH THE EFFICACY of standardized testing has been hotly debated for decades, one thing has become crystal clear: It's big business. In 2002, President George Bush signed the infamous No Child Left Behind Act. While testing around the country had been on the rise for decades, NCLB tripled it. "The amount of testing that was being done mushroomed," says Kathy Mickey, a senior education analyst at Simba Information. "Every state had new contracts. There was a lot of spending." The companies that create and score tests saw profits skyrocket. In 2009, K-12 testing was estimated to be a $2.7 billion industry. The Twin Cities were early beneficiaries of the gold rush. Minnesota's history as an early computer hardware hotbed led to the creation of some of the earliest data-scanning and numbers-crunching businesses here, including Scantron and National Computer Systems. By the '90s, NCS was grading 85 percent of the standardized tests for the nation's largest school districts. In 2000, NCS was bought by Pearson, a multinational corporation based in London, making it a part of the largest education company in the world. In 2009, it posted $652 million in profits. Today, tens of thousands of temporary scorers are employed to correct essay questions. This year, Maple Grove-based Data Recognition Corporation will take on 4,000 temporary scorers, Questar Assessment will hire 1,000, and Pearson will take on thousands more. From March through May, hundreds of thousands of standardized test essays will pour into the Twin Cities to be scored by summer. The boom in testing has come with several notable catastrophes. The most famous happened in 2000, when NCS Pearson incorrectly failed 8,000 Minnesota students on a math test. Pearson shelled out a $7 million settlement to the students, and Gov. Jesse Ventura participated in a makeup graduation for students who were wrongly denied their diplomas. In 2010, Pearson again miss-scored two questions on Minnesota's fifth- and eighth-grade tests. Delays in its Florida scoring resulted in a $3 million fine and glitches in Wyoming led the company to offer a $5.8 million settlement. But while a mistake on a bubble form is a black-and-white problem, few scandals have broken on the essay side of the test-scoring business. "It requires human judgment," says Michael Rodriguez, of the University of Minnesota's educational psychology department. "There is no way to standardize that." Now scorers from local companies are drawing back the curtain on the clandestine business of grading student essays, a process they say goes too fast; relies on cheap, inexperienced labor; and does not accurately assess student learning. "The entire testing system in the U.S. needs to be restructured," says Robert Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest. "That would likely result in the disappearance of these essay-scoring sweatshops." DANI INDOVINO DIDN'T want to score tests. She wanted to work in nonprofit administration. But she was fresh out of school in September 2008, just as the economy was entering its freefall. Desperate to get out of her parents' house, she perked up when some friends told her about becoming a "reader" for one of the local test companies. It was easy work to get and there was lots of it. All you needed was a college diploma. "I was like, 'Yeah, I have a degree, I can do that,'" she recalls. On Indovino's first day, she drove out to Questar Assessment in Apple Valley, a beige warehouse, and followed the signs that said "Scoring Center" in bright red letters. During her brief interview, she'd been asked repeatedly if she was able to follow a "rubric"—a set of guidelines to assess the essays in as uniform a way as possible. "I guess they've had bad experiences with English teachers," she says. Inside Questar, Indovino took a seat in a room that looked like a classroom, crammed with as many computers and desks as could fit. It was here that the team leaders unveiled the scoring rubric, which was like a secret decoder ring for the job. The rubrics are most often developed in conjunction with the state's department of education and its testing contractor. Currently, Minnesota contracts both its test writing and scoring to Pearson. Local teachers are included in the rubric-writing process, as well as test-writing academics called "psychometricians." At first blush, the rubric seemed simple enough to Indovino. It was a chart with one- or two-sentence explanations of each number grade. Scorers are forbidden from taking the rubrics out of the Questar building or talking about them, but they generally look something like this: 6. An excellent response, the essay includes• excellent focus and development • excellent organization • excellent language skills and word choice • excellent grammar, usage, and mechanics 5. A good response, the essay includes • good focus and development • good organization • good language skills and word choice • good grammar, usage, and mechanics 4. An adequate response ... On down to 1s, which were reserved for barely decipherable language. As part of their training, Indovino and her co-workers read through pre-graded examples out loud, then discussed why each had been scored the way it was. The process quickly divided the room into two camps—the young, unemployed kids who were just there for a paycheck, and the retired teachers. "The retired teachers would argue everything," says Indovino. After two days of going through example papers, each scorer had to pass a qualifying exam. Indovino scored three sets of ten pre-scored papers. In order to be approved to work on the project, she had to pass two of the sets with at least an 80 percent "agreement rate" with the rubric. She did so with relative ease; most of the rest of the room passed on their second try. Her first project was from Arkansas, an essay written by eighth-graders on the topic, "A fun thing to do in my town." And that's where the troubles began. Suddenly, she was being asked to crank through 200 real essays in a day. The scanned papers popped up on the screen and her eyes flitted as fast as they could down the lines. The difference between "excellent" and "good" and "adequate" was decided in a matter of seconds, to say nothing of the responses that were simply off the reservation. How do you score a kid who rails that his town sucks? What about an exceptionally well-written essay on why the student was refusing to answer the question? All over the room, the teachers were raising their hands and disputing the rubric. Indovino preferred to keep her head down and just score the way she was told to. "I was good at the bad system," she says. Over the next several months, Indovino got to know her co-workers better. The young people were mostly laid off or in foreclosure. They came straight from paper routes and went off to waitressing jobs afterward. They also made for a very dedicated workforce. Indovino says she saw her co-workers hung-over, extremely ill, and even fresh from surgery. "I scored a full day without glasses on," Indovino says with a shrug. "I sat with my nose up to the glass all day. I couldn't read it." When she eventually got a full-time job, Indovino quit scoring. Although she'd done well by the company's standards, following the rubric provided little sense of accomplishment. "Nobody is saying, 'I'm doing good work, I'm helping society,'" she says. "Everyone is saying, 'This isn't right.'" DAVID PUTHOFF WAS an experienced reader with Questar when he started getting the warnings that his job performance wasn't up to snuff. "Your numbers are down a little bit," his supervisor said at the end of one day. "Make sure you bring those back up." Most essays, depending on the criteria established in the state, are scored by two readers. As Puthoff and his fellow scorers whipped through their essays, their supervisor had their own eyes glued to a screen, keeping them apprised of whether Reader #1 agreed with Reader #2. If so, both got a 100 percent agreement score for that essay. If one differed by a point or so, the essay would be counted as "adjacent" agreement. Puthoff had thus far been an agreement-rate superstar. He was consistently in the high 80s. Then came the question from hell out of Louisiana: "What are the qualities of a good leader?" One student wrote, "Martin Luther King Jr. was a good leader." With artfulness far beyond the student's age, the essay delved into King's history with the civil rights movement, pointing out the key moments that had shown his leadership. There was just one problem: It didn't fit the rubric. The rubric liked a longer essay, with multiple sentences lauding key qualities of leadership such as "honesty" and "inspires people." This essay was incredibly concise, but got its point across. Nevertheless, the rubric said it was a 2. Puthoff knew it was a 2. He hesitated the way he had been specifically trained not to. Then he hit, "3." It didn't take long before a supervisor was in his face. He leaned down with a printout of the King essay. "This really isn't a 3-style paper," the supervisor said. Puthoff pointed out the smart use of examples and the exceptional prose. The supervisor just shook his head and pointed out how short the paragraphs were. "You know, it's more of a 2," the supervisor repeated. "Not enough elaboration." Puthoff quickly learned these were not arguments he could win. But as time went on, he found himself having more and more of them. There were the students who wrote extremely well but whose responses were too short—in his mind he saw them, bored with the essay topic, hurrying to finish. Or the essays where the handwriting got rushed and jumbled at the end, then cut off abruptly—he imagined the proctor telling the frantic student to lay down his pencil on a well-written but incomplete response. And there were the kids who just did what they wanted. Like the boy from Arkansas who, instead of writing about the most fun thing to do in his town, instead wrote a hilarious essay on why his town is terrible and how he wanted to burn it down and pee on the ashes. "I wanted the kid to get the score they deserved," Puthoff says of his time in the business. "But they want to put them in boxes." In defiance, Puthoff started giving creatively written essays an illicit score bump. His agreement numbers noticeably suffered. The industry calls this "scorer drift," a well-documented tendency to begin deviating from the rubric over time. One case of scorer drift actually resulted in some 4,100 teachers failing the essay portion of their certification exams. The teachers successfully sued for $11.1 million. What was different about Puthoff's scorer drift was that he was doing it on purpose. "I'll bring them up, don't worry," he'd say of his agreement rate, then go back the next day and do the exact same thing. "I know this kid is good," he'd tell himself. "I know this kid's a good writer." TODD FARLEY TREATED his supervising position at a scoring company like a joke. "At the time, testing wasn't that big," he says. "I never had to feel like I'm actually deciding someone's future. It was just silly." Farley had started at the bottom rung of the testing industry in Iowa City. A part-time graduate student with bills to pay, he was more interested in partying and trying to become a writer than he was in getting a real job. So he took one scoring job after another for NCS. "It was always a temporary gig," he remembers. "It was a lovely, slacker-y life." Farley had no official training in teaching, education, or test writing, but the longer he remained at NCS, the more responsibilities he was handed. He took the offer to become a team leader because it paid a little extra money and got him out of scoring. Teaching his first group of scorers, Farley walked them through the rubric the same way he'd been shown. He fielded the inevitable bombardment of confused questions as best he could, in particular from one man: Harry the laid-off refrigerator plant worker. Even though Harry eventually passed his qualifying exams, he was a disaster. As Farley monitored Harry's scoring, he found himself walking back over to Harry repeatedly. "Look," Farley would say. "You're giving this essay a 2 even though it's perfectly formatted." Harry would nod. But a short time later, another ridiculous low ball from Harry would land on Farley's desk. Before long, Harry began to drag down the all-important agreement level. Farley now understood the reasons why, when he'd been a scorer, his team leaders would tell the room he wanted to start seeing more 3s or 4s or whatever. Supervisors were expected to turn the test scores into a nice bell curve. If his room did not agree at least 80 percent of the time, the tests would be taken back and re-graded, wasting time and money. The supervisor would be put on probation or demoted. When Farley complained to a fellow supervisor about his problem, she smiled wryly and held up a pencil. "I've got this eraser, see," she told him. "I help them out." So Farley simply began changing Harry's scores to agree with his peers'. The practice soon spread well beyond Harry. "I'd just change a bunch of answers to make it look like my group was doing a great job," Farley says. "I wanted the stupid item to be done, and so did my bosses." There were a few other tricks to keep the numbers up. One was to send a wayward scorer off into a corner to study example papers long enough for the group's numbers to rebound. Another was to pair up a couple of bad scorers and make them decide together what to give a paper. Or he could make the same announcement he'd heard from his supervisor back when he was a scorer. "It's time we see more sixes," Farley would tell the group, which was code that his bell curve was off. "We're in trouble here, we need higher scores, give higher scores." Though Farley and his fellow team leaders were fudging the numbers, even he was shocked when a representative from a southeastern state's Department of Education visited to check on how her state's essays were doing. As it turned out, the answer was: not well. About 67 percent of the students were getting 2s. That's when the representative informed Farley that the rubric for her state's scoring had suddenly changed. "We can't give this many 1s and 2s," she told him firmly. The scorers would not be going back to re-grade the hundreds of tests they'd already finished—there just wasn't time. Instead, they were just going to give out more 3s. No one objected—the customer was always right. Eventually, Farley was hired away by a rival testing company and moved to the East Coast. As he saw standardized tests becoming more and more important to the fate of schools and kids, he got fed up, quit the industry, and decided to write a whistle-blowing book. Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry, came out in 2009. Though the tell-all chronicles Farley's many misdeeds while scoring tests and supervising, he has nonetheless been invited back to work for the testing companies several times. The boom has just made his experience too valuable. "They get paid money to put scores on paper, not to put the right scores on papers," he says. "They have a bottom line. Why anyone would expect anything else is beyond me." PEARSON SPOKESMAN ADAM Gaber warns against taking the opinions of former scorers too seriously. In an email, he characterized their concerns as "one-sided stories based upon people who have a very limited exposure and narrow point of view on what is truly a science." Questar declined a request to visit their facilities, but reached by phone, Susan Trent, vice president of assessment services, said that the essays are scored as objectively as is possible. "We're really insistent that readers understand they're dealing with kids," she says. "Decisions are being made about these kids based on these scores, and we're absolutely committed to getting them right." She denies that graders are pressured to work too quickly and says that any evidence of scorer drift results in test re-scoring. She is also adamant that well-trained temps are the best way to score essays objectively. "You do not have to be a teacher in order to score student response," adds Terry Appleman, vice president of performance assessment. "You have to have a good rubric and good training." Asked what to make of the former Questar employees who felt they couldn't do a good job given their training and time constraints, Appleman quickly answers: "If they don't think they're qualified, it's not the job for them." Most of the scorers interviewed for this story agree, but nearly all plan to return to the scoring center. They say they need the money. http://www.citypages.com/content/printVersion/1782234/

Pope Francis criticizes indifference toward immigrants' plightBy Tom Kington LA Times July 8, 2013, 10:06 a.m. ROME -- Against a backdrop of growing anti-immigration sentiment in Europe, Pope Francis on Monday used his first papal trip outside the Vatican to denounce the "globalization of indifference" to migrants, calling their suffering "a painful thorn in my heart." The pontiff traveled to the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa to drop a wreath of flowers into the Mediterranean in mourning for the thousands of migrants and asylum seekers who have drowned while sailing from Africa to Europe in search of a better life. "We have become used to the suffering of others," said Francis, who made the surprise decision to visit Lampedusa after reading about the recent sinking of a boat that resulted in the deaths of a dozen migrants. "Has any one of us wept for these persons who were on the boat? For the young mothers carrying their babies? For these men who were looking for a means of supporting their families?" he asked. "We are a society which has forgotten how to weep, how to experience compassion." Addressing Muslims on the island, the pope said that "the church is with you in the search for a more dignified life for you and your families." Francis' fiercely worded homily, delivered before a crowd of 10,000 people, highlighted his focus on the plight of the poor and marginalized. Just 70 miles off the coast of Tunisia, Lampedusa is a favored landing point in Europe for African migrants, who travel on rickety fishing boats that often run out of fuel or sink in rough weather. About 8,400 migrants landed in Italy and the nearby island of Malta in the first half of this year, up from 4,500 in the same period last year, but down from the many thousands who headed for Lampedusa during the political upheaval of the Arab Spring in 2011. More than 6,000 people are believed to have drowned in the waters around Lampedusa between 1994 and 2012. The United Nations recorded 500 deaths of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean during 2012. Hostility toward immigrants is on the rise in Europe as the region contends with a stubborn economic recession. Countries such as Britain are trying to tighten restrictions on newcomers; anti-immigrant political parties, some on the far right, have become potent forces in France, Greece, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. In 2009, Italy struck a deal with Libya's then-ruler, Moammar Kadafi, to send back migrants intercepted at sea without hearing claims for asylum. Pope Francis, whose own forebears migrated from Italy to Argentina, was accompanied by a flotilla of local fishing boats as he sailed into Lampedusa's harbor after dropping a wreath of yellow and white flowers from an Italian coast guard vessel. The pope celebrated Mass on a sports field near where the wrecks of migrants' vessels have been piled up. He used an altar fashioned from a small boat and a lectern made from the helm of one of the vessels. His staff and chalice were also made from piece of wood taken from the wrecks. The pope met a group of migrants and thanked locals for their kind treatment of new arrivals. After his visit, he tweeted: "God will judge us on the basis of how we have treated the most needy." http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-pope-immigration-20130708,0,4473843.story

At first I thought this was going to be a variation of the old joke about the guy who goes to a shrink. The shrink gives the guy a word association test. Shrink: Elephant. Guy: Sex. S: Cake. G: Sex. S: Tree. G: Sex. S: Why does everything remind you of sex? G: It doesn't. You are the one with the dirty mind. Best regards, RA1

Somehow you left out or gave short shrift to the abductee enjoying himself. Aren't all encounters after midnight on Saturday somewhat alien in character? Best regards, RA1

I course I knew what an Uncle Tom Oreo is. However, your graphic description hits a little too close to home, especially on a Saturday night. Best regards, RA1

Do you guys believe there is living intelligence outside our universe? Yes Do you think we captured a Alien from another world? No

Well 4 Aces pulled a "Queen".... albeit an Intense one...

(1) Intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? There has to be. See the Drake Equation. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation And of course the old crack "They must be intelligent -- you don't see them looking for intelligent life down here." (2) Have we had a visit yet? No way. As Arthur Clarke said, "If I came 2 billion light-years to see you, believe I wouldn't spend another 200 years lurking around in the shadows trying to find a parking spot." I know Erich Von Daniken proved it had to have been extraterrestrials who set up the Easter Island statues. But as Thor Heyerdahl went and saw, if no aliens are handy that day, then a couple dozen men with ropes and log rollers will have to do.

Without a doubt, my favorite place to grab a bowl/tijela of this merlot-toned treat. I think what I like is that they serve it in an authentic manner. Your option whether with or without guarana syrup, with our without tapioca, ability to adjust the sweetness level to your own preference. An oral orgasm before the other type waiting for you just a short walk or two-stop metro ride from Clube 117. Besides the tacaca and acai, I can vouch for a sampling of the ice cream with exotic flavors of fruit from the northeast of the country. In my open, don't bother with bonbons and waste your money on. Have another scoop or two of the sorvete/ice cream. Yum! Yum! The eyes of Tacacá do Norte’s harried staff widen as yet another customer arrives during the lunchtime rush. The bedroom-sized snack bar can barely hold one line of chairs around its bar but they have somehow managed to squeeze in two. Impatient regulars shake hands and whistle “psst” to the sheepish young men staffing the establishment, who gingerly hand steaming pots of shrimp soup and freshly puréed juices over the packed bar. If overcrowding is a problem for this tiny snack shack, it’s because it’s the real deal for açaí – a rare place in Rio serving pure, velvety slushies made from the purple Amazonian berry rather than the ersatz, hyper-sweet iced drink with lots of added sugar found in the standard snack bars elsewhere around town. While foreigners may know açaí as a trend - See more at: http://www.culinarybackstreets.com/rio/2013/tacaca-do-norte/#sthash.DNWoRNgE.dpuf

Absolutely. I don't know about today but for many, many years, the US Navy only had rear facing seats in their transport aircraft. I can personally attest to the efficacy of such. I was catching a ride in a biz jet many years ago and was asked to sit in a rear facing seat. Virtually all corporate type aircraft have at least some rear facing seats - the four seats facing each other are called a club arrangement. We were going from LGA-ALB-BGR and had 3 board of directors on board + 3 "hitch hikers" like me. Actually I was going to get a trade in aircraft at BGR. The weather was very rainy. The runway at ALB is not extra long and was covered with water. We landed going pretty fast, hydroplaned and went off the end doing about 80 MPH. Everyone else was thrown violently into their seat belts but no one was injured. I could have been in my den watching TV because all that sudden deceleration was absorbed by my seat back. Rear facing seats won't cure every possible injury but would reduce a lot of them substantially. Rarely I have a passenger to object to facing the rear but as soon as I explain do that or stay home they usually are OK. A few think they will have motion sickness or somehow feel uneasy but those are all imagined objections. If it is dark or one does not look outside one never knows. If offered a rear facing seat, take it. Best regards, RA1

Apparently Pope Francis has more power than a US President but likely that was always so. Carter, among others, tried to "reform" the bureaucracy and failed. I hope Francis has better luck. Best regards, RA1

That is what I had heard and read (but not experienced). In other words, mostly US trained MD's as well as clean and very good care. A combination impossible to beat, especially when priced fairly. Best regards, RA1

As always, thank you for the info. I will have to try this on my next trip.

Great story and photos! http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/04/travel/brazil-10-things/index.html