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Friday, November 30, 2012

Movie review: Anna Karenina | canada.com

Anna Karenina

3? stars out of 5

Starring: Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson

Directed by: Joe Wright

Running time: 130 minutes

Parental guidance: Adult themes

There are moments in Joe Wright?s exquisitely artificial remounting of Anna Karenina when Keira Knightley stares at the camera in passionate close-up and we are invited to drink her in: the lush pout, the soft sculpt of her chin, the promise of her bare shoulders, the yearning in her eyes. It?s a face men might ruin lives for.

But that?s not all there is to Knightley. The actress, who has served as a kind of muse to Wright (Atonement, Pride and Prejudice) also arrives with a slouch and a crooked smile: It?s a face men with ruined lives might also have second thoughts about.

And so it is with Anna, a married woman in Leo Tolstoy?s vast love story who surrenders to forbidden desires and lives to regret them. It has been turned into a film that seems to be afraid of its passions and therefore mounts them behind glass: Anna Karenina is filmed as if it was a play into which we have been invited backstage to see the hidden workings of its artifice. Screenwriter Tom Stoppard may be commenting on the theatre of Imperial Russia ? filmed with sumptuous glitter, flickering lamps and embroidered excess ? or the theatre of desire itself. ?Love,? an older woman says to Anna on a train (a toy, chugging through an artificial field of snow). ?Is it love?? Anna asks. ?Always,? the woman says.

Anna is married to cold and proper bureaucrat Alexei Karenin (Jude Law, hiding behind a goatee and receding hairline) in St. Petersburg, but goes off to Moscow to attend to the adultery afflicting her sister Dolly (Kelly Macdonald). In Moscow, she comes under the spell of the dashing cavalry officer Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who seems hardly less prissy than Karenin), and they become the scandal of the steppes.

?Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,? Tolstoy wrote, and the film applies the principle to love affairs. Vronsky and Anna ? she in a black dress ? fall in love while dancing, a trope so familiar that Wright turns it into a piece of framed performance, with Vronsky and Anna sweeping across a floor of aristocrats frozen into a tableau of formalized privilege. Wright extends the choreography to other key events: A horse race rushes across the stage of a theatre; government workers raise and lower their arms together to stamp documents.

The formalized structure works only if we feel the proscenium burned away by the heat of attraction. But unlike the melodrama of the 1935 version with Greta Garbo, which was designed to melt your heart, this version runs cool. Knightley is at once regal and gawky ? you half expect her to raise the hem of one of her lush dresses and kick a soccer ball ? and Taylor-Johnson seems half-formed and callow. ?Oh, to be young again,? Anna says. ?Shrouded by that blue mist.? But the mist seems too ephemeral to be real.

Anna and Vronsky are meant to be a contrast to Anna?s brother Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen), who wears his adultery lightly and complains that in a long marriage ?you find yourself a martyr to distraction.? His unfaithfulness is shallow and selfish but at least he seems to be enjoying life.

Anna Karenina is a tragic story about breaking the rules and the lavish punishments ? cut dead at the opera, disapproved by society ? that result. Wright has turned it into a rich operetta of unhappiness, tinged with hints of social commentary. We barely see the underclasses, and the Russian Revolution was still almost 40 years away, but there?s a proto-socialist hero in the wings.

He is a farmer named Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) who falls in love with Kitty (Alicia Vikander), the woman who lost Vronsky to Anna, and rescues her into a life of propriety and marital happiness. Levin works shoulder to shoulder with his farm workers, scything the crops with the kind of devotion that, decades later, Soviets would put on their propaganda posters. Levin is the future. Anna, alas, is the past.

Source: http://o.canada.com/2012/11/29/movie-review-anna-karenina/

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Ronda Rousey: ?I try to have as much sex as possible before I fight?

UFC/Strikeforce women's bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey appeared on Jim Rome's show on Wednesday. What does the champion use as her training secret? Does she have high-level training methods not available to amateur athletes and workout warriors?

Nope. She likes to have as much sex as possible before fights. Though Mick advised Rocky that women weaken the legs, Rousey believes it has the opposite effect on women.

"For girls it raises your testosterone, so I try to have as much sex as possible before I fight actually. Not with like everybody, I don't put out like a Craigslist ads or anything, but if I got a steady I'm going to be like, 'Yo, fight time's coming up,'" Rousey said.

It clearly works for her. Rousey has steamrolled every opponent she has faced on her way to the championship and a 6-0 record. She's won every fight with a first-round submission, and she recently was named the first woman in the UFC. Though her opponent and the date for her first UFC fight are currently unknown, UFC president Dana White said her bout will be a main event on a pay-per-view.

Rousey is also a two-time Olympian, and she won a bronze medal for judo in 2008. It was a fight before the Beijing Olympics that made her think she could be successful in the cage.

"Yes. I got in a fight with a couple of guys at the end of 2007 in a movie theater. It was four couples so four guys and one girl tried to get into it. And I had two friends with me. But I was only really handling two guys by myself. They sued me for assault because it didn't really go too well for them. I guess if you lose a fight in Santa Monica the next option is to sue. Everyone in the theater was cheering for me. I was thinking I might have a future in this. It was before the whole MMA thing."

Source: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mma-cagewriter/ronda-rousey-try-much-sex-possible-fight-171940850--mma.html

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Thursday, November 29, 2012

Why did Obama invite Romney to lunch?

President Barack Obama is having Mitt Romney over for lunch on Thursday, and their meeting is already generating a lot of buzz. Here are five theories about the White House?s motives.

cspandebateObama and Romney were bitter rivals in the 2012 presidential campaign, with Obama getting a surprisingly big victory in the Electoral College.

Since then, Romney has stayed out of the spotlight, while Obama said he would invite Romney to the White House at some point.

The pair will have a private meeting for lunch, so there will be no press coverage or a photo opportunity.

So here are five theories that are floating around about the get-together.

1. Obama is extending a common courtesy

In 2008, President-elect Obama met with John McCain on November 17 in Chicago, and there was a photo op with the two men. McCain had lost to Obama, but he was still a U.S. senator.

At the time, McCain said he would ?obviously? help the incoming president, and the former foes issued a statement about bipartisanship.

Conditions are different in 2012, with Romney not holding a Senate position and Obama sitting in office as the incumbent.

We?re also not sure that there is a tradition of losing presidential candidates meeting with incumbent presidents.

The protocol for current presidents meeting with former presidents is entirely different.

You can read excerpts from a book called ?The President?s Club? for a look at how presidents interact.

2. Obama will offer Romney a Cabinet job

That doesn?t seem likely, since Romney is self-supporting financially and has a life outside politics, with 18 grandchildren.

If a job were forthcoming in the new Obama Cabinet, it would have to be approved by the U.S. Senate, with a majority vote.

Since the Senate is controlled by the Democrats, that could get interesting.

Also, as a Cabinet member, Romney would be reporting to Obama, which also would be interesting, given the mutual dislike between the candidates on the campaign trail.

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3. Obama will enlist Romney in the fiscal cliff debate

One issue where the candidates disagreed sharply on the campaign trail was on the fiscal cliff debate.

Romney was not in favor of raising taxes on higher income earners, because he believed it stunted the growth of business and hurt its ability to create jobs.

Obama was critical of Romney?s philosophy about the fiscal cliff, especially his attacks on entitlement spending.

However, one of Romney?s ideas on the campaign trail, a cap of income tax deductions for wealthier Americans, might become part of the negotiations in Congress in December.

Obama had floated out a similar plan in the past, but just after the election, Senate Democrats attached Romney?s name to it, as a way to get the Republicans to discuss it.

?Let?s just say there?s a renewed interest,? said Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, as reported in The New York Times on November 13. ?Part of it is people reflecting on Obama?s proposal, but when Romney said what he said, it just added fuel.?

4. Obama wants Romney?s advice on business issues

That?s also a distinct possibility, since President Obama praised Romney?s business acumen after the campaign.

?He presented some ideas during the course of the campaign that I actually agree with. And so it?d be interesting to talk to him about something like that. There may be ideas that he has with respect to jobs and growth that can help middle-class families that I want to hear,? Obama said.

Of course, President Obama has scores of business advisers already, including friends in the private sector.

5. Obama wants closure on the 2012 presidential election, or something else?

President Obama said after the election that he was interested in talking with Romney about ways the two men could work together.

He used similar words about John McCain in 2008, after Obama easily defeated the Republican candidate. That didn?t come to pass.

One theory is that Obama could just want to be consistent in how he publicly handles his consecutive wins in 2008 and 2012, and it would be a slight to Romney if he didn?t extend a similar invitation for a sit-down meeting.

But in an editorial in Wednesday?s Washington Post, former Romney strategist Stuart Stevens paints a portrait of Romney as a good man who is a Washington outsider, who was never accepted by the GOP establishment.

?I appreciate that Mitt Romney was never a favorite of D.C.?s Green Room crowd or, frankly, of many politicians. That?s why, a year ago, so few of those people thought he would win the nomination,? Stevens said.

Given that some key Republican leaders criticized Romney for his post-election comments about Obama using ?gifts? to win the election, could Obama approach Romney about some kind of position related to bipartisanship or public service?

As odd as the idea sounds, Romney has made it clear he?s done running for public office, but has no plans to retire.

An Associated Press story earlier this month cited a Romney insider as saying the former candidate had an interest in philanthropic efforts or having a role in future Olympics efforts.

Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of the National Constitution Center.

Suicide bomber wounds prominent Pakistani militant

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan (AP) ? A suicide bomber on Thursday attacked a prominent Pakistani militant commander in the country's northwest who is believed to have a nonaggression pact with the army, wounding him and killing seven people, officials said.

A few hours later, a U.S. drone fired a pair of missiles at a house several kilometers (miles) from the bombing site, killing three suspected militants, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

The suicide bomber attacked Maulvi Nazir in Wana, the main town in the South Waziristan tribal area, as he was arriving at an office he uses to meet with locals and hear their complaints, said the commander's spokesman, Maulana Ameer Nawaz. Nazir was not critically wounded, said Nawaz.

Nazir was one of over a dozen people wounded in the attack, said Pakistani intelligence officials and a local government administrator, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. They initially reported that three people died, but later raised the number to seven after some of the critically injured died of their wounds.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but suspicion is likely to fall on the Pakistani Taliban, which has been waging a bloody insurgency against the government for the past several years and has jockeyed with Nazir for power in South Waziristan.

The tribal area was the Pakistani Taliban's main sanctuary until the army launched a large ground offensive in 2009 and pushed many of them out.

Nazir is widely believed to have cut a deal with the army ahead of the offensive that allowed him to stay in South Waziristan as long as he remained on the sidelines. The militant commander has in the past focused his fight against U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, not against the Pakistani state.

Nazir had been running a secret campaign in recent weeks to push the Pakistani Taliban and foreign militants allied with them out of Wana and the surrounding areas, said intelligence officials.

Nawaz, the militant commander's spokesman, said the suicide bomber who attacked Nazir appeared to be a 15- or 16-year-old boy.

"The moment the chief got out of his vehicle, the boy ran toward him and detonated his explosives," Nawaz told The Associated Press by telephone.

Yar Mohammad, a resident of Wana who witnessed the attack, said the blast was huge.

"I'm seeing smoke everywhere," he said.

Nazir's fighters retaliated after the attack by killing two Pakistani Taliban militants in the main market in Wana, said intelligence officials. There were also reports of Nazir's fighters attacking Pakistani Taliban militants in the nearby village of Kari Kot, they said.

The house that was hit by a U.S. missile strike later Thursday was located in Sheen Warsak, another village near Wana, said intelligence officials. The identities of the suspected militants who were killed were not clear, said the officials.

The U.S. does not normally comment publicly about CIA drone attacks in Pakistan, but American officials have privately said that the strikes have killed senior Taliban and al-Qaida leaders and are a key counterterrorism tool.

_____

Associated Press Rasool Dawar contributed to this report from Peshawar, Pakistan.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/suicide-bomber-wounds-prominent-pakistani-militant-100441092.html

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makaskarler: World Racquetball News: no 1 racquetball player in ...

Donna Ryder from Newport, Co. Mayo, is a Sports Scholarship student at IT Sligo and is currently ranked the no 1 racquetball player in Europe. She was conferred with a Bachelor of Business in Recreation and Leisure at the 2012 IT Sligo Conferring.
Mayo graduates were among more than 1,800 graduates conferred at IT Sligo at its annual Conferring Ceremonies last week. President of IT Sligo, Professor Terri Scott, said encouraged the graduates to be entrepreneurial in their outlook.
She quoted the President of the USA Barak Obama who said that ?focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it?s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realise your true potential.?

Source: http://mauro-racquetball.blogspot.com/2012/11/no-1-racquetball-player-in-europe.html

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Source: http://makaskarler.blogspot.com/2012/11/world-racquetball-news-no-1-racquetball.html

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Source: http://mcmillan5061.typepad.com/blog/2012/11/makaskarler-world-racquetball-news-no-1-racquetball-player-in.html

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Source: http://wall30.typepad.com/blog/2012/11/makaskarler-world-racquetball-news-no-1-racquetball-player-in.html

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Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Graphene/nanotube hybrid makes single-surface material for energy storage, electronics

ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2012) ? A seamless graphene/nanotube hybrid created at Rice University may be the best electrode interface material possible for many energy storage and electronics applications.

Led by Rice chemist James Tour, researchers have successfully grown forests of carbon nanotubes that rise quickly from sheets of graphene to astounding lengths of up to 120 microns, according to a paper published November 27 by Nature Communications. A house on an average plot with the same aspect ratio would rise into space.

That translates into a massive amount of surface area, the key factor in making things like energy-storing supercapacitors.

The Rice hybrid combines two-dimensional graphene, which is a sheet of carbon one atom thick, and nanotubes into a seamless three-dimensional structure. The bonds between them are covalent, which means adjacent carbon atoms share electrons in a highly stable configuration. The nanotubes aren't merely sitting on the graphene sheet; they become a part of it.

"Many people have tried to attach nanotubes to a metal electrode and it's never gone very well because they get a little electronic barrier right at the interface," Tour said. "By growing graphene on metal (in this case copper) and then growing nanotubes from the graphene, the electrical contact between the nanotubes and the metal electrode is ohmic. That means electrons see no difference, because it's all one seamless material.

"This gives us, effectively, a very high surface area of more than 2,000 square meters per gram of material. It's a huge number," said Tour, Rice's T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science and a co-author with former postdoctoral researcher and lead author Yu Zhu, now an assistant professor at the University of Akron.

Tour said proof of the material's hybrid nature lies in the seven-membered rings at the transition from graphene to nanotube, a structure predicted by theory for such a material and now confirmed through electron microscope images with subnanometer resolution.

Carbon has no peer as a conductive material in such a thin and robust form, especially in the form of graphene or certain types of nanotubes. Combining the two appears to offer great potential for electronic components like fast supercapacitors that, because of the massive surface area, may hold a great deal of energy in a tiny package.

Rice chemist Robert Hauge and his team made the first steps toward such a hybrid over the past decade. Hauge, a distinguished faculty fellow in chemistry at Rice and co-author of the new work, discovered a way to make densely packed carpets of nanotubes on a carbon substrate by suspending catalyst-laced flakes in a furnace. When heated, the catalyst built carbon nanotubes like skyscrapers, starting at the substrate and working their way up. In the process, they lifted the aluminum oxide buffer into the air. The whole thing looked like a kite with many strings and was dubbed an odako, like the giant Japanese kites.

In the new work, the team grew a specialized odako that retained the iron catalyst and aluminum oxide buffer but put them on top of a layer of graphene grown separately on a copper substrate. The copper stayed to serve as an excellent current collector for the three-dimensional hybrids that were grown within minutes to controllable lengths of up to 120 microns.

Electron microscope images showed the one-, two- and three-walled nanotubes firmly embedded in the graphene, and electrical testing showed no resistance to the flow of current at the junction.

"The performance we see in this study is as good as the best carbon-based supercapacitors that have ever been made," Tour said. "We're not really a supercapacitor lab, and still we were able to match the performance because of the quality of the electrode. It's really remarkable, and it all harkens back to that unique interface."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Rice University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

Yu Zhu, Lei Li, Chenguang Zhang, Gilberto Casillas, Zhengzong Sun, Zheng Yan, Gedeng Ruan, Zhiwei Peng, Abdul-Rahman O. Raji, Carter Kittrell, Robert H. Hauge, James M. Tour. A seamless three-dimensional carbon nanotube graphene hybrid material. Nature Communications, 2012; 3: 1225 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2234

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/rB6NJZnJIoU/121127111342.htm

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