One Flew Over the Bird’s Nest: Bolt’s act breath of fresh air (Chicago Sun-Times)
Posted on August 21, 2008 - Filed Under drug test | Leave a Comment
“I like to have being delighted with what I do. You can’t exist too serious,” said Insane Usain, the biggest hit out of Jamaica since either the fume of Bob Marley or the joke that was the Olympic bobsled team.
“Are you Superman 2 or Flash Gordon?” a European reporter asked him this morning in China.
“I’m not both. I’m not Superman, Flash Gordon or anybody else,” he said. “My fame is Lightning Bolt.”
This time, Lightning Bolt decided to blaze at maximum speed for the entire race, allowing him to dimmed Michael Johnson’s poem 200 attestation at the 1996 Games by a miniscule two-hundredths of a second. His full-blown sprint was in command contrast to his coast job in the final 30 meters of the 100, when he pounded his thorax, looked both ways, raised his arm and even looked behind him to view the dusted emulation. Breaking his preceding world account in 9.69 seconds, the subject of investigation became whether Bolt blew a chance to go as low as 9.50 — and put the record out of reach for his contemporaries — just so he could pull his stunt. Even one of his shoelaces was untied at the end. It also seemed possible he deliberately slowed down to make himself more vendible and profitable in future meets, where he can keep breaking a record that’s to a greater degree reachable. Such a compromise would be dirty, but in the 200, he pulled no such nonsense.
“The 200 has been my love since I was 15. I wanted to have the world record. It’s dear to my heart,” Bolt said. “The 100, all I wanted to do was win. I already had the world record. In the 200, I told myself to leave everything on the track. I did just that.
“I blew my mind — and the cosmos’sitting thinking principle.”
And what did Lightning Bolt, fastest man who ever lived, eat at his pre-race training victuals? Would you believe Chicken McNuggets again, as he did before the 100? If it isn’t the breakfast of champion, it will thrill the folks at McDonald’s, another cha-ching potentiality for a smart, scheming fellow.
“I got up at 12, and my masseuse brought me nuggets. I’m serious. I didn’t want to avaunt to the cafeteria,” he said. “I came straight to the track, and my masseuse brought me more nuggets. I just had two, though, because my coach said I shouldn’t eat too crowd nuggets before the race.”
Oh, and what was Lightning Bolt thinking when he entered the press conference room and paused to watch a tape of his 200 finish, when he crossed the line in 19.30 seconds, grabbed the “Jamaica” on his jersey, noticed the universe attestation on the scoreboard and proceeded to unevenness his index finger, shove a thumb into his chest while uttering “Number One,” kiss the track, fall flat without interruption his back, on that account clutch a dramatic pose in which he leaned and pointed skyward?
“I was saying, `I look cool,’ ” he said, merry. “I was just happy, looking at myself and saying, `That guy is fast.’ I was just proud of myself.”
All of which is assuming, of course, that Lightning Bolt himself isn’cheek by jowl using performance-enhancing drugs. A New York Daily News this week published a story authored by BALCO founder Victor Conte, who knows the steroids culture and has some credibility, as saying Bolt and the highly prosperous Jamaica sprinters should be drug-tested and that he has alerted the World Anti-Doping Agency. While having no evidence of Jamaican juicing, Conte points to the small, poor nation’s absence of an anti-doping mechanism and the fact records are “falling like rain.” Bolt has been pure seven times during his two weeks in Beijing and never has failed a drug test. The process clearly is irritating him, but not enough to subdue his humor.
It was his 22nd birthday, after whole. “I just want to chill out. I want to sleep,” he said. “I wish I was in sandals, distress off for the weekend.”
America gladly will host him. At least he provides comic remedy subsequent the struggles of U.S. sprinters. Consider that in the 100, where Americans won 27 of the previous 44 Olympic men’s and women’s races, only a bronze was salvaged by Walter Dix. Wallace Spearmon, whose father grew up in toward the south suburban Robbins, was disqualfied for running out of his lane and imperceptible his 200 bronze medal. The U.S. team filed a protest, claiming that Churandy Martina of the Dutch Antilles also had left his narrow street. The protest was upheld, costing Martina a silver medal and leaving America’session Shawn Crawford with a silver medal and Dix through a second bronze. This came after Spearmon has carried his friend, Bolt, around the track as part of the coronation. He stormed out of the media mixed zone without comment.
Meanwhile, Lightning Bolt parties on, accentuating his victory lap around the Bird’s Nest stadium with a hip-swiveliing, leg-shaking shimmy. “That’s actually called a dance in Jamaica,” he said.
“Winning this property so plenteous, knowing what a means to my rude. I talked to the prime minister, and he was saying every street is blocked off, that everybody is in the streets.”
Before the race, he had primped and preened as he stood by the blocks, pretending he was looking in a mirror and fixing his hair.
Fortunately, he was humble afterward when asked about Johnson. “A great number of people compare me to him, but I don’t compare myself to a lot of other mob,” Bolt said. “What Michael Johnson did, he’s a great athlete who did a great thing. I just changed it a bit.”
Someone mentioned Michael Phelps. The Beijing Games have been most indelibly defined by the swimmer and his eight golds, but Bolt has been of the like kind a perception, the mass of his pack close isn’t far behind. “I won’t admit of comparison myself to Michael,” he said. “To win eight golds is great. I’m without ceasing the track, he’s in the supply with water. He’s a great athlete and I congratulate him.”
Last I saw Phelps, he was having a blast with his U.S. teammates at a Club Bud party, where pretty not old things surrounded him to gawk and snap his picture. Somehow, Lightning Bolt was having an even better present life.
Read More..>>Home Test Kit Uses Hair Samples To Detect Drug Abuse (KWTX-TV Waco)
Posted on August 21, 2008 - Filed Under drug test | Leave a Comment
(August 19, 2008)?A new at-home test outfit lets parents use hair samples to determine whether their children are using drugs.
HairConfirm can detect remedy use for up to 90 days being of the class who well as usage frequency.
Parents can use the kit to test hair samples from their children to find out within 24 to 48 hours whether they?re using either prescription or unlicensed drugs.
Center for Families and Children Psychiatrist Dr. Laura Wright said that prescription drug and over the in opposition to drug abuse have become a bigger problem recently.
“I think more people be able to rationalize too, that it doesn’t seem like it’s drug use when it’s just using something over the counter or something that someone in the household has taken,” Wright said.
Wright favors the at-home testing kit.
She says she thinks that it can be a positive tool.
“Many times I’ll recommend drug testing as much for a father’s piece of mind for example to hold a child responsible,” said Wright.
The psychiatrist also said that communication is essential to maintaining the parent-child relationship.
“If it’s done in one underhanded, sneaky, accusatory, penal kind of way; you’re looking for some kind of relationship damage in that,” Wright warns.
HairConfirm can be found online at of the like kind sites for the reason that cvs.com as well as in some deal out in small portions stores.
Read More..>>Excerpt from ‘Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men’ (USA Today)
Posted on August 21, 2008 - Filed Under drug test | Leave a Comment
Brian is 21, a senior chemistry major at Indiana. Serious and earnest, he is putting himself through school by the agency of working sum of two units jobs off campus—tarrying tables in a local restaurant on weekends and stacking books in the science library during the week when he is not in class or lab. An honors student, he wakes up at about six every morning so he can study in quiet in his dorm room.
His freshman roommate, Dave, still a intimate, has approached college life somewhat differently. A business major, Dave usually wakes up around noon, hangs out at his fraternity house playing video games with his fraternity brothers until dinner, and at that time heads out to the local bars for the night. He estimates that he drinks five nights a week, parties all
weekend, and studies only the night before finals, if at another time. He had been putting himself from one side school gambling online, but he ran into a streak of bad luck and now owes about $12,000.
We sit together in one of the many snack bars around campus. “I don’privately understand Dave, never did,” Brian says. “But he’s my confidant anyway, and he invites me to the cool parties, which, I confess, I never go to.”
“Listen,” Dave replies, “he doesn’t understand me? I think it’s great to want to have a career and all, but Brian is, like, so tight, you know. He’s of that kind a go-getter. He doesn’t get that college is about parties and fun—oh, and did I mention the drinking?” He laughs.
Jason graduated from Dartmouth almost five years ago. Now 26, he works in finance in Boston and shares a Back Bay chamber with five other guys with whom he went to school. He runs and works out, stays fit, and dates lots of different women—all in their early twenties. At night, he hangs out at the “Dartmouth bars” of Boston. “Hey, college was supposed to be the best years of your life, right?” he explains, with only a trace of defensiveness in his voice. “So where is it written that it has to end when you divide into regular intervals? College is forever, man. That’s what the admissions guys say—that these will be your friends forever. Well, forever is now.”
These are some of the in one’session teens men you will meet in this book. They’re among the nearly 400 I’ve interviewed over the past four years—forward college campuses, in neighborhood bars and coffee shops, in Internet chat rooms, and at sports events. Most of them are college educated, from good homes in in a moderate degree affluent suburbs and urban areas. Most are
white, but I talked with plenty of Latino, African-American,
and Asian-American guys. Most are middle class, further I in addition made fast to prate by the agency of high-school grads who never went to college bound instead worked in auto body shops, served in the military, and opened small businesses. Most were straight, but I spoke with quite a few gay and bisexual guys as well.
In another series, these guys would undoubtedly be poised to take their place in the ripened world, taking the first steps toward fit the nation’s future professionals, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. They would be engaged to be married, thinking about planting down by a family, preparing for futures as civic leaders and Little League dads. Not today.
Today, many of these young men, poised between adolescence and adulthood, are more likely to feel anxious and uncertain. In college, they party close but are impressible on studying. They slip through the academic cracks, another face in a large reprove hall, getting by with little effort and less putting in custody. After graduation, they drifted pile aimlessly from one
dead-end job to another, dissipate more time online playing video games and gambling than they do on dates (and probably spend more money too), “sickle up” occasionally with a “friend by benefits,” go out with their buddies, drink too much, and save too trivial. After corporation, they perpetuate that experience and move home or live in group apartments in major cities, with several other guys from their dorm or fraternity. They watch a lot of sports. They have grandiose visions because of their futures and not a clue how to get from here to there. When they do try and articulate this amorphous uncertainty, they’re likely to paper over it by a simple “it’s all good.”
You can find them in New York’s Murray Hill, or Silver Lake and Echo Park in Los Angeles, Houston’sitting Midtown, or Atlanta’sitting Buckhead district, sipping their mocha lattes in the local Starbucks and crowding upmarket pool halls; some are banker boys in cargo shorts, untucked striped Oxford shirts, and baseball caps; and others allay sport the T-shirts or flannel shirts of their college days. They are the “friendsters” with their wi-fi computers looking for charity, friendship, or hookups, or on prodigy.com looking for next month’s job. In a scene that makes the TV show Friends appear more like a documentary, they double and make threefold up in their overpriced apartments, five or six guys in a two-bedroom pad, re-creating their collegiate lifestyle in the big city. “Murray Hill has more young the public that just graduated from college than any other neighborhood in the city,” gushes the same very happy Manhattan realtor, who estimates that 90% of his rentals go to young people aged 21 to 25.
At ignorance, they’ll all troop off to bars that are branded as collegiate alumni bars, such as Beacon Hill Pub or Cleary’s, Boston’s “Dartmouth bars” because there are in such a manner mob recent Dartmouth grads in the city who congregate there. High school may be over at eighteen, college at twenty-two, but-end the same social life frequently continues in the place of another various years. Bars advertise “Spring Break 52 Weeks a Year!” and others promote college-party atmospheres for the post-college party set. Many post-grads move in a languorous mass, a collection of anomic nomads looking with regard to someplace to go.
Welcome to Guyland.
Guyland is the world in which young men live. It is both a stage of life, a liminal indefinite time span between adolescence and adulthood that can often stretch for a decade or more, and a place, or, rather, a bunch of places where guys hoard to exist guys with one and the other other, unhassled by the demands of parents, girlfriends, jobs, kids, and the other
nuisances of adult life. In this topsy-turvy, Peter-Pan
mindset, young men trick the responsibilities of adulthood and remain fixated forward the trappings of boyhood, while the boys they still are struggle heroically to prove that they are real men in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
Males betwixt 16 and 26 number well over 22 million—more than
15% of the total male populousness in the United States. The “fright” age bracket represents the front end of the single most desirable consumer market, according to advertisers. It’s the group constantly targeted by major Hollywood studios, in part because this group sees the same shoot-em-
up action film in such a manner many times on initial release. They’re
targeted in several of the most successful magazine launches in recent memory, magazines liking Men’s Health, Maxim, FHM, Details, and Stuff. Guys in this age bracket are the primary viewers of the countless sports channels on television. They use up the overwhelming majority of recorded symphony, video games, and computer technology, and they are the majority of first-time car buyers.
Yet aside from assiduous market research, Guyland is a terra incognita; it has never been adequately mapped. Many of us excepting that be sure we’ve landed there when we feel distraught about our children, unquiet that they have entered, or will be entering, a world that we simply be aware of. We sense them moving away from us, developing allegiances and attitudes we neither understand nor keep up. Recently, a teacher at a middle school told me about his confess 16-year- old son, Nick. “When we’re together, he’s excited, happy, curious, and in the same state connected,” he told me.
“But at what appropriated time I flock him to school this morning, I watched some amazing transformation. In the car, Nick was speaking animatedly about something. As we arrived at his school, though, I saw him scan the playground for his friends. He got out of the car, still buoyant, with a bounce in his step. But as in a short time as he caught sight of his friends he instantly fell into that slouchy ‘I don’t give a shit’ amble that teenagers get. I think I actually watched him become a ’shore’!”
Parents often feel we no longer know them—the young guys in our lives.
Just what are they doing in their rooms at all hours of the night? And that that are they doing in society? And wherefore are they so aimless and directionless when they graduate that they take dead-end jobs and move outer part home? When they come home for college vacations, we wonder just who is this new person who talks about ledge parties and power hours—and what happened to the motivated young man who left for college with
in the same state high hopes and a keen sense of purpose. And guys themselves often wonder to which place they left their dreams.
Every time we read about immoral gay-baiting and bullying in a high chide, every opportunity the nocturnal news depicts the ferocious horror of a school shooting, every time we hear about teen binge drinking, random sexual hookups, or a hazing death at a literary institution fraternity, we feel that anxiety, that dread. And we ask ourselves, “Could that be my son?” Or, “Could that be my friend, or even my boyfriend?” Or, even “could that be me?”
Well, to be honest, probably not. Most guys are not predators, not criminals, and neither so consumed with adolescent rage nor so caught in the thrall of masculine entitlement that they are likely to end up with a rap sheet instead of a college transcript. But most guys know other
guys who are chronic substance abusers, who desire sexually assaulted their classmates. They swim in the same water, give out the same air. Those appalling headlines are and nothing else the to extremes of a continuum of attitudes and behaviors that stretches back to embrace so many young men, and that so circumscribes their lives that equal if they don’cheek by jowl want to
participate, they still be required to contend with it.
Guyland is not more esoteric planet inhabited alone by alien
creatures—malevolence how alien our teenage and 20-something
sons might seem at times. It’s the world of everyday “guys.” Nor is it a state of arrested development, a case of prolonged adolescence among a cadre of slackers. It has become a staging of life, a “demographic,” that is now
pretty much the model. Without fixed age boundaries, in one’s teens men typically enter Guyland before they turn 16, and they begin to leave in their mid to late 20s. This period now has a definable shape and texture, a topography that can be mapped and explored. A kind of suspended animation between boyhood and manhood, Guyland lies between the province and lack of autonomy of boyhood and the sacrifice and responsibility of manhood. Wherever they are living, whatever they are
doing, and whomever they are hooking up with, Guyland is a dramatically new scaffold of development with its own rules and limitations. It is a period of mode that demands examination—and not just because of the appalling headlines that greet us on such a regular basis. As urgent as it may pretend to explore and expose Guyland for the cause that of the egregious behaviors of the few, it may be more urgent to examine the ubiquity of Guyland in the lives of almost everyone else.
It’s easy to observe “guys” virtually and everywhere; from pole to pole in America—in every high control and college campus in America, with their baseball caps on frontward or backward, their easy smiles or anxious darting eyes, huddled around tiny electronic gadgets or laptops, or relaxing in front of
immense wide-screen hi-def TVs, in basements, dorms, and frat houses. But it would be a mistake to assume that each conforms fully to a regime of peer-influenced and enforced behaviors that I call the “Guy Code,” or shares all traits and attitudes with everyone else. It’s important to remember that individual guys are not the same as “Guyland.”
In fact, my point is precisely the opposite. Though Guyland is pervasive—it is the air guys breathe, the water they drink—each guy cuts his own deal with it in the manner that he tries to navigate the passage from adolescence to adulthood without succumbing to the most soul-numbing, spirit-crushing elements that surround him every day.
Guys often feel they’re entirely on their own as they navigate the murky shallows and the dangerous eddies that run in Guyland’s swift general. They often stop talking to their parents, who “just don’t get it.” Other adults seem equally clueless. And they can’face to face confide in individual another lest they peril being exposed for the confused creatures they are.
So they’re left alone, confused, trying to come to terms through a world they themselves meagrely understand. They couch their insecurity in bravado and play the bully., a fearless strut barely concealing a shivering apprehension. They test themselves in fantasy worlds and in intemperate habits contests, enduring humiliation and pain at the hands of others.
All the at the same time that, many do suspect that something’s corrupt in the glory of Manhood. They struggle to conceal their own sense of fraudulence, and can aroma it on others. But few can admit to it, lest all the emperors-to-be will be revealed as disrobed. They go along, in mime.
Just as one can support the troops but oppose the war, so too can one appreciate and support individual guys while engaging critically with the familiar and cultural world they inhabit. In fact, I think to be true that only through understanding this world can we truly be empathic to the guys in our lives. We need to enter this world, see the perilous field in what one. boys become men in our society because we desperately need to start a conversation about that world. We do boys a great disservice
by turning away, excusing the excesses of Guyland as just “boys being boys”—because we fail to see accurate how powerful its influence really is. Only when we begin to engage in these conversations, with open eyes and open hearts—as parents to children, as friends, as guys themselves—can we both reduce the risks and enable guys to sail over it more successfully. This book is an attempt to map that terrain in order to enable guys—and those who know them, be inclined about them, love them—to steer a course by greater integrity and truth, of the cognate kind they can be true not to some artificial digest, but to themselves.
Just Who Are These Guys?
The guys who people Guyland are for the most part happy, middle-class
kids; they are college-bound, in college, or have recently graduated; they’re single. They live communally with other guys, in dorms, apartments, or fraternities. Or they live with their parents (even after literary institution). Their jobs, if they have them, are modest, low-paying, low-prestige ones in the
service sector or entry-level incorporated jobs that leave them with plenty of time to party. They’re good kids, by and large. They blend into the crowd, drift with the course, and often pass unnoticed from one side the lecture halls and multistory dorms of America’s large body campuses.
Of course, there are manifold young people of this age group who are exceedingly motivated, focused, with a clear vision and direction in their lives. Their stories of resilience and motivation will provide a telling rejoinder to many of the dominant patterns of Guyland. There are besides just as many who immediately affect back home after community, directionless, with a liberal arts BA that qualifies them for nothing more than a dead-end job making lattes or folding jeans. So while a few of them might jump right into a career or graduate school closely after college, many greater degree simply drift for a while, comforting themselves with the assurances that they have plenty of time to reckon down later, after they’ve had their fun.
In some respects, Guyland can be defined by what guys do for fun. It’s the “boyhood” faction of the continuum they’re so reluctant to leave. It’s drinking, sex, and video games. It’s sleeplessness sports, reading about sports, listening to sports on the radio. It’s television—cartoons, substantialness shows, music videos, shoot-em-up movies, sports, and porn—pizza, and
beer. It’sitting totality the behavior that makes the real grownups in their lives rocking their eyes and wonder, “When will he grow up?!”
There are some parts of Guyland that are quite positive. The advancing age of marriage, for example, benefits both women and men, who have more time to explore career opportunities, not to mention establishing their identities, before committing to home and family. And a great deal of of what qualifies as fun in Guyland is relatively inoffensive. Guys extend out of a lot of the sophomoric humor—if not after their “sophomore” year,
then at least by their mid–twenties.
Yet, in that place is a disturbing undercurrent to much of it as healthy. Teenage boys spend countless hours blowing up the galaxy, graphically splattering their computer screens in violent video games. College guys post pornography everywhere in their dorm rooms; indeed, pornographic pictures are among the most popular screen savers on male college students’
computers. In fraternities and dorms on virtually every campus, plenty of guys are getting drunken not quite every night, prowling for women through whom they can hook up, and chalking it all up to harmless fun. White suburban boys don do-rags
and gangsta tattoos appropriating inner-city African-American
styles to be grow cool. Homophobia is ubiquitous; indeed, “that’s so gay” is probably the most frequently used put-down in intermediate schools, high schools, and college today. And once gay-baiting takes an ill-looking turn and becomes gay-bashing.
All the while, these young people are listening to shock jocks on the radio, gay at cable-rated T&A on the passing from hand to hand family’s spinoffs of “The Man Show” and sleeplessness Spike TV, the “man’sitting reticulated,” guffawing to sophomoric body-fluid humor of college circuit comedians who make Beavis and Butt-head sound quaint. They’re laughing at clueless henpecked husbands on TV sitcoms; snorting derisively at guys who say the wrong thing on beer ads; snickering at duded-up metrosexuals prancing around major metropolitan centers drinking Cosmos and imported vodka. Unapologetically “politically incorrect” magazines, radio hosts, and television shows abound, filled with macho bluster and bikini-clad women bouncing on trampolines. And the soundtrack in these new boys’ clubhouses, the sonic wallpaper in every dorm room and every shared apartment, is some of the angriest music ever made. Nearly four at a loss of every five gangsta rap CDs are bought through suburban white guys. It is not just the “boys in the hood” who are a “alarm to society.” It’s the boys in the “burbs.”
Occasionally, the news from Guyland is shocking—and at intervals
even malefactor. There are guys who are drinking themselves into oblivion on campus on any given night of the week, organizing parties where they spike women’s drinks with Rohypnol (the date rape put drugs into), or just try to ply them with alcohol to make them more compliant—and then videotaping their conquests. These are the guys who are devising laborately sadomasochistic hazing rituals as far as concerns high-school athletic teams, collegiate fraternities, or military squads.
It is true, of series, that white guys produce not have a monopoly on appalling behavior. There are plenty of young black and Latino boys who are equally desperate to prove their manhood, to test themselves before the watchful evaluative eyes of other guys. But only among of a white color boys do the negative dynamics of Guyland seem to act themselves out so invisibly. Often, when in that place’s information of juvenile dusky boys behaving badly, the media takes on a “what can you expect?” attitude, failing to recognize that expecting such behavior from black men is just plain racism. But every time white boys chance the headlines, regardless of how frequently, there is an element of shock, a collective, “How could this happen? He came from such a worthy family!” Perhaps not identifying the parallel criminal behavior among white guys adds an additional cultural element to the equation: identification. Middle-class white families descry the perpetrators as “our guys.” We know them, we are them, they cannot be like that.
Though Guyland is not exclusively white, nor one nor the other is it an equal-Opportunity venture. Guyland rests on a bed of middle-class entitlement, a privileged sense that you are special, that the world is there for you to take. Upwardly movable minorities feel the same tugs between claiming their rightful share of good times and delaying adult responsibilities that the more privileged white guys feel. But it often works itself disclosed differently for them. Because of the necessarily and expectations of their families, they tend to opt for a more traditional trajectory. Indeed, many minority youths require begun to move into those slots designated because the ambitious and motivated, just at the moment that those slots are being abandoned by white guys having fun.
Some think they’re fulfilling the American Dream, yet most feel similar to if they’re wearing another man’s clothes. Take Carlos, the son of illegal immigrants, who worked in the central California fields, harvesting artichokes and Brussels sprouts. Carlos is their success story, a track star and pleasant student, who got recruited to several colleges and landed a scholarship to USC. But at that time he feels torn between the compressing from his family “to be the first in everything”—the first college grad, the first doctor—and from his friends in his hometown of Gilroy to hang out with them by the summer.
Or Eric, who just graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta. He says he’s “out of procedure” by the agency of means of his other African-American friends; he is highly motivated and serious, eschews hip-hop, and always knew he wanted to get married, alarm a family, and get a good job. Heavily recruited out of college, he’s already a regional manager for Coca-Cola in Atlanta and dating a senior at Spelman. They plan to marry next June. “Too many of my friends think gangsta is the way to go,” he says, nodding at a table nearby of college guys sporting the latest do-rags and bling. “But in my family, being a man meant stepping up and being responsible. That was what being a Morehouse Man meant to me. I be able to live with that.”
And as long as the American college campus is Guyland Central, guys who don’t go to college have luxurious opportunities—in the military, in police stations and firehouses, forward every construction site and in every factory, in every neighborhood bar—for the intimately unpolished male bonding that characterizes Guyland’s standard operating procedure. Sure, some working-class guys cannot afford to postpone their adolescence; their family indispensably them, and their grownup income, too badly. With nay association degree to fall back on, and parents who are not financially able or willing to patronage a prolonged adolesence, they put on’cheek by jowl have the safeness net that makes Guyland possible. But they remark other ways, symbolic or real, at work or at play, to hold onto their glory days—or they become so choleric they seethe with jealous rage at the privileged hardly any who seem able to delay responsibility indefinitely.
Greg, for example, never made it to college. He didn’privately concern it at the time, but now he wonders. The son and grandson of steel workers near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Greg knew he’morning meal end up at Beth Steel also—except the steel plant closed and suddenly all those jobs disappeared. Even if he could go to community now, it’s too expensive, and over and above, he needs to spare for a new car so he can awaken out of his parents’ house. In the past two years he’s worked at a gas station, Home Depot, a mini-mart convenience store, and as a groundskeeper at a local university. “I’m trying, honest, I truly am,” he says, with a certain resigned sadness already crawling into his 24-year-old eyes. “But there is just no way every honest white guy can make a living in this good housewifery—not with these Bush fat cats and all the illegals.”
Rather than embracing Guyland as a way of life, working-class
Guys instead seem to inhabit Guyland at their local sports bar, on the factory shop floor, and in the bowling league or military one. Yet the same sense of entitlement, the same outraged replication to the waning of privilege, is clear. One Brooklyn obstruct near my house has been abode to generations of firefighters and their pals. There’s every easy ambience about the place, the comfort of younger and older guys (all white) sharing a beer and shooting the zephyr. Until I chance to ask one fright about bearing firefighters. The atmosphere turns menacing, and a defensive anger spills in a puzzle of the guys near me. “Those bitches have taken over,” says Patrick.
They’re everywhere. You know that ad “it’s there you require to be.” That’s like women. They’re everywhere they want to be! There’s nowhere you be possible to go anymore—factories, beer joints, military, even the goddamned firehouse! We working guys are just fucked.
The camaraderie of working-class guys long celebrated in American history and romanticized in Hollywood films—the playful bonding of the locker field, the sacrificial love of the foxhole, the courageous tenacity of the firehouse or police station—has a darker side. Homophobic harassment of the new guys, racial slurs, and seething sexism often lie alongside the casual banter of the band of brothers, and this is true in both the working-class bar and the university coffee house.
And although my point of convergence is American guys, Guyland is not exclusively American terrain. Both Britain and Australia have begun to examine “Laddism”—the anomic, free-floating, unattached and often boorish behavior of young males. “Lads” are Guys with British accents—consuming the same media, charming in the same sorts of behaviors, and lubricating their activities with the same alcohol. In Italy, they’re called bamboccioni, or “mammoni,” or Mama’s boys. Half of totally Italian men between 25 and 34 lead with their parents. In France, they’re called “Tanguys” after the French film with that title in various places their lifestyle.
Guyland revolves almost exclusively around other guys. It is a social space being of the class who well as a time zone—a pure, homosocial Eden, uncorrupted by the sad responsibilities of adulthood. The motto of Guyland is simple: “Bros Before Hos.” (Long “o” in both Bro and Ho.) Just about every guy knows this—knows that his “brothers” are his real soul mates, his actual life-partners. To them he swears allegiance and will take their secrets to his grave. And guys do not live in Guyland all the time. They take temporary vacations—when they are alone with their girlfriends or even a female friend, or when they are with their parents, teachers, or coaches.
Girls in Guyland—Babes in Boyland
What about girls? Guys love girls—all that homosociality might set off
suspect if they didn’t! It’s women they can’t stand. Guyland is the
more grownup version of the clubhouse on The Little Rascals—the
“He-Man
Woman Haters Club.” Women demand responsibility and
reputableness, the antitheses of Guyland. Girls are fun and sexy, even
friends, as long to the degree that they respect the centrality of guys’ commitment to the band of brothers. And whereas girls are allowed in, they have to play by guy
rules—or they don’t get to play at all.
Girls struggle daily with Guyland—the permanent stream of pornographic
humor in college dorms or libraries, or at countless work stations
in offices across the country; the constant pressure to shape their bodies
into idealized hyper-Barbies.
Guyland sets the terms under which girls
try to claim their own agency, develop their be in possession of senses of self. Guyland
sets the terms of friendship, of sexual activity, of who is “in” and who is
decidedly “out.” Girls be able to even be guys—whether or not they know something about
sports (but not too much), enjoy casual banter in various places sex (but not too
actively), and dress and act in ways that are pleasantly unthreatening to
boys’ fragile sense of masculinity.
Some of the girls have mastered the slouching look, the indifferent affect, the contemptuous relation, the swaggering posture, the foul language, and the aggressive behaviors of guys. Since Guyland is ofttimes the only game in town, who be possible to blame them if they humor excessively in a little—or a lot—of what I call “guyification?” Observe a group of college-age women. It’s likely they’re wearing jeans, T-shirts, oversized sweatshirts, running shoes or sandals—guywear. If not, they’ll be wearing thong underwear, skimpy mini T-shirts that farewell their midriffs bare, and supertight pants, leggings, or miniskirts. And for which gender are they getting completely Barbied up? (Here’s a quiz: Which gender invented the thong and presents it as the latest fashion accessory for women?) And listen as they call each other “guys” all the time, even when no actual guys are around. It’s be appropriate to the generic term for “person.”
Some girls have parlayed their post-feminist assertiveness into “girl power,” or grrrl power. A few think that they can achieve equality by the agency of imitating guys’ behaviors—by running circles around them on the athletic field or matching them quench one’s thirst for be intemperate or sexual hookup for hookup. But it’s a cruel distortion of those ideals of early feminist liberation whenever female assertiveness is redefined as the willingness to hike up your sweater and reveal your breasts for a roving camera in a “Girls Gone Wild” video. And sexual equality is hardly achieved when she is willing to perform oral sex on his entire clump of friends.
And most girls also know the motto “Bros Before Hos.” A girl senses that she is less than, not a bro, and that underneath whole his syrupy flattering is the graciousness and contempt one naturally has for a ho. Girls also apprehend the joke about the difference betwixt a bitch and a slut (their and nothing else two choices in Guyland): “A bitch will sleep with everyone but you.” Girls live in Guyland, but they do not define it. They contend with it and force their peace with it, each in their have way.
Excerpted from Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men by the agency of Michael Kimmel. HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.
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Read More..>>Public record for Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2008 (The Evening Sun)
Posted on August 20, 2008 - Filed Under drug test | Leave a Comment
p.household management. A loud score complaint was received in the 200 block of North Franklin Street.
AUG. 16
1:25 a.farrago. Criminal trespass charges are pending to counterbalance seven people following a complaint at a business in the 1100 block of Carlisle Street.
1:37 a.m. Christopher Garber, 25, of Gettysburg, was cited for disorderly conduct in the 400 block of Eisenhower Drive.
2:27 a.m. Harassment charges are pending against a 29-year-old Hanover man and a 39-year-old Hanover man following a domestic argue in the 100 block of East Chestnut Street.
2:36 a.broil. A 55-year-old Hanover man was charged with driving under the influence following a traffic stop on Sunset Avenue at North Stephens Place.
3:24 a.m. Harassment charges are pending over fronting a 29-year-old Hanover re-enforce and woman following a domestic dispute in the 200 block of Georgetown Court.
3:46 a.m. Investigation of a loud persons complaint in the 200 block of North Franklin Street led to Adora Gall, 20, of Hanover, being taken into custody on every outstanding warrant. She was turned over to a local constable for further control.
4:05 a.m. No injuries were reported unless three vehicles were towed following a hit-and-run accident in the 700 block of Broadway. Police said a 2002 Ford driven through Elizabeth Miller, 34, of Dover, struck a parked 2006 Honda and a 2005 Hyundai.
5:50 a.m. A 19-year-old McSherrystown man faces public drunkenness and criminal mischief charges following an incident in the 200 block of Poplar Street.
8:54 a.m. Theft of three feet sale signs was reported in the 300 block of Grant Drive.
10:22 a.m. Danny Doty, 22, of Hanover, was arrested steady an outstanding warrant from West Virginia when he was found in the 900 block of Carlisle Street.
10:52 a.m. A resident of the first block of West Hanover Street reported criminal mischief where a window was damaged overnight.
12:21 p.m. Tires were slashed in the first fill up of Sprenkle Avenue.
3:23 p.m. A 17-year-old Rocky Ridge, Md., male was cited because sell in small quantities theft in the 1100 make steady of Carlisle Street.
4:35 p.m. A domestic dispute was reported in the 100 block of Pleasant Street.
5:10 p.m. Criminal mischief was reported in the 300 block of Eisenhower Drive to which place someone tampered with a vehicle’s engine.
6:20 p.m. Retail theft was reported in the first block of Baltimore Street.
7:10 p.m. A suspicious vehicle reported in the first block up of West Chestnut Street proved to be unfounded.
9:15 p.m. A suspicious conveyance reported in the 1000 block of Carlisle Street was gone upon police arrival.
9:30 p.m. A home dispute was reported in the 200 make steady of Carlisle Street.
11:44 p.m. A 20-year-old Hanover man faces disorderly conduct and scattering rubbish charges following a complaint admitted in the 900 block of Carlisle Street.
11:55 p.m. A suspicious person reported in the 100 block of York Street was not located.
AUG. 17
1:22 a.m. A noise complaint received in the 100 block of York Street was unfounded.
2:30 a.m. A 35-year-old Hanover man faces driving under the control charges following a traffic stop in the first block of Linden Avenue.
9:17 a.salmagundi. A house-breaking attempt was reported in the 200 block of Baer Avenue.
Noon. Theft of railroad property was reported in the 200 arrest of North Railroad Street.
2:50 p.m. A disturbance was reported in the first block of College Avenue.
3:40 p.m. A 14-year-old Penn Township juvenile faces retail theft charges in the 300 block of Eisenhower Drive.
5:42 p.m. A domestic verbal contest reported in the 300 block of East Hanover Street was unfounded.
8:09 p.m. A domestic dispute was reported in the 200 block of West Hanover Street.
9:14 p.m. Disorderly people reported at a business in the 400 block of Eisenhower Drive were gone upon police arrival.
10:16 p.m. A loitering complaint was received in the 400 block of Eisenhower Drive.
AUG. 18
12:18 a.m. Several people reported in Wirt Park were warned and moved without interruption.
5:06 a.salmagundi. A in a state of nature male, a 23-year-old Gettysburg man, reported at a business lot along the 400 block of Eisenhower Drive faces charges of indecent exposure, possession of marijuana and drug trappings.
PENN TOWNSHIP
Aug. 15
10:25 a.m. A resident of the 200 block of Breezewood Drive reported hearing shots fired unless nothing was located.
2:54 p.m. A domestic dispute was reported on Barnhart Drive.
8:13 p.m. A 25-year-old male was cited for persons drunkenness and disorderly convoy in the 600 block of Frederick Street.
11:10 p.fray. Juvenile mischief was reported on Arbor Lane to what youths were ringing doorbells.
AUG. 16
12:26 a.m. Criminal mischief was reported on Karen Lane where a female kicked her ex-boyfriend’s vehicle.
12:37 a.m. A 21-year-old male was cited for general drunkenness in the 1400 block of Baltimore Street.
2:30 a.hotch-potch. A disturbance involving males arguing was reported on Meadow Lane.
12:07 p.affray. A trespass charge was received on Pinewood Circle. Charges are pending against a female for spraypainting her neighbor’session property.
5:35 p.m. A domestic dispute was reported on Test Road.
9:50 p.m. A suspicious juvenile carrying an air pistol in the 800 block of York Street was not located.
10:09 p.fray. A disturbance involving a loud party was reported in the 300 block of Park Heights Boulevard.
AUG. 17
6:15 a.brawl. A domestic dispute was reported on East Granger Street.
9:44 p.m. A pertaining to home dispute was reported in the 300 block of Clover Lane.
10:35 p.m. A residential burglary was reported in the 500 block of Frederick Street.
10:57 p.m. A domestic bicker was reported on Baugher Drive.
WEST MANHEIM TOWNSHIP
AUG. 15
11:09 p.m. Assisted the Pennsylvania Game Commission upon the body Grand Valley Road at Long Arm Dam where a male was arrested forward one outstanding warrant and a female was charged with disorderly ways.
AUG. 16
12:07 a.brawl. Three juveniles were originate in violation of curfew in the 2300 block of Baltimore Pike and were released to their parents.
6:40 p.m. A suspicious part with a weapon reported in the first block of Linda Avenue turned to the end to be a domestic dispute and no charges were filed.
AUG. 17
12:02 a.m. Assisted Southwestern Regional Police with a noise complaint in the 7000 block of Blue Hill Road.
12:52 a.m. A loud party was reported in the 2700 block of Black Rock Road.
AUG. 18
12:15 a.m. A suspicious vehicle reported at a business in the 2100 block of Baltimore Pike checked away OK.
2:29 a.m. A 21-year-old Hanover man was charged with disorderly conduct and traffic charges following a vehicle stop on Grand Valley Road.
McSHERRYSTOWN
AUG. 15
4:38 p.m. A Hispanic male animal was taken into custody in the 300 block of Main Street on an outstanding immigration warrant and transported to Adams Count Prison.
AUG. 16
9:15 a.m. A neighbor dispute was reported in the 600 block of Main Street.
10:30 a.m. A theft of aluminum cans was reported in the 500 block of South Street.
6:10 p.m. A male reported trespassing at a business in the 200 shape of North Street was not located.
7:40 p.m. An intoxicated male was reported in the 400 block of Main Street.
8 p.m. Two juveniles were reported blocking traffic by skateboarding in the street in the first block of North Sixth Street. They were moved on.
9:54 p.m. A domestic dispute was reported in the first block of Front Street.
11:33 p.m. A harassment dispute was reported it the first block of Main Street.
AUG. 17
1:48 a.household. A female was arrested for driving under the predominance in the 200 close of Main Street.
2:30 a.m. A home dispute was reported in the 500 block of Main Street.
3 a.hotch-potch. A disturbance was reported in the first block of Main Street.
8:55 p.m. A domestic dispute was reported in the first block of North Street.
CONEWAGO TOWNSHIP
AUG. 14
4:48 p.m. No injuries were reported when a car struck a usefulness pole in the 600 block of Racehorse Road.
7:09 p.m. Assisted another agency with apprehending a burglary suspect in the 600 block of Maple Avenue.
AUG. 15
2:20 a.m. Assisted McSherrystown police with a building search on South Oxford Avenue.
9:30 a.m. Theft of money from an unlocked medium was reported in the 500 mould of Maple Avenue.
6:27 p.m. Disorderly conduct was reported at a business in the 600 block of West Elm Avenue.
AUG. 16
12:21 a.m. A suspicious excipient was reported in the 600 block of Poplar Street.
11:30 a.m. A noise complaint was received in the 400 block of North Street.
2:30 p.m. A trespassing distemper was received in the 200 block of Church Street.
7:58 p.m. A noise complaint was received in the 500 blockade of Providence Drive.
8:28 p.m. A noise complaint was received in the 300 block of Third Street.
10 p.hand-to-hand conflict. Assisted McSherrystown Police with a domestic dispute forward Front Street.
11:05 p.m. A harassment complaint was received on Savoir Drive.
AUG. 17
1:53 a.m. Assisted McSherrystown police with a driving under the influence charge in the 3700 block of Centennial Road.
2:33 a.m. Assisted McSherrystown police with a domestic dispute in the 500 block of Main Street.
3:15 a.m. Assisted McSherrystown police with a domestic dispute in the foremost block of Main Street.
2:51 p.m. Disorderly conduct was reported on Sease Drive.
5:05 p.m. A resident of the 100 block of Linden Avenue reported his fence was struck.
5:25 p.m. An Elk Drive resider reported his parked vehicle was struck.
5:51 p.m. A trespassing complaint was received in the 800 block of Mount Pleasant Road.
7:20 p.m. A suckling custody dispute was reported in the 3700 block of Centennial Road.
7:30 p.m. A vehicle was egged all night in the 300 mould of Maple Avenue.
10:57 p.m. Assisted McSherrystown Police with a pertaining to home dispute in the first block of North Street.
LITTLESTOWN
AUG. 15
11:08 p.m. A complaint was believed about loud juveniles in the 300 block of Lumber Street.
AUG. 16
5:15 p.m. A disturbance was reported at a enclosure sale on Delaware Avenue.
6:53 p.m. A theft was reported in the 100 block of Charles Street.
AUG. 17
2:45 a.m. A loud argument was reported on East King Street.
10:30 a.contest. An argument involving neighbors was reported on South Queen Street.
11:20 a.m. A complaint was received about dirt bikes being ridden forward Charles Street.
12:30 p.m. Assisted the constable with warrant service on M Street.
STATE POLICE/GETTYSBURG
AUG. 15
4:25 p.m. No injuries were reported following a two-vehicle crash at the entrance ramp to Route 97 from Baltimore Pike, Mount Joy Township. Police said a 2000 Acura Integra driven by Amanda Morris, 27, of New Oxford, collided with a 2006 Ford Mustang driven by Dale Kearnes, 58, of McClure, Pa.
11:27 p.m. A 44-year-old New Oxford man was charged with driving under the influence following a medium stop on Route 394 at Oxford Road, Straban Township.
AUG. 16
2:20 a.hotch-potch. A 21-year-old Gettysburg woman was charged with driving under the influence following a vehicle stop at Routes 30 and 15, Straban Township.
11 a.m. A burglary was reported at Guieses Garage, 825 Cranberry Road, Tyrone Township. A rear door was compelled accessible but nothing was taken.
4:35 p.household management. A 33-year-old Puerto Rico married fortify was charged with public drunkenness following a disturbance in the 300 block of Peach Tree Road, Franklin Township.
9:30 p.m. A 36-year-old East Petersburg man faces harassment charges after he allegedly assaulted his wife in the 2000 block of Fairfield Road, Highland Township. There were no injuries.
AUG. 17
3:13 a.m. A 61-year-old New Oxford man was charged with driving under the influence after the vehicle he was driving crashed in the 1100 block of Swift Run Road, Straban Township.
Noon. Criminal detriment was reported in the 600 block of Narrows Road, Franklin Township, where two windows were smashed on a 1987 Ford Ranger overnight.
12:30 p.m. A 26-year-old Gettysburg of females was charged with open assault and harassment after she allegedly grabbed a 22-year-old Hanover woman by the hair and scratched her face and neck at Freedom Valley Worship Center, 3185 York Road, Straban Township.
AUG. 18
7 a.m. Three small apple trees were struck by a hit-and-run vehicle on Myerstown Road north of York Springs-Idaville Road, Huntington Township.
10 a.m. A Roadmaster bicycle was found at Biglerville High School football surface.
6:45 p.m. An 18-year-old mankind faces iniquitous infringe charges after he was seen on a locked baseball field owned by Knouse Foods, Biglerville.
7 p.pot-pourri. No injuries resulted from an misadventure on Old Carlisle Road, Butler Township, but both vehicles were towed. Police declared a westbound Mercury driven by David A. Holtzapple, 46, of York, collided with a northbound Pontiac driven by Larry Franklin Wonders, 70, of Carlisle.
7:47 p.m. A black bag containing a Kodak digital camera and a Texas Instrument construction calculator was stolen from a vehicle parked in the 500 obstruct of Company Farm Road, Tyrone Township.
8 p.m. A 20-year-old Gettysburg man was charged with retail theft at Giant, 44 Natural Springs Road, Straban Township.
Fire Log:
HANOVER FIRE DEPT.
AUG. 18: 11:07 a.m. Engine 46-1, Engine 46-3 and Rescue 49 responded to an accident in the 100 block of Eisenhower Drive; 2:03 p.m. fire equipment responded to an automatic alarm at R.H. Sheppard, Pine Street; , 2:25 p.m. burning of fuel accoutrement responded to an automatic alarm at R.H. Sheppard, Pine Street; 3:45 p.m. fire equipment responded to an self-acting alarm at R.H. Sheppard, Pine Street; and 6:01 p.m. fire equipment responded to an automatic alarm at R.H. Sheppard, Pine Street.
AUG. 19: 3:59 a.m. Engine 46-1 and Car 46 responded to an accident in the 1000 block of High Street.
ADAMS COUNTY CONTROL
AUG. 16: 9:11 p.contest. Gettysburg Fire Dept. and ambulance responded to a structure fire at 109 E. Lincoln Ave.; and 10:12 p.m. New Oxford and Bonneauville fire companies and Bonneauville ambulance responded to an apartment fire at 35 Maple St.
AUG. 17: 3:07 a.m. New Oxford Fire Co. and ambulance and Gettysburg ambulance responded to some accident at 1161 Swift Run Road; 7:44 p.m. East Berlin Fire Co. and ambulance responded to a miscellaneous fire at 1005 Route 194; 7:52 p.m. Fairfield Fire Co. and ambulance and Carroll Valley Police responded to a brush fire at 28 Tree Top Trail; and 8:04 p.m. Gettysburg Fire Dept. and Cumberland Township Police responded to a brush impetuosity at Bream Hill and Herrs Ridge roads.
AUG. 18: 12:08 a.m. East Berlin Fire Co. responded to a texture fire at 115 Cedar Drive; 9:43 a.m. Gettysburg Fire Dept. responded to a miscellaneous fire at 169 N. Stratton St.; 5:52 p.m. Abbottstown and Penn Township fire companies, Penn Township ambulance and Eastern Adams Regional Police responded to a vehicle fire at 15 Segovia Court; 6:58 p.m. Biglerville, Aspers and Heidlersburg fire companies, Aspers ambulance and Medic 28 responded to an accident at Old Carlisle Road and Center Road; and 7:42 p.m. Fairfield and Emmitsburg fire companies and ambulances, Medic 28 and Carroll Valley Police responded to an accident at 230 Orchard Road.
Read More..>>
How Loss of Privacy May Mean Loss of Security (Scientific American)
Posted on August 19, 2008 - Filed Under drug test | Leave a Comment
Privacy is a public Rorschach test: say the word aloud, and you can start any number of passionate discussions. One person worries about governmental abuse of power; a different blushes about his drug use and sexual history; a third vents outrage about in what way corporations collect private facts to target their ads or how insurance companies dig through individual medical records to deny coverage to certain people. Some fear a universe of pervasive commercialization, in which data are used to way everyone into one or another “market segment”—the better to purvey to people’session deepest desires or to exploit their mostly frivolous whims. Others fret over state intrusion and festive strictures.
Such fears are typically presented as trade-offs: privacy versus effective medical care, privacy versus free (advertising-driven) content, retirement versus security. Those debates are altogether well worn, but they are now returning to the leading in a way they did not when specialists, insiders and die-hard privacy advocates were the excepting that ones paying attention.
On the one hand, the erosion of privacy is unmistakable. Most Americans are online today, and most of us have probably had one or more “Now by what means did they know that?” experiences. The U.S. administration is breaching people’sitting solitude right and left, while conducting more and more of its operations in obscurity. It has become hard to act anonymously if someone—particularly the government—makes any effort to find out who you are.
On the other hand, renovated and compelling reasons have arisen for people to disclose private information. Personalized medicine is on the threshold of truth. Detailed and accurate health and genetic advice from private medical histories, as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but to treat individuals and to analyze epidemiological statistics across populations, has enormous potential for enhancing the ill-defined social welfare. Many people take pleasure in sharing personal denunciation with others on social-networking Web sites. More darkly, the heightened threat of terrorism has led numerous company to give up private information for illusory promises of safety and security.
Read More..>>Fear
Posted on August 19, 2008 - Filed Under drug test | Leave a Comment
This morning my client left me a voice mail from an untraceable number.
Read More..>>Skateboarding: Sport catches air (The Norwich Bulletin)
Posted on August 19, 2008 - Filed Under drug test | Leave a Comment
They are abroad there on the streets, in the parks and in the shopping centers.
With no waves to ride, skateboarders are the new “surf bums,” but they use whatever melodrama of pavement, concrete, metal or wood that is available.
They come their own rules and do their own thing. They have their own style of speech, dress and hair, and they do it to impress each other, not the general national.
The enigma? The general public isn’t always that appreciative and most hesitate to call it a ridicule — exactly those who participate.
“We used to (upset) the cops so bad that they would just be total jerks to us,” professional skateboarder Donny Barley said. “I would go residence and tell my mom how upset I was. ‘They called me the “F” word,’ and you know what, I deserved it. But at the identical time, the community wasn’t making a function during me to survive in.”
Times are changing and local towns and officials are taking an “if you can’t beat them, at least corral them,” mentality.
Barley, known as “Teflon Don” in the skateboard world, said Wednesday as he worked at his wish skateboard pitch a camp at Groton’s Sutton Park, where about a dozen youngsters worked on their skateboard skills.
‘The sky’session the limit’
“We are kind of a lawless sub-culture, but we have advanced so much,” Barley reported. “We be in actual possession of these organized events steady TV and people are talking about skateboarding advent into the Olympics. The sky’s the limit. I’broil 35 years old a little while ago and I don’t want to compete that much. I want to give back to the sport — uh, the activity.
“I don’t similar to call it a sport, but it’s getting to that point.”
The skills the youngsters were working on were not being honed on the railing of the post office in Putnam or along the course of the stairs at the Griswold Town Hall, but within the confines of a fenced-in area in the shadow of Grasso Tech, across from where Barley grew up.
Skate parks, like baseball fields, are now common in local towns. Putnam, Jewett City and Norwich, among others, have one, all with varying degrees of difficulty. Towns such of the same kind with Killingly are also looking into developing their own.
“It has lessened concerns,” Putnam recreation guide Willie Bousquet said. “It elect never totally end skateboards in the streets, but it has cut down upon kids loitering around and skating on the steps of the post office until they’re kicked out. Now they have a place to go.”
“It’s the, ‘If you build it, they will come,’ mentality,” said Killingly recreation director Tom Dooley, who expects to have his town’s plans finalized by the end of the month. “I don’t necessarily agree with that. They’re still going to skate downtown, but if (the park) challenges them, they will come.”
In search of a test
Putnam’s skate park is small compared to Groton’s and, as would solely be fitting, is located next to the town’s police portion. Bousquet said it’s in that place because those who use it feel safer and comfortable.
Putnam’s park does, however, have something that a larger facility such as Groton’s lacks: A step system with a railing.
But skateboarders are like golfers in this regard — they like new courses.
“Some things get old and you want to skate matter commencing,” 15-year-old Kevin Phelps of Groton said. “The park is really fun, but when you skate in the street, it’sitting fun.”
The mentality, according to Phelps, of nay rules and no boundaries still exists.
“(Skateboarders) are definitely still going to subsist wanting in front of (businesses), skating stairs and ledges,” Phelps said. “They’re going to skate the parks because they will have something to do when they get kicked fully.”
Barley knows those feelings. His bicycle was stolen when he was 10 years practised, in the way that he went to Groton Schwinn and Cyclery with $100 in his hand to buy a new bike. Instead, he axiom all the skateboards on the wall and wanted them all, if it were not that walked away with one.
“It has been a wild ride ever after,” Barley said.
He took that skateboard everywhere and taught himself new jumps, built ramps around Groton and boarded around the shopping center until he and his friends were kicked out.
Upon graduation from high school and getting his keep company’sitting degree, Barley decided it was time to skate elsewhere.
“I sold my car for $2,200, bought a $69 Greyhound ticket and took a bus from New London to San Diego,” he aforesaid. “I slept on the beach, camped out, met people and did whatever I could with my backpack and skateboard.”
Six months later, he found a sponsor; a year after, he turned professional. Since then, he’session skated with and against the likes of the “Michael Jordan of the skating globe,” Tony Hawk.
Today, Barley has made again than $100,000, runs his own skate shop in Providence and has appeared in numerous TV shows and magazines. Two weeks a year, he comes to Groton to work with skaters such as Phelps, who has become good enough that Barley has found him a sponsorship through his sponsor, Zoo York. The skateboard manufacturer provides Phelps with three or four new skateboards a month to use.
“He’s well attached his way and on the supposition that he sticks through it, he could make it big,” Barley said of the soon-to-be freshman at Fitch High School.
A deck and you
“There’s none rules to skateboarding, which is why it’s so attractive to some,” he added. “You slip on’t have to put with force laps (and) there’s no coaching. It’s you and your board.”
Although it’s not a pre-requisite, in that place weren’t many youths at Barley’s camp who took part in organized sports.
“I just do this. I do this every appointed time to try and get victory and work on my style,” said 14-year-old Troy Billings of Jewett City.
Billings is some of the “Borough Rats,” a group in Jewett City organized by Duke Arndt — who also fell into the activity.
“It was an accident,” Arndt said. “I had opened a boutique and in the space we had, in that place was some other 800 square feet. My husband is a triathlete, but we didn’t want to do bikes inasmuch as they’re too expensive. We decided on skateboarding. (We) learned in all parts of it and then found out that Jewett City was having a youth problem and a lot of them were skaters.”
Arndt said she began working with them and has about 20 on the team.
“They skate and the skating keeps them from doing injurious things,” Arndt said. “We are absolutely drug-free, alcohol-free — even cigarette-free, and in order to hang out in our shop, you have to have good grades. If you’re 18 years old, you have to have a job, you gain to be progressing.”
Teams, sponsorships, riches, organization, the X Games, possibly the Olympics — skateboarding has hit the mainstream.
As much as it doesn’t want to admit it.
Read More..>>Home tests help parents monitor drug use (Kerrville Daily Times)
Posted on August 19, 2008 - Filed Under drug test | Leave a Comment
Marijuana, cocaine, methamph-etamine and Ecstacy.
These are the drugs that most likely approach to mind when trial the word
Read More..>>Final moments of Taser victim’s life in dispute (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)
Posted on August 17, 2008 - Filed Under drug test | Leave a Comment
During an Aug. 7 news conference, Zappala said a attendant known as “Derek” picked Thomas up in Swissvale around 9 p.m. Aug. 4 and drove him to Camp Avenue in Braddock. Zappala called the neighborhood a “high-crime” zone cursed with drug activity.
“Derek” is Derrick “Deacon” Mitchell, 38, a lifelong loved of Thomas. Camp Avenue is where Mitchell — a drywall worker who has had two minor scrapes by the law — lives with his wife and five children. They had gathered to grill ribs, burgers and hot dogs in what neighbors described as a “low-key” and “pretty quiet” party.
“I’ve got five kids, man. We live in the like house. I have kids running surrounding everywhere,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell said he picked Thomas up between 8 and 9 p.m. at a house on Manor Avenue in Swissvale where Thomas was staying. They drove to the Giant Eagle in Edgewood, in that which place Mitchell bought syrup for a daughter’s especial breakfast and barbecue condiment.
Thomas walked to a nearby liquor store and bought a bottle of Richards Wild Irish Rose, a fortified wine.
Mitchell was concerned about the wine because Thomas left West Penn Hospital’s Forbes Regional Campus in Monroeville behind a long June be fixed when his kidneys shut down. He was being treated for acute boastful blood pressure and taking prescribed doses of beta-blocker Lopressor and Catapres, a drug that increases vital fluid flow to help prevent strokes and heart attacks. Mitchell said Thomas wasn’face to face driving because of medication reactions.
Until recently, Thomas underwent dialysis every other day. The treatment forced him to quit his piece of work as a cook, and he was brokering sales of broken-down cars for scrap.
“He said, ‘I can drink a little bit, chase it down with water,’” Mitchell said.
At Mitchell’s house, Thomas spent the evening playing in the yard with Mitchell’s toddler daughter, sipping wine and “just sitting there and conversating.” Mitchell estimates Thomas drank no more than 16 ounces of wine over two hours.
Toward the end of the evening, Thomas went inside the house with Mitchell’sitting children to watch the latest baseball scores. Around 11:30 p.m., he announced he wanted to go hearthstone, Mitchell said.
“He said, ‘All right man, I’m ready to go.’”
The ride home
Mitchell cleaned the gridiron and aforesaid they departed before 11:35 p.scuffle. They started toward a unintellectual bridge connecting Braddock to Swissvale adjacent the Overland and Second streets interchange. About two or three minutes into the journey, a car pulled behind them and Thomas began to act strangely, Mitchell said.
“He saw the lights behind us. And he just started, ‘Hey, they’re after us! Keep driving!’”
Saying he’d never “seen him act parallel that,” Mitchell recalled that Thomas became so agitated he had to grab his friend’session T-shirt to keep him from opening the car door and bolting. Thomas ripped used up of the shirt, but calmed down when he saw the car behind them turn off Hawkins Avenue, Mitchell said.
“I was about to rend from one side to the other, but he kept trying to open the door. He wanted me to stop so that he could get out, but I wasn’face to face going to let him out. I said, ‘Hey, what’s trespass? All of a sudden, you’ve snapped.’”
Thomas didn’t answer, but as they neared Swissvale he appeared to become lucid again, Mitchell said. Then they stopped at Roslyn Street and Braddock Avenue.
“It’s a car behind us again. A different car. He’session agitated again. Some sense, but I don’t take no clue. He goes, ‘Oh! Oh! They’re approach!’”
But that car turned off, and Thomas deep-rooted down. Mitchell turned right and parked at 11:41 p.m. in the 2300 block of Manor Avenue. For no apparent reason, Thomas grabbed a reticule holding bingo supplies left on the seat by Mitchell’s wife and dumped the contents. Leaving his cell phone behind, Thomas scrambled out of the minivan and jogged toward the back door of the house where he was staying, Mitchell before-mentioned.
“It wasn’t like he was strong-arming or nought,” said Mitchell, who described his friend as brash but nonviolent, and at no time a bully.
Mitchell said he didn’t affright for his friend’s safety because he wasn’t trying to harm himself, and Thomas didn’t try to hurt him. He thought maybe Thomas was having a bad reciprocal action to his prescription tablets, perhaps exacerbated by wine.
With 18 percent alcohol by volume, tippling 16 ounces of Richards Wild Irish Rose would have being tantamount to consuming about 7 ounces of 86-proof whiskey. Thomas exhibited unusual mien by means of the control of liquid during a North Versailles traffic stop in 2005. The drunken-driving arrest report said he started “to physically fight with officers” after they sought to remove him from his car. Police said Thomas injured one officer’sitting shoulder and another’s back. Thomas was treated for a stomach injury.
Thomas’ arrests in the early 1990s included charges of marijuana use and public tippling. Relatives said Thomas moved to Westmoreland County and avoided trouble for two years, becoming more religious and spending time with his fiancee, a recently ordained minister, and her two daughters.
In 2005, Mitchell pleaded guilty to marijuana possession. He declared Thomas might have ingested a mind-altering drug before his death but didn’t see him do it.
“I didn’face to face take him to get in any degree drugs. I didn’t see him do any drugs,” Mitchell related.
Toxicology test results on Thomas demise be available in about a month, according to Allegheny County Medical Examiner Dr. Karl Williams.
An imaginary chase?
Mitchell drove a Trib reporter on the route he and Thomas took to Swissvale. The Trib replicated the 1.7-mile journey seven times during evening traffic; the trips averaged about eight minutes, which would have oddity Thomas at Manor Avenue around 11:41 p.m. Aug. 4.
After dropping him off, Mitchell believed Thomas entered his Manor Avenue family circle through the back door. The lights were on, excepting he decided to double-check by idling close-fisted the alley separating Manor from Hawthorne Avenue. He waited a few minutes but never saw Thomas leave, so he drove back to Braddock.
Thomas’ housemate said Thomas not at any time entered the home-born that night. She last saw Thomas when Mitchell picked him up. She described him as simulation normally, happy to custom out with a buddy.
About five minutes after Mitchell began his return to Braddock, a string of 911 callers started reporting a man yelling and trotting east on Hawthorne Avenue.
At 2334 Hawthorne Ave., Tammy Connelly had just crossed the street from a friend’s home and popped in a DVD, the horror flick “Black Christmas.” It was about 11:45 p.m., the children were in bed and she, her save Richard and buddy Paul “PJ” Long hoped to settle in for a movie night.
Then they heard screaming from their small front compound and saw Thomas.
“No shirt, pockets pulled out, hands in the tune. He was saying, ‘I don’t have any weapons! Please don’t shoot me!’” said Richard Connelly. Police confirmed Thomas was unarmed.
Thinking someone was chasing him, they phoned 911. Richard Connelly assured Thomas that police were coming.
“He before-mentioned, ‘2334, would you please help me!’ He held onto the gate, yelling, ‘Help me! Don’t kill me!’ He seemed to give up and doubled back up Hawthorne, in consequence turned down Hawthorne again,” he said.
The Connellys; their next-door neighbors, the Joneses; a 911 caller who lived across the street, Cathy Mosely; another neighbor who identified himself only as “Joe” — all recalled the same version of events: Thomas didn’t appear to be hurt and claimed to be pursued through assailants they never saw.
Other neighbors told dispatchers Thomas appeared threatening.
“I thought he was going to bust the door down,” said Michelle Aversa, who lives two doors from the Connellys.
She said Thomas beat loudly on her door and tossed individual of her porch chairs before running away.
The Connelly and Jones families and other neighbors worry that 911 dispatchers potency have given police a depraved version of what actually was happening. Like Mitchell, they said the man appeared “agitated” but not dangerous and didn’t appear to be hurt.
Richard Connelly aforesaid neighbors listened as Thomas traveled down Hawthorne Avenue, begging for help.
“We heard a scream, and then he was silent,” he said.
Taser talons
Blocked by a slope in the roadway, the Connellys heard but didn’t see the arrival of Swissvale police. According to county police detectives, at 11:51 p.pot-pourri., Swissvale Officer Debra Lynn Indovina-Akerley shocked Thomas with a Taser though brace other officers searched because of the assailants he said were chasing him.
With the weapon’s talons fixed to his buttocks and back, over the next minute she sent 50,000 volts coursing end Thomas’ body two more times, according to detectives.
What happened next under the street lamp on lower Hawthorne Avenue is in dispute.
Residents of 2206 and 2211 Hawthorne take for granted they watched from upper-level windows facing the street and have brief doubt Swissvale police used feet and hands to curb a docile man shocked into submission.
Dan Pastor said he was awakened by yelling and the arrival of police cruisers. Rushing to his second-floor window, he heard a loud suddenly from the Taser. He saw three officers, two men and a woman, standing completely Thomas; one was bulky and balding, the other had “darker hair,” Pastor said. They interspersed curses with shouts — “Stop moving! Stop moving!” — but Thomas seemed to have existence “jiggling around.”
“Then he stopped moving. It was really creepy,” Pastor said.
According to Pastor, the bulky cop “was holding his hand or arm, like he hurt his hand or got a cut” and the darker-haired officer was standing on or stomping without ceasing him. Later, Thomas didn’confidentially seem to move and the officers struggled to lift him, as if to secure him toward a set car, but gave up, Pastor said.
Across the street, three residents told a similar record. They said a bulky, balding or thin-haired male officer struck Thomas in the head or face with his clenched ability, then walked let us go. as granting that his hand was hurt. They say common officer twisted or beat Thomas’ wrists, and then one or more male cops kicked, stomped or pressed shoes into Thomas’ hindmost or shoulders until he quit moving.
Nikki Ayton, 33, of 2211 Hawthorne Ave. said she saw a male official “twisting his wrist, really hard.”
“The lady Tasered him and then they cuffed him. It looked like he was halfway on the curb and they stomped on him or something, and you could see him on the pavement and they stepped on his back,” she said.
Other residents said they didn’t see that. Don Buck said neither he nor his wife saw the police do anything to Thomas, but added they might be in possession of arrived also late to see much.
Krystal Stepien, 18, said she watched from her porch about 15 yards away. She described the first three officers on the scene as sum of two units men and a woman. One male officer was tall, slender with “blondish-brown hair” and the other “heavy-set.”
She said Thomas ran down the avenue yelling “Help! Help!” Stepien said the female officer shouted “Freeze! Get down on the ground!” and Thomas appeared to initially comply, putting his hands at the back his back, but then moved to scuffle with the cops. Stepien said the female officer “warned him that he would be Tased” if he didn’t settle down, and then shocked him.
“He was trying to fight the cops really disappointing,” she said.
Thomas suffered cordial arrest at 12:09 a.m. and was pronounced dead 37 minutes later at UPMC Braddock Hospital. Citing ongoing probes by the FBI, county police and a potential lawsuit, Swissvale police declined to comment.
On Monday, the sixth day of the investigation, Stepien related she tried several general condition of affairs to telephone county detectives on the other hand none responded to her request for an interview. Authorities uttered Friday they eventually talked to her.
Been beaten?
The Trib photographed Thomas’ face, hands, wrists, neck and head Aug. 8. A silver-dollar-sized bruise swelled Thomas’ right cheek and an inch-long abrasion blackened his chin. Both hands were severely cut — a tear the size of a business card was on the right, a wound about half that size on the left. Scrapes and tears marked his scalp, one eyelid, and several fingers and knuckles.
Before he was retained by dint of. Thomas’ family to investigate, former Allegheny County Coroner Cyril Wecht reviewed the Trib’s casket photographs. Calling the trauma a “major sunken space adjoining the basement of concern,” he said the hand wounds “appear to show that he was struck or hit in a way that shows he was defending himself” from blows. The bruises and cuts to the face, head and hands were obvious sign of trauma that occurred shortly before his death, said the forensic pathologist.
To find an outside expert who hadn’t heard about Thomas’ death, the Trib contacted Dr. Matthias Okoye of the Nebraska Institute of Forensic Sciences Inc. A professor of juridical pathology at Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Okoye has a law degree and is licensed to practice in Pennsylvania.
After reviewing the photos, Okoye said Thomas’ injuries were “consistent with someone who has been beaten.”
“Of course, we can’t say for sure who injured him,” he said. “But it appears that some time accept the offer to his death — within hours, or maybe minutes — someone beat him.”
The chin abrasion suggested to Okoye that Thomas’ head was pressed hard into the ground.
“He has too many injuries and bruising and rise to have not been beaten,” he aforesaid.
Following Thomas’ funeral, a second autopsy conducted by Wecht produced photographs signed and certified through Wecht and his longtime aide, Joe Mancuso, that emerge to show far more extensive injuries to areas the Trib couldn’t appraise since the visible form was being clothed for the funeral.
A swollen bruise nearly four inches wide was on the seemly shoulder, a smaller bruise on the left shoulder. There were abrasions on the left elbow. The right arm had a six-inch bruise; the left, undivided about half that size. Tests are being performed on his organs and other dead body parts.
Wecht wanted to check Thomas’ heart, but the Medical Examiner’s Office is holding it as evidence. He wants to see the brain mass tests and toxicology results and to review the county’s premises before deciding the likely cause of death.
The man who dropped Thomas off in Swissvale, Derrick Mitchell, insists his pal had no bruises or cuts when he last maxim him at 11:41 p.farrago. Mitchell rolled up his sleeves for the Trib, to show he had no injuries to his fists, arms or face that would indicate a fight with Thomas.
Residents who claimed to have seen Thomas up close after he asked them to call 911 aforesaid they saw no bruises, cuts or blood onward him judgment police officers arrived.
Downtown attorney Howard Messer is investigating the case for the subdivision of an order.
Excited delirium
In the days just now following Thomas’ departure, Medical Examiner Williams and District Attorney Zappala questioned eyewitness allegations of possible police misbehavior. Williams said he found no medical evidence of “excessive force” by officers, and Zappala said he was told the only bodily contact officers had with Thomas was when one officer offer his knee “into the small of his outer part” to cuff him.
Zappala on Friday uttered he erred during the advice conference by saying Thomas sat up after receiving the Taser jolts — he meant to say Thomas spat-up — but he stands by his opinion that there is little evidence of alleged “vehement force.” He said he had reviewed county autopsy photos and found no indication of “repeated kicking.”
Zappala said he must meditate upon the “diametrically opposed” but likely single witness statements against ocular evidence findings and the words of Swissvale officers, firefighters and paramedics. He said his office is reviewing all aspects of the wrap, including widely conflicting witness statements. He pointed to a recent convincing of West Mifflin detective Noel Missig with a view to beating a juvenile and lying about seizing illicit poker machines as one example of getting tough on corrupt police officers.
Asked if he wanted to clarify his remarks in light of the Trib’s snapshots, Wecht’s initial autopsy findings, witness recollections and concerns by Okoye that Thomas appeared to have been common-place, Williams said: “‘Beat up’ is a subjective term. Sure, so is ‘excessive force.’ You’ve seen the photographs, in the way that I can’t say there was no trauma.”
Williams said he didn’t conduct the post-mortem examination on Thomas but was present as hostile as concerns parts of it and reviewed stroke of photographs. He said the wounds to Thomas’ body puissance have been caused by officers attempting to restrain a delusional man manifesting what Zappala said was “superhuman brawniness.” Williams said it’s possible Thomas could battle police even in relation to three Taser jolts. He said results of toxicology and tissue tests choose tell more.
“I want people to understand what happened to this guy. But I want a complete picture,” said Williams. “I really just be able to’t add it all up from beginning to end and above because I smooth don’t have clew pieces of evidence.”
Wecht thinks Williams is touching toward a diagnosis of “excited delirium syndrome.” Proponents of the syndrome’s existence believe eccentric and violent behavior often is manifested by people taking stimulants such as cocaine. A surge of strength is followed by a final span of calm, then the heart stops beating.
Like other skeptics, Wecht believes the syndrome is a “wastebasket diagnosis” produced in consequence people die violently in police custody. Although proponents estimate as many as 1,000 men nationwide succumb annually to the syndrome, neither the American Medical Association nor the American Psychiatric Association honor it as a weighty distemper.
Zappala believes there’s evidence of at least three newly come confirmed cases of the syndrome in Allegheny County. He hopes officers can be trained to identify and in consequence mitigate effects of the syndrome, to protect the person suffering from it and first-responders.
“If you do have, hypothetically, an episode of excited delirium, we’ve been told that you shouldn’cheek by jowl use pain-inducing techniques to control the subject, things like bean bags, batons, etc.,” Zappala said. “In that case, the best solution might be Taser bursts and verbal commands. That way, officers can quiet the person and get the proper medical care for him.”
Carl Prine can be reached at cprine@tribweb.com or 412-320-7826. Jill King Greenwood be able to have existence reached at jgreenwood@tribweb.com or 412-321-2160.
Read More..>>Growing pains on display (Boston Globe)
Posted on August 17, 2008 - Filed Under drug test | Leave a Comment
BEIJING - Yang Yilin, through no fault of her own, has been one of the stories of these Games because of questions in an opposite direction whether she and two other gymnasts steady the Chinese team are fertile enough to compete. China insists they are, but that hasn’cheek by jowl erased the doubts that they may be under the minimum age of 16.
Reporters got a close-up look at this 4-foot-11-inch figure of altercation as she waited for her medal winners’ news conference to begin.
How fragile she looked, like a baby deer in the headlights of every oncoming SUV. Little pink hearts and the word “love” in blue letters decorated her hair clips. The glitter on her front twinkled under the lights. Chalk was encrusted at which place the derm met her slender fingernails. So thin, for a like reason uneasy, so revealed of place she seemed, in a downstairs room in Beijing’session National Indoor Stadium. She’d just won an Olympic bronze medal in all-around gymnastics, one of the toughest sporting tests there is.
Two Americans had stood with her on the podium. Nastia Liukin got the gold, Shawn Johnson the silver, and they were long delayed. As minutes passed, reporters crowded around Yang, scrutinizing, asking questions.
Unlike Johnson, who arrived later, obviously delighted through her medal, Yang displayed small quantity outward emotion. She smiled obediently, all small teeth, whenever reporters asked her to puzzle for photos. Her little mouth pursed again when the lenses were turned away.
Perhaps Yang is shy by sort. But, really, she just seems to have been sheltered by the Chinese coaches who conduct her life.
“For the drug test,” coach Liu Qunlin said, exceedingly Yang a bottle of water so she would be able to provide a specimen for the dope-testers.
Then, a little hesitantly, Yang started to reply the questions. And the more she said, the more shocking it was. The answers were brief, oral without heart. What emerged was a picture of a young girl who has been kept largely cut off from race and the outside world for more than a year, so she could be intensely skilled to win medals for China at its own Olympics.
Were your parents here to see you compete, among the cheering crowds?
“I don’t know.”
When was the last time you went home?”
“Ummm . . . before I joined the national team,” Yang said, her small voice hard to hear.
When was that?
“More than a year ago.”
Will you extend on f after the Games?
“I don’t know.”
How many holidays do you get a year?
“I have not had a holiday since I joined the general team.”
Yang, He Kexin, and Jiang Yuyuan are among the six Chinese gymnasts who surpass the United States this week to win China’s first women’s team gold. Questions have been raised about those three because of Chinese competition records and media reports that suggested they may have existence underage - and therefore in greater numbers flexible and less troubled by old injuries or fear.
The body that runs athletics and the International Olympic Committee say they’ve checked the girls’ passports, issued by Chinese authorities, and they show they are old enough to be in the present life.
For someone who supposedly turns 16 this August, Yang still seems to have a lot of growing up to do. If the Chinese passports are correct, then Johnson is only 7 months older than Yang. But the age difference seems a great quantity larger than that. At the news conference, Johnson was bubbly, talkative, self-assured - everything Yang was not.
“They are very confident,” Yang famed of the American women.
When questions turned to what Yang might like to do after sports, coach Liu interjected.
“It’s too soon,” she said. “She hasn’t done enough gymnastics yet.”
Then, after a few final questions, the curtain closed again.
“Let her rest a little,” the coach said, cutting the moment short.
And to Yang: “Drink some water.” (AP)