Newscenter CNN

Il caldo comincia a farsi insopportabile in Costiera Amalfitana come in Penisola Sorrentina, Positano, Amalfi, Ravello, Capri, Sorrento, Vico Equense, ma anche il Cilento e le aree costiere di Napoli, Salerno e della Campania. Con la conclusione di Agosto termina insieme a Luglio il periodo estivo per eccellenza e facendo le somme spiccano alcune anomalie più o meno gravi.  Quella più preoccupante ci occupiamo del lungo periodo siccitoso che ci sta accompagnando da metà giugno, il problema assume particolare rilevanza in quanto non sta interessando una porzione limitata dello stivale quale la Campania, ben
sì gran parte della nazione; praticamente tutto il centro sud non vede piovere in modo omogeneo da almeno due mesi e gli unici episodi degni di nota si limitano alle zone interne (grazie ad una discreta attività termoconvettiva con numerosi temporali sulle zone montuose tipica della stagione estiva) che di certo non possono esserci utili nel colmare il deficit idrico di questo periodo.

Non solo la Costa d´Amalfi e Sorrento, ma tutte le località costiere della Campania hanno registrato accumuli nulli sia a Luglio che ad Agosto fatta eccezione per qualche locale acquazzone che ha colpito qualche fortunata località grazie allo sconfinamento dei suddetti temporali appenninici. In provincia di Napoli e in particolare quella a Nord del capoluogo partenopeo non piove da metà giugno, anche se per dovere di cronaca il trimestre estivo chiude in perfetta media grazie ai circa 100 mm registrati durante la prima metà di Giugno.

Altra anomalia di quest´estate la troviamo nelle temperature medie che su tutta la regione risultano superiori alla norma di circa 1-2° nonostante non vi siano state particolari avvezioni calde africane.

Le anomalie maggiori le ritroviamo nelle temperature minime notturne mentre le massime sono risultate ovunque nella media o al più leggermente al di sopra. Ricordo che il confronto viene fatto col trentennio 1961-1990 per cui la spiegazione trova conforto nella maggiore (a mio avviso) urbanizzazione del territorio, per cui almeno per quanto riguarda le temperature minime tale confronto non può essere più attendibile. Infatti se andiamo ad analizzare gli ultimi cinque anni tale anomalia risulta assai più contenuta e nell´ordine di 0,5-1° in più.

In conclusione appare sempre più evidente la tendenza ad avere maggiori influenze delle alte pressioni con conseguente riduzione di episodi di maltempo, a differenza di qualche anno fa che vedeva i primi segnali di cedimento intorno all´ultima decade di Agosto. Da una visione dei modelli previsionali per avere un cambiamento del tempo dovremo attendere almeno la fine della prima settimana di Settembre che darà inizio (si spera) ad una esaltante stagione autunnale.

fonte www.positanonews.com

Russian Paralympians at a formal reception at the State Kremlin Palace

Moscow, 29 August 2008 (Interfax):

On Friday, the Russian Paralympians gathered at the Lower Church of the Transfiguration at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour for a molieben. After the service, Bishop Amvrosy of Bronnitsky communicated the blessing of Patriarch Aleksei II of Moscow and all Russia to the team as they prepared to depart for Beijing. He noted that the molieben for the Paralympians was served in a church that “is a symbol of the victories and of the spiritual revival of Russia. You are shining exemplars of indomitable spirit and dynamic will-power; therefore, we believe that you shall do your best”. Vladyki Amvrosy then gave each of the athletes a small cross and a small icon of St George the all-Victorious. The Paralympians were dressed in their team uniforms for the molieben, and Vladimir Lukin, the President of the Paralympic Committee and Advisor on Human Rights in the RF, and Pavel Rozhkov, the First Vice-President of the Committee and the Head of the Team, were present as well.

Russian Paralympic Team with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (1952- ) in the State Kremlin Palace

The Paraympic Games (Olympics for the physically-handicapped) in 2008 shall take place in Beijing from 6 to 17 September 2008, 13 days after the closing of the 29^th Olympic Games. The Russian National Team consists of 145 members, including 40 Masters of Sport, 29 Masters of Sport (International Class), and 55 trainers.   

Interfax-Religion

http://www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=26263 (in Russian)

Editor's Note:

The lower church of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was chosen as the venue of the molieben due to the fact that wheelchair accessibility is better than in the upper church or in any of the older churches in the Moscow Kremlin.

Dua mahasiswa Institut Pertanian Bogor dan seorang mahasiswa dari Universitas Tanjungpura, Pontianak, Kalimantan Barat, menyisihkan 7 peserta final Lomba Karya Tulis atau LKT Beswan Djarum 2008, regional Jakarta. Gagasan ketiga mahasiswa itu diharapkan bisa menjadi solusi dari permasalahan Indonesia ke depan. Read more...

Fox News is reporting Gustav has been reduced to a Category 3.  Some people no doubt will be bummed at those news.

Take solace, Michael Moore.  Hanna is not far behind.  Hey, maybe Hanna will become a Hurricane and hit New Orleans.

After having their bid for USL Atlanta Silverbacks forward Macoumba Kandji blocked by the MLS because their $200,000 would set a high precedent for pricing on USL players, the Red Bulls instead signed one-time Arsenal trialist Sainey Touray to a developmental contract.  Touray, a 6'1, 18 year-old forward, has played for his country's U-17 and U-20 teams and led his Gambian First Division side, Wallidan FC, in goals last season with nine.

The pacy Touray, commonly known as 'Ballack' had been on trial for New York a week earlier.  Red Bulls Manager Juan Carlos Osorio is obviously getting a player who is at least his second choice though, as he commented that Touray has great physical ability and skills, but is very raw.  The Red Bulls may not need immediate help after all, though, as Mike Magee and Juan Pablo Angel's goal-scoring have them on a hot streak that has seen them collect 10 of a possible 12 points in their last 4 games.

ugh. sunva got me into this.

it's all good. today was another lovely day on the faroe islands. sad to say, it was my last day on the faroe islands...

it all began around 9:30 or so in the morning.

i awoke and padded into the kitchen to find mikkjal and kjarton (the littler boy...3 years old or so...name pronounced "charshton") at the table, working on puzzles together. (they were those wooden puzzles little kids have that are pictures of cars and trains or different kinds of animals...so cute.) sunva was curled up on the couch to which she'd relocated after waking up, and poul jens was just arriving from his in-laws', having stopped to get breakfast stuff on his way to sigrid and mikkjal's.

so...breakfast, blah blah blah, yum yum yum...and then our days had to begin, so we said goodbye to mikkjal and many thanks and a hug or two and we're off.

[i'm so sorry to report, dear reader, that i have zero pictures of the family. like i've said many a time, they are all gorgeous, but you'll have to take my word for it. perhaps sunva will start a blog and share pictures of all of her friends and then you can see...]

sunva has some more work to do at the newspaper for which she is freelancing, so poul jens and i drive around tórshavn, seeing some of the older parts of town and staying out of the rain and killing time until it's time for my interview.

yeah, so, funny story about how that even became a possibility. our first day in tórshavn, poul jens and i came by the newspaper to pick sunva up in the afternoon and she gave me a tour of the building. it's a really cool old house that they've redone in a really great, open way with lots of light and original hardwood flooring, etc. so, we're going around and i'm meeting people here and there and sunva and i are talking about some of her upcoming shoots and all that and we are up on the second floor where all her equipment is and she brings me into the office of her editor-in-chief, jan müller, who is very quiet and has a very stern look despite being very easy to get along with and talk to, from what sunva has told me. meeting him takes all of 30 seconds, during which sunva basically explains who i am and that i was traveling in israel and then came here for a visit and we're out of his office again and sunva's tying up loose ends and getting her stuff together. i pause at a copy of the danish newspaper page that caused such an uproar in the muslim world: that page that they printed that had all the muslim stereotypes cartoons. i had never seen it and was interested, even though i couldn't read any of the danish copy...

so, we're on our way out and jan calls to sunva and they have a brief conversation during which i don't think he even looked at me. walking down the stairs she explains that she has agreed for me to be interviewed for the paper.

huh? why?

that's a bit unclear, but whatever. so, i was a bit nervous about all this and kind of hoped/assumed it would get forgotten or they'd run out of time or scrap the idea or what have you. but it didn't and they didn't, so there i was on a rainy tuesday in the faroes, driving back to the newspaper with poul jens to meet a reporter.

since bill clinton had been in town, and since the paper is called sosialurin ("the socialist"), we kind of thought there might be a political bent to the interview and they might want to know what i thought about the war and the upcoming presidential election, etc. i had even read up a bit on the candidates just so i wouldn't be completely ignorant if the interview did go in that direction.

funny thing, that didn't come up at all. the interview was more like a get-to-know-you kind of conversation. the reporter, leo, was very nice and had just been in washington state, so we talked a bit about life in the states compared to life in the faroes, and sports, and photography, and how i know sunva, and so on and so forth.

i have no idea what he's going to write.

and i have no idea how the photos will turn out.

that's right: there were photos.

i sat in the rain on the rocks by the parliament building, holding an umbrella and a camera.

the photographer asked if i had a little american flag with me! (i found that pretty funny and laughed out loud when he asked me. i think he realized on second thought that that might be an unusual thing to carry around...)

oh...i'm such a nobody; that whole experience was really funny. i hope it's a nice little piece, though, and that people get a kick out the off-season tourist whose visit coincided with clinton's.

ack!

anyway, moving on, interview: over, sunva's work: over (for the day), and we're free to go.

by now it's late in the day and we're hungry so we go to the mall and get burger king, (that's right) and run into sunva's cousin and then her friend that just had a baby and then sigrid's sister. it's fun how often one sees people one knows here...

anyway, off we go and, yippee!, next stop is another of sunva's friend's houses! i got to meet susanna!

those of you who know sunva well have probably heard tell of sigrid, susanna and eva, among others, and you may even have seen photos of these girls. i got to meet these three and we ran into a few others around town, so that was really cool for me.

susanna has two boys, just like sigrid, and their names are rogvi ("rek-veh", age 6 but looks like he's 10 or 11 and idolizes mikkjal who plays soccer for a beloved tórshavn team as well as the national team) and brandur (pronounced just how it looks, age 1 or so, extremely social with a huge impish grin that he's constantly flashing and likes to sit on the kitchen table to be eye-level with everyone). her husband is sjur?or ("shoorr-or"), and he's a bit of a local celebrity. sunva was photographing him because he's written an essay on the issue of church and state in the faroes for a book that is being published later this month, and, beyond being a cultural commentator, he's also an actor and comedian. he also speaks excellent spanish.

[sadly, again, dear reader, i have no photos. it always seems weird to me to take pictures of people i've met for less than an hour when we're in their home and i'm a guest... ugh. i wish i did have pictures to share with you, but i don't.]

so, that was a lovely little jaunt before stopping by sunva's parents' house one last time to get a few things before heading back to klaksvík for the evening.

back in klaksvík, it was a happy homecoming!

sunva's dad had gone back out on the fishing boat, but his mom and sister were still home and they greeted us with a feast of a lasagna dinner.

and then it was time to shower and pack and get in bed because in the early early morning we were taking off to have breakfast with sunva's friend eva's family before getting to the airport for our 8:15AM flight to copenhagen.

wonderful copenhagen!

and, dear reader, here is your reward for reading all of that (or just scrolling down, you clever devil!): a few photos of rainy day tórshavn.

the posh hotel tórshavn.

the posh hotel tórshavn, right next to sosialurin, the newspaper for which sunva is freelancing, and a sculpture of a national faroese hero who routed the danes' attempts to squash free trade and commercial growth in the faroes in the 18th century...

...and proof that the city is not deserted...hehe.

(the newspaper building has that plastic over the front façade because they just bought a radio station and the top floor is being renovated to house the studios and offices for the station.)

panoramic shots showing the red parliament buildings on the left (with traditional grass roof) and the harbor that lies before the downtown area where the newspaper and hotel are on the right.

I finished E-Myth Manager by Michael Gerber yesterday.  It was a good book that left me with some good takeaways, application points for myself, and some questions.  I'll share the takeaways which are mostly quoatables, which caused me to pause or were central points of the book.  I condensed them to for pages of bulletted notes...kind of a Cliff's Notes for E-Myth Manager.

Download the e-myth-manager-by-michael-gerber-takeaways Document here.

Or, check out the bulleted comments with poor formatting here:

•    An unchallenged idea can be a dangerous idea. Read more...

I started yet another wordpress blog in an effort to further 'niche-ify' my work.  So much of what I wanted to post about in postalheaven.wordpress.com and then sparechangenews.com was technical stuff about computers and as of late that is specifically studies about Linux.  So the name is a tribute to my wife who came up with the term I was looking for for a miniscule linux operating system - minilini.wordpress.com.  Minilini.wordpress.com will not only be about small linux operating systems and their hardware friends tiny pcs (there will also be www.tinypcnews.com launching in a short time) but about all my experiences trying to work with Linux.

Talking about my wife, she has spunoff preborn.wordpress.com  from noblevine.net at my suggestion for her Pro-Life work specifically, in an effort to further 'niche-ify' her work.

My Wordpress dashboard will never be the same again.

mem-O, day 27: i heart cph.

up up up!

5:15 and there's a knock on the door and i must get out of bed and into the car because we have a breakfast date with eva a few islands away and it takes an hour to get there.

6:30 we arrive, having just managed in the last few minutes of the trip to find some fresh-baked bread (brey?, "bray") to contribute to the table.

and in in into the brand new house where eva greets us with a huge smile and the familiarity of old friends which she and sunva are.

and in in in comes husband jakob...who looks a bit like an american actor and i can't quite say whom...

oh, well! breakfast is before us and conversation is fun and the sun is rising and the view over the small town and big bay is lovely.

and in in into the kitchen come sleepy sleepy babies, 4-year-old hanna (blond and light-eyed like her daddy, dressed in red underoos and a strawberry shortcake tank top) and 14-month-old sonja (long, chubby legs, a downy brunette anna wintour bob, thick baby-girl eyebrows and eyelashes and green eyes like her mama, dressed in a striped purple long-sleeved onesy). cute as can be.

and conversation and eating continue and clothes are brought into the kitchen so that the girls are dressed for the day while conversation and eating continue. (at one point sonja is dressed in the purple onesy and pink rain boots that come up over her little dimpled knees...cute as can be!)

and down down down to the lower level where the bedrooms are for a tour of the new house and sad sad sad we must be off as it's already almost 7:30 and our flight's in 45 minutes!

so, drive a few minutes to the airport, check in, hug poul jens goodbye, through security and onto the plane where the head air hostess is sunva's cousin and the pilot is her good friend's brother and the famous faroese artist tróndur patursson is just a few rows ahead of us. this is fun!

so, knit knit knit sunva does and doze doze doze meg does, all the way to copenhagen.

wonderful copenhagen!

and, onto the ground and through to airport and to the baggage claim and out of the doors and into the parking lot we go and are presently met by linda of linda and palli (one of poul jens' bestest friends from klaskvík) who picks us up and takes us to kvickly ("quickly," believe it or not), a grocery store where we stock up and drive on to linda and palli's lovely apartment where we will be staying until sunday.

so, into the apartment, to the table for lunch...and then sunva and i crash.

so, it's nap nap nap for an hour or so and then up up up! we're in copenhagen...

wonderful copenhagen!

...and there's shopping to be done!

so, "thanks for the ride, palli!" and we're onto the pedestrian shopping area called strøget ("stray-eh") after seeing tons and tons of people walking, driving and biking home after work and we're strolling through and window shopping (the stores close at 6! 6! that's not right.) and then really shopping and then we're running into faroese singer/songwriter lena anderssen and her husband victor (both of whom i met in los angeles last summer) and chatting with them for a while. such a nice serendipity as she and sunva are friends but with sunva being in the states and lena touring a LOT now they don't get to see each other very often at all...

but, "great to see you! enjoy your time in copenhagen!"

wonderful copenhagen!

and we're off to the metro station to catch a train to a great, big danish mall, and roll roll roll we do two stops down the line to emerge in the twilight where a photo is imperative.

(thanks for the picture, sunva!)

and more shopping 'til the mall closes and then let's take a taxi back to the apartment. okay.

and it's dinner time for sunva, meg and palli (as linda is working. she's a cop. he's a graphic designer.) before an evening of danish dancing with the stars and all three of us on our laptops before sunva falls asleep on the couch and i realize that we lost an hour coming here to copenhagen.

wonderful copenhagen!

[caption id="attachment_6379" align="alignnone" width="432" caption="ΑΕΚ-ΠΑΟ"][/caption]

Κιτρινόμαυρο χρώμα είχε το ντέρμπι της πρεμιέρας του πρωταθλήματος. Με γκολ των Εντίνιο και Μπλάνκο, η ΑΕΚ δεν άφησε περιθώρια στον ακίνδυνο Παναθηναϊκό, επικρατώντας -υπό το βλέμμα του Ζοζέ Μουρίνιο- με 2-1, κερδίζοντας και σε ψυχολογία ενόψει της συνέχειας.

Επιτυχία που πιστώνεται αναμφισβήτητα στον Γιώργο Δώνη και στους παίκτες , η ΑΕΚ έπαιξε με καρδιά και απέδειξε το πόσο μεγάλη ομάδα και με καθαρό μυαλό έφτασε δίκαια σε μια αν μη τι άλλο τονωτική νίκη αν μάλιστα, οι Μπλάνκο και Σκόκο ήταν πιο εύστοχοι το σκορ θα είχε πάρει διαστάσεις θριάμβου.

Many thanks to fimatiosi bro for the video upload

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