In the Era of Cheap DVD's, Anyone Can Be a Producer

http://query.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F00816F6385B0C738EDDAC0894DC404482

May 20, 2004, Thursday

CIRCUITS



In the Era of Cheap DVD's, Anyone Can Be a Producer



By PETER WAYNER (NYT) 1638 words
IN the fall, on the Monday after each University of Texas football game, the university's athletic department produces a bulk mailing for the post office: DVD's containing a complete video of the game, interviews with the coaches and other features.

There may be more college football on television than ever before, but even so, schools like Texas with prominent football teams can't count on reaching a national audience every Saturday. So the university offers DVD's of its 12 games as a $300 package; so far about 300 fans around the country are subscribers.

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"Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully - in Ten Minutes"

Via tdj.

http://www.msu.edu/~jdowell/King_Everything.html

"Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully - in Ten Minutes"


by Stephen King
(reprinted in Sylvia K. Burack, ed. The Writer's Handbook. Boston, MA: Writer, Inc., 1988: 3-9)


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My God Problem

Via atheism.

http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/angier_24_5.htm

My God Problem


by Natalie Angier

The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 24, Number 5.


In the course of reporting a book on the scientific canon and pestering hundreds of researchers at the nation's great universities about what they see as the essential vitamins and minerals of literacy in their particular disciplines, I have been hammered into a kind of twinkle-eyed cartoon coma by one recurring message. Whether they are biologists, geologists, physicists, chemists, astronomers, or engineers, virtually all my sources topped their list of what they wish people understood about science with a plug for Darwin's dandy idea. Would you please tell the public, they implored, that evolution is for real? Would you please explain that the evidence for it is overwhelming and that an appreciation of evolution serves as the bedrock of our understanding of all life on this planet?

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Dangers of Masturbation

O'Halloran RL, Dietz PE: Autorerotic fatalities with power hydraulics. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 38:359-364, 1993

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=8454997&itool=iconabstr

Autoerotic fatalities with power hydraulics.

O'Halloran RL, Dietz PE.

Ventura County Medical Examiner Office, CA.

We report two cases in which men used the hydraulic shovels on tractors to suspend themselves for masochistic sexual stimulation. One man developed a romantic attachment to a tractor, even giving it a name and writing poetry in its honor. He died accidentally while intentionally asphyxiating himself through suspension by the neck, leaving clues that he enjoyed perceptual distortions during asphyxiation. The other man engaged in sexual bondage and transvestic fetishism, but did not purposely asphyxiate himself. He died when accidentally pinned to the ground under a shovel after intentionally suspending himself by the ankles. We compare these cases with other autoerotic fatalities involving perceptual distortion, cross-dressing, machinery, and postural asphyxiation by chest compression.