Nashville, Season 1

Sylvia Jefferies as Jolene Barnes and Connie Britton as Rayna Jaymes.

Every week in?Slate?s?Nashville TV club, Katy Waldman will have an IM conversation with a different?Nashville?fan. This week, she rehashes episode 1.11 with June Thomas,?a Slate culture critic.

Katy Waldman: Hey there, June! I hate to start with the last scene, but I?m so glad circumstances have finally thrown Deacon, Juliette, and Rayna together in a confined space.

June Thomas: And at the crack of butt, no less.

Waldman: With Deacon as Juliette?s new guitarist, the Red Lips/White Lies tour seems destined to become the hot, melodramatic mess we?ve long hoped it would be. But what were your impressions of tonight?s episode?

Thomas: I feel a bit churlish saying this, since You Win Again had very few of the plot threads that bore me (For instance, Rayna's daddy?OK, pretty much everything except Rayna, Juliette, and Deacon), but my enjoyment was a little marred by the episode?s ridiculous on-the-noseness. I mean, it's enough to show Liam and Callista doing their best impression of the snake in the Garden of Eden, tempting Rayna to try something new. They don't also need to turn Liam into a patchy-facial-hair-twirling bad guy who states flat out that Edgehill is like her marriage, "stale, old, and boring." Give us a little credit, bad boy.

Waldman: I knew Liam was naughty, but I was surprised and saddened to see him become a straight-up adversary. He seemed more interesting as a bargaining chip, or a prize for Juliette and Rayna to wrangle over. (Some critics even thought he?d make a good love interest for Juliette!) And I agree that the parallel between Rayna?s marriage and her career at Edgehill felt too easy, as did Liam?s equation of ?stable? with ?stale.? Which one is Teddy, do you think? Marshall Evans?

Thomas: Those two, Marshall and Teddy, are only bad for Rayna in that they limit her future options. She'll be just fine if she sticks with them both. It's unpredictable, melancholy dudes like Deacon and Liam that have the potential to burn down her beautiful house. I'm sorry that Liam messed up Rayna's potential alliance with Callista. Rayna spends so much time dealing with people who are at very different places in their lives (Juliette looking at Rayna's longevity with contempt, Deacon looking at her happy home life with envy, and Teddy being such a drain on her) that I liked the idea of those bread-winning moms each supplying the thing the other needed.?

Waldman: I wonder whether this TV Club hasn?t overlooked friendship as a major theme on Nashville. More than a love interest, so many characters seem to need at least one true, loyal friend who has their best interests at heart. Even the main romances on the show are grounded in a deep sense of companionship?with desire functioning, sometimes, as a damaging complication.

Thomas: Well, Scarlett and Gunnar tested out another kind of alliance this week, when they joined up with TJ and the rest of Avery's old band. They formed with the explicit intention of winning one for the good guys. They're like the Justice League with guitars.

Waldman: Yes! It?s the Super Friends vs. Avery, the narcissistic loner.

Thomas: They love to play with duality in this show--even though we know that Rayna and Juliette are actually sisters under the skin, for the moment we're supposed to see them as polar opposites. So maybe Avery's the other side of friendship?

Waldman: Back that truck up. What makes Rayna and Juliette so similar, besides profession?

Thomas: Rayna and Juliette both have a difficult, damaged relationship with a parent. They're both shouldering more responsibilities than is fair. They're both single-minded, hard-working, charismatic, and of course talented. At first I thought the path the series was taking was leading Juliette to accept Rayna as a mother figure. Now I think the path is toward recognizing each other's shared qualities.

Waldman: Another thing Rayna and Juliette have in common is a fierce sense of independence: Neither wants to be beholden to anybody! That said, Juliette's animosity toward Rayna has always puzzled me. For someone as savvy as she is, wouldn't it make more sense to play nice with a reigning country music queen? I wonder if her mommy issues have affected the way she relates to musical "mother" figures?the women who paved the way for her career.

Thomas: It would be one thing if we made life choices based on cold calculation, but this is the emotional world of country music. Juliette definitely has some major mama issues, yet she's also blinded by pride. She clawed her way up to the top without anyone else's help; she doesn't need to play nice to the queen of Belle Meade.

Speaking of her real mom, I found the rapprochement between Juliette and Joleen tonight surprisingly moving. As a good Brit?a working-class Brit, to boot?I was so glad to see class make an appearance. I?ve been thinking for a long time that Juliette?s issues with her mom aren?t only about the pain her mom?s addiction has caused, but also that Juliette is embarrassed by her mom?s inability to fit in with the middle and upper-class folks that Juliette mingles with these days.

Waldman: It will be interesting to see if improvements in the Juliette-Joleen relationship translate into some sort of detente for Juliette and Rayna. But yeah, I agree with you about the class dimension. Perhaps that?s why Deacon was so wise to link himself to Joleen when he spoke to Juliette. He forced her to confront that the musical hero she so wanted in her band had a lot in common with her mortifying mom.

Thomas:?Yes! Juliette knows how to read Deacon, whereas she's too close to see her mom clearly, but he made that connection. And it was almost as though Joleen allowed Juliette to see all the hurdles she'd had to leap over to get to where she is today. That was really lovely.

Waldman: Right, and in Juliette?s eyes, Rayna never had to lift a finger for her stardom. She?s just hanging around gobbling up all this unearned attention. (I love jealous Hayden Panettiere!)

Thomas: Juliette thinks it's time for Rayna to retire her tour bus and leave the business to the next generation. Sometimes I think Rayna would like that, too, but her family needs the money that only her music career can generate. And with Teddy's in public office, that need isn't going away any time soon.

Waldman: True. Songwriting is still very much a job for all of them (with the possible exception of Gunnar and Scarlett, for whom it's basically foreplay. I kid, sort of.) Nashville is so interesting in that it doesn't sentimentalize music?it's a show about the music?business?but the songwriting and the performances are also so genuine, often the most emotionally affecting parts of the show.

Thomas:?I agree. We often see people sitting down and writing songs. They don't make it seem easy peasy lemon squeezey, but when they really apply themselves, they can all do it. That's an amazing achievement, and ultimately it's because they've all got something to say. I can't think of a single time when any of the songwriting shown on Nashville has seemed cynical.

Waldman: Before we part, what do you make of Gunnar?s fugitive brother? Is this plotline plausible? Irritating?

Thomas: JASON! That boy's a heartbreaker. Too bad it's his kid brother's heart he's breaking.

Waldman: I hope he steals Avery?s fancy new car.

Thomas: I do have one last thought, before I leave you in Tennessee and head back to Yorkshire. Every time Nashville cut to a commercial break, I was aware that everyone in the promos for other NBC shows seemed so much happier than the folks on Nashville. There doesn't seem to be much joy on this show. And when there is, it's fleeting: Rayna and Liam's special connection turned into betrayal and breakup in the blink of an eye. Will we ever see adoring looks that last longer than the time it takes to sing a love song?

Later This Week: Further analysis of Episode 11.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=9092308e1735e74a54e75033b66b73f5

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AP Interview: UN wants better family planning

DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) ? The U.N.'s top population official wants governments to do more to ensure that women have access to family planning.

The U.N. says the world will add a billion people to its current population of some 7 billion within a decade, further straining the planet's resources.

Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund, says more than 220 million women in the developing world want family planning but aren't getting it.

Speaking to The Associated Press at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he said many women want to have fewer children and that "30 percent of those who die giving birth we can prevent with family planning."

He also called for providing girls with "comprehensive sexuality education."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/bbd825583c8542898e6fa7d440b9febc/Article_2013-01-24-Davos%20Forum-Population/id-0becb289d18b403d9e272f97a1168bc7

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Crews again can't reach downed plane in Antarctica

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) ? For a second day, searchers have been unable to reach a plane believed to have crashed in an Antarctic mountain range while carrying three Canadians.

Hurricane-force winds and snow Friday prevented teams from getting to the plane. Its emergency locator started transmitting late Wednesday in mountains about 680 kilometers (420 miles) north of the South Pole.

Rescuers don't know if the men are alive. Their plane has survival gear including tents and food.

The locator stopped transmitting Thursday night and crews have been unable to establish radio contact. Rescuers say they will likely need to wait until Saturday for a break in the weather.

One man on the plane has been identified as Bob Heath from the Northwest Territories, an experienced pilot in both the Antarctic and Arctic. Rescuers say the other two men were also part of the flight crew and that no passengers were aboard.

The plane, a propeller-driven de Havilland Twin Otter, was flying from a U.S. station near the South Pole to an Italian research base in Terra Nova Bay. Rescuers believe it crashed in the Queen Alexandra mountain range at an elevation of about 3,900 meters (13,000 feet).

Winds of up to 90 knots (104 miles per hour) have continued in the area.

Steve Rendle, a spokesman for New Zealand's Rescue Coordination Centre, said rescue planes circled the area on Thursday and Friday but have been unable to spot the downed plane due to poor visibility. He said the battery on the locator beacon may have run out but that rescuers have a good fix on its location.

He said winds of up to 90 knots (104 miles per hour) continued Friday in the area.

He said that when the weather clears, crews hope to establish a forward base at the Beardmore Glacier about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the assumed crash site. He said there's a rudimentary runway and a fuel depot at the glacier.

But for now, two helicopters and a small plane remain at McMurdo Station, the main U.S. base about four hours' flight away. Rendle said the weather is forecast to improve Saturday and crews are hopeful they can reach the downed plane then. He said the elevation provides extra challenges for helicopter crews.

Heath's wife, Lucy Heath, told the Calgary Sun newspaper Thursday that she'd been called by airline officials and told "Bob's plane was down, and they were trying to reach it." She said she was just waiting for more news: "I'm so worried."

On the online networking site LinkedIn, Heath writes that he typically spends this time of year coaching and mentoring other pilots to upgrade their skills in polar regions.

The missing plane is owned and operated by Kenn Borek Air Ltd., a Canadian firm based in Calgary that charters aircraft to the U.S. Antarctic program. In a release, the National Science Foundation said the plane was flying in support of the Italian Antarctic program.

Authorities from New Zealand, Canada, the U.S. and Italy are working on the rescue operation.

Antarctica has no permanent residents, but several thousand people live there in the Southern Hemisphere summer as a number of countries send scientists and other staff to research stations. The U.S. runs the largest program, with about 850 staff at its McMurdo Station and another 200 at its Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, where the Canadians' flight originated.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/crews-again-cant-reach-downed-plane-antarctica-013607635.html

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How Much Beef Is In Your Burger?

dgharmon writes in with an interesting article about how much, or how little beef is in a UK burger. "The presence of horsemeat in value beefburgers has caused a furore. But what is usually in the patties? It has been a sobering week for fans of the beefburger. Tesco have used full-page adverts in national newspapers to apologize for selling burgers in the UK that were found to contain 29% horsemeat. Traces of horse DNA were also detected by the Food Standards Agency of Ireland in products sold by Iceland, Lidl, Aldi and Dunnes. But a beefburger rarely contains 100% beef."

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/vNAyeyWE6_I/story01.htm

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Explorer's rare Scotch returned to Antarctic stash

SCOTTBASE, Antarctica (AP) ? Talk about whisky on ice: Three bottles of rare, 19th century Scotch found beneath the floor boards of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackelton's abandoned expedition base were returned to the polar continent Saturday after a distiller flew them to Scotland to recreate the long-lost recipe.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key personally returned the Scotch to Antarctic Heritage Trust officials at a ceremony at New Zealand's Antarctic base on Ross Island. The bottles will be transferred by March from Ross Island to the desolate hut at Cape Royds, where they had been forgotten for 102 years.

Key acknowledged that some would question why the bottles were being replaced beneath the restored hut as part of a program to protect the legacy of the so-called heroic era of Antarctic exploration from 1898 to 1915.

"I think we're all tempted to crack it open and have a little drink ourselves now," Key said.

The bottles of Mackinlay's whisky, bottled in 1898 after the blend was aged 15 years, were among three crates of Scotch and two of brandy buried beneath a basic hut Shackleton had used during his dramatic 1907 Nimrod excursion to the Antarctic. The expedition failed to reach the South Pole but set a record at the time for reaching the farthest southern latitude. Shackelton was knighted after his return to Great Britain.

Shackelton's stash was discovered frozen in ice by conservationists in 2010. The crates were frozen solid after more than a century beneath the Antarctic surface.

But the precious bottles were found intact, and researchers could hear the whisky sloshing around inside. Antarctica's minus 22 Fahrenheit (-30 Celsius) temperature was not enough to freeze the liquor.

Distiller Whyte & Mackay, which now owns the Mackinlay brand, chartered a private jet to take the bottles from the Antarctic operations headquarters in the New Zealand city of Christchurch to Scotland for analysis in 2011.

The recipe for the whisky had been lost. But Whyte & Mackay recreated a limited edition of 50,000 bottles from a sample drawn with a syringe through a cork of one of the bottles. The conservation work of the Antarctic Heritage Trust has received 5 British pounds for every bottle sold.

The original bottles had flown in two combination-locked containers with Key to Antarctica in a U.S. Air Force transport plane from Christchurch on Friday.

Antarctic Heritage Trust manager Lizzie Meek, who was part of the team that found the whisky, recalled its pleasant aroma.

"When you're used to working around things in that hut that perhaps are quite decayed and some of them don't have very nice smells, it's very nice to work with artifacts that have such a lovely aroma," Meek told the ceremony by radio from explorer Robert Scott's Antarctic hut which she is restoring.

"And definitely the aroma of whisky was around very strongly."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-01-19-New%20Zealand-Antarctica-Shackelton's%20Whisky/id-f3e04501df15441a948f714ce6d4b6b0

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Celebrating Motherhood: All of us...

"as you walk and eat and travel, be where you are. otherwise you will miss most of your life."?

I watch out my window, them pushing snow. How her little hands slid into pink gloves. My how they have grown. I am enjoying this season of life with

loose teeth

boys growing tall

the way she can read now

the way I had a little person laying next to me last?night just because.?

Reaching over in the middle of the night?and feeling the breathing.?The life next to me.

The cup of coffee that was brought to my bed side.

The way he calls me his "beautiful bride" even

?though?we've been married for almost 21 years.

?I, being self conscious, push my hair back realizing what I must

look like. He says I'm beautiful. I look down.

Could he still think that?

Really? I sip my coffee and we talk. Me bundled in covers

and slowly they come and climb under the covers with me.

Until it's all of us.

The night before me drifting off to sleep with a bed full?and Andy Griffith.

All of us.?

This stage of gangly legs and toothless grins.

The nights they would rather be with us instead of without us.

I love?the way winter slows us down.

I try and stay focused on my chores but my eyes?keep looking heavenward.... wanting to see the sun.

It feels like forever since her warmth clothed me.

??

Be content I keep telling myself?and myself responds only half the time.

I want what I don't have.

The warmth of a day.

More time with my husband who seems

to be in a busy season.

Everyone well at the same time.

More time to work out.

More time to sit here and write out?my every day so when I look back

I'll remember, they'll remember.

More More More

Not all bad things but things I crowd my mind and?heart with.?

Be content in whatever season you're in

I must?continue to practice this.

I have to go out in the cold....walking through the snow to check on the numerous animals on the farm. The crunching under foot and the flakes in my hair.

The kitten who blends into the beautiful back drop of the painting of my life.

The cow named Rosebud who moos at me as I go to check on her?one more time.?

My house warm.

My stove holding a huge pot of soup.

My fireplaces going.

Hot chocolate for everyone,?warm blankets and long books.

Am I sure I'm living in this moment instead of

getting through it?

Can I smell and see and taste that it is good?

My life is good.

Trees heavy with the beauty of the color white

My heart free to love deeply these portraits of God's.

His paint brush so beautiful on the farm and on

my life and on me.

Source: http://www.celebratingmotherhoodeveryday.com/2013/01/all-of-us.html

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Odd meteorite could be time capsule of a wetter Mars

Scientists have analyzed a meteorite found on Earth and suggest that it could come from Mars's crust at a time when the planet was still wet and volcanically active.

By Pete Spotts,?Staff writer / January 3, 2013

This image shows a rock from Mars that landed in the Sahara. An examination of the Martian meteorite known as NWA 7034 determined it is 2.1 billion years old and is water-rich.

Carl Agee/University of New Mexico/AP

Enlarge

An unusual meteorite plucked from the Moroccan desert holds the potential to open a window on a critical period in the history of Mars, when the planet was undergoing a dramatic change from warm and wet ? conditions potentially hospitable to life ? to cold, dry, and desolate.

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Unlike any Martian meteorite scientists have studied so far, the new object, tagged as NWA 7034, has a composition similar to the planet's crust. Indeed, the sample is similar to rock and soil samples seen by rovers Spirit and Curiosity ? the first time scientists have been able to link a meteorite to rocks analyzed on the surface of the red planet, according to a team from the US and China formally reporting its results in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

It is the 2 billion-year-old meteorite's volcanic origin and its apparent interactions with water and the atmosphere at or near the Martian surface that may have turned it into such an intriguing a time capsule.

"Having this sample from 2 billion years ago may give us a little bit of a glimpse of what the surface conditions were like" during a poorly understood period in Mars's history, says Carl Agee, the team's leader and director of the Institute for Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

The rock was formed during the early years of Mars's Amazonian epoch. The epoch is thought to have started between 3.5 and 1.8 billion years ago and was marked, among other things, by the formation of the solar system's largest volcano, Olympus Mons, as well as by volcanic activity elsewhere on the planet.

The 11-ounce meteorite's mix of minerals and its rubble-like composition speak to a violent beginning ? rising toward the surface in an explosive, Mt. St. Helens-style volcanic eruption, Dr. Agee says.

Surprisingly, the meteorite boasts some 10 times the water of other, younger Martian meteorites, although the amount is still tiny. The team initially estimated that the meteorite held up to 3,000 parts per million in water, half of which the rock accumulated after landing on Earth. Further measurements, however, showed that the rock held up to twice the water the team initially calculated. And virtually all of it was of extraterrestrial origin, Agee says.

Moreover, the measurements suggested that the meteorite's water came from at least two sources ? magma and water at or near the planet's surface. This water, perhaps melted permafrost or a surface pool, reacted with the rock while it was still too hot to handle.

NWA 7034 also hosts complex organic molecules, which can have biological as well as nonbiological sources.
?
?Other Martian meteorites have contained polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which had nonbiological origins. The team is now examining NWA 7034's nonbiological organic molecules to see if they are similar to those found in earlier Martian meteorite samples, writes Andrew Steele, an astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, in an e-mail exchange. [Editor's note: This paragraph, as well as the one preceding it, have been revised to better reflect the analysis that Dr. Steele is conducting.]

Ongoing research aims to use the rock's interaction with cosmic rays to determine how long it took to reach Earth from Mars. Nor have they yet pinned down the length of time it sat in the desert before a meteorite hunter picked it up in 2011. Based on the amount of weathering the specimen displayed, Agee estimates that NWA 7034 might have landed several hundred years ago.

Colleagues are also cataloging the relative abundance of gases trapped in tiny pockets to tease out clues as to the makeup of the planet's atmosphere at the time the rock reached the surface.

?The contents of this meteorite may challenge many long held notions about Martian geology,? said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA?s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, in a statement. ?These findings also present an important reference frame for the Curiosity rover as it searches for reduced organics in the minerals exposed in the bedrock of Gale Crater.?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/UrIKOW5oQnI/Odd-meteorite-could-be-time-capsule-of-a-wetter-Mars

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