Donald Trump says he feels 'very badly' for Michael Flynn – video

The US president addresses the media about his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who last week pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Trump had already fired Flynn for lying to the vice-president, Mike Pence, about his contacts with Russia in February. Trump said it was 'very unfair' how Flynn was being treated compared with Hillary Clinton, who Trump claimed had lied to the FBI many times without sanction

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Publicity Shy Tycoon Forging Modern Peru Amid Expanding Economy

By Edward Robinson - Aug 3, 2011 5:00 PM GMT-0500
Bloomberg Markets Magazine

As confetti and balloons fall from the ceiling, scores of bankers dressed as characters from TV shows and movies hit the dance floor in a circus-sized party tent in Lima, Peru. Jedi knights from Star Wars wave glowing green light sabers while the Flintstones groove to blasting techno-pop. Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor, one of Latin America’s least known billionaires, joins the throng, wearing a white wig, a silly hat and a big smile.
Rodriguez-Pastor, who normally shuns publicity, is hosting the costume party on this June evening for 4,000 employees of IFH Peru Ltd., the Lima-based financial services and retail conglomerate he has built and run since 1995. His top managers, made up as Batman, Herman Munster and Happy Days’ Fonzie, perform musical skits that showcase corporate values such as innovation and teamwork, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its September issue.
“This is the best team-building exercise I know,” says Rodriguez-Pastor, 52, as members of his bank’s board of directors, dressed in Star Trek uniforms, dance behind him. “We can all be ridiculous together.”
The tycoon, little known outside Peru, belongs to a new breed of Latin empire builders who are capitalizing on a decade- long boom in the region. Rodriguez-Pastor has cobbled together a family of companies that offers everything from credit cards to groceries to mutual funds, making him worth about $3 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg on his various holdings.
Wave of Wealth
“Our sweet spot is the emerging middle class,” Rodriguez- Pastor says. “Our big bet is that it’s going to take off.” He granted Bloomberg Markets his first extensive interview to highlight how his company’s growth reflects the rising fortunes of Peru, one of South America’s most impoverished nations.
Rodriguez-Pastor’s story shows how the industrialization of Asia and the commodities boom in Latin America have set off a wave of wealth creation reaching from Beijing and New Delhi to Sao Paulo and Lima.
After enduring debt meltdowns and hyperinflation in the 1980s and 1990s, governments in Brazil, Colombia, Peru and other Latin American nations have embraced free trade and fiscal discipline. Even left-leaning leaders such as Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010, have produced budget surpluses and repaid International Monetary Fund loans early.
Latin nations cleaned up their act just as China’s explosive growth drove demand for the natural resources found in abundance in the region. While corruption and income inequality still plague Latin America, not even the global financial crash in 2008 could derail its robust economies. The region’s GDP grew 6 percent in 2010, and the IMF forecasts it will expand another 4.7 percent this year, compared with an average of 2.3 percent for the Group of Seven nations.
A Different Reality
No major Latin American country has grown more than Peru since 2001, according to the IMF. Its mineral-rich, $168 billion economy jumped 73 percent from 2001 to 2010. Peru, which defaulted on its sovereign debt in the mid-1980s and suffered years of runaway inflation and the terrorism of the Shining Path insurgency, now boasts a solid government-debt-to-GDP ratio of 23 percent compared with 93 percent for the U.S.
The World Bank reports that Peru has lifted more than 65 percent of its 29 million people out of poverty from less than 50 percent in 2000. And Lima, a sprawling city of 9 million that has long been emblematic of Third World misery, is today bristling with construction cranes and new shopping centers. The Plaza San Martin, in its historic center, which used to be overrun by child thieves known as piranhas, is now ringed with bustling sidewalk cafes.
State of Crisis
“Our generation grew up in a constant state of crisis, and for the first time, we see a different reality,” says Luis Enrique Pardo-Figueroa, 48, a Lima-based lawyer who represents industrial companies. “We feel like Peru is a viable country.”
Rodriguez-Pastor has focused his conglomerate of supermarkets, department stores, fast-food restaurants, hotels and movie theaters directly on Peru’s rising tide of consumers. The group, which is on course to produce $3 billion in revenue this year, has even started developing for-profit private elementary schools that immerse students as young as 3 years old in English. Rodriguez-Pastor and his family control these assets through IFH Peru, a private holding company.
Intergroup Financial Services Corp. (IFS), his flagship, is a consumer-banking and insurance group that trades on the Lima Stock Exchange. Known as Interbank in Peru, the company is the country’s No. 4 financial services firm, with more than $8 billion in assets.
106 Percent Return
The bank’s return on equity, which shows how well it manages its capital, was 32 percent in the first quarter compared with an average ROE of 7.7 percent for U.S. retail banks. As of Aug. 3, Intergroup’s shares had returned 120 percent since the company’s initial public offering on June 20, 2007.
The stock’s performance has made Rodriguez-Pastor a billionaire: IFH Peru owns a 71 percent stake in Intergroup Financial. In March, he also raised a $350 million private- equity fund with outside investors under the name Nexus Group, which buys stakes in many of IFH Peru’s companies.
“Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor understood that our economic growth would require modernized offerings,” former Peruvian President Alan Garcia, who was set to step down on July 28 after completing his second non-consecutive term in office, said in an interview at the presidential palace in Lima. “He built shopping centers in parts of the country where none had existed before. I believe Interbank is, perhaps, the most modern company in Peru.”
Growth in Jeopardy
This new Peru was thrown into doubt on June 5 when Ollanta Humala, a former army lieutenant colonel, was elected president after promising more programs to help the poor. Humala has long- standing ties to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and in the past, he embraced the socialist firebrand’s policies of nationalization. Humala supports steep tax hikes on mining operators to fund anti-poverty initiatives and the introduction of a national pension system financed solely from tax revenue. He has pledged not to nationalize Peru’s natural gas reserves and to respect private enterprise. The Lima Stock Exchange has increased less than 1 percent from the election through Aug. 3, and Intergroup slid 10 percent.
“People feel our growth could be in jeopardy,” says Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Peru’s finance minister, who was prime minister from 2001 to 2006 and a presidential candidate this year for a center-right coalition party.
Fled by Foot
Rodriguez-Pastor says he’s confident that Peruvian consumers will keep spending. IFH Peru’s real-estate development arm, headed by Carlos Casa-bonne, is building Interbank villages in Peru’s provinces that bring together the company’s numerous businesses in one location to maximize sales.
In Chimbote, an industrial city on the north coast, the company is financing the construction of 5,000 houses around a town center that features a new courthouse. Interbank will supply home-owners with their mortgages, and the $170 million development will be anchored by the company’s Plaza Vea supermarket, its InkaFarma pharmacy and its movie theater, private school and burger joint.
“We are in full development mode, and unless there are some crazy things that happen in the next five years, I see no need to slow down,” Rodriguez-Pastor says. “We only have Plan A; there is no Plan B.”
Savored the Action
Rodriguez-Pastor was 9 years old when General Juan Velasco Alvarado seized power in a nonviolent coup in 1968. Rodriguez- Pastor’s father, Carlos, chief executive officer of Peru’s central bank, resisted Velasco’s efforts to nationalize industries. When Velasco ordered his arrest in March 1969, Carlos Sr. fled by foot across the Ecuadorian border and eventually settled with his wife and six children in Lafayette, California, a suburb east of San Francisco.
Carlos Sr. went to work as an international banker at Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) Rodriguez-Pastor enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979 and worked as a teller in a Wells Fargo branch for four years to pay for school. He forced himself to overcome his shyness by taking a job conducting marketing surveys in a suburban shopping mall.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in social studies, Rodriguez-Pastor went on to receive an MBA at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1988. He then moved to New York and became co-head of the emerging-markets sales and trading desk at Citigroup Inc.
He savored the action on Wall Street, and in 1993, he jumped at the chance to set up a New York-based hedge fund at Banco Santander SA (SAN) with fellow Citi alumni Hari Hariharan and Manuel Balbontin. Called New World Investments, the firm focused on emerging markets.
Returns to Peru
By 1994, Carlos Sr. had returned to Peru and led a group of investors that acquired a distressed 98-year-old firm called Banco Internacional del Peru from the government for $51 million. The next year, he asked his son to come and help him run it.
Rodriguez-Pastor, then 36, was torn. He was determined to make his own way without his father’s help, and he loved his hedge-fund career. He also had a long-standing agreement to work with his dad once they each managed about the same amount of money. Rodriguez-Pastor was overseeing $1 billion at New World compared with the $600 million that Carlos Sr. managed in Lima. He agreed to return to Peru for a spell.
“I wanted my independence, but my heart was always in Latin America,” he says, sitting at a table heaped with platters of grilled octopus and other Peruvian delicacies at Central, a Lima eatery. “So I said, ‘Let’s see how this goes.’”
Assumes Full Control
Four months after father and son joined forces, Carlos Sr., then 60, suffered a fatal heart attack on a treadmill during a business trip to Detroit. Rodriguez-Pastor, who had invested in the bank, now assumed control of the company and considered selling it. Peru, then in the throes of President Alberto Fujimori’s autocratic rule, was roiled by corruption scandals and the aftershocks of the war on Marxist insurgencies.
Yet the government had curbed inflation largely through introduction of a new currency, the nuevo sol, and gross domestic product had rallied almost 13 percent in 1994. Rodriguez-Pastor bet that Peru was stabilizing and opted to stay at what is now Interbank. There was only one problem: He didn’t know how to run a retail bank.
So Rodriguez-Pastor called Thomas Brown, an analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Inc. in New York who took clients on tours of U.S. banks. Rodriguez-Pastor showed up for Brown’s 1996 trip with five deputies in tow, and they visited Commerce Bank and Wells Fargo. They quizzed executives on everything from customer service to credit card management, to locating ATMs.
Balloon-Filled Playrooms
“What he really wanted to know was: How do you get engaged front-line employees? How do you get them motivated?” says Brown, who now runs a New York-based hedge fund called Second Curve Capital LLC.
Rodriguez-Pastor figured that the only way to break into a market dominated by Banco de Credito del Peru was salesmanship. Emulating marketing maestros such as former Southwest Airlines Co. CEO Herb Kelleher, he cultivated a loose corporate culture that turned branches into balloon-filled playrooms for kids and encouraged employees to sell products with humor.
Rodriguez-Pastor, who shuttles between Lima and an apartment in Manhattan, has surrounded himself with Ivy League- trained Peruvian executives willing to perform in company talent shows. He introduced his management philosophy by riding a Harley-Davidson on stage dressed as Elvis Presley at the company party in 1996.
Sense of Urgency
He’s also an exacting, detail-obsessed boss who’s fond of posing as a customer in his supermarkets to see how well clerks know their shelves. And he imparts his sense of urgency on his managers, says Luis Felipe Castellanos, the retail bank’s CEO and a former investment banker at Salomon Smith Barney in New York.
“I can come out dressed as a clown one day, but we have to hit our goals every month,” says Castellanos, 40, a Dartmouth grad.
Rodriguez-Pastor’s push into retailing came about almost by accident. In 1996, he negotiated a deal to place Interbank mini branches in stores operated by Grupo de Supermercados Wong, the No. 1 grocery chain in Peru. He dressed up as a giant carrot and handed out credit card promotions at the markets. By 2003, Interbank was operating more than 20 percent of its outlets inside Wong supermarkets. Negotiations to renew the deal stalled.
A Serious Threat
“That posed a serious threat,” says Juan Carlos Vallejo, head of Interseguro, Interbank’s insurance unit. “So Carlos decided to go out and buy our own supermarkets.”
In 2003, Interbank acquired a troubled chain of 30 Peruvian supermarkets owned by Dutch retailer Royal Ahold NV for only $70 million and transferred its mini branches from Wong stores. Eight years later, Interbank’s Supermercados Peruanos unit, with 68 stores and plans for nine more, expects to record $1 billion in revenue in 2011 compared with $787 million for the bank.
Rodriguez-Pastor says he wants to take his retail group public in the next 12 to 24 months. And his real-estate unit, in partnership with a Peruvian builder, plans to break ground next year on IFH Peru’s most ambitious venture to date: a $500 million project designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel that will place three office towers, a luxury hotel, 300 residences and a shopping mall featuring IFH Peru stores on 16 acres of the Lima waterfront.
Sheepish Billionaire
Rodriguez-Pastor’s big plans might backfire if Chinese demand for metals, Peru’s No. 1 export, ebbs. And should Humala, who was to take office on July 28, pursue radical tax and spending policies, investors may export their capital to more- favorable countries.
There’s no sign of worry inside the mammoth tent at IFH Peru’s annual party. Several young women dressed as Morticia Addams ask Rodriguez-Pastor, beer in hand, to pose with them for a smartphone photo. The billionaire looks sheepish afterward.
“I’m a very public figure inside my company but not on the outside,” he says. As IFH Peru grows more influential, and Rodriguez-Pastor’s wealth mounts, his days of anonymity are coming to an end.

The Bilingual Advantage

www.nytimes.com
May 30, 2011
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
A cognitive neuroscientist, Ellen Bialystok has spent almost 40 years learning about how bilingualism sharpens the mind. Her good news: Among other benefits, the regular use of two languages appears to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms. Dr. Bialystok, 62, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, was awarded a $100,000 Killam Prize last year for her contributions to social science. We spoke for two hours in a Washington hotel room in February and again, more recently, by telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows.

Q. How did you begin studying bilingualism?

A. You know, I didn’t start trying to find out whether bilingualism was bad or good. I did my doctorate in psychology: on how children acquire language. When I finished graduate school, in 1976, there was a job shortage in Canada for Ph.D.’s. The only position I found was with a research project studying second language acquisition in school children. It wasn’t my area. But it was close enough.

As a psychologist, I brought neuroscience questions to the study, like “How does the acquisition of a second language change thought?” It was these types of questions that naturally led to the bilingualism research. The way research works is, it takes you down a road. You then follow that road.

Q. So what exactly did you find on this unexpected road?

A. As we did our research, you could see there was a big difference in the way monolingual and bilingual children processed language. We found that if you gave 5- and 6-year-olds language problems to solve, monolingual and bilingual children knew, pretty much, the same amount of language.

But on one question, there was a difference. We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.

Q. How does this work — do you understand it?

A. Yes. There’s a system in your brain, the executive control system. It’s a general manager. Its job is to keep you focused on what is relevant, while ignoring distractions. It’s what makes it possible for you to hold two different things in your mind at one time and switch between them.

If you have two languages and you use them regularly, the way the brain’s networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what’s relevant in the moment. Therefore the bilinguals use that system more, and it’s that regular use that makes that system more efficient.

Q. One of your most startling recent findings is that bilingualism helps forestall the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. How did you come to learn this?

A. We did two kinds of studies. In the first, published in 2004, we found that normally aging bilinguals had better cognitive functioning than normally aging monolinguals. Bilingual older adults performed better than monolingual older adults on executive control tasks. That was very impressive because it didn’t have to be that way. It could have turned out that everybody just lost function equally as they got older.

That evidence made us look at people who didn’t have normal cognitive function. In our next studies , we looked at the medical records of 400 Alzheimer’s patients. On average, the bilinguals showed Alzheimer’s symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language. This didn’t mean that the bilinguals didn’t have Alzheimer’s. It meant that as the disease took root in their brains, they were able to continue functioning at a higher level. They could cope with the disease for longer.

Q. So high school French is useful for something other than ordering a special meal in a restaurant?

A. Sorry, no. You have to use both languages all the time. You won’t get the bilingual benefit from occasional use.

Q. One would think bilingualism might help with multitasking — does it?

A. Yes, multitasking is one of the things the executive control system handles. We wondered, “Are bilinguals better at multitasking?” So we put monolinguals and bilinguals into a driving simulator. Through headphones, we gave them extra tasks to do — as if they were driving and talking on cellphones. We then measured how much worse their driving got. Now, everybody’s driving got worse. But the bilinguals, their driving didn’t drop as much. Because adding on another task while trying to concentrate on a driving problem, that’s what bilingualism gives you — though I wouldn’t advise doing this.

Q. Has the development of new neuroimaging technologies changed your work?

A. Tremendously. It used to be that we could only see what parts of the brain lit up when our subjects performed different tasks. Now, with the new technologies, we can see how all the brain structures work in accord with each other.

In terms of monolinguals and bilinguals, the big thing that we have found is that the connections are different. So we have monolinguals solving a problem, and they use X systems, but when bilinguals solve the same problem, they use others. One of the things we’ve seen is that on certain kinds of even nonverbal tests, bilingual people are faster. Why? Well, when we look in their brains through neuroimaging, it appears like they’re using a different kind of a network that might include language centers to solve a completely nonverbal problem. Their whole brain appears to rewire because of bilingualism.

Q. Bilingualism used to be considered a negative thing — at least in the United States. Is it still?

A. Until about the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that bilingualism was a disadvantage. Some of this was xenophobia. Thanks to science, we now know that the opposite is true.

Q. Many immigrants choose not to teach their children their native language. Is this a good thing?

A. I’m asked about this all the time. People e-mail me and say, “I’m getting married to someone from another culture, what should we do with the children?” I always say, “You’re sitting on a potential gift.”

There are two major reasons people should pass their heritage language onto children. First, it connects children to their ancestors. The second is my research: Bilingualism is good for you. It makes brains stronger. It is brain exercise.

Q. Are you bilingual?

A. Well, I have fully bilingual grandchildren because my daughter married a Frenchman. When my daughter announced her engagement to her French boyfriend, we were a little surprised. It’s always astonishing when your child announces she’s getting married. She said, “But Mom, it’ll be fine, our children will be bilingual!”

"Diary of Facebook" Preview

Jennifer Aniston - Goes Viral - Smartwater

Sex Symbol Jennifer Aniston + Smartwater = Viral YouTube Marketing

Full Transcript

("Like A G6" is a song from Far East Movement's 2010 album Free Wired)

Like a G6, Like A G6
Now – Now – Now – Now – I’m feelin so fly like a G6

Jennifer Aniston (born February 11, 1969): Cut Cut Cut! Hi

Keenan Cahill: Hi

JA: How you doing?

KC: I’m good

JA: What are you doing?

KC: I’m lip singing!

JA: Ya, I know that, and that’s really really adorable! But ah, do you – do you know any songs about water?

KC: No

JA: Hi, I’m Jen Aniston and I’m here to talk to you about SmartWater. But in this day of age apparently I can’t just do that, can I? I can’t just tell you that SmartWater is the smartest, best tasting water that’s out there. I have to make a video apparently that turns into a virus!

Internet Boys: Viral

JA: So,

Internet Boys: We need the video to go viral

JA: Right, sorry viral! Thank you. This is why I have these three lovely internet boys here to help me, so, apparently well, animals are huge on line, do we have animals.

(Jennifer Aniston - Holds Pupppy)
JA: Oh your, ah, (kisses the puppy) so sweet!

(Jennifer Aniston - Parrott on arm)
JA: Can you say: “I love SmartWater”

(Jennifer Aniston - Pupppies jump in her crossed legs)
No, no, no, out of there

(Jennifer Aniston - Parrott on arm)
“I love SmartWater”

Parrott: Rachel I love your hair

(Jennifer Aniston surrounded by puppies)

JA: That’s enough, I don’t want, lets try to think of something else.

(baby annimation dancing in sync)

JA: Okay, well that’s adorable, look at you guys! Look at them, this, wait! (babies dancing samba) What are you doing? No No No! No dirty dancing babies.

Internet Boys: It will get us more views

JA: It will also get us arrested

JA: Babies stop that, you really can’t do that, yet, where’s the mommy?

(Paul Vasquez - HungryBear9562)
Full on. Double rainbow all the way across the sky!

JA: What’s going on?

PV: Oh, my god

JA: Hi, honey, are you okay?

PV: Its so beautiful! (sobbing with amazement)

JA: Come on, let’s get you up! Here have some SmartWater,

PV: (sobbing with amazement)

JA: What did they do to you?

JA: Anything else? What’s left?

Brad Wollack: Oh, my god, Jen Aniston, I’ve been in love with you forever.

(Jennifer Aniston kicks Brad Wollack in the private area)

JA: Sorry, apparently, that’s worth about 100,000 hits!

BW: Not for me

JA: God, is it, is it hot in here? (swings hair and drinks water) (laughs) I’m fired! Well in closing I would like to say that SmartWater is the purest tasting water there is! What are we gonna call this video?

Internet Boys: Jen Anniston’s sex tape!

JA: I love it!

(Glaceau - SmartWater - smart because it's made that way)

From lybio.net

Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel Prize speech

Longing for the Lines That Had Us at Hello

http://www.nytimes.com/

By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES — Have we heard the last (truly memorable) word from Hollywood?

Probably not, but it’s been a while since the movies had everybody parroting a great line.

Like, say, “Go ahead, make my day.” That was from “Sudden Impact,” written by Joseph Stinson and others, more than 27 years ago.

Sticky movie lines were everywhere as recently as the 1990s. But they appear to be evaporating from a film world in which the memorable one-liner — a brilliant epigram, a quirky mantra, a moment in a bottle — is in danger of becoming a lost art.

Life was like a box of chocolates, per “Forrest Gump,” released in 1994 and written by Eric Roth, based on the novel by Winston Groom. “Show me the money!” howled mimics of “Jerry Maguire,” written by Cameron Crowe in 1996. Two years later, after watching “The Big Lebowski,” written by Ethan and Joel Coen, we told one another that “the Dude abides.”

But lately, “not so much” — to steal a few words from “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” Released in 2006, that film was written by Sacha Baron Cohen and others and is one of a very few in the last five years to have left some lines behind.

Maybe it’s that filmmaking is more visual, or that other cultural noise is drowning out the zingers.

“I’m at a loss, because the lines for a while were coming fast and furious,” said Laurence Mark, who had us at “hello” as a producer of “Jerry Maguire,” and is a producer of “How Do You Know,” which is written and directed by James L. Brooks and scheduled to open just before Christmas. (In 1987 Mr. Brooks mapped the media future in seven words from “Broadcast News”: “Let’s never forget, we’re the real story.”)

If film lines don’t stick the way they used to, Mr. Mark said, it is not for lack of wit and wisdom in Hollywood. “What I don’t believe is that the writers are less talented,” he insisted. “I don’t think that’s true, I just don’t.”

Speaking by phone recently, however, Mr. Mark was hard-pressed to come up with a line that stuck with him in the last few years. “I will try my darnedest to think of one,” he promised.

It may be that a Web-driven culture of irony latches onto the movie lines for something other than brilliance, or is downright allergic to the kind of polish that was once applied to the best bits of dialogue. Thus one of the most frequently repeated lines of the last year came from “Clash of the Titans,” which scored an unimpressive 28 percent positive rating among critics on the Rottentomatoes.com Web site after it was released by Warner Brothers in April.

“Release the Kraken!” thundered Liam Neeson as Zeus — spawning good-natured mockery on obscene T-shirts and in Kraken-captioned photos of angry kitty cats.

In truth, a good deal of thought went into the line. “When we came on, one of our conditions was that the line had to be in the movie,” said Matt Manfredi, who, with his writing partner, Phil Hay, joined in revising a script by Travis Beacham.

A predecessor film in 1981, written by Beverley Cross, had used the line, alongside another formulation that called for the Kraken to be “let loose,” Mr. Manfredi recalled. “In terms of poetry, ‘release’ worked for us,” he said.

“Machete don’t text,” from “Machete,” written by Robert Rodriguez and Álvaro Rodriguez, also traveled well on the Internet this year. But “can you imagine comparing that to ‘round up the usual suspects?’ ” said Mr. Mark, invoking a much-quoted line from “Casablanca,” the 1942 film that marked the golden era of movie quotations.

Written by Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein and Howard Koch, based on a play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, with uncredited work by Casey Robinson, “Casablanca” placed six lines in a list of 100 top movie quotations compiled by the American Film Institute in 2005, with help from a panel of 1,500 film artists, critics and historians.

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” was first on the list. Those words, of course, come from “Gone With the Wind,” whose screenplay, based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell, was written seven decades ago by Sidney Howard and a number of uncredited writers.

Only one post-’90s line made the institute’s ranking. That would be “My precious.” The line came in 2002 from “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair and Peter Jackson, based on a novel by J. R. R. Tolkien.

When the film institute updates its list in another five years, at least a handful of lines from the current era will perhaps have aged into greatness, alongside classics like “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown,” from “Chinatown,” with a screenplay by Robert Towne, in 1974, and “Hasta la vista, baby,” from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” written by James Cameron and William Wisher Jr., in 1991.

“I drink your milkshake” is a possibility, said Bob Gazzale, the institute’s chief executive. Those words, connoting triumph, came from “There Will Be Blood,” written in 2007 by Paul Thomas Anderson and based on a novel by Upton Sinclair.

Great movie lines might communicate insouciance (“La-di-da”), rage (“You talking to me?”) or something more cosmic (“May the Force be with you”). But they are almost never so much about Noël Coward-like turns of phrase as simply capturing “indelible character moments,” says Tom Rothman, a chairman of the Fox movie operation, who has also introduced regular showings of classic films on the Fox Movie Channel.

(In a window display at the headquarters of the Writers Guild of America West and the Writers Guild Foundation here, some of the more elaborate wordsmithing comes from Billy Wilder and his various associates. Even Mr. Coward would be hard-pressed to one-up a line from a script by Mr. Wilder and Charles Brackett for “The Major and the Minor.” The line is spoken by Robert Benchley, and Mr. Wilder attributed it to him, although Mr. Benchley, in turn, apparently attributed it to his friend Charles Butterworth: “Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?”)

And Mr. Rothman cautions against believing that the great lines are all behind.

“It just takes a little time to sort the wheat from the chaff,” he said in an e-mail last week. Mr. Rothman predicted, for instance, that “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” with a script by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, would have a keeper with “Stop telling lies about me, and I’ll stop telling the truth about you.” (Written by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone, the original “Wall Street,” from 1987, will ever be remembered for declaring that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”)

Meanwhile, a call to Eric Roth, the veteran screenwriter behind movies like “Munich” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” found him scratching to find an unstoppable one-liner in “The Social Network.”

That film was written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, and in a bit of dialogue that inspired Web parodies galore, it has the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg “talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online.”

Mr. Roth said that he deeply admired “The Social Network,” and that he thought that it could secure its place in history with a simple bon mot.

But “is there a great line” in it? he pondered. Its best lines, Mr. Roth said, were not as “sophomoric” as his own much-quoted speeches from “Forrest Gump.” Who could forget “Stupid is as stupid does”?

Neither are they quite as angry as Paddy Chayefsky’s mad-as-hell work in “Network,” from 1976, he noted.

But, Mr. Roth said, there is still time for viewers to find a word or two that will sum up “The Social Network” — much as “plastics” did for “The Graduate,” with a script by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, in 1967. Besides, memorable words have a way of popping up when they are least expected. “The minute you write this, you’ll be proved wrong,” Mr. Roth predicted.

As Quentin Tarantino wrote in “Inglourious Basterds,” just last year, “That’s a bingo.”

Nine months after the ski trip

www.livinginperu.com


Jack decided to go skiing with his buddy, Bob. So they loaded up Jack's minivan and headed north.

After driving for a few hours, they got caught in a terrible blizzard.

They pulled into a nearby farm and asked the attractive lady who answered the door if they could spend the night.

"I realize it's terrible weather out there and I have this huge house all to myself, but I'm recently widowed," she explained. "I'm afraid the neighbors will talk if I let you stay in my house."

"Don't worry," Jack said. "We'll be happy to sleep in the barn, and if the weather breaks, we'll be gone at first light." The lady agreed, and the two men found their way to the barn and settled in for the night.

Come morning, the weather had cleared, and they got on their way and enjoyed a great weekend of skiing.

But about nine months later, Jack got an unexpected letter from an attorney.

It took him a few minutes to figure it out, but he finally determined that it was from the attorney of that attractive widow he had met on the ski weekend. He dropped in on his friend Bob and asked, "Bob, do you remember that good-looking widow from the farm we stayed at on our ski holiday up north about nine months ago?"

"Yes, I do." said Bob

"Did you, er, happen to get up in the middle of the night, go up to the house and pay her a visit?"

"Well, um, yes!," Bob said, a little embarrassed about being found out, "I have to admit that I did."

"And did you happen to give her my name instead of telling her your name?"

Bob's face turned beet red and said, "Yeah, look, I'm sorry, buddy, I'm afraid I did. Why do you ask?"

"She just died and left me everything."

The Wife and The Maid

The maid asks for a salary increase. The wife was very upset about and decided to talk in private about her request.

The wife said, "Now Isabel, why do you want a pay increase?"

Isabel: Well Señora, there are three reasons why I want an increase. The first is that I iron better than you.

Wife: Who said you iron better than me?

Isabel: Your husband says so.

Wife: Oh.

Isabel: The second reason is that I am a better cook than you.

Wife: Nonsense, who said you are a better cook than me?

Isabel: Your husband did.

Wife: Oh.

Isabel: The third reason is that I am better at sex than you. Now the woman was furious and red in the face.

Wife: Did my husband say that as well?

Isabel: No Señora, the gardener did.

Wife: Oh. So how much of a raise did you have in mind?

The Name of the Game

from www.newyorker.com
by Hendrik Hertzberg
July 12, 2010

F.A. (Football Association) Do Americans hate football? Not regular football, of course. Not football as in first and ten, going long, late hits, special teams, pneumatic cheerleaders in abbreviated costumes, serial brain concussions—the game that every American loves, apart from a few, uh, soreheads. Not that one. The other one. The one whose basic principle of play is the kicking of a ball by a foot. The one that the rest of the world calls “football,” except when it’s called (for example) futbal, futball, fútbol, futebol, fotball, fótbolti, fußball, or (as in Finland) jalkapallo, which translates literally as “football.” That one.

The question arises now—as it has arisen periodically for eight decades—on account of the World Cup, the quadrennial global tournament of the sport that goes here by the name of soccer. “Soccer,” by the way, is not some Yankee neologism but a word of impeccably British origin. It owes its coinage to a domestic rival, rugby, whose proponents were fighting a losing battle over the football brand around the time that we were preoccupied with a more sanguinary civil war. Rugby’s nickname was (and is) rugger, and its players are called ruggers—a bit of upper-class twittery, as in “champers,” for champagne, or “preggers,” for enceinte. “Soccer” is rugger’s equivalent in Oxbridge-speak. The “soc” part is short for “assoc,” which is short for “association,” as in “association football,” the rules of which were codified in 1863 by the all-powerful Football Association, or FA—the FA being to the U.K. what the NFL, the NBA, and MLB are to the U.S. But where were we? Ah, yes. Do Americans hate it? Soccer, that is?

Here’s one plausible answer: we don’t. The non-haters include the nearly twenty million of us who stayed indoors on a balmy Saturday afternoon to watch Ghana join England, Slovenia, and Algeria on this year’s list of countries beaten or tied by the United States in the World Cup. We were disappointed—Ghana won, 2-1, sending our team home from South Africa. Still, 19.4 million, the number registered by the Nielsen ratings service, is a lot of people. It’s not just more people than had ever watched a soccer game on American television before. It’s also more people than, on average, watched last year’s World Series games, which had the advantage of being broadcast live in prime time. It’s millions more than watched the Kentucky Derby or the final round of the Masters golf tournament or the Daytona 500, the jewel in NASCAR’s crown. And we don’t just watch. We do. An estimated five million grownups play soccer in these United States on a regular basis. Kids are mad for it, especially little ones. More American children play it, informally and in organized leagues, than any other team sport.

Soccer may be an import, as is our entire nonaboriginal population, but it’s well on its way to becoming as American as pizza, tacos, and French fries. (And motherhood: Sarah Palin notwithstanding, “soccer moms”—a term introduced to the political world in 1996, by a Republican consultant—are the proverbial key demographic.) Of course, soccer has its challenges here, many of them owing to its relative newness in the arena of American commerce. The enthusiasm of toddlers and post-toddlers is all very well, but, if that were enough to do the trick, Nike would have a division devoted to dodgeball. Compared with its established rivals, big-time soccer is ill suited to televisual exploitation. The game’s continuous, almost uninterrupted flow of action denies it a steady supply of intervals for the advertising of beer and the fetching of same from the refrigerator. The expedient of selling space on the players’ bodies—plastering their uniforms with corporate logos from neck to navel—is less than fully satisfactory. Also, the soccer pitch is vaster than the gridiron or the diamond, and the choreography of the game demands the widest of angles. On TV, the players are tiny—a problem for those as yet unequipped with enormous high-def flat screens.

Do Americans hate soccer? Well, some of us dislike it immoderately—not so much the game itself as what it is taken to represent. This spring, anti-soccer grumbling on the political right spiked as sharply as the sale of those great big TVs. Back in 1986, Jack Kemp, the former Buffalo Bills quarterback turned Republican congressman, took the House floor to oppose a resolution supporting America’s (ultimately successful) bid to host the 1994 World Cup. Our football, he declared, embodies “democratic capitalism”; their football is “European socialist.” Kemp, though, was kidding; he was sending himself up. Today’s conservative soccer scolds are not so good-natured. Their complaints are variations on the theme of un-Americanness. “I hate it so much, probably because the rest of the world likes it so much,” Glenn Beck, the Fox News star, proclaimed. (Also, “Barack Obama’s policies are the World Cup.”) What really bugs “silly leftist critics,” the Washington Times editorialized, is that “the most popular sports in America—football, baseball, and basketball—originated here in the Land of the Free.” At the Web site of the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote, “Soccer is a socialist sport.” Also, “Soccer is collectivist.” Also, “Perhaps in the age of President Obama, soccer will finally catch on in America. But I suspect that socializing Americans’ taste in sports may be a tougher task than socializing our healthcare system.” And then there’s G. Gordon Liddy. Soccer, Liddy informed his radio listeners,


comes from Latin America, and first we have to get into this term, the Hispanics. That would indicate Spanish language, and yes, these people in Latin America speak Spanish. That is because conquistadores who came over from Spain—you know, tall Caucasians, not very many of them—conquered the Indians, and the Indians adopted the language of their conquerors. But what we call Hispanics now really are South American Indians. And this game, I think, originated with the South American Indians, and instead of a ball they used to use the head, the decapitated head, of an enemy warrior.


Liddy’s guest, a conservative “media critic” named Dan Gainor, responded cautiously (“soccer is such a basic game, you can probably trace its origins back a couple of different ways”), while allowing that “the whole Hispanic issue” is among the reasons “the left” is “pushing it in schools around the country.”

Do we hate soccer? That depends on who we think “we” are. One of the things that Franklin Foer’s charming book “How Soccer Explains the World” explains is how soccer, along with its globalizing, unifying effects, provides plenty of opportunities for expressions of nationalism, which need not be illiberal, and for tribalism, which almost always is. The soccerphobia of the right is tribalism masquerading as nationalism. One in four of those twenty million viewers of the U.S.-Ghana match was watching it on Univision, America’s leading Spanish-language network. The three others were—well, who knows. Liberals, probably, or worse. Enough. A yellow card is in order here, maybe a red one. Soccer may never be “America’s game” (though it’s already one of them), but America is game for soccer. We’re the Land of the Free, aren’t we? Can’t we be the land of the free kick, too?

Pad Thai

Recipe: Pad Thai
Time: 25 minutes

4 ounces fettuccine-width rice stick noodles
1/4 cup peanut oil
1/4 cup tamarind paste
1/4 cup fish sauce (nam pla)
1/3 cup honey
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes, or to taste
1/4 cup chopped scallions
1 garlic clove, minced
2 eggs
1 small head Napa cabbage, shredded (about 4 cups)
1 cup mung bean sprouts
1/2 pound peeled shrimp, pressed tofu or a combination
1/2 cup roasted peanuts, chopped
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
2 limes, quartered.



1. Put noodles in a large bowl and add boiling water to cover. Let sit until noodles are just tender; check every 5 minutes or so to make sure they do not get too soft. Drain, drizzle with one tablespoon peanut oil to keep from sticking and set aside. Meanwhile, put tamarind paste, fish sauce, honey and vinegar in a small saucepan over medium-low heat and bring just to a simmer. Stir in red pepper flakes and set aside.

2. Put remaining 3 tablespoons oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat; when oil shimmers, add scallions and garlic and cook for about a minute. Add eggs to pan; once they begin to set, scramble them until just done. Add cabbage and bean sprouts and continue to cook until cabbage begins to wilt, then add shrimp or tofu (or both).

3. When shrimp begin to turn pink and tofu begins to brown, add drained noodles to pan along with sauce. Toss everything together to coat with tamarind sauce and combine well. When noodles are warmed through, serve, sprinkling each dish with peanuts and garnishing with cilantro and lime wedges.

Yield: 4 servings.

www.nytimes.com

Portraits by Mario Testino: Photography Exhibition

For the first time in his career, one of the most influential personalities in fashion, photographer Mario Testino, will present an exhibition in his homeland, Peru. Portraits gathers 90 superb photographs of celebrities like Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Kate Moss, Julia Roberts, The Rolling Stones and Brad Pitt, and was first presented in London, in 2002, very much appraised by the international community. It then went on to Milan, New York, Amsterdam, Tokio and other parts of the World, and is now known to be Testino's most celebrated exhibition.When: Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. - 8 p.m., Saturday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. Until May 23Where: Museo de Arte de Lima - Paseo Colón 125, Parque de la Exposición, Cercado de LimaCost: General: S/.6, Students, Child.
www.livinginperu.com

Fiesta de La Vendimia in Ica - Festival

From www.livinginperu.com

Every year, Ica celebrates the Fiesta de La Vendimia, a festival traditionally known for its celebrations, musical concerts, parades, contests and, of course, the election of the festival's queen. The Fiesta honors Ica's most important agricultural jewel, the grapevine, from which grapes are harvested to make some of the world's most exquisite wines and piscos, and takes place every year during the time of harvest. The whole city participates, and it is estimated that over 200 000 tourists will travel to Ica to be a part of this magnificent festival.

When: March 5 to 15
Where: City of Ica, Ica

New Year's resolutions

>
Dan: Hello and welcome to this week’s 6 Minute English. I’m Dan Walker Smith and today I’m joined by Kate.
Kate: Hi Dan. Happy New Year!
D: And Happy New Year to you!
K: So what did you do on New Year’s Eve?
D: Well, this New Year I went to a party in East London with lots of friends; lots of dancing. Good times really.
K: That sounds great fun - a great way to bring in the New Year!
D: It was. It was very good indeed. And, of course, as well as celebrations, New
Year is also the traditional time to make resolutions, which are plans to improve yourself. So what were your resolutions this year?
K: I don't actually think I've made any yet, but I suppose now I think about it, I'd like to do more exercise, be healthy and travel more.
D: They sound like good resolutions. The aim of most resolutions is to ‘turn over a new leaf’. That is, to make yourself better by changing your routines and habits. It’s making a fresh or new start in your life.

So the question for this week is:
What is the most common goal for people making New Year’s Resolutions?
Is it:
a) to sort out their finances and money
b) to lose weight
c) to learn a new language?

K: Hmm, that's a tricky one. But thinking about it, we've just had Christmas-time, where people tend to eat an awful lot or overindulge themselves. So I'm going to go for b, to lose weight.
D: OK, we’ll see if you’re right at the end of the programme.

Now generally, there are two main types of resolution:
To give up something is to stop it, such as when someone says they’re giving up smoking or giving up fattening foods.
K: And to take up something is to start a new activity for the first time. For example you can take up the guitar, or take up a new sport. A lot of people say that their New Year’s Resolutions are to give up a bad habit or to take up a new hobby.
D: Now we’re going to hear some of the resolutions a British radio DJ has made for 2010. You're going to hear the expression 'carry on'. Can you explain what this means Kate?
Kate: Sure. Well 'carry on' means to continue to do something as you were before.
So if, for example, last year I went swimming every day, I could say 'I want to carry on going swimming', which means just to continue the same actions as you were doing before.
D: OK, so let's listen. What resolutions does the speaker have for this year?


Extract 1
Right, New Year's Resolutions 2010. It's the end of a decade. I think that what I would
just like to do is carry on working hard; carry on being happy and healthy. So keep on
exercising in the park, keep on eating well and keep on sleeping well. And that’s about it
– nothing else. Nothing too big, nothing too heavy, ‘cause experience tells me that if you try to ask yourself to do too much stuff it will eventually not happen.

K: OK, that was a bit different, as she’s not giving up or taking up anything, but she wants to carry on or continue what she’s already been doing. There are some pretty common or usual resolutions there: doing exercise, eating healthily and sleeping well – quite similar to the ones I made actually.
D: Well, she's not exactly turning over a new leaf in the New Year, but just keeping herself healthy with resolutions she can achieve.
As well as keeping healthy, one of the most common New Year's resolutions in the UK each year is to stop smoking.
K: Yes, and it’s also one of the hardest resolutions to keep, so this year the British government is launching a new campaign for people who want to stop smoking. Have a listen to the next report. Can you hear how many people tried to give up smoking last year and how many actually succeeded?


Extract 2
More than three quarters of a million smokers tried to give up last New Year. But fewer
than 40,000 have managed to keep that resolution.

K: Oh dear, not a great success rate then. Only around five per cent of the smokers managed to keep their resolution.
D: Resolutions are basically promises to yourself, and like promises, you either keep them or break them. That is, you either successful in keeping to your plans, or you're not and you go back to your old habits.
K: Well we’re almost out of time now, so let's go over some of the vocabulary we’ve come across today:
First of all, we had resolution, which is a kind of promise you make to yourself to improve yourself or your actions.

To turn over a new leaf is an expression meaning to make a new start in your life.
To give up something means to stop it.
Whereas, to take up something is to start it for the first time.
Then we heard to carry on, which means to continue with an action that you’re already doing.
And finally to keep or break a resolution, is either to persist with your new changes or to go back to your old routine.
D: Oh and there’s just time to answer the question I asked at the beginning of the show: What is the most common goal for people making New Year’s resolutions? Is it:

a) to sort out their finances and money
b) to lose weight
c) to learn a new language

K: And I said b, to lose weight
D: Actually it's both a and b. Most men want to sort out their finances and most women apparently want to lose weight in the New Year.
K: Ah, a trick question then.
D: A trick question indeed.
K: But I'm sure there must be some women out there who want to sort out their finances.
D: And there must be some men who want to lose weight.
K: Of course! So Dan can you tell me if you have any resolutions for the coming year?
D: I've actually signed up to run a marathon, so I'll be doing that in April. I'm training quite a lot at the moment; it's beginning to kick in.
K: Wow, well that's very impressive. Good luck with this year's resolution.
D: We'll see how it goes in April.
So from all of us here at BBC Learning English, thanks for listening. I hope you're sticking to your resolution and have a very Happy New Year! Goodbye!
K: Goodbye!

Gold vending machine

From http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/how2

Dima: Hello and welcome to this edition of 6 Minute English with me, Dima Kostenko.
Kate: and me, Kate Colin.
D: Kate will be our language guide for today.
Today we'll hear a fascinating report about a new vending machine that's unlike any other. But first - Kate, how would you describe what a vending machine is?
K: Responds...(short dialogue to introduce synonyms, slot machine, dispenser, soft drinks-snacks-newspapers-transport tickets-Mars bars)

D: Well Kate, if you're only using vending machines to buy things like chocolate bars, you are in for a surprise! As Steve Rosenberg, the BBC's correspondent in Berlin has discovered, a German company is planning to install some very different dispensers at stations, airports and shopping centres. Would you like to hear more?

K: Well, hearing all these phrases from you - 'very different' and 'unlike any other'. I must say I'm a bit intrigued.
D: You won't be intrigued for too much longer because in a moment we'll hear from Steve Rosenberg to find out what those machine will be selling. I'll say just one thing: it's something really valuable.
K: OK, let's listen, and as you are listening, try to find out what it is. Also, listen out for these words and phrases. 'On the go goodies', meaning small things that we buy and consume without stopping - like chocolate bars, crisps and other snacks, for example. And - 'precious', which means very expensive and valuable.
D: Here's Steve Rosenberg:

Clip One
I'm standing next to a vending machine at a Berlin railway station. It offers a typical selection of on the go goodies. There are fizzy drinks and crisps, chewing gum... But very soon machines like this one could be selling something far more precious than a packet of peanuts.
As well as chocolate bars you'll be able to buy...gold bars.

D: So Kate, what is it that the new vending machines will be selling?
K: Steve says it isn't going to be 'on the go goodies'. Not chewing gum, not packets of peanuts. It will be the precious metal...gold! Well, sounds interesting, but I am not quite sure I understand… Why would anyone want to by a gold bar from a slot machine?

D: Well apparently, with the global financial crisis more and more people decide that they can no longer rely upon stocks and shares the way they used to.
K: 'Stocks and shares' - that's a useful expression, often heard among business people. It means part of the ownership of a company which people can buy as an investment.

D: Indeed, they can. But in reality many start turning to other types of investment, which they consider safer - like buying precious metals. And with this new slot machine, buying gold simply can't be easier! The price will be adjusted daily, and in the next part Steve Rosenberg quotes some prices at current rates. And here comes your challenge for this week: what currency unit is mentioned?

a) euro
b) dollar
c) pound

Kate, which of these three currencies would you expect to hear in a report about gold, recorded in Germany by a reporter of a British broadcaster?
K: Responds...

D: We'll check your guess later, but first, what's your language point for the second part of the report Kate?
K: It's the expression 'to keep a close eye on', meaning to watch closely. Steve says 'built-in video cameras will be keeping an especially close eye on all the customers', so his word of warning is, watch out how you behave when you use them:

Clip Two
The machine will dispense a gram of gold for about 40 dollars and a 10 gram bar - for just under 350 dollars. But one word of warning: if you put in your money and nothing comes out, don't start banging your fist on this treasure chest - built-in video cameras will be keeping an especially close eye on all the customers.

D: That was our correspondent Steve Rosenberg at a railway station in Berlin.
Now, before we talk about the answer to this week's question, do you mind going through some of today's vocabulary again Kate?
K: Responds...We began by talking about vending machines - that is machines from which small items such as packaged food or drinks can be bought by inserting money. Because cash is inserted through a slot, they are also known colloquially as slot machines. And another synonym is dispensers.

We then mentioned the phrase on the go goodies meaning small things that we buy and consume without stopping - like chocolate bars, crisps and other snacks, for example. And then, the word precious which means very expensive and valuable. We talked briefly about stocks and shares, which means part of the ownership of a company which people can buy as an investment. And finally, the expression to keep a close eye on, meaning to watch very closely.
D: Thanks Kate. Finally, back to our question. Which currency was used in the report to talk about the price of gold?
K: Responds (the choice was euro, dollar and pound and I said… which was correct/wrong…)
D: Responds...I'm afraid that's all we have time for today. Until next week.
Both: Goodbye!

No Country for Old Typewriters: A Well-Used One Heads to Auction

By PATRICIA COHEN from http://www.nytimes.com/

Cormac McCarthy has written more than a dozen novels, several screenplays, two plays, two short stories, countless drafts, letters and more — and nearly every one of them was tapped out on a portable Olivetti manual typewriter he bought in a Knoxville, Tenn., pawnshop around 1963 for $50.

Lately this dependable machine has been showing irrevocable signs of age. So after his friend and colleague John Miller offered to buy him another, Mr. McCarthy agreed to auction off his Olivetti Lettera 32 and donate the proceeds to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization with which both men are affiliated.

“He found another one just like this,” a portable Olivetti that looks practically brand new, Mr. McCarthy said from his home in New Mexico. “I think he paid $11, and the shipping was about $19.95.”

Mr. McCarthy, 76, has won a wagon-full of honors including a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and the MacArthur Foundation’s so-called genius grant. Books like “Blood Meridian,” “All the Pretty Horses” and “The Crossing” have propelled him to the top ranks of American fiction writers.

Even nonreaders are familiar with his storytelling since his two most recently published novels, “No Country for Old Men” and the 2007 Pulitzer winner “The Road,” have been made into movies. (“No Country” won best picture and three other Oscars last year.)

Christie’s, which plans to auction the machine on Friday, estimated that it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000. Mr. McCarthy wrote an authentication letter — typed on the Olivetti, of course — that states:

“It has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose. ... I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence I would put this at about five million words over a period of 50 years.”

Speaking from his home in Santa Fe, Mr. McCarthy said he mistakenly thought that the typewriter was bought in 1958; it was actually a few years later. He had a Royal previously, but before he went off to Europe in the early 1960s, he said, “I tried to find the smallest, lightest typewriter I could find.”

Mr. McCarthy is known for being taciturn, particularly about his writing. He came to realize that not only his working method but even his tools are puzzling to a younger generation.

He remembers one summer when some graduate students were visiting the Santa Fe Institute. “I was in my office clacking away,” he said. “One student peered in and said: ‘Excuse me. What is that?’ ”

“I don’t have some method of working,” he said, adding that he often works on different projects simultaneously. A few years ago, when he was in Ireland, “I worked all day on four different projects,” he said. “I worked two hours on each. I got a lot done, but that’s not usual.”

Glenn Horowitz, a rare-book dealer who is handling the auction for Mr. McCarthy, said: “When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional, frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to Cormac’s typewriter. It’s as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife.”

The institute is in a rambling house built in the 1950s that sits on a hill overlooking Santa Fe. “It’s been under not-so-benign neglect,” Mr. McCarthy said.

He is working to help upgrade parts of the house, like the library. It turns out that architecture is one of the many odd jobs that Mr. McCarthy said he had had in his life.

He joined the institute at the invitation of its founder, the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, whom he met at a MacArthur Foundation meeting years ago. “It’s just a great place,” said Mr. McCarthy, whose primary responsibilities at the institute are eating lunch and taking afternoon tea.

He still has a house in Texas. If he had his druthers, he would live there now, except “they wouldn’t move the institute.”

Rafael Benítez's job is safe despite Liverpool's Champions League exit

by Andy Hunter from http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Wednesday 25 November 2009

Rafael Benítez has been assured his position as Liverpool manager will not be undermined by Champions League failure as he admitted the 2005 winners and 2007 runners-up had only themselves to blame for a damaging group-stage exit. The unequivocal support arrived from the Liverpool managing director, Christian Purslow, who insisted the Anfield club could withstand the financial impact of their early elimination.

David Ngog's fourth-minute goal gave Liverpool victory over Debrecen but a first win in six matches was rendered irrelevant by Fiorentina's defeat of Lyon. The result in Tuscany ensured Fiorentina progressed at Liverpool's expense, and prompted Purslow to issue firm backing for Benítez before his future at the club could come under scrutiny again.

"This will have no bearing on Rafa whatsoever," Purslow said. "He signed a new five-year deal four months ago and in those terms he is four months into a five-year journey. You don't deviate from long‑term plans for people and the way to take the club to the next level because of two late goals against Lyon, and that's what it boils down to."

Purslow is currently searching for new investors willing to meet Tom Hicks's and George Gillett's asking price of £100m for a 25% stake in Liverpool. While that process may be complicated by demotion to the Europa League, Liverpool are expected to suffer a budgetary shortfall of only £2.4m for this season as a consequence of their group exit.

"We budget for a level of performance that maybe fans would not like to be at, it's prudent," the managing director added. "If we have three home games in the Europa League we are equivalent to what we budget for in the Champions League.

"We are very disappointed but we could have played one home leg, one away leg and been out. I like to think we'll be taking 40 or 50,000 fans to Hamburg in May and if we get halfway to doing that we will make more money than we would from one round in the Champions League. It is a missed opportunity financially but it has no effect on budgeted performance, and that's the key thing. Budget prudently and then you don't get negative surprises if football doesn't go the right way."

Purslow's guarantee was the only tangible consolation in Hungary for Benítez, who now travels to Merseyside rivals Everton on Sunday with qualification for next season's Champions League an absolute priority. The Liverpool manager, whose players gathered around a screen to watch the closing minutes from Florence, pinned the blame on his team's exit on Lyon's stoppage-time winner at Anfield, their 90th minute equaliser at Stade Gerland plus a poor first-half display in Italy.

The Liverpool manager said: "You have to be disappointed. We knew we had to win and we did. We can't change what happened in the other match, but at least we did our job. If you look at the games, two late goals made a massive difference. We were not any worse in them than others but we paid for the two late goals against Lyon. It's part of football but it's difficult to control.

"We made mistakes in those games in the last minute, so it's our fault in the end. I'm really disappointed because we had chances in all games and could have won them all."

Benítez also claimed Liverpool's previous success in the Champions League had clouded analysis of this season's struggles in the group. "We have been so good in the last years that people think it is easy to go through in this competition. They think it has to be every year. We could have done it but have to be positive now. Now we have a massive game on Sunday and we have to be ready for it.

"It really hurts, especially in the way we went out. We're in a very bad position and can't win the Champions League now so we will just have to do our best in the next game. A lot of teams don't even reach the Champions League. Because we have qualified for five years in a row people think it's easy, but it's not."

Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool captain, admitted the task of winning the inaugural Europa League in Hamburg next May represented a dispiriting consolation. "The main prize has gone and to be playing in the Europa League is disappointing but we have to accept that, move on and try to win that competition," he said. "The only consolation in this is if we go on and win the secondary one."

Xstrata says Peru projects moving ahead on target

from http://www.reuters.com/

LIMA, Nov 23 (Reuters) - Xstrata Copper (XTA.L) said on Monday its projects in Peru, among the largest in the country's crisis-tinged mining sector, are on track.
Peru's President Alan Garcia met with top Xstrata executives to discuss the company's developments, which include Las Bambas and Antapaccay.

The meeting included Mick Davis, chief executive officer of Xstrata; Charlie Sartain CEO of Xstrata Copper; and Jose Marun, head of Xstrata operations in Peru.

Xstrata sees production starting at Antapaccay by the end of 2012 or the beginning of 2013, while it expects Las Bambas to be operational by the close of 2014.

Both are copper projects and, together, are forecast to cost some $5.1 billion to develop.

"We're finishing studies in line with prior projections -- without delay. We're moving forward," said Marun.

The investments would be among the biggest since before the start of the global economic crisis and show that large miners are moving to build new mines before the next big upswing in prices.

Peru, a major metals exporter, is the world's third-largest copper producer.

Also on Monday, Marun said weeks of area protests had not affected production at Xstrata's Tintaya copper mine.

Protesters, worried about the security of water supplies, had been blocking roads near the mine for weeks. By Monday, most highways were clear.

"There have been some entry problems at the mine obviously, but operations are calm," said Marun.

Union starts strike at Repsol's Peru oil refinery

from http://www.reuters.com/

LIMA, Nov 24 (Reuters) - Workers at Repsol's (REP.MC) La Pampilla oil refinery in Peru said on Tuesday they had started a two-day strike to pressure the company for better benefits and to end forced overtime.
La Pampilla, located near the Pacific coast, has a precessing capacity of some 107,000 barrels per day, and is Peru's largest refinery.

The country is a net oil importer and the government is encouraging foreign investment in the sector to boost output.

"It's a 48-hour (strike)," union leader Jose Guerrero told Reuters outside Repsol's corporate office in Lima, Peru's capital.

Roughly 100 workers, wearing blue and orange Repsol vests, were outside the office mid-Monday, carrying protest signs and chanting strike slogans.

Company officials were not immediately available to comment.

On Monday, Repsol said it had taken precautions so that production would not be "significantly affected" by a strike.