Prof. Amy Darnell

As they ask on their website, “What are you going to do to end the silence?”

http://dayofsilence.org/content/truth.html 

Final Exams will occur during the specified times listed for each course. Rearranging exam times requires approval from the VPAA.

COMM 495– Monday 5/5/08 12:00- 2:00 p.m.

COMM 110A– Tuesday 5/6/08 10:00- 12:00 a.m.

COMM 324– Tuesday 5/6/08 12:30-2:30 p.m.

COMM 110B– Wednesday 5/7/08 8-10 a.m.

FRANCE MAY OUTLAW INCITING EXTREME THINNESS

By DEVORAH LAUTER, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 40 minutes ago

The French parliament’s lower house adopted a groundbreaking bill Tuesday that would make it illegal for anyone — including fashion magazines, advertisers and Web sites — to publicly incite extreme thinness.

The National Assembly approved the bill in a series of votes Tuesday, after the legislation won unanimous support from the ruling conservative UMP party. It goes to the Senate in the coming weeks.

Fashion industry experts said that, if passed, the law would be the strongest of its kind anywhere. Leaders in French couture are opposed to the idea of legal boundaries on beauty standards.

The bill was the latest and strongest of measures proposed after the 2006 anorexia-linked death of a Brazilian model prompted efforts throughout the international fashion industry to address the repercussions of using ultra-thin models.

Conservative lawmaker Valery Boyer, author of the law, argued that encouraging anorexia or severe weight loss should be punishable in court.

Doctors and psychologists treating patients with anorexia nervosa — a disorder characterized by an abnormal fear of becoming overweight — welcomed the government’s efforts to fight self-inflicted starvation, but warned that its link with media images remains hazy.

French lawmakers and fashion industry members signed a nonbinding charter last week on promoting healthier body images. Spain in 2007 banned ultra-thin models from catwalks.

But Boyer said such measures did not go far enough.

Her bill has mainly brought focus to pro-anorexic Web sites that give advice on how to eat an apple a day — and nothing else.

But Boyer insisted in her speech to lawmakers Tuesday that the legislation was much broader and could, in theory, be used against many facets of the fashion industry.

It would give judges the power to imprison and fine offenders up to $47,000 if found guilty of “inciting others to deprive themselves of food” to an “excessive” degree, Boyer said in a telephone interview before the parliamentary session.

Judges could also sanction those responsible for a magazine photo of a model whose “excessive thinness … altered her health,” she said.

Boyer said she was focusing on women’s health, though the bill applies to models of both sexes. The French Health Ministry says most of the 30,000 to 40,000 people with anorexia in France are women.

Didier Grumbach, president of the influential French Federation of Couture, said he was not aware how broad the proposed legislation was, and made no secret of his strong disapproval of such a sweeping measure.

“Never will we accept in our profession that a judge decides if a young girl is skinny or not skinny,” he said. “That doesn’t exist in the world, and it will certainly not exist in France.”

Marleen S. Williams, a psychology professor at Brigham Young University in Utah who researches the media’s effect on anorexic women, said it was nearly impossible to prove that the media causes eating disorders.

Williams said studies show fewer eating disorders in “cultures that value full-bodied women.” Yet with the new French legal initiative, she fears, “you’re putting your finger in one hole in the dike, but there are other holes, and it’s much more complex than that.”

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Associated Press writer Emmanuel Georges-Picot in Paris contributed to this report.

Then…

And now…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7347856.stm

January 15, 1929- April 4, 1968

“They said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh.  Come now therefore, and let us slay him…and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”  Genesis 37:19-20 KJV

Today, in my independent cinema class, we watched Hoop Dreams, the uplifting yet heart-wrenching tale of Arthur Agee and William Gates. As one student talked about the expectations and assumptions that exist for so many in my classto go to college, the reality is that the experiences of Arthur and William are all too common. They are, unfortunately, not an exception.  This week’s report of graduation rates in American cities confirms the all too common stories in Hoop Dreams and in homes around the nation.

Report: Half of big-city children drop out

Published: April 1, 2008 at 3:24 PM

WASHINGTON, April 1 (UPI) — A report out Tuesday found alarmingly high dropout rates among students in the largest U.S. cities.

America’s Promise Alliance said about half of the students in the nation’s 50 largest cities don’t make it to graduation compared to a nationwide dropout rate of about one-in-three.

Detroit reported a graduation rate of 24.9 percent compared to high-side cities such as Colorado Springs (83.7 percent) and San Jose, Calif., (80.9 percent).

“It’s time for a national ‘call to arms,’ because we cannot afford to let nearly one-third of our kids fail,” said Colin Powell, a founder of America’s Promise Alliance.

The retired general and former secretary of state added in a written statement that the inability to produce an educated workforce amounted to a threat to U.S. economic security and, eventually, national security.

The organization Tuesday announced it would start a national campaign of summits aimed at dropout prevention to be held in every state and 50 communities over the next two years.

In college towns across USA, record stores bite the dust

By JUSTIN POPE, AP Education Writer

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - You need a college, of course, but that’s not the only ingredient in a good college town. You need quirky bookstores. Coffee shops - preferably not all chains. A diner. An artsy cinema. A dive bar.There’s one other thing you need, and it’s getting harder to find: a local record store. The kind of place with poster-covered walls, tattoo-covered customers, and an indie-rock aficionado at the cash register, somebody in a retro T-shirt who helps you navigate the store’s eclectic inventory.

A few years ago on just one block of Chapel Hill’s Franklin Street, the main drag in what’s been called America’s ideal college town, four or five such places catered both to locals and University of North Carolina students.

But with the demise of Schoolkids Records, the last one is gone. Schoolkids had planned to gut it out through March, but couldn’t even make through its final week and shut down Saturday. It’s just the latest victim in an industry hit by rising college-town rents, big-box retailers, high CD prices, and - most importantly - a new generation of college students for whom music has become an entirely online, intangible hobby they often don’t have to pay for.

Chapel Hill is hardly alone. In recent years, perhaps hundreds of independent and small-chain record stores in college towns have shut down or consolidated as music downloading all but eliminated the demand for them.

In State College, Pa., Arboria and Vibes have closed. Iowa City, Iowa, used to have BJ’s, Sal’s Music Emporium and Real Records.

Boulder, Colo., has lost at least a half dozen - Cheapo Discs, All the Rage, Rocky Mountain Records and Tapes, and others. Albums on the Hill, a holdout across from the University of Colorado’s campus, is down from 18 full-time employees to three part-timers.

“I’m just trying to decide when I’m going to go online and close my brick and mortar,” said Greg Gabbard, owner of City Lights Records in State College, near Penn State’s campus. “I’m trying to stay here as long as I can because I love the people. We’re all teachers.”

Big record chains aren’t doing much better. But somehow, customers never seem to miss them as much when they close down.

“You walk down the hall of the dorm and hear everything possible, and you will be influenced by all these people,” said Ric Culross, who managed Schoolkids and has been in the business 35 years. “They’ve come to a store such as ours to feed off of that, just like they go into a bookstore.”

But these days, most just go online. Culross said he’d hoped this year’s freshmen might arrive with a revived passion for CDs and even vinyl albums, which have experienced a minor resurgence. It turns out many have never even bought a single non-digital one.

College students are the perfect market for music downloads. They have low incomes, small living quarters and endless bandwidth.

The change may be an economic inevitability, but still a loss. Colleges talk a lot about diversity, but you often find more of it browsing record stores near campus than in the cafeteria. Customers are black and white, well off and poor. You’ll find cool high school kids next to older collectors, professors and students ranging from straight-laced pre-professionals to punk rockers.

“This is one of the few places I can consistently find things I’m interested in,” David Crotts said as he flipped through CDs at Schoolkids’ going-out-of-business sale recently. An MBA student at UNC, he first shopped at Schoolkids when he was a teenager in nearby Burlington. He has about 500 CDs, but most people he knows just download music.

“It’s not surprising, but it’s disappointing,” he said. “You can’t come into a place like this that has atmosphere anymore.”

Nearby, as his wife thumbed a CD by a group called Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Timothy Shelly, who works for a catering company, complained about his recent shopping experience in one of the big chain stores.

“Even in their specialty heavy metal section, they didn’t even have Black Sabbath,” he said disgustedly.

In a town like Chapel Hill, with a good music scene, record stores also have been venues. Over the years, several bands played on a tiny stage behind Schoolkids’ front window, including Tom Tom Club, a Talking Heads offshoot, and John Mayer, before he moved up the ladder to clubs and now arenas.

Like most such places, Schoolkids’ walls were lined with posters - Nirvana, James Dean, Led Zeppelin, the Breeders. The rock shelves ran from Aberdeen City to Neil Young. Biggest sellers over the years ranged from groups such as Pink Floyd and Pixies to jazz musicians like Miles Davis and Latin albums including “Buena Vista Social Club,” Culross said.

At their peak, around 2000, the five or so stores on the block did around $250,000 worth of business each month, he said. By the end, it was under $50,000. U.S. album sales have plummeted, declining 15 percent in 2007, while digital album sales rose more than 50 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Some independent record stores are surviving, though mostly ones that don’t depend so much on college students.

There is still one independent record store in Chapel Hill, called CD Alley, though it’s much smaller than Schoolkids and farther from the center of town. Owner Ryan Richardson, a 1998 UNC grad, says he has an older clientele and cheaper rent. But he’s trying to drum up new business, selling turntables and hoping to get more students into vinyl records. The local college radio stations are a big help.

“We can carry all this obscure stuff because there’s a good chance people will hear it on the radio,” he said. “I’m hoping there’s enough of a difference in what we do to keep us going a little while longer.”

Schoolkids’ owner, Mike Phillips, once owned eight stores, and will now be down to two - in Athens, Ga. (home of the University of Georgia) and nearby Raleigh, near North Carolina State. He said he’s been getting lots of e-mails about the store closing, some of them from angry customers.

“If everybody was so damned concerned,” he responds, “they should have come in and bought a CD every once in a while.”

It makes me sad, sad, sad to know that Polaroid has decided to stop production of their film. The Polaroid experience is something that everyone knows. Whether it was the updated 70s camera my brother had that made that special sound when it shot the film out of the front of the camera, or the older Polaroid that my dad had– with it’s side slot where he pulled the photo out of, only to have to time the ‘developing’ and to delicately peel back the paper to reveal the gift inside. In an electronic-digital-instant-cyber age, there is still a place for Polaroid. There is. There has to be. There’s nothing quite like a photo with that white frame at the bottom.

I want to Save Polaroid and hope you do too!

http://www.savepolaroid.com

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19115854 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/magazine/16wwlnConsumed-t.html 

Oscar winner Minghella dies at 54

By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 15 minutes ago

Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella, who turned such literary works as “The English Patient,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Cold Mountain” into acclaimed movies, died Tuesday of a hemorrhage following surgery. He was 54.

Minghella’s publicist, Jonathan Rutter, said the filmmaker died at London’s Charing Cross Hospital. He said Minghella was operated on last week for a growth in his neck, “and the operation seemed to have gone well. At 5 a.m. today he had a fatal hemorrhage.”

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who became friends with Minghella after the filmmaker directed a Labour Party election ad in 2005, said he was “really shocked and very sad.”

“Anthony Minghella was a wonderful human being, creative and brilliant, but still humble, gentle and a joy to be with,” Blair said. “Whatever I did with him, personally or professionally, left me with complete admiration for him, as a character and as an artist of the highest caliber.”

Jude Law, who starred in Minghella’s “Cold Mountain,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and 2007’s “Breaking and Entering,” said he had “come to value him more as a friend than as a colleague.”

“He was a brilliantly talented writer and director who wrote dialogue that was a joy to speak and then put it onto the screen in a way that always looked effortless. He made work feel like fun. He was a sweet, warm, bright and funny man who was interested in everything from football to opera, films, music, literature, people and most of all his family.”

The 1996 World War II drama “The English Patient” won nine Academy Awards, including best picture, best director for Minghella and best supporting actress for Juliette Binoche. Based on the celebrated novel by Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, the movie tells of a burn victim’s tortured recollections of his misdeeds in time of war.

In a 1996 interview with The Associated Press, Minghella said too many modern films let the audience be passive, as if they were saying, “We’re going to rock you and thrill you. We’ll do everything for you.”

“(’The English Patient’) goes absolutely against that grain,” he said. “It says, `I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to make some connections. There are some puzzles here. The story will constantly rethread itself and it will be elliptical, but there are enormous rewards in that.’”

Minghella (pronounced min-GELL’-ah) also was nominated for an Oscar for best screenplay for the movie and for his screenplay for “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”

His 2003 “Cold Mountain,” based on Charles Frazier’s novel about the U.S. Civil War, earned a best supporting actress Oscar for Renee Zellweger.

The 1999 “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” starring Matt Damon as a murderous social climber, was based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith. It earned five Oscar nominations.

Among his other films were “Truly, Madly, Deeply” (1990), and last year’s Oscar-nominated “Michael Clayton,” on which he was executive producer.

Minghella also turned his talents to opera. In 2005, he directed a highly successful staging of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” at the English National Opera in London — choreographed by Minghella’s wife, Carolyn Choa. The following year, he staged it for the season opener of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. It was the first performance of the Met’s new era under general manager Peter Gelb.

Minghella was recently in Botswana filming an adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s novel “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.” Due to air on British television this week, the book is the first in a series about the adventures of Botswanan private eye Precious Ramotswe; a 13-part television series was recently commission by HBO.

Jeff Ramsay, press secretary to Botswanan President Festus Mogae, said the director had been coming to the country ahead of the detective film and learning about Botswana. He said Minghella had told him how he had been forced to shoot “Cold Mountain” in Romania and that it had “seemed wrong.” He said this made the director “more sure that the film could only be shot in Botswana.”

“Much more than a TRUE artist who thrilled in offering his divine gift with the world, Anthony Minghella was a dear, dear trusted friend,” Jill Scott, who plays Ramotswe, said in a statement. “My heart aches with grief. Words can not express how deeply he will be missed or how deeply he was loved.”

Born the second of five children to southern Italian emigrants, Minghella came to moviemaking from a flourishing playwriting career on the London “fringe” and, in 1986, on the West End with the play, “Made in Bangkok,” a hard-hitting look at the sexual mores of a British tour group in Thailand.

He worked as a television script editor before making his directing debut with “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” a comedy about love and grief starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman.

Producer David Puttnam told the BBC that Minghella was “a very special person.”

“He wasn’t just a writer, or a writer-director, he was someone who was very well-known and very well-loved within the film community,” Puttnam said. “Frankly he was far too young to have gone.”

Minghella is survived by his wife; his actor son, Max Minghella; and his daughter, Hannah.

___

Associated Press Writers Raphael G. Satter in London and Celean Jacobson in Gaborone, Botswana,

Rebate letters to cost $42 million
By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press WriterFri Mar 7, 1:47 PM ET
At a cost of nearly $42 million, the IRS wants you to know: Your check is almost in the mail.

The Internal Revenue Service is spending the money on letters to alert taxpayers to expect rebate checks as part of the economic stimulus plan.

The notices are going out this month to an estimated 130 million households who filed returns for the 2006 tax year, at a cost $41.8 million, IRS spokesman John Lipold confirmed.

That works out to about 32 cents to print, process and mail each letter. It doesn’t include the tab for another round of mailings planned for those who didn’t file tax returns last year but may still qualify for a rebate.

Democrats accused the Bush administration of wasting time and postage.

“There are countless better uses for $42 million than a self-congratulatory mailer that gives the president a pat on the back for an idea that wasn’t even his,” Sen. Charles Schumer said Friday, arguing the IRS could more effectively spend the money to catch tax cheats.

Keith Hennessey, director of the president’s National Economic Council, said the letters are being sent to explain how the tax rebates will work.

“Any time you do something as a government tens of millions of times, there is ample room for people to get confused. And so if you’re going to have tens of millions of taxpayers getting checks, you want to get the information out so that you have as few people as possible confused about what’s happening, they understand what’s coming, and it reduces the number of incoming requests that IRS and Treasury have to figure out how to deal with it,” said Hennessey.

“Dear Taxpayer,” the letters will begin, going on to say the IRS is pleased to inform the recipient that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law a plan that will provide payments of up to $600 for individuals who qualify or $1,200 for married couples filing jointly. The rebates are the centerpiece of a $168 billion economic stimulus package.

The actual rebate checks are scheduled to go out starting in May, after the IRS has finished separately mailing out routine refunds for the 2007 tax year.

The letters will be a reminder that people need to file a 2007 tax return so they will receive the rebate if they are eligible for it.

Similar notices will go out later to some Social Security recipients and those who receive veterans benefits — groups that often do not file tax returns.

For those people to get a rebate check, they will need to file a tax return if they received at least $3,000 from a combination of certain Social Security benefits, veterans benefits and earned income. The minimum payment for this group will be $300 for an individual and $600 for a couple filing jointly.

Not everyone will be eligible. Singles with income of more than $75,000 and couples with more than $150,000 get only partial rebates, if any.

People who earn less than $3,000, illegal immigrants and anyone who does not file a tax return will miss out. Singles with incomes exceeding $87,000 and couples with incomes exceeding $174,000 also won’t qualify, although those caps rise by $6,000 per child.

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Associated Press Writer Deb Riechmann contributed to this report.

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On the Net:

Internal Revenue Service: http://www.irs.gov

Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.