Running Times has published their May 2009 issue! Featured in this issue are articles on 3 tough, targeted workouts, Lyle Knudson, and August Knox.

Hammer When It Matters: 3 Tough, Targeted Workouts
Last time around, I introduced Go Zone Racing. Go Zone Racing seems intuitive; some brush it off by saying, “Anyone can say run faster at the end.” But this misses the point.

Go Zone Racing isn’t just “go faster at the end.” It encompasses and reinforces what great coaches and athletes have taught us for years -you must plan for success, not hope for it. This strategy involves breaking the race into smaller pieces, with a different directive for each piece, that builds to a successful result. It requires that you focus your mental state on successful strategies across the entire race. After working with runners at all levels, I’m convinced that a lack of attention to race planning is a chief reason breakthrough performances or even expected performances aren’t as common as they should be.

To help instill the Go Zone Racing concepts, I’ve described the Top 3 Go Zone workouts below. No matter whether you’re prepping for the 800m or the half marathon, these Go Zone workouts practice the winning Go Zone Racing strategy.

Progression Runs
Nothing is better for preparing you to use the Go Zone Racing strategy than a progression run. In a progression run, the latter part of the workout is completed at a faster pace than the initial parts. Like all speed work, there are thousands of possible progression runs, but I’ve found two types to be the most effective.

Run to the Next Level
It’s 6 o’clock on a Tuesday evening at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. I’m talking with Neil about the reasons behind a recent race disappointment and with Dave about his spring marathon mileage buildup. Newcomers Joe and Monica wait to discuss pace for their upcoming intervals; meanwhile, around 10 more experienced runners warm up together, rehashing the past weekend, debating the relative merits of various post-workout watering holes, or planning the next West Valley Track Club beer mile.

All of these athletes have joined the club for one basic reason: to improve. And, although each may see a different aspect of the experience as most important, all have found something in the mixture of group training, weekly workout schedules, and socializing that has enriched their running experiences.

I did all my best running, modest as it might have been, solo. I became intimately familiar with the pitfalls that can result from training without a coach or experienced training partners, even as I read every available book on the theory and practice of training and worked toward a Ph. D. in exercise physiology. Now, after discovering how much the camaraderie of team training and team competition can enhance someone’s enjoyment of the sport and improve their performance, I understand well the pull that brings this group to the track each week, and I try to ensure that their experience with the club benefits their running.

To figure out whether joining a club and/or working with a coach can help your running, you need to figure out what your needs are, and understand what a club or coach can bring you. For most runners, finding a club may be a better first option than searching for a coach. Most clubs do offer coaching, and a good, diverse club composed of experienced runners can take over much of what a coach offers. As pointed out by Bill Clark, a former world-class distance runner who coaches the South Bay wing of WVTC, much of the coaching and guidance available to club runners comes from teammates on group runs.

Never Too Old – Secrets of Late Starting Elites
The phenomenon of the “overnight sensation” might be so common as to be cliched in the entertainment industry, but it’s almost unheard of in American running. The path to running greatness is nearly identical for those at the top: four years of high school competition, followed by another four in college, and then several more seasons struggling upward through the ranks of the track or road racing elite, learning the ropes and paying one’s dues before being able to finish in the medals or money. But every so often someone comes along and ignores that roadmap, bursting into the front pack without any significant background in running.

The latest such phenom is Kelly Jaske, who placed second at the USA Half Marathon Championships in Houston in January in 1:12:06. It was a huge breakthrough for Jaske, who didn’t start running until she was in law school at Harvard, and whose marathon PR was just under 2:50.

Over the years there have been other elite or semi-elite runners who have enjoyed similar success without an extensive running background. Mike Reneau qualified for the 2008 Olympic trials marathon with the Hansons-Brooks squad after a career as a wrestler in high school and college. Aileen Condon played field hockey and lacrosse before becoming a top finisher in New York-area races with a track 10,000m PR of 34:07. And Jill Gaitenby Boaz became the poster girl for no-background running success: As a Boston College senior, she watched the Boston Marathon from a roadside party on Heartbreak Hill; a few years later she would run 2:36:45 there to place 14th as the first American. She represented the U. S. in two world championships in the marathon and won the USA title at that distance in a then-PR 2:36:10.

A closer look at these athletes, however, belies the scenario of instant success achieved the first time they laced up a pair of running shoes. All of them had some athletic experience, even if they didn’t have the running background common to most top runners. And they all certainly possessed the potential for running success, even if realizing it was delayed.

“You’re not going to run well if you don’t have the inherent ability,” says Jack Daniels, who is currently working with Reneau in Arizona. “People with talent would probably have done well five or 10 years earlier in their lives. It’s true that once they mature they have a better chance to take advantage of their bodies. The added strength they have in their 20s might help them avoid injuries a little better, too.”

Lonely Heights
Lyle Knudson: Running’s Forgotten Coach
The tall blond man sits by the window in his favorite breakfast place, hunched over a plate of poached eggs at 9,100 feet in the Rocky Mountains. It is 10 degrees outside and even colder with the stinging wind. Not a great morning for running. But, as with most days, decent enough to talk about it. Talking about running, after all, helps the tall blond man feel in touch.

Once upon a time, he was current and relevant, a coach everyone in the running world knew well. He coached seven Olympians, two before he turned 30. Launched the women’s track and field program at the University of Colorado. Was named Southeastern Conference Coach of the Year at Florida. Served as head coach of the women’s Pan American team when the Pan Am Games still mattered. Perhaps most notably, he introduced a training model so deep and complex that even now, decades later, almost nobody understands it. If it didn’t produce such miraculous results, it would’ve vanished years ago, just like the tall blond man who invented it.

Excellence
And the Problem with Deals with the Devil
If there’s a rule about deals with the devil, it’s that you don’t realize you’re making one at the time. Especially when the devil in question walks with a cane and looks more like Kris Kringle than Beelzebub.

He said his name was August Knox and that he was a researcher working to beat multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and all the other muscle-wasting disorders the world has ever known. Maybe he was. He was peddling a dream, and you don’t look a gift horse too strongly in the mouth.

You remember BALCO, right? Well, suppose BALCO had visited you at age 42 and asked if you wanted to be a guinea pig for a new product. Kringle/Knox wasn’t with BALCO, obviously — they’d been out of business for years — but that’s what he was peddling. Test samples of a new product, guaranteed undetectable by conventional tests, that would tune up your muscle efficiency not just by enough to roll your performance back to age 30, but to match you with the best of them.

Could you win an Olympic medal? No guarantee there, but you’d be in the hunt. There was only one catch: If humans were like rats, you’d peak in a year and stay there for 18 months. Two years, if you were lucky. After that? Well, once the rats had started to decline they’d done so rather precipitously.

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June 2009 Smart Computing has been published. This issue features articles which help you identify whether your old computer is upgradeable and still salvageable. Providing extensive tips on upgrading your old computer to make it more efficient and save you money!

Read Before Burning
Don’t Pitch Your Old Computer Just Yet
Everyone faces a time when he has to decide whether to pitch his old computer and buy a new one or try to extend the life of his current machine. There’s a variety of factors to consider, including hardware requirements for new operating systems (if you’re planning to upgrade to a newer operating system), compatibility of new parts with the old system, and the hardware requirements necessary to run new software.

All factors point to the bottom-line question we have to ask ourselves: Can my computer still operate at the level I need it to? Before you answer this question for yourself, read the following pages in this month’s feature package. You may be surprised at the tweaks and upgrades you can perform to get a few more miles out of your computer.

Time To Toss The Computer?

Computer parts are very affordable these days, especially items such as DDR2 memory, which costs significantly less than DDR3 but hasn’t yet been supplanted by DDR3 in many motherboards.
 
When a computer’s performance starts slowing down, it doesn’t mean that it’s becoming obsolete. Most likely, you just need to perform some basic maintenance, such as defragmenting your hard drive, cleaning out your Startup folder, and possibly running a malware scan. Maintenance alone will usually give your computer a performance boost.

Granted, that isn’t always the case—the computer’s hardware may be insufficient and cannot conduct the operations you need it to. But again, in this case, it doesn’t mean the computer is dying—you may just need to upgrade some parts, and this is where the following articles come in.

Upgrade Your PC’s Memory
The Easiest Way To Boost Performance
When it comes to your sluggish computer, exercising patience can seem like an epic challenge. While browsing the Internet, you’re forced to wait what seems like forever for each page to load. Viewing and editing the pictures from your camera’s memory card takes ages, and playing music from your hard drive while working on any other project causes your whole computer to freeze. You’ve endured these tests of patience for long enough; it’s time to upgrade your PC’s memory.

 What Is Memory?

If you open up your computer case, you’ll find one or more thin rectangles positioned upright on the motherboard. These are memory modules. Memory is used to store temporary information that the computer needs to run an application. Although there are other factors, the amount of memory your computer has affects how quickly your computer can process data. Even if you have the latest and fastest processor, a lack of memory will cause your computer to perform sluggishly.

Think of the relationship between your computer’s processor and memory as a mathematician who is trying to solve a complicated equation on a single square inch of paper. She must write out a formula, and in order to solve the problem, she must erase parts of her paper to make room for new information. The mathematician may be a genius, but without enough space to write out the formula, solving the problem takes a great deal of time.
 
Upgrade Your PC’s Optical Drive
Easy Come, Easy Go
You have a high-definition camcorder, a digital camera, and an iPod, and now your PC’s digital media library is filled with thousands of music, photo, and video files. It might be time to think about getting an optical disc drive that can meet your media needs.

You’re probably wondering what an optical drive has to do with your PC’s media collection. With the right type of disc burner, you can transfer those files to CDs, DVDs, or BDs (Blu-ray Discs) to enjoy elsewhere, such as in your car or on your TV. Optical drives can read and write files, such as documents, music, photos, and HD (high-definition) videos. You can archive several gigabytes of data inexpensively because bulk packages of CDs and DVDs are relatively inexpensive. Additionally, by writing media files to CDs and DVDs, you can free up storage space on your hard drive, and the discs can also serve as a backup of your media library.

Upgrade Your PC’s Video Card
Process Photos, Videos & Graphics Faster
Does your computer seem slow when you edit videos and photos or play video games? Does the computer limit you to analog low-resolution video, even though your LCD can display digital high-resolution video? If the answer to either question is yes, an upgrade to your video card—the component that provides your PC’s video output and connects to your monitor’s video cable—is in order. Additional advantages to a new video card include the ability to edit and play back HD (high-definition) video content and span your Desktop background across two (or more) monitors. We’ll show you what to look for when buying a video card and provide instructions for upgrading the video card.

The type of video card you can use largely depends on the type of expansion slots available on your motherboard. Most computers and motherboards purchased in the last three years feature one or more PCI-E (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) slots, while older computers may offer a single AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) slot or standard PCI slots. As you might guess, the PCI-E interface provides the best performance of the three, but you can still find a limited selection of video cards that feature the AGP and PCI interface for legacy computers.

The users manual included with your PC or motherboard should indicate which type of video card the PC uses. Barring a users manual, you can open up your PC’s case to determine what type of card you need.

Upgrade Your PC’s Power Supply
Invest In Quality & Power Efficiency
In order for a computer to operate, it requires at least two things: data and power. Data is provided by the hard drive, whereas the power required to run every component in your computer is produced by a PSU (power supply unit). Its single job is to convert electrical power from the wall outlet into functional power for your entire PC. However, the PSU is often the most overlooked component inside your computer’s case, even though it serves as the central conduit through which power is managed.

Most standard PSUs are square and include vents or fans for cooling. They’re constructed of some kind of metal and have a large bundle of colored cables extending from one side. At the end of these cables are connectors that are designed to attach to specific plugs on components or chassis fans. (We’ll address the names and compatibility of each connector when we walk through the installation later.) In general, a PSU appears inconspicuous on the outside of a PC case, but it connects to every part on the inside.

Why Invest In An Upgrade?

One of the primary reasons to upgrade your PSU is to add more wattage overall. If you’ve recently installed a new high-end video card or an extra hard drive or optical drive, you’ll want to test the fortitude of your PSU and whether it can provide enough power to your whole system.

Upgrade Your PC’s Storage
Install A Second Hard Drive
Nature abhors a vacuum, your garage will accumulate as much stuff as it can hold, and you’ll eventually fill your hard drive. Not to worry. When you’re running out of space—thanks to the thousands of photos, audio files, and video clips on your drive—you can add a supplemental drive easily enough.

How To Buy

A cutting-edge 2TB (terabytes; equal to 2,000GB) hard drive cost $299 at press time, but you’ll get more for your money with a lower-capacity model, such as a $72 750GB drive. (There are also fast SSDs, or solid-state drives, but they cost much more per gigabyte.) Here’s how to buy the right hard drive.

First, open your computer case and verify that there’s a free hard drive-sized bay. If there isn’t, consider buying an external drive. Alternatively, read the “Replacement” section at the end of this article for notes on replacing your existing hard drive outright. Most of the following buyers’ advice and installation steps will still apply.

Next, check to see whether your computer’s motherboard (or hard drive controller card) has an unused SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) header, or port, as shown in one of the photos in this article. If so, you can buy a SATA drive, which means a better selection and an easier setup.

Upgrade Your PC’s Processor
Give Your System A Better Brain

The CPU is usually considered to be the brain of a computer. These days, there are only two major competitors left in the CPU world, Intel and AMD, and both are constantly at work to improve their products at a furious pace. When you hear the old adage that a computer is obsolete almost as soon as you buy it, that may be a slight exaggeration, but the truth of the joke largely falls at the CPU’s feet.

The CPU is the primary engine inside your system. Software gets written to take advantage of whatever features and speed the CPU can provide. For example, most CPUs now integrate special routines for accelerating multimedia tasks. Multimedia software developers know this and write their programs to take advantage of these capabilities. In the same vein, the traditional design of CPUs involved having one “core” that ran as fast as possible, but now the focus is on having multiple energy-efficient cores in one chip doing more total work with less heat and power consumption.

This is why people find themselves needing new computers. It’s not because the hardware gets physically slower (usually), but because new software keeps being designed for new hardware improvements. Fortunately, you can get many of a new system’s benefits simply by replacing the CPU.

Upgrade Your PC’s Motherboard
Give Your System An Internal Makeover
Right on the heels of upgrading your CPU, you may find yourself also considering a motherboard upgrade. The two often go together, although they can be handled separately. A motherboard upgrade (which usually includes a newer chipset) can give you a range of benefits. Sure, you can have a faster FSB (frontside bus) and support for more modern architectures so you can run faster CPUs, but also consider some of the other features a motherboard upgrade can bring.

For starters, integrated video is a lot better than it used to be, not only faster but also more vibrant and capable of displaying things such as HD (high-definition) video. Onboard audio has seen similar improvements, moving from noisy stereo to sterling 5.1 surround sound. Newer motherboards have more SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) ports, including eSATA (external SATA; for high-speed external drives) and more RAID (redundant array of independent disks) options for helping to protect and accelerate the data on those drives. By upgrading your motherboard, you can expect more overclocking tools, support for newer card slot formats, and so on.

Most major brand systems are sold with fairly ho-hum motherboards. When people buy a new PC, they’re usually looking at things such as processor speed, hard drive capacity, or a certain kind of video card. Specifics about the motherboard are rarely ever given, in part because the vendor doesn’t waste money on motherboards with nonessential features.

Out With The Old
Recycle, Reuse, Or Donate?
Unlike an old piece of furniture, computer parts don’t often make good hand-me-downs. PC hardware changes so frequently that it’s likely another PC can’t use your leftover memory, video card, or processor. You shouldn’t just throw the equipment in the garbage because it may contain lead, mercury, cadmium, and flame-retardant plastic that is toxic to the environment and a threat to everyone’s health. It’s best to recycle or donate your old, unusable computer parts.

Recycle
Many electronics manufacturers, including Apple, Dell, Epson, Lenovo, and Sony, offer recycling programs to process, donate, and reuse devices and hardware. Typically, a manufacturer will recycle its own products free, but most charge to process components made by other manufacturers. In some situations, only specific products will be recycled free. Therefore, you’ll want to contact your PC’s manufacturer about whether it will recycle components that were manufactured by other companies.

The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has set up a Plug-In To eCycling program that works with computer manufacturers to orchestrate take-back programs for desktop PCs and laptops. The program also provides other opportunities to donate and recycle your computer hardware, such as local collections where you can drop off unwanted technology for reuse/recycling.

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Condé Nast has published the May 18, 2009 issue of The New Yorker. Featured in this magazine are articles on President Obama’s collegiate tour, Manny’s Music, enviroment, and the apocalypse.

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College Try
The President’s campus tour.
With summer almost here, and the green shoots on the ground (if not on the Dow) grown to leafy fullness, the White House has completed an annual springtime chore: choosing among the many invitations from colleges and universities for the boss to address the graduating class. This year, three were accepted. On May 13th, President Obama speaks at Arizona State University, in Tempe; four days later, at the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana; and, five days after that, at the United States Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Maryland.

The Talk of the Town

Engine Trouble
A vigilante’s quest against idling vehicles.
Talk story about George Pakenham who alerts drivers to the city’s prohibition against letting engines idle for longer than three minutes.

The Wall
Rock stars immortalize Manny’s Music.

Manny’s Music, one of the largest of the West Forty-eighth Street musical-instrument stores, is closing soon, and among the matters yet to be resolved between Manny’s owner, Sam Ash Music, and Manny’s founding family, the descendants of Manny Goldrich, is the fate of the hundreds of publicity photographs of musicians that line the store’s walls. Many of them are inscribed with personal notes to Manny, who died in 1968, and to his son Henry, who is seventy-six and retired.

Green Collars
An environmental eye-opening for aspiring welders.

Aspiring ironworkers in New York City must complete a three-year apprenticeship. They take classes two evenings a week and on occasional Saturdays, and they spend most of the third year practicing things like arc-welding single-V butt joints and slicing through inch-thick steel plates with oxyacetylene torches. One recent Wednesday evening, approximately two hundred of them arrived at the training center of Locals 40 and 361, on Thirty-sixth Street in Astoria, and encountered a scene of a type that has gladdened students’ hearts since the time of Thomas Edison: a classroom furnished with a screen and a movie projector. It was Earth Day, and in its observance the apprentices were going to be shown “The Greening of Southie,” a documentary about the construction of an environmentally friendly luxury apartment building in an old working-class neighborhood in Boston. Some of the third-year students were feeling nervous—the city’s licensing exam for welders was a week away, leaving them little time for last-minute practice in the center’s welding booths, which resemble oversized shower stalls—but few could have been as nervous as Ian Cheney, who had directed the film and agreed to introduce it. Making a movie about green construction is one thing; screening it for actual construction workers is another. Cheney wasn’t wearing steel-toed boots, a do-rag, or a split cowhide welding jacket, and his arms and neck were neither bulging with muscles nor heavily tattooed, and he had to warn the ironworkers that they might see people in the film wearing Boston Red Sox insignia. “If that’s shocking to you,” he said, “just close your eyes.”

End-Times 101
Graduate studies in the apocalypse.
It was a sunny spring day when Michael Taussig, a professor of anthropology at Columbia, wrapped up his graduate seminar on the apocalypse (official title: “Preëmptive Apocalyptic Thought: The Angel of History Reconsidered in Light of Climate Change, the War on Terror, and Financial Meltdown”). Meanwhile, the World Health Organization was warning of an imminent swine-flu pandemic, the gross domestic product shrivelled for the third quarter in a row, and Senator Arlen Specter became a Democrat.

Annals of Science

Don’t!
Why children who are patient prosper.
In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although she’s now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness for those air-puffed balls of corn syrup and gelatine. “I know I shouldn’t like them,” she says. “But they’re just so delicious!” A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. Then he left the room.

Letter from Malaysia
 
Eastern Promises
The best hope for reforming a corrupt state.
about opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim and the ethnic and religious problems facing the country. Anwar Ibrahim has come back from six years in prison on corruption and sodomy charges to become the best hope for a more democratic, less corrupt Malaysia. This is the same Anwar Ibrahim who had once been at the heart of the Malaysian establishment. He was poised to succeed Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad until he launched an attack on “nepotism” and “cronyism” in his own party, the United Malays National Organization. The “cronies” included members of Mahathir’s family and in 1998, Anwar was removed from the cabinet and from UMNO. He was charged with corruption and sodomy and was beaten while awaiting trial. Mentions accusations that Anwar is a Jewish agent. Released from prison in 2004, Anwar eventually returned to Parliament in a landslide. In the next general election, possibly as soon as 2010, Anwar Ibrahim may well become Prime Minister.

Annals of Finance

The Death of Kings
Stories from the end of a financial era.
about the financial meltdown as seen from the offices of bankers, hedge-fund managers, analysts, and others in the financial sector. Most people may now recall a moment of clarity, an inkling of doom. A private-equity executive the writer talked to said that he sensed the jig was up when his cleaning woman took out a subprime loan to buy a house in Virginia. A big-wheel hedge-fund manager had his epiphany at a Goldman Sachs hedge-fund conference during which he found himself questioning the rapid accumulation of dynastic wealth by the people in the room. The final sign, the big wheel felt, was the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, which cost an estimated three hundred million dollars. A month later, Lehman Brothers collapsed. Some who foresaw the implosion underestimated its power and duration.

The World of Business

Drink Up
The man behind Two Buck Chuck.
about vintner Fred Franzia and Two Buck Chuck. Fred Franzia owns forty thousand acres of vineyards, more than anyone in the country; crushes three hundred and fifty thousand tons of grapes a year; and his company, Bronco, has annual revenue of more than five hundred million dollars. Recently, Franzia celebrated the sale of the four-hundred-millionth bottle of Charles Shaw, known as Two Buck Chuck, which is sold for $1.99 at Trader Joe’s. Franzia’s objective is to sell as much wine as possible—he sells twenty million cases a year now, making Bronco the fourth-largest winery in the U.S., and would like to reach a hundred million. He believes that no bottle of wine should cost more than ten dollars.

Fiction

“In The South”
by Salman Rushdie

Books

The case for William Hazlitt.
Review of Duncan Wu’s “William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man.”

Briefly Noted: “The Song Is You”; “Apologize, Apologize!”; “The Complete Game”; “The Last Witch of Langenburg.”

The Current Cinema

“Star Trek.”
by Anthony Lane

The Theatre

“Waiting for Godot.”
by John Lahr

Poems

“Delphiniums in a Window Box”
by Dean Young

“Lines on the Poet’s Turning Forty”
by Ian Frazier

“Bleecker Street”
by Philip Schultz

Critics’ Notebooks

St. Vincent, at Webster Hall.
by Sasha Frere-Jones

“Compass in Hand,” at MOMA.
by Andrea K. Scott

Mark Morris’s “Romeo and Juliet,” at the Rose Theatre.
by Joan Acocella

Tables for Two

Delicatessen
by Leo Carey

Pop Notes

The New York Dolls’ “’Cause I Sez So.”
by Ben Greenman

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Condé Nast has released their May 2009 issue of Gourmet. Featured in this magazine are articles on Melbourne, Australia; Turkish chili peppers; Charleston, South Carolina; and Dordogne, France.

The Melbourne Supremacy
Move over, Sydney. Austrailia’s second city is gaining ground as the country’s culinary capital.

On the southern banks of the Yarra—the muddy river that flows slowly through the heart of Melbourne—a modern saga is unfolding. It’s an entertainment complex called Crown. Vegas in microcosm. Along with the hotels, shops, bars, nightclubs, and, of course, Crown Casino—the jewel in the revenue tiara—the landlord is remorselessly driving a swath of restaurants upmarket and kicking out any tenants who can’t live up to the place’s blue-chip image.

In 2006, Neil Perry became the first big-name Australian chef to open a restaurant at Crown with the launch of Rockpool Bar & Grill. It’s been a critical and commercial success, and the food—some of the country’s best seafood sharing equal billing with grass-fed, dry-aged steaks—is terrific. The following year, Crown reveled in the prestige of having its own Nobu, a first on this side of the world. But despite the hype, the multimillion-dollar investment, and the visits by Nobu-san, Robert De Niro, and friends, Nobu has faded from the town’s dining spotlight faster than an aging starlet after a face-lift gone wrong. It will be interesting to see what happens when Crown gets its very own Gordon Ramsay outpost next year, also a first in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Heat of the Matter
In a sun-soaked valley in southern turkey, hospitality still rules and chile peppers are a constant presence in people’s lives.

It’s dusk in Sanliurfa, 30 miles from the Syrian border in south-central Turkey. From our hotel terrace, we watch birds glide through the apricot-gold light that slants onto the building below, a shrine to the birthplace of Abraham. The first notes of the call to prayer float up to us, a single voice becoming a syncopated cacophony as a dozen muezzins from other mosques join in. This moment, I think, is why I love Turkey. Okay, maybe this moment and the food. In fact, I could swear I detect on the breeze the slightly harsh, sweetly vegetal aroma of the peppers that brought me here.

These are not just any peppers. They are, you might say, an obsession. And obsessions are unpredictable. Sometimes one springs full-blown into your consciousness; at other times, it grows slowly, almost unnoticed, until a friend says to you, “Do you have to put those Turkish peppers on everything?”

Lowcountry Rising
Beyond the picture postcards, Charleston is a lovely port city that’s fast on its way to becoming a serious food capital.

In late October, Charleston, South Carolina, was in the throes of a charcuterie revolution. Of course, it was possible—easy, in fact—to find fried green tomatoes, fried oysters, and fried flounder, too, but plates of house-cured meats were featured on a few of the more daring restaurant menus around town, and they were causing some excitement. Not along the lines of, say, girls at The Citadel or that serious commotion at Fort Sumter in 1861, but excitement just the same. Change comes slowly to the South.

In Charleston sitting rooms, you can still hear the Civil War referred to as the War Between the States, and homeowners can be reprimanded by historical fundamentalists for veering a few shades away from the original paint color on the exterior of their antebellum mansions. Yet somehow, in an enduring swell of proud preservation (from the pre-Revolutionary Powder Magazine, one of the oldest fortifications in the 13 colonies, to the scholarly and modern Charleston Renaissance Gallery), the city’s culinary heritage was besmirched, or at least belittled, by popular demand. For fried fish.

In The Night Kitchen
When dusk falls on the Dordogne’s farmers markets, rather than pack up their produce and head home, the area’s artisanal purveyors

The best way to get a parking spot at the night food market in Audrix, in southwest France, is to drive up to the tiny village in a Citroën 2CV. The ancient cars—an aggregation of tin cans and elastic bands first produced in 1949 to carry a farmer, his wife, two children, and a dairy churn over plowed fields without spilling a precious drop of milk—are so beloved, the French treat them like pets.

Although I had the Dersh—as the Deux Chevaux, or two-horsepower Citroën, is fondly nicknamed—the only spot, if it could be called that, was a very small gap between a foreigner’s rented automobile and a pack of motorcycles. I nosed alongside to measure the distance. A passing villager set down his basket and gave a peremptory wave: “Descendez.” I turned off the replacement bathroom light switch that operates my car instead of a key and obeyed. He gave another wave to his son. Together they picked up the Dersh and dropped it into the one space the night market had to offer.

Ruth’s Favorite May Recipes
View the ten dishes from our May issue that our editor in chief can’t stop thinking about. We’re pretty sure they’ll captivate you, too.

1. Peruvian Rice and Lentils (Tacu Tacu)
2. Jamaican Beef Dumplings
3. Tuscan Beans in Summery Tomato Ragù
4. Strawberry-Vanilla Swirled Frozen Pops
5. Sake Sea Bass in Parchment
6. Fresh Pasta with Crabmeat, Peas, and Chile
7. Périgord Walnut Tart
8. Lemony Risotto with Asparagus and Shrimp
9. Tortilla Chicken Drumsticks
10. Savory Parmesan Pain Perdu with Poached Eggs and Greens

Great Meals: Just Add Water
The most enchanting memories of this laid-back Caribbean sail came out of Sam Malone’s postage-stamp galley.

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Saveur has released its May 2009 issue. Featured in this edition are articles on Turkish coffee, Amaro, Irish Whiskey, and home made ice cream.

Bittersweet Symphony: Turkish Coffee
Learn the history behind this famed brew, and how to make the perfect cup.

In 16th-century Turkey, coffee was the elixir of royalty, brewed by a kahvecibasi, or chief coffee maker, who was considered a trusted member of the sultan’s court. As the consumption of coffee entered the public domain, the velvety drink was sipped almost everywhere, both on significant social occasions and at intimate family gatherings. Nowadays, expatriate Turks in America, such as the Boston-based chef Ozcan Ozan, still prepare the caffeinated drink traditionally. For Ozan, the earthy aroma of Turkish coffee, known as kahveh, triggers an image of his mother, working a handheld grinder to brew his father’s after-dinner cup.
 
Ozan, who owns the Sultan’s Kitchen in Boston, outlined for SAVEUR a series of easy steps that produce a foolproof demitasse. Best made in a cevze, or a petite, long-handled pot (a small saucepan also does the trick), the coffee is first boiled with sugar and water over a low flame. When foam begins to appear, lift the saucepan or cevze from the stove and scoop the foam into a cup. Simmer the rest of the coffee; then bring it to a quick boil, pour it over the foam, and serve it immediately. Properly made, the coffee has a thick accumulation of sugar and a rich trail of finely ground coffee lining the bottom of the cup.

Amaro: Three To Try
The Basilicata region is only one of many in Italy that produce the bitter digestif known as amaro. Here are tasting notes of three of our favorites.

We’ve long known that Basilicata, the region of Italy tucked between the toe and the heel of the boot, is home to many of our favorite foods and wines, but we’ve only recently learned that amaro, the bitter Italian digestif, often hails from the same place. Made for more than five centuries from a process that entails the macerating of herbs (anything from chamomile to wormwood), citrus, flowers, and roots in alcohol, the drink is underappreciated here in the States, where it is often claimed to be too harsh for the American palate.

Similar to grappa (made from grape skins), vin santo (a thick, meadlike wine), and other Italian digestifs, amaro is meant to be sipped slowly after a leisurely meal. It is usually served neat, thinned with tonic water, or over ice, and in the winter it is sometimes heated and garnished with a twist of lemon. While amaro makes no apologies for its boldly herbaceous flavor—it was originally concocted for use as a tonic, not a cocktail mixer, after all—we were pleasantly surprised by these mellow and drinkable liqueurs.

Irish Whiskey, Made By the Irish
John Teeling of Cooley Distillery answers our questions about his liquid gold.

In 1970, John Teeling, an Irish graduate student at Harvard Business School, did a case study on the history of Irish whiskey exports. His findings were bleak: Irish whiskeys, once a major contender in international markets, had experienced a dismal century. Prohibition in the States, two world wars, decades of economic isolation, and shifting tastes, among other factors, had devastated the once vibrant industry. Teeling suspected that he could turn it around.

Twenty-seven years later (after becoming chairman of several mining companies), he founded Cooley Distillery—the first new distillery to open in Ireland in more than a hundred years and the only Irish-owned distiller on the island (Bushmills and Midleton are owned by Diageo of Britain and Pernod-Ricard of France, respectively). Soon, under the direction of master blender Noel Sweeney and master distiller David Hynes (seen at left), Cooley was making Irish whiskey in styles not seen for 50 years and in some cases never at all: peat-smoked malt whiskeys, single-grain whiskeys, and single malts finished in madeira, sherry, and port casks. Since its bottles first hit the market, in the 1990s, Cooley has won more than 150 domestic and international awards. Recently, SAVEUR spoke by phone with Teeling from his offices in County Louth, in northeastern Ireland.

Homemade Ice Cream
11 recipes for this cool and creamy delight.

Vanilla Banana Black and White Milk Shake
This recipe for a layered shake is based on one in Thoroughly Modern Milkshakes by Adam Ried.

Malted Caramel Shake
This recipe is based on one in Thoroughly Modern Milkshakes by Adam Ried.

Classic Vietnamese Dipping Sauce
This version of the classic Vietnamese dipping sauce is based on a recipe from SAVEUR contributing editor Andrea Nguyen, author of Into the Vietnamese Kitchen.

Chocolate–Almond Cookies
These traditional crumbly cookies from the Basilicata region of Italy are flavored with Strega, an Italian herbal liqueur.

Iceberg Wedge with Blue Cheese
This hearty wedge salad, which contains the classic elements of a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, is a version of one served at Old Homestead Steakhouse in New York City.

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People has published it’s 11 May 2009 issue. Featured in this issue are:

Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon share exclusive photos of their intimate seaside wedding in the Bahamas

Brad Pitt, a pregnant Angelina Jolie and their brood enjoy some family time on the beach in the south of France

New Orleans’s Neville Brothers play the Big Easy for the first time since Katrina

As she gets her life back on track, Britney Spears earns more visitation with her sons

Their White House quest ended, Elizabeth and John Edwards talk about the presidential race, health care and more

After surviving years of drug addiction, Robert Downey Jr. proves he’s one superstar in Iron Man

Rob Lowe’s legal woes continue as a second nanny files suit

All grown up, Christina Ricci roars into the multiplex in Speed Racer

After 17 years on the air, Montel Williams says goodbye to his talk show

Men prove that the job of bridesmaid isn’t just for women anymore

D.C. Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey hangs herself two weeks after being convicted of running a high-end prostitution ring

Hollywood A-listers hit the red carpet for the Metropolitan Museum’s annual Costume Institute Gala. Plus: a PEOPLE Exclusive! Giorgio Armani on making the dresses for the night’s big stars, including Julia Roberts and Katie Holmes

For Mother’s Day, Good Charlotte’s Joel and Benji Madden, Michael Bublé, Flavor Flav and other music stars pose with their No. 1 fans

Heroes Among Us
After a five-year search, Libba Phillips found her sister – and now gives hope to others seeking missing loved ones

Think you’ve got a lot going on in your head? Meet Jill Price, who remembers every single day of her life from the age of 14

Are plastic baby bottles safe? A new report raises concerns

American Idol’s Final Four – Syesha Mercado, David Cook, David Archuletand Jason Castro – reveal their secrets for surviving the competition

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PC Today has published the June 2009 issue. We used to assign the “camera phone” label to simple mobile phones with built-in digital cameras. Today, however, cameras are commonplace in ordinary mobile phones and smartphones alike. The cameras are getting better, too; some rival or exceed the average dedicated digital camera in picture quality. This month’s featured articles will help you make better use of your phone’s camera and the photos and videos you take with it. They’ll also help you choose the best mobile phone for photography and explain how to create professional videos on the go.

Say “Cheese” To Your Cell
A History Of The Camera Phone
It’s hard these days to buy a cell phone that doesn’t have a built-in camera. Whether you’re getting a cutting-edge smartphone such as the Apple iPhone or the Android-based T-Mobile G1, or a throwaway prepaid phone, putting a camera in there is so prevalent that it’s inspiring everything from locker room laws to an army of citizen documentarians who use them to share a visual record of the news the instant it happens. Where did these devices come from, what’s available on the market today, and where is all of this headed?

The idea of camera phones is as old as cameras and phones, but it wasn’t until 1993, when Daniel A. Henderson put together a couple of prototypes, that the two started to converge in a meaningful way. Dubbed the “Intellect,” Henderson’s design was for a phone that could display pictures received wirelessly instead of taking pictures and sending them wirelessly. On the other side of the equation, in 1994, Olympus released the Deltis VC-1100 digital camera, which couldn’t receive calls but could transmit pictures over the cell phone network.

When it came to realizing the full potential of combining cell phones with digital cameras, necessity, as with most things in the world of electronics, was the mother of invention. Back in 1997, Phillipe Kahn’s wife was due to have a baby, and Kahn, a billionaire who founded Borland and other companies, wanted a way to quickly send live pictures of his newborn daughter to friends and family. He had the know-how and the technical means necessary to tether a digital camera to his cell phone, so he used a cell phone to transmit the snapshots; thus, the camera phone as a tool for instant sharing was born.

Improve Your Cell Phone Photos
Better Pictures From The World’s Most Maligned Cameras
In the consumer electronics world, few gadgets get less respect than the cameras inside cell phones. Granted, cell phone cameras will likely never match the image quality and features of a high-end compact, let alone a digital SLR. That doesn’t mean you have to grudgingly tolerate their photographs as something less than the real thing.

To elevate your cell phone camera game, it just takes some attention to the input and output stages. Here’s how to get more out of your convergent camera.

Better photos begin with better shooting technique. Keep these pointers in mind the next time you aim and click.

• Understand your camera’s limitations.
• Then there’s autofocus.
• Set the camera to its highest resolution.
• Keep the lens clean.
• Ignore the digital zoom.
• Fill the frame.
• Let there be light.
• Brace yourself.
• Set the white balance.
• Shoot now, tweak later.

Photos Here, There & Everywhere
Store & Share Images On Your Mobile Phone
When a spontaneous photo opportunity arises, we’re more likely to have a mobile phone with an integrated camera handy than a dedicated digital camera. And because we almost always have our phones at the ready, we seem to find more photo ops than ever before. So what’s the best way to handle all of the images that accumulate on our phones? In this article, we’ll explore several ways in which you can store, back up, and share your mobile phone photos. Let’s start with a look at the basics.

After The Snap
After you snap a photo, the phone’s software sends the picture either to internal memory or to a microSD memory card, if you have one in the phone. If you want to store more than a few photos on your phone, a microSD card is helpful, if not a necessity, depending on the amount of storage space that is built into your phone. You can easily purchase cards that store between 1 and 16GB of data; cards with higher capacities are forthcoming, but even a 2GB card allows for plenty of storage space for the average user. Because mobile phone photos aren’t usually more than a few megapixels in size, individual photos won’t take up much space on your card.

Portable Video Production Made Easy
Create Quality Video That Will Impress
You own business suits. You proofread your marketing before making it available to the public. Quality of presentation matters, and quite often it can mean the difference between impressing clients and being dismissed by them. Given that, why do some companies, even multi-billion-dollar enterprises, seem to think it’s OK to post business-related videos that look like they were shot and produced by an 8-year-old?

Business video is increasingly important, but as a relatively new medium, not everyone yet appreciates the importance of treating digital video with the same quality standards we use for traditional media. The good news is that it doesn’t take much to go from posting low-grade video to producing something viewers would find engaging, pay attention to, and hopefully want to share.

The Future Of Mobile Imaging
More Than Bells & Whistles
Mobile tech changes faster than you can cycle through a two-year cell phone contract. By the time your plan suggests it’s time for a new mobile phone, chances are you’ve grown weary of the virtually obsolete device you thought was so impressive and feature-laden just a year or two before.

One of the ways mobile devices change quickly is in the realm of mobile imaging. The industry has moved from simple phones with monochrome screens to powerful devices that can stream video and capture photos and video at high resolutions.

And the latest and greatest innovations in mobile imaging are just around the corner.
 
We’ve Got Your Numbers
States with significant rural populations lead the way among U.S. households with mobile phones but no landline phone service, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Oklahoma takes the No. 1 spot with 26.2% of households; runners-up include Utah (25.5%), Nebraska (23.2%), Arkansas (22.6%), Iowa (22.2%), and Idaho (22.1%). The data is from 2007, the last full year for which complete information is available.
 
Noteworthy
Life got easier recently for iPhone owners who are also patrons of Choice Hotels, as the hotel chain made a free GPS-supported Choice Hotels Locator app available to book rooms from the device. Choice Hotels, which operates nearly 6,000 properties globally, claims the app is the first from a major hotel company. In-device features include making changes or canceling reservations, viewing street-level and hotel images, and acquiring door-to-door directions.

Tech To Watch
Wireless Open-Access Research Platform
Look up in the sky: It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s . . . streaming music, videos, documents, emails, and phone conversations! The unprecedented data access we enjoy today is largely thanks to a proliferation of wireless technologies, from Wi-Fi to Bluetooth to cellular to infrared and more. In fact, many of us would have difficulty imagining life without the omnipresent standards that make our remotes and televisions, smartphones, notebooks, PCs, and gadgets communicate like old friends. But for the most part, the wireless protocols and devices we use today were researched, designed, and created using proprietary test systems that were prohibitively expensive to develop and inherently limited to the tasks that the bankrolling companies and standards organizations set out to tackle. Rice University’s WARP (Wireless Open-Access Research Platform) aims to change that, and in so doing, open wireless networking to more creative problem solvers than ever before.

In 2006, a handful of Rice University researchers, led by Ashutosh Sabharwal, set out to create a wireless research platform that was inexpensive, easy to develop on, and freely open to anyone who wanted to use it. The group, part of Rice University’s CMC (Center for Multimedia Communication), created WARP as a platform consisting of customizable hardware and communications blocks that enable researchers to modify electrical connections to suit any high-performance wireless communication application as needed. CMC designed the FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array)-based circuit boards to accommodate multiple analog and digital wideband radios and specialized processors, several I/O (input/output) interfaces for communications with testing hardware and computers, and also included a set of algorithms adept at handling wireless communications. WARP boards are flexible enough that researchers can test multiple radio transmitters, wireless routers, and network access points by writing simple programs that transform the WARP board into whatever device is needed.

Greenovations
Energy-Conscious Tech
On the front side, Samsung’s Blue Earth looks like any other touchscreen mobile phone, but the entire back is covered with a solar panel, so you can use the sun’s rays to charge it and rely less on power outlets. Additionally, the Blue Earth is constructed using PCM, which is a plastic created mostly from recycled bottles. Samsung indicates that the phone—and its charger—contain no environmentally toxic substances, such as brominated flame retardants or beryllium. To save energy while in use, the Blue Earth offers an Eco mode that sets the screen brightness, backlight duration, and Bluetooth power to more energy-efficient levels. It’ll be available in the UK during the second half of 2009; no release date has been set for the U.S.

The electronic devices that make our lives easier also produce some unwanted side effects on the environment. Fortunately, many consumer electronics manufacturers are now making products that keep us productive and lessen our device’s energy demands. In this article, we’ll cover some of the newest environmentally friendly technology available.
 
BlackBerry Tips
Secure Your Device
The latest reports tell us that President Barack Obama got to keep his Research In Motion BlackBerry when he took office. We may never fully know the extent to which his BlackBerry was altered to meet security requirements, but according to an ABC News report, RIM worked with government officials in making enhancements to make communications even more secure. Still, if the BlackBerry has what it takes to become the First Smartphone, then you can rest assured it will protect your data like it was wearing black sunglasses and an earpiece.

BlackBerry has received more worldwide security accreditations than any other wireless device. An independent Common Criteria evaluation facility awarded the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and BlackBerry software with Common Criteria EAL 2+ (Evaluation Assurance Level 2 augmented) validations, making BlackBerry the first mobile platform to receive the international standard’s certification. Common Criteria Certification verifies that the BlackBerry platform delivers independently assured security features.
 
Windows Mobile Tips
Windows Mobile Marketplace & My Phone Deliver More Personalized Phones
The introduction of Windows Mobile 6.5 for Windows phones turned a lot of heads, but two other announcements have had a similar impact. The introduction of Windows Mobile Marketplace and the Windows My Phone at Mobile World Congress in February has caught the attention of Windows Mobile users, as the duo has the potential to boost their productivity levels.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer appeared at Mobile World Congress and explained that the mission of this new generation of Windows phones (complete with Windows Mobile 6.5, Windows Mobile Marketplace, and My Phone) is to create a single device that can serve as a business and personal mobile device and let users live a more organized and seamless lifestyle. We take a closer look at how Windows Mobile Marketplace and My Phone can help you enhance your Windows Mobile phone.

Digital Downtime
Notes On The Latest In Digital Music & Video
Music, photos, videos, movies, TV shows, podcasts, FM radio, audio books, calendars, contacts, file browsers, touchscreens, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and on and on. Yeah, today’s portable audio and video players give you pretty much the whole enchilada and a side of nachos to boot. For the latest software, hardware, accessories, services, content, and tips concerning portable audio and video players, belly up and dig in.

Save Energy (& Money)
Through Green Computing
These days, “green” is king. Whether that green is the color of cash or a sign of eco-friendliness, they’re really two sides of the same leaf. Saving energy means saving money. We all want to wean ourselves away from super-sized watt consumption, but relatively few of us have a good idea of where to start. We’ve got some food for thought.

There are good reasons to turn in your desktops for laptops. You can look at things in terms of either total power draw or total efficiency, meaning performance per watt. According to EfficientProducts.org, “the average desktop computer (without its accompanying monitor) now consumes 200 to 400kWh per year of electricity (nearly as much as a highly efficient refrigerator). Laptops consume about 80 to 140kWh per year.”

But although a laptop consumes one-third to one-quarter of the power of a desktop, it definitely offers more than one-third of the performance. CPU and graphics manufacturers have made tremendous strides in bringing their mobile products to parity or near-parity with desktop components. Chip cores are often made using the exact same architectures. Only customizable details, such as frequency, amount of memory, and bus speeds, tend to vary between desktop and mobile processors.

Google Latitude
What It Is & How To Use It
It’s the eternal cry of every spouse, friend, and manager: “Where are you?” Well, if you and yours run Google Maps with the new Latitude feature, you won’t have to ask. You’ll be able to see it on the Web browser of any PC and many smartphones.

Essentially, Latitude is a tracker designed to let you see the geographic location of certain people on a Google map—and likewise for them to see you—provided both parties approve of being visible via a double opt-in. A lot of people get riled up about Latitude as an invasion of privacy, but this seems far-fetched and ill-considered. First, you have to enable the Latitude service manually. Then you invite people whose locations you want to see, and they have to agree to let you see them. It’s a buddy list, and everyone has to agree to be on it. That doesn’t mean that if you invite Bob, Sue, and Jackson into your Latitude circle of friends, they can all see each other. They’re only giving you permission to see them on their own terms. Bob couldn’t see Sue’s location unless they established their own Latitude relationship.

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The Car Collector Magazine has published its May 2009 issue. Featured are articles on a review of the past years Bugatti auctions, 1913 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost Town Carriage, Pioneering Hardtop Convertible Coupes of General Motors 1949-1950, McFarlan Carriage Company, and part 3 of “Who put the muscle in the muscle cars?”

The Year of the Bugatti
The last 12 months have been a Bugatti Bonanza.
Dr. Peter and Susan Williamson’s Type 57SC Atalante for $7,920,000, Earl Howe’s Type 57S Atalante for $4,399,743, the ex-Bill Serri Type 55 for $3,240,033, Black Bess for $3,125,201 and even the 2009 Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport for $3,190,000 have led a parade of Bugattis, great and small, across various auction blocks in the past twelve months that made 2008-2009 a Bugatti Year at the auctions.

Even the Baby Bugattis, the two Type 52s, brought surprising prices, $54,990 for Richard C. Paine, Jr.’s aged but nearly completely original example last September and the Williamsons’ similarly original but much better maintained example for $110,000. Prices like these contributed to 27 Bugatti transactions in the past year which added up to $33,688,618, a total much enhanced by the sale of Earl Howe’s Atalante and “Black Bess” at Bonhams Rétromobile auction in early February. That is a lot of money, the kind of totals usually associated with Ferraris [which, it should be noted, accounted for 119 transactions in cars dated 1975 and earlier in the same period, a total of $102,968,000!]

The Bugatti total would have been even more except for the strength of the US dollar which cut deeply into the US$ values of transactions at the recent Bonhams auction at Rétromobile. The dollar’s value rose more than 12% between the 2008 and 2009 Rétromobile dates so although the dollar totals for the sales in the table are nearly the same the Euro total was up 14.2%. The effect of the dollar’s rise (or the Euro’s fall, depending upon your point of view) is so important that the Euro values for the sale total and average transaction are included in the table.

1913 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost Town Carriage

In Great Britain there has only been one word for luxury when it comes to motorcars…well, actually two words, Rolls-Royce, created by the amalgamation of C. S. Rolls & Co. and Royce & Co. Ltd., in March of 1906. The following year Messrs. Frederick Henry Royce and Charles Stewart Rolls introduced the 40/50hp model at the Olympia Motor Show. The 40/50hp was to become known as the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, a name chosen by Claude Johnson, managing director of the newly organized Rolls-Royce Ltd., and a man whose role within the company, some say was so significant, that he is literally the hyphen in Rolls-Royce. The original Silver Ghost was the 13th car produced and featured a distinctive silver-gray color scheme and silver-plated fitments.

In Great Britain there has only been one word for luxury when it comes to motorcars…well, actually two words, Rolls-Royce, created by the amalgamation of C. S. Rolls & Co. and Royce & Co. Ltd., in March of 1906…. more

From the onset, Rolls-Royce automobiles established an international standard for quality, luxury, and meticulous engineering. By 1910 the Silver Ghost was the most desirable luxury automobile in the world, a car for sheiks, monarchs, heads of state, captains of industry, and not too infrequently military officers of note, such as Col. T.E. Lawrence. During WWI the famed “Lawrence of Arabia” made use of several armored Silver Ghosts.

Who Put The Muscle in the Muscle Car? Part III

Knowing that internal combustion engines are basically big air pumps, it only follows that one of these contraption’s chances of functioning in fast fashion is only as good as its ability to vent the bad stuff out with relative rapidity. Once mixed with fuel molecules, the good air can rush towards a combustion chamber all it wants but can’t get all the way in until spent gases—resulting each time a spark plug sets things off—finish evacuating the premises. Stuffing in a lumpier cam, increasing valve sizes, massaging cylinder head passages for better flow characteristics; tweaks like these represent sure-fire ways to speed the process along yet basically don’t mean spit unless all that bad air keeps zooming along after it leaves the heads.

Ah, but then comes the rub. When those sparks fly they make mucho racket, and local constabularies have long mandated that such ear-splitting noise be muffled down to socially acceptable degrees. These degrees have varied over the years and still do depending on the jurisdiction you’re passing through, not to mention the vehicle you’re operating. Trucks continue to rumble away seemingly everywhere today with little fear of inciting citations, and we won’t even mention all those window-rattling two-wheeled hogs and crotch-rockets. Well, maybe we will. Hey Easy Rider, could ya keep it down a little? We’re trying to enjoy a Metallica concert over here.

A-B+C=Hardtops
The Pioneering Hardtop Convertible Coupes of General Motors 1949-1950

Certainly not regarded as a classic mathematical formula, A-B+C=Hardtop was nonetheless a magical formula for success for nearly every automobile manufacturer during the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. The simple omission of the “B” pillar would create nothing short of a styling sensation that would become the latest “must have” fad for car hungry consumers following World War II. The idea was really nothing new as manufacturers flirted with the concept from the early days of the automobile. Chrysler is arguably given credit for the first modern hardtop when beginning in 1946 pillar-less coupe roofs were bolted onto Town & Country Convertible bodies. Known as the Custom Club Coupe, just seven were produced through 1950 due to the heavy handwork required on the already complicated metal and wood body construction.

During the early years of the body style, the hardtop convertible designation was commonly used. It was nothing more than a literal interpretation of the car’s construction, essentially a convertible body and frame with a steel top. In addition to the missing central “B” pillar, the notchback roofline used a large, three-section wraparound rear window with more glass area than the sedan model. The windshield was also subtly different with chrome coverings for the corner posts. This created an especially light and bright interior giving the illusion of added space.

McFarlan & Fatty
A larger than life car for a larger than life character
Fatty Arbuckle’s 1923 McFarlan Model 154 Knickerbocker Cabriolet

In 1909, in the quiet Indiana town of Connersville, where the McFarlan Carriage Company had been manufacturing wagons and carriages since 1856, it was rumored and then confirmed in the trade press that the wagon works was going to begin building motorcars. Later in 1909 that became a fact when the first McFarlan automobile rolled out of the Connersville factory.

Getting into the motor trade was the idea of Harry McFarlan, grandson of the company’s founder John B. McFarlan.  Harry chose to present his new cars to the public with some fanfare by testing them on the track at Indianapolis over the Labor Day weekend in 1910!  The McFarlans finished third and fifth, and fourth and fifth, in two races held the year before the first Indianapolis 500.  It was an impressive first outing and cars began to sell in small numbers, about 200 a year, which was all that Harry could build from the wagon works.

In 1913 the company was reorganized as the McFarlan Motor Car Company.  As a manufacturer of exclusively hand-built luxury cars, McFarlans were very pricey from the start, beginning at around $2,000 and rising to a lofty $9,000 in 1923 when the company built this almost larger-than-life Knickerbocker Cabriolet for film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.

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Connecticut magazine has released their April 2009 issue. Featured in the magazine are articles on mom’s who band together, private schools, outdoor living, and Connecticut travel.

Angry Moms

From greener soccer fields to safer toys and cleaner drinking water, Connecticut moms who band together have been able to make big impacts on their communities when necessary.

Private Schools: Are They Worth the Money?

To ensure their children get what they perceive as the best possible education, many parents are willing to pay hefty tuitions for private schooling. Quite often, they get what they desire — more diverse curriculum, smaller classes, greater individual attention.

Connecticut Home: Outdoor Living

We look at the latest trends in outdoor living for your home, from pergolas and canopies to all-weather furniture and grills.

Connecticut Travel: Triple Plays

Oftentimes, a choice of travel destination comes down to a “triple play” of factors: where to stay, where to eat and what to do. We visit six spots in Connecticut that offer all three in spades.

Special Section: Top Docs

This year in our exclusive survey, we list over 600 physicians in 24 different specialties who were recommended by their peers.

Columns And Departments

Lary Bloom’s Notebook

The University of Connecticut’s masters program in Homeland Security Leadership is unique in its focus: getting inside the mind of a terrorist.

First

The importance of a conviction in the Eddie Perez corruption case, profiles of actress Lauren Ambrose and author Tony Abbott, the rivalry between the state House and Senate, and more.

This Month

The monthly assortment of plays, shows, exhibitions, fairs and events as well as guitarist Leo Kottke, the Litchfield Writer’s Project and the art of Nelson White.

From the Field/Everywhere Bears

The number of bears in Connecticut has been increasing, as have the challenges in ursine relations — they’re not just after picnic baskets, Boo Boo.

The Connecticut Table

The food is as exciting as the nightlife at 116 Crown in New Haven and Shrine in Mashantucket. Plus chef du jour Noel Jones, Table Talk and the state’s most comprehensive dining guide.

Being There

Making a pilgrimage to the shrine at Lourdes in Litchfield.

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Simple and Delicious has published its May/June 2009 issue. Featured in this magazine is an “how to grill guide” containing 75 grilling recipes, 30-Minute Menu: Pizza Pasta Toss & Salad Greens, several desert recipes which can be made in 10 minutes, and preparing for a Memorial Day party.

How-to Grill Guide
Kick off the summer barbeque season with Taste of Home! In this how-to grill guide, we share our favorite grilled chicken, steak, pork and ribs grilling recipes, along with our best BBQ tips and grill menu ideas.

Get ready for summer and play our Get Grilling Instant Win Game daily for a chance to WIN amazing prizes like a new Weber® Grill and delicious Omaha Steaks®!

1. Top 10 Grilled Chicken Recipes
2. Top 10 Burger Recipes
3. Top 10 Grilled Ribs Recipes
4. Top 10 Grilled Steak Recipes
5. Top 10 Grilled Pork Recipes
6. Top 10 Grilled Fish Recipes
7. Top 10 Grilled Vegetable Recipes
8. Top 5 Grilled Dessert Recipes

30-Minute Menu: Pizza Pasta Toss & Salad Greens

At home in historic Beverly, West Virginia, realtor Lori Daniels’ two girls, Hannah, 11, and Heidi, 7, keep her constantly on the go with Girl Scouts, basketball, music and church activities. And then there’s work. “As a realtor, you need to be flexible with your schedule to accommodate customers and clients who work or come from out of state,” Lori says.

Luckily, Steve, her husband of 17 years, helps to get meals on the table. Besides being a machinist and welder, Steve also raises Black Angus cattle and has a garden, from which he harvests many of the fruits and vegetables Lori uses to prepare nearly 10 meals weekly!

Ready in 10 Desserts
Fast-fixing 10-minute dessert recipes

Peanut Butter Delights
I’ve been making these sweet peanut butter parfaits for years, so I do it by memory now. Instead of sprinkling the top of these Peanut Butter Delights with chocolate chips, use chocolate syrup to create a gourmet design.

Angel Food Cake with Fruit
I get so many compliments on this Angel Food Cake with Fruit dish, and it’s so simple to make. Fruit and peach pie filling create a lovely sauce—in just 10 minutes!

Black Forest Sundaes
This dessert makes a sweet ending, and best of all, Black Forest Sundaes take just five minutes to prepare! My husband and grandchildren just love them.

Garden-Fresh Recipes
Make the most of spring produce with these delicious recipes.

Tangy Asparagus Potato Salad
I look forward to making this Tangy Asparagus Potato Salad whenever asparagus season rolls around. It’s been our family’s favorite for years.

Italian Spinach Salad
Here’s a quick, colorful veggie salad as refreshing as springtime itself. Italian Spinach Salad is also pretty as a picture and a great way to use up all those extra hard-cooked Easter eggs!

Rhubarb Lemon Muffins
My father has a rhubarb plant and gives me some every spring. I stew a portion of it for him, but always save a little for a new recipe. Rhubarb Lemon Muffins is one of the tastiest I’ve tried.

Memorial Day Picnic Recipes & Tips
Start the summer off right with these recipes and party tips for your Memorial Day celebration.

Memorial Day Party Planning Tips
Although Memorial Day has simply come to symbolize the start of summer for many people, its true purpose is to honor the men and women who lost their lives while serving our country. Here are a few ways you can observe the real meaning of Memorial Day with your family:

1. Take time to explain the meaning of Memorial Day to children or grandchildren.
2. Proudly fly the American flag.
3. Take your family to a Memorial Day parade in your community.
4. Place a donation in an American Legion kettle and get a red poppy for your lapel.
5. Make a point of attending a ceremony at the local war memorial.
6. Stop by a local cemetery and place flags on the graves of fallen soldiers.

Pirate Party
Throw a pirate-themed birthday party with these fun recipes, games and cake decorating ideas!

Yo-Ho-Ho Game Ideas
Make your own “pin the eye patch on the pirate” game.

Hold a treasure hunt, complete with treasure map, messages (clues) in bottles, and prizes like pirate story books, eye patches, bandanas, gold-covered candy coins and candy necklaces.

Hide a ticking egg timer and let kids try to locate Captain Hook’s hidden crocodile before the bell rings.

Have a three-legged “peg-leg pirate race.”

Divide the kids into two teams for a water balloon battle using red and black balloons (or foam balls).

Toss bean bags into an open treasure chest.

Pool Party Tips
To keep salads, meats and desserts cold and safe at a summer party, I place all the containers in a pleasing arrangement in a small, inflatable child-size swimming pool. Then I sprinkle bags of ice cubes around everything. I also use netting from a fabric store to keep flies and other pesky bugs out of the food. I have enough to cover the tables, too. After the party, I wash the fabric on the gentle cycle in the washing machine and air-dry it for future use.

I make gelatin for picnics and pour it into individual plastic containers with mini marshmallows on top. To make it special, I sprinkle with pastel marshmallows. Kids always enjoy this treat. Plus, this prevents spills that can occur when you’re spooning from a larger bowl.

Scooping ice cream at a party is always so messy and time-consuming. Therefore, before a party I place single scoops of ice cream in paper cupcake liners and pop them back into the freezer until they’re ready to serve.

When you’re grilling lots of chicken wings for an outdoor party, speed up the basting by putting the sauce in a spray bottle and spraying it on the wings as they cook.

Recipe Index

Breads

Pull-Apart Sticky Bun Ring
Breakfast/Brunch
Bacon Vegetable Quiche

Dessert

Blueberry Ice Cream Tart
Chocolate Zucchini Cupcakes
Coconut-Layered Pound Cake
Cookie Sundaes
Hidden Treasure Cupcakes
Triple Chocolate Cake

Snack Loot

Summer Fruit Cooler
Summer Fruit Salad
Summer Fruit Salad for 2
Summer Strawberry Soup
Vegetable Pasta Salad

Main Dish

All-American Loaded Burgers
Asian Pork Burgers
Buffalo Turkey with Linguine
Grilled BBQ Meatball Pizzas
Grilled Vegetable Sandwich
Hash Brown Pork Skillet
Hearty Sirloin Pitas
Macaroni & Cheese Bake
Meaty Noodle Casserole
Monterey Chicken
Orzo-Stuffed Peppers
Pasta Carbonara
Pepperoni Provolone Pizzas
Pizza Pasta Toss
Potato-Topped Chicken Casserole
Ranch Turkey Wraps
Ranch Turkey Wraps for 2
Roasted Turkey Breast Tenderloins & Vegetables
Shrimp & Broccoli with Pasta
Shrimp Burritos
Smoked Kielbasa with Rice
Swiss Steak Burgers
Swiss Steak Burgers for 2
Taco Turkey Burgers
Tortellini and Ham
Zesty Tacos

Salads

Cobb Salad with Chili-Lime Dressing
Fruit Flower Garden
Fruited Chicken Pasta Salad

Sandwich

Pirate Ship Sandwich
Pizza Burgers
Toasted Artichoke Sandwiches
Side Dish
Bacon-Wrapped Asparagus
Flavorful Red Potatoes
Fried Onion Rings

Soup

Smoked Sausage Gumbo

Low Carb

Asian Pork Tenderloins
Balsamic Almond Chicken
Balsamic Almond Chicken for 2
Chili Cheese Dip
Crustless Chicken Quiche
Greek-Stuffed Hamburgers
Green Beans with Pecans
Italian Pot Roast
Mediterranean Green Salad
Orange-Glazed Salmon
Salmon with Vegetable Salsa
Steaks with Mushroom Sauce
Steaks with Mushroom Sauce for 2
Summer Squash Casserole

Low Fat

Corn Salsa
Herb Vegetable Medley
Orange Rhubarb Sauce
Salad Greens & Creamy Sweet Dressing

Lower Fat

Asparagus with Dill Sauce
Basil Red Potatoes
Basil Red Potatoes for 2
Berry Delicious Rhubarb Crisp
Cajun Potato Wedges
Cereal Snack Mix
Citrus Chicken
Green Salad with Pepperoni and Cheese
Grilled Artichoke-Mushroom Pizza
Grilled Asian Flank Steak
Grilled Lemon Chicken
Grilled Vegetable Platter
Honey-Glazed Lamb Chops
Iced Coffee Latte
Italian Tossed Salad
Out to Sea Pasta Shell Salad
Parmesan Breadsticks
Pork Chops Creole
Pork Chops with Blackberry Sauce
Radish Asparagus Salad
Seasoned Tilapia Fillets
Slow Cooker Sloppy Joes
Southwestern Corn Salad
Strawberries with Chocolate Cream Filling
Toffee Bars
Tropical Pie
Turkey Stir-Fry with Cabbage

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