SARASOTA COUNTY - The Legacy Trail's parking problems on its north end and its gaps due to the lack of trestles to the south are the focus of a flurry of actions by county commissioners this week.
Another clue to the parking puzzle along the increasingly popular 11-mile trail fell into place as the county agreed Tuesday to spend $2.9 million to buy land for parking and other uses along the trail's entry on Bay Street in Osprey.
"We're pretty much good to go on the south side," said Parks Director John McCarthy. The 10-acre land purchase should relieve parking problems to the south, but parking in Palmer Ranch at the north end of the 11-mile-long trail remains a problem.
Because of neighborhood complaints, county commissioners also voted Tuesday to ban parking on the east side of McIntosh Road near the trail. There is a nearby county park where trail users can park, but apparently they feel it is too far away and have been parking along McIntosh.
The county is talking with Palmer Ranch Holdings about using a portion of its property near the north terminus of the trail, and parks staff were told to explore whether land owned by the county's sewer utility about a mile to the south could be connected to the trail and opened for parking.
County commissioners are expected today to set aside $2.5 million toward funding the final $6 million of the trail's costs.
That will be for building trestles across Dona and Roberts bays. In all, the trail is expected to cost $32 million. The county expects to put the trestles out for bid early next year and finish the projects by late 2010.
Parking on the north side of Bay Street adjacent to the trail should be in place this fall. The county will then conduct public meetings to figure out what else the neighborhood would like to see on the property, McCarthy said. Restrooms are likely, as are picnic areas. A ballfield is needed in the area and there may be a need for a simple, open, peaceful area off the trail, he said.
The property is being bought from Dennis T. and Mary Ann Marlin. With closing and start-up costs, the county expects it will spend $3.1 million opening the new park.
By Doug Sword www.heraldtribune.com 7/23/08
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Osprey tiki bar can reopen, but must keep noise down
OSPREY - Drinks will begin flowing again at a long-shuttered Osprey tiki bar in early October but drunken crooners be warned: Karaoke is forbidden and live music will be strictly curtailed.
County leaders agreed to end a four-year legal dispute Tuesday with Casey Key Fish House owner Jimmy Von Hubertz over his detached tiki bar, but not without some elaborate and unusual conditions designed to control noise.
County leaders agreed to end a four-year legal dispute Tuesday with Casey Key Fish House owner Jimmy Von Hubertz over his detached tiki bar, but not without some elaborate and unusual conditions designed to control noise.
Neighbors repeatedly complained about loud music at the tiki bar, leading county officials to rule in 2004 that the structure was illegal and shut it down.
Von Hubertz sued, and on Tuesday the Sarasota County Commission agreed to a settlement agreement that will allow the bar to reopen but only offer live music on weekends until 9 p.m. -- as opposed to 10 p.m. for outdoor music countywide.
In addition, the music must be kept to 70 decibels, which is lower than the countywide standard of 75 decibels.
The agreement even specifies where bands can set up on the property (they must face away from nearby homes) and the type of music that can be played: Island style, soft rock and jazz.
Von Hubertz also is limited to three-piece bands without amplified bass on all but seven holiday weekends totaling 20 days.
"You've gotten really specific on this, which is fine," said Commissioner Nora Patterson.
Von Hubertz sat down with neighbors last week at the bar to hash out the music restrictions. A neighbor even paid to have a sound engineer measure noise levels.
"I want to make my neighbors happy," he said.
Von Hubertz said the battle over the tiki bar -- which he plans to demolish and rebuild as a "Chickee Hut" that does not need to be permitted because it is built by American Indians -- was a battle to preserve a piece of Old Florida at the 1950s-era Fish House.
"This was a victory for the whole community," he said.
Commissioners agreed.
"This is a jewel," said Commission Chair Shannon Staub. "There were an awful lot of people that were not disturbed by the music but now that it's reined in, it's going to be as good as it was before."
By Zac Anderson Heraldtribune.com 7/23/08
Saturday, July 19, 2008
The star manatee gets a party and an AARP card
BRADENTON - For the guest of honor today, there will be no cake. There will be crowds of well-wishers and there will be singing -- "Happy Birthday" is at high noon -- and there will be cookies for those gathered to toast another milestone in the extraordinary life of the world's oldest manatee.
But for the object of all this affection at Parker Manatee Aquarium, there will be no cake, no cookies, no special treat beyond the apple he has come to expect first thing every morning, and perhaps an extra head of cabbage.
At 60, Snooty has a weight problem.
When he hit 1,380 pounds awhile back, his keepers cut out the pineapple and strawberries, and today Snooty carries a trim 1,260 on his 9 feet 4 inches, snout to tail, with a waist of 89 inches.
Also, there will be no cake for Snooty because Snooty is an animal, although this fact may be easily overlooked in the giddy barrage of Disney-esque hoopla his special birthday is likely to provoke.
Born in captivity in Miami and a resident of Bradenton for all but his first year of life, Snooty, nee Baby Snoots, is by now as humanized as any marine mammal ever known outside the Magic Kingdom.
He pulls himself half out of his 60,000-gallon tank (Bradenton tap water) and leans on powerful shoulders to demand a little face-to-face with visitors.
He sleeps on his back sometimes, with his flippers crossed over his chest.
He has fingernails (well, flippernails) and a navel.
He flirts.
He sulks.
He loves a party.
But birthday cake, no.
The feeling at the Parker Manatee Aquarium is that you have to draw the line somewhere.
Given to titanic flatulence in the best of circumstances, all-vegetarian, all-natural, nonfat Snooty would likely not react well to refined sugar and eggs.
Matters of metabolism aside, though, "there's a danger in going too far with humanizing any animal," says Marilyn Margold, director of the aquarium.
"With an endangered species, in particular, I don't think it's healthy. You lose respect for them in the wild."
Snooty has never seen the wild, nor will he. He is one of four manatees in the state officially designated by wildlife authorities as non-releasable, because their long lifetimes in captivity have stunted the survival skills they would need "out there."
In exchange for confinement, Snooty has survived roughly 10 times longer than the typical manatee in the wild.
As far as anyone at Parker Aquarium knows, he has survived longer than any manatee anywhere, ever.
Current laws ban the breeding of manatees, or their extended confinement for any but medical reasons, so there will quite literally never be another Snooty.
Thus, these public birthday celebrations, which have been going on annually since 1993, are an occasion of considerable magnitude in Bradenton, where last year 4,000 people turned out for the big event.
The actual date of the manatee's birth is July 21, but Mondays are no good at all for a birthday party, in part because Snooty has to work the day afterward and these birthday events take it out of him.
"He'll be tired the next day," says Margold. "He'll need Sunday to rest up."
With an active schedule of 24 performances a week, plus pretty much nonstop interaction with visitors and staff for 10 hours a day, Monday through Saturday, plus these birthday parties, plus the annual Snooty Gala every November, when black-tied donors and patrons get their own private moments, Snooty is the hardest working manatee in show business.
Lately, he has been enduring the additional burden of Baby Coral, a young manatee convalescing from propeller injuries and due for release soon.
Baby Coral is a bit of a pest. She eats his food and plays with his toys -- "environmental enrichments" to the aquarium staff, hula hoops and plastic bowling balls to the rest of us -- and she follows Snooty around like a kid sister until he sends her away with an exasperated chirp.
More than a dozen manatees have roomed here since his tank was made big enough for guests in 1993. Snooty has never shown much interest.
He prefers to swim alone, and slowly, snacking from time to time on a head of romaine, 45 of them a day, on average. When Snooty gets to the hard, white core of the lettuce he spits it out with a contemptuous smack. His pool is littered with rejected cellulose by the end of the day.
Snooty is a manatee of very specific tastes.
He enjoys pineapple juice but dislikes bananas. He prefers women to men. He retains an eye for blondes, possibly because his first keeper was a tow-headed girl.
Snooty is believed to have a special fondness for Tippi Hedren, the aggressively blonde star of Hitchcock's "The Birds" and mother to Melanie Griffith, who is one definition of blonde.
An animal rights activist, Hedren came by for a Snooty inspection when she was in the area for the Sarasota Film Festival a few years ago. She has since been back to his tank twice.
Snooty's international fan base -- he is particularly big in Germany, for some reason -- includes among its ranks a number of individuals who might on principle oppose the lifetime confinement of any animal.
"Snooty is just special," shrugs Pat Rose, longtime executive director of Orlando-based Save the Manatees, which has endeavored for 25 years to protect the dwindling species in the wild.
For his 60th, Rose's group scored Snooty a membership in the AARP.
"We talked about some sort of floating cake, but this is better.
"I hope he likes it," says Rose.
By Bill Hutchinson
Published: Saturday, July 19, 2008 www.heraldtribune.com
But for the object of all this affection at Parker Manatee Aquarium, there will be no cake, no cookies, no special treat beyond the apple he has come to expect first thing every morning, and perhaps an extra head of cabbage.At 60, Snooty has a weight problem.
When he hit 1,380 pounds awhile back, his keepers cut out the pineapple and strawberries, and today Snooty carries a trim 1,260 on his 9 feet 4 inches, snout to tail, with a waist of 89 inches.
Also, there will be no cake for Snooty because Snooty is an animal, although this fact may be easily overlooked in the giddy barrage of Disney-esque hoopla his special birthday is likely to provoke.
Born in captivity in Miami and a resident of Bradenton for all but his first year of life, Snooty, nee Baby Snoots, is by now as humanized as any marine mammal ever known outside the Magic Kingdom.
He pulls himself half out of his 60,000-gallon tank (Bradenton tap water) and leans on powerful shoulders to demand a little face-to-face with visitors.
He sleeps on his back sometimes, with his flippers crossed over his chest.
He has fingernails (well, flippernails) and a navel.
He flirts.
He sulks.
He loves a party.
But birthday cake, no.
The feeling at the Parker Manatee Aquarium is that you have to draw the line somewhere.
Given to titanic flatulence in the best of circumstances, all-vegetarian, all-natural, nonfat Snooty would likely not react well to refined sugar and eggs.
Matters of metabolism aside, though, "there's a danger in going too far with humanizing any animal," says Marilyn Margold, director of the aquarium.
"With an endangered species, in particular, I don't think it's healthy. You lose respect for them in the wild."
Snooty has never seen the wild, nor will he. He is one of four manatees in the state officially designated by wildlife authorities as non-releasable, because their long lifetimes in captivity have stunted the survival skills they would need "out there."
In exchange for confinement, Snooty has survived roughly 10 times longer than the typical manatee in the wild.
As far as anyone at Parker Aquarium knows, he has survived longer than any manatee anywhere, ever.
Current laws ban the breeding of manatees, or their extended confinement for any but medical reasons, so there will quite literally never be another Snooty.
Thus, these public birthday celebrations, which have been going on annually since 1993, are an occasion of considerable magnitude in Bradenton, where last year 4,000 people turned out for the big event.
The actual date of the manatee's birth is July 21, but Mondays are no good at all for a birthday party, in part because Snooty has to work the day afterward and these birthday events take it out of him.
"He'll be tired the next day," says Margold. "He'll need Sunday to rest up."
With an active schedule of 24 performances a week, plus pretty much nonstop interaction with visitors and staff for 10 hours a day, Monday through Saturday, plus these birthday parties, plus the annual Snooty Gala every November, when black-tied donors and patrons get their own private moments, Snooty is the hardest working manatee in show business.
Lately, he has been enduring the additional burden of Baby Coral, a young manatee convalescing from propeller injuries and due for release soon.
Baby Coral is a bit of a pest. She eats his food and plays with his toys -- "environmental enrichments" to the aquarium staff, hula hoops and plastic bowling balls to the rest of us -- and she follows Snooty around like a kid sister until he sends her away with an exasperated chirp.
More than a dozen manatees have roomed here since his tank was made big enough for guests in 1993. Snooty has never shown much interest.
He prefers to swim alone, and slowly, snacking from time to time on a head of romaine, 45 of them a day, on average. When Snooty gets to the hard, white core of the lettuce he spits it out with a contemptuous smack. His pool is littered with rejected cellulose by the end of the day.
Snooty is a manatee of very specific tastes.
He enjoys pineapple juice but dislikes bananas. He prefers women to men. He retains an eye for blondes, possibly because his first keeper was a tow-headed girl.
Snooty is believed to have a special fondness for Tippi Hedren, the aggressively blonde star of Hitchcock's "The Birds" and mother to Melanie Griffith, who is one definition of blonde.
An animal rights activist, Hedren came by for a Snooty inspection when she was in the area for the Sarasota Film Festival a few years ago. She has since been back to his tank twice.
Snooty's international fan base -- he is particularly big in Germany, for some reason -- includes among its ranks a number of individuals who might on principle oppose the lifetime confinement of any animal.
"Snooty is just special," shrugs Pat Rose, longtime executive director of Orlando-based Save the Manatees, which has endeavored for 25 years to protect the dwindling species in the wild.
For his 60th, Rose's group scored Snooty a membership in the AARP.
"We talked about some sort of floating cake, but this is better.
"I hope he likes it," says Rose.
By Bill Hutchinson
Published: Saturday, July 19, 2008 www.heraldtribune.com
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
New group dedicated to Sarasota Bay
And the Sarasota Bay Watch was born. The nonprofit organization's first official day was Monday in the form of a press conference at the Longboat Key Chamber of Commerce.
The health of Sarasota Bay and its surrounding waters has a deep economic impact on communities from Bradenton to Venice. SBW President Rusty Chinnis pointed out that builders, developers, realtors, as well as fishing guides, restaurants and coastal resorts, depend on the bay's health.
Chinnis said Sarasota Bay Watch is committed to restoring and preserving Sarasota Bay's ecosystem and its resources through community education and citizen participation.
The "Sarasota Bay Great Scallop Search" on Aug. 23 will be the SBW's first event. At Sarasota's Ken Thompson Park, the boating event will be composed of 30 boats and their crews, who will be given areas of grass flats to search. After recording the scallops and bringing them back to the park, there will be an opportunity to learn about scallops from noon to 2 p.m. The general public is invited.
All boating participants will receive complimentary lunches and T-shirts.
Because the SBW is an independent, autonomous organization, SBW members will have the capacity to make a decision and carry out a certain task themselves, immediately.
There are good indications that the bay has temporarily returned to health, but much effort will be needed to maintain such healthy levels.
One of those positives is the vast supply of scallops, which MOTE Marine Laboratory staff scientist Dr. Jay Leverone said is a record number for the Sarasota-through -Tampa Bay area compared to past years. Scallops were basically wiped out locally after the 2005 red tide, but have made an astounding recovery. The healthy scallop population is an indication of good health, including factors such as high oxygen levels.
But scallop populations rise and fall frenetically, partially due to the fact that scallops can live up to one year.
Chinnis, a freelance outdoors writer, was the first president of the Manatee Chapter of the Florida Conservation Association (now CCA). He is an avid and locally well-known fly-fisherman.
Other board members of the Sarasota Bay Watch are John Ryan, Ryan Denton, Lowe Morrison, Sandy Gilbert, Charlotte Richardson and Capt. Jonnie Walker of Bay Walker Charters.
Chinnis said that START (Solutions to Avoid Red Tide) played a crucial part in the formation of the SBW.
The organization was put together in six months.
Nick Walter @ nwalter@bradenton.com
July 16, 2008 www.BradentonHerald.com
The health of Sarasota Bay and its surrounding waters has a deep economic impact on communities from Bradenton to Venice. SBW President Rusty Chinnis pointed out that builders, developers, realtors, as well as fishing guides, restaurants and coastal resorts, depend on the bay's health.
Chinnis said Sarasota Bay Watch is committed to restoring and preserving Sarasota Bay's ecosystem and its resources through community education and citizen participation.
The "Sarasota Bay Great Scallop Search" on Aug. 23 will be the SBW's first event. At Sarasota's Ken Thompson Park, the boating event will be composed of 30 boats and their crews, who will be given areas of grass flats to search. After recording the scallops and bringing them back to the park, there will be an opportunity to learn about scallops from noon to 2 p.m. The general public is invited.
All boating participants will receive complimentary lunches and T-shirts.
Because the SBW is an independent, autonomous organization, SBW members will have the capacity to make a decision and carry out a certain task themselves, immediately.
There are good indications that the bay has temporarily returned to health, but much effort will be needed to maintain such healthy levels.
One of those positives is the vast supply of scallops, which MOTE Marine Laboratory staff scientist Dr. Jay Leverone said is a record number for the Sarasota-through -Tampa Bay area compared to past years. Scallops were basically wiped out locally after the 2005 red tide, but have made an astounding recovery. The healthy scallop population is an indication of good health, including factors such as high oxygen levels.
But scallop populations rise and fall frenetically, partially due to the fact that scallops can live up to one year.
Chinnis, a freelance outdoors writer, was the first president of the Manatee Chapter of the Florida Conservation Association (now CCA). He is an avid and locally well-known fly-fisherman.
Other board members of the Sarasota Bay Watch are John Ryan, Ryan Denton, Lowe Morrison, Sandy Gilbert, Charlotte Richardson and Capt. Jonnie Walker of Bay Walker Charters.
Chinnis said that START (Solutions to Avoid Red Tide) played a crucial part in the formation of the SBW.
The organization was put together in six months.
Nick Walter @ nwalter@bradenton.com
July 16, 2008 www.BradentonHerald.com
Divers Seek Ancient History In North Port Salt Spring
NORTH PORT - Scientists have a good idea of what Florida was like 12,000 years ago: hot and dry and twice as wide as now, with seas 400 feet lower. That would have put the Gulf coast of Florida about 100 miles west of today's shoreline.
Turtles the size of beanbag chairs roamed the land, along with giant sloths, mastodons and saber-toothed tigers.
A few humans passed through, too, briefly settling in spots where food was plentiful and where fresh water, sparse as it was, could be found.
Little Salt Spring, which reaches more than 200 feet into the earth, was a hot spot back then, the Don CeSar of its time, a place where nomads gathered to spend time, hunt animals, feast and then move on. The lush, nearly undisturbed sinkhole now is a treasure of artifacts that is just beginning to spill clues about prehistoric life.
Secluded, surrounded by thick vegetation and patrolled by an 8-foot alligator and four or five of her offspring, Little Salt Spring is bubbling with activity. Divers from Miami and Tampa are plunging in, dropping about 90 feet, where the light of the sun fades to black and silt stirred by the slightest movement cuts visibility to a bare minimum.
The divers are on a mission. They're looking for old stuff, 100 to 120 centuries old. Animal bones. Fossilized plants. And maybe, if they're lucky, human remains or remnants of a long-dead culture.
Divers have been in the water every day for a week and a half and have turned up interesting artifacts, but, so far, nothing related to ancient humans.
The search continues until the end of July.
It was 33 years ago when divers brought up circumstantial evidence that humans were here in 10,000 B.C. - a giant tortoise shell with what appeared to be a spear plunged into it, said John Gifford, associate professor and archaeological diver with the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.
For the past 30 years, there have been no archaeological dives to that depth at the sinkhole, he said.
It costs to mount such a project, Gifford said. This dive is being funded by the National Geographic Society. There are two teams of divers, one from the University of Miami and the other from The Florida Aquarium in Tampa.
Gifford said divers are examining the underside of a ledge some 90 feet down. That's the level at which they expect to find what was here 12,000 years ago. In shallower waters, they found 15 oak stakes pounded around the perimeter of the sinkhole. They date back about 9,500 years, Gifford said.
Ice age migratory people used Little Salt Spring for water and as a place to hunt and kill thirsty animals such as mastodons and giant ground sloths.
Those people left evidence they were here, evidence that just now is being uncovered.
"This," Gifford said of the spring, "is a real time capsule."
Ninety feet down there is little oxygen in the cold water, and that tends to preserve organic material such as bones, wooden tools and weapons.
It's scientifically significant stuff, Gifford said.
"Here in Florida, people don't appreciate the fact that we have a prehistory that goes back thousands and thousands of years," he said.
Archaeologists long have treated Little Salt Spring as an untapped gold mine of ancient artifacts, and the isolated spot is considered "one of the most important archaeological sites in the state, and perhaps the nation, for its wealth of information about the first Floridians more than 12,000 years ago," Florida Aquarium officials say.
Little Salt Spring was discovered to be an underwater archaeological site in the late 1950s.
Seventy-four-old George Guy used to teach diving classes in the sinkhole. He was watching from the shore as the archaeologists bobbed in the water Tuesday morning. It was 1966 when he first donned fins and a tank and jumped in, he said. He lived in St. Louis at the time.
Guy's dives only descended to depths of 40 or 50 feet, he said. He never knew what treasures lay beneath him. It was too deep.
But the spot was a favorite, he said. "I've enjoyed it so much, I decided to move here." Now, he volunteers at the site.
The sinkhole was donated to the University of Miami in 1982.
In 2005, Gifford and some graduate students, diving at a shallower level, discovered two artifacts estimated to be about 7,000 years old, a greenstone pendant and a carved stone artifact that appears to be part of a spear-throwing device.
Gifford said there likely are many artifacts yet to be discovered.
"The research proposed by Dr. Gifford is critical to our understanding of the first Americans," said Emily Landis, program officer with the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration.
The dives are difficult and dangerous, said Casey Coy, dive safety officer for The Florida Aquarium and one of eight divers on the excursion.
"There is a lot of floc, a lot of organic material," he said. "It's easy to disturb the stuff and limit visibility."
That, and the fact divers are in total darkness, makes it dangerous.
"You can become very disoriented," Coy said. Each diver had to complete a 100-hour course in scientific diving, he said.
Gifford said the dives are exciting, and not walks in the park.
Once the divers pass the point where sunlight reaches, "the beams of our lights are all that we see."
Reporter Keith Morelli can be reached at (813) 259-7760 or kmorelli@tampatrib.com.
The Tampa Tribune
Turtles the size of beanbag chairs roamed the land, along with giant sloths, mastodons and saber-toothed tigers.
A few humans passed through, too, briefly settling in spots where food was plentiful and where fresh water, sparse as it was, could be found.
Little Salt Spring, which reaches more than 200 feet into the earth, was a hot spot back then, the Don CeSar of its time, a place where nomads gathered to spend time, hunt animals, feast and then move on. The lush, nearly undisturbed sinkhole now is a treasure of artifacts that is just beginning to spill clues about prehistoric life.
Secluded, surrounded by thick vegetation and patrolled by an 8-foot alligator and four or five of her offspring, Little Salt Spring is bubbling with activity. Divers from Miami and Tampa are plunging in, dropping about 90 feet, where the light of the sun fades to black and silt stirred by the slightest movement cuts visibility to a bare minimum.
The divers are on a mission. They're looking for old stuff, 100 to 120 centuries old. Animal bones. Fossilized plants. And maybe, if they're lucky, human remains or remnants of a long-dead culture.
Divers have been in the water every day for a week and a half and have turned up interesting artifacts, but, so far, nothing related to ancient humans.
The search continues until the end of July.
It was 33 years ago when divers brought up circumstantial evidence that humans were here in 10,000 B.C. - a giant tortoise shell with what appeared to be a spear plunged into it, said John Gifford, associate professor and archaeological diver with the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.
For the past 30 years, there have been no archaeological dives to that depth at the sinkhole, he said.
It costs to mount such a project, Gifford said. This dive is being funded by the National Geographic Society. There are two teams of divers, one from the University of Miami and the other from The Florida Aquarium in Tampa.
Gifford said divers are examining the underside of a ledge some 90 feet down. That's the level at which they expect to find what was here 12,000 years ago. In shallower waters, they found 15 oak stakes pounded around the perimeter of the sinkhole. They date back about 9,500 years, Gifford said.
Ice age migratory people used Little Salt Spring for water and as a place to hunt and kill thirsty animals such as mastodons and giant ground sloths.
Those people left evidence they were here, evidence that just now is being uncovered.
"This," Gifford said of the spring, "is a real time capsule."
Ninety feet down there is little oxygen in the cold water, and that tends to preserve organic material such as bones, wooden tools and weapons.
It's scientifically significant stuff, Gifford said.
"Here in Florida, people don't appreciate the fact that we have a prehistory that goes back thousands and thousands of years," he said.
Archaeologists long have treated Little Salt Spring as an untapped gold mine of ancient artifacts, and the isolated spot is considered "one of the most important archaeological sites in the state, and perhaps the nation, for its wealth of information about the first Floridians more than 12,000 years ago," Florida Aquarium officials say.
Little Salt Spring was discovered to be an underwater archaeological site in the late 1950s.
Seventy-four-old George Guy used to teach diving classes in the sinkhole. He was watching from the shore as the archaeologists bobbed in the water Tuesday morning. It was 1966 when he first donned fins and a tank and jumped in, he said. He lived in St. Louis at the time.
Guy's dives only descended to depths of 40 or 50 feet, he said. He never knew what treasures lay beneath him. It was too deep.
But the spot was a favorite, he said. "I've enjoyed it so much, I decided to move here." Now, he volunteers at the site.
The sinkhole was donated to the University of Miami in 1982.
In 2005, Gifford and some graduate students, diving at a shallower level, discovered two artifacts estimated to be about 7,000 years old, a greenstone pendant and a carved stone artifact that appears to be part of a spear-throwing device.
Gifford said there likely are many artifacts yet to be discovered.
"The research proposed by Dr. Gifford is critical to our understanding of the first Americans," said Emily Landis, program officer with the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration.
The dives are difficult and dangerous, said Casey Coy, dive safety officer for The Florida Aquarium and one of eight divers on the excursion.
"There is a lot of floc, a lot of organic material," he said. "It's easy to disturb the stuff and limit visibility."
That, and the fact divers are in total darkness, makes it dangerous.
"You can become very disoriented," Coy said. Each diver had to complete a 100-hour course in scientific diving, he said.
Gifford said the dives are exciting, and not walks in the park.
Once the divers pass the point where sunlight reaches, "the beams of our lights are all that we see."
Reporter Keith Morelli can be reached at (813) 259-7760 or kmorelli@tampatrib.com.
The Tampa Tribune
In Paris, Burgers Turn Chic
EVEN if you couldn’t be on the Champs-Élysées for Bastille Day on Monday to watch seven parachutists float down in front of President Nicolas Sarkozy, you can still celebrate the greatness of France with a new local tradition.
Eat a hamburger.
Beginning
a few years ago but picking up momentum in the past nine months, hamburgers and cheeseburgers have invaded the city. Anywhere tourists are likely to go this summer — in St.-Germain cafes, in fashion-world hangouts, even in restaurants run by three-star chefs — they are likely to find a juicy beef patty, almost invariably on a sesame seed bun.
“It has the taste of the forbidden, the illicit — the subversive, even,” said Hélène Samuel, a restaurant consultant here. “Eating with your hands, it’s pure regression. Naturally, everyone wants it.”
It is a startling turnaround in a country where a chef once sued McDonald’s for $2.7 million in damages over a poster that suggested he was dreaming of a Big Mac. Hamburgers were everything that French dining is not: informal, messy, fast and foreign.
But as French chefs have embraced the quintessentially American food, they have also made it their own, incorporating Gallic flourishes like cornichons, fleur de sel and fresh thyme. These attempts to translate the burger, or maybe even improve it, strongly suggest that it is here to stay.
“It’s not just a fad,” said Frédérick Grasser-Hermé, who, as consulting chef at the Champs-Élysées boîte Black Calvados, developed a burger made with wagyu beef and seasoned with what she calls a black ketchup of blackberries and black currants. “It’s more than that. The burger has become gastronomic.”
Some of the most celebrated chefs in the city have taken up the challenge. Yannick Alléno, who earned a third Michelin star in 2007 for his precise, rarefied cuisine at Le Meurice, serves a thick, succulent hamburger at his casual restaurant, Le Dali. Mr. Alléno’s baker, Frédéric Lalos, a winner of one of the country’s fiercest cooking competitions, makes the buns. With smoked bacon, lettuce, dill pickles, mustard, mayonnaise and fries, the burger at Le Dali costs 35 euros, about $56.
Romain Corbière, the chef at Alain Ducasse’s restaurant Le Relais du Parc, in a Norman-style manor near Trocadéro, cooks a seasonal burger a la plancha. This summer Mr. Corbière, a veteran of Mr. Ducasse’s Louis XV in Monaco, is substituting a shrimp and squid patty for the beef burger he served in cooler weather.
L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon offers Le Burger, actually two small burgers topped with slabs of foie gras of almost equal size.
The only thing more surprising than the about-face in chefs’ attitudes may be the enthusiasm with which their patrons have devoured these haute burgers.
“I didn’t think we would sell so many,” said Sonia Ezgulian, guest chef at Café Salle Pleyel, which Ms. Samuel opened last fall in an airy, modernist space inside one of Paris’s most prestigious concert halls.
On some days, as many as a third of her customers order the burger, which is offered alongside Mediterranean-inspired dishes like sea bass with fennel confit and pistachios. “Sometimes we say we have no more,” she said. “It’s just too much.”
When a new guest chef replaces Ms. Ezgulian at the end of August, he will keep the burger on the menu. It’s in his contract.
IT is not as if hamburgers were unknown in Paris. American restaurants here like Joe Allen have long served them. Ms. Grasser-Hermé ate her first in 1961 at the American Legion, 11 years before McDonald’s unveiled its golden arches in France. But with few exceptions the local burgers were flat, overcooked and shunned even by American expatriates.
Other forms of ground or chopped beef have been enjoyed here for years as well. Butchers sell kilos of ground meat destined to become steak haché, a pan-seared patty made with lean meat, pressed into an oval, and served without a bun.
And while steak tartare shows up on practically every brasserie menu, chefs now recognize that a hamburger is not simply six ounces of chopped lean beef grilled until crusty.
“No, that would be an error,” said Ms. Grasser-Hermé.
“A hamburger is the architecture of taste par excellence,” she explained. “The meat needs to be a mix of fatty and lean. Not raw, not rare. It must be medium rare. At the same time the bread needs to be smooth, tepid, toasted on the sesame side. I like to brush the soft side with butter. There needs to be a crispy chiffonade of iceberg lettuce. Everything plays a role.”
In developing the Salle Pleyel burger, Ms. Samuel and Ms. Ezgulian felt the weight of tradition. “We’re a little terrified of making a mistake,” said Ms. Samuel. “We cling to things like the soft buns, sweet-and-sour pickles, onions, tomatoes, cheese. We need these guideposts because we don’t have the history, the context. Otherwise, for us, it’s not a burger. It’s a hot sandwich.”
Yet Ms. Ezgulian has taken some liberties. The current version of her burger is a riff on steak tartare. She’s kneaded a mixture of chopped sun-dried tomatoes and tangy cornichons and capers into the ground meat. Parmesan shavings stand in for the usual Cheddar.
Céline Parrenin, a co-owner of Coco & Co, a two-level place devoted to eggs that opened in St.-Germain last year, didn’t feel any such compunction when she and her business partner, Franklin Reinhard, invented the Cocotte Burger. The Cheddar cheeseburger, with pine nuts and thyme mixed into the meat, sits on a toasted whole-wheat English muffin pedestal. In a wink at the restaurant’s egg theme and recalling the time-honored steak à cheval, a fried egg is placed on top.
All the chefs are making hamburgers for the first time, and they are uncertain about the exact cuts of beef they are using. Mr. Alléno, for example, simply relies on his butcher, Yves-Marie Le Bourdonnec, whose shop, Le Couteau d’Argent, is in the Paris suburb Asnières.
For Mr. Alléno’s burgers, Mr. Le Bourdonnec delivers a mix of chuck and beef rib. But the butcher thinks the American T-bone steak is an ideal cut. The T-bone does not exist in France, but to make his point, Mr. Le Bourdonnec made his own. He combined a piece of filet, which is tender but less flavorful, with a piece of contrefilet, which is marbled and tasty, but slightly less tender.
Using a long, razor-sharp knife, he sliced the meat into quarter-inch dice, chopped it fine with a cleaver and shaped it into patties, to be cooked rare in a hot skillet filmed with olive oil. No bun, no pickles, no cheese, no special sauce; only a few grains of fleur de sel.
“What you have is texture and the flavor of meat,” he said. “No artifice.”
“That’s not a burger, Papa,” pointed out his 13-year-old son, Paul. “There’s no bread.”
HOW did the dripping, juicy hamburger come to be one of the signature dishes of Paris? For one thing, expatriate French chefs reinventing American classics in the United States made it safe for their countrymen to try it back home.
“I didn’t have this burger culture,” said Ms. Samuel. “A hamburger, what’s that? I didn’t get it. Then I tasted it at DB Bistro Moderne,” she said, speaking of Daniel Boulud’s restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. “If Daniel hadn’t done it, maybe I wouldn’t have either. He helped me understand.”
Mr. Corbière grew up with burgers, but he didn’t think of putting one on the Relais du Parc menu until he tasted Laurent Tourondel’s Black Angus burger at BLT Market in New York last October.
Both Mr. Tourondel and Mr. Boulud laughed when they were told that they had helped the hamburger conquer Paris.
“I think it’s shocking, but at the same time the French are realizing that a burger is real food, it’s good,” said Mr. Boulud.
Mr. Tourondel grew up in a small town where, he said “nobody ever saw a burger until 10 years ago. Everybody was against it, but everybody goes to eat it.”
Whether the interpretations are classical or whimsical, Americans would probably recognize most of the burgers in Paris. They might be flummoxed, however, by the etiquette associated with eating them.
Ketchup does not automatically come with a burger. If requested, it may appear in a porcelain bowl. At the Café Salle Pleyel, servers do produce a ketchup bottle on demand. At lunch there one recent day, a businessman shook the ketchup onto his plate, then, taking a knife in his right hand, spread the condiment onto a forkful of hamburger in his left hand before lifting it to his mouth.
Alicia Fontanier, the co-owner and chef at the tiny gourmet bar Ferdi on the rue du Mont-Thabor, laments that many of her customers insist on using silverware. Ms. Fontanier is the sister of Maria Luisa Poumaillou, who owns a couple of boutiques down the street, and many of the socialites, expatriate international types and fashionistas who shop there invariably stop in for her burger, the Mac Ferdi, and guarapita de parchita, a potent drink of cachaça and passion fruit juice.
“Eating with your hands is part of the pleasure,” Ms. Fontanier said, seated in a dining room decorated chiefly with her 15-year-old son’s childhood toy collection. “But nine out of 10 people use knife and fork. I’m happy not to see it. I’m in the kitchen.”
At Floors, a three-story diner in a former printing shop near Sacré-Coeur that features custom burgers, Emil Lager, a waiter, said that many of the diners seem self-conscious about ordering.
“Another thing I’ve noticed is that the muscled guys order the boeuf double with bacon, egg and fries, and a Diet Coke,” he said. “Then they share a cheesecake. They don’t want to gain weight.”
Also, he explained, Parisians don’t really understand about drinking a milkshake with the burger. They order it as dessert.
By JANE SIGAL
Published: July 16, 2008 www.nytimes.com
Eat a hamburger.
Beginning
a few years ago but picking up momentum in the past nine months, hamburgers and cheeseburgers have invaded the city. Anywhere tourists are likely to go this summer — in St.-Germain cafes, in fashion-world hangouts, even in restaurants run by three-star chefs — they are likely to find a juicy beef patty, almost invariably on a sesame seed bun.“It has the taste of the forbidden, the illicit — the subversive, even,” said Hélène Samuel, a restaurant consultant here. “Eating with your hands, it’s pure regression. Naturally, everyone wants it.”
It is a startling turnaround in a country where a chef once sued McDonald’s for $2.7 million in damages over a poster that suggested he was dreaming of a Big Mac. Hamburgers were everything that French dining is not: informal, messy, fast and foreign.
But as French chefs have embraced the quintessentially American food, they have also made it their own, incorporating Gallic flourishes like cornichons, fleur de sel and fresh thyme. These attempts to translate the burger, or maybe even improve it, strongly suggest that it is here to stay.
“It’s not just a fad,” said Frédérick Grasser-Hermé, who, as consulting chef at the Champs-Élysées boîte Black Calvados, developed a burger made with wagyu beef and seasoned with what she calls a black ketchup of blackberries and black currants. “It’s more than that. The burger has become gastronomic.”
Some of the most celebrated chefs in the city have taken up the challenge. Yannick Alléno, who earned a third Michelin star in 2007 for his precise, rarefied cuisine at Le Meurice, serves a thick, succulent hamburger at his casual restaurant, Le Dali. Mr. Alléno’s baker, Frédéric Lalos, a winner of one of the country’s fiercest cooking competitions, makes the buns. With smoked bacon, lettuce, dill pickles, mustard, mayonnaise and fries, the burger at Le Dali costs 35 euros, about $56.
Romain Corbière, the chef at Alain Ducasse’s restaurant Le Relais du Parc, in a Norman-style manor near Trocadéro, cooks a seasonal burger a la plancha. This summer Mr. Corbière, a veteran of Mr. Ducasse’s Louis XV in Monaco, is substituting a shrimp and squid patty for the beef burger he served in cooler weather.
L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon offers Le Burger, actually two small burgers topped with slabs of foie gras of almost equal size.
The only thing more surprising than the about-face in chefs’ attitudes may be the enthusiasm with which their patrons have devoured these haute burgers.
“I didn’t think we would sell so many,” said Sonia Ezgulian, guest chef at Café Salle Pleyel, which Ms. Samuel opened last fall in an airy, modernist space inside one of Paris’s most prestigious concert halls.
On some days, as many as a third of her customers order the burger, which is offered alongside Mediterranean-inspired dishes like sea bass with fennel confit and pistachios. “Sometimes we say we have no more,” she said. “It’s just too much.”
When a new guest chef replaces Ms. Ezgulian at the end of August, he will keep the burger on the menu. It’s in his contract.
IT is not as if hamburgers were unknown in Paris. American restaurants here like Joe Allen have long served them. Ms. Grasser-Hermé ate her first in 1961 at the American Legion, 11 years before McDonald’s unveiled its golden arches in France. But with few exceptions the local burgers were flat, overcooked and shunned even by American expatriates.
Other forms of ground or chopped beef have been enjoyed here for years as well. Butchers sell kilos of ground meat destined to become steak haché, a pan-seared patty made with lean meat, pressed into an oval, and served without a bun.
And while steak tartare shows up on practically every brasserie menu, chefs now recognize that a hamburger is not simply six ounces of chopped lean beef grilled until crusty.
“No, that would be an error,” said Ms. Grasser-Hermé.
“A hamburger is the architecture of taste par excellence,” she explained. “The meat needs to be a mix of fatty and lean. Not raw, not rare. It must be medium rare. At the same time the bread needs to be smooth, tepid, toasted on the sesame side. I like to brush the soft side with butter. There needs to be a crispy chiffonade of iceberg lettuce. Everything plays a role.”
In developing the Salle Pleyel burger, Ms. Samuel and Ms. Ezgulian felt the weight of tradition. “We’re a little terrified of making a mistake,” said Ms. Samuel. “We cling to things like the soft buns, sweet-and-sour pickles, onions, tomatoes, cheese. We need these guideposts because we don’t have the history, the context. Otherwise, for us, it’s not a burger. It’s a hot sandwich.”
Yet Ms. Ezgulian has taken some liberties. The current version of her burger is a riff on steak tartare. She’s kneaded a mixture of chopped sun-dried tomatoes and tangy cornichons and capers into the ground meat. Parmesan shavings stand in for the usual Cheddar.
Céline Parrenin, a co-owner of Coco & Co, a two-level place devoted to eggs that opened in St.-Germain last year, didn’t feel any such compunction when she and her business partner, Franklin Reinhard, invented the Cocotte Burger. The Cheddar cheeseburger, with pine nuts and thyme mixed into the meat, sits on a toasted whole-wheat English muffin pedestal. In a wink at the restaurant’s egg theme and recalling the time-honored steak à cheval, a fried egg is placed on top.
All the chefs are making hamburgers for the first time, and they are uncertain about the exact cuts of beef they are using. Mr. Alléno, for example, simply relies on his butcher, Yves-Marie Le Bourdonnec, whose shop, Le Couteau d’Argent, is in the Paris suburb Asnières.
For Mr. Alléno’s burgers, Mr. Le Bourdonnec delivers a mix of chuck and beef rib. But the butcher thinks the American T-bone steak is an ideal cut. The T-bone does not exist in France, but to make his point, Mr. Le Bourdonnec made his own. He combined a piece of filet, which is tender but less flavorful, with a piece of contrefilet, which is marbled and tasty, but slightly less tender.
Using a long, razor-sharp knife, he sliced the meat into quarter-inch dice, chopped it fine with a cleaver and shaped it into patties, to be cooked rare in a hot skillet filmed with olive oil. No bun, no pickles, no cheese, no special sauce; only a few grains of fleur de sel.
“What you have is texture and the flavor of meat,” he said. “No artifice.”
“That’s not a burger, Papa,” pointed out his 13-year-old son, Paul. “There’s no bread.”
HOW did the dripping, juicy hamburger come to be one of the signature dishes of Paris? For one thing, expatriate French chefs reinventing American classics in the United States made it safe for their countrymen to try it back home.
“I didn’t have this burger culture,” said Ms. Samuel. “A hamburger, what’s that? I didn’t get it. Then I tasted it at DB Bistro Moderne,” she said, speaking of Daniel Boulud’s restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. “If Daniel hadn’t done it, maybe I wouldn’t have either. He helped me understand.”
Mr. Corbière grew up with burgers, but he didn’t think of putting one on the Relais du Parc menu until he tasted Laurent Tourondel’s Black Angus burger at BLT Market in New York last October.
Both Mr. Tourondel and Mr. Boulud laughed when they were told that they had helped the hamburger conquer Paris.
“I think it’s shocking, but at the same time the French are realizing that a burger is real food, it’s good,” said Mr. Boulud.
Mr. Tourondel grew up in a small town where, he said “nobody ever saw a burger until 10 years ago. Everybody was against it, but everybody goes to eat it.”
Whether the interpretations are classical or whimsical, Americans would probably recognize most of the burgers in Paris. They might be flummoxed, however, by the etiquette associated with eating them.
Ketchup does not automatically come with a burger. If requested, it may appear in a porcelain bowl. At the Café Salle Pleyel, servers do produce a ketchup bottle on demand. At lunch there one recent day, a businessman shook the ketchup onto his plate, then, taking a knife in his right hand, spread the condiment onto a forkful of hamburger in his left hand before lifting it to his mouth.
Alicia Fontanier, the co-owner and chef at the tiny gourmet bar Ferdi on the rue du Mont-Thabor, laments that many of her customers insist on using silverware. Ms. Fontanier is the sister of Maria Luisa Poumaillou, who owns a couple of boutiques down the street, and many of the socialites, expatriate international types and fashionistas who shop there invariably stop in for her burger, the Mac Ferdi, and guarapita de parchita, a potent drink of cachaça and passion fruit juice.
“Eating with your hands is part of the pleasure,” Ms. Fontanier said, seated in a dining room decorated chiefly with her 15-year-old son’s childhood toy collection. “But nine out of 10 people use knife and fork. I’m happy not to see it. I’m in the kitchen.”
At Floors, a three-story diner in a former printing shop near Sacré-Coeur that features custom burgers, Emil Lager, a waiter, said that many of the diners seem self-conscious about ordering.
“Another thing I’ve noticed is that the muscled guys order the boeuf double with bacon, egg and fries, and a Diet Coke,” he said. “Then they share a cheesecake. They don’t want to gain weight.”
Also, he explained, Parisians don’t really understand about drinking a milkshake with the burger. They order it as dessert.
By JANE SIGAL
Published: July 16, 2008 www.nytimes.com
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Venice Theater - 2008 Summer Rep Series @ Yvonne Pinkerton Theatre - August 12 - 24, 2008
The Graduate
Adapted for the stage by Terry Johnson
August 12, 2008 @ 8:00pm
A college student spends his first summer out of school in the arms of his father's best friend's wife. Meanwhile, he is falling in love with the man's daughter.
Trumbo: Red, White & Blacklisted
by Christopher Trumbo based on the letters of Dalton Trumbo
August 13, 21, 2008 @ 8:00pm & August 17, 2008 @ 2:00pm
When legendary screenwriter Dalton Trumbo stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, he was thrown in prison and blacklisted as one of the "Hollywood Ten." Based on his brilliant and razor-sharp letters to friends, former friends, and family, Trumbo reveals how the author of Spartacus, Roman Holiday, and Exodus took on Congress, Hollywood, and the Red Scare -- and won.
The Little Dog Laughed
by Douglas Carter Beane
August 14, 18, 2008 @ 8:00pm & August 23, 2008 @ 4:00pm
The Little Dog Laughed follows the adventures of Mitchell Green, a movie star who could hit it big if it weren’t for one teensy-weensy problem. His agent, Diane, can’t seem to keep him in the closet. Trying to help him navigate Hollywood’s choppy waters, the devilish Diane is doing all she can to keep Mitchell away from the cute rent boy who’s caught his eye and the rent boy’s girlfriend (wait, the rent boy has a girlfriend?). Will there be a happy ending as the final credits roll?
Regrets Only
by Paul Rudnick
August 15, 19, 23, 2008 @ 8:00pm
This comedy of Manhattan manners explores the latest topics in marriage, friendships and squandered riches. A powerhouse attorney, his deliriously social wife and their closest friend, one of the world’s most staggeringly successful fashion designers come together in a Park Avenue penthouse. Add a daughter’s engagement, some major gowns, the president of the United States, and stir.
Love Drunk
By Romulus Linney
August 16, 20, 22, 2008 @ 8:00pm
An older man picks up a much younger woman in a bar and brings her to his retreat, an Appalachian palace. Her littered past collides with his need and what follows is an inspired dance of sexual tension. This yet to be published play is set to open at the Abingdon Theatre Company in 2009 starring Austin Pendleton.
King Lear
by William Shakespeare
August 24, 2008 @ 2:00pm
Shakespeare's dark tragedy, King Lear begins with the fictional King of England, King Lear, handing over his kingdom to two of his three daughters whom he believes truly love him. Angry that his youngest daughter does not appear to love him as much as the others, Lear banishes her. She leaves and is taken by the King of France as his Queen. Illegitimacy, devious plots, and threats of invasion, are but a part of this classical bitter story.
Adapted for the stage by Terry Johnson
August 12, 2008 @ 8:00pm
A college student spends his first summer out of school in the arms of his father's best friend's wife. Meanwhile, he is falling in love with the man's daughter.
Trumbo: Red, White & Blacklisted
by Christopher Trumbo based on the letters of Dalton Trumbo
August 13, 21, 2008 @ 8:00pm & August 17, 2008 @ 2:00pm
When legendary screenwriter Dalton Trumbo stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, he was thrown in prison and blacklisted as one of the "Hollywood Ten." Based on his brilliant and razor-sharp letters to friends, former friends, and family, Trumbo reveals how the author of Spartacus, Roman Holiday, and Exodus took on Congress, Hollywood, and the Red Scare -- and won.
The Little Dog Laughed
by Douglas Carter Beane
August 14, 18, 2008 @ 8:00pm & August 23, 2008 @ 4:00pm
The Little Dog Laughed follows the adventures of Mitchell Green, a movie star who could hit it big if it weren’t for one teensy-weensy problem. His agent, Diane, can’t seem to keep him in the closet. Trying to help him navigate Hollywood’s choppy waters, the devilish Diane is doing all she can to keep Mitchell away from the cute rent boy who’s caught his eye and the rent boy’s girlfriend (wait, the rent boy has a girlfriend?). Will there be a happy ending as the final credits roll?
Regrets Only
by Paul Rudnick
August 15, 19, 23, 2008 @ 8:00pm
This comedy of Manhattan manners explores the latest topics in marriage, friendships and squandered riches. A powerhouse attorney, his deliriously social wife and their closest friend, one of the world’s most staggeringly successful fashion designers come together in a Park Avenue penthouse. Add a daughter’s engagement, some major gowns, the president of the United States, and stir.
Love Drunk
By Romulus Linney
August 16, 20, 22, 2008 @ 8:00pm
An older man picks up a much younger woman in a bar and brings her to his retreat, an Appalachian palace. Her littered past collides with his need and what follows is an inspired dance of sexual tension. This yet to be published play is set to open at the Abingdon Theatre Company in 2009 starring Austin Pendleton.
King Lear
by William Shakespeare
August 24, 2008 @ 2:00pm
Shakespeare's dark tragedy, King Lear begins with the fictional King of England, King Lear, handing over his kingdom to two of his three daughters whom he believes truly love him. Angry that his youngest daughter does not appear to love him as much as the others, Lear banishes her. She leaves and is taken by the King of France as his Queen. Illegitimacy, devious plots, and threats of invasion, are but a part of this classical bitter story.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Country, the City Version: Farms in the Sky Gain New Interest
What if “eating local” in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food?
Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Dr. Despommier’s pet project is the “vertical farm,” a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact.
The idea, which has captured the imagination of several architects in the United States and Europe in the past several years, just caught the eye of another big city dreamer: Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president.
When Mr. Stringer heard about the concept in June, he said he immediately pictured a “food farm” addition to the New York City skyline. “Obviously we don’t have vast amounts of vacant land,” he said in a phone interview. “But the sky is the limit in Manhattan.” Mr. Stringer’s office is “sketching out what it would take to pilot a vertical farm,” and plans to pitch a feasibility study to the mayor’s office within the next couple of months, he said.
“I think we can really do this,” he added. “We could get the funding.”
Dr. Despommier estimates that it would cost $20 million to $30 million to make a prototype of a vertical farm, but hundreds of millions to build one of the 30-story towers that he suggests could feed 50,000 people. “I’m viewed as kind of an outlier because it’s kind of a crazy idea,” Dr. Despommier, 68, said with a chuckle. “You’d think these are mythological creatures.”
Dr. Despommier, whose name in French means “of the apple trees,” has been spreading the seeds of his radical idea in lectures and through his Web site. He says his ideas are supported by hydroponic vegetable research done by NASA and are made more feasible by the potential to use sun, wind and wastewater as energy sources. Several observers have said Dr. Despommier’s sky-high dreams need to be brought down to earth.
“Why does it have to be 30 stories?” said Jerry Kaufman, professor emeritus of urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Why can’t it be six stories? There’s some exciting potential in the concept, but I think he overstates what can be done.”
Armando Carbonell, chairman of the department of planning and urban form at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass., called the idea “very provocative.” But it requires a rigorous economic analysis, he added. “Would a tomato in lower Manhattan be able to outbid an investment banker for space in a high-rise? My bet is that the investment banker will pay more.”
Mr. Carbonell questions if a vertical farm could deliver the energy savings its supporters promise. “There’s embodied energy in the concrete and steel and in construction,” he said, adding that the price of land in the city would still outweigh any savings from not having to transport food from afar. “I believe that this general relationship is going to hold, even as transportation costs go up and carbon costs get incorporated into the economic system.”
Some criticism is quite helpful. Stephen Colbert jokingly asserted that vertical farming was elitist when Dr. Despommier appeared in June on “The Colbert Report,” a visit that led to a jump in hits to the project’s Web site from an average of 400 daily to 400,000 the day after the show. Dr. Despommier agrees that more research is needed, and calls the energy calculations his students made for the farms, which would rely solely on alternative energy, “a little bit too optimistic.” He added, “I’m a biologist swimming in very deep water right now.”
“If I were to set myself as a certifier of vertical farms, I would begin with security,” he said. “How do you keep insects and bacteria from invading your crops?” He says growing food in climate-controlled skyscrapers would also protect against hail and other weather-related hazards, ensuring a higher quality food supply for a city, without pesticides or chemical fertilizers.
Architects’ renderings of vertical farms — hybrids of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Biosphere 2 with SimCity appeal — seem to be stirring interest. “It also has to be stunning in terms of the architecture, because it needs to work in terms of social marketing,” Dr. Despommier said. “You want people to say, ‘I want that in my backyard.’ ”
Augustin Rosenstiehl, a French architect who worked with Dr. Despommier to design a template “living tower,” said he thought that any vertical farm proposal needed to be adapted to a specific place. Mr. Rosenstiehl, principal architect for Atelier SOA in Paris, said: “We cannot do a project without knowing where and why and what we are going to cultivate. For example, in Paris, if you grow some wheat, it’s stupid because we have big fields all around the city and lots of wheat and it’s good wheat. There’s no reason to build towers that are very expensive.”
Despite its potential problems, the idea of bringing food closer to the city is gaining traction among pragmatists and dreamers alike. A smaller-scale design of a vertical farm for downtown Seattle won a regional green building contest in 2007 and has piqued the interest of officials in Portland, Ore. The building, a Center for Urban Agriculture designed by architects at Mithun, would supply about a third of the food needed for the 400 people who would live there.
In June at P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center in Queens, a husband-wife architect team built a solar-powered outdoor farm out of stacked rows of cardboard tube planters — one that would not meet Dr. Despommier’s security requirements — with chicken coops for egg collection and an array of fruits and vegetables.
For Dr. Despommier, the high-rise version is on the horizon. “It’s very idealistic and ivory tower and all of that,” he said. “But there’s a real desire to make this happen.”
By BINA VENKATARAMAN
Published: July 15, 2008
www.nytimes.com
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Sweet Heat: For Jamaicans, It’s About Jerk
ON most summer Sundays, Brooklyn is burning.
Smoke rises from grills, many of them charcoal-fueled, illegal and loaded with jerk chicken — the spiced, smoky favorite of the borough’s large Jamaican community.
“We don’t mess around out here,” said Hubert Lawton, an owner of Boston Jerk City in East Flatbush, where an oil drum full of charcoal belches smoke onto Utica Avenue. Mr. Lawton’s jerk chicken and jerk pork are among the best in Brooklyn. The mix of herbs and spices he rubs on the meat is so pungent and coarse that you feel thyme twigs and cracked allspice berries when you bite it.
“My jerk is all natural, and a gift from God, and I give it all respect,” he said.
Jerk is Jamaica to the bone, aromatic and smoky, sweet but insistently hot. All of its traditional ingredients grow in the island’s lush green interior: fresh ginger, thyme and scallions; Scotch bonnet peppers; and the sweet wood of the allspice tree, which burns to a fragrant smoke.
“It’s not a sauce, it’s a procedure,” Jerome Williams, a Jamaican-born Brooklyn resident, said on a recent Sunday in Prospect Park, where families arrive as early as 6 a.m. for lakeside grilling spots, a few of which are actually authorized by the parks department. “I
t has to be hot, but it cannot only be hot, or you get no joy from it.”
Done right, jerk is one of the great barbecue traditions of the world, up there with Texas brisket and Chinese char siu. Its components are a thick brown paste flecked with chilies, meat (usually pork or chicken, occasionally goat or fish) and smoke, from a tightly covered charcoal grill, that slowly soaks into the food.
“Making jerk is like spending time with a kid,” said Oneil Reid, the chef and owner of the shiny Jamaican Dutchy food truck that parks daily on West 51st Street in Manhattan. “You have to watch it every second.” His care pays off: the Dutchy’s jerk chicken with two sides is one of the best truck lunches in the city.
He said that he would like to make jerk pork sometimes, but that many of the other food vendors, and the taxi drivers who inch past his cart in Midtown traffic, are Muslim, and the pork smell bothers them.
That, however, is one of the few concessions he makes to New York.
“I don’t change what I do,” Mr. Reid said. “I give them the straight-up Jamaican thing, and they eat it up.”
Some of jerk’s special qualities often get lost in translation to the United States, where the sticky-sweet chicken salads and gas-grilled wings sold as jerk have little to do with the real thing and its particular balance of flavors.
“You have to taste that scallion, taste that fresh herb, taste that Scotch bonnet,” said Marilyn Reid, an owner of Islands restaurant in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, who is not related to Oneil Reid. “It has to absorb all those flavors,” she added, punctuating each item with an emphatic nod. “You can’t just throw some sauce on grilled chicken and call it jerk.”
Jerk began with the Taino Indians, who lived on Jamaica and used the sweet wood of the allspice tree to cook the meat of local wild pigs. As Europeans planted the island with sugar cane, bananas and coffee, the Taino retreated to the safety of the vast inland forests.
The particular genius of jerk — the play of sweet and smoke, green and wood, spicy and herbal — is credited to the Maroons, Africans who taught the Taino their method of smoking food in pits dug into the earth. The Maroons were brought to Jamaica as slaves, but began escaping in the 1650s, joined the Taino in the forests, and fought British and Spanish dominion over the island. (The words jerk and jerky come from charqui, the Spanish version of the Quechua word charki, meaning dried meat.)
The American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston chronicled an overnight boar hunt with the Maroons in 1939. “Towards morning we ate our fill of jerk pork,” she wrote. “It is better than our American barbecue. It is hard to imagine anything better than pork the way the Maroons jerk it.”
The legend of the Maroons’ daring and resourcefulness lives on in the islanders’ pride in jerk. “This is a dish that is ours, not coming from England like the patty, or from India like the roti,” said Winston Currie, owner of the Best Jerk Center in St. Ann, Jamaica. “Real Jamaicans can eat jerk every day; we never get tired of it.” Employees from a nearby bauxite mine, their work boots coated with red dust, line up daily for Mr. Currie’s dry-rubbed jerk.
Although the seasonings of jerk do not change much around the island, some cooks use more liquid — usually soy sauce or vinegar — to transform the rub into a kind of marinade. A dry rub makes for crustier jerk; a wet rub produces juicier meat. (The recipe on this page is somewhere in the middle.)
Boston Bay, on Jamaica’s east coast, has become the island’s most famous destination for jerk. The beach is lined with stalls selling jerk, and the sweet and starchy foods that go well with it: “rice and peas,” rice cooked in coconut milk with small red beans; sweet potatoes roasted in charcoal; and “festival,” a missile of sweet fried dough that resembles an oversize hush puppy.
“People drive all the way from Kingston for Boston jerk,” Mr. Williams said. That’s a four-hour journey of hairpin turns over the Blue Mountains, where allspice trees grow wild.
Purists say allspice smoke is a defining element of jerk. The entire tree, which Jamaicans call pimento, is used: the crushed berries are rubbed into the skin; the wood burns hot and slow; the green leaves are tossed on the fire, releasing a sweet smoke that flavors the meat with a warm, woody pepperiness.
Last year, because of the efforts of Gary Feblowitz, a jerk-obsessed cinematographer for television documentaries, pimento wood for grilling became available in the United States. It took him five years to clear red tape in the United States and Jamaica.
“We are very careful about taking trees,” said Mr. Feblowitz, who works with several pimento farmers in Jamaica to ensure a steady supply without any deforestation. “The trees have about a seven-year fruiting period, and after that the farmers cut them down and sell or burn them anyway.”
After I acquired a supply of pimento wood, dried leaves and berries — the box alone made the lobby of my apartment building reek of allspice — the only remaining challenge was the rub.
Jerk is so ingrained in Jamaican cooks that the notion of getting a recipe is entertaining, something like asking a Midwesterner for a hamburger recipe.
“Go around the corner to the cellphone store, the music store — you will always find someone to tell you how to do it,” Mr. Williams said, gesturing toward Flatbush Avenue, the main artery of West Indian Brooklyn.
Ms. Reid, of Islands restaurant, bakes her jerk, as her mother did before her. “I think men like messing around with hot coals,” she said, proving that some gender-culinary stereotypes transcend geography. “Women just want to get a good dinner on the table.”
In the end, I tried many methods as I jerk-cooked eight chickens, and they all worked, just as my Jamaican sources had so casually promised. Pimento wood is an expensive novelty, and none of the jerk makers I found in Brooklyn are using it. But the smell and taste of pimento-grilled jerk is highly satisfying.
Refusing to fuss with pans of water and smoker boxes as some grill experts demand, I just dumped in one chimney of hot coals, added the pimento wood, put the chicken on the grill, covered it tightly and left it alone for half an hour. This produced the best jerk I’ve had outside Jamaica.
The jerk I made with plain hardwood charcoal, showered during the cooking with handfuls of allspice berries, was excellent, and even the batch I baked in the oven wasn’t bad. But once you’ve had the smoke, it’s hard to give it up.
To find good jerk in New York, one place to look is near hospitals (serving the many Jamaicans who work in health care), busy subway stops, or better yet, both.
Yvonne’s Jamaican food truck, which parks on East 71st Street near New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center on the Upper East Side, sells jerk pork only on Tuesdays and Fridays, and jerk chicken only on Wednesdays, but a fiery sauce of chopped Scotch bonnets pickled in vinegar every day of the week. The sauce is available by the shot and, alarmingly, by the quart. (Most local jerk is made mild, with hot sauce glugged on afterward at the customer’s request.)
“Jamaicans and Trinidadians like heat,” said Tamika Macintosh, a nurse’s assistant and an Yvonne’s regular. “The other West Indians can’t take it.”
Alternatively, follow the smoke. Some fancy West Indian restaurants make very good jerk rubs, but they are too mindful of the law to put a charcoal grill out on the sidewalk. You have to seek out the renegades.
“If the smoke is so thick outside on the sidewalk that you can’t see to put the quarter in the parking meter, that’s a good sign,” Mr. Williams said.
“We get tickets, sure,” said Desmond Mailer, the manager of McKenzie’s on Utica Avenue in Flatbush, where smoke billows from blackened oil drums 16 hours a day. “But you know, cops like jerk, too.”
By JULIA MOSKIN www.nytimes.com July 2, 2008
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Charlotte Harbor's ecological recovery threatened by rains
For the first time in four years, clams in Pine Island Sound are ready to harvest, oysters are growing in thick clusters on pilings in the Caloosahatchee River and shrimp are teeming in the seagrass beds of San Carlos Bay.
Two dry years have kept Lake Okeechobee’s polluted water away from Charlotte Harbor, helping the estuary spring back to health and make fishing profitable again.
But only abundant rainfall stands between a harbor bursting with life and collapse. The flawed water management system that supports agriculture in the heart of the former Everglades still artificially connects the big lake to Charlotte Harbor.
It could be more than a decade before that plumbing is fixed, despite Gov. Charlie Crist’s bold plan, announced last week, to reconnect the lake to the Everglades by buying out U.S. Sugar for $1.75 billion.
Until Lake Okeechobee’s water is directed south again, as Crist aims to do with the help of 300 square miles of sugar land, fishermen can only hope for good weather.
“We cross our fingers and keep our thumbs up,” said Ralph Woodring, a shrimp fisherman on San Carlos Bay in Lee County.
Those fingers will have to stay crossed while the government decides whether an Everglades restoration project designed to benefit Charlotte Harbor will be sacrificed to help pay for Crist’s plan.
The Everglades spending requires approval from the governor-appointed board that controls the 16-county South Florida Water Management District.
The district’s board meets today Monday to discuss the governor’s proposal and what it means for the $11 billion Everglades restoration plan.
The decisions will affect the future of Charlotte Harbor, Florida’s second-largest estuary — fed by three Southwest Florida rivers, the Myakka, Peace and Caloosahatchee — and one of the state’s most productive.
Moving water
The Everglades, a vast sawgrass marsh interspersed with oak hammocks and cypress swamps, once extended from Lake Okeechobee to Florida's southern tip.
The lake, fed by the Kissimmee River, overflowed its shallow banks in the wet season, sending a slow-moving sheet of water across the flat Florida plain.
Sawgrass helped hold water year-round and trapped layers of rich muck.
Settlers discovered the muck would produce bountiful crops if they drained the northern Glades. Engineers designed a dike around the lake and a canal to the Caloosahatchee River to divert excess water toward the Gulf of Mexico. A canal also was built to drain water east to the Atlantic.
Drainage allowed two companies to emerge from the soil -- U.S. Sugar and Florida Crystals. The sugar companies grew towns -- Clewiston, Belle Glade, Pahokee -- and political alliances that proved valuable when water became a precious commodity needed for growth.
Although South Florida receives about 50 inches of rain a year, most of it falls in summer. Drainage projects kept sugar fields dry in the wet season, but made water scarce in the dry season.
Complicated engineering projects sought to balance water needs with flood control, but they carried polluted water to Lake Okeechobee and severed the Everglades from its lifeblood.
When serious Everglades restoration talks began in the 1990s, scientists argued that the best way to reverse the damage would be to clean up Lake Okeechobee and send the water south again.
The sugar industry balked at the prospect of giving up its land, leaving only one option: building canals around the sugar land, as well as reservoirs and hundreds of underground storage wells.
No one considered the plan perfect, but many thought it was better than nothing. Congress approved it in 2000, but little progress has been made, to the detriment of Charlotte Harbor.
In the very wet years of 2004 and 2005, water managers dumped billions of gallons of polluted water from Lake Okeechobee into the Caloosahatchee, to keep from flooding sugar farms and communities.
The lake water turned the river black with mud and later green with algae. Murky water in the estuaries killed oysters and clams, drove out crabs and fish, and caused blankets of algae to smother the seagrass beds in San Carlos Bay.
Living on the edge
With the recent drought, the Charlotte Harbor estuary has bounced back, but the water in the lower Caloosahatchee River has become so salty that it has killed off all the underwater grasses, which provide critical habitat for tiny fish.
Long periods without flow from the lake this year turned the middle of the river stagnant, spawning blue-green algae blooms that have forced a water plant on the river to stop operating since June 5.
"You can't even stand outside with the odor; it has a very strong ammonia smell," said Katee Minneker, who lives across the river from the plant and just east of the Franklin lock and dam.
The dam is the only obstacle keeping the stagnant water from the estuary. Once rains cause the dam to open wide again, the algae will flow into San Carlos Bay, which flows into southern Charlotte Harbor.
"It's the same situation where there is either too much or too little water," said Kurt Harclerode, a water policy expert with Lee County's natural resources department.
Those who live on the river and rely on the estuary have waited more than a decade for a remedy to the imbalance.
Relief was supposed to come by 2011 through a $450 million reservoir to hold water on 11,000 acres for more gradual release and an artificial marsh to filter pollutants.
The reservoir was part of the original $11 billion Everglades restoration plan that now hangs in limbo.
"If they delay it much longer it's going to kill off our estuary system here," said Roy Kibbee, who sells crabs, mullet and clams in St. James City. "There won't be nothing left. They might as well just flush it, make it a sewer system."
Southwest Florida does not want the Caloosahatchee reservoir project lost in the excitement over the U.S. Sugar deal that Crist has dubbed the "missing link" in Everglades restoration.
"It may be a great big link in the chain, but it is a link," Harclerode said. "You need these other projects that go along with that to have full restoration."
Coastal communities have been asking for lake water to be moved south for a long time, but the reservoir projects should not be shoved aside, he added.
"We're still at the mercy of weather the way the system is now," Harclerode said.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Healthier Aging
Mice fed an ingredient in red wine are healthier, although they don't necessarily live longer. Aging mice fed a chemical found in red wine were healthier in their twilight years, scientists have confirmed, although the rodents didn't necessarily live longer.
The anti-aging effects of the compound, resveratrol, mimic those of a calorie-restricted diet, which has been shown to give mice, dogs, and worms longer, healthier lives. Although resveratrol only extended the lives of obese mice in this latest study, it made all the animals healthier. They were spared the worst of some of the declines that come with old age, and they had healthier cardiovascular systems and stronger bones than did untreated animals. Non-obese mice fed resveratrol also had significantly lower total cholesterol. The study was done by the National Institute on Aging, as a follow-up to 2006 findings that resveratrol improves the health and longevity of overweight, aged mice.
The study offers yet more evidence of the possible anti-aging benefits of resveratrol. "Is this too good to be true?" asks Harvard Medical School's David Sinclair, one of the authors of the paper, which appears this week in Cell Metabolism. "I think we'll know in the next few years." Sinclair initially showed the anti-aging effect of resveratrol several years ago. Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, the company that he cofounded to develop anti-aging drugs, including ones based on resveratrol, was recently sold to GlaxoSmithKline for about $720 million.
Sinclair and his colleagues gave one-year-old mice--that's middle-aged, in mouse years-- high doses of resveratrol. It's found in the skins of grapes--which are left on the fruit when red wine is fermented but removed from white wine before fermentation--and in lower amounts in peanuts and some berries, including cranberries and blueberries.
Resveratrol had a broad range of health benefits for mice, the researchers confirmed. The mice had fewer cataracts, better bone density, healthier cardiovascular systems, and better motor coordination than did untreated animals, and resveratrol also made obese mice more sensitive to insulin.
"Let's hope it will do the same things for humans," says Mark Leid, a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Oregon State University. He wasn't involved in this work.
Other studies have found that resveratrol extends life span in various organisms, including fish, flies, and yeast, and in mice fed a high-calorie diet. This study found the same effect in obese mice, although they still didn't live as long as mice on a normal diet. Resveratrol had no effect on the life span of animals fed a normal diet, although they had a healthier old age.
It's possible that in this case, the mice didn't begin resveratrol treatment when they were young enough to get the full benefits of the compound, perhaps including a longer life, Sinclair says. Also, unlike humans, mice don't die from cardiovascular disease or suffer serious consequences from brittle bones, so it's possible that resveratrol may be an even greater boon to aging humans than it is to mice, says Rafael de Cabo of the National Institute on Aging, who also worked on the project.
Sinclair's team also monitored gene activity patterns in various tissues in the treated mice and found that they were similar to those in animals on a restricted-calorie diet. Scientists have found that reducing mice's caloric intake by 30 to 50 percent while maintaining adequate nutrition can ward off age-related diseases, improve stress resistance, and slow the declines in function that come with age in many species, including mice, fish, and yeast. Mice treated with resveratrol in this study "have a younger gene-expression profile," de Cabo says.
It's not exactly clear how resveratrol works. There's evidence that the compound activates proteins called sirtuins that play a key role in controlling aging. However, a recent study using lower doses of resveratrol in mice suggests that there may be another mechanism at work, at least when lower doses are given.
The daily dose of resveratrol that Sinclair and his colleagues gave mice was the equivalent of more red wine than most people will drink in a lifetime, so "wine isn't going to do the trick," says Leonard Guarente, a professor at MIT and a pioneer in the study of sirtuins. (Guarente is on the board of Sirtris but didn't work on this study.) "There's going to have to be a supplement," he says.
Resveratrol pills are already on the market, but until more studies are done in humans, de Cabo advises caution. Even though you'll get much less of the compound by eating berries and drinking wine, he says, "I'd rather people buy grapes and red wine than take compounds off the shelf."
Sirtris is conducting clinical trials using resveratrol to treat type 2 diabetes. The preliminary results look promising, and no serious side effects have surfaced, notes Sinclair.
He and other scientists are also studying the anti-aging properties of similar compounds--some of them apparently much stronger than resveratrol. "There's a whole pipeline of better molecules coming along," Sinclair says.
By Anna Davison Copyright Technology Review 2008.
A little change at Venice Theatre
Venice Little Theatre is not little anymore. The 58-year-old organization is the third-largest community theater in the United States, with the largest professional staff of any community theater in the Southeast.
Consequently, its board of directors voted last week to change its name to Venice Theatre.
Consequently, its board of directors voted last week to change its name to Venice Theatre.
The name change had been kicking around the organization for several years, said Artistic Director Murray Chase. But with the impending retirement and replacement of Maureen Holland as publications director for the theater, VLT decided to conduct an independent marketing study. Over six months, several focus groups of ticket buyers, donors, community leaders, volunteers and people with no connection to the theater met to share their impressions of the theater.
What they said surprised Chase and the board of directors.
"No. 1, people thought we were a children's theater," Chase said. "People had no idea about the breadth of our programming. Here's another one: Community people who knew us very well were not aware of any nonprofit organization's constant need" for development and fundraising. "That was an eye-opener. The other thing was that some people thought it was a theater for old people solely."
The first step in changing community misperceptions about Venice Little Theatre is to drop "little" from the name.
"Little theater" once meant a particular form of community theater. But, Chase said, "'Little' has become increasingly pejorative in people's minds. 'Children' or 'small' or 'limited,' 'amateurish,' all of those things kept flying by."
The organization has long since outgrown any of those meanings. With two stages and an annual operating budget of $2.39 million for 2008-2009, Venice Theatre presents plays, musicals and concerts year-round and supports a full theater curriculum for students starting at age 5. It routinely wins awards at theater festivals regionally and nationally.
"So looking at it pretty hard, the No. 1 suggestion that came back was to change the name," Chase said.
Among the new names considered were Venice Theater Arts Center, Venice Stage and the Stages of Venice (in a nod to Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice"). But rather than complicate the organization's identity, the board decided to keep it simple.
"We have Venice Symphony, we have Venice Arts Center, and now we have Venice Theatre," Chase said.
The theater's mission will not change at all, Chase said. The staff is developing a new logo, "very simple, very clean, kind of dynamic. It lets go of some of the quaintness and tradition, which is a bit of a shame."
The name change is the first step in a process of getting people "to understand what it is we do now," Chase said. "I believe that actually getting people to understand what we do now will draw people with ideas for helping us reach a greater vision. It's a thing that kind of builds upon itself."
Within the next couple of years, Venice Theatre will begin a capital fundraising drive to expand its current facilities at 140 W. Tampa Ave.
Chase said the response among donors and volunteers to the name change has been almost entirely positive.
"Among donors I had no negative reactions," he said. "Among volunteers, I had two. It's not going to be as big a hill to climb" as it would have been "if we had done something more radical."
Published Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 1:10 p.m.
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