HOME BASED PET FOOD OPPORTUNITY: Iams pet food business to shrink again in Dayton region

Procter & Gamble Co.’s desire to move its research and development operations closer to the businesses they serve will cost Lewisburg most of its Iams and Eukanuba home based pet food opportunity, as the company moves them to Mason, Cincinnati and other states.

The changes, involving almost 190 Lewisburg jobs, will begin in 2010 and end by June 2012. They were among a larger group of relocations that P&G announced Monday, Nov. 9, involving nearly 700 employees in Ohio, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Lewisburg is in northeast Preble County. Mason is in southern Warren County.

P&G employees in Lewisburg were summoned to meetings Monday and informed of the upcoming changes, a spokesman said.

Already this year, P&G has closed its Iams-Eukanuba pet food office headquarters in Vandalia, moving its 240 jobs to Mason and selling the Vandalia property.

P&G ultimately may consider selling its pet food business entirely in order to focus on product categories where it sees greater potential to increase sales, industry analysts said last week.

Transformers Animated

Based on the Cartoon Network’s animated television series, this well-crafted oneplayer Nintendo DS fighting title lets you take control of your favorite Autobot characters, including Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Bulkhead and Prow.
As you make your way through each level of the side-scrolling kids game, you collect the lost fragments of the Allspark before the Decepticons intercept it and claim Cybertron as their own. Got that? As you blast through Decepticon-controlled hoverbots, you try to solve puzzles and race through a futuristic Detroit — avoiding oncoming traffic while changing from robot to vehicle form. This makes perfect sense, if you’ve watched the show. Features include three game save slots.
Besides the cartoon violence on par with the show, there is no worrisome content. In short, this is another action-packed fighting game designed to extend and transform the Transformers into an interactive medium. Developed by Artificial Mind and Movement exclusively for the Nintendo DS.
Details: Activision, Inc. Ages: 7-up. Platform: Nintendo DS.

Link to buy Transformers Animated game

The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague. Review

Yudl Rosenberg’s 1909 version of the traditional Jewish folktale of the Golem transformed this story forever. The Golem is a man made by rabbis from clay and given life, usually by means of Kabbalistic practice. Rosenberg’s book became an immediate bestseller and was immensely influential. It masqueraded as an original account of sixteenth-century events, divided into self-contained stories, which centred on the “Maharal,” the maker of the Golem. “The Maharal of Prague” is another name for Rabbi Judah Loew Ben Bezalel (1525–1609). Rosenberg’s book ensured that he was best known for his fictitious role in the Golem legends, but his reputation as an important thinker of the post-Medieval period is growing. Loew developed an entirely new approach to the aggadah of the Talmud. He was also a progressive educationalist and an enlightened student of science. Far from being a practitioner of the secret arts, his reputation for mysticism rests on his translation of Kabbalistic ideas into clearly accessible terminology. In Rosenberg’s stories this historical personage is transformed into a protector of the Jewish people, whose knowledge of Kabbalah gives him superhuman powers.

An important reason for the success of Rosenberg’s book was a very strong interest in the occult, widely shared by his contemporaries, both Jewish and non-Jewish. This partly explains why this version of the ancient Golem tale transcended a Jewish audience and became widely known. The importance and influence of Rosenberg’s version is beyond dispute, which means that Curt Leviant’s translation performs a vital role in making this book available to a broader audience.

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City Limits

It was with mixed horror and depression that I read Ryan Scott’s preview of SimCity: Societies, a game which purports to “return to SimCity’s roots” while stripping out everything that’s made a SimCity title for the last 18 years. No zoning? No power and water grids to worry about? No roads beyond the terribly unrealistic-looking, squashed four-lane things there now? The ability to make haunted theme parks, mime factories, Stalinist cryo-prisons, and a whole city that looks like something out of Willy Wonka’s franchising-opportunities guide is supposed to appeal to lifelong fans of the series?

I humbly beg Maxis to not allow this kind of dumbed-down gameplay style to pervade and become the whole of the SimCity universe. From every screenshot and preview of this game I’ve seen, the hype is all about making totally unrealistic fantasy-type cities: Orwellian slums. Candy Land nonsense, industrial hellholes, things out of the great stereotype playbook, Surely there’ll be fans of this type of city-building genre, a type in which what you plop down and where doesn’t appear to be half as important as what little giggly coiorfui stimulus responses you get from watching it I, however, and many hundreds of thousands of others, I would venture to guess, are not fans of this and were hoping for a rTiore streamlined but also more realistic sim - as in simulation - version of SimCity that would get us ever closer to being able to model our hometowns and cities with better accuracy and fun bells and whistles.

More types of roads. Perhaps a preindustrial starting period that would let us watch our cities turn into the skyscraper ferms that SC3 and 4 would generate over time as technology advanced. But all that possibility is thrown out for cheap graphical gimmicks and simplified gameplay. It’s a shame.

Cinderella in America: A Book of Folk and Fairy Tales. Book review

The title of this superbly edited book is misleading and yet accurate. At first glance, one might think that the book would be about the different versions of the tale “Cinderella” in America. This is not at all the case. Yet the title is apt, for the book is truly about a neglected and mistreated “Cinderella genre,” the wonder fairytale in America, in all its diverse oral and literary forms, and about how scholars and educated readers have tended to believe that the European tale types never took root in the early days of the founding of America. Some have even asserted that there is no such thing as an American fairytale.

McCarthy’s purpose is to prove them wrong. His goal, he states, is “to demonstrate the scope of the Old World repertoire as it settled into U.S. American culture, changing, developing, and acclimating inmuch the same way the tales of this repertoire have always settled and acclimated, wherever they have found themselves”(p. 8). Not only does he fulfil his goal, but he does it convincingly and with great erudition, thoroughness, and originality, and with a stunning collection of approximately two hundred tales from the eighteenth century to the present.

McCarthy’s anthology is divided into six parts and eighteen chapters and a helpful appendix about studying American folktales. The repertoire of the tales is generally Indo-European, and he provides the Aarne-Thompson-Uther tale-type index for those readers who want to compare the tales with similar ones in other cultures. The organisation of the chapters is based on geography and the particular connection that a region may have had to another European country. For instance, the headings of the parts read: (I) The Early Record; (II) The Iberian Folktale in the United States; (III) French Tradition in the Old Louisiana Territory; (IV) The British Tradition of the South; (V) Other People, Other Tales—which includes German traditions in Pennsylvania, Irish-American tales, tales from other communities, and European tales in Native American traditions; and (VI) A Case Study—which includes photographs of Betty Carriveau telling one of her father’s French-Canadian tales entitled “Angel Gabriel.”

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Film, Folklore, and Urban Legends. Review

Film, Folklore and Urban Legends consists of slightly reworked essays previously published by Mikel Koven between 1995 and 2007, collected with the hope, he says, of drawing “a line underneath these preliminary explorations,” and so that “future scholarship will develop” the ideas contained in the collection. The book is divided into five sections: part one is a partial survey of scholarship concerning film and folklore, part two consists of three methodological studies (of The Wicker Man and Frazer’s Golden Bough, and of the use or misuse of tale-type and motif indices in understanding some horror films and some film comedies), part three is concerned with exploring the feedback-loop of certain legendary beliefs created by their depiction on television and in the movies, part four discusses various aspects of urban legends and their depiction, and part five presents an essay on “ostension,” the enactment of legend in film and on “reality” television.

As a whole, this group of essays provides a useful entry point to many important theories, practices and arguments about folklore and visual narrative, not least because it is in the form of essays aimed at specific questions rather than aiming to serve directly as a primer. The citations and bibliography alone are a valuable resource for anyone wishing to take up the subject. The down side of any such published collection, though, is that while ideas and methods may recur, there is no consistent argument sustained throughout. Everything has the defects of its virtues. Some consistent themes, do, however, hold many of these essays together conceptually: first, the position that mere “motif-spotting” is a pretty sterile enterprise; second, the question of the extent to which popular films participate in the production and dissemination of folklore; and third, an examination of the usefulness, or lack thereof, of applying the methods of folklore to the study of film.

Chapter one is a quick review of many different ways of applying folklore to films and a justification of studying film from a folkloric perspective on the grounds that film is the dominant modern mode of dissemination and propagation of narrative. Chapter two takes on the much-discussed (and much reviled) film, The Wicker Man (1973, directed by Robin Hardy) pointing out the irony that, while entirely reworking its sources, the film itself became a source for modern neo-pagan ritual. Koven here also raises the issue of ostension, which becomes the major subject of his penultimate essay in this volume.

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Greek and Roman Folklore. Book review

This series of folklore handbooks is outstanding for the expertise displayed, which is not surprising, when one considers that each writer is a recognised authority in his or her field, and skilled in conveying a wealth of information in a clear, lively, and modern manner. They follow the same pattern, the major sections being: definitions and classifications of various genres; examples and texts; the history of folklore collecting, scholarship and interpretation in the area concerned; and contexts, including the use of folklore material in literature, song, film, etc. This enables the authors to alternate their approach between the general and the particular, in some chapters offering guidance on various broad issues which could apply to many cultures besides the one under discussion, and in others illustrating the necessarily brief treatment of individual topics by a selection of well-chosen illustrative texts. Needless to say, the chapter notes and bibliographies give ample guidance to further reading.

Space does not permit a detailed review of the contents of each book, but I can warmly commend them not only as guides to the traditions of these particular regions, but as excellent models of modern folklore scholarship.

Op Verhaal Komen. Moderne Sagen en Geruchten uit Vlaanderen

With his most recent book, Stefaan Top has published an impressive collection of modern legends and rumours that were collected among Flemish youngsters. This book is the sixth and last part of the author’s legend collection Op Verhaal Komen. The previous five parts dealt with traditional legends recorded in the five Flemish provinces.

Top enthusiastically reassures the reader that storytelling is still alive today. Just like their traditional counterparts, modern legends voice the fears, frustrations, and obsessions of their narrators. What distinguishes modern legends from traditional ones is primarily their contemporary setting and modern themes. The author pays attention to classical problems such as terminology and definitions associated with modern legends. Regarding terminology, Top presents an elaborate inventory of nineteen Dutch names for modern legends, forty English, eleven German, and four French ones. He also discusses the content, presentation, sources, and circulation of these legends.

Whereas the roots of collecting and recording traditional folk narratives lie in Europe, the first scientific studies of contemporary legends come from the United States of the 1940s and 1950s. Later on, Europe caught up, which the author shows by a non-exhaustive overview of publications on this subject. In 1982 Top attended the first international contemporary legend conference in Sheffield. Since then he has pursued this fascinating subject in his educational activities at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. This book presents the striking results of fieldwork during which university students questioned hundreds of pupils in youth groups and secondary schools about their knowledge of modern legends. In his foreword to this book, the Minister of Youth and Culture praises the author’s ability to render the oral discourse of adolescents with great precision.

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Double Indemnity. Film Review

The shadows look more ominous than ever in this remastered print of one of Hollywood’s first films noirs. Fred MacMurray plays against type as Walter Neff, an insurance salesman who falls for a client’s wife and gets snared in a scheme to kill the husband. Barbara Stanwyck thickly applies both the femme and the fatale, and Edward G. Robinson is superb as Neff’s suspicious boss. This was second of four pairings for MacMurray and Stanwyck, and definitely the best. Extras on the two-disc set tend toward the scholarly, with a documentary and two commentaries. (Fun fact: Director Billy Wilder had to take a bathroom break every 15 minutes while writing the screenplay because he and co-writer Raymond Chandler couldn’t stand each other.) The second disc includes a faithful 1973 television remake starring Richard Crenna.

You can buy the film here

RV. Film Review

If you’re looking for an updated “National Lampoon’s Vacation” for middle school-aged kids, and you’re not afraid of a predictable plot and potty humor, “RV” is the film for you. It’s the story of a suburban family, including a clueless but lovable dad (Robin Williams), on a “family time” road trip in - you guessed it - a recreational vehicle. Even for fans of Williams’s over-the-top “Mrs. Doubtfire” fare, “RV” delivers only a handful of laughs. A flat character and even flatter lines hardly allow the comedian to be himself (except for the opening tickle-monster scene). Those who prefer more subtle comedy than exploding sewage lines and rabid raccoons will likewise be disappointed. Extras: Details of the many toilet scenes are included in the appropriately named gag reel.

You can buy the film here