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.

It has been a major hit in the market and is largely responsible for changing the ‘Two wheeler market’

It will be introduced in Indian market in  31 July 2009 …

I hope everyone wil come to office by bike in few days..

Facilities are..

Available in following option
a) Kick Start
b) Electric Start

1. 250 CC Speed + we can increase speed by pedaling
2. 24 hr Free Air Conditioner System
3. Leg break System as like Disc break in Pulsar
4. Without doubt it’s going to win “Best Bike Of the Year 2009 ”

Front Brakes - N/A
Rear Brakes - 130mm Drum
Front Tyre - 2.75 X 18
Rear Tyre - 100/90 X 18
Wheelbase - 1265mm
Ground Clearance - 155mm
Dry Weight - 50 Kg
Tank Capacity - No Need
Colours - Brown

It has a admire look…

These sculptures are the creation of the crazy Finnish artist. You can see these life size works of art as you drive down 6th road in route from Imatra in Savonlinna as they line the right side of the road.
These sculptures have real human teeth in their mouths. The big question is, where did all these teeth come from? Or better yet, from whom?
At the station and situated on just over one acre of land you will see several hundred more of these types of sculptures. A spooky sight at any hour of the day or night. The sculptor himself lives not far from there.

Human's sculptures near Savonlina

These sculptures have real human teeth in their mouths

Naked housewives are making their work

Finnish Kamasutra

Reported China Journal: In the weekend’s bizarrest news, a nearly finished, newly constructed building in Shanghai toppled over, killing one worker. As can be seen in the photo below, the 13-story apartment building collapsed with just enough room to escape what would have been a far more destructive domino effect involving other structures in the 11-building complex. See original photos here.

Read more news about the building collapse:
Arrests over tower collapse
Building collapse: Nine under probe
Officials Probe Building Collapse In China

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

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.

The book contains an excellent introduction by Leviant, which puts the Golem legend very successfully into context. He explains how the story reflects the concerns and attitudes of its times, and points out that this legend is not static or timeless, but is constantly evolving. Rosenberg’s interpretation of the folktale overshadowed, and largely replaced, all the earlier versions, many of which are now completely forgotten. Leviant also draws our attention to the fact that this version in turn inspired famous works of art such as Wegener’s film The Golem (1921), which was based on Meyrink’s brilliant and famous novel of the same name written in 1915. These are major works of Expressionist art from a period when Jews and Gentiles collaborated to create a shared culture. Leviant also helpfully supplies notes that explain unfamiliar concepts and facts, and this allows for further investigation, and deepens the scope of the book.

Considering the awful events from which it arose, the shocking Hilsner case and the devastating Russian pogroms, Rosenberg’s book is written with an incredibly light and humane touch. It illustrates the complex and fraught relationship between Jew and Gentile in the German Empire. The ghastly priest Thaddeus, is the personification of the bigoted and poisonous anti-Semite whose ill-will causes the Jews terrible suffering.

However, it is important to point out that Rosenberg’s stories also reflect the hope that many felt at the time, that, despite anti-Semitism and its attendant horrors, reason would triumph ultimately, and enlightenment would finally come. The Maharal battles Thaddeus, not with violence, but with the courts, the law of the land, and the help of sympathetic authorities like the Police Chief and the Emperor. The touching story of Duke Bartholomew also reveals the intertwined fate of Jew and Gentile. The anti-Semitic Christian duke, Bartholomew, finds out he was born a Jew. As he was neither truly Jew nor truly Christian, he could not be buried as either; therefore, accepting that he would have be buried as neither, he prepared a grave in his own park. In this story Rosenberg points to a shared humanity and to the idiocy of bigotry.

The arguments that Rosenberg puts in the Rabbi’s mouth against the blood libel and other anti-Semitic hate-filled rhetoric current at this time seem clearly to have been meant for his contemporaries; their aim is to put the Jewish case forward without appearing to do so, in the time-honoured and highly effective method of storytelling. That the book was brilliantly successful in this is shown by its great influence and the popularity of its ideas.

Rosenberg conjures out of the visionary, mystical atmosphere real people, such as resentful tannery workmen, bewildered beggars, and helpful, if misguided, midwives. This Leviant has captured in his clear and lucid prose. Very successful too is Rosenberg’s use of the supernatural and dream-like events that are treated as perfectly normal in these tales. This adds to a rich atmosphere, reminiscent of Yiddish films like The Dybbuk (1937), where legend and reality interrelate quite naturally, and often give rise to a surreal and haunting quality. Leviant’s translation conveys this very well.

Rosenberg’s fighting Golem has become merged in later times with the idea of implacable warfare and defence; for example, in Daniel Horowitz’s Yossele Golem, (premiered at New York’s La Mama T.T.C. in 1982), which presents Rosenberg’s Golem as an Israeli soldier. This is undeniably one of his qualities, but Rosenberg, ably translated by Leviant, presents us with a vulnerable creature, neither human nor demon, and, like Duke Bartholomew, neither Jew nor Gentile, who can nevertheless be injured and needs his master’s loving care to heal his wounds. His end, which comes when the need to defend the Jews is over, is poignant and tinged with regret and sacredness. The book ends with words of confidence and hope: “And the land was tranquil.”

Leviant’s excellently written translation makes accessible Rosenberg’s delightful stories, which are an important link in the chain that makes up the incredible richness and diversity of the ideas contained in the legend of the Golem. It brings to life a vanished world.

Excerpted from an article which appeared in The Dublin Times about a bank robbery on March 2.
Once inside the bank shortly after midnight, their efforts at disabling the security system got underway immediately. The robbers, who expected to find one or two large safes filled with cash & valuables, were
surprised to see hundreds of smaller safes throughout the bank.
The robbers cracked the first safe’s combination, and inside they found only a small bowl of vanilla pudding.
As recorded on the bank’s audio tape system, one robber said, ‘At least we’ll have a bit to eat.’
The robbers opened up a second safe, and it also contained nothing but vanilla pudding. The process continued until all safes were opened.
They did not find one pound sterling, a diamond, or an ounce of gold.
Instead, all the safes contained covered little bowls of pudding.
Disappointed, the robbers made a quiet exit, each leaving with nothing more than a queasy, uncomfortably full stomach. The newspaper headline read:
‘IRELAND’S LARGEST SPERM BANK ROBBED EARLY THIS MORNING’….

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.

One of the things I wanna learn this month is to build hardware circuit on a pcb with commercial CAD software which are used to build circuits. The coolest thing about PCB software is that you can actually simulate a circuit without making the real hardware circuit. and it helps you analyze faults before you produce your circuit. I had designed a small PCB for SPI interface of an MMC/ SD card to a microcontroller. It was easy to design as there was no special circuitry needed for except for a few optional pull up resisters which should be used if the BUS is in open drain mode. If it is in push pull mode then there is no need of using pull up resistors. It all depends on which microcontroller we are using. If we are using a low end microcontroller like a PIC which is cheap we must use a Pull up on the data lines of the SPI bus. On the other hand if we use a High end microcontroller, it may provide options so that we dont need pull-ups. Overall PCB design a must learn thingy if you are into hardware and serious about becoming a hardware engineer.

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.”

McCarthy, a modest and meticulous collector, spent years scouring the country for the tales that he includes in his book—and he probably could have included a few hundred more from his archives. His sources are vast: chapbooks, almanacs, letters, early issues of the Journal of American Folklore and many other journals and magazines, oral recordings, tape-recordings and written recordings from the WPA project, oral tales written down and sent to him by colleagues and friends, translations, family records, and so on. It is obvious that McCarthy did not spare himself in his endeavour to establish how widely and diversely the wonder tale types were disseminated in America.

McCarthy’s editorial principles, presented in his introduction, are explicit, sound, and fair. His major goal is to “keep the tales as told, not as reimagined by the editor” (p. 15). Therefore, all the tales taken from print are reprinted as they were unless there were typographical errors.With regard to translations and tales based on recordings, McCarthy has tried to preserve the voice and oral style of the narrator as best he could. His careful explanations that follow each tale provide important historical information and clarification about the sources and informants.

Since nobody can define and decide what America or American means, McCarthy takes a historical and “existential” approach to designating what American folktales and fairytales are and to justifying the selection of the tales that he includes in this anthology.

All of the tales in the collection are American because they are based on the storytelling of storytellers whose families had been in America for generations, including tales from Native Americans, of course, and from all possible ethnic groups. What fascinates McCarthy, and what is fascinating about the “American” versions of the wonder tales from the Indo-European tradition, is how they express the American experience with clear traces of the Old World. One need only study the derivation of tale types such as “The Three Stolen Princesses” (ATU 301) or “The Boy Steals the Ogre’s Treasure”(ATU 328) in McCarthy’s anthology to sense how the British, German, or Irish sensibilities have been altered to address a different audience in another socio-cultural context. The tales are roughly hewn, in verse, humorous, and inventive. Their transformations delineate the adaptive practices and transformative experience of the narrators and people who kept them alive. It is to McCarthy’s great credit that he has resuscitated the “Cinderella” tradition of folklore in America with a profound understanding of what these tales meant and mean for American culture and with acute insights into the extraordinary diversity of American culture.