To contact us Click HERE Redondo Beach CA Dec 31 2012 The two teenagers stabbed inside the South Bay Galleria in Redondo Beach late Saturday night suffered serious wounds and have been rushed into surgery. The boy and the girl were taken to an area hospital, but their condition was not immediately known, according to the Redondo Beach Police Department.
The stabbing occurred in the public area of the mall’s third level, which is where the movie theaters, a food court and various shops are located.
Late Saturday night police said they had found no witnesses. A mall security officer discovered the injured pair and called for help from police who already were in the mall area. Before the boy passed out, he provided a general description of the suspect, said Sgt. David Christian.
Many stores were in the process of closing as the investigation began, and officers did not order a lockdown, but they did stop vehicles as they left. The attacker, however, is still at large.
"We did not have a lot to go on," Christian said. "We basically blocked all the exits for the parking area. We just stopped every car that went by and looked inside with a flashlight and talked to the people inside. It was a lot of cars."
Redondo Beach police were assisted by police from Torrance, Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach.
A manager at the movie complex, which was showing such holiday releases as "Les Miserables," "Jack Reacher" and "Django Unchained," told The Times that the mall administration had directed her to close down the theaters.
"We don’t know anything about it," said the woman, who did not give her name. "I don’t know what happened. The mall said you need to close down."
Christian said he was not aware of any order from police to close the cinemas, but he said he thought that, after the incident, the theaters were allowing no further admissions.
Investigators are reviewing mall surveillance video for possible stills or video that might assist their probe. Anyone with information is asked to call the Redondo Beach Police Tip line at (310) 937-6685, or send a text message to (310) 339-2362. Source:LA NOW
To contact us Click HERE HUNTSVILLE, AL Dec 31 2012 Police said that a suspected shoplifter stopped by Walmart loss prevention is behind bars after police said he got physical with a Walmart security agents. According to the store security officer, they observed Joshua Hineman, concealing merchandise at the Sparkman Drive location. When he tried to leave without paying, the loss prevention agent confronted him. Hineman used force in his attempt to flee but security was able to subdue and detain him until police officers arrived. Hineman has been booked on several charges. No word on what he was trying to steal.
To contact us Click HERE RICHMOND, VA Dec 31 20102 – During one of the busiest party months of the year, Seiberts Towing is stepping in to help prevent drunk driving. The towing company unveiled it’s Toast’d Tow program this week. This community service offers to get Richmonders and their cars home for juse $50-dollars between the hours of 10pm and 4am. Toast’d Tow will operate seven nights a week leading up to New Years Day and provides holiday revelers another option for getting home safely – car included. Randy Seibert, President of Seibert’s Family of Companies says “Around the holidays, people often find themselves in situations where they can’t drive home safely. With our new Toast’d Tow program, you don’t need to worry about taking a taxi home at the end of the night and coming back for your car the next day. Our company cares about the community and getting people home safely.” December is also National Impaired Driving Prevention Month. Each December, automobile accidents involving impaired drivers occur more frequently. In the past five years, the Commonwealth of Virginia had over 1,360 DUI fatalities. Seibert’s says impaired drivers must be within Richmond city limits to deliver them and their car home safely. Delivery of drivers and vehicles outside the city limits incurs an additional $1.50 per mile charge. If you have any questions about the problem you can contact The Toast’d Tow hotline from 10pm to 4am daily at 804-233-5757.
To contact us Click HERE DUNN, NC Dec 31 2012 (AP) - Harnett County authorities are accusing a 56-year-old man of robbing and killing his former boss.
The sheriff's office says James Davis is charged with murder in the death of 76-year-old Charles Stewart. Additional charges are pending.
Sheriff Larry Rollins accuses Davis of breaking into Stewart's home in Dunn about 10:30 a.m. Sunday, and beating Stewart and his wife before fleeing with guns, jewelry and cash.
Deputies responding to a 911 call found Stewart dead outside. Stewarts' injured, 62-year-old wife was found inside and taken to Betsy Johnson Regional Hospital.
Davis was found at an abandoned home in Clinton about 7:45 p.m. The Stewarts' stolen van was also there.
Rollins says Davis used to work for Stewart before he was let go about a year ago.
To contact us Click HERE NEW YORK NY Dec 31 2012 AP— When revelers pack Times Square for the annual New Year's eve celebration on Monday night, police will observe a tradition of their own: giving them lots of company. Each year, the New York Police Department assigns thousands of extra patrols to festivities — in ways seen and unseen — to control the crowd and watch for any signs of trouble. Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world are expected to pack into the bow-tie stretch of streets in Midtown Manhattan to see the crystal ball drop and ring in 2013.
"We think it's the safest place in the world on New Year's Eve," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told The Associated Press ahead of the holiday.
Security in Times Square has become an obsession for the NYPD in the post-9/11 world, especially since the botched attempted car bombing there in the summer of 2010. More recently, details emerged in another case in Florida saying that one suspect considered Times Square as a potential target.
"Times Square is an iconic location that draws a significant number of people every day," Kelly said. "New Year's Eve is the apex of that, so we have to plan accordingly."
Kelly stressed that there are no specific terror threats related to a celebration televised across the globe. But believing that the so-called "Crossroads of the World" is always in the crosshairs of would-be terrorists, the nation's largest police department has turned securing the event into a science.
Hotels are a particular concern. The department has worked closely with managers, urging them to guard against anyone who might seek to check into a guest room and use it to launch a sniper or other type of attack.
"We ask them to monitor people coming into the hotels very closely," Kelly said.
In terms of crowd control, police noticed last year that revelers starting flocking to Times Square earlier in the day to hear rehearsals of performers scheduled for various telecasts.
"At one o'clock in the afternoon, there was a significant crowd," Kelly said. "It was really packed with people."
So this year, the department will adjust by posting more officers on the streets before nightfall, the commissioner said.
Along with the army of additional uniformed officers, police will use barriers to prevent overcrowding and for checkpoints to inspect vehicles, enforce a ban on alcohol and check handbags. Visitors will see bomb-sniffing dogs and heavily armed counter-terrorism teams. Rooftop patrols and NYPD helicopters will keep an eye on the crowd as well.
Other plainclothes officers are assigned to blend into the crowd. Many officers will be wearing palm-size radiation detectors designed to give off a signal if they detect evidence of a dirty bomb, an explosive intended to spread panic by creating a radioactive cloud.
The bomb squad and another unit specializing in chemical and biological threats will sweep hotels, theaters, construction sites and parking garages. They also will patrol the sprawling Times Square subway station.
The NYPD also will rely on a network of thousands of closed-circuit security cameras carpeting the roughly 1.7 square miles south of Canal Street, the subway system and parts of Midtown Manhattan.
Another annual practice: Sealing manhole covers and removing mailboxes to prevent anyone from using them to conceal an explosive or other device.
In 2010, Faisal Shahzad left a Nissan Pathfinder outfitted with a crude, homemade propane-and-gasoline bomb on a block teeming with tourists. The explosive malfunctioned, but the near-miss spread a wave of fear across the city. Authorities say Shahzad was backed by the Pakistani Taliban,
Shahzad was arrested and, after a guilty plea, sentenced to life in prison. But he warned, "Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun."
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My main project for the summer is basically the dream of any soon-to-be job-seeking college student (like myself). I am working with Human Resources to research and develop a social media strategy for recruiting, observing what kind of cool new methods other companies are implementing. The best part of this job is that my research consists of looking at company websites, twitter accounts, LinkedIn profiles, facebook pages and YouTube accounts all day long. Lately, I’ve been too busy to keep up with my research, but now that our presentations are going to be here oh so soon (exactly two weeks from now) I have to make time so I can be fully prepared to explain what’s going on in the exciting world of recruitment.
Here is a little peek of what I’ve been working on …
twitter – Lots of companies are using their twitter feeds to publicize job openings in addition to sharing information about their culture or their employees, so I follow anyone and everyone from our main competitors to companies like Starbucks and Google. One thing I’ve learned: Recruiters love to tweet … all the time.
So many tweets, so little time ...
YouTube – Some companies are using YouTube to promote their company culture and the organization by posting videos of company events and employee profiles showcasing what they love about their jobs. (How cool is that?!)
Since I’m a marketing major, all of this research is showing me how many different ways social media can be used for one company. Also, I will begin looking for my first post-grad job rather soon, and I’m learning how to be as thorough as possible when preparing for an interview. Most people long for the time to invest in this kind of research, and I’m lucky enough to have it be my job!
I couldn’t end this post without a shameless plug for Vera’s company culture or our open jobs … so check out the official Vera Bradley blog, Inside Stitch, for some fabulous posts about life at Vera Bradley, and be sure to stop by our Careers page to see what openings we have at our home office and in our retail stores!
To contact us Click HERE fish eye lens advantage image from forkergirl's photostream
In this consideration of Mermaid as Metaphor, a point of entry and a point of departure (bifurcation hub) are formed by two elements brought together (in a range of manipulations) forming a third element that is a composite of the two (1 element plus 1 element = a 3rd element [1+1=3], as Rima pointed out in a limited forked multimedia story class). At this hub is a common depiction of mermaids in which two unrelated biological segments of two organisms are brought together in (primarily visual) unification usually depicted as horizontally split halves forming wholeness: a mermaid.
This (visual) wholeness is a form of marriage, an easily imagined evolutionary progression or regression of marriage. Though the one mermaid outcome of wholeness formation is usually offered, there are at least two composites that would emerge from each union in this imagined evolution or regression. Human upper body + fish lower body, and human lower body + fish upper body. This is an answer to where's the other halves? —the human lower body and the fish upper body? An example of this more complete merger outcome scenario supplies the horror factor of The Fly (1958). The human/fly hybrid is created when a teleportation experiment meant to be an exclusively human teleportation experiment becomes a human/insect teleportation experiment when a fly is discovered inside the teleportation chamber with the scientist when the experiment is already underway and no one is there to stop the experiment. Though the human/fly hybrid is an unintended outcome, that the hybrid is an outcome indicates a form of successful, if horrifying, biological union. The film features both composite forms: human body with fly head/hand and fly body with human head/hand. Once the hybrids emerged, the assumption was that capturing the fly body/human head composite and repeating the experiment with both hybrid outcomes in the chamber, would restore the human and the fly to pre-composite forms though other possibilities would have been as likely had the fly body/human head variation not been snared in a web of spider for whom the genetic modifications of the humanized insect changed nothing.
A cautionary tale, to be sure. A scientist accused of playing God to be sure.
Though I hesitate the use the term, this serves, in part, as a, well, deconstruction of the mermaid metaphor. It is a closer look inside what is and isn't occurring in the architecture of the metaphor that a mermaid is, and simultaneously is an invitation to explore what can happen/is happening inside other metaphors, using the outcomes of those explorations to establish other opportunities and forms of expression: the making of other poams (products of acts of making).
In popular depictions of mermaids, biological segments contributed by the human and by the (unspecified species of) fish seem interchangeable, largely because each segment apparently remains intact with crossover of fish into human, human into fish. The fish and human portions of a mermaid hybrid system could be separated easily. It is obvious where to cut. The human and fish segments seem closed systems stitched together (or in some other way held in place) superficially. The forming of human/fish composites seems exceedingly neat with a well-defined boundary separating fish function and appearance from human function and appearance. No transgression of species apparently occurs; nothing, well, fishy in the merger. Mermaids, rather, seem models of respect for species purity despite their being linked. No tinkering with the actual DNA as human DNA and fish genetic code don't mix, but instead exist side-by side. Good neighbors who share much, but not everything. Good spouses who share much but not everything.
If a deeper connection is considered, the external division and separation of fish and human raises questions about function, form, and layout of internal organs. Just how is the mermaid metaphor creature mapped internally? Surely anatomical mingling occurs, or it is difficult to imagine viability of this trans-species as a species distinct from human and fish with its own biological frameworks and systems; the fish, in the more frequent ichthyological bottom half mermaid configuration, would have no heart, no brain, no circulation of human blood in fish areas. If the halves are stitched together superficially and not integrated into a single being, each half would then need separate and contained systems of respiration, systems of ingestion, systems of excretion, etc. A romanticized depiction (and why not such a depiction!) of mermaids does not support contamination of the beautiful, usually, woman, with fishiness. Indeed, the mermaid might even be a purer form of woman for rejecting genitalia in favor of fishtail; with breasts, she may suckle a child and could even seem, depending on who's constructing the idea system, nearly as wholesome and good as Mary, Mother of Christ. In this wonderful anatomical chart (to the right) of a mermaid from gearfuse.com, the internal revelation is still decidedly human in keeping with the biological structure of most mermaids; no doubt a common or typical mermaid is dissected in the well-imagined image of mermaid reality wherever it exists, in imagination, gaming, and/or virtual worlds, for instance. Mermaid Diaries is a blog all about a little mermaid named Natalia Zelmanov and her adventures in second life. Below is a video of a Spore mermaid followed by a video of a Second Life mermaid show:
The common mermaid is uncomplicated, unproblematic in biological terms. She (usually) looks good, and, in keeping with her fish contribution, is an excellent catch.
Consideration of shared biological functioning is not meant to discredit the mythic or aesthetic function of mermaid systems, and certainly does not undermine an ability of imagination to overcome problems of mermaid existence within shared physical realities. That closed biological and chemical systems can align themselves without sharing structures or circulation, may give a nod to some of the power of imagination as part of the glue maintaining the human/fish alignment. Not that everyone can (or should) use imagination in tis manner; what I refer to as imagination may be referred to differently in other cultural and/or belief systems that configure reality differently, including religions in which what some might consider supernatural is real; prayer connects a human mortal reality with a divine system of existence; prayer and belief function as bridges between these configurations.
It is quite odd, I think, that more mingling apparently does not occur at the juncture of fish and human in a mermaid system of co-dependency to be one being, one creature; why not more raggedness as these halves struggle to come together? In the production of mermaids, if something is occurring biologically, why not more evidence of mutation in the manipulation of humans and fish to produce mermaids? Where are the failures? Where are the monsters of human/fish alliances? Where are the other creature from black lagoons (gill-men) and other evolutionary missing links along the evolutionary road to mermaid? What is it about certain environments that seem to encourage emergence of human/fish hybrids? So much perfection! —similar, it seems (sorry for a lack of statistics) to a rate of perfection in production of angels or other beings embodying some human elements and some divine elements. Something in imagination apparently overcomes potential conflict in human and fish unions —did not George W. Bush say that he hoped the human and the fish could coexist peacefully? In configuring scenarios of this coexistence, some of that peaceful cohabitation would exist within a single body, half human, half fish; the bi-species creature practicing a form of political correctness in blending —indeed, Bush's statement could be construed as a call for transspecies experimentation, phase one focusing on human and fish peacful coexistence scenarios.
Had W seen Shiloh Pepin on a Discovery Channel documentary (Mermaid Girl) when he said that? Did he realize that there was such a condition as sirenomelia, that humans were sometimes born with their legs fused in a disease commonly called mermaid syndrome, a challenging coexistence that might look peaceful? What hope for the future of humans did he foresee in improving human/fish coexistence? What's in that enhanced coexistence for Americans? for democracy? for capitalism?
In written metaphor also things come together with suspicious ease, perhaps in part because of familiarity with a long history of mythical part human creatures from ancient, classical, and sacred texts ; indeed, even Jesus Christ is a half-human outcome of a human/divine union. Evolutions occur inside metaphor; there is a journey from something to something, and details of the journey are seldom mapped. Mapping of what occurs inside metaphor could be quite revelatory and could lead to other revelatory forms of making, thinking, and/or understanding. To the left, Gort becomes The Stig, and to the right, Sambo becomes Obama in two metaphork evolutions by forkergirl. Much, much (compelling and exciting, among other forms of work) remains to be done.
Redondo Beach CA Dec 31 2012 The two teenagers stabbed inside the South Bay Galleria in Redondo Beach late Saturday night suffered serious wounds and have been rushed into surgery. 
RICHMOND, VA Dec 31 20102 – During one of the busiest party months of the year, Seiberts Towing is stepping in to help prevent drunk driving. The towing company unveiled it’s Toast’d Tow program this week. This community service offers to get Richmonders and their cars home for juse $50-dollars between the hours of 10pm and 4am. 
DUNN, NC Dec 31 2012 (AP) - Harnett County authorities are accusing a 56-year-old man of robbing and killing his former boss.
NEW YORK NY Dec 31 2012 AP— When revelers pack Times Square for the annual New Year's eve celebration on Monday night, police will observe a tradition of their own: giving them lots of company.
fish eye lens advantage image from forkergirl's photostream
If a deeper connection is considered, the external division and separation of fish and human raises questions about function, form, and layout of internal organs. Just how is the mermaid metaphor creature mapped internally? Surely anatomical mingling occurs, or it is difficult to imagine viability of this trans-species as a species distinct from human and fish with its own biological frameworks and systems; the fish, in the more frequent ichthyological bottom half mermaid configuration, would have no heart, no brain, no circulation of human blood in fish areas. If the halves are stitched together superficially and not integrated into a single being, each half would then need separate and contained systems of respiration, systems of ingestion, systems of excretion, etc. A romanticized depiction (and why not such a depiction!) of mermaids does not support contamination of the beautiful, usually, woman, with fishiness. Indeed, the mermaid might even be a purer form of woman for rejecting genitalia in favor of fishtail; with breasts, she may suckle a child and could even seem, depending on who's constructing the idea system, nearly as wholesome and good as Mary, Mother of Christ. In this wonderful anatomical chart (to the right) of a mermaid from gearfuse.com, the internal revelation is still decidedly human in keeping with the biological structure of most mermaids; no doubt a common or typical mermaid is dissected in the well-imagined image of mermaid reality wherever it exists, in imagination, gaming, and/or virtual worlds, for instance. Mermaid Diaries is a blog all about a little mermaid named Natalia Zelmanov and her adventures in second life. Below is a video of a Spore mermaid followed by a video of a Second Life mermaid show: