Biographies “Verizon Adds Mobile Broadband Backup for Dedicated Internet Service to ... - Providence Journal” plus 3 more |
- Verizon Adds Mobile Broadband Backup for Dedicated Internet Service to ... - Providence Journal
- Middlebury historian pens mini-biographies - Rutland Herald
- Elvis pal Klein goes inside King's court - Gloucester Daily Times
- St. Syncletica - Catholic Online
| Verizon Adds Mobile Broadband Backup for Dedicated Internet Service to ... - Providence Journal Posted: 05 Jan 2010 04:52 AM PST NEW YORK, Jan. 5 -- Small and medium-sized businesses now can get Verizon high-performance Internet access coupled with automatic wireless broadband backup to help ensure the businesses are always available to their customers. The new solution -- Verizon Internet Dedicated Access with Mobile Broadband -- automatically routes business traffic to the Verizon Wireless 3G EV-DO broadband wireless network in the event of a service disruption. The new solution, which is immediately available nationwide, is ideal for businesses that have highly distributed locations and primarily use IDA for outbound critical traffic, Web research or point-of-sale transactions. "This new integrated solution gives small- and medium-sized business customers robust and reliable Internet access along with the peace of mind that comes with having a wireless backup plan in place," said Carrie Gray, Verizon Business executive director of SMB solutions marketing. "Our white-glove managed installation approach enables our customers to concentrate on doing business while leaving the technical complexities to us." In addition to network diversity and customer premises equipment, Verizon Business provides a premium managed installation. (To hear a podcast on the benefits of Verizon IDA with Mobile Broadband for small- and medium-sized business customers, go to: http://www.verizonbusiness.com/resources/media/index.xml?urlid=130295.) Resilient, Cost-Effective Wireless Backup Broadband backup over the Verizon Wireless network provides SMB customers with an attractive alternative to traditional wireline business-continuity solutions, offering high speed at a low cost along with rapid deployment. The combined solution features two linked ADTRAN NetVanta 3200 routers -- one connected to the primary T1 access source and the other featuring a 3G wireless Network Interface Module designed for use with the Verizon Wireless network. This dual-unit approach provides the flexibility to place the 3G NIM-equipped router wherever cellular coverage is strongest. The IDA circuit and Internet traffic are actively monitored so that the wireless link is activated only as needed. "Small and mid-size businesses, across a variety of vertical industries, seek the same resilient, reliable networks of their large counterparts," said Gary Bolton, vice president of global marketing, ADTRAN. "With Verizon's dedicated Internet solution and ADTRAN NetVanta routers, we bring unmatched industry expertise, best-practice business processes and platform leadership to address the critical business-continuity needs of small and mid-size businesses." For more information about Verizon's integrated solutions for small- and medium-sized business customers, visit http://verizon.com/businesspower. Verizon Communications Inc. VERIZON'S ONLINE NEWS CENTER: Verizon news releases, executive speeches and biographies, media contacts, high quality video and images, and other information are available at Verizon's News Center on the World Wide Web at www.verizon.com/news. To receive news releases by e-mail, visit the News Center and register for customized automatic delivery of Verizon news releases. CONTACT: Peter Lucht, +1-617-535-5533, Web site: http://www.verizon.com/ Company News On-Call: http://www.prnewswire.com/comp/094251.html Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Middlebury historian pens mini-biographies - Rutland Herald Posted: 02 Jan 2010 11:54 PM PST Middlebury historian pens mini-biographies
By MARK BUSHNELL - Published: January 3, 2010 If you pick up one of Robert Buckeye's new biographies of important Vermonters, chances are you'll never have heard of the subject. Buckeye wants it that way. "These people should be better known," he says. And, reading through these essay-length books, it is easy to agree. In his chapbooks, Buckeye, a retired archivist for Middlebury College, offers insights into such little-known Vermonters as Martin Freeman, Edwin James, Viola White, Samuel Dwight and Francis Frost. They are not part of the pantheon of important Vermonters — Ethan Allen, George Aiken, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, etc. — but their absence makes their stories no less significant. Take Edwin James. James was a fascinating person who was ahead of his time, which might explain why he has been lost to time. Born in Weybridge in 1797, James graduated from Middlebury College. He was a learned young man, with knowledge far beyond his years. By the time he is 23, he has studied botany, geology and medicine. Tellingly, while at Middlebury, he reads about the voyages of Capt. James Cook and Don Quixote, notes Buckeye. The books encapsulate his future — part adventure, part tilting at windmills. James gains an appointment to Maj. Stephen Long's expedition to the Rocky Mountains, the first major exploration since Lewis and Clark's. He becomes the first white man to climb Pike's Peak, which is initially identified on maps as James Peak. He discovers and names hundreds of plant species, including mountain blue columbine, which will become Colorado's state flower. To James, however, the West is not a nirvana to explore. He is horrified by what he sees there: White men slaughtering buffaloes by the thousands and keeping only their tongues. But he is most appalled by the treatment of Native Americans. He sees how false treaties, Christianity and alcohol are being used to push tribes off their land. In 1827, he helps write a book to expose the atrocities being committed in the name of progress, but few people listen. James is a century too early. In his essay, Buckeye has brought back James, who was in serious need of resurrecting. Buckeye uncovered about 200 citations about him in 19th-century journals and newspapers. "I don't think there are more than three or four in the 20th century," he says in an interview, "but I think he is a significant American." 'Not Vermontiana' Buckeye's brief books — they are only about a dozen pages long — fall somewhere between works of popular history and scholarly fare, though they tend toward the academic end of that spectrum. "I was aware when I began this series that they might be difficult to interest people in because in some sense they are not Vermontiana," says Buckeye, whose Amandla Publishing company produces this Quarry Books Series. "They are more intellectual and scholarly than Vermontiana." On the other hand, they are not long, scholarly works, so academics might be turned off. "In each case I wanted to do a responsible job," Buckeye says, "but I wasn't going to be a lifelong scholar on any of them." Buckeye's foray into publishing is a second, or perhaps third or fourth, career for him. From 1971 to 2003, he worked for Middlebury College, serving in a variety of positions, including college archivist, special collections librarian, and curator of and instructor in American literature. Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the subjects of his books have ties to Middlebury. Buckeye plans to write 10 such books and sell them through local bookstores. Yale, Middlebury and the University of Vermont have subscribed to the series. These are not encyclopedic works that tell every known fact about a historic figure and do so in a chronological order. Instead, these are free-ranging essays in which Buckeye teases out themes in the subjects' lives and lets facts rise to the surface as needed to make his points. The essays are poetic at times. Not surprisingly, Buckeye modeled his books after the book "In the American Grain" by William Carlos Williams. Better known as a poet, Williams picked subjects who represented his vision of what it meant to be an American. Similarly, Buckeye chose subjects who embodied a certain "Vermontness." Buckeye was a contributor to the Vermont Encyclopedia, which came out in 2003. One of his guidelines in picking subjects for these books was that they had to be obscure enough to have been excluded from that book. All but two of his subjects passed that test. "But," Buckeye says, "I wanted to include Martin Freeman (whose encyclopedia entry he wrote), and my take on Joseph Battell was one that no one had taken." Battell is probably the best-known subject in Buckeye's series. He was a quirky land baron in Addison County who gave away his vast holdings, including the top of Camel's Hump, on condition that they be preserved. Most writing about Battell looks at his environmental ethic. Buckeye looks at another aspect of Battell's urge to conserve things. "He was the first Take Back Vermonter," Buckeye says of Battell, who lived from 1839 to 1915. Wading through Battell's rambling and "unreadable" tome, "Ellen, or Whisperings of an Old Pine," Buckeye found Battell rejecting the waves of modernity that were then hitting Vermont. He sees the rise of science, particularly Darwinism, as threatening the supremacy of religion. He also rails against other forces that he sees threatening the way of life he knows, particularly trains and automobiles, which bring the outside world streaming into Vermont. A free man Though Martin Freeman appears in the Vermont Encyclopedia, he is hardly a household name. The grandson of a slave who gained his freedom by fighting in the Revolution, Freeman was born in Rutland in 1826. He grows up with opportunities that few blacks of the era experienced. The minister at his church, the East Parish Congregational Church, recognizes his potential and supports his admission to Middlebury. The college's president, an abolitionist, loans Freeman money for tuition and books. He is selected the salutatorian by his graduating class and gives an address in both Latin and English, as is the custom of the time. He gains an appointment at the Allegheny Institute near Pittsburgh as professor of mathematics and science, and eventually becomes the college's president. Freeman becomes involved in the slavery issue. He argues that blacks shouldn't try to pass as whites by straightening their hair. "Let the man of whatever hue, respect himself, and be true to the instincts of his manhood," he writes. Freeman eventually despairs of the United States ever getting over its ingrained racism. He resigns his college presidency and joins the faculty of Liberia College in Liberia, a country founded with the purpose of providing a home for freed American slaves. Though the work is hard, Freeman declares: "I have never been happy until I made Liberia my home." A unusual woman Viola White found no such home. Heeding her inner compass, White follows a path rarely followed by women during the early 1900s. She is an intellectual, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley in 1911. She becomes a socialist and pacifist and travels to Europe to work as a nurse during the Great War. After the war, she writes poems and is identified as a promising younger poet in a Yale publication. Her poems denounce capitalism, religion and war. She works at the Brooklyn Public Library but can't stand the city, where the language of daily life is "vulgar and impoverished, and this extends to every subject howsoever great, even love and death." The great love of her life is another woman, whom Buckeye identifies simply as Beatrice. Their love, he notes, is "bound by middle-class norms of respectability" and is a romantic friendship rather than a sexual relationship. Beatrice leaves and in her sorrow, White writes a 57-sonnet cycle to her lost love. White leaves Brooklyn for Vermont, taking a position in 1933 at Middlebury, curating the college's American literature collection. The next year she earns her doctorate, having completed her dissertation on novelist Herman Melville. For the sake of the job, which she needs to help her parents in New York City, White doesn't talk about politics. She starts taking long walks in the wilds of her new community and writes two nature books about her experiences: "Not Faster Than a Walk" and "Vermont Diary." She is devoted to the work of Thoreau and obtains for the college his own copy of "Walden," with his handwritten notes inside. She acquires more of Thoreau's books, many of which were in his cabin on Walden Pond. Viola White chooses a quiet life among the books and flowers of Middlebury. Like the others in the Quarry Books Series, it is a life that might have gone unnoticed if Robert Buckeye hadn't illuminated it. (The Quarry Books Series is available at Book King in Rutland, Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury and Northshire Bookstore in Manchester.) Mark Bushnell's column on Vermont history is a weekly feature in Vermont Sunday Magazine. A collection of his columns was recently published in the book "It Happened in Vermont." He can be reached at vermontpastlane@gmail.com.
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| Elvis pal Klein goes inside King's court - Gloucester Daily Times Posted: 05 Jan 2010 02:29 AM PST Hundreds of thousands of people still pay each year to see Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tenn., and fork over cash for his music and memorabilia. And he consistently places at or near the top of the annual list of highest-earning dead celebrities. Not bad for a guy who died in 1977. He's known around the world simply as Elvis, and his life story has been told and retold in every imaginable medium, from documentaries and movies to biographies and memoirs. And they keep rolling in. The latest comes from George Klein, who befriended Presley when they were high school classmates. Klein went on to earn a place in the King's inner circle of friends and employees known as the Memphis Mafia. "Elvis: My Best Man" isn't a tell-all. Klein makes it clear in the author's note that he "was offered a fair amount" to write such a book after Presley's death. Instead, what he offers is an insider's view of Presley the man as opposed to Presley the singer, actor and icon. "So much has been written and said about Elvis Presley that for a long time I didn't feel the need to add my own book to the clamor," Klein writes. "Now, though, I'm old enough to know that I won't always be around to speak of the Elvis I knew." His Elvis is funny, kind, whip-smart and generous. Presley bought Klein gifts, including a new car, and paid for his wedding — he was Klein's best man at the nuptials, hence the book's title. Many who write or reminisce about their time with Presley focus on subjects that titillate, but Klein holds off on all of that, preferring to paint a picture of Presley the human being. The book comes across as an affectionate recounting of the times Klein spent with a man he considered his best friend. Klein — called "GK" by Presley — offers a stirring account of how Presley coped with the untimely passing of his beloved mother, Gladys, whom Klein calls "the anchor in his crazy life." "I've come to believe that if Mrs. Presley had lived a full life, Elvis would be with us today," Klein writes. The book features retellings of Presley's interactions with other famous figures of the era — from Ann-Margret and Steve McQueen to Nat King Cole and James Brown. "Elvis: My Best Man" also hits on the major points in Presley's life, including his marriage to — and divorce from — Priscilla Beaulieu; his time in the Army; his movie and music careers; and so on. Klein unlocks the door to the King's court, but what he shows us isn't a tale of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll favored by other Presley biographers. His is a tribute and a welcome addition to the mountain of Presley books already on the market. "Elvis: My Best Man" (Crown, 320 pages, $25), by George Klein: Elvis Presley is one of the most enduring figures in American pop culture history. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| St. Syncletica - Catholic Online Posted: 04 Jan 2010 11:59 PM PST Feastday: January 5 St. Syncletica Virgin JANUARY 5 She was born at Alexandria in Egypt, of wealthy Macedonian parents. From her infancy she had imbibed the lore of virtue, and in her tender years she consecrated her virginity to God. Her great fortune and beauty induced many young noblemen to become her suitors for marriage, but she had already bestowed her heart on her heavenly spouse. Flight was her refuge against exterior assaults, and, regarding herself as her own most dangerous enemy, she began early to subdue her flesh by austere fasts and other mortifications. She never seemed to suffer more than when obliged to eat oftener than she desired. Her parents, at their death, left her heiress to their opulent estate; for the two brothers she had died before them; and her sister being blind, was committed entirely to her guardianship. Syncletica, having soon distributed her fortune among the poor, retired with her sister into a lonesome monument, on a relation's estate; where, having sent for a priest, she cut off her hair in his presence, as a sign whereby she renounced the world, and renewed the consecration of herself to God. Mortification and prayer were from that time her principal employment; but her close solitude, by concealing her pious exercises from the eyes of the world, has deprived us in a great measure of the knowledge of them. The fame of her virtue being spread abroad, many women resorted to her abode to confer with her upon spiritual matters. Her humility made her unwilling to take upon herself the task of instructing, but charity, on the other side, opened her mouth. Her pious discourses were inflamed with so much zeal, and accompanied with such an unfeigned humility, and with so many tears, that it cannot be expressed what deep impressions they made on her hearers. "Oh" said the saint, "how happy should we be, did we but take as much pains to gain heaven and please God, as worldlings do to heap up riches and perishable goods! By land they venture among thieves and robbers; at sea they expose themselves to the fury of winds and storms; they suffer shipwrecks, and all perils; they attempt all, try all, hazard all but we, in serving so great a master, for so immense a good, are afraid of every contradiction." At other times, admonishing them of the dangers of this life, she was accusoned to say, "We must be continually upon our guard, for we are engaged in a perpetual war; unless we take care, the enemy will surprise us, when we are least aware of him. A ship sometimes passes safe through hurricanes and tempests, yet, if the pilot, even in a calm, has not a great care of it, a single wave, raised by a sudden gust, may sink her. It does not signify whether the enemy clambers in by the window, or whether all at once he shakes the foundation, if at last he destroys the house. In this life we sail, as it were, in an unknown sea. We meet with rocks, shelves, and sands; sometimes we are becalmed, and at other times we find ourselves tossed and buffeted by a storm. Thus we are never secure, never out of danger; and, if we fall asleep, are sure to perish. We have a most intelligent and experienced pilot at the helm of our vessel even Jesus Christ himself, who will conduct us safe into the haven of salvation if, by our supineness, we cause not our own perdition." She frequently inculcated the virtue of humility, in the following words: "A treasure is secure so long as it remains concealed; but when once disclosed, and laid open to every bold invader, it is presently rifled; so virtue is safe so long as secret, but, if rashly exposed, it but too often evaporates into smoke. By humility, and contempt of the world, the soul, like an eagle, soars on high, above all transitory things, and tramples on the backs of lions and dragons. By these, and the like discourses, did this devout virgin excite others to charity, humility, vigilance, and every other virtue. The devil, enraged to behold so much good, which all his machinations were not capable to prevent, obtained permission of God, for her trial, to afflict this his faithful servant, like another Job: but even this served only to render her virtue the more illustrious. In the eightieth year of her age she was seized with an inward burning fever, which wasted her insensibly by its intense heat; at the same time an imposthume was formed in her lungs; and a violent and most tormenting scurvy, attended with a corroding hideous stinking ulcer, ate away her jaws and mouth, and deprived her of her speech. She bore all with incredible patience and resignation to God's holy will; and with such a desire of an addition to her sufferings, that she greatly dreaded the physicians would alleviate her pains. It was with difficulty that she permitted them to pare away or embalm the parts already dead. During the three last months of her life, she found no repose. Though the cancer had robbed her of her speech, her wonderful patience served to preach to others more movingly than words could have done. Three days before her death she foresaw, that on the third day she should be released from the prison of her body; and on it, surrounded by a heavenly light, and ravished by consolatory visions, she surrendered her pure soul into the hands of her Creator, in the eighty-fourth year of her age. The Greeks keep her festival on the 4th, the Roman Martyrology mentions her on the 5th of January. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. 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