Archive for the ‘Personal Performance’ Category
MissTeen Personal Talent Performance by Serena Himesh Kana – Video
Posted: February 15, 2012 at 4:30 pm
Read more from the original source:
MissTeen Personal Talent Performance by Serena Himesh Kana - Video
Joss Stone and Dave Stewart at late late night Feb. 14th 2012..interview+performance – Video
Posted: at 4:30 pm
Original post:
Joss Stone and Dave Stewart at late late night Feb. 14th 2012..interview+performance - Video
MissTeen Personal Talent Performance by Tanvi Shinde – Video
Posted: at 4:30 pm
Read this article:
MissTeen Personal Talent Performance by Tanvi Shinde - Video
Personal Foul
Posted: at 4:30 pm
You might not recognize Mike Shropshire’s image on the video clip — avuncular, face framed by thinning gray hair — but you may recall the name. Shropshire’s byline ran over sports columns and feature stories in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Dallas Morning News, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, D magazine, and elsewhere for 35 years.
In the video, he reminisces about the early years of the Texas Rangers baseball club, name-dropping a little — Billy Martin, Dan Jenkins. His memories were trotted out last week as a promotional piece for The Sports Page, a comedy by local playwright Larry Herold that premiered at Stage West Theatre last week. The play is set in the mid-1960s, near Shropshire’s heyday as a sports writer.
The clip includes one section by Shropshire that is drawing protests from women journalists around the country. In it, Shropshire talks about the “first woman journalist I ever encountered,” who worked for a radio station and who happily had sex in the showers with “four or five” Rangers players one night in 1975.
Shropshire now says he asked the video producers to delete that part of his interview in the video but that they said it was too late to do so. Both Adam Dietrich, the video producer, and Herold defended its inclusion.
What’s more, Dietrich admits that he hoped the inclusion of Shropshire’s salacious charges would create controversy to promote the play. As a documentarian, he said, he doesn’t have to follow the same rules as a journalist. The video, however, is being used as promotion for a play, not as part of a documentary, stand-alone film.
The offensive nugget has put Shropshire all over the internet, incensing women and apparently titillating some men. Commenters alternately raged and guffawed on D magazine’s FrontBurner blog after Executive Editor Tim Rogers, an erstwhile colleague of Shropshire, posted the video on Feb. 8 with a short story.
The Dallas Observer’s Robert Wilonsky wrote a neutral introduction and posted the clip, with four others, on that newspaper’s web site. The “gang-bang” video has gone DFW-viral in less than a week. “Boys will be boys,” commenters suggested (wink-wink, nudge-nudge), but many women journalists, especially sportswriters, are furious.
Melissa Ludtke, executive editor of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, heard about the video via the members-only listserv of the Journalism & Women Symposium, a national professional organization.
“It’s wrong for these Dallas news organizations to post something like this,” she said. “It’s just disgusting and goes against every aspect of decency.
“First of all, to charge a particular person anonymously but yet indicate this was one of the only women in that area covering this sport for radio, is reckless,” she said. “If Shropshire knows the name of this reporter, he ought to give it, and that person ought to have the opportunity to respond. … Not one player is named. There is absolutely nothing in there to give it one shred of credibility.”
Sexist treatment of women sportswriters is familiar ground for Ludtke. Covering baseball for Sports Illustrated in the mid-1970s, she was banned from team locker rooms and couldn’t sit with the guys in the press box. That all changed when she filed a federal lawsuit against Major League Baseball and then-Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. She won the landmark case in 1978, establishing equal access to locker rooms for women reporters.
Dietrich, a Fort Worth-based actor with a fledgling commercial videography business, agreed that what Shropshire said was “outlandish.” But, he said, “My platform is not to show whether this is true or not true. I would be lying if I said we put that part of his interview in without realizing it would be controversial. We hoped to position it to create dialogue and questions and conversation.
“If an audience is outraged or interest is piqued, then I would encourage our audience to go out and continue the conversation.”
Stage West producing director Jerry Russell could not be reached for comment about the video and whether its use is an acceptable method of attracting audiences.
Herold used his experiences as a sportswriter back in the day as inspiration for his play’s focus on two crusty newspaper sportswriters at the Dallas Cowboys training camp in 1966. In the play, he treats the dramatic changes of the time — televised sports, women sportswriters, and arrogant athletes — with humor and sensitivity.
But he defended the use of Shropshire’s story in the video as being “Mike’s choice” and suggested that perhaps the video is helping sell tickets at Stage West.
“Every seat was filled on opening night,” Herold says. “That’s very unusual for a Saturday night opening at that theater.”
Shropshire, however, is anything but happy about the video and the response to it.
“I’m happy for the play’s success,” he said from his home in Dallas’s Preston Hollow neighborhood. “But I kinda feel like Rick Perry having to explain myself after a terrible debate performance. Anything I say about that video will make it worse.”
He said that after a bit of reflection on his inflammatory remarks, he contacted Dietrich with a request to “expunge those remarks.” Ten days had passed since the shoot, and “by then it was too late,” Shropshire said. He’d like to make amends now.
“The person I was talking about was not an accredited media person,” he says. “What she was, or what she claimed to be, was a freelancer working for a rock-and-roll radio station. I realize I created the [inaccurate] impression that she was an accredited writer assigned by a real news organization.”
Tim Rogers defends D’s decision to post the video without examining the truth of Shropshire’s statement. “Mike Shropshire is no shlub,” he says. “He’s a veteran sports reporter, and he writes books, so when we get something like this, it’s newsworthy. We put it up for our readers because it’s news.”
Rogers pointed out that he posted a rebuttal of sorts in a follow-up entry on Frontburner. Rogers made a call to a retired Texas Rangers player from the 1975 team and asked him “about Shrop’s story that a female reporter got ‘gang-banged’ in the clubhouse shower.” According to Rogers, the unidentified player hemmed and hawed and then concluded, “In a word, if I had to say whether or not that ever happened, I would easily say no.”
The video of Shropshire is part of a series featuring sportswriters who worked in North Texas during the timeframe featured in the play. A different clip will be rolled out each week for the run of the show.
“It’s done for movies all the time,” Herold says. “Why not create some videos just like the film trailers used to promote movies?” A slick, trailer-style video on Stage West’s web site (www.stagewest.org) introduces the play’s characters, interspersed with action shots.
Ludtke is still fuming. “Sexuality and sensuality were not on our minds when we were doing our jobs,” she said, mentioning some of her peers — pioneering female sportswriters such as Mary Ellen Garber, Betty Cuniberti, Lawrie Mifflin, Lesley Vissar, Robin Herman, and Jane Gross.
“Lawrie said it best,” Ludtke added. “She said, ‘Locker rooms are grubby, smelly, disgusting, exhausting, pressure-filled places that couldn’t possibly be thought of as a sexual situation.’ Women were doing this work because they knew how to do it, they wanted to do it, and they did it well despite the various challenges put in their way.”
If Dietrich and Herold are unrepentant, Shropshire is not. “If you can set the record straight,” he said, “I can dare to show my face in the neighborhood again and possibly I can remain married for another year.”
Excerpt from:
Personal Foul
Getting to the emotional roots of poor eating habits
Posted: at 4:30 pm
Life was becoming a winless race for Nora Mullen, 37: rushing to the office and back to her Oreland home, feeling overwhelmed and dissatisfied with her role as a new working mother.
Her baby daughter, an extremely picky eater, was in day care, and often sick.
It was during that period two years ago that Mullen consulted personal performance coach Erin Owen. The Northern Liberties founder of Your Performance Breakthrough (www.yourperformancebreakthrough.com) offers counseling in stress reduction, change, and nutrition, all with a leaning toward Eastern wisdom.
The two began meeting, and the results, according to Mullen, "were profound." Mullen gained insight into what her stress was costing her, and how she was shortchanging herself and her family, especially at mealtimes. A year ago, she left her job and is now making quality of life and nutrition high priorities. Her toddler daughter is thriving, and so is Mullen.
For the last eight years, Owen, an MBA who also trained at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (affiliated with Columbia University), has worked as one of a growing number of professionals who specialize in guiding high-achieving and often exhausted people to live more balanced lives, with nutrition as a cornerstone. Nutrition coaching leaves the prescribed diets to the Weight Watchers of the world, and takes a deeply personal approach, examining emotional triggers, eating history, and family dynamics in a one-on-one setting. It's an expanding field - the institute has 20,000 alumni working in 50 states and more than 80 countries since Joshua Rosenthal founded the program in 1992.
Owen, herself a mother of two, jumped from her corporate treadmill after noticing in her 20s that her body was breaking down from stress and improper eating, those deadly companions of modern Western life.
"I studied more and more about Eastern philosophies, made drastic changes in my own diet, ditching the doughnuts and burritos, and even stopped drinking coffee," says Owen. "I use some ancient Chinese ideas about the digestive system, about keeping food in proper relationship to the seasonal changes. ... Food can be the 'drug of choice,' and knowing how to use it can change your life."
Karen Gomez was a skinny kid until around age 10. Then, says the Philadelphia resident, she started gaining weight. "I come from a family with weight issues and bad habits," says Gomez. She tried every diet. As a teen and later as a young adult, she followed scripted plans that failed her. And then she met her nutritional inspiration: Ali Shapiro.
Gomez attended one of Shapiro's group sessions on emotional eating back in 2008, and as she listened to Shapiro discuss the tangled relationships that women have with food, something clicked. She signed on as a private client. "I left that first session so relieved that I wasn't going on a diet, one that would leave me hungry for weeks."
Fast forward to 2012, and Gomez is a considerably thinner - and infinitely happier - working mother of a 10-year-old son.
She has dropped about 60 pounds, embraced an entirely new way of nourishing herself, left a job that she disliked, and is passionate about walking several miles daily to and from her job in administration at the University of Pennsylvania.
Shapiro's "Truce With Food" approach to nourishment (alishapiro.com) contends that excess weight needs first to be understood if it is to be fixed.
Shapiro, 33, often shares her own story with clients, one that begins with her diagnosis, at age 13, of Hodgkin's disease.
"I thought I was going to die - I hated not being 'normal' - and I tried to bulldoze my way through chemo and radiation, stuffing down the feelings."
She was emotionally ravaged, at war with her body, and grew prone to cycles of losing and gaining weight into her young adulthood.
"And then I chose to work in corporate America, traveling all the time, feeling anxious and pressured. All the while, my body was signaling me that I was abusing it. I struggled with depression, had an undiagnosed gluten intolerance, asthma, allergies.. . ."
About six years ago, still in her stress-loaded life, Shapiro began studying nutrition, enrolling in the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.
Today, a regular health contributor to NBC's The 10! Show, she works with women struggling with weight. Shapiro reviews health histories, family patterns, and emotional eating, offering simple strategies such as getting off processed foods, digging into one's emotional history, and not waiting for life to get better "once I lose weight."
Says Shapiro, "My life and body are at peace now that I've designed my life in a way that truly feeds me."
Although the majority of clients are women, the problem isn't solely a female one. Just ask Jay M. Leistner, founder of Phase 2 Architecture and Interiors.
The 53-year-old Elkins Park resident summarizes: "I had too much on my plate - both food and work."
Given to late-night snacking, Leistner saw his weight creeping up, but he wasn't looking for a diet. He wanted a new relationship with food.
He found it with Sally Eisenberg, founder of Nourish Ur Life (nourishurlife.com), a nutrition counselor who also entered the field following some personal struggles.
"In 2006, I lost my sister to ovarian cancer. That was a terrible wake-up call to me about how precious life is," says Eisenberg, 47. "I'd worked for 20 years in the world of marketing and advertising, and I realized I wanted something more meaningful and personal in my life."
Then there was her own history: "As a chronic dieter, I was obsessed with my weight. It was completely unhealthy. I would weigh myself daily, and if I didn't like the number, my day would be ruined."
Eisenberg understands that with adjustments in attitudes and in daily diet, food can become a friend and less an enemy. Through her company, she works with clients on replacing unhealthy habits and ingredients with healthy ones. "I'm definitely not a fan of going on a diet," she says, noting that instead, she often takes clients on shopping trips to the grocery store to introduce new foods - and new food ideas. She also cooks with them in her kitchen.
On a recent afternoon, she was doing a refresher course with Leistner, who has learned about foods he never knew existed, like the quinoa fritters they were preparing together.
"I've lost 20 pounds without really trying," says Leistner, "and I've gained mindfulness and balance in my life. And that's better than ice cream."
Marni Grinberg Davis, 42 and pregnant, is another Eisenberg client. The director of philanthropy for a nonprofit, Davis has never had a weight problem, but her goal is to improve her awareness about nutrition.
"I definitely feel healthier, cleaner, and better-informed," says Davis. She and her husband plan to pass these principles on to their baby, due in March.
Continued here:
Getting to the emotional roots of poor eating habits
How to Boost PC Game Performance for Free – Video
Posted: at 4:50 am
See the original post here:
How to Boost PC Game Performance for Free - Video
Minnesota's per capita personal income compared to its neighbors
Posted: at 4:50 am
How is Minnesota doing compared to other states? Are we falling behind? Staying ahead? People ask these questions whenever I give a public talk. Those questions lie behind much of the policy discussion going on in St. Paul about the governor's job plan, right-to-work laws and tax policy.
Over the next few weeks, I'll take you on a guided tour of some data that sheds light on how well Minnesota is doing relative to other states and what these data imply about public policy. This week, I'll focus on one measure: per capita personal income. The take away: As Garrison Keillor says, we're above average, but it hasn't always been that way.
Minnesota in the long run
Per capita personal income equals the total amount of income earned by residents of a state divided by that state's population. (The complete definition is available here. In 2010, per capita income in Minnesota reached $42,847, while the national average hovered at $39,945 in 2010.
Per capita income is not in and of itself a measure of well-being. However, when adjusted properly for changes in prices, per capita income does tend to be positively associated with many things people value, including a high material standard of living, better health and life expectancies, and better education. These are the data I use in the figures below.
The figure below shows the raw data on Minnesota's per capita income relative to the national average. Notice the U-shaped pattern: Minnesota started out at the national average, fell below it, and then steadily climbed above the average.
Source: 1880-1920: Richard A. Easterlin, "Interregional Differences in Per Capita Income, Population, and Total Income, 1840-1950." [PDF] National Bureau of Economic Research, 1960; 1929 to present: Bureau of Economic Analysis
The line is smooth from 1880 to 1920 because we do not have annual data before 1929. Our best estimates are that Minnesota was at the national average in 1880, was slightly above in 1900, then fell to about 85 percent of the national average in 1920. Annual data begin in 1929 and confirm Minnesota's position.
Terry Fitzgerald, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, first presented the data for 1929 onward in a 2003 article which tells an important story: Starting at 85 percent of the national average, Minnesota reached parity in the 1960s and has been above average since the 1970s.
How did Minnesota become above average? We'll explore this question over the coming weeks, but here's the short version: High rates of labor force participation (especially by women), investments in human capital (such as education and health care), and investments in physical capital (both by private funders and public agencies) contributed to Minnesota's strong economic performance.
Minnesota and its neighbors
We often hear of how Minnesota must compete with its neighbors for businesses and jobs. We ultimately care about these things because they help determine our citizens' standard of living. So, how does Minnesota stack up against our neighbors, namely Wisconsin, Iowa, South Dakota and North Dakota?
Let's start by smoothing the data so that we can see the long-run trend. (For those who are interested: I applied a Hodrick-Prescott filter just as Fitzgerald did in his work.) Here is what we get for Minnesota:
Now, let's compare this with Wisconsin over the same period:
Minnesota's per capita income exceeded Wisconsin's starting in the 1960s. Not only that, but Wisconsin fell relative to the national average at the same time as Minnesota rose. Comparing Minnesota and Iowa tells a similar story:
Average income in Minnesota exceeded Iowa's in the early 1960s and never looked back.
How about the Dakotas? We hear quite often how well they are doing, so let's take a look. Here is South Dakota versus Minnesota:
South Dakota certainly grew steadily over the past 25 years, but its average income still hasn't reached the national average. Further, the high points in the late 1940s, the mid-1970s and the late 2000s all correspond to periods of high prices for agricultural commodities, pointing to a potential weakness in South Dakota's economy.
The situation is even starker when we compare Minnesota and North Dakota:
North Dakota exhibits the same patterns as South Dakota; they are exaggerated by the importance of oil and gas extraction in North Dakota and thus make their economy even more subject to booms and busts.
What about some other states?
Two states to which Minnesota is often compared are Indiana and Texas. Indiana, for example, recently passed a right-to-work law and this will no doubt be cited in our Legislature's debates on this issue. Texas is known as a low-tax, small government state that its governor, Rick Perry, cited as an example that the rest of the nation could follow.
Here is Minnesota versus Indiana:
Indiana went in exactly the opposite direction of Minnesota since World War II, with per capita income about 85 percent of the national average.
How about Texas versus Minnesota?
The Lone Star State shows a pattern similar to the Dakotas, with booms and busts in oil and farm prices driving per capita incomes. And, despite low taxes and little regulation, Texas still hasn't reached the national average in per capita income.
Implications for policy
These data are only the first pieces of a larger puzzle we must assemble in order to think about economic policy in Minnesota. However, they paint a very clear picture. First, Minnesota did well since World War II both in absolute terms and relative to our neighbors. Second, Minnesota performed better than states such as Indiana and Texas that are held up as examples of low taxes and minimal government.
Obviously, the past doesn't predict the future. It could be that the factors that made Minnesota above average no longer apply in the early 21st century. But before we enact radical reforms to improve our competitiveness, let's spend some time ensuring that we have the record straight. We'll keep assembling that record in the coming weeks.
Read more:
Minnesota's per capita personal income compared to its neighbors
Whitney Houston's Musical Director Rickey Minor Looks Back On Singer's 'Star Spangled Banner' Performance
Posted: February 14, 2012 at 11:08 pm
Whitney Houston's career was filled with standout performances, but for Rickey Minor - who worked with the late singer as her musical director over the span of her career - the singer's performance of "The Star Spangled Banner" at Super Bowl XXV in 1991 rises to the top.
"Every time, never fails, chills, the hair raises up on my arm," Rickey told Billy Bush and Kit Hoover when asked about the iconic performance on Tuesday's Access Hollywood Live. "I cannot hear it for three years, and if I hear it somewhere, it's immediate."
PLAY IT NOW: Did Whitney Houston Lip-Synch The National Anthem At The 1991 Super Bowl?
Rickey, who did all the musical arrangement for the song, said Whitney nailed her rendition with very little preparation.
"That was one take," he said, watching a clip of her performance. "It's hard to top that emotion and performance... It really is about a personal best."
VIEW THE PHOTOS: A Look Back: Whitney Houston — Her Life In Pictures
Rickey - who is now the musical director and band leader of "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" - told Billy and Kit that her iconic performance also stirred up some negative press initially.
"There was controversy about Whitney doing the national anthem and lip synching. Was she lip synching? [There was] a lot of backlash right away," he recalled.
According to the Associated Press, the performance seen by people at home was a combination of a Whitney's pre-recorded rendition of the song - which she did days earlier in a studio - mixed with her live vocals. Fans attending the game heard the taped version of the song.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: Whitney Houston’s Final Public Appearance — February 9, 2012
Whitney's longtime collaborator was quick to come up with a plan to squash the talk how much of the song was actually performed live and just how well she could perform the challenging song.
"We made the decision, I told her, 'What we need to do, I said, we have this show on HBO, 'Welcome Home Heroes,' Just do it again, first verse a capella... it shut [the rumors] down, it just shut down all the talk," he explained. "The thing that people don't understand about television, especially singing the national anthem in a big stadium, there's no way to rehearse, the sound of the crowd coming at you... it's rowdy, it's loud, the fly over [from] the jets."
VIEW THE PHOTOS: A Look Back: Whitney Houston & Bobby Brown
Copyright 2012 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
See the article here:
Whitney Houston's Musical Director Rickey Minor Looks Back On Singer's 'Star Spangled Banner' Performance
Cupid sings songs for your sweet
Posted: at 11:08 pm
PHOTO: Cupid and the Prius of Passion
Ali Meyer Reporting KFOR-TV
February 14, 2012
OKLAHOMA CITY -- Many Oklahomans found special chocolates on their desk at work or flowers on the kitchen counter. But a lucky few scored a personal performance from the metro's only working cupid.
Jacob Shuart will spend eight hours this Valentine's Day singing to strangers.
Dressed up in red silk boxer shorts, white tights and slip-on shoes, Shuart is canvasing the metro delivering vocal Valentines to unsuspecting lovers.
Shuart says, "This is my sixth year to do this. I sing to people that hire me. I sing to their boyfriends or girlfriends or wives or husbands. All the money goes to charity. It's one day a year that I can do something for someone else."
The Tax Department at Sonic Headquarters in downtown Oklahoma City got a special performance Tuesday morning.
Jennifer Adair's husband paid for a $20 song.
The money goes to a charity which buys goats for needy families in the Philippines.
If you'd like to hire Jacob Shuart to sing to your sweet, you can email him at jacob.shuart@gmail.com.
Originally posted here:
Cupid sings songs for your sweet
Part 7 – Self-employment Lifestyle Reality Check. – Video
Posted: at 1:48 pm
Visit link:
Part 7 - Self-employment Lifestyle Reality Check. - Video