Dear Abby: I recently had to spend a night in the hospital following minor surgery. One of the female techs taking care of me leaned over me to straighten out the bedding and I could see "everything" when the top of her scrubs fell open.

I'm not sure if it was on purpose or by accident. I say this because after the first time, it happened several more times. I only looked the first time out of shock. The other times, I looked away.

Other than saying, "Hey, lady, I can see your boobies when you bend over," what's the polite way to say, "Oops wardrobe malfunction"? GOT AN EYEFUL IN ILLINOIS

Dear Got An Eyeful: Since, with luck, you won't have to make another visit to the hospital, I think your question may be moot. However, the discreet way to deal with something like that would be to mention what happened to the head nurse or supervisor and say that it made you uncomfortable.

Dear Abby: I'm in my early 30s and recently met a very attractive woman my age. We are planning to get married. She wants us to be married as soon as possible because she has been divorced for the last seven years.

My problem is, she's extremely secretive about her past, especially the period between her divorce and our meeting. I have been open with her about my past, but when I ask about hers, she refuses to discuss it and says it has nothing to do with our relationship.

I have a feeling there may be something nasty she's hiding. I'm afraid I'm heading into a trap, but my love for her makes it tough to consider breaking up. Am I being too demanding? CONCERNED GUY IN THE SOUTH

Dear Concerned Guy: If your intuition is screaming that your girlfriend's desire for a hasty marriage could spell trouble in the future, you should pay close attention to it. It is not "too demanding" to want to know what one's fiancee has been doing for the last seven years. Under no circumstances should you marry this woman without first talking to a lawyer, who I am sure will suggest doing a background check and/or drafting an ironclad prenuptial agreement.

Dear Abby: I recently attended a bridal shower for my nephew's fiancee. My sister-in-law (the future mother-in-law of the bride) also attended the shower. She did not choose any gifts from the bride's registry, but decided instead to give the bride lingerie, including thong underwear. Frankly, I was shocked. I didn't think it was appropriate for either the mother or the future mother-in-law to give such intimate gifts. Am I wrong? FLUMMOXED IN FLORIDA

Dear Flummoxed: Shower guests are not restricted to items based solely upon the couple's registry. They can give whatever gift they wish to the bride and groom. Your sister-in-law chose something she thought the bride and groom would enjoy. Please try to be less judgmental and hope she was right.

Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Contact Dear Abby at http://www.DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069.

Original post:
Dear Abby: Hospital patient receives surprise anatomy lesson - Bloomington Pantagraph (blog)

Photo: Earl Gardner. All screenshots taken from MLSsoccer.com

Six secondsis all it takes to undo 90 minutes of good work.

A fraction of a second can undo six seconds.

Philadelphia Unions Andre Blake got it all right with his fantastic late save Saturday to secure Philadelphia Unions 1-0 win over D.C. United.

Here is video of the save with two alternate angles.

When a goalkeeper makes an amazing save, there was usually a defensive breakdown somewhere along the line that led to it.

Here, Gaddis and Bedoya have a miscommunication, allowing an uncontested cross. Jack Elliott is marking nobody. Medunjanin is upright and behind the play, taking himself out of the play. Thats four of the seven defenders here.

Sapong defends the late runner, tracking all the way back. Wijnaldum fights for position with the back man. Onyewu gets in the ready position between the ball and the target men.

Andre Blake leans to the near post, defending it from a surprise shot and getting in good position to smother a low/close cross before it reaches the target men.

With the cross in the air, there are now three defenders against three attackers.

This leaves two men free for the header against Blake.

Blake recognizes that the out-swinger is floating too far outside the box for him to get to and immediately starts to sink back to the goal line, keeping his eyes on the play in front of him and maintaining ready position as he retreats.

Blake does two very difficult things here.

At the time the shot is struck, Blakes heels are just about on the goal line. Most importantly for Blake, his weight is on his left foot and he is on his toes. He is anticipating a shot to his right, and by putting his weight on his left foot, he is ready to dive hard and fast to his right.

This is why it is so key for Blake to read the players rather than the ball. Blake was able to cut out half of the net by keying on the head movement. Heading an out-swinger to the far side of the net would have required a head whip that Blake never saw. Unlike the penalty save, which required a guess, Blake was not guessing on this shot. He read the player and was able to identify where the shot could go.

The alternate angle shows just how free the header was and just how out of position the Union defenders were. Its also a little easier to see Blake already leaning hard to his right. Thats as free as a header gets, and from about 7.5 yards out.

These saves are practically impossible. Lamar Neagle knows that if he puts the shot on frame with power, it is going in unless he strikes it directly into Blake. Even a foot or two away from where his body already is and theres no time to react.

Lamar Neagle does his job perfectly. He heads it on frame, with power, high and to the side of Blake. Easy goal.

Enter Superman.

Words cant describe just how insanely hard this save is. If this were the Olympics, Blake would get a 10 for degree of difficulty alone. Keepers just dont save power headers from that range. This save may have been Blakes best ever, and that is not hyperbole. It shows off the full range of Blakes tools: his height and length, his athletic ability, his instincts, his reaction speed, and his hand strength.

Blake prepared properly. He got to the right spot and got in the ready position leaning the correct direction. As the ball is struck, he uncoils and contorts his body and gets his hand way up above his head in about a quarter of a second.

Despite the ball going to his right, Blake reaches to it with his left because of his ready position. He was ready to dive right, which puts his left hand high, so he used momentum to get his hand there in time. He arches his body to get his feet on the line but his body in front of it. This means that the core of his body is providing almost no strength to his arm here. His hand finds the ball perfectly and he is strong enough to power it up over the bar from no more than a foot or two in front of it. This is Andre Blakesweak hand getting to the ball and staying strong enough to knock it almost straight up. Truly unbelievable.

Brick Wall Blake, indeed.

Read more from the original source:
The anatomy of an amazing save - The Philly Soccer Page

Rob Savidge just didn't think it would be much of a problem.

A project manager for the Anne Arundel County Department of Public Works, he gave the go-ahead to make repairs on storm drain inlets on Forest Drive at Bay Ridge Avenue in Annapolis starting at 8 a.m. April 4.

The result came as a surprise for Savidge, but perhaps even more for thousands of motorists stuck in gridlock memorable even in a part of the city known for traffic jams. On a bright sunny morning they found themselves stuck for more than an hour at the confluence of Hillsmere Drive, Bay Ridge Road, Bay Ridge Avenue and Forest Drive because someone didn't realize the impact of shutting down lanes in rush hour.

"That's the most frustrating part of all of this," said Savidge, now a candidate for City Council in the ward next to the intersection. "At the time, I was following the procedures that I was aware of.

"Just, unfortunately, a lot of things came together."

Documents released to The Capital under a series of Maryland Public Information Act requests show city and county officials searched for hours on the morning of April 4 to explain what seemed like an inexplicable traffic jam.

Now, Department of Public Works spokesman Matt Diehl said, they've come up with a solution to prevent a reoccurrence. Every construction project affecting county roads and supervised by the department must now be reviewed by the Traffic Engineering Division before work begins.

It's a follow-up to a promise made by county Public Works Director Christopher Phipps, who wrote shortly after the traffic jam that the backup "was the result of a failure to coordinate ...."

"Impacting traffic on a main road during the morning or afternoon commute for anything other than an emergency should not happen," he wrote in a letter to The Capital. "However, you have my commitment that steps are now in place to appropriately coordinate any such work along this corridor and avoid situations like this in the future."

Emails obtained by The Capital show that no one seemed to know exactly what was going on that morning.

City spokeswoman Rhonda Wardlaw emailed Mayor Mike Pantelides explaining that neither Diehl nor "anyone at the higher levels" at Public Works was told about the project before work began.

That left city officials struggling to explain what was happening as they heard from angry constituents unable to get to work on time. Those complaints went to many officials, including County Executive Steve Schuh.

During an interview on the morning of April 4, Wardlaw said city officials learned of the backup through social media.

In an email to Pantelides, Wardlaw later wrote that there was confusion between Savidge and the Annapolis Police Department as it was trying to deal with traffic backing up for more than 2 miles on the Annapolis Neck Peninsula.

Wardlaw wrote that Savidge was identified as the project manager and he told police the work "was an expedited project that needed to be done in the next few days," which police officials interpreted as an "emergency" project. The department posted that information on its social media pages, which prompted Diehl to issue a correction.

A few hours after the work was called off and the traffic jam cleared, Pantelides was still pressing his staff to find out who was in charge of the ill-timed project.

"Who was the project manager responsible for the horrible traffic this morning? Was it an emergency or just routine maintenance poorly scheduled?" Pantelides wrote in a 12:30 p.m. email to his staff. "The county executive assured me it will not happen again."

Pantelides is familiar with Savidge, a former city planner who has been critical of city laws designed to protect forested land and how they are administered.

Phipps wrote to Pantelides that he planned to "(r)eiterate to staff the criticality of understanding the impact of any traffic disruption along major roads during rush hours."

Savidge said he faced no disciplinary action because of the traffic jam.

And Wardlaw said the city is confident the county has properly addressed the issue.

"We're just grateful that there was a problem and they have fixed it and justified it," she said. "I'm not concerned about 'Will this situation happen again?' I don't know if it will."

"It was one person making a decision, not the county making the decision."

See the rest here:
Anatomy of a traffic jam: How storm drain repairs locked up Annapolis - CapitalGazette.com

Left, Gabriella Boyds Very inadequately dressed I am making my way from a ground floor flat up the stairs to a higher floor 2015; and, right, Untitled (Woman with Black Line) by Jo Ann Callis. Composite: Courtesy: the artists and Folio Society/Freud's Interpreting Dreams/White Cube; Rose Gallery

The word surrealism was coined by the poet Apollinaire a century ago, and refers above all to an art of juxtaposition, the concatenation of shockingly disparate elements, shorn of context, with the slippery, succinct logic of a bad dream. Little wonder it was Merriam-Websters word of 2016, owing to above average online searches.

Early surrealists sought to plunder unconscious forces; inevitably, sex was the main energy supplier. What this meant in practice was a prevalence of womens bodies, appropriated and dismembered. Voiceless, limbless, headless, the surrealist woman reaches her apogee in Magrittes The Rape, in which a face is formed from a torso, with breasts for eyes and a pubic grin.

This isnt to say that female artists havent found surrealism a productive field to plough, as the dizzyingly beautiful Dreamers Awake makes clear. A sublime survey of more than 50 female artists, from Dorothea Tanning and Louise Bourgeois to Hannah Wilke and Tracey Emin, the exhibition riffs artfully around what it means to live inside rather than gaze upon a female form.

A body is disgusting as well as desirable, meat incarnate, an animated corpse. Its hateful to be reduced to flesh, but there may be compensatory pleasures in the butchers shop. In Rachel Kneebones extraordinary sculptures, human and floral forms entwine and interbreed, the cool austerity of porcelain at odds with the frenzy displayed. Its like peering into a primordial soup full of synchronised swimmers. Is that a side of beef, a stamen, a penis, a hydrangea, a human thigh?

Bodies undergo translations, and they also leak and shed. Hair is everywhere: a sleek blonde ponytail worn as a fetishistic tie; a cheery tuft of pubic hair abandoned on a garden chair. Like dreamers, surrealists love visual puns. Best is Helen Chadwicks witty I Thee Wed: a set of five tumescent vegetables sea cucumbers? cacti? cast in bronze, each bound at the root with a ginger fur cuff, a lascivious ring. Sarah Lucas is likewise killer at the lewd eye-gag. In The Kiss, one chair penetrates another, cartoonishly embellished with tits and cock made from neatly bent and glued Camel cigarettes, ready-made for the post-coital puff.

You can laugh at the absurdity of human figures and the ways we think about them, but that doesnt erase their capacity to horrify. One of the oldest works here is a bleak little photograph by Lee Miller. It shows a stomach-churning place-setting photographed in Paris in 1921: checked cloth, knife and fork, and a human breast on a plate, the bloody remnant of a mastectomy. As a model and muse for Man Ray, Miller had been subject to all the customary visual dismemberments of the surreal gaze; now she shows what slicing into flesh actually looks like.

Not everyone born as a woman wants to stay there. The trans photographer Claude Cahuns subversive self-portraits show her in multiple disguises, slipping the knot of gender, refusing to participate. Cahun died in 1954, but its not hard to see why she has resurfaced this year, appearing in Queer British Art at Tate Britain, a show at the National Portrait Gallery with Gillian Wearing and in a new biography, Exist Otherwise (Reaktion).

The US conceptual artist Hannah Wilke is likewise deft at finding ambiguities in even the crudest physical depictions. Her Five Androgynous and Vaginal Sculptures are much more subtle than the title suggests. Humble as Etruscan jars, they delight in the abstract possibilities of human anatomy.

Hybridisation was always a surrealist strategy, visible in some of the earliest as well as more contemporary exponents here. The one-time debutante Leonora Carrington deployed surrealism as a means of escape, a launch pad to a liberatory landscape populated by monsters and beasts. In 1980, the year before her suicide, Francesca Woodman took an eerie, beguiling photograph of her upraised arms in birch-bark gauntlets: an Angela Carter figure at loose in the New Hampshire woods, girl metamorphosing into tree.

The best surrealist work possesses this uncanny dream logic, the feeling of a revelation barely glimpsed in the dark. One of the more compelling dream manifestations here is Kelly Akashis Well(-)Hung. A rope dangles from the ceiling, hung at intervals with bronze casts of hands. Are they ascending or trapped, the macabre relics of some medieval punishment? A few clutch small clammy objects, like sea anemones or jellies.

This enigmatic tone continues in Gabriella Boyds lovely indefinite paintings, made to illustrate the Folio Society edition of Freuds Interpreting Dreams. Nothing quite makes sense; there is a delicious sense of anticipation, of luminosity. Grass grows beneath running water, a pair of legs are stippled with black dots. The caption explains that this depicts a girls dream of her brother, slathered in caviar. Deliciously mortal, the body is ground for dreaming still.

At White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 17 September. Details: 020-7930 5373.

See the rest here:
Dreamers Awake review a sublime anatomy of female surrealism - The Guardian

Dear Abby: I recently had to spend a night in the hospital following minor surgery. One of the female techs taking care of me leaned over me to straighten out the bedding and I could see everything when the top of her scrubs fell open. Im not sure if it was on purpose or by accident. I say this because after the first time, it happened several more times. I only looked the first time out of shock. The other times, I looked away. Other than saying, Hey, lady, I can see your boobies when you bend over, whats the polite way to say, Oops wardrobe malfunction?

Got an Eyeful in Illinois

Dear Got an Eyeful: Since, with luck, you wont have to make another visit to the hospital, I think your question may be moot. However, the discreet way to deal with something like that would be to mention what happened to the head nurse or supervisor and say that it made you uncomfortable.

Photo: EMPPhotography, Getty Images

A hospital patient experienced more than they wanted during a recent stay.

A hospital patient experienced more than they wanted during a recent stay.

Dear Abby: Hospital patient receives surprise anatomy lesson

Dear Abby: Im in my early 30s and recently met a very attractive woman my age. We are planning to get married. She wants us to be married as soon as possiblebecause she has been divorced for the last seven years. My problem is, shes extremely secretive about her past, especially the period between her divorce and our meeting. I have been open with her about my past, but when I ask about hers, she refuses to discuss it and says it has nothing to do with our relationship. I have a feeling there may be something nasty shes hiding. Im afraid Im heading into a trap, but my love for her makes it tough to consider breaking up. Am I being too demanding?

Concerned Guy in the South

Dear Concerned Guy: If your intuition is screaming that your girlfriends desire for a hasty marriage could spell trouble in the future, you should pay close attention to it. It is not too demanding to want to know what ones fiancee has been doing for the past seven years. Under no circumstances should you marry this woman without first talking to a lawyer, who I am sure will suggest doing a background check and/or drafting an ironclad prenuptial agreement.

Dear Abby: I recently attended a bridal shower for my nephews fiancee. My sister-in-law (the future mother-in-law of the bride) also attended the shower. She did not choose any gifts from the brides registry, but decided instead to give the bride lingerie, including thong underwear. Frankly, I was shocked. I didnt think it was appropriate for either the mother or the future mother-in-law to give such intimate gifts. Am I wrong?

Flummoxed in Florida

Dear Flummoxed: Shower guests are not restricted to items based solely upon the couples registry. They can give whatever gift they wish to the bride and groom. Your sister-in-law chose something she thought the bride and groom would enjoy. Please try to be less judgmental and hope she was right.

Link:
Dear Abby: Hospital patient receives surprise anatomy lesson ... - SFGate

In early May, on the day our Legislature adjourned, one of the newspapers summarized our Legislatures work on the Honolulu transit surcharge extension as Epic Fail on Rail. With the Federal Highway Administration poised to pull out its $1.5 billion commitment if no funding solution is firmed up, our legislators need to get their collective act together if they want to help the project get back on track.

How did we get to be in this spot? This week well retrace Senate Bill 1183 and its tortuous history through our legislative labyrinth.

SB 1183, like its companion House Bill 1442, was a six-page bill to extend permanently the current rail surcharge on general excise tax. The bill also proposed to give an unspecified percentage of the surcharge proceeds to the state Department of Transportation. The other counties were given the option to adopt their own GET surcharge beginning in 2018.

The first committees to work on the bill, the Senate committees on Transportation and Energy and Public Safety, Intergovernmental, and Military Affairs, came up with a 78-page monster containing two parts, one that would extend the surcharge permanently and another that would extend it to the year 2032. (Yes, these conflict with each other.)

Other sections of the bill would establish a tax credit for low-income taxpayers, raise the base GET rate to 4.5 percent for everyone (the surcharge would be on top of that) and contained a pages-long laundry list of mandates to the city. At the time, the Senate transportation chair explained that she wanted to keep all options open.

The Senate Ways and Means Committee took a very different tack. Its 10-page version basically said, Well take away the states 10 percent skim off the surcharge, but no extension; youre on your own. That draft unanimously passed the full Senate and went over to the House.

There, the House Transportation Committee kept the bill alive by putting blanks in it its draft extended the tax to an unspecified date, reinstated the skim but replaced the percentage with a blank percent to recover the states costs and a blank percent that would go the DOT for state highway projects.

The House Finance Committee then filled in the blanks, extending the tax for two years, and dropping the skim to 1 percent, none of which would be earmarked for the DOT.

This version went to the Conference Committee, and then surprising things started happening. First, the Senate proposed a new draft, radically different from the version that passed the Senate, which extended the surcharge for 10 years and raised the skim to 20 percent. The House came back with a draft that left the GET surcharge untouched, dropped the skim to 1 percent, and raised the hotel room tax from 9.25 percent to a hefty 12 percent.

The latter proposal, though innovative, caught the hotel industry unaware, prompting vigorous objections. Then-Senate money chair Jill Tokuda agreed to that version with tweaks a few hours later, thereby making the Final Decking deadline.

After frantic meetings through the weekend, the money chairs, apparently with some members of the hotel industry, reached a compromise involving a shorter GET extension and a lower TAT hike. Amendments were introduced on the chamber floors to implement the agreement, although another version with only a GET extension and no TAT increase, which Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell supported, was circulating in the Senate. The House passed one version and jettisoned its speaker, while the Senate adopted the other version and deposed Tokuda as chair. With no agreement between the chambers, neither version can be enacted. That is where we are now.

We now seem to have a bunch of rudderless ships in the harbor banging into each other. Could the governor have brought both sides together? Was Senate President Ronald Kouchi capable of herding the 25 senators? And how about former Speaker Joe Souki, new Speaker Scott Saiki or House money chair Sylvia Luke? To what or whom should we be looking for leadership to get us out of this mess?

* Tom Yamachika is president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii.

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Anatomy of epic fail on rail offered - Maui News