Well: Expressing the Inexpressible

When Kyle Potvin learned she had breast cancer at the age of 41, she tracked the details of her illness and treatment in a journal. But when it came to grappling with issues of mortality, fear and hope, she found that her best outlet was poetry.

How I feared chemo, afraid
It would change me.
It did.
Something dissolved inside me.
Tears began a slow drip;
I cried at the news story
Of a lost boy found in the woods …
At the surprising beauty
Of a bright leaf falling
Like the last strand of hair from my head

Ms. Potvin, now 47 and living in Derry, N.H., recently published “Sound Travels on Water” (Finishing Line Press), a collection of poems about her experience with cancer. And she has organized the Prickly Pear Poetry Project, a series of workshops for cancer patients.

“The creative process can be really healing,” Ms. Potvin said in an interview. “Loss, mortality and even hopefulness were on my mind, and I found that through writing poetry I was able to express some of those concepts in a way that helped me process what I was thinking.”

In April, the National Association for Poetry Therapy, whose members include both medical doctors and therapists, is to hold a conference in Chicago with sessions on using poetry to manage pain and to help adolescents cope with bullying. And this spring, Tasora Books will publish “The Cancer Poetry Project 2,” an anthology of poems written by patients and their loved ones.

Dr. Rafael Campo, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, says he uses poetry in his practice, offering therapy groups and including poems with the medical forms and educational materials he gives his patients.

“It’s always striking to me how they want to talk about the poems the next time we meet and not the other stuff I give them,” he said. “It’s such a visceral mode of expression. When our bodies betray us in such a profound way, it can be all the more powerful for patients to really use the rhythms of poetry to make sense of what is happening in their bodies.”

On return visits, Dr. Campo’s patients often begin by discussing a poem he gave them — for example, “At the Cancer Clinic,” by Ted Kooser, from his collection “Delights & Shadows” (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), about a nurse holding the door for a slow-moving patient.

How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

In Ms. Potvin’s case, poems related to her illness were often spurred by mundane moments, like seeing a neighbor out for a nightly walk. Here is “Tumor”:

My neighbor walks
For miles each night.
A mantra drives her, I imagine
As my boys’ chant did
The summer of my own illness:
“Push, Mommy, push.”
Urging me to wind my sore feet
Winch-like on a rented bike
To inch us home.
I couldn’t stop;
Couldn’t leave us
Miles from the end.

Karin Miller, 48, of Minneapolis, turned to poetry 15 years ago when her husband developed testicular cancer at the same time she was pregnant with their first child.

Her husband has since recovered, and Ms. Miller has reviewed thousands of poems by cancer patients and their loved ones to create the “Cancer Poetry Project” anthologies. One poem is “Hymn to a Lost Breast,” by Bonnie Maurer.

Oh let it fly
let it fling
let it flip like a pancake in the air
let it sing: what is the song
of one breast flapping?

Another is “Barn Wish” by Kim Knedler Hewett.

I sit where you can’t see me
Listening to the rustle of papers and pills in the other room,
Wondering if you can hear them.
Let’s go back to the barn, I whisper.
Let’s turn on the TV and watch the Bengals lose.
Let’s eat Bill’s Doughnuts and drink Pepsi.
Anything but this.

Ms. Miller has asked many of her poets to explain why they find poetry healing. “They say it’s the thing that lets them get to the core of how they are feeling,” she said. “It’s the simplicity of poetry, the bare bones of it, that helps them deal with their fears.”

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Have you written a poem about cancer? Please share them with us in the comments section below.

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DealBook: Suit to Accuse S.&P. of Fraud in Mortgage Bond Ratings

The Justice Department plans to file civil fraud charges against the nation’s largest credit-ratings agency, Standard & Poor’s, accusing the firm of inflating the ratings of mortgage investments and setting them up for a crash when the financial crisis struck.

The suit, expected to be filed as early as this week, would be the first significant federal action against the ratings industry, which during the boom years reaped record profits as it bestowed gilt-edged ratings on complex bundles of home loans that quickly went sour. The high ratings made many investments appear safer than they actually were, and are now seen as having contributed to a crisis that brought the financial system and the broader economy to its knees.

More than a dozen state prosecutors are expected to join the federal suit, and the New York attorney general is preparing a separate action. The Securities and Exchange Commission has also been investigating possible wrongdoing at S.& P.

Settlement talks between S.& P. and the Justice Department broke down in the last two weeks after prosecutors sought a penalty in excess of $1 billion and insisted that the company admit wrongdoing, several people with knowledge of the talks said. That amount would wipe out the profits of S.& P.’s parent, the McGraw-Hill Companies, for an entire year. In one session with the government, S.& P. had proposed a settlement of around $100 million, the people said.

S.& P., which was first contacted by federal enforcement officials three years ago, said in a statement Monday that it had acted in good faith when it issued the ratings.

“A D.O.J. lawsuit would be entirely without factual or legal merit,” it said, adding that its competitors had given exactly the same ratings to all the securities it believed to be in question.

It was unclear whether state and federal authorities were targeting the other two major ratings agencies, Moody’s and Fitch.

A spokesman for Moody’s Investors Service declined to comment. A spokesman for Fitch, Daniel J. Noonan, said the agency could not comment on an action that appeared to focus on Standard & Poor’s, but added, “we have no reason to believe Fitch is a target of any such action.” During the settlement talks, S.& P. sought a deal that would allow it to neither admit nor deny guilt; the government pressed for an admission of guilt to at least one count of fraud, said the people who did not want to be named because the suit had not been filed. The company told prosecutors it could not admit guilt without exposing itself to liability in a multitude of civil cases.

The case is said to focus on about 30 collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s, an exotic type of security made up of bundles of mortgage bonds, which in turn were composed of individual home loans. According to S.& P., the mortgage securities were created in 2007, at the height of the housing boom. S.& P. was paid fees of about $13 million for rating them.

Prosecutors, according to the people briefed on the discussions, have uncovered troves of e-mails written by S.& P. employees, which the government considers damaging. Portions of those e-mails are likely to be disclosed in the government’s complaint, these people said. The firm gave the government more than 20 million pages of e-mails as part of its investigation, the people with knowledge of the process said.

Since the financial crisis in 2008, the ratings agencies’ business practices have been widely criticized and questions have been raised as to whether independent analysis was corrupted by Wall Street’s push for profits.

A Senate investigation made public in 2010 found that S.& P. and Moody’s used inaccurate rating models from 2004 to 2007 that failed to predict how high-risk residential mortgages would perform; allowed competitive pressures to affect their ratings; and failed to reassess past ratings after improving their models in 2006.

The companies failed to assign adequate staff to examine new and exotic investments, and neglected to take mortgage fraud, lax underwriting and “unsustainable home price appreciation” into account in their models, the inquiry found.

“Rating agencies continue to create an even bigger monster — the C.D.O. market,” one S.& P. employee wrote in an internal e-mail in December 2006. “Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of card falters.”

Another S.& P. employee wrote in an instant message the following April, according to the Senate report: “We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.”

The three major ratings agencies are typically paid by the issuers of the securities they rate — in this case, the banks that had packaged the mortgage-backed securities and wanted to market them. The investors who would buy the securities were not involved in the process but depended on the rating agencies’ assessments.

Although the three agencies tend to track each other, each has its own statistical methods for assessing the likelihood of a bond default. That has led to speculation that S.& P. analysts knew their method yielded unrealistic ratings, but issued the ratings anyway.

In its statement on Monday, S.& P. said it had begun stress-testing the mortgage-backed securities it rated as early as 2005, trying to see how they would perform in a severe market downturn. S.& P. said it had also sent out early warning signals, downgrading hundreds of mortgage-backed securities, starting in 2006. Nor was it the only one to have underestimated the coming crisis, it said — even the Federal Reserve’s open market committee had believed at the time that any problems within the housing sector could be contained.

The Justice Department, the company said, “would be wrong in contending that S.& P. ratings were motivated by commercial considerations and not issued in good faith.”

The federal action will mark the first time a credit-rating agency has been charged under a 1989 law, intended to protect taxpayers from frauds involving federally insured financial institutions, which since the financial crisis has been used against a number of federally insured banks, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Citigroup.

The government is taking a novel approach in this instance by accusing S.& P. of defrauding a federally insured institution and therefore injuring the taxpayer. The government is expected to cite the demise of Wescorp, a federally insured credit union in Los Angeles that went bankrupt after investing in mortgage securities rated by S.& P. Wescorp will be showcased as an example of the contended fraud, and as a way to bring the case in California, people with knowledge of the proceedings said.

By bringing a civil suit, as opposed to a criminal case, the Justice Department’s burden of proof will be less, perhaps lowering the bar for a successful prosecution.

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

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Greuel is in good position in mayor's race

Wendy Greuel's success in winning support of key city employee unions has enabled her to jump ahead of rivals in TV advertising in the Los Angeles mayor's race and left her chief opponent, Eric Garcetti, scrambling to slow her momentum.

With voting by mail beginning today, Greuel, the city controller, holds an enviable spot: For nearly a week, she has had the airwaves to herself. In a city where many voters know little or nothing about the eight people vying to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, first impressions will matter.

Early advertising is a luxury Greuel can afford thanks largely to an independent group of big-money donors preparing to spend heavily on her behalf before the March 5 primary.

The donors include Hollywood movie producers Norman Lear and Judd Apatow, but so far most of the group's cash is coming from the Department of Water and Power employees' union. The group is not bound by the strict donation and spending caps that constrain candidates' campaign committees.

Greuel also has won the backing of the city's police and firefighter unions, two of the most coveted endorsements in a mayoral contest.

"The firefighters are the single most valuable source of borrowed credibility that any politician can ever dream of, and the police are almost as good," said Dan Schnur, director of USC's Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics.

Still, the race is very fluid, and Garcetti, a city councilman from Silver Lake, remains well positioned to win a spot in the May 21 runoff.

He is half Mexican and half Jewish, key assets in an election with large Latino and Jewish voting blocs up for grabs. Garcetti has raised slightly more money than Greuel. And in recent days he won the support of the 35,000-member United Teachers Los Angeles, which helped get Villaraigosa elected, and the Sierra Club, which has an extensive grassroots following.

But the surest sign of Garcetti's concern about Greuel's strength was his decision last week to go on the attack.

After months of unbroken civility between the two in mayoral forums that even supporters found dull, Garcetti lashed out at Greuel's ad, calling it a "flim-flam." The ad says she exposed $160 million in waste and fraud at City Hall and would root it out, using the savings for "job creation, better schools and faster emergency response."

Garcetti summoned news cameras to his Studio City campaign headquarters, where he told reporters the $160 million "simply doesn't exist."

"The centerpiece of her campaign is fraudulent," said Bill Carrick, Garcetti's top campaign advisor. "That is a huge problem."

Garcetti's team ties labor's tilt toward Greuel to Garcetti's support for laying off city workers and scaling back their health and retirement benefits after the recession caused a sharp drop in tax collections.

Tactically, Garcetti has decided to hold back on early advertising, so he'll have money to respond to attack ads he expects Greuel or her backers to air in the final run-up to the primary.

Greuel, whose effort to cast herself as a tough fiscal watchdog is aimed largely at locking down her San Fernando Valley base, answered Garcetti's attack by accusing him of turning a blind eye to the waste revealed by her audits. John Shallman, her chief strategist, took Garcetti's attacks as a good sign.

"When someone makes the decision to go negative, it's not because they're winning," he said. "It's because they're losing."

If the Greuel-Garcetti fight intensifies, the candidate best situated to benefit is Councilwoman Jan Perry.

"Her cause would be helped if you had Garcetti and Greuel going after each other with ball-peen hammers," said Garry South, an L.A. campaign consultant unaligned in the mayoral race.

Rancor between Garcetti and Greuel has yet to reach that level, he said, but independent groups like the one led by the DWP workers' union "tend to get out the meat cleaver" in their advertising.

"I think either of the other candidates would be making a big mistake to assume there's no way Jan Perry might finish second place in the primary and end up in the runoff," South said.

Having raised $1.5 million, less than half that of her top two opponents, Perry can afford little TV advertising. But she has plenty to wage an expansive mail campaign. Over the last few weeks, she has sent mailers introducing herself to thousands of carefully targeted voters. The lone African American in the race, Perry, who is Jewish, has combined biography, stressing her family's role in fighting for civil rights when she was growing up in Ohio, with pledges of fiscal restraint. Her slogan — "Tough enough to make Los Angeles work again" — plays off a winning campaign theme of former Mayor Richard Riordan, a Republican.

The wild cards in the contest continue to be Emanuel Pleitez and Kevin James. Pleitez, 30, a former personal assistant to Villaraigosa and onetime Goldman Sachs financial analyst, has raised his profile in recent weeks as debate sponsors have invited him to participate. He has raised too little money to advertise widely in a city with 1.8 million voters, limiting the reach of his message, which emphasizes improving city services in the most underserved neighborhoods. But in a close contest, Pleitez, who lives in El Sereno, could affect the result, particularly if he draws a respectable share of the expanding Latino vote.

James, the sole Republican in the field, has spent heavily on high-priced consultants and had just $49,000 cash on hand as of Jan. 19 — a fraction of Pleitez's $320,000, according to the most recent campaign finance reports. An entertainment lawyer and former radio talk-show host, James, who is gay, is counting on news coverage of the race to amplify his vows to clean up what he portrays as a corrupt City Hall.

James' hope of squeezing into a two-way runoff also rests heavily on the help of an independent committee formed by Republican ad man Fred Davis. So far, the committee, bankrolled largely by a Texas billionaire, has collected $700,000, well short of Greuel's $3.5 million and Garcetti's $3.6 million.

Now that voters can begin casting ballots, the top contenders face mounting pressure to draw sharper contrasts with their rivals. For Perry, Garcetti and Greuel, the similar records they built while serving together on the City Council make that task paramount.

"They need to be differentiating themselves in some fashion," said Parke Skelton, who was a top campaign strategist for Villaraigosa. "The risk is that you don't give anyone a reason to vote for you."

michael.finnegan@latimes.com

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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Wheatley Crater on Venus

Magellan radar image of Wheatley crater on Venus. This 72 km diameter crater shows a radar bright ejecta pattern and a generally flat floor with some rough raised areas and faulting. The crater is located in Asteria Regio at 16.6N,267E.

Image: NASA/GSFC [high-resolution]

Caption: NASA

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Keys sings national anthem on piano at Super Bowl

Alicia Keys performed a lounge-y, piano-tinged — and live — version of the national anthem ahead of the Super Bowl on Sunday.

The Grammy-winning singer played the piano as she sang “The Star Spangled Banner” in a long red dress with her eyes shut. Her publicist said the performance was live, days after halftime performer Beyonce admitted singing along to a prerecorded track at the Inauguration.

Keys’ version was soft and featured additional lyrics: She added “living in the home” before belting “home of the brave” as she finished the song.

Before Keys hit the field, Jennifer Hudson performed “America the Beautiful” with the 26-member Sandy Hook Elementary School chorus, a performance that had some players on the sideline on the verge of tears.

The students wore green ribbons on their shirts in honor of the 20 first-graders and six adults who were killed in a Dec. 14 shooting rampage at the school in Newton, Conn.

The students began the song softly before Hudson, whose mother, brother and 7-year-old nephew were shot to death five years ago, jumped in with her gospel-flavored vocals. She stood still in black and white as the students moved to the left and right, singing background.

Keys and Hudson warmed up the field for Beyonce, who is set to perform at the half-time show.

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Phys Ed: Helmets for Ski and Snowboard Safety

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

Recently, researchers from the department of sport science at the University of Innsbruck in Austria stood on the slopes at a local ski resort and trained a radar gun on a group of about 500 skiers and snowboarders, each of whom had completed a lengthy personality questionnaire about whether he or she tended to be cautious or a risk taker.

The researchers had asked their volunteers to wear their normal ski gear and schuss or ride down the slopes at their preferred speed. Although they hadn’t informed the volunteers, their primary aim was to determine whether wearing a helmet increased people’s willingness to take risks, in which case helmets could actually decrease safety on the slopes.

What they found was reassuring.

To many of us who hit the slopes with, in my case, literal regularity — I’m an ungainly novice snowboarder — the value of wearing a helmet can seem self-evident. It protects your head from severe injury. During the Big Air finals at the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo., this past weekend, for instance, Halldor Helgason, a 23-year-old Icelandic snowboarder, over-rotated on a triple back flip, landed headfirst on the snow and was briefly knocked unconscious. But like the other competitors he was wearing a helmet, and didn’t fracture his skull.

Indeed, studies have concluded that helmets reduce the risk of a serious head injury by as much as 60 percent. But a surprising number of safety experts and snowsport enthusiasts remain unconvinced that helmets reduce overall injury risk.

Why? A telling 2009 survey of ski patrollers from across the country found that 77 percent did not wear helmets because they worried that the headgear could reduce their peripheral vision, hearing and response times, making them slower and clumsier. In addition, many worried that if they wore helmets, less-adept skiers and snowboarders might do likewise, feel invulnerable and engage in riskier behavior on the slopes.

In the past several years, a number of researchers have tried to resolve these concerns, for or against helmets. And in almost all instances, helmets have proved their value.

In the Innsbruck speed experiment, the researchers found that people whom the questionnaires showed to be risk takers skied and rode faster than those who were by nature cautious. No surprise.

But wearing a helmet did not increase people’s speed, as would be expected if the headgear encouraged risk taking. Cautious people were slower than risk-takers, whether they wore helmets or not; and risk-takers were fast, whether their heads were protected or bare.

Interestingly, the skiers and riders who were the most likely, in general, to wear a helmet were the most expert, the men and women with the most talent and hours on the slopes. Experience seemed to have taught them the value of a helmet.

Off the slopes, other new studies have brought skiers and snowboarders into the lab to test their reaction times and vision with and without helmets. Peripheral vision and response times are a serious safety concern in a sport where skiers and riders rapidly converge from multiple directions.

But when researchers asked snowboarders and skiers to wear caps, helmets, goggles or various combinations of each for a 2011 study and then had them sit before a computer screen and press a button when certain images popped up, they found that volunteers’ peripheral vision and reaction times were virtually unchanged when they wore a helmet, compared with wearing a hat. Goggles slightly reduced peripheral vision and increased response times. But helmets had no significant effect.

Even when researchers added music, testing snowboarders and skiers wearing Bluetooth-audio equipped helmets, response times did not increase significantly from when they wore wool caps.

So why do up to 40 percent of skiers and snowboarders still avoid helmets?

“The biggest reason, I think, is that many people never expect to fall,” said Dr. Adil H. Haider, a trauma surgeon and associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and co-author of a major new review of studies related to winter helmet use. “That attitude is especially common in people, like me, who are comfortable on blue runs but maybe not on blacks, and even more so in beginners.”

But a study published last spring detailing snowboarding injuries over the course of 18 seasons at a Vermont ski resort found that the riders at greatest risk of hurting themselves were female beginners. I sympathize.

The take-away from the growing body of science about ski helmets is in fact unequivocal, Dr. Haider said. “Helmets are safe. They don’t seem to increase risk taking. And they protect against serious, even fatal head injuries.”

The Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma, of which Dr. Haider is a member, has issued a recommendation that “all recreational skiers and snowboarders should wear safety helmets,” making them the first medical group to go on record advocating universal helmet use.

Perhaps even more persuasive, Dr. Haider has given helmets to all of his family members and colleagues who ski or ride. “As a trauma surgeon, I know how difficult it is to fix a brain,” he said. “So everyone I care about wears a helmet.”

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Thomas Tull of Legendary Entertainment Faces a Critical Juncture

Kerry Hayes/Warner Brothers Pictures

Legendary is the primary backer behind the coming release “Pacific Rim.”

LOS ANGELES — During the baseball strike of 1995, Thomas Tull, then a 24-year-old laundromat owner, was audacious enough to turn up at a training camp for the Atlanta Braves. They looked at his swing and sent him home.

No matter. Mr. Tull swatted through the entrepreneurial minor leagues, from laundries to tax prep centers to dot-com start-ups, and into Hollywood.

His aggressiveness and aw-shucks charm made him one of the most successful walk-on players in movie history. “The Dark Knight,” “300,” “The Hangover” and “Clash of the Titans” were all made with backing from his company, Legendary Entertainment, a Warner Brothers affiliate, which picked up more than $700 million in new financing last year.

But the coming months will tell if Mr. Tull really is the latest outsider to win an insider’s game.

Legendary is a supplier of six major releases by Warner from March to August, giving it an unusually large portion of the blockbuster season. If they are successful, Mr. Tull, 42, may come to be viewed as a budding Steve Ross, who used the resources of Kinney National Services, which operated parking lots, to build Time Warner: Legendary’s goal is to continue to grow. But failure could tip Legendary in the direction of the original DreamWorks SKG. That company, backed by Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, started big and fizzled.

Already, some thorny problems have surfaced. Last month, Mr. Tull became embroiled in two lawsuits over an expensive “Godzilla” remake that is supposed to begin production shortly. Legendary’s forays into China as well as television and comic book publishing have failed or had a shaky start.

The Warner-Legendary relationship oscillates between cool and frosty, with Mr. Tull at times telling cohorts that he is taken for granted and various studio executives vexed by his success and efforts to be seen as a creative force and not just a writer of checks. Mr. Tull, who declined to comment, is betting hundreds of millions of dollars on his next films. Sequels to “The Hangover” and “300” are almost guaranteed hits. But others are substantial risks. “Jack the Giant Killer,” an embellishment of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” comes on the heels of several fairy tale adaptations that disappointed at the box office.

“Man of Steel” is an expensive attempt to revive a well-worn Superman franchise. The less costly “42” is something Legendary once said it would never make — a drama, in this case the life story of Jackie Robinson.

The biggest gamble is “Pacific Rim.” Directed by Guillermo del Toro, it is a $150 million movie, set to open July 12, about human-piloted robots and alien monsters. Legendary is breaking its pattern of equal partnership with Warner by shouldering 75 percent of the cost, and is hoping the film will jump-start a merchandise business. Mr. Tull is also counting on “Pacific Rim” to convince skeptical industry peers that he has the creative acumen to generate a critical smash without Warner to lean on.

(Mr. del Toro is already a convert. “With Thomas,” he said in a phone interview, “the reactions are the same reactions you would get from another filmmaker.”)

Soon, Legendary must make a crucial decision about its future. Mr. Tull’s deal with Warner expires at the end of this year. So far, no serious talks about a renewal have started, according to both companies, partly because Mr. Tull was waiting for Warner to pick a chief executive to succeed Barry M. Meyer, who is retiring. Kevin Tsujihara was named to the post last Monday.

Warner declined to comment on its relationship with Mr. Tull. The studio would like him to stay, but it would not suffer terribly if he left, according to two high-level executives inside the company who requested anonymity to speak candidly. Warner, for instance, can rely on another financing partner, the newly revitalized Village Roadshow, these people said.

Legendary is equally cool; a person with knowledge of Mr. Tull’s options, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that Legendary had interest from other studios, mentioning a bond between Mr. Tull and several senior executives at Universal and Comcast.

This high-powered jockeying occurs a long way from the outskirts of Binghamton, N.Y., where Mr. Tull was raised poor by a single mother, a dental hygienist. Even he seems stunned by his rise in Hollywood, complete with a mansion in suburban Calabasas, Calif. — the nouveau riche nesting place of the Kardashians — and a small ownership stake in the Pittsburgh Steelers. (He made a failed bid for the San Diego Padres last summer.)

“If somebody came in and pitched me as a script, I would say it’s too far-fetched,” Mr. Tull said in a 2010 television interview.

He arrived here about a decade ago as a midlevel venture capitalist, working on technology start-ups with the Convex Group, based in Atlanta. He helped hatch an ill-fated plan to create disposable DVDs that would self-destruct in 48 hours, making for return-free rentals.

In 2004, Mr. Tull and William Fay, a friend and producer, decided to buy a film library from which they could produce effects-driven remakes and sequels. They settled on Orion Pictures, owned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. A third partner, Scott Mednick, soon joined.

But Sony and others took MGM’s assets off the market, leaving Mr. Tull stuck on Hollywood’s doorstep.

“Let’s just forget about the library,” Mr. Fay recalls Mr. Tull saying. “Let’s just build a film company around the precepts we’ve developed.”

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The World's Tweets Light Up the Globe in Stunning Live Visualization

It’s simple, but lovely. Web designer Franck Ernewein‘s real-time Twitter visualization, Tweetping, drops a bright pixel at the location of every tweet in the world, starting as soon as you open the page.

The result is a constantly changing image that grows to look like a nighttime satellite shot, bright spots swarming over the most developed areas. But Ernewein has packaged it all in a subtly interactive visualization that avoids distracting the viewer while still imparting a great amount of information.

Meanwhile, a selection of tweets are projected, along with latest hashtags and mentions, all while tracking total tweets, words, and characters. The length of the two gray lines on the display represent the number of characters and words in each tweet.

Though it’s one of the most beautiful, Tweetping is far from the first to display geotagged tweet information; coders have built sites to display election tweets, adjustable parameter maps, and even 3-D visualizations.

Tweetping even represents Antarctica, but not the ISS. And there’s no pause button; like Twitter itself, Tweetping’s data accrues incessantly; there’s no off switch but the back button.

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Afghan singer’s star is rising, as are the threats

KABUL (Reuters) – With a scarf loosely covering a fancy television hairstyle, Latifa Azizi raised her arms in victory after surviving another elimination round on the hit talent show, “Afghan Star“.

But the victory pales into insignificance when compared with the larger battle 17-year-old Azizi is fighting – to pursue her dream of becoming a famous singer despite the censure of ultra-conservative Afghan society.

“Whether I win or lose, my family can’t go back home, it’s too dangerous,” Azizi, from the relatively liberal northern capital of Mazar-e-Sharif, told Reuters in the show’s dressing room.

Azizi and her family fled Mazar for the Afghan capital, Kabul, soon after she appeared on the show in November. Her community was angry with her appearance, saying it was un-Islamic for a woman to sing and appear on television. The family began to receive death threats.

“Latifa will have no life here after what she’s done. We don’t do such things and we don’t accept people who do,” said Sayed Mohammad Kasem, a member of Azizi’s tribe in Mazar-e-Sharif.

The threats began after the airing of her audition for “Afghan Star”. With an audience of 11 million, the six-year-old show has become an important vehicle for young Afghans aspiring to become famous singers.

“I went to school the day after my audition aired to take my final exams and my classmates started to shout horrible things and pulled at my hair,” Azizi said in a soft low voice.

“I ran away crying,” she said. “Not even my teachers tried to help me.”

Azizi said she was eventually expelled. The school’s headmaster, Mohammad Kalanderi, denied that when contacted by Reuters and said Latifa could come back whenever she wanted.

The backlash Azizi faces is not out of the ordinary for Afghan women who become public figures. Female actors and singers are often harassed, and sometimes beaten and killed.

In a 2009 documentary about “Afghan Star”, one contestant was forced to leave her hometown of Herat in the country’s west after her head scarf slipped to her shoulders during a performance.

During the 1996-2001 reign of the Taliban, women were banned from school, voting and most work. They were not allowed to leave their homes without a man.

Many women’s rights have been painstakingly won back since the Taliban’s overthrow, but there are fears violence against women is under-reported.

Last year also saw a worrying spike in violence, including several cases of female school students being poisoned.

This has led to fears that, when most NATO-led forces withdraw from the country next year, women may once again be subject to Taliban-style repression and violence.

“Every day that passes by, you’re supposed to move forward, but we keep moving backwards,” said singer and “Afghan Star” judge Shahla Zaland, whose mother was also a famous singer in the 1960s.

“The struggles female singers had to overcome fifty or sixty years ago are being faced by these girls today.”

Even in Kabul, Azizi and the only other female contestant receive constant threats.

People follow their cars as they travel to rehearsals to try to discourage them from attending, and issue threats of violence over the phone.

Azizi told Reuters she would not let the threats stop her from appearing on the show. Her father, Sayed Ghulam Shah Azizi, agreed.

“Our family is angry but my daughter had a dream,” he said in the family living room. “What else was I to do but encourage her to pursue it?”

(Additional reporting By Bashir Ansari; Editing by Dylan Welch and Nick Macfie)

(This story was refiled to fix the spelling of Sayed Ghulam Shah Azizi)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was 90.

The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”

“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”

Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.

When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.

“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”

He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”

Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.

Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.

Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.

“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 2, 2013

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the town in which Mr. Sams died. It was Fayetteville, Ga., not Lafayette, Ga.

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