Ride operator charged over 5 hurt at NC State Fair

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Authorities investigating a North Carolina State Fair ride that injured five people have concluded that someone tampered with it, and the ride's operator was being held Sunday on criminal charges.

On the fair's final day, state officials said attendance was down compared to the final weekend of last year's fair and attributed the dip partly to the injuries. They declined to elaborate on how the ride had been tampered with.

Three people remained in a Raleigh hospital on Sunday, three days after the "Vortex" ride suddenly jolted into gear as people were exiting, dropping some riders from heights that eyewitnesses estimated to be 20 or 30 feet.

Investigators determined the Vortex, known for thrilling riders with its wild twirls and flips, had been tampered with and critical safety devices were compromised, Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison said Saturday. Harrison's office did not return messages and officials with the state Labor Department declined to offer further explanation of the tampering and the overall investigation.

Ride operator Timothy Dwayne Tutterrow, 46, of Quitman, Ga., faces three criminal counts of assault with a deadly weapon in the mishap. Tutterrow was being held in jail Sunday on $225,000 bond and was due in court Monday for a first appearance, said attorney Roger W. Smith Jr.

"Mr. Tutterrow is absolutely devastated by what happened," Smith said in a phone interview Sunday.

Fair attendance on Friday and Saturday was down more than 11 percent compared to the corresponding days last year. While that may have been partly due to colder nighttime temperatures, the injuries probably factored into the decline, said spokesman Brian Long of the state agriculture department, which runs the fair.

"I do understand that this incident may have given some people pause," he said.

He said no further safety measures have been taken for the 100 other rides.

It is uncommon for ride operators to be criminally charged, but safety consultant Ken Martin chalks that up to the industry being largely self-regulated in most states.

"If more incidents on amusement rides were investigated as thoroughly as this ride in North Carolina is being investigated, there's quite possibly the opportunity that more criminal cases would come out. The folks in North Carolina, they don't pussyfoot around when it comes to amusement ride safety," said Martin, owner of KRM Consulting in Richmond, Va., which conducts amusement ride inspections in Texas, Virginia, West Virginia and Missouri.

The North Carolina State Fair is known in the industry for its requirement that everything on an amusement ride has to operate or the ride does not move. Several ride inspectors are on the grounds of the Raleigh event daily watching operators and equipment to make sure everything is in order, Martin said.

The people who remained hospitalized were a 14-year-old whose identity hasn't been released; Anthony Gorham, 29; and Kisha Gorham, 39. The Gorhams' family members declined to comment Sunday. The two others who were hurt have been treated and released.

The Vortex had at least one other technical problem at the North Carolina fair. A safety switch that keeps the ride from operating unless seat restraints are engaged malfunctioned on Monday. The ride was temporarily idled as workers replaced the switch, but it reopened Monday night after being tested, state inspectors said.

The Vortex was supplied by Family Attractions Amusement Co. LLC of Valdosta, Ga. The company "has never had an incident with a machine like this before," spokeswoman Joyce Fitzpatrick said.

She said the company's representatives can't explain what happened because they have not been allowed to review the inspection records, which are kept inside the ride, Fitzpatrick said. The ride has been closed since Thursday's injuries.

The Labor Department said its inspectors performed safety checks on all the rides before the fair opened. Ride operators are supposed to do three daily operational checks and record those in a log, said Tom Chambers, the chief of the department's ride inspection unit. State inspectors then perform checks of the logs to confirm operators are complying with the rules.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission recorded 875 injuries associated with amusement rides in 2012, up from 774 injuries the previous year. The cases included people who needed emergency-department treatment for injuries associated with fixed rides in theme parks, mobile rides associated with carnivals or fairs, or inflatable slides or bouncy cabins.

___

Emery Dalesio can be reached at http://twitter.com/emerydalesio

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-10-27-US-State-Fair-Accident/id-7a42be10419f44a4b9d13ab3379f3a99
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What Lou Reed Taught Me

Lou Reed onstage in Amsterdam in 1975.

Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns

Lou Reed onstage in Amsterdam in 1975.

Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns

Lou Reed was the first rock star to truly mess up my mind. It was the end of the '70s; I was in high school. With no older siblings and few friends to guide me — my sweet boyfriend was a classical cellist — I was stumbling around trying to educate myself about the foundations of the punk scene I desperately wanted to make my home. I haunted record-store cutout bins because the remaindered albums there, commercial failures, were cheap. I'd buy whatever looked vaguely roughneck (The Clash and the scruffy early Springsteen had revolutionized my life) or theatrical (after Bowie and Kate Bush started the wheels turning). One day, I saw a cover shot of Reed, whom I recognized because I had that Velvet Underground banana album, wearing aviator shades and looking both Hollywood-glamorous and oily. A car's headlight made a starburst in the plastic that hid his eyes.

The album was Street Hassle, the first solo album that Reed, an acknowledged godfather of punk, made with that movement's snotty children spitting back at him. Released in 1978, Street Hassle was a self-corrective — Tom Carson, in his Rolling Stone review, called it "an admission of failure that becomes a stunning, incandescent triumph," an antidote to Reed's post Velvets plunge into all kinds of excess. But the way I heard it, having not yet discovered the melodrama of Berlin or the glam glory of Transformer or the mean noise of Metal Machine Music, was as a corrective to me, the listener. Reed made me realize that, for all of my self-stylings as a rebel in love with noise that stripped away bulls—-, I didn't know the first thing about how rock music could provide a certain kind of unsought enlightenment.

You might call it moral clarity. Ellen Willis did, writing about the Velvet Underground in her landmark essay on the Velvets, first published the same year Street Hassle came out. Identifying Reed as an "aesthete punk" whose relationship to the urban demimonde he always wrote about was intellectual, stylized and distanced, Willis noticed that because he also really grasped the pain of those shadowed characters he wrote about, he ended up a moralist: a writer primarily concerned with the choices that make up people's lives, choices to hurt or help others, to be safe or potentially self-destructive, to love or to harden the heart. "The point was not to glorify the punk, or even to say f—- you to the world, but to be honest about the strategies people adopt in a desperate situation."

Listening to Street Hassle, with its songs about feelings no one would ever want to admit, with titles like "Dirt" and "Leave Me Alone," I slowly realized what most of the punk or New Wave rock I loved so much rarely gave me. Clarity! Most music was too earnest, too clever, too deliberately gorgeous or bloody exciting to require what Reed's demanded, which was that a listener sit with the ugliness of a moment and really grasp the fatal mistakes and collapses that go hand-in-hand with the risks that bring humans to life.

Reed's songs are actually often quite pretty, his pop ear well-tuned by the '50s rockabilly and doo-wop he loved as Long Island teenybopper kid. But he would always show the sweat on the lips of the beauty queens and muscle boys he sang about. The fact that those queens were often in drag, and the boys were paying the rent with their erotic encounters, is in some ways secondary. (In another way it's central, since few other rockers fleshed out those characters, especially the queer ones, the way Reed did.) Reed was just as willing to explore conventional married life unsparingly, as he did on his turning-forty album The Blue Mask, the New Wave crossover hit New Sensations or his late-in-life albums about partnered bliss with his artistic soulmate Laurie Anderson. What matters most in Reed's music is the commitment to what's difficult, whether it's expressed through distorted guitar, lyrics whose exposure of a self or a situation peels deeper with each verse, or the kind of melodic richness that doesn't comfort but instead renders a song's singer vividly vulnerable.

Street Hassle's centerpiece, now considered one of Reed's greatest accomplishments, taught me that getting just what I wanted from a song (uplift, for example, or sloppy catharsis) wasn't always the best thing. "Street Hassle" includes bluntly sexual lines that turned me on, but also made me feel the edge of my own prudery. It explores how one person dehumanizes another and, just a few minutes later, how losing one person can make a person feel real and whole for the first time. It's a song suite that doesn't sound at all like punk; it features strings, female back-up singers and Reed definitely crooning. There's also an uncredited spoken-word passage by the then-rising Springsteen that adds in some of that future superstar's trademark grandiosity, serving as a telling contrast to Reed's own cooler storytelling. The song's triptych of scenarios is very Velvets: A probable transvestite picks up a male hooker at a bar; a drug dealer worries about how to get rid of an overdose victim's body; and, in the last verse, a more anonymous lover laments his man's departure in naked, needful agony. A lot happens musically around these stories, but every violin stroke, guitar bend and percussive push intensifies the focus on Reed's core message: that opening up your being — to sex or drugs or just to feeling — is inevitable, dangerous and the main purpose of life.

Lou Reed's music takes in and gives us back the whole picture. Describing another one of Reed's signature works, the Velvet Undergound opus "Heroin," Patti Smith once fittingly assessed Reed's breadth of vision. "'Heroin,' to me, is one of our more perfect American songs," she said, "because it addresses a very conflicting subject that has so many stigmas attached to it. It addresses the deeply painful and destructive elements of it, and also whatever is precious about it, just with Lou's beautiful, simple, direct language." Reed himself often explained that he was simply doing what artists in other media do; novelists or filmmakers don't limit their subject matter. Dedicating himself to rock and roll, though, kept Reed committedly exploring the visceral in ways other artists could avoid. In the funky rhythms he borrowed from early rock 'n' roll and especially in the drone and noise that connected him over the years to both minimalist composers like La Monte Young and hard rockers like Metallica, Reed moved through what felt like confusion toward a sense of grace.

Sometimes what Reed moved through was a minefield. He didn't worry about offending anyone or, preferably sometimes, everyone. Street Hassle, for example, also contains "I Wanna Be Black," a proto-rap unspooling of racist stereotypes that makes fun of white hipsters by forcing a deep wallow in ignorance. Plenty of Reed fans find Metal Machine Music, his 1976 excursion into nothing but guitar feedback, unlistenable. Others feel that way about his theatrical collaborations with Robert Wilson; I myself sat through the time-stopping Timerocker at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1997 and felt every spring in my seat. Even Reed's most accessible efforts proudly bear painful twists: The gorgeous ballad "Pale Blue Eyes" turns on a blunt justification of adultery; my favorite of his almost-pop dance numbers, "Vicious," is a lighthearted account of personal repulsion.

And then there's "Perfect Day," Lou Reed's "Hallelujah." Like Leonard Cohen's irreverent secular hymn, this one has been milked for exultation by many interpreters. Duran Duran covered it; so did the talent show diva Susan Boyle. It was featured in Trainspotting (in a scene that played upon the theory that Reed's perfect imagined lover is heroin, not a person), got an all-star charity remake in the late '90s and most recently, formed the basis for a Sony Playstation ad. It's a song that will live on, both enhancing and apart from Reed's expansive legacy.

But, like the essence of Lou Reed, "Perfect Day" is tricky. In the original recording, Mick Ronson's piano gives Reed's stately melody a French feel, something like an Edith Piaf song. David Bowie's production adds heft: the thing swells. Reed goes along for the ride. The choruses ring, anthemic, but why is Reed singing about how his ideal lover just keeps him hanging on? At the end of the second verse, Reed's voice dips and his diction clips. "You made me forget myself," he nearly whispers. "I thought I was someone else. Someone good." And the song ends in anger, with Reed muttering, over and over again, "You're going to reap what you sow." The soft focus that seemed to dominate the song in its beginning has sharpened. As Lester Bangs, the writer most passionately dedicated to understanding Reed, once wrote, "If 'Perfect Day' is autobiographical, he must be the most guilt-ridden person on the face of the earth."

See, there's the whole picture. Happiness intermingled with self-loathing. Freedom all tied up in dependency. Rage bubbling through tenderness. It took discipline to put all of this into a song, a determination to not soften into earnestness or excuse the hard stuff in the name of romance. "The core of Reed's sensibility is his visceral aversion to corn," the critic Robert Christgau once put it, succinctly. For the last three decades of his life, Lou Reed was a tai chi practitioner; he learned how to move slowly through uncomfortable positions. All the art he's left us will continue to help us learn to do that, too.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2013/10/27/240841092/what-lou-reed-taught-me?ft=1&f=10001
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The White House Is Foundering

By Kathleen Parker, Washington Post - October 27, 2013

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Source: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2013/10/27/the_white_house_is_foundering_318672.html
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Banksy slams One World Trade Center in rejected op-ed

Banksy, the elusive British street artist nearing the end of a month-long New York City residency, published an op-ed column on his website Sunday slamming the design of One World Trade Center, the 104-story skyscraper scheduled to be opened on the World Trade Center site next year.

"As a visitor staying New York for the past few weeks one thing has become very clear to me," Banksy wrote in the op-ed. "You've got to do something about the new World Trade Center. That building is a disaster. Well no, disasters are interesting. One World Trade centre [sic] is a non-event. It's vanilla. It looks like something they would build in Canada."

According to Banksy, he submitted the op-ed to the New York Times, which declined to publish it. A representative for the newspaper did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"The attacks of September 11th were an attack on all of us and we will live out our lives in their shadow," Banksy continued. "But it's also how we react to adversity that defines us. And the response? 104 floors of compromise?"

The 1,776-foot tall building, co-developed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and The Durst Organization, is being billed as "the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere." The spire was completed in May.

More from Banksy's op-ed:

Remarkably for such a tall structure One World Trade lacks any self-confidence. How does it stand up without a spine? It looks like it never wanted to be built in the first place.

It reminds you of a really tall kid at a party, awkwardly shifting his shoulders trying not to stand out from the crowd. It's the first time I've ever seen a shy skyscraper.

It would be easy to view One World Trade Centre [sic] as a betrayal of everyone who lost their lives on September 11th, because it so clearly proclaims the terrorists won. Those 10 men have condemned us to live in a world more mediocre than the one they attacked, rather than be the catalyst for a dazzling new one.

Nobody comes to New York to bathe in your well-mannered common sense. We're here for the spirit and audacity. One World Trade has none. Instead you have to look to the rooftops - to the chorus of precariously roller painted names and slogans crawling over the skyline like poison ivy. This is the city's true heritage — a city that made its name giving space to the mercurial and the brave.

One World Trade declares the glory days of New York are gone. You really need to put up a better building in front of it right away. Or better still, let the kids with the roller poles finish it off. Because you currently have under construction a one thousand foot tall sign that reads — New York — we lost our nerve.

The op-ed isn't the first time Banksy has referenced the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Earlier this month, he unveiled graffiti in Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood depicting a silhouette of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers with a flower — an orange chrysanthemum singed at the edges — emerging from one of the buildings.

And it probably won't win him any fans in the mayor's office, which is already irked by Banksy's installations.

"Running up to somebody's property or public property and defacing it is not my definition of art," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said when asked of the graffiti. "It may be art, but it should not be permitted. And I think that's exactly what the law says."

Banksy fired back Sunday.

"The biggest eyesore in New York is not the graffiti," Banksy wrote as the title to his fake Times op-ed. "It's under construction at ground zero."

• Banksy
• new World Trade Center
• New York

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/banksy-nytimes-op-ed-one-world-trade-162728695.html
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PS4 launch day update will enable second screen, iOS app due for launch November 13

One of the features coming with the launch of Sony's new PS4 console next month is a second screen experience that will enable use of your iPhone or iPad with the console. Today, Sony has released a statement confirming that this, plus other features will require a launch day software update to enable:

We wanted to shed some light on system software update version 1.50 for PS4, which will launch simultaneously with the system’s official North American launch on November 15th, 2013. By updating to system software version 1.50, you’ll be able to experience a variety of new features in addition to the basic functions of PS4.

Users can use the PS4 Link application for the PS Vita system, and PlayStation App for iPhone, iPad, and Android-based smartphones and tablets, to use these devices as second screens in supported titles. PlayStation App has the ability to enable users to interact with games with their mobiles devices. For example on The Playroom, a title pre-installed in all PS4 systems that requires PlayStation Camera, users can draw pictures on their mobile device screens and flick them towards the TV. The images then appear as a 3D object within the game.

Integration with our iPhone and iPad continues to intrigue, and it's going to be exciting as time goes on to see how game developers involve our mobile devices in the overall experience. But before anyone can do anything, they'll need to download the 300MB software update.

Additionally, Sony has also detailed when said application will be available to download from the App Store. Initially it will become available on November 13 in the U.S, two days before the launch of the console. Then, Europe will follow on November 22 ahead of the November 29 launch in countries such as the UK. Second screen something you're looking forward to from your PS4?

Source: Sony

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/j6Xe8uQhBDg/story01.htm
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iPad Air coming to US Cellular and regional carriers starting November 8th

Apple's plan to launch the iPad Air with cellular data support for T-Mobile was apparently just the start of a larger strategy. US Cellular has announced that it will offer the featherweight tablet on November 8th, while regional carriers like Bluegrass Cellular, C Spire and GCI say that they'll ...

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/ReEzlmCtbDU/
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Miley Cyrus Says She's Having "The Best Time of My Life" Now Single, How VMAs Would Have Been Boring Without Her

Miley Cyrus is high -- on life, that is. The 20-year-old star opens up in the December 2013 issue of Cosmopolitan about her crazy year and how she still surprisingly feels like the underdog -- and likes it that way. The "Wrecking Ball" singer also makes clear that she won't be dwelling over her September split from fiance Liam Hemsworth that ended after four years of dating.

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"I need to treat my music like a relationship – give it my time and all the attention it deserves – and that’s my main love right now," she says in the issue. "This is the best time of my life. I'm not going to look back on it and be like, 'I wish I hadn’t been dwelling over a breakup,' you know?"

Indeed, Cyrus has been on the fast track this year -- making headlines for her controversial "Blurred Lines" and "We Can't Stop" VMAs performance alongside R&B crooner Robin Thicke, hosting Saturday Night Live and landing the coveted cover spot on Rolling Stone in September.

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"Everything is so chaotic and crazy right now and it's so much all at once, but I'm living for it," she says of the attention. "I'm just having the best time ever and everything's falling into place like it's supposed to. Even people who want to hate on me, they can't even shut down the fact that I’m literally what everyone is talking about."

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She continues: "I don't want to say that I'm on top right now – I feel like I'm kind of an underdog in a cool way. It's almost punk rock to like me because it's not the right thing to do. Like, society wants to shut me down."

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MIley Cyrus in December 2013 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine
Credit: Peter Pedonomou/ Cosmopolitan

But some fellow artists who haven't shut her down? "The support of other artists is important because there are not many people who can relate to what I'm going through right now. Kanye West is one of those people, and even Katy Perry has been so cool," she admits. "It's easy for Kanye to support me because we’re in totally separate lanes of competition, but for Katy to say that she appreciates what I'm really doing for the pop industry, that keeps you going. And I mean, who cares what the media buzz is if Kanye West is telling you that you're the shit?"

As for her VMAs performance -- where it seemingly all began -- Cyrus has no regrets. "When people started complaining about the awards show, I was like, 'Have you never seen the f-cking video?' And what if I hadn't done that performance? The VMAs would have been bad. They would have been missing something. The show was kind of making fun of how serious the pop industry is."

Source: http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/miley-cyrus-says-shes-having-the-best-time-of-my-life-now-single-how-vmas-would-have-been-boring-without-her-20132710
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