The extraordinary true story of a Malawian teenager who transformed his village by building electric windmills out of junk

By Jude Sheerin

The extraordinary true story of a Malawian teenager who transformed his village by building electric windmills out of junk is the subject of a new book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

Self-taught William Kamkwamba has been feted by climate change campaigners like Al Gore and business leaders the world over.

His against-all-odds achievements are all the more remarkable considering he was forced to quit school aged 14 because his family could no longer afford the $80-a-year (£50) fees.

When he returned to his parents' small plot of farmland in the central Malawian village of Masitala, his future seemed limited.

But this was not another tale of African potential thwarted by poverty.

Defence against hunger

The teenager had a dream of bringing electricity and running water to his village.

And he was not prepared to wait for politicians or aid groups to do it for him.

The need for action was even greater in 2002 following one of Malawi's worst droughts, which killed thousands of people and left his family on the brink of starvation.

Unable to attend school, he kept up his education by using a local library.

Fascinated by science, his life changed one day when he picked up a tattered textbook and saw a picture of a windmill.

Mr Kamkwamba told the BBC News website: "I was very interested when I saw the windmill could make electricity and pump water.

"I thought: 'That could be a defence against hunger. Maybe I should build one for myself'."

When not helping his family farm maize, he plugged away at his prototype, working by the light of a paraffin lamp in the evenings.

But his ingenious project met blank looks in his community of about 200 people.

"Many, including my mother, thought I was going crazy," he recalls. "They had never seen a windmill before."

Shocks

Neighbours were further perplexed at the youngster spending so much time scouring rubbish tips.

"People thought I was smoking marijuana," he said. "So I told them I was only making something for juju [magic].' Then they said: 'Ah, I see.'"

Mr Kamkwamba, who is now 22 years old, knocked together a turbine from spare bicycle parts, a tractor fan blade and an old shock absorber, and fashioned blades from plastic pipes, flattened by being held over a fire.

"I got a few electric shocks climbing that [windmill]," says Mr Kamkwamba, ruefully recalling his months of painstaking work.

The finished product - a 5-m (16-ft) tall blue-gum-tree wood tower, swaying in the breeze over Masitala - seemed little more than a quixotic tinkerer's folly.

But his neighbours' mirth turned to amazement when Mr Kamkwamba scrambled up the windmill and hooked a car light bulb to the turbine.

As the blades began to spin in the breeze, the bulb flickered to life and a crowd of astonished onlookers went wild.

Soon the whiz kid's 12-watt wonder was pumping power into his family's mud brick compound.

'Electric wind'

Out went the paraffin lanterns and in came light bulbs and a circuit breaker, made from nails and magnets off an old stereo speaker, and a light switch cobbled together from bicycle spokes and flip-flop rubber.

Before long, locals were queuing up to charge their mobile phones.

Mr Kamkwamba's story was sent hurtling through the blogosphere when a reporter from the Daily Times newspaper in Blantyre wrote an article about him in November 2006.

Meanwhile, he installed a solar-powered mechanical pump, donated by well-wishers, above a borehole, adding water storage tanks and bringing the first potable water source to the entire region around his village.

He upgraded his original windmill to 48-volts and anchored it in concrete after its wooden base was chewed away by termites.

Then he built a new windmill, dubbed the Green Machine, which turned a water pump to irrigate his family's field.

Before long, visitors were traipsing from miles around to gawp at the boy prodigy's magetsi a mphepo - "electric wind".

As the fame of his renewable energy projects grew, he was invited in mid-2007 to the prestigious Technology Entertainment Design conference in Arusha, Tanzania.

Cheetah generation

He recalls his excitement using a computer for the first time at the event.

"I had never seen the internet, it was amazing," he says. "I Googled about windmills and found so much information."

Onstage, the native Chichewa speaker recounted his story in halting English, moving hard-bitten venture capitalists and receiving a standing ovation.

A glowing front-page portrait of him followed in the Wall Street Journal.

He is now on a scholarship at the elite African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Mr Kamkwamba - who has been flown to conferences around the globe to recount his life-story - has the world at his feet, but is determined to return home after his studies.

The home-grown hero aims to finish bringing power, not just to the rest of his village, but to all Malawians, only 2% of whom have electricity.

"I want to help my country and apply the knowledge I've learned," he says. "I feel there's lots of work to be done."

Former Associated Press news agency reporter Bryan Mealer had been reporting on conflict across Africa for five years when he heard Mr Kamkwamba's story.

The incredible tale was the kind of positive story Mealer, from New York, had long hoped to cover.

The author spent a year with Mr Kamkwamba writing The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which has just been published in the US.

Mealer says Mr Kamkwamba represents Africa's new "cheetah generation", young people, energetic and technology-hungry, who are taking control of their own destiny.

"Spending a year with William writing this book reminded me why I fell in love with Africa in the first place," says Mr Mealer, 34.

"It's the kind of tale that resonates with every human being and reminds us of our own potential."

Can it be long before the film rights to the triumph-over-adversity story are snapped up, and William Kamkwamba, the boy who dared to dream, finds himself on the big screen?

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"This remarkable example shows how much of a contribution one could make by taking an initiative with a sound vision."

We only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control.

The Referendum
By Tim Kreider

Recently an editor asked me for an essay about arrested adolescence, joking: “Of course, I thought of you.”

It is worth mentioning that this editor is an old college friend; we’ve driven across the country, been pantsless in several nonsexual contexts, and accidentally hospitalized each other in good fun. He is now a respectable homeowner and family man; I am not. So I couldn’t help but wonder: is there something condescending about this assignment? Does he consider me some sort of amusing and feckless manchild instead of a respected cartoonist whose work is beloved by hundreds and has made me a thousandaire, who’s been in a committed relationship for 15 years with the same cat?

My weird touchiness on this issue — taking offense at someone offering to pay me money for my work — is symptomatic of a more widespread syndrome I call “The Referendum.”

The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.

It’s especially conspicuous among friends from youth. Young adulthood is an anomalous time in people’s lives; they’re as unlike themselves as they’re ever going to be, experimenting with substances and sex, ideology and religion, trying on different identities before their personalities immutably set. Some people flirt briefly with being freethinking bohemians before becoming their parents. Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your 20s make different choices about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you can only regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension.

I may be exceptionally conscious of the Referendum because my life is so different from most of my cohort’s; at 42 I’ve never been married and don’t want kids. I recently had dinner with some old friends, a couple with two small children, and when I told them about my typical Saturday in New York City — doing the Times crossword, stopping off at a local flea market, maybe biking across the Brooklyn Bridge — they looked at me like I was describing my battles with the fierce and elusive Squid-Men among the moons of Neptune. The obscene wealth of free time at my command must’ve seemed unimaginably exotic to them, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.

What they also can’t imagine is having too much time on your hands, being unable to fill the hours, having to just sit and stare at the emptiness at the center of your life. But I’m sure that to them this problem seems as pitiable as morbid obesity would to the victims of famine.

A lot of my married friends take a vicarious interest in my personal life. It’s usually just nosy, prurient fun, but sometimes smacks of the sort of moralism that H.G. Wells called “jealousy with a halo.” Sometimes it seems sort of starved, like audiences in the Great Depression watching musicals about the glitterati. It’s true that my romantic life has produced some humorous anecdotes, but good stories seldom come from happy experiences. Some of my married friends may envy my freedom in an abstract, daydreamy way, misremembering single life as some sort of pornographic smorgasbord, but I doubt many of them would actually choose to trade places with me. Although they may miss the thrill of sexual novelty, absolutely nobody misses dating.

I regard their more conventional domestic lives with the same sort of ambivalence. Like everyone, I’ve seen some marriages in which I would discreetly hang myself within 12 hours, but others have given me cause to envy their intimacy, loyalty, and irreplaceable decades of invested history. [Note to all my married friends: your marriage is one of the latter.] Though one of those friends cautioned me against idealizing: “It’s not as if being married means you’re any less alone.”

Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.

I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small, rude, incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life. [Note to friends with children: I am referring to other people’s children, not to yours.] But there are also moments when some part of me wonders whether I am not only missing the biological boat but something I cannot even begin to imagine — an entire dimension of human experience undetectable to my senses, like a flatlander scoffing at the theoretical concept of sky.

But I can only imagine the paralytic terror that must seize my friends with families as they lie awake calculating mortgage payments and college funds and realize that they are locked into their present lives for farther into the future than the mind’s eye can see. Judging from the unanimity with which parents preface any gripe about children with the disclaimer, “Although I would never wish I hadn’t had them and I can’t imagine life without them,” I can’t help but wonder whether they don’t have to repress precisely these thoughts on a daily basis.

Yes: the Referendum gets unattractively self-righteous and judgmental. Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.

The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.” Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.

A colleague of mine once hosted a visiting cartoonist from Scandinavia who was on a promotional tour. My colleague, who has a university job, a wife and children, was clearly a little wistful about the tour, imagining Brussels, Paris, and London, meeting new fans and colleagues and being taken out for beers every night. The cartoonist, meanwhile, looked forlornly around at his host’s pleasant row house and sighed, almost to himself: “I would like to have such a house.”

One of the hardest things to look at in this life is the lives we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back — Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice — are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.

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The mystery of Lake Louise's missing water

Unexplained absence of 510,000 cubic metres of water from resort's distribution system 'an embarrassment for Canada'

by Dawn Walton

The Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise taps into the iconic emerald-blue lake in Alberta that shares its name for everything from supplying its laundry room and watering its gardens to ensuring the ice buckets are filled.

That water distribution system has lost almost 510,000 cubic metres of water – the equivalent of 33,630 tanker trucks or 204 Olympic-sized swimming pools – pulled from the lake since 2003, according to records that the hotel submits to Parks Canada, which oversees all operations in Banff National Park.

That's almost as much water as Ottawa allows the hotel to draw each year from the postcard-perfect lake that thrives on glacial runoff in Canada's oldest national park.

Brad Cabana, a former member of Parks Canada's advisory development board, rang alarm bells about the water losses for more than a year before he resigned. He said he received little explanation – or assurances the problem has been fixed.

“This is not a slough in Saskatchewan,” said the former mayor of Elstow, Sask., who lives in the Rocky Mountain resort town of Canmore, Alta. “This is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I'm trying to save something that can't speak for itself. I want to hold people accountable.”

Parks Canada doesn't monitor levels at Lake Louise because it is always changing, affected by the seasons and dependent on rain as well as the melt from Victoria Glacier above it. But evidence suggests the main glacier is under pressure.

“It's definitely melting away,” said Gerald Osborn, a professor of geoscience at the University of Calgary who has studied glaciers.

Although the icepack loss has not been calculated recently, scientists say glaciers in the Rockies are declining and at a more rapid pace.

“It's a natural recession, but it is augmented by the man-made effects,” Prof. Osborn said.

The impact of global warming is a problem for huge regions, including Western Canada, that rely on glaciers for water for their homes, businesses and farms.

Mr. Cabana noticed what he considered a large water-loss rate at Lake Louise in February, 2008, when the hotel presented his board with a $7-million plan to upgrade its water-treatment plant and build a huge new reservoir.

Records eventually showed that one-fifth of the lake water drawn by the hotel's treatment plant (which is used by the hotel and the nearby Deer Lodge and Parks Canada washrooms) has been disappearing from the metered distribution system.

Over the years, the hotel has installed low-flow toilets and shower heads, tap aerators and taken other high-tech conservation measures. Since 2001, water consumption has dropped 36 per cent.

While experts say even well-run water systems have an 8- to 12-per-cent loss or leakage rate, average annual losses at the hotel ranged from 6.9 per cent to 33.4 per cent. There has been an average annual loss of 21 per cent between 2003 and today.

The board rejected the upgrade, but it went ahead with Parks Canada's blessing. Mr. Cabana pursued the issue, but recently quit the board in frustration. He continues to hunt for answers.

“Apart from where the hell is the water going and what the hell are people doing about it, it's certainly an embarrassment for Canada,” he said.

The advisory development board, which has seven volunteer members, was set up in 1998 to let Canadians be involved in deciding what projects go ahead in Banff, Yoho and Kootenay national parks in Alberta and British Columbia. It's supposed to make sure permit applications receive “consistent, fair and transparent reviews.”

When Mike McIvor of the Bow Valley Naturalists, a Banff-based conservation group, attended the board's first public hearing, he was impressed by the tough questions. But soon, he said, the board turned pro-development, and its recommendations could be overruled by the park superintendent.

“We came to call it the approval development board,” Mr. McIvor said.

“We stopped participating because we thought the role of the board had been reduced to choosing what colour should be on the bathroom walls,” he said.

Interested in conservation issues, Mr. Cabana joined the advisory board in January, 2008.

The next month, the waterworks upgrade at Lake Louise was presented. According to the hotel, which has roots dating back to 1890 and some water pipes that are a century old, the project was needed to meet new federal and provincial regulatory rules for drinking water and to ensure enough storage capacity in the event of a disaster such as a fire. The new reservoir would hold 1,450 cubic metres of water, more than three times as much as the existing one.

During the presentation, records showed that the hotel had been consuming well below its annual permit of 525,653 cubic metres of water.

The board was told water consumption had dropped between 2003 and 2006 and ranged from 267,809 to 346,533 cubic metres. During the same period, water production ranged between 357,803 and 384,989 cubic metres.

(Water that is produced, but not clocked by consumption meters, is not paid for. The hotel pays only for water it uses.) A chart showing the growing gap between the amount of water produced and the water consumed by the hotel and other facilities jumped out at Mr. Cabana and some other board members.

“Where is this water going?” he recalled asking. “They could not answer me.”

Three of six board members voted against the proposal, in part over concerns about adding a new water project to what seemed like a faulty system. Questions about aesthetics were also raised. The tie defeated the project. But a Parks Canada superintendent, satisfied that the concerns were addressed, later gave it the green light.

“We asked that aesthetics be improved and that's why it was approved,” explained Pam Veinotte, Parks Canada's field unit superintendent for Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay.

“There will always be a level of discrepancy in any municipal water system between withdrawal and usage. That doesn't necessarily mean there's been a loss of water. It's often a result of unmetered water usage,” she added.

Mr. Cabana asked for the water balance sheets for 2007 and 2008. Unlike the numbers in the presentation to the board, the charts he was given were vague. This week, he was offered more complete – and in some cases different – figures for those years, as well as the first eight months of 2009.

There were seven months between 2003 and today when water from the treatment plant didn't vanish. But during those years, the system could not account for 509,208 cubic metres of water. Mr. Cabana figured that would be like nearly 33,630 tanker trucks loaded with 4,000 gallon drums.

Last February – one year after the project was approved – Mr. Cabana tabled a motion to find out what measures had been taken to locate the sources of the losses and fix the problem.

A month later, Parks Canada received a letter from Jackie Budgell, the hotel's environmental systems manager, who attributed the discrepancy to non-metered water consumption for irrigation, annual fire-hydrant testing and cleaning the plant filters. She also suggested that some meters might be inaccurate.

Harsh winters sometimes burst water lines and cause leaks, Ms. Budgell said. One hydrant line ruptured in the winter of 2006 and could not be fixed until spring, she said. As well, non-metered hydrants were used during a big landscape project between 2003 and 2006. She assured Parks that the discrepancy between the water production and consumption was not because of leaking pipes or other causes.

“The most important fact is that we have continued to reduce our production and consumption since 1995,” she wrote.

But those explanations didn't wash for Mr. Cabana.

The hotel estimates that cleaning the filters accounts for 2.5 to 3.2 per cent of the water consumed, and includes it on the balance sheet, therefore that can't be the cause, he said. Water losses tend to be greatest between September and March, not during the prime summer landscaping season when new plants and trees would need heavy watering, he added. And, large water losses continued after the major landscaping project was completed, he said.

“Estimates are often difficult,” said Ms. Veinotte of Parks Canada.

Hotel spokeswoman Alicia Chelsom said an environmental assessment concluded that as long as the hotel stays below its permit, there's no ecological risk.

“We draw well below that number, so even if there is a slight difference between our production and consumption numbers, there is no risk for environmental damage. Also, any water that would leak from the distribution system would run back into the ground and return to the water table,” she said.

Chris Huston, leader of asset operation for water services for the city of Calgary, called monthly water losses ranging from 20 to 42 per cent “huge.”

“There's something going on there,” he said.

It could be as simple as inaccurate meters. The system could be over-pressured, which is pushing water through leaks faster. Theft can also be a factor. But in most cases, he explained, leaks are to blame.

“It could be water running underground and they don't even know it,” Mr. Huston said.

Back in the 1980s, Calgary lost 30 per cent of its water, about 140 million litres per day. The city launched an aggressive water-main replacement program and water loss dropped dramatically. While about 1,500 water mains used to break in a year, now fewer than 400 do.

“It's a major issue across North America – the state of infrastructure,” Mr. Huston said.

At an advisory board meeting in May, 2009, Mr. Cabana quit, citing concerns about “environmental negligence.” Neither Parks Canada nor the board, he said, appeared to have any intention to hold themselves or the hotel to account.

“It remains a shock to my system that the very organization entrusted with protection of our national parks, and thereby their ecosystems, would allow such a systemic abuse of perhaps the most recognized symbol of our country,” he wrote in his resignation letter.

At the meeting, the board gave the hotel until the end of the year to show how the new system, which went into operation in June, was working. (It includes new meters and a new irrigation system.) So far, the water-loss rate has ranged from 3 to 28 per cent.

Parks Canada said it needs more data to find out whether it has a handle on its water losses.

Joe Obad, associate director with the Water Matters Society of Alberta, an independent organization focused on watershed protection, said when talking about a Canadian icon like Lake Louise there should be no questions about where the water is going.

“What I would like to see is that every drop coming out of that lake is accounted for,” he said.

Mr. Cabana has enlisted the help of Wild Rose Conservative MP Blake Richards, who has the Environment Minister's office looking into the issue.

“Water is a pretty valuable resource and you want to make sure it's being used properly,” Mr. Richards said.

Parks Canada has been directed to get to the bottom of it.

Meanwhile, Parks Canada is undertaking a mandated facelift under federal legislation. It will look at what, if anything, it should do with the many committees, such as the advisory development board, that offer Ottawa advice. Boards could be disbanded or merged.

Mention Mr. Cabana's name around the lake and people tend to bristle. When asked about his water crusade, Ms. Veinotte offered a diplomatic response.

“We really appreciate the efforts of a number of private citizens to sit on advisory groups and I think that these advisory groups have served us well in the past and many will serve us well into the future,” she said.

Mr. Cabana would still like to see an independent audit, wonders how far back the losses go and doubts the water-plant upgrades will help. So what happened to Lake Louise's water?

“That's a question I wish I had the answer for,” he said.

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Walmart's Latest Move to Crush the Competition

By Sean Gregory

Walmart loves to shock and awe. City-size stores, absurdly low prices ($8 jeans!) and everything from milk to Matchbox toys on its shelves. And with the recession forcing legions of stores into bankruptcy, the world's largest retailer now apparently wants to take out the remaining survivors.

Thus, the company is in the beginning stages of a massive store and strategy remodeling effort, which it has dubbed Project Impact. One goal of Project Impact is cleaner, less cluttered stores that will improve the shopping experience. Another is friendlier customer service. A third: home in on categories where the competition can be killed. "They've got Kmart ready to take a standing eight-count next year," says retail consultant Burt Flickinger III, managing director for Strategic Resources Group and a veteran Walmart watcher. "Same with Rite Aid. They've knocked out four of the top five toy retailers, and are now going after the last one standing, Toys "R" Us. Project Impact will be the catalyst to wipe out a second round of national and regional retailers."

Though that's bad news for many smaller businesses that can't compete, Walmart investors have clamored for this push. Despite the company's consistently strong financial performance, Wall Street hasn't cheered Walmart's growth rates. During the 1990s, the company's stock price jumped 1,173%. In this decade, it's down around 24% (Walmart's stock closed at $51.74 per share on Sept. 3). "Walmart is under excruciating pressure from employees and frustrated institutional investors to get the stock up," says Flickinger.

Many analysts believe that the store-operations background of new CEO Mike Duke will keep investors quite happy. Though the recession finally caught up to Walmart last quarter, when the company reported a 1.2% drop in U.S. same-store sales, Walmart was a consistent winner during the worst days of the financial crisis, as frugal consumers traded down. While most retailers are shutting down stores, Walmart has opened 52 Supercenters since Feb. 1. Joseph Feldman, retail analyst at Telsey Advisory Group, estimates that each store costs Walmart between $25 and $30 million. In order to continue the momentum that it has picked up during the retail recession, over the next five years the company plans to remodel 70% of its approximately 3,600 U.S. stores.

So what does a Project Impact store look like? One recent weekday afternoon I toured a brand new, 210,000-sq.-ft. Walmart in West Deptford, N.J., with Lance De La Rosa, the company's Northeast general manager. "We've listened to our customers, and they want an easier shopping experience," says De La Rosa. "We've brightened up the stores and opened things up to make it more navigable." One of the most noticeable changes is that Project Impact stores reshape Action Alley, the aisles where promotional items were pulled off the shelves and prominently displayed for shoppers. Those stacks both crowded the aisles and cut off sight lines. Now, the aisles are all clear, and you can see most sections of the store from any vantage point. For example, standing on the corner intersection of the auto-care and crafts areas, you can look straight ahead and see where shoes, pet care, groceries, the pharmacy and other areas are located. And the discount price tags are still at eye level, so the value message doesn't get lost.

"They are like roads," De La Rosa says proudly. "And look around, the customers are using them. We've already gotten feedback about the wider, more breathable aisles. Our shoppers love them."

The layout is also smarter. "You can kind of guess where everything is going to be," says Sharon Tilotta, 73, a shopper in the West Deptford store. The pharmacy, pet foods, cosmetics and health and beauty sections are now adjacent to the groceries. In the past, groceries and these other sections were often at opposite ends of the store, which made it more difficult for someone looking to pick up some quick consumables to get in and out of Walmart. "Under Project Impact, Walmart is providing more of a full supermarket experience within its walls," says Feldman. "The biggest complaint against them has always been that it takes a long time to get through everything. This definitely improves efficiency." De La Rosa also points out the party-supply section. Favors, wedding decorations, cards and scrapbooks are all in one area. "In the past, these products would be in three different places," he says.

And although Walmart won't admit to targeting specific competitors — "We're just listening to what our customers want," De La Rosa says — it's clear that, under Project Impact, Walmart will make major plays in winnable categories. The pharmacy, for example, has been pulled into the middle of the store, and its $4-prescriptions program has generated healthy buzz. With Circuit City out of business, the electronics section has been beefed up. Walmart is also expanding its presence in crafts. Sales at Michael's Stores, the country's largest specialty arts-and-crafts retailers, have sagged, and Walmart sees an opportunity. Stores are chock-full of scrapbooking material, baskets and yarns. "Look, they're selling the stuff that accounts for 80% of Michael's business, at 20% of the space," says Flickinger. "It's very hard for any company to compete with that."

Apparel, one of Target's traditional strengths, gets a prominent position at the center. The color palettes of the shirts and dresses are brighter and more appealing than they've been in the past. "Walmart has figured out fashion for the first time in 47 years," Flickinger says. "They've gone from a D to an A-minus." Briefs and underwear have been shuttled to the back. "That's a smart move," Flickinger says. "People know to come to Walmart for the commodity clothing. Now, they have to walk past the higher margin, more fashionable merchandise to get what they need."

Of course, Project Impact isn't perfect. You'd think that if Walmart was going to open a massive new store with a cutting-edge layout, the company would at least put a sign up. In West Deptford, it's easy to miss the entrance to the Walmart — which is buried in the back of a parking lot — while driving along a main thoroughfare. And of course, customers will always nitpick. One elderly shopper complained about a shortage of benches in the store (she needed a rest). Another had a more esoteric, yet legitimate, gripe. "Their meat is leaky," says Jeff Winter, 30, a West Deptford shopper. "And instead of giving you a wet wipe to clean it off, they give you a dry towel. How's that going to prevent E. coli or whatever?"

What analysts really want to see from Project Impact, however, is a faster pace of implementation. "The biggest hurdle facing Walmart is the speed with which they can roll this out," says Feldman. As more Project Impact stores pop up, the existing stores appear worse by comparison. For example, while the merchandise at the Project Impact store outside of Philadelphia really speaks to that particular market — there's tons of Eagles and Phillies gear — at one regular discount store outside New York City, Minnesota Twins and Seattle Mariners pajama pants wasted away on the racks. There were plenty of associates staffing the electronics section at the Project Impact store; at the discount store, five frustrated shoppers waited in line for help from a customer-service rep. Soon, it was closer to 10.

What about the friendly service? In West Deptford, the associates were sunny and bright. At the New York–area discount store, not so much. "You'll notice we've been in the store for two hours, and no one has even said hello to us," Flickinger says after he and I toured that store. He's right, we weren't feeling any love. But if Project Impact keeps picking up momentum, many more Walmart salespeople, and shareholders, should be smiling.

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A skull that rewrites the history of man

It has long been agreed that Africa was the sole cradle of human evolution. Then these bones were found in Georgia...

By Steve Connor

The conventional view of human evolution and how early man colonised the world has been thrown into doubt by a series of stunning palaeontological discoveries suggesting that Africa was not the sole cradle of humankind. Scientists have found
a handful of ancient human skulls at an archaeological site two hours from the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, that suggest a Eurasian chapter in the long evolutionary story of man.

The skulls, jawbones and fragments of limb bones suggest that our ancient human ancestors migrated out of Africa far earlier than previously thought and spent a long evolutionary interlude in Eurasia – before moving back into Africa to complete the story of man.

Experts believe fossilised bones unearthed at the medieval village of Dmanisi in the foothills of the Caucuses, and dated to about 1.8 million years ago, are the oldest indisputable remains of humans discovered outside of Africa.

But what has really excited the researchers is the discovery that these early humans (or "hominins") are far more primitive-looking than the Homo erectus humans that were, until now, believed to be the first people to migrate out of Africa about 1 million years ago.

The Dmanisi people had brains that were about 40 per cent smaller than those of Homo erectus and they were much shorter in stature than classical H. erectus skeletons, according to Professor David Lordkipanidze, general director of the Georgia National Museum. "Before our findings, the prevailing view was that humans came out of Africa almost 1 million years ago, that they already had sophisticated stone tools, and that their body anatomy was quite advanced in terms of brain capacity and limb proportions. But what we are finding is quite different," Professor Lordkipanidze said.

"The Dmanisi hominins are the earliest representatives of our own genus – Homo – outside Africa, and they represent the most primitive population of the species Homo erectus to date. They might be ancestral to all later Homo erectus populations, which would suggest a Eurasian origin of Homo erectus."

Speaking at the British Science Festival in Guildford, where he gave the British Council lecture, Professor Lordkipanidze raised the prospect that Homo erectus may have evolved in Eurasia from the more primitive-looking Dmanisi population and then migrated back to Africa to eventually give rise to our own species, Homo sapiens – modern man.

"The question is whether Homo erectus originated in Africa or Eurasia, and if in Eurasia, did we have vice-versa migration? This idea looked very stupid a few years ago, but today it seems not so stupid," he told the festival.

The scientists have discovered a total of five skulls and a solitary jawbone. It is clear that they had relatively small brains, almost a third of the size of modern humans. "They are quite small. Their lower limbs are very human and their upper limbs are still quite archaic and they had very primitive stone tools," Professor Lordkipanidze said. "Their brain capacity is about 600 cubic centimetres. The prevailing view before this discovery was that the humans who first left Africa had a brain size of about 1,000 cubic centimetres."

The only human fossil to predate the Dmanisi specimens are of an archaic species Homo habilis, or "handy man", found only in Africa, which used simple stone tools and lived between about 2.5 million and 1.6 million years ago.

"I'd have to say, if we'd found the Dmanisi fossils 40 years ago, they would have been classified as Homo habilis because of the small brain size. Their brow ridges are not as thick as classical Homo erectus, but their teeth are more H. erectus like," Professor Lordkipanidze said. "All these finds show that the ancestors of these people were much more primitive than we thought. I don't think that we were so lucky as to have found the first travellers out of Africa. Georgia is the cradle of the first Europeans, I would say," he told the meeting.

"What we learnt from the Dmanisi fossils is that they are quite small – between 1.44 metres to 1.5 metres tall. What is interesting is that their lower limbs, their tibia bones, are very human-like so it seems they were very good runners," he said.

He added: "In regards to the question of which came first, enlarged brain size or bipedalism, maybe indirectly this information calls us to think that body anatomy was more important than brain size. While the Dmanisi people were almost modern in their body proportions, and were highly efficient walkers and runners, their arms moved in a different way, and their brains were tiny compared to ours.

"Nevertheless, they were sophisticated tool makers with high social and cognitive skills," he told the science festival, which is run by the British Science Association.

One of the five skulls is of a person who lost all his or her teeth during their lifetime but had still survived for many years despite being completely toothless. This suggests some kind of social organisation based on mutual care, Professor Lordkipanidze said.

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Historian says creating new Saskatchewan cities has 'great significance'

By Jennifer Graham

The last time two Saskatchewan towns became cities in the same year, Premier Walter Scott was walking the halls of the newly completed provincial legislative building, agricultural was the driving force of the economy and most of the province's nearly 500,000 residents lived in rural areas.

It was 1913 when North Battleford and Weyburn became the province's newest cities.

Nearly 100 years later, Saskatchewan is doing it again, announcing last week that the towns of Meadow Lake and Martensville have reached city status.

"There's a great significance to yet another city in Saskatchewan because in the national consciousness, Saskatchewan is a place that time forgot - of rural roads, country elevators, wheat fields," says Bill Waiser, a professor in the history department at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

"What people don't realize today is that Saskatchewan is essentially an urban province. More people in Saskatchewan live in urban centres than they do in the countryside."

For years, Saskatchewan was a place people loved to leave.

After reaching a high of more than 1,032,000 people in 1987, the province's population started to drop. It fell to below 992,000 in 2006 before things started to turn around.

Saskatchewan's population was at 1,027,092 in June, according to figures released by Statistics Canada. Most of the growth came from people moving to Saskatchewan from other provinces.

Waiser says two out of every three people in Saskatchewan live in urban centres - most in Regina and Saskatoon.

The historian, who penned the book "Saskatchewan: A New History," says people need to get away from the images of Saskatchewan as one big wheat field or as a small town where most people are engaged in agriculture.

"That's not the real Saskatchewan of today," Waiser says.

"The fact that Martensville is becoming yet another in the list of cities in Saskatchewan reflects the fact that there's this growing urbanization in Saskatchewan, that people are moving off the farms into the cities where they can get better services."

"Yes, Saskatchewan has that feel of a rural province because of the grid roads, the country elevators, the grain fields, but that rural population is becoming increasingly smaller as the urban population grows."

In fact, Waiser says a lot of smaller communities will likely see their numbers decline and might eventually disappear.

Such hamlets, villages and towns were put on the map a century ago to service the agricultural community so that producers didn't have to haul their crops too far. But Saskatchewan's economy has expanded into areas such as mining and oil and gas. Agriculture's contribution has declined, taking with it the need for all the small rural centres, says Waiser.

In Saskatchewan, a community must have a population of 5,000 or more to get city status.

Martensville has seen its population grow because of its proximity to Saskatoon, the province's largest city. Martensville is just 20 minutes north of Saskatoon, but it doesn't want to be seen as a bedroom community.

"We want our own identity," says Martensville Mayor Giles Saulnier.

Saulnier says the city is trying to move forward and grow with the Saskatchewan economy. He insists the personable image that makes small town life appealing won't change.

"It's the people. It's walking down the street and saying hello to your neighbour and that will continue to happen because everybody wants to lend a helping hand in Martensville," says Saulnier.

"It's a sign of what we are as a community."

Premier Brad Wall says two towns becoming cities in the same year is evidence that Saskatchewan is growing even during the recession. The growth in Meadow Lake is being driven by many factors, including agriculture, energy exploration and the potential of oil sands development.

But the situation is not all rosy.

Saskatchewan was the only province to experience a sizable deterioration in the job market in August, losing 3,200 jobs, according to the latest Labour Force Survey released by Statistics Canada. However, the province still boasts Canada's lowest unemployment rate at five per cent.

Waiser admits there are challenges with a shifting population and the current economy, but he says people should look forward to what Saskatchewan is going to do.

"It's not going to be an easy road ahead of us, it's going to be bumpy, but I suggest that Saskatchewan will find its own solutions to the challenges that it faces and that the rest of Canada should be watching closely."

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Turning to Tie-Ins, Lego Thinks Beyond the Brick

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

FROM the outside, there is nothing playful about the drab, two-story Lego Idea House here, where designers gather in whitewashed rooms to dream up new toys. But upstairs, behind a series of locked doors accessible only to employees with special passes, is a chamber that might as well be toy heaven for kids — and more than a few adults.

Multicolored Lego creations in every imaginable size and shape spill from the shelves, from Indiana Jones’s biplane to Darth Vader’s fighter. Boxes stamped “confidential” hold potential future blockbusters, like Buzz Lightyear, the hero of the “Toy Story” animated films, as well as a police station bustling with miniature cops and robbers.

“It’s our way of looking at the world,” says Soren Holm, the head of Lego’s Concept Lab. “We have happy criminals; even they are smiling. The sun is shining every day.”

While that may be true of Lego’s toys, until recently it was hardly the case for Lego’s bottom line. But five years after a near-death experience, Lego has emerged as an unlikely winner in an industry threatened by the likes of video games, iPods, the Internet and other digital diversions.

Even as other toymakers struggle, this Danish maker of toy bricks is enjoying double-digit sales gains and swelling earnings. In recent years, Lego has increasingly focused on toys that many parents wouldn’t recognize from their own childhood. Hollywood themes are commanding more shelf space, a far cry from the idealistic, purely imagination-oriented play that drove Lego for years and was as much a religion as a business strategy in Billund.

Just as the toys are changing, so is the company. Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, 40, a father of four and a McKinsey & Company alumnus who took over as Lego’s chief executive in 2004, made it clear that results, not simply feeling good about making the best toys, would be essential if Lego was to succeed.

“We needed to build a mind-set where nonperformance wasn’t accepted,” Mr. Knudstorp says. Now, “there’s no place to hide if performance is poor,” he says. “You will be embarrassed, and embarrassment is stronger than fear.”

But the story of Lego’s renaissance — and its current expansion into new segments like virtual reality and video games — isn’t just a toy story. It’s also a reminder of how even the best brands can lose their luster but bounce back with a change in strategy and occasionally painful adaptation.

Founded in 1932 on the principle of “play well,” or “leg godt” in Danish, by a local carpenter, Ole Kirk Christiansen, this privately held company had a very Scandinavian aversion to talking about profits, much less orienting the company around them.

Mr. Christiansen’s family still owns Lego and its business may still be fun and games, but working here isn’t. Before Mr. Knudstorp’s arrival, deadlines came and went, and development time for new toys could stretch out for years; in 2004, the company racked up a $344 million loss.

Now, employee pay is tied to measuring up to management’s key performance indicators (K.P.I.’s, in Lego-speak). And cost-saving touches are encouraged when it comes to designing new toys.

That has helped to lower development time by 50 percent, with some new products moving from idea to box in as little as a year. Mr. Knudstorp’s bottom-line-oriented team, meanwhile, has shifted some manufacturing and distribution from Billund to cheaper locales in Central Europe and Mexico.

Nevertheless, Lego hasn’t entirely shed its Scandinavian sense of social mission when it comes to making toys. It kept quality high and never moved any manufacturing to China, avoiding the lead paint scare and grabbing market share when rivals stumbled amid multiple recalls.

Now, with profits swelling and the turnaround firmly in place, Lego is preparing for a future that moves well beyond the basic brick but carries big risks as well.

Last month, it opened its first “concept store” in Concord, N.C., where parents can bring children for birthday parties and classes with master builders; another concept store is set to open near Baltimore this fall. It’s all part of a broader retail expansion that will give Lego 47 retail stores worldwide by year-end, up from 27 in 2007.

In 2010, the first board game designed by Lego will go on sale in the United States, while its new virtual reality system, Lego Universe, will make its debut on the Web, with children able to act out roles from Lego games and build toys from virtual bricks.

Video games — yes, Lego is there, too — are increasingly important to the company, as are Lego’s legions of adult fans, who can now buy kits to build architect-designed models of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum. What’s more, the company is in talks with Warner Brothers about a mixed live-action and animation Lego-themed movie that would move the company and its Lego brand even further into the Hollywood orbit.

“Developing a movie doesn’t come cheap,” says Soren Torp Laursen, a 23-year Lego employee who heads its North American operations. “But five years ago, we were in the midst of a crisis, and now we’re in a growth phase. We are definitely taking bigger risks than we previously did.”

WHILE that shift has disappointed purists and prompted worries from experts that some of what has long made Lego special may be in jeopardy, it’s paying off, at least in the short term.

Amid a 5 percent drop in total United States toy sales last year and the industry’s worst holiday season in three decades, according to Sean McGowan, an analyst at Needham & Company, Lego’s sales surged 18.7 percent in 2008. And despite a worsening global recession, Lego powered through the first half of 2009, with a 23 percent sales increase over the period a year earlier. It earned $355 million before taxes last year, and $178 million in the first half of 2009.

The numbers are all the more impressive given the sales declines this year at the two biggest toymakers, Mattel and Hasbro.

“I was stunned when I heard how strong Lego’s performance was,” says Mr. McGowan, who has covered the toy industry for 23 years. “How could an $80 Lego set sell better than a $10 action figure?”

The answer is as multifaceted as one of Lego’s most complicated brick creations — and, like the best children’s stories, contains elements of luck, hard work and the loss of innocence.

SOREN HOLM looks down at the machine gun atop Indiana Jones’s jeep and winces. By the standards of video games like Grand Theft Auto and of other childhood attractions, it’s mild stuff.

But here in Billund, toy weapons have always been a touchy subject. “I can tell you there’s been a lot of debate about how far we can take it,” Mr. Holm says. Right down to Indy’s gun? “Oh, yes,” he says slowly. “Oh, yes.”

Since Lego overcame its initial hesitation about rolling out a “Star Wars” series a decade ago because the word “war” would appear on the box, the company has grown more comfortable with conflict.

“We’ve opened up slightly,” Mr. Holm says. After all, he adds, “when you give boys a bunch of bricks, they build a gun.”

In fact, Lego has opened up more than slightly. Whether it’s the Star Wars Assassin Droids Battle Pack or the Indiana Jones Ambush in Cairo set — featuring a pistol-wielding Indy against a scimitar-swinging local — many of Lego’s most popular toys today seem inspired by the special effects and violence of the big screen.

In the United States, Lego’s biggest market and the biggest toy market in the world, games with themes like “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” were among the reasons Lego sales jumped 32 percent last year, well above the global pace. But experts like Dr. Jonathan Sinowitz, a New York psychologist who also runs a psychological services company, Diagnostics, wonders at what price these sales come.

“What Lego loses is what makes it so special,” he says. “When you have a less structured, less themed set, kids have the ability to start from scratch. When you have kids playing out Indiana Jones, they’re playing out Hollywood’s imagination, not their own.”

Even toy analysts who admire the company and its recent success acknowledge a broad shift. “I would like to see more open-ended play like when we were kids,” says Gerrick Johnson, a toy analyst at BMO Capital Markets in New York. “The vast majority is theme-based, and when you go into Toys “R” Us, you’d really be challenged to find a simple box of bricks.”

Lutz Muller, an independent toy analyst in Williston, Vt., who has long followed the industry, estimates that 60 percent of Lego’s American sales are linked to licenses, double the amount five years ago.

And the coming “Toy Story” sets have retailers salivating, as Disney prepares to release the latest movie in the hit series next June. “ ‘Toy Story’ is a fit made in heaven,” raves Jerry Storch, the chief executive of Toys “R” Us, which has increased the shelf space allotted to Lego in recent years.

Nevertheless, acquiring licenses to make toys linked to hot Hollywood properties like “Toy Story” carries risks. “It’s a slippery slope,” Mr. Johnson says, and today’s hit can quickly turn into tomorrow’s dud, adding volatility that Lego never faced in the past.

Indeed, unlike the Cabbage Patch Kids or Atari or the Beanie Babies, it was Lego’s seeming aloofness from the market that helped it endure, rather than ending up in the back of the closet like those toys of yesteryear.

For longtime Lego executives like Mr. Laursen, it’s a delicate issue, and his own comments echo Lego’s ambivalence over creativity and hallowed Lego traditions versus the appeal of more profitable, Hollywood-influenced toys.

He says that “we’re definitely more commercially oriented” and notes that licenses play a bigger role in the American market than overseas. But he says that “we’ve never sacrificed our values, and have never been a fundamentally profit-oriented company.”

In fact, he says that there is often a long debate about values when acquiring new licenses, and that “we’re far from always agreeing to take on new ones.” He won’t specify which movies or themes Lego has passed on, but says that “there are many licenses out there that represent a level of violence that is not suited to Lego and doesn’t fit with the trust of parents.”

As Lego ventures deeper into video games and virtual reality with Lego Universe, the question of violence, not to mention commercial temptations, will become only more charged.

One answer, Mr. Laursen says, is to make “violence not explicit, but humoristic.” For example, when a minifigure “dies” in a “Star Wars” or “Indiana Jones” video game, he dissolves into a pile of bricks and then springs back to life, cartoon style.

“We think kids really want to have this good-against-evil play; they want this fighting against each other,” says Charlotte Simonsen, a Lego spokeswoman. “But we want to do it with a wink.”

Analysts add that the recession has proved to be an unexpected boon for Lego, as parents favor spending more time at home with traditional toys instead of going out to the movies or taking trips with the children.

Even parents who won’t let video games in the house, like Alyson Richman Gordon of Huntington Bay, N.Y., say Lego has retained its innocence, especially when it comes to toys built around the traditional bricks. “It echoes back to a bygone era,” she said. “And I find as a parent that I’m drawn to things from my own childhood that inspired my creativity.”

Lester Munson, a father of two in Alexandria, Va., agrees, even though he sees a difference between the Legos of his own childhood and those favored by his 8-year-old son, Jonas. “The most exotic thing I could build when I was a kid was an ambulance,” he says. “Now Jonas can build the Death Star.”

“I still like Legos, and I’m 41,” he says. “Instead of watching TV or playing computer games, the kids are building something, and Jonas and I will build stuff together. The pieces and the sets are a lot cooler than they were 30 years ago, and if the price you have to pay is these tie-ins, that’s fine.”

IT’S not only children who fight over toys. John Barbour, a former top executive of Toys “R” Us, recalls “a series of truly frustrating meetings” with Lego officials in Billund and New York at the beginning of the decade, which climaxed when Mr. Barbour bluntly told them that Toys “R” Us cared more about the Lego brand than they did.

The most popular toys would run out, he recalls, and Lego was simply unable to ship more or manage the complex process of producing the plastic pieces for its most complicated sets.

That began to change in 2004, after Mr. Knudstorp took over in Billund and Mr. Laursen arrived at Lego’s regional headquarters in Enfield, Conn. Besides reaching out to top retailers and cutting costs, they untangled a supply chain that churns out 29 billion pieces a year.

The changes also filtered down to the ranks of Lego’s toy designers, says Paal Smith-Meyer, head of Lego’s new-business group. The number of different bricks or elements that go into Lego toys has shrunk to less than 7,000 from roughly 13,000, and designers are encouraged to reuse parts, so that a piece of an X-wing fighter from the “Star Wars” series might end up in Indiana Jones’s jeep or a pirate ship.

That’s very different from when Mr. Meyer joined Lego a decade ago. Though creating a mold to make a new plastic element might cost 50,000 euros. on average, he recalls that 90 percent of new elements were developed and used just one time.

Nowadays, Mr. Meyer says, “you have to design for Lego. If you want to design for yourself, go be an artist.”

For those would-be Lego artists out there, the company has created a Lego Certified Professional program, selecting adult Lego enthusiasts who don’t work directly for the company but whose creations are aimed at Lego’s vast population of adult fans as well as museum and gallery shows.

It’s part of another broad new effort at Lego — reaching out to those adult fans, who maintain thousands of Web sites and blogs, like GodBricks, which features Lego creations inspired by different faiths, and the Brothers Brick, which showcases all things Lego, whether a life-size Lego house, news, or advice on how to shine up yellowing bricks (hydrogen peroxide).

“There’s a huge community of people that treat Lego as an art form rather than just a toy,” says Andrew Becraft, a technical writer at Microsoft who created the Brothers Brick blog. His site pulls in 125,000 unique visitors a month, and Lego officials estimate that 915,000 people worldwide attended Lego conventions and other events in the first seven months of 2009. Five to 10 percent of Lego toys are snapped up by adults.

In the past, Mr. Knudstorp says, “we considered the adult fans like vintage cars, a bit bizarre.” But he called on another longtime Lego executive, Tormod Askildsen, to work with adult fans. Now Mr. Askildsen journeys to Lego conventions organized by adult enthusiasts, while working with 44 Lego “ambassadors” from 27 countries, seeking advice about new toys and heading off public anger when older lines, like Lego’s 9-volt train sets, are phased out.

Ultimately, Lego came up with a new, profitable train set, after inviting the 9-volt enthusiasts to two workshops in Billund to brainstorm and help design it. “If you rock the boat, people will notice,” Mr. Askildsen notes. “They were fighting furiously for us not to give it up, but we were able to turn tension into opportunity.”

The same might be said for Lego as a whole, as it navigates the fiercely competitive toy market and ventures into movies and virtual reality while clinging as best it can to the more innocent, Scandinavian values that made it so popular in the first place.

“In the end, you’ve got to go where your consumer is going,” Mr. Barbour says. “And the reality is that themes and movies are what kids want. There’s no point in developing the best product in the world if you can’t put it on the shelf.”

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Mythbusters Rocket Car Pancake

How to Quickly Identify Bad Movies

Was 'Aliens' the Best Science Fiction Sequel Ever?

By Michael Simpson

"There Are Some Places In The Universe You Don't Go Alone."

So said the tag line advertising the main feature at London's Odeon Leicester Square in August 1986. The film on show was Aliens, the eagerly anticipated sequel to the 1979 sci-fi horror movie Alien. Fans of the first film had waited a long time to see what new horrors would be inflicted on Alien's heroine, Ellen Ripley, and her beloved cat. Some feared the cat might be the unfortunate host of writer and director James Cameron's new generation of stomach-bursting beasts. The young Canadian director was keeping the truth close to his chest, though.

Despite the secrecy, moviegoers and critics were optimistic that they would get something good from the man who had thrilled them with The Terminator. As one of them, I went to the Odeon Leicester Square to see Aliens one week after it went on general release in the UK (I'd wanted to go on opening day, but I slept though my alarm and missed the train). Yet, contrary to my expectations, I left the theater feeling slightly disappointed. It was only when I saw the film on VHS for the first time that I began to appreciate its excellence. Since then I have come to believe that Aliens may be the best science fiction action movie and the best sequel ever made.

Thanks to the franchise is spawned, Ridley Scott's Alien is now seen as a critical and commercial success. In the early 1980s, however, sequels to adult-oriented horror movies were not guaranteed. Consequently Alien II (as Aliens was initially and unimaginatively known) took a while to gestate. Part of the blame for that could rest with the producers of Alien. The story goes that Cameron initially met with two of them, Walter Hill and David Giler, to discuss another project that they had in mind. That project didn't interest him, but his ears pricked up when they mentioned a sequel to Alien. Cameron 's accounts of those meetings suggest, however, that they weren't enthusiastic about revisiting Ripley's nemesis.

"I felt like he was digging out an old bone in the backyard, dragging out something no one had been thinking much about," Cameron said in a 1986 issue of Time Magazine.

Thankfully, Cameron was a fan of Ridley Scott's film and was inspired by Hill and Giler to develop a treatment for Alien II. According to EOFFtv, he already had a concept for another project involving "predatory aliens tangling with highly armed space marines" that he had titled "Mother". Hill and Giler were supposedly also thinking of having soldiers in the sequel, so it seems likely that the two ideas fed Cameron's imagination.

Enlisting Cameron to develop Alien II was initially a bit of a gamble. He was relatively unknown in Hollywood when he first met Hill and Giler. He had directed Piranha II: The Spawning, a silly 1981 sequel to Joe Dante's Piranha, but had no major work for a big studio to his name. Between first meeting Hill and Giler and the start of production on Aliens, though, he scored big with The Terminator and his screenplay for Rambo: First Blood Part II (although he has said that the final script for the latter differed significantly from his own). These successes gave him the credibility he needed to take the best elements of Alien and use them as the basis for a story that referenced the original but (in the modern parlance) partially rebooted it.

With the benefit of hindsight, Cameron actually looks like the perfect fit for Aliens. The terrifying creature introduced in Alien was similar in its single minded determination and ferocity to Arnie's Terminator or the relentless war veteran John Rambo. Cameron also wanted to make a different kind of film from the one Ridley Scott had helmed. The scenes of future warfare in The Terminator introduced the conservative directing style and dour military-industrial design sensibilities that Cameron would carry over into Aliens. At that time he also reveled in action. This mixture of qualities meant that Aliens would have a different vibe from the slow pace and artistic imagery that characterized Alien. The result was a stylistic and thematic distance between Alien and Aliens that ensured the sequel was no inferior retread of the original.

Bearing in mind Cameron's different visual style, it was an inspired move on his part to set Aliens 57 years after its predecessor. It implicitly justified the different look of his film and meant he wasn't bound by expectations about the level of technology that humans had reached in Alien. For example, in Scott's film the crew of the Nostromo had to wear space suits when they landed on the moon where the alien was found. This led to one of that film's most memorable scenes (when Kane's mask is removed to reveal the face-hugger). However, it also slowed down the action because the suits were an encumbrance to the wearers. Cameron avoided this problem by populating LV-426 with terraformers. The result of their work was breathable air, which negated the need for suits. The changed climate also allowed for rain, which gave the outdoor scenes in Aliens a claustrophobic and chilling atmosphere that complemented other sources of tension. Meanwhile, the terraformers — men, women and children, alike — gave the aliens the means by which to multiply.

While the success of Aliens owes much to Cameron's directorial vision, the contribution of Sigourney Weaver cannot be underestimated. The script allowed Weaver to expand on the minimal characterization Ripley was afforded in Alien and bring the character through a process of maturation. Whereas Ripley quivered with fear at the end of Alien, she had grown into a strong, courageous, uncompromising heroine by the climax of Aliens. Along the way she was also able to show a caring, compassionate side that made her a fully-rounded personality to which the audience could relate. Weaver's performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in 1987.

One of Cameron's biggest difficulties in the script was finding a convincing reason why Ripley should agree to another face off with a creature that had terrorized her once already. He eventually settled on something suggesting catharsis and conscience; Ripley returned to LV-426 to destroy the aliens and help an investigation into the disappearance of the terraformers. She was also supposed to be under the protection of highly trained space Marines. The Marine's cocksure did not save her from another round of trauma, however. Instead they got the royal ass-whooping that provided the film with much of its action. This element of the plot also echoed Cameron's earlier works in that it was a vague reference to the United States' military adventures in south-east Asia. In an interview on the film's DVD release Cameron admits that Aliens was, in a minor way, meant to be a Vietnam movie in outer space.

To populate Ripley's military support, Cameron called on some past acquaintances. The character of sensible Marine Corporal Hicks was given to Michael Biehn, who had played someone similar (Kyle Reese), in The Terminator (Biehn would work again with Cameron on The Abyss). Cameron also drafted in another Terminator alumnus, Bill Paxton, to play a cocky and foul-mouthed Marine called Hudson. Paxton had played a minor role in The Terminator as one of the bikers accosted by a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger early in the film (and would work again with Cameron on Titanic). Rounding out the better known members of the cast were Lance Henriksen (Piranha II) as the android Bishop and comedian and writer Paul Reiser (Mad About You) as slimy company man Carter Burke. Canadian viewers may also recognize a young Daniel Kash (Due South, The Line) as the ill-fated Private Spunkmeyer.

Aside from Ripley and the Marines, the other principal character in Aliens was the little girl known as Newt. She was played by Carrie Henn and that role was to be Henn's first and only part. She left acting thereafter and went on to earn a degree in liberal studies and child development from California State University.

While Cameron may have got much of what he wanted with Aliens, the studio left its mark before the film's release. The theatrical cut was substantially shortened, resulting in the removal of some important character scenes and a sequence showing how the colonists initially become infected. In terms of the coherence of the plot, Aliens fared better from such editing than did Cameron's next film, The Abyss. Nonetheless, the restoration of missing scenes for the DVD release, amounting to an extra 17 minutes, was a welcome event.

The writers and directors of the sci-fi blockbusters Hollywood puts out today could take several lessons from Aliens. It proved that action films needn't be preposterous and over-the-top; that a successful sequel can be stylistically and thematically different from the original; and that suspense is a better buttress for action scenes than big explosions.

That said, Aliens is not without its faults. It starts slowly (especially the extended version) and the finale is both contrived and too similar to that in Alien. It also suffers from a false climax that is more stirring than the real one. Nonetheless, over 20 years after it was made, it remains one of the best action films to come out of Hollywood. It is a rollercoaster ride, comprising one memorable sequence after another, backed up by James Horner's fabulous score. Furthermore, the build-up to that aforementioned false climax is fantastic. The introduction of the now iconic alien queen was a masterstroke and the scenes in the nest were more macabre than any amount of gore.

Almost 23 years after my trip to the Odeon, I am intrigued to read that Ridley Scott will direct a prequel to Alien. It is a fascinating prospect. To pull it off, though, Scott faces an unusual challenge. His new film must not only match the quality of his own original work, it must also be a prequel that is as good as the sequel. James Cameron raised the bar with Aliens and no subsequent film in the franchise has reached it. I hope Scott succeeds and that the release of his film can be celebrated by viewing the hi-def remastering of Aliens that is overdue. Both would be fitting tributes to one of filmland's finest monster movies and what must surely be the best sequel ever made.

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"For my money, the film is still as intense as ever - it still rocks over 20 years later as non-stop pure adrenaline sci-fi action!"

Hanging 10 with the Beach Boys' Mike Love

By Sean Daly

Back in the late '60s, when the rock 'n' roll template was chiseled in stone, the Beatles and the Beach Boys battled in brilliance. Blue-collar Liverpudlians and SoCal surfers, Lennon-McCartney against Brian Wilson, Pepper's versus Pet Sounds.

Who won? We did.

Four decades later, the Beatles continue to be deified; on Wednesday, they will be celebrated with an assortment of new box sets, video games and more. But despite their genius bloodlines and phenomenal songbook, the Beach Boys now reek of mothball nostalgia. Saturday, they'll play a free postgame show at Tropicana Field — a band with more sad, spare parts than '61-vintage ones.

So it was with a wrinkle of the nose and only middling curiosity that I sat in on a conference call with the controversial Mike Love, the sole founding member still touring under the Beach Boys shingle. (Bruce Johnston will be there, too, but he joined in '65 for California Girls.)

Although Love is not the reason the famously troubled Brian Wilson split the band — and Love's fractiousness certainly didn't cause the sad deaths of Carl and Dennis Wilson — he is nevertheless berated as arrogant and litigious, a loud, proud divider with a history of lawsuits against his musical family. (His most recent legal action against Brian was filed in 2005.) In '88, Love famously scored a dubious double-whammy: He insulted the Beatles and the Stones during the band's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Worse, he co-wrote Kokomo, the video that featured Full House dope John Stamos, now an occasional member of a once-indomitable band.

Love is synonymous with the Beach Boys' fall from relevance. But a funny thing happened on that conference call: I found the 68-year-old Love to be surprisingly interesting — or at least a little weird. Plus let's be honest: Love helped write Surfin' Safari, Fun Fun Fun and Good Vibrations, and his deep R&B voice lent great grooving counterpoint to Wilson's high hang-ten croon.

So I shouted out the first question, unafraid of being impolitic: Hey Mike, in 2011 the Beach Boys will celebrate their 50th anniversary. Any chance you, Brian and Al (Jardine, another founding member who left in 1998) will patch things up and reunite?

"There's a lot of thought going on in that direction," Love answered in a soft, methodical voice, both vaguely creepy and politely engaged. "There have been issues in the past...but for something that auspicious, yes, there's a lot of activity."

"Issues in the past"? Yeah, the Beach Boys had issues like Salem's Lot had vampires. Another reporter then asked who was in the band these days. Love responded: "As you may or may not know, my cousin Brian stopped touring with the Beach Boys in 1964..." Love said "my cousin Brian" as if he were casually wiping schmutz off his lapel.

For all his curious chatter — "I do transcendental meditation I learned from the Maharishi in September of 1967" — there was also just-plain-cool stuff. The Beach Boys "started out with a pure love of making harmonies," he said, inspired by doo-wop, the Everly Brothers, the Four Freshmen. "We wrote songs about surfing and cars and high-school life, and that subject matter was unique. It was the kind of stuff kids of all ages can relate to."

Love spoke of the late Ted Kennedy: "Because of our experience in the Beach Boys, we met quite a few of the family members. I was at Ted Kennedy's house one time. I took a shower there." That led to a story about Love and "cousin Brian" writing the devastatingly beautiful Warmth of the Sun on the evening of Nov. 22, 1963: "One of the most beautiful songs we've ever done. It's about losing someone who doesn't love you back — and that's a bummer."

I managed to sneak in another question, asking about that Beatles-Beach Boys rivalry: "The Beatles are unrivaled globally," he said. "But the Beach Boys have always been heralded as original. Paul McCartney has said that God Only Knows is the perfect song, and that Pet Sounds is required listening for his kids. It was a mutual admiration society more than a competition."

That creaky-jointed nostalgia was suddenly youthful, vital. But then Mike Love tried to instill confidence in the modern Beach Boys, his Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations was the most unique and most popular of our songs — eclipsed only by Kokomo. That's been our best-selling song."

Ugh. God only knows what Brian Wilson would think.

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Beach Boys celebrate the 'Sounds of Summer'

By Scott Meeker

Mike Love remembers looking at the lyrics for the then-newly written song “Kokomo” and being disturbed by them.

Off the Florida Keys

There’s a place called Kokomo

That's where we used to go to get away from it all

“I thought, ‘Oh no. This sounds like some old guy lamenting his youth,” said Love, the lead singer of the Beach Boys. “My thought has always been to try to think about how (a song) is going to communicate what we want it to communicate to the widest possible group of people.”

At his insistence, writer John Phillips changed the line to “That’s where you wanna go.” The song would go on to be one of the band’s biggest hits.

Songs celebrating youth, young love, fast cars and good times are at the root of many of the Beach Boys’ greatest hits which the audience can expect to hear when the band perform Sunday at Downstream Casino.

Love said that the music has come to embody the title of his favorite release by the band, the 2003 greatest-hits package “Sounds of Summer.”

“We actually haven’t had a summer off in about 40 years, but that’s OK,” said Love. “Musicians love performing. And if you don’t, you better get out while the getting is good.”

That’s what Brian Wilson — the band’s founder and chief songwriter — did in 1964, being replaced on tour first by Glenn Campbell and then Bruce Johnston. Johnston still performs with the band today.

But it’s not a dig at his cousin, because Love credits Wilson as being “incredible” when it comes to music arrangement and a “master of harmonies.”

Love said that he can’t help but be amazed sometimes at how so much of Wilson’s music has found an audience with each successive generation.

“Three years ago, my daughter who was 13 years old at the time said that ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ was her class’ favorite song.

“That song, the lyrics appeal to a young generation of kids who are in love. We may look at it nostalgically, but every successive generation has that boy-girl attraction.”

After Brian stepped back from touring and a combination of drugs and mental illness took their toll on his songwriting, the band struggled to find their footing and their place in the music world. Their constant touring helped the band find popularity as a live act, and the nostalgia inspired by their greatest hits helped secure them the title of “America’s band.”

Drummer Dennis Wilson died in 1983, and Carl Wilson succumbed to cancer in 1988. Brian Wilson eventually severed his ties with the band, as did original vocalist and guitarist Al Jardine. Lawsuits among the surviving members are not uncommon.

In reading what has been written about the band over the years, Love is not always portrayed in the most flattering light. There are plenty of allegations of condescension toward the direction Brian’s music was taking and a domineering nature when it came to how the band was run.

But Love said that those accounts aren’t accurate and that he feels he has been unfairly portrayed.

“A lot of that is just hearsay by people who weren’t even there,” Love said. “Some writers get all caught up in that and lose sight of the music.”

Much of the rumored acrimony, he said, came from a tumultuous time during the band’s history, when they fired Murry Wilson — the Wilson brothers’ father — as their manager.

“And then there was a time in the late ‘60s when the Wilson brothers got into drugs, and Al and I got into meditation,” he said. “There was definitely a division there, which led to some people making comments.

“But that’s pretty much in the past, and my personal relationship with Brian is great.”

Still, the surviving members of the band continue to tour separately — Love and Johnston as the Beach Boys, while Wilson and Jardine perform with their respective bands.

But Love said that fans of the band can take heart: with a milestone in the Beach Boys’ history approaching, there is a strong possibility of a reunion of some sort to come about.

“We’re looking at doing a 50th anniversary celebration in 2011, and that would entail seeing what we could get together and do recordingwise,” he said. “And the PBS show ‘American Masters’ is interested in doing a documentary about the band. There are a lot of interesting possibilities likely to manifest in the near term.”

Reunion or no reunion, though, Love said he believes that the Beach Boys’ legacy in the world of American music is already secure.

“I think the band’s legacy is already being realized to a pretty good degree,” he said. “Our music has been part of the soundtrack of America, and I think it will always be a super positive legacy because of the good feelings it has made people enjoy over the years.”

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Beach Boys' Mike Love recharges at The Raj

By SOPHIA AHMAD

With its tight falsetto harmonies and sunny lyrics, the Beach Boys' sound is immediately recognizable to both young fans - who consider it a retro band - and to older fans who grew up on hits such as "California Girls" and "Surfin' USA."

The legendary ensemble that has been entertaining audiences since 1961 will perform Monday in Fairfield - a quick return trip to Iowa after a recent show Aug. 14 at Meskwaki Bingo-Casino-Hotel in Tama. But Monday's outdoor concert on Labor Day at a middle school in Fairfield also will deliver a different "vibration" for singer Mike Love.


"My main place for rest and relaxation and recharging has been the Raj and meditating in the domes," Love said last month during a stopover in Fairfield. The Raj is a Fairfield spa that integrates holistic practices into its treatments.

And Love routinely practices transcendental meditation (T.M.) inside the domes of Maharishi University of Management, founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Love, one of the remaining 1960s members of the Beach Boys, will be named Energy Czar for the day by Fairfield Mayor Ed Malloy. He will also help unveil the city's 40-point Green Sustainability Plan, funded by an $80,000 grant from Iowa's Office of Energy Independence. The plan calls for energy conservation and support of local farms, among other initiatives.

"Energy independence is something that is close to my children and grandchildren and their children's heart," Love said.

Proceeds from Monday's concert also will benefit the David Lynch Foundation, which supports T.M. education, and the Fairfield Arts and Convention Center.

Love is a longtime fan of the eastern Iowa city.

"I've been going to Fairfield for a few decades," he said. "One time I came here for three weeks and did treatments every day, and that was fantastic. I never felt better."

Transcendental meditation is so important to Love that he wrote a song about its founder: "Cool Head, Warm Heart."

"Maharishi said once in a meeting, 'You need a cool head and a warm heart,' so I made a little sound out of it," Love said about his inspiration for the song.

Love, who performs nearly 150 concerts per year, said he has a special connection to Iowa and its "small-town environment." He recalled a recent memory of the "little gem in the heartland" when he landed at a Tuscon airport.

"This woman that drove me from the airport said she heard us at the Dance-land Ballroom in Cedar Rapids ... Now how ironic is that?"

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Al Jardine Emerges From Beach Boys' Shadow

By Winchester

I was a late-to-the-party Beach Boys fan. Sure, I loved all the classics, but when Brian Wilson dropped out, I somehow became more and more interested in that ensuing train wreck, than the group.

When Dennis Wilson released his amazing solo album Pacific Ocean Blue, I became quite enthralled; it quickly became the quintessential solo album. To me, it was right up there with McCartney’s first solo work.

When CBS re-released it late last year, I went on and on about it. It sounded better than ever. CBS even released it with his second solo album, delayed for years after Dennis untimely passing. It too, was fabulous.

When Tom Cuddy called with an invitation to joined him for a show by former Beach Boy Al Jardine at B.B. King, I was there in a flash.

Jardine, to me, never really stood out as a singular artist; he was always there with the Wilson Boys, Brian, Dennis and Carl. Now, seeing him front his own act, Al Jardine’s Endless Summer was one of the best shows I’ve seen this year.

His sons, Matt and Adam now handle the Brian-like vocals and boy, they are impressive. Also joining them was David Marks who was, one of the original Beach Boys, according to Cuddy, even replacing Jardine for a time. Boy, imagine having to live with that!

But tonight he was back and certainly impressive. Richie Cannata, late of the Billy Joel’s band was on horns, percussion and keyboards and was simply dazzling, adding a nice extra-texture to everything. Jardine will release his first solo album, A Postcard From California on Sept. 7, and on it he has guest spots from Brian, Neil Young, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Glen Campbell, Flea and Steve Miller.

The three tracks he did this night were terrific, reminiscent of The Beach Boys in many ways. He serve up their hits, including “I Get Around,” “Sail On Sailor,” and, “God Only Knows.”

Those songs proved one thing for sure: Brian Wilson is an amazing writer! Cuddy said, the irony of Jardine, is that his group sounds more like the Beach Boys than Mike Love’s current touring entourage.

If Jardine comes to your town, definitely check him out.

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Earth as photographed in 1990 by the Voyager 1 from more than 4 billion miles away

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, Random House, 1994

Disney to Acquire Marvel Entertainment

BURBANK, Calif. & NEW YORK, Aug 31, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE)

Acquisition highlights Disney's strategic focus on quality branded content, technological innovation and international expansion to build long-term shareholder value

--An investor conference call will take place at approximately 10:15 a.m. EDT / 7:15 a.m. PDT August 31, 2009. Details for the call are listed in the release.

Building on its strategy of delivering quality branded content to people around the world, The Walt Disney Company has agreed to acquire Marvel Entertainment, Inc. in a stock and cash transaction, the companies announced today.

Under the terms of the agreement and based on the closing price of Disney on August 28, 2009, Marvel shareholders would receive a total of $30 per share in cash plus approximately 0.745 Disney shares for each Marvel share they own. At closing, the amount of cash and stock will be adjusted if necessary so that the total value of the Disney stock issued as merger consideration based on its trading value at that time is not less than 40% of the total merger consideration.

Based on the closing price of Disney stock on Friday, August 28, the transaction value is $50 per Marvel share or approximately $4 billion.

"This transaction combines Marvel's strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor with Disney's creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories," said Robert A. Iger, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company. "Ike Perlmutter and his team have done an impressive job of nurturing these properties and have created significant value. We are pleased to bring this talent and these great assets to Disney."

"We believe that adding Marvel to Disney's unique portfolio of brands provides significant opportunities for long-term growth and value creation," Iger said.

"Disney is the perfect home for Marvel's fantastic library of characters given its proven ability to expand content creation and licensing businesses," said Ike Perlmutter, Marvel's Chief Executive Officer. "This is an unparalleled opportunity for Marvel to build upon its vibrant brand and character properties by accessing Disney's tremendous global organization and infrastructure around the world."

Under the deal, Disney will acquire ownership of Marvel including its more than 5,000 Marvel characters. Mr. Perlmutter will oversee the Marvel properties, and will work directly with Disney's global lines of business to build and further integrate Marvel's properties.

The Boards of Directors of Disney and Marvel have each approved the transaction, which is subject to clearance under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act, certain non-United States merger control regulations, effectiveness of a registration statement with respect to Disney shares issued in the transaction and other customary closing conditions. The agreement will require the approval of Marvel shareholders. Marvel was advised on the transaction by BofA Merrill Lynch.

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