Trade Show Exhibit Display Booths

What is the best material for building a portable trade-show display? It needs to be lightweight, cheap easy to cut and work with. Also I will be either glueing or screwing on aluminum and or plastic for advertising purposes.

I'm looking for a portable, fold-able, projection screen.? I work trade shows and have seen other vendors with these portable screens. Some of the ones I've seen are "accordion" type screens that fold like the old maps you buy at gas stations. Others I've seen are similar to something like a monopoly board, only larger with a fold out on each side. I've searched the internet and checked Staples, Office Depot, Ritz Camera Supply but cannot find them.

Need advice. Portable device to display photo's.? I'm not very savvy when it comes to electronic gadgets, so I need some advice. I need something to display photo's of my products, at trade shows. Must be portable (battery operated) as no plugs are available. Slide-show would be nice. Also, I need to be able to access specific photo's at will. Like if a client wants to see a particular photo without waiting for it to scroll by again. Screen must be bigger than 2 inches. Something you can see from 8 feet away. Do you have any suggestions for me? I'd like to use a laptop, but, I can't justify that kind of expense. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance, Valerie

I'm building a trade show wall for wall mounted aquariums. What is the lightest yet strongest material to use? I need to create a portable wall that will be easy to transport on a pallet every month. Instead of taking the aquariums out of the box at each trade show, I decided to make a show wall with stackable durable boxes. I can keep the aquariums mounted on at all times saving me time to reinstall it each time. I've thought of a few ways to accomplish my goal. I can either make a framed box 65" w x 46" h x 12" d (2 stacked) with some sort of heavy duty 1"x2" stud as the frame then put a light weight PVC sheet over the framed box or just use a light heavy duty plywood as the box. If I framed a box, will 1"x2" frame stud hold the weight of 300 pounds of another framed box (including aquariums and water) on top? Is 12" depth for the top and bottom of the box be enough to support the 300 pound on top? If I use plywood instead, will it be lighter weight than using 1" x 2" + PVC sheet? Please help! www.bayshoreaquarium.com ______ [ top box ] [______ ] ______ [ bottom ] [_box__ ]

Please help me find a decent mini projector for a laptop? We are doing a trade show display and I plan on having a small, 24'' by 32'' portable projection screen up for some info on what we do with photos, slideshow, music, etc. Do I need a projector for this? Is there one that hooks up to my laptop that will do the job? I'm dense when it comes to this. Thanks for any advice....I need to keep price around 300$ or less.

Does anyone have a Full show of Wicked the play? This isn't meant to sound pathetic, sorry, but I was looking to find copies of the production of Wicked, full show but I don't have a show to trade with. I'm a cancer patient, work out of a hospital bed in living room, but I'm not a slug, I design jewelry, crochet with file silver wire and gemstone crystal or pearl beads to make amulet bags, necklaces, bracelets. I would love to trade something I have made for copies of the show. I made Teal and Kassie, in the sf production, sterling silver witches hats, inlay in silver wire for glenda, and teal green for elphaba, and hung a tiny silver broom from hers, and a tiny magic wand from glendas. I sure hope they got them, I sent them in the mail in Feb. haven't heard... but I could make one of those, they can be necklaces, or suspended from a sterling silver safety pin, i love making those.... I hope we can work something out. I could see the sf show again, for wheelchair it's 25.00 and one assistant can come with you for 25. and you sit on the bottom floor, actually great seats. but it takes so much out of me to even walk to the stupid car to get there, then pack extra o2 canisters.... I'm not portable. I thought if I had some copies of various productions, it would be fun. besides my 6 yr old granddaughter fell in love with the song, get this, As Long As You're Mine! truly. I don't think she took a breath thru the whole thing. I also make one ruby slipper, made with 14k gold fill wire or ss wire, and ruby swarovski or clear ab as in the play. I really like it as a pendant. can anyone help? I can give you the link to my jewelry if you email me. the hats aren't there, I forgot to take a pic. when husband mailed them, he just stuck them in the mail, not signed for, or anything!argggggggg thanks pat caudel

2 Playstation 3 questions? This past weekend gamestop was offering a deal where you trade in 6 or more games and you get an extra 40% trade in value. So I traded my Nintendo Wii and 11 games in and bought a PS3. I bought NBA 07, Little Big Planet, and Killzone 2. So here are my questions that I have... 1. I currently am a member of Gamefly. They have a shipping warehouse in Pittsburgh and that where I live so I get my games same day or next day. I use it a lot for the xbox 360 but I am going to use it now for the PS3 as well. I have Resistance 2 and Warhawk coming tomorrow. I have the First Resistance on there as well but what are some good games that I check out. I like all types of games. 2. I would like to post my PSN ID in my myspace just like I can do with my xbox 360 gamercard. I've seen people post there's and it shows there trophies and such. I can't seem to find that. I checked Playstation.com and they have my portable id but it just has my name and picture (no trophies). So can someone give me a link to where I could this? By the way if anyone wants to add me my PSN ID is ZNucks23 Thanks You

Which SHORTWAVE RADIO should I buy that is best for listening to worldwide music? I can spend up to $300 for a good SW radio, Not interested in smaller, ultra portable or mini types. Want to primarily listen to foreign MUSIC from all around the globe---followed by talk shows, other programming and news---from where I live in Los Angeles. I want largest possible speaker for best possible QUALITY OF musical SOUND. I'm leaning towards Grundig as I want superior design and crafsmanship, ruggedgness, dependability and quality. This seems to mean one of the following Grundig Models: the S350DL, E5/G5---and the G4 due out in March. I want my radio to really reach WAY out there, lock on and stay locked on, and with as little noise and interference as possible. I'm willing to trade digital PLL capability of the E5/G5 and the G4 for the big speaker quality sound of the (analog) S350DL---as their comparative filters and RF gain controls plus added external antennas should render them somewhat equal. Also want to be able to use quality headphones or external speakers

Is anti-Americanism a new phenomenon. Or did the WOT just bring out the haters that were always there? I have read much on the issue and I am convinced that the people who hate America today also hated America 20 years ago. Obviously younger generations will learn their hatred of America from their parents, teachers and the spiteful media. - I posted an interesting article on the subject below. The Falseness of Anti-Americanism Pollsters report rising anti-Americanism worldwide. The United States, they imply, squandered global sympathy after the September 11 terrorist attacks through its arrogant unilateralism. In truth, there was never any sympathy to squander. Anti-Americanism was already entrenched in the world's psyche—a backlash against a nation that comes bearing modernism to those who want it but who also fear and despise it. By Fouad Ajami Want to Know More? Suggested Readings “America is everywhere," Italian novelist Ignazio Silone once observed. It is in Karachi and Paris, in Jakarta and Brussels. An idea of it, a fantasy of it, hovers over distant lands. And everywhere there is also an obligatory anti-Americanism, a cover and an apology for the spell the United States casts over distant peoples and places. In the burning grounds of the Muslim world and on its periphery, U.S. embassies and their fate in recent years bear witness to a duality of the United States as Satan and redeemer. The embassies targeted by the masters of terror and by the diehards are besieged by visa-seekers dreaming of the golden, seductive country. If only the crowd in Tehran offering its tired rhythmic chant "marg bar amrika" ("death to America") really meant it! It is of visas and green cards and houses with lawns and of the glamorous world of Los Angeles, far away from the mullahs and their cultural tyranny, that the crowd really dreams. The frenzy with which radical Islamists battle against deportation orders from U.S. soil— dreading the prospect of returning to Amman and Beirut and Cairo— reveals the lie of anti-Americanism that blows through Muslim lands. The world rails against the United States, yet embraces its protection, its gossip, and its hipness. Tune into a talk show on the stridently anti-American satellite channel Al-Jazeera, and you'll behold a parody of American ways and techniques unfolding on the television screen. That reporter in the flak jacket, irreverent and cool against the Kabul or Baghdad background, borrows a form perfected in the country whose sins and follies that reporter has come to chronicle. In Doha, Qatar, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, arguably Sunni Islam's most influential cleric, at Omar ibn al-Khattab Mosque, a short distance away from the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, delivers a khutba, a Friday sermon. The date is June 13, 2003. The cleric's big theme of the day is the arrogance of the United States and the cruelty of the war it unleashed on Iraq. This cleric, Egyptian born, political to his fingertips, and in full mastery of his craft and of the sensibility of his followers, is particularly agitated in his sermon. Surgery and a period of recovery have kept him away from his pulpit for three months, during which time there has been a big war in the Arab world that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq with stunning speed and effectiveness. The United States was "acting like a god on earth," al-Qaradawi told the faithful. In Iraq, the United States had appointed itself judge and jury. The invading power may have used the language of liberation and enlightenment, but this invasion of Iraq was a 21st-century version of what had befallen Baghdad in the middle years of the 13th century, in 1258 to be exact, when Baghdad, the city of learning and culture, was sacked by the Mongols. The preacher had his themes, but a great deal of the United States had gone into the preacher's art: Consider his Web site, Qaradawi.net, where the faithful can click and read his fatwas (religious edicts)— the Arabic interwoven with html text— about all matters of modern life, from living in non-Islamic lands to the permissibility of buying houses on mortgage to the follies of Arab rulers who have surrendered to U.S. power. Or what about his way with television? He is a star of the medium, and Al-Jazeera carried an immensely popular program of his. That art form owes a debt, no doubt, to the American "televangelists," as nothing in the sheik's traditional education at Al Azhar University in Cairo prepared him for this wired, portable religion. And then there are the preacher's children: One of his daughters had made her way to the University of Texas where she received a master's degree in biology, a son had earned a Ph.D. from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, and yet another son had embarked on that quintessential American degree, an MBA at the American University in Cairo. Al-Qaradawi embodies anti-Americanism as the flip side of Americanization. A NEW ORTHODOXY Of late, pollsters have come bearing news and numbers of anti-Americanism the world over. The reports are one dimensional and filled with panic. This past June, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press published a survey of public opinion in 20 countries and the Palestinian territories that indicated a growing animus toward the United States. In the same month, the BBC came forth with a similar survey that included 10 countries and the United States. On the surface of it, anti-Americanism is a river overflowing its banks. In Indonesia, the United States is deemed more dangerous than al Qaeda. In Jordan, Russia, South Korea, and Brazil, the United States is thought to be more dangerous than Iran, the "rogue state" of the mullahs. There is no need to go so far away from home only to count the cats in Zanzibar. These responses to the United States are neither surprising nor profound. The pollsters, and those who have been brandishing their findings, see in these results some verdict on the United States itself— and on the performance abroad of the Bush presidency— but the findings could be read as a crude, admittedly limited, measure of the foul temper in some unsettled places. The pollsters have flaunted spreadsheets to legitimize a popular legend: It is not Americans that people abroad hate, but the United States! Yet it was Americans who fell to terrorism on September 11, 2001, and it is of Americans and their deeds, and the kind of social and political order they maintain, that sordid tales are told in Karachi and Athens and Cairo and Paris. You can't profess kindness toward Americans while attributing the darkest of motives to their homeland. The Pew pollsters ignored Greece, where hatred of the United States is now a defining feature of political life. The United States offended Greece by rescuing Bosnians and Kosovars. Then, the same Greeks who hailed the Serbian conquest of Srebrenica in 1995 and the mass slaughter of the Muslims there were quick to summon up outrage over the U.S. military campaign in Iraq. In one Greek public opinion survey, Americans were ranked among Albanians, Gypsies, and Turks as the most despised peoples. Takis Michas, a courageous Greek writer with an eye for his country's temperament, traces this new anti-Americanism to the Orthodox Church itself. A narrative of virtuous and embattled solitude and alienation from Western Christendom has always been integral to the Greek psyche; a fusion of church and nation is natural to the Greek worldview. In the 1990s, the Yugoslav wars gave this sentiment a free run. The church sanctioned and fed the belief that the United States was Satan, bent on destroying the "True Faith," Michas explains, and shoring up Turkey and the Muslims in the Balkans. A neo-Orthodox ideology took hold, slicing through faith and simplifying history. Where the Balkan churches— be they the Bulgars or the Serbs— had been formed in rebellion against the hegemony of the Greek priesthood, the new history made a fetish of the fidelity of Greece to its Orthodox "brethren." Greek paramilitary units fought alongside Bosnian Serbs as part of the Drina Corps under the command of indicted war criminal Gen. Ratko Mladic. The Greek flag was hoisted over the ruins of Srebenica's Orthodox church when the doomed city fell. Serbian war crimes elicited no sense of outrage in Greece; quite to the contrary, sympathy for Serbia and the identification with its war aims and methods were limitless. Beyond the Yugoslav wars, the neo-Orthodox worldview sanctified the ethnonationalism of Greece, spinning a narrative of Hellenic persecution at the hands of the United States as the standard-bearer of the West. Greece is part of NATO and of the European Union (EU), but an old schism— that of Eastern Orthodoxy's claim against the Latin world— has greater power and a deeper resonance. In the banal narrative of Greek anti-Americanism, this animosity emerges from U.S. support for the junta that reigned over the country from 1967 to 1974. This deeper fury enables the aggrieved to glide over the role the United States played in the defense and rehabilitation of Greece after World War II. Furthermore, it enables them to overlook the lifeline that migration offered to untold numbers of Greeks who are among the United States' most prosperous communities. Greece loves the idea of its "Westernness"— a place and a culture where the West ends, and some other alien world (Islam) begins. But the political culture of religious nationalism has isolated Greece from the wider currents of Western liberalism. What little modern veneer is used to dress up Greece's anti-Americanism is a pretense. The malady here is, paradoxically, a Greek variant of what plays out in the world of Islam: a belligerent political culture sharpening faith as a political weapon, an abdication of political responsibility for one's own world, and a search for foreign "devils." Lest they be trumped by their hated Greek rivals, the Turks now give voice to the same anti-Americanism. It is a peculiar sentiment among the Turks, given their pragmatism. They are not prone to the cluster of grievances that empower anti-Americanism in France or among the intelligentsia of the developing world. In the 1920s, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk gave Turkey a dream of modernity and self-help by pointing his country westward, distancing it from the Arab-Muslim lands to its south and east. But the secular, modernist dream in Turkey has fractured, and oddly, anti-Americanism blows through the cracks from the Arab lands and from Brussels and Berlin. The fury of the Turkish protests against the United States in the months prior to the war in Iraq exhibited a pathology all its own. It was, at times, nature imitating art: The protesters in the streets burned American flags in the apparent hope that Europeans (real Europeans, that is) would finally take Turkey and the Turks into the fold. The U.S. presence had been benign in Turkish lands, and Americans had been Turkey's staunchest advocates for coveted membership in the EU. But suddenly this relationship that served Turkey so well was no longer good enough. As the "soft" Islamists (there is no such thing, we ought to understand by now) revolted against Pax Americana, the secularists averted their gaze and let stand this new anti-Americanism. The pollsters calling on the Turks found a people in distress, their economy on the ropes, and their polity in an unfamiliar world beyond the simple certainties of Kemalism, yet without new political tools and compass. No dosage of anti-Americanism, the Turks will soon realize, will take Turkey past the gatekeepers of Europe. WE WERE ALL AMERICANS The introduction of the Pew report sets the tone for the entire study. The war in Iraq, it argues,"has widened the rift between Americans and Western Europeans" and "further inflamed the Muslim world." The implications are clear: The United States was better off before Bush's "unilateralism." The United States, in its hubris, summoned up this anti-Americanism. Those are the political usages of this new survey. But these sentiments have long prevailed in Jordan, Egypt, and France. During the 1990s, no one said good things about the United States in Egypt. It was then that the Islamist children of Egypt took to the road, to Hamburg and Kandahar, to hatch a horrific conspiracy against the United States. And it was in the 1990s, during the fabled stock market run, when the prophets of globalization preached the triumph of the U.S. economic model over the protected versions of the market in places such as France, when anti-Americanism became the uncontested ideology of French public life. Americans were barbarous, a threat to French cuisine and their beloved language. U.S. pension funds were acquiring their assets and Wall Street speculators were raiding their savings. The United States incarcerated far too many people and executed too many criminals. All these views thrived during a decade when Americans are now told they were loved and uncontested on foreign shores. Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for the United States immediately after the September 11 attacks, as embodied by the famous editorial of Le Monde's publisher Jean-Marie Colombani, "Nous Sommes Tous Américains" ("We are all Americans"). And much has been made of the speed with which the United States presumably squandered that sympathy in the months that followed. But even Colombani's column, written on so searing a day, was not the unalloyed message of sympathy suggested by the title. Even on that very day, Colombani wrote of the United States reaping the whirlwind of its "cynicism"; he recycled the hackneyed charge that Osama bin Laden had been created and nurtured by U.S. intelligence agencies. Colombani quickly retracted what little sympathy he had expressed when, in December of 2001, he was back with an open letter to "our American friends" and soon thereafter with a short book, Tous Américains? le monde après le 11 septembre 2001 (All Americans? The World After September 11, 2001). By now the sympathy had drained, and the tone was one of belligerent judgment and disapproval. There was nothing to admire in Colombani's United States, which had run roughshod in the world and had been indifferent to the rule of law. Colombani described the U.S. republic as a fundamentalist Christian enterprise, its magistrates too deeply attached to the death penalty, its police cruel to its black population. A republic of this sort could not in good conscience undertake a campaign against Islamism. One can't, Colombani writes, battle the Taliban while trying to introduce prayers in one's own schools; one can't strive to reform Saudi Arabia while refusing to teach Darwinism in the schools of the Bible Belt; and one can't denounce the demands of the sharia (Islamic law) while refusing to outlaw the death penalty. Doubtless, he adds, the United States can't do battle with the Taliban before doing battle against the bigotry that ravages the depths of the United States itself. The United States had not squandered Colombani's sympathy; he never had that sympathy in the first place. Colombani was hardly alone in the French intellectual class in his enmity toward the United States. On November 3, 2001, in Le Monde, the writer and pundit Jean Baudrillard permitted himself a thought of stunning cynicism. He saw the perpetrators of September 11 acting out his own dreams and the dreams of others like him. He gave those attacks a sort of universal warrant: "How we have dreamt of this event," he wrote, "how all the world without exception dreamt of this event, for no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of a power that has become hegemonic . . . . It is they who acted, but we who wanted the deed." Casting caution and false sympathy aside, Baudrillard saw the terrible attacks on the United States as an "object of desire." The terrorists had been able to draw on a "deep complicity," knowing perfectly well that they were acting out the hidden yearnings of others oppressed by the United States' order and power. To him, morality of the U.S. variety is a sham, and the terrorism directed against it is a legitimate response to the inequities of "globalization." In his country's intellectual landscape, Baudrillard was no loner. A struggle had raged throughout the 1990s, pitting U.S.-led globalization (with its low government expenditures, a "cheap" and merciless Wall Street-Treasury Department axis keen on greater discipline in the market, and relatively long working hours on the part of labor) against France's protectionist political economy. The primacy the United States assigned to liberty waged a pitched battle against the French commitment to equity. To maintain France's sympathy, and that of Le Monde, the United States would have had to turn the other cheek to the murderers of al Qaeda, spare the Taliban, and engage the Muslim world in some high civilizational dialogue. But who needs high approval ratings in Marseille? Envy of U.S. power, and of the United States' universalism, is the ruling passion of French intellectual life. It is not "mostly Bush" that turned France against the United States. The former Socialist foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, was given to the same anti-Americanism that moves his successor, the bombastic and vain Dominique de Villepin. It was Védrine, it should be recalled, who in the late 1990s had dubbed the United States a "hyperpower." He had done so before the war on terrorism, before the war on Iraq. He had done it against the background of an international order more concerned with economics and markets than with military power. In contrast to his successor, Védrine at least had the honesty to acknowledge that there was nothing unusual about the way the United States wielded its power abroad, or about France's response to that primacy. France, too, he observed, might have been equally overbearing if it possessed the United States' weight and assets. His successor gave France's resentment highly moral claims. Villepin appeared evasive, at one point, on whether he wished to see a U.S. or an Iraqi victory in the standoff between Saddam Hussein's regime and the United States. Anti-Americanism indulges France's fantasy of past greatness and splendor and gives France's unwanted Muslim children a claim on the political life of a country that knows not what to do with them. THE BURDEN OF MODERNITY To come bearing modernism to those who want it but who rail against it at the same time, to represent and embody so much of what the world yearns for and fears— that is the American burden. The United States lends itself to contradictory interpretations. To the Europeans, and to the French in particular, who are enamored of their laïcisme (secularism), the United States is unduly religious, almost embarrassingly so, its culture suffused with sacred symbolism. In the Islamic world, the burden is precisely the opposite: There, the United States scandalizes the devout, its message represents nothing short of an affront to the pious and a temptation to the gullible and the impressionable young. According to the June BBC survey, 78 percent of French polled identified the United States as a "religious" country, while only 10 percent of Jordanians endowed it with that label. Religious to the secularists, faithless to the devout— such is the way the United States is seen in foreign lands. So many populations have the United States under their skin. Their rage is oddly derived from that very same attraction. Consider the Saudi realm, a place where anti-Americanism is fierce. The United States helped invent the modern Saudi world. The Arabian American Oil Company— for all practical purposes a state within a state— pulled the desert enclave out of its insularity, gave it skills, and ushered it into the 20th century. Deep inside the anti-Americanism of today's Saudi Arabia, an observer can easily discern the dependence of the Saudi elite on their U.S. connection. It is in the image of the United States' suburbs and urban sprawl that Saudi cities are designed. It is on the campuses of Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford that the ruling elite are formed and educated. After September 11, 2001, the Saudi elite panicked that their ties to the United States might be shattered and that their world would be consigned to what they have at home. Fragments of the United States have been eagerly embraced by an influential segment of Saudi society. For many, the United States was what they encountered when they were free from home and family and age-old prohibitions. Today, an outing in Riyadh is less a journey to the desert than to the mall and to Starbucks. An academic in Riyadh, in the midst of an anti-American tirade about all policies American, was keen to let me know that his young son, born in the United States, had suddenly declared he no longer wanted to patronize McDonald's because of the United States' support of Israel. The message was plaintive and unpersuasive; the resolve behind that "boycott" was sure to crack. A culture that casts so long a shadow is fated to be emulated and resented at the same time. The United States is destined to be in the politics— and imagination— of strangers even when the country (accurately) believes it is not implicated in the affairs of other lands. In a hauntingly astute set of remarks made to the New Yorker in the days that followed the terrorism of September 11, the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem— a free spirit at odds with the intellectual class in his country and a maverick who journeyed to Israel and wrote of his time there and of his acceptance of that country— went to the heart of the anti-American phenomenon. He was thinking of his own country's reaction to the United States, no doubt, but what he says clearly goes beyond Egypt: People say that Americans are arrogant, but it's not true. Americans enjoy life and they are proud of their lives, and they are boastful of their wonderful inventions that have made life so much easier and more convenient. It's very difficult to understand the machinery of hatred, because you wind up resorting to logic, but trying to understand this with logic is like measuring distance in kilograms….These are people who are envious. To them, life is an unbearable burden. Modernism is the only way out. But modernism is frightening. It means we have to compete. It means we can't explain everything away with conspiracy theories. Bernard Shaw said it best, you know. In the preface to 'St. Joan,' he said Joan of Arc was burned not for any reason except that she was talented. Talent gives rise to jealousy in the hearts of the untalented. This kind of envy cannot be attenuated. Jordanians, for instance, cannot be talked out of their anti-Americanism. In the BBC survey, 71 percent of Jordanians thought the United States was more dangerous to the world than al Qaeda. But Jordan has been the rare political and economic recipient of a U.S. free trade agreement, a privilege the United States shares only with a handful of nations. A new monarch, King Abdullah II, came to power, and the free trade agreement was an investment that Pax Americana made in his reign and in the moderation of his regime. But this bargain with the Hashemite dynasty has not swayed the intellectual class, nor has it made headway among the Jordanian masses. On Iraq and on matters Palestinian, for more than a generation now, Jordanians have not had a kind thing to say about the United States. In the scheme of Jordan's neighborhood, the realm is benign and forgiving, but the political life is restrictive and tight. When talking about the United States, Jordanians have often been talking to their rulers, expressing their dissatisfaction with the quality of the country's public life and economic performance. A pollster venturing to Jordan must understand the country's temper, hemmed in by poverty and overshadowed by more resourceful powers all around it: Iraq to the east, Israel to the west, and Syria and Saudi Arabia over the horizon. A sense of disinheritance has always hung over Jordan. The trinity of God, country, and king puts much of the political life of the land beyond scrutiny and discussion. The anti-Americanism emanates from, and merges with, this political condition. With modernism come the Jews. They have been its bearers and beneficiaries, and they have paid dearly for it. They have been taxed with cosmopolitanism: The historian Isaac Deutscher had it right when he said that other people have roots, but the Jews have legs. Today the Jews have a singular role in U.S. public life and culture, and anti-Americanism is tethered to anti-Semitism. In the Islamic world, and in some European circles as well, U.S. power is seen as the handmaiden of Jewish influence. Witness, for instance, the London-based Arab media's obsession with the presumed ascendancy of the neoconservatives— such as former chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz— in the making of U.S. foreign policy. The neocons had been there for the rescue of the (Muslim) Bosnians and Kosovars, but the reactionaries in Muslim lands had not taken notice of that. Left to itself, the United States would be fair-minded, this Arab commentary maintains, and it would arrive at a balanced approach to the Arab-Islamic world. This narrative is nothing less than a modernized version of the worldview of that infamous forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. But it is put forth by men and women who insist on their oneness with the modern world. A century ago, in a short-story called "Youth," the great British author Joseph Conrad captured in his incomparable way the disturbance that is heard when a modern world pushes against older cultures and disturbs their peace. In the telling, Marlowe, Conrad's literary double and voice, speaks of the frenzy of coming upon and disturbing the East. "And then, before I could open my lips, the East spoke to me, but it was in a Western voice. A torrent of words was poured into the enigmatical, the fateful silence; outlandish, angry words mixed with words and even whole sentences of good English, less strange but even more surprising. The voice swore and cursed violently; it riddled the solemn peace of the bay by a volley of abuse. It began by calling me Pig . . . ." Today, the United States carries the disturbance of the modern to older places— to the east and to the intermediate zones in Europe. There is energy in the United States, and there is force. And there is resistance and resentment— and emulation— in older places affixed on the delicate balancing act of a younger United States not yet content to make its peace with traditional pains and limitations and tyrannies. That sensitive French interpreter of his country, Dominique Moïsi, recently told of a simple countryman of his who was wistful when Saddam Hussein's statue fell on April 9 in Baghdad's Firdos Square. France opposed this war, but this Frenchman expressed a sense of diminishment that his country had sat out this stirring story of political liberation. A society like France with a revolutionary history should have had a hand in toppling the tyranny in Baghdad, but it didn't. Instead, a cable attached to a U.S. tank had pulled down the statue, to the delirium of the crowd. The new history being made was a distinctly American (and British) creation. It was soldiers from Burlington, Vermont, and Linden, New Jersey, and Bon Aqua, Tennessee— I single out those towns because they are the hometowns of three soldiers who were killed in the Iraq war— who raced through the desert making this new history and paying for it. The United States need not worry about hearts and minds in foreign lands. If Germans wish to use anti-Americanism to absolve themselves and their parents of the great crimes of World War II, they will do it regardless of what the United States says and does. If Muslims truly believe that their long winter of decline is the fault of the United States, no campaign of public diplomacy shall deliver them from that incoherence. In the age of Pax Americana, it is written, fated, or maktoob (as the Arabs would say) that the plotters and preachers shall rail against the United States— in whole sentences of good American slang. Fouad Ajami is the Majid Khadduri professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report. http://www.travelbrochuregraphics.com/extra/the_falseness_of_antiamericanism.htm

did you know about Sen. John Kerry? With his win in Iowa, Sen. John Kerry could be on his way to the White House. But most Americans are unaware of the real Kerry. Here are facts and quotations that reveal the character of the new Democrat leader. Denouncing America with ‘Hanoi Jane’: Although Wesley Clark and others have attacked former front-runner Howard Dean as a draft-dodging ski bum, Kerry is far more complex than the simple war hero he portrays himself as. He became a celebrated organizer for one of America's most extreme appeasement groups, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He consorted with the likes of “Hanoi” Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson’s radical former attorney general. He attended a seminar bankrolled by Fonda in Detroit in February 1971. Watching 125 self-proclaimed Vietnam veterans testify at a Howard Johnson’s about atrocities allegedly committed by U.S. forces, the man who would be president later said he found the accounts shocking and irrefutable. Dubbed “The Winter Soldier Investigation,” the protest attracted minimal media attention, according to the Los Angeles Times, because Fonda insisted it be held in the remote Michigan city rather than the less “authentic” Washington, D.C. Still, the event gave Kerry an idea for a protest that was sure to be a media smash, and he immediately set out to organize one of the most confrontational protests of the war. Operation Dewey Canyon III began on April 18, 1971, when nearly 1,000 Vietnam veterans and people claiming to be veterans gathered on Washington’s Mall for what they called “a limited incursion into the country of Congress.” The group staged mock firefights on the steps of the Capitol and Supreme Court and defied U.S. Park Police after the Department of Justice issued an injunction barring it from camping on the Mall. Those evil American soldiers: Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971, Kerry claimed that U.S. soldiers had “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.” ‘We are not the best’: In his testimony, Kerry claimed there was no communist threat and said: “In 1970 at West Point Vice President Agnew said ‘some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse,’ and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam. But for us, as boys in Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion, and hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country ….” U.S. Veteran Dispatch noted in 1996: “Kerry's testimony, it should be noted, occurred while some of his fellow Vietnam veterans were known by the world to be enduring terrible suffering as prisoners of war in North Vietnamese prisons. Kerry was a supporter of the ‘People's Peace Treaty,’" a supposed ‘people's’ declaration to end the war, reportedly drawn up in communist East Germany. It included nine points, all of which were taken from Viet Cong peace proposals at the Paris peace talks as conditions for ending the war.” Throw as I say, not as I do: On that same day he led members of VVAW in a protest during which they threw their medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the U.S. Capitol. Kerry later admitted the medals he threw were not his. To this day they hang on the wall of his office. Communist stooge: The communist Daily World delightedly published photos of him speaking to demonstrators and boasted that the marchers displayed a banner depicting a portrait of Communist Party leader Angela Davis, on record stating, “I am dedicated to the overthrow of your system of government and your society,” the New American recalled in May 2003. “By frequently participating in VVAW’s demonstrations, Kerry found himself marching alongside what the Boston Herald Traveler identified as ‘revolutionary Communists.’ While noting that known Reds had openly organized these events, the December 12, 1971 Herald Traveler reported the presence of an ‘abundance of Vietcong flags, clenched fists raised in the air, and placards plainly bearing legends in support of China, Cuba, the USSR, North Korea and the Hanoi government.’" Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry says: “As a national leader of VVAW, Kerry campaigned against the effort of the United States to contain the spread of Communism. He used the blood of servicemen still in the field for his own political advancement by claiming that their blood was being shed unnecessarily or in vain. “Under Kerry's leadership, VVAW members mocked the uniform of United States soldiers by wearing tattered fatigues marked with pro-communist graffiti. They dishonored America by marching in demonstrations under the flag of the Viet Cong enemy.” Sen. John McCain revealed that his North Vietnamese captors had used reports of Kerry-led protests to taunt him and his fellow prisoners. Retired General George S. Patton III angrily noted that Kerry’s actions had “given aid and comfort to the enemy.” In recent years when Kerry has exploited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial for photo opportunities on Veterans Day, some veterans, still outraged by his betrayal, have turned their backs on him. The book he doesn’t want you to see: When Kerry ran for election to the U.S. House of Representative in 1972, “he found it necessary to suppress reproduction of the cover picture appearing on his own book, The New Soldier. His political opponent pointed out that it depicted several unkempt youths crudely handling an American flag to mock the famous photo of the U.S. Marines at Iwo Jima,” according to Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry. “Suddenly, copies of the book became unavailable and even disappeared from libraries. But the Lowell (Mass.) Sun said of the type of person shown on its cover: ‘These people spit on the flag, they burn the flag, they carry the flag upside down, [and] they all but wipe their noses with it in their efforts to show their contempt for everything it still stands for,’” the New American reported. Even today it is hard to find this infamous photo and book. Friendly with the enemy: Kerry’s fondness for Vietnam’s communist dictatorship, one of the most oppressive in the world, continues. As chairman of the Select Senate Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, created in 1991 to investigate reports that U.S. prisoners of war and soldiers designated missing in action were still alive in Vietnam, Kerry badgered the panel into voting that no American servicemen remained in Vietnam. “[N]o one in the United States Senate pushed harder to bury the POW/MIA issue, the last obstacle preventing normalization of relations with Hanoi, than John Forbes Kerry,” noted U.S. Veteran Dispatch. “But Kerry's participation in the Committee became controversial in December 1992,” reported the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, “when Hanoi announced that it had awarded Colliers International, a Boston-based real estate company, an exclusive deal to develop its commercial real estate potentially worth billions. Stuart Forbes, the CEO of Colliers, is Kerry's cousin.” The “odd coincidence,” according to FrontPageMagazine.com, involved a deal worth $905 million. Jeff Jacoby, the token conservative columnist at the Boston Globe, notes that Kerry continues his apologia for Vietnam's never-ending atrocities. "Far from taking the lead on the Vietnam Human Rights Bill, he has prevented it from coming to a vote. He claims that making an issue of Hanoi's repression would be counterproductive." Kerry is also a fan of China’s communist dictatorship. “On May 19, 1994, five years after Tiananmen Square, Kerry spoke on the Senate floor against linking China's Most Favored Nation trade status to its human rights record,” Slate reported. Kerry said: “China is the strongest military power in Asia. We need China's cooperation. We cannot afford to adopt a cold-war kind of policy that merely excludes and pushes China away.” Limiting China's MFN status “would make us a bit player in a production of enormous proportions. We possess no stick, including MFN, which can force China to embrace internationally recognized human rights and freedoms.” More extreme than Hillary and Kucinich: Among the White House wannabes, long-shot Rep. Dennis Kucinich has the reputation of holding the most left-wing congressional voting record. In fact, this “honor” goes to Kerry. According to American Conservative Union, Kerry has a lifetime rating of 6 percent, compared to 13 for the demolished Rep. Dick Gephardt, 14 for Sen. John Edwards, 15 for Kucinich and 19 for Sen. Joe Lieberman. Sens. Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle score 13 percent. Only the likes of Sens. Teddy Kennedy and Barbara Boxer have more left-wing records than Kerry. In contrast, Sen. John Breaux, one of the upper chamber’s few remaining moderate Democrats, has a 46. Drive as I say, not as I do: Like Al Gore and other self-described environmentalists, Kerry has a radical agenda that would devastate the U.S. economy in favor of the likes of communist China, yet he enjoys the gas-guzzling modern conveniences that greens denounce. Kerry, a delegate to the environment-destroying Earth Summit in 1992 (where he met his future wife, left-wing activist Teresa Heinz, the multimillionaire widow of GOP Sen. John Heinz), the Kyoto climate talks in 1997 and the Hague Conference of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2000, has attacked President Bush for withdrawing from the anti-U.S. Kyoto Protocol. This treaty, which then-President Bill Clinton had signed, would impose severe restrictions on the United States but not Third World polluters that already enjoy huge trade surpluses with the U.S. However, although Kerry spouts the party line on anti-U.S. ecopolicy, he doesn’t like to practice what he preaches. Kerry was humiliated in April 2002 when photographed attending a rally against energy independence and then heading back to his SUV, the symbol of all that is evil to self-described greens. Bone to pick: Bush-hating conspiracy theorists find it alarming that the president, like his father, was a member of the secretive Skull and Bones society at Yale University. Another alum of this club: John Kerry. Get out your wallets: One reason Kerry and Edwards did well in Iowa: Losers Dean and Gephardt admitted they'd repeal all of the president's tax relief. However, although Kerry has taken credit for middle-class tax cuts, child tax credit and relief of the marriage penalty, he voted against them, GOP.com disclosed. "Kerry will have to expend an awful lot of time and money to convince people that he's not the classic Massachusetts liberal," Larry Sabato, a respected political analyst at the University of Virginia, told the Associated Press in December 2002. "And that's going to be tough, because mainly he is." Waffling on Iraq: Kerry has the tough job of wooing Howard Dean’s anti-war Democrats despite his support of the war in Iraq. His favorite tactic, claiming the president outfoxed him, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. On “Meet the Press” in late August, Tim Russert played a tape of Kerry addressing the Senate in October 2002 with a hard-line speech declaring Iraq “capable of quickly producing weaponizing” of biological weapons that could be delivered against “the United States itself.” Kerry insisted: “That is exactly the point I’m making. We were given this information by our intelligence community.” However, as columnist Robert Novak noted, “as a senator, Kerry had access to the National Intelligence Estimate that was skeptical of Iraqi capability. Being tricky may no longer be as effective politically as it once was.” No doubt Dean, Lieberman, Clark and other rivals will now use these and other details to do to Kerry what the Democrats did to Dean.

If your a 90's kid how much do you remember? Anybody under the age of 13 should not read this, and if you do, you should not repost this. Just because you were born in '98 doesn't mean you're a 90's kid. It's not like you could remember the original Simpsons. I am sorry but three conscious years of the 90's just wont cut it. You're a 90's kid if: You can finish this [ice ice _ _ _ _ ] You remember watching Doug, Ren & Stimpy, Pinky and the Brain, and Two Stupid Dogs. AAAAAAAH Real Monsters! You've ever ended a sentence with the word "PSYCHE!" You just cant resist finishing this . . . "Iiiiiiin west philidelphia born and raised . . ." You remember TGIF, Step by Step, Family Matters, Dinosaurs, and Boy Meets World. You remember when Tupac and Selena died. You remember when it was actually worth getting up early on a Saturday to watch cartoons. You got super excited when it was Oregon Trail and Reader Rabbit day in computer class at school. You remember reading "Goosebumps" You took plastic cartoon lunch boxes to school. You remember the craze and then the banning of slap bracelets and slam books. You still get the urge to say "NOT" after (almost) every sentence . . . not when everyhting was settled by rock paper scissors..or bubble gum bubble gum in a dish...and even better daddy had a donkey inky binky bonky. when cops and robbers was a daily activity. when we played Hide and go seek until our legs grew numb. when we used to obey our parents You used to listen to the radio all day long just to record your FAVORITE song of ALL time. "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?" was both a game and a TV game show. Captain Planet. He's a Hero. You knew that Kimberly, the pink ranger, and Tommy, the green ranger, were meant to be together. You remember when Super Nintendos and Sega Genisis became popular. You always wanted to send in a tape to America's Funniest Home Videos . . . but never taped anything funny. You remember watching Home Alone 1, 2 , and 3 . . . and tried to pull the pranks on "intruders" You remember watching The Magic School Bus, Wishbone, and Reading Rainbow on PBS. You remember when Yomega Yo-Yos were cool. You remember those Where's Waldo books. You remember when Mortal Kombat Was "Da Bomb!" You remember eating Warheads. You remember watching the 1st Batman, Aladin, Ninja Turtles, and 3 Ninjas movies. You remember Ring Pops. You remember drinking Fruitopia, Surge, and Tang. If you remember when every thing was "da BOMB!" When they made the new lunchables so that you could make pizza AND tacos. You remember boom boxes vs. cd players. Writing M.A.S.H. notes. Making those little paper fortune cookie things, and then predicting your life with them. You knew all the characters names and their life stories on "Saved By The Bell". You played and/or collected "Pogs" You had at least one Tamagotchi, GigaPet, or Nano and brought it everywhere. . . . Furbies. You haven't always had a computer, and it was cool to have the internet. And Windows 95 was the best. You watched the original cartoons of Rugrats, Power Rangers, and Ninja Turtles. You had a favorite "New Kid on the Block", and you knew all of their names. When Goth (NOT EMO) was crazy cool! Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth, the good bands. You remember Bewitched, Jump 5, S-Club 7, and that whole period with the boy bands and pop divas. You remember exactly where you were and what you were doing the first time you saw a Britney Spears or N'SYNC video. Michael Jordan was a king. YIKES pencils and erasers were the stuff! All your school supplies were "Lisa Frank" brand. You remember when the new Beanie Babies and Talking Elmo were always sold out. You collected those Beanie Babies. You remember the first Beanie Babies. Growing Pains. Carebears and The Gummy Bear show. Gak was the coolest stuff invented. Lambchop's song never ended. The old dollar bills. Silver dollars, which were cool to have. You remember a time before the WB. You collected all the Troll dolls You owned a portable tape player. If you even know what an original walkman is. You remember wanting to sit on the orange Nickelodeon couch. You've gotten creeped out by "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" You know the Macarena by heart. "Talk to the hand" . . . enough said You always said, "Then why don't you marry it!" You know the significance of the number 23. You went to McDonald's to play in the playplace. You remember playing on merry go rounds at the playground. Before the MySpace frenzy . . . Before the Internet & text messaging . . . Before Sidekicks & iPods . . . Before MIKE JONES . . . Before PlayStation2 or X-BOX . . . Before Spongebob . . . Back when you put off the 5 hours of homework you had every night. remember the boy band "dream street"--- When light up sneakers were cool. When you rented VHS tapes, not DVDs. When gas was $0.95 a gallon & Caller ID was a new thing. When we recorded stuff on VCRs. When we called the radio station to request songs to hear off of our walkmans. When the Chicago Bulls were the best team ever. Way back. When it was all about N64. WHEN YOU TRADED POKEMON CARDS FOR A LIVING. Before we realized all this would eventually disappear. Who would have thought you'd miss the 90's so much!!!!!

1. What have been the key success factors for Sony? Sony Started as a radio repair shop, founded by Masuru Ikura and Akio Morita after Would War II. The company began its long history of producing compact consumer electronics in 1957, when it introduced the World’s first pocket-sized all-transistor radio. The company’s name, Sony, was taken from Sony, the Latin word for “sound” Sony went on to invest a series of transistor-based TVs and increasingly smaller audiocassette recorders. In 1979, the Sony Walkman introduced the World to a new, portable way of listening to music. Sony became a world leader in consumer electronics and was the first Japanese company to have its shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange. In the late 1980s, Sony began expanding into media, purchasing a U.S. record company (CSB records for $22 billion in 1988). And a major Hollywood studio (Columbia Pictures for $4.9 billion in 1989). The purchases made Sony a major force in the entertainment industry. The importance of marketing at Sony started with Akio Morita, who said that for a company to be successful, it must have three kinds of creativity: creativity to make inventions, creativity in planning and production, and creativity in marketing. Creativity in marketing at Sony means not just cleaver ads, but deep insight into its customers. For example, Sony knows its playstation customers like to find clues and to decode things. So Sony’s ads for playstation 2, like “Signs,” feature a young man walking the streets of a city where he encounters various signs foreshadowing the events. Mannequins appear in a store window, arms outstretched, and point enigmatically to something that’s about to happen. “The lead character is almost in the midst of his own role-playing game. He needs to follows clues to save the heroine”, said Andrew House, Sony’s executive vice president of marketing. In the ads, “we were essentially trying to tap into a range of emotions that we think we deliver in the games – intrigue, forebonding, excitement, panic, relief and achievement at the end”. Sony’s marketing also includes careful measurement of each campaign’s effectiveness. Foe example, Sony runs 30-second commercials for its Playstation as part of the previews in more than 1,800 theatres and on 8,000 movie screens. The ads appear before such films as “The Cat in the Hat”. Sony Computer Entertainment America has been running movie ads for six years.” Cinema advertising has been very effective for us”, said Amil Blaire, director of product marketing.” The reason why we have committed to cinema every year is the tremendous unaided recall shown by our own research and communicus – commissioned ad tracking”. Another example of measurement is Sony’s GenY youth marketing efforts. “The online program promoting the NetMD ATRAC CD Walkman and Cybershot U30 ran July 1 through September 30, 2003, and we found that more than 70 percent static banners”, said Serge Del Grosso, Director of Media and Internet Strategy, Sony Electronics”. In fact, Sony has even developed a direct-marketing solution which it sells to other companies who want to measure marketing effectiveness. The product, called eBridge[TM], allows marketers to use video, measure the effectiveness of the campaign, and gain insight into the target audience, all in one package. Sony expects that the next big breakthrough will not come from a single new electronic device.Rather, Sony President Kunitake Ando says that the future lies in making a whole range of devices more usefully linking them in a networked home-entertainment system. The company believes that its clout in consumer electronics, combined with its media content, will allow it to steer that convergence in a way that suits it. Whether the future of convergence resides in TV’s or PC’s or devices , $62-billion Sony makes every one of them- with a strong brand name that gives them an extra push off retail shelves around the world. 1. What have been the key success factors for Sony? 2. What recommendations would you make to senior marketing executives going forward? What should they he sure to do with its marketing?

I'm building a trade show wall for wall mounted aquariums. What is the lightest yet strongest material to use? I need to create a portable wall that will be easy to transport on a pallet every month. Instead of taking the aquariums out of the box at each trade show, I decided to make a show wall with stackable durable boxes. I can keep the aquariums mounted on at all times saving me time to reinstall it each time. I've thought of a few ways to accomplish my goal. I can either make a framed box 65" w x 46" h x 12" d (2 stacked) with some sort of heavy duty 1"x2" stud as the frame then put a light weight PVC sheet over the framed box or just use a light heavy duty plywood as the box. If I framed a box, will 1"x2" frame stud hold the weight of 300 pounds of another framed box (including aquariums and water) on top? Is 12" depth for the top and bottom of the box be enough to support the 300 pound on top? If I use plywood instead, will it be lighter weight than using 1" x 2" + PVC sheet? Please help! ______ [ top box ] [______ ] ______ [ bottom ] [_box__ ]