Rated: 14 Accompaniment (Coarse Language)
Runs: 92 minutes
Director: Jay Duplass/Mark Duplass
Country: US
Released: 2010
Starring: Marisa Tomei, Jonah Hill, John C. Reilly, Catherine Keener

“Middle-aged romance can be a dicey prospect. And it gets more complicated when children are in the picture. But it gets more complex still if the ‘child’ is actually 21, and creepily meddlesome... What makes this dark comedy work so well is the way in which directors Jay and Mark Duplass build an original story on a broad, even farcical, foundation and leaven it with nuance. It's an edgy, engrossing comedy... Amid the laughs, emotional truths loom large for each of its rather odd characters. The story centers on John, a sad sack whose ex-wife, Jamie, is soon to be remarried. John's life is a cringe-fest until he meets the warmhearted Molly.... Reilly and Tomei have credible chemistry, convincing us that these two damaged adults may actually have found their soul mates. But their romance runs into a rather sizable snag in the form of Molly's maladjusted son, Cyrus. Molly and Cyrus have an unusually close bond that gives new meaning to the term ‘mollycoddled.’ A rivalry between Cyrus and John is hilarious... Hill plays a very different character from his usual harmless geeks in Get Him to the Greek or Superbad. He nails Cyrus' sense of menace laced with brattiness, making this his best and most complex performance... The Duplass brothers fuse comedy, tragedy and discomfort... Above all, it deftly captures the ambiguity and absurdity of human relationships... Cyrus is an off-kilter charmer.” - Claudia Puig, The Washington Post. “Painfully funny farce... one of the best and most surprising movies of the year.” - Georgia Straight

Advance Tickets ~ IMDB on Film ~

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 Over the last few days, RCMP members from various districts in

partnership with members from Charlottetown, Summerside and Kensington

Police Services  seized over 400 marijuana plants from various wooded

areas following aerial searches conducted over Prince Edward Island. 

The "L" Division RCMP Drug Section,  thanked the public for their support, and for providing tips

about marijuana grow-operations to the police. The RCMP say marijuana production

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The Daily Specials at Casa Mia Restaurant for Friday, September 3, 2010 are:

• Island beef chili with sausage beans and peppers..4.99
• Chicken salad wrap with maple and thyme and spinach..9.99

Casa Mia Restaurant
131 Queen Street
Charlottetown, PE
Telephone: (902) 367-4440
Email:

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The 30-year-long search for a cure for AIDS, the world’s deadliest viral infection, may get a renewed boost from an unlikely source: a little-used Merck & Co. cancer drug.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill plan to test Merck’s drug, Zolinza, next year in about 20 people infected with HIV, the AIDS virus. The goal is to determine if Zolinza, or a medicine like it, can force HIV out of cells where it can reside, concealed from attack by potent antiviral treatments, said David Margolis, a professor of medicine who’s leading the research.

While AIDS drug cocktails can eliminate more than 99 percent of virus from an infected person, the treatment isn’t a cure because a remnant of the virus remains hidden in certain cells. For years, scientists have sought a simple way to drive the remaining virus into the bloodstream where the drugs can clear them from the body. Zolinza, approved in 2006 for use against a rare type of blood cancer, may work by blocking an enzyme that helps the virus avoid detection.

“It’s really all about trying to move the field ahead,” Margolis said in a telephone interview. “We don’t expect to cure anybody, but we expect to really show whether it can work the way we think it does in people -- or not.”

Zolinza earned Whitehouse Station, New Jersey-based Merck $15 million in 2008, the last year it disclosed sales of the drug, for treating a malignancy of white blood cells that affects the skin. In a laboratory test published last year, Margolis used the medicine to coax HIV out of hiding in cells taken from infected patients. Now he wants to replicate the result inside the body. Success would show he’s on the right track to finding a cure.

“There is a good chance that it will cause some activation of latently infected cells,” said Robert Siliciano, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who first identified the cells in which HIV hides out, and isn’t involved in the Zolinza trial. “Nobody knows if it will work, but it’s important to try.”

Zolinza targets an enzyme called histone deacetylase, or HDAC, that helps HIV go to sleep in cells by interfering with its ability to replicate. By blocking HDAC, Zolinza would reactivate the virus, kickstarting reproduction.

From there, nature would take its course: HIV would exit and kill its host cell, and enter the bloodstream in search of new cells to infect. Anti-AIDS drugs would prevent it from doing so, and with nowhere left to go, the virus would die after several hours.

Margolis and his colleagues plan to give about 20 patients a few doses of Zolinza, then measure whether it’s had any effect on the amount of virus the immune cells are producing. That will tell them whether they’ve succeeded in disturbing the reservoir.

Zolinza, also known as SAHA, may not be suitable as a cure for AIDS because of its potential to cause genetic mutations that lead to cancer, Margolis said. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration accepts that risk when the drug is being used in patients who already have cancer. It probably won’t tolerate the risk for use in other diseases, Margolis said.

The FDA has approved the trial “because we will so severely limit the exposure to SAHA that the risk of inducing cancer is felt to be negligible, like getting on a plane and taking a flight to New York, or lying on the beach and getting a tan,” he said.

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It’s apparent from the book that Blair felt a kinship with his “friend” Chrétien, describing him in warm terms.

“He was a very wise, wily and experienced old bird, great at international meetings, where he could be counted on to talk sense and as Canadians often are, firm and dependable without being pushy,” Blair says.

“All in all, a good guy and a very tough political operator, not to be underestimated,” he says.

Blair was in Canada just as Britain was hit with an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease and credits Chrétien with immediately identifying it as a serious crisis.

“Watch that, young Tony, watch it very carefully. That’s trouble,” Blair recounts Chrétien as saying.

For all his effusive praise of Chretien, he is silent on Martin, suggesting that the personal tie to Canada had disappeared once Chrétien left office.

For all the flak he has taken at home for his perceived kowtowing to the foreign policy agenda of the United States, former British prime minister Tony Blair still thinks there could be no better partner with whom to have a “special relationship.”

This is an overarching theme of Mr. Blair’s newly published memoirs, and one he thinks governments in Canada and Britain alike should internalize as they seek to buttress their countries’ influence in a multipolar world.

“Canada has got to decide – in a world that is opening up, [with] power shifting to the East, where America is looking at its own alliances shifting – what its place is,” Mr. Blair confided in a far-ranging interview in Washington, where he is taking part in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

“You want to maximize the strengths of your relationships, so that in the evolving policy decisions that will determine the future – whether in trade, the economy or security – you’ve got a voice and a say that, looking ahead 20 or 30 years, is bigger than your size will permit you on your own.”

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Sometimes the animals have a great view.....if they'd only look up once in a while. Click to Play: Bill Staines - Home on the Range We love water views on An Island Walk.

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During the dinner hour Thursday O’Leary residents looking skyward saw a thick plume of white smoke that curled far into the horizon.

It was a fire at a Unionvale farmyard owned by Ewen Stetson. 

The call came through to firefighters at approximately 11:40 am.

Throughout the early afternoon hours exhausted firefighters from four departments - O’Leary, Alberton, Tignish and West Point - battled searing heat that topped 32 C and a persistent fire lurking amongst hundreds of hay and straw bales that could not easily be extinguished.

All told more than 200 straw bales and about 40 to 50 bales of hay were destroyed, estimated Mr Stetson, who praised firefighters for their “more than excellent” response.

Fortunately, a barn filled with about 20 Holstein cattle was spared and so was Mr Stetson’s home, just a short distance away.

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Iron Knitter 2:  Mad Knitting has begun... after a slight delay in the clue-solving (thank you Team Canada for being smarter than I and figuring it out in time!) my socks are cast on, and the ribbing is mostly complete.  90% of the knitters who complete this design will progress on to round 2, so I have to knit quickly, but really don't need to kill myself at it for this round.  I have no problems churning out a pair of socks in a weekend, and the deadline for this round is Sept 17th.

I decided to challenge myself a little here - I'm working this pair 2-at-a-time on circulars - my first time using this technique.  I hear that it's a great way to work a pair of socks quickly, especially since there is less counting and record-keeping.  Because both socks are worked at the same time, when you complete a section (ribbing, leg, heels, toes) you are completely done of that section.  I've caught myself counting the rows of 2x2 ribbing several times already... but it doesn't Matter how many rows of ribbing I do now as long as it reaches the 2 inches mark!  Freeing isn't it?

The pattern itself ("Out of Town in London Fog" by Helen Waittes) is a specially designed pattern for Iron Knitter and is named for one of the companies that employs the advertising company of Sterling Cooper Draper Price in the AMC show Mad Men.  Helen knit her test socks in a lovely grey smoke color (presumably the color of the London fog itself? though in the show, one Brit Character admits that there really is NO fog in London to be spoken of) but I decided I'd like to be different.  And since the pattern is named for a fictitious meterological phenomenon - I decided to name mine after a fictitious mythological creature... the Loch Ness Monster.  (Yarn:  Knit Picks Stroll Kettle Dyed in "Spruce")

Loch Ness Socks... Cuffs - Knit 2-at-a-time on Circs!

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Zapatero had rashly promised to accept whatever changes the Catalan parliament made to its existing autonomy statute, so long as they stayed within the current constitution. But the most radical changes were watered down by the Madrid parliament, though it did approve Catalonia's desired affirmation of its "preferred" status of the Catalan language, and its full control of over its judiciary. Most significantly, it accepted Catalonia's status as a "nation" in its own right, though it shifted this provision from the main statute to the preface.

But in early July, the Spanish Constitutional Court, responding to a petition organized by the opposition conservative People's Party (PP), ruled that some of the changes violated the constitution and avowed that only it only recognizes "one nation, Spain," dashing Catalan hopes. Popular support for the PP petition campaign revealed that Spanish nationalism, dormant since the dictatorship, remains a key force in Spanish politics.

Yet the court decision provoked what were probably the biggest demonstrations in Barcelona since the transition to democracy. Around a million people took to the streets to protest in favor of increased self-determination for the Catalan nation. They were led by José Montilla, leader of the PSC, the Catalan chapter of Zapatero's party, who described the decision of Spain's highest court as "offensive." The tone of the march suggests that many Catalans who would have been content with even the watered-down statute are now shifting towards demands for complete independence. Montilla was repeatedly abused by pro-independence demonstrators, who appear increasingly to reflect the popular mood.

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dewline

Hadfield will launch aboard a Soyuz spacecraft late in 2012, Gary Goodyear, minister of state for science and technology, told a news conference Thursday in Longueuil, Que. The exact date of the launch has not been set, but it will likely be in either late November or early December.

In March 2013, Hadfield will take command for the second half of the six-month mission, overseeing the work of five other astronauts.

"To be trusted on their lives … is a tremendous honour that all of us share," he said, calling the opportunity extremely challenging, exciting and rewarding.

It will be his third journey into space.

The Ontario native, who was born in Sarnia and raised in Milton, will co-pilot the Soyuz rocket en route to the space station.

[. . .]

Veteran test pilot Hadfield's first mission in space was in 1995, when he became the only Canadian astronaut to board the Russian space station Mir.

On his second mission, in 2001, he attached Canadarm 2 to the International Space Station (ISS) during the first-ever spacewalk by a Canadian.

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