Test C&P article...

[motordavid]

Text only, test...can't C&P full article. Returns me to Home Page...
jes'fiddling around trying to break the code.

First came a chance encounter at the antique store he and his wife run in Ellenville, 90 miles north of New York City, then a trip to the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor in nearby Vails Gate, and along the way an idea he could not get out of his head.
So, almost inevitably, there was Roger Baker prowling around an immense, sweltering field of grass and clover here on Thursday in work boots, blue jeans, green plaid shirt and engineers cap, taking swigs from the jug of Leisure Time spring water and contemplating his latest adventure in field carving, lawn mower art and large-form Americana.
By Friday, it was pretty much done, an 850,000-square-foot Purple Heart medal, more than 1,000 feet long, each detail precise down to the seven 36-foot laurel leaves on each side of the three gold stars above the portrait of George Washington.
“Hi,” he said when he made his pitch to Orange County officials in June. “I’m Roger, and I mow the lawn.”
On one level, that’s pretty much it, though, even including the space aliens who carve mazes in Kansas wheat fields, he may be the greatest lawn mower who’s ever lived. On other levels, well, pick your own job description for a guy who carves titanic portraits, most of them visible just from the air, into summer fields, which within days give way to grass, bugs, dust, butterflies and nature’s heedless currents.
Beginning in 2000, Mr. Baker, now 53, has created field portraits ranging in size from 500,000 square feet to more than a million: the Statue of Liberty, Elvis Presley, Albert Einstein, Jimi Hendrix. When last seen in these pages, he was contemplating his next act after a portrait of the late custom motorcycle builder, Larry Desmedt, known as Indian Larry.
His instincts this year were pulling him sax-ward — either John Coltrane or Boots Randolph — until May, when he met Bill Bacon, an official with the Military Order of the Purple Heart, who was passing through Ellenville. Mr. Bacon was planning events in conjunction with the 75th anniversary of the Purple Heart medal.
The more they talked, the more the idea of a giant Purple Heart took hold. Mr. Baker visited the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor, where the director, Anita Pidala, was instantly intrigued. He made a draw- ing, using as his model the Purple Heart of Art Livesey, 88, of Middletown, N.Y, who was a marine who fought on Iwo Jima in World War II.
And when he and Ms. Pidala found the site 16 miles from the Purple Heart Hall of Honor, off State Road 416, at the edge of Thomas Bull Memorial Park, he had to catch his breath: It was a gorgeous sloping field, thick grasses, even gentle strains of purple clover. “I thought,” he said, “that’s one of the nicest fields I’ve ever seen.”
And so, after getting permission from the county, which owns the park, he began work a week ago, walking the field with his Craftsman Hi-Wheel gas-powered push mower.
He did the detail himself, like the 260-foot-long portrait of Washington, while county workers on brushhogs did much of the large-scale mowing. He gets different colors and shades by changing the height of the blade. The piece will be unveiled today at an 11 a.m. ceremony.
EACH piece is different. The biggest new element in this one is that because of the slope of the land you can see it from the ground — “not perfect — it will look like a bad haircut — but it gives you a sense, and then I know from the air it will be something.”
Mr. Baker, a sculptor, artist, cartoonist and whatever comes his way, has no cellphone and no computer. He’s not political and he won’t make any money from the project. He did it because in a visceral way it hit him like a sudden burst of wind — his attempt, at once large and small, to make sense of and to honor the sacrifice people make in battle.
He said when he began, he looked, as usual, for reasons not to do this one. How about, he was asked hypothetically, the notion that many people won’t be able to think of it apart from the passions surrounding the war in Iraq?
“My thought processes never went there,” he said. “Not one time did that enter my mind. I look for things — aesthetic, personal, artistic, technical — that draw me. What I’m concerned with is my craft and doing this as if it’s the last time I’ll ever have a chance to.”
One thing he loved about the Indian Larry project, he said, was how Mr. Desmedt’s friends and family came to the site, and then walked it as if getting to touch his spirit.
Mr. Baker hopes that happens even more this time — no simple answers or message, just a chance for people to silently traverse a country field to pay tribute, to give thanks, to contemplate heroism before his handiwork disappears.
<NYT_AUTHOR_ID>E-mail: [email protected]

</NYT_AUTHOR_ID><NYT_UPDATE_BOTTOM></NYT_UPDATE_BOTTOM></NYT_TEXT>

[motordavid]

Wierd...cannot break the code on how to do C&P of articles
containing pics/text, etc. I used to be a pro at this...
wonder if it's The Site or the NYTimes site or...
damn weird. Maybe just glitching again?

Stumped in the Mtns.

[testacct_ncx]

test 1
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Karl Rove, Top Strategist, Is Leaving the White House
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By JIM RUTENBERG
Published: August 13, 2007
WASHINGTON, Aug. 13 — Karl Rove, the political adviser who masterminded President George W. Bush’s two winning presidential campaigns and secured his own place in history as a political strategist with extraordinary influence within the White House, is resigning, the White House confirmed today.
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Karl Rove has been a close adviser to President Bush since 1993. More Photos >
In an interview published this morning in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Rove said, “I just think it’s time,” adding, “There’s always something that can keep you here, and as much as I’d like to be here, I’ve got to do this for the sake of my family.”
Mr. Rove said he had first considered leaving a year ago but stayed after his party lost the crucial midterm elections last fall, which put Congress in Democratic hands, and as Mr. Bush’s problems mounted in Iraq and in his pursuit of a new immigration policy.
He said his hand was forced now when the White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, recently told senior aides that if they stayed past Labor Day he would expect them to stay through the rest of Mr. Bush’s term.
“He’s been talking with the president for a long time — about a year, regarding when might be good to go,” said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman. “But there’s always a big project to work on, and his strategic abilities — and our need for his support — kept him here,” she said.
Ms. Perino said Mr. Rove would leave at the end of August.
The White House did not say early today whether Mr. Bolten would name a successor to Mr. Rove, who held a “deputy chief of staff” title.
But even if he does, none would have the same influence with the president or, likely, the same encyclopedic knowledge of American politics.
Mr. Bush was expected to make a public statement at around 11.35 a.m. today.
With his departure, Mr. Rove will be the latest major figure to leave the Bush administration’s inner circle. Earlier this summer, Mr. Bush lost as his counsel Dan Bartlett, a fellow Texan who had been part of the original group of close advisers that followed Mr. Bush from the Texas governor’s mansion to the White House.
Mr. Bush named as Mr. Bartlett’s successor Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National Committee chair who was a crucial part of Mr. Bush’s 2004 campaign brain trust. But Mr. Gillespie has neither the history, nor the closeness with Mr. Bush, that Mr. Rove has.
Mr. Rove was not only the chief architect of Mr. Bush’s political campaigns but also the midwife of the president’s political persona itself.
His continued presence in the White House had become a source of fascination in Washington as others, like Mr. Bartlett, left, and as Democrats honed in on his role in the firings of several United States attorneys.
Yet it was nonetheless widely believed inside and outside the White House that he would walk out the door behind Mr. Bush at the end of the president’s term in January, 2009, and help him solidify his legacy before his exit.
Mr. Rove had vowed to build a lasting Republican majority, and some associates believed he would try to help his party keep the White House. But Mr. Rove said in his interview with The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page is a favored outlet for Mr. Bush and his aides, that he had no intention of getting involved in the 2008 presidential race.
Mr. Rove has portrayed the defeat in the 2006 midterm elections as a temporary setback, and said in the interview he believed Republicans were still on track for victory in the next election.
He predicted that conditions in Iraq would improve with the continuation of the surge — though he did not address speculation that the president will face pressure this fall, possibly even from fellow Republicans, to bring troops home sooner rather than later. And he predicted that Democrats would fail to show unity on issues such as the president’s eavesdropping program.
He said he intended to write a book, which had been encouraged by “the boss,” and eventually to teach.
Throughout Mr. Bush’s tenure, Mr. Rove vilified Democrats, and they vilified him right back, complaining about his infamously bare-knuckled political tactics on the campaign trail and what they considered his overt politicization of the White House.
He has been the focus in the Congressional investigations into the firings last year of several federal prosecutors, and he was until last year a focus of the C.I.A. leak case investigation that led to perjury charges for Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.
Mr. Rove emerged from the cloud of the investigation to try to stave off Republican defeats last fall. The subsequent failure was his biggest political loss during his tenure at the White House. Afterward, he continued to take a central role in key initiatives such as Mr. Bush’s ultimately failed attempt to create a new immigration law that would have legalized millions of workers that are currently living in the United States illegally.
A political strategist who solidified his reputation by bringing together the sprawling coalition that put Mr. Bush in office, and which he believed would sustain a prolonged Republican majority, he had considered Hispanic voters to be a potential source of new Republican voters.
But Mr. Rove was in the eye of the political storm once again this year as Congress set out to learn his role in the attorney firings, which critics charge had been carried out to impede or spark investigations for partisan aims.
That investigation, and others, have raised new questions about Mr. Rove’s dual role as political adviser and a senior policy aide with wide latitude to pull the levers of government while briefing even members of the diplomatic corps on the political landscape and the electoral vulnerabilities of the Democrats.
The White House cited executive privilege in blocking the testimony of Mr. Rove before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In the Wall Street Journal interview today, Mr. Rove said he knew that some people might suspect he was leaving office to avoid scrutiny but said, “I’m not going to stay or leave based on whether it pleases the mob.”
He said he believed the scrutiny would continue after he left the White House because of what he called the “myth” of his influence, which he referred to as “the Mark of Rove.”
But from the time he leaves office, Mr. Rove will no longer have the protection of White House lawyers and will be more on his own when it comes to dealing with Congressional subpoenas.
The White House has provided cover for some former aides by issuing letters directing them not to testify about their privileged conversations with the president or to answer only a limited set of potential questions.
In his exit interview today, which was with Paul Gigot, the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Rove had a parting shot for his political nemeses, telling Mr. Gigot that he believed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton would be the Democratic nominee but called her a “tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate,” and predicted a Republican victory in the 2008 presidential race. It is the sort of political boasting that had become Mr. Rove’s hallmark.
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[testacct_ncx]

Test 1 was text only, worked fine.

Test 2 included Jscript and did NOT work. Analysis forthcoming, MD.

[motordavid]

Originally Posted by testacct_ncx

Test 1 was text only, worked fine.

Test 2 included Jscript and did NOT work. Analysis forthcoming, MD.

Thanks, K! Ya'll a helluva "Janitor" as your Ava ID decribes you!
Pretty good looking, too.


What continues to stump me is that I used to post NYTimes articles
on a regular basis, with pics, with text and I simply pre-edited out
the noise/junk as much as I could...did the post and then quickly
jumped back in to "re-edit" that post, cleaning up parargraphs and
any other "noise" so the posted art. looked clean and easy to read.

I was able to do that kind of C&P posting, from NYT sites, until
I got the "stumbles" here on The Board...that connection may be
coincidental, I realize.

Don't make this a project...I can still do a sep. text C&P, save the
sumbitch, C&P related story pic(s), save those and tie them all
together. Only about 4 1/2 people here, on average, read my long
boring azz posts anyhoo...