Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 758
June 5, 2016
With stars neutralized, unsung players step up in Cup final
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — This is a Stanley Cup Final filled with stars who have won the Hart Trophy, Olympic gold medals and numerous other awards.
With players like Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Joe Thornton and Joe Pavelski, the final features some of the biggest names in hockey.
The one place where those players haven’t showed up so far is on the goal-scoring sheet. In a series that has featured three straight one-goal games all decided either in the final three minutes of regulation or overtime, some of the lesser-known players have delivered the goals.
“You look through these playoffs and third-line, fourth-line guys have stepped up for both teams and scored big goals,” Sharks center Logan Couture said Sunday. “It’s not necessarily that the big guns have scored the huge goals for both teams. You need that when you get to this point.”
Sharks rookie Joonas Donskoi was the latest to get on that list when he scored the overtime winner in San Jose’s 3-2 victory in Game 3 on Saturday night that cut Pittsburgh’s series lead to 2-1. Game 4 is Monday night in San Jose.
Donskoi matched the overtime goal scored just one game earlier by Penguins rookie Conor Sheary. Before that, it had been 30 years since a rookie had scored in overtime in the final when Montreal’s Brian Skrudland did it in Game 2 against Calgary.
But Donskoi and Sheary are far from the only unusual suspects to score in the first three games. Sharks defenseman Justin Braun has two goals in the past two games, matching his total from the previous 40 contests.
“I’m happy I can finally chip in offensively,” Braun said. “A lot of other guys have done a lot of heavy lifting to get us here. I’m just trying to do my part.”
Pittsburgh defenseman Ben Lovejoy, who has 15 goals in 334 career regular season games, scored one of the Penguins’ goals in Game 3 and set up the other that was deflected in by Patric Hornqvist.
Nick Bonino got the Game 1 winner for Pittsburgh when the other goals were scored by rookies Sheary and Bryan Rust.
And after three games, players like Crosby, Malkin, Thornton, Pavelski, Kris Letang, Logan Couture and Brent Burns are all still looking for their first goals.
“You just try to worry about yourself and make sure you’re doing your job and as a team you’re doing the things necessary to give yourself a chance to win games,” Crosby said. “It’s tight. Like I keep seeing year after year, there’s a small margin of error. Just make sure you’re competing and give yourself a chance to create and ultimately produce.”
It hasn’t been like those players haven’t performed well. Crosby was dominant the first two games and set up a pair of goals that helped Pittsburgh take the 2-0 lead. But he got much less generated on the road when the Sharks were able to match top defensive pair Marc-Edouard Vlasic and Justin Braun against him consistently. Even a few shifts with Malkin couldn’t generate many chances for Pittsburgh.
“We’re playing against good defensemen,” Malkin said. “They play so close and so tight, it’s tough to shoot sometimes.”
Thornton had a few good chances late, especially after Couture joined him and Pavelski on San Jose’s top line. But Pavelski, who leads the NHL with 13 playoff goals, has been mostly silent with no points and only four shots on goal through three games.
“It’s tough this time of year,” Sharks coach Peter DeBoer said. “Every round, he’s getting a lot of attention, just like Brent Burns is getting a lot of attention, just like Jumbo is getting a lot of attention. That’s not an easy role to play. I have no doubt he’s going to break through here. He has all year for us. It’s just a matter of time.”
One of the factors limiting Pavelski’s effectiveness has been Pittsburgh’s propensity to block shots. The Penguins blocked 38 shots alone in Game 3, including 12 from Burns. With fewer point shots getting to the net, Pavelski has been unable to utilize his elite hand-eye coordination to deflect pucks like he was so successfully the first three rounds.
“We’re creating some chances,” Pavelski said. “It’s just that end result hasn’t been there. You just stay with it, keep trying to have the puck and play with it and get open. Try to get a few more.”
NOTES: Sharks F Tomas Hertl remains day to day with a lower-body injury. … Penguins D Letang and Olli Maatta were given maintenance days and did not practice.
June 4, 2016
How to be a better burglar: Creeping around in buildings with Geoff Manaugh and Jeff VanderMeer
Cary Grant in "To Catch A Thief"
I first met Geoff Manaugh years ago, through the amazing Bldgblog website, and I’ve always enjoyed his thoughts on architecture, use of space, and how it’s all relevant to the planet and to our lives.
When I heard he had a book out called “A Burglar’s Guide to the City,” I knew I had to have it. I devoured it in a couple of sittings, fascinated by his tales of burglars, yes, but also the way in which Manaugh writes about architecture in that context. He’s changed my view of even very mundane spaces, and it’s not too dramatic to say that he often creates the same effect with his nonfiction as J.G. Ballard does with his fiction: expands and contracts space and time in your mind.
Which is to say, “A Burglar’s Guide to the City” isn’t just an entertaining and unusual book but also kind of trippy and at times metaphysical in its musings.
So it seemed like a good time to ask Manaugh some tough burglary-based questions, especially since he just had a related story optioned for film.
Why do you want to steal people’s stuff? Or, maybe more accurately, why do you want to make it easier for your readers to steal stuff?
I don’t! In fact, luckily, my book is not about theft but about burglary—and there’s a really interesting difference between those two crimes. Burglary specifically requires architecture—that is, to be burglary, it has to occur inside a legally recognized structure, whether it’s a house or a houseboat, a telephone booth or a greenhouse—and burglary doesn’t actually require that you steal something. It’s a common misperception that burglary and theft are synonymous.
That might sound really vague, but look at the FBI’s definition of burglary. They define it pretty simply, as just “the unlawful entry of a structure to commit a felony or theft.” But note that the felony, of course, doesn’t have to be theft; it could be any felony, like firing an unlicensed handgun. Or even—somewhat hilariously—tax evasion, which is a felony. Check fraud is a felony.
So I could sneak into your house and, if I have the intention of performing tax evasion there—or maybe I’m going to forge some checks or counterfeit my paystubs—then, technically and legally speaking, I am committing burglary. Or gambling is also a felony. So I could sneak onto your back porch, without your permission, and, while standing there in the shadows, forging checks, I place a bet on a football game. I’m a burglar.
Anyway, the reason all this interests me is that, as an architecture writer, someone who’s been writing about architecture and cities for more than a decade now, it’s just fascinating to me to think that the construction of architecture actually brings with it a whole new type of crime. Without architecture, burglary cannot exist.
Have you ever broken into a building? If so, what was that experience like?
I haven’t broken into any buildings, but I have always been intrigued by the back-corridors and maintenance rooms that exist behind the scenes, the places that make the world of public-facing architecture actually function. I love steam tunnels and fire stairs and loading docks.
In my book, I call these places the “dark matter” of the built environment, and at least two of the burglars I profile also explain that it’s these other parts of our buildings—the kitchens and janitorial closets and garbage chutes and rooftop elevator maintenance rooms and parking garages—that they’re most comfortable with navigating. You could say it’s the world of J.G. Ballard, not the world of Frank Lloyd Wright.
One of them—a guy named Bill Mason—wrote a memoir where he explains that he grew up with some pretty absentee parents, and thus spent a lot of time hanging out with building superintendents. They mentored him into the ways of how buildings really work, and he learned firsthand, from a very early age, that there’s always an unexpected, unseen way to get from one point to another. From the basement to the roof, or from the emergency exit to the door of someone’s apartment. That was architectural knowledge, in other words, that Mason could later draw on when he became a burglar.
Having said that, way back when I was a teenager, my dad moved into a new development in the woods of North Carolina that now has something like 900 houses on it—but he and my stepmom were literally the 11th or 12th people to move in. I spent a few summers running around on unpaved streets through the pine trees and climbing around at night through new houses under construction. I didn’t “break into” anything, but it was a great way to experience houses almost as x-rays, before the drywall went up, just empty skeletons of 2x4s in the middle of nowhere.
I broke into my own house because I needed a scene for a novel I was working on. Yes, I was kind of nervous, but there was an odd element of performance about it. Do you think that for some burglars the act is also a performance? That there’s an aesthetic to it beyond the practical aesthetics of a successful process?
That’s definitely part of it. Burglary can be a very theatrical undertaking, in fact, even down to pretending that you’re someone else so that you can talk your way into a building you’re not supposed to enter. One of the burglars I write about in the book even went so far as to steal costumes from the New York opera—this was back in the 1870s—in order to use those disguises when his gang broke into banks up and down the mid-Atlantic and in New England.
I also briefly mention some of the tactics used by FBI surveillance teams who need to break into a target apartment to install bugs or other listening devices. A lot of what they do involves disguises, misdirection, subterfuge. It’s stagecraft—it’s a performance—and, in fact, the name of the program, of all things, is Operation Stagehand.
A fair number of unsuccessful break-in attempts are documented, and there’s a curious affection for the unsuccessful in the tone of those passages. Do you have a fondness for the screw-ups?
Absolutely! They’re often the most interesting, precisely because they fail so badly. The book actually opens with a montage of burglaries-gone-wrong. There’s a nude teenager who got stuck in the air vent of a veterinarian’s clinic in Milwaukee, or the guy who got caught after dressing up like a plant to break into a mineral museum, of all things. You can’t make this stuff up. The failures are actually the rule, not the exception.
In fact, you’d be sad to learn how often burglars get busted for doing things like breaking into a house in the middle of winter: their footprints in the snow then lead the police right back to their own home or apartment. Or take the much more recent story, from just a few weeks ago, where a man robbed a restaurant but then knocked over a bag of flour on the way out. He stepped in the floor and left a trail of white footprints all the way back to his house.
They’re honestly not the brightest people—but, like extras in a Jerry Lewis film, that makes them no less interesting.
Do you have a favorite break-in artist?
The opening person I write about in the book is honestly pretty great. It’s a guy named George Leonidas Leslie—he’s the guy who broke into the New York opera who I mentioned earlier.
Leslie trained as an architect in Cincinnati before moving to New York in 1969. Once he got there, though, he saw a whole new world of potential for putting his architectural skills to use: he realized he could make an excellent burglar. Leslie conned his way into ritzy social circles and used his charisma and his familiarity with architecture to convince people to show him floor plans of their homes or reveal key details of their businesses, even down to bank vaults, and then he did things like construct duplicate vaults for his crew to train with, in a bunch of warehouses over in Brooklyn.
His story is pretty incredible, actually, and so many of the people who knew were larger than life. He worked with this woman known as Marm Mandelbaum, for instance, who was really extraordinary: she was a female crime boss in the middle of the 19th century, as well as the go-to fence for thieves even on the other side of the Atlantic.
In terms of other favorites, there is also a Toronto-based burglar who spoke to me under a pseudonym—he called himself “Jack Dakswin”—who really captured my imagination. Dakswin introduced me to all sorts of new techniques, like using the city’s fire code to plan which buildings he would break into next.
So I’d say that both of those guys are pretty indicative of the level of creativity and strategic thinking that you can find—but, again, they are the exceptions, not the rule. They’re not stepping in bags of flour and leaving trails of footprints back to their front doors.
In studying architecture and burglary, as someone who is an expert on architecture, what surprised you the most?
Honestly, I think the ease of it all—how easy it is not only to break into a building, or to sneak into a building, but also how easy, straightforward, commonsense decisions can help you protect yourself from these crimes. You know, don’t leave windows on the second floor unlocked—especially if someone can climb a tree branch and get onto your roof. Don’t post your travel or vacation schedule on the internet for everyone else to see, so that even strangers know when your house is empty.
The book is full of more tips like that, obviously, but it’s really just thinking logically about what a stranger might see. Well, it’s a little more complex than that, I guess. It’s just thinking logically about what a stranger might see—but then also imagining, at the same time, that it’s a very devious and crafty stranger who is hoping to gain illicit entrance to your home or office.
You have to think like the adversary. You have to look at your own home or apartment and ask yourself how you’d break into it.
Wouldn’t it be accurate to say that even the most successful criminals you document in your book are failures?
Well, cynically, yes—but definitely not literally. In fact, one of my favorite stories in the entire book is a still-unsolved crime from Los Angeles in the 1980s. There, a group of what was believed to be three or four men tunneled into a bank vault near the Sunset Strip, and they have still never been caught. In fact, it’s past the statute of limitations now, so they can’t be arrested, even if they show up at FBI headquarters tomorrow morning.
They were so good at tunneling, the FBI thought they might actually have been from the mining industry, and they knew so much about the city’s storm sewer network that another theory tried to connect them in some way to L.A.’s Department of Water and Power.
Although they tried an almost identical heist—in fact, two simultaneous tunnel jobs—a year later, they were interrupted before they could steal anything. So that, technically, makes them “failures.” But they actually got away with it. They succeeded. They could be reading this interview right now, drinking Coronas.
Does it concern you that the most perfect manipulators of architectural space for criminal enterprises we will likely never know about? That the brilliance of their break-ins and the nature of the crimes indulged in within a particular illicit space have rendered them invisible?
I would actually say that that is one of things I find so incredibly interesting about burglary. When you think about how we describe burglars—as mysterious figures at the periphery of the world, in alleyways, on rooftops, tucked away in air vents, removing objects and influencing our everyday lives without ever being seen—it’s at least rhetorically comparable to how we describe figures from folklore. Like demons, ghosts, or other supernatural figures.
In fact, before the bank was robbed in L.A.—the one I mentioned with the tunneling crew—the group managed to set off the bank’s alarm system a few times and even made the electrical system go haywire. As the FBI later discovered, it was because they had hooked up their concrete-coring machine to the bank’s own electrical supply, stealing power to make their tools work, but the bank employees, freaked out by the flickering electricity and the strange noises, started to joke that the bank had a poltergeist.
I love the fact that a supernatural haunting—an otherworldly presence menacing them from the dark side—was more believable than the possibility that burglars were assaulting the bank from below. Burglars are like figures from mythology, nameless creatures operating in darkness.
Has writing this book increased or decreased your own criminal urges?
[laughs] You know, it’s funny. I really came out of this book process with an incredible appreciation for the people who want to prevent this crime—with the police officers I got to shadow and the FBI agents I met and the retired New Jersey cop who is now a panic room designer.
I really learned from them that the moral and ethical stakes of burglary are severe, and not at all—what’s the word? It’s not a victimless crime. It’s a really devastating, emotional violation, to have someone else in your home or apartment, going through your stuff, taking things that mean so much to you and then selling it all for pennies on the dollar or even just throwing it away.
The panic room designer I mentioned—a guy named Karl Alizade—was particularly interesting on this. He had been so affected by the impact burglary obviously had had on the people he met while working as a cop that he effectively dedicated the second half of his professional career to trying to design something that would make burglary impossible. To design an absolute, trustworthy, unbreachable barrier. And I love that he actually put his money where his mouth is—he tests his panic room designs against Russian military equipment, including rocket-propelled grenades and sniper rifles.
For him, it’s a moral quest. It’s architecture in the service of ethics. I really like that, and I was impressed by that, even if it is incredibly easy otherwise just to dismiss this stuff—to roll your eyes at burglar alarms and panic rooms and home safes—as a useless form of paranoia catering to the ultra-rich.
So, no, then, I guess I would say that I did not come out of this looking to become a burglar! Even though I still really like heist films, and heist fiction—in fact, probably even more now, oddly enough.
But I want to circle back to my first answer here, just briefly, because what interests me about burglary is not taking things from other people. I’m not interested in that. What interests me here—and why I like heist films and why I wrote this book—is that there is a way to use architecture that is much more like trying to solve a puzzle, a giant 3D puzzle that you have always lived within but just never realized was a game.
In other words, how do you get from one room to the next? How do you get from one floor of a building to another? Is there a hidden way to get from your building to the building across the street?
These are fundamentally architectural questions—questions about buildings and cities about circulation and infrastructure, about floor plans and sections, about how we use the world and engage with it—but they’re also the plot drivers of heist films. They’re what make burglary so interesting as an abstract spatial concept. It’s about illicit or secret connections between points A and B.
I imagine a version of Geoff Manaugh who now wants to break into buildings in order to rearrange and redesign their innards to be more functionally or aesthetically pleasing to him. But what would the real Geoff Manaugh like to see change in architectural spaces, in relation to your research for this book?
Definitely; that sort of flexibility would be amazing. I’ve always admired traditional Japanese architecture, for example, with its sliding paper walls, where open space becomes solid and obstacles become openings with the flick of a wrist. And I’ve always really liked the avant-garde fantasies of groups like Archigram, who proposed infinitely rearrangeable interiors and “plug-in” cities and buildings where whole rooms could be plucked off and placed onto other structures, like grafting flowers onto new stems.
Actually, this might sound weirdly specific, but a lot of the book takes place in the shadows—which, of course, is a metaphor, but it’s also very literal. You hide in the shadows. You use shadows to evade discovery. But it’s funny: the trend toward glass curtain walls and open interiors, especially in new high-rises and office buildings here in New York City, often means that finding shadows can be unexpectedly difficult. We’re designing a world of constant sunlight, where finding a good place to hide is more and more of a challenge.
There’s obviously yet another metaphor hidden in there somewhere, but reading about these 19th-century cat burglars and burglars operating in medieval Europe and burglars walking the streets of ancient Rome, all of which I also cover in the book, made me really miss the darkness that used to come with architecture. The deep shadows of recessed windows, the unsettling gloom of interiors even in the middle of the afternoon.
If writing a book about burglary made me want to see one architectural change, it’s that, ironically, I’d like to see architects bring back shadows.
Cake and death: Why we need to get together and talk about dying
(Credit: Robert Hoetink via Shutterstock)
The sky looked like abalone shells taking on a darker complexion, the threat of rain advancing over the small town. I was running late and hurried into a restaurant overlooking a gently moving river. As I took my seat, a middle aged woman was ending her sentence: “… it’s about living life with death on your shoulder.” A plastic skull lay on a table across the room that held roughly 40 people, all of whom were middle-aged or in their twilight years — death sitting on their shoulder a little more heavily than mine. Or so I hoped, considering that many are twice my age.
This is a death café. A week earlier, a blurb in the local paper of the small, picturesque town of Damariscotta, Maine announced the event: “Lively discussion with cake.” it read. “Free, open to the public. Not a grief group.”
They had me at “cake.”
The café has a simple premise: to gather, eat cake and talk about death. Lynne Tobin, a licensed therapist and grief counselor, founded the death café in Damariscotta three years ago. The monthly gatherings were inspired by web designer and entrepreneur John Underwood, who founded Death Café in the UK in 2011. Since that time, cafés have grown in popularity and have been held all over the world.
Tobin recalls that the initial response from the community was that the word “death” should be removed from the name. She steadfastly refuses. “It’s important because we live in a death-denying culture,” she explains. “We don’t talk about death. We don’t even call it what it is,” using instead euphemisms such as “passing away” or “bought the farm.” “We don’t call it death, because we’re very afraid of it.”
“What is a very normal part of our living experience has been made a taboo,” she adds. Part of overcoming the fear and dismantling the taboo is to eliminate the euphemisms and have open and honest conversations about death.
At the death café, Tobin speaks in calm, even tones and is quick to laugh with the group when a joke offers a welcome break during discussions of cremation and end of life issues. There is no set agenda, and the conversation soon turns to the personal. “When did you first see a dead body?” Tobin asks the group. The responses vary from seeing dead relatives laid in coffins to teenagers who, having snuck into a morgue, had the misfortune (and impeccable timing) of passing by a man who was shot dead outside a bar.
The question causes me, however, to have a momentary lapse in cognitive thinking. It wasn’t silent-still bodies I thought of, but a small box. An imaginary snap of the fingers, like a hypnotist lulling me back in time, and I am back in sunny Los Angeles.
He was unrecognizable at the funeral. He was disguised as a box. I think it measured 4 by 6 inches, though I can’t be certain of the exact dimensions because I had no ruler to confirm. I could only confirm that the box was wooden and small enough to carry with both hands. My own hands trembled at the thought that my father’s physical form transformed into the outer contents of a box. Death happened in a foreign land that I could not get to nor comprehend. I’m assuming this is where the vaudevillian transubstantiation took place: body into box.
***
Humans have cared for the dead and dying for thousands of years, but by the 20th century death was taken out of the home and placed in hospitals and mortuaries. Mortician and New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Doughty explains that the view that dead bodies are “dangerous” originated in the late 19th century. The now-debunked Miasma theory held the belief that “bad air” floating from decaying things, such as dead bodies, caused disease. Morticians became the stewards of public health, replacing families in caring for the dead. They were and still are viewed as protecting the public from death. But Doughty argues, “The living doesn’t need protection from the dead.”
Last year Doughy opened up Undertaking LA, a fully licensed funeral home in Los Angeles, California. The funeral home offers services in home funerals, cremation and natural burial. The mission of the funeral home is to “allow families to reclaim rightful control of the dying process and care of the dead body.” Participating in the process of caring for the dead of our loved ones can help to overcome death denial and also with the grieving process.
“As you sit with body, little changes happen, both physically in the body,” Doughty explains. “And little emotional changes happen to you as you can see that taking place. It becomes very clear that this person is not coming back.”
Doughty argues that death denial has affected the spaces where we bury the dead. In her book, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory,” Doughty cites a 1959 Time Magazine article entitled “The Disneyland of Death” about Forrest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California. The goal of the cemetery, the article states, is to “erase all signs of mourning” replacing traditional headstones with flat markers and filling the cemetery with art and sculptures. Doughty surmises, “Forrest Lawn became well-known for its aggressive, beautiful-death-at-all costs policy.”
Interestingly, a year after the article was published, “Elegy” aired on the popular television show “The Twilight Zone.” In the episode, three lost astronauts have landed on an asteroid that looks identical to Earth, with one exception: People are frozen stiff in poses that mimic fishing, beauty contests, and mayoral celebrations — all the trappings of a Norman Rockwell painting. The astronauts soon discover to their horror that they are in a cemetery. The people in the town are actually corpses who paid to have their bodies beautified and posed in ideal settings for all eternity. Looking on the episode with 21st century eyes, the episode is the most extreme form of death denial. It is the Forrest Lawn of the future, where all signs of death and mourning are erased and the corpse is beautified in eternity.
The corpse is a terrifying specter. What was once a normal occurrence in our lives now inhabits the shadowy realm of the unknown. We have taken great pains to hide the dead through the use of funeral homes and erasing signs of death in our cemeteries. Corpses have disappeared from view but have entered our psyche and filtered out as euphemisms, funeral home contracts and, even 50 years after the “Twilight Zone” episode aired, continue to live on in TV crime dramas and zombie apocalypse movies, rotting, speechless and sometimes moving at us at tortoise speed. Part of overcoming the fear, however, is in engaging with the unknown.
***
It was a hot September day in Cottonwood, Arizona. I was looking at my great-grandmother. She had the most beautiful hands. Growing up in a poor immigrant Hungarian family, and not averse to bootlegging whiskey during Prohibition, those hands worked hard, but they didn’t show it. She had slender, elegant fingers, even when she died at the age of 102. I remember those fingers clasping a rosary or holding a glass of iced tea as we sat in the backyard of her home during my beloved summer visits with her. Even there, at her wake — though she was painted with a little too much rouge (“she’s a party girl,” my mom joked) — her hands, which were folded neatly over each other, nails painted red to match the rouge, looked as they had in life. Though I was not present for the “tiny changes” that took place, seeing my great-grandmother at the wake allowed me to say goodbye and grieve. Unlike my father’s body, there were no magic tricks performed on her, save embalming and some make-up. Reality was less terrifying than an unmarked box.
Sitting in the room with my great-grandmother seven years after my father died, I found that death does not occur in some foreign place, but in the land of the living. And it is in this land that we can come together at places like the death café in small towns in Maine to talk not only about death, but also about life.
Tobin recalls a past café when the discussion turned to love and the meaning of life. “The consensus of the group is that life becomes meaningful when we have love in it.” She adds, “It’s not so much about dying but about living.” There can be no life without death, and to acknowledge that we co-exist with the dead, especially by sitting with our loved ones when they die, is an act of both love and acceptance.
Tropical rains, possible tornadoes threaten half of the US
ATLANTA (AP) — From tropical rains to tornadoes, about half of the U.S. expected to see wet and at times severe weather this weekend, capping a week of scorching temperatures out West and flooding that killed nine soldiers when their military vehicle got caught in the rushing waters of a rain-swollen creek at Fort Hood, Texas.
People along the Gulf Coast kept a watchful eye on a system over the Caribbean Sea that was forecast to bring 5 to 10 inches of rain to parts of Florida. The storm is likely to develop into a tropical cyclone.
In the Mid-Atlantic region, the nation’s capital and more than 17 million people braced for the possibility of severe thunderstorms, damaging winds and tornadoes Sunday. In Southern California, nine people were sickened by the heat during a high school graduation ceremony as temperatures flirted with triple digits. In Ohio, the third round of the Memorial PGA tournament was delayed by thunderstorms.
Here’s a look at what people are doing to prepare and recover from the various types of weather:
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TROPICAL RAINS
The hurricane season is just a few days old, and its third named storm may be developing near Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami says the system has a good chance of forming into a tropical cyclone, and even if it doesn’t, it will still bring heavy rains along the Gulf Coast.
Police in St. Petersburg distributed sandbags to residents Saturday in anticipation of the drenching beginning Sunday night. Gov. Rick Scott was closely monitoring the weather and warned residents, tourists and businesses to be prepared.
Florida’s emergency management director Bryan Koon said they expected a fast-moving storm, which means it could mature rapidly. The severe weather could last through Tuesday.
“Even if this system does not develop into a named storm, it still poses significant risks from flooding, damaging winds and tornadoes, and rip currents,” he said.
If the storm does develop, it would be named Colin.
Last weekend, Bonnie formed off the South Carolina coast, inundating parts of the East Coast. On Saturday, Bonnie was weakening far offshore and posed no threat to land.
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HEAT SICKNESS
Nine people were sickened from the heat at Palm Desert High School’s graduation ceremony, which was held outside.
Two people had to be taken to the hospital for treatment, said Jennifer Fuhrman, a spokeswoman for the Riverside County Fire Department.
The National Weather Service issued a heat advisory and warnings for the suburbs south and east of Los Angeles through Sunday and urged residents to take extra precautions when spending time outside. Temperatures in the area could reach triple digits on Saturday.
Similar heat warnings were issued in Las Vegas and Phoenix, where the mercury could climb to 118 degrees Saturday.
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TAKING AIM AT THE NATION’S CAPITAL
More than 17 million people in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Raleigh, North Carolina, are looking at an “enhanced” risk of severe thunderstorms Sunday, according to the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center.
Damaging winds, a tornado or two and marginally severe hail are expected from the Southeast to as far north as New York.
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BRUSHFIRES AND WILDFIRES
Firefighters are spending the weekend battling blazes in California, New Mexico and Arizona.
A wildfire sparked by lightning burned nearly 12 square miles in the San Mateo Mountains near Magdalena, which is about 100 miles southwest of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
In Arizona, firefighters are fighting a much larger blaze. The Juniper Fire just south of the town of Young is now burning on over 28 square miles in the Tonto National Forest. It too was caused by lightning.
Officials say the extreme heat and a dry winter mean there’s a high risk of wildfires. Summer has typically been considered wildfire season but experts now say blazes happen year-round.
In Southern California, a brush fire burned 30 acres near Temecula, forcing the closure of the southbound I-15 freeway. No homes were immediately threatened.
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UNYIELDING TEXAS FLOODING
It’s been several days since deadly flooding began in parts of southeast and central Texas, and the rain just started to let up Saturday.
In its wake, Army officials investigated a training exercise that went horribly wrong at Fort Hood, leading to the deaths of nine soldiers whose vehicle was swept into rushing waters of a rain-swollen creek. Three soldiers were pulled from the water and survived.
Coryell County emergency medical services chief Jeff Mincy told the Killeen Daily Herald that only the wheels of an Army troop-transport truck were visible after swift flood waters washed the 2½-ton vehicle from a low-water crossing on the installation. He surmised the waters were about 8 feet deep.
The Brazos River is causing trouble for communities in Fort Bend County, especially near where the river empties into the Gulf of Mexico. County Judge Robert Hebert said floodwaters are receding but warned some neighborhoods are still cut off and many local streets are impassable.
“As water levels recede we will be able to get into these inundated areas and assess the damage,” he said.
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Associated Press writers Terry Wallace in Dallas and Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee, Florida, contributed to this report.
No stranger to adversity, Cavs have more of it in NBA Finals
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers know what’s being whispered — and sometimes shouted — at the NBA Finals.
The Cavaliers play in the Eastern Conference, they say. They haven’t been tested, they say. What happens when the adversity finally hits?
It came in Game 1, with the Golden State Warriors not even needing their two biggest stars while flattening the Cavaliers in the din of Oracle Arena. Now everyone wants to know how the Cavaliers will respond, how will they react after a body blow in Round 1 showed no indication that a fully health Cavaliers team was any more capable of defeating the mighty Warriors than the depleted unit that James dragged along with him for six games last year.
The Cavs cruised through the inferior Eastern Conference all season, the narrative goes, and now their reckoning is upon them. Game 2 is on Sunday in Oakland, and the Splash Brothers will be frothing at the mouth after a tepid Game 1. It’s up to the Cavaliers to show they belong on the same court with the defending champions.
“We’re not a team that loses our composure over anything,” James said.
In reality, the Cavaliers have been tested like few others. Such is life on Planet LeBron, the most scrutinized, most followed, most nit-picked athlete in America. His gravitational pull draws in fans, teammates and anybody with a notebook, a microphone or a blog, for better and worse.
“It was funny because people were talking about not having been through adversity, and, I mean, we’ve been through adversity all season,” Cavaliers coach Tyronn Lue said. “And I thought our guys did a great job of just coming together and understanding we have one common goal to start the season, and throughout that we had a lot of bumps in the road and a lot of things that happened.”
No adversity? How about firing a coach who led them to the NBA Finals a year ago and got them off to a 30-11 start to this season?
How about James raising eyebrows with his cryptic tweets, public challenging of teammates and midseason refreshes in South Beach?
How about Kevin Love trying to find his way in an offense dominated by James and Kyrie Irving?
Sure, they won their first 10 games of the playoffs. Sure, the Raptors were never truly a threat to them in the East finals, even after tying the series 2-2. Sure, the Eastern Conference remains far less challenging on a night-to-night basis than the West.
But these Cavaliers have lived in a pressure cooker ever since James decided to return to Cleveland two summers ago. They know that the city’s tortured fan base pins its hopes on them to end a 52-year championship drought. They have been pushed and prodded and poked at all season long.
“There’s good things that can come from it and feeling like your back is up against the wall,” Love said. “Then you have to push back and fight. I think we’ve been a team that has kind of thrived in, I don’t know if chaos is the right word, but thrived in adversity and been able to bounce back. We’re going to look to Sunday as definitely a bounce-back game and try to go 1-1 back to Cleveland.”
Then again, there is adversity, and there is Golden State.
The Warriors have returned the finals even better than the team that throttled the league a year ago. They won a record 73 games in the regular season, survived some injuries to star Stephen Curry in the early rounds of the playoffs and then were pushed to the brink by the Oklahoma City Thunder in the West finals.
Surviving that crucible — coming back from a 3-1 deficit — only served to embolden a team that needed no such emboldening.
“I think that experience of going through that definitely makes us closer and a lot tougher,” Warriors forward Draymond Green said. “That wasn’t an easy series by any means. Then coming down and coming back from down 3-1, it gives you a certain amount of confidence.”
The Warriors also know what can happen when they ease up against James. Last year they took Game 1 and then dropped two straight to a James-led team missing Irving and Love due to injury.
They also know it’s highly unlikely that Curry and Klay Thompson clank jumpers like they did Thursday night.
“I don’t think it will be a problem,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “I think we’re much more experienced. We have that memory in our mind. We’ve been through this now, and we understand you can’t let up ever. Sunday is obviously a huge game. We’d like to go take care of business and get out on the road with a 2-0 lead. But we’ve got to play well.”
Police officer shot near apartment complex in Atlanta
ATLANTA (AP) — Atlanta police say an officer has been shot near an apartment complex in Atlanta.
Police spokeswoman Elizabeth Espy tell local news media that the officer was alert, conscious and breathing after being shot Saturday afternoon at the Allure at Brookwood apartment complex, about five miles from downtown Atlanta. Police say the officer was wearing a vest.
Police say the officer was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
WSB-TV says a suspect was shot in the shoulder and taken into custody. The television station says another suspect ran into a wooded area behind the apartment complex and was captured later.
It was not immediately clear what transpired before the shootings took place.
Names of the officer and suspects have not been released.
Bourdais races to first win of season at Belle Isle
DETROIT (AP) — Sebastien Bourdais raced to his first IndyCar victory of the season, beating Conor Daly by 2 seconds Saturday at Belle Isle.
Bourdais had not led a single lap in any of the season’s first six races, and he hadn’t finished higher than eighth. He led only 12 of the 70 laps Saturday on the 2.35-mile street course, but Bourdais was able to hold on the rest of the way after Daly made a pit stop on lap 61 and gave up the lead.
Bourdais won for the second time at Belle Isle. He took the latter half of last year’s doubleheader at the Detroit course.
Indianapolis 500 winner Alexander Rossi finished 10th.
Bourdais won for the 35th time in his career.
Alarm over Nigerian Christian killed for insulting Islam
KANO, Nigeria (AP) — Christians are demanding that authorities do more to protect them after a woman was stabbed to death for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad in Nigeria’s mainly Muslim north.
Nigeria’s police chief said Saturday that two suspects have been arrested in Thursday’s killing of a middle-aged petty trader, Bridget Abihime, who allegedly said the Prophet Muhammad was not important.
But the Christian Association of Nigeria said police are not doing enough to protect Christians and warned Saturday of a “looming religious crisis.” In the past, such attacks have led to retaliation and sectarian violence.
Most Christians and Muslims live side-by-side peacefully in Nigeria but tensions are high in the north and especially the northeast where Boko Haram’s near 7-year-old Islamic insurgency has killed about 20,000 people and suicide bombings keep people in fear. Kano has suffered several such attacks.
Padres trade Shields, cash to White Sox for Johnson, Tatis
SAN DIEGO (AP) — The San Diego Padres have traded pitcher James Shields and cash to the Chicago White Sox for pitcher Erik Johnson and shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr.
The deal was made Saturday. It came three days after Padres executive chairman Ron Fowler criticized the team’s recent performances as being “embarrassing” and “pathetic,” and called out Shields for his poor start Tuesday at Seattle.
Shields was one of several big-name players the Padres brought in before the 2015 season, giving him a $75 million, four-year deal. The roster overhaul fizzled, as the Padres finished three games worse last year than they did in 2014.
The 34-year-old Shields is 2-7 with a 4.28 ERA. He allowed 10 runs in 2 2-3 innings in a 16-4 loss at Seattle on Tuesday.
Tatis is the son of former big leaguer Fernando Tatis.
North Carolina high school prank upsets Latino students
MARION, N.C. (AP) — A group of students at a western North Carolina high school built a wall made of boxes and blocked access to a common area, and their Latino classmates are upset.
Local media outlets report the students were allowed into McDowell High School, about 100 miles northwest of Charlotte, on Wednesday to perform a prank as a teacher supervised them.
A photo of the wall with about 30 students standing in front of it was shared on Instagram and captioned, “We built the wall first.” Principal Edwin Spivey says one of the kids wanted to put a Donald Trump logo on it and was told he couldn’t do that.
The wall was taken down before classes began on Thursday.
A school district spokesman says the students won’t face any disciplinary action.
