The James Logan Courier

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

Children of the 1980's doubtlessly remember the wave of low-budget Nintendo Entertainment System games that didn't exactly view user-friendliness as a virtue. Instructions and storytelling were minimal to non-existent, and completing the games demanded some mix of cruel trial and error and/or a strategy guide purchase.

"X-Blades" is, on multiple levels, the modern-day embodiment of those old games.

Take for instance, the Observation Site level, which finds you trapped in a room with spikes that pop out of the floor. "X-Blades" gives you no instruction on how to escape the room, nor does it really explain why the trap even exists. So you're stuck with your contemporary instincts, which compel you to find a way to escape the room. But there exists no such trick: If you can dodge the spike patterns for an entirely indeterminate amount of time, a cut scene plays and you're freed.

By Rick La Plante, New Haven Schools Public Information Officer

Children with special needs who are enrolled in the New Haven Unified School District’s before- and after-school program are getting extra help, thanks to United Cerebral Palsy.

Kids First, the District’s childcare program, is partnering with United Cerebral Palsy of the Golden Gate on an “Everyone In” program to provide recreational assistants to facilitate the inclusion of special needs children. The recreational assistants, who come from the Regional Center of the East Bay, “support the child’s participation to his or her maximum potential,” Kids First Manager Mark De Muri said.

From wikipedia:
Ebenezer Elliott (17 March 1781 - 1 December 1849) was an English poet, known as the Corn Law rhymer.

Elliott was born at the New Foundry, Masbrough, in the Parish of Rotherham, Yorkshire. His father, (known as "Devil Elliott", for his fiery sermons) was an extreme Calvinist and a strong Radical, and was engaged in the iron trade. His mother suffered from poor health, and young Ebenezer, although one of a family of eleven children, of whom eight reached mature life, had a solitary and rather morbid childhood. At the age of six he contracted small-pox, which left him ‘fearfully disfigured and six weeks blind.’ His health was permanently affected, and he suffered from illness and depression in later life.

Learn more about Ebenezer Elliott.