| The Watch: Closed strip mall black eye in West Side neighborhood
Is there a problem in your neighborhood? Tell The Watch. Each Tuesday, The Dispatch features a problem from Columbus, its suburbs and surrounding counties and explains how officials are working -- or not working -- to fix it. Then we'll keep watch to make sure they keep their word. Call The Watch hot line at 614-461-8731 or send an e-mail to thewatch@dispatch.com. The Briggs Road strip center is a sore spot for its West Side neighbors. The shopping strip at 2732 Briggs Rd., near Briggs High School, was built in 1962. The grocery store, beauty shop and bar that once served the neighborhood vanished long ago. Sections of the roof collapsed, leading to water damage in the building's interior, according to Columbus inspectors' reports. "If this place was in (Upper) Arlington or Grandview (Heights), it wouldn't even be here," said Don Fritch, who lives nearby.
2ND UPDATE: Toy Fair Notebook: Toy Makers Enter Virtual World
Mattel is making Barbie more virtual, while Jakks and Hasbro are pushing further into the pet kingdom. Mattel's Barbie iDesign is a CD-ROM game, where girls can dress Barbie in hundreds of outfits, creating a runway show and a magazine layout that can be emailed to their friends. Barbie made her first foray onto the web last April, when Mattel launched BarbieGirls.com, a Web site that allows girls to combine fashion, music, and social networking. Its core audience is 10 and 11 year olds. Since the launch, the site has accumulated 10.5 million registered users, said Mattel senior brand manager Rosie O'Neill, who spearheaded the site's development. 'It's a way to extend the Barbie franchise,' O'Neill said in an interview. Mattel is targeting boys with Hot Wheels Turbo Driver, a game controller that opens up eight different terrains online.
HEALTH
There's a move that noise kids make at noise shows: With their heads down, feet shoulder-width apart and unmoving, they uncross their arms and lunge both fists in the air. It's commonly referred to as "awesome arms" — and it will definitely occur as the Los Angeles quartet HEALTH performs its much-anticipated set at the Billiken Club. With either electro new-wave percussion or booming war drums at the core of its songs, HEALTH then layers sparse guitars and glitchy thrift-store keyboards alongside effects-laden vocals (courtesy of the "zoothorn," a microphone/guitar pedal hybrid). But it's all more than just a big racket: The band's attention to song form and tension/release puts it more in touch with Animal Collective or Liars than with your average knob-twisting noise group. .
Oxygen bars pop up across France
PARIS: As oxygen bars begin to pop up across France, health authorities are beginning to question the merits or otherwise of sniffing O2.
Supposed to improve health and well-being, oxygen bars date back to the late
1990s, spreading from Canada to California and to Britain and Japan, in nightclubs, health clubs, airports or even trade fairs.
But Paris' first oxygen bar opened only last week. Flagged as "a revolutionary anti-fatigue, anti-stress and anti-depression concept", the city's maiden O2 bar is housed in an up-market beauty institute owned by no less than the wife of top French publicist and political "kingmaker" Jacques Seguela.
Seguela has been very much in the news recently for bringing together President Nicolas Sarkozy and his new wife Carla Bruni around a dinner table, a coup that comes almost three decades after helping propel leftwing leader Francois Mitterrand to the country's highest public office.
In Defense of Incandescence
Let us now praise incandescence—and, while we're at it, let's damn fluorescence. Last year a woman compiling a unique kind of anthology asked me for a contribution. She was getting a number of writers to do essays about one word, their single favorite word. An intriguing assignment. But months went by, and whenever I thought of it I just couldn't make up my mind. I couldn't commit myself to a single word (spare me the psychologizing, please). I missed the deadline. .
Chandigarh, February 6
He said that this concept gives banks a single number indicating the impact of a 1 per cent change of interest rate on its capital, captures the interest rate risk, and can thus help them move forward towards assessment of risk based capital. This approach will be a graduation from the earlier approach, which led to a mismatch between the assets and liabilities. The ED said that RBI has been laying emphasis that banks should maintain a more realistic balance sheet by giving a true picture of their non performing assets (NPAs) , and they should not be deleted to show huge profits. Though the banking system in India has a strong risk management architecture, initiatives have to be taken at the bank specific level as well as broader systematic level. He also emphasized on the need for sophisticated credit-scoring models for measuring the credit risks of commercial and industrial portfolios.
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