Expression Is Freedom is a clothing company started by friends Mike Maher and Joe Caviston. As writers, both hold the first amendment sacred and push it to the limit. As music lovers, they herald expression as a vital part of the creative process. And as citizens, they believe it is what keeps us “free.”
The freedom to express one’s identity in every way possible is what makes a Democracy a Democracy and separates a free nation from oppression. As Lenny Bruce once said, “Take away the right to say “fuck” and you take away the right to say “fuck the government.”
Our Mission: To make and design clothes for anyone and everyone. We design our own clothes and create our own slogans, and we work with bands to make and design clothes/merch for them.
But not just any clothes. Our messages promote individuality and encourage people to push the limits of their freedom through slogans such as “Do You” and “Keep your coins; I want change.” Martin Luther King used to proclaim, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” That is what we stand for.
Likewise, our designs are unique and creative. $35 dollars for a t-shirt simply because it says Hollister or has an A&F logo on the front won’t cut it anymore. We offer custom designs for individuals and bands alike at affordable costs. Our clothes enable you to express yourself because, after all, Expression is Freedom!
ex•pres•sion - the quality or power of expressing an attitude, emotion, etc.: a face that lacks expression; to read with expression.

free•dom - exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc. the power to determine action without restraint. Ease or facility of movement or action: to enjoy the freedom of living in the country.
BANDS: Contact us for rates and deals. Need a design? We’ll do it. Have a design? We’ll make it.

Individuals: Have an idea for a shirt? Shoot us a message.

Our online store will be up and running shortly, but until then just message us for anything you want/need.

ExpressionIsFreedom@yahoo.com

Yuengling and Son Brewing: Located in Pottsville, PA, Yuengling is America’s oldest brewery and has been around since 1829. It boasts what it considers the best brewery tours in America, and offers a unique history of how the brewery survived during the Prohibition era. Go all the way back to when beer was distributed in horse-drawn wagons and be brought right back up through the current process.

Barley Creek Brewing Company: Located in Tannersville, PA, Barley Creek Brewing Company opened in 1995 and offer seven of their own microbrews. From Antler Brown Ale to their Rescue IPA (India Pale Ale), they have a wide variety to sample for different beer tasters. Their brewery operates within their Restaurant and Pub, so food, draught beer and packs/cases are available on site at the best price around.

The Lion Brewery: Built in 1905 and located in Wilkes-Barre, PA, the Lion Brewery merges what they refer to as state-of-the-art brewing technology with rustic architecture. Their beers have been featured at The Great American Beer Festival and the World Beer Championships in past years, and they too have their own history about surviving Prohibition, producing what are referred to as “cereal beers.” Despite being a Pennsylvania microbrewery, their products can be found as far away as Oklahoma and Virginia.

Yards Brewing Company: Located in Philadelphia, PA, since 1994, the Yards Brewing Company produces six beers year-round and two beers seasonally. Their beer can be found as far north as Connecticut and as far south as Virginia, and their Philadelphia Pale Ale was rated by the New York Times as one of the best Pale Ales in the country. Since 2003, they have featured what are called “Ales of the Revolution,” which are based on the original recipes of Ben Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson.

Straub Brewery: Located in Saint Marys, PA, and founded in the late 1800s, the Straub Brewery may not wow you in the way a Yuengling or Coors Light Tour would, but is still a must see because it is America’s smallest brewery. Their Straub Beer and Straub Light Beer have been made the same way for over 125 years now, and feature fresh mountain water from the Laurel Run Resevoir.

Flashing images, music, auto-play videos, and other effects may sound and look exciting, but they often just get in the way and are detrimental to the quality of your website and its design. Just as your site should be designed for search engines to scan it, it should also do the same thing for readers. Short, indented (or listed) paragraphs with frequent break points to make it easier to scan and read, not to mention increasing its visual appeal.

Don’t understand? Copy and paste this entire article into a word document, delete all indentations and paragraph breaks, and then ask yourself: “Would I waste my time reading that?” Exactly, you wouldn’t, and neither will someone visiting your website.
Once you have your website designed in an effective manner, your next step is making sure you have the right content on there. Your quality design and organization will go for naught if you don’t keep your target audience in mind. Five paragraphs and five hundred words about mountain bikes won’t do much to bring people to your restaurant (or other small business, assuming that’s why you’re making the website). Stay relevant and identify your audience, but also keep your message universal. Avoiding slang and jargon is a good initial way to keep your content universal and optimized.

Most small business websites will use static pages (pages that need to be manually changed or updated), and it is important to keep the pages up to date. If a potential customer visits your site and sees information dated two weeks ago, he/she probably won’t stick around very long to see what else your site has to offer. Make sure that you are committed to keeping your site updated or have someone reliable in place to update it for you.

For example, a quick visit to www.burkestavernpa.com is a perfect guide to what the small business owner does not want to do. Not only is the homepage of the site unattractive and largely useless, but also the last update was over six months ago. This leaves the prices, product listings, menu, newsletter and promotions incredibly outdated. A “Happy Valentine’s Day” message doesn’t do much for small business in August.

Remember, the most important thing is making your small business web design attractive to search engines. SEO is the best way to increase traffic to your site, which is the first step in the right direction. If your site has a high SEO ranking, it’s already doing a lot of things right.

It just doesn’t make any sense. Melky Cabrera is batting .244, and Robinson Cano is riding a hot streak to a meager .263 average. In fact, Johnny Damon and Alex Rodriguez are the only starters with respectable averages over the .300 mark. Their ace is on the DL until September at the earliest, while their All Star left fielder may not return at all (his replacement, Brett Gardner, is hitting a less than respectable .161). Jorge Posada is on the DL, and will either join the team’s crowded first basemen/DH room or call it a season with surgery.

Their makeshift rotation consists of Darrell Rasner and his near-5.00 ERA and the banished boozing brawler Sidney Ponson in the fourth and fifth spots and the over-forty duo of Pettitte and Mussina on the front end. And their starter with the best numbers, Joba Chamberlin, only has two wins because of run support. The bullpen is made up of journeyman like Kyle Farnsworth and Latroy Hawkins and youngsters such as Edwar Ramirez and Jose Veras. So, I’ll say it again: how the heck does this team keep winning. They’ve won nine in a row at home and five in a row overall with nothing but smoke, mirrors, crutches and mustaches. Or have they?

Mike Mussina is pitching like he has an Orioles uniform on, and Andy Pettitte is pitching like he has an, err, Yankees uniform on (the first time around), with 11 and 12 wins, respectively. Mariano Rivera has been borderline untouchable, shortening games to eight innings like the Rivera of old. The starters (minus Darrell Rasner) have stepped up and kept them in games, while the bullpen seems to only give up runs when it doesn’t matter, locking things up in tight games.

The hitting, likewise, seems to come when it’s needed the most. A .260 average doesn’t seem to matter when all of your hits seem to come with runners in scoring position. Case in point: Bobby Abreu is hitting .277 with only 11 home runs, but he leads the team in RBI with 64. I’ll say that again, Bobby Abreu, on a team with Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi and their 40-plus home runs, leads this team in RBI.
Right now, Major League Baseball should make a tape of how the Yankees are playing and send it to little league and high school teams everywhere on how to play the game. That’s right, old cliché alert: good pitching and timely hitting. I hate resulting to using that analysis but (to use another shameless cliché) it is what it is. It’s the only logical explanation to how this team is winning. The numbers just aren’t there to prove otherwise. They’re pitching well enough and hitting (only) when they need to.

As a Red Sox fan, this scares me. To think that this team is riddled with injuries and not batting up to potential and still winning games with seemingly relative ease is not a thought that comforts me at night. The only thing that could make this worse right now is if Richie Sexson can manage a typical Yankee career resurrection that seems to occur all to often with players that other teams give up on and the Yankees pick up.
With the Red Sox making road games look like the Iditarod, thank goodness the upcoming series is at Fenway Park. Red Sox fans will look to welcome back David Ortiz and hopefully to welcome back the Yankees of June.

I braved the crowds of hardcore comic book fans and batman enthusiasts and went to see The Dark Knight yesterday eve on its opening night. I knew that a new batman movie combined with the tragic, shameless hype of Heath Ledger would call for a large crowd, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I showed up half an hour early (mostly by chance), and found that three of the times were already sold out for the show. Luckily, the one I was there for was not one of them. I was meeting a friend of mine there, and since he wasn’t there yet, I decided it would be a good idea to buy both tickets right then. Good call. The couple behind me bought the last two tickets to that time slot.

When my friend showed up, we went inside and found hordes of people lined up and roped off waiting to get into the theater. We cautiously grazed the place like confused cattle, eventually finding ourselves near the back of one of the lines. As we stood there waiting, we saw strange groups of people only to be rivaled by a Star Wars convention. Grown men wearing batman shirts and utility belts, a group of girls wearing capes. I stood there in my cargo shorts and Fairmont T-shirt thinking, “What the heck did I get myself into?”

The doors opened, the line finally moved, and I was on my way inside to be more comfortable. Or so I thought. When the smoke cleared, I found myself front and center in the first row of the theater. As I stared practically straight up, I said out to loud to anyone who was listening, “Why do they even make these seats?” My neck is so strained that even now, the morning after, I’m lying on my back holding my laptop in the air while writing this because I can’t look down. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you get the point: the seats stunk.

I got over the seats pretty quickly, though, as the movie was nothing short of fantastic. I admit, I was pretty skeptical coming in, especially after the way it was promoted with trailers of nothing but Heath Ledger. I knew he was going to posthumously win an Oscar regardless of how well he acted, but I have to say, it’s going to be well deserved. I’d say he would be a lock to win one even if he was still alive. He was deliciously dark as the joker, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but he blew Jack Nicholson out of the water. Christian Bale was equally first-rate, and Michael Caine was his usual flawless Michael Caine. Actually, pretty much all of the actors were flawless. Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, everyone. The movie was even void of the Hollywood cheesiness that has become all-too-common these days (see Hancock for a most recent example).

I’ll spare you all the actual review of the movie, as it is something you really should see for yourself. I’m probably going to see it again, hopefully from a better seat. I think I may go to a matinee.

The problem is that the Eagles don’t seem to learn their lessons. Clemons is replacing the last big-name defensive end they signed in free agency. Spikes isn’t the first veteran linebacker to be surprisingly let go (Jeremiah Trotter, twice). As for Sheppard, the last guy who showed up to training camp unhappy was named Terrell Owens. You may have heard of him.

Every football fan with access to a television, newspaper, or radio knows of the Lito Sheppard situation: Asante Samuel is the new hire who shows up to work and finds out the guy he is replacing hasn’t been fired yet. What many fans may not know is the names of these young Eagles linebackers.

Long gone are the glory days of William Thomas, Bill Romanowski and Seth Joyner. But also long gone are the forgettable names of Barry Gardner, Mark Simoneau and, yes, Levon Kirkland. Okay, so Kirkland was only with the Eagles for a year in 2002 at the end of his career, but it was still fun to watch him in pass coverage when teams threw on first or second down.

On July 21, the Eagles will roll into training camp with a starting linebacker corps of Omar Gaither (WILL), Stewart Bradley (MIKE) and Chris Gocong (SAM). Gocong started at SAM last year and finished with a solid 92 tackles, gaining more confidence from the coaching staff every week. Gaither, despite a rocky start, finished the year with an eye-opening 170 tackles at middle linebacker. With Gaither moving back over to the weak side to replace Spikes, Bradley will take over this season in the middle. This won’t be Bradley’s first rodeo, however, as he started a game in the middle last year. You may not remember that start, but I bet Drew Brees does. In his first start on December 23, Bradley sacked Brees and intercepted one of his passes.

This defense has every chance to be an exclamation point for the Eagles this season. However, it has an equal chance at being a big question mark for them. Brian Dawkins is going to be Brian Dawkins, even if he is a little bit older now. A solid defensive line is returning three of its four starters, and Clemons will surpass Kearse by leaps and bounds if he can merely find his way to the field. The variable is going to be this young linebacker corps, and whether or not they step up is going to be the key to the Eagles’ season.