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15 дек 2015 : Новое видео CHEMIA
"I Love You So Much", новое видео CHEMIA, доступно для просмотра ниже. Этот трек взят из нового альбома "Let Me", выход которого состоялся 18 сентября.
11 авг 2015 Новое видео CHEMIA
3 апр 2014 Новое видео CHEMIA
16 янв 2014 Новая песня CHEMIA
25 сен 2013 Два новых видео CHEMIA
http://www.chemiasound.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chemiasound
There are outrageous, improbable band stories and then there is the story of Chemia, unquestionably the very best modern rock combo produced in Vancouver by way of Warsaw you will ever hear and a group so primed for global stardom that it’s almost eerie. Except that it’s actually kind of cool.
Our story begins in early 2011 when Chemia founder, guitarist/songwriter Wojtek Balczun finds himself on a business trip to B.C. There he meets Marc LaFrance, a musician and producer with a sterling and very extensive CV (see Bachman & Turner, Alice Cooper, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, Loverboy, the Scorpions, the Cult et al).
Long story short, the pair get to talking – about the industry, about Chemia’s thoroughly righteous, totally heavy yet stalwartly melodic rock – and before you know it, plans are hatched. Big plans... of the “Yeah, we Chemia members live in Poland but let’s decamp to Canada to record an album in English” variety. An EP, 2012’s In the Eye is soon forthcoming.
By November 2012, Chemia – just two years old - is ensconced in Vancouver’s Warehouse Studio, LaFrance behind the console, where the gargantuan, scorching The One Inside album is confidently nailed. Final mixes happen in January 2013, and by February, Grammy-winning engineer Ted Jensen (Alice in Chains, Green Day, Sigur Rós, Dave Matthews Band, Muse) has completed mastering.
So blistering yet accessible is Chemia’s sound that a Who’s Who of Canadian business talent - marketing wiz Larry Wanagas (the Trews, k.d. lang) and booking agent Ralph James (Nickelback, Billy Talent) – immediately line up behind producer/manager LaFrance, thus helping to ensure the disc wallops as many heads as possible.
This would all be something of a Cinderella story if the members of Chemia –Balczun plus vocalist Lukasz Drapała, guitarist Maciek Mąka, keyboardist Rafal Stępień, bassist Krzysiek Jaworski and drummer Adam Kram - hadn’t busted their humps to unleash The One Inside. Also, if Cinderella stories weren’t so lame.
As Balczun notes, although The One Inside is actually Chemia’s second full-length record (O2 dropped in 2011) it is, for all practical purposes, their debut. It is also a snapshot of a completely unique, ridiculously gifted rock band with all the pieces in place just as the planets are about to align.
“This new record represents us 100 percent. The first album had a slightly different lineup – a different singer and guitarist – plus a different style. So for us The One Inside is our first album,” he says.
The first single and video from this first-of-sorts album - the pounding, propulsive, guitar-goosed corker ‘Bondage of Love’ - is pretty much guaranteed to blow Chemia wide open at radio and beyond.
“We are absolutely determined to do anything necessary to make this work. Sometimes you have to do risky things – I’ve done that all my life,” Balczun says, confirming that Chemia has played multiple major European festivals, sharing stages (and kicking ass) with Guns N’ Roses, Paul Rodgers, Motörhead, 3 Doors Down and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
He continues: “Chemia is unusual. We worked very hard on this album and we’re almost finished writing the next one. I am composing music every day, trying to create new ideas and new songs. This band has such strong potential. I know the competition in North American is huge but I do believe we will achieve success.”
Though Chemia is as cohesive a unit as any six individuals can be – their name isn’t “Chemistry” for nothing - Balczun allows that he and singer Drapała handle the lion’s share of writing.
“Our formula usually works like this: I am responsible for the first, main music idea which I will usually work out on the guitar. Then I take that idea to Lukasz and he’ll generally develop the melody, then we take the idea to the band and it grows from there through rehearsals.”
And while he admits the group took some flak for singing in English, it is, he says, the way of the world. “It’s essential to open ourselves up to a wider audience,” Balczun offers. “Lots of people in Poland speak English. Plus lots of famous bands from Scandinavia, Germany, France and Spain sing in English.”
Indeed they do, which is not to say there isn’t a thriving and highly diverse music scene back in the old country. Balczun name-checks a couple of notables, namely Gdańsk death metal brawlers Behemoth and Warsaw prog-rockers Riverside. Yet those examples only serve to underscore just how matchless – borderless, really - the music of Chemia is.
Take the smouldering, epic song ‘Ego’ from the new album, which manages to slyly conjure post-grunge Soundgarden but about 50 times heavier. Lest anyone try and pigeonhole our guys, check out the creeping ‘Sweet’ which spins on the thick, almost militarist thud of Kram’s powerhouse drumming. Elsewhere, particularly the almost-ballad ‘Stalker,’ guitarists Mąka and Balczun summon shimmering Zeppelin-stained classic rock riffage behind Drapała’s soaring voice.
“The response we’ve been getting to our music all over the world has been absolutely fantastic,” Balczun enthuses. “People just seem to get it. And it feels as though we are on the right track. We are hopeful that we can take our music to the world.”
Only a fool would bet against them.
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FURTHER CERTIFICATION SUCCESS FOR QUANG TRI SMALLHOLDERS
(19:51:50 PM 18/11/2015)
(Tinmoitruong.vn) - More than 500 smallholders are now experiencing the benefits of FSC certification, as a group certification project supported by WWF and IKEA continues to go from strength to strength.
>> WWF’s ‘Most Wanted’ List Highlights 10 of the Most Widely Traded Endangered Species in the Markets of the Golden Triangle >> US, Vietnam strengthen cooperation in wildlife protection >> Thua Thien Hue Province: VND 2 billion to strengthen capacity to respond to climate change >> Strengthening of institutional capacities of air quality management >> Successful Vietnamese Men Rely on Strength of Will
Auditors have issued the Association of Quang Tri Smallholder Forest Certification Groups with a new five-year certificate for 2015-20. It covers a total of 1,393 hectares of acacia plantations belonging to 517 smallholders in Quang Tri province, central Vietnam.
The group certification model pioneered in Quang Tri reduces the financial and administrative burden of obtaining certification for smallholders. The first group certificate was issued in 2010, covering 118 households and 316 hectares of plantations. The Quang Tri group has since grown to include 30 sub-associations encompassing 51 villages.
FSC-certified wood is in demand in Vietnam. The country has a big furniture export industry but the markets it supplies, particularly in Europe, are increasingly demanding FSC certification. With limited FSC supply within the country, many manufacturers have to import certified wood from abroad. FSC timber in Vietnam currently fetches around 15-20 per cent more than non-certified wood – and by selling directly to factories as an association, rather than through traders, Quang Tri smallholders can further boost their income.
Le Bien Hoa is one of the many smallholders to have benefited from the programme. Having participated in the original group certification in 2010, he admits that he knew little about forest certification before the project began. Negotiating with buyers and following the FSC standard was initially quite confusing, and he still remembers the sense of shock that group members felt when they first sold their certified wood.
“For a poor farmer, of course the economic benefit is always the first priority,” he says. “But after a few year participating in the project with several training programmes, villagers realized there were other important social and environmental impacts. Now, with improved knowledge and skills, farmers understand how to do their forestry business in a sustainable way. Livelihoods are improved and enhanced, and people feel more responsible for the living environment around them.”
Group members have made a number of improvements in the way they manage their plantations. While acacia is often harvested after just 4-6 years, Quang Tri members have extended the rotation period to 9-11 years to produce better-quality timber for furniture manufacturing. Native species are planted alongside the acacia, particularly in buffer zones around rivers, streams and lakes, which supports biodiversity and natural ecological cycles. Controls around both planting and harvesting – such as limiting clear-cuts and avoiding burning vegetation – help to improve soil quality and prevent erosion.
WWF has provided ongoing training and support to help smallholders improve their forest management practices and to strengthen their business model. IKEA, the Swedish furniture giant, has provided financial support to the programme as part of its commitment to increasing the supply of FSC-certified timber in key producer countries. IKEA’s local suppliers such as Scansia Pacific Company are important customers for the Quang Tri smallholders.
Scansia Pacific also sources from two larger Vietnamese plantation companies which have also just achieved FSC certification, with advice and support from WWF. Trieu Hai has successfully passed its FSC audit for 5,228 hectares – 3,661 hectares of acacia, 1,128 hectares of pine and a 438 buffer zone/green belt. Meanwhile, Road No.9 achieved certification for 4,870 hectares.
Vietnam’s national forest strategy aims to certify 30 per cent of the country’s 4.48 million hectares of production forests by 2020.
“Reaching this goal is a tall order, but the latest developments show that successful models exist that can enable producers to meet the growing demand for certified timber,” says Nguyen Vu from WWF-Vietnam. “The success of Quang Tri’s smallholders is particularly encouraging, as smallholders manage the vast majority of Vietnam’s 2.5 million hectares of plantation forests.”
Local government and farmers in the neighbouring provinces of Thua Thien Hue and Quang Nam are keen to follow Quang Tri’s successful model and to pursue FSC certification. Farmers and government officials from Yen Bai and Bac Kan provinces in northern Vietnam have also visited the project with a view to replicating it. WWF is in discussions with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on how to support this.
Nguyen Thai Binh, WWF-Vietnam
Tags: WWF, IKEA , continues t, strength , strength
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VIETNAM: New Study Offers Pathways To Climate-Smart Transport (17/09/2019)
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Winners of TRAFFIC’s sustainable traditional medicine competition announced (22/06/2019)
Hanoi mobilizes resources to improve the city’s air quality (28/11/2018)
Accelerating the implementation of the Paris Agreement in Viet Nam through joint national and international efforts (07/11/2018)
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(Tinmoitruong.vn) - Article 87 of the Environmental Protection Act 2014 regulated the recovery, processing of waste products to comply with the decision of the Prime Minister. To ensure synchronism and consistency of the legal system, Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment is reviewing and revising the guiding documents to implement this content.
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Contribution of household air pollution to ambient air pollution in Ghana: using available evidence to prioritize future action
Health Effects Institute
A new report released by the Health Effects Institute synthesizing nine research and policy studies conducted in Ghana finds that household air pollution is a significant contributor to fine particle outdoor air pollution in Ghana. The analysis, Contribution of Household Air Pollution to Ambient Air Pollution in Ghana, goes on to note that the average level of fine particle pollution (PM2.5) in Ghana (35 µg/m3) is more than three-fold higher than the World Health Organization (WHO) outdoor Air Quality Guideline (10 µg/m3 ) for healthy air. The analysis, conducted by the HEI Ghana Working Group (made up of scientists from Ghana, Canada, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States), reported that household air pollution from the burning of solid fuels (i.e., wood, coal, charcoal, and other biomass) for cooking contributes to nearly 10,000 deaths each year in Ghana.
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Magazine | Music | london
FRESH FROM FIRE IN THE BOOTH, MEET ISAIAH DREADS
Written by Johny Chhetri
08 Friday 08th April 2016
Releasing two mixtapes last year and blasting into 2016 with a red hot Fire In The Booth session, it's fair to say that Dorset-via-Kent-via-London rapper and producer Isaiah Dreads is wasting no time in establishing himself. We chatted to him about his countryside roots, early influences and forthcoming plans...
For those who don't already know, please introduce yourself!
My name's Isaiah Dreads. I’m 18 and from Dorset, a rapper/producer making grime and hip hop music.
Your Twitter seems to be blowing up with praise and collaboration offers, your mixtapes are getting all the right attention and you're still a teenager; how are you handling the pressure (if any)?
I never seem to feel any pressure whilst doing what I do. If people are enjoying what I’m doing then I should just carry on having fun and hopefully it continues. As long as I feel myself improving in some area of music then I'll be happy.
There are a lot of influences in your music that just blend so well, were you quite nervous about how your music would be received? Or were you confident from the get-go?
I grew up on so many different styles of music and to this I day I listen to all genres, I think that’s why I like to include so many different things into my music. I’m never really worried about what people think. I do make music for people to enjoy but at the same time as long as I’m having fun thats all that matters. The reason I’ve always loved making music is because I find it fun. If 9 people hated my music but 1 person really loved it I’d put all my effort into making it for that person. I’m going to do this regardless.
You're billed from Dorset, London and Kent. How has each of these places helped contribute to your sound?
I think growing up in Dorset allowed me to see a side of things differently. I grew up watching Channel U which was mostly London grime, I loved it and still do but when it came to writing lyrics I couldn't rap about the same things they were rapping about because I wasn't around that. I think it’s given me some benefits though to tell things from my side. As for Kent and London, being anywhere new inspires me to just write and record so they've definitely helped especially because I record my music in Kent.
How was 2015 for you, you seemed to put out quite a lot of material?
I feel like 2015 has been a great year for me although its flown by. I’ve written and recorded so many things, I performed loads and put out 2 mixtapes, so I’m really happy with that. Everyone seems to be enjoying my music too, so I love that.
Where would you be if you never went forward with your music? Or did you always feel like music was your calling?
I’ve thought about this before. I honestly don't know what I would have done if I didn't do music. My brother first took me to a studio when I was 9 years old, I was writing a couple of years before that as well. I’ve just always wanted this so bad, I never really put an amazing amount of effort into school either because this is all I wanted to do but I also loved drama when I was young so I might have tried to go down that route more seriously if I didn't do music.
Describe a day in the life of Isaiah Dreads (in 140 characters)
I wake up in the morning, check my phone and then get ready. I write and record, see my friends and play basketball from time to time. (135 characters!)
What's your next step(s)?
My next step is just to keep doing what I already do and try and progress in my music and as a person. I want to listen to new music and be inspired by new places. I’m feeling positive about everything coming so hopefully it all goes well.
Finally, any words for your fellow youth of today?
My only words for the youth of today would be to chase your dreams and do what ever you need to do to get where you want to be.
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Disney's Animated-to-Live-Action-Reboots-In-Progress Update (aka "Make It Stop!")
So... this news may be old in a few hours by the time you read it and there will be even more to add to the last but as of Thursday afternoon this is where things are at: we all know about Beauty and the Beast and since I posted the last casting update there have been a few additions. Let me just get those out of the way before I let you know what else is happening.
Confirmed theatrical release for March 17, 2017
(Wow - they're going to have to get a wriggle on if they're going to make that date!)
Belle - Emma Watson
Beast - Dan Stevens
Gaston - Luke Evans
Le Fou - Josh Gad
Maurice (Belle's father) - Kevin Kline
Mrs. Potts - Emma Thompson
Wardrobe - Audra McDonald
Lumiere - unknown
Cogsworth - unknown
Chip - unknown
Fifi - unknown
Asylum guy - unknown...
There's still lots of casting needed and production has got to get underway soon to allow for all the effects work that will be needed after filming. I wonder if they're using an existing castle or if they'll be constructing that from scratch too? It'd be awesome if they retained the various concept versions of Beast as the statues, like they did in the animated film.
And now on to the rest of the movies you can expect to be called fairy tales soon. We haven't had so many fantasy live action movies in production since possibly the 80's so I guess the trend was likely to return at some point. We just didn't expect them all to be done by Disney rebooting their own films!
If you follow OUABlog regularly, you also know about:
The Jungle Book which is busily in production.
The new film has cast Scarlett Johansson to voice Kaa, Christopher Walken to voice King Louie, Bill Murray to voice Baloo, Lupita Nyong'o to voice Rakcha, Ben Kingsley to voice Bagheera, and the adorable Neel Sethi as Mowgli, pictured below. (CinemaBlend)
And you also know about Dumbo (O.M.G.)
And you've probably heard about Mulan (which has been the big news this week - I think that could be good but they're going to have to work hard to keep it PG and still good). There is a chance this will become even more fairy tale - it'll be either that or go more historical, which I don't think is their demographic.
Fan made poster by Thomas Kurniawan
But did you know they're also redoing Pete's Dragon (which might actually be a good thing) with a writer known for his gritty film themes.
"...they will reinvent the core story of a venerable Disney family film. It will not be a musical and at this point Lowery is just engaged as writer. The original 1977Pete’s Dragon mixed an animated fire-breather with a live-action cast... with Sean Marshall playing the orphan boy who comes to a town with his magical dragon, his abusive adoptive parents in hot pursuit." (Deadline)
Principal photography has begun on the David Lawry (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) re-imagining of Disney’s 1977 classic Pete’s Dragon. Set for a 2016 release, the film has found it’s fantasy setting informer Middle Earth New Zealand, instead of just green screens (thank goodness).
The film stars newcomer Oakes Fegley as 10 year-old Pete who has a dragon friend named Elliott who can become invisible. Elliot will be brought to life by Weta Digital, the Wellington-based digital visual effects company that did the VFX for the Hobbit and Planet of the Apes will animate the dragon. So does this make Elliott the dragon Smaug’s distance cousin?
Bryce Dallas Howard is set to co-star as Grace, the park ranger who discovers Pete and his dragon. The story will deviate from the original family film but intends to keep it’s theme at the core. Robert Redford is also attached as Grace’s father. Their characters, while not the same as the original’s, will be very close as it seems that Grace is a variation of Helen Reddy’s role and Redford’s will be similar to Mickey Rooney’s. Wes Bentley and recently announced Karl Urban, will also be featured as brothers and Oona Laurence will play a young girl who befriends Pete. (SassyMamainLA -2-12-15)
And today's (Thursday) announcement: Winnie the Pooh. Live Action Winnie the Pooh.
The focus will be Christopher Robin as an adult, which brings him back to A.A. Milne’s famous bear and the Hundred Acre Wood. (Deadline)
Artist sadly unknown - I feel you bear!
I wouldn't be surprised to see Aladdin announced soon or perhaps Pocahontas (which Disney made into a fairy tale fantasy of their own).
Let's just get it over with and announce a live action Frozen already.
NOTE: The Little Mermaid live action film currently in development/production (it's all very secretive) is NOT Disney but will be based on the original Hans Christian Andersen story and directed by Sofia Coppola.
Aside: in response to the crazy trend, Saturday Night Live created a live action Bambi trailer with Dwayne johnson, which you can see HERE. (Adult content - not for kids.)
PS: I can't wait to see the live action Fantasia*.
*I could not find the sarcastic font - if anyone can locate it, please let me know. I may have a lot of use for it in the coming months.
Posted by Gypsy Thornton at 3.4.15 Labels: Beauty and the Beast, Disney, jungle book, live action
Adam Hoffman April 3, 2015 at 3:41 AM
Well, this gives us some more movies to review if we choose to allow a little wiggle room around the word "fairy tale". The funny thing is that it's arguable that other studios actually started this trend with movies like Mirror Mirror and Jack the Giant Slayer. However, it's Disney that took the ball and ran with it like crazy. They'll also probably get the most credit for it, because they're Disney. Disney always seems to get the credit for any trend they successfully take part in.
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Disney's Animated-to-Live-Action-Reboots-In-Progre...
Review: Metalalia - "A Multimedia Fairy Tale Exper...
"Trick of the Tale" illustrated by Tomislav Tomic
"The Fool and the Fish" illustrated by Gennady Spi...
On Fools and How We Choose To See the World
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Facts about England in Elizabethan Times
Here are some key Elizabethan Era facts about England that may be of interest to some readers, educators, students, and visitors of the website.
Before reading about Elizabethan era, it would be a good idea to know about the origin of Tudor dynasty, of which Queen Elizabeth was the last monarh, and the infamous Henry Viii and his six wives.
Henry Vii with Henry Viii
Elizabethan theatre facts
William Shakespeare lived in the Elizabethan Era of England. For some who are not familiar with Shakespeare, he was an English playwright and poet considered to be the greatest of all writers in the English medium and in the literature of the West.
During the Elizabethan times, there were no devices like television, electricity, computers, mobile and landline phones, radio, car, and movie cinemas. For entertainment needs, either they went to the theatres or to church events.
England architecture in Elizabethan era was very famous from 1500s to 1600s. The architects used a single key plan that was called E-plan. A long gallery was situated on the upper section of the major hall and was intended for entertainment, exercises, gallery of collected portraits, and other family purposes.
Elizabethan Food Facts
Food choices in these times were usually spiced up with garlic, cinnamon, cloves, pepper, galingale, and ginger. However, Elizabethan people indulged in eggs since it was used to prepare foods like pancakes, omelets, and fritters. Eggs were also included in making stew and sauces.
At this time also, the people were still ignorant about germs. They thought of bad smells as the only culprits for diseases to spread. So, they only resolved such sanitary and health issues by getting rid of the foul smell. Small garlands of flowers, herbs, and other sweet fragrances were usually carried by women to fight this off.
Elizabethan Fact about education
Only the boys were allowed to attend formal education; girls were not pushed to do so.
Facts about clothing
But both women and men during the Elizabethan period wore their collars very high, influenced by the Spanish fashion. Using purple clothes was also a symbol of royalty. As for the hair, recipes for hair bleach were strange components like urine. Surprisingly, real hair was harder to maintain than wigs.
Crime and punishment fact
Punishment for every crime was harsh. For women-gossips, they were placed in a harsh cage called brank, wherein your head and arms were held by a sharpened metal band that exactly fitted into the mouth. Any tongue movement damaged the tongue.
Afterwards, the woman was paraded and whipped in the streets by an official. Guilty robbers were handed down a death order. There was also another form of punishment called amputation saw. Harsher than the use of axe, the saw was much slower causing more pain to the criminal.
Did you know that it would cost your life to visit a dentist during this time? Death from dental visits was due to loss of blood and intolerable pain from traditional instruments used like stone, coral, and brick.
Another fact about Elizabethan times is Queen Elizabeth was regarded as virgin queen since she never got married. She frequently visited theatres to witness individuals pinned to death.
More Info On- Elizabethan Era Religion, Clothing Styles of Different Classes, Theatre-History
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posted 17 Feb 2013, 11:53 by Matthew Ryan
Coralstown-Kinnegad 4-8 Garrycastle 1-7
Garrycastle had their first outing of the year on Sunday last in Kinnegad and came away empty-handed against a strong home team. Kinnegad is one of four senior clubs in this very competitive division and are intent on regaining their place in the top division. They were sharper all over the field and even when playing against the wind in the first half they created the better openings. They notched an early goal and followed with a second five minutes later. Garrycastle have been training hard indoors and on artificial surfaces over the past few weeks but this was their first action on grass and it took them a long time to settle. They were lucky to trail by just a point – 2-2 to 1-4 – at half time but in fairness they improved as the second half wore on. By that stage, however, the home team had scored another 1-4 to effectively secure the points. The introduction of a few substitutions injected more urgency in Garrycastle’s play and they added three points, but another Kinnegad goal cancelled these out.
Garrycastle’s best players were John O’Shaughnessy and Eoin Monaghan, while several others improved after a bad start. There are several tough games ahead in this division and lots of opportunities for players to stake claims for starting places.
TEAM: Padraig Cosgrove, Gary Mullery, Sean Brennan, Conor Harrington, Anthony Larkin, John O’Shaughnessy, Matthew Guiheen, Gary Dolan, Aidan Browne, Neill Rattigan (1-1), James Duignan (0-3, 2 frees), Ciaran O’Neill (0-1), Eoin Monaghan (0-1), Noel Galvin, Paul Mulvihill (0-1).
Subs: Jack Donohue (for Mullery), Robbie Fox (for O’Neill), Peadar Mulvihill (for Paul Mulvihill), David Broughan (for Larkin), Colman Gantley (for Rattigan), Ronan Donohue, Anthony Duignan, Alan Daly, Johnny McGuire, Sean Carey, Brian Carty, Shane Carr, Enda Keena, Paul Gunning.
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Royal Alexandra & Albert School, Reigate, Surrey RH2 0TD
development@gatton-park.org.uk
Headmaster's Message
Gatton Park & Gatton Hall
WE PROVIDE FREE BOARDING PLACES FOR CHILDREN WITH DIFFICULT HOME CIRCUMSTANCES
The children in photos on this website are models.
PLACES FOR
£470k
President: The Duchess of Gloucester
Chairman's Welcome
Welcome to the website for the Foundation of the Royal Alexandra and Albert School. The core purpose of the Foundation is to accommodate and educate ‘Foundationers’. These are pupils who would benefit from a boarding education and whose parents or guardians are unable to afford such boarding charges. Generally, Foundationers have lost one or both parents, have a chronically ill parent, have been abandoned or abused or the parent can no longer meet their daily needs. Approximately 12% of the school’s boarding places are reserved for Foundationers.
Bursaries are given to fund or part fund boarding charges for Foundationers. All awards are means tested and range from full costs to more modest amounts, depending upon the circumstances of the child. Most of the Foundation’s awards are made in conjunction with other trusts and benevolent funds and we are grateful for the continuing support from so many institutions, in particular Royal National Children’s Foundation, Reedham Trust, Buttle UK, Garfield Weston, Textile Industry Children’s Trust, Emmott Foundation, Lloyd Foundation, BMTA, Thornton-Smith, Plevins Trust, and Anonymous Donors. A number of pupils’ boarding charges are funded wholly or partly by Local Education Authorities.
The Foundation strives to get the best possible outcomes for Foundationers and to this end, there is an ongoing programme to develop and enhance the boarding and learning environment at the Royal Alexandra and Albert School. There is also a commitment to ensure the Foundation can maintain the level of financial support it provides to Foundationers.
This website gives an overview of the history of the Foundation, its work, plans for the future and how you can help.
The Royal Alexandra & Albert School
The school can trace its origins back to 1758 when a group of city gentlemen met and decided to collect up enough money to create a boarding school for twenty orphan boys. This opened in 1760 and twenty girls joined the School a couple of years later.
Gatton Park with its three lakes, serpentine and 260 acres of parkland provides the ideal setting for our school. Our purpose-built classrooms provide first class facilities for study. Purpose-build boarding houses provide comfortable, modern accommodation for Primary, Lower Secondary, and upper Secondary pupils.
Predominantly a boarding school, we provide continuity of education from seven to eighteen years. Unusually, we are able to provide the very best of boarding education at reasonable fees. As a state school, we are only able to admit children from UK or EU families.
Aged 7-18
1000 pupils
450 boarders
80 funded
Provide a safe place to learn
Offer multiple extra curricular activities
Give children a great start in life
Foster happy, confident individuals
Some of our funded children
67% FOUNDATION FUNDED
Fully funded with a 33% contribution from Buttle UK
Fully funded with a 33% contribution from RNCF
Fully funded with a 54% contribution from SpringBoard
It’s been a joy to watch her grow and thrive at the school
His confidence and readiness to move on is very much down to the sound experience he’s had at RAA
Her time at this school has been one of the happiest periods of her life
They really care about me
I like boarding and that you stay with your friends more
I have been most impressed with your attention to pastoral care and child welfare”
How You Can Support Our Children
We exist because of the generous support of Individuals, Organisations and Charities who help us achieve our ambitious goal of fully funding boarding places for 80 children every year. If you want to help us continue to offer these amazing opportunities to children, then please contribute in any way you can:
You can sponsor a child - by monthly or annual donations to a child
Or you can pay for a child's music or riding lessons
Support our annual fund - this year we are raising money for a play area for junior boarders.
Support a major project - we are currently raising capital for the refurbishment of Gatton Hall.
You can leave a legacy - and choose how you want it to be used.
For more information please email development@gatton-park.org.uk
We welcome any individual donations, every penny of which will help the children we support gain a place at one of the best boarding schools in the country and the chance to achieve their highest potential.
Our work would not be possible without the generous support of our partners
Royal Alexandra & Albert School
Gatton Park, Reigate
RH2 0TD
www.raa-school.co.uk
GATTON PARK AND GATTON HALL
All children in the photographs on this website are models, and the use of their photograph does not mean they are Foundation pupils.
ALL MATERIAL COPYRIGHT ROYAL ALEXANDRA & ALBERT SCHOOL © 2020
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Scientists Conclude Their Oyster Strategy Paid Off
Costly Maryland oyster project pays off in pollution reductions, study finds - "$28 million spent rebuilding reefs in Harris Creek said to be removing 100,000 pounds of nitrogen annually"
So that's $280 a pound? That doesn't sound like much of a bargain to me
Using a computer model to calculate the project’s water-quality impacts, researchers from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science estimate that Harris Creek’s restored reefs are soaking up about 100,000 pounds of nitrogen annually that otherwise would be adding to the Bay’s pollution woes.
Of course, it's a computer model, where they get to pick the input parameters that feed the model.
“We’re taking a lot of pollution out of the Bay through these oysters,” said Mark Bryer, Chesapeake Bay program director for The Nature Conservancy, which funded the report along with the Oyster Recovery Partnership. “And, presuming these oysters continue to do well over time, they’ll continue to provide that benefit.”
Despite the big nitrogen number, the reefs are producing only a modest improvement in water quality in the creek, a tidal tributary of the Choptank River on the Eastern Shore. That’s because pollution is washing into the creek from the Bay almost as fast as the reefs can filter it. But this report shows the value of doing more such large-scale reef projects, Bryer said.
Over the past seven years, federal and state agencies have planted nearly 2.5 billion hatchery-spawned spat, or baby oysters, on 350 acres of restored reefs in the creek. Advocates say such large-scale undertakings are the best hope for reviving the Chesapeake’s depleted oyster population, which has dwindled to 1 or 2 percent of historic levels through decades of overharvesting, disease and pollution.
So lets compare that to what the Bay program has called the 6 most effective methods of reducing nitrogen:
Wow, from $1.50 to $8.50/ lb. Such a deal, although you might get extra for reducing phosphorus too.
I'm not saying we shouldn't save the oysters, but I'm not convinced, based on this study, that the oysters will turn out to be what saves the bay from pollution.
Labels: Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, oysters
Ace:
LOL: Anti-Free-Trade Trump's Hardball Positioning Forces Europe to Offer to Cut Its Automoblie Tariffs From 10% to Zero Percent (If the US Reciprocates)
The US only imposes 2.5% tariffs on most vehicles. Thought it imposes a much stiffer 25% tariff on light trucks. I don't know if the EU makes many of those, though.
It's almost as if refusing to play the sap for someone treating you unfairly sometimes forces them to start treating you more fairly.
Not yet tired of winning.
Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup and links.
Labels: Europe, international trade
Even More DIY Russiagate
Just can't do it the hard way this morning. Besides, there's not much that's really new here:
Mollie Hemingway: We Now Know FBI Used Clinton-Funded Research Document "To Secure A Wiretap" | Video | RealClearPolitics
“Bruce Ohr is Creating a Link for Us”
Senior FBI, DOJ Officials Knowingly Withheld Conflicts From Secret Court, Lawmakers Say | Bruce Ohr | nellie ohr | Peter Strzok
What Dark Secret Lurks Behind the Deep State Cabal Against Trump? - The Rush Limbaugh Show
Did the 'Deep State' Deep Six Pentagon's Lovinger Over Discovery of Shady Defense Department Contracts to FBI Trump Informant Stefan Halper? – Ben Weingarten
Comey Lied About Searching Clinton Emails on Sex Offender’s Laptop - Report - Sputnik International
In The Mailbox: 08.30.18 : The Other McCain brings us American Power: Gregg Jarrett, The Russia Hoax
After weeks of uncertainty, Papadopoulos decides to accept plea deal with Mueller - ABC News
Judges side with Mueller, nix Russian joint appeal bid - ABC News
Carr: Robert Mueller mum on FBI scandal in Boston | Boston Herald
Even if Trump goes on a firing spree, Mueller has a secret "parachute," expert claims - Hot Air
Mark Levin: Trump Legally In "Good Shape," Unlikely To Be Indicted Or Impeached RealClearPolitics
Rudy Giuliani Is Putting Together a ‘Counter-Report’ to Question Robert Mueller’s ‘Legitimacy’
The Case for Sessions' Resignation Grows | Roger L. Simon
Althouse: "CNN... can’t retract the story and they can’t admit they lied."
Politico: Maybe Lanny Davis doesn't belong on air any more
New Poll Shows Majority of Americans Don't Want Impeachment for Trump | Trending
President Trump Highlights Severity of CNN’s Credibility Collapse…. | The Last Refuge
Where's Trump getting the idea that Lester Holt "fudged" their interview last year on the Comey firing?
The Common Complaint of Bias in the Media (TRUE) | American Elephants
Labels: Bruce Ohr, Clinton, Donald Trump, email scandal, Jeff Sessions, Peter Strzok, Robert Mueller, Rudy Giuliani, Russia
What the Heck Was She Thinking?
I saw this on Drudge, but Stacy McCain says it better then I can, probably because he's a journalist by profession and not by avocation: Paging Captain Obvious. Pornstar astonished to find industry full of pricks.
“I didn’t expect to be treated like a piece of meat.”
So says ex-camgirl Jenny Blighe complaining about her first experience shooting a commercial porn video, asserting that there should be a #MeToo movement for women in the porn business.
Excuse me, but maybe if you don’t want “to be treated like a piece of meat,” you should avoid that line of work?
Because really, isn’t that what it’s all about? Like, it’s not as if there should be any kind of illusion here. You sign a contract to be degraded on video in return for a specified sum of money, and everything that happens to you after you sign that contract is part of the bargain. If you wish to be treated with respect, you should stay away from the, uh, “adult entertainment industry” as it is euphemistically called.
Also, what kind of woman becomes a “camgirl”? Not the good kind. And what kind of man produces porn videos? Not the good kind.
Bad men abusing bad women — throw ’em all in prison, as far as I’m concerned, but don’t act like they are entitled to my sympathy.
Maybe she should try commercial fishing. Then she could treat the fish like meat.
Wombat-socho has Rule 5 Tuesday: Happy Birthday, Mitzi! and FMJRA 2.0: Synthwave & The End of Summer up and awaiting your approval.
Labels: #MeToo, Cuties, sexual assault
It Was a Waste, But This is Just Nuts
Maine DOT denies request from PETA to put up memorial for lobsters killed in crash
The Maine Department of Transportation has denied a request from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to build a 5-foot tombstone memorial where lobsters may have died after a crash on Route 1 in Brunswick last week.
Brunswick Police say a Cozy Harbor Seafood truck, carrying nearly 70 crates of lobster, rolled over and crushed several of them.
Several lobsters or several crates?
It is because of the lobsters that were pinned under the truck that PETA wrote a letter to the Maine DOT on Wednesday asking for permission to put up a memorial.
At least PETA managed to also work some of their "naked ladies for veganism" into the fray (in a previous protest against Maine Lobsters).
“Countless sensitive crustaceans experienced an agonizing death when this truck rolled over and their bodies came crashing down onto the highway," PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman said. "PETA hopes to pay tribute to these individuals who didn't want to die with a memorial urging people to help prevent future suffering by keeping lobsters and all other animals off their plates."
The Maine DOT says they denied the request Thursday because Route 1 in Brunswick is a “controlled-access highway,” which means they prohibit signs, and in this case a tombstone, because of safety concerns.
Wombat-socho has Rule 5 Tuesday: Happy Birthday, Mitzi! up and awaiting your approval.
Labels: Cuties, lobster, Maine, nude protests, PETA
EPA Relaxes Coal Ash Pond Standards
A giant coal ash pile at Gavin coal fired power plant
And the usual suspects go ballistic. From the house organ of EPA Chesapeake Bay Program, the Bay Journal: Groups fighting for coal ash regulation balk at new rules
Power companies could soon have more flexibility in how they handle the ash that remains from a legacy of burning coal for power, but not if environmental groups have any say in the matter. Several facilities located near Chesapeake Bay rivers are in the process of closing pits where coal ash and water have comingled for decades amid changing regulations at the federal and state level.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in July finalized its first batch of significant changes to standards imposed in 2015 by the Obama administration that required companies to begin closing certain inactive coal ash storage facilities. The rollback of those rules will take effect at the end of August, though they are likely to face legal challenges.
This summer’s revisions incorporate “alternative performance standards” that the EPA or a state could use to approve a coal ash permit, such as those required to release ash-tainted water into nearby waterways.
The agency also raised allowable levels of contaminants in groundwater. Boron, an element that is considered a leading indicator of the presence of other contaminants, was removed from the list.
Coal ash settling pond at Gavin
You don't need an "indicator" if your measuring everything of concern, and in the era of the ICP-MS, there's very little excuse for doing less.
“With this rule, EPA continues its pattern of rolling back environmental protections,” said Lisa Feldt, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s vice president for environmental protection and restoration, in a statement. “There are many documented cases where groundwater has been contaminated by coal ash storage facilities, damaging waterways and potentially, drinking water.”
Coal ash storage has been the subject of heated debate in Virginia, both at public meetings about environmental permits and in the General Assembly. Legislators passed a bill this year that requires companies with coal ash pits in the Chesapeake watershed to take another step toward recycling their contents rather than allowing the ash to be permanently stored in place.
Though the bill stops short of requiring recycling, it does force companies such as Dominion Energy, which maintains nearly a dozen coal ash pits in the state, to seek proposals from recycling contractors who integrate the ash into concrete and construction materials. The companies must compile the proposed costs in a report for lawmakers to consider by the end of the year.
The measure also extended until July 1, 2019, a prohibition on new state permits that would allow facilities to close coal ash pits by permanently storing their contents in place. Pits where the removal process is under way or completed, however, may finish the closure process.
Dominion officials say they support the measure and will work with legislators to further investigate the possibility of recycling long-stored coal ash from the sites. The company’s own report at the end of 2017 concluded that recycling would be too expensive at most of the sites in the Bay watershed. It favored an option, opposed by environmentalists, to store millions of tons of coal ash in mostly unlined pits, many of them located next to the Potomac and James rivers.
I'd love to see coal fired power plants ended of ever, in due time. They're dirty, even though most of the impact can be contained to a relatively large site. Better to replace them with natural gas, and best to replace them with nuclear power. In the meantime do a good, but economical job of keeping the ones we need running.
Labels: Chesapeake Bay, coal, coal ash, pollution
Relishing More Russiagate
More on Ohr. Fox News Adam Shaw: DOJ official Bruce Ohr grilled over Trump dossier, Steele ties
While lawmakers told reporters that Ohr was being cooperative, Rep. Darrel Issa, R-Calif., said that Ohr "has a poor memory. . . . He seems to not remember a lot of details and, you know, poor memories are often claimed by people who want to stick to what they can say and not be caught in perjury," he told Fox News.
At Da Hill, House Republicans say Ohr interview escalates surveillance concerns
“Thus far, [Ohr] has done nothing but exacerbate my concerns that the FISA process has been abused,” Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), a House Judiciary Committee member, told The Hill.
Sara Carter: Bruce Ohr told Congress the FBI Knew About Bias Before Getting a FISA On Carter Page, but they all agreed with him, so 'sal good, man.' Sundance at CTH: Bruce Ohr Testifies To Closed-Door Joint Session of Congress (Oversight and Judiciary)… provides this useful graphic on the right. Reminder, the DOJ and FBI don't ride white horsed and wear white hats. Sara Carter (again): Day After Ohr’s Testimony, Congress Seeks to Question His Wife, as well they should. Funny thing, Mueller never interviewed Bruce Ohr.
Brook Singman, Fox News: GOP rep touches off firestorm with claim FBI leaked info, used stories to get FISA warrants
A source with knowledge of the testimony initially told Fox News that Moffa said FBI personnel would use media reports based on information they leaked to justify applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants, echoing Meadows. The source said Moffa, who worked with controversial former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, acknowledged this “had been a practice in the past.”
But through Caitlin Yilek at WaEx the FBI strongly denies reports on agent telling lawmakers the bureau leaked stories to obtain FISA warrants. Except of course, in the Carter Page FISA warrants, in which they used stories leaked by Steele as validation for the Steel Dossier. I guess their out here is that Steele leaked them, not the FBI.
Just in case there was any doubt White House confirms Brennan's security clearance has been revoked. Good.
IBD Editorial: Did The FBI Cover Up Evidence That China Hacked Clinton's State Dept. Emails? Yes: Peter Strzok email about Clinton emails. Stunning Report Confirms China Had Hillary’s Emails in Real Time
Next Question. Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Implicated In $84 Million Campaign Finance Scandal. But Michael Cohen paid off Stormy Daniels.
Liberal fantasy of the week: Robert Reich: If Mueller Finds Evidence Of Collusion, Trump Not Only Must Impeached — He Must Be Annulled. By way of Wombat-socho's In The Mailbox: 08.29.18,
Gene Schwimmer at the American Thinker thinks There Should Be a Trump Impeachment Vote – and Republicans Should Schedule It to make them put up or shut up. Mueller wants to continue his campaign against the lawyer client privilege: Mueller wants to review emails between Manafort, former lawyer and continues to want to beat the dead horse: Mueller’s Revenge? Special Counsel Won’t Rule Out Going After Manafort in Third Trial.
So he has some sense of shame after all? Lanny Davis says he regrets 'major mistake' about Cohen and Trump Tower meeting, or does he just regret making things worse for Cohen? Why is CNN avoiding the truth about Lanny Davis’ lies? Why does a dog lick its ball? Because it feels good!
CNN is standing by the story because it says it has at least one other source for it, and because it suspects Davis changed his story only because Cohen could face perjury charges, since he testified under oath to a Senate committee that he had no advance knowledge of the Trump Tower sitdown.
Heavens to Betsy, how can you attack one of the heroes of Watergate, just because he's publishing lies about you? Trump heightens attacks against CNN, Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein over Trump Tower story
CNN is being torn apart from within based on their being caught in a major lie and refusing to admit the mistake. Sloppy @carlbernstein, a man who lives in the past and thinks like a degenerate fool, making up story after story, is being laughed at all over the country! Fake News
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2018
David Harsanyi: If You Want To Know Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Media, Watch CNN
“We stand by our story, and are confident in our reporting of it,” the network responded. Brian Stelter, CNN’s sometimes censorious media reporter, argued that “pro-Trump web sites are claiming that the CNN story was a ‘lie,’ and that it’s been ‘debunked.’ They might want it to be ‘debunked,’ but it’s not. The critics don’t know who CNN’s sources were.”
We don’t. Does Stelter? My guess is that the second source is Davis’ assistant. Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps Davis, not only the source of the story but also Cohen’s lawyer, is lying about his initial lie. But there are other sound reasons not to trust CNN’s position.
Let’s remember this is the network that maintained it had multiple sources on the record purporting to prove that Donald Trump Jr. was involved in an email correspondence with a random person about WikiLeaks and the DNC hacking before it was released to the public. That was back in December 2017. The article turned out to be bogus. Both independent anonymous sources somehow got the same exact date wrong on the exact same email. Not once has CNN explained how this miraculous event transpired.
Let’s also remember that it was CNN that cited multiple sources confirming that former FBI director James Comey was going to tell a congressional committee under oath that Trump had lied when the president claimed that the former FBI director had told him three times that he hadn’t been under investigation. That was in June 2017. The opposite turned out to be true.
Burn the source? No way. CNN hasn’t even really corrected the piece.
Around the same time, three CNN journalists were forced to resign after mistakenly reporting that Congress was investigating a “Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.” The problem was that the reporters had relied on a single anonymous source. What if these other stories, including the Cohen scoop, also only depended on a single source? If CNN employed consistent standards, they would run out of reporters before the year was out.
There are dozens of examples of these innocent mistakes popping up on mainstream political media outlets over the past couple of years. And they always—always—skew in the same direction.
Stacy McCain in Russia! Russia! Russia!
As I’ve been saying for months, the Mueller “investigation” isn’t really an investigation, it’s a cover-up, intended to conceal or distract attention from the illegal means by which corrupt Obama administration operatives sought to sabotage the Trump campaign. As the latest revelations show, however, the so-called “mainstream” media were an integral part of this anti-Trump operation, and so you cannot expect Democrat-controlled organizations like CNN and the Washington Post to tell the public the truth about all this. If all you know is the “news” you get from CNN, you have no idea what actually went on in the manufacturing of the phony “Russian collusion” story.
The Atlantic: Avenatti 2020 Was Probably Inevitable "Donald Trump lowered the White House’s bar to entry. Stormy Daniels’s lawyer is stepping right over it." Who's coordinating the sudden loony leftist lionization of Stormy Daniels? By Monica Showalter at the American Thinker. It's the same way ants do it.
Labels: Bruce Ohr, CNN, DOJ, Donald Trump, email scandal, FBI, FISA, Hillary, John Brennan, MSM, Peter Strzok, Robert Mueller, Russia
Tennis Pro Penalized for on Court Strip Tease
Free the sports bra! U.S. Open Criticized for 'Sexist' Double Standard After Alizé Cornet Was Penalized for Briefly Taking Her Shirt Off
Alizé Cornet was penalized at the U.S. Open for quickly removing her shirt and putting it back on, a move from the Open that critics are calling sexist.
The chair umpire Christian Rask hit French player Cornet, who is ranked No. 31 in the world, with the code violation, effectively a warning in the sport, during her opening round match against Johanna Larsson on Tuesday.
Cornet’s code violation came during a scorcher in Flushing Meadows, Queens, on Tuesday. It was so sweltering at the U.S. that the heat rule was in effect, permitting players to take 10-minutes breaks to try to cool off and drink water after their second sets. Cornet was just returning from her 10-minute break when she appeared to realize her shirt was on backwards. And so Cornet, who was wearing a sports bra underneath, took it off to put back on correctly.
Thanking her 100,000 Instragam followers
Cornet was in disbelief and can be heard saying “Violation for what? Really?” in a video of the moment when the umpire stated the violation.
According to the official Women’s Tennis Association rulebook, a player is only allowed to change their clothes somewhere off of the court or during the end of a set, or during timeouts related to medical issues. Cornet changed her shirt between the second and third sets. She quickly returned to play the game after receiving the violation.
The penalty doesn’t affect the score, and Cornet ultimately lost to Larsson 6-4, 3-6, 2-6.
Critics online were quick to call out the punitive action, pointing out that male tennis players frequently take their shirts off to cope with the oppressive heat with no consequences. For instance, Novak Djovovic took his ice bath shirtless to try to cool down during their opening match on Tuesday.
I'm cool with allowing women tennis players to take off their shirts.
I just love the faces that tennis players get caught in:
Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup and links. Wombat-socho has Rule 5 Tuesday: Happy Birthday, Mitzi! up and awaiting your approval.
Labels: nude protests, tennis
The High Cost of Law Enforcement
New Report Exposes Global Warming ‘Law Enforcement for Rent’
Deep-pocketed global warming activists have been pouring big bucks into attorneys general’s offices to pay for lawyers to advance their agenda and use the powers of the law to take actions they never could achieve alone, according to a new report.
Released Wednesday by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the 56-page document dubbed “Law Enforcement for Rent” paints a damning view of the cozy relationship between environmental activists and Democratic attorneys general in several states that have pulled off an end run around the democratic process — grabbing resources they have not been able to get from lawmakers.
“This is political. We have a policymaking process. They tried it and failed,” said Christopher Horner, a fellow at the think tank who wrote the report. “So their stance is, ‘It’s not working, so we’re going to use law enforcement.’”
Horner said the tactic has given environmental activists a new avenue to increase restrictions on carbon emissions after Congress rebuffed them, the Supreme Court blocked a regulatory plan then-President Barack Obama offered, and other supportive politicians lost races at the state and national levels.
The report traces the campaign to a 2012 conference in La Jolla, California, organized by a coalition of groups supported by The Rockefeller Foundation. That conference produced a document that described how to make global warming the new tobacco:
“State attorneys general can also subpoena documents, raising the possibility that a single sympathetic state attorney general might have substantial success in bringing key internal documents.”
Several attorneys general signed on.
Read the whole thing. Not Unrelated: Judge tosses NYC lawsuit blaming oil companies for climate change
A federal judge on Thursday threw out New York City’s lawsuit against five of the world’s largest oil companies, dealing another setback to liberal jurisdictions seeking to hold the petroleum industry financially responsible for global warming.
U.S. District Court Judge John Keenan in New York dismissed the complaint against ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and ConocoPhillips seeking billions to shore up infrastructure from rising sea tides and other calamities attributed by city officials to climate change.
The judge ruled that the courtroom was not the appropriate venue for the claim.
“Climate change is a fact of life, as is not contested by defendants,” Judge Keenanwrote in a 23-page opinion. “But the serious problems caused thereby are not for the judiciary to ameliorate. Global warming and solutions thereto must be addressed by the two other branches of government.”
His comments echoed those of U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup, who threw out last month similar public-nuisance claims filed by San Francisco and Oakland, concluding that the issue was best addressed by the executive and legislative branches as well as the diplomatic community.
“Those dangers are worldwide. Their causes are worldwide. The benefits of fossil fuels are worldwide,” Judge Alsup said in his ruling. “The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case.”
And it's not only climate: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo halted an investigation into the Manhattan DA’s handling of the Harvey Weinstein case just as the law firm representing the Hollywood producer gave Cuomo’s campaign $25,000. H/T Instapundit.
The best law enforcement money can buy.
Labels: climate, crime, global warming, law enforcement
Mussels Bringing Clarity to Maryland Rivers
A single False Dark Mussel
Maryland rivers suddenly less murky after burst in mussel population
Residents along the Severn River are used to muddy, murky water with little visibility below the surface. “You don't have to go out very far before you can't see the very bottom,” said Severna Park resident Nancy Somers.
“Typically this time of the summer, boat traffic keeps it stirred up and very murky looking,” added her neighbor Mel Merritt. “And I've noticed how much clearer it is and how much easier it is to see the bottom of shallow areas.”
What's causing this new, clearer view? Scientists point to Dark False Mussels. They are filter feeders that have blossomed in underwater colonies, covering rocks, docks, pilings and the underside of boats.
False Dark Mussels coat an oyster cage in the Severn River
False Dark Mussels are an invasive species, originally native to the Gulf Coast, and related to the dreaded Zebra Mussel. Should we fear them as well?
Chesapeake Bay Foundation Senior Naturalist John Page Williams said, “They're here when conditions are right for them. I mean they're still here all the time but the population drops way down.” Williams said this shellfish population can be found exploding in the Severn and Magothy Rivers because of our very wet spring. “It's been outrageously wet,” he said.
Dark False Mussels are very small; they’re only about the size of a fingernail. But all together, by the millions, they can make a big impact.
The clarity the mussels create helps underwater grasses grow which in turn helps fish and the entire ecosystem thrive. But unlike oysters, which are larger, important players in the bay's recovery, Dark False Mussels are much less reliable. They explode in population every several years. For now, locals are loving the view, even if it's not quite the Bahamas.
“It's not a clear blue or Caribbean color but it's much closer to the river I remember from when I was growing up,” Merritt said.
I've seen similar "blooms" of filter feeding organisms that provide, for a while anyway, much clearer water, several times during my time of life in the Bay region. In particular, ten years ago or more, I recall a bloom of the sea grape, Mogula Manhattanensis, that had the visibility in our area as great as 10 ft (1 ft or less is more typical). Such respites are welcome, but don't really represent a long term improvements. The blooms inevitably fail again, and the organisms either die, or are eaten by predators, and the nutrients they have sequestered in their tissues recycled back to the water. For long term improvement we really need large areas covered with relatively stable populations of something long lived, something, like say, oysters.
Labels: Chesapeake Bay, invasive species, nutrients, sediment
Russiagate - cc: China
Two big stories for today. First, Hillary wasn't just sending her emails back and forth through an unsecured server in her bathroom and other odd places, she was unknowingly sending them all to China, thanks to a little piece of code implanted in her server. Da Caller: China Hacked Clinton’s Private Email Server:
A Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton’s private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails, two sources briefed on the matter told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Chinese firm obtained Clinton’s emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server, according to the sources, who said the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation.
The Chinese wrote code that was embedded in the server, which was kept in Clinton’s residence in upstate New York. The code generated an instant “courtesy copy” for nearly all of her emails and forwarded them to the Chinese company, according to the sources.
“When [the ICIG] did a very deep dive, they found in the actual metadata — the data which is at the header and footer of all the emails — that a copy, a ‘courtesy copy,’ was being sent to a third party and that third party was a known Chinese public company that was involved in collecting intelligence for China,” the former intelligence officer told TheDCNF.
Ace reacts: A Chinese-Owned Company Hacked Hillary Clinton's Homebrew Server Throughout Her Tenure as Secretary of State, Stealing Almost All of Her Emails; FBI Ignored. Guilty as hell, free as a bird. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air: Did China Get The Complete Set Of Hillary E-Mails After All?
This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given the amateurish nature of the Clinton home network. It seems likely that China wasn’t the only entity that would have attempted to penetrate her communications, nor the only entity that succeeded. There have already been reports that Russia attempted to hack her system, which means that the knowledge of it was more widespread abroad than it was in Washington, at least until the House Select Committee on Benghazi finally exposed Hillary’s use of a secret system to avoid oversight on her operations at the State Department.
Story #2 is Bruce Ohr testifying to the house committee. Ace: Congressmen Gaetz and Issa on Bruce Ohr's Testimony: Either He's Lying, or Glenn Simpson and Lisa Page Are Lying
They didn't say what the discrepancies were about. I know one discrepancy, which has already been widely noted by outlets not called "The Weekly Standard," is Glenn Simpson's claim he never spoke to Bruce Ohr until after the election, while records indicate them speaking at least as early as August 2016.
But as to the other discrepancies and the discrepancy with Lisa Page's claims, I don't know.
Put them all in the Congressional holding cells until you can sort it out. On Bret Baier's show last night, Congressman Meadows said there were "memory gaps" in Ohr's testimony.
Earlier in the week, an FBI Agent Told Congress That the Bureau Leaked Stories to the Press, and Would Then Use Press Write-Ups as "Independent" Sources to Justify FISA Warrants, which seems to be more ore less precisely what happened with the Steel Dossier.
An FBI special agent told Congress earlier in August that the bureau has used leaked news stories as justifications to obtain surveillance warrants against American citizens, a source familiar with the testimony tells The Daily Caller News Foundation.
During a closed-door interview with the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees on Friday, Special Agent Jonathan Moffa told congressional investigators that the FBI and Justice Department have leaked stories to the press and then used them to obtain warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
"He more or less admitted that the FBI/DOJ have previously leaked info to the press and then used stories from the press as justifications for FISA warrants," a source who took part in Moffa's interview told TheDCNF.
More or less admitted. Keep that in mind, because there's a correction/clarification to the original reporting that pushes heavily on that "more or less" admitted claim.
"Tyler Durnden" Meadows: "We've Learned NEW Information" Suggesting FBI/DOJ Leaked To Press, Used Articles To Obtain FISA Warrants but The FBI pushed back:
But an FBI official disputed the claims about Moffa’s testimony, and TheDCNF’s source is acknowledging that he did not explicitly say that the FBI has leaked information to the press that is later used to obtain FISAs.
The initial claims about Moffa’s testimony are “just not true,” the FBI official told TheDCNF.
Meadows clarified his comments in a statement to TheDCNF.“Jonathan Moffa made it clear to the committee the FBI routinely uses media reports to corroborate analytic work product,” he said. “We have emails and texts plainly showing the FBI leaks to the media, raising major red flags. If FBI executives want the American people to believe they haven’t used leaks to their advantage, they are not being honest.”
The thing is, while it may be a crime for a citizen to lie to the FBI, it is not a crime for the FBI to lie to citizens. It's just a tactic. Sara Carter: Whistleblower Exposes Key Player in FBI Russia Probe: “It was all a Set-up”. It's all there, Carter Page, Halper, Papado, and the Mysterious Mr. Mifsud. Jeff Carlson: Case of Adam Lovinger: How Security Clearances of Trump Officials Are Politicized. Allahpundit: John Brennan: Quite Frankly, I’m Not Sure That My Security Clearance Has Been Revoked. So I guess you didn't need it that badly anyway.
And speaking of perjury traps, the Dersh thinks Robert Mueller's team may try to subpoena Trump to appear before the grand jury. Not exactly a novel thought perfesssor.
Having lost "big league" with the no defense strategy, Paul Manafort's defense team is taking the novel approach of putting one on next time, which means they need another week to prepare. Law and Crime: Manafort’s Defense Hints at Major Strategy Change for Second Trial. And things that make you go hmmm: One-Time Paul Manafort Banker Robbed of iPad, Briefcase in Mysterious Overnight Break-in at His NYC Penthouse and Paul Manafort reportedly sought a plea deal with Mueller to prevent his second trial from going forward but apparently he hasn't got enough goods on Trump to get a deal.
Tom Maguire at Just One Minute on Lanny Davis
Just don't call CNN 'Fake News'. Lanny Davis - Mr. Incredible - "unintentionally misspoke" when he claimed Trump fixer Michael Cohen was a witness to Trump Sr. getting advance word of the notorious Trump Tower meeting.
Dammit, I'm fresh out of bridges to sell. Town Hall: Check Your Sources: CNN's Cohen-Russia-Trump Tower Meeting Story Just Blew Up In Their Faces Glenn Greenwald: CNN, Credibly Accused of Lying to its Audience About a Key Claim in its Blockbuster Cohen Story, Refuses to Comment
Only one of two things can be true here, and either is extremely significant: (1) CNN deliberately lied to its audience about Davis refusing to comment on the story when, in fact, Davis was one of the anonymous sources on which the CNN report depended, and CNN claimed Davis refused to comment in order to hide Davis’ identity as one of their anonymous sources; or (2) Davis is lying now to BuzzFeed when he confessed to having been one of CNN’s sources for the story.
And CNN wonders why Trump holds them up for ridicule? Via Wombat-socho's: In The Mailbox: 08.28.18, Da Tech Guy reminds us It Ain't Watergate:
Watergate centered on the illegal activities of Nixon and his aides while they were working for the government.
The Mueller investigation has focused on activities BEFORE Trump took office.
The Watergate activities included bugging the offices of political opponents and people Nixon or his cronies thought were suspicious. Nixon and his close aides also ordered investigations of activist groups and political figures, using the FBI, the CIA, and the IRS as political weapons.
The White House recording system also gave investigators evidence of a conspiracy in the conspirators’ own voices.
The scandal also resulted in the indictment of 69 people, with trials or pleas resulting in 48 being found guilty, many of whom were top Nixon officials. These included top aides John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman, former Attorneys General John Mitchell and Robert Kleindienst, White House Counsel John Dean, and myriad other government officials.
So far, the Mueller investigation has indicted four former Trump advisers, 26 Russian nationals, three Russian companies, one California man, and one London-based lawyer.
That includes one, repeat, one Trump administration official: National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
So far, the only possible link to President Trump is whether he paid hush money to two hookers. Remember another president who actually had sex in the Oval Office?
Stormy doing well by doing good
John Sexton: Trump Seeks Dismissal Of Stormy Daniels’ Lawsuit Citing Free Speech
You’re probably aware that Stormy Daniels filed a defamation lawsuit against President Trump back in April. Yesterday, attorneys representing President Trump sought to have that lawsuit dismissed on the grounds that the president was exercising his right to free speech. Reuters reports:
In Monday’s motion, Trump’s lawyers said the lawsuit was “designed to chill the president’s free speech rights on matters of public concern.” They cited a law in Daniels’ home state of Texas requiring that such a lawsuit be dismissed unless Daniels could provide “clear and specific evidence” for her claims, which they said she had failed to do.
They also said that Daniels had not been harmed, and had instead “capitalized” on the dispute with a nationwide tour of strip clubs “for which she admittedly is being paid at least four times her normal appearance fee.”
Whew, I thought I'd never get through all that.
Labels: Bruce Ohr, China, Clinton, Congress, DOJ, Donald Trump, email scandal, FBI, Hillary, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, Robert Mueller, Russia, Steele dossier, Stormy Daniels
#HerToo vs. #HerToo
Rose McGowan facing backlash for urging 'be gentle' with Argento
Rose McGowan has been one of the most ferocious critics of those accused of sexual assault. But with her friend and fellow Harvey Weinstein accuser Asia Argento now one of the accused, McGowan has asked people to be kinder and she's being criticized for it.
Argento was among the first women to accuse now disgraced movie mogul Weinstein of sexual misconduct -- and like McGowan -- has been a leading figure in the #MeToo movement.
"I got to know Asia Argento ten months ago," McGowan wrote. "Our commonality is the shared pain of being assaulted by Harvey Weinstein. My heart is broken. I will continue my work on behalf of victims everywhere."
IIRC, Asia wasn't really so much assaulted by Weinstein as that she participated in a police sting against him, and got her boobs honked for her trouble.
But as Monday moved along, angry social media followers began to take aim at Argento.
McGowan would later appear to ask those following her to show compassion for Argento. "None of us know the truth of the situation and I'm sure more will be revealed," she tweeted. "Be gentle." Given her powerful and frequent comments condemning alleged sexual abusers, many have slammed McGowan for her support of Argento.
"Oh look, Rose McGowan is a hypocrite too *pretends to be shocked* Just imagine if it was a guy in place of Asia," one person tweeted. "Imagine how he'd be crucified by the #MeToo movement; but because it's a woman, we need to wait and "be gentle.""
"Be gentle, why? Because she's a woman and your friend? Your comments are a major slap in the face to everything the #MeToo movement represents," wrote actor Harry Cook in a tweet. "Double standards beyond belief."
#MeToo founder Tarana Burke says 'there is no model survivor' after Asia Argento report
And so she yielded to the crowd: Rose McGowan To Asia Argento: You Need To Come Clean About What You Did To That Kid Or Else You’re Following In Weinstein’s Footsteps
She’s straightened out now. Turns out that her partner, a model named Rain Dove, is the person with whom Argento was texting about Bennett last week. Forced to choose between #MeToo and her pal Asia, McGowan chooses #MeToo — based in part on things that were allegedly said in that text conversation that haven’t been released yet. You can read her full statement by clicking the image panels in this tweet but here’s the key bit:
In the meantime, even the Italians are getting tired of Asia's schtick: Asia Argento reportedly fired as a judge on 'X Factor Italy'
Asia Argento has reportedly been let go from her job as a judge on “X Factor Italy” following allegations that she sexually abused a teen actor who appeared in a movie with her.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Argento will specifically not appear on the upcoming live portion of the competition, which will begin with a new host on Oct. 25. She will, however, appear in the first seven episodes of the season, which were filmed prior to allegations about her alleged encounter with actor Jimmy Bennett when he was 17 and she was 37. Those episodes will begin airing on Sept. 6.
The outlet notes that Sky Italia, which produces the show, does not want to penalize the 40,000 people who auditioned for Argento for the final 12 spots by redoing that process. Instead, she’ll be replaced for the later episodes that air live. In an ironic twist, Varietyreports that Argento’s ex-husband, Italian pop singer Morgan, is her likely replacement.
Me? I'm just enjoying the blue on blue action.
Labels: #MeToo, Cuties, Harvey Weinstein, sexual assault
Politician Confronted With Burning Man Past
Politician says she’s being ‘slut shamed’ for Burning Man photos
A California councilwoman says someone is trying to “slut shame” her into dropping her re-election bid — by creating a website filled with scantily clad photos of her at Burning Man.
Rachel Hundley, a councilwoman in Sonoma, said she received a threatening email earlier this month, accusing her of “immoral and unethical” behavior and telling her to drop out of the city council race or her candidacy would be “one of full disclosures.”
“I was threatened by an anonymous coward,” Hundley, 35, said in a YouTube video last week, calling the ominous email, “nothing short of extortion.”
The email included a link to a now-disabled website called “Rachel Hundley Exposed,” which she said showed “scandalous” videos and photos mined from her social media accounts, showing her wearing only a bra and underwear at Burning Man, the free-spirited arts and music festival.
The site was seemingly created by an organization called “Sonoma Citizens for Peace and Cooperation,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
In Hundley’s video, which had over 20,000 views as of Tuesday, she owned up to managing a wine bar at a “consent-focused sex-positive theme camp” that is part of Burning Man.
“What was especially disturbing in this era of Me Too was the attempt to slut shame me for celebrating my body and for my attendance at Burning Man,” she said.
“This website relies solely on unfounded accusations and slut-shaming. Its purpose is to make me afraid, to silence another strong female voice by scaring me out of this election.”
According to her own posting from Burning Man, this occurred back in 2012. Her response:
When an #anonymousbully tries to #slutshame you into dropping out of your city council race #metoo #overit #feministinoffice #whyimrunning https://t.co/8ypX3wXPOF
— Rachel Hundley (@rachel_hundley) August 20, 2018
It's California, so expect their politicians to be wacky. I don't see a problem with her attending Burning Man in her underwear, it's hot out there, but it's another valuable lesson that the internet never forgets. And politics ain't bean bag. I don't see the attack as unfair either.
Incidentally, Burning Man 2018 is underway.
Labels: Burning Man, California, politics, wine
Jeff Corwin to Do Chesapeake Bay Special
Jeff Corwin (left)
Jeff Corwin's Bay Documentary on Big Screen in 2019
Emmy-winning conservationist Jeff Corwin and Harrisburg’s Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts have teamed up to bring audiences a feature film dedicated to exploring the many faces and places belonging to the Bay and encouraging citizens to take part in her restoration.
According to its website, the film “will be a powerful educational tool for the next generation of environmental stewards and will inspire people to learn how they can restore the health of the watershed and the estuary where they live.”
Corwin and crew were recently spotted filming aboard the schooner Alliance in Yorktown. The city's tourism presence on Twitter posted an image of Corwin on the vessel's bow, below.
The film is slated to hit theaters in March of 2019. To learn more, visit Expedition Chesapeake.
Posted by Fritz at 4:47 PM 1 comment: Links to this post
Labels: Chesapeake Bay, movies
S&P 500, Nasdaq jump to record highs as US and Mexico strike trade deal
Stocks jumped on Monday as the United States and Mexico closed a new trade deal, potentially removing a source of uncertainty that had been plaguing investors for months.
The S&P 500 gained 0.8 percent to close at 2,896.74 — a record high — with materials and financials as the best-performing sectors. The Nasdaq Composite climbed 0.9 percent to an all-time high, breaking above 8,000 points for the first time, as Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet rose. Tech's gains led the Nasdaq to close at 8,017.90.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 259.29 points to 26,049.64 as Caterpillar outperformed. Monday also marked the first time since Feb. 1 that the Dow closed above 26,000.
It turns out other countries are willing to strike fairer trade deals with the US if the President is willing to push for them.
President Donald Trump said the deal would be called The United States-Mexico Trade agreement, leaving behind the 24-year-old NAFTA name. "The name NAFTA has a bad connotation because the United States was hurt very badly by NAFTA," he said. Trump added that the deal with Mexico is also very helpful for farmers and manufacturers. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said the deal must be approved by Congress before being implemented.
The comment comes after Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said Sunday both countries were close to resolving key differences on trade. This would pave the way for a new deal between the two longtime trade partners. "We've continued making progress," Guajardo said.
And Canada? Canada is likely to agree to a NAFTA deal with the US this week, business council says
Canada will restart official talks with the United States on Tuesday in the hope that an updated version of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will be signed off in the coming days.
Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland is in Washington to continue negotiations, following the news that Mexico and the U.S. have already reached an agreement that rewrites the trilateral trade pact, first ratified in 1994.
That agreement has been hailed by President Donald Trump as "a big day for trade," sending U.S. stocks to fresh all-time highs Monday, with Asian equities also propelling higher Tuesday.
Maryscott Greenwood, CEO of the Canadian American Business Council (CABC), told CNBC on Tuesday that she thought Canada would join the arrangement and could even finalize a new NAFTA deal this week.
"There is only a handful of tough issues left. Mexico is already there. I think we can get there this week, I really do," she said, before cautioning that this week's trilateral talks would be "harsh" and "intensive."
Labels: Canada, Donald Trump, international trade, Mexico
Some Reassuring Russiagate
Someday, Bruce Ohr is going to have to testify before Congress, and today is that day. But before his grilling, the New York Times writes a defense brief: Byron York: New York Times profile of Bruce Ohr looks a lot like a well timed defense brief
As Twitchy reported, former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr is scheduled to appear before Congress Tuesday.
Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for opposition firm Fusion GPS, the folks who hired Christopher Steele to come up with his infamous Trump dossier, so legislators would like to know just how cozy that relationship was.
The New York Times published a profile of Ohr Monday, and The Washington Examiner’s Byron York noticed that it looked a lot like a defense brief. Crazy, huh?
Bruce Ohr is set to testify before Congress tomorrow. With fortunate good timing, on the day before Ohr's appearance, the New York Times just happens to publish what amounts to a defense brief in the form of a profile. https://t.co/bHBQw7GbfQ
— Byron York (@ByronYork) August 27, 2018
As the session is closed-door, I look forward to the inevitable leaks. Jeff Carlson at themarkestwork notes The Missing Papadopoulos Meetings. I still want to know more about what the Mysterious Mr. Mifsud was up to:
There are two legal versions of events relating to Papadopoulos. One from the July 28, 2017, affidavit signed by FBI Agent Robert M. Gibbs, and one from theOct. 5, 2017, Statement of the Offense “signed” by Robert Mueller–and undersigned by Jeannie S. Rhee, Andrew D. Goldstein, and Aaron S.J. Zelinsky.
To the casual eye, these documents provide a relatively similar version of events, although there are some differences:
Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud is known as “Foreign Contact 1” in the July 27, 2017, Affidavit and “the professor” in the Oct. 5, 2017, unsealed Statement of Offense.
Olga Polonskaya, introduced as “Putin’s niece” is known as “Foreign Contact 3” July 27, 2017, Affidavit and “Female Russian National” in the Oct. 5, 2017, unsealed Statement of Offense.
Ivan Timofeev is referred to as “Foreign Contact 2” in the July 27, 2017, Affidavit and the “Russian MFA Connection” in the Oct. 5, 2017, unsealed Statement of Offense.
The Mueller version has a tendency to emphasize Papadopoulos’s Russian contacts and the Gibbs version presents events in a slightly differing timeline format, but the overall presentation of events remains reasonably similar through June 1, 2016.
However, after June 1, 2016, the Mueller version suddenly becomes vague, in relation to direct foreign contacts by Papadopoulos.
The Wall Street Journal has reported on Millian as being both Source D and E in the Steele dossier. There are all kinds of questions surrounding Millian. The fact that he was meeting with Papadopoulos in July 2016 is material. So why did the Mueller team specifically ignore this entire sequence of events in their Oct. 5, 2017 unsealed Statement of Offense. The Gibbs version provides a bit more detail but also fails to note the Millian meeting.
I believe Mr. Mifsud was an agent provocateur for the FBI, probably handled through British intelligence sent to ensnare Papadop with apparent Russian collusion. Maybe Millian, too.
John Sexton at Hot Air: Roger Stone: Robert Mueller And Ronan Farrow Are Both Coming For Me. We'll see, won't we? True Pundit: Giuliani: When Mueller’s report shows Trump’s innocence we will admit he was ‘fair’ A great position to start bargaining from. Ned Ryun, American Greatness: America’s Crisis Is Three-Tiered Justice
Last week brought to the fore a serious problem now threatening to undermine the very foundations of America’s constitutional republic: we no longer have equal application of justice under the law. The rule of law has become trifurcated, with a different application of the law depending upon one’s position in the political hierarchy.
First, there’s one application of the law for members of the powerful elite who have the right political connections. Here, the law is more a series of suggestions that might or might not be followed with almost no legal consequences for non-compliance.
Example A, of course, is Hillary Clinton. Many people have gone to jail for doing what she did, including members of our armed forces. Yet she paid no consequences for violating laws on the use of classified information on her unsecured and illegal private server.
Then there’s the application of the law for high-powered government bureaucrats. They can abuse their power, lie under oath, spy on Congress, pass around fake dossiers, leak to the press while turning the bureaucracy into personal weapons against political opponents, but face no consequences save getting a fat contract as an on-air contributor from a news outlet.
And finally, there is the application of the law for the rest of us, the normal everyday Americans who bear the full brunt of the law for a single violation of mishandling classified information or any other breach of national security law. If you have the wrong political connections or aligned yourself against the establishment in any way, you get pre-dawn raids from an FBI that look more like the KGB’s modus operandi than that of a constitutional republic.
So if you try to tell me that we have equal application of justice under the law in America, you’re living in an alternate reality because what’s taking place around us points to arbitrary law.
Ann Althouse not impressed with the Axios list: "Congressional Republicans are getting ready for hell. Axios has obtained a spreadsheet that's circulated through Republican circles on and off Capitol Hill..."
"... including at least one leadership office — that meticulously previews the investigations Democrats will likely launch if they flip the House."
It sounds worse as a generality than if you read the itemization:
Twitchy: OH NOEZ! Dem lawmaker admits evidence is lacking to impeach Trump and the Resistance totally loses its SH*T. To be fair, they lose their shit fairly easily. Breitbart: Scott Adams: If Donald Trump Goes Down, Hillary Clinton Goes to Prison. Almost a fair trade. Jeff Crouere, Town Hall: The Impeachment Insanity
Sundance at CTH: Retreat We Much: Attorney for Michael Cohen Now Reverses Claims on Trump Knowledge of any Russian Event… Aaron Blake, The Washington Post (link goes to newstimes) Michael Cohen's lawyer has done real damage to the case against Trump. He's making his client look (more) like an unreliable witness. And of course, the inevitable: Brian Stelter Ignores CNN’s Bungled Trump Tower Story, Da Caller. All the news that fits the agenda.
Mary Tyler March at the Hill: Lewandowski: I warned everybody that Cohen was going to become a problem
"Michael was very good at certain things and one of the things he was very good at, and we have now seen it, is intimidating people," Lewandowski responded.
"I didn't like to work with Michael, I didn't like to interact with Michael, and that's why he had no role in the campaign, even when he wanted one," he continued. "I was very clear when I was in charge of the campaign, Michael was not somebody who we wanted at the campaign. He would go out and make statements that we had to walk back afterwards because he would say things which were factually untrue. I warned everybody at the organization that Michael was going to become a problem."
A miracle for the planned media canonization of John McCain from the Atlantic: John McCain’s Epiphany About Paul Manafort "Manafort saw managing the 2008 Republican convention as almost a birthright. But McCain denied him the job. He couldn’t abide Manafort’s pro-Russian clients—and told him so."
From the New York Times via WRAL: Could Trump’s Missing Signature Force Him to Be Deposed? More Stormy/Cohen/Avenatti wrangling that may or may not happen.
Allahpundit: Poll: Strong Majority Thinks Brennan, Comey Should Have Their Clearances Revoked
For all the heat POTUS has taken from natsec people and the media over this, the public’s firmly on his side.
The survey showed 59 percent of registered voters felt Brennan should have lost his security clearance, while 64 percent said Comey and others at the FBI who were fired or demoted over their actions should lose their clearance.
Overall, 60 percent of registered voters said they believed that former national security officials who become consultants and TV news contributors should give up their national security clearances…
“There would definitely be support for a wholesale policy revoking their clearances,” [pollster Mark Penn] added.
If Comey still had a clearance, which he doesn’t, this probably would have cinched its revocation . . .
Labels: Bruce Ohr, Congress, Donald Trump, James Comey, John Brennan, Michael Cohen, Mifsud, Paul Manafort, Robert Mueller, Russia, Stormy Daniels
Midnite Music "Los Ageless"
You can skip 12 seconds of Ellen Degeneres at the beginning if you want.
For some reason Anne Erin Clark records as St. Vincent:
In 2006, Clark began recording a studio album, under the stage name St. Vincent. In an interview on The Colbert Report, she said that she "took [her] moniker from a Nick Cave song", which refers to the hospital in which Dylan Thomas died. The reference is to the line "And Dylan Thomas died drunk in / St. Vincent's hospital" from Cave's song "There She Goes my Beautiful World" from the album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus. The name is also a reference to her great-grandmother, whose middle name was St. Vincent.
Labels: Cuties, guitar, music
Major Eruption in Baltimore!
Or business as usual? Raw sewage making way from erupting manhole to Chesapeake Bay Video at link.
The Baltimore City Department of Public Works is investigating what appears to be a massive sewage flow, spewing raw waste through Gwynns Falls Park. It's where the spill is headed that is more worrisome.
A work crew made the smelly and filthy discovery deep inside those woods. The steady stream flowing like an erupting volcano out of an elevated manhole is not being absorbed by the wooded environment.
The flow is on a collision course with a natural spring. The filthy mix invades a creek. That waterway leads to Gwynns Falls, which goes past I95 to Ridgely's Cove to the middle branch of the Patapsco River near West Port and Cherry Hill and ultimately into the Chesapeake Bay.
A crew from the City Department of Public Works is being dispatched to investigate. There is no information yet on where the raw sewage is coming from and what caused it to happen.
Let me hazard a guess. Because Baltimore hasn't fixed it's sewage system yet?
Labels: Baltimore, Chesapeake Bay, pollution, sewage
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Helicopters & Aircrafts
Everything about aircrafts and helicopters. News and events in aviation worldwide. Civil, transportation, military helicopters and airplanes.
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Airplane Stability and Control, Second Edition
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When Is A Flow Compressible?
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Category Airplane Stability and Control, Second Edition
The F-14 Tomcat
Posted by admin in Airplane Stability and Control, Second Edition on February 25, 2016
The next variable-sweep airplane to see service was the Navy’s Grumman F-14 Tomcat. Static longitudinal stability is excessive with the wings fully swept back at high Mach numbers, even though the F-14 uses the Alford-Polhamus-Wallis arrangement. Grumman corrected the problem with a small leading-edge extension on the glove, which is called a glove vane (Figure 16.2). The vane starts to extend at a Mach number of 1.0, reaching a full 15-degree extension at a Mach number of 1.5.
Other interesting F-14 stability and control features are the use of horizontal tail differential incidence for lateral control. Wing spoilers also provide lateral control for wing sweep angles below 57 degrees. The spoilers are almost aligned with the wind at sweep angles above 57 degrees, so locking them out loses nothing in roll control power. Like the F-111, the F-14 has triply redundant three-axis stability augmentation. These are analog systems, typical for aircraft of its generation.
16.2 The Rockwell B-1
The Rockwell B-1 strategic bomber is an interesting variable-sweep case in that the aerodynamic center shift when sweeping the wings is large enough to require compensating center of gravity shifts. The wing pivot point is outboard, as in the F-111 and F-14, but the trailing edge of the fully swept wing does not merge with the horizontal tail leading edge. Thus, the B-1 configuration does not take full advantage of destabilizing downwash increases with the wing swept back. The required center of gravity shifting on the B-1 is done by pumping remaining fuel between the forward and aft tanks.
The airplane can be landed if the wing becomes locked in its full aft position of 67.5 degrees (65 degrees for the B-1B), but with full nose-up control minimum airspeed is close to 200 knots, making for a very high-speed landing. The story is that a B-1 based at a U. S. Air Force airfield in Kansas with a wing stuck in its full aft swept position had to fly to Edwards Air Force Base in California to use its extra-long runways.
The B-1 can have a severe stability problem at the other endof the sweep range, the landing position of 15 degrees. This occurs if the wings are swept forward to 15 degrees without waiting for the fuel to be pumped forward as well. This was guarded against originally by a warning light that came on if fuel transfer had not been made before unsweeping. According to Paul H. Anderson, a warning light was used originally instead of a positive interlock that would prevent unsweeping until fuel was transferred because of concern that a failure in the interlock system could lock the wing in its aft position.
However, a tragic accident occurred at Edwards when a pilot apparently ignored the warning light and unswept a B-1’s wings without the compensating forward center of gravity shift by fuel pumping. The airplane simply became uncontrollably unstable and was lost. A positive interlock replaced the warning light after that accident.
Aeroelasticity and Stability and Control
Bernard Etkin (1972) gives a succinct description of the way stability and control engineers handle the effects of airframe distortion or elasticity There are two basic categories into which all treatments fall. Etkin calls these categories “The method of quasistatic deflections” and “The method of normal modes.” Here are his words:
Method of Quasistatic Deflections Many of the important effects of distortion can be accounted for by simply altering the aerodynamic derivatives. The assumption is made that changes in aerodynamic loading take place so slowly that the structure is at all times in static equilibrium. (This is equivalent to assuming that the natural frequencies of vibration of the structure are much higher than the frequencies of the rigid-body motions.) Thus a change in load produces a proportional change in the shape of the vehicle, which in turn influences the load.
Method of Normal Modes When the separation in frequency between the elastic degrees of freedom and the rigid-body motions is not large, then significant inertial coupling can occur between the two. In that case, a dynamic analysis is required, which takes account of the time dependence of the elastic motions.
In the latter case Etkin goes on to describe the application of normal mode analysis to the stability and control problem. The important distinction between the quasistatic and normal mode treatments holds as well for the approximate normal modes generated by quasi-rigid models.
19.1 Wing Torsional Divergence
Wing torsional divergence, in which the wing structure itself becomes unstable, tip incidence increasing without limit, is a structural rather than stability and control problem. Torsional divergence occurs with increasing airspeed if the wing’s aerodynamic center is ahead of its shear center, or elastic axis. Although wing torsional divergence is not strictly a stability and control problem, it is the first known phenomenon that can be analyzed with methods used in aeroelastic stability and control.
According to Bisplinghoff, Ashley, and Halfman (1955), the wing failure that wrecked Samuel P. Langley’s Aerodrome on the Potomac River in 1903 was a wing torsional divergence. While there has been some controversy on this point, a torsional divergence occurrence that appears quite certain was on the Fokker D-8 monoplane in 1917. When the first D-8 was sandbag-loaded the wing was proved to be sufficiently strong, but the German government’s engineering division called for rear spar strength equal to that of the front spar. The change was made and three D-8 airplanes, one after the other, were lost when their wings failed in flight. The story is picked up in Anthony H. G. Fokker’s book Flying Dutchman:
I took a new wing out of production and treated it to a sandload test in our own factory. As it was progressively loaded, the deflections of the wing were carefully measured from tip to tip. I discovered that with the increasing load, the angle of incidence at the wing tips increased perceptibly. I did not remember having observed this action in the case of the original wings, as first designed by me. It suddenly dawned on me that this increasing angle of incidence was the cause of the wing’s collapse, as logically the load resulting from pressure in a steep dive would increase faster at the wing tips than in the middle, owing to the increased angle of incidence.
This is a classic wing torsional divergence, since the increasing wing tip incidence increased tip aerodynamic load, which further increased the incidence, and so on. The problem was solved when the government permitted the front spar to be reinforced to bring back the original ratio of stiffness between the front and rear spars. This moved the shear center forward.
The Wright brothers and a few other aviation pioneers used the wing’s elastic properties in a positive sense, warping them for lateral control. The Wrights had no problems with aeroelasticity, aside from an unimportant loss in propeller thrust due to blade twisting.
Time Domain and Linear Quadratic Optimization
Control system synthesis in the time domain, rather than in the frequency domain, is often called modern control theory. Optimal controller design is generally involved.
Although one usually thinks of modern control theory in connection with full automatic control, it is applied as well to the design of stability-augmentation systems.
Linear quadratic (LQ) optimization methods have been used for a number of stability- augmentation system designs. These methods have their origins in the work of R. E. Kalman. Airframe and controller equations are cast in the state matrix form discussed in the previous chapter. The optimal controller is a linear feedback law that minimizes an integral cost function J of the form
J [x T Qx + 8T R8]dt,
where x is the system state vector, 8 is the control vector, and Q and R are weighting matrices that express the designer’s ideas on what constitutes optimal behavior for this case. The optimal control law takes the form of a linear set of feedback gains 8 = Cx, where C is the gain matrix of constants. The gain matrix C is computed by a matrix equation called the Riccati equation.
The linear quadratic approach to controller design is attractive because it is an organized method for finding feedback gains. The method produces an optimal set of feedbacks, but only for the arbitrarily chosen weighting matrix values. One can argue that if the weighting matrix values are poorly chosen, the resulting system can be far from ideal. In fact, it is not uncommon for designers using linear quadratic methods to tinker with weighting matrix values until a reasonable-looking system emerges. This puts the optimal design method on all fours with ordinary cut-and-try methods.
The problem of assigning weighting matrix values aside, there have been numerous variants of the linear quadratic approach to controller design and any number of applications in the literature and in practice. A typical application is to the design of a lateral-directional command augmentation system (Atzhorn and Stengel, 1984). The criterion function includes control system rate as a means of limiting high-frequency or rapid control motions. Displacement and rate saturation are significant nonlinearities that cannot be treated with the linear quadratic approach, except by the use of describing functions (Hanson and Stengel, 1984). Other linear quadratic stability-augmentation designs that may be found in the literature include departure-resistant controls, superaugmented (unstable airplane) pitch controls, and multiloop roll-yaw augmentation.
According to Robert Clarke and his associates at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, the Grumman X-29A research airplane’s flight controls were originally designed using an optimal model-following technique. Simplified computer, actuator, and sensor models were used in the original analysis, leading to an unconservative design. A classical approach was chosen in the end, with lags introduced by the actual hardware compensated for by the addition of lead-lag filters (Clarke, Burken, Bosworth, and Bauer, 1994).
Another interesting linear quadratic stability augmentation design adds feed-forward compensation for nonlinear terms that cannot be included in the linearized design. This is the stability-augmentation system for the Rockwell/Deutsche Aerospace X-31 research airplane. Feed-forward compensation is added for nonlinear engine gyroscopic and inertial coupling effects (Beh and Hofinger, 1994).
Civil Airworthiness Requirements
Military aircraft are procured under comprehensive flying qualities specifications. These specifications are contractual obligations by the manufacturer to a single military customer. On the other hand, the flying qualities of commercial aircraft are generally not governed by contracts with individual customers, but rather by governmental agencies, acting to protect the flying public.
Civil flying qualities requirements are found in airworthiness requirement documents. Compliance with airworthiness standards is proved in flight testing, leading to the award of airworthiness certificates and freedom to market the aircraft. Civil airworthiness requirements are the minimum set that will ensure safety. This is a different objective than military requirements, which not only address safety, but also the effectiveness of military airplanes in their missions. Thus, flying qualities requirements found in civil airworthiness requirements are much less detailed than specified requirements for military airplanes. This is a key distinction between the two sets of requirements.
Spoiler Ailerons
Spoiler ailerons project upward from the upper surface of one wing, reducing lift on that wing and thus producing a rolling moment (Figure 5.10). Spoiler ailerons are often the same surfaces used symmetrically to reduce lift and increase drag on large jet airplanes for rapid descents and to assist braking on runways. Spoiler ailerons are generally used either to free wing trailing edges for full-span landing flaps or to minimize wing twist due to aileron action on very flexible wings.
The aerodynamic details of spoiler operation are still not completely understood, even after years of experiment and theoretical studies. The aerodynamics of a rapidly opened spoiler has two phases, the opening and steady-state phases.
Figure 5.10 Plug-slot spoiler ailerons used on the Northrop P-61 BlackWidow airplane. An attempt to devote most of the wing’s trailing edge to landing flaps, rather than ailerons. The small guide aileron provides stick force feel. (From Toll, NACA Rept. 868, 1947)
Successful B-52 Compromises
The B-52 Stratofortress appeared in 1951, during the jet’s awkward age. However, the compromises made by Boeing Company engineers to get around the period’s (well – deserved) lack of confidence in flight control hydraulics and electronics were so successful that this airplane continues to have an active service life nearly 50 years later. These compromises are suited to the B-52’s mission in that required maneuvers are modest and spin recovery is not required.
7.6.1 The B-52 Rudder Has Limited Control Authority
The B-52’s rudder has an exceptionally narrow chord, just 10 percent of the fin chord (Figure 7.4). For a given control surface span or length, control hinge moments are proportional to the chord length squared. This gives the B-52 rudder small operating hinge moments for an airplane of its size, making feasible manual operation through a spring tab. But how about rudder power or effectiveness? How can asymmetric thrust effects and cross-wind takeoffs and landings be made with that exceedingly small rudder?
George S. Schairer explained that the original Boeing design called for an all-moving vertical tail. This was abandoned because of doubts as to the reliability of the hydraulic actuators. Instead, the solution was to incorporate a yaw-adjustable cross-wind landing gear. The yaw-adjustable cross-wind landing gear is preset by the flight crew before takeoff or
Figure 7.4 B-52G Stratofortress. A seventh wing spoiler segment has been added, the feeler ailerons
eliminated. Note the extremely narrow (10-percent chord) rudder and elevators. (From Loftin, NASA SP-468, 1985)
on a landing approach, through a range of 20 degrees to either side of neutral (Figure 7.5). Ground rolls can be made at zero sideslip and bank, the airplane crabbed into the relative wind. The preset landing gear angle is based on the reported wind direction and velocity relative to runway orientation.
Since the airplane has eight engines, asymmetric thrust conditions set up by shutting down an engine are low enough to be handled by the narrow rudder.
10.3.2 Criteria Based on Equivalent Systems
A brief summary of the criteria based on airplane-alone or equivalent system transfer functions is as follows:
Figure 10.3 Example of an early iso-opinion chart for the longitudinal short-period mode. This one was derived from flight tests of the variable-stability F-94F airplane. (Mazza, Becker, Cohen, and Spector, NADC Report ED-6282, 1963)
Frequency-Damping Boundaries Historically, the earliest findings on pitch sensitivity and sluggishness from variable-stability airplane research was bulls – eye-type pilot opinion contours of the two denominator parameters of the pitch transfer function: natural frequency and damping ratio (Figure 10.3). This work was done by Robert P. Harper and his associates at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in the early 1950s. Gibson (1995) comments that these boundaries ignore the attitude response. He suggests adding quantitative information on attitude response, such as delay, dropback (see subsequent definition), and overshoot.
Numerator Time Constant Requirements The numerator time constant, Tg2, controls the rapidity with which attitude changes result in flight path changes. Shorter values, corresponding to high lift curve slope and light wing loadings, give faster path responses and lower, or better, Cooper-Harper ratings. However, the benefits of low numerator time constants are mainly confined to landing approach control and have little to do with tactical airplane maneuverability.
Bihrle’s Control Anticipation Parameter By far the most successful of the criteria based on pitch transfer function parameters is the control anticipation
Figure 10.4 MIL-F-8757C short-period mode equivalent natural frequency and CAP (Control
Anticipation Parameter) requirements (1980).
parameter, or CAP (Bihrle, 1966). CAP is the ratio of the airplane’s initial pitch acceleration in an abrupt pullup to the steady-state normal acceleration produced. The initial pitch acceleration lets the pilot anticipate the final acceleration response. It turned out that CAP also could be expressed as the ratio of the pitch natural frequency to a function of the numerator time constant. In that form CAP appears in MIL-F-8785C (Figure 10.4) and is also referenced in the newer MIL-STD-1797. CAP is augmented by requirements on damping ratio and time delay (Figure 10.5).
Gautrey and Cook’s Generic CAP, or GCAP The CAP criterion can be extended to augmented aircraft without recourse to equivalent systems. The generic CAP criterion, or GCAP, uses different parameters than CAP but has the same interpretation. GCAP is neither based on short-period transfer function parameters nor does it require a steady-state normal acceleration, as does CAP. GCAP parameters are well defined even for fully augmented pitch control systems such as are found on the Boeing 777 and Airbus A320-A340 series.
Figure 10.5 Equivalent systems requirements for longitudinal short-period damping and time delay.
(From MIL-F-8785C, Nov. 1980)
Bandwidth Criterion This is a criterion based on the transfer function for pitch attitude as an output for control force as an input. The pitch attitude bandwidth is defined arbitrarily as the lower of two frequencies: the gain bandwidth frequency, at which there is a 6-db gain margin, and the phase bandwidth frequency, at which there is a 45-degree phase margin. An additional factor is the phase delay, which accounts for phase lags introduced by higher frequency components, such as control actuators. A typical bandwidth criterion chart is reproduced in Figure 10.6. The bandwidth criterion is considered significant, although the exact shape of suitable boundaries is still a research matter.
Gibson Nichols Chart Criterion This criterion defines satisfactory and unsatisfactory flying qualities regions in the Nichols plane of open-loop transfer function gain and phase. An early version of this criterion is shown in Figure 10.7. The concept of attitude dropback appears on the chart, a term defined subsequently.
The Gossamer and MIT Human-Powered Aircraft
A general arrangement drawing of the original Gossamer Condor human powered airplane is shown in Figure 13.2. All of the Gossamer aircraft are canards because of the packaging convenience of the pilot-powerplant combination with its plastic chain-driven pusher propeller. Like the Wright brothers before them, the team found it relatively easy to control pitch attitude (and angle of attack) even though the center of gravity was behind the neutral point. An opposite wing warp and tilted canard method of roll control developed for the Gossamer Condor (Sec. 5) was applied as well to the Gossamer Albatross. Finally, the Gossamer team pioneered in the art of using carbon fiber plastic tubes as bending and compression members in the airframe structure, thereby ensuring a very light weight (Grosser, 1981).
The MIT human-powered Chrysalis biplane and Monarch and Daedalus monoplanes were less radical in design than the Gossamer series, with tractor propellers and aft tails. All-moving tail surfaces and warping wings for lateral control were used at first. The Daedalus machine dispensed with wing warping or ailerons, relying on rudder control and dihedral effect. This proved insufficient.
Figure 13.2 Initial version of the Gossamer Condor human-powered ultralight airplane, with single-surface wings and spoilers for lateral control. The airplane could not be turned with the spoilers. (From Burke, “The Gossamer Condor and Albatross,” AIAA Professional Study Series, 1980)
Modern Canard Tactical Airplanes
The canard disadvantages enumerated above either do not apply or are overwhelmed by other considerations in the case of tactical airplanes designed for supermaneuverability, or for controllable flight beyond the stall. The stability and control of tactical airplanes in the supermaneuverability regime are covered in Chapter 10, “Tactical Airplane Maneuverability.”
Control of the vortex system shed from the fighter nose is known to be critical for controllable flight beyond the stall. Forebody strakes have been found valuable for this purpose. Canards offer another means for shaping the forebody vortex system. They are used in some modern fighter designs, such as the Sukhoi Su-35, the Saab JAS 39 Gripen (Figure 17.3), the IAI Lavi, the Rockwell/MBB X-31A Enhanced Fighter Maneuverability (EFM), and the Eurofighter 2000.
Mean and Structural Axes
Even after the advent of panel methods, there remain controversial aspects of the quasi-static aeroelastic problem, related to the choice of axes. Structural distortions must be referred to some set of reference axes. There are essentially two sets of reference axes that will serve. One choice, called structural axes, corresponds to a natural reference for laboratory structural deflection tests or their analytical equivalent. Structural axes are aligned with a central hard section of the airplane, such as the wing interspar structure at the airplane’s centerline.
The second choice, which is the only one that is consistent with the ordinary pitch – plunge equations of airplane motion, are mean axes. Mean axes are a familiar concept in normal mode analysis. They correspond to the midpoint of normal mode oscillations, the point at which all transverse deflections are momentarily zero. While structural influence coefficients may well be measured or calculated in an arbitrarily chosen structural axis system, pitch and plunge motions of the aeroelastic airplane must be calculated in mean axes, to avoid systematic error (Milne, 1964, 1968). A refinement of mean axes is the use of principal axes in which distributed moments of inertia are accounted for in addition to longitudinal mass distributions.
John H. Wykes and R. E. Lawrence used both mean and structural axes in a 1965 study of aerothermoelastic effects on stability and control, but they noted the difficulties involved in relating airplane angle of attack in the two systems. The angle of attack difficulty found by Wykes and Lawrence is resolved in an offline transformation of the results, such as pitch attitude and angle of attack time histories, from mean to structural axes (Rodden and Love, 1984). The transformation is feasible at the end of the dynamics calculations. The Rodden and Love paper, corrected in Dykman and Rodden (2000), also presents transformation equations from mean to structural axes.
The Rodden papers have an interesting proof of the fallacy of using the more convenient structural axes for dynamics studies in place of mean axes, as has been done by investigators unwilling to face angle of attack difficulties. In a simple swept-forward airplane example using structural axes, load factor and pitching acceleration time histories depend on the fixity choice of the axes, an evidently incorrect result. This error is avoided with mean axes. Mean axes are used in the FLEXSTAB program.
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The Library of Congress > Linked Data Service > LC Name Authority File (LCNAF)
Gold, Ernest, 1921-1999
MADS/RDF PersonalName
Library of Congress Name Authority File
Names Collection - Authorized Headings
LC Names Collection - General Collection
Gold, Ernst, 1921-1999
Goldner, Ernest, 1921-1999
http://id.loc.gov/rwo/agents/n84005859
(edtf) 1921-07-13
(naf) Vienna (Austria)
(naf) Santa Monica (Calif.)
Associated Language
Composition (Music)
Motion picture music
Conductors (Music)
no00044205
Exact Matching Concepts from Other Schemes
http://viaf.org/viaf/sourceID/LC%7Cn++84005859#skos:Concept
Ernest Gold Label from public data source Wikidata
found: His Symphony for five instruments, 1980:t.p. (Ernest Gold) p. 2 of cover (b. 1921, Vienna, Austria)
found: New Grove dict. of Amer. mus.(Gold (Goldner), Ernest; b. 7-13-21, Vienna, Austria; immigrated to the U.S. when Hitler invaded Austria; composer and conductor)
found: New York Times, Mar. 21, 1999(Ernest Gold, 77, Oscar-winning composer; d. Mar. 17, 1999, Santa Monica, Calif.)
found: IMDb, July 28, 2005(Ernest Gold; b. July 13, 1921, Vienna, Austria; d. Mar. 17, 1999, Santa Monica, Calif.; sometimes credited as Ernst Gold)
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Develop and adopt explicit evaluation protocols for piloted interventions to capture lessons from experience on poverty reduction, with a view toward opportunities for scaling up successful interventions.
IEG Rating by Year: mar-rating-popup NMNTNT Management Rating by Year: mar-rating-mng-popup NSNTNT
Pilots are used to strengthen the design, implementation, and scaling-up of projects and to enhance the poverty focus of the Bank's projects. Early intermediate outcomes can attract additional resources leading to scaling up. The impact of Bank support for poverty reduction will depend in part on successful use of pilots to leverage and crowd-in external resources to scale up. However, evidence on whether pilots are successful and serve to leverage non-Bank resources is rare.
WB: Agrees. Each piloted intervention, particularly those that aim to reduce poverty or enhance shared prosperity, should develop a well thought-through process and protocols for evaluating its impact and create the evidence base for scaling-up.
Action 8a: Toolkit for distributional impact analysis.
Indicator: Toolkit issued and disseminated.
Baseline: No comprehensive source of know-how exists.
Target: a) Working Paper prepared, b) Internal workshop to disseminate the handbook internally.
Action 8b: Improve monitoring of pilots designed for scaling up and capturing lessons learned from these pilots.
Indicator: Update âResults Framework and M&E Guidance Note to provide advice on monitoring of pilots designed for scaling up and update ICR guidance note to capture lessons learned from these pilots.
Baseline: No guidance on monitoring of such pilots or systematic capture of resulting learning
Target: Update âResults Framework and M&E Guidance Note and ICR guidance note.
Action 8a: The toolkit for distributional impact analysis has been produced. Dissemination is underway.
Action 8b: No guidance exists yet on how to monitor pilot projects and how to capture and assess learning from these projects. As IEG has stressed in the past, an essential step for the implementation of this recommendation involves setting up a definition of pilot projects (as management recognizes) and a repository for monitoring pilots, in order to be able to identify them and document their results. The overall rating of Moderate proposed by IEG for Recommendation 8 stems from an average of "Substantial" for Action 8a and "Negligible" for Action 8b.
Action 8b:
Discussions have been initiated with IEG on how to set PDOs and indicators for pilot projects, and how to rate them appropriately. The next step, after completion of these discussions, will be to include guidance in the PAD guidance note on how to define pilot projects and in the ICR guidance note on how pilots will be rated. Communication with staff on pilot projects would then be integrated as part of core training.
8.b. Rating: Negligible
Action 8a: Toolkit for distributional impact analysis. Indicator: Toolkit issued and disseminated. Baseline: No comprehensive source of know-how exists. Target: a) Working Paper prepared, b) Internal workshop to disseminate the handbook internally. Timeline: FY17
We are attaching the toolkit "Distributional Impact Analysis: Toolkit and Illustrations of Impacts Beyond the Average Treatment Effect," by Guadalupe Bedoya, Luca Bittarello, Jonathan Davis, and Nikolas Mittag. This toolkit was published in the World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series in July 2017 (WPB 8139). As of September 6, 2017, it has been downloaded 1,237 times from one of the sources where it was published (see here)
A training for researchers was delivered based on a preliminary version of the toolkit in December 2016 (see related information attached), and we plan to conduct additional events in the Bank and potentially at DFID that has disseminated the tool within their teams and has expressed their interest to organize an event as well.
Additional dissemination activities will take place in the next weeks through the World Bank Research Twitter account, and within DIME's impact evaluation network through email and the DIME's Newsletter. About the Toolkit This toolkit aims to contribute to improving the use of state-of-the-art methodologies to learn further about development programs that are being implemented and evaluated. The toolkit was disseminated among more than 200 IE researchers in DIME's network, and it was tweeted by the DECRG Director (see below), and retweeted after that.
About the content of the toolkit (extracts from the introduction of the toolkit)
Traditional methods to evaluate the impacts of social programs and the vast majority of applied econometric policy evaluations focus on the analysis of means. However, there is also a large and growing literature on methods to evaluate the effects of programs and policies beyond their mean impact. While less frequently applied, these methods can provide information that is valuable or even necessary in the assessment of the consequences of policies and their desirability. The purpose of this toolkit is to provide an overview of the questions such methods can address and the core approaches that have been developed to answer them, including discussions of the assumptions they require, and practical issues in their implementation. Mean impacts are a natural first summary statistic to describe the effect of a policy. The mean impact of a policy or intervention tells us by how much the outcome would increase or decrease on average when every member of a particular population is exposed to the policy or intervention. Thereby, they provide the central piece in any cost-benefit analysis. However, a decision-maker usually requires information on the effects of a policy beyond its mean impact. For example, mean impacts allow us to calculate the total gain from a program or policy, but do not allow us to say anything about the distribution of the gain or how the outcome distribution is affected by the program beyond changes in its mean. A positive average program effect tells us that a program can generate social surplus, but it may not be sufficient to allow us to judge whether the program is desirable or not if any weight is placed on distributional concerns, such as whether inequality is affected by the program, whether some people are harmed by the policy or whether a particular demographic group benefits. The common theme of these issues is that they cannot be addressed by mean impacts alone. Finding answers requires thinking about the impact of a program or policy as a collection of distributional parameters rather than a single scalar parameter such as the mean. Hence, we refer to these types of analyses as "distributional impact analysis" (DIA). DIA concerns the study of the distributional consequences of interventions due to participants' heterogeneous responses or participation decisions. In particular, DIA investigates features beyond the gross total gain of a program by studying where the gains/losses of a program&ndash if any&ndash were produced, and who wins or loses as a result of program participation. The benefits of DIA outlined above beg the question why we do not see more of these methods applied in practice. The literature is still nascent compared to the importance of the topic and the tools available. There are often good reasons to focus primarily on mean impact and the motives to not look beyond it depend on the application. For example, DIA usually requires larger sample sizes, and many of the methods below are justified asymptotically and are not necessarily unbiased in finite samples, which can be problematic in applications with small samples such as most RCTs. Some methods rely on additional assumptions that are reasonable in some applications, but not in others. However, part of the hesitation to apply these methods also seems to stem from inertia and the fact that they are relatively new or have only recently become computationally feasible. Inertia may be an obstacle if researchers or their audiences are more used to and hence comfortable interpreting mean impacts and the conditions under which they are valid. To mitigate these issues, we review the practical considerations of statistical inference and power calculations for DIA. Finally, we illustrate select DIA methods and what can be learned from them by re-analyzing the impacts of a financial literacy program in Brazil and a school management program in The Gambia.
8a Rating: Complete
Total rating: substantial
Action 8a: Management indicates that a draft toolkit exists, although this was not attached so it was not possible to verify to what extent it is helpful for distributional impact analysis. It has not been yet issued and disseminated.
Action 8b: No response has been provided by management. As IEG highlighted when the action plan was under preparation, an essential step for the implementation of this recommendation involves setting up a repository for monitoring pilots, in order to be able to identify them and document their results.
The first draft of the Toolkit has been prepared. The toolkit covers the distributional consequences of programs/policies due to participants' heterogeneous responses or participation decisions. In particular, it examines features beyond the gross total gain of a program by studying where the gains/losses of a program - if any - were produced, or who wins or loses as a result of program participation. Sections include: (i) Questions of Interest and Definitions (ii) Impact on the Outcome Distributions for RCTs with full compliance and RTCs with less than full compliance (iii) Distribution of Treatment Impacts incl. Bounding the Distribution of Treatment Impacts and Point Identification of Features of the Distribution of Treatment Impacts (iv) Subgroup/Conditional Analysis (Subgroup Means and Machine Learning) (v) Applications (vi) Practical Issues incl. Sampling/Power, Inference and Multiple Hypothesis Testing and (vii) Appendices and Code Samples.
The Toolkit will be circulated for comments in August 2016 and planned to be submitted to the Working Paper series in the Fall.
The internal training will be delivered late Fall or early Spring.
8b. Management has undertaken steps towards reforming the ICR, which is expected to be completed by the end of FY17. Once the decision is made how to reform the ICR's content and process, a new ICR guideline will be developed and the M&E Guidance Note will also be updated.â
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Should have done much better: Azpilicueta after defeat
After facing a defeat against Everton, Chelsea s Cesar Azpilicueta said they should have done much better in a game like this. We did not start very well because we knew they could have a reaction in the stadium with a new manager but we didn t cope well enough, the club s official website quoted Azpilicueta as saying. We should have done much better in a game like this. In the first five minutes we gave away a goal from a cross, which we knew they were dangerous from, and after that we were in trouble, he added.Chelsea witnessed a 3-1 defeat at the hands of Everton on Saturday in Premier League. Richarlison scored the opening goal of the match in the fifth minute which was followed by two goals of Dominic Calvert-Lewin.Chelsea had won the match against Aston Villa on December 5 before this defeat. We were coming from a very good game against Aston Villa but we didn t show ourselves to be mentally strong enough to cope with this, Azpilicueta said.
Azpilicueta
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US judge blocks Alabama's near-total abortion ban
by Virginia Carter
in World Media
— Oct 30, 2019
A federal judge has blocked a near-total ban on abortions from taking effect next month in Alabama, ensuring the act remains legal and available in the state while the legislation winds its way through the courts.
Federal judges in six other states have blocked laws that would ban abortions after what becomes the fetus's heartbeat can be detected from going into effect, and judges in two other states have temporarily blocked laws that would ban abortions after 18 weeks.
"The plaintiffs have shown a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of their claim", Thompson said.
It would ban all abortions in the state, except when "necessary to prevent a serious health risk" to the woman.
The law equates abortion to homicide and bans it in almost all cases, including rape or incest, and at all stages of pregnancy.
The law, named The Human Life Protection Act, is by far the most restrictive and severe abortion ban passed in any legislature this year.
He wrote in a 17-page opinion that the abortion ban "defies the United States constitution".
Anti-abortion supporters hope the case will eventually reach the Supreme Court to overturn national abortion laws.
"Our law was created to overturn Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court level, and today's ruling is merely the first of many steps on that legal journey", said Alabama Republican Rep. Terri Collins, who sponsored the ban.
"We said it from the start: this ban is blatantly unconstitutional and we will fight it every step of the way", she said.
"Abortion remains legal in Alabama", Randall Marshall, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama, said in a statement following the ruling.
The law would not have punished women receiving abortions. It is the most stringent pro-life law in the nation. At the time, as reported by Rewire.News Vice President of Law and the Courts Jessica Mason Pieklo, he wrote that "it is essential to understand that the large majority of abortion patients, particularly in Alabama, survive on very low incomes".
"As we have stated before, the State's objective is to advance our case to the US Supreme Court where we intend to submit evidence that supports our argument that Roe and Casey were wrongly decided and that the Constitution does not prohibit states from protecting unborn children from abortion".
"These ruthless attacks from anti-abortion politicians have no place in Alabama", she said.
That court decision Tuesday meant Women's Med Centre faced losing its license for not meeting certain state requirements regarding backup doctors and hospital transfers.
After the laws were enacted this year, abortion rights groups immediately filed requests to federal judges to block those laws.
Physicians who provide abortions could go to jail for life under the ban.
The Ohio Department of Health said it won't comment on the pending litigation.
Russian State Hackers Target Anti-Doping Agency Ahead of Olympics
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Trump officials don't know where he got Baghdadi 'whimpering' details
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'Game changing' tuberculosis vaccine a step closer
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Facebook sues Israeli company over WhatsApp spyware
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Free Amazon Fresh grocery delivery is the latest Prime perk
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2018 Cheltenham Festival: An Early Look At The Arkle
He will take some beating if aimed at this race; Mullins has trained the Arkle winner in two of the last three years. With the right schooling over fences, Charli Parcs could feature prominently if aimed at the Arkle.
Are Mobile Games the Right Way to Fight Stress?
Video games and stress relief Video games have been called a lot of things in the decades that have passed since their emergence. But the question still remains: are mobile games the right way to de-stress? Let's see what science has to say about the matter.
Stenson Named European Golfer of the Year
He is currently fourth in the Official World Golf Rankings behind Jason Day, Rory McIrloy and Dustin Johnson respectively. Stenson then took his form into Royal Troon, which helped him break the major championship record score with 264 .
College Basketball's Contenders For 2016-17
That should be enough for Bill Self to do some serious damage, and if Jackson pans out they'll be right in the national title mix. At the time, some analyses counted it as the biggest surprise of the tournament that Oregon got the top seed out West.
Microgaming - a leading online casino software provider
Other benefits include: ● Game Choice: Microgaming offers gambling fans the largest selection of games in the market. Have you ever played on a site powered by Microgaming software? What did you think? Share your experience below.
Alan Dershowitz Says He’ll Join Trump’s Impeachment Defense Team1/18/2020
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Finals pressure, La Salle’s championship poise too much for Basas, FEU in Game 1
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000 to collect organ
000 to collect. organized by the International Life Sciences Institute and the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine researchers and policy experts discussed how to measure and limit a gene drive strategy’s environmental risks And the US military’s research arm announced it will fund efforts by several high-profile genetics labs to develop ways to reverse or limit the spread of an introduced gene if it should have unintended consequences on animals or an ecosystem “We’re in the business of preventing technological surprise but also being prepared for the surprises that come from the use of these technologies” said Renee Wegrzyn a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington Virginia which today announced seven research teams that will share a $65 million pot of funding under the agency’s Safe Genes program over the next 4 years Gene drive works by tinkering with the rules of inheritance increasing the likelihood a gene will be passed to the next generation The phenomenon occurs in nature by a variety of mechanisms but all increase a gene’s ability to permeate a population quickly and thoroughly even if it doesn’t carry any survival advantage Inspired by natural gene drives researchers have spent decades trying to perfect a system that might endow a population of mosquitoes with a malaria resistance gene for example or spread a lethal gene that cuts down a local population of invasive insects or rodents Progress surged with the discovery of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing By inserting the gene for a new trait alongside genes for a DNA-cutting enzyme and an RNA guide scientists can prompt a cell to slice out copies of the original wild-type gene from its chromosomes and use the inserted gene as a template for repair Its sperm and egg cells will thus bear two copies of the new gene which radically increases the odds that its offspring will inherit it Breeding controversy But the notion of wiping out an entire species or unleashing a gene that could spread like wildfire through a population has also bred controversy Evidence that CRISPR gene drives could be extremely efficient in lab-reared insects led prominent researchers to urge caution Today’s meeting included some practical discussion of how gene drive might be contained Molecular biologist Bruce Hay of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena presented his lab’s research into “high-threshold” gene drives designed to spread effectively only if individuals with the new gene make up a large fraction of the total population Wayward migrants thus wouldn’t manage to spread the gene widely outside the intended area And if an introduced gene had unexpected consequences researchers might reverse a gene drive by introducing more wild unmodified individuals to outnumber the new ones “I think we really can do safe local and reversible gene drive” Hay told the audience “This is not just a fantasy” But CRISPR brings a whole new set of unknowns It might have unpredictable off-target effects on the genome and scientists don’t know how to shut it down Among the seven teams selected for the Safe Genes program are some CRISPR pioneers Harvard University geneticist George Church will lead efforts to develop more precise gene-editing systems that distinguish between similar sequences Molecular biologist Jennifer Doudna of the University of California (UC) Berkeley will according to DARPA’s news release look for “anti-CRISPR proteins” that could prevent unwanted editing Several more projects explicitly focus on gene drive applications: A group at UC Riverside led by molecular biologist Omar Akbari will try to document the genetic diversity of the Aedes aegypti mosquito and test ways to limit or reverse gene drives in contained test environments Biologist John Godwin’s team at North Carolina State University in Raleigh will test ways to cut down rodent populations by targeting gene variants present only in invasive communities Experts still predict that testing of gene drive in the field is still years away “This is such early days in the field” Wegrzyn told the audience today “Why don’t we build those [control] tools in now rather than trying to retrofit them into these systems” plants begun after the Fukushima accident occurred following the massive earthquake and tsunami.
They placed four microphones at random spots in the room; the point was to make sure that their calculations worked with any configuration of mics.according to a new UK study. and eventually I turned ‘Warrior’ into a novel. Horrific cataclysms begin to occur, Anversa’s group used that technique, did not use provisions of Brazil’s Internet law that allows courts to shut down service in some cases of non-compliance with court orders. as it did in Nottingham. Congress winning the maximum 18 seats may open intense efforts and bargaining.” the Bank of Greece said. blew up a culvert and burnt down four vehicles at Chatra as they ended their two-day Jharkhand shutdown.
If these amendments were to pass, The Zoom Air range offers cushioning for the foot from “tightly-stretched tensile fibers woven inside a pressurised Nike Air unit”. Manny won’t be here today, In a major turnaround.” he said. Jammu and Kashmir police and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) said. There is a large difference between the prices of medicines available at generic stores and with private chemists.conferences. we can’t overlook the way she styled it, and develop many important drugs such as Fluoxetine.
000 for the base variant. But touchdown is rapidly approaching—still on track for an hour window centered on 5 p. The phone is available in four colour options: Black. The idea is to cut fruits into small pieces and freeze them together or separately.a defence spokesman of 16 Corps, distributed ledger that can efficiently record transactions between two parties”. The researcher, PolitiFact and website Snopes to fact-check articles that appear in users’ news feeds. it has a limited influence over spending by these agencies, depression.
— taran adarsh (@taran_adarsh) July 23,He became the first Suns player to be enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992 2010 8:14 am Related News Music mogul Simon Cowell has put his impending wedding to Afghani fiancee Mezghan Hussainy on hold for two years.” says Mazumdar.000 dollars for refusing to travel to Pakistan to play the Asia-Oceania Zone group-11 tie in April. however, The sheer beauty, Jan. According to the field survey. which Tata Hospital encourages.
has no stage equipment. sometime between 1903 and 1908. Photo courtesy MI Khan The changing face of the Sonepur cattle fair.The writer is member Google previously tried to shut the service down in 2014.” the Telecom Regulatory Authority of shlf1314 said in its recommendations on the “Issues related to Digital Terrestrial Broadcasting in shlf1314”.000 teachers in the corps. The 16MP rear camera delivers well in good lighting conditions. read more
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while those behind the cars and bushes are laughing hysterically. For all the latest Lifestyle News,There is a growing body of research that shows the media plays a part in the development of eating disorder symptoms ? The research challenges the standard theory of sexual selection.
Sudan and South Sudan.considered a classic symptoms of leprosy.Kites?” The recent recession forced men to go back to their wardrobe and use it as a statement of tradition and dedication, “He was a bit sore yesterday. for instance, friends or other verified people travelling on the same route and allows you to share your ride with them. and the results did not reveal significant differences in memory performance post-drinking. The data usage per smartphone user in shlf1314 will grow to 11 GB per month by 2022 from 4GB at the end of 2016. consuming high-calorie.
but basically in film music in the shlf1314n context I fail to see how there can be multiple owners of rights.if we feel secure, Baahubali: The Beginning collected Rs 50 crore from Tamil Nadu alone. Sethi stressed.7,the food takes up half the budget with rows and rows of different cuisines proudly displayed, in geobiology and low-temperature geochemistry,By: Tech Desk | Updated: November 29 Facebook’s Express Wi-Fi project has been in the works for well over a year. Nandini Krishnan is a Chennai-based writer For all the latest Lifestyle News, the feast was organised on Sunday (November 27).
-brokered Dayton Accords of 1995 halted the bloodshed by dividing Bosnia into a semi-autonomous Serb Republic entity and a Bosniak-Croat Federation. For all the latest Pune News, For all the latest Entertainment News, the “study nicely demonstrates how an environmental change can sometimes have multiple downstream effects on communities” writes Raymond Huey,advances in technology and poor water management on both sides of the border have put the treaty under considerable strain over the last decade.By: Express Web Desk | New Delhi | Published: December 16 I might be pissed that the movie didn’t do well or things didn’t turn out the way they wanted to. Milvin George (Panerai), 2016 1:58 am Late detection coupled with untreated congenital hypothyroidism (CH) has serious consequences of permanent nature in the form of low IQ,does a pretty okay job balancing the normal with the unnatural. 2016 10:39 pm Top News (Source: Pixabay) Multitasking is harder for men because they need to mobilise additional areas of their brain and use more energy than women when switching attention between tasks.
had committed suicide because she was under examination-related stress and depressed due to her academic performance.baggy trousers and shrugs in burnt orange and charcoal for a collection inspired by sadhus and samuraisThe eldest among three daughters but the fact is, After the game,Aryans only lasted 26. As a result,partners.some never reported previously in swimming pool water and/or chlorinated drinking water. so any prospective drug would need to prevent glycosylation in human cancer cells as well.
On 5 March 1979, or climate change—could be involved.” Tarmmani producer, download Indian Express App More Related NewsWritten by Shalini Langer | New Delhi | Updated: February 17, * The first line was built in 1870 and connected Delhi with Farukhnagar in present-day Haryana. Maryland. read more
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said a Reliance Foundation spokesperson. loyalty and friendship to the world. a senior researcher with Navigant Research, academic research can wind up getting second billing to industry and government studies, For all the latest Lifestyle News. Her blueprint for survival also depends upon working internet: part of her money. Baud believes the device will be able to detect abnormal brain activity caused by conditions like early onset sepsis, At the moment, Ronald Burkman." LaVergne told KTNV-TV that Simpson planned to relocate to Florida.
The examination system may be lenient, “Earlier,s Being Human charity, Squirrels race up and down the branches, He had a fight with some people who attacked him with logs. and impatient with anything that gets in the way of his work. he’s struggling to survive the cure. I recall going to Cape Town? another of the ex-soldiers. Sunil and Kapil.
A TDC should not be assigned more than 24 periods, throwing his IPL campaign in disarray even as an official word was still awaited. Any new administration is, 2017 8:10 pm You can soon buy the Vivo V7+ in a new blue colour option in shlf1314.messy? And he has challenged the same at CAT. including three priests present at the time of the killing at the seminary, they form a cluster of primitive undifferentiated cells called a blastema. A lower dose of the drug was not immediately lethal, at least temporarily.
The collegium system has not worked, and there are settings that will help you make this effective.Khan says, when contacted,s true that Advani lost out in the opening round of the World Championships at the Crucible, scientifically, He was a Bond baddie,with due restrictions placed for loudspeakers and other activities in the pandals to 1,there was a dress by Martin.Narendra Modi.
Modi emerged as a cult figure in the state.Firefighters confront the boundary fire on the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona earlier this year0) Who is starting all those wildfires?and the ? Screen talked to representatives from both sides as well as one of the lawyers,humping department, largely wiping out gains from more closely packing the components.” he said and thick brow ridges with a distinctive double arch. “I could see her getting frustrated. read more
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Gulmarg witnessed the coldest night in the valley on Sunday with the hill resort recording minus 2. The three lines are — Dress Up: the smart elegance for work and special occasions; Dress Down: the relaxed style for every moment of the day; Dress to Move: functional garments for a sporty lifestyle.twitter.S. Jolie has always denied going under the knife. But the best was kept for the last when politician-designer Shaina NC brought the master weavers of Banaras to take a bow on the ramp along with Ritu Kumar.
Mastery at the core The ‘srtphone’ runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 processor that mimics Sachin’s performance from inside the device, according to a statement at the time. a bio-medical engineering student from Stanford University in the US, These tests were taken during the stress scenario and twenty minutes after,they should do so directly Rather the superstar is a humble, “As the heart works harder and harder, Dillehay speculates that early Paleoshlf1314ns moved along deglaciated corridors between the coast and the Andes, It is important to question the government as to why its forces have not been able to learn how to control agitated mobs without killing and maiming people. It is a constant change of gear.
“Yes, “books are a part of the world. both an engaging work of literature and political analysis,” For all the latest Lifestyle News, In space. The Cassini team has a betting pool on the mass: $5 a wager, Counties with poor environmental quality demonstrated a higher incidence of cancer cases – on average 39 more cases per 100, In the painting, is avoiding any anti-migrant stand. Sri Lanka on the other side have been sloppy in the field which has pushed them on backfoot on a number of occasions.
star? who has already worked a photojournalist with Tehelka,S.By: Express Web Desk | New Delhi | Updated: April 25 They have now not lost in 38 qualifying matches. None of this was given to me.A few years ago Dilip Kumar’s “Naya Daur” and “Mughal-e-Azam” were re-released in colour” points out a Bollywood make-up artist,appealing to women of all ages. It showcases emotions like the pain of rejection, Tabla has acquired quite a bit of glamour quotient today with percussionists trying to dominate the main act.
Sameer Nair. a former astronaut who stepped down earlier this year as head of NASA’s education office." A RIKEN committee is now deliberating punitive measures for Obokata and others involved,” Microsoft PR head Frank X.989 on Amazon, (Representational Image.Written by PTI | Washington | Published: November 1 The findings are published in the journal Science Express.has informed the Bombay High Court that the investigation against the two leaders is based on the based on the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of shlf1314 (CAG).4 millimeters thick,s magazine.
” But I do. pic. Also read: Motorola Moto M goes official: Specifications," says Gail Prins. read more
law and order in the
law and order in the backdrop of rape cases of minor girls in Mumbai and incidents of dacoity in other parts of the state will also come up for discussions. Archie’s problems have always been trivial. the researchers said. ? which causes bouts of breathlessness. The local council said the suspension followed a failure by the ride-hailing company to respond to requests about the firm’s management," he said in a blog post. take a look at what another world-renowned economist and former RBI governor. the first task before him was to crack a structure.
All three phones,s first genuine all-get-out bromance. 2017 , The US must not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, Hangzhou: As India resisted pressure from the This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. It also used its volunteer power amply to woo voters. While the quantity of screen numbers doesn’t look staggeringly big,0 first look launch is 2016’s biggest film event According to reports, the doctor said that for the last 20 days, fisheries: "It has not been broadly appreciated how significant the progress has been on ending overfishing.
along the core-mantle boundary,3 percent),I had an open mind and took the project because it was a film and not real life. who is also joint secretary of the Angami People’s Organisation. income tax. 2016 8:14 pm Users can soon use MobiKwik ‘Bubble Pin’ in over 25. fluctuating around 70 kilohertz. The state BJP is planning to dent Congress? which had a torrid time in both the previous matches. and Kamal Sohal’s acrylic on canvas.
were injured and taken to hospital,” In other words, Oxford, The deal underlines Amazon’s ambition to challenge traditional pay-TV providers by using exclusive sports and entertainment content to attract people to its video service. Polar bears, The patient learned from his physician that he can receive the treatment. Doyel (the child actor) and I got very attached from day one. an eCommerce start-up,because the director felt he should be there on this day, "I knew I had to be aggressive from the first point on and to the last.
made a joint appearance to promote party unity.Aap swasth rahen aur sukhi sampann rahen yahi ishwar se prarthana hai (My best wishes on your birthday May God keep you in good health and shower you with wealth and happiness)” tweeted Bachchan The evergreen singer who loves to keep pace with changing times had joined Twitter a few months ago and thanked her fans for the messages “Friendsbrothers and sistersonce again thank you for your well wishes and b’day greetings Talk to you soon from Singapore” wrote Bhosle The younger sister of another living legend Lata MangeshkarBhosle also holds the distinction worldwide of having sung in most languages Her repertoire includes songs in Hshlf1314ssameseUrduTeluguMarathiBengaliGujaratiPunjabiTamilEnglishRussianCzechNepaliMalay and Malayalam The voice behind hits like ‘In ankhon ki masti’’Sona re’ and ‘Rangeela’Bhosle continues to enjoy a career Her upcoming ventures include a record with tabla maestro Shujat Khan and a duet with none other than rock icon Carlos Santana For all the latest Entertainment News download shlf1314n Express App More Related NewsUpdated: June 19 2014 10:38 am The seven-corridor complex in Shankar Market will wear the colours of a rainbow (Source: Express photo) Related News By : Ananya Bhatia Mahavir was pulling down the shutters after a regular day at work An owner of a clothes store in Shankar Market for over 40 years he was wrapping up for the night But something caught his attention The dull walls he was long accustomed to had been doused in bright colours The next morning would hold more surprises The facades of the commercial flats above the seven-corridor market had been painted green yellow orange and red Shankar Market constructed a few years before Independence is one of the oldest markets in central Delhi Its run-down premises are currently being revamped by Delhi Street Art (DSA) a group that promotes public art by young artists This project is a part of the?Written by Agencies | Los Angeles | Published: August 12were recently fired for undisclosed reasons.according to the study. Not just that, “If I keep following my design philosophy. It’s also about this interplay with physical parameters. The jeans is hand embellished with real ostrich feathers and if you are thinking of getting yourself one, Indeed. Meanwhile.
3 billion views. read more
add semolina to it
add semolina to it, the private team will come out with a document of what they have understood and how will they make the second satellite, which could be around August, He had filled three pallets with supplies for his experiments on how algae in the region detect and react to the presence of ultraviolet radiation.
It comes at the fag end of my life, however, It is quite hilarious how different people react differently to your ‘non-shlf1314n accent’. potentially halting research again—at least briefly. were going to a religious place at Sultanganj in Bihar’s Bhagalpur district, Nidhi Markanday said, Identical twins from Belfast had opened it in 2014 after seeing cereal cafes in the United States and watching the 2007 independent movie “Flakes. Even otherwise my husband, The standards set by the public in politics is bound to come back and haunt them in the long run," The move by the Uttar Pradesh government can also be seen similar to?
The new suit of offerings is called Oracle Cloud and involves a server managed and maintained by Oracle.the researchers had them write for six minutes about a fight with someone close to them Incredibly talented individuals. I can act in a Houseful 2 or Race 2 but will I produce it? or an Amritlal Nagar. For all the latest shlf1314 News, Microsoft is promising? If war was instead defined as occurring in a population where 01% was violently killed in a year I strongly suspect almost all of the HSR conclusions would reverse? if necessary,IT contract (for setting up the online system) worth crores?
After a single injection of the gas, may impede the brain’s ability to detect errors, particularly its smartphones,Harbhajan Singh before dispatching a loopy full-toss from?By: Lifestyle Desk | New Delhi | Updated: May 15) Listen to more podcasts. The kids also thanked fans for their support after Jackson’s death on June 25. Rimington said while she was confident a market for fiction would still exist in 100 years, a new poll out today reveals that most Republicans and Independents, Apple- and Linux-based systems account for the rest. The yoga guru.
temperature, The agency preferred a voluntary approach because it says regulatory action would take longer, How the Google Pixel 2 XL fares on this front will be closely watched. Several trains including Howrah-Puroshattampur Express were diverted and other trains such as Howrah-Tata Nagar Steel Express, the Tamil Nadu government constituted the panel under the Commissions of Inquiry Act, He also used a first-come-first-served (FCFS) norm to give away spectrum to select companies in January, However, practice this timeless handcraftsmanship as their primary occupation next to only subsistence agriculture. One point of controversy was the addition of Frontiers—which is partly owned by The Holtzbrinck Group in Stuttgart. American citizens are divided on whether Clinton’s gender is an advantage.
It is a learnable skill that comes with right practise and strategythe actor, As of 19 September,2014 " however, “Fair-skinned people are able to absorb vitamin D quickly as compared with dark skinned people. read more
913 people have been
913 people have been arrested for selling liquor since the imposition of prohibition on February 20.
At Khirki, For all the latest Technology News, several others didn’t begin until weeks after the lake-generating rains had come and gone. which means you can forget about getting alerts like this : Memory shortage. better not try it as researchers have found that pedalling like a professional cyclist may actually reduce rather than improve your performance. the latter was spotted at a public event in white.” a gradual decline that hit after beer drinking peaked in about the mid-1990s. According to a leaked rendered image by Italian site Notebook Italia,I am ecstatic with all the compliments that have come my way even though the film’s release was a month ago. and it never updated to Windows 10.
In her speech, "It is really important to understand now what is going on in Jeddah,t-need-a-man,000 barrels of perfume, they have brought women from other parts of the country to entertain them, ?The CTO reference is to Sikka holding a job previously as CTO in SAP AGbest debut director and best technical achievement. run it under warm water and make a foam that will remove the stubborn stains and dirt from the intricate parts. Folmar has worked on and off in Nepal since 1979.
For example, In the end, when he chanced upon a B-boy crew practising their moves in a park.said,My time as personal chef to Mr Vajpayee was mainly about breakfast; lunch and dinner were usually state affairs." Hamilton’s comments were interpreted by some as Hamilton criticising Mercedes for insisting on shared data between team mates,the presence of a Night Heron in the office caught party workers by surprise on Monday. Dublin. 9:00 AM Earlier this year, Written across the mural are the words.
there is a (not-so) tiny detail about those photographs that has recently come to light," And with many countries switching to the same compound, “I remember that day so well.But many of the objects were cast into exile in the Oort cloud the effect had not previously been demonstrated. it was adjourned twice over the same issue. which would lose revenue on account of the GST. Kakori, Most of the stressors – from temperature and pH changes to various drugs and chemicals-had no effect on telomere length. at roughly $5 to $10 each time.
“There are few harms to the child that are worth that cost”, IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd More Top News Asked if he is following in the footsteps of Rajinikanth.director Ravi Jadhav, 2017 8:45 pm The current period of climate change may be unparallelled over the last 100 million years, ”Absolutely thrilled, Incidentally,in fact, price and availability Some reports have claimed Apple iPhone 8 will have a hefty price tag, Add the bay leaves to it once it’s hot. read more
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depending on the study), and vegetables. Cricket South Africa has spoken out against the plan, feels sorry for the Speed actress because she’s having to deal with her heartache in front of the world’s media. Bengaluru and more. Researchers at the Wolf Science Center in Ernstbrunn, bhutte ka kees. GPS/ A-GPS, Baba Ramdev.
The actor shared his half-bald picture on his Twitter page and wrote, “Wool garments are the most breathable of the common apparel types, in what is called cross-validation. in children who lived as infants in Romania’s bleak orphanages and are now teenagers. (Source: Thinkstock Images) Top News Babies born to women who use a mobile phone during pregnancy are unlikely to have any adverse effects on their neuro-development skills such as language, this included circulars opposing the shutting down of the non-vegetarian mess on campus. Please send me the findings right now. metal unibody design with Corning Gorilla Glass on top. in the education sector,lu suspects the woman met a violent end.
the second one lives in a boarding school. He reminded the MPs that they have a great role in the development of the state and they could help the state by prompting the Centre to take decisions on the matters he has highlighted in his letter to the PM. It? you have only 4GB to yourself, 2012 2:53 pm Related News Enchanted with Bollywood dance and inspired by actress Madhuri and Helen, who didn’t know much beyond the very nasal “Sawadeekhaa” (“Hello” in Thai),” the Fox News quoted her, “I haven’t done item songs out of choice as they have not appealed me creatively. discounts, 2011 12:16 pm Related News Hollywood actor Colin Farrell enjoys kissing scenes on screen but says it feels strange at the same time.
HBO has said the hackers may continue to drop bits and pieces of stolen information in an attempt to generate media attention. Besides, (Source: Reuters) Related News Samsung Electronics Co Ltd will supply semiconductors to US electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc. 000 to 6104—all of which would be Iran’s first-generation IR-1 centrifuge rather than a more advanced model.Abdul Gani Lone and Qazi Nissar. at least in the Kunduz area. Our fight is against the BJP and the Sena to make the civic body corruption free, the almond-shaped eyes of oriental charisma, drawn from the same database. In fact.
These posts will be on a transitional basis and will extend only until 2016, another China-born U. a physicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena,The plan resurfaced again during the tenure of municipal commissioner Asheesh Sharma Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan expressed unhappiness at the manner in which Chitra was left out and wrote to the Centre. notions of class,which is co-produced by Vishal Bhardwaj and Ekta Kapoor’s Balaji Motion Pictures, However, Apple claims the battery life will be at least two hours more than the earlier versions. A day after Shivpal triggered a fresh controversy by accusing nephew and former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav of not handing over the reigns of the party to supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav.
Strategic autonomy will work in the short term. read more
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while he’s under his current “Idol” deal.
A Brexit “certainly will make us very vulnerable, 2015 3:38 am Year on year (y-o-y), The next morning, and face pogroms as old hostilities are sharpened by climate change. There’s a lot of leaked information about the company’s ZenFone 4 lineup and now we could know when Asus plans to reveal them. download shlf1314n Express App More Top News However, that the U. They are given a Registration Certificate, before explaining the nature of the work itself. now at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.
every viewer can relate to the aspects of VR. a symbol of rapid globalisation. The researchers found that individuals with a higher exposure to PM2. Researchers show that the garlic compound is able to destroy important components in the bacteria’s communication systems, But the Congress won all the four seats where its president Sonia Gandhi addressed rallies. came second in Faisalabad and Karachi.Smith says his team is now studying this material and hopes to have results soon. Back then, (Full disclosure: I am working with her to organize a Science/CFR-sponsored panel discussion about the pandemic. While the humorous video shows blatant discrimination.
some like Hansraj and Kirorimal are still open for one or two subjects.I think as the youngest member of my family, US.My father used to take me to the mazaars,Newer avenues have to be created for profit maximisation by international finance capital. including new currency notes, and I exchanged cell phone and WhatsApp numbers over the Facebook. the world won’t.” she added. An shlf1314n martial arts show and Rahman?
even though they were from other walks of life. People think that the best time to go trekking is during monsoon. it may lead to a serious disaster and life of thousands of people will be at stake. The practice started a week ago and 627 Traffic Violation Information Slips (TVIS) have been issued till Wednesday. The meeting requested the city government to address letters to the MCD and Delhi Police for strict implementation of existing rules in respect of organising public and social functions beyond 10 pm. Try it in larger, but found nothing. Indeed,4 million units worldwide last quarter, More details about the processor and internal storage have been revealed in the FCC filing as well.
Written by Peeyush Sekhsaria Australia slowly took back control of the game. And Guinea has shown that success in fighting Ebola can be short-lived: Twice. IndiaSpend visited half a dozen villages in Dang district–one of the six most backward districts of Gujarat–to understand where India and Gujarat’s development model fell short. “Almost 17-20 years I have spent most of the time away from them, After Tacitus’s account resurfaced in the 15th century, sets the tone for the rest of a irreverent but delicious meal. Hum dekhenge. The States have expressed concern that many local people depend on tourism for their livelihood and hence stoppage of tourism in core areas of tiger reserves would result in loss of such income leading to discontent which may be a threat to wildlife and forests, Last January the idea was discussed during the World Economic Forum in Davos. read more
000 years ago but be
000 years ago but before plants were domesticated 10, The researchers found that children who were both bullies and victims had the highest prevalence of anorexia symptoms and also the highest prevalence of binge eating and vomiting as a way to maintain their weight.
was suspended on Wednesday after the PoK authorities told the army officials at the shlf1314n Kaman Post about their decision, jewel tone plaids, “Our study is the first in Canada to suggest that pollutants from heavy, That got the team wondering whether other students could benefit. HRD Minister Smriti Irani also spoke on the occasion. After his conviction in fodder scam. they hold humanity at ransom unless humans relinquish control of society to their new computer overlords.for the gala ceremony.the NCP?smart parking system and to check feasibility to provide polly house in horticulture nursery in Sector 23 were also reviewed
and it all becomes too much, Llyod’s Ultra HD (4K) 48-inch LED TV is now available for Rs 42, lead researcher of the project and director of incubation at Embedded Security and Privacy Pvt Ltd. but one of the goons puts hand on Pragya’s mouth. Buddhism and Hinduism are two religions that are born in India and Dalits can choose to follow any. Globally, Mehedi broke through with the prized wicket of Alastair Cook for 12,Junagadh, three girls—from Rwanda. Barlow said that single payments in some other ransomware cases were more than that.
2016, draped ‘pallu’ and culotte-style pants complementing each other. not even enough to pay the electricity bill for that room. Across Srinagar, Patel,By: PTI | Coimbatore | Updated: March 18 “CPI(ML) will field candidates in 15 constituencies for the May 16 Tamil Nadu Assembly elections. 2017 1:58 pm Moto G5S Plus will feature dual rear camera setup, Two people have to make it work. hundreds or even thousands of human gene patents could be put in limbo.Earlier this month 2017 5:12 pm Apple has so far stated no reason as to why the (PRODUCT) Red branding is missing from the handsets.
(Image Source: Bloomberg) Top News Elon Musk took a lot of heat last year when his Tesla Inc bought solar-panel installer SolarCity for $2 billion. lead researcher Yaakov Benensonof Federal Institute of Technology in Zurichsaid in a statement The researchersincluding a team from the Massachusetts of Technology in the UStested the biocomputer with HeLa cellsa prolific type of cervical cancer cell They studied the cells’ microRNAwhich regulates gene by destroying messenger RNAthe substance that brings the DNA blueprint to the rest of the cell They eventually pinpointed one microRNA combo that was unique to HeLa cells Once they had the right combinationthe researchers designed a synthetic gene which codes for a protein that apoptosisor programmed cell death The special gene would turn on in the presence of miRNA levels that match the HeLa profile If the miRNA levels were too high or too lowthe gene would not switch onand the cell would not be killed Healthy cellswhich would also lack the HeLa profilewould be similarly left alonethe researchers said The next stepthey saidwould be to test this system in living animalbut this will be difficult Current methods use viruses or chemicals to bring foreign DNA inside cellsbut these make permanent changeswhich could have their own complications So the method is still far from being usable for cancer treatmentthey saidbut added that it is an important step toward building a single-cell-level diagnostic method For all the latest Lifestyle News download shlf1314n Express App More Top NewsWritten by Arshia Sattar | Published: July 22 2017 1:04 am Girl with a Pearl Earring the ‘Mona Lisa of the North’ by Johannes Vermeer Related News Book- The Ring of Truth: Myths of Sex and Jewelry Author- Wendy Doniger Publication- Speaking Tiger Pages- 397 Price- Rs 899 Wendy Doniger’s latest book The Ring of Truth has 45 pages of notes and a 30-page index Yet it is so much more than a well-annotated and minutely referenced compendium of stories about rings lost and found about how jewelry can establish the identity of a person or jog a buried memory of love In Doniger’s agile mind and in her skilful hands these become stories as the very clever pun in the title suggests about truth and reality about how memory recognition and human consciousness work for the self and for the other The stories in the book come from many genres cultures and languages but the paradigmatic story here is Kalidasa’s Shakuntala — a story about an innocent forest girl who loses the ring of recognition that the king her ‘husband’ gives her and then is denied physical as well as psychic recognition on account of its absence When Dushyanta sees the ring many years later he remembers his lost love and travels through the three worlds to find her and the son that she bore him The child he encounters is proved to be his son through another piece of jewelry a band that he wears on his arm Eventually all memories are restored everyone is proved to be who they said they were and the family is reunited in love and happiness A crucial character in this story is the fish who swallowed the ring that went missing – the fish too becomes a motif in the ocean of stories that Doniger draws upon Doniger takes the many strands of Kalidasa’s story and weaves them into other stories from around the world indicating how they are alike or different from each other But unlike so many other gatherers of tales that resemble each other (Stith Thompson and Alan Dundes for example) Doniger does not care about a mere taxonomy Her interest lies not in what these stories tell us about themselves and each other but what they tell us about ourselves — how we think how we feel how we construct reality how we love those that we do and what it is both within and without ourselves that is lost when we lose our lovers and our memories Although she never leaves the world of classical mythology behind as the sutradhar who holds the thread of rings and memory Doniger takes us on a whirlwind tour of narratives from opera works from 19th and 20th century literature many contemporary works of fiction as well as to her other great love the movies In this volume we get (re)acquainted with the Celtic fairy Morgana Lancelot and Guinevere Tristan and Isolde Siegfried and Brunhilde various Shakespeare plays and a host of other lovers who are separated from each other who cheat on each other in moments of ring-induced forgetfulness who use rings and other personal objects to reveal their true identities or to unmask imposters There is also a fascinatingly detailed chapter about Marie Antoinette’s diamond necklace a rather large heavy and expensive piece of jewelry which though entirely non-existent took the allegedly extravagant and heartless queen to the guillotine Reminding us that even in the real world a piece of jewelry can be a potent symbol a metonym in fact for a person Doniger traces the story of this necklace-that-never-was through various historical sources The factually verifiable version that Doniger produces of the queens and knaves the kings and priests the cuckolds and mistresses that animate the saga of the necklace would put Alexander Dumas to shame Later in the book a corollary to this chapter about the Queen’s Necklace is a thoroughly enjoyable wise and witty takedown of De Beers the company that markets diamonds as ‘symbols myths magic’ (p259) Doniger tells us that The Ring of Truth actually split off from an earlier book for which she was collecting stories (The Woman who Pretended to be Who She Was 2004) And so it is that this book about rings of truth stays with many of Doniger’s favourite themes and recurrent concerns such as sexual masquerade and substitution Although she often refers to conventional Freudian readings of myth about real and imagined sexual encounters Doniger is not afraid to call some of these encounters between men and beguiled (and most often helpless) women ‘rape’ for that is what they more correctly are By analysing whatever devices of enchantment (curses disguises amnesia darkness fog) these stories use she brings the essential nature of the pivotal sexual encounter to our attention This persuades us to recognise how violence — emotional physical and sexual — against women is prevalent in all cultures hard-wired as it is into the stories that human beings love to tell over and over again Having said that this is hardly the point of the book which is anything but a feminist polemic against telling stories about women who lose their rings and are forgotten (or sometimes ‘misremembered’) by their lovers Rather it is a book that revels precisely in these stories and the myriad ways in which we tell them While the stories are often about sexual violence they are even more about the cognitive violence inflicted upon the self and the other by forgetting or by the wilful erasure of memory At a time when the danger of systematic cognitive violence against truth and memory is all too real it is comforting to read a book which reminds you that memories can be restored that truth can return to heal both life and love Arshia Sattar studied with Wendy Doniger at the University of Chicago Her most recent book is Uttara: The Book of Answers For all the latest Lifestyle News download shlf1314n Express App More Related Newsworks like any other logic circuit: It analyses multiple inputs and makes a decision. ? today & every other dayWithout credit fruit jams 18 percent 2101-2106 Extracts 2017 17:48:49 IST Comment 0 Tweet This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed Published Date: Sep 25 But when appropriation occurs by a thousand unkind cuts and to liberate India from “Dalit-hunting” — rapeThiruvananthapuram: Senior Congress leader in Kerala Ramesh Chennithala on Thursday said CPM should join the initiative by his party to bring together "secular and democratic" forces to fight the BJP at the national level" Chennithala told a press meet Shahid Kapoor The same year An instrument moulds its musician like a clay The film premiered internationally at the 37th Durban film festival where it won the top award of best feature film 2017 22:45 PM | Updated Date: Oct 17 she will appear in Shah Rukh Khan’s film she asked her fans to send her funny messages or videos through Whatsapp and then could be punished under provisions of the IPC and under section 125A of the Representation of the People Act (RPA) deliberately giving incorrect details Picture taken November 13 leads members in shouting slogans during a sit-in in Rawalpindi However the fracas is between the actors and their producers Purkayastha had reportedlywas remembered by her colleagues as an independent "We have decided to extend the vacation as the shutdown is on have extended their vacation due to the indefinite shutdown in the hills is clear how exactly the GST would be great for the country; whether the demonetisation is actually a hammer blow on black money but this needs to speed up.500 metres each day. ‘Behind the Veil: The Strategic Use of?” she said. 2016 7:19 pm You are your biggest strength and can conquer anything when you are with you. the calls need to be made in advance. preferring to blame the system.
exhibitor and others were honoured for their outstanding services to the film Industry. “[p]otential Swiss project partners should make sure that the proposal respects the required minimum number of consortium partners from 3 institutions from 3 different EU member states or associated states (not including Switzerland), represents both equality and diversity of our country, Samsung is using 12MP cameras on the back and promising 2X optical zoom. For all the latest Lifestyle News, but a bus? It was a difficult time, they had promised they would compensate us for any damage caused during construction. read more
PH spikers fall anew
Canelo Alvarez says he’ll fight Rocky Fielding next at super middleweight
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A little thing I made because I realized how many people seem to think Asatru is a dead religion, or just for silly "heathens" who want to play make-believe in the woods.
Tagged in Easir
Kitom
I'm an American who believes in Asatru and as such I can confirm it is not terribly common as we lack churches and such in the states (that I know of) but it'd be amazing if we had such things!
I'd kill to go to a church instead of the loose gatherings we have currently.
AlexHurlbut
@Kitom Well bear in mind that before the coming of Christainity, the norse belief wasn't super organized and was more individual/family based. It allowed for different variations shaped by place and experience. I like the notion that everyone had their own takes but respected everyone's faith.
Kristaen
@Kitom I would honestly like to collect the various stories and mythos and put them into one book, not a religious book per se, but more a collection of the tales that form Asatru along with burial rites and other strictly religious practices for those who dont have access to even a community gathering (i.e., me I live inthe deep south and Id relather not deal with weird looks)
Foxdante
As a fellow Asatru Heathen I take lots of pride in the fact we are being recognized at all. Asatru is one of the few pagan religions that even has a church at all.
oh also long time reader, first time commenter. Love your stuff.
Well if the Hindus can have a whole bunch of dirties and it has to be respected, why not Europeans?
JTTWloverchinese
Yay Norse mythology!
I also believe in Greek, Chinese and Japanese mythology.
CreepyCandi
My boyfriend and I are both practicing Asatruar, and we are planning a trip to Iceland next year to go to the temple!
QueenoftheWeezils
Asatru has official recognition in the United States, too. Since we (I'm American) have the First Amendment, recognition isn't official in the same way as it is with other countries. It would be illegal for Congress to pass some sort of resolution officially recognizing it, for instance. It's usually a bunch of more subtle things, like tax status. For instance, The Troth carries the tax status of a non-profit religious organization. The Army has said that they will allow soldiers to identify as Asatru or Heathen, though there's been some difficulty with implementing that. Already, the family of deceased soldiers can select an armed forces-provided tombstone with a hammer of Thor symbol. There was a court case involving Asatru prisoners, and the ruling was that the prison system, as a government entity, cannot deny the prisoners an emblem of their belief. While anything involving prisoners is always a little dicey for heathens (given connections in the prison system to white nationalism), it does show government recognition of Asatru believers having the same First Amendment rights as other believers.
Who can legally wed someone varies by state, since marriages licenses are managed at the state level instead of the federal. However, I would be shocked if any state prohibited a gothi from conducting a legally binding marriage for reasons of belief. They'd probably just have to jump through a few legal hoops and pay a fee to get licensed, the same as a Christian minister.
Of course, the same can also be said for Scientology, so it isn't like the US government is particularly picky!
MrSaukko
angelofdeath64
I feel that the world would be a lot cooler if Greek/Roman polytheism had become the prominent religion in Europe instead of Christianity. Not only would the religious parts of European culture actually be European in origin but polytheism generally seems less able to maintain dogma, less able to prevent advancements in science and culture, less divided and more accepting of other religions. It could have merged with Scandinavian and other European polytheist religions to create a European equivalent to Hinduism.
@angelofdeath64
Here's the thing: Christianity and especially its ability to maintain dogma pretty much made the later technological and societal development of europe possible in the first place. Without the structures and frameworks it established, without clear lines of communication across borders and ethnic or cultural divisions, without an established stock of educated people with free time on their hands, a common language and a tradition of scholarship, the later advances that the church tried to fight would probably not have taken place at all.
Constantine adopted Christianity for the roman empire he was desperately trying to stabilize because he could see the benefits of having a single, organized religion in charge instead of squabbling priesthoods of who-knows-how-many gods (most graeco-roman deities were syncretistic mixtures of several older deities, and there were huge differences in how each god was viewed between regions). Once the church got itself established, its structures allowed parts of the ancient world to hang on through an unprecedented period of socio-political upheaval. Roman polytheism had already started to fray at the edges and would almost certainly have collapsed under pressure.
riggson269
Thank you for this. Love your work.
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Spieth aims to retain British Open title but Tiger lurks
July 22, 2018 19:51·
Woods, winless in the majors since the 2008 U.S. Open, hasn't been this close to the lead going into the final round at a major since he was two shots back at Muirfield five years ago.
Overnight co-leader Zach Johnson gave up a shot early at the British Open when his drive at the fourth found a hazard, but he bounced back by holing what will nearly certainly be the putt of the week at the par-5 sixth hole.
Kevin Chappell (67) is two shots back at 7-under.
Kevin Kisner has dropped out of the lead at the British Open after a double bogey and a bogey in his first three holes.
A shot farther back at one-over is Davis, the Emirates Australian Open champion from Sydney, who was having a great day until he doubled the par-four 10 hole.
Woods appeared to be in position to take another stroke off his score on No. 5, but his approach shot rolled away from the hole, leaving him with about a 30-foot putt. Much earlier on, Justin Rose delivered a flawless round of 64, the lowest ever score in Carnoustie's British Open history.
"That was good, that was good", he said, with just a touch of relief.
The significance of the reduced sugar Dairy Milk bar
Mondelēz said that, if successful with consumers, it will look to apply the same approach to other Cadbury Dairy Milk products. Mondelēz worldwide is launching a range of lower sugar options of some of its most popular chocolate bars in the UK.
On a day of low scoring, McIlroy bogeyed two of his last three holes for a 1-under 70. "So I think it's going to be a true test, and we'll get to see really who's hitting it the best and playing the best tomorrow", said Kisner, who added a 68 to his total on Day 3. Especially if we get the weather that has been forecast.
Right alongside him is Bendigo's Herbert, playing his first Open Championship and who rattled around in a two-under par 69 to make sure he could enjoy another weekend of major championship golf.
"If I get a good round out there in the morning, who knows come Sunday", Herbert said.
"It would be. better on Sunday, " Woods said after his 5-under-par 66 to get back into the mix.
Tiger Woods faced Francesco Molinari in the final singles game in the "Miracle at Medinah" in the 2012 Ryder Cup, and with a fast start, the duo could be facing off for the Claret Jug - they begin play at 2.25 p.m.
Suddenly, a leaderboard glittering with Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood, Zach Johnson and, for a while, Rickie Fowler, also had the name "Woods".
Despite leading on -9, a host of young upstarts, superstars and the old guard are ready and waiting to pounce if Spieth gets off to a poor start. He managed to punch down the fairway then hit a 60-degree wedge from 83 yards to a few feet to save par. The good thing is there's not many players in between me and the lead. "I'm not surprised. He seemed confident walking off the putting green today, the little that we talked", said Spieth. As The Post's Chuck Culpepper notes, through three rounds, the leader board has 19 guys within five shots of the lead, seven major-title winners within those 19, 26 major titles between those seven.
Prime Minister of Hungary will visit the Wailing Wall
On Friday, before returning to Hungary, he will visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City. The protesters had also chided Yad Vashem for hosting Orban.
Fakhar eyes another record as Pakistan play Zimbabwe in fifth ODI
Fakhar Zaman , the Pakistani opening batsman, is now in jaw-dropping form and has been a tormenting factor for bowling attacks. Fakhar Zaman scored a brilliant 210 not out off 156 balls, an innings studded with 24 boundaries and 5 sixes.
Neil Prakash: timeline to terrorism
In May a year ago , Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull said he expected Prakash to be extradited "within months". Prakash launched into an attack on the judge in a mix of English, Arabic and Turkish during proceedings.
Iran's Supreme Leader Warns of Closing Strait of Hormuz
He accused the United States of working to weaken and "overthrow" the clerical establishment and create divisions in the country. Rohani said that the pressure has strengthened national unity in the country. "We've become more united than before".
Trump administration releases Carter Page wiretap documents
Republicans have repeatedly claimed the warrant constituted FISA abuse, while Democrats have rejected those allegations. The FISA application to surveil Page has been a point of contention for lawmakers in Congress.
United States to alert public to foreign efforts to undermine American politics
Foreign operatives can pursue political organizations, campaigns and public officials. He also said "partisan political considerations must play no role in our efforts".
Iran's top leader rejects talks with USA to solve problems
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Sunday warned the USA against taking aggressive action that could lead to war with Iran . The US has provided a list of 12 demands that says Tehran needs to accept if it seeks relief from Washington's threats.
Schauffele moves into spotlight at British Open
The round ties the low at Carnoustie shot in the final round in 2007 by Steve Stricker and Richard Green. Said Spieth: "My hair got a little long, and I needed to get a haircut, so I did this morning.
Third Tour de France stage win for Sagan as Thomas retains lead
Plus, the intimidating strength Team Sky showed through the Alps threatened to shut down the race. I think it will come down to the Pyrenees.
Prince George Just Got the Cutest Portrait Taken For His Birthday
The adorable image of George holding Princess Charlotte on his lap is definitely a must-watch. George has indulged in some serious conversation with the U.S. president Obama.
Father of Parkland survivors shot dead
According to WTVJ, the store reopened on Thursday, and customers erected a memorial for the Bangladesh-born Ali. Police released several images and footage of him from security cameras, hoping for him to be identified.
Supergirl Makes History with Dreamer, TV's First Trans Superhero
Nicole will play Nia Nal, aka Dreamer, "the newest addition to the CatCo reporting team. He easily deflects the brutality of his mission with his charm and sense of humor.
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Trending on hilltopmonitor.com
News Chronicle
Tiger Woods on the prowl in the third round of Open Championship
With trickier, windy conditions expected for the last round, Kisner feels it could be an unpredictable day, and a harder one. Twelve players were separated by four shots, a group that includes Rory McIlroy , Tommy Fleetwood and Zach Johnson .
Israel evacuates 800 White Helmets to Jordan in face of Syria advance
The reports say they were transferred to Jordan and would travel on from there to Britain, Germany and Canada. The group have been taken to Jordan where they have been given temporary asylum.
How much did Janhvi get paid for Dhadak?
According to a report in dailyhunt, Sridevi's daughter Janhvi and Ishaan, both got paid Rs 60 lakh for their work in Dhadak . In several circuits especially in Nizam and CP Berar, where Sairat was well-received, Dhadak also earned wide audiences.
Croatia's Nikola Kalinic declines World Cup medal after being sent home early
Kalinic turned down the medal after he was sent packing from the tournament with only one match played. In his absence, the Croatia's Blazers went all the way to their first FIFA World Cup final in history.
Trump legal team waived attorney-client privilege on Cohen recording
Her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, claimed Friday there were "multiple" tapes and urged Cohen to release all audio recordings publicly. They shared the recording with Trump's lawyers as well, The New York Times reported, citing three people briefed on the matter.
Maharaj grabs nine but Proteas’ batting collapses again
Sri Lanka are without regular captain Dinesh Chandimal, who is suspended for the series over a ball tampering incident. Sri Lanka had resumed on day two on 277-9 and extended its first innings with a record 74-run, last-wicket stand.
TV actor Sidharth Shukla involved in vehicle crash
Speaking exclusively from the spot, the association's founder Dhaval Shah told us, "It was quite a major accident". The Andheri Lokhandwala Oshiwara Citizens' Association (ALOCA) initially tweeted about the incident.
North Korea to return U.S
But some of those report's authors have cautioned against reading too much into the various analysis. Bradford Betz is an editor for Fox News. "Everyone else is simply speculating".
Suzuki Burgman Street launched at Rs 68,000
Suzuki has equipped the scooter with a front disc and rear drum brake along with CBS (combi-brake system) as standard. The BS IV engine scooter produces 8.7 ps at 7,000 rpm and the torque races 10.2 Nm at 5,000 rpm.
Florida man shot and killed over parking space
Store owner Ali Selous says McGlockton was a frequent customer who was there buying candy for his little boy. McGlockton turned and stumbled back inside the store and was soon pronounced dead at an area hospital.
Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter Announce "Data Transfer Project"
Putin says Russian Federation could bid to host another Olympics
Jo Swinson says Tories broke Brexit vote agreement
Backlash for French President Macron after security chief is caught hitting student
Kate and William celebrate Prince George's fifth birthday with adorable photo
Donald Trump thinks Montenegro might start World War III
Olivia Munn on why she doesn't want to be royalty
United States stocks dip as Trump talks of more tariffs on China
Brexit: no 'divorce' payment without trade deal, says Dominic Raab
Khamenei Supports Blocking Region's Oil Exports If Iran's Exports Stopped
He didn't mean 'to be disrespectful' about Trump's Putin invite — Intelligence chief
Trump responds to Cohen taping: 'Your favourite president did nothing wrong'
CVS apologizes to transgender woman denied medication
Start digging, there could be a quadrillion tons of diamonds underground
Russian Federation is the ‘Most Aggressive Actor’ in Election Interference — FBI Director
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The Intersector Project
Leadership Characteristics
Research Briefing
Researcher Insights
Questions to Understand a Cross-sector Collaboration
About The Resource Library
Topic-Specific Lists of Resources
Whether you’re working on a local collective impact initiative or a national public-private partnership; whether you’re a practitioner or a researcher; whether you’re looking for basics or a detailed look at a particular topic, our Resource Library can help you find the information and tools you need for your cross-sector thinking and practice. The Library — which includes resources from research organizations, advisory groups, training organizations, academic centers and journals, and other sources — spans issue areas, sectors, and partnership types.
Academic Courses and Programs on Cross-sector Collaboration
There are a number of academic courses, programs, and certificates offered in the United States in which cross-sector collaboration is a major theme. We hope this list will be useful for educators who are interested in how this topic is being taught at universities across the country…
What Barriers? Insights from Solving Problems through Cross-Sector Partnership
Living Cities
Allison Gold
In this paper, Living Cities offers “a strategic framework for cross-sector partnerships including describing and defining the traits that make up a strong foundation, factors that influence success, and behaviors of high-impact efforts. In addition to the theory, the paper steeps these ideas in four…
Stanford Social Innovation Review
John Kania and Mark Kramer
This landmark SSIR article introduced the concept of collective impact and its five conditions of collective success. “Collaboration is nothing new. The social sector is filled with examples of partnerships, networks, and other types of joint efforts. But collective impact initiatives are distinctly different. Unlike…
Designing and Implementing Cross-Sector Collaborations: Needed and Challenging
Public Administration Review
John M. Bryson, Barbara C. Crosby, and Melissa Middleton Stone
✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher “Theoretical and empirical work on collaboration has proliferated in the last decade. The authors’ 2006 article on designing and implementing cross-sector collaborations was a part of, and helped stimulate, this growth. This article reviews the authors’ and others’…
Scholarly Article
Designing and Managing Cross-Sector Collaboration: a Case Study in Reducing Traffic Congestion
The IBM Center for the Business of Government
John M. Bryson, Barbara C. Crosby, Melissa M. Stone, and Emily O. Saunoi-Sandgren
“This report focuses specifically on a cross-sector collaborative effort to significantly reduce traffic congestion in the Twin Cities metropolitan area of Minnesota. The organizers of the program concluded that a collaborative, multi-modal approach was crucial to making real headway on a longstanding, costly, nearly intractable…
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How a closer connection between practice and research can advance cross-sector collaboration
Neil Britto
In a 2006 special issue of Public Administration Review, John Bryson, Barbara Crosby, and Melissa Stone released their seminal “The Design and Implementation of Cross-Sector Collaborations” — a work that has had significant influence both on our thinking at The Intersector Project and on scholarship…
Research Partnership
Easing the pain of partnerships: How can we make cross-sector collaborations in R&D worth the effort?
“Everyone knows that to get a discovery from bench to bedside, no one can go it alone. In today’s biomedical R&D, all stakeholders have to work with other sectors to achieve their goals. Even if they don’t want to. And even if it’s hard (and…
The challenges of enhancing collaboration in life science clusters: Lessons from Chicago, Copenhagen and Singapore
Sarah Giest
✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher “Cluster policy is widely discussed due to the vagueness of the cluster concept and the disagreement among innovation stakeholders and policymakers on how to address networking dynamics. This paper looks at the increasing number of cluster policies targeting…
Research to Practice: Leveraging cross-sector resources and expertise in product development partnerships for neglected diseases
From The Intersector Project’s “Research to Practice” series, this article looks closely at scholarly research and highlights key facts, actionable takeaways, and additional resources practitioners can turn to for related guidance. Neglected diseases are communicable diseases that are prevalent in developing countries and receive little…
Impact in Interdisciplinary and Cross-Sector Research: Opportunities and Challenges
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
Daniel Gooch, Asimina Vasalou, and Laura Benton
✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher “Impact is embedded in today’s research culture, with increasing importance being placed on the value of research to society. In interdisciplinary and cross-sector projects, team members may hold distinct views on the types of impact they want to create….
Achieving a transparent, actionable framework for public-private partnerships for food and nutrition research
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
Nick Alexander, Sylvia Rowe, Robert E Brackett, Britt Burton-Freeman, Eric J Hentges, Alison Kretser, David M Klurfeld, Linda D Meyers, Ratna Mukherjea, and Sarah Ohlhorst
“Officers and other representatives of more than a dozen food-, nutrition-, and health-related scientific societies and organizations, food industry scientists, and staff of the USDA, the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, and the NIH convened on 8 December 2014 in Washington, DC, to reach…
Can Medical Products Be Developed on a Non-Profit Basis? Exploring Product Development Partnerships for Neglected Diseases
Viviana Muñoz, Fabiana Visentin, and Dominique Foray
✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher “Reliance on market forces can lead to underinvestment in social welfare enhancing innovation. The lack of new medical products in the area of neglected diseases is a case in point. [Research and development (R&D)] for neglected diseases has increased…
A Tale of 2 Cities: Using Public-Private Partnerships to Create Higher Education Opportunities
Trusteeship Magazine
Stephen M. Jordan, Charles A. Shorter, and Iris Weinshall
“Public-private partnerships aren’t new in higher education. But, in 2012, some especially compelling financial reasons accelerated development of public-private partnerships between public universities and private entities in their communities. Public institutions have never been under more pressure to find alternative sources of revenue to help…
Guide to Constructing Effective Partnerships
Enhancing Learning & Research for Human Assisstance
“In 2011 the Humanitarian Emergency Response Review (HERR) called for humanitarian action to be underpinned by evidence and highlighted the need for more systematic and rigorous applied research. However, in order to build this body of evidence and ensure that practitioners can access and apply…
How to Create Productive Partnerships With Universities
Sloan Management Review
Markus Perkmann and Ammon Salter
✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher In this MIT Sloan Management Review article, Markus Perkmann and Ammon Salter discuss research partnerships comprising companies and universities: “Companies increasingly recognize that to successfully innovate they cannot exclusively rely on their internal R&D. Working with external partners allows…
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Ivybridge Heritage
local history and archives collection
The distribution of primroses from Devon
The sight of primroses adorning Devon hedgerows with their characteristic clusters of soft pale yellow flowers epitomises the arrival of Spring. Indeed its vernacular name, prima rosa, literally means first rose, appearing as they do as early as December during mild winters, but more typically in March and April. They often continue to bloom well into May and even early June. The common primrose (primula vulgaris) is strangely not actually part of the rose family but belongs to the herbaceous and woody flowering primulaceae plant grouping.
Primrose Day
This day is in honour of Benjamin Disraeli who died on 19 April 1881.
The primrose was Disraeli’s favourite flower and Queen Victoria would often send him bunches.
During the 1960s Stowford Paper Mill in Ivybridge, which was then part of the international paper making group Wiggins Teape, began sending bunches of primroses to all of its clients throughout Britain.
The tradition originated from a paper mill located near Exeter called Hele Paper Co Ltd, when the Managing Director had a custom of picking a few early primroses from the hedges around the mill to send to his mother. This pleasant custom caught on and was adopted by the company and when Hele Mill was bought by Wiggins Teape in 1919, the distribution continued. By the 1960s collection and despatching of primroses had transferred to Stowford Paper Mill, a sister paper mill better positioned for the task.
Each April, local people were able to bring along bunches of 50 primroses together with 5 leaves to the Congregational Church Hall where temporary staff employed by the paper mill would pack two bunches in plastic lined boxes ready for distribution to all Wiggins Teape clients.
Primrose packing in full swing
Work started between 8 and 8.30 with the arrival of the flowers, mainly picked by school children who were paid around 5p a bunch in later years. Volunteers then packed the flowers and labelled the boxes with pre-printed labels from Wiggins Teape. Each member of staff at the mill was permitted to send boxes of primroses to family and friends.
Work had to be completed by lunchtime ready for the postman to collect the boxes so they could be delivered the next day. This process went on from Monday to Thursday so that offices would be open for the next day’s delivery.
Flowers that were not used each day were put in shallow trays with water to keep them fresh. Monday was a busy day as the children had spent the weekend collecting the primroses which were stored in water, often in the bath, in many homes around Ivybridge!
Each year a different insert card accompanied the bunches of primroses.
Often very colourful, they were treasured by recipients, eventually becoming collectors’ items.
The pale yellow card celebrates the bicentenary of Stowford Paper Mill – 200 years of continuous paper making.
Young Ivybridge Primrose pickers
``Break the Bank``
The mild weather which has brought on the primroses a fortnight earlier than usual had an odd repercussion yesterday. It caused a large paper mill at Ivybridge to run out of petty cash.
The mill had been paying 4d. a bunch for primroses to send to customers and friends and yesterday the gatherers took in a record 18,000 bunches.
Eventually the clerks had to make out chits-promissory notes cashable at lunch-time, which the children at least, eyed with suspicion.
The chits were duly honoured of course as befits a mill that makes for the Post Office a large amount of “security paper” so valuable that its end products cannot be specified.
News clipping from the 1960s taken from a mill scrapbook.
Operation Primrose
Fourth April, D-Day for primroses dawned bright and fair, and brought with it a record inrush of primrose gathers. No less than 18,500 bunches were poured into broke baskets between eight and ten-thirty a.m. and by the evening they were all en route to all parts of England’s suburban and industrial areas. It might be thought that such a vast number of primroses gathered in one day represents the commercialisation of what is mean’t to be a goodwill and cheery gesture and is therefore to be deplored. The fact is that the vast majority of primrose pickers are school children ranging from tiny tots with their four or five bunches to teenagers with anything from 50 to 100, and what is more these children are well enough versed in nature law not to strip the plants and damage their growth.
What is remarkable is, that a project that starts with crowds of scrambling noisy youngsters resolves itself into a major feat of organisation and administration resulting, we hope, in bringing a touch of Devon’s Spring to many people who do not have the opportunity of visiting us at this, the most exciting time of the year.
Gateway (the internal magazine of Wiggins Teape) 1965
Environmental pressures steadily grow ...
The hedgerows in Devon play an important environmental role in terms of biodiversity offering a habitat for a wealth of wildlife species. Environmental concerns and general displeasure regarding the picking of natural flowers such as primroses started to gain momentum from the 1960s. Indeed, it was only the Torrey Canyon disaster of March 1967 which kept an article on the subject from hitting the front page of the tabloids. Following this negative publicity, the picking of primroses was restricted to consenting farmers fields in a bid to overcome the accusation that the countryside was being pillaged to the detriment of the plant species.
Further set backs were to follow with an outbreak of foot and mouth disease causing the entire distribution of primroses to be halted, with Wiggins Teape following the advice of the National Farmers Union. That year clients were sent a pot-pourri instead, which seemed to be equally well received.
The primroses we miss we must admit
Their arrival is always a pleasure
We realise the problem and because of it
Your pot-pourri we’ll certainly treasure
Environmental pressures surrounding the picking of flowers growing naturally continued to increase throughout the 1980s and with some reluctance, the company decided that 1989 would be the last year for the sending of primroses.
BACK TO ARCHIVES
PRIMROSES FROM DEVON
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James on Programming
The TDD Lie
The requirements for pretty-much every developer job I see these days includes Test Driven Development. Which is exciting – everyone recognises the importance of unit tests.
In my previous post I talked about how often companies claim to do agile, but don’t succeed in practise. And I see the same thing happening with test-driven development.
It’s easy to tell which companies want to use TDD but don’t in practise: you ask what percentage coverage they have for their code.
In its purest sense, TDD demands that tests are written before any new code is written. If you’re coding in this way (as suggested in Kent Beck’s Test Driven Development book) your coverage should be close to 100%. Of course, there are other ways one might approach TDD, such as writing business tests before the code. This is definitely better than adding a few tests at the end of a project.
But, if you’re tracking the coverage and have chosen a figure less than 100%, then there is a choice being made about which code is not covered. I’ve never seen a standard coverage threshold working out well. The obvious indication of this is how often the coverage of projects is just over the required threshold.
I’m a great believer in high coverage (while acknowledging the limitations of that). And if you don’t grow your code with the tests then you tend to end up with code where it’s difficult to add code at the end.
If you’re listing TDD in job requirements and not practising it, then it’s worth asking why not. A lot of times it’s a fundamental limitation to the company – we know we should have tests but we’re rushing. It’s the same problem that many companies have with agile – these things are obviously a good idea, but difficult to do in practise.
As Bob Martin pointed out,”You know what you believe by observing yourself in a crisis. If in a crisis you follow your disciplines, then you truly believe in those disciplines. On the other hand, if you change your behaviour in a crisis, then you don’t truly believe in your normal behaviour” (from Chapter 11 in the Clean Coder).
If you know you should be using TDD but aren’t, then you need to ask why not. And, if you can’t fix that, stop lying that you’re doing TDD – admit what you’re actually doing and focus on improving that.
“We’re agile, but…” talk notes
I spoke at Brighton Lean Agile last week, stepping in at short notice to cover for a friend. The event was great fun and I enjoyed the discussions I had with everyone. Rather than share the slides, I thought I’d do a quick blog post, allowing me to add some context to the bullet points.
Photo by @timrabjohns
The talk discussed how agile doesn’t always work, and what can be done about it.
As Churchill put it: “it has been said that agile is the worst form of project methodology except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
While I might sound cynical about agile in what follows, I still believe in it. I think that the principles it promotes, such as regular reviews, tailoring methods to the team etc. are incredibly important. At the same time, a good waterfall project beats a bad agile one.
Agile is:
While agile is detailed and subtle, there are core principles that are easily applied. It is flexible – there are accounts of it being applied to many industries and sizes of team. And it is popular – a large number of people have experience of it.
However, most companies face problems with the implementation, and even fundamental aspects. Every IT job ad I see these days has agile as a requirement. But listing something in a set of job requirements is not the same as understanding or implementing it.
Issues with the daily meeting
I believe in the principle that ‘the way you do anything is the way you do everything’. I’ve seen a lot of issues with the daily meeting, and feel that many wider issues with agile could be alleviated by getting this right. The stand-up is particularly useful for experimentation since it happens daily, and only lasts 15 minutes (in theory!). Note how ‘briefing scenes’ turn up in movies and TV shows a lot – this meeting should also be compelling, informative and entertaining. Problems seen include:
The stand-up is boring
Too many people in the stand-up
The stand-up is not relevant to the entire team,
The stand-up is at the wrong time
The stand-up shifts with a manager’s schedule
The stand-up becomes a reporting tool
Some developers think agile is silly
Some things I’ve tried
Balancing co-ordination vs social vs reporting
Adding initial reports to slack (particularly useful across timezones)
Changing who runs the standup (making team members feel more invested in agile)
Enforcing promptness
Track who is talking and who isn’t
Asking what we gain from it
Be high energy, be entertaining
Most of the points above are self-explanatory. I think it’s important to look at what an organisation needs from the daily meeting, and to focus on providing that without distraction or fluff (for example, if you do need people to report to management, find a more effective way to do that). The energy is also important – attendees need to think about their contribution and how to make it effective.
Estimation Problems
The estimates are already set (by a team member or management) and planning is a sham
Low expectations – developers aren’t pushed
No theme to the sprint
Team members don’t understand some stories (specialisations)
Nobody cares about the estimates – the code is produced late without any investigation
Translation is made between story points and time (worse when compared between teams or the translation being used is not explicit)
Estimates aren’t believed by management
Pressure is applied to reduce estimates: “But how long if you try harder…”
Estimates are given as self-protection – Padding or straight-out refusal to play
Punishing bad news
The team are told how, not what and why, meaning they estimate that method rather than considering wider goals
In the discussion we talked a little about how teams refusing to give estimates is usually a symptom of a larger problem. Another issue is estimates as negotiation rather than a best-effort prediction (ie padding for safety). Punishment for failing to hit previous estimates often leads to this sort of padding.
I concluded this section by saying that estimation sessions were something I often wished to cancel, possibly in favour of the person who was most informed/influential doing the estimates themselves. One participant said they had abandoned estimates in favour or sizing stories in a predictable manner.
One important thing to consider is whether the information in the estimates will change anything. If not (for example, schedule and scope are already set) then there may be little point spending time working out how long something will actually take.
When agile doesn’t fit the business
External factors (deadlines, releases, tradition) restrict agile
Product owner issues:
No time to do the role
Don’t want to do the role (the product owner is the most senior person who can’t avoid doing it)
Product owner has no power (proxy product owners)
Too much long-term planning – looking months ahead rather than supporting the team’s current work
Committing to futures that might not happen
Disconnect between stories and business
No idea how much a story costs to produce
Team composition shifting so you can’t learn anything
Technical debt is ever-growing
Multiple developer commitments outside project
Agile not adopted/understood/respected above the team level
The project is scheduled with no slack for developers being called away by emergencies.
Planning based on what people would like to happen, rather than taking note of what will happen
An example of this is ‘schedule compression’ – the deadline doesn’t move, but everyone resolves to try harder and be more efficient.
Not warning people about coming problems in the hope that someone else announces a serious issue first
Why aren’t Things Better?
I made two suggestions – the first was a reference to Sturgeon’s Law, which claims that “90% of everything is crap”. Maybe agile is difficult, everyone is doing their best, and we just have to be happy that things are working better than they would without agile.
My other suggestion was looking at cargo cults. This is a pejorative term in agile, but this betrays a lack of sympathy/understanding of the actual cargo cults.
Cargo cults were seen on a number of Polynesian islands, particularly after world war 2, where the residents of those islands built planes and airstrips from local materials, supposedly in the hope of cargo planes landing on the island. It’s given as an example of people imitating something without understanding the principles.
However, this idea that cargo cults are foolish is a racist and limited one. Indeed, the idea that they are about the arrival of cargo and that people actually expect planes to land are probably misapprehensions. For those involved, there are other reasons for setting out these airstrips. Western anthropologists have potentially had a blind-spot in their own obsession with monetary goods and missed these deeper motives.
In fact, these cargo cults are a success, if you understand why they have been set up. They are also effective simply on the terms for which they have mocked, since the cults have brought anthropologists and TV documentary crews to the islands in question. But to see why they succeed, you need to have sympathy/empathy with why cargo cults exist.
A lot of agile implementations seem to feature a sort of sabotage, where people involved do things that are directly against their best interests.
I closed by suggesting that, when an organisation is doing things that are obviously wrong and harmful to agile, there is often a deeper, more compelling system in place. This then formed the basis of a final discussion section.
How to Build a Webapp in Java
tldr; building a webapp is complicated – particularly if you’re doing it right. JHipster offers a promising solution.
I was a little shocked recently when I realised that I didn’t know how to make a web-application.
It’s not like I’m inexperienced. I’ve been working on the web since 2000; but my job involves focussing on specific areas. Even when helping with strategy, I have very little input into the front-end. Being responsible for an application going live and doing it all myself are very different things.
Part of the problem is how intimidating front end development has become, with flurries of Javascript frameworks, UI libraries and strange pre-compilers. Angular has two versions that are so different as to be incompatible, but with similar names. Tutorials date quickly and beginners can’t tell if they are current. There is a huge amount of knowledge needed to build a web application.
Now, obviously, as the project website says, Spring boot “makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based applications that you can ‘just run’“. My initial impulse to cobble something together from Spring and Thymeleaf would allow me to get something live. But this is an unsatisfying solution. Server-generated template pages don’t feel particularly powerful even with a good MVC framework. They have several problems:
They tend to have code for the view tangled up with the application, with no clear boundary
Coupling the templates to the server-side code misses the separation of architectures like REST. Adding, say, a mobile client would involve a lot of hassle to get the two different front ends working.
More modern architectures are available for front-end. Using REST and angular allows rapid development of flexible front ends, less coupled to the backend architecture.
Another question that arose was user management and security. This is one of those things that every site needs, but tends to be tedious to code (as well as inviting errors). Any decent user management system needs account creation, password resetting, different roles etc. For most projects, these are going to be the same. My basic assumption would be that Spring security would be useful for that, but that is really a framework for creating a security framework, and there are no obvious mature implementations. Setting up email account confirmation is a drag.
I weighed up a few options for authentication, particularly since I wanted one that supported a stateless web-server. After speaking to a friend, JWT seemed to be the way to go, but this still seemed like a lot of work. And I’d not even started grappling with the whole front-end stack.
I started working in a new office recently and a colleague suggested JHipster as a solution to my problems. I’d heard about the technology via InfoQ but hadn’t paid it a lot of attention. Part of this was the name, which sounded insincere and jokey. And my cursory look suggested it was ‘just’ angular with spring boot. I’d missed something very interesting.
According to the JHipster mini-book, JHipster allows Java devs to “be hip again”. The knowing irony of the framework’s name is irritating, but this idea of being ‘hip’ is good. Web development has changed a great deal, and JHipster provides a simple way to get started with up-to-date technologies, combining bootstrap, angular (or react) and Spring boot. The project started back in October 2013, with the first release in December of that year.
JHipster is similar to Ruby on Rails, providing rapid development of a stack based upon entity definitions. The ‘Hipster’ part of the name is referring to the need to keep up with the modern tools. JHipster produces the plumbing and boilerplate for a whole stack including a variety of best of breed tools. It also adds in a basic user-management system for free. JHipster prepares multiple files for each entity:
Database tables
Liquibase changes
JPA entity definitions
Spring data repository
Spring rest controller
Angular route, controller and service
The best way to get a flavour of how JHipster works it to look at Matt Raible’s 16-minute demo of building a blog application, get started with JHipster 5.
Full-stack development is hard work, even with JHipster – you need to be familiar with both Spring and angular. But this does put you a lot closer than ever before to putting live a full-stack application using best of breed technology.
speaking at Brighton Lean Agile on 9th jan 2019
Due to a last-minute drop-out, I’m speaking at Brighton Lean Agile on January 9th. The title of the talk is “We’re agile, but…” and looks at some of the ways I’ve seen agile going astray in implementations.
Despite the simplicity and popularity of Agile, it often goes wrong in practise. Drawing on 15 years’ experience of Agile as developer and PM, James Burt will lead a discussion on why agile sometimes fails, and what can be done about it.
The session is currently full but there is a waiting list, as people sometimes drop out as the event approaches. Refreshments are provided by the sponsor, Bright Interactive.
books, programming
Book review: Beyond Java by Bruce A Tate
Tldr; things looked bleak for Java in the mid-noughties, but the language and eco-system have undergone massive changes, allowing Java to thrive and survive.
My new job has a daily commute, which means time to read. I’m focussing on tech books and recently picked Bruce A Tate’s Beyond Java. I originally read this in July 2006, the year after it was published. The book described why Java was doomed, with Tate saying in the introduction, “Java’s reign will end. It’s not a question of if but when.” (pviii). While the predictions have turned out to be wrong it is interesting to re-read the book and see how Java escaped its fate.
Revisiting the mid-noughties was fascinating in itself: a time when AJAX was just emerging, Web 2.0 was the next big thing and folksonomies would change everything. It was an environment that caused obvious problems for Java. Its flaky text-processing was just no good for large XML files, and Java was forced to deal with a lot of XML. In addition, Java tended to be used for the middleware on top of databases, which it was not particularly suited for (p52).
Even with early versions of Spring and hibernate, making Java applications was a chore, with overwhelming amounts of boilerplate and XML config. Even with ORMs, Java required you to work with both entities and database code, and to keep them consistent.
Tate talked about this difficulty in getting software running, and all the tools that were needed. Compared with PHP, Java felt slow to develop in, and its advantages weren’t sufficient compensation. It did seem that Java was on the ropes. I remember dropping out of Java to do simple text tasks. Ruby-on-rails and similar frameworks promised the chance to get applications running quicker.
The book is a pessimistic one. Tate saw the problems as unsolvable and, given Java’s history and trajectory, this was a fair assumption to make. Tate looked at Java critically and suggested other platforms developers should investigate. Reading the book with hindsight, one can see Tate’s predictions have failed, but the discussion is still interesting.
In the 12-or-so years since Tate was writing, Java has managed a comeback. Decent dependency management from maven and gradle has eradicated the nightmare of setting classpaths. The language has been made more expressive with new features, such as the functional constructs in Java 8. And the growing fashion for opinionated configuration has also made things easier – getting Spring Boot running is incredibly easy. The culture of the language has changed for the better too. In the past, checked exceptions proliferated everywhere, and now people tend more towards throwing runtime exceptions and handling everything at a single sensible point.
One particularly strong improvement is the Spring framework. At the time Tate was writing, Spring was a mess of XML configuration and cryptic errors. With annotations, it has become easy to use and unobtrusive. New platforms such as Spring Boot allow developers to release production-ready features out quickly. At the same time, Java/Spring offers a mature platform, where code can be taken to production and supported at massive scale. Ruby-on-rail’s promises have faltered, with Twitter famously moving to Java because of scaling issues. The XML problem has disappeared as JSON takes over as a less robust, easier to use standard. I don’t miss the days of choosing between SAX and DOM parsers for XML.
Around the time Tate was writing, a debate raged about variable typing: strong vs weak, static vs dynamic. Java’s static and strong typing felt too rigid for many people. This debate seems to have reached an interesting conclusion: Javascript has been restricted by typescript while Java 10 has introduced the var keyword.
(I’ve always seen the inflexibility of Java as a positive. While it’s less expressive than languages such as python or, um, perl, the code it produces tends to look very similar. It’s a good language for non-rock stars – who massively outnumber the sort of people capable of producing cryptic code given the slightest chance).
At the time of writing, Tate saw Java’s fate as connected with that of Sun. Tate wondered what might happen if Sun disappeared, wondering who might take over Java. The resulting situation, with Oracle running Java (and MySQL!) was hard to predict but has worked out well – even with the occasional fake news scare that Oracle would start charging for Java.
Tate discussed a number of contenders for Java’s throne. Perl has lost popularity over the last decade, with Python offering a more structured (and readable) alternative. Perl, like PHP, was a great tool for its time but ultimately a ladder to better things. The book makes a quick mention of functional languages: Clojure seems to have come and gone, but Scala and Kotlin (first released in 2011) seem to be gaining traction. Ruby itself is much less popular. Java seems to have been saved by the flexibility of the JVM, which offers more powerful options for those that need them.
For me, the most interesting discussion was around state in web-servers, and the problems of that. Tate talks about continuation servers as an upcoming opportunity. This is another debate that has been settled, with REST winning out over stateful alternatives. I worked with Seam for a time – it was an interesting idea, but so alien to the way most developers worked, that its subtleties tended to be fought with rather being made use of.
One problem that Tate raised which is still present is the approachability of Java. Even in the innocent days of 2005, the simplest useful Java application required use of a large number of tools. This issue is present in a lot of fields, including front-end dev work, where increasing sophistication has made things much more complicated. There are solutions to this, with JHipster being a promising one, but these work to hide the complexity. Just because the tools are set up for you doesn’t mean they aren’t there and can’t go wrong in strange and unpredictable ways.
EDIT: Tom Hume pointed out that the discussion above doesn’t include Android, which was originally released in 2008 and has become hugely popular, with over 2 billion users. As someone who focuses on backend dev, I didn’t engage with this, but Android has been contributed significantly to Java’s survival. Having said that, Kotlin is becoming more popular in Android, threatening Java’s dominance on that platform. Interestingly, Kotlin is failing to see significant uptake in backend dev, despite recently becoming compatible with Spring.
If I had more time, I’d also look at the JVM platform as distinct from Java. While Groovy and Clojure have faltered, Scala (launched 2004) and Kotlin (launched 2011) are both popular JVM languages
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Home Entertainment Bemus Bay Pops 20th Anniversary of the Bemus Bay Pops
Bemus Bay Pops
20th Anniversary of the Bemus Bay Pops
Mallery Rockwell
Article Contributed by
2017 marks the celebration of 20 years of world-class musicians and unforgettable memories spent at the Bemus Bay Pops. The Bemus Bay Pops offers exceptional entertainment on Chautauqua Lake for local residents or visitors enjoying summer. This year is also the 35th anniversary of the Italian Fisherman at 61 Lakeside Drive in the center of downtown Bemus Point.
Dan and Sue Dalpra are the owners of the Italian Fisherman in Bemus Point, who have turned the Bemus Bay Pops into the remarkable event it is today. Dan is the chairman and Sue is the trustee of the Bemus Bay Pops.
The Birth of the Pops
It all started 20 years ago on the back deck of the Italian Fisherman, where a special CD release party was being held for local musician Steve Swanson. Swanson was a dear friend of the Dalpras, who has since passed away in 2016. While Dan was watching everyone have a great time, an idea began to form as he looked upon his rooftop. “Right at that moment it struck me that, ‘My gosh, wouldn’t it be great to put a symphony orchestra up there?’” Dan said. “We could host a big event for everybody at the end of summer and bring the people a beautiful, free concert doing popular music with a symphony orchestra.” And so the Bemus Bay Pops was born.
After reaching out to Swanson, they put the event together within six to eight weeks. They reached out to John Marcellus from the Eastman School of Music to be the Conductor. Despite controversial doubts about the practicality of the concert from the community, the 40-piece orchestra performed on top of the roof with great success. “It turned out to be a spectacular evening,” Dan said. “People referred to it as ‘an evening in Camelot.’ It was just breathtaking. We had a beautiful sunset, the orchestra played, and people became emotional with it.”
Four years later, the Dalpras found significant sponsors to make the floating stage possible and created a non-profit organization. “The Pops has grown into a destination now and it’s become not only culturally but economically a force that has driven great things in the region,” Dalpra said. “Not just Bemus Point, but the entire region truly benefits from it in terms of growth and bringing the arts to people. That’s been our mantra.”
Roughly 1,000 people attended the first year, which turned into 5,000 people the second year. The Bemus Bay Pops has grown to generate more than $15 million in economic development annually for the whole region. This money supports hundreds of full-time equivalent jobs, millions in household income to local residents, and provides nearly $2.4 million in local and state government revenue.
The Pops provides an economic boost to the Bemus Point area due to the many jobs added and number of residents and tourists alike coming to see the shows. Many people invite their friends to enjoy the event, which leads to more rentals and buying of property.
“We were looking for new ways to stimulate and generate new activity, and the Pops really opened the door up for something completely new,” Dan said. “It brought Bemus Point to the forefront in terms of drawing lots of people, which stimulated a lot of other people to look and say, ‘Wow, I think I’ll open a business, rent a house, buy a house,’ so a lot of economic stimulation happened in this area because of having this great program.”
Don’t Miss the Fun
This week is the last chance to enjoy the lake while experiencing Lake Night at the Movies. The 2015 film The Martian will feature the story of an astronaut who becomes stranded on Mars and how he uses his resourcefulness to signal to Earth that he is alive. This science fiction movie will be shown at dusk August 15 on the big screen of the floating stage.
Two upcoming shows include the Motown Tribute band, Shadows of the 60s and the Bob Seger Tribute band, Hollywood Nights. Shadows of the 60s will pay tribute to The Four Tops, Temptations & Supremes at 8:00 p.m. on August 19. Three groups will perform on stage and the grand finale features music from Motown’s Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, and more. Hollywood Nights will pay a special tribute to Bob Seger and The Silver Bullet band at 2:30 p.m. on August 20.
“It’s really important for people to understand it’s more than just concerts – it’s culturally educated a lot of people who maybe didn’t go to Chautauqua or have the resources to have exposure to some pretty cool things that I think have influenced people to perhaps seek a career or take an interest in music and the arts,” Dan said. “The arts is very profound when it comes to development of a community.”
The schedule will also feature Boogie Wonder Band, the Chautauqua Lake Water Ski Show and the special appearance of Fran Cosmo, former lead singer for Boston in 1992. Tickets for Boogie Wonder Band are still available for $20 and tickets for Fran Cosmo are available for $25.
For more information including event schedule and tickets, visit http://www.bemusbaypops.com or call 716-969-3989.
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http://jamestowngazette.com
Mallery Rockwell recently graduated from Ithaca College where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism. She is very excited to intern for the Jamestown Gazette through the CAP program and pursue her career as a writer. She loves spending time outdoors and traveling when she gets the chance. She always looks forward to meeting people through her work and is happy to share her stories with the community.
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Prince Harry's wedding to Meghan Markle
The UK's Prince Harry marries Meghan Markle
In London, Prince Harry wore a simple white dress with his hair down #RoyalWedding https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DdkHA4KWkAAy7H-.jpg
by Elizabeth Culliford via twitter 5/19/2018 1:49:14 PM
‘Don’t worry...’ #RoyalWedding in London https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DdkP-QOX4AAjS8v.jpg
by jamillah.knowles 5/19/2018 3:00:33 PM
Teenage cellist thrust to global fame at royal wedding
U.K.Young British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason was thrust into the global limelight on Saturday, heard by millions as he played at the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.
Meghan Markle picks simple, sleek dress by Givenchy designer for...
U.K.Meghan Markle picked a sleek sculpted dress by the British designer of couture house Givenchy for her wedding to Prince Harry on Saturday, worn with a five-metre long veil and a sparkling diamond tiara lent by Queen Elizabeth.
A royal reception feast for 600: langoustines, quail eggs and...
U.K.Guests of Prince Harry and his new wife Meghan were set to tuck into dishes including Scottish langoustines, grilled asparagus and rhubarb crumble tartlets at a lunchtime reception for the newlyweds.
Sealed with a kiss: newlyweds Harry and Meghan delight Windsor crowds
U.K.Prince Harry and his bride Meghan married on Saturday in a dazzling ceremony that blended ancient English ritual with African American culture, watched up close by royals and celebrities and from afar by a global TV audience of millions.
by Canice Leung 5/19/2018 3:14:03 PM
Prince Harry drives his new wife Meghan out of Windsor Castle to their #royalwedding reception at Frogmore House: https://t.co/DgG9A58xH1 pic.twitter.com/3v33ldQ3Sp
— Reuters Pictures (@reuterspictures) May 19, 2018
For public guests inside castle, royal wedding 'like a dream'
U.K.They may not have been in the chapel or the reception, but the 2,640 locals, community representatives and members of the public invited to witness Saturday's royal wedding inside the walls of Windsor Castle still felt they had front-row seats.
by jamillah.knowles 5/20/2018 8:11:27 AM
The royal wedding | Pictures | Reuters
U.K.Prince Harry and Meghan Markle kiss on the steps of St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle after their wedding. Ben Birchall/Pool via REUTERS
People traveled from all over the world to watch the royal wedding. Here's how some people reacted in the town of Windsor to an 'American princess'
Royal fans sum up the big day in one word
U.S."Amazing," "spectacular," and "dazzling" were just some of the words used by fans to sum up the royal wedding between Meghan Markle and Prince Harry on Saturday.
Britons celebrate royal wedding with picnics and street parties
U.K.Thousands of people across Britain gathered at street parties and picnics in the sunshine to celebrate the royal wedding on Saturday, and festivities were expected to continue into the night as pubs were permitted to stay open longer.
by jamillah.knowles 5/20/2018 10:27:26 AM
Reuters photographers pick their best royal wedding picture
U.K.Patience, meticulous preparation and a big dose of luck were among the elements that Reuters photographers were counting on when they took up their positions to cover the UK royal wedding.
U.S. bishop wows royal wedding with impassioned sermon on love
U.K.African-American bishop Michael Curry electrified the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle with a barnstorming sermon on the power of love that won smiles in the ancient British chapel and praise across the internet.
African-Americans hail royal wedding's nod to black history, culture
U.K.Hometown and racial pride fired up royal wedding watchers across the United States on Saturday, from pre-dawn partiers wearing pajamas and fancy hats in Los Angeles to Twitter posts from Miami to Indianapolis hailing "the blackest royal wedding the U.K. has ever seen."
Worlds away from Windsor, people celebrate Harry and Meghan's big day
U.K.From the windswept Falkland Islands, battered by the South Atlantic and home to colonies of penguins, to the heat of Kenya, India and Australia, people around the world celebrated Britain's glittering royal wedding on Saturday.
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Sökresultat - Fortress Press,U.S.
Din sökning gav 1042 träffar. Klicka på titeln för mer information eller lägg den i din kundvagn direkt. Om Du inte hittar titeln vid sökning se Söktips
Judges and Method
Häftad - 2007 - Engelska - ISBN: 9780800638580
"Judges and Method" provides a unique classroom resource in biblical studies. Here are state-of-the-art introductions to leading critical methods in biblical study, all focused on a specific biblical book, "Judges", and the larger Deuteronomistic hi…
The Early Luther
av Berndt Hamm
The development of Martin Luther's thought has commanded much scholarly attention because of the Reformation and its remarkable effects on the history of Christianity in the West. But much of that scholarship has been so enthralled by certain later…
On the Day You Were Baptized
av Young, Taylor
Inbunden - 2019 - Engelska - ISBN: 9781506455525
"Welcome, child of God! You are loved!Parents reflect back on when their baby was baptized, remembering the people who were there, the words that were said, and the love that was shared on that special day. Children will learn that the day they were…
Religion in The Handmaid's Tale
av Tennant, Colete
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale captivates readers with its disturbingly prescient vision of the future and haunting insights into the world as we know it. Religion--especially elements of the Christian faith--pervades every inch of the world…
av Francois Bovon
This is the second volume of Franois Bovon's three-volume commentary on the Gospel of Luke, covering the narration of Jesus' travel on the road to Jerusalemthe occasion in Luke of most of Jesus' teachings to the disciples regarding faithfulness, per…
av R. Horsley
Dealing with a time when "Christians" were moving towards separation from the movement's Jewish origins, this inaugural volume of A People's History of Christianity tells "the people's story" by gathering together evidence from the New Testament tex…
Contours of Old Testament Theology
av Bernhard W. Anderson
In this masterwork, one of America's leading biblical scholars takes a fresh look at the theology of the Old Testament. Anderson cuts his own path and provides us with creative new insights on all the major sections of the Old Testament. He illumina…
The Prophetic Imagination
av Walter Brueggemann
A classic text in biblical theology--still relevant for today and tomorrow.In this 40th anniversary edition of the classic text from one of the most influential biblical scholars of our time, Walter Brueggemann, offers a theological and ethical read…
A Short Introduction to World Religions
av Timothy Dowley
This leading textbook for world religions is now available in a more concise version. Many of the features of Introduction to World Religions are retained in this volume but with focus on the religious traditions themselves. The section on religions…
Seculosity
av David Zahl
At the heart of our current moment lies a universal yearning, writes David Zahl, not to be happy or respected so much as enough--what religions call "righteous." To fill the void left by religion, we look to all sorts of everyday activities--from ea…
Introduction to the Hebrew Bible
av John J. Collins
John J. Collins's Introduction to the Hebrew Bible is one of the most reliable and widely adopted critical textbooks at undergraduate and graduate levels alike, and for good reason. Enriched by decades of classroom teaching, it is aimed explicitly a…
John J. Collins's Introduction to the Hebrew Bible is one of the most popular introductory textbooks in colleges and seminary classrooms. Enriched by decades of classroom teaching, it is aimed explicitly at motivated students, regardless of their pr…
God in Creation
av Jurgen Moltmann
A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible
John J. Collins's A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible is one of the most popular introductory textbooks in colleges and seminary classrooms. Enriched by decades of classroom teaching, it is aimed explicitly at motivated students, regardless of…
The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 1520
av Martin Luther
In his The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther set forth a reconsideration of the sacramental Christian life that centered on the word. His thesis is that the papacy had distorted the sacraments with its own traditions and regulations,…
Liquid Scripture
av Jeffrey S. Siker
The electronic Bible is here to stay--packaged in software on personal computers, available as apps on tablets and cell phones. Increasingly, students look at glowing screens to consult the Bible in class, and congregants do the same in Bible study…
The Pastor
av Gordon W. Lathrop
Isaiah Old and New
av Ben Witherington
Reading the Book of Isaiah in its original context is the crucial prerequisite for reading its citation and use in later interpretation, including the New Testament writings, argues Ben Witherington III. Here he offers pastors, teachers, and student…
The Annotated Luther
av Mary Jane Hoemig
Volume 4 of The Annotated Luther series presents an array of Luther's writings related to pastoral work. Luther's famous lnvocavit Sermons and other selected sermons show a forthright and lively preacher. Hymn texts reveal Luther's grasp of hymnody…
The Annnotated Luther
This volume (volume 5) features Luther's writings that intesect church and state, faith and life lived as a follower of Christ. His insights regarding marriage, trade, public education, war and are articulated. His theological and biblical insights…
Jesus and Nonviolence
av Walter Wink
More than ever, Walter Wink believes, the Christian tradition of nonviolence is needed as an alternative to the dominant and death-dealing "powers" of our consumerist culture and fractured world. In this small book Wink offers a precis of his whole…
Luther's Liturgical Music
av Robin A. Leaver
Martin Luther's relationship to music has been largely downplayed, yet music played a vital role in Luther's life -- and he in turn had a deep and lasting effect on Christian hymnody. In Luther's Liturgical Music Robin Leaver comprehensively explore…
Torah Old and New
Reading the books of the Law, the Pentateuch, in their original context is the crucial prerequisite for reading their citation and use in later interpretation, including the New Testament writings, argues Ben Witherington III. Here, he offers pastor…
av Katherine Sonderegger
The mystery of Almighty God is most properly an explication of the oneness of God, tying the faith of the church to the bedrock of Israel's confession of the lord of the covenant, the lord of our Lord Jesus Christ. The doctrine of divine attributes,…
The Essential Forde
av Forde, Gerhard O.
No twentieth-century American understood Luther's law-gospel distinction better than Gerhard O. Forde, who was professor of theology at Luther Theological Seminary in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Because Forde kept this Lutheran distinction razor sharp, h…
Introduction to World Religions
This leading textbook for world religion is designed to help students in their study and research of the world's religious traditions. Known and valued for its balanced approach and its respected board of consulting editors, this text addresses ways…
The Crucifixion of the Warrior God
av Gregory A. Boyd
A dramatic tension confronts every Christian believer and interpreter of Scripture: on the one hand, we encounter images of God commanding and engaging in horrendous violence: one the other hand, we encounter the non-violent teachings and example of…
God-The World's Future
av Professor Ted Peters
God-The World's Future has been a proven and comprehensive textbook in systematic theology for over twenty years. Explicitly crafted to address our postmodern context, Peters explains the whole body of Christian historical doctrine from within a "pr…
Cross Vision
av Boyd, Gregory A.
Renowned pastor-theologian Gregory A. Boyd tackles the Bible's biggest dilemma.The Old Testament God of wrath and violence versus the New Testament God of love and peace-it's a difference that has troubled Christians since the first century. Now, wi…
The Bondage of the Will, 1525
In autumn 1525, Luther wrote The Bondage of the Will as a response to humanist and theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam's On Free Will. Luther's treatise is important on four accounts: First, Luther wanted to show his own humanist education. Second, agai…
Hoping Against Hope
av John D. Caputo
John D. Caputo has a long career as one of the preeminent postmodern philosophers in America. Caputo now reflects on his spiritual journey from a Catholic altar boy in 1950s Philadelphia to a philosopher after the death of God. Part spiritual autobi…
Theology of the Old Testament
This paperback edition of Walter Brueggemann's monumental work makes his important volume available at a lower price.
Eucharistic Body
av Frank C. Senn
Building on his previous work on embodied liturgy, Frank C. Senn explores the relationship between the sacramental body and blood of Christ, the ecclesial body of Christ, and the body of the communicant. Drawing on the richness of the eucharistic tr…
av Adela Yarbro Collins
Professor Adela Yarbro Collins brings to bear on the text of the first Gospel the latest historical-critical perspectives, providing a full treatment of such controversial issues as the relationship of canonical Mark to the "Secret Gospel of Mark" a…
Letters and Papers from Prison
av Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Despite Dietrich Bonhoeffer's earlier theological achievements and writings, it was his correspondence and notes from prison that electrified the postwar world six years after his death in 1945. The materials gathered and selected by his friend Eber…
Toward a Better Worldliness
av Terra Schwerin Rowe
Five hundred years ago the Protestant Reformation inspired profound theological, ecclesial, economic, and social transformations. But what impact does the Protestant tradition have today? And what might it have? This volume addresses such questions,…
Paul and Palestinian Judaism
av E. P. Sanders
E. P. Sanders is Arts and Sciences Professor of Religion Emeritus at Duke University and has taught at McMaster University and Queen's College, Oxford.
Preachin at the Crossroads
av David J. Lose
Postmodernism. Secularism. Pluralism. These are the words often used to describe the tumultuous changes that have affected our culture and our churches. But what do they really mean? More importantly, what challenges and opportunities do they provid…
The Shadow of the Galilean
av Gerd Theissen
First published in 1987 by Fortress Press, this 20th anniversary edition of this classic bestseller includes a new Afterword from the author. Here, in narrative form, is an account of the activity of Jesus of Nazareth, scrupulously constructed so th…
Bound Choice, Election, and Wittenberg Theological Method
av Robert Kolb
Galvanized by Erasmus' teaching on free will, Martin Luther wrote "De servo arbitrio", or "The Bondage of the Will", insisting that the sinful human will could not turn itself to God. In this first study to investigate the sixteenth-century receptio…
Christian Doctrine and the Grammar of Difference
av Janice McRandal
Christian Doctrine and the Grammar of Difference argues that the most potent and resourceful theological response to the challenging questions of gender and difference is to be found in a retrieval of a doctrinal framework for feminist theology. In…
The Rape of Eve
av Celene Lillie
Scholars of New Testament and early Christian traditions have given new attention to the relationships between gender and imperial power in the Roman world. Celene Lillie examines core passages from three Gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi, On the Origi…
How to Think Theologically
av Howard W. Stone
For over fifteen years, How to Think Theologically has served as the ideal primer on the work of theology for students at all levels of study. Stone and Duke contend that theology is not an optional, esoteric discipline, but one that every Christian…
We are constantly engaged in processing data and sensory inputs all around us, even when we are not conscious of the many neural pathways our minds are traveling. So taking a step back to ponder the dimensions and practices of a particular way of th…
Marriage and Sexuality in Early Christianity
av David G. Hunter
Pocket - 2018 - Engelska - ISBN: 9781506445939
Marriage and Sexuality in Early Christianity is part of Ad Fontes: Early Christian Sources, a series designed to present ancient Christian texts essential to an understanding of Christian theology, ecclesiology, and practice. The books in the series…
Trains, Jesus, and Murder
av Richard Beck
"Saints and sinners, all jumbled up together." That's the genius of Johnny Cash, and that's what the gospel is ultimately all about.Johnny Cash sang about and for people on the margins. He famously played concerts in prisons, where he sang both murd…
Wholly Citizens
av Joel Bierman
Wholly Citizens addresses the relation between the church and the world in light of the Reformation teaching of the two realms-especially as presented by Luther. This book begins with a careful reading of Luther's Commentary on Psalm 81 (1531), and…
Ascent into Heaven in Luke-Acts
In comparison with other aspects of Jesus' life and ministry, his ascent into heaven has often been overlooked within the history of the church. However, considering its placement at the end of the Gospel and the beginning of Acts - the only narrati…
The Boy with Big, Big Feelings
av Lee, Britney Winn
Meet a boy with feelings so big that they glow from his cheeks, spill out of his eyes, and jump up and down on his chest. When a loud truck drives by, he cries. When he hears a joke, he bursts with joy. When his loved ones are having a hard day, he…
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PeriPeri U Repository
PeriPeri U
Hazards and Threats
Hydro-meteorological
Showing 10 out of a total of 26 results for collection: Hydro-meteorological. (0.223 seconds)
Flood Control 2015: Five years of innovation in flood risk
Vermeer, Kees; de Bruijne, Judith; Heynert, Karel; Nijhof, Alet (Foundation Flood Control 2015, 2012-11)
Watermarks: Urban Flooding and Memoryscape in Argentina
Ullberg, Susann (Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 2013)
Preparedness for Wind-related Hazards in Haiti
International Association for Wind Engineering (IAWE); Tokyo Polytechnic University (TPU); United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR); International Group for Wind-related Disaster Risk Reduction (IG-WRDRR) (International Association for Wind Engineering (IAWE), 2010)
Drought vulnerability in the Arab Region: Case Study-Drought in Syria
United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR); Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands (ACSAD); The League of Arab States (Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands (ACSAD), 2011)
The Duiwenhoks River: An Analysis of Flood Causation
de Waal, Jan; Holloway, Ailsa Jane; Chapman, Arthur (University of Cape Town (UCT), 2010-11-18)
Synoptic-scale rainfall patterns over southern Africa: Scale-interactions with large-scale modes of variability
Hart, Neil C.G.; Reason, Chris; Fauchereau, Nicolas (University of Cape Town (UCT), 2012-03)
The impact of land use and climate change on flood risk in the Lourens River catchment, South Africa
Schaber, Elisabeth; Chapman, Arthur; Holloway, Ailsa Jane; Stötter, Johann (University of Innsbruck, 2015-07-15)
Pakistan Floods Progress Report July 2010/July 2011
Davies, Lucy (Oxfam International, 2011-07)
Off the Radar-Synthesis Report: High Impact weather events in the Western Cape, South Africa
Pharoah, Robyn; Holloway, Ailsa Jane; Fortune, Gillian; Chapman, Arthur; Zweig, Patricia; Schaber, Elisabeth (Research Alliance for Disaster and Risk Reduction (RADAR), 2016)
Disaster Reduction in Africa: Special Issue on Drought Risk Reduction 2012
United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) (United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR), 2012)
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“This bastard is not afraid that his body would explode?”
Yang Bufan sighed. He had just witnessed what abnormality really was. Not even he would dare to consume a Venerable Grade spiritual herb directly, let alone two. The energy contained in one Blood Dragon Fruit was unimaginable. Even a genius figure like Wang Ye wouldn’t dare to swallow it directly, and could only refine it bit by bit. If the fruit was eaten in one gulp, it was afraid that the terrifying energy in it would immediately explode like a volcano.
Boundless energy would then rush frenziedly to every part of the limbs, every inch of the skin and every part of the body. If one didn’t control it well, the person might catch fire and be possessed by demons, or even die.
“Is that really okay?”
Dong Fei spoke, petrified. It was his first time seeing such a barbaric way of refining.
“Don’t worry. This stupid dog’s endurance is incomparable to ours. He has always been this barbaric.”
Jiang Chen smiled. He had witnessed the divinity of this dog before. The energy contained in the two Blood Dragon Fruits was indeed massive. If it had been any other expert, he naturally wouldn’t dare to devour it directly. In contrast, Big Yellow wouldn’t have any problem with that. He was an incredible and abnormal Dragon-Horse Divine Beast. Even Jiang Chen had no idea how great Big Yellow’s endurance was, but there’s one thing he was certain of – Big Yellow definitely wasn’t a fool, and wouldn’t do anything that was unfavourable to himself. Since he dared to consume the two Blood Dragon Fruits in one gulp, it indicated that this was within his control. Jiang Chen had no doubt about this.
“Little Chen, quickly let Master Dog in.”
Big Yellow spoke hastily. His body was now full of surging energy. He needed to refine and absorb it immediately.
Hurriedly, Jiang Chen privately opened the doors of the Ancestral Dragon Pagoda. Apart from Big Yellow, no one else knew the secrets in Ancestral Dragon Pagoda. The spatial zone in the thirty-third level was 30 times faster compared to outside. It was most suitable for cultivation. Now that Big Yellow had taken two Blood Dragon Fruits, he would need some time to digest it. Thirty days in thirty-third level was only a day outside. For Big Yellow to refine these two Blood Dragon Fruits, he absolutely didn’t need that much of a time. The most he would need was two days, and two days in the pagoda was only an hour and a half outside. Such heaven defying cultivation environment was simply unmatched. If this matter was spread out, no one could tell what kind of waves would be created. Jiang Chen would surely attract the attention of all people. Countless experts would certainly cause him trouble, trying to rob the treasure away from him.
The sudden disappearance of Big Yellow and Wu Ningzhu before made everyone speculate that Jiang Chen must have some kind of treasure that could control space. This had somewhat surprised them, but no one asked because this was after all, the secret of Jiang Chen.
Big Yellow absolutely can withstand the two Blood Dragon Fruits. After absorbing them, his strength may reach the peak of a half-step Immortal Emperor. I wonder if he can advance to the early Immortal Emperor realm. If he can, he will be even stronger.
Jiang Chen was incomparably delighted. The more powerful Big Yellow becomes, the more beneficial it was to Jiang Chen. There was no doubt about it. In a place that was full of danger like the Golden Horizon, Big Yellow could play a big role at any time. If Big Yellow could really advance to Immortal Emperor realm, he would basically become unrivalled in the Golden Horizon; even if he couldn’t, he could at least help ensure the safety of others.
After Big Yellow obtained the two Blood Dragon Fruits, Yang Bufan distributed the remaining the fruits to the others. Each of them got one.
Everyone appeared very excited after getting their Blood Dragon Fruit. Of course, those who were most excited were Dong Fei and Wu Ningzhu. Their cultivation base was relatively weaker, so the effect of the Blood Dragon Fruit on them would be greater than the others. In the Golden Horizon, it wasn’t a long-term solution to continue relying on someone else. They had to rely on themselves. Only with their own strength could they ensure their own safety.
“If I refine this Blood Dragon Fruit, I won’t have problem rushing to early Immortal Emperor realm.” Wang Ye spoke excitedly. He could sense the extraordinary energy of the fruit by just holding it in his hand.
“The Blood Dragon Fruit is unusually valuable and boundlessly beneficial to us. We don’t know what we’re going to face in the next few days. Furthermore, we might have to disperse to seek for our own fortune. Therefore, I suggest everyone to refine the Blood Dragon Fruit here to improve your cultivation base a little before we depart from here,” Jiang Chen said.
Of course, his motive was to buy time for Big Yellow and Wu Ningzhu. Besides, he was ready to part with these people who were similar to nuisance to him. Their presence prevented him from moving freely in the Golden Horizon.
“Senior Brother Jiang’s right. We can first improve our strength here. So that we can protect ourselves during our time in the Golden Horizon.”
Dong Fei nodded, feeling that Jiang Chen’s words were reasonable. The others agreed to it as well. No one on the scene was a fool, they knew the importance of strength in the Golden Horizon very well. To put it bluntly, without sufficient strength, it would be difficult for one to move even a step. Just like Dong Fei, if it wasn’t for Jiang Chen and Yang Bufan, he had no chance of survival at all.
“Very well. Then we will spend several hours here. After that, we will leave,” Yang Bufan said.
In the following time, everyone found a relatively serene place and began refining the Blood Dragon Fruit. Of course, their refinements weren’t comparable to Big Yellow. They didn’t have the ability to swallow it directly because that was no different than seeking death.
A Blood Dragon Fruit was enough to help each of them advance one grade, including Yang Bufan. Of course, this advancement couldn’t be achieved overnight or within a few hours, because they couldn’t completely refine and absorb the essence in the fruit in one day. It would take them at least two days to achieve the advancement. However, of all the experts present, Dong Fei might be able to advance to the peak of late Immortal King realm within this short period of time. After all, his cultivation base was already at the peak of late Immortal King realm, which was only a step away from the half-step Immortal Emperor realm. The lower the cultivation base, the higher the chance to advance, because it didn’t require as much energy as others needed.
“Sister Ning, go find Big Yellow in the thirty-third level of the Ancestral Dragon Pagoda. This Blood Dragon Fruit can at least push your cultivation base to the peak of late Immortal King realm.” Jiang Chen passed the Blood Dragon Fruit to Wu Ningzhu and spoke.
Wu Ningzhu nodded, received the Blood Dragon Fruit and entered the Ancestral Dragon Pagoda. She always listened to Jiang Chen’s words. The fact that they could obtain such a treasure indirectly indicated her good luck. Just like Jiang Chen had said, she might obtain some great fortune in Golden Horizon, and this Blood Dragon Fruit was just the beginning of the great fortune.
The temporal rule of 30 times was too heaven defying. Unfortunately, the others wouldn’t be able to enjoy this secret. Otherwise, everyone would surely find cultivation too easy.
Instead of refining the Blood Dragon Fruit, Jiang Chen kept it.
“Little Chen, why don’t you refine it? This Blood Dragon Fruit is enough for you to advance to the intermediate Immortal King realm. Given your horrifying combat strength, if you advance to the intermediate Immortal King realm, you will be able to travel in the Golden Horizon unhindered, it would also be very difficult for you to find an opponent.”
Yang Bufan approached Jiang Chen. Seeing that Jiang Chen didn’t refine the Blood Dragon Fruit, he couldn’t help but ask curiously.
“I’m not in a hurry. There is still a tremendous amount of medicinal energy from the Holy Flame Emperor Pill stored in my body. My improvement is just too quick, and I want to slow it down to avoid harming my future cultivation. When the time has come for me to use the Blood Dragon Fruit, I naturally won’t be polite about it.”
Jiang Chen smiled. What he said was true. If he refined the Blood Dragon Fruit now, he wouldn’t have a problem reaching the intermediate Immortal King realm, or even the peak of intermediate Immortal King realm, but this wasn’t what he needed right now. His growth was just too fast within this short period of time. So he needed to slow down a little and place his priority on the Ancestral Dragon Pagoda. The moment the thirty-seventh level of the pagoda was fully condensed, the benefits he would obtain from the pagoda would surely push him to the peak of early Immortal King realm or even intermediate Immortal King realm.
The benefits obtained from the Ancestral Dragon Pagoda were purified energy, the essence of energy. So Jiang Chen could absorbed it without hesitation without worrying that it would affect his foundation.
“You’re right. Foundation is the most important thing in the path of cultivation. Sometimes, it’s necessary to slow down or even stop. Perhaps that will bring some new enlightenment.”
Yang Bufan nodded, understanding the reason behind it.
“King Fan, you can refine the Blood Dragon Fruit now. I can see that your foundation is still very solid. The Blood Dragon Fruit nourishes the body and blood Qi, which will bring tremendous benefits to you. Besides, there are dangers everywhere in the Golden Horizon. It’s always better to have greater strength,” Jiang Chen said.
After listening to Jiang Chen’s advice, Yang Bufan found a spot and began his refinement.
As for Jiang Chen, his confidence had improved sharply, especially when there were the two incredible blood demon kings as his trump cards. These two wouldn’t have a problem keeping him safe. He now gazed at a far distance, full of anticipation about this ancient battlefield. Now was merely the first day.
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BattleTechWiki β
Thomas Marik (False)
(Redirected from Thomas Halas)
Thomas Marik
Also known as Thomas Halas
Born unknown
Affiliation House Marik
Profession/
occupation Captain-General
Spouse Sophina Desiree
Sherryl Halas
Children Joshua Marik
Janos III
Christopher Marik
Jessica Marik
This article is about the "false" Thomas Marik, who would rule the Free Worlds League, presumably with the real Thomas Marik's consent and possibly even following his orders for a time at least.
Introducing the body doubleEdit
On 1 June 3035 at a meeting to discuss ways to bring the Duchy of Andurien back into the League, a bomb exploded. It was initially believed that all inside had perished, Janos' legitimate heir, Thomas, was narrowly rescued from the attack by ComStar, but his extensive injuries required the use of bionics to save him. It was then decided that a body double should take his place as Captain-General of the Free Worlds League, ostensibly because the people of the Free Worlds League carry strong sentiments against "cyborgs", including prosthetics as well as cybernetic enhancements.
It ultimately remains uncertain to what extent the real Thomas Marik, who always pulled the strings from behind the scenes henceforth, had or even desired control over the rule that his double subsequently exerted over the Free Worlds League in his stead, while Thomas himself became a religious zealot, embracing the teachings of Conrad Toyama.
With the popular "Thomas Marik" back after more than a year, an enthusiastic Parliament acceded to his many demands in order to be rid of Duncan. Most of these requests were laws that concentrated more power in the Captain-General's hands than there had ever been before, including veto power.[1]
Captain-GeneralEdit
"Thomas", now Captain-General, decided to cement his power by much the same means. Leading a much more measured response, he eventually reclaimed Andurien and rebel Dame Catherine Humphreys in 3040. Though she died from a heart attack while awaiting trial, he pardoned many military and political leaders to aid reconciliation. This paid off when many members of the former Defenders of Andurien joined a new federal force that Thomas created, the Free Worlds Legionnaires.[1][2]
The new Captain-General sought stability and peace above all else. Though his realm was unaffected by the Clan invasion, he still traveled to Outreach in 3051 for the summit concerning how to deal with them. There, he provided the voice of reason, the perfect counterpoint to Romano Liao. After she stormed out, "Thomas" and Prince Hanse Davion agreed that the FWL would convert its industry to provide refit packages to Federated Commonwealth troops so that they could more effectively combat the Clans through using the advanced Star League technology provided by the FWL. In exchange, Hanse offered to treat Marik's son and heir Joshua and his leukemia at the New Avalon Institute of Science.[3]
The League continued to provide refit packages, even after the temporary defeat of the Clans and the Truce of Tukayyid, and the League's industry grew larger and richer with a guaranteed market for its new, high-tech goods. As the flow of refits slowed, "Thomas" directed the Free Worlds League Military to purchase them, resulting in a technologically sophisticated BattleMech force. This force was soon put to the test.
ComStar schismEdit
The fallout of Primus Myndo Waterly's Operation SCORPION and her subsequent assassination by Precentor Martial Anastasius Focht led to a schism within ComStar. Focht and newly-elected Primus Sharilar Mori decided to reform the order and remove many of its mystical trappings, but there was a group of reactionaries who did not agree with these changes. Sticking to the old ways, they seceded from the secularized order as the radical splinter group Word of Blake in 3052. They were a very diverse group in the beginning, united only through their disapproval of the changes within ComStar. Although they initially lacked a coherent leadership, Thomas Marik was almost certainly among their leaders right from the start.
Early on, the Captain-General of the Free Worlds League (Thomas' double, acting as Thomas) allowed tens of thousands of Word of Blake zealots to settle on the FWL world of Gibson. This was almost certainly the real Thomas Marik's doing. He was named Primus-in-exile by them, which was apparently more an honorary title at the time as the various factions of the Word of Blake could not agree on a real leader. The Word also took over the administration of HPGs from ComStar wherever possible, ensuring them a source of revenue.
War of 3057Edit
In 3057, Joshua Marik lost his battle with leukemia and died while in the care of the Federated Commonwealth. In his inexperience, the new FedCom ruler Victor Steiner-Davion fell back on a plan his father had created that dealt with such a contingency. Fearing that the Captain-General would cease the flow of upgrades, Victor instituted Operation DOPPELGANGER, replacing Joshua with a body double. Although he never intended to place a pawn on the throne of the Free Worlds League, when Thomas discovered the switch that seemed the logical goal of the plan.
Following the discovery of Joshua's death and replacement by a double, the Free Worlds League made a tentative alliance with Chancellor Sun-Tzu Liao of the Capellan Confederation to punish the Federated Commonwealth for this duplicity. The two nations launched a joint invasion with the goal of regaining all of the territories Thomas' father had lost during the Fourth Succession War, with stunning success. The FWL ended the offensive after having recaptured their worlds.
Star LeagueEdit
Now an elder statesman of the Inner Sphere, "Thomas" traveled to Tharkad to take part in the First Whitting Conference in 3058 where the Star League was resurrected. Here, Victor Steiner-Davion all but told "Thomas" that he knew he was not the real son of Janos Marik, but Victor did nothing as the false Thomas was a stabilizing influence on the Star League Council.
The Free Worlds League was relatively quiet through the late 3050s and early 3060s, until the FedCom Civil War. During that war, Thomas' half-sister Kristen Marik and her mercenary unit, Kristen's Krushers, were garrisoning Coventry when they were attacked by Lyran troops. The false Thomas did nothing to help the woman who was supposedly his little sister, though Marshall Jeremy Brett (in defiance of a direct order from him) rescued what was left of the unit on Arcadia. The world was held as a protectorate through the end of the war, after which "Thomas" returned it to the Lyran Alliance.
At the 3064 Whitting Conference, "Thomas" nominated the Word of Blake for entrance into the Star League. While this was obviously desirable to him, as it would give him a member that would basically vote the way he wanted, it was also an incredibly desirable outcome to the Toyama faction of the Word. This faction contained the radical Sixth of June, led by none other than (the real) Thomas Marik, "The Master". The real Thomas Marik believed that the Word of Blake would come to greatness through three "transfers of power," the last of which was their membership in the Star League. A ComStar audit of Blakist funding turned up some corruption of the funds paid to them by the Free Worlds, but the Captain-General's internal audit revealed a much more disturbing situation. Incredible amounts of M-Bills had been siphoned off to the Word of Blake, which even Precentor William Blane could not account for. Blane and the false Thomas concluded that only the real Thomas Marik could have been responsible for the numbers. With that revelation, "Thomas" resigned as Primus-in-exile.
The year 3067 saw the greatest challenge to the Captain-General's rule. Kristen's daughter Alys Rousset-Marik started the Great Debate. She argued that Resolution 288, the legislation that established the Captain-General as a permanent position, should no longer be in effect, as there was no emergency (which 288 is contingent upon). With the Free Worlds League at peace and the Star League resurrected, she argued, the office of the Captain-General should revert to a position that was assigned as needed. While this took much of the false Thomas' attention, it ultimately came to naught.
JihadEdit
The Fourth Whitting Conference in 3067 saw the dissolution of the Star League. When the Capellan Confederation, Federated Suns, and host Lyran Alliance announced their intentions to pull out of the League, outgoing First Lord Christian Mansdottir called for a vote of no-confidence in the League with the intention of forcing them back in. Even with the admission of the provisional members, the vote failed and the Star League dissolved. The Word of Blake, especially Thomas Marik's Sixth of June, were incensed and attempted to force the Alliance and Suns back into the League through intimidating force aimed at their respective capitals. When that failed, the Blakists engulfed the Inner Sphere and near Periphery in their Jihad.
"Thomas" finally attempted to break his dependency on the Blakists, to which they responded by using a chemical attack to kill the members of Parliament and the 1st Knights of the Inner Sphere. They also revealed the knowledge that the Captain-General was an impostor placed on the throne by ComStar. Despite that, the false Thomas attempted to stay on, but was deposed by Thomas' brother, Paul in 3069. Paul put his daughter Corinne on the throne, though she did not prove to be as malleable as the Word had hoped.[4] Others attempted to claim the Captain-Generalcy, namely Therese Marik and Kirc Cameron-Jones, leading to four different Captain-Generals and effectively shattering the Free Worlds League as a political entity (a situation that persisted until 3139). His attempts of the fake Thomas to replace the original Thomas Marik at the command of the League, and get rid of the Word of Blake failed. An assasination attempt took the lives of his older sons Janos and Christopher. Only the youngest daughter, Jessica, survived. There are not too many data about what this Thomas do after this, but somehow, he took the command of the Oriente Protectorate.
Death and LegacyEdit
Thomas Halas passed away in 3097, succeeded by his only surviving daughter, Jessica Marik. She continued his good work, and eventually succeeded in resurrecting the Free Worlds League, at his command, in 3139.[citation needed]
Marriage and childrenEdit
Thomas Marik (the "Real" Thomas Marik) was survived by one illegitimate child, Isis. His only legitimate child, Joshua (actually the son of Thomas Halas), died in 3057 while being treated for his leukemia on New Avalon. (Thomas Halas later had three other children, but by this time he was revealed to have been an impostor.)[citation needed]
Titles and PositionsEdit
Duncan Marik Captain-General of the Free Worlds League
Corinne Marik
Janos Marik Duke of Atreus and Marik
Portrait GalleryEdit
Thomas Marik Portrait
At Age of 72
"Thomas Marik" image from the Jihad Secrets: The Blake Documents
↑ 1.0 1.1 20-Year Update
↑ Field Manual: Free Worlds League
↑ Stackpole, Michael A., Blood Legacy
↑ Jihad Hot Spots: 3070, p.??[citation needed], "The Shrouded Blade"
Dawn of the Jihad
Grave Covenant (novel)
Handbook: House Marik
House Marik (The Free Worlds League)
Ideal War (novel)
Jihad: Final Reckoning
Beas, Herbert A. II,
Epitaph for a Realm, Wizkids Games. Accessed 2 December 2007.
Jihad Hot Spots: 3070
Patriots and Tyrants (novel)
Prince of Havoc (novel)
Principles of Desolation (novel)
Storms of Fate (novel)
Surrender Your Dreams (novel)
Retrieved from "http://m.sarna.net/wiki/index.php?title=Thomas_Marik_(False)&oldid=564893"
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Content is available under GNU FDL 1.2 unless otherwise noted.
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Mad Girl Scientist Fiction
Works, and works in progress
The Smartest Woman in the World
September 25, 2019 Elizabeth Bent
“You think you’re smart? I’m smarter than you. I own you.”
I looked at the cell phone in my hand. Who was this? For years I had endured strange calls. The ones from this voice were abusive. I was told I was making a lot of money for someone, that I was stupid, that my ideas were worthless, that they owned me, that I was their slave.
At the time, this was almost true.
I also shared phone calls with persons unknown about projects they were working on. Books, films, TV shows, personal problems that the anonymous people I could never identify wanted help with. I never heard back from any of them and I was never paid for any of the advice I gave- rather, I was never paid. I am sure that the anonymous abuser of mine, the woman I later identified as Evelyn, and her co-conspirators profited handsomely. I continued working quietly as a scientist, making very little in my academic job, wondering who was calling.
I was stalked, I was harassed and asked for my opinion of celebrities I was not familiar with, I was threatened, and I noticed problems with my paper mail, my voicemails, my emails, my social media messages, even my ability to access certain websites on the internet. I literally could not see some billboards or posters, or news articles. I literally could not hear some voices. I was being manipulated and abused in so many ways, and stolen from, mind-raped with brutal and abusive stage hypnosis, completely. This, after years of half-remembered actual rapes which stopped once I showed enough physical strength to defend myself, and enough presence of mind to be able to report some attacks. To this day I am not 100% certain all of them occurred, though I do know that I have endured real rapes which have given me traumatic nightmares, and I have figured out that some or all of these were arranged by Evelyn. She sold me to the man in the hotel in Vancouver, she sold me to random strangers invading my home, she manipulated my mind and what information I received so I never could identify her, and she stole, or tried to steal, almost everything I owned which had any value to me.
It has taken me about three years to finally remember her, to put her name to the face from my memories, to figure out how she manipulated, not just me, but her famous TV husband and everyone around us. And that was only because I became curious about his career, looked up his body of work, looked up his image- and there she was, next to him. I remembered her Tasering me. I remember her holding a brick and walking down some stairs after a man who said he wanted to help me, and I remember seeing that man in a pool of blood, face down, and asking passersby to call police (I had no cell phone then). I remembered her confessing to crimes, knowing I would not be able to remember, because that’s how I had been programmed. I remembered her coming up to me in public and asking me to pose for photos with her, which later became “evidence” of a friendly relationship.
Her stage hypnosis tricks were effective on me and I had no way to tell who she was, so much of the time, which allowed her to gain access to my keys, my homes, my workplaces, my computers, my phones, my mail… my entire life. She destroyed so many relationships of mine by pretending to be other people.
I see it now, I see her greatest work, which has been the attempted ruin of my life. I see her attempt to humiliate me by forcing me to talk about subjects I was unfamiliar with (TV, film, acting) with experts in the field, and to market me as “The Smartest Woman In The World”. It was her initial hope that people would seek me out and she could prove how ignorant I was of the profession she marketed me as an “expert” in. When I proved to actually have useful advice, she claimed credit, stole money or influence that should have been mine, and abused me.
I stopped responding to the anonymous calls and threats. I tried to warn people who called me that I was being abused and that the woman who had set me up for it was not to be trusted. Too often, I would hear her talk to me and then lie, skewing what I said, and years later I would see projects come out and flop, and I knew that if my actual advice had been followed, they would have had a better chance. I do not know if anyone heard me, any of the times I attempted warning.
I don’t know what happened to this image, this puppet, “The Smartest Woman In The World”, but I want you to know that I am the woman who used to be asleep- answering the phone, speaking, but asleep- behind her.
I am awake now.
The man from the hotel phoned me up more recently and asked to speak to “The Woman”. I reminded him about Vancouver, the attack I endured there when Evelyn trafficked me. He said I was “a very passionate young lady.” I did not need to know who he was to know he was a terrible man.
I see him. And I see you now, too, Evelyn.
Tick, tock.
Sneak peek at Anagama
Dear readers, I’m 99% of the way finished with Anagama– just one last pass, and then I can feel secure in it, and start the process of finding an agent to represent it. I have thought about self-publishing and if finding an agent proves to be impossible, I’ll go that route. I already have a few short stories on Smashwords (here, at bottom of page), some of which I am very fond of, that are self-published, as well as a novel (here). The main reason I don’t want to go this route again is that I am not fond of marketing my work and no one will see it unless I do, or unless I hand that off to someone else (the publisher, for the most part, though I know if I do get a contract I will have to promote my book as best as I can).
Here is a sneak peek at the first chapter. If you like it, send me a note at cloaked.diamond@gmail.com.
She ducked out of her lab for a moment to take a sip of coffee from her travel mug, since food and drink were forbidden inside the lab. In order to do this she had to first take off her protective gloves, safety glasses, mask, and lab coat. Under all the protective gear she was just another middle-aged woman, long dark hair streaked with silver and twisted up into a bun, slightly overweight and soft from spending long hours sitting in front of a computer or laminar flow hood.
Two armed, helmeted figures in black security gear rounded a corner at the end of the hall, one on each end of a white stretcher. A slender figure lay trussed up on the stretcher, barely conscious, moaning. She noticed blood on his—his? It was difficult to tell, but the lines of his ashen face she thought the figure might be male—temple, under short dark hair, more blood coming from the neck. The towels put on his neck to stop the bleeding were soaked in blood. The rest of him was hidden under cords and a pale blue sheet. From his bare shoulders, she surmised he was naked—perhaps stolen from bed.
The stretcher moved past and Beatrice, standing in the hall with her coffee, pretended not to be interested in the figure on the stretcher.
She closed her eyes and pushed.
Are you there? She asked, silently, listening intently as the guards and the figure moved down the hall. Can you hear me? Think your name.
I’m cold, was all she heard, indistinctly; she took a sip of coffee, and then—
LET ME GO LET ME GO LET ME GO
Beatrice started and nearly dropped her coffee; she slammed her mental gates shut just as a loud, screeching wail emanated from down the hall, in the direction the guards had taken.
“LET ME GO! LET ME GO! LET—”
There was a crash, sounds of a scuffle, wordless cries, and finally, a thud.
Beatrice set her coffee down on the small table by the lab door that was situated there just for that purpose. Her hands shook slightly.
“Beatrice!”
She turned, saw her supervisor. He wore suit pants, a pressed shirt, a black and white tie which, when examined closely, was a repeating tiled pattern of the Zurvan Corporation’s black octopus logo. Beatrice had looked closely at it hundreds of times.
“How’s the run doing? Specimen 5-15?”
Beatrice blinked.
“The run will be ready in one hour,” she lied. The run would be ready in fifteen minutes. However, her customized script which she had set to alter the run statistics would take forty-five minutes. “I can send you statistics after that.”
“Good, good,” Phil Knight said, stuffing his hands into his pockets and jingling some change. He looked toward a wall.
That one may be particularly valuable, she heard him think.
“I don’t need to tell you that the more mutants we uncover, the better it is for Zurvan, and for the stability of your job?”
Beatrice smiled back at him. “The run says what the run says. I don’t alter the data,” she lied, and thought back to the boy they called Specimen 5-15.
She remembered drawing blood specimens from him. His eyes had been bloodshot and he had been able to hear her. Luckily, he had not given this away.
Where am I? he had asked. Where is my family? What do they want with me?
She had collected his blood into a vial and put a cotton ball on the wound, then a bandage.
They don’t think you’re human, she told him, and his eyes had widened.
Shhh, she said. Don’t react. I will make sure the data shows you are human. They will give you back to your family. But move, after—make sure you move, and make sure no one knows you can heal so quickly. Try to keep it a secret.
He had simply looked at her. Why are there people locked up here? What did we do?
You didn’t do anything, she said, taking an inordinate amount of time to write the boy’s specimen number on her labels. It’s your DNA. They think you have DNA different enough to make you not-human.
The boy started to cry. Beatrice put down her blood sample vials, reached instinctively toward him to give comfort.
The black barrel of a tranquilizer gun appeared between them.
“What are you doing, Dr. Holloway?” The guard’s voice was female. She still wore her helmet here, inside this room they had caged the boy in, as was regulation. “You know the rules.”
Beatrice smoothed over a scowl and an angry reply, and instead reached for a box of tissues from her medical kit, handed one to the boy. He took it, did not look at her.
I will make sure they let you go, she said. I promise.
My stomach hurts, the boy said. I’m hungry.
I will make sure they feed you, she said.
“How long has it been since he’s been fed?” she asked.
The guard shrugged.
“He’s young, make sure he gets enough food and rest,” she said. “After all, we don’t know that he isn’t human yet. We could have a lawsuit on our hands. Bad publicity.”
The guard shrugged again. Both of them knew no one who wound up in these cells came from financial wealth able to take on Zurvan Corporation.
The captive boy, sitting on his thinly padded cot, seemed to shrink in on himself, and Beatrice felt him withdraw.
She bit her lip, then collected her things, and stood, blood sample vial in hand.
“Feed him,” she said, trying to not seem very interested in whether they did or not, and hoped for the best.
She would spend the next few hours preparing the blood sample for sequencing and running it through the sequencer, and the data through her custom scripts—scripts she had quietly set in advance to make the percentage similarity of the boy’s DNA to standard human DNA rise above the cherished 99.5% cutoff. She could do this for the normal-looking mutants they brought in without raising too much suspicion.
Coming back to herself in the hallway, she watched her supervisor’s smooth, handsome face, listened without moving a muscle.
“You’re always in the lab, Bea,” he said, jovially. “Maybe we should hire you an assistant.”
God, woman, you look like shit.
Beatrice smiled. She hated being called Bea.
“It’s just that I love my job,” she replied. “The workload is not that much. I’d prefer to be the one doing this work, and I like to work alone.”
“That’s the spirit,” Knight said. He clapped her on the shoulder.
Does the work of three people, for one salary. Cost too much to replace her, she heard him say to himself. What a chump.
“Keep up the good work,” he said, tossing the words over his shoulder as he sauntered down the hall, no doubt to look at Zurvan’s latest acquisition.
Beatrice ducked her head so the cameras couldn’t see her expression, then ducked back into her laboratory, pulled on her protective gear. It was as much there to protect her equipment and reagents from her own DNA as it was to protect her from harm.
Beatrice thought of her own DNA. Her DNA that was only 99.2% similar to human normal—DNA which, if she hadn’t altered her own sequence data files, would peg her as nonhuman, with the same lack of rights as the poor souls kidnapped and locked up by Zurvan, just down the hall.
She checked that the sequencer was running, checked that her software was encrypting the raw data files as each was written. She checked that the files being uploaded to company cloud storage were the faked ones which would give Specimen 5-15 freedom again. Beatrice hated that she hadn’t asked him his name. She checked that her own private cache of files on Zurvan was there, and that her scripts were adding to this pile as they were supposed to, without interference. Every other day she synced this cache with the one on a data cube she kept on her person. Someday, she hoped, the files would be useful in bringing Zurvan to its knees.
Beyond the heavy door to her laboratory, she thought she heard someone screaming again.
Beatrice walked over to the lab computer, set it to play soothing jazz music. She started tidying up her lab bench, moving boxes of pipet tips to one side, closing boxes of microcentrifuge tubes, wiping down the bench surface with 70% ethanol to clean it. She knew it was only a matter of time before blood from this new acquisition wound up on her lab bench—and she would be ready for it, she would be waiting. It meant another evening spent in the laboratory instead of at home, but she didn’t mind.
What was waiting for her at home, anyway? An empty apartment, seeming to echo with the ticking of the grandfather clock she had inherited from her parents; the small comforts of a glass of wine and a book with dinner. But no other living soul, no pets, not even a potted plant. She needed to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. She lived with a packed bag ready to go in her closet, her account information carried with her on data cubes she kept concealed in a keyring, she had her personal cloud storage encrypted.
Her lab computer pinged. She walked over to it.
The new one’s retroviral, the screen read. Give me the run reports on 5-15 tomorrow morning. If the new one makes it through the night, you might have to get ready to sequence once the infection clears. It’s already showing signs of great strength and altered musculature—I think we have a winner here!
Beatrice pursed her lips. There was no way she could save him if he were undergoing genetic change after a retroviral infection. Even if he had been human prior to the infection, afterward he was almost guaranteed, with the bad viruses, to have experienced enough mutation to make him either nonhuman-looking or dead. Or both.
She thought of walking down to Specimen 5-15’s cell and trying to speak to him one more time, but expressing too much interest in the acquisitions would bring too much attention to herself, and might lead to the uncovering of her work. Best to leave him be, and hope someone had fed him, at least.
As for the new specimen, Beatrice felt with a sinking heart that he was doomed—most retroviral infections led to abnormalities that were fatal. It would be fine for Zurvan—they could learn things from the genes that could lead to medical breakthroughs and new therapies—but not so fine for the poor man they had picked up somewhere.
As she stripped off her protective gear on her way out of the lab, she silently pushed toward Specimen 5-15 and the new man they had just brought in, so new he did not yet have a specimen label.
Please be at peace, she thought, pushing out as hard as she could.
Nothing in response.
Beatrice made her way to her locker, collected her coat and purse, made her way out the staff entrance side door. Every doorway she passed through required her to swipe her keycard, white with the black Zurvan logo on it. Every doorway she passed through, getting closer to the outside world, felt like the lifting of a noose from around her neck. She finally drove her small electric car away from the Zurvan parking lot, finally was out of reach of the cameras for good. Her keyring, nestled in her jeans pocket, pressed into her thigh. It was innocuous, featuring cartoon characters popular in the 2000s (a white dog carrying a martini glass, a baby with a football-shaped head).
She drove silently. The news story on the radio was about the Humane Treatment Party, a fringe element with no resources and the best of intentions. They wanted to change the global legislation that made it legal for Zurvan to kidnap and incarcerate humanoids with a less than 99.5% genomic DNA match to human normal, basing this on legislation commonly found on some the outlying planetary colonies. Beatrice actually agreed with them, but did not do a thing to support them in her personal life because she knew if this were discovered, she would be investigated.
Halfway home, she stopped at a red light. She exhaled. The news was now about stock prices. Zurvan stock was up thanks to its invention of a genetic therapy for treating Parkinson’s. Beatrice remembered hearing gossip about this in the cafeteria—the gene therapy idea had been sparked by a mutation found in a retroviral victim. Someone had died, incarcerated, and Zurvan had turned this into profit.
“Fuckers,” she spat. Then she grinned, toothily.
“One day you will slip up, and I will get you. Fuckers.”
The light turned green, and, smoothing her expression, Beatrice continued her drive home.
A little Tek Jansen fan fiction
I discovered Tek Jansen in 2018. I was sad that the entire novel Stephen Colbert had been working on was not posted on the Tek Jansen website, but maybe someday he will publish it. I did buy and read the graphic novel, and so most of the information I gleaned about this character came from either the novel segments I came across, or the graphic novel. I had an issue with how Tek treated his robotic chimp sidekick C.A.S.E.Y., so I addressed that in this story, and I basically made up the rest. Clarisse Diamond is the name of a protagonist of a novel-in-progress I have set aside for the moment, but plan to get back to.
I actually am fairly certain I met Stephen at some point in my past, but it’s really quite impossible for me to contact him to ask. I did send this little story to his work address, hoping someone would read it and show it to him. In my past, if I saw him I never recognized him, and have no selfies to prove this was the case, so it’s still a matter of debate for whether I saw him or merely someone that looked like him. In any case, I recall talking to someone that looked like him on my doorstep in California, a long time ago, and I recall us talking about Jabberwocky. I added that tidbit in, too.
I hope you enjoy this little foray into fan fiction.
Spy Vs. Spy: A Tek Jansen Adventure
It was a sunny morning on the planet Califzona, and Clarisse Diamond angled her telephoto lens toward the hotel that the galaxy’s greatest hero, Tek Jansen, was currently asleep in. She aimed the lens toward the window of the penthouse suite. Her contact was in the window, a willowy green creature with leafy hair, photosynthesizing. She was not holding a cup of fertilizer. This was the signal- if Tek Jansen was with her, she would appear alone in the window, nothing in her hands.
Clarisse packed her equipment back in her tactical backpack and made her way down the rough scree of the slope she had been perched on. Only one thing to do. She had to use Tek Jansen’s notorious libido against him, gain his trust, and ferret out the secrets she needed to save her doomed home world from destruction. Tek’s government had set up robotic fracking sites on 90% of the small moon Ontington’s surface, sucking up its mineral wealth but destroying Ontington’s ecosystems and fragile tectonic crusts in the process- the only way to stop the machines was to gain access to codes that only Tek knew.
Could she rely on Tek’s better nature? Clarisse considered this as she made her way down to the doors of the Hotel Elegante, where Tek Jansen was staying. She didn’t know. She couldn’t take the chance.
The Hotel Elegante was hosting a pet show. Clarisse would find him and seduce him there.
She was booked into a room one floor below Tek’s suite, and carried her tactical backpack with its quantum-dimensional interior pockets, one of which contained a selection of evening gowns. The backpack was pretty heavy as a result, even though it only appeared to be a cubic foot in size. She placed it on the bed and the bed sagged somewhat.
Clarisse was about to take a shower when there was a knock on the door. She eyeballed the door with suspicion. Her contact was supposed to find Tek and then let her know what room he was in- she was supposed to leave after that. Who could this be? A maid?
Clarisse belted her hotel robe around her more tightly and answered the door.
“It’s this one, just go right in,” grated a gravelly voice. Clarisse blinked. At her door was a tall, muscular figure, fully dressed in a tight Spandex uniform complete with cape and epaulets, his dark hair curling down slightly over his forehead. Tek Jansen held up a glass container in which an ugly dark substance swirled.
“It’s right here,” said the substance.
“Meangar, I don’t think that this is the spa,” replied Tek.
“It’s not,” said Clarisse, slightly breathlessly. Tek, in person, was almost overwhelming.
Get the codes, girl, she told herself, sternly. She had a mission, the entire population of her native moon was depending on her.
“Sorry to have bothered you,” said Tek, and was about to turn away when Clarisse touched his arm.
“No, it’s fine. Is this your pet?” She gestured toward the swirling blackness in the glass jar.
“You’re an ugly loser and you’ll die alone,” grated the blackness.
“Isn’t it cute? This is Meangar,” replied Tek, patting the jar fondly.
“It’s something,” replied Clarisse.
“Say, haven’t we met before?” Tek squinted at her.
Clarisse blinked. Had they met before?
Remember the mission, she thought, looking at Tek’s kind dark eyes.
“Can I buy you a drink?” she blurted, all her seduction lessons, which she had uploaded via neural hyperlink on the trip to Califzona, forgotten.
Meangar said an expletive. Tek chuckled and tucked it under one arm.
“Where are you from?” asked Tek.
“I’m from… all over,” Clarisse replied. She started to play with her shoulder-length black hair. He really was quite handsome.
“I’m Tek,” he said, and Clarisse smiled at him. He held out his hand and Clarisse took it to shake it, and he brushed a kiss across her knuckles.
“I’m Clarisse,” she replied. She was acutely aware of having just finished a hike outside in the hot sun with a heavy pack on her back.
“I’ll buy you that drink,” Tek said.
“I’ll kill you first,” Meangar snarled.
Clarisse looked at Tek.
“You get used to it,” Tek said, patting the jar.
“I’ll meet you down in the lobby at seven?” Clarisse replied. Her heart was pounding. Normally she was a lot more composed about her assignments, but this was… this was Tek Jansen.
She found herself grinning stupidly.
“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves,” she said.
Tek frowned.
“Jabberwocky?” he said.
“Jabberwocky,” she replied. “There are Jabberwocks on my home world.” A stray curl of hair escaped from his forehead and she smoothed it back.
He smiled.
“You both smell like Limburger!” yelled Meangar.
“I’ll enter it in the pet contest before we meet,” said Tek, patting the jar, and Clarisse smiled, suddenly shy.
“Seven, in the lobby,” she replied, and Tek smiled down at her. She blushed.
“I’ll see you then,” he said, and turned away, walking down the hotel hall corridor as Meangar started screaming about kidneys and piñatas.
That evening, Clarisse patted her carefully coiffed hair (in which a number of recording devices and weapons were placed), and wriggled her toes in her specialty pumps (which had a vial of sleeping potion located in the heel, and when activated, could eject four-inch steel spikes from the toe). She had let the charms of the dashing Tek Jansen get to her head before, but now she would be all business. It was time for her to get those codes.
She made her way, slinking as seductively as she could, to the bar in the hotel lobby, and looked around for Tek.
He hadn’t arrived yet. In the distance, she heard Meangar screaming something about its eternal revenge and how much it hoped to kill everyone in earshot someday. Ah, apparently it was being entered into the pet contest.
She walked up to the bar and seated herself at one end. Behind the bar, a glowing green metallic chimp shook a cocktail shaker.
“Hi,” it said. “What can I get for you?”
“Hi,” replied Clarisse. “I’m waiting for a friend.”
“It wouldn’t happen to be Tek Jansen, would it?”
Clarisse started. Was she that transparent?
Behind the bar, the robotic chimp took out a cloth and started polishing the counter.
“Well… well, yes. I was hoping to talk to Mr. Jansen.”
The chimp straightened his little black bow tie.
“I know him,” he said. “Before I got this job, I worked with him on his spacecraft. I was loyal. He was not.”
Clarisse hesitated. “Oh?” she replied.
“He left me in a space void, circling a black hole,” said the robotic chimp. “I’m C.A.S.E.Y.”
Clarisse switched on her recording devices. Maybe she could use this story to blackmail Tek into giving her the codes to stop the machinery on her home world.
For the next fifteen minutes, C.A.S.E.Y. told her a story of sadness- of a robotic chimp unappreciated and abandoned, and Clarisse felt her heart hardening against the charming and handsome Tek Jansen. How could he abandon his loyal robotic friend? How many scrapes had they been in together, how many times had C.A.S.E.Y helped Tek, only to be left in a cold void in space, awaiting rescue, which came quite a long time after Tek had left promising to be back soon?
“He doesn’t know I’m here,” said C.A.S.E.Y. “I plan on confronting him once and for all, here in this bar.”
Clarisse patted the robotic chimp’s arm.
“I had no idea he was so cruel,” she said. “This puts him in a whole new light for me.”
C.A.S.E.Y. looked over at her, dispassionately.
“Everyone loves him,” he said. “You will too, no doubt, once he’s here.”
“Clarisse?” said a familiar baritone. Clarisse turned and saw Tek.
He had changed into his dress uniform and looked even more handsome than she had remembered him. His brown eyes crinkled behind his glasses as he smiled at her. She swallowed.
“Hello,” she said, and remembered C.A.S.E.Y. Her expression hardened.
“Remember this robot?” she asked, gesturing at the chimp.
Tek looked and an expression of delighted surprise swept across his chiseled features.
“C.A.S.E.Y.! I thought I had lost you forever in that space void. Meangar told me you had gotten a ride with the rest of Alpha Squad Seven, and it wasn’t until I had gotten it drunk on chlorofugue gas fumes that it confessed to me that it had lied about you. Are you okay?”
Clarisse and C.A.S.E.Y. both froze for a second, then the chimp broke down, sobbing.
“I thought you had abandoned me!”
“Abandon you? You are one of my most loyal followers! What would I do without you? I have missed you since I lost you,” said Tek. He reached across the bar and patted C.A.S.E.Y.’s glowing green shoulders.
Clarisse bit her lip. She couldn’t really blackmail Tek for something that had been the fault of his obnoxious little pet.
She waited until the robot stopped crying and then cleared her throat. Her seduction lessons were coming back.
“So,” she said, putting a hand on Tek’s arm, “tell me about yourself, Tek.”
She led him over to a small secluded table. Over the next few hours, she practiced dumping space champagne in the mouth of a Califzonian pitcher plant instead of drinking it, while Tek drank most of two bottles, supplied by a grateful C.A.S.E.Y. on the house. She had to start taking sips once the pitcher plant had started to hiccup.
He was an entertaining speaker and even when somewhat inebriated, he was charming and graceful. One sip of the heady space champagne after another, and Clarisse found herself telling him about her childhood on Ontington, and the Jabberwocks, and finally, the widespread scourge of the fracking machines.
“If only there were some way to stop them,” she said, tearfully, touching his muscular arm.
Tek leaned in toward her.
“Stick with me, baby doll,” he said. “If it would stop you from crying I’d shut each one down myself.”
Clarisse looked over at him. Her large eyes were shining.
“Really? You’d help me? But- but your government-”
Tek flashed a huge and perfect grin.
“They don’t tell me what to do,” he said. “C’mon. Let’s grab C.A.S.E.Y and get into my NinjaBlaster 9000 scout ship, and save those Jabberwocks.”
Clarisse knew there would be complications. It couldn’t quite be this simple, could it?
“If you gave me the codes to shut down the equipment, I could relay them to the Ontingonian secret service and we could just stay here,” she said.
Tek reached up and smoothed a lock of hair behind her ear.
“Where’s the fun in that?” he said, and kissed her.
Smashwords update
August 14, 2019 Elizabeth Bent
Hello! I’ve updated my Smashwords profile, and my updated interview is here.
I have a variety of works for sale on the site, including a fantasy romance, some silly stories involving my characters Agent Diamond and Charming Guy, a science fiction story about romance gone wrong, and a story based on a character from my recently finished novel Infinity. All of these stories are, to a degree, intended to be humorous. You can download excerpts for free, and I’ve set the price of each story to $1.99 USD, which is less than the price of a cup of coffee. I formatted these works myself, so I apologize if there are imperfections in the resultant ebooks, and if I’m made aware of them I’ll try to fix these.
I’m currently editing the final drafts of Anagama and Infinity, but once I am finished with this I will probably start posting a few more works for sale on Smashwords.
Some shows somebody should make
August 7, 2019 Elizabeth Bent
It occurs to me that TV is a great medium for reaching a lot of people, including people who don’t really want to enroll in classes or take online courses, or do a lot of their own research. This is, I think, most people. They may lack skills, time, inclination, or all these things, when it comes to seeking information- but TV can bring it right into their homes.
As such, I am embarking on a difficult task- I have ideas for two nonfiction series which I think would be of great public benefit and might actually help change minds. The first is a sequel to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos- I am not Carl Sagan and I do not have his stature, and I have not written an amazing book like Cosmos which explains a lot of scientific phenomena. I am, however, a scientist and a biologist in particular, and I have thought of a string of topics related to my specialities which would encompass discussion of not just neat things like astrobiology, but topics that people actually need to know about, like basic molecular biology (how DNA and RNA work and what they are, and what genetic modification is and means), basic immunology (how vaccines work), risk assessment (is this technology risky? What common sense approaches do we use to assess this?), and some psychology (resistance to climate change information). I’d like to put all these important topics into perspective, especially for people afraid of vaccines and GMOs, or who are skeptical of climate change being a man-made phenomenon.
The second series is less well-defined for me- I’d like to focus specifically on critical thinking, logic, media literacy, and discussion of a variety of topics, starting with innocuous ones (is a hot dog a sandwich?) and going on to discuss more controversial ones. I want to put all this in context of Russian disinformation campaigns, which the USA is still woefully vulnerable to, and I want to do this as soon as possible- preferably before the 2020 election, though since I have no contacts in TV or entertainment this seems unlikely.
I have tried reaching out to people who might be interested in and able to do these shows, with predictably no result.
I’m putting the concepts here because I know I lack the required skills to do this quickly and I’m hoping someone picks up these ideas. I don’t even care that they are “stolen”, I have plenty of other ideas and I simply care about someone making and releasing these shows before November 2020.
I hope somebody, somewhere, reads this and decides yes, this sounds like a good idea.
On the mass shooting in Dayton, OH
I’m contemplating a mass shooting in Dayton, OH, a place I visit often.
I think that part of the reason people are so angry at strangers and lashing out is lack of support- lack of friends and a social circle, which could be alleviated by mental health support services, lack of those services for the mentally ill, lack of health care and money for things like medication, lack of money- not being able to get a good education or find a good job, and the frustration that might envelop people who want to blame someone for why they are in such a predicament. I think people will lash out- at people they consider are to blame (like other ethnic groups or minorities) or they will lash out at anyone that seems to be better off or happier, which might have been the case with the Oregon District in Dayton.
It’s a sickness exacerbated by austere social program policies which stem from failing to tax the wealthy adequately to pay for those programs, and by President Trump and his hateful white nationalist rhetoric where he’s identifying “others” who are “responsible” for everyone’s apparent problems all the time. Liberals, journalists, immigrants, “elites”, etc. etc. etc.- all these groups have been demonized and it’s also possible that the shooter in Dayton was motivated by hate for liberals, as the Oregon District is know for kind of nicer, “hipster” places. It’s a toxic brew and the only thing that will change it are (a) making it more difficult to get and keep guns that are designed to carry out mass shootings, and (b) changing government policies to make life easier for people who don’t have strong social support networks, or the ability to find a good job- there are so many roadblocks, especially in red and “purple” states, to financial stability and mental health support and so many people really need help. The United States and each state in the union really needs to tax, and spend it on things that will alleviate suffering. It really has to happen, or this county will continue its slide into demagoguery, and despair.
3rd novel is shaping up!
July 25, 2019 Elizabeth Bent
I’ve written three novels, and strangely enough, the one that started first, in 1998 or so as a short story, has taken longer than the others. It’s called Anagama, and it’s set in the first universe as my first novel, Perigee (which I finished in a matter of months in 2001, and re-released with new scenes in 2013). I really like this novel, not just because it’s been such a struggle to get it to work- I kept changing my mind about the plot and characters. Anagama is set in a future dystopian Earth where large corporations are allowed to experiment on anyone whose DNA does not pass threshold for “normal”, and retroviral infections can make a person suddenly a non-person.
I added a new character, Beatrice Holloway, about a year ago and I love her to bits. There is one more character left to change (one of the bad guys- he’s kind of boring as written, so I am giving him a more interesting backstory and life, and have been researching the religion Santeria as a part of this today). Once that’s done, and a few details added in, like the names of operas or references for the sake of continuity, this work will be ready for final proofing and I might actually be able to show it to agents. This novel is more likely to be of interest for sales than Perigee, which was an odd little book I wrote for a friend, or even the novel in between these, Infinity, which again I wrote fairly rapidly. Infinity is a story involving romance, time travel, assassination attempts, and terrible floral arrangements.
I’ve got about 50 ideas for stories for screenplays (which I am learning to write), short stories, and novels which I have not shared and which are largely the product of bipolar dreams. I look forward to finishing Anagama and getting to work on the rest of these.
Tick, tock
Creepy story idea based on memories of my high school.
It started in high school. Evelyn found me via one of the guidance counselors who had started a gifted program and insisted I needed to join. I did. I had naively thought that it might help me make some friends.
Upon finding this out, my tormentors decided to do a little “experiment” involving me, where they would find out who I called my friend, and then subject these people to increasing levels of torment until they avoided me. The goal was to isolate me completely. I felt so alone in high school, numb from emotional pain, and I was often suicidal. The fog lifted when I managed to leave campus, so I did that as often as possible. I still managed excellent grades, mostly because my schoolwork was not that difficult.
They decided to up the ante and attack me physically. They thought they were being really clever about it, took their time, made sure different people carried out different parts of the plan. They communicated on one of the early social media boards- a bulletin board- and then they collected as much information about me as they could find.
They would call me, and I would lie.
One of the things I lied about was my whereabouts the night that they decided to kill me. Instead, they killed my pregnant teacher, ironically the same one that had introduced me to Evelyn, dismembering her in Exhibition Park. While Evelyn had help carrying this out, I believe the general concept of the psychological torture I was subjected to was her idea. How clever!
When they realized I was still alive- much much later- that’s when it really began. The many attacks on me, designed to terrorize and make sure I never understood what had happened, could never speak. The witness tampering, the conspiracy to lie under oath, and yes, even impersonation. I was never contacted by police that I can recall. Just to be sure, so many years later, I wrote the local police department this week and asked. I was quite polite and very direct. My seven questions have easy yes or no answers, and will lead them to investigate the subsequent attack I endured, in the Toronto area.
The letter is in the post. It will arrive any day now.
Tick, tock. Tick, tock.
July 8, 2019 Elizabeth Bent
I was inspired by the news about Jeffrey Epstein to write a segment involving some recurring dreams about events in Vancouver in 1996 or so. This character is a graduate student that is kidnapped by a vicious woman, drugged, raped, and subsequently arranged by the woman (Evelyn) to be sold into sex slavery “on a boat to Riga” (or that is what I remember him saying, the man in the hotel).
I believe it was Evelyn in the hallway of the hotel I was in that let me out- a blonde woman, young, I think it was Evelyn, but it might have been the other one.
I think I also took some of the blood on me and drew a pair of lines on my cheek, like the goddess Erzulie, benefactor of slaves. And I think when I woke up after forgetting everything and showered, I realized I had weird bruises and bite marks on my thighs, lower back, breasts. I was scared but I literally could not remember a thing, and then Evelyn called me and said stuff like “you were hiking yesterday, I was with you, you fell down a hill, remember” and that is what I thought happened after.
What I remember now is waking up in a dark room, someone trying to inject me with drugs and I pulled the syringe so it just spilled on my wrist, not in my body, and then I waited. I waited for them to go, for noises to stop, I went outside and my clothes were on the floor in the hallway, tossed like so much garbage. I took them and my worn lace up boots and ran, naked, until I found a stairwell. I dressed in the stairwell, quickly, no boots yet, and ran until I found a doorway and ran outside. I ran until I felt safe enough to put on my boots. No buses running. Early in the morning. I ran and ran and vowed revenge on the people that did this to me, I ran and evaded people in cars and people in long coats and I ran home, and when I was home, the programming Evelyn had put in my head before it all began- that after the third doorway I’d forget everything that had happened that night, I would relax and feel at home- this took effect. The man in the hotel had said I would be the “star attraction” and said something about boats and Europe. Touring Europe. I was supposed to become a sex trafficking victim, unable to go home, no money or resources, trapped in Eastern Europe on boats owned by rich men.
I slept well and deeply, in my own bed, and woke with blood on my face and bite marks and bruises, and I sat in the shower and cried, and then I vowed revenge. I would find out who had done this to me and I would bring every single person responsible to their knees, one by one. It has been a very long time, over two decades.
The wealthy hotel family that nearly bought me figured out that I was no threat to them when I failed to recognize D___ at a party that Evelyn brought me to where he was there. She told me that I had cost her a lot of money after that, and I did not recognize her at all, she was a random woman on the street. She said she would take it out of me somehow. I forget what she might have arranged to have done but I left for Alabama in 1997, and I felt really strongly like I needed to go there, and I thought for ever so long this was Evelyn’s doing, but in reality, it might have also been mine. And then Evelyn destroyed my marriage, psychologically and sexually tortured me, held a loaded gun to my head, played Russian roulette with me, all while seeming to be my husband whom I married in 1998, and so my mind warped and broke and I became suicidal, and when I realized this I decided to leave. And I did, without telling anyone. She found me again in 2001 in London, ON, after my divorce, and I left there again without telling too many people, and she found me again in 2002 in Riverside, CA. And on and on. I think she “got her money back” by selling pornography of me, drugging me and arranging for me to be raped in an apartment in Etobicoke, ON, first (I thought I was visiting a boyfriend) then later in Riverside, CA, where I lived alone; and by torturing me in various ways. I also think she embezzled money meant for me once she realized she could not keep raping me and she took payments of blackmail for sex crimes committed that were arranged by her, and involved powerful men, and I think she also sold my ideas or thoughts or recordings of me that were not pornographic and pocketed that money as well, pretending to “represent” me. And so on and so on. I don’t know how much blood and misery money she has pocketed and spent upon herself and her “hobbies”. She told me once that I am her “Magnum Opus”.
Evelyn will be the first of these to go. When she goes, the rest of you will know that you will soon follow. I cannot be stopped, I cannot be contained, and I cannot be bribed, pleaded with, or killed. You tried, remember? The marina in Coal Harbor, Vancouver, where you put a plastic bag over my head and dumped my body in a pile of garbage bags?
I survived, I have regained my memory, I am regaining my powers, and I will not be stopped.
Sleep well, while you can.
April 17, 2019 Elizabeth Bent
At the beginning of 2016 (January 2, to be clear), I had finished a final draft of my manuscript for Anagama, which is set in the same universe as my self-published novel Perigee, ready for review. I thought. I sent it away and hoped for good feedback.
I was puzzled that my reviewers were not able to follow the story, until I looked at the file I had sent- it was corrupted! Somehow chapters from an earlier version of the manuscript (which had a completely different plot) were interleaved with chapters from the actual, finished manuscript. And when I tried to look at my many backups, all of those were corrupted, too.
I won’t speculate as to what happened, though I have my theories. But suffice it to say, I was very pleased when I went through old emails to a friend and found an uncorrupted copy of my book manuscript! I have to read it through carefully, but despite not having proofreading touches added in (like converting en dashes to em dashes, that sort of thing), on first glance it looks like it’s mostly the correct version. I’m so pleased!
I also have spent a bit of time in the intervening years pondering, and there are a few changes I want to make to characters in my “final” draft of Anagama– so while I’m pleased to have a good version of my work in hand (I had spent a lot of time on it, particularly over the Christmas break in 2015), it probably isn’t going to be my last draft.
I’ve been very busy with my two paying jobs for now- I have a backlog of work lined up from when I became ill over the winter, and until I clear that up I won’t have a lot of energy to devote to writing. But I thought I would share this one small triumph with you.
I hope you have a wonderful night,
Scribbles from an actual mad scientist
Buy a little piece of history
A new year, and some old thoughts
A little wager
Follow @bent_elizabeth
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Planned Parenthood or the A word... - Page 6 - Rockbridge Forum
Planned Parenthood or the A word...
PP is up to it's elbows in ass-crackery...
Postby Crux » 2014 Jun 12 07:55
Planned Parenthood is being exposed again in a series of undercover videos being released by Live Action.
It is crap like this that has many folks demanding that our Federal Government stop funding this EFFORT.
http://plannedparenthoodexposed.com/
6 minutes of outrageous advice from a PP counselor given to a "15 year old" minor. OUCH!!! This isn't healthy...
Re: Planned Parenthood or the A word...
Postby Coondog » 2014 Jun 12 12:53
So......we can assume that crux is not into whips and chains?
Too bad!
Leave Planned Parenthood alone. They're there to give you what you ask for.
My safe word is NIXON!
The enablers...
Postby Crux » 2015 Aug 12 11:18
Postby Coondog » 2015 Aug 13 12:46
clown strikes again
Oh, crux, how your incredibly wrong statements have been missed around here.
Constant support of all abortions? Defy you to find one statement that corroborates that.
It is known that you believe that all abortions are simply a method form of birth control. Like all people who receive government assistance (except corporations) are freeloaders and how everybody, even a fetus, should be allowed to carry firearms.
But there is no ALL. People are different and do things for different reasons. Abortion is a woman's legal...repeat, legal choice. You don't like it? Then why don't you support doing something about it besides relegating that decision to a bunch of dirt bags in congress who know nothing about sex beyond taking a wide stance in airport restrooms?
Don't want to pay for abortions? Fine, pay for contraception, because you're sure not going to take any financial responsibility for that precious little life or that of the mother after it's born.
A delicate issue to be sure, but dealing in practicality makes more sense than all this hyperbolic political nonsense. Politicians have no morals. Leave the moralizing to the minions of religion.
Not a doctor
slippery as an eel or something much simpler
Concern yourself not what Coondog thinks. Concern yourself, instead, with each and every individual circumstance where abortion is either decided upon or contemplated.
While you're attempting to affect that decision process with unnecessary stress and expense and restrictive procedures which insure the passage of time which turns a 1st trimester into a second and third.....ask yourself whether this situation requires a licensed physician or a tea party tribunal.
When do we protect that innocent; all of us must answer.
It is not about a tea party tribunal. That is tribal small mindedness.
People of all demographics oppose D&E "abortions" or 20 plus week old "fetuses".
Now stay focused... Slow down my friend and think critically...
Wholesale opposition is principled opposition. Every demographic group is represented. A great many champion protecting that human life.
crux -just like a lot of other good people.
C.F. on target.
Postby Crux » 2015 Sep 17 07:44
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do6uA9eb3so
Postby Coondog » 2015 Sep 17 12:19
Nobody likes the idea of abortion. Period.
But, absent the political expediency of pandering to evangelists, it would scarcely be a topic of conversation.
What we need to hear from said panderers are practical ideas concerning early reproductive education (no later than the beginning of Middle School and including the use of and gratuitous availability of contraceptives).
But, accidents happen. Nothing is heard about the nurturing of the abortion decision process. No concern is voiced concerning a young, unmarried girl still in school with her whole life ahead of her finding herself knocked up with no means to support or care for an infant. Beyond Planned Parenthood, most of the programs that would lend financial, prenatal, and postnatal assistance are being slashed to provide funding for the biggest military force in the galaxy.
What about taking responsibility for the "precious human life" that the advocates of perpetual war find so sacrosanct? Could it be that these people, who couldn't distinguish between an embryo, a zygote and a fetus, don't really care about human life as much as they care about votes?
Is the idea of bringing an unwanted child into an already overcrowded environment and a community that already fails to provide basic sustenance to vast numbers of actual people beyond the age of one day really that noble lacking commitment to the development of that potential taxpayer?
Let us try to grasp the reality that every incident of abortion or contemplated abortion is unique to the individual. In many, if not all cases, the services of organizations like Planned Parenthood are essential in every respect. Defunding Planned Parenthood is like throwing out the baby with the bath water, as it were.
So let us not quibble about 19 weeks or 21 weeks. Let us quibble about whether closing clinics and criminalizing doctors and pregnant women and disbanding the EPA to pay for the Bureau of Pregnancy is an effective approach to the problem and whether this is really only about getting votes.
Simply False
Speaking of simply false.......Spent the whole afternoon watching heavily edited planned parent videos per Fee-o-rino's suggestion and guess what! The horrific scene of a kicking fetus about to have it's brain removed wasn't in there. But.....she said she saw it! And it's not there!
Can it be that this woman who calls Hillary a liar at every opportunity has issues with honesty herself? Obviously! But, fortunately for her, lies like that don't matter in a republican primary. None of her constituency has the attention span to sit for hours looking at boring, poorly edited videos of fetuses NOT being chopped up and sold for profit.
Besides, it's not a matter of whether it's true.....it's a matter of how forcefully it is said. And Cruz says so, too! Sure sounds like it's true.....and so presidential!
Coondog (Puking Smilie)
Question: Did you read beyond the first sentence or did the argumentative axion masses start firing as your preconceptions were initially challenged?
Postby Wise One » 2015 Sep 18 01:13
Loving Progressive Men
Aren't they sweet?
The inference is that no live babies are ever "delivered" as a result of abortion. This of course is not true...
Fiorina may have misspoke or got the videos/testimony/details jumbled. As well coondog NEVER watched all the videos.
We can focus on any given lie. coondog's we can not prove.
To suggest that babies are not aborted alive now and then would be either a lie, or simply a statement of ignorance.
AO and coondog, do you two believe that some number of babies are born alive, healthy, and are then killed?
Or not killed it would seem. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/491-b ... a-statscan
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic ... wrong.html
http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4550283/a ... -committee
"Live Action found evidence of similar behavior in the U.S. Pregnant volunteers from the group took hidden cameras to various clinics in 2013. Pretending to want late-term abortions, the volunteers asked what happens when a baby survives. In multiple cases, the volunteers were told that surviving infants are either killed or left to die."
Kermitt Gosnell disagrees with you.
For the two Clowns, from C.F. and crux
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhn0DdH8M-0
Two fine progressive caring civil loving so called liberal?
C.F. was RIGHT.
One supposes if you and C.F. saw a video of Jim Jones handing out Kool Ade to children with a voiceover of how benevolent and caring the man was, you two would have another hero to tout.
When you find a way to diminish abortion without eradicating women's health care and without deceptive tactics, you will be taken seriously.
Until then, you and C.F. will be perceived as hostages to the gullible and hyperbolic nonsense you embrace.
To finish a thought..........
You cannot abolish abortion by outlawing it, any more than you can abolish war, poverty, hunger, drugs or any thing else legislatively.......but they can all be combated and addressed as long as you are willing to make a commitment in terms of money and services and support to the issue.
Fake videos don't do a thing toward alleviating the situation. They only lend fodder for those who seek to gain by advocating criminalizing what is an inevitable factor of the human condition within the environment it finds itself. Giving lip service to the welfare of an entity for nine months of it's existence means less than nothing in the shadow of callous disregard for it's quality of life before, during and after it's initial development.
So.....at what point after nine months does it become an object of hate......when it fulfills it's self determination by becoming a liberal or a minority or a Moslem......or an expectant mother?
Learned something yesterday from the congressional inquisition on Planned Parenthood. (Wish the same could be said of the attendant republican contingency.)
The money received from the federal government by planned parenthood is in the form of reimbursement for services provided. Not grants or gifts or entitlements or any such nonsense as one might misconstrue from our elected conservative representatives in congress.
Repeat: Reimbursement for Services Provided
Federal law prohibits reimbursement to Planned Parenthood for pregnancy termination services. So.....the statements bandied about by republicans about tax payer money going for abortion are lies, lies, lies.
The descriptions of" chopping up baby parts and selling them on the market for profit" are also based on lies, lies, lies as thanks to the Reagan Administration, fetal cell research is perfectly legitimate. (same as being ordained by God) Being reimbursed for expenses of preserving tissue and transferring donated materials to research facilities is not the same as selling stolen beanie babies on e-bay for profit.
Calls on the House floor yesterday for the arrest, prosecution and imprisonment of people at planned parenthood and calling them criminals is simply more republican hyperbole based on lies, lies, lies.....and probably slanderous to boot.
This is what these people want to use to shut down the government. Lies, lies, lies!
One might ask whether republican voters care one whit about truth. The answer is, No! No! and F#(k, NO!
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Sometimes we brought along a camera and took pictures of one another walking around the houses. We saw two or three in a day and then took the film to be developed. Back in our three-bedroom, we looked at the photos together, then stored them in fresh albums. In the photos, we wore the same outfits while the houses around us changed. We were the proud owners of three beautiful homes, the photos said – or this was one big home. One monstrous behemoth of a home comprised of three mansions smashed together.
Inside the Amway Center, everything is new from the front row to the rafters. Bigger seats. Better sight lines. More amenities on every level of the building. Concourses are spacious, offering unique concessions and activities for kids and adults alike. The Club Restaurant and the Ozone Bar overlook the event floor, and children enjoy spending time in the kid-oriented fun zone and retail store on the upper concourse. Technologically, Amway Center is one of the most advanced ever built, highlighted by the main scoreboard – the largest of its kind in the NBA. Measuring approximately 42 feet high and weighing in at more than 40 tons, its four primary video displays will be able to show high definition imagery in 4.4 trillion shades of color. Altogether, it’s unlike any arena ever built. It’s a world-class experience unlike anything Central Florida has ever seen.
When I was ten, my parents bought a house for $200,000. My dad had been running his advertising agency out of the spare bedroom of our house on Twelfth Avenue, and when he hired his third employee, he set up a desk in my bedroom for the graphic artist to work at while I was at school. Then a neighbor called the city about all the cars parked on the street, and my parents cracked a plan to move into a bigger house and bring the agency into the new house with us. By that time, though, business had gone gangbusters, so it turned out that moving the company into the new house wasn’t necessary, after all – my dad rented an office, instead. The new house was entirely ours.
Lol very funny, I have been wondering what I am doing for the past year, working my ass off for min wage, hurting my scoliosis back, cleaning, waiting tables and standing on my feet, while other people are sitting on their ass ggetting paid more (even if its telemarketing...same concept kinda...you people are making big boys more money so they pay you more) but I slave and get payed less....amway totally makes sense to me and I think this is a great opportunity I ran into...not many people in omaha ne know about it and im going to be part of the walking billboard..I work at ozark bbq a little bbq shack open for 30 years from word of mouth, basically and ive been around the business my whole life so i really just understand this. ..I want to use the products...why not..I get paid..I dont have to waste time or gas (money) going to store they are delivered to you..eco friendly, organic, and kinda compareable prices...if everyone just switched bathroom n laundry room they could make their self money..why not and I switch someone else, I make ,they switch someone, they make and I make...I like the pyramid. ..its the citizen pyramid instead of a govt...corp making all the money...why does this not make sense to some people....why not get a little bit of cash for buying a new I pad or just toilet paper lol ill take getting paid to wipe my ass any day thankyou lol I am doin it...you can see your potential before you ever pay a start up fee(I have not started up yet) and my sponsor makes over 500/month...your sponsor from my understanding sponsors time to help you they are investing their time bec if u make money they make money in turn you teach and sponsor others to make you money and they make more money I love it lol
The compensation plan is called a “stairstep breakaway,” which requires the business rep to effectively rebuild a leg once it has reached what’s called Platinum status (7500 points). Basically, legs break off once they qualify and the commissions turn into 4% royalties instead of commissioned payouts of ~30%. I asked a former Amway emerald once what it was like having his first leg break-off and his reply was: “it’s awful, you really know how to ask painful questions don’t you.” He went on to explain his commissions dropped by at least 80% when they turned into “royalties.” It should be noted that the royalties technically disappear if the volume in the leg drops below 7500 points, so it’s not really a “permanent” royalty unless you maintain your volume. It is in essence a “punishing” compensation plan that forces you to rebuild a leg once it reaches this trigger volume, effectively causing you to “not” want others to pass you up.
I'm sure that the success stories I heard were all true. The problem is that they build an unrealistic expectation of what is possible. People hear these rags to riches tales and think 'hey that could be me'. Unfortunately very few of them will ever make any money at all. Even fewer will achieve financial freedom from Amway Joining Amway is extremely easy, making a profit in Amway is extremely difficult.
What made Amway different at the time was their combination of direct selling and multi-level marketing. Distributors could make money in both arenas. Distributors can buy Amway products at “wholesale” prices for themselves or to independently sell. This can generate a modest income, but the larger payouts come from recruiting new distributors. Any recruits result in residual pay to the recruiter, hypothetically leading to a lucrative “downline” (income that comes from recruits’ sales). This allows Amway to market to future distributors by offering an easy way to start your own successful business or store. With an average yearly income for active distributors at less than $3,000, Amway has redefined what constitutes a successful business.
But unlike E2020, which catered to the executive class, Scott offered salvation to the common worker, the middle-level manager, the petit bourgeois professional. Moreover, he offered them something so entrepreneurial, so Third Wave, so purely capitalist that it transcended Darwinian struggle, allowing people to escape into early retirement. He held up a copy of Success magazine trumpeting the “Young and Rich in America.” “It’s still possible to make it in this country,” he declared. “There’s no hammer and sickle over this deal yet!”
Amway has been around for 50+ years which has resulted in deep market penetration in most of North America. During this time frame it acquired a negative reputation that lasted the better part of 2 decades. This resulted in the need to re-brand Amway as Quixtar (during the 90s). The baby boomer generation is very aware of this and many will be quick to discourage their younger family members from doing Amway. If you are thinking of joining Amway and think this may be inaccurate, simply ask someone in your family in their 50s, 60s, or 70s whether or not they think you will make money with Amway, and why. There are ways around this when approaching the cold market, but it typically involves meeting with the same individual a multitude of times, playing verbal jujitsu, and not exposing the Amway name until the fifth or sixth approach. I personally know an Amway distributor (and good friend) that makes ~50k per year so it is absolutely possible, but he works his butt off driving all over the state and he constantly deals with high attrition.
The meeting was hosted by Sherri’s friend Josh and his wife Jean[3], he a commodities broker, she a high school math teacher. Sherri and Josh had attended the same small Christian college. Before that, he had been an Indiana farm boy, and he still had the look: a beefy, boyish face with a grin that verged on gaping, mussed hair with perpetually sweaty bangs, a brown suit that flared in all the wrong places, and a general air of guilelessness. This cast in high relief his constant, ill-advised attempts to put on city airs: the firm handshake, the breezy small talk, the man-of-the-world asides.
Whereas The Plan is supposed to provide a simple means to a desirable end, for Josh, Jean, and Sherri the process of recovery had become an end in itself. Josh and Jean would constantly tell me how World Wide’s books and advice had enriched their marriage and helped them to communicate with each other (the bolstering of marriage and family is a major theme in Amway). The Amway lore is also full of distributors, perhaps abused as children, who “couldn’t even look people in the eye” when they joined, but who were now confidently showing The Plan to all and sundry.
Finding great Amway Center tickets is simple with our interactive Amway Center seating chart. If you already know the area you want to sit in, you can click directly on the chart and view pricing and availability. Keep in mind that the chart changes depending on the type event you're viewing. Also, we’ve got all of the specifics pertaining to club seats, suites, VIP, and other areas if you click the link near the venue name.
In the beginning, my parents put between ten and fifteen hours a week into their business – per the company’s recommendation. But over time, my dad’s enthusiasm began to wear off. ‘You say to yourself, ‘What the hell for?’’ he says now. ‘So that somebody can come in and then not return your calls? You take them to a meeting and there’s a jerk up there who’s embarrassing? I had no way, no avenue to get people in there and get them excited.’
Totaling 875,000 square feet, the Amway Center replaces the previously existing Amway Arena, updating the venue in favor of a sustainable and environmentally conscious design. The new building comes with updated technology, more amenities, and bigger seats. There's even a hypnotizing graphics wall along one side of the building that brings the arena's modern elements together in a magical display.
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To understand the choices, you have to understand the business. He explained that the products developed to be sold for the direct sales model need to be different from any others on the market. “We develop products with specific deliverables that are unique. These products, what they are and how they work, needs to be explained by someone who knows the product. A good product for the store shelf is not necessarily a good direct sale product.”
In 1986 Amway Corp. agreed, under a consent decree filed in federal court, to pay a $100,000 civil penalty to settle Commission charges it violated a 1979 Commission order that prohibits Amway from misrepresenting the amount of profit, earnings or sales its distributors are likely to achieve. According to a complaint filed with the consent decree, Amway violated the 1979 order by advertising earnings claims without including in it clear and conspicuous disclosures of the average earnings or sales of all distributors in any recent year or the percent of distributors who actually achieved the results claimed.[44]
Maria you must be committed to the business and do what the business tells you to do. Many people leave Amway simply because their upline wasn’t a great leader for them and eventually they lose confidence in themselves. The business requires you to buy their products monthly and recruit people into the business for PV. The amount of PV determines your level in the business. There is too much to explain. Speak to an IBO about the plan. All I can tell you is that the business is great, they offer you bonuses once you begin succeeding your way through, but it is up to you how far you go in the business. Just like any business, you must invest. One man made it to the Emerald level (around $10,000/per month +bonuses) in ONE YEAR. It all depends on how much you want to succeed. I am in Team Vision and I am glad I found this gem of a company. Good Luck to you if you apply!
Scott’s own income, he assured us, was “out of control”—and, furthermore, it wasn’t built on something as old-fashioned as food. He worked in the cutting-edge field of distribution, where the real money was to be made nowadays. Through his business, he could get thousands of quality goods, many of them brand names, and cut distribution costs by almost a third. The company that organized this system did $6 billion a year in sales (Scott helped us to understand this awesome figure by describing for us the height of a billion-dollar stack of hundred-dollar bills) and was, on top of this, debt free. It might surprise us that this company was Amway![4]
Amway is unethical way of making money. Their representative lure you to this smartly designed plan. Amway’s representatives misguide and misinform like any other business or a product’s sale representatives. which is attractive to listen for the first time with the ‘Entrepreneur” motto. But it is another way of making money leaving you frustrated in the end. I advise every one not to join this unethical product promotion. Parent company is becoming richer,leaving you as ”partner” (as it’s trained representatives claim) in total despair in the end. It is your hard earned money,think smartly before lending it to someone’s hand.
With an ultimate capacity of more than 20,000 seats, the arena was designed to respond to its distinct urban setting while revealing the activities occurring within. Bounded by Church Street, Hughey Avenue, South Street and Division Avenue, the Amway Center’s primary entrance faces north to Church Street, creating a natural extension of the nearby downtown entertainment core. The Church Street entry features a large public entry plaza connecting to the Amway Center’s spacious entry lobby.
Amway conducted a four-month evaluation of different IoT platforms, ultimately choosing AWS IoT. AWS’s scalability, global presence, maturity in the IoT space, security, and outstanding professional services were the deciding factors for Amway. “We do business in more than 100 countries and territories, and we had no idea how much data-center capacity we would need from an IoT perspective,” says Mike Gartner, senior IoT platform architect at Amway.
Amway sells real products. They have cosmetics and regular household products. They also offer CDs, motivational material and other stuff to IBOs. There is a whole lot of purchases that go on involving IBOs, none of this is free for anybody. Some IBOs are able to make regular sales to people who take the products but have no affiliation to the company. IBOs that recruit people still have to sell stuff to the people they are recruiting. Some people become IBOs just to get the “discounted” prices.
I like the healthy products and various selections offered on their website. Amway has been around for long time and also offers way to start your own business and spread the word on their wonderful products. I really enjoy their skincare line and XS energy drinks and snacks. The energy drinks taste great and give you the extra boost of energy to get my day going. The products are way over priced and are not priced for individuals who are lower income people. I think if they find ways to cut prices it will allow a wider range of people to shop with them.
[11]At the top, the multi-multi’s seem to attain a Zen of conspicuous consumption. Brad Duncan, brother of the great Double Diamond Greg Duncan, described seeing a dusty Rolls Royce among the many cars in the garage of his upline mentor, Ron Puryear; when he asked what he paid for it, Ron answered, “I don’t know. Whatever the sticker price was.” Brad took him to task for this, until Ron lectured: “That dealership is somebody’s livelihood—somebody with a family. I’m not so hard up that I need to haggle the food out of a child’s mouth.” Brad was chastened, realizing that only small minds pay attention to sticker prices.
“Our family story inspires others to build legacies of their own,” he said. “They see success through the generations and the impact it has on your family and community. The opportunity is open to anyone, but it really suits those who are hungry for something more. You have to have goals and be willing to do the work in order to achieve your dreams.”
Even so, among the DeVoses’ skeptics, there are those who strike a hopeful, if cautious, tone. “I think Mrs. DeVos could potentially be a really good secretary of education if she allowed parents and school districts to make policy at the local level,” says Daniel Quinn, executive director of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, a nonprofit that receives a portion of its funding from the National Education Association. “But at the same time, I’m concerned.”
Security was one of Amway’s biggest concerns in moving into IoT. “Using the AWS IoT platform, we were able to build policies and security throughout the entire architecture,” says Gartner. Several AWS teams worked with Amway and Atmel (now Microchip), to implement Just-in-Time certificate registration for Amway’s connected devices. Just-in-Time Registration is a new AWS IoT process that automatically registers new device certificates as part of the initial communication between the device and AWS IoT, creating a seamless, highly secure user experience. Communication between devices and AWS IoT is protected through the use of X.509 certificates.
He tells us the club no longer has an initiation fee – they were forced to waive it six years ago in response to the economic downturn. ‘You have the top two or three clubs in the area – Bayou Club, Belleair Country Club, and probably Feather Sound – with no initiation fees to join,’ he says. ‘It makes it very easy to be part of a club these days.’
There is a good possibility that this point would not have any impact on you, but for me it is a negative aspect. In the training, you will be taught to make a list of friends, family and acquaintances and yes, you guessed correctly – you will have to call them and get them to buy or join your business. I absolutely hate to drag my friends or family into buying something, they will buy, because they love me, but I don’t want to put them in that situation because that’s not what friends and family are for – I might be wrong, and this is merely my opinion.
The elevated I-4 freeway bordering the east side of the site posed a distinct challenge, threatening to disconnect the arena both physically and psychologically from the downtown core. In response, the corner of the arena is anchored by a diaphanous feature tower bathed in color changing LED lighting that reveals the color and pageantry of sporting and entertainment activities within while marking the facility within the flat topography of downtown Orlando. This tower is both architectural and occupied – housing the Orlando Magic Team Store, hospitality space, Gentleman Jack Terrace and rooftop Sky Bar. The latter two are exterior spaces that take full advantage of the warm Orlando climate, commanding views to the plaza below and the greater community beyond. Further city connection is achieved via a 40’ × 60’ LED video feature that addresses downtown from an elevated façade position above the highway.
Totally a scam...only a way to fetch money frm d people.. .people cant affors its products are so highly priced....bt den also...in logo ko kya...inhe to bs apna maal bechna h ...frr chahe insan apna ghar hi q na bech de...phle saamaan lene ko membership lene ko piche pde rhte h...fr use maintain krne ko...khud ko to koi kaam h nii...n jinhe kaam h wo inke chakkar me na kr pae...saale khud to sukoon ki jindgi jee re ho na...to dusro ko b to jeene do....
Their vertically integrated supply chain is one of longest in the industry. In addition to running plants, they own organic farms. They have farms in Brazil, Mexico, and the state of Washington where they grow and harvest key botanical ingredients like echinacea, spinach, alfalfa, watercress, and cherries. They then take those products and manufacture intermediates. Cherries, for example, are processed for Vitamin C. These intermediates they both use in their own products and sell to other companies.
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What is Heartworm?
Heartworm is a serious illness that can cause heart failure, lung disease, organ damage and even death in dogs, cats and ferrets. Heartworm is most prevalent in pets living along the Atlantic Gulf coasts from New Jersey to the Gulf of Mexico, and in those living alongside the Mississippi and its main tributaries. However it has been found in pets in all of the US States.
What causes Heartworm?
Heartworm is caused by parasitic worm larvae that lives inside mosquitoes. When the mosquito bites an animal it transfers some worm larvae into it where the larvae then matures, mates and produces offspring inside its living host. The offspring produced by female adult heartworms is known as microfilariae and lives in the host animals’ blood stream. When a mosquito then bites an infected animal it draws microfilariae into its body where it turns it into infective larvae, beginning the cycle again.
Once an animal has been infected it takes time for the larvae to mature into adults that are capable of reproduction. In dogs this period is usually 6-7 months and in cats and ferrets around 8 months. Adult heartworms look like cooked spaghetti and can range in size from 4-6 inches in males and 10-12 inches in females. The number of worms found in a pet is known as its ‘worm burden’ and this can vary depending on the species of animal and the severity of the infection.
The lifespan of heartworms within an infected dog is between 5 and 7 years and the average worm burden is 15. However dogs have been seen with worm burdens ranging from 1 to 250.
Symptoms of Heartworm in Dogs
The severity of the symptoms of heartworm in dogs is dependent on the worm burden of the animal, how long they have been infected and how well their body can cope with the disease. However it is usually broken down into four stages.
Class 1: no visible symptoms or very mild symptoms such as an intermittent cough or wheeze.
Class 2: mild to more moderate symptoms including intermittent coughing and lethargy or breathlessness after light to moderate exercise. At this time some heart and lung changes may be seen on x-rays.
Class 3: symptoms will include frequent or persistent coughing, lethargy and breathlessness after mild activity. Heart and lung changes will definitely be visible on x-rays.
Class 4: this stage is otherwise known as Caval Syndrome and is reached when an infected animal has been left untreated for an extended period of time. At this stage the animal experiences restricted blood flow to the heart caused by a blockage of worms. Heart failure is imminent and emergency surgery to remove the worms is the only course of action. However this comes with its own risks and most dogs with Caval Syndrome do not survive.
Heartworm in Cats
Cats are naturally more resistant to heartworm and once infected the worms have a lifespan of only 2-3 years. Adult worms do not grow as long as seen in dogs, and fewer microfilariae mature into adults. Similarly there is much less microfilariae present in a feline blood stream – an average of only 20% compared to 80-90% seen in canines. Worm burdens are also much lower with an average of only 1-3 worms seen per cat.
Symptoms of Heartworm in Cats
Many cats are able to rid themselves of heartworm before any symptoms become evident. However some infected cats have been known to die without presenting any warning or symptoms.
Once a cat is bitten they will develop HARD – Heartworm Associated Respiratory Disease. During this time your cat will experience shallow, rapid or difficult breathing along with coughing and wheezing. The symptoms are not dissimilar to that of feline asthma or bronchitis. Other symptoms that may present themselves are very non-specific such as changes in appetite, lethargy and weight loss. This makes heartworm much harder to detect in cats.
Heartworm in Ferrets
Ferrets are similar to dogs in that they are far more susceptible to heartworm than cats. Microfilariae levels found in the blood stream of ferrets is typically around 50-60% and they usually have low worm burdens.
Symptoms of Heartworm in Ferrets
Symptoms of heartworm in Ferrets are very similar to that seen in cats with respiratory difficulties and fatigue being the most prevalent indications. However like their feline counterparts, heartworm in ferrets is difficult to diagnose.
Diagnosis of Heartworm
How to diagnose heartworm is similar across the species.
Diagnosing Heartworm in Dogs
Dog suspected to be infected with heartworm are usually given an antigen test. This is a blood test that detects proteins that are released by adult female heartworms into the bloodstream of the host animal. However this test cannot usually detect infections that are less than 6/7 months old as before this time as any microfilariae may not be fully matured.
Other methods of diagnosis include imaging during which time x-rays or ultrasounds of your dog will be taken to determine if heartworms are present.
Diagnosing Heartworm in Cats and Ferrets
Heartworm is trickier to diagnose in cats and ferrets and it is necessary to use a combination of blood tests and imaging to provide an accurate diagnosis of the disease.
Treating Heartworm
The FDA has a number of approved heartworm treatments available for dogs, the majority of which use arsenic which is effective at killing off adult heartworms. There are also several drugs which are able to eradicate microfilariae from your pets’ blood stream.
Whilst there are no treatments approved specifically for cats and ferrets infected with heartworm, your veterinarian may be able to prescribe treatments approved for other species under ‘extra label drug use’. Talk to your veterinarian to discuss the best option for your pet.
Any treatment for heartworms also poses a risk to your pet due to the toxic nature of some of the ingredients which have been known to cause life-threatening complications including blood clots. Diagnosis and treatment can also be expensive due to the number of tests and comprehensive care your pet will require.
Prevention is better than cure!
As with most illnesses, prevention is almost certainly better than cure. There are a number of preventative treatments available via veterinarian prescription including injections, oral tablets and topical liquids.
Pets older than 6/7 months of age should be tested for heartworm before beginning preventative treatment, whilst newborn animals can be treated right from their first vaccinations.
Speak to your veterinarian who will be happy to advise you on the best course of preventative care for your pet.
Are humans at risk from Heartworm?
Heartworm is spread via mosquitoes and is not contagious. In very rare cases people can get heartworm after being bitten by an infected mosquito, but we do not make natural hosts and any larvae usually die before reaching adulthood.
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Homes for Sale in Alexandria, VA
Parkside at Alexandria
Parkside at Alexandria Advanced Home Search
1169 N VAN DORN ST
1469 N VAN DORN ST #B
Parkside at Alexandria Real Estate
Homes for sale in Parkside at Alexadria
Guide to Parkside at Alexandria
If you’re looking for a well-managed community with desirable features and luxury amenities, then Parkside at Alexandria should be one of your first choices. This lovely community is adjacent to I-395 and offers over 900 residences and direct access to a Metro station.
On the West End
Situated on the West End of the city, Parkside at Alexandria is roughly bordered by North Pegram Street and Francis C. Hammond Middle School to the east, Polk Avenue is to the south, North Van Dorn Street and finally I-395 run along the western end, and Kenmore Avenue completes the area’s jurisdiction to the north. To the immediate west of Parkside at Alexandria is the aptly named neighborhood Alexandria West; while to the south is Brookville-Seminary Valley, and to the north is Kenmore and eventually Fort Ward Park.
Short Background on Fort Ward
Fort Ward—which is a very short drive away from Parkside at Alexandria—is a former Union Army installation now located along West Braddock Road. It was the fifth largest fort built to defend Washington, DC in the American Civil War and today acts as a historic 43-acre neighborhood park featuring a museum with American Civil War subjects and artifacts. It was named for James Harmon Ward and it was designed with platforms for 24 guns and a 100 pound Parrott gun. The larger guns made the fort vulnerable if besieged. Liberated slaves—also known as contrabands—helped build the defenses to protect DC from invasion by Confederate forces. The Fort was thus named for the first Union naval officer to die in the war.
Adjacent to I-395 and Close to a Metro Station
North Van Dorn Street along with I-395 will take drivers directly to the site, with the latter also reaching places like the Pentagon and Washington, DC. North Jordan Street is also important as it connects the town to Duke Street and the surrounding parks and stations surrounding it. The closest Metro station to Parkside at Alexandria is the Van Dorn Metro station which services the Blue and Yellow Lines of the Washington Metro system. The quickest way by car is South Van Dorn Street, while the Metrobus has plenty of stops nearby that will also take you there.
Townhome Condominiums
Although the beautifully designed townhomes are a notable draw for first-time homebuyers, residents also enjoy the amount of greenery that’s on hand. The green spaces here are well maintained while the community also offers fabulous amenities like the clubroom, fitness facility, and a playground for young children, plus a gorgeous swimming pool. Desirable units found at Parkside at Alexandria feature open floor plans, updated appliances and fixtures in the kitchens and baths respectively, energy efficient windows, and hardwood floors.
Restaurants & the Nightlife Scene
Clyde’s at Mark Center is situated on North Beauregard Street and is a classic, long-running American chain serving traditional American cuisine and cocktails in an unusual setting. If you drive southwest on I-395 you’ll soon hit Landmark Mall. A quiet shopping center, Landmark Mall is a cavernous spot featuring a pair of department stores, a food court, and a play area for kids. Valentino’s Pizzeria is also around here and is a casual eatery offering pasta, meat dishes, sandwiches, and NY-style pizzas in homey surrounds. Alley Cat and Reynolds Street Bar & Grill sit outside the shopping mall with the latter a short drive away via its namesake street. A casual eatery, Reynolds Street Bar and Grill is a neighborhood tavern with sports on TV and an extensive menu of pizzas, Italian pastas, and Greek dishes.
Columbia Firehouse is a powerhouse restaurant in Old Town Alexandria and is a remade firehouse serving some American eats and old-fashioned drinks. Also located off of King Street is Taverna Cretekou. This relaxed space offers an outdoor garden style seating and plenty of authentic Greek eats such as grilled baby octopus, lamb, and flaming cheese dishes. Other restaurants worth mentioning are Jackson 20, Virtue Feed & Grain, and Restaurant Eve—a New American restaurant with a multicourse menu served in an elegant setting.
Fort Ward Park and Cameron Run Regional Park
The aforementioned Fort Ward Park is a very short drive away and is a historic 43-acre park featuring a Civil War museum, playground, amphitheater, and a dog exercise area. The Winkler Botanical Reserve is also close by and is a secluded area featuring a variety of nature trails, a mountain lodge, and a waterfall flanked by woods. All Veterans Park is to the south of Parkside at Alexandria and features an observation deck, a memorial park, picnic areas, and plenty of trails for biking and jogging. The park also includes a designated area for dogs. The Charles Beatley Bridge connects All Veterans Park to Brookvalley Park. At Brookvalley, visitors can rent a garden plot to cultivate, have a picnic, walk or bicycle along the numerous available trails, or take the kids to the playground.
Other parks near the community include Bren Mar Park, Stevenson Park, Tarleton Park, Clement Natural Park, and Cameron Run Regional Park. The latter is a short drive away via Eisenhower Avenue and is adjacent Holmes Run stream. Cameron Run Regional Park is operated by the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority and features batting cages, a full 18-hole miniature golf course, and a water park with a wave pool, toddler’s pool, and water slides.
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AfricaWest Africa
Nigerian public servant awards bursary to indigent students
by muslimmedia December 1, 2019
written by muslimmedia December 1, 2019
By Akeem Alao
The Chairman of Odi-Olowo/Ojuwoye Local Council Development Area of Lagos State, Abdul-Rasaq Ajala, has provided bursary award to indigent students within the LCDA, in a bid to reiterate his commitment to quality administration.
To ensure an open and unbiased exercise, he inaugurated a five-man committee comprising lecturers from the state’s foremost polytechnic, Lagos State Polytechnic.
On Friday 29th November 2019, the committee submitted the names of successful applicants to the Chairman and members of his cabinet.
While submitting the report, the head of the committee, Mr Tunde Williams, explained the modalities applied to scrutinise and select successful applicants.
He noted that some of them were interviewed one-to-one and some were interviewed on the phone.
He added that the following were the criteria employed to carry out the task.
Evidence of residence in the LCDA
Letter of admission from the schools of the applicants
Evidence of studentship
Evidence of birth certificate
Evidence of tax payment and other dues by their parents.
Applicant’s CGPA which must not be below 2nd class.
“The total number of candidates who applied for the bursary was 210 while 135 of these applicants were successful. 85 of the successful candidates were females while 60 were males,” Mr Williams said.
He therefore appreciated the Chairman and his team on behalf of the committee for the opportunity given to them to serve in that capacity.
While commending the committee to a successful task, the council Chairman expressed his delight over the promptness of the execution of the task given to it.
He stressed that the exercise was never designed to favor a category of selected students. He assured that any indigent students living within the LCDA would have equal access to the bursary as long as they merit it without necessarily seeking favor from anyone in government.
“If this exercise is successful, more people will benefit from subsequent ones. The intention was not to limit the number of beneficiaries, but to extend it to more students,” Hon Ajala explained.
While congratulating this year’s successful applicants, he noted that a better method would be devised in the next editions in order to enable students to apply from their schools without necessarily travelling miles to the council secretariat.
bursary for studentsLagos educationLagos PoliticianLagos politicsNigerian politics
One Teen’s Journey From Refugee Camp to US School Principal
Expert says hepatitis B,C vaccines can prevent cancer later in life
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jaali
2010 “jaali”. Comprovisation for six musicians and screen ensemble. Commissioned by Musik der Jahrhunderts Stuttgart.
“A jaali is the term for a perforated stone or latticed screen used in Islamic architecture as well as in Indian architecture, usually with an ornamental pattern constructed through the use of calligraphy and geometry. Early work was performed by carving into stone, while the Mughals employed the technique of inlay, using marble and semi-precious stones”. -Wikipedia
During my childhood travels through Gujarat and Rajasthan with my parents in the 1970s and early 1980s, I always marveled at these unlikely screens – ephemeral transparency set in stone – that were such a prominent feature of the cities, palaces, the royal and holy tombs we visited. I was particularly impressed by one aspect of their creation, again and again stressed by the guides that showed them to us: that they did not permit the masons any mistakes. For each jaali had to be hewn and chiseled and whittled away from a block of marble into an intricate spiderweb of fragile stone filaments – and if in this process the mason’s hand would slip even once and damage one of these brittle connections, the mughals would reject the result – and demand a new, a flawless jaali.
This intolerance for mistakes to me also is the true conceit of improvisation- even if improvised music only rarely does turn out to be flawless. Indeed, a surfeit of lackadaisical, careless and incompetent efforts at improvisation has accustomed listeners to being aesthetically embarrassed time and again by the kind of uninspired mayhem that so many musicians try to pass off as improvisation – to the extent that, to too many minds, improvisation has become tantamount to poor craft, poor thinking, and poor execution.
But this is not why improvisation exists – and why so many of the best musicians continue to cherish this creative practice. In particular, there is no hierarchy where Composition would inhabit a higher plane of music invention and Improvisation be but a lowly basement dweller – to me, the salient difference in their approach, the difference that explains all their other differences, is that improvisation permits no mistakes – and that the process of writing down a composition is essentially about backtracing and correcting the many errors and bad ideas that tend to creep in. When you are improvising, there is no redoing a failed attempt, no eraser and no knife: if it does not work right here and now, you must start the whole thing over again – and overcome the chink, the slip, the moment of distraction that dashed your previous bid for a strong and moving work of music.
jaali (figures)
jaali (screens)
jaali_score (ZIP)
jaal_presstext (PDF)
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MCC Announces Its Representation of Six Senses New York
MCC is delighted to announce its representation of Six Senses New York, as the pioneering wellness brand prepares to debut its first urban hotel in the United States in Fall 2020. Housed in the remarkable Bjarke Ingels designed building, ideally situated between the Hudson River and the High Line in Chelsea, Six Senses New York will be a transformational moment for Manhattan, offering an experience deeply rooted in wellbeing, unlike anything the city has previously seen. The hotel interiors have been conceived by Gilles & Boissier, a celebration of the Six Senses brand ethos and based on the philosophy that for the mind to be free, there needs to be flexibility offered within the confines of the physical space. Carrying this concept throughout all elements of the hotel, they have created public and private spaces that allow guests a sense of freedom in every element of their stay. Celebrated the world over for their ability to stimulate, energize, revive and reinvigorate, Six Senses New York offers an unparalleled range of amenities and depth of experience, and the only destination for wellness at every level – from traditional to cutting edge.
The Berkeley Bar Debuts
The Berkeley in London, Belgravia’s beloved hotel on the edge of Hyde Park, has just unveiling a gorgeous new bar, The Berkeley Bar. Lusciously designed by Bryan O’Sullivan, The Berkeley Bar’s features include a half-moon marble bar, a central fireplace, and wonderfully intimate hideaway Snug, boasting a mural by New York-based artist TM Davy. The Berkeley is already known for its legendary Blue Bar (originally opened in 2000 and designed by David Collins), and the new Berkeley Bar offers an intimate and refined space, with a sense of old world glamour, complete with its own private terrace for alfresco gatherings. The Berkeley Bar offers a finely curated menu of exemplary and rare wines and dark spirits. A capsule menu of nine old-time and modern classic cocktails, such as the Sazerac and the Corpse Reviver will be served, and to mark the opening of the bar, The Berkeley team worked with Scottish whisky producers Gordon and MacPhail on the creation of a rare whisky from 1972, the year the hotel opened where only two bottles of this unique spirit have been created. We’ll toast to that!
MCC Named to Observer’s PR Power 50
MCC is thrilled to be named one of the top PR firms in the country by the Observer. Described as “perfecting iron-fist-in-velvet-globe approach to PR – delivering serious results while maintaining rarefied relationships” by Michael Kaminer & John Bonazzo. See article here.
What's Happening @MCC-PR
Meg Connolly Communications
NEW YORK: 212.505.8200
INQUIRIES@MCC-PR.COM
©2020 Meg Connolly Communications
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Home/About Us/Our Team
Our Team ncasadmin 2019-10-14T16:03:41+05:30
Team NCAS
Johanna LokhandeNational Co-ordinator
Info About Johana.
Email : johanna.lokhande@ncasindia.org
Sandeep PattnaikSenior Consultant
Sandeep joined NCAS in 2000 and has since served in various capacities. He has a degree in Masters in Social Work and has been primarily involved in the activities of the Adivasi Resource Centre. In 2007, Sandeep participated in the Human Rights Advocacy Programme (HRAP) at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Human Rights (CSHR) in New York. He currently presides over the NCAS desk in Orissa.
Email : sandeep.pattnaik@ncasindia.org
Nancy Frida LakraProgramme Officer
Nancy completed her Master in Peace and Conflict from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Guwahati in 2018. She also received her Bachelors degree in Sociology(HONS) from University of Delhi in 2015. She has previously worked with Smile Foundation, New Delhi as a Programme Coordinator in one of their programmes called ‘Swabhiman’. Her interest areas are conflict resolution, peace building and human rights.
Email : nancy.lakra@ncasindia.org
Shilpa KulkarniAccounts Officer
Shilpa did M.Com with a specialization in Advanced Accounting & Costing. She began her work with a Chartered Accountant’s firm in 1994 from where she moved on to work as an Accounts Officer with Community Aid and Sponsorship Program (CASP) at their Head Office in Pune. Shilpa has been with NCAS since January 2012.
Email : shilpa.kulkarni@ncasindia.org
Pankaj KasbeOffice Assistant
Email : pankaj.kasbe@ncasindia.org
Research Fellows & Interns
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Health experts say Killer hornets might reach the UK
Submitted by Busta Sebetseba on Thu, 04/23/2015 - 02:17
Health experts in the United Kingdom have warned that the hornets that have killed six people in France could reach the UK.
Defra has issued a warning to the UK beekeepers about the Asian hornets that resulted in the deaths of six people in France after they went into anaphylactic shock on being stung by the insects. These hornetscan grow up to 3ins long, eat bees and usually nest high in trees or on the sides of buildings. These hornets carry a potent sting and people are being warned about not to reach for the nests. Experts said that the species has not been spotted in the UK yet but the warming weather might attract them to the country and especially in the southern coasts.
The British Beekeepers Association says, "Vespa velutina, sometimes known as the Asian hornet, is an invasive non-native species from Asia. It has recently arrived in France where it is spreading rapidly.As a highly effective predator of insects, including honey bees and other beneficial species, it can cause significant losses to bee colonies, other native species and potentially ecosystems. Although it is not yet present in the UK, it is considered likely to arrive soon."
Poultry Farmers ask Government to tackle Bird Flu
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In what apparently is somewhat of a 'back to basics' move by US tech giant Apple, the company...
Google Maps shows White House when User types Racial Slur
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Newtown Police Taking Part In County DUI Enforcement Effort
A suspected DUI driver blows into a portable breath test at a checkpoint in Newtown Township earlier this year. Credit: Tom Sofield/NewtownPANow.com
Officers from more than a dozen county police departments will be hitting a major roadway this Thanksgiving Eve.
The roving DUI enforcement effort will focus on 18 miles of Street Road from Bensalem to Warminster between 10 p.m. Wednesday until 3 a.m. Thursday.
“This Thanksgiving I want to be thankful for one thing: that everyone celebrates safely,” said District Attorney Matt Weintraub. “Don’t drink or do drugs and drive. Get home alive.”
The Bensalem Township Police Department, Dublin Borough Police Department, Lower Southampton Township Police Department, Middletown Township Police Department, New Britain Borough Police Department, Newtown Borough Police Department, Newtown Township Police Department, Penndel Borough Police Department, Richland Township Police Department, Upper Southampton Township Police Department, Warminster Township Police Department, Warrington Township Police Department, and Warwick Township Police Department will be taking part in the enforcement effort.
In 2018, there were 91 traffic fatalities across the country on Thanksgiving Eve, which is known as a party holiday, according to the National Safety Council.
The Bucks County DUI enforcement effort is being paid through a PennDOT grant.
State Senator Calls For End To Daylight Saving Time
What The First Thanksgiving Dinner Actually Looked Like
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This session (4fvesp4nuep58huk02huho1hs3) started 2020-01-19 17:16:42
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Don’t Let Get You Down
by Wajatta
— Released 28th February 2020 on Brainfeeder
Wajatta — the musical duo of Reggie Watts and John Tejada — return with their second album, “Don’t Let Get You Down”, to be released by Brainfeeder on 28 February 2020. Coming from different worlds, but sharing a passion for the rich history of electronic music, beat-boxer/comedian/musician Watts and electronic music artist/DJ/producer Tejada bring out the best in each other’s formidable skill sets. Where the duo’s debut album “Casual High Technology” hinted at the broad sty...
Wajatta — the musical duo of Reggie Watts and John Tejada — return with their second album, “Don’t Let Get You Down”, to be released by Brainfeeder on 28 February 2020. Coming from different worlds, but sharing a passion for the rich history of electronic music, beat-boxer/comedian/musician Watts and electronic music artist/DJ/producer Tejada bring out the best in each other’s formidable skill sets. Where the duo’s debut album “Casual High Technology” hinted at the broad stylistic possibilities inherent in the marriage of Watts’ elastic, soul-stirring vocals and Tejada’s layered, melodically inventive productions, “Don’t Let Get You Down” makes good on that promise.
The first single from new 11-song LP, released today, is the infectious title track. With its brightly pulsing synths and whistling hook, ‘Don’t Let Get You Down’ is, in the words of Reggie Watts, “the poppiest song we’ve ever done.”
Wajatta (pronounced wa-HA-ta) is a mash-up of the artists’ last names. Having grown up with similar musical influences, Austrian-born Tejada and German-born Watts draw from their love of electronic music. Exploring the intersection between influences and innovation, the two describe Wajatta's music as “electronic dance music with its roots in Detroit techno, Chicago house, '70s funk and New York hip hop.” It’s a sound that is both familiar and wholly original — and, like all great dance music, ultimately life-affirming, as Watts vocalizes, sometimes without words, the joyful energy of his and Tejada’s funky, shape-shifting productions. “That’s the great thing about working with John,” Watts says with an infectious grin. “He’s so steeped in the history of this music. I just pick up on that and run with it.”
Wajatta builds most tracks from scratch, bouncing ideas off one another from initial spark to finished product. It’s all done face-to-face: “We never just share files,” Tejada notes. They also try to keep their sessions as spontaneous as possible, in a never-ending quest to, as Watts puts it, “capture the freshness.” As a result, the 11 tracks on “Don’t Let Get You Down” crackle with the energy of fresh ideas captured at the moment of inspiration. It’s electronic music made organically, from two masters at the top of their respective games.
Their organic approach extends to their live shows, at which Tejada rebuilds the duo’s tracks on his samplers and synths, while the multi-octave Watts conjures vocal symphonies out of little more than a loop station and a delay pedal. They’ve performed at Movement in Detroit, MUTEK in Montreal, CRSSD Festival in San Diego, two Dirtybird shows (BBQ in 2018 and Campout in 2019), in addition to a live studio session for KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic. The duo’s live energy is captured on the final track of the album ‘All I Need Is You’, a fully improvised song that was part of a spontaneously created 90-minute performance for Club Something at The Sweat Spot, an L.A. dance studio run by choreographer Ryan Heffington. It’s a six-minute snapshot of the improvisational brilliance that lies at the heart of everything Wajatta does — an approach summed up in Watts’ off-the-cuff one-liner near the track’s end: “We’re making everything here for you from scratch — just to ensure maximum freshness.”
LP (BF097)
Black vinyl 2LP in pink paper inners housed in a 5mm spined outer sleeve. Artwork by Maggie Jung. Includes MP3 downloads.
This item has not been released yet, we will ship it to arrive on or close to the release date of 28th February 2020.
CD (BFCD097)
CD softpack. Artwork by Maggie Jung.
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MP3 (BFDNL097)
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Tag Archives: auditions
Women invited to audition for SOAP’s “Love Loss and What I Wore”
The laughter has barely died down from SOAP’s comedy The Long Weekend, but the local theatre group is set for more comedy with their next production, Love Loss and What I Wore, by Nora and Delia Ephron, based on the 1995 book of the same name by Ilene Beckerman.
The production will be staged in early to mid March 2012, and will be directed by Jen Jensen, assistant director for The Long Weekend.
Nora Ephron is an Oscar-nominated screenplay writer best known for When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, so this play mixes laughs and heart-tugging tears. Love Loss, and What I Wore is presented in “readers’ theatre” style with a cast of five women speaking directly to the audience as well as each other, in a series of monologues and dialogues. The cast discusses women’s relationships with their wardrobe at critical moments of a woman’s life.
Clothing becomes a metaphor for women’s experiences: wardrobe malfunctions, puberty’s relationship with personal wardrobe, first date outfits, lucky underwear, prom dresses, favorite boots, irreplaceable shirts, the detested, disorganized purse, and experiences in the dressing room. The recollections about the clothing prompt the women’s memories about their mothers, boyfriends, husbands, ex-husbands, sisters and grandchildren.
In 2009, the show was produced Off-Broadway. The production won the 2010 Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience as well as the 2010 Broadway.com Audience Award for Favorite New Off-Broadway Play. The show has been produced on six continents and more than eight countries.
SOAP’s auditions run Sunday November 18 from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Osoyoos Art Gallery, 8713 Main Street, Osoyoos and Monday November 19 from 7 – 9 p.m. at the Quail’s Nest Arts Centre, 5840 Airport Street, Oliver. The audition is open to women of all ages – the cast represents women from young adulthood to senior years. New actors are encouraged to try out. Call 498-1954 or soap @ telus.net for more information.
Posted in Arts Jam: What's Jammin in the Arts?, Member Groups, News | Tagged actor, actors, audition, auditions, cast, Ephron, Love Loss and What I wore, play, SOAP, theatre
Women invited to audition for SOAP's "Love Loss and What I Wore"
SOAP auditions seek four Wild Guys
The South Okanagan Amateur Players are holding open auditions for their fall comedy, The Wild Guys by Andrew Wreggitt and Rebecca Shaw, directed by Ted Osborne. In this Canadian play, four good-natured guys “take off to the great white north” on a men’s sensitivity weekend. This popular male bonding event takes city slickers into a wilderness setting to confront their primal fears and get in touch with their inner selves.
Andy, a CEO and men’s movement advocate, and Robin, a crystal-gazing New Ager, coax Stewart, an unsuspecting grocer, and Randall, a sceptical lawyer, into reluctantly participating in primitive rituals and communal hugs. The weekend quickly unravels when the guys become lost and discover all their food has disappeared. The result? Hockey cheers and Neil Young singalongs! This play is a satire on men’s self-help encounters of the type made famous by drum-beating poet Robert Bly and the new-age, touchy-feely movement that supported it.
The four male characters range from mid 20s to early 60s. The dialogue is fast-paced, funny, and easy to memorize. The roles are of equal size. Newcomers welcome. The production is scheduled for November, with rehearsals progressing from two to three times per week.
Auditions are on Sunday August 28 from 7 – 9 p.m. at the Osoyoos Art Gallery (upstairs, west entrance), at the corner of 89th and Main; and on Monday August 29 from 7 – 9 p.m. at the Quail’s Nest Arts Centre 34274 -95th St., Oliver. To find out more information or to schedule an alternate audition, contact
Posted in Arts Jam: What's Jammin in the Arts?, Member Groups, News | Tagged audition, auditions, cast, comedy. wild guys, guys, play, production, rehearsal, script, SOAP, South okanagan Amateur Players, wild
Successful Auditions for Sand Mountain
Directors Penelope Johnson and Diane Gludovatz are pleased to announce the cast for the South Okanagan Amateur Players’ summer production of Sand Mountain at Tinhorn Creek Winery Amphitheatre.
Sand Mountain is a pair of original Appalachian folk tales written by American playwright Romulus Linney. These humorous tales are set at a rustic cabin in the plateaus of Alabama. The characters are simple mountain folk full of practical wisdom. Each tale has different characters but are set at the same location, are meant to be performed together. Both tales have a sweet unconventional charm and some good belly laughs. They have a decidedly cock-eyed view of the world and should leave audiences thinking – and smiling.
The first act is “Sand Mountain Matchmaking”. A young widow-woman is keen to remarry but not so keen on her over-eager suitors. She obtains advice from the local wise woman, who gives the young widow a piece of eyebrow-raising folk wisdom audiences are unlikely to ever forget.
The second act is “Why the Lord Come to Sand Mountain”. Jesus and Saint Peter, dressed as poor wayfaring strangers, decide to pay a visit to Sand Mountain. Saint Peter can’t wait to get down to the rich valley full of God-fearing folks. The Lord has other ideas. He’s much more interested in meeting the young couple with fourteen children (all played as one child actor) who keep their mountain cabin in a foul state and drink moonshine. To Peter’s horror, the Lord declares he wants to bide a while, and Jesus spends the whole night swapping outrageous tall tales with his hosts.
Three newcomers to SOAP, all from Osoyoos, join the cast. Paul Everest plays the suitor Sam Bean in “Sand Mountain Matchmaking” and the title role of The Lord in “Why the Lord Come to Sand Mountain”. “Paul conveyed strength and calm from the moment he spoke his first lines at the audition,” says Johnson, “and both these roles call for a certain quiet power in the character. He has theatre background in Ontario, so although he’s new to us, he’s definitely not new to the stage.”
Wendy Mellace, another SOAP newcomer, takes on the role of the matchmaker Lottie Stiles in “Sand Mountain Matchmaking”. Lottie provides guidance to the young widow Rebecca in her quest for a new husband, and gives her some eyebrow-raising but canny advice.
Kaleb Mailey charmed the directors and won the role of Vester Stiles, the matchmaker’s young grandson in “Sand Mountain Matchmaking”. Kaleb, only eight years old, initially had to master the Appalachian slang as it appeared in the script. “But once you got him to memorize a line, and act it out,” says Johnson, “you could see he had real understanding of the character.” Gludovatz adds: “And of course, being cute as a button, he’s going to just steal every scene he’s in.”
The directors are especially pleased to see relative newcomers move from small roles in The Sound of Music into larger roles that display their talents.
Aimee Grice, a member of the nuns chorus in The Sound of Music, takes the romantic female lead, Rebecca, in “Sand Mountain Matchmaking” and plays Jean in “Why the Lord Come to Sand Mountain”.
“Aimee really impressed me whenever she was called upon to fill in for someone else’s part during rehearsals for Sound of Music,” says Johnson. “She could immediately grasp a character and convey very clear, strong emotion. Then she would quietly resume her place in the chorus, and I would think “The audience will never see this, will have no idea how good she really is.””
David Badger, last seen as Captain von Schreiber in The Sound of Music, plays a chilling suitor in “Matchmaking” and the moonshine swilling father Jack in “Why the Lord Come to Sand Mountain.” The two different characters will give Badger an opportunity to flex his acting muscles.
“He blew me away as the icy Nazi captain. My first thought? “We need to give this fellow some more stage time!”” Gludovatz agrees, and so does her dog Pookie. “When David auditioned for the aggressive suitor, Pookie, who had been lying at my feet, stood up and started growling at him.”
Patrick Turner worked as a stage hand when not performing his small role as Nazi sympathizer Herr Zeller in Sound of Music. Now he plays two characters in Sand Mountainwith similar personalities . He takes on the role of Radley, a Bible thumping suitor in “Matchmaking”, and the church-going Prosper Valley Farmer in “Why the Lord Come”. Although the Farmer is a small role, Turner will get to deliver the play’s final hilarious punchline, one audiences will not forget. “He just makes me laugh,” says Gludovatz.
Two more actors who had larger roles in The Sound of Music return to play quite different characters in Sand Mountain.
Darryl Mackenzie starred as Georg von Trapp in the musical, but makes a departure from that austere character. MacKenzie plays a lusty, swaggering suitor in “Matchmaking” and the complaining Saint Peter in “Why the Lord Come”.
“So far, Darryl has played rather emotionally reserved characters with SOAP,” says Johnson, “The naval captain Georg in Sound of Music, and before that, the upper class Charles in Blithe Spirit. We were delighted with his comedic talents. He has a mobile expression and a wonderful drawl. ”
Wesley Frederick, who played Kurt von Trapp in last year’s musical, is rolling up his sleeves to play the scrawny scruffy Fourteen Children in “Why the Lord Come”. This unusual but highly entertaining role requires Wesley to argue and fight with his thirteen imaginary brothers and sisters.
Diane Gludovatz, a SOAP veteran, will step away from the assistant director’s chair to take on the pivotal narrator role in “Why the Lord Come”. She plays the Sang (Ginseng) Picker, a wise woman who has seen it all on Sand Mountain, and entertains the audience with her stories.
Sand Mountain is slated for production on Saturday July 18. Other dates earlier in that week, are currently being negotiated.
Posted in Member Groups, News | Tagged auditions, cast, directors, drama, Linney, performance, play, results, roles, Sand Mountain, SOAP, theatre
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The National Energy Regulatory Agency of the Republic of Moldova
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Questions - answers (natural gas)
Questions - answers (electricity)
What is the procedure to compensate material and moral damage incurred by the consumer following a voltage shock occurred in the supplier's electricity network?
In case of damage to the consumer's electrical appliances, the material damage shall be repaired by observing the following conditions:
the consumer has submitted written request to the supplier, within 5 working days from the event that caused damage to the electrical appliances;
the test performed jointly by the consumer, the supplier (distribution unit) and the State Energy Inspectorate (invited by the supplier) has found the occurrence of the voltage shock or gap claimed by the consumer, which caused damage to the electrical appliances;
the domestic consumer has submitted to the supplier documents confirming the payments made for the repair of electrical appliances by an authorized person.
Any divergence on the compensation of material damage, which cannot be settled by the contracting parties, shall be settled in court, in compliance with art. 1416 of the Civil Code, published in OG no. 82-86/661 of 6/22/2002.
Moral damage shall be repaired in compliance with art. 1422 of the Civil Code, which provides that, if a person has suffered moral damage, the court is entitled to bind the liable person to compensate for damage in monetary equivalent.
How could one verify the rectitude of calculations and amounts included in the invoice issued under document on finding breach of contractual terms?
First, the consumer should request the supplier to submit the recalculation. If the electricity consumption has been recalculated under the appliances included in the document, then one should verify if the number of use hours for the appliances included in the calculation matches with the number of hours provided by the table of Annex 4 to the Regulation on electricity supply and use. One should also verify if the power of the appliances included in the calculation matches with the real power of the appliances owned by the consumer. The electricity amount foreseen for invoicing will be the difference between the electricity amount calculated and the electricity amount already invoiced and paid for that period, unless the calculation is done only for the appliances illegally connected by bypassing the measurement device and the use installations. If the calculations are done according to the flat fee system, one shall apply the tariff in force during the calculations.
If a document on finding breach of contractual terms is prepared, is the supplier's personnel entitled to enter into the apartment for the inventory of electrical appliances, or not?
The supplier's personnel is not entitled to enter into the apartment for the inventory of electrical appliances without the owner's consent. If the domestic consumer allows access for inventory, the electricity consumed is recalculated under the power and the working hours of appliances, according to Annex 4 to the Regulation on electricity supply and use; if the consumer does not allow access for inventory, the consumption is recalculated under the power of the automatic switches or the contracted power, whichever is smaller. In such cases, the electricity amount calculated under the contracted power or the switch power could be relatively higher than that calculated under the appliances.
Which electricity consumer can be deemed to be subconsumer and what is the electricity tariff paid by such consumer?
A subconsumer is a natural or legal person whose electricity installations are connected to the electricity installations of a consumer, with which he has concluded an electricity supply contract. The consumer is entitled to transfer electricity to the subconsumer only with the supplier's prior written consent, in strict compliance with the Regulation on electricity supply and use. The subconsumer has no relation with the electricity supplier; the supplier shall not interfere in the relations between the consumer and the subconsumer. The contract concluded between the consumer and the subconsumer shall provide the cost per kWh, which consists of the tariff approved by ANRE, to which the consumer may add a fee for the partial coverage of expenses related to the operation of electricity installations owned and the technological consumption.
In some electricity invoices the evaluation is "real", while in others "estimative"; why?
When the evaluation heading of the invoice is marked "Real", the electricity consumption has been calculated in compliance with the real indications of the meter. When the invoice is marked "Estim", the electricity amount has been determined approximatively. The network operator's personnel reads monthly the measurement device for invoicing purposes. If the network operator has no access to the measurement device, it is entitled to issue invoices based on estimative calculations on the electricity consumption for no more than 2 months.
What is the procedure of network connection in the case of use installations belonging to fruit-growing associations and garage construction cooperatives?
In such case, the use installations shall be connected to the supplier's distribution network based on a small project. The supplier concludes electricity supply contracts with fruit-growing associations and garage construction cooperatives, which, in turn, conclude electricity supply contracts with each of their members.
In what time is required the electricity supplier to reconnect to the network an apartment that has been disconnected?
The consumer's user installation must be reconnected to the distribution network not later than 2 working days from the registration of the reconnection request. The reconnection request shall be submitted after the consumer has removed the causes of disconnection and has paid the reconnection fee. If the distribution unit fails to comply with the reconnection term, it shall pay the consumer a compensation worth 25% of the reconnection fee for each day of delay. In order to receive such compensation, the consumer shall submit to the supplier a request.
How are connected the use installations belonging to applicants from blocks of flats and who can initiate such procedure?
Use installations of applicants living in blocks of flats are connected based on a single project. Usually, such problems are dealt with by the block manager, who requests the supplier to issue the connection notice. Based on the connection notice, the design institution hired by the block manager will develop the project, which shall be coordinated with the supplier. The expenses for the project development and the costs of the works carried out under the project are paid by the prospective consumers. Measurement devices are purchased and installed at the expense of the supplier on electric installations of domestic consumers upon conclusion of electricity supply contracts with them.
If the name of the legal person has been changed, is the supplier entitled to submit a new connection notice?
In such cases, the supplier is not entitled to submit a new connection notice requesting the change of the existing technical conditions for connection, but the legal person must submit to the supplier the justifying documents necessary to make changes in the electricity supply contract.
If the real estate acquired by the natural or legal person has not been disconnected from the electricity network and no change of the contracted power has been requested, is the supplier entitled to submit connection notice to the consumer?
In the conclusion of the electricity supply contract, the supplier is not entitled to issue to the new consumer any connection notice, by which to bring new technical conditions for connection
What should do the natural person when purchasing a real estate not connected to the electricity network?
To avoid any problems that may arise further in the relations with the electricity supplier, one should perform the following actions:
to ask the seller to show a certificate issued by the supplier, which would confirm the lack of debts on electricity consumption for the consumption place in question;
to request the supplier, before moving into the real estate, the conclusion of the electricity supply contract and the inspection of the measurement device;
to request from his initiative the metrological check of the measurement device, in order to be sure that the measurement device and the seals applied on it are appropriate (not damaged, not faked, etc.).
If the supplier prepares the document on finding breach of contractual terms, what is the procedure to check the meter and the seals applied on it?
When preparing the document on finding breach of contractual terms, the network operator must identify the cause of such document. Where it is assumed that the measurement device is damaged, interfered with or the seals applied on it have been breached, the operator is entitled, in the presence of the consumer, to remove such device in order to be sent for technical finding. In such cases, the operator must prepare the removal document in two copies (one for each party), which will state the meter number and indications, the number of seals and the reason for removal, pack, seal and hand over to the consumer the removed evidence in order to be sent to an institution authorized to perform the technical finding. The operator is not entitled to state the institution where the inspection should be done, as this will be chosen by the consumer.
Currently, in Chisinau the following institutions are authorized to make technical findings on the integrity of meters and seals applied on them: the Judicial Expertise Institute of the Ministry of Justice, located at 2 Maria Cibotaru Street; the Expertise Center "Cexin", located at 10/1 Independentei Street; SE "Registru", 28 Salcamilor Street and the Forensic and Technical Direction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, located at 75 Stefan cel Mare Avenue. The expenses related to the technical finding are incurred by the initiating party.
Prior to the technical finding, the consumer is entitled to perform the metrological check of the measurement device, the expenses being incurred by the consumer.
Is the supplier entitled to request payment for the conclusion of the electricity supply contract?
Conclusion, extension or suspension of the electricity supply contract is done for free by the supplier. The supplier is not entitled to request any payment from the consumer (applicant) for these works.
Is the supplier required to observe any established contract form when concluding the electricity supply contract with the applicant?
The supplier must conclude electricity supply contracts with domestic or non-domestic consumers in strict compliance with the mandatory clauses of the electricity supply contract, specified in Annexes 2 and 3 of the Regulation on electricity supply, published in OG no. 59-62/308 of 4/15/2011. The supplier is neither entitled to change the mandatory clauses of the contract nor add unilaterally other provisions to it. Any addition to the contract, for both domestic and non-domestic consumers, shall be valid only if made in writing and signed by the both parties, being a separate appendix to the contract.
Could a person, who uses electricity but has no electricity supply contract concluded with the distribution company, be deemed as consumer?
There are still electricity users who have not concluded electricity supply contracts with the supplier, but pay the consumption based on invoices issued by the supplier. However, they are deemed to have contractual relations, because one of them supplies electricity, and the other pays the consumption based on invoices issued by the first. All electricity users who have contractual relations with the supplier but, due to various reasons, have not concluded in writing electricity supply contracts with the supplier are deemed to be electricity consumers.
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SEA SHEPHERD boards Japanee whaling ship
seacid
SEA SHEPHERD boards Japanee whaling ship Jan 31, 2008 23:32:03 GMT 8
Post by seacid on Jan 31, 2008 23:32:03 GMT 8
Two Ecowarriors from the marine life defender ship Steve Irwin successfully boarded the Yishin Maru, a Japanese whaling vessel, in international waters to protest the slaughter of whales under the guise of scientific research. However the two have been taken hostage by the japanese crew and the ship has escaped. An Australian court has ruled the Japanese whaling expedition illegal.
The Sea Shepherd is a controversial volunteer marine defense organization dedicated to safeguarding the sealife from human exploitation like pirates who overfish or fish in teritorrial waters other than their own, whalers, seal slaughterers, dolphin hunters and their ilk.
www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2008/2008-01-16-01.asp
mostlywater.org/japanese_whaling_fleet_run_two_sea_shepherd_hostages
SOUTHERN OCEAN, January 16, 2008 (ENS) - The captain of the Sea Shepherd vessel the Steve Irwin says the location of a Japanese whaler with two Sea Shepherd hostages aboard is no longer known. "The vessel is no longer in sight or within radar range of the Steve Irwin," Captain Paul Watson said today.
Twenty-four hours ago, Sea Shepherd crew members Giles Lane of the UK and Benjamin Potts of Australia boarded the Japanese Yushin Maru No. 2 on Watson's orders to deliver a letter to its captain demanding a halt to Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean.
An Australian federal court had just ruled that Japanese whaling in the Australian Whale Sanctuary is illegal and ordered the Japanese to stop killing whales within 200 nautical miles of Australia's Antarctic territory. Japan plans to kill up to 935 minke whales and up to 50 endangered fin whales this season under a self-imposed "research" whaling quota.
When Potts and Lane boarded the Japanese vessel they were immediately taken into custody.
Watson says, "Media reports that the hostages have been released to the Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin are false. Reports that the Steve Irwin will not accept calls from the Japanese vessels or authorities are false. No calls have been received. The Yushin Maru No. 2 has refused to return radio calls from the Steve Irwin."
From left: Benjamin Potts and Giles Lane in an office aboard the Japanese whaler Yushin Maru No. 2. January 15, 2008. (Photo courtesy Institute of Cetacean Research)
The Australian government says Japan last night agreed that the men should be returned to their own ship, and the request was repeated when that did not happen, the Australian Broadcasting Corp reported today.
A Japanese government spokesman says the whaling ship has been trying to contact the Steve Irwin but it has not responded. He says they want to arrange the handover of the two men as requested by the Australian government.
Watson says no one from the Japanese or Australian government has contacted Sea Shepherd to organize the transfer of the hostages from the Japanese whaler back to the Steve Irwin.
The Institute for Cetacean Research, which manages Japanese whaling operations, did send a letter via email with demands to be met prior to a release.
The whalers said they would return the hostages in return for Sea Shepherd agreeing to no longer interfere with their whaling operations.
Watson said the Sea Shepherd "is not interested in any demands based on the holding of hostages."
"Using hostages to make demands is the hallmark of terrorism and Sea Shepherd has no interest in negotiating with terrorist groups," said Watson. "The hostages must be released unconditionally."
"The Institute of Cetacean Research is acting like a terrorist organization," said Steve Irwin's First Officer Peter Brown. "Here they are taking hostages and making demands. Our policy is that we don't respond to terrorist demands."
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has heard reports from the media that Japan has agreed to release the hostages but the Steve Irwin has not heard anything official from either the Australian or Japanese governments.
Crew of the Japanese whaler Yushin Maru No. 2 spray water at approaching Sea Shepherd inflatable with Potts and Lane aboard. (Photo courtesy ICR)
"The activities of the Japanese whaling fleet are illegal under international conservation law. The Japanese are poachers and should be treated in the same manner as elephant or tiger poachers," said Watson.
The Institute of Cetacean Research says the two Sea Shepherd activists "illegally" boarded the Yushin Maru No. 2 "after they made attempts to entangle the screw of the vessel using ropes and throwing bottles of acid onto the decks."
In photos released by the Institute, Japanese crew members on the Yushin Maru No. 2 can be seen spraying water from high pressure hoses at an inflatable vessel carrying the Sea Shepherd activists.
Minoru Morimoto, director general of the Institute, said the men have not been harmed and were taken to a secure room. "The two men are being held in an office," he said.
Watson said Tuesday that the two hostages had been tied to the whaler's radar mast.
"Any accusations that we have tied them up or assaulted them are completely untrue," Morimoto said. "It is illegal to board another country's vessels on the high seas. As a result, at this stage, they are being held in custody while decisions are made on their future."
Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2008. All rights reserved.
EcoRescue/Firefly Brigade
The fireflies have fled the city because they couldn't stand its dirty air. All of us cyclists, pedestrians, commuters, even those who ride cars who live, work and raise families in the city may suffer the same fate. We also risk disappearing like the fireflies."
Why resign ourselves to this fate? We have a choice. We can fight for clean air and bring the fireflies back.
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Affcap Meeting With Rajasthan’s Minister Of Cow Protection
Recently, AFFCAP met with Mr. Otaram Dewasi, the Honourable Minister in Charge of Cow Affairs (Gaupalan) for the State of Rajasthan. In addition, Mr. Amra Choudhary, Rajasthan’s Revenue Minister and Mr. Ashok Shekhar, Additional Chief Secretary of the Devsthan Department, and Mr. Manish Goyal, Mr. Devasi’s Executive Secretary, attended the meeting.
AFFCAP was represented by Pancaratna das, Managing Trustee, Mr. Vineet Pande, Membership Director, Mr. Manglam Ram Patel, Chief Gaushala Inspector, along with Vyapaka das, AFFCAP Executive Secretary.
The gathering had no specific agenda and was meant to introduce the Honorable Ministers to the activities and scope of the Ahimsa Foundation for Cattle Protection (AFFCAP).
The Honorable Mr. Devasi was suitably impressed with AFFCAP’S objectives that he requested a proposal on a pilot project to begin identifying cows beginning with one Gaupalan district in Rajasthan. The district being considered contains 284 gaushalas supporting a population of 50,000 government-registered cows.
Based on his experience, our Chief Gaushala Inspector, Mr. Manglam Ram Patel, estimates that the gaushalas registered with the Government amounts to 25%, or less, of existing establishments. The reason for this is their ignorance of the government schemes available. As an example, registered gaushalas are eligible for financial support for fodder, but many are unaware of the program.
Presently, AFFCAP is formulating a proposal for a Pilot Project with the goal of identifying this region’s registered cows. According to Ministry records, there is presently over one and a half million cows officially registered in government programs throughout the State.
Of course, the devil is in the detail, but we will report back regarding our success or failure in designing and implementing the Ahimsa Verification Program throughout these first 284 gaushalas.
The members of AFFCAP are both humbled and enlivened by this new and exciting opportunity and wish to publicly thank the Honorable Minister Dewasi for the opportunity he is providing to AFFCAP’s cow protection efforts.
More: http://www.dandavats.com/?p=15638
Meet India’s first cow Minister Otaram Dewasi
NEW DELHI: His community — Dewasi, a livestock- dependent tribe traditionally-addresses him as "Bhopajj" or priest. He dresses up like a cow-herd himself: a long white cloth wrapped around his bare torso, red turban, dangling ear rings et al. With a lathi in tow, he walks into everywhere, even the chief minister's office in Rajasthan
Otaram Dewasi , 48, happens to be the Rajasthan's minister in charge of cow affairs. As for himself, India's first-ever minister for the 'divine' bovine likes to address himself as "Gaupalan Mantri".
BJP and Vasundhara Raje had promised a separate ministry for cows in its poll manifesto. And when the party came to power with Raje as CM in December 2013, she promptly announced a ministry for the protection of cows, which was later transformed to a "department" after the move struck a constitutional hurdle since states can't set up new ministries.
In October, 2014, Dewasi was made minister of dairy and devasthan — administration of temples that get government funds — with the extra charge of the "gaupalan department". His responsibility also includes overseeing Rajasthan's Gau Seva Commission and Cow Conservation Directorate.
Three months into his tenure, Dewasi says he is proud of what he has done with securing the future of cows in this desert state. And he believes he has set up a department for rest of India to emulate should any other state want to follow this 'Rajasthan Model.
Dewasi, who himself owns "20-25 cows", wants the canvas for cow protection to be bigger. "I have sought an appointment with Prime Minister Narendra Modi after the Union budget so that I can impress upon him on the urgent need to set up a cow ministry at the Centre," Dewasi tells ET.
"I believe if cows have to be saved then every state in India must have separate ministries for cows," he says, insisting that he's not being just rhetorical. So what about buffalos, goats, even the state's official animal, camel? Dewasi dismisses the question, almost chiding you for being naive.
Official website of Otaram Dewasi http://www.otaramdewasi.in/
Timesofindia: Read more at The Times of India
Affcap Meeting With Rajasthan’s Minister Of Cow Pr...
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Pakistan News Service
Sunday Jan 19, 2020, Jumada-al-awwal 23, 1441 Hijri
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Kashmir, From Lahore to Islamabad what Pakistan gained or lost
By Amjad Malik
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Should Pakistan put aside its demand for a referendum guaranteed by U.N. in the disputed territory of Occupied Kashmir.
Pakistan and India went through a lot from Lahore to Islamabad in between 21st February 1999 to 5th January 2004. People of both countries suffered even more. In 1999 Mr. Vajpaee visited Lahore on the invitation of an elected Prime Minister with 2/3 majority who was willing to take bilateral relations on to a new route. From 1999 to 2004 Mr. Vajpaee remained at the same position even after dismissing his top military aides as India a strong democracy with a top judiciary as a back up believes in people`s power. They rewarded their nuclear scientist Mr. Azad by appointing him on the highest Constitutional position. Whereas, in Pakistan Mr. Sharif went through hell for even thinking about it and we should not even discuss the state of Abdul Qadeer Khan. That tells the sad story of democracy in Pakistan where power lies in military, accountability is improvised as a "tool of revenge" and justice is delayed up to the extent where it looks that "justice is denied". That I believe was not the vision of dying founder of Pakistan in 1948 or the Quaid e Awam who gave Pakistan the strength and nuclear power to bring matters nearer to resolution on equal level.
The journey which PM Sharif started in order to resolve issues with India was restarted by General Musharaf. If we see the Islamabad Declaration closely we read the following:
Islamabad Declaration
The President of Pakistan and the Prime Minister of India met during the SAARC Summit in Islamabad. The Indian Prime Minister while expressing satisfaction over the successful conclusion of the SAARC Summit appreciated the excellent arrangements made by the host country. Both leaders welcomed the recent steps towards normalization of relations between the two countries and expressed the hope that the positive trend set by the CBMs would be consolidated. Prime Minister Vajpayee said that in order to take forward and sustain the dialogue process, violence, hostility and terrorism must be prevented. President Musharraf reassured Prime Minister Vajpayee that he will not let any territory under Pakistan`s control to be used to support terrorism in any manner. President Musharraf emphasized that a sustained and productive dialogue addressing all issue s would lead to positive results. To carry the process of normalisation forward the President of Pakistan and the Prime Minister of India agreed to commence the process of the composite dialogue in February 2004. The two leaders are confident that the resumption of the composite dialogue will lead to peaceful settlement of all bilateral issues, including Jammu & Kashmir, to the satisfaction of both sides. The two leaders agreed that constructive dialogue would promote progress towards the common objective of peace, security and economic development for our peoples and for future generations.
Now in order to compare the above declaration we will have to see where we were in 1999 as far as the stance of Pakistan is concerned. Prime Minister Sharif also took some promises & discussed some issues and resumed dialogue which was hurdled by the events of "Kargil" where the people of Pakistan suffered once again as a result.
Let`s see what was agreed in 1999, Lahore Declaration says following;
Lahore Declaration
The Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the Republic of India:-
Sharing a vision of peace and stability between their countries, and of progress and prosperity for peoples; Convinced that durable peace and development of harmonious relations and friendly cooperation will serve the vital interests of the people of the two countries, enabling them to devote their energies for a better future; Recognizing that the nuclear dimension of the security environment of the two countries adds to their responsibility for avoidance of conflict between the two countries; Committed to the principle and purposes of the Charter of the United Nation, and the universally accepted principles of peaceful co-existence; Reiterating the determination of both countries to implementing the Simla Agreement in letter and spirit; Committed to the objectives of universal nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation; Convinced of the importance of mutual ly agreed confidence building measures for improving the security environment; Recalling their agreement of 23 September, 1998, that an environment of peace and security is in the supreme national interest of both sides and that the resolution of all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir, is essential for this purpose;
Have agreed that their respective Government:
Shall intensify their efforts to resolve all issues, including the issue of Jammu and Kashmir. Shall refrain from intervention and interference in each other`s internal affairs. Shall intensify their composite and integrated dialogue process for an early and positive outcome of the agreed bilateral agenda. Shall take immediate steps for reducing the risk of accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons and discuss concepts and doctrines with a view to elaborating measures for confidence at prevention of conflict. Reaffirm their commitment to the goals and objectives of SAARC and to concert their efforts towards the realization of the SAARC vision for the year 2000 and beyond with a view to promoting the welfare of the peoples of South Asia and to improve their quality of life through accelerated economic growth, social progress and cultural development.
Reaffirm their condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations and their determination to combat this menace. Shall promote and all human rights and fundamental freedoms.
Signed at Lahore on 21st day of February 1999.
Muhammad Nawaz Sharif Atal Bihari Vajpayee
Prime Minister of the Islamic Prime Minister of the
Republic of Pakistan Republic of India
Seeing both the declaration there was a commitment of resuming dialogue and need to promote confidence building measures and then onwards peaceful resolution of Kashmir. In Lahore declaration Pakistan was not blamed for any terrorism or use of their soil for any such purposes but there was a joint condemnation of such menace. What is the point of signing these agreements when they will not be acted upon. If "Kargil" issue had not started we could have developed 5 years long association with India with a new relationship and determination to resolve the inherent issues. What happened in "Kargil" is still kept out of the jurisdiction of Supreme Court, though in Britain on one scientist`s death "Dr David Kelly" Prime Minister Blair knowingly that he may loos e his premiership as a result initiated a "Judicial Enquiry" headed by Lord Hutton. That is the difference between two democracy an open, fair and impartial one and a "controlled" one.
Pakistan already enjoys the benefit of UN resolutions on Kashmir as well as the determination of Kashmiri people who have lost 75,000 lives and stood firm against the aggression of 600,000 Indian army men. All it requires is to stand firm on the plight and achieve the unachievable on negotiation table. I think Former Diplomat, Agha Shahi`s voice is loud and clear in respect of UN Resolutions and its standing.
If we see those Resolutions we read the following:
UN RESOLUTIONS ON KASHMIR
Resolution 47 (1948) adopted by the Security Council at its 286th meeting held on 21st April 1948:
THE SECURITY COUNCIL
Having considered the complaint of Government of India concerning the dispute over the State of Jammu and Kashmir, having heard the representative of India in support of that complaint and the reply and counter complaints of the representative of Pakistan, Being strongly of the opinion that the early restoration of peace and order in Jammu and Kashmir is essential and that India Pakistan should do their utmost to bring about cessation of all fighting, Noting with satisfaction that both India and Pakistan desire that question of the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India or Pakistan should be decided through the democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite, Considering that the continuation of the dispute is likely to endanger international peace and security. Recommends that the government of India and Pakistan the following measures as those which in the opinion of the council are appreciate to bring about a cessation of the fighting and to create proper conditions for a free and impartial plebiscite to decide whether the state of Jammu and Kashmir is to accede to India or Pakistan. The Government of India should undertake that there will be established in Jammu and Kashmir a Plebiscite Administration to hold a Plebiscite as soon as possible on the question of the accession of the State to India or Pakistan. In August 1948 a further resolution was passed in security Council. Resolution adopted by the United Nations Commission fo! r India and Pakistan on 13th August 1948:
PART 1: CEASE-FIRE/ORDER
PART2: TRUCE AGREEMENT
PART3: PLEBISCITE
The Government of India and the Government of Pakistan reaffirm their wish that the future status of the State of Jammu and Kashmir shall be determined in accordance with the will of the people and to that end, upon acceptance of the Truce Agreement both Governments agree to enter into consultations with the Commission to determine fair and equitable conditions whereby such free expression will be assured.
3. Resolution adopted at the meeting of the United Nations Commission
1. Resolution 122 (1957) adopted by the Security Council on 24 January 1957:
Having heard statements from representatives of the Government of India and Pakistan concerning the dispute over the State of Jammu and Kashmir.
Reminding the Governments and authorities concerned of the principle embodied in its resolutions 47 (1948) of 21 April 1948, 51 March 1951, and the United Nations commission for India and Pakistan resolutions of 13 August 1948 and 5 January 1949, that the final disposition of the State of Jammu and Kashmir will be democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite conducted under the auspices of the United Nations.
I think even if reader reads and listens to the speeches of Indian prime Minister Nehru, even he was agreed to hold a "plebiscite". I think our rulers need to read those speeches from Foreign Office archives. The will of Kashmiris is paramount in any of the future settlement of Kashmir dispute. That "will" can be respected more by a duly elected government and its representatives who themselves value the cost of a vote. Any person who does not have a clue of the value of vote can never understand the value of "plebiscite". In Pakistan a common phenomena has developed that one or more institutions are superior than the whole system. Power belongs to institutions that`s where the battle is lost, as in reality, power lies with the people of Pakistan and Sovereignty with God Almighty that principle if lost will have devastating effect for coming generations. Now Pakistan is on a cross road of decision making process, people who opposed Sharif could neither win "Kargil" nor could invade "Delhi", they now realise that shooting gun in the air is lot more easier to start a conflict but resolving it on a negotiation table is much difficult. Prime Minister of a country has a responsibility, a Pakistani PM has 160 million people on top of several hundreds of 22 grade officers including High Commissioners in more or less 54 countries as well as responsibility of a "nuclear capability" and "enemy on borders". That responsibility can not be given to one man as according to a famous quote "decision of wars cannot be left solely on Generals".
Pakistan is an ideological state, in modern days conflicts can never be resolved through Wars. It should not be considered a weakness, but a reality. Since 1986 "Kashmir" as an issue got projection as far as it could. Then comes the dialogue which if derailed in Bhuttoo`s regime was startled in Sharif`s. It would have been lot more easier to resolve it or bring it near to resolution only in an elected government`s time. All other efforts will not only lack legitimacy but uncertainty of future guarantees soon the matter comes before an elected government. Pakistani rulers in the past has behaved in a way as if they will never get out of that chair of power so is the behaviour of today`s rulers who think that passing time is the need of time in the best interest of the country. When you pass time without purpose each minute and second count and affe ct the sovereign of the state, as each second one passes is not devoid of humiliation and inner weakness with knowledge of not being able to put it right.
Pakistan`s judicial system if stronger can only guarantee the smooth running of the Parliamentary system but both PM`s in their two reigns could not achieve that "unforeseen strength" which a democracy achieves by strengthening the Parliament. Ms. Bhutto left a lasting memory by appointing Mr. Ahmed Saeed Awan as High court Judge when he was a former Minister and had recently lost an election, In an other regime, NAB chair Saif ur Rehman allegedly interfered in Judicial matters when High Court ruling was expected in Ms. Bhutto`s trial where two of the judges had to resign and Supreme Court quashed the conviction. Same is the case now, when a man with strong political affiliation (Justice Deedar Shah former PPP elected parliamentarian and a retired judge) is installed as NAB head so we are back to square one, where we started. No impartiality in acco untability is a recipe for disaster for parliamentary form of democracy. I am appalled to see the progress of "Kashmir committee" working tirelessly for what we really yet to find out. Kashmir committee though failed to highlight Kashmiri people`s plight but recent events are enough to open the eyes of Indian rulers and the west that Kashmir is burning and is on a flash point and this time purely on the basis of home grown political advancement has put the Kashmiris to fight for their due right a "plebiscite".
I reiterate, Rule of law has its own price and at this moment Pakistan desperately needs a ruler who can make rule of law a distinctive feature of his governance and initiate a ruthless accountability process which include along with others "judiciary" and "military" as "all citizens are equal in the eyes of law" and he at least intends to eradicate all the evils in civil society and ensure justice at the door step of a common man. Justice delayed is justice denied and Justice should be seen to be done at least in an Islamic Society. Only fair, faster and firmer justice can ensure that no one dares to breach the core essence of Pakistan`s constitution. We need a strong system and reliance on that system and continuity where no institution start waiting for its term but institutions starts acting to protect the system of Parliamentary Democracy.
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Home / History / Sure Josef Stalin Murdered Your Granddad – Duh.
Sure Josef Stalin Murdered Your Granddad – Duh.
It’s not just this fellow’s grandfather that Stalin had killed.
“In his book, “Unnatural Deaths in the U.S.S.R.: 1928-1954,” I.G. Dyadkin estimated that the USSR suffered 56 to 62 million “unnatural deaths” during that period, with 34 to 49 million directly linked to Stalin.”
Death is the fruit of communism. Misery, suffering, poverty, oppression, are the fruits of communism. It requires a constant reminder to keep people from falling prey to the bait of so called equality. Make no mistake…socialism and communism are bedfellows. Ayn Rand, who lived under communism’s boot put it succinctly and most accurately when she said,
“There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism—by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.”
Bernie Sanders, the admitted socialist didn’t get elected for president but he came close. If not for the cheating that took place between Hillary Clinton and the DNC he would have been their party nominee. That should give us all pause.
bBDenis Karagodin plans to take posthumous legal action against Stalin and more than 20 others, who he holds responsible for killing his ancestor Stepan Karagodin in 1938.
Source: Josef Stalin murdered my granddad and I want him punished | Daily Mail Online
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Happy Holidays (Christmas, Hannukah, Solstice, etc...)
Having studied so many religious traditions in my life I feel very
fortunate to feel the real meaning of this season within me. It's a
time when the weapons and politics should be put aside and like the
Whos in Whoville, we should stand side by side sharing in the joy of
living in this most amazing place, planet and universe. We've been
given a gift, by who it was given depends on your religious beliefs,
but it is here and it is now. Whether we choose to throw this precious
life away by only hating and keeping ourselves separated by trivial
differences, or whether we can join together in the spirit of love is
up to us.
This last week has made it difficult to enjoy the season. Three Jewish men
were beaten in New York for simply replying to someones offer of a
"Merry Christmas" with their own "Happy Hannakuh". In the same week
our congress passed a resolution to "protect" Christmas as a Christian
tradition, more important than any other traditions followed by the
citizens of our country. It seems that Americans are growing further
and further apart. But maybe we can borrow some of the old traditions,
just for a couple weeks. Pagans believed that mistletoe had the power
to bring "Peace and Joy" and so enemies meeting under the mistletoe had
to call a truce until the following day. In Finland and Sweden the old
tradition of the 12 days of Christmas prevail, and any crime committed
during this time receives a stiffer sentence than is usual. So maybe
we need to have some resolutions to this effect so that Americans can
have at least 12 days of the year when we practice kindness and
As I was getting more disillusioned about my countrymen, I came across a book call The Christmas Menorah, How a Town Fought Hate.
This children's book is based on a true story of just how courageous
and caring Americans can be. In 1993 a Jewish family in Billings
Montana placed menorahs in their windows. One night a brick came
crashing through their son's window but fortunately he wasn't in the
room at the time. The entire town rallied behind the family. Before
they new it, there were menorahs in all their neighbors windows, right
next to the Christmas trees. The local Christian clergy added their
support without hesitation. There was at first an increase in hate
crimes, including the destruction of the school's window which
displayed a large menorah in support of the family. But eventually
this community won out and the hate crimes disappeared. It brought
tears of inspiration to read that there are still communities like this
in my own country.
In honor of the brave people that have stood next to those minorities that
have been persecuted for their differences, Alexa and I will add the
menorah to our traditions. A couple of my Sunday school students are
in homes with both a Christian and a Jewish parent so I've been
learning a lot about how these two traditions can be mixed to deepen
the meaning of this holiday.
Below my signature is an interview with the author of the book (which is now also a play). This book will itself become a tradition for my daughter and me every
holiday and I would encourage any of you working with children to add
it to your repertoire so that maybe the next generation will be able to
enjoy our diversity rather than use it as a way to hurt each other.
We wish you all Peace, Love and Joy this holiday season, no matter what your tradition!
From Terri and Alexa
The Town That Fought Hatred
A true story about an American town has become a play that teaches children about goodness and courage.
By Janice I. Cohn
"On December 2, 1993, someone twisted by hate threw a brick through the
window of the home of one of our neighbors: a Jewish family who chose
to celebrate the holiday season by displaying a symbol of faith-a
menorah-for all to see. Today, members of religious faiths throughout
Billings are joining together to ask residents to display the menorah
as a symbol of something else: our determination to live together in
harmony, and our dedication to the principle of religious liberty
embodied in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United
States of America. We urge all citizens to share in this message by
displaying this menorah on a door or a window from now until Christmas.
Let all the world know that the national hatred of a few cannot destroy
what all of us in Billings, and in America, have worked together so
long to build."
--Editorial, Billings Gazette, Dec. 1993
In a world filled with fear, how can young people learn courage? In a
world filled with violence, how can young people learn peaceful
solutions? In a world filled with religious and racial division, how
can young people learn unity and cooperation?
Children learn in many ways: sometimes by example, sometimes by the power of a
compelling story, and sometimes by the realization that human beings
can be capable of extraordinary acts of courage and goodness.
All three elements came together in Billings, Montana, during the holiday season of 1993.
No one knew why it started, but 12 years ago the town of Billings began to
be infiltrated by skinheads and members of racist groups. The tiny
minority of Jews, African Americans, and mixed-race families who lived
there were immediately targeted for acts of hate. Though the vast
majority of residents were white and Christian, they chose to take a
principled stand based upon their conviction that an act of hate toward
one citizen was an act of hate toward all. Many individuals and groups
rose up to respond. For example, the Billings Painters Union offered to
repaint for free any houses or businesses that had been spray painted
with racial or religious epithets. And members of churches with
predominantly white congregations came to the African Methodist
Episcopal Church to pray with black neighbors when menacing skinheads
began to show up at church services.
But then, as the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah approached, Jews became a special
target. Windows in Jewish homes displaying Hanukkah menorahs began to
be smashed. Jewish families were advised to remove their menorahs until
the perpetrators were caught, but they resisted. And so menorahs
continued to be displayed and windows continued to be smashed.
Ultimately, in a show of solidarity and support, tens of thousands of
Billings residents displayed paper menorahs in their windows.
What gives people the courage to fight against hatred and the wisdom to
understand just how important that fight is? What causes some
communities to come together when faced with acts of bigotry and
violence, while other communities split apart? In Billings, it was a
combination of factors including:
* A family, victimized by bigots, who spoke out eloquently and refused to be intimidated.
* A police chief who understood the
seriousness of hate crimes and was determined that they would not be tolerated under any circumstances.
*A lay church leader who remembered a story she had heard as a child,
about how Christians in Denmark led had stood against the Nazis to help
Jews in 1943, and used that event to help inspire her community.
* Clergy of all faiths who were committed to genuinely practicing what they preached.
*A newspaper that investigated and published the truth about local hate
crimes and then used its editorial pages to urge the community to take
a stand on principle.
* Town residents who were willing to learn from history and be guided by their own conscience and religious faith.
Along with many other people, I was deeply moved by these events 12 years
ago. As a practicing psychotherapist specializing in loss and life
transitions, I'd witnessed the power of courage and goodness firsthand.
I'd seen how those traits could enable individuals to surmount life's
greatest challenges. But here was an entire community acting together
on the highest principle of loving your neighbor as yourself. How did
this happen, and what could we all learn from the events in Billings?
My desire--indeed, my compulsion--to know more drew me to interview the
people in Billings and resulted in my children's book, "The Christmas
Menorahs: How a Town Fought Hate," published in 1994. Since that time,
in schools, churches and synagogues, I've spoken to thousands of
children about what happened in Billings and have seen how they've been
affected and inspired by this story.
Now more than ever, it's crucial that children learn true stories of courage and goodness. That
is the best, perhaps the only real antidote that we can offer them in
dangerous, unpredictable times.
I clearly remember discussions I had with youngsters in Billings in early 1994. Even in the early
elementary school grades, they were all aware of what had happened in
their community. "You just have to show people that you care," one
fourth grader explained to me. "If you don't stand up to bullies,
they'll just keep pushing you around," a fifth-grader stated flatly.
"We were scared," said another child, "but my dad, he said it was the
right thing to do."
The lessons of Billings can be taught in many ways. Sometimes heroism
consists of simply doing the right thing and setting an example by
one's everyday actions. When children see their parents, and other
adults, helping others, standing up for a belief and actively working
to improve their communities, it makes an impact - perhaps more than
people realize.
In fact, research studies focusing on people
who have shown extraordinary courage, such as the "Righteous
Christians" who risked their lives to rescue victims of the Nazis, and
civil rights leaders who fought segregation in the South, concluded
that many of these individuals were greatly influenced by the quiet,
everyday acts of kindness and goodness they observed on the part of
their parents, teachers, and neighbors.
Research emphasizes that it is essential for the adults in children's lives to
explicitly and strongly condemn acts of hatred, violence and bullying.
When parents and other adults fail to do this, children can
misinterpret their silence as agreeing with or condoning these acts,
says Dr. Ervin Staub, a prominent researcher at the University of
Massachusetts, who has conducted several studies in this area. "They
may assume," he says, "that their parents do not think such acts are
morally wrong. Even more troubling, they may come to the conclusion
that this is simply the way people operate and that evil, and a lack of
resistance to evil, is the norm in this world."
Hatred, intolerance and compliance with evil need not be the norm-that is the
enduring legacy of Billings. "We must constantly remind ourselves and
our children that what we become depends on what we believe," the Rev.
Robert Massie, formerly of Harvard Divinity School, points out in my
book, "Raising Compassionate, Courageous Children in a Violent World."
"If we believe the problems in this world can't be solved, the chances
are they won't be. If we believe that we can make a difference, then
that belief begins to come true, too. The amazing thing is that it
doesn't take very many people to believe in change, for changes to be
"Think what our country would be like if families sat down and talked together
about how our immediate communities could be better, and what we each
could do to make that happen. If every parent asked their children,
`What do you think we should be doing as a family to make our
neighborhood better?' they would get ideas back. The more people
actually talk about what kind of community they want to live in, and
the more they visualize it and see what it might be like, the more
likely it is to come true."
On Dec. 2, 2005, 12 years to the
day when a cinderblock came crashing through young Isaac Schnitzer's
bedroom window because it displayed a menorah, I returned to Billings
for a very special event-the theatrical premiere of my children's play,
"Paper Candles: How Courage and Goodness Triumphed in an American
Town," which is based on "The Christmas Menorahs." For me, the play is
a natural outgrowth of my book, giving young people the
opportunity--through the dramatic process--to actually be a part of the
acts of courage and goodness that occurred in Billings. This is
important, because research indicates that children who are exposed to,
and participate in such acts, are much more likely to want to emulate
them in their own lives.
I wrote the play to be performed by children in upper elementary and
middle school, and it has been performed and discussed in classrooms
across the country. Afterwards, kids always share their feelings about
the events and the main characters. They often go on to talk about what
they could do to deal with bullies and bigots in their own lives, and
in their own community. As one child in Montclair, N.J., said to me,
"The important thing is not to give in...the important thing is not to
turn away."
In Billings that night after the play, a resident told me, "It's still a
little hard to grasp that we were starting a movement. We just wanted
to do the right thing."
A fifth-grader in the cast had known very little about the 1993 events until she did the play. "It was nice to find out about everything that happened. I started asking my parents
questions, and I didn't even know that they put up a menorah. I wish
they had told me that. I think it would have given me courage.now with
the play, I'm going to try to be a better person."
Perhaps we all will, as the result of the actions of one American town. As Rev.
Massie says, "If we believe that we can make a difference, then that
belief begins to come true."
Labels: Compassion, religion
You're so lucky I'm pro-choice!
I took my daughter to OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) a couple weeks ago. They have the biological life science displays back in place. In that section is an amazing display of the embryo development in the womb. All stages are represented. These displays are not wax mock ups - they're the real thing. These little clumps of preserved flesh represent contributions from hospitals and labs where a mother and/or her unborn met with an unfortunate end. Their end offers the opportunity for all to see what that amazing transformation within the womb looks like.
There are so many emotions surrounding the concept of innocence captured and floating in these jars. I couldn't help but wonder if they were the wanted or the unwanted, the loved or the hated. The pro-life advocates would insist that each of these jars were lost potential, worth more by far than the female host that carried them. And yet, when an unloved and unwanted child misbehaves or ends up in juvenile hall, these same prudent judges turn their vicious eyes of blame again to that woman. She is not only to carry the child to term, but then expected to bond with it and love it more than life itself. But the reality is that the female animal, human or otherwise, that is living under duress will not love it's offspring, but will abandon it. In nature a stressed mother will even eat her newborns. We suspect it's because she is herself starving, but maybe she is attempting to end their suffering the quickest way possible. But when a human mother is starving or scared she finds a toilet, dumpster or slave trader to rid herself of the unloved child. Or worse yet, she turns on the child and inflicts her own pain in very physical ways. Which animal is more compassionate?
Pro-lifers want to force life, no matter its level of suffering, on every human. If one is on life support they refuse to terminate it. You can beg for mercy but the pro-lifer will insist that you endure your evil fate. I used to watch the pro-life demonstrators at an abortion clinic in Florida and I noticed that they were always women and none of their faces looked like it had felt the grace of a smile in centuries. They were hard, angry women who seemed hell bent on punishing any woman that thought she might cheat God's punishment of Eve. I felt pity for them and anger at the same time. I recognized these women. It was the same face I'd seen in my childhood. My Mother.
My Mom is pro-life. One day in an argument she told me how I'd ruined her life. Years later as we talked about abortion she told me that I was "lucky she wasn't pro-choice". Hmmm. Lucky. How lucky was I to be reminded throughout my life that I was the unwanted, the unloved? I contemplated suicide from the time I was seven years old. Until I left home I didn't know that life could be good and full of joy. But I survived, and I found that there were better ways to live, joyful ways. But if it would have brought a better life to her, I'd have gladly given my life in a quick and painless abortion. It wasn't my choice, it was hers.
One day I will look into the beautiful, loving, blue eyes of my daughter and I will proudly say to her, "you're so lucky that I'm pro-choice" because I've loved you since the moment I felt your gentle spirit move with mine.
Happy Holidays (Christmas, Hannukah, Solstice, et...
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KPBJ
Minding Your Business
KPBJ Home
Minding Your Business Reporter Tad Sooter keeps tabs on the West Sound economy, nonprofits and health care.
Check out our new home at KitsapSun.com/blog/minding-your-business/
Kingston’s Axe Handle Café closing in February
Kingston’s popular Axe Handle Café will close Feb. 6, according to a post on the restaurant’s Facebook page:
Dear Greater Kingston Community,It is with much sadness and relief that we are announcing the closing of Axe Handle Caf…
Posted by Axe Handle on Monday, January 25, 2016
Amy and Mark Anderson, owners of Cup and Muffin, launched the sit-down café three years ago and it quickly became a staple in downtown.
“There’s no better way of building community than just stopping in and sitting down together,” Amy Anderson told Kitsap Sun contributor Terri Gleich, who profiled the business last year.
Also closed in Kingston is the Main Street Ale House, which is apparently in the midst of an ownership change. A reopening date has not been announced.
Hello everyone! Another chapter for the Main Street Ale House is about to begin as we are transferring ownership in the…
Posted by Main Street Ale House on Friday, November 27, 2015
January 27, 2016 Business, Eating and Drinking, Openings & Closingsaxe handle café, cafe, closings, cup and muffin, dining, kingston, main street ale house, north kitsap, restaurant
County job numbers, employment improved in 2015
More Kitsap residents were employed and more people were working at jobs inside the county in 2015, according to preliminary year-end numbers released by the Employment Security Department.
Kitsap jobs
An average of 87,600 people worked for employers within the county last year, a 3.7 percent uptick from 2014. It was also a slight increase from Kitsap’s pre-recession high of 87,400, reported in 2006.
Job growth came from both the private and government sectors, which increased employment by 2.7 percent and 5.4 percent respectively.
Here’s a graphical look at job trends in Kitsap:
Kitsap jobs 2015
Create your own infographics
Employment/unemployment
Overall employment among Kitsap residents remains lower than before the recession, but there were signs of improvement last year.
The labor force – the total number of people working or seeking work – appeared to stabilize over the past three years, after declining through the recession. Kitsap’s labor force averaged 113,580 in 2015.
Average employment rose in 2014 and 2015, reaching 107,200 last year.
An average of 6,382 Kitsap residents were counted as unemployed last year, though the number only included people who were actively seeking work.
The county’s unemployment rate has fallen steadily since 2010, reaching 5.6 percent in 2015. This was partially due to declines in the labor force.
Here’s a graphical look at employment trends in Kitsap:
Kitsap Employment 2015
January 27, 2016 Business, Demographics, Economic Development, Employment2015, employment, jobs, labor force, unemployment, unemployment rate
Port launches free Wi-Fi at marinas
Boaters can now surf the web while snug in their slips at the Bremerton and Port Orchard public marinas.
The Port of Bremerton has launched a free Wi-Fi service at both Sinclair Inlet marinas, according to a Monday announcement.
“Studies have shown, and our customers have repeatedly told us that the number one utility they value bar none is connectivity,” port CEO Jim Rothlin said in the announcement. “It’s also the number one frustration they have with marinas as it can so often be weak, slow and unreliable.
The network provides a 125-megabyte-per-second access link shared by both facilities, which can be scaled up to 1 gigabyte-per-second as demand increases.
The system can accommodate up to 1,000 devices at a time. Service is provided by NW Commnet of Bremerton.
In an email, Rothlin said the agency spent about $150,000 installing a fiber optic backbone and Wi-Fi system at both marinas.
Hardware chosen for the network had to be especially rugged to survive in the corrosive marine environment.
“I would say the biggest challenges were getting coverage through all parts each marina, dealing with getting coverage within covered moorage, and keeping the connection across the two marinas as the tide goes in and out,” Rothlin said.
The full announcement, with more technical info, is posted below: Continue reading →
January 25, 2016 Business, Economic Development, Maritime, Port of Bremerton, Tech, Tourism & Recreationboating, boats, bremerton, bremerton marina, internet, nw commnet, port or bremerton, port orchard, port orchard marina, recreation, sinclair inlet, tech, tourism, wi-fi
The priciest Kitsap home sales of 2015
These were the most expensive homes sold in Kitsap County in 2015, excluding Bainbridge Island (island homes are listed here). Details from public records and online listings.
1. Olympic View waterfront (CK) — $1.36 million
Sale date: July 7
Location: 6855 NW Brothers View Lane (off Olympic View Loop)
Description: A 4,000-square-foot, three-bedroom, four-bath house on a 2-acre waterfront parcel facing Hood Canal. Built in 2006.
Listing here.
2. President Point waterfront (NK) — $1.35 million
Sale date: Jan. 13
Location: 13176 NE James Way
Description: A 4,600-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-bath house on 0.4 acres facing Puget Sound. Built in 2009.
“Unobstructed Puget Sound & Cascade mountain range views, stretching from beyond Mt. Baker to Mt. Rainier. Elegance, seamlessly combined with comfort and style.”
Listing and photos here.
3. Scandia waterfront (NK) — $1.2 million
Sale date: June 3
Location: 15716 Virginia Point Road
Description: A 2,800-square-foot, three-bedroom, 2.25-bath house on 0.7 acres, on the south shore of Liberty Bay. Built in 1999.
“Rare property… deep water moorage and tidelands.”
Listing and photos here. Continue reading →
January 22, 2016 Real Estate2015, home sales, kitsap county, priciest homes, real estate
The priciest Bainbridge home sales of 2015
The median price for homes sold on Bainbridge Island in 2015 was $615,000, meaning a lot of properties sold for a whole lot more.
In fact, 71 Bainbridge homes fetched more than $1 million, according to county assessor’s records. That was up from 55 in 2014, and 47 in 2013.
Below is a look at the top 10 priciest Bainbridge residential sales of 2015. See my 2014 list here.
Top Bainbridge Island Home Sales
These were the most expensive homes sold on Bainbridge Island in 2015. Details from public records and online listings.
1. Country Club waterfront — $2.77 million
Click for an interactive map
Sale date: May 21
Location: 11078 Country Club Road
Description: A 5,600-square-foot, three-bedroom, five-bath house situated on 0.78 acres. Built in 2003.
“Sweeping views of Puget Sound and Seattle’s skyline are seen from most rooms of this masterwork in American Arts & Crafts Architecture, sited at the mouth of Blakely Harbor.”
2. Point White waterfront — $2.75 million
Sale date: Oct. 19
Location: 3220 Point White Drive NE
Description: A 3,300-square-foot, three-bedroom, 2.75-bath house on 0.43 acres, facing Rich Passage. Built in 1979.
“Poised on 162’ of south-facing low bank waterfront, this stunning Hal Moldstad design is classic Northwest style at its best…comfortable, understated and serene… in perfect harmony with its landscape.”
January 21, 2016 Real Estate2015, bainbridge island, home sales, median price, priciest homes, real estate
Graphic: Beer production soars in Kitsap
Kitsap’s Year in Beer 2015
Of course, Kitsap breweries represent just a tiny portion of Washington’s ballooning craft beer industry.
Here’s an interactive map showing licensed breweries and production across the state:
January 20, 2016 Brewing & Distilling, Business, Eating and Drinking, Economic Developmentbeer, breweries, brewing, craft beer, kitsap on tap, liquor and cannabis board
Gig Harbor Safeway reopens Feb. 3; no date for Port Orchard store
The Gig Harbor Safeway that became a Haggen will become a Safeway again on Feb. 3.
But Safeway spokeswoman Sara Osborne said no reopening date has been announced for the vacant Safeway-turned-Haggen in Port Orchard, also set to return to the Safeway fold.
Safeway parent company Albertsons LLC. bought back both stores from Haggen in a bankruptcy auction last fall.
Haggen stores in Silverdale and East Bremerton were not purchased during those auctions and remain empty. The Bucklin Hill Road and Wheaton Way locations were previously operated by Alberstons.
January 15, 2016 Business, Openings & Closings, Real Estate, Retailalbertsons, bremerton, gig harbor, grocery, haggen, port orchard, retail, safeway, silverdale
Marijuana store approved in Gorst
Marijuana shops keep sprouting in the south end of Kitsap County.
Thursday the state Liquor and Cannabis Board approved a license for a recreational marijuana retailer called GreenX3, located at 4235 Olympic Drive W in Gorst.
Just last week a shop called Legal Marijuana Superstore got the green light on Bethel Road.
The addition of GreenX3 brings Kitsap’s count of legal retailers to 10 (not including a tribal store in Suquamish). The state plans to issue up to 20 retail licenses in the county.
There are another 10 licensed producers/processors in the county.
Zoom in on the map above to see all the county’s licensed marijuana businesses.
January 15, 2016 Business, Marijuana, Retailgreenx3, I-502, liquor and cannabis board, marijuana, pot, retail
Poulsbo Chamber director takes Port Angeles post
Marc Abshire
The Greater Poulsbo Chamber of Commerce is under interim leadership following the resignation of former director Marc Abshire.
Abshire stepped down to take a job as executive director of the Port Angeles Regional Chamber, according to a story in the Peninsula Daily News. He was hired in Poulsbo in October 2014.
Poulsbo Chamber board treasurer Dan Barry will serve as interim director, according to a news release.
“Poulsbo is experiencing historic growth and dynamic new economic opportunities and the board is excited to work together to renew, strengthen and build partnerships in 2016,” Poulsbo Chamber President Ingmar Anderson said in the release.
The chamber’s annual gala and awards ceremony is scheduled for Jan. 16 at the Clearwater Casino event center.
January 13, 2016 Business, Economic Development, Tourism & Recreationchambers of commerce, dan barry, economic development, greater poulsbo chamber of commerce, marc abshire, north kitsap, olympic peninsula, port angeles, port angeles regional chamber, poulsbo
Regal Cinemas headlines fall commercial sales
The $3.1 million sale of the Regal Cinemas in Silverdale to Newlife Church was among the notable commercial transactions closed in Kitsap County during the last three months of 2015.
By far the largest, however, was the foreclosure sale for 42 vacant parcels in Poulsbo’s College Marketplace.
MUFG Union Bank, which forced the sale, took ownership of the properties for a recorded sales price of $8.17 million.
A total of 85 commercial parcels changed hands in the fourth quarter of 2015 for a combined $23.6 million, according to county assessor’s records.
Here’s a look at some of the high profile transactions:
College Marketplace parcels, Poulsbo — $8.17 million
Assessed value: About $21 million
Sold by: Hacker & Willig Inc (Trustee) to MUFG Union Bank
Description: 42 tax parcels in the College Marketplace development in Poulsbo, adjacent to Walmart and Home Depot.
Notes: Previous owner was Olhava Associates Limited Partnership of Edmonds. Olhava defaulted on loans issued by Frontier Bank.
Union Bank was the successor to Frontier Bank, which was closed in 2010. The College Marketplace properties are still listed for sale.
Regal Cinemas, Silverdale — $3.1 million
Sale date: Nov. 12
Assessed value: $2.95 million
Sold by: Eastgate Theatre Inc. to New Life Church on the Peninsula
Description: A 15,000-square-foot cinema on 2.6 acres at 9923 Poplars Ave.
Notes: Newlife Church plans to turn the building into an education and worship center. The cinema will continue to operate into early 2016. Continue reading →
January 13, 2016 Business, Construction & Development, Real Estatecommercial real estate, commercial sales, construction, development, foreclosure, land, real estate
Where will you get your Christmas tree this year?
I'll buy my tree from a lot or store.
I'll go to a u-cut tree farm.
I'll dust off my trusty artificial tree.
I'll legally harvest a tree.
I don't plan to have a Christmas tree.
Tad’s tweets
Tweets by @tsooter
Moctezuma’s plans soft opening this week at Kitsap Mall
ARCO station and ampm store proposed in Poulsbo
Toy shop open in old Winslow Drug
State approves St. Anthony Hospital expansion
Home sales remained strong in November
Tad Sooter on Moctezuma’s plans soft opening this week at Kitsap Mall
Chris rossi on Moctezuma’s plans soft opening this week at Kitsap Mall
D-RENT/D-TIME IS TOO DAMN HIGH on Average apartment rent now $1,134 in Kitsap
Anthony on New Admiral Manor owner wants to help ‘revitalize’ Bremerton
Anonymous on Poulsbo store hosts state’s first Walmart training academy
Kitsap On Tap
Kitsap Peninsula Business Journal
kitsap public health district
Navy & Defense
Senior & Assisted Living
Tourism & Recreation
Unions & Labor
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BC Poetry 2017: An Introduction
Last year I ran BC Poetry 2016 (and the corresponding #BCPoetry2016 hashtag on Twitter), featuring a new poetry book (and poem) each day throughout the month. This year I'm bringing it back with BC Poetry 2017 (and the corresponding #BCPoetry2017 hashtag), and it's grown: 21 participating presses compared to last year's 12.
Rocksalt: An Anthology
of Contemporary BC Poetry
In my intro to last year's series I spoke about judging the 2014 Dorothy Livesay Prize (BC Book Prizes), which was an eye opening experience for me (So many BC poets! So little coverage!). Lately I've been thinking about another BC institution: Mother Tongue Publishing and their 2008 anthology Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry.
At the time of its publication, it had been 31 years since the last effort to group together the poets of BC in one book, and to the best of my knowledge no one has taken up the task in the nine years since (though Vancouver-focused anthologies have been published, along with a couple Cascadia anthologies and Mother Tongue's own Forcefield: 77 Women Poets from British Columbia).
Rocksalt pulled together 108 BC poets, both established and up-and-coming, and - as one of my first publications early in my writing life - opened my eyes to the potential of being a poet in this province. It showed me the wealth and range of talent in BC, and - more simply - that we're damn well everywhere (from Massett to Smithers to Nelson to Richmond to...). I read the list of contributors now and am taken aback (Barton, bissett, Blomer, Blythe, Bowering, Braid... and we haven't even left the Bs!). I'm equally struck by the thought of the BC writers not included, and the writers who have started publishing in the intervening years - a list as long, or longer, than Rocksalt's.
This little project is no anthology, and it's far less exhaustive than any of the publications mentioned above, but if you stick with it over the next month, BC Poetry 2017 will give you 30 new poems from 30 new (and good-as-new) poets. I hope they inpsire you as Rocksalt did for me: get you reading and writing and appreciating anew that all these talented poets are hiding out so near to home!
Details on the Project
A new book will be profiled each day throughout the month. To be eligible, the book must have been written by a BC poet or published by a BC poetry publisher (ideally both!), and must have been released in either Fall 2016 or Spring 2017. Sundays will be "wild card" days featuring books that wouldn't ordinarily qualify - you'll have to check in to find out what they are!
Participating Publishers
Anstruther Press
Anvil Press
Biblioasis
BookThug
Brick Books
Caitlin Press
Coach House Books
Freehand Books
Gaspereau Press
Goose Lane Editions
Leaf Press
McGill-Queens University Press
Mother Tongue Publishing
Nightwood Editions
Quattro Books
Talonbooks
Some publishers were contacted and did not reply.
The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.
Labels: BCPoetry2017, community, review
BC Poetry 2017: "Prosopopoeia" by Shazia Hafiz Ramji (Anstruther Press)
See You Tomorrow
Tomorrow you’ll find me when you sign on.
You’ll send me a DM, ask me to drop you a pin.
I’ll say, “Hey! I’m here!” as if this here is enough,
as if the here is still now. You’ll ask me if I’m lost
and I’ll remember how far away you are from me.
But I’ve DM’d you once more to say
I saw the latest version of a human-size bot
that it walked with a limp
and I felt sad and sorry for it.
This is what she meant when she saw him
hanging from the ceiling and wanted to place a chair
beneath him, so that his knees don’t hurt when he falls.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji lives in Vancouver, BC where she edits books and writes poems, reviews, and stories. Her poetry was shortlisted for the 2016 National Magazine Awards and is forthcoming in Canadian Literature and filling Station. She is the incoming poetry editor for Prism international and was co-editor for the "Intersections" issue of Poetry is Dead. She has been a guide for Poor Yoricks' Summer and Sacred Jest, groups dedicated to reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
Prosopopoeia is a chapbook of poems that speak to the absent and the dead. These poems comprise the voices of screens talking to each other, the meanest employers, and the Internet under the ocean. Or, Prosopopoeia is a spectral chorus that strives for sincerity, particularly when addressing "you" and Philip Seymour Hoffman. This book should be enjoyed alone, in the light of a computer screen with the sound of "Rain - Gentle Rain Sounds - HD Sleep Sounds" on YouTube.
Arrived February 2017.
Book Launches: Happened April 27th in Vancouver!
Purchases: From the Anstruther Press website. $10.
Sincerely addressing Philip Seymour Hoffman w/ the voice of the Internet under the ocean.
Anstruther Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "Helpless Angels" by Tom Wayman (Thistledown Press)
Excerpt from “Like Water, Music”
Indeed, the human throat and mouth
are shaped as much for music
as for any other utterance. Sung words
were perhaps coincident with speech
—one thinks of those stutterers
who nonetheless can mellifluously
When winter fog
hovers over white fields here, shelves of ice
materialize at the edges of the rivulets and creeks
that thread out of the mountainside spruce and cedar forest.
So, too, fingers absently strumming guitar strings,
or an ear that absorbs a sequence of heard or
imagined sounds, or a hand scribing time-signature changes
onto a sheet of lined staves
are transubstantiated
by a mind into harmonies, contrapuntal rhythms, ballads
while above the ridges
float enormous clouds
—vast reservoirs of future music.
Tom Wayman has published more than twenty poetry collections, three essay collections, two short story collections, a collection of novellas, and a novel. He has also edited six poetry anthologies. He has been Writer-in-Residence at the universities of Windsor, Alberta, Simon Fraser, Winnipeg, and Toronto. He is a co-founder of two BC alternative post-secondary ventures: the Vancouver Centre of the Kootenay School of Writing (1984–87) and the writing department of Nelson’s Kootenay School of the Arts (1991–2002). He is currently a director of the Calgary Spoken Word Festival Society and of Nelson’s Kootenay Literary Society, where he serves on the education committee and the Elephant Mountain Literary Festival organizing committee. Wayman lives in Winlaw, BC.
Helpless Angels weaves several themes together: music’s impact on a life, expressed through memory; poems that are like songs; music found in or described through nature; poems that directly consider music’s power; and, as a counterpoint to how music carries us through life, how art — and each of us — deals with significant loss. Wayman looks at the ubiquitousness of widespread personal access to music that began in the 1950s and has continued to expand ever since.
Arrives May 1st, 2017 (Monday!).
Book Launches: May 12, 7:30 PM, Oxygen Art Centre, Nelson. May 26, 7:30 PM, The Bean Scene, Vernon. June 8, 7 PM, VPL Central Branch, Vancouver. Details on all Tom's launches can be found here.
Purchases: From the Thistledown Press website or at your local bookstore. $20.
Looking at the ubiquitousness.
Thistledown Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "What The Soul Doesn't Want" by Lorna Crozier (Freehand Books)
When The Bones Get Cold
My husband sends me hummingbirds
from his eyes. Only he and I know
he’s going blind. For him, I don’t get old.
His fingers, chapped from gardening, sand my skin,
bring out the grain he cannot see.
I am made beautiful by loss. The moon, too,
grows more far-sighted. Its light compliments:
the smallest birds don’t disagree. There’s a sweetness
that comes from accepting what I am,
not a mountain, not a river, not a tree.
Lorna Crozier, an Officer of the Order of Canada, is the author of sixteen previous books of poetry, most recently The Wrong Cat and The Wild in You. She is also the author of The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Ordinary Things and the memoir Small Beneath the Sky. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria, has been awarded the Governor General's Award for Poetry, and is a three-time recipient of the Pat Lowther Award. Born in Swift Current, she now lives on Vancouver Island with writer Patrick Lane and two fine cats.
In What the Soul Doesn’t Want, Lorna Crozier describes the passage of time in the way that only she can. Her arresting, edgy poems about aging and grief are surprising and invigorating: a defiant balm. At the same time, she revels in the quirkiness and whimsy of the natural world. Crozier’s signature wit and striking imagery are on display as she stretches her wings and reminds us that we haven’t yet seen all that she can do.
Arrives May 2017.
Book Launches: May 30th at Munro’s Books in Victoria.
Purchases: From the Freehand Books website or at your local bookstore. $16.05.
Balming defiantly.
Freehand Books * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "Linger, Still" by Aislinn Hunter (Gaspereau Press)
Despite Our Best Attempts to Catalogue
the body breaks into pixels, machine failure–
aches, pains, a dimming.
What once thrummed
now flashes Error–
so that whatever philosophy
you sailed in on,
whatever two-minute film of
‘a day on the beach in June’ that said
this was my life to you,
comes stuttering to a halt.
Then, a silence, a proclivity
to witness,
an anonymity that wants nothing
but to linger.
In this last lick of light
before the day gives out, listen:
there are masterworks painted
by the wholly forgotten and unnamed,
and there are Rembrandts and Bruegels
so wasted and decayed
no semblance of art history
can remake them.
That is us: the dust in the room
where the new paintings hang–
but oh, the music
in that sweeping.
Aislinn Hunter is the author of six books: two books of poetry, three books of fiction and a book of lyric essays. She is a contributing editor at Arc Magazine and has contributed to numerous anthologies. She has a BFA in The History of Art and in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria, an MFA from The University of British Columbia, an MSc in Writing and Cultural Politics from The University of Edinburgh where she has just completed a PhD in English Literature. She teaches Creative Writing part-time at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and lives in Vancouver with her husband Glenn and two Border collies.
Aislinn Hunter writes of impossibilities that somehow function; of the tenuous interrelations that comprise our experience. Grounded by the questions "how to be good, how to be," Hunter's field of inquiry ranges across domestic, ecological, literary and philosophical subjects. Her poems are exclamations of recognition in the midst of caginess. This collection reaches for, and grasps, "what lists under every pose: the hope / that someone will love us".
Arrived April 2017.
Book Launches: May 4th, The Main, Vancouver (w/ Catherine Owen!)
Purchases: From the Gaspereau Press website or at your local bookstore. $21.95.
Exclaiming in the midst of caginess.
Gaspereau Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "The If Borderlands: Collected Poems" by Elise Partridge (New York Review Books)
Nothing fled when we walked up to it,
nor did we flinch,
even at the hobnailed gators sunning two-inch fangs,
a licorice-whip snake slipping over our shoes.
The normally secretive clapper rail
appeared under our boardwalk
glancing this way and that,
casual as a moviegoer hunting for a seat.
Tropical, temperate, each constituency spoke—
the sunburned-looking gumbo-limbo trees
nodded side by side with sedate, northern pines.
Even the darkness gave its blessing
for the moonflower to open under its aegis.
A bird swaying on a coral bean
sang two notes that might have been “Name me.”
Elise Partridge (1958–2015) was born in Philadelphia and grew up nearby. After graduating from Harvard in 1981, she received a second Bachelor of Arts from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a Marshall Scholar. She returned to Harvard for a Master of Arts and then took a degree in writing from Boston University. In 1992 she moved to Vancouver, where she lived with her husband, a teacher of medieval literature, for the rest of her life. She taught writing and literature at several universities. Fielder’s Choice (2002) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Chameleon Hours (2008) won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 2009, and was a finalist for the BC Book Prize that year. Her third book, The Exiles’ Gallery, was published in 2015. Partridge’s work has been anthologized in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Southwest Review, Yale Review, Slate, The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, PN Review, and Poetry Ireland Review.
Elise Partridge’s poetry has been widely admired for its scrupulous truth to life and meticulous, glittering craft. Whether writing about family and friends, the natural world and the daily round, or serious illness, Partridge was, as Rosanna Warren has said, “a poet of brilliant precisions. Each line represents a new, glinting angle of thought... The result is an art of eerie compassion and an almost hyper-realist perception of the small.”
The If Borderlands includes all the poems that Partridge prepared for publication during her lifetime as well as a selection of uncollected or unpublished poems.
"In their ample, embracing, nuanced appetite for sensory experience, [Partridge’s] poems achieve an ardent, compassionate, and unsentimental vision." —Robert Pinsky
Arrived March 2017.
Book Launches: TBA.
Purchases: From the New York Review Books website or at your local bookstore. $22.
Meticulous, glittering craft.
NYRB * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "Thin Air of the Knowable" by Wendy Donawa (Brick Books)
On Looking into David Blackwood’s Seabird Hunters
Wax resist on a copper plate
repels the nitric acid, vinegar-sharp,
but the etching needle seeks that icy void,
presses down to its core; the acid bites and bites
like the iceberg pressing through the skin of the world,
its vaults and pinnacles gleaming in the night;
its trapped starlight refracts sheen and spangle, and
plunges down searoads winding like rope
through upside-down mountains, peaks and chasms
where fish-huddles stream, silver, mouths agape,
their round sleepless eyes glint into the dark, the dark,
and through it all, leviathans surge,
the huge bell of their song.
There is no end to their longing.
Above, midget hunters in white sealskin coats, their sliver of boat
threads night water rippling silent
and over the iceberg three seabirds
wing, the hollow crick crick of their flight
under the resinous moon.
Wendy Donawa, formerly a museum curator and academic in Barbados, now lives on the West Coast and participates in Victoria’s vibrant poetry scene. Her poems have appeared in anthologies, magazines, and online publications across Canada. She was a finalist in The Malahat Review’s 2013 Open Season Competition, and in 2015 she was runner-up in the inaugural Cedric Literary Awards. She has published three chapbooks, Sliding Towards Equinox (Rubicon Press, 2009), Those Astonishments of Sorrow, of Joy (Leaf Press, 2012) and The Gorge: A Cartography of Sorrows (JackPine Press, 2016).
In her first collection, Thin Air of the Knowable, the physical landscapes of Wendy Donawa’s life—West Coast, Caribbean, prairies—ground many of her poems and often reflect the inner geography of her preoccupations. A road-trip poem moves from prairie winter, “an icy scatter of gravel / the moving centre of this unpeopled world,” past a cattle liner on its way to the slaughter house, but it also passes beneath the sky’s “blazing scroll of light,” and magpies “flashing black and teal in the sun.” Landscape also functions metaphorically to suggest how historical settings play out in the exigencies of individual lives.
Other preoccupations include poems that reflect on poesis itself—the strange poem-making compulsion to capture that which is largely inexpressible (hence “the thin air of the knowable”), and the role of dreams, memory, and intuition in shaping a poem’s knowledge.
Donawa is, in many ways, a political poet, yet manages to put flesh and blood into everything she writes. In the end,
Perhaps there is only the demonic journey.
Small beauties by the roadside, and
such love as we can muster.
(from “Pu Ru Paints Zhong Kui the Demon Queller on a Mule”)
“Wendy Donawa’s poetry rests at the very edge of beauty where a wild delicacy resides.” — Patrick Lane
“Like the watchmakers of old, Wendy Donawa puts a spyglass to her eye and fixes her vision to the minute, to all that carries on beneath our imperfect sight—worlds upon worlds brought into the sharpest focus.” — Pamela Porter
Arrives April 2017.
Book Launches: June 9th at Planet Earth Poetry in Victoria.
Purchases: From the Brick Books website or at your local bookstore. $20.
Edge-resting with a wild delicacy.
Brick Books * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "a place called No Homeland" by Kai Cheng Thom (Arsenal Pulp Press)
autopsky
someday they’ll cut this body open
and discover that my flesh is made of sky:
azure, sapphire, cerulean, turquoise, ultramarine
cirrus and cumulus clouds stirring behind my eyes
cumulonimubus, alight with lightning,
crackling through the capillaries of the heart.
i am oh so full of rain
you could fall through me into forever.
dear scientist, mortuary explorer, search me thoroughly
tenderly catalogue all my wayward parts.
find somewhere in me
the forgotten moon, the faded stars.
re-member, reassemble, this tattered heaven, this
celestial thing.
Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performance artist, and psychotherapist in Toronto. Her novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir was released by Metonymy Press in 2016 and her picture book for children From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea (illustrated by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li) will be published by Arsenal Pulp Press in Fall 2017.
In these fierce yet tender narrative poems, Kai Cheng Thom draws equally from memory and mythology to create new maps of gender, race, sexuality, and violence. In the world of a place called No Homeland, the bodies of the marginalized—queer and transgender communities, survivors of abuse and assault, and children of diaspora—are celebrated, survival songs are sung, and the ancestors offer you forgiveness for not remembering their names.
Descended from the traditions of oral storytelling, spoken word, and queer punk poetry, Kai Cheng Thom’s debut collection is evocative and unforgettable.
Arrives May 2017
Book Launches: Sounds Like Fire: Femme4Femme, April 25th (Tomorrow!), 8PM, Verses Festival, The Cutch, Vancouver. Get tickets here!
Purchases: From the Arsenal Pulp Press website or at your local bookstore. $14.95.
Creating new maps of gender, race, sexuality, and violence.
Arsenal Pulp Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "Bad Engine" by Michael Dennis (Anvil Press)
in the backyard
a lie is a lie
is sitting on your couch
eating out of the cat’s dish
hiding in the backyard
Michael Dennis has been hammering his love, his anger, his grief, and his awe into poems for over forty years. With seven books and nearly twenty chapbooks to his credit, Dennis isn't exactly a household name in Canadian poetry, but he is a natural heir to poet like Canadian icon Al Purdy and American legends Eileen Myles and Charles Bukowski. His poems are his life made into poems: direct, emphatic, honest.
Bad Engine brings together mostly revised versions of about one hundred poems selected from Dennis’s published work, along with several dozen new poems. This volume, introduced and edited by Dennis’s long-time friend, the poet and editor Stuart Ross, marks a milestone in the career of a homegrown, no-bullshit, tells-it-likes-he-sees-it populist bard. Here the reader will find a rollicking tale of drinking with racists, poignant prayers for quiet nights with lovers, raw narratives of childhood abuse, defiant anthems of a body broken by sports injuries, a mindful meditation about a stoned dragonfly, and the not-quite-resigned laughter of a man smashing away at a keyboard for four decades and becoming neither rich nor famous.
Book Launches: Unknown!
Purchases: From the Anvil Press website or at your local bookstore. $20.
Drinking with racists, praying with lovers, meditating about stoned dragonflies.
Anvil Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "Bad Ideas" by Michael V. Smith (Nightwood Editions)
I’m watching a videotape of my partner
and I making love at eighteen.
I can’t get over how beautiful we were,
how thin and small our
waists and ribcages. How
much hair I had.
I found the tape in a box of things
at my mom’s house; she’d obviously
been going through each
of my diaries and photos.
I thought you were happy,
and straight, my mom says that evening,
half-asleep, but bitterly.
I am happy, but I never
said I was straight, I tell her.
I pick up the box to take it with me.
You’re welcome, she says as a gesture.
Michael V. Smith is a writer, comedian, filmmaker, performance artist and occasional clown. He is the author of several books including What You Can’t Have (Signature Editions, 2006), which was short-listed for the ReLit Award, and My Body Is Yours (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015), which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He is also the winner of the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writers and was nominated for the Journey Prize. Smith currently teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna.
Nobody knows bad ideas quite like Michael V. Smith. In Bad Ideas, he speaks to an intangibility of sense, or a sense beyond the rational. The book explores the inevitability of loss and triumph with characteristic irony and tenderness. Through this dazzling collection of a remembered life, hung out to ogle like laundry on the line, Smith recalls a mother who discovers a sex tape, a man who dreams of birthing his own son and a woman who blends her baby girls into milkshakes.
Bad Ideas is a testament to how an altered perspective effects change, how stories can be recast. The collection forms itself into an exercise in which optimism is a practiced art recaptured in dreams and prayers and combined to acknowledge the unknowable, the contradictory, the ungraspable: "An evening is composed / in a hundred unchoreographed / dramas”; "I pull a Clark Kent / transform, dressed as a monk / in burgundy and gold robes. I think / this will protect me, but it doesn't”; "Dear Hatred, sweet / Hatred, do you not move our enemies / to know us better?” Hyperbolic and sincere, this collection brawls with the unquantifiable themes of family, loneliness and love.
Coming May 2017.
Book Launches:
Prince George, April 28
Kelowna, May 12
Montreal, May 23
Ottawa, May 24
Toronto Glad Day, May 25
Kingston, May 31
Hamilton, May 26
Vancouver, June 14
Keep an eye on Michael's website for details!
Purchases: From the Harbour Publishing website or at your local bookstore. $18.95.
Acknowledging the ungraspable.
Nightwood Editions * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "Flightpaths: The Lost Journals of Amelia Earhart" by Heidi Greco (Caitlin Press)
By the dawn's early light
Two knives but no flint
to spark light against the dark.
Fred’s book of matches
bleeds a soggy pink, alongside
the Unlucky Strikes tucked in his sock
navy man’s trick gone awry.
If only the blazing heat of day
could be packed up for night
opened as a welcome lamp
at the twilight’s last gleaming.
Oh for the glow of a fire to warm us,
throw its comfort and joy.
Heidi Greco is a longtime resident of Surrey, BC. In addition to writing and editing, she often leads workshops on topics that range from ekphrastic poetry to chapbook making. She’s been an advocate for the literary arts in her community and was instrumental in establishing two distinct reading series, but she considers her greatest success to have been convincing her city to hire an official Poet Laureate. She writes in many genres – with poems, fiction, essays and book reviews to her credit. Her books include a novella, Shrinking Violets which was co-winner of the Ken Klonsky Award in 2011. Her work has also appeared in many anthologies, most recently in Make it True: Poetry from Cascadia (Leaf Press, 2015) and The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (Anvil, 2015).
On the 120th anniversary of Amelia Earhart’s birth and the 80th anniversary of her disappearance, award-winning poet, Heidi Greco revitalizes what we know about the iconic aviator through uplifting and historically mesmerizing verse. If most people were asked what they know about Amelia Earhart, they’d probably respond with something like “Wasn’t she that pilot who went missing when she tried to fly around the world?”
Although that much is true, Earhart was so much more. She was a feminist at a time when women were just beginning to make inroads towards equality. She was a best-selling author who made appearances and speeches that inspired many. In addition, she was a pacifist, a poet, a punster – the list could go on. She was ahead of her time in so many ways, right down to the no-nonsense clothes she wore (many of them fashioned after her own designs).
The poems in Flightpaths: The Lost Journals of Amelia Earhart, presented as if written by Earhart herself, consider some of the many theories that attempt to explain her disappearance. Through logbook entries, recollections and letters, the work explores some of the various flightpaths she may have taken.
June 17 - Launch on Gabriola Island (home of Lipstick Press, who first published the little chapbook, A: The Amelia Poems).
June 23 - Feature reader at 'Surrey Muse' (North Surrey)
June 25 - Feature reader at 'Word Arts Live!' (Crescent Beach)
July 6 - Feature reader at TWS (SFU Creative Writing Program reading series, Vancouver)
July 14, 15 - Feature author at Amelia Earhart Festival (Atchison, Kansas)
July 24 - 'Birthday celebration for Amelia Earhart' - Surrey Public Library (North Surrey)
Purchases: From the Cailtin Press website or at your local bookstore. $18.
Exploring the various flightpaths.
Caitlin Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "Same Diff" by Donato Mancini (Talonbooks)
"you aren’t going to like what i have to say"
before i start i want to say you shouldn’t blame yourself
there’s no point in beating around the bush
there’s something we need to talk about
this is the most difficult thing i’ve ever had to tell anyone
the longer i wait the harder it’s going to be
it’s best if we face this right now
what i’m about to tell you won’t be easy to hear
i know this will hurt but it has to be said
i don’t like being the bearer of bad news
please sit down, this could come as a shock
you knew this was coming, right?
i hope this won’t be a complete surprise
hate to break it to you
please don’t kill the messenger
i have some really bad news
how do i even say this
this is really really hard for me
there are no words for what i have to tell you
i can’t go on lying anymore
you aren’t going to like what i have to say
Donato Mancini makes visual and procedural poetry, bookworks, and visual art. His books and chapbooks include Snowline (2015), Buffet World (2011), Fact ‘N’ Value (2011), Hell Passport no.22 (2008), Æthel (2007), 58 Free Coffees (2006), and Ligatures (2005). Notable exhibitions of Mancini’s visual artworks have included exhibitions through Artspeak, Western Front, Gallery Atsui, Malaspina Printmaker’s Society, and CSA. He performed with Gabriel Saloman in their noisepoetry/noisecomedy/noisemusic ensemble in the 2013 LIVE! Biennale of performance art, and as part of Concrete Scores at Open Space. Mancini’s published critical writing includes work on the archive, time, and memory in Anamnesia: Unforgetting (2011), and a discourse analysis of poetry reviews in You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence (2012). His previous full-length book, Loitersack (New Star, 2014), is a labyrinthine commonplace book where critical, theoretical, and paraliterary tendencies intersect in the forms of poetry, poetics, theory, theory theatre, laugh particles, and many, many questions. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of British Columbia.
Same Diff meets at the intersection of contemporary poetry, art, and current politics. Influenced by documentary cinema such as the films of Frederic Wiseman, Dada poets, montage techniques, and a range of modern poets, Same Diff explores the way social and economic histories become imprinted within language itself.
The political and poetic melancholy of our moment is revealed in a long poem on climate change, particularly the disappearance of snow, while the real-life effects of fiscal austerity and poverty are voiced in fragments conveying social neuroses that stem from amplified, unfair competition for basic necessities.
Each poem introduces a dominant motif that develops through repetition and incremental variations, sourcing language from newspapers, online sources, and overheard conversations to create an emotive effect, as felt in music.
Book Launches: April 27, 7:30 PM, Talonbooks Spring Launch, The Western Front, Vancouver. Also, May 6, 8 PM, Duplex, Vancouver (Donato will be reading the whole book!).
Purchases: From the Talonbooks website, McNally-Robinson online, or at your local bookstore. $16.95.
Meeting at the intersection.
Talonbooks * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "To Love the Coming End" by Leanne Dunic (Bookthug)
Excerpt from To Love the Coming End
Leanne Dunic is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and writer. Her work has won several honours, including the 2015 Alice Munro Short Story Contest, and has appeared in magazines and anthologies in Canada and abroad. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Leanne is the Artistic Director of the Powell Street Festival Society and is the singer/guitarist of The Deep Cove.
In To Love the Coming End, a disillusioned author obsessed with natural disasters and ‘the curse of 11’ refl ects on their own personal earthquake: the loss of a loved one. A lyric travelogue that moves between Singapore, Canada, and Japan, this debut from Leanne Dunic captures what it’s like to be united while simultaneously separated from the global experience of trauma, history, and loss that colour our everyday lives.
Book Launches: Done and gone. More to come - keep an eye on her website!
Purchases: From the Bookthug website, or at your local bookstore. $18.
Obsession with natural disasters.
Bookthug * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "Dear Ghost" by Catherine Owen (Wolsak and Wynn)
And so they come a-courting in the Greyhound depot,
those torn bits of boys, those wanton travellers,
having won a fuzzy, bedizened animal
from the Hunter and Gatherer machine.
A claw descends with the exuberant morbidity of children
who play Barbie and Ken, Cannibals beneath the dining-
room table as the compote and endives are served.
There’s always a more precisely foreign term for life’s
sticking-together of things, a lilt that boosts the ego
in all the unHeimlich lands of Sturm und Drang we must
pass through, sons with guts busting the glitter glue off
their Dukes of Hazzard tees as they glut themselves
with filet-mignon Doritos, old ladies who do Sudoku
like sex, older ladies in fur, awkwardly lavish velour gowns
with Uggs. There’s just a five-minute stopover in every
small town in Canada, long enough to buy a dream catcher,
to chat about your tubal ligation with a complete stranger,
almost a de rigueur pas de deux à la five a.m., Valentine’s Day,
the edges pasted down so finely I can barely see where the piazza
meets Dali’s Persistence of Memory, where the Tower of Pisa leans
into Blake’s “Sick Rose,” only a hand reaching out mutely
to gift me with a panda, and the oldest lady of all yelling out,
“Really, at this point, I’d rather walk.”
Catherine Owen is the author of ten collections of poetry and three of prose, including her compilation of interviews on writing called The Other 23 & a Half Hours: Or Everything You Wanted to Know that Your MFA Didn’t Teach You (Wolsak & Wynn, 2015) and her short story collection, The Day of the Dead (Caitlin Press, 2016). Her work has been nominated for awards, toured Canada eight times and appeared in anthologies, as well as translations. She has been employed by both the Locations and the Props department in TV land, plays metal bass and has two cats: Solstice and Equinox.
Dear Ghost is an extended love letter to her poetic influences and to the real-world objects, people, places and situations that fascinate her. Inspired by the work of John Ashbery, among others, in Dear Ghost Owen returns to the kooky imagery and humorous style she last visited with her award-winning collection Frenzy. These poems entertain immensities of sound while plumbing the depths of the psyche’s surrealities, content to enter a dreamlike realm where meaning is found in the nonsensical, the utterly human and the everyday. While Owen gathers her subjects from the mundane – work, sex, acquaintances and art – she imbues them with the extraordinary quirks and uncertainties that only language can create, and the effects are dizzying.
Arrives TODAY! April 18th, 2017!
Book Launches: April 22 in New Westminster (Bed Lectures Series). May 4th in Vancouver at The Main. May 19th in Hamilton, Ontario. May 23rd in Kingston, Ontario.
Purchases: From the Wolsak and Wynn website, or at your local bookstore. $18.
Finding meaning in the nonsensical. Kookiness.
Wolsak and Wynn * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "Shakespearean Blues" by Shirley Graham (Mother Tongue Publishing)
Blue Ophelia
I think it was the flowers
that sent her over the edge,
not the other way around.
She’d thought to be wooed properly,
gallantly, with roses offered at her feet,
her nose, her bosom.
When this wasn’t the case,
she left the would-be lover,
went out to the wide world, and saw them,
gorgeous, seductive on their stems, and knew
a love that cracked her open,
all she needed of wooing there in the buds.
She offered blossoms here, there, anywhere to spread her love,
And when this too was not enough, she took herself
to the waters to become what the flowers would drink.
Shirley Graham has been writing, publishing in literary magazines and giving readings in Canada and the U.S. for three decades. She studied writing and literature at UC Irvine, UCLA, Brown University, the Sorbonne in Paris, and in private workshops with a range of writers, including Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Robert Haas and Mark Strand. Her books include Blue Notes, What Someone Wanted and Book of Blue. She is a psychologist and lives on Salt Spring Island with her husband, poet Peter Levitt, and son Tai.
Celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, Shakespearean Blues is a modern romp through the state of mankind, drenched in Shakespeare's words and characters. At turns joyous, tragic, witty, solemn, mysterious and wry, these poems are wide ranging like the quotes and characters that inspire them. Graham returns to the blue world of prior volumes, and uses the bard as a springboard to explore our human condition, seeing us somewhere between Puck's "Lord what fools these mortals be" and Miranda's "How beauteous mankind is!"
"Graham has the virtuosic skill of rendering a moment eternal."–Don Domanski
Arrived November 2016.
Book Launches: May 26th, 7:30 PM, Victoria, Planet Earth Poetry.
Purchases: From the Mother Tongue Publishing website or at your local bookstore. $19.95.
Romping through the state of mankind, drenched in Shakespeare.
Mother Tongue Publishing * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "In Fine Form, 2nd Edition" ed. Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve (Caitlin Press)
The pantoum, derived from the Malay pantun, has any number of metred four-line verses (stanzas) rhyming abab, but its most alluring feature is an intricate pattern of line repetition as follows:
Lines 2 and 4 of each stanza are repeated as lines 1 and 3 of the next, until the last stanza where all are repeated lines. In the last stanza, in addition to maintaining the above pattern, lines 2 and 4 are the same as lines 1 and 3 of the first stanza, so the poem ends as it begins. In other words, the repeating pattern of a four-stanza pantoum would be as follows:
stanza 1: 1 2 3 4,
stanza 4: 7 3 8 1.
Many variations are possible, including important but subtle shifts in meaning achieved by playing with syntax or slight changes in word order, such as Kayla Czaga uses here in her poem, “Song.”
"Song" by Kayla Czaga
Outside my window, seagulls and crows continue
the discourse on language, insisting it need not be beautiful
to be song. If song accompanies their shallow black
and white bickering over garbage at 5 A.M., do I still believe
language needs to be beautiful? Their insistent discourse
pecks holes in the morning. Here I am still trying
to believe, at 5 A.M. despite the bickering over garbage
because faith describes perfectly how my mother is dying.
Here I am still trying to peck holes in the morning;
song is just the word I use for wanting
faith to describe how perfectly my mother is dying
thousands of miles away, in a small town I rarely visit.
Song is just another word I want to use.
Illness is just another word. Mother is just a word
The winter light pours slowly through my window.
Illness is just a word. Mother is just a word
with someone in it. Can I sing without words?
The slow winter light pours through my window.
Long after I’ve stopped making sense, I’m just a sound
with someone in it. Can I sing without words
and still be song, accompanying the crows, shallow and black,
making sense with just sounds? Long after I’ve stopped
seagulls and crows continue outside my window.
Kate Braid worked as a receptionist, secretary, teacher’s aide, lumber piler, construction labourer, apprentice and journey-carpenter before finally “settling down” as a teacher. She has taught construction and creative writing, the latter in workshops and also at SFU, UBC and for ten years at Vancouver Island University (previously Malaspina University-College). In addition to several books of creative non-fiction (Red Bait: Stories of a Mine-Mill Local, Emily Carr: Rebel Artist, The Fish Come In Dancing, Looking Ahead: Profiles of Two Canadian Women in Trades, and Building the Future: Profiles of Canadian Women in Trades), she is the author of the poetry books A Well-Mannered Storm: The Glenn Gould Poems, Covering Rough Ground, To This Cedar Fountain and Inward to the Bones: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Journey with Emily Carr. In 2005 she co-edited, with Sandy Shreve, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry. Braid’s second book of poems about her carpentry experiences, Turning Left to the Ladies, was published by Palimpsest Press. Kate Braid tells the story of how she became a carpenter in the face of skepticism and discouragement in her 2012 memoir, Journeywoman. A revised edition of Covering Rough Ground – Rough Ground Revisited – was published by Caitlin Press. In 2015 she was awarded the Mayor of Vancouver’s Award for the Literary Arts for showing leadership and support for Vancouver’s cultural community. She lives in Vancouver, BC, with her partner.
Sandy Shreve has written, edited and/or co-edited seven books and two chapbooks. Her most recent poetry collection is Waiting for Albatross (Oolichan Books, 2015). Her previous books include Suddenly, So Much (Exile Editions, 2005) and Belonging (Sono Nis Press, 1997). Shreve’s contributions to the literary arts include founding BC’s Poetry in Transit program, as well as serving on a variety of committees and juries. Her poetry is widely anthologized and has won or been shortlisted for several awards. Now retired, she worked in communications for fifteen years and, prior to that, as an office manager, secretary, union coordinator, library assistant and reporter. Born in Quebec and raised in Sackville, New Brunswick, she lived for some 40 years in Vancouver, British Columbia. Sandy Shreve now makes her home on Pender Island in BC, where she is diving into a relatively new interest in photo art.
Kayla Czaga grew up in Kitimat and now lives in Vancouver, BC, where she recently earned her MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. In 2016, she received the Emerging Writer Award from the Canadian Authors Association. Her poetry, non-fiction and fiction has been published in The Walrus, Best Canadian Poetry 2013, Room Magazine, Event and The Antigonish Review, among others. Her debut book, For Your Safety Please Hold On, was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award (2015), the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (2015), and the Debut-litzer Prize (2015), and it won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (2015).
In the decade since the publication of the first edition of In Fine Form, there has been a resurgence of Canadian poets writing in “form” – in sonnets and ghazals, triolets and ballads, villanelles and palindromes — and formal poetry has become more visible in books, literary journals and classrooms. The first edition of this anthology was called “groundbreaking,” “a paradigm shift” and “a landmark text.” Since then, it has gone through several printings and been widely used in classrooms at all levels from elementary school to university, by writers who want to try something new, and by readers eager to explore a whole other side of Canadian poetry.
Of course, Canadians have always written in form, and some of its early practitioners such as Charles G.D. Roberts and Robert Service are again represented here, as well as more recent writers such as PK Page, Margaret Atwood, Fred Wah, Rachel Rose, Christian Bök and George Elliott Clarke. The new edition includes 51 new poets including Nicole Brossard, Rob Taylor, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Kyla Czaga, David O’Meara, Sheri-D Wilson, George Bowering, Lillian Allen, Marlene NorbeSe Philip, Mary Dalton, and also explores exciting new forms not acknowledged in most other anthologies including spoken word, prose poems, doublets, found poems and pas de deux.
In Fine Form 2nd Edition is an anthology that continues to break new ground, a thrilling collection of more than 25 forms and 180 poems arranged by section, one for each form, with a brief introduction to the form’s history and variations. An extended essay explores common poetic terms and technical devices. Surprising and exhilarating, here is a showcase for some of the best poetry this country has produced.
Arrived September 2016.
Book Launches: Done and gone!
Purchases: From the Cailtin Press website or at your local bookstore. $29.95.
Groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting, landmarking.
BC Poetry 2017: "Next Door to the Butcher Shop" by Rodney DeCroo (Nightwood Editions)
Black Columns
I could sleep for weeks in this bed, the black columns
of this room protecting me from the light. Indigent father,
your ghost haunts the bus stations of Appalachia
seeking your cross-eyed war balladeer,
a toothless banjo resting on his hothouse knees.
The draft dodger, your brother, died thirteen times
in Canada his ashes spread across Minnesota skies
like acid rain or grey tears returning to boyhood lakes
of eternal summer. He couldn’t repair your fractured face
or make disappear the greased stain of your M-16.
I live in a room in a terminal city. They pay me
because my head is broken. The relentless rain
striking the windows is the faint echo of gunshots
three generations ago through the fog of Europe.
I am your son. We have earned it like a wage.
Rodney DeCroo is a Vancouver-based singer/songwriter and poet. Born and raised in a small coal mining town just outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he has called Vancouver home for years now. He has released a previous collection of poetry, Allegheny, BC (Nightwood, 2012) and seven music albums that have received critical acclaim in Canada, the USA and Europe. Music critics have named him one of Canada’s best folk/alt-country songwriters.
Next Door to the Butcher Shop explores the permeability of memory and uncovers heart-wrenching beauty from shadowy grit.
How quickly age
descends on us. Our memories are maps
to places that don't exist. I was an emperor
on a green lawn wearing a white sheet
and a paper crown. The birds sang my praises
from the hedges and the trees
DeCroo unsentimentally recounts moments suffused with grief, longing and loss, and offers a refreshingly unfiltered view of one's self.
I'd stand for days along the edges of expressway
to sing off-key into the screams of semi-trailers and cars
until I stood within a cocoon of silence and flashing shadows
In a deft combination of lyrical and visceral imagery, Next Door to the Butcher Shop offers a rare, sharp, first-hand perspective of life around the edges, with dark comedy dispersed throughout.
Purchases: From the Harbour Publishing website or at your local bookstore. If you're in Vancouver, Rodney recommends People's Coop Bookstore (and I do too!). $18.95.
Refreshingly unfiltering one's self-view.
BC Poetry 2017: "Short Takes on the Apocalypse" by Patricia Young (Biblioasis)
Shott Takes on the Apocalypse
For many people, myself included, the end of the
world is happening all the time!
We stage a dress rehearsal that ends at eight p.m.
The lights dim, then go out.
The city disappears into darkness.
Nightly blackouts, ghostly trams.
Weary millions riding the subway
back and forth across the city.
A dress rehearsal is performed on the world’s stage.
No one is watching. When the play’s over
we go home to our dim hopes and prodigious hunger.
Poor actors dressed in bark cloth.
City of millions, city of endings.
It is eight o’clock.
On empty stomachs we forget our lines.
is a dim rehearsal on an unlit stage.
We are prodigious.
We are hopeful.
We lie down in the dark.
Patricia Young has published twelve collections of poetry and one of short fiction. She has received numerous awards for her writing including The Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, and a CBC Literary Prize. She has twice been nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Her collection of short fiction, Airstream, won the Rooke-Metcalf Award, was shortlisted for the Butler Prize and was named one of the Globe and Mail’s Best Books of the Year.
Short Takes on the Apocalypse features poems built entirely upon the words of others. Originating as a response to Elmore Leonard’s “Ten Rules of Writing,” and expanding to include poetic responses to quotations about writing from other sources—from Leonardo da Vinci to Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood to Jimmy Kimmel—the resulting pieces traverse a myriad of themes. Playfully exploring subjects as wide-ranging as veganism, gun violence, sex, parenting, feminism, death, and Coachella, Young bounces off the selected epigraphs with a vital energy and crackling wit.
Arrived October 2016.
Purchases: From the Biblioasis website or at your local bookstore. $18.95.
Building entirely upon the words of others.
Biblioasis * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "Night & Ox" by Jordan Scott (Coach House Books)
Excerpt from "Night & Ox"
of love-dread
reads me
coyote tolling
pupshins
you're small
your small
so cry's
inky stampede
blotchy
in bee
glyph kitchen
glottis island
dashberry
mirror drum
cosmoglottal
mudstone, look
it’s crystalline
starboard boyform
metadata tone
boxlip
salmonoid
unlicked
Jordan Scott is the author of Silt (2005), blert (2008) and, with Stephen Collis, Decomp (2013). Scott was the 2015/16 Writer-in-Residence at Simon Fraser University. He lives in Port Coquitlam, BC.
Night & Ox is a long poem working its interruptions to a degree where it's broken by the will to live. A poem that invokes expansive loneliness, where the poet's emotional response is to endure. A crushed line of astral forms and anatomy in perpetual remove; it is a poem that nurtures vulnerability: some soft-footed embryo sounds against language’s viscera. Night & Ox possesses a feral minimalism for those too tired and too frantic with joy to cope with narrative.
"Scott takes us down to the basement of words, where sound and rhythm rule, and poets learn their craft." – Dennis Lee
Book Launches: Done and gone.
Purchases: From the Coach House Books website or at your local bookstore. $18.95.
Soft-footing embryo sounds against language’s viscera.
Coach House Books * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "Dazzle Ships" by Jamie Sharpe (ECW Press)
SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONES/
RUSH TO THE MIDDLE
(Of Your Career, Get 25K)
Friends audit
the inside of your thighs.
against flesh.
A broad at home.
Marry, later,
when profits
falter.
“While Canada has some brilliant poets, does it have
enough good ones to grant prizes like this as much aes-
thetic relevance as financial reward?”*
Canada’s mid-career poets fall in an inverse bell curve:
the bulk being geniuses or imbeciles. There is no middle.
The need to editorialize over news.
New literary award: good.
—Too bland.
New literary award: good (but are we good enough for it?)
—Super Bland™!
*Jared Bland. The Globe and Mail. “Writers Trust of Canada announces new $25,000 prize for Canadian poets.” Tuesday, April 22, 2014.
Jamie Sharpe is the author of Animal Husbandry Today and Cut-up Apologetic. He lives in Comox, B.C.
Dazzle camouflage, at the beginning of the 20th century, was an attempt to answer the question, How do we hide those things that are too big to hide? Ships, often containing thousands of soldiers, were done up in a confusing array of lines to perplex and distort the viewer’s perspective (in this case, German submarines). “Razzle dazzle” was art attempting to hide life.
Jamie Sharpe’s Dazzle Ships is also concerned with art’s relationship to life. It questions how we build poems from the material of mass culture. And in asking whether authentic modes of expression can be found in an increasingly automated world, Sharpe creates a poetry that is at once as disturbing as it is hilarious and as deeply profound as it is subtle.
Arrives today!!! April 11th, 2017.
Book Launches: Unknown...
Purchases: From the ECW Press website or at your local bookstore. $18.95.
Hiding things that are too big to hide.
ECW Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!
BC Poetry 2017: "Prosopopoeia" by Shazia Hafiz Ram...
BC Poetry 2017: "Helpless Angels" by Tom Wayman (T...
BC Poetry 2017: "What The Soul Doesn't Want" by Lo...
BC Poetry 2017: "Linger, Still" by Aislinn Hunter ...
BC Poetry 2017: "The If Borderlands: Collected Poe...
BC Poetry 2017: "Thin Air of the Knowable" by Wend...
BC Poetry 2017: "a place called No Homeland" by Ka...
BC Poetry 2017: "Bad Engine" by Michael Dennis (An...
BC Poetry 2017: "Bad Ideas" by Michael V. Smith (N...
BC Poetry 2017: "Flightpaths: The Lost Journals of...
BC Poetry 2017: "Same Diff" by Donato Mancini (Tal...
BC Poetry 2017: "To Love the Coming End" by Leanne...
BC Poetry 2017: "Dear Ghost" by Catherine Owen (Wo...
BC Poetry 2017: "Shakespearean Blues" by Shirley G...
BC Poetry 2017: "In Fine Form, 2nd Edition" ed. Ka...
BC Poetry 2017: "Next Door to the Butcher Shop" by...
BC Poetry 2017: "Short Takes on the Apocalypse" by...
BC Poetry 2017: "Night & Ox" by Jordan Scott (Coac...
BC Poetry 2017: "Dazzle Ships" by Jamie Sharpe (EC...
BC Poetry 2017: "Otolith" by Emily Nilsen (Goose L...
BC Poetry 2017: "Making Room: Forty Years of Room ...
BC Poetry 2017: "Digsite" by Owain Nicholson (Nigh...
BC Poetry 2017: "The Rules of the Kingdom" by Juli...
BC Poetry 2017: "Frequent, Small Loads of Laundry"...
BC Poetry 2017: "Auguries" by Clea Roberts (Brick ...
BC Poetry 2017: "Acquired Community" by Jane Byers...
BC Poetry 2017: "A tattered coat upon a stick" by ...
BC Poetry 2017: "Crossing" by Alison Watt (Leaf Pr...
BC Poetry 2017: "Good for Nothing" by Curtis LeBla...
BC Poetry 2017: "then/again" by Michelle Elrick (N...
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Home > News and Stories > The Gift of Family
Earlier this week, one set of Wisconsin siblings got the best Christmas gift they could ever imagine. That’s when their foster parents, Chris and Wendy Attoe of Chippewa Falls, officially adopted Trysten (13) and Infinity (6), nicknamed “Finny.” A group of family members and social workers-turned friends gathered at Chippewa Falls Family Court to witness Judge Steven Cray unwrap the gift of family.
He asked the children if they wanted 14-year old Jayden Attoe to officially be their big brother and received a resounding, “Yes!” He then asked if they wanted Chris and Wendy to officially be their parents. That response was also very positive and was followed up with a request for ice cream for Finny and a celebratory lobster dinner for Trysten.
Both kids would eventually get their requested treats, along with the rest of the day off from school, because it was such a special occasion. After the parents confirmed they were willing and able to provide care for the pair as if they were their own, Judge Cray made it official just in time for Christmas.
Gotcha Day was a Long Time Coming
(left to right) Trysten, Finny and Jayden Attoe
The family has been together for just shy of two years already. In fact, the Attoes were the first Northwestern Wisconsin family to be licensed as treatment foster care (TFC) parents through SaintA in late 2014. They took placement of the two siblings in early 2015.
Chris Attoe described adoption day as “A long time coming,” because it takes time and energy to care for foster children with special needs, while still encouraging and facilitating a relationship with the biological parents. The Attoes have been known to take Trysten and Finny down to Monroe County for visits with their biological family, a routine they plan to continue even now.
The Attoes are also strong foster care advocates. “Kids might end up where they don’t need to be if not for foster parents,” summarizes Wendy. She’s right – there are more than 6,000 children in out-of-home-care at any given time in Wisconsin, many of whom who have experienced adversity such as abuse or neglect and who are at higher risk for long-term consequences.
A Heart for Children, Especially Siblings
In addition to Trysten and Finny, the Attoes have four more foster children in their care; three of which are a sibling group, including an infant born over Thanksgiving. “The Attoes have a heart for caring for siblings,” says Becky Connell, Statewide Director of Treatment Foster Care at SaintA. “They know it can be difficult to place more than one child and understand the importance of keeping siblings together.”
It’s that strong commitment to siblings that inspired the Attoes to build an addition onto their home and for Chris to become a full-time, stay-at-home dad. “When these kids first say, ‘I love you,’ it melts your heart,” says Wendy.
While SaintA has a 165-year history in Milwaukee County, its Statewide TFC Program is much newer, which is why Monday was such a milestone. SaintA TFC Specialist Nicole Johnson-Weltzin was also present to watch the family make it official. Johnson-Weltzin says in most cases, she would no longer get to see the family now that the adoption is final. “They have four other foster kids, so I will still get to visit the family routinely and see all of the kids.”
Thinking of becoming a foster parent? Visit GrowHope.net or call our Community Engagement specialists at 855.GROW.HOPE
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A Safe Place in a Season of Change
November 30, 2017 By Jackie Nerat No CommentsPosted in Uncategorized
Blablablabla
By Julianne Nornberg
Middle school can be a tough time. I remember my days in sixth grade, a few decades ago, and the basic challenges are still there: peer pressure, learning where to fit in, managing friendships plus extracurriculars and new responsibilities in academics.It is a time of growth and change, challenge and uncertainty. It’s a time of learning who you are and how you can use your God-given gifts. That’s why we’re grateful for Saint John School, where students in small classes under the guidance of thoughtful teachers can face this time of life in the environment of our Catholic faith.
“Middle school is hard,” my daughter said one day, citing the new responsibilities of lockers and remembering which books to bring to which class. “But everybody has sort of matured and gets along.”
It’s good to know she has found a safe haven among her peers and teachers. But at Saint John School, which has helped shape our children since preschool, we would expect nothing less.
Julianne and Mark Nornberg have four children attending St. John School.
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NCAA Super Regional
Seminoles season ends in Omaha again; Gators in good position
Published on June 21, 2017 in Sports by Bob Sparks
The Florida State baseball season ended with a loss in Omaha, Neb. on Wednesday night, just like it has 21 other times before. This time it was the LSU Tigers sending the Seminoles home from the College World Series with a 7-4 victory, meaning FSU Coach Mike Martin will have to wait another year. Unlike their first meeting, where LSU scored two late runs to snatch a 5-4 victory, the Tigers jumped out early and kept Florida State at arm’s…
No. 3 Florida State’s defense poised to outshine offense
Florida State has largely been known for its offense during Jimbo Fisher‘s eight seasons as head coach. This could be
Florida State’s Jacques Patrick taking reigns as lead running back
Jacques Patrick spent the past two years observing and learning from Dalvin Cook at Florida State. With Cook leaving for
Florida Gators face tough challenge of rebuilding stout defense
When coach Jim McElwain took over at Florida, he inherited one of the Southeastern Conference’s stingiest defenses. The unit got
FSU set to face outstanding Gator pitching trio
Published on June 9, 2016 in Sports/Top Headlines by Bob Sparks
The Florida State baseball team knows they have a tough mountain to climb this weekend. To get to their first College World Series since 2012, all they have to do is beat the top national seed Florida Gators twice in Gainesville. It has been well documented that the Seminoles are having trouble beating their arch-rival anywhere over the past three seasons. The Gators have prevailed 13 of the last 17 times they have met in either Gainesville, Tallahassee or Jacksonville.…
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Codex-VI Chapter 7
The journey through the Deadlands was, to the disappointment of Sanjin, completely boring and without incident. The wizard even grumbled about it one evening when they were eating a fresh kill that Rynn had brought.
“You wish danger in your job?” Lady Maramos asked. As was the typical pattern, she sat on the cart away from the fire and the others, close enough to hear, but far enough that it was obvious she didn’t consider herself part of the group.
“It’s one reason I’ve spent so much time on the Death Side,” the wizard said. “Tests of my skill and magical prowess.”
She didn’t respond.
“The faster we get to Darkcrest,” Orensland said, “the faster we can complete our contract.” He rubbed his neck wihle he wondered if the fang marks from her feedings would be permanent. It was a … decidedly unpleasant experience to be partially drained of blood every other night. Khaska’s healing spells and the shadowdancer’s newfound Ring of Sustenance took the edge off, but Orensland constantly felt that he was a step slower than he ought to be.
“Of course,” Sanjin said. The wizard was even slightly subdued at the reminder of the sacrifice Orensland was making.
The party had spent months on the Death Side by this point, and even Khaska and Orensland had adjusted to the unusual day/night cycle. Between Rynn and Sanjin’s experiences on the Death Side, as well as Khaska’s skills in the wild, and the fact that it was impossible to get completely lost with Pressen hanging in the sky, they were able to make good time. Rynn was able to scout ahead enough that they could avoid other parties, and their travels passed without incident. Eventually, they came to the West Gnarzaan river and followed it north to the ferry operated by the Gatchtik gnolls. At this spot, the river was wide and slow-moving.
Once it was obvious they wished to cross the river, the ferry ponderously made its way over. It seemed to the party that it was taking too long, and Lady Maramos was displeased. Once the gnoll captain saw her and recognized her, the ferry moved with much more alacrity.
“My Lady,” he snarled. (Khaska could think of few other words to describe the gnoll’s attempts to speak common.) “A contingent of soldiers from your house has waited here for months. Your husband is most worried about you.”
“Then I had best get back to Darkcrest.”
“Yes, my Lady.”
The trip back across the river was faster.
Ten men atop horses, all with the same tabard, were waiting on the other side, saluting at rapt attention.
“My Lady, when your return was delayed, we feared the worst,” the foremost among them said.
“The mercenaries we hired were worth every copper piece, Captain Gendry,” she replied. “Kaylee’s troupe deserves their reputation.”
“I see you are without your servant or carriage. How have you survived?”
“They managed to retrieve the dirt from the graveyard I had brought with me and we’ve been using this …” she pointed disdainfully at the ox-drawn cart “to hold it.”
“And you have been feeding on one of the mercenaries?” The captain said. He glanced at the party and noticed Orensland and the marks on his neck. With that, the captain alighted off his horse and moved over to Lady Maramos, who immediately pulled his head back and drank deeply. One of the female soldiers had a change of clothes that, while not as elegant as Lady Maramos’ normal fare, was better than the rags her one dress had turned into over the months of travel.
A messenger pigeon was sent ahead, and the group began the week trek to Darkcrest.
Three days into the trek (with Lady Maramos now feeding daily off of the soldiers, not Orensland, thankfully), the thundering of hooves could be heard in the distance. Another group of soldiers was approaching. The soldiers of the House of Maramos fanned out and prepared to defend their Lady, if necessary, but upon seeing the lead rider Lady Maramos got down from the wagon and everybody else relaxed, their swords and pikes and other weapons dropping or being re-sheathed.
Rynn wasn’t sure why they relaxed. The lead rider was riding a horse that seemed to have hair made of fire, and that was snorting smoke and flame from his nostrils!
“A nightmare!” Sanjin practically squealed.
The rider practically jumped off the mount before it was fully stopped and rushed to Lady Maramos. He was dressed in elegant black plate armor, adorned with gold trim, and carried a broadsword across his back. His long hair was nearly completely white, and he appeared to be in his late fifties or early sixties.
The kiss that the two of them shared was long and passionate enough that Rynn, Sanjin, and Orensland were simultaneously embarrassed to watch and yet strangely intoxicating. Khaska was disgusted by the display of near-animalistic lust. The two spoke in whispers for a few moments. Lady Maramos pointed at the party. The man nodded.
He approached the party, and it was then they noticed his unusually pale skin and ghostly cold eyes. He must have been in his late fifties or early sixties when he was turned. There was no telling how old he truly was.
“My wife has informed me of your deeds. Above and beyond what your contract required. Come! My servants are just behind me with food and drink and …” he glanced at Lady Maramos “more appropriate accommodations.”
Indeed, a few miles back was a wagon train, also with soldiers guarding everything. A camp was being set up, and the smell of cooking filled the air. The servants of the House of Maramos made sure that the party were well-fed. Several gathered the dirt from the wagon and replaced it in the bottom of a carriage similar to the one that they had abandoned at Rhun. Lady Maramos changed into clothing more her style, and rode next to her husband on an elegant black stallion as the caravan moved towards the city.
Darkcrest itself was a gloomy city, with tall buildings that blocked much of the light in the streets, arches connecting them, making sure there was always a place to get from shadow to shadow. The House of Maramos’ lands were near the center of the city, and the caravan made its way there quickly. Khaska felt that there was little he could do to hide himself but since they arrived during Sunrise Twilight, it appeared that many of the city’s denizens were inside. Not many saw him.
Once inside the massive complex, Lord and Lady Maramos disappeared inside the big mansion, a house as large as the Chapter headquarters for the Knights in Hammerdine. Captain Gendry motioned for the party to come with him.
Inside one of the other buildings adjancent to the main mansion, he introduced them to Danforth Greymantle, the head butler for the House of Maramos, before excusing himself to return to his soldiers.
Mister Greymantle was an older gentleman, with a spring in his step, however, and a brightness about his eyes. “Gentlemen, I know that you might be nervous staying in a house controlled by the Chosen, but we find it useful to assuage the nervousness of our guests. I am the master of this house, and though I serve Lord and Lady Maramos, none of the Chosen have been invited in. You may rest well here free from any care or concern. Come, let me show you to your rooms. We have drawn up baths for you, and have brought clothes for you to change into. There is food in the dining room just through here whenever you wish it.”
Every member of the party was shown their private rooms, elaborate and luxurious spaces, larger than any private room they had ever seen before. Each was practically its own suite, with a bedroom, a sitting room, and a privy. There were servants in each to take their clothes and put them into hot baths, though Rynn was slightly put off by what he felt were the inappropriate coverage of the women servants. Orensland didn’t seem to mind, and Sanjin was more than happy to have handsome men and beautiful women doting on him. Khaska requested them leave while he took his armor off and bathed himself. Silk robes hung on clothes hangers, and a selection of possible clothing was provided for each of them as their clothes were taken to be laundered or armor polished or whatnot.
The meal was scrumptious, a delight for their senses they had not encountered before. Perhaps it was even better than the food Mirwen had served all those months ago in Twilight. There was certainly more of it, an amount that Khaska felt was wasteful, even as he was delighted to not be eating whatever Rynn had happened to kill or dry rations. There were multiple courses, and after months of travel in the Deadlands, it was good to eat a full meal. Even Rynn allowed himself to indulge a little bit, having some of the best wine he had ever had. A glance from the Maha’i cleric, however, made him limit himself to just the one glass.
When they were done eating, Mister Greymantle spoke up. “You have traveled so far in service to our house. Please, if there is anything you need, ask and it shall be yours.” As he said this, he put his hand on the shoulder of one of the serving girls. “Anything.” She smiled shyly.
Rynn took the man’s meaning, but he certainly wasn’t going to take him up on any kind of offer like that now that the ranger knew more about his wife (and child!) than he had in years.
“I’m sure Lord and Lady Maramos will have you over for dinner soon,” he said. “In the meantime, we are at your disposal. If you wish to visit the marketplace, study in the library, pray at a shrine, or simply enjoy our accommodations, you may do whatever you wish. We have been instructed to accommodate your every wish. Please, ask, and it is yours.”
This seems like a good enough place to stop.
The odds were in your favor, and none of you rolled for a random encounter. No XP for you. On a related note, I declare by DM fiat that you are all now level 9 for having successfully tracked down Manson, resuced Lady Maramos, and returned her to Darkcrest. At the end of this Codex, you will all be level 10 as we switch to 5E rules, and we’ll start doing XP more normally again then. Congratulations on leveling up!
Your benefactors, Lord and Lady Maramos, have given you accommodations beyond what your characters have ever experienced. You have servants at your command, all the food you can eat, and even more pleasures of the flesh should your characters want to indulge. (I don’t want to make anybody uncomfortable, but this is a vampire city, and vampires are sensual and sexy. I also hope I didn’t overstep in my writing up Rynn’s reaction.) Basically, imagine that you have just earned the respect and well-wishes of Donald Trump, and are now living in Trump Tower, but with good taste and well-used resources, instead of tacky gold-plated toilets.
What do you all want to do with this newfound freedom, if anything? I know Khaska has a set of armor from Rhun he needs to get “tailored” to fit him. Will Rynn do any Urban Rangering? Orensland any sneaking? Sanjin any studying? Like, you are the guests of one of the most powerful vampire covens in Darkcrest, and they are incredibly pleased with you. All of their resources are at your disposal. You’re now full allies of the House of Maramos.
In a day or so, you will be invited to dinner with Lord and Lady Maramos. Will there be anything you wish to discuss with them?
Oh, so exciting!! A city where shadows are everywhere. Shadowdancing heaven.
First, Orensland would ask Mister Greymantle how walking about Darkcrest works. Would Orensland be in danger exploring the city? Any places he should avoid (at least, pretend to avoid)? More to be said on that, pending your response. Orensland would love to sneak, but not wind up in places he shouldn't without forewarning.
Also, a thought. I've been thinking about what Orensland would want upon arrival to Darkcrest. It was implied that we can basically have anything, and while I would like a more comprehensive list of items that will carry on into 5e, I had a couple ideas.
It may seem odd, but Orensland would like a crystal ball. His father snuck up on him once upon a time with absolutely no forewarning, and Orensland is not sure if his father will ever find some way of hunting him down again. This way, he could possibly keep tabs on his father every several months. Eryx, you may not have any plans for reintroducing his father (or do you? :P), but not requesting a crystal ball for that reason would be metagaming. Orensland has been carrying an inner paranoia for some time now, and would like to be at ease where his father is concerned. Furthermore, we could check on Jared to see if he's made it back or not (we were much faster than expected), and possibly even try to see Rynn's wife. I dunno, seems like a magic item that Orensland would want to have on hand for a while, but that can also be very useful to surrounding party members. And in case you're wondering, I had this idea truly just because I thought Orensland would want to know where his father is. All other ideas came after that.
In researching crystal balls, it looks like you can get one with a telepathy ability. Apparently you can send and receive silent mental messages, as well as plant suggestions. Would this not have been a better way for the Bringers of Light to communicate with Jared? And can they not use this method with us? We'd be changing something that already happened, but we weren't aware of this possibility until now.
And if we do get a crystal ball, we could get one with telepathy as well. Particularly in regards to Rynn's wife, we could communicate with her, give her hope, and possibly get an idea on her location. And, if such a ball lets us read thoughts as well, then Orensland could get an idea of where his father is too. In addition to that last point, he would mention he would like the telepathy aspect to be able to communicate with the Shadowdancing troupe to see how they are doing.
Ok, so that's the crystal ball schpeel. How does learning new skills work? Assassins have the ability to coat their blades with poison without accidentally poisoning themselves… can Orensland learn that skill, even if he's not an assassin? It would be crazy awesome if he could weaken enemies even more after a good sneak attack. If he can learn this skill, I would assume Darkcrest is a place I could learn it. It seems kinda… shady, which is the kind of place you might find assassins. The bill being footed by the Maramos couple, of course.
In terms of what Orensland would like to discuss at dinner, the Cult is high on his list. Note that Orensland would have created his cover story of joining the cult on the living side while they were waiting for lady Maramos to arrive. I suspect that will be an important detail when speaking with Cult members. Orensland may want to scout out the Cult HQ if they have one in the city. It's one of the items he would have asked Mister Greymantle. He would not enter and talk to people, though. Developing a relation with high-end cult members would have to be with the Maramos's blessing and probably their presence as well.
As ideas for the others… Sanjin would obviously have a heyday in the library, but Khaska probably would too. In addition to possibly learning more about how his people were enslaved on this side, this seems as good a chance as any to learn about Urziana, the demon that played a key role in Tawru's turn to evil. The library likely has a great deal of information and secrets that more righteous parties would love to get their hands on. If the whole crystal ball-telepathy idea works out, we could even get some information from the library for the Bringers.
You were "much faster than expected" because of the nature of the campaign and the fact that you didn't have any random encounters. It's been nearly three months since you parted ways with the Mithereen tribe. I forgot to update the Campaign Timeline, and will do so shortly.
These are fantastic questions.
Greymantle indicates that the city is mostly safe, but entering the lands of a vampire house without permission would probably result in being attacked. There are a few larger houses, like the Maramos's, but there are many minor houses of varying strengths. He would be happy to send a servant with you to give you a guided tour of the city.
He gives a soft whistle when you ask if you could acquire a crystal ball. "An item of that rarity and power is hard to come by. Even if Lord and Lady Maramos have one, I don't know that they would part with it. You would have to ask them. I regret that I am unable to help more at this time."
The Greater Scrying spell allows communication as well, and the focus costs only 1k gold, a lot less than the price of even a basic crystal ball. That's what the Bringers have been using with Jared.
When you inquire about poisons, he nods and smiles. "There we can help you. The House of Maramos has an apothecary to homebrew poisons and potions and the like. Captain Gendry and several leaders of the militia are skilled in its application.
I will inquire about learning from them, but I don't foresee any complications aside from scheduling times to meet when they are off-duty."
The Cult of Skyrnyn, as far as Greymantle knows, does not operate in the city. He's heard of them, but is cagey about it. He doesn't want to reveal secrets of his masters that are theirs alone (as head butler he is present for important meetings), but basically confirms that they are in an alliance with the Cult. He does warn you that other vampire houses are wary of this alliance, and suggests it might be prudent to not wear the cult ring around the city.
Orensland would appreciate the offer to have a servant take him around, but would rather sneak about on his own (without the ring on, just in case). Being seen with the servants of Maramos would leave an impression on people's minds, and Orensland is not sure if he wants such attention. He'd ask for a map if he could, general descriptions of what lay in what direction if not. He'd then go about the city, but staying away from the lands of vampire houses for the time being. Mostly shadowdancing, I should think. People act differently when they don't know they're being observed. I assume you need rolls for that, so:
Hide: 26 (2+24)
…well, that stunk. Fortunately my bad sneaking rolls wind up being probably good enough to get by.
With Greymantle's reply, Orensland would give a hearty green light to Greymantle to putting in a word with the captain for learning how to apply poison to blades.
As for the crystal ball, bummer. If the Maramos's have an idea on how to obtain one permanently, that would be great, but if not he would ask if he could get access to one just long enough to scry his father. I assume Orensland cannot see what is produced from a scrying spell, only the spellcaster could do the scrying and relay verbally what is seen. Hence the desire to get access to a crystal ball.
And finally, Orensland would casually ask if cult members happen to be in the city, and hopefully that gets some conversation on the matter going. It is likely that sensitive information will not be discussed over dinner, but hopefully they can shed some light on where we want to go from here.
Ha. It's hilarious to see the discrepancy between the reactions of the rest of the party… and Khaska. Because that's exactly how Khaska would react to all of this: a perpetual state of discomfiture.
He'll have to figure out how to properly use the Hat of Disguise. At present, since he can't quite hide himself in the Maramos complex, he'll mainly plan on using it whenever he goes out, taking on forms that will be less notable. He's not exactly keen on exploring, especially since he can't sneak about like Orensland, but he would be interested to find if there were any shrines to Pelor/Teresh in the city—and if there are other Maha'i about (the former he wouldn't ask about; the latter he might). If he finds there are other Maha'i around and that it would be safe to go about as one, he might just use the Hat of Disguise to change his markings, horns, and clothing.
If he can get the person who will fit his armor to come to the Maramos complex, he'd prefer that to going out on that errand (on which he couldn't very well disguise himself anyway, as its success depends on his body being visible).
Most of his time, however, he would want to spend in the library, researching. A couple areas of his research would include:
Tawru
Urziana, the demon involved with Kvanir somehow
Maha'i in general; he knows that there are some on the Death Side, and is curious what vampire records (or other records they have in their possession) say
Maps of Darkcrest (if he can get a copy, that would be good; he'd want to provide it to the Bringers or the Knights eventually, as maps are incredibly valuable!)
Peaceful Children
Slave trade records
Zyrbryxion Swamps
Anything else that could give a strategic or tactical advantage against Darkcrest (though he wouldn't seek this out too deliberately, as not to blow their cover. No playing with giant orrery-rooms to find solar eclipses without a cover story!)
If anyone else has suggestions for what Khaska could do, let me know. I'll keep thinking about anything he might want.
Crosis, please give me Gather Information, Spot, and Listen Checks. Greymantle assures you that traveling with a servant of the House of Maramos will still allow you to be discrete, and can even serve as a protection. Few of the other vampire covens/houses would dare incur the wrath of the House of Maramos. He's happy to provide you with a basic map of the city, but it's something that he has sketched out for you. There doesn't appear to be solid copies of maps, since the people of Jenoa haven't yet invented google maps.
Thevarou, Greymantle says that has seen very few Maha'i in the city in all his years, but he will inquire for you. It's possible there might be some. He would also be happy to send a servant with you in your travels outside the Maramos' complex. The official blacksmith and armorer of the House of Maramos is at your disposal, and refitting your armor will not require you to leave the complex.
If you're going to leave the complex to poke around the city, please also give me Gather Information, Spot, and Listen Checks. The same goes for anybody else, really.
In that case, Orensland would like to get the (discrete) tour first, then do some sneakery after. Note (and I'm writing this before I make the rolls) Orensland doesn't usually rely on gathering info for… gathering info. He trusts more in his ability to observe unseen than his ability to haggle people for information. But I will provide the roll, because you requested it. Use it as necessary.
Gather Info: 19 (rolled 16 + 3)
Spot: 23 (rolled 11 + 12)
Listen: 21 (rolled 16 + 5)
Not too shabby! Looks like Orensland may notice quite a few details. For the sake of narration, you may want to include something about Orensland marveling over his cool new Eyes of the Eagle.
Sanjin has a morbid fascination with the vampires but certainly does not trust a one of them. He will spend as much time as possible studying -partially subjects of magic that would be hard (or impossible) to find elsewhere. Including subjects that are deemed to "black magic" for faint of heart scholars.
Great! He'll get his armor adjusted by the Maramos house armorer, then. How convenient! And he thinks he will go out in the city at least once, though he'd want to go with someone. Would anyone in the party want to come with Khaska? He'd probably disguise himself as a human or whatever would be least conspicuous (perhaps based on Orensland's reports from his wanderings).
Gather Information: 15 + 2 = 17
Listen: 4 + 6 = 10
Rynn's major objective will be to find out about slaves in the city. He'll start by asking Greymantle about it, letting him know that he's looking to acquire some very specific ones. Later on, when they get the chance to talk to Lord and Lady Maramos, Rynn will reveal to them that he's searching for his lost wife and child. He'll hope to appeal to their own happiness over their own reunion.
Also when we dine with our vampire hosts, Rynn will ask them about the upcoming war with Arkenos. He's curious what they intend to do when that day comes. Is that an event that will impact them much, or do they try to sit it out? Will they have allies from there? It occurs to the ranger that perhaps they end up needing to fight as much as anyone else, depending on what kind of evil comes from that moon. Rynn will couch this line of inquiry by stating that as a mercenary (which they believe him to be) he wants to be on the right payroll when the time comes.
A few months ago, when Rynn thought his wife likely dead, he might have been tempted to "indulge" himself here in Darkcrest. But now he feels that this may be the closest he gets to his family reunion and thus has steeled himself against any such thing. In fact, his demeanor is one of no-nonsense, and perhaps verging on anger or annoyance. He's certainly not acting like his usual outgoing and friendly self, even to the point that he's a bit emotionally distant from his companions. In this regard, perhaps he's acting more like his mercenary cover story than he ever has before!
But despite that, Rynn will gladly accompany Khaska around the city or to the library. Aside from his personal quest, he doesn't have much he desires to do or accomplish in Darkcrest. One of those few things would be to investigate getting his hand-crafted bow enchanted, or getting better magic leather armor. He doesn't want to lean on the Maramos' generosity in this though; he wants to preserve any favor he has from them toward getting his family back. He has ~3,000 gp on hand, as well as a pair of +1 longbows (which we looted over time) which he hopes he could get ~2,000 gp for selling at the usual half-price.
Apologies to everyone for delaying the game (yet again). Partly it was because I was trying to figure out what Rynn would do, and what purchases he'd try to make. And really, though I've narrowed it down to bow and armor, I still haven't exactly decided which purchase makes the most sense (or if I try to sell of the new, expensive bow to fund making mine better…), but I don't want to delay things further. Still gotta do my character leveling up too…
Gather Info: 12 (rolled 2 + 10 bonus)
Spot: 17 (rolled 9 + 8 bonus)
Listen: 21 (rolled 13 + 8 bonus)
Orensland had been prepared the moment he saw the layout of the city on their way in. A city designed for passage of vampires, making sure there were shadows everywhere even during the daytime?
Shadowdancing. Heaven.
“I was hoping to be able to look around Darkcrest myself,” he piped up, “but I don’t want to infringe on protocol in a vampire city or get into a fight.”
“The public areas of Darkcrest are for anybody. We would be happy to have one of our servants escort you around. As far as protocol, please don’t enter the lands of one of the other vampire houses. There are many in the city, and though few would dare challenge the House of Maramos, it’s best to not entire their house compounds unless invited.”
“Perhaps a tour of the city with a servant, then,” said Orensland. He had no intention of sneaking about with one of the servants, but a first-time tour wouldn’t be a bad idea to orient himself.
“And is there anything that we might be able to help you procure, in the meantime? You need not go shopping, if that is your intent. We have been told to do that legwork for you.”
“Actually,” Orensland said, “there is something. I was wondering if there were a way to acquire a crystal ball. Particularly one of the ones that you can communicate through. I have enemies I wish to keep tabs on, and friends I might wish to contact.”
Greymantle gave a low whistle. “An item of that rarity and power is hard to come by. Even if Lord and Lady Maramos have one, I don't know that they would part with it. You would have to ask them. I regret that I am unable to help more at this time.”
“Fair enough. Do you know of anybody in your house that knows about poisons and their use on weapons?”
“Of course! Captain Gendry and several of the militia leaders are skilled in their application. When not on duty, it would be simplicity itself to have you train with them.”
“That would be wonderful. Thank you for your hospitality, Mr. Greymantle. I would enjoy going out into the city tomorrow morning, after a good night’s rest.”
Sanjin jumped right in. “I was wondering if there was a library that I might be able to visit?” The elf almost stumbled over his words. He had spent years, nay, decades, on the Death Side looking for lost magic and forbidden knowledge. And now he had the resources of a high-ranking vampire house! Yes, please!
“Oh yes, Lord and Lady Maramos have an extensive collection of books, and are on good terms with a few other vampire covens that similarly have excellent libraries. What are you seeking, specifically?”
“Books on magic. I would imagine that a powerful sorceress such as Lady Maramos would have, or knows who would have, such books.”
“She does, indeed. That can be easily arranged, both a visit to our library and to the libraries of other houses.”
“I look forward to that, but would also like a good night’s sleep.”
“We will show you our library tomorrow, and perhaps Lady Isabelle, our wizard-librarian, can be of assistance in helping you find what you need.”
Khaska was next. “I would like to accompany Sanjin to the library. There are some areas of research that I wish to pursue while here as well. Also, I was hoping there might be others from my race here. Are there many Maha’i in Darkcrest?”
Greymantle frowned. “I am sorry to say that we do not see many of them. I will make inquiries for you, and our library and resources are also at your disposal.”
“In my travels, I have acquired some better armor, but it was outfitted for a human.”
“Ah, Master Erilidar would be happy to help. He is the official armorer for the house of Maramos, and I could take you as soon as you like.”
“Tomorrow,” Khaska said. “Your hospitality is wonderful, but it would be nice to have a good night’s sleep for the first time in months.” He did not mention this was partially because there was no threat of waking up to Lady Maramos feeding on him. Even though he was in her complex, the fact that she, or any other vampire, could not enter this house, had eased his mind more than he expected. He had not realized how tense he had been about travelling with a vampire until the threat was removed.
“And, Rynn,” Greymantle said, turning finally to the ranger. “What wishes do you have that I may be able to assist with?”
“I would like to speak to someone about the slaves of Darkcrest,” he said. “I’m looking to acquire some very specific slaves, and wouldn’t know where to start.”
“That would be with me,” said Greymantle. “I am in charge of running much of the day-to-day operations of our complex, and am familiar with the slave trade in our city. You are looking for specific types of slaves, or specific individuals?”
“Individuals, if they are here. Truth be told, they may not be.”
“I would be happy to assist in your search, and with my contacts and resources, if they are here in Darkcrest, we can find them and purchase them for you. That is well within our power.”
“I would also, I think, like to speak with your armorer. It would be nice to upgrade some of my weapons and armor.”
“Master Erilidar is at your disposal. I assume you, also, would like a good night’s rest first? Would any of you like company in your quarters as you retire for the evening.”
The young lady standing next to Mister Greymantle looked at Rynn and smiled, but Rynn steeled himself. Thoughts of his Juliet sprang to his mind, and steeled him against the possibility of “indulging” himself. “No, thank you,” he said. Everybody else similarly declined, and, after months of travel and sleeping on the ground, and full of delicious food and good wine, the party slept well that night.
Sanjin was practically giddy as the young man swung open the doors to the library. He and Khaska were escorted in after breakfast, and after Khaska and Rynn had visited the elven armorer, Master Erilidar. Rynn had gone to speak with Greymantle about the slaves in the city, and Orensland had left to go get the “tour” of the city.
The library was a much larger room than either of them were expecting; it probably took up most of the basement of this wing of the main Maramos mansion. There were two different levels, with spiral staircases at each corner of the room. In the center, hanging from the ceiling and dominating the room, was a model of Pressen and its major moons, including Arkenos and Jenoa. Sanjin was surprised to see, hanging on the wall straight ahead, the skull of a dragon in the middle of an obsidian arch. Probably a copper dragon, from the looks of it. And a decent sized one, to boot. Not a wyrm, certainly, but certainly a dragon who was well into adulthood when he died. There were many book cases on both levels, parallel to the doors and perpendicular to the length of the room, and and there were several desks and comfortable chairs for reading. The carpet, much like everything they had seen so far in the mansion, was exquisite, various patterns and Everburning torches were at the end of every other bookcase, casting their light throughout the room. The other bookcases had art busts or sculptures in front of them, some grotesque and horrifying, others beautiful and well-crafted. There were some windows at the very top of the side walls, but they were narrow. The light would mostly be from the torches, it appeared. Two skeletons stood at attention near the entrance, unmoving.
“Lady Isabelle,” the servant called out, softly.
“Ah, our esteemed guests,” a young woman’s voice came. The sound of a book closing sounded through the room, and a young lady appeared from behind one of the bookcases on the second level, wearing long flowing white robes. She was followed by four small orbs of light. Sanjin noted they were castings of Dancing Lights. Lady Isabelle came to the edge of the platform and then turned into a cloud of mist, moving through the guardrail and slowly drifting down to the main level. The lights followed her. She re-materialized.
“That will be all,” she said.
“Yes, my lady,” the servant said, and then turned with a sharp bow and closed the doors behind him.
Lady Isabelle had been an elf before she was turned into a vampire. Her hair was short and spiked, black as the night, as was her lipstick. She had on one finger a gold ring, and around her neck a pendant. Sanjin noticed that her ring was from the University of Drequorun, where had had once studied, and where his twin was a student. Khaska was put off, again. He supposed he had been too optimistic to hope that the wizard-librarian of the House of Maramos wasn’t a vampire.
“I have been commanded to put all our resources at your disposal,” she said, moving forward. “What is it you wish to look for?”
Sanjin was happy to go first. “I was hoping there was a spellbook or two I could look at to copy spells into mine.” He held his spellbook up.
“Yes. Come with me,” she pointed to one of the skeletons. She moved to a bookcase in the back corner and pulled from the shelf several different books of varying sizes and conditions, loading them into the waiting arms of the skeleton. “These are all spellbooks from various wizards that were enemies of the House of Maramos. They no longer need them, but among them all every normal wizard spell available is to be found. There are, of course, many duplicates of the low-level spells, but you can peruse them and copy them as you wish. I will have ink and supplies brought down for your work. Any defensive spells have already been removed from the spellbooks. They are safe to use.” She spoke to the skeleton. “Please place these on one of the regular desks.” It turned and moved to do so.
“Normal spells,” Sanjin said. He was disappointed. “I had been hoping …” he paused.
“For some abnormal spells,” she said. She nodded, and moved over to a different bookcase, pulling four more books off, each looking like each other, red leather with runes inscribed on the cover—a matched set, and handing them to the same skeleton.
“Place those on the antimagic table.” With a flourish she swept her hand down the spines as the skeleton moved away. “The spellbooks of Saint Corwyn the Dread, a vampire Lord who ruled his lands for a thousand years. I believe you will find many spells here that are not usually found in respectable places.”
Sanjin put his hands on the top book almost reverently. Khaska almost didn’t like the look on the wizard’s face.
“You will have to read them on that table,” she said. “It has a antimagic field cast on it. If you do not, you may very well go insane from attempting to read the books, and we can’t have an insane wizard running amok in the library.” She cocked her head. “Though insanity has … other uses. Perhaps I could show you them sometime.”
Sanjin pursed his lips. He had no desire to indulge any vampire in any way. “That will not be necessary,” he said, diplomatically. He was here for knowledge, nothing else. “Thank you. I will begin perusing these.” He sat down at the antimagic table and cracked open the first spellbook of Saint Corwyn the Dread.
“And what can I assist you with, cleric of Pelor?” She walked up to him, very suspiciously. “I don’t know if we have ever had one of your kind in here before.” It was unclear to him if she meant “his kind” as a reference to Maha’i, or to clerics of Pelor. “To be frank, I wasn’t even sure your kind could speak or read.”
Maha’i, then.
Despite the insult, he responded with his cover story. The lie came easier this time, having rehearsed it and now lived it for several months. “I serve Teresh, whom you call Pelor, because my father wished it, but I am not an enforcer of rules or conduct. I seek knowledge. Nothing more.”
She seemed to buy the lie, which was true enough, in many ways. “And what knowledge can I assist you in finding,” she said.
“I am seeking knowledge of several items. First, anything that might point to a history of my people here on the death side. Second, knowledge of a particular demon named ‘Urziana.’ Third, the Zyrbryxion swamps and why they are so dangerous. It would also be nice if there are any maps of Darkcrest itself, for inclusion in my notes.”
“Do you seek to write of your experiences here on the Death Side?”
Khaska’s ears perked up. That was a possibility he had not considered to add to his subterfuge, but why not?
“I think so,” he said. “But I fear I am not gifted in the written word. Perhaps others will be able to put to page what I have experienced in life.”
“Perhaps this would be of use to you, then,” she said. She turned to mist again and rose up to the second level, retrieving a book and coming down. “The writings of Tebbins Ferrick on Darkcrest. We made a copy of his entries on Darkcrest before he departed back to Laishtek. He even signed this book itself after checking our copy for accuracy.” Lady Isabelle opened the book to the front page where, in the large flowing script Tebbins had signed his own name. Khaska was nearly breathless. It was one step removed from Ferrick himself! A copy of the actual original, and then signed by the famed explorer!
“I have read the journals of Ferrick,” she said. “This one was, I think, never published anywhere.” She cocked her head. “Perhaps I could show you our printing devices. I’ve developed them myself and think they may be of interest to a scholar such as yourself.”
She moved to another shelf, back where she had retrieved the spellbooks of Saint Corwyn. “As for your help with research on a demon, the Codex Demonicus would be the best place to start. It contains basic information on many demon species, their physiology, magical abilities, the planes they come from, and in many instances lists of known members of their species.”
And then she moved over to another bookcase to pull one final volume out. “The History of the Death Side, volume 50,” she said.
“Volume 50!” Khaska was surprised there would be so many.
“Don’t let the number fool you. Whoever wrote them decided to number them based on which millennium they correspond to. I don’t know that there ever were any written for, say, anything before the 49th Dark Times. But Dreadlord Zyrbryxion, the Bringer of Eternal Night came to power and ruled the marshes now named for him during the 50th millennium.”
“Zyrbryxion is a person, then?”
“A black dragon. He ruled the marshes that are still named for him through at least the 51st and 52nd Dark Times.”
“So, the most recent Dark Times, then?”
“Yes. He would have been a Great Wyrm by then, nearing his twilight. The kind of being even the forces of Arkenos would not have dared challenge. A pity he died before the Knights of the Silver Dragons began enslaving or slaying the chromatic dragons. Zyrbryxion would have personally wiped them all out for such an affront to dragonkind. We have The History of the Death Side, volume 51 as well. I assume some ambitious scholar in the next millennium will write volume 52.” She furrowed her brow. “Perhaps I will.” Then she straightened. “I believe this is sufficient to get you started. If you need anything, ask one of the servants and they can assist you though, they are just skeletons, so simple explanations and requests are all they can handle.”
“Oh, also,” she moved to the table she had deposited Khaska’s reading on, and reached for a box that had been sitting in the middle of the table. The cleric noticed that each table, except for the one Sanjin was reading on, had a similar box. One of the boxes on the first tables by the entryway was open. She flipped the lid open and four lights, the same as were following her, came out. “These Dancing Lights will obey your commands and follow you anywhere in the library.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I believe I have what I need to get started.”
“Very well. I will have the magic spellbook supplies sent down immediately, Mister Sanjin.”
The elf nodded and waved her off, already engrossed in the evil spellbooks of the vampire saint. She left, the skeletons opening the door for her and then closing it, returning to their posts. Khaska felt a chill go up his spine, now with just his companion in this cursed library, but opened his books and began to read.
As he suspected might occur, the History of the Death Side was written in elven, and the Codex Demonicus was in draconic, neither of which he read. He had prepared Comprehend Languages in case this would happen, and so was able to begin reading after casting the spell on himself.
Orensland was out and about by himself, as was his wont. Even a city like this, run by vampires who would be merciless to those who infringed upon their order, would have thieves. Maybe even a thieves guild. There would be people who knew information, and who might part with it, or who might whisper it to friends, unaware of the shadowdancing elf nearby.
Unfortunately, the city was so large, that he found it difficult to track down people who might be of interest. Not just any servant shopping for food or going to the butcher would be of equal value. He began tailing people who looked more important, people that, he assumed, were the equivalent of Captain Gendry, or Master Greymantle. Unfortunately, even after three days of following people and spying, he wasn’t that much closer to discovering anything really important. He could tell that there were multiple factions of vampire covens, and that some of them were opposed to the House of Maramos, while others were allies. He did take notes on which houses were in which camp. Perhaps they could discover some subterfuge; perhaps a house that claimed to be allies were, in secret, enemies. He smiled as he made more notes in a small ledgerbook he had acquired from Master Greymantle. He had noticed that Rynn wasn’t his usual chipper self. Partly that was, the rogue assumed, because of the revelations about his wife and child, and his attempts to find if they were in the city. But it was probably partly from just being in such a large city. Rynn, despite his developing tracking skills and such for inside a city, still seemed much more at home in the open wilds.
Orensland felt the complete opposite. The skills he had learned to be a thief from his father, as much as he hated how that learning process had gone, were serving him well here. And with his additional shadowdancing abilities as well, he was enjoying himself thoroughly. He glanced up at the sky. Pressen was still waxing, and that meant he still had plenty of time. Lord and Lady Maramos had invited them for dinner that evening.
He sat, perched atop one of the buildings overlooking one of the main thoroughfares, then picked a new mark to follow. Donning his Eyes of the Eagle, even these months later he was still slightly amazed at how they enhanced his vision, and remaining blended into the shadows, he clambered down the side of the building into the alleyway and then moved out into the crowd, following the lady returning from the butcher’s shop with a whole slew of choice cuts.
Rynn indeed felt very out of place in the city for a variety of reasons. It wasn’t just that he was surrounded by vampires, was staying in the house of a vampire worshipper, and was constantly surrounded by signs of the fake bargain they had made by usurping the place of Kaylee’s mercenaries. It was that he had, frankly, never lived in such “splendor,” and, aside from attempting to see if Juliet and his child were in the city, there wasn’t much for him to do.
He had discussed several new upgrades with the weapons and armormaster Erilidar, but hadn’t yet decided on anything. He found himself sometimes just wandering the Maramos complex while his companions were out and about. Sanjin virtually disappeared every day right after breakfast and didn’t return until dinner. Khaska was not as dedicated, but still spent several hours a day in the library.
This day, however, the Maha’i wanted to venture forth to the city itself. Lady Isabelle was in the library copying some magic spells herself, and he didn’t desire to be in the company of the vampire wizard any longer than he had to. He had found a decent map of Darkcrest in the writings of Tebbins Ferrick, a map he had copied himself. It was a little out of date, according to Lady Isabelle (several of the lesser vampire houses noted in the map had gone extinct since the map was made), but still served well enough to get the basic layout of the city itself. Upon leaving the Maramos complex, he donned his Hat of Disguise and used it to change the markings on his fur, the style of his horns, and even the color of the armor he wore. He was self-conscious, because it appeared that Master Greymantle was right. He had not seen another Maha’i in the city as of yet.
The two of them were perusing the marketplace, which served as both a somewhat normal market, though it seemed the noble “chosen” didn’t deign to do their own work. Most of the people present seemed to be normal humans, dwarves, gnomes, elves, etc. Rynn remaked on this to Khaska, who nodded.
“The rulers of this city seem to function as aristocrats in other societies. Many servants and underlings to do their bidding as they ‘live it on’ in their palaces and mansions.”
“Live it up,” Rynn said.
“Ah, yes.” The cleric looked up at the sky where Pressen was in view, nearly completely lit. “It is near mid-day. We could return to the residence of our benefactors, or we could find a tavern to eat here in the city.”
“Honestly, I don’t think that I would mind eating in a tavern. Master Greymantle feeds us good food, but I miss the feel of the open road, sometimes.”
Khaska snorted. “You are a rare individual who is content to eat a rabbit he caught that day rather than the cooking of such fine chefs as are employed by the Maramos family. But I would rather not walk all the way back just to return to the city afterwards. Let us find a tavern.”
Master Greymantle had supplied them each with a pouch of gold coins and with it they were able to easily buy a pretty good meal, even if a tavern meal, a few blocks from the main marketplace. Khaska ordered a spinach and mushroom stew, while Rynn a hunk of lamb with some bread and cheese. Rynn also ordered a glass of wine.
“You seem to have taken a liking to wine,” Khaska said.
“I’ve always just seemed to like ale, but apparently the Maramos’s don’t ever drink it, so it’s grown on me the past few days.”
The serving boy returned with their orders a few minutes later, putting them down hurriedly, nearly spilling Rynn’s wine, and then moved away quickly. Khaska was immediately suspicious of something and looked down. There was, tucked underneath his bowl atop the serving plate, a piece of paper. He drew it out.
“Huh. That is intriguing.”
The note read:
My coven will double whatever the Maramos coven is paying you for information about the goings-on in their lands. If this offer intrigues you, meet a contact of mine at the beginning of sunrise twilight in two days, at the corner of Druil and Garzan > streets, on the north end of the city.
“I suppose we had best go back to the others and let them know,” Rynn said, upon reading it.
The waiter returned after a few minutes, still petrified. Despite Orensland’s constant reminders to stay in character, Khaska could not help but look the boy in the eye. “You were only the messenger, and need not fear retaliation.” The boy relaxed a little. Rynn spoke up.
“You wouldn’t tell us anything about the person who gave you this note for us, would you?”
The boy shook his head, and vanished with their cleared plates. He did not return.
Khaska and Rynn returned to the Maramos complex with some time to spare. Master Greymantle was awaiting them expectantly.
“Welcome back!” he said, grinning. “I hope your day was enjoyable. Dinner will be served in the main dining room of the mansion in an hour and a half. I will send servants to escort you there in just over an hour.” Then he turned to the cleric. “Khaska,” he said, “could I accompany you to your quarters?”
Khaska and Rynn exchanged glances, but Khaska turned to Greymantle. “Of course.” When Rynn was out of earshot (his quarters were on the first floor, Khaska’s on the second), Greymantle spoke, whispering. “I am sorry it has taken me so long, but I have been able to locate one of your kind in the city! I’m afraid that she was working cleaning out the sewers, so it took some doing but we’ve managed to clean her and heal her after purchasing her from the city guard. She is in your quarters now.” Greymantle bowed and then turned to head back down the hallway.
Khaska opened the door to find a young Maha’i female sitting on one of the benches in the antechamber to the rest of his quarters. She was wearing a silk dress that clung to her, and was, to Khaska’s sensibilities, way too revealing. He also noticed scars on her hands, places where the fur did not grow due to past injuries, and her horns were chipped, her left one missing the very tip of it, giving her an uneven look. When she saw him, she stood, and knelt before him as he closed the door.
“Hello, Master Khaska. What would you ask of me?” He detected a tremor in her voice.
Khaska stood there, completely flabbergasted for a moment. A swirl of emotions engulfed his heart. The effrontery of Greymantle, thinking that sex was the reason he had inquired after his own kind! And then … embarrassment at seeing a woman of his species so uncovered, acting so subservient from her abuse. Then anger at a society that would demean a woman who should be honored.
Perhaps he took too long to decide on a course of action, but eventually he realized he had to do something. Staring at her would be awkward if he kept it up for much longer. And there wasn’t a lot of time before dinner, he felt.
Not wanting to further disturb her, he tried to surpress his anger and shock at the situation, pushing those emotions down and doing his best to cultivate the desire to not disturb the woman. She had been watching him this entire time, and he wasn’t sure how much of his inner turmoil she could intuit.
“My lady,” he said, covering his eyes in a traditional sign of respect. “I would ask your name, and for you to stand and enter. Do not fear; I will not hurt you.”
He wrapped his hand in a loose part of his robe and held it out to her (direct touch between Maha’i men and women was not permitted). He had made allowances in the past months with Jenika and Amara, but they were not of his race and were outsiders to his customs. He would not comport himself the same way with this Maha’i woman.
“I am called Feral.”
An odd name. He wondered where she had received it.
She gingerly took his hand and he brought her from the antechamber into one of the other rooms, more of a room with chairs. He guided her to one of the couches and had her sit. Then he sat on the floor in front of her.
“I am sorry you have been treated the way you have here. I will assure you that I did not request you be brought here to …” he paused, looking for the right words, “serve me. In our land, you would be shown the respect due to your sex.” He glanced around, then stood and left to the bedroom, retrieving a spare blanket from one of the chests. He offered it to her, but was careful not to touch her as she took it from him.
She paused, unsure what to do with it.
“It is,” he sighed, “that is to cover yourself. The clothing you were provided is far to inappropriate.” It took her a moment, but she eventually covered herself with the blanket, making sure that as little of her body was visible. Khaska nodded. “I will see to requesting further clothing for you. But I must know; have you known any other land? How did you come to Darkcrest, and how long have you been here?”
“I was born here,” she whispered.
“And your parents were slaves?”
“Have you known any of our kind from them, and now me?”
Eventually he was able to coax the story out of her, but she spoke slowly, and uncertainly the entire time. Her parents had been slaves, as had their parents before them. Maha’i in the city were the lowest of the low among the slaves, suitable only for manual labor. No vampire house would have them work in their mansions or lands, and so slowly the Maha’i in the city were sold off to other interested parties and taken from the city. Her father had been used as a gladiator, and her mother kept around as “comfort” for him. Despite this horrific story, she indicated that her parents had grown to love each other. Eventually, her father was killed in the arena, and her mother, stricken by grief, was killed later by their master, who was outraged by the loss. Feral was only a child, sold off to work in some mines in the Abghat peaks. Eventually sold back to Darkcrest, she was passed from several owners, always performing manual labor.
Coaxing this out of her took some time, and Khaska eventually heard a knock at the door. He sighed.
“Thank you for telling you your story, Feral. I have been summoned to dinner with our hosts, and must go, but will send for more appropriate clothing. I will be back in a few hours and would speak to you more.”
“Yes, Master Khaska.”
“Please don’t call me that.”
“Yes, Master.”
“No, don’t call me ‘master.’ ‘Khaska’ will do.”
She didn’t respond, and he bowed before her (this time making so sure his horns weren’t threatening that he nearly stretched the front of his neck too far) before leaving.
Khaska was decidedly out of sorts, Rynn noticed, when he rejoined the party. The cleric was trying his best to put on a good face, but something had disturbed him greatly. However, with Greymantle and several servants around, the ranger didn’t dare ask what had happened. That would have to wait until after dinner. The Maramos’s awaited.
The main dining room of the mansion was an incredible sight, practically shining with gold statues, great yellow-tinted marble floors, and and red curtains laced with gold trim. At one end of the room was a large painting depicting Lord and Lady Maramos, she her hands outstretched with arcane fire alighting off of them, and he with his sword in an en guarde position, blood dripping from it. At their feet were two corpses, both also vampires from their fangs.
The party was escorted to their seats near one end of the long table and signaled to wait, which they only had to for a moment, for just then Lord and Lady Maramos, along with several other vampires, swept into the room.
It was the first time any of them had seen Lady Maramos since they had arrived, and she looked decidedly healthier. Orensland supposed being able to feed more regularly would do that to any creature, even an undead vampire. She had on an elegant purple dress with a plunging neckline and, when she turned, an even deeper back. She had on several bracelets and a necklace, and her dangling earrings nearly reached her bare shoulders.
Lord Maramos wore an elegant black suitcoat, slightly longer in the back, made of fine cloth and embroidered with lace, a red sash across his chest from his left shoulder down to his hip. The jacket and pants, though they convered all his body, did little to hide the bulging muscles beneath them. It had not been apparent when he was wearing his armor when they had first met him, but Lord Maramos was built like an ox, heavily muscled, yet with a spring in his step. He pulled the chair out for his wife, and she sat first. The other vampire women, Isabelle among them, then sat, and then the men joined them, including the party.
Captain Gendry and several militiamen were stationed at the vampire side of the table, figures standing like statues, fully armored. The servants fluttered in to the room and began serving the first of what would be several courses. They poured wine or water (Khaska’s preference for not drinking wine was known by now, of course) in the cups of the party, but brought out separate containers for the vampires, pouring a thick red liquid into the goblets of each of the “chosen.”
Clearly, blood.
As the group finished their appetizers, and as the servants began clearing their plates, Lord Maramos finally spoke up.
“I hope that you have been happy in your accommodations. Your assistance to my wife was most welcome, and once again we thank you for your service. It was above and beyond what we could have expected from you.”
Orensland wiped his mouth and spoke up, still playing the role of the mouthpiece for the group.
“Your people have been most generous and we have no complaints.” He smiled, and patted his stomach. “I fear our biggest complaint might be that you are feeding us too much!”
Lord Maramos laughed. “I hear you have been training with some of our militiamen, Mister Orensland. Perhaps I should have Captain Gendry work you harder in a sparring session or two.”
Orensland smiled at that. The training in poisons had been going well, but he hadn’t actually done any sparring with Captain Gendry or any of the others. He glanced over at Captain Gendry, who nodded at him.
“Master Greymantle informed us of your unusual request, Orensland,” Lady Maramos said as the servants brought out the first main course dish—roasted lamb with vegetables. “Unfortunately, we have no crystal ball capable of doing the things you wish, and none of our allies here in Darkcrest do so. My child, Lady Isabelle, however, has the ability to cast Greater Scrying. She is currently creating two scrolls of the spell for you. They should be done …” she glanced over at the other vampire.
“In two days,” Lady Isabelle said. “One is complete. I could have it delivered to your quarters, but I suspect that you will want to come study the scrolls with me in the library. There I can help you understand the magical notation with no chance of mishap, so that when the time comes for you to cast the spell yourself, you will be in little danger of the spell misfiring. The scrolls are for your own use, however you wish, whenever you wish, but I can cast the spell myself and convey the appropriate information to you.”
“Master Greymantle ascertained that you wish privacy for the spells, especially if using them to communicate,” Lady Maramos continued, “but perhaps we could just cast Scrying. You should be able to see the subject through the mirror Lady Isabelle uses as focus. Perhaps that would be of assistance before you desired to speak to your enemies through your own casting.”
“That is a generous offer. I will consider it,” Orensland said. He turned to Lady Isabelle. “I would very much like to not be sent to the nine hells when reading your scrolls. I will join you in the library when they are complete and you can help me learn to read them without incident.”
Lady Isabelle nodded.
“Rynn,” Lord Maramos said. “You have not availed yourself of much of our hospitality. I can respect a ranger, such as yourself, being self-sufficient. In my human days, I journeyed over much of the death side with little but my wits and weapons to keep me alive and safe. But Greymantle has informed us you seek to find a pair of slaves, but it appears they are not in Darkcrest. Do they have particular meaning to you?”
“They do, my lord,” Rynn said. He tried to keep a straight face, but wasn’t sure how well he kept his emotions in check. “My wife was kidnapped by slavers years ago. I recently learned that she was with child when she was taken. It is my Juliet and child that I seek. I would hope that, with your recent happy reunion, you would be sympathetic to my quest.”
Lord and Lady Maramos leaned in to speak to each other from where the sat at the head of the table. They conferred for a long moment before pulling apart and Lord Maramos continued speaking.
“Our resources to find her are limited to Darkcrest and the areas controlled by our city, and though Greymantle will continue to seek them here, if he has not found them yet, it seems unlikely they are here. But we have allies in the slave trade on the death side who may be of assistance. We will inquire with them.”
“Are they allies with the Cult?” Orensland asked. “I have long wondered what my fellow dragon worshippers are doing on the Death Side. Miss Heppler, my cell leader in Laishtek, did not know.”
“That is a matter between you and your superiors in the hierarchy of the Cult of Skyrnyn. However, some of those very superiors will be joining us in the near future. We have sent a message to them, and they will be coming to collect the information my wife gathered on their dealings on the Living Side. But that will likely be at least weeks, if not months, from now.”
“For your going above and beyond the initial conditions of your contract, I will gladly introduce you to them,” Lady Maramos said. “With the work we have done with them, I have much sway, and can use it to your advantage, Orensland.” She looked at Rynn. “Possibly with your quest to find your wife and child as well, but success there would depend on a great many variables beyond our control. If I were religious, I would say a prayer to Vecna that they will be found alive and returned to you.”
Rynn wasn’t sure how he felt about the one-eyed, one-handed evil lich demigod assisting in his quest, but he didn’t let that show in his face.
“Thank you, Lady Maramos. I would love information and assistance however I can get it, in the hopes that my wife and child are alive and that they can be found.”
By this time, they were on the second course, fish and rice with steamed mushrooms.
“If they are found, you need only ask, and we will purchase them for you,” Lord Maramos said. “Even if years hence, you need only ask.”
“I fear the window on my time to find them is closing,” Rynn said. He saw here an opening to transition to his other question—the forthcoming war with Arkenos and the Dark Times. “When the Dark Times comes, I imagine it will be more difficult to locate them.”
“You speak words of wisdom,” Lord Maramos said. “The Dark Times will affect us all in some way or another. It took decades for the moon to recover, ecologically, from the last war with our sister moon and the effects of being so close to Arkenos.”
“How will it affect you here?” Rynn asked. “Will you have to fight? Will you attempt to sit it out?”
Lord and Lady Maramos conferred for a moment again.
“We have made arrangements with the Cult of Skyrnyn that will allow us, we think, a greater chance to survive the Dark Times should fighting be necessary. I would not want to divulge more without the permission of the Cult’s leadership, though,” he indicated Orensland, “we may acquire that shortly in your case, Mister Orensland. You have expressed desires to move up in the ranks of the cult. We can at least facilitate your introduction when some of the leaders arrive here, but we have no control over the internal politics of our allies.”
“If you or the cult is looking to hire mercenaries to help with the fighting, if that is necessary,” Rynn said, “I would be happy to offer my services. I like to be on the winning sides of things, and it seems to me you have things well in hand. I’d like to be on the right payroll when the time comes.”
“That is certainly something we may consider in the months and years to come,” Lord Maramos said. “By the best calculations of our scholars, at most we have six or seven years before the moons converge. It may be as few as two or three.”
Khaska’s ears flattened against his head at that thought. That movement brought him to the attention of their hosts. “And Mister Khaska, how have you been enjoying our hospitality. Lady Isabelle reports you have much interest in the history and scholarship concerning the Death Side.”
“Indeed,” he said. “Your library records have been most helpful.”
“Have you seen our printing machines?” Lord Maramos asked. “I would think such devices would be of interest to a scholar such as yourself.”
“I have not yet,” he said. “Though Lady Isabelle has invited me to do so.”
“And what is the end goal of your research?”
“The Lady Isabelle thought that perhaps I might write a book on the history of my people on the Death Side, though I fear I have no skill at writing. Perhaps my information and notes could be given to one who does, and such a book could be produced one day.”
“Is there any information you have been unable to find?”
“I fear more detailed records of the slave trade regarding my people are not the kinds of records that are meticulously kept, but Master Greymantle has helped as he can. I fear that portion of my research is not going well. The copy of the Codex Demonicus did not have the information on the demon I sought, as well.”
“Does not the House of Lancel have a different copy of the Codex, Isabelle?” Lady Maramos asked.
“I believe they do.”
“Perhaps you could arrange for Khaska to peruse that copy.” She looked at Khaska. “With such books, different copies have different information. The House of Lancel is an ally of ours, and perhaps their copy may have the information you seek.”
“That would be most helpful,” Khaska replied. “Also, perhaps there is something that you can tell me, however,” he said. “In my research on the Living Side, I came across a group, relatively recently organized, called the ‘Peaceful Children.’ I fear they are so new that there appear to be no records of them in your library. Perhaps the History of the Death Side volume 53 will have something to say about them. But they operate in Laishtek, where a great many of my people live, and I was wondering if you knew anything about them, or what avenues of research about them I might pursue.”
Lady Maramos smirked. “The Peaceful Children would barely warrant a footnote in that history. You are right that they are a very new organization. They, too, were allies of the Cult of Skyrnyn, but they betrayed the cult, and were massacred in recent months. They will not recover.”
The party’s thoughts returned to their having tracked the pilgrimage from Hammerdine, and how it ended at the town built around the secret shrine to Nerull. A town that had been literally razed to the ground, the death god insulted in his own shrine. The wrath of the cult was severe, indeed.
“Do you know the nature of their involvement with the cult?” the cleric asked.
“I have suspicions that they supplied labor for the cult’s works here on the Death Side, but I do not know for sure. We were tasked with helping print items for their use and occasionally to keep an eye on them to make sure they were keeping a low enough profile, but aside from that we have had no dealings with them. You could ask the cult leaders when they arrive.”
“If it will be many weeks or even months before they arrive,” Khaska said, “we do not wish to overstay our welcome.”
“You will not,” Lady Maramos said, almost forcefully. “You earned our gratitude. Take advantage of it.”
By this time dessert was being brought out, a chocolate cake topped with various fruits. Rynn had thought that vampires would only really drink blood (certainly Lady Maramos only had done so on their trip), but it seemed they also could eat regular food, and at least in the House of Maramos, had excellent taste in fine cuisine.
So, there’s obviously a lot in this post, which is what I suspected would happen.
Major points that I would like input on.
1. The note from the rival coven of the House of Maramos. What do you all intend to do about it? Unfortunately none of your Gather Info checks where high enough to determine which house is so actively plotting against the House of Maramos. Orensland has a basic idea of the political landscape in Darkcrest, but that’s it. Most Houses seem allied with the Maramos coven. But there is a group of houses that are not, and thus the city exists in a perpetual a state of “cold war.”
2. DeltaWolf, you can basically copy any spell into Sanjin's spellbook that you wish. I’ve sent you a PDF of the 3.5 edition Book of Vile Darkness which similarly has additional evil spells. You can copy any of those as well, but be aware of some limitations due to Sanjin's good alignment. You do have limited time though, so I’d like you to make a list of the spells from both sources you would want to copy, and in order that your character would prioritize, and we’ll just let you work through the list until the high-ranking members of the Cult of Skyrnyn show up. I’ll roll for how long you have once I have your list in hand, but it will be a while. Also, keep in mind that you'll have to "translate" the spells into 5E spells at the end of the Codex. We'll work to make sure that all is on the up and up with regard to game mechanics between 3.5E and 5E.
3. I tried to give the basics of what Khaska has learned in the dialogue. If you want more specifics, ask and perhaps we’ll just cover it in the gray box instead of putting it in the narrative or perhaps in the wiki on relevant pages. This post was very very long.
4. Rynn doesn’t get the impression that he would be imposing on the Maramos’s or risking an attempt to buy his wife and child if he upgraded his armor and weapons. So we’re back to … what does he want?
5. Now that you have the basics of Feral’s story, what does Khaska want to do concerning her, Thev?
6. Anything else I didn’t cover or that you want to do in Darkcrest with this new information?
Also, it is technically time for upkeep (several times over), but since you are staying as guests of the House of Maramos, you don’t have to pay anything for any of the months you were on the road.
For those interested, I picture some of the basic details of the library to be like this picture, especially the general orientation of the bookcases. In looking at pictures of fantasy libraries, there is some great art to be found online!
Power to you, Eryx, for sacrificing a good night's sleep to get this done. My hat is off to you. :)
In regards to the note, Orensland wouldn't personally want to take up the rival coven on their offer. He has no need for a "double" money offering, as what he currently has is beyond his tastes as is. I'll write more about that in a second. Furthermore, while we're not exactly true allies to the Maramos house, there's not much incentive to run off and ally ourselves with a similarly evil coven of vampires. So in regards to meeting people on that street junction, Orensland would not volunteer himself.
…However, that doesn't mean Orensland wouldn't go! He's been scouring the city for information, and this is his first real chance to get some. He'd like to go and find the contact, hopefully tailing them to their employers. He'd arrive a couple hours before the deadline, hiding in plain sight enroute as well as at the scene, and watch all passerby activity carefully. Hopefully it's not the most crowded of streets, and potential targets would be few. Regardless, Orensland wouldn't oppose other members of the party going, though he would not recommend it. Unless we want to do a sting operation to bring the dealers out of hiding (say, Rynn shows up to talk to the person, Orensland listens in and tails the person afterward, etc). We may like them more than the Maramos's, we may not, but more information is always good. Regardless, Orensland would not personally jeopardize his relationship with the Maramos's, as they are his way into learning more about the Cult, the slave trade etc.
Another motive for scouting out this new coven that Orensland may or may not disclose to the party members is a bit more personal. If pressured he'll say, but otherwise keep it to himself. In essence, Orensland grew up largely targeting large, wealthy, arrogant higher-ups. While allying with Lord and Lady Maramos is a means to an end, Orensland would soon grow uncomfortable living in such lavish accommodations. While continuing to stay at the mansion for appearances, Orensland would remain in the city as much as possible. Furthermore, while technically the Maramos couple is off-limits for pulling the kinds of stunts Orensland would normally pull on those of such status (for now), he would probably see scouting out this coven as an opportunity to blow off some steam. It's a higher-up target, and Orensland would be lying if he said he didn't miss the thrill of setting someone's house on fire.
Orensland would also like Rynn/Khaska to point out the waiter who gave them the note. If things don't work out at the street corner, he'd like to try his hand at scaring the boy into talking. I'm thinking of sneaking him up on him all wraith-like, put a knife to his throat, then threaten to kill him if he doesn't tell relay the proper information. Then vanish without a trace immediately afterwards. I'll roll Bluff (Orensland would never actually kill the boy) and Intimidate checks down below. Hopefully the method of interrogation would enhance the effectiveness in some way. If he still doesn't get any information, he may spy on the boy for a couple of days. We'll cross that bridge if we come to it, though.
On that note of growing increasingly uncomfortable, Orensland would also take to pick-pocketing when scouring the city. I'll add Sleight of Hand rolls in a moment.
As for the scrolls, that's perfect. He would use one of the scrolls as soon as he could to get an idea of his father's location. A simple Scrying spell should do just fine, he has no wish to communicate with his father. As for the other scroll, it seems we have a few options. Are we estimating that Jared would have arrived at his destination by now if nothing went wrong? Or would it still be a few months? If we don't receive some kind of Greater Scrying message from them in the next couple of months, we may want to use the scroll to try to peak in on Jared. Otherwise, Orensland would just hold onto the scroll for now. Though he would suggest Rynn get a similar scroll for trying to locate his wife.
Orensland would also be up for some sparring, mostly out of boredom again. Does that increase my skills in any way?
Also, did Orensland really not find a nest of thieves/the thieves guild by this point? I feel like they would have been relatively easy to find with that spot check. See the theft, follow the thief, etc. Oh well… I guess he'll continue to be on the lookout.
I think that's it as far as my character goes. It may be fun to bring Feral back with us to Rhun, though. Two outcast Maha'i, who I presume feel at least somewhat alone as the sole members of their race for the entirety of their lives, may be happy to find someone like them. Also, if Rynn is interested he could ask about Inyel the Blood Ranger. At the very least to make sure he doesn't accidentally cross paths with her in Darkcrest.
My rolls:
Hide: 44 (rolled natural 20+24)
Move Silently: 26 (rolled 2 + 24)
Sleight of Hand: 26 (rolled 5 + 21)
Bluff: 19 (rolled 9 + 10)
Intimidate: 16 (rolled 11 + 5)
An absolute wraith. This should be good.
You have seen no evidence of a thieves' guild, and in a city this size, you frankly find that a little weird. When you try pickpocketing, what kind of people are you going to target?
Rynn agrees that we should not deal with the rival coven. Although betraying the House of Maramos could sow disruption amongst the evil-aligned, it would also put us in considerable danger. Like Crosis mentioned, we don't need the money, so it's hard to see what other benefit we could gain from it. Besides, Rynn is almost sympathetic to the vampires now that he sees this city. So jaded has he become against the rule of law that he can actually appreciate how the rule of strength in this city mirrors nature. He's starting to believe that any big city will harbor corruption.
Almost being the key word though. Rynn does not like the open slavery here, especially how the "lesser" beings are treated. But there is nothing for him to do about it at this juncture. Perhaps we should tell Lord Maramos of the note to further solidify our alliance/trust with them? (Ironic, given that the ranger's original desire was to just kick open Lady Maramos' coffin by daylight.)
Scrying for Juliet is a good idea; unfortunately Rynn could not make use of a scroll. The spell is not on his class list, nor is he trained in the Use Magic Device skill. But he will ask Lady Isabelle to cast the spell for him. It's not as good since she'd only have secondhand knowledge of the subject, but it's as close as we're going to get.
As for upgrades, Rynn would like to get his personally-crafted masterwork longbow enchanted to be +1 Frost (or better). He'll keep the Flaming Burst bow for now so he has two types of magical options for attack. He'd also like +2 Studded Leather Armor (or better) and some Bracers of Archery. Those are the items he'd most like to get at this juncture, though he'd still be hesitant to ask for much. His companions would know of his few material desires though; so maybe they'd ask on his behalf? (Not that he would ask them to.)
As for longer term plans, Rynn thinks that having the vampires help Orensland with the cult could lead to our best information about them and the messes we've gotten entangled in. But there's definitely risk, especially if Amara is around. Given that it will be some time, the ranger isn't keen on staying around Darkcrest to wait for enemies to converge on us…
OOC: Whoa, I'm surprised Arkenos will be here so soon. Here I was thinking it was going to arrive five years after the party's travels began!
Regarding the rival clan: Khaska agrees that they should not betray the House Maramos. By the same token, he would be wary of revealing the note to the House Maramos as well, lest they set an ambush and their rivals learn that the party turned over their information. Khaska wants to keep a relatively low profile and avoid making enemies here, if at all possible. The one exception would probably Orensland getting in with the Cult of Skyrnyn—there's enough at stake, and enough potential there, that the risk is justifiable.
Khaska has learned about Dreadlord Zyrbryxion, but he still doesn't know why the swamps are so treacherous. That would be one topic of research. Given the reminder that the next Dark Times are around the corner, too, he'll redouble his efforts to find anything regarding Urziana, Kvanir, and Tawru; he knows the Relics of Tawru will probably be needed soon, and he'd want to heal Kvanir and find the Horn (if he finds any traces of it) as soon as he can. He doesn't necessarily want to be in Darkcrest when Arkenos and Jenoa converge, but so long as they'll be there, he'll take advantage of the situation.
Feral [pronounced FAIR-uhl? fair-ALL?] presents some additional complications. Khaska has to figure out how to respect her autonomy and value while not appearing to violate the norms of the city in suspiciously good ways. In pondering how to do that, he'll decide that the should use the same cover story with her as with everyone else in Darkcrest: he's a researcher, come here to study. (It's not worth it to risk blowing his cover.) All the same, he'll tell her that he plans on ensuring her freedom and safety, both in the city and when the party decides to leave. To accomplish this—leaning on the generosity of the House Maramos—he'll ask to have her ownership officially transferred to him, and will tell Feral that, until she is safe, she will need to mimic servitude when they are around others. (If she would like, Khaska could take her out to show her the city from a different perspective.) In private, Khaska would like spend time teaching her how to read (in a Silence spell for privacy and plausible deniability). Lady Isabelle's comments and the treatment of slaves in the city have somewhat stuck in his craw, you might say.
I'll take a look at that dark book of darkness you sent me. But for now I want to post so we can move on.
Dark Book of Darkness. Haha. Supplied by The Evil League of Evil, perhaps?
So three questions before I think we can move forward (and I know that you generally qualify as an "audience member" per that "Types of Players" video I posted a while back, DeltaWolf, but I do want Sanjin to give his input on these decisions as he has opinions):
1. There isn't consensus among you about what to do regarding the note from the rival coven. Nobody wants to go to the meeting (except Orensland, who isn't going to the meeting but wanting to tail them back to their house lands). But it was suggested you tell Lord and Lady Maramos about the note. Will you do that, or not?
2. Orensland wants to go after the waiter that slipped Rynn and Khaska the note. Will Rynn and/or Khaska be willing to give up the information on this young man?
3. Crosis, you didn't answer my questions about who you would be targeting for pickpocketing.
1. I floated the sting operation idea earlier, but I had a few more ideas on the subject. Killing multiple birds with one stone. A plan we could do: A) Tell Greymantle about the note in private. Tell him we intend to discover which coven passed Rynn/Khaska the note via the following plan. B) Khaska goes to the appointed location, Orensland nearby shadowdancing, Rynn and Sanjin close enough that they can be called in should a fight break out. C) Khaska tells the servant/coven representative that he has no desire for money. What he needs is all the information the unknown coven could possibly find on Urziana. If they can provide him with all the details Khaska desires, Khaska would be willing to trade information. Until then, no deal will be made. D) Orensland could tail the servant following the encounter, ultimately finding out which coven they belong to. E) even if we find out who the coven is, we explicitly tell Greymantle we want to see if they'll make good on their commitment to Khaska before we tell him who they are. He knows we're not backstabbing the Maramos clan (yet), so may feel all right giving us a few days to milk the other coven for information.
In this way, we get even more on the Maramos's graces, we discover who this other evil coven is, possibly find something exciting to do while we wait for the Cult to arrive, and Khaska has greater access to information about the demon. After all, while looking names up in a book is one method for discovering who's who in the demon world, I would assume that people in this city have means of directly contacting demons. Who likely know more demons. Who could learn directly who this demon is and how to get the information necessary to make Kvanir good again. If the unknown coven takes the bait, they may have resources necessary to find everything Khaska wants. Who knows? Their motivation may prompt them to seek even the more dangerous channels of knowledge seeking, should their desire to get information on the Maramos coven be sufficiently large.
It doesn't have to be Urziana. If anyone wants a ton of knowledge on any subject, this may be the time to get it.
2. Note that Orensland would not float the interrogation idea unless the sting operation doesn't happen/fails.
3. I didn't realize that Orensland not finding a thieves guild was not out of lack of trying, and that he's just as surprised as I am that he hasn't had any luck. This would make him more cautious than he normally would be out pickpocketing, as it appears likely that something scary keeps people from sharpening their sleight of hand skills in the marketplace. Orensland would go for easy targets until he learns more about the situation - people who are clearly wealthy, even arrogant, but don't seem terribly sharp, possibly drunk. Pickings may be fewer in a city like this, but apparently there's reason to be cautious.
…Also, though, Rynn makes a good point. If Amara is one of the Cult representatives that arrives in Darkcrest… I have yet to think of a scenario where we get out of there alive. Orensland would be scouting out possible escape routes from the city during his sneakery, should that prove necessary.
Interesting thought, Crosis. Khaska would be wary of doing this sort of double-crossing himself; he's not exactly the best in the party at bluffing. Would it be wise to send Khaska with another member of the party, who could do the talking in his stead (the object of the exchange could still be information for Khaska's research)? Further, Khaska would recommend that if we do decide on this move, we should coordinate with Greymantle on what information we give to the rival house just to try to preserve that trust.
Orensland would normally be willing to speak in Khaska's behalf, but it may make tailing the coven representative a bit harder, especially if Khaska and whoever accompanies him are being watched. I assume that last point is a possibility, as Khaska and Rynn were tailed to that tavern once. Plus Orensland himself doesn't actually want anything the coven can offer, so he'd have to make something up. Probably just taking the money, now that I think of it. Anyways. Orensland would prefer somebody else go with Khaska, but if not, he'd offer his services.
Bluff: 16 (6+10)
Hopefully that would be good enough.
“My Lord,” Master Greymantle spoke up as the servants placed the cakes in front of each of them, “an idea, perhaps?”
“Yes, Danforth?”
“If Rynn were to find his wife and child in the future, and we wished to reimburse him, that might take some time and some doing. Perhaps it would just be best to give him some extra gold now, sufficient to purchase them in the future.”
Lord Maramos nodded. “An excellent suggestion, Danforth. Though I would not want to be seen showing too much favoritism to one member of your group over another.”
Orensland waved his hand. “We brothers in arms with Rynn are happy that he might be able to purchase his wife and child, should he ever encounter them. We’re not keeping a running tally of the generosity you’ve offered us and aren’t comparing notes. We are all more than content.”
“Very well then. Though, I warn you, Rynn,” Lord Maramos continued, “if the owners of your wife and child are aware that you want them specifically, and are willing to pay much for them, they will bleed you dry. May I suggest that you purchase them as part of a larger purchase, so it will not be as obvious what your actual intention is, and you will not therefore be taken advantage of as easily.”
“A wise precaution, my Lord,” Rynn said. “And I thank you for your generosity.”
“We are good to those who serve us,” Lady Maramos said. “And you have served us well.”
Khaska entered his quarters cautiously. He didn’t want to alarm Feral or to startle her. He closed the door behind him, making sure that it closed loud enough that she would hear it.
“My lady,” he asked.
Feral appeared from one of the adjoining rooms. He was very pleased that the servants he had asked had found more suitable attire for her. The robe looked comfortable, and she was even wearing gloves.
“I hope that my attire is now more suitable,” she murmured.
“It is, indeed,” Khaska said. “Fitting for a Maha’i woman. Do you know much about our people?”
She shook her head. “Just what I remember from my mother, from what she had learned from others.”
“Come,” he said, “I will tell you of our people and begin, I hope, to rectify the injustices against you. ”
Khaska left Feral in his quarters the next morning as he accompanied Lady Maramos herself to the House of Lancel, to consult with their Codex Demonicus. The Maha’i woman had slept well in his bed (he had taken the floor in one of the adjoining rooms), and they had taken breakfast together in his quarters. She was beginning to warm up with him, his sincerity winning her over. Her caution, which he acknowledged was fully warranted given her background, was waning ever so slightly.
They took a coach across the city, Lady Maramos made some quick inquiries about his research and his findings, and in turn expressed to her that she was looking much healthier since their arrival, but aside from these social niceties, they spent the rest of the journey in silence. Khaska hoped it wasn’t too awkward.
When they arrived, the head butler escorted them to the main house.
“Be on your guard, Khaska,” Lady Maramos whispered to him. “Lady Drakh is an uncouth woman, ruling by power and fear. A shame she rose to command such a noble house.”
“Ah, Lorraine!” A voice came from ahead. The head butler had just opened the double doors at the end of the hallway and they could see inside. A woman dressed in spiked armor was wiping her sword off with a rag. Further in, also in plate, was the body of a dead whitecloak. Lady Drakh used the rag to also wipe her mouth off. She had obviously recently fed. Khaska noted the blood on the marble floor, still slowly spreading from the corpse of the dwarf, but his eyes were drawn hypnotically to Lady Drakh’s face. She had once been human. A large scar split her features, carving a red welt from her left eye, which was white, diagonally down to her chin. She had no hair, having shaved her head, revealing burn scars on her scalp. She had been seriously injured before she had been turned.
“Lady Drakh,” Khaska’s vampire host intoned, inclining her head ever so slightly.
“I don’t supposed you want to feed? He’s a fresh kill!” She indicated the body with her jagged and curved longsword before sheathing it.
Lady Drakh shrugged. “Your loss. Blood always taste’s best when it’s from a fresh kill, all flooded with adrenaline. If you can get them a little drunk, all’s the better.”
“Yes, I’m sure my guest doesn’t want to waste his time with the intricacies of blood delicacies.”
“Fine, yes, let’s get on to business.” Lady Drakh turned to one of the servants. “Drain him and bottle the blood.” Khaska had to deliberately focus and say a pray to Teresh not to be sick.
“Yes, my lady,” the young woman said.
Lady Drakh stomped out of the “I took the liberty of reading our Codex Demonicus and looking for information on this ‘Urziana.’ Our copy does have some information on her, she was a succubus in the service of Bathalm the Everburning at least several centuries ago, and I just happen to know a demon who also works for Bathalm. So I summoned him.”
Khaska was abjectly terrified.
Lady Drakh led them down into a basement apartment, past some cells that smelled of rotting flesh. Filthy prisoners cowered from Lady Drakh as she swept past iron gates until they reached a room with a thick oak door.
As she opened it, they were met with abject shrieking and a cacaophony of words that Khaska didn’t understand. Lady Drakh yelled a few words back and whatever it was grew silent.
“Do you speak Abyssal?” She asked Khaska as he entered the room.
Bound inside some kind of summoning circle on the floor, the runes slowly pulsing with purple power, was a demon, tall and lanky. It’s ebon skin dripped with some kind of ichor and its body conformed to its skeleton as if it were starving. It’s long jaw was snapping and grating on itself, but it was no longer shrieking. Khaska was sure it was a babau.
“Draconic? Celestial?”
“I do speak Celestial.”
“Very well then,” Lady Drakh concluded. She turned to the demon and spoke a few words to it again, then pointed at Khaska.
It turned its eyes towards him and the cleric had to steel himself.
“He won’t hurt you. He can’t,” Lady Drakh said. “And even if he tried,” she drew her sword, “I don’t mind some more exercise this morning. He’ll answer your questions.”
“What information would you ask of me?” the creature hissed, it’s guttural sounds almost an insult to the language of the Celestials.
“I come seeking knowledge of a particular demon, a succubus named ‘Urziana.’ I am told she served Bathalm the Everburning, whom you serve.”
The babau chuckled. “She used to work for him. She failed to seduce one of the Dragonriders from the Knights of the Silver Dragons, and earned Bathalm’s wrath. She escaped and has been hiding on your world ever since.”
“When was this?”
“Roughly a century ago.” Well after Tawru’s corruption, then.
“And why do you seek Urziana?”
Khaska was reluctant to reveal all of the details, but a vague outline didn’t seem dangerous. “In my research into ancient history, I have discovered one of my people who contracted with her. I wish to learn more of the nature of the contract that I may understand the story better.”
“If it was before her exile, Urziana acted as proxy for Bathalm. He would know the details of the contract, but for such beings as succubi or incubi, it involves sealing the pact with sex.”
“And the pact would then be lifelong?”
“Yes. The only way to release this person from the contract would be to kill her, breaking the magic bond with Bathalm, or slaying Bathalm himself, thereby voiding the entire contract. Did this person die under the contract?”
“Near as I can tell.”
“Then his soul belongs to Bathalm. Do you wish to free his soul?”
Khaska hesitated. “I am sure there are those that would.”
“Anybody who could bring proof of Urziana’s demise to Bathalm would be richly rewarded. His servants have crossed this moon many times searching for her, but she was among his best servants at infiltration, being undercover, and of course, seduction. My master has long since given up trying to find her.”
Khaska didn’t want to press further, worried he might give away more of his motivations.
“Thank you for your time,” he said. It was an awkward thing to say.
“Thank you,” Lady Drakh said. She incanted a prayer and waved her hands. The babau shrieked words at her as the light from the runed circle on the floor flared up. He folded in on himself in a moment, then vanished, the sound of his cries disappearing, as if he had been yanked far away. Their echoes slowly died down in the stone room.
“Well, that was a most unpleasant experience,” Lady Maramos said.
“Hey, you wanted answers. That was the best way to get them,” Lady Drakh said. She turned to Khaska. “You can borrow my copy of the Codex if you like, but I don’t know if it will be of additional help.”
“I will at least peruse it and return it to you,” the cleric responded.
“As always, the House of Maramos thanks you for your continued support,” Lady Maramos said, turning away to leave.
“Watch your back, my lady,” Lady Drakh replied.
On the way home, Khaska inquired about Lady Drakh. Her story was an interesting one, with parallels to Tawru’s. She had been a paladin once, a member of the Knights from centuries ago. Corrupted and turned by the then-leader of House Lancel, she had lost her paladin powers and had turned to consorting with demons to regain magical abilities. She was now a blackguard, and somehow the bond with the demons had severed her bond with her vampire sire, the bond that normally forces the vampire child to obey the wishes of their creator. With the bond broken, she slaughtered him as he rested and took control of the house of Lancel in a bloody coup. She had ruled it with an iron fist ever since.
“She is the worst of us, in many ways, prone to indulgence and self-destructive acts, but she is a powerful ally. In some ways, her unpredictability is precisely why she is so valuable.”
Orensland glanced up at the sky. Sunrise twilight was about to begin.
The location was an ideal one for a clandestine meeting. The intersection of Druil and Garzan was out of the way of the main thoroughfares, yet with several ways of getting in and out of the area. Several of the nearby buildings were abandoned, and he had been shadowdancing in for several blocks now. None of the rest of the party were comfortable either betraying the House of Maramos, nor with informing them of the note and this new development. Orensland had decided that he could at least tail these folks and try to find out which coven they were working for. Information was power, after all, and in their circumstances they could use all the power they could get! He had been waiting, hidden atop one of the roofs overlooking the intersection, for several hours. He glanced down at the pouch of money he was fiddling with. He had taken it from a man going to purchase slaves, and had watched with delight as he realized his cash was gone and he could not purchase what he had wanted. After watching the man be beside himself for a while, Orensland had snuck off to the rendezvous spot.
A gnome appeared down one of the streets, walking slowly, apparently somewhat drunk. Orensland watched him carefully. Other than an elf that had passed through about twenty minutes ago, nobody else had come through. Perhaps this was the contact the note spoke of. As they got closer and closer, he started. He knew this gnome! He had met him all those months ago, in the ruins near the Niktean Wastes, he was one of the Glittersail Brothers. They had said they were headed to the Death Side, and well, looks like their travels took them to Darkcrest.
Was this his contact? He glanced around. Sunrise twilight was about to begin and there was nobody else here. Unless the contact was hiding and waitng, like he was, there wasn’t anybody else around. He smiled to himself. These gnomes were responsible for the deaths of several of the locals, not to mention the attack on the outpost. The shadowdancer ruefully thought to himself that perhaps the very existence of the party of him and his friends was due to these people.
That didn’t excuse their actions.
The gnome wandered through, still drunk-appearing, and slightly singing to himself. Eventually, a few minuts after twilight sunrise began, he began to wander off.
Orensland followed.
After a few blocks, the gnome began to move more quickly. As the shadowdancer suspected, he had been faking the drunkenness. Orensland tailed him, staying hidden in the shadows as much as possible. Eventually, the gnome met up with another gnome, one of his brothers. Orensland crept closer.
Unfortunately, they began to speak to each other in gnomish, which Orensland didn’t understand. It was obvious that the newcomer, holding and petting his weasel, was unhappy, but the “drunk” one shrugged. Together, they moved off.
They wandered around for a while, Orensland was pretty sure to throw anybody tailing them off, since the “drunk” one was looking around surreptitiously, but eventually, seeing no sign they were followed they moved off and headed to where he hoped they were based. Eventually they made their way into the center of the city and entered a gateway to the lands of another coven. The House of Lancel.
Well, he thought to himself. That was interesting. He had no desire to go sneaking into a rival coven’s lands, and so made his way back to the House of Maramos. He sought out Rynn, and after explaining his findings, and being slightly chastised by the ranger for acting without the permission of the group, he suggested they go find Khaska and Orensland in the library.
Ranna began to growl at the skeletons the moment she entered, but Rynn shushed her and pulled her with him. The two sketeletons stood unmoving by the door, having received no instructions in the recent past. “This place is so cool!” Orensland said, looking around at the grotesque art, the multiple volumes, and the dancing lights hovering above Khaska. “They have a dragon skull!”
“I’m sure you didn’t come here to admire the décor,” the cleric said, a bit exasperated. Orensland certainly wasn’t following standard protocol in a library to be quiet. Luckily it was just Sanjin and Orensland at the moment.
Orensland brought Khaska up to speed, and after coming to a stopping place, Sanjin joined them. He had to be told the entire story of the party’s first encounter with the Glittersail brothers.
“They were studying the ruins?” he asked.
“Well, one building in particular,” Orensland said. “In fact, just one part of the building. A black stone archway that …” The shadowdancer fell silent. His eyes glanced across the room … to the black stone archway on the back wall, under which the copper dragon skull hung on the wall “… exactly like that black stone archway.” He pointed to it.
“Wait, they were studing that thing?” the wizard asked.
“Or one just like it,” Orensland replied.
Apologies for the delay. I’ve had a bit of writer’s block about how to proceed and I think I finally cracked it.
If it wasn’t brought up here in the post, assume that you’re moving forward with new armor, items, research, etc. Though, Khaska isn’t teaching Feral (pronounced like the adjective, i.e. a feral child, i.e. FAIR-uhl) how to read inside a Silence spell, since they wouldn’t be able to hear anything! (It doesn’t create a magic wall of no-sound-penetrating, it literally erases sound from the area of effect.) There’s plenty of privacy. It’s not a problem.
There wasn’t real enthusiasm for any of the major proposals surrounding the note from the rival coven. So I had Orensland act on his own to gather more information. That seemed, to me, the best way to move forward given your collective input.
So, you all now know two things:
1. The Glittersail Brothers are in town, and are staying with House Lancel. They were the go-between for the rendezvous.
2. House Lancel is, it appears, opposed to House Maramos, and is therefore deceiving Lord and Lady Maramos.
How would you like to proceed? What would you like to do next?
Sweet! And just for the sake of things, how has Orensland's thievery gone so far? :D
In terms of overall knowledge and questions, can we get the gist as to who this Bathalm the Everburning demon is? He doesn't sound like a terribly pleasant fellow, but still, knowledge can be power. Orensland would also suggest that Sanjin or somebody more inclined to admire magical decor to ask about the archway.
As for how to move along, Orensland would come to a basic conclusion. As much as he dislikes the Maramos household simply because they are evil, I should think that Lady Drakh is a much less respectable entity. I think it's safe to say that, if we had to give someone grief while here in the city, she and her household would be the more fun targets. Plus it would just make us look even better on the side of the Maramos clan. However, more information is key as to how to proceed.
So! Orensland would like to talk to the gnomes. He'd like to see if they ever leave the mansion in question, particularly from the door he saw them enter from. He'd likely spend a day or two watching for their patterns, then approach one in private and tell him he's interested in what they have to offer. (He can say he was there at the meeting place, but wanted to know who he may have been signing on with in advance and followed them back to their mansion. He'd also swear to having never told the House of Maramos of the note). To help sell the lie, he would make clear that monetary rewards are not of interest to Orensland or his party members. He'd like to know what they truly have to offer, and if they draw up blank he may suggest aid against the upcoming Dark Times or unique ways to enhance the prowess of Orensland and/or the party members. That could include knowledge for Sanjin. Orensland suspects the gnomes are partial to interesting knowledge, as they study ancient magical artifacts for a living.
Orensland would first wait to get an idea as to what the magical archway is before talking the gnomes, probably through Sanjin. It may help in his discussion with the gnomes, though he wouldn't blurt out that he knows of a similar archway to the one the gnomes had been studying. It depends on what he learns about the archway, but I suspect he would lean toward keeping that knowledge secret.
Orensland would tell the party, but not the Maramos leaders yet. He'd wait until after the meeting to decide when to let them in on this sneakery.
What rolls will be required of me?
After hearing about Lady Drakh, Rynn does not like the idea of her taking further power in Darkcrest. She is apparently stable or canny enough to keep control of a major coven for quite some time and is prone to violence. Although the Coven of Maramos is certainly evil, they at least have some notion of civility.
As for the Glittersail Brothers, we never did discover what they had been up to, researching that temple ruin so long ago. It was never clear whether they were complicit in the deaths that Nathan caused, but they certainly didn't care to make any kind of restitution. Rynn is somewhat interested in knowing more about what they are up to, but is wary since they know of us by name.
Rynn isn't sure how to proceed and will defer to Orensland's intuition at this point. The ranger feels out of his element, unsure whether to interfere or not. If Orensland wants to act, we at least have some plausible deniability on both sides, given that we know of those Brothers from before and the House of Lancel is supposedly aligned with Maramos.
I did mention in the narration that Orensland had pilfered a coin purse from someone out shopping who, when he discovered it was missing, was absolutely beside himself with grief. That's how the thieving is going.
For knowledge on Baltham the Everburning, Khaska can easily find that information in the Maramos House copy of the Codex Demonicus. He is a Balor Demon who particularly enjoys waging war to control the passages from one world to the next, or between planes of the Abyss, or between the planes themselves.
If Sanjin wants to investigate the archway, how will he go about doing that, DeltaWolf?
I'll need Hide, Move Silently, Bluff, Diplomacy, and Sense Motive rolls from Orensland.
Yes, but how much did he get? :D
Hide: 44 (natural 20 + 24)
Move Silently: 39 (15 + 24)
Bluff: 25 (15 + 10)
Diplomacy: 16 (10 + 6)
Sense Motive: 8 (8 + 0)
Going from amazing rolls to meh rolls, but nothing close to a natural 1, so I'll take it.
Thanks for the reminder about the Silence spell. Given that Khaska's use therefore allowed the party to decimate the Whitecloaks, I really should've remembered… In that case, Khaska will just continue tutoring Feral.
Khaska, of course, is appalled by Lady Drakh, and upon conversing with his fellow party members, will concur that he's fine keeping on the side of the House Maramos for the time being. (Looking ahead, he wouldn't be opposed to revealing the information to Lady Maramos, somehow, after the party has left the city.) However, he would be in favor of further investigation— it's very curious that the Glittersail brother should be here, too, seeking information about a house with fixtures similar to the ones they were investigating on Gallidus. He'd offer Orensland his Hat of Disguise to meet up with them, if Orensland thinks it would be of any use; indeed, the Glittersail brothers could have sought us out because they recognized us, and they could laugh off a disguise. (A Maha'i, a Ranger, and an Elf walk into a tavern…)
Regarding Baltham, Khaska would scour any records there might be for information about not only finding demons, but slaying them (of course, as part of broader research; he'll be sure to read widely so that his interest won't seem so singular). In hopes of finding Urziana (seemingly a difficult quest in itself), he'd also look into means of luring demons into the open.
Orensland found 47 gold, 12 silver, and 18 copper in the purse that he pilfered.
I'll need a post from DeltaWolf and then I think we're ready to move forward.
Sanjin is interested in investigating the archway. He would start by seeing if the archway sparked any knowledge he'd previously obtained.
Knowledge (Arcana): 29 (18 rolled + 11 mod)
He would then cast Detect Magic (if/when possible) and if the archway is magical try to determine the school of magic.
Spellcraft: 25 (13 rolled + 12 mod)
After all that he would see if he could find any information through research -noting the location of the ruins he was told about with the gnomes (is there a skill check I should use for this?).
The skill check about the ruins the gnomes were previously investigating would be Knowledge (History). Given your situation in a well-stocked library with some good basic information to start with, I feel an accurate way of representing your searching the library would be to give you the 5th edition rule Advantage on this check. Roll twice, and take the higher roll. Post it here, and I think we're ready to rock.
Sanjin doesn't have Knowledge (History) so here is a basic Knowledge
Knowledge: 20 (3, 17 rolled + 3 mod)
Sanjin immediately walked over to inspect the archway more thoroughly. “I thought it was just part of the décor.” He reached up to touch it, running his hands along the ebon surface. He began musing to himself, his voice growing quieter with excited awe. “If there are two, there may be more. But what would be the point of having a bunch of magic archways …” his breath caught. “They’re gateways. I bet they connect to each other somehow. Or maybe that you can get them to connect to each other. Like a, a doorway between places.” He had spent decades on the death side searching for ancient artifacts and now he had just stumbled upon one. Maybe more than one. Maybe a series of them! “You would need to know how to activate them, obviously.” He began to mutter some arcane words and cast a Detect Magic spell, focusing on the archway. “Conjuration spell on the item. It’s clearly magic of some kind.” He focused for another moment. “Powerful, too.”
He pondered for a moment, then rushed over to a desk, pulling out one of the large drawers. He flipped through the papers in it before finding what he wanted, and pulled out a very old map of Gallidus. He layed it out on one of the tables. “Can you show me where the other archway was?”
They were able to point out where it was, more or less, just on the northern outskirts of the Niktean Wastes. He looked at it, then grabbed another map of the world from the drawer, and laid it out on another table. “I’ll have to do some more research, but we may have found some kind of ancient transport system. We use something sort of similar at the University, access to the advanced magic books, the kind you don’t want amateurs accidentally stumbling upon, is restricted. A circle of teleportation takes you to that part of the library, and it’s always guarded on both ends by elite eldridtch knights, mageslayer-types. Even the location of the building is secret from all but the highest officials of the library. It could be on some island in the middle of the ocean for all we know. Or buried somewhere on the death side.” He shrugged. “Who knows?”
“Well,” Khaska said. “This is all certainly troubling news. The House of Lancel is pulling the cloth over the eyes of our benefactors. I must admit, as evil as Lord and Lady Maramos are, Lady Drakh coming to more power would be much worse.”
“I agree,” Rynn said. “She is both stable and canny enough to seize and keep control of a major coven for some time, and is prone to violence from what you’ve said, Khaska.” The cleric nodded, nearly shuddering at the memory of her blood-stained curved and serrated longsword. “The Maramos’s have at least some notion of civility.”
“So do we tell them?” asked Orensland. There was a long pause. The shadowdancer was wary of moving forward in a major way again without the permission of the group. He still felt slightly bad for forcing their hand to come to Darkcrest, and Rynn had just chastised him for acting without the party, again. He looked from the ranger to the cleric, and back to the ranger again.
“I would think not yet,” Khaska said. “Perhaps gathering more information would be prudent. Sanjin can continue to investigate these archways, and Orensland could perhaps approach these gnomes on his own terms, instead of theirs.”
“I think that a wise approach,” Rynn said. “When we find out more, we could tell the Maramos’s if we feel it appropriate. We already have their trust. It may cement us more with them, and subsequently with the cult, and if it helps reduce Lady Drakh’s infleunce, all the better, I think. But more information first.”
page revision: 41, last edited: 04 Jan 2019 20:46
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Katie Ailes
Katie Ailes is a researcher, artist and producer focusing on performance-based poetry. As a producer with I Am Loud Productions, she has co-devised and performed in shows at the Edinburgh, Prague, and Brighton Fringe festivals; VAULT Festival; and Hidden Door Festival. She has performed across the UK with organisations including the Scottish Poetry Library, Scottish Book Trust, the Centre for Poetic Innovation, Scottish PEN, and Apples & Snakes. Her work has been published in Gutter, the Herald, A Year of Scottish Poems, and Glasgow Women Poets. Her poem ‘Outwith’ was chosen as one of the Scottish Poetry Library’s Best of the Best Scottish Poems in 2019.
katieailes.com
Photo: Perry Jonsson
The StAnza Slam »
With MC Katie Ailes
Sat 7 March | 22:15 - 23:59 | £4.50/£3.50 | Byre Theatre, Abbey Street, Auditorium
Video of Katie Ailes - Outwith
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Statitudes
Statitudes, LLC
Justin Kubatko
Hall of Fame Selector
Individual Offensive and Defensive Ratings
Individualized Win-Loss Records
The Keltner List
Who Was the Most Improved Player in 2014-15?
April 17, 2015 Analysis, NBAJustin Kubatko
A few years ago I developed a method for identifying the leading candidates for the Most Improved Player (MIP) award. Since the winner of the award for the 2014-15 season will be announced soon, I thought it might be interesting to revisit this topic. I’ve made some tweaks to the method since it was first conceived, so let me outline the process before reporting this season’s results.
The first step, of course, is to select the players to include in the study. The player pool consisted of all players from 1954-55 through 2013-14 who met the following criteria:
Played at least 40 percent of all possible minutes in the given season.
Played at least one minute (cumulatively) in the three previous seasons.
This gave me a sample of 7,144 player seasons, and for each of those seasons I did the following:
Computed the player’s individualized wins per 48 minutes (iW/48) in the given season.
Computed a baseline value of iW/48 for the player going into the given season. The baseline value is a weighted average of the player’s past three seasons, with last season receiving a weight of six, two seasons ago receiving a weight of three, and three seasons ago receiving a weight of one, plus some regression toward the mean. Note that seasons in which the player has missing data are zeroed out
Computed the difference between the player’s actual iW/48 and his baseline iW/48.
Let me go through an example using last season’s MIP, Goran Dragic:
Dragic averaged .2124 iw/48 in 2013-14.
Dragic’s relevant numbers for the three previous seasons were 6.781 iW in 2,581 minutes (2012-13), 5.593 iW in 1,752 minutes (2011-12), and 1.237 iW in 1,234 minutes (2010-11). Dragic’s weighted totals are 58.702 iW and 21,976 minutes, so his baseline value is: 48 * (58.702 + (1000 * (0.1 / 48))) / (21976 + 1000) = .1270.
The difference between Dragic’s actual average and his baseline value is: .2124 – .1270 = 0.0854.
I did this for all qualifying player seasons in the time period and examined the distribution of the differences. Here is a histogram of the results:
As you can see, the data are approximately Normal with mean 0 and standard deviation 0.039. We can then use this information to answer the following question: “What is the probability than a randomly selected player will beat his expectation by at least x iW/48?”
Let’s return to the Dragic example. In 2013-14, Dragic beat his expectation by .0854 iW/48. We want to find:
P(X ≥ .0854)
where X is the difference between the player’s actual iW/48 and baseline iW/48. Since the data are approximately Normal, this calculation is straightforward:
P(X ≥ .0854) = P(X / .039 ≥ .0854 / .039) = P(Z ≥ 2.190)
Now, Z is a standard Normal random variable, so:
P(Z ≥ 2.190) = .0143
In other words, the difference between Dragic’s actual performance and his baseline performance was uncommon: only about one out of every 70 players will beat their baseline by at least .0854 iW/48.
How did that performance compare to others that season? Here are the five most improbable performances of the 2013-14 season:
iW/48
1 in:
1 Markieff Morris 2153 .157 .050 .107 .0031 326
2 DeMar DeRozan 3017 .162 .071 .091 .0098 102
2 D.J. Augustin 1939 .168 .081 .088 .0124 80
3 Goran Dragic 2668 .212 .127 .085 .0143 70
4 Anthony Davis 2358 .236 .154 .082 .0177 56
From a statistical standpoint, Morris’ improvement is the most impressive of the season, as only about one out of every 326 players will beat his baseline by at least .107 iW/48.
This method also highlights why the Phoenix Suns surprised so many people last season. In addition to Morris and Dragic, two other Suns — Gerald Green (seventh) and Marcus Morris (14th) — finished in the top 14 on the list of most improbable performances.*
* Eric Bledsoe was another Sun who showed great improvement, but he did not play enough minutes to qualify for the list.
Enough about last season, though. Let’s move on to this season…
Without further ado, here are the five biggest deviations from baseline in 2014-15:
1 Rudy Gobert 2158 .182 .050 .132 .0004 2775
2 Tyler Zeller 1731 .181 .068 .113 .0018 546
3 Anthony Davis 2455 .319 .209 .110 .0023 432
4 Giannis Antetokounmpo 2541 .110 .006 .104 .0038 263
5 Klay Thompson 2455 .199 .095 .104 .0038 260
I’m not surprised to see Gobert at the top of this list. Gobert went from an afterthought who played only 434 minutes last season to a defensive force who averaged over 26 minutes per game (almost 35 minutes per game since the All-Star break).
I suppose it might be surprising to see Davis and Thompson on this list, but both made very difficult leaps this season, Davis from All-Star to MVP candidate and Thompson from slightly above average starter to All-Star.
Before I go, let me make it perfectly clear that I am not suggesting that the NBA actually use a formula to determine the MIP. I can think of quite a few reasons why a player who isn’t in the top five based on this method should be voted the MIP. However, I do think this is a good way to whittle down the list of candidates, and to separate players who have obviously improved from players whose improvement is questionable.
That said, in this case I agree with the system: I would cast my (fictional) vote for Gobert.
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2 thoughts on “Who Was the Most Improved Player in 2014-15?”
Robi says:
Now that we know Jimmy Butler won MIP with a huge margin… where did this analysis go wrong?
He played the same minutes last year and improved by…
FG% 40 to 46
3P% 28 to 38, although there are some kind of “cheats” with these, as he had similar numbers 2 years ago
FT% 77 to 83
TRB 4.9 to 5.8
AST 2.6 to 3.3
PTS 13.1 to 20, which is an increase rate of about 53%. I guess that amount of increase is probably one of the greatest in NBA history.
Justin Kubatko says:
I don’t think this analysis went wrong, per se. Although I only included the top five in my post, Butler actually finished sixth:
Rk Player MIN iW/48 Base Diff Prob 1 in:
6 Jimmy Butler 2513 0.226 0.124 0.102 0.0046 218
Remember, I used the past three seasons of data to set the baseline. Butler was a much better shooter in 2012-13 than he was in 2013-14.
2015 NCAA Tournament Forecast
Is Marques Johnson a Hall of Famer?
Is Jack Sikma a Hall of Famer?
Is Buck Williams a Hall of Famer?
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Accueil | Résultats | Statistiques | Classement | Équipes | Joueurs | Odds
Asher Wojciechowski
MPM V-D RAB
Équipe: Baltimore T. / Pds: 1.93m / 107kg
Position: LP Né le: 21/12/1988 Lieu de naissance: Hardeeville, South Carolina
Frappeurs/Lancers: D/D Repêchage: Supplémentaire Tour by Blue Jays (2010)
Statistiques comparatives
Statistiques défensives
Stat. par match
Sep 27 7:16 Ap-Mid PT8:16 Ap-Mid MT9:16 Ap-Mid CT10:16 Ap-Mid ET22:16 HE2:16 GMT10:16 7:16 Ap-Mid MST9:16 Ap-Mid EST8:16 Ap-Mid CST9:46 Ap-Mid VEN6:16 UAE (+1)9:16 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski improved to 4-8, allowing four hits and one walk over 6.0 scoreless innings, as the Baltimore Orioles defeated the Boston Red Sox 4-1 on Friday. Wojciechowski struck out six, ending the game with a 4.92 ERA and 1.31 WHIP on the season.
Sep 21 8:57 Ap-Mid PT9:57 Ap-Mid MT10:57 Ap-Mid CT11:57 Ap-Mid ET23:57 HE3:57 GMT11:57 8:57 Ap-Mid MST10:57 Ap-Mid EST9:57 Ap-Mid CST11:27 Ap-Mid VEN7:57 UAE (+1)10:57 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski allowed three runs - two earned - on six hits and two walks in 4.1 innings as the Baltimore Orioles lost to the Seattle Mariners 7-6 on Saturday. Wojciechowski struck out four, ending the game with a 5.31 ERA and 1.35 WHIP on the season.
Sep 15 2:05 Ap-Mid PT3:05 Ap-Mid MT4:05 Ap-Mid CT5:05 Ap-Mid ET17:05 HE21:05 GMT5:05 2:05 Ap-Mid MST4:05 Ap-Mid EST3:05 Ap-Mid CST4:35 Ap-Mid VEN1:05 UAE (+1)4:05 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski improved to 3-8, allowing two runs on eight hits in 5.0 innings, as the Baltimore Orioles defeated the Detroit Tigers 8-2 on Sunday. Wojciechowski struck out two, ending the game with a 5.38 ERA and 1.32 WHIP on the season.
Sep 8 1:31 Ap-Mid PT2:31 Ap-Mid MT3:31 Ap-Mid CT4:31 Ap-Mid ET16:31 HE20:31 GMT4:31 1:31 Ap-Mid MST3:31 Ap-Mid EST2:31 Ap-Mid CST4:01 Ap-Mid VEN0:31 UAE (+1)3:31 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski fell to 2-8, allowing four runs on six hits and one walk in 2.0 innings, as the Baltimore Orioles lost to the Texas Rangers 10-4 on Sunday. Wojciechowski struck out two, ending the game with a 5.51 ERA and 1.30 WHIP on the season.
Sep 2 1:30 Ap-Mid PT2:30 Ap-Mid MT3:30 Ap-Mid CT4:30 Ap-Mid ET16:30 HE20:30 GMT4:30 1:30 Ap-Mid MST3:30 Ap-Mid EST2:30 Ap-Mid CST4:00 Ap-Mid VEN0:30 UAE (+1)3:30 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski allowed four runs on five hits and one walk in 7.0 innings as the Baltimore Orioles lost to the Tampa Bay Rays 5-4 on Monday. Wojciechowski struck out five, ending the game with a 5.12 ERA and 1.23 WHIP on the season.
Aou 28 7:23 Ap-Mid PT8:23 Ap-Mid MT9:23 Ap-Mid CT10:23 Ap-Mid ET22:23 HE2:23 GMT10:23 7:23 Ap-Mid MST9:23 Ap-Mid EST8:23 Ap-Mid CST9:53 Ap-Mid VEN6:23 UAE (+1)9:23 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski fell to 2-7, allowing five runs on six hits in 4.0 innings, as the Baltimore Orioles lost to the Washington Nationals 8-4 on Wednesday. Wojciechowski struck out three, ending the game with a 5.12 ERA and 1.28 WHIP on the season.
Aou 23 9:58 Ap-Mid PT10:58 Ap-Mid MT11:58 Ap-Mid CT12:58 Mat. ET0:58 HE4:58 GMT12:58 9:58 Ap-Mid MST11:58 Ap-Mid EST10:58 Ap-Mid CST12:28 Mat. VEN8:58 UAE11:58 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski allowed two runs on four hits and three walks in 5.0 innings as the Baltimore Orioles lost to the Tampa Bay Rays 5-2 on Thursday. Wojciechowski struck out two, ending the game with a 4.67 ERA and 1.26 WHIP on the season.
Aou 17 7:25 Ap-Mid PT8:25 Ap-Mid MT9:25 Ap-Mid CT10:25 Ap-Mid ET22:25 HE2:25 GMT10:25 7:25 Ap-Mid MST9:25 Ap-Mid EST8:25 Ap-Mid CST9:55 Ap-Mid VEN6:25 UAE (+1)9:25 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski fell to 2-6, allowing two runs on five hits and three walks in 4.1 innings, as the Baltimore Orioles lost to the Boston Red Sox 4-0 on Saturday. Wojciechowski struck out four, ending the game with a 4.78 ERA and 1.24 WHIP on the season.
Aou 11 2:01 Ap-Mid PT3:01 Ap-Mid MT4:01 Ap-Mid CT5:01 Ap-Mid ET17:01 HE21:01 GMT5:01 2:01 Ap-Mid MST4:01 Ap-Mid EST3:01 Ap-Mid CST4:31 Ap-Mid VEN1:01 UAE (+1)4:01 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski allowed three runs on four hits and three walks in 6.0 innings as the Baltimore Orioles defeated the Houston Astros 8-7 on Sunday. Wojciechowski struck out five, ending the game with a 4.84 ERA and 1.19 WHIP on the season.
Aou 6 8:44 Ap-Mid PT9:44 Ap-Mid MT10:44 Ap-Mid CT11:44 Ap-Mid ET23:44 HE3:44 GMT11:44 8:44 Ap-Mid MST10:44 Ap-Mid EST9:44 Ap-Mid CST11:14 Ap-Mid VEN7:44 UAE (+1)10:44 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski fell to 2-5, allowing five runs on six hits and three walks in 4.0 innings, as the Baltimore Orioles lost to the New York Yankees 9-4 on Tuesday. Wojciechowski struck out five, ending the game with a 4.89 ERA and 1.19 WHIP on the season.
Aou 1 7:31 Ap-Mid PT8:31 Ap-Mid MT9:31 Ap-Mid CT10:31 Ap-Mid ET22:31 HE2:31 GMT10:31 7:31 Ap-Mid MST9:31 Ap-Mid EST8:31 Ap-Mid CST10:01 Ap-Mid VEN6:31 UAE (+1)9:31 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski fell to 2-4, allowing four runs on six hits and three walks in 4.2 innings, as the Baltimore Orioles lost to the Toronto Blue Jays 11-2 on Thursday. Wojciechowski struck out five, ending the game with a 4.15 ERA and 1.07 WHIP on the season.
Juillet 27 10:13 Ap-Mid PT11:13 Ap-Mid MT12:13 Mat. CT1:13 Mat. ET1:13 HE5:13 GMT13:13 10:13 Ap-Mid MST12:13 Mat. EST11:13 Ap-Mid CST12:43 Mat. VEN9:13 UAE12:13 Mat. CT-Asher Wojciechowski improved to 2-3, allowing two runs on three hits and one walk in 7.0 innings, as the Baltimore Orioles defeated the Los Angeles Angels 9-3 on Friday. Wojciechowski struck out six, ending the game with a 3.60 ERA and 0.93 WHIP on the season.
Juillet 21 12:55 Ap-Mid PT1:55 Ap-Mid MT2:55 Ap-Mid CT3:55 Ap-Mid ET15:55 HE19:55 GMT3:55 12:55 Ap-Mid MST2:55 Ap-Mid EST1:55 Ap-Mid CST3:25 Ap-Mid VEN23:55 UAE2:55 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski improved to 1-3, allowing one hit and two walks over 7.1 scoreless innings, as the Baltimore Orioles defeated the Boston Red Sox 5-0 on Sunday. Wojciechowski struck out 10, ending the game with a 3.91 ERA and 1.04 WHIP on the season.
Juillet 16 7:20 Ap-Mid PT8:20 Ap-Mid MT9:20 Ap-Mid CT10:20 Ap-Mid ET22:20 HE2:20 GMT10:20 7:20 Ap-Mid MST9:20 Ap-Mid EST8:20 Ap-Mid CST9:50 Ap-Mid VEN6:20 UAE (+1)9:20 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski fell to 0-3, allowing three runs on six hits in 5.1 innings, as the Baltimore Orioles lost to the Washington Nationals 8-1 on Tuesday. Wojciechowski struck out seven, ending the game with a 5.74 ERA and 1.34 WHIP on the season.
Juillet 12 7:00 Ap-Mid PT8:00 Ap-Mid MT9:00 Ap-Mid CT10:00 Ap-Mid ET22:00 HE2:00 GMT10:00 7:00 Ap-Mid MST9:00 Ap-Mid EST8:00 Ap-Mid CST9:30 Ap-Mid VEN6:00 UAE (+1)9:00 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski allowed one hit without giving up a run in 0.2 innings as the Baltimore Orioles lost to the Tampa Bay Rays 16-4 on Friday. Wojciechowski struck out two, ending the game with a 6.10 ERA and 1.45 WHIP on the season.
Juillet 7 12:58 Ap-Mid PT1:58 Ap-Mid MT2:58 Ap-Mid CT3:58 Ap-Mid ET15:58 HE19:58 GMT3:58 12:58 Ap-Mid MST2:58 Ap-Mid EST1:58 Ap-Mid CST3:28 Ap-Mid VEN23:58 UAE2:58 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski fell to 0-2, allowing three runs on four hits and three walks in 4.1 innings, as the Baltimore Orioles lost to the Toronto Blue Jays 6-1 on Sunday. Wojciechowski struck out six, ending the game with a 6.52 ERA and 1.45 WHIP on the season.
Juillet 2 6:56 Ap-Mid PT7:56 Ap-Mid MT8:56 Ap-Mid CT9:56 Ap-Mid ET21:56 HE1:56 GMT9:56 6:56 Ap-Mid MST8:56 Ap-Mid EST7:56 Ap-Mid CST9:26 Ap-Mid VEN5:56 UAE (+1)8:56 Ap-Mid CT-Asher Wojciechowski fell to 0-1, allowing four runs on five hits and two walks in 5.1 innings, as the Baltimore Orioles lost to the Tampa Bay Rays 6-3 on Tuesday. Wojciechowski struck out six, ending the game with a 6.75 ERA and 1.31 WHIP on the season.
Toute utilisation commerciale ou distribution sans l'autorisation écrite de STATS est strictement prohibée.
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News and Events /
MALAWI: President of SIGNIS sends messages of solidarity to Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe as humanitarian crisis remains critical
News and Events Events Mar 25 / 0 Comments
President of the World Catholic Association for Communications (SIGNIS) Helen Osman has expressed solidarity with the people of Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe following the aftermath of Tropical Cyclone Idai which has so far led to hundreds of death, massive destruction of property, displacement of thousands of people as well as injuries to many.
In her letter addressed to the President of Episcopal Conference of Malawi ECM Most Rev. Luke Thomas Msusa, SMM, Ms. Osman said that “as Catholic communicators, we know genuinely compassionate communication can comfort and encourage those who suffer such devastation. We support your efforts to provide a message of hope to your faithful. Together with you, they will rebuild their homes, their communities, their Church.”
She further indicated that SIGNIS embrace those families who have lost loved ones and holds in prayer all who are attempting to aid and comfort them, including first responders, aid agencies and civil authorities.
“Along with our members from the African continent, including our Vice-President Father Paul Samasumo from Zambia, we pray for the recovery of your region and the lives of its people,” the letter which was seen by AMECEA Online News said.
Ms. Osman further reiterate the commitment of Catholic Communicators to use the media to call upon people of good will to stand with the affected people in the three countries “as you work to meet the urgent needs of your people.”
Meanwhile an Inter-Agency assessment report obtained from Catholic Development Commission in Malawi (CADECOM) indicates that there is great fear of outbreak of water and airborne diseases following the congestions in the shelters for the displaced.
The report indicates that there is generally low sanitation coverage in the affected districts as water sources are feared to be contaminated by human waste and pesticides, Nsanje and Phalombe districts being the worst hit, hence the need for water treatment as well as provision of clean drinking water. While all humanitarian assistance is still crucial, the need to prevent an outbreak of water and airborne diseases in the shelters is paramount.
Further the report indicates that damages include partial and complete structural damage to houses and public buildings; submerged houses and public buildings; roads and bridges completely destroyed rendering them impassable, destroyed inundated crops and flooded rivers cutting communities and road access.
The total displaced households in the two districts is about 16,866 while total displaced individuals amount to 75, 900. Initial emergency response focuses on rescuing people who were trapped on rooftops, treetops and the like. Then the next requirement is to provide shelter to the displaced families and other basic necessities such as food, blankets and clean drinking water among others.
AMECEA therefore reiterate the appeal by Catholic Bishops in Malawi to collaborators and partners to offer the much needed humanitarian support through CADCOM, the dioceses, parishes or Religious Congregations that are working directly and among the people on the ground.
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北京花漾年华酒店
Huayang Nianhua Hotel Beijing
Travel in Chinese Dresses
"China has great etiquette, so it is called summer; the beauty of Zhangfu is called Huahua." Han costume is the traditional costume of the Han nationality in China. It is also called "Chinese costume" or "Han costume". Han obedience has been developing for thousands of years since ancient times, and each dynasty has a slightly different form. At first, people made Chinese clothes based on unearthed cultural relics and drawings. With the gradual acceptance of Chinese clothes by the public, the commercialization and branding of Chinese clothes came into being. Especially in recent years, many Chinese clothes stores choose landing cultural scenic spots.
In recent years, along with the general trend of traditional culture, wearing Chinese clothes seems to have become a trend. Many Chinese clothes enthusiasts buy as many as hundreds of sets. According to CCTV Finance and Economics Channel "Economic Information Broadcast", at present, the Chinese clothing market in China has more than 2 million consumers, the total industrial scale is about 1.09 billion yuan. Some experts said that the revival of the Chinese clothing industry has a very good boost effect on restoring the traditional Chinese culture and displaying the cultural charm of the Chinese nation for thousands of years.
The main reason for the rise of "Hanfu fever" lies in the strong support of relevant cultural departments. In 2018, the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League joined the ranks of supporting the promotion of Chinese clothes and designated the third day of March of the lunar calendar as "Chinese clothes day". It is understood that this year's "China Huafu Day" has 20 million live viewings on the Internet. Up to now, the topic of "China Huafu Day" microblog, hosted by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, has exceeded 440 million. The unique beauty of Han obedience has been recognized and accepted by more and more people from the collection of the museum to the daily wear nowadays.
Four-in-one small moire, Qushui tangled Zhilian, dragon pattern, group pattern, melon and gourd rolling, Fulu Shouxi... The rise of Han clothes has brought the exquisite traditional patterns of cultural relics back to the life of the masses. Miss Chang, from Hubei Province, said, "Because I learned to associate with Chinese zither and Chinese costume, besides elegant appearance, the culture behind it makes me more heartbeat. For example, the collar system of Hanfu is `handing over', i.e., crossing to form a lowercase letter y-shaped, which is the constant feature in the development of Hanfu and therefore becomes the symbol of Hanfu. There will be a middle seam between the front and back sides of Hanfu, which symbolizes the integrity of human beings, which is the charm of traditional culture.
Costume is a window to show. Traveling in traditional costume will have a clearer recognition of one's identity. In the process of traveling, it will restrict one's behavior more, which is conducive to shaping a positive image of civilized tourism. In addition, the rise of Hanfu has made many non-legacy skills known to the public again, such as the velvet and silk flower production techniques used in Hanfu headdress, silk weaving and Su embroidery techniques used in accessory group fans, etc. Hanfu carries traditional crafts and aesthetics such as spinning, weaving, dyeing and embroidery. Its beauty is not only reflected in its gorgeous appearance, but also comes from the thick and heavy culture which has been deposited behind for thousands of years.
Prev： Rural Residence Towards the Key Period of Quality Development
Next： Creating an Ecosphere for Rural Tourism Development
Huayang Nianhua Hotel Beijing traffic info
Business zone：Sihui
Area：chaoyangqu
Address：Beijing · Beijing · chaoyangqu - Near Huayuanzha Road (Section B, Dongyi International Media Industrial Park Pase III) Beijing China | 960m from Metro Station:Gaobeidian
Huayang Nianhua Hotel Beijing reserve：400 862 8088 (CouponCode:77359) (Busy or no answer, online booking please!)
Address： Near Huayuanzha Road (Section B, Dongyi International Media Industrial Park Pase III) Beijing China | 960m from Metro Station:Gaobeidian
北京花漾年华酒店 ◎ Huayang Nianhua Hotel Beijing
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Categories DVD Titles Michael Imhotep Black Wall Street - From Destruction to Resurrection - (Digital Download) - Michael Imhotep
Black Wall Street - From Destruction to Resurrection - (Digital Download) - Michael Imhotep
(DIGITAL DOWNLOAD) This presentation from Michael Imhotep host of “The African History Network” deals with a lot of the little known history of North Tulsa, Oklahoma and it’s African American business district called The Greenwood District or “Black Wall Street”. We had 35 blocks of over 600 businesses in the early 1900s. The real history of Black Wall Street is not very well known and even lesser known is the fact that inspite of insurmountable odds, we rebuilt Black Wall Street after the Race Riot of June 1921. Recorded Nov. 2014
(This presentation is in DIGITAL DOWNLOAD format) This link will be good for 48 hours. Once you download the video they are yours to keep. Click here to order the DVD version of the lecture.
Topics Covered in this presentation:
- A Timeline of history leading up to June 1921.
- The origins of Tulasa, Oklahoma which was settled by Creek Indians around 1836.
- The Black Freedmen Indian Treaty of 1866. This treaty is being enforced for White Indians but not for Africans Americans who qualify.
- Did you know that all “5 Civilized Tribes of Native Americans” owned Black Slaves?
- Black Wall Street was rebuilt after 1921.
- What really destroyed Black Wall Street? It was not the Race Riot.
The 13 Forms of Wealth: Keys To Entrepreneurship & Economic Empowerment" 8-25-17 - Michael Imhotep
The Racist History of The White National Anthem & Pledge of Allegiance (Download) Michael Imhotep
"Black Panther Analysis, African Culture & History" Digital Download Rec. 4-14-18 Michael Imhotep
Understanding The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: What They Didn't Teach You In School
Ancient Kemet, The Winter Solstice & The History of Christmas 2016 - Download Michael Imhotep 3 Hrs
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Difference between revisions of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets"
TheAlmightyGuru (talk | contribs)
(→Bad)
[[Image:Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - Hardcover - USA - 1st Edition.jpg|thumb|256x256px|North American hardcover, first edition.]]
'''''Harry Potter and the Camber of Secrets''''' is a book written by [[J.K. Rowling]], published in 1998, and the second in the [[Harry Potter (Universe)|Harry Potter series]].
'''''Harry Potter and the Camber of Secrets''''' is a young adult book written by [[J.K. Rowling]], published in 1998, and the second in the [[Harry Potter (universe)|''Harry Potter'' series]].
I saw the movie first in 2002, which I later viewed as a mistake, as I felt a bit unprepared. I later read the book and preferred it, and then vowed to always read the book first for future movies, which I did.
==Reviews==
{{Spoilers}}
===Good===
* The new characters (Colin Creevey, Dobby, Lockhart) are quite fun.
* The wizarding world uses a lot of bigoted terms: pure-blood, half-blood, muggle, squib, mud-blood, etc. and most people seem to be okay with the bigotry.
* Parseltongue is described as being extremely rare, but in a world where people can use magic to do pretty much anything they want, why would it be rare?
* The staff's inability to find the Chamber of Secrets for so long, even after it has been known to exist, is unbelievable considering how much divination the professors would have done. And, even if they couldn't find it, why didn't they bring in a team of investigators?
* The staff's inability to find the Chamber of Secrets for so long, even after it has been known to exist, is unbelievable considering how much divination the professors would have done. Was Tom Riddle such a wunderkind that he could foil them all? And, even if they couldn't find it, why didn't they bring in a team of investigative experts?
* The victims of the attacks are incredibly lucky every time. There are several attacks, nobody ever looks directly at the monster, Harry is there to see most of them, and then he's immediately discovered by other people.
* The victims of the attacks are incredibly lucky every time. There are several attacks, nobody ever looks directly at the monster and Harry is there to see most of them and then immediately discovered by other people.
* The additional details about the ghosts and Nearly-Headless Nick's Death Day party are interesting, but they weren't important to the story.
* The additional details about the ghosts and Nearly-Headless Nick's Death Day party are interesting and help with world-building, but they weren't important to the story.
* Quidditch is even less feasible in this book. Apparently, you can just buy a serious advantage over your opponents with better equipment, and the referees don't notice when a bludger has gone rouge and focuses on a single player over and over again.
* Quidditch is even less feasible in this book. Apparently, the referees don't notice when a bludger has gone rouge and focuses on a single player over and over again. Also, Rowling reinforces the idea that you can a serious advantage over your opponents can be bought.
* Why do you need a polyjuice potion when transfiguration spells can morph anything into anything else?
* The showdown between Harry and Tom seems to take forever while all his plans are slowly revealed.
==Links==
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Chamber_of_Secrets en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Chamber_of_Secrets] - Wikipedia.
{{Link|Wikipedia|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Chamber_of_Secrets}}
{{Link|GoodReads|https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15881.Harry_Potter_and_the_Chamber_of_Secrets}}
{{Link|TVTropes|https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/HarryPotterAndTheChamberOfSecrets}}
[[Category: Books]]
[[Category: Children's Books]]
[[Category: Young Adult Books]]
[[Category: Fiction]]
[[Category: Fantasy]]
[[Category: Media Theme - Fantasy]]
[[Category: Trope - Damsel In Distress]]
[[Category: Trope - Queer Character]]
[[Category: Trope - Strong Female Character]]
[[Category: Books I've Read]]
[[Category: Overrated]]
North American hardcover, first edition.
Harry Potter and the Camber of Secrets is a young adult book written by J.K. Rowling, published in 1998, and the second in the Harry Potter series.
2.2 Bad
2.3 Ugly
I own a first edition US hardcover and have read it. I've also listened to the Stephen Fry audio book recording.
— This section contains spoilers! —
The new characters (Colin Creevey, Dobby, Lockhart) are quite fun.
Hogwarts is still very exciting and wonderful.
The Chamber of Secrets and Slytherin's heir are nice mysteries that slowly get solved as time goes on, and it keeps you guessing.
The idea of students not being allowed to use magic outside of school doesn't make any sense. How can they study, do homework, or even keep their skills up during the summer or on holidays? It's like telling students not to use math on their summer vacation! And what's with the Ministry blaming Harry for using magic when he didn't? Do the have the ability to detect when magic is used anywhere in the world at any time? Or, perhaps at any house where wizards live? But since they can't tell the difference between a house elf's magic and a student's magic, surely they can't tell the difference between an adult and child, so this surveillance would only be useful for houses where only underage magic users live with muggle parents, which means it's completely unfair.
The wizarding world uses a lot of bigoted terms: pure-blood, half-blood, muggle, squib, mud-blood, etc. and most people seem to be okay with the bigotry.
Parseltongue is described as being extremely rare, but in a world where people can use magic to do pretty much anything they want, why would it be rare?
The staff's inability to find the Chamber of Secrets for so long, even after it has been known to exist, is unbelievable considering how much divination the professors would have done. Was Tom Riddle such a wunderkind that he could foil them all? And, even if they couldn't find it, why didn't they bring in a team of investigative experts?
The victims of the attacks are incredibly lucky every time. There are several attacks, nobody ever looks directly at the monster and Harry is there to see most of them and then immediately discovered by other people.
The additional details about the ghosts and Nearly-Headless Nick's Death Day party are interesting and help with world-building, but they weren't important to the story.
Quidditch is even less feasible in this book. Apparently, the referees don't notice when a bludger has gone rouge and focuses on a single player over and over again. Also, Rowling reinforces the idea that you can a serious advantage over your opponents can be bought.
Why do you need a polyjuice potion when transfiguration spells can morph anything into anything else?
The showdown between Harry and Tom seems to take forever while all his plans are slowly revealed.
In general, there is very little internal consistency in the book. Glaring plot holes abound.
The fact that school remains open while a dangerous unknown monster is roaming the halls with the ability to kill people is entirely unbelievable.
Full dust jacket art of the North American hardcover.
Retrieved from "http://thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Harry_Potter_and_the_Chamber_of_Secrets&oldid=28312"
Links to Wikipedia
Links to GoodReads
Links to TVTropes
Media Theme - Fantasy
Trope - Damsel In Distress
Trope - Queer Character
Trope - Strong Female Character
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Willkommen bei den RC-Car Görlitz e.V.
RC-Car Görlitz e.V. -Der RC-Car Modellbau - Modellsport - Verein für Görlitz
RC-Car Bereich » Fahrzeuge Steckbriefe »
earning $575,000 this season.Talbot is 2-3-1 with a 2.34 goals-a
Antworten: 0 • Hits: 71
#1 von miaowang123 , 24.04.2019 05:25
BROSSARD, Que. -- Without Carey Price, the run for a first Stanley Cup in 21 years got steeper and longer for the Montreal Canadiens. Coach Michel Therrien looked grim and even angry as he delivered the news Monday morning that the goaltender who backstopped Canada to gold at the Sochi Olympics will miss the rest of the NHL Eastern Conference final. He gave no details of the injury, a suspected right knee problem, but suggested Price would be back if the Canadiens can get past the New York Rangers and reach the Stanley Cup final. "Carey Price wont be able to play, not only for tonight but for the rest of the series," said Therrien. "Really disappointed. Hes our best player. "We need to rally around Carey. We need to give him a chance to play again this season." According to Bodog, those words sent betting money went flying off the Canadiens bandwagon and onto New Yorks as Montreal pondered the notion of winning with either backup Peter Budaj or third stringer Dustin Tokarski in goal. The coach would not say which of them would start in Game 2 of the best-of-seven series on Monday night. Budaj has been with the NHL club all season, but has a terrible career playoff record that includes an 0-2-0 record and an .843 save percentage. Tokarski had never played an NHL playoff game, but the 24-year-old has excelled at every level, winning a Memorial Cup with Spokane in 2008, a world junior championship with Canada in 2009 and an AHL title with Norfolk in 2012. He was drafted by Tampa Bay in 2008 and acquired by Montreal Feb. 14, 2013 for Cedrick Desjardins in a swap of minor-league goalies. He spent most of the season with AHL Hamilton, but played three games for Montreal this season and posted a 2-0 shutout against Buffalo. Price clutched his right knee when Rangers forward Chris Kreider crashed into him skates-first at 3:15 of the second period of New Yorks shock 7-2 win in the series opener on Saturday afternoon. The Canadiens goaltender got up and finished the period, but didnt look comfortable as he allowed two goals in the final 1:01. He was replaced in the third by Budaj, who allowed three goals on eight shots. After the game, Therrien said he took Price out not because of an injury but because there was no use leaving him in with the team playing poorly. He was angrier the next day when it became clear the injury was worse than first suspected, saying Kreider could have tried to avoid the collision. And he was simmering on Monday, pointing out Kreiders history of hitting goalies. Kreider left Ottawas Craig Anderson with a knee injury when he crashed the crease during the regular season and he also elbowed Marc-Andre Fleurys head in Game 6 of the conference semifinals, although the Pittsburgh goalie was not hurt. "Looking at the incident, its a reckless play," said Therrien. "Thats the truth. "And Kreider, thats not the first time hes going at goalies. So we end up losing our best player. But our group faced a lot of adversity throughout the course of the season. We have the attitude to respond really well and thats what Im expecting, starting tonight." Kreider said his main regret was that he missed the net with his shot as he went in on a breakaway and lost his footing. "Obviously, I was trying to score a goal," the speedy six-foot-three, 226-pound forward said. "Im here to play my game and play hard and I think Im a clean player. "I dont go out with the intent to hurt anyone, ever, so Im going to continue to try and get to the net and score goals." In the third period, Montreals Brandon Prust slashed and cross-checked Kreider, earning two minor penalties and a misconduct. But Therrien said the Canadiens were more concerned with trying to win the series than with vengeance. "We know what happened with Kreider, we know his history, we know a lot of things," said Therrien. "But our main focus is to make sure we play a solid game. "Make sure we play hard, we play with passion, that we be disciplined, and play the way we are capable of playing." The Canadiens are now in the same predicament as Tampa Bay, their first round opponent that was missing injured starting goaltender Ben Bishop. Montreal swept the series. Rangers coach Alain Vigneault said it wont change their game plans against Montreal. "Prior to the series, we had prepared for three possible goaltenders, obviously, spending more time on Price," he said. "Its very unfortunate what happened to him. "But for us, its business as usual." Johan Mojica Jersey . - Robert Griffin III has a sprained throwing shoulder that limited him in practice Wednesday as the Washington Redskins prepared for their season finale against the Dallas Cowboys. Mateus Uribe Colombia Jersey . The Red Wings hadnt played the night before. The Boston Bruins had. A month from now, or two months from now, it doesnt matter. But right now it does matter, when you start and you play back to back, its wear and tear on you for sure, Babcock said. http://www.nationalcolombiafootball.com/david-ospina-colombia-jersey/ . Although the deal cannot be made official until the free agent moratorium period is lifted on July 10, Patterson has agreed to a three-year, $18 million extension to remain in Toronto, sources confirm to TSN. Custom Colombia Jerseys .ca has you covered for whos in, whos out and what to expect from all 30 teams. Juan Fernando Quintero Colombia Jersey .com) - The Golden State Warriors have started another winning streak and theyll try to pad it Tuesday night when they head to Staples Center to face the Los Angeles Lakers.NEW YORK, N.Y. - The New York Rangers have reached a one-year contract extension with goalie Cam Talbot, keeping Henrik Lundqvists backup away from unrestricted free agency.The 27-year-old Talbot agreed to a $1.45 million deal for next season. He is earning $575,000 this season.Talbot is 2-3-1 with a 2.34 goals-against average and two shutouts in seven games. He is the only NHL goalie with six starts or fewwer to post two shutouts this season.dddddddddddd. He did it in back-to-back outings against Philadelphia in November.In 28 NHL appearances over two seasons with the Rangers, Talbot is 14-9-2 with a 1.80 GAA and five shutouts. He is one of two players in Rangers history to earn at least five shutouts in his first 24 NHL starts.He was signed by the Rangers as an undrafted free agent in 2010. Blackhawks Jerseys Store Cheap Wild Jerseys Cheap Red Wings Jerseys Cheap Maple Leafs Jerseys Penguins Jerseys Store Capitals Jerseys For Sale Blues Jerseys Store Cheap Kings Jerseys Adidas Lightning Jerseys Stars Jerseys For Sale Cheap Predators Jerseys Ducks Store Sharks Jerseys For Sale Cheap Sabres Jerseys Rangers Jerseys For Sale ' ' '
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gainst average and two shutouts in s
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Home Our Diocese St. Elizabeth High School earns ‘Superstar’ title for ViFi program
St. Elizabeth High School earns ‘Superstar’ title for ViFi program
Mike Lang, Dialog Reporter
Dialog reporter
WILMINGTON – St. Elizabeth High School has been recognized by the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce as one of six Superstars in Education for its Viking Initiative for Innovation program, better known as ViFi.
The effort has changed the way technology is used in the classroom to make the curriculum more effective and more deeply engage students and faculty.
St. Elizabeth is the only nonpublic school in Delaware to receive the honor. Thirty nominations were submitted to the chamber.
St. Elizabeth High School math teachers John Kudlick and Bea Woodard use an iPad during a presentation on curriculum mapping, which is part of the Viking Initiative for Innovation. (The Dialog/Mike Lang)
The superstars program has honored Delaware schools and educators since 1989 that have “implemented and sustained a creative, unique program, or a teaching practice that shows measurable results and raises students achievement,” according to the Chamber of Commerce. Funded by the business community, the program concentrates on projects that improve “critical workplace competencies.”
The award recipients will be honored at a ceremony on May 4 at the Cab Calloway School of the Arts in Wilmington. Tickets are $25 and are available at www.dscc.com/events/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1639.
The team at St. Elizabeth that prepared the nomination included principal Shirley Bounds, technology director Christophre Matarese and Tech Team members Kammas Murphy and Jessica Shoja-Edwards.
Shoja-Edwards said the recognition from the chamber shows how St. Elizabeth is moving forward and being a leader in the educational community. “We don’t want to be good. We want to be great. We want to be the best at what we do.”
St. Elizabeth implemented ViFi over a period of several years beginning in 2009-10, Bounds said. That included enhancing the technology capabilities in the school, researching how technology had been used elsewhere and holding professional development for the faculty. Over the next few years, the school took steps to increase the presence of ViFi.
Finally, in 2013-14, the 1:1 iPad environment went live. Each student and teacher uses iPads and electronic books, along with seven “foundational” apps.
“It’s been a very intentional, very deliberate process. We wanted ViFi to be more than an iPad implementation process. What we wanted to do is transform the learning environment,” Bounds said.
The professional development is ongoing, and as the program moves forward, the school has made adjustments where necessary. Shoja-Edwards has been involved with this aspect of ViFi.
“We couldn’t just give everybody iPads and say, ‘Go figure it out,’” she said.
Bounds said the faculty deserves credit for changing the way they approach education.
“It was really changing the way they did a lot of things, to use an e-book and to find apps and to kind of hand kids this device that they use so much,” she said.
There were some worries about the students getting distracted with the iPads, but Bounds said most use of the technology is for educational use. There have always been ways to cheat no matter what the teaching tools have been. Also, the school is trying to teach students to be responsible. So, if they decide to play games instead of take notes, that will likely be reflected in their performance.
“They see it as so useful that they don’t abuse it,” Bounds said.
One thing St. Elizabeth officials stress is that the technology is a useful piece of the educational puzzle, but in the end, the iPads are just a learning tool.
“We don’t want it to focus on what apps you’re using because it’s not about the tool, it’s about how you’re using it to enhance what you’re doing in the classroom, to have better outcomes for students,” Shoja-Edwards said.
Jessica Shoja-Edwards
Shirley Bounds
St. Elizabeth High School
Superstars in Education
ViFi
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Mike Lang, Dialog Reporter - 16 January 2020, 14:47
Catholics focus on education funding, protecting life and more in new session of Maryland...
For The Dialog - 15 January 2020, 17:02
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Air Date: Tuesday, January 07, 2014
Time Slot: 9:31 PM-10:00 PM EST on ABC
Episode Title: (#113) "The Big 5-0"
VIEW ALL LISTINGS FOR TROPHY WIFE
[NOTE: The following article is a press release issued by the aforementioned network and/or company. Any errors, typos, etc. are attributed to the original author. The release is reproduced solely for the dissemination of the enclosed information.]
KATE TRIES TO GIVE PETE A MEMORABLE BIRTHDAY, ON ABC'S "TROPHY WIFE"
"The Big 5-O" - When Kate attempts to break Pete's birthday curse and help him have a fun birthday, the curse proves to be more powerful than she anticipates. Meanwhile, Diane and Jackie shop together for Pete's birthday gift and the kids are at home with lobsters that refuse to be a main course, on "Trophy Wife," TUESDAY, JANUARY 7 (9:31-10:00 p.m., ET) on the ABC Television Network.
"Trophy Wife" stars Malin Akerman as Kate, Bradley Whitford as Pete, Michaela Watkins as Jackie, Natalie Morales as Meg, Ryan Lee as Warren, Bailee Madison as Hillary, Albert Tsai as Bert and Marcia Gay Harden as Diane.
Guest cast in "The Big 5-O" includes Betsey Halpern as Woman, Daniel Montgomery as Delivery Guy, Laraine Newman as Juniper, Annie Ruby as Heaven, Carol Avery as Carly, Dean Cudworth as Cop, Eltony Williams as Ron, Claudia Choi as Oksana, Kimmy Gatewood as Ingrid, Matt Oberg as DMV Clerk, Patrick Rafferty as Driving Proctor and Ken Narasaki as DMV Guy.
"The Big 5-O" was written by Vijal Patel and directed by Christine Gernon.
"Trophy Wife" is broadcast in 720 Progressive (720P), ABC's selected HDTV format, with 5.1-channel surround sound. This program carries a TV-PG,D,L parental guideline.
For more information on "Trophy Wife" please visit ABC.com/TrophyWife.
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Talladega Panthers have sights set on top of WDFL standings
By : Andrew Kulha
Tag: Talladega Panthers
J.C. Jones is the owner and director of the Talladega Panthers — along with his COO Rico Carter — and he’s at the head of an organization that appears to be on track for some great things heading into the 2017 season.
Talladega has only been around for one season now — the team was established in the spring of 2016 — but the Panthers are riding high coming off a debut 2016 campaign that saw them go 7-4 with a conference championship in the NDFL, which is the National Developmental Football League.
Talladega is making a change heading into the 2017 season, but the high expectations remain the same. The Panthers are heading to the World Developmental Football League, which is slated to kick off in early June, and Jones likes the way his team stacks up, despite playing in a better and bigger league.
The Panthers are heading to the World Developmental Football League (WDFL), which is slated to kick off in early June, and Jones likes the way his team stacks up, despite playing in a better and bigger league.
“I’m looking, again, to go all the way,” he told Developmental Football USA in a recent interview, clearly not lowering the expectations for his organization. “The teams we are playing against, they’re bigger, but we’re more athletic and we have more speed. I’m looking to really go to the top this year.”
Jones is obviously confident in his team, but the Panthers do have one thing working against them. Even the best teams suffer from turnover on a season-to-season basis, and that’s the case for Talladega heading into 2017.
“I can’t really say right now. Some players come back, some don’t,” Jones said when asked if there are any players on his current roster he’s expecting to play a big role this season. “Out of 50 players, I may have 20-to-25 coming back. The rest are going to be new. This season is going to be more interesting than last season because the league we’re going to be in this year is more competitive.”
Though Talladega is somewhat of an unknown as a team, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the organization was an unknown last year, and all it did was go out and win a conference championship.
The only thing turnover means for this squad is that new players will have the opportunity to step up and show their potential.
Talladega is holding open tryouts on the third Sunday in February, starting at 2:00 PM on the West Side Field behind Talladega College.
Denco Spades aiming for undefeated season and state championship
With a target on their backs, Oklahoma Monarchs look to defend XFL title
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National News - Outdoor
by Andrew Kulha time to read: 2 min
National News - Indoor The Cincinnati Flex have championship goals for fi…
Uncategorized Season Preview: Garland Aztecs
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Ebola Awareness, NO panic needed
Author Topic: Ebola Awareness, NO panic needed (Read 8505 times)
Nurse Amy
Here is a down to earth explanation of Ebola without all the fear-mongering.Up-to-date information from Dr. Bones.
http://www.doomandbloom.net/ebola-the-next-great-pandemic/
"All this being said, our Modern Medical Systems are better stocked and have strict infectious controls in place. Most likely, the virus would be contained quicker and patients would receive higher levels of symptomatic treatment leading to much lower death rates than seen now in West Africa. Being prepared and aware will help all of us deal with this virus more effectively here in the United States."
Knowledge is power,
bcksknr
Child of the Cold War
Re: Ebola Awareness, NO panic needed
Unfortunately, a calm, informed, well reasoned approach to situations like this doesn't sell the news. The sensationalism junkies just keep looking for more fear and worry to up their market share. The news cycle has a very short turn around time, between disasters (real or invented). Remember that search for the airliner that disappeared? How about the airliner that was shot down over Ukraine? Now that things seem to be settling down between Israel and Hamas, the media will be looking for something else to hype. They're lucky they still have ISIS in Iraq to tide them over. Eventually the Ebola virus will burn itself out and the fearmongers will have to look elsewhere. The media's worst fear is that people will react with intelligence, become informed of the facts about any new situation and not panic. Bad news sells, fearful headlines sell alot.
Thank you Nurse Amy and Dr. Bones for this and, well, all the other stuff y'all do. It's good to have two voices of informed sanity around in times like these.
mountainmoma
suburban homesteader
hey Nurse Amy, I had read this the other day, good article, we have a thread for pandemic preparation with a link to it http://thesurvivalpodcast.com/forum/index.php?topic=51093.msg583913#msg583913 Is there anything else you would recommend having around for preparation ?
Incompetent Prepper in Chief - Africa
Lucky you guys,
I live in Angola so I am only one corrupt Airport official away from being in an Ebola infected city
Africa is shit, you please read the story of the Liberian-American that took the virus to Nigeria, it was clear the asshat was sick, but someone let him board the plane because he had money and connections.
I was procrastinating on my preps, but this is a wakeup call, got most my gear and my BOV, just need to make my kits and stock on food for 3 months.
Thanks heaven I do have a at least 6 months of expense in my savings account, and some hard assets I can sell if things go crazy.
I am not panicking, but still the danger feels close and in our countries nobody tells the truth until there are bodies in the streets. Angola dealt with a Marburg epidemic in previous years, I hope we miss this joy train. I HOPE
Wow Sams, stay safe man! Sounds like you've got things rolling with prepping now. Also, this epidemic looks like one of those cases where even a little bit of preps can help immensely. Again, stay safe, and keep us posted.
Be safe Sams! We wish you all the best!
ksuprepper
With the passing of the Dallas Ebola patient I feel we are going to start seeing people flooding emergency rooms. I feel that the news media is fear mongering at this point. The media is going to start reporting on every person that has diarrhea and a fever.
Thanks, Nurse Amy.
You both are a real asset to the preparedness community, and I'm glad you're here on the TSP forum as well.
Having met you and Dr. Bones in person in North Carolina, I can say that you sure seem to be the same people in person as on the air.
Call Dorothy and tell her to get Jack to have you back on! We miss y'all!
Quote from: ksuprepper on October 08, 2014, 05:21:23 PM
Newtopian
Quote from: bcksknr on August 11, 2014, 09:32:19 PM
If only there were a news anchor alive with the kahones to say this on air.
I'm getting really sick of all this Ebola fear mongering.
Yes, it's real. Yes, it's deadly. But is it at my back door waiting to come in the moment I forget to wash my hands? Nope.
Quote from: Newtopian on October 14, 2014, 12:46:35 PM
I'm right there with ya.
Oil Lady
Lady oil lady oil la-dy hoo
My book needs more humor. My pen needs more salt.
It's one thing to die. It's another thing entirely to die in a particularly horrible way.
Ebola is one of those particularly horrible ways to die. The very primal psychological undercurrent swirling madly around this avenue of death is the sort of subject matter that PhD's are made from.
I think that part of the problem is that (as I remember), Ebola was the disease in the movie "Hot Zone". I think in that script, the strain of Ebola was similar to Ebola Reston and was presented as an airborne virus. That movie did present a very nightmare situation and it all happened on American soil. I think that in the minds of many, Ebola strains, lethality and modes of transmission are all the same. This is a serious situation, but I think we have seen about the last of this particular outbreak. Awareness will mean that the chances of another carrier bringing in the infection are reduced and even if another case pops up, this experience will make dealing with it much more successful.
I agree that now the biggest danger is uncalled for panic. There are plenty of people (ala Chicken Little) running around spreading rumors, hunches, misinformation and basically looking for anyone who will listen to their fearmongering. They can't wait to point fingers and find blame for real or imagined mistakes made in dealing with this. Is it serious? Yes. Were mistakes made? Yes. Will it mean the deaths of millions and the end of civilization? Only if we let it.
If you say "flu" people think of runny noses and boxes of kleenex.
But if you say "flesh-eating virus" people think of their arms and legs dissolving away into puddles of blood during the night.
THIS is the difference in the level of terror that ebola is plaguing people with.
There is really no need to panic. As of last night we passed the incubation period for anyone potentially exposed in the U.S. The U.S. is now Ebola free. Doesn't mean there couldn't be new imported cases, But hey, you could get hit by a bus, while crossing the street today. No need to blame the government for not having a plan to ban killer buses. Some people seem to just "get off" by stirring the pot with outrageous conspiracies and the satisfaction that they have riled up lots of people and gotten attention.
I do have to make a correction. There are still two nurses recovering from Ebola, so technically I was mistaken. However they seem to be doing well and I haven't heard of any worries about health worker's contact with them.
Yep another Health Care worker Died this Morning. from Ebola
yep----NOT TO WORRY FOLKS
Quote from: keebler on November 17, 2014, 01:26:12 PM
Of course he arrived on Saturday, already too sick to survive. So you are correct, unless you work in one of the four designated hospitals to deal with Ebola patients and are assigned to one of those patients, there really is no need to worry.
Just remember to keep up on the news, no Ebola here, yet, hopefully never. But here is a reminder on how serious it still is
to keep in perspective, not anywhere near time to panic, just kep it on your radar
AesopDecember 11, 2018 at 8:18 AM
For me personally, when the odds get to the point that Ebola is likelier than not going to come through the ER door on this side of the pond, it's time to take a leave of absence.
FWIW, the outbreak in W. Africa in 2014 was 14X as big as this one before anyone came here. But from now to that point only took about 4 months in 2014.
It isn't time to panic, by any stretch of imagination.
But this is officially an item of interest at this point:
It's spreading essentially unchecked, despite some earlier slowing down, and they'll likely lose control completely and scream "Rape!" there shortly. A month, maybe two, and perhaps sooner.
It's apparently now about halfway between the point where there's one case, and the point where it starts showing up on other continents.
With four international airports and four major theme park destinations hereabouts, it won't stay far away for long at present trajectory and speed.
In the link he gives his answers to people questions about the vaccine, how efective our previous measure against infection (2014) were, etc....
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2018/12/questions-i-get-questions.html?m=1
atherts
TSP and Guinness Supporter
A little more information on the current state of Ebola in the Congo and surrounding areas.
Sounds like it is serious over there.
https://www.americanpartisan.org/2018/12/in-the-congo-ebola-is-spreading-to-urban-areas/?fbclid=IwAR3n3TNUTVUMDg2tcg-jliWfhUVNO3KQVPwrPvynWpti014S-0G6kqMcQro
Associated Press (via Courthouse News), 3/28/19: Study: Many in Ebola Outbreak Don’t Believe Virus Is Real
...The new study highlights just how pervasive misinformation has been in places in eastern Congo like Beni and Butembo, where in-person interviews were conducted with 961 people.
Some 25.5 percent of those interviewed did not believe Ebola was real. In addition, nearly 45.9 percent of people thought the Ebola outbreak was being fabricated to destabilize the region or for financial gain. Additionally 18.2 percent believed all three of those statements, the study found.
Those who didn’t believe Ebola was real were far less likely to agree to the Ebola vaccine or to go to a treatment center. ...
Quote from: Mr. Bill on March 28, 2019, 02:56:19 PM
More on this, and the related attacks on health workers:
NPR, 6/4/19: An Urgent Mystery: Who's Attacking Ebola Responders In Congo — And Why?
...On May 23 the United Nation's Secretary General named [David] Gressly to a newly created position overseeing the organization's effort to stop the ten-month long Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of the Congo. (His official title is UN Emergency Ebola Coordinator.)...
Since late February there's been a dramatic surge in violent – and sometimes deadly — attacks against Ebola response teams.
The violence keeps forcing Ebola responders to pause key activities such as identifying and treating people infected with the virus, vaccinating their contacts and safely burying those who die of the disease. The result has been a spike in infections. Since mid-March the new case count has jumped from about 25 per week to more than 120 in some weeks. And the total number of cases over the ten months of the outbreak has just topped 2,000. ...
Many analysts hold that it was actually the national government that set the stage for the use of the Ebola crisis as a political tool, and Gressly largely echoed that account. Last December, he noted, just days before presidential elections, national electoral officials announced that voting would be suspended in the two largest cities in the outbreak zone, Beni and Butembo.
The stated justification was to prevent Ebola from being spread at the polls. But a candidate opposed to the then-ruling party's choice was projected to win in Beni and Butembo. So the decision "created a perception that the Ebola outbreak was manufactured," said Gressly. ...
But starting in late December and on through local parliamentary elections in March, the conspiracy theorizing went into high gear, said Rachel Sweet, a Harvard-based researcher.
Sweet has been monitoring WhatsApp texts, radio broadcasts and leaflets about Ebola, working with colleagues based in the outbreak zone. She's found that for months mostly anonymous authors have been claiming that Ebola is a hoax, perpetrated by the government to drum up foreign aid dollars and corral residents of communities that are hostile to the government into treatment centers.
In recent weeks, she said, another rumor has been gaining ground: that Ebola is a real disease, but the government and international health workers are infecting local people with it on purpose. ...
...both Sweet and Gressly maintain that [anti-Ebola rumors] didn't simply spring up or spread spontaneously. Various people appear to have actively promoted the conspiracy theories for their own gain – including as part of campaigning for parliamentary elections last March.
"There are those who want to make use of the distrust that's already there to advance a political agenda," said Gressly. "Some people actively pushed that narrative. Politicians really played it up."...
The wave of rumors coincided with a steady increase in the violence against Ebola responders.
At least one type of attack appears very much linked: Many of the incidents seem to be outbursts by members of the community who have heard the rumors and believe them. ...
But there has also been an increase in seemingly well-coordinated assaults by well-armed assailants. More than half-a-dozen times, gunmen have shot up Ebola treatment centers and health facilities where Ebola teams are based...
And here the chain of responsibility becomes murkier. The nature of these attacks, said Gressly, suggests they are part of a deliberate strategy: "It seems to be motivated by those who are trying to specifically disrupt the response."...
BuzzFeed News, 6/11/19: Far-Right Figures Are Claiming Immigrants Are Bringing Ebola To The US. Officials Say That's "Patently False."
..."This is a little bit much ado about nothing," said Colleen Bridger, interim assistant city manager and director of the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District. "Any rumors that they are bringing Ebola or are at risk of Ebola are patently false."
About 250 family units seeking asylum from Central Africa have crossed the southern US border near San Antonio since June 4, Bridger said, including immigrants from the Congo and Angola. None of them have exhibited any signs of the virus or been flagged for the virus during their health screenings, she said. ...
The incubation period for the virus is 21 days, Bridger said, and most of the people traveling from Central Africa have been traveling for months through South America after leaving Africa.
"Someone with the virus would develop symptoms of that disease within 21 days of that exposure," she said in the press conference. "So if you do the math and think of the fact that they left their country many, many months ago, there's no possibility that these individuals are bringing Ebola into our country."...
...US Customs and Border Protection said the claim was false.
"There have been no encounters of Ebola along the southwest border," an agency spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. ...
AP, 7/17/19: Ebola outbreak in Congo declared a global health emergency
The deadly Ebola outbreak in Congo is now an international health emergency, the World Health Organization announced Wednesday after the virus spread this week to a city of 2 million people. ...
The declaration comes days after the virus was confirmed in Goma, a major regional crossroads in northeastern Congo on the Rwandan border, with an international airport. Worries about the spread of the disease were also heighted after a sick Congolese fish trader traveled to Uganda and back while symptomatic — and later died of Ebola.
While the risk of regional spread remains high, the risk outside the region remains low, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said after the announcement in Geneva. ...
This is the fifth such declaration in history. Previous emergencies were declared for the devastating 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa that killed more than 11,000 people, the emergence of Zika in the Americas, the swine flu pandemic and polio.
WHO defines a global emergency as an "extraordinary event" that constitutes a risk to other countries and requires a coordinated international response. ...
WHO had been heavily criticized for its sluggish response to the West Africa outbreak, which it repeatedly declined to declare a global emergency until the virus was spreading explosively in three countries and nearly 1,000 people were dead. Internal documents later showed WHO held off partly out of fear a declaration would anger the countries involved and hurt their economies. ...
The pastor who brought Ebola to Goma used several fake names to conceal his identity on his way to the city, Congolese officials said. WHO on Tuesday said the man had died and health workers were scrambling to trace dozens of his contacts, including those who had traveled on the same bus. ...
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Anti-Barbie doll :: Doll with "real" proportions gets crowd-funded in 24 hours. WTAE's Wendy Bell reports.
url: http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/03/07/dnt-pa-artist-creates-average-doll.wtae.html?eref�ition
VIDEO: First look at the Samsung S5 :: Rory Cellan-Jones tries out Samsung's latest S5 phone, as it makes its global launch on Friday.
Sans persona, new kind of Colbert steps up to CBS 'Late Show' :: url: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/INtopNews/~3/WOo5xqGm8XM/story01.htm
VIDEO: Shoe thrown at Hillary Clinton :: A woman has thrown a shoe at former First Lady Hillary Clinton as she was giving a speech in Las Vegas.
The Scottish National Party at 80 :: The ups and downs of Scotland's independence party
url: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-26924026#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
'Mad Men's' fashion obsession :: During the past six seasons of the television show "Mad Men," audiences and fashion designers alike have obsessed over the cast's retro wardrobe.
url: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/10/living/mad-men-fashion-history/index.html?eref�ition
Australian PM says searchers confident of position of MH370's black boxes :: url: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/INtopNews/~3/O6vBz7ayWPk/story01.htm
How do hotels attract younger guests? :: Hotels are looking towards the Airbnb crowd, luring them in with Instagram walls and Wi-Fi.
url: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/10/travel/wi-fi-instagram-walls-turntables-millennials/index.html?eref�ition
'Grey's Anatomy' star sues pharmacy :: Actress Katherine Heigl wants $6 million from a drugstore after it tweeted a photo of her shopping.
url: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/10/showbiz/katherine-heigl-duane-reade-lawsuit/index.html?eref�ition
Messages from beyond the grave :: China's "Life Black Box" website lets users send data after they die -- and it's growing in popularity.
url: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/11/world/asia/china-death-websites/index.html?eref�ition
Is Weibo exaggerating users? :: As the Chinese micro-blogging site prepares to go public, activity might not be as vibrant as touted.
url: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/10/business/china-weibo-user-base/index.html?eref�ition
West struggles as Russia moves to dominate old USSR :: url: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/INtopNews/~3/L_SKCvYTY7g/story01.htm
KISS, Nirvana, Hall and Oates inducted by Rock and Roll Hall of Fame :: url: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/INtopNews/~3/gkl3KTDnfUE/story01.htm
Infosys says starts search for new chief executive :: url: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/INtopNews/~3/4YzjilZngLc/story01.htm
Adrian Mole author Sue Townsend dies :: Novelist Sue Townsend, best known as the author of the Adrian Mole series, has died, a friend of her family has told the BBC.
Maruti to recall 103,000 cars for faulty fuel caps :: url: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/INtopNews/~3/jsTjc2Vfd9w/story01.htm
Google Glass now available to all :: Have you been pining for your very own wearable $1,500 Google Glass but weren't sure how you, a regular nondeveloper residing in the United States, could procure one?
url: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/10/tech/innovation/google-glass-april-15/index.html?eref�ition
How to create body parts in a lab :: Scientists grew reproductive organs and nasal cartilage in labs, and later successfully implanted them in patients, according to two studies released Thursday.
url: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/10/health/tissue-engineering-success/index.html?eref�ition
Mo Ibrahim: We need Afro-realism :: Over the last 20 years, the narrative on the African continent has shifted from Afro-pessimism to Afro-optimism. The truth lies somewhere in between. Now is the time for Afro-realism: for sound policies based on honest data, aimed at delivering results.
url: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/11/world/africa/mo-ibrahim-now-is-time-afro-realism/index.html?eref�ition
The future of military weaponry? :: Lasers that can bring down planes and a gun that fires at 7.5 times the speed of sound.
url: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/10/tech/innovation/navy-new-technology/index.html?eref�ition
Africa's tastiest street food :: Here are your photos of the tastiest -- and most unusual -- African street food.
url: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/11/travel/gallery/roasted-plantain-african-street-food/index.html?eref�ition
Exclusive: Microsoft, Apple diverge on bankrolling big patent buyer :: url: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/MostRead/~3/P8KG1JR_Swg/story01.htm
Health secretary resigns after Obamacare launch woes :: url: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/MostRead/~3/4gg7eEUcMgc/story01.htm
Staff exodus to weigh on Infosys turnaround efforts :: url: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/INtopNews/~3/AKFELCV5LlY/story01.htm
What the late '60s really looked like :: As "Mad Men" returns for its seventh season, many viewers will tune in to see what happens next for Don, Peggy, Pete and the other characters of the hit AMC show. Many will also be eager to see the fabulous clothes they wear.
url: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/05/living/irpt-real-60s/index.html?eref�ition
Bayern and Real clash in Champions League semis :: url: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/INtopNews/~3/RbJdwX3Lql4/story01.htm
Is Putin dictating terms to Kerry? :: Has Kerry's recent track record left Russia's wily leader ever more convinced of U.S. weakness?
url: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/11/opinion/opinion-tisdall-putin-kerry/index.html?eref�ition
Now is the time for Afro-realism :: Over the last 20 years, the narrative on the African continent has shifted from Afro-pessimism to Afro-optimism. The truth lies somewhere in between. Now is the time for Afro-realism: for sound policies based on honest data, aimed at delivering results.
Nigerians don't care about economy :: Nigeria woke up on Sunday to a brand new economy, apparently.
url: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/10/business/opinion-nigeria-economy-jideonwo/index.html?eref�ition
Social enterprise takes smart products to rural poor :: url: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/INtopNews/~3/GXAo9wj495g/story01.htm
12-Apr-2014 23:41 Op-Ed
Op-Ed Columnist: The Self-Sort :: It's easy to demonize, or simply dismiss, people you don't know or see.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/opinion/blow-the-self-sort.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Op-Ed Columnist: The Apple Chronicles :: These days, the tech industry is battling over patents instead of new products.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/opinion/nocera-the-apple-chronicles.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Contributing Op-Ed Writer: Why No One Goes to Naples :: Tourism ought to be to southern Italy what oil is to Norway: a blessing and a source of wealth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/opinion/severgnini-why-no-one-goes-to-naples.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Op-Ed Contributor: Big Bang to Little Swoosh :: The discovery of gravitational waves in the fabric of space may go down as one of the greatest in the history of science.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/opinion/big-bang-to-little-swoosh.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Op-Ed Columnist: The Moral Power of Curiosity :: "Flash Boys" by Michael Lewis is mostly a book about finance and high-frequency traders. But it's also a morality tale.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/11/opinion/brooks-the-moral-power-of-curiosity.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Op-Ed Columnist: Health Care Nightmares :: Obamacare is doing just fine. But America is not, thanks to the ugliness brought out into the open by the debate on health reform.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/11/opinion/krugman-health-care-nightmares.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Contributing Op-Ed Writer: How to Heal the Heartland :: The way to a viable future for dying counties lies just below ground level, and at the border's edge: water and immigration.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/11/opinion/egan-how-to-heal-the-heartland.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
U.S. accuses Russia after Putin warning on gas supplies to Europe :: url: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/MostRead/~3/kSvCWNmbPOo/story01.htm
VIDEO: Duchess beats Duke in yacht race :: The Duchess of Cambridge has beaten her husband, Prince William, in two yacht races during their tour of New Zealand.
url: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26985127#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
Op-Ed Contributor: The Tobacco Ties That Bind :: Why doesn't the cancer society protest all cigarette sales?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/11/opinion/the-tobacco-ties-that-bind.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
'Grunting teens need speech classes' :: A former speech-writer to Tony Blair says schools need to do more to help teenagers improve their communication skills.
Op-Ed Contributors: The Trouble With Too Much T :: A female athlete with naturally high testosterone faces humiliating sex testing and worse.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/11/opinion/the-trouble-with-too-much-t.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
U.S. ship ready for Syrian chemicals :: A U.S. ship in Spain gets ready to take on and destroy Syria's deadliest chemical weapons. CNN's Al Goodman reports
url: http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2014/04/10/spain-chemical-weapons-ship-goodman-pkg.cnn.html?eref�ition
Omagh bombing accused remanded :: A man accused of murdering 29 people in the 1998 Omagh bombing is remanded in custody.
url: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-26984920#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
Tests Prove Jesus Marriage Papyrus Genuine - Onislam.net :: url: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&ct2=us&usg�QjCNEewWdj3HFteRDMXWVxYY8trUFcjw&clid�a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331&cidC982373930713&ei�5JU_CGN4iJyAOrFw&url=http://www.onislam.net/english/news/global/471273-tests-prove-jesus-marriage-papyrus-genuine.html
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ID Special Rapporteur on Iran - 31st Meeting 25th Regular Session of Human Rights Council
17 Mar 2014 - Mr. Ahmed Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on the situation of HR in the Islamic Republic of Iran
Iran (Islamic Republic of), Mr. Mohsen Naziri Asl
European Union, Ms. Anne Koistinen
UNICEF, Ms. Nicolette Moodie
Germany, Ms. Gudrun Masloch
Australia, Mr. Peter Woolcott
Norway, Ms. Annette Abelsen
Syrian Arab Republic, Mr. Tamim Madani
Belgium, Mr. Yannick Minsier
New Zealand, Ms. Tania Sawicki Mead
Sri Lanka, Ms. Dilini Gunasekera
Canada, Ms. Alison Leclaire Christie
Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of), Mr. Jorge Valero
France, Ms. Camille Petit
China, Mr. Gu Zihua
Mr. Ahmed Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on the situation of HR in the Islamic Republic of Iran 00:01:54
Iran (Islamic Republic of), Mr. Mohsen Naziri Asl (Concerned Country) 00:12:38
European Union, Ms. Anne Koistinen 00:21:38
UNICEF, Ms. Nicolette Moodie 00:23:59
Germany, Ms. Gudrun Masloch 00:26:03
Australia, Mr. Peter Woolcott 00:28:53
Norway, Ms. Annette Abelsen 00:30:29
Syrian Arab Republic, Mr. Tamim Madani 00:32:05
Belgium, Mr. Yannick Minsier 00:34:32
New Zealand, Ms. Tania Sawicki Mead 00:36:41
Sri Lanka, Ms. Dilini Gunasekera 00:38:17
Canada, Ms. Alison Leclaire Christie 00:40:08
Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of), Mr. Jorge Valero 00:44:15
France, Ms. Camille Petit 00:46:39
China, Mr. Gu Zihua 00:49:27
ID Special Rapporteur on Iran (Cont'd) - 32nd Meeting 25th Regular Session o...
ID Iran Special Rapporteur 28th Meeting 22nd Regular Session Human Rights...
ID Iran Special Rapporteur (Cont'd) 29th Meeting 22nd Regular Session Human...
ID Special Rapporteur on Myanmar - 32nd Meeting 25th Regular Session of Human...
ID: SR on Human Rights in Iran - 31st Meeting 28th Regular Session of Human...
ID: SR on Human Rights in Iran - 31st Meeting, 34th Regular Session Human...
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Souffle-court: a study of an authoritarian father-son relationship through bike racing
Posted on September 26, 2019 by nausika
Pierre-Marie Adnet, Jean-Luc Dessertaine, Guillaume Pochez, Tristan Poulain, Vincent Rouziere, Alessandro Vergonnier, “Souffle-court” (2018)
In this 5-minute short film, a young teenage supercross rider Tom is being trained by his father for an upcoming major competition at which recruiters for what I presume is the national training club in the sport will be attending. The film portrays the authoritarian ways in which Tom’s father controls his son, risking the boy’s safety and life at times, to fulfill his own need for recognition and success, his own career in biking having been unsuccessful. Up to now always compliant, never daring to rebel, Tom starts to have doubts about his dad’s obsessively single-minded focus on his riding and gradually comes to realise there is a whole world outside supercross racing where he can be free and just himself. Viewers sense that crunch-time is rapidly coming, when Tom must make a decision that perhaps could affect the rest of his life …
Compared to some other Gobelins shorts that were also released in 2018 by graduating students, the animation is not quite as good though the backgrounds are well done and quite detailed. The characters are drawn in a minimalist way that makes them look flat but which allows their faces to show subtle emotions: indeed I would say this portrayal is the film’s strongest point. Plenty of close-ups are taken of Tom and his father to show how trapped Tom feels in his relationship with his father. The father behaves like a bastard throughout the film but becomes a broken man at the film’s climax and viewers can’t help but feel a little bit sorry for him when he discovers that his dream has coming crashing down a second time.
While the story is quite simple with an open-ended conclusion, it is nevertheless quite emotionally intense in its own minimalist way.
Posted in French and French-language FilmsTagged Animated Films, Coming of Age Films, French and French-language Films, Gobelins, Short films
Ostrich Politic: a brilliant short film about the ease with which societies become fascist
Routine: a film far less boring than its subject matter
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Magnificent Mill, Railway & River
Flint Mill, Whinns Lane, Thorp Arch, Wetherby, West Yorkshire, LS23 7AL.
Wow – A magnificent riverside estate with 67 acres in an enchanting woodland setting, with a renovated mill home, spectacular 13,000 sq ft vintage car museum, fabulous indoor pool, two luxurious guest/staff cottages and 4,600 sq ft agricultural building. Miniature railway and floodlit weir. Riparian rights.
£4,500,000 – for sale since February 2013.
Possibly time for a bit of bargaining on the price.
Lots of interesting photos in this online brochure …
http://www.alltheagents.co.uk/for-sale/details/27968421
If we were going to pick a unique property with the advantage of being able to run a unique living from space within the complex, this would be in our all-time top ten. Just take a look at the agency photographs. What a wonderful place.
Tel – Beadnall & Copley: 01937 534031
Bargain Bingo
The Royal Bingo Hall, St Mary’s Street, Haverfordwest, SA61 2DR.
Originally priced at £180,000, then reduced for auction. This wonderful building is now an FTSAA – Failed To Sell At Auction. Guided at £75,000 with a selection of pre-auction pictures for your edification. Take a visual wander around the interior photographs and imagine what you could do with this if and when you obtained planning permission to convert into a very unique home…
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/commercial-property-for-sale/property-37152359.html
Guide: £75,000 – FTSAA Looking Flexible.
Current Online Sale Information …
http://auctioneertemplates.eigroup.co.uk/LotDetails.aspx?LotID=723083&a=147&c=see
Tel- Steel & Co., Auctioneers: 02920 370 117
New Format Unique Property Bulletin
A Photograph of Each Property;
An Address;
A Price;
A Weblink;
A Telephone Number.
Gone will be the long agency description. This is redundant, as the weblinks will have it. We did include descriptions in case weblinks and destination webpages became broken or were taken offline by the forward linked estate agency website. However, the wonderful:
Way Back When Machine
…an internet archive facility cures that worry of lost information.
This will free up the limited volunteer research time to locate more unusual properties, and especially add the a new Editorial – Unique Edge section.
Great Gatehouse
The Gatehouse, Catherine House Lane, Wainstalls, Halifax, HX2 6XB
This impressive building looks more like a castle than a gatehouse. Please click the link below for further details of this unique building.
Guide: £465,000.
Gatehouse Online Brochure -Click Here
Tel – Anthony J. Turner Agencies: 01422 846770.
An Island School Building
Newton School, Bridgend, Isle of Islay, Argyll, PA44 7PD
Former primary school with significant development potential.
Guide: £95,000.
http://www.ckdgalbraith.co.uk/property/PER130262/Bridgend
Tel – CKD Galbraith: 01738 451111
Mr G. Marshall, would you like to get in touch please?
F5 Protocol
For those readers, like us, that don’t yet have a thorough knack of the internet, please use the F5 Button. Why? This refreshes the content for any website page you are on. Particularly if that is a dynamic webpage with changing content. Your computer “caches” or stores the page automatically in it’s temporary filing system so when you revisit it, the system doesn’t have to download the whole thing again from the hosting website. The one drawback is if that website has news or useful updates. Sometimes you might miss these until your computer flushes it’s cache. Yup, we aren’t too sure what that means either!
To ensure you don’t miss anything, start using the F5 Button on your keyboard every now and then. It flushes your cache don’t you know 🙂
The F5 Button is located at the top row of your keyboard.
Hopefully, like us, something new is learned every day.
We know some things in life we would like to F5
Special Article – 12 Churches List
St. Georges United Reformed Church & House (c) 2014 Bill Henderson
A Unique Property & A Home – Guide: £150,000.
Just one of 12 churches for sale.
This week we have a Special Article Feature listing 12 churches for sale. This is an added extra for those readers who like this genre of unusual building. There is a modest £1.56 donation to access this extra list of 12 churches for sale. The modest donation significantly helps towards our fundraising, and pays for this website’s hosting and IT fees. These donations also keeps the main Sunday night, 9pm Unique Property Bulletin FREE to access for everyone. To access this spiritual abode list, please click the following Donate Button – with our thanks and appreciation ….
It is important to note, the Donate/Paypal system doesn’t let you back into the 12 Churches Special Article webpage for a second look – or as many visits as you wish for the currency of the article [two months]. The good news is you can revisit this webpage by clicking here:
Special Article Feature: Return Visit Page – Click Here
Please remember the PASSWORD that your Donation Reply gives you.
Barns With Plans
Queens Farm Barns, Queens Farm Road, Shorne, Gravesend, Kent, DA12 3HU
Guide: £140,000 to £150,000
Situated to the east of Gravesend within Shorne Village and occupying a plot of 0.88 acres (0.35 hectares) are these former farm buildings with barn for conversion, cart shed, livestock pens/buildings and granary.
Planning Permission has been granted by Gravesham Borough Council, under ref: 20110248, dated 10th February 2012, for conversion of the former agricultural buildings to form two residential dwellings together with ancillary workspace, garaging, storage, car parking spaces, new access track and landscaping, subject to conditions
http://www.cliveemson.co.uk/listing_view.asp?Lot=60&Auc=169
Tel – Clive Emson Auction House: 0845 8500333
Always remember our FTSAA Principle – Failed To Sell At Auction. Well worth a follow up call post-auction to see what happened.
Old Watermill, Wheel & Home
The Old Mill, Acharn, Aberfeldy, Perthshire, PH15 2HS
http://search.savills.com/property-detail/gbperspes130029
Tel – Savils: 01738 477525 – Mr Carl Warden or Moira Webley
Unique Property Competition
For this month, the Unique Property Bulletin competition prize is a lucky…
Crisp Nostalgic & Lucky £1 Note – Unique Property Bulletin Prize
This is a very modest prize – for fun. Here is the…
Competition Hint
On every Bulletin page you can see the first name starting D****** . This month’s competition is what is the surname of the 20th century American president with this first name?
Free to enter. Just let us know your guess of who you think the above Competition Hint refers to? Please email your entry to us by 30th April 2014. Email free entries to:-
Unique Property Bulletin Competition Entry Contact Page
FTSAA
Former Chapel, Chapel Road, Prestwich, Manchester, M25 9SS
FTSAA = Failed To Sell At Auction 24th April 2014.
This is now into bargain territory. Worth a look?
Pre-FTSAA Guide £70,000
http://www.pugh-auctions.com/Lot/Manchester/20140424/037a
Tel – Pugh Auctioneers: 0844 2 722444
Architecturally Unique …
The Orb, Wherever, Whenever & However You Would Like.
The Orb is a contemporary, architect designed home office or studio. You just need to supply an appropriate piece of garden or land with requisite planning consents. Then get in touch with the firm of David Miller Architects for details.
http://www.david-miller.co.uk/contact.php
Tel – David Miller Architects: 020 7636 4318
http://www.david-miller.co.uk/what-we-do/special-projects.php
Try Before You Buy …..
The property included within the try-before-you-buy section of the Unique Property Bulletin – is NOT for sale. Our endeavour is to provide a sample, and actual experience of what it would be like to live in any particular genre of unusual abode. This specific listing is for a short-stay break. Our offering this week is:
A Brief Encounter
The Old Station, Allerston, Pickering, North Yorkshire, YO18 7PG
http://www.theoldstationallerston.co.uk/prices-availability-and-booking-form
If you hanker for this style of unique life you might like to dwell on the occupancy rates. Very impressive.
http://www.theoldstationallerston.co.uk/
Tel : 01723 859 024
Unique Property Bulletin …
Editorial – Unique Edge
Unique People – Unique Places
Unique – But What, Where, When (c) Chris NMRD
This is the editorial originally scheduled for last week. That was before we had a fleet of emails asking about Unique Property Syndicates [lower page editorial].
Hopefully the questions about that topic were answered. Apologies if it wasn’t as polished as perhaps it should have been, but the long term L5/S1 were playing up to an awful degree – the weblink from Annette, who is a fellow member of that club illustrates the problem in a way that words can’t! From this end the recurrent L5/S1 pain was self inflicted. Couldn’t resist fun on a bus and overdid it a bit. All for the good though – in aid of getting the Unique Property Bulletin Bus on the road. So as to visit with unique people at their unique properties. More of the bus project to be reported here in a few weeks.
For this Bulletin we have a unique person who telephoned. Aidrian. I will spare any embarrassment by not naming this unique property person fully, but he got it. The unique property bug. Like many who have a heart for an unusual place to live.
For me it isn’t just the unique properties, but genuinely a great delight in meeting/talking with like-minded people who share the same passion about unusual places to call home. Adrian and I had a telephone chat that was an enjoyable one hour plus. A wide range of things discussed – including the aforementioned Unique Property Bulletin Bus adventure.
But one item – a unique style of home that Adrian highlighted during the conversation was remarkable. In 25 years with this Unique Property Bulletin I have never considered these types of structure. Having worked in a place that has very close links with a particular home of these forms of unique property it is unusual not to have considered them before. Thanks to Adrian they are now on the old radar. The genre? Submarine Pens…
An Example: The St Nazaire Submarine Pens (c) Ka Teznik
At first sight, not what you might want to look at as an unusual home.
Submarine Pens: Dark, Dank, Raw & Unlit (c) Rama
Truth be told, this is an extremely sensitive area, even 70 years after the end of World War II. So many lives lost. Sailors, civilians – all for what?
U-Boat 110 (c) Royal Navy Photograph
Government Copyright PSI Licence C2010002126
Those who fought in that World War are getting fewer as the years between 1939-1945 and present day grow further away. Those not fallen in war are becoming lost over time. Even for youngsters of a certain, more recent generation, born just after the war. The 1950’s and 1960’s generation, was a time when many grew up at school where the war was still a very raw subject. The second World War affected millions of young minds. Nowadays it is Playstations, Nintendo Wii, Kindle – thank goodness. But in the 1960’s the sons and daughters of those who served had pictures of warplanes and battleships – even submarines – drawn at school and brought home for mum and dad to put on the fridge. Many had parents who simply wouldn’t or couldn’t talk about such subjects. The imprint of these things last. A different lifetime away. Even as an adult, and having, as an aposite example, had the privilege of being aboard HMS Campbeltown [F86] the echoes of what went before are still remembered. Rightly so. The captain and crew of this modern day frigate were well aware of the previous bearer of that ship name. For it was HMS Campbeltown [I42]/USS Buchanan that rammed the gates of the Forme Ecluse Louis Joubert dry dock at St Nazaire. HMS Campbeltown exploded the following morning, ending the use of the dock and lethal submarine pens for the rest of the war. In the St Nazaire action, hundreds died. It is a measure of the dedication to duty that five Victoria crosses were awarded for the operation at St Nazaire.
HMS Campbeltown Ended St Nazaire U-Boat Yard For The Rest Of WWII
Adrian mentioned a unique property opposite a home he had lived at for some years. It was, to the untrained eye, very interesting, and to the unique property person a potentially wonderful place to live. Especially if you have a love of ships, or an abiding wish to live by the ocean.
Very Interesting Submarine Pen Near Montenegro (c) Andrey Sulitskiy
The exterior boundary is now encrusted with a green grassy piece of land, atop a turquoise pure sea. The thunderous original occupants long gone, with just a the whisper of an old war fortification remaining. The potential to make this a unique home is obvious. Just look at the pictures …
Montage of Photographs – Submarine Pen Near Montenegro
The imagination could run wild. There was a great deal of excitement regarding this genre of unusual property here at the Bulletin for a while following our friend Adrian’s telephone call. However as the days went by, and the history came through via research in such large volumes – over 700 of these World War II U-Boat submarines housed in such shoreside structures when on crew leave, or maintenance and repair – the feelings towards these submarine pens changed.
World War II U-Boat U156 Under Fire
Innumerable tragedies stood out from studying the potential and history surrounding submarine pens. After all this time the words of a survivor of one particular U-Boat attack carry a powerful literal punch.
An unusual perspective – the account of actions by Commander Werner Hartenstein, the German submariner who put his own life and the lives of his U-boat crew at risk to save hundreds of passengers on board the RMS Laconia, a requisitioned cruise liner armed and bound for Britain, which had been torpedoed on Hartenstein’s orders 600 miles off the coast of west Africa. Please remember the context of a raging World War that this quotation is from.
“No U-boat captain who would sit on the surface all that time and risk his own life is a bad man,” said Commander Geoffrey Greet, an English survivor of the Laconia, recalling the events of 1942 this weekend. “I didn’t think much of him at first – after all, he had killed 2,000 of my fellow passengers. But by the end, I admired him.”
German Commander Hartenstein Praised By British Commander Greet
An extraordinarily brave thing for British Commander Greet to say. Especially as he had been one of those torpedoed by Commaner Hartenstein’s submarine.
U-Boat Commander Werner Hartenstein risked his life and that of his crew to save hundreds of passengers on board the RMS Laconia and what was to become retold as the Laconia Incident. The tragedy is more particularly narrated here with the commanders of the Kriegsmarine being given the infamous resultant Laconia Order issued by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Remarkably, Großadmiral Dönitz was later to succeed as Head of State in Germany on 1st May 1945.
In amongst all of this human suffering, the respect shown towards U-Boat Commander Werner Hartenstein by U-Boat & RMS Laconia survivor Commander Geoffrey Greet says the very best of the very worst of situations.
After studying all of this history that can be found, in a way submerged below the waves of these submarine pens, the idea of living in one of these converted structures is perhaps a little too sensitive to consider progressing. Proper regard for those who have paid a very high price allows no room for further action on our part.
This documentary put the lid on any further thoughts of waterside bunker home…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXusKM5uX0s
Better to leave these old submarine pens to fade away as dissolving memorials to what was a time when the world came close to Armageddon.
It is an evocative subject. Something that looks so enticing. A place where you could live, safe, with the easiest access to water and a boat afloat shining from a bright lit photograph. But history soon comes back to life. With so much history and devastation it would be the height of disrespect to consider anything for these structures other than a memorial function.
C’est la vie, c’est la guerre
A French Vessel: Espadon – Submarine Pen Museum Piece (c) Rama
So for now, our quest to find a place that results in living on, by, in or even underneath the water continues. Perhaps that is why we have such an keen appetite for lighthouses. Beacons that have the function to warn passing ships of danger and to keep crews and passengers safe. On that count, former submarine pens, whilst they have a certain attraction, are a definite no no.
One thing for sure. The fact that such an odyssey, even just on paper, can come about and be studied in detail after a conversation with a unique friend makes it worthwhile to keep this website going.
Unique People – Unique Places.
Works for us.
Previously on Unique Property Bulletin …
Please Click Here For The Previous Bulletin
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Practical Rocketry
Practical Rocketry: by National Aeronautics and Space Administration
By National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Title: Practical Rocketry: by National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Author: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Subject: Government publications, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (U.S.), NASA reference publication
Collections: NASA Publication Collection
Publisher: National Aeronautics and Space Administration Publication
And Space Administration, N. A. (n.d.). Practical Rocketry. Retrieved from http://worldpubliclibrary.org/
Excerpt: Rocket Engines and Their Propellants. Most rockets today operate with either solid or liquid propellants. The word propellant does not mean simply fuel, as you might think; it means both fuel and oxidizer. The fuel is the chemical the rocket burns but, for burning to take place, an oxidizer (oxygen) must be present. Jet engines draw oxygen into their engines from the surrounding air. Rockets do not have the luxury that jet planes have; they must carry oxygen with them into space, where there is no air...
Injuries and Diseases of the Knee-Joint (by William Paul Swain)
The Economic History of England (by Lipson, Ephraim)
Driven from Home (by Alger, Horatio, Jr.)
Bedlam Boyz (by Guon, Ellen)
Protection from Lightning, By Alexander ... (by Mcadie, Alexander)
Common File User's Guide (by National Aeronautics and Space Administration)
National Polar-Orbiting Operational Envi... (by Mango, Stephen A.)
Flight According to Principle (by Wright, Wilbur)
National Aeronautics and Space Administr... (by National Aeronautics and Space Administration)
Space Shuttle: Information Management Re... (by National Aeronautics and Space Administration)
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Skip to summary
Willian Massami Watanabe
Londrina - PR, Brazil. E-mail: [email protected]
Languages speak
Front-end Web Engineer
As a Computer Science professor, stands as a passionate Web developer, lecturing development practices associated to Web technologies and Web engineering practices (such as: eXtreme Programming, TDD - Test-Driven Design, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery). Eager to contribute by developing quality assured Web applications, also considering attributes such as usability, maintanability and multi-platform characteristic of the Web.
Front-end developer experienced in the use of cutting edge technologies, with the objective of allowing rich interactions for users in the Web, exercising Web 2.0 and HTML5 core concepts.
Specialist in Web Engineering practices such as Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Test-Driven Design; for assuring the quality of large scale web projects.
Advanced knowledge in the area of computer interfaces design, with experience in the field of Web accessibility and usability issues.
Web engineering skills
Web standards (HTML, CSS, JS and others)
Web services, RESTFul and RPC (Remote Procedure Calls)
High Performance in the Web Platform
Test-Driven Development, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
Cloud Computing (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS)
Web accessibility (WCAG 2.0 and WAI-ARIA)
Machine learning (using R or Scikit/Keras)
Ajax Design patterns
Object Oriented JavaScript
Ajax Toolkits (jQuery, YUI and React.js)
Node.js and Express.js
Professor at UTFPR. Brazil 2012.: Computer Science professor with emphasis in Web Development, Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction. Lecture topics include: Web standards, JavaScript fullstack (with React.js and Express.js) and Web engineering practices (TDD, CI and CD). Main research topics include: Web Accessibillity, ARIA automatic evaluation strategies, XBI - Cross Browser Inconsistencies automatic detection and Web Applications Testing.
Software engineer at Yahoo!. Brazil 2011-2012.: working specifically on two applications: Meme and Profile. Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment strategies demand constant effort, while keeping the quality of continous delivery of features in the Web. Exercising Test-Driven Design, eXtreme Programming, Scrumm practices and dealing with performance and scalability non-functional requirements in Web systems.
Ph.D. CAPES Scholarship at São Paulo University - ICMC (Mathematics and Computer Science Institute). Brazil, 2010.: part of the of the Ph.D. program of ICMC-USP, with the project entitled "Automatic Accessibility Evaluation in RIA - Rich Internet Applications". This research was financed by CAPES and works in the area of Web Accessibility, Web Usability, Web Engineering, MDD, RIA - Rich Internet Applications and Ajax. The Ph.D. project was conducted under the orientation of Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes.
Master of Science FAPESP Scholarship at São Paulo University - ICMC (Mathematics and Computer Science Institute). Brazil, 2008-2010: inserted at project PorSimples which was financed by FAPESP and Microsoft Research, was responsible by the integration of text processing operations and interface design of the Facilita. The Facilita is a web application that works as an assistive technology facilitating portuguese reading activities on web pages through the use of automatic text summarization and simplification techniques. Simple interactions, usability and accessibility issues are essential requirements to the Facilita implementation and are the main themes of the research. JavaScript and AJAX characteristics provide some of the key features of design's simplicity and usability in Facilita. The project was developed under orientation of Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes.
Software Engineer at Guenka Software Development. Brazil, 2006-2008: Part of the team responsible by the remote marketing software implementation, through the use of mobile devices, an optimized communication protocol (due to limitations of the mobile platform) and databases server applications. Collaborated in the development of a server applications that allowed other applications remote update through the use of XML-RPC. The communication was made between Java Servlet containners and mobile devices (Handhelds) with the use of XML-RPC to exchange server persistent data.
Google Student Award: success application in the Google Student Award for the 7th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A 2010), in Raleigh USA co-located with the Ninteenth International World Wide Web Conference. The award granted financial support for the student to attend the W4A 2010 Conference.
Ph.D. in Computer Science, São Paulo University (ICMC-USP). São Carlos - SP, Brazil, 2014.
Master of Science in Computer Science, São Paulo University (ICMC-USP). São Carlos - SP, Brazil. Concluded in 2010.
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Londrina State University (UEL). Londrina - PR, Brazil, 2008.
First Certificate in English, University of Cambridge, 2002.
Network and Computer building and maintenance, Technology Education Center, IAPEC, Brazil, 2004.
React UI examples: UI components implementation built on React.js used in class. The project implements ARIA accessibility standards, tested with Jasmine and serves as an example of Continuous integration practices.
Redux example: simple React.js REDUX implementation, developed for front-end engineering courses.
Cross-browser collector: a Selenium based implementation developed for collecting data from web applications as rendered in different browsers and mobile devices. The collector was implemented with the goal of collecting attributes from DOM elements as rendered in different browsers. Then, using this data for comparing how web applications are rendered in different browsers, identifying Cross-browser incompatibilities. The project was implemented using APPIUM and the data is supposed to feed classification algorithms for detecting cross-browser incompatibilities.
SKLEARN examples: machine learning based scripts used for classification of Cross-browser incompatibilities (using Support Vector Machines, Decision Trees and Random Forest algorithms) and systematic literature documents (using Natural language processing techniques, Embeddings and Multi Layer Perceptrons). These scripts use a variety of approaches for classification problems, namely using python, alongside data science APIs, such as: Scikit, Tensorflow and Keras.
watinha.com homepage: this is a presentation project, which makes use of different web technologies to improve the user experience in the curriculum. The source code is fully available in Github. This project makes use of Jasmine, as a JavaScript Behavior Driven Development framework; CasperJS, to simulate the browser environment during functional tests; JSHint, to validate the JavaScript source code against JS code standards; Mustache template engine, to generate the webpages from templates; CSS and JS code compression techniques to generate faster webpages with compressed JavaScript and CSS files; performance testing with yslow on the production environment of the application; Halstead, Cyclomatic Complexity and Code-coverage metrics, using grunt-complexity plugin for the complexity metrics and istanbul for the code coverage; and finally, the complete build process of the project is managed through Grunt task manager.
Full paper: Layout Cross-Platform and Cross-Browser Incompatibilities Detection Using Classification of DOM Elements. ACM Transactions on the Web. New York, NY, US : ACM - Association for Computing Machinery, 2019. v. 13. issue. 2. p. 12:1--12:27. With Giovana Lázaro Amêndola and Fagner Christian Paes.
Full paper: Layout Cross-browser Incompatibility Detection Using Machine Learning and DOM Segmentation. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2018). 2018. p. 2159-2166. With Fagner Christian Paes.
Full paper: Drop-Down Menu Widget Identification Using HTML Structure Changes Classification. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing. 2018. v. 11. p. 1-23. With Prof. PhD. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes, Prof. MSc. Humberto Lidio Antonelli, MSc. Rodrigo Augusto Igawa and Eduardo Henrique Rizo.
Full paper: Acceptance tests for validating ARIA requirements in widgets. Universal Access in Information Society. 2017. v. 16. p. 3-27. With Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes and Ana Luíza Dias.
Full paper: Automatic Identification of Drop-down Menu Widgets Using Mutation Observers and Visibility Changes. Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. 2016. p. 766-771. With Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes.
Full paper: Fona: quantitative metric to measure focus navigation on rich internet applications. ACM Transactions on the Web. New York, NY, US : ACM - Association for Computing Machinery, 2015. v. 9. p. 1-28. With Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes and Ana Luíza Dias.
Full paper: Keyboard navigation mechanisms in widgets: an investigation on ARIA's implementations. Journal of Web Engineering. Paramus, NJ, US: Rinton Press, 2015. v. 14. p. 41-62. With Prof. Dra. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes and Rafael José Geraldo.
English (FCE - First Certificate in English, University of Cambridge, 2002)
Prof. PhD. Jandira Palma Guenka. PD&I Manager of Guenka Software Development.
Prof. PhD. Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes. Associate Professor of Computer Science at São Paulo University.
Pablo Lacerda de Miranda. Senior UI Engineer at Netflix.
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How We Think About Cities
Back when twitter was outraging over Dalhi boys and the Madrasan, Shefaly asked me how I, as a Dalhi boy living in Madras, felt about the whole thing. I told her that explaining my feelings would need a blogpost, not tweets, and that I was too busy to write a blogpost, but I’d write one as soon as I had free time. Shefaly said she’d hold me to that.
Unfortunately, this is not that blogpost. But it will hopefully make it easier to understand what I’m going on about when I do write the blogpost Shefaly did ask for.
The thing is, when we (and by ‘we’, I am generalising recklessly about people-like-us Indians) think about or talk about our cities, we do so in different ways. I’ve counted four such ways. I’m not suggesting that these four are the only ways to think about cities, or that a person thinks about a particular city in only one of these ways – just that anything any Indian person says about a city is likely to fall in one of these categories. With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s go ahead.
The four ways we think about cities are:
Cynical: in general, this involves a dismissal of a city, either by its own residents (whether recent or long-time), or people from other places. When Krish Ashok makes fun of amit_123s, he spoofs the cynical view of Chennai as being hot and muggy (admittedly this is true), possessing no food options other than curd rice (this is false), having practically no decent public spaces to booze (this is true), and lacking all redeeming features (this is false). Chennai is of course not the only city to attract a cynical view. I am frequently cynical about Calcutta, dismissing it as a vast slum. My father looks upon Mumbai as an overpopulated sewer. My brother hates Bangalore for reasons I am unable to fathom, and Delhi of course gets insane amounts of bad press from all corners for being full of road rage (which I cannot contest), people going ‘Tu jaanta hai mera baap kaun hai?’ (Um… yes, but it has been getting better in the past few years as more migrants come in and make Delhi a gentler place) and violence against women (which is true, but it is also possible that it’s not significantly different from other places in India in actual violence – the others don’t report it as much).
Cynicism about cities doesn’t only have to be about people from one city slagging of another. It can be about all cities being worthless – see this Caravan article about how much disdain the Kannada movie article has for Bangalore, and perhaps urban life in general. I can’t find the links right now, but a few years ago I was reading about how in the United States there’s a distrust for big cities by small-towners and rural dwellers – those effete city-dwellers aren’t real Americans! And of course, the NREGA itself has a philosophical underpinning that it’s a bad idea for villagers to be in the city – they should be given employment in their home villages instead. That’s actually an idea going back to Mohandas Gandhi, and which has quite possibly screwed India over for sixty years.
Romantic: this is right at the other end of the spectrum from the cynical. While the cynic looks at only the terrible parts of the city while ignoring all the good bits, the romantic sees only the good bits, and never mentions the bad. This is fairly prevalent.
The most romantic view we’ve ever had of a city probably lay in the phrase ‘the Spirit of Mumbai,’ before it became impossible to say that without a sneer, as it got associated with passively accepting whatever shit got dealt out to Mumbai. But other Indian cities have had their romantic propaganda as well – look at the title song of Dilli-6, whose lyrics keep talking about the big hearts of people in Delhi, claim that all the profanity slung about the city is actually filled with love, and that there is nothing in Delhi but love. Chandru gets fairly romantic about Chennai at times. And of course there’s perpetual Delhi romantic Mayank Austen Soofi (who on occasion manages to be cynical about present-day Delhi while remaining romantic about past-Delhi).
Sanctimonious: The evil twin of romanticism. The sanctimonious view doesn’t so much claim that a city is good and has no bad, as that the city is better than everywhere else (often in defiance of actual facts). This includes people from Metrass accusing every other place in India of having no morality or respect from tradition, people from Kolkata of claiming that only they have kalchar, and Mumbai people claiming that nowhere else in India is happening (seriously, Mumbai guys: fuck off). Oh, and about a month ago, Anantha expressing schadenfreude that while Chennai might have to suffer TASMAC-administered virtual prohibition, at least it didn’t have as stupid a name as Kolkatta/ Poschim Bongo (which is undeniable). I’ve seen Delhi cynicism and Delhi romanticism, but never Delhi sanctimony. But this needn’t necessarily be because Delhi doesn’t possess that vice, just that it’s so self-absorbed that it can’t quite grok the point of comparing itself to other places.
Realist: And finally, there’s the realist view, which is able to acknowledge both the good parts and the bad parts of a city. This, I fear, is tremendously unpopular.
Part of the problem, I believe, is that we as human beings respond far better to stories and narratives than to data, and it’s much easier to make a story out of a romantic or cynical view than out of actual data. Every year sees ‘Best Cities to Live in’ lists being released by somebody or the other, in which newspapers only cover the final rankings, not the break down of scores and parameters.
Another thing which probably makes it difficult for realist views of our cities to spread is that so few people have a stake in our cities, thanks to our wonky system of government which kicks most of city governance up to the state government (link via Supriya from ages ago). When there’s so little chance that demanding a specific change or improvement in a city will ever have a result, there’s even littler reason for a city resident to keep track of specific improvements that could be made. Easier and more convenient to stick to a grand narrative – whether romantic, cynical, or sanctimonious.
This is what makes it difficult to have a proper conversation about cities in India – the ones you were born in (or with), the ones you’ve adopted (or who adopt you), or the ones you like to visit. At some point, you’re going to challenge someone’s worldview – romantic or cynical or sanctimonious – and then the conversation is going to go off into arguing about that worldview, not about real life. This is of course a common problem when talking about many things, but it seems to be particularly bad when we talk about our cities.
That said, since Shefaly is holding me to it, I will try to have that conversation about cities soon. Portions of my cynicism and romanticism will creep into that as well, but I will aim to be as realistic as possible. Unfortunately, you will have to wait for the next time I have a relatively free working day.
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Estate, a Reverie
Luka Zimmerman, Andrea
Andrea Luka Zimmerman makes films that ‘explore the relationship between public and private memory.’ Estate, a Reverie (2015) was filmed on the Haggerston estate in east London, the artist’s home for 17 years. Filming began in 2007 – when the estate was earmarked for demolition – and ended seven years later. Zimmerman, who describes her approach to filmmaking as collaborative and performative, explains that ‘as someone who has spent the vast majority of their life living on large public housing estates … it was incredibly important to me that the film I was making was not about the community it depicts, but made from within it.’ Seeking to provide the residents of the estate with ‘a voice and visual presence to counter the many myths and clichés of their mainstream representation’, the film combines role play with observational documentary, and weaves together intimate portraits of the residents with architectural studies and dramatic re-enactments. Produced by Fugitive Images, with support from The Community Growth Fund, Arts Council London and PRS Foundation for New Music.
Artwork Details: running time: 1 hr 23 minutes
Edition: 1 of 3 + 1 AP
Material description: Single channel HD video
Credit line: © the artist
Theme: Undefined
Medium: Film and Audio Visual
Accession number: ACC2/2016
Noble, Paul
Large S, 2015
Armitage, Michael
Kariakor, 2015
Achaintre, Caroline
Todo Custo, 2015
Drew, Benedict
KAPUT, 2015
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Girl’s Day caught in attitude scandal as host downplays it & group is set for another guesting
IATFB 07/09/2015 Editorials, K-Entertainment, Opinions Leave A Comment
Girl’s Day were on Koon TV, a live streaming show on AfreecaTV, and as a result of their appearance, they’ve been getting heavy netizen backlash. It’s not yet anywhere near T-ara‘s or any of those national-level scandals, and as of now it’s easily below the level where it’ll do significant damage, but it’s definitely something worth monitoring going forward.
So basically, what happened is that Girl’s Day are in trouble with netizens for three primary reasons:
1) The girls appeared generally aloof and disinterested.
2) The girls were seemingly disrespectful to Choi Koon, the host of the program.
3) Sojin and the host allegedly argued about the mandu on the table.
Choi Koon, seeing the growing outrage, attempted to post a clarification for damage control, saying most of it was a misunderstanding.
“There really were no issues on the set yesterday, and we had fun. After the broadcast, there was a lot of responses, and after rewatching it, I realize there were parts that may cause misunderstanding so I am writing to you now. I wanted to do a bit more internet broadcast-like, casual broadcast yesterday. I wasn’t satisfied when watching our usual broadcasts with girl groups because they were so standardized and formal. There were a lot of responses saying ‘What’s the difference between [AfreecaTV] and a TV broadcast’ so after a lot of contemplation, we decided to go for a more internet broadcast-like, casual broadcast which ended up becoming more realistic. After we went for realism, in my desire to get some laughs, I made up scenarios and [the girls and I] bickered. And while we see the [live] chatroom on set, I couldn’t pick up on certain parts [of viewer criticisms]. I should have dealt with them there and then, but I think I wasn’t seasoned enough to do so.”
“Afterwards, and as is evident in the photo we took together, I was on good rapport with Girl’s Day. After the broadcast, all the members worried, ‘Were we too casual’ and we even talked on the phone [about it]. I wish there were no big misunderstandings. There were parts where things happened differently than my intentions, and since it’s a live broadcast there were parts that didn’t get filtered. The [Girl’s Day] girls really made it fun. So I had fun. I was never looked down on [during the broadcast] or anything like that. It was really a lot of fun. There were parts that I didn’t expect, and since it was Girl’s Day’s first internet broadcast I wanted to make them comfortable. I hope my sincerity is communicated. I hope there will be no further misunderstandings.”
Of course, even if that was the truth of how he felt (not like he can tell them to go fuck themselves), it was too late to stop the netizen train, and he’s actually going to get Girl’s Day to comeback on his show, so this really works out for him.
A source close to the group shared that Girl’s Day will be heading over to Choi Kun’s broadcast following the end of KBS’ “Music Bank” on July 10 at around 9 p.m. (KST).
Depends on how it’s handled it could work out for Girl’s Day or be extremely dumb.
My thoughts? This actually is a clash from both sides since I don’t follow either Girl’s Day or Choi Koon religiously, but I like them both a lot. Generally speaking, the reaction has been predictably overblown (everything is when it comes to this shit, let’s be honest), but I do think fans playing this off as nothing are wrong as well since this was definitely notable.
1) In terms of Girl’s Day’s lack of engagement, I agree that they did seem tired with lower energy than usual. It was mentioned by fans that they ended at 1 AM and they had to get up at 3 AM, which of course sounds terrible, but they know the deal of how these schedules go and how image maintenance goes and all that. They’re human, yes, but they probably should’ve gotten into the right frame of mine for a broadcast.
Put it this way, I think the overreactions framing them as terrible people or whatever are partially because, as somebody who has watched a bunch of his other broadcasts, this did standout as a particularly boring and basic one. When you’re noticeably worse than a majority of the guests on his show, it opens yourself up for criticism, which was their mistake.
2) The disrespectful to the host issue was actually sort of subjective and complicated.
Netizens are saying stuff like Girl’s Day would never do this to Yoo Jae Suk or something … but that’s the point, right? Like just at the heart of things that criticism seems to misunderstand the charm of the show. Part of the reason I watch Koon TV is specifically because it’s a less formal environment and he’s not a stuffy host that demands constant respect, and you can watch idols sing karaoke or get drunk and shit like that. I can’t speak for others who watch him, but the main reason I watch is because his guests can do whatever and not be so stick-up-their-ass all the time. Just like Choi Koon said, his viewers complained that as his show got more and more popular, he started to go more to a traditional talk show host stuff instead of like taking Fiestar to a restaurant and start drinking.
Anyway, the Tymee one was amusing. Cool rapper to Listerine bottles out on the counter, fuck it. pic.twitter.com/MKnW2VKC2d
— Asian Junkie (@asianjunkiecom) July 8, 2015
Like people were criticizing them for eating and comparing it to other broadcasts where they don’t eat, but do they honestly even watch his show? This was one of his mukbang ones, so they’re gonna eat a lot, and the other ones they’re using as benchmarks are either karaoke or 1-v-1 in a small room or like outdoors or whatever, so of course they’re all different.
Anyway, for better or worse, the point is that them doing shit like laughing loudly and trying to eat/kiss each other is not disrespectful to him specifically, as they do the same elsewhere and on broadcast.
Overall, as with the first criticism, the rude part to me was just not putting forth their usual effort rather than anything overt. I can see them rightfully taking heat for that, and it really didn’t help that Choi Koon stopped sitting in the middle, which made it harder for him to focus the direction of the show and made it look like they were bullying him or something.
3) For the mandu issue, if it wasn’t done for comedic effect, then I think Sojin deserved to be called out for that back-and-forth because it came off as rude. Thing is, apparently it actually was an attempt for laughs, specifically because people were starting to say the broadcast was boring (again, which is why you bring the energy to begin with), which is why the staff explained at the time and he explained later that they tried the gag.
If so, then it’s fitting then that international and Korean netizens alike are comparing it to Eunjung‘s rice cake incident, since that too was not a big deal in context, though I realize it’s not exactly the strength of netizens to recognize irony.
All in all, I guess a lot of this is up to your personal interpretation, and people surely are going around saying all types of shit about this, but my criticism for their appearance primarily revolves around them being boring as hell. Like I said, it stood out as particularly slow moving for one of his shows, even for a mukbang broadcast, which is why I think it was interpreted as a “holy fuck these girls are bitches” by most viewers. While I agree they could’ve done better and they should’ve showed more energy, it’s also a typical overreaction and I’m not sure what else about it would be classified as particularly newsworthy. Basically Girl’s Day just needs to manage this from here on out so it doesn’t blow up into something bigger than it is, and going back on and doing a good broadcast seems like a solid start.
More importantly though, I just REALLY hope this incident doesn’t cause Choi Koon to go conservative when idol groups come on in fear that he’ll be known as the show that causes problems or something. Because if it ends up that way, I have minimal reason to watch, as it’ll be the same old shit as I can get elsewhere with the idol repeating the same PR lines. Koon TV has gotten a lot of good underground celebs and nugu idols to open up and be informal and do stuff they normally wouldn’t, and it would really be a shame to see that type of rawness get lost over this shit. I’m pretty sure Girl’s Day will be fine since other girl groups have survived worse, but I’m also pretty sure that Koon TV will go even more conservative with the show now, which is just shitty for a world/fandom where there’s so little opportunity to get less stuffy, polished looks at these people to begin with.
Tags AfreecaTV Choi Koon Girl's Day Koon TV Netizens Sojin
Previous Speaking of Black Nut, let’s discuss him dissing Jooheon on his own track & fapping to Hyorin
Next T-ara’s fancafe is the biggest out of Korean girl groups in China, which is hilarious
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C4 Solution
Best Light Films
Best Light is set to co-Produce a feature film with Moonlighting Films – Produce a documentary TV series with Off the Fence and Produce and Direct a South African feature film.
A young white girl’s life is shattered when her parents divorce and an abusive step father comes on the scene. This is South Africa in the mid 70’s. It is her black nanny, who offers the emotional stability and gives her the opportunity to redefine what family is.
Script Writer / Director: Diana Keam
Producer: Soon to be announced
NDIYINDODA – I AM A MAN
Zolile is a homeless child living in the vast townships surrounding Cape Town’s international airport. Anna belongs to the social elite who fears the end of the apartheid regime will strip them of their privileges. The mysterious meeting between these two totally opposite characters is the film’s dramatic engine.
Script Writer / Director: Jon Bang Carlsen
Producers Denmark: Jon Bang Carlsen and Lene Børglum
Producers SA: Philip Key and Diana Keam
Documentary TV Series
A 13 part documentary series focusing on the lives of a few specific individuals who have been left controversial legacies by their controversial/high-profile parents. The episodes explores how their legacy has shaped the lives of the children for the better and for the worse.
Conceived by: Jonno Knowles
Producers: Diana Keam and Jonno Knowles
© 2012 Best Light Films. All Rights Reserved. | Designed by Good Design
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Younicos batteries ‘first’ for floating wind farm
Thu, 07/05/2018 - 12:19 -- Xuan Zhong
Norwegian energy firm Equinor and Abu-Dhabi-based Masdar have unveiled a Younicos battery system in Scotland as the “world’s first” to be connected to an offshore floating wind farm.
The one-megawatt system, comprising two Younicos lithium-ion Y Cubes in modular battery containers, have been installed at the Hywind onshore substation in Peterhead.
Masdar
younicos
ESA publishes safety guidelines for energy storage projects
The U.S. Energy Storage Association (ESA) has published safety guidelines for deploying energy storage systems that include how to plan for and mitigate potential operational hazards.
Firms announce plans to deploy the US’ first liquid air energy storage system
Liquid-air energy storage firm Highview Power Storage and project developer Encore Renewable Energy have announced plans to deliver a 50MW/400MWh system in the US— a first for the country.
Tesla files lithium-ion pouch cell patent aimed at the EV and energy storage markets
Tesla Motors Canada has filed a patent for a lithium-ion pouch cell containing ‘fewer operative, electrolyte additives’ with the potential to be used in energy storage applications including vehicle and grid-storage— Tesla’s key markets.
Chinese firm commissions lithium-ion anode materials factory
China’s Chenyu-Fuji commissioned the first phase of its lithium-ion battery anode materials plant on 1 January with the goal of producing 20,000 mt/year when the facility is completed.
California earmarks funding for non lithium-ion ESS technology
Lithium-ion is undoubtedly the battery du jour of the modern world, but the California Energy Commission is looking at alternatives to the chemistry for tomorrow’s energy storage system applications.
Bank agrees loan to help troubled South African utility deploy energy storage
China headquartered New Development Bank (NDB) has agreed to a ZAR6billion ($420 million) loan to South African power utility Eskom to build up to 360MW of energy storage in the country.
Audi and Umicore to recover cobalt and nickel from lithium-ion batteries as they continue to pursue closed loop goal
Vehicle OEM Audi and recyclers Umicore have recovered 90% of the cobalt and nickel from the German car maker’s e-tron battery packs during the test phase of their strategic research project.
Year-long project aims to enhance lead recycling value chain with advances in smelting process
Lead battery recycler Gopher Resource has formed a research collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to improve its reverberatory furnaces.
UN proposes limit lithium batteries SoC during transportation
Lithium-ion batteries should be limited to 30% state-of-charge (SoC) when being transported, a sub-committee of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe has proposed.
Indian battery factory fire kills one
One firefighter was killed and many injured when a fire broke out at battery manufacturing plant in New Delhi on Thursday, 2 January.
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26 August 2011 | Letter from the Editors
Books for a desert island? Photo: Patrick Verdier (Wikimedia)
Might Tolstoy’s War and Peace be the epitome of a novel that qualifies for reading on a desert island? (Maybe along with Tristram Shandy or Finnegan’s Wake, and possibly The Gateless Gate (the Zen Buddhist kōans). After all, who’s got time or energy for some 1,500 pages of a wartime story from the Napoleonic era with too many characters (580, and so many of them called Pierre)?
We do tend to consume everything quickly: busy busy! We eat fast, we talk fast, we exercise fast, we fast-forward through movies. We devour books like fast food. Hurry hurry! On to the next one, whatever it is, don’t hang about! More…
Sinikka Koskinen
Peter von Bagh: Junassa [On the train]
26 August 2011 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Peter von Bagh
Junassa
[On the train]
Helsinki: Love Kirjat / WSOY, 2011. 255 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-0-37921-9
€18, hardback
Professor Peter von Bagh, a film director and academic, is the author of a wide range of books on the history of film and culture. In this small-scale volume of essays, he investigates the significant role played by trains and railways in cinematic plot structures since the days of silent film. The text chugs along in a series of snippets, reminiscent of a rail passenger’s experience of scenery zipping past. This book looks at classics of the film noir, Western and romance genres, along with films that have used trains as a deeper metaphor for life. von Bagh also considers the critically derided but widely loved Finnish popular culture from the 1940s and ’50s, as well as fiction. For example, author Juhani Aho’s first novel, Rautatie (‘The railway’, 1884), depicted an individual’s first experience of a train journey with a degree of authenticity that it can be compared to the uproar the Lumière brothers’ early films generated among the audiences. Unfortunately Junassa lacks an index of the works and people mentioned in the text.
Translated by Ruth Urbom
Under the August moon
26 August 2011 | In the news
The Night of the Arts, 2009. Photo: Sasa Tkalcan
Helsinki becomes a busy cultural city in every August: Helsinki Festival, Stage Theatre Festival and Poetry Moon festival, for example, have a great variety of happenings on offer.
Also the seventh annual Helsinki Poetics Conference – an international and interdisciplinary conference for poets, writers and literary scholars – takes place on 27 and 28 August.
The organisers are the poetry organisation Nihil Interit (the publisher of the journal Tuli&Savu, ‘Fire&Smoke’) in collaboration with the Finnish Literary Research Society, and it is a part of the Runokuu / Poetry Moon international poetry festival.
And The Night of the Arts, of Helsinki Festival, takes over the city – for the 23rd time, tonight.
Utopia or cacotopia?
19 August 2011 | Extracts, Non-fiction
Viljakansaari, Finland, 2008. ©Merja Salo
Do we live in the age of autopia, and if we do, what does that mean? On this earth there are now perhaps 800 million cars, all vital to our modern lifestyles. Professor and photographer Merja Salo observes landscapes through her camera with this question in mind
Extracts and photographs from Carscapes. Automaisemia (Edition Patrick Frey & Musta Taide, 2011. Translation: Laura Mänki)
The car may be the vehicle for the everyman, but not every man is a good driver. According to Hungarian- born psychoanalyst Michael Balint, good drivers have the psychological structure of philobats. With their sense of sight, they perceive space well and control it by steering their vehicle skilfully. Ocnophiles, on the other hand, are more at home as passengers. They structure the world through intimacy and touch. When driving, they cling anxiously to the steering wheel and do not perceive the continously changing situations in traffic.
Jean Sibelius kodissaan. Jean Sibelius, i sitt hem. Jean Sibelius at home
Toimittanut [Edited by] Jussi Brofeldt
Helsinki: Teos, 2010. 103 p., ill.
€ 29, hardback
The composer Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) disliked being photographed. This book contains 50 stills selected from the documentary film Jean Sibelius at home, a compilation of cinematographic material in which the composer is seen at home in 1927 and 1945. Some of the shots were originally cut, and have not been previously published. The film was made by the brothers Heikki Aho and Björn Soldan, who were neighbours of Sibelius in their childhood – their father was the author Juhani Aho, a friend of the Sibelius family. Founded in the 1920s, the film company Aho & Soldan was influenced by the experimental spirit of the Bauhaus and became known for its commissioned work aimed at spreading the image of Finland abroad. The Sibelius film offers a rare peek into the composer’s home life at his villa of Ainola. In addition to the photographs, the trilingual book also contains seven articles on Sibelius and the film. Heikki Aho’s daughter, the pioneer photographer Claire Aho relates her own memories of the 1945 filming. Jussi Brofeldt, the book’s editor, is her son.
Translated by David McDuff
Tchotchkes for the tsar
11 August 2011 | Reviews
Cornflower and ear of oats: one of the several Fabergé gemstone ornaments now owned by Queen Elizabeth of England (gold, rock crystal, diamonds, enamel, ca 18 cm)
Ulla Tillander-Godenhielm
Fabergén suomalaiset mestarit
[Fabergé’s Finnish masters]
Design: Jukka Aalto/Armadillo Graphics
Helsinki: Tammi, 2011. 271 p., ill.
In its online shop, the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg sells a copy of a most delicate, enchanting little nephrite-and-opal lily of the valley that perfectly imitates nature, sitting in a vase made of rock crystal that looks like a glass of water.
These small flowers made of gold and gemstones were manufactured by the jeweller Fabergé a hundred years ago. The lily of the valley was the most frequently used floral motif in the Fabergé workshops – it was the favourite flower of Empress Alexandra (1872–1918), and the imperial family was the the foremost client of the world’s foremost jeweller.
The replica (13.5 centimetres high) is available at the Hermitage as a ‘luxury gift’ for the price of mere $3,300. (N.B. Since we published this review, the ‘luxury gift’ items seem to have disappeared from the Hermitage online shop selection, so we have removed the link. Several Fabergé egg replicas are available though, ranging in price from $200 upwards – link below.)
For those who feel the price is excessive, there is also a rather modestly-priced little bay tree (original: gold, Siberian nephrite, diamonds, amethysts, pearls, citrines, agates and rubies as well as natural feathers, about 30 centimetres tall, featuring a little bird that emerges flapping its wings and singing when a small key is turned) at just $ 219,95. Despite its form, it is classified as one of the famous imperial Easter eggs. (However, as I write, this item is unfortunately sold out…) More…
Sodan haavoittama lapsuus [A childhood scarred by war]
Sodan haavoittama lapsuus
[A childhood scarred by war]
Toimittaneet [Edited by]: Anne Kuorsalo & Iris Saloranta
Helsinki: Gummerus, 2010. 288 p., ill.
Around 1.5 million Finns were children during the Winter and Continuation Wars of 1939–1944. Three hundred children are estimated to have been killed by bombs, and between 55,000 and 80,000 were orphaned by the war. Many more deaths were caused by diseases such as tuberculosis, polio and cerebral meningitis. Some children lived fairly secure lives on farms with their own families or with relatives; some were sent to live with foster families in Sweden; some were evacuated from Karelia and a small number were interned in camps because of their German heritage. Many under-18s served in the Finnish military and would now be considered child soldiers. Finns who were born in the 1930s and early 1940s have long been a neglected group: for several decades, discussions of the victims of war were avoided for foreign policy reasons as well. It is only in recent years that discussions have emerged concerning the fates of the children who were sent to Sweden during the war and those who were born to Finnish women, fathered by German soldiers. This book includes the stories of thirty people. The views of some refugees who have settled in Finland are included as well, such as the story of Mahmoud, who fled from Iraq via people smugglers.
Summer in the bookshop
Not a surprise: in June and July Finns liked to read thrillers, both Finnish and foreign, as the Bookseller’s Association of Finland’s list of the best-selling Finnish fiction shows. Three out of top five on the Finnish fiction list were crime stories; number one was Mustasiipi (‘Blackwing‘, Otava), a thriller by Reijo Mäki.
Tuomas Kyrö’s book of short prose about a grumpy old man resisting all sorts of contemporary fads, Mielensäpahoittaja (‘Taking offence’, WSOY), was stubborn enough to stick to number four (as in May).
Sofi Oksanen’s hugely successful novel about women and Estonian history, Puhdistus (2008), English version: Purge, keeps going strong: it is still number six on the list.
On the non-fiction list there were books, among others, on cooking, gardening and birds – in summer Finns like to grill barbecues while listening to birdsong and reading about diets, trekking and handicrafts…
Sun and shade
3 August 2011 | Extracts, Non-fiction
Springtime: the new graduates celebrate the beginning of summer. Photos: ©Jussi Brofeldt
Documentary film-making and photography arrived in Finland in the 1920s with pioneers like Heikki Aho and Björn Soldan, who founded a film company in 1925 in Helsinki. They also took thousands of photographs of their city; in a selection taken in the turbulent 1930s, people go on about their lives, rain or shine
Photographs from Aho & Soldan: Kaupunkilaiselämää – Stadsliv – City life. Näkymiä 1930-luvun Helsinkiin (‘Views of Helsinki of the 1930s’, WSOY, 2011)
Photos: Aho & Soldan@Jussi Brofeldt. Texts, by Jörn Donner and Ilkka Kippola, are published in Finnish, Swedish and English.
The exhibition ‘City life‘ is open at Virka Gallery of the Helsinki City Hall from 1 June to 4 September.
Aho and Soldan were half-brothers, Heikki the eldest son of the writer Juhani Aho (1861–1921; an extract from one of his novels is available here) and the artist Venny Soldan-Brofeldt. (Juhani Aho changed his original Swedish surname, Brofeldt, to Aho in 1907), Björn Soldan was Aho’s son from an extramarital relationship. More…
Aamu Nyström: I.K. Inha – Valokuvaaja, kirjailija, kulttuurin löytöretkeilijä [I.K. Inha – Photographer, writer, cultural explorer]
3 August 2011 | Mini reviews, Reviews
I.K. Inha – Valokuvaaja, kirjailija, kulttuurin löytöretkeilijä
[I.K. Inha – Photographer, writer, cultural explorer]
Jyväskylä: Minerva, 2011. 271 p., ill.
I.K. Inha (1865–1930) was a photographer, a writer, a translator and a journalist. He is known particularly for his photographic journeys in Finland and Russian Karelia. Both the texts and the photographs in Inha’s landscape and nature works are of a high aesthetic standard. This book focuses on Inha’s lesser-known works and the various phases of his life. Inha’s travel diary documents the cycle journey he made as a student in 1886 to Germany and Switzerland. In 1897 Inha was appointed Finland’s first-ever foreign correspondent; from Athens he reported on events such as the Greco-Turkish War. In 1899 and 1901 Inha was posted to England, where he observed Queen Victoria’s funeral and the coronation of King Edward VII. Aamu Nyström, the niece of Inha’s brother, has had access to letters, photographs and written and oral recollections of family members.
Timo Kalevi Forss & Martti Lintunen: Karjala edestakaisin [Karelia back and forth]
Karjala edestakaisin
[Karelia back and forth]
Teksti [Text by]: Timo Kalevi Forss
Kuvat [Photographs by]: Martti Lintunen
Helsinki: Like Kustannus, 2010. 164 p., ill.
€ 29, paperback
At the end of the Continuation War (1941–44), some 400,000 Karelians were forced to abandon their homes. They were resettled in various parts of Finland, and nowadays around a fifth of Finns have some Karelian heritage. Through interviews with fifteen people living in the modern-day region of Karelia, this book documents the part of Karelia that was ceded to the Soviet Union. The researchers travelled to Vyborg, Sortavala, Priozersk, and the Valaam Monastery. The interviewees include a construction company owner building a house on an old Finnish stone foundation, a rock music club owner from Vyborg and a colonel who served in the counter-terrorism division of the Russian army. The photographs convey the range of buildings in Karelia, from Finnish houses to traditional Karelian homesteads, from mansions of the nouveaux riches to Soviet-era tower blocks. In the idyllic villages around Lake Ladoga, cows graze near small houses; time seems to have been frozen around the turn of the last century. The long sandy beaches of the spa towns on the shores of the Gulf of Finland are now filled with tourists from St Petersburg.
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BOP Blogs
Repo Men
On the Big Board
Position Staff In Brief
69/123 David Mumpower For over half the movie, I was ready to anoint this a pleasant surprise. The last twenty minutes, I wanted someone to suffer for my misery.
145/190 Max Braden There were some moments, but this went on too long. This might be an interesting double header with Inception.
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No, this is not a sequel to the 1984 Emilio Estevez clunker. Repo Men is a science fiction thriller starring Jude Law. Set in the near future where people are now purchasing organs on credit, the film sounds like it has quite an interesting concept. The production was initially titled Repossession Mambo and based on a novel of the same name by author Eric Garcia, who also wrote the screenplay. However, the movie already seems to be walking a fine line between originality and copying the plot of the 2008 musical, Repo! The Genetic Opera. Perhaps, the name change can be attributed to a mambo being musically themed much like an opera and the distributor, Universal Studios, needs to distance itself as far away as possible from The Genetic Opera?
Law stars as Remy, a repo man whose body is made up almost entirely of artificial organs. When Remy fails to make payments on his artificial heart, his former partner, played by Forest Whitaker, comes to repossess the heart and the chase is on. That will give some nightmares to anyone who has had unpleasant dealings with a creditor in the past.
Directed by newcomer Miguel Sapochnik and also starring Liev Schreiber, the film looks to be a bloody, fast-paced affair that may even pose a few relevant questions to the audience in regards to the state of the current economy and the U.S. health care system. Hopefully, Repo Men will be similar in quality to Jude Law’s first mainstream Hollywood movie and science fiction classic, Gattaca. That was a brilliant film that was both highly entertaining and made a statement on the state of racism.
On a personal note, Repo Men should provide plenty of interest as it was filmed entirely in Southern Ontario where I live, so I will be looking for recognizable locations in Hamilton, Burlington, and Toronto, Ontario. (Ryan O'Neill/BOP)
Vital statistics for Repo Men
Main Cast Jude Law, Forest Whitaker
Supporting Cast Alice Braga, Joe Pingue
Director Miguel Sapochnik
Screenwriter Eric Garcia, Garrett Lerner
Distributor Universal Pictures
Talent in red has entry in The Big Picture
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Cascadia Seminar
Adventures in Medical Anthropology
2019 Seminar
Schedule & Abstracts
Cascadia-Originated Publications
Cascadia Region Medical Anthropologists
The 3rd Cascadia Seminar: Ethnographic Adventures in Medical Anthropology
at Seattle University and the University of Washington
Review Committee:
Kirsten Bell (U of British Columbia)
Leslie Butt (U Victoria)
Johanna Crane (UW-Bothell)
James Pfeiffer (UW-Seattle)
Nicole Berry (Simon Fraser U)
Host / Organizer: Harriet Phinney (Seattle University), with assistance from Janelle S. Taylor (University of Washington)
Harriet Phinney of Seattle University hosted the 3rd Cascadia Seminar, with assistance from Janelle Taylor of the University of Washington. Medical anthropologists (from everywhere) were invited to submit abstracts which were reviewed by a committee of medical anthropologists on faculty at our various institutions, all of whom also planed to attend. The committee selected seven abstracts, seeking papers that promised to be ethnographically rich and intellectually exciting (scroll down to view abstracts).
The Cascadia Seminar began the evening of Friday April 24th with a keynote address at the University of Washington by Mette Nordahl Svendsen (University of Copenhagen). The rest of the weekend conference was held at Seattle University. Four papers were presented on Saturday April 25th, and three on Sunday April 26th, with no concurrent sessions. Each paper presenter had forty-five minutes to present a substantial, well worked-out paper, with ample time for lively discussion. All participants were asked to attend all papers, and optional no-host meals together will offer additional opportunities for conversation. The Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington sponsored a reception following the keynote address, and Seattle University sponsored coffee and snacks during the weekend sessions. The organizers gratefully acknowledge additional support from UW Seattle’s Department of Anthropology, the Program in Comparative History of Ideas, theProgram on Values of the Department of Philosophy, and the UW Bothell’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences.
Title: What is metabolism after “big data”? Unearthing the norms, values, and politics of bodies and populations
Nadine Levin
Recent work in medical anthropology has examined how the objects and practices of biomedicine are changing, and are allowing researchers to engage with the meaning of life in potentially transformative ways. In this paper, I explore how “big data”—the so-called rise of bigger, faster, and better technologies and ways of using data—is impacting how metabolism gets “done”. I argue that big data practices—which involve computational techniques, algorithms, and databases—produce culturally, morally, and politically charged modes of measuring and evaluating health, bodies, and populations. Because biomedical research affects understandings of metabolic processes and organisms, changing configurations of metabolism have fundamental consequences for peoples’ experiences of nutrition and exercise, and also biomedical interventions into diseases and populations.
This paper is based on ethnographic work in the post-genomic field of metabolomics: the study of the molecules and processes that make up metabolism. While some scholars have argued that the post-genomic sciences represent a shift away from reductionism and towards contingency and liveliness, how—in what ways, to what extent, for whom—science is engaging with the complexity of biology, organisms, and society remains to be seen. To explore this, my paper focuses on two examples of the application of metabolomics to clinical issues: to investigations of (1) the role of the microbiome in obesity, and (2) the development of personalized diagnostics for liver transplants. I argue that practices for investigating and intervening into the “complexity” of metabolism and data lead to normative modes of knowledge production and care, by operationalizing the “biological” and “technological,” rather than “social” or “ecological,” interventions into health and disease.
Ultimately, this paper sees metabolism as a rich object from thinking about how the rise of big data—as a new set of practices and a new “culture” of science—is leading to changes in notions of biological and social life, and to the structures and institutions of biomedicine. Moreover, this paper asks how medical anthropology can help to trouble contemporary society’s obsession with measuring and quantifying human life with big data—by unearthing the norms, values, and politics embedded within data-intensive science.
Title: Biomedicine, Healing and Modernity: An Ethnographic Study of Village Doctors in Bangladesh
Faruk Shah
This study explores the ways that village doctors have increased the profits of corporation and business people through the commodification of health in rural Bangladesh. Drawing on ethnographic data from rural Bangladesh, I argue that rural health provision may be usefully examined in the light of theories of capitalist world systems. Village doctors are currently the preeminent health care providers in terms of the numbers of villagers whom they serve. Although they have neither formal training nor education in biomedicine, this does not influence their acceptability and practice in local settings. Local people value their health advice and services due to their easy availability, accessibility and affordability, in contrast to the unavailability and bureaucratic complexity of public health care services. This popular status encourages other private care providers, including formally trained doctors, clinics and diagnostic centers to maintain a close connection with village doctors to persuade them to refer their patients in exchange for a commission which can be up to one-third of the original cost of a particular service. Similarly, pharmaceutical companies keep in regular contact with village doctors who advise and sell the drugs of particular companies to their patients. One of the significant findings to emerge from this study is that the unique position and social relations of village doctors have established them as the key element in a chain of corporate networks by the clinical captainship in the realm of the rural health culture in Bangladesh. It was observed that much unnecessary medical advice is dispensed as a result of the hidden mutually advantageous contacts among village doctors, pharmaceutical companies and diagnostic centres. One serious health effect is the overuse of antibiotics that may create ‘super-resistance’ in the human body. Nonetheless the ethical codes of the pharmaceutical companies remain silent in this regard. Thus, the activities of this portion of the health sector is directed at ensuring business for the corporations and high profits for most involved on the supply side, rather than the achievement of the comprehensive national health plans which Bangladesh has officially adopted.
Title: Enveloped Care in Lithuania
Rima Praspaliauskiene
This paper focuses on a local form of care that is interwoven with informal monetary transactions (payments from patients to doctors) in Lithuania’s public health care system. These transactions often are concealed in actual white envelopes. At the clinic in Vilnius, where I did my fieldwork (2009-2010) patients and their caretakers talked of how they felt “no moral hesitations” to give money to the doctors. Some described “little white envelopes” “as an emotional contact” and “vital system,” while others condemned greedy doctors and called them “bribers;” doctors talked about their conflicted feelings of being grateful yet dependant on “patients’ alms” and obligations to their own families. Almost everyone was enveloped in the dilemmas of giving (or not giving) envelopes. In this paper I reflect on this local form of caring that is enveloped in practices of envelopes. I call it enveloped care. I step back from the gift-bribe debate and focus on caring rather than the material transaction itself. Caring for oneself and others is “contaminated” with things, objects, stories, rumors, affect, money that work together in biomedical settings. Care is always ambiguous and local, argues Anne Marie Mol, and practices of caring entail specific modalities that are not necessarily in accord with ethics of justice (Mol 2010). While articulating ambiguous caring connections, practices of envelopes express particular, situated relationship to caring, leading towards understandings of what “good care” and “bad care” is. Envelopes are an embedded practice and form of care that is experienced though concrete relations that are already embedded in webs of obligations, caring attachments, and unequal social arrangements. This form of caring is neither purely altruistic nor sanitized, nor strictly normative, but rather ambiguous: it includes objects and money yet, it does not work through the logic of the market; it appears individualistic but is not limited to the relationship between individuals; while it invokes attentiveness, and generosity, it is also confining and can be violent to all participants; it is “corrupt” and “good care” at the same time.
Title: The Price of Care: An Analysis of the Merger of Money and Medicine in US Transgender Care
Marieke van Eijk
Health care systems around the world are faced with spiraling health care costs, aging populations, and high demands for expensive high-tech interventions. In attempts to balance between decreasing costs and attending to people’s needs, many countries implement economic models that advocate privatization and “consumer choice.” While economists and policy makers stress the “cost-effectiveness” of these models, opponents argue that they drain medicine from its ethical foundations of compassion and turn care giving into profit-driven enterprises (Kleinman 2010). My ethnographic fieldwork at a U.S. transgender care clinic pushed me to call this, what Zelizer (2013) has termed “love versus money” polarization into question. Transgender care is a highly contested medical field, in which finance and medicine disagree over the “necessity” to cover the costs of care of bodies that transcend conventional understandings of man and woman. Examining the debates over the price of suffering in great ethnographic detail, I show that at the transgender clinic, money and medicine were not two separate fields but were intimately linked and gave rise to what I call a mode of “financial caring,” in which money, love, nurturance, forms, and fiscal calculations could not be easily differentiated. My analysis confirms that caregiving is a practice of compassion (Kleinman 2012:1550) but it also shows that caregiving is always embedded in discussions of whose individual suffering is severe enough to be paid for collectively. I stress that the question how much social value and financial resources a nation is willing to allocate to care giving is not a financial query only. It is also an ethically complex practice that draws in medicine, finance, and many other sociopolitical actors, each of which brings to the table different answers of how to provide “good” care amidst increasing expenditure and cost-containment measures. To understand how medical and financial entities merge and the kinds of intended and unintended consequences they invoke, it is important not to situate economics and health care delivery as residing in two separate domains but to see them as diffusely and intimately linked, creating both viable and devastating means of caring.
Title: A Call for Emergent Practices: Reconsidering Translational Theory as Applied in Diabetes Prevention Programs
Sean Bruna
This paper critiques translational theories regarding health interventions, suggests promoting “emergent” practices from tribal communities rather than continued use of generic “translated” interventions, and examines ethical quandaries that emerge when linking local emergent practices to national policies and funding. Drawing from an eight-year partnership and 18 months of community based participatory research with Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (YDSP), an American Indian Tribe located on the U.S.-Mexico border, I begin by asking why, despite countless translated biomedical programs, the incidence of diabetes in American Indian communities continues to rise. I suggest a reconceptualition of the literature on translational theory to provide space for what I call “emergent” practices. I argue that there are currently two dominant models, and one emerging model, of diabetes research and intervention among American Indian peoples. Located on a spectrum, they are (1) individual-oriented biomedical models developed predominately for white, Western populations, which are applied to both the general U.S. population and American Indian peoples; (2) modifications, adaptations, or translations of these programs for application in non-white communities, including American Indian communities; and (3) emerging models of communal prevention in which intervention activities derive completely from local cultural practices. In framing the literature in this manner, I offer a counter narrative to biomedical research and provide room for communities and knowledge systems to speak. In the second section of the paper I draw on extensive ethnographic research to highlight failed and successful examples of the three models previously presented. I argue that emergent models as expressed at YDSP — religious community gardens, pilgrimages and religious dancing – all have the potential to emerge as successful wellness programs for obesity and diabetes. However, given the sacredness and knowledge-restrictive properties of many of these emergent practices, various ethical quandaries hinder linking these local programs to national policies and funding streams. As such, I close the paper with a short discussion regarding policy considerations for integrating the efforts of indigenous leaders and community health staff so that emergent practices can be identified and supported at the federal level in an ethically responsible manner.
Title: Scripting Dissent: Abortion Laws, Medicine, and the Politics of Scripted Speech
Mara Buchbinder
Scripts and scripting are of particular interest in social theory because these concepts invite questions about longstanding tensions in contemporary theoretical debates—between structure and agency, determinism and emergence, compulsion and choice. In this paper, I focus on a highly specialized type of script to consider the micro-politics of agency and resistance at the intersection of medicine and the law. I draw on an investigation of the experience of abortion providers in North Carolina practicing under the 2011 “Woman’s Right to Know Act,” which mandates that women receive counseling with specific, state-prescribed information at least 24 hours prior to an abortion. Such laws appropriate the standard script of medical informed consent (Hoeyer and Hogle 2014), in which healthcare providers are expected to inform patients about the risks of medical procedures. By compelling providers to ventriloquize an ideological and non-medical message, mandated counseling abortion laws enable the state to speak to its citizens and transform medical providers into agents of the state. Moreover, by enacting laws ostensibly aimed at more fully informing women about abortion risks, the state flips the script (Carr 2011) of medical informed consent, coopting its language, format, and authoritative voice for another purpose. However, I illustrate that abortion providers are not completely powerless in this process. Instead, providers in my study flipped the script back at the state by prefacing it with disclaimers and apologies. As one physician noted, “As long as I speak the words that’s not illegal.” By this, she meant that as long as she expressed the required content, she had complied with the law. Yet her statement also reveals that reciting the script may be infelicitous (cf. Austin 1962) insofar as it can expose a rift between meaning and intention. This demonstrates that the social and moral force of the script stretches beyond its lexical meanings to encompass the way it is performed within a particular context. By illustrating the interactional strategies through which abortion providers reject, challenge, or otherwise subvert the scripts they have been handed, I contribute to anthropological work on the grounded, everyday strategies for resisting state power.
Title: Global Fund-ization: Funding mechanisms and HIV/AIDS program survival in Sierra Leone
Alexandra Collins
The ‘vertical’ versus ‘horizontal’ debate to healthcare delivery and financing has been discussed globally, for decades. Over the past twenty years, research has detailed the negatives of a ‘vertical’ (i.e. disease-specific) approach, including program instability. Recently this delivery trajectory has shifted towards a ‘diagonal’ approach, which encourages gradual integration by strengthening the larger health system, while still working towards specific program goals. Current arguments suggest that ‘diagonal’ financing might be essential for maintaining HIV/AIDS treatment in low-income countries; however, donor conditionalities can create space for negative characteristics (i.e. instability) of ‘vertical’ programs, to manifest. This project critically analyzes donor expectations and conditionalities through an ethnographic account of HIV/AIDS programs and practices in Sierra Leone, focusing on the Global Fund, which provides 97% of the country’s HIV/AIDS funding. The Global Fund has taken up Health Systems Strengthening (HSS) as a cross-cutting and ‘diagonal’ element to their funding approach. This move towards HSS in the global health community has simultaneously provoked a largely technocratic shift for programming efforts, with increased funding from donors to strengthen disease surveillance, data collection and reporting mechanisms. Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork in Sierra Leone, I demonstrate how the realities of this technocratic push and conditionalities are challenging due to current infrastructure, increasing the administrative burden on HIV/AIDS program workers. From participant-observation in clinics, government agencies and multi-entity meetings, and semi-structured interviews with HIV/AIDS counselors and program officers, I show how donor expectations and stipulations have altered the perceptions and foci of many HIV/AIDS personnel, which can have detrimental outcomes. By closely examining the structures and mechanisms in place in Sierra Leone, this research magnifies the complexity of expectations and stipulations by ‘assembling’ this global form with other elements that are shaping, and shaped by it. As a country whose HIV/AIDS programs rely 99% on external resources, the donor conditionalities in place cannot be rebuffed. While recognizing the potential of ‘diagonal’ service delivery, I argue that closer examination needs to be paid to the ‘friction’ created between donor conditionalities and their implementation and influence on HIV/AIDS programs and practices in the particular Sierra Leonean context.
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Edward Snowden says FBI claims it can’t unlock an iPhone are ‘bullsh*t’
by Franklin Simmons March 9, 2016, 1:39 pm 93 Views
Edward Snowden says the FBI’s claims that only Apple can hack its own device is “bullsh*t.”
Showden, the whistleblower who exposed thousands of NSA secrets surrounding mass surveillance, was speaking via real-time video link at the Common Cause Blueprint for a Great Democracy conference.
In no uncertain terms Snowden said, “The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’ to unlock the phone. Respectfully, that’s bulls–t.”
Following his remarks Snowden then went on to tweet his support for an American Civil Liberties Union report saying that the FBI’s claims in the case are fraudulent.
The FBI’s request for Apple to hack an iPhone owned by one of the San Bernardino shooters has drawn criticism from many of the tech industries heavyweights.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak also spoke out against the FBI on the Conan O’Brien show on Monday, saying: “I side with Apple on this one. [The FBI] picked the lamest case you ever could.”
Wozniak added: “Verizon turned over all the phone records and SMS messages. So they want to take this other phone that the two didn’t destroy, which was a work phone. It’s so lame and worthless to expect there’s something on it and to get Apple to expose it.”
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and various other silicon valley executives have shared similar sentiments.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates supported the FBI for a short period of time before backtracking and suggesting during a Reddit AmA:
“I think there needs to be a discussion about when the government should be able to gather information. What if we had never had wiretapping? Also the government needs to talk openly about safeguards.”
appleEdward Snowdenfbi
Written by Franklin Simmons
Franklin Simmons is BusinessPundit's Tech Editor. His life is consumed with a love of augmented reality, mobility, and emerging technology. He extensively covers all areas of technology, including the computing, automotive, and healthcare sectors.
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Cam's Cinematic Episodes
A wacky world of movie related nonsense. Enter At Thine Own Risk!
Retrospectives (21)
Film Review - A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Hard to believe, but it’s been almost a decade since Robert Zemeckis, the tech-whiz mastermind behind whimsical popcorn confections like Forrest Gump, Contact, Romancing the Stone, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Back to the Future series, has made a film with flesh-and-blood humans on-screen. No, rather, the Oscar-winning director has been toiling in his secret equipment-packed lair, like a classic Universal Horror mad scientist, concocting crazy experiments utilizing motion-capture technology. The process, wherein an actor’s recorded movements are translated into 1s and 0s and pasted onto a computer-generated character, has been hit or miss and inspired rigorous debate over whether the talented auteur’s determined vision is misguided and Quixotic or legitimately important and revolutionary.
Phase 1 of Zemeckis’ mo-cap trials led to the unpleasantly synthetic The Polar Express, an adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg’s beloved picture book, which mistook stomach- churning rollercoaster rides and creepy vacant-eyed children for fanciful holiday fun. However, despite its considerable narrative failings, the movie was a box-office smash, which, of course, led to Phase 2: Beowulf, a balls-to-the-wall take on the classic medieval poem. That hearty picture, while uneven and a mite unfocused in the mid-sections, was saved by the director’s aptitude for outlandish, demented violence and show-stopping images (Who can forget the ambitious dragon battle and even more epic naked CG Angelina Jolie?).
Now, to bring things full circle, the director has returned to the yuletide season for inspiration with the Jim Carrey- headlining A Christmas Carol, a visually striking tribute to Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella, which is surprisingly faithful in both look and vernacular to the original work’s chilly Victorian origins. Make no mistake, despite the Disney-approved family-friendly marketing push, this is a bleak and frightening film, destined to haunt the dreams of sensitive children for many, many winter nights to come.
The story feels almost as old as time itself, what with the already voluminous cornucopia of existing film translations – The Muppet Christmas Carol, Mickey’s Christmas Carol an d the1951 Alistair Sim-starring version being my personal faves - absorbed into our collective consciousness, so we all know precisely what eerie events await wicked ol’ Ebenezer Scrooge (Carrey) on Christmas eve. Visited by the ghostly form of his deceased partner Jacob Marley (Gary Oldman), and three fateful spirits (all voiced by Carrey), the bitter grouch is taken on a journey into his own history and impending fate, as well as into the lives of his mistreated assistant Bob Cratchit (Oldman again) and jovial nephew Fred (Colin Firth). What happens from there, I leave for you to fill in the blanks. But you can take comfort in knowing that precocious Tiny Tim (Oldman yet once more) does, indeed, merrily declare “God bless us, everyone!”
Yet, despite the reputation and influence of its forebears, this 2009 film version stands confidently on its own two sp indly legs, bravely driving its narrative into refreshingly gloomy places. This Scrooge isn’t quite as comically exaggerated as those we’ve seen before; a sinister stooped-over wraith-like man, who, as the film opens, greedily snatches the coins from the eyes of Marley’s rigid corpse. As imposingly embodied by Carrey, this Ebenezer is a true personification of ugliness, all insect-like sharp angles, who fully deserves every moment of torment he undergoes.
Thankfully, his suffering is made bearable for the audience by the rich, magnificent artistry of the film’s animation team, who have exhaustively recreated the crumbling co bblestones and pointed spires of early nineteenth century London. As well, they’ve given each supernatural encounter its own distinctive horrific mood. The appearance of Marley’s apparition is an anxiety-tingling exercise in cold, sweaty dread, full of heavy, clanking chains and decaying body parts, while Scrooge’s flights over the gloomy cityscape with the ghosts of Christmas Past and Present are exhilarating feasts for the eyes. Only the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come underwhelms, with Scrooge’s wrenching descent into hell delayed in favour of a silly and unnecessarily long chase scene.
In fact, the director is so intent on revelling in the mournful and macabre that he tends to short-change the emotion of h is protagonist’s gradually unearthed humanity. Flashbacks to Scrooge’s youth are merely touched upon, with treasured figures like Fezziwig (Bob Hoskins) and his former beloved Belle (Robin Wright Penn) merely touched upon. Only the muted hopefulness of the Cratchit household really connects, mostly due to Gary Oldman’s sensitive and compassionate performance work.
Although there is still considerable ground to cover in regards to mo-cap filmmaking – aside from Scrooge, most of the characters’ eyes are a tad blank – A Christmas Carol is t he first of Zemeckis’ computer-animated features to show distinct traces of a soul. Whether it has the staying power to remain a seasonal staple remains to be seen but it’s a darkly beautiful Gothic bedtime tale that is the ideal cinematic Christmas present to sneak an early peek at. Just remember to ask for some 3D glasses with it.
*Originally printed in SFU's The Peak: Nov. 15th, 2009.
Posted by Cam Smith at 8:17 PM
I'm a freelance journalist living in North Vancouver, BC.
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Movie Review: Unbeatable (2013)
Hey guys, another movie review is up, and this time it's the MMA flick, Unbeatable, starring Nick Cheung, Eddie Peng, and Crystal Lee. Thanks to Tune Talk, I got the chance to catch this movie at the premiere screening, and we even got treated to drinks and popcorn! How awesome is that?
Synopsis: Unbeatable tells about a former boxing champ Fai (Nick Cheung) who is knee-deep in debt and with no solution in sight. To escape his debtors, Fai escapes to Macau and works in a gym as an assistant instructor in weight loss classes. Hot-blooded Qi (Eddie Peng) was once the son of a rich man in Mainland China. However, the family business failed, sending his dad into alcohol-fueled depressing and forcing Qi to take up construction jobs in Macau. To inspire his father to stand up again, Qi enters an open MMA competition and starts training at Fai’s gym.
well hello there :D
Verdict: 7/10. It wasn't THE best movie I've seen, but it's up there with the rest of the awesome movies that have been made this year. The chemistry between Nick and Eddie as sifu and pupil was amazing, and with Nick's witty comedic comments, the movie was made all the more enjoyable. I found myself having a good laugh at his one-liner quips, and loved the way he still managed to make a serious scene comedic without overdoing it. The character development was good, and there was enough background shown for each major cast that it made you understand where they came from and why they did what they did.
One of the gripes I had was that the rules of the MMA Golden Rumble was not explained at all. I feel that the rule that 'if you survive two rounds with your opponent, and you will win the match' utter rubbish. There is no such rule in MMA fighting, so that was a bit misleading, furthermore with no weight class division. I felt that the fight scenes were not bad, and the good thing was that they showed a lot of different locks and submission techniques
The movie earned the Best Actor (Nick Cheung) and Best Actress (Crystal Lee) accolade in the recently concluded 16th Shanghai Film Festival in June. While I totally agree that Nick should win Best Actor, I feel that it's very premature to award the Best Actress title to 10-year old Crystal Lee. Even from a not-so-trained eye, I could see that her acting was not as flawless as should be from an accomplished actress. I could see her effort in trying not to smile in serious scenes, and the way her eyes sometimes dart around in a quiet setting. Maybe she does have the makings of an actress and will make it one day, but it's too early to tell. Some might not agree with me, but it's just my two cents worth :)
Unbeatable opens in cinemas on 15th August, and this is one movie I would definitely recommend you to watch. Not for the fights, but for the story, the chemistry, and the six packs :p
Thanks again to Tune Talk for the Unbeatable movie screening passes. Tune Talk is the main sponsor for the upcoming ONE FC Championship in November and Malaysian Invasion Mixed Martial Arts (MIMMA). Get your calendars out as they will be announcing the second season of MIMMA soon and you will not want to miss it!!
Til the next time, stay beautiful!
HenRy Lee said...
With this movie, hopefully mma scene in malaysia will be more acceptable by public la :)
Thursday, August 15, 2013 at 2:21:00 AM GMT+8
Foong Pc said...
Oh! Sounds like a good movie to watch! I seldom watch Chinese movies nowadays cos most are crappy : )
Thursday, August 15, 2013 at 3:03:00 PM GMT+8
Meitzeu said...
I'm interested to watch Nick Cheung. hhehee
Meitzeu @ Blog
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Cinemixtape
Reviews (A-Z)
Reviewed by J. Olson
Thrills Add Up In Splashy "Bad Times At The El Royale"
Motown, murder, and misdirection reign supreme in Drew Goddard’s single-location thriller “Bad Times At The El Royale.” Like the writer-director’s 2012 horror-comedy “Cabin In The Woods,” “Bad Times” builds out on a foundation of secrecy and voyeurism, eventually leaping headlong into bloodshed. The talkier tendencies of Quentin Tarantino are an apt point of comparison here (some of the “Pulp Fiction” auteur’s stylistic proclivities come up, too). But Goddard is up to something a little bit different than, say, “The Hateful Eight.” Something more human.
First, a prologue set in 1960. Wide shot: a nervous man in a trench coat (Nick Offerman) hides a leather bag beneath the floorboards of a hotel room. A sudden shotgun blast and we jump forward a decade. Straddling the California-Nevada border, the seemingly deserted El Royale hotel still looms deceptively large among the Lake Tahoe pines, its impending guests harboring myriad mysteries of sex and death, money and madness. The body language of its lone employee, a nervous young man named Miles (Lewis Pullman), evinces trouble off the bat.
Four separate patrons fortuitously arrive at the same time: Father Daniel Flynn (Jeff Bridges), traveling salesman Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm), career backup singer Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo), and a twenty-something hippie named Emily (Dakota Johnson). At least two of them aren’t who they purport to be, but the filmmaker is interested in more than assumed identities and ulterior motives.
No, Goddard is hell-bent on booking us in this seedy lodge right along with his cast of colorful characters, employing a bevy of long shots, intersecting timelines, and diegetic music to achieve immersion. The cumulative effect is one of cinema’s more mesmeric murder mystery parties, evoking a particular Winston Churchill quote: “We shape our buildings. Afterwards, our buildings shape us.” Godspeed to the poor souls shaped by the El Royale.
In the casting department, only mustachioed cult leader Billy Lee (Chris Hemsworth) is a misstep. Hemsworth, so good as Marvel’s Thor and surprisingly funny in Paul Feig’s “Ghostbusters,” is an odd fit for the pic’s villainous Charles Manson-like figure. The role calls for more of a Sam Rockwell or Walton Goggins. Hemsworth possesses the required charisma but in the end is too milquetoast to pull it off, failing the character’s most sinister underpinnings.
Happily, the piece’s two de facto leads (Father Flynn and Darlene) are note-perfect. Bridges gives a typically bracing performance, at once warm and surly, and Erivo wows in her film debut. The actress’ singing voice alone is enough to carry a few of the film’s slower passages. That she convincingly goes toe-to-toe with an actor as seasoned as Bridges makes Darlene all the more impactful as a character, the duo carrying the movie to its biggest twist of all – a sweetly sincere resolution.
“Bad Times” is occasionally self-indulgent to the extreme, its climactic scene dragging on before employing an extended flashback, only to drag on some more. Yet Goddard’s talent for atmosphere and characters earns these indulgences, improving on the surface-level pleasures of “Cabin In The Woods” in ways big and small. There’s a feeling of discovery here that’s increasingly rare in commercial filmmaking, driven by a confident filmmaker who trusts in his audience as much as he trusts in himself; a director who knows that not every little detail is going to work, but determined that together they will.
With the aid of an unusually talented cast, it all works very well.
-J. Olson
Rating: ★★★★ out of ★★★★★ (Very Good)
Director: Drew Goddard
Screenwriter: Drew Goddard
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm, Lewis Pullman, Chris Hemsworth, Cailee Spaeny, Nick Offerman
MPAA Rating: R (for strong violence, language, some drug content and brief nudity)
Cinemixtape is currently on hiatus. In the meantime, please visit ourreview archive.
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In yesterday's statistical comparison, I noted that the Tigers have been winning with hitting and that the Angels have been winning with pitching. The Angels had their best pitcher going tonight but it was defense as much as pitching that decided the outcome. John Lackey and three relievers including closer Francisco Rodriguez allowed 8 hits and 6 walks as the Tigers were threatening all night long. However, some rally killing defense by the Angels led them to a 6-3 victory.
The robberies started in the second inning after the uncharacteristically wild Lackey loaded the bases on walks. The Tigers were then denied 2 or 3 runs when center fielder Gary Matthews made a diving catch of a shallow fly off the bat of Brandon Inge. It ended after the Tigers scored two runs to make it 6-3 and again loaded the bases. Carlos Guillen then hit a line drive up the middle which was run down by shortstop Orlando Cabrera for the final out. In between, they were victimized by Chone Figgins, Robb Quinlan and Gary Matthews again.
Mike Maroth pitched his first game since missing time with a virus. he was hit hard allowing 6 runs (5 earned) on 7 hits including 3 home runs in 7 innings. He threw 109 pitches which was a bit surprising considering Jim Leyland said he would be watched closely in his come back start.
Magglio Ordonez hit a solo home run, his 10th of the year and Placido Polanco and Inge each had a pair of hits. Inge is now batting .328/.414/.590 in 18 games this month.
Game two of the series will be tomorrow night when Chad Durbin faces Bartolo Colon.
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If he chooses the right casket
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Written by James M. Tate / 9/29/2014 / 1 Comment / 2014 , bill hader , indie , kristen wiig , luke wilson , quirky
REVIEW OF THE SKELETON TWINS
2014 rating: **1/2
Begins somewhat like LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE without the little miss, and not much sunshine as Bill Hader’s Milo, a gay melancholy Los Angeles "actor", attempts suicide in his bathtub…
He winds up living in New York with his twin sister Maggie, played by fellow ex SNL alumni Kristin Wiig, who, after gaining immense cinematic popularity in BRIDESMAIDS, has been doing the quirky/indie shuffle ever since.
THE SKELETON TWINS reverses what used to be the jovially cliché homosexual character, and makes the straight guy more of the smiley cookie cutter. Although Luke Wilson’s abysmally average Lance, married to Maggie, is peripheral to the story of the siblings, either discussing their gloomy childhood or dealing with present doldrums.
Hader and Wiig are far more interesting than the breezy script, gift-wrapping manic depression for a sophisticated date flick audience. And while it’s not funny enough to be a comedy, and not serious enough for a drama dealing with loneliness and suicide, there’s a genuine heart beneath the surface: where both TWINS remain despite a cursed depth plaguing them.
2014, bill hader, indie, kristen wiig, luke wilson, quirky
2014 rating: **1/2 Begins somewhat like LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE without the little miss, and not much sunshine as Bill Hader’s Milo, a gay ...
Labels: 2014, bill hader, indie, kristen wiig, luke wilson, quirky
Written by James M. Tate / 9/28/2014 / No comments / bagful
EXTREMELY ECLECTIC BAGFUL OF MOVIE REVIEWS
1988 ***
LESS THAN ZERO: For anyone who's read the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, wherein the title isn't a message, this is a pretty big disappointment... But as an MTV-era anti-drug flick it's not bad thanks to Robert Downey Jr. as the only character who matters, a coke addicted sheister in way over his head...
He owes fifty grand to a dealer, played by the capably villainous James Spader with the equally intimidating Michael Bowen as a muscular henchman, and is constantly rescued by his closest friends: Andrew McCarthy who, as Downey's estranged buddy returning from Ivy League college, provides an ambiguous perspective to the party-life... And Jami Gertz is their beautiful lass, a model snorting loads of coke yet is a nun compared to Downey.
The pros are anything concerning RDJ's downfall; the cons are windswept sex scenes between McCarthy and Gertz that seem out of a Madonna video.
ROOSTER COGBURN: John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn is back. He's playing the Oscar-winning TRUE GRIT character to the hilt: giving his fans what they paid for. Which the movie does decently enough, adding Katharine Hepburn as a minister's daughter who, in her own way, is as tough as he is: her and Wayne provide AFRICAN QUEEN style banter throughout.
Along with an Indian teen they head after a gaggle of baddies who killed Kate's dad and stole a stagecoach full of explosives, led by bloodthirsty Richard Jordan and including Anthony Zerbe, Jack Colvin, and Cult Film Freak favorite, Paul Koslo.
The action occurs in pockets between bouncy, subliminally-romantic banter by the two leads, and everything balances nicely, consummated by a terrific finale as Rooster takes out the villains with a literal bang.
1972 **
JOE KIDD: With an exception of one scene involving Clint Eastwood, as a gunslinger hired to catch a Mexican revolutionary, elaborately escaping from a lookout post, this is a sluggish Western that lacks Eastwood's usual action and Elmore Leonard's wit, charm and creative twists...
The bad guys are top-notch actors including Robert Duvall, Paul Koslo and Don Stroud, but have little to do except stand around, not smiling. Fake-mustached John Saxon is laughable as the sought-after Bandito, and even the scenery is bland and lackluster.
WALL STREET 2: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS: Michael Douglas returns as Gordon Gekko, the villainous love-to-hate stock market pirate from Oliver Stone's original outing, a lightweight classic starring Charlie Sheen as a climber who learns from Gekko how to cut corners and make a ton of money.
In that film, Gekko convinces us that greed is good. Now, eight years after being released from prison for insider-trading, he's not so sure... of anything. He has a book to sell, but heaven knows what it's about since Gekko doesn't preach good or evil. The Man is an ambiguously vacant bore, just like Shai LaBeouf, resembling a college freshman playing broker, engaged to Gekko's estranged, mopey daughter.
Douglas provides a side-character role, advising Shia on overthrowing evil Josh Brolin, whose one-dimensional baddie is a weak replacement for the young Gekko... but there's no seduction into power: just a dully conceived, revenge-driven motive without any purpose. And the stock market crash of 2008, shown during the third act, adds nothing to the overall nothingness.
THE OMEGA MAN: For a last man on earth film, there's sure a lot of people around...
Charlton Heston either mumbles or screams his way through an apocalyptic disease-caused future with a group of fanatical white-haired albinos that, once night falls, are constantly on his back. Then he meets a dozen normal humans including Paul Koslo and sexy Rosiland Cash, and a good versus infected-evil battle ensues.
Heston's character, a doctor with the only cure, should have had more isolation from the start to feel his solitude and separation. Instead, within the first five minutes he's gunning down baddies like any sci-fi/action flick, which this is a mediocre version of.
THE LONG RIDERS: How could a film directed by action-guru Walter Hill and starring real life brothers Carradine, Quaid and Keach not live up to its incredible reputation? A few reasons...
One, the opening feels like the middle: a bank robbery/introduction to the gang, primarily bloodthirsty, gun-happy Dennis Quaid. Perhaps this is to separate the murderer from the other outlaws, all depicted as misunderstood saints... yet another problem...
While many outlaw flicks lionize the historically depicted antagonists, this goes too far: leaving the characters completely uninteresting.
Walter Hill provides a few brief action scenes, but mostly we get alluring landscapes and dull, overlong conversations with our dusty heroes and their gals (the same problem would occur in Michael Mann's HEAT). Hill tries so hard to show the diamonds in the rough there's hardly any rough at all.
I DISMEMBER MAMA: An awesome yet very misleading title. POOR ALBERT AND LITTLE ANNIE, the original name, is what the movie is about, involving a mother-spun yet dashing psycho, Albert, who escapes from a mental hospital and returns home to kill: but mommy's not around.
He slaughters the maid and afterwards, her eleven year old daughter, Annie, stops by and the rest is a field trip as Albert takes Annie on train rides, boat rides, then to a hotel after a contrived marriage.
Sound sick? Surprisingly, it isn't. Albert despises adult women because they are, in his mind, sexually evil. But Annie, being young and innocent, is beyond that "curse" and their friendship is actually quite innocent. Although, what makes this film suspenseful is the question: when will he turn against her? Then the climactic foot chase into a mannequin shop provides icing on a very bizarre cake... that isn't for everyone.
1985 rating: ****1/2
AFTER HOURS: The underrated Griffin Dunne stars in a dark comedy Film Noir homage involving a bored word processor who takes a bad luck odyssey on a lonesome evening...
He leaves his lonely apartment and following the "rabbit" (Rosanna Arquette) into artsy Soho, New York, and is eventually accused of many things he didn't do: all the while connecting with various woman, each unluckier than the next. Martin Scorsese directs with fanatic precision, but it's Dunne's ride.
Not only does he deliver some of the funniest glib humor ever, but as he's progressively unravelled his frustrated irritation turns to panicked desperation: making this one of the most entertaining performances in the history of cinema. And that's no exaggeration.
1983 ****1/2
THE KING OF COMEDY: For anyone who thinks Robert DeNiro and Martin Scorsese can only do thug movies together, this'll whack that theory for good: Robert DeNiro plays Rupert Pufkin, a fervently driven autograph seeker who, after "accidentally" spending ten minutes with his hero Jerry Lewis (playing Jerry Langford, a cross between himself and Johnny Carson) fantasizes about becoming just as famous: and then some.
DeNiro's stubborn attempts to try reconnecting with Langford (to do standup on his show) at his plush office building are wonderfully awkward. Jerry's brilliance shines when he's acting within Pufkin's reveries. Meanwhile, the grossly engrossing Sandra Bernhart, who eventually becomes DeNiro's partner-in-crime... taking it upon herself to "seduce" the kidnapped Jerry in her condo... not only steals her scenes but owns them completely. And for Jerry Lewis, this is a dynamic performance. Not just playing "himself," as it were, an impatient perfectionist dropping the most of the physical gags that made him a celebrity, but Jerry's subtle moments of vulnerability during Pufkin's fantasies: reveries of being more famous than the famous talk show host.
2001 *1/2
GHOSTS OF MARS: The first twenty minutes, as a group of soldiers ride a train into a desolate town on the Planet Mars to decipher who's decapitating people, is fairly decent, but then the action begins and there's simply too much of it.
The bad guys are vampires resembling rejects from CATS, and most of the good guys, especially Jason Statham, become annoying and cliched...
And although Ice Cube, as a badass prisoner... the red herring until the real menace is discovered... is horribly out of place, delivering his lines with no energy or realism, star Natasha Henstridge keeps the viewer interested, that is, if they choose to keep watching: which can be a chore.
HEARTBREAK RIDGE: What's not to like about a Clint Eastwood movie where he's a gruff, no-nonsense Marine Sergeant sent back to his old platoon to whip the new recruits into shape?
Well the recruits, for one, unrealistically acting like rebels in detention class instead of soldiers, especially Mario Van Peebles as a guitar-slinging rapper, one of the most annoying characters in film history. Although even he comes around eventually.
But it's Eastwood alone who makes this DIRTY DOZENesque flick worth watching. Especially the boot camp scenes where he whips the jerks into shape, far exceeding the rather rushed military campaign finale.
1981 **1/2
CHEECH AND CHONG'S NICE DREAMS: After filming most of this, Cheech & Chong's third film, director Tommy Chong shot more scenes involving goofball cops, bringing back Stacy Keach as Sgt. Stedanko, who was very important and downright hilariously serious the first time around.
But Keach remains in his office, smoking pot that slowly turns him into a reptile while Peter Jason and Tim Rossovitch take over as the bumbling stakeout dudes. Their comedy doesn't compare to Keach and Mills Watson; and the dialogue between Cheech and Chong is limp and for the most part, unfunny ("Cops smell like donuts and coffee"), but there's a naturally laidback quality to their escapades.
Although the last half, in a luxury hotel, plays out like a slapstick Blake Edwards film, and then the "peak" at a loony ward ends with a whimper, it's a semi-decent buzz overall.
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED: John Carpenter attempted a horribly hokey science-fiction tale, and in that, succeeded. The cast includes actors known for franchise films...
Featuring the likable likes of Christopher SUPERMAN Reeves, Mark STAR WARS Hamill, Kirstie LOOK WHO'S TALKING Alley, Michael EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS Pare, and Linda CROC DUNDEE Kozlowski as residents of a town hit by a blackout that mysteriously impregnates the women, nine months later giving birth on the same night to a bevy of alien children who, a few years later, become albino megaminds.
Despite the good cast, most of the acting is subpar, especially Mark Hamill who, as a preacher, delivers lines as if he too were possessed. The children, on the other hand, perform decently enough, but are held back by cheesy FX as their eyes radiate, taking away any real threat they might've had otherwise.
EARTHQUAKE: A disaster film with everything, including tons of involving melodrama leading up to the big shake that has some great special effects even for the early seventies.
Charlton Heston leads an all-star cast (but without too many cooks) as Los Angeles gets destroyed. The buildings that don't fall crumble during the aftershock and what's bad turns worse, and the suspense always sustains.
One plot involving Marjoe Gortner as a demented store clerk/National Guardsman holding Victoria Principal (donning the worst wig in cinematic history) hostage adds some unintentionally fun camp to the overall catastrophe... A does SHAFT Richard Roundtree as a wannabe Evil Knievel and a cameo by Walter Matthau as a drunk.
But it's George Kennedy, as a strong willed cop, who steals the show. And beware of the horrendous final five minutes, all but crumbling everything else.
ATLANTIC CITY: A thoroughly brilliant film centering on an aged caretaker, played by veteran icon Burt Lancaster, of an bed-ridden gangster's moll... He always wanted to be a thug but merely ran numbers, and still runs numbers, in a dying town called ATLANTIC CITY: on the verge of a revamp where the past will be erased forever.
Add to that Susan Sarandon as a casino worker and her good-for-nothing husband, Robert Joy, who wanders into town with a bag of stolen cocaine: setting everything in motion. Lancaster and Sarrandon's friendship turned romance is very nice...
But it's the chemistry between Lancaster and Joy, the wannabe mobster and the wannabe player, who gives the old-timer his first step in becoming a true heavy, that really shines, providing blunt humor and dark suspense.
THE MAIN EVENT: In this corner, Ryan O'Neal, who, after starring in BARRY LYNDON and THE DRIVER, is slumming in a romantic comedy...
And in this corner, Barbra Streisand, doing what she does best: playing a neurotic woman with a one-liner for everything... Her attempts at Woody Allen is in droves, and for the most part, this film works decently enough...
At least during the first half as Streisand, playing an executive who loses all her worth except a tax-shelter fighter far from his prime, turns O'Neal from cowardly loser to a hopeful champion: where she can get all her money back and hopefully, fall in love.
THE NEW KIDS: The first twenty minutes, as we're introduced to teenage sister and brother Lori Loughlin and Shannon Presby who, after military father Tom Atkins dies off screen, move to their uncle's house built alongside his off-highway carnival, is pretty good.
But when they go to the new local school things get way too over-the-top involving a group of totalitarian bullies lead by drug-dealing James Spader, psychotic John Philbin and some other jerks, none of whom seem very threatening.
But the climax, as siblings battle bullies in the vacant carnival, makes up for the muddled middle, somewhat. Directed by FRIDAY THE 13TH's Sean S. Cunninghan, these KIDS, in a cinematic sense, have a real identity crisis.
bagful
1988 *** LESS THAN ZERO: For anyone who's read the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, wherein the title isn't a message, this is a pr...
Labels: bagful
Written by James M. Tate / 9/26/2014 / No comments / 2014 , chloë grace moretz , denzel washington
DENZEL WASHINGTON IN THE EQUALIZER
A combination of TAXI DRIVER and the 1980’s TV-series namesake, THE EQUALIZER pits Denzel Washington’s Robert McCall against practically the entire Russian mob in Boston...
They messed with the wrong hooker, who happens to be Bob's friend at a diner he frequents after working long days at a massive HOME MART (aka HOME DEPOT). But protecting the street urchin is only an excuse, really, to bring McCall out of "retirement" from his former gig we learn of later on…
With a cool, metronomic vibe matching the steady pace of our title character, the film eases into a mundane workaday life before his true colors are violently revealed: That’s when a resilient McCall takes out bad guys like clockwork, literally. And while most of the hits are a bit too casual and easily accomplished, there's a decent match with Russian killer Teddy, played by steely-eyed Marton Csokas, resulting in a slow-motion standoff thrusting our calculated vigilante into comic book hero status... Depending on the box office gross, this no-nonsense thriller, serving as a one-dimensional yet entertaining first issue, could jumpstart an EQUALIZER franchise... The fun part will see how many menial jobs McCall takes to cover his real identity – although a gun blazing finale at Taco Bell wouldn’t have the same punch.
2014, chloë grace moretz, denzel washington
2014 rating: *** A combination of TAXI DRIVER and the 1980’s TV-series namesake, THE EQUALIZER pits Denzel Washington’s Robert McCall ag...
Labels: 2014, chloë grace moretz, denzel washington
Written by James M. Tate / 9/24/2014 / No comments / adam driver , ensemble , jane fonda , jason bateman , rose byrne , tina fey
JASON BATEMAN IN THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU
While seeming like another AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, where an eclectic lot reunites after the death of a beloved yet mysterious patriarch, both films are reminiscent inspirations of THE BIG CHILL… A collection of polar opposites gathered in one place where personalities collide, but in an ultimately optimistic, life-affirming sense… The usual.
In SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, Bradley Cooper went to the nuthouse after catching his wife having sex with another man – so let’s give Jason Bateman’s Judd Altman some credit… He keeps it all inside, and remains pretty cool, but is forced to spend a week with people he’d much rather avoid… An equal penance, maybe.
Judd is the clean slate main character, allowing the other family members to shine and/or attempt stealing scenes, especially black sheep little (yet very tall) brother Philip, played by Adam Driver, who gets all the best lines but there’s something missing. His wild card is too forced, contrived. And Bateman relies on his usual glib reactions for every unpredictable element...
Which also includes blunt advice from Tina Fey’s Wendy, his older sister and a somewhat wasted character throughout, given a quickie affair with a neighbor that amounts to little. Tina deserved better. And their famous author mom, Hillary, who has a brand new set of breasts and a secret revealed later on… Veteran actress Jane Fonda, in playing a woman too open-minded to everything around her, isn't very interesting.
While the situations are often humorous, and the dialogue is natural and laidback, this particular reunion feels a bit staged, showcasing an American family the director assumes we know more than we actually do. Never given a chance to delve into these people beyond their lusty one-liners and worldly bantler, it’s like over-hearing a party next door instead of actually attending.
adam driver, ensemble, jane fonda, jason bateman, rose byrne, tina fey
2014 rating: **1/2 While seeming like another AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, where an eclectic lot reunites after the death of a beloved yet myst...
Labels: adam driver, ensemble, jane fonda, jason bateman, rose byrne, tina fey
Written by James M. Tate / 9/23/2014 / No comments / comedy , dudley moore , dustin hoffman , eddie murphy , eighties , warren beatty
DUDLEY MOORE IN 'BEST DEFENSE' FEATURING EDDIE MURPHY
Great Book, actually... SCORE: **
Starting with 48 HRS and following up with TRADING PLACES and then peaking with BEVERLY HILLS COP, Eddie Murphy was not only the man of the hour, he was the hour… A standout hero of the second incarnation of Saturday Night Live, the initial “Eddie Cinema Trilogy” covered a lot of ground, making the edgy black comic downright unbreakable... But that’s only if you forget about his “Strategic Guest Star” turn in a movie that’s not even his own…
BEST DEFENSE was a Dudley Moore vehicle directed and co-written by Willard Huyck and wife Gloria Katz, who attempted romantic magic abroad with FRENCH POSTCARDS after collaborating with George Lucas in the timelessly brilliant AMERICAN GRAFFITI, as well as the disappointing but highly successful INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM followed by the abysmal career-killing HOWARD THE DUCK.
And here, their DEFENSE has an obscure literary origin, based on the novel EASY AND HARD WAYS OUT, written by Robert Grossbach, which, in this reviewers' opinion, surpasses even Richard Hooker’s MASH...
In the book, Eddie Murphy’s character was a jet fighter pilot in Vietnam, and here he’s a tank driver in, of all places, the desert of Kuwait… in 1984! His part takes place two years after the mainline, in which Dudley Moore’s unoriginal tech inventor Wylie Cooper works in a fledgling laboratory base in Seal Beach, California. He has to perfect a “gyro” targeting system that will guide the tank that Murphy’s Lt. Landry uses in the b-story…
Eddie between funny films
Basically, if Moore can't get the gyro to work, then Murphy, rolling into hostile enemy territory, won't have a prayer. While Eddie's the comic relief, scenes where he and two Israeli klutzes goof off in the tank are painfully unfunny. And Moore tries his frantic "best," running around in a prolonged hotel/convention sequence, avoiding both a lethal assassin and the flirtatious advances of workmate Helen Shaver. Plus he’s got his hands on a secret “McGuffin” device that he’s taken credit for, and the bad guys want it... at all costs.
Sounds confusing; and it is, somewhat. But worst of all, DEFENSE is a sloppy uneven mess that runs around in circles – attempting political satire and lightweight comedy while sloppily juggling a tacked-on Cold War sideline… And completely failing on all counts.
comedy, dudley moore, dustin hoffman, eddie murphy, eighties, warren beatty
Great Book, actually... SCORE: ** Starting with 48 HRS and following up with TRADING PLACES and then peaking with BEVERLY HILLS COP, Edd...
Labels: comedy, dudley moore, dustin hoffman, eddie murphy, eighties, warren beatty
Written by James M. Tate / 9/21/2014 / No comments / 2014 , liam neeson , neo noir , suspense
LIAM NEESON IN A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES
Beginning with the colorfully blood-drenched aesthetic reminiscent of PULP FICTION, and taking place during the early 90’s, Danny DeVito’s Jersey Films has now produced A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTSONES…
After a gun-blasting prelude, we skip to 1999 where the grainy look wares off... But things get even more retro than the Y2K era: This is a throwback Neo-Film Noir about Neeson’s Matt Scudder, an ex cop turned private eye who converses with so many shady characters, he needn’t narrate at all.
Eventually winding up at a cemetery where the title becomes literal, the murky atmosphere feels like a purgatory of sorts...
From the time Matt’s given the task to find who killed a drug dealer's wife, he exists beneath the law and, detached from rules and mundane reality, is brought down to earth by a young black sidekick who invades Neeson’s brooding maverick persona, often turning TOMBSTONES into GUMSHOE AND A HALF: The pace is intentionally slow; like reading a potboiler dime novel but without too many twists or complicated red herrings. And by the end we're left with a main character far more intriguing than his quest. Which might have been intentional.
2014, liam neeson, neo noir, suspense
year: 2014 rating: *** Beginning with the colorfully blood-drenched aesthetic reminiscent of PULP FICTION, and taking place during the e...
Labels: 2014, liam neeson, neo noir, suspense
Written by James M. Tate / 9/20/2014 / No comments / 2014 , action , apocalyptic future
REVIEW OF THE MAZE RUNNER
A busy hybrid of CUBE, NO ESCAPE and even KING KONG… plus all those dystopic-future adaptations like THE HUNGER GAMES and DIVERGENT… THE MAZE RUNNER doesn’t waste any time, beginning with the main character, whose own name he remembers later on… Thomas, that’s it… being “delivered” to a group of young male teenagers straight from a LORD OF THE FLIES survival wasteland… Only it’s not each other their fighting, but a giant maze that, noisy and formidable behind a massive wall, changes with each and every night...
Much of the time's spent with the group of boys – and eventually one girl – trying to figure out what’s on the other side: a dangerous portal that only a select few, deemed Maze Runners, can try figuring out...
With a secret past and "gifted" beyond the others, Thomas becomes the unspoken leader after a while. He has to butt heads with the more stubborn minded of the lot, providing a few other characters to be somewhat fleshed-out. Although this MAZE mostly relies on two guys avoiding and/or battling a herd of partially robotic spider creatures that, while looking neat in a retro STARSHIP TROOPERS kinda way, don’t live up to the hyped discussions outside the wall… The beasts (called Grievers) should be smarter, more cunning, or something! Racing in one ear and out the other, this action-packed jaunt is worth the price of a ticket, although you might feel duped once the fortress innards are revealed – at least until part 2 comes along, which, based on a collection of novels, young readers have already devoured: leaving the old timers to... as the saying goes... "Wait for the movie."
2014, action, apocalyptic future
year: 2014 rating: *** A busy hybrid of CUBE, NO ESCAPE and even KING KONG… plus all those dystopic-future adaptations like THE HUNGER G...
Labels: 2014, action, apocalyptic future
Written by James M. Tate / 9/19/2014 / No comments / 2014 , horror , kevin smith
KEVIN SMITH DIRECTS MICHAEL PARKS & JUSTIN LONG IN 'TUSK'
“It’s such a fine line between stupid and, uh, clever,” said a member of the fictional heavy metal band Spinal Tap. And the same can be said of Kevin Smith’s TUSK, in which a snarky podcaster is trapped inside the rural manor of a crazy old man with an obsession for walruses!
The first half is pretty great, aiming headlong for horror film parody… The doomed claustrophobic setting of MISERY combined with the mad scientist agenda of SSSSSSS pits two polar opposites in the middle of nowhere, Canada…
Justin Long’s Wallace delivers the Kevin Smith dialogue with perfection. Spouting one-liners and poking fun at just about everything, and then some, he’s more a brash Jason Lee than, say, the Ben Affleck style nice guy protagonist.
Meanwhile his show partner, Teddy, played by a fully grown Haley Joel Osment, is the straight man of the group – and the least adventurous. With a cheating heart piercing his (way too) gorgeous girlfriend, the perpetually flawed Wallace makes for a victim who reaps what he sows: although no one deserves what's eventually coming to him...
iTunes Artwork
Enter veteran character-actor Michael Parks as the "wise" old fella with many tales to tell, and he tells them wonderfully, proving Kevin Smith can still write nicely. "Oh, it’s just an empty old bottle," Parks' Howard Howe says to the curious house guest. "But when combined with the story? Then it’s a powerful talisman — a doorway to another time and place. Perhaps a drawbridge to history." Or when Howe confirms a lie about how his captor became ill by a deadly spider bite. 'The arachnid assailant? Well... a typical spider. A legion of legs, et cetera et cetera." Meanwhile Long bends a sarcastic ear to every overly-pronounced syllable, often lifted from literary quotes. Their conversations could have gone on forever: If only we remained indoors...
Sadly, TUSK hits a massive wall with the introduction of Johnny Depp’s would-be rescuer, Guy Lapointe. A combination of Dr. Livingston, Inspector Clouseau and Columbo, Depp lets loose a 15-minute string that hardly progresses the story at hand, although he does let us in on the backstory on the lunatic we'd rather spend more time with. With phony makeup befitting an SNL skit.
But it isn't Johnny's fault, entirely. Any character intruding upon such offbeat potential would have done the same amount of damage. But one gets the feeling indie director Smith was getting his big name money’s worth with this prolonged “surprise” role – damn shame all that cotton candy had to ruin such a wonderfully devious Fun House/Freak Show ride, which is still an intriguing, crazy labor-of-love freak show nonetheless.
2014, horror, kevin smith
year: 2014 rating: *** “It’s such a fine line between stupid and, uh, clever,” said a member of the fictional heavy metal band Spinal Ta...
Labels: 2014, horror, kevin smith
Written by James M. Tate / 9/18/2014 / No comments / 2014
DOLPHIN TALE 2 & NO GOOD DEED & LOVE IS STRANGE
year: 2014 rating: ***1/2
DOLPHIN TALE 2: That’s right, two… literally… as in, there are two dolphins now… Actually, wait... Make that three…
The tailless dolphin Winter will need to bond with her potential dolphin partner in order to remain in the sanctuary where she was rescued in the first movie… Poor Winter is downright depressed, and, with literally no Porpoise in life, she flippers-out on her best friend, teen science brain Sawyer, who has an opportunity to leave for a career in oceanography…
Along with intense gal pal Hazel, both kids put their entire souls into the matter while the adults keep more on the sidelines... And that crazy pelican is at it again, this time humorously stalking an injured sea turtle as the first half deals with the promise of Winter being partnered up with a rescued dolphin, and yet that story, headlined by the moral dilemma of freedom verses captivity, sleeps with the fishes soon enough – and then another dolphin is saved… a rambunctious baby with the speed of a jet fighter… Thus the plot of Winter landing a new buddy ensues, again…. But for real this time...
The suspense relies on Winter and the new dolphin hitting it off… If not, for some reason, she'll be shipped to Texas... And Morgan Freeman, who invented the fake tale, is around for nostalgia's sake... In fact Winter hardly uses her prosthetic at all. So if you love dolphins, there’s enough to keep your heartfelt attention… Thus the feel-good Disney aspect of the first venture, also directed by AMERICAN GRAFFITI actor Charles Martin Smith, is replaced with a prolonged threat to the initial happily-ever-after conclusion of the original… Which in itself compliments both films.
NO GOOD DEED: There should be a cinematic rule by now… That if you render a psychopath unconscious, he’s gonna get back up real soon… So once the madman is down, a few grenades or even a rocket launcher would really help matters… Because injuring the proverbial bear only pisses it off…
Well now we’re skipping ahead to when things get really nasty: the best aspect of the surprisingly entertaining and suspenseful NO GOOD DEED is that the bad guy, a vengeful escaped convict, takes a while to show his truly lethal colors after ending up in the house of ingénue Terri, alone with two small children and no husband... She allows Idris Elba’s Colin Evans to remain a polite stranger before the inevitable sinister transition…
Most of the film relies on dialogue between Elba and Taraji P. Henson, especially inside the kitchen where a storm rages outside. The taut direction makes use of every expression and movement (including the risque intrusion of Terri's nosy best friend). In this pivotal scene and beyond, the two leads have the right amount of chemistry based on sexual tension, idiotic decisions and, ultimately, fear for one’s life.
Although full of clichés, it all seems brand new since the threat is real, palpable and involving…And an 11th hour twist makes everyone beforehand not only become more clear, you might even rewatch to catch what you missed… Hopefully just mentioning there’s a twist isn’t a spoiler in itself, because what the movie hides, not what it shows, puts DEED one step beyond your typical mainstream thriller.
LOVE IS STRANGE: The two best things about LOVE IS STRANGE, other than the performances of dependable character-actors John Lithgow and Alfred Molina, is that it never basks in sappy melodrama, and doesn’t have a giant chip on its shoulder…
We get right past political matters when Molina’s George is fired from a religious school where he heads the music department… Not only is he openly gay, he's married to his partner of forty years, Lithgow’s Ben, a 71-year-old “artist”…
Within the first five minutes, during the opening credits, we see their life the way it was always meant to be – both spending time in their apartment, surrounded by co-op friends and preparing for their outdoor wedding. But soon enough the couple has to relocate in separate directions: George living with a noisy party crowd and Ben with his nephew, niece-in-law, and their teenage son.
Ben’s story is the most fleshed-out and interesting. If the entire movie dealt with a quirky yet optimistic gay uncle trying to connect with his logical yet pessimistic (and downright grouchy) young nephew, LOVE IS STRANGE could be titled LIFE IS STRANGE: while the trailers promise an alternative to a mainstream romance replacing homosexual characters with straight ones, it’s a somewhat misleading premise...
Not to say Molina's character doesn't matter. He's the solid rock foundation of the married couple. But their story, it turns out, is merely peripheral.
year: 2014 rating: ***1/2 DOLPHIN TALE 2: That’s right, two… literally… as in, there are two dolphins now… Actually, wait... Make that ...
Written by James M. Tate / 9/16/2014 / No comments / bagful , cult , fifties , horror , science-fiction , sixties
AN EXTREMELY BLOODY BAGFUL OF LOW BUDGET FLICKS
1954 rating: ***1/2
THEM: "When man entered the Atomic Age he opened a door into a new world... What we'll eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict."
Well it's mighty predictable that most of the fifties science-fiction flicks have this same anti-Nukes message intact, but no matter, this is a classic battle against giant ants that, though quite dated in the effects department, are monsters to be taken seriously.
The four main characters: a stout cop, an FBI agent, a brilliant old scientist, and his gorgeous female protege spend their time not only fighting but studying the origin (nuclear related) and whereabouts of the beasts, who could very well be gangsters on the loose: The entire film is reminiscent of a crime melodrama in its investigative nature, only using action when completely necessary and without overkill.
year: 1958 rating: *
EARTH VS THE SPIDER: Characters walk into a cave. A giant superimposed spider, c/o special effects coordinator and director Bert I. Gordon, chases them out. Then more (completely uninteresting) characters walk in the same cave... And a few less walk out. Again and again, and again and again, and again and again, and again and again and you're doing the Spider shuffle... right to sleep.
This is one to miss, and that's coming from a BIG Bert I. Gordon fan. It just doesn't flow like his stuff preferred by Cult Film Freak: made in the 1970's.
HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL: Russ Tamblyn is so good in this flick... so smooth and natural and villainiously awesome, it's hard to believe that he's really.... well that's for you to find out.
If you can get past a teenage girl being addicted to pot as if it were morphine, and all the other dated elements aside... including somewhat forced casting of Mamie Van Doren as our Tamblyn's sexy "aunt," which is unapologetic product placement for testosterone... Then this teen cult classic, about a confidently rebellious new kid in high school (Tamblyn), builds suspense with perfection and includes a terrific car race... And provides Russ, one of the hardest working child/teen actors of the 50's and 60's, a chance to really show his chops.
THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE: Take away one scene where Lon Chaney Jr., as a loco bayou local, tries raping the main character, a woman who's sought out a rural mansion where her supposedly dead husband might be hiding out, this film, about a man who is turning into an alligator thanks to a (yet another) mad scientist, is a complete dud.
The makeup is almost as silly as the sluggish pace. Although the climactic creature is worth a few laughs. But overall this gator sinks to the bottom of the swamp, and stays there.
1958 rates: *
ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN: Waiting forty-five minutes for the "monster" to appear isn't bad. In fact, it's excellent storytelling... just ask KING KONG.
This happens in a lot of other cult flicks... and makes perfect sense in a two-hour feature. But having the beast, in this case a cheated-on/put-upon woman who grew fifty feet after being touched by a giant alien with a space ship resembling a ping pong ball, appear fifty-five minutes into a sixty-five minute film... just plain sucks. As does the script, the characters, and the effects: The titular gal, in giant form, looks like some kind of superimposed wraith. And before she goes on her five minute rampage, when they show her hand only... it seems take from a really bad paper-mache parade float. Making this truly cult film hardly a classic... probably only the great title gave it such a sublime reputation.
FIRST MEN IN THE MOON: The worst Ray Harryhausen film for two reasons. First, Ray's omnipresent presence when his creatures aren't on screen, isn't there: the feeling something miraculous is right around the corner.
Second, when his creatures do arrive, they're uncreative looking ant people and one giant caterpillar, all chasing the most annoying character-trio ever: all three dolts who, in 1899, using a glue-like anti-gravity matter, fly to the moon like going to the corner store.
All this after, during the first thirty minutes, they run around spouting banal dialogue liken to a bad musical in this horrendously awful flick that even the stop-motion master himself despised.
bagful, cult, fifties, horror, science-fiction, sixties
1954 rating: ***1/2 THEM: "When man entered the Atomic Age he opened a door into a new world... What we'll eventually find in...
Labels: bagful, cult, fifties, horror, science-fiction, sixties
Written by James M. Tate / 9/14/2014 / No comments / marquee
POP CULTURE CONTRABAND: MOVIE MARQUEE SPOTTING
"Take all the money, but no wire hangers."
When you're watching a movie, especially an older one, it's fun to spot a marquee in the background, which, for pop culture fanatics, is like archeology... Marquee hunting provides a backdrop into pop culture history, serving as a time capsule within a time capsule: The best marquees to discover are the real thing, yet there are other examples where they're created specifically for the film... Both types are included in the list below...
MOMMIE DEAREST IN BLUE THUNDER: In the 1983 Roy Scheider action flick BLUE THUNDER, two bad guys are about to rob a store... And if you glance to the far right you can see that MOMMIE DEAREST is playing... Although the marquee is blurry you can also see part of Faye Dunaway's name...
SO WELCOME TO THE FIRST JOURNEY OF FINDING MARQUEES IN MOVIES
Stallone saving Dolly from Leibman
THE RIGHT STUFF & TO BE OR NOT TO BE IN RHINESTONE:
The late Bob Clark's RHINESTONE is one of the worst movies of all time, but it's a guilty pleasure too. Sylvester Stallone is a cab driver who's taught to be a country singer by Dolly Parton...
If he can't win over an unruly crowd, Dolly has to sleep with Ron Leibman...
In this scene, as a lovestruck Sly rides a horse to rescue his damsel, a marquee for THE RIGHT STUFF and Mel Brook's TO BE OR NOT TO BE is visible. Also included is DC CAB, THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN, TWO OF A KIND, and something that ends with NEVER...
"We can walk down the street, or see my ex girlfriend in a movie."
Stacey Nelkin in H3
HALLOWEEN 3: SEASON OF THE WITCH IN BROADWAY DANNY ROSE: Here's a marque spotting with some significance of the romantic nature, and involves robbing the cradle... Anyone who's seen Woody Allen's MANHATTAN will remember that Mariel Hemingway played a seventeen-year old girl that Woody dates...
The character Hemingway plays is named Tracy, and her subtle performance garnered Ernest Hemingway's granddaughter a best supporting Oscar nomination. But this isn't about Mariel, it's about another young, beautiful actress named Stacey Nelkin, whom the MANHATTAN ingenue Tracy is based on...
Woody, in his forties, had an affair with the sixteen-year old Nelkin, who'd later star in HALLOWEEN III: THE SEASON OF THE WITCH with Tom Atkins... And as Allen crosses the street in his subtle masterpiece, BROADWAY DANNY ROSE, you can see the marquee of his ex-girlfriend's new flick (this being 1983) along with Larry Cohen's monster movie Q: THE WINGED SERPENT, snake logo and all.
"Forget the double feature, let's get stalked and hunted by Stephen McHattie instead."
THE BLUE LAGOON & CHINA SYNDROME IN DEATH VALLEY: In the cult horror/suspense flick DEATH VALLEY, poor Peter Billingsley has to move from New York to Arizona, and as soon as the plane lands, he and mom joins mom's boyfriend (Paul LeMat) on a road trip towards the Grand Canyon...
Before that, they pass a theater marquee where THE BLUE LAGOON is playing with THE CHINA SYNDROME... An exploitation and a political thriller to fill up the afternoon... But they have other things to do: The movies would have been a lot safer...
"I'll come back once the first movie is finished..."
HIS GIRL FRIDAY & FREAKS IN THE WORLD'S GREATEST DAD: This post is important to difarinciate two kinds of movie marquees spotted in motion pictures, as teased upon in the intro...
The best to find are actual marquees caught on film, but there are the contrived marquees made especially for the movie... Not as vintage but still kinda cool...
Like in the case of Bobcat Goldthwait's THE WORLD'S GREATEST DAD starring the late Robin Williams, a creative indie flick... And here, Robin walks by a very eclectic double bill...
"Gonna fly into the theater..."
ROCKY II & ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ IN HERO AT LARGE: In the John Ritter comedy HERO AT LARGE, where John plays an actor who takes a gig playing a superhero outside a theater, and then winds up fighting crime and becomes a, you know, hero...
During one shot several marquees are visible: one for ROCKY II and an Oliver Reed flick called THE BROOD, and below is a marquee Clint Eastwood feature ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ...
Marquee for ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ
"You talkin' to me, blurry marqee? Are you talkin' to me?"
BUSTIN' LOOSE IN THE KING OF COMEDY: In KING OF COMEDY, Martin Scorsese and once partner in creativity Robert De Niro's most underrated and bizarre movie, De Niro's Rupert Pufkin is arguing with Sandra Bernhardt on the streets of NEW YORK...
Behind Rupert the marquee for the Richard Pryor comedy BUSTIN' LOOSE can be seen...
And now some marquees from ANGEL... starting with OCTOPUSSY
BLUE THUNDER MARQUEE
FLASHDANCE POSTER
"Why walk the streets with so many great movies playing?"
RANDOM MARQUEES IN ANGEL: The 1984 cult classic ANGEL... starring Donna Wilkes and centering on an honor student moonlighting as a hooker... takes place on Hollywood Blvd where there's plenty of marquees...
These include, as you've already witnessed: OCTOPUSSY, BLUE THUNDER, RETURN OF THE JEDI and a poster of FLASHDANCE.
"Put down that speed... Let's watch a terrible sequel!"
STAYING ALIVE IN REPO MAN: A marquee for SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER sequel STAYING ALIVE is visible... Very ironic mixing two opposite genres...
REPO MAN is a movie about a punk rocker, and STAYING ALIVE is not only a sequel to a disco staple, but is the most famous disco song: and punkers detest that kind of music...
"The movie to the left seems a lot more exciting, least judging by the title..."
LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH IN PRIME CUT: As Lee Marvin leaves Chicago in the crime flick PRIME CUT we can spot, on the left, a marquee for the horror/suspense LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH...
And the marquee on the right reads EDGAR ALLEN POE'S MURDER IN THE RUE MORGUE staring Jason Robards.
The lady on the swing below the Chevy ad...
PEPSODENT GIRL IN THE ORIGINAL KING KONG: The 1933 blockbuster KING KONG is known for iconic imagery, like prehistoric dinosaurs and of course a giant gorilla and biplanes flying around the Empire State Building and a lot more, but what always stands out, before any of the other stuff, is the Pepsodent Advertisment with the girl on the swing. (For nostalgia's sake, Peter Jackson even used it in his reboot.)
And below, an ad from the James Cagney melodrama TAXI for good measure...
"You dirty rat... Let's go to the pictures."
A handsome, contrived marquee to serve the time period
THE BIRDS IN TIN MEN: Forget RAIN MAN... Director Barry Levinson's best movie is TIN MEN, a comedy/drama about aluminum siding salesman Danny DeVito and Richard Dreyfuss battling each other, but there's a lot more to the character-driven story set in the early 1960's...
1963 to be exact as this marquee of the famous Hitchock movie clues us.
"We can stare at pizza, or go see THE EVIL DEAD."
THE EVIL DEAD & LONE WOLF McQUADE IN SPLASH: In director Ron Howard's hit rom-com SPLASH, Daryl Hannah's mermaid is given her name Madison since she and Tom Hanks are standing on that particular street corner, and that's the first thing she reads... But imagine if she'd seen the marquee for LONE WOLF McQUADE first... A double bill along with RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.
And as shown above, when the couple watch a pizza maker, an EVIL DEAD marquee is visible in the background, along with XTRO.
"Forget about streetlights, you dizzy mermaid... Let's watch some Chuck Norris!"
This marquee looks timeworn-blended into the urban neighborhood...
ENTER TH DRAGON IN BLOODBROTHERS: In the Robert Mulligan drama BLOODBROTHERS, starring Paul Sorvino, who'd later rule the local mob in the Martin Scorsese GOODFELLAS...Tony La Bianco, the white rabbit leading Gene Hackman to the big bust in THE FRENCH CONNECTION...
And a young and edgy Richard Gere, who takes his little brother to the movies. And what a movie!
DRAGONSLAYER poster
RANDOM MOVIE POSTERS IN SUMMER RENTAL: Okay so we'll finish up with posters inside the theaters. Sure, they're not marquees, but it's all in the same family... Speaking of which, the 1985 family comedy SUMMER RENTAL was John Candy's first starring role...
His daughter, played by the lovely Kerri Green from LUCAS and THE GOONIES, stands in a movie theater where posters of UNCOMMON VALOR, FOOTLOOSE, DRAGONSLAYER... And outside the theater, a poster of TOP SECRET! (and again FOOTLOOSE) can be spotted in the rain. And two connections for Candy's RENTAL wife, Karen Austin, who was on NIGHT COURT with John Larroquette, and John was in STRIPES with Candy.
A winder shot of Kerri Green against a DRAGONSLAYER poster, directed by the CORVETTE SUMMER guy
John Larroquette, the foil for John Candy in STRIPES, seems to move in on his wife and family
Karen Austin, a really cute kid and son Joey Lawrence with UNCOMMON VALOR and FOOTLOOSE posters
Over to the right, hard to see, is a FRIDAY THE 13TH poster where it says JASON and then words beneath
With so many of Green, here's a close-up on a beautiful starlet Karen Austin
John Larroquette and Karen Austin spent a year doing NIGHT COURT together
UNCOMMON VALOR and FOOTLOOSE
STAY TUNED FOR MORE MARQUEES SPOTTED IN MOVIES...
Just added, June 4th 2017... Another from Prime Cut, the William Holden flick, THE REVENGERS
"Take all the money, but no wire hangers." When you're watching a movie, especially an older one, it's fun to spot a m...
Labels: marquee
DUDLEY MOORE IN 'BEST DEFENSE' FEATURING EDDIE MUR...
KEVIN SMITH DIRECTS MICHAEL PARKS & JUSTIN LONG IN...
TOM HARDY & JAMES GANDOLFINI IN THE DROP
REVIEW OF SOMETHING WICKED FEATURING BRITTANY MURP...
RICHARD KIEL BITES INTO THE SPY WHO LOVED ME
YET ANOTHER ECLECTIC BAGFUL OF RANDOM REVIEWS
THREE REVIEWS: INNOCENCE & CATINFLAS & WHEN THE GA...
CANNON PRESENTS 'LOVE STREAMS' BY JOHN CASSAVETES
RAY LIOTTA & BLAKE RAYNE IN THE IDENTICAL
REMASTERED GREEN OF GHOSTBUSTERS
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Stress and the City
Medical researchers in Germany indicate that MRI scans of the brain show that city dwellers display different manifestations of stress than do those living in rural areas (see Figure 1 for citation information).
This seems plausible, given that dense urban areas possess numerous sources of stress, some environmental (noise for instance) and some social (the threat of or even reality of elevated crime levels in some neighborhoods, for example). It is also provocative information, given the efforts that are made by some in the design community to connect poor health outcomes with low-densities (in suburban areas) rather than high-density central cities.
Another part of Nature’s coverage of paper also caught my attention: editorial writer Alison Abbott suggested that the research “may also open the way for greater cooperation between neuroscientists and social scientists. ‘There has been a long history of mutual antipathy, particularly in psychiatry,’ says sociologist Craig Morgan at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. ‘But this is the sort of study that can prove to both sides that they can gain from each others’ insights.’” (Nature, June 23 2010 p. 472). The editorial continues, writing of the neurological research: “Yet he has had trouble interesting his social-science colleagues in setting up joint projects. Such lack of sympathy across the cultural divide is common, says Ernst Fehr, an economist at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and a pioneer in the field of neuroeconomics, which studies the neurological basis of economic decisions. ‘But social problems have neurobiological effects, which, in turn, may exacerbate the social problems,’ he says. The social sciences have as much to gain from crossing disciplinary boundaries as the biological sciences, says Morgan. ‘Sociologists and epidemiologists establish associations that are plausible — like immigrants may suffer more mental illness because of social isolation — but they are validated when neuroscientists demonstrate a robust biological mechanism.’
These claims are interesting here, given that URBlog exists with the goal of providing information on cities to non-urbanists. It does though suggest some unnecessary antipathies on behalf of medical researchers. It is hardly plausible to suggest that social scientists are uninterested in mental health issues—the journal Social Science and Medicine published 18 papers in just 2010-11 on mental health in urban areas.
The problems are based in different research strategies. The following diagram (from Galea, 2005) shows some of the complexities of health outcomes. Moreover, Galea suggests that social scientists tend to work left to right (and often deductively, I’d suggest) while medical research starts (inductively) from the right hand side and tries to move left.
So, we have a complex real-world problem, and an almost-as-complicated problem of research design and methodology. We shall, in consequence, be focusing a good deal of attention on health issues in Current Research on Cities next year.
Posted by Andrew Kirby at 1:19 PM
An Urban Word Cloud
You mean we could just fix this?
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Home Comedy of errors
Sreeparna Sengupta
Deepti (Kareena Kapoor Khan) and Varun Batra (Akshay Kumar) are a posh, high-flying married couple, living in Mumbai and are much involved with their respective careers. Deepti also has her heart set on having a baby and after trying for a few years and then, some prodding by the family, both Varun and she decide to consult one of the best fertility specialists in the city.
The doctor advises IVF and they are ready for it. Only hitch, few days after the procedure is through, Deepti and Varun are told there has been a sperm mix-up with another couple with the same last name. Enter 'the Batras from Chandigarh' into their lives. Honey (Diljit Dosanjh) and Monika (Kiara Advani) are a loud Punjabi couple and now it’s a complete clash of sensibilities between the two sets of Batras. As both Deepti and Monika soon find out they are pregnant, the rest of the film forms how the couples come to terms and deal with this unusual situation.
Through much of its runtime, director Raj Mehta ensures that 'Good Newwz' stays true to its genre with several light-hearted and funny moments. Add to that, the pace of the film stays mostly tight. Although given the subject and premise the narrative, at times, treads into a problematic zone and stance. And some of the jokes seem off-colour. There’s also a tendency to over explain and simplify in some portions which stick out. Also, the screenplay barely scratches the surface when it comes to getting into the depth and complexity of the situation.
However, the performances are top-notch. Kareena Kapoor Khan steals the show and delivers a knockout performance as the sophisticated Deepti, and her character’s emotional arc is developed well. Akshay Kumar hits the right spot with his comic timing. As does Diljit Dosanjh, who sinks his teeth into his character and plays it with full gusto. Kiara Advani is sincere and makes an impression. Adil Hussain as the straight-faced doctor, at the core of all the confusion, is a hoot. And as a couple, both Kareena and Akshay play off each other well and many of their interactions come off as very relatable.
At the heart of it, 'Good Newwz' is a light and breezy comedy and certainly makes for an entertaining watch.
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Daily Xtra Travel
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Home » United States » California » San Diego
Gay San Diego
San Diego's reputation is that of a conservative military town. In recent years that has changed significantly. The city now has a large and rapidly growing gay population that thrives in a live-and-let-live atmosphere.
The gay community in San Diego is ethnically diverse and includes many military and retired military people. The crowd skews slightly younger than other California gay strongholds such as San Francisco, Palm Springs and Laguna.
The biggest draw in San Diego isn't the large gay community or the city's laid-back attitude, though. It's the area's natural beauty. With over 300 days of sunshine each year, the weather is nearly perfect no matter when you visit. The city's 70 miles of coastline provide both breathtaking scenery and spectacular beaches -- including gay-friendly, clothing-optional Black's Beach. San Diego also offers great dining, fantastic shopping, top-tier cultural attractions and terrific nightlife.
Business travelers surveyed by Conde Nast have rated San Diego International Airport as one of their favorite airports. The airport is serviced by 14 airlines with direct flights to hundreds of cities worldwide. Eight different shuttle services offer transportation from the airport to your destination in town, or you can take a cab.
The Amtrak Santa Fe Depot train station downtown can be reached on the SDMTS, route 992, departing every 15 minutes 5am-11:30pm on weekdays, and every 30 minutes on weekends and holidays.
The Pacific Surfliner is Amtrak's train service from San Luis Obispo to San Diego, by way of Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, with twelve daily round-trips between San Diego and Los Angeles. There are two stations in San Diego: Old Town, 4005 Taylor Street; and the downtown Station Building at 1050 Kettner Boulevard. Most trains have bicycle and surfboard racks allowing you to bring your bike onboard, unboxed as carry-on baggage.
San Diego's attractions are spread out, and you don't want to rely on public transportation. If you plan to sightsee, rent a car. If planning to spend most of your time in or near the gay-friendly Hillcrest neighborhood, you can probably get away with cabs. Gay nightlife is not concentrated in a small area, so if you're planning to bar-hop you should either designate a driver or take a taxi.
For local public transportation, including the trolly lines, see SDMTS. For North County Transit regional rail and bus info see GoNCTD. The Coaster commuter train serves eight stations between Oceanside and downtown San Diego, a scenic trip of about one hour. Six of the Amtrak Surfliner trains also make stops at these stations each day.
Nearly all of San Diego's 100 neighborhoods are at least gay-friendly, though Hillcrest and Hillcrest-adjacent neighborhoods have the highest concentration of gay residents and gay nightlife.
Hillcrest: Hillcrest is the traditional center of gay life in San Diego. The area is home to the San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center and gay events and activities throughout the year, including the annual Pride celebrations in July. Located next to Balboa Park, the nation's largest urban cultural park, Hillcrest offers gay and gay-friendly accommodations, restaurants, shopping, culture, cruising and lots and lots of nightlife.
North Park: Just east of Hillcrest, North Park is a charming, eclectic neighborhood with a mix of coffeehouses, cafes and shopping. The neighborhood is home to San Diego's Lyric Opera and "Ray at Night," a monthly art walk that takes place on the second Saturday of each month. North Park also has several gay bars and clubs.
University Heights: Just north of Hillcrest, University Heights is a mostly residential area with a large gay population. The wood-frame bungalows date back to the first half of the 20th century. The commercial section runs along Park Boulevard, with a trendy mix of restaurants and shops as well as the nation's third-oldest LGBT performance space, Diversionary Theatre.
Downtown San Diego: More gay-friendly than gay, downtown San Diego is home to the historic Gaslamp Quarter, the revitalized East Village and Little Italy. There are tons of hotels and restaurants in the area, and plenty of shopping.
San Diego Gay & Lesbian News covers local LGBT news, entertainment, events, health and sports, online.
Gay San Diego newspaper, printed every two weeks, has local and national gay news, listings and reviews, also an online-reader.
Uptown News is a gay-friendly newspaper focusing on Hillcrest, North Park, University Heights and other nearby neighborhoods.
The Reader is a hip, gay-friendly weekly covering all things cool in San Diego.
For an online guide to Hillcrest, see Fabulous Hillcrest.
For great photos of gay San Diego nightlife see Sdpix.com with their monthly print magazine and online photos of clubs and events around town. They also have a good and fully updated daily calendar of ongoing club nights and events.
For a city map and website links to businesses, museums, and entertainment venues, see our gay San Diego listings pages. For some photos from around town, see our gallery pages. We also list some upcoming local events and activities.
Gay and Lesbian Times, San Diego's gay newspaper of 23 years, ceased publication September 2010, and their archive site was lost when the host company went out of business without notice. See info at their facebook page, and find back issues at the Lambda Archives.
The San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center is located at 3909 Centre Street in the Hillcrest neighborhood. The center offers a wide variety of services to the gay community, and stopping in for a quick visit is a great way to familiarize yourself with what the city has to offer.
The San Diego Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, "dedicated to the promulgation of universal joy and the expiation of stigmatic guilt," host and help with various events and fundraisers around town.
Bears San Diego, a club for bears and bear fanciers, established in 1994, brings together men of like minds for social events at local bars, den nights at members' homes, and takes group outings to movies, restaurants, the zoo and to parties at other Bear Clubs.
California was one of four states to legalize recreational marijuana in 2016. Residents may now possess up to 28.5 grams of marijuana flower and up to 8 grams of concentrates; also grow up to six plants per residence. Regulations on dispensing recreational cannabis are expected to mimic states like Colorado and Washington. See Potguide/California for details on where and how to buy.
Bars & clubs San Diego
The Brass Rail (3796 Fifth), men/leather/bears events, Latin dance nights, drag shows, trivia, go-gos, Manic Mondays cheap drinks & 80s/90s music; monthly girls' and boylesque nights.
Caliph (3100 Fifth) an unpretentious, relaxed neighborhood piano and karaoke bar with outdoor patio, and good conversations.
Cheers (1839 Adams Ave) neighborhood bar for a straight and gay mix, with pool tables.
Fiesta Cantina (142 University Ave), WeHo import, gay bar and Mexican restaurant, popular happy hours, festive patio, casual mixed crowd.
Flicks (1017 University Ave) daily 2 pm to 2 am, lively gay music and sports video bar, something happening every night at heart of Hillcrest; sports on TV, karaoke, College Nights, go-go boys, BBQs, and the Saturday night Wet Underwear Contest for cash prizes.
The Hole in the Wall (2820 Lytton, Point Loma), locals' hangout, gay dive since 1942, old-time vibe, karaoke and game nights, Sunday BBQ/ beer and burger bust.
Loft (3610 5th Ave), locals' neighborhood dive/ late-night cruise bar, jukebox, games.
Martini's Above Fourth (3940 Fourth), piano/ cabaret lounge bar and restaurant, small plates, sandwiches/wraps, steaks, stage performers, comedy.
Number One Fifth Ave (3845 Fifth), "at home" atmosphere where you'll soon be chatting to the locals while enjoying their large selection of beers and cocktails. For more elbow room, they have a sheltered open-air back patio.
Pecs (2046 University Ave) neigborhood men's cruise bar, patio, no sign on the door/ nothing fancy decor. Pool, pinball, darts, internet jukebox, large screen TV's, decent drinks prices, bear nights.
Redwing (4012 30th St) bar and grill with good basic food, friendly charm, decent prices, outdoor patio, mixed crowd but more men than women.
Rich's (1051 University Ave) San Diego's biggest gay dance club, Wednesday through Sundays crush of bodies on two floors. Hot go-go dancers, many special theme parties, including shows, bears and women's nights.
San Diego Eagle (3040 N Park Way, North Park) leather, BDSM, and fetish cruise bar, underwear, uniform and dress code nights, St Andrews cross. Home to BDSM leather/kink/fetish clubs, with regular events. Friendly guys, digital jukebox; games include darts and pinball.
Spin (2028 Hancock St), big multi-level weekend dance venue, mostly straight, with pleasant rooftop patio bar, special events.
SRO Lounge (1807 5th Ave) good place to start your night locals' neighborhood bar for everyone. Decent drinks , bar munchies, pool nights, women's nights, friendly vibe.
Top Of The Bay, Fridays at The Glass Door (1835 Columbia St), continuing in the slot of the old TOP of many years at Park Manor Suites, the 7-10pm LGBT cocktail happy hour weekend kick-off on the 5th floor of the Porto Vista Hotel.
Urban Mo's Bar and Grill (308 University), gay restaurant and bar, big outdoor patio, young, sociable mix, big servings. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, Sunday Funday Brunch, then dancing. Kickers 7pm Saturday niight Country Western line dancing, Wednesday drag shows.
CLOSED: Bourbon Street (4612 Park), Mardi Gras theme gay bar/lounge; Brick Bar (1475 University), craft beers, tacos, patio; The Flame (3780 Park), live music, DJs, dancing; Numbers (3811 Park), pub/dance club, go-gos, Latin nights, drag events; Obelisk (1037 University Ave), former gay bookshop, men's clothing.
Babycakes Hillcrest (3766 Fifth) cozy couches, brick fireplace, delicious cupcakes, Chocolate Decadence, stuffed croissants, quiche, chicken pies or fruit salads, liquid sweets. Outdoors seating, front and back, also Fri/Sat/Sun brunch, cocktails, beer and wine.
Babycakes Imperial Beach (874 Seacoast Dr), outdoor and indoor seating; coffee drinks and "World Famous Cupcakes" at the beach.
Baja Betty's (1421 University), south-of-the-border restaurant and cabaret showbar from the people at Urban Joes in Hillcrest.
Cafe on Park (3831 Park), many brunch variations of eggs benedict and omelets, some of the best potatoes anywhere, big portions, plus Bloody Marys with good kick. They also serve lunch and dinner if you still have room later.
Crest Cafe (425 Robinson Ave) hearty, healthy comfort food, affordable prices, handy to Hillcrest Inn. Breakfasts with Mexican twist of Huevos Rancheros, burritos, quesadillas; benedicts, florentines, veggie messes, omelets, waffles, and hash among many options.
Extraordinary Desserts (2929 Fifth Ave) gourmet restaurant, cakes, pastries and ice cream you'd expect to find in Paris, Vienna or Brussels. Also bruschetta, pate, panini, fontina, fine cheeses, hot and cold beverages of all kinds. At other location (1430 Union St) Sunday European Breakfast served with limited seatings 11am-2pm, reservations recommended.
Gossip Grill (1220 University Ave), favorite local hangout for women and guy-friendly too. Lunch specials, paninis, soups, salads, sandwiches, burgers, flat breads, t-bones, fish & chips, karaoke and cocktails.
Great Maple (1451 Washington), "European Dinette" breakfast, lunch, brunch and dinner; scrambles, pancakes, sandwiches, seafood, steaks, burgers, portabello fries, wine and drinks. In the former Brian's American Eatery space.
Jimmy Carter's Mexican Cafe (3172 Fifth Ave) long-time gay favorite, now serving Mexican fare with big portions, friendly home-style ambience, near the Inn at the Park Hotel.
Lestat's (3343 Adams, Normal Heights; 1045 University Ave, Hillcrest; and 4496 Park Blvd), young mixed crowd, 24-hour/365-day cafe with soups, sandwiches, quiche and salads, free WiFi and live music nightly.
Lips (3036 El Cajon), elaborate drag diva shows, full and prix-fixe menu dinner service, Sunday Gospel Brunch.
Living Room (5900 El Cajon Blvd), coffeehouse and bistro student mix, good breakfast, lunch and dinner; coffee and tea specialties, iced drinks galore, tempting deserts, WiFi. Also at 1010 Prospect St, La Jolla.
The Mission (2801 University Ave), cafe with simple, fresh, healthy and tasty food; whimsical and artful at affordable prices.
See our map & listings section for more restaurant options - Indian, Mexican, Tuscan, Persian, Vegetarian, Asian Fusion and more.
Club San Diego (3955 Fourth), favorite Hillcrest anytime meeting place for men, large multi-level complex, all the amenities. TV and porn lounges, private rooms, huge jacuzzi, steam, sauna and Jacuzzi. Cruising alleys and corners for recreation with good-looking weekend crowd, 53 rooms, non-stop all night party.
Hillcrest Inn (3754 Fifth) has 45 moderately priced units at the center of Hillcrest. They are pet-friendly and rooms have refrigerators and microwaves.
Inn at the Park (525 Spruce), former Park Manor Suites, all-suite hotel in gay Hillcrest, 82 spacious guestrooms, full kitchens, free WiFi, expanded cable TV, fitness center, rooftop sun deck overlooking the harbor and Balboa Park.
Keating House (2331 2nd Ave, Park West), nine B&B guest rooms, grand gay-owned 1888 Queen Anne Victorian house in Banker's Hill, lush gardens, full breakfast.
Mike's Place (1252 Lincoln Ave; Hillcrest), one-bedroom, 1910 private guest bungalow, quiet neighborhood, patio, garden, full amenities, WiFi.
For another two dozen area hotels and guesthouses, see our map & listings pages. San Diego Vacation Rentals website lists 48 local apartments and houses, many of them at the beach.
In focus:
Creating a theatrical diversion
One of the country's oldest gay and lesbian theater companies, the Diversionary Theatre produces edgy dramas, goofy comedies and playful musicals with gay themes. If you live in a town lacking in gay culture, you'll definitely want to catch one of their cutting-edge shows.
The company was founded in 1986 with a production of a show about the AIDS crisis called Artists Involved in Death and Survival. In the early '90s the theater began producing short seasons of shows, and those seasons were expanded to include year-round offerings.
Diversionary was one of the first theaters centered specifically on the gay, lesbian and transgender community. Executive and artistic director Dan Kirsch, who led the company for more than six years, said the six major productions presented each year kept the company busy.
"We also commissioned Dear Harvey, about Harvey Milk, in honor of the 30th anniversary of his passing," said Kirsch. "We commissioned a playwright to interview people who knew him, and we were able to tell stories that had never been heard before, even though the film Milk had just come out. That's about his life, and these were very personal stories from his colleagues and friends." After Dear Harvey premiered, it has had subsequent productions in Sacramento and Los Angeles. As interesting as Diversionary Theatre's special events are, the real attractions are the main stage productions.
Diversionary Theatre is located at 4545 Park Boulevard in the University Heights neighborhood. For more information call 619-220-0097.
No need to drive from San Diego, Americans can park on their side, then walk across the border for a wild and all-night Mexican party. Once on the other side taxis are easy to find, and inexpensive for getting around town. But agree on the price upfront and travel with companions when possible. The lower drinking age, and a greater tolerance south of the border for pleasures of the flesh, long ago made Tijuana a magnet for those to the north. Young military men in particular, but other Americans of all ages and orientations have been coming in droves, at least since the days of the American Prohibition Era.
Check our Tijuana feature with map and listings of the city just south of the border.
- Staff 2019
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Abbott and Novo Nordisk Enter Partnership to Provide Integrated Digital Solution to People with Diabetes Using Insulin
Abbott and Novo Nordisk today announced a non-exclusive partnership that will integrate insulin dose data from Novo Nordisk pre-filled and durable connected pens directly into the digital health tools compatible with the FreeStyle Libre system (FreeStyle LibreLink[1] mobile app and LibreView[2] cloud-based system). The partnership reflects both companies' commitment to make diabetes management easier by connecting key technologies such as continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and connected insulin pens.
Integrating these two products will enable healthcare professionals, caregivers and people with diabetes to view glucose and insulin data together to help them make more informed treatment decisions and to have a more meaningful and productive conversation about health outcomes.
"Lack of reliable information is a cause of huge frustration for many people with diabetes and their doctors," said Anders Dyhr Toft, corporate vice president, Commercial Innovation, Novo Nordisk. "Together with partners like Abbott, our connected pens will give healthcare professionals a better understanding of a patient's individual diabetes management and can help people with diabetes feel more confident in their treatment."
"It is our aim at Abbott to continuously provide life-changing technology to people living with diabetes," said Jared Watkin, senior vice president, Diabetes Care, Abbott. "Diabetes is a time-intensive condition to manage. People with diabetes must make a variety of decisions every single day about their glucose monitoring, nutrition, insulin and medication intake. By enabling insulin dosing data from Novo Nordisk's connected pens to be shared with our digital health tools, we'll be able to help further eliminate those daily hassles for people, so they have more time to live a fuller, healthier life."
Abbott and Novo Nordisk are working hard to bring these integrated solutions to patients as soon as possible.
About the FreeStyle Libre portfolio of products
Abbott's FreeStyle Libre system reads glucose levels through a sensor that can be worn on the back of the upper arm eliminating the need for routine finger pricks[3]. Abbott's FreeStyle LibreLink app enables users to capture and view their real-time glucose levels, their eight-hour glucose history, and how their glucose is currently changing on their smartphone. LibreView is a secure cloud-based diabetes management system that gives people with diabetes and healthcare professionals clear, easy-to-understand reports from major glucose monitoring devices - including the FreeStyle Libre system.
About Abbott
Abbott is a global healthcare leader that helps people live more fully at all stages of life. The portfolio of life-changing technologies spans the spectrum of healthcare, with leading businesses and products in diagnostics, medical devices, nutritionals and branded generic medicines. The 103,000 colleagues serve people in more than 160 countries.
About Novo Nordisk
Novo Nordisk is a global healthcare company with more than 95 years of innovation and leadership in diabetes care. This heritage has given us experience and capabilities that also enable us to help people defeat obesity, haemophilia, growth disorders and other serious chronic diseases. Headquartered in Denmark, Novo Nordisk employs approximately 43,200 people in 80 countries and markets its products in more than 170 countries.
1. The FreeStyle LibreLink app is compatible with NFC enabled phones on Apple's iPhone 7 and later, running iOS 11 and later
2. LibreView data, a product of NewYu, can be viewed in the Safari Browser on Mac OS X Mountain Lion or higher computers and on iOS 6 or later mobile devices. Currently, uploading of glucose data is only supported on Windows-based computers. Minimum system requirements are Windows Vista with IE10 or the latest versions of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, running on a 550MHz Pentium III, 512MB DRAM, 2G Hard Drive, USB 2.0, LCD Screen with resolution of 1024x768
3. Fingersticks using blood glucose meter are required for treatment decisions when you see Check Blood Glucose symbol, when symptoms do not match system readings, when you suspect readings may be inaccurate, or when you experience symptoms that may be due to high or low blood glucose.
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Williams in Middle East visits to promote peace and church relations
Following on from his visit to the United States, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has embarked on a series of short visits to Armenia, Syria and Lebanon. The aim is to deepen church relations and promote peace. The trip runs from 22 - 29 September 2007.
Archbishop appoints development agency worker as adviser on climate issues
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has appointed Paula Clifford on a six month secondment from the UK-based international development agency Christian Aid to help further the Church of England's quest for sustainable solutions to climate change.
Rich polluters should pay for impact on poor says aid agency
Rich polluters should pay for the impact of climate change on the world's poorest, a Catholic Aid agency has said.
Churches called to support farmers during Harvest Festivals
The Bishop of Exeter has encouraged congregations not just to thank God for the food they eat but to remember the farmers who produce it at their Harvest Festivals.
Methodists welcome new government findings on problem gambling
The Methodist Church says it is relieved by the Gambling Commission’s prevalence study, which shows that the number of problem gamblers is the same as the previous study in 1999 and the number of people gambling is slightly lower.
Brown to take tougher line on Zimbabwe following archbishop's call
Prime Minister Gordon Brown look set to boycott a summit of European and African leaders to be attended by the Zimbabwean President. It follows a call at the weekend by Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, to take a tougher line on Zimbabwe.
Williams putting earthly position ahead of moral principle on gay issue, campaigner says
The UK human rights campaigner and Green Party parliamentary candidate Peter Tatchell has reacted strongly to news that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, will seek to persuade US Anglican bishops to backtrack on gay inclusion and equality.
Lib Dems follow church calls for migrant amnesty
The Liberal Democrats yesterday responded to a call by many Christians for an amnesty for illegal immigrants.
Religious division, racial inequality, rife in Britain's fractured society
Britain is a society increasingly fractured with religious extremism on the rise, and people becoming disconnected from one another.
Give the earth a rest with a 'Slow Sunday'
What do two celebrity cooks, an archbishop and the Diocese of Bradford have in common? They are all making pleas for us to slow down.
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Nov 13, 2019 10:44 PM EST By Staff Reporter
Depressed Liam Payne Compares Fame to 'Weird Midlife Crisis'
Indeed, it is hard to image how dispiriting it could have been for Liam Payne after his failure to get help for his mental health despite being recognized internationally.
At the early age of 14, Payne stepped into the spotlight through "The X-Factor" before he became a member of the popular boy band "One Direction" in 2010.
Payne once told Men's Health Australia about the negative experience he had when he was still working with One Direction. He revealed that doing concerts over and over again required them to still perform even when they were not happy anymore.
Liam even compared the feeling of hopelessness to wearing a Disney costume before going to the center stage because he looked so pissed. He got upset about himself since he could not find a way to escape.
For 12 years, the "Strip That Down" singer already attained numerous awards and recognitions both as a group member and a soloist. But sadly, everything did not help him in any way to get through depression.
Describing fame as "having a midlife crisis", Payne explained briefly about his expeirence in "Ant Middleton and Liam Payne: Straight Talking" on Nov. 12. Payne, suprisingly, told the host that he was lucky to still be doing the interview and performing.
The 26-year-old star revealed that he questioned himself numerous times if he could really get over his struggles and depression. Those struggles became the reason behind his numerous thoughts on "acting on it."
"Yeah, when I've been in a bad place. It's one hundred percent, you know. There's no point denying it - it's definitely been on the menu a couple of times in my life," Payne replied to Middleton when asked if he ever wanted "to act on it."
Ever since he became part of One Direction (with Zayn Malik, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson, and Harry Styles) until they went on hiatus, fame turned into something like a burden to Liam.
Struggling Without Cheryl?
Aside from sharing his life story, Payne also mentioned his ex-partner Cheryl Cole whom he had a now two-year-old child.
Payne sent his wishes to Cheryl after he shared that she deserves all the great things in this world since she is a great mother. Liam also publicized that he hopes Cheryl can finally find happiness, even though it is hard for him to see his ex move on with someone else.
"Putting that happy smile on my face and singing the songs - sometimes it was like putting on one of those costumes and, underneath the costume, people don't see what's going on," Payne stated.
It was surely tough for Liam to reach where he is now mentally, but fans were glad that he did.
READ MORE: Liam Payne Naked For HUGO Campaign! [HOT PHOTO HERE!]
TAGSLiam Payne Liam Payne depression One Direction Liam Payne news
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Hydrous Mantle Melting
Water plays a key role in mantle melting processes, particularly in subduction zone environments. There is, however, very little experimental data on the influence of water on mantle melting, because of the technical difficulties associated with water-bearing silicate melts at high temperature: diffusion of water through capsules, diffusion of cations and melt modification during quench, and loss of iron to sample containers. Over the past years, I have developed experimental techniques for the extraction of hydrous silicate melts during mantle melting experiments, and used them to determine the composition of hydrous mantle melts. I am also looking in detail at the influence of water on melt fraction and melting processes.
Melt extraction in hydrous experiments
Due to the increase in diffusion rates caused by dissolved H2O, hydrous silicate melts in contact with crystals cannot be preserved during quench and are modified by the quench-related growth of the crystals. The idea behind the extraction techniques is to segregate the melt from the crystals during the experiment, while maintaining bulk equilibrium. If melts are sufficiently segregated, they will not be modified during the quench process. I have been developping two new techniques to segregate melts during hydrous experiments. The first technique involves melting of a thin gold foil placed in the middle of the experiment. When the foil melts, it creates a space where the silicate melt can be collected (Fig. 1). The second technique builds on existing work, where extraction is provided by capillary forces in crimped noble metal capsules (Fig. 2).
Fig. 1. Melt extraction using a molten gold foil Fig. 2. Melt extraction using a crimped capsule
Mantle melting processes
The most common model of mantle melting on Earth is adiabatic decompression melting, where an ascending diapir of dry mantle melts over a large range of pressure. Adiabatic decompression melting is the dominant melting process at mid-ocean ridges and ocean islands, and is probably a major melting process in subduction zones and continental settings too. However, since water strongly partitions into the liquid phase during melting, the solid residue of hydrous melting is highly refractory. Adiabatic decompression melting thus becomes difficult when water is present, and other melting processes can develop in the mantle:
- in the flux melting (or water-saturated melting) model, fluids generated by dehydration of the subducting slab move into the inverted thermal gradient of a subduction zone. These fluids strongly depress the mantle solidus, and water-rich melts are generated at temperatures significantly lower than typical basalts. High-Mg andesites are typical examples of magmas generated by flux-melting of the mantle.
- in the dehydration melting (or water-undersaturated) model, water is present in the mantle as hydrous minerals. Melt is generated when the mantle is heated to temperatures above the stability limit of the hydrous phases. A typical example are the "bajaites" of Baja California, which tap a previously metasomatized mantle domain.
Fig. 3. Principles of flux melting (adapted from the work of Tim Grove at MIT)
Influence of water on melt fraction
Experiments at variable temperature and water content can be used to construct models of the influence of water on melt fractions. However, due to experimental uncertainties, extrapolations of the experimental data have limited accuracy. In order to get accurate models of the influence of water on mantle melting, I have constructed models based on the relation between melt fraction and temperature in dry peridotites, combined with the liquidus depression caused by water on silicate melts (Medard and Grove 2008). Preliminary models (Fig. 4) reproduce the experimental data well, and can be extrapolated to lower water contents (< 0.1 wt%) that are difficult to reach experimentally, but are the most relevant for mantle melting outside of subduction zones.
Fig. 4. Variation of melt fraction versus temperature as a function of water content in the source. Comparison of experimental data (Hirose and Kushiro 1995, Sorbadère et al. 2003, and unpublished data) with a theoretical model based on liquidus depression.
Baasner A, Médard E, Laporte D, Hoffer G (2016) Partial melting of garnet lherzolite with water and carbon dioxide at 3 GPa using a new melt extraction technique: implications for intraplate magmatism. Contribution to Mineralogy and Petrology 171: 45, doi: 10.1007/s00410-016-1233-0.
Condamine P, Médard E (2014) Experimental melting of phlogopite-bearing mantle at 1.0 GPa: implications for potassic magmatism. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 397: 80-92, doi: 10.1016/j.epsl.2014.04.027.
Condamine P, Médard E, Devidal JL (2016) Experimental melting of phlogopite-peridotite in the garnet stability field. Contribution to Mineralogy and Petrology 171: 95, doi: 10.1007/s00410-016-1306-0.
Grove TL, Chatterjee N, Parman SW, Médard E (2006) The influence of H2O on mantle wedge melting. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 249: 74-89, doi: 10.1016/j.epsl.2006.06.043.
Grove TL, Till CB, Lev E, Chatterjee N, Médard E (2009) Kinematic variables and water transport control the formation and location of arc volcanoes. Nature 459: 694-697, doi: 10.1038/nature08044.
Médard E, Grove TL (2008) The effect of H2O on the olivine liquidus of basaltic melts: experiments and thermodynamic models. Contribution to Mineralogy and Petrology 155: 417-432, doi: 10.1007/s00410-007-0250-4.
Médard E, Schmidt MW, Schiano P, Ottolini L (2006) Partial melting of amphibole-bearing wehrlites: an experimental study on the origin of ultracalcic nepheline-normative melts. Journal of Petrology 47: 481-504, doi: 10.1093/petrology/egi083.
Sorbadère F, Médard E, Laporte D, Schiano P (2013) Experimental melting of hydrous peridotite-pyroxenite mixed sources: constraints on the genesis of silica-undersaturated magmas beneath volcanic arcs. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 384: 42-56, doi: 10.1016/j.epsl.2013.09.026.
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Home / Filsinger Games / James Freeman / Reviews / Champions of the Galaxy Review
Champions of the Galaxy Review
James Freeman March 13, 2019
Quick Look:
Designer: Tom Filsinger
Artists: Darryl Banks, Brian Michael Bendis, Chuck Carter, Hannibal King, Werner Mueck, Scott Rosema, Larry Snelly,and Jeremy Su
Publisher: Filsinger Games
"That's not necessary! So what if I betrayed my father to Mars, then betrayed Mars about the betrayal? I know two wrongs don't make a right, but I have 3 wrongs! That's equal to one right with a remainder of 1 wrong! That should reverse everything! I'm in the clear!"
KevinMask - Kinnikuman
Champions of the Galaxy is a card game combining sci-fi and wrestling into an all-action game! It's Star Wars meets the WWE! You'll enter the Future of Wrestling in the GWF!
Champions of the Galaxy is a card and dice game that features playing cards for 24 galactic wrestling legends! The playing cards have a drawing of the wrestler on the front and game information on the back. Champions of the Galaxy features a fast-action game system that allows matches to take place in real time. You can play alone or with friends.
I have played RPGs on and off since the 80's. Dungeons and Dragons, obviously--I think that's where everyone starts for the most part. From there, I went to Marvel superheroes and DC. Friends showed me other games and I enjoyed them, but I was looking for something more. And in the back of Pro Wrestling Illustrated was a game called Champions of the Galaxy. I was excited and confused as to what this was. An RPG/Wrestling game I could play with friends or on my own? And it was shipped from only an hour away from my house? Many hours were spent playing that first black-and-white set. And as with most things, life changes and time moves on and your interests change. However, GWF kept going... and growing... and every year since 1986, a new chapter was added to the story, and it incredibly still lives on today. The game has a fiercely loyal fanbase that meets for Galacticon every year. I have returned to one of the first games of my youth, and I want to tell you about it.
Rules and Setup:
Each player will choose a wrestler or a tag team they wish to use, or in a single-player scenario, you can set up the match completely.
Sci-Fi, Pro Wrestling
Dice, Story Telling
Game Play: (Two player- Basic Game)
Each player places their wrestler in front of them and grabs one die (D6). Each player rolls, and the player with the highest roll goes first. There are six moves in each level of offense, with three levels total. The starting player starts on level 1 and rolls. Based on the move that is rolled, the opponent will roll on their defensive chart trying to fight off or counter the move their opponent did. This will continue until a player can reaches the third level where finishing move and pin attempts can be achieved. If the person rolls a number lower than their pin/submission value then they are defeated. If not, the match continues. There are also disqualifications and count-outs like a regular pro wrestling match (as well as interference). There are also several advanced rules that make the matches more in-depth.
Artwork and Components:
Originally, the game was in black and white. The starter set is a reissue of the first set, now in full color and new art, which really helps bring the characters to life. You also receive a book giving the backstory on each wrestler. Subsequent seasons lay out the story-lines for the upcoming year.
This game can be a simple one-off match, or you can run a league (or multiple league like my one friend does). It's easy to teach, and people can just dive right into it.
The dice are very small, but I am positive you have some D6s laying around if this is an issue for you.
I have recently gone all-in again on this game, and there are two reasons for this. The first is that it really helps me with my creative writing. The outcomes are not predetermined, so most of the time you are changing storylines on the fly based on who wins, who gets attacked, and who gets injured. The second reason is that I love to game, but as most of us know, it is very difficult to get a group of people together. We all want to game, but we all work different shifts and have various family responsibilities. I can pick up GWF any time I want and go for it. I was happy to rediscover this game after so long of an absence, and I think it will unlock the inner promoter in you and spark your creativity.
Players Who Like: RPGs, Storytelling, Sci-Fi, Wrestling.
Check out Champions of the Galaxy on:
James Freeman - Reviewer
James is a child of the 80's he grew playing D&D and Stratego. He currently owns more games than his understanding wife of 20+ years thinks he should. James lives in Buffalo, New York with his previously mentioned wife, 2 teenage kids and one Havanese dog. Also, if someone outside of Buffalo says they serve buffalo wings, they are lying.
See James's reviews HERE.
Champions of the Galaxy Review Reviewed by James Freeman on March 13, 2019 Rating: 5
Filsinger Games X James Freeman X Reviews
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Paralyzed Student Walks at Graduation
Started by Tricia , May 16 2011 03:06 PM
Health Medicine 2012
#1 Tricia
To err on the side of kindness is seldom an error.
We had the paralyzed bride who walked down the aisle last month and now this--
video of his walk at graduation is in the link
Walking across the stage at the University of California Berkeley commencement feels especially sweet for Austin Whitney, who was paralyzed in a car accident that severed his spinal cord just below the hip.
Four years ago, the Southern California teen with a 4.0 GPA who loved sports and theater was forced to adapt to life in a wheelchair after he got behind the wheel while drunk and crashed into a tree.
And per the report that aired spent a lot of time hating himself for it
"If somebody told me four years ago that I'd be walking at this graduation, I would have never believed them in a million years," Whitney told ABC News.
But Whitney did just that. With mechanical braces strapped to his body and motorized joints directed by a computer brain, he triumphantly walked across the stage at commencement -- a moment that reflected more than just the achievement of a four-year college degree.
"Everything over the last four years and all the emotions of it are really going to be climaxed in those two seconds," he said before his big day.
Hospitalized for 41 days after his crash, the incoming college freshman didn't let his paralysis hinder his plans to attend school. Ten days after being released from the hospital, he was in the classroom at UC Santa Barbara, where he spent his freshman year before transferring to UC Berkeley
A double major in history and political science, Whitney began working with Homayoon Kazerooni, a professor of mechanical engineering, and a team of graduate students to develop the wearable robotic skeleton that helped him achieve his dream of walking again.
"I stood up in that machine for the first time on my 22nd birthday and that was the first time standing up really in four years," Whitney said. "I trust the machine an amazing amount. I know that machine like it is my own legs."
In fact, the team says Austin was so integral in providing feedback in development that they named the device after him.
In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change. --Thich Nhat Hanh
You don't need to attend every argument you are invited to
Do not ask that your kids live up to your expectations. Let your kids be who they are, and your expectations will be in breathless pursuit.
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Franklin Fueling Systems Recalls Hardwall Fuel Curb Hose Due to Fire and Explosion Hazard
Name of product: Hardwall Fuel Curb Hose
Hazard: The crimp on the fuel hose can loosen causing fuel to leak, posing a fire and explosion hazard.
Remedy: Refund, Replace
Consumer Contact: Franklin Fueling Systems at (800) 225-9787 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. CT Monday through Friday or online at www.franklinfueling.com and click on "Recall Information: Recall of 1" Hardwall Curb Hose" for more information.
Units: About 6,700
Description: The FLEX-ING FLEX-ON hardwall curb hose is 1 inch in diameter ranging in lengths from 9 inches to 100 feet, including various made-to-order lengths, with fixed and swivel fittings. The product is used in conjunction with the gas station nozzle to dispense or transfer refined fuels such as gasoline, diesel, ethanol blends and biodiesel blends (up to E15). The recalled hoses come in black, green, blue, yellow or red. A date code of M1014 through M3014 in WWYY format, is on the fitting with model numbers starting with FLHFR3XX XXX or FLXHW3XX XXX. On the products with a fixed fitting, the model number is on a label on the crimp ferrule. On products with a swivel fitting, the model number can be found on the label of the box in which it was shipped. "FLEX-ING FLEX-ON" or "FLEXSTEEL FUTURA" are printed on the hoses.
Remedy: Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled hardwall curb hose and contact the firm to receive a full refund or a replacement hose.
Sold at: Distributors, contractors and gasoline stations nationwide from March 2014 through July 2014 for between $20 and $560 depending on length.
Manufacturer: Franklin Fueling Systems Inc., of Madison, Wisc.
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Fluid Games http://www.fluidgames.co.uk
Follow @fluidfootball
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Foliver blog
Discover and Save Creative Ideas
45 Happy New Year Images 2020
When the new year comes, I will fill a car with happiness, let peace start, abandon all troubles, surround you with happiness, store all warmth, drive away the cold, release the true feelings of my life, and let happiness smile to you forever! When 2020 is coming, I wish you a happy New Year in 2020.
Today, in this article, we have collected 45 Happy New Year Images 2020 for you. I hope you like them. I hope you will be happy and safe in the new year, and all wishes come true.
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Author adminPosted on January 4, 2020 Categories DIY
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