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The Party:
Rig Bigny, Gnomish Beastmaster
Flit, the bat familiar
Clench, the Wardog War-Badger
Faufe Yitaw, Dogwere (Badgerwere?)
Rawf, Wardog familiar
Caranthir, Human Leader of Men
Rhea Trueheart, Elvish Nightblade
Lucille "Luce" Burwood, Fighter
Elenora Garrard, White Mage
Gróin of Norston, Dwarven Sapper
Zarc, Thrassian Gladiator
Llarm Paphyra, Elvish Polydoctorate
The Metal Man, construct
Airsen Birdmaster, Airwalker
Erik Stein, Dwarven Vaultguard
???, Elven Ranger
In Roundrock, while the ranger found a trainer for her ferret, Gróin went looking for henchmen. He found a priestess, whose name I forgot to write down (typical). She does, however, speak both Common and Mejastan, which should prove useful if the party were to journey further south.
The ranger attempted to hire a sage to determine just what, exactly, the strange magical globe actually was. She forked over 250 gold, but when she handed over the globe, the sage quickly handed both back. "I don't work on items that far outside my power level," she explained; the globe is immensely powerful, but beyond that, the sage had no further information. That left only hiding it away forever, or actually staring into it; with a deep breath, the ranger held the globe aloft, peered into its depths...
...And suddenly understood everything. She felt information filling her mind; the fundamental workings of the universe were laid bare. She knew she could cast any spell, or summon any knowledge; she could see the strings of reality, and the weave of the universe. She quickly thought about the scales, and images flooded her mind: the silver Shield of Armies, hanging behind the throne in Slowhaven; the green Eye of the Golem, set in the great golem watching over Roundrock; the purple Sightstone, deep beneath the Mountain Dwarves' capital; the white Airstone, set on a grand plinth in the Airwalker Tower; the gray Mother Loadstone, hidden in a storage room in Falach a'Bhaile; the clear Faultless Diamond, secreted in one of the ancient elven cities; the black Gem of Darkness, still in place at the top of the Spire, in the Blasted Lands; and oddly, a strange, quick glimmer in Slowhaven. With that information, she also realized that the power of the globe was fleeting; this information would fade, and soon. Quickly, she sought information on the towers; what she saw, she did not remember, apart from a strange symbol. Before the information completely left her mind, she quickly traced out the symbol for the others to see, and explained the locations of the scales.
Not wanting to try to fight the great golem (the nearest scale), the group decided to return to the gnomes, and find the scale stored there. On the way north again, they stumbled across four small blue dragons - three spawn, and a young dragon. The beasts had brought down an antelope, and were busily devouring it, oblivious to the group just behind them. The party quickly moved into position, quaffed several potions (speed, and more importantly, dragon control - these were the tiny potions, so the effect wouldn't last long), and charged in, absolutely splattering the dragons! Before the four beasts had time to react, they were slaughtered. The ranger quickly attempted to harvest any useful organs (and we'll have the rolls for those eventually, to find out what was actually harvested!).
However, the dragons were not the only casualty of the battle. As the fight started, Airsen attempted to leap into the air, to no avail! His actions earlier - attempting to start a race war between dwarves and gnomes - had broken the (albeit lax) rules of the Airstone, and it had removed his flight ability as punishment! He knew he would have to find a cleric and Atone for his actions.
They saw a flight of 12 small Rocs pass by, on their way south for the winter; the next day, they were surprised by a flight of five hippogriffs! Only the ranger managed to spot them, and warned her teammates as she loosed an arrow. The first hippogriff slammed into Erik the dwarf, knocking him out of the battle immediately; another tore into Elenora, but she managed to remain on her feet. Caranthir and Luce managed to hold off the beasts, until Luce went down! Caranthir cleaved through one into another, killing them both, and rushed to Luce's aid in time to cut down the last of them. As Elenora and the new priestess looked after the fallen, the ranger busily dissected the hippogriffs, pulling their feathers. Luce groggily blinked awake - she was only knocked out, and needed but a hand up to get to her feet. Erik was lucky, too; though he was badly injured, he only needed a week of bedrest. And a small box, for his five missing teeth.
In Falach a'Bhaile, the party quickly located the building with the Mother Loadstone: a storage shed, connected to the Gnomish Mage University! After a quick conversation with the, er, front door, they were joined by the bursar, who confused them for the junk removal society. After narrowly avoiding certain doom through wading into a room full of failed magical items, they managed to convince the bursar to let them see the loadstone. He took them to a Professor Thunderthistle, a busy research scientist, who then lead them, finally, to the storage room with the Mother Loadstone. The great scale was a dull gray, and roughly oval, with a rounded top. And surrounded by a red and yellow warning circle, with "Danger! Stay back!" written on it in a dozen languages. The professor demonstrated the power of the scale by flipping a gold coin - borrowed from one of the party, of course - towards the gray mass. It zipped towards the scale, landing with a 'ping' on the side. The party realized there were many other objects stuck to the scale, as well; fountain pens, small knives, other coins, and so forth. After some consideration, Caranthir asked the professor what they planned on doing with it, and if it would be possible to remove it. On the latter point, the professor explained that the scale was stuck to a vein of iron, and very difficult to lift. On the former point... he was unsure. He left - with dire warnings - to fetch yet another gnomish mage: the arch-chancellor himself! More beard than gnome, the arch-chancellor listened to what the party had to say, then shrugged; "If you want it, you can have it! It's done nothing but cause trouble, here!"
Luce, the ranger, and Caranthir removed their armor, weapons, and anything else with metal, then struggled to lift the magical boulder, to little effect. After a potion or two of Giant Strength, they managed - with much grunting and straining - to hoist the scale from the ground, and carried it, halting step by halting step, away from the vein of iron. The professor, eyes nearly bugging out of his head, quickly began moving magical items out of their way.
However, their progress halted when they neared the door - the doorway was only 10' wide, but the scale's influence was about 40 feet in diameter. And the lead-lined walls would surely be pulled towards it, or at least it towards them. Stuck, Caranthir suggested they put the scale in a bag of holding; the arch-chancellor thought it was a wonderful experiment, and brought an enchanted container (a large burlap sack), before hiding behind a plate glass viewing window. Luce, her loyalty unwavering, pulled the sack around the scale and closed it. Though the sack easily managed to hide the size of the scale, somehow, it was just as heavy. It tore out of the sack, falling to the floor. Gróin, realizing the only way to get the stone one was through a tunnel, pulled out his pick and went to work; the arch-chancellor realized this was likely the only way to get rid of the scale, and gathered a group of diggers to tunnel out.
Meanwhile, the three scale-carriers realized that they, too, had become magnetized! They took care to stay away from their items, for fear of damaging them (it wore off after 24 hours).
One purchase of a horse and cart later, and the scale was safely in place. With Erik still needing rest, the group decided to remain in town a few more days. They visited a local pub, where they learned of a new drink, as yet unnamed; it was blindingly expensive at 5 gold per mug, but Luce, Rhea, and Gróin were willing to try anything. They paid their dues, and chugged the amber liquid... and then the room started to spin. And dance. And sing. Luce and Gróin managed to hang on to their seats, but the elf, after calmly walking to a chair, keeled over, stiff as a board. Luce and Gróin saw the room go dark; they were suddenly surrounded by strange creatures with glowing eyes, ethereal bodies, and flowing movements. Just as suddenly, they found themselves rushing towards the forest with incredible speed; Luce was unable to avoid the trees, and was thrown onto her back, where she passed out. Gróin, meanwhile, saw himself rushing through forest, then plains, then jungle, before seeing tall mountains rise up before him; then, he was rushing through cool darkness, and out into the burning heat of the desert, before suddenly flashing over sparkling oceans. He flew faster and faster, until suddenly, he stopped; he walked through strange creatures: men, a bear, a coyote, a giant with a single eye and one leg, until he saw, seated at a wooden table... Thor himself!
As Gróin stood in reverent awe, Thor turned and spotted Gróin. "Not another one!" he grumbled, and threw his mug, hitting Gróin square in the forehead. Gróin blacked out for a moment, before coming to flat on his back, his friends staring down at him in concern. Groggily, and still in awe of his experience, he stood to his feet. To the cheers of the gnomes filling the pub, the barman returned his 5 gold pieces. Oddly, Gróin's forehead had a red mark, though his physical body had obviously never left the bar.
That night, Luce sat bold upright with a shout, "They're coming!" She stared around her, then mumbled an explanation: she had seen countless creatures, in full battle gear, standing in a forest, as if ready to invade. They looked like the creatures she had seen in the drink-vision... an odd portent.
The next day was Beastnight; Luce and Rhea needed a full day of rest to recover from their rather impressive hangovers, and Caranthir wanted to add a symbol to his shield and armor:
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\/\/
Later, during the festivities, the priestess overheard something about a scale - as it happens, she was knew about the scales; she had been in Roundrock to study them, and was overjoyed to have been a part of uncovering the Mother Loadstone. Caranthir, too, overheard something from the same group - something about the Seekers. He approached them, and asked about the scale, and the Seekers. The group - three gnomes, not that that means anything in Falach a'Bhaile - seemed a little hesitant, but the more talkative of the bunch, a gnome with a deep, rich voice, cautioned Caranthir about the Seekers. "A dangerous bunch - they seek knowledge no matter the cost. We too seek knowledge, but carefully." The second member, a flighty fellow who kept pulling on his ear, mentioned that they had heard of a scale being found locally. Caranthir explained how he had come to own the scale; suddenly very interested, the three began to whisper to each other in a language Caranthir didn't understand. Eventually, the third member, who had previously remained in shadow, leaned forward. In a gravelly voice, he suggested a deal: they had access to many magical items, and would trade some for the scale; the party had little use for it, but their organization would be able to study it and learn its secrets.
They met the next morning to trade. Deep in the Last Bank of Falach a'Bhaile, the four strangers pulled out various strange and magical items. After passing up the Sword of Domination, due to it being a chaotic sentient weapon intent on taking over the mind of the wielder, they left with the Haunted Sword, a shadowy blade that grows in power with combat; the Thieves' Gem, which can summon various tools of the thief's trade; the lawful Searching Club, an ancient sentient club; an odd map with a symbol in the corner, that reveals the paths the holder has taken; and a wand, supposedly able to charm humans and demi-humans, though as yet untested.
Meanwhile, the ranger has increasingly growing agitated; she feels she must search out knowledge. Finding the scale helped, but as time goes on, the urge will only grow stronger.
XP from combat:
3 blue dragons, spawn (29 xp each)
1 blue dragon, very young (190 xp)
5 hippogriffs (65 xp each)
12 small rocs (0; bypassed)
XP from Treasure: none
XP from other sources:
Finding a scale (1000 xp)
Total XP: 1602
XP per PC: 229
XP per Henchman: 114
Drinking Ale of the Gods:
Rhea: 15 xp
Luce: 50 xp
Gróin: 100 xp
Ranger only:
Using the globe (100 xp)
New Character Starting XP: 5614
The globe is immensely powerful. It features a snapshot of the entirety of the universe, giving a glimpse of how the strings of reality are woven. In the brief moments the effect is active, the wielder can do literally anything. Want to teleport to an outer plane, with 100% accuracy? You can. Want to return a fallen friend from the dead? You can. Want to instantly cast a spell, even a ritual spell, even though you're not a spellcaster? You can! Any spell, any knowledge, anything is possible. However, the globe is only temporary; spells lasting longer than an instant will continue to function, but any control or concentration will be lost (careful summoning creatures). Knowledge gained through the globe (as opposed to Scry, etc.) will fade; if not communicated or written down, the knowledge will be lost.
All this power comes with a cost, however: a geas, driving the wielder to find knowledge. If not properly followed, this geas can become an obsession...
Meanwhile, choosing knowledge over spells was a smart move. Mechanics-wise, casting a spell takes the full round, while accessing knowledge allows for two questions to be answered, and answered in a helpful way, neither the dangerous nor the "fuzzy" way other spells work. And, asking about the scales and the towers was an excellent use.
Speaking of scales, the Mother Loadstone the party discovered is simultaneously useful and useless, and both methods are dangerous. Like a real magnet, the Mother Loadstone attracts metal and magnetizes things in contact with it. Unlike a real magnet, the loadstone magnetizes everything - metal, wood, even flesh. And, also unlike a real magnet, the loadstone attracts any metal, including silver, gold, and lead, as well as magic. Carrying the loadstone, or even having touched the loadstone, makes you a target. Swords and arrows are pulled towards you; magical effects will seek you out over your companions. Good for treasure-hunting, bad for not dying.
And what was all that with Luce and Gróin, and the strange mystic ale? Was it real, or just their imagination? And why can elves never hold their liquor?
Labels: artifacts, calendar, cities, dates, language, magic, map, mor-thir, places, play, scale, towers, treasure
One Shot: Rise of the Beastmen: Battle for the Nor...
One-Shot: Ancient History: The Dwarves
How does Wish work?
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Three brothers, Vietnam veterans to be honored during Indy Honor Flight
Posted 3:01 PM, October 25, 2019, by Melissa Crash, Updated at 06:39PM, October 25, 2019
GREENWOOD, Ind. – Three local brothers are about to embark on a trip of a lifetime: Indy Honor Flight.
The Sowder brothers have a lot more in common than just being related. Because of their special connection, they’re being honored this weekend as Hoosier heroes.
A lot has changed in 50 years for the Sowder brothers.
“We’re afraid we’d outgrow our uniforms, so we had to do it quick,” Joe Sowder explained while holding an old photograph, “I was 21.”
David Sowder said, “I guess I was 24.”
One thing that’s stayed the same is their brotherly connection, humor and love.
“And we still looked pretty good back then,” the three brothers joked.
James, David and Joe aren’t just brothers by blood. They’re brothers in arms; all three served in Vietnam.
“It was quite an experience and there’s some other things I wouldn’t want to talk about,” said Joe Sowder.
To this day, they still recount new memories from the long and divisive Vietnam war.
“I was signed up for three years and I spent 13 months overseas, that was typical. You sleep two, then stay awake two and hope nobody snuck up on you. I was kind of in the background. I stayed in the compound where the supplies were,” said David Sowder.
Though they are family, all three had very different experiences.
“Working in surgery all of that time, the doctors come up one time and asked me and said 'Well, I’ve got a guy that’s going to lose his eye sight and he’s from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Can you go talk to him a little bit?' I was thinking, 'I don’t know why I was talking to somebody'. I wished I would have thought more about it and talked with him longer,” James explained.
Yet, through their stories, they have a special bond.
“I’ve been through a lot of rice paddies and climbing up trees and doing scrimmages with infantry driving,” said Joe Sowder.
For the Sowder brothers, their time in Vietnam was not only difficult because of their missions.
“It was just, we missed each other you know,” Joe added.
And now they hope a once in a lifetime trip this weekend will help fill those gaps.
“We used to, when our dad was alive in Florida, we’d go down there every year and spend a few days down there with our dad,” said Joe, “Then, he passed away and we haven’t done that, we just haven’t done anything.”
James, David and Joe were invited to go on the Indy Honor Flight. A one-day, free trip to Washington D.C. with 85 other veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam. They’ll visit memorials and honoring their time in the service, the way they should have been honored years ago.
According to Indy Honor Flights website:
Indy Honor Flight is a non-profit organization created solely to honor Indiana’s veterans for their service and sacrifice. Top priority is given to the oldest veterans. Our goal is to get the most senior veterans to visit the memorials built for them before it is too late. We also give priority to terminally ill veterans.
“Even though we didn’t get too much acceptance back then,” said James.
Joe added, “We didn’t talk about it back then, because no one wanted to hear about it.”
“A lot of our Vietnam veteran guys were plainly mistreated, and we can’t correct that, but this is an opportunity for the community to show their support, to show their gratitude,” said Dennis Disney, a volunteer for Indy Honor Flight.
A trip that the Sowder brothers will cherish together.
“A very short, but very heartfelt thank you,” Disney added.
Morning News Your Town Friday
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Google's New 'Equiano' Subsea Cable to Connect Africa and Europe
Google said Equiano is the company's 14th subsea cable investment globally.
By Reuters | Updated: 29 June 2019 13:25 IST
Cable named after Nigerian-born writer and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano
This is Google's third private international cable
It's also the company's 14th subsea cable investment globally
Alphabet's Google on Friday announced a new subsea cable dubbed "Equiano" that will connect Africa with Europe, as it boosts its cloud computing infrastructure.
Equiano, fully funded by Google, is the company's third private international cable.
The search engine giant, which has invested $47 billion in improving its global technology infrastructure over the last three years, said Equiano is the company's 14th subsea cable investment globally.
"Equiano will be the first subsea cable to incorporate optical switching at the fiber-pair level, rather than the traditional approach of wavelength-level switching," Google said in a blog post.
"Named for Olaudah Equiano, a Nigerian-born writer and abolitionist who was enslaved as a boy, the Equiano cable is state-of-the-art infrastructure based on space-division multiplexing (SDM) technology, with approximately 20 times more network capacity than the last cable built to serve this region," the post added.
Google said a contract to build the cable with Alcatel Submarine Networks was signed in the fourth quarter of 2018, and the first phase of the project, connecting South Africa with Portugal, is expected to be completed in 2021.
The company in April completed the "Curie" project, its first private intercontinental cable, connecting Chile to Los Angeles.
It also announced last year the Dunant transatlantic submarine cable project connecting France and the United States. The 6,600 km cable is scheduled to come into service in 2020.
Subsea cables form the backbone of the Internet by carrying 99 percent of the world's data traffic.
Further reading: Google, Subsea Cable, Telecom
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Oppo F15, Realme X2 और Vivo S1 Pro में कौन बेहतर?
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LeEco Plans to Start Selling VR Headsets in India
By Reuters | Updated: 29 January 2016 11:16 IST
Chinese consumer electronics maker LeEco plans to start selling virtual reality headsets and launch smart TVs in India in the June quarter, months after entering the country with its smartphone range, a company executive said.
LeEco's VR headset, Le 3D Helmet, will come equipped with a 5.5 inch, 2K resolution screen with a 70 degree field of view. It was launched in China in September.
Virtual reality (VR) is seen as the next big thing in technology but not many devices are available for sale in India.
Oculus, the VR company Facebook bought in 2014, started accepting pre-orders this month for its much-awaited headset, Rift, which is priced at $599.
Atul Jain, India chief operating officer of LeEco, declined to disclose the price of the company's VR device.
LeEco, formerly known as LeTV, entered India earlier this month with the launch of two smartphones - Le 1s, priced at Rs. 10,999 ($162), and Le Max, priced at Rs. 32,999.
The company, which got more than 300,000 registrations for a flash sale of the phones scheduled for Feb. 2 on e-commerce website Flipkart, said it doesn't expect any supply glitches even if all those registrants convert into customers.
"I'm actually expecting a much bigger (registration) number by the time the flash sales begin," Jain said.
The company's China-based rivals, OnePlus and Xiaomi, had faced problems as demand outstripped supply, leading to a delay in deliveries.
LeEco sells roughly half a million smartphones in China every month, Jain said. "There is a huge amount of production capacity available."
Founded in 2004, LeEco started selling smartphones in China in April last year and has sold 4 million of them so far, said Jain, who earlier worked at Samsung Electronics.
LeEco also plans to gradually bring all its products, including Netflix-like streaming service and electric cars, to India.
The company has already tied up with ErosNow and YuppTV for providing online content and is in talks with others companies for possible partnerships.
Jain declined to comment on any partnership talks with RelianceJio, telecom arm of Reliance Industries Ltd, which is building India's biggest 4G telecommunications network.
Further reading: Gaming, Home entertainment, Le 3D Helmet, LeEco, LeTV, Virtual reality, Wearables
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The LG Watch W7 marries Wear OS features to a classic analog watch movement
Unknown Wednesday, October 03, 2018 GSMArena.com - Latest articles
Progress and tradition rarely go hand in hand - you can have either a feature-packed digital smartwatch or the classic beauty of an analog watch. The LG Watch W7 aims to offer the best of both worlds. LG Watch W7 It's a fully fledged Wear OS watch with a 1.2" LCD touchscreen (360 x 360px). But poking through that screen are the hands of a watch mechanism that was developed in collaboration with Swiss watchmaker Soprod SA. The smart side of things is handled by the fairly old Snapdragon Wear 2100 chip. It's paired with 768MB of RAM and 4GB of built-in storage. But if you...
from GSMArena.com - Latest articles https://ift.tt/2zOzW3V
By Unknown at Wednesday, October 03, 2018
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Galveston Arts Center Names New Executive Director
by Paula Newton May 17, 2018
The Galveston Arts Center (GAC) has announced that it has appointed Lisa Shaw to take over as executive director. She succeeds the tenure of Interim Executive Director Joanna Bremer, who has been running the ship for the past 13 months and she will help out Dennis Nance, who was appointed curator in the fall of 2016. GAC had only moved back into its original building the previous year after renovations due to 2008’s Hurricane Ike. After a decade, perhaps things have finally settled down.
Shaw began her career as an intern for Galveston’s American Undersea Warfare Center at Seawolf Park, where she eventually became Museum Director. She has spent the past three years as Associate Museum Director for the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, TX.
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Christie Blizard’s Strange Signs
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Home Eastern Europe
MIL-OSI Russia: From 4 to 7 November: all about changing bus routes in the coming days
Photo: Press service of the Mayor and Government of Moscow. Denis Grishkin
Passengers should be careful when planning trips.
Several buses will change the route in the coming days due to celebration of Day of national unity and preparation of a ceremonial March dedicated to the 78th anniversary of the parade on 7 November 1941.
Exhibition-forum
On 4 November in the Central exhibition hall “Manege” exhibition opens-forum “Orthodox Russia — the Day of national unity”. From 06:00 to the end of major events buses M1, M2, M3, M6, M27 and bus # 144 in adherence to the metro station “Kitay-Gorod” will be driving past the bus stop “Metro station “Lenin Library””.
March around the Marina
In Maryino buses will change the route on 4 November due to the festive March and rally.
10:20 bus No. 112e will move from the metro station Bratislavskaya in both directions on Myachkovsky Boulevard and Novomaryinskaya street, and then on Belorechenskaya street his route.
10:30 the same detour route is introduced for bus No. 10, 30 and 625. On Novomaryinskaya street and Myachkovsky Boulevard also will go to the bus No. 55 on the route between the metro stations “Marino” and “Bratislava”, No. 749, from “Bratislava” in both directions.
Buses No. 657 will follow on the street Pererva, Lublin street and the street the Top Fields, and buses No. 762 — for Novomaryinskaya street. Change is also the route of bus No. 713.
Boarding the bus № 10, 30, 55, 112e, 625, 749 in the metro station Bratislavskaya on Myachkovsky Boulevard will be at the bus stop for the number 55 bus.
The celebration in Schukin
In the area the local population will also host public events in honor of national unity Day. Because of the festive March and rally on 4 November from 10:00 to change the routes of some buses.
For example, the bus number 39 will go in the direction of the center of the street Berzarina street people’s Militia (no arrival on Raspletin street and Marshala Biryuzova), and then your route. And back after the station Panfilov ICC route will pass through the streets of the people’s Militia, Marshal Vershinin and Raspletin (no arrival on the street of Marshal Birjuzova).
Bus number 60 will walk from Schukinskaya on Novoschukinskaya the street, streets of Marshal Novikova and Maksimova, and then his route. And the bus № 460 will go on the street of Marshal Vasilevsky and Schukinskaya street to street of Academician Kurchatov, then return to the usual route.
Shortened flight No. 800 (from metro station “the October field” to the 3rd Volokolamsky proezd) are canceled. The main route of 800 are temporarily held from the metro station “Schukinskaya” in both directions on Schukinskaya street, street of Academician Kurchatova, Infantry and Pine streets, 2nd Infantry lane, 1st Volokolamsky proezd, streets of Marshal Konev, Marshal Rybalko and the people’s Militia. The same pattern of motion will be for buses 105.
Buses No. 253 in adherence to the metro station “Schukinskaya” after the Picturesque streets go around the streets Berzarina, Maksimova and Marshal Novikov. And Aviation streets on the street of Marshal Vasilevsky, Schukinskaya street, street of Academician Kurchatova, Infantry and Pine streets, 2nd Infantry lane, 1st Volokolamsky lane, streets of Marshal Konev, Marshal Rybalko and the people’s Militia to metro station “the October field” and then your route.
Preparation and holding of the March on red square
5 and 7 November in the city centre will change bus routes due to the preparation and carrying out of a solemn March in honour of the 78th anniversary of the military parade of 1941.
From 06:00 until the end of the event buses M5 will follow from Nagorno Boulevard to the street Baltschug, and buses No. 158 — from 3-go Paveletsky journey to street Balchug.
For more information about change the city bus routes is available on the website Mosgortrans.
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South Africa Info Forums > Your Resources > Your Education > Institute of Humanities, Social Sciences to be established
Full Version: Institute of Humanities, Social Sciences to be established
Pretoria - The Department of Higher Education and Training intends establishing a National Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences in the next few months.
“I have taken this initiative in order to ensure that the humanities and social sciences are not neglected as we focus on the urgent issues of developing our economy and providing it with the scientific, industrial, and commercial skills,†said Minister of Higher Education and Training, Dr Blade Nzimande, at a memorial service for Professor Bernard Magubane on Wednesday.
He said as important as these skills are, people often neglect the social sciences at their peril.
“The work started by Prof Magubane and others like him, must not be forgotten and must be built upon. It is important to our identity as a nation and it contributes importantly to our understanding of our social and political systems and therefore guides the policies that we adopt and the actions we take as a government,†Nzimande said.
He said academics like Prof Magubane have ensured that they record and analyse the processes which have shaped society such as colonialism, conquest and cultural domination, the reserves or Bantustans and the migrant labour system, the nature of apartheid and its relationship to capitalism.
He said as the nation, bows their heads in tribute to Professor Magubane and extend their deepest condolences to his family and friends, they should know that his life well lived.
“He was a credit to his country, to his movement and to his family. He will be remembered by us all,†Nzimande said.
He said South Africa should use his legacy to ensure that educational opportunities are provided to all South Africans. “If we don’t do this, we must know that it is certain that we are depriving not only talented individuals of an opportunity to reach their potential, but also we are depriving our country of a vast pool of talent,†he said.
Prof Magubane was one of South Africa’s leading social scientists – a historian and sociologist.
An eminent academic and a leading Marxist intellectual, he spent many years in exile, teaching at universities in the United States where he was a member of the ANC and a leading activist of the anti-apartheid movement in the USA. – SAnews.gov.za
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Fossil Free UK
About Fossil Free UK
Campaign Guide
Divestment Hub
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Let Communities Decide
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Framing Climate Justice
Mondial (Français)
Common arguments from decision-makers
How to respond to these common complaints about divestment…
A growing body of evidence suggests that it is fossil fuel investments that are increasingly risky, and that many fossil free portfolios are outperforming their conventional counterparts. Key arguments and resource to use relating to this are here.
Top tips:
While it’s important to point out the positive statistics on fossil free portfolio performance, leading with divestment as a money making strategy isn’t a great idea (even if you may end up being right!). You’re not a financial advisor after all. Focusing on climate risk and “risk exposure” of a portfolio to fossil fuels is a more persuasive line.
It’s worth clarifying the divestment ask gives them 5 years to extract themselves, as this is sometimes a sticking point.
It’s also worth pointing to all the organisations that have already divested and are doing fine.
Once the decision has been made, it’s often just a case of instructing the financial officer or external asset manager to apply exclusion classes.
Here’s some resources to help:
Institutional Pathways to Fossil Free Investing: Endowment Management in a Warming World
Climate Proofing Your Investments: Moving Funds out of Fossil Fuels
List of Exclusions by Asset Class
Remember: here’s the Fossil Free Divestment Ask.
Shareholder engagement has been a crucial tactic at creating change in all sorts of areas from the living wage to curbing executive pay, but there are some reasons why we think divestment may be a more powerful option in the case of fossil fuels:
There is no track record of success for challenging the business model of a company rather than specific corporate practices. So far no engagement strategies has developed an ask or a timeline that matches the size or urgency of the climate challenge and the need to keep 80% of fossil fuels in the ground.
The engagement clout from the organisations we’re dealing with is minimal in financial and ‘shareholder power’ terms
The vast sums of money going into political lobbying and further extraction and stated commitment to burning all of their reserves shows the fossil fuel industry is not willing to change their stripes.
A recent United Nations report on emissions disclosure from the ‘Principles for a Responsible Investment Academic Network’ further confirmed “pressure from the state, NGOs and the public impact a corporation’s decision to report GHG emissions data, but pressure from equity investors and debt lenders does not.”
Further resources making the case against engagement:
350.org’s response on engagement in the Guardian
Jonathon Porritt: ‘Engaging with fossil fuel companies over climate change is futile’
Clean Yield: Talking to the Hand: Why Engagement With Fossil Fuel Companies Offers So Little Promise
Green Century: The power and limitations of shareholder advocacy with fossil fuel companies
GreenBiz: Why shareholder engagement with fossil-fuel companies won’t work
Ben Franta: Why We Must Divest From Fossil Fuel: A Student’s Open Letter To Harvard President Drew Faust
Clean Yield: MA Divestment Testimony
Bevis Lonstreth: How, Given Norway’s Control of Statoil, to Dovetail Active Ownership With Exclusion
Hurrah – that’s a great start and make sure to celebrate this victory. Tar sands and coal are some of the dirtiest fossil fuels. 99% of tar sands need to be kept underground to meet the 2 degrees target, and coal is generally seen to be in the way out.
Even if we abandoned coal and tar sands completely however, that wouldn’t be enough to stop runaway climate change and institutions need to be pushed further.
Fiduciary responsibility, or fiduciary duty, is a legal term meaning that trustees must act in the best interest of the ‘fiduciary’ or ‘fiduciaries’ – which could be an institution like a university, or individual pension holders for a pension board trustee.
In many cases, this duty is interpreted to mean maximising short term returns at the expense of all other factors. As such, many administrators justify a policy of continuing to invest in fossil fuels by stating that any other course of action would be breaking their legal responsibility.
Growing concern that this current interpretation tends to overemphasise short-term performance while neglecting longer-term risks prompted the 2012 Kay Review into Equity Markets and Long-term Decision and 2014 UK Law Commission Report to support a broader interpretation of fiduciary duty – suggesting that socially and environmentally responsible approaches to investment are, at the least, consistent with this duty, and that institutional investors acting in their clients’ best interests should consider the environmental and social impacts of their investments.
As this ruling is relatively new, decision makers should be pointed towards this summary of the Law Commission ruling.
The review states that “the primary aim of an investment strategy is therefore to secure the best realistic return over the long term, given the need to control for risks.” Financial risks to take into consideration included “environmental degradation”, “poor safety record”, and “risks to a company’s long-term sustainability.”
“The Law Commission’s conclusion is that there is no impediment to trustees taking account of environmental, social or governance factors where there are or may be, financially material.”
They state that environmental concerns may also be taken into account as a non-financial factor so long as there is there is no “significant impact on returns” and “trustees have a good reason to think that scheme members would share the concern.”
The Law Commission suggests that administering authority’s requirement to diversify their investments does not prohibit fossil fuel divestment, stating “the law does not require a portfolio to be diversified to the fullest extent possible.” … “for example, in Harries, the Church Commissioners reached the view that excluding 13% of the market would be acceptable, while excluding 37% would not be.”
The UK Government has agreed to implement the recommendations of the Law Commission:
“Fiduciaries such as pension scheme trustees have a duty to consider any factors which are, or may be, financially material to the performance of an investment …this should include taking into account environmental and social, and corporate governance factors and wider macroeconomic considerations, where trustees think these may be financially material.”
“[We] share(s) the Law Commission’s hope that this report will remove any remaining misconception that fiduciaries duties require trustees to focus on maximising short-term returns alone.”
“The interpretation of fiduciary duty has evolved significantly over time and must continue to evolve to adjust to changing social and economic realities” – Smith School Stranded Assets Programme
UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said “Investment decisions need to reflect the clear scientific evidence, and fiduciary responsibility needs to grasp the intergenerational reality: namely that unchecked climate change has the potential to impact and eventually devastate the lives, livelihoods and savings of many, now and well into the future,” she added bankers would be “blatantly in breach of their fiduciary duty” if they failed to accelerate the greening of their portfolios.
Top tip for Local Government Campaigners:
In March 2014 the Local Government Association (LGA) (England & Wales) published a legal opinion on how fiduciary duties affected the scope for a Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) fund to incorporate ESG risks into their decision making, concluding that as long as authority’s powers are used only for investment purposes “the precise choice of investment may be influenced by wider social, ethical or environmental considerations, so long as that that does not risk material financial detriment to the fund.”
ShareAction lays out fiduciary duty here
Reagan era SEC Commissioner: The Financial Case for Divestment of Fossil Fuel Companies by Endowment Fiduciaries
Pensions & Investments: Divesting is an exercise in real fiduciary care
The economic benefits need to square with our ERISA fiduciary responsibilities
Most institutions will use external asset managers and consultants to manage their money on a day to day basis (and pay an enormous amount for the pleasure). Some key things to note are:
Whoever manages the money, the ultimate decision rests with the trustees at your institutions. If they say divest, the asset managers have to do it (or they can threaten to find someone else that will)
Asset managers aren’t neutral – they will be consulted around decisions like divestment, and may say things like ‘it’s just not possible’ and derail the process.
Some institutions claim that engagement is happening through their asset managers (who are entrusted to vote at AGMs on their behalf) – often this is lip service, and it’s worth checking the voting record of the asset managers and flagging this up to officials
ShareAction conduct an annual asset managers survey to compare firms against each other
This argument has been put forward by a number of institutions, including Harvard, that are unwilling to divest. But now the debate is public, investments are political if you like it or not – you’re either with the fossil fuel industry or you’re not!
Divestment is about political rather than financial power, so if the ditched shares are bought up by some faceless investor, it doesn’t really matter. The point is that a public institution has stood up to the fossil fuel industry and set out its stall for climate action, and the fossil fuel industry can’t undo that reputational hit very easily.
Oxford University Smith School ‘Stranded Assets’ Report:
‘The outcome of the stigmatisation process, which the fossil fuel divestment campaign has now triggered, poses the most far-reaching threat to fossil fuel companies and the vast energy value chain’.
Divestment movements have been incredibly powerful in the past, and there’s more information about ours here.
Where the institution chooses to ‘reinvest’ may be determined by both its mission, and its current investment strategy and asset allocation criteria. There are some examples of local reinvestment here, and it’s worth looking around for local options to suggest (without giving financial advice).
While the options for reinvestment have sometimes seemed limited, especially for larger investors, it’s important to note that:
The number of ‘fossil free’ products out there is growing, so encourage them to take a look. Many of the large index providers now have fossil free options, as a good place to start.
When investors (especially large institutions) have signaled that they are ready to divest in the past (eg South African Apartheid), products were created (within days) to meet their demand. Institutions that have asked their manager lineup if they can help them go fossil free, by and large, have received positive reactions.
If you are addressing trustees, challenge them to post a request for proposal (RFP) and see what comes back.
Resources from the US:
Green America: List of Fossil Free Products and Managers
US SIF: Separate Account Managers (look for asterisk under the “Screening & Advocacy” tab)
US SIF: Mutual Fund Chart (look for asterisk under the “Screening & Advocacy” tab)
Divest-Invest: Resources (Invest tab)
Fossil Free Indices: Fossil Free Indexes (S&P500 with Parametric), MSCI (with Blackrock), FTSE (with Blackrock)
← back to divestment arguments
This site is maintained by 350.org. Read our privacy policy.
Visit Fossil Free Global
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Fireground Tactics
Clutter or "Collyer's Mansion" Conditions
captnjak
Is it just me or are people gathering and keeping more stuff than ever in their houses? It seems like more and more fires are affected by this. It can be a real pain in the ***. Or much worse when crap is piled floor to ceiling.
Anyone changing tactics on these?
We have recently changed to "light, medium or heavy clutter" to identify these houses or apartments. It gives a better idea of what is there versus just saying "Collyer's Mansion conditions.
FyredUp
I have run across several light to medium clutter and one heavy clutter. The heavy clutter had pathways through the rooms between the stacks of clothing, garbage, rotting food and cat feces. Fortunately we were not there for a fire but an EMS assist. The stench was unbelievable. All of our turn-out gear had to be washed after that call.
I like the rating scale and I will discuss that with the command staff at my combo department. I think with heavy clutter tactics need to change simply because of the added danger of collapse of the piles burying and trapping firefighters.
Crazy, but that's how it goes
Millions of people living as foes
Maybe it's not too late
To learn how to love, and forget how to hate
Light to medium can amount to little more than a nuisance. Heavy clutter can be a game changer. Or maybe should be a game changer. Entrapment is a major concern in my mind. Every thing will be slowed down so even a RIT response would be delayed. Water application too. After a while structural collapse becomes a real concern.
I think outside streams or at least the need for alternative access for hose lines should be considered. We must accept that searches will be delayed. Additional resources should be requested sooner rather than later.
Originally posted by captnjak View Post
I agree 100% with what you said here.
WOW! I expected this to be a great discussion.
Originally posted by FyredUp View Post
Or at least a mediocre discussion.
I really am curious if it is a nation-wide trend. Or do all the hoarders tend to live where I work?
I 100% believe it is a national trend. Because we have it in rural Wisconsin too.
The weird element to me though is you would think it would automatically be a sign of mental illness and yet that doesn't always seem to be the case. Sometimes it seems to just be a thing that got bigger than the people can handle. Those would be the light to medium clutter. Often a collector, or an older person that just doesn't want to throw anything away, or just plain hoarder shop-a-holic. They differ from the piles of garbage and newspapers and animal feces that you tend to see in the heavy clutter mental illness situations.
Definitely agree there are two levels to this stuff. I've seen situations that could only be explained by real mental illness.
The hard part is that we have no real enforcement action available to us. We have little power here over what people do inside their homes.
RFDACM02
No doubt this seems to be a growing issue. We see these popping up all the time when our crews are doing EMS. Early on in my career we had two fires within a year that both required adjusting tactics due to heavy clutter. The second fire I was conducting VES and couldn't find the floor and no way to close the door due the amount of everything, exited and reported conditions. Luckily no one was inside. Turned out to be more of a second floor issue where one resident created these conditions, the rest of the building was pretty "normal".
We have struggled finding a way to deal with heavy clutter conditions via codes, legal, or mental health professionals. It just doesn't seem anyone is the one resource.
len1582
Generally the first officer in will inform incoming units of "Collyer's Mansion" conditions.
If it's a confirmed fire, you should consider a larger fuel load in the apartment, or entire house, resulting in a larger fire than in your average dwelling. A simple room and contents fire might not be so simple. Access to a rear bedroom can be difficult resulting in a delay getting water on the fire, causing the fire to grow and spread. Also, having to climb over contents through narrow halls to get to the fire will also require climbing over the same junk to exit. Keep this in mind when leaving to change your SCBA bottle, or if conditions deteriorate and there's a need to evacuate. Much of the firefighting could be in the hands of the first engine and truck, as there might not be sufficient room for a back up line.
captnjak, so what are your normal tactics on a heavy clutter fire incident? Offensive? Into the debris laden residence? Or Defensive? Exterior streams?
Tactics haven't necessarily changed yet. It is only relatively recently that we have really acknowledged it as a serious problem. The big push now is recognition of the conditions, communication of the conditions and an adjustment to the level of aggressiveness employed. Our biggest problem (and maybe it's true for all departments) is acknowledging we HAVE a problem. Change comes slow. We sent engine company after engine company into public hallways of fireproof multiple dwellings that were literal infernos for years before admitting we had to change.
I believe more concrete guidelines need to be issued. Specific alternatives are not officially listed anywhere. Alternate access for hoselines would be a start. Take a line up a portable and hit the fire through a window if it is a private dwelling or smaller multiple dwelling. Breach walls in larger multiple dwellings. Breach walls in attached frame buildings. Use the floor below nozzle. Maybe even try a cellar distributor or cockloft nozzle (upside down) from the floor above. Admit and accept that the searches will be seriously delayed (a huge deal for us).
Getting out of a heavy clutter situation in a hurry is somewhere between difficult and impossible IMO. Pulling off a successful RIT operation would take a small miracle.
We can't go defensive in multiple dwellings. Too many floors and apartments. We have numerous non-fireproof apartment buildings that are quite large (and unsprinklered). Stairs are unenclosed in many of them, allowing smoke and heat to spread upward. There are also open vertical voids (pipe chases, dumbwaiter shafts, vertical I-beams, etc). Numerous apartments adjacent to and above the fire apartment require searching. The best we can do is go transitional. That is historically a dirty word around here. But we're working on it.
I understand the need for a search, obviously saving lives is our primary mission. The difficulty, as you have explained, is getting in, maneuvering among the debris, and the concerns of disorientation and worrying about the fear of collapse of high piled junk. I can't imagine the difficulty of attempting a RIT operation in one of those buildings.
I am curious of why transitional is still a dirty word there. I am fascinated by the animosity towards this tactic. If a few seconds of water can make entry for us safer and make conditions more survivable for civilian victims what's the problem?
tbzep
I believe it to be national also. I work in a small city and volunteer in a rural county dept. I've seen everything from the floor being lined with a 6" layer of clothes and garbage, all the way up to climbing over stuff piled nearly to the ceilings in every room with both depts.
Last edited by tbzep; 06-28-2018, 02:17 PM.
It's a cultural thing. We have long prided ourselves on aggressive interior attack. We have the resources to do it but mostly we have a need to do it. Unless a window is on the front of a building and on a reachable floor we can't hit it from the outside. There are rooms with no window access at all. Buildings are attached on each side and getting the hoseline to the rear isn't much easier than getting it to the fire floor. In my mind a transitional attack must happen quickly or it is not a benefit.
Change comes slow. We do now have chief and company officers who understand the benefit of a quick shot through a window and will order it done where and when it is called for. But we are not at a point where all will do it all the time.
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Main Massassi Forums
Thread: The Rise of Skywalker
Doesn't care what his title is
Christmas Cardmaker Extrordinarie
Umm... wtf?
I thought all the skywalkers were dead... I guess maybe that's the "rise" part.
Not impressed, really. Flips aren't cool anymore. Lando is p. cool tho. And the emperor at end? Yawn.
saberopus
Likes Kittens. Eats Fluffies
I laughed at all the prequel memes in the youtube comments a couple hours ago, NGL
^^vv<><>BASTART
Ahh, just posted about this in the movie thread. Yeah, this looks bad from so many perspectives.
Originally Posted by Steven
Yeah. Green screen wire flips are seriously super early 2000's. The Matrix kicked it off, then you had films like Kill Bill and the prequels which all made gratuitous use of it.
It just looks ****ing dated now. Everyone knows how it's done, and I can't see them without also seeing the air-conditioned green screen studio they filmed it all in. There is no veneer of plausibility to any of it, it just makes me wince.
The Emperor reeks of desperation. They realize that Kylo is a character a huge amount of people actually found compelling, but set him up to be a villain in TLJ.. so where do you go? I guess you need a new villain to displace Kylo, who is 100% not dying now because fans.
Reverend Jones
The title is easily explained.
Rise of Skywalker => end of saga loops back to beginning, making it Infinite. Just like David Bowman turns into a space fetus at the end of 2001.
ECHOMAN
"Has it won yet?"
Just not feeling it.
Also why are we back in a desert again. And why is Rey an aerobatics master now.
SnailIracing:n(500tpostshpereline)pants
-----------------------------@%
Thrawn[numbarz]
colonpee addict
Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only person on this website who still likes Star Wars
Originally Posted by Thrawn[numbarz]
I'm a grumpy old man who can't enjoy anything anymore
Further explanation for the title of this film:
Shimi is Rey
Edit: 4chan.org/tv confirms!
Last edited by Reverend Jones; 04-12-2019 at 04:18 PM.
stop lookin at 4chan so much
I would have rather seen a jedi grab the tie fighter in midair and hurl it into a mountain
I want to see some goku vs vegeta kind of stuff
Originally Posted by saberopus
I didn't find it there, I just made sure my own independent conclusion was shared by the greatest minds of the day. I actually got there through a google search but the thread is active as of a few hours ago.
Jon`C
Admiral of Awesome
I like good Star Wars.
The funny thing about my little Rey theory is that it only involves the $$$-bookends around that good part (the OT), meaning you can chop them off and forget about it if you dislike both 4chan and crappy movies.
Originally Posted by Jon`C
So like...ESB?
Hey, it's right in the middle, so as you go in either direction...
Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back are the only masterpiece Star Wars films.
Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and I guess Rogue One are the only watchable Star Wars films. Maybe Solo in parts.
Everything else is pretty bad.
I can agree with that, although I rate RotJ far, far higher than Rogue One, probably because it carries over all the good parts of the first two OT movies for the most part (with a heaping serving of Ewok cheese and other filler that I can overlook).
After TFA and TLJ (both which gave me little more than a headache and confusion, with their non-existent or contrived, happenstance and tedium driven action-based 'plots'), I don't think I'll bother to see Solo or even TRoShimi.
Originally Posted by Reid
I thought Rogue One was pretty unwatchable, personally.
And like...I do have my old guy purist gripes with the new movies as much as anybody, but...we spent an awful lot of time on this site talking about/making & playing mods about the prequel movies, and those were terrible. The new stuff is certainly flawed but I really think the userbase has changed a lot more than the films have.
Those mods weren't terrible as part of a cynical and calculated decision to maximize the $$$, though. In fact for all their faults, they're more like indie art than schlock IMO.
Originally Posted by Reverend Jones
wait, forgot about TODOA
(OK, I'll admit that Rogue One has its merits, seen in the right light )
The mods were largely uncritically embracing the prequel movies (which were also cynical and calculated to maximize the $$$) though, is my point. They represented an enthusiasm for (bad) Star Wars that isn't here now.
Ah, that's fair. I remember a whole slew of double-bladed light saber mods, and all other manner of Duel of the Fates -ish fan mods / levels. I guess back then we were all just a bit more optimistic about the franchise?
Eversor
Given to fly
TPM seemed like a better movie before the subsequent prequels came out. (I think it also feels much more like a Star Wars movie than the other prequels.)
I think so, and I think it was very much tied to age. I was 10 when The Phantom Menace came out. I thought podracing and AATs and battle droids were ****ing awesome. I didn't realize it was bad and I was supposed to hate it until internet forums told me so later. Revenge of the Sith is my least favorite of the prequel movies, and I don't know if that's because it's dour and visually ugly (which is what I've always told myself) or because I was starting to age out of that stuff.
You were mentioning the messy plotting of the new movies (and I agree, it is), but a lot of that could be said for the OT--the insane post-Hoth timeline of ESB, the absolutely bat**** opening of RotJ, probably more. We just don't care because we had a great time.
I think a lot of the critiques being levied at these new movies ("how did Rey learn to do a flip," "how did they get to that planet so fast,") whatever, aren't the reasons people didn't like the movies. People watched a Star War and didn't feel the way they did when they were watching Star Wars as a kid and are searching for reasons why.
Phantom-Seraph
Of the Opera!
One could also argue we tolerated the prequels because we knew the story was going to eventually go somewhere we knew and love. The sequels on the other hand don't have a clear objective on where they are going to go. We knew Anakin was somehow going to turn into a badass, and there was some draw to that. I cant say I care what happens to anyone in the continuing story anymore since they weren't planned and therefore lack any foreshadowing, or other forms of audience investment.
For Quality Entertainment?
Originally Posted by Eversor
Yeah, this is something I'm torn about. Most people agree that it's the worst movie of the entire series. And yet if you imagine a universe where eps. 2 & 3 were never made, I think it stands by itself fairly well. For some reason it feels like a different universe, and in its own way, has a certain aesthetic depth to its plot & setting that I can't quite describe, and perhaps could have evolved into something quite different than the more action-driven Clones & Revenge. That said... it was still pretty bad in too many ways.
Originally Posted by Phantom-Seraph
I just don't see this--since when do we only care abt stories if we know the ending already? And Anakin sucked from day one and was everyone's least favorite part of the prequels, Jar Jar notwithstanding. People loved the spaceship explosions and the laser swords. And the flips.
I'm a huge fan of TPM just for the imagination in setting and production design (and SOUND design, which is so good throughout the prequels and one area where I think the new movies really dropped the ball). Yeah the script is a mess and the acting is bad, but if it hadn't been a Star Wars movie, with all the weight of those expectations, I think it'd be a fondly-remembered cult classic today.
I agree a lot of the Prequel stuff was bad, but I think the new trilogy kinda hits more of a nerve with the userbase. Especially when Disney takes the actual ideas and actors from the OT, the faces we are so familiar with. Now they even got Billy Dee Williams (where was he hiding for the past 30 years?). The Prequels did their own thing, silly as they sometimes were, but the Sequels just can't be divorced from the OT.
With how big Disney is and the fact that LucasFilms is just a name now, it's really hard to not embrace the cynicism unfortunately. :/
Regarding the Rey flipping around comment: I thought it was believable for Rey to go around Starkiller base easily because she was familiar with climbing around Imperial stuff back in her home planet (those opening scenes in the junkyard). And basic combat in TLA because she had to fend for herself from childhood. Was that intended? Dunno, but it made some sense. But then TLJ happen and things just went weird.
I still think Droidekas are awesome.
Last edited by ECHOMAN; 04-12-2019 at 07:00 PM.
Wookie06
I personally never understand this opinion from real Star Wars fans but opinions are like a certain bodily orifice. Everyone's got one.
I'm actually somewhat optimistic about this new film but after the train wreck that is The Last Jedi it doesn't have to do much to be better. I think it would have been better to not tease the Emperor but I guess it's going to be pretty hard to remain spoiler free until the movie is available to [legally] watch at home.
"I would rather claim to be an uneducated man than be mal-educated and claim to be otherwise." - Wookie 03:16
The epic revenue implosion implies that the new movies actually are much worse and in a different way than the prequels
I think it’s the best prequel by a pretty wide margin, actually. It’s a freestanding story that doesn’t seem constrained by having to fit into the rest of the “saga.” And it has the feature that ESB and ANH have, where you follow characters as they travel through the galaxy. It doesn’t jump around from world to world, following different plot lines, as LotR does, or the other prequels do, which actually makes the galaxy seem a lot smaller, because it lacks any sense of discovery.
Also, they didn’t green screen the **** out of it.
Originally Posted by ECHOMAN
I think if they'd left out the original cast members entirely there would have been just as many complaints, lots of "it's just not Star Wars." They're kind of in a damned-if-you-do scenario. The real problem with Star Wars is that "Star Wars" means something different to everyone who likes it. But everyone thinks their feelings abt Star Wars are universal. You can't make a Star Wars movie that everyone will like. It's why Rogue One didn't succeed despite being designed in a lab to appeal to old-guard Star Wars fans who only liked the OT and practical effects.
That's pretty understandable, and a lot of my friends and coworkers have been fired b/c of Disney so I definitely don't have a rosy-eyed view of everything they do. I think their handing exclusive game rights to EA was not a good move from a user POV. But I do think they've actually done a pretty decent job thus far of encouraging risk-taking like Rogue One and Solo and The Last Jedi. Arguably those risks did not pay off and I wouldn't be surprised to see them start reigning their creative talent in moving forward, but they could have been playing it a LOT safer than they have been so far.
I totally think there's a lot of stuff in the new movies that's dumb and makes no sense, I'm just saying there's a lot of stuff in the old movies that's also dumb and make so sense. I don't think that's the reason we like or dislike these movies--it's the stuff we pick at after the fact to try to understand our emotional reaction & why we can't recapture that sense of childhood wonder (imo? it's cause we're old and mad now)
Droidekas ARE awesome and I used to have a toy one that you could roll on the floor and it'd flip open. I think. Maybe that was a Bionicle.
Solo was a disaster but the rest of them have made more than the prequel films if I'm not mistaken? I am very interested to see how Revenge of Skywalker does.
Even so, I think the churn out time for what suppose to be the new main-line trilogy is surprising, eyebrow-raising-ly short and the seams are coming apart fast. I feel that Rian Johnson could have made TLJ something much better given the time. Speculation of course, but here we are and its the last movie already.
Is it the optimal approach for Disney to burn out this license as quick as possible than to gradually move forward? After all, they bought the rights and didn't raise it up from nothing.
When I say I like it, I mean that only in that I can completely turn my brain off and it doesn't try to pretentious me with its characters or plot. So it's watchable. Not magnificent at all.
Ironically the Darth Vader hallways scene is one I like least. It's far too fan servicey for me.
10 year olds also think the gummy bear song is the height of music. Realizing **** you liked as a kid is awful isn't a defect, it's something that hopefully happens. Kids have much different taste from adults
Some internet denizens argue that Star Wars was "always for kids" and that if you don't like it now you're just ""jaded"". Which is just ****ing wrong, I don't even know how to express it any other way. Star Wars and ESB were very clearly written for a more adult audience. Lucas purposefully diverted aspects of the film to sell more toys. So yeah, the two films most adults agree are the best Star Wars films are also the ones which make no attempt to appeal to children. In other news, adults don't listen to the gummy bear song.
Also, as an aside, I absolutely hate "nostalgia!" arguments. Nostalgia to me is when you can't detach yourself from emotions and rewatch something critically. There are parts of ESB I think are very weak. The Hoth battle is a good example. Most of the ships flying look pretty bad, and the stop motion on the AT-ATs looks crappy. It was an achievement for the time but it doesn't hold up. I felt like skipping it when I watched ESB a couple months back.
That said, I still think all in all it's a great film, for some reasons I'll express below.
Alright, I'll let you in on a little secret. Generally speaking, plot comes second to characters when making a timeless film. The Dark Knight, for instance, is not remembered for the plot. It's remembered for Heath Ledger's astonishing performance as the Joker. The OT may not have had the best performances ever, but Harrison Ford gave one of his best and the characterization holds up well.
I recommend rewatching the OT in terms of characters, then watch the ST. When you try and ask the question "how is the character developing in this scene?" you will find the ST spends a massive amount of time jerking off over nostalgia and generally wasting time doing very little. The OT pushes characters forward in a much more direct and consistent way. It's not unique or flashy, but it's well-done, and that's a huge reason the films still work today.
So yeah, the fact ESB's plot moves forward well is enough. Small time frame holes don't add up to much when the film successfully invests you in the characters.
So I agree with this, 100%, people are dumb and don't understand the films. The biggest issue with Rey is the film doesn't do much to get you involved with her or care at all. She's just characterized very weakly.
Even so, I think the churn out time for what suppose to be the new main-line trilogy is surprising short and the seams are coming apart fast. I feel that Rian Johnson could have made TLJ something much better given the time. Speculation of course, but here we are and its the last movie already.
Is it the optimal approach for Disney to burn out this license as quick as possible than to gradually move forward?
No, I think you're right about the turnaround time. I think they imagined they could run it the same as Marvel and they're finding that's not the case. I hope they dial it back to one movie every two years or something, but I'm not confident that'll happen. They may well run it into the ground.
IMO Solo was a bellwether for those one-off movies they wanted to do more than it was a referendum on TLJ, but I guess time will tell.
Alright, I'll let you in on a little secret. Generally speaking, plot comes second to characters when making a timeless film. I recommend rewatching the OT in terms of characters, then watch the ST. When you try and ask the question "how is the character developing in this scene?" you will find the ST spends a massive amount of time jerking off over nostalgia and generally wasting time doing very little. The OT pushes characters forward in a much more direct and consistent way. It's not unique or flashy, but it's well-done, and that's a huge reason the films still work today.
oh my god is this what being a woman feels like all the time
Last edited by Thrawn[numbarz]; 04-12-2019 at 07:58 PM.
No, the optimal strategy is what Bob Iger is doing. Give the IP some time to breathe before deciding where to go. It's clear that with Solo he decided to pump the brakes on future projects.
TLJ box office is about even with TPM adjusted for inflation. But its production budget was 3 times bigger, marketing budget was Disney times bigger, and it had every possible tailwind working for it, including distribution deals that forced theatres to give up a much larger take and run it on more screens for longer (crowding out the competition).
Basically, even Disney knew it was gonna be ****. I’m not afraid to agree with them.
Then there’s the merchandising. Disney doesn’t break it down but FY18 had BF2, Solo and TLJ, and they were down pretty far from FY17 on merchandising. Word is, TLJ toys sold much worse than even Rogue One toys, but the high water mark was Star Wars Classic toys sold in 2015 in the lead up to TFA and revenues haven’t recovered since that movie came out.
I’m not writing this to say “well the free markets deciding something so you should hate it too”, I’m just saying, I can smell a dead fish. This is going very differently than the prequels did.
That's fair--I was wondering abt the merchandising numbers. One of the really irritating things abt TLJ was how much it became a political shibboleth, all my idpol feminist friends say they love it and all the gamergaters say they hate it. I always thought the internet hate for that movie was a non-representative echo chamber but I may be suffering from the same thing. I really am genuinely interested to see how the next movie does. If it does anywhere near as poorly as Solo I will concede defeat, haha
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Doom 3 BFG Edition
Re: Doom 3 BFG Edition
by cylonsurfer
Any news from your Dev team Seth? Is it looking likely they'll be interested in picking this up?
Posted: Mon Oct 29, 2012 10:29 am
by Seth Steiling
There is interest, for sure. But...
[quote=NaturalPoint - Seth]One significant qualifier on this D3 BFG possibility--our devs work on three product platforms simultaneously--TrackIR being one of them--and they're presently heads down working on our largest development project in company history for our OptiTrack line. So it's probably safe to assume that nobody will be available to jump on a mod project next week.[/quote]
I'll refer back to this and say that we're literally swamped with the largest project we've undertaken in quite some time--probably our company's history. While a D3 BFG mod is something we'd like to explore, it realistically can't be on our radar for the next while.
Unfortunately, the status remains the same. All hands on deck on another, humongous project. I'm expecting things to remain the same for the next 3-6 months.
Posted: Thu Dec 06, 2012 11:35 am
So what you are sayng is that you are going to ignore all support for a product that you have sold to a large amount of customers and continue to do so. A Very, very poor attitude, "we have your money now get lost while we make more working on somthing else". If you expect to continue selling TrackIR I would seriously hope to see more commitment from you guys.
I'll be sure to make my views very clear in as many public places as possible. Waiting 3 - 6 months for you to look at "maybe" supporting a game is just unacceptable. Hopefully I can prevent others from wasting a lot of money on a product you clearly do not have much love for.
3 - 6 months for your product to further stagnate - come on. It's time to act like professionals who are selling a product they intend to continue to support.
Things do not look good for TrackIR. Such as shame.
Do you intend on putting such news on your main page? Something along the lines of "Beware, we do not intended to work on further TrackIR game support for 3 - 6 months, we have more important clients to consider". At least your customers can make an informed choice on whether to purchase or not, instead of laying down a lot of money for TrackIR only to find out that Mouse Emulation is the best it can offer and you have little or no interest in adding new game compatibility.
Hi CylonSurfer. I appreciate your frustration over this situation, but please understand--that's not at all what I'm saying. We will continue to support TrackIR with our API, working hand in hand with developers to officially integrate head tracking in their titles--the same thing we've done in the 130+ games that already support our tech.
That pipeline is established, stable, and efficient, and as such is totally sustainable. It's also agile enough that it allows us to continue to support new games even while we're in the midst of a major dev phase. Modding is a far more laborious and uncertain pathway to support. That doesn't mean we're opposed to it. It does, however, mean that when we're in the middle of a project, with all of our developers working day and night to complete it, we're not able to just drop everything and tackle a new task that's outside of our standard pipeline for product development.
Doing so might seem reasonable--or even critical--from an external viewpoint, but that's not the way software development works. If that's how we operated our business, we literally could not keep the doors open. We would never complete anything, and the quality of all of our projects would suffer.
Taking a macro view of our history--we've been developing and selling head tracking technology for a decade. We've had steady adoption over that time, and we continue to expand our supported game library. That we don't have the time in the middle of another project to service this mod request does not mean that TrackIR is in a bad place, or that no work is being done on it at all. It just means that our programmers are currently tasked.
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N2EY Premium Subscriber QRZ Page
WA8KJP said: ↑
Yes, what you are saying is pretty much true. But what is the point other than to state the obvious? I think everybody knows what you are saying and would agree with it.
The way a lot of hams talk, it's not obvious at all.
73 de Jim, N2EY
N2EY, Mar 20, 2013
W2VW Ham Member QRZ Page
Hmmm...they don't, to me.
Their pinouts and filament requirements, and even anode ratings, look similar or identical. But the 4-400A etc. have metal shells at their bases and different anode material (metal vs. graphite) and quite different internal construction -- although 3-500Z's have varied in construction quite a bit over the decades and most new ones don't look like the original Eimac product internally.
Unfortunately, the manufacturers seem to keep the metallurgy and processes pretty closely guarded, so I can't find if there are differences in the Kovar pin seals and such; there might be, but it's hard to tell. I "think" they're all gettered with Zirconium powder applied to the anodes, but even that process is likely different depending upon the base metal of the anode, and all the "new generation" 500Zs are graphite (the original 1960s-1970s Eimacs weren't).
I have a HB 4-1000A amp I built in 1984 using a "pull" tube that was date coded in the 70s, and it's transmitted thousands of hours for me with no signs of deterioration at all (running about 1500W PEP output, which is a bit below its ratings). Some original Eimac 500Zs seem to have enjoyed similar lives; I don't know of "any" modern 3-500ZGs, which is really all that's available today, which have. Something's changed.
A lot has changed Steve. We're older, boatanchors are worth money, rectifier diodes don't need parallel capacitors for the last 30 years.... One thing at a time.
Metal base means zero to the supposed internal gassing due to prolonged storage. The base is outside the vacuum. Compare apples to apples. Eimac only. There are 4-400s whose plate structure looks exactly like a 3-500. Many don't. They look like 4-250s with fins added. Still the 4-400s with the cookie cutter plate structure (similar if not identical to the second generation 160 mu 3-500) are not known to fail from being shelved.
There are still plenty of AM broadcast engineers around who would know. I'm just a guy with a lot of old stuff in my basement.
Anyone with battle experience? Is the "gear" plate 4-400 problematic verses the finned plate style?
Maybe the 4-400s with the gear like plates WERE problematic. I auditioned a pile of these tubes last winter for use in a Viking 500 here. The finned ones are still here. 1 "gear" plate 4-400 filled with smoke when lit. Another had very poor emission. Off resonance plate current was way down from the others tested.
Seems to me there's a whole lot of Chicken Little advise on ham radio sites. Discourages new ops from anything but buying new stuff. Then the same guys complain new guys know nothing.
One must break a few eggs to make an omelet.
W2VW, Mar 21, 2013
W2VW said: ↑
Metal base means zero to the supposed internal gassing due to prolonged storage. The base is outside the vacuum.
True, but I mentioned it because it's an obvious difference. The metal shell is normally plugged into a socket having grounding clips that ground it and add mechanical support to the base (at least, in all the commercial transmitters I've ever seen using the tetrodes) and make it very difficult to install the tube at a "tilt," which places stress on the pins -- the 500Z doesn't have that feature.
I mention the difference in anode material mostly because it seems likely the gettering process would be somewhat different, based on the metal used (not the gettering material, but the base metal), and that could make a difference as well.
An interesting observation: I've used 4-400As in 3-500Z amplifiers lots of times, even in SB-220s. An SB-220 run at 800mA Ip for a while can make the filament pins so hot they can melt solder, and I've had that happen. But the same amp run the same way with 4-400As in it...I've never, ever seen that happen. This may reveal a difference in the way the pins are attached.
WB2WIK, Mar 21, 2013
Put some well bypassed screen voltage and a little negative bias on that 4-400. Drive it through the cathode now with same drive used in the 3-500Z test : )
I can't think of a reason nor have I ever heard from any source that the plate structure of a tube like a 4-400 or 3-500z made any difference. The original 3-500z (1968) that Eimac manufactured had carbon plates. After a few years Eimac put metal plates in them because of the cost of carbon. (carbon plates had to be made on a lathe) In the late 80's, Eimac went back to carbon plates for marketing reasons. Neither tube had any effect on the tubes data sheet ratings. Both had the same plate dissipation rating. Neither plate had any effect upon operation of the tube.
I don't think the plates made any difference but I think the 3-500z tubes were not made to the same quality standards of other tubes like the 4-400 which were made for commercial use. They cost more too. I also think that most 4-400 tubes that hams were most familiar with were made by RCA who made tubes that were totally superior compared to the tubes made by Eimac.
Interesting comments.
It would be intructive to have a list of all the 3-500Z variations and production dates.
Maybe the problem ones from Eimac were produced near the time of the problematic 8877s.
W1QJ Ham Member QRZ Page
Unless Collins never had a definate platform for the 30L1 before it considered using a 3-400 (which you say Eimac designed special for that amp) you could not fit a pair of them in a 30L1 with an atomic bomb.
W1QJ, Mar 22, 2013
RCA didn't exactly stop making transmitting tubes.
With the acquisition by GE in the 1980s, a management buyout of the transmitting/microwave tube division occurred to form Burle Industries, at the same facility/location (Lancaster, PA) as the RCA transmitting tube plant. They still make tetrodes, magnetrons and some other stuff there, but I don't think they make any glass transmitting tubes.
I don't think Eimac would ever release any info like you are asking. Eimac did say that the 3-500 tube from Amperex was not an exact clone of their 3-500. From a user standpoint the tubes were close enough. I am convinced that Eimac's 3-500z was not produced with the same manufacturing standards that other tubes were made. The 3-500 was a successor to the 3-400 tube which was designed for the Collins 30L1. Collins chose the 811 and Eimac sold the 3-400/3-500 as a cheap ham tube. It could have been used in commercial transmitters but I am not aware of any.
The best days for tubes are long gone. The crap sold now is either priced super high or is not so cheap crap. Its only going to get worse and more desperate to find good working tubes. RCA made the best tubes in my opinion and when they quit, the handwriting was on the wall. Solid State!
I'm not ready to give up and go solid state even if you are right. It's plain boring.
All the more reason for not rotating tubes.
I don't think Eimac would ever release any info like you are asking. Eimac did say that the 3-500 tube from Amperex was not an exact clone of their 3-500. From a user standpoint the tubes were close enough. I am convinced that Eimac's 3-500z was not produced with the same manufacturing standards that other tubes were made.
I wouldn't expect they would release that info either. The information could be generated by owners of tubes. Look at the date code, match it to a picture, post info somewhere. There are certainly a lot of people on amateur radio websites discussing this bottle.
There was a PDM AM broadcast box which used a 3-500Z. I know one guy had one on 160. He would have some info on tube life.
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HomeRecipes From 'Across the Sea' in Tel Aviv
Recipes From 'Across the Sea' in Tel Aviv
by Renee Ghert-Zand
A new stunning Israeli book aims to bridge the space between the ocean and the table. Half cookbook, half artful seafood encyclopedia, the book is a project of famed Tel Aviv port restaurant Mul-Yam (or, Across the Sea).
“Mul-Yam is known for bringing unusual fish to Israel,” the book’s designer Dan Alexander said about the 17-year-old restaurant. “We wanted to show [the owner] Shalom Maharovsky’s obsession in bringing the best raw material. He was the first to bring lobsters, oysters and rare seafood to Israel.” In 2003, Mul-Yam was the first Mediterranean-region restaurant to be added to the elite Les Grandes Tables du Monde group.
The first section of the book, which is also called “Mul-Yam,” contains stunningly artful photographs of a wide selection of domestic and imported fish and edible sea creatures — with their names given in seven languages. Culinary information along with scientific and even mythological anecdotes accompany the photographs. The book’s second part consists of recipes from the restaurant, along with beautiful photographs of the prepared dishes.
“The challenge was to create something people wanted to look at,” Alexander explained. “Creating a catalogue of fish was risky. It could have ended up just a book of dead fish.”
On the contrary, Alexander’s expert styling and noted food photographer Clay McLachlan’s exquisite pictures create a vibrant work of art highlighting the unexpectedly fascinating beauty of all variety of fish, mollusk, clam, crustacean, and cephalopod — ranging from the common sardine and codfish, to the exotic whelk (a sea snail) and slipper lobster.
For weeks, the cookbook’s production team got up at three o’clock in the morning to photograph fresh fish from all over the world as it arrived at either the Le Havre port or the gigantic Rungis Market outside Paris. “We basically set up a little fish photography studio right on site,” Alexander recalled. “We turned the fish into beautiful models.” The team later proceeded to Tel Aviv to shoot the dishes prepared in the Mul-Yam kitchen by chef Yoram Nitzan.
The concept for the book came from a collaborative process undertaken by Mul-Yam owner Maharovsky, together with Alexander and chef Yair Yosefi, his partner at their Tel Aviv and Paris-based boutique publishing house, à point books, part of the Dan Alexander & Co. design house.
Yosefi assisted Nitzan in writing the Mul-Yam recipes for the book. Among them are: “Chilean Sea Bass in Miso Soup with Bok Choy, Tofu and Persian Lemon”; “Striped Bass, Grilled Red Cabbage, Gnocchi, and Morel Mushrooms”; and “Little Neck Clams in Chardonnay Butter.” The dishes served at the restaurant change according to the seasons and supply of the fish, but half of the dishes whose recipes are in the book are on Mul-Yam’s menu at any given time.
Unfortunately, as of right now, the book’s entire text (save for the species’ names) is in Hebrew. However, with the attention “Mul-Yam” has been receiving for being a finalist for a Gourmand Cookbook Award, (the winners will be announced February 22), translations are sure to be forthcoming. Alexander reported that there are proposals for French and English versions already in the works.
“Israel is not the target audience for a non-kosher cookbook like this,” the publisher said. “We knew from the beginning that we wanted to go international with this.”
In the meantime, Hebrew readers can get one of a limited initial run of 1,000 copies only from the Mul-Yam restaurant, or by ordering directly from à point books.
Take a peek into the beautiful “Mul Yam” cookbook with the slideshow below, or click on the top right corner to expand each picture to its full size.
Photo Credit: Clay McLachlan
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Discover New Noise
Meg Myers Shares Gripping Cover of Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’
Meg Myers shares potent cover of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill."
by janette
Alternative-rock goddess Meg Myers shares her potent and burning rendition of Kate Bush’s 1985 track “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God).” What was originally performed during a NPR Tiny Desk session, the cover riles up a certain poised freedom that finally sees a studio version and anticipates new music from the artist, scheduled for release this summer.
Growing up, Myers explains that she was never interested in covering music, noting the desire to sing authentic lyrics written herself, while matching her rather deep set of vocals. “Well, then I discovered Kate Bush’s ‘Running up that Hill,’ which for years has resonated with my soul like nothing ever before,” explains Myers.
“What if we could experience role reversal? What would it be like living in each other’s shoes? I think we would find a lot more compassion for one another and a passion for kindness and truth. This song to me, represents an opening of our hearts and a possibility of acceptance for all. And to me, this is an important message for the world we are living in right now.”
The artist’s stirring vocals revisit climatic drum beats and electronic pads of the original version with a slightly more aggressive tone. The alluring familiarity sees Myers holding onto each line with a controlled force; arousing the dormant aspect of our higher selves. Her dark and resounding infliction carries the track into a different realm and truly grips the intent for a universal anthem.
Whereas the magic of Kate’s introspective lines captivated the throes of love and the bittersweet power that emerges as hate, from love, Myers’ version is the final nail in the coffin.
Share The Dopeness
TagsA Deal With God • cover • Kate Bush • Los Angeles • Meg Myers • Running Up That Hill
About janette
Janette Ayub is a former disc jockey and wing enthusiast that collects cats in her spare time. She is also a recovering carnivore.
girlundergroundmusic.com
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Readers Have Questions
About the Books • About Writing • About Grace Herself
This page shows a list of all the questions. Click to reveal Grace’s answer.
There are so many reader questions answered in Grace's FAQ. Chances are that the info you seek is right here.
The Most Frequently Asked Question:
How can I keep track of all your books? When is the next one coming out?
There are two ways to keep track of all the books I have coming your way.
You can head over to my Coming Soon page, where I post books as soon as I have a publication date for them, or…
Or sign up for my Newsletter, where I often announce future projects first (and sometimes do giveaways, too)!
Questions About the Books:
At the very end of Lady Louisa’s Christmas Knight, Joseph Carrington is given the title Earl of Kesmore, and he’s referred to as Kesmore in subsequent Windham family stories. In The Trouble With Dukes, he’s referred to as the Earl of Keswick (also the Earl of Cowlick). What happened?
Author error! I hadn’t written Joseph into a story in some time, though he’s one of my faves (they’re all my faves). I did double-check his title in Louisa’s story, and right there on the page, it says Kesmore. I happily congratulated myself on my conscientiousness (if not my memory), sat back down at the computer, and wrote Keswick.
I have two associations with the name Keswick. The first is a town in Virginia where I’ve seen and participated in some really cool horse shows. Good memories! The second is a town in England’s Lake District where I’ve stayed for a long weekend—more good memories! Maybe the good memories decided to morph Joseph’s title? In any case, I’ll explain the confusion in an author’s note if Joseph shows up in another happily ever after. I have a feeling Louisa is laughing herself silly over this. She kinda liked that bit about Earl of Cowlick.
Are any of your novels available as audiobooks?
Glad you asked! I’m slowly building my audio list. Check out my audio page. I’d like to hear from my readers which book or books they think should be next in the audio queue.
Do you have a favorite book?
Yes–the one I’m working on now.
The published books are out of my hands–they belong to the readers. The Work in Progress is mine, mine, all mine… at least through the rough draft stage. As editorial revisions are made, copy edits happen, and proofreaders get in a few licks, the book becomes less and less mine, and more and more the readers’. By the on sale date, I have to let the book go, and the only way I know to cope with that loss is to write another book.
Your books set in the regency are in different series, but they’re in the same universe. How do I read them chronologically?
When I started writing, I had no idea my books would ever be published. As I finished one book, I’d start the next without much thought for how somebody might organize the stories into series or sub-subseries. My editor had the thankless task of picking a starting point, and chose The Heir, because with The Soldier and The Virtuoso it formed a good, strong, trilogy of brothers to launch my career.
But that left some loose ends—about twenty of them—before, during, and after the Windham brothers, and I kept writing more books around and in between the ones I’d started with. What follows is my attempt to lay out the Windhams, the True Gentlemen, the Jaded Gentlemen, and Lonely Lords in a reading order that makes sense. The difficulty is that some books are happening at the same time as other books. In the case of Darius, between the beginning and end of his story, five other books are going on. (Vivvie says some things can’t be rushed).
The Windham Brides technically fall outside the Regency (George IV had finally ascended to the throne), so they are not included here. They’d go at the end, after the last of the Windham sisters.
If I had it to do over, I’d start at the beginning, but I don’t, so here we go:
The Courtship (followed by), The Duke and His Duchess
Gareth, Andrew, Douglas, David
Thomas, Matthew, Axel, Jack
The Heir, The Solder, The Virtuoso
(The Captive, The Traitor, The Laird)
Darius, Nicholas, Ethan, Hadrian, Beckman, Gabriel
Trenton, Worth
Tremaine’s True Love, Daniel’s True Desire, Will’s True Wish, His Lordship’s True Lady, (followed by remaining True Gentlemen)
Lady Sophie, Lady Maggie, Morgan and Archer, Ashton
Lady Louisa, Lady Eve, Jonathan and Amy, Lady Jenny
Hope that helps, and as more books find publication, I’ll integrate them into the list above.
Will you ever do a Windham spin-off for Uncle Tony and Aunt Gladys’s daughters?
Glad you asked!.
When I finished Lady Jenny’s book, I went into a period of Windham-moping. I think this is half the reason why Westhaven and Anna popped up The MacGregor’s Lady, though that’s a Scottish Victorian. I missed my Windham friends too badly to leave them entirely behind.
Then I began to get Ideas–about four daughters, and what sorts of devoted swains they might encounter. My mom was a blue-eyed red-head, and I thought it might be fun if all four Windhams shared that rarest of colorings… and then some story ideas began to materialize. The result is The Windham Brides series, which includes The Trouble With Dukes, Too Scot to Handle, No Other Duke Will Do, and A Rogue of Her Own.
And before you ask, no, Tony does not have an illegitimate son… that I know of.
Tiberius Flynn, Earl of Spathfoy, has two more sisters–Mary Ellen and Pandora. Will they get stories?
I’m almost certain they will, for several reasons.
First, I love the MacGregor series and its close kin. I’m writing in the high Victorian, which isn’t that much different from the Regency. The population shift has barely, barely tipped, with about equal numbers living in the cities and in the country. Prince Albert is still alive, so the whole fascination with death, the occult, and mourning hasn’t caught on. Fashion is still fairly reasonable–those enormous twelve foot wide hoops (which Queen Victoria abhorred and never wore) only began in mid-1850s, and the awful excesses of corsetry are yet to come.
So I like the world a lot.
Second, I particularly like the Scottish world and I also like the tension between an English hero and a Scottish heroine, or vice versa. This builds in a layer of misunderstanding, if not antipathy, between the heroes and heroines, and that’s always lovely.
Third, I love Tiberius. He can pop up in as many stories as he pleases, confiding in Flying Rowan, doting on his countess, and putting crooked, droopy diapers on his heir. In fact, I wish he had more sisters so I could see more of him..
Will you ever write stories for Rose, Winnie, or Westhaven’s children?
Rose and Winnie beg for a post-Regency series, along with, Priscilla Jennings, and some of Winnie’s Windham cousins. Fifteen years on, their parents will still be plenty young and full of fun. Our heroines could well have a passel of younger siblings, and yet, we’re still not into the Victorian period, about which readers have many pre-conceived (and often erroneous) notions.
So yes, I can see a series for members of the next generation–probably two series, for that matter. I seem to recall that St. Clair’s oldest and Michael Brodie’s daughter have an entanglement, and you know how much I love to write about Scotland….
Then there are Matthew and Axel Belmont’s five boys, who fall into yet another cohort between the Regency generation and the very young ladies.. I am well blessed with characters to write for!
Will you ever write a story for Lord Bartholomew Windham?
Bart is reported to have died in a tavern imbroglio in Portugal. He’d been drinking, he did not understand the language, and he inadvertently insulted a decent woman. Before he realized how much trouble he was in, weapons had come into play.
The very senselessness of his death made his passing harder for his family to grieve. He was the next duke, vivacious, full of himself, dear, and a little hard to take sometimes. He should not have died like that.
Through every book in the eight siblings series, Bart functioned at some level as a specter, a sorrow, a guilt and a grief. I’m hesitant to mess with that, because whatever emotions my characters endure, to some extent, my readers endure them too. My editor’s vote is to leave Bart on the far side of the rainbow bridge.
That said, I do think about the what ifs. What if he staged his death to become a spy, fell in love with the enemy, and had to stage even his spy-death to avoid (unfair) accusations of treason? He’s doubly dead in the eyes of England, and can’t come back to life without a lot of sticky explanations…
I dunno. It could work, or maybe not. What do you think?
Questions About Writing:
If you had one piece of advice for aspiring writers, what would it be?
I DO have one piece of advice for aspiring writers: Write more than you aspire to write. Hammer away at a novel, a collection of short stories, a volume of poetry, until you have something completed in draft, and ignore all the noise. Then hammer away at the next project.
Story time: I’d been writing for a couple years, FOR FUN, because I enjoyed it, and I got tired of family and friends elbowing me about “when are you going to get that stuff published?” I hadn’t been writing for publication, but what the heck, why not give it a shot? People–me among them–had been known to pay money for books, and being a lawyer had become wearying.
So I joined RWA and I went to a small (about 150 people) conference. GAAAH! Everybody there knew each other, and they all had tremendous energy (I’m pretty uniformly whamped). They blathered on confidently about WIPs, and GMC charts, saving the cat, story mastering, and pitch appointments and I had NO CLUE what any of it meant. Eventually, some kind soul explained the Goal, Motivation and Conflict (GMC) chart to me, and immediately, my remaining joy and confidence spiraled down.
That was basic stuff and I didn’t know it. I hadn’t had an inkling what a pitch appointment was (you pitch your book to an agent or editor), I didn’t have a WIP (work in progress), I usually had several and that had to be a bad thing because nobody else worked that way. I left the conference a writing wreck.
Silly me. MANY of those energetic, knowledgeable, fast pitching, GMC’ing hot shots are still not published. I’ve stumbled my way onto bestseller’s lists, starred reviews, reviewer’s choice awards, and other honors. I’m convinced that part of my success is because I wrote and wrote and wrote rather than paid any attention to what people who were no more successful than I had to say about the process.
Don’t listen to the noise, don’t do it the way “they” do it just because it’s working for them. Listen to your characters, listen with your writer’s ear and your writer’s heart. Work on your craft–of course, always work on your craft–but leave the anxiety and subtle competition and posturing to others.
You write.
If you had a second piece of advice for aspiring writers, what would it be?
Writer’s write… but they don’t write ALL THE TIME.
Lawyers can go days, even years, without setting foot in a court room. Parents can go years without seeing the children they pray for nightly. A gardener must wait out the winter, subsisting on catalogs and web surfing.
An aspiring writer can feel great pressure to produce, to a quota, on a schedule, no matter what. Some people comforted by a highly structured approach to writing, but for most of us, there’s a danger that we’ll be tyrannized by somebody else’s definition of success.
So many writers I know are also raising children, tending a significant relationship, holding down a day job, keeping an eye on the elders, hitting the gym, keeping the house in order, and even nurturing a social life. On top of that they pressure themselves to make progress with writing goals AND get enough sleep.
Any writer who can wedge 250 words a day into a schedule like that is a superhero (and is producing a book every year with a few weeks off).
To me, the bedrock upon which a writing career must be built is not a word count goal, or measurable goals prominently displayed in a well ordered writing space. Of course, if you want to be published, creating a product at some point is important. To me, though, to create a product worth reading, the writer must have a passionately experienced life, an emotionally vibrant reality, from which fictional worlds can spring. All that parenting, partnering, and professional-ing is the golden grist for the writer’s imaginative mill.
So my second piece of advice would be, don’t let an obsession with writing productivity leach the joy from your writing soul. Whether you get out a book this year or not, whether you write one day a week or five, whether you have six outlines under the bed, or one monster rough draft…. writer is something you ARE, it’s an identity, not simply a job.
What’s the hardest part about writing a book for you?
This is a tough question, with an element of “answers may vary,” because every book faces slightly different challenges. I often struggle with figuring out WHAT exactly pushes the characters apart and how I can make it EVEN WORSE as the story progresses. If I get that nailed down, the ending can give me trouble. Not the “how do I solve this” part of the ending, but the “how do we say good-bye to these characters so we know they’ll be endlessly happy” part of the ending.
In revisions, the book fares best if I go over and over it, with several weeks down time between layers of varnish. The downside of that approach is that I get tired of the book, even as each review cycle reveals more to polish. This can produce anxiety, and buffing a book this way can take a long time.
If I had to put a finger on one aspect of writing for publication that’s most difficult, it’s that I must let the book go. Once the book is published, particularly if it’s traditionally published, it must stand or fall on whatever merits it had when it left my hands. If I wake up a week later with my head full of snappier dialogue, more imaginative settings, and cleverer symbolism (and I do), that’s too bad. The book has been released into the wild, and belongs to the readers now.
Letting go is so hard, that the only way I’ve found to deal with it, is to write another book.
Are you a plotter or a pantser?
First, what is a plotter, what is a pantser?
These are terms writers use to describe how they approach writing a manuscript. Some of us make an outline, some of us make a VERY DETAILED outline. Other of us have nothing more in our heads than an opening line or opening scene, and we crank up the computer and “see what happens.” We don’t know the story until we write it.
I’m somewhere in between. I have OFTEN started a book with only a single line in my head. I hear a man’s voice, a Scottish accent, but an educated one, and he’s grousing about needing a rich wife. Somebody paraphrases Jane Austen, and I find out this guy needs a wealthy wife, but the whole idea makes his quietly sentimental and family-oriented heart ache.
That was all I needed to get started on The Bridegroom Wore Plaid.
With Nicholas: Lord of Secrets, I’d met Nick in earlier books, and he wasn’t making sense. He was a ladies man, sorta, and he loved horses, kids and old people, but he was loath to marry. Why? He’s a dear sweet, guy, handsome and charming, he needs an heir, and he won’t marry. He had a reason. I knew he had a reason and a valid reason (no reason-y, no book-y, dude), but he wouldn’t share his secret with even me until his book was half written.
That’s an extreme case of my usual approach: I write as much as I know, a few chapters, usually, and then I must perch on my croquet wicket, waiting, waiting, hoping, waiting, for the characters to let me in on the deal. Lady Louisa took half the book to tell me what exactly was plaguing her from her past, but in the middle of a conference of the American Librarians Association, she came clean.
Other books I have a sense going in where we’ll end up based on the character’s wounds–Lady Eve had to get back on the horse, so to speak; Gillian, in The Captive, had to reconcile herself to how far we’ll go to protect someone we love. Those were by far the easier books to write, so now I try to spend more time analyzing where a character hurts before I get too much of the book written.
A word of caution: I’ve been told, and I expect it’s true, that no matter what our preferred process is, a book will come along that refuses to be written unless we go over to whatever the dark side of the writing process is for us. For me that would probably be a detailed outline, for another writer, it’s the hold your nose and jump school of plotting. I haven’t hit that book…. yet.
What is your writing routine?
Erm, I don’t have one.
In one blog on craft after another, in one craft book after another, I see that writers who have a set writing time, who write every day, who have word count goals, written business plans, prominently displayed objectives, five-year plans, visible affirmations, and a bunch of other accoutrements of outwardly expressed purpose are the authors who attain success.
I don’t do any of that stuff and I never have. I write when I feel like it, I work on what clamors for my attention in that hour, and I write because I love to write, not because a deadline looms. Maybe I would get ten times more done, or write better quality prose, or sell more books if I were comfortable with more structure–it’s possible–but it’s highly improbable.
I thrive on unstructured time, on heeding an intuitive sense of what task I can do best in any given hour. For another writer my approach would be the death knell of their publication dreams, nothing would ever get finished, and a sense of chaos would defeat their creativity.
That said, I do think writing first thing in the day works best for a lot of people. Your brain is still enjoying the alpha waves, and Stephen King’s “boys in the basement’ are coming off their shift. But I’ve also written terrific scenes late at night and in the middle of the day, and I’ve written schlock right out of gate. To each his or her own.
After the Captive Hearts, I wanted to dine on some lighter writing fare, so the True Gentlemen emerged from the queue. His Lordship’s True Lady is my latest addition to that series (Hessian Kettering’s story), and I foresee tales in 2018 for Jonathan Tresham, Grey Dorning (the Earl of Casriel), and I am committed to writing a story for Valerian Dorning, which will come out next June (working title The Beowulf Book).
The drafting is done for the remaining Windham Brides, which means I get to start something entirely new in the Regency World, and the first book in that series will come out in Autumn 2018. I’m drawn to the premise of men who find titles thrust upon them, but we’ll see what my editor has to say about that.
And then there’s Scotland to the Max, the third story in my Trouble Wears Tartan contemporary series. I expect this novel will be published in Spring 2018, though I’m not sure it will be the last of the series. In addition, it seems I always have a novella or two up my sleeve….
Why do your stories so often involve families and sibling relationships?
The simple answer to this one is that I have six siblings, so family relationships are part of me. I’m also number six in the queue, so I was born into a situation where I had many sibling relationships to observe as I grew up. Then too, I love my brothers and sisters, and consider each one a friend, so that’s also an organic part of what I write.
There are other reasons to build siblings into a story, though.
First, the hero and heroine need what are called reflection characters. These are the side kicks, mentors, sometimes the devil’s advocates, henchman/women, and other secondary roles who enrich the protagonists’ worlds and make their stories complicated Siblings fit well into these roles, and using siblings helps me get to know characters who may soon have books of their own.
Second, a lot of what troubles the hero or heroine probably comes from their past, and few people will know that past as well as siblings do. Think of Lady Eve, and how her sisters alone knew how hard she’d fought to recover from her fall. Only Westhaven’s brothers knew how much pressure he was under to marry. Ian MacGregor held Asher’s secrets, and was the one encouraging Asher to trust their siblings with those confidences.
Third, because the hero and heroine are carrying around old wounds, they often have to sort things out with family members before they can rise to the challenge presented by the romance. Ethan and Nicholas had to air old laundry before Ethan could move forward, same with Sara (Beckman) and Polonaise (Gabriel). The family of origin stuff will hold us back until we deal with it, and then our family ties can propel us forward into a happily ever after.
Fourth, part of what every romantic protagonist has to learn is that they are lovable, and worth being loved. It’s not enough to learn this only as it relates to their partner. That’s a life lesson, and means accepting the love and support of siblings as well.
Tons of reasons to build siblings into a romance!
When did you first sit down to write a book?
My parents gave me a manual typewriter for Christmas when I was eight years old. I wrote about forty pages of a story about cats, The Cat Council, but it didn’t have a plot that I can recall, and most of the names for the cats were the results of typos. Hissfur, for example, was what happened instead of “his father.”
My next effort to write a novel came from the master’s program I did in Conflict at Eastern Mennonite University. My advisor asked me what I wanted to do for my thesis, what I would do if I could choose any project in the whole world.
“Write a novel evaluating the American legal process as a conflict management system,” says me.
“Then do that,” he replied.
I had pages and pages of head-hopping, ranting, digressing, fun, without much of a sense of character arcs or even dramatic arcs, but I got the degree, and I could use a few elements of the book in my first published contemporary, A Single Kiss
As for writing a romance novel… I was in my late forties, a voracious reader of romance novels, but it had never occurred to me that I might write one. I was working late at the office, trying to finish up some legal motion or pleading that had be to filed at the courthouse the next day. I’d reached the point where I was so tired, progress was slow I decided to treat myself to one chapter of a romance novel I’d been saving back for a low moment. This was from one of my keeper authors, and like the last candy bar, I had held it back until I had no other ammunition in my emotional arsenal.
No author hits one out of the park every time, but this book was a disappointment. I didn’t throw it at the wall, but I certainly set it down and muttered to myself, “I could do better than that.”
I opened up a new document on my computer and wrote, “A Young Person to see you, my lord.” The book turned into Gareth and Felicity’s story, and from there flowed the entire Lonely Lords series as well as the Windhams. I had a signed publishing deal by the time I was fifty, and at age fifty-five had maybe thirty-five titles under contract. Best five years of my entire professional life!
Do you ever base your characters on real people?
That would be a qualified no. Sometimes, a real person’s inflection will catch my ear, the mischief in their smile will catch my eye Maybe they have some colorful turns of phrase that I can tweak to tuck into a scene I’m working on, but I haven’t used anybody’s direct experiences to form the basis for a major character—with one exception.
My books come from me, from my life, from my experiences. I could write about Lady Eve falling off a horse because I’ve come a cropper many times (never with the results she suffered). I could write about the horror of realizing your child is climbing a tree to within several feet of a large hornets nest because my daughter did that. I can write about courtroom experiences because I’ve sat at many a counsel table before many a judge.
So yes, to some extent there is a real live person inspiring many of my characters—me.
What do you love best about writing?
That’s not a PR answer, either. I love the struggle to find a plot that really works for the characters emerging from my imagination. I love the creation of prose that tells their tale their way. I love the follow-up detail work, buffing the words, spackling in tighter structure, sanding down the pacing. I love the unplanned twinkles, when parts of a book resonate with each other all without my planning it. I love the research, from figuring out which words are anachronistic, to digging into entire biographies to mine a single, priceless detail of the period.
I love it all, and I’m happy when I’m working on a book. When a book can also brighten a reader’s day, then I have joy to go with my happiness, and that just makes me want to write MORE.
Where do you get your ideas?
I get my ideas from the dark place under the bed where nameless groaning monsters once lurked, turning every night into a battle between terror and the demands of a full bladder.
I slept with the light on until well into adulthood. I am not proud of this, but it’s indicative of some wiring I was born with that makes writing fiction easier for me than it might be for some other people: I have a busy imagination. The question “What if?” has long been my bosom companion, and the petty inconveniences of reality and logic do not bound the answers that come to me in response to “what if?”
You are glowering at your screen, perhaps, because that’s all lovely, but it’s not very helpful in terms of the question. I’ll try again. Romance is character-driven fiction, so what I’m stalking in the world of ideas, are characters who have unhealed wounds. Characters who are emotionally stuck fast, usually because they’re clinging to coping mechanisms that once served them well, or at least allowed them to survive, but are now consigning them a lonely, fearful, half-life.
To find these characters, I think about how we hurt, how we get stuck. I pay attention to the stuck people I meet, I pay attention to the times in my life when I was stuck, or when I did something REALLY stupid, because I’d confused avoiding pain with living life. I also look at when I’ve felt the most torn.
I asked my brother Dick once how to make a man really, really suffer, and his response was brilliant, “Make him choose between the competing demands of honor.” Make a hero choose between protecting his mother or his legitimate younger brother, the title’s sole heir. Make him choose between his duty as a soldier and his duty as a son, between telling the truth and protecting the innocent. Tear his heart in two. Works for any character.
If I dwell on those questions long enough, some feckless character usually come stumbling up from the imagination’s root cellar, and off we go. I get my ideas by dwelling on how we suffer, and then figuring out to make the suffering go away.
What do you find most difficult about being an author?
Fraught question! If the research is going well (big if), sometimes I have trouble determining a story’s “throughline.” I know what story I need to tell, but I’m less sure what scenes are required to tell it best.
The plot can give me fits, especially what’s called the external conflict. This is the real, interesting, substantial factor that’s driving the protagonists apart, or that pits them against an antagonist. Occasionally, I find I’m writing a character whose wounds and ways I don’t grasp as well as I’d like to, or I’ve assembled all the required parts–plot, conflict, characters–and the prose just isn’t singing to me.
So a manuscript presents many opportunities to become frustrated. If one of my books upsets or disappoints a reader, that’s difficult too.
But I’d have to say the hardest part about being a published author is that I didn’t foresee that I’d have to grow a new kind of thick skin. As an attorney, I’ve developed a certain kind of thick skin. Opposing counsel can be bratty, the judge cranky, and clients very demanding. My area of expertise is child welfare law, and that requires a special subset of thick-skin skills, because the cases are often break-your-heart tragic. None of the options before the judge will put Humpty together again, ever.
I expected all of that real life experience would stand me in good stead as a published author. Downright ugly reviews (as opposed to honestly negative ones, which I have no problem with), the occasional snippy author, sales anxiety, deadline pressure… I didn’t expect any of that to get to me because I’m supposed to be tough.
I’m about as tough as a fresh marshmallow when it comes to the writing. Over time, I’m less easily knocked off my horse, but the process is gradual, and bad days still take me by surprise. I expected that learning the craft and the business would be ongoing challenges, but I didn’t expect to have to also be vigilant about developing resilience and perspective.
Questions About Grace:
Why Name Your Blog “Her Grace Notes?”
Most historical romance readers grasp that a duchess is respectfully referred to in the third person as “her grace.” My pen name is Grace, so I thought that was a lovely little play on words. I’m indebted to my brother Tom for the suggestion to name the blog, “Her Grace Notes.” The plain meaning of such a title could be, “the duchess takes notice,” or “the duchess’s list of short, written, asides.” Either one works, but Tom’s suggestion is even clever than that.
In music, a grace note, as Lord Valentine would tell us, is defined as “an additional note introduced as an embellishment and not essential to either the harmony or melody or a piece,” or, “decoration, adornment, embellishment; a finishing touch.” My first profession was musician, and I put myself through college by accompanying ballet classes at the piano. The sense of the blog posts as little extras to go with the books delights me.
Whether I’m making observations about life in general, or the craft of writing, or something in between (there’s a lot in between), the notion of a grace note works wonderfully. Thanks, brother Tom!
What is it with you and Scotland?
Like a lot of Americans, I share an abiding affection for Scotland, and sociologically, there’s a reason for this.
The Scottish Highlands are among the least populous regions of any developed nation, in part because the terrain is challenging, but also because for centuries, Scotland has suffered a diasporo (or dispersion) of its people. From the 1700s onward, when hardier breeds of sheep developed, large landowners realized that sheep would be more profitable than continuing to allow small tenancies.
Entire villages were evicted (cleared), the only recourse left to the people to walk to the coastal cities and there find employment, starve, or immigrate. Then too, Scotland was prone to periodic potato famines, much like Ireland, and British politics weighed against a Scot who was too outspoken in support of democracy or a Jacobite (Stuart) monarchy. Finally, the Scottish regiments, traditionally deployed where the fighting was worst, created a portion of the population who’d seen the world–and seen the New World.
For the first hundred and fifty years of European colonization of the New World, the incoming population remained concentrated along the Eastern seaboard. Following the Battle of Culloden (1746), Scottish immigration into North American picked up velocity, including immigration by Scots who’d tried settling in Ireland in the early 18th century.
By 1800, the Scottish immigrants had a name, “The Disposable People.” So hungry for land of their own (something nearly impossible in Scotland) and a life of self-determination were the displaced Scots that they were usually the first to settle the westward wilderness. Hardship, isolation, hostile natives, thin rations, hard winters, nothing deterred the immigrant Scots from their quest for lives of freedom and self-sufficiency. By 1850, settlement stretched coast to coast.
Americans pride themselves on a number of characteristics–a willingness to work hard, attachment to family, honesty, resourcefulness and thrift among them. We refer to Yankee ingenuity and a Protestant work ethic, when in fact, these are the values brought to our shores by Scottish immigrants (among many others) and spread across our land by them and their children.
While the Scots are certainly not the exclusive progenitors of those values in our society, their role is significant. I think that accounts for why most Americans will look upon all things Scottish with a certain–deserved–fondness.
Did you always want to be a romance writer?
I NEVER wanted to be a romance writer. Nobody is more surprised than I am to see my name on published books.
What I do know, is that I’ve always written, and always loved to write–at least I know it in hindsight. I started keeping a journal before I could write cursive. I never struggled with English classes, I enjoyed foreign languages and never found them particularly difficult. My verbal SAT was–altogether now–more than 200 points higher than my math score, and in college I delighted in working for the university newspaper.
Never once did it occur to me to be a writer.
After college I got a job in Washington, DC, as a technical editor and proposal coordinator. I’d honcho up the production of a 300 page document, with illustrations, index, table of contents and cross references in about a week flat. After a few years of that, I added night law school to my routine, and shifted into the contract administration end of the federal contracting business.
And still, I had not clue I might enjoy writing for a living. I was, however, reading like a house afire. For much of my adult life, I’ve limited myself to reading one romance novel a day. I’ve also not had a TV in my house. My daughter came along, I opened my own law practice, I pursued a master’s degree in conflict…. still no writing aspirations.
And yet, I kept a journal year in and year out. I submitted a column to Runner’s World on being a fat runner and boom–it got published. For my master’s degree, I rapped out a 400 page novel that analyzed the American legal process as a conflict management system–that was kinda fun!
But become a professional writer? Why would I do that? Meanwhile, I’m still reading, reading, reading…. and by this time, my daughter has moved out. I’m in my late forties, I never acquired the TV habit, I’m not house proud or yard proud…. When one of my keeper authors disappointed me with an “off” book, I decided to give the romance novel writing schtick a try.
I had SUCH FUN. I wrote about a million words in a year flat. Manuscripts of 200,000 words flowed like wine–Gone With the Wind is 418,000 and that seemed to work OK, right? I wrote some more and wrote some more after that, like the sorcerer’s apprentice. Finished Gareth, but that lead to Andrew, and that lead to Douglas AND David, and that lead to Thomas and that Westhaven fellow–who is he and what does he want?–but Nicholas Haddonfield had also popped up in Thomas’s story and Nick needed a story….
Still, I did not consider that I might earn a living as a writer. Friends and family nudged me one too many times, though, to “get that stuff published,” and so I signed up for a writer’s conference. The first person I pitched offered me a deal, and still…. what me, a writer?
What has convinced me that I AM a writer is how much I love doing it. Never was mortal woman happier than I am when I’m cranking on a scene. I’m blissin’, I don’t know what time it is, forget what season it is, and my heart is an incandescent center of joy. This happens about twice a year. The rest of the time, I’m still pretty happy.
A bad day writing is usually much better than an average day doing a lot of other things I’ve considered “my profession,” so here’s hoping I get many more years to write!
What’s the best part of being a published author?
This one is easy: The best part of being a published author is knowing that the books I write can make a positive difference in a reader’s life. Sometimes, that can be a pretty big difference. I’ve received emails from readers who read their way through depression or grief, through chemo, through a bad break up. If a book you paid a few bucks for can do that, that’s a mighty book
But I’m happy about the tiny differences too. If reading a romance novel helped you get to sleep on Wednesday night, so you could tackle the to-do list more energetically on Thursday, that’s making a difference. If being able to slip away to Regency England for a few hours means the weekend with your in-laws was a little more bearable, that’s a difference.
So I get to do what I love, and it can help other people. WOW.
How does your day job relate to your writing?
My day job, for the past twenty-plus years, has been providing legal representation to children in abuse and neglect proceedings in Circuit Court.
I guarantee you, when it’s Career Day in fifth grade, not a single kid in any school anywhere ever thought, “I want to be a child abuse lawyer!” I backed into this work because the state was hiring child welfare attorneys through a competitive procurement, and that involves writing a proposal. I DO enjoy writing proposals, and I had a child of my own to look after. When the work became available, I grabbed it with both hands.
It’s honorable work. My job is (usually) to advocate for what the child wants, provided the child has some reasons for the position they take. Just the fact that the child HAS a voice in the courtroom proceedings speaks well for us as a society, and often results in the judge making a wiser decision.
But there are bad days. Families I was sure had made it out of the woods fall back into spectacular trouble. Toddlers play with guns. You get the picture.
On those bad days, what has often sustained me is the certain knowledge that I have a new Loretta Chase, or Mary Balogh waiting by my bedside. Some years, I was in the habit of reading a book a day, every day. This means that before I started writing romance novels, I had read THOUSANDS of them. I attribute that to the day job, and what remaining functional on the day job required.
The day job has also shown me the variety of ways we cope with, ignore, rise above, and are brought low by the wounds we suffer. I’ve had a front row seat on a lot of suffering, and on a lot of healing and courage. This is the stuff of a good romance, particularly the courage and the love, and I have the day job to thank for letting me see so much of it in action.
Finally, the day job shows me miracles. The children I work with have been dealt such low cards–genetically, socially, intellectually, economically, politically–that by rights, very, very few of them should lead successful lives. I’ve been doing this long enough, though, to know that many of them do. They beat the tremendous odds stacked against them from birth, they triumph over adversity, bigotry, poverty, institutional injustice, disability and just about every other curse a baby can be born under, and they live contributing happy lives. If that’s not heroic, I don’t know what is.
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Big Crowd, Key Players Back but Bulldogs Fall to No. 7 Aztecs
Nunes' Reliably Red District Remains So, But Is Slipping
Risks, Rewards, and Robots: The Future of Work in California
Who Besides the Obvious Are Running for Fresno Mayor?
The Ahwahnee Hotel at Yosemite National Park (Shutterstock)
Stomach Illness Outbreak at Yosemite Prompts Major Clean-Up
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK — Federal health officials are inspecting Yosemite National Park’s food service areas after at least a dozen people have fallen ill with stomach issues.
The National Park Service and the U.S. Public Health Service told the San Francisco Chronicle they launched an investigation after employees and visitors reported the problems this month.
Federal officials said they haven’t identified the illness or the origin of the outbreak. Park officials said those who had gotten sick are getting better or already recovered.
Concessionaire Is Disinfecting Food Facilities
Federal officials were working with Aramark, the concessionaire that operates Yosemite’s restaurants, snack shops, and hotels, to clean up and disinfect food service facilities in the park, including the famous Ahwahnee Hotel, Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman said.
“The park is reminding all employees and visitors to wash their hands frequently and stay home if they experience any symptoms of a gastrointestinal illness,” Gediman said in a statement.
No Comment From Aramark
A message seeking comment from a spokesman for Aramark has not been returned.
Aramark received numerous complaints from visitors about poor food quality, shuttle service, and other services since it began managing Yosemite’s concessions four years ago.
The Ahwahnee Hotel lost its prestigious four-diamond rating by AAA, a distinction the luxury hotel held since 1991, and is now listed as a three-diamond hotel. Visitors to the hotel at the foot of the iconic Half Dome have included Queen Elizabeth II and U.S. presidents.
Ahwahnee HotelAramarkcomplaintsdisinfectantfoodsickstomach illnessYosemite
Gov. Newsom Targets Fresno Needs With Big Bucks in Budget
Nearly Half of California Students Can’t Read at Grade Level. Here’s What We Must Do About It.
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Nation-wide radio station hack airs hours of vulgar “furry sex” ramblings
Listeners hear explicit audio caused when station equipment is commandeered. Some Tuesday morning listeners of KIFT, a Top 40 radio station located in Breckenridge, Colorado, were treated to a radically different programming menu than they were used to. Instead of the normal fare from Taylor Swift, The Chainsmokers, or other pop stars, a hack by an unknown party caused one of the station’s signals to broadcast a sexually explicit podcast related to the erotic attraction to furry characters. The unauthorized broadcast lasted for about 90 minutes.
KIFT wasn’t the only station to be hit by the hack. On the same day, Livingston, Texas-based country music station KXAX also broadcast raunchy furry-themed audio. And according to an article posted Wednesday by radio industry news site RadioInsight.com, the unauthorized broadcasts from a hobbyist group called FurCast were also forced on an unnamed station in Denver and an unidentified national syndicator.
“All in all the FurCast aired for an hour, possibly two,” Jason Mclelland, owner and general manager of the KXAX Radio Group, wrote in an e-mail. “During that time they talked about sex with two guys and a girl in explicit details and rambled on with vulgar language not really having much of a point to the podcast. I’m assuming there was no real reason for this hack.”
In the planning stages for some time
Mclelland said the hack was carried out by someone who managed to take control of an audio streaming device sold by a company called Barix. The account is consistent with the RadioInsight post, which said the string of unauthorized broadcasts was accomplished when attackers attempted to log in to large numbers of Barix boxes. When successful, the attackers locked out the rightful operators and caused the equipment to play Internet-accessible podcasts made available by FurCast, a hobbyist group dedicated to furry sex.
“This appears to have been in the planning stages for some time by the person doing it,” an advisory published by the Michigan Association of Broadcasters said of the Barix system hack. “Apparently they have been accumulating passwords for some time. MAKE SURE that your password is of sufficient strength! Barix Boxes will take up to 24 characters…. In at least two cases six character passwords were cracked.”
Members of the group responsible for the FurCast have also supported the explanation. In a post published Wednesday and updated Thursday, they report that starting on Tuesday morning, their streaming server was hit by “large numbers of IP addresses attempting to connect to our archive stream.” Most of the connection requests identified themselves as being made by a “Barix Streaming Client.” Most or all of the Barix boxes attempting to connect were listed on the search website Shodan, an indication that they were easy for hackers to find and then probe for weaknesses. FurCast members were able to thwart the attack by changing the Web addresses of podcasts the compromised streaming equipment attempted to play.
According to KIFT officials, the compromise hit a studio transmitter link used to send audio to a booster antenna and didn’t affect broadcasts over the station’s main signal. The furry podcast was streamed non-stop for an hour and a half over the auxiliary channel. “Our station was unable to regain control over the STL [studio transmitter link] until the station engineer actually traveled to the remote transmitter site and reprogrammed the system from that location,” the station officials wrote.
It’s not the first time hackers have caused a TV or radio station to make an unauthorized broadcast. In 2013, TV stations in California, Michigan, Montana, New Mexico, and Tennessee interrupted scheduled broadcasts to warn of an imminent zombie invasion, supposedly brought on when “bodies of the dead [were] rising from the grave and attacking the living.” The cause of the compromise was most likely weaknesses in hardware used to deliver emergency alerts. The ease in compromising production broadcast gear is part of a much larger problem securing a variety of industrial control systems such as those used to control building elevators, heating systems, door locks, and fire alarms.
The Barix equipment that appears to have been targeted is susceptible to hacks when running factory default settings. The Michigan Association of Broadcasters’ advisory suggests that users should change passwords to the Web interface and hide the devices behind firewalls that expose only the ports needed to receive the stream. The boxes are also an easy target when connected to a static IP address and no changes are made.
Source:http://arstechnica.com/
Related Items:Nation-wide radio station
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Harpreet Kaur Creative
Working across Arts, Gender and International Development
Humans of the World
Skills/Services/Training
Diversity and Climate Art: Shaheen Ahmed
Born in Burnley Lancashire, Shaheen is a female British Artist whose parents are from Gujarat Pakistan. Shaheen is settled in Birmingham and practises as a Muslim, reaching out to injustices across the globe.
How would you describe your practice/research/work on climate change?
I connect with the earth on a spiritual level. Mountains for example can be seen as more than towering earth. I feel connected to their expansive presence. Primordial earth belongs to the destitute whether they are humans or animals. We have a problem with boundaries and borders. I look particularly at borders, boundaries and structures, displacement on another level with maps. I work with maps to explore and illustrate displacement and belonging. I put a geometric pattern onto the world map, carve it up and put it back together. How is the earth feeling? The earth’s ruptures, techtonic plates, and the movement of people is part of my current my research.
What influences your work and do you have a particular intention with it?
We need nature for the survival of people and communities. Emphasis on a collective shared narrative, caring for others is my approach. History is seen through the person who shares it. Maps are physical pieces of paper that humans generally agree on. I am looking at kindness across the globe. When the time is right communities will merge as one. A simplistic view perhaps, and something that may not happen but one that I feel suits my sensibilitites. As yet some people are holding onto certain power structures. I am creatively navigating around these set ups and maybe defying them at their own game. Whoever has reached a certain space or level of progress is racing towards the next one and sometimes not looking back to see how society remains disjointed.
At school I thought I was going to be a fashion designer, it was at art school that I really got into fashion. Aged sixteen I spoke to my Art History teacher saying I wanted to research Islamic art. She guided me to research the influence of Japanese woodcut prints on Impressionist painters. Burnley College of Arts and Technology didnt have many books on Islamic Art back in the late 80’s. Perhaps I was surprised to hear this one sentence, a lack of information on my culture, my history. I feel a strong connection to Europe and this reflects in my artwork. After completing my degree in Art and Design, I started doing a lot of digital art, it felt like men were mainly at the forefront of this, and I had to take on this challenge. Then I was reading about Islamaphobia and didnt agree with what I was finding.
Do you think you have had an impact with your work and how is it funded?
My recent collaboration with Future Possibilities Lab was funded by Arts Council England. Curator Jose Forrest Tennant approached me, saying she would like to work with me! I deliver creative workshops for various art projects. I also hand make lampshades, using maps from history. As these are time consuming and one offs I take commissions.
Who is your audience?
The wider community , museum audience, academic, diverse communities. I am my own audience as I am fascinated by the topics I dig around.
I remember at University studying computer art, using complex 3D packages. At that time I was saying whatever the boys could do I can do just as well. Now I focus on my research and try to uncover facts around who created which map, where they got their source from etc. My audience is the curator who brings over a pakistani artist, usually from Lahore and then ships them back. I am saying that I am a British born artist of Pakistani heritage. I challenge, not for the sake of challenge. I want to introduce history to the muslim comunity, to show the glory within the 9 colours used by the cartographer. I want to work with all communities. I think we need diverse storytellers telling the story as they all have different perspectives.
Do you think diverse artists/people are less involved in exploring the climate issue?
Yes they are less involved in the UK, or maybe they are not being given a big enough platform. I work with maps and have heard people say is this really art?…I am not playing it safe, i.e not creating pretty pictures. Black and Asian artists do look at climate change topics but perhaps play it safe to get into galleries and responding to briefs by ticking boxes. I’m not immune to this and have done my fair share of ticking boxes projects. Creatively more people from diverse backgrounds will get involved as it will be seen as the latest fad.
I recently completed a residency entitled Embodying Geographies at the University of Birmingham Lapworth Museum. Historically, female geographers, explorers and academics have worked in the shadows of their male counterparts. Even today, women are still under represented in these areas of expertise as well as many other academic fields.
Why do you think most of the funded work for Climate Arts projects we see seem to be by white artists?
This platform could be seen as stifling for artists of colour as it often keeps us out of the main arena. There is a focus on community work and diversity is the agenda so we can more easily fit into this. I personally do however find it humbling to work with marginalised communitites, irrespective of colour.
In 2008 I was Artist in Residence at Wightwick Manor House for the National Trust. The artwork I produced was an installation of a Maypole, an English symbol of a time gone by. This piece culminated in combining my childhood memories of skipping round a maypole at Infant school in Burnley Lancashire, along with narratives from the National Trust Property. Would my work have been better received if I created something culturally more associated with someone who looks like me? Perhaps something to reference my father? Thereby ticking the diversity box, and this in turn would attract a more diverse audience. How would the maypole have been received if it was created by an english artist, whose heritage wasn’t from Pakistan?
Do you think we need specific arts projects by and for diverse audiences to widen the impact and encourage change in society?
Yes. An inclusive approach is imminent. Maybe the word diversity needs rebranding within the arts. It can no longer just be polished every now and then. Only to find the diverse artist/ academic is kept at arms length.
In my practice I want stories to be more about the world. There needs to be more platforms and opportunities for everyone. If we say this is for black people only and this group, then the white community feels left out. White working class communities have there own problems, white power infrastructure is another commodity in itself. Having said that black and minority groups struggle to get recognition and opportunities for their work. This imbalance reflects how poorly we are interacting with people who may seem different to ourselves. We need to correct this and look at people as human beings not as different groups. My art practice is looking at global displacement, so I am trying to make links with charities who work to help others especially on my doorstep within the West Midlands.
www.shaheenahmed.com www.futurepossibilitieslab.net
Harpreet’s Reflections
Shaheen is proud of her heritage and spirituality but does not want to be defined only by it, or to be held back as a woman, as we often are. She is an artist first wanting to create work about a range of topics for a range of audiences. Shaheen rightly points out that often as a POC it seems you are ticking a box. Once there are a number of people getting recognition and status, it can often seem like there is space for no more. This is a very controversial topic. I started my career in 2001 in South Asian Arts and have worked in a number of places on a range of arts projects but still it feels easier for me to get work related to South Asian Arts in England, even though my interests have developed and are now global. Is this because I am of South Asian origin, or that I have this specific expertise or both? I also agree with Shaheen that most POC do play it safe, and for some they do want to explore certain topics that relate to their heritage and culture, as easy this does make it to tick boxes. I also agree that as important as it is to have diverse people on board, (the highest positions in the arts are still dominated by middle class white men) it depends on who these people are as so many become gatekeepers. Even within diverse circles there is a lot of male privilege and class privilege, but I think many individuals regardless of colour in comfortable positions of power prefer not to discuss this. Perhaps human beings are just not able to function beyond power dynamics.
For an introduction to this series of articles see New Narratives on the Climate Story.
This project has been supported by Creative Climate Leadership, a programme supported by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
April 16, 2018 by creativeharps
Fierce Words – Writing as if the world matters
Working remotely: Berlin – New York – Mumbai – Shropshire-
Art & Change in Portugal & Australia
Diversity and Climate Art: Eca Eps
Diversity and Climate Art: Emma Ako
Diversity and Climate Art: Anna Lau
Diversity and Climate Art: Kooj Chuhan
Diversity and Climate Art: (New) Narratives on the Climate Story
Arts Activism and Justice in Copenhagen.
Shrewsbury Folk Festival Challenges Xenophobia through Music
Connecting Stories of British Heritage
Museum of Urban & Contemporary Art, Munich
Birmingham’s Indian Film Festival is back!
Climate Change and the Arts
Hope for the Many, Not the Few
Being an Artist Today; Gender, Mobility & Friendship
BBC Expert Women 2017
Women’s Empowerment and Sustainability
Mobility & Smart City: England & Wales
Smart City: Better Budapest
Cultural Leadership
Gender Inequality in Contemporary Dance
EU Referendum & the Arts
Living Differently
The Art of Moving House
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CD WHAT IF What If BVCM37165 RCA JAPAN OBI PROMO SEALED
What If - What If - ID3z - CD - New
What If ‎– What If / Japan original CD Album with OBI-strip / Like New
WHAT IF-WHAT IF -JAPAN CD B63
Category: AOR
Label: RCA/ BMG Funhouse (Japan)
Catalog Number: BVCM-37165
Average Rating: 88 / 100 (14 ratings)
Ebay Average Price: $13.28
Tommy Funderburk vocals
Larry Williams keyboards, sax
Bob Wilson drums
Michael Landau guitar
Dann Huff guitar
Jakko M. Jakszyk guitar
Larry Klein bass
Paulinho Da Costa percussion
Bill Champlin backing vocals
Bob Carlisle backing vocals
1. What If
2. If This Is Love
3. Perfect World
4. One Look
5. Ride The Hurricane
6. She Rocked My World
7. Love Is A Fire
8. When Right Is Wrong
9. Turn And Walk Away
The music discographies on this site are works in progress. If you notice that a particular What If CD release or compilation is missing from the list above, please submit that CD using the CD submission page. The ultimate goal is to make the discographies here at Heavy Harmonies as complete as possible. Even if it is an obscure greatest-hits or live compilation CD, we want to add it to the site. Please only submit official CD releases; no bootlegs or cassette-only or LP-only releases.
EPs and CD-singles from What If are also welcome to be added, as long as they are at least 4 songs in length.
Search all current eBay listings for WHAT IF WHAT IF
What If It's You by Reba McEntire AUDIO CD *DISC ONLY* $2.75 1d 18h 53m
What If It's You by Reba McEntire (CD, Nov-1996, MCA Nashville)Disc Only 34-282 $2.79 24d 23h 54m
What If It All Means Something [Bonus Track] by Chantal Kreviazuk (CD, Apr-2003, $2.59 1d 6h 22m
Mcentire, Reba : What If Its You CD DISC ONLY #58A $2.99 5d 22h 41m
What If It's You by Reba McEntire CD, Nov-1996, MCA Nashville (( Disc Only)) $3.00 11d 3h 31m
What If It's You by Reba McEntire $3.03 17d 8h 55m
From: ROB GARCIA Date: April 12, 2004 at 9:22
certainly one of the most classic christian aor albums ever released and that is one hell of an achivement...but then, i'm not surprised. when you have two top session guitar players;two excellent vocalists doing background vocals+ one of the best vocalists in the business then nothing can't go wrong in here.production is top notch and the material is of a high quality.the only problem i find in here it's that with only 9 tracks it turns out to be way too short but i guess that quality comes
first and there's plenty of that in here.buy.
From: Rycheage Date: June 21, 2004 at 0:05
This can only be best described as heavied up West Coast, somewhere between Mr Mister, Tim Feehan and latter-day Richard Marx. The fluid guitar of Landau and the impressive vocals of Funderburk tips the scales in my favor though the overly laden brass parps from Larry Williams keyboards do tend to get slightly overbearing at times. However, for the most part it's stylish AOR/melodic rock.
From: gener8tr Date: September 2, 2004 at 19:04
As soon as I read Ryche's description of a cross between Mr. Mister and Richard Marx I'd heard enough.
From: oliver Date: October 14, 2004 at 8:39
overrated cd. this is average aor/melodic rock. the songs aren´t very catchy, heard them and forgot them. not worth spending 30$.
From: POTENTE Date: March 12, 2006 at 21:12
Don't be fooled-look the rating,38 people can't be wrong.This is an AWESOME Westcoast/AOR/Rock album.Funderburk is one of the best in the business,he made backing vocals for almost 1000 albums and Huff(of Giant)and Landau are so fine players...and the bass pump in your head as a hammer...the production is a million bucks. Don't miss this GEM. Also check Funderburk's 'Anything for you' (2004) album, a great piece of art.
From: Heavy.AOR Date: June 22, 2006 at 11:43
BRILLIANT 10/10
From: aorteto Date: October 25, 2006 at 13:51
A so-so CD, even if I do like TIM FEEHMAN and RICHARD MARX.It's not bad, just average for me. PERFECT WORLD is a great song, but it's very weak recorded here. Sorry for desagree.
From: aorfan700 Date: October 22, 2008 at 10:54
WHAT IF (The Front 2?)...Interesting to see Rob call it a christian classic cause generally this is labelled as non-christian as opposed to the front project of 85 which was very strongly christian in lyrics. However I'd see where Rob is coming from, cause about half of the songs here still seemed to me to be songs talking to a god, just not so much christian lyrics. Eitherway, this is a great cd. It takes a while to like. I agree it's best decribed as heavied up westcoast as another reviewer puts it. I can also see how someone could say they played it a few times and disliked it, forgetting it, but give it another go.. it turns out to be a total classic even if you often hate heavier WC as I do. Great more poppy but rock songs are the title track. Great!... Michael Landaus guitar play (unmistakable) and last but not least...THE SOUND quality of this is v good. I can't believe it's so smooth when it's 87 full digital recording down to the core. Heavy music, smooth sound, top songs
and yeh, it is cheekily short, 9 songs and not even long songs. Definately leaves you wanting more!
From: juan carlos Date: October 9, 2010 at 14:20
Good AOR album indeed with some Hi-tech/Westcoast elements, i expect for more Midtempos or ballads here, too many Uptempos to my tastes, Top-notch production of course! you can not go wrong with those names! Michael Landau and Dann Huff what a duet not a classic in my opinion but quite good indeed! certainly a Great voice of Tommy(the best background vocals!), my favorite tracks are "Perfect World" "What If" "Turn And Walk Away" and "When Right Is Wrong" 8.5/10
From: rick kerch vzla Date: October 9, 2010 at 19:04
Fans of Device,Mr Mister and perhaps some Starship (their poppier side)will like this act!!! ...an only release but quite interesting for the likes of AOR/Hi-Tech/Westcoast lovers..."What If" is such a catchy starter and the same goes to "If This Is Love"(this one is an excellent track,it has a very nice chorus),"Perfect World" is a goodie one,"Ride The Hurricane" has a solid chorus,is kinda the "heavy" track of the album,"She Rocked My World" & "When Right Is Wrong"(this one is also an excellent song)...plenty of talented musicians in here for our delight...90/100
From: juan carlos Date: October 10, 2010 at 1:34
HAHAHAHAAAAA BUY IT Looser!!
From: rick kerch vzla Date: October 10, 2010 at 14:55
HAHAHAHAAHA!!!!BUY LOOSER!!!!!!YOU A**!!!!
PRETTY EASY ALBUM TO BUY IN PERU..JUST AROUND THE CORNER...YOU LOOSER!!!
ARE YOU GONNA START ANNOYING ME OR ATTACKING EVERY SINGLE COMMENT I WRITE MR ANGULO????LIVE AND LET LIVE DUDE..THAT'S ALL I HAVE TO SAY...
From: Locoaor Date: December 4, 2016 at 13:30
Awesome AOR album, "If this is love" and "Perfect World" my favorite tracks, greetings from Peru
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10 Best Things to Do for Couples in Sao Paulo
Sao Paulo’s Most Romantic Places
Sao Paulo may not be your typical choice for a romantic getaway, but the city has an abundance of culture and eccentricity. The atmosphere throughout the city is buzzing and lively – something that will keep you and your loved one on your toes throughout your stay. You can have a lazy day in one of the sprawling city parks, but nights are for upbeat, happening samba bars.
We’ve taken the liberty of creating a condensed list of the most romantic and fun things to do around the city, which will surely make for a memorable holiday for 2.
A morning hike in Cantareira State Park
Escape the bustle of Sao Paulo
Cantareira State Park sprawls over 8,000 hectares of untouched Atlantic Forest, giving visitors a seemingly endless expanse of deep, verdant green to explore. The park offers 4 rustic hiking trails, swimmable lakes, tropical birdwatching and stunning views of Sao Paulo. The 2 main trails can be accessed through the main entrance and will take you to Pedra Grande for fabulous city views, then a lagoon called Lagoa das Carpas. The other trails bring you to quaint waterfalls, which can be swum in. Spend the day meandering through the park, stopping for a picnic and a cuddle under the swaying trees or by the lagoon. The best time to visit is early on Saturday morning.
Location: Rua do Horto, 1799 - Horto Florestal, SP, 02377-000, Brazil
Open: Saturday–Sunday from 8am to 4pm
photo by Rcezar87 (CC BY-SA 4.0) modified
Theatro Municipal
Take a tour of this beautiful theatre for free
Found in the centre of the city, Theatro Municipal is an architectural treasure with a gorgeous Renaissance-style exterior, topped with angelic statues and a towering dome. The inside is just as beautiful, especially The Noble Room, which glints in golden light and has heavenly paintings all along its ceiling. The best way to explore the theatre is to go on the free guided tour. English tours for fewer than 10 people held between Wednesday and Saturday at 11am. Visits are not allowed on Monday, Tuesday, Sunday and on holidays.
Location: Praça Ramos De Azevedo, República, Sao Paulo - SP, 01037-010, Brazil
The Botanical Garden of Sao Paulo
Look out for sloths and monkeys
The Botanical Garden of Sao Paulo offers excellent walking trails that take you to brimming greenhouses and quaint gardens. This is a great place to spend a quiet day in the park with your loved one, where you can bring your own picnic and lounge under the trees. As you wander the gardens, look out for howler monkeys, toucans, sloths and large lizards – a little taste of Amazonia. The gardens are part of the larger Fontes do Ipiranga State Park, which also contain many woodlands and lakes for those who want to explore more.
Location: Avenida Miguel Estefno, 3031 - Vila Água Funda, Sao Paulo - SP, 04301-902, Brazil
Open: Tuesday–Sunday from 9am to 5pm (closed on Mondays)
photo by siliconpalms (CC BY-SA 3.0) modified
Have a stroll in Ibirapuera Park
Sit in the cool of the towering trees
Ibirapuera Park is known by locals and tourists as a lush, sprawling park in the heart of the city, and an escape from the city hustle for many people. Given its sheer size, it’s easy to find a secluded spot nestled in the cool shade of the huge trees. Bring a picnic and spend a few hours relaxing and munching away. You can rent bicycles (or even a tandem) and cycle around the park into the last hours of sunlight. Look out for stalls throughout the park, which sell refreshing and cheap coconut water. The park is also dotted with historic monuments, such as the Obelisk of Sao Paulo and the Monument to the Bandeiras.
Location: Avenida Pedro Álvares Cabral, Vila Mariana, Sao Paulo - SP, 04002-010, Brazil
Open: Daily from 5am to midnight
Roam the streets of Vila Madalena
Explore its art-ridden streets
Vila Madalena is a neighbourhood spilling over with energy and colour. A day exploring this area will take you around alleyways sprawled with art and an endless supply of art galleries. This neighbourhood is an ideal setting for a relaxed day admiring art and eating in quaint, boho-chic cafés and bistros. Popular street art spots in the area include Beco Do Batman and Beco Do Aprendiz. Look out for the wonderfully eccentric street names, which are noticeably different to the rest of the city. Some examples include Rua Girassol (sunflower), Purpurina (glitter) and Harmonia (harmony).
Location: Vila Madalena, Sao Paulo - SP, 03178-200, Brazil
Grab a Brazilian snack
Share some pastels or coxinha
We all know snacking is inevitable on a day filled with activities, especially in a place like Sao Paulo, which hosts many cuisines. Coxinha is the face of the city’s street food, loved by all and found everywhere. These deep-fried tear-drop-shaped parcels of deliciousness normally contain shredded meat, although there are many variations of it. They frequently come hand-in-hand with a cold beer. Head to Frangó or Bar Veloso for some of the best in the city. Pastéis (plural for pastel) are the city’s comfort food and come in the form of thin, fried squares of crispy perfection, filled with anything you desire. Interestingly, they are inspired by the traditional Chinese egg rolls, which came to Brazil with Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the mid-19th century. Find some of the yummiest at Mercado Municipal, Pastel da Maria and Yoka.
Praça Pôr do Sol
Watch a sunset with a beer in hand
Praça Pôr do Sol is located in the eccentric neighbourhood of Vila Madalena, where a carefree atmosphere permeates every nook and cranny. The square is no exception, and crowds of young and old, families and couples visit this stunning viewpoint come sundown. The viewpoint gives you a different outlook on the city, where the familiar noise and commotion seems so small and distant. The atmosphere is serene, as golden light envelops the skyline and laughter fills the air. Grab a few beers or a bottle of wine (if you’re feeling fancy) and head over early to nab good spots.
Location: Praça Coronel Custódio Fernandes Pinheiro - Alto de Pinheiros, Sao Paulo - SP, 03178-200, Brazil
photo by Vinicius Pinheiro (CC BY-SA 2.0) modified
Visit a rooftop bar
Take in the city from above
Given Sao Paulo’s immense size and density, a view from above can be particularly breathtaking. The landscape is varied, with an eclectic mix of traditional and modern architecture making for some truly unique views. Sao Paulo’s amazing nightlife only makes it that much better to visit a rooftop bar. If you’re looking for something more upscale, visit Terraço Italia, which is particularly romantic and offers live jazz music. Other sophisticated spots include Skye Bar, which has its own pool, and The View Bar, with has arguably the best view in the city. For lamp-lit romance, check out Adega Santiago and Alto da Harmonia.
Try a feijoada
A hearty stew for two
A feijoada is a flavourful stew of beans with beef and pork, which originated from Portugal. Cooked in a clay pot, the dish is known as something of a tradition, with many locals eating it for lunch on weekends. Dollop a generous helping of stew onto your plate with rice, potatoes, salad greens, sliced oranges and salsa. If you’re lucky enough, some Paulista friends may offer a home-cooked feijoada. If not, they can be found virtually everywhere on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Head to either Star City, Bolinha, or Figueira Rubaiyat.
photo by raphaelstrada (CC BY 2.0) modified
Go samba dancing
End the night in a happening bar
While samba is usually associated with Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo does not disappoint when it comes to happening samba bars. The dance has Afro-Brazilian roots and involves lively and rhythmic motions to samba music. Across Brazil, the dance is loved, and it incites a festive spirit in all who partake and observe it. If you and your partner are looking for a night-out on the town, a samba bar is the answer. Bars are usually very laidback, with cheap drinks and friendly crowds. Bar Mangueira is one of the most popular Brazilian music venues in the city and even serves feijoada on Saturdays. Some other bars worth hitting up are Vila do Samba, Traço de União, Cachaçaria do Rancho and Ó do Borogodó.
Sophia Macpherson | Contributing Writer
10 Best Cultural Things to Do in Sao Paulo
Sao Paulo Travel Kit
10 Things to Do in Sao Paulo with Kids
Sophia Macpherson, 23 Dec, 2019
7 Best Local Markets in Sao Paulo
12 Best Things to Do in Sao Paulo
10 Free Things to Do in Sao Paulo
9 Amazing Daytrips Near Sao Paulo
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Promoters of the hoax, part 2
Yesterday we published the first half of an update to our FAQ: Promoters of the hoax. We’ve been going over the evidence from Sabine McNeill’s trial, integrating new information and deleting material which is no longer relevant, in order to present the most accurate summary possible.
In yesterday’s post we covered the time between Abraham Christie and Ella Draper’s return from Morocco and Ella’s requesting assistance from Sabine; today we’ll look at the release of the videos and the immediate aftermath.
1. The release of the videos
During her trial, McNeill said that Draper gave her the videos of the children “over Christmas” in 2014. On 21 December 2014, she emailed a person named Brad, asking for his assistance in preparing the videos to be shared online.
Describing the contents of McNeill’s computer at her 2018 trial, DC Martin testified:
She said she was sharing the videos and wanted to know how to make a trailer for them; she also mentioned having contacted a police officer who she felt would confirm the credibility of the mother’s story.
“Russian TV will come on 11 January”, she said. “I may persuade Ella to pay for it”.
On 26 December 2014, Sabine posted this on her (now defunct)National Inquiry into Organised, Orchestrated & Historic Child Sexual Abuse blog:
Later in the same blog post she stated:
On 23 December, the last of 3 hearings took place in Barnet Court. At the previous one, the mother dismissed her barrister who was not willing to defend her affidavit. Since then, she dismissed her solicitor who had not filed documents in time for the court.”
On the face of it, this appears to contradict McNeill’s testimony that Draper had called her in to act as a McKenzie friend, since she had just sacked her legal team.
However, in another post McNeill revealed that by the time Draper contacted her, she had already sacked her second set of solicitors, as they would not go along with her ideas of how the case should be run. In December, Draper grew angry with her legal team once again, and sacked, re-hired, then sacked them again all in the same day.
At that time, frustrated with their difficult client, the legal team handed the legal bundle over to Draper. The bundle contained not only all the “home-made” videos of the children, but also the police interview videos, the CRIS report, the medical report, and other confidential material.
Draper and McNeill
During cross-examination at her trial, McNeill stated that she did not view Draper as a McKenzie friend client, but as a “protegée”.
This suggests that Draper had contacted McNeill not to act as a McKenzie friend, but to help her publicise the case online. McNeill is well-known in some circles for her prolific blogging about controversial cases in which she or her friends had involved themselves.
During her trial, McNeill appeared not to fully understand the role of a McKenzie friend. However, she is well-acquainted with using the internet to (in her words) “Expose, expose, expose!”
How were the videos shared?
Prior to her trial, McNeill repeatedly contended that she had not deliberately shared the videos.
In August 2015, McNeill was arrested for the first time, at the Royal Courts of Justice. In her police interview, she repeatedly denied any responsibility for having released the videos.
DC Chris Wall testified that during her police interview McNeill said:
“I have never uploaded the videos”.
“I have uploaded the videos to a private Google account”.
“I have removed the videos from my Google Drive”.
Later, she admitted that she had not released the videos intentionally, but had “inadvertently bcc’d” them in an email to Henry Curteis, owner of the Tap News Wire blog.
At her 2018 trial, McNeill tried to stick with the “inadvertent bcc” story.
She maintained she had sent an email to the Home Secretary, to notify May’s office that the petition on Change.org would be sending her a notification every time anybody signed it. She claimed that she had added the bcc to Curteis at Tap News Wire because his blog was “very wide-ranging” and she felt he needed to be informed.
The ‘bcc’ story was bunkum
However, at McNeill’s trial DC Martin testified that during his investigation of one of her computers, he saw an email from her dated 2 February 2015.
This email was addressed to the private office of then-Home Secretary Theresa May, and was cc’d to Draper, the Royal Courts of Justice, the family courts, and McKenzie, among others. The email demanded the return of the children to their mother.
DC Martin testified that there was nothing on the email to indicate that Henry Curteis had been bcc’d on it. This runs counter to previous assumptions about how the videos went viral on the internet.
The Change.org petition
It emerged during the trial that the original source of the videos online was a Change.org petition McNeill originally launched on 21 January 2015 to demand the return of the children to Draper.
The petition, titled “Return #WhistleblowerKids and #AbuseSurvivors to their Russian Family!” was addressed to:
Home Secretary The Rt Hon Theresa May MP
Ministry of Justice The Rt Hon Chris Grayling MP
Chief Executive London Borough of Barnet Andrew Travers
and two others whose names are no longer visible on the Wayback Machine version of the petition.
Change.org forwards any updates to its petitions to all who have signed it. In one such petition update, made on 26 January 2015, McNeill included a link to her Google Drive, where the videos were stored.
McNeill had given the videos provocative names such as “Papa kills babies”, and had saved the videos on her Google Drive, which she made available not only via the Change.org petition and then the email to the Home Secretary, but later via some of her blogs.
Part of the email stated,
The attached Position Statement was our offer NOT to expose this scandal in exchange of returning the children. Instead, Mrs Justice Pauffley ignored the issues that have been outstanding since Judge Mayer transferred the case to her on 23 December:
1. The justification for an Interim Care Order.
2. The discussion of a Non-Molestation Order.
3. The inequality of Contact.
The Position Statement was one which McNeill had attempted to present to Mrs Justice Pauffley when it became clear that she had no intention of immediately handing the children back to Draper. In the Position Statement, she had written:
To avoid high level embarrassment, the following possible arrangements might be worth considering:
1) Instead of starting public law proceedings against the school, the children are returned – with immediate effect – to live with the maternal grandparents in Russia.
2) Instead of mobilising English and Russian social media, the father is given a non-molestation order for life, anywhere in the world.
3) Instead of joining the Russian government to the proceedings, the children are released to their mother and maternal grandparents with immediate effect.
Mrs Justice Pauffley had rejected this attempt at judicial blackmail, and so McNeill attempted to go over her head, to the Home Secretary. In doing so, she also released the videos onto the internet.
On 26 January, Draper had handed McNeill the bundle containing her court materials, including sensitive documents such as the police medical report. This was the material which Draper’s last legal team had given her in December.
McNeill placed all this material on her Google Drive, which was publicly accessible via the sharing link in the email/Change.org update. The material very quickly went viral.
On 2 February 2015, Henry Curteis of Tap News Wire published a post titled “Children describe Satanic murders they were forced to take part in”, which contained an email to then-Home Secretary Theresa May, along with a clickable list of the videos.
While McNeill claimed that Curteis published this as a result of her “inadvertent” bcc, it now looks more likely that Curteis was either informed directly of this material, or that he received one of the updates from the Change.org blog.
On 8 February, Draper contacted McNeill by email. She stated that she was unhappy that McNeill had gone against her explicit instructions not to publish the material she had shared with her:
Dear Sabine:
Following yesterday’s meeting and discussion of your decision to post the videos and other material online and share this information with parties unknown to me after I explicitly asked you not to do so on at least two separate occasions: during the Saturday meeting at 31.01.15 and also during private telephone conversation please be kind enough to return all my children’s case material, including all videos, documents.
I much appreciate all the work and assistance you’ve provided for me so far and you are welcome to participate on the condition that you will consult with me and the group before making such decisions in the future.
McNeill’s response was that she was “nicely miffed now”:
I sent a text, I telephoned and left a message and am nicely miffed now.
I’ve spelled out to John Hemming with cc to Ella, once again, that I did NOT publish anything, I just blind-copied one blogger in my email to Theresa May MP as a recipient of the petition.
Victims are always their worst enemies after all…
If Abraham wants to run the show, let him!
Our ‘group’ does not include him.
Terry says clearly that if there is no defence in, the case is lost. But you can say it’s lost no matter what.
I’ve done as best I could. Sorry it wasn’t good enough.
This email raises an interesting question: “Terry” refers to Terence Ewing, a colleague of McNeill and McKenzie, who had been involved with the Association of McKenzie Friends. Ewing was a former business partner of Keith Hammerton and Roger Gleaves, both convicted paedophiles.
Ewing was described by a high court judge as “unattractive and indicative of a lack of personal integrity and honesty”, as well as a “vexatious litigant” and a “professional nimby” with a “voracious appetite” for taking cases. He is banned from taking a civil action in England and Wales unless he has the permission of a High Court judge.
How or why Ewing was involved in the Hampstead matter remains a matter for further investigation.
Following her email exchange, McNeill did not remove the material as requested by Draper. Nor did she remove it in response to a court order, nor following any of her eight arrests between August 2015 and February 2018.
Mandatory injunction issued
On 11 February 2015, a mandatory injunction was issued by Mrs Justice Anna Pauffley, demanding that Draper and McNeill “delete from publicly available electronic sources their postings of all photographs, recordings (voice or video)” which identified the children or their father.
Rather than complying with the order, Draper and McNeill both responded by fleeing the country to avoid arrest.
Draper went to Spain, and was joined shortly afterward by Christie; McNeill went to Berlin, but returned in August 2015. The day after her return, she was arrested at the Royal Courts of Justice, where she had gone to watch Draper’s appeal, a last-ditch effort to have the children returned to her.
Charlotte Ward and Hampstead Research
In early March 2015, a few weeks after the videos were released online, Charlotte Ward, now “rebranded” as Jacqui Farmer and living in Paramaribo, Suriname, launched a new blog titled Hampstead Research.
Jacco de Boer, aka “Video Man”, took on the task of making videos about the hoax. Both the blog and the videos contained material probing into the private lives of all the people Draper and Christie had named. In the videos, narrated by Ward, her voice was deeply distorted to avoid recognition.
While it was relatively short-lived, Hampstead Research and its associated video channel played a major role in harassing the families and teachers of Hampstead.
Ward and de Boer published a great deal of completely baseless defamatory, harassing material, and encouraged readers to send harassing emails to people’s friends and workplaces.
Hampstead Research was closed by WordPress in July 2015, but Ward persisted, creating a new version of her blog which contained much of the same material. However, by the end of October 2015, she ceased posting. The blog remained up for some months afterward, but eventually disappeared. Ward claimed that it had been hacked, and this seems possible given that no trace of it exists even on the Internet Archive.
Araya Soma
As we stated in Part 1 of this FAQ, Araya Soma was involved in the hoax in its very early stages. She attempted to get Bill Maloney’s interest, but he seemed to back out quite quickly.
Once McNeill had posted the videos and other confidential information about the children, Soma (aka Araya Manna, aka Ninon Dulac, aka Laurence Lavie) continued trying to promote the hoax, through her own Cbange.org petition.
This was posted, as far as we can tell, on 9 February 2015:
We demand that the alleged abusers with apparent distinguishing marks come forward to be examined by independent trusted doctors alongside trusted police and normal police too
Come forward to be examined, if you are not guilty you should have come forward STRAIGHT away to be examined , you havent, so we find that as this is weird that you havent, we assume you are guilty, so we DEMAND that you be examined by trusted doctors who could see any attempts to cover up those marks up, plus trusted police and any other police that wish to be present. We want photos taken to kept by the police and doctors for reference in court
Petitioning HAMPSTEAD ALLEGED ABUSERS COME TO BE EXAMINED
In an update to the petition, titled “COMMON LAW”, Soma wrote on 16 February,
16 Feb 2015 — If any of you know people who are very well versed in common law and could help us take those accused into a common law court please HELP , contact me on FB as ARAYA SOMA
In November 2015, Soma posted something which sounded suspiciously like an admission that child sex abuse images had been found on Christie’s phone:
And here is the report by a close friend: Just spoke with Abraham. He and Ella are safe… However, it’s obvious what the agenda/plan is:
Back in the summer the kids stole Abraham’s phone, and of course now surprise they have found kids porn on it… planted by the dad. The computer they say they have of Abe is bullshit, cause he has his computer with him, so they’ve implanted some computer which isn’t his…
So the agenda will be to say that it was Abe who is a paedo, which won’t wash as the kids were found to have been abused far far far longer than the very short time they knew Abe for…
Soma, an ardent neo-Nazi who advocates drinking one’s own menstrual blood and urine, has long since faded out of the picture, all the more so after Facebook removed two of her profile pages. Gone, but not forgotten.
09/04/2019 in Investigating the hoax. Tags: Abraham Christie, Araya Soma, Charlotte Ward, Ella Draper, FAQ, Hampstead Research, Sabine McNeill, trial
Updating the FAQ: Promoters of the hoax
Hampstead SRA hoax timeline update, part 2
← Updating the FAQ: Promoters of the hoax
Brees retaliates against Private Eye journalist →
61 thoughts on “Promoters of the hoax, part 2”
Angela Power EuroDisney says:
At last some GREAT NEWS!
Captain slaphead Chris Spivey is finally closing his site for good.
Cos all his flock let him down by not paying him several hundred quid every month.
I hope he blames them and they feel awful.
Rofl,pmsml,lol,lulz,ha ha,etc etc😂😂😂😂😂
Thanks for these updates, EC. Nice work 🙂
Thanks, Tinribs. Interesting how many gaps were filled in by Sabine’s trial, I’m finding! 🙂
Speaking of early promoters of the hoax, check out Abe’s latest ramblings (and thank you to the tireless Agent J for the links):
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NzvSai74WUFjZfq5W0HUtzK4lrSjV_6o
The latest pearls of wisdom from King Wanker. He’s all about peace and love, you know. Just ask his chief bootlicker Andy Devine…
Ahem… 🤭
https://hoaxteadresearch.wordpress.com/2019/04/07/the-pain-of-living-with-a-conspiracy-cultist/comment-page-1/#comment-135003
“…their ass”
Do they all share one communal ass, then? Interesting
It’s the donkey I feel sorry for.
As I feared, he’s now going to use Ebglish bench law- far more powerful than Common Law and pre-dates the Magna Carta.
Mind you Ebglish Law’s jurisdiction doesn’t currently extend beyond the boundaries of Hobbiton as far as I know. But if Wanoa also seizes New Zealand I’m terrified he may do a deal with the Orcs. What if he loads up Peter Pan’s Jumbo jet with them and attacks the island of England?
Do you think that the reality of Deportation may now be sinking in?.
Well you don’t have to worry as they have all been identidied (unless zombies are real) do zombies gistoric indentidie someone, and is it related to gastric function- if so what do the British police have to do with it?
I would wonder what language that post his kingness posted is written in???
I see Fat Cat’s been making sizeist jibes again. It’s what bullies who are insecure about their own obesity do…
He’s really off on one at the moment, lol…
4:29 – “I’ve just seen someone being murdered online” 😮
Based on his posts, the English language was slaughtered already, so……….
Egblish of course. It’s a combination of English and Quantum.
Oh dear we hardly want to bore Hiz Highness Wanoa and make him look amarteurish. Especially as he’s quite capable of doing it himself.
He thinks this Cook St business is Blue Collar Crime. And Lee Cant is doing all his legal work. Don’t tell Equity Lawyer Edward Ellis. If you listen to Wanoa without watching him it’s like listening to a lunatic.
Flo Destroyer says:
Some people fail to adapt to life after primary school.
“Talk Like a James Joyce Novel” Day seems to come earlier each year.
It’s the utter lies that get me:
Sabine says “The hearing of the boy is impaired due to the father’s hitting and excessive shouting”
If you are one of the people who ‘believe the children’ you should note that the child said Abraham (not his father) had hit him causing injury to his ear. He hadn’t seen his natural father in months and yet had fresh blood in that ear. It’s all in the medical report.
The children were removed into ‘care’ because of their complaints of violence perpetrated by Abraham.
How can she lie like this when it affects people’s lives to such an extent?
I can’t imagine how Sabine feels. She went into bat for a woman, Ella, who basically couldn’t give a stuff about Sabine’s plight.
I could never celebrate in Sabine’s incarceration but it’s very hard to work out how Sabine must feel. It’s not like she robbed a bank and knew the risks.
I wonder how she must feel late at night knowing she has another 4/5 years to serve?. I hope she’s treated OK while she’s inside.
I’ve read reports by some pretty intelligent people who have done time and they have mostly made friends of other prisoners from all walks of life and set out to help them with letters, rights and so on as a way of filling their time. I even read one or two have actually found a lot of comfort in being able to help others in jail who may have almost no education. Sabine is obviously intelligent even if she has some wacky views.
Would Sabine be assisting other prisoners with their problems? (Gawd help them).
Notice how almost to a man /woman the fanatics have abandoned Sabine. Out of sight out of mind. Not too different to how Rupert is just a very small side note in this saga and put himself through an ordeal that serves no purpose.
# I won’t dwell on this for too long.
Off topic but if anyone fancies some levity a link to an unsuspecting YouTuber reacting to a video accusing her of being a secret transgender (the lady who is the subject of the video isn’t even an A or B list celebrity, just a reasonably successful YouTuber). The reaction video is actually funny but the person who made the original video accused her of being a bully because she reacted (then conspiracy theorists seem to live in a different reality to the rest of us – those who aren’t outright liars and scammers anyway). “mayfair’s” videos where he used google earth to trace King John’s addresses in New Zealand were funny also. (Though people have probably seen those.
Never heard of her described as an unsuspecting You Tuber before! But still not as fun as the Armored Skeptic / Shoe on Head accusations.
That reminds me. I haven’t visited Encyclopædia Dramatica for a while. Wonder what’s been going on? 😜
Yes, she spouted a load of lies, when the very documents Ella had given her contradicted her.
LOL too true.
Gosh, you mean she doesn’t like it when people look at her family? Who could have imagined what that might feel like?
And don’t forget to wait for Godot at the same time. 🙂
I have to say I will never forget that look on Sabine`s face in court, when she still didn`t have a clue what she had done right up to the end. She turned round to one of her supporters, grinned, then winked. but when the Judge told her to stand up, she looked so pained with her crutches, poor lady. Prison is the best place for her, it`s a shame Belinda didn`t go with her.
Yay! Just got one of these…
And FOUR of these… 😆
She’s been posting endless photos of her children on her publicly viewable page, despite believing she’s being stalked by child rapists. Go figure
Devine’s daily dollops (so far today)…
VIDEO TWO (Feat. King John Wanker)
9:52 in the first video: “These Hoaxtead people have gone and attacking [sic] a video of my wife’s. They’re saying some not nice comments.”
Huh? What’s he banging on about now? His wife doesn’t even make videos, lol. And as for attacking people’s innocent family members, we leave that to lowlifes like him, Angela, Cat and the Beast of Kincorth.
Tom Dunce is off on one again. Seems he’s not a big fan of Satanism. Who knew…?
9:01 – “I’ve lost a lot of friends over this” 😂
The begging bowl bit comes at 20:05.
I’m the living embodiment of a rehabilitation rather than punishment liberal and I too was sympathetic towards the treatment of an elderly defendant who no longer posed a threat to society. That was until I actually attended one day of her trial. She will be out in about three years if she can convince the authorities that she is no longer a danger, But if she doesn’t, I won’t weep for her.
The City Works Depot Carpark
Good luck with your car park King Con! 🤔
77 Cook St, Auckland 1010 Auckland Central, Auckland
A pay and display carpark located on the block bounded by Cook Street, Nelson Street, Wellesley Street West, Sales Street and Morton Street.
Devine’s daily dollops. 😆
I guess it’s preferable to catching sight of one of his ‘big logs’. 🤭
Am I the only one made nervous by how he takes his eyes off the road?
I am trying to imagine a court’s response to Wanoa’s next attempt to claim property.
Perhaps a Writ of Foock right off, and keep foocking off, until you have foocked off all the way back to where you foocked off from, and then foock right off some more – whatever that is in Latin.
It’s now six… 😆
From MKD, who here clarifies the comments he left on a video he found on Heather’s Facebook page, which he maintains were fair:
Heather’s not all sweet and innocent in Devine’s antics, to be fair. She’s been posting quite a lot over the last few weeks cheering him on in his illegal UK endeavours.
Also from MKD:
Interesting observation from Agent J – it seems Abe and Cat have been tagging each other into Instagram posts. Why would Fat Cat be so keen to get in with the self-confessed child-abuser and convicted violent criminal Abe Christie, I wonder 🤔
Funny you mention that. I see she’s also been cheering on the unhinged psycho Robert ‘Fabooka’ Matheson, who I gather has had previous visits from the boys in blue for stalking, harassment and weapons possession.
So to reiterate, that’s Catriona “I just ignore Hoaxtead” Selvester encouraging a dangerous lunatic to harass, slander and threaten innocent people from this blog. Things that make you go hmm, eh 🤔
More from Cat & Fatfooka:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1k41_ucsDzSo15Wj7rdM5ZKlITv0ZHX4E
I won’t link the post in question but in it Fabooka attacks Sheva, Jimmy Outlaw and a protected witness (whom he also illegally names).
So he admits he’s only attacking said protected witness and promoting the hoax for personal reasons (to wit: a bruised ego), not because he believes it. Hmm, sounds familiar (mentioning no Angelas).
“Your arseholes were warned”
Oh no, I wonder what he’s planning to do to them 🤭
There’s a really nasty, slanderous page about Sheva on there. Seems Fabooka likes to bully and harass vulnerable, disabled abuse survivors. No wonder Cat’s kissing his arse – kindred spirits and all that.
The gist of that seems to be: “Waah waaah, Sheva was mean to me. She smells of piss – ner-ner-n-ner-ner – and I hate her I hate her I hate her”
What a sad, pathetic wanker 🙄
An update… from 2015.. from Neelu. No desperation there, then… 🙄
I’m pleased to hear that that disgusting ‘Psycho Profiles’ site, where Fatfooka had posted really vile profiles of Sheva, Jimmy and other people who’d dared to question him, has been taken down by the police 🙂
Yeah, Cat has a habit of supporting fakes, liars and child-abusing crooks – Angela, Fabooka, Abe Christie. the Beast of Kincorth, Robert Green, Janine Rennie, David Scott, Brian Gerrish… to name but a handful.
Desperation confirmed:
Hiz Majesty Wanoa says he’s flying to Perth in WA any day now.
From memory New Zealanders & Australians didn’t need visas and had automatic entry but I suppose now things have been tightened up especially after the recent shocking terrorist Mosque attacks.
Of course the current British regent also happens to be the Queen of Australia so I wonder if any concerned citizen has alerted Oz Border Force that a traveler who threatens the Monarch is about to arrive?
Odd really that Wanoa claims he was broke and yet he’s musing over the reasonable $750 flight cost (doesn’t mention accommodation costs ). He claims Qantas wanted some fantastic price for his luggage..in the $1000s but brilliant negotiator Andy convinced them that the “facts aren’t the fiction” and got it reduced right down. Mind you Devine never said such a thing just that they had over-charged him a bit more. Talk about fiction.
Perhaps she’s heard he’s a nutrition expert and she wants to try his famous cannabis soup weight loss plan?
Or maybe she’s looking for a childminder? So many possibilities.
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Trailer Frenzy
Charlize Theron Is Some Kind of Crazy Car Sorceress in the New Fate of the Furious Trailer
Filed to:trailer frenzy
Image: Universal.
Trailer FrenzyA special place to find the newest trailers for movies and TV shows you're craving.
I have previously asserted that the Fast and the Furious films are in fact a superhero movie franchise where everyone’s superpowers is “cars.” Thanks to this new trailer for the upcoming installment, The Fate of the Furious, I have new evidence backing up my conjecture—namely, Charlize Theron’s villainess summoning whole fleets of cars to do her evil bidding.
Guys, I can’t actually explain how much I love these dumb, wonderful movies if I want to accomplish anything else today, but I will say that my lovely wife and I have said to many family members, friends, and even some new acquaintances, “Have you accepted the Fast and the Furious movies into your life?” We proselytize these things. But I really do believe they’re actual superhero movies. I mean, watch the new F8 trailer, which features the Rock literally altering the path of a torpedo with his hands (while on a car driving at top speed, of course):
If you are interested in hearing the good word and learning to live your life a quarter-mile at a time, email me a self-addressed stamped envelope and I’ll send you my hand-made religious tracts. Fate of the Furious opens April 14.
More from io9
How Fast and the Furious Became the World's Greatest Superhero Movie Franchise
The Cars In The Fate Of The Furious Look Damn Near Indestructible
The Fast And The Furious Is A Ridiculous Movie But Here's Why We All Love It Anyway
Rob Bricken was the Editor of io9 from 2016-18, the creator of the poorly named but fan-favorite news site Topless Robot, and now writes nerd stuff for many places, because it's all he's good at.
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Michael Bauer’s review of Amber Dhara, in photos
By Paolo Lucchesi on October 15, 2012 at 8:04 AM
"Evolution is important in keeping a concept fresh, so it's understandable that this contemporary Indian-California-inspired restaurant takes some chances, but it comes together in an amateurish way." less
"Evolution is important in keeping a concept fresh, so it's understandable that this contemporary Indian-California-inspired restaurant takes some chances, but it comes together in an amateurish ... more
"The room is self-consciously hip with multiple communal tables, high ceilings and a mezzanine ... t was never even half-filled on my visits, but it was still too noisy to be comfortable."
"The big orbs hanging over the bar and the large graphics on the wall are impressive, but the interior doesn't feel welcoming..."
"...And neither do the reinvented recipes crafted by Vittal Shetty, the corporate chef for the chain, and Arindam Bahel, who came from the Rodas Ecotel hotel in Mumbai."
" The restaurant prides itself on using seasonal, local ingredients and in the transition from a summer to a fall menu, the preparations got marginally better, but the portion size seemed stingy in some dishes. The Kadhai steamed mussels ($11), for example, brought just seven small, rubbery mussels. But their sauce, one of the best of our visits, was a rich yellow curry, with ginger and coconut milk - balanced, with just a hint of sweetness." less
" The restaurant prides itself on using seasonal, local ingredients and in the transition from a summer to a fall menu, the preparations got marginally better, but the portion size seemed stingy in some ... more
"Yet, the kitchen still takes license with other traditional recipes, with mixed results. One dish that worked pretty well was the trio of chicken tikka ($16). One chunk of white meat was coated in blue cheese, another in saffron and a third in chile paste." less
"Yet, the kitchen still takes license with other traditional recipes, with mixed results. One dish that worked pretty well was the trio of chicken tikka ($16). One chunk of white meat was coated in blue ... more
"No one asked why it was practically untouched while the rogan josh ($18) was spooned down to the scrapings ... Still, the rich spicy flavors in the sauce were particularly welcome with the assortment of tandoori breads ($9), especially the classic naan." less
"No one asked why it was practically untouched while the rogan josh ($18) was spooned down to the scrapings ... Still, the rich spicy flavors in the sauce were particularly welcome with the assortment of ... more
"I thought the vegetable dishes might be the thing to order; this is the place where the chef takes the most California license, and the combinations sound interesting. One combined organic quinoa ($7) with peanuts, cucumber and a pleasant, if timid, lift from capers and a strawberry and malt vinegar." less
"I thought the vegetable dishes might be the thing to order; this is the place where the chef takes the most California license, and the combinations sound interesting. One combined organic quinoa ($7) with ... more
" I also liked chwonke palak, singada and edamame ($14), again stuffed into a too-small bowl. A raw blast of cumin and chiles belied the velvety texture of the chopped spinach accented with the crunch of snap peas and water chestnuts." less
" I also liked chwonke palak, singada and edamame ($14), again stuffed into a too-small bowl. A raw blast of cumin and chiles belied the velvety texture of the chopped spinach accented with the crunch of snap ... more
"Owner [Vijay] Bist is a veteran restaurateur, so perhaps he will still make some changes. As it stands now, from start to finish, Amber Dhara isn't even a shadow of the original."
Michael Bauer's review of Amber Dhara, in photos
This weekend, Michael Bauer reviewed Amber Dhara, the ginormous Valencia Street offshoot of the very successful Amber India empire. Unfortunately, Amber Dhara doesn’t quite measure up to its predecessors, earning just one star.
Amber Dhara has been in the works for years, and it finally opened in July. Bauer is the first major reviewer to take a crack at the Indian restaurant, and sadly, it wasn’t very good. Read the entire review here and check out the photos above.
Have you been to Amber Dhara? What did you think of it?
· Review: New Amber Dhara doesn’t measure up [San Francisco Chronicle]
Amber Dhara: 680 Valencia St (near 18th Street), San Francisco; (415) 400-5699. amber-india.com
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Is Microsoft Turning Itself Around?
by Nick Kolakowski February 6, 2015 3 min read
MicrosoftMicrosoft WindowsSatya Nadella
This week, a number of tech publications published rundowns of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s first year in office, with most seeming to conclude that he’d managed to breathe some new life into the tech giant.
As any longtime Microsoft watcher knows, former CEO Steve Ballmer (and before him, co-founder Bill Gates) organized the company in a way that created fiefdoms among business divisions. In the months before exiting the company, Ballmer began to reorganize those divisions in a way that knocked down at least some of the walls between them, a process that’s continued under Nadella. Reports from inside Microsoft indicate there’s more collaboration between working groups, and more of a focus on developing interesting mobile and cloud software.
Check out the latest .NET jobs.
What does Microsoft’s future look like? Nadella is making a very big bet—in prestige, if not in resources—on the HoloLens, a black plastic headset that projects holographic images on the wearer’s surrounding environment. You could use HoloLens to play games, such as Minecraft, or for more productive pursuits: Imagine working on a virtual mockup of a project at your desk.
But Microsoft still depends on enterprise sales for a significant portion of its revenue, which means its immediate future will also depend on the success of Windows 10, due later this year. If Windows 10 proves a massive hit, it could give Microsoft some much-needed momentum. (Certainly Nadella’s decision to make the operating system free for those upgrading from Windows 7 and 8, at least for the first year of Windows 10’s life, will spur early adoption.)
If Windows 10 fails to perform at a blockbuster level, however, it will only contribute to a perception that Microsoft is gradually crumbling away to obsolescence, despite Nadella’s efforts. While the “new” Microsoft has made great strides in interoperability with competitors’ platforms, and received strong reviews for its latest cloud products, it still needs to show in the only way that matters to investors—revenue, profit, and units sold—that it can take on Apple and Google.
Bill Gates Talks Regrets, Current Microsoft Project
Meet HoloLens, Microsoft’s Attempt to Win the Future
Is Microsoft Truly Embracing Open Source?
Windows Leader Sinofsky Exits Microsoft
Microsoft Windows Phone Gets a New Boss
Microsoft Shifting Away from Windows Phone
Finding Silicon Valley’s Heart of Entrepreneurship
Metro Areas Offer Top Prospects for STEM Jobs
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Emmy® nominee Simon Baker returns as Patrick Jane in Season Two of last year’s top-rated new drama. Notorious for his lack of protocol and past as a sham psychic, Jane’s got a remarkable track record for solving serious crimes with his razor sharp skills of observation. With a little more edge and a lot more office dynamics, the California Bureau of Investigation’s supersleuth solves case after case like a cat among the procedural pigeons! Highlighting new faces and a series of roadblocks, both personal and professional, Season Two of THE MENTALIST delves not only into the shadows of Patrick Jane’s well-concealed past, but also the personal histories and dynamics of the other CBI team members. Created and executive produced by Rome’s Bruno Heller, THE MENTALIST stars Simon Baker, Robin Tunney as Sr. Agent Teresa Lisbon, Tim Kang as Agent Kimball Cho, Owain Yeoman as Agent Wayne Rigsby and Amanda Righetti as Agent Grace Van Pelt.
The Mentalist, Season 2
The Mentalist: The Complete Series
Castle, Season 8
Lie to Me, Season 3
Person of Interest, Season 5
Elementary, Season 7
Rizzoli & Isles, The Complete Series
Bones, The Complete Series
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Tag Archives: Taito
It’s that time of year again–i.e., the time of year when I spend way too much time searching for games that will put me in a Halloween mood.
Thankfully, a good number of such games were released for the PC Engine during its heyday. Here are the ones I’ll be playing (or be thinking of playing, at least) in the run-up to this year’s All Hallows’ Eve:
Cotton (Hudson Soft/Success, 1993)–There are two main reasons this cute shmup would earn a regular spot in my PC Engine Super CD-ROM2 system over the next few weeks if I still owned a copy of it: 1) It stars a broom-riding witch who has to fly through all sorts of dark and dreary environs in order to collect a bunch of missing gems, and 2) Said witch is obsessed with candy. Really, it’s the perfect game for such a spooky-and-sweet season.
Dracula X: Chi no Rondo (Konami, 1993)–I couldn’t very well create a list like this and not include on it a game that not only features Dracula’s name in its title but also features said vampire as its main villain, could I? I’d mention Dracula X here even if it didn’t involve that old bloodsucker, though–thanks in no small part to its Thriller-meets-Sleepy Hollow opening slavo.
Jigoku Meguri (Taito, 1990)–True story: I used to rather dislike this pixelated platformer, which follows a portly monk as he makes a perilous trek through hell. I changed my tune after giving it another try a month or so ago (expect to see a post about this epiphanic experience soon), though, and now consider it to be an appreciably dour counterpoint to a similar-yet-much-more-cheerful Taito-developed title: Mizubaku Daibouken.
Splatterhouse (Namcot, 1990)–The protagonist of this bloody beat ’em up looks like Friday the 13th‘s Jason Voorhees. That alone makes me want to play it this time of year. The game’s grotesque baddies–like the chainsaw-weidling dude showcased in the screenshot above–and creepy soundtrack are just the blood-spattered icing on this ghoulishly rotten (in a good way) cake.
I’d add NEC Avenue’s Horror Story and Human’s Laplace no Ma, a supposedly terror-ific dungeon crawler, to this list, but I’ve never played the former (important if I’m to know whether or not it’ll put me in a Halloween mood) and I don’t understand the language (Japanese) that’s likely required to make it through the latter.
Tagged as Cotton, Dracula X, Halloween, Horror Story, imports, Jigoku Meguri, Laplace no Ma, Mizubaku Daibouken, reviews, Splatterhouse, Taito
So, now what?
First, there were four–games at the top of my “to buy” list, that is. After I bought Mizubaku Daibouken, the list shrank to three. Then I bought Rainbow Islands and Gekisha Boy and it was down to two and then one.
Well, the list is no more thanks to my recent acquisition of Parasol Stars.
Which, I guess, begs the question asked in this post’s headline: So, now what? The answer, of course, is to add more games to my “to buy” list.
As of now, that list includes a few cheap-ish HuCards (Don Doko Don, The New Zealand Story and PC Denjin), a considerably more expensive HuCard (Coryoon) and a similarly pricey Arcade CD-ROM release (Madou Monogatari).
Although I’d love to run out and buy the last two games mentioned above as soon as possible, the more likely scenario involves me buying Don Doko Don, The New Zealand Story and PC Denjin over the next few months and then waiting until the end of the year to buy Madou Monogatari and Coryoon.
In the meantime, I’ll busy myself with the brazenly plucky Parasol Stars.
Note: check out this Flickr set for more photos of my PC Engine collection.
Tagged as acquisitions, Flickr, HuCards, Parasol Stars, photos, platformers, Taito
PCE Review #2: Mizubaku Daibouken
Game: Mizubaku Daibouken
Developer: Taito
Publisher: Taito
One way to translate the Japanese title of this game into English, or so I’ve been told, is to call it Water Bomb Adventure. That’s certainly an apt way to describe this quirky little platformer, which stars a platypus–yeah, I know the folks at Taito say he’s a hippopotomus, but there’s no way the paunchy protagonist is anything other than an Ornithorhynchus anatinus–who throws, you guessed it, giant balls of water at innumerable foes as he waddles through levels pulled from the pages of Platformers for Dummies. His journey–to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend, naturally–begins easily enough, with straightforward stages filled to the brim with enemies who put up little to no resistance, but it rapidly rachets up in intensity. That’s OK, though, because the Parasol Stars-esque sights you’ll see and the hummable tunes you’ll hear along the way help make it all worthwhile–assuming, of course, you didn’t drop too much cash to procure your copy of the game (an unfortunately all-too-common occurrence given its Bubble Bobble connection).
Tagged as HuCards, Liquid Kids, Mizubaku Daibouken, PCE Reviews, platformers, reviews, Taito
PCE Review #1: Rainbow Islands
Game: Rainbow Islands
Developer: NEC Avenue
Publisher: NEC Avenue
Most platformers follow in Super Mario Bros’ hugely successful footsteps and scroll horizontally. Well, Fukio Mitsuji’s arcade classic–technically the first sequel to Bubble Bobble–turns that tried-and-true tradition on its head and scrolls vertically, much like those odd overworld sections of Kid Icarus that caused you to pull out your hair by the handful. (Or was that just me?) As much as I like that mythological Famicom Disk System title, though, it has nothing on Rainbow Islands, what with its titular arcs of light–which can be used as weapons and as platforms–shimmering, Wizard of Oz-esque soundtrack (i.e., the main theme sounds an awful lot like “Over the Rainbow“) and varied assortment of enemies and environments.
See also: ‘Introducing: PCE Reviews‘
Tagged as CD games, NEC Avenue, PCE Reviews, platformers, Rainbow Islands, reviews, Taito
Two down, two to go
Two months ago, I typed up a post (this one) in which I mentioned the four games at the top of my to-buy list: Gekisha Boy, Mizubaku Daibouken (aka Liquid Kids), Parasol Stars and Rainbow Islands.
Actually, the point of that post was to declare that I had acquired Mizubaku Daibouken, so I guess I should have said that it mentioned the three games at the top of my to-buy list.
Whatever. The point of this post: To gush about the fact that I’ve finally picked up a copy of Rainbow Islands.
Of all the games on the above-mentioned to-buy list, Rainbow Islands is, by far, my favorite. In fact, it’s probably one of my favorite games of all time–regardless of platform.
Unfortunately, my love for the game has yet to translate into anything approaching mastery of it. (Sad-but-true story: I can’t seem to get past the fifth stage.)
I’ll do my best to improve between now and when I (finally) buy the last two games on my famed to-buy list: Gekisha Boy and Parasol Stars.
Tagged as acquisitions, CD games, NEC Avenue, Rainbow Islands, Taito
Mizubaku Daibouken = Bubble Bobble 4?
At least, that’s what the editors of TurboPlay magazine suggested all the way back in 1992–just before Taito’s Mizubaku Diabouken (aka Liquid Kids) hit the streets in Japan.
My initial reaction to that suggestion was something along the lines of “nuh uh!”–but after giving it some consideration my reaction has softened a bit.
After all, the series’ other (actual) entries–Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands and Parasol Stars–don’t share enemies, protagonists, settings or weapons, so why would part four–with its waterbomb-wielding platypus–be any different?
All that said, Mizubaku Daibouken isn’t, as far as I can tell, officially called chapter four of the Bubble Bobble saga–although I suppose that may have been something the game’s creators considered early on.
Tagged as Bubble Bobble, HuCards, Liquid Kids, magazines, Mizubaku Daibouken, scans, Taito, TurboPlay
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The Pleasure Principle
Erin Williams and Marielle Coutrix
Originally posted on the Sex Pleasure Rights blog.
In the words of Janet Jackson, circa 1986, “It’s the pleasure principle!” Yet, those of us working to advance the sexual and reproductive rights of adolescent girls often forget this and are reluctant to talk about pleasure.
In sexuality education, educators feel awkward and ill-equipped to broach the topic, and as a result, young people don’t get the information they need. Of course, personal boundaries are crucial. But teachers should be having these discussions, and responding constructively when students question them about it. This is especially important as women, girls, and transpeople are targeted the most by negative messages about their bodies and their sexuality by media.
Some brave organizations around the world are working to change this. IWHC’s grantee partners Creating Resources and Empowerment in Action (CREA) in India, Trust for Indigenous Culture and Health (TICAH) in Kenya, and International Center for Reproductive Health and Sexual Rights (INCRESE) in Nigeria are breaking new ground. Their empowerment programs promote sexual pleasure as an end in and of itself. In fact, they are unleashing pleasure waves that span the globe!
At recent international conferences — Women Deliver 2016 and the AWID Forum — CREA has explored the politics of pleasure, sexual autonomy, and bodily rights. In conversations and presentations at these conferences, they brought to light how our field had tended to associate sex with pain and distress. This is important as one in three women will be beaten, coerced into sex, or abused by an intimate partner in the course of her lifetime. However, a disproportionate focus on violence ignores women’s sexual agency and choice.
CREA points out that our collective language reflects this bias: we have more vocabulary for sexual violence than for pleasure. By putting sexual freedom and enjoyment on the feminist agenda and using different language, we affirm that we want to live in a world where all women and girls can act with self-determination in the boardroom, and the bedroom–alone or with a partner. At the same time, we should recognize that pleasure is just one of the many possible motivators for and goals of sex.
During a Women Deliver panel, the Pleasure Project, a U.K.-based nonprofit, made a dramatic point by describing the internal (female) condom as a sex toy. This caused the audience to gasp. They eroticized safer sex! Youth Advocate Arushi Singh also discussed their “pleasure audits,” which include working with sexuality educators to review curricula and ensure they include pleasure in a meaningful way.
In Kenya, TICAH bravely and provocatively tackles issues of pleasure in an environment where girls are not supposed to be knowledgeable about sex. Jade Maina, Deputy Director, states that she hopes the long-term impact of their work will be girls and women who enjoy sex and sexual expression. “Sex is fun and should be a happy thing!” she said. However, her team does grapple with how to have conversations about masturbation that uproot patriarchal notions of female body exploration and pleasure as sinful and perverse.
Dorothy Aken’Ova, Founding Executive Director of INCRESE in northern Nigeria, has said, “Rights include the right to seek pleasure.” Dorothy, who has been on the frontlines of the national LGBTQ movement, recently returned home from a trip to the United States with a suitcase full of sex toys, including butt plugs, which can’t be found in Nigeria. She hopes to use pleasure as an entry point for broader discussions on consent and sexual and reproductive health and rights.
CREA, TICAH and INCRESE recognize women’s and girls’ rights to express their thoughts, opinions, needs and desires. They talk about pleasure in ways that challenge hetero-normativity, welcoming diversity in sexual identity, experience, and expression.
It’s clear that we need more investment in pleasure, a neglected area of sexual and reproductive health. However, it’s unlikely that donors will ever consider orgasms, or other aspects of pleasure, as deliverables they should support. But initiatives that promote pleasure have measurable and positive health outcomes. Research shows that when girls internalize the message that they shouldn’t be enjoying sex, they are less likely to negotiate the terms of sex, less likely to insist that their partners use condoms. In addition, the marketing of condoms as an erotic accessory has been proven to increase their use. Campaigns like Arushi Singh’s in Sri Lanka—which eroticized internal condoms—enabled sex workers to charge more money for sex with condoms than without. So positive social constructs of pleasure can motivate and incentivize safer sex.
Given our ability to transform social norms, promoting safe and consensual pleasure as “hot sex” should be a focal point for feminist and public health advocates alike. If we want to enhance informed sexual decision-making and promote equality, we can’t keep ignoring one of the main reasons that people engage in sex. If female and trans pleasure is an affront to patriarchy, let’s get busy people!
Photo: -MaDMAn-/Flickr
Erin Williams
Program OfficerIWHC
Erin is a former program officer on IWHC's grantmaking and international partnerships team.
Marielle Coutrix
Program AssistantIWHC
Marielle is a former program assistant on IWHC's grantmaking and international partnerships team.
Tagged with: comprehensive sexuality education, gender equality, India, Kenya, LGBT, Nigeria, sexual and reproductive health and rights
Making the Most of Partnerships for Sexuality Education
What Does President Trump Mean for Sexual and Reproductive Rights at the UN?
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Jacob Bacharach
Blogarach
100 Miles and Runnin’
Culture, Movies, Plus ça change motherfuckers
Everyone is all like, Daniel Craig is the best James Bond evar! Except, of course, for Daniel Craig, who is a fine actor and knows that the whole thing is shit or bollocks or whatever the Brits say. I guess James Bond was fine back when the casual murder of women could be chalked up to No Homo and a few laughs, but now it’s all Heath Ledger killing poor Maggie Gyllenhal in order to signify that this crap is “dark” and “gritty” and “realistic.” Well, it’s realistic that society hates women, all right, but at least the 60s were halfway honest about it instead of dressing it up as psychological realism and passing it off as a form of world-weary sophistication. I guess festooning your rapemurder tree with baubles of cosmopolitan disapproval makes for a better holiday, but you still have a rapemurder tree in the middle of your house.
Anyway. Daniel Craig knows that Bond sucks, and that’s why he’s subtly trying to get out of it. Like every other dead franchise, the 21st century has seen fit to torture Bond back into existence though the moody application of shadow. Getting blood on your shirt somehow imbues that fight on top of the train with the weight of actuality. Yeah, no. It just makes the unreality more noticeable; it sandbags the balloon that is your suspension of disbelief. That smoke coming from the engine under the right wing? That is your capacity for fantasy and wonder being overtaxed.
You see, James Bond has nothing to say about the world we live in now. It is about guns, fucking, and fast boats. The next time your grandma the Washington Post columnist disapproves of “those rap videos,” show her any Bond flick, which glorifies precisely the same acquisitive, casually murderous booty shaking, albeit with a crackpot post-imperial nationalism as the crispy white stand-in for the hood. Substitute Compton or the Dirty South or wherever for The Sceptered Isle, and you get the picture. Bond is a rap video for white people. Straight up.
What was I saying? Skyfall. Everything about it is tired, and what’s worse, this is a deliberate effect! Judi Dench is tired. Ralph Fiennes is tired. The pretty black girl who, surprise, can’t really hack field work is tired. Daniel Craig is tired. Javier Bardem? Tired. Also gay, maybe? And Spanish. Why a villainously homosexual Spaniard was ever employed by MI-6 is a question this realistic movie fails to pause and ponder. I leave it to you. Even the sexy twink they cast as Q is tired. Again, exhaustion is supposed to connote reality here.
Let me wander afield for a moment. The problem with realism as practiced in the anglosphere is that it’s supposed to act in a manner once reserved for metaphor and allegory. Thus realism crawls up its own, you’ll pardon me, arse and starts gnawing its own guts out. You see, the nature of reality, the real reality, is that nothing stands for anything other than what it is. My psychological exhaustion is not commentary on the state of the West, not until plucked from its tender stem and planted in the water of narrative construction. Bond’s enervation and fatigue are supposed to be real, and yet they are also supposed to be metaphorical vehicles for England, thereby becoming totally unreal. Suddenly nothing self-refers; everything instead reflects the state of something else. The result is profoundly alienating to both the sense of reality and the sense of fun. Insert “we’re getting too old for this” joke.
The penultimate sequence in Skyfall is the intercutting of three scenes: Judi Dench telling some parliamentarians that the world is more dangerous than ever because there are no more Russians; James Bond pursuing Javier Bardem through some tunnels; Q doing something on computers that’s even more embarrassing than your mom’s activities on Facebook. “He’s using a quantum core search algorithm password encryption matrix code branch substation key root data program,” or something. The Dench speech is all about our enemies among us—the standard post-9/11 crap about the obfuscation of once-clean lines of national enmity, and this again is there purely to lend the cartoonish affair some portion of Page A gravitas.
The whole thing then transports itself to the Scottish moors. The final action sequence was praised for its austerity, even as it emptied vast armories of bullets into our by-now mushy brains. Like everything else, the austerity was a metaphor, although at this point the film is as exhausted as its main characters and sees no point in making it a metaphor for anything in particular. Just a metaphor, you guys. Daniel Craig tries to drown himself, but Eon and Columbia pulled his ass out of the frozen lake and gave him a 2-picture extension. The next Bond film tentatively entitled Staight Outa Eastwaithe Moorheath, will be released in 2015.
March 4, 2013 jacobbacharach Tagged Daniel Craig, James Bond, Movies, Spies 15 Comments
Things from the Backpack
QAnonskiya twitter.com/page88/status/… 2 hours ago
I'm really gonna miss winter when it's gone forever. https://t.co/OZ78TUF8gR 2 hours ago
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Hate to break it to you but . . . everything should be free. nytimes.com/2020/01/14/us/… 4 hours ago
Follow @jakebackpack
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The Beta Release of New SEPTA Key Website
SEPTA has updated the SEPTA Key website www.septakey.org with a modernized design and new features to make using SEPTA Key online easier than ever. Before we officially launch the site, we are offering customers the chance to try it out on a fully functional Beta site. You can be among the first to see and experience the new septakey.org by going here and logging in as you normally would.
Customers can still use the current www.septakey.org until the full transition to the new website is made at a later date. The Beta site offers the same options you are already used to, and more, but we've redesigned it to be easier to use, especially for the on-the-go customer. Eventually, this site will be the sole tool for everyone to manage their SEPTA Key accounts and purchase fare products online.
Customers will find the site more intuitive, with a fresh design and layout. Highlights include:
Responsive Web: The site automatically adjusts its display for any device, such as Apple and Android phones and tablets, desktop computers, and laptops. It will provide each user with a customized experience tailored to the screen size they are using.
Ease of Use: Easier to load fare products, get news and information about the SEPTA Key, manage your account, access trip history and add or remove payment methods. All security protocols that are in place for the current site are also applied to the Beta version, to ensure customers’ information is safe.
New Help & Information Section: Includes updated Frequently Asked Questions, SEPTA Key program and fare information, a locator to help identify places to buy and load Key Cards, and details on travel options available with the Key.
Customers can submit their feedback through SEPTA’s online comment form here. Comments and suggestions will be considered as SEPTA moves toward the full launch of the new e-commerce site.
For more information, and to participate in the Public Beta Release of the SEPTA Key e-commerce site, please visit BETA.SEPTAKey.org.
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small format volume 3
an ArtCenter/South Florida publication July/August 2015
depicting urban landscapes. Using transfers and abstract collage, she establishes a new relationship between her and the location. In this juncture of texture, material and color, Gonella displaces different elements and rearranges them into a new reality. Going Home is on view through August 2nd. The closing brunch and film screening will be held on Sunday, August 2nd at 11:30am. The film has yet to be determined. The next exhibition, a solo show by Elysa D. Batista, opens on Thursday, August 6th, 6-9pm. O Cinema Wynwood is located at 90 NW 29th Street in Miami’s Wynwood Art District.
The Field/Miami Going on 22 Years Going Home, Marina Gonella, Acrylic, Transfer and Collage on Canvas, 36" x 24”, 2015
ArtCenter in Wynwood By Susan Caraballo Since December 2013, ArtCenter/South Florida has been partnering with O Cinema for solo exhibitions featuring ArtCenter resident and alumni artists. In this one and a half year history, O Cinema Wynwood has hosted ten exhibitions featuring works by Lujan Candria, Deming Harriman, Babette Herschberger, Juana Meneses (in collaboration with Leila Leder Kremer), Ania Moussawel, Doris Rodriguez, Lissette Schaeffler, Carrie Sieh, Natalie Zlamalova, and now alumna Marina Gonella.
Argentina at an early age. She graduated from the School of Fine Arts Pridiliano Pueyrredón (Buenos Aires) and attended classes at IUNA (Instituto Universitario Nacional de Las Artes, Buenos Aires), pursuing a MFA. Marina has participated in group and solo exhibitions in Argentina, Uruguay and the United States. Her work is included in national and international private and corporate collections. Gonella currently has a studio at Laundromat Art Space.
As the collaboration evolved, the exhibitions were extended from four weeks to eight weeks and a closing brunch was added. Each exhibiting artist has the opportunity to select a film of choice that is screened at the closing brunch. Featured films have included Blood Simple (Herschberger), Eat Drink Man Woman (Moussawel), Marie Antoinette (Harriman), Lost in Translation (Candria) and Six Degrees of Separation (Sieh).
Gonella’s work explores how place affects our concept of identity. Our surroundings alter our actions, thoughts and way of life. Gonella’s pieces become a tangible and personal interpretation of her awareness of these surroundings. From the buildings of Buenos Aires to the highways of South Florida, Gonella has adapted her work according to her environment. In her latest series, the images reflect her daily commute.
The current exhibition Going Home is a solo exhibition by alumna Marina Gonella. Gonella, a mixed media artist, works with acrylic, collage, photography, transfers and assemblage. Born in Chicago, Gonella moved to Buenos Aires,
Driving a car presents a different way of experiencing the city than as a pedestrian. Through the process of appropriation and representation, she captures the moment and makes it her own. Her creative process starts with the manipulation of her own photographs
By Susan Caraballo Earlier this year, ArtCenter/South Florida became the new home for The Field/Miami. In 1993, Miami Light Project established The Field/Miami, the Miami chapter for the robust Field Network, a consortium including 14 cities nationally and internationally with headquarters at The Field in New York City. The Field/Miami is not new to ArtCenter. ArtCenter was involved in the beginning years when The Field was affiliated with the Here & Now Festival. The Field/Miami’s core program is the Fieldwork workshop, a unique non-curated forum for artists to share developing creative works and exchange feedback, peer to peer. Fieldwork is open to any emerging, mid-career or established artist looking for a new way to develop new or existing work and bring insight to his/her creative process. The Fieldwork structure reveals how each piece is perceived by others and fosters a detailed information exchange. Incisive and stimulating critiques are guided by an experienced facilitator. Comments focus on what is happening in the work and how each choice shapes the work, keeping the authorship of the artist constantly supported. In addition, Fieldwork cultivates insight into composition and strengthens one's ability to give critical commentary. This workshop offers artists an opportunity to try out new ideas and take risks. Fieldwork affords artists a safe setting to receive honest and rigorous feedback about their art before it hits the stage or the wall. Over 100 artists have participated in Fieldwork in its 22 year history in Miami including critically acclaimed artists: Teo Castellanos, Rafael Roig, Heather Maloney, Rudi Goblen, Oscar Fuentes, Becky Flowers, Jillian Mayer, Octavio Campos, Karen Peterson, Bill Spring, Patricia Margarita Hernandez, Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez, Pioneer Winter and many others. Fieldwork’s previous session culminated in an informal showing, Field Day, that was open to the public during ArtCenter’s April Studio Crawl. Artists who presented work included John DeFaro, Susan Feliciano, Rosa Naday Garmendia, Ralphy Love, Kelly McNulty and Sharon Weisfenning. The last session was led by Oscar Fuentes who will also facilitate the upcoming workshop. On August 12th from 6-9pm, ArtCenter will host a free Fieldwork OPEN HOUSE. This is the perfect opportunity for you to see how Fieldwork works and participate by getting feedback! Come to engage, listen and share your work! The next session will be held September 12th through November 7th at ArtCenter’s campus located at 924 Lincoln Road in Miami Beach. Registrations are currently being accepted. The cost for the workshop is $150 and $135 for ArtCenter members. As part of
Untitled (Mother), Ania Moussawel, Inkjet Print, 12” x 16”, 2011
Hill Roll 1, Ariel Baron-Robbins, digital print, 40" x 60", 2014
the Studio Residency Program, ArtCenter current resident artists receive scholarships to participate. Fieldwork groups are mixed discipline including performing and visual artists working in all styles and genres. For information and to register, call 305.674.8278 or visit www.artcentersf.org/the-field-miami/
Class is In By Tammy Key In life there are always lists of things that we need to do. Somewhere at the bottom of that list are those things that we want to do. Taking time out for ourselves is essential and yet it often feels like a bold decision when we decide to do something purely for the joy of it.
School of Crafts, and Lazaro Amaral, silkscreen artist, storyboard illustrator and ArtCenter alumnus. In the fall, we will have an expanded selection of classes that will include drawing courses taught by ArtCenter resident artist Ariel Baron-Robbins. Baron-Robbins is an interdisciplinary artist currently working in photo, video and drawing who recently completed a residency at the prestigious Vermont Studio Center. Classes in printmaking and book arts will also be offered by Ingrid Schindall, a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art and owner of IS Projects in Ft. Lauderdale’s arts district, FATVillage. ARTstudies also features Open Figure Drawing labs held every Monday from 7-9pm. ArtCenter is one of very few sites that offer the opportunity to exercise and improve your figure drawing skills in an uninstructed setting.
This fall, ARTstudies will offer expanded open studio hours in the PRINTshop which was recently upgraded through support of the Wells Fargo Foundation. In addition, ArtCenter will welcome its first PRINTshop resident artist, Loren Abbate. Abbate is a graduate of School of Visual Arts in New York City and has been teaching in Colorado since 2011. This program is made possible through the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. ARTstudies offers enriching programs and lab access to a wide range of artists, from beginners to professionals. Join us and let it be your resource for learning new mediums, refreshing techniques and creative collaboration. For information and to register, call 305.674.8278 or visit http://www.artcentersf.org/education/
When someone signs up for a class at ArtCenter/ South Florida, we know that they have carved time out of their busy lives to be here, to learn, to meet new people and to gain skills that allow them to express themselves. It is an honor to be a place that people want to escape to and a place that inspires. We offered our first community art classes through a continuing education program with Miami Dade College’s Wolfson Campus back in 1988. Every year since then, we have been lucky to have some of South Florida’s most talented teaching artists on staff offering classes in everything from drawing to jewelry design. This year, we continue to offer classes in drawing, painting and printmaking and we look forward to growing our programming as ArtCenter expands in 2016. This summer, we are offering day and evening classes in oil and acrylic with long time ArtCenter instructor, alumnus and accomplished painter Pablo Contrisciani. We will also offer a Saturday workshop in paper making and silkscreen co-taught by Candy Gonzalez, who just returned from a residency at Penland ArtCenter/South Florida ARTstudies programming includes silkscreen printing, drawing, painting, and more!
ArtCenter/South Florida
CALENDAR Going Home | Marina Gonella
O Cinema Wynwood | 90 NW 29 St, Miami Wednesday, July 1 | 7-10pm
Studio Crawl featuring Shane Parish guitar solo
924 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach
Sunday, August 2 | 11:30am
Saturday, August 22 | 10am-2pm
O Cinema Wynwood | 90 NW 29 St, Miami
924 Lincoln Road # 100, Miami Beach
Closing Brunch & Screening: Marina Gonella
Wednesday, August 5 | 7-10 pm
Studio Crawl
Demystifying the Art of Proposal Writing Workshop
August 24 – October 4, 2015
ARTstudies
Art classes and workshops: painting, drawing, silkscreen and more. 924 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach
On View through July 18, 2015
Thursday, August 6 | 6 -9pm
Windows @ Walgreens 100 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach
On view through October 4, 2015 O Cinema Wynwood | 90 NW 29 St, Miami
On View through August 2, 2015
Saturday, August 8 | 10am-2pm
Saturdays 10 am -1pm 924 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach | Studio 100
Windows @ Walgreens 6700 Collins Ave, Miami Beach
Elysa D. Batista
Dona Altemus | Gustavo Oviedo
Laz Ojalde & Natalie Zlamalova | John Sanchez
Windows @ Walgreens 7340 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach
924 Lincoln Road Miami Beach, FL 33139 T 305.674.8278 email@artcentersf.org www.artcentersf.org Like our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @artcentersf Staff María del Valle, Executive Director Susan Caraballo, Artistic Director Tammy Key Johnston, Education Director Patricia Leder, Comptroller Dan Weitendorf, Facilities Manager Leila Leder Kremer, Program Coordinator Cherese Crockett, Exhibtions Manager Anais Alvarez, Administrative Assistant Desiree Guerrero, Comptroller Assistant Donald Godelia, Facilities Vinny Diaz, Facilities
Board of Directors Kim Kovel, Chair Alessandro Ferretti Josh Fuller Lilia Garcia Jane Goodman Thomas F. Knapp Maricarmen Martinez Credits
Opening Reception: Elysa D. Batista
Writing an Effective Artist Statement Workshop
Wednesday, August 12 | 6 -9pm
Fieldwork OPEN HOUSE
FREE and Open to the Public 924 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach
September 12 – November 7, 2015
Fieldwork Workshop
Studio Residency Program
Application deadline (11:59pm EST)
To register, to apply and for all ArtCenter programming information call 305.674.8278 or visit www.artcentersf.org
RESIDENT ARTISTS Dona Altemus Ariel Baron-Robbins Elysa D. Batista Heloisa Botelho Miranda Burns Lujan Candria John Henry Dale Silvana D’Mikos Veronica Fazzio Deming Harriman Karelle Levy David McCauley Laz Ojalde John Sanchez Carrie Sieh Luciano Stazzone Laurencia Strauss Michael Williams Natalie Zlamalova
Kevin J. Miller Reagan Pace Eric Rodriguez David Siegel Kristen Thiele Merle Weiss
Editor: Susan Caraballo | Project Manager: Leila Leder Kremer | Publication Design: Francesco Casale | 2015 © ArtCenter/South Florida. All rights reserved.
Exhibitions and programs at ArtCenter/South Florida are made possible through grants from the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the City of Miami Beach Cultural Arts Council; the Miami Beach Mayor and City Commissioners; and the State of Florida, Florida Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts; and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Additional support provided by Best Buy, Celebrity Cruises, Shake Shack, Walgreens Company and Wells Fargo.
Cover: Speed Limit 25. Marina Gonella, Acrylic, Transfer and Collage on Wood, 12” x 12”, 2015
June 11 – August 2, 2015
Oolite Arts
Small Format Vol 3
small format is a bi-monthly publication designed in tabloid format to keep you informed about the latest exhibitions and projects at ArtCen...
artcentersf.org
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Settler Who Planned Dawabsha Arson Attack to be Released
July 12, 2018 6:36 PM IMEMC News & Agencies Israel, Israeli attacks, Israeli Settlement, News Report, Prisoners 0
On Thursday, an Israeli court decided to release the main settler who planned the arson attack on the Dawabsha family in Douma village, near Nablus, killing three people, including a baby.
According to the decision of the Israeli court in Lod, Israeli police must release the accused and transfer him to house arrest.
The court’s decision was based on the allegation that the accused had participated in planning the crime of throwing Molotov cocktails at the Dawabsha family home, but did not participate in the operation itself.
The court decided that the accused settler be subject to house arrest, and wear an electronic armband that tells the Israeli police about his location, according to the PNN.
The crime of throwing Molotov cocktails at the house of Dawabsha occurred on the 31st July, 2015, and led to the death of baby Ali Dawabsha and his parents, Raham and Saad, while the 5-year-old child, Ahmad, suffered serious burns, but survived the crime.
Nasser Dawabsha, a relative of the afflicted family, told WAFA that the court decided to place the murderer, a minor, under house arrest and banned him from leaving the country or to use the phones or internet.
“It is a sad day for the family,” he said. “The decision brought back to us dreadful memories of the fire at my brother’s house and when we tried to save them. The scene has been re-enacted with the court ruling.”
Dawabsha accused the Israeli court and judge of being racist and of double standard, saying that if the accused was Palestinian he and his family would have been punished severely and their home demolished, and even their entire village would have been subjected to collective punishment. “But, when the crime is perpetrated by Israelis, the courts try to find anything to get them out of it.”
He said, “The Israeli court system gives impunity to the murderers of Palestinians and the more reason to continue to attack them.”
He said that the family has no choice but to pursue the case at Israeli courts before appealing to international courts for justice, if all efforts to convict the murderers fail.
Search IMEMC: “Dawabsha”
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Immigration Solicitor Nottinghamshire
10 Common Mistakes
Below is a snapshot of our success story, we will send you a detailed success story after dealing with your enquiries
2013- December
Client initially came to us in 2010 when her previous legal representatives had made an expensive error on her application. Her application was refused. We assisted her in 2010 to regularise her status and argued on the gap.
In December 2013 we successfully obtained herindefinitely leave to remain (ILR) under the 10year rule. Her ILR was granted within 4 months of our application
SPOUSAL VISA
2012- July
Leave granted by the court following a successful appeal. The applicant is the spouse of a British National, she had been refused Leave to enter because her husband had other children in the UK and was previously with another partner. The UKBA argued that the husband had not provided sufficient evidence that the UK relationship had ended.
We successfully argued that there was no requirement for formal documents to show the ending of a relationship which was not a marriage. The Court agreed and the applicant was granted leave to enter the UK to join her husband.
EEA DEPENDENT – RETAINING RIGHTS TO RESIDE
A Client, an Ivorian national was married to an EEA national, but had divorced prior to the expiry of the 5years leave to remain that he had been given. We successfully argued that the client had retained the rights to reside under the EU rules, the UKBA agreed and he was granted Permanent Right to reside in the UK. He is now eligible to Naturalize as a British Citizen.
DISCRETIONARY LEAVE TO REMAIN
2010- August
This client was referred to us by the citizens advice bureau in Havering. She was a failed asylum seeker who had been in the UK for several years. She was near destitute by the time she came to us. We reviewed her case, made representation on her behalf under the legacy rules and her article 8 rights of both herself and her children.
The client was overjoyed when 18months after, she was granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK.
She now had the right to work and fend for her children
Her husband was also able to work.
The family were able to reside peacefully in the UK knowing their immigration status had been resolve Indefinitely and they could, if they choose become British
Desborough
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We can provide immigration services in: Worksop,Sutton in Ashfield,Stapleford,Retford,Nottingham,Mansfield,Kimberley,Hucknall,Eastwood,Cotgrave,Carlton,Bingham,Beeston,Arnold Wickford and several other areas
We are one of the leading immigration solicitors and lawyers and we provide immigration advice and assistance to the public in: Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Birmingham, Buckinghamshire, Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, Devon, Dorset, Dover, Durham, Essex, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Hampshire, Herefordshire, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Lincoln, London, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Nottinghamshire, Norfolk, Oxfordshire, Rutland, Surrey, Sussex, Suffolk, Somerset, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Wales, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire, Yorkshire- all across the United Kingdom.
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What's the original Japanese word for door, other than the loanword ドア?
I assume that ドア is a loanword from English, unless it's a big coincidence, yet, it's in the top 200 most used Japanese words by frequency, in a Japanese words by frequency list. What's the original Japanese word for door? Any idea why they switched for the English one considering doors (or something similar foldable perhaps to cover an entrance) had to exist in Japan before western contact?
word-requests loanwords history
PabloPablo
Your suspicion is leading you down the right path.
ドア is in fact a loanword from English. According to Jisho.org, ドア is used in reference to a Western-style door. This is a door that opens on hinges.
Before the introduction of Western-style doors, you are also correct to assume that the Japanese had doors as well. These doors would slide on a track. In English, we would refer to them as sliding doors. In Japanese, you will refer to the Japanese-style door as 戸｛と｝. That being said, I can't really say that I have heard 戸 used very often. I think it's slightly archaic in its usage.
I will add that 障子{しょうじ｝ is another word for the Japanese-style door, but it specifically refers to the paper sliding door (with a wood/bamboo frame). Other sliding doors would not classify as 障子. I cannot say much about the usage, except it is used when you are being specific about doors. It appears in many texts though.
There is one word that will be used in reference to both Western and Japanese-style doors, 扉｛とびら｝. It is a commonly used word as well, because I recall having heard it used over the intercom when trains or elevators were opening\closing the doors saying:
扉が(開き\閉まり)ます。ご注意ください。
The thing is that I have also heard ドア in those cases as well.
ajsmartajsmart
I wonder if Doraemon's "Doko Demo Doa" from 1969 had anything to do with the widespread adoption of that word, or if its adoption pre-dates Doraemon... hmm.. – ericfromabeno Sep 13 '18 at 16:11
@ericfromabeno You could be right, but I suspect that usage was probably very common before that, if it was able to end up in Doraemon. – ajsmart Sep 13 '18 at 19:17
Western style doors are 扉{とびら} which actually more loosely translates to "opening" I suppose. The sliding doors are called 障子{しょうじ}.
A linguist will have to answer the "why", although I suspect the simple answer is "because it's cool to use foreign words". One path that foreign words take to "common parlance" is through songs, so it wouldn't surprise me to find that the first popularization of the word ドア came from a song.
ericfromabenoericfromabeno
Do you have any examples of words that were clearly popularized by a song? – kuchitsu Sep 13 '18 at 14:58
Short answer, no I don't. Long answer, I'm not a language historian, but I would be very surprised if borrowed words like "love" "romance" "baby" "angel" "sweet" "sweetheart" and "darling" did not come to common parlance by imported music during the 1950's/60's/70's, either directly from those English songs, or by being incorporated into songs in Japanese. "Energy" strikes me as another possible word popularized by song. How do you decide if something is "clearly" spread by a song or not? Yes, English is in general popular in Japan, and so it will spread. But popular songs must spread it too. – ericfromabeno Sep 13 '18 at 15:34
Why was this downvoted? – istrasci Sep 13 '18 at 15:42
probably too much conjecture in the last half? And the first half states only simply what the other answer went into more detail on. Though I would expect that to result in a "null" rather than a "minus" myself. But I'm biased. ;) – ericfromabeno Sep 13 '18 at 15:51
Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged word-requests loanwords history or ask your own question.
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Do you think the Carlos Ghosn case would make for an interesting movie or documentary?
It'll be a blockbuster, way bigger than Fugitive.
It will certainly make for a great documentary, once it's all over and the facts are all in.
Give it ten years (the trials may take 5 at least after all)
Poor English Speaker
For more or less 20 minutes movie, spending 1,500 yen for the ticket in Japan... awesome. How many explosives would be used in the scene? I'm very interested in it.
Can't wait! If I am lucky some day I will meet and congratulate the only man who escaped the corrupt Japanese criminal justice system.
browny1
This came up in conversation with friends the other day and all agreed it'd be a great topic for a movie.
I said a Netflix style limited series (maybe 5 or so episodes) would be the best to flesh out the narrative.
We then discussed who'd play Ghosn.
If it was 20 + years ago, Jack Nicholson would've been interesting.
I'm not up with the wide range of current "top" actors, but someone suggested Guy Pearce. He has the vocal skills, look and air to carry it off.
Other suggestions?
Pukey2
And banned in Japan.
How many explosives would be used in the scene?
No explosives, just intrigue and Mission Impossible style masks.
Tom Cruise can play the Green Beret guy ( this will make up for The Last Samurai ), and of course Rowan Atkinson will play Ghosn.
Julia Roberts would be excellent as Carole Ghosn.
gakinotsukai
Depends where it is produced.
Not interested if it's in Japan ...
I think David Suchet would do a good job. But the story isn't over yet. We don't know how it will turn out. And unless Ghosn discloses how he escape, he won't make for much of a story. A drama about breach of trust and underreporting income charges and seeing him interrogated hardly makes for riveting viewing.
No Japanese movie producer will touch this story.
But if you could find one who would, they would insist on an actor who looks way more sinister than Rowan Atkinson to play Ghosn.
Ah_so
Rowan Atkinson or Ben Kingsley
Toasted Heretic
Am bored with the concept of another elitist and possible criminal being immortalised in the cinema.
If they can't get Julia Roberts to play Carole Ghosn, maybe they can get Raquel Welch to agree to de-age a little...
How could it not? A big shot CEO, that rescued a company from the brink,framed for illegal payments,escaping 400 days under jail and house arrest, in a box undetected,out of the country? Even I could direct that money maker.And even better,it's not a repeat or a sequel.It's original and new!!
I think that as long as it is not too hollywoodized, doesn't skirt the issues to avoid offending japan, and tells it as it is as honestly as possible, then yeah. It can be amazing.
If not a movie, then I' d like to see Yamamoto Hyoe make a documentary on it like he did with the Olympus scandal.
Have I just missed it or is there not much info on the supposed other escape mastermind, George- Antoine Zayek? Plenty of stuff on Michael Taylor. Was the box a decoy and the second guy actually Ghosn all along?
In my post re suitable actors to play Ghosn, I failed to mention my choice.
None other than the infamous Agent Smith of Matrix fame - Hugo Weaving.
Does it matter in the slightest?
Educator60
No, not at all. Aside from the need for a good script, direction, photography, acting etc, to be interesting to me it would need to tell me things I don’t already know. But this case is already well-known. Alternatively, it would need to be so historical that it was no longer well-known, but this case is so recent it’s not even over yet.
What do you think of the phrase 'Act of God' that insurers in many countries use to deny claims in times of natural disasters?
Do you think gold is a safe investment in times of geopolitical trouble, threats of war or other international crises?
Roundabouts have been installed at 87 locations in 31 prefectures since the revised Road Traffic Law took effect in September 2014. Do you think roundabouts reduce the number of traffic accidents?
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Basketball high school jersey worn by Barack Obama sells for $120K
By: Bob D’Angelo, Cox Media Group National Content Desk
DALLAS –
Michael Jordan may be the most famous person to wear a No. 23 basketball jersey, but former President Barack Obama could be a close second.
A basketball jersey believed to have been worn by the former president while he attended a Hawaii prep school sold at an auction for $120,000 Saturday night, according to Heritage Auctions. The final selling price includes a buyer’s premium, the Dallas-based auction house said.
The buyer of the jersey requested anonymity, according to Heritage Auctions officials.
The sale was part of Heritage Auctions two-day Summer Platinum Night Auction. The top sale of the night was for a 1937 Lou Gehrig flannel road uniform, which fetched $2.58 million, according to Sports Collectors Daily.
The Obama jersey was worn by the future president when he played for Punahou School in Honolulu, according to Heritage Auctions. Obama was a member of the 1979 squad that won the state title that season.
It was rescued by Peter Noble, a Punahou player who was three years behind Obama, Heritage Auctions officials said in the jersey’s auction description. Noble, 55, told the auction house he wore No. 23 while playing for Punahou’s junior varsity team and saw the jersey being discarded when a new shipment of jerseys arrived for the school.
“I took it because they were getting rid of it,” Noble, of Seattle, told The Associated Press. “It meant nothing else, really.”
It meant more when Obama was elected president in 2008.
“I got to thinking: Is there an opportunity to do something, perhaps good?” Noble told the AP. “Perhaps have this a see a bigger, broader light of day than sitting in my closet.”
Noble consigned the jersey to Heritage Auctions, which photo-matched the jersey to Page 104 of the 1979 Punahou school yearbook. “Barry Obama goes up for a basket against St. Louis,” the photo caption read.
Punahou spokesman Robert Gelber told the AP the school is “enormously proud” of Obama, but he could not confirm the authenticity of the jersey.
According to Heritage Auctions, the jersey came with a letter of provenance from Noble and his 1979 Punahou yearbook.
Noble told the AP he would donate a portion of the auction proceeds to his alma mater but joked he wished he had grabbed jersey No. 5 years ago. That belonged to Darryl Gabriel, the player who starred on Punahou’s team. Obama was a role player for Punahou and spent a good portion of his high school varsity career on the bench.
“In hindsight, I wish I had grabbed No. 5 because it was Darryl Gabriel and Darryl Gabriel was my favorite player,” Noble told the AP.
Trump considers buying Greenland. Can he do it?
Recall alert: Tyson Foods recalls Weaver frozen chicken patty products
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Episodes, Season 1
Butch Lukic
Jim Krieg
Shaunt Nigoghossian
The Brain Buster
"Forget Me Not" is the thirty-eighth episode of the first season of Justice League Action. It is the overall thirty-eighth episode of the series.
When Felix Faust goes on a looting spree in Metropolis after causing the Justice Leaguers to lose their memories it is left to the mysteriously unaffected Firestorm to oppose him.
Firestorm is late for a meeting of the Justice League and hurriedly flies towards the Watchtower. When he arrives, however, there is no one else around and his mind's counsel, the Professor, reminds him that there ought to be at least one person on duty. He is unable to contact any of the League using the comms and the Professor suggests that they should visit one of them. Firestorm flies off to the Daily Planet.
Locating Clark Kent in his office, the latter denies that he is Superman and says that he only bears a passing resemblance to him. Firestorm assures him that he has super powers and takes him outside and drops him from the top of a skyscraper. Clark does not know how to fly and hits the ground, shaking Metropolis. To his own amazement, he survives and begins to believe that he is Superman but still can't remember that he is. The Professor suggests to Firestorm that they gather more examples of forgetful superheroes to be able to solve their problem.
Later, in the Watchtower, Firestorm has managed to assemble Bruce Wayne and Diana Prince in addition to Clark Kent but they are not cooperative. Firestorm uses his powers to change their clothes into the uniforms of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman but, while he is trying to teach them how to act as superheroes, a news broadcast tells of looting at a Metropolis shopping precinct by stone monsters accompanied by the sorcerer Felix Faust. Firestorm flies to confront Faust while the three forgetful superheroes have to take a cab.
As Firestorm makes fun of him, Faust, riding a self-balancing scooter, is surprised to see the Justice League arrive because he thought that he had taken their memories. He orders the stone monsters (he calls one a golem) to attack them, but the superheroes are still not confident enough to use their powers and end up running away from their foes. Firestorm intervenes and transforms some of the monsters into harmless cars and scooters, but Faust responds and casts a spell on the floating Firestorm, bringing him down for a closer look. He realises that the superhero's dual minds have stopped him losing his memory, so he produces a glowing, purple orb, which contains the memories of the other superheroes, and casts a spell which adds both of Firestorm's as well.
However, on hearing Faust and seeing the orb, the other three superheroes begin to remember what has happened to them, recover their abilities and deal with the remaining monsters. Faust attempts to escape on his scooter after the superheroes demand the orb but he is caught by Superman. Before Faust can cast a spell using it, the orb is lassoed by Wonder Woman who throws and smashes it to recover the lost memories. This is just in time to save the hopelessly confused Firestorm and Professor.
Appearing in "Forget Me Not"
Superman (Clark Kent)
Batman (Bruce Wayne)
Wonder Woman (Diana Prince)
P. J. Byrne - Firestorm
Jon Cryer - Felix Faust
Stephen Tobolowsky - Professor Stein
Retrieved from "https://justice-league-action.fandom.com/wiki/Forget_Me_Not?oldid=16793"
2 Wonder Woman
3 Batman
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Floating Solar panels for Jawaharlal Port Trust
Bureau News Shipping October 2, 2019
India’s largest port Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust in Maharshtra is reported to tap solar energy through floating solar panels for reducing its dependence on conventional power. It is reported that the JNPT has called for bids for holding a detailed survey of installing the floating solar panels.
The lagoons that lay adjacent to the Container Terminal is said to have been identified for installing the floating solar panels. It is said that the floating panels would cover an area of about 80,000 square metres. The Port trust wants to complete the survey within a period of 15 days.
The port trust has decided to install floating solar panels as vast sect of land was not available for erecting solar panels. Land is always a challenge in many of the states and as such floating solar panels are considered to be the best option now.
Floating solar panels are going to make a big difference in the country with many states now thinking of installing floating solar panels. The NTPC in Kayamkulam in Kerala is going to install floating solar panels.
Until now, the centre or the state government have not yet utilised its vast water surface for tapping the unconventional energy.
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Bureau News
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View over Montreal from the Mont Royal
The period from August 29 to October 1, 2018, was rather eventful: first we traveled to Ireland for ten days. Six days after we got back to Cannes, we flew to North Carolina, one day earlier than planned because of hurricane Florence. One week after we arrived in Chapel Hill, we went to Baltimore for a couple of days of sightseeing, and eight days after we got back from there, we flew to Montreal for three days. Normally, we would not pack so much into such a short time, but sometimes things just work out that way. In Montreal, we had a wonderful Airbnb in walking distance to everything we wanted to see, and it's not until we left for the airport three days later that we had to board a bus again. We enjoyed Montreal a great deal; neither one of us had been there before, and we're glad we visited when we did: a couple of weeks later it may have gotten a tad to chilly for us. So yes, it was a pretty hectic time, but it was all great fun—and yielded a few pages for this site!
Click on any image to see a larger (2100 x 1400 pixel) version!
Looking toward the old Place Viger railway station
The Sir George-Étienne Cartier National Historic Site
Corner of rue Berri and rue Saint-Louis
Steeple of the Saint-Sauveur church
St. Paul Street
By the Bonsecours Market
On St. Paul Street
The 7 Grains Bakery and Café on St. Paul Street
Inside the café
The Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel
Fun at this Aerial Park near the old harbor
The Route Verte 1
Boats in the Old Port of Montreal
The 60 meter (197 ft) tall Ferris Wheel in the old harbor
The Promenade du Vieux-Port
The view from the Jacques Cartier Pier
The Montreal Biosphere
Looking from the port to the Place Jacques Cartier
On the Place Jacques Cartier
Montreal City Hall
Some trees have changed color already, others are still green
Nelson's column
The fountain on Vauquelin Square
On the upper part of the Place Jacques Cartier
Strolling on the Place Jacques Cartier
St. Gabriel Street
On St. Sulpice Street
The apse of Notre Dame
The organ above the main entrance
The main entrance of Notre Dame
Complexe Desjardins, our stop for any kind of shopping in Montreal
On Sainte Catherine Street
The corner of rue Emery and rue Saint Denis
Starbucks on rue Saint Denis
Night is falling...
...on rue Saint Denis...
...in the Quartier Latin.
We had a great dinner at Biscotti e Cucina
On the way back to our Airbnb
Bust of JFK on the Avenue du Président-Kennedy
On the rue Sainte Catherine
Building on Mansfield Street
King Edward VII monument in Phillips Square
McGill University Arts Building
Looking down McTavish Street
Beginning to climb up to to the Mont Royal
After a lovely walk through the woods...
...one reaches Beaver Lake.
The Mont Royal Chalet
From the Mont Royal Chalet...
...one has a magnificent view over Montreal.
One of four gates to Chinatown across the street from our Airbnb
On Sun-Yat-Sen Square
On the rue de la Gauchetière
On Clark Street
The photos on this page were taken on September 30 and October 1, 2018.
Trips Home
https://www.kiechle.com/trips/montreal/index.htm
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MARCUS SPILLER. Immigration is not the cause of our urban challenge.
Our biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, are growing at around 100,000 people a year causing a bevvy of commentators including, Four Corners and the Grattan Institute, to question whether Australia is in a position to sustain its historically high immigration rates.
As Grattan’s John Daley puts it “unless the states are prepared to reform their planning systems, the Commonwealth should consider tapping the brakes on Australia’s migrant intake”.
Framing Australia’s urban challenge as an immigration problem, however obliquely and sensitively this might be done, is wrongheaded. Firstly, it leads to ‘cutting off the nose to spite the face’ solutions. Australia’s healthy economy and outstanding record of unbroken growth has a lot to do with our immigration program. Our famously selective intake of migrants gives us the workers to do jobs that Australians cannot do or are unwilling to do. Most credible reviews have affirmed that immigration delivers a net community benefit. Australia’s successful integration of migrants into a dynamic and productive economy is one of the nation’s greatest achievements.
Pointing the finger at the migration program also diverts debate from the core cause of our growing pains. This is systemic failure in the way we govern our cities; a failure that is evident in our housing sector as Daley points out but also reaches far beyond this.
We should be asking why it is that a country with an elite ranking in GDP per capita (US$55,200 in 2017 according to the IMF) cannot find a way to plan and deliver the urban infrastructure to keep pace with immigration? Greater London has grown at around 100,000 people per year since the mid 1990s and seems to have made a better fist of it in a nation with a GDP per capita of US$37,800.
Australia has, arguably, the least efficacious arrangements for managing big cities of any country in the OECD.
Let’s look at housing and transport, for example. For its part, the Commonwealth does not have a coherent policy for housing people. It has all but vacated the social housing sector, preferring to focus on safety net and band-aid programs in the homelessness arena.
In the main, the Commonwealth views the housing challenge through the prism of household investment. Over the decades, policies to privilege the tax treatment of home ownership has distorted housing preferences, rendered the housing market less nimble and played their own part in entrenching the NIMBYism which Daley laments.
It’s hard to keep track of Commonwealth policy and programs on urban transport. Canberra is wont to use its excessive tax base to pick winners in major road and rail projects for local jurisdictions. It purports to have better insights to the congestion and access problems that beset our burgeoning cities.
The scorecard for the States in these matters is hardly more encouraging. The over-reliance on income and consumption taxes in this country as opposed to land taxes means that the States have a vested interest in maintaining buoyant property markets and sprawling cities.
Notwithstanding recent policy initiatives to start the slow climb back in social housing construction, the truth is that, like the Commonwealth, the States have been grossly negligent in this area for the better part of 3 decades.
The States have ‘perfected’ planning systems to package up and release greenfield land on the metro fringes, ever more remote from where the jobs are. They have been strikingly unsuccessful in coming up with similar high volume pipelines for infill housing construction.
The States continue to preside over planning systems where speculators chase windfalls from rezonings and infrastructure projects, instead of establishing routine value capture arrangements where the community reserves ownership of development rights. In the process, valuable resources for investment in transport, affordable housing and other facilities for the growing city are foregone.
Meanwhile, in the transport arena, the States are perennially bogged down in silo approaches to policy making and investment. There is the odd success story, but, by and large, transport plans are made and funded separately from housing and land use plans.
While the Commonwealth, with its national mandate, cannot purport to speak for individual metropolitan communities, the States have a similar legitimacy problem in engaging metropolitan citizens. This makes some vital urban reform discussions almost impossible. For example, the States have great difficulty embracing road pricing (as distinct from road building) as a way of dealing with congestion. The fact that Ken Livingstone, London’s first Mayor following the reinstatement of the Greater London Authority by Tony Blair in 1999, was able to introduce cordon pricing in that metropolis is instructive. It’s doubtful that Westminster could have ever managed the politics to pull off this important reform.
The problem we have is not too many migrants, but a system where urban growth management is entrusted to two tiers of government that are not competent for the task. As Infrastructure Australia recommends in its recently released ‘Future Cities’ report, we need profound reforms in urban management including the establishment of autonomous urban governments such as the GLA.
Dr Marcus Spiller is principal at and a founding partner of SGS Economics & Planning. He has lectured in urban economics at Melbourne University, been an adviser to the Minister for Planning and Housing in Victoria and a Senior Executive in the Queensland Department of Housing, Local Government and Planning. He is a past National President of the Planning Institute of Australia and a former Board Member at VicUrban (now called Places Victoria). He has also served on the Commonwealth Government’s National Housing Supply Council.
1 Response to MARCUS SPILLER. Immigration is not the cause of our urban challenge.
David Maxwell Gray says:
Dr Spiller, the continuing high rates of immigration should be curtailed, not because of some populist racist agenda, but because we not not have the very governmental systems and policies in place to manage the effects of the high rates and the predominantly Melbourne and Sydney destinations of most of the new entrants.
We are so far from having, through governance infrastructure, the policies and planning processes – as well as actual plans and projects – which would enable our cities to cater for high levels of immigration-led growth that until this situation reverses, maintaining such high levels seems foolish. Policies can be suggested to ameliorate our problems such as: twenty-first century integrated public transport; planning policies which allow higher housing densities in established, near city areas; creation of entirely new cities at the expense of Sydney/Melbourne; more distributed office and commercial centres in existing cities; exclusion of most cars from city centres using electronic devices to charge entry fees. On one could go. But how are our parochial systems of government and the “games of mates” culture which underpins them going to be changed?
Australia has been for decades running a “ponzi” scheme with much of the aggregate growth of the economy, measured as GDP particularly in the housing sector, being driven by immigration. This has disguised the fact that the type of growth triggered does not enhance community welfare or higher disposable incomes at the bottom third of society, but forces ever longer and slower trips. At some point, the gains in Sydney and Melbourne are more than offset by the costs . Eventually, even the elites become affected.
A truly healthy economy would be one which does not rely for its growth on the currently very large immigration numbers, but one which reduced this to cater for required high-level skills. Current high rates also have an agenda, not too hidden, of keeping a lid on wages growth in the sectors requiring lower-skilled workers.
Skilled migrants bring enormous benefits to Australia. We often talk about engagement with Asia, but maintain barriers to entry to good jobs in many parts of industry and commerce where Asians’ language skills and cultural knowledge could add to their relevant professional know-how in export oriented activities. A recent Landline (ABC) programme had a story about a very well educated experienced Indian who has started a canola oil processing plant at Wagga Wagga which, after decades of non-Asian Australians talking about the need to add value to agricultural products, but achieving very little, has already established good markets in India and the USA for its canola oil. Where were the Australian banks? The founder needed to get Indian banks and investors involved to get the project up.
My direct experience of “planning” as conducted by States in Australia is that it is run by cabals of large developers, buttressed by minor government “planning” officials, so they can order and control the markets for land and housing for the maximum benefit of developers without paying for most of the externalities including traffic congestion which their developments induce on the rest of the community. City-wide visions of “green wedges” get trashed later once the big boys put political pressure on the relevant players. The “game of mates” goes on.
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Home | Online Magazine | Tech Notes
App roundup
From pediatrics to menopause management, these free apps help physicians.
By Iltifat Husain, M.D. | Tech Notes | Winter 2020
In this edition of Tech Notes, I look at three exciting medical applications. One is a pediatric patient management app that manages to be one of the best pediatric focused apps ever released; one puts a dermatologist in your pocket; and the other helps with a key area of women’s health.
Price: Free. iPhone, iPad: apple.co/2m2MmAS Android: bit.ly/2kYhQI6
PedsGuide
The PedsGuide medical app is created and developed by Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City. What separates PedsGuide from other traditional pediatric patient management applications is how specific it is. The medical app doesn’t cover 30 different pathologies; it focuses on just two types of presentations of pediatric patients: the febrile infant and the child with an asthma exacerbation.
The important thing to realize is that these two presentations alone consist of a large portion of pediatric patient population presentations. Further, these specific types of presentations often present variability in practice.
I cannot emphasize enough how stunning the user interface and overall medical functionality of this app is.
The PedsGuide is one of the best-designed medical decision pathway apps ever created. It bundles chief complaint, assessment calculators, checklists, treatment recommendations and re-evaluation protocols all into one app. Children’s Mercy Hospital should be proud of the work they have done with this app, and other medical app developers should take notice.
An important note: It is critical that this application should not trump your own hospital’s and local practice standards for the management of these specific patient presentations.
Price: Free. iPhone, iPad: apple.co/2m6vAke Android: bit.ly/2mo0uEV
AOCD Dermatology Database App Review
The Dermatology Database medical app by the American Osteopathic College of Dermatology is one of the most exciting apps to be released this year. It has more than 300 dermatologic pathologies detailed out with several pictures and specific treatments.
When you open the app, you’re presented with three sections: diseases, drugs and procedures. In the diseases section, you can search for specific pathologies. When you find what you’re looking for, you’re given multiple pictures of that pathology with the ability to zoom in on the pictures, and a brief description of the disease. The drugs section of the app shows applications for particular drugs as well as the side effects.
I am a huge fan of the detailed pictures, user interface, and the wealth of information provided. However, there are two specific areas the app could have improved. It would be great to see a section focused on primary care, urgent care and emergency medicine; and it could have improved its references. There are great review articles on each of the pathologies mentioned, and a simple PubMed reference to key journal papers would have been a great feature to include.
Price: Free. iPhone, iPad: apple.co/2krmH4o
Johns Hopkins Menopause Guide
In 2002, the Women’s Health Initiative, the first randomized trial to directly look at the effect of estrogen plus progestin in relation to coronary heart disease, published remarkable results. The results showed overall health risks exceeded benefits of using combined estrogen plus progestin in healthy postmenopausal U.S. women.
These are the types of studies and treatment discussions the Johns Hopkins Menopause Guide, created with Unbound Medicine, addresses.
The guide goes through critical research studies related to women who are post menopause, perimenopause, and early menopause, and goes through all the major critical treatment options for this patient population.
The treatment section alone has more than 15 various drug therapies mentioned that treat a variety of postmenopausal conditions. The symptoms section is the part of the app that medical providers will use most.
Apps for physicians and patients
Some of the apps in this issue’s Tech Notes are great for both sets of users.
By Iltifat Husain, M.D. | Fall 2019 | Tech Notes
In this edition of Tech Notes, the apps I cover are geared more toward the geriatric patient population. Two of the apps featured in this column are from large government agencies, and both have done a fantastic job leveraging their resources to create slick apps that will help their patient populations.
Price: Free. iPhone, iPad: apple.co/2N4YAGn Android: Not available.
The Frailty App
Even those not in medicine know that people age differently. Everyone has their example of an 85-year-old patient who can run circles around a 65-year-old. So when you’re trying to assess a patient’s vulnerability to poor outcomes or ability to thrive, you can’t just use a patient’s age. There are now several frailty assessment tools that exist, and we’ve even highlighted them before in Tech Notes.
This particular app and protocol are from a group of Canadian providers in Halifax who have pioneered what they call the Palliative and Therapeutic Harmonization (PATH) assessment. The app they have released, called The Frailty App, can be used not only by providers, but also by family and friends.
Overall, I’m impressed by the types of questions in the algorithm for PATH’s frailty assessment tool. These questions touched on cognitive questions, social and interpersonal questions, physical ability questions and more. They did not just focus on the patient’s functional ability.
Antidepressant Proposer
Price: Free. iPhone, iPad: apple.co/2J4D1jO Android: Not available.
The Antidepressant Proposer app was created by Theodore Huzyk, M.D., a psychiatry resident from the University of Southern California, to help those prescribing gain a better familiarity with antidepressants. Huzyk makes it clear the tool is for educational purposes, and not meant to be an authoritative clinical decision-making tool.
Antidepressant Proposer assigns scores for 32 different antidepressants based on 20 different commonly encountered patient factors and drug measures.
When you open the app, you are given three screens: side effects, special populations and Cipriani 2018 measures. Within the side effects section, you are given options such as anticholinergic, drowsiness and more. You can toggle to desire or avoid.
In this way, the app combines patient factors and drug side effects with results from medical literature to create a unique list of drug options based on your inputs. Once you have answered all the questions, the list of drug options are presented in a ranked fashion.
Medicare: What’s Covered
Price: Free. iPhone, iPad: apple.co/2KFAuzK Android: bit.ly/2NeBFIQ
Medicare: What’s Covered is the official Medicare app from the United States government to help you understand the health coverage offered by Medicare Part A (hospital insurance) and Part B (medical insurance).
Kudos to the development team; the Medicare app is slick, easy to use and packed with information.
Some of the key questions this app can help answer are: How much will I pay for prescription drugs included in Medicare Part B coverage? Does the part B deductible apply to cardiac rebab? What percent of the Medicare approved amount will I need to pay for colorectal cancer screening?
Notably though, there are key things the application does not cover, such as information on Medicare Advantage Plans, Medigap, and other Medicare health plans.
The most glaring omission was that CPT code searches and reimbursements are not covered at all.
Overall, this is a fantastic app to further understand what Medicare covers, especially when it comes to preventive services.
NHS 24 MSK Help
Price: Free. iPhone, iPad: apple.co/2X41RFm Android: bit.ly/2X3b7K5
NHS 24 MSK, from the National Health Service in the U.K., provides quality videos and materials to help patients with musculoskeletal conditions. The app includes several MSK conditions commonly seen in primary care, urgent care and emergency medicine settings.
When you open the app, you are presented with three buttons: exercises, self help and reminders. The exercises section is where a bulk of the time is spent, and where the app truly shines.
For example, click on the neck section to find exercises and videos for how to help whiplash.
This is one of those apps that can be used by both providers and patients. Providers can use it to review and educate their patients on the different types of physical therapy exercises their patients can do at home. Patients can use the calculators and questionnaires to create custom therapies. There is even a calendar section that patients can use to remind themselves to do their exercises, take their medication and keep track of their appointments.
3 new medical apps
These innovative apps help clinicians and patients evaluate risk and remember treatment.
By Iltifat Husain, M.D. | Summer 2019 | Tech Notes
Price: Free. iPhone, iPad: apple.co/2HqXAYO Android: bit.ly/2TGxgAa
Pediatric Asthma Risk Score
The Pediatric Asthma Risk Score (PARS) medical app was created out of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. PARS is a continuous scoring system for predicting asthma risk in young children.
The app asks you to answer six questions related to the patient’s past medical history and demographics. Based on these answers, it assigns a PARS score. Based on the PARS score, you are given the probability of the patient developing asthma by the age of 7.
The score was published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in December 2018, and was shown to be better than the Asthma Predictive Index (API) in children with mild to moderate asthma.
One of the main reasons I am featuring this medical app is because it’s a great example of how researchers can take published research and transform it into an easy-to-use app that can be accessed by any clinician. Traditionally, you would have to read the actual published article to access the guidelines and scoring criteria. By making this into an app, clinicians will be more inclined to download and use the tool.
Price: Free iPhone, iPad: apple.co/2HoyRUU Android: bit.ly/2XRhQZ1
PneumoRecs VaxAdvisor
Remembering vaccination guidelines and making sure your patient is up to date on key vaccines isn’t always easy—especially when it comes to the pneumococcal vaccines. These guidelines have undergone updates in recent years, making keeping track of when to administer them a bit more confusing.
There are several medical apps dedicated to helping providers remember when patients should receive their pneumococcal vaccines and the types to administer. However, it’s nice to see the CDC finally getting into the fray and releasing their own dedicated app to help clinicians with this, especially since they created the guidelines.
The PneumoRecs VaxAdvisor was created by the CDC in collaboration with the Georgia Tech Research Institute. The app provides easy-to-use, patient-specific pneumococcal vaccination guidance. Simply enter the patient’s age, pneumococcal vaccination history and underlying medical conditions.
The app is particularly useful in the pediatric patient population of less than 2 years of age (PCV13). The app gives specific recommendations on the numbers of doses of PCV13 and the specific intervals the vaccinations should be given. For clinicians in the primary care setting, this is a must-have app when evaluating if a patient is up to date on their vaccinations.
Price: Free. iPhone, iPad: apple.co/2TrLAxm Android: Not available
PE & DVT dx tool
I have featured several apps by Joshua Steinberg, M.D., in the past—and this one gets a great update.
The PE & DVT dx tool app incorporates a clinician’s pretest probability via the Wells DVT score to help make decisions on whether or not to order a D-dimer or imaging. The app offers one algorithm for DVT diagnosis and two algorithms for PE diagnosis.
The app makes it easy to go through these algorithms based on what you’re evaluating and gives the option to view the algorithms on one page via a large diagram. The new addition is the evaluation of a pulmonary embolism in a pregnant patient. This is based on a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in October 2018, by Righini M, et al., “Diagnosis of Pulmonary Embolism During pregnancy: A multicenter Prospective Management Outcome Study.”
As usual, Steinberg does a great job of providing all the references, as well as detailed explanations.
Medical societies win with apps
Two associations release helpful apps—and another that you may want to share with patients.
By Iltifat Husain, M.D. | Spring 2019 | Tech Notes
In this edition of Tech Notes, I will cover three recently released medical apps. Two of them are from medical societies and provide great value to their members. Both of those are free to download and critical for their particular specialties.
I’ll also dive into the difference between an FDA “approved” medical app and an FDA “cleared” medical app, and how the FDA has opened up a new regulatory pathway for medical apps that allows them to market their treatment benefits in a way that was not possible before.
Price: Free. iPhone, iPad: apple.co/2Brt7oC. Android: bit.ly/2A5bqeO.
ACOG District II Safe Motherhood Initiative
There has been a lot of unfortunate news recently on how maternal mortality in the United States after childbirth has been increasing. The increase has been dramatic and has been highlighted in many mainstream news publications, with some numbers showing an almost doubling of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births since 1987.
Although the dramatic increase might make researchers think the underlying pathology has changed, it hasn’t. There are still three main causes of maternal mortality worldwide and in the United States: postpartum hemorrhage, severe hypertension of pregnancy, and venous thromboembolism.
The Safe Motherhood Initiative (SMI) is a project of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) District II. SMI started in 2013 and works with over 10,000 health care providers and 118 birthing facilities to help develop a standard approach to handling obstetric emergencies associated with maternal mortality and morbidity.
The application itself contains position statements, guidelines, checklists, algorithms and teaching slides. You are able to highlight and bookmark key bundles and checklists. An interesting feature of the app is the ability to leave feedback. If you click the star icon within a document, you are able to give ratings on the actual content. There is an additional section for leaving detailed text feedback.
My only criticism of the app is in the lack of conversion of the PDF files. The actual content is presented in PDF forms. While the PDFs themselves are relatively easy to read on a mobile device, it would have been much better to convert the PDFs into a native iOS or Android format for reading.
Overall, it’s great to see ACOG’s District II take on such an important task and help standardize management of the main causes of maternal mortality.
Price: Free. iPhone, iPad: apple.co/2A3YOEx. Android: bit.ly/2BBbHWX.
Pedi Crisis 2.0
The Society for Pediatric Anesthesia (SPA) created Pedi Crisis 2.0, a medical app that has peer-reviewed algorithms for treating 26 pediatric crisis situations. Not only is there specific treatment advice, but the application also contains checklists and differentials.
Pedi Crisis allows you to enter the weight of the pediatric patient you’re taking care of, then gives you specific dosing advice throughout the app. The application has a really interesting user interface, with a host of hyperlinks throughout that allow you to jump around the pediatric crisis situations.
A lot of thought went into the user interface, shown in the “phone numbers” section. Instead of just having a blank screen for providers to input key numbers, the application gives you specific sections and categories for the phone numbers, such as “code team,” “blood bank,” “ECMO” and more.
Almost all medical societies have algorithms and treatment plans they give guidance on, and it would be great to see more of them getting into the mobile space by providing value add mobile apps such as Pedi Crisis.
Price: $79.99 billed annually, or $9.99 per month billed monthly. iPhone, iPad: apple.co/2USSUiD. Android: bit.ly/2Ciuesz.
Natural Cycles is the first FDA-cleared mobile medical application that can be used as a method of contraception to prevent pregnancy. It’s important to note the mobile application isn’t “approved,” but “cleared.” This means the FDA is allowing the application to market this specific medical use.
Why does the FDA stamp matter here? The story is actually pretty interesting. The FDA reviewed the Natural Cycles app through the new de novo premarket review pathway. This is a regulatory pathway for novel, low-to-moderate risk devices of a new type.
This now allows mobile medical apps to go through the FDA’s 510(k) process, allowing them to obtain marketing authorization for their claims.
Natural Cycles contains an algorithm that calculates the days of the month a woman is likely to be fertile based on daily body temperature readings and menstrual cycle information. This is a type of contraception referred to as fertility awareness. The daily body temperature reading is based on a basal body temperature, which is the lowest body temperature attained during rest (immediately after awakening).
The Natural Cycles app algorithm was originally created by nuclear physicist Elina Berglund Scherwitzl, a Nobel Prize winner. The app launched in 2014, and there have been several studies performed that test the efficacy of the application and algorithm. Overall, this is definitely an interesting medical application with solid research to back it up. The app claims to be 93 percent effective under typical use, meaning that 7 out of 100 women get pregnant during one year of use—so there are definitely several cases of unintended pregnancy.
There is a subset of women who are interested in non-hormonal methods of contraception, and this app could be appealing to them, as long as it’s made clear to patients that it’s not superior to traditional methods and that unintended pregnancy can occur.
Iltifat Husain, M.D., is editor-in-chief and founder of iMedicalApps.com, the leading physician publication on digital medicine. He’s also assistant professor of emergency medicine and director of medical app curriculum at Wake Forest School of Medicine.
CDC releases two new apps
These free apps are instrumental to physicians.
In this edition of Tech Notes, I will cover three recently released medical apps. They’re all from venerable institutions, and they’re all free to download.
CDC Anticoagulation Manager
Price: Free. Apple: apple.co/2NqlRBE
I’ve always been a fan of apps produced by the CDC. Even though I know they produce quality apps, I was pleasantly surprised when they recently released the Anticoagulation Manager.
There are already several other anticoagulation management medical apps available. However, the CDC’s app surpasses both.
One of my favorite parts of the app is that, instead of just presenting the data, it gives you three of the most often-encountered clinical scenarios: Do you want to start a patient on anticoagulation; switch the patient’s current regime; or reverse a patient’s anticoagulation.
Over the past few years, the usage of NOACs has increased tremendously for common conditions such as a-fib, and the app takes this into account.
Where the CDC’s app really shines, though, is in its ability to help through various “tricky” clinical scenarios, such as what to do for patients who are pregnant or have chronic kidney disease.
The app doesn’t go into granular details, but rather mentions key papers that explain the reasoning in more detail. It would have been helpful for the development team to include hyperlinks to PubMed instead of having to do manual searches of the papers listed.
The CDC specified that this app was developed through a collaborative effort with the Georgia Institute of Technology. This is notable, as most of the CDC’s other apps don’t announce a collaboration. (That also might explain why the user interface is my favorite out of all the CDC’s apps.) My only frustration is that it isn’t available on Android yet.
MD Anderson’s QuitMedKit
Price: Free. iPhone, iPad: apple.co/2wVFTul Android: bit.ly/2wSz9MX
MD Anderson, the venerable cancer treatment center, is upping its focus on prevention by releasing a round of new tobacco and nicotine cessation apps.
The apps released recently are Vaper Chase and QuitMedKit. The original QuitMedKit was released more than four years ago, but it has been completely been revamped and re-released. Vaper Chase is an interesting medical app game for patients that explains the dangers of new and emerging tobacco products.
QuitMedKit is based on the 2008 clinical guidelines for tobacco cessation from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The guidelines also include first-line medications that help with increasing long-term smoking abstinence rates.
For those who counsel patients on tobacco cessation and want an easy-to-digest format for viewing evidence-based recommendations, this app is key.
Prior apps released by MD Anderson have been updated infrequently. I’m hoping that’s not the case with this one.
CDC Cause of Death Reference Guide
Free. Apple: apple.co/2CHl630. Android: bit.ly/2QebXl5
There’s another recently launched CDC app that provides significant utility—this one for physicians who work in inpatient settings and have to complete a death certificate when a patient dies.
I remember that, when I was a resident, this was the line always fraught with debate, as there were often multiple morbidities and pathologies that contributed to death, but you have to list one main cause.
The CDC wants to educate providers about how to fill this section out correctly because they track causes of death nationally and release the data to the public.
These reports also shape how grants and research funding can be allocated by the NIH and other foundations. For example, if there’s a sudden uptick in a cause of death from a particular pathology or region, there would be more research funding granted to explore further and come up with a solution.
Overall, the app is a great resource if you want to make sure you’re completing a death certificate accurately.
Iltifat Husain, M.D., is editor-in-chief and founder of the website iMedicalApps.com, the leading physician publication on digital medicine. He’s also assistant professor of emergency medicine and director of medical app curriculum at Wake Forest School of Medicine. Learn more about our contributors on page 20.
The best patient education app
The app I most recommend helps patients understand if early breast cancer screening will benefit them—or not.
In this edition of Tech Notes, we’ll cover two applications, each made by venerable medical institutions. Though one of the apps I write about, from the American College of Cardiology, is great, my favorite is from a collaboration between Weill Cornell Medicine and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. They’ve produced the best patient education app I have ever reviewed or used—no exaggeration.
WCM BSD
Price: Free. Apple: apple.co/2MzeAfw
I’ve reviewed and downloaded thousands of medical applications since 2009, when I wrote my first article on iMedicalApps.com. I’ve never said this statement about a medical app before, but I’ll say it now: The WCM BSD application is the best patient education app that has ever been created.
It takes a ridiculously complex and sensitive issue, breast cancer screening before the age of 50, and does what no one could do for years: explain it to patients in an uncondescending and educational way that just makes sense.
When the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) released their draft report of breast cancer screen recommendations in 2009, they advised women to start getting mammograms at age 50 rather than 40, and recommended that screening happen every two years instead of yearly.
This caused a huge uproar and an absolute frenzy in the media because it was a drastic change from recommendations that had been made by other groups. Further, the way it was explained at the time by the USPSTF was not ideal. The USPSTF struggled to explain the real harms vs. the nominal benefits of early screening in the majority of the population—a population that tends to believe that early screening is always a good thing.
The USPSTF recommendation also made it seem like breast cancer screening should never happen before the age of 50. It didn’t consider the risks and benefits of screening from an individual patient’s perspective and experience.
In 2016, the USPSTF updated their recommendations to include the following Grade C recommendation: “The decision to start regular, biennial screening mammography before the age of 50 years should be an individual one and take patient context into account, including the patient’s values regarding specific benefits and harms.”
This recommendation is difficult for patients and physicians to manage because it’s hard during a 10- to 15-minute office visit to truly explain and understand the patient’s risk, context and values.
Enter the WCM BSD app, a collaboration between Weill Cornell Medicine and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
WCM BSD is a tool to help patients and their physicians decide how often they should have screening mammograms performed.
Some of the key questions the app is designed to answer include:
Should you have screening mammograms in your 40s or wait until you are 50?
Should you have a mammogram every year, or every other year?
The app also helps patients see their own personal risk of breast cancer and learn the benefits and harms of screening mammograms.
After a patient enters responses to a series of 11 questions, the application displays the patient’s overall risk factor as a pictograph. This type of visual representation is much easier to understand than percentages or statements, such as “your chance of developing breast cancer in the next 5 years is 0.7%.” The app also explains what a screening mammogram is and how it is performed.
An important part of the app is the “benefits and harms” section. The general public has a good understanding of the benefits of screening mammograms, but often doesn’t realize there can be serious harms, such as false results that cause unnecessary biopsies, or diagnoses of slow growing breast cancers that end up getting treatment but wouldn’t have changed overall morbidity or mortality.
One of the most interesting parts of the application is the section that shows how well mammograms perform in women with similar profiles. Here, users can see—with another pictograph—how many cases of breast cancer are caught by early screening compared to how many screenings return false positives.
The USPSTF’s recommendation to take a patient’s values into account isn’t easy; the WCM BSD app handles this well. With their answers to eight statements, patients can help physicians better understand their opinions and feelings about early breast cancer screening. This truly empowers the patient.
Clinicians with patients in their 40s who are considering mammograms should tell those patients to download the app and schedule a follow-up appointment to discuss the results. There’s also an online version of the decision tool if patients don’t want to use the app: bsd.med.cornell.edu.
My only negative comment about the app is it isn’t available for Android phones—yet.
TreatHF
Price: Free. Apple: apple.co/2JRuVdu
Android: play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.acc.treathf
The American College of Cardiology was one of the first medical societies to start launching medical apps for smartphones. Their more than 20 medical apps in the Apple App Store alone range from medical calculators to clinical decision support tools. Almost all of their apps are free to use, and they are a great resource for both cardiologists and primary care physicians managing patients with cardiovascular disease.
TreatHF is an app from the ACC that focuses on helping providers manage patients who have heart failure. (This app addresses patients with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF), not patients with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF).)
TreatHF is based on the ACC’s Expert Consensus Decision Pathway for Optimization of Heart Failure Treatment and the 2017 ACC/AHA/HFSA Focused Update of the 2013 ACCF/AHA Guideline for the Management of Heart Failure.
The app starts the heart failure assessment by asking NYHA classification, LVEF range, types of medications the patient is and isn’t on, renal/hepatic function status, and age.
From there, TreatHF gives advice related to the patient, such as medication change suggestions and even titrations of key medications. Medications and classes of key medications, specific dosing and frequency are all included in the suggestions.
The last section of the app, “therapies,” contains sections such as “guiding principles for treatment,” further information on classes of medications, considerations for ICD placement and more.
The app’s user interface is clean and simple to use. TreatHF does a great job of using bullet points and dropdown menus to present a wealth of information in an easy-to-digest manner.
Iltifat Husain, M.D., is editor-in-chief and founder of iMedicalApps.com, the leading physician publication on digital medicine. He’s also assistant professor of emergency medicine and director of medical app curriculum at Wake Forest School of Medicine. Learn more about our contributors on page 20.
Evidence-based apps for physicians
These apps put help for specific conditions at physician fingertips—and patient bedsides.
Each of the apps in this article help clinicians practice evidence-based medicine at the point of care and in clinic and hospital settings.
Frailty Tool
Price: Free Apple: apple.co/2DQtNDn Android: bit.ly/2EGQ6x4
As cardiac procedures such as transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) have become more popular in the elderly, it has become even more critical to determine which patients are at a higher risk for mortality and disability following the procedure.
Since TAVR and aortic valve replacements (AVR) performed on the very elderly are still relatively new, integration of consensus algorithms and scores has been suboptimal.
In order to solve this problem, researchers published the FRAILTY-AVR Study last year in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Researchers wanted to compare seven different frailty scales in order to predict poor outcomes following AVR in the elderly. The Essential Frailty Toolset (EFT) was found to be the more predictive for one-year mortality and disability.
This toolset is now easy to access through the Frailty Tool, an app developed by physician Jonathan Afilalo, the first author of the FRAILTY-AVR study.
The EFT is relatively easy to use, having only four main components that can essentially be performed at a patient’s bedside (as long as you have key lab values).
It’s important to note the Frailty Tool app isn’t exclusive for TAVR and AVR procedures. The frailty app can be utilized for other procedures or simply to assess frailty in your elderly patient.
GOLD 2017 Pocket Guide
Price: $2.99 Apple: apple.co/2ul4auC Android: bit.ly/2pGRb19
The Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) is a global initiative and organization that works with health professionals and public health officials to improve prevention and treatment of COPD. They focus on evidence-based strategies for COPD management.
When GOLD released its 2017 Pocket Guide, they also released an accompanying medical app. The comprehensive app covers the whole spectrum of COPD, from definition and diagnosis to management of stable COPD versus acute exacerbations.
This isn’t the first COPD application that has been available to download, but it’s the first one that is completely comprehensive and focused on COPD. The GOLD 2017 Pocket Guide has everything in one app.
The app is relatively easy to navigate and lets you favorite high-usage tools for quick access, such as the ABCD assessment tool, CAT assessment and mMRC dyspnea scale.
The only concern with the GOLD 2017 Pocket Guide is that their last app didn’t receive frequent updates.
EBM Stats Calc
Price: Free Apple: apple.co/2IQFSvI
Joshua Steinberg, M.D., is back at it with another great application: EBM Stats Calc. Those who read this column know we feature Steinberg’s medical apps frequently. We find them to provide a great deal of functionality while being simple to use. EBM Stats Calc is another one of his apps that fits the bill.
Steinberg wants EBM Stats Calc to help clinicians and educators do more effective clinical reasoning by helping with the math. The app:
Calculates the number needed to treat from event rates
Calculates post-test probability from sensitivity, specificity and likelihood ratios
Demonstrates diagnostic principles to learners dynamically
4 free apps to download today
A long-overdue addition to the app store—and a good example of how a practice can develop an app of great value.
These four great medical apps have all recently been developed and released. They’re all free to download, and they all come from great sources. One application in particular has long been overdue to make an entrance in the app store, and you’re sure to be excited to download it and give it a try.
Price: Free. Apple: apple.co/2tYQfVK. Android: Not available at this time.
The Choosing Wisely app is a collaboration between the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) and Consumer Reports—and finally brings the popular Choosing Wisely recommendations to mobile form via a smartphone app.
Most physicians are aware of Choosing Wisely, a campaign created in collaboration between ABIM, other medical societies and Consumer Reports to help promote conversations between clinicians and their patients when it comes to ordering tests and procedures. The crux of the campaign is to reduce unnecessary medical testing and procedures, while also improving health outcomes.
The Choosing Wisely campaign has gotten a lot of attention in the media because of the number of medical societies involved, the evidence behind the recommendations, and how the recommendations are easily presented in one easy-to-access area not only for clinicians, but also for patients.
This ease of access is why I have been puzzling that it took this long for the campaign to make it to mobile form—but it’s better late than never, and the app is a welcome addition to the medical app store.
When you open the Choosing Wisely app, you are immediately prompted to select “For Patients” or “For Clinicians.” In the physician section, along with key recommendations and literature citations, the app has patient-specific handouts and sharing functions that make it easier to explain to patients why a certain test or procedure isn’t recommended at the time.
It’s great to have an application to help patients understand the guidelines their physician is using. It’s important that patients realize that following guidelines and evidence-based care is how tests and procedures should be ordered—not in a haphazard manner that can cause unintended consequences.
My biggest issue with the app is that it’s not available on the Android platform yet. That will hopefully change soon.
Pneumonia Guide
Pneumonia Guide is by the prolific physician app developer Joshua Steinberg, M.D., whom we’ve featured before. His medical apps are truly created “by physicians, for physicians,” and they are simple and easy to use.
Though Steinberg’s Pneumonia Guide app has been around for years, it has undergone a significant update centered around recent changes in pneumonia guidelines by the American Thoracic Society (ATS) and the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA).
Once you select the type of pneumonia (the app has pediatric pneumonia recommendations as well), you are presented with a page that lists diagnostic testing that should and shouldn’t be considered, antibiotic choices, assessing clinical response, and recommendations on management of overall care.
The app makes distinctions between IV and PO antibiotics and outpatient and inpatient settings. There is a calculator section as well to help physicians with risk stratification.
Price: Free. Apple: apple.co/2BaINPc. Android: Not available.
Pregnancy Passport from P&M
Price: Free. Apple: apple.co/2iQGANR. Android: bit.ly/2BCugwg
Pregnancy Passport was developed by the Physicians and Midwives Collaborative Practice, a team of OB/GYNs and midwives who practice across five centers across Northern Virginia. The app is a great example of how a practice can promote itself by providing a great smartphone app experience that’s not only for their patients, but for patients in general.
Though the app itself does have specific features made just for patients of the Physicians and Midwives practice, it’s packed full of great patient education content that any pregnant patient would find useful.
There are sections related to many chief complaints encountered in pregnancy. Key timers included in the app are kick counts and a contractions timer. A great feature of this app that many other patient-centered pregnancy apps don’t include is a postpartum and newborn care section.
Practice-specific apps rarely have patient portals and simply include information on the medical practice, which don’t make them useful. However, this app does a great job of promoting their practice by creating a medical application that provides real value.
If you’re thinking of making a practice-specific app, look at the Pregnancy Passport app as a model application.
The CKD Care app by the National Kidney Foundation calculates eGFR, adjusted eGFR, and other related information.
The app allows you to enter in key demographic information, insert key lab values, and get eGFR and adjusted eGFR values. Interestingly, while you are entering in the data, you are at times prompted with pop-ups that explain why the patient should see a nephrologist based on the values that you enter.
You are given a differential diagnosis as well as the actual values, which is one of the main features that separates this app from those that have come before.
Click through the differential list to get a nice condensed version of the condition. Some of the content within the differentials can also link out to UpToDate.
Overall, this medical app is a nice addition by the National Kidney Foundation into the app store and provides value by providing a great differential list based on the values that you get for eGFR and adjusted eGFR.
Price: Free. Apple: apple.co/2BSRyK8. Android: bit.ly/2juOGzT
7 new apps for physicians to try
From guidelines for cancer patients to neurosurgery simulation, these apps—all free—help physicians through a variety of training and practice decisions.
Usually, I use Tech Notes to cover three recently released apps in depth. But over the last few months, we’ve seen a flurry of interesting medical apps released. This time, instead of discussing three apps in detail, I’ll give you a summary of seven interesting, free medical apps that were released in the last few months.
Dx Challenge
Dx Challenge, from the University of Pennsylvania, gives you a case-based presentation of a patient and tests your responses. You have a limited amount of time to respond to the questions, and a limited number of attempts. The interesting thing about the app is that you actually can collect an honorarium for getting the answers right. The challenges and cases are live and only available for a limited time. This is the only medical app I know of that actually pays you for getting medical questions correct.
iTunes: appstore.com/dxchallenge
CorticoCalc
The CorticoCalc app helps you determine the appropriate topical steroid and coverage. The app would be useful not only for dermatologists, but also for pediatricians and primary care physicians. One of the best features of this app is the ability to separate pediatric cases from adult ones—there is a separate decision tree for patients 0 to 3 years old and those who are older.
Once you select the appropriate age, the app guides you through selecting the amount of coverage, such as right arm, and then gives steroid recommendations.
Android: play.google.com/store/apps/ details?id=org.padermatology.corticocalc&hl=en
ASCO Guidelines
The ASCO Guidelines app from the American Society of Clinical Oncology helps clinicians with a range of management questions and treatment guidelines for their cancer patients. The app has point-of-care decision-making tools and is kept up to date when new evidence becomes available.
iTunes: itunes.apple.com/app/asco-guidelines/id1238827183?uo=5&at=10l9yE
Prescription Check by Warby Parker
Prescription Check by Warby Parker is an app that enables you to take a vision test at home and get a prescription for glasses. Simply by using a smartphone and laptop, you’re able to get a prescription assigned to you, approved by an optometrist. The key though is you don’t get a comprehensive medical eye exam, simply a prescription.
Warby Parker makes it clear their technology isn’t meant to replace visits to your eye doctor, but you can imagine there is concern by medical professionals.
The American Optometric Association (AOA) has submitted complaints about this technology to the FDA, and they are concerned that this type of technology will lead to harm by causing fewer patients to get medical eye screening exams.
The main reason I mention this medical app is because these types of eye prescription apps are gaining traction, and the technology itself is innovative. As medical professionals, we should know that we might have patients using these types of apps and should be ready to answer questions that patients have about their safety and use.
iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/app/prescription-check/ id1209102842?mt=8&uo=4&at=10l9yE
PsychoPharm Research
PsychoPharm Research was created by noted medical app developer Joongheum Park, M.D., who is an internal medical physician. Park has created several notable medical apps, and this current one provides an interactive version of medical decision support trees for psychopharmacology.
It should be noted that medication decision support trees have backing from a venerable institution. They are developed by the Psychopharmacology Algorithm Project at the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry, South Shore Program (founded by David Osser, M.D., an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School).
This application really is tremendous. It helps primary care physicians and psychiatrists with a decision tree for patients who have depression, bipolar and other psychiatric complaints that haven’t responded to the first line of therapy. It’s a must-have for primary care physicians to try, especially when choosing second line options for patients who have depression or general anxiety disorders. It’s remarkable that this application is available to download for free.
iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/app/psychopharm-research/id1238087068?mt=8&uo=4&at=10l9yE
Pterional Craniotomy
Pterional Craniotomy is a real-time 3-D neurosurgery simulation app that shows you one of the most common neurosurgery procedures: the pterional craniotomy. The app teaches about and enables you to actually perform the surgery. Users are given controls at a granular level, even determining how to position the patient during the surgery by utilizing tap and zoom functions on your phone.
The team of neurosurgeons that helped develop the app state that it was built through “a systematic 3-D reproduction of real surgical scenes.” The app gives you an idea of how future medical students and residents might learn complex surgical procedures by using their phones.
iTunes: itunes.apple.com/app/pterional-craniotomy/id1239319725?uo=5&at=10l9yE
Android: play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.upsurgeon.pterionalcraniotomy&hl=en
REBEL EM
REBEL EM by AgileMD organizes the content from the RebelEM website into easy to use, point-of-care accessible information. RebelEM.com was founded by Salim Rezaie, M.D., and is run by a group of academic emergency medicine physicians. The website provides great peer-reviewed blog posts that focus on various emergency medicine topics.
Instead of simply turning the website into an app, AgileMD divided the app into key systems, such as cardiovascular and gastroenterology. Within each of these sections, you’re given summary morsels of information. My only issue with the app is that I wish they put links to the full posts on each of the subsections for further reading. That said, this is a great example of distilling a website into an easy to use, point-of-care form.
iTunes: itunes.apple.com/app/r-e-b-e-l-em/ id1224830512?uo=5&at=10l9yE
Android: play.google.com/ store/apps/details?id=com.agilemd.android.rebelem&hl=en
Medical Apps for Physicians
The CDC, ACC and University of Toronto help physicians motivate patients, make better decisions and refresh their techniques.
In this edition of Tech Notes, we’ll cover a medical app from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) essential for the current opioid epidemic, an app from the American College of Cardiology, and an app that helps providers do quick and minor procedures at a patient’s bedside.
CDC Opioid Guideline: Motivating behavior change
Price: Free Apple: ow.ly/yiOH30d7PAg Android: ow.ly/Bj8Z30d7PHL
Every health care provider is currently aware of the opioid epidemic that is gripping our nation. Many of us see this on a daily basis with patients who come in for overdoses. It has become common to administer naloxone to patients who come into the emergency room with decreased mental status. Per the CDC, overdose deaths involving opioids, including prescription opioids, have quadrupled since 1999.
To help physicians manage this crisis, the CDC released the “CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain” in 2016. These guidelines were meant to help physicians treat chronic pain in patients who are outside of active cancer therapy, palliative care and end-of-life care. The guidelines address when to initiate opioid therapy, the types of opioids to choose, and how to assess the risks and harms of prescribing opioids.
At the end of 2016, the CDC released a medical app dubbed CDC Opioid Guideline, an app that condensed the recommendations the CDC had made earlier in the year pertaining to chronic opioid management. The app itself offers some great features. One of the favorites is the morphine equivalency calculator and a subsection that explains how to perform motivational interviewing with chronic pain patients.
I can’t overemphasize the importance of the app’s motivational interviewing section. It gives physicians the opportunity to use evidence-based techniques for behavior change. The techniques have been proven to reduce the risk of opioid misuse, increase patient motivation to change, and decrease depression in the setting of opioid use.
This app is a must-have for primary care physicians and other physicians who prescribe opioid therapy on a daily basis.
Key ways to use this app: If a patient presents with chronic pain, use the app to determine if their medication dosing should be changed, or if they are at risk for opioid addiction. Use the morphine equivalency calculator to determine conversions for opioid therapy. Use the motivational interviewing section with patients. It’s a patient-centered approach to causing behavior to change.
DAPT Risk Calculator: Help deciding on treatment
Price: Free Apple: ow.ly/YSvT30d7PTK Android: ow.ly/PTeT30d7Q5n
The American College of Cardiology (ACC) is one of the most active medical societies in the mobile space. The DAPT Risk Calculator is one of their latest medical apps and continues the association’s trend of producing useful and free medical apps.
Duration of Dual Antiplatelet Therapy (DAPT) is a big deal for patients who undergo cardiac catheterization procedures. While the length of DAPT after bare metal stents and drug eluting stents is well established, guidelines aren’t as clear on what to do after 12 months.
Serious harm can arise from continuing antiplatelet therapy, such as gastrointestinal bleeds. The DAPT score, developed from the DAPT study randomized trial data, helps physicians determine whether or not anticoagulation therapy should be continued based on a patient’s comorbidities and stenting characteristics.
Though there are online calculators for this, having it available at the point of care provides ease of use and helps you go over the score with the patient as well.
Key ways to use this app: This app helps family physicians and cardiologists decide whether or not to continue antiplatelet therapy after 12 months.
Proceducate: Refresh your skills
Price: Free Apple: ow.ly/oiiW30d7SdJ Android: ow.ly/1UxU30d7S21
Having a medical app that helps with you with both learning and refreshing your medical procedure skill set can be very useful. Proceducate is a medical app that fills this role. The app is focused on procedures encountered in the primary care setting and would also be useful for urgent care providers and emergency medicine physicians.
The great thing with the videos and explanations is how abbreviated they are, enabling them to be used at the point of care to refresh on anatomy or key parts of the procedure. The app is part of a research study at the University of Toronto that is looking at how to best integrate mobile applications in learning and teaching.
Proceducate isn’t a great app to use if you’re just learning a procedure; for that, you need formal training and to see several being done. But it’s a great tool to use if you have already learned a procedure and want to reinforce and learn some of the finer points, or if you need to refresh your memory on a key part. The following are key procedures discussed within the app: suturing, cryotherapy, biopsies, toenail management, aspiration/injections, IUD insertion, speculum exam and perineal laceration repair.
For almost every procedure, there is a short video along with the following information: indications, risks, equipment needed, detailed review of the procedure and various steps, complications, and references to where the procedure steps were sourced.
Key ways to use this app: There is often not just one way you can do a procedure. Use this app to learn a variation on a technique or to refresh your memory of any key part.
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Put the Pen to the Paper!
Tag: #deferredactionforchildhoodarrival
DACA: HOW THIS IS MORE ISOLATED THAN SPREAD OUT
“What will be the outcome?”
For those of you unfamiliar with what has been going on in the recent news surrounding Donald Trump’s decision to end DACA, it concerns immigration. Former President Barack Obama signed this into action to protect minors for a temporary basis looking to seek work permits/right to stay in America. Donald Trump now wants the bill killed via Congress. A move that has sparked once again, protest across the country. And if you don’t know what DACA stands for, it stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival. Now, with the decision to kill the act, we could potentially see nearly 1 million people deported in America. But is this an America issue, or more of a states issue. Because if you live in certain states, this is a bigger concern than if you live in other places. And nowhere is it bigger than in the state of California.
California has nearly 223,000 people under DACA, which constitutes for 27% – 28% of the DACA recipients. So the protest are massive in California against the DACA end. But not all people are against the move to end DACA. Donald J. Trump still has his strong support that feel that it is not the job of America to care for illegal immigrant’s children. These are also the same people who feel that their jobs are already threatened by illegal immigrants coming into America. Now their children will be allowed to stay and retain work permits in an already tough to find work economy. So my question is, “What will be the decision from Congress?” Will they side with Trump or will they uphold Obama’s previous decision? And once again be another policy that Trump has tried to pass and was unsuccessful. There has been so much going on lately, that I have not had too too much to process this policy in its entirety. But the outrage from the predominantly Hispanic community has been great.
Now before I said California was a major state for DACA. But there are a few other key states that are in the line of fire. Texas is the second highest of DACA recipients, with Illinois, New York, and Florida rounding out the top five states. What sticks out to me besides Florida, which has a lot of Hispanics, as well as New York, and Illinois , is Texas. Texas has been in the news for other reasons outside of DACA; the big story, Hurricane Harvey. Now the question remains, “What will Texas do now that this natural disaster has happened?” Families are struggling to regain their footing because of this storm, so what will come of them maybe having to compete for aid from the federal government knowing they are the state with the second highest DACA recipients? This could be another situation that starts to get dicey once the water has receded. Once people have to rebuild their lives in a disaster zone.
But in the end, another major concern is not only the issue of DACA, not just the high numbers centralized to a few states, but the average age of DACA recipients. The average age is about nine years old. A nine year old, that has spent much of their years in America. So now, you’re dealing with children that have no connection to Mexico, a country where the majority are coming from, besides their ethnic and cultural makeup. Young people who could potentially be thrust into a land of high crime and poverty. In a land they know absolutely nothing about because they are now more American than Mexican citizens.
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Author faheemjackson44Posted on September 7, 2017 Categories Allies, Business, Culture, Economy, Government, Human Rights, Politics, Race Relations, UncategorizedTags #bringmetired, #DACA, #deferredactionforchildhoodarrival, #deport, #deportation, #freeatlast, #freedom, #godgivenrights, #hispanics, #huddledmasses, #immigrants, #immigration, #INS, #justiceforall, #mexican, #mexico, #righttostay, #statesrights, #yearningtobefreeLeave a comment on DACA: HOW THIS IS MORE ISOLATED THAN SPREAD OUT
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Teammates On The Field, Friends Off The Field
I’ve written often about my support for team sports, and its relevance in the development and education of its participants. There is no deeper connection, except perhaps, the camaraderie on the battlefield, that engenders lifetime connections like competitive athletics. It is not just the hours spent during an intense competition, but the shared intensity of training that knits bonds that will last a lifetime. The life of an elite athlete, which is who these young Division One student-athletes are, is a shared experience. It melds into a community that can last a lifetime.
I receive from time to time, email from past and present field hockey Leopards, letting me know what they are up to and I thought I might share this with my readers ( with their permission).These are examples of how lifetime connections develop and flourish. It demonstrates how those connections can continue not only after a completed season, but after graduation.
I suppose it all begins during the recruiting period. Official visits are usually timed to coincide with games and allows the prospective teammates to begin that lifetime bonding process, not only with their classmates but with the team with whom they will be spending training hours on and off the field. There is no group on campus with which they will interact and depend on more than their teammates.
Several days ago I received an email from junior forward Rosie Shanks as she was about to leave for the USA from her home in Scotland. She reflected on her wonderful time at home with family and friends. Rosie emphasized she has been training hard and recounted that in the games she played in at home, she had scored in every game. She opined on the different style of play, and how interesting it was to experience both hockey cultures. Rosie used her time to also complete her level one coaching certification, while also coaching at her old Club, Clydesdale, with 120 children ranging from 5 to 15. She loves coaching and is considering becoming a coach after graduation, perhaps even coaching in the US.
Rosie Shanks and Meg Lillis working together against Boston University with Coach Stone looking on.
The highlight of the summer was a visit with a friend in Paris who is studying art after which Rosie traveled to Ireland to meet up with teammate Meg Lillis. The two had adventures in Dublin and later returned returned to Scotland for a few days. Rosie was able to show Meg, Edinburgh and on another day Inveraray Castle in Argyll before Meg had to rerun to Ireland to complete her internship.
Part of maturing and growing is to expand your connections. Those connections endure after leaving the playing field for the last time. Earlier in the summer I received an email from Megan Cicchi ’11 who was an all league and region all american at Lafayette graduating with a degree in Chemistry after only 3 1/2 years. She was obviously a terrific athlete, and given her intelligence and ambition destined for great things. Megan is working in her field and still is connecting to field hockey as a volunteer commissioner for her club team. Her brother is on the US under 21 team and recently selected for the US team. She has managed to stay connected with her teammates as well. Megan and Bridget Hilbig also a teammate and classmate from the class of ’10, make it a point to go backpacking at least once year. At the time of her email, they were preparing for an 8 day trip to Iceland. Bridget recently received her PhD and one year of post-doc. and will start teaching at a small California college this fall.
Megan Chicchi gets ready to score against Georgetown
Finally, the connections are made even to those who were not teammates. but share the experience of playing hockey at Lafayette. This fall, the current team and alumni shared a moment to support Emily Goldman Garibaldi’07 and her husband Peter. Their two year old daughter had succumbed to a terminal illness. As Emily and Peter stood surrounded by Emily’s teammates, one former teammate remarked how she had given her daughter the middle name Lucille, after Emily’s little girl. Her short life was remembered in a dedication on October 24. It was a remarkable ceremony as current teammates and alumni teammates stood in support and dedicated a tree at the playing field they shared during their stay at Lafayette. The dedication reads, “In loving memory of Lucille Elizabeth Garibaldi, daughter of Emily Goldman Garibaldi ’07 and Pete Garibaldi.” The message finishes,” The legacy is really the lives we touch, the inspiration we give.”
Those that say athletics is just about the game… are wrong!
Posted on July 26, 2016 July 27, 2016 Categories Sports, UncategorizedTags field hockey, Lafayette College1 Comment on Teammates On The Field, Friends Off The Field
Lafayette Schedule Change Moves First Day of Preseason
Coach Stone released the final schedule recently with several changes from the spring temporary release. The most noticeable change was moving the first game from August 28th to 6pm on August 26th at Rappolt field. That move started a series of changes.The most important change was to move the first day of preseason to August 9th instead of August 11th. The earlier start gives the Leopards two days more of practice before the first scrimmage.
Given the large class the two day earlier start is welcomed by the Lafayette coaching staff to give them more time to assess and train the 2016 version of Leopard Field Hockey. This may be one of the earliest starts for the field hockey team in my memory.
The first game will be with Fairfield University, a former member of the Patriot League. They were the MAAC champions last year and played Patriot League champion Boston University in the NCAA first round game. Although they lost that game, they have a strong contingent returning. Fairfield also spent 9 days in May on a european tour after a strong spring season. They will be ready when they arrive from Connecticut on the 26th and will be bringing a good attitude and good skills to Easton.
The Leopards will need to be ready for that home opener and the preseason will be crucial to doing their best. So August 9th for all you Leopards who are working hard on your training regimen.
As for the rest of you fans check out the schedule on http://www.goleopards.com, as there are several other changes since spring release!!
Posted on July 19, 2016 July 20, 2016 Categories Sports, UncategorizedTags field hockey, Lafayette CollegeLeave a comment on Lafayette Schedule Change Moves First Day of Preseason
Sarah Dalrymple Rounds Out Lafayette Field Hockey Staff
Sarah Dalrymple was scheduled to start on July first as Head Coach Stone’s addition to the Leopards coaching staff. She comes to the Hill after serving a two year stint at Hofstra where she was responsible for team practice organization, player development , recruiting evaluation, equipment and team travel operations and other administrative responsibilities. But it was her coaching skills that were put in operation early on as she worked Stone’s Total Hockey Field Hockey Camp last week.
Rising freshmen Sam Di Maio and Sara Park getting instruction from camp coaches
The camp gave Dalrymple, current Lafayette players who worked the camp, as well as rising freshmen a chance to get to know one another. Sarah is a 2011 graduate from Temple and served as the team captain in her last season in 2010. She was the team defensive MVP and earned regional all-american and all-conference honors in her senior year. She was a member of the US National Indoor team in 2012 and 2013 and a member of US National Developmental Squad in 2010 and 2011.
Before her time at Hofstra, Dalrymple was an assistant at Longwood where she served as acting head coach during the spring of 2012. The ebullient coach said when she saw that Stone was looking, she gave her a call that led to her eventual appointment. ” I was extremely excited to be joining a great program.”
I reminded her that she was player at Temple as an opponent. ” Yes those were all tough games. I remember particularly a 2-2 overtime game in which Temple fell,” she remarked. I reminded her that Temple had the best of the Leopards the year before 3-1. I then asked if it would be weird coaching against 3 teams she was associated with this year,since Temple, Longwood, and Hofstra appear on the Leopard schedule this year. “Actually my first year at Longwood, Temple came down to play and we competed against my former teammates, however there is a now a new coach and new players. Much is the same at Longwood, but I suppose I don’t have to spend the same amount of time looking at Hofstra tapes,”she volunteered.
I asked if she would be responsible for the defense and goalies and she responded,” Yes, I will working with the goalies,but I hope to be helpful all over the field. Few people know I was recruited as a field player at Temple. The summer before I arrived, I seriously broke my ankle. We only had one goalie and the coach asked me to be the second goalie. So yes, I volunteered! By my junior season I was the starter and the rest is history.” Sara will have three goalies to work with, senior Kaitlyn Arnold, sophomore Gabrielle Ulery and freshman Sara Park. She has met all three and I can say they are all excited to work with her.
Coach Stone has said, “Sarah is an energetic, passionate, and driven coach, and we’re excited to welcome her to College Hill.”
Several rising freshman Leopards take in all the instruction at camp
The team reports on August 11, less than one month from today and I have heard that many members of the team will arrive early staying at apartments of those living off campus to work out together without coaches prior to the official start. Sounds to me like the team is anxious to get going. Go Pards!!
Posted on July 14, 2016 July 14, 2016 Categories Sports, UncategorizedTags field hockey, Lafayette CollegeLeave a comment on Sarah Dalrymple Rounds Out Lafayette Field Hockey Staff
Lafayette Field Hockey Campers Receive Advice On The Mental Aspects Of Being An Athlete
Coach Jennifer Stone who runs the Total Field Hockey Camp at Lafayette College had her student athlete campers trade the hockey turf for the classroom, for an hour on monday. The group of over 100 high school and rising college athletes marched into Oeschle Hall, the headquarters for the psychology and neuroscience departments at Lafayette, to hear Dr. Megan Cannon, a sport psychologist explain how to improve their mental health and achieve peak performance as a student athlete. She works for Mind of the Athlete, a sports psychology consulting firm. They consult with many schools including Lafayette to help foster an environment of positive communication, encouragement, and cohesion to achieve success.
Dr. Cannon competed in swimming, softball and basketball as a youth, while also performing on the stage in ballet, jazz and tap dance from the age of three through college. She brought these experiences, along with her educational background to help today’s student athletes, deal with performance anxiety, nervousness, and many other obstacles to maximize performance on the field and in life.
Current and future teammates listen attentively
One of the first tips was to suggest to athletes that they visualize their ideal performance, scoring that difficult goal, making a save, or the perfect pass. Visualization is important in all sports and help your mind and body to perform without conscious thought. She also discussed how to deal with bad play or mistakes and how to get over it. She introduced the idea of using a mantra to overcome nervousness and to even increase team unity.
Questions from the floor included the ideal amount of sleep required. Dr. Cannon reemphasized how important sleep was to be at you peak. ” Anyone who says they do not need sleep is lying,” she said. There was a question of naps and what was the ideal time for a nap. (26 minutes). There were suggestions to reduce pre-game anxiousness by doing some rhythmic breathing.
Applying what they learned on the field
Finally, she brought up the real case study of a student athlete. He was a wrestler at a major division one school and during his undefeated career won 136 straight matches. She attributed part of his success to his major….art. He would draw pictures of wrestlers in imagined holds. It was this exercise that helped him visualize his success on the mat. Dr Cannon then did an exercise where she had her audience draw themselves on the field doing a good play. Several shared their brief drawings with the assembled class.
The group left with additional tools to help deal with the pressures of being a student athlete and to perform their best on the field and in the classroom.
Posted on July 12, 2016 July 12, 2016 Categories Sports, UncategorizedTags field hockey, Lafayette CollegeLeave a comment on Lafayette Field Hockey Campers Receive Advice On The Mental Aspects Of Being An Athlete
Lafayette Senior Leaders Set Themes For The Fall Season
Amanda Madagan on her way to two goals in the Junior Pan Am games
It’s a little over one month before the team reports for the official preseason camp. In the meantime, the independent team camps are due to start. Open to all high school and college players, many of the rising first year players will take advantage of the extra instruction, while the veteran players and coaches will act as camp councilors and teachers. In the meantime, captain’s practices will be in full swing as the melding of the team begins to take place. All the players will have received a regimen from the strength and conditioning staff to make sure that on August 11th the team is ready to get on to the serious business of designing schemes and lineups.
Six days after reporting in August, the 2016 Leopards will travel to Rutgers for its first taste of collegiate competition, and 6 days after that Columbia will be the final tune up before the team will tackle the regular season with Fairfield University, on August 26 at 6pm at Rappolt Field.
Senior leadership is important as they will set the tone and help bring the team together, leading by example and encouragement. This is the first class in four years that has not experienced a championship in their previous three years and they will want to do everything possible to earn that championship ring.
I contacted two of those leaders several days ago and asked them to write to me and explain what this coming season means to them, and what the team must do to have a successful season. Amanda Magadan, a first team league selection who for the past year has been playing for the US under 21 team was the leading goal scorer for the Leopards, and her skill is quite evident on the turf. Kaitlyn Arnold is not only a Phi Beta Kappa student but is also an all league performer in the goal for the Leopards. She had the most shutouts of any goalie in the league.
Katelyn Arnold stands tall in the goal against Bucknell last year
Amanda wrote, ” If we want to be successful in the upcoming season, we need to work hard, be persistent, and believe! Our goals will be accomplished not by luck, but through our hard work on the field and our ability to learn from our mistakes. There is no doubt that as a team we will be faced with obstacles in the upcoming season. Maybe we are down 2-0 in the second half, but how will we react? Will our bench get louder? Our players sprint faster? Our choice to unite, believe and overcome the challenges in front of us will define our success. As a rising senior, I sincerely look forward to beginning our journey as a team and watching us grow and accomplish tons!”
Katilyn struck a similar theme in her response,” I think this can be a huge fall for us. We have a really strong group with a lot of talent. Even more than that , we’ve made huge strides as a program on developing out culture and I think that can pay dividends in the fall season. In the offseason, we’ve worked on creating an environment that breeds and encourages hard work. To be successful in the fall, we need to keep this environment as cornerstone of our team culture. If we work hard and play tough and with grit, I think we’ll be able to play with anyone.”
Along with their fellow seniors they will lead the team and will dare their teammates to be a winner. Coach Stone remarked to me at the end of the spring season that this team didn’t want to leave the field after the last practice. The “journey” begins!!!
Posted on July 5, 2016 July 5, 2016 Categories Sports, UncategorizedTags field hockey, Lafayette CollegeLeave a comment on Lafayette Senior Leaders Set Themes For The Fall Season
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Social Studies & History
Instructional Strategy
Paleolithic People: Adapting to Change
Invite your class members to learn more about early and late Paleolithic settlements across the globe with this set of informative worksheets. Incorporate activities to compare and contrast the Paleolithic people of the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe.
CCSS: Adaptable
paleolithic, migration
Informative handouts
Includes timeline of geological and anthropological events events during the Paleolithic period
RH.6-8.1 RH.6-8.3 RH.9-10.1 RH.9-10.3
Geography and Early Peoples of the Western Hemisphere
Young historians discover the early people of the western hemisphere. The unit explores how the land changed, how it was used and homes of early Americans such as Incas, Mayans, Inuits, Aztecs, and Pueblos. Individuals also examine these...
5th - 7th Social Studies & History
Climate Change - Who's In Control?
How can both individuals and governments respond to climate change and take responsibility to reduce its effects on our environment? Here you will find three lessons filled with discussion, debate, and role-playing...
8th - 12th Science
Resiliency Among the Salmon People
Is losing cultural traditions the cost of social progress, or should people make stronger efforts to preserve these traditions? High schoolers watch a short film about the native Yup'ik people in Alaska and how they handle the shifts in...
How Did the Unification of Germany Change the Course of World History?
Here you'll find a nice guided notes activity on Otto von Bismarck, which details Bismarck's plan to unify Germany, as well as asks learners to analyze his motivations and overall impact.
10th - 12th Social Studies & History
Communities on the Threshold of Change
Viewers of the short documentary Santa Cruz Del Islote consider how changes in climate and overfishing impact the life style of the 1,200 residents of a small island off the coast of Cartagena, Columbia.
9th - 12th English Language Arts
What Do People Want to Wear?
Who doesn't love fashion, especially when it can be applied to economics, supply, demand, market trends, and price equilibrium. Curious young consumers examine market scenarios to determine their effect on the demand and price for...
6th - 12th Social Studies & History
The Last Generation: Climate Change and the Marshall Islands
Are some families down to their last generation? The final segment of a two-part climate change series investigates the vanishing Marshall Islands. Scholars divide into research teams to analyze three different individuals whose lives...
We the People Focusing on Details: Compare and Contrast
Even the most inspiring documents in American history had to go through a few drafts before they were ready for publication. Reinforce the importance of the writing process, as well as the collaborative nature of democracy, with an...
Why Humans Are so Bad at Thinking about Climate Change
Climate change is in the news more than ever these days, and it will increasingly continue to be a hot topic in the future. Watch a video that proposes different ways people can begin to think about climate change in order to address...
10 mins 6th - 12th Science
People and Places in the North and South
North and South: two opposite directions and two opposite economic and social systems in time of the Civil War. Pupils peruse census websites and primary source photographs to understand what life was like for the everyday person before...
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Halo World Championship 2017 sets records
The Halo World Championship 2017 Finals broke records after three amazing days of competition between twelve of the best teams the world has to offer.
The Halo World Championship began with hundreds of teams and thousands of players competing in qualifiers, but only the twelve aforementioned teams were good enough to make it this far.
The #HaloWC 2017 Finals had more than 135k concurrent viewers and 13mil unique viewers! Thank you for your support! https://t.co/0QpBTimSs1 pic.twitter.com/1qrrzMziqL
— Halo (@Halo) March 29, 2017
The Halo World Championship 2017 Finals by ESL broke digital viewership records across the board. At its height, the broadcast reached more than 135,000 concurrent viewers across Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, and Beam. In addition, more than 13 million unique viewers tuned in over the weekend to see competitive Halo played at its peak. For the first time in eSports history, 10.3 million unique viewers watched the tournament live on Twitter.
OpTic Gaming had arguably the two best players in the entire tournament, with Royal 2 posting an incredible 1.55 KD ratio. His teammate, SnakeBite, posted a 1.37 KD. Both were top two in the tournament.
Team EnVyUs went on an incredible streak, winning 16 games in a row at one point. After falling in the Loser’s Bracket after the first round, Team EnVyUs sent four teams home, including a very talented Team Liquid, before losing in the Grand Finals.
In the end, OpTic Gaming’s Bradley “Frosty” Bergstrom, TJ “Lethul” Campbell, Mathew “Royal 2” Fiorante, Paul “SnakeBite” Duarte and Coach Chris “Royal 1” Fiorante repeated as Halo World Champions.
The post Halo World Championship 2017 sets records appeared first on LPL.
Anti-Cheat Policy
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So far Liam has created 9 blog entries.
Achieving Action in Community (4th in series on communities leading the way)
By Liam|2019-09-27T13:59:16+01:00September 27th, 2019|News|
From small group to a small army After a well-run public exercise such as described in my earlier blogs it is not unusual to have around 50 people engaged in [...]
Choosing the right projects with your community – Third article in a five-part series on how communities become leaders
By Liam|2019-04-10T16:12:50+01:00April 10th, 2019|News|
In this third article I suggest how a community can choose collectively the best projects to fulfill its own vision. Blog summary so far. In the first article (Winners and [...]
Letting communities think for themselves: Second article in a five-part series on how communities become leaders
By Liam|2019-02-16T16:15:51+00:00February 16th, 2019|News|
The big questions At a time when governments simply haven’t the answers to rural decline then how can communities step into the breach and find solutions? At a time when [...]
Winners or losers in the community stakes – First in a 5-part series on how communities become leaders
By Liam|2019-02-04T16:31:05+00:00February 4th, 2019|News|
What 40 communities feel At a time when many of the institutions we depend on have been shown to be vacuous, self-serving clubs I reserve my highest respect for the [...]
Voices of the West of Ireland
By Liam|2018-01-16T20:38:09+00:00November 6th, 2017|News|
Whose voices need amplifying in the West of Ireland? Please comment to liamscollan@gmail.com or on the facebook post I am engaged in some work in the West of Ireland and I [...]
Time to Re-imagine Rural Ireland
By Liam|2018-01-16T20:40:19+00:00September 21st, 2016|News|
Summary In this article I argue that rural Ireland needs a whole new movement a whole new mechanism by which ordinary people can work in solidarity to build society and [...]
Achill Island Global Story
By Liam|2018-01-16T20:42:33+00:00May 7th, 2016|News|
Achill Island Global Story Telling a story to the world Local people see an object floating in the sea off the coast at Doega village in Achill island. They [...]
Transforming our Neighbourhoods
By Liam|2017-12-04T13:06:23+00:00January 10th, 2016|News|
Changing lives A group of people in the West of Ireland transformed their world. The prices they paid for animal feed, fertiliser and general supplies had risen too high and [...]
In Andalucía, in southern Spain, there is a village called Marinaleda with a population of 2,700 people. It has virtually no crime, full employment and everyone can build their house [...]
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Home / I couldn't paint golden angels: Sixty years of commonplace life and anarchist agitation - Albert Meltzer
10 The Spy, the Royalist and a Last Farewell; The Freedom of the Press; Admonition; Old Flame and New Floods
The Spy, the Royalist and a Last Farewell
When I walked away from the remnants of my bookshop venture I was head over heels in debt and somewhat inclined to curse, like Thenardier, the wretched place ‘where they all had such royal sprees and I devoured my all like a fool’, not that the All came to very much, and I had enjoyed myself at times. I had never been able to shake off the legacy of the 374 Monster and by the time I had paid off its debts those of the bookshop had mounted.
For months I had been stunned by the tragic death of Evie, with whom I had a long association. She crashed her car in Wales returning from a trade show in Manchester, after the usual hospitality that goes with such affairs.
Some ten years later, I met her last boss by chance at a filling station. He got out of his chauffeur-driven Bentley and came across to me, reproaching me for never going to see him or his wife after Evie’s death, assuring me how much everyone in the trade appreciated her and how keenly they felt her loss. In the true, sincere and authentic voice of fashion business, he told me how they missed her, “You can’t begin to think how much money she made for us”, he assured me, tragically.
Though we had moved into a good flat after leaving St. Pancas, and giving up a decent place at a rent one could afford was the most idiotic thing financially and socially one could do at that time and since, that was what I did. I could not bear to live in it nor even to talk about Evie. I felt so emotional about it that Joe Thomas, who came with me to the funeral, warned people from talking to me either about Evie, or even about the flat.
Unlike the 374 Monster, it wasn’t easy to give the flat up. Though everyone was crying out for flats, the landlords wouldn’t transfer the lease. I let someone else move in provided they paid the rent direct. They ran up seven months rent when the landlord got a court order and evicted me and them without my knowing. I learned this later when sued in the county court for the balance of the rent owing after distraint. But fate always frowned on my landlords. True, nothing much happened to Miss Rowntree, but her devotion to the cause of peace and international understanding certainly never had any luck.
The solicitor for the 374 landlords having been burned to death, the bookshop’s landlord was drowned on a holiday cruise to the Canaries. The flat’s landlord was killed crossing the road from the car park to the court, and as his barrister did not understand at the time why his client failed to appear to instruct him, which annoyed the judge, I got a couple of months reprieve, by which time I had gone from the only address they knew. Alternatively Pharaoh’s heart had been softened by the omen, since I never heard of the case again.
Soon afterwards Audrey Charity, whom I had known for years, returned to England. She and I had an on-off relationship for years as she every so often abandoned the attempt and returned to a comfortable life-style in California, always returning just when it seemed all was at an end between us. Even before my leaving the bookshop venture, which had lasted five years, she kept pressing me to concentrate on my personal affairs rather than worrying about lifelong political commitments so many had abandoned long before my age, now pushing forty and knocking it over. She did not think much of honest poverty and all that. I did not think too highly of it myself, but it was all I could manage.
We were at opposites politically. She said she was a Royalist-Republican, which was to say a royalist in England and a Republican in California, and as such was a devout groupie of Charles II. We re-fought all the battles of the Civil War in our weekend journeys round the country. She got on very well with my parents, with whom she often stayed. Sid always jokingly called her ‘Baby Doll’ and Rose called her ‘Lady Jane’, which she regarded as the height of cockney humour. This time it almost seemed as if we would marry. But it never came off, though we always reckoned we might eventually shack up instead of having what we laughingly called our perpetual holiday romance. She wanted too much of life and I too little, everyone told us.
Within a year of coming back she thought she had cancer. Afterwards the doctors explained it was an eye complaint affecting descendants of North Europeans in California. She took her own life. She was always merry and so used to being complimented on her blonde beauty that she concealed her secret fears of illness and old age, neither of which she was to experience. Coming only eighteen months after Evie’s death, I felt emotionally shattered and drained.
A last fond and despairing look at the charming Welsh spy and the lovely American royalist! I lived alone for the next thirty years, and it would seem now certain, for the rest of my life.
The freedom of the press
While I was still on the dreary round of looking for work and finding inexplicable refusals I went with one old friend, Dave Kinsella, for a job on London Transport. He, like me, had been one of those excluded from the army for years. In his case it was the Irish republican connection — he was Lancashire-born but in the Connolly Club. When they had finally came round to telling him he had been ‘enlisted’ some months before, he had been at sea in the merchant service. He still faced a court-martial on his return but a fairer court martial than Captain Le Strange could conduct listened to his evidence and decided, even though not admitting the truth about the mysterious call-up so long delayed and then coming out of the blue, that the accused could hardly have left ship in Murmansk to respond even if he had known about it. It would have been an offence in itself.
However, he was less lucky than I in the long run since, once in the army, he got a five year prison sentence (he served two) for assaulting an officer, in circumstances which would not have caused more than a frown from a magistrate in civil life, and in circumstances more justified than in my case. How many got the same two years? Was it a mandatory penalty upon dissenters? I would still like to know, though it now makes no difference. It did not bother Dave. What irked him was that we were still turned down, and for such a lousy job, on the grounds of our ‘prison records’ yet they were recruiting former members of enemy forces who might have had criminal records, for all they knew, and in some cases might well have been guilty of war crimes, but that did not go against them.
At the suggestion of Joe Thomas, who was by then working for The Guardian, Dave and I applied to join the print union Natsopa. The union promptly fixed me with a job as a copytaker at the Daily Sketch and him as a driver at another daily. Such were the restrictive practices denounced as being a restraint of the freedom of the press-lords to decide who should work and who shouldn’t that the management was not consulted as to our political reliability and the only test applied was whether we could do the job or not. This type of abuse of the employer’s natural rights was later held up by Tory propagandists as an example of union power at its worst. Mrs Thatcher came to liberate industry from that threat.
Just when I was packing up the bookshop, I received a last admonition on my folly. A would-be Conservative councillor on the St. Pancras estate was a young man in a hurry named Andrew came in to see me and analyse my financial follies, of which I was already well aware and did not need to have explained kindly.
George Plume, who worked for the municipality but had died two or three years before, had introduced him to the bookshop in the first place. Among the accumulated stock of Simpkin Marshall were some several dozen copies of a painting of Hans Christian Andersen, which George helped flog him on the basis of their being of Benjamin Disraeli, a likeness I had never before noticed. Thereafter he occasionally called on the look-out for portraits of other Conservative heroes, and he never failed to berate me politically and explain how well I could do on the other side of the fence if I only “looked after No. 1.”
He came round for the last time just as we were packing it all in, and met two Turkish Cypriots who occasionally bought indiscriminate stacks of books. They were after the non-books that had been left. They were not readers, but landlords.
Books were still a cheap method of claiming the furnished rooms they let had furniture over a certain value. Some types of non-books can be bought and sold cheaply, but who is to say what they were worth on the prices then charged? The bed and chairs in a ‘furnished bed-sit’ might be worth a couple of shillings, the wardrobe a pound or so, but the ‘library’ brought the furniture up to the valuer’s assessment. I hated dealing with them, and they sensed this. They generally came when I was out and dealt with my colleague who appeared to them much more reasonable.
Their belief in free enterprise coincided with Andrew’s and they got on famously. They invited him to join their jewellery import firm and use his charisma and ability to manage the office, insisting that as an Englishman he was ideal as managing director. He was delighted, took over, boasted to all and sundry of his sudden rise to a directorship. He sat giving orders to smiling Cypriots, which he never realised were never carried out, as they were for a fictitious operation. Meanwhile he drew a salary commensurate to his presumed standing, until one day the police raided the firm. The ‘workers’ pleaded they knew nothing of handling stolen property or long term fraud, which is what the company was really about. They only “took orders from the boss” who would no doubt have a suitable explanation. A warrant was out for his arrest and he left for Australia hurriedly. So ended my acquaintanceship with yet another person who assured me always “I was foolish not to look after No. 1.” and would do well if I did.
Old Flame and New Floods
It was a few years after the tragic loss of both Evie and Audrey that I met with Roz Shepherd once more. We had parted after the war when she decided to return to her husband, though their married life previously had been brief. He had taken the opportunity of being called up for military service to avoid a domestic battle, being able to go away without confessing he had another home to which to return, and to break with his wife by post from France. After the war, feeling herself getting too old for stage work, and with the variety theatre dying anyway, Roz felt the need for ‘security’. When he was demobbed, having broken with his war-time love (somebody else’s wife), he proposed resumption of the marriage, and she accepted.
I had barely the opportunity of holding our daughter in my arms before Roz reunited with her husband. I never saw her grow up. She did not know of my existence until just before she married, and for conventional reasons kept it as her secret. When we met, and I detected the strong likeness to my mother’s family I must admit I regretted lost opportunities, at least of not having had other children. As one grows older one tends to feel bitter about such matters, though I hope I haven’t. It hurt for a time and I never discussed it. Many friends have assured me I would have been a good father. I suppose some foes have regarded me as a Godfather. I met Roz sometimes and she put on my door a medallion of The Good Shepherd, which was the name Audrey jocularly gave her. It has fooled many a doorstep missionary. I met her husband only once before his death. He had been working at County Hall where he was a senior clerical officer until for some reason he retired early on an inadequate income. He came up to me in the coffee room and greeted me effusively, though I had not the faintest idea who he was (he knew me from photographs). Perhaps he thought I had some importance, as I was surrounded by councillors, but I hadn’t. The reason I was sitting in the County Hall coffee room was that I had met Ellis Hillman in the street. I had known him for years. He was a scientific prophet of doom and was now a Labour councillor which was doom enough to be going on with. We had a common interest in reviving public attention in the works of F. A. Ridley which is what we went in to discuss.
Ellis had entered electoral politics as a Trotskyist ‘deep entrist’ like three-quarters of the County Hall Labour councillors and not a few Tory ones who had gone in so deep they came out the other side. Indeed he told me of a mixed committee of Labour and Tory Opposition councillors he once chaired, prefacing his remarks with the statement that it was a trifle bizarre as all concerned happened coincidentally to be former members of the same Trot group.
They crowded round to hear his latest theory of disaster, that given the right combination of tide and wind, London could face a worse disaster than Venice, with the added possibility of the Underground being flooded. It sounded like science fiction, even more bizarre than his committee meeting. Most were more amused than disturbed and when he stood for a Hackney municipal election, his Conservative opponents used it extensively for ridicule to show the constituency what sort of mad ideas the Socialist member had. The Conservative Government issued a statement calming down undue fears, pointing out that the Thames Barrier would prevent this once they got around to building it and meanwhile a major disaster was no doubt possible but unlikely. They granted Mr Hillman’s premises, but explained only a few named London districts could be affected anyway — disastrously for the local Conservatives, as Hackney was one of them.
Even Roz, who lived in Hackney, phoned me anxiously to ask if she should get out with her daughter, and how soon. I told her it would be quite a while, if ever. Now the Thames Barrier is built, and Roz lived just long enough to see the new attraction. As I did not by then live far away from it, she called on me for tea just before it was completed and laughingly recalled her former fears. “You were always too damn cautious,” I remarked.
‹ 09 The Iberian Liberation Council; How the Thames Was Lost up 11 Half-time summing-up ›
Juan Conatz
Jan 5 2011 17:49
I couldn't paint golden angels: Sixty years of commonplace life and anarchist agitation - Albert Meltzer
Foreword and Introduction
01 The Box Scandal; Gypsies and Germans; The Film Scandal; The Road to Salvation: In the Van; Lost Millions; Paradise Lost and Regained
02 The Coasts of Bohemia; Fighting Fascism; The Battle of Cable Street; Schoolboy Anarchist; Castles in Spain; Frustration on Spain
03 Off to Work; The Guy They All Dread; Early Days; Ebbtide; Attempts on Dictators; Around the Left
04 War Clouds; The Taste of Defeat; War at Last; Internment and Discernment; Splitting the Atom; Blackpool Breezes; Prison; Division; Military Detention
05 On 'Active' Service; the Marquis and the Maquis; the Cairo Mutiny; Bounty on the Mutiny
06 Back in the Old Routine; The Spanish Resistance; The 374 Monster; Ruling the Waves; Three Minute Celebrity
07 Bookselling; The Thetford Pain; Bookselling, the Lack of; Tales of the Housing Acts; The New Left; Squatting; International Spy
08 Plumbing the Depths; Keeping Watch; -- And Ward; The Law-and-Order Candidate; Poetry to Pros
09 The Iberian Liberation Council; How the Thames Was Lost
11 Half-time summing-up
12 Closer Links with Spain; Customs and Practice; Error and Terror; Satire; The Wooden Shoe; The Carrara Conference; The Vietnam Connection
13 The Shadow of the Tong; The Anarchist Black Cross; Miguel Garcia; Start of "Black Flag"; Towards the Centre; Rise of the Print Empire; Anarchist in Fleet Street; 1986 Again; Doctor's Dilemma
14 The Spanish War (Continued!); Centro Iberico; Greek Tragedy; Haverstock Hill; The Invisible Woman; This Gun for Sale; Only Too Visible Women; Channel Swimmer in Beads; Emilienne
15 Floodgates; The First Twenty Black Flag Years; Novel Approach; Terrorist Links; The Magic Coat
16 Barrack Room Lawyer Again; Twilight of Francoism; The Angry Brigade; Bitov What You Fancy; The Brief Morning of Anarchy; Trials and Tribulations
17 Auto Destruction; At the Old Bailey; Witness of the Persecution; Fun and Games at the Gulag; The Most Distressful Country; After the Storm; Irish Association; The Murrays
18 The CNT between Death and Birth; The Re-Birth of the CNT; The Phoney CNT; The Orkneys; Cienfuegos Press; The Wooden Horse
19 The Execution of Puig Antich; the 'Newer Angry Brigades': The Bookie Always Wins; Affinity Groups; Persons Unknown; The Protest Movement
20 After the Christie File; Refract; "The Kid's Last Fight"; Kate Sharpley
21 By the Waters of Babylon; The Battle of Railton Road; International Centres
22 Communism and Pandora's Box; A Rebel Spirit; 1984 and All That
23 The State's Internal Enemy; Death Pangs of Fleet Street; Spanish Practices; The Battle of Wapping; The Emperor's Courtiers
24 The New Left; "Anarchy'; Lost Weekend; Venice Observed
25 Lucky Strike; Direct Action Years; Poll Tax; The Battle of Trafalgar Square; Class War; Leo
26 Higher Intelligence; Velikovsky; Wonderful Copenhagen; Jim Abra; Counter intelligence; The Informer Who Changed History
27 Two Fascisms; Anti-Fascist Fascism; The irascibles; the End of Fleet Street; Retirement; Down Under
28 My Discovery of Sweden; The Schism; 'Nordic Anarchism': Weekend in Macedonia
29 Looking Back; State Over Health; The Slump (Second Act); Act in the Court; Police in the State; Looking Forward
30 The Final Curtain
Appendix I (Chronology for 'I couldn't paint golden angels')
Appendix II (Albert Meltzer's 'political record')
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UTHSC Library Workshops
Library workshop: So You Want to Do a Systematic Review
The Systematic Review Process
Thinking of doing a systematic review?
Systematic Review Services for Faculty
Email: library@uthsc.edu
Alexandria Quesenberry
Alexandria Quesenberry, MSIS
Research & Learning Services Librarian
The University of Tennessee Health Science Center
877 Madison Ave, Rm. 224
https://libguides.uthsc.edu/aquesenberry
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Subjects:EndNote, Nursing, Teaching and Learning
What is a systematic review?
AHRQ defines a systematic review as "a summary of the clinical literature. A systematic review is a critical assessment and evaluation of all research studies that address a particular clinical issue. The researchers use an organized method of locating, assembling, and evaluating a body of literature on a particular topic using a set of specific criteria. A systematic review typically includes a description of the findings of the collection of research studies. The systematic review may also include a quantitative pooling of data, called a meta-analysis."
Systematic Review Request Form
Adapted under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. from: YourHealthNet, "Navigating Effective Treatments With Systematic Reviews: An online toolkit that will help you understand and develop the skills to explore health research" developed and published by the Centre for Health Communication and Participation with support from the Australasian Cochrane Centre.
If you are interested in doing a systematic review, check out the Library's systematic review services for faculty and consider signing up for the So You Want To Do A Systematic Review Workshop.
Next: Methodology >>
Last Updated: Jan 13, 2020 8:42 AM
URL: https://libguides.uthsc.edu/systematicreview
Subjects: Education, Research/Learning/Scientific Writing
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Community safety and attractive urban for citizens and visitors are critical challenges for Leadsun.
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Music | Updated June 13, 2014
Top 10 Cocaine Songs Of All Time
Sharkguys . . . Comments
Cocaine has had a significant impact on popular music. While booze is far more likely to result in sloppy work and an unsightly beer gut in middle age, coke leaves you wired enough to ensure that you will produce a whole lot of something, and thus ups the odds that you will actually produce something good.
Keith Richards may have fallen out of a tree in Fiji while out of his gourd on other than vitamin supplements, but he is what rock n’ roll is all about: debauchery. And, while a sober Eric Clapton was quoted as saying, “I hate listening to my old records, which I did stoned or drunk,” he’s alone in that camp as most fans of his music hate listening to anything that he’s done straight.
Keith Richards’ entire career, Neil Young’s coked out performance at “The Last Waltz”, Stevie Nicks having built up such a tolerance to cocaine that she had to have it blown up her rectum to get a high (this never happened, apparently, but is nonetheless one of the more entertaining urban legends), cocaine use is an integral part of the rock-star lifestyle. It’s what young boys dream about: One day, if I practice enough and work on perfecting my skills as a singer-songwriter, I too will be able to snort cocaine off of the breasts of a vacant-eyed stripper whose name I’ll forget before I’m back on the tour bus and liquidating a savings account by mobile phone to settle debts with unsavory characters.
Here we have compiled a list of the Top 10 Cocaine Songs of all time — songs about, influenced by, and more than likely written on clouds of Peruvian marching powder:
Bales of Cocaine
The Reverend Horton Heat
In this one, the good Reverend regales us with the modern day parable of a farmer out in his field pulling corn and carrots “when two low-flying aeroplanes, ’bout a hundred feet high/dropped a bunch o’ bales o’ somethin’, some hit me in the eye”. The farmer cuts the bales open and notices a mysterious powder inside. Being a rube, for whom presumably white lightnin’ is still the biggest thrill in town, he has no idea what it is and brings it to his “Crazy Brother Joe”: “He sniffed it up and kicked his heels, said, ‘Horton, that’s some blow!’” Our lucky farming friend then heads into Dallas, becomes a millionaire by selling his find, ditches his farm in Texas and buys another in Peru. Think of it like the Bill Paxton movie “A Simple Plan”, only a whole lot happier and without Billy Bob Thornton in the role of a mouth-breather. We can safely assume that at some later point in this farmer’s life the drug dealers whose fortune he stole would have tracked him down and introduced him to the latest in Columbian necktie attire, however, for taking a different angle on the cocaine song and for its appreciation of the entrepreneurial spirit, we salute the Reverend Horton Heat and include “Bales of Cocaine” on our Top 10 Cocaine Songs of All Time list:
Bales of cocaine, fallin’ from low-flyin’ plane
I don’t know who done dropped ’em, but I thank ’em just the same
Bales of cocaine, fallin’ like a foreign rain
My life changed completely by the low-flyin’ planes
Lit up
This is a song that needs to wipe its nose before returning to the dinner table. With two founding members who met in a tattoo parlor and bonded over their mutual love of AC/DC, Buckcherry exemplifies the type of hard rockin’ lifestyle that has enriched many a well-connected roadie. A song meant more for the mosh-pit than for lyrical analysis, this one is interesting though for the number of places in which the narrator gets “lit up”. They include: a plane, his couch, his bed, on a train and backstage somewhere with a groupie knocking, “Crack the door for the curious girl cuz she’s waitin’ she’s been waitin’…” And fulfilling the age-old maxim that all bands who look like this will eventually do something that reminds one of Spinal Tap, we get a replay of the classic, “It goes up to 11” bit of dialogue in the following bit of verse: “I’m in touch love, from this crutch/Well you’re on ten but buddy I’m on eleven”.
“I’m on a plane With cocaine And yes I’m all lit up again”
Guns ‘n’ Roses
“I don’t do cocaine anymore. Well, only occasionally,” GNR guitarist Slash, 1992. Long before the band broke up and Axl Rose set about attempting to strangle whatever bit of fan support they had with the “Chinese Democracy” debacle, the Gunners were at the forefront of cocaine-fueled hard rock with Appetite For Destruction, and “My Michelle” was one of their best. The Michelle in the song actually existed. She knew the band and asked Axl to pen a tune for her. She did not get “Sweet Child Of Mine” treatment. This one tells a story of a hard-living woman whose “daddy works in porno/Now that mommy’s not around/She used to love her heroin/but now she’s in the ground.” The song and the real-life story both have a happy ending, as, according to Slash’s biography (which would no doubt require a snort of something illicit to get through), Michelle has since moved across the country and cleaned up her act.
“So you stay out late at night And you do your coke for free Drivin’ your friends crazy With your life’s insanity”
Though better known for penning that motet Sweet Home Alabama, heard if a case of Amstel Light, a $150 Yamaha guitar, a group of white people, or a campfire are within a 100-yard radius, Skynyrd is also known for this thoroughly unpleasantly titled opus: ‘What’s that smell?’ being one of the worst questions you can ever hear uttered, along with ‘Is anyone here a vegetarian?’ A well-worn refrain when it comes to the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, members of the band were killed by over-consumption, but in this case, it was of fuel, at least according to the National Transportation Safety Board, who determined this caused their plane to take a nosedive into a Mississippi forest. This song references an earlier and less-killing crash involving guitarist Gary Rossington, whiskey, coke and an oak tree that would just not get out of the way.
“Whiskey bottles, and brand new cars
Oak tree you’re in my way
There’s too much coke and too much smoke
Look what’s going on inside you
With an obstructed view concert ticket to one of their performances costing in the range of your average eight-ball, The Eagles certainly know a thing or two about life in the fast lane, a song inspired by a road trip Glenn Frey took with a dealer named ‘The Count’. In ‘Hotel California’, (a song so ubiquitous you can be wandering the rugged mountains of northern Laos and hear a villager who’s otherwise had no contact with modernity, humming a few bars) there were ‘mirrors were on the ceiling’, and in this song, their paean to hard-living, they served a dual purpose other than a means to admire your feather mullet and creepy mustache.
“They threw outrageous parties, they paid heavenly bills
There were lines on the mirror, lines on her face”
“Casey Jones” and “Truckin”
These Dead songs casually mention cocaine use as part of the average work day for those in two occupations — a train conductor and a trucker — and we’re hoping this was more fantasy than fiction. Truckers are already not the kind of people that most like to share the road with — their egos being inflated in proportion to their rigs and requiring no further boost from chemicals. Cocaine use might, however, explain, how train conductors can crash something that sets out on a predetermined track. The ‘livin’ on reds, vitamin C and cocaine” lifestyle is unlikely to feature prominently in the health and wellness section of your local bookstore alongside “You: On a Diet”, or “Train your Brain to Think like a Thin Person”.
“Driving that train, high on cocaine,
Casey Jones is ready, watch your speed.”
“Livin’ on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine
All a friend can say is ain’t it a shame?”
Sticky Fingers album
Pound for pound, or more accurately, ounce for ounce, “Sticky Fingers” is one of the most drug-addled albums ever released, with nearly half of the songs on it in some way referencing drugs either obliquely, or quite explicitly with heroin in Dead Flowers, morphine in Sister Morphine, or singing the praises of a nighttime bump in Moonlight Mile. Sticky Fingers, along with Neil Young’s “Tonight’s the Night” are among the most depressing albums of the 1970s, and together make the Tom Waits song catalog sound like the collected works of the Village People by comparison.
“Yeah, you got satin shoes
Yeah, you got plastic boots
Ya’ll got cocaine eyes
Yeah, you got speed-freak jive”
“Sweet cousin cocaine, lay your cool cool hand on my head
Ah, come on, sister morphine, you better make up my bed”
“When the wind blows and the rain feels cold with a head full of snow, with a head full of snow”
Cocaine Blues
There are numerous songs out there that go by the name “Cocaine Blues” or a variation thereof, presumably because there was no shortage of real-life material on which to base such ditties. We’re slotting two of the more prominent in our third and second spots. The first is a “traditional” song, which means that it’s public domain and can therefore be burned, photocopied, recorded, dubbed over, mixed with farm animal sounds, and played over and over again on the street corner to the annoyance of everyone within 100 yards (public noise ordinances notwithstanding) — all with copyright-infringement impunity. The Reverend Gary Davis, who, unlike Brother Horton Heat earlier in the list, actually was an ordained minister, laid down the definitive version of this one, and a young Bob Dylan added it to his repertoire. This version takes us through some of the less pleasant aspects of cocaine use — hence the “blues” part — including:
Any pretense to romance going out the window:
You take Sally, an’ I’ll take Sue,
Ain’t nah difference between the two.
Cocaine all around my brain.
Unpleasant physical effects:
Hey baby, you better come here quick,
This old cocaine ’bout to make me sick.
And one quite bizarre veterinary notion:
Cocaine’s for horses and it’s not for men,
Doctor said it kill you, but he didn’t say when.
The second of our public domain songs (go ahead and record this one on YouTube using a butt kazoo and a ukulele for all the record companies care) was first known by the far more ominous sounding name “Transfusion Blues”, but popularized as Cocaine Blues by none other than the Man in Black (especially after Labor Day) Johnny Cash. This was one of the songs that Cash sang at Folsom Prison that no doubt had the guards ruining underwear while wondering whether they would soon have a riot on their hands. This super-charged song tells the story of Willie Lee, a “hack”, which we presume means either a prison guard or cop, as a reporter for a schlock newspaper wouldn’t be as cool, who takes a shot of cocaine and shoots his cheating woman down. He then flees to Mexico, but is apprehended, put before a jury of “12 honest men” and sentenced to “99 years in the Folsom Pen”. By the end the convicted prisoner advises his fellows to stay off the cocaine, not to murder, mind you, but to avoid the cocaine; he seems ok about the murdering your wife part.
The judge he smiled as he picked up his pen
99 years in the Folsom pen
99 years underneath that ground
I can’t forget the day I shot that bad bitch down
Come on you’ve gotta listen unto me
lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be
Don’t be fooled by Clapton’s fatigued version, this gem penned by J.J. Cale (a man to whom Slow Hand arguably owes his entire career) is in our estimation, the definitive blizzard ditty. Clapton is quoted on Wikipedia as having once said that “Cocaine” is actually an anti-cocaine song. If you study it or look at it with a little bit of thought… from a distance… or as it goes by… it just sounds like a song about cocaine. But in actual fact, it is quite cleverly anti-cocaine.” Being that Clapton didn’t write this song, this opinion is about as valuable as the answer you’d get if you asked the Byrds what they were thinking when they came up with “Mr. Tambourine Man”. Defending his position, Clapton mentions the lyric, “If you wanna get down, down on the ground; cocaine” to demonstrate that the song is anti-coke. He doesn’t mention though that every other lyric in the song could feature in the text of a Colombian drug-runner’s spring/fall catalogue:
If you want to hang out, you’ve got to take her out, cocaine
She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie, cocaine
If you got bad news, you want to kick them blues, cocaine
When your day is done and you got to run, cocaine
If your thing is gone and you want to ride on, cocaine
Dont forget this fact, you cant get it back, cocaine
Honorable or dishonorable omissions: Never Change (Jay-Z), Snowblind (Black Sabbath), Cocaine (The Game), No Thing On Me (Curtis Mayfield), What A Waster (The Libertines), Picture (Kid Rock)
Contributor: Sharkguys
Top 10 Little Known Influential Musicians
10 Banned Controversial Album Covers
Top 15 Rock Riffs of All Time
10 Music Genres Designed To Scare And Offend
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Animals | Updated November 6, 2014
10 Strange Flightless Flies
Jonathan Wojcik . . . Comments
Houseflies, horseflies, fruit flies, mosquitoes and gnats are all examples of the insect order Diptera, latin for “two-winged,” and include an estimated 250,000 species around the world, from sinister parasitoids to beautiful nectar-feeding pollinators. Some, however, are adapted to such unusual conditions that they’ve lost their most defining feature; throughout the world, flightless flies include some of the weirdest, rarest and most specialized insects known to man.
10 Horseshoe Crab Fly
With a thin crescent head and a rounded, pill-like body, this pinhead-sized animal looks more like a mite or a beetle than a fly. This form is well-suited to creeping about their only known habitat: the nests of termites. It’s not entirely known what they eat, but it’s possible they prey upon termite eggs or make pests of themselves in their hosts’ fungal gardens.
9 Louse Flies
Photo credit: Alvesgaspar
Flat and tick-like, this large group of bloodsucking flies are more devoted to the parasitic lifestyle than your usual horseflies or mosquitoes, sometimes remaining on the same host for their entire adult lifespan. Some species are winged, but only fly once before their wings rub off in a host’s fur. Others are flightless from the start, their entire life cycles spent on their host. Various species can be found on birds, deer, cattle, and particularly sheep, whose hides can be ruined by their large bite wounds.
8 False Termite
As their names imply, this is another fly that lives in the nests of termites. In this case, the female resembles a normal fly until she mates, leaving behind the male who dies shortly after. The female enters a termite mound, loses her wings, and slowly changes shape. Her abdomen swells, taking on the rough form of a young termite and blends with the colony through a chemical secretion that termites find quite tasty.
7Snow Fly
We don’t usually associate insects with snow, but crane flies (otherwise known as snow flies) are well-adapted to icy conditions, including some of the highest altitudes of any non-microscopic animal. Glycerol, a natural antifreeze, keeps the little guys from turning into bug-sicles. By giving up flight, they conserve even more heat and energy. Their larvae feed on organic matter under the ground. Adults, who live only to mate, are unable to feed; they just sip a little water from the ice and snow.
6 Bat Fly
More closely resembling a crab or spider, these weird parasites feed only on the blood of bats and need those long, prickly legs to hang onto their flying hosts. Their maggots complete development still inside the mother’s body, allowing her to lay pupae rather than eggs—which is quite unusual for flies. These soon “hatch” into fully developed, sexually mature adults, ready to cling for dear life to their furry food source.
5 Ant Larva Mimic
While it may resemble a maggot, this fly is an infiltrator of army ant colonies. Dwarfing her tiny head and thorax, her bloated abdomen looks, smells, and feels almost exactly like an army ant grub. The ants are fooled into carrying, feeding, and protecting this impostor as one of their own. When the ants stop to rest, the winged males sneak in to mate with these freeloaders and quickly escape.
4Stilt-Legged Pitcher-Dweller
This rare Australian fly raises its larvae in the water-filled traps of an insect-eating pitcher plant, where they resist the plant’s digestive enzymes and feed on whatever else falls in. The adult flies closely resemble ants, which may be a case of defensive mimicry. Many creatures who would love to devour a juicy, defenseless fly prefer not to anger a stinging ant colony. Strangely, adults are more commonly found in arid habitats where their pitcher plant hosts are unable to grow, implying they may travel quite far between mating and egg-laying.
3 “Bee Louse”
When a honeybee is feeling hungry, it can always depend on its nestmates for an emergency refueling; using its antennae, it tickles the face of a fellow worker, triggering the regurgitation of a droplet of nectar. This is how bees constantly distribute nutrients around the colony to those who need it most, but wherever there’s free food to be had, you can bet something will evolve to take advantage of it.
The wingless flies known as “bee lice” spend their entire adult lives on the bodies of social bees. They’re so small they can even wedge themselves into the sockets of their host’s wings. Whenever they want food, they scurry down to the bee’s face, and tap out that same signal used by other bees to share food. The poor host uncontrollably spits up, and most of the food is completely wasted once the minuscule parasites have had their fill. These sneaks can become numerous enough to greatly shorten bee lifespans and weaken entire colonies, creating an epidemic of insect bulimia.
2 Sea-Skating Fly
As larvae, these tiny gnats live submerged in stagnant tide pools, feeding on algae and rotting marine flotsam. This makes pontomyia one of the only known insects on our planet to colonize saltwater environments. Adult males are also the only insects who travel exclusively on their hind legs. They stand upright on the water’s surface while their tiny, flipper-like wings push them forward. Females lack wings or even fully developed legs. Their grub-like bodies simply float to the surface, where they are picked up and carried by the water-skiing males for what sounds like one of the most fun lovemaking sessions in the animal kingdom.
1 New Zealand Bat Fly
Unrelated to our earlier bloodsucking bat fly, this oddball species belongs to its very own taxonomic family. Unlike those other, less scrulupous “bat flies,” these blind insects are harmless guano-eaters. They even clean fecal residue directly from bat fur. Though they would make tasty morsels for the winged mammals, the two very different creatures have evolved a mutual tolerance for one another.
As unwholesome as their lifestyle sounds, these helpful symbiotes are among the only flies to demonstrate devoted parental care; they work together to rear larvae in communal “nurseries.” Females have been observed using their mouths to groom one another and their young, while certain special males seem to age into a sort of “guardian” caste. They watch over the nursery and emit a high-pitched noise that directs bats away from the fly’s breeding grounds. In a sense, they stand around all day screaming “don’t step on our babies! You need us for toilet paper!”
The divine beauty of nature, laid bare.
Jonathan Wojcik is a web cartoonist and avid biology enthusiast. More of his writing, as well as artwork, can be found on bogleech.com
10 Dull-Sounding Creatures With Fascinating Abilities
9 Truly Bizarre Ways Animals Work for Humans
10 Mammals You Probably Didn’t Know Exist
10 Completely Unsettling Animal Behaviors
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Craig Lowndes and Jamie Whincup are back together again.
Whincup driven by big Bathurst regret
by Rebecca Williams
JAMIE Whincup won't be shy about giving teammate Craig Lowndes a hug if the reunited Triple Eight dream team can again conquer Mount Panorama on Sunday.
Ahead of the pair's first race together in 10 years, the Red Bull Holden Racing Team star has revealed his big regret from his famous Bathurst 1000 win alongside Lowndes in 2006.
Showing another side to the V8 iceman, Whincup said he wished he had embraced a clearly emotional Lowndes on the podium after the first of the duo's hat-trick of wins in the Great Race.
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The most famous of Lowndes' seven Bathurst crowns, the 2006 victory came shortly after the death of Lowndes' long-time mentor, and the original King of the Mountain, Peter Brock.
Lowndes was filled with emotion as the victorious pair were presented to the crowd on the podium and Whincup said if he had his time again he would have given his teammate a hug.
"It (2006) was obviously a very special year, the great man (Brock) has passed away only a few months before," Whincup said.
"He (Lowndes) says without doubt it is by far his best victory.
Jamie Whincup warms up the Holden for the weekend ahead.
"I was very lucky to be able to share that with him. If I had my time again, I would have given him a hug on the podium, but I was pretty young then and I wasn't into that stuff at all.
"I just sort of left him hanging there, I didn't really know what to do. 'Hey, don't worry mate, your wife is there, just give it two minutes and you can hug her'.
"But I certainly would have given him a hug in this day and age, it was a pretty emotional one for him."
Whincup and Lowndes combined to win three Bathurst titles between 2006 and 2008 and finished fifth in 2009 before Supercars rules changed so two full-time series drivers could not team up together.
The seven-time Supercars champion went on to win his fourth Bathurst crown - with Paul Dumbrell - three years later in 2012. He has been stranded on four titles since.
Craig Lowndes takes in practice from pit lane.
Whincup has endured a string of bad luck on the mountain; running out of fuel in 2014, passing the safety car in 2015, a win-denying penalty in 2016, engine fault in 2017 and a lost wheel in 2018.
The Holden star hoped teaming up with the mountain's favourite son - and defending champion - again would help him break his recent Bathurst curse.
"I'm hoping Lowndesy brings me some good luck, but in saying that I'm a huge advocate that you make your own luck," Whincup said.
"We haven't made much luck up there, but hopefully everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. I've had a good mix of all sorts of things that have happened with a wheel falling off, penalty and the safety car. Gee, what else was there? Running out of fuel, it just goes on and on.
"All in all I'm very grateful that I've been a contributor to the race. I'd hate to just run mid-pack and no one talk about it.
"Although I've lost more than I've probably won, I'm really proud of the fact that I've been able to contribute every year and hopefully we can contribute and make up part of the story this year."
Lowndes and Whincup took the 2006 honours.
But the man with more Supercars titles than any other driver said he had not let his frustrating recent run at the mountain cast a shadow over his Bathurst record.
"I used to always think that the result was all that mattered, but what I have learnt it's not just about the result, it's the effort, the effort comes before the result," Whincup said.
"One of the best Bathursts I had was when I ran out of fuel because we started last. It wasn't our race to win, we started last … it wasn't our race, but we almost stole it, we led the race on the last lap.
"The effort to get from last to first almost two laps down and then back to lead the race on the last lap, that to me has got more value than any win up there."
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News Russell Kemp has seen everything on the job in his 22 years of service, and now he’s being recognised.
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DEERFIELD INSTITUTE PAPER
Deerfield Institute Publishes Paper on Ovarian Cancer that Mentions M3 Global Research
M3 Global Research client Deerfield Institute has had a paper on ovarian cancer published by Dove Medical Press, which details how M3 Global Research was used in Europe to contact medical and gynecologic oncologists.
Medical Conditions with New Product Needs
With over 12 years' experience in the industry, M3 is the US leader among digitally active specialty HCPs and is the owner/operator of leading award winning HCP brands. M3 is actively engaged with 14 of the top 15 pharma companies & provides extensive coverage of EU20 physicians.
AMA Policy Research Perspectives: Updated Data on Physician Practice Arrangements
Inching Toward Hospital Ownership, offers four viewpoints on the practice arrangements of physicians in 2014, and the practice changes that have taken place between 2012 and 2014.
AMA Policy Research Perspectives: How are Physicians Paid?
A detailed Look at the Methods Used to Compensate Physicians in Different Practice Types and Specialties, provides a detailed look at how physicians are paid by their practices.
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The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences acknowledges Australia’s First Nations Peoples as the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land and gives respect to the Elders – past and present – and through them to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are advised that the MAAS website contains a range of material which may be culturally sensitive including records of people who may have passed away.
Sydney Observatory
Museum of
& Sciences
MAAS Magazine
A brilliant gift
By The Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences
By Cristina Briones
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Erebus, Op Art glass sculpture designed by Victor Vasarely, France, 1982. Barry Willoughby bequest, 2017
Curator Eva Czernis-Ryl reflects on Barry John Willoughby’s significant contribution to the MAAS collection.
Barry John Willoughby was a valued patron and friend of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. Art was a constant companion in his life and he enjoyed visiting galleries and museums and attending concerts. His interest in collecting decorative arts and orchestral scores led to his long involvement with the Museum.
Willoughby was particularly inspired by Australia’s flourishing studio glass scene of the 1970s–90s — he was always on the lookout for new talent and his collection includes rare examples of pioneers of the Crafts Movement, such as Stephen Skillitzi and Sam Herman. According to Sydney glass artist Jan Blum, Willoughby bought the first work she ever sold (leadlight panel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, 1985), thus encouraging the artist to further experiment with glass. He delighted in seeing the Museum’s glass collection grow and sought opportunities to engage his artist friends and curators in discussions about art and collecting.
In his will, Willoughby left the Museum many objects and funds for new acquisitions, which will significantly enrich our permanent design and music holdings. Reflecting his passion for glass, the bequest includes French art deco vases by René Lalique, Australian studio glass pieces and examples of Scandinavian, Italian, French and English modernism. Among the highlights in the latter group are the iconic limited-edition sculpture Erebus by the French-Hungarian Op Art artist Victor Vasarely, Spina vessels from Murano’s Barovier & Toso, and a rare Venetian vase by Alfredo Barbini that Willoughby bought from an Italian glass exhibition at Sydney’s David Jones Gallery.
Vase, Alfredo Barbini, Italy, 1978. Barry Willoughby bequest, 2017
The bequest also includes a unique ceramic platter painted by notable Australian artist Salvatore Zofrea, and the first edition musical score (oratorio) of Joseph Haydn’s masterpiece The Creation (Die Schöpfung, 1797–98) published in Vienna in 1800. This rare publication includes the list of subscribers particularly from the London music scene in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Creation is a great companion to the George Frideric Handel manuscript in the MAAS collection and other early and first editions by great European composers such as Mozart and Beethoven.
Bequests have played a major part in the development of the Museum’s collection and have provided us with some of our most important and best loved objects. Thank you to all benefactors who have generously pledged to support the future of the Museum via a gift in their will. If you would like further information about making a bequest, please contact development@maas.museum or (02) 9217 0577
Alfredo Barbini
Barry John Willoughby
Crafts Movement
Eva Czernis-Ryl
René Lalique
Salvatore Zofrea
The Creation
Introducing the Barry Willoughby Bequest for glass and ceramics
Meet the curator- Eva Czernis-Ryl
The Barry Willoughby Bequest: two new acquisitions
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The Leader in Business Sales and Acquisitions
Selling a Business Articles
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Buying a Business FAQ
Understanding M&A Purchasing Agreements
December 3, 2019 By M&A Business Advisors
M&A purchasing agreements can have a lot of moving parts when it comes to selling a business. A recent article from Meghan Daniels entitled, “The Makings of the M&A Purchase Agreement” serves to outline a range of facts including that every M&A deal is different. The article, which serves as a general overview, raises a range of good points.
Components of the Deal
It should come as no surprise that M&A purchase agreements have various components. Everything from definitions and executive provisions to representatives, warranties and schedules, indemnifications and interim and post-closing covenants are all covered in these purchase agreements. Other key factors included in M&A purchase agreements are closing conditions and break-up fees.
In her article, Daniels includes a range of tips for sellers. She correctly points out that negotiating a purchase agreement (as well as the different stages involved in finalizing that agreement) can be both time consuming and stressful.
As any good M&A Advisor / Business Broker will tell you, business owners have to be careful not to let their businesses suffer while they are going through the complex process of selling. Selling a business is hard work, and this fact underscores the importance of working with a proven advisor.
Likewise, Daniels observes that any serious buyer is likely to look quite closely at your business’s financials, which is yet another reason to work with key professionals during the process. Additionally, you don’t want to wait until the last moment to get your “financial house in order.”
You can be completely certain that prospective buyers will want to examine your finances closely before making an offer. The sooner you begin working on getting your finances together, the better off you’ll be.
Use Trusted Pros
Another key point Daniels makes is that there will be tension, as every party is looking to protect their own best interests. Having an experienced negotiator in your corner is a must. Make sure your negotiator has bought and sold businesses in the past, and he or she will understand what pitfalls and potential problems may be lurking on the horizon. Daniel’s view is that the sale price isn’t the only variable of importance. Factors such as the terms of the deal must be taken into consideration.
The bottom line is that there are many reasons to work with a M&A Advisor / Business Broker. They understands the diverse complexities of an M&A purchase agreement and the process. They also have experience helping business owners organize and analyze their financial information and can prove invaluable during negotiations. For most business owners, selling their business is the single most important business decision they will ever make. Find a M&A Advisor / Business Broker who has experience and understands the process.
Filed Under: Seller Articles, Seller FAQ, selling a business
Representing Sellers and Buyers of Privately Owned Businesses in a Wide Range of Industries.
See the full List of Business Brokerage and M&A Offices, Click Below!
See List of Offices
Become an M&A Business Advisor
Exploring the Offering Memorandum When Selling a Business
The Hidden Benefits of Planning Your Succession Strategy
Erase the Stress of Selling Your Business by Finding the Right Buyer
Business Brokerage | Mergers & Acquisitions | Business Broker | Business Advisor | Valuation | Selling a Business | Southern California | Northern California | Northern Nevada | Southern Nevada | Los Angeles Business Broker | Ventura Business Broker | Orange County Business Broker | San Diego Business Broker | San Francisco Business Broker | Marin Business Broker | San Jose Business Broker | Palo Alto Business Broker | Sacramento Business Broker | Roseville Business Broker | Reno Business Broker | Sparks Business Broker | Las Vegas Business Broker
M&A Business Advisors represents sellers and buyers of privately owned businesses in a wide range of industries in California and Nevada. Our services include Selling a Business, Buying a Business, Mergers & Acquisitions, Business Sales and Acquisitions, Valuations, Opinion of Value, SBA Finance and Business Consulting. Sell your Business, Buy a Business, How do I determine the Value of a Business, How do I Sell my Business Confidentially, What is a Safe Way to Sell my Business, How long does it take to Sell a Business, How do I Sell a Business in California, How do I Sell a Business in Nevada, Search Businesses for sale. We represent Sellers and Buyers in Southern California, Los Angeles County, Orange County, Ventura County, Santa Barbara County, Kern County, San Bernardino County, Riverside County, San Diego County, Los Angeles, Torrance, Gardena, South Bay, San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel, Upland, Woodland Hills, Chatsworth, North Hollywood, Van Nuys, Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, Santa Clarita, Palmdale, Thousand Oaks, Ventura, Camarillo, Anaheim, Irvine, Santa Ana, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Fullerton, Laguna Beach, Aliso Viejo, Rancho Santa Margarita, Orange, Costa Mesa, Brea, Loa Alamitos, Mission Viejo, Fountain valley, San Clemente, Northern California, San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, San Ramon, Napa, Sacramento, Nevada, Northern Nevada, Southern Nevada, Reno, Carson City, Tahoe, Las Vegas.
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Mac › Tags › send midi to ios
Send MIDI to Ios
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Powering-Up the Finnish Range
Costa Crociere's impressive new Costa Atlantica gives first form to the so-called Panamax-Max generation from Kvaerner Masa-Yards, embodying the 8000-class design concept developed in conjunction with the Italian operator and its parent Carnival group.
While providing a further, prestigious reference for the diesel-electric mode in conjunction with podded outboard drives, encapsulated in two 17.6-MW Azipod propulsors, Costa Atlantica also ushers-in a new power rating for the popular Wartsila 46 medium-speed diesel.
The vessel's six diesel engines mark the seagoing debut of the D version of the Wartsila 46 design in a key sector of the market. The new model yields a 10 percent power increase over the 46C series, already one of the industry's most competitive designs. The cumulative effect of the uprating amounts to 5,670 kW in the case of the multi-engine installation employed in Costa Atlantica.
Making for a 62,370 kW powerhouse, each of the 9L46D units develops 10,395 kW at 514 rev/min, and is connected to an ABB alternator delivering electricity into the main 11 kV system.
An important aspect of the machinery installation aboard Costa Atlantica is its division into two, completely independent systems, conferring full redundancy.
Each 'half plant' incorporates three main diesel gensets plus fuel and ancillary systems, main electrical distribution, control and automation.
Wartsila NSD's 460 mm-bore engine series, which has become a popular propulsion selection for large cruise vessels and passenger ferries in addition to mercantile tonnage, is produced at the extensively modernized Turku factory in Finland. Surging business for the Wartsila 46 series this year has included the engine's nomination for a high proportion of the RoPax ferry projects implemented by European operators.
The design is also central to Wartsila NSD's continuing, large-scale endeavors to provide new solutions to the market's increasing expectations as regards diesel engine environmental performance at large.
Circle 41 on Reader Service Card
Read Powering-Up the Finnish Range in Pdf, Flash or Html5 edition of October 2000 Maritime Reporter
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IP Practice Areas
IP Blog
IF THE SHOE FITS… NEW SUPREME COURT DECISION ON COVENANTS NOT TO SUE
Written by Jason LaCosse
In connection with a trade dress infringement action by Nike, Inc. against another shoe company, Already, LLC, involving Nike’s federally registered trade dress for a certain shoe design, the U.S. Supreme Court decided an important issue regarding the scope and ramifications of covenants not to sue.
Published in Trademark
2012 - A GOOD YEAR FOR MADRID
In 2012, the Philippines, New Zealand, Colombia, and Mexico acceded to the Madrid system, bringing to 89 the total number of members to join the Madrid Protocol for the International Registration of Marks. Administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization, the Madrid System for the International Registration of Marks (“Madrid system”) is designed to provide a cost-effective and efficient way for trademark holders to secure and maintain protection for their marks in multiple countries.
US SUPREME COURT TO END GENE PATENT DEBATE
Written by Jessica Hauth
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in the Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics case. As noted in our previous posts, this case deals with whether patent claims directed to "isolated DNA sequences" are patent eligible subject matter under the patent laws, in connection with the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes involved in breast cancer.
Published in Patent
human genes
CYBER MONDAY CRACKDOWN PART III
This past Monday, November 26, 2012 marked "Cyber Monday," a recently established tradition identified with the Monday following the U.S. Thanksgiving weekend, where consumers tend to escalate their online holiday shopping activities.
Published in Internet
IP ISSUES AND THE ELECTION
Written by Meredith Frank Mendez
Intellectual property issues have becoming increasingly present during presidential elections as candidates frequently use music, phrases and even fictional characters in their campaigns. This presidential election is no different.
OBVIOUSNESS STILL AN ISSUE FOR BIOTECH PATENTS
Gene patents (and by extension biotech patents) have received quite a bit of attention lately from the ongoing Myriad Genetics case, which challenges the appropriateness of genetic material for patents. However, patentable subject matter is only one hurdle would-be patentees must face in order to obtain a coveted patent. The invention must also be novel and not obvious over what is known in the field of art at the time of invention. This last point recently caused one patentee to lose his battle for a patent, and due to his own publication at that.
THE BATTLE OVER THE YOGA PANTS
lululemon, the popular designer of yoga clothing has filed a Complaint in federal court in Delaware against Calvin Klein alleging that Calvin Klein is selling pants that infringe three design patents owned by lululemon. The design patents issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office are for pants with a waistband featuring overlapping panels of fabric.
LOUBOUTIN AND YSL BOTH CLAIM VICTORY OVER SECOND CIRCUIT'S RULING
The next round in the legal battle between the two famed French fashion houses, Christian Louboutin and Yves Saint Laurent, has both companies claiming victory. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court’s denial of trademark protection to Louboutin’s use of contrasting red lacquered outsoles and holding that a single color can never serve as a trademark in the fashion industry. "We hold that the lacquered red outsole, as applied to a shoe with an 'upper' of a different color, has come to identify and distinguish the Louboutin brand and is therefore a distinctive symbol that qualifies for trademark protection," the Court found.
WHAT YOUR BUSINESS CAN LEARN FROM APPLE V. SAMSUNG: DESIGN PATENTS CAN BE VALUABLE
IMPACT OF APPLE’S U.S. PATENT VICTORY OVER SAMSUNG
MYRIAD PART II: ISOLATED DNA CLAIMS STILL PATENT ELIGIBLE
NEW U.S. PATENT APPLICATION FORMS FOR SEPTEMBER 16, 2012
PATENT CHANGES COMING IN SEPTEMBER
SECOND VERSE, SAME AS THE FIRST – FEDERAL CIRCUIT HEARS ORAL ARGUMENTS ON REMAND IN MYRIAD
CRACKING DOWN ON TRADEMARK REGISTRY SCAMS
INTERESTING MIX OF PROPOSED GENERIC TOP-LEVEL DOMAINS
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By Regina Lee Blaszczyk
How does a firm find its customers? How does it communicate with them? In the glory days of the British wool fabric industry during the mid 1800s, the mills of West Yorkshire sold their output to wholesale merchants through the large rambling Coloured Cloth Hall in Leeds.
1.1 Exterior of the Coloured Cloth Hall, Leeds, 1850. Author’s collection: The Land We Live In, vol. 3 (London: Charles Knight, 1850), 116.
Those merchants in turn sold the fabric to makers-up and tailors across Britain or packed it up for shipment to markets around the world, from Japan to the United States. As trade barriers and shifting markets put pressures on costs, the relationship between the mills and their customers changed. Most mills did not survive the transition.
Design has played a crucial role in the prosperity of Abraham Moon and Sons. As early as the 1850s, some Yorkshire designers were reaching out to London merchants, and by 1875, Abraham Moon had established a London office for selling cloth to makers-up in the East End and to shipping merchants who served the global market. Over the years, the firm capitalised on its reputation for design to reach out directly to makers-up and then multiples to reduce intermediary costs and to incorporate their customers’ needs into the design process. Agents were engaged to open up and develop export markets at a time when the home market was shrinking.
9.1 The sales and marketing staff from the mill interact with a guest viewing the display of Bronte Tweed and Highland Tweeds at the Top Drawer trade show, London, January 2015. Author’s collection.
Today, the trade show is the primary vehicle for sales and for information exchange in the textile industry. Abraham Moon was one of the first of the British tweed mills to successfully exploit trade shows. There were well-established fabric and fashion trade shows in Paris, Milan, and Frankfurt by the last quarter of the twentieth century. Moon displayed at the Interstoff fabric fair in Frankfurt starting in 1977, learning how profitable the face-to-face interactions with present and potential customers could be. In 1981, they attended the prestigious Première Vision trade show in Paris for the first time, opening them up to increased potential for exports by exposing them to potential high-end customers from all over the world.
These days, the Abraham Moon team is constantly in attendance at shows staged from New York to Shanghai. Countless other textile firms display their products, but most importantly, Abraham Moon bring their designers to interact dynamically with customers. Two hundred years ago, the wool fabric was sent to the cloth halls and the customers came to buy what was on display. Today, the trade shows serve as mobile, global cloth halls where producers and customers collaborate.
Next: Abraham Moon and heritage branding in Blog Six, publishing Wednesday 20th December.
The first chapter of Fashionability is free to access here,
Category: Blog, Fashion 0 Comments.
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Twitter hashtags are 10 years old and they wouldn't have happened without old-school texting
HBD Twitter hashtags!
Image: vicky leta/mashable
By Karissa Bell 2017-08-23 12:00:00 UTC
Yes, it's really been 10 years.
Twitter's most iconic feature is celebrating a big birthday today. Exactly 10 years ago, before there were iPhones, Android phones, or a Twitter app, one Twitter user came up with the idea of using the "#" symbol to group tweets together.
SEE ALSO: Twitter is testing a subscription service — but it's $99 per month
That early Twitter user was Chris Messina, who has said the idea originally stemmed from what are now two major throwbacks from the early days of the Internet: IRC and T-9.
IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, is an old web standard that enabled messaging via group chat rooms. The format we now know as a hashtag, where similar messages are grouped together using the # sign, was already a well-established part of IRC in 2007, so it made some sense to bring the same dynamic to Twitter.
It was also, as Messina points out, easier to type on old phones that used T-9, an early form of predictive text when you still had to tap out messages via your phone's keypad. (Texting was hard before touchscreens!)
@brittanyannen # because of IRC convention and it was easy to type on T-9 phones in 2007! (Pre-touch!)
— ⌗ChrisMessina (@chrismessina) October 4, 2013
More surprising though, is that Twitter's founders came close to ignoring the idea completely. Before he had sent that first hashtagged tweet, Messina showed up at Twitter's offices to pitch the idea to Twitter cofounder Biz Stone and a few other early employees.
"Because brevity is essential on Twitter, he suggested using the 'pound' or 'hash' character common on phones (this was pre-iPhone) to create groups of related Tweets," Stone recounted in a blog post published today.
how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?
— ⌗ChrisMessina (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007
Unfortunately for Messina, Stone was more concerned with dealing with the site's frequent crashes, which famously plagued the service in its early days.
"It was an undeniably elegant proposal, but I really needed to get back to work. I turned back to my computer screen to help get Twitter back up and running, hurriedly ending the conversation with a sarcastic, 'Sure, we’ll get right on that,' ” Stone wrote.
Luckily for all of us, Messina brushed off the brushoff and tweeted out his idea anyway. It was awhile longer before Twitter's founders embraced the idea and starting officially supporting it. But they eventually added hyperlinks to the tags, which cemented their status as one of Twitter's most recognizable features.
Of course, the hashtag has evolved a lot since then. Today, Twitter users send more than 125 million hashtags a day, according to the company, which is celebrating the milestone with — what else — a dedicated hashtag and custom emoji.
WATCH: Who knew watching trees getting a trim could be so peaceful
Topics: apps-and-software, Mashable Must Reads, Social Media, social-media-companies, Tech, Twitter
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80 Diamagnetic anisotropy of NaNO3
This document is part of Subvolume A ‘Diamagnetic Susceptibility and Anisotropy of Inorganic and Organometallic Compounds’ of Landolt-Börnstein II/27 ‘Diamagnetic Susceptibility and Anisotropy’, Group II ‘Molecules and Radicals’.
Diamagnetic Susceptibility and Anisotropy of Inorganic and Organometallic Compounds
10.1007/978-3-540-44694-1_3061
R. R. Gupta (11)
11 Department of Chemistry, University of Rajasthan, 302004, Jaipur, India
M. Jain (101)
A. Gupta (102)
101 Department of Chemistry, Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, India
102 Department of Chemistry, Delhi University, 110007, Delhi, India
M. Jain, A. Gupta (2007) R. R. Gupta (ed.) SpringerMaterials
80 Diamagnetic anisotropy of NaNO3 Landolt-Börnstein - Group II Molecules and Radicals 27A (Diamagnetic Susceptibility and Anisotropy of Inorganic and Organometallic Compounds)
10.1007/978-3-540-44694-1_3061 (Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg © 2007) Accessed: 19-01-2020
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Molecules containing Five or More Carbon Atoms · C6KrO6W
This document is part of Subvolume D 'Molecules containing Five or More Carbon Atoms' of Volume 28 'Structure Data of Free Polyatomic Molecules' of Landolt-Börnstein - Group II 'Molecules and Radicals'. It contains the data set of geometric parameters of Tungstenhexacarbonyl - krypton (1/1).
Molecules containing Five or More Carbon Atoms
K. Kuchitsu (11)
M. Tanimoto (12)
N. Vogt (13)
11 University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku ,Tokyo, Japan
12 Department of Chemistry, Shizuoka University, Shizuoka, Japan
13 Department of Theoretical Chemistry, AG Chemieinformationssysteme, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany
E. Hirota (4)
T. Iijima (5)
K. Kuchitsu (1)
D. A. Ramsay (6)
J. Vogt (3)
N. Vogt (3)
4 The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Hayama, Kanagawa, Japan
5 Gakushuin University, Toshima-ku, Tokyo, Japan
1 University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku ,Tokyo, Japan
6 Steacie Insitute of Molecular Sciences, National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa, Canada
3 Department of Theoretical Chemistry, AG Chemieinformationssysteme, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany
E. Hirota, T. Iijima, K. Kuchitsu, D. A. Ramsay, J. Vogt, N. Vogt (2007) K. Kuchitsu, M. Tanimoto, N. Vogt (ed.) SpringerMaterials
Molecules containing Five or More Carbon Atoms · C6KrO6W Landolt-Börnstein - Group II Molecules and Radicals 28D (Molecules containing Five or More Carbon Atoms)
10.1007/978-3-540-44742-9_152 (Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg © 2007) Accessed: 19-01-2020
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Bande-annonce de 'Criminal Justice II'
A thespian without vanity :: Télévision :: Criminal Justice
Matthieu le Jeu 9 Juil 2009 - 13:02
Le bureau de presse de la BBC vient de mettre en ligne un nouveau communiqué sur les programmes de la rentrée sur BBC One, où l'on peut voir une bande-annonce de la 2e saison de la série Criminal Justice.
Maxine Peake stars in the return to BBC One of Peter Moffat's Bafta award-winning drama. This major new five-part thriller takes an uncompromising and insightful look at the criminal justice system through the experience of one woman. Peake leads an impressive cast that boasts some of Britain's top acting talent, including Matthew Macfadyen, Denis Lawson, Steven Mackintosh, Eddie Marsan and Sophie Okonedo.
Peake plays Juliet Miller, a woman who suffers from depression. She is married to Joe Miller (Macfadyen), a barrister at the height of his professional powers. The couple have one 13-year-old daughter, Ella (Alice Sykes). When Joe is stabbed at home one night, the family's life is changed forever. As fragile Juliet travels through the criminal justice system under the constant scrutiny of police, prison and social services, questions are raised about psychological and sexual abuse.
Passing through the family courts, her ordeal concludes in a heart-rending denouement in the High Court.
BBC Productions
Re: Bande-annonce de 'Criminal Justice II'
Sylvie V le Jeu 9 Juil 2009 - 13:40
Merci, Matthieu!
Sylvie V
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rosweldrmr
FIc: Losing Touch (McKay) | Rodney loses the ability to use the ATA gene...
Title: Losing Touch
Author: Winter Ashby ( rosweldrmr)
Disclaimer: Stargate Atlantis © Brad Wright & Robert C. Cooper
Warnings: McKay Whumping. Because I'm only happy when he's miserable.
Time Line: Somewhere between 2.16 (The Long Goodbye - the one where Weir and Sheppard get taken over by aliens and try to kill each other) and 2.19 (Inferno - the one where SGA1 get trapped on the planet with a super volcano).
Summary: The city was too quiet without it, too lifeless and dead. It reminded him of life before, of earth, of Antarctica and Russia and a time before cities could fly and swim and think. Before buildings could hum and light through stained glass could sing. Before he was whole, before he had friends and purpose and before, when the world was so much smaller. | Rodney's ATA gene therapy stops working and he struggles to cope while the rest of the team rallies to come up with a solution. But is there something else he's not telling them? [McKay Whump]
Authors Notes: I chose to set this fic during this period because it's when Ford is gone, Ronon is part of the team, Weir and Beckett are still alive, and the Dedalus (under an un-Goa'uld infected Caldwell) is making regular runs between the Milkyway and Pegasus, and before Michael comes back or Teyla gets preggers. This is sort of the period that I love the most, when everyone is there and happy and perfect. It was the Golden Age of the expedition.
This story is told through the perspective of John, Rodney and Radek, for no real reason other than that's what happened as I wrote. Trust me, there was no planning that went into that.
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Head Coaches (London Tecumsehs Baseball)
PrintHead Coaches
All London Tecumsehs coaches are overseen by the Coaching Committee, lead by the head of Coaching and Player Development.
To contact, email [email protected]com.
Minor Rookie '12
Major Rookie '11
Mike Smit
Minor Mosquito '10
John Gilkes
Major Mosquito '09
Inshan Rahaman
Minor Peewee '08
Jason Potts
Head Coach Show Bio
Jason is entering his second year with the London Tecumsehs. He would like to extend a huge thank you to Jeff Flesher, who trained him and brought him into the organization.
Jason grew up in London, playing baseball in the LDBA, where he excelled as a pitcher. He has taught for 15 years for the Thames Valley District School Board. He has extensive coaching experience in basketball, volleyball, and track. However, his real passion has always been baseball. Jason is very grateful to the London Tecumsehs’ organization for the opportunity to work with the talented players at the minor mosquito level.
Jason’s team will dedicate themselves to hard work and to being class acts on and off the field. His players will have the tools they need to continue their dreams in baseball, but more importantly, his players will be better equipped to handle the challenges that life will present.
Major Peewee '07
Shawn Slota
Minor Bantam '06
Chris Metron
Major Bantam '05
Dan Cabral
» Head Coaches
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About Our Policies
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This Week In Golf: Jason Day Wins PGA Championship To Get First Major
Filed Under:Adam Scott, Billy Horschel, Jason Day, Jordan Spieth, PGA, PGA Championship, Pro Golf, Ron Patey, This Week In Golf, ThisWeekInGolf, Tiger Woods, Whistling Straits, Wyndham Championship
Jason Day (Photo Credit: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
By Ron Patey
Tears dripped down Jason Day’s cheeks as he won the PGA Championship at Whistling Straits on Sunday, his first career major victory. Not only did they show the Australian’s realization of what he’d accomplished, but they washed away all of his past major championship disappointments. Day put together a record-breaking virtuoso performance throughout the event. The 27-year-old pulverized 300-yard-plus drives with laser-like accuracy, following up his spectacular tee-shots with long iron strikes that proved the usually intimidating course (with more than 1,000 sand traps) to be very getable. And when he didn’t drop putts, he repeatedly scared the hole or lagged to within tap-in range.
The Aussie’s 20-under 268 total was three shots better than runner-up, and freshly minted top player in world, Jordan Spieth. Day also surpassed the record for low 72-hole score in a major by one stroke, a record that Tiger Woods previously set at the Open Championship in 2000. Day can now move past his close-but-no-cigar efforts in the Masters (2011, 2013), U.S. Open (2013) and this year’s Open championship at St. Andrews and prepare for the FedExCup playoffs while he still has that major high.
Although Spieth came second, and didn’t join Ben Hogan (1953) and Tiger Woods (2000) as players who’ve won three majors in a season, this year’s Masters and U.S. Open champ grabbed the world’s top ranking when Rory McIlroy faded to a solo 17th finish. Spieth creeped to within two shots of Day early in the final round, but couldn’t overcome the Australian’s relentlessly awesome play. The 22-year-old Texan also set a record of his own when he posted 54-under par for this year’s four major championships, besting Woods’ 53-under, which he set in 2000.
Read more from This Week In Golf.
Next On The Tee: Wyndham Championship
Tiger Woods has officially committed to playing in Greensboro. Woods will start in 187th place and is 292 points out of a playoff spot. The 14-time major champion would need to produce a Hail Mary win at Sedgefield Country Club to make the FedExCup playoffs.
Last year’s FedExCup champion, Billy Horschel, starts his quest for a repeat, coming off a decent T25 in the PGA Championship. Horschel has recorded a solid season so far and sits 43rd in the standings. This time last year is when he began to find his groove, winning the BMW Championship and The Tour Championship and blowing past everyone to claim the FedExCup.
Adam Scott lands in Greensboro with a mission: to figure out how he accomplished top-10s in the U.S. Open and Open Championship before skidding to T45 at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational. Scott missed weekend play at Whistling Straits and finds himself at 91st place in the FedExCup standings. Unless he can get his game squared away this week, he could easily fall below 125th and not contend for the FedExCup.
Sedgefield Country Club (Donald Ross Course) plays 7,127 yards and is a par 70.
Favorites: Billy Horschel, Branden Grace, Brooks Koepka, Brandt Snedeker, Paul Casey
Players To Watch: Charl Schwartzel, Adam Scott, Hideki Matsuyama, Webb Simpson, Martin Kaymer
Ron Patey covered the golf industry for 21 years as a special sections editor with Sun Media. During the past five years, Patey has been a golf writer for Examiner.com.
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Home Employee Theft Cheater, Cheater: Dishonest Workplace Behavior Is a Complicated Phenomenon
Cheater, Cheater: Dishonest Workplace Behavior Is a Complicated Phenomenon
Garett Seivold
For those charged with protecting company assets, a couple of recent news items raised red flags about dishonest insiders.
First, were results from the latest Hiscox Embezzlement Study, “An Insider’s View of Employee Theft,” which found the average case lasts over two years and causes loss in excess of $350,000. The latest survey didn’t slice the data by industry, but previous years’ studies showed that while retailers are less likely to be a victim of insider embezzlement than companies in many other industries, retailer suffer financial harm nearly double the overall average.
The Hiscox survey report provided an example: “An employee of a high-end New York department store recruited other sales associates to make purchases on store computers using stolen credit card information. They then sold the designer goods on the black market. The group got away with $430,000 in fraudulent purchases before the scheme was discovered.”
- Sponsor -
The next disturbing news item was a survey in August of workplace behavior conducted at the Blackhat USA 2019 conference. Gurucul, a behavior-based security and fraud analytics technology company, surveyed 476 IT security professionals at the show and learned:
24% would take company information to help apply for a role at a competitor.
44% spend at least one hour per day on non-work web sites, including 32% of those in retail.
The studies underscore the risk from dishonest insiders, with which LP leaders are well acquainted. To maximize efforts to combat cheating employees, however, it’s worth considering an important discovery by social scientists who have examined insider schemes and unethical workplace behaviors—the “two-person rule” isn’t always enough.
A “two-person rule” calls for two authorized persons to be present and in a position from which they can positively detect incorrect or unauthorized behavior with respect to a task or operation being performed. So, for example, a security policy might require two persons to be present when uncontrolled access to funds could provide opportunity for diversion by falsification of accounts. Or when uncontrolled delivery or receipt for materials could provide opportunity for pilferage through “short” deliveries and false receipts.
Having two people present in such cases certainly helps prevent dishonest behavior, but the basic premise—that two dishonest employees are less likely than just one—isn’t ironclad (“Cheating More When the Spoils are Split,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes).
It’s not uncommon that an individual’s dishonest behavior might benefit others. Athletes who cheat by using performance enhancing drugs boost their careers, certainly, but they probably also help their team’s performance. And remember Bernie Madoff? His Ponzi scheme ultimately caused harm, but—for a time—he could ease his guilt by telling himself that others were getting rich off the scheme as well.
The question the research study asked was this: How do these third-party benefits of cheating influence whether an individual is likely to cheat? One experiment examined whether participants cheat more to gain money when the additional money is split between themselves and another person than when they alone enjoy the spoils. Another tested how incidence of cheating might change depending on how spoils are divided.
The results of the experiments don’t repudiate the value of the two-person rule, but they do offer LP executives a good reminder that unethical behavior is a complicated psychological issue, something that can’t be eradicated with simple oversight. “Self-interest clearly motivates people to behave unethically,” said the researchers. “However, the studies here indicate that people may actually be more likely to behave unethically when they do not capture all of the benefits that the unethical behavior yields.”
The reasoning is straightforward. Most people have a need to see themselves as moral, which places a limit in how unethically people behave in order to maintain that view. “When we can rationalize that our unethical behavior benefits others as well, we may be able to simultaneously act unethically and preserve our positive view of ourselves.”
The above study is not the only one to observe the phenomenon. In recent experiments with college and graduate students, researchers discovered similar results (“Self-serving Altruism? The Lure of Unethical Actions That Benefit Others,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization). “The results show that whenever cheating benefits other people, dishonesty increases, and that this increase is influenced by the number of people who stand to benefit from one’s own unethical actions. The more people can benefit from an individual’s unethical actions, the greater the cheating. This result is consistent with our predictions and suggests that the presence of other beneficiaries facilitates dishonest behavior.”
The lesson is not only relevant to insider theft. Indeed, research suggests that “minor” unethical behavior—such as cheating customers to improve sales and boost the company’s bottom line—is the most likely to be influenced by a justification of “benefiting others.” Not recording security lapses, failure to report safety violations, inflated job performance evaluations are other examples. Broadly speaking, the results suggests that security directors concerned with ethical staff behavior should examine dishonesty not only at the individual level but also at the group level, where employees can influence one another through both their ethical and unethical behavior.
Finally, an additional set of experiments suggests that cheating, lying, and stealing should be of greatest concern in competitive workplace environments (“Sloppy Work, Lies, and Theft: A Novel Experimental Design to Study Counterproductive Behavior,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization). Productivity is highest under competition, but so too are counterproductive workplace behaviors (CWBs), said researchers. CWBs are voluntary acts that are detrimental to the organization, such as employee theft, lies, slow and sloppy performance, sabotage, tardiness, and absenteeism.
Get critical information for loss prevention professionals, security and retail management delivered right to your inbox.
What Retailers Need to Know about New York’s Bail Elimination Act
Another Phish in the Sea: This Time It’s Wawa Hit by Hackers
Then What? 7 Tips for Post-Incident Management
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SearchHub, Technical Article, Tutorials and Documentation
Technical Application Note: ilocal and JTeam build Context Aware Local Search with Solr
by Tony Barreca
When ilocal and JTeam connected, it was an ideal fit for a lot of reasons. At the time, ilocal had been using an Enterprise Search (ES) solution based on a commercial ES product, but had hit a wall on multiple dimensions.
As leading on-line directory service site headquartered in the Netherlands, ilocal had stringent requirements for innovative functionality implemented quickly. They discovered that their commercial provider was often unable to respond with product updates with sufficient speed.
In addition, like many other commercial search providers, they “specialized in directories.” In other words, their search technology was optimized for Web-centric searches, rather than accommodating the additional complexities of wide-ranging enterprise datasets.
Confronted with these limitations, ilocal decided that the time had come to take the situation more in their own hands. To control their business destiny effectively, they first had to exert control over their core technology. They started to consider alternatives, including an open-source solution based on Lucene/Solr. At this point they engaged with JTeam. JTeam is a Dutch-based company specializing in open source, customized software solutions using JEE and related technologies. For ilocal, JTeam architected the new solution and developed it jointly with ilocal developers, providing targeted training, knowledge and skills transfer along the way. The goal was to deliver both a new search platform and an ilocal team fully empowered to maintain and extend it. Mission accomplished.
We spoke with JTeam’s Enterprise Search lead, Uri Boness, to ask what about the work they did was challenging, interesting, and cool.
ilocal is in an exceptionally fast-moving marketplace, with searchable datasets in constant and rapid flux. They were fairly clear on their business requirements from the outset of the engagement, and this in combination with the flexible, iterative Agile approach the development team used, turned out to be an important factor in its eventual success. The new search solution set needed to exhibit:
Results ranking that combined complete flexibility with exquisite precision
A scalable solution with top-shelf performance (low latency for users)
Support for location-based searches (i.e., for geo-tagged data)
These became the basis for defining a set of success metrics, discussed further below. In addition, the new solution needed to be implemented and deployed quickly (it was ready in 4 months) and transparently, i.e., without any visible effect on existing customers and operations.
After an initial discovery stage, the two organizations formed a development team and worked in tandem during short sprints to deliver the required solution, with JTeam acting as the lead developer. The jointly developed solution was built on top of Solr V1.3, which itself turns out to be illuminating given some subsequent developments.
Solutions using Solr
This joint effort resulted in some innovative technology that should interest anyone working on Enterprise Search, not limited to the local search business. The centerpiece of the technology resulting from the ilocal/JTeam collaboration is an approach to ranking that is dynamically re-configurable on a per-query basis. It also turned out that the technologies required to fulfill the requirements for scalability, performance, and location-based search support are loosely coupled in their implementation.
Dynamically re-configurable, “per query” ranking
In the ilocal environment, a wide range of variables are key to getting optimal results. These moving targets require the ability to change configurations (weightings) quickly and on-the-fly. Although the basic ranking capabilities of Lucene and Solr are industrial-strength, they are also pretty generic and were not by themselves up to the more demanding requirements of ilocal’s business.
It soon became clear that to accommodate the full range of user requests ilocal encounters, the ranking scheme needed to be both context-aware and sufficiently rich to support a wide variety of possible contexts, i.e., some with and some without geo-data, some using “categories” and others not, etc.
To accomplish this, the development team introduced a new object type on top of the base Solr functionality, namely, the SearchContext. Search contexts can include whatever parameters are needed; common ones include location, language used (e.g., English or Dutch), and time of day.
In addition to this SearchContext object type, the development team also extended some core Solr functionality to make it all work. They used the Solr standard DisMaxQParserPlugin, but augmented it with custom Query functions. They also implemented a custom ilocalRequestHandler, based on Solr’s StandardRequestHandler, but extended with the ability to resolve the appropriate search context for each request (query).
Now, when a user request hits an ilocal server, its ranking schema (weighting configuration) is computed and assigned dynamically, based on its SearchContext.
Multi-core and location-based-search support
ilocal had some stringent performance and scalability requirements in mind from the beginning of the project, and achieving them ultimately required multi-core and location-based-search functionality to be implemented in tandem on top of Solr V1.3. For those unfamiliar with Solr terminology, multi-core in this context refers to the simultaneous utilization of multiple, logically independent Solr indices, with each index having its own configuration. As it turned out, this multi-core capability proved to be essential to the performance of location-based search.
Since location-based search is ilocal’s principal business (a typical query involves for example, finding a plumber in the city of Utrecht), almost every request they receive is within a location-based Search context. Unfortunately, some early testing of the standard location-oriented Lucene and Solr libraries indicated that their performance would not achieve ilocal’s goals. However, the relevant Solr plugin, localsolr, proved adequate as a starting point from which to innovate, with the development team optimizing for performance every step of the way. Although the basic logic of this plugin stayed the same, the implementation was significantly modified and extended.
In the end, performance and scalability objectives were met by:
Parallelizing computation by using multiple threads
Optimizing distance computations in terms of ilocal-specific requirements
Utilizing multi-core functionality
As an example of optimizing distance computations for ilocal, the team discovered that accuracy sometimes is not worth the cost of achieving it. They determined that treating the Earth’s surface as a Cartesian plane, a mathematical strategy for achieving maximum accuracy in the calculation of point-to-point distances, results in an approximately 0.2% increase in accuracy. This increase was not a worth hit to performance, noticeable to the user as latency, and so they eliminated this computation from the algorithm.
Similarly, the multi-core approach that the team implemented was initially motivated by ilocal’s specific approach to search. As can be seen on the ilocal home page, ilocal supports search for companies, products, and services either by name or by category in one text-entry field, or by geographical proximity in another.
To make this work, two cores were implemented: one holding the main index (products, companies, services), and the other holding a smaller index of locations.
The structure of the location index, and attendant request parsing, is made complex by the need to support a relatively sophisticated algorithm for recognizing user-entered locations. For example, if a user enters “Amsterdam,” the algorithm must be able to discriminate between whether she is referring to the city of Amsterdam, or to a street named “Amsterdamsestraat” in the city where she lives.
Having the location index in a separate core helped in several ways. The complexity of the location index did not affect on the complexity of the main index; each index has its own unique and customized structure. And since the indices are separate, it is possible to manage them separately as well (for example, rebuilding the locations index doesn’t affect the main index and vice-versa).
As mentioned above, this collaboration between ilocal and JTeam was based on Solr V1.3. In a great illustration of how well and how quickly the development community steps up to real-world needs, most of the customized clustering support that was built for ilocal will come out-of-the-box in the upcoming version – Solr 1.4.
It’s fair to call the ilocal/JTeam collaboration an unusually successful one. All the business and technical objectives were met:
Average search time dropped by 70 percent with even the most complex queries not exceeding response times of 500 ms.
User response time (latency) remains relatively constant even as the number of users on the system is increased
Budget and time constraints were respected and the project came in both under time and budget. The new solution costs far less on an annual basis.
ilocal is in control of its own technology and pace of business innovation, and attained the performance and scalability it needs to take its business to the next level.
Tony Barreca is a technologist and freelance writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Journalists Blast Facebook’s Zuckerberg for ‘Free Expression’ Speech
By Stacy M. Brown
NNPA Newswire Senior Correspondent
@StacyBrownMedia
Facebook’s version of free expression has hurt minority-owned newspapers and media outlets, stated Nick Charles of the Save Journalism Project. (Photo: iStockphoto / NNPA)
Approximately 7,200 jobs in the news industry were lost in the past year.
Journalism in America is facing an existential threat from the monopolistic control of tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Apple.
A growing group of publishers, news gatherers, journalists, photographers and other professionals have formed the Save Journalism Project, with the goal to educate and activate journalists across the country to tell the story of big tech’s threat to journalism.
The leadership at the Save Journalism Project scoffed at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent Georgetown University speech, where he touted his popular social media site as a “champion of free expression.”
“Given the sensitivity around political ads, I’ve considered whether we should stop allowing them altogether,” Zuckerberg stated in defending Facebook’s decision to allow misinformation in political advertising.
“But political ads are an important part of voice – especially for local candidates, up-and-coming challengers and advocacy groups that may not get much media attention otherwise. Banning political ads favors incumbents and whoever the media covers,” Zuckerberg stated.
He reportedly invoked Frederick Douglass, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Black Lives Matter as a means of positioning Facebook as a champion for freedom of speech.
“The Facebook news tab is a shiny new object to distract from the damage Zuckerberg has done to journalism and a ploy to steal journalists’ content without compensating us,” said Laura Bassett, the co-founder of the Save Journalism Project and the former senior politics editor for HuffPost.
“This initiative will only further his agenda to derail the journalism industry so that Facebook can be the bearer of all the news, stated Bassett, who was laid off from her HuffPost position in January.
John Stanton, another co-founder of the Save Journalism Project and a former fellow of Georgetown University, called Zuckerberg’s speech “a joke.”
“Mark Zuckerberg is the antithesis of free expression,” stated Stanton, who until January worked as BuzzFeed’s DC Bureau Chief.
“He’s thrown pennies at programs to ‘help’ journalists that, in actuality, are little more than PR stunts intended to provide cover as he puts countless journalists out of work, strips the industry to the bone, and reaps billions in ad revenue. He’s thrown free speech, public education, and democracy to the waste side in his quenchless thirst for power and profit,” Stanton noted.
He added, “Instead of providing a platform for Zuckerberg propaganda, how about we rein in this monopoly and save journalism?”
Efforts by NNPA Newswire to reach officials at Facebook for a response were unsuccessful.
Facebook’s version of free expression has also hurt minority-owned newspapers and media outlets, stated Nick Charles of the Save Journalism Project.
“Local, regional, ethnic, and specifically, African American news media, have always had thin margins and been under threat from majority media consolidation, diminishing ad revenue, and the hemorrhaging of newsroom resources. If small businesses in African American communities decide to advertise with monopolists such as Google and Facebook online, that impacts legacy media, which in turn now have less revenue for journalistic pursuits, like informing their communities and holding elected and public officials to account,” Charles stated.
To that end, African American media needs to stand with the Save Journalism Project and others who have been sounding the alarm around platform domination and advertising monopoly, he added.
“Big Tech needs to be checked, and the corrosive way they utilize content addressed. Editorializing and reaching out to local, state, and federal officials who should be looking at these issues is a start,” Charles said.
Popular Interests In This Article: Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Stacy M. Brown
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Cognition in the Wild
By Edwin Hutchins
A Bradford Book
Hardcover $85.00 S £70.00
Paperback $50.00 S £40.00
ISBN: 9780262581462 402 pp. | 6.875 in x 10 in August 1996
Print Exam/Desk Copy
Hutchins argument that 'the physical symbol system is a model of the operation of the sociocultural system from which the human actor has been removed' has great force. Hutchins challenge to the formal account of human cognition is based on what he knows about how humans actually navigate their way through the world, not on a philosophic doctrine. Overall, I think this is a great book. It has lots of ideas, rich data, and innovative analyses. It is highly disciplined, clearly written, and thoughtful. I believe it will be a real landmark for other naviagators of the cognitive ocean.
Roy G. D'Andrade
Department of Anthropology, University of California
Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation—its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory—"in the wild."
Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen in the cracks between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that are different from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture: the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system.
Introducing Navy life and work on the bridge, Hutchins makes a clear distinction between the cognitive properties of an individual and the cognitive properties of a system. In striking contrast to the usual laboratory tasks of research in cognitive science, he applies the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation (adopting David Marr's paradigm)—to the navigation task. After comparing modern Western navigation with the method practiced in Micronesia, Hutchins explores the computational and cognitive properties of systems that are larger than an individual. He then turns to an analysis of learning or change in the organization of cognitive systems at several scales. Hutchins's conclusion illustrates the costs of ignoring the cultural nature of cognition, pointing to the ways in which contemporary cognitive science can be transformed by new meanings and interpretations.
Out of Print ISBN: 9780262082310 402 pp. | 6.875 in x 10 in February 1995
$50.00 S | £40.00 ISBN: 9780262581462 402 pp. | 6.875 in x 10 in August 1996
Edwin Hutchins
This timely work has the potential to make important contributions to cognitive science, artificial intelligence and computer supported cooperative work communities. It addresses difficult problems of great importance with novelty and creativity. The general area of situated cognition is a lively and important one, spanning areas as diverse as anthropology, robotics, and office information systems. There are two fundamental persepctives that are central to these efforts: that cognition must be studied in realistic contexts, and when viewed in these contexts much of what we consider intelligence is really not in the head but out in the world. Given these persepctives, there are two research questions that need to be addressed - how can we go about studying cognition in the real world and how does this affect the way we study what is going on in heads of the people the way we study what is going on in heads of the people embedded in these contexts? Hutchins tackles both of these questions in new and intriguing ways.
Computer Science Department, University of Colorado
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cognition-wild
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Category Archives: St. Malo
BRITTANY: Part II
Road Tripping continued…
Wednesday-Friday, June 4-7, 2019
Instead of a making a day trip we decided to spend the night in a quintessential medieval village: Dinan (formerly called Saint-Sauveru). [In the map below Lézardrieux is in the upper left where you see one of the rivers, and Dinan is far to the right at the end of the river next to St. Malo.]
Within an hour or so driving we reached this medieval jewel.
Founded in the 1st century on the banks of the Rance river, Dinan would grow into a commercial hub. Exporting food crops, and later hemp, cloth merchants became prosperous during the 12th and 14th centuries. A healthy middle class emerged and became more powerful thanks to the support of Jean the 3rd who granted the town special privileges to curry the bourgeoisie’ favor.
The town also attracted the reigning dukes: In the late 1300s Duke John IV built the Château de Dinan (unfortunately closed for renovations); and, in the late 1400s Duke Francoise II approved the building of a town hall and a municipal tower. In 1500 Duchess Anne gave them a bell, converting it to a belfry, one you can climb, which Max did (I went only part way up not wanting to be on the open-air balcony at the tippy top).
Of course, if there’s a decent-size town, there’s a good-size religious building. Dinan’s is a lovely one named St. Saviour’s Church.
A Crusader, the knight Rivallon le Roux, a member of the Lords of Dinan family, made a promise to himself to build a church if he returned from the Crusades. He did return, remembered his pledge, and called the church Saint-Sauveur.
Behind it an English garden flows to the town wall, built in the late 1700s,
where peering from one of the towers
you see the old town spread out below you.
Our first taste of Brittany’s famous crepes occurred here (Max eyeing our targeted lunch spot…)
and we quickly became hooked as we had crepes for both lunch and dinner. I really don’t know how these French folk stay so slim. If they’re not eating crepes or croissants, they’re eating a baguette the size of a bat. And, let’s not forget the cheese AND the wine. It’s tough trying not to follow in their footsteps.
We loved the medieval-ness of the town but a 21st century event really made our stay magical. Our hotel happened to be adjacent to the Jacobin Theater, During a quick scouting of the area Max noticed a dance performance being staged the one night we were in town. Figuring dance would allay any issues of not speaking French, we bought two tickets.
If you EVER get the oppportunity to see “Du Désir D’Horizons” (Desire for Horizons) by Salia Sanou, GO. Being modern dance the first minute or so when a lead performer just pretty much moved one finger or a toe I thought, ‘Oh, boy, this is going to be a long evening…’. Twenty seconds later I sat in awe and for the next 60 minutes watched chaos made beautiful by eight dancers whose limbs darted, crashed, and swayed across the stage. Minamalistic music added to the raw power on stage punctuated every now and then with some speech. http://www.saliasanou.net/new/du-desir-dhorizons-2
I’ll remember Dinan for its ancientl setting, but more so from the magnificent performace we were fortunate to see.
The next morning we left for St. Malo on the eastern edge of the Côtes d’Armor. This city is a favorite for sailors, as well as tourists.
We parked in the underground garage next to the old city and stopped to take note of an interesting sailboat moored along the town quay. Conversing with one of the crew aboard we discovered it was used for research, spending three months to three years at sea depending on the project. They were prepping the boat for their next excursion: studying microplastics, beginning in the Thames. Another reminder of the harm we’re doing to our world.
With that sobering thought we journeyed back in time to the 12th century when the fortifcation of this Ducal town began with construction of impressive walls.
In the late 14th century a castle, Château de Saint Malo, was added and it’s here we visited the city’s History Museum. Since most of it was in French and the displays seemed a bit dusty, we were in and out within the hour. Yet, we did grasp an understanding of the importance of cod fishing for the area. The ships would leave St. Malo for the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Each ship carried 20 dories, each manned by a crew of two who would catch the cod and then return to the mothership to offload. Not a job I’d want.
Back outside we explored a bit more, first stopping in for a coffee at a restaurant made famous for its highly unusual decor.
I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw one item hanging in the window:
Ellen, Liza and Tracy, do you remember your Patty Playpal :) ?
Fortified, we joined the busloads of tourists checking out shops and eateries along cobblestone streets. Then we escaped the masses by climbing the steps to the lovely promenade on the impressive town walls wreathing the old city.
During our wandering Max eyes lit upon a fruit we’d been searching for: pomegranites!
Thanks to our friends Sue and Carol W. we’ve been making two delicious quinoa meals, one requiring the bulbous seeds of those lovely pink globes.
Yet, after Max started picking several out of the crate, the proprieter came running towards us stating they weren’t for sale. And, it’s then we looked at the storefront and discovered it’s a cafe selling smoothies (with a sign stating ‘please don’t touch the fruit’). In other words, they, too, were using them as a key ingredient…
This town definitely deserved more than the cursory few hours we allotted, but having seen Dinan and anxious to continue our explorations elsewhere, we returned to our car and headed for less Disneyesque views.
Our final stop of the day involved the amazing display of this coast’s tidal waters. Several cruisers have recommended the port of Paimpol as a unique opportunity to experience the complete draining of a harbor. However, we subsequently heard stories that made us rethink heading there with our deep-draft boat. Basically, there is no margin of error if you miss the high water mark to enter the port. To paraphrase British sailor Mike’s experience, whom we met in Guernsey, and who misread the tide tables and had to beat a hasty retreat to deep water: “when you can see the eyes of the crabs under your keel you realize it’s not a good time to be there.”
Which is why we opted for the safe ‘cruise’ on land where happy boats float on one side of the lock…
while the other side is not so likely to float one’s boat.
And, after witnessing the incoming sailboats endeavoring to dock alongside or in berths, I am so willing to wait for the perfect tide + current combo, or as perfect as we can get them.
It’s no wonder this area breeds excellent sailors. Like we did in the Channel Islands, we have to plan our exits and entrances to coincide with the tide and current.
If we ever think of going against the current at its peak all we have to do is remember watching a sailboat trying to dock recently. First it appeared as if they’d be coming alongside with no problem only to see them moving horizontally as all on aboard quickly assess how to get the boat pointing back towards the dock. Once they manage that, it’s a fight to land without the bow hitting the pontoon first. When they’ve finally reached the dock and someone is able to jump off (or toss their lines to a person on the dock) and wrestle to slowly inch the boat closer to finally allow all to breathe a sigh of relief and the captain cut the engine.
I know it sounds crazy but we’ve both been helped (thankfully) and have helped boats to dock. At times a boat feels like a bucking stallion. And, god help you if you mess up tieing the lines!
PAIMPONT
Thursday was our last day with the car. Heading back towards Lézardrieux we stopped at the enchanting Fôret de Paimpont. The forest is known for its ties to the Legend of King Arthur and Camelot and his sidekick Merlin (and Max).
Supposedly he found Excalibur here. Although, I think it more likely he located some good cider and an abbey.
The Paimpont Abbey sits next to a lovely lake and dominates the small village. Like most of these religious structures it began as a much smaller version in the 7th century when missionaries seemed to flood the area. The Normans knocked it down, resulting in a rebuild during the 9th century. Four hundred years later, the abbey acquired its Gothic style with add-ons and renovations occurring during subsequent centuries.
Similar to other churches we’ve seen in Brittany, the roof resembles an upside-down ship’s hull. And, it’s made of wood versus stone, which is unusual.
While in Paimpont we met a charming Irish cyclist who uses the summers to recoup from a hectic winter of musical work including teaching and touring with musicals. Ger (short for Gerald) had two weeks to explore this area and was making the most of it without brutalizing himself. We wish he had more time or was closer in his circuit to JUANONA for he would have been great to have aboard for a night of conversation.
We then headed almost due west to Jossselin and its Château. In the 11th century a viscount built a fortified town here in the Oust Valley; but, it didn’t last too, too long because the English King Henry II (same guy who built the Dover Castle and took Eleanor de Acquitaine as his 2nd wife) destroyed most of the château in 1168 when the feudal Bretons opposed him.
Two hundred years later the rebirth of what was left of the building began after a swap between the Count of Alençon and the High Constable of France. The latter, Olivier Clisson, proceeded to strengthen the defense by adding three towers along the riverside
and one more as a stand-along (which looks like a perfect Rampuzel residence if you note the little red door).
What amazed me, though, is that the current owners are related to that original Clisson. Can you imagine someone doing their geneology being able to trace it back to this house?! When Olivier died in 1407 the renovations continued via his grandson, Alain IX de Rohan, and great-grandson, Jean II.
However, once again, revenge caused massive damage to the place in 1629. This time that marvelous spiritual guidance, i.e., religion, was the culprit when Cardinal de Richelieu didn’t take too kindly to rebellious Calvinist Henri de Rohan. Rumor has it the Cardinal snidely quipped to Henri, “Sir, I have just scattered your skittles.” And, he most obviously wasn’t talking about the candy.
Daily tours were available, and we joined the group after the guide provided a quick background. ‘After’ because it was all in French.
With no photography allowed inside we contented ourselves with exterior shots
and referencing an English brochure.
In the write-up we learned…
The ‘Battle of the Thirty’ in 1351 occurred close to Josselin during the ‘Deux Jeannes’ war (Brittany’s Civil War). The fame derives from being seen as the most chivalrous battle in history (Encyclopedia Britannica.com). It began when the governor of Brittany (supporting the French House of Blois) challenged the Captain of Ploëmel (supporting House of Montfort) to a fight composed of 30 soldiers per side. The governor eventually won with both sides suffering heavy casualties while ensuring the prisoners of the losing faction were treated well and released (The House of Montfort eventually won the overall war.)
A more recent tidbit appeared in the form of a contemporary portrait of Duke Alain de Rohan, father of the current owner. I hadn’t heard of him but some of you may have: his friend, the American artist Trafford Klots (1913-76), painted it in 1966. Just one more reminder of the longevity of Olivier’s DNA…
I convinced Max to purchase the joint ticket so we could visit The Musée de Poupées, a collection of puppets and dolls by Herminie de Rohan during the 19th century with more recent donations reflecting current times.
Having read in THE LONELY PLANET guidebook it was, and I quote: “more interesting that it sounds!” I thought it could be fascinating.
Hah! Fascinating if you, too, collect dolls. However, it provided some light-hearted (and extremely fast) viewing resulting in naming some of them myself, such as…
Big-headed Gulliver
Religious salesman
Bad Hair Day Lady
Temper Tantrum Tess
Juvenile on my part, I know. Okay, EXTREMELY childish.
CHÂTEAU DE LA ROCHE-JAGU
Our last stop made us wish it could have been a longer one. On the outskirts of Ploëzal Château de la Roche-Jagu sits above the Trieux River, only a couple miles up from where we’re docked in Lézardrieux. Built as part of a ten-fortress defense in the 15th century, it’s the only one still standing.
And, it’s stunning with its stoic facade juxtaposed against lovely gardens.
Renovated by the Côtes de l’Armor county council, the château and grounds host exhibitions and performances. Our late arrival precluded anything but a brief visit, but we met a teacher who takes his young students here annually. He kindly walked with us to the magnificent viewing platform and explained this location was strategically important for hampering any Viking raids coming up river. Standing where we were it was easy to understand how.
After he left we strolled through some gardens. In one we spotted an Insect Hotel.
A bit bizarre, but, then, we’d seen one earlier in the day just outside of the Château de Josselin.
Hey, if I were a bug I’d be booking in at one of these hotels that sit within buzzing range of a château.
Our time in Lézardrieux was coming to a close with a forecast of a good combo of wind and tide. However, our next port isn’t too far from here. And, we’re looking forward to more adventures in Brittany!
Next, more medieval-ness and an amazing sailing race…
This entry was posted in 2019, Brittany, Château de la Roche-Jagu, COUNTRY, Josselin, Paimpol, Paimpont, St. Malo, SUMMER CRUISING on June 20, 2019 by margaretlynnie.
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Home < Activities < Virtual Song Evaluations
Virtual Song Evaluations via Email
Song evaluation requests may be submitted via a special email list, to which members may subscribe. Via that list, members may submit an audio file (MP3) and a lyric sheet (DOC, DOCX or TXT) for songs they'd like to have evaluated. Members who review submitted songs reply individually to the submitting member, which allows an ongoing dialogue between the two.
While we absolutely encourage all members to take advantage of this tool, we hope this benefit will especially help members who cannot regularly attend monthly meetings due to geographical distances or job schedules.
Here's how this benefit works:
It's very much like our actual meetings, where members show up with their songs and meeting attendees volunteer their feedback. The advantage of this method is that you can, at your convenience, get or give an evaluation from your easy chair at home.
Evaluators also get the benefit of time to articulate what they want to say to the writer. In addition, writers have an electronic copy in either a text file or an MP3 file if evaluators want to create an audio reply.
If you choose to participate in this process as either an evaluator or songwriter, step one is to join the evaluations e-mail list at the following link:
Sign Up for Virtual Song Evaluations
Follow the instructions at this link to join the EVALUATIONS email list, which allows you to post your songs and review the songs of other members. The welcome message at the above link will give you information you might want to keep, such as how to change your e-mail settings (so you can take a break from this list without unsubscribing and re-subscribing).
Before you begin posting songs, PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING IMPORTANT ITEMS:
DO NOT post your song to the MAS "members" email list. Please send your songs to evaluations@mnsongwriters.org
To present a song, simply attach an MP3 of your song and a text document containing your lyrics when you send the email requesting evaluation. The subject line ought to look something like: "YOUR NAME/YOUR SONG TITLE".
We're asking each member to limit on-line evaluations to two songs a month.
Get one, give one: If you have a song evaluated, please return the favor to those who took the time to help you by doing some evaluating in return.
For your convenience, we've provided a guide for evaluating songs. You do not have to use this form, or even the many points within it; it is merely a guide to help you evaluate a song. You may download an evaluation guide in the form of a Word document here: Evaluation Form.doc
MAS hopes you will enjoy and utilize this new benefit to your advantage!
A NOTE ABOUT EVALUATIONS
Music is experienced in as many different ways as there are people in the world, so MAS members are open about what they hear and offer constructive criticism, keeping in mind the goals of the songwriter. Each member determines his or her own goals and objectives.
On the other hand, some songwriters are interested in the business of music, so commercial aspects of songwriting also play a part in the evaluation process, again, depending on the songwriter's objective. Songwriters interested in selling their songs are educated about what makes a song a hit, since every record label exists to make a profit. MAS teaches you how to employ techniques that might help make your song commercially successful.
Either way (commercially oriented or not), members offer each other opinions and advice during these sessions. Sometimes, commentary brings two or more songwriters together for a successful co-writing team.
Any and all music submitted for evaluation is done so under the sole discretion of the artist and hereby releases the Minnesota Association of Songwriters from any and all liability arising out of or in connection with any tapes, songs, or recordings submitted to the organization, including but not limited to claims of copyright infringements by any third party on behalf of the artist. The artist hereby warrants and represents that all material submitted is the original creation of the artist.
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The Neo-Futurist Theater
The Neo-Futurist Theater Artboard 1
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About Neo-Futurism
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Bring Us To You!
Empty Threats is playing through July 14th!
“(Empty Threats) is one of the most provocative theatrical experiences I’ve had this year… Lily Mooney has created a fiction that is stranger than truth while allowing truth to break into it. It’s a complex conundrum of an evening, and I found myself enjoying the game completely.” -Chicago On Stage
“The Neo-Futurists’ EMPTY THREATS is not common or expected or simple…Mooney is not only an expert at her craft, she’s also empathetic, never leaving you adrift or without an ‘in’.” -PerformInk Chicago
“It’s the best-executed concept I’ve ever seen on the Neo-Futurists’ stage… Empty Threats is smart. It’s quirky. It’s nothing you expect and more than you hope it will be… It’s worth waiting in line for. It’s worth seeing twice.” -Splash Magazines
Empty Threats is running through July 14th! Empty Threats Created by Lily Mooney Directed by Krissy Vanderwarker Video: MJ Wrobel
You can do this, too.
Interested in taking a class? Our ensemble members teach Neo-Futurism throughout the year at our home space in Chicago. We can also come to you. Find out more about enrollment, hiring teachers, and scholarships.
5153 N Ashland, Chicago, IL 60640
Doors open:
11pm Friday/Saturday
6:30pm on Sunday
Copyright © 2020 The Neo-Futurist Theater. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy
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This entry was posted in tech and tagged admin, fail, glassfish, internet, java, problem, programming, server by netmikey. Bookmark the permalink.
9 thoughts on “[Java] If you can’t login to your Glassfish Admin Console these days…”
Thanh Campobasso on October 3, 2011 at 2:02 pm said:
thx, ill check back later, have bookmarked you for now.
SCO on October 8, 2011 at 2:37 pm said:
Great ! This saved some time to me 😉 I was looking into the server.log, and not seeing anything interesting…
MarkJ on October 10, 2011 at 6:08 am said:
it works, by the way, was there any side-effects? I am using glassfish v3.0.1, THANKS!
Mike Meessen on October 17, 2011 at 10:17 am said:
No, Mark, no side effects at all for us. In the meantime, we’re also using these settings in production since there, of course, we don’t have direct internet connectivity.
Besides, as a developer / operator I don’t want my Application Server to automatically update itself, loading some new JARs that may kill my applications. Anti-feature imho…
Olivier on October 30, 2011 at 1:01 pm said:
huy on February 17, 2012 at 2:57 pm said:
Thank you, it save a lots of time to me !.
Thnx! That spinning loading chrome whirl was a nightmare
rahul on June 6, 2014 at 1:43 am said:
Please advise where to change the second setting?
Dcom.sun.enterprise.tools.admingui.NO_NETWORK=true
it is there somewhere in domain/config file?
Mike Meessen on June 6, 2014 at 2:25 pm said:
I don’t know about current versions of Glassfish (It’s been a while since I last used it ;)), but back in the days, it was configurable in the Admin GUI where the post says: Configuration > JVM Settings > JVM Options. It’s basically a Java System Property set at JVM Startup time, but I don’t know from the top of my head where Glassfish stores these settings.
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Why do we say trick or treat at Halloween?
Last update: January 14, 2020 1 Answer
Children of all ages dress up in costumes and travel from house to house to receive treats in response to their call of “trick or treat!" The phrase is a subtle suggestion that if a treat (like candy) is given, then the child will not perform a “trick" (mischief) on the owner of the house.
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Why do we say trick or treat on Halloween?
Why do you say trick or treat at Halloween?
Why do people say 'trick or treat' at Halloween?
The phrase trick or treat means give someone a treat (i.e. candy) or they will pull some kind of trick on you if you don't.
Why say trick or treat on Halloween?
Why do you say trick or treat on Halloween?
Why do children say Trick or Treat on Halloween?
The phrase 'Trick or Treat' originates in North America, but is now commonly heard all over the world. It is a variation on many other Halloween traditions such as guising which originates in Scotland. Guising consists of children performing a small entertainment act such as singing or dancing be...
Why do people say trick or treat on Halloween?
Why do kids say trick or treat on Halloween?
Why do you say trick-or-treat on Halloween?
Because when you go to a persons house for candy you're demanding a treat "or else" you'll trick them. It was something that started a long time ago involving people presumed to be witches, demons, and monsters or who pretended to be them. It was a way for them to "scare" people into getting what...
Why do we trick or treat on Halloween?
The custom of trick-or-treating on Halloween may come from the belief that supernatural beings, or the souls of the dead, roamed the earth at this time and needed to be appeased.It may otherwise have originated in a Celtic festival, held on 31 October–1 November, to mark the beginning of winter.
Why trick or treat at halloween?
because its fun for children to go to people houses an Church's
Why do they say trick or treat?
Why do people say trick-or-treat?
It's like: "I will trick you (prank you) or you can treat me (to some candy)" People long ago believed that evil spirits and ghosts came out on all Hallows eve ( halloween, also fall harvest festival ), and would cause them harm or be mischiefous if they were not appeased. Halloween was perceive...
Why do you say Trick or Treat?
You say Trick or treat because it is a tradition on Halloween. It is a challenge to the candy giver-- give candy or I'll do a trick on you. Over time, the idea of playing a trick was lost and forgotten... even though we still use the saying, "Trick! or Treat!"
Why do people say trick or treat?
if you dont get a treat you do a trick on the one that didnt give you a treat
Why do we trick or treat?
Why do we go trick or treating?
I don't know, it is a horrible tradition.
Why do we celebrate Trick or Treat?
Children in costumes travel from house to house, asking for treats with the phrase "Trick or treat".The "treat" is usually some form of candy, although in some cultures money is used instead.The "trick" refers to a threat, usually idle, to perform mischief on the homeowners or their property if n...
What do you say on Halloween treat or trick?
Children in costumes travel from house to house, asking for treats with the phrase "Trick or treat".The "treat" is usually some form of candy, although in some cultures money is used instead.
Why do we say trick or treat when asking for candy?
How do you say trick-or-treat?
In the USA it's generally just that, "Trick-or-Treat".
Why do we trick or treat for kids?
Why do we trick or treat for candy?
What do you say when someone says Trick or Treat?
Despite the inherent question of the phrase, "trick or treat," the socially accepted response is to give the person candy.There's no official verbal response to it, though most reply with some variant of, "Happy Halloween," or a compliment if you like the person's costume.
Why do we dress up and go trick or treating on Halloween?
As for the trick or treating, or “guising” (from “disguising”), traditions, beginning in the Middle-Ages, children and sometimes poor adults would dress up in the aforementioned costumes and go around door to door during Hallowmas begging for food or money in exchange for songs and prayers, often...
Why do we wear costumes and go trick or treating on Halloween?
To go get candy gout there kids do not just stay inside
Why do you say trick or treat instead of happy Halloween?
Because you have the choice to treat people and give out candy, or trick people by hiding your identitiy. So somehow it turned into trick or treat.
What do say when kids say trick or treat?
Why do people trick or treat at night?
to scare the crap outta people
Why do you trick-or-treat on Halloween?
Because you want to go for candy.
Why do people go trick or treat on Halloween?
It happend a long time ago you see on the october the 29th the England army attacked Scotland for not paying taxes and the Scotland army did not have training and guns or swords or anything so they dressed up in scary costumes and scared the life out of the England army they ran and Scotland won ...
Why do they call it trick or treat on Halloween?
Its an American term. From about 1845 people would go from house to house in some American areas seeking (begging ) food and or money if they were given some they would wish the householder well, if not they would cause all sorts of mischief In the very early 1950s the the giving of candy (sweets...
Who started saying trick or treat?
Some have traced the earliest print reference of the term trick or treat to 1927 in Alberta, Canada.It appears that the practice didn't really take hold in the US until the mid-1930s, where it wasn't always well received.The demanding of a treat angered or puzzled some adults.
Why do they trick-or-treat on Halloween?
because the Celtic people of Ireland thought that it would be nice to get treats from people while having fun celebrating a holiday in their country
Why do you go trick or treating on Halloween?
Why do you go trick-or-treating on Halloween?
People go trick-or-treating because they want to go for candy
Why do people trick or treat for candy on Halloween?
People really treat or trick. The meaning of trick-or-treating use to be if you didnt receive a treat u played a trick on that person.
Why do kids go trick or treating on Halloween?
How do you say Trick or Treat in other languages?
Dulces o travesura, in spanish Süsses oder Saures, in German
How do say trick or treat in Chinese?
We wouldn't say it because Chinese don't celebrate Halloween!
How do you say trick or treat in Russian?
Russians don't celebrate Halloween, some people there have never even heard of it! Therefore I don't think there's been a word created for Trick or treat.
What do you get when you say trick or treat?
candy but dis only works on holloween
What to say when somebody says trick-or-treat?
They wouldn't say anything if u wern't at home because trick or treat means they want candy obn Halloween but if a random person comes up to u and says trick or treat u can do nothing or give the person candy or u can SAY sorry i don't have candy!
Why do people go Trick-or-Treating on Halloween?
People go trick or treating because they want to get candy. Plus, it is a fun way to spend time with friends and family.
Why do you trick or treat on halloween?
We Trick-or-Treat because it is fun.
Why do children trick or treat on Halloween?
Because they want candy
Why do kids go for trick or treating on Halloween?
It's a rare opportunity to gather candy and dress up in costumes.
Why do people trick or treat for Halloween?
Why do people go trick or treating on Halloween?
How do you say 'trick or treat' in French?
Trick or treat in French is friandises ou bêtises.
How do you say trick or treat in German?
Süßes, sonst gibts Saures.
How do you say trick or treat in Punjabi?
Im not sure but you can go to the google translater and it will tell you how to say it. Hope this helped!
How do you say trick or treat in welsh?
CERTAINLY NOT "twyllo neu drin", best would be "cast neu geiniog" (cast being a sort of "trick" and ceiniog being "penny" i.e. get some money or a trick will be played on you)
How do you say trick or treat in Asia?
You don't. It is only an American custom and in Asia they would not understand what you wanted.
What do you say when you go trick or treating?
When you go trick or treating you obviously say ' trick or treat ' then they give you sweets and candy and just shut the door in front of you.
What do you say in response to trick or treat?
How do French people say trick or treat?
Don't say “trick-or-treat” When a kid comes to the door asking for candy or les bon bons during Halloween in France, they don't say 'trick or treat'.Instead, they ask you in French if you would like 'candies or a spell' or 'mischief or sweets'.Candies or a spell: Des bonbons ou un sort?
When should we trick or treat?
The "treat" is usually some form of candy, although in some cultures money is used instead.The "trick" refers to a threat, usually idle, to perform mischief on the homeowners or their property if no treat is given.Trick-or-treating usually occurs on the evening of October 31.
When should we go trick or treating?
Trick-or-treating usually occurs on the evening of October 31.Some homeowners signal that they are willing to hand out treats by putting up Halloween decorations outside their doors; others simply leave treats available on their porches for the children to take freely.
How do you say trick or treat in portuguese?
The common translation would be "Doçura ou travessura".
What do you say to trick or treat?
What is the purpose of trick or treating at Halloween?
To dress up in costumes to impress people and get free candy. The wearing of scary costumes can be traced back to Celtic times. October 31 once marked the Celtic new year and was believed to be a time when spirits of the dead could come back and possess the living. In order to avoid being possess...
Do Koreans trick or treat for Halloween?
Some do and some don't. I am a Korean and I go trick or treating but my brother(Korean) dosen't
When did we start trick or treating?
You might think that this practice then simply migrated along with Europeans to the United States.But trick or treating didn't re-emerge until the 1920s and 1930s.It paused for a bit during World War II because of sugar rations, and it's now back in full force.The term “trick or treat” dates back...
Where do we get trick or treating from?
Modern trick or treating is a custom borrowed from guising, which children still do in some parts of Scotland.Guising involves dressing in costume and singing a rhyme, doing a card trick, or telling a story in exchange for a sweet.The Scottish and Irish brought the custom to America in the 19th c...
Why do people go trick or treating?
To get candy. Obviously. It's better then being one of those people who use it as a excuse to get drunk off there faces.
Halloween Trick Or Treat Costumes ?
When you go out trick or treating, you need to be comfortable. Whether it is going to be hot or cold, you need to take these things into consideration when you look for Halloween trick or treat costumes. In addition, you should find something that is very easy to walk in so that you can collect a...
Why do people trick or treat?
People trick or treat because boys used to vandalize homes on Oct. 31. The boys soon got smart and put on masks to hide their identity. The home owners gave the boys treats so they wouldn't harm their homes. Other people soon caught on and on Oct.31, kids made their own costumes and got candy.
Halloween trick or treat costumes?
According to some people, Halloween has changed. In the past, it was fun, safe and the kids were well behaved. However, times have changed and Halloween has also been affected by these changes. In the past, people would spend months simply preparing for Halloween. Making a decision on the specifi...
Halloween Trick or Treat Deals?
Get the ghouls together or a couple of families to get group discount deals on Halloween fun. Listed are a few suggestions where group rates for Halloween festivities are a great trick for reducing the price of admission for a spooky treat. Parks and Recreation Look for discount coupons that redu...
Why do kids trick or treat?
kids trick or treat because they like knocking on doors and people open, when they say trick or treat. They say trick or treat because they want sweets from stranger, but you only go to houses that have lights in the room because if you knock on a door when the light is off they will not answer t...
What do you say in return when kids say trick or treat?
Hers you treat and here is your trick and then through confetti at them just kidding don't.:( :)
Why do little kids trick or treat?
They love getting candy and dressing up as their favorite characters.
Why do people go trick or treat?
Why is there trick or treating on Halloween?
What will you do at Trick or Treat?
I will knock on peoples doors and say " Trick or Treat ". We receive candy! =) What a fun way to get candy.
Where did the Trick or Treat saying come from?
The saying trick or treat on the holiday Halloween comes from as far back as the Middle Ages in the United Kingdom. The phrase signifies that the person want to receive some candy.
When did people start saying trick or treat?
The term “trick or treat” dates back to 1927.Today I Found Out explains: The earliest known reference to “trick or treat”, printed in the November 4, 1927 edition of the Blackie, Alberta Canada Herald, talks of this, Hallowe'en provided an opportunity for real strenuous fun.
Can I trick or treat at 17?
While parents couldn't agree on a specific cut-off age, they did specify a range.Seventy-three percent of more than 2,000 respondents said kids should stop trick-or-treating between the ages of 12 and 17.
What did people say before they said trick or treat?
Before people said 'Trick or Treat', since Hallowe'en is a Celtic Celebration, they said calaverita, Which means 'Little Skull'.
Can you trick or treat at apartments?
Apartments buildings aren't only beneficial for adults but also for children.If you think about it, apartment buildings are the perfect places to go trick-or-treating: You get all the candy without having to brave the cold or worry about the safety of your little ones.
Most teenagers stop dressing up and trick-or-treating somewhere between the ages of 12 and 16 — but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad manners for them to go door-to-door, as long as they are polite while out on the streets.
Can you trick or treat at 16?
Instead, the new rules _ expected to pass third reading in early October _ make trick-or-treating illegal for anyone older than 16 with a curfew for all set at 8 p.m.The updated rules say those caught with a facial disguise in public after curfew, or anyone over 16 found trick-or-treating can be ...
When did kids start saying trick or treat?
What do you say trick or treat or thank you when you arrive?
You say trick or treat when you arrive at a house on Halloween so the owner will give you candy and you won't have to play a trick on them. You say thank you when they give you candy because it is good manners.
How do you trick or treat for Halloween?
Why banning 13-year-olds from trick-or-treating on Halloween is ridiculous.Teens could be fined or even jailed for trick-or-treating in one Virginia city.No, you haven't been redirected to a story on The Onion.
What is trick or treat for Halloween?
Trick-or-treating is a Halloween ritual custom for children and adults in many countries.Children in costumes travel from house to house, asking for treats with the phrase "Trick or treat".The "treat" is usually some form of candy, although in some cultures money is used instead.
What can you do on Halloween Besides trick or treat?
13 fun ways to celebrate Halloween (without trick or treating) Visit somewhere haunted. Book a Halloween cruise. Hold a scary movie marathon. Do some spooky story telling time. Hold a Halloween treasure hunt in your own backyard. Cook a spooky family dinner. Create Halloween crafts toge...
What time do you start trick or treating on Halloween?
Trick-or-treating typically happens between 5:30pm and 9:30pm on October 31, although some municipalities choose other dates.Homeowners wishing to participate sometimes decorate their homes with artificial spider webs, plastic skeletons and jack-o-lanterns.
Who started Halloween trick or treat?
Ancient Origins of Trick-or-Treating Halloween has its roots in the ancient, pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain, which was celebrated on the night of October 31.
What time do you go trick or treating on Halloween?
Trick-or-treating typically happens between 5:30pm and 9:30pm on October 31, although some municipalities choose other dates.
What can you do on Halloween Besides trick or treating?
How do people celebrate Halloween without trick or treat?
What does trick or treat have to do with Halloween?
As years ago people who died on the day of halloween 31st october too remember them like a gift to say sorry they died if you knew them
Does Sweden trick or treat on Halloween?
no. Halloween was originally made by the irsh as Hallows eve. It was a day to scare of demons and such so that they wouldn't die. It slowly came to america.
Happy Halloween - Time For Tricks Or Treats?
Once the kiddies go back to school, all attention begins to focus on Halloween. It's a rite of autumn few want to miss especially the kids. A Happy Halloween is all about costumes, Jack-O-Lanterns, ghosts and goblins and lots and lots of special treats. It's a holiday that adults can't resist tak...
What time should we start trick or treating?
The ideal times for most families to trick or treat is 6:30 p.m.to 8 p.m., according to parenting guide How to Adult.This is the stretch when people are usually home from work and ready to start festivities, according to the site.
Is trick or treating always on Halloween?
Trick-or-treating is a Halloween ritual custom for children and adults in many countries.Children in costumes travel from house to house, asking for treats with the phrase "Trick or treat".Trick-or-treating usually occurs on the evening of October 31.
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North Little Rock Advertising & Promotion Commission
Remit Taxes
Foodservice Tax
About the NLR A & P Commission
Commission Minutes
Prepared Food Ordinance
Food Trucks and Mobile Vendors
Non-Profit Foodservice Vendors
Remittance Options
Remit Online (recommended)
Remit by Mail
Remit in Person
All foodservice businesses (hotels, restaurants, caterers, convenience stores, movie theaters, food vendors, mobile concessionaires, food trucks, etc.) are required to obtain a FREE Advertising & Promotion Commission (A&P) Tax Permit to operate in North Little Rock.
Obtain Permits: Visit the North Little Rock Advertising & Promotion Commission at 1 Eldor Johnson Drive, North Little Rock, AR 72118. The applicant’s driver’s license will be copied and attached to the application.
North Little Rock A&P Permit ApplicationDownload
Renewing Permits: Existing permits do not have to be renewed each year and expire only when the business closes or ownership changes.
The A&P Tax Permit specifies the Tax ID number that must be stated on every remittance form. The A&P Permit must be prominently displayed along with the city’s business license.
All foodservice businesses are required by law to collect and remit a three percent (3%) A&P tax on gross receipts of prepared food and beverages for on or off-premises consumption. The City of North Little Rock’s Ordinance 7992 details the specific definition of “prepared food” as directed by the State of Arkansas (Emergency Rule 2007-3).
Click here for a copy of the Prepared Food Ordinance.
All food and beverage vendors operating in North Little Rock including special events such as concerts, street parties and sporting events are required to have an A&P Tax Permit. The A&P Tax Permit must be prominently posted on site along with the city business license. All vendors are required to remit the three percent (3%) foodservice tax on gross receipts of prepared food and beverage.
Non-profit vendors must also receive a business license and A&P Tax Permit. Non-profit food and beverage vendors will be exempt from collecting and remitting the A&P tax ONLY if a copy of the non-profit status letter as assigned by the IRS is given to the City Clerk’s Office with A & P Tax Permit application.
Operating a Business in North Little Rock -updated April 27 2018
Full remittance of collected taxes is due by the last day of the month after the month in which taxes are collected. For instance, taxes collected in January must be remitted by February 28.
Businesses may take a two percent (2%) discount for remitting A&P taxes by the 20th of the month in which taxes are due. For instance, taxes collected in January must be remitted by February 20.
A five percent (5%) late fee on the tax amount due for each month past due will be charged if not remitted by the end of the month.Remittances should NOT be rounded up or rounded down. Exact amounts are required.
Checks returned for Insufficient Funds (NSF) will be charged a $25.00 service fee. If the check is returned a second time, the check will be turned over to the Prosecuting Attorney.
POSTMARK NOTICE:
Remittances must be postmarked no later than the due date (either the 20th for the discount or the last day of the month for full remittance). Businesses should be aware that the due date may fall on a weekend or holiday. Mail the remittance earlier than the due date in order to take the discount or avoid late fees.
The North Little Rock Advertising and Promotion Commission offers three different options for remitting collected taxes: remit online, remit by mail and remit in person.
Option 1: Remit Online (recommended)
Fast, easy and secure step for both reporting and remitting!
Click here for Foodservice Remittance Form and Payment
Remit with an electronic check – no service fee applies. NOTE: Your bank will need these numbers before you can process an electronic check. Click here for Company IDs.
Remit with a credit card – 2.5% service fee applies
Option 2: Remit by Mail
(Be aware of the postmark deadlines)
NLRAP Foodservice Tax Remittance FormDownload
Checks MUST be made payable to the North Little Rock Advertising & Promotion Commission.
Remittance forms and payment must be mailed to:
Attention: Accounting Department
Option 3: Remit in Person
Remittances accepted in person will be credited on the date paid – not on the date the check is written. The date remitted will determine discounts and late fees.
Remittance forms and payment can be delivered to this location:
North Little Rock Visitors Information Center
#1 Eldor Johnson Drive, Burns Park
Tax Remittance forms (must be completed in advance) and payments will be accepted at this location between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday.
Click here for North Little Rock Advertising & Promotion Commission DBA North Little Rock Convention & Visitors Bureau W-9 Form.
Robin Powell, Tax Revenue Manager: (501) 404-0143, rpowell@northlittlerock.org
(Available 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday)
1 Eldor Johnson Drive (Burns Park)
North Little Rock Advertising & Promotion Commission,
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Sutton Trust on GCSE Reforms
The Sutton Trust is right to say that the new GCSE reforms have a negative impact on students.
Commenting on Making the Grade, a study of GCSE reforms published today by the Sutton Trust, Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said:
“It is absolutely not surprising that the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and others has widened as a result of the Government’s GCSE reforms.
“These reforms were unplanned, had no meaningful consultation with teachers and no proper lead-in time.
“The exams now cover an unmanageable amount of content for many students, and unlike in real life the students have to sit them once-and-for-all at the end of the course.
“Both these issues are causing real problems.
“It is at the door of the Government that whilst under the previous system 2% of disadvantaged pupils achieved the top grade (of A*), it is now just 1% that achieve a grade 9.
“The Sutton Trust is right to say that this may have negative impacts on these students when they are applying for university places.
“A survey of National Education Union members found that 73% thought that pupil mental health was worse due to the new GCSE reforms and 64% said the reformed courses did not reflect students’ abilities as accurately. (1)
“We need to see a system in place that plays to all pupils’ strengths to ensure they get the qualifications they deserve.”
Reformed GCSEs are damaging the mental health of young people, and failing to accurately reflect their abilities, 21 August 2019.
2019-195-NEU
Ofsted 'stuck' schools report
Fear of Ofsted is a key factor in school leader and teacher flight from these schools. Ofsted is, unfortunately part of the problem, not the solution.
General Election Result
The NEU reacts to the result of the 2019 General Election.
NFER report on T Levels
NFER is right that there has to be a concerted effort to raise awareness about the new T Level awards, particularly around the uncertainty about progression routes.
Liberal Democrats Manifesto
NEU welcomes the the Liberal Democrats commitment to abolish primary SATs testing. These tests, beloved of the Government, cause enormous stress and narrowing of the curriculum – they do not produce useful information for teachers.
Unexplained Pupil Exits
Sixty-nine thousand unexplained pupil exits from schools is a shocking figure and one which the Government needs to address.
NEU comments on Government's release of Phonics Check statistics.
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Glass lodge on Icelandic fjord offers stunning views of the Northern Lights
By Nick Lavars
Glass lodge on Icelandic fjord...
The Panorama Glass Lodge is crafted largely from wood, but at one end floor-to-ceiling windows open it up to the surroundings
The Panorama Glass Lodge is a standalone cabin on the water's edge around 30 minutes' drive away from Reykjavík, iceland's capital
A one night stay at Iceland's Panorama Glass Lodge is priced at €342 (US$425) for a couple
Small living area at Iceland's Panorama Glass Lodge
These days, there are some pretty special places to sit back and take in the nature's most spectacular light show, the Northern Lights
Kitchen at Iceland's Panorama Glass Lodge
Hot tub at Iceland's Panorama Glass Lodge
Bathroom in Iceland's Panorama Glass Lodge
The Panorama Glass Lodge is now open, although it won't be taking bookings until the end of April due to a frozen main pipe affecting the area
Bathroom inside the Panorama Glass Lodge, a standalone cabin on the water's edge around 30 minutes' drive away from Reykjavík, iceland's capital
Gravel road leading up to Iceland's Panorama Glass Lodge
View from the bedroom of Iceland's Panorama Glass Lodge
These days, there are some pretty special places to sit back and take in the nature's most spectacular light show. Finland's Kakslauttanen Arctic Resort and Iceland's ION Adventure Hotel are just a couple of remarkable refuges offering panoramic views of the Northern Lights. Joining the latter near Iceland's capital of Reykjavík is the Panorama Glass Lodge that gives guests a glimpse of the aurora borealis across a shimmering fjord.
The Panorama Glass Lodge is a standalone cabin on the water's edge around 30 minutes' drive away from Reykjavík. Because of the snowfall, you'll likely need a four-wheel drive to access the lodge during winter, which is the time to go to see the Northern Lights do their thing.
The lodge is crafted largely from wood, but at one end floor-to-ceiling windows open it up to the surroundings, offering uninterrupted views of the fjord below, the spectacular skies above and the rolling grasslands and snowcapped mountains in between. These can also be enjoyed from the comfort of an adjoining hot tub.
According to the family behind the business, seals and whales can be spotted in the fjord's waters, and the isolation of the cabin far away from city lights makes it a great place to view the aurora borealis. The lodge is one of just five houses along the shoreline, with the next closest 300 m (1,000 ft away). There are roller blinds in case extra privacy is needed, however, and inside is a king bed, rainforest shower and fully equipped kitchen with stove, toaster, water heater and fridge.
The Panorama Glass Lodge is now open, although it won't be taking bookings until the end of April due to a frozen main pipe affecting the area. When they do open up again, a one night stay will cost €342 (US$425) for a couple.
Source: Panorama Glass Lodge
Holiday DestinationsNorthern LightsIceland
Nick Lavars
Nick has been writing and editing at New Atlas for over six years, where he has covered everything from distant space probes to self-driving cars to oddball animal science. He previously spent time at The Conversation, Mashable and The Santiago Times, earning a Masters degree in communications from Melbourne’s RMIT University along the way.
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Thinly sliced: Leading ag groups are concerned with climate change … but behind closed doors
Flickr/USDA/Bob Nichols
Climate, closeted. Despite outward messaging to the contrary, farm country heavyweights like the American Farm Bureau Federation and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue are indeed concerned about our planet’s impending demise, Politico reports. They’re just not willing to talk about it in public. In June, they held a secret, closed-door meeting in Maryland to discuss potential opportunities for the ag sector to reduce emissions and sequester carbon. Welcome to the 21st century.
But the bananas aren’t on walls. “The secret museum in every city is a grocery store,” New York Magazine proclaims this week. And they’re right: What’s better than stumbling, jet-lagged, into a well-stocked market to load up on more fruit and novelty snacks than a hotel mini-fridge can reasonably accommodate? The people watching is never bad, either.
Gingerbread candles are trash. If you thought you were going to be able to scent your house with the perfect holiday aroma of fried chicken, think again, buddy. The limited-edition 11 Herbs & Spices Firelog from Kentucky Fried Chicken—brought back this year by, um, popular demand—has already sold out. “Last year, we captured the hearts, noses and fireplaces of our fans,” says KFC’s U.S. chief marketing officer, Andrea Zahumensky. USA Today reports that Enviro-Log and Walmart partnered to make this “hearth-warming and hunger-inducing” opportunity a reality for only $18.99, but prices are now up to $69.95, due to scarcity.
Not lovin’ it. McDonald’s black franchisees aren’t earning as much as white counterparts, and they’re leaving the chain instead of passing the franchise down to their family. Business Insider reports that black-owned locations net around $68,000 less per month than those owned by white franchisees, a disparity that’s more than doubled in just a few years. Orders from corporate HQ to undertake expensive renovations are at least partly to blame for the exodus—because franchisees with fewer locations and lower cash flows couldn’t afford to cover the costs. Meanwhile, a McD’s cashier can’t get by on $9.50 an hour.
PFail. Until late last week, it seemed the National Defense Authorization Act, a massive, $738-billion bill, might contain bold new protections against PFAS—a class of more than 5,000 toxic “forever chemicals” that are found in a range of consumer products, including compostable bowls. But despite some bipartisan consensus, Congressional leaders disagreed on several key provisions, including the introduction of a water safety threshold and mandating the cleanup of PFAS-contaminated sites. Ultimately, reform efforts broke down at the 11th hour, and those provisions were not included, though the agreed-upon bill does contain some modest new protections. E & E News and Politico explain how talks fell apart.
Newsclimate changeMcDonald'sPFASthinly sliced
Farm Environment Policy NewsNews
If McDonald’s is serious about reducing its carbon footprint, it may need to rethink the hamburger
Thinly sliced: How warming waters in Bristol Bay are threatening sockeye salmon populations
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BGFN MAGAZINE >> News >> World fashion >> 17th edition of Amsterdam Fashion Week
17th edition of Amsterdam Fashion Week
by Fashion.bg, 16 July, 2012
The seventeenth edition of Amsterdam Fashion Week (AFW) took place from the 11th until the 15th of July on the Westergas Area (Cultuurpark Westergas) in Amsterdam. Both renowned designers and upcoming talented designers show their latest collections to fashion professionals.
The fashion week has started on Wednesday night with shows of two talented Dutch designers. Claes Iversen made a big impression with his Spring/Summer 2013 collection. His designs are formed from fragments, sometimes already shown on his earlier creations. Marga Weimans has done the second show of the opening night and gave an impressive fashion show, consisting of designs for which she got her inspiration from cities and architecture.
The Spring-Summer 2013 collection of Claes Iversen starts with sobriety and monotone colors and finishes in a flowery and fresh whole. 'Flying debris' find each other and come together in designs formed from fragments, or from before-seen creations of Claes: the iconic Rose Dress from his 2007 collection for example has become a part of the final dress from this collection. Elements from different periods merge and modernity translated into femininity remains an important theme.
For Marga Weimans this was the first time she gave a catwalk show during Amsterdam Fashion Week. She is known by participating in various exhibitions and presentations in Paris. Cities and architecture play an important role in her collection and are reflected in material, color and shape. Interactivity is key. Highlight of her collection was the 'Vodafone Dress', a dress consisting of three hundred mobile phones. The mobile activity ensures that the dress is put into effect and changes color when dialed by the audience.
Immediately after the show Weimans took the audience into the story behind her designs by launching a large installation called Fashion House, in which she shows her inspiration and innovative technology. This Fashion House literally gives insight into the dream future, the rationale and design process of the designer.
Their collections also presented Tony Cohen, Edwin Oudshoorn, Elise Kim, Danish Gestuz, Winde Rienstra, Marije de Haan etc.
Amsterdam Fashion Week was established in 2004 to position the Netherlands, and Amsterdam in particular, as inspirational and internationally oriented fashion destination. Amsterdam Fashion Week has grown into the semi-annual fashion event in the Netherlands and enjoys plenty of interest from both Dutch and foreign press.
Amsterdam Fashion Week celebrates Dutch fashion talent, builds bridges between creativity and commerce and seeks for international connection. With fashion shows, trade shows, presentations, lectures, private training and a business programme, Amsterdam Fashion Week brings designers, labels, buyers, press, agencies, creative industries, government and semi-government and investors together. The official catwalk programme, Amsterdam Fashion Week Uptown, and the business programme focus mainly on professionals from the fashion and related industries. They take place at the Westergas area (Cultuurpark Westergas) in Amsterdam. The public programme, Fashion Week Downtown, takes place mainly in the inner city.
Photos: BGNES/EPA
Tags:Amsterdam Fashion Week, fashion week, fashion, collections, fashion show, Amsterdam, designers, Spring, Summer, 2013
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Home » Foreign Forces » Panel: ‘Maximum Pressure’ Campaign Exposes U.S. Middle East Allies to Iran’s Military Reach
Panel: ‘Maximum Pressure’ Campaign Exposes U.S. Middle East Allies to Iran’s Military Reach
Undated photo of IRGCN fast attack boat.
The U.S. “maximum pressure” campaign to stop Tehran’s meddling in its neighbors’ affairs, scale back its missile programs and comply with a nuclear weapons agreement has instead exposed America’s regional partners to Iran’s military reach, a panel of regional agreed on Thursday.
The continually tightening economic sanctions, particularly after May’s White House announcement that there would be no exceptions to buying Iranian oil and that businesses and nations would also be hit with penalties, has caused Tehran “to have a much more assertive posture for months and years to come,” David Jalilvan, a Berlin-based energy and security analyst and co-author of a new report on the campaign, said at the Atlantic Council on Thursday.
The most noticeable demonstration of that military reach came in September, when Iran conducted a sophisticated cruise missiles strike on critical Saudi petroleum infrastructure. This surprise attack followed several incidents earlier in the summer, when Iranian Revolutionary Guards attached limpet mines to oil tankers transiting the Persian Gulf and when other tankers were seized in Tehran’s answer to the sanctions campaign.
This “much more bellicose” response is not surprising, Jalilvand and others said at the Atlantic Council panel discussion.
Some of the youngest Iranian hardliners have combat experience in the Revolutionary Guards’ battle against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and they have brought that knowledge and attitude back into Iran’s domestic affairs. They now join others who have believed since Iran’s 1979 revolution that Tehran can never negotiate with the United States.
More results of that political change away from further talks likely will be seen following Iran’s parliamentary and presidential elections next year and its future selection of a new Supreme Leader to succeed Ali Khamenei, who has held that position for 30 years.
Kenneth Katzman, senior Middle East analyst for the Congressional Research Service, said if “maximum pressure” was working to get Iran to accede to 12 U.S. demands to ratchet down its destabilizing activities in the region, “it wouldn’t carry out” an attack like it did on Saudi Arabia.
He cited Defense Intelligence Agency assessments of Iranian military strength now almost a year into the announced American sanctions campaign. He then quoted the region’s top military officer, Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, that “Iran is in position to attack” the Gulf states while avoiding possible American targets in the region.
“Iran is getting progressively strategically stronger” at relatively little cost, Jalilvand said in answer to a question.
Although Iran’s gross domestic product is expected to fall about 9 percent because of the sanctions this year and there have been large demonstrations in a number of its larger cities that have been met with armed force by the regime, he estimated Tehran is spending about $3 billion a year on its missile program, other military activities and support for proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon. He said this is a fraction of what American allies like Israel and partners like the Sunni Gulf states spend on their militaries.
There is a firm belief in its leadership that Iran “needs to be able to hit back on others in the area” to keep the revolution intact, he added. The American sanctions and the European Union’s inability to work around them while urging Tehran to stay within the nuclear agreement has produced a “logic [of necessary force] that will not be changed.”
Katzman disagreed with the notion that Iran feels cornered as a result of the campaign. The missile attack on Saudi infrastructure and the mining and seizure of oil tankers were the big reasons “why the UAE is visiting” Tehran and Saudi Arabia “is visiting, and why Mr. [Donald] Trump hasn’t pulled the trigger” in response to the downing of an American drone.
Katzman said “perhaps [the Gulf states] are going to mute” their antagonisms to the Islamic Republic and that could lead to an alteration in U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Right now, Jalilvand said Iranian leaders see “confrontation yields better results than engagement,” particularly with Washington and the European Union.
While remaining guardedly optimistic about future engagement with Tehran, such as the recent prisoner exchange, Barbara Slavin, director of the council’s Future of Iran Initiative, said, “there is a lot of confusion over what [the American] goal is” with the campaign and the policy behind it. In many ways, she said the Iranians see the policy as ultimately leading to “regime change.”
Complicating matters in Washington is the administration has had four national security advisers and two secretaries of state in three years saying different things about the Middle East and Iran, she said.
For sanctions to work effectively in having Iran meet the demands concerning its short- and long-range missile programs, backing of Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq, and power centers like Hezbollah, Slavin said there needs to be multi-layered support for them as existed with the European Union before and clear goals. “We don’t have those conditions now.”
Article Keywords: Iran, The Atlantic Council
Categories: Foreign Forces, News & Analysis
John Grady, a former managing editor of Navy Times, retired as director of communications for the Association of the United States Army. His reporting on national defense and national security has appeared on Breaking Defense, GovExec.com, NextGov.com, DefenseOne.com, Government Executive and USNI News.
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Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Google Keep – Save what’s on your mind (googleblog.blogspot.com)
72 points by swohns on Mar 20, 2013 | hide | past | web | favorite | 66 comments
Adaptive on Mar 20, 2013
I would have jumped on this a year ago.
The elephant in the room with every one of the Google announcements is that they've drained their coffers of trust/goodwill with the early adopter crowd, which is precisely the group you need to kick these things off.
Until Larry Page makes a clear, official public comment about this, I'm left wondering what is considered core product and what isn't. Is this? Is it an experiment? I get that this integrates with Drive, which is core product (it is, right?). Not the point. Using a new tool is me spending time and effort to learn/use/integrate into a workflow.
Until I know that I'm not going to be backtracking on this territory in two years when Google has another epiphany about strategy, I'm left feeling genuinely skeptical.
Recoil42 on Mar 20, 2013
I'm not part of the whole Google Reader hate bandwagon, but this one makes me puzzled too. Isn't Google Keep a shade too similar to Google Notebook ( http://www.google.ca/googlenotebook/faq.html ), a product they shut down a couple years ago?
Does this show a lack of foresight in maintaining products, a lack of dedication to making them successful, or what? There's clearly a problem here.
Google has the same duplication problem all over the place -- constantly recreating projects that they've previously shut down, or running several redundant projects simultaneously. Google Chrome and the AOSP Browser, Buzz/Orkut/G+, Sites and Blogger (and whatever they had before). Reader and Currents, What is going on here? Rather than improving a project, they seem to have this epidemic problem of creating a whole new one and letting the old one get lost in the fray.
jfoutz on Mar 20, 2013
Writing code is fun. Maintaining code sucks. You expect A programmers to stoop to maintaining old crap?
alaskamiller on Mar 20, 2013
Wait, wait, wait... have we finally concluded on the narrative that Google just throws random pies at the wall to see what sticks? Because I'm pretty sure that's been their modus operandi for the last fifteen years.
That said there's a Google clone for every single popular web product of the past five years that they dogfood constantly. That's all they kind of do these days, hire smart kids into trendy things. Whether pulling the trigger to launch them publicly, maintaining them publicly, or even as much as supporting them...
Well, if it doesn't make a buck selling ads and contribute to keeping that $50B/yr consolidated revenues growing year-over-year then it's just corporate charity work.
Making billions and billions of dollars while beholden to shareholders? That's a good evil problem to have.
jfoster on Mar 20, 2013
There's also a Chrome extension developed by Google that does notekeeping and syncing. Not exactly the same, but along a similar vein is the Todo list functionality in Gmail. Assuming Google is committed to notekeeping, which one of their solutions is the "right one" to use?
LandoCalrissian on Mar 20, 2013
This is a really nice comment that I think really cuts to the meat of the issue. I'll admit to being a pretty big Google apologist, but now that we know they are willing to ax services with devoted followings it makes me really hesitant to take the dive on new products they are releasing. My confidence in them being willing to support these services down the road has been great impacted.
Now with every new Google that gets released the first question that goes through my brain is "Will this be here in 2 years". That can't be a good thing.
ariwilson on Mar 20, 2013
They kept Google Reader for 8 years before shooting it...
That's a very relevant point. I'd say that for about 4 or 5 years it was in a safe, stable zone in the product strategy, but for the past 3-4 it was a dead app walking. Those last 4 years also say Wave, Buzz and other very big, public launches of products that were killed within a year each.
Clearly Google saw that it was flinging spaghetti at the wall just to see what stuck and decided
1) be really careful about big public announcements, people get excited, the product doesn't deliver and we look bad then
2) refocus (even if I don't like the strategy, at least they have one, so this is good, assuming they really are focused)
The problem is that they are now gun shy about saying anything clearly, apparently.
It's like a teenager that buys a new outfit they really like and mentions it only casually because if they get rebuffed by the peers for wearing it, they can always claim they didn't like it that much.
Sometimes you have to just define your own style and wear the outfit, man. Be proud.
That's what Google is missing.
pasbesoin on Mar 21, 2013
And Wave was the next big thing, until they suddenly put a bullet in it.
Yes, it was "opened" and the code persists, to some extent.
I think a lot of people here on HN may nonetheless be pissed that, in the process, they absorbed and then destroyed the official, supported version of EtherPad.
Maybe EtherPad as company / commercialized product wouldn't have made it... But, maybe it would have. Regardless, Google burned a lot of good will with that one, too.
And, as numerous commenters have pointed out with respect to Keep: Google Notebook.
P.S. In my opinion, what killed Wave was not the technology (or, "concept"), but in part a batshit heavy and obscure UI. One of the early signs of Google's trend towards a "design ueber alles" failing.
Having spent many years in corporate environments, I saw Wave (as technology/"concept") as a real solution to a number of longstanding, pernicious problems I'd encountered with electronic communication, and its effect upon work, in those environments.
I never used Reader much (signed up and subscribed to the same feeds I already followed, but a local reader was quicker and easier for me). But I gather from many comments that its key, distinguishing features were not the straightforward feed processing but the "social" aspect of the product. The "network" and "meta" that Reader enabled.
For a company that (Google+, etc.) seems particularly interested at present in focusing on "network", this seems to be a particularly boneheaded move.
I also agree with the philosophy of "don't piss off the alpha nerds... although I don't particularly like the descriptor "alpha". They have a canny knack of revealing the interesting (and "interesting" is what sells, online). And of being good hires, for creating same.
psweber on Mar 20, 2013
For all the talk of focus after Larry Page took over, Google still seems to be releasing half baked products. I tried switching from Dropbox to Google Drive to get double the storage for the same price. Uploaded 100 gigs, got an error, and was told I had to re-download the 100 gigs to sync again. Using an early version of a Google product for a trusted system is riiiiisky.
yanw on Mar 20, 2013
Yay, more indignant Reader protest in the form of casual comments about a different Google launch, how refreshing!
As you noted Drive is actually acknowledged to be under someone's management (Apps) and not an afterthought kept on life support, so there's that.
And worst case scenario you can export your data and stick it in any number of similar services out three, it took me all of 3 seconds with Reader.
mmanfrin on Mar 20, 2013
You must be some sort of savant, being able to manage the switch from Google Reader in 3 seconds.
How is the concern over first-adapter respect at all deserving of the dripping-with-sarcasm snark of your comment? Why is it so terrible that someone brings up the fact that Google now has a reputation for simply deadpooling products they no longer wish to support but that others have begun to rely on?
Why, on earth, should I trust a product that is meant to keep a record for me, when I can no longer trust the long-term support of said product.
But such concerns, to you, are pointless to discuss, because if this eventually gets deadpooled, all we'll have to do is take 3 seconds to pull out our data and move to a different product.
It has less to do with my superior intellect and more with the fact that every wannabe reader has an import from Reader button, which is made possible by Google allowing data portability.
You could buy more Drive storage to put your mind at ease (free v paid and all that), but keep in mind that the chances of whatever you're using getting bankrupt or "acqui-hired" away are just as likely.
fakeer on Mar 21, 2013
I still believe that "3 seconds" was figure of speech for all practical reasons.
Switching is not just: [1. download GR OPML -> 2. upload to some Feed_Service_XYZ -> 3. Bingo!].
Not for a person who had curated his feeds over the years. Starred, tagged and have been using GR's sync services almost everywhere. He might be using it subscribe to new feeds on the web. Share. Etcetera.
But you might be knowing better(I mean about your comment).
donretag on Mar 20, 2013
"Changing priorities isn’t a problem"
I love the irony.
martythemaniak on Mar 20, 2013
The ceaseless whining over Google Reader is getting tiresome - I don't think there's been a Google-related post in the last week that had discussion actually related to the article.
Google took a zombie out back and double-tapped it. You can download your data. You have plenty of alternatives eager for your business. Move on.
http://xkcd.com/1172/
Zikes on Mar 20, 2013
A lot of Google's business is based on our trust. We have to trust them as a company, and we have to trust their ecosystem if we're going to invest our time and data into it. If they consistently violate that trust, shouldn't we get at least a little upset?
abraham on Mar 21, 2013
We also have to trust them to shed dead weight or they will turn into a bloated whale that is never able to produce anything of quality. They gave plenty of warning time and have made it very easy to easily export our data.
b0sk on Mar 20, 2013
Before you put your data in this, make sure there's a way out because Google has the nasty habit of discontinuing its stuff.
I just checked Google Takeout, it's not listed there yet.
jrmiii on Mar 20, 2013
I think that's because it's dropping it right on your Google Drive. It's taken out by nature, all the time, whenever you sync.
bookwormAT on Mar 20, 2013
I don't find my notes in drive. Except for the URL there seems to be me no connection to drive.
You're right, neither do I.
But tfa clearly says, "Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have them at hand." - So, I dunno.
EDIT: dammit, down at the bottom - last line - " in the coming weeks you'll be able to do the same[view,edit,etc.] directly from Google Drive."
Ah, I guess that settles that, then.
I've created a test note and force synced both Keep and Drive, and I also do not find my note in Drive.
I do hope that Drive will contain Keep notes, though, as that would seem like an optimal solution.
Newky on Mar 20, 2013
My initial reaction was that they were doing a read it later service and competing with the likes of Pocket. That would be a disaster as that area doesn't need competition at this time.
But it appears that they are targeting a light weight evernote replacement. A killer feature for me on this would be a command line binary which calls up my $EDITOR and allows me to write a note immediately and have them synced immediately. This, with the power of lighter production of notes on mobile devices could find a place into my workflow.
baq on Mar 20, 2013
this would be a killer feature for you and about 17 other people - if they don't already use dropbox for that.
if that sounds offensive, just look at the number of reader users - and it got axed. google doesn't aim at tens of thousands, it aims at millions.
zmmmmm on Mar 20, 2013
> google doesn't aim at tens of thousands, it aims at millions.
I think that is a bit simplistic in terms of why they shut Reader down. Reader was in conflict with their G+ strategy, distracting millions of highly influential people out of G+ and into a cannibalising product and technology (RSS) with no clear G+ integration path. Google wants those people using G+. Even if only 10% of them convert to G+ thats better than 100% of them using Reader and living outside the G+ bubble. I suspect Reader was in the awkward situation of being too small for Google to devote a major product / engineering effort to migrate it's features into the G+ world but too big for them ignore and just leave running as a side project.
Ok perhaps an API would suffice for me.
I will happily write said script. Google aim's at the thousands but I feel they are in danger of neglecting the fact that people who want features like this make services like this popular i.e the tech community are early adopters and they generally recommend tools (especially tools like this) to their less tech savvy friends. Cater in a small way (you still need your swanky android apps and colors) for the hardcore tech, and you add users.
Flenser on Mar 21, 2013
I think with the prioritisation / reordering features on mobile it's more of a Google Tasks replacement seeing as how GTasks has received very little attention since it was launched.
Kylekramer on Mar 20, 2013
No integration with Google Tasks? It may be barebones and needing some love, but I like having it to the side of my calendar.
donniezazen on Mar 20, 2013
Google Tasks might be a candidate for next Spring cleaning.
Interesting. I was hoping this would mean that tasks would be taken out of calendar. I guess when you have millions of users, every action delights some and angers others.
twistedanimator on Mar 20, 2013
I know it's been said a million times already, but no way would I use this service after they shut down Reader.
Maybe they're just fishing to see how much marketshare they can take away from Evernote? If it's enough they'll keep it and improve it. But if it doesn't capture enough marketshare, I expect to see it culled in a few years as well.
minikites on Mar 20, 2013
Remember Google Notebook?
shared4you on Mar 20, 2013
I loved the Firefox extension for Notebook. Hope they make one for Keep as well!
recoiledsnake on Mar 20, 2013
Remember Google Bookmarks Lists?
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/03/google-bookmarks-li...
I do need something like this; my Gmail is littered with drafts that I created as notes to myself when I frantically needed to jot something down.
However it would be a thousand times better with time / date / calendar integration. A large percentage of my random notes to myself are reminders to do something by a particular time "pay electricity bill by thursday". Even their example video shows this. Right now I use an app (Voice Calendar) which puts an event in my calendar. However these aren't really events and it pollutes my real calendar with all kinds of junk. I find it weird that despite having awesome email and awesome calendar, Google has really not done a good job of integrating their ecosystem into an exchange-like competitor yet.
slg on Mar 20, 2013
I keep seeing this listed as an Evernote competitor. I have a sneaking suspicion that people saying that have never consistently used Evernote since it does so much more than Keep apparently does.
dageshi on Mar 20, 2013
Yeah I don't think I'm going to fall for another product that looks like it'll disappear in a few years time when google HQ gets bored of it.
jauco on Mar 20, 2013
"oops! an error occurred" On google chrome on windows 7
Not quite prime time ready? Or am I the only one?
Metapony on Mar 20, 2013
You aren't the only one.
hackernewbie on Mar 20, 2013
Boy, I can't wait to have two years worth of notes 'No longer supported'! Sign me up!
alexpopescu on Mar 20, 2013
Is this sort of an announcement that Google failed to buy Evernote, so they decided to create a project that does exactly the same things and that will be discontinued after a while because it's not Google's focus?
Kiro on Mar 20, 2013
How does this compare to Evernote?
(I wish there was a way to filter out all the comments referring to Reader. Most people including me don't care that they discontinued it so please stop spamming about it everywhere.)
omonra on Mar 20, 2013
So 80% of the comments here mention the Reader and yet you surmise that most people don't care about it?
Regardless of what your personal relationship to the Reader issue is, you might consider the possibility that THIS product is axed after a few years when you are used to it.
80% on HN, 20% on other tech sites, <1% overall.
I don't think it's very likely. And even if it is I would just export my data and go to another service. "But I'm used to it" is no argument since we're so adaptable.
drive.google.com/keep/ keeps giving me errors. I don't see how this is going to be an Evernote-killer for me though. (I am actually new to Evernote, but it's been wonderful so far.) I actually don't like google's unified product integration! If there was a clear way to export or use webhooks to retrieve these notes, I'd reconsider.
"Oops! An error occurred. Please click here to reload the page."
I'm getting it, too.
joshrotenberg on Mar 20, 2013
Me three, over and over.
tbourdon on Mar 20, 2013
I've got no time to invest in this. I'm too busy finding an alternative for Reader and seriously looking at alternatives for Gmail because I'm just plain torqued at Google right now.
ch8230 on Mar 20, 2013
Keep your stuff at Google - until their next spring cleaning!
0xndc on Mar 20, 2013
So it's Evernote, but with two panes and a white widget?
jimdesu on Mar 20, 2013
... until you start relying on it. Then Google will shut it down. No way I'm using any more Google products except the one I pay for (mail).
endgame on Mar 20, 2013
... until they kill it because nobody used it.
uslic001 on Mar 20, 2013
I am getting the same reload error on Google Chrome on Win 8 notebook. Not a very good way to launch a new product.
lsiebert on Mar 20, 2013
Mobile app lacks barcode scanning. I'll play around But Springpad still better from what I can see.
nelse on Mar 20, 2013
Searching in Market/Play sucks. Try to find Google Keep now. Impossible.
libria on Mar 20, 2013
No need, they linked it in the article: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
bockris on Mar 20, 2013
It was way down the list for some reason. Look for the yellow icon.
crazy1van on Mar 20, 2013
If they put it at the top of the list, people would just complain about showing favoritism for their own apps. Can't win.
you can't even make a nested list or a proper table right now. i'll wait a couple of weeks during which i'll probably forget about the thing.
EugeneOZ on Mar 20, 2013
When this service will be retired?
uribs on Mar 20, 2013
Any bets on when this is going to be discontinued?
Yep, right after you get hooked on it.
cooldeal on Mar 20, 2013
Is this hosted on Google Drive?
Anyone know if they did a post-mortem post explaining the Google Drive outage from a couple of days ago?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5394475
The post quickly disappeared off the HN front page despite having a lot of upvotes, perhaps due to flagging.
http://hnrankings.info/5394475/
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HomePeopleHomer gears up for recall election Tuesday
author: Suzanne Downing
Homer gears up for recall election Tuesday
Residents of Homer, Alaska wave signs on a street corner as a reporter from This American Life in New York interviews one of them. The recall election for three council members is Tuesday.
HOMER, Alaska – A small group of Homer residents held signs and waved flags at passersby today, as this seaside community gears up for a recall election that has already attracted hundreds of early and absentee voters.
The response has been overwhelmingly positive, with more honks and waves from drivers than thumbs down. Organizers of the recall, which seeks to remove three city council members, say they are encouraged going into the home stretch of a drama that has played out for several months.
Tomorrow is decision day for Donna Aderhold, David Lewis, and Catriona Reynolds, who worked together somewhat surreptitiously to try to make Homer a sanctuary city, where illegal immigrants could find safe haven from federal authorities. It was an act of defiance against the Trump presidency.
FLYERS, SIGNS, FLAGS, AND BARBECUES: Late last week, Homer voters may have seen a reminder flyer in their mailboxes, which was printed and mailed by Heartbeat of Homer, the group that formed to oppose the council members and their efforts.
The flyer contained photos of a few of the actual emails between the council members, which showed their original intent. That intent was later watered down into a resolution that failed to gain the support of most of the council.
About 150 Homerites came through the Heartbeat of Homer fellowship barbecue on Saturday, a strong turnout for a community that is at the height of its tourist and fishing season. Recall organizers say they are tired, but feel good about their efforts and the response of the community.
To summarize: Three council members face recall after having exchanged emails that showed they were trying to establish Homer as a sanctuary city, where illegal immigrants could find safe haven. They worked with far-left groups outside the state to get the wording right.
Some citizens got ahold of the emails via a public records request earlier this spring, filed a recall petition, and the town has been torn apart ever since over whether those council members were acting properly and in the best interests of the city.
Some citizens feel they’ve been tricked by the three, who subsequently changed their story about their actual intent. Their original language had been crafted by a retired reporter, Hal Spence.
The council members didn’t like facing recall, so they sued to quash the election. They hired the ACLU in Anchorage to defend them, lost in court, and are now asking the city of Homer to pay the legal costs they owe Heartbeat of Homer because Heartbeat had to hire a lawyer to fight for the recall election. The losing side of that case is required to cover at least some of the legal fees of the winner.
The three council members had offered to not take the case to a higher court if the recall proponents agreed to waive the legal fee reimbursements. That didn’t fly with Heartbeat of Homer.
The drama-filled situation has drawn the interest of a reporter from the radio show This American Life, which runs weekly on NPR. The reporter landed in Homer this weekend and is staying through the voting festivities. Brian Reed, senior producer of the show, was spotted at the Heartbeat of Homer picnic on Saturday and will be developing some kind of long-form radio piece in the classic public broadcasting style, which will come out long after the election dust has settled and everyone has gone fishing. Care to guess how he’ll be portraying the recall proponents?
[Read: Smoking Gun: Homer City Council members tried to make it a sanctuary city]
Written by Suzanne Downing
Suzanne Downing had careers in business and journalism before serving as the Director of Faith and Community-based Initiatives for Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and returning to Alaska to serve as speechwriter for Gov. Sean Parnell. Born on the Oregon coast, she moved to Alaska in 1969.
Where have all the leaders gone? Long time passing
Budget impasse: Alaska airports shut down July 1?
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https://t.co/kNDiptIQs0 He appears to have left the state, but after that, the trail grows cold.
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Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics
Fatherlands in Mothers’ Hands
Eszter Salgó
Routledge, London & New York, 2014
Door Danae Karydaki, researcher, Birkbeck College, University of London
Order this book at Athenaeum Boekhandel
Bringing together psychoanalysis and politics has always been a fascinating, yet challenging task. In the long course of his writing life, Freud himself expressed his interest in politics. In fact, one of his most widely read books, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), is an account of political philosophy, while in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), he prophetically depicts the appeal of fascism. Other eminent thinkers of the post-WWII period, such as Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Lionel Trilling and, most recently, Juliet Mitchell, Julia Kristeva, Jacqueline Rose, and Slavoj Žižek employed psychoanalysis in conceptualising politics. Eszter Salgó, in Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics: Fatherlands in Mothers’Hands, picks up the threads from these authors in an attempt to, in her own words (p.1), ‘wed’ psychoanalysis with politics. And just as every marriage, this attempt comes with its happy moments as well as its weaknesses.
The book comprises a brief introduction by the author, two parts including two and three chapters respectively, and a helpful index. The first part illustrates the theoretical background of the book, in which democratic politics are represented as a parents-children relationship: the political community is conceptualised as a ‘fantastic family’ consisting of the ‘children’, i.e. the political subjects or, rather the voters, the Winnicottian ‘good-enough mother’, who creates and maintains the transitional space, and the Lacanian ‘symbolic father’, who consolidates the desire with the Law. The second part of the book focuses on three examples of this ‘fantastic family’: Hungary, Italy and the ‘world community’.
Salgó’s book presents some considerable advantages. Firstly, it gives prominence to very timely events; to name just a few, the rise of the Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo, the triumph of nationalist forces in the 2010 Hungarian elections, the role of Facebook in politics, Wikileaks and Qaddafi’s rule in Libya. Secondly, it introduces some intriguing theoretical concepts, such as the ‘Name-of-Winnie’, standing for a symbolic teddy bear given to the ‘children’ by the ‘parents’ in order to engage them in the interactive game of democratic politics. Finally, the author explores some cases of the realm of politics which have never been studied together under the psychoanalytic prism: Hungary, Italy, and the ‘world community’.
However, there also exist some weak points in this book. For instance, the reasoning provided by Salgó for the above-mentioned selection of countries (that she happened to have lived there) is rather personal and, thus, somewhat arbitrary. In terms of content, while the idea of a ‘fantastic family’ may, indeed, be an inspiring one, there is one parameter of any family that lacks further analysis here: the crucial role of siblings (or of their absence). Juliet Mitchell’s book Sibling (2003), for example, offers a marvelous account of how psychoanalysis, being preoccupied with vertical relationships, namely, the Oedipal confrontation, tends to neglect the horizontal ones, in other words, those between siblings. In Salgó’s employment of the family as a metaphor for the political community, while maternal and paternal functions towards the children-voters are adequately explored, the dynamics between brothers and sisters – which could symbolize the solidarity and competitiveness among political subjects – are hardly touched.
Moreover, some minor structural issues need further attention: it would have been useful for the book to include a conclusion section as well as definitions of the applied terminology (e.g. ‘world community’, ‘national identity’, and ‘European values’), whereas the plethora of quotes throughout the book disrupt the narration at times. Finally, the way in which the fundamental idea of Salgó’s account, namely that democratic politics are seen as a ‘fantastic’ family, is applied, raises some methodological concerns. According to relevant bibliography on the implications of applying psychoanalysis outside the clinic, the political community, just as culture, art or history, cannot be treated like a patient on the couch. In other words, a scholar who attempts to apply psychoanalysis on politics is not identical to an analyst, precisely because the latter has at their disposal fragmentary psychic imprints from their analysand. Unlike scholars who appears to be in the know of their field, the analyst’s knowledge is channeled through and grace of their analysand. Thus, any attempt to transplant knowledge acquired in the framework of the psychoanalytic encounter per se to politics bears the risk of becoming an example of a ‘wild’ colonizing science.
If the readers become aware of the above-mentioned risk, they are strongly encouraged to read this highly stimulating book.
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Millions of people in the U.S. are affected by mental illness each year. It’s important to measure how common mental illness is, so we can understand its physical, social and financial impact — and so we can show that no one is alone. These numbers are also powerful tools for raising public awareness, stigma-busting and advocating for better health care.
Mental Health Care Matters
The Ripple Effect of Mental Illness
Common Warning Signs of Mental Illness
It’s Okay to Talk About Suicide
The information on these infographics and this page comes from studies conducted by organizations like Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Justice. The terminology used reflects what is used in original studies. Terms like “serious mental illness,” “mental illness” or “mental health disorders” may all seem like they’re referring to the same thing, but in fact refer to specific diagnostic groups for that particular study.
If you have questions about a statistic or term that’s being used, please visit the original study by clicking the link provided.
1 in 5 U.S. adults experience mental illness each year
1 in 25 U.S. adults experience serious mental illness each year
1 in 6 U.S. youth aged 6-17 experience a mental health disorder each year
Suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death among people aged 10-34
19.1% of U.S. adults experienced mental illness in 2018 (47.6 million people). This represents 1 in 5 adults.
4.6% of U.S. adults experienced serious mental illness in 2018 (11.4 million people). This represents 1 in 25 adults.
16.5% of U.S. youth aged 6-17 experienced a mental health disorder in 2016 (7.7 million people)
3.7% of U.S. adults experienced a co-occurring substance use disorder and mental illness in 2018 (9.2 million people)
Annual prevalence of mental illness among U.S. adults, by demographic group:
Non-Hispanic Asian: 14.7%
Non-Hispanic white: 20.4%
Non-Hispanic black or African-American: 16.2%
Non-Hispanic mixed/multiracial: 26.8%
Hispanic or Latino: 16.9%
Lesbian, Gay or Bisexual: 37.4%
Annual prevalence among U.S. adults, by condition:
Major Depressive Episode: 7.2% (17.7 million people)
Schizophrenia: <1% (estimated 1.5 million people)
Bipolar Disorder: 2.8% (estimated 7 million people)
Anxiety Disorders: 19.1% (estimated 48 million people)
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: 3.6% (estimated 9 million people)
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: 1.2% (estimated 3 million people)
Borderline Personality Disorder: 1.4% (estimated 3.5 million people)
43.3% of U.S. adults with mental illness received treatment in 2018
64.1% of U.S. adults with serious mental illness received treatment in 2018
50.6% of U.S. youth aged 6-17 with a mental health disorder received treatment in 2016
The average delay between onset of mental illness symptoms and treatment is 11 years
Annual treatment rates among U.S. adults with any mental illness, by demographic group:
Female: 48.6%
11.3% of U.S. adults with mental illness had no insurance coverage in 2018
13.4% of U.S. adults with serious mental illness had no insurance coverage in 2018
60% of U.S. counties do not have a single practicing psychiatrist
People with depression have a 40% higher risk of developing cardiovascular and metabolic diseases than the general population. People with serious mental illness are nearly twice as likely to develop these conditions.
19.3% of U.S. adults with mental illness also experienced a substance use disorder in 2018 (9.2 million individuals)
The rate of unemployment is higher among U.S. adults who have mental illness (5.8%) compared to those who do not (3.6%)
High school students with significant symptoms of depression are more than twice as likely to drop out compared to their peers
At least 8.4 million people in the U.S. provide care to an adult with a mental or emotional health issue
Caregivers of adults with mental or emotional health issues spend an average of 32 hours per week providing unpaid care
Mental illness and substance use disorders are involved in 1 out of every 8 emergency department visits by a U.S. adult (estimated 12 million visits)
Mood disorders are the most common cause of hospitalization for all people in the U.S. under age 45 (after excluding hospitalization relating to pregnancy and birth)
Across the U.S. economy, serious mental illness causes $193.2 billion in lost earnings each year
20.1% of people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. have a serious mental health condition
37% of adults incarcerated in the state and federal prison system have a diagnosed mental illness
70.4% of youth in the juvenile justice system have a diagnosed mental illness
41% of Veteran’s Health Administration patients have a diagnosed mental illness or substance use disorder
Depression and anxiety disorders cost the global economy $1 trillion in lost productivity each year
Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide
Suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death among people aged 10-34 in the U.S.
Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S.
The overall suicide rate in the U.S. has increased by 31% since 2001
46% of people who die by suicide had a diagnosed mental health condition
90% of people who die by suicide had shown symptoms of a mental health condition, according to interviews with family, friends and medical professionals (also known as psychological autopsy)
Lesbian, gay and bisexual youth are 4x more likely to attempt suicide than straight youth
75% of people who die by suicide are male
Transgender adults are nearly 12x more likely to attempt suicide than the general population
Annual prevalence of serious thoughts of suicide, by U.S. demographic group:
4.3% of all adults
11.0% of young adults aged 18-25
17.2% of high school students
47.7% of lesbian, gay, and bisexual high school students
If you or someone you know is in an emergency, call The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or call 911 immediately.
Last updated: Sept. 2019
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Tag Archives: Scientific Socialism
On the Continued Relevance of Scientific Socialism in our daily lives
By: Heshima Jinsai
© Heshima 2005
As we witness the gap between rich and poor widen by its largest margin in modern human history, while simultaneously experiencing an unprecedented rise in the “ I/me” mentality of selfishness, greed and avarice which the system of capitalism promotes across the race-class strata, it becomes prudent for us to make a scientific analysis of the reliance of our socio-economic world view. Scientific socialism, primarily, is an economic system where the means of production are in the hands of the people; where distribution of wealth, opportunity and materiel needs is equalitarian in nature. Scientific socialism is a system of non-exploitation and puts an end to the wage slave system and the fleecing by capitalist of the surplus value of labor. Scientific socialism’s central tenet is “From each person according to their talents, to each person according to their needs.”
This principle of socialist dialectics envisions a symbiosis of objective socio-economic output and objective human need/consumption, and reveals the fallacy in logic of proponents of market capitalism. Unlike the bureaucratic totalitarian economics of planned economics in the former eastern European Soviet era, scientific socialism employs a more stringent and all-inclusive standard of materialist analysis on both the “talents” and “needs” sides by ensuring society-wide input via the democratic centralist construction of each city block, town, and rural community. Scientific socialism respects the humanity of the individual by ensuring the finest and most advanced education and training in any field the citizen may desire, while mandating general indoctrination in our core principles and ideology – not only developing them to their ultimate potential, but strengthening and fitting them in the area of our socio-economic infrastructure where their talent, education/training and personal desires all converge with the needs of the collective society as a whole (divisions of labor, specialization). This ensures the freedom to do what you like to do while maximizing productivity through the joy and enthusiasm of working in a field you enjoy with the prospect of greater influence in that field should your performance prove exemplary.
Simultaneously, need at every level of human activity (material, spiritual, psychological, medical, cultural, entertainment, scientific, technological, fellowship, etc., etc.) is met in accordance with current conditions, and surpluses are distributed equally. With the means of production and distribution in the hands of the masses, the surplus value of labor, normally extracted as profits by the capitalist class, remains intact end distributed equally across the population. This ensures a maximization in the standard of living for all and not simply a minimum needs standard for most and an opulence standard for some. This is possible only through the strict adherence to the dictatorship of the proletariat as envisioned by Marx, Lenin, Mao and Jackson.
But scientific socialism is much more than this. Scientific socialism is also a psychology and culture exemplified by our ‘principles of collective life.’ It’s a way of thinking and living that is both egalitarian and compassionate. Scientific socialists have largeness of mind. Are selfless and caring, and care more for the needs and welfare of others than for themselves.
In contrast, market capitalism has made a science of behavior modification in marketing its goods and services and promoting the fantasy that multiple, attainable paths to wealth, power and opulence exist for everyone if they are only willing to “work hard enough to attain ‘the American dream.’” This divorces the minds of the masses from the reality that capitalism presupposes the necessity of unemployed (surplus labor) and under employed (competitive class labor pool) to ensure the wage and class systems function. There is an underlying psychological phenomenon I’ve coined, “The Success Brainwashing Method” which I define as the systematic psychological conditioning of capitalist indoctrination that begins at infancy and is reinforced throughout life which enforces the premise that a man’s / woman’s worth as a human in this society is directly proportional to their ability to make money, attain upward class mobility, or achieve the trappings thereof (i.e. jewelry, fine cars, expensive clothing etc., etc.).
The motive force behind this phenomena focuses efforts on one’s individual gain and self-interest, if need be, at the expense of others – even celebrating one’ s ability to dispense with ethical standards which would impede the realization or maximization of material wealth (i.e. exploitation, betrayal, usury, manipulation, fraud, theft, misappropriation). This psychological construct encourages “getting over” on, or at the loss of, others and is all perfectly allowable; if skillfully done, it is even encouraged – no matter the adverse effects on one’s community(s), personal relationships, or even themselves. Capitalism as a productive system has as its primary motivation the development of super-profits and the growth of its markets and influence on the natural resources, political structures, and labor which sustains them. The capitalist extracts the surplus value of the worker’s labor as profits or super-profits and is obsessed with finding new ways of reducing costs and maximizing profits at the expense of labor and consumers.
The capitalist state is a tool to ensure the dominance of one class (the ruling or “capitalist” class) over the others and does so through the economic and social stratification of society via the two primary components of the capitalist state: 1) the economic class system and 2) the race/gender caste system. Racism, xenophobia and sexism are key components of the global white supremacist motive force of capitalist, market economics. Each individual class is competing with and in opposition to, the other classes – and within their own – while the reinforced race antagonisms, anti-immigrant sentiment, and sexist attitudes ensure the necessary divisions are in place, and periodically intensified, to prevent broad class cooperation or proletariat / lumpen-proletariat united mass organization. Capitalism must ensure the existence of surplus labor (the unemployed / lumpen-proletariat) while simultaneously promoting social attitudes against this segment of the population as undesirable and / or “criminal” to ensure the remaining socio-economic strata act as a check on its revolutionary potential.
Criminalization of the poor has been woven into the very fabric of the social consciousness, while police state repression supports this notion by creating a pool of souls for the prison industrial complex to both profit from the disposal of this surplus labor and act as a deterrent against effective organization (or even accurate identification of the people’s ills) at this level of society. It is though this highly refined system of racial automation which combines the psychological incentive of potential wealth with the deterrent of underlying force /violence, of divide and rule at every level of human activity, where in the ruling class’ monopoly on control is grounded. The difficulty in popularizing any alternative socio-economic system rests here. Here in the U.S., Yankee-style capitalism has systematically conditioned its population against broad based cooperation or cooperation which could threaten the continuation and expansion of exploitation of man by man.
To understand the clear polarization between these two systems of thought and production I have enclosed a thirteen (13) point comparison in simple terms of the two modes of thought (see attachment-[missing]).
Despite the inherently avaricious culture of capitalism and its facade of glitz and universal privilege, scientific socialism and principles of collective life can be popularized in the under end working classes of the capitalist economy by creating and successfully implementing programs that meet the needs of the people, providing an alternative to lift the yoke of poverty and perpetual toil from their backs without the need to abandon their humanity.*
Humans are social creatures, and capitalism promotes social ties based solely on the individual interests of those tied together. Should those individual interests change, those social ties are as transient as the sunset. Principles of collective life base success on the strengthening of social ties at every level of human activity and looking upon the success of your fellow man/woman as your own because, quite literally, they are. The resultant, collective consciousness, this united mind is far better equipped to manufacture cooperative economic programs and collective work ventures, and is more efficient as it is consistent with the social nature of the human condition. This is uniquely true for the New Afrikan. Communalism, socialism’s evolutionary origin, is indigenous to our economic culture; harkening back to the very beginnings of the historical miscarriage and throughout our subsequent struggles for survival on the shores of North America.
We are here today because those principles have served us well, allowed us to endure through the most heinous privation, evolved and refined, end now find their highest expression in our Party. But, let ‘ s be clear, modern U.S society has never been more polarized between rich and poor while, simultaneously, being as self-interest orientated, avaricious and disconnected from one another. The advent of Barak Obama has resulted in no change in the status-quo. And the nature and composition of monopoly capitalism will only be transformed as a result of a victorious revolutionary change. The popularization of principals of collective life are the first concrete steps on that path (transfer culture) providing the psychological foundation for educating, organizing and mobilizing the people for scientific, socialist revolution.
But anything new is fraught with uncertainties and peril. The potential for mistakes is great – especially considering the reactionary nature of domestic U.S imperialism and its history of violent repression-
So, in this discussion it may be prudent to revisit some of the past mistakes in the implementation of socialism as a socio-economic and political system. Though ideologies are indigenous, surely there are things we can learn. Let’s see what a cursory examination of history reveals to us:
In the chattel slave uprisings and subsequent Haitian revolution of the 1700′ s, following the final military defeat of the French, Dessalines and his successors were so traumatized by the chattel slave experience that they oversaw the systematic destruction of every aspect of the Haitian, national economic infrastructure which reminded them of the institution of slavery. This included the entire transport, mining, agriculture, and warehousing infrastructure which made Haiti the single most profitable colony in the history of the colonial era.
Instead of appropriating and maintaining this productive capacity for themselves, after decimating the infrastructure they restored communalist economics emptying subsistence farming. So fearful were they of the return of the French, and being isolated by the other (meaning all) economic powers in the western hemisphere -this fledgling socialist commune paid billions of dollars to the French right up until 1948 effectively bankrupting Haiti and taking it from one of the most productive economies in the western hemisphere to the poorest. Had Dessalines, and those that came after him, simply abolished the oppressive end exploitive relationships upon which their enslavement was based, maintained the economic infrastructure and productive capacity of the nation while instituting the same communal, (socialist in practice) mode of distribution of wealth, goods and services, the demand for Haitian sugar, rubber and coffee, globally, would have been tapped via South American and Caribbean proxies (Haiti sent military aid to Cimon Bolivar in Venezuela in the 1800’s – they had the means) effectively breaking the U.S embargo, maintaining its prosperity, despite the payoffs to the French, and today we’d see a much different Haitian history and nation – and as communal socialists may well have lived in a much different world.
As father of fascism, many on the left conveniently forget that prior to the ultra-right wing, jackboot politics of “The new Pax Romana,” Benito Mussolini was a leading official in the Italian Socialist Party, an avowed Marxist (at least in self-description). So how then did he go from a proponent of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia to the ultra-reactionary book burning, race mysticism of fascist nationalism?
The answer is two-fold and was repeated only a short time later in Germany with the Brown Shirts and Hitler’s “National Socialist” NSDAP Party (the Nazis).
During the height of the Great Depression Italian socialists clung to mechanistic, Marxist economic dogma which failed to feed, house, clothe and warm the deprived Italian masses, while the sure economic benefits of seizing wealth and resources by force of arms from the “lesser nations and subject races to the greater glory of the “Pax Romana” and “The New Empire” were readily understandable and visually in reach. Mussolini argued their ability to conquer others and the inability of others to stop them was all the justification needed to legitimize the fascist enterprise – the Italian people agreed and supported him as did the German people with Hitler a short time later.
Which brings me to point 2) Mussolini understood what the mechanistic Marxist could not: the nature and structure of patriarchal, authoritarian, European society lent itself to the social manipulation of mysticism and ultra-nationalist zealotry. He understood that psychological constructs were more capable of influencing masses of people than were data or external, material conditions – the perceptions of which could be manipulated. Amazingly, the socialist of this time discounted the existence of “psychology” as an influence on social conditions, or even a verifiable factor, period – reducing man to mechanical processes alone. Hitler continuously stressed that one could not influence the masses with arguments, proofs and knowledge, but only with feelings and beliefs. These two points are exceedingly complex end interconnected, involving everything from the misapplication of dialectical materialism to patriarchal, authoritarian, sexual conservatism as a basis for ultra-right wing reaction.
But, for the sake of expediency, I ‘ll highlight a few key points and move on. The application of mechanistic Marxism as a tool for economic and social empowerment in Italy and Germany has fertile ground in the industrial workers sector, but its narrow interpretation applied solely to the sphere of subjective economic processes and government policies. It was thus, doomed from the outset. When it tried, and failed, to implement industrial and agricultural soviets to feed the starving masses of workers (due primarily to the opposition of industrial capitalist and their program of bloody sabotage and brutal intimidation), they also failed to note or comprehend the development of subjective contradictions within the minds of these same workers .
The socialists failed to make use of their own method of dialectical materialism to comprehend this new historical reality of fascism, which neither Marx or Engels had encountered, and Lenin recognized too late. It was not that the socialists of that time did not understand the progressive farces of society where its productive farces or the contradictions of as they related to real life. They wrote the book on it. Their failure was to understand the forces that retarded social progress (such as fascism) and degenerated into hollow formulas as opposed to assessing the concrete socio-economic and mass psychological factors of the social changes that extreme economic deprivation was creating. Instead of the economic crisis leaving the mass clearly to the left, it made them feint left then ride hard for the right. The result was a split between the economic basis developing to the left, and the ideology of broad levers of society developing to the right. The role of ideology and emotional attitudes, unanalyzed and uncontested by an oblivious left, had contradictory and devastating repercussions on the economic basis for change. The left did not understand that the basic structure of reactionary man’s mind, especially in patriarchal authoritarian Europe, was capable of subordinating its objective economic interests to its subjective emotional attitudes where no opposition to this tendency was present. The failure to address those material needs through socialism further underscored the potential inherent in this new uItra-nationalistic doctrine – fascism.
What Italy teaches us is two prime points and one cognizant lesson:
we cannot afford to field ineffective economic policies which fail to meet the people’s needs, they will reject us, and thus, their own interests.
It must be understood “… revolution is a war for the minds of the masses.”
The psychological structures of the masses, and our influence on those structures towards scientific, socialist economics and principles of collective life, are central to our entire struggle.
If you all recall, in a single generation, the New Afrikan colony went from the Black Liberation Movement to reverting back to right-wing lumpen-proletariat expressions (circa 1985 to present) as a direct outgrowth of multiple, adverse psychological factors (the loss of many New Afrikan teachers to integration and busing policies, the introduction of crack and popularization of narco-trafficking and social empowerment through gang warfare, a move to the right and rejection of radicalism amongst Reagan-era New Afrikan intellectuals and co-option of radical voices or marginalization of the same, a resurgence of Baptist Evangelical Christianity in the mid-west and south, etc.).
George’s statement that, “The principle reservoir of revolutionary potential in Amerika lies in wait inside the Black colony, its sheer numerical strength, its desperate historical relationship to the violence of the productive system and the fact of its present status in the creation of wealth, forces the Black stratum at the base of the whole class structure into the forefront of any revolutionary scheme”, is still true. Yet, the practical application of socialism – or true social change – is a remote one in the New Afrika colony.
The U.S. S. R’ s implementation of a bourgeois, bureaucratic state oligarchy under Stalin, in essence removing power from the Soviets and concentrating it in the Kremlin, abandoning the 3rd. revolutionary international, and purging its most advanced elements, (Lenin and Trotsky) sounded the death knell for soviet socialism. Which warns us of the danger of totalitarian sentiments and personality cultism in the political application of socialism. A trend that was repeated with Kruchev, Breznev and Gorbatchov – ultimately dismantling the mighty U.S.S.R under Yeltsin.
But for a more contemporary view of Stalinist, Bureaucratic deformation of a socialist economy – we need look no further than China. In China we find a deformed worker’s state strangled by the global capitalist construct into accepting market reformation, in which a privileged, parasitic bureaucracy sits atop collectivized property relationships developed by the glorious 1949 revolution! Guided by a desire to protect its privileges, the bureaucracy defends state property only to the extent it fears the working masses.
As scientific socialists, we see collective economics based on democratic centralist planning as essential for truly developing the productive forces of society. We seek to liberate the creative and imaginative powers of humanity, which have been shackled by capitalism and class divisions. This brings us to the second flaw inherent in the Chinese approach to socialism which doomed it from the outset: single state socialism.
Capitalism is a global monopoly construct that, though competing with one another, unifies as a reactionary survival mechanism against anything resembling revolutionary, scientific socialism. The concept of “single state socialism”, or juche as it’s known in North Korea (the legacy of Il Jung Kim), in essence, dooms a socialist economy to the whims of monopoly capitalist pressures (through trade embargoes and other restrictions on natural resources or technology necessary to run a modern industrialized nation that cannot be domestically found, refined or produced by the socialist state in sufficient volume to meet its needs or on par with the capitalist), eventually resulting in capitulation to “market reforms” or becoming a vassal nation of another power (i.e., North Korea is a vassal state of China).
The very conception of a truly socialist future presupposes a global economic order based on the seizure of the productive resources of the advanced capitalist states through international revolutionary war. There is an inherent tendency (where personality cult does not overshadow as in North Korea) for Stalinist bureaucracy to abandon true socialism in favor of “market reforms ” with output and prices determined through micronized competition between enterprises; wages geared to enterprise profitability, price subsidies are eliminated resulting in higher inflation, the role of petty capitalist entrepreneurs is expanded, increased commercial and financial ties to western and Japanese capitalism, including joint ventures are encouraged. This all strengthens the internal forces of capitalist counter-revolution. Mao made his mistake in economic policy development by basing it on bureaucratic commands and arbitrariness instead of socialist democracy (workers communes). Trotsky, in his piece, “The Revolution Betrayed”, said of the U.S.S.R under Stalin that “Soviet products are as though branded with the gray label of indifference, under a nationalized (socialist) economy , quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative – conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies end flattery (which the U.S.S.R had become under Stalin).” When we speak of political and economic revolution to establish a collective democracy it must strengthen, not weaken, the scientific socialist commune.
This dogma of “socialism in one country” is anti-socialistic. The problem of privation in the rural areas of China, across North Korea, the entire world for that matter, can only be resolved through successful international socialist revolution. To underscore this point, the entire concept of “socialism in one country” is the bureaucracies’ fruitless pursuit for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism, a position that has undermined the defense of socialists end socialist states, not least through the betrayal of socialist revolutions internationally. Any serious talk of successful, international, socialist revolution will be decided here in the belly of the imperialist U.S beast. The lessons here are clear, ideological consistency and advance of democratic totalitarianism is central to our socialist ambitions – and we have not won until we win the World (our positive objective).
The core psychologies of socialism and capitalism are diametrically opposed to one another, their care values and motive forces in perpetual conflict. Scientific socialism is guided by principles of collective life which holds genuine concern for one’s fellow man/woman as a preeminent consideration, and puts the interests of the collective before one’s own. In contrast, capitalist psychology promotes such concepts as Gordon Gekko’s iconic “greed is good” diatribe from the movie “Wall Street” and places self -interest as the central psychological concern. Key to reinforcing this psychological state is the basis of competition as the catalyst for innovation and productivity, as a form or socio-economic “natural selection,” appealing to the basest and most predatory instincts of the human social creature. Key to the maximization of competition among workers and enterprises is the “incentive interest.” One of the prevailing arguments made by supporters of market capitalism is that the per capita productivity of wage-based labor (capitalist) is superior to that in socialist economies because superior performance is rewarded with additional material wealth which, in turn, translates into a higher standard of living amongst the populations of capitalist states. This material interest itself translates into a higher interest for capita list states workers to work harder, be more productive, and compete more intensely with other workers for the notice of management or owners which will translate into promotion(s) or increased wages – the material incentive. It is the position of market, capitalist economies that the productive power of capitalism, both individually and nationally (i.e., gross domestic product) will always outstrip that in socialist economies because the incentive interest is present in capitalist economies and absent in socialist economies. Scientific socialist, unlike vulgar Marxist, mechanistic socialist, or dogmatic “MLM” (Marxism, Leninism, Maoism) ideologies, employs dialectical materialism – not communist cannon – as the primary tool of analysis, dispassionately and objectively and there is no dispute that the additional stock option, performance-based Christmas bonus, or company car are all effective incentives to increase productivity.
The simple fact that selling one’s labor to those who own the means of production is the sole “legal” way for workers to generate money to survive in a capitalist economy, and the incentive interest is a clear path to more of that precious cash, clearly supports a motivation to increase labor productivity. If we analyze the few remaining, practicing socialist economies in relation to nations in the global capitalist construct with equitable populations and land mass – at first glance it’ s clear the capitalist states (i.e., Thailand (capitalist) vs. Vietnam (socialist) ) G.D.P far outstrips the socialist ones (i.e., the Bahamas vs. Cuba). But what is conveniently overlooked by capitalist economists is the incentive interest of capitalism notwithstanding, capitalism is a global construct of interconnected markets that support global growth while, simultaneously competing within this network of economies. The work force and industries of Thailand or the Bahamas do not have to contend with the economic sanctions, trade embargos/limitations, import tariffs and technological exclusion acts that the labor force of Vietnam or Cuba have to contend with which are designed to intentionally undermine the productive capacity and success of these socialist economies.
Such restrictions by global capitalist states are eased only to the degree that “market reforms” in these socialist states allow for the penetration of capital, exploitation of resources or labor, end access to consumers, all of which deforms the workers state end sets the stage for capitalist counterrevolution. Nevertheless, it would be unscientific to deny the productive and innovative impact of the material incentive interest in a capitalist economy. But, is this material incentive a necessary component of human productive capacity? Can man be motivated to higher performance by some incentive other than more cash? This is an important question if we’re seriously speaking of convincing the people to abandon market capitalism in favor of scientific socialism.
It is my contention that the objective economic conditions of a capitalist economy make the incentive interest a key subjective psychological factor for the acceptance of wage slavery and active participation in their own exploitation. Inversely, it is also my contention that the objective economic conditions of a scientific, socialist economy (where material needs are met by the commune) make the material incentive interest an unnecessary component, and the subjective psychological considerations of principles of collective life and the influence incentive of democratic, centralist organization sufficient motivation for equal, if not more, productive labor capacity.
Economist from Harvard University conducted an experiment with ninth grade students where they were offered a relatively significant cash reward, and the chance for more, if they maintained minimum, educational standards set by the researchers. The researchers were shocked to find a paltry 30% increase in educational performance set by the study – and one of the subjects highlighted in the study, an intentional underachiever – the popular guy and class clown – made a conscious decision that he could not trade his social life and peer standing for the effort necessary to get the cash. For this kid, and a significant number of others, the social empowerment of the peer group was a greater Incentive than the cash.
I raised this point in defense of socialism’s psychological incentive (principles of collective life) vs. the material incentive of capitalism with a friend in a conversation on the yard – his reply was: “The kid would have made a different choice if he had bills to pay.” I couldn’t argue with that point, yet it only served to underscore the compulsion of self-interest-orientated psychologies (the “I/Me” mentality) that are the hallmark of capitalism.
I also noted the flaw here in the assessment: in a socialist state, your “bills” are non-existent as your material needs are addressed by the commune. It is my contention that in a scientific, socialist economy, where survival is not contingent on the wage slave system of competitive labor, the desire to increase the prosperity of the collective and the incentive of having greater influence if you have greater insight, skill or ability in a specific field, is sufficient incentive to maximize human productive advancement and innovation. Thought (subjective) is the origin of actions which forge the material world (objective) – simultaneously, it is the objective, material conditions of life which influence what, and how we think. Living in a society where egalitarian mores are the norm, where human need is the primary motivation for material production and distribution, where being generous, sharing and selfless is virtuous not “naïve” or “perilous,” where the success of the collective is more vital than the desires of the individual, where everyone’s opinion has value and the most effective ideas are those that are adopted, will inevitably forge mindsets with motivations and incentive-triggers that are much different than those in a traditional, capitalist economy.
I, like all of us, was raised and developed in this malignant, bourgeoisie society – but, after making the transition and undergoing internal revolution many years ago – as a scientific socialist, I asked myself these same questions – and answered them frankly and honestly. Would I rather have my own freedom – or the freedom of our leading Party officials? Would I rather have $140.00 in supplies – or $20.00 worth for each of us here? Is the work I’m doing for myself – or for the Party, this body and the people (one in the same)? On and on I went -and in every instance I put the interests of the Party, people and our cause before myself and have done so for many, many years.
This, to me, signals (since I know so many others here of like mind) that our core psychology is not determined by mere objective, material conditions but also influenced by our concepts of truth and adhered to by our will and commitment to that truth. Principles of collective life are lived daily and influence every aspect of the socialists day-to-day activities.
So, how can we promote and popularize scientific socialism as a viable alternative in our own communities and daily lives? I believe it begins with the man himself, our daily practice and interactions with one another and the people. Practice selfless and equalitarian giving. Live generosity. If you are aware that someone needs something – and you can meet that need – do so without their even having to ask. In fact, actively inquire as to the needs and concerns of your Comrades and the people. Genuine concern should flow naturally and organically through your personal relationships. Facilitate cooperation among others and foster unity wherever you are. Actively think of new and imaginative ways you can strengthen and support the collective, and develop yourself and your abilities to their maximum potential so you will be more capable of making a meaningful contribution to the Collective, thereby, enriching us all. See the world and your place in it in terms of us and we – ensuring every decision is weighed with and against the interest of the Collective (the People and Party) first, and all else flowing therefrom. The popularization of scientific socialism, especially the revolutionary variety, in the context of a contra-positive authoritarian regime like capitalist Amerikkka is (and must be viewed as) an effort in social engineering which must involve both subjective and objective factors.
To that end we must, as an organization, develop, field and maintain community development initiatives and economic programs that effectively meet the people’s needs, popularizing the practice of communal economics strategically (we may well need to use different terms to identify these efforts in a population that’s been conditioned to fear and reject socialism/communism), while educating and organizing the traditionally most revolutionary segments of the population (i.e., the lumpen proletariat and proletariat).
For purposes of this discussion I’ll outline two (2) programs and one (1) organizing effort developed right here in this region, with elements in this body.
1) The Youth Community Action program (Y-CAP) – Y-CAP is both an educational / training program and a socialist, economic non-profit initiative (in disguise), which targets underclass youth and neighborhoods employing volunteers from the youth’s own community and family to work in concert with Y-CAP organizers in a two phase development initiative.
PHASE 1 – involves a five (5) times a week, 2 1/2 hour (after school) educational and training initiative that focuses on history (from the true perspective – think Zinn, Diop and Dela Valle), cultural awareness (to retard racial conflicts and strife between oppressed nationalities such as Mexicans and New Afrikans), computer and technological literacy, the arts and science / engineering.
Three out of five days a week the final hour will be devoted to martial arts, self-defense training, and strategic thought. Participants must comply with the participation requirements of phase one to be eligible for phase two inclusion.
PHASE 2 – involves establishing a collectively owned, community based business which each youth participant will own an equal stake in and be trained in the area of the venture which best suits them. All will receive equal pay / profit portion (collective work and responsibility, egalitarian distribution of wealth). The pilot venture will be a custom car garage (think “pimp my ride”) where we will seek in-kind donations of equipment and old cars (all tax deductible), cash donations, and fund raiser revenue to fund the rest. Volunteers from that industry will train each youth in exchange for marketing publicity for their own business. And we’ll seek industry related corporate sponsors (socio-economic guerrilla war – using the enemy’s own resources to strengthen you). The cars will be retrofitted, rebuilt and “pimped out” into custom low riders, ‘donks’ and Euro-tuners and put on the lot for sale and website auction. The proceeds from each sale or client fix-up will be split equally among the youth (50% of the profit). 20% will go to expand the non-profit initiative. 20% will go to a college fund for them all and 10% will flow back into expanding their venture. We, in this manner, provide them with an economic incentive to be indoctrinated into scientific socialist practices and revolutionary progressive politics; bring the community closer to one another and the Party (mass line organization), and introduce a new source of revenue into the underclass community where that chapter of Y-CAP is based.
2) Closed-Circuit Economic Commune – The C. C. E. Commune focuses its efforts in a single designated underclass community, educating the people on the concept of collective ownership of business ventures and equalitarian distribution of wealth and employment – going to churches, mosques, community centers, street corners, and door to door with a simple informative / survey pamphlet. The concept is based on the design of a closed circuit capacitor which increases and amplifies electrical wattage by recycling a current on itself through a catalyst element like ionized zinc phosphorous or cadmium.
A dollar circulates in the average Jewish community for forty seven (47) days; in the “white” community for thirty eight (38) days; in the South Korean community for twenty eight (28) days; in the Mexican community for fifteen (15) days. But in the New Afrikan community a dollar circulates for … 17 seconds. Yes seconds. Comrades, we own so few of the economic institutions in our communities that seventeen (17) seconds after we spend one of our dollars it’s enriching some other community. I point this out not to stoke race -caste antagonisms, but to illustrate how little economic organization exists in the New Afrikan colony.
The closed circuit economic model is one that intentionally re-circulates and grows wealth within the community it was generated in initially. For example – in the south east San Diego community of Skyline reside some 10-15 thousand residents. We will request $1.00-$2.00 every two weeks from each able resident that will go to a central fund for a six (6) month period. Analyzing the purchasing habits and preferences of the residents who will use the majority of the balance of that fund (est. $100K in six months) to purchase a business which offers that most purchased good/service – say a bakery – which will be collectively owned by everyone in the community on the C.C.E. registry. we will hire only people from that community who are unemployed. All the profits (minus overhead) will go back to the central fund with 70% being paid out monthly to all registers in the form of a dividend check – the other 30% gaining interest in the central fund. We will keep collecting the $1.00-$2.00 every two weeks, depositing it in the central fund – in another six months we purchase a “sympathetic/support business” – which is a venture that depends on our contributes to the initial venture – say a grocery store. The grocery store will purchase its baked goods inventory exclusively from the commune bakery. Again, the grocery store will hire only people from that community that do not have a job. Again we repeat the process. In the next six months a cannery and packaging factory – on and on. In each successive expansion of the C.C.E commune, the unemployment rate drops until eventually we reach 100% employment. The dividend checks will grow as the number and prosperity of businesses grow, and; inevitably, we will reach complete, community economic interconnection (multiple enterprises that all do business with or support one another and the community). The central fund will continue to grow until it is sufficiently capitalized to establish our own credit commune – where people from the community can get guaranteed micro-loans, home and auto financing and standard banking services – and the community itself – own and operates it all – while being its own customer at the same time. In this way, the community becomes entirely independent of the standard competitive, capitalist economy through cooperative economics and collective work, distribution, and ownership. Once a full circuit is closed – we move to the next community, developing interrelated ventures that compliment one another and each community successfully. We only touch the capitalist economy where our own innovation and enterprises fail to meet the capacity, or is simply unable to. By means of the C.C.E commune we can clearly demonstrate that cooperation serves the interests of the underclass where competition cannot – and will not. It is a brief ‘walk’ through transfer culture from here to scientific, socialist economics.
Finally, the proletariat / lumpen-proletariat alliance initiative is a simple organizing effort between politically conscious prisoners, industrial and service labor organizations, immigrant labor organizations and unemployed or under-employed workers with class consciousness to commit to supporting one another in their mutual, class interests. This includes, but is not limited to developing strategies to organize and coordinate the various sectors of the labor force to increase employment opportunities, working condition and profit margins and benefits. Prisoners will / can strike in solidarity with organized labor, and organized labor can strike and support legislation for prisoner’s rights and community reentry initiatives such as community-based parole boards. Advanced prisoners, such as this body, can serve as strategic think tanks, research committees, policy statement authors, and immigrant workers rights drafters – churning out articles, essays and pamphlets articulating the issues and agitating in the communities. One of the primary problems facing the popularization of socialism in this nation is the disorganization of these most revolutionary segments of the population. The success of union busters and co- option of organized labor by corporate and state special interests, and the success of divisive polities which has driven wedges between prisoners, organized labor and immigrant workers dating back to Thomas Dorrs and the Hay Market massacre. We have it in our power with pen, paper and envelopes to start reforging those bonds.
Revolutionary, scientific socialism is more relevant, more necessary, more urgent now than ever. As the Vanguard Party of the most revolutionary segment of the New Afrikan colony, and the North Amerikan population – it is our duty to seek its popularization and establish its roots wherever we can. We have a world to win – let our contributions and sacrifices reflect this intent. Think on these things, they are cause for great meditation.
* “Social alienation” is a central component of market ‘sales theory’ and brand promotion in capitalist systems.
Heshima Jinsai has published multiple articles in progressive publications such as the S.F. Bay View, Prison Focus, and Turning The Tide. One of many dynamic activists in the New Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalist Collective Think Tank (N.C.T.T.), he co-founded the State Raised Foundation, co-authored the 10 Core Objectives for Progress and Social Transformation, as well as the 3 Pilot Programs. Imprisoned since 1993, he has been a tireless advocate for scientific socialism, community development, abolition of indefinite solitary confinement, anti-imperialism, prisoners’ human rights, and social equality. For more information, please go to ncttcorshu.org.
CaliforniaconsciousnessdialecticsHeshima DenhamJ. Heshima Denhampolitical activismScientific Socialism
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Chili Bowl
Kyle Larson scores first Chili Bowl Nationals victory
By Dustin LongJan 19, 2020, 12:09 AM EST
Kyle Larson passed Christopher Bell with 17 laps left and went on to win his first Chili Bowl Nationals crown Saturday night.
Bell, vying for a record-tying fourth consecutive win in the country’s premier midget race, finished second in the 24-car field at the River Spirit Expo Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Cannon McIntosh, 17 years old, finished third. NASCAR Xfinity driver Justin Allgaier placed 21st.
A year ago, Larson lost this race on the last lap to Bell. Larson had a large enough lead late in Saturday night’s race that Bell wasn’t close enough to make a move.
“Its a pretty different range of emotions 365 days later,” Larson said on the MavTV broadcast. “I feel like I’m going to pass out.
“I’m sorry NASCAR, I’m sorry Daytona, but this is the biggest (expletive) race I’ve ever won. I hope to win Daytona in a few weeks but this is bad ass.”
Here’s how other NASCAR competitors did in the various races Saturday that led to the A main that Larson won:
Dillon Welch, Alex Bowman and J.J. Yeley each failed to advance from the B2 Main.
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. failed to advance from the C1 Main.
Ryan Newman failed to advance from the D1 Main.
Chase Briscoe failed to advance from the B1 Main
You can’t even fully dream of moments like this. I thought I might know what it’d feel like to finally win this thing but after what I experienced tonight I had no clue! I’m so blessed to be with great people. Loved… https://t.co/G6kONqvk9e
— Kyle Larson (@KyleLarsonRacin) January 19, 2020
Can tell ya this. A year ago I couldn’t sleep cause I was so dejected. This year I can’t sleep cause I’m still effing pumped up!!!!
Someone’s ready to keep the momentum rolling into the @nascar season! Thanks to all of our great fans and partners for supporting Kyle, where ever or whatever he’s racing.@CreditOneBank @McDonalds pic.twitter.com/3tidzG5KbT
— CGR NASCAR Teams (@CGRnascar) January 19, 2020
#ChiliBowl2020 A-Feature Rundown. Congratulations Kyle Larson! pic.twitter.com/HwDyQZaTKI
— Chili Bowl Nationals (@cbnationals) January 19, 2020
Huge congrats to @KyleLarsonRacin on finally getting his @cbnationals win. @Paul_Silva57 and Kyle unstoppable since they built own team. @factorykahne #ChiliBowl2020
— Kasey Kahne (@kaseykahne) January 19, 2020
Hell yeah @KyleLarsonRacin!!! Finally got that @cbnationals 🏁 Congrats!!
— Kurt Busch (@KurtBusch) January 19, 2020
Big congratulations to @KyleLarsonRacin #ChiliBowl
— Dale Earnhardt Jr. (@DaleJr) January 19, 2020
Enjoyed the heck out of my first Chili Bowl experience, an amazing event I finally got to see in person. Happy for @KyleLarsonRacin, it’s been a long time coming!! https://t.co/AfXEimUW0f
Very cool seeing @KyleLarsonRacin finally pick up that win he’s been hunting down for years at the Chili Bowl!!
— Matt DiBenedetto (@mattdracing) January 19, 2020
Congrats to @KyleLarsonRacin Achieving something that is so difficult makes it even more gratifying when it finally happens. Great drive.
— Jeff Burton (@JeffBurton) January 19, 2020
Tags: Cannon McIntosh, chase briscoe, Chili Bowl, Dillon Welch, J.J. Yeley, justin allgaier, nascar, Alex Bowman, Chase Briscoe, Christopher Bell, J.J. Yeley, Justin Allgaier, Kyle Larson, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Ryan Newman
Christopher Bell win sends him to Saturday’s Chili Bowl feature
By Dustin LongJan 16, 2020, 11:18 PM EST
Three-time defending Chili Bowl Nationals champion Christopher Bell won his preliminary feature race Thursday to advance to Saturday night’s feature event.
The victory was his fifth consecutive preliminary night feature win at the Chili Bowl. Bell continued his strong week. He won the event’s race of champions earlier this week.
Thomas Meseraull finished second to also advance to Saturday’s main event.
The other preliminary feature winners this week have been Cannon McIntosh (Monday), Kyle Larson (Tuesday) and Rico Abreu (Wednesday). Abreu won back-to-back Chili Bowl titles before Bell’s run of three in a row.
“You know (Larson) is going to be there at the end,” Bell said in the press conference about Saturday night’s feature. “Rico is on kill mode. The champ is back. I think Rico is going to be really strong. Aaron Reutzel, my teammate, was outstanding at the end of the race Monday night. I think there are a ton of guys that will show up. I think we’re in for a treat Saturday.”
Friday will be the final preliminary night. NASCAR drivers Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Justin Allgaier are among those who will compete.
Christopher Bell wins John Christner Trucking Qualifying Night! pic.twitter.com/D6B9Ls2H5b
Last night was a lot of fun. One of the most special moments I’ve had in Tulsa.
Especially rewarding seeing how much @ChadBoat pours into making our @TBMotorsprts @iRacing @toyotaracing cars so strong! pic.twitter.com/K9h5EvvsGr
Tags: Aaron Reutzel, Cannon McIntosh, Chili Bowl, justin allgaier, nascar, Rico Abreu, Thomas Meseraull, Christopher Bell, Justin Allgaier, Kyle Larson, Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
Kyle Larson begins quest for elusive Chili Bowl Nationals title
Photo by Brian Lawdermilk/Getty Images
Kyle Larson‘s quest for his first Chili Bowl Nationals championship resumes tonight.
Larson, Alex Bowman and NBC Sports broadcaster Dillon Welch are among those scheduled to compete Tuesday, day two of the six-day event that concludes Saturday night at the River Spirit Expo Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
“There’s a handful of events throughout the year that get me excited, but the Chili Bowl is right up there at the top,” Larson said at a press conference Monday. “It’s hard to believe that this is my 13th year competing in this event. It’s pretty incredible. I look forward to it more and more each year.”
Larson finished second to Christopher Bell in last year’s Chili Bowl Nationals after being passed by Bell on the final lap.
“It took a few days, for sure, it took longer than any other race to get over that I’ve had in my career,” Larson said at Monday’s press conference of last year’s defeat. “I think when you go through defeats like that, it just makes you want it that much more and work harder to get better and probably, hopefully, someday when I do win, it’s going to make it feel that much more special. I would have obviously liked to (have won) but made a mistake and allowed Chris to get by and those are things you learn from. Hopefully, I don’t ever make that mistake again.”
On Monday night, 17-year-old Cannon McIntosh won his heat, qualifier and the feature to advance to Saturday’s main event. McIntosh drives for Keith Kunz Motorsports, which has won the last five Chili Bowl Nationals (Rico Abreu won in 2015-16 and Bell won from 2017-19).
Tyler Courtney finished second to also advance to Saturday night’s 55-lap A main.
NASCAR Xfinity driver Chase Briscoe finished ninth in Monday night’s feature race.
Had a super fast car all night and in the feature completely missed the setup. Live and learn. Ended up 9th, we will have some work to do come Saturday.
RESULTS >> Cannon McIntosh Rolls Undefeated On Cummins Qualifying Night! Find out more at https://t.co/0L20M8zYEU pic.twitter.com/GdFGDtQnCC
Tags: Cannon McIntosh, chase briscoe, Chili Bowl, Dillon Welch, Keith Kunz Motorsports, nascar, NBC Sports, Rico Abreu, Tyler Courtney, Alex Bowman, Chase Briscoe, Christopher Bell, Kyle Larson
Gio Scelzi hopes to use Chili Bowl as springboard to NASCAR
Photo: Rich Forman
By Jerry BonkowskiJan 13, 2020, 11:00 AM EST
Giovanni Scelzi grew up the son of a four-time National Hot Rod Association champion, and has been making a significant name of his own racing dirt midgets and sprints, particularly in the World of Outlaws series.
But there’s another race series that the 18-year-old Scelzi – “Gio” for short – has his sights set upon: NASCAR.
If all goes well, Scelzi hopes to begin climbing the NASCAR ladder – perhaps as early as this year.
But first things first: the Fresno, California native is participating in this week’s Chili Bowl in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’s one of more than 350 entries that also includes good friend Kyle Larson, plus other NASCAR drivers including Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Alex Bowman, Chase Briscoe, J.J. Yeley, James Davison, Ryan Ellis, Ryan Newman, Justin Allgaier and Christopher Bell, who has won the Chili Bowl the last three years.
Scelzi isn’t the only aspiring NASCAR driver from the World of Outlaws. David Gravel, who is also competing in the Chili Bowl, recently signed a part-time Truck Series deal with GMS Racing.
Once the Chili Bowl concludes Saturday night, Scelzi, son of four-time NHRA champion Gary Scelzi, and younger brother of fellow sprint/midget car racer Dominic Scelzi, will then travel with Larson to Australia, where they’ll compete in several races, most notably the biggest event of the Australian sprint car season, The Classic, on Jan. 23-24.
Gio Scelzi after one of his nine wins last season. (Jason Tucker Photos)
Needless to say, all the time together with Larson will give the youngest Scelzi a chance to further pick his fellow Californian’s mind about how to reach and race in NASCAR.
“I love sprint car racing, that’s always where my heart will be,” Scelzi told NBC Sports last week. “It’s obviously what I grew up doing, dirt racing.
“I’ll still race sprint cars as much as I can, but in the next 5-10 years, I hope to get into Trucks and Xfinity to get towards NASCAR (Cup).”
Scelzi and his father have been working on getting Gio some seat time this year in the ARCA Menards Series West (formerly K&N Pro Series West).
“Hopefully this year or next year I’ll transition over to ARCA, which is a good stepping stone, do something along those lines and get my feet wet on pavement,” Gio Scelzi said. “I’ve done some testing the last year, just trying to see if that’s the direction I want to go.
“Nothing’s been announced yet, but I think something will be announced here pretty soon to hopefully go down that path.”
Even though their father was one of the most prolific drivers in NHRA history, Gio and his brother Dominic went in a different direction when they first started racing themselves.
Instead of the straight and narrow, they chose round and dirty, you might say.
“The hardest part of drag racing, there really is no way for a kid that can race anything before you’re 16,” Scelzi said. “That’s kind of the age where you can earn a license and are allowed to race under power and really learn how to race.
“But in dirt racing, there’s micro-sprints, outlaw karts, you name it, there’s all kind of kids classes you could do to learn how to race. My dad went to dirt races a lot in California and really enjoyed it, was good friends with (NASCAR Hall of Famer) Tony Stewart and (sprint car racer) Danny Lasoski, so he always had a friend base in dirt racing and that was a way to get me and my brother in a race car when we were really young.”
Dominic began racing go-karts at five years old and Gio began racing micro-sprints at 6 at their home track, Plaza Park Raceway in Visalia, Calif., about 30 miles from Fresno.
“I think sprint car racing is so unique from other forms of racing,” Gio Scelzi said. “With a 410 sprint car, around the United States, you have the World of Outlaws, the All-Stars (All Star Circuit of Champions), IRA (Sprint Series), Knoxville (Nationals), I mean there’s probably 20 or 30 race tracks racing on a given weekend, with the same rules package, the same kind of cars and there are very good race car drivers in their own region.
“With a sprint car, what I’ve done the last two years, I’ve been based in Indianapolis and race wherever we want. If we want to race in an All-Star race in Ohio, we can go there. If we want to race an Outlaw race in North Dakota, we can go there.
“There are so many different options with that same rules package that is such a simple, powerful, exciting race car, I don’t think there’s no other kind of professional racing where you can make a living at it that has that kind of atmosphere.
“If you’ve got the money and the motors to race, you can race every weekend. Just the World of Outlaws schedule is 95 races. Or you can race the All-Stars, which is 50 races, and then maybe 20 races in Outlaws when you want to. There’s so much freedom with a team where you want to go and where you want to race, I think that’s what makes it unique.”
Gio Scelzi in one of his midget races last season. (Jason Tucker Photos.)
The youngest Scelzi has steadily been making a name for himself in the sprint car dirt racing world. At the age of 16 in 2018, he became the youngest winner in World of Outlaws history. He also won his first USAC Midget race in just his sixth career start in the series.
And at 17 last season, he was the youngest winner in the Knoxville Raceway’s history when he won an All Star Circuit of Champions race there, one of the most notable outings in a season that saw Scelzi make 71 starts across several dirt racing series, earning nine wins, 23 top-five and 40 top-10 finishes.
This week is the second Chili Bowl for Scelzi. He did well in his first start in 2018, finishing sixth in his preliminary race, was second in the B Main and then was running in the top 10 in the week’s main event – until the motor in his midget car blew halfway through the race and he finished last in the 24-car field.
Scelzi is racing at the Chili Bowl — his first race of the week is this evening, which kicks off the Nationals’ six-night run at the Tulsa Expo Center — as part of the Toyota Development program with Chad Boat (son of former IndyCar driver Billy Boat). His teammates include Christopher Bell and NBC Sports reporter Dillon Welch.
“I’m excited for it,” Gio Scelzi told NBC Sports. “The Chili Bowl as an event is huge and keeps growing and growing and attracting more attention through NASCAR and all kinds of racing fans.
“There’s a lot of good race cars, it seems like every year more and more guys and good race car drivers all-around get a ride and want to participate.”
Here’s a video of Scelzi getting ready and then taking to the track for his first practice session Monday (video courtesy Toyota Racing Development):
https://nascar.nbcsports.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2020/01/Gio-Monday-Practice-30-seconds-1.mp4
Tags: ARCA, arca menards series, chase briscoe, Chili Bowl, Chili Bowl Nationals, Dominic Scelzi, Gary Scelzi, Gio Scelzi, Giovanni Scelzi, James Davison, JJ Yeley, justin allgaier, nascar, NHRA, Ryan Ellis, World of Outlaws, Alex Bowman, Chase Briscoe, Christopher Bell, J.J. Yeley, James Davison, Justin Allgaier, Kyle Larson, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Ryan Ellis, Ryan Newman
Kyle Larson scores first Chili Bowl Nationals victory January 19, 2020 12:09 am Friday 5: Rule change is chance for drivers to go back in time January 17, 2020 6:30 am Christopher Bell win sends him to Saturday’s Chili Bowl feature January 16, 2020 11:18 pm Kyle Larson begins quest for elusive Chili Bowl Nationals title January 14, 2020 9:17 am Gio Scelzi hopes to use Chili Bowl as springboard to NASCAR January 13, 2020 11:00 am Kyle Larson ready to fly to Chili Bowl, Australia and Daytona January 9, 2020 3:05 pm Jimmie Johnson hopes for ‘more crossover’ between auto racing stars January 22, 2019 5:59 pm Karsyn Elledge, granddaughter of Dale Earnhardt, impresses in Chili Bowl debut January 22, 2019 10:38 am Landon Cassill set to make Chili Bowl debut December 28, 2018 4:00 pm Christopher Bell, Kyle Larson highlight preliminary Chili Bowl list December 18, 2018 7:03 pm Long: Why must-win situation was no pressure for Christopher Bell November 13, 2018 10:30 am NASCAR wants no ‘muzzle’ on Kyle Larson’s love of dirt racing September 26, 2018 2:50 pm Christopher Bell wins Thursday night’s A main at Chili Bowl Nationals January 11, 2018 11:10 pm Kyle Larson covets Chili Bowl over Daytona 500, but still wants to win ‘Great American Race’ January 11, 2018 3:30 pm Kyle Larson wins A main on opening night of Chili Bowl Nationals January 10, 2018 12:19 am Kyle Larson highlights NASCAR drivers entered into Chili Bowl Nationals January 2, 2018 5:20 pm ‘Old dog’ Matt Crafton preparing to make USAC Midget debut Saturday night December 15, 2017 3:00 pm Piece by piece: Christopher Bell rebuilt midget car in his house May 26, 2017 8:30 am Lifelong dream comes true: Christopher Bell wins Chili Bowl in native Oklahoma January 15, 2017 1:24 pm Tony Stewart shows how he hopes to feel after tonight’s Chili Bowl finale January 14, 2017 3:05 pm Several NASCAR drivers still hope to make Chili Bowl title race tonight, fans fight ice storm January 14, 2017 1:23 pm Christopher Bell wins qualifying feature at Chili Bowl January 13, 2017 7:45 am Multiple NASCAR drivers entered in Chili Bowl Nationals January 9, 2017 6:30 pm Multiple NASCAR drivers entered into 31st Chili Bowl Midget Nationals December 31, 2016 11:02 am Chili Bowl helped give Kasey Kahne change he ‘needed’ after 2015 January 17, 2016 6:27 pm Rico Abreu defends Chili Bowl title in duel with Bryan Clauson January 17, 2016 1:06 am Fan in confrontation with Tony Stewart is a Tulsa Sheriff’s deputy January 16, 2016 2:06 pm Christopher Bell dominates Thursday night race before Chili Bowl January 15, 2016 12:16 am Defending Chili Bowl champ Rico Abreu moves closer to repeating with feature win Wednesday January 14, 2016 12:29 am Alex Bright narrowly wins Chili Bowl’s Tuesday night A-Main, other results January 13, 2016 1:29 am Kevin Swindell back in Tulsa for Chili Bowl in new role as team owner January 12, 2016 1:39 pm Tony Stewart reveals plans for when he leaves Sprint Cup Series January 12, 2016 11:07 am Rico Abreu, Kasey Kahne, Kyle Larson part of Chili Bowl’s NASCAR list December 23, 2015 6:55 pm Kasey Kahne plans to run in Chili Bowl next year February 13, 2015 2:54 pm
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Solvent extraction of Au(III) for preparation of a carrier-free multitracer and an Au tracer from an Au target
R. G. Weginwar, Y. Kobayashi, S. Ambe, B. Liu, S. Enomoto, F. Ambe
Separation of Au(III) and various carrier-free radionuclides by solvent extraction was investigated using an Au target irradiated by an energetic heavy-ion beam. Percentage extraction of Au(III) and coextraction of the radionuclides were determined with varying parameters such as kinds of solvent, molarity of HCl or pH, and Au concentration. Under the conditions where Au(III) was effectively extracted, namely extraction with ethyl acetate or isobutyl methyl ketone from 3 mol·dm-3 HCl, carrier-free radionuclides of many elements were found to be more or less coextracted. Coextraction of radionuclides of some elements was found to increase with an increase in the concentration of Au(III). This finding is ascribed to the formation of strong association of the complex of these elements with chloroauric acid. In order to avoid serious loss of these elements by the extraction, lowering of the Au(III) concentration or the use of a masking agent such as sodium citrate is necessary. Gold(III) was shown to be effectively back extracted with a 0.1 mol·dm-3 aqueous solution of 2-amino-2-hydroxymethyl-1,3-propanediol. Thus, a radiochemical procedure has been established for preparing a carrier-free multitracer and an Au tracer with carrier form from an Au target irradiated with a heavy-ion beam. Both tracers are now used individually for chemical and biological experiments.
Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry
Heavy Ions
Chemical elements
Ion beams
Weginwar, R. G., Kobayashi, Y., Ambe, S., Liu, B., Enomoto, S., & Ambe, F. (1996). Solvent extraction of Au(III) for preparation of a carrier-free multitracer and an Au tracer from an Au target. Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry, 210(1), 45-54. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02055405
Solvent extraction of Au(III) for preparation of a carrier-free multitracer and an Au tracer from an Au target. / Weginwar, R. G.; Kobayashi, Y.; Ambe, S.; Liu, B.; Enomoto, S.; Ambe, F.
In: Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry, Vol. 210, No. 1, 1996, p. 45-54.
Weginwar, RG, Kobayashi, Y, Ambe, S, Liu, B, Enomoto, S & Ambe, F 1996, 'Solvent extraction of Au(III) for preparation of a carrier-free multitracer and an Au tracer from an Au target', Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry, vol. 210, no. 1, pp. 45-54. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02055405
Weginwar RG, Kobayashi Y, Ambe S, Liu B, Enomoto S, Ambe F. Solvent extraction of Au(III) for preparation of a carrier-free multitracer and an Au tracer from an Au target. Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry. 1996;210(1):45-54. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02055405
Weginwar, R. G. ; Kobayashi, Y. ; Ambe, S. ; Liu, B. ; Enomoto, S. ; Ambe, F. / Solvent extraction of Au(III) for preparation of a carrier-free multitracer and an Au tracer from an Au target. In: Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry. 1996 ; Vol. 210, No. 1. pp. 45-54.
@article{a513b8b4fe6d4e579da5c142ef83d393,
title = "Solvent extraction of Au(III) for preparation of a carrier-free multitracer and an Au tracer from an Au target",
abstract = "Separation of Au(III) and various carrier-free radionuclides by solvent extraction was investigated using an Au target irradiated by an energetic heavy-ion beam. Percentage extraction of Au(III) and coextraction of the radionuclides were determined with varying parameters such as kinds of solvent, molarity of HCl or pH, and Au concentration. Under the conditions where Au(III) was effectively extracted, namely extraction with ethyl acetate or isobutyl methyl ketone from 3 mol·dm-3 HCl, carrier-free radionuclides of many elements were found to be more or less coextracted. Coextraction of radionuclides of some elements was found to increase with an increase in the concentration of Au(III). This finding is ascribed to the formation of strong association of the complex of these elements with chloroauric acid. In order to avoid serious loss of these elements by the extraction, lowering of the Au(III) concentration or the use of a masking agent such as sodium citrate is necessary. Gold(III) was shown to be effectively back extracted with a 0.1 mol·dm-3 aqueous solution of 2-amino-2-hydroxymethyl-1,3-propanediol. Thus, a radiochemical procedure has been established for preparing a carrier-free multitracer and an Au tracer with carrier form from an Au target irradiated with a heavy-ion beam. Both tracers are now used individually for chemical and biological experiments.",
author = "Weginwar, {R. G.} and Y. Kobayashi and S. Ambe and B. Liu and S. Enomoto and F. Ambe",
journal = "Journal of Radioanalytical Chemistry",
T1 - Solvent extraction of Au(III) for preparation of a carrier-free multitracer and an Au tracer from an Au target
AU - Weginwar, R. G.
AU - Kobayashi, Y.
AU - Ambe, S.
AU - Liu, B.
AU - Enomoto, S.
AU - Ambe, F.
N2 - Separation of Au(III) and various carrier-free radionuclides by solvent extraction was investigated using an Au target irradiated by an energetic heavy-ion beam. Percentage extraction of Au(III) and coextraction of the radionuclides were determined with varying parameters such as kinds of solvent, molarity of HCl or pH, and Au concentration. Under the conditions where Au(III) was effectively extracted, namely extraction with ethyl acetate or isobutyl methyl ketone from 3 mol·dm-3 HCl, carrier-free radionuclides of many elements were found to be more or less coextracted. Coextraction of radionuclides of some elements was found to increase with an increase in the concentration of Au(III). This finding is ascribed to the formation of strong association of the complex of these elements with chloroauric acid. In order to avoid serious loss of these elements by the extraction, lowering of the Au(III) concentration or the use of a masking agent such as sodium citrate is necessary. Gold(III) was shown to be effectively back extracted with a 0.1 mol·dm-3 aqueous solution of 2-amino-2-hydroxymethyl-1,3-propanediol. Thus, a radiochemical procedure has been established for preparing a carrier-free multitracer and an Au tracer with carrier form from an Au target irradiated with a heavy-ion beam. Both tracers are now used individually for chemical and biological experiments.
AB - Separation of Au(III) and various carrier-free radionuclides by solvent extraction was investigated using an Au target irradiated by an energetic heavy-ion beam. Percentage extraction of Au(III) and coextraction of the radionuclides were determined with varying parameters such as kinds of solvent, molarity of HCl or pH, and Au concentration. Under the conditions where Au(III) was effectively extracted, namely extraction with ethyl acetate or isobutyl methyl ketone from 3 mol·dm-3 HCl, carrier-free radionuclides of many elements were found to be more or less coextracted. Coextraction of radionuclides of some elements was found to increase with an increase in the concentration of Au(III). This finding is ascribed to the formation of strong association of the complex of these elements with chloroauric acid. In order to avoid serious loss of these elements by the extraction, lowering of the Au(III) concentration or the use of a masking agent such as sodium citrate is necessary. Gold(III) was shown to be effectively back extracted with a 0.1 mol·dm-3 aqueous solution of 2-amino-2-hydroxymethyl-1,3-propanediol. Thus, a radiochemical procedure has been established for preparing a carrier-free multitracer and an Au tracer with carrier form from an Au target irradiated with a heavy-ion beam. Both tracers are now used individually for chemical and biological experiments.
JO - Journal of Radioanalytical Chemistry
JF - Journal of Radioanalytical Chemistry
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Democratic Platform 2016-2020
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Community Leader Cyndi Munson Announces Candidacy for House District 85
Home / Oklahoma Dems / Community Leader Cyndi Munson Announces Candidacy for House District 85
by Angela A in Oklahoma Dems
Kylie Shelley
Cyndi Munson, community leader and advocate, announced her candidacy for House District 85. The House seat became vacant when Representative David Dank, R- Oklahoma City, passed away last week. Governor Mary Fallin is expected to call a special election within the coming days.
“Representative Dank left a legacy that will live on for many years to come,” said Munson. “Our district lost a tireless worker, a man of good conscience, and a strong voice for seniors. He was highly regarded as someone who stood on principle and made our district proud. I hope to be a strong servant and continue the tradition of service-based leadership at the Capitol.
Cyndi has spent a decade working and volunteering in Oklahoma City’s non-profit community. She spent the last five years working with Girl Scouts of Western Oklahoma, providing leadership programs for thousands of girls in low-income schools, juvenile detention centers and public housing. She currently serves as Vice Chair of the Infant Crisis Services Young Professionals Group, secretary of the University of Central Oklahoma Alumni Association Board of Directors, member of the Oklahoma Messages Project Board of Directors, member of the Oklahoma Women’s Coalition, member of the University of Central Oklahoma Young Leaders Alliance, and alumni member of the Department of Corrections Leadership Academy.
“Oklahoma’s schools are in serious need of more resources and more teachers,” said Munson. We have an economy in Oklahoma City that needs to diversify and build more quality jobs for our families. Oklahoma is the least healthy state for women and girls. And 1 out of 4 children go to bed hungry every night in our state. We have serious problems that need leaders with the right type of experience to find solutions to these issues. I am the type of leader that puts the needs of her community and state ahead of partisan politics.”
For more information about the campaign, please visit http://www.cyndimunson.com.
Legislation Filed To Tackle Homeless Youth Quality-of-Life Issues
by Angela A Jan 16 2020
Provenzano Files ‘Student Borrower Bill of Rights’ Legislation
Dunnington Legislation Looks to End Oklahoma’s Death Penalty
ODP Names Social Justice Advocate as New Interim Executive Director
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Evaluation Blues
Yesterday I spoke with a young teacher who told me this was his worst year ever. I asked him why and he told me it was the evaluation system. He says it has him and everyone on edge. I asked whether he had gotten a negative rating and he said no, he hadn't. He was just feeling a general vibe of uneasiness. He told me our school wasn't what it used to be four years ago.
One of the things I found really shocking was that this is a guy who generally complains about nothing, ever. He has this very positive vibe, and this makes me think he must be a great teacher. I would be very happy to have someone like him looking after my kid. He told me that, though there is a whole lot of focus on test scores, that he doesn't worry about that first and foremost. Who knows where our kids come from? Who knows what they have going on at home? It's our job to show them there's a whole world of possibility out there.
I agree with that. Particularly if home is a place of uncertainty, or worse, there's a need for kids to see adults who are getting by. There's a need for kids to see there is possibility, that there is a way to maneuver through this world while managing to stay happy. That's why it's counter-intuitive, not to mention idiotic, to stress out teachers to the breaking point. If this teacher feels stressed out, then so does every teacher.
It's easy for Michael Mulgrew, who has not taught in years, to stand around and say we have fewer bad ratings this year than in years past, so the system is a victory. I can only suppose it's also easy for Mulgrew to ignore the fact that this is the very thing that motivated Andrew Cuomo and his Heavy Hearts to worsen things for working teachers. For Michael Mulgrew, it really doesn't matter whether that plan causes more teachers to get bad ratings. Because there's always a silver lining. Under my leadership, 95% of UFT teachers didn't get fired this year.
Under UFT Unity leadership, the Teacher Improvement Plans were 8% less degrading and humiliating than last year. Under our leadership, 12% fewer teacher meeting weekly with the supervisors who rated them ineffective have contemplated suicide. Under our leadership, we haven't had a catastrophic natural disaster in over two years.
Unfortunately, when you live in a system where absolutely everything is a victory, no one feels it when things are bad. No one knows when things are bad. Things are not permitted to be bad. And the great thing is most representatives have actually signed an oath to perpetually agree that this is the best of all possible worlds, the best of all possible school systems, and the best of all possible evaluation systems negotiated by the best of all possible union leaderships.
I'm not sure what I would say to such people if I had signed the oath. I suppose I could trot out the stat about fewer people getting bad ratings. But I know if the guy I spoke to yesterday is stressed out, so is every working teacher. That's not how you treat role models for children, not if you actually care about those children.
Extra Credit: Name the bluesman in the photo.
Labels: Andrew Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo's Heavy Hearts Club Band, junk science, Micheal Mulgrew, teacher evaluation, UFT leadership, UFT Unity loyalty oath, value-added, VAM
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Owners Facilities Reviewed: York, Wincanton, Goodwood, Sedgefield, Huntingdon
December 10, 2013 By jasonhathorn in Course Reviews - an owners perspective, Horse Racing Leave a comment
York (Baytown Kestrel, Flying Bear)
York gives the impression that it has thought hard about how to make owners and spectators happy. I usually travel to York races on the train but this year took the car to the busy August festival. The owners car park is organised for quick entry and get away. Kim Bailey writes about how he’d like to see this introduced for owners car parks at UK racecourses. I can see why as it works very well. The owners building at York is brilliantly positioned, with a balcony that on one side overlooks the paddock and on the other the finishing line. You couldn’t wish for better viewing. The dining room is excellent – food is close to Ascot standards, albeit you have to pay. Canny Yorkshire folk. But I don’t mind at all – it’s good value. The owners bar was very busy. By mid afternoon sitting/standing outside was a more comfortable option, but with it being York’s August festival it’s understandable. York possesses a charm few courses in the country can match and it is a pleasure to own/part-own a horse running at the course.
Rating: 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
Wincanton (Douchkirk, Heath Hunter)
Wincanton states in the letter you receive when your horse is entered for a race at the course that “our owners facilities are some of the best in Jumps racing”. Hmmmmmm – they need to get out more. With a few minor changes they could be, but they aren’t there yet. There are usually queues for owners badges on arrival, the owners facility is very crowded with nowhere to sit and there are long queues for food. The ‘hot local pie’ on offer was, sadly, passed over due to the queues in favour of wanting to see some racing. Views of the finish are good from the owners bar, but then you have to face the scrum inside to get a drink or go to the paddock. It’s interesting that Wincanton has an arrangement that ROA membership gives you access to the owners facility. I’m not an ROA member. I know Rachel Hood, ROA Chief Executive would find this ‘extraordinary’, consider it because ‘I’m not sufficiently immersed in racing‘ or wish to ‘free ride‘ on the efforts the ROA makes on behalf of owners. She wrote as much in the July 2012 edition of Owner Breeder magazine. Maybe that article was a parody and I’m not in on the joke. What I do know is that if racecourses such as Wincanton, with capacity constrained owners facilities, have arrangements with the ROA so that its members can use those facilities even if they don’t have a horse running, and that usage detracting from the experience of owners with runners on the day, those racecourses and the ROA are doing a disservice to those owners that do have runners and, in the long run, to all owners. In Wincanton’s defence the Clerk of the Course has stated its badge arrangements with the ROA are being reviewed and they are also looking at how to alleviate the overcrowding and queues. A few minor changes here and there and Wincanton could be miles better.
Rating: 😀 😀
Sedgefield (Innsbruck, Heath Hunter)
Sedgefield looks after owners. Decent food in the owners bar, plenty of places to sit and a jolly atmosphere. The course itself is the epitome of weekday National Hunt racing. Viewing is ok, but none of the stands have the height to make it exceptional for anyone. If you’re lucky enough to have a winner you are looked after very well with a photograph of your winning horse in a frame presented to you within short order of the race having finished. A nice touch.
Rating: 😀 😀 😀 😀
Huntingdon (Dr. Darcey)
You’d think on a rare sunny day in February that three people sitting on a deserted set of steps each drinking a cup of tea wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. When those steps are outside the owners enclosure opposite the winning post at Huntingdon racecourse it’s an occasion for the security guards to move in. Apparently the health and safety risks were too great for us to continue with our reckless tea drinking. No matter the tea was in a pathetic little paper cup with a sad teabag bobbing up and down within it – the spillage risk was too great for Mr & Mrs HiViz to bear. You’d think a featureless racecourse next to a motorway that doesn’t have a fixture list to set the world alight might want to differentiate itself as a course based upon, say, friendliness, or facilities, or, I don’t know a decent hot meal, or tea served in china cups, or something, anything (!) that suggests a bit of effort. No chance. Huntingdon fails and fails badly. I can only imagine that Huntingon and Newbury raceourses are twinned. Huntingdon is a course to avoid as an owner.
Goodwood (Silken Thoughts, Platinum Proof, Palazzo Bianco, Flying Bear)
Goodwood has plenty going for it as a racecourse. A wonderful setting and home to the fantastic Glorious Goodwood festival. The amount of racing gives many owners a shot at having a runner there. Plus the course hasn’t messed things up as it has expanded – certainly not for owners. The views from owners seats at Goodwood is the best of any racecourse in the country. The owners pavilion is stylish with an excellent choice of food, and whilst it gets busy service is good. Food and drink isn’t cheap, but it hardly seems to matter. If you grab a table paddock side on a sunny day, where else would you rather be?
Owners Facilities Reviewed : Ascot, Bath, Cheltenham, Newbury and Wolverhampton
December 6, 2013 By jasonhathorn in Course Reviews - an owners perspective, Uncategorized Leave a comment
Ascot (Flying Bear, Palazzo Bianco)
The best owners experience in the country. Whilst there are some aspects of the new stand that don’t quite work as well as they could – too much space between the paddock side and track side in the interior of the stand, sight lines in some places that aren’t perfect, the interior too hot in the Summer, too cold in the Winter, these are minor quibbles. Ascot probably receives some criticism because it is the flagship track in the country with the highest standards expected. By contrast Cheltenham, given its facilities, gets away with little criticism. The Ascot owners facility overlooks the pre-parade ring, an inspired placement on the part of the architects team that were responsible for the re-design of Ascot. The owners facility is in two parts – a bar and a dining room. The food in the dining room is a wedding style buffet. Top quality – and free to boot. The wine list has some gems, too. The bar next door is very comfortable and has large picture windows that open to allow you a view of the pre-parade ring.In the stands owners viewing isn’t quite opposite the finishing post but is close enough. Organising badges, and for Royal Ascot, paddock passes, all very easy. The staff were friendly, efficient and welcoming. Going racing as an owner at Ascot is a pleasure. I’ve also had the good fortune to be part-owner of a horse that won at Ascot. There were plenty of families with young children in our party, and winning connections were made to feel entirely at home, even in spite of the impromptu creche that had been created. Hats off to Ascot.
Rating out of 5: 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
Bath (Dr. Darcey, Orla’s Rainbow, Baytown Kestrel)
ARC, owners of Bath, have started to make more of an effort with owners, and things have improved noticeably in 2013 versus previous years. It’s still tough to get a seat in the owners area, but the food choice is much improved with a separate, albeit somewhat soulless, dining room at the back with a decent choice. The paddock area is close by, and whilst I don’t recall an area for owners viewing it’s never a problem to find a spot in the stand with both a decent view of the course and close to the finishing line.
Rating out of 5: 😀 😀
Cheltenham (Alcalde)
I hope the redevelopment of Cheltenham results in an improvement in it’s owners facilities. Whilst the food on offer in the temporary marquee was decent enough, the large round tables mean you feel as if you are at a large wedding where you don’t know many guests. The owners bar is placed down near the 1f pole and is reminiscent of a 1950’s pub gone to seed. Owners viewing isn’t great either, further from the finish line than ideal – I’d choose to stand nearer the finish where the viewing is better. For many people the pleasure of having a runner at Cheltenham outweighs the owners experience. I remember going to watch England play at Wembley in the 1970s. I didn’t notice the facilities were rubbish because of the wonder of being at the match. I wouldn’t put Cheltenham in the rubbish category, but as the home of jumps racing its owners facilities should match those on offer at Ascot.
Newbury (Alcalde, Silken Thoughts)
Oh dear. An excellent racecourse with clueless management and inefficient, officious staff. I’m of the view that the quality and behaviour of a management team in a business is reflected in the attitudes of its staff towards customers, and in the case of Newbury I hope the current search for a new Chief Executive results in an appointment from outside the current management team. Whoever is appointed can then, hopefully as a priority, sort out the treatment of owners and customers. There is also an atmosphere at Newbury that contrasts with that existing at the majority of other racecourses in the UK. It may have something to do with the cavernous Oktoberfest-style drinking halls, both permanent and temporary, that exist. A re-design of these may improve matters here. My last visit as an owner to Newbury suffered from the following: queues for owners badges, no record of e-mail requests for badges at the owners desk, with questioning from the staff that suggested it was my fault they hadn’t read the e-mail, paddock stewards intent on preventing my teenage sons from entering the paddock with me, officious stewards at the owners facility, an uncomfortably crowded owners facility with no space to sit down, queues for drinks at the owners bar, and a long wait for food orders – we gave up and went to the on course fish and chip shop, where the food is decent and the service exemplary – in contrast to that experienced almost everywhere elsewhere on course. To put the tin hat on it our car was broken into in the owners car park. More security staff in the car park rather than acting as the fashion police might help here. Newbury is a racecourse that benefits from an excellent fixture list and proximity to Lambourn. Good horses end up running at the course almost by default. The racecourse ought to be able to turn these benefits to its advantage. Yet it is a business which has lost money 4 years in the last 5 with no growth in turnover and attendance figures described as disappointing by the Chairman in reporting on its interim results last month. Whilst these might be problems generic to racing, it is also a course that unlike others has had problems with mass brawls, fines for under-age drinking, the placement of concert stages for music nights so that viewing of the home straight is obscured, and horses being electrocuted in the paddock. The latest dress code furore can be added to the list of pratfalls that appear to be the speciality of Newbury’s management team, which doesn’t appear to have made a connection between disappointing attendance figures, imposing a dress code and poor customer service. At the moment a course to avoid as an owner.
Rating out of 5: none
Wolverhampton (Magic Ice, Platinum Proof)
Wolverhampton offers decent facilities for owners. There is a good sized owners bar/room, decent hearty food on offer with viewing of the paddock from one end of the room and viewing of the track from the other. So why don’t I look forward to having runners at the track? It’s probably because the whole is so much less than the sum of the parts. There isn’t much of an atmosphere and the racing doesn’t inspire. But that is more my problem than that of the track – but in terms of being looked after, Wolverhampton does a decent job for owners.
Rating out of 5: 😀 😀 😀
High Class Novice Chase Candidates: Numbers, Yard Concentration 2008-13
December 1, 2013 By jasonhathorn in Handicapping Leave a comment
In the last week Nicky Henderson complained about the programme for Novice Chasers, his comments culminating with the line “And that’s why there will be no chasers in three or four years time” . A forthright summary of his comments can be found on Dan Kelly’s excellent blog here , which firstly covers the ongoing concerns about the Betfair Chase distance, then moves on to the Novice Chase programme in the context of Nicky Henderson’s comments. So leaving the programme book aside, how does the pipeline of high class horses going Novice Chasing look year by year? Using Racing Post Ratings (RPR) the number of horses rated above 145, 150, 155 and 160 is given in Table 1 below for each of the years 2008-2013 inclusive. To qualify horses must be with GB based trainers, never have run in a Chase, achieved the rating at a GB track and have run within twelve months of the end of April of each of the years considered. These filters are designed to capture high class Hurdlers that are candidates for Novice Chasing. The filters will include Hurdlers that won’t go Chasing, and excludes recruits to Novice Chasing from overseas, so the list isn’t complete. Still, these effects should be the same year on year and not affect a year on year comparison. Table 1 shows the pool of candidate horses has varied between 46 and 70 in the last six years, with no clear trend. The numbers for 2013 suggest a healthy pool of candidate horses for Novice Chasing relative to the recent past.
Year RPR 145+ RPR 150+ RPR 155+ RPR 160+
Table 1: High Class Novice Chase Candidates 2008-13
Using horses rated 145+, how has the concentration of horses by training yard changed over the last six years? Table 2 shows the number of training yards that have 1 only, 2 to 5 and at least 5 high class Novice Chase candidates. So in 2008 17 yards had one candidate. In 2013 there were 19 such yards. No real pattern exists year by year. However it is in the yards with at least one candidate that the picture has changed. In 2009 there were 11 yards with 2 to 5 candidates. By 2013 this had dropped to just four yards. The view that high class Novice Chase candidates have become increasingly concentrated at the largest training yards is borne out by the data. Table 3 shows the same information but represented by total number of horses. The number of candidates in 2013 at smaller yards is the lowest it has been in the last six years and the number in the larger yards the highest. Increasing yard concentration exists.
Year 1 horse only rated 145+ 2 to 5 horses rated 145+ 5 plus horses rated 145+
Table 2: Number of yards with Novice Chase candidates rated 145+
Year up to 5 horses 5+ horses Total horses rated 145+
Table 3: Novice Chase Candidates Yard Concentration
The falling field sizes in Novice Chases cannot be blamed upon the number of horses that could go Novice Chasing. Candidate numbers are healthy. So either the programme book or yard concentration is to blame. The changes made to the Novice Chase programme in the last year or two should have led to an increase in field sizes. The only explanation for their falling in the 2013-14 so far is the refusal of the larger yards to race their best horses against each other. The campaigning of horses is largely a matter for the trainers and their owners. However, if the BHA react to the concentration of the best horses in a few yards by making changes to the programme book to reflect campaigning realities, it is difficult to imagine this leading to a dearth of Novice Chasers in a few years time. Some trainers would argue that Novice Chasing is different from Novice Hurdling and their concern is primarily one of horse welfare. The first implication is that anyone arguing the opposite position does not have horse welfare at heart. Not a position anyone wishes to inhabit lightly. The further implication is that a series of uncompetitive races should exist so that high class horses can learn the ropes. This will then benefit their long-term career, which, in turn, benefits racing. Perhaps to address both small field sizes and welfare concerns a series of zero prize money Australian style ‘Barrier Trial’ Novice Chases at racecourses could be introduced, with the full cost of hosting these races borne entirely by the owners. No handicap marks would be awarded and no betting available. These trials would allow for legitimate schooling in public in near race conditions. Lowly handicapped horses could take part knowing their handicap marks will be unaffected, better horses could make their own way home, learning the ropes as desired by trainers. The quid pro quo would be that the Novice Chase programme would be further reduced. Welfare concerns are addressed by the existence of Barrier Trails, whilst field sizes in Novice Chases would increase because of the reduced number of races, improving the viewing spectacle for the racing public.
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Feminism / Film, Media & TV / TV
In ‘Game of Thrones’ the Mother of Dragons Is Taking Down the Patriarchy
Posted on April 29, 2013 by The Opinioness of the World 1 Comment
Originally published at Bitch Flicks for Infertility, Miscarriage and Infant Loss Week. | Warning: Spoilers ahead!
When I first wrote about Game of Thrones two years ago, I wrote about its vacillation between showcasing strong, intelligent female characters and its sexist objectification and misogynistic rape culture.
I received an exorbitant amount of comments on my criticism of the show — even though I simultaneously lauded its brilliant acting and interesting characters and dialogue. Some told me I didn’t understand anything about the show. Others told me to wait, just wait as it would get better. While the show suffers serious problems, particularly in its sexposition and depiction of graphic female nudity, as the show has progressed, it has indeed become more and more feminist.
We witness more of the women expressing their disdain for their lot in life due to their gender. We see women buck gender norms (Arya, Brienne, Yara Greyjoy) and we see women scheme to surreptitiously assert their power (Margaery Tyrell, Cersei Lannister, Olenna Redwyne) or even just to better their lot in life (Shae, Ros, Sansa).
While many women orchestrate machinations behind the scenes, no woman is openly a leader, boldly challenging patriarchy to rule. Except for one. Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen.
When I first wrote about Dany (Emilia Clarke), I was captivated by her. She drew me in immediately and became my favorite character. I loved watching her transformation from meek and timid, bullied by her creepy brother Viserys, to a powerful yet kind-hearted Khaleesi (Queen). Each episode she grows more bold and assertive. Yet she continually strives to be fair and just. Watching her growth has been the most enjoyable aspect of the series.
Daenerys marries Khal Drogo in an arranged marriage in order to secure Viserys, rightful heir to the Iron Throne after the murder of their father the king, an army so he can claim the throne. Viserys uses Dany, telling her he would have all 40,000 Dothraki rape her if it garnered him an army. Nice guy.
After a rapey wedding night (Sorrynotsorry, fans. It is), Daenerys and Drogo eventually form a bond and fall in love with one another. (I know, I know, but bare with me). Dany grows more confident and assertive both with her sexuality and her authoritativeness in giving the khalasar (clan or tribe) commands. Months later, when Viserys hits her, she hits him back and tells him if he strikes her again, she will have his hands cut off.
When Dany becomes pregnant with a son, she eventually convinces her husband to cross the sea, something the Dothraki fear, in order to claim the Iron Throne and rule. Both Daenerys and Drogo believe their son Rhaego will be the heir to the throne, calling him the “Stallion Who Mounts the World,” because according to a Dothraki prophecy he will be a great khal (king) of khals, uniting the Dothraki as one khalasar (clan or tribe) and conquer the world.
After Khal Drogo’s khalasar conquer a village, Daenerys — growing more confident and outspoken — prevents the men from raping the enslaved women. When challenged by her husband, she boldly defends her decision, trying to advocate for the women’s rights. Rather than crediting his wife’s penchant for advocacy, Drogo tells her she grows fierce as their son grows in her womb, “filling her with fire.”
But after her husband has a wound, Mirri Maz Duur an enslaved shaman whose life Dany spares, treats his injury. Yet he falls deathly ill. Mirri tells Dany how to save him, by using blood magic, something forbidden by the Dothraki. Dany follows her instructions. Yet she goes into labor and passes out. When Dany awakens, her advisor Jorah tells her that her son was born dead and deformed with scales. She’s been “rewarded” by having Drogo a shell of his former self in a catatonic state. When Dany confronts the shaman, asking when she will be reunited with her husband, Mirri replies:
“When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child. Then he will return, and not before.”
Mirri’s spell took the life of Daenerys’ unborn son as revenge for the Dothraki attack on her village. Also inherent is an infertility curse, that Dany will not have any of her own children. She loses the lives of both her husband and her unborn child.
With nothing left to lose, Daenerys resolves to make a bold and drastic decision which showcases her resolve and empowerment. As Angela Smith wrote on bereaved mothers at Bitch Flicks:
“It’s not uncommon for women to feel empowered to make drastic changes after losing a child. They may, understandably, become far less tolerant of others due to the realization nobody at all can break them down any further than they’ve already been broken.”
Dany has one of her Khalasaar place 3 dragon eggs she was given as a wedding present on the pyre. As the fire burns, she steps into the flames, despite the protestations of Jorah. In the morning, a new day has dawned. Dany emerges from the ashes unharmed, and the eggs have hatched with the 3 dragons perched on her body.
Daenerys becomes the Mother of Dragons
But now that she has lost her son, Daenerys decides she will take the Iron Throne herself and rule the Seven Kingdoms. After all the men in her life — her husband, son and brother — have died, she claims the throne for her own.
Dany becomes the metaphorical phoenix rising from the ashes, purging the last vestiges of her former timidity to transition into her life as a powerful leader.
At the end of season one, I’ll admit I worried that her magical powers were somehow explaining away her awesomeness. But now I see that no, it’s merely to highlight the importance of her role in Game of Thrones — as a woman leader challenging sexism.
Daenerys is continually called the Mother of Dragons, spoken with awe and reverence. In many cases, women are allowed to lead or be ruthless as lioness mothers. And while Dany lost her son, and she may be cursed with infertility by Mirri, she still remains a mother figure. She envisions herself as the mother to her 3 dragons. In the second season’s episode “Prince of Winterfell,” Dany’s dragons are kidnapped in the city of Qarth. When Jorah tells her to abandon them, that they are not her children, and escape, Dany replies:
“A mother does not flee without her children…They are my children, and they are the only children I will ever have.”
Daenerys risks her life to save her dragons, and they save her life and free her when she’s captured as well. The mysterious masked woman Quaithe tells Jorah that “dragons are fire made flesh…and fire is power.” Daenerys has given birth to power. Power contains a duality – it can subjugate and torment or it can crush oppression and yield justice.
Speaking with confident assuredness, Daenerys tells those that doubt her:
“When my dragons are grown, we will take back what was stolen from me and destroy those who have wronged me! We will lay waste to armies and burn cities to the ground!…I will take what is mine, with fire and blood!”
In season 3, after having survived the treacheries in the city of Qarth, Daenerys looks to procure an army in the city of Astapor in order to take the Iron Throne. Despite her steeliness, she has not lost her kindness. She tries to give water to a dying slave. She doesn’t hide her horror and disgust during negotiations when she hears that murdering a newborn in front of the infant’s mother is a component of the training for the highly skilled slave warriors, the Unsullied. To her advisors, she expresses her unease over buying slaves for an army. She doesn’t want the “blood of innocents” on her hands.
In last week’s episode “And Now His Watch Is Ended,” Game of Thrones turned a corner in perhaps the most feminist episode of the series.
Daenerys makes a trade for all 8,000 Unsullied warriors, appearing as if she’s going to give up her dragon Drogon to make the exchange. But it’s all a ruse. When the brutal slaver Kraznys — who has insulted Dany with sexist, slut-shaming insults, erroneously thinking she didn’t understand the Valeryian language — is irritated that her dragon doesn’t obey him, she retorts that of course he doesn’t, “a dragon is a not a slave.” Dany then orders the Unsullied, now in her command, to murder the slavers and break the chains off the slaves. She frees the enslaved warriors, asking them to fight for her as free men. Daenerys then drops the whip equating ownership of the slaves. In essence, she drops the symbolic weapon of tyranny and oppression, heralding rebellion.
If there was ever any question, Daenerys is clearly here to dismantle the patriarchy.
Not only is she a woman leader, her very existence challenging the status quo. But Daenerys openly questions and challenges patriarchal norms. She refuses to abide by societal gender limitations mandating men must rule. She’s determined to forge a different path. Rather than follow in the footsteps of leaders embodying toxic masculinity, she’s determined to rule through respect, kindness and fairness — not through intimidation or fear. Daenerys refuses to enslave people. She wants to emancipate them.
The Mother of Dragons cares for the dragons as if they were her own babies. Could it be that Daenerys will become the archetypal mother of humanity? Perhaps. She’s wielding justice, crushing oppression and protecting the weak. Yet it is the loss of her son that enables Daenerys to envision herself in the role of leader. No longer is she supporting a man to be a great leader. She has become that leader.
The princess has become a queen.
Daenerys being a badass. Boom.
Tags: Daenerys, Emilia Clarke, feminism, Game of Thrones, sexism, TV, women. Bookmark the permalink.
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50 Best Albums of 2017
December 13, 2017 December 4, 2018 / David James
Drunk is Thundercat’s overstuffed clown car of a funk maybe-masterpiece. Everything about the artist, from his virtuoso bass prowess to his proudly immature sense of humor to his deep 1980s pop affection, is amped up to eleven here. The album is a ceaseless parade of short, punchy funk pop gems, sprinkled generously with dick jokes, cats, and incredible instrumental moments. The peak might just be his collaboration with Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, Show You The Way. No shit, just listen.
Drunk is streaming on Spotify and available on CD and 4×10″ boxset from Ninja Tune.
29. Gas – Narkopop
Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas project laid dormant for well over a decade, during which time ambient techno enjoyed a renaissance, permeating the entire Kompakt label and spreading from Berlin to Detroit and everywhere in between. His original four albums are considered cornerstones of the genre to this day. So there was a bit of hesitation when it came to a new Gas album in 2017. Would it be any good? Would it matter? Thankfully, the answer is a resounding yes. The cover art is incredibly appropriate, because this music sounds like getting lost in a crystalline, digitally damaged forest at night. Dreamlike aural quicksand envelops the listener, where a curious, subtle tunefulness emerges and swallows them whole.
Narkopop can be streamed and purchased on Bandcamp.
28. Future – HNDRXX
This album is the moment Future became a bona fide pop star, teasing out the inherent tunefulness of his odd voice and pushing a new array of colors through the hazy, dark membrane of drugs, sex, and damage that have always been his purview. The incredible coherence of the production here supports a continuous-flow feel, where songs bleed into one another, continuing the same long narrative arc, flashing with occasional ecstatic outbursts like Incredible, one of the most joyous pop tunes of the year. Rap and R&B blend and blur in a trap-infused beat tapestry, the perfect environment for getting lost in.
HNDRXX is streaming on Spotify and available digitally pretty much everywhere.
27. Laraaji – Bring on the Sun
Laraaji makes the warmest, most human ambient music on the face of the earth. Designed to actively create a meditative, soothing state of mind, his work is unrivaled for coming down after a stressful day. There’s a spiritual gravity at work here, honed through decades of mystic studies with Eastern gurus and work with his Laughter Meditation Workship – the guy truly wants to heal the world and uses his zither-centric music to further the cause. Thanks to a handful of recent reissues of his hard-to-find cassette work from the 1980s onward, he jumped back into the global music consciousness and actually released TWO albums this year. The other, Sun Gong, is equally adept at sending the listener into a trance, but feels less substantial as an album to my ears. Give them both a try.
Bring on the Sun can be purchased on vinyl, CD, or digital through Boomkat.
26. Cocainejesus – Nervous
Ok so I played a lot of JRPGs growing up and now I can’t help but melt into a puddle when I hear music like this, soulfully blending techno, hip-hop, synth magic, and sampledelia into what sounds like the dream sequence of every Final Fantasy put together. I’m biased. But maybe you are too. This is earnest, open hearted electronic music to swoon to, cook to, draw to, or dream to.
Nervous can be streamed and purchased on Bandcamp.
25. Kamasi Washington – Harmony of Difference
2017 was the year that short but ambitious albums challenged some of the very best full-lengths for greatness and replay value. Kamasi Washington, the saxophonist and bandleader who released a three hour, three disc set called The Epic as his debut album, somehow dropped one of these brief gems. In a turn from the more busy, sprawling arrangements on his debut, this little set spreads a handful of new melodic ideas across five very short tracks before tying them all together in the thirteen minute closer, which is almost half the album, of course. It’s relatively low stakes jazz, but still more fun, more alive than most of Washington’s peers.
Harmony of Difference can be purchased from The Young Turks.
24. Kelly Lee Owens – Kelly Lee Owens
I had a friend push this album on me, and I have to thank his diligence for getting me to give a chance to one of the best dance music albums of the year. I’d never heard of Owens before, but she’s permanently on my radar now. The album starts unassumingly, giving scant hint that it slowly blooms over its tracklist into a progressive, intricately programmed techno epic, wrapped in pop textures and driven by classical motorik rhythms. Every time I’ve passed the album along to a friend, I warn them to just keep with it. Sure, it’s pleasant at first, but it snowballs into something more complex and rewarding as it goes, with the final track being perhaps my favorite of the whole set.
Kelly Lee Owens is available streaming, on CD, and vinyl at Bandcamp.
23. Floating Points – Reflections-Mojave Desert
I’ve written before about the transition of Floating Points, aka English musician Sam Shepherd, from dubstep-adjacent techno to a neon-lit hybrid jazz sound. It’s one of the most fascinating evolutions in a modern artist that I’ve been privy to, one taken wholeheartedly, without any sense of genre tourism. This new persona is Floating Points, and the old one was simply something he was working through to get here. Like a handful of other great albums this year, Reflections – Mojave Desert is a densely packed sub-half hour of music that feels more like one continuous piece than a traditional album, with individual songs. This structure fits the sound even better than his debut full length, stretching the spiritual psychedelic sound of his epic Kuiper single into a more complete, satisfying arc.
Reflections – Mojave Desert is available streaming and on vinyl and CD on Bandcamp.
22. Shackleton & Vengeance Tenfold – Sferic Ghost Transmits
Shackleton returns with one of the most startling listens of the year, shocking the listener with its earnest vision of existential dread, as clear as it is merciless. What began as an apocalyptic take on dubstep slowly bloomed into a sound equally indebted to astral explorers Coil and late twentieth century composers like Steve Reich, meshing messianic vocals, industrial crunch, and earthquake dub bass with pointillist gamelan percussion. His songs have evolved from cavernous post-Burial beat constructions to exotic, black-tinted operas, seemingly dispatched from the future back in time, to warn us about our terminal Western lifestyle. Partnered with spoken word poet Vengeance Tenfold a second time, the rapturous dark energy of his compositions flare up into visceral, emotionally draining cyberpunk narratives. To listen is to stare into an abyss, marveling at the stark beauty of destruction, entranced by its inevitability.
Sferic Ghost Transmits can be purchased on CD and vinyl at Boomkat.
21. Arca – Arca
Arca, aka Venezuelan electronic sculptor Alejandro Ghersi, has been one of the most singular voices in modern music for a few years now, without even opening his mouth. His productions have shredded the boundaries of techno, r&b, and pop music, dropping depth-charge power into the weird, extraterrestrial corners of these sounds, emphasizing all the bits that most artists gloss over. His music carries a mutant physicality, evoking the tangible world in a freaky cyberpunk way. It’s dance music for contortionists, headphone journeys for people raised on Aphex Twin.
So when he brought his own vocals into the mix for his third full length album, I was skeptical. This is the guy who helped elevate artists such as Kanye West, FKA Twigs, Frank Ocean, and now even Björk into new, uncomfortable spaces. Hearing him take the spotlight on his own production felt off at first, like the appearance of audible words were going to make this sound feel suddenly pedestrian. I ended up listening only once and putting it away for most of the year. But now that I’ve returned with my expectations reset, I’m falling back in love with Arca. He’s obviously still got it, only now there’s another tool to sculpt with.
Arca’s self titled album can be streamed and purchased on any format through his website.
20. Björk – Utopia
Utopia was one of the last new albums I heard before making this list. But with one listen, I knew it belonged. Björk is an artist who has always managed to stay relevant and artistically vital, but to me, lost a sense of adventure as her experimentation turned more to how her music was made (on iPads, without instruments) than what she was making with it. Vulnicura seemed to blow away fans a couple years ago, but to me it was just treading water. A classical Björk album, if you will, advancing no new ideas, but doing it well enough. If that was what she was going to do this many decades into her career, she was doing better than most artists.
But then here comes 2017 and Utopia and it feels like she finally got back that screaming energy, that experimental attitude and willingness to do something she hasn’t heard before. She’s paired up with Arca to make this album and the occasionally unnerving, ecstatic results seem to confirm my theory that Björk works best when she can bounce off a singular collaborator. It’s her best album in a decade, easily. But don’t take my word for it. Just check this uh.. video out.
Utopia can be purchased at Björk’s website and probably anywhere else.
19. Mr. YT – Brand New Day
Admission: Brand New Day is not an album of new music, but an album-shaped compilation of three timeless late 1990s EPs of deep house, techno, and lush ambient tracks from producer Mr. YT, aka Yuji Takenouchi. Even more, it’s a retitled reissue of a 2012 Japanese release. Regardless of how it came to my ears, I’m considering it a 2017 album because there was no other way I’d end up hearing this blissed-out, balearic take on some of my favorite electronic sounds.
This atmospheric set takes warm ambient drones with deep bass grooves and euphoric synth sprays, familiar ingredients to any fan of Carl Craig or any of the Basic Channel descendants, and combines them in uniquely cozy ways. There’s a sense of bedroom charm to these ostensible dance tunes, rendering images of sun-dappled carpet and open windows and a hazy perception of time. When I’m lost in this album, I’m dreaming of endless afternoons with a Super Nintendo and zero obligations, all the bright future waiting ahead of me, ready whenever I was.
Brand New Day is streaming and for sale on Bandcamp.
18. Visible Cloaks – Reassemblage
Reassemblage is probably the most appropriate album title of 2017. The album is composed of shards of brilliant micro-moments, shuffled and arranged like a quicksand mandala. Bits of Oneohtrix Point Never, bursts of Dream Catalogue’s digital vapor, an overall sensibility that pushes playful experimentation to the forefront, with recognizable songs and arcs left presumably on the cutting room floor. Visible Cloaks is exploding with so much potential, so quickly, that there’s no telling where they might go next. I only know that it already has my attention.
Reassemblage is streaming on Spotify and available for purchase on Bandcamp.
17. Vince Staples – Big Fish Theory
For his sophomore release, wildly talented young rapper Vince Staples hooked into a surprising new tangent, splitting away from the subdued fireworks of double disc debut Summertime 06, one of the best albums of 2015. Big Fish Theory is as knotty, lucid, and striving as its forebear, but comes armed with a new hyphy-inspired production sense and a racing sense of vibrancy that sees him covering twice as much ground in half the time. It’s more overtly electronic, dance-inspired, and future leaning, but the core strength remains the same: Staples’ inimitable storytelling ability and parkour-like nimbleness on the microphone. He’s real in the way most rappers only pretend to be, upending assumptions left and right, whether on record or in one of the many funny interviews he’s blown up over the year. The fact that he refused to make an obvious sequel to a breakout album made when he was only 21 years old shows, even more than I knew already, a wealth of potential waiting to be unleashed over the coming years.
Big Fish Theory can be purchased right on Vince Staples’ website.
16. Chuck Johnson – Balsams
I’ll simply share some of what I wrote about Balsams last July:
Johnson crafts his utterly time- and place-less music with steel pedal guitar, which gives the cloudlike tunes a distinctly American, pastoral vibe. It also grants the gauzy sounds a sense of physicality that other, similarly dreamlike ambient music lacks. Instead of ethereal synth pads drifting into oblivion, we’ve got the tactile pull of guitar strings, tethering us to the world from which they came.
Every element of this music casts a resonance outside its own time, drifting and blurring the space between notes, between beginnings and endings, and between anxious little thoughts and the broad feeling of existential acceptance. In this sense, it’s an instant shortcut to deeply meditative states without ever tipping into pure abstraction. This is a quality found in many of my favorite albums, ambient or not, so it immediately drew me in.
Read the full review here.
Balsams can be purchased right from Chuck Johnson’s website.
15. Deradoorian – Eternal Recurrence
This miniature album uses all of its 29 minutes to take flight over desert nightscapes, all cloudlike spiritual jazz singing and wide-open organ drones. The feeling is expansive, blooming far beyond its edges, stretching time. The instrumental aspects hew closer to Tangerine Dream or Vangelis than Alice Coltrane, making for a coolly futuristic tone, despite the enveloping warmth of the vocal performance at its heart.
Album highlight Return-Transcend expresses Deradoorian’s notion of meditative “thoughts in sound” most purely over 8 blissed-out minutes at the heart of this set. But is clearly made to be heard all in one go – its mercifully short length means that it’s easy to devour it, then go in for a second play right away.
Eternal Recurrence can be streamed and purchased on Bandcamp.
14. Forest Swords – Compassion
Forest Swords, aka Matthew Barnes, creates some of the most unique sounding music today. I mean this in the most literal sense: his work hardly resembles anyone else, even when he’s covering a famous r&b song, and absolutely no one has been able to ape his style in the years since he became an experimental music phenom. Fusing a swarm of digital textures, samples, beats, string swells, and distorted saxophone and guitar, his songs often feel as ancient and impenetrable as the boulder crushing down on the man on the album cover. Compassion simply exists in a separate space from most music out there, with only Barnes’ prior work as a reference point.
In an interview, Barnes was saying that he struggled with finding hope in the future that this world was forcing upon us, saying “I realized there’s some sort of power in trying to create our own instead. I’m inspired by the ways we’re communicating now, for better or worse, and thinking about new channels we can distribute ideas. The idea of looking for flexible future ways of expression and language, that bends to our needs quicker, really excites me.” Reading these words, I realized how spot on they describe the confident, questing music on the album.
The music here feels torn between paranoid decay and exuberant, cinematic rapture. Pockets of real strings, brass, human vocals bubble and pop in the swirling electronic torrent of sound. Each song rides the precipice of disintegration, resisting the very weight they collectively conjure. Compassion is heavy music, but Forest Swords puts itself in position to do all the lifting for you, providing a conceptual light at the end of its own tunnel.
Compassion can be streamed and purchased on its Bandcamp page.
13. Oneohtrix Point Never – Good Time OST
I stated it well enough before I even saw the film, which incidentally is easily one of the best of 2017 itself: With this score, Oneohtrix Point Never, aka Daniel Lopatin, used some sort of planetary gravity slingshot to circle back around his earlier work and create truly new music within that framework. It feels informed by that old familiar cyberpunk throb, yet delicately teased into much more delicate, ornate shape than anything made when he was crushing on his Juno 60. I couldn’t help but draw the conclusion that this was some kind of perfected second draft of the sounds that originally got me into his work, the albums collected on the massive Rifts compilation.
The Good Time OST is streaming on Spotify and can be purchased on vinyl, CD, or digital from Bleep.
12. Shigeto – The New Monday
Reviewed in September, these three excerpts say it all: The New Monday is an eclectic set of rhythm vehicles caught in traffic somewhere between hip-hop, spiritual jazz, and the psychedelic fringe of techno. It fully invests in several directions at once, offering a warmly disorienting maze in its ping-ponging structure. This is Shigeto returning to Detroit, trying on its signature sounds, and realizing they fit better together than anything he’s done before.
Shigeto is working in a whole new league now. The album feels closer to enigmatic Detroit superheroes like Moodymann and Theo Parrish – hot, swaggering techno fucking with soul and rap in a reckless parade of surprises. The change feels natural, seeing him flip from lush jazz into hard rhythm sequences with the same preternatural force as local beat legend Robert Hood. Each genre exploration feels as sure-footed as the last, lived in and fully invested.
The magic of The New Monday reveals itself with the third track, when the album swerves yet again, this time into deep techno space. Instead of a jarring turn, the transition happens almost imperceptibly. The first time I listened, I was nodding along daydreaming when I suddenly got confused. What was I listening to? I checked my playlist, thinking that it was one of the above mentioned Detroit techno legends. Nope, still the new Shigeto album. I sat up and leaned in with the realization that this was turning out to be something special.
The New Monday is streaming and available for purchase on Bandcamp.
11. Ensemble Economique – In Silhouette
Ensemble Economique, aka Brian Pyle, has been dropping modern minimalism bombs for a decade now, pushing mutated composer music to new heights of weirdness, daring, and vulnerability. This time, he finally crested into a new level of emotional directness and cinematic production gloss, rippling generative synth cascades with ferocious noise energy.
Imagine Steve Reich in the 1970s, writing Music for 18 Musicians. Imagine those pristine organ tones and string shards rising up in ferocious anger, splintering and crackling the sky, tearing open an entrance to an alternate timeline. Now it’s 2017 and low clouds of arpeggiated organ tones roll over the landscape, laser-cut synth tones bristle on hilltops and bridges, howling around the corners of brutalist office towers. Most colors have drained from the landscape, but the few that remain – bright orange, deep, saturated blue, have bloomed over the surrounding spaces, oppressive and hard. Bursts of neon, fluttering vocal snippets pock the skyline, all reaching, twisting upward toward some transcendence that’s always out of reach, set amongst the stars.
In Silhouette can be purchased from Denovali on Bandcamp.
50 – 31 | 30-11 | 10-1
Best Of, Music
2017, Actress, Alessandro Cortini, Alice Coltrane, ambient, Arca, best albums of 2017, best of 2017, Björk, Call Super, Chuck Johnson, Cocainejesus, Dam-Funk, Dauwd, deep house, Deepchord, Deradoorian, drone, dub, Ensemble Economique, Euglossine, experimental, Fabiano Do Nascimento, Floating Points, Forest Swords, funk, Future, Garrett, Gas, Gaussian Curve, hip-hop, idm, industrial, jazz, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Jlin, Joseph Shabason, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Kamasi Washington, Kelela, Kelly Lee Owens, Kendrick Lamar, Laraaji, LCD Soundsystem, Lee Gamble, Mark Barrott, Mount Eerie, Mr. YT, new age, Octo Octa, Oneohtrix Point Never, r&b, rap, Robert Hood, Run The Jewels, S.A.M., Sampha, Scott Gilmore, Shabazz Palaces, Shackleton, Shigeto, shoegaze, soul, spiritual jazz, Suso Saiz, SW., synth, SZA, techno, Thundercat, trap, Vengeance Tenfold, Vince Staples, Visible Cloaks
← Call Super – Arpo
Joseph Shabason – Aytche →
21 thoughts on “50 Best Albums of 2017”
dupek
mrmocha
Now THAT’S a fucking year-end-list…
I envy your ability to describe these albums and not sound like you’re just randomly regurgitating audio adjectives.
I grabbed a couple that caught my ear. The super ambient stuff is a little ambitious for me but Jlin, Scott Gilmore, Mark Barrott and Cocainejesus are in the chute. Congrats on the family!
Thank you for the kind words! I try! Well mostly I just have a lot of passion about this stuff.
Mark Barrott has a ton of great output, most of it currently on Spotify if you have that. This little EP was just, to me, the crystalization of a lot of what he does great. If you didn’t hear last year’s Cocainejesus album, “We’re worried about you” I can’t recommend it enough, too. Oh, and that Scott Gilmore inspired one of my mixtapes earlier this year, helping drive the direction of Deep Future :) https://optimisticunderground.com/2017/09/05/deep-future-mixtape/
Also, thank you again! It’s so weird being a dad now but I’m loving it.
Shaun Kardinal
david, your year-end list remains one of the most engaging and surprising out there. as in years before, i took my time with it, working my way up the list a few records at a time since you posted, and walked away with a cool dozen completely new-to-me adds to my library. it’s also great to read along with your life as you continues to approach music from the perspective of this blog itself. cheers to the end of this terrifying and weird year, to your continued work here, to your family, and to the new tunes coming our way in the next one.
ps— my year-end megamix is up at http://sptfy.com/1SLz
Shaun, thank you so much for your thoughtful reply and for the kind words. I’m just so happy to know that I’ve shared some great art with people, and that you’ve got new music to add to your collection. This year has been pretty wild, both globally and personally, but brought us wonderful music, as always. Cheers to you as well and to a better 2018 for all of us!
And thanks for the mix link! I’m following it now, excited to hear it – there are many songs both from familiar and unfamiliar artists I definitely missed out on!
Eurodance Typhoon
Glad to see my favourite album of the year (On The Echoing Green) in the top 3.
It is SO GOOD. I’m glad to know someone else thinks so!
Jake (@_FormFunction_)
‘V’ by The Horrors should definitely have had a look in. Tip top list though.
I didn’t hear that one! I’m going to check it out for sure. Thank you!!
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svceleste
This is great. Thank you for putting so much love into this so we wanderers can stumble back into new music. Going to float around in this list for some time. AWESOME.
Thank you for the kind words!! I make my lists exactly for that reason. It really brings me joy to know people are discovering great music. I hope you continue to find more stuff!!
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What a brilliant list! I’ll be coming back to this to check out a whole lot of new music over the next few weeks. Did you listen to Ryucihi Sakamoto’s async last year? Utterly brilliant, deeply personal and far-ranging ambient music. (It topped my year-end list!)
Thank you! So glad you’re enjoying the list.
I did hear async and really enjoyed it, though I didn’t listen enough I think. It made my second best of 2017 list, probably would have been higher up if I’d had more time with it. The remix album is interesting too, if you haven’t heard it.
Got a link to your year end list? I love seeing different takes!
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How Bin Laden Bankrupted America
by Jon Basil Utley Posted on January 19, 2009 August 7, 2009
For a man who spent years living in caves, Osama bin Laden sure knows his Sun Tzu and the basics of jujitsu. Sun Tzu’s famous dictum was “know yourself” and “know your enemy.” Jujitsu is based upon using your enemy’s strength against him, e.g., like Jack in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” who used the giant’s own size and anger to get him to crash from his own weight. Bin Laden understood that the way to beat America was to turn its power back upon itself. His early stated aim was to bankrupt America. He knew his own weaknesses, and he profoundly understood America’s, how its pride and fears could trigger irrational, self-destructive reactions.
The genius of bin Laden’s pinprick attacks, costing a few hundred thousand dollars, has left America reeling with two unending multi-trillion-dollar wars it doesn’t know how to get out of. He knew that his own strength was mainly in his appeal to the minds of men, particularly to the lost dignity of Muslims trampled under the heel of their own dictators, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and America’s military. Getting rid of the “far” enemy was the way to take on the “near” ones.
Instigating America to destroy Iraq was a triumph of genius. He must have known about the neoconservative cabal in Washington that was itching to start wars and destroy Iraq. In bin Laden’s wildest dreams he then imagined that he could get an enraged America to destroy his enemies while, at the same time, isolating itself from allies and becoming seriously weakened. His prime Arab enemy, secular nationalist socialism, was embodied by the Ba’athist rulers in Iraq. Once destroyed, Muslim resistance could be channeled to religious fundamentalism as the only remaining force honest and profound enough to challenge Arab dictators and American soldiers successfully. In that sense he was allied with Israel, again an intelligent strategy of harnessing his enemies’ strength, which, for different reasons, feared Iraq as the most modern, secular nation among the Arabs far more than it feared Muslim fundamentalists. Indeed, in Palestine, Israel built up Islamist Hamas at first as a counterforce to the secular PLO. Successful terrorists come from the well educated, not from fundamentalist fanatics.
Next was his hope that he might get America to destroy his Shi’ite enemy, Iran. He almost succeeded in this too. His prime aim, though, was to get America bogged down in endless, resource-sapping wars on the Asian landmass and disrupt oil flows that benefited his enemies.
Bin Laden understood how America’s religious fundamentalists, who had inordinate power in Washington, could be encouraged to sustain religious wars. He “knew” them precisely because he understood his own Muslim fundamentalists, as indeed also the Israeli ones. All could work together in his scheming mind to wreck the global economy, which so benefited American power. In 2002 at a party in my home, I said to Peru’s brilliant economist Hernando de Soto that, of course, bin Laden’s objective was to drive America out of the Middle East. He replied to me, “Not just that, out of the whole Third World!”
The actual crash in America came about because of the wars, in several ways:
First, financing the wars with debt was the final straw that broke the camel’s back. No one knew how much debt would break America, but doubling the national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion, with new trillions being borrowed now, finally did it. A government at war seeks political support. Spending billions for an unpopular war and its waste makes it far more difficult to deny billions for more welfare. That’s why America is called a warfare-welfare state. Welfare began in Germany in the 19th century when Bismarck sought popular support for his military ventures. It was the trade-off.
Second, the destruction of Iraq, and Bush’s constant threats to start bombing Iran, which could have closed down the Strait of Hormuz, brought about sky-high oil prices, which then busted world prosperity. Still, bin Laden might not have imagined that hedge funds would feed the speculation, and that Bush would not release oil from the petroleum reserve, which could have broken the price, because he wanted to keep it in reserve for war against Iran. Then the subsequent collapse of oil prices dried up a major source of foreign buyers for U.S. government bonds, which finance America’s wars and reckless debts.
Third, all of Washington’s attention was absorbed by the wars, leaving little time or energy for dull domestic issues such as debating reforms to the financial markets. Anyone who questioned the wars’ costs was dismissed as unpatriotic. Lies are part of waging war, and losing discredits and exposes the leaders’ lies. From discredited American leaders, it was a short step to discredited American financial markets.
Fourth was the toxic alliance of neoconservatives and religious fundamentalists. The neocons were academic Washington policy wonks who dreamed of ruling the world. The “fundies” provided electoral support, because they viewed America as doing God’s work among the foreign heathens. Their extremists indeed wanted chaos in the Middle East to “hurry up” God’s plans for Armageddon. Instead they served bin Laden’s goals.
Fifth, war spending deficits were in effect a massive Keynesian pump-priming operation, bound in the end to leave an economic hangover. Wars make the economy boom with seeming prosperity, but they are actually incredible wastes of resources. Over $200 million for each new fighter plane, $1,000 a day for mercenaries, massive corruption and incompetence in the military occupation – even bin Laden could not have anticipated how costly the war would become.
All of this was indeed foreseen by the wars’ many critics, but they could not break through in the major media against the powers and lies of the Bush administration.
Editor John Feffer forecast the wars’ consequences precisely in 2002:
“The successful realization of bin Laden’s secret strategy will happen not with a bang but with a whimper. Having failed to use the unipolar moment for the world’s advantage, the United States runs the risk of following the examples of Russia and England and Turkey, all faded empires whose ambitions overreached themselves. In the worst-case scenario, the U.S. will become the sick man of North America, a victim of military hypertrophy, extremes of wealth and poverty, decay of civil infrastructure, and loss of competitive economic advantage.”
At least Americans are told that Washington “succeeded” in preventing any more attacks on the homeland. Maybe, but the more likely reason there have been no further attacks was explained in a letter to the editor of Foreign Policy magazine [.pdf] by researcher Laura Garcés:
“But one could venture that Osama bin Laden has no reason now to expose himself and expend massive resources when he accomplished exactly what he wanted: billions of dollars of expenditures in launching wars, the total neglect of infrastructure, the loss of thousands of tourists who are wary of staying in line for hours dealing with airport. Decay and bankruptcy is what he sought, and fear is what he wanted to instill. Can anyone doubt that he succeeded?”
Author: Jon Basil Utley
Jon Basil Utley is associate publisher of The American Conservative. He was a foreign correspondent in South America for the Journal of Commerce and Knight Ridder newspapers and former associate editor of The Times of the Americas. He is a writer and adviser for Antiwar.com and edits a blog, The Military Industrial Congressional Complex.
View all posts by Jon Basil Utley
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Tag Archives: Fellowship of Pentecostal Churches of Banten Province
Islamic Groups Shut Down Worship of Church in Indonesia
Under pressure from Islamists, local officials order halt to services in home.
JAKARTA, Indonesia, October 5 (CDN) — Several Islamic organizations have pressed officials in a sub-district near Indonesia’s capital city to forbid Jakarta Christian Baptist Church to worship in a house, resulting in an order to cease services.
The Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), the Betawi Forum Group, and political party Hizbut Tahrir have told officials in Sepatan sub-district, Tangerang district, near Jakarta that worship activities cannot be conducted in a residence. The house belongs to the Rev. Bedali Hulu.
Both District Officer Ismet Iskandar and a sub-district officer support the closure and have ordered Hulu to use his home only as a residence, the pastor said. The sub-district officer, who goes by the single name of Rusdy, has sent a notice ordering an end to all worship at the house.
“But they have not put forth a solution,” Hulu said. “For a long time we have suggested that we build a place of worship, but there has been no response from the local government.”
On Sept. 27 a large crowd came to the house and demanded a stop to the Sunday worship service, Hulu said. Visibly frightened and anxious, the congregation hurried through the service.
An Islamic throng also came to the house on Sept. 13, with hundreds barging in and forcing the congregation out, Hulu said. Worship did not take place that day.
In another incident on the night of Sept. 19, unknown persons burned a vehicle belonging to the church. Hulu said the car was parked in front of his house. The next day Hulu reported the incident to police, who promised to catch the culprit, though at press time no one had been arrested.
Security forces, however, were able to maintain peace the next day when a mob showed up at the house, Hulu said; worship took place free of incident.
Church members feel terrorized by the mobs, the pastor said, but the nearest house of worship is several miles away, and many congregants do not have access to transportation. The Sepatan church has been serving worshippers, mostly day laborers, in Pisangan village since 2005.
“In the beginning we approached religious and community leaders and asked for permission to worship,” Hulu said. “They had no objections.”
Hulu established the church in June 2005 and held services in his home until December 2006 without objection from neighbors. He had obtained written permission from a local official to hold the services, and the church was registered with Religious Affairs authorities.
When the church planned to hold a Christmas celebration in December 2006, however, FPI members began an extended intimidation campaign with the express goal of ending “illegal” Christian activity in the village.
A Joint Ministerial Decree promulgated in 1969 and revised in 2006 requires a congregation of at least 90 adult members, the permission of at least 60 neighbors and a permit from local authorities to establish a place of worship. Church leaders say it is virtually impossible to obtain a permit under these terms.
The Rev. Wilhelmus Latumahina, head of the Fellowship of Pentecostal Churches of Banten Province, said that for years different groups have requested permission to build places of worship in Sepatan sub-district, with no response from officials.
He added that if the government closes a church, it is obligated to provide a solution.
Hulu said he would like to negotiate a solution. The pastor said he has tried repeatedly to meet with Sub-district Officer Rusdy but has been told that the official was not in the office.
Outside Agitators
Hulu said outside Islamists have incited local people to oppose the church.
Two years ago Islamists succeeded in closing the church, and Hulu was temporarily forced from the area. On Nov. 4, 2007, as children attended Sunday school at the church, a group of around 10 FPI members arrived and broke up the meeting. On Nov. 19 of that year, several FPI associates sent a letter to Hulu warning him and his family to leave the village within six days or the extremists would chase them out.
Hulu left temporarily on the advice of police, but his wife and mother-in-law were allowed to remain.
When Hulu filed another police report, the police summoned him to a meeting at the home of FPI leader Habib Muhammad Assegaf. While Hulu and his wife met with Assegaf, a church member sent a text message informing them that a small mob had attacked the church, breaking windows and taking church property. The mob also forced Hulu’s mother-in-law to leave the building.
Hulu reported this incident to district police in Tangerang, who informed him that he could either return to Pisangan village and cease all religious activity, or pursue the matter through legal channels. Weary of the constant pressure, Hulu filed an official complaint.
A Pisangan FPI leader who goes by the single name of Ocit then demanded that Hulu withdraw his complaint or else FPI members would raid the homes of individual church members.
Tensions were subsequently resolved through dialogue facilitated by a member of the Tangerang Parliament, Hanie Lawrence, and worship was permitted to resume. A number of radical Muslim organizations, however, have now resumed the fight to close the church.
Agus Andrianto, police chief of Tangerang district, said his forces are doing everything possible to maintain peace in Sepatan.
“It is our job to curb excesses,” he said. “We don’t want anything to get out of hand.”
Posted in Christianity, Indonesia, Islam, Islamic Defender' Front | Tagged 1969, 2005, 2006, access, activities, activity, adult, advice, agitators, Agus Andrianto, allowed, anxious, area, arrested, associates, attacked, attended, authorities, Baptist Church, barging, Bedali Hulu, belonging, Betawi Forum Group, breaking, build, burned, cannot, capital, car, catch, cease, channels, chase, children, Christian, Christianity, Christians, church, city, closes, closing, closure, complaint, congregants, congregation, constant, crowd, culprit, curb, day-laborers, demanded, dialogue, different, district, District Officer, end, establish, established, excesses, facilitated, family, feel, Fellowship of Pentecostal Churches of Banten Province, fight, filed, forbid, forces, forcing, FPI, free, frightened, front, government, groups, Habib Muhammad Assegaf, halt, Hanie Lawrence, head, Hizbut Tahrir, hold, home, house, hurried, impossible, incident, incited, individual, Indonesia, informing, Islam, Islamic, Islamic Defenders' Front, Islamists, Ismet Iskandar, Jakarta, Jakarta Christian, job, Joint Ministerial Decree, large, leaders, leave, legal, letter, local, maintain, matter, meet, meeting, members, mob, mobs, mother-in-law, Muslim, muslims, name, negotiate, neighbors, notice, objection, obligated, obtained, Ocit, office, officials, oppose, order, organizations, outside, parked, Parliament, party, Pastor, peace, people, permission, permit, permitted, Persecution, persons, Pisangan, place, police, Police Chief, political, possible, press time, pressed, pressure, promised, promulgated, property, provide, pursue, radical, raid, registered, religious, Religious Affairs, remain, repeatedly, report, requested, requires, residence, resolved, response, resulting, resume, Rev, revised, Rusdy, security, Sepatan, services, serving, shut-down, single, small, solution, stop, sub-district, sub-district officer, subsequently, succeeded, suggested, summoned, Sunday, Sunday School, support, taking, Tangerang, temporarily, tensions, terms, terrorized, text message, throng, transportation, tried, unknown, vehicle, village, virtually, visibly, warning, weary, Wilhelmus Latumahina, windows, withdraw, worship, worshippers, written | Leave a comment
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It might look like a toaster but StarTech’s StarDock can quickly back up one hard drive in triplicate
Posted by Jeremy Hellstrom | Dec 8, 2011 | Storage | 0
hdd duplicator1
Startech8
usb to eSATA1
Source: StarTech
Lockbourne, OH – StarTech.com, a leading manufacturer of hard-to-find connectivity parts has announced the release of the (SKU: SATDOCK4U3RE) USB 3.0/eSATA to SATA Standalone 1:3 Hard Drive Duplicator Dock, which enables users to perform 1:3 sector-by-sector duplication from a single SATA hard drive onto three others simultaneously, without having to connect the dock to a host computer. The Duplicator Dock also includes a SATA to IDE adapter, which provides the option of connecting an IDE hard drive in one of the SATA slots.
"IT professionals are always looking for ways to make their jobs more efficient and this new multi-drive duplicator allows them to accomplish just that," commented StarTech.com Senior Product Manager, Carey Cline. "The ability to perform a sector by sector duplication on up to three drives simultaneously, frees up the user’s time to perform other functions while the back-ups are created in the background. The fact it acts as a standalone unit also means it doesn’t use up resources on their computer system."
The duplicator dock can also be used as an external 4-bay hard drive dock, connected through either USB 3.0 or eSATA, providing an easy way to add and remove bare external hard drives from a computer system.
Other features and benefits of the Hard Drive Duplicator Dock (SATDOCK4U3RE) include:
Up to 72 MBps data transfer rates between drives, when used for hard drive duplication
Up to 5Gbps or 3Gbps data transfer rates (connected through USB 3.0 or eSATA, respectively), when utilized as an external drive docking station
Secure Erase feature simplifies erasing/wiping drive contents for further cloning use or disposal of a hard drive
Dual 60mm cooling fans mounted beneath the drives help to keep docked hard drives at optimal operating temperatures
Supports 2.5" or 3.5" form factor hard drives (HDDs) or Solid State Drives (SSDs)
Integrated LCD displays duplication progress and duplicator options menu
Included SATA to IDE adapter enables users to dock an IDE hard drive in place of a SATA hard drive in one of the four bays, making it possible to copy the contents of an IDE hard drive onto three SATA drives where necessary, when IDE drive is used in source slot
The USB 3.0/eSATA to SATA Standalone 1:3 Hard Drive Duplicator Dock (SKU: SATDOCK4U3RE) is available for purchase from leading technology resellers including CDW, Newegg.com, Amazon.com, PC Connection, and Insight and will also be distributed by Ingram Micro, Tech Data, D&H and SYNNEX. MSRP for this product is $499.99 USD in the United States and $514.99 CDN in Canada.
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How Ambitious is Mayor de Blasio’s Bus Plan?
You have to give Bill de Blasio credit: when someone else forces his hand, he will immediately claim that he was on the more popular-seeming side all along. After other people brought up the idea of a bus turnaround, starting with shadow agencies like TransitCenter and continuing with his frontrunning successor Corey Johnson, the mayor released an action plan called Better Buses. The plan has a bold goal: to speed up buses to 16 km/h using stop consolidation and aggressive enforcement of bus priority. And yet, elements of the plan leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Bus speeds
The Better Buses plan asserts that the current average bus speed in New York is 8 miles per hour, and with the proposed treatments it will rise to 10. Unfortunately, the bus speed in New York is lower. The average according to the NTD is 7.05 miles per hour, or 11.35 km/h. This includes the Select Bus Service routes, whose average speed is actually a hair less than the New York City Transit average, since most of them are in more congested parts of the city. The source the report uses for the bus speed is an online feed that isn’t reliable; when I asked one of the bus planners while working on the Brooklyn route redesign, I was told the best source to use was the printed schedules, and those agree with the slower figures.
In Brooklyn, the average bus speed based on the schedules is around 11 km/h. But the starting point for the speed treatment Eric Goldwyn and I recommended is actually somewhat lower, around 10.8 km/h, for two reasons: first, the busiest routes already have faster limited-stop overlays, and second, the redesign process itself reduces the average speed by pruning higher-speed lightly-used routes such as the B39 over the Williamsburg Bridge.
The second reason is not a general fact of bus redesigns. In Barcelona, Nova Xarxa increased bus speeds by removing radial routes from the congested historic center of the city. However, in Brooklyn, the redesign marginally slows down the buses. While it does remove some service from the congested Downtown Brooklyn area, most of the pruning in is outlying areas, like the industrial nooks and crannies of Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Without having drawn maps, I would guess the effect in Queens should be marginal in either direction, for essentially the same set of reasons as in Brooklyn, but in the Bronx it should slow down the buses by pruning coverage routes in auto-oriented margins like Country Club.
With all of the treatments Eric and I are proposing, the speed we are comfortable promising if our redesign is implemented as planned is 15 km/h and not 16 km/h.
How does the plan compare with the speaker’s?
City Council Speaker Johnson’s own plan for city control of NYCT proposes a bus turnaround as well. Let us summarize the differences between the two plans:
Aspect Johnson’s plan De Blasio’s plan
Route redesign Yes Yes
Bus shelters Yes Probably
Stop consolidation Not mentioned Yes
Bus lanes 48 km installed per year 16-24 km installed per year
Bus lanes vs. cars Parking removal if needed Not mentioned
Physically separated bus lanes Yes 3 km pilot
Median bus lanes Probably Maybe
Signal priority 1000 intersections equipped per year 300 intersections equipped per year
For the most part, the mayor’s plan is less ambitious. The question of bus lanes is the most concerning. What Eric and I think the Brooklyn bus network should look like is about 350 km. Even excluding routes that already have bus lanes (like Utica) or that have so little congestion they don’t need bus lanes (like the Coney Island east-west route), this is about 300 km. Citywide this should be on the order of 1,000 km. At the speaker’s pace this is already too slow, taking about 20 years, but at the mayor’s, it will take multiple generations.
The plan does bring up median lanes positively, which I appreciate: pp. 10-11 talk about center-running lanes in the context of the Bx6, which has boarding islands similar to those I have observed on Odengatan in Stockholm and Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris. Moreover, it suggests physically separated lanes, although the picture shown for the Bx6 involves a more obtrusive structure than the small raised curbs of Paris, Stockholm, and other European cities where I’ve seen such separation. Unfortunately, the list of tools on pp. 14-15 assumes bus lanes remain in or near the curb, talking about strategies for curb management.
The omission of Nostrand
The mayor’s plan has a long list of examples of bus lane installation. These include some delicate cases, like Church Avenue. However, the most difficult, Nostrand, is entirely omitted.
Nostrand Avenue carries the B44, the second busiest bus in the borough and fifth in the city. The street is only 24 meters wide and therefore runs one-way southbound north of Farragut Avenue, just north of the crossing with Flatbush Avenue and Brooklyn College. Northbound buses go on New York Avenue if they’re local or on Rogers if they’re SBS, each separated from Nostrand by about 250 meters. The argument for the split is that different demographics ride local and SBS buses, and they come from different sides of Nostrand. The subway is on Nostrand and so is the commerce. And yet, parking is more important to the city than a two-way bus lane on the street to permit riders to access the main throughfare of the area most efficiently.
Moreover, even the bus lanes that the plan does discuss leave a lot to be desired. The second most important street in Brooklyn to equip with high-quality physically separated bus lanes, after Nostrand, is Church, like Nostrand a 24-meter street where something has to give. The plan trumpets its commitment to transit priority, and yet on Church it includes a short segment with curb lanes partly shared with delivery trucks using curb management. Limiting merchant complaints is more important to the mayor than making sure people can ride buses that are reliably faster than a fast walk.
Can the city deliver?
The mayor has recurrently prioritized the needs of people who are used to complaining at public meetings, who are typically more settled in the city, with a house and a car. New York may have a majority of its households car-free, but to many of them car ownership remains aspirational and so does home ownership, to the point that the transit-oriented lifestyle remains a marker of either poverty or youth, to be replaced with the suburban auto-oriented lifestyle as one achieves middle-class status. Even as there is cultural change and this mentality is increasingly not true, the city’s political system keeps a process that guarantees that millions of daily transit users must listen to drivers who complain that they have to park a block away.
The plan has an ambitious number: 16 km/h. But when it comes to actually implementing it, it dithers. Its examples of bus lanes are half-measures. There’s no indication that the city is willing to overrule merchants who think they have a God-given right to the street that their transit-riding customers do not. Without this, bus lanes will remain an unenforced joke, and the vaunted speed improvements will be localized to too small a share of bus route-km to truly matter.
The most optimistic take on Better Buses is that the mayor is signaling that he’s a complete nonentity when it comes to bus improvement, rather than an active obstacle. But more likely, the signal is that the mayor has heard that there are political and technical efforts to improve bus service in the city and he wants to pretend to participate in them while doing nothing.
Written by Alon Levy Posted in New York, Politics and Society, Shoddy Studies, Studies, Transportation, Urban Transit
2019/04/20 - 00:22 petey
just one point: we here in NYC use mph and yards, as does the rest of the US, and we’re not changing anytime soon, fortunately. i have no idea what 16 kmh would feel like, though i have some idea of what 24 meters would look like – it would look like 24 yards. speaking only in metric when discussing US transit is precious. can you also give numbers in the US system?
2019/04/20 - 00:51 Nilo
1 km is .6 miles. Really this isn’t that hard and facilitates cross national comparisons when they’re made.
that’s of no use to us who live here and don’t deal in kmh or meters. it;s not that hard, to use your term, to include the US measures.
also, it’s not .6 mi really and that’ll add up after a bit, leading to inaccuracy.
I mean, New York has a vast community of immigrants, who almost always know the metric system. (In San Diego, for example, the museum I went to in Balboa Park has information in English and Spanish, using English units in English and metric units in Spanish, because that’s what first-generation Mexican immigrants know.) Immigrants are disproportionately riding transit – US-wide 32.5% of transit commuters are immigrants, NYC-wide it’s 44%, both figures counting Puerto Ricans as native-born Americans. For the actual users of NYCT, metric units aren’t necessarily stranger than English ones.
we’re not changing anytime soon
It’s not true today. You do realise that all your “knowledge” workers use metric for everything? From rocket scientists to biotech, medical-tech, engineering, etc etc. Only if the need arises to “communicate” to the unwashed masses are measures converted to your ancient cumbersome Imperial measures. Imperial measures can’t even be consistent amongst the only two countries that still use them, though please note that metric is actually the legal measure in the UK and the country only stays stuck halfway because of Thatcher who reversed the metricisation process in the early ’80s. That gives you an idea of the backwoods stubbornness and ignorance of Thatcher and the neo-liberal “intellectuals”.
But also realise that your Imperial measures are actually metric under the hood. That is, they are now legally and scientifically defined in terms of their metric equivalents, for the obvious reason that Imperial measures don’t have reliable fixed physical constants (bars of steel or lead or whatever ceased to be accurate enough more than half a century ago) while metric measures are fixed against universal physical constants.
BTW, I happened to watch a bit of Star Trek (Next Gen.) which is 32 years old. All metric, from kilometers to centimetres to kilograms etc.
Perhaps its time for you to catch up. Five billion people manage it so how difficult can it be?
2019/04/22 - 11:40 Tonami
The US can be a weird place. I work in the civil engineering division a California utility and all our measurements are in Feet and inches which drives me nuts(I assumed that all engineering in the US is done in metric). I have friends in the auto industry and it’s metric during engineering then once the product is ready for release, everything gets converted to Imperial for marketing purposes. However it seems Imperial is the standard in civil engineering across the US. Apparently our contractors can provide engineering drawings in metric, but it costs more, about 45% more for the same job. So in some cases there’s a financial reason why the US has not changed yet. Only a federal mandate will move the needle.
2019/04/20 - 03:31 Seb
What do you think about the new bus network in Pairs? It seems not ambitious enough, or is the network not that broken?
In Paris? I genuinely don’t know, having never taken any of the buses there, since the Metro is everywhere.
It still gets more than 400 million trips per year intramural, including T3. (https://www.api-site.paris.fr/paris/public/2018%2F11%2FParis_ra2017_web.pdf)
I feel like I’m just missing some good analysis of the plan, from you or someone else.
The bus figure alone comes to 333 million. The RATP Metro had 1.539 billion passenger trips during the same period. This meas there were 0.22 bus trips for each Metro trip . By contrast there were 2.677 billion NYCT subway and SIRT trips and 844 million MTA and NYCT but and brt trips, according to the NTD. The NYC ratio was 0.32 bus passengers per subway passenger.
This makes NYC buses 43% more popular than subways than the Parisians’ metro/bus preference.
The NTD counts unlinked trips, so it highballs NY rail ridership. Actual subway ridership is about 1.7 billion. Bus ridership is indeed 844 million unlinked, but very few trips involve bus-bus transfers (3% according to one study from 1999), so linked ridership is hardly lower.
Of course, many, many trips involve a bus-subway transfer, whence the apparently low revenue per rider on NYCT buses per the NTD…
If the bus figures are for just the municipality of Paris, it is better compared to Manhattan than to all of NYC.
They’re just in Paris, yeah. Ile-de-France-wide it’s 1 billion. But then the Metro mostly just serves Paris as well – the suburbs have the RER. Overall rail ridership in Ile-de-France is just short of 3 billion a year, which I believe double-counts intermodal transfers (i.e. Metro-RER).
Like Alon, I avoided buses when I lived in Paris and for the same reason: the Metro is so good and reliable and gets you very close to your destination (much closer than the likes of the Underground in London or the Subway NYC). But it’s also because we transients tend to live in the centre of Paris. The bus network is huge and may serve you better if you live or work in the banlieus. The night service (Noctilien) is a pretty good backstop if you’ve missed the last Metro or RER.
As to “new bus network”, not sure what you mean. The only changes I am aware of are summarised in Wiki:
Paris’ bus lines interconnecting all points of the capital and its closest suburban cities. There are 58 bus lines operating in Paris that have a terminus within city limits.
The capital’s bus system has been given a major boost over the past decade. Beginning in early 2000, Paris’ major arteries have been thinned to reserve an express lane reserved only for bus and taxi, usually designated with signs and road markings. More recently, these bus lanes have been isolated from the rest of regular circulation through low concrete barriers that form “couloirs” and prevent all other forms of Paris circulation from even temporarily entering them.
Presumably this means they are less subject to traffic snarls and that thing we hate about all buses: wait forever for one then three arrive together.
Here is the webpage:
https://www.nouveaureseaubusparisien.fr/fr/
Yes, it just happened over the weekend! 20th April.
When you look at these dense bus route maps its not easy to really see what has changed, however I found this article from 2017 with a bit of explanation:
https://www.thelocal.fr/20170629/relief-for-parisians-as-new-bus-map-with-better-links-to-suburbs-unveiled
Paris unveils new bus network map for first time in 70 years
The Local, 29 June 2017.
Aiming to create better links between Paris and its surrounding suburbs, the transport network will create four new lines (45/59/71/77) and update 57 existing ones, meaning that nearly 65 percent of the current routes will change.
Line 45 is set to connect Concorde (8th) to Aubervilliers/Saint-Denis to the northeast of the city. Line 59 will transport people from place d’Italie (13th) to Clamart in the southwestern suburbs, while line 71 will travel between porte de la Villette (19th) to the François-Mitterrand library in the capital’s 13th arrondissement.
Finally, buses on route 77 will travel between Gare de Lyon (12th) and Joinville-le-Pont in the southeastern suburbs of the capital.
Among the 23 lines that run between Paris and the suburbs some six have been modified and four have been extended.
It has a link (below) to a map that is one of those fancy divided graphics of the bus maps before and after, with a vertical line that you can drag left or right to see the changes in a kind of dynamic fashion.
https://gpbus-v3.serveurlc.com/
You wrote: “I feel like I’m just missing some good analysis of the plan, from you or someone else.”
I agree. Alon should give us an analysis:-) Tout de suite.
Nostrand Avenue carries the B44, the second busiest bus in the borough and fifth in the city. The street is only 24 meters wide and therefore runs one-way southbound north of Farragut Avenue, just north of the crossing with Flatbush Avenue and Brooklyn College…And yet, parking is more important to the city than a two-way bus lane on the street to permit riders to access the main throughfare of the area most efficiently
According the the DCP online map, the the street width is indeed 80 ft (24 m) between Eastern Pkwy and Kings Hwy. However, this is the building line to building line measure. It includes sidewalks. According to the NYC Street Centerline map, the roadway width is only 44 ft (13.4 m) along the same stretch.
By contrast, the Bd. Montparnasse is approximately 120 ft (36.5 m) wide building line to building line, as measured by Google satellite view.
Yep. This is why Nostrand is difficult. Unless you get rid of the sidewalks, you have room for four lanes. Right now the city chooses two parking lanes, one car moving lane and one painted bus lane. A city that gave a crap about transportation would change it to two bus lanes and two car moving lanes (or one car moving lane and one parking lane), but that’s not de Blasio’s New York.
A city that gave a crap about transportation would change it to two bus lanes and two car moving lanes (or one car moving lane and one parking lane), but that’s not de Blasio’s New York.
Only a few NYC streets meet the 120 ft (36.5 m) building-to-building width of the grands boulevards of Paris. The extra 40 ft (12 m) width translates to 4 extra traffic lanes. Re-purposing 2 of 8 lanes for buses is a lot easier than re-purposing 2 of Nostrand Avenue’s 4 lanes. I wonder how Paris officials would have reacted had they been confronted with NYC’s spatial constraints.
Look at what they do on 24-meter streets. Those streets are often one-way, which isn’t good, but they don’t have on-street parking. Boulevard Saint-Michel has four traffic lanes, two for buses (one contraflow) and two for cars.
According to Janette Sadik-Khan in her book Street Fight, she implies she implemented plenty of that while she was Bloomberg’s head of DoT for 6 years. Certainly the book lays out the schema for converting such American streets, and with some actual examples in NYC. She explains that the American convention (not a law) of 12 ft (≈4m) per lane is excessive when most vehicles are only 2m wide. She says that often reducing both vehicle lane width and redrawing lanes (often reducing lanes for private vehicles) can actually improve traffic flow, and certainly improve passenger movement and safety. I think she boasts that her changes have carried over to the De Blasio era.
BTW, in response to a complaint by adirondacker below, these schemes incorporate loading zones in clever “bulb” arrangements at intersections which narrow the crossing and improve pedestrian visibility/safety.
However I haven’t been to NYC for yonks so I don’t know how much actually got done. Her book highlights just how painfully slow it is to bring change to the streets of the US, even in relatively progressive NYC.
I’m gonna have to buy lottery tickets. The place I decided to drop the Streetview icon onto the block had two vans parked illegally, I assume loading or unloading something.
they don’t have on-street parking.
They built underground parking lots to store them. The one on Place Saint-Michel holds 428 cars and should cover the Latin Quarter. There are 4 more between Bd. Saint Germain and the Luxembourg Gardens that are within 150 m of Bd. Saint-Michel.
Boulevard Saint-Michel has four traffic lanes, two for buses (one contraflow) and two for cars.
There’s the question of size, when comparing Bd. Saint-Michel to Nostrand Ave. The Bd. Saint-Michel section with bus lanes extends for roughly 0.5 mi (800 m) from the Seine to the Luxembourg Gardens. The Nostrand Ave section from Eastern Pkwy to Flatbush Ave is 2.5 mi (4 km) long. Proportionately that’s 5 times the difficulty of Paris. There’s also the question of the cost of underground garages to hide the parked cars, in the Paris fashion.
Okay, but if we’re permitting parking within 150 meters of the destination, then there’s plenty of that on the side streets next to Nostrand.
Limiting merchant complaints is more important to the mayor than making sure people can ride buses that are reliably faster than a fast walk.
Merchants are one of the amenities that makes people get on the bus. If it wasn’t for those pesky merchants you’d have a whole bunch of origins without any destinations.
So let the merchants get deliveries between midnight-6am, and have it bus-only the rest of the time.
Yes, UPS, FedEx, the USPS etc. are going to have special routes just for those blocks. And all of the other deliveries they get so they, as merchants selling things, have things to sell. Pesky customers, expecting there to be goods in the shops.
They manage to deliver to streets without curbside parking.
Where? I’ve pulled around too many illegally parked trucks to count.
The merchants keep selling goods even if they’re inconvenienced by having to park half a block away. The sort of apocalyptic rhetoric we get from them (and from New Right actors in general – it’s the same with the Prop 13 tax revolters, the Sagebrush Rebellion types, the NRA, etc.) comes precisely from the fact that they don’t have a credible exit threat. They know that if the city builds bike lanes and bus lanes and removes parking over their objections, within a year everyone will forget that the parking even existed and move on.
2019/04/21 - 01:55 Jacob Manaker
What is the “New Right”? (I get a sense of it from your examples, but it’s a term I’ve never heard before, so could you define it more clearly?)
I know you like to tear into local government for being do-nothing… Well IGEB has the same criticism of Berlin city government, in part also when it comes to buses. What are your thoughts there?
I’m mainly annoyed at S21, rather than the buses, but that could be because my local tram, the M10, is actually getting dedicated lanes extended.
But S21… I’m probably going to post about it after the holiday. It’s orthogonal to the S-Bahn’s most pressing need for more capacity.
https://www.zukunft-mobilitaet.net/95052/urbane-mobilitaet/berlin-ausbau-schienennetz-bvg-s-bahn/ here is a German language “wish list” of possible rail extensions in Berlin. Which of those would you think the best ideas?
The S21 variants to the southeast are really good, and I’m sad that what seems to be the official plan involves just extending S21 south to Yorckstrasse.
I’m surprised the list doesn’t include the Siemens Railway. This list of potential extensions, which omits your link’s more fanciful U-Bahn crayon, talks about it. In addition to that I’d also look at extending the S-Bahn to Tegel rather than the U-Bahn, since a southeast-facing S21 would need lines on the northwest for balance, and there’s just more S-Bahn demand going east and southeast than going west and northwest today.
Getting back to comparing Bd. Saint-Michel to Nostrand Ave, there is plenty of on street parking on the side streets close to both. Paris’ underground garages have the capacity to displace only the parked cars in the bus lanes.
Here’s my guesstimate for the construction cost of similar parking garages for Nostrand Avenue.
Using DCP’s City Map data, I estimate there are 700 curbside parking spaces between Eastern Pkwy and Flatbush Ave. My method was to take the total length on Nostrand and subract the building-to-building width of each of the 67 cross streets. I also guessed there were 2 fire hydrants per side that each took away 20 feet of curb space and that each car required 20 ft of curb space. No allowance was made for curb cuts or bus stops, which are generally fair game for “short” periods of time.
Shoup estimated the cost for each NYC underground parking space at $35,000, using 2012 construction cost data. This means the Shoup estimate would come to $24.5M to remove the parked cars from the two-way bus lanes on Nostrand. I’d assume a this is a lowball figure: it’s 2012 dollars; the construction estimates were for building sites not streets (water, gas, electric, sewer, steam etc. services); and the MTA or NYC would be running the project. It would probably be closer or more than $100M, if ESA is any yardstick. That’s 2 bus lanes of 2.5 miles each. That comes close to $20M/single-bus-lane-mile ($12.4/single-bus-lane-km).
Mr. Johnson’s 48 km bus-lane/yr comes to $595M per year to build underground garages in the Paris style. Mr. DeBlasio’s more modest plan comes in at half that.
This is the investment that Paris made to prevent strangulation from parked cars. One should not ignore it, even though it’s hidden from view.
What you’re missing is that the customers don’t actually drive to the shops that much. They mostly arrive by transit or on foot, but the merchants think their customers drive because the merchants themselves drive.
It’s not really a question of parking capacity. New York has more than enough for the amount of car traffic it should be planning for, which is far lower than it has today. Removing car lanes in favor of bus lanes on wider streets and removing obstructive highways like the BQE should remove more moving capacity than two-way bus lanes on Nostrand and Church should remove parking capacity. It’s a question of how far merchants have to park from their businesses, and there the answer is that what works in Paris should work in New York equally well.
They aren’t parking on Nostrand Ave. They’d take up all the spaces their customers, who drive, want to use.
Stephen Bauman: This is the investment that Paris made to prevent strangulation from parked cars. One should not ignore it, even though it’s hidden from view.
First, those Parisian underground car parks were built decades ago (most in the 60s & 70s) so they have absolutely zilch to do with policy re bus lanes or whatever. And they have zilch impact, other than negative (induced demand) on “strangulation” or congestion.
Second, though there are surprisingly plenty of them in central Paris, for such a dense city (people & businesses) it is still not much; in the 5th arrondissement there are 5 (though make it 7 for two on the border with the 6th) which even at several thousand places is probably 1% of people each day in the area. Note that those are public parking stations. There are private ones usually associated with ‘recent’ (post-war) redevelopment; not many in the 5th but a big one is rue des Saints Pères in the 6th where you can buy a spot (leasehold for defined time) or rent on monthly basis. The Saints-Pères Parking goes at least 7 levels down and the last I saw (2016) to buy a spot (and it’s not lock-up, just an open spot) cost €45,000. In my files I found a lock-up (“box ferme”) in Mabillon-Lobineau (marché St Germain, 6e) going for €92,000 in 2017! (Of course in one sense these are capital investments so may make more sense than paying absurd parking rents that you never get back.)
Third, those public Parkings are expensive (the private ones too but less on long-term lease) being >€50 for a day-long park, so I assume they are mostly used by short-term visitors (one or two hours) or of course by the wealthy who don’t care. In all my time in Paris I have never known anyone to have used them, or been with anyone who has, but several friends rented a long-term carpark (not in central arrondissements where you would have to be wealthy) or had one as part of owning an apartment in one of those ‘modern’ (70s-80s) blocks in an outer arrondissement. In the Italie complex (13e) the parking (which has both public and private) it goes ten floors down and is quite freaky driving down there. So you get the slightly weird (but logical) situation where people drive in and park their car in one of these, then catch the Metro to their apartment across town … and yes, they mostly keep a car for extra-mural purposes.
Fourth, as you say, there is still quite a lot of surface parking–just less and less on the major arterials–but of course in high demand which means endless “circling the block” syndrome if you need to find an overnight one close to where you live. This means you have to be a super-dedicated driver and slightly loco to either own a car in Paris or to use it daily and worse, expect to park it near to where you live. This is as it should be.
Thus, this is to reinforce what Alon wrote in his last comment: this kind of parking is no “solution” to mobility issues in a dense city. Once, back in the early-post-war period up to early 80s, they may have tried to cater for cars in Paris but it is obviously hopeless and counter-productive encouraging them into the city in the first place. They are certainly not looking at this “problem” of displacement when they create exclusive bus lanes (which also double as cycle-lanes). Just like expropriating a swathe of the boulevardes-des-Marachaux for the T3 tramway, or the recent closure of the riverside expressway (voie Pompidou, rightbank) no carmaggedon ensued. That’s because congestion is self-limiting. Pushing such schemes (bus & cycle lanes) into the inner-fringe suburbs (Petit Couronne) along with GPX mass transit, can only improve things a lot. They absolutely don’t need to be accompanied by absurd expense and absurdity of building parking stations. That is seriously outdated thinking.
2019/04/22 - 12:02 Paul
A 1:1 replacement of parking spaces is not the answer, since parking demand responds to price and scarcity. The problem in most of the US (including New York) is that, aside from garages, parking is underpriced — either free or very cheap. If you’ve read Shoup’s work, you’re probably familiar with these arguments.
What I’d do around Nostrand is decide on a split of short-term vs. resident parking in the area. Build the bus lane on Nostrand. Meter the short-term spaces and adjust the price per block based on demand. San Francisco and Calgary have been doing this and it seems to work well — you can find a metered space near your destination, although it might cost you. Then, auction off resident parking permits so that demand matches supply. There are fair auction strategies so that they don’t necessarily all go to rich people.
There are fair auction strategies so that they don’t necessarily all go to rich people.
That’s the whole point of “congestion” pricing. The very rich found it cheaper to use cars than to pay their fair share of building and maintaining public transit. Their interest in public transit was to make sure it did not raise their taxes. Public transit suffered.
Soon, the less rich had to opt for cars because public transit became unreliable. It wasn’t cheaper for them but they had no choice. The less rich, getting no visible benefit from public transit, also turned against financing it.
Unfortunately for the rich, cars are an inefficient way to move people in urban areas ( and possibly elsewhere). Their solution is to raise the cost of car travel by various means. This would drive the less rich back onto public transit. The additional cost would still be cheaper for the very rich than paying their fair share to build and maintain public transit.
But what if the congestion pricing money goes to fund public transit?
what if the congestion pricing money goes to fund public transit?
My last sentence holds: “The additional cost would still be cheaper for the very rich than paying their fair share to build and maintain public transit.”
The monies gained from congestion pricing will never be sufficient to make the very rich to pay their fair share to build and maintain a public transit system for all people. NYC’s current congestion pricing law illustrates this point. It’s designed to raise $15B in bonds. Estimates for the capital needed start at 3 times that amount. More importantly, it’s to go for paying back bonds. Should congestion pricing fail to reduce congestion or improve public transit, it cannot be repealed as was Prohibition. The bonds will have to be paid back first.
But it did reduce congestion in Singapore and London (and I think also Stockholm and Milan?)… and the estimates for NYCT capital needs are relative to obscenely high construction costs. No shit, if it takes you $40 million to make a station elevator-accessible rather than the more reasonable $3 million, you’re going to struggle to raise money.
those Parisian underground car parks were built decades ago (most in the 60s & 70s)…
At the same time that the RER was being built and the Sprague’s were being replaced. Urban planning wasn’t one dimensional in Paris during that era.
…so they have absolutely zilch to do with policy re bus lanes or whatever.
Workable policies must address existing conditions. Policies that ignore existing conditions and assume they will be enforced by fiat will fail.
When implementing bus lanes, one existing condition that must be considered is the disposition of parked cars. This isn’t a problem for the 120 ft (36.5 m) wide boulevards. There will be enough remaining lanes to accommodate parking and motion. It is a problem for the narrow 80 ft (24.5 m) two-way boulevards because parking and/or sidewalks have to go.
Fortunately, there were adequate, existing parking garages for Bd. St-Michel for two dedicated bus lanes. The fact the garages may have been built without considering future dedicated bus lanes is immaterial. Their existence is what was key. If they didn’t exist, they would have had to be built. They existed in Paris, which made the bus lane installation easier. They don’t exist in NYC, so their cost needs to be added to the cost of a bus lane policy.
One other problem for NYC is that there are very few streets that are 120 ft (36.5 m) wide. What to do with the existing parked cars, will be a problem for most bus lane proposals.
If there’s less room for cars (parked or moving) less people will drive.
Right, in the 1960s and 70s transportation investment included more car infrastructure as well as rail infrastructure that would get trains out of cars’ way. West German cities built U-Bahn tunnels with the express purpose of replacing the surface streetcars in order to make more room for cars. West Berlin built A100 and is still expanding it, although the next phase is finally seeing serious opposition from the left. The changes in urban planning toward more surface livability specifically postdate the big S-Bahn/RER investments, and mostly go back to the 1990s or 2000s, including French tramway revival, various freeway removal projects, bike lanes, bus lanes, and pedestrianization.
The parking may seem like it’s making transit investment easier, but it’s the exact opposite. Thanks to all the effort Paris made in the third quarter of the 20th century to be car-friendly, it has very high density of cars per square kilometer (I believe about on a par with the most motorized US county per km^2, which is San Francisco), which are disproportionately driven by middle-class suburbanites who can take the train but don’t want to. These suburbanites have sued the city over its livability plans, though thankfully the courts permitted the motorway removal to proceed. They’ve also turned the city into one of Western Europe’s pollution capitals, making it harder to sell people on living in the city (remember, this is why I left, the riots were just an indication things aren’t going to improve much).
That’s also part of the “streetcar versus metro” lines of argument in Germany. Metros are compatible with wide car only streets. Streetcars aren’t. Hence red red green at least paying lip service to tram expansion into west Berlin and some impressive tram improvements in a few cities (Karlsruhe comes to mind)
Stephen Bauman:
The fact the garages may have been built without considering future dedicated bus lanes is immaterial. Their existence is what was key. If they didn’t exist, they would have had to be built. They existed in Paris, which made the bus lane installation easier.
I don’t believe that for a moment. You’re thinking as an non-Parisian, presumed American or Anglosphere type. There will be essentially no new Parkings built in Paris, except perhaps on fringe new developments. So far there have been three Paris administrations elected on the slogan “Paris for Parisians Not Cars”. The riverside expressway was closed without any real alternative. More and more road closures or lane closures for bus & bike & pedestrian space will happen. The serious questions don’t concern what the cars will do or where will they go (there will simply be far fewer of them) but how the Metro etc will cope. Part of the answer is GPX which will remove the need for lots of people to needlessly come into and out of Paris. An example is of tramway T3a which carried 30+ million pax shortly after opening (I can’t find figures since T3b opened but it surely must be carrying the same, ie. another 30m.) BTW, I am not aware of any construction of new parking stations to cope with all the cars displaced from the boulevards des Marachaux by the tramway.
Also, as we have seen–with Velib, dedicated bus-lanes, street closures (Times Square) even High Line (Promenade Plantée was 13 years before HL)–where Paris leads, NYC and others eventually follow. It is already happening. It doesn’t mean there won’t be resistance by some car drivers who can’t imagine anything else other than “their” ownership of our road space. That happens in Paris, mostly by banlieusardes who think the same way. Luckily the mayor of Paris doesn’t have to worry so much about them as they aren’t her voters! But even the president of Ile de France, right-wing Valerie Pécresse, has had to backdown on her previous rhetoric designed to appeal to that same road lobby. I think that says more than any argument bloggers can have.
OTOH, I am not sure Paris isn’t correct in avoiding congestion charges, though of course parking scarcity and costs are already a very big deterrent to driving intramuros. It really does favour the rich and privileged. I’d bet in all such places that have such zones, including or especially Singapore, the top echelon award themselves all kinds of exceptions or someone else is paying for their permit. Instead I wonder if all car owners couldn’t be given a set number of days of free access; this would be linked to the driver not the car.
For what it’s worth, the populists loathe Anne Hidalgo. I don’t think she’s even that popular in Paris anymore; Eastern Paris shifted from far left posters to generic UKIP-style posters calling for Frexit and accusing Hidalgo of turning Paris to shit (“emmerder”).
In Singapore the elites don’t give themselves exemptions from paying ERP, they just have enough money that they can eat the cost and benefit from clear roads. The waste of space at the Ministry of Transport pulls well over a million dollars a year in salary.
Yes, I understand. I have written some criticism too–such as the recent weird new urinoirs (on my ile-saint-louis) and I am still not convinced about closing the riverside expressway (even as it didn’t induce carmageddon on the streets of Paris). As for populists hating her, isn’t that a good thing? Popularity is of questionable value and isn’t necessarily reflected in elections. She runs ahead of popular opinion but that is not a bad thing. In any case elections are next scheduled next year (or is it 2021?). Is it clear she wants to run again? Being deputy-mayor for 12 years and this term as mayor it will be 18 years in the hot-house of Parisian politics. She has previously expressed the wish of running for mayor of Toulouse …
Yes, Singapore pays it pollies a cool one million dollars p.a., justified on the grounds of neutralising corruption! In a state where nepotism rules. But I’d be surprised if governmental limos weren’t somehow exempted the normal road rules. The city-state has the worst inequality in the developed world.
You’re thinking as an non-Parisian, presumed American or Anglosphere type
I prefer to attribute my thinking to knowledge of Menken’s Law: “Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.”
In the case of bus lanes on Church and Nostrand Aves, X are bus riders and B are people not using these buses and parking cars. In the case of Robert Moses: X were automobile drivers and B were everyone else. On St-Michel the B were pedestrians, who were now prevented from crossing mid-block by barriers.
You’re describing literally any government program that didn’t get 100% approval. Maybe A is the NHS, B is Tories who thought paying higher taxes = communism, X is British health care. Maybe A is child labor laws and compulsory education, B is parents’ rights types and the US Gilded Age Supreme Court, X is children. Maybe A is mandatory vaccination, B is assorted anti-vaxxers, X is public health.
You’re describing literally any government program that didn’t get 100% approval.
I’m not the literalist nor absolutist you are describing. I also see merit in utilitarianism’s “greatest good for the greatest number” mantra. In this instance, I believe more consideration should be given to B in various bus lane “uber alles” proposals.
The point of bus lanes is that a bus with 40 passengers gets 40 times the priority of a car with one.
2019/04/22 - 14:14 Reedman Bassoon
Last time I was in Paris, I used the underground Parking Etoile Foch (near the Arch de Triomphe. It has 2312 spaces, a gas station, and a car rental agency. New York should duplicate this.
Because I presume Reedman Bassoon is an American!
The real question for him is did he use the car while in Paris? That would be freaky. OTOH, if one didn’t plan to use it within Paris it makes more sense to park it out in the suburbs (or at CDG) and catch the RER back. This reminds me once of when a (ageing) Stanford professor was visiting my Paris lab and we took him to dinner. There was much joking (can’t remember if in his presence) on the fact that he had hired a car and brought it into central Paris; he was already known as a somewhat idiosyncratic driver in California so we just could not imagine how he could cope with Paris, except perhaps in a Mister Magoo fashion (it is everyone else who suffers while Magoo blithely sails thru the chaos untouched). Are you Mister Magoo, Reedman?
I know: you need a car because you have to lug that bassoon around with you!
Thank you for that correction. I’ll use the MTA’s Facts and Figures web page for ridership numbers from now on.
Actually, the correction makes my point stronger. The 1.727B subway riders and 725M NYCT+MTA bus riders means there are 0.42 bus riders per subway rider vs. 0.22 for Paris. This means that a NYC public transit rider is 90% more likely to use a bus than his Paris counterpart.
Yep! I bring up the weak ridership of buses in Paris proper (since the Metro has complete coverage) when people ask me for opinions about the bus network there. I never took it, I don’t think I was ever in a position where it made sense for me to take it, and I suspect that if the entire intramural network shut down (e.g. due to strike) the Metro could absorb its traffic without too much pain. The policy relevance is that you don’t see me calling for median bus lanes on Saint-Michel even though I do call for same on Nostrand and Church, because Saint-Michel is frankly not as important a bus corridor.
I did take buses, when I first visited Paris in 1967. I wanted to see the City and the two-man buses were quite civilized compared to NYC. Buses were probably more popular because I spotted many going to “Complet”. One of the buses took a direct trajectory from the American Express office to where I was staying. It used Bd St-Michel. It took forever. I could walk faster, if I did not examine St-Michel’s bookstores.
There are some corridors in Paris, which need a bus lane. Line 62 has 15 million passagers a year, but is still missing them, as I guess, the street is not wide enough to make to put them in easily. https://youtu.be/lj19mxBgIFs?t=717
But it did reduce congestion in Singapore and London (and I think also Stockholm and Milan?)…
That depends on one’s definition of “congestion.”
I’ve studied London’s experience. If one equates congestion with traffic volumes, then the traffic volume into the charging cordon has remained 20% lower than its pre-charging level. The story is different, if one considers average vehicle speed (or excess min/km as in the TfL reports). The TfL metric defined a non-congested baseline min/km during midnight hours. Congestion level was defined as the excess of the min/km from that baseline during other hours. The congestion levels dropped 30% during the first year. The excess min/km measure subsequently increased so that after 5 years they exceeded the pre-charging congestion levels.
There was a hint as to the reason for the first year’s spectacular results. During the hours when charging wasn’t in effect, vehicle volumes returned to their pre-charging levels but the congestion level remained 30% lower. Another factor was involved. London did about 5 years worth of street mains repairs in the year leading up the congestion pricing’s start. They did not pursue street mains repairs with the same vigor after its implementation. The result was that congestion gradually increased, as the street mains infrastructure gradually deteriorated.
Singapore first instituted a cordon toll like London. It did not experience any increase in vehicle speed within the cordon despite a reduction in vehicle volume entering the cordon. They went to a different system that monitored when and how much each vehicle traveled within the cordon. The congestion price was based on vehicle distance traveled within the cordon. The second implementation increased vehicle speed within the cordon.
Stockholm’s system is a pure cordon toll on bridges leading to the congestion zone. Vehicle volumes and travel times on the bridges were reduced. Vehicle speeds decreased to the previous levels the further one traveled from the bridges and their access roads.
NYC is instituting a pure cordon toll. The London, Singapore and Stockholm experiences are the reason I’m dubious regarding any congestion improvement. I’d like an escape, if congestion pricing is a failure. I define failure as not increasing vehicle speed while simultaneously not improving public transit. The bonding requirement in the legislation prevents such an escape.
Singapore first instituted a cordon toll like London. It did not experience any increase in vehicle speed within the cordon despite a reduction in vehicle volume entering the cordon. They went to a different system that monitored when and how much each vehicle traveled within the cordon. The congestion price was based on vehicle distance traveled within the cordon.
Good points about the various congestion charge models. I believe what the Singapore experience foretells is a generalised kilometres-travelled toll for all roads. It will probably be forced within the next 5, or certainly 10, years as e-cars eat away government receipts from gas taxes. It could also be progressive, charging more at various thresholds, as well as zoned. Like progressive taxes it could also build in some social equity.
I believe what the Singapore experience foretells is a generalised kilometres-travelled toll for all roads.
I’d prefer to examine the underlying data before jumping to a conclusion. London’s initial bottom line did not tell the whole story. There may be other factors in Singapore.
2019/04/23 - 01:04 marvin gruza
Have we considered half width buses but twice as long? Many of the “trollies” at zoos are much narrower than a regular buses but are several carriages long. Once we make a dedicated bus lane we want it to run near capacity and this could be the solution. What I am really proposing is trackless rubber tired guided narrow width trains with each articulated unit steering itself based on inground (or painted) censors.
Have we considered half width buses but twice as long?
My attempts at modelling congestion have led me to consider the ratio of area occupied by moving vehicles to available roadway space. Any geometry change while keeping the footprint constant would not have any affect. Bus stop length is another problem for longer buses. Short blocks and long buses limit the number of buses a single bus stop can simultaneously handle. Dwell time is another factor at bus stops, so double deckers are not necessarily the solution.
2019/04/23 - 11:33 santogigantepatriota
You sum up de Blasio’s posture on this pretty well. I think this can be applied to virtually all of the mayor’s stances on the issues facing New York City.
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Little Things That Matter: Bus Shelter
Stop Spacing and Route Spacing
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Damien Sneed leads a band consisting of vocalists, a bassist, organist, and drummer that performs music from the civil rights movement, juxtaposed with spoken word from Martin Luther King Jr. speeches.
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A team of neuroscientists at the University of Pennsylvania has constructed the first whole-brain map of electrical connectivity in the brain based on data from nearly 300 neurosurgical patients with electrodes implanted directly on the brain. The researchers found that low-frequency rhythms of brain activity, when brain waves move up and down slowly, primarily drive communication between the frontal, temporal and medial temporal lobes, key brain regions that engage during memory processing.
The research, part of the Restoring Active Memory project, was conducted by Michael Kahana, Penn professor of psychology and principal investigator of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s RAM program; Ethan Solomon, an M.D./Ph.D. student in the Department of Bioengineering; and Daniel Rizzuto, director of cognitive neuromodulation at Penn. They published their findings in Nature Communications.
This work elucidates the way different regions of the brain communicate during cognitive processes like memory formation. Though many studies have examined brain networks using non-invasive tools like functional MRI, observations of large-scale networks using direct human-brain recordings have been difficult to secure because these data can only come from neurosurgical patients.
For several years, the Penn team gathered this information from multiple hospitals across the country, allowing the researchers to observe such electrical networks for the first time. Patients undergoing clinical monitoring for seizures performed a free-recall memory task that asked them to view a series of words on a screen, then repeat back as many as they could remember.
At the same time, the researchers examined brain activity occurring on slow and fast time scales, also called low- and high-frequency neural activity. They discovered that when a person is effectively creating new memories — in this case, remembering one of the presented words — alignment between brain regions tends to strengthen with slow waves of activity but weaken at higher frequencies.
“We found,” said Solomon, the paper’s lead author, “that the low-frequency connectivity of a brain region was associated with increased neural activity at that site. This suggests that, for someone to form new memories, two functions must happen simultaneously: brain regions must individually process a stimulus, and then those regions must communicate with each other at low frequencies.”
Areas of the brain identified in this paper — the frontal, temporal and medial temporal lobes — have long intrigued neuroscientists because of their crucial role in such memory functions.
This work supports the RAM project goal of using brain stimulation to enhance memory.
“Better understanding the brain networks that activate during memory processing,” Kahana said, “gives us a better ability to fine-tune electrical stimulation that might improve it. We’re now prepared to ask whether we can use measures of functional connectivity to guide our choice of which brain region to target with electrical stimulation. Ultimately, given the size of this dataset, these discoveries would not be possible without years of effort on the part of our participants, clinical teams and research scientists.”
Earlier this month, the RAM team publicly released its extensive intracranial brain recording and stimulation dataset that included thousands of hours of data from 250 patients performing memory tasks. Previous research showed for the first time that electrical stimulation delivered when memory was predicted to fail could improve memory function in the human brain. That same stimulation generally became disruptive when electrical pulses arrived during periods of effective memory function.
Next, the Penn researchers plan to examine the interaction between brain stimulation and the functional connections the latest study uncovered.
“There’s still significant work to do,” Rizzuto said, “before we can use these connectivity maps to guide therapeutic brain stimulation for patients with memory disorders such as traumatic brain injury or Alzheimer’s disease, but we’re working toward that goal.”
Funding for this research came primarily from the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, with additional funding from National Institutes of Health grants MH55687 and T32NS091006.
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