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What is the mission of Advancing the Interests of Animals (AIA)?
AIA’s mission is to improve the lives of animals and to encourage increased compassion and respect for all living beings. The organization acts directly with focused campaigns to help animals as well as through a variety of educational activities and informational efforts. Its vision is to be an effective, passionate and nationally respected advocate for all animals.
How did AIA get started?
Drs. Lori Kirshner and Peter Spiegel initially founded Desert Paws in 2001 with a focus on the welfare of dogs and cats in the southern California Coachella Valley community. As the founders learned more about the plight of other animals, such as the abuse of animals in rodeos and circuses, as well as the exploitation of wild animals through such activities as illegal poaching, they expanded their advocacy efforts to be a voice for the humane treatment of all animals.
In 2011, Desert Paws became Advancing the Interests of Animals (AIA) dedicated to the belief that all animals – domesticated and wild – deserve to be treated with compassion and respect.
What does AIA do?
AIA is a national organization that addresses animal welfare issues around the globe through public education and regional projects. Its primary focus is to encourage people of all ages to treat animals with compassion and respect.
In addition, AIA promotes a plant-based diet, which is consistent with its mission and is also the least harmful to the environment. This diet has also been scientifically proven to be the healthiest for humans.
AIA’s founders, Drs. Kirshner and Spiegel, produce and host a weekly, one-hour radio show and podcast, Animals Today. Animals Today features interviews with experts from around the world, commentary and analysis on a wide variety of animals issues, news reporting, pet product reviews, and lighter animal segments.
Guests on the show include celebrities, politicians and government officials, lawyers, naturalists and activists working in the field. They all share a desire to improve the lives of animals around the world.
Where is AIA located?
AIA’s national offices are located in Palm Springs, California.
How do people benefit from the work of AIA?
Although our main focus is the welfare of animals, AIA believes that people who treat animals kindly are generally more respectful in their dealings with other people. By promoting compassion and respect for animals, the work of AIA benefits animals and society as a whole.
In addition, animal abuse by youth can be an early warning sign of potentially violent behavior towards people. The connection between such abuse and the later development of antisocial behavior is well known. AIA educates people about the importance of recognizing and properly addressing animal abuse and neglect in order to interrupt this cycle of violence.
How is AIA funded?
AIA is a tax exempt, 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization and is completely supported by private donations. Drs. Kirshner and Spiegel donate their time and energy and all board members serve as volunteers.
Who supports AIA?
AIA’s supporters come from all walks of life and have a wide range of animal-related interests. These include concerns about the care of companion animals, protecting wild animals and their natural habitats, treatment of farmed animals, and teaching children compassion and respect toward animals. Most of all, AIA supporters share a common desire to help and protect animals.
AIA seeks the support and involvement of individuals and organizations. Financial gifts of any size are appreciated. Tribute gifts can be made in honor or in memory of a loved one. AIA also welcomes volunteers to assist with specific projects.
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Paul Goma - Arhivă Privată
http://courage.btk.mta.hu/courage/individual/n158100?sq
This collection consists primarily of the items confiscated by the Securitate on 1 April 1977, on the occasion of the house search and arrest of the driving force behind an emerging movement in defence of human rights in Romania, Paul Goma, a writer censored in Romania but successful abroad. A particular feature of this collection is that the confiscated items were not destroyed, but were preserved by the Securitate and finally transferred to CNSAS in 2002, from where they were returned to Goma in 2005. Thus, the collection is one of the few which travelled after 1989 from Romania into exile and is now to be found in Paris, where Goma was forced to emigrate a few months after his arrest and the confiscation of the collection.
Paris Rue François Pinton 7, France 75019
Paul Goma Private Archive
This collection constitutes the most important selection of documents relating to the events in 1977 which transformed Paul Goma from a writer, who was censored in Romania but successful abroad, into a dissident and a defender of human rights. At the beginning of February 1977, inspired by Charter 77, Goma effectively made a public appeal – via Radio Free Europe which he had reached with the support of foreign diplomats – with the purpose of protesting against the violation of human rights in Romania. Around 200 people had responded to this appeal and signed a collective open letter by the time of Goma’s arrest on 1 April 1977. The arrest was followed by the confiscation of all items found in his home relating to the emerging protest for human right. Thus, the core of the collection traces only the first phase of this ephemeral movement for human rights, which relates to its rapid development in only two months mostly due to Goma’s personal efforts. After Goma’s arrest, in the second phase, the Securitate quickly manged to disband the movement, which came to be popularly known as the Goma Movement. However, evidence about this second phase is to be found only in the documents created by the secret police, namely in the Goma Movement Ad-hoc Collection at CNSAS, defined as such by COURAGE research.
Effectively, the earliest document relating to the Romanian movement for human rights is a personal letter addressed to the playwright Pavel Kohout, one of the signatories of Charter 77, whom Goma had had the chance to read and thus selected as addressee. In other words, what turned later into a collective protest was preceded by an isolated act of defying Ceaușescu’s regime and at the same time expressing solidarity with those who had founded Charter 77. According to Goma, he decided to take this step after several unsuccessful attempts to convince his fellow writers to send a common message. The majority of Goma’s colleagues, according to his recollections, regarded the signatories of Charter 77 as courageous intellectuals, but saw their endeavour as a useless protest which could have no practical result. Goma’s letter to Kohout assured the Czechs and Slovaks who signed Charter 77 of the sympathy they enjoyed among Romanians and made a telling comparison between Romanians and the other national communities included in the Soviet bloc after WWII. According to Goma’s description of the situation in 1977, “We [Romanians] are living in the same camp, in the same Biafra (capital: Moscow). You, Czechs and Slovaks, had a 1968, the Poles had a 1956, a 1971 and an ... always, the East-Germans had Berlin and Biermann. We, Romanians, do not have these landmarks. But suffering is not always proportional with the intensity of the outcry of revolt. You (like the Poles, the East-Germans, the Hungarians and the Bulgarians) are living under Russian occupation; we, Romanians, are under Romanian occupation – ultimately, more painful and more effective than a foreign one. But we live under the same yoke. ... The same lack of elementary rights, the same mockery of the individual, and the same shamelessness of lies everywhere. Everywhere: poverty, chaos in the economy, demagogy, uncertainty and terror.” Against this “programmatic degradation of the human being in our Stalinist ‘socialist’ societies,” Goma called for a fight using as weapon the “word, which is sharper than the blade.” This self-critical and witty letter contrasted Romania to other fraternal countries, but simultaneously pointed out that the communist regimes inflicted everywhere the same abuses upon individuals, for that represented the very essence of the system. It was a moving letter of solidarity with Charter 77, but not a programme of action for a Romanian Charter. However, due to Goma’s amateurish but quite perceptive political analysis in this letter, most historical reconstructions of the Goma Movement mention it as one of the most important documents of the Romanian movement for human rights.
Goma’s personal endeavours continued with a letter to the secretary general of the party himself. In his open letter to Ceauşescu, he invited the leader of the country to follow his initiative of expressing publicly solidarity with the Czechs and Slovaks who signed Charter 77. Through a much-quoted phrase, Goma drew the attention of his addressee to the simple fact that “in Romania, [only] two people are not afraid of the Securitate, your excellency and myself.” Thus, Ceaușescu, just like himself, was practically free to write to the Charter signatories, Goma’s argument continued. If he does this, all Romanians will be able to overcome their inherent fear of the Securitate and follow his and Goma’s example. As far as Ceaușescu is concerned, Goma underlined, the letter will illustrate “consistency with the declarations of 1968” and the secretary general’s genuine desire to “fight for socialism, democracy and humanity.” At the same time, “Romania will be able to participate in the [CSCE Helsinki Follow-Up] Conference in Belgrade with dignity.” The text of this letter is both amusing and mocking; it is illustrative of Goma’s literary talent and it is quoted by most analysists due to the unusual style for an official (though open) letter to Ceaușescu. Together with the letter to Kohout, it is often quoted in historical analyses, given its unique character in terms of content. Thus, this letter is also a featured item of this collection. However, this letter is not part of the collective protest against the violation of human rights in Romania either. Both letters marked Goma’s solitary action of defying the communist regime once they were disseminated among Romanians by Radio Free Europe beginning with 9 February 1977.
The most important document of the collective movement and implicitly of the collection, is the above-mentioned open letter of protest addressed to the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which was scheduled to take place in Belgrade in 1977. By the time of his arrest, Goma had collected about 200 supporters for this common letter denouncing human rights abuses in Romania. The list of signatures collected by Goma is another featured item of this collection. This number of supporters was about as many as Charter 77 attracted from among the Czechs and Slovaks in the same year. In comparison to the signatories of the Charter, those who endorsed the Romanian letter of protest were rather a very loose community of isolated individuals who lacked a genuine common purpose. Turning to the letter which was finally signed by these 200 individuals, thus giving birth to a human rights movement in Romania, it is worth underlining its rather haphazard public emergence. It was initially disseminated as an open letter with eight supporters, of whom two were Goma and his wife. The real author of the letter was not Goma himself, as he recalls; although he drafted a version, the signatories preferred another variant, which one of the other initial signatories wrote. This explains why this collective letter contrasts sharply in style and content with the emotional and witty, but general and non-specific denouncement of abuses under the Ceauşescu regime which can be found in Goma’s two letters mentioned above. In contrast to these, the letter to the CSCE Follow-up Meeting in Belgrade uses a neutral tone to enumerate the rights which Romanian legislation theoretically guaranteed, but the authorities did not respect in practice. Besides indicating the precise articles of the Constitution which referred to rights that existed on paper but not in reality, this letter specifically emphasises the right to free circulation, which the Romanian communist regime (like all the others in the Soviet bloc) totally disregarded. According to the document, “the articles of the Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Romania which refer to civic rights (art. 17); the right to work (art. 18); the right to education (art. 21); the right to free association (art. 27); the freedom of speech, of press, of meetings and public demonstrations (art. 28); the freedom of thought (art. 30); the inviolability of human beings (art. 31); and of private residence (art. 32); the secrecy of correspondence and phone conversations (art. 33); are not respected. At the same time, the right to the free circulation of human beings, ideas, information is not respected, while the right to citizenship is transformed into an obligation.” By contrasting freedom of movement with the enforcement of citizenship, the letter hints at the right to change the citizenship given by birth by emigrating to a country of choice. A copy of this letter, which was dated 8 February 1977, was sent to Radio Free Europe using Goma’s channels of communication. Once information about the existence of the letter was systematically disseminated due to the active involvement of the Romanian desk of Radio Free Europe, it appeared as if the example of the Czechs and Slovaks was spreading fast among Romanians. Only a month after Charter 77, concern for the observance of human rights seemed to have gained momentum in Romania too. Although the two collective protests were apparently similar, in terms of the message expressed and the support received, their proponents proved to be driven by very different motivations.
Due to the way Radio Free Europe disseminated the information about this open letter, Goma turned into the epicentre of an earthquake which shook the Romanian communist authorities and took the secret police by surprise. The novelty of the challenge which Securitate had to confront with Goma’s attempt to establish a Romanian Charter 77 was twofold. It consisted not only in the ideas expressed, which were alien to political traditions in Romania, but also in the unprecedented and unexpected support for an open letter of protest. No other such rapid solidarisation of individuals around a common purpose occurred in communist Romania either before or after. Thus, this emerging movement which implied the defence of a political idea (and not a material benefit) must have been really puzzling for the Securitate officers, who did their best to grasp the situation and to understand the “real” motivations of the individuals involved in protesting over such an “abstract” issue as human rights. With the aim of containing the support for this collective protest, the secret police transformed what appeared to be an aggregate action against the communist regime into a multitude of individual motivations for expressing discontent with the regime. It was to this end that Goma was eventually arrested and brutally interrogated, among others by First Deputy Minister Nicolae Pleșită himself. He was, however, released on 6 May 1977, after a rather short detention, due to massive protests by the Romanian emigration in Paris, which managed to convince many outstanding personalities to sign a petition for his release. As is well known, Goma left Romania never to return just a few months later, in November 1977, thus ending his career as dissident in Romania and opening a new one as a defender of human rights in exile. The documents confiscated at the time of his arrest were preserved by the Securitate and subsequently transferred to CNSAS in 2002. They were included by the secret police in the Confiscated Manuscripts Fonds. All items confiscated during Goma’s house search were returned to him in 2005, so they are now to be found in Paris, where Goma settled after his forced emigration. Many of the documents confiscated from Goma, however, were also preserved in his file of informative surveillance, in particular the open letters and the lists of signatures, and thus they are still preserved in the Archives of CNSAS (ACNSAS, Informative Fonds, File I 2217). It is worth mentioning that copies of the documents that reached Radio Free Europe can also be found in the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest (OSA/RFE Archives, Romanian Fond, 300/60/5/Box 6, File Dissidents: Paul Goma). The Paul Goma Private Collection is truly a special case not only because many of its items are preserved in copies in other repositories, but also because it is one of the few which travelled after 1989 from Romania into exile. The post-communist pattern was rather to bring back to Romania collections created in exile.
The core of this collection consists of the 39 notebooks confiscated from Paul Goma’s house on the occasion of his arrest on 1 April 1977, which were preserved in the archives of the Securitate and then transferred to CNSAS in 2002. The confiscated items amount to more than 2,500 pages of manuscripts, correspondence, diary extracts, notes, open letters and address books. Obviously the most interesting items are the open letters, which trace the emergence and development of the ephemeral movement in defence of human rights which Goma established on the model of Charter 77. Among them, the most important item is lists of signatures of the individuals who endorsed the collective letter denouncing the violation of human rights which were guaranteed by the constitution in force in the Socialist Republic of Romania. The content of the confiscated manuscripts is also interesting because it illustrates the lawlessness which characterised the actions of the secret police under the Ceaușescu regime, at a time when it was officially claimed that the communist authorities respected so-called “socialist legality,” which had allegedly been violated only during the time of terror instituted by the Gheorghiu-Dej regime. Because the confiscated items only illustrated Goma’s appeal for the observance of human rights, which the constitution indeed guaranteed, the secret police needed different pieces of evidence to provehis guilt and justify his arrest in accordance with the existing legislation. As Goma recalls in his post-1977 diaries, the Securitate did not hesitate to plant evidence in his apartment in order to achieve the goal of finding evidence of acts contravening the laws in force. The planted documents were then “discovered” by the officers in charge of Goma’s arrest among the many other manuscripts found in his house. These planted materials were intended to prove that Goma was a supporter of the Romanian extreme right, the so-called Legionary movement, which had emerged in the interwar period as a Nazi-fellow-traveller organisation and then, after the communist takeover, survived informally due to its sympathisers in the exile community. Ana Năvodaru, Goma’s wife, fell into the trap of signing the list of confiscated materials on 1 April 1977 without checking their content. In this way, the Securitate managed to obtain their first evidence that the Legionary materials belonged to Goma. Later, during his arrest, the officers in charge of his interrogation attempted to get irrefutable proof of Goma’s entanglements with the Legionary movement by forcing him to touch these materials with his hands or lips, but he managed to resist their strategy of incrimination (Goma 1990, 276–290; Goma 2005, 219–223). As illustrated by the Chart of Paul Goma’s Personal Connections in the Goma Movement Ad-hoc Collection at CNSAS, which the Securitate compiled, the secret police officers were interested above all in proving his relations with former members or supporters of the interwar Legionary movement. Thus, out of the categories of individuals with “political background” identified by the Securitate among those who contacted Goma in order to support the letter of protest against the violation of human rights in Romania Legionaries came first, although they were not the most numerous. This is not surprising considering that in 1977 the secret police were confronted for the first time since the last group of resistance in the mountains was disbanded in the early 1960s with a large-scale movement. Thus, their analyses went along the same line of reasoning as in the late 1940s and the 1950s, when the enemies of the new regime were identified with the remnants of the interwar extreme right movement which had managed to survive the war against Nazi Germany and its allies, which included Romania until August 1944. For instance, an analysis of 1977, published in the top-secret periodical for internal use of secret police cadres, estimated that “in the period 1975–1977, the leaders of the Legionary movement in exile intensified their attempts to create channels of communication with those in the country in order to disseminate Legionary publications” (Securitatea 2/ 1977, 26). The accusation of support for the extreme right was also intended to compromise Goma and implicitly the entire movement for human rights in Romania in the eyes of the West. Fortunately, this strategy of the Securitate did not work, for the Romanian emigration in Paris was still able to catalyse wide support for Goma’s release, so he was eventually released from prison on 6 May 1977 without being formally charged with any offence.
grey literature (regular archival documents such as brochures, bulletins, leaflets, reports, intelligence files, records, working papers, meeting minutes): 1000-
publications (books, newspapers, articles, press clippings): 500-999
Goma, Paul
emigration/exile
literature and literary criticism
Securitate (Department of State Security)
The return of the manuscripts confiscated by the Securitate to Paul Goma
Goma, Paul. Letter to Nicolae Ceaușescu, in Romanian, February 1977
Goma, Paul. List of the signatures in support of the human rights protest, 1977
visits by appointments
Goma, Paul. 1990. Gherla. Bucharest: Humanitas.
Goma, Paul. 1991. Soldatul cîinelui (The dog’s soldier). Bucharest: Humanitas.
Goma, Paul. 1992. Ostinato. Bucharest: Univers.
Goma, Paul. 1992. Amnezia la români (Amnezia among the Romanians). Bucharest: Litera.
Goma, Paul. 1992. Uşa noastră cea de toate zilele (Our daily door). Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 1992.
Goma, Paul. 1995. Scrisori întredeschise: Singur împotriva lor (Half-open letters: Alone against them). Oradea: Multiprint.
Goma, Paul. 1997. Jurnal (Diary). 3 vols. Bucharest: Nemira.
Goma, Paul. 2005. Culoarea curcubeului ‘77: Cutremurul oamenilor. Cod “Bărbosul:” Din dosarele Securităţii, 1957-1977 (The colour of the rainbow 1977: The earthquake of people. Code-name “Bearded Man:” From the files of the Securitate, 1957-1977). Iaşi: Polirom.
Petrescu, Cristina
ACNSAS, Informative Fonds, File I 2217.
OSA/RFE Archives, Romanian Fond, 300/60/5/Box 6, File Dissidents: Paul Goma.
Goma, Paul. 2005. Culoarea curcubeului ‘77: Cutremurul oamenilor. Cod “Bărbosul:” Din dosarele Securităţii, 1957–1977 (The colour of the rainbow 1977: The earthquake of people. Codename “Bearded Man:” From the files of the Securitate, 1957–1977). Iaşi: Polirom.
Petrescu, Dragoș, interview by Pătrăşconiu, Cristian Valeriu , November 15, 2017. COURAGE Registry Oral History Collection
COURAGE Registry, s.v. "Paul Goma - Arhivă Privată", by Cristina Petrescu, 2019. Accessed: 2021. janar 20., doi: 10.24389/158100
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airBaltic Secures Equity to Overcome Crisis
08.05.2020 16:51 | Latvia
Photo: airbaltic.lv
Author: Alise Briede
Source: A/S Air Baltic Corporation
The Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic of Latvia, as the majority shareholder of Latvian airline airBaltic, has approved the investment of up to EUR 250 million into the equity of airBaltic in order to mitigate the company to overcome the economic crisis caused by COVID-19.
Martin Gauss, the CEO of airBaltic, said: "With this new equity investment, we can begin to execute our new business plan Destination 2025 CLEAN which focuses on a new start for airBaltic once international flight resume. This will facilitate successful growth for the company once the impact of the COVID-19 crisis begins to ease."
The Latvian government's plan, which remains subject to the approval of the European Commission, is to provide its investment to airBaltic in tranches. Each investment tranche will be provided in line with market rules and will not exceed the losses caused as a result of COVID-19 crisis.
Following such investment, the Latvian state's shareholding in airBaltic will increase from 80.05% to 91%.
On April 23, the Supervisory Board of the Latvian airline airBaltic approved the new business plan of the company presented by the management of airBaltic. The new plan foresees a reduced fleet for the upcoming years, initially resuming operations with 22 Airbus A220-300 aircraft. The new plan takes into account the reduced capacity for the years 2020 and 2021, while at the same time foresees return to growth with up to 50 Airbus A220-300 aircraft by the end of 2023. The additional 30 options of Airbus A220-300 remain for future growth.
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Season nine of ‘AfroPoP’ starts with an ‘American Ascent’
1/6/2017, 6 a.m.
Actress Nikki Beharie hosts the ninth season of the public television documentary series AfroPoP: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange. The season premiere airs on Monday, January 16, 2017 on the WORLD Channel. Courtesy Photo/APT
NEW YORK — New York— The ninth season of the award-winning documentary series “AfroPoP: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange” premieres on WORLD Channel at 8 p.m. on Monday, January 16, 2017 —Martin Luther King Jr. Day— with An American Ascent.
The gripping film captures the first African-American team of climbers attempt to summit Denali (formerly Mount McKinley), North America’s highest peak, and to inspire other Blacks to connect with the outdoors. Hosted by acclaimed actress Nikki Beharie (Sleepy Hollow, Shame, 42), AfroPoP is comprised of documentaries about contemporary life, art and culture across the African Diaspora. The program is produced by National Black Programming Consortium and co-presented by series distributor American Public Television (APT).
New episodes of AfroPoP will air weekly through February 15, 2017. APT will release the series to the nation’s public television stations in February.
The season opens with George Potter and Andy Adkins’ An American Ascent. Winner of Best Documentary and Best Director at the 2015 San Diego Black Film Festival and Best Feature Film at the 2015 Film Festival Flix Mountain and Adventure Film Festival, the film depicts the mountaineers’ backbreaking journey to scale the 20,310-foot mountain. The reward? The satisfaction of overcoming personal limits and societal views of what a mountaineer looks like, not to mention the peaks’ breathtaking views.
Previous hosts of AfroPoP include: Idris Elba, Anika Noni Rose, Wyatt Cenac, Gabourey Sidibe, Anthony Mackie, Yaya DaCosta and Jussie Smollett.
“An American Ascent is more than beautiful mountainous vistas and harrowing, dramatic scenes pitting man against nature. Its purpose is also to convey two important messages— African Americans still have ‘firsts’ to summit, and as citizens of a new majority in 2020, we must become familiar with, care about and become guardians of our national parks to ensure they are preserved for future generations,” said NBPC Director of Programs and Acquisitions and AfroPoP Co-Executive Producer Kay Shaw. “This season of AfroPoP presents six beautifully crafted stories that like An American Ascent will challenge, inspire and touch the heart and mind. It’s a season the public should not miss.”
Other films this season include:
*The moving Intore, by Eric Kabera (January 23), which demonstrates the impact a new generation of artists in Rwanda is having in healing a nation that suffered greatly in the horrific 100-day genocide in 1994.
*Tyler Johnston and Miquel Galofré’s beautiful My Father’s Land (January 30), which follows an illegal immigrant in the Bahamas and the lengths to which he goes to return to his native Haiti to see his ailing 103-year-old father. The film also explores issues of immigration and human rights.
*Eva Weber’s important documentary Black Out (February 6), which shines the spotlight on schoolchildren in Guinea who trek for miles each day during exam season to find places with light so they can study and better themselves and their families. The film airs with Olivia Peace’s narrative short Pangaea, a moving story of a young girl who was trapped on a rooftop after Hurricane Katrina.
*Omo Child: The River and the Bush by John Rowe (February 13), a heartwarming story demonstrating the positive impact one determined individual can have on his community to save lives. Shot over five years, the film follows Lale Labuko, from the Kara tribe in the Omo Valley, Ethiopia, as he works to create a cultural shift in his tribe by ending an ancient practice that will save a generation of children.
For more information about AfroPoP, visit: www.blackpublicmedia.org and for viewing information, check local listings or visit: www.APTonline.org.
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The Tragic Story of Syria: How a Promising Nation Became a War Zone
Posted on October 14, 2013 by Cole Crawford
The people of the Syrian Arab Republic (Syria for short) have seen decades of struggles, tension, and conflict. They have seen a dynastic series of Assads lead their small nation for over 40 years. They have seen peaceful protests against the Assad regime turn into a violent rebellion, and their current president turn from a reserved, quiet doctor to a tyrannical dictator. They have been struck by chemical weapons of their own government, the United States and the United Nations threatening to punish Syria (including the innocents) for their nation’s horrendous actions. These people live in the shadow of politics, the drama of their president’s actions receiving more international news coverage than the families and communities who are affected by their government.
Bashar Al-Assad, once labeled by Diane Sawyer as a “quiet man,” succeeded his father, Hafez Al-Assad, on July 17, 2000. His father was considered legendary by the people he governed and many outside of Syria, having led Syria for 29 years and negotiated with 5 U.S. presidents. Bashar was not Hafez’s first choice of the successor: Bashar’s older brother, Bassel, was groomed his whole life to follow in his father’s footsteps; he was thoroughly educated in military sciences. When Bassel died in 1994, Bashar was hastily primed to take over his father’s presidency.
A man protests the Assad regime in front of the Syrian embassy in Dokki, Egypt.
Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy via Creative Commons
Even though he was not prepared to take the role of a leader, Bashar did well in the first few years of his presidency. In the beginning of his rule, the new Assad introduced a set of reforms to improve the quality of life in Syria, dubbed the “Damascus Spring.” Some of the objectives of these reforms pertained to granting economic rights to all citizens, establishing a multiparty democracy, and ending the special status of the Baath party, Bashar’s own political faction. The Damascus Spring answered the issues that many Syrians had hoped Hafez Al-Assad would address over the previous three decades, and Assad’s attentiveness towards his people made him a very popular president.
In 2005, Bashar helped organize the Damascus Declaration, an attempt to make peace with the government’s opposition and the regime’s conflict with the United States over Iraq and Palestine, considered a bold, but extremely progressive move in the eyes of his nation and internationally as well.
On the day of his 2007 re-election, Syrians flooded the streets with signs of praise and cheers for the president, and cheered when he won with an astounding 97.62% of the votes. At that time, the Syrians loved their progressive and attentive president, who was leading his nation on an upward spiral, and advancing Syria to a national greatness never previously achieved by any Syrian president.
Unrest over the regime began in 2011 as a part of the ongoing “Arab Spring.” Syrians, sparked by the protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other Middle Eastern countries, began themselves to protests for better human rights and socioeconomic equality.
Established in 1963, an emergency rule still active today allows police to detain or arrest citizens without a warrant, censor websites, and impose travel bans. The Syrians, eager to reap the benefits of a republic, desired more freedom from their government, a basic, necessary right for a country that calls itself a democracy.
Additionally, the Syrians called for an improvement in the government’s economic situation. According to the CIA World Factbook, 11.9% of Syrians lived beneath the poverty line, even after the reforms of the Damascus Declaration. Massive economic inequity existed between the elite Syrians and the poor, and many protestors requested more support for those in extreme poverty, as a socialist nation was desired, and this ideal must be followed.
The small fire of peaceful protests grew after a nameless group of teenagers were arrested and tortured by local police for writing anti-regime graffiti on a school. When word of the detainment reached the public, enraged protests grew against their generally popular government. This was the start of the Syrian Civil War.
Syrians in Qatar protest the Assad regime.
Photo by Omar Chatriwala via Creative Commons
As demonstrations turned into violence against police, and police retaliation fueled the riots, tension between the opposition and the regime grew at exponential rates. On March 20, 2011, revolutionaries burned down the Baath Party headquarters. In response, an armored division of soldiers fired live ammunition into a crowd of unarmed protestors. 15 demonstrators died that day, and by now, both parties were completely enraged.
As the war began, a new, powerful force was born. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) formed from a group of defected soldiers from the Syrian Armed Forces (SAF) in July of 2011. The group focuses on disposing possible informants, shabiha [“thugs”], and prominent military officers in the SAF, with the goal of protecting innocent Syrians from the regime. By executing force against Assad’s army, the FSA protects protestors and brings security for the opposition through their organized military force.
The ferocity of the war expanded as the regime developed new methods of fighting the opposition. Local police became violent in support of Al-Assad, but the opposition fought back with equal force. Recognizing the use of social media to organize rallies and protests, the regime also shut down the Internet in parts of Syria, and spread propaganda around towns and cities. During this period of growing conflict, hundreds of thousands of Syrians fled the country under the direction of the United Nations.
The battle between the opposition and the regime lasted for several months, from roughly April of 2011 to today, in October 2013, growing with intensity, and the death toll increasing steadily. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights stated that by September of 2013, over 110,000 people had been killed in the crisis in Syria.
On August 21, 2013, massive chemical explosions erupted in a heavily populated suburb of the central city Damascus. Over 1,000 men, women and children were killed; they suffered agonizing deaths from the weapons. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) stated that Assad’s administration was responsible for the attack, but the regime immediately rejected the claim. The UN led subsequent investigations, and confirmed that these weapons contained the extremely toxic nerve gas sarin. The few survivors joined the refugee count fleeing their country.
The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reports that there are nearly two million registered Syrian refugees, currently residing in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. Conditions for these refugees are less than ideal; one UNHCR video explains that over a thousand refugees live in an underground garage in Lebanon, without medicine, clean water, reliable electricity, but plenty of sickness. The footage shows children playing on the damp pavement, watchful mothers lounging underneath sodden clothes hanging, as they wait for some, any kind of reassurance or support. In Jordan, over 50% of the refugees are children.
“We have nothing here,” a refugee referred to only as Fatima pleads in a UNHCR production.
Another refugee, Yosra, tells her story to the online community. Seven months ago, an attack shattered her hip and killed her husband.
“I didn’t see the plane before it started shelling us,” Yosra told the UNHCR. “I just heard it coming. Then the sound got a lot louder and the shelling started. The whole ground started shaking. I fell down and I couldn’t feel anything anymore. When I got up, I realized that something was wrong with my leg. And that the whole house had collapsed on top of my husband.”
Today, the revolution and the counter-insurgency efforts surge on.
Tags: assad, bashar, protests, revolution, syria
About Cole Crawford
Cole Crawford is a senior in his third year with The Paper Tiger; he currently serves as the Tiger's Managing Editor and Centerspread Editor. Crawford primarily writes about the Lick community, sports, and politics. He is 6' 4".
View all posts by Cole Crawford →
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Home » Commentary » Arsenal Pulse » Never Alone: Video game brings an Alaska Native story to life
Never Alone: Video game brings an Alaska Native story to life
By Bill Humphrey October 13, 2014 - 9:00 am January 11, 2015 Arsenal Pulse
Note added January 11, 2015: We are hoping to have a review of the game available on this website soon from one of our correspondents. Unfortunately, he has reported that there’s a bug that stops the game about a third of the way through. You might want to wait for it to be patched before buying the game.
NPR recently reported on a very cool video game that brings to life a traditional Iñupiat adventure story from Alaska. It’s called “Never Alone” and is produced by “Upper One Games,” a studio founded in 2013 by Cook Inlet Tribal Council of Alaska to help promote the native cultural heritage to a new generation of its members and to the wider world.
The game, which brought on board a number of respected veterans from the video game industry, was developed with extensive input — on plot, in-game art, and structure — from those who know the story best:
“We didn’t want this to be an outsider’s view of what the Inupiaq culture was. We wanted it to come from the people themselves.”
Never Alone is based on a traditional story known as Kanuk Sayuka and the experiences of Alaska elders, storytellers and youth. The story follows a young Inupiaq girl and an Arctic fox as they go on an adventure to save her village from a blizzard that never ends.
Game developer Sean Vesce has 20 years of experience in the industry working on action titles like Tomb Raider. He recently went to Barrow, in far northern Alaska, to watch the students play a demo of the game. He says that day was his most memorable experience from the project.
The puzzle platformer game will be released for Windows (via Steam), PS4, and Xbox One in November. Here’s the official trailer:
It looks like an incredible game, and it features a female lead playable character, as well as bringing both cultural diversity and an unusual structure (since it was built around the Iñupiat cultural/linguistic worldview and oral traditions, rather than around the industry-dominant Euro-U.S. cultural framework).
Here’s the gameplay description from the official website:
– Play as both Girl and Fox – switch between the two characters at any time. Girl and Fox must work together to overcome challenges and puzzles as each has unique skills and abilities. A second player can join at any time for local co-op play.
– Explore perilous Arctic environments, from tundra to coastal villages, from ice floes to a mysterious forest. Brace yourself against gale-force winds and blizzards; face treacherous mountains.
– Meet fascinating characters from Iñupiaq folklore – Manslayer, the Little People, Helping Spirits, Blizzard Man and more. Never Alone was crafted in partnership with Alaska Native elders and storytellers for true authenticity.
– Hear the story of Kunuuksaayuka as told by a master Iñupiat storyteller in the spoken Iñupiaq language — a first for a commercial video game.
– Unlock special video Insights recorded with the Iñupiaq community to share their wisdom, stories and perspective.
They also worked to appropriately balance the game play with the source material:
One famous Iñupiaq storyteller named Robert Nasruk Cleveland, born in the late 1800s, was renown for his storytelling skill. Many of the great examples of traditional Iñupiaq stories are closely associated with him, including the story of Kunuuksaayuka.
The Never Alone team located Robert Cleveland’s daughter, an Iñupiaq elder named Minnie Gray, to obtain permission to use the story as the inspiration and main narrative spine of the game. The team worked directly with Minnie to ensure that, as the story was adapted to the needs of a video game, it maintained the wisdom and teachings of the original.
Here’s another video on the impact they hope to have with “Never Alone”:
Tagged Alaska, Alaska Natives, American Indians, cultural heritage, Native Americans, political pop culture, video games.
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Poor US-Russia relations still thwart Native reunifications
Why #INeedDiverseGames Is Vital To The Future Of Gaming
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Statement: Rob Guest Endowment announces cancellation of 2020 Scholarship
On 20 August, the Rob Guest Endowment announced the 30 semi-finalists for this year’s scholarship. Due to the lack of racial diversity of the semi-finalists, we received criticism for not doing enough to attract black, Indigenous and people of colour applicants.
We heard this message and agreed that we should have done more to ensure there was a greater BIPOC representation. We unreservedly apologised and vowed to do better. Our initial response in August contained language that we should have known was offensive and we apologise unreservedly for any offence caused.
On 16 September, we announced a wide range of changes to ensure that in the future, the endowment would involve people of colour and of Indigenous and other diverse backgrounds in every area of the competition, and we introduced measures to ensure that semi-finalists in future competitions included a diverse array of entrants including Indigenous Australians and people of colour. Details can be found on our website.
The Rob Guest Endowment is run totally by volunteers passionate about the musical theatre industry. Our goal is to help promising young performers in the name of one of Australia’s greatest musical theatre performers Rob Guest, who guided, mentored and taught young artists and theatre workers, boosting their resilience and determination. For more than a decade, the endowment has been a unifying and positive force in the commercial musical theatre industry.
The endowment team is particularly concerned for the mental health and welfare of the 30 semi-finalists in this year’s competition. They have endured significant challenges which are likely to intensify should the competition enter its second and third rounds.
We are aware that some semi-finalists have been targeted and intimidated from a number of sources and as a result have experienced significant anxiety over recent weeks. Bullying and intimidation have no place in a competition that has only ever sought to bring joy and hope to talented young performers in the commercial musical theatre sector.
The semi-finalists in the Rob Guest Endowment competition are our first priority, and their wellbeing comes before the scholarship. To protect them, it is with great regret that the 2020 Rob Guest Endowment Competition will now be cancelled and this year’s scholarship grant is suspended until 2022.
To emerging young performers in the commercial musical theatre industry in Australia, we will endeavour to continue to support and encourage your talent. We look towards the future and to the next scholarship, which will usher in a new era of change for the endowment. Information about future dates and details will be announced on our website.
The Rob Guest Endowment leadership committee
For more information about the Rob Guest Endowment, visit: www.robguestendowment.com.au for details.
Image: Thor Alvis on Unsplash
Riverside Theatres Digital: Pancha Nadai
Top Picks at the 2020 Queer Screen Film Fest
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News: Hunt for Lost City of Atlantis
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3227295.stm
'Zodiac Killer' cipher solved after 51 years
Atlantis Online > Forum > the Unexplained > Vanishings & Unsolved Murders > 'Zodiac Killer' cipher solved after 51 years
Author Topic: 'Zodiac Killer' cipher solved after 51 years (Read 12 times)
Kristen Kroll
Posted on Saturday, 12 December, 2020 |
Who is the Zodiac Killer and where is he now ? Image Credit: PD
The notorious serial killer, who to this day has never been caught, left several mysterious ciphers.
The unidentified individual, who terrorized parts of northern California back in the 1960s and 1970s, has been linked to at least 5 murders and several attempted murders in the San Francisco Bay area.
At the time, he had contacted several newspapers and even the police themselves with cryptic messages in the form of ciphers which experts have long struggled to solve.
His first cipher, which was solved by a schoolteacher and his wife, read simply - "I like killing."
Another however, which was sent to The Chronicle in November 1969, proved so difficult to figure out that it has taken a staggering 51 years for someone to solve it.
Now according to expert David Oranchak, who has been working on the codes for years, it reads:
"I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me. ... I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradice (sic) all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me."
Sadly, however, the message does not help authorities identify the killer.
"The FBI is aware that a cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer was recently solved by private citizens," said FBI spokeswoman Cameron Polan. "The Zodiac Killer case remains an ongoing investigation for the FBI San Francisco division and our local law enforcement partners."
"The Zodiac Killer terrorized multiple communities across Northern California, and even though decades have gone by, we continue to seek justice for the victims of these brutal crimes."
"Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation, and out of respect for the victims and their families, we will not be providing further comment at this time."
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Zodiac-340-cypher-cracked-by-code-expert-51-years-15794943.php
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View source for Polaroid Camera
From Dead Media Archive
← Polaroid Camera
=Early Years= [[Image:Film1.jpg|thumb|right|Edwin Land and the First Synthetic Sheet Polarizer (Save Polaroid)]] The story of the Polaroid camera begins with its founder and innovator, physicist Dr. Edwin Land, who came to the forefront of photographic technology in 1929 when he created the first synthetic sheet polarizer; thus solving "one of science’s long-standing 'unsolvable' problems – polarizing light without needing a large crystal of an esoteric mineral" (Save Polaroid). This technology enabled not only the development of the Polaroid camera but sunglasses, 3-D glasses, glare-reducing glass and windows, and many other products as well. In 1937, Dr. Land presented his plastic polarizer as a possible material to reduce headlight glare to a group of Wall Street investors(Blout 40). After an investment from Kuh, Loeb and Co., of $350,000, Land was able to form the Polaroid Corporation that same year, allowing them to begin to manufacture, develop and market these large-area plastic polarizers (40). During the war years, Polaroid turned all its focus on the war effort, manufacturing "optical plastics for military range finders", a "new type of heat homing 'smart bomb'", as well as vectographs, which Elkan Blout, a former Polaroid employee describes as "a system using polarized images to visualize objects three- dimensionally.(40)" In essence, these early years were defined by Land's work. "Polaroid's early years," Blout notes, "were Land's early years; the company exemplified the characteristics of the man -- inventiveness, determination, hard work, ability to communicate (39)." Land was not only the corporate manager, he too was the inventor, innovator and researcher (47). The idea of an instant camera, which would eventually become entirely responsible for the Polaroid Corporation's revenue, wasn’t envisioned by Dr. Land until 1943 in response to his 3-year-old daughter’s confusion as to why a camera could not instantly produce pictures. The story is told that Land's daughter asked her father (who was in the process of taking taking family pictures), “Why can’t I see them now?” (Pace). The question intrigued Dr. Land and set him on the quest to solve the 'problem' of instant photography. [[Image:Example.jpg|thumb|left|Edwin Land, Founder of Polaroid (New York Times)]] In 1947 the concept of instant photography was presented to The Optical Society in New York City and shortly after, in November of 1948 (Blout 43), instant photography became available to the public with the introduction of the Polaroid Model 95 Camera (also referred to as the Polaroid Land Camera) and Type 40 film . The Polaroid Land Camera was welcomed and widely accepted by consumer markets – even with a $95 price-tag (approximately $850 today) the camera flew off shelves and sold out in a matter of weeks. The demand for the new camera was so great that backorders began being taken and consumers started to pay up to $150 (approximately $1350 today) for the new instant photography device (Save Polaroid). A long line of instant photography developments and products proceeded the Polaroid Land Camera’s release and by the 1960’s approximately fifty-percent of American households owned a Polaroid camera (Pace). [http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/29594-invention-the-first-polaroid-camera-video.htm VIDEO - Invention: The First Polaroid Camera (Discovery Channel)] =The SX-70= Released in 1972, the SX-70 Land camera represented a completely revolutionary leap for Polaroid in the field of instant film photography. According to N. Trotman of ''Afterimage Magazine'', unlike previous models of Polaroids which printed with peel- apart layers, the SX-70 transformed "the photography into a unitary, sealed packet containing negative, positive and processing chemicals" (Trotman). Additionally, the SX-70 came with a "custom motor battery system to eject the print, which developed in direct sunlight before the user's eyes" (Trotman). The later models that would follow the SX- 70 would build upon the successes of the SX-70, but they also "improved film speed along withe exposure control and added automatic focus systems" (Trotman). These included the Prontol (1976), One Step (1977), 600 Sun (1981), and Spectra (1986). =Noteworthy Dates of Several Polaroid Models= [[Image:Camera1.jpg|thumb|left|130px|Polaroid Model 95 Camera (Save Polaroid)]] 1948: The first Polaroid Land Camera, a Model 95, is sold at Boston’s Jordan Marsh department store. ---- 1957: Polaroid camera sales reach over 50 million (Blout 45) ---- 1960: Polaroid camera sales reach almost 100 million/year (46) ---- 1963: Polaroid color film is now widely sold ---- 1964: The five-millionth Polaroid Land Camera, an Automatic 100, is manufactured. ---- 1971: The Big Shot Land Camera, designed to take flash color portraits, debuts. ---- 1972: The SX-70 system is introduced (see section SX-70). The camera is fully automatic, motorized, folding, single-lens reflex which ejects self developing, self-timing color prints. [[Image:OneStep.jpg|thumb|right|150px|Polaroid OneStep Camera (Amazon)]] ---- 1976: Sales of Polaroid cameras exceed six million units. ---- 1977: The OneStep Land Camera is the best-selling camera in the U.S. for more than four years. This year Polaroid sales exceed $1 billion. ---- 1986: The Spectra debuts at Jordan Marsh in Boston. ---- 1998: The OneStep is the world’s best-selling camera. ---- 1999: 9.7 million instant cameras are sold. The iZone Pocket Camera and "sticker" film are introduced. ---- 2004: Polaroid introduces a new line of six instant cameras (Naples Daily News). ---- =What makes the Polaroid Camera special?= ==How a Polaroid Camera Works== [[Image:Works.jpg|thumb|right|"Instant camera film has the entire developing process arranged in chemical layers. When the reagent enters above the light sensitive layers, it gets the process going" (HowStuffWorks).]] The film used in the Polaroid camera is quite similar to the film used in regular cameras (with the exception of a few extra elements). The difference is that the film has "its own built-in developing studio" (HowStuffWorks). Although the Polaroid camera developing process combines colors in the same basic way as slide film, what makes it unique is that the developing chemicals are already present in the film itself (HowStuffWorks). ==How to Take a Picture== '''Step 1''' Purchase the Polaroid film specified for use with your Polaroid camera model. '''Step 2''' Load film into your Polaroid camera (instructions vary depending on the Polaroid camera model. '''Step 3''' Although the Polaroid camera automatically adjusts focus, getting closer than 18 inches from the subject will cause the photograph to blur. '''Step 4''' Choose the exposure control feature you want in order to customize your image quality - a longer exposure time is best for use in areas with low light while a shorter exposure time is best for use in areas with bright light. '''Step 5''' If your Polaroid camera has extra features (i.e., a self-timer) you should adjust these settings to your preference now. '''Step 6''' Take your picture - your photograph will be produced in under 60 seconds (eHow). ==Significance== Ultimately, what makes a Polaroid photograph unique is its combination of its immediate and its material nature. You are not simply producing an instant image, but also an instant ''physical object''. Many theorists have argued, in act, that the emergence of the Polaroid required its own set of phenomenology from that of traditional photography due to these distinctive qualities. In a discussion of using a Polaroid at a party, Trotman argues that <blockquote> “Taking a Polaroid is an event unto itself, contained within the party atmosphere. The partygoer holds the photo-object in his or her hand like a strong drink, taking it in as the image forms. At the moment that the development ceases, the picture does not commemorate the past party, but participates in the party as it occurs. It circulates through the festivity, inspiring others to take their own snapshots, visualizing reality as it takes place, condensing time into a continuous present." (Trotman)</blockquote> The physicality of the Polaroid photo, combined with ability to produce it almost instantly, transforms it from merely a photograph, into a sort of instant source of entertainment, amusement and play. The photo is not solely significant as an artifact, or physical proof of a past moment. The Polaroid photograph is an object to be appreciated in its own materiality, in the present. =Applications= ==Practical uses of a Polaroid camera== The introduction of the Polaroid instant camera created a sensation among regular camera users. The obvious immediate application for “instant pictures” was at family gatherings (i.e., birthdays, holidays, etc.) since it allowed people to see the photos right away and, if necessary, reshoot the picture. But an entire market emerged for other applications as well. For example, many professions and services benefitted from the ability to create near “instant” photographs – DMV’s, Post Offices, and other institutions (business, schools, etc.) used them to quickly snap photos for driver’s licenses, passports, and ID cards. Doctor’s and hospitals began using them to document visible injuries their patients may have had and some even began to use them for “before and after” reference (this was particularly common in dermatology). However, the Polaroid camera was most commonly used in the medical field to take pictures of ultrasounds (in order to provide parents-to-be with their own photograph copy). Law enforcement was another professional that took advantage of the Polaroid camera’s ability to take instant photos – often police officers and crime scene investigators used Polaroid Cameras because of their ability to create immediate, unalterable, photographs (crucial in mug-shots or the documentation of evidence from a homicide). ==Polaroid in Art and Popular Culture== Over its 60 years as a popular form of photography, the Polaroid camera has been a favorite of artists, filmmakers and even songwriters. An exhibition in October 2009 brought together a collection of visual arts pieces which all utilized Polaroid photographs. These ranged from works by Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki to fashion photography Guy Bourdin and filmmaker Wim Wenders. The exhibit also included pieces by major modern artists including David Hockney's ''Joiners'' series, which collages many Polaroid images together to build a "fly-eye compound image", Michael Snow's 1969 piece ''Authorization'', and a variety of pieces by Andy Warhol, a lover of the Polaroid (Barrett). Beyond the visual arts, the Polaroid has been featured in countless films, including the French film hit ''Amelie'' [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiU_SYV5W70&feature=related] (YouTube, clip from ''Amelie'', Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet)] Polaroids were also brought back into popular lexicon with the hip-hop group Outkast's smash-hit "Hey-Ya" which included the repeated lyric: "Shake it like a Polaroid picture." [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWgvGjAhvIw&ob=av2e] (YouTube, music video for "Hey Ya", Outkast). =Decline= ==Kodak Lawsuit== On October 6, 1981, in a court battle over the invention of the instant camera, the Polaroid Corporation accused the Eastman Kodak Company of "violating its patents in a way that 'strikes at the very heart of Polaroid's business'" (The New York Times). Polaroid claimed that Kodak illegally copied their technology and "entered Polaroid's exclusive field" with their 1976 introduction of an "instant color camera" (The New York Times). According to Polaroid's lawyer, William K. Kerr, "Kodak unsuccessfully tried to develop non-infringing methods...[b]ut they bumped against stone walls and eventually were driven to infringe upon Polaroid's patents" (New York Times). This patent infringement, he added, 'strikes at the very heart of Polaroid's business,' whereas instant photography represents 'only a very small part of Kodak's overall business'" (The New York Times). In 1985 Kodak was found guilty of infringing on seven of Polaroid's instant photography patents and was forced to stop producing devices that allowed for instant photography. However, the question of how much economic damage Polaroid had suffered was still unanswered (Holusha). The Polaroid Corporation claimed that Kodak's development and production of instant photography devices and products caused Polaroid to lose $4 billion in profits. And, in a further claim that Kodak "willfully stole its technology," Polaroid asked to receive damages of $12 billion (Holusha). On October 12 1990, "in the largest award ever in a patent-infringement case, a Federal judge ruled...that the Eastman Kodak Company must pay the Polaroid Corporation $909.4 million for infringing Polaroid's patents for instant photography" (Holusha). Unfortunately for Polaroid, "the decision represents something of a victory for Kodak, since it is well below the $12 billion sought by Polaroid and the $1.5 to $2 billion that some financial analysts had expected" (Holusha). ==Marketing== "There was a time when there was nothing to beat a Polaroid camera for instant gratification. But in a world of disposable cameras, one-hour film processing and the camcorder, Polaroid's...sales [suffered]" (Smith). The 1980s and 1990s were not a strong time for Polaroid as their sales and earnings were essentially flat (Blout 52). Some argued, however, that it wasn't due to the emergence of other more progressive photographic technology but rather due to poor marketing on Polaroid's behalf. Many claimed that the company was simply marketing it in the same category as "documentary" or "recording" devices when it should have been marketed as a "social enhancement device." For example, Martin Smith, BBH's deputy chairman, is cited as saying that "Polaroid operate[d] in a different market from 35mm cameras and advanced photography systems. Rather than recording the event, it add[ed] to it, and help[ed] it to become more informal. It [was] less about memories [and] more like alcohol and karaoke" (Smith). As a result, some scholars suggest that if Polaroid had marketed itself as more of a fun-enhancing gadget and less like a traditional camera, sales would have improved. ==Digital Photography== Regardless of poor marketing, there was one force which Polaroid could not ignore: digitization. With the creation of digital photography, and the increasing popularity of photo viewing and sharing via the computer and Internet, most of Polaroid's consumer base has left the Polaroid behind for the even more instant device, the digital camera. Even business applications that so commonly used the Polaroid camera have switched entirely to the digital camera. Almost all Post Offices, DMV's and other institutions are now using digital cameras to take photographs for passports, driver's licenses and ID cards. Even professional photographers who often used the Polaroid camera to preview lighting before taking an expensive photograph are switching to digital cameras- not only because the digital camera provides an instant visual of the photo without more than a moment of waiting time (via a screen on the back of the camera) but also because digital cameras allow almost near instant access to a large, high-def, visual of the image if attached to a computer. Finally, the most obvious benefit of digitization: cost. Digital cameras don't require film, so once you've purchased the device, your costs are almost non-existent. The popularity of viewing images on screens didn't just impact how consumers were previewing and sharing images but also how they were storing and saving images. Over the past several years it has become more and more common (especially among younger generations) to not keep a hard copy of photographs. The days of photo albums and prints are disappearing and being replaced by online photo-sharing websites such as Facebook and Flickr, camera-phones, and iPhoto. Many consumers find that higher definition images, the ability to edit, and the ability to instantly share (either via email, a website, or cellphone) a photograph, with a near infinite number of people, is far superior to a small, unalterable, physical copy. =Bankruptcy and the Petters Group Purchase= On October 12, 2001 the Polaroid Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. “The news did not shock Wall Street, where analysts…watched the company's stock sink and debts soar as digital cameras hurt Polaroid's core instant photography business…Its stock, which approached $50 in early 1998, was selling for 28 cents...In its filing, the company listed $1.81 billion in assets and $948.4 million in debts” (Deutsch). The Polaroid instant camera was the basis for founding the Polaroid Corporation and drove the company’s profits for decades. Unfortunately, it was Polaroid’s large reliance on the instant camera – “a vicious cycle of constantly putting all the eggs in one basket” – that ultimately led to the company’s financial failure (Deutsch). In 2005 Polaroid was bought by Petters Group Worldwide (a private investment company) for approximately $426 million (Naples Daily News). In 2007, under the ownership of the Petters Group, The Polaroid Company ceased their production of instant cameras for commercial and consumer use. The following year Polaroid announced that they would cease to produce and manufacture instant film by 2009. ==The Impossible Project== [[File:PROJECTS_FACTORY_tour_p2_b.jpg|thumb|right|320px|Image from The Impossible Project, Factory Tour (Impossible Project)]] In 2009, an organization called the Impossible project took on a 10-year lease of the old Polaroid factory in the Netherlands, with the hope of reproducing film for the slew of Polaroid cameras still in circulation (Barrett). The mission of the Impossible Project, officially launched in October 2008 by Florian Kaps (CMO), Andre Bosman (COO) and Marwan Saba (CFO) is, however, "not to re-build Polaroid film, but to develop a new product with new characteristics as well as to support and promote analog Instant Photography amongst artists and photographers" (The Impossible Project, Press Release). In other words, while they did see themselves as responsible for the future of instant photography, they also hope to enhance the technology in new and interesting ways. The Impossible Project still continues to manufacture film for Polaroid Cameras to this day. ==Polaroid under the Petters Corporation== In the meantime, the new Polaroid corporation (owned and operated by the Petters Group) attempted to find its voice in the digital photography world - this time with photos taken by digital cameras and camera phones. During the third quarter of 2008 the Polaroid Corporation partnered with Zink to create and market the Polaroid PoGo Instant Mobile Printer – a small, portable, battery-powered printer from the company that was built on Edwin Land's Polaroid (Eisenberg). <blockquote> “Polaroid PoGo™ - short for Polaroid-on-the-go - is a pocket-sized, ink-free digital photo printer that produces full-color photos wirelessly from Bluetooth-enabled cell phones and via PictBridge from digital cameras. Weighing only eight ounces, Polaroid PoGo™ provides consumers with a convenient solution for sharing digital images trapped on cell phones and digital cameras. Connecting via Bluetooth or PictBridge, Polaroid PoGo™ uses a revolutionary ZINK Zero Ink Zero Hassles™ Printing Technology to produce borderless, full-color, 2-inch by 3-inch prints in less than 60 seconds” (ZINK).</blockquote> [[Image:Future1111.jpg|thumb|right|320px|Zink Enabeled Polaroid PoGo (Polaroid)]] The 2008 Polaroid PoGo printer connected to cell phones wirelessly via Bluetooth technology and to digital cameras via a cable. The 2008 PoGo was unique in that it didn't use cartridges or toner (because it doesn’t use ink). “Instead, there is a computer chip, a 2-inch-long thermal printhead and a novel kind of paper embedded with microscopic layers of dye crystals that can create a multitude of colors when heated” (Eisenberg). “When the image file is beamed from the camera to the printer, a program translates pixel information into heat information. Then, as the paper passes under the printhead, the heat activates the colors within the paper and forms crisp images” (Eisenberg). The unique paper was created by former Polaroid employees and conceptualized at Polaroid. However, after Polaroid filed bankruptcy in 2001 the employees founded the company ZINK Imaging in 2005 where the product was able to be developed and made available to buyers (Eisenberg). As of 2010, the PoGo has been transformed from simply a portable printer into digital camera with a built in printing capacities (Polaroid CZA-05300: Polaroid PoGo Instant Digital Camera). Clearly, the original PoGo; not quite a digital camera, and not quite a traditional Polaroid, failed to find the niche market they hoped it would. ---- = Polaroid in 2010 and into the future = In 2010, Polaroid filed for bankruptcy again, this time due to a multi- billion dollar Ponzi scheme at parent company Petters Group (Burns). Polaroid's name and assets have now been acquired by private equity film Hilco Consumer Capital and liquidator Gordon Brothers Group (Burns) for 67 million US dollars (Kirby). When purchased, the company which had once employed 21,000 workers, employed only 70 people. On June 30, 2010 at the MIT Museum, Polaroid, under it's new ownership, celebrated its history and introduced its plans for the future. This event included an addition to the museum: an image of their new Creative Director, performer Lady Gaga. The appointment of Lady Gaga, Polaroid argues, is simply continuing their tradition of drawing inspiration from "the creative community" ("Polaroid at MIT"). More likely, the addition of Lady Gaga as their Creative Director is part of the new leadership's attempt to relaunch the brand as young, hip, and current- the antithesis of what the brand had come to represent in the past decade. While the company is still interested in cracking the digital market, they are also revisiting analog photography and plan on re-releasing some of their classic cameras. Interestingly, rather than manufacture their own film, Polaroid hopes to help distribute the film currently being produced by The Impossible Project to run with their re-released cameras, a fascinating instance of grassroots-corporate teamwork (Kirby). The new Polaroid seems to believe that the resurgence amongst youth for tangible items, in other terms, "things you can hold and touch," such as vinyl records, will encourage an interest in the Polaroid camera once more (Kirby). The past 5 years have also revealed the popularity of Lomography as an artform, and an interest in film-based cameras as a new means of creative expression. In this age of digitization and the move from the material to the digital, there is hope at Polaroid that there will be some kind of return to physical objects, and to the joy of the instant, material photograph. As one of the founders of the Save Polaroid movement, Dave Bias asserts, "the thing on the paper is a tangible artifact of the moment in time. Good or bad, right or wrong, it's what you created. These tangible things have gained in value" (Kirby). =Works Cited= Amazon. Image: Polaroid OneStep Camera. Amazon. 25 Oct. 2008. <http://www.amazon.com/Polaroid-One-Step-600-Instant-Camera/dp/B00004RFC5>. Barrett, David."Reviews: Exhibitions". Art Monthly. London: Nov 2009. , Iss. 331; pg. 20, 2 pgs Blout, Elkan. "Polaroid: Dreams to Reality". Daedalus, Vol. 125, No. 2, Managing Innovation (Spring, 1996), pp. 39-53 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/20013438> Burns, Charlotte. "Polaroid row hots up." Art Newspaper 19 (2010): 65. OmniFile Full Text Mega. Web. 22 Sep. 2010. Deutsch, Claudia H. "Deep in Dept Since 1988, Polaroid Files for Bankruptcy." The New York Times. 13 Oct. 2001. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A00E0D8123FF930A25753C1A9679C8B63&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/C/Credit>. Discovery Channel. Video: Invention: The First Polaroid Camera. Discovery Channel. 25 Oct. 2008 <http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/29594-invention-the-first-polaroid-camera-video.htm>. eHow. "How to Use a Polaroid Camera." eHow. 26 Oct. 2008. <http://www.ehow.com/how_2075800_use-polaroid-camera.html>. Eisenberg, Anne. Image: Edwin Land, Founder of Polaroid. The New York Times. 13 April 2008. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/technology/13novel.html?scp=30&sq=polaroid%20camera&st=cse>. Eisenberg, Anne. “Instant Digital Prints (and Polaroid Nostalgia).” The New York Times. 13 April 2008. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/technology/13novel.html?scp=30&sq=polaroid%20camera&st=cse>. Holusha, John. “Kodak Told It Must Pay $909 Million.” The New York Times. 13 Oct.1990. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE6D91F39F930A25753C1A966958260&sec=&spon=&&scp=4&sq=polaroid%20kodak%2suit&st=cse>. HowStuffWorks. "How Instant Film Works" HowStuffWorks. 26 Oct. 2008. <http://science.howstuffworks.com/instant-film.htm>. HowStuffWorks. Image: Instant Camera Film. HowStuffWorks. 25 Oct. 2008. <http://www.howstuffworks.com/question605.htm>. Kirby, J. Polaroid: The revival. Canadian Business v. 83 no. 1 (January 19-February 15 2010) p. 20 Lyons, Patrick J. “Polaroid Abandons Instant Photography.” The New York Times. 8 Feb. 2008. <http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/polaroid-abandons-instant-photography/?hp>. Naples Daily News. "The Polaroid Project: The Timeline." Naples Daily News. 20 April 2008. <http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2008/Apr/20/polaroid-project-timeline/>. Pace, Eric. “Edwin H. Land Is Dead at 81; Inventor of Polaroid Camera.” The New York Times. March 2 1991. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE6D8133AF931A35750C0A967958260>. Polaroid. "Polaroid CZA-05300: Polaroid Instant Digital Camera". 22 September 2010. <http://www.polaroid.com/product/0/266909/CZA-05300/_/CZA-05300%3A_Polaroid_PoGo%26%238482%3B_Instant_Digital_Camera> Polaroid. "Polaroid at MIT." 22 Sept. 2010. <http://www.polaroid.com/About/Polaroid+at+MIT/Polaroid+at+MIT/4434> Polaroid. Image: Zink Enabled Polaroid PoGo. 25 Oct. 2008. <http://www.polaroid.com/us/index.jsp?co=usbmLocale=en_US>. Save Polaroid. “A History of Polaroid.” Save Polaroid. 23 Oct. 2008. <http://www.savepolaroid.com/history>. Save Polaroid. Image: Edwin Land and the First Synthetic Sheet Polarizer. Save Polaroid. 23 Oct. 2008. <http://www.savepolaroid.com/history>. Save Polaroid. Image: Polaroid Model 95 Camera. Save Polaroid. 23 Oct. 2008. <http://www.savepolaroid.com/history>. Smith, Allison. “Having a Party with Your Polaroid Camera – Marketing Brand Management.” F.T. Business Enterprises Limited. 26 May 1998. ProQuest. NYU. 20 Oct. 2008. <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdlink?did=29683432&Fmt=7&clientId=9148&RQT=309&VName=PQD>. The New York Times. “Polaroid Says Kodak’s Entry In to Instant Photos Injured It.” The New York Times. 6 Oct. 1981. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F03E5DF1239F935A35753C1A967948260&scp=9&sq=instant20camera%20polaroid&st=cse>. Trotman, N. "The Life of the Party". Afterimage v. 29 no. 6 (May/June 2002) p. 10 Youtube. Clip from ''Amelie''. Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet. 22 September 2010 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiU_SYV5W70&feature=related> Youtube. Music Video for "Hey Ya". Outkast. Dir. Bryan Barber. 22 September 2010 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWgvGjAhvIw&ob=av2e> ZINK (Zero Ink). Image: PoGo and Bluetooth Technology. ZINK. 22 Oct. 2008. <http://www.zink.com/partner-products>. ZINK (Zero Ink). “Partner Products.” ZINK. 22 Oct. 2008. <http://www.zink.com/partner-products>. [[Category:Dossier]]
Return to Polaroid Camera.
Retrieved from "http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php/Polaroid_Camera"
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Whitecliff Bay
Whitecliff Bay is a sandy bay near Foreland which is the easternmost point of the Isle of Wight, England, about two miles south-west of Bembridge and just to the north of Culver Down. The bay has a shoreline of around three-quarters of a mile (1.2 km) and has a popular sandy shingle beach which is over half a mile long.[1] It is a tourist site with three holiday parks in the vicinity of the bay; it has two cafes though minimal facilities. Access is limited and only possible down two steeply sloping concrete tracks.
Sandown Bay
Location within the Isle of Wight
Ceremonial county
Sovereign state
List of places
50°40′12″N 1°05′49″W / 50.67000°N 1.09694°W / 50.67000; -1.09694Coordinates: 50°40′12″N 1°05′49″W / 50.67000°N 1.09694°W / 50.67000; -1.09694
The site is of major geological interest, being part of the Whitecliff Bay And Bembridge Ledges SSSI.
GeologyEdit
View of the bay from Culver Down
Whitecliff Bay has nearly identical geology to the lesser known Alum Bay, being a coastal section of the same strata which run east-west across the island. It displays a classic sequence of fossil-bearing Eocene beds of soft sands and clays, separated by an unconformity from the underlying Cretaceous Chalk Formation forming the headland of Culver Down to its south. Due to geological folding of the Alpine orogeny, the strata in the main section of the Bay are vertical, with younger rocks to the north.[2] In the bay, there are around 500 metres (1,600 ft) of well-exposed sands and of late Palaeocene to late Eocene clays which make the site is a good spot for fossil hunting, with an abundance of prehistoric shells, sponges and molluscs.[3] The bay itself is shallow up to around 350 metres (1,150 ft) from shore getting to deep water 1⁄2 nautical mile (0.6 mi; 0.9 km) out.[4]
Whitecliff Bay was one of the landing points for the French invasion of the Isle of Wight (1545) where they planned to go on to attack Sandown.[5] The bay gets its name from the chalky cliff on the headland, Culver Down, which rises over 340 feet (104 m) at the south-eastern point of the bay.[4]
^ Google (5 September 2018). "Sandown Bay" (Map). Google Maps. Google. Retrieved 5 September 2018.
^ West, Ian M. 2007. [1], Geology of the Wessex Coast of England. School of Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, Southampton University. Internet site. Version: 25 July 2007, retrieved 3 August 2008
^ "Whitecliff Bay". UK Fossil Collecting. 8 February 2008.
^ a b "Whitecliff Bay". eoceanic.com. Retrieved 6 September 2018.
^ "Pilot the Isle of Wight: Puckaster Cove to Bembridge". Yachting Monthly. 20 June 2012.
Whitecliff Bay Holiday Park
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Posted on May 24, 2016 by Cindy Moore
Movie Review: Spotlight
This evening I completed this year’s list of Best Picture nominated movies, with Spotlight. Watching the Academy Awards, I was surprised when this film won the final Oscar. The movie Revenant was favored to win. I knew little about Spotlight, other than the premise. I settled in tonight, curious to discover what made this film stand out.
Spotlight stars Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Brian d’Arcy James and Len Cariou. This historical drama was directed by Tom McCarthy and has a run time of 2 hours and 9 minutes. The film is rated R for adult themes and strong language.
Spotlight was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Ruffalo, Best Supporting Actress for McAdams and Best Editing. It won for Best Original Screenplay and the coveted Best Picture Oscar.
Based on actual events, Spotlight is the story of how the Boston Globe uncovered a massive scandal and cover-up of child molestation within the Catholic Church. In 2001, editor Marty Baron (Schreiber) assigns Spotlight, a specialized group of journalists within the Globe, the task of investigating allegations against an unfrocked priest accused of abusing more than 80 boys.
Editor Robby Robinson (Keaton) leads the team, made up of journalists Mike Rezendes (Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (McAdams) and Matt Carroll (d’Arcy James). Because of the sensitive nature of the investigation and the involvement of the Church, Robby secures the help of fellow editor Ben Bradlee Jr. (Slattery). What at first appears to be an isolated case soon grows in its complexity and breadth. As more and more victims are found, the team discovers that the number of Boston priests involved may number closer to 90.
From attorneys who refuse to disclose information, to Cardinal Bernard Law (Cariou), the Archdiocese of Boston, the cover-up is more intentional and more wide spread than the Spotlight team could have imagined. One attorney, Mitchell Garabedian (Tucci), who fights tirelessly on behalf of victims, finally agrees to help in the investigation by securing crucial documents.
The year long investigation threatens to crack open decades of abuse that has been hidden away, while pitting the Church and its supporters against the credibility of the Boston Globe. In breaking the story, they are breaking the silence.
This was a very well done film. The subject was sensitive, and painful. However, the movie never sensationalized the story nor did it pull back from the gravity of the investigation. This was not an attack against Faith, or even so much an attack against the Church in general. It was an uncovering of a deep flaw in the system that allowed a horrific injustice to continue while leaders looked the other way.
I very much appreciated the flow of the film and the journalistic feel, which was a credit to the director. Rather than make a strong emotional appeal, which would have been easy to do, given the circumstances, the story was presented in a factual way. It was vital that the investigation build its case piece by piece, and that the scope was broad enough, so that there could be no defense against the story that broke. I felt like I got to watch that happen.
Marty Baron said, “Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we spend most of our time stumbling around in the dark. Suddenly, a light gets turned on and there’s a fair share of blame to go around. I can’t speak to what happened before I arrived, but all of you have done some very good reporting here. Reporting that I believe is going to have an immediate and considerable impact on our readers. For me, this kind of story is why we do this.”
The impact was huge, and far reaching, and many, many other victims spoke up.
This was a somber movie with an important message. As Marty said, there is enough blame to go around. It takes all of us being vigilant to protect our children. Spotlight made me think and made me aware and in my opinion, deserved the Best Picture win. I was left wondering what changes have been made by the Catholic Church concerning abusive priests, since this story broke in 2002. I’ll find out.
CategoriesUncategorized, Year of Surrender Tags#surrender144, Academy Awards, Best Picture 2016, best picture nominated movies, Movie Review Spotlight, Oscars, Surrender, Year of Surrender
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3 MARCH 1837, Friday
On Saturday last, at Bosvigo Farm near Truro, of brain fever, Elizabeth, wife of Mr. Henry Ellery, aged 32 years.
On Thursday, the 23rd ult, Mrs. James, wife of Mr. Henry James, grocer, Truro, aged 50 years.
At Tywardreath, on the 28th ult, Mr. Samuel Serpell, aged 48 years, leaving seven children to lament their loss.
On Wednesday last, at Tresillian, Mary, third daughter of the late Mr. Mitchell, of that place, aged 23 years.
On the 13th ult., at Well Town, Warleggan, Mr. B. Lean, aged 57 years.
On Wednesday last, at Camelford, Mrs. Soloman, aged 55 years.
At the house of his son-in-law, Carvedras, near Truro, where he had been for the benefit of his health, Mr. Wm. Steppings, of Ilfracombe, Devon, block and pump maker, aged 67 years.� He was for many years a member of the Calvanistic society; his end was peace.
On Wednesday last, at St. Ives, Mr. John Painter, aged 81 years.� On Thursday, Mrs. Goodman aged 67 years,� Mrs. Ann Couch, aged 81 years, and the infant son of Mr. William Veal, aged 6 months.
On the 20th ultimo, at London,� John Grant, Esq. the respected Secretary to the Albion �Mining Association; sincerely regretted by all who knew him.� His urbanity of manners commanded the respect of a large contingent of friends who have sustained a loss long to be remembered.
At the London Inn, St. Austell, last week, Miss Hannah Bastard, aged 86 years.
At Mount Charles, St. Austell, on Thursday last, Mrs. Collings, aged 41 years.
On Friday last, at his residence at Trevena, in the parish of Tintagel, W. Wade Esq. aged 71 years.� The deceased was a highly honourable and benevolent gentleman, and respected by all who knew him.
On Sunday morning, at West Looe, Mrs. Wilcocks, after only two days illness, aged 46 years, daughter of the late Mr. Jeeves, many years Comptroller of H. M. Customs at Looe.� She was generally beloved.
At Penzance, on Friday last, the Rev. Wilkinson Stephenson, Wesleyan Minister, aged 34 years.�His end was peace.
At Penzance, on Tuesday last, Mrs. Rillstone, aged 66 years.
At St. Ives, Mr. Sidney Richards, aged 85 years.
At Falmouth, on Tuesday morning last, the youngest son of Capt. J. Cooper, aged 8 months.
At Lower St. Columb, on the 5th instant, Miss Kezia Nicholls, fifth daughter of the late Mr. James Nicholls, of decline, aged 20 years.
On the 3rd instant, in the Workhouse, Penzance, where she had been an inmate for 10 years, Hope Reseigh, in the 94th year of her age.
At Truro, on Wednesday last, at the age of 90 years, Mr. William Harlow, for upwards of 50 years an inhabitant of this town.� During 70 years, he honourably sustained a Christian profession, having been first a member of the Tabernacle, Moorfields, London, under the ministry of the celebrated Geo. Whitfield; and for many years a deacon of the Independent church of this town.� He was greatly beloved by all who knew him, and distinguished by his zeal in the cause of religion.� He gradually sunk under increasing infirmities, powerfully exemplifying to the latest period of his affectionately disposition to those whom he has left to mourn his loss, and came to his "grave in a full age, like as a shock of corn cometh in his season".
Last week, at Truro, Mrs. Bult, relict of the lat Mr. Thomas Bult, late of the Seven Stars Inn, Truro, aged 70 years.
At Launceston, on the 7th instant, the Rev. John Rowe, aged 60 years, perpetual curate of that parish, and also vicar of St. Cleather, near Launceston.
At Liskeard, on Friday last, Mr. Henry Longmaid, copperplate engraver, aged 36 years.
At S... �near Fowey, last week, the infant son of Mr. Richard Hicks.
Last week, at Fowey, Mrs. Line, aged 89 years.� Also, on Wednesday last at Fowey, the infant daughter of Mr. Kingcome of the Crown and Anchor Inn.
At Penzance on Tuesday last, Mrs. Batten, relict of the late John Batten, Esq.
At St. Agnes, on Friday last, Mr. Wm. Matthews, of Mevagissey, aged 19 years.
Lately, at Probus, Mr. Thomas Gerrans, a respectable butcher, aged 76 years; also, Mrs. Ann Searle, aged 35 years.
At Plas Newydd, Bodmin, on Saturday last, William James Esq. civil engineer &c, aged 66 years.
At Bodmin,on Friday last, after a short illness, Mary, the wife of Mr. William Carter, aged 25 years.
On Sunday last, at Penzance, Nanny Ninnis, at the advanced age of 100 years and 5 months.
To the last she was in possession of her mental faculties; and till within the last few weeks, was enabled to walk about; she could also read the smallest print without the aid of spectacles, and was for upwards of 60 years a steady and� consistent member of the Wesleyan Society.
At Helleston, on Sunday evening last, after an illness of long standing, and much occasional suffering, George Simon Borlase, Esq., F.R.S. deputy-lieutenant of his county, in the forty-sixth year of his age.� The early death of this lamented gentleman will be felt, not merely as a private, but as a public loss.� As an active magistrate, ever ready to lend his best exertions to the cause of improvement, as the friend of every useful and benevolent institution, and as the strenuous promoter of every object calculated to advance the best interests of the county, and raise the general standard of intelligence among the people, he will be sincerely regretted by all who shared his labours, or are capable of appreciating their utility.� In his native town, more particularly, and its immediate vicinity, the independence of his character, his public spirit and liberality, will long be remembered in their effects, no less than in the grateful recollections of the inhabitants.� Of the many permanent records by which his practical worth may be estimated, it may be sufficient to notice the schools at Huel Vor, founded, supported, and to a considerable extent endowed, for the children of the miners in that populous district, by his persevering zeal and beneficence; and many similar undertakings directly as well as indirectly conducive to the advancement of religion and piety, either effected, commenced, or only frustrated by his premature decease, bear testimony equally honourable to his character.� He took much interest in the pursuits of science, and numbered among his friends Davies, Gilbert, Dr. Paris, and many other individuals distinguished in the scientific world.
At Helston, on Sunday se'nnight, Mr. P. Best, aged 81 years.
Suddenly, at Trevarth in Gwennap, on Tuesday last, John Paul Esq. surgeon, aged 69 years.
At Tregaswith, St. Columb Major, on Sunday last, universally beloved and esteemed, Philip Drew, Esq. aged 61 years; his loss will be long lamented by a numerous circle of sorrowing relations and friends.
At Penzance, on Tuesday last, Mr. Nicholas Tremewen, aged 79 years.
At Liskeard, on Thursday last, at an advanced age, Mr. R. Hockins, woolstapler.
At Enys, on the 18th instant, aged 71 years, Susanna Sarsons, for more than 19 years the much respected housekeeper in Mrs. Enys's Family.
At Hayle, on Saturday last, Mrs. Mary Thomas, aged 77 years.
At Padstow on Saturday last, after a lingering illness, Anna Maria, the wife of Mr. G. Graham, excise officer aged 21 years.
At Ladock, on Friday last, Mrs. Susan Pearse, aged 92 years, she was much lamented; her end was peace.
At Newquay, on Sunday last, Frances, second daughter of Mrs. Thomas, of the Old Inn, aged 20 years.
At Germoe, at an advanced age, Mr. Henbard.
At Callington, on the 11th instant, Mrs. Kinsman, aged 81 years, widow of the late John Kinsman of Manaton.
On Sunday morning last, at Torpoint, Mr. J. Powel.
On Monday last, at Polsue, near Truro, highly respected for his numerous excellencies, Mr. Gatley, aged 77 years.
At Rosewyn, Truro, on Saturday last, John Richards, Esq. aged 65 years.
At St. Blazey, on Monday the 27th instant, Thomas Bond, Esq. late surgeon of Fowey Consols and Lanescot Mines. His abilities and constant attention to the patients under his care, obtained for him considerable esteem and respect. He died from over exertion in his practice whilst labouring under the effects of an attack of the influenza. His loss will be deeply felt by the inhabitants of the thriving town of St. Blazey and its populous neighborhood.
On Tuesday, the 21st instant, at Rosenitheon, St. Kevern, at the advanced age of 92 years, 40 of which were spent in his Majesty's service, Mr. George Boom, beloved and lamented by all who knew him.
At Penzance, on Wednesday last, Mary, eldest daughter of Mr. Pool, Star Hotel, aged 12 years.
At Padstow, on Friday last, Mr. Humphry Sleeman, aged 73 years.
On Tuesday last, after a protracted affliction, borne with Christian patience and resignation to the Divine will, Mr. Oliver Matthrew, bookseller, stationer, &c in the 66th year of his age.
At Helston, on Monday last, Mr. Richard Hawke, aged 40 years. Also, Mrs. Moyle.
At Redruth, on the 29th instant, Elizabeth Ann, eldest daughter of Mr. Haynes, grocer aged 16 years.
Lately, at Mullion, highly respected, at an advanced age, Mr. Fowell, for many years a local preacher in the Methodist connexion.
On Saturday last, at Pengersick in Breage, Mr. T. Harvey, aged 78 years.
On Friday last, at Trew in Breage, Miss Hebbard, a highly respectable shopkeeper.
At Falmouth on Wednesday, the 22nd instant, the infant son of Mr. T. Dash.
At Falmouth, on the 23d instant, after a long illness, which she bore with resignation, Miss M. Frood, aged 30 years.
At Falmouth, on the 17th instant, aged 80, Mr. Richd. Pike, for many years a consistent and highly respected member of the Methodist society.
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The 'Home Alone' Reboot Has Found Its Lead Boy
'Jojo Rabbit' star Archie Yates will star alongside Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney
Archie Yates in 'Jojo Rabbit'
A Home Alone reboot will begin shooting in Montreal early next year. And while we all wish the movie would star Macaulay Culkin, a different boy has been cast as the lead.
Archie Yates, who broke out with scene-stealing turns in Jojo Rabbit, will star in the film alongside Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney. The reboot is being directed by Dirty Grandpa helmer Dan Mazer based on a script from SNL's Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the new movie will have nothing to do with the original Home Alone movies. Instead, the film follows "a wife and husband who, in order to save their home from financial ruin, go to war with a kid who has stolen a priceless heirloom."
The new Home Alone will shoot in Montreal from February until mid-April before arriving on Disney+.
More Dan Mazer
More Taika Waititi
More Rob Delaney
More Ellie Kemper
Vancouver's Rio Theatre Is Becoming a Sports Bar
Vancouver's beloved Rio Theatre is making a major move — it's becoming a full-on sports bar. Yes, a sports bar. The Rio made the announce...
'Snowpiercer' Will Return for Season 3
Ahead of the fast-approaching premiere of Snowpiercer's second season, the show has already been renewed for Season 3. TNT has ordered up...
It's nearly February 2021 and, well, we're still inside. Fortunately, Netflix has promised to release at least one original movie every week...
'At Home with Amy Sedaris' Has Just Been Cancelled
Bad news Amy Sedaris fans — her At Home with Amy Sedaris has just been cancelled. Yes, we too see the irony of a show called At Home being c...
'Saved by the Bell' Renewed for Season 2
Whether you love it or hate it, the new Saved by the Bell series is coming back for Season 2. Today NBC's Peacock announced it has ordered u...
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How do I love thee, Robert Rauschenberg? Let me count the ways.
At the Musée d'art moderne et d'art contemporain, Nice, France:
Ruby Goose, Robert Rauschenberg, 1979
Ruby Goose, Robert Rauschenberg, 1979 (detail)
At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC:
Reservoir, Robert Rauschenberg, 1961
oil, wood, graphite, fabric, rubber, metal on canvas
At the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington DC:
Dam, Robert Rauschenberg, 1959
oil paint, photomechanical reproductions, cloth and metal on canvas
"Dam is one of the influential hybrid works known as the Combines that Robert Rauschenberg made between 1954 and 1964. Described by his contemporary Jasper Johns as 'painting playing the game of sculpture,' the Combines incorporate both two- and three-dimensional elements, many of which Rauschenberg collected from the streets of his Lower Manhattan neighbourhood. In an often quoted statement from 1959, the artist wrote: 'Painting relates to both art and life... (I try to act in the gap between the two.)' Reflecting the unexpected contrasts and continuous flux of urban life, Dam invites the viewer's eye to roam among its parts, making unexpected connections between high and low, word and image, art and everyday life."
At the Museum of Modern Art in New York:
Rebus, Robert Rauschenberg, 1955
Bed, Robert Rauschenberg, 1955,
oil and pencil on pillow, quilt and sheet on wood supports
I love the way Rauschenberg combined collage, paint, text and silkscreen printing with found 3-dimensional objects. Though no longer an uncommon practice, it was innovative in its time.
To hear a conversation between Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Stephen Zucker about Bed, and about the place of Rauschenberg in the history of modern art, click on the brief video below:
Labels: inspiration, museum
While in Washington DC this past April, I visited the National Museum of Women in the Arts. What a beautiful venue! Private groups often rent space in the building to hold special events. This museum is the only one in the world devoted exclusively to art made by women.
Here is the text from one of the panels placed near the entrance:
Art and Feminism
Visual art in the 1970s reflected dramatic political and cultural shifts occurring globally. In the U.S., the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights and Women's Movements challenged mainstream values. Feminist artists and activists protested the unequal representation of women in museums, galleries, and publications. Colleges and universities responded by introducing women's studies curricula and feminist art history classes.
Seeking imagery that could form the core of feminist art, some artists created abstracted symbols that reference the female sexual body. Feminist artists worked in traditional fine art media such as painting and sculpture, but they also pioneered experimental art forms such as performance and video. They attained critical recognition for weaving, sewing and assemblage - processes that had previously been classified as handicrafts. Feminist art put strong emphasis on subjective experience. Content often reflects artists' direct experiences within both the domestic and professional spheres as well as critiques of popular culture. Much feminist art is also representational. This sets it apart from the abstract minimalist style prevalent in the 1960s, which was praised by critics and associated almost exclusively with male artists.
I'd like to share here some of my "finds". Of course my photos do not do justice to the experience of seeing these works in their museum setting.
Louise Nevelson, Reflections of a Waterfall II, painted wood, 1982
Louise Nevelson, always one of my favourite sculptors, was 83 years old when she made this work.
"When she was in her sixties, Nevelson became known for her wood sculpture installations comprising columns and walls filled with objects such a newel posts, baseball bats, picture frames, and driftwood. Waterfall is more allusive, with simpler shapes that suggest running water, rocks and bridges. The large scale and dramatic play of light and shadow within Nevelson's sculptures prompted one critic in the 1960s to describe her works as 'appalling and marvelous, utterly shocking in the way they violate our received ideas on the limits of sculpture.'"
Helen Frankenthaler, Spiritualist, acrylic on canvas, 1973
"Rather than apply paint with a brush Frankenthaler poured paint onto unprimed canvas and allowed the pigment to soak directly into the fabric. Her innovative stain technique emphasizes the essential flatness of a painted surface, while the broad swathes of pigment envelop the viewer in an environment of colour. Frankenthaler's work formed a bridge between gestural abstract expressionist painting of the 1950s and colour field painting of the 1960s."
Susan Swartz, Gentle Morning, Acrylic on linen, 2007
There was no explanatory label for the Susan Swartz painting, but I thought it was lovely: atmospheric and painterly.
Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, The Town, oil on canvas, 1955
"Vieira da Silva was a key figure within the field of expressive abstraction in post-war Paris, where she lived and worked for nearly 60 years. Her paintings explore how space can be simultaneously suggested and collapsed or flattened on the two-dimensional surface of a canvas. The grid of black linesand short brushstrokes in this work creates an abstract pattern that seems to shimmer and pulsate like blinking lights and fast-moving traffic."
Here's a short video that will introduce you to the National Museum of Women in the Arts:
Labels: museum, travel
Philadelphia's Magic Gardens
In April I attended the annual SAQA conference, held this year in Philadelphia. It was during a casual conversation with another registrant that I learned about the Magic Gardens. A short walk from our centrally-located hotel, I thought it warranted a visit.
To quote from the facility's brochure:
"Philadelphia's Magic Gardens is a nonprofit visionary art environment and community arts centre located in Isaiah Zagar's largest public artwork.
"Spanning half a block, the museum includes an immersive outdoor art installation and indoor galleries. Zagar created the space using nontraditional materials such as folk art statues, found objects, bicycle wheels, colourful glass bottles, hand-made tiles, and thousands of glittering mirrors.
"The site is enveloped in visual anecdotes and personal narratives that refer to Zagar's life, family, and community, as well as references from the wider world such as influential art history figures and other visionary artists and environments.
"In 1994, Zagar started working on the vacant lots located near his studio. He first constructed a massive fence to protect the area then spent years sculpting multi-layer walls out of found objects.
"In 2002, the Boston-based owner of the lots discovered Zagar's installation and decided to sell the land, calling for the work to be dismantled. Unwilling to witness the destruction of the now-beloved neighbourhood art environment, the community rushed to support the artist.
"After a two-year legal battle, his creation, newly titled Philadelphia's Magic Gardens, became incorporated as a nonprofit organization with the intention of preserving the artwork at the PMG site and throughout the South Street region."
The installation reminded me of a visit to the Hundertwasser museum in Vienna, with its mosaics and bizarre architecture. I felt that I had fallen down the "rabbit hole", separated from the real world and immersed in a strange and fantastic labyrinth.
This kind of art is often labelled as "outsider". But Isaiah Zagar is not a social isolate. He is a community activist. He earned his B.F.A. in Painting and Graphics from the Pratt Institute in New York City, and he has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pew Charitable Trusts.
And if you have a chance to visit Philadelphia's Magic Gardens? Prepare to be amazed.
Labels: finds, travel
Papeterie Saint-Armand
We are fortunate to have in Montreal a renowned maker of artisanal papers, Papeterie St-Armand, located at 3700 St-Patrick Street, a few blocks from the Atwater Market. Their unassuming entrance, a yellow door positioned below ground level in a huge, old industrial building, gives no hint of the wonders inside: papers speckled and striped, smooth and rough, in every colour of the rainbow.
Our text'art group was lucky enough to be given a tour by David Carruthers, who founded the paper mill in 1979. He explained that all his paper is made of rags, off-cuts from manufacturers of clothing and bed linens. The cloth remnants are chopped into little bits before being beaten into pulp. The colour of the rags determines the colour of the paper. The black paper, made from black denim, is favoured for photo albums.
Other materials used include jute, linen, sisal, and occasionally leaves. Many of the papers are available for sale in small, postcard-sized bundles, or bound as notebooks and sketchbooks.
textile off-cuts, chopped
While we did see some technicians hand-screening paper, most of the production comes off the assembly line, powered by a machine made in Edinburgh, 1949.
A corner of the plant is sectioned off and filled with drawer after drawer of metal type. Printing can be done to order for posters, wedding invitations, book covers, etc.
Papeterie St-Armand stages special events on the last Saturday of every month, from 10 am to 1 pm. Check the bulletin section of their website to see just what will be presented: monotype printing, hand-screening, or the opportunity to bring your own media and try them out on a variety of papers. Papers of all kinds may be purchased during business hours, 9 am - 5 pm, Monday - Friday.
A 5-minute video made at the Papeterie St-Armand and showing its manufacturing process is available here:
Labels: finds, resource
I recently saw the 2014 film "IRIS", a profile of fashion icon Iris Apfel. The director, then 88-year-old Albert Maysles, since deceased, is best known for his movies "Grey Gardens" and "Gimme Shelter".
Iris Apfel is the 93-year-old style maven who has had an outsized presence on the New York fashion scene for decades. A description of the film from the ImDb film review site says,
"More than a fashion film, the documentary is a story about creativity and how, even at Iris' advanced age, a soaring free spirit continues to inspire. IRIS portrays a singular woman whose enthusiasm for fashion, art and people are life's sustenance and reminds us that dressing, and indeed life, is nothing but an experiment. Despite the abundance of glamour in her current life, she continues to embrace the values and work ethic established during a middle-class Queens upbringing during the Great Depression."
The film offers us a glimpse into her very eclectic home, a veritable museum of curiosities. We also witness the loving relationship she has with husband Carl, some seven years her senior.
I would have liked to have had more of a backstory in the film. Apfel credits her mother as having been a big influence in her life, but we don't learn much about her mother, or even about her own career as a designer. What was her interior design work like? What exactly was her contribution to the White House? The movie is more a snapshot of her life now rather than an exploration of her influences.
The film is available as a rental or purchase on Amazon, and also as a free download.
Labels: film
Our little town of Hudson (pop. 5000) has not only an active group of quilters, but a newer group, Hudson Fine Craft. This lively bunch meets regularly to explore new techniques and to organize exhibition opportunities.
Congratulations to Carol Outram, Joanna Olson and Kathryn Lamb, who have worked hard to pull together a collaborative project involving Hudson Fine Craft, the Hudson Historical Society, and the Hudson War Memorial Library.
antique patterns for dolls' clothes, McCall's
Women's Work is on display at the Hudson Historical Society Museum, with many artifacts relating to needlecraft. Antique scissors, thimbles, needles and pincushions have been collected from Hudson's attics and are now showcased along with examples of weaving, quilting, and lacemaking.
Grandmother's Fan quilt, on loan from Inge Lawson
Grandmother's Fan quilt (detail)
I was intrigued by the tiny paper patterns for doll clothes, and by the "Make Do and Mend" wartime government pamphlet. A fine example of an antique Grandmother's Fan is on display, having been rescued for a few dollars from a charity shop. Admittedly, the quilt is a little threadbare, but its decorative embroidery stitches more than make up for that.
Untitled, Phyllis Spriggs
A companion exhibition is currently running at the War Memorial Library. Thirteen works of contemporary textile art, employing a wide variety of techniques and materials, have been hung on the library walls for the pleasure of visitors. Each piece measures 16" square.
Starlight in Silk, Marlise Horst
The artist participants are:
Carol Outram
Joanna Olson
Michele Meredith
Sharon Gallagher
Monique Verdier
Madeleine Leger
Phyllis Spriggs
Marlise Horst
Ann Letellier
and myself.
Artisanes to the Core, Monique Verdier
The Hudson Historical Society Museum is located at 541 Main Road, and is open Wednesday - Sunday, 10 am - 4 pm.
The library is found at 60 Elm Street, and hours are published on its website.
The shows will continue into the summer. More images from the library show are below:
March Hare, Joanna Olson
Untitled, Sharon Gallagher
Still Life with Pillows, Heather Dubreuil
Hudson Artists Spring Show
With fewer artists than usual in the AHA Spring Show, 28 compared to an average of 33 or so, there was still lots of energy at the opening night on Friday. I find that usually I can't take photos at the vernissage, because I am so busy chatting with visitors and other artists.
I went back at a quieter time to get these pix:
My colour studies, acrylic paint on paper, mounted on birch cradleboard, 10" x 10"
and four mini-collages, 6" x 6"
My work was displayed back-to-back with Michele's:
Michele Meredith's compositions in raw silk,
the larger three framed under glass, the smaller on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
The event was well-attended, and Michele and I each sold a piece. A total of 18 works were sold, with net sales approaching $5000.
The group plans to paint the boards a dark grey for the next show, with the hope that the holes in the boards will visually recede, giving more prominence to the works on display. It seems that most community art groups have less than ideal venues to display their work: lighting, floorspace and methods of hanging are often compromised. Still, these local shows help add to a lively community cultural scene.
Berkhamsted #4
Based on a photo I took visiting my cousin's home in England, this 12" x 12" was made as my contribution to the 2016 SAQA benefit auction.
Berkhamsted #4, 12 x 12
hand-dyed cotton, fused appliqué, machine-stitched
It almost didn't get made, and it will no doubt arrive late. I was running out of time as the deadline approached, but then I realized that I could use this as a work in progress for my recent workshop at the Courtepointe Quebec conference, to demonstrate my Cityscapes technique.
I was pleased to be able to share my expertise with a small group of enthusiastic learners at the conference, and I hope that they will send me some photos of their finished projects.
More information about the SAQA auction will be posted in the months to come.
Labels: Cityscape, finished work, workshops
Latest 12 by the dozen challenge: Paul Klee
My 12 by the dozen group has begun a new series of challenges. Our first series was inspired by a particular word (Reflections, Connections, Structure, etc.) and the second series was sparked by a specific colour.
For this new series, we are responding to the work of a particular 20th-century artist. Member Patricia A'Bear chose Paul Klee as the focus for this first quarterly challenge. We were free to concentrate on a single painting, or on his entire oeuvre.
Senecio, Paul Klee, oil paint on gauze, 1922
I chose this painting, Senecio, as my starting point. I always assumed it represented a child, but then I learned that the title can be translated as "Old Man", from the Latin, "senescere", or "to grow old". Still, I find the colours suggest youth and light-heartedness. From this painting, I chose my palette, and I also used some of its simple curves and shapes.
As the final assignment for the Jane Davies course Beyond the Colour Wheel, participants were asked to take the small, 3-colour collages we had made and "tile" them together. In other words, to take those 3" squares or rectangles and put them onto a grid, with no spaces between, just to see what they looked like arranged as a group. So my response to the 12 by the dozen challenge also met the criteria for the last assignment of my on-line course.
Patchwork, made of hand-dyed cotton, 16" x 16"
Many of Klee's paintings suggest a patchwork or a mosaic, with small square-ish shapes "tiled" to form a kind of loose grid, so my use of a grid is also a reference to Klee. I tried to use the colours in more or less the same proportion that Klee used them in Senecio.
In summary, I'd say that I like the original painting, I like the colours, I like the shapes, and I like the idea of a grid. But somehow, in my interpretation, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. I think that without the organizational structure of a recognizable face, the piece has no unity. It's a hot mess: it looks like it went through the blender. Klee's painting has a variety of small, medium and large shapes. My patchwork has only small and smaller. It's one thing to fulfill the requirements of a class assignment or a group challenge, but it's another thing to make good work.
To see the other responses to our latest challenge, some of them spectacular, please visit the 12 by the dozen website or blog.
Labels: finished work, membership
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Emrah Yildiz
)Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East & North African Studies
Norhwestern University
Emrah Yıldız is 2016-17 College Fellow of the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, and Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East & North African Studies at Northwestern University. His work is a historical anthropology of routes of mobility between Iran, Turkey and Syria. His research lies at the intersection of historiography and ethnography of borders and their states; ritual practice, saints and visitation in Islam; as well as paper currency and contraband commerce in trans-regional political economy.
His current book project, The Ways of Zaynab via Turkey: Genealogical Geographies and Arrested Mobilities across Iran and Syria, brings these areas of scholarship into conversation as it follows the pathways of a ziyarat (visitation) route, often referred to as Hajj-e Fuqara’ (pilgrimage of the poor) from bus stations in Iran, through informal bazaars in Turkey, to the Sayyida Zaynab shrine in Syria. He is also interested in studies of gender and sexuality in the Middle East and is currently at work on a second project on LGBT and queer Iranian asylum-seekers at the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Turkey.
Yıldız holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. A former DAAD Research Fellow at Institut für Europäische Ethnologie—Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, he received his BA in Anthropology & German Studies, and his MA in Cultural Anthropology from Wesleyan University. He has also been a visiting researcher at Boğaziçi and New York Universities. The Wenner-Gren Foundation, Die Zeit Stiftung Bucerius Fellowship in Migration Studies, Cora Du Bois Charitable Trust, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, as well as Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Studies have supported his research and writing. Yıldız is co-editor of Jadaliyya’s Turkey Page, and co-editor (with Anthony Alessandrini and Nazan Üstündag) of the collection “Resistance Everywhere:” The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey (2014).
Sites of Religious Memory in an Age of Exodus - Eastern Mediterranean
Faculty Bio
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East Side Highway
Environmental Assessment (EA) Study
Study Process
Origin Destination Survey
Context Sensitive Solutions
Public Information Meetings
Community Working Group
Focus Working Group
Land Use and Access Management Focus Working Group
Sustainability Focus Working Group (FWG)
Alternative Modes Focus Working Group (FWG)
Final Environmental Assessment
2009 Corridor Report
Stakeholder Involvement Plan
Purpose and Need
O-D Survey Memorandum
Alternative Evaluation Process
Joint Council Meeting
The Bloomington-Normal metropolitan area has been experiencing an unprecedented amount of new growth over the last several decades. It is predicted that the future urban expansion will stress the existing infrastructure networks: transportation, water, and sewer. A new transportation facility is being considered to meet the transportation needs of the new and continued development on the east side.
The East Side Highway EA is the next stage of analysis that follows the East Side Highway Feasibility Study and Corridor Study. The 2002 Feasibility Study examined the ability to connect I-55 to I-74 east of Bloomington-Normal. It predicted that the future urban expansion of the region will stress the existing roadway networks, and explored the impacts of providing a new major roadway facility that would relieve traffic congestion.
The East Side Highway Corridor Study began in March 2007 and was completed in March 2009. The Context Sensitive Solution (CSS) approach to public involvement was used throughout the Corridor Study and will continue through the EA. The East Side Highway Corridor Study identified a single feasible 500’ wide corridor that would serve the needs of anticipated growth on the east side of the Bloomington-Normal community. This study did not determine the location of a specific alignment.
The EA is not a refinement of the Corridor Study’s recommended alternative. The EA will assess a full range of transportation improvement alternatives. Some of the corridors previously studied, in addition to new corridors, will be examined for compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). NEPA requires federal agencies to integrate socio-economic and environmental values into the decision making process. Transportation Demand Strategies, compatibility with transit, support of alternate modes of transportation, location of a specific alignment, roadway geometry, and interchange type will be refined during the EA study. The Corridor Study considered these values on a preliminary level only. Upon completion of the EA, a specific alignment with centerline and preliminary Right Of Way needs will be identified. The final Corridor Report and associated appendices can be downloaded here.
...McLean County was one of very few counties in Illinois where jobs continued to grow during the recent economic downturn. In 2010, it also had the lowest unemployment rate among metro regions in the State. (Illinois Department of Employment Security).
A Public Hearing will be held on October 19th, 2016 at the Central Catholic High School at 1201 Airport Road in Bloomington, Illinois. The meeting will be held from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM. For more information, click here.
The final East Side Highway Environmental Assessment document may be downloaded here. It is also available for viewing at the McLean County Highway Department building at 102 S. Towanda Barnes Road, Bloomington, IL.
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* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *
This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.
This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. If the book is under copyright in your country, do not download or redistribute this file.
Title: The Uncommon Prayer-book
Author: James, Montague Rhodes (1862-1936)
Date of first publication: 1921 (Atlantic Monthly); included in "A Warning to the Curious, and Other Ghost Stories" (1925)
Edition used as base for this ebook: "The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James" (New York: Longmans, Green; London: Edward Arnold, 1931) [first edition]
Date first posted: 28 February 2010
Date last updated: 28 February 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #493
This ebook was produced by: David T. Jones, Mark Akrigg & the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net
THE UNCOMMON PRAYER-BOOK
Mr. Davidson was spending the first week in January alone in a country town. A combination of circumstances had driven him to that drastic course: his nearest relations were enjoying winter sports abroad, and the friends who had been kindly anxious to replace them had an infectious complaint in the house. Doubtless he might have found someone else to take pity on him. "But," he reflected, "most of them have made up their parties, and, after all, it is only for three or four days at most that I have to fend for myself, and it will be just as well if I can get a move on with my introduction to the Leventhorp Papers. I might use the time by going down as near as I can to Gaulsford and making acquaintance with the neighbourhood. I ought to see the remains of Leventhorp House, and the tombs in the church."
The first day after his arrival at the Swan Hotel at Longbridge was so stormy that he got no farther than the tobacconist's. The next, comparatively bright, he used for his visit to Gaulsford, which interested him more than a little, but had no ulterior consequences. [491]The third, which was really a pearl of a day for early January, was too fine to be spent indoors. He gathered from the landlord that a favourite practice of visitors in the summer was to take a morning train to a couple of stations westward, and walk back down the valley of the Tent, through Stanford St. Thomas and Stanford Magdalene, both of which were accounted highly picturesque villages. He closed with this plan, and we now find him seated in a third-class carriage at 9.45 a.m., on his way to Kingsbourne Junction, and studying the map of the district.
One old man was his only fellow-traveller, a piping old man, who seemed inclined for conversation. So Mr. Davidson, after going through the necessary versicles and responses about the weather, inquired whether he was going far.
"No, sir, not far, not this morning, sir," said the old man. "I ain't only goin' so far as what they call Kingsbourne Junction. There isn't but two stations betwixt here and there. Yes, they calls it Kingsbourne Junction."
"I'm going there, too," said Mr. Davidson.
"Oh, indeed, sir; do you know that part?"
"No, I'm only going for the sake of taking a walk back to Longbridge, and seeing a bit of the country."
"Oh, indeed, sir! Well, 'tis a beautiful day for a gentleman as enjoys a bit of a walk."
"Yes, to be sure. Have you got far to go when you get to Kingsbourne?"
"No, sir, I ain't got far to go, once I get to Kingsbourne [492]Junction. I'm agoin' to see my daughter, sir. She live at Brockstone. That's about two mile across the fields from what they call Kingsbourne Junction, that is. You've got that marked down on your map, I expect, sir."
"I expect I have. Let me see, Brockstone, did you say? Here's Kingsbourne, yes; and which way is Brockstone—toward the Stanfords? Ah, I see it: Brockstone Court, in a park. I don't see the village, though."
"No, sir, you wouldn't see no village of Brockstone. There ain't only the Court and the Chapel at Brockstone."
"Chapel? Oh, yes, that's marked here, too. The Chapel; close by the Court, it seems to be. Does it belong to the Court?"
"Yes, sir, that's close up to the Court, only a step. Yes, that belong to the Court. My daughter, you see, sir, she's the keeper's wife now, and she live at the Court and look after things now the family's away."
"No one living there now, then?"
"No, sir, not for a number of years. The old gentleman, he lived there when I was a lad; and the lady, she lived on after him to very near upon ninety years of age. And then she died, and them that have it now, they've got this other place, in Warwickshire I believe it is, and they don't do nothin' about lettin' the Court out; but Colonel Wildman, he have the shooting, and young Mr. Clark, he's the agent, he come over once in so many weeks to see to things, and my daughter's husband, he's the keeper."[493]
"And who uses the Chapel? just the people round about, I suppose."
"Oh, no, no one don't use the Chapel. Why, there ain't no one to go. All the people about, they go to Stanford St. Thomas Church; but my son-in-law, he go to Kingsbourne Church now, because the gentleman at Stanford, he have this Gregory singin', and my son-in-law, he don't like that; he say he can hear the old donkey brayin' any day of the week, and he like something a little cheerful on the Sunday." The old man drew his hand across his mouth and laughed. "That's what my son-in-law say; he say he can hear the old donkey," etc., da capo.
Mr. Davidson also laughed as honestly as he could, thinking meanwhile that Brockstone Court and Chapel would probably be worth including in his walk; for the map showed that from Brockstone he could strike the Tent Valley quite as easily as by following the main Kingsbourne-Longbridge road. So, when the mirth excited by the remembrance of the son-in-law's bon mot had died down, he returned to the charge, and ascertained that both the Court and the Chapel were of the class known as "old-fashioned places," and that the old man would be very willing to take him thither, and his daughter would be happy to show him whatever she could.
"But that ain't a lot, sir, not as if the family was livin' there; all the lookin'-glasses is covered up, and the paintin's, and the curtains and carpets folded away; not but what I dare say she could show you a pair[494] just to look at, because she go over them to see as the morth shouldn't get into 'em."
"I shan't mind about that, thank you; if she can show me the inside of the Chapel, that's what I'd like best to see."
"Oh, she can show you that right enough, sir. She have the key of the door, you see, and most weeks she go in and dust about. That's a nice Chapel, that is. My son-in-law, he say he'll be bound they didn't have none of this Gregory singin' there. Dear! I can't help but smile when I think of him sayin' that about th' old donkey. 'I can hear him bray,' he say, 'any day of the week'; and so he can, sir; that's true, anyway."
The walk across the fields from Kingsbourne to Brockstone was very pleasant. It lay for the most part on the top of the country, and commanded wide views over a succession of ridges, plough and pasture, or covered with dark-blue woods—all ending, more or less abruptly, on the right, in headlands that overlooked the wide valley of a great western river. The last field they crossed was bounded by a close copse, and no sooner were they in it than the path turned downward very sharply, and it became evident that Brockstone was neatly fitted into a sudden and very narrow valley. It was not long before they had glimpses of groups of smokeless stone chimneys, and stone-tiled roofs, close beneath their feet; and, not many minutes after that, they were wiping their shoes at the back-door of Brockstone Court, while the[495] keeper's dogs barked very loudly in unseen places, and Mrs. Porter, in quick succession, screamed at them to be quiet, greeted her father, and begged both her visitors to step in.
It was not to be expected that Mr. Davidson should escape being taken through the principal rooms of the Court, in spite of the fact that the house was entirely out of commission. Pictures, carpets, curtains, furniture, were all covered up or put away, as old Mr. Avery had said; and the admiration which our friend was very ready to bestow had to be lavished on the proportions of the rooms, and on the one painted ceiling, upon which an artist who had fled from London in the plague-year had depicted the Triumph of Loyalty and Defeat of Sedition. In this Mr. Davidson could show an unfeigned interest. The portraits of Cromwell, Ireton, Bradshaw, Peters, and the rest, writhing in carefully-devised torments, were evidently the part of the design to which most pains had been devoted.
"That were the old Lady Sadleir had that paintin' done, same as the one what put up the Chapel. They say she were the first that went up to London to dance on Oliver Cromwell's grave." So said Mr. Avery, and continued musingly, "Well, I suppose she got some satisfaction to her mind, but I don't know as I should want to pay the fare to London and back just for that; and my son-in-law, he say the same; he say[496] he don't know as he should have cared to pay all that money only for that. I was tellin' the gentleman as we come along in the train, Mary, what your 'Arry says about this Gregory singin' down at Stanford here. We 'ad a bit of a laugh over that, sir, didn't us?"
"Yes, to be sure we did; ha! ha!" Once again Mr. Davidson strove to do justice to the pleasantry of the keeper. "But," he said, "if Mrs. Porter can show me the Chapel, I think it should be now, for the days aren't long, and I want to get back to Longbridge before it falls quite dark."
Even if Brockstone Court has not been illustrated in Rural Life (and I think it has not), I do not propose to point out its excellences here; but of the Chapel a word must be said. It stands about a hundred yards from the house, and has its own little graveyard and trees about it. It is a stone building about seventy feet long, and in the Gothic style, as that style was understood in the middle of the seventeenth century. On the whole it resembles some of the Oxford college chapels as much as anything, save that it has a distinct chancel, like a parish church, and a fanciful domed bell-turret at the south-west angle.
When the west door was thrown open, Mr. Davidson could not repress an exclamation of pleased surprise at the completeness and richness of the interior. Screen-work, pulpit, seating, and glass—all were of the same period; and as he advanced into the nave and sighted the organ-case with its gold embossed[497] pipes in the western gallery, his cup of satisfaction was filled. The glass in the nave windows was chiefly armorial; and in the chancel were figure-subjects, of the kind that may be seen at Abbey Dore, of Lord Scudamore's work.
But this is not an archæological review.
While Mr. Davidson was still busy examining the remains of the organ (attributed to one of the Dallams, I believe), old Mr. Avery had stumped up into the chancel and was lifting the dust-cloths from the blue-velvet cushions of the stall-desks. Evidently it was here that the family sat.
Mr. Davidson heard him say in a rather hushed tone of surprise, "Why, Mary, here's all the books open agin!"
The reply was in a voice that sounded peevish rather than surprised. "Tt-tt-tt, well, there, I never!"
Mrs. Porter went over to where her father was standing, and they continued talking in a lower key. Mr. Davidson saw plainly that something not quite in the common run was under discussion; so he came down the gallery stairs and joined them. There was no sign of disorder in the chancel any more than in the rest of the Chapel, which was beautifully clean; but the eight folio Prayer-Books on the cushions of the stall-desks were indubitably open.
Mrs. Porter was inclined to be fretful over it. "Whoever can it be as does it?" she said: "for there's no key but mine, nor yet door but the one[498] we come in by, and the winders is barred, every one of 'em; I don't like it, father, that I don't."
"What is it, Mrs. Porter? Anything wrong?" said Mr. Davidson.
"No, sir, nothing reely wrong, only these books. Every time, pretty near, that I come in to do up the place, I shuts 'em and spreads the cloths over 'em to keep off the dust, ever since Mr. Clark spoke about it, when I first come; and yet there they are again, and always the same page—and as I says, whoever it can be as does it with the door and winders shut; and as I says, it makes anyone feel queer comin' in here alone, as I 'ave to do, not as I'm given that way myself, not to be frightened easy, I mean to say; and there's not a rat in the place—not as no rat wouldn't trouble to do a thing like that, do you think, sir?"
"Hardly, I should say; but it sounds very queer. Are they always open at the same place, did you say?"
"Always the same place, sir, one of the psalms it is, and I didn't particular notice it the first time or two, till I see a little red line of printing, and it's always caught my eye since."
Mr. Davidson walked along the stalls and looked at the open books. Sure enough, they all stood at the same page: Psalm cix., and at the head of it, just between the number and the Deus laudum, was a rubric, "For the 25th day of April." Without pretending to minute knowledge of the history of the Book of Common Prayer, he knew enough to be sure[499] that this was a very odd and wholly unauthorized addition to its text; and though he remembered that April 25 is St. Mark's Day, he could not imagine what appropriateness this very savage psalm could have to that festival. With slight misgivings he ventured to turn over the leaves to examine the title-page, and knowing the need for particular accuracy in these matters, he devoted some ten minutes to making a line-for-line transcript of it. The date was 1653; the printer called himself Anthony Cadman. He turned to the list of proper psalms for certain days; yes, added to it was that same inexplicable entry: For the 25th day of April: the 109th Psalm. An expert would no doubt have thought of many other points to inquire into, but this antiquary, as I have said, was no expert. He took stock, however, of the binding—a handsome one of tooled blue leather, bearing the arms that figured in several of the nave windows in various combinations.
"How often," he said at last to Mrs. Porter, "have you found these books lying open like this?"
"Reely I couldn't say, sir, but it's a great many times now. Do you recollect, father, me telling you about it the first time I noticed it?"
"That I do, my dear; you was in a rare taking, and I don't so much wonder at it; that was five year ago I was paying you a visit at Michaelmas time, and you come in at tea-time, and says you, 'Father, there's the books laying open under the cloths agin'; and I didn't know what my daughter was speakin' about,[500] you see, sir, and I says, 'Books?' just like that, I says; and then it all came out. But as Harry says,—that's my son-in-law, sir,—'whoever it can be,' he says, 'as does it, because there ain't only the one door, and we keeps the key locked up,' he says, 'and the winders is barred, every one on 'em. Well,' he says, 'I lay once I could catch 'em at it, they wouldn't do it a second time,' he says. And no more they wouldn't, I don't believe, sir. Well, that was five year ago, and it's been happenin' constant ever since by your account, my dear. Young Mr. Clark, he don't seem to think much to it; but then he don't live here, you see, and 'tisn't his business to come and clean up here of a dark afternoon, is it?"
"I suppose you never notice anything else odd when you are at work here, Mrs. Porter?" said Mr. Davidson.
"No, sir, I do not," said Mrs. Porter, "and it's a funny thing to me I don't, with the feeling I have as there's someone settin' here—no, it's the other side, just within the screen—and lookin' at me all the time I'm dustin' in the gallery and pews. But I never yet see nothin' worse than myself, as the sayin' goes, and I kindly hope I never may."
In the conversation that followed (there was not much of it), nothing was added to the statement of the case. Having parted on good terms with Mr. Avery and his daughter, Mr. Davidson addressed[501] himself to his eight-mile walk. The little valley of Brockstone soon led him down into the broader one of the Tent, and on to Stanford St. Thomas, where he found refreshment.
We need not accompany him all the way to Longbridge. But as he was changing his socks before dinner, he suddenly paused and said half-aloud, "By Jove, that is a rum thing!" It had not occurred to him before how strange it was that any edition of the Prayer-Book should have been issued in 1653, seven years before the Restoration, five years before Cromwell's death, and when the use of the book, let alone the printing of it, was penal. He must have been a bold man who put his name and a date on that title-page. Only, Mr. Davidson reflected, it probably was not his name at all, for the ways of printers in difficult times were devious.
As he was in the front hall of the Swan that evening, making some investigations about trains, a small motor stopped in front of the door, and out of it came a small man in a fur coat, who stood on the steps and gave directions in a rather yapping foreign accent to his chauffeur. When he came into the hotel, he was seen to be black-haired and pale-faced, with a little pointed beard, and gold pince-nez; altogether, very neatly turned out.
He went to his room, and Mr. Davidson saw no more of him till dinner-time. As they were the only two dining that night, it was not difficult for the newcomer to find an excuse for falling into talk; he was[502] evidently wishing to make out what brought Mr. Davidson into that neighbourhood at that season.
"Can you tell me how far it is from here to Arlingworth?" was one of his early questions; and it was one which threw some light on his own plans; for Mr. Davidson recollected having seen at the station an advertisement of a sale at Arlingworth Hall, comprising old furniture, pictures, and books. This, then, was a London dealer.
"No," he said, "I've never been there. I believe it lies out by Kingsbourne—it can't be less than twelve miles. I see there's a sale there shortly."
The other looked at him inquisitively, and he laughed. "No," he said, as if answering a question, "you needn't be afraid of my competing; I'm leaving this place to-morrow."
This cleared the air, and the dealer, whose name was Homberger, admitted that he was interested in books, and thought there might be in these old country-house libraries something to repay a journey. "For," said he, "we English have always this marvellous talent for accumulating rarities in the most unexpected places, ain't it?"
And in the course of the evening he was most interesting on the subject of finds made by himself and others. "I shall take the occasion after this sale to look round the district a bit; perhaps you could inform me of some likely spots, Mr. Davidson?"
But Mr. Davidson, though he had seen some very tempting locked-up book-cases at Brockstone Court,[503] kept his counsel. He did not really like Mr. Homberger.
Next day, as he sat in the train, a little ray of light came to illuminate one of yesterday's puzzles. He happened to take out an almanac-diary that he had bought for the new year, and it occurred to him to look at the remarkable events for April 25. There it was: "St. Mark. Oliver Cromwell born, 1599."
That, coupled with the painted ceiling, seemed to explain a good deal. The figure of old Lady Sadleir became more substantial to his imagination, as of one in whom love for Church and King had gradually given place to intense hate of the power that had silenced the one and slaughtered the other. What curious evil service was that which she and a few like her had been wont to celebrate year by year in that remote valley? and how in the world had she managed to elude authority? And again, did not this persistent opening of the books agree oddly with the other traits of her portrait known to him? It would be interesting for anyone who chanced to be near Brockstone on the twenty-fifth of April to look in at the Chapel and see if anything exceptional happened. When he came to think of it, there seemed to be no reason why he should not be that person himself; he, and if possible, some congenial friend. He resolved that so it should be.
Knowing that he knew really nothing about the printing of Prayer-Books, he realized that he must make it his business to get the best light on the matter[504] without divulging his reasons. I may say at once that his search was entirely fruitless. One writer of the early part of the nineteenth century, a writer of rather windy and rhapsodical chat about books, professed to have heard of a special anti-Cromwellian issue of the Prayer-Book in the very midst of the Commonwealth period. But he did not claim to have seen a copy, and no one had believed him. Looking into this matter, Mr. Davidson found that the statement was based on letters from a correspondent who had lived near Longbridge; so he was inclined to think that the Brockstone Prayer-Books were at the bottom of it, and had excited a momentary interest.
Months went on, and St. Mark's Day came near. Nothing interfered with Mr. Davidson's plans of visiting Brockstone, or with those of the friend whom he had persuaded to go with him, and to whom alone he had confided the puzzle. The same 9.45 train which had taken him in January took them now to Kingsbourne; the same field-path led them to Brockstone. But to-day they stopped more than once to pick a cowslip; the distant woods and ploughed uplands were of another colour, and in the copse there was, as Mrs. Porter said, "a regular charm of birds; why you couldn't hardly collect your mind sometimes with it."
She recognized Mr. Davidson at once, and was very ready to do the honours of the Chapel. The new visitor, Mr. Witham, was as much struck by the completeness of it as Mr. Davidson had been.[505] "There can't be such another in England," he said.
"Books open again, Mrs. Porter?" said Davidson, as they walked up to the chancel.
"Dear, yes, I expect so, sir," said Mrs. Porter, as she drew off the cloths. "Well, there!" she exclaimed the next moment, "if they ain't shut! That's the first time ever I've found 'em so. But it's not for want of care on my part, I do assure you, gentlemen, if they wasn't, for I felt the cloths the last thing before I shut up last week, when the gentleman had done photografting the heast winder, and every one was shut, and where there was ribbons left, I tied 'em. Now I think of it, I don't remember ever to 'ave done that before, and per'aps, whoever it is, it just made the difference to 'em. Well, it only shows, don't it? if at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again."
Meanwhile the two men had been examining the books, and now Davidson spoke.
"I'm sorry to say I'm afraid there's something wrong here, Mrs. Porter. These are not the same books."
It would make too long a business to detail all Mrs. Porter's outcries, and the questionings that followed. The upshot was this. Early in January the gentleman had come to see over the Chapel, and thought a great deal of it, and said he must come back in the spring weather and take some photografts. And only a week ago he had drove up in his motoring car, and a very 'eavy box with the slides in it, and she[506] had locked him in because he said something about a long explosion, and she was afraid of some damage happening; and he says, no, not explosion, but it appeared the lantern what they take the slides with worked very slow; and so he was in there the best part of an hour and she come and let him out, and he drove off with his box and all and gave her his visiting-card, and oh, dear, dear, to think of such a thing! he must have changed the books and took the old ones away with him in his box.
"What sort of man was he?"
"Oh, dear, he was a small-made gentleman, if you can call him so after the way he've behaved, with black hair, that is if it was hair, and gold eye-glasses, if they was gold; reely, one don't know what to believe. Sometimes I doubt he weren't a reel Englishman at all, and yet he seemed to know the language, and had the name on his visiting-card like anybody else might."
"Just so; might we see the card? Yes; T. W. Henderson, and an address somewhere near Bristol. Well, Mrs. Porter, it's quite plain this Mr. Henderson, as he calls himself, has walked off with your eight Prayer-Books and put eight others about the same size in place of them. Now listen to me. I suppose you must tell your husband about this, but neither you nor he must say one word about it to anyone else. If you'll give me the address of the agent,—Mr. Clark, isn't it?—I will write to him and tell him exactly what has happened, and that it really is no fault of yours. But, you understand, we must keep it very[507] quiet; and why? Because this man who has stolen the books will of course try to sell them one at a time—for I may tell you they are worth a good deal of money—and the only way we can bring it home to him is by keeping a sharp look out and saying nothing."
By dint of repeating the same advice in various forms, they succeeded in impressing Mrs. Porter with the real need for silence, and were forced to make a concession only in the case of Mr. Avery, who was expected on a visit shortly. "But you may be safe with father, sir," said Mrs. Porter. "Father ain't a talkin' man."
It was not quite Mr. Davidson's experience of him; still, there were no neighbours at Brockstone, and even Mr. Avery must be aware that gossip with anybody on such a subject would be likely to end in the Porters having to look out for another situation.
A last question was whether Mr. Henderson, so-called, had anyone with him.
"No, sir, not when he come he hadn't; he was working his own motoring car himself, and what luggage he had, let me see: there was his lantern and this box of slides inside the carriage, which I helped him into the Chapel and out of it myself with it, if only I'd knowed! And as he drove away under the big yew tree by the monument, I see the long white bundle laying on the top of the coach, what I didn't notice when he drove up. But he set in front, sir, and only the boxes inside behind him. And do you[508] reely think, sir, as his name weren't Henderson at all? Oh, dear me, what a dreadful thing! Why, fancy what trouble it might bring to a innocent person that might never have set foot in the place but for that!"
They left Mrs. Porter in tears. On the way home there was much discussion as to the best means of keeping watch upon possible sales. What Henderson-Homberger (for there could be no real doubt of the identity) had done was, obviously, to bring down the requisite number of folio Prayer-Books—disused copies from college chapels and the like, bought ostensibly for the sake of the bindings, which were superficially like enough to the old ones—and to substitute them at his leisure for the genuine articles. A week had now passed without any public notice being taken of the theft. He would take a little time himself to find out about the rarity of the books, and would ultimately, no doubt, "place" them cautiously. Between them, Davidson and Witham were in a position to know a good deal of what was passing in the book-world, and they could map out the ground pretty completely. A weak point with them at the moment was that neither of them knew under what other name or names Henderson-Homberger carried on business. But there are ways of solving these problems.
And yet all this planning proved unnecessary.
We are transported to a London office on this same 25th of April. We find there, within closed doors,[509] late in the day, two police inspectors, a commissionaire, and a youthful clerk. The two latter, both rather pale and agitated in appearance, are sitting on chairs and being questioned.
"How long do you say you've been in this Mr. Poschwitz's employment? Six months? And what was his business? Attended sales in various parts and brought home parcels of books. Did he keep a shop anywhere? No? Disposed of 'em here and there, and sometimes to private collectors. Right. Now then, when did he go out last? Rather better than a week ago? Tell you where he was going? No? Said he was going to start next day from his private residence, and shouldn't be at the office—that's here, eh?—before two days; you was to attend as usual. Where is his private residence? Oh, that's the address, Norwood way; I see. Any family? Not in this country? Now, then, what account do you give of what's happened since he came back? Came back on the Tuesday, did he? and this is the Saturday. Bring any books? One package; where is it? In the safe? You got the key? No, to be sure, it's open, of course. How did he seem when he got back—cheerful? Well, but how do you mean—curious? Thought he might be in for an illness: he said that, did he? Odd smell got in his nose, couldn't get rid of it; told you to let him know who wanted to see him before you let 'em in? That wasn't usual with him? Much the same all Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Out a good deal; said he[510] was going to the British Museum. Often went there to make inquiries in the way of his business. Walked up and down a lot in the office when he was in. Anyone call in on those days? Mostly when he was out. Anyone find him in? Oh, Mr. Collinson? Who's Mr. Collinson? An old customer; know his address? All right, give it us afterwards. Well, now, what about this morning? You left Mr. Poschwitz's here at twelve and went home. Anybody see you? Commissionaire, you did? Remained at home till summoned here. Very well.
"Now, commissionaire; we have your name—Watkins, eh? Very well, make your statement; don't go too quick, so as we can get it down."
"I was on duty 'ere later than usual, Mr. Potwitch 'aving asked me to remain on, and ordered his lunching to be sent in, which came as ordered. I was in the lobby from eleven-thirty on, and see Mr. Bligh [the clerk] leave at about twelve. After that no one come in at all except Mr. Potwitch's lunching come at one o'clock and the man left in five minutes' time. Towards the afternoon I became tired of waitin' and I come upstairs to this first floor. The outer door what lead to the orfice stood open, and I come up to the plate-glass door here. Mr. Potwitch he was standing behind the table smoking a cigar, and he laid it down on the mantelpiece and felt in his trouser pockets and took out a key and went across to the safe. And I knocked on the glass, thinkin' to see if he wanted me to come and take away his tray;[511] but he didn't take no notice, bein' engaged with the safe door. Then he got it open and stooped down and seemed to be lifting up a package off of the floor of the safe. And then, sir, I see what looked to be like a great roll of old shabby white flannel, about four to five feet high, fall for'ards out of the inside of the safe right against Mr. Potwitch's shoulder as he was stooping over; and Mr. Potwitch, he raised himself up as it were, resting his hands on the package, and gave a exclamation. And I can't hardly expect you should take what I says, but as true as I stand here I see this roll had a kind of a face in the upper end of it, sir. You can't be more surprised than what I was, I can assure you, and I've seen a lot in me time. Yes, I can describe it if you wish it, sir; it was very much the same as this wall here in colour [the wall had an earth-coloured distemper] and it had a bit of a band tied round underneath. And the eyes, well they was dry-like, and much as if there was two big spiders' bodies in the holes. Hair? no, I don't know as there was much hair to be seen; the flannel-stuff was over the top of the 'ead. I'm very sure it warn't what it should have been. No, I only see it in a flash, but I took it in like a photograft—wish I hadn't. Yes, sir, it fell right over on to Mr. Potwitch's shoulder, and this face hid in his neck,—yes, sir, about where the injury was,—more like a ferret going for a rabbit than anythink else; and he rolled over, and of course I tried to get in at the door; but as you know, sir, it were locked on[512] the inside, and all I could do, I rung up everyone, and the surgeon come, and the police and you gentlemen, and you know as much as what I do. If you won't be requirin' me any more to-day I'd be glad to be getting off home; it's shook me up more than I thought for."
"Well," said one of the inspectors, when they were left alone; and "Well?" said the other inspector; and, after a pause, "What's the surgeon's report again? You've got it there. Yes. Effect on the blood like the worst kind of snake-bite; death almost instantaneous. I'm glad of that, for his sake; he was a nasty sight. No case for detaining this man Watkins, anyway; we know all about him. And what about this safe, now? We'd better go over it again; and, by the way, we haven't opened that package he was busy with when he died."
"Well, handle it careful," said the other; "there might be this snake in it, for what you know. Get a light into the corners of the place, too. Well, there's room for a shortish person to stand up in; but what about ventilation?"
"Perhaps," said the other slowly, as he explored the safe with an electric torch, "perhaps they didn't require much of that. My word! it strikes warm coming out of that place! like a vault, it is. But here, what's this bank-like of dust all spread out into the room? That must have come there since the door was opened; it would sweep it all away if you moved it—see? Now what do you make of that?"[513]
"Make of it? About as much as I make of anything else in this case. One of London's mysteries this is going to be, by what I can see. And I don't believe a photographer's box full of large-size old-fashioned Prayer-Books is going to take us much further. For that's just what your package is."
It was a natural but hasty utterance. The preceding narrative shows that there was, in fact, plenty of material for constructing a case; and when once Messrs. Davidson and Witham had brought their end to Scotland Yard, the join-up was soon made, and the circle completed.
To the relief of Mrs. Porter, the owners of Brockstone decided not to replace the books in the Chapel; they repose, I believe, in a safe-deposit in town. The police have their own methods of keeping certain matters out of the newspapers; otherwise, it can hardly be supposed that Watkins's evidence about Mr. Poschwitz's death could have failed to furnish a good many head-lines of a startling character to the press.
[End of The Uncommon Prayer-book by M. R. James]
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An emotional journey of identity change and transformation: The impact of study-abroad experience on the lives and careers of Chinese students and returnees
Gu, Qing (2015) An emotional journey of identity change and transformation: The impact of study-abroad experience on the lives and careers of Chinese students and returnees. Learning and Teaching, 8 (3). pp. 60-81. ISSN 1755-2281
Official URL: http://berghahn.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/berghahn/latiss/2015/00000008/00000003/art00004
This article discusses the nature of Chinese students' transnational experiences and its impact on their identities within and beyond national and cultural boundaries. The discussion is located in the theoretical framework of transnationalism and explores in detail the ways in which students adapt, change and develop, both in the host country of their study and also on their return to work in their home countries. Empirical evidence in the article is drawn from the findings of three studies, led by the author, which have investigated the pedagogical, sociocultural and emotional challenges that Chinese students have encountered when studying at British universities, and the perceived impact of their overseas studies on their lives and careers in their home countries. The research findings suggest that there are distinctive patterns of challenges, struggles, adjustments, change and achievement over time – all of which are embedded in the processes of socialisation, enculturation and professionalisation. Such experiences are both transitional and transformational and, most profoundly, they necessitate identity change at and across different layers of boundaries. At the heart of this identity change is a constant, emotional search for a reflexive sense of self as an embodied individual, a member of a professional group and a member of an organisation.
Chinese students; culture; identity; returnees; study abroad; transnationalism
https://doi.org/10.3167/latiss.2015.080304
Collier, Elanor
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Blogs > Liberty and Power > Historical Revision and the alleged “myth” of an exploitable Phillips Curve
Historical Revision and the alleged “myth” of an exploitable Phillips Curve
by Liberty and Power tags: economics,Phillip W. Magness,Phillips Curve,Paul A. Samuelson
Dr. Phil Magness is a policy historian and Academic Program Director at the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. He is the co-author of the critically acclaimed book Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement (University of Missouri Press).
The history of thought is an inherently tricky evidentiary exercise, as it typically involves a need to discern intention from written words left by the subjects in question. Its better practitioners attempt to understand the parameters of a particular decision or argument by weighing the available evidence around it and interpreting it in light of the context in which it was made. Typically implicit is a willingness to follow that evidence where it leads, even when the implication is unexpected or, in cases involving thinkers of prominence, an unwelcome mark on their reputation.
This contrasts with a more problematic approach wherein the historian begins his or her investigation with an explicit case to “prove” and thus begins the evidentiary process by casting about for bits and pieces of material to support the predisposed thesis. Or in the case of written matter, begins with a search for narrow and esoteric renderings of the subject’s work, so as to extract from it a contingent and favorable rendering toward the predisposed position. As no investigator is ever truly impartial, the tendency to slip into this latter approach is a persistent danger, though one that may also be mitigated with an empiricist’s grounding. But when the historical enterprise itself begins with an act of simply casting about for bullet points to get around a past figure’s shortcomings, the whole enterprise quickly devolves into counter-historical territory – into exercises in exonerative history that attempt to parse a past figure away from something embarrassing, or something that simply “went wrong” in ways that defied his intentions or expectations.
Such seems to be the case with a relatively new and unusual approach to the contributions of economist Paul A. Samuelson as they pertain to the Phillips Curve. Samuelson’s work on this subject in the 1960s has long been linked to an embarrassing episode in prescriptive Keynesian policy-making wherein an exploitable inverse relationship was posited between unemployment and the price level. Drawing upon a famous 1960 article in the American Economic Review by Samuelson and Robert Solow in which its authors investigated and adapted a perceived empirical relationship between employment and wage levels in the work of A.W. Phillips, policy-makers in that decade and for some time beyond consciously used the Phillips Curve as a structural relationship on the basis of which to conduct macroeconomic policy in the United States. As one of the article’s more notorious passages suggests,
“In order to achieve the nonperfectionist’s goal of high enough output to give us no more than 3 percent unemployment, the price index might have to rise by as much as 4 to 5 percent per year. That much price rise would seem to be the necessary cost of high employment and production in the years immediately ahead.”
In its most problematic iteration, the Samuelson-Solow derived Phillips Curve fostered a belief that monetary inflation could function as an acceptable trade-off, along side which low unemployment could be obtained in the United States. While this did not necessarily commend an intentional inflationary policy to combat unemployment, it did foster an increased tolerance for inflationary circumstances on account of the presumed tradeoff…that is, until the whole thing came crashing down with the stagflation episode – simultaneous high inflation and unemployment – in the 1970s.
Followers of the economic literature of the time will also probably be aware that the attempted operationalization of the Phillips Curve in the early 1960s underwent a series of damning critiques in the theoretical literature as well by Milton Friedman, Edmund Phelps, and Robert Lucas in particular, the gist of which (1) left the Curve practically impotent as a basis for prescriptive policy, as had been theorized and attempted in the wake of Samuelson-Solow, and (2) highlighted the dangers of the very same in showing it to be the genesis of prolonged stagflation. While a number of modified “Phillips Curve” relationships – usually tied to short run phenomena – have persisted in the macro world ever since, they bear little resemblance to the original Samuelson-Solow articulation of the concept and offer little in the way of policy advice, which had been a central feature of the Samuelsonian version.
All said, the Phillips Curve episode proved quite embarrassing for the type of prescriptive macroeconomics that first brought it to prominence and remains a warning against the perils posed by a macroeconomic outlook that approaches policy as a matter of simple lever-pulling to manipulate overall output patterns in a seemingly desired direction.
The Revisionist Case Considered:
While the Phillips Curve experience of the 1960s is well known (and indeed the basis for multiple subsequent Nobel Prize citations), a recent attempt has been made at the rehabilitation of Samuelson’s reputation as a prime instigator of the episode. The gist of its argument is that Samuelson and Solow never really intended the Phillips Curve to be a “stable and exploitable” relationship, and that the subsequent attribution of this charge to them starting with Friedman (1968) onward is a “myth.” In some iterations, the Samuelson-Solow (1960) is either assumed to have been misinterpreted by the field and/or public as offering a prescriptive policy relationship, or its subsequent influence to that effect is also deemed a further part of the “myth.”
The most detailed examples of the revisionist case are laid out in this 2010 article by James Forder, critiquing Friedman’s self-accounting of the deficiencies in the Phillips Curve, and a followup working paper on Samuelson himself, which has gained a fair amount of subsequent currency in some quarters of the economics blogosphere. Forder’s argument also finds currency, to some extent, in another recent working paper by Kevin Hoover and appears to be the basis of a forthcoming book, due out this October.
As the two Forder papers are the most developed examples of the revisionist literature, I’ll focus primarily on their contributions. Both pieces are worth reading as both a history of how the economics profession grappled with the Phillips Curve, and for consideration of the arguments made therein. Briefly summarized, Forder mounts an extended challenge to whether Samuelson and Solow actually intended for the Phillips Curve to be interpreted as an exploitable trade-off for policymaking. He approaches this issue on many fronts, both internal to the Samuelson-Solow (1960) paper and its developing external reception and reputation ever since.
In doing so, Forder relies heavily upon finding textual qualifiers, nuance, and a number of hedged predictions – typical of academic writing – to effectively leave its authors an “out” to their oft-noted association with the policy errors of the 60s and 70s. Some instances are more successful than others, including his drawing attention to Samuelson & Solow’s postulating that the theorized curve for the U.S. had “shifted somewhat” in prior decades. This, he supposes, is an answer of sorts to the presumed stability of the curve that would make it an exploitable relationship, at least in the critique offered of it by Friedman.
It might be noted in response that Samuelson and Solow’s apparent cognizance of the Phillips Curve’s “shiftiness” actually appears to have extended its manipulable characteristics in their minds, thus its closing paragraph suggests not only a belief in the exploitable nature of movements along the curve but also the possibility of further controlling the external parameters of those movements by shifting the curve itself in a more conducive direction. To frame the reception of Samuelson and Solow as a dispute over “stability,” in the sense that it portended a permanently fixed and non-shifting relationship, might thus be a simple confusion of terms. Samuelson and Solow seem to have believed they were dealing with a relationship that they could (1) internally base policy upon where the Phillips Curve presently stood – an implied stability of sorts when operating along that curve, but hardly an immovable one – and (2) if needed, externally manipulate the curve to a better plane through certain external prescriptive measures. Any “shiftiness” was something they believed - quite literally – that they could control and even induce with the “right” types of policies:
“These could of course involve such wide-ranging issues as direct price and wage controls, antiunion and antitrust legislation, and a host of other measures hopefully designed to move the American Phillips curves downward and to the left.”
So yes, in a very narrow sense Forder is correct that Samuelson-Solow (1960) recognized a shifting Phillips Curve. It is not at all apparent though that they saw this as a destabilizing feature of the relationship. To the contrary as the line above indicates, they interpreted the Phillips Curve’s “shiftiness” as another another lever to manipulate through a suite of complimentary policies. And they did so from the very outset of their work.
As a brief aside I cannot stress the importance of that final paragraph in Samuelson-Solow (1960) enough. We will return to it shortly, as it set up precisely where Samuelson was going with his Phillips Curve analysis: a model that could be exploited via movement along the curve itself and by externally inducing a favorable shift in the curve to create a more idealized set of conditions for the aforementioned movements.
But what of Samuelson and Solow’s policy objectives in the 1960 article? They do indeed pose additional problems for Forder and the revisionist account. One of the better known instances comes from Solow himself, who in later years strongly suggested that he and Samuelson saw the Phillips Curve as an exploitable tool for macroeconomic policy purposes at the very outset of their inquiry. In an interview given to the MIT alumni magazine in 1978, Solow recounted a conversation in the late 1950s after his reading of the original Phillips paper:
“I remember that Paul Samuelson asked me when we were looking at those diagrams for the first time, ‘Does that look like a reversible relation to you?’ What he meant was ‘Do you really think the economy can move back and forth along a curve like that?’ And I answered ‘Yeah, I’m inclined to believe it’ and Paul said ‘Me too.’ And thereby hangs a tale.”
Forder’s handling of this reminiscence is unconvincing. He attempts to work around it by narrowing the contextual applications of the quote to an endorsement of an inflationary prescription out of the trade-off. Yet the issue of Samuelson-Solow (1960) was always the existence and use of an exploitable trade-off itself, not necessarily its consequential disposition toward inflationary policies which is a product of its political economy. But needless to say, there is much in both the article and Solow’s recounting of its genesis to suggest that its authors had a direct interest in applying it to prescriptive policymaking.
Samuelson as a Prescriptive Phillips Curve Economist:
In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that Samuelson actively pressed policymakers to employ his Phillips Curve trade-off prescriptively in the immediate wake of the 1960 article. It is this political context that is largely missing from the textual analysis of the revisionist account, and it tends to show that an accompanying depiction of the dissemination of Samuelson-Solow (1960) in the academic literature is very incomplete – and perhaps even partial to presenting an exonerative interpretation.
Even Samuelson-Solow (1960) was an academic revamping of an earlier and more prescriptive paper they drafted in 1959 and presented at the American Economic Association in the context of its policy implications. To this end, Samuelson and Solow went on to publish an extended passage from the 1959 original as a chapter in Arthur M. Okun’s 1965 book The Battle Against Unemployment. Its title reveals a directly prescriptive intent, “Our menu of policy choices,” and the excerpted passages center around the prescriptive characterization quoted above wherein a price level rise is described as a “necessary cost of high employment and production.”
But of perhaps more direct significance to the 1960 academic article’s influence, Samuelson himself actively went to work in pressing it upon congressional legislators and suggesting it could be used as a basis for crafting unemployment policy!
An early occasion came in December 1961 when Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI) invited Samuelson to address a hearing of the Joint Economic Committee on the problem of unemployment. Note that at this time the Phillips Curve’s implied connection between employment and the price level was still a very new concept. The hearing thus had no particular charge to investigate inflation or any related aspect of monetary policy. That is until Samuelson introduced it by way of the Phillips Curve, which he presented to the committee as something of a cutting edge concept to emerge from the economics discipline. A relevant passage from the hearing transcript may be seen below in which Samuelson introduces the Phillips Curve to the committee and suggests that it operates as both a constraining and prescriptive mechanism for them to consider. The relationship, he suggested, implied the existence of “a tendency for wages and prices to rise for cost-push or seller-inflation reasons, even before we got to the desirable social goal of full employment.”
This tendency, Samuelson continued, was “an institutional situation in which there seems to be cost-push or seller’s mechanisms at work,” that institution being the referenced Phillips Curve. The implication of the curve as he then explained was “a relationship of an empirical and sometimes theoretical type between the unemployment rate and the percentage increase in money wages or the percentage increase in prices.” He then provided Proxmire with a copy of his 1960 paper for the committee’s consideration.
As his testimony resumed, Samuelson asserted quite plainly that the “general policy implications of the above analysis are quite clear.” Though limited by time to expand upon them, he urged the committee to adopt “expansionary fiscal and monetary measures and the more direct programs for retaining manpower” in reference to a suite of government jobs training initiatives – two approaches he described as “supplementary, in my view, rather than competitive. This is a case where the whole will add up to much more than the sum of the separate parts.”
Keeping in mind the closing paragraph from Samuelson-Solow (1960) as quoted above, it might be reasonably inferred that by late 1961 he was pressing the more encompassing suite of programs hinted at therein. A written memo accompanying Samuelson’s testimony further expands upon his prescriptive points as well, making note that, though warranting further study, “the preponderance of the existing evidence and analysis suggests to me that something like two-thirds or more of the described increase in unemployment has been due to the inadequacy of overall dollar demand.” This observation though was further “complicated by the fact that even if there were zero “structural unemployment” there might be a tendency for wages and prices to rise for cost push reasons even before the percentage of unemployment had been reduced down to a tolerable and desirable low percentage.” He then goes on to recommend a suite of federal jobs training programs, federally managed employment information exchanges, and aggressive anti-trust enforcement. In other words, he was informing them of a theorized policy implication of Phillips Curve and imparting them with policies that he thought would advantageously manipulate the parameters of that curve – just as he suggested in the final sentence of the 1960 article.
If the 1961 hearing is suggestive, Samuelson’s other actions in this period should remove any doubt of his prescriptive intentions in attempting to enlist the Phillips Curve to macroeconomic policymaking. Brian Domitrovic, who has written extensively about the Phillips Curve fiasco of the 1960s and 70s, alerts me to several such instances from Samuelson’s own capacity as an economic adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The first comes from an early 1961 memo that Samuelson wrote to the Kennedy transition team:
“A careful survey of the behavior of prices and costs shows that our recent stability in the wholesale price index has come in a period of admittedly high unemployment and slackness in our economy. For this reason it is premature to believe that the restoration of high employment will no longer involve problems concerning the stability of prices. Postwar experience, here and abroad, suggests that a mixed economy like ours may tend to generate an upward creep of prices before it arrives at high employment. Such a price creep, which has to be distinguished from the ancient inflations brought about by the upward pull on prices and wages that comes from excessive dollars of demand spending, has been given many names: “cost-push” inflation, “sellers” (rather than demanders) inflation, “market power” inflation, – these are all variants of the same stubborn phenomenon.”
While Samuelson contextualized this comment amidst a broader ongoing dialogue in the economics discipline about the nature of inflation, it is evident he was mapping out an underlying Phillips Curve-based mechanism. He goes on to acknowledge a divergence of expert opinion on the problem of inflation but then proceeds to a lengthy prescriptive warning:
“[I]t should be manifest that the goal of high employment and effective real growth cannot be abandoned because of the problematical fear that reattaining of prosperity in America may bring with it some difficulties; if recovery means a reopening of the cost-push problem, then we have no choice but to move closer to the day when that problem has to be successfully grappled with. Economic statesmanship does involve difficult compromises, but not capitulation to any one of the pluralistic goals of modern society.” (emphasis original)
If Samuelson did not intend to convey an exploitable unemployment-inflation trade-off in the policy sphere, he certainly chose a poor way of expressing himself. The next example comes from a 1964 memo prepared by an advisory committee to LBJ under Samuelson’s direction. By this point Samuelson appears to have been operating under a full-fledged embrace of the operationalized implications of his work on the Phillips Curve.
“An economy which is always near full employment faces a more persistent threat of inflation than a stagnant economy. The remarkable price stability which the U.S. has maintained over the past 6 years has in part been due to the high level of unemployment. One way of assuring a continuation of this price stability would be to tolerate continuing high unemployment. Like most Americans, we reject this “solution” to the problem of inflation. Yet the reconciliation of price stability with full employment is a thorny problem – one to which there are no tried and tested solutions.”
The memo then proceeds to suggest a variety of policy solutions that might mitigate inflation, including “vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws,” increased spending on federal jobs programs, freer trade, and federal intervention against market “barriers” to price competition such as monopoly. It is important to realize that Samuelson actually eschews inflation as a tolerable policy onto itself, though two things may be noted here:
(1) His further prescriptive observations reflect the extension of his own search for other manipulable characteristics that could favorably alter the parameters of the Phillips Curve, as suggested in the closing lines of the 1960 article. Note that this directly chafes with the revisionist account, which questions the presence of an exploitable Phillips Curve. Samuelson quite plainly thinks “yes, it can be exploited” but far from recognizing a problem of “instability” of an order that limits the curve, he has at this point identified its anticipated shiftiness as an additional exploitable characteristic.
(2) A key point of Friedman’s critique is important here as well, as he called into question not just the naive trade-off that Samuelson was assuming from the Phillips Curve but also the constraining implications of his expectations critique upon the curve: that attempts to exploit it in the manner being discussed in policy circles would invariably initiate an inflationary course with stagflationary risk, the various under-developed and concurrent attempts Samuelson was undertaking to further exploit or control a shift of the curve itself notwithstanding.
When turning to his continued forays into policy, the staying power of a prescriptive and exploitable Phillips Curve in Samuelson’s work becomes similarly difficult to escape. He famously incorporated it into his widely used economics textbook in the mid 1960s, and regularly extolled its prescriptive uses in a column for Newsweek magazine. By the time that his original 1959 paper with Solow was excerpted and republished as a “menu of policy choices” in 1965, there was absolutely no doubt in the public arena that he intended such implications to be drawn from the more notorious prescriptive passages I have excerpted at the outset of this post.
Similarly revealing are Samuelson’s comments in a 1967 debate sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, the text of which may be found here. It shows a Samuelson who was quite enamored with the policy implications of the Phillips Curve. As he informed the audience,
“[O]ne must not exaggerate the exactitude of the Phillips curve but nevertheless it is one of the most important concepts of our times. Any criticism of the guideposts which does not explicitly take into account the Phillips curve concept I have to treat as having missed the fundamental point of all economic policy discussions.”
So where then did this concept stand with Samuelson in 1967? As his remarks at AEI reveal, he was aggressively toying around with the final point of his 1960 article with Solow: how to externally manipulate the location of the Phillips Curve through other policies for the purpose of making it further exploitable as a relationship for movements along the curve. He proceeded to identify a “good” and a “bad” Phillips Curve based upon their respective optimality for this persisting goal of operation along the curve. As he put it at the time, “Macroeconomic policy can determine where you are on the Phillips curve. But if you have a bad short- or long-run curve, macroeconomic policy cannot give you a good Phillips curve.” This, he suggested, had to come externally through a suite of policies to induce a more “ideal” Phillips Curve. His hand-drawn example from the lecture may be seen below:
Note that in the explanatory paragraph, Samuelson further specifies the two concurrent policy questions underlying his attempted use of the Phillips Curve. First is the problem of whether the curve itself is at an “ideal” location or not, implying not instability in the curve but an ability to manipulate it externally. And the second issue is the location of an economy along the curve itself, which “is the problem of proper macroeconomic fiscal and monetary policy” – again fully endorsing the original notion of an unemployment/price level trade-off, which would indeed still be a “stable” operating and exploitable target within the idealized parameters of an already-attained “good” Phillips Curve for the country. As Samuelson had asserted all along and was now arguing with increasing sophistication, the policy question about the Phillips Curve was really a two-component proposition, and both components – he plainly believed – were manipulable.
Except that it simply wasn’t so, and a growing number of academic critics posited reasons why it wasn’t so: expectations traps that led to a vertical long run curve, behavior adjustments taken in anticipation of policy premised on the curve, difficulties in identifying the operating point of an economy along the curve, and even the overall empirical weakness of the purported relationship. Far from salvaging the Phillips Curve from its deficiencies, the ensuing literature thoroughly undermined its Samuelsonian iteration and incapacitated it as a functional policy-making mechanism.
Samuelson himself resisted the incoming repudiation of his attempts to operationalize the concept. As late as 1971 and well after Friedman’s formal critique appeared in the economic literature (1968), Samuelson was still pushing a hardline prescriptive orthodoxy around the Phillips Curve. In a letter to the New York Times (12/29/1971) reflecting on leadership changes in Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers, he noted the following:
“But how can any economist throw a stone at him for not having predicted the unpredictable – the fact that the cost-push (or Phillips curve) pathology of hte American mixed economy has turned out to be so much worse than past patterns of experience had suggested? By this I mean: All the regression equations to predict how much deceleration of price and wage inflation the Nixon-engineered stagnation would induce, proved to be systematically overoptimistic. For a little unemployment, we got only a derisory reduction in the rate of inflation.”
This is not the language of an inquisitive scientist as he encounters the first cracks in a prior supposition; it is a rigid clinging to a prior orthodoxy around an exploitable Phillips Curve whose performance was increasingly at odds with empirical evidence. And with it came a bitter lashing out at those he had influenced, not for want of their own attempts to continue a failed exploitation of the curve but for their less rigid adherence to the prescriptive course he himself had laid out.
In turning to these policy examples, it is not difficult to observe what is missed in the revisionist Phillips Curve narrative of Forder and others. The “myth” of an exploitable Phillips Curve is no myth at all where Samuelson is concerned, and indeed he likely viewed it as another manipulable component of his growing macro system that could be subjected to policy ends both within its framework – i.e. a movement along the curve – and externally through a consciously induced shift of that curve.
Where ambiguities in the text of the 1960 article and a few sparing selections from the subsequent academic discussion seem to provide an air of plausible deniability around his connection to the notion of an exploitable Phillips Curve, it is actually Samuelson’s concurrent actions in the public policy sphere that belie the “myth” revision. His advice to policymakers in Congress and the White House shows that he viewed the curve as an exploitable extension of prescriptive macroeconomic policymaking. And where such policy implications are only hypothesized in the 1960 article, they are connected in tangible and specific instances to the legislators and presidents he was urging them upon throughout the 1960s. The revisionist account reminds us of nuance in academic writing and even inadvertently teases out a more complicated element of prescriptive manipulation in Samuelson’s consideration of a “shifting” curve. But it is at best an exercise in selective evidence assemblage to exonerate Samuelson from an episode that his own policy work directly reveals to the contrary.
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Tomorrowland 2011 AfterMovie vol.2 | Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike ( Official )
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He has been remanded in custody and appeared at the Ontario Court Jul 25, 2019 · Ontario police appeal for information on missing persons cold case in Muskoka, now believed to be four murders - The Globe and Mail Provincial police say the cases involving a complex of retirement Because of COVID-19 restrictions, Kevin Martin’s family wasn’t able to travel from P. On November 6, 1982 Fifty years ago, a serial killer prowled the quiet city of London, Ontario, making it, unofficially, the serial killer capital of Canada. Police in Montreal and Ottawa do not have dedicated cold case teams, while Ontario's York Regional Police has two detectives working full-time on long-unsolved murders. Despite his short life, Lenny Breau’s legacy is significant. Apr 15, 2020 · Long:We travel across Canada to look at cold cases that involve the unidentify, and help raise awareness so we can give them back their identites. In addition to my think tank at Western, I've now also partnered with industry leading and community focused Ellipsis Digital to offer a corporate workshop version of my groundbreaking Cold Case Society - one geared to both private and public sector innovators. No one was ever charged in the crime. October 16, 2019 Alberta, Calgary, Death, Eastern Canada, Firearms, Murder, Ontario, Z-Featured Jan 07, 2013 · Canada. Thousands of volunteers from across southern Ontario then joined the hunt. Today's episode takes place in Vancouver BC and covers a cold case that is decades old, The Pauls family murder. In a news conference Saturday, officials said the patient, a man in his 50s Aug 09, 2018 · The case goes cold. That’s cold. is flattening the COVID-19 curve while numbers in central Canada surge Cold Case Secrets is the fourth book in Maggie K. Nov 28, 2019 · A case that has haunted a small town in eastern Ontario for more than 47 years continues to baffle police and media alike. In comparison to some of the very remote areas of Ontario, where winter usually starts in October and generally ends in April with tons of snow and many, many freezing cold days, Toronto's winters are not that cold or that harsh. Get this from a library! Forest City Killer: a serial murderer, a cold-case sleuth, and a search for justice. While most are located within a short period of time, some become long-term missing child cases. Without the public's assistance, many of these cases could remain unsolved. Stacy Gallant. On Feb. There are over 200 different known cold viruses, but most colds (30% to 40%) are caused by rhinoviruses. ONTARIO COLD CASE: Deadly shooting during funeral remains unsolved:'I miss the smile, I miss the laughter,' mom says. [Vanessa Brown] -- "Fifty years ago, a serial killer prowled the quiet city of London, Ontario, marking it as his hunting grounds. Air Ontario Flight 1363 was a scheduled Air Ontario passenger flight which crashed near Dryden, Ontario, on 10 March 1989 shortly after takeoff from Dryden Regional Airport. Cold Case Files tells the story of their work. Toronto. Federal income support for parents of murdered or missing children grant Find information on funding available to those who have suffered a loss of income to cope with the death or disappearance of a child or children as a result of a probable Criminal Code offence. ABC News Recommended for you. Some cases are well-known, while others have virtually disappeared from the public eye. Open during COVID London cold-case slaying thrust under new spotlight. This is the haunting case of two young men whose skeletal remains were found in 1967 and 1968 in rural locations north of Toronto. Jan 24, 2020 · It’s been 47 years, but Bill Blundell still hopes for some closure in the hit-and-run death of his sister. Hair Color: Dark Brown Eye Color: Brown Race / Ethnicity: White Sex: Female Distinguishing Characteristics: She has a beauty mark … For too long awareness of serial murder in Canada has been confined to the likes of Clifford Olson, Paul Bernardo, Karla Homolka, and pig farmer Robert Pickton. Canada's Coast to Coast Internet Service Provider Home » Historic/Cold Cases » The Disappearance Of Pamela Holopainen – Missing Since 2003 From Timmins, Ontario Apr 18, 2014 · More Reopening Canada; Business. This online petition is directed to the Quebec Government and calls "for an inquiry into police conduct, and asking for funding to create a 'cold case' bureau within the Surete du Qubec. Nine-year-old Christine Feb 05, 2019 · According to The Vancouver Sun, this was one of the oldest cold-case arrests in Canadian history. QBD - Quality by design is world class manufacturer, supplier and exporter of refrigerated Display case, Beverage coolers, Glass door merchandisers, Freestanding beverage cooler, Beverage display refrigerator, Refrigerated merchandisers, Bakery display case, Commercial coolers, Commercial Refrigeration, Hydrocarbon coolers, R290 beverage cooler, Biomedical cooler, Pharmacy cooler, Glass door The Forest City Killer: A Serial Murderer, a Cold-Case Sleuth, and a Search for Justice by Vanessa Brown is a highly recommended examination of cold cases and the likelihood that a serial killer is the culprit. He is an actor, known for Cold Case (2003), Leatherheads (2008) and Blue Murder (2001). 40 Cold Case Investigator jobs available on Indeed. In collaboration with the CBC News series Ontario Cold Cases July 5 at 2:14 PM · Shaw's murderer, Alan Craig MacDonald, drove a mid-70's Chrysler Newport and Cindy Halliday, who disappeared in April 1992 and who's body was found in June 1992, was last seen getting into an light-coloured older model (1979-1981) Chrysler LeBaron or Dodge Diplomat. Evidence has been analyzed, interviews have been conducted and avenues have been exhausted, but still, solid answers elude Jul 14, 2019 · "She is not just an unsolved, forgotten cold case or some files of paper collecting dust in a box. Boy reels in cold case South Carolina rail production in Ontario and Quebec Bombardier Inc. A suspected Toronto serial killer may provide closure in the disappearance of Jon Riley of Meaford. Ontario Provincial Police are finally able to put a name to a body that was found in 1967 in Balsam Lake Provincial Park near Coboconk, Ont. “The murder knocked World War 2 from the front pages in Europe and Canada,” Gray told an audience that included senior court officials such as Ontario Justice Charles Anderson. They say that a woman who had entered an apartment building at Parliament Street and Front Street East on April 15 was grabbed from behind by a man. The Cold Case section continues to solve these homicides recognizing that, beyond statistics, there are still families and communities seeking answers and Michael Arntfield is a leading Canadian authority on cold case murders and serial homicide. This will display the postal code of the selected location from Canada on Google map. Dec 05, 2019 · Another unsolved case which might be considered is that of the 27 April 1967 disappearance of Marianne Schuett, age 10, from Kilbride, Ontario. Crime. Please Bring Me Home was featured on an episode of the popular CTV show, W5, which aired on the evening of October 5, 2019. Wed Dec 25, 2019 Lloyd Billingsley . 3°C (30°F). The aircraft was a Fokker F28-1000 Fellowship twin jet. Second, even though Canada, like the United States, is in the midst of a reckoning about statues to monsters, the Cold Cases Statistically, Homicide investigators have been very successful in solving murders in Toronto. His first episode occurred when swimming in a pool, as he exited the water and was exposed to cold air. There’s a void there. Cold Cases are unsolved criminal investigations which remain open pending the discovery of new evidence. Windsor police announced Friday a deceased male was responsible for the death of Ljubica Topic. Canada is a uniquely Since 1996, through new opportunities in investigative techniques and advancements in scientific methods, Cold Case investigators have had success solving cases through the re-examination of old evidence. Second, even though Canada, like the United States, is in the midst of a reckoning about statues to monsters, the They also went behind closed doors to review seven local cold cases and three from elsewhere in Ontario. Nov 10, 2016 · More than 400 people came forward to assist with the search for Cheryl. (NForce) is a boutique collateral locate and recovery company with it’s head office in Brampton, Ontario. Every three years the Brantford department reviews cold cases to see if any advances in technology can assist investigators in finding Jun 21, 2010 · Despite advances in DNA testing, forensics, and the investigative skills used by police, hundreds of crimes remain unsolved across Canada. About Cases Dec 01, 2014 · An Ontario senior has been charged in the murders of two young B. Pierre Chamberland of the Ontario Provincial Police. Jun 06, 2016 · Police in Montreal and Ottawa do not have dedicated cold case teams, while Ontario's York Regional Police has two detectives working full-time on long-unsolved murders. Freelance columnist for Metroland Media Group Ltd. The name George Dowse jumped off the screen because Kenny’s older brother, Gary, said Dowse was part of a group he believes was involved in his 17-year-old brother’s Ontario conducting fewer COVID-19 tests daily as cases keep climbing Positive COVID-19 tests at Maple Leaf Foods plants in Hamilton and Brampton Why B. 351 King Street East, Suite 1600, Toronto, ON Canada, M5A 0N1. Jan 25, 2020 · TORONTO -- Ontario’s chief medical officer has confirmed Canada’s first "presumptive positive" case of coronavirus. Age: 5 years old. to Pictou County to remember him on May 19, like they have in years past. Canada; Reopening Canada $75,000 reward offered in cold-case MacVicar murder in 2001, say police to this day to believe MacVicar was taken at such a young age and that the case remains ONTARIO COLD CASE: What happened to Pamela Holopainen? 'As much as I pray we find her, or her remains, it is still hard for it to become a reality' News May 03, 2019 by Sarah Bissonette Parry Sound Canada Unsolved. The only item found on the lake was a gas can belonging to the 4-metre Boston Whaler. new idea to assist with these cold case missing persons. Nation River Lady – OPP case overview A team of historians have been trying to solve some historical "cold cases" -- old crimes in which the guilty ones walked, and even more insidious crimes where a whole village may have been complicit. With the help of an ensemble cast, follow our hosts as they take you on an entertaining journey through the crime scene, the investigation and attempt to solve the case. Hoshowsky examines twelve crimes that continue to haunt us. That compares to a solve rate of 84 per cent of homicides in general. 1, 1995 UPDATED Nov. The Ontario head office now has 18 volunteers and is Apr 01, 2020 · ontario provincial police Detectives from the Collingwood and The Blue Mountains detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police are asking for the public's assistance in locating a possible witness in an ongoing criminal investigation pertaining to incidents that date back from 1982 to 1983. Mounties arrested 67-year-old Garry Taylor Handlen in Surrey late Aug 07, 2017 · The Government of Ontario has offered a $50,000 reward. Canadian Police Services reported 543 homicides in 2012, translating to a. Sadly, on New Years Eve, they made the horrifying discovery of her remains. But no bodies. Report terrorist activity Contact the National Security Information Network with information about a suspected or known terrorist, terrorist group, or threat of a terrorist act. com) is located at Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower, 22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5H 4E3 and sends informational and promotional emails on behalf of itself and Harlequin Digital Sales Corporation. CANADA - Canada - Marianne Schuett, 10, Kilbride, Ont, 27 April 1967 Arntfield, a 15-year veteran of the London Police Service who now teaches forensic writing and crime fiction at Western University in London, Ont. Kilbride is approximately 88 miles from London. In British Columbia's lower Ontario, Canada 1983: Link: On Sept 8, 1983 around 330am Mary Emma Bisenthal Hammond (Aug 1, 1958 - missing Sept 8, 1983) left her home on Elgin St. Note that the postal code may be searched with nearby approximation. Memories fade and with them the Special Investigation: Yorkregion. Select the name of the Place/Address/City (in Canada) from the suggested list. *Harlequin Enterprises ULC (Harlequin. They also allege the man is responsible for a brazen armed bank robbery in Kingston and an explosion in Toronto. She had been employed there for about one year. ONTARIO COLD CASE: Retired detective still haunted by woman's 1973 homicide UNSOLVED COLD CASE: The Murder of Claire Gagnon (1970) - Dieppe, NB Claire Gagnon was just 16 years old when she was murdered on May 24, 1970 in Dieppe, New Brunswick. ONTARIO COLD CASE: New tips could help solve missing seniors mystery 'We can confirm a significant number of tips from the public that were beneficial' News Oct 03, 2019 by Mary Beth Hartill MuskokaRegion. In the winter, you can expect cold temperatures, with an average low of 24 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 4 degrees Celsius) and snow—even up to a foot. Suspect in Toronto cold-case sexual assaults arrested in Alberta. Manitoba's cold case squad is actively investigating this case. We demand justice be brought to the family of Sheryl Sheppard. E. Public health officials announced Saturday afternoon the Oct 29, 2017 · COLD CASE: Trans-Canada Hwy double homicide still unsolved after 26 years News Oct 29, 2017 by Paige Phillips Huntsville Forester Jacqueline McAllister, left, and Brian Major, were shot and killed at a picnic rest area on Highway 17, west of Blind River on June 28, 1991 when an individual claiming to be a police officer gained entry to Jun 27, 2012 · A case like this one is rare in the small Ontario city. Oct 16, 2019 · Two Ontario men arrested, charged in 2007 Calgary cold case homicide By Bill Graveland The Canadian Press Published Wednesday, October 16, 2019 12:03PM EDT Oct 12, 2019 · Missing From: Lake, Brougham Township, Ontario, Canada. is temporarily halting production in Canada and suspending its 2020 financial forecast due to TORONTO — DNA collected from the scene of a 1988 murder has been used to create images of a suspect in the unsolved homicide, police in Ontario said Tuesday as they released the sketches they hoped would lead to a break in the case. S. com. go somewhere in Canada where is isn’t that bad. Witnesses and evidence suggest the boys went down to the beach looking for adventure. NiagaraThisWeek. D. Lee Mellor was born in Chester, England, and immigrated to Canada as a child. True Crime podcast called Frost, A cold case podcast based on cases that have occurred only in Canada. On Wednesday, May 2, 2018, a second arrest was made in Keswick, Ontario in regards to this ongoing investigation. Police say they’ve arrested one man in three cold case homicides in Kingston murders and a string of other crimes that took place years ago was arrested in eastern Ontario this week Apr 23, 2018 · Canadian Cold Case Published by csteiger on April 23, 2018. An arrest has been made in the murder of a San Antonio woman who was killed more than a decade ago. Jamestown, at 650 Parliament St. com OPP give an update and appeal for public's help in 1998-99 disappearance of four seniors in the Huntsville area. The first case is an 8-year-old boy living in Montreal, Canada, who presented with recurrent hives for the last 2 years. In Canada, more than 50,000 children are reported missing to police each year. And so on. “I was surprised and humbled,” Arntfield said of being selected for the Western Humanitarian Award. Public health officials announced Saturday afternoon the Canada Unsolved. Mar 13, 2020 · Cases Today (July 19) Ontario (164) --Ontario recorded 164 new cases of COVID-19 and three deaths on Saturday. Dry Ice Blasting Systems For cleaning, surface preparation and parts finishing Sep 09, 2019 · A curious 13-year-old boy in Canada is being credited for helping solve the case of a woman who Canadian boy's discovery helps solve decades-old cold case By Eric Levenson, CNN Ontario (AP Sep 25, 2014 - Missing Female Donna Bester Missing since January 16, 1981 from Toronto, Ontario, Canada Classification: Missing For complete info on case http://www In Canada, the legislation from some jurisdictions provide a range of acceptable temperatures for specific circumstances. Visit Our Website to Learn More. In a news conference Saturday, officials said the patient, a man in his 50s For the first time since the pandemic began, Windsor-Essex has claimed the highest COVID-19 infection rate in the province. While McIntyre has no surviving immediate family, the desire to solve the case is still strong. Public health officials announced Saturday afternoon the Jun 06, 2016 · Police in Montreal and Ottawa do not have dedicated cold case teams, while Ontario's York Regional Police has two detectives working full-time on long-unsolved murders. ONTARIO COLD CASE: Murdered mob enforcer implicated in Ken Worth's homicide. Ontario Cold Cases. Corporate Cold Case Training Program. Police said he was associated with a “criminal organization” and the initial investigation uncovered information that suggested his disappearance might have been deliberate. criminal cases in Ontario , she says that it is not a question of science, but rather politics, 26 Jun 2018 Homicide is the most serious offence in Canada and the Hamilton Police Service At the time of a murder, witnesses are often reluctant to speak to police because they fear retaliation from others. Jennifer Langston from Ontario in Canada sent this message to curiouscases@bbc. com delves into the unsolved murder of Tracy Kundinger, the subsequent police investigation and what's happened in the ONTARIO COLD CASE: Reward offered in 38-year-old unsolved murder. Public health officials announced Saturday afternoon the Feb 15, 2019 · Share via Text Message Police in eastern Ontario say they have solved three cold case homicides in Kingston. 30, 2012. Nov 30, 2017 · Cracking cold cases with interactive map. Jun 12, 2017 · Ontario. Ontario Provincial Police - Investigations and Missing Persons Oct 06, 2016 · Cold Case Files: 32 years later, Ontario mother still searching for daughter’s killer. We want to set an example for Sheryl's case and other cold cases by providing our direct support as a community and fellow Canadians. Case Number: 17746707. 9. Cold Case File Jean Paul Page, 29 years old, of 4 Grosvenor Ave. In 1971, Aug 31, 2018 · Today, Kingston Police have nine cold cases involving 10 victims. Missing child cases remain open until the child is located. Despite forensic evidence, it is still important for investigators to hear from the public who may have information about past homicides. Most people do not live in the arctic. McIntyre's 17 Jan 2020 He founded the Cold Case Society at the university and has been studying the The Ontario Provincial Police insist, despite the passage of time, that the Two private Canada Day parties source of Kelowna, B. " Mar 13, 2013 · Police in Guelph are singing the praises of DNA data banks following a recent arrest. Related Reading. 09. Support the show (https://www. READ MORE: Cold Case Files: 32 years later, Ontario mother still searching for daughter’s killer “411 people at that Cold Case – Little boy vanishes during fishing trip – The Disappearance of Adrien McNaughton Feb 14, 2020 717 Adrien McNaughton (born November 4, 1966) was a five-year-old Canadian boy who went missing on June 12, 1972. McIntyre's death is one of those unsolved murders. It’s an unsolved case from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry cold case files. Cold Squad is a Canadian police procedural television series that premiered on CTV on January 23, 1998, at 10 p. At the time of the murders, the police had interviewed over 3,000 suspects and West would have likely have been involved in the original manhunt for the murderer in 1970. In other cases, occupational health and safety jurisdictions use the Threshold Limit Values® for cold stress as published by the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH). Our styles are comfortable and uncomplicated, and they cultivate your curiosity with unexpected, artful details. While on a late-afternoon fishing trip at Holmes Lake, near Calabogie, five-year-old Adrien McNaughton simply vanished into the approaching night of June 12, 1972. Oct 22, 2018 · Cold case cracked: Arrest in 1993 murder of Toronto single mom CTVNews. Chantel GILLADE Homicide Sep. ca Staff Published Monday, October 22, 2018 10:55AM EDT Last Updated Monday, October 22, 2018 11:03AM EDT SHARE Oct 24, 2019 · Since 1961, according to Statistics Canada, only five murders of police officers, four per cent of the total, have remained unsolved. New information could emerge from additional witness testimony, new or retained material evidence, as well as fresh activities of the suspect. Your assistance 2 Jan 2019 Rockne Harmon, a cold-case consultant from the U. A Brantford resident, he was visiting his girlfriend and her roommate on Elm Ridge Drive, in Kitchener’s In her newsmaker interview, Sacha Long talks to W5 reporter Avery Haines about efforts to bring closure to families with missing loved ones. See full bio ». Police officer stretches tape around the Victoria Sicurella crime scene. In British Columbia's lower mainland, the RCMP's Integrated Homicide Investigation Team has five detectives who look into cold cases dating back to 2003. In Unsolved, Robert J. If you have any information, contact the OPP at 1-888-310-1122 or the Nation River Lady tipline at 613-591-2296. March 19th, 1983 Toronto police have closed a 1983 homicide cold case after the suspect in the case has died. As young women and boys were abducted, raped, and murdered, residents of the area held *Harlequin Enterprises ULC (Harlequin. CHCH is available to over 92% of Ontario households and is Oct 16, 2019 · Two Ontario men charged with second-degree murder in 2007 Calgary cold case . The prairies in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba get cold because of the cold air flowing down from the arctic but this air does not stop at the border, the American states get it Oct 14, 2019 · Unsolved Murders: True Crime Stories is a podcast drama with a modern twist on old time radio that delves into the mystery of true cold cases and unsolved murders. Date Of Birth: November 4, 1966. Killers slip through the cracks. The slaying of Renee Sweeney has stymied police in Sudbury, Ont Aug 10, 2018 · ONTARIO COLD CASE: A murder, an arrest, and a shocking twist News Aug 10, 2018 by Jeff Mitchell Oshawa This Week Durham police responded to the report of stabbing in the Rossland and Thornton roads area of Oshawa at lunch time Wednesday and found a dead man. Read More Mar 09, 2009 · Ontario police identify victim from 1967 cold case. The average temperature in Toronto in January is -1. While police zeroed in on a suspect, a lot of questions were being ignored. Aug 31, 2018 · This tip, like countless others, are difficult to investigate considering the Jessop case is one of the most convoluted in Canadian history. Though he had never before heard of Kelly Morrisseau, the details of her cold case, and the subsequent 10-year investigation into her murder, were instantly familiar to Rockne Harmon. The alleged victims, between 15 and 33 years old, were recruited from dance clubs, schools and group homes in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Alberta and Edmonton. Adriano, Delia Maria Ontario, Canada 1982, Link, Delia Maria Adriano disappeared on September 26, 1982. The Press-Enterprise 1,917 views. 17 Aug 2018 ONTARIO COLD CASE: A tip, DNA will lead to killer of Renee Sweeney about possible suspects coming from all over Canada and the United 19 Aug 2015 London, Ontario once suffered the highest concentration of serial killers on Earth, and 16 of 29 murder cases were never concluded – but a 9 Sep 2014 Canada's violent crimes. [2] Ontario Politics Doug Ford Despite the best efforts of law enforcement, some cases go "cold" over time, when no new information is available to investigators and culprits cannot be identified Feb 04, 2017 · On the late evening of March 17, 1995, after a spring break party which included copious amounts of alcohol, six teenage boys from Pickering Ontario, left the party. That was the last time they were ever seen. ONTARIO COLD CASE: Father vows to keep searching for his missing son Niagara-on-the-Lake flags are ready for pickup and to be displayed ahead of Canada Day. DNA continues to be Toronto, Ontario. 1991, Cartierville John 2017, Honey and Barry Sherman, 69 & 75, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Ontario Cold Case: Still no signs of Lorraine Roach 5 years after her disappearance Peterborough woman was last seen by her husband on May 11, 2013 News May 11, 2018 by Todd Vandonk Peterborough ONTARIO COLD CASE: Good deed for co-worker ends in murder At first, it was thought he may have gone into hiding. com/FROSTcnd) Hi there, I am a freelance reporter working on a podcast series on the death of a 14-year-old girl in Ayton, Ontario. For months searchers looked everywhere, but no trace could be found. In Canada, the peak times for colds are at the start of school in the fall, in mid-winter, and again in early spring. Black's True North Heroes Series. Pickering, Ontario, 1995: After leaving a neighborhood basement party on a cold night a group of six teenage boys (who had been drinking) headed out for some We all love the special prices, saved shipping costs and expert advice we can obtain at the shows. Quebec (166)-- Quebec recorded 166 new COVID-19 cases and one death on Sunday, the Missing Kids, Ontario, Missing, Cold Case, 1990s SM 6/30/20 Missing Kids, Ontario, Missing, Cold Case, 1990s SM 6/30/20 MISSING: Nancy Liou - 1999 - Toronto, ON Toronto Police are appealing for information about the historic disappearance of 15-year-old Nancy Liou, last seen in 1999, along with that of Richard David Marlow (age 9, 1944), Helga May 19, 2015 · KINGSTON, Ont. Jul 18, 2019 · ONTARIO COLD CASE: Patient 1 of 6 to vanish after fleeing psych unit New Missing Persons Act opens health, financial and other police records to investigators News Jul 18, 2019 by Danielle Marr North Bay Nipissing News Canada confirmed its first "presumptive" case of coronavirus in Toronto as the number of infections worldwide surpasses 1,900 cases. Distinguishing Characteristics: White Male, Blonde hair, Brown eyes, Adrian has a two inch scar on his forehead and it goes over one of his eyes Jun 25, 2017 · The case remained cold until 2010, when the case was reopened. This database contains a listing of long-term missing children registered with MissingKids. ca. However, there have been more than 60 serial killers in Canadian history, and Cold North Killers is a wake-up call. Case Number: 99-6261090 Dana Zelic Missing Since: August 30, 1999 from #Hamilton, #Ontario, #Canada Classification: Missing Date Of Birth: November 12, 1972 Age at the time of Disappearance: 26 years Height: 5'6" Weight: 100 lbs. A Windsor cold case homicide has been solved, almost 50 years after the homicide occurred. As a result, parts of the site may not function properly for you. Ontario Provincial Police have been investigating the death of 80-year-old Thera Dieleman for the last three They found nothing. Gray said Oakes was a renowned philanthropist who supported local causes wherever he lived, including Niagara Falls, ON, where he spent 10 years and donated land now It appears you are trying to access this site using an outdated browser. " On October 3rd, 1984, nine year old Christine Jessop vanished from the streets of Queensville, Ontario. Stay tuned at the end of the episode for a brief discussion on the cases that sparked our interest in true crime. Once there, they may […] In Canada, the legislation from some jurisdictions provide a range of acceptable temperatures for specific circumstances. 2000, André In collaboration with the CBC News series Canadian Cold Case, the CBC Digital Archives presents a collection of stories from unsolved crimes in Canada. 26 Jun 2018 As each day passes, an already cold case grows a little colder. Nader Nilianbousheri was killed at his home on Nov. Local Business. His parents attributed this to viral illness. July 13, 2020 — Toronto RCMP/NPF Statement: Speculation on Rideau Hall Arrest July 10, 2020 — Ottawa ON National RCMP lay charges in Rideau Hall incident July 3, 2020 — Ottawa ON National Statement by Deputy Commissioner Federal Policing Mike Duheme: Update on arrest at Rideau Hall Jun 25, 2017 · COLD CASE: The Huntsville ‘Cat Lady’ who just disappeared News Jun 25, 2017 by Roland Cilliers Huntsville Forester A $50,000 reward is offered for information leading to the conviction of those responsible for the disappearance of Joan Lawrence. In what would become a fateful headline, the 'Lost Boys' of Lake Ontario - and an unsolved case of multiple missing persons - has left many questions unanswered for nearly 25 years. After receiving new information and a search warrant, police began searching in a rural area near ONTARIO COLD CASE: Tracy Kundinger was strangled just metres from her front door It was on Aug. If you have any information about a case profiled here, please submit a tip online or contact the VPD Homicide Unit. In this case, the victim of the shooting was a bull moose whose body was found out near Red Lake, left to spoil. NForce specializes in Cold Case collateral, charge Case Number: 99-6261090 Dana Zelic Missing Since: August 30, 1999 from #Hamilton, #Ontario, #Canada Classification: Missing Date Of Birth: November 12, 1972 Age at the time of Disappearance: 26 years Height: 5'6" Weight: 100 lbs. “People are more advocacy-minded today; there is a lot of good projects going on. When we think of Canada, we think of things like friendliness, good manners, cleanliness, and hockey. Jun 12, 2019 · Home » Toronto News » ONTARIO COLD CASE: Snowy driveway alerts neighbours to teacher's murder:Retired high school shop teacher killed in his Welland home. Investigators say he was the victim Toronto police's cold case unit is appealing for the public's help in identifying the suspect responsible for the murder of 28-year-old Richard Thomas Moore in Dec. Police have blocked off the area of Bermuda Street and Waverly Street North. Canada is a uniquely Cold Cases. VersaCold is a one-stop Supply Chain Solution providing Global Logistics Solutions that no other Canadian supplier can match. A cold case can quickly heat up. Watch the latest Episodes for free on 123movies Kitchener, Ontario, Canada . The Canadian Press . Only at 123movies can you watch Cold Case - Season 1 free in HD/Full HD. The victim’s wallet containing a Royal bank card, a social insurance card, birth May 11, 2018 · Ontario Cold Case: Still no signs of Lorraine Roach 5 years after her disappearance Peterborough woman was last seen by her husband on May 11, 2013 News May 11, 2018 by Todd Vandonk Peterborough This Week Toronto police's cold case unit is appealing for the public's help in identifying the suspect responsible for the murder of 28-year-old Richard Thomas Moore in Dec. 3:11. com 3 Comments by Sarah Ferguson. Having served as a police officer in London, Ontario for over 15 years, 8 Dec 2017 Ontario cold case remains unsolved after 45 years CTV News is Canada's most-watched news organization both locally and nationally, and 25 Jul 2019 Ontario police appeal for information on missing persons cold case in Muskoka, now a fraud and theft case on behalf of the Muskoka Christian School. The pattern is familiar, but changing, thanks to the efforts of a special breed of detectives. com under the column header: "Cold Case Chronicles" - profiling unsolved crimes Oct 16, 2019 · Home Alberta Calgary Police make arrests in cold case homicide Calgary Police make arrests in cold case homicide. post was last updated: June 3, 2019 ; 0 Canada confirmed its first "presumptive" case of coronavirus in Toronto as the number of infections worldwide surpasses 1,900 cases. uk: "My husband has just taken up cold water swimming and he'll swim in temperatures as low as 6 degrees Celsius. Actor | Cold Case Jeremy Ratchford was born on August 6, 1965 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. W. Moffett Reopening Canada. Apply to Criminal Investigator, Protection Specialist, Examiner and more! Ad Policy. Apr 01, 2020 · ontario provincial police Detectives from the Collingwood and The Blue Mountains detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police are asking for the public's assistance in locating a possible witness in an ongoing criminal investigation pertaining to incidents that date back from 1982 to 1983. New images show couple before their deaths in Canada - Duration: 3:11. the zero canada project: Need help through this difficult time? 12 Dec 2019 The hope is that the cold case website started in Southern Ontario will for assistance, and have expanded operations across Canada since it Last check 8/2018. , in Toronto. Many people confuse the flu with a bad cold. As a result, 52-year-old David Glenn BOND is currently facing 2 charges of Accessory After the Fact to Murder, contrary to Section 240 of the Criminal Code of Canada. As of 2020, no one was ever charged with Tara Singh Hayer's murder and the case remains unsolved. Height and Weight: 3’0″ and 35 pounds. Disappearances and unsolved murders devastate Canadian families in all parts of the country, creating anger and suspicions that may never be put to rest. EMMA:48323049. Dec 29, 2019 · Canadian cold case story could be a contender. Your assistance could make the difference. Phillip Feb 15, 2019 · Canada. The The Ontario Provincial Police needs your help. Nation River Lady – Ontario’s Missing Adult Registry case overview. COLD CASE: 45 years later - tips still come in for missing Ingrid Bauer A buyer at Kodak Canada, Oscar put up $3,000 of his own money toward a reward for details on her whereabouts Jun 09, 2020 · Nick: Please Bring Me Home is a not-for-profit organization based in Ontario. , hopes the series will convince police agencies across Canada to break out of their “institutional” thinking and embrace the idea of outsourcing cold-case investigations to civilians with diverse We travel across Canada to look at cold cases that involve the unidentify, and help raise awareness so we can give them back their identites. Aug 19, 2015 · London, Ontario once suffered the highest concentration of serial killers on Earth, and 16 of 29 murder cases were never concluded – but a new book looks to a former detective’s diary entries Be ready for hot, humid temperatures with an average high of 79 degrees Fahrenheit (26 degrees Celsius). I worry that it's too cold for him, but he claims that 'swimming in cold water is good Jun 22, 2018 · Ontario Cold Case: Nearly 26 years ago Mark Nimz was killed trying to stop a robbery Police still searching for gunman who killed Burlington resident News Jun 22, 2018 by Veronica Appia Independent Free Press The tip came out of the blue, two weeks after the Ontario Cold Case story Did jewel thieves execute Ken Worth in 1975? was published on all Torstar community websites. girls taken from their families more than three decades ago. Toronto, Ontario, M4W Jun 06, 2016 · Police in Montreal and Ottawa do not have dedicated cold case teams, while Ontario's York Regional Police has two detectives working full-time on long-unsolved murders. She was a young, 13-year-old, vibrant girl who enjoyed baseball, skating, bowling, horseback Jan 07, 2017 · Ontario Though he had never before heard of Kelly Morrisseau, the details of her cold case, and the subsequent 10-year investigation into her killing, were instantly familiar to Rockne Harmon. We recommend updating your browser to its most recent version at your earliest convenience. No, this isn’t an episode of CSI. More Reopening Canada; the mother of a five-year-old boy whose body was found nearly 31 years ago to help her turn the page on the grim cold case. Mar 14, 2020 · The investigative news show dubbed the group “cold case hunters,” a label that has stuck as word of the group has spread across the country. About Cases Toronto police allege that a local gang is responsible for several women and girls from across Canada being forced into the sex-trade industry. Feb 22, 2019 · COLD CASE: Search for Diane Prevost continues 50 years on. 6, 2007. Young women and boys were This book gives details on several murders in and around London, Ontario, Canada. Events in the Area This is an online tool (Mashup) to search postal code of a place, address or city in Canada. With the passage of time, families lose hope and another unsolved homicide file settles into obscurity. Hair Color: Dark Brown Eye Color: Brown Race / Ethnicity: White Sex: Female Distinguishing Characteristics: She 1-800-563-COLD (1-800-563-2653) Case Studies; Transit Matrix Use this map to find our Warehousing and Transportation Solutions Terminals across Canada. Classification: Endangered Missing. Murders go unsolved. The article mentions the name of the victim as Jacobina Wilhemina Carman. ONTARIO COLD CASE: Snowy driveway alerts neighbours to teacher's murder:Retired high school shop teacher killed in his Welland home. Search Canada's database on cold case files, and find out how you can help improve the chances of solving them. The cause of death was multiple stab wounds. Jeremy Ratchford was born on August 6, 1965 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. Veronica 24 Oct 2019 Since 1961, according to Statistics Canada, only five murders of police officers, four per cent of the total, have remained unsolved. I haven't read any of the previous books and, while I could tell there were events that I missed out on, I wasn't confused by the storyline or characters…it was easy to remember who was whom. of 120 people across Jun 03, 2019 · Home » Toronto News » ONTARIO COLD CASE: Deadly shooting during funeral remains unsolved:'I miss the smile, I miss the laughter,' mom says. Cops hope to reveal more about how this cold case heated up this week, but a search of the outskirts of the town is underway to try to locate the girl’s remains. - writing a monthly article in NiagaraThisWeek. But even unlucky Jun 06, 2016 · Police in Montreal and Ottawa do not have dedicated cold case teams, while Ontario’s York Regional Police has two detectives working full-time on long-unsolved murders. May 01, 2020 · Niagara, Ontario. Sgt. Coldwater Creek creates women’s clothing that makes customers feel more connected to nature – and themselves. Investigators If you have any information concerning this case, please contact: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police 877 If you don’t want the cold that lasts about 3-4 months…. But the country does have its dark Not an Ontario cold case but considering the amount of time Lenny Breau spent in Toronto and Canada, it deserves mention. 8 Chantel Gillade was born Robert Gillade in 1967. Long: We travel across Canada to look at cold cases that involve the unidentify, and help raise awareness so we can give them back their identites. One of these is one of. " - Owen Gleiberman, Variety - Owen Gleiberman, Variety "A tremendously absorbing film, a documentary that plays like a first-rate thriller hinging on key issues of the Cold War and African decolonization. patreon. Campbell, one of Waterloo Region’s most recent cold cases, was killed on Nov. Cold Jet provides value to our customers by helping you solve your cleaning, surface preparation and dry ice manufacturing problems. Police said they received information that a car . 6, 1973, 10-year-old Sheryl Blundell and a friend left home to a buy candy at a Nov 21, 2017 · 10 Most Famous Disturbing Cold Case Mysteries From Canada. 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That’s what the OPP is hoping for with the new video series. A DNA sample was taken from a 39-year-old Guelph man following his arrest for another crime, and police say Jan 25, 2020 · TORONTO -- Ontario’s chief medical officer has confirmed Canada’s first "presumptive positive" case of coronavirus. ca Following an investigation that spanned almost 20 years, Windsor police say they have solved the cold case murder of a 55-year-old mother of two. 740 likes · 16 talking about this. outbreak. Scott Miller reports Apr 11, 2014 · Cold Case Arrest: San Antonio murder suspect captured in Canada[Illegal Alien] Fox 29 ^ | 11 April 2014 | Fox 29 Posted on 04/11/2014 1:42:57 PM PDT by Theoria. Actor Jussie Smollett claimed two white men in MAGA hats attacked him in Chicago. The author has done exhaustive research on the subject matter as well as 15 Feb 2020 Cold case continues to baffle Windsor police 25 years after woman's brutal slaying murdered indigenous women across Canada in Windsor on Tuesday, Emergency Management Ontario sent to Essex County to handle 19 Oct 2018 ONTARIO COLD CASE: Conviction registered but child's body still missing Katherine May Wilson - Government of Canada's, "Canada's 25 Feb 2014 Given an opportunity to assemble a cold-case squad for a new investigators,” said Sgt. , is advocating the use of familial But, the process is not permitted in Canada. A Cold Case Part 2 Two cold callers feature in this episode. cold case ontario canada
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In praise of questions which tend not to edification
Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, German Tradition, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Monasticism, Social Science
autobiography, Carl Sagan, Communism, Henry Clarke Warren, Karl Marx, Leo Panitch, Pali suttas, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha)
The Shorter Māluṅkya Sutta, in the early Pali Buddhist sutta texts, opens with the Buddhist monk Māluṅkyaputta meditating and thinking as follows:
These positions that are undeclared, set aside, discarded by the Blessed One [the Buddha] — ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ ‘The cosmos is finite,’ ‘The cosmos is infinite,’ ‘The soul and the body are the same,’ ‘The soul is one thing and the body another,’ ‘After death a Tathagata exists,’ ‘After death a Tathagata does not exist,’ ‘After death a Tathagata both exists and does not exist,’ ‘After death a Tathagata neither exists nor does not exist’ — I don’t approve, I don’t accept that the Blessed One has not declared them to me. I’ll go ask the Blessed One about this matter. [Majjhima Nikāya i.426, Thanissaro Bhikkhu translation]
The absence of answers to these questions frustrates Māluṅkyaputta enough that he is ready to leave the monkhood and become a layman if the Buddha doesn’t answer him. The Buddha responds, not by answering any of the questions, but by chiding Māluṅkyaputta with his famous parable of the arrow:
It’s just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, “I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a brahman, a merchant, or a worker.” He would say, “I won’t have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me… until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short…” (Majjhima Nikāya i.428)
In the classically repetitive style of the Pali suttas (designed for memorization) the Buddha goes on with a long list of similar questions about the shooter, the bow, the shaft and the arrow, all in the same form: look, Māluṅkyaputta, you’ve got a misplaced sense of priorities here. You are trapped in the terrible cycle of suffering, and as a human being you’ve got a shot at getting out of it. That needs to be your priority. These questions of cosmology are not going to help. They are not connected with the goal (atthasaṃhitaṃ); they do not lead to a pure life (nādibrahmacariyakaṃ). In English scholarship on Buddhism it has been commonplace, at least since Henry Clarke Warren used the phrase in his 19th-century Buddhism in Translation, to refer to them as “questions which tend not to edification”. In discouraging Māluṅkyaputta from asking such questions, the Buddha is showing a strong single-mindedness: everything should be focused on one goal. But it is more than that: it is a practical single-mindedness, where theoretical reflection is irrelevant compared to a practical goal. (Yavanayāna Buddhists should take note that the practice in question is not meditation, but monkhood.)
The pragmatic spirit of the Buddha in this sutta is shared above all by none other than Karl Marx. One of Marx’s most memorable phrases — so well remembered that it is carved on his gravestone — is the eleventh and last of the Theses on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” [emphases in original] For Marx as for the Buddha, the worthy questions to ask are the ones that edify, that lead to change in something more than knowledge alone. If your questions only interpret without changing, they will tend not to edification. For Marx it is a matter of edifying the world rather than individual people, but the basic practical orientation remains.
Throughout my own education, I held steadfast to this practical orientation. I suppose that may sound strange coming from someone who has devoted his life to studying philosophy, but it is the case. In my undergraduate and master’s degrees in sociology, I looked down on those who would stand on the sidelines and analyze society without any practical orientation. The point of studying society was to change it. And then while studying Asian philosophy and “religion”, I always looked for ethical thought that would offer us guidance here and now – I had interest neither in studying the past as antiquity, nor in questions of metaphysics that did not relate directly to a life better lived.
Now, however, I am softening on this orientation. For one thing, the questions of practical philosophy keep leading me back to the questions of theoretical philosophy, in various ways, and this is hugely important. But it goes deeper. The disparaging of “questions which tend not to edification” turns out not to go very far, in either Buddhism or Marxism.
Once during my Master’s degree, the Canadian Marxist Leo Panitch came to give a talk. In a social evening afterwards, one of my student colleagues asked Panitch why he had turned to Marxism, and Panitch replied that it was the framework that most helped him understand the functioning of society as a whole. My colleague noted: “It always comes down to that!” Indeed it does: I have yet to meet a Marxist who claimed to have become a Marxist because it was the best way to bring about social change. It has always been about understanding the world. And well it should be. To date, Marxists have proved inept or worse at actually changing the world. The experience of all the sovereign states and revolutions that adopted Marx’s thought as an official ideology is painfully instructive: after committing millions of grisly murders in an attempt to change the world, a few decades later they ended up in a form of capitalism more authoritarian than the ones they had fought against.
In spite of all of this, Marxism abides in intellectual circles, and this too for good reason. I’ve noted before just how valuable I find Marx’s thought for interpreting the world, and I’m not alone in this. The trendiness of the old postmodern trinity – Foucault, Derrida, Lacan – is inevitably fading. And the names that are increasingly bandied about to replace them as current heroes of “continental” philosophy (in Speculative Realist circles, for example) are Agamben, Badiou and Žižek – each one of whom, as far as I know, considers himself to be in some respect Marxist.
So too, the context of the Shorter Māluṅkya Sutta is critical to the Buddha’s instructions. The Buddha never says that cosmological questions are unworthy of study or examination. Rather, he is saying that Māluṅkya is making a grave mistake to abandon his monastic practice on the grounds that the Buddha does not answer those questions. The practice is essential – but there’s nothing wrong with seeking the theory, even when the theory is not essential to liberation, as long as the theory-seeking doesn’t interfere. We must still act, even in the face of doubt.
What’s more, theoretical reflection always surfaces one way or another. People will always be curious about unanswered questions. And there is usually good reason to encourage that curiosity. Much of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, which I discussed before in a different context, is a plea to encourage basic research in the sciences with no clear technological application – on the grounds that those applications will often be found after that research has been done. Similarly, once we know more about theoretical questions in philosophy, we often understand the practical questions better. We may well want to extend the Buddha’s parable. Yes, removing an arrow in us may well be more important than figuring out who put the arrow there and how. But if the arrow stands for the suffering we are enmeshed in – as it certainly seems to – then everybody has that arrow in them. And if everybody in the world has been shot with an arrow, we would be crazy not to try to learn who is doing the shooting.
5 thoughts on “In praise of questions which tend not to edification”
Without disagreeing with your central point concerning expediency, I think there is more to be learned about the teachings of the Buddha from the sutra that you cite.
The Buddha does not simply say “philosophical inquiry is unhelpful.” Instead he says, it is unhelpful to say, for example: “After death a tathagata exists.” It is also unhelpful to say: “After death, a Tathagatha does not exist” or that “A tathagata both exists and does not exist” or that “A tathagata neither exists and does not exist.” He is teaching to students who are trapped in samsara and believe in dualism. So, his initial teachings are like a koan — the questions that he refuses to answer exhaust the possibilities of logic and point out that liberation is not achieveable in a framework of logic and dualism.
That is probably the fundamental difference between Buddha and Marx. Marx never aspires to or believes in liberation or ultimate truth. He is entirely concerned with how to improve the lives of individuals in a relative sense by manipulating the causes and conditions of social relationships. From the Buddha’s point of view, this at best is simply like scratching an itch from poison ivy — making samsara temporarily a little more comfortable.
The Buddha might also view the Marxist approach to relative truth as being misguided as well — this would certainly be the case to the extent that Marx advocates manipulation of external social structures or violence as a part of class warfare, rather than cultivation of virtue.
Ultimately, Buddha and Marx don’t have much in common. The Buddha’s central point is the rejection of relative truth and logic — except as an expedient method that leads beyond logic to realization. Of course, to divide relative and ultimate truth and to reject logic is an approach based on logic. So, the leap that is required cannot be planned ahead.
Well, Marx definitely believes in liberation, but he means something very different by it. But yeah, I agree that their differences are very significant: http://loveofallwisdom.com/2010/02/marx-on-religion-and-suffering/
On the sutta: that’s an interesting interpretation, Jim. I hadn’t heard it before. Until you pointed it out, it hadn’t struck me how the options that Māluṅkyaputta wants on the Tathāgata after death look like Nāgārjuna’s catuṣkoṭi – I’m guessing this text was a significant inspiration for that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets used that way in later tradition. But in the context of the original sutta, I don’t think that’s what was being got at. The parable that the Buddha gives in response isn’t about logic but about urgency. The questions about the arrow shooter would have perfectly good logical and categorical answers; it’s just that, when one stops the practical task at hand in order to ask them, one shows a deeply misplaced sense of priorities.
Bat Ben Zoma said:
Amod, I’ve been reading through your discussion of “Yavanayana Buddhism” with interest. Many western Buddhists, it seems to me, interpret this sutta through the lens of “Buddhism is a philosophy/way of life, not a religion” or “Buddhism concerns itself with practical matters, not metaphysical questions (and is hence superior to Christianity, etc). Of course this is a generalization, but I have certainly heard this interpretation offered fairly frequently. Obviously what’s going on seems to be a little more complicated.
And for some more free-musing questions (or thinking out loud…): It’s hard for me to square this with the notion that understanding causality and cause and effect is important, and that right knowledge is a necessary part of the path toward nirvana. Are the questions which the monk poses irrelevant? Is the Buddha’s response merely pedagogical or koan-like, as JimWilton suggests? Why is it important to understand sunyata or dependent arising, but not whether a Tathagata exists after death?
Good questions, Bat Ben Zoma. As I understand it, the difference is that some features of the universe are directly related to the arising and ending of suffering. Dependent arising and śūnyatā in particular help us understand the impermanent, inessential and unsatisfactory nature of conditioned things in the world, and for that very reason they get us beyond attachment to those things. The realization of these metaphysical truths (at a deep level, not merely mouthing agreement with them) will have direct practical (ethical and soteriological) consequences. Knowing whether a Tathāgata exists after death doesn’t have those consequences.
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IMF, World Bank Warn on 'Emergency' in West Africa
The IMF and World Bank on Saturday raised the alarm on the "humanitarian emergency" in West Africa's Sahel region, where millions risk starvation amid regional insecurity, drought and poor harvests.
"We are troubled by the acute humanitarian emergency in the Sahel region where hunger threatens the lives of 19 million people and the stability of the region," said a statement from the organizations' joint development committee.
"Food security and food price volatility remain persistent threats to development and merit continued attention."
The IMF and World Bank, which are holding annual meetings in Tokyo, called for accelerated efforts to help millions in the vast desert area "permanently escape the cycle of emergency aid".
The Sahel stretches across a swathe of west Africa, including Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal.
The warning came amid preparations for an international military intervention aimed at reconquering northern Mali -- home to the fabled city of Timbuktu -- which was seized by Islamist rebels earlier this year.
In March, a military coup in the capital Bamako toppled President Amadou Toumani Toure, with the vast country's north and east falling to Tuareg rebels and militias linked to al-Qaida.
This year, more than 18 million people in the region have been hit by a severe food crisis, with some 1.1 million children facing acute malnutrition, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The instability in northern Mali has led 400,000 people to leave their homes, with more than half fleeing into neighboring countries, straining the infrastructure of already poor western African nations.
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Madrid Journals
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Mynor Padilla: Killer of anti-mining activist pleads guilty
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The Speaker of Congress in Guatemala has said a controversial budget that triggered protests during which parts of the Congress building were set on fire on Saturday will be shelved.
Speaker Alan Rodríguez said Congress would not send the budget to the president to sign and it would therefore not come into force.
He made the announcement after fresh protests on Sunday.
Protesters were angry that spending on health and education had been cut.
Speaker’s power queried
In a pre-recorded message broadcast at midnight local time (06:00 GMT Monday), Mr Rodríguez said that leaders of some of the parties represented in Congress had agreed to shelve the budget for the sake of Guatemala’s stability.
He was surrounded by 16 lawmakers from parties that back the government of conservative President Alejandro Giammattei.
Mr Rodríguez did not say if Congress would draw up a new budget or what changes it would make ahead of a December deadline for the budget to be passed into law.
Opposition lawmakers also questioned whether it was in the Speaker’s power to shelve the budget, which was passed by 115 out of 160 members of Congress.
Big business over health?
Critics of the budget said it prioritised big infrastructure projects over spending on health, which they argued was badly needed at a time when the country continues to battle the spread of the coronavirus.
According to Johns Hopkins University, there have been more than 118,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Guatemala and more than 4,000 people have died in the Central American nation of 17 million inhabitants.
The budget, which Congress passed on Wednesday, was the largest in Guatemala’s history and amounted to $13bn (£9.7bn)
It triggered large protests with demonstrators saying they were angered that the bulk of the funds would benefit big business.
The government said that the budget had been “misreported” and that it contained funds to build hospitals.
But protesters on the streets at the weekend, many of whom were young, carried banners reading: “They messed with the wrong generation”.
While much of the protest on Saturday was peaceful, a group of hooded demonstrators set fire to part of the Congress building in the capital, Guatemala City.
Firefighters put the blaze out but the administration of President Giammattei called it an “act of terrorism”.
Pressure has been growing for President Giammattei to resign. He was elected last year and had campaigned on a promise to increase prosperity by attracting foreign investment.
He has come under widespread criticism for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Critics say that hospitals have struggled to cope with the increased number of patients and there has been little financial help for those who could not work due to lockdowns.
Read from source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-55042835
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The ex-security chief at a mine in Guatemala, Mynor Padilla, has pleaded guilty to killing an anti-mining activist in 2009.
Adolfo Ich was killed at the Fénix mine, which was owned at the time by a subsidiary of Canadian mining giant Hudbay Minerals.
He had been campaigning against the mining project and for his community’s land rights.
Germán Chub, a bystander, was also shot, leaving him paralysed.
The guilty plea comes at a retrial after Padilla was cleared of murder at a previous trial.
What happened in September 2009?
The Fénix nickel project was owned by the Guatemalan Nickel Company (CGN), a subsidiary of Toronto-based Hudbay Minerals.
CGN wanted to develop the mine, but the indigenous Maya community objected, arguing that much of the company’s land belonged to them.
The company said it engaged in talks to negotiate their resettlement but members of the Maya community said they were threatened with forced evictions.
On 27 September 2009, security guards at the mine attacked members of the community with machetes and firearms, according to witnesses.
Adolfo Ich was killed, Germán Chub was left paralysed, and at least seven more people were injured.
What was Mynor Padilla’s role?
Mynor Padilla was the chief of security at the Fénix project and witnesses said he was the key man in the attack on 27 September 2009.
Hudbay defended its personnel, alleging that members of the Maya community had turned on each other and that their security staff had acted in self-defence.
Following a three-year murder trial Padilla was acquitted, much to the outrage of the victims’ families who launched an appeal.
The court of appeal overturned the acquittal and ordered a retrial which began in December 2020.
After having for years maintained his innocence, Mynor Padilla entered a guilty plea which was accepted by the court on Wednesday.
A lawyer for Adolfo Ich’s widow in a civil lawsuit against Hudbay Minerals in Canada called it a “momentous day”.
Why does it matter?
There are three civil lawsuits under way against Hudbay Minerals in Canada, in connection with the Fénix mine.
One of them was filed by Adolfo Ich’s widow, Angélica Choc, who alleges that the company failed to take adequate precautions to ensure that human rights abuses would not be perpetrated by Hudbay’s security personnel.
In 2013, a court in Ontario allowed the lawsuits to proceed, making it the first time that foreign claimants were allowed to pursue a lawsuit against a Canadian company in Canada for alleged human rights abuses.
Cory Wanless, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, said that following Mynor Padilla’s guilty plea “it will be difficult for Hudbay to continue to argue that it does not bear responsibility for the killing and shooting”.
Hudbay Minerals has released a statement saying it would “review the court’s decision once it is released”, which is due to happen later this month.
The company, which sold the Félix mine to Swiss-based Solway Group in 2011, also stated that “any agreements made in the Guatemalan court do not affect our view of the facts of Hudbay’s liability in relation to civil matters currently before the Ontario court”.
The Hotel Humboldt sits atop El Ávila, a national park overlooking Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.
At more than 2,000m (6,500ft) above sea level, you have to take a 20-minute trip in a cable car to the top of the mountain to reach it.
From there, a golf buggy drives guests along the ridge to an impressive glass and aluminium structure surrounded most of the day by rolling clouds that suddenly clear to reveal the most astounding view.
The hotel was built in 1956. Finished in less than 200 days, it was the pet project of dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who ruled Venezuela from 1950 to 1958.
At a time of great oil wealth, it was a show of pomp and modernity.
National icon
It operated as a hotel for just a few years before falling into disrepair, but it has remained an icon, one that the late President Hugo Chávez wanted to restore to its former glory. After his death in 2013, his successor, Nicolás Maduro, has been intent on finalising the restoration.
“This building means so much for the Venezuelan people,” says Carlos Salas, one of the hotel’s managers.
He shows me around the hotel, which has just started accepting overnight guests after nine years of renovations.
“It’s a representation of a golden era for Venezuela.”
But that golden era is long gone.
The economy is in crisis, oil prices have slumped as has production and around 60% of Venezuelans now live in poverty, according to researchers at the Andrés Bello Catholic University.
Financially sound or a folly?
A stay at the Hotel Humboldt costs around $300 (£225) a night.
Clearly a lot of hard work has been put into restoring this architectural jewel but it is not your typical five-star lodgings. Indeed, the classification was awarded by the government which is promoting it, and the hotel is still a bit rough around the edges, despite having been inaugurated a month ago.
The Marriott hotel chain was given the concession to run it in 2018 but it did not stay long as partner. The team now in place is clearly proud of its achievements but in crisis-hit Venezuela, the hotel’s restoration feels like a folly, promoted by a president with his head buried in the sand.
“One banana here costs triple the price [elsewhere],” Mr Salas says, explaining the logistical challenges of getting supplies up the mountain to the hotel.
“My people here, we have to pay them more, the maintenance of the building, water, electricity, it’s really difficult.”
So what, I ask, is the demand for a hotel like this, in a country where the minimum wage is around $2 (£1.50) a month.
He responds without flinching, arguing that five-star hotels are not within everyone’s reach anywhere in the world. Venezuela is no different, he says.
The hotel is seen by many as a symbol of the rise of a group of newly wealthy Venezuelans, in particular those who have become rich thanks to their close ties to the government.
And Hotel Humboldt is not the only sign of an economic revival in Venezuela.
Faced with US sanctions, rampant hyperinflation and a spiralling economic crisis, President Maduro responded by removing the price controls and easing the capital controls introduced by his predecessor and fellow socialist, Hugo Chávez.
With the local currency increasingly hard to come by due to the sky-high inflation rate – a cup of coffee with milk can set you back almost 1.5m bolivars in Caracas – Mr Maduro also begrudgingly accepted the use of the US dollar.
The result of this easing of economic restraints can be seen across Caracas, where new “bodegas” (shops) have opened up, selling all sorts of imported goods to people long-used to shortages of even the basics.
The Caracas stock exchange is another beneficiary, booming because of an uptick in private enterprise, although it is still comparatively small.
A brighter future?
It has made life a bit more bearable for many, especially in this toughest of years, but not everyone is positive about these changes.
“The government is building on the ashes of this wrecked economic model in a very disorganised fashion,” says economist Tamara Herrera.
“This re-accommodation of the economy is amorphous, disorganised and positive results are difficult to judge. This won’t mend the tragedy that you can see in the population,” she argues.
And there is no doubt that while there may be an emerging class of haves, there are still plenty of have nots – those with little or no access to dollars, or basic services.
In the poor neighbourhood of Catia, on the outskirts of Caracas, I met former housekeeper Diurka González, who is helping out in a soup kitchen. Every day, the kitchen provides lunches for as many as 140 children, including her two-year-old daughter.
“My boss couldn’t keep me on because she was scared of the pandemic,” Ms González tells me.
She did not even earn $2 a month, but now she gets nothing. The soup kitchen allows her daughter to eat one decent meal a day.
Hard realities
A few doors down, Jonathan Fermenal is feeding his two-year-old daughter Samara with the lunch they have just picked up from the soup kitchen. He relies on the free lunches for Samara and his other two children.
Mr Fermenal’s wife, Laila, left to find work in Colombia at the beginning of the year.
The plan was for the rest of the family to follow a few months later, but then came the coronavirus pandemic. They have not been able to see her since.
“At the beginning, it was horrible, horrible,” he says about his wife’s departure. “My youngest was 18 months old, she was still breastfeeding and had to stop suddenly. The first month, I didn’t sleep at all.”
Mr Fermenal has had to learn to play the role of both mother and father. “For my wife it’s also been hard, everything is done by Whatsapp, a photo here, a voice message there, but it’s not the same,” he says.
“And the way I live is how thousands and thousands of Venezuelan families are living,” says Mr Fermenal about the more than five million Venezuelans who have left to escape their home country’s economic hardships over the past six years.
Lives – and hardships – that are far more common than those who invested in the Hotel Humboldt would like to believe.
Argentina’s Congress has legalised abortions up to the 14th week of pregnancy, a ground-breaking move for a region that has some of the world’s most restrictive termination laws.
Senators voted in favour of the bill after a marathon session with 38 in favour, 29 against and one abstention.
Until now, abortions were only permitted in cases of rape or when the mother’s health was at risk.
The bill had been approved by the Chamber of Deputies earlier this month.
The Catholic Church, which remains highly influential in Latin America, had opposed the move, calling on senators to reject the bill supported by centre-left President Alberto Fernández.
Pro-choice activists hope the passing of the law in Argentina – one of the largest and most influential countries in the region – will inspire other countries to follow suit.
Large crowds of campaigners both for and against abortion had gathered outside Congress in the capital Buenos Aires, following the debate on huge screens.
When the vote finally happened in the early hours of Wednesday, there was jubilation in the pro-choice camp.
While Argentina’s powerful Catholic Church, and its growing evangelical community, put up strong opposition against this bill, it was Argentina’s mighty “green wave” women’s movement that has been at the forefront of this change.
A grassroots feminist movement that has grown in influence in the past few years, its campaigning prevailed, overturning a law that had been in place since 1921.
What has happened in Argentina has been closely watched across the region.
With Argentina now legalising abortion up to 14 weeks, activists in major neighbours like Chile and Brazil will no doubt use this precedent to help their cause in rewriting the law in their countries and allow broader reproductive rights in a region known for tough restrictions on abortion.
Long fought for change
Activists have campaigned for a change in the law for years. The passing came two years after senators narrowly voted against legalising abortion.
President Fernández had made reintroducing it one of his campaign promises. “I’m Catholic but I have to legislate for everyone,” he argued.
The president also said providing free and legal abortions up to the 14th week of pregnancy was a matter of public health as “every year around 38,000 women” are taken to hospital due to clandestine terminations and that “since the restoration of democracy [in 1983] more than 3,000 have died”.
Alongside the legalisation of abortion, Senators also voted in favour of a bill dubbed the “1,000-Day Plan”, which will provide better healthcare for pregnant women and mothers of young children.
After the vote, President Fernández tweeted: “Today, we’re a better society, which widens women’s rights and guarantees public health.”
Vilma Ibarra, who drafted the law, was overcome with emotion as she spoke to reporters after it passed. “Never again will there be a woman killed in a clandestine abortion,” she said, crying.
Emotional debate
The vote had been predicted to be extremely tight but in the end, all four senators who had said they were undecided voted in favour of the legislation after a 12-hour debate.
Senator Silvina García Larraburu voted against the bill in 2018 but backed it this time. Speaking during the debate she said, coming close to tears: “My vote is in favour of free women, of women who can decide according to their own conscience.”
Anti-abortion activists, who followed the proceedings but were separated from pro-choice activists by barriers, were dejected.
“The interruption of a pregnancy is a tragedy. It abruptly ends another developing life,” said Inés Blas, a senator who voted against the law.
But Argentina’s Women’s Minister, Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta, said that “we’re making history” and many of the pro-choice activists said they hoped it would set a signal for other lawmakers across Latin America.
Abortions are completely banned in El Salvador, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic and only allowed in certain restricted circumstances in most other Latin American nations.
In the wider region, only Uruguay, Cuba, Guyana and parts of Mexico currently allow women to request an abortion, with varying limits on the number of weeks of pregnancy in which an abortion is legal.
The director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, José Miguel Vivanco, said that he thought that the new law “could have a domino effect in the region”.
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The Men of Acme, 1956
Authoritative 1950's-style announcer voice: "Remember this, folks! When better markets are built, Acme Men will build them! Just look at these Acme Men...Men of foresight...Men of ingenuity...Men of zeal!"*
Zeal notwithstanding, Acme’s late 1950’s stores were fairly plain as a rule, with the only standout aspect being the “Acme Markets” logo (which by this time had evolved into a cool automobile fender-style script) above the awnings. The example shown below in a 1957 photo is typical of the period and portrays the design seen in a multitude of shopping center and free-standing Acme locations. From an architectural standpoint, much more interesting things would come from Acme in the 1960's.
Acme closed the 1950's with 870 stores, of which only 50 remained of the service type, the rest being self -service, and nearly $900 million in fiscal 1959 sales. Acme's co-founder and longtime president Samuel Robinson passed away in 1958.
*Not an actual commercial.
Labels: 1950's, Acme, American Stores, Philadelphia
Acme Markets Nighthawks, Early 1950's
Nice 1954 artist's rendering of an Acme Market, neon blazing at night. Kind of reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s famous painting “Nighthawks”, isn’t it? I mean, except for the setting being a grocery store instead of a café…and the location probably a shopping center instead of a dimly lit downtown street…and a larger group depicted instead of three brooding, lonely patrons and a soda jerk…Ok, let’s forget that comparison.
The picture, based on this prototype, does show that by the early 50’s, Acme was moving into larger footprint stores and designing to blend into shopping centers.
Acme - Clean, Bright, Sparkling White
A paraphrase based on a Jewel Tea ad, but one that certainly applies here. Like its future stablemate, Acme Markets of the 40’s and early 50’s featured gleaming white porcelain facades. For the most part, the stores displayed the “Acme script” signage shown here, rendering a great iconic look that was used heavily in Acme newspaper ads. Most Acmes, like nearly all grocery stores of the era, ranged between only 5,000 and 10,000 square feet, lending to the quaint appearance. Ironically, these stores could still be spotted occasionally in urban Philadelphia and other areas as late as the early 1970’s, with some examples surviving even later than that.
Acme Markets was the trade name of American Stores Company, which had been in business for 30 years when these photos were taken. At the time, the company founder Samuel Robinson was still on their Board of Directors. In 1947, Acme had 1,921 stores, mostly in Eastern Pennsylvania and portions of the surrounding states. They battled head-to-head with “Grandma”, (the A&P, as fondly referred to by its longtime employees) and fellow Philly-based Food Fair for dominance in the ferociously competitive Philadelphia market, among others. One of the biggest challenges facing Acme (and most of the other major supermarket chains) during the era was the conversion of their stores from counter service to the self-service format. Evidently it was an arduous process, as even five years later, in 1952, only 55% of Acme’s stores were self-service units.
Here are a couple of links to some photos of similar Acme stores – a great 1966 photo featuring a 40's era Acme store at Wyoming and Rising Sun Avenue in Philadelphia, and another shot from 1991 of the Lambertville, NJ Acme in an incredibly good state of preservation. I’m curious to know if that one’s still around.
Posted by Dave at 11:42 AM 8 comments
Labels: 1940's, 1950's, A and P, Acme, American Stores, Food Fair, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
The Marina Safeway at Night, 1968
A beautiful dusk view of what is undoubtedly the most famous individual grocery store location in the country, if not the world. This is, of course, the Marina Safeway – San Francisco Landmark, Meeting Place Extraordinaire (having duly earned the nickname “Dateway”), and the Proud Standard of Safeway Stores, Incorporated. This store, still going strong, is located at 15 Marina Boulevard, San Francisco and was opened in 1959. It set the style that even today is the one most closely associated with Safeway, and it had a not inconsiderable influence on the store design of other supermarket chains.
Interestingly, Safeway was forced to wage a “protracted zoning fight” in order to win approval to build this store, according to the July, 1960 issue of Chain Store Age magazine. After gaining approval, some area residents still objected, so Safeway set out to build “a showplace that would pacify its opponents and satisfy the neighborhood’s esthetic as well as practical needs”. They certainly succeeded.
The store originally opened with a different interior design scheme than the one pictured here. If you click on the photo, you can see that by this time, Safeway had replaced it with their standard 60’s look.
Labels: 1950's, 1960's, Bay Area, California, Marina, safeway, San Francisco
Safeway Sixties Style
Through the 1960’s, Safeway continued to pursue Chairman Robert Magowan’s oft-expressed objective of maintaining an aggressive store building and modernization program. During this period, usually 60 percent or more of Safeway’s stores were under ten years old - no mean achievement for a chain of that size. The comparatively tiny, white-painted Safeway stores of the 30’s and 40’s were an all-but-distant memory. A great many of the distinctive pyloned stores that had replaced them in the early and mid-50’s were themselves radically remodeled and expanded or replaced altogether by modern, much larger stores, often on the same site. Even though Safeway’s overall U.S. store count dropped by roughly 10 percent through the sixties, the chain’s overall square footage greatly increased, a trend shared with several other major supermarket chains.
Safeway utilized a number of architectural styles throughout the sixties, the first versions of many of them having “premiered” in 1959 or so. The most notable of these styles can conveniently be called the “Marina Family” of designs, after the company’s signature “Marina Safeway”, which opened in San Francisco in 1959. Although most (but certainly not all) subsequent marina-type stores were less elaborate than this first store, with its mosaics and four-foot wide louvered sunshades, the influence is obvious. The marina style generally consisted of a curved roofline and glass across most of the storefront except for a small section on the sides, which were usually finished in stone, wood or mosaic tile and most often sported the red and white round “S” Safeway logo. There were several basic variations of the marina theme (hence the “family” designation), which are most easily distinguished by the curvature of the roofline.
Many Safeway stores featured a low-slung peaked roof that Progressive Grocer magazine generically termed a “ranch-type design”.
The company also designed a wide variety of stores to meet local architectural standards, and this practice yielded many interesting designs – “Colonial Williamsburg” style buildings, rustic western-style exteriors, stores sporting historical murals of local significance (this category also included some of the marina-style buildings) and other one-of-a-kind designs intended to blend in with adjacent shopping centers. To be sure, however, many shopping centers of the era were content to present a “mix-n-match” appearance.
Then, there were stores that by Safeway standards were of very conventional design, with flat roofs and a minimum of architectural frills. Even these stores, in my opinion, had a classy, understated look that clearly identified them with Safeway.
As far as their overall business was concerned, the 1960’s saw a continuation of Safeway’s remarkable growth, the entrance into some new markets and exit from others. In 1960, Safeway opened its first store in Alaska, and in 1963, they reentered Hawaii after a 29-year absence with a new store in Honolulu. In 1961, the company ended its 20-year long presence in the underperforming New York-New Jersey market with the sale of around 160 area supermarkets to First National Stores. Magowan stated that the company’s intention was to use the funds from the First National transaction to build additional stores in the West, “where growth is assured”, as he was quoted in Time Magazine. The early sixties also saw Safeway’s entry into the UK, West Germany and Australia, all initially by acquisition of existing local chains. Many of these early European and Australian Safeways are very charming in that they were converted from existing, sometimes very old stores in picturesque old-world street settings. The stores that Safeway would build in those areas in the coming years often closely resembled their American and Canadian counterparts which were, of course, also charming.
The following stores are pictured, top to bottom: A 1963 Marina-style store with historical murals in Ashland, Oregon honoring a famous local Shakespearean theatre, another Marina-style from Honolulu, also from 1963 (the first Hawaiian Safeway in nearly three decades) , a "ranch-style" store in Alamo, CA from 1968, a Colonial-style from Richmond, VA in 1959, a unique design featuring historical murals in Santa Barbara from '59 as well (now a Vons and still looking good at 34 W. Victoria St in SB, thanks for the tip, Ed!), another '59 shot, this one a shopping center special in Independence, Missouri, an unusual design from in a 1965 Oakland location (which was actually a newly renovated 1950's era store) and a conventional flat-roofed store in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada from 1968.
Labels: 1950's, 1960's, Alamo, Alberta, Ashland, Bay Area, California, Canada, Edmonton, Hawaii, Honolulu, Independence, Marina, Missouri, Oakland, Oregon, safeway, Santa Barbara, SoCal, Vons
Checkout Time
In this idyllic circa 1968 scene, a family is ready to head for home with a fine haul of Safeway-branded merchandise. The young lad seems to be playing a little tug of war with the cashier, who doesn't appear to be amused...or maybe she was about to break out in a big smile. The store decor is late 60's state-of-the-art for Safeway.
Labels: 1960's, Edwards Coffee, Lucerne, safeway
Safeway's Windmill?
This photo (from 1963, location unknown) is intriguing to me for a couple of reasons – first, because it shows the “March of Progress” – a classic 50’s Safeway about to realize its destiny as a parking lot for the brand-new, gleaming Safeway/Super S store seen under construction in the background. On the new store, the plastic insert for the round, red “S” logo isn’t even installed yet!
Secondly, because of the famous Van de Kamp’s windmill sign on the pylon of the older store. Out of the many vintage Safeway photos I’ve seen, this is a first. As anyone who grew up in pre-1970 Southern California knows, the windmill signs were a fixture (literally) of grocery store facades all over the region. Vons, Thriftimart, Market Basket, A & P (before they cleared out of L.A. in the early 60’s), Food Giant and many others all featured Van de Kamp’s bakery departments and thus sported the familiar sign. In the couple of vintage film clips I’ve seen of them, the windmill blades really did turn, though I’m not sure if it was purely from the wind or with the assistance of a small electric motor.
I’ve always assumed that Safeway did their own baking for their stores. If someone knows the backstory on this, please let us know!
(Thanks to the sharp-eyed PFS reader who identified this store's location - at the corner of 3rd and Vermont in L.A. - now a Vons.)
Labels: 1960's, A and P, California, Food Giant, Market Basket, safeway, Super S, Thriftimart, Van de Kamp's, Vons
Safeway's Super S Story
In the early 1960’s, several leading supermarket chains began a concerted effort to augment their traditionally razor-thin grocery margins by greatly increasing their offering of non-food items. Typically, this category included outdoor accessories, sporting goods, cameras, small appliances, basic clothing and a host of other items, which were usually marked-up at more than twice the rate of food products.
This trend was accelerated with the introduction of the “food/drug combination store” – essentially two adjoining stores - by such chains as Albertsons of Boise, Idaho and Jewel Food Stores of Chicago in the opening years of the decade. Safeway, far larger than either of these two companies, jumped into the fray in October 1962 with the establishment of their “Super S” division. The Super S stores would be newly constructed units, built in conjunction with an adjoining new Safeway. The two stores would share an entrance portal between them, but would be operated as separate businesses with their own checkstands. Super S would sell the products mentioned above, in addition to health and beauty products, and each unit would feature a full-service pharmacy. The stated goal was to have the first combination Safeway/Super S store open during the following March in Anchorage, Alaska (hey, why not?) with a total of five stores to be opened in 1963. Six stores were actually opened that year, with 22 more following in 1964.
Surprisingly, especially given Safeway’s outstanding overall performance throughout the period, the Super S stores were not a successful venture. In 1965, twenty-three new Safeway/Super S stores were opened. That same year, however, 22 of the existing (and still very new) Super S units were sold off to Salt Lake City-based Skaggs Drug Centers, Inc., in a transaction that included all Super S’s east of the state of California except for two Washington, D.C. stores. The adjoining Safeways continued to operate. By 1969, the Super S store count was stagnant at 30 stores, and in 1971 the balance of the Super S stores were disposed of.
I surmise that one factor involved in the failure of the Super S concept was the fact that they were separated by a full-length wall from the Safeway, save for the relatively small entrance portal between them. To me, this arrangement could only serve to discourage customers from wandering the second store after they had completed their purchases from the first. In Chicago, for example, the Jewel/Osco combination stores (which have been successful for 45 years now) had no such wall (*see comments), and any item from either store can be purchased at the Osco counter or any of the Jewel checkstands. Most Jewel/Osco stores opened in recent decades in fact share checkstands.
Sadly, the ultimate advantage to this divided arrangement, then, was to facilitate the conversion of the Super S operations to a Skaggs or other successor brand.
As the years have rolled on, of course, Safeway’s store footprints and product offerings have grown tremendously, and undoubtedly most products once sold at the Super S stores can today be found under the roof of a regular Safeway. All’s well that ends well.
The top photo, from 1964, features a Safeway/Super S from San Jose. The other three photos are Super S interiors from a slightly older store in Carmichael, California.
Posted by Dave at 1:25 AM 17 comments
Labels: 1960's, albertsons, Bay Area, California, Carmichael, Jewel Tea, safeway, San Jose, skaggs, Super S
Safeway Fifties Style
The three photos above are of new Safeway stores opened in 1955, a very significant year in Safeway's 40-year long (at that point) history. In October 1955, longtime Safeway President Lingan A. Warren stepped down. Warren, as a Time magazine article put it, “built Safeway from nothing” during his 21 years at the chain’s helm. By the mid-50’s, however, despite store growth that would be impressive by any standard, profits were low as a result of Warren's pricing policies, and Safeway stockholders were restless. Enter Robert Magowan, a onetime Warren assistant and more recently a top manager at brokerage firm Merrill Lynch. Magowan, a dynamic, hard charging, customer-oriented executive also happened to have an important personal connection. He was the son-in-law of Charles Merrill, founder of Merrill Lynch, who personally controlled a huge block of Safeway stock.
Magowan began by, among other things, reversing two key Warren policies – a “to the death” resistance to trading stamps and a reluctance to move Safeway into shopping centers. Both moves, particularly the embrace of the booming shopping center movement, helped to catapult Safeway to new heights. By 1958, only three years into Magowan’s reign, Safeway’s profits were at the top of the heap in the supermarket industry.
These three stalwart examples of classic Safeway 50’s architecture are (top to bottom) from Walnut Creek, California, Phoenix, and Mill Valley, California. Mount Tamalpais looms in the background in the third photo.
Posted by Dave at 1:14 AM 5 comments
Labels: 1950's, Arizona, California, Mill Valley, Phoenix, safeway, Walnut Creek
Safeway's Wonderful World of Color
“Color does brighten things up, doesn’t it?” Walt Disney asked the television audience in the opening minutes of his first Color TV broadcast in 1961. Well, it was true for Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color”, and it was also true for Safeway and many other leading supermarket chains throughout the 1950’s and into the early 60’s. Pastel colors were used to great effect in this 1953 Portland, Oregon Safeway, which also features signage the company would use as a standard in its stores for more than a decade. The different colors allowed easy identification of departments and created an illusion of space in an era when most supermarkets still averaged 15,000 square feet or less.
As the sixties wore on, Safeway changed to deeper, darker shades for their standard color scheme. Many others who had used a pastel scheme did the same, or switched to one or more of a much wider variety of wall finishes, including paneling, wallpaper, mosaics, murals – you name it.
Labels: 1950's, 1960's, safeway
...And Don't Forget The Coffee!
Gotta have that flavor lift... Here's another 1945 photo, this one featuring a gentle reminder outside a San Francisco Safeway. Edwards was Safeway's longtime house brand. The billboard looks bigger than the store itself!
Labels: 1940's, Bay Area, California, Edwards Coffee, safeway, San Francisco
Safeway Upgraded
It would be understandable to assume that civic design approval for retail stores is a fairly recent thing – a phenomenon of the past 25 to 30 years only, or perhaps dating as far back as the mid-60’s, when Lady Bird Johnson’s “Keep America Beautiful” campaign ushered in a new, austere (shudder) era of retail architecture.
The interesting fact is that there are examples of appearance zoning that go back much earlier than this, and many of these early results were pretty nice looking. Pictured above are two Safeway stores from 1945. The top photo features the ubiquitous standard Safeway design – cement outer construction, painted white, with the famous yellow and red porcelain-coated signage. Many hundreds of these stores were built throughout the 1930’s and 40’s. The second store is an attractive example of an effort on Safeway’s part to blend in with the local area. The brick and Spanish tile are striking, and the subtle signage (while maintaining Safeway’s trademark typeface) is icing on the cake. In all likelihood, these stores were alike in every other respect. The front glass and door arrangements appear to be identical, right down to the little “Safeway” decal to the left of the doors.
Just a few notes on Safeway at the time these stores were opened – the chain had 2,442 stores in 23 states, Washington D.C., and Canada and were a key factor in the Western, Southwestern, Eastern, and Plains States’ grocery markets. They were by far the dominant grocery retailing concern on their home turf of Northern California.
Labels: 1930's, 1940's, Bay Area, California, safeway
White Front - Under the Familiar Arch
All right folks, time to grab your BankAmericard, Master Charge or just good old fashioned cash as we take a brief trip to a great discount store of the past. Since we’ve been discussing West Coast supermarket chains lately and I had yet to cover a single actual discount chain at all (save the Lucky variants from the last post), this is a good place to start – with the long gone White Front stores.
In 1959 Interstate Department Stores, Inc., led by president Sol Cantor, purchased the two-store White Front operation in Los Angeles (the next year, Cantor would purchase the ten-store Topps "Discount City" chain in the East). White Front was founded in 1929 and was known for many years as primarily a seller of electrical appliances. Interstate moved quickly to expand White Front’s retail offering to include clothing, sporting goods, automotive items, household décor and much more. By 1963, the chain had grown to 11 stores and by 1970 there were 30 stores, concentrated around the Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle market areas. The new store footprints ballooned to 150,000 square feet, and in many cases a supermarket department was added to the mix.
By far the most distinctive White Front store design featured a massive arched entrance-way with the “White Front” lettering fanned out along the edge. They were spectacular looking stores, and Interstate went all out to make sure their Grand Opening festivities created a stir to match. A look through old newspaper articles on White Front grand openings shows that many stars were typically on hand – Jayne Mansfield, Troy Donahue, Bill Cosby (riding high on his early “I Spy” fame, but long before he became a legend) and Sebastian Cabot (of “Family Affair”) all did their part, along with a horde of lesser-knowns. Ah, the benefits of opening a store in Los Angeles.
In the early 70’s, the chain began a retrenchment to Los Angeles, and within a couple of years was gone. Interstate Stores folded and the only remaining vestige of the company would ultimately be Toys “R” Us.
The first photo is of the original White Front location at 7651 So. Central Avenue in Los Angeles. The store was opened in 1929, but this photo looks to be considerably more recent than that. This store was burned down during the 1965 Watts riots, and was replaced by a modern White Front at the same location which opened in March, 1967. The second and third photos are of an unknown location and are from 1968, showing the classic exterior and an interior view where customers are perusing the latest beautiful avocado and burnt sienna appliances. The final photos are from 1970, a new store at Normandie Avenue and Imperial Highway in Los Angeles. White Front had scrapped the arched look in favor of a more standard design, albeit with a “key-osk” (Sorry.) out front. Note the young ladies in the last photo checking out the groovy “tape decks”.
Labels: 1960's, 1970's, California, Interstate Department Stores, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, SoCal, Topps Discount City, White Front Stores
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MDM Banker Killed in Tver Plane Crash
Apr. 28 2009 00:00
Mdm-bankYermak
An MDM-Bank vice president was killed when a light sports plane he was piloting crash-landed in the Tver region.
The single-propeller SP-20081 plane piloted by Bronislav Yermak skidded as it touched down on a landing strip in the village of Yuryevskoye on Sunday, crashed through a fence and then plunged into the Volga River, news reports said Monday.
A second man, Alexander Ludanov, also died in the crash.
Yermak, 39, a licensed military pilot, owned the SP-20081, a modification of the Yak-52, a Soviet trainer plane.
Regional transport prosecutor Sergei Malchuk said the two-seater plane was discovered overturned in the river, and the bodies were recovered from the water-filled cockpit.
He said the reasons for the crash and the cause of death were unclear.
MDM praised Yermak, head of the bank's margin trading on foreign currency markets, for his work.
"The establishment and development of MDM-Bank's forex system is inextricably tied to his name," it said in a statement.
MDM, a top 15 bank in terms of assets, said Yermak was on vacation at the time of the accident.
(MT, AP)
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Chapter XXVIII, of Cassells Illustrated History of England, Volume 1
Prev: Chapter: XXVII
Current: Chapter XXVIII, of Cassells Illustrated History of England, Volume 1
Next: Chapter: XXIX
Conspiracy against the Normans - Its Consequences - Escape of Edgar Atheling with his Sisters to Scotland.
Pages: <1>
Although Fortune appeared to lavish her smiles upon the Conqueror, bitter discontent was brooding in the hearts of the English, who saw themselves stripped one by one of their liberties and privileges, and whenever they met with the Normans in small parties the people set on them and slew them without mercy.
An insurrection at last broke out in the north of England, headed by the Earls Morcar and Edwin, who bitterly regretted their short-sighted policy in not supporting Edgar Atheling on the throne. Before appealing to arms, these powerful nobles had secured the assistance of their nephew Blethyn, Prince of North Wales; of Malcolm, King of Scotland; and of Sweyn, King of Denmark.
Besides the injuries inflicted upon their country, the two leaders of this rebellion had private insults to atone. The Conqueror, at the time of his election to the crown, had promised his daughter in marriage to Edwin, in order to secure his adherence; but when the king was called upon to fulfil his engagement he refused to do so, and this disappointment induced the two brothers to take up arms against him.
None knew better than William the importance of celerity in quelling a revolt, especially when supported by such powerful leaders. He advanced, therefore, with rapid inarches towards the north. On his way he gave orders to fortify Warwick Castle, which he committed to the government of Henry de Beaumont, one of his nobles; and that of Nottingham to William Peverell, another Norman leader.
Using the utmost expedition, the Conqueror reached York before the arrival of the promised succours, or the English were prepared for resistance; and the two earls had no Other resource than to appeal to the clemency of the victor.
Archil, a potent nobleman in those parts, imitated their example, and delivered his son as a hostage for his fidelity; nor were the people, thus deserted by their leaders, able to make any further resistance. But the treatment which William gave the chiefs was very different from that which tell to the share of their followers. He observed religiously the terms which he had granted to the former, and allowed them for the present to keep possession of their estates; but he extended the rigours of his confiscations over the latter, and gave away their lands to his foreign adventurers. These, planted through the whole country, and in possession of the military power, left Edwin and Morcar, whom he pretended to spare, destitute of all support, and ready to fall whenever he should think proper to command their ruin. A peace which he made with Malcolm, who did him homage for Cumberland, seemed at the same time to deprive them of all prospect of foreign assistance.
The English were now sensible that their final destruction was intended; and that, instead of a sovereign, whom they had hoped to gain by their submissions, they had tamely surrendered themselves without resistance to a tyrant and a conqueror. Though the early confiscation of the estates of Harold's followers might seem iniquitous, being inflicted on men who had never sworn fealty to the Duke of Normandy, who were ignorant of his pretensions, and who only fought in defence of the government which they themselves had established in their own country; yet were these rigours, however contrary to the ancient Saxon laws, excused on account of the urgent necessities of the prince. Those who were not involved in the present ruin hoped that they should thenceforth enjoy, without molestation, their possessions and their dignities; but the successive destruction of so many other families convinced them that the king intended to rely entirely on the support and affections of foreigners; and they foresaw new forfeitures, attainders, and acts of violence, as the necessary result of this destructive plan of administration. They observed that no Englishman possessed his confidence, or was entrusted with any command or authority; and that the strangers, whom a rigorous discipline could have but ill restrained, were encouraged in their insolence and tyranny.
Convinced of the hopelessness of resistance, many of the English fled to foreign countries to seek that security denied them in their own.
Edgar Atheling, dreading the unscrupulous policy of William, yielded to the advice of Cospatrick, a powerful Northumbrian noble, and fled with him, accompanied by his mother Agatha and his two sisters Margaret and Christina, to Scotland, where they were hospitably received by Malcolm, who soon afterwards espoused the former princess - the latter became a nun. If the English were thus oppressed, and driven from their homes, the position of the conquerors was anything but an agreeable one. On all sides they were surrounded by bitter enemies, who, if too feeble and disunited to oppose them in the field, never failed to slay them, singly or in small parties, whenever an opportunity offered. Many Norman nobles followed the example of Hugh de Grentmesnil and Humphrey de Tilleuil, threw up their commands, and returned to their own country, a proceeding which William resented by depriving them of the possessions he had bestowed upon them in England. The Norman army was speedily reinforced by the arrival of fresh adventurers from Normandy and other parts of the Continent, and it was not long before the king found occupation for their swords. Godwin, Edmund, and Magnus, three sons of Harold, had, immediately after the defeat at Hastings, sought a retreat in Ireland, where, having met with a kind reception from Dermot and other princes of that country, they projected an invasion of England; and they hoped that all the exiles from Denmark, Scotland, and Wales, assisted by forces from these several countries, would at once commence hostilities, and rouse the English against their haughty conquerors. They landed in Devonshire, but found Earl Beorn, at the head of some foreign troops, ready to oppose them, and, being defeated in several actions, they were obliged to retreat to their ships, and return with great loss to Ireland. The efforts of the Normans were now directed to the north, where affairs had fallen into the utmost confusion. Robert de Comine, who with 1,200 Norman lances had attacked Durham, and massacred a few defenceless men, was surprised in the town by the exasperated people, and put to death, with the whole of his followers. This success animated the inhabitants of York, who, rising in arms, besieged in the castle William Malet, their governor. Two years afterwards the Danish troops landed from 240 vessels; Osberne, brother to King Sweyn, was entrusted with the command of these forces, and he was accompanied by Harold and Canute, two sons of that monarch; Edgar Atheling appeared from Scotland, and brought along with him Cospatrick, Waltheof, Siward, Bearne, Merleswain, Adelin, and other leaders, who, partly from the hopes which they gave of Scottish succours, and partly from their authority in those parts, easily persuaded the warlike and discontented Northumbrians to join the insurrection. Malet, that he might better provide for the defence of the citadel of York, set fire to some houses which lay contiguous; but this expedient proved the immediate cause of his destruction. The flames, spreading into the neighbouring streets, reduced the whole city to ashes. The enraged inhabitants, aided by the Danes, took advantage of the confusion to attack the castle, which they carried by assault, and put the garrison, consisting of three thousand men, to the sword.
This success gave the signal for the inhabitants of many other parts of England to show their hatred of the Normans. Hereward, a noble of East Anglia, assembled a considerable force, and taking a position on the island of Ely, made successful incursions in the country round him.
The English, in the counties of Somerset and Dorset, rose in arms and assaulted Montacute, the Norman governor; while the warlike inhabitants of Cornwall laid siege to Devon and Exeter, which, from a grateful recollection of the clemency William had shown them, remained faithful to his interests
Edric the Forester laid siege to Shrewsbury, and made head against Brient and Fitz-Osborn, who commanded there. In short, the whole nation role, like a man suddenly awakened from a dream, and seemed resolved to atone for the abjectness of their previous submission, by a vigorous and well-organised resistance to their oppressors. William, however, appeared undismayed by the storm lowering on every side around him; and little as he can be said to have had justice upon his side, it is impossible not to admire the energy and courage with which he met danger.
Calling his army together, he matched rapidly towards the north, where the rebellion appeared the most formidable, knowing that a defeat there would strike terror to the rest of the insurgents.
Joining policy with force, he made a separate treaty with the Danes, offering them, as the price of their withdrawal into Denmark, permission to plunder and ravage the seacoasts.
Cospatrick also, despairing of success, paid to the Conqueror a large sum to be received once more into favour; he was afterwards invested with the earldom of Northumberland as the price of his submission. Even Edric, obliged by necessity, submitted to William and was pardoned.
The King of Scotland arrived too late with his succours, and found himself obliged to retire; and all the insurgents, in various parts of the country, either dispersed or laid down their arms, with the exception of the East Anglian noble Hereward, who still kept possession of the island of Ely.
Edgar Atheling, finding himself unsupported, withdrew with his followers and friends once more into Scotland; and the kingdom, without any great battle being fought, once more submitted to the iron yoke of the Normans.
In the crisis in which he found himself suddenly placed, William displayed his usual deceitful policy, and affected a gentleness foreign to his nature. But this seeming clemency towards the English leaders proceeded only from artifice; his heart was hardened against all compassion towards the people; and he scrupled at no measure, however violent or severe, which seemed requisite to support the plans he had adopted. Sensible of the restless disposition of the Northumbrians, he determined to incapacitate them ever after from giving disturbance; and he issued orders for laying entirely waste that fertile country, which for the extent of sixty miles lies between the Humber and the Tees. The houses ay ere reduced to ashes by the merciless Normans; the cattle seized and driven away; the instruments of husbandry destroyed; and the inhabitants, compelled either to seek for subsistence in the southern parts of Scotland, or, if they lingered in England, from a reluctance to abandon their ancient habitations, perished miserably in the woods from cold and hunger. The lives of 100,000 persons are computed to have been sacrificed to this stroke of barbarous policy, which, by seeking a remedy for a temporary evil, thus inflicted a lasting wound on the power and opulence of the nation.
Pictures for Chapter XXVIII, of Cassells Illustrated History of England, Volume 1
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Set the Night on Fire
Set the Night on Fire is a major contribution to our understanding of the struggles taking place in Los Angeles during the 1960s.
It is a movement history, an 800-page chronicle of struggle encompassing everything from anti-nuclear campaigns to the battle for civil rights, emerging feminist and LBGT liberation and so much else besides.
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Justice for Some
Noura Erekat, an American-born Palestinian, human rights attorney and assistant professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University, has produced an accessible and important analysis of what has been and remains a deliberate strategy by the state of Israel to normalise its history of illegality in Palestine.
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Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crisis
Adrian Budd
Walden Bello has championed the interests of the Global South, particularly its poorest and most disadvantaged, since the late-1960s. The struggles of workers and working class communities do not appear in this book, but global capitalism remains firmly in his sights.
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Eve R Stone Light
Jack the Ripper’s murder of five “prostitutes” on the streets of London’s East End has spawned thousands of books, TV programmes and vile walking tours of sites where the five women were mutilated. Their question is always the same: who might have been the murderer?
Hallie Rubenhold’s book is an astonishing piece of historical detective work that finally asks, after 130 years, “who were the women?” They were Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly.
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Seducing and Killing Nazis
Jane Bassett
The Nazi occupation of The Netherlands is indelibly linked to reading Ann Frank’s diary; her extraordinary description of surviving in hiding for over two years and her tragic death in Belsen shortly before the end of the war.
However, fewer of us know much about the Nazi occupation and the resistance to it, including the contribution made by women and teenagers.
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The colourful life of Alasdair Gray
Eliza Gearty
Alasdair Gray, the author, illustrator, artist and political commentator, died aged 85 at the turn of the last decade on 29 December 2019. He will be remembered for his polymathic talent, the sheer force of his creativity and his life-long commitment to the notion that a better world is possible.
The child of factory and warehouse workers, and brought up on a council estate in the east end of Glasgow, Gray was raised with a strong socialist sensibility.
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Mau Mau Interrogator
Ken Olende
The 1950s Mau Mau war in Kenya was one of the bloodiest of the conflicts that ended the British Empire. The colonial authorities won, but the cost was too heavy to keep holding on. Still, the colonialists’ view of rebels as “debased creatures of the forest” became common.
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The Dressing-Up Box
Richard Rose
“The trouble with you...is that you feel that people’s stories have to make some sort of sense. Whereas in reality it’s all accidents.” So says one of the characters in David Constantine’s collection of gripping, dark and powerful short stories; stories whose unexpected twists seek to bring in some sort of light and meaning.
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The Other End of the Line
Phil Webster
This latest Inspector Montalbano story is the one the racists do not like. It is sympathetic towards refugees, who are shown as human beings facing hardship and tragedy, rather than as an alien “threat” to be feared or hated.
Author Andrea Camilleri has often sprinkled his Montalbano books with social comments from his left-leaning perspective — for example, targeting the links between big business, corrupt politicians and the Mafia.
But this time he wears his heart on his sleeve even more explicitly than usual by conveying a strong anti-racist message.
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Mask Off: Masculinity Redefined
Sam York
This incredibly enjoyable book utterly destroys the myths around masculinity and is a great read for younger men told to “man up”, “stop being such a wimp” and so on. There has been a significant rise of books around the same theme, but JJ Bola directly relates his struggles and understanding to a younger audience, which has largely gone amiss in recent years.
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Location: Aptos, CA
Wheelbase:142"
In need of more capital, the Packard brothers would find it when Henry Joy, a member of one of Detroit's oldest and wealthiest families, bought a Packard. Impressed by its reliability, he visited the Packards and soon enlisted a group of investors that included his brother-in-law, Truman Newberry. In 1902, Ohio Automobile Company became Packard Motor Car Company, with James as president. Packard moved its automobile operation to Detroit soon after and Joy became general manager and later chairman of the board. The Packard's factory on East Grand Boulevard in Detroit was designed by Albert Kahn, and included the first use of reinforced concrete for industrial construction in Detroit. When opened in 1903, it was considered the most modern automobile manufacturing facility in the world and its skilled craftsmen practiced over eighty trades.The 3.5 million ft2 (325,000 m²) plant covered over 35 acres (142,000 m²) and straddled East Grand Boulevard. It was later subdivided by eighty-seven different companies. Kahn also designed The Pacakrd Proving Grounds at Utica, MI.
Entering into the 1930s Packard attempted to beat the stock market crash and subsequent depression by manufacturing ever more opulent and expensive cars than it had prior to October 1929. The Packard Twin Six was introduced for 1932, and re-named the Packard Twelve for the remainder of its run (through 1939). For one year only, 1932, Packard tried fielding an upper-medium-priced car called the Light Eight. As an independent automaker, Packard did not have the luxury of a larger corporate structure absorbing its losses as Cadillac did with GM and Lincoln with Ford. However, Packard did have a better cash position than other independent luxury marques. Packard also had one other advantage that some other luxury automakers did not; a single production line. By maintaining a single line, and inter-changeability between models, Packard was able to keep its costs down. Packard did not change cars as often as other manufacturers did at the time. Rather than introducing new models annually, Packard began using its own "Series" formula for differentiating its model change-overs in 1923. New model series did not debut on a strictly annual basis, with some series lasting nearly two years, and others lasting as short a time as seven months. In the long run, though, Packard did average approximately one new series per year. By 1930, Packard automobiles were considered part of the "Seventh Series". By 1942, Packard was in its "Twentieth Series". There never was a "Thirteenth Series".
Clearly one of the most desirable Packard’s and therefore one of the most desirable Pre-War cars, the ’34 Twelve Dietrich Convertible Sedan, is without peer really. This largely original car has never required a body off restoration so still has the factory solidity that makes such a car so special. The engine was rebuilt by the legendary Charlie Last some years back, and still runs perfectly; a testament to his abilities. The Top, Upholstery, and Interior wood trim appear to be the most recently restored finishes on the car. The car is a proven tour car having completed a CCCA CARavan or 2 under current ownership. It is still very show worthy; and has the added benefit of being able to be driven anywhere one wants to take it without fear or hesitation. Finished in a striking Black over Red color combination, this car is tasteful while simultaneously sporting.
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‘Success is a team effort’
July 2004 2478
Sharp ... ‘if you are satisfied with the result, accept the decisions you have made along the way’
Founder, chairman and CEO of Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts Isadore ‘Issy’ Sharp tells SHAFQUAT ALI how he has shaped the premier luxury hospitality brand
It’s what many preach, yet fail to practice: treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.
But at the Four Seasons, this philosophy is adhered to as a Golden Rule. Right from the very top.
More than two decades ago, when Wolf Hengst was barely a year and half with Four Seasons as the general manager of a not-yet-completed Four Seasons Hotel Washington, he suffered a heart attack. With three small children at home, Hengst was shaken. But it was not just the doctor who helped him get back on his feet: chairman Isadore ‘Issy’ Sharp was immediately on the phone to Wolf’s wife assuring her that her husband’s job and future was safe.
Today, Wolf is the president of the company’s worldwide hotel operations, incontrovertible proof that the Four Seasons’ Golden Rule – to treat others as you would wish to be treated – does not exist merely on paper.
Sharp believes that companies which keep their eye on profit and not on the people who make the profit are like soccer players who keep their eye on the scoreboard and not on the ball. Not surprising, then, that the Canadian-headquartered Four Seasons – which has 63 hotels and resorts in 29 countries around the world – not only has one of the lowest employee turnover rates but also boasts one of the strongest balance sheet in the business.
In a candid interview with TTN, Sharp speaks about his life, his beliefs and the future of Four Seasons.
You were a stellar athlete in school and studied architecture at Toronto’s Ryerson Institute of Technology before joining your father’s construction business. How did you land up in the hotel business?
In the 1950s, when I was in the construction business, I had an idea to build a small motor hotel in downtown Toronto as an alternative to the roadside motels that were the craze at the time. I had a hunch that it would work, but it took me about five years to convince some investors to back me. After the first deal I did a second and I started to think that this would be a good business to pursue. I didn’t have a grand vision at the time. My objective was to get that first deal signed and I went from there.
Would you have done things differently if you were to start all over again?
At the time, I didn’t have the experience to be fearful of any pitfalls and that worked to my advantage. I just kept plugging away until I signed that first deal. If you’re satisfied with the result, you should accept the decisions you’ve made along the way, because to change anything might take you down a different path and you might not be where you are today.
What were Four Seasons’ greatest strengths when it made its debut in Toronto?
We offered something completely different. That first project combined the best aspects of a motel and a hotel. It was a place where you could feel as though you were a guest in a private home, not a hotel. We even provided some of the comforts of home with amenities such as shampoo, hairdryers and bathrobes. No one else was offering this at the time.
The opening of the Inn on the Park in London in 1970 set the course for future years. What did you do to measure up to London’s other famous luxury hotels, like the Savoy and the Connaught?
The Inn on the Park gave us an opportunity to provide the business traveller with a completely unique experience. We weren’t as concerned with measuring up to other hotels. We thought about what people need when they are travelling and we provided all the conveniences they would expect in their homes and their offices. We made out rooms larger than other hotels and we had large writing desks so business could be done in comfort.
London was where we first introduced our custom-made beds and equipped rooms with everything a guest would need to ensure a good night’s sleep, including blackout curtains for those wishing to nap during the day. We also introduced 24-hour dry cleaning, one-hour pressing, complimentary overnight shoe shine, round-the-clock in-room dining … services we knew would save precious time. Today, many of these things are standards, even in smaller hotels.
BUILDING A LUXURY BRAND
Do you have any regrets turning down ITT Sheraton’s offer to join hands with it after building Four Seasons Sheraton, a major convention hotel in Toronto?
No at all. That was a turning point for us and solidified our direction: we made key decisions which have come to define the company. First, we decided to operate only medium-sized hotels of exceptional quality. Secondly, in a more intimate environment we knew we could focus on the kind of personalised service we excelled at. We also decided to make our employees a significant company focus, and established a mission statement based on The Golden Rule.
What did you gain?
We gained the ability to control our operations and deliver service in such a way that would never be possible in a larger hotel. Smaller hotels also afford us the opportunity to build a dynamic, tightly knit workforce.
What prompted the move away from property ownership to management in the 1980s?
Our expertise is in management and operations, not real estate, so we decided to focus on what we do best and leave the ownership issues to our investors, who not only bring resources to the table, but specialised experience and expertise on the development side.
What was the response after you set up Four Seasons’ first ‘destination’ resort in Maui?
The resort was an immediate success and we continue to feed the hunger for Four Seasons resorts all around the world. In the last year, we’ve opened resorts in Great Exuma, The Bahamas, Costa Rica, our first mountain resort in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and our first resort in Europe at Terre Blanche in Provence. Today we have 16 resorts, including Sharm El Sheikh. We have plans to open resorts in Langkawi, Malaysia and Bora Bora in French Polynesia.
Four Seasons was one of the first companies to manage hotels in mixed-use and residential developments. Has that decision paid off?
This was a logical extension. We believe our key competitive advantage, the delivery of superior customer service, is as viable in a residential setting as it is in a hotel. It also makes good economic sense for our developers. We now have a residential product that our customers love, so from that perspective, yes, it has paid off. Our Residence Club customers are now looking for more residential options so they can have more opportunities for exchange and we are working towards meeting that need. Where it makes sense, many of our projects going forward will have a residential component.
What can discerning guests expect from Four Seasons in the years to come?
The sky is the limit. We continue to introduce new innovations, because we empower our people to be creative. We recognise that today’s traveller is more stretched for time than ever, so we’ve developed creative ways to help them make the most of their precious time. For example, guests can order meals from the car on the way to the hotel from the airport to be served hot when they arrive. We offer guests fitness clothing so they don’t have to travel with bulky workout gear. We also allow frequent guests to store personal items or luggage for their next stay.
Why did it take so long for Four Seasons to make a foray into the Middle East?
It can take as many as 15 years from the time a deal is signed to the time a hotel opens, so while you are seeing the fruits of our labour today, our plan to expand the brand in the Middle East has been in the works for some time.
Since the opening of the Cairo hotel in 2000, the company has been rapidly expanding in the region to include Sharm El-Sheikh, Amman and Riyadh. Now you plan to open five more hotels by 2006. Is that not too much, too fast?
We believe there is tremendous opportunity in the Middle East. No other hotel company in the region can provide the exceptional service that we do. Judging from our initial successes, we believe the market can sustain a healthy complement of Four Seasons properties. The pace of our expansion in the Middle East mirrors our expansion in other parts of the world, such as Europe, for example, where we are in the midst of introducing new properties in places such as Provence, Budapest, Hampshire and Geneva.
In the next few years we will open hotels in Doha, Damascus, Alexandria, Beirut and in the next few months, a second hotel in Cairo. We go into a new market when it’s the right time, with the right product, not to be the first there, so we don’t feel like latecomers to the market. In fact the timing of these openings is in line with our overall strategy. As our guest has needed to travel to various destinations in the Middle East for business or leisure, we’ve opened hotels there.
One would have assumed that the UAE would have been on top of the wish list. Why haven’t you decided to open a hotel in Dubai as yet?
Dubai is a very attractive market. We’ve actually been looking for the right opportunity there for about 15 years and even though a deal hasn’t crystallised, we are closer to opening a hotel there today than ever before.
Are Middle East guests particularly demanding? And are there any facilities that you offer especially for guests in this region?
Our goal is always to do everything we can to meet the specific needs of a country or a culture as well as a guest. In that respect, we do have some services that are unique to the Middle East, but for the most part, our guests in the region can expect the same personalised and anticipatory service that our guests receive in Asia, Europe, South America or North America.
Over the next 10 years, Four Seasons plans to double in size. What are the core areas of your expansion plans?
We plan to expand in nearly every corner of the world ... We will focus on Asia, which is a growing market and South America. And we still have room to grow in North America, the Caribbean and Europe.
Your management contracts are famously long term. Is that a deterrent for property owners?
No, in fact, our development partners see it as a benefit. They can be assured that Four Seasons is committed to their project for the long term providing them with financial stability, consistency and quality well into the future. Also, it gives our partners confidence that while the political and economic landscape may change, Four Seasons will remain a constant.
As companies reduce travel budgets, do you think luxury hotels are in for trouble?
There’s no question that the challenges of the past few years have put a strain on the industry but people will always need to travel for business. The good news is we’ve actually seen an increase in travel budgets recently. As long as we continue to provide exceptional experiences and consistent service, we can weather any storm. In fact, we’ve come out of the past three years stronger than ever.
How do you manage to have the one of the strongest balance sheets in the business?
In general, our focus on hotel management versus hotel ownership is what has helped us build a solid financial foundation. As a management company we are able to generate significant cash flow from operations. We have a relatively small corporate infrastructure which doesn’t grow significantly as we add new hotels. This structure has helped to make our balance sheet the strongest in the industry.
Four Seasons does not discount. Has it made life more difficult when competitors think nothing of discounting up to 50 per cent?
Not at all. In fact, our decision to maintain rates has put us in the best possible position coming out of the downturn. It has enabled us to maintain the service that our guests have come to expect. Despite our higher rates, our occupancy numbers actually stayed in line with industry trends. We’ve maintained or enhanced market share in nearly every market we operate. So rate integrity is an important part of our overall strategy.
To sum up, after 40 years in the business, what are the lessons you have learnt, both as a person and as a professional?
What I’ve learned is about people. People who are trusted achieve remarkable results. I’ve also learned that talented, qualified people can be found in every country. Everywhere in the world where we operate – whether it’s Thailand, New York or Paris – we have found people with the drive and ability to do an outstanding job.
Something else I’ve learned is that achieving great success is a team effort, where each and every person makes a significant contribution. In the context of a hotel, that means the front-line staff are every bit as important as the management. When everyone pulls together, it’s remarkable what we can accomplish.
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593 taekyun.kim Sept. 11, 2014, 1:26 a.m. 58
592 KCA Sept. 10, 2014, 10:42 p.m. 63
591 Tom McDermott Sept. 10, 2014, 12:51 a.m. 54
590 Canopus Sept. 9, 2014, 8:57 p.m. 51
589 Jiaming Kong Sept. 8, 2014, 11:24 p.m. 56
588 Ning Yin Sept. 7, 2014, 12:53 p.m. 49
587 Bhimsen Sept. 6, 2014, 11:29 p.m. 30
586 deuspayne Sept. 5, 2014, 8:36 p.m. 66
585 MCMC Sept. 5, 2014, 7:28 p.m. 73
584 aman.sohane Sept. 5, 2014, 6:13 a.m. 51
583 jesse.moll Sept. 5, 2014, 2:52 a.m. 48
582 kingofthepark Aug. 31, 2014, 9:41 p.m. 102
581 Sp3000 Aug. 31, 2014, 6:33 p.m. 56
580 Calle Aug. 28, 2014, 5:03 p.m. 40
579 Egor Panfilov Aug. 26, 2014, 10:11 a.m. 72
578 Anoop Kulkarni Aug. 25, 2014, 8 a.m. 48
577 ekorsky23 Aug. 24, 2014, 9:32 p.m. 31
576 EROR (Sadlil Rhythm @ ICT, MBSTU) Aug. 21, 2014, 7:56 p.m. 60
575 Bas Verbruggen Aug. 19, 2014, 3:41 p.m. 43
574 C.Leung.L Aug. 13, 2014, 7:07 p.m. 71
573 Aeonhades Aug. 13, 2014, 2:50 p.m. 61
572 askhat molkenov Aug. 13, 2014, 7:25 a.m. 92
571 joelg Aug. 13, 2014, 7:14 a.m. 44
570 cbu Aug. 12, 2014, 8:05 a.m. 63
569 laurent.mazare Aug. 12, 2014, 7:20 a.m. 211
568 Nikita Alexeev Aug. 10, 2014, 9:19 a.m. 246
567 Alsu_Missarova Aug. 7, 2014, 2:50 p.m. 51
566 Arafat Rahman Aug. 7, 2014, 9:49 a.m. 102
565 arjunc12 Aug. 6, 2014, 10:12 p.m. 68
564 xdacc Aug. 6, 2014, 5:39 a.m. 129
563 cdeterman Aug. 5, 2014, 3:59 p.m. 59
562 Szymon Śliwa Aug. 5, 2014, 1:36 p.m. 96
561 Eric Mertens Aug. 5, 2014, 6:10 a.m. 60
560 Arda Çınar Aug. 3, 2014, 3:28 p.m. 127
559 bjhall July 30, 2014, 1 p.m. 127
558 .enno July 28, 2014, 8:39 p.m. 129
557 kirk July 26, 2014, 3:02 p.m. 48
556 RichardGooding July 25, 2014, 8:52 p.m. 87
555 rafa50 July 24, 2014, 7:47 p.m. 45
554 tonygong172 July 22, 2014, 1:54 p.m. 60
553 schottkey July 21, 2014, 9:47 p.m. 58
552 Zoran Krišto July 21, 2014, 6:37 p.m. 41
551 halwhite July 20, 2014, 5:08 a.m. 62
550 Flavin July 20, 2014, 2:05 a.m. 37
549 wilheru July 18, 2014, 9:47 p.m. 49
548 changebio July 14, 2014, 3:18 a.m. 53
547 dmms3 July 13, 2014, 3:25 a.m. 74
546 Lauren Petty July 11, 2014, 10:38 p.m. 60
545 eris July 11, 2014, 7:13 a.m. 90
544 Ivanichkina Lyudmila July 6, 2014, 8:56 p.m. 72
543 Павленов Семён July 6, 2014, 9:03 a.m. 112
542 Yarygin Konstantin July 4, 2014, 10:32 a.m. 72
541 Ke Bi July 3, 2014, 7:16 p.m. 39
540 Bruno P. Kinoshita July 3, 2014, 4:25 p.m. 43
539 Jonathan M July 2, 2014, 8:32 a.m. 64
538 Ivan Yurchenko June 30, 2014, 10:08 p.m. 46
537 Peter Georgeson June 30, 2014, 10:30 a.m. 173
536 inamori June 28, 2014, 11:57 p.m. 305
535 Yue June 25, 2014, 11:10 p.m. 183
534 Joel Southgate June 23, 2014, 6:20 a.m. 100
533 Philippe Giacinti June 18, 2014, 8:38 a.m. 40
532 spooknick June 17, 2014, 2:32 p.m. 59
531 mionolski June 16, 2014, 4:48 p.m. 147
530 Jeremy Teitelbaum June 3, 2014, 1 p.m. 96
529 max May 31, 2014, 10:10 p.m. 117
528 tanunia May 31, 2014, 3:51 p.m. 51
527 Hein May 28, 2014, 4:06 a.m. 58
526 Feng May 28, 2014, 2:27 a.m. 39
525 Илья Малиновский May 27, 2014, 1:40 p.m. 55
524 Ming Jie Wong May 24, 2014, 3:30 p.m. 141
523 seped May 21, 2014, 5:27 p.m. 46
522 Andreas Cederholm May 20, 2014, 3:46 p.m. 60
521 Sergio Botero May 19, 2014, 8:51 p.m. 62
520 mcsimenc May 18, 2014, 1:03 p.m. 56
519 yaochisite May 17, 2014, 4:35 a.m. 45
518 Joseph May 14, 2014, 7:33 a.m. 63
517 Margharet May 13, 2014, 1:56 p.m. 49
516 Hreapca Aurelian May 13, 2014, 8:52 a.m. 176
515 Alex Federation May 12, 2014, 3:28 p.m. 41
514 marshall.lee May 11, 2014, 7:08 a.m. 50
513 Francesco Asnicar May 8, 2014, 3:53 p.m. 46
512 andthorn May 6, 2014, 9:32 a.m. 43
511 Abdrafikov Vitaly May 6, 2014, 5:06 a.m. 73
510 Kawazoe May 5, 2014, 10:01 a.m. 51
509 uzer May 4, 2014, 1:28 p.m. 44
508 codeguru42 May 4, 2014, 1:40 a.m. 45
507 Orhan Ozalp May 1, 2014, 5:26 p.m. 87
506 Quan Wei May 1, 2014, 9:38 a.m. 268
505 yusixie April 28, 2014, 3:01 a.m. 33
504 Nathan Edwards April 22, 2014, 6:41 p.m. 47
503 jeremycgray April 22, 2014, 4:17 p.m. 51
502 betelgeuse April 20, 2014, 11:23 p.m. 67
501 Richard Ding April 19, 2014, 8 p.m. 134
500 Vincenzo Bonifaci April 19, 2014, 2:17 p.m. 231
499 Eduard Trott April 16, 2014, 11:20 a.m. 87
498 Pavel April 16, 2014, 6:36 a.m. 74
497 Roman Gusarev April 14, 2014, 8:01 p.m. 72
496 Grigorii Reutov April 11, 2014, 3:35 p.m. 72
495 jz403 March 31, 2014, 2:39 a.m. 51
494 Alex Heyam March 30, 2014, 11:36 p.m. 45
493 Sri Harsha March 30, 2014, 10:49 p.m. 38
492 Peter Leontev March 29, 2014, 4:19 a.m. 43
491 Yuanchao Zhang March 28, 2014, midnight 111
490 ded March 27, 2014, 12:53 p.m. 72
489 amm March 27, 2014, 6:04 a.m. 91
488 JMarx March 27, 2014, 5:47 a.m. 33
487 Ravi Patel March 27, 2014, 4:35 a.m. 50
486 piyushs March 27, 2014, 3:27 a.m. 55
485 Denis.Torre March 22, 2014, 7:32 p.m. 121
484 IIMOG March 21, 2014, 12:56 p.m. 319
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01769 581581 chris.cope@accountant-services.co.uk
Regulatory burden
An “argumentative” sole practitioner who was far too busy to respond to the ICAEW’s requests was severely reprimanded and branded “aggressive and unhelpful”.
The investigation involving M could never be described as amiable. He treated the ICAEW’s requests with secondary importance, prioritising instead his clients.
M continually butted heads with the ICAEW throughout the year-long investigation. Towards the end, M even told the ICAEW his intention was to retire in two-to-three years’ time so he would be grateful to be left in peace.
But the tribunal found M’s delays unsatisfactory and ordered him to pay a £5,000 fine as well as footing the Investigation Committee’s costs of £8,960.
The investigation dates back to a practice assurance meeting in November 2015. At the time of the review, M jointly owned the firm with his wife and because he did not have the majority voting control, the ICAEW advised him that it could not automatically be his AML supervisor.
Once M took majority ownership, a practice assurance case manager then carried out a further meeting in April 2016, raising issues regarding, among other things, the firm’s AML supervision.
M responded at first asking for an extension and then in June 2016 when he asked for assistance, attributed the delay on his part to having two elderly family members needing care.
But despite the ICAEW providing him with links to information and support, M continued to find excuses for further delays. He asked the PCD to relieve him of this “pressuring burden” so he could instead use the time for the proper supervision of his clients’ accountancy and tax affairs.
In January 2017, M was told if he did not respond by March, matters would be referred to the Practice Assurance Committee (PAC). He responded the same day blaming the looming tax return deadline for the delay and expressed concern about being ‘threatened’ with referral to the PAC.
Later in 2017, the case was escalated to the PAC who decided M should pay for a follow-up QAD meeting. M replied saying a “one-man practice simply could not afford such a cost”.
He also claimed his AML issues remained unresolved as he blamed the ICAEW’s website for being like “minefield” and said the support network “could not really be called a support network”.
The PAC continued to pursue matters until June 2017 when M refused to pay anything for the proposed follow-up meeting. M said it was “outrageous that a one-man firm, under constant pressure to service clients, should be subjected to the degree of scrutiny and bureaucracy that the ICAEW impose”.
M claimed he could not spare the time to attend a course on AML because he was a sole practitioner. But the ICAEW disciplinary committee found this excuse “profoundly unsatisfactory”.
The tribunal also heard another complaint where M failed to provide details of an alternate in the event of his death. M considered his executor would have the power to manage the client bank account, but the Investigation Committee was not satisfied with this.
The Disciplinary Committee also pulled M up on the “argumentive” way he engaged in correspondence. “The tone was aggressive and unhelpful. He stated that his priority was his clients (a point repeated to us during the hearing), and the requests from ICAEW were of secondary importance.”
Chris Cope comments:-
I have some sympathy with M. Regulatory enquiries can be frustrating and time-consuming. This must be irritating for the sole practitioner. Nevertheless, in this highly regulated age in which all professionals must exist, satisfying the regulator that you are compliant is the penalty for enjoying the qualification which ought to give the practitioner a good standard of living. Reverting to hostile correspondence helps no one and can be costly. M ended up with a severe reprimand and fine of £5000, both wholly avoidable if the matter had been handled courteously and promptly.
Misleading accounts
The ICAEW has excluded an Oxfordshire-based small practitioner who deliberately concealed the existence of a director’s loan in order to make tax savings for his clients.
The ICAEW disciplinary tribunal considered that exclusion was the only sanction, seeing that concealing information was not an isolated case as it had happened with two different companies over a period of three tax years.
W also has to pay a financial penalty of £5,000 and the costs of £18,000.
The case centred on the corporation tax returns W prepared for two limited companies from 2010 to 2011. The tribunal heard how W failed to include the overdrawn director’s loan accounts in the companies’ CT600s and accounts.
W did not include these loans within the notes to the accounts, as required by FRSSE. He did, however, write to a director of both limited companies and advised them not to declare the loan in the CT600 as it would attract tax at 25%. He recommended that they wait and see if HMRC spotted it.
But without disclosure in the CT600, coupled with a failure to disclose in the accounts meant that HMRC would not know there was an outstanding director’s loan at the end of the tax year.
However, W insisted the director’s loan omission was a short cut and not a ploy to avoid additional tax as it was anticipated that the client would be paying back the loan within nine months.
The tribunal, therefore, did not believe W’s shortcut assertion and concluded that he had deliberately concealed the information.
It is worth noting W suffered a prolonged period of ill health and sold his practice in 2012, shortly after the issues at the heart of this complaint.
Although the tribunal took into account W’s good character and clean disciplinary record, this was not an isolated case in that more than one client had been involved and in one case, the same had occurred over three consecutive years. And so, W’s fate was ultimately decided as exclusion with a hefty financial penalty.
I should probably make little comment on this case, seeing that I was instructed by W, who was represented by Counsel. There were, in all, some 12 complaints of which ten were either found not proved or were withdrawn by the Investigation Committee following defence submissions. The allegations went back as far as 2004. The latest occurred as long ago as 2012.
Accountants National Complaint Services Limited
chris.cope@blakemorgan.co.uk
Hammetts, Kings Nympton,
Devon EX37 9ST
Copyright © Accountants National Complaint Services Limited 2021. All rights reserved. Website design by FirstFound
phone phone email
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Love Hope Strength
Gathering 15 – 2007
Gathering Useful Info
Gathering Concierge
[ January 19, 2021 ] Recording Day 05 – The Sweet Spot News
[ January 18, 2021 ] Songwriting Day – An intimate portrait of Mike Peters the songwriter. News
[ January 17, 2021 ] Fourth Day of Recording – We Got This News
[ January 15, 2021 ] Third Day of Recording with lead vocals and guitars from Mike Peters. News
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HomeEditorialMike Peters Strength 2015 Interview
Mike Peters Strength 2015 Interview
Interviewed by the alarm.com founder Steve Fulton, Mike Peters delves into the creative process that fuelled the new Strength album covering a wide range of subjects.
SF: How was your re-envisioned version of Declaration received by fans in 2014?
MP: From my own point of view it certainly elevated the profile of Declaration way beyond a remastered / bonus track style reissue. It got everyone who has ever been in contact with Declaration talking and created all kinds of discussion and debate which was the whole point of the project. It gave me a platform to move forward as a musician, producer, arranger and singer and revealed insights into the songs that would never have surfaced.
Lots of shows sold out, there were some amazing reviews, the BBC got behind the project and so I can only say that a lot of good came of it. Of course, there were a few negative vibes, especially at first, and I expected that, but once people got into the spirit of the project most of them came around even if it drove them back to the original with the ability to hear it with a fresh appreciation.
I don’t think anyone has done anything like this before so it was uncharted territory for all of us and I don’t think anyone can argue that it has only had a positive effect and if nothing else, one of the best lines I ever wrote for the original Alarm is now in the public domain… “If they take our chances, we’ll create our own”.
SF: Were you pleased with how the Declaration 2015 record turned out?
MP: It was everything I hoped it would be. It was great to play live and a record in tune with the times. The music, songs, lyrics, artwork, everything about it stands up in its own right. People forget that the original release polarised opinion when it first came out and now has its place in history with those who were affected by it just the same as Declaration 2014 will hold for those who embraced the new version as a reflection of the times we live in now.
SF: Did you learn anything from the recording of Declaration that took into the studio for the re-envisioned “Strength?
MP: You always learn from one project to the next. Strength is another record built from the foundations of the original. I kept a book of lyrics and production notes for Strength that I only recently discovered. I had misfiled it with some Declaration era lyric sheets and memorabilia that I had left it with Karl Parsons when we were researching the artwork for Declaration and Peace Train and he brought the folder back to me at the chapel one day and that was when the book came to light with all these additional lyrics and notes relating to the Strength era. It was invaluable to the creative process of the new Strength.
SF: Strength was released in October of 1985. Can you briefly describe the process of going from touring the Declaration record in 1984, to recording Strength in 1985? What were the record company pressures? What was the band like internally? Basically, I want to know what forces were in place to create “Strength”, one of the best albums of the 80’s.
MP: Hard to answer this one briefly. The band was on a creative high after ‘Declaration’ and we were well placed to make a great follow up. We had previewed new songs like ‘Walk Forever’, ‘Unbreak The Promise’ and ‘One Step’ on the BBC before we had even released ‘Declaration’ itself.
We produced a great set of demos (check out Alt-Strength), with our live sound engineer Nigel Luby in the summer of ’84 so there was no fear factor about our second album. The demos had even secured us the services of Jimmy Iovine to produce in the January of 1985 and the title of the album was going to be ‘Absolute Reality’. The Absolute tour was even booked to promote it’s release.
The only problem we had was that IRS did not have distribution deal and I think that when talks broke down with A&M it scared a ‘player’ of Jimmy Iovine’s nature away. Big producers want to work on albums with big budgets and big marketing strategies behind them and to be honest we must have looked second rate compared to the likes of U2 and Simple Minds (who eventually secured Jimmy Iovine’s services for Once Upon A Time).
At the beginning of 1985, Ian Wilson and Steve Tannet put together an independent release for ‘Absolute Reality’ (which we had in the can as we had previously recorded it with Alan Shacklock after Declaration but decided not to release). It was a brave attempt to keep the momentum going but in the eyes of the industry we looked weak and instead of coming out all guns blazing with a brand new album building on the success of Declaration, it was like starting all over again.
When Strength was eventually released IRS was a part of MCA and they didn’t really believe in us the way A&M did, so it felt like we had to build everything up all over again. Again, Ian Wilson and Steve Tannett did an amazing job winning over MCA by the end of the album’s initial release life that culminated in us playing at UCLA and Wembley but if the label had been behind us from day one who knows what could have happened.
SF: How did “The Chant” fit into all that? Almost 20 years ago I asked you about that song, and you said “It was recorded out of fear.” Can you explain that? I ask because the acoustic sound of “The Chant” as played on The Cutting Edge alonq with “Bells Of Rhymney” and the Woodie Guthrie covers you were doing at the time *did* signal the direction of Strength 2015, just not the single itself.
MP: The Chant was supposed to be like a new version of The Stand and wrapped in the folk rock influences that abounded in our music of 1983-4. It was chosen as a single because it was going down fantastic live whenever we played it. Unfortunately, we went in the wrong direction in the studio and it ended up sounding more Frankie Goes To Hollywood than The Alarm meets Woody Guthrie.
I don’t think it did Alan Shacklock any favours with IRS in terms of producing the second album and drove them to try and secure Jimmy Iovine. It certainly didn’t sound like The Alarm for sure and was recorded using computer technology pioneered by Trevor Horn. I think we got caught up in trying to be a singles band with ‘The Chant’ and once we had got that out of our system it was back to being an album band from then on.
SF: When you finished “Strength” in 1985, did you have any regrets? Anything you wanted to change?
MP: I always regretted that we had not been able to work with Jimmy Iovine. We made strength with Mike Howlett and our live sound engineer Nigel Luby. Don’t get me wrong they did a fantastic job but Mike Howlett was not a ‘rock’ producer. His previous production before The Alarm was Blancmange but IRS wouldn’t let us produce ourselves so he was really there to oversee and make sure we got things done on time. He brought a lot of great ideas to the table but he wasn’t really the kind of producer we needed at that point.
SF: alt.strength came out more than a decade ago. It featured several songs that were not on the “Strength” album including “Black Side Of Fortune”, “Sons Of Divorce”, and “In The Cold Light Of Day”. When you were going through the “re-envisioning” process, did you consider recording any of those?
MP: I have cut some of those songs for the companion album which is going to be called ‘Majority’. ‘Black Side Of Fortune’ is a great song that could easily have helped make ‘Strength’ a very strong double album.
SF: Speaking of the new “Strength” album, did you approach it as a whole project, or tackle each song individually?
MP: I tried to see the album as a complete project and make sure there was an identity and focus to the direction I was pushing for in 2015. It’s not the album I think we could have made back then but more an album I think The Alarm would have been made if those very same songs had been written recently.
SF: You’ve said that if you worked with Jimmy Iovine, the album would have been named “Absolute Reality”, and it would have been closer in sound to what you have produced with Strength 2015. Are you letting fans into “what could have been” a bit with this album?
MP: I’ve made Strength 2015 to sound like the kind of record those songs (if written today), would demand. Of course, I’ve taken some of the Jimmy Iovine ideas on board but as The Alarm never actually followed any of that through to a recording stage of any kind in 1984/5, I can’t say for certain what a Jimmy Iovine produced album would have turned out like.
I have taken on board some of the things like prioritising the arrangement around the vocal delivery and I’ve also added in a lot of the early Alarm folk / Americana influences that were hardly visible on the original album once it came out.
I’m still very proud of the original album but wanted to show how the songs have evolved and the characterisation stands up to today’s life challenges. I’ve made this record to compliment what was made in 1985 not to replace it. I think what comes out through this recording will only add substance to the original Strength.
SF: The Deportees are an alt-Bluegrass band and they have backed you on this record. Do you feel like The Alarm took a turn with Strength away from it’s core “electric folk” sound. (i.e. away from where you were going with those b-sides from “The Chant” Are you trying to recapture some of that?
MP: I’m still trying to work with all the core influences that made The Alarm special – the electro acoustic sound that made us so interesting musically at the beginning of the Declaration / Strength period. We toured a lot with The Long Ryders at that time and shared a lot in common and if we had embraced the mandolin a little more at that time rather than going fully electric who knows where we might have gone.
I think Strength was the point where we started to act as individuals, or in pairs, rather than as a band, especially when Dave Sharp got into using the vintage Stratocaster (that he bought from Bad Co. Guitarist Mick Ralphs’). That really changed the dynamic of our relationship and sound both in the studio and on the stage.
All the songs that made it on to Strength ended up being mine and Eddie’s (The title song was credited to the band so that everyone got an equal share of the single royalties but it was mainly my song). All of Dave’s songs got left behind because he wasn’t disciplined enough to be able to sing them when the time came as was the case with ‘One Step Closer To Home’. We all loved ‘Black Side Of Fortune’ but it’s quite a high song to sing and Dave couldn’t quite pull that range out of himself consistently and so another great track fell by the way side.
Personally, I think Dave changed the way he wrote after that and rather than writing the melodies he was capable of, he started writing for the range of his own voice. Imagine if Pete Townshend never wrote songs he couldn’t sing himself…. We wouldn’t have ‘Won’t get fooled again’ or ‘Behind Blue Eyes’. Dave used to get very angry when each producer we worked with tried to persuade him to let me sing his songs for him. I always felt for him and tried everything to encourage him to do it his way and hated it myself when the producers suggested it. It actually killed the band when Dave eventually refused to record any more of my or Eddie’s songs after Strength. It always made for a very uncomfortable creative process from then onwards.
SF: Wow, that’s some powerful commentary. How did The Alarm create songs after 1985 if some of the members refused to play on the songs they didn’t write? How did you work through that to create three more albums after Strength?
MP: That’s all part of the story for ‘Eye Of The Hurricane’!!! Basically, we did demos as either Sharp and Twist (with other musicians), and Eddie and I together. The next step was to deliver them to IRS and then people like our A&R man Steve Tannet would make the decision as to which songs went forward to be recorded.
SF: Have Eddie, Dave or Nigel ever commented to you about your solo work or material? Do they even acknowledge that it exists?
MP: Eddie has been very supportive and often comes to my shows in London. We did Flesh and Blood together in 1999 and that was a great experience. To my knowledge, Nigel and Dave have never talked in any detail about my music either from my time with them in the 1980’s or post. Dave has played at The Gathering and also with the modern Alarm as special guest but never says anything to me about my own writing other than general esoteric stuff.
SF: Do Dave, Eddie or Nigel have any solo material that you admire?
I thought Dave’s solo albums were excellent and had some fantastic songs (especially Hard Travelling), although I was surprised he got another player in to do the guitar solos on Downtown America. I’ve always been a fan of Dave’s writing and wish he would do more. I also think he could have developed his music writing for other people’s voices as he has a way with melody and words that is unique. He’s also a great guitar player but since 1990 he’s been more obsessed with being an acoustic singer songwriter. Back in the 1980’s I would have liked to see him become someone like Johnny Marr and playing with other bands. He would have been great in The Pretenders. In 2003, I travelled to see him in New Orleans and when he came back to live in the UK I funded an album for him called ‘Power Of Soul’ to help him get something going back in Britain. The highest compliment I can pay to Dave is that I’m always playing his songs live (and recording some of them), as I genuinely love them.
As for Nigel, I see him when I’m in San Francisco occasionally (he almost came to see me with Big Country in Napa a few years ago), but we don’t really communicate much. Musically he was a great drummer and I respect that he gave up his rock and roll career to be near to his daughter while she was growing up in San Francisco and as a father myself I can totally understand that kind of sacrifice so good on him.
Eddie has got a lot of music to share and I hope we all get to hear some songs from him soon. It seems like he has a project brewing and I wish him every success.
SF: The Alarm were many things to many people. The band mixed punk, folk, rock together like no band before or after. Do you think the way you have recorded Strength 2015 is more in-tune with that spirit than the record released in 1985?
MP: I wanted this record to be in tune with these times and reflect the life I have lived with these lyrics at the core of my experiences. When I got married ‘Walk Forever’ was played in the church. When I was diagnosed with cancer ‘Strength’ was the song that spoke to me the most. I’ve walked the lonely streets of ‘Dawn Chorus’ and it is my friends and story in the ‘Spirit of ’76’.
I may have shared a lot of the music writing with Eddie Macdonald but almost every word on Strength is mine. I’m not sure where I would be without those lyrics. I have tried to live by some of them and can still look the people in the eye that I’ve written about. It’s as real to me today, even more so, than when it was written in some ways, so I wanted to show the human side of those songs today.
The album is responsible for creating a charity called Love Hope Strength that has played a part in saving people lives. The song ‘Walk Forever’ has given its lyric to an appeal that will help give people in my community the same fighting chance against cancer that I have. It’s so alive today it’s ridiculous, and so I wanted to set the songs free from their 1980’s time capsule and see what happens. I know it won’t be for everyone, especially those who just wants the songs to stay the way they were, and I appreciate that, but for me it’s almost as if my life depends on this record again so I decided to let it live and damn the consequences.
SF: This album reminds me very much of what might have become of those demos from the summer of 1984 that were on alt.strength. Did you use that session as a focal point and move forward from there?
MP: I definitely referred to the demos, especially the songs that never made the album, and it was this collection of music that attracted Jimmy Iovine. I also loved the demo of ‘Knife Edge’ more than the album track and so grabbed some of the lyrics back, same with ‘Deeside’. The only song I haven’t gone to is ‘One Step Closer To Home’ as that feels like its part of ‘Eye Of The Hurricane’ even if it was conceived in the Declaration / Strength era.
SF: Some of the new tracks are so different from their roots (Deeside, Knife Edge, Strength, Father To son) they sound like different songs, but are good enough to be singles unto themselves. Do you feel like you’ve breathed new life into these old creations?
Of course, I think so but I’m biased. As a songwriter in The Alarm, it was only Eddie who ever got behind me as a creative person. Ian Wilson our manager and Steve Tannet who signed The Alarm were the ones who believed in me the most, along with Redeye (who’s contribution to my confidence was invaluable). Redeye was always excited to hear about my new song and lyric ideas whereas Nigel and Dave remained indifferent at all times.
Dave used to say to me that people came to see The Alarm because of the four members and not because of the songs. He would often say before a gig that it didn’t matter ‘what’ we played but ‘how’ we played. I used to argue that our audience would go crazy if we didn’t play our own songs but he would never back down from his point of view. Nigel also used to back Dave to the hilt and was more of a Karl Wallinger (World Party), fan than a Mike Peters or Eddie Macdonald fan especially when it came down to songwriting. That’s why you’ve never seen or read Dave and Nigel acknowledge my lyrics or the songs Eddie and I brought to the band. In their eyes it’s all ‘Alarm’ music and nothing else. In some ways, it’s one of the reasons why I’ve fought pretty hard to get my part in the band’s creativity acknowledged and part of what drives me to make these albums and not rely on just another remastered reissue to tell the story.
SF: As far as Strength 2015 goes, were there any stand-out songs that were begging you to work on first?
MP: I started with Spirit of ’76 as that was a colossus hanging over the project. It was playing that song on the Baritone guitar and using completely different chord shapes that opened it up to me in a new way. I was always fascinated by how that song could turn around live in my acoustic shows and could take having other songs played in the middle or the Mersey lights part in different places. I always like playing the guitar riff on the harmonica and then when I performed it with the Orchestra at Cardiff I knew it was ready to be challenged.
SF: So how did the BBC recording / Horizons Sing event come about? What do you think of it a year on?
MP: Horizons Sing came about when BBC Wales heard the new Declaration and thought it would be appropriate for BBC Wales Music Day and a pairing up with the National Orchestra of Wales. It was a very special project to be involved with and I have to say Dave Driscoll from The Orchard (who promote all my shows in Wales), did an incredible job putting me together with John Quirk the arranger (who came to the show in Neath), and got the vibe instantly. John and I worked closely on the musical arrangement ‘direction’ although John created the scores for all the wonderful orchestral accompaniment. The BBC production team were amazing to work with and they made it happen for the choir to come down from North Wales and arranged the surprise message from U2 (which I knew absolutely nothing about right up to the second I saw them on screen). It was an incredible event, and such an honour to work with a massive world class orchestra. The concert was very successful for the BBC also as it made an impact all over the world and I would love to see it released as a CD / DVD at some point in the future.
SF: One of the songs that interested me the most here is “Spirit Of ‘76” because , to me, it’s the one song that didn’t really need to be redone at all. Spirit Of ’76 always struck me as the “spiritual center” of The Alarm from 1985 onward. From what I hear though, that might have been a mistake. Why did you choose such radically different arrangement for the song?
It’s not as radical sounding to me. It still has the melody of the guitar but played on violin. The arrangement still has the stomping backbeat although is more akin to the seven inch single version that was released in January 1986. The single version was a weird one as the opening lines were not “Well I find myself in Reverie”, but “My friend John he went away” which was a strange opening for a song on Top Of The Pops. As far as I’m aware, I don’t think there is an Alarm compilation in the history of the band that carries that version on it anywhere. It’s always the album version. My approach was to look at it as a single for 2015 and get straight to the substance of the song. I upped the melody a little with the delivery and gave it more of an upbeat rather than wistful vocal performance. I also felt it important to rewrite the stories of the main characters as I still see them from time to time and talk whenever we meet. Anyone who has studied the recent live Gathering DVD’s will have heard me trying to give the outcome of their personal stories a more positive slant and this re-recording provided the perfect opportunity to get it right. I have sung the song with the original lines on the Vinyl LP version though.
SF: The version of “Father To Son” on Strength 2015 had me choked up. What meaning, if any, does this song have in 2015 that it didn’t have in 1985?
MP: I think the main difference is that all of us who have lived with the song from 1985 until now have had to go through that experience in some way either with our own fathers / mothers or as parents ourselves. I think the song makes a connection in all of us and I tried to make more of the lyrics by spacing them out more so that there is as much unsaid as spoken in this performance of the song.
SF: If you could choose one song from this new collection as the one you are the most proud of, which one would it be?
MP: The Day The Ravens Left The Tower is very powerful on this record and allows a much deeper connection to the man and the woman in the lyric which is something that I think got overlooked with all the poetic imagery flowing through the verses. I think in some way every journey we make in life is only ever made complete through trying to get home to our loved ones.
SF: I’ve heard some fans say that they believe you “toned down” a few of the songs on Declaration 2015 because your voice might not be as strong as it used to be? Can you address this directly?
My voice is as ‘strong’ as it ever was. I actually sang Sixty Eight Guns’ a semi tone higher than the original for Declaration 2014. I will accept however, that I have been experimenting with ‘where’ my voice sounds the ‘strongest’ though and that doesn’t always mean singing higher.
In recent times I have lowered the tone of a lot of songs as I think it suits my voice better. In fact, I think the vocal performance on the new Strength has some of the best singing of my entire career. I’ve even sung the title song a semi-tone higher than the original which allows me to deliver the song with a greater low to high register whereas on ‘Ravens’ I have lowered it to be able to get more warmth and emotion into the performance.
In the original 1980’s my vocals were cut as almost an afterthought as Dave and Eddie took so long doing the guitars and bass that I would only have a day or two to sing (or as some observers remarked – Shout!) the entire album.
Recently, I learnt a lot from Steve Lillywight when I sang for him in the Big Country session for ‘Another Country’ as he afforded me a lot of time to get the vocal performance right. He really pushed for the best key to suit the voice first as that is most listeners way into a song. It was amazing to work with someone who saw my voice as an instrument and not just a mouth piece for the lyrics. I have taken the experience gained from Steve Lillywhite and applied it to all my musical thinking of recent times.
Throughout most of my career I have sung in sharps and flats especially with The Alarm as we always tuned a semi tone down. This is one area that Jimmy Iovine was challenging us on in 1984. It’s always a discussion debated amongst musicians on the merits of tuning down or to concert. Jimi Hendrix tuned a semi-tone down as do many other acts. The Smiths used to tune a tone up to F# to give the guitars more jangle as did Big Country when recording Fields of Fire (Steve Lillywhite argued that when following records in a lower pitch on radio there was a subconscious lift for listeners hearing a higher tuned recording. Alan Shacklock actually sped up the original ‘Sixty Eight Guns’ single to give it more snap on the radio. Others like Dave Sharp’s hero Stevie Ray Vaughan, tuned a tone down to D. There’s no right and no wrong.
Big Country have remarked of late that they are back to playing their songs in the original keys but when I saw them live in the original days I always felt Stuart Adamson struggled on some of the higher tuned tracks like ‘Look Away’, and lowered and adjusted the melody in concert. When I joined BC I brought an individual singer’s approach to the material that suited me and allowed a song like ‘Look Away’ to be sung live with the original melody. I was most certainly not trying to sing it like someone would in a tribute band.
All singers are different and some higher pitched than others. Rod Stewart has an incredibly high voice range although most people would not realise because of the husky nature of his tone. As a singer in a band, you are often shackled to a pitch because of the guitar riff and where it can be played but as a singer songwriter I have recently been looking beyond that to try and discover ways to deliver the song and the lyrics with more depth and emotion and I think it’s working.
SF: Well, that was certainly a definitive answer! I don’t think anyone would blame you if you had to change-up your vocals after two bouts with cancer. Maybe that is where the rumors start. Maybe they come from the fact that your fans care about you. By the way, How are you feeling these days?
MP: I’m feeling great. I have treatment every two months and Dr. Edwards has halved my dosage for a while to stop me having the nasty reactions I was having last year and so far, I seem to be getting pretty good results. It’s been great to not go so far under during the treatment cycle and I don’t think I fully realised the toll the side effects were having until they stopped happening this last few months. I guess I can get a little defensive about my voice especially after Big Country put out some veiled negative messages about changing song keys which had nothing to do with the actual ‘quality’ of my voice. In fact, I’m very proud of the record I made with them and thought it showed how much my voice has improved over the years. I’m always looking for ways to improve my singing and stay very disciplined on tour so that I’m in as good a voice as possible. Of course, I’m only human and sometimes I get affected by colds or tiredness but I always do my best to make the show happen so as not to let anyone down. At The Gathering this year I was really ill with food poisoning late on the Thursday night and had stomach cramps and sickness that kept me awake and in major discomfort. Jules was thinking we might have to cancel the show but my doctor gave me an injection on the Friday morning that seemed to stabilise the situation.
I was not even close to 100% when I went out on stage and I thought I did a proper job apart from a few cracked syllables here and there during two and a half hours. The next night I was fine and didn’t miss a single note across three hours of hard rock and roll. The point being that playing concerts and touring is always a gamble. In the studio you can usually come back the next day if your are not feeling 100% but on tour it’s different. A lot of singers cancel at the merest sniffle but I don’t buy into that and will never make an excuse from the stage unless it’s ridiculously obvious and that has happened on only a handful of occasions. I’m of the mindset that I will always try and push through and make it happen the way that some athletes try and run off an injury while others leave the field of play.
SF: Let’s put the final nail in the coffin for the discussion about Big Country. Was your time and effort worth what you got out of the experience of playing with them?
MP: Absolutely. I loved every minute of my time with Big Country apart from the last tour when they had decided they were moving on but wouldn’t talk to me or tell me straight up what was happening. Bands are terrible at delivering bad news to someone they are moving on from so a I can ultimately understand that part of it as it’s not something you have to do on a daily basis in rock and roll. The only disappointing part for me was that it was all made out like I was to blame and that I had even disrespected Stuart because I’d changed the lyrics in Fields of Fire from ‘a beating heart will never die’ to ‘Sixty Eight Guns will never die’. That’s only three words and I only ever did it at a couple of shows and only on the repeated second verse. It was just a small way of acknowledging The Alarm fans in the audience as they were always shouting out for ‘Alarm’ songs while I was with the band. Personally, I felt it wasn’t respectful to play an Alarm song in that situation but I felt I had earned the right to be playful with a word or two here and there. They certainly used that as a whip to beat me with although they never complained when I changed other lyrics on other songs such as ‘I am new to History’ to ‘ I am new to Big Country’ in ‘The Teacher’ as they thought that was hilarious.
At the end of the day Big Country changed when Tony Butler (who was the quality controller of the band), left and Derek Forbes came in. I carried on because we had made an album that I was proud of and thought the remaining band members of Big Country wanted to be a serious creative entity but all that changed after the American tour when they wanted to play every weekend which was something I couldn’t / didn’t want to do. To be fair to them, there was no way I could have done all of that and created all that I have in recent times alongside, so a parting of the ways was inevitable. I just wish it could have been done with a hand shake and a thank you followed by a joint statement to the fans. I do admire them for continuing though and having the courage to change singers as that takes some doing whichever way you look at it.
I’m also not down on it because I learnt so much from being part of Big Country. Jamie introduced me to the Mandolin and Bruce is still a fantastic guitarist and Mark a great drummer. I got to work alongside Tony Butler who was an amazingly talented musician and bass guitarist and also recorded with Steve Lillywhite. I think my time with the band was special. There were some highly charged moments on stage and so I can only speak well of the experience overall. Ultimately, I did it out if choice and for Stuart Adamson and I’d like to think he would have appreciated what I brought to his old band in his absence. The fans were always great to me and so I can only wish them and Big Country every success for the future.
SF: You finished “The longest song ever recorded” last year, and made a world record. How many world records do you hold at this point?
MP: I don’t actually hold any world records. I did hold one for ‘Highest Gig On Land’ for about two weeks in 2007 after Everest Rocks but we were beaten to the title by some German jazz musicians who went higher in the Andes. The Scriptures world record bid is just being assessed by Guinness now so fingers crossed.
SF: You spoke and played at the World Cancer Congress last year. How did that feel? How were you received?
MP: It was pretty nerve racking to be honest and James Chippendale (co-founder of Love Hope Strength), had me practising for hours in my hotel room for days before the opening ceremony. When I walked out onto the plenary stage I felt calm and at ease. I don’t think the congress was prepared for a guy at the podium with a guitar and once I started speaking my performers instinct felt like I made an instant connection. By the end the congress was on its feet applauding. James Chippendale was crying back stage when I walked off and it was a very special moment. A lot is happening as a result and it has put Love Hope Strength on the global map in a very big way.
SF: It looked like an amazing time. Was any of it recorded for future use?
MP: At the World Cancer Congress I also had to put a band together for the closing ceremony. Through a friend I teamed up with the The Firebird Trio who are a first rate rockabilly outfit from Melbourne. At rehearsal the first thing we played was ‘Rock This Town’ by Stray Cats and it was phenomenal. Then we moved on to ‘Bound For Glory’.
All the band members were out of this world as players. Chris Nomad on double bass rocked and his brother Pete could play like Stevie Ray Vaughan way better than anyone I’ve ever heard and the drummer Eddie was right on the money. We worked up a set of covers mainly and, because I wanted the show to be as inclusive for local Australians as possible, I suggested a version of INXS ‘Devil Inside’.
At first it sounded cool but Eddie the drummer suggested we play it ‘swing’ style. Well… It was one of those moments when everything stopped and the rehearsal room lit up with people stopping by to see what was going on. We actually went to a studio the very next day and cut everything live to tape. I’m not sure where it will go, but I would love to do more because we really hit it off and tapped into the very earliest Alarm influences that were so fresh with us once we had toured with The Stray Cats back in late 1980.
At the show itself, we were joined by Glenn Tilbrook (who was in Australia on tour), and we stormed the congress in a way that it had never experienced before. I got everyone from around the world on stage and there were 105 countries represented so it was a lot of people rocking out to Love Hope and Strength.
SF: The “Mike Peters Documentary” was previewed at the World Cancer Congress. Any word on a release?
MP: We didn’t actually preview the new film at the congress rather an edited version of ‘Song That Changed My Life’. The ‘Song’ documentary has been the catalyst for the forthcoming fim though. Russ Kendall the director has interviewed almost everyone I’ve ever known pretty much, although I don’t have a lot to do with it as Russ wants to make a very open portrait of not just me, but the journey of both The Alarm and Love Hope Strength. Realistically it should start screening in late 15 or early 2016 at the latest.
SF: Russ Kendall appears to be looking “under chairs and looking under tables” to find the full story. Even though it’s not done yet, it must be gratifying to know that he has taken-up the charge here to create something special. How does that make you feel?
MP: Nervous!!! Ha ha!!! Russ is a great man and he is so dedicated to the project. He has a very calming way about him that gets people to open up. I’m sure it will be something very special when it’s finished and there will be a lot of things in it that have never been seen or heard before. James Chippendale, Alex Coletti and Stash Silonski deserve special mention also as they have been driving the production and filming side of things and without their drive and energy a lot of things may never have been filmed. The big problem for Russ Kendall as Director, is going to be containing the story inside one film as there is so much footage.
SF: Speaking of other projects, are there any plans for further “Dead Men Walking” shows?
MP: There is an album of original material that we have been working on for sometime that is coming out soon. It’s more U.S. based now and final recordings are happening in LA with Slim Jim and Chris Cheney right now. Captain Sensible and I have a little bit left to do in the UK but we are trying to finish it up for release in a few months time. There will be more live dates in the U.S. and then UK and Europe… Depends what we can all fit in basically, but we are all committed to making it work.
SF: Finally, next year in 2016. There was no album released 30 years from 1986. Is that the year we will finally see a new Mike Peters solo album?
MP: New album, movie, soundtrack and a musical. Bring it on…..
This Interview was originally published exclusively on The Alarm’s official Facebook page to mark the day when Strength 2015 was made public on 25.02.2015 (Mike Peters birthday), and the beginning of the Strength 2015 World Tour.
Strength 2015 Available to order now
MP’s sign to Donor List
Strength 2015 in California
Recording Day 05 – The Sweet Spot
Songwriting Day – An intimate portrait of Mike Peters the songwriter.
Fourth Day of Recording – We Got This
Third Day of Recording with lead vocals and guitars from Mike Peters.
Second Day of Recording – New Song, Helicopters, Tambourines and Artwork. Watch the drama unfold here.
History Repeating – Roll Of Honour Update – Good News from Jules Peters and Video Premiere
The Gathering 2021 [North] Official 40th Anniversary Acoustic Concerts Celebrating the Music of Mike Peters and The Alarm 1981-2021
21/May/21 - 22/May/21 The Gathering 2021 [North] Official 40th Anniversary Acoustic Concerts Celebrating the Music of Mike Peters and The Alarm 1981-2021 in Rhyl - Rhyl Town Hall Sold Out
The Gathering 2021 [South] Official Mike Peters and The Alarm 40th Anniversary Celebration Concert 1981-2021
05/June/21 The Gathering 2021 [South] Official Mike Peters and The Alarm 40th Anniversary Celebration Concert 1981-2021 in Cardiff - St. David’s Hall Sold Out
Mike Peters presents The Alarm 40th Anniversary New York City Acoustic Concert 2021
12/June/21 Mike Peters presents The Alarm 40th Anniversary New York City Acoustic Concert 2021 in New York - Sony Hall Buy Tickets
The Alarm – Isle of Wight Festival 2021
20/June/21 The Alarm – Isle of Wight Festival 2021 in Newport - Isle Of Wight Festival 2021 Buy Tickets
Mike Peters presents The Alarm Experience 40 Staycation Concert Series at The Village
01/July/21 - 05/September/21 Mike Peters presents The Alarm Experience 40 Staycation Concert Series at The Village in Dyserth - The Alarm Chapel Sold Out
09/September/21 - 07/October/21 Mike Peters presents The Alarm Experience 40 Staycation Concert Series at The Village in Dyserth - The Alarm Chapel Sold Out
The Alarm 40th Anniversary UK Tour 2022
19/March/22 The Alarm 40th Anniversary UK Tour 2022 in Birmingham - 02 Instutute Buy Tickets
25/March/22 The Alarm 40th Anniversary UK Tour 2022 in London - Electric Ballroom Buy Tickets
26/March/22 The Alarm 40th Anniversary UK Tour 2022 in Manchester - O2 Ritz Buy Tickets
02/April/22 The Alarm 40th Anniversary UK Tour 2022 in Glasgow - Glasgow Garage Buy Tickets
© The Alarm
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Response to “The Promise of Video Games”
by Pat Chesnut on February 21, 2013
When I was a kid, video games meant watching as much as they meant playing. It’s not that I didn’t love to play—and didn’t play plenty—but that, as a youngest brother whose closest friends wereyoungerbrothers,I wanted to see what happened when older, better players beat the levels. We’d all sit around with a game like “Zelda” or “Mega Man” or “Metroid”—or maybe, for the CPU gamers who are as old as my oldest brother, “Alone in the Dark”—and, no matter who was playing, we’d find ourselves engrossed. The action, the discovery, the cut scenes—they all blended into an immersive pseudo-cinematic experience, and one that felt like part of our lives.
Teddy talks about video games in the context of music, but the more relevant medium, to me, is film. Look at the examples Teddy uses: ascending a hill, plunging into a bunker, and exploring the void of space are events; they require not only sound and music, but plot, character, and visuals. This is clearest in the most sophisticated games, the ones whose fans obsess over the stories and concepts as much as the gameplay. “Halo” proved a natural adaptation for novels, comics, and anime; “Gears of War” announced itself with a stunning trailer that has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with the world in which it’s set.
But while these tendencies have become more pronounced as gaming technology has advanced, the basic phenomenon isn’t new: at least since 1981, when Shigeru Miyamoto mixed “Popeye” and “King Kong” to create an archetypal damsel-in-distress skeleton for “Donkey Kong,” most games have been fleshed out around some type ofnarrative,andthis plays a large role in making gamers fall in love with them. Even arcade-style games like “Rogue Squadron,” which I also played as a kid, do this to an extent. (Check out the Wikipedia page: the first section is called “Gameplay,” but the second is “Synopsis.”) As with other forms of narrative, these games provide us—in a way that is collective and shared but connected to the personal and emotional—with an immersive, ordered experience of the ineffable. (If you’re interested, I talked in more depth about video games-as-narratives and the importance of cinematic narratives in “Hours and Days” and my response to “Degree of Life,” both in Issue 1.)
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RE-OPEN THE WESTGATE HOTEL
A Message from David Daniel
We’ve had the privilege of working at the Westgate Hotel for just over a year. After the owner gave us permission we began the clean up process and worked alongside amazing volunteers from "Our Chartist Heritage" to transform the building. The Westgate Hotel, had been largely abandoned for 15 years. From a dark, dirty and neglected ex-hotel it changed into a bright, vibrant events venue in the city centre with so much potential. We love this building; the history it contains, what it stands for and what it could be. We’re dedicated to our mission to revitalise it and open it up to the public again, permanently!
"We Love This Building"
Our convictions are based on more than just optimism. With our partners Newport Rising and others, we’ve tested a variety of cultural, heritage and entertainment events and attracted over 2500 visitors to the venue in just two weeks for a graphic novel launch in June 2019. This was followed by a vibrant festival in November, multiple music and film events and the hugely successful New Years Eve celebration that raised thousands for charity and brought hundreds of visitors to the city centre.
Cllr Jane Mudd, Leader of Newport City Council at the Westgate opening in 2019
Activities continued through to the Covid lockdown in March 2020. Public interest was not deterred by the still present coronavirus and once restrictions were relaxed we held a highly successful art exhibition attracting over 600 visitors of all ages in two weeks of August this year.
Our Chartist Heritage has done so much to lay the foundations. We are determined to continue their efforts and guarantee a permanent position for them to continue to do their great work of telling the Chartist story at the Westgate and make the story relevant for today's audience.
We've chosen "Crowdfunding" so that we can deliver the project sooner and to a higher standard. This will enable us to achieve much more - on top of the money and time we will be investing ourselves.
There's lots of work to be done at the Westgate but every penny raised will go back into the building. We're not asking for a handout though, if you back us you get rewarded not just with the great perks but you'll get the satisfaction of making a big difference to Newport's City Centre at a time when the city needs us the most.
"THE place to be in Newport"
Every time we open the Westgate, visitors tell us how they remember it. When it was THE place to be in Newport. So many people have had their weddings at the venue, remember dancing in the ballroom and much more.
Younger generations only know the Westgate as being closed and boarded up.
Let's work together to change that, to open the building up for everyone and protect it for the future.
The campaign can be found at
igg.me/at/thewestgate
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Bravo Media's First Monday in March Brings the Madness
Look for the season finale of "Vanderpump Rules" and season premiere to "Shahs of Sunset" on Monday, March 2.
[via press release from Bravo]
Season Finale of "Vanderpump Rules" Kicks Off at 9pm ET/PT Followed by the Season Premiere of "Shahs of Sunset" at 10pm ET/PT
NEW YORK - February 18, 2015 - Bravo Media delivers an exciting and entirely unforgettable evening on Monday, March 2 beginning at 9:00pm ET/PT with the season three finale of "Vanderpump Rules." SUR's yearly photo shoot turns tense after Tom Sandoval confronts Jax for stabbing him in the back. Katie forces Tom Schwartz to take action in their relationship, while Tom Sandoval and Ariana take their own relationship to a whole new level. Stassi accepts Lisa's invitation to the restaurant's anniversary party, but finds returning to SUR more nerve wrecking than nostalgic.
In the season four premiere of "Shahs of Sunset," airing at 10:00pm ET/PT, the gang rings in the Persian New Year surrounded by love, friends and bling. During the celebration it becomes apparent that Mike has been drifting away from the crew and the mood dampens when he picks a fight with Asifa's boyfriend Bobby over a fashion faux pas. Moving to 9:00pm ET/PT starting Monday, March 9 in episode two Mike's girlfriend Jessica completes her conversion to Judaism and GG reveals a secret that could cast a dark cloud over the tight knit group. To soak up the California sun, the crew decides to organize a luxurious staycation in Malibu, but the dynamic shifts when Mike faces off with Asifa's boyfriend, Bobby, for the second time. For a sneak peek at the season, please visit: http://www.bravotv.com/shahs-of-sunset/season-4/videos/sneak-peek-its-time-for-shahs
In Part I of the tense "Vanderpump Rules" reunion on Monday, March 9 at 8:00pm ET/PT, Andy Cohen brings Lisa Vanderpump and her staff together at SUR, including Stassi who comes face-to-face with Jax for the first time in over a year. Part II of the emotional reunion airs Monday, March 16 at 8:00pm ET/PT and the "Secrets Revealed" episode airs Monday, March 23 at 8:00pm ET/PT.
"Vanderpump Rules" is produced by Evolution Media with Douglas Ross, Greg Stewart, Alex Baskin, Bill Langworthy, Lisa Vanderpump and Ken Todd serving as Executive Producers. John Carr, Robert Carroll and Brian McCarthy serve as co-executive producers.
"Shahs of Sunset" is produced by Ryan Seacrest Productions for Bravo with Ryan Seacrest, Kris Curry and Eric Gardner serving as executive producers on the series. Brandon Panaligan and Susan Gibson serve as co-executive producers.
Bravo is a program service of NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment, a division of NBCUniversal, one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies in the development, production, and marketing of entertainment, news, and information to a global audience. Bravo has been an NBCUniversal cable network since December 2002 and was the first television service dedicated to film and the performing arts when it launched in December 1980. For more information, visit www.BravoTV.com. Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BravoPR.
· SHAHS OF SUNSET (BRAVO)
· VANDERPUMP RULES (BRAVO)
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Greek Orthodox Direct Archdiocesan District
Saint Barbara Greek Orthodox Church
27 Forsyth Street New York, NY 10002
Our Ecumenical Patriarch
March 2002 - Historic Visit
Homepage » Our Faith » History
History: The Great Epochs of Orthodoxy
The Church has her origin with Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, not with a human teacher, or group, nor a code of conduct or religious philosophy. Orthodoxy believes that the Church has her origin in the Apostolic Community called into being by Jesus Christ, and enlivened by the Holy Spirit. The Feast of Pentecost, which is celebrated fifty days after Easter, commemorates the "outpouring'' of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and marks the beginning of the mission of the Church to the world. The Orthodox Church believes that she has maintained a direct and unbroken continuity of love, faith, and order with the Church of Christ born in the Pentecost experience.
The Time of Persecution
The earliest Church, which is described in the Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles, did not confine itself to the land of Judea. She took very seriously the command of Our Lord to go into the whole world and preach the Gospel. The words of Christ and the event of His saving Death and Resurrection were destined not only for the people of the first century and the Mediterranean world of which they were a part, but also for persons in all places and in every age. Within only a few years after the Resurrection, colonies of Christians sprung in the major cities of the Roman Empire.
While the early Church received many converts from Judaism and the pagan religions, the world in which the Gospel was proclaimed was, in the words of St. Paul, "heartless and ruthless." With only a few intervals of peace, the Church was persecuted throughout the Empire for nearly three hundred years. The faith and love expressed by the Christians were viewed as a threat to the religion and political policies of the Empire. Thousands upon thousands of Christians were martyred.
The Time of Growth
The beginning of the fourth century marked a new stage in the development of the Church. After centuries of vicious persecution at the direction of the Roman Emperors, an Emperor of Rome became a Christian. This was Constantine the Great, who in the year 313 granted Christians freedom of worship. The Edict was a recognition that the Church not only had survived the persecutions but also had become a significant force in the Empire. From that time onward, the Church and the Empire began a very close and mutually beneficial relationship. Not only did the Church receive imperial support, but also the evils which had characterized the old Roman Empire were greatly reduced in Christian Byzantium. The Church was truly a leaven of the society of which it was a part. The fourth through the tenth centuries were a significant period for the Church's internal development. The authorative content of the New Testament was determined. The Services of Worship received a formal framework. The Teachings of Christianity were developed by great pastors and theologians who are known as the "Fathers" of the Church. It was also a period of missionary activity. Among the most important was the evangelization of the Slavs by Saints Cyril and Methodius. However, the period was not without struggle. The Byzantine Empire was constantly on guard against the neighboring Persians and Muslims. The Church itself was frequently afflicted with many grave schisms and heresies. For example, serious schisms took place in the years 431 and 451. Among the greatest heresies was Arianism, which taught that Christ was not truly God. This heresy plagued the Church and brought havoc to the Empire for nearly a century.
The fundamental doctrines of the Church were proclaimed and defended by the Seven Ecumenical Councils. These Synods, which are known by the names of the cities in which they were convened, included Bishops from throughout the world, who came to affirm the authentic teachings on the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity. The Councils did not create new doctrines, but in a particular place and time, they proclaimed what the Church always believed and taught. The counciliar and collegial expression of Church life and authority which was manifest at the Ecumenical Councils and other synods of the early Church continue to be an important aspect of Orthodox Christianity.
The Ecumenical Councils also sanctioned the organization of the Church about the five great ecclesiastical centers of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The Archbishops of these cities came to be known as Patriarchs. They presided over the synod of bishops in a particular area. Since the early Church was not monolithic, each center had its own theological style, customs, and liturgical traditions. Yet, all shared in the unity of the faith. However, a primacy of honor was accorded the Bishop of Rome, from early times. The Second Ecumenical Council (381) gave Constantinople a position of honor by stating, "The Bishop of Constantinople shall have the prerogative of honor after the Bishops of Rome, because Constantinople is New Rome."
The Great Schism
The Great Schism is the title given to separation between the Western Church (the Roman Catholic) and the Eastern Church, (the Orthodox), which took place in the eleventh century. Relations between the two great traditions of the East and the West had often been strained since the fourth century. Yet, unity and harmony was maintained in spite of differences in theological expression, liturgical practices, and views of authority. By the ninth century, however, legitimate differences were intensified by political circumstances, cultural clashes, papal claims, and the introduction in the West of the Filioque phrase into the Nicene Creed. The Filioque affirms that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Both the papal claims and the Filioque were strongly repudiated by the East.
Although it is difficult to date the exact year of the schism, in the year 1054 official charges, known as Anathamas, were exchanged. The Crusades, and especially the sack of the city of Constantinople by the western crusaders in 1204, can be considered the final element in the process of estrangement and deepening mistrust.
From that period onward, the Western Church, centered about the Pope of Rome, and the Eastern Church, centered about the Patriarch of Constantinople, went their separate ways. Although there were attempts to restore communion in the years 1274 and 1439, there was no lasting unity achieved. While political, cultural, and emotional factors have always been involved, the Orthodox Church believes that the two principal reasons for the continued schism are the papal claims of universal jurisdiction and infallibility, as well as the meaning of the Filioque.
For nearly 500 years the two traditions lived in formal isolation from each other. Only, since the early 1960's have steps been taken to restore the broken unity. Most significant has been the mutual lifting of the Anathamas of 1054 by the late Patriarch Athenagoras and Pope Paul VI in 1965.
Time of Struggle
In the year 1453, the City of Constantinople fell to the invading Muslims. With its capital, the Byzantine Empire came to an end; and the vast lands of Asia Minor fell subject to non-Christians. The great ecclesiastical cities of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, which had come under the political control of Islam centuries earlier, were now joined by Constantinople. Throughout the Ottoman Empire, Christians came to be treated as second-class citizens who paid heavy taxes and wore distinctive dress. The life of the Orthodox Church in the Balkan and Asia Minor continued, but under much duress. Thousands of Christians suffered martyrdom. Patriarchs were deposed and murdered. Churches, monasteries, and schools were closed and destroyed. Only with the liberation of Greece in 1821, did some of the brutality come to an end. However, there were a series of vicious massacres at the beginning of this century. And, even today, Christians are denied their basic human rights in parts of Asia Minor.
After the decline of Byzantium, the Church in Russia thrived for nearly 500 years. However, with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Orthodoxy found itself confronted with the beliefs and political policies of militant atheists. Most churches were closed; and a policy was inaugurated to eliminate Christianity from Russia, a land which was steeped in Orthodoxy since the tenth century. In the years between the two World Wars, Orthodox Christians in Russia suffered much cruel and devastating persecution. Only since 1943 have there been modifications in government policy which have permitted the Church some degree of existence.
Today, in many of the lands which were once the pride and glory of Eastern Christendom, the Orthodox Church struggles amid great obstacles and persecution. It has been observed that in recent centuries there have been more martyrs than during the great persecutions of the early Church. Yet, despite injustices and indignities, the Faith survives.
Time of Renewal and Reconciliation
Throughout the past two hundred years the Orthodox Church in the Western Hemisphere has been developing as a valuable presence and distinctive witness. For example, in the United States, Orthodoxy has been recognized as one of the four major faiths. She has more than five million members, who are grouped into more than a dozen ecclesiastical jurisdictions. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, which is the largest, has about 500 parishes and operates church schools, parochial schools, an orphanage, a college, and a graduate theological school. Many believe that Orthodoxy in America has the potential for true renewal, creative development, and missionary activity which can contribute greatly to American life.
From the beginning of this century, the Orthodox Church has been committed to the Ecumenical Movement. This quest for Christian unity is the boldest attack on division since the early centuries of the Church. The Patriarchate of Constantinople not only inspired the movement for unity with an encyclical in 1920, but also was one of the co-founders of the World Council of Churches in 1948. The cause of Christian unity was a special concern of the late and beloved Patriarch Athenagoras. He labored greatly to promote a renewed sense of collegiality among the various Orthodox Churches, as well as to inaugurate a true dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church. In the year 1968, the Patriarch looked toward the future and declared: May the Lord of mercy send as soon as possible to our holy Eastern and Western Churches the grace of celebrating the Divine Eucharist anew and of communicating again together... The common chalice stands out luminously on the horizon of the Church.
Source: Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, http://www.goarch.org/ourfaith/ourfaith7052.
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All Alliance for Education Spirit Work top headlines Uncategorized >>
Friday, October 12, 2018 | 1 comments
RELEASE: Amazon Donates $2 Million to Alliance for Education to Create "Right Now Needs Fund" to Help Students in Seattle
October 15, 2018 at 9:00 AM EDT
Fund will address urgent needs of students in all Seattle Public Schools, with resources targeted to schools with the greatest needs
SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Oct. 15, 2018– Amazon (Nasdaq:AMZN) today announced a $2 million grant to the Alliance for Education to create the “Right Now Needs Fund” to help meet the urgent and basic needs of students attending Seattle Public Schools. This money is meant to be flexible and could be used to purchase a needed raincoat or school supplies, or to provide food in backpacks to feed students over a long weekend.
“At least a third of the students in Seattle Public Schools are impacted by poverty, and they are present in all of our 103 schools. The opportunity gap facing children from low income families has been a persistent problem in our community, and it is widening,” said Lisa Chick, President and CEO at the Alliance for Education. “We are grateful for Amazon’s generosity and understanding that to be successful in education we need to support the basic needs of children. These funds will help us directly address closing the opportunity gap in Seattle.”
“We work hard at Aki Kurose to make sure all our kids have what they need to be ready to learn, but the need is far greater than the resources we have available,” said Dr. Mia Williams, Principal at Aki Kurose Middle School. “This fund puts an incredible tool in our hands to solve problems and set my students up for success. I couldn’t be more excited about what this means to my community.”
Low-income students, including students experiencing homelessness, are concentrated in Seattle’s 31 “Title 1” schools. However, 18,300 children receive free and reduced lunch across all Seattle Public Schools. Students whose basic needs are not met often struggle to learn.
“The Alliance for Education has a track record of administering on-the-ground programs that effectively support success for students and teachers,” said David Zapolsky, Amazon SVP & General Counsel and Alliance for Education board member. “We worked hard with the Alliance to create a flexible source of funding so each school can quickly decide how to best serve their students.”
The Right Now Needs Fund will help principals, teachers, and parents collaborate to remove students’ most basic barriers to learning in all Seattle Public Schools during the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years. Spread over the next two years, Amazon will grant $2 million to the Alliance for Education to serve as the administrator of the funds for all Seattle Public Schools. The Alliance will disburse the funds to schools according to student needs, and higher poverty schools will receive more support. The only stipulation of the fund is that it must directly benefit students and not replace currently budgeted items.
“I’m inspired by this city’s strong commitment to public education – everyone wants our students to succeed. I have also been troubled by the significant challenges many of our students face in their daily lives,” said Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Denise Juneau. “The Amazon contribution is designed to address those challenges by supporting students’ basic needs and removing barriers to learning. This generous and meaningful support, with the Alliance for Education’s stewardship, will help make sure students can focus on their education. We are so appreciative of this gift to our student community.”
Both the Alliance for Education and Amazon are committed to education and addressing urgent needs that prevent students from learning. The Alliance for Education is Seattle’s local education fund, and works in close partnership with Seattle Public Schools and other education stakeholders to create programs and raise funds designed to close opportunity gaps in Seattle’s public school system. Amazon supports STEM and computer science education and programs that address childhood hunger and family homelessness. Amazon is a proud donor to the Families Yes campaign in support of the Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise Levy on the ballot November 6.
“These resources will complement existing school funding and help to close the opportunity gap,” said former Seattle Mayor Norman Rice. “There’s nothing more important than making sure our students are safe, healthy and ready to learn – I’m delighted that Amazon is making this investment in the future.”
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.
Source: Amazon.com, Inc.
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Lucy Harstrick
exciting news for Seattle’s students.
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Scientists create thin films with tantalizing electronic properties
“Our thin films open the door to a new direction in semiconductor research. There’s a chance to explore the potential of a whole new class of materials.”
Hao Zeng, Professor
BY CHARLOTTE HSU Republished from UB Now
Scientists have created thin films made from barium zirconium sulfide (BaZrS3) and confirmed that the materials have alluring electronic and optical properties predicted by theorists.
The films combine exceptionally strong light absorption with good charge transport — two qualities that make them ideal for applications such as photovoltaics and light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
In solar panels, for example, experimental results suggest that BaZrS3 films would be much more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than traditional silicon-based materials with identical thicknesses, says lead researcher Hao Zeng, professor of physics, College of Arts and Sciences. This could lower solar energy costs, especially because the new films performed admirably even when they had imperfections. (Manufacturing nearly flawless materials is typically more expensive, Zeng explains.)
“For many decades, there have been only a handful of semiconductor materials that have been used, with silicon being the dominant material,” Zeng says. “Our thin films open the door to a new direction in semiconductor research. There’s a chance to explore the potential of a whole new class of materials.”
The study was published in November in the journal Nano Energy.
UB physics PhD students Xiucheng Wei and Haolei Hui were the first authors. The project — funded by a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) SunShot award and National Science Foundation (NSF) Sustainable Chemistry, Engineering and Materials award — included contributions from researchers at UB; Taiyuan Normal University, Southern University of Science & Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, all in China; Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Experiments inspired by theoretical properties
BaZrS3 belongs to a category of materials known as chalcogenide perovskites, which are nontoxic, earth-abundant compounds. In recent years, theorists have calculated that various chalcogenide perovskites should exhibit useful electronic and optical properties, and these predictions have captured the interest and imagination of experimentalists like Zeng.
BaZrS3 is not a totally new material. Zeng looked into the history of the compound and found information dating back to the 1950s.
“It has existed for more than half a century,” he says. “Among earlier research, a company in Niagara Falls produced it in powder form. I think people paid little attention to it.”
But thin films — not powder — are needed for applications such as photovoltaics and LEDs, so that’s what Zeng’s team set out to create.
The researchers crafted their BaZrS3 films by using a laser to heat up and vaporize barium zirconium oxide. The vapor was deposited on a sapphire surface, forming a film, and then converted into the final material through a chemical reaction called sulfurization.
“Semiconductor research has traditionally been highly focused on conventional materials,” Hui says. “This is an opportunity to explore something new. Chalcogenide perovskites share some similarities to the widely researched halide perovskites, but do not suffer from the toxicity and instability of the latter materials.”
“Now that we have a thin film made from BaZrS3, we can study its fundamental properties and how it might be used in solar panels, LEDs, optical sensors and other applications,” Wei says.
In addition to the NSF and DOE SunShot program, the research received support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration’s Laboratory Directed Research & Development program.
7. Affordable & clean energy: Making reliable and affordable energy more accessible to everyone
13. Climate action: Taking steps to combat climate change and its impacts
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the Wesleyan Argus
Nominate a WesCeleb
Cross Talk: On Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play” and When Processing Isn’t Enough
October 29, 2019 , by Nathan Pugh, Paul McLaren, Assistant Arts & Culture Editor & Contributing Writer
c/o playbill.com
In “Cross Talks,” two writers sit down to discuss a piece of art they both feel strongly about. Sometimes they disagree; other times, they’re in perfect harmony.
Here, Contributing Writer Paul McLaren ’21 and Assistant Arts and Culture Editor Nathan Pugh ’21 discuss “Slave Play” by Jeremy O. Harris on Broadway: a play that has sparked rave reviews and outrage over its recreation of slavery which is (spoiler alert) revealed to be sex therapy for three modern-day interracial couples.
Nathan Pugh: I went to see the show with my friend Esmé who is also white/Asian, but she’s in a relationship with a white guy, so she was having….
Paul McLaren: A moment?
NP: A moment in a different way than I was having a moment. We also saw it with a bunch of white Wesleyan theater people, because we’re all interested in theater. Theatrically, “Slave Play” is….
PM: Significant.
NP: Yeah! What was the audience like for you? Who did you go with?
PM: I went with my boyfriend who is also Black and mixed. I think it’s important who you go with. The audience was super white: we sat next to these old white British people, they probably came from Connecticut, definitely super white. But there were some Black people, you know bougie Black people, from the city, I guess.
NP: The audience for me was obviously mostly white and old. These white women who sat next Esmé asked her, “Did I see you earlier today?” And she was like, “No.” Like, you saw some other Asian girl. There were a lot of Asian people in my matinee, and I was like, “Where do non-Black POC fit into this whole world?”
PM: I think that’s such an interesting question. As a mixed person also I was definitely made aware of a sort of privileging that goes on. The funniest part to me was the Dustin monologue where he was like, “That is erasure!” And he went on about his erasure, meanwhile his boyfriend Gary is a Black dark-skinned gay guy. There’s that moment where Dustin is like, “You’re a bougie Black person. You’re the one who goes to, like, the nice cafés,” sort of reciting what we think of the neo-liberal white racist does, but inhabited by this gay Black guy. Dustin weaponizes that against Gary, saying, “I’m going through shit and you’re the one conforming.”
NP: Dustin is the closest representation of someone like me I’ve seen onstage. Where else am I going to read a play about a mixed white gay person? Watching Dustin was like, “Wow, this is exactly who I am.” There was no translation, I have been/am him. And I hated him. I hated that character so much. The whole erasure line, I was laughing at it, but I have felt that before. I understand where he is coming from. But to contrast what he’s going through with what his partner is going through, and to say that they’re even on the same playing field, is horrifying.
PM: To get back to your earlier question: non-Black POC are not white people. But the POC label has flattened and reduced the experiences of marginal groups, undoing the progress that’s been made in intersectionality. I think the label POC in many ways can be regressive. Because, are we all this one thing? Is there really unity? Jeremy wants to say “There is a difference between Black POC and POC, between queer Black men and Black women.” It’s not the same. It’s not at all comparable for Dustin to say, “I’m going through this, too!” to his Black boyfriend. What Dustin does is really an act of violence.
NP: Problematizing the POC label is important. I also get frustrated on this campus when people use the label “queer” to mean anything they want it to. It’s saying everyone has the same experience in the LGBT community, and no, not everyone….
PM: Not everyone experiences queerness or Blackness or Asianness in the same way. These things impact different bodies in different ways. Queerness has also become a kind of moniker for some sort of deviance.
NP: I saw a lot of myself in Dustin. What character drew your attention?
PM: I feel like sometimes I’m a combination between Phillip and Gary. I understand Gary because he’s gay and I related to his need to co-opt whiteness to be a part of the queer community or a community that’s successful. Phillip is funny to me, he reminds me of mixed Black people I know who really haven’t come to terms with their Blackness in a certain way. I know a lot of Alanas, Jims, Dustins. I don’t know if there’s one person I identified with, I don’t want to tie myself to one character.
NP: I know some Phillips in my own family. I was also wondering…how this show got to Broadway? What the desire for people to see it is. Before going in, how much of the play did you know?
PM: I didn’t know anything.
NP: I knew the second act twist going in.
PM: I didn’t know about that. I was really glad it happened, because I was like, “Oh my god is this whole play going to be antebellum South sex scenes?” The second act was incredible writing, the way that the dialogue and arguments were being developed.
NP: Just the fact that it was people, literally sitting on stage talking, and I was still on the edge of my seat.
PM: Because you’re like, this is an essay about love and race, but it’s presented in this comedic dialogue on the stage. It just felt very lucid and complicated and personal. I think you get a lot of emotion in the last act. It really opens the door, leaves things unsaid. I saw Jeremy’s other play “Daddy,” and it felt very much in this style, very inconclusive, leaning into discomfort. Ugh, I hate that phrase!
NP: I know what you mean, though.
PM: Not tying a bow on things. Opening doors, and giving way to really difficult questions.
NP: I feel like the show is very academic. He’s drawing upon so many theories that he could’ve written an academic research paper. But to choose to make this into a play allows for a kind of cross-cultural argument…that’s hard when you’re just writing in the first person. I was also intrigued by how entertaining and funny it was. Watching the slavery scenes in the first act, I couldn’t stop hearing white people laughing at the recreation slavery, finding pleasure. And that’s subverted, but there was a part of me that couldn’t get past that.
PM: There’s the inside of the play and the outside of the play. Inside of the play is what’s happening onstage, and outside of the play it’s on Broadway. The audiences are mostly white—how are they engaging with this? I was kind of looking around during the first act, and my laughter and reactions were out of sync with everyone around me. They were laughing at things I don’t find particularly funny. The white people in the crowd were so, “Ha, this is so funny! I would never! This is not me.” I think the intention of the mirror behind the stage is to show that the audience is creating the play just as much as the play itself. They’re critical to the show, to how we might tease out meaning, what we take away. Which is already a loaded ask, I will say. This is a more general question about art. How do we go into art with didactic prescriptions like, “I’m going to get something out of it?” Our conversation is already predicated on that.
NP: It’s like…I don’t want to put pressure on this play to solve something.
PM: That’s a part of it, too. What can we ask of this play? What do we expect it to do? And are those expectations reasonable? What does this do for the world? Do we want white people to go see this play and have some sort of epiphany?
NP: But it’s also, who is this play for? “Slave Play” can have a preview with a completely Black audience and can function. I think Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview” is a cool companion piece. “Fairview” needs white people, and Drury has said it can’t function without having a white audience. Something about what it’s doing is speaking to them; the ghost of white spectatorship haunts “Fairview.” Doesn’t the same happen with “Slave Play?” Jeremy O. Harris says he wrote his show for himself, and I’m like, “Okay, sure….”
PM: Well, especially for Black artists, I don’t think their work needs to be for anyone. Black people are so conditioned into that history, to do things for other people. If this play is for Jeremy, it’s for Jeremy. There’s this interview with Anderson Cooper and the artist Mark Bradford. Cooper says something like, “What do you think gives value to your work? Where would be without the art market, people investing to give your work value?” Bradford says, “Excuse me, this has value because I say this has value! If I was waiting on people to say that this has value, I would still be waiting today!” For someone like Jeremy, his work has value because he says it does. I don’t want to speak for him, but I think it’s significant that this work can have value for himself outside of what it does for others.
NP: He titles the play’s third act “Exorcise.” That’s a phrase also used by playwright Djanet Sears about her writing. Maybe playwriting can be kind of a self-exorcism, getting something out of you that you don’t want?
PM: The last scene in “Daddy” also has this spiritual side. Jeremy is definitely in touch with religion and spirituality.
NP: There is a spiritual element to this show, with the ancestors. I’m from Virginia, and when Kaneisha’s talking about the annual plantation trip, I was like yeah! I remember shit like that. There’s a Civil War base five minutes from my house where I used to play on the playground and where people do drugs. In the center of my town is a Confederate statue pointing to the South. You just kind of live with that, you’re just surrounded by it constantly, maybe you’re not even aware. I found it really compelling to just name that out loud…. How did you feel just walking out of the theater? Did you have people to talk to?
PM: I was with my boyfriend Campbell, we drove back to Wesleyan talking the whole way back. Going into the theater, all the white people, coming out and seeing this sea…being the only Black person in my eyeline. I’ve spent so much time thinking and reading, but…I’m inclined to go back to my earlier point. What are we getting at when we say, “Let’s unpack this play, analyze and deconstruct?” I think we should get comfortable with saying, “This is a play for Jeremy, for whoever sees it. Whatever you take away is what you take away.” That’s okay. It’s not the end of the world if something is hard to understand. To understand is not actually the primary objective.
NP: Being comfortable with that lack of resolution is something that runs so counter to an academic setting!
PM: Or what we’re doing right now. Reaching towards a goal, some sort of resolution or catharsis. With the work that we’re seeing now, the question of “What is this supposed to do?” is no longer such a concern. There’s been an interesting turn to focusing on process. Process and presence. Not “I’m going to have this insane realization.” That kind of thought is exactly what Jeremy’s resisting.
NP: That kind of thought turns theater—turns any Black writing—into a tool for you to use to get whatever you want.
PM: Exactly! It instrumentalizes. Let’s just allow it to be a present piece of process—wow, alliteration—made simply for existing. I’m struggling with the language for this because we’re so conditioned to think about art in the opposite way. You can turn to someone like Fred Moten, about turning Black study into this practice not of transcendence or progress, but of process, exhaustion….
NP: Or like, Saidiya Hartman and the “incomplete project of freedom.” Just…walking out of a theater, usually I want to turn to the person I saw it with and talk….
PM: And say, “What did I learn?”
NP: Or “Do you remember this moment? What did you think of that?” It’s just a theater convention, right?
PM: Yeah. When you leave the work of a Black artist, the expectation is already hard-wired that the art undoes racism. Jeremy can’t escape the prescriptions of “my play needs to work against white supremacy.” I think the more productive way of reading the play is not using it like a tool….
NP: I just imagine a white person who goes to see Broadway shows often, buying these expensive-ass tickets, being like, “I need my investment to be worth it. I need my time and money to pay off.”
PM: Even if it was free! There’s still time, energy, and labor that makes you say, “I want something in return for that.” To resist that prescription is already radical.
NP: Walking out of the show, instead of talking to Esmé, I was just quiet. I didn’t have anything to say. I couldn’t really speak for 30 minutes.
PM: What’s wrong with that? You just witnessed an incredibly moving piece of art, you don’t need conversation. Why do we want some academic to tie the loose ends for us? Or even some reviewer? Let it be what it is. We shouldn’t look to anyone else or ourselves to find an explanation or some concrete resolve.
NP: What’s genius about the show is this very conversation is included within the text.
PM: It’s baked into the show!
NP: They’re like, “Let’s process this, let’s ruminate!”
PM: Isn’t that the word Jim hates? “Process….” That whole second act is, “Let’s unpack, let’s understand….”
NP: “Let’s break this down…”
PM: Yeah! It’s poking fun of the whole discourse of unpacking. It’s self-reflexive about the show itself. We see how futile it is to unpack slavery. That therapy they undergo, it actually does very little to solve their problems. Because essentially what that therapy is asking is “How can we escape our racism and really love each other?” The therapy’s futility is…
NP: You’re not going to escape racism.
PM: It’s not going to happen so we should stop trying. Same with the outside of the play. How does this play edge at the edifice of racism and white supremacy in some way? It doesn’t. It never will. So why are we asking it to do that work? It’s not that it doesn’t, but to instrumentalize it and to put that burden on it is unfair.
NP: I just…Yeah, after the show, I was like, I just need to sit. Not even think it over, but be with it. I’m still kind of in that space. The idea of “processing” slavery is…we’re never going to be able to do that…. I want more people to see this show, I want more people to read it. We don’t even need to “process” it together. I just want them to experience it.
Nathan Pugh can be reached at npugh@welseyan.edu.
Paul McLaren can be reached at pmclaren@wesleyan.edu.
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Joseph Ruttenberg
Joseph Ruttenberg, A.S.C.
Promotional Photo
(1889-07-04)July 4, 1889
Berdychiv, Zhytomyr oblast, Ukraine
May 1, 1983(1983-05-01) (aged 93)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Rose Ruttenberg
Virginia Ruttenberg
Joseph Ruttenberg, A.S.C. (July 4, 1889 - May 1, 1983) was a Russian-born American photojournalist and cinematographer.[1]
Ruttenberg was accomplished at winning accolades. At MGM, Ruttenberg was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography 10 times, winning four. In addition, he won the 1954 Golden Globe Award for his camera work on the film Brigadoon.
2 Filmography
3 Accolades
Born into a Jewish family in Berdychiv [2] [3]Zhytomyr oblast, Ukraine, Joseph Ruttenberg emigrated to the United States, arriving in Boston, Massachusetts on 7 January 1895.[4] As a young man he went to work at the Boston Globe as a photojournalist but left in 1915 to accept a job with the Fox Film Corporation in New York City to train as a cinematographer. Two years later, he was behind the camera for The Painted Madonna (1917), which marked the start of a remarkably successful career.[5]
In the late 1920s, Ruttenberg went to work for Paramount Pictures in New York. His first assignment for a sound film was The Struggle (1931), D.W. Griffith's final film.[6] In 1934, Ruttenberg signed with MGM, moving to Hollywood where he was invited to join the American Society of Cinematographers.
Joseph Ruttenberg retired from MGM in 1968 and died in Los Angeles on May 1, 1983.
The Painted Madonna (1917)
The Blue Streak (1917)
The Slave (1917)
Wife Number Two (1917)
Thou Shalt Not Steal (1917)
A Heart's Revenge (1917)
The Debt of Honor (1918)
Peg of the Pirates (1918)
Doing Their Bit (1918)
The Woman Who Gave (1918)
The Yellow Dog (1918)
Woman, Woman! (1919)
A Fallen Idol (1919)
My Little Sister (1919)
The Shark (1920)
From Now On (1920)
The Tiger's Club (1920)
The Thief (1920)
The Mountain Woman (1921)
Know Your Men (1921)
A Virgin Paradise (1921)
Beyond Price (1921)
Silver Wings (1922)
The Town That Forgot God (1922)
Who Are My Parents? (1922)
My Friend the Devil (1922)
If Winter Comes (1923)
Does It Pay? (1923)
The Fool (1925)
School for Wives (1925)
Summer Bachelors (1926)
The Struggle (1931)
The Knife of the Party (1934)
Woman in the Dark (1934)
The People's Enemy (1935)
Frankie and Johnnie (1935)
Gigolette (1935)
Three Godfathers (1936)
Mad Holiday (1936)
Fury (1936)
Man Hunt (1936)
Piccadilly Jim (1936)
Big City (1937)
Everybody Sing (1937)
A Day at the Races (1937)
Dramatic School (1938)
The Great Waltz (1938)
Three Comrades (1938)
Spring Madness (1938)
The First Hundred Years (1938)
The Shopworn Angel (1938)
On Borrowed Time (1939)
Balalaika (1939)
The Ice Follies of 1939 (1939)
Tell No Tales (1939)
Comrade X (1940)
Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940)
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
Waterloo Bridge (1940)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)
Ziegfeld Girl (1941)
Two-Faced Woman (1941)
Woman of the Year (1942)
Crossroads (1942)
Random Harvest (1942)
Mrs. Miniver (1942)
Presenting Lily Mars (1943)
Madame Curie (1943)
Gaslight (1944)
The Valley of Decision (1945)
My Brother Talks to Horses (1946)
Killer McCoy (1947)
Beloved Stranger (1947)
Julia Misbehaves (1948)
B.F.'s Daughter (1948)
That Forsyte Woman (1949)
The Bribe (1949)
Side Street (1949)
The Miniver Story (1950)
The Magnificent Yankee (1950)
The Big Hangover (1950)
Cause for Alarm! (1950)
Kind Lady (1951)
It's a Big Country (1951)
The Great Caruso (1951)
Young Man With Ideas (1952)
Because You're Mine (1952)
Small Town Girl (1952)
The Great Diamond Robbery (1953)
Latin Lovers (1953)
Invitation to the Dance (1954)
Her Twelve Men (1954)
The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)
Brigadoon (1954)
Interrupted Melody (1955)
The Prodigal (1955)
Kismet (1955)
Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956)
The Swan (1956)
Until They Sail (1957)
Man On Fire (1957)
The Vintage (1957)
The Reluctant Debutante (1958)
Green Mansions (1959)
The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959)
BUtterfield 8 (1960)
The Subterraneans (1960)
Two Loves (1961)
Bachelor in Paradise (1961)
Who's Got the Action? (1962)
The Hook (1962)
A Global Affair (1963)
It Happened at the World's Fair (1963)
Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed? (1963)
Harlow (1965)
Sylvia (1965)
Love Has Many Faces (1965)
The Oscar (1966)
Speedway (1968)
L-R: Deborah Kerr, Greer Garson & Joseph Ruttenberg on the set of Julius Caesar (1953)
Academy Awards wins:
Golden Globe Award win:
Academy Award nominations:
"Photographing Pre-Production Tests," in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), January 1956.
"Sound-Stage Sea Saga," in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), April 1960.
Positif (Paris), September 1972.
Seminar in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), July 1975.
Focus on Film (London), Spring 1976.
In Dance in the Hollywood Musical, by Jerome Delamater, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1981.
Film History (Philadelphia), vol. 1, no. 1, 1987.[8]
^ Joseph Ruttenberg on IMDb.
^ Birth place. "Ancestry.com".
^ 1895 passenger list. "Ancestry.com".
^ Dec 1894 passenger list from liverpool. "Ancestry.com".
^ Steeman, Albert. Internet Encyclopedia of Cinematographers, "Joseph Ruttenberg page," Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2007. Last accessed: December 22, 2007.
^ Joseph Ruttenberg at AllMovie.
^ Goble, Alan. The Complete Index to World Film, since 1885. 2008. Index home page.
^ Film Reference. Joseph Ruttenberg publications section, 2007. Last accessed: December 22, 2007.
Joseph Ruttenberg on IMDb
Joseph Ruttenberg at AllMovie
Joseph Ruttenberg at the TCM Movie Database
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Bay Area Houston Magazine
SpaceX to build spaceport on the Texas coast
By Mary Alys Cherry
Move over Florida — Texas soon will have its very own spaceport.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Gov. Rick Perry made it official Aug. 4 with Perry providing $2.3 million in incentives from the Texas Enterprise Fund and the state an additional $13 million for infrastructure necessary to establish a spaceport on the Texas coast near Brownsville.
Contingent upon receipt of the required permits and approval of local agreements, the facility will create 300 jobs and pump $85 million in capital investment into the local economy, Perry said.
“Texas has been on the forefront of our nation’s space exploration efforts for decades, so it is fitting that SpaceX has chosen our state as they expand the frontiers of commercial space flight,” the governor said. “In addition to growing the aerospace industry in Texas, SpaceX’s facility will provide myriad opportunities for STEM education in South Texas, and inspire a new generation of Texas engineers and innovators.”
SpaceX currently operates a Rocket Development Facility in the small central Texas town of McGregor, near Waco, which has grown to over 250 employees since starting operations in 2003. The Brownsville facility will launch commercial satellites.
“SpaceX is excited to expand our work in Texas with the world’s first commercial launch complex designed specifically for orbital missions. We appreciate the support of Gov. Perry and numerous other federal, state and local officials who have partnered with us to make this vision a reality,” the SpaceX CEO said.
“In addition to creating hundreds of high tech jobs for the Texas workforce, this site will inspire students, expand the supplier base and attract tourists to the south Texas area,” Musk added.
Texas has a long history with both public and private spaceflight, the governor pointed out. NASA’s Johnson Space Center served as a hub for America’s human space exploration program from the early Gemini, Apollo and Skylab projects to today’s Space Shuttle and International Space Station Programs.
The Legislature created the TEF in 2003 and reauthorized funding in 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2013 to help ensure the growth of Texas businesses and create more jobs throughout the state, the governor’s office explained, adding that TEF projects must be approved by the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the House. The fund has since become one of the state’s most competitive tools to recruit and bolster business.
To date, the TEF has invested more than $565 million and closed the deal on projects generating nearly 76,000 jobs and more than $24 billion in capital investment in the state.
Posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2014 at 11:07 am | Category Business, Community, News | Tags: Brownsville spaceport, Elon Musk, SpaceX spaceport, Texas enterprise fund, Texas spaceport| Comment |
One Comment to “SpaceX to build spaceport on the Texas coast”
Gary Seeba says:
This would be awesome to go on.
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Meet the Brewer – Ilkley Brewery
19 July 2018, 19:30 - 19 July 2018, 21:30
The Ilkley Brewery and Aerated Water Company was originally founded in 1873, and soon grew to become one of the region’s leading beverage producers and suppliers. Importing fine wines and spirits from around the world, and utilising the town’s natural spring water, the beers were universally commended for their outstanding quality, purity and splendid condition. The brewery was ultimately swallowed up by Hammonds Bradford Brewery Co, and consequently Bass, and then shut down in the early 1920s. The Head Brewer departed to take up residence at a certain Timothy Taylors Brewery, where he first brewed Landlord.
The brewer’s tradition was brought back to the Yorkshire spa town after a 100 year hiatus in 2009, and like its predecessor the new Brewery built its reputation on the quality of the ingredients and skill of the brewing team. The brewery is an important part of the community; providing jobs and working with local business and producers, as well as being an ambassador for Ilkley and Yorkshire having won national plaudits and awards. We brew the beer in the same manner in which it should be drunk; with passion, patience and most importantly, in a happy and hoppy state of mind! We care about every drop of ale we produce, and take pride in the manner in which every stage of production is carried out by hand. We are a small team, all passionate about their work, and relish the challenges of working with a live product. Since inception the brewery has grown at an astounding rate, and we are now able to produce over 50,000 pints a week.
http://www.ilkleybrewery.co.uk/the-brewery/
Thursday 19th July 7.30pm
£10 per ticket includes 6 thirds, free supper & beer talk
Tickets are available from the bar 01274 616587
Grab your tickets whilst they last!
Admission: £10 ticket includes 6 thirds, tutored tasting and supper
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The Shape of Economic Recovery
On June 8, 2020, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which has official responsibility for determining U.S. business cycles, announced that February 2020 marked the end of an expansion that began in 2009 and the beginning of a recession.1 This was no great surprise considering widespread business closures due to the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting spike in unemployment, but it was an unusually quick official announcement.
The NBER defines a recession as “a decline in economic activity that lasts more than a few months,” so it typically takes from six months to a year to determine when a recession started. In this case, the NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee concluded that “the unprecedented magnitude of the decline in employment and production, and its broad reach across the entire economy,” warrants the designation of a recession, “even if it turns out to be briefer than earlier contractions.”2
Another common definition of a recession is two or more quarters of negative growth in gross domestic product (GDP), and it’s clear that the current situation will meet that test. The U.S. economy shrank at an annual rate of 5% in the first quarter of 2020 — a significant but deceptively small decline, because the economy was strong during the first part of the quarter.3
The first official estimate for the second quarter will not be available until July 30, but the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta keeps a running estimate that is updated based on incoming economic data. As of June 26, the Atlanta Fed estimated that GDP would drop at a 39.5% annual rate in the second quarter.4 By comparison, the largest quarterly drop since World War II was 10% in the first quarter of 1958, followed by 8.4% in the fourth quarter of 2008.5
Most economists believe that GDP will turn upward in the third quarter as businesses continue to open.6 But with the extreme decline in business activity during the first half of 2020, it will take sustained growth to return the economy to its pre-recession level. In its June economic projections, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee projected a 6.5% annual drop in GDP for 2020, followed by 5.0% growth in 2021 and 3.5% growth in 2022.7 The simple math of these projections suggests the economy may not return to its 2019 level until 2022.
By the Letters
Economists traditionally view economic recessions and recoveries as having a shape, named after the letter it resembles.
V-shaped — a rapid fall followed by a quick rebound to previous levels. The 1990–91 recession, which lasted only eight months and was followed by strong economic growth, was V-shaped. This type of recovery would require control of COVID-19 through testing and treatment, a quick ramp-up of business activity, and a return to pre-recession spending habits by consumers.8–9
U-shaped — an extended recession before the economy returns to previous levels. The Great Recession, which lasted 18 months followed by a slow recovery, was U-shaped. If COVID-19 takes longer to control and the economy does not bounce back as expected in the third quarter, the current recession could be prolonged.10–11
W-shaped — a “double-dip” recession in which a quick recovery begins but drops back sharply before beginning again. The U.S. economy experienced a W-shaped recession in 1980–82, when a second oil crisis and high inflation triggered a brief recession, followed by a quick recovery and another recession sparked by overly aggressive anti-inflation policies by the Federal Reserve. This type of recession could occur if a second wave of COVID-19 forces new business shutdowns just as the economy is recovering.12–13
L-shaped — a steep drop followed by a long period of high unemployment and low economic output. The Great Depression, which lasted 43 months with four straight years of negative GDP growth, was L-shaped. This is unlikely in the current environment, considering the strength of the U.S. economy before COVID-19 and the unprecedented economic support from the Federal Reserve. However, it is possible if the virus is not controlled.14–15
A Swoosh
In the June Economic Forecasting Survey by The Wall Street Journal, which polls more than 60 U.S. economists each month, 13.8% of respondents thought the recovery would be V-shaped, 8.6% expected it to be W-shaped, 6.9% indicated it would be U-shaped, and just 1.7% thought it would be L-shaped.16
The vast majority — 69.0% — believed the recovery would take a “Nike swoosh” shape, which suggests a sharp drop followed by a long, slow recovery.17 This view factors in the possibility that businesses may be slow to rehire, and consumers could be slow to resume pre-recession spending patterns. It also considers that some businesses may be impacted longer than others. Airlines do not expect to return to pre-COVID passenger activity until 2022, and movie theaters, beauty salons, sporting events, and other high-contact businesses may struggle until a vaccine is developed.18
Adding to the prognosis for a slow recovery is the fact that the rest of the world is also fighting the pandemic, including many countries where growth was already more sluggish than in the United States. And if the virus resurges in the fall or early 2021, the recovery may turn jagged with significant setbacks along the way.19
While the general consensus suggests that the duration of the actual recession may be brief, it is much too early to know the true shape of the recovery. However, the economy will recover, as it has in even more challenging situations. All of these projections indicate that a key factor in determining the shape of recovery will be control of COVID-19. Beyond that, the underlying question is whether the virus has fundamentally changed the U.S. and global economies.
1–2, 8, 10, 12, 14) National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2020
3, 5, 15) U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, June 2020
4) Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, June 26, 2020
6, 16–17) The Wall Street Journal Economic Forecasting Survey, June 2020
7) Federal Reserve, June 10, 2020
9, 11, 13) Forbes Advisor, June 8, 2020
18–19) The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2020
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Home Page Fun in the streets, but should community be looking at the far horizon? 04/07/11
Anyone who stubbornly retains the old tendencies to knock Haverhill in general would have done well to get out and about in the town over the last week or so to see several aspects of a positive community in action.
The weekend marked both the close of the two-week Haverhill Festival, and the annual highspot of Haverhill Show, and the good weather brought out plenty of people to enjoy the events on offer.
Although Haverhill Show is not what it once was and, in many ways, has settled down to being a glorified car boot sale with attendant attractions, it is still a happy occasion in a very British style, where you will find lots and lots of people who are determined to enjoy themselves and raise money for charity.
The weather may be awful, as it has sometimes been, and there may not be much to see on occasions, but the good old British spirit ignores all that and gets on with it. Every town needs such an event at least once a year.
The festival may be a little more contentious, because it is funded from council tax and people are divided on whether entertainment is the sort of thing they want their hard-earned cash spent on.
But I think you would find that those who criticise it have not attended it seriously, and those who have made the effort have become its staunchest supporters. That is not unusual in community arts provision.
I was wandering around the high street on Saturday morning and witnessed a small child being lifted up by two giant stilt-walking Restoration belles, a memorable and highly enjoyable experience. Street entertainment is all about moments like that, and worth every penny.
However, these were not the only interesting events afoot over the weekend. While all that gentle silliness was going on in the street outside, a small number of people were gathered to pursue what many would see as the ultimate silliness – the return of the railway to Haverhill.
This project moves at about the same speed as climate change and has just as much difficulty in persuading those who control finances that it is ever likely to be a reality.
It is curious that whenever there is a big business meeting in Haverhill, the guest speaker always urges local businesses to look at the bigger picture, to widen their horizons, to take a global view, etc, etc.
Yet the one idea which really is on an almost ridiculous scale attracts very little notice. Like Don Quixote and his windmills, RailHaverhill, as it is now going to be branding itself, takes no notice of reality-bound pragmatists, and presses on with the grandest of ideas by making them even bigger.
There is no hope, the group thinks, for the small-scale versions of the project which are the only possibilities entertained by local authorities. Guided bus? Waste of time and money. Light railway? Never be viable. Any mass-transit system solely linking Haverhill and Cambridge? No chance. Single track railway? Unachievable.
No, the only chance is for a double track rail link from Colchester to Cambridge. The fact that Haverhill (and, for that matter, Sudbury) happen to be on the route is fortuitous but unimportant. The C-to-C link, which their new logo will reflect, could fit in with the East-West rail link which, it is rumoured, will be a reality in the not too distant future.
People are coming round to the idea that railways – and new ones at that – must have a major part to play in the future transport infrastructure of this country.
The contrast, between the intimate day-to-day debate about whether our town council should be funding entertainment - on the street or in the arts centre - and the almost geological scale of discussions about whether the railway will ever return, was ironic and poignant.
It’s all about vision, really. The consultation process on Haverhill’s new local plan is entitled Vision 2031, but I seriously doubt whether the word railway will appear anywhere among the hundreds of pages of the finished document.
Of course, nobody thinks it likely there will be a railway here by 2031, but it would be nice to think that the likelihood of one being built in the future will be greater by then. It would probably surprise most of the individuals attending Saturday’s meeting if the railway returned in their lifetimes, but it doesn’t stop them pressing on with the idea.
If Haverhill had had people thinking that far ahead back in the 1970s, things would probably be a lot further advanced today. That is a thought which is worth holding as we go around admiring the positive community around us.
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The Channel Tunnel
Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong
Tuesday, 28th June 2005 by Alex Turnbull
This is brilliant, hundreds of sea-vessels of all shapes and sizes zipping around in Victoria harbour, Hong Kong. Scroll around to see just how many of them there are! Victoria Harbour is one of the busiest ports in the world, with an average of 220,000 ships visiting the harbour each year.
Apparently the container port in Hong Kong is the busiest in the world. There’s some weird looking cargo transporter things, and you can also see one of them being tugged (check out the guy doing the u-turn too!).
There’s also a massive cargo ship, and even an airplane in this mega-harbour!
As usual, loads more great info about Victoria harbour is available on Wikipedia 🙂
Thanks to Nels Nelson and others.
Exploring Hong Kong with Google Street View (Part 1)
Winterfresh says:
Wednesday, 29th June 2005 at 12:05 am
What are these weird white things, here?
noknok says:
Wednesday, 29th June 2005 at 1:05 am
You mean the breakwaters?
And this? What do my western eyes see here?
aaron: it looks like it’s a dry dock that was built offshore for lack of enough flat space on land. For the same reason, the new airport was built in 1998 on a man-made island. You can see it here: View Placemark Here’s a great interactive xite explaining how it was built: http://media.dsc.discovery.com/convergence/engineering/airport/interactive/interactive.html The old airport was also built on water. It looks like it is now used as a part of the port, but it’s still quite obvious it used to be an airport: View Placemark
floating drydock
Wednesday, 29th June 2005 at 4:34 pm
check out the suspension bridge http://tinyurl.com/7o3nr
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Kavous Seyed-Emami is seen in this undated handout photo
Iran, February 12, 2018
Iranian-Canadian Dies in Custody in Tehran After Crackdown
An Iranian-Canadian university professor detained in Tehran has died in custody, activists and a family member said Sunday, marking the latest suspicious death of a detainee in Iran after a crackdown on dissent following nationwide protests.
They identified the professor as Kavous Seyed-Emami, a 63-year-old professor of sociology at Imam Sadeq University in Tehran and the managing director of the Persian Heritage Wildlife Foundation. His son and the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran say that authorities told Seyed-Emami's family that he committed suicide in custody, something they described as suspicious following other detainee deaths.
Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi later confirmed the professor's death on Sunday, saying he had been detained in an alleged espionage ring. The prosecutor on Saturday announced the ring, saying it had targeted people who were "implementing scientific and environmental projects" to collect information on "strategic areas."
"He knew there were a lot of confessions against him and he also confessed himself," Dolatabadi was quoted as saying Sunday by the semi-official ILNA news agency. "Unfortunately, he committed suicide in prison."
The professor's son, musician Ramin Seyed-Emami who performs under the stage name King Raam, wrote on Instagram that his father had died following his arrest on Jan. 24.
"They say he committed suicide. I still can't believe this," he wrote.
Global Affairs Canada, the country's Foreign Ministry, said it was aware of reports of Seyed-Emami's death. An Iranian reformist lawmaker, Mahmoud Sadeghi, tweeted that he failed to get information on Seyed-Emami's death despite calls to "related officials."
"Some of them refused to comment, some others said we pursued (but) failed to get information," the lawmaker wrote.
Iran entered the New Year with nationwide protests sweeping across 75 cities and towns. The demonstrations initially focused on Iran's poor economy despite its nuclear deal with world powers, but quickly spiraled into chants directly challenging Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and its theocratic government.
Authorities arrested nearly 5,000 people in the crackdown that followed, according to Alireza Rahimi, an Iranian lawmaker. At least 25 people were killed in clashes surrounding the demonstrations.
Activists say they have concerns about Iran's prisons and jails being overcrowded and dangerous, pointing to allegations of torture, abuse and deaths that followed the mass arrests during Iran's 2009 Green Movement protests. Since the most-recent protests, activists have said they also remain concerned by reported suicides within Iran's prison system.
Analysts and family members of dual nationals and others detained in Iran have suggested that hard-liners in the Islamic Republic's security agencies use the prisoners as bargaining chips for money or influence. A U.N. panel in September described "an emerging pattern involving the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of dual nationals" in Iran, which Tehran denies.
Iran does not recognize dual nationalities, so those detainees cannot receive consular assistance.
Others with ties to the West detained in Iran include Chinese-American graduate student Xiyue Wang, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for allegedly "infiltrating" the country while doing doctoral research on Iran's Qajar dynasty. Iranian-Canadian national Abdolrasoul Dorri Esfahani, a member of Iran's 2015 nuclear negotiating team, is believed to be serving a five-year sentence on espionage charges. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian woman, also is serving a five-year prison sentence for allegedly planning the "soft toppling" of Iran's government while traveling with her young daughter.
Iranian businessman Siamak Namazi and his 81-year-old father Baquer, a former UNICEF representative who served as governor of Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan province under the U.S.-backed shah, are both serving 10-year sentences on espionage charges. Iranian-American art dealer Karan Vafadari and his Iranian wife, Afarin Neyssari, recently received 27-year and 16-year prison sentences respectively.
Iranian-American Robin Shahini was released on bail last year after staging a hunger strike while serving an 18-year prison sentence for "collaboration with a hostile government." Shahini is believed to still be in Iran.
Also in an Iranian prison is Nizar Zakka, a U.S. permanent resident from Lebanon who advocated for internet freedom and has done work for the U.S. government. He was sentenced to 10 years last year on espionage-related charges.
Former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who vanished in Iran in 2007 while on an unauthorized CIA mission, remains missing as well. Iran says that Levinson is not in the country and that it has no further information about him, though his family holds Tehran responsible for his disappearance.
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River Jökulsá á Fjöllum
- Arnardalur Power Plant
Diverting the flow of the river Jökulsá á Fjöllum to East Iceland would affect the river and its surroundings all the way to the mouth of the river. The series of waterfalls in the river, including Dettifoss waterfall, would disappear in its present form. Construction would affect the landscape from Mt. Herðubreið all the way east to Egilsstaðir and north to the coast at Öxarfjörður fjord. The area’s landscape, natural expanses, geological features and wildlife are all considered invaluable.
Photo © Mats Wibe Lund
Two power proposals in the river Jökulsá á Fjöllum are currently under consideration. They are the Arnardalur Power Plant and the Helmingur Power Plant.
The river Jökulsá á Fjöllum is the longest as well as the greatest in waterflow of the rivers that run northward from the Vatnajökull ice cap. The area is noted for the great number of active volcanic systems found there, and is considered unique in the Iceland Highlands. The river runs through the Vatnajökull National Park, Jökulsárgljúfur canyon by the Askja volcano, the Herðubreið Nature Reserve, Hvannalindir springs, and wetlands at Öxarfjörður, Kverkfjöll and the Ódáðahraun lava field.
The area is of great natural beauty. The river has carved out a layered canyon during successive glacial floodings, wide at the top, but growing ever narrower towards the bottom, with the river running through the narrowest, bottommost canyon. The floodings in the river weathered and wore down everything in their path, including a series of craters that have been transformed into the Hljóðaklettar cliffs, forming fantastical images of castles, lions and trolls.
The river‘s drainage basin remains almost untouched. The river follows its natural course, albeit with seasonal changes in waterflow, and carries sediment out to sea. Sandbanks erected at Kelduhverfi to prevent coastal erosion are the most significant human structures in the area. Two out of three major river systems on Earth have already been dammed, and their flow patterns disrupted. Outside of Iceland, only three large rivers in Europe remain completely undisturbed. Iceland can almost be said to be the only country in Europe where large or relatively large river systems remain undisturbed.
Icelandic poet and entrepreneur Einar Benediktsson tried to sell Dettifoss waterfall to foreign tycoons at the turn of the 19th century, but he greatly overestimated the height of the waterfall. There have since been several proposals for the harnessing of Jökulsá á Fjöllum, mostly envisaging the diversion of the river‘s flow eastward. This includes recent proposals for the Arnardalur and Helmingur Power Plants, but they have been classified as protected according to the Master Plan for Hydro and Geothermal Energy Resources.
Falcons nest widely in the area around the river Jökulsá á Fjöllum. The birdlife of Arnardalur and Möðrudalur is varied and plentiful, with nine species of ducks and several falcon nesting sites. Pink-footed geese are common, with 5% of the entire Iceland-Greenlandic population nesting in the area.
The area is listed 43rd on the list of Important Bird Areas (IBAs) in Europe.
The area‘s wetlands are also varied and make it onto the list of important wetland areas in Europe.
Photo © Daníel Bergmann
The road to the Kverkfjöll mountains runs from Möðrudalur valley to the mouth of Arnardalur valley far to the south. Arnardalur valley is verdant with vegetation, and there are vestiges of human habitation to be found there, as of yet unexplored, that may date to the first age of Icelandic settlement.
The river Jökulsá á Fjöllum flows through important natural areas, amongst them the Vatnajökull National Park, Jökulsárgljúfur canyon by the Askja volcano, the Herðubreið Nature Reserve, Hvannalindir springs, and the wetlands at Öxarfjörður and Kverkfjöll.
The proposal for Arnardalur Power Plant is classified as protected, but would have entailed the submerging of the valley and the creation of several reservoirs, including one reaching from Arnardalsalda east to Grjót, and another at the confluence of the river Hölkná. Dettifoss waterfall would have been altered, but the waterfall is part of the Vatnajökull National Park. The flooding of Arnardalur valley would furthermore destroy the nesting grounds of pink-footed geese, which numbered 740 couples or 2% of the entire population in 2002.
Photo © Thorsten Henn
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Prior Events
Shannon deMelo – Ignition Interview – 15 September 2016
Posted on September 15, by
Fuse Theatre: Ignition Interviews
These interviews aim to highlight brilliant members of our community and spread their knowledge to ignite some Fuses.
Each interview will consist the same three, initial questions, and the fourth, final question will specifically pertain to a project they are currently working on.
Friends of Fuse: Shannon deMelo
Shannon is a managing consultant with Fuse. She is currently working with Silicon Valley Shakespeare as the director of Labor’s Lost Love.
What was the best piece of practical stagecraft advice you have received or given?
“Strangely enough, the best piece of advice I have ever gotten has almost nothing to do with theatre. It’s just ‘be on time.’ Be on time and show up when you don’t have to. It’s the best thing you can do to keep getting hired.”
If you could use any place in the world as a location for a theatre creation of any kind, where would it be?
“Well, I really like outdoor spaces. Pretty much any park I think is really good place for theatre. To be able to set on the grass, do a show, and leave.
This was the inspiration when I kind of vaguely started my own company, which really was just me saying ‘I want to do a show; let’s all do a show, guys!’. My goal was to eventually be able to place a stake in the ground in any kind of public park that says ‘Show Coming in 24 Hours,’ and then the next day do a show, and then leave as if we were never there. So I love just open spaces that really have nothing to do with theatre.”
What draws you to specifically parks and open spaces?
“The variety of audience members you will get in a space like that. It’s going to be a ton of people who aren’t necessarily seeking out theatre. Wouldn’t necessarily seek out theatre. But if you put it out there, they will stay and they will watch. It doesn’t matter what it is. Anything from Shakespeare all the way through contemporary. If you are doing it right in front of them, they will sit and go, ‘Oh hey, here is a thing, we should watch this.’ As if they were flipping TV channels. Because it is there.”
What voice or voices have recently inspired you to speak or think or create?
“The brand new artistic director for Pacifica Spindriff Players Mauricio Suarez. His theatre is changing the way they format seasons. They are allowing people to pitch whatever they want, pitch their dream projects, and then they put a season together from all of those pitches. And being able to think so outside the box like that is really inspirational to me. Because it allows artists to do what they do best. Which is create! Go mad! Go absolutely wild with ideas and then they (the artistic board) can cherry pick the best ones. So they are only taking people who are already inspired by the work they are showing them, which is just a phenomenal idea. I wish more companies did it.”
That is incredible, so a bottom up instead of a top down approach?
“Yes and it is brilliant. It is a brilliant way of thinking. I am pitching to them next month because of it. Because they are allowing people to do that and just pitch weird and off the wall things. It is a lot of fun.”
What lights your Fuse? How do gender dynamics play into ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ this show as an aspect of Shakespearean times and how do they reflect upon today?
“One of the things my dramaturg on Love’s Labour’s Lost brought to our first cast meeting was that this play highlights the differences between men and women [in Shakespearean] times and then flips them around. So generally, women were seen as being in high towers. They were removed, you didn’t approach them, you didn’t see them. There were all of these formalities around how a man would get access to a woman and start courting her.
In this show, it’s completely the opposite. The guys completely lock themselves away from everyone. And then the women have to be the suitors. They have to be the ones going up, knocking on the door, and saying, ‘Hey, we would like access to you.’ And the guys are being like, ‘No, no, no! You can’t come in.’ Which is totally opposite of what it would have been. And so it plays with this interesting idea about how love and courtship works.
Of course, at the end, the guys are totally head over heels in love. They practically shout, ‘Marry me, marry me!’ But the girls say, ‘Hmmmm, maybe not…’ They are put in the position to be able to say no, which is very unusual. Almost never would have happened. The guys are begging, ‘Please, please!’ But the girls respond, ‘Maybe you have some growing up to do. Perhaps in a year we will reconsider.’ Which is strange. It is unheard of for anyone to do that. It makes the ending of this play something of an oddity, in how the resolution goes, because we are used to, ‘It’s a Shakespeare comedy! It’s going to end in wedding! Oh how cute! Yay!’ But at the end of this show, the ladies simply say, ‘We don’t think so. We are going to go now.’
I like the end of this show because I like to think how Shakespeare’s audience would have watched it and have been surprised. ‘Woah! They are not getting married? How is that possible?’ It’s cool that it plays with the gender roles in that way.”
Do you think many of those sentiments would carry today? That today’s audiences would still think, ‘What? They are not getting married?’
“I think they do. They think, ‘Oh it’s comedy; it’s going to end in a wedding, or in kids, or a bunch of couples getting together at the very least.’ And then it doesn’t. I think it surprises people.
Since we have already mounted this project once for a few weeks in June, with people we either get, ‘Oh really we like this play, but with that ending, ooo, rough ending!’ or we get, ‘Oh that ending was so interesting.”
Because the ending makes people uncomfortable?
“Yes, because it is not an ending they expect. In a way, it’s like not having an ending at all. It’s almost as if someone runs in halfway through the last scene and says, ‘Okay, bye folks, that’s it!,’ which is very disorienting.”
Come see Love Labour’s Lost this weekend at Central Park, San Mateo!
Friday and Saturday at 7 pm, Sunday at 2:30 pm.
Free Admission!
Shakespeare meets ‘90s pop rock!
Ferdinand, the king (of pop music), and his loyal boy band have sworn off women. But what happens when a Princess arrives, with her spicy friends? Romance, comedy, misdelivered letters, and overheard confessions fill this early Shakespeare comedy, newly reimagined through a modern pop star lens!
More information here: http://www.svshakespeare.org/our-season/loves-labours-lost/
2021 Сopyright by Fuse Theatre . Privacy Policy
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Cultural Conservation
Cultural Conservation: an Opportunity for You and Your Family
A Tale of Two Families
How You Can Help Your Family Today!
A Personal Plan of Action for You
Telesummit
About Mark! My Words
About Our Musical Heritage
Purchase “Our Musical Heritage”
Joy of Music
Delight of Language
Pride of Achievement
Our Vanishing History
Learning for a Lifetime
Joy of Music |
| by Mark Evans
Do Your Children Think Beethoven is a Saint Bernard?
You may be tempted to shout, “Of course not!” But think again.
Beethoven was a popular 1992 film about a giant St. Bernard that was named after the legendary composer. The film found such a large audience that a sequel was produced and titled Beethoven’s 2nd. If your children aren’t encountering classical music, they may well think that “Beethoven” is the name of the dog or the movie in which he starred.
Nor is classical music the only genre of music your children and grandchildren may be missing. Jazz, classic film scores, and pieces from the Great American Songbook are also likely to be ignored. There are reasons for this and it is essential that you understand them so that you help members of your family experience the joy of real music.
Today the classical music world is in turmoil.
Major symphony orchestras have simply been dissolved for financial reasons. The legendary New York City Opera filed for bankruptcy. These are events that would have seemed unthinkable only a few years ago. While public broadcasting stations broadcast classical concerts on occasion, classic musicians almost never perform on commercial television.
A few classical superstars are well-known to the public as celebrities, but by and large, classical music has become a niche appealing to an increasingly aging audience.
Classical music is simply irrelevant to the pervasive pop culture.
The causes of this sad state of affairs are many. In the years following World War I, many composers of concert music began rejecting many of the traditional values of melody, harmony, and rhythm, substituting intellectual theories for creativity and imagination. (The distinguished American symphony composer Roy Harris once asked, “Without melody, harmony, or rhythm, what do they have left?”
The result is that many in the classical music audience developed a dislike for modern concert music and actually try to avoid hearing it performed. They will go to great lengths to achieve this, arriving late or leaving early if a modern work is on the program. There are producers of classical music concerts who actually tell visiting artists, “Don’t perform anything written after 1920.” Since virtually all of the music written by living composers was written after 1920, this effectively closes the door of opportunity for anyone trying to write symphonies, operas, or chamber music today.
While the classical music world seems to be withering on the vine for lack of funds, the same cannot be said for the world of popular music.
Beginning in the late 1950’s with the advent of rock ‘n’ roll, continuing in the 1960’s with the so-called “British invasion,” rock record promoters essentially took over the world of popular music and turned it into a multi-billion dollar colossus. With a fortune to be made in selling recordings to teenagers, these promoters generated enormous pressure in every genre of music imaginable. Composers of film music were pressured to produce scores that could appeal to a huge teenage audience. Broadway producers scrambled to present musical theater productions that could be perceived as “contemporary,” This usually meant that they were looking for so-called “rock operas” that could appeal to the same audience. Jazz musicians were privately conflicted about the advent of rock. Some saw it as a threat to real jazz and recognized the rock stars as charlatans who typically knew four chords and couldn’t sing without massive amplification and groups of gyrating backup singers. But others were quick to seize the commercial opportunity to jump aboard a commercial bandwagon and hence “jazz-rock” was born.
Today, young audiences interested in popular music are likely to be listening to rock, pop, or rap, with an occasional country recording thrown in for good measure. So while classical music is directed at an increasingly smaller and self-styled elite audience, popular music has abandoned all pretense of artistry in pursuit of the fast buck. This situation has been made more egregious by critics and academics who want to be perceived as contemporary and are quick to lend their credentials to the latest fads.
What are the genres of popular music that are in danger of fading into oblivion?
Labeling musical genres can be tricky and frequently inaccurate.
Jazz is an American musical treasure, essentially produced through simultaneous composition and performance. Many of the finest jazz musicians have been classically trained, but there are countless classical artists who cannot improvise a note and can only play what has been put before them on a printed page.
There was a golden age of film scoring, beginning in the 1930s and running through the 1960s. This doesn’t mean that there haven’t been fine scores written since then, but the music of the golden age is often released today on CD by so-called boutique labels in small and limited editions.
During the first half of the 20th century, with work continuing into the 1960s, an incredibly gifted group of composers and lyricists created what we have come to call “The Great American Song Book.” Their works found a home on Broadway with the creation of a distinctly American musical theater, in musical motion pictures, and in the mythical street address known as “Tin Pan Alley.” Well-crafted melodies bursting with musical expression and sophisticated lyrics were the hallmark of these musical pioneers.
In today’s world of digital downloads, I-Pads, smart phones, and mobile devices of every type, what passes for music is often simplistic amplified noise accompanying crude and occasionally obscene lyrics. But this is the throbbing sound of the pop culture. Too many teachers have fallen prey to the notion that to capture the attention of their students, they need to communicate with them on their own level and hope that they will discover other types of music as they mature. There are teachers, let alone students, who show no signs of maturing.
If your children and grandchildren are introduced to the best classical and popular music early in their lives, they will be provided with a standard for comparison. As they grow, they are far less likely to fall prey to ghastly influences in the age of MTV. You can do this for them and discover a treasure trove of new music that can impact your life as well.
All it takes is a sense of resolve to discover the joy of music together. So when your children (and the children they may have one day) hear the name Beethoven, they will first think of the composer after whom the St. Bernard was named.
Are you certain that your you and your family will have the opportunity to encounter the best of our musical heritage? To find out what you can do to make sure that the answer to this question is “yes,” click here
Beethoven, Classical music, Great American Songbook, Ludwig van Beethoven, New York City Opera, Roy Harris, Tin Pan Alley, United States
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Welcome to Cultural Conservation
http://www.culturalconservation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Culturalconservation2.mp4
Consideration with an English Accent
How Listening to Good Music Can Shape Your Family For the Better
To Read or Not to Read Music or “What Hamlet Might Have Asked If He Were a Musician”
A New Gospel According to GQ
An Award Is Known By The Company It Keeps
© 2014-2019 CulturalConservation.org
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BLATZ
(56) Jesus said: He who has known the world has found a corpse; and he who has found a corpse, the world is not worthy of him.
(56) Jesus said, “Whoever has become acquainted with the world has found a corpse, and the world is not worthy of the one who has found the corpse.”
DORESSE
61 [56]. Jesus says: “He who has known the world has fallen into a corpse; and he who has fallen into a corpse, the world is not worthy of him!”
Scholarly Quotes
Robert M. Grant and David Noel Freedman write: “Knowing the world is equivalent to finding a corpse (or, in the parallel Saying 80, a body); this knowledge and this discovery are evidently regarded as good, for the world is not worthy of the discoverer (cf., Hebrews 11:38, and page 77). Knowing the world, then, must be truly knowing it for what it is. But we must also consider one more saying (109). The world is not worthy of the one ‘who will find himself.’ We conclude that Saying 57 [56], like these variants we have cited, is based on the verse which in Matthew (10:39; cf., Mark 8:34-35) follows the verses cited in Saying 56 [55]. ‘He who finds his soul [life] will lose it, and he who loses his soul for my sake will find it.’ Either Thomas simply mystifies his readers by speaking of a corpse or he uses ‘corpse’ as the equivalent for ‘body’ and hence for ’self.’ The Naassenes used ‘corpse’ of the spiritual man (Hippolytus, Ref., 5, 8, 22).” (The Secret Sayings of Jesus, p. 164)F. F. Bruce writes: “To say that the world is not worthy of someone (cf. Hebrews 11.38) is to commend him; therefore (strange as it may seem) to find a corpse is praiseworthy. The Naassenes, according to Hippolytus, spoke of the spiritual body as a ‘corpse’. [The reason for this strange use of ‘corpse’ was that the spiritual essence is ‘buried’ in the body as a corpse is buried in a tomb (Hippolytus, Refutation v.8.22).] But the analogy of Saying 111 (‘as for him who finds himself, the world is not worthy of him’) suggests that here ‘corpse’ means ‘body’ as used in the sense of ’self’. If so, we may have a cryptic parallel to the canonical saying about gaining the world and losing one’s own self, or vice versa (Luke 9.24f.; Matthew 16.25f.), which follows a saying about denying self and taking up the cross (cf. Saying 55).” (Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament, p. 135)Stevan Davies writes: “Gos. Thom. 56 is a scribal alteration of saying 80, the word ptoma having been substituted for soma.” (http://www.misericordia.edu/users/davies/thomas/jblprot.htm)Kurt Rudolph says of Saying 56: “in saying 80 the same is said, but instead of ‘corpse’ the reference is to the ‘body’ of the world).” (Gnosis, p. 264)Funk and Hoover write: “The fact that there are two versions suggests that some such saying might have circulated previously in an oral form. Yet both sayings deprecate the created world in a way that is typical of Thomas (27:1; 110; 111:3) and atypical of Jesus. Furthermore, the notion that the world is evil, or corrupt, and is to be shunned is common in other gnostic writings. The Fellows therefore concluded that this saying, in both its forms, originated in early Christian circles such as the one that produced the Gospel of Thomas. It represents gnostic tendencies of one branch of the Christian movement.” (The Five Gospels, p. 505)Gerd Ludemann writes: “Thomas 80 corrsponds to Thomas 56, the ojly difference being that there we have ‘body’ instead of ‘corpse’. For Thomas this world is a sphere opposed to God. So the commandment is to abstain from it (21.1). But the Gnostic must first recognize it as an anti-world in order to be able to turn tk the true life. Cf. Gospel of Philip 93: ‘This world is an eater of life. Because of this, none of those who are nourished on the [truth] will die. Jesus came from that place and brought food from there. And to those who wished he gave [life, so that] they will not die.’” (Jesus After 2000 Years, p. 618)
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David Luiz signs new Arsenal deal
Veteran defender David Luiz has signed a new one-year deal with Arsenal, the Premier League club announced on Wednesday.
The 33-year-old Brazil international joined the Gunners last year from Chelsea on an initial 12-month deal.
He was heavily criticised after being sent off in last week’s 3-0 loss to Manchester City — when the Premier League resumed after the coronavirus shutdown.
But Arsenal technical director Edu hailed Luiz’s influence on and off the pitch.
“David is a really important player for us,” he told the club website.
“He has played most of our matches this season and has been important for the team. His passing, his communication with the team on and off the pitch — he helps everyone.”
Arsenal have also moved to make the temporary moves of fellow defenders Pablo Mari and Cedric Soares into permanent arrangements, while midfielder Dani Ceballos’s loan from Real Madrid has been extended until the end of the 2019/20 season.
“I am really happy that we will have these players in our squad for the future,” said Edu.
“They have been part of the long-term technical plan (manager) Mikel (Arteta) and I have developed. They bring the right balance to our squad.”
Arsenal, who are 10th in the table, will bid to end a run of two defeats since the resumption away at Southampton on Thursday.
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Cristiano Ronaldo has now scored more goals than Brazil’s Pele
Juventus superstar, Cristiano Ronaldo has now moved above Brazil football legend, Pele to climb second in the all-time goalscoring charts.
Ronaldo’s two strikes against Udinese on Sunday helped him achieve the feat and move closer to becoming the all time highest goal scorer in the game of football.
The 35-year-old opened the scoring in the first half with a superb strike pass a helpless Juan Musso.
He came back in the second half to score his second as the Old Lady extended their lead to 3-0 at the Allianz Stadium.
His brace on Sunday night means that he has scored 758th goal in his glittering career and moved one ahead of Pele on the all-time list.
Ronaldo now hopes to chase and overtake Slavia Prague legend, Josef Bican, who scored 805 goals in 530 matches between 1931 and 1955.
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Trivia Facts About Kazakhstan
Now, when you have learnt some fast and important facts about Kazakhstan, it's time to widen your knowledge with the other fun and interesting facts.
Join in and add your own fun facts about Kazakhtan.
The apple trees originated in the mountains of the Central Asia, namely Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uyghur Autonomous Region of China.
Many wild apple trees still grow in various parts of Kazakhstan.
The name of the major city and the former capital of Kazakhstan, Almaty, means a "place full of apples".
The national symbol of Holland Tulip, originated in and around the mountains and steppes of Kazakhstan.
The tulip was first introduced to Europe only at the end of the 16th century, during the Tulip era of the Ottoman Empire.
Then it gained the reputation of the sign of abundance.
To start with the price per bulb in Holland was at times equal to the price of a house in Amsterdam.
A very rare species of the endangered Sogdian Ash Tree grows along the Charyn River of Kazakhstan. The Ash Tree Grove extends to 800 ha. The uniqueness of the grove is that the tree survived the Glacial Age. It co-exists with the Charyn "Grand Canyonette".
The world's first and largest space launch site is situated in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
There is actually a town called Baikonur a few hundred kilometers away from the space center.
The name Baikonur was given to the space launch site by the Soviets to cause confusion and keep the location secret.
7 Facts About Kazakhstan - Geography
Kazakhstan is located both in Asia and in Europe. The Ural River, which forms the traditional boundary between these continents cuts through Kazakhstan in the West.
Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country in the world.
Kazakhstan takes the ninth place in the world by area, i.e. after 1) Russia, 2) Canada, 3) China, 4) the USA, 5) Brazil, 6) Australia, 7) India and 8) Argentina.
The distance from one end of Kazakhstan to the other is as much as from London to Istanbul.
Comparatively Kazakhstan is:
more than twice the combined size of the other four Central Asian countries;
about twice the size of Alaska;
four times the size of Texas;
five times the size of France;
equivalent to the size of Western Europe;
equivalent to the size of the following seven largest European states put together: France, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Finland, Italy and Great Britain;
equivalent to the size of such states of Asia, as Pakistan, Turkey, Iraq, Japan and Vietnam taken together.
The highest point in Kazakhstan is 7010 meters (about 23 000 ft), which is the top of the mountain Khan Tengri of the Tian Shan mountain range. It is also is the world's most northern 7000m peak.
The lowest point is 132 meters (433 ft) below the sea level, the bottom of the Karagiye depression in the Mangystau province east of the Caspian Sea, which is one of the lowest elevations on Earth.
The country consists of the Steppe 804,500 sq.km (310,600 sq. mi) Steppe, which is one-third of the territory and is the world's largest dry steppe region.
Some miscellaneous facts about Kazakhstan
As you know from the Kazakhstan Facts page, the capital of Kazakhstan is Astana. Do you know what it means? It literally means "capital".
Kazakhstan people celebrate three New Years. Two official ones, which are the 1 January by the Gregorian Calendar and the 22 March, "Nauryz", the spring equinox or renewal of nature. 14 January by the Julian Calendar is the legacy of the Soviet times. This day is called "the Old New Year".
Although Kazakhstan is a landlocked country it still has its own navy.
Out of 110 elements from the Mendeleev's table of chemical elements 99 were detected on the Kazakhstan territory.
The weather in various parts (a few streets up or down) of Almaty can differ quite significantly, due to its altitude from 600 meters (aprx. 1970 ft) to 1500 meters (aprx. 4920 ft) above the sea level.
Koumiss, the traditional drink was referred to as the milk champaigne by A. Myers in 1877, in his Treatise on Koumiss "The Great Russian Remedy for Wasting, Debilitating and Nervous Diseases.
There is an Ostrich farm next to Almaty. Although the Golden Eagle is the symbol of Kazakhstan, it doesn't mind that its flightless friends use some of its vast space.
If you are interested in more facts about Kazakhstan, do come back and check every now and again, as I will be adding more in due course.
If you have some funny facts about Kazakhstan, that you want to share, you can do it here in 4 very simple steps. Join In.
Have A Great Fact on Kazakhstan?
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What Other Visitors Have Said
Click below to see contributions from other visitors to this page...
First Nuclear Free Country
Kazakhstan was the first country in the world who abandoned atomic bombs!
Kazakhstan had 4 capitals: Orenburg, Kyzylorda, Almaty, Astana. So in 92 years Kazakhstan changed its capital 3 times.
Number one exporter of potassium.
Kazakhstan is in Europe and Asia.
Kazakhstan is in Europe and Asia, however 96% of the population is in the Asia part.
The Second Coldest Capital
Kazakhstan's capital Astana is the second coldest capital in the world . It could get as low as -50 Celsius below during winter. Image credit …
Longest Continuous Border
Kazakhstan border with Russia is the longest continuous border between two countries. It is 6846 kilometers.
Return from the Facts about Kazakhstan to the Guide to Kazakhstan home page
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R-9 - Act respecting the Québec Pension Plan
40. For each of the years 1966 and 1967, the amount of the Maximum Pensionable Earnings is $5,000.
For each of the years 1968 to 1972, the amount of the Maximum Pensionable Earnings is obtained by multiplying $5,000 by the ratio that the Pension Index for the year bears to the Pension Index for the year 1967.
For the years 1973, 1974 and 1975, the Maximum Pensionable Earnings shall be $5,900, $6,600 and $7,400, respectively.
For each of the years 1976 to 1987, the amount of the Maximum Pensionable Earnings for one year is equal to 112 1/2% of the Maximum Pensionable Earnings for the preceding year, until it has reached 52 times the Base Wage for the year; commencing with the year it reaches such level, it shall be equal, for each year, to 52 times the Base Wage.
For the year 1988, the amount of the Maximum Pensionable Earnings is equal to the Maximum Pensionable Earnings for the year 1987 multiplied by the ratio that the average, for the twelve-month period ending on 30 June 1987, of average weekly salaries and wages of the Industrial Composite in Canada for each month within that period, as published by Statistics Canada under the Statistics Act (Revised Statutes of Canada, 1985, chapter S-19), bears to the average, for the twelve-month period ending on 30 June 1986, of average weekly salaries and wages of the Industrial Composite in Canada for each month within that period, as published by Statistics Canada under the Statistics Act.
For the year 1989 and each subsequent year, the amount of the Maximum Pensionable Earnings is equal to the Maximum Pensionable Earnings for the preceding year, established without reference to the seventh and eighth paragraphs, multiplied by the ratio that the average, for the twelve-month period ending on 30 June of the preceding year, of average weekly salaries and wages of the Industrial Composite in Canada for each month within that period, as published by Statistics Canada under the Statistics Act bears to the average, for the twelve-month period ending with the end of June of the year immediately preceding that preceding year, of average weekly salaries and wages of the Industrial Composite in Canada for each month within that period, as published by Statistics Canada under the Statistics Act.
When the product obtained under the second, fourth, fifth and sixth paragraphs is not a multiple of $100, the next lowest multiple of $100 shall be substituted therefor.
Notwithstanding the second, fourth, fifth and sixth paragraphs, the Maximum Pensionable Earnings for a year shall not be lower than the Maximum Pensionable Earnings for the preceding year.
1965 (1st sess.), c. 24, s. 37; 1972, c. 53, s. 10; 1973, c. 16, s. 5; 1974, c. 16, s. 4; 1987, c. 14, s. 1.
40. For each of the years 1966 and 1967, the amount of the Maximum Pensionable Earnings is $5 000.
For each of the years 1968 to 1972, the amount of the Maximum Pensionable Earnings is obtained by multiplying $5 000 by the ratio that the Pension Index for the year bears to the Pension Index for the year 1967.
For the years 1973, 1974 and 1975, the Maximum Pensionable Earnings shall be $5 900, $6 600 and $7 400, respectively.
For each of the years 1976 to 1987, the amount of the Maximum Pensionable Earnings for one year is equal to 1121/2% of the Maximum Pensionable Earnings for the preceding year, until it has reached 52 times the Base Wage for the year; commencing with the year it reaches such level, it shall be equal, for each year, to 52 times the Base Wage.
For the year 1988, the amount of the Maximum Pensionable Earnings is equal to the Maximum Pensionable Earnings for the year 1987 multiplied by the ratio that the average, for the twelve-month period ending on 30 June 1987, of average weekly salaries and wages of the Industrial Composite in Canada for each month within that period, as published by Statistics Canada under the Statistics Act (Statutes of Canada, 1970-71-72, chapter 15), bears to the average, for the twelve-month period ending on 30 June 1986, of average weekly salaries and wages of the Industrial Composite in Canada for each month within that period, as published by Statistics Canada under the Statistics Act.
For the years 1973, 1974 and 1975, the Maximum Pensionable Earnings shall be $5 900, $6 600 and $7 400 respectively.
For the year 1976 and each subsequent year, the amount of the Maximum Pensionable Earnings for one year is equal to 1121/2% of the Maximum Pensionable Earnings for the preceding year, until it has reached 52 times the Base Wage for the year; commencing with the year it reaches such level, it shall be equal, for each year, to 52 times the Base Wage.
When the product obtained under the second or fourth paragraph is not a multiple of $100, the next lowest multiple of $100 shall be substituted therefor.
The Maximum Pensionable Earnings for a year shall not be lower than the Maximum Pensionable Earnings for the preceding year.
1965 (1st sess.), c. 24, s. 37; 1972, c. 53, s. 10; 1973, c. 16, s. 5; 1974, c. 16, s. 4.
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Last update: September 11 12:34 pm MST
Land of giants and eagles
Indian Wells is an oversized sculpture garden
INDIAN WELLS, Ariz., April 16, 2013
(Editor's note: In an effort to chronicle the beauty and diversity of the Navajo Nation, as well as its issues, the Navajo Times has committed to visiting all 110 chapters in alphabetical order. This is the 34th in the series.)
(Times photo — Cindy Yurth)
TOP: map
SECOND FROM TOP: Gorilla Head and Twin Peak are just two of the iconic rock formations that guard Indian Wells Chapter. They are part of the Hopi Buttes Volcanic Field, and are old volcanic plugs. While they definitely give this chapter some character, the igneous rock also leaches toxic heavy metals into the water table, rendering some of the windmill-powered wells unsafe to drink from.
A gorilla that dwarfs King Kong scowls at the traffic flowing down Navajo Route 6. In the background are the humps of a sleeping dromedary. Drive toward Holbrook at a certain time of day, and you will notice a giant Santa Claus keeping track of whether passersby are naughty or nice.
Out here, says Indian Wells native Dorothy Denetclaw, "We see things into the rocks."
The huge grayish-black rock sculptures are actually maars and diatremes (basically leftovers of a volcanic event) of the Hopi Buttes Volcanic Field. They define this oft-overlooked chapter as much as the "Indian wells," a series of springs and shallow wells with colorful names like "Poking Springs," "Dogwater" and "The Late Crazy Man's Spring."
According to Denetclaw's family's oral history, Navajos started settling here in the 1880s, a splinter group of Ganado Mucho's band who was overpopulating the area around Cornfields and decided to strike out on their own. But it was already a major overland route for the U.S. military. The old stone building by the Bitahochee Trading Post was an Army depot during the Civil War, and according to Denetclaw, the gas company once dug up the skeleton of a Spanish conquistador, still fully clad in his armor - revealing that this was a war path much earlier still.
(A treasure may lie buried in one of the washes as well; local legend has it a band of Navajos ambushed the Army supply caravan one year, stealing the food and livestock and stashing the payroll cash, figuring it was valuable but not knowing what to do with it.)
Even before the conquistadors, the Anasazi were here. They left ruins of what were perhaps fortresses or lookout towers on the tops of nearly every butte. According to Denetclaw, one of the ruins is surrounded by a puzzling layer of sand, as though the Ancient Ones had hauled it up the steep hill for the desert version of a lawn. Even in the 1000s, apparently, there were Joneses to keep up with.
Reclaiming history
But the modern community of Indian Wells sprang up around a trading post started at the old depot by John Theodore Thysing, a Prussian who enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry in 1873 as a cigar maker and was discharged five years later.
Quite a bit is known about Thysing, thanks to Redwing Nez, who is trying to restore the old post, and Egon Koch, a German journalist who met Nez when he was traveling through the reservation. The men became interested in Thysing's little military-issue tombstone behind the post, and thanks to meticulous German record-keeping, have managed to piece together much of his life, starting with his birth in Westphalia.
Nez has obtained the business-site lease to the place, and is slowly but surely raising money to restore the old post. He envisions it as a combination coffee shop/visitors' center/community center, with a corner devoted to the old Prussian.
Nez, who literally stood in front of the bulldozers when the tribe tried to tear down Bitahochee during the hantavirus scare of the 1990s, is continually amazed he can't get more support for the venture from the community.
"This is history!" he gushes as he gives a reporter a tour. "Our history!"
The 53-year-old recalls sitting on the steps of the post as a child, licking an ice cream cone.
An artist of some renown, Nez has set up his studio in the post's old wool shed, and is in the process of getting electricity to the main building so he can start working on it in earnest.
Nez has set up a foundation with a board of directors whose ancestors helped build the post. To learn more about Bitahochee and Nez's efforts, visit www.bitahochee.blogspot.com/.
The post has become something of a bone of contention within the community. While some people think the chapter should be throwing money at the project instead of just passing resolutions in support of it, others would like to tear it down and build a modern gas station and convenience store on the prime real estate at the crossroads of N15 and N6 - which, according to Claudia Jackson, is about to get a whole lot more prime with the advent of Twin Arrows Casino to the southeast.
Jackson, a member of the Community Land Use Planning Committee and an aide to Council delegate Elmer P. Begay, is bullish on Indian Wells. The chapter has withdrawn 25 acres at the intersection for commercial activity, hoping to lure other businesses to join the Baldwin Gravel Pit and an out-of-the-way gas station and convenience store on the road to White Cone.
Other kinds of development
While commercial development may be lagging, other kinds of community development are coming along fine in this small and tight-knit chapter.
The chapter has partnered with neighboring southwestern chapters, the Navajo Nation Police Department, the Office of Youth Development, the Navajo Housing Authority and the Winslow Indian Health Center to create a "Summer Jam" program similar to one in Chinle, with a variety of fun and educational activities.
A running club, "Rez Soles," and a cycling club, "Cycling Ma'iis," have been set up to encourage fitness. On July 7, the Ma'iis and anyone else who wants to join in will embark on a ride from Twin Arrows to the Navajo Nation Council Chambers, carrying a proclamation they hope the Council will adopt. It will encourage the Council delegates to set a good example by setting aside one day a year for their lunch to be catered by a Navajo chef who specializes in healthy food made with local ingredients.
In addition to these less tangible improvements, the chapter is working on extending its water and electric lines, and crossing its collective fingers that NTUA will bring it cell service and wireless, two things that our sorely lacking now.
A strong chapter spirit is no surprise at Indian Wells, where, according to Denetclaw, chapter government as we know it started.
Denetclaw, a case worker for the tribe in the early 1980s, was frustrated with the condition of the chapter house.
"It was all cobwebs," she said. "All the chapter houses were like that. People would go there once a month for the meeting, but it's not a place they liked to hang around."
In 1983, Denetclaw went to then-Chairman Peterson Zah with a proposal to give each chapter enough money to hire some employees and clean up their chapter houses. It was the beginning of increasing autonomy on the Navajo Nation.
Fighting for a chair
Indian Wells also was the scene of a showdown between the locals and the Holbrook School Board.
Indian Wells children had been bused to Holbrook for years, but the Navajos had never had any representation on the school board.
"The board was all white, all Mormon and all men," Denetclaw recalled. "Half of them were also on the county commission. They had no idea the kind of things our children were facing out here."
In 1988, a parent, George Clark, sued the school district, and the district - perhaps realizing the fight for Civil Rights had already been fought and won in most of the country and they wouldn't have a leg to stand on if the case reached federal jurisdiction - settled out of court.
Encouraged by having a seat on the school board, the Diné parents did not rest on their laurels. They started agitating for their own school.
Finally, with a push from Arizona State Sen. Jack C. Jackson Sr., Indian Wells Elementary became a reality in 2002.
"It's a very nice school and attracts a lot of students from all over the area," said Claudia Jackson, who thinks she might be a distant relation to Jackson. While many reservation schools are losing enrollment, Indian Wells is bursting at the seams with 500 students at last count.
Fight for flight
But there are fights left to be fought. The current battle is on behalf of some local wildlife.
During the settlement of the Navajo-Hopi land dispute, the Navajos were awarded some land in exchange for which the Hopis would be allowed to harvest eaglets for their ceremonies on Navajo land.
The black buttes rising out of Indian Wells are not only picturesque, but prime eagle habitat the Hopis have been harvesting - or, if you ask Denetclaw, "stealing from" - for centuries.
Over the years, this has resulted in clashes with groups of Navajo vigilantes trying to protect the eagle nests. Gathering the eaglets - which are raised to adulthood in captivity and then ritually sacrificed - upsets the local Diné, who believe the birds carry prayers to the Holy People.
In recent years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife has set a limit of 40 eaglets total and 18 from the Navajo Nation to be captured by Hopi clan representatives. Last month, it proposed to reduce the number on Navajo land to five. This was immediately protested by the Hopis and last week, negotiations between the two tribes and Fish and Wildlife were held. The feds decided to keep the number at 18 until a study can be done on the impact of ritual harvesting on the eagle population.
However, the cost of such a study - which would have to be done by helicopter - is about $41 million, according to President Ben Shelly's spokesman, Erny Zah, so the Navajos are skeptical it will ever get done.
Nez, who watches the eagles on Eagle Butte from his studio, believes a compromise can be reached.
"Last year, they cleaned out the whole butte," he said, his irritation evident in his voice. "I think they should be limited to one from each nest. Let the eagles raise at least one of their young, so they don't get discouraged."
At this beautiful, historic and cohesive chapter, discouragement is not something anyone should have to feel.
Indian Wells at a Glance
Name - Named for a series of little springs and shallow wells that were collectively known as Indian Wells. The Navajo nam e, Tó Hahadleeh (Dipping Water) is similar and may stem from a dipping barrel kept by an early trader. Bitahochee, the name of the butte behind the trading post, means "Red Running up the Edge," referring to the color of the butte.
Population - 1,287
Major clans - Tótsohnii (the area was first settled by followers of Ganado Mucho, who was of this clan), Kinyáa'aanii, Tl'izilani, Tó'dich'íinii, Tsi'naajinii
Land area - 227,500 acres
Assets - good community spirit, on a fairly major crossroads about to get more major with the advent of Twin Arrows Casino
Problems - heavy metals in the well water, friction between residents and Hopis gathering eaglets for ceremonies
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Last update: November 21 12:27 pm MST
An eye on the past and the future
Still remote, Ojo Encino has developed quickly
(Editor's note: In an effort to chronicle the beauty and diversity of the Navajo Nation, as well as its issues, the Navajo Times has committed to visiting all 110 chapters in alphabetical order. This is the 61st in the series. Some information for this series is taken from the publication "Chapter Images" by Larry Rodgers.)
OJO ENCINO, N.M., Nov. 21, 2013
(Cindy Yurth - Navajo Times)
TOP: From the ruins of a granary where Navajos once stored their crops, the modern town of Ojo Encino can be seen in the distance. This very remote chapter has a clinic and a school, and a lone paved road from the chapter house to New Mexico Rte. 197.
BOTTOM: Reuben Jake walks toward the Ojo Encino, the small but dependable spring for which the chapter is named, Friday. Trash and graffiti around the spring is a recent phenomenon; back when people had to fetch water from here, Jake said, people had more respect for the “ojo.”
By the time we get to the Ojo Encino, the little eye-shaped spring, dusk is falling and the almost-full moon is high in the sky.
Somewhere behind us, a pack of coyotes sets up a blood-curdling wail.
This time of year, says Reuben Jake Jr., our guide for this remote chapter, the ma'ii are begging for snow.
"It makes it easier for them to hunt rabbits," he explains. "At least, that's what my father told me."
It's the kind of thing, Jake says, that every kid in Ojo Encino used to know, until about 30 years ago when the chapter suddenly developed. NHA housing sprang up, along with a clinic, a Head Start and a Behavioral Health facility.
"Before that, there was nothing here," Jake said. "Just the school."
Much was gained when running water and electricity finally came to this far eastern edge of the reservation, but something was lost too.
Jake, 58, points out the graffiti and trash around the spring. "Teenagers," he mutters.
Jake says nobody from his generation would defile the spring, which flows all year round and, according to Jake, produces some of the sweetest water on the rez.
"We used to come here every day to get water," he says. "Now, they just turn on the NTUA tap. They don't realize what a special thing water is."
On this barren, sandy plateau, with the last rays of sun glinting off the little ojo's trickle of tears, it seems a magical place indeed. Jake picks up an empty bottle and flings it away from the water.
Other things have changed since Jake was a kid. There's no sign of the farm fields that used to be all over the place, irrigated by the runoff from the ojo. The old stone granary where people used to store their crops has fallen in, and looks more Anasazi than Navajo.
This is the time of year when people used to socialize and share their harvest, but these days, the streets in the housing are empty.
Ojo Encino at a Glance
Name: Spanish for "Oak Eye" in reference to a small but reliable eye-shaped spring. The oaks are long gone, but there is a magnificent cottonwood guarding the spring, which is still used by residents who believe the water tastes better than treated tap water.
Population: 688 at the 2010 Census
Major clans: Tó Dích'íinii
Problems: isolation, lack of paved roads, no private business other than the clinic run by non-profit Presbyterian Medical Services
Assets: rights-of-way fees for oil and gas pipelines provide a small amount of income to local allottees; the chapter was recently certified under the Local Governance Act
Interesting facts: The chapter includes parts of four New Mexico counties and sits on top of the Continental Divide.
"Everybody just sits in their own house and watches TV," Jake laments.
Actually, right now, that sounds like a really good idea. The coyotes have failed to call down snow, but they have managed a freezing drizzle that is rapidly turning the sandy dirt roads to corn meal mush.
Problem No. 1 here, as in so many chapters: lack of pavement. The only paved route to Ojo Encino involves taking New Mexico Highway 509 past Torreon, then north on 197 and about eight miles in from there to the chapter house. There are some dirt-road shortcuts, but, trust this reporter, you have to know what you're doing or you can get dangerously lost.
People out here, according to Jake, don't even bother to call the police when there's a mishap. It will be hours, if they get here at all.
The county sheriff? First you have to determine which county you're in. Ojo Encino Chapter comprises bits of Sandoval, McKinley, San Juan and Rio Arriba. Jake says, here on the extreme eastern edge of the rez, the closest police force may be in Cuba, N.M. or the neighboring Jicarilla Apache reservation -- but of course, they have no power outside of their jurisdictions.
The chapter even straddles two continental watersheds. It may not look like it on this broad, almost vegetation-free plateau, but you're at 7,000 feet here, atop the Continental Divide.
The plus side of living in Ojo Encino? This place is so out in the middle of nowhere that, as the crow flies anyway, it's on the way to everywhere. Seven different pipelines bring petroleum products through here, and they're working on a new one.
"Natural gas, gasoline, jet fuel; you name it, we've got a pipeline for it," Jake boasts. This is good news for the chapter's many allottees, who get right-of-way revenue from the pipeline companies, although most would argue it's not anywhere near enough.
The chapter is certified now, so it's ready for any businesses that might come its way.
That hasn't happened yet, but you never know -- 30 years ago, it was hard for people to imagine what Ojo Encino would look like today.
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USF awards PEP grants, tertiary scholarship
KINGSTON, Jamaica— Twenty eight top performing students in the 2020 Primary Exit Profile (PEP) have benefited from education grants from the Universal Service Fund (USF) to cover study-related expenses in secondary school.
The students, one boy and one girl from each parish, received a cheque valued at $40,000 during a ceremony on Tuesday at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston.
In addition, the USF Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH) scholarship was awarded to Shantel Williams to cover her tertiary studies in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) at Church Teachers’ College.
Minister of Science, Energy and Technology, Daryl Vaz, in his keynote address, said he is always heartened by initiatives that invest in the education of the nation’s children.
He noted that “children are the light of their families and the hope of countries. They represent the next generation of world changers and are filled with tremendous capacity and potential and we must give them every opportunity to fulfil their potential”.
Vaz congratulated the recipients and encouraged them to use the awards as a launching pad to pursue their dreams and advance the country’s welfare.
“Your work has proven that you are capable and you have the potential and the ability to change not just your life but to also transform this nation,” he said.
“Set goals for yourself, aspire towards great things, apply yourself to your studies and aggressively pursue your dreams. Never settle for mediocrity but never be afraid to fail, because sometimes failure is the fuel that births success,” he added.
Minister of Education, Youth and Information, Fayval Willias, during a recorded video presentation, also offered commendations to the students.
“Your hard work and discipline have paid off and you are deservedly being rewarded today. Scholarship awardees, you have done yourself proud and your schools proud and I wish all of you success in your studies,” she said.
She also thanked USF for investing in the country’s youth.
Executive Director of the USF, Daniel Dawes, for his part, said the agency is very pleased to support the education of the country’s youth, noting that it is a worthwhile investment.
“These programmes form a part of the USF commitment to ensure that Jamaica becomes a knowledge-based society,” he added.
The USF’s annual scholarship awards is in keeping with the agency’s mandate to ensure Jamaica becomes a digitally literate and knowledge-based society.
The aim is to ignite interest in ICT on the part of the PEP recipients and propel tertiary students to achieve great heights in ICT.
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Tekkonkinkreet Review
Tekkonkinkreet follows two street orphans, Black and White, living in Treasure Town, a crumbling district being fought over by scavenging mobsters and soulless developers. Black and White are aptly named, Black being violent and aggressive, while conversely White is innocent and peaceful. Black and White are urban Lost Boys in a town filled with pirates, fighting ever increasing odds to achieve their dreams. To summarise the film much more would ruin the experience, as this films narrative story is a relatively small part of the overall experience. Although featuring a relatively involved plot, the film focusses on the character stories that surround the larger narrative. We see how plot elements affect the characters, rather than how the characters affect the plot.
All films, if not all stories, should be led by character and in films without obvious characters, such as more visual works, the character can be an abstract such as a location or a feeling. For example, 'Koyaanisqatsi’s' lead characters are the world and humanity as a whole.
The thing is, I can appreciate nice characterisation but if I can’t believe that the character has been characterised from living in that world then the story fundamentally fails and once a story has crossed that failure line there is narratively speaking, no going back. You don’t necessarily need a fascinating world for your characters to inhabit but you do need one that it is basically believable for your particular characters to exist within. You need a world built from a basic level of structure that makes sense.
Art and craft are intrinsically linked and both should complement each other. Craft seems to generally be separated and receive the raw end of the deal, being viewed as the necessary evil that allows the artistic vision to come alive. The issue is that a well-crafted story is in itself an art, having good ideas and characters well elevate it massively but the structure alone can be beautiful, much like with an empty honeycomb. Character however, requires some degree of truth to function, a good character can elevate a bad narrative but it can’t even exist in a non-believable one.
Now the above rant was for a reason, it was inspired by Tekkonkinkreet. Tekkonkinkreet breaks almost every rule it can. The characters exist in a basically real world, one that follows the same scientific and mathematical rules as ours. That being said characters constantly break these rules, doing ridiculous things such as jumping hundreds of feet into the air and surviving the fall afterwards. The thing is that these rules are arbitrary, some characters can do impossible things and some cannot without any apparent reason given. This unbelievable world becomes completely believable however, when filled with the characters that inhabit it. The world is a mixture of unbelievable and believable, because the characters are themselves both insane and sane. The narrative form works with the character function and they work very well together indeed.
The story is about very abstract concepts, such as the universal balance of good and evil and these elements are worked into a symbolic story of brotherhood. The strengths of the characters seemingly exist in one reality while their weaknesses exist in our own, creating a subjective reality that we are presented with, to interpret as we wish.
The basic heart of the story is the relationship between the two orphans, the older raising the younger and the problems they encounter. The fact that their story remains emotionally strong and real, despite the problems they encounter including aliens and demons, is a real testament to how well the characters are handled. This is primarily because the entire story is focussed on this brotherhood dynamic and even when it is not focussing on Black and White, it focuses on the brotherhood of two Yakusa and the partnership of two detectives. This helps the story of Black and White as it allows other facets of their nature to be explored without changing their characters to do so.
Tekkonkinkreet is a very tonal film and it deals with a lot of interesting concepts. Black and White are completely different in personality but are unable to function without the other, Black is yin to White’s Yang. In addition it is heavily implied that Black and White are suffering from mental problems that make them so distinctly polar in nature. White describes himself as being “made broken”. The fact that they have both been abandoned alone at the threshold of society, along with the venerable elderly is a powerful message.
In addition to this, there is also a strong environmental focus to the film. Black is almost like a spirit of nature, wanting to stop the extensive redevelopment of what he calls “my town” and keep it the way it is. White dreams of moving out of the city entirely and living at the beach. Both of them are trying to grow an apple tree within the city and are upset at how it won’t grow.
Primarily the film tells of what it is to be human. Tekkonkinkreet questions what we have lost as a species by losing our connection to nature and to the mystic, to gain ‘progress’.
The animation is primarily what people reference when talking about the film and it is very stylised and impressive. The animation is very fluid, mixing seamlessly between moments of calm and hyper kinetic action sequences. The camera shakes as the action sequences build, like a drink that is about to explode before following the characters as if they had been filmed live action. That being said you can see where the budget of this film has been spent, the action sequences run at a far higher frame rate to those of the slower and although it creates a tonal shift it would have been nice to see some of these more thoughtful sequences looking a bit more visually realistic.
The designs of the characters are also very effective with each characters design aesthetic being based on their personality, down to the shape of their faces. The city is also very expressive, being a character in its own right. The detail put into the city, considering its size is incredible. It looks like a moving art book.
Tekkonkinkreet is a very interesting film. It asks a lot of questions and leaves it up to the audience to answer them. It is a beautiful film but one that is both visually and tonally, not for everyone. The balance between reality and the impossible is generally handled very well but towards the end does become fairly firmly rooted in the impossible at the expense of some of the emotional realism the film has portrayed up to that point. That being said the film is easy to recommend. Tekkonkinkreet made me think and feel more than any film has in a long time. Films about ideas are fairly common but good films about ideas don’t come along that often.
Labels: Tekkonkinkreet Review
Doctor Who: 'The Caretaker' Review
Danny Pink is not an interesting character. So to devote a large amount of an episode, let alone an entire season to introduce him is ridiculous. I don’t blame Samuel Anderson for this, given that he gave a perfectly fine performance as Orson Pink in ‘Listen’ he can obviously act. With the kind of scripting that Danny Pink has, nobody could save this character and I really suspect Anderson’s doing the best he can with what he has to work with. The real issue is that Danny doesn’t have anything to his character aside from his soldier backstory. I can’t imagine what Danny does on his days off, aside from Clara or what music he might listen to, anything that make suggest he is a rounded character.
Ok real talk, a character having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder should be handled with a bit more care. I don’t mean in terms of offending people, although I’m fairly sure it shouldn’t, I mean narratively. If you’re going to pull from the big book of bad things, such as rape, murdered family members, PTSD and so on, it should be for a good narrative reason. Dark backstories are the narrative Pandora’s Box and once opened you need to be careful. When I say careful I mean that when used correctly you can make a good story better and handle the topic appropriately, when not...bad times.
‘Vincent and the Doctor’ managed to deal with the mental health angle with a reasonable deal of care and dignity. Not only that, but it managed to work the symbolic idea of an invisible monster into the actual plot that surrounded it. At this point all we know about Danny is that something bad happened to him when he was a soldier…that’s about it, if you’re going to make us feel sympathy for someone, we need to know who he is, what the war has done to make his life worse. I appreciate that some of this may be in future episodes but the back story was not introduced in future episodes, we have that now.
That being said the biggest issue with Danny is Clara, she agreed to go on a date with him within minutes of meeting him, despite seeing him have, what can nicely be described as a public meltdown. Now maybe she thinks he’s the new hotness and ignored the odd behaviour or maybe night terrors really turn her on. Now it’s possible that she feels sorry for him and is giving him a chance. Let’s ignore for a fact that she would be taking pity on him, which is a terrible way to introduce a disabled character. Why did she agree to a date? We didn’t see him do anything to show that he was a nice guy. We didn’t get a scene where she overheard him offering to help a student after hours or saving a cat or anything remotely to separate him from every other guy at the school, ignoring the ones who’d get her jail time from dating of course. Apparently she now loves him, so any more development isn’t really needed I guess? FYI Moffat, love doesn’t conquer all in fiction, we as an audience, without hormones to blind us, need to understand why they love each other.
I think Steven Moffat has developed writing shorthand of assuming the audience has seen every cliché and established trope in storytelling, so he doesn’t bother to use any of them, leaving undeveloped characters and scripts full of holes. I hope that the Clara wuvs Danny arc is not more of this and actually has a conclusion for once…
For ‘The Caretaker’, Moffat was writing with Gareth Roberts, a writer who usually injects a certain level of comedy to his scripts. This episode actually made me laugh several times, and I laughed with it, not at it, which makes a nice change. The overall plot made sense and Peter Capaldi continues to give a brilliant performance as the Doctor, not the same Doctor he was playing in the previous episodes apparently but good all the same….Ok that’s the good stuff over with.
We open with a ‘Love and Monsters’ like comedy montage to show Clara’s double life, complete with terrible keyboard demo music. Clara’s plight is made worse when The Doctor goes undercover at her school to track a back massager like Digimon that destroys everything. The robot killing machine is terrible, even by Doctor Who standards, I appreciate it isn’t meant to be the focus of the episode but it’s huge and shoots lasers so I’m going to rate it as if it were.
When the idea of The Doctor’s invisibility watch was discussed, why was it not used as the basis of a story by itself? The idea of invisibility and the danger of that power would be a good start for a character led episode, loads of potential. Instead it is used as a throwaway story element, one I suspect will never be seen again despite obvious plot uses for such a thing in future episodes. The script in general can’t see the wood for the trees, if the point of the episode was the five minute scenes with The Doctor and Danny squaring off, make that the entire episode! You could have trapped the three of them in the Tardis and had a character discussion based episode. You could have actually produced something interesting in the process, just possibly.
Now I’m going to be honest, when I mentioned the successful use of symbolism in Vincent and the Doctor I was setting this episode up, I tricked you all and I apologise. Attempts are made to add symbolism to ‘The Caretaker’ but they are handled worse than most media college students would. We have a disrupted chessboard at the school once The Doctor has arrived and a mirrored Clara talking about her double life. Top tip, symbolism is meant to be subtle. It works better when the audience doesn’t notice it immediately.
When the director wasn’t trying to work GCSE level art into the episode they were being distracted by the 1960’s Batman tv show. So distracted by Batman in fact, that they let the camera lean constantly back and forth, Dutch angle after Dutch angle, we get it! THINGS AREN’T HOW THEY SHOULD BE! THINGS ARE LEANING TO A DANGEROUS EXTENT!
This episode is really messy and far too ‘New Who’ for its own good. I think if i'd watched this episode without having seen the Clara/Doctor/Danny build up in previous episodes I would have liked it a lot more. As a standalone Who story it really isn't that bad, it's just that the character build up before this point has been terrible enough to condition me against it/them. The episode has some really funny lines and this brings a great comedy performance from Capaldi. He alone is keeping this season going and he yet again manages to just about scrape an episode from being unwatchable.
Labels: Doctor Who: The Caretaker Review
Disney Sleeping Beauty Review
Walt Disney took a gamble when putting together Sleeping Beauty, not only did he decide to shoot the film using a new widescreen 70mm format but he also chose to heavily stylise the film as if it were a ‘moving tapestry’. The long development times these decisions brought made the film the most expensive to date for Disney, which led to it being a commercial failure when originally released. The film also got mixed critical reception, with negative reviews criticising the story for a lack of character development. I decided to review Sleeping Beauty as, incredibly enough, it is one of the few animated Disney films I had never watched before, somehow missing it as a child.
Sleeping Beauty is a film led almost entirely by its visual design. That being said, where films such as Sucker Punch have beautiful design but very little else, Sleeping Beauty succeeds as a film. To be clear, this is not due to the story being a good compliment to the visuals as much as it is to the fact that Sleeping Beauty is such a visually beautiful film it distracts you from a lot of the conversely bland story content.
Stripping the visuals the story is very simplistic and aside from one MAJOR exception, the characters are bland and uninspired. Princess Aurora in particular has almost no character, her only traits being the gifts of beauty and song she was given as a baby. Prince Phillip isn’t a lot better, with his horse given more personality than him. We are only given the slightest pretence that Aurora and Phillip are in some way destined to be together, this is expected to be enough reason for us to believe that they want an immediate marriage to each other, despite having only spent 10 minutes together. This is the Disney trope of marrying someone you’ve just met at almost its very worst.
The major exception I mentioned earlier is the character of Maleficent, a villain who, with about 5 combined minutes of screen time, became Disney’s undisputed best villain. Eleanor Audley’s performance breaths fire into what could have been a throw away threat, giving multiple shades of black to a character that could have been easily one note. Vocal talent in the recording studio is coupled with the animation team’s sinister designs to create a distinctly unique character, one that for once, truly deserved a spin off.
The films Walt Disney personally produced are all beautiful, so for one to break away from the pack it has to be truly stunning. Every element of the design and animation of Sleeping Beauty is rich with the effort and skill used to create it. Nobody making the film could be charged with not doing their best on the project. If you compare Sleeping Beauty with a post Walt Disney, Disney studios film such as The Aristocats you can see the personal care and determination Walt Disney brought to the world of animation.
The film has a very clear design aesthetic throughout. Backgrounds are both visually complicated and muted, while characters are minimalist and vibrant. This makes the characters clearly pop, as if from a story book. This primary use of colour from the character is used on any element that is intended to draw focus, as with the green flames near the conclusion. Visual symbolism is rife throughout the film adding additional depth that is lacking from the majority of films, animated on not, produced even today.
The animation is still very impressive, particularly in the magical effects and movement of fabrics, they look almost digitally calculated. A lot of animated realism comes from the fact that Walt Disney chose to shoot the entire film live action as reference for the animators. When some films use rotoscoping for animation the characters look strange and it creates an unsettling effect. For Sleeping Beauty it is clear that this was used primarily as reference rather than as a tracing base, the characters move as animated humans would, not as humans actually do. You only need to see the ‘Once Upon a Dream” sequence to see how successful this is.
The story side of Sleeping Beauty has definite issues, the characters are mostly pop-up book in depth and the films relatively short running time makes the story pacing a bit rushed. That being said this is an outstandingly impressive Disney film and well deserving of the Disney classic branding. The animation and soundtrack is almost 60 years old but they would still impress on a film released today. I’d take ‘Once Upon a Dream’ over ‘Let it go’ any day.
Labels: Sleeping Beauty Review
Professor Layton and the Curious Village Review (DS)
Professor Layton, everyone’s favourite dot eyed, puzzle solving gentleman! If the DS brand had a mascot of its own, away from Nintendo’s overall Mario focus, it would be hard to think of a better candidate than Professor Layton. Layton represents the DS brand not only by his large volume of game titles but also by the genre that those games exist in, that of the puzzle game. Portable systems have a long history of being supported by puzzle games, due as much to the lower average computing requirements, as to the pick up and play nature of the genre. The Professor Layton games are a somewhat unusual member of the puzzle game club, because they give as much focus to solving puzzles as they do to storytelling.
‘Professor Layton and the Curious Village’ follows the titular Professor Layton and his “apprentice number one” Luke Triton as they travel to St. Mystere to attempt to solve the mystery of the Golden Apple and end an ongoing inheritance dispute. Upon arriving, the Professor and Luke discover that the village is pretty curious and set out to discover why it is so strange.
Reviewing a game such as this comes with the unfortunate issue that everyone playing it will have a different experience based on their ability and speed at solving puzzles, making criticism far more difficult to gauge. Most of the 135 puzzles are fairly good and work well. Having said this, the game has definite problems with a lot of its puzzles, problems which are hard to miss.
For starters, many of the puzzles aren’t really puzzles, in the traditional sense. Many of them are simply maths questions, which require knowledge of, for example, how to find the area of a square but aside from having some basic knowledge of mathematics, offer no real challenge. In addition to this, many of the puzzles give descriptions that are purposefully written to be vague and open for interpretation. This wouldn’t be an issue if not for the fact that some of the puzzle questions are just badly written, meaning that emphasis on words or a lack of words in a description becomes impossible to spot.
The game has an inbuilt three tier hint system. You use hint coins that you find in your travels to unlock hints for puzzles. The issue is that hint one, and usually hint two are painfully obvious, the first hint is quite often simply, ‘read the question carefully’. In order to therefore unlock hint three, which may actually help you, you have to spend three of the limited number of hint coins. This would not be an issue if not for the seemingly random complexity level of puzzle while progressing through the game. You earn Picarats for completing puzzles, the amount earned being an indicator of the difficulty of the puzzle, in theory. In practise a puzzle worth 20 Picarats may be far harder than one valued at 50 Picarats.
The amount of Picarats attached to the puzzles seem almost arbitrary at times, particularly as the game has different types of puzzles which different types of people will find easier or harder. I for example found the wordplay based puzzles far easier than the purely visually based puzzles. The constantly fluctuating difficulty makes the budgeting mechanic of Hint coins somewhat useless.
This is additionally frustrating as some of the puzzles are multiple choice and some require a written answer. This means that if you are willing to sacrifice points, some questions can be repeatedly retried at the expense of said points until successful, while other cannot. All this serves to do is to discourage you to seek the non-essential story progressing puzzles when low on hint coins.
The storyline essential puzzle and non-essential puzzle system is a double edged sword. You can choose to play additional puzzles while progressing with the story or ignore them and directly progress as fast as you want with the story. This system would work if the puzzles were all of an equal quality, some of the puzzles are not as well designed as others and this quality split is divided evenly between both the essential and non-essential puzzles. This raises the inevitable question when playing the non-essential puzzles of why the good ones aren’t in the main story instead of the bad puzzles and why you would include the bad puzzles as additional content at all?
Supporting these puzzles are the story elements which, generally speaking, work pretty well. The story is easy to predict but in a game like this the story is only a small part of the story telling experience. The world and characters inhabiting it are interesting and the way it is presented both graphically and sound wise is enchanting. The story and the puzzles don’t always interact as well as they might, someone will give you an important life and death mission but will want you to count and divide some sweets first so they stop panicking about the plight of some imaginary children they invented.
The game makes an effort to explain that everyone in the village is obsessed with puzzles to explain the constant harassment from the locals but that explanation will only hold so much water, water that you must then evenly divide between three different sized cups before you can progress in the story. While playing I was wondering who this game was designed for? The storyline is too in depth for the short pick up and play session audience and too puzzle dense for extended play. I’d be curious to see what the characters of the Professor Layton universe would be like in a more streamlined simple puzzle experience.
Reading this back I’m coming across far more negatively about this game than I actually feel. While I feel that everything I have written is true, the overall experience of the game holds together surprisingly well. Presentation is an area it would be very hard to criticise Level-5 in. While the games they develop often have clear flaws, they present the overall experience with such a level of heart and polish it is easy to forgive and generally overlook the flaws. ‘Professor Layton and the Curious Village’ is a flawed experience but a generally positive one, clearly filled with a lot of energy and passion. At the price it tends to be these days it would be hard to not recommend ‘The Curious Village’ as a puzzle worth solving.
Labels: Professor Layton and the Curious Village Review
Disney Cars 2 Review
Now the first Cars from Pixar had a major issue for me, it doesn’t need cars in it. This may sound weird but bear with me. Toy Story is, at its core, about learning to accept what you are and your place in the world. Toy Story has a universal message but if made with human actors in a non-toy setting you’d lose the fundamental dynamic of being a toy in a human world and the added pathos that brings to the story. Monsters Inc needs monsters, A Bugs Life needs bugs. Each of these stories uses its non-human cast to help it by taking the elements of that world and using them to enhance the story and message of the film.
You could take Cars, change the cars to humans and have the exact same film. It would be the story of a race driver whose car breaks down in a small town and has to pitch in with the locals while his car is repaired, learning the value of life as he does. Having cars with human traits adds nothing to the film, the message of the film would, if anything, be enhanced by having human actors to empathise with.
Anyways taking Cars for what it was, it’s ok. The story was fine, if nothing special and the film drove along at a fairly nice pace. I have no major issues with it or feelings towards it in any way. Now cynical people would say that Cars was only made to sell toy cars to Disney’s, at that point, limited young male audience and that if you wanted to keep selling those toy cars you’d have to make a sequel. Even more cynical people than the aforementioned would say that you should add more toy cars to any sequel, ideally with hidden weapons that can be fired. I’m honestly amazed they didn’t add robotic dinosaur cars made out of Lego.
Now Cars didn’t leave much potential for a sequel, what with McQueen’s story wrapped up. So what do you do when you have no ideas? Parody! Cars 2 is a parody of spy movies and to be precise, comedy spy movies. This film has more in common with The Man Who Knew Too Little or Spy Hard than it does with James Bond. At best it’s a parody of Roger Moore era Bond, but with none of the charm or heart. The key rule of parody is that you affectionately mock certain, distinct, elements of the original genre. Once you are copying a copy, you stop being a parody of a spy film and become just a bad spy film. That being said the action and spying sequences are generally handled quite well, helped by an enthusiastic performance from Michael Caine. If the film had just been about following Caine’s British and Bruce Campbell’s American agents as they travel the world fighting evil cars, I would have liked it.
This film is visually speaking one of Pixar’s most beautiful. The animation is amazing and the cinematography is outstanding. That being said the film has a strange air of cheapness to it, although it clearly cost a lot of money to make, it’s hard to escape a feeling of 3D assets being reused, the soundtrack also only seems to have three constantly repeated tracks on it. The script also feels somewhat rushed. Exposition is handled in an almost comically clunky way, dialogue is obvious and painful and the eventual plot twist is one of the few manmade objects visible from space.
This film has one joke, that joke being that Mater the tow truck is confused with a spy by the secret service and keeps being put in dangerous situations he doesn’t comprehend by people who think he is an amazing undercover agent. This joke is as old as comedy itself yet requires a certain level of care to be successfully worked. Without care you get lines like “Look out McQueen, I’m a bomb!” followed by “That’s right Mater, you are the BOMB, you’re great!”. This is basically how the entire film functions but they did manage to resist the urge of creating a master spy called Maytier who is identical to mater aside from a moustache, so that’s something.
Now there is a simple litmus test for if you will like the Cars franchise. The test revolves around if you find Mater an amusing character. The great thing is if you haven’t seen either film you can still do this test! Simply jingle a set of keys in front of your face and see if you laugh or not. If you laugh you’ll think Mater is the funniest hype shit you’ve ever seen. Obviously someone at Pixar does because he’s on the screen for about 90% of this film.
You see Mater’s amazing friendship with McQueen, complete with stilted Rain Man like witty dialogue exchanges. You also see Mater fall in love with Holly Shiftwell, Shiftwell presumably being a car based double entendre. She thinks he is a master spy, which makes the fact that he keeps calling her pretty every five minutes, workplace sexual harassment. To be fair, since she doesn’t have a personality he has to keep calling her pretty or we wouldn’t get why he wants to Mater with her.
Mater has a personal journey throughout this movie, he realises that being an idiot has ruined his best friend McQueen’s life and that he has to try harder. I think Pixar realised the lesson of ‘Don’t carry your friends with you in your adventures, they’ll ruin your life’ was negative so they tacked a scene with McQueen apologising for shouting at Mater and saying “If people don’t take you seriously, they need to change”….Much better.
In conclusion, this may be the most pointless sequel ever. Even more so than Highlander 2, at least Highlander had the potential for interesting lore to be exploited. I’m not even sure that if you liked Cars you’ll like this film. Imagine the drop in quality from Aladdin to its sequels and then that same drop distance from Cars to Cars 2. That being said, I honestly can’t think of a better sequel idea for Cars…aside from Cars 2: Junkyard?
UPDATE! I have had the argument presented to me that liking Mater may not be due to if you find him amusing but rather that you care for him as a character. I would counter this by saying that for a character to be truly cared about they have to be aware of their surroundings and the situation they are in. You care about someone primarily because you empathise with them. Mater is for 90% of the film unaware of what is happening to him and why. Even when he realises how the world actually sees him, as an idiot, this realisation does not change him and the world instead changes around him. You can argue that for the 10 minutes where he realises the truth about himself you can feel sorry for him. However given that his idiotic behaviour is adversely affecting those around him, he is the issue, not the world, so why should the world change for him?
Labels: Cars 2 Review
Dreamworks Spirit Review
Occasionally you experience something you can’t explain, something that makes you question your established place in the universe. I’m not exaggerating when I say that watching Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron is one of the weirdest, most confusing experiences of my life. The strange surrealist films of David Lynch and the Brothers Quay have nothing on Spirit. Most abstract cinema seems to be purposefully trying to be unusual and is unmistakably made by humans, for humans. Spirit seems to be made primarily for horses and to be more precise, 19th Century American horses at that. The very fact that the marketing team went with "A motion picture experience for everyone" on the poster shows they knew this was going to be an uphill struggle.
Spirit loosely follows a horse, coincidently also named Spirit and his adventures against the MAN, in this case oppressive white frontier settlers, oppressive Native Americans and shitty humanity in general. The movie starts with an opening narration from Spirit. To be fair he narrates everything since he doesn’t ever talk but I have a few issues with this opening speech in particular, as I shall now explain.
“They say the history of the West was written from the saddle of a horse, but it’s never been told from the heart of one, not till now” Why tell this story? Who honestly was sitting around waiting for this story to be told? The great American horse tale finally brought to our screens! I guess those Fievel dollars finally dried up.
“They say the Mustang is the spirit of the West, whether that West was won or lost in the end, you’ll have to decide for yourself” SPOILER ALERT! It was lost. This film is incredibly preachy, the West was lost and so were we. What the films preaching isn’t entirely clear, there’s the environmental message about the destructive spread of humanity but the horses are all shown to be equally as narcissistic and species self-obsessed as we are. There is an attempt made to show how the Native Americans were treated badly but then they go on treat Spirit in much the same way that the settlers do. Not only that but they make a point of showing how the main villain The Colonel has honour to him as well.
“But the story I want to tell you is true, I was there!” Ok, now when Fargo made the point of lying and saying that it was based on a true story people were brought in, it was a live action crime movie, this stuff could have happened. Why are you telling the audience that the stuff that an animated horse experienced is all true, when it clearly isn’t? Is this to add authenticity, people know that the old West happened, people know that wild horses exist, so what does this add?
ANYWAYS moving on, Spirit gets captured by the army who attempt to break him and make him an enslaved horse. The army also capture a Native American, Little Creek and are treating him in the same shabby way…subtle. They manage to escape but then Little Creek tries to break him and…wait what? Anyway Little Creek has a super sexy horse called Rain who Spirit falls madly in love with, the issue being that she has Stockholm syndrome and has fallen in love with Little Creek. Now with Spirit not being cool with an interspecies threesome he has to try and convince her to leave with him and move back in with his mum.
Basically horse based peril happens for another hour and it all works out ok, unless you like steam trains.
I honestly don’t know how to rate this film, animation is really good, soundtracks ok. In terms of story it makes sense, although it’s really hard to get engaged with. I can’t say the overall experience of watching it was bad, in much the same way that I can’t imagine watching a fish bowl all day is interesting, but cats seem to love it. If you’re a horse, particularly a xenophobic one wishing for the good ol’ days, give it a watch.
Labels: Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron Review
Snatcher Review (SEGA CD)
I’ve always viewed Hideo Kojima with a certain level of distrust. He has a reputation as an auteur which, stripping the French artistic filter, simply labels him as an author. The thing is, having your work immediately discernible is as true of Steven Spielberg as it is of Ed Wood Jr. Being ‘auteur’ is not in itself a guarantee of quality, particularly as anything auteur and unique tends to immediately gain a fan base regardless of whether it has any merit to deserve one.
My opinion was not helped by a rental of Metal Gear Solid 2 back in the day, my first foray into Kojima’s most notable series. Having only a weekend to play the game I found myself incredibly frustrated with frequent deaths and my inability to make any quick progress in the short time I had with the game. I made the decision that I’d seen all that I needed of the series and its creator and ignored both from that point on.
Now I may have continued to have this somewhat uninformed opinion of the man and his work had it not been for my chance discovery of ‘Snatcher’ while reading a Blade Runner forum. My discovery of a Blade Runner ‘Inspired’ game that actually looked cool, coupled with my unnatural love of terrible SEGA hardware drove me to seek it out the SEGA CD port and see if the hype was deserved.
Snatcher is a point and click visual novel in much the same style as the Phoenix Wright game series, although notably more adult in content. You play as Gillian Seed, a newly recruited Junker. Junkers have been given the task of hunting down cybernetic creatures known as ‘Snatchers’ (like the title), who hide their Terminator ‘inspired’ robotic bodies under human skin, taking over or, if you will, ‘Snatching’ unfortunate humans and taking over their lives and bills and such.
You fulfil this Junking duty in much the same way as you would fulfil anything in a point and click game, by pointing and clicking, then pointing and clicking another thirty or so times until you click them in the exactly ordained correct order. I’m being a bit unfair in saying that however, as this was where Snatcher immediately started to peak my interest. With many point and click games frequent visits to Gamefaqs is an unfortunate requirement if you wish to get anywhere, since even if you have solved the required puzzle in the game you will also have to solve the game developer’s puzzle of how they implemented the solution.
The puzzles in Snatcher makes sense, they work. I did get stuck a few times while playing but in all but one of those times, upon learning the solution, I was frustrated with myself for getting stuck rather than with the game. I’m also 99% sure that the other time was due to a translation issue. To solve puzzles using actual real world logic in a game in this genre is pretty rare, even a series as good as Phoenix Wright is near unplayable without a guide.
That being said the game is frequently not as straightforward as you might hope, falling back on unfortunate genre staples. For example it is fairly common to skip triggering the next section of the game by not investigating the correct object in a room or by not showing a piece of evidence to the right character.
This design decision is made worse as it is also possible to repeatedly examine objects and ask people repeated questions, sometimes having to ask someone a question multiple times to further the story. One notable example was when I had to show someone an identification photo which they didn’t recognise until the third time they were shown it, the first two times saying that they’d never seen them before. This very quickly gets you into the mind-set of showing every item you collect to every character you meet, however tenuous the link and asking them each question again until they eventually repeat themselves. Although initially frustrating you quickly get into this way of working and it would be a lot more annoying if not for some of the interesting and frequently amusing responses you get from the characters during this process.
To break up the investigation sections the game has mini-game like shooting sequences. Typically your robot partner ‘Metal Gear’ indicates to you that his motion sensor has detected nearby Snatchers, this brings up a 3x3 whack-a-mole grid overlay to the screen and you have to tilt your d-pad in the direction of the segment that the enemy appears in and shoot. With the game having been designed for the limitations of the d-pad the target speed is mostly kept to an acceptably difficult level. That being said near the end of the game the difficulty of these sequences suddenly ramps up considerably and although still possible, they become unnecessarily frustrating for this genre of game.
The story of Snatcher is really engaging, although somewhat over reliant on well driven film noir and science fiction tropes. The actual plot holding the narrative together remains interesting and engaging throughout, despite approximately half way through when the game decides to take a narrative leap off of the nearest cliff before awkwardly dragging its carcass back to the top for the final act.
As with the best visually realised stories the real narrative meat is not in what’s written but in the world itself. The game oozes atmosphere, you never feel completely unwatched by Snatchers regardless of how safe the location looks. The characters also feel well realised and are easy to root for and, when necessary, against. Topping this all off is a really great soundtrack, the same one I’ve listened to twice while writing this alone.
Snatcher is a truly fun and immersive game, it is let down by some unusual design choices at times but none that would stop me from recommending it to anyone who would listen. As with any game in this genre they live or die by their story, in that regard Snatcher snatches you up and holds you from the opening sequence through to the end credits.
I wouldn’t say this game has converted me to a diehard Kojima fanboy, but what it has done is drive me to re-evaluate my opinion of him and his reputation as an auteur. Completing Snatcher has driven me to seek out other games from his portfolio to see what all the fuss is about. Bottom line, if you like the Phoenix Wright series this game plays very similarly. If you’ve always thought that the main things lacking from the Phoenix Wright series, aside from working gameplay, were decapitations/creepy shower scenes and let’s be honest who hasn’t, then give Snatcher a go, you won’t be disappointed.
Labels: Snatcher Review
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1812 fleet
Scientists explore wreck thought to be part of 1812 fleet
By Lara Lutz - Bay Journal
Archaeologist Julie Schablitsky normally works on land. For this job, she learned to dive.
Then, in the murky waters of Maryland's Patuxent River, she touched a piece of the nation's past.
Schablitsky, chief archaeologist for the Maryland State Highway Administration, is helping to excavate an early U.S. vessel that fought British forces on the Chesapeake Bay during the War of 1812.
"It's a piece of Maryland history and heritage, a symbol of strength from 200 years ago," Schablitsky said.
Most of the sunken shipwreck is covered by 60 feet of silt that a team of archaeologists from the Maryland State Highway Administration, Maryland Historical Trust and U.S. Navy began to remove this summer.
Sediment - a pollutant that fouls Bay water quality - hangs heavy in the water, too, and makes work difficult. On a good day, divers can see about 12 inches in front of them. After rain, almost nothing.
The cloudy water hampered Schablitsky's first dive at the site but made it memorable, too.
"I'm used to picking up an artifact and letting my eyes see it," Schablitsky said. "But reaching through that water and having my hand 'see' it first just took me instantly back to the War of 1812. It gave me goose bumps."
The vessel was once part of "Barney's Flotilla," a small but scrappy collection of gunboats launched in 1814 to confront the British navy on the Chesapeake Bay. The superior British naval forces had run rampant through the Bay since the war began, raiding port towns and farmland at will.
Led by Commodore Joshua Barney, the flotilla moved easily through the Bay's shallow waters and bedeviled the British as they made their way toward Washington, D.C. British ships eventually chased the flotilla to the upper reaches of the Patuxent River.
On a stifling day in August 1814, the Americans faced defeat. Rather than leave the vessels in British hands, they destroyed the flotilla and continued on foot to help defend the nation's capital.
Fifteen gunboats and Barney's flagship, the USS Scorpion, sank to the bottom of the river.
Investigators have located a handful of sites that may hold remains from Barney's Flotilla. But the current site is the only one to be explored and dated to the War of 1812.
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Alternative Health Health IT
Pollution breeds CHAOS: Scientists find link between dirty air and violent crime
The deadly and devastating effects that air pollution has on one’s health such as sickness, malaise, lowered immunity and depression are all well-known. However, it is worth noting that the phenomenon has one other, far more insidious effect that many may not be familiar with: it could induce violent behavior in some people.
According to a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and Colorado State University, more violent crimes are committed in places where the air is dirtier and lower in quality – a phenomenon that is especially concerning, given that according to the World Health Organization (WHO), nine out of 10 people worldwide are breathing in toxic air. This is because airborne particles and noxious gases are likely to interfere with the proper functioning of the brain, making people more likely to lash out and act aggressively.
This, the researchers said, has led to an uptick in aggressive behavior, mostly in the form of aggravated assaults and domestic violence. Even more alarming, the researchers noted, is that the risk of aggressive behavior was seen to have increased even at air pollution levels that are deemed below the regulatory standards for breathability that have been set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (Related: The depressing connection between air pollution and happiness.)
As described in the academic journal Epidemiology, the researchers looked at how recorded offenses rose and fell over a period of 13 years in 301 counties across the United States and whether or not these were linked to air pollution.
They examined datasets from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) National Incident-Based Reporting System, air pollution data tracked by the EPA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and weather data from the PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University.
Upon evaluation of the gathered data, what they found was that instances of violent crime went up when the air was more polluted – a phenomenon that they said happened in both poor and rich areas.
“What our study really found was that day-to-day changes in air pollution levels will actually increase the risk of violent behavior,” said Jesse Berman, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.
As noted by the researchers, instances of violent crime such as assaults went up by 1.17 percent in areas with a 10-microgram-per-cubic-meter increase in their daily fine particulate matter levels. An increase of 0.59 percent in violent crimes, meanwhile, was seen in areas that had a 10-parts-per-billion increase in their daily ozone concentration.
This uptick in violence, the researchers said, could be linked to air pollution, citing previous studies in mice and dogs which found that animals exposed to high levels of fine particulate matter – such as those from diesel fumes – often exhibit increased aggressiveness and territorial behavior, as well as bias toward immediate rewards.
The researchers also pointed out that previous studies have linked metallic constituents of particulate matter, notably, manganese and mercury to more aggressive and violent behavior.
“One of the hypotheses, or ways that we think this is affecting us, is that by breathing these particles, it’s actually impacting our neurological systems and that might affect our fight or flight type of behavior. Where people will become more impulsive or aggressive as a result of the harm that the air pollution is causing,” Berman explained, adding that their findings need to be further investigated in order to find the exact mechanism behind air pollution’s effects on human behavior.
For more stories about air pollution and its effects on humans and other organisms, head over to Pollution.news.
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Home › Top Stories › PILOTS BLAMED FOR FIJI FLIGHT PC 121 CRASH KILLING 17 ›
PILOTS BLAMED FOR FIJI FLIGHT PC 121 CRASH KILLING 17
SUVA, Fiji Islands (January 21, 2000 – Fiji’s Daily Post)---The two pilots of the ill-fated Air Fiji PC121 flight have been blamed for the crash that claimed 17 lives, including their own.
A full report on the accident, released to the media yesterday, said that the pilot-in-command had insufficient rest before the flight and had taken medication which may have degraded his ability to safely pilot the aircraft.
The report said the co-pilot had insufficient training and did not know how to react when he recognized that the pilot-in-command was having difficulties. And neither crewmember had received crew resource management training.
These reasons led the investigators from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau to believe that the pilots were at fault and may have caused the tragic accident, which occurred in inland Viti Levu last July.
The investigators said no evidence was found of any fault in the aircraft or the weather that may have contributed to the accident.
Their report stated that the examination of company documentation indicated that check and training records were not appropriately maintained.
It said that Air Fiji pilots interviewed during the investigation indicated a low level of skills and knowledge on the operation of the Bandeirante aircraft and a lack of adherence to standard operating procedures.
Deficiencies were found with the level of surveillance conducted by the Civil Aviation Authority of Fiji. The investigation team has made several recommendations as a result of their findings.
One is for the government to ensure that the aviation authority is adequately resourced with well-qualified and experienced people for the surveillance of all commercial aircraft operators.
Regular training meetings for pilots and aircraft maintenance engineers should be conducted.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry told a press conference that the Civil Aviation Authority and the government have put in place several measures to ensure that accidents do not reoccur.
He said the authority has strengthened its check on aircraft operations, maintenance and pilots, and has provided additional staff to carry out these checks.
"Local officers have been given additional responsibilities and training to carry out their work more effectively," Mr. Chaudhry said.
"Regular training and safety education meetings are also being conducted for pilots and operators.
"Aviation safety reports are now being circulated to the aviation industry to inform them about safety and the precautions that they need to take.
"Aviation regulations are being reviewed to enable testing of all aviation personnel on substance abuse," Prime Minister Chaudhry noted.
Attorney General Anand Singh said the tests will be conducted randomly by regulators.
For additional reports from Fiji’s Daily Post, go to PACIFIC ISLANDS REPORT News/Information Links: Other News Resources/Fiji Live.
MARSHALL ISLANDS PORT AND SHIPPING AUTHORITIES TO STREAMLINE EASE OF
TONGAN PARLIAMENT CALLED INTO SPECIAL SESSION
NEW CALEDONIAN BANK CHANGING NAME
NEWS FROM NEW CALEDONIA AND FRENCH POLYNESIA
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I鈥橫 JOHN DOE
UX - UI DESIGNER
Dyin' ain't much of a livin', boy. here. put that in your report!" and "i may have found a way out of here. you want a guarantee, buy a toaster. here. put that in your report!" and "i may have found a way out of here. this is the ak-47 assault rifle, the preferred weapon of your enemy; and it makes a distinctive sound when fired at you, so remember it. this is the ak-47 assault rifle, the preferred weapon of your enemy; and it makes a distinctive sound when fired at you, so remember it. don't p!ss down my back and tell me it's raining. this is the ak-47 assault rifle, the preferred weapon of your enemy; and it makes a distinctive sound when fired at you, so remember it. don't p!ss down my back and tell me it's raining. this is my gun, clyde! man's gotta know his limitations. ever notice how sometimes you come across somebody you shouldn't have f**ked with? well, i'm that guy.
MASTER DEGREE OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
This is Photoshop's version Lorem Ipsum. Well, the way they make shows is, they make one show.
Now that there is the Tec-9, a crappy spray gun from South Miami. This gun is advertised as the most popular gun in American crime. Do you believe that shit? It actually says that in the little book that comes with it: the most popular gun in
I'm gonna shoot you in the head then and there. Then I'm gonna shoot that bitch in the kneecaps.
You think water moves fast? You should see ice. It moves like it has a mind. Like it knows it killed the world once and got a taste for murder. After the avalanche, it took us a week to climb out. Now, I don't know exactly when we turned on each other, but I know that seven of us survived the slide and only five made it out. Now we took an oath, that I'm breaking now. We said we'd say it was the snow that killed the other two, but it wasn't. Nature is lethal but it doesn't hold a candle to man.
However unreal it may seem, we are connected, you and I. We're on the same curve, just on opposite ends.
Sam L. J. - Pulp Fiction
Nature is lethal but it doesn't hold a candle to man.
Your bones don't break, mine do. That's clear. Your cells react to bacteria and viruses differently than mine. You don't get sick, I do.
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SUGARUSH – Sugarush EP
Posted on January 31, 2016 by Real Gone
As the summer of 2014 faded, Israeli avant-garde rock band Memory In Plant released their ‘Epic Triumph’ EP, an angular collection of arty noises that wasn’t always the easiest to digest. Despite their deliberately obtuse stance, the EP somehow managed to bring entertainment value as bits of tunes fought their way through the cracks of the many spliced together ideas. Unsurprisingly, though, they weren’t so quick to follow up that release…
The band’s vocalist/guitarist Chen Firsel resurfaced at the beginning of 2016 under the pseudonym Sugarush, dropping an EP that, while showing off more of an acoustic bent than the work of Memory In Plant, still shows occasional traits from his previous work. It’s almost as if he’s allowing an insight into the earlier and more basic stages of his song writing; the word ‘song’ open to interpretation, once more, since these four pieces are neither very chorus-driven or especially friendly affairs.
The title track presents something relatively accessible, however. A guitar clangs out a hard metallic rhythm (in sound rather than heaviness), before a heavily treated vocal brings a darker edge. Briefly sounding almost like a hybrid between the wistful numbers from Deconstruction and a Guided By Voices lo-fi style, things get shaken up by a tinkling and busy lead guitar that occasionally dominates everything. Unexpectedly, this guitar riff sounds like a work in progress by Anthony Phillips. Although perhaps too short, this track has just enough going on to intrigue but without being too quirky to distract or off-put. ‘Diamonds’ is a little more complex, mixing electronica with something that sounds like a cross between a mandolin and balalaika. At the heart of everything, of course, is Firsel himself, portraying a role of a dark folk singer. With hints of Mike Johnson’s sadcore moodiness and a forlorn voice, everything lends itself to a downbeat performance. If somehow it feels as if the bewildering arty slant has gone out of the window, the lyrics seem more than happy to oblige with a main hook that suggests we shall “stand in the middle, with arms crossed on shreds of lemons” before being instructed to “go to the ant, you looking comatose”. It’s all pretty free-form.
The earlier hints of Deconstruction’s quieter moments come back with a vengeance during ‘Stellar’ – the EP’s standout track. As Firsel’s voice rises against a hard rhythm guitar, it becomes more obvious that any Deconstruction reminiscence is purely down to his slightly off-key, deep croon, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the younger Eric Avery. At the end of the first verse, the arrangement swells and percussive beats are provided by handclaps and rattling bells, occasionally borrowing from more traditional Mediterranean musics. There’s a genuine focus here…and then everything drops out to leave just swooning sounds and gentle slide guitar, almost as if we’re supposed to think of warm climes and the shifting tides of the sea as we listen. Another change of mood closes the release, as ‘My Last Brain Cells’ clatters with cymbals and a heavy bass, before dropping into a quasi-stoner affair that’s deliberately off-key throughout. Again, many might hear elements of Guided By Voices’ tape deck experiments, but the wandering electronica noises in the back often give a different perspective. It may be among the more adventurous, but even so, this is the weakest of the four tracks and isn’t necessarily something you’d listen to more than once.
Like everything recorded by Firsel – whether as Sugarush or as part of Memory In Plant – you won’t “get” it on first listen. To be fair, although this EP is rather marginal when it comes to obvious melodies, it’s clear there are a few interesting homespun ideas scattered throughout. It certainly won’t appeal to everyone, but one suspects that’s exactly Firsel’s intention.
Sugarush EP by Chen Firsel
This entry was posted in Album & EP Reviews and tagged alternative, chen firsel, israel, memory in plant, singer songwriter, stream by Real Gone. Bookmark the permalink.
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Posts Tagged ‘mike ford’
Michael Francis Ford, 1948-2013
Thursday, November 7th, 2013
Mike Ford was the creative genius behind Americom’s branding campaign, launched in 2006, and encouraged the creation of this blog.
Michael Francis Ford, a noted Democratic political strategist, entrepreneur and founder of the Center for the Study of the American Dream at Xavier University, died on November 5 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md., after battling melanoma for five years. He was 65.
Over four decades, Mr. Ford served in nine presidential campaigns, holding senior strategic positions for Edward Kennedy in 1980, Walter Mondale in 1984, Jerry Brown in 1992 and Howard Dean in 2004. In addition, he managed more than 100 gubernatorial, US Senate, US House and mayoral campaigns across the country.
Former Vice President Walter Mondale said in a letter this week: “A man of many gifts, Mike’s greatest gift may have been his ability to inspire young people around him, teach them to be the best versions of themselves, and to understand the importance of giving back to their community and country.”
After graduating from Xavier University in 1970, Mr. Ford remained in Cincinnati, Ohio where his political career blossomed. In addition to numerous local and statewide campaigns, Mr. Ford served as Executive Assistant to Ohio Governor John J. Gilligan. He later served as campaign manager, Deputy Mayor and Chief of Staff to Cincinnati Mayor Jerry Springer, and was as an international representative and organizer for AFSCME, AFL-CIO.
In 1980, Ford was part of a cadre of seasoned political veterans who helped lead Senator Edward Kennedy’s challenge to President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination. Among other assignments, Ford managed Kennedy’s crucial Pennsylvania primary win, which breathed new life into the campaign at a critical time.
In 1984, while serving as Deputy Campaign Manager and National Field Director for Vice President Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign, Ford’s persuasive post-primary memos urging an ambitious effort to register minority and union voters and advocating for an “out-of-the box” selection for running mate, were published in The Quest for the Presidency, 1984.
Mike taught and inspired legions of young volunteers and first-time staffers and turned them into the next generation of political professionals.
Writing about Ford in The Quest for the Presidency, 1992 author Peter Goldman described Ford as: “a tough, veteran pol, equally at home in the world of ideas.”
In 1988, Mike and his wife, Sally, founded Bay Communications, a strategic communications firm, consulting for executives of Fortune 500 companies, Democratic national and state parties and caucuses, international unions, and political action committees.
While serving in the 90’s as the Senior Advisor to the Executive Vice President of Internet Operations at Citibank, Mr. Ford created the “Financial Services in the Next Ten Years” White Paper, helping Citibank focus on company-wide long term planning, including voice recognition and A/I, universal/simultaneous multi-lingual translation, and miniature robotics as virtual guides for consumers.
In 1996, Ford created the Affordable Access Trust Inc., a unit investment trust filed with the SEC, designed to package low cost units of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Corporation, at the time trading at $50,000 a share. The Trust was terminated after Buffett to reluctantly created lower cost “Berkshire B shares” at a 96% discount from the “A share” price. The B shares have quintupled in value since then.
A Newsweek article noted the Trust’s extraordinary genesis and impact. “The gestation of the Baby Berkshires began not on Wall Street but in Annapolis, Md., with political consultant Michael Ford, who specializes in working for liberal Democrats. Ford decided he could do well by doing good.”
“I just wanted to let the average person buy a piece of the best investor of our time,” Mr. Ford told Newsweek.
Mr. Ford’s unique career afforded him the chance to consult a variety of clients, ranging from the NBA Players’ Association, the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, and many technology start-ups. Mr. Ford was even enlisted by the producers of the 1983 film The Dead Zone to help create scenes about a New Hampshire primary election event.
In 2009, Mr. Ford founded the Center for the Study of the American Dreamat his alma mater, Xavier University. The Center serves as the nation’s pre-eminent clearinghouse for information on the state of the American Dream.
As its Founding Director, Mr. Ford led the Center’s efforts in generating significant original research analyzing shifts in the Dream’s continuing evolution. Under Mr. Ford’s leadership, the Center has received significant national attention for its work.
At the time of his death, Mr. Ford was working on a book on the history, meaning, and future of the American Dream, which his family plans to publish posthumously. The book’s genesis comes from his 2012 Washington Post Sunday Outlook 5 Myths opinion piece “Five Myths about the American Dream.”
Mr. Ford’s commentaries appeared in radio and newspapers including The Chicago Tribune, and The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Huffington Post, He appeared on “Larry King Live,” the “Today Show” and CNN’s “Crossfire,” serving as a political analyst and campaign spokesperson.
He lectured at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Ohio State University, American University, University of Cincinnati, Wake Forest University, and the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas.
Mr. Ford was such an avid reader that his home contains a two-story library filled with thousands of books and busts of his Founding Father heroes. His many passions ranged from writing, classical music, American history, financial investing, art collecting, cooking, and his favorite sports teams, most notably the Washington Redskins and Xavier Musketeers basketball.
Mr. Ford was born in Washington, D.C. on June 27, 1948, and grew up in Takoma Park, Md. He attended St. Michael’s School in Silver Spring, Md. and St. John’s College High School in Washington, D.C. He received an A.B. from Xavier University in Cincinnati, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and was a Graduate Fellow at the Institute of Public Administration at Penn State University.
Surviving Mr. Ford are his wife Sally, of Glyndon, Md.; a son, Matthew of New York, N.Y.; Mary Jo Ford (Richard) Schneider of Herndon, Va., Patrick (Peggy) Ford of Columbia, Md., Christopher Ford of Detroit, Mich., and Maureen (Dave) Jester of Damascus, Md.; numerous nieces and nephews, and other family and friends.
The family suggests donations in Michael’s memory to the Center for the Study of the American Dream, Xavier University, 3800 Victory Parkway, Cincinnati, Ohio 45207-5471; or to the continuing research efforts at Johns Hopkins University, c/o Dina Mallis Klicos, Kimmel Cancer Center Development Office 750 E. Pratt Street, Suite 1700, Baltimore, Md. 21202. Please indicate that the donation is in memory of Michael Ford.
With heroic symbolism, Mr. Ford died on Election Day.
Tags: afscme, alf-cio, american dream, howard dean, jerry brown, Jerry Springer, john gilligan, mike ford, mta, nbapa, ted kennedy, walter mondale, xavier
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Stephanie Cervantes, CEO
Cyber Security & Privacy Strategist
Stephanie Cervantes is the Owner of Secure Smart Solutions, where she utilizes her 25 years of experience in the security and privacy realms to create relevant training classes for her clients’ needs and to meet regulatory compliance in their work spaces.
After a distinguished career in CA government she consulted for a telecom company, has done several keynote talks and joined cyber panels as a security expert, joined an IT reseller for a brief period before going out on her own to start Secure Smart Solutions. Stephanie sits on an Advisory Board to a start-up company in the Silicon Valley, is a frequent panelist and speaker at cyber events and has written and collaborated on cyber security and privacy training courses for continuing education institutions.
She has been a Chief Security Architect for the largest public-sector pension fund in the world; managed technical security testing for two large State of CA ERP projects, along with quality assurance for one of the projects. Stephanie started one of the first Privacy Offices for the State of CA. She has been a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and served on many State and Federal level security policy development groups and advisory boards. She is the founder of the CA Inter-Agency Security Group, which she chaired for 20 years. She is a founding member and current Board Member of the Sacramento Chapter of InfraGard, a public / private sector alliance between the FBI and critical infrastructure. Through her work with InfraGard she received an FBI Director’s Award for Exceptional Service in the Public Interest from FBI Director Robert Mueller in 2011. Stephanie received an Information Security Leadership Award in 2014 in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the State of CA Information Security Community.
Stephanie holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Government from California State University, Sacramento and is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP) and Certified Information Privacy Technologist (CIPT) certifications.
Ray Cervantes
Ray Cervantes is the VP of Business Development at Secure Smart Solutions. He brings over 30+ years in sales, negotiations and regulatory compliance to the table, as well as numerous sales awards.
After a long career in Real Estate and with the State of CA selling worker’s compensation insurance and managing Claims and Human Resources Sections, he co-founded Secure Smart Solutions.
Ray loves solving problems for people. He excells at assisting customers find solutions to those problems by matching them with the technology or training to meet their needs.
While Business Development is his primary job function by day, Ray also enjoys golfing, traveling and spending time with his family and 7 granddaughters. He holds a B.S. from California State University, Chico.
CA Certified Small Business ID #2010049
Photo used under Creative Commons from TomPhotography18
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Richard Francis-Bruce
Title: Richard Francis-Bruce
Subject: Academy Award for Best Film Editing, Seven (1995 film), Harry Potter (film series), Lorenzo's Oil, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
(1948-12-10) 10 December 1948
Richard Francis-Bruce (born 10 December 1948 in Sydney, New South Wales) is an Australian film editor who has received several nominations for the Academy Award for Film Editing.
Career 1
Filmography 2
Francis-Bruce aspired to be a cinematographer like his father, Jack Bruce, who worked for Hollywood players like Cecil B. De Mille and the Famous Lansky Players. Nonetheless, Richard's aspirations landed him an editing gig at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in Sydney, where he spent 15 years honing his craft.
Francis-Bruce collaborated with filmmaker Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), and Lorenzo's Oil (1992).
Francis-Bruce later earned Academy Award nominations for his work on Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption (1994), David Fincher's Seven (1995) and Wolfgang Petersen's Air Force One (1997). Francis-Bruce was nominated for ACE Eddie Awards for The Shawshank Redemption, The Rock (directed by Michael Bay - 1996), Air Force One, and for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (directed by Chris Columbus - 2001). In 1997, he was invited to become a member of the American Cinema Editors (ACE).[1]
In 1996, Francis-Bruce visited Australia and spoke at a seminar at the Australian Film Television and Radio School entitled Frame by Frame. Francis-Bruce explained the importance of understanding internal rhythm and external rhythm as well as the choices he made in and between every shot throughout the film Seven.
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
The Witches of Eastwick (1987)
Dead Calm (1989)
Cadillac Man (1990)
Lorenzo's Oil (1992)
The Shawshank Redemption (1994) Academy Award nominee
Se7en (1995) Academy Award nominee
The Rock (1996)
Air Force One (1997) Academy Award nominee
The Perfect Storm (2000)
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001)
The Italian Job (2003)
The Forgotten (2004)
Killers (2010)
Cristiada (2011)
Oblivion (2013)
^ "American Cinema Editors > Members", webpage archived by WebCite from this original URL on 2008-03-04.
Richard Francis-Bruce at the Internet Movie Database
Articles needing additional references from May 2015
Australian film editors
American Cinema Editors
People from Sydney
People educated at Sydney Grammar School
Australia, United Kingdom, New South Wales, Canada, World War II
Australian Capital Territory, Sydney, Australia, States and territories of Australia, Queensland
United Kingdom, New Zealand, New South Wales, Canada, Queensland
Academy Award for Best Film Editing
Michael Kahn (film editor), Thelma Schoonmaker, James Cameron, Daniel Mandell, Ralph Dawson
Seven (1995 film)
Seven deadly sins, David Fincher, Brad Pitt, Dante Alighieri, New York City
Harry Potter (film series)
David Yates, Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling, Alfonso Cuarón, John Williams
Lorenzo's Oil
Peter Ustinov, World Bank, Nick Enright, Augusto and Michaela Odone, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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We Are Not Such Things
We Are Not Such Things by Justine van der Leun
Random House: 6/28/16
eBook review copy; 544 pages
hardcover ISBN-13: 9780812994506
We Are Not Such Things by Justine van der Leun is a very highly recommended account of the story behind the headline. During the last days of apartheid, on August 25, 1993, Amy Biehl, a 26 year old white American Fullbright scholar, women's rights advocate, and anti-apartheid activist, was murdered by a mob in Cape Town, South Africa. Four young black men were convicted for the crime.
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation program was put in place four years later - once apartheid was officially over. The Truth and Reconciliation program was an experiment in restorative justice and offered release from prison and a clean slate to anyone who took full responsibility for their crimes and could also prove that their crimes were politically motivated. Two men who were convicted for Amy's murder were released under this program. Amy's parents publicly forgave those involved with Amy's murder and started a foundation carrying Amy's name. The foundation even gave the men who were released jobs.
Van der Leun, who was initially interested first in how the forgiveness in the Reconciliation program affected real individuals, later became intrigued by the discrepancies surrounding Amy Biehl's murder. Even though it had been twenty years since the tragedy, she decided to dig deeper, and meet the people involved. She wanted to uncover the real story and ended up forging relationships with several men involved. She also presents background information and history of the colonial legacies present in South Africa. Many of the events started years ago are what lead to the huge gulf between blacks and whites that continue to this day.
We Are Not Such Things is a fascinating, well-researched look into a specific highly publicized murder case. Van der Leun makes it clear that there are still issues between the races today in South Africa. It becomes abundantly clear that the governmental systems in South Africa are broken, or extremely dysfunctional, which made getting information or trying to research difficult. She also asks some difficult questions and uncovers questions about the true story of Amy Biehl's murder.
I was totally immersed in this story. It is about a murder, and van der Leun thought it was going to answer the question, "How could the Biehls forgive their daughter's murderers?" and address their celebrity status over their forgiveness. But then it evolved into a story about South Africa - its social problems and people. I could see where some repetition of what people said could be bothersome to some readers but I didn't have a problem with it. It seemed to reflect what she was experiencing or being told by people she was talking to, the repeating of a story, right or wrong, without question. It took many interviews and questions to uncover a glimmer of the truth.
Disclosure: My advanced reading copy was courtesy of the publisher for review purposes.
The Harrows of Spring
All the Missing Girls
Vinegar Girl
The Mandibles
The Joy of Less
Follow the River Home
Life Moves Pretty Fast
Dead End Fix
I Like You Just Fine When You're Not Around
Goodnight, Beautiful Women
The Fallout
The City of Mirrors
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THE UNIVERSITY OF DA NANG
An incubator of intellects and talent for the development of the Central- Highlands area and the whole of Vietnam
Greeting and Message
History of The University of Da Nang
Member Universities and affiliated units
List of professors and associate professors
High Quality program
English Teaching Program
The list of UD’s Honorary Professors/Doctors
Awards and products
Research News and Research Events
Visiting lecturers and Researchers
Journal of Science and Technology, UD
Student - Alumni
Newsletter and Annual Report
Assoc.Prof.Dr. NGUYEN NGOC VU,
President of the University of Danang
The University of Danang (UD) now in its twenty-five year of buiding and development since 1994 under Decree No. 32/CP by the Government, was initially established over forty five years of training and research of member units (1975-2019).
Located in the heart of Danang city - a dynamic, developing and nuclear city and the driving force for development of the Central-Highlands region, especially close to the UNESCO World Heritage listed ancient city of Hoi An, the My Son holy land, Hue’s Imperial City and Phong Nha-Ke Bang Scenic Spot, UD is situated in a strategic location on the East-West economic corridor toward the East Sea gateway with development potentials and advantages of the country.
As a key regional university providing a wide range of courses and training programs at multi-level and multi-disciplinary, UD has 05 member universities (University of Science and Technology, University of Economics, University of Education, University of Foreign Language Studies, and University of Technology and Education), 01 College of Information Technology (it is currently approved by the Prime Minister and completed the appraisal of the Development Project to become Vietnam-Korea University of Information Technology and Communications under UD) ) and 06 affiliated training units (UD campus in Kon Tum; Vietnam-UK Institute for Research and Executive Education, School of Medicine and Pharmacy, School of Information Technology and Communications, School of International Education and School of Physical Education.
For nearly 45 years, UD has provided the Central-Highlands region and the whole country with a large resource of leaders, managers, experts and entrepreneurs in many key fields of engineering - technology, economics - law, social sciences and humanities, education, language - culture, medicine. Alumni, postgraduate students and PhD students of UD are successful and have held key positions and responsibilities in agencies, organizations, schools and businesses that have contributed significantly to the cause of socio - economic development of the region and the country.
UD has always focused on building the human resources, improving the quality of training and scientific research, considering it a "vital" factor, a goal and motivation to confirm the prestige and quality of the top leading university in Vietnam, ranked in the regional and international higher education system. With many synchronous and effective policies and solutions, including the policy of sending staff to abroad for training, UD has built and developed rapidly in terms of quantity and quality of lecturers, research staff and management staff with nearly 2,500 officials, including 1500 lecturers (09 professors, more than 100 associate professors, more than 500 doctor of science and doctor, reaching 32% of qualified lecturers holding doctorate or higher degree, particularly University of Science and Technology-UD has a high rate of 52% compared to the national average). UD has now attracted and trained more than 60 new doctors every year.
According to the orientation of research university, in order to focus on improving the quality, UD advocates to maintain a reasonable training scale with currently more than 50,000 regular undergraduate students, nearly 5,000 graduate and PhD students and 600 international students, an average of 11,300 freshmen per year (regular university system). UD has a full range of training majors: 130 undergraduate majors, 44 graduate majors, 22 PhD majors, including 40 advanced, high-quality and joint training programs meeting the high quality demand of human resources for Danang city, localities of the Central-Highlands region and the whole country, especially the key and high-tech industries, ready for industrial revolution 4.0. Thanks to the combination of training and employment, the university and the enterprise, the quality of training at UD has continuously improved, approaching international standards. As the first regional university in the country since 2016, 100% of its member universities have met the national quality standards, University of Science and Technology - UD is one of the first four universities in Vietnam to be reached the international standards of HCERES. As of the 2018-2019 academic year, UD is ranked 3rd in the country in terms of the number of accredited training programs, reaching international standards with 16 accredited programs, meeting Southeast Asia standards (AUN-QA) and Europe. (CTI).
Thanks to the potential of the human resource and facilities that are continually invested in a synchronous and modern direction, UD's scientific and technological activities are promoted in association with application transfer to serve the community's interests (particularly in 2018, there were nearly 400 scientific research projects at all levels and many useful solutions, inventions); the number of published scientific works has increased rapidly (on average, there are nearly 800 international articles every year, of which nearly 200 are in prestigious ISI and SCOPUS lists). Journal of Science and Technology of UD has been recognized by many Council of professors with a score of 0.5 to 1.5 (in which the ICT Journal has been added to the list of prestigious national magazines by Nasfoted). In addition to strengthening international publication and innovation, UD has focused on developing applied research to meet practical requirements of localities. International cooperation is a respectedly strength in the process of international higher education integration. UD has extensive cooperation with over 200 universities and scientific-educational organizations in the world such as the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, South Korea, Singapore ...With successful cooperation experiences, UD is also a destination for many national and international events, scientific conferences and seminars.
By relentless efforts to innovate in the form of advanced university governance, promoting the strength of the regional multi-disciplines university system, improving the role of university autonomy associated with social responsibility, contributing positively to community, UD is always ranked in the top leading universities in Vietnam: Top 2-3 according to uniRank rankings (2018, 2019 of 4icu organization), Top 6-10 according to Webometrics rankings (2018, 2019) and Top 400-500 Best Universities in Asia in 02 consecutive years (2018, 2019), ranked by the UK's prestigious Quacquarelli Symonds Educational Organization (QS).
With the mission and great responsibility trusted by the Government and the Ministry of Education and Training, UD is directed to promote investment in the construction of UD's Urban University (in Hoa Quy-Dien Ngoc) to "become one of the three prestigious training and scientific research centers on a regional and global scale. According to the" Master development strategy of UD until 2025, vision to 2035 ", UD will continue to affirm its international quality and prestige making an important contribution to the process of integration and renovation of the country’s higher education.
The University of Danang - the incubator for intelectual and talented people for the development of the Central Areas and Western Highlands of Vietnam - always warmly welcomes you.
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THE UNIVERSITY OF DA NANG (UD)
Address: 41 Le Duan, Hai Chau, Da Nang, Viet Nam
Phone: (84-236) 3822041; Fax: (84-236) 3823683
Email: webmaster@ac.udn.vn
Copyright © 2020 The University of Danang
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Sign up for the Chickasaw Nation Productions Mailing List for information about feature and documentary films, short history film projects, educational videos and more, featuring the Chickasaw Nation and its people.
Chickasaw Outpost celebrates Native American Heritage Month
by Chickasaw Nation Media Relations Office
The Chickasaw Outpost is offering a 20 percent discount for Te Ata and Bearer of the Morning: The life of Te Ata Thompson Fisher DVDs and Blu-Rays throughout the month of November to celebrate Native American Heritage Month.
Produced by Chickasaw Nation Productions, the films follow the life of Mary Frances “Te Ata” Thompson Fisher as she embraces the Chickasaw tradition of storytelling and transforms herself into the world-renowned performer, Te Ata.
Each film tells Te Ata’s story in a unique way. Te Ata, a full-length feature film, stars Q'orianka Kilcher, Gil Birmingham and Graham Green.
Bearer of the Morning tells Te Ata’s story in a traditional documentary format. Historic video footage, voice-overs and interviews of Te Ata gives viewers a glimpse into her life and performances as told by herself and contemporary historians. Viewers discover how this dynamic Chickasaw woman successfully navigated social, geographic and cultural distances to become one of the most successful Native American performers in history.
By studying and performing traditional Native American stories, Te Ata overturned negative stereotypes and advocated the preservation of Indigenous American cultures. Te Ata kept her Chickasaw heritage close to her heart and shared the unique story and spirit of the Chickasaw people.
Educational curriculum for elementary and secondary students to learn more about Mary “Te Ata” Thompson Fisher, and the role she played in shaping the Chickasaw Nation and the United States of America can also be downloaded at ChickasawFilms.com/TeAta. To learn more about the Chickasaw Nation, visit Chickasaw.net.
For more information, visit ChickasawFilms.com/TeAta or call (580) 332-1458.
A Chickasaw Nation Production
Bill Anoatubby, Governor
Directed by Nathan Frankowski
Produced by Paul Sirmons
About the Chickasaw Nation
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Home → British Society and the 1st World War
British Society and the 1st World War
Monday 20 April, 2015, by Dr Adrian Gregory
In around forty-five minutes, Dr Gregory delivered his lecture, demonstrating how matters at home impacted on the business at the Front during the conflict.
British society prior to 1914 had been very localised: people worked within walking distance of home, many lived-in as domestic staff, and services were mainly provided by Local Government. There was, however, mass emigration to destinations within the Empire, for, although commerce and industry were buoyant at home, there was extraordinary poverty, resembling that of today’s Third World nations. The population, relatively young (its norm large families, checked by high infant mortality), Trade Unions, an emergent Labour Party, women suffragettes, and suffragists clamoured for a reluctant Liberal Government to do something at national level. The most urgent concern was not the rise of militarist Germany but the “Irish Question”, politics on the emerald isle embracing militarism, gun-running, and armed opposition to British troops. A sense of crisis obtained, certainly, but no inevitable explosion.
In 1914, however, there was considerable dismay, the economy in bad shape, unemployment rising, a panic setting in regarding supplies, rampant inflation, and then that fateful August Bank Holiday weekend. On the Sunday, there were substantial anti-war protests, but Germany’s subsequent trespass onto Belgian soil brought Britain unavoidably to war in support of her ally, France. The Liberal Lloyd-George and much Liberal opinion openly supported the war.
War accepted, patriotic feelings manifested themselves in support of the Armed Forces, heightened at the end of August following the Mons débâcle, as the need for more soldiers grew desperate. Basing his thinking on earlier Napoleonic wars, Lloyd-George declared “Business as usual”, but Kitchener was to draw thousands of men away from the workplace. The press criticised the management of the war, demanding a more effective industrial workforce at home, equal to the necessary huge demand for supplies.
Gallipoli, April 1915, was unsuccessful, the ensuing Coalition Government containing Conservatives calling for greater effort on the Western Front, this giving rise, in turn, to the Derby Scheme and the Military Service Act. Lloyd-George understood the merits of using the suffragettes against the Trade Unions, bringing them into industrial employment to address the outright labour shortage. At this time also, rent protests on the Clyde led to the passing of a Rent Act, while Lloyd-George increased anti-drink measures as a means of curbing the growing incidence of drunkenness.
The war appeared to be heading for a swift military conclusion, but Allied offensives were derailed by events at Verdun in 1915, leading to the launch of the Somme offensive of July-November 1916. If the Allies did come close to getting the Germans to the negotiating table, it would take a further two more years of struggle to do so. After the loss of his son, Asquith, understandably, had little appetite for the war, and was replaced by Lloyd-George, who concentrated on holding British society together in 1917, at a time of unrestricted U-boat warfare, exacerbated by Britain’s own limited strategic options. The dynamics changed once Tsarist Russia imploded and the USA entered the fray, not for that long-held British concept of the Balance of Power, but “for the sake of democracy and civilisation”.
By late 1917 the pressures of new forms of industrialised warfare intensified, the bombing raids, notably by Gotha bombers on London, growing more serious. Nonetheless, the population was confident of final victory, accepting stoically the 1918 introduction of sugar, margarine, and meat rationing. Other combatant nations had put bread on ration, yet Britain did not.
Despite enormous tensions, British society held together. Around 750,000 young British men lost their lives (12% of those under arms), a similar number being badly wounded, this human cost unevenly spread in both families and communities, the tension between survivors’ “guilt” and the anger of those bereaved particularly acute. Working-class families may have had greater losses, but the smaller middle-class family units often lost an only son. The middle-classes, particularly, were resolved to press on for absolute victory, in an attempt to justify the sacrifice made to achieve it, while families with members still at the Front, however, were more amenable to a compromise to end the conflict.
The Armistice of November 1918 brought hostilities to a close, but the Peace Treaty was not signed until June 1919, so, correctly, the war is the 1914-1919 War. Why had it been fought? It was a war against militarism, intended to put an end to belligerence itself. The author H.G. Wells coined the phrase “The war to end wars”, but Maréchal Foch opined (rightly, as it turned out) that the Treaty of Versailles delivered merely a fragile peace for the coming 20 years. That British generation which lived through it regarded this war as the Great War, and British society, dusting itself down after more than four years of bitter struggle, realised that things would never be the same again, pre-1914 Britain having changed forever.
Stefan Gatward
The Rye Lifeboat “Mary Stanford” Disaster of 1928
The New Year opened with a mesmerising account of the tragedy of 15th November 1928 when seventeen RNLI volunteers from Rye Harbour lost their lives. Read an account of the talk here.
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Walking Taco
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You are here: Home / Archives for Jaquine Phoenix
November 15, 2011 By Seth H. 2 Comments
These days, mentioning the name M. Night Shyamalan while in line at the cineplex is a good way to get a punch in the mouth. Over the last five years, the man named after an orbital phase has become synonymous with insulting, navel-gazing movies like The Last Air Bender, The Happening, and of course, the unforgivable Lady in the Water. People especially hate him because the worse his movies get, the more in love with himself he seems to fall. The reason producers keep giving him chances has to be that his first few films were true masterpieces. Critics and Audiences alike called The Sixth Sense (1999) one of the best movies ever made. Unbreakable (2000) was less impressive, but definitely fit the mold of “both new and good.” By the time Signs was released in 2002, Shyamalan had his own genre.
And then, in between these gems and Shyamalan’s crimes against humanity, there was … this. The Village (2004) occupies an odd spot in history; Shyamalan’s pivot-point between greatness and sucking. Some loved it. Some hated it. It definitely isn’t your conventional movie, but then Shyamalan was always anything but conventional. On which side of the fence does it fall? Is it more like Shyamalan at his best, or his worst? Let’s find out.
Warning: spoilers ahead.
It must be acknowledged that the biggest selling point in the way this film was marketed turned out to be a total sham. A village full of apparently colonial people lives isolated from the rest of the world, oppressed by the fear of “Those We Don’t Speak of,” creatures that lurk in the forest around them. Good ominous beginning. As you might expect, there is a twist toward the end. But while the twist in The Sixth Sense made us re-think everything that happened in the movie, and increased our enjoyment of the story, the twist in The Village is a massive let down: the creatures are fake. Yep. That’s it. They spend 1:45 scaring you with these things, only to tell you what anyone over 5 knew walking into the theatre: that they are people in costumes. From this, and the dialogue that follows, it’s not hard to figure out the other twist: that this is actually happening present day, and the town elders have attempted to create a utopian world by isolating themselves from the rest of civilization, using the creatures to scare villagers from exploring beyond the village outskirts.
So this one must be a turd, right? Not so fast. I first saw The Village when it was newly made and wasn’t sure what to make of it. Some months later I found I was dying to see it again, so I rented it. Obviously, I knew the twist, but I still was caught up in the story and the passion that the actors put into it. A young Bryce Dallas Howard and Jaquin Phoenix light up the screen as the primal couple, who only slowly begin to realize their love for each other. The older members of the cast include a number of actors who have had more glorious rolls, such as Sigourney Weaver, former slayer of aliens, now cast as a humble, devoted house wife, and Brendan Gleeson, who reveled in badassery in Braveheart, Gangs of New York, and 28 Days Later, now confined to a small roll as a man too old to do much more than smoke a pipe. You might think these post-stars would be a little bitter, but what they bring to the screen reminds us that there are truly “no small parts; only small actors.”
This film probably repulsed a lot of viewers on a first viewing just because of the obvious gaff discussed above, but it merits a second and third viewing. As I watched it a second time, I came to understand that the gaff doesn’t harm the film because it isn’t a film about monsters. It’s a film about the community on screen and the people in it. The power of the movie comes home as boys tease each other with dares and girls dream about boys. We are drawn deeper in as their utopian society is suddenly, unexpectedly shattered by the crime of murder. And, despite suspension of belief, we are on the edge of our seats as a young, frightened, and blind girl (Howard) is forced to trek alone through the forbidden wood to save the boy she loves. And of course, even after the “twist,” there are some scary surprises waiting in the wood.
As good as the cast is, they might be outperformed by the score. Composer James Newton relied mostly on the solos of violinist Hillary Hahn to enhance the picture. It serves well to reflect the isolation that the characters feel in many scenes. This is one of the few movies that is worth checking out just for the soundtrack. The music excites, builds tension, and carries emotion just as well as what we see. A great deal of effort was also put into the costumes and the set design, both for authenticity and beauty, and it makes for a lot of sumptuous visuals. And I have to say, Shayamalan’s directing was still pretty good at this point. One scene in particular comes to mind, in which Those They Don’t Speak of attack the village (below). The boy on the watchtower sounds the alarm, and there are several minutes of people scrambling to gather the children, get inside, and get into their hiding places. This can’t have been an easy scene to pull off, with the amount of fast activity that had to be captured, the number of child actors, and the number of plot points that have to be hinted at, but Shayamalan did it brilliantly. Not only is the story told, but it’s a truly beautiful scene. Even on a second viewing, when I knew there was no real danger, I was caught up in it. When the rubber meets the road, Shayamalan really can do it — when he’s not jerking us around, that is.
Even as early as Signs, some of Shyamalan’s annoying habits were beginning to come to light. He loved to have something really important happen, such as an alien attacking someone, at point A, and, for no reason, point the camera squarely at point B. Or else, force us to look through some distorting piece of scenery, or look at a poor reflection. There’s a lot to be said for not showing too much, especially if you want to build suspense or scare the audience, but in order to do those two things, you also have to make us feel with the characters. For example, in Signs, when the main family has retreated to the basement, an alien hand reaches through the coal chute and grabs Morgan. A scuffle ensues as Grant and Merrill try to pull him to safety. Shyamalan chooses this moment to wave the camera around incoherently, showing us nothing. The characters see what’s happening! Why the hell shouldn’t we? The next morning, Morgan is again grabbed by an alien. This time, for the first time in the movie, we get a really good look at one of these things. Merrill then kills the alien with a bat. And then Shyamalan treats us to one more bad reflection, in an over-turned tv, of the alien’s chest rising as it struggles to breath. What is the point of this? We’ve already seen the alien!
The Village takes this a step further. Some of the most crucial scenes are interrupted by completely meaningless things. For example, near the end, when one of Those They Don’t Speak of (who seem to get mentioned a lot) chases Howard’s character, Ivy, we see the creature lunge at her from behind a tree. She runs. Then, for no reason, we see an empty rocking chair in front of a grove of trees. Then we see the creature chasing Ivy. Then we see a close up of a weather vane, over looking a hilltop. Then we see Ivy running. Just when it looks like something’s about to happen, we see another grove of trees. What is the point of this? These cut away shots don’t even match the main scene, or each other; they were obviously shot on different days, in different weather at different times of the year, and they serve no purpose whatsoever.
Of course, Shyamalan went on to commit atrocities like Lady in the Water (2006), where we almost never see anything except as a distorted reflection. All in all though, The Village is well worth checking out. It’s not without its faults by any means, but when the dust settles, what you have is a series of great scenes, beautifully shot and beautifully acted, perfectly capturing the emotion of the moment, all with a haunting score playing in the back ground. Much like in Van Helsing, the power of the performances smooths over the imperfections in the plot.
Have you seen this movie? Rate it!
Filed Under: Drama, Movies, Mystery, Uncategorized Tagged With: Brendon Gleeson, Bryce Dallas Howard, Drama, Jaquine Phoenix, M. Night Shayamalan, Mystery, Sigourney Weaver
By Simon R. 3 Comments
Midway through The Hunt for Red October a few nights ago, my wife turned to me and said “Why don’t they make movies like this anymore?” I asked her what she meant, and she said “You know, movies with just a really good plot.” As we spent a good chunk of our evening watching Jack […]
In Defense of George Lucas: Why the New Trilogy Matters
By Dwise1 4 Comments
This article is in response to Simon’s article Star Wars: Why the Originals Matter (So if you haven’t read that yet, read it first.) Simon’s article is, as always, well written, and he touches on many of the issues that have inflamed fans for years now. I must, however, do my part to stand up […]
Anvil: The Story of Anvil
By Simon R. 1 Comment
This Is Spinal Tap is one of the most well-known documentaries to be released in the past 30 years. It tells the story of a has-been heavy metal band that is about to embark on an American tour (dubbed “Tap into America”) while promoting their new album Smell The Glove. And even though things get […]
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The Dirty Little Secret About De-Funding Obamacare
Published February 20, 2011 | By dditton
Several members of Congress, like Rep. Denny Rehberg (R, MT) and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R.-Wash.) are offering amendments that would prevent any new spending from being used to implement Obamacare.
Good for them. Those are important additions to the big spending bill pending in Congress.
But here’s the dirty little secret: Much of Obamacare is being implemented with money that was already appropriated last year. These billions are already available for bureaucrats to put Obamacare into force.
Denying additional funding for Obamacare does not de-fund the huge amounts it already is using for implementation. That requires additional action.
Even though the last Congress failed to pass other appropriations bills (creating the need for the currently-pending spending measure), that former Congress DID provide billions to get Obamacare launched. The money was directly appropriated as part of the health care legislation, rather than included in a separate appropriations bill as is the normal practice.
The details are in a Congressional Research Service report issued last October, “Appropriations and Fund Transfers in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).” CRS devotes seven pages to describing the billions of dollars already appropriated and which the Obama Administration even now is spending to promote that law.
Conservatives agree with the American people that Obamacare should be repealed. Short of outright repeal, leaders from 32 conservative groups in the Conservative Action Project have unitedly stated that the next-best strategy is defunding. As their report states, “The safest route for legislatively combating Obamacare is to defund it. Now that the statute has been declared unconstitutional, Congress should use the power of the purse to deny funding for the individual mandate, employer mandates, and writing the 100s of regulations need to impose Obamacare. Such legislation will not in any way jeopardize the ongoing litigation efforts.”
It’s good that a federal judge has declared Obamacare unconstitutional, but the White House insists it’s going forward anyway. It’s good that the House may cut off any new money to implement Obamacare. But unless Congress deals with the pot of money already provided, we won’t meet the goal of defunding Obamacare.
Posted in National Issues, ObamaCare | Tagged ObamaCare
Alaska Governor Refuses to Implement ObamaCare
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — Gov. Sean Parnell took a defiant stand Thursday against the federal health care overhaul Congress passed last year, declaring that he will refuse to implement a law he views as blatantly unconstitutional.
Parnell is the latest Republican governor to lash out against the law as the courts weigh the constitutionality of the overhaul. More than half of all states, including Alaska, have sued or joined lawsuits against the government over the health care plan pushed by President Barack Obama.
It’s not immediately clear what impact the unusual, rather bold move would have on Alaskans, an estimated 14 percent of whom are uninsured year-round.
Several experts believe Parnell is on shaky legal ground and that his comments are little more than symbolic. The law won’t fully take effect until 2015 – just after his first term will have ended – and the constitutionality question will not get settled until the U.S. Supreme Court decides it.
Until then, in Parnell’s view the decision by a federal judge in Florida, striking down the law as unconstitutional, “is the law of the land, as it pertains to Alaska.”
Alaska was one of 26 states party to that case. In other cases, two federal judges have upheld the law and another judge ruled a provision requiring citizens to buy health insurance or face penalties – a major point of contention in the Florida case – is unconstitutional but did not strike down the rest of the law.
Federal Judge: Obamacare is Void
From The Heritage Foundation:
Today’s decision by Judge Vinson is another stinging defeat for the administration in its defense of Obamacare. Defenders of the health care bill had tried to paint any legal challenge as “frivolous.” When then-Speaker Pelosi was asked by a reporter “where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate,” Pelosi responded incredulously, “Are you serious? Are you serious?” To wit, Judge Vinson offered a serious response, striking down not only the mandate, but the whole of the health care bill.
In a 78-page opinion, Judge Vinson dissects the two major claims at issue in this case: whether Obamacare violates the spending clause, particularly the coercion principles announced in South Dakota v. Dole, and whether the mandate to purchase health insurance violates the Commerce Clause.
On the first claim, Judge Vinson sided with the administration. In the second, he offered a detailed analysis of the law which reads like a treatise. Rather than picking and choosing his cases, as many proponents of Obamacare like to do, he went through all of the relevant case law at length before concluding that the mandate violated the Commerce Clause. He correctly observed that “it would be a radical departure from existing case law to hold that Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause.” He then concluded that “the individual mandate and the remaining provisions are all inextricably bound together in purpose and must stand or fall as a single unit. The individual mandate cannot be severed.” As such, he appropriately struck down the entire law. Today’s decision should be a major source of concern for the Obama administration for at least five reasons.
First, the parties involved. This case involves a majority of the states (26), and the National Federation of Independent Business. If not completely unprecedented, the very fact that more than half the states marched into federal court on behalf of themselves and their citizens to challenge an unconstitutional federal program falls into the category of “beyond any recent memory.” The sheer magnitude of the parties involved guarantees that the courts on appeal will pay particular attention to this case.
Second, the case creates a very bad trend for the administration. Those courts which have taken the time to more fully develop the record in the case, and to have more briefing and hearings (Virginia and Florida), have ruled Obamacare unconstitutional. This is important because, contrary to the White House spin, litigation is not a scoreboard. It is not enough to say that you have won some and lost some. Some district court wins “count” more, because they are more indicative of what is likely to come next. Here, the cases the administration has lost have been better developed, have significant and sophisticated parties, and are in a better position for appeal than the more cursory cases that they have won at more preliminary stages.
Third, the case strikes down the whole of Obamacare based on the unconstitutionality of the mandate. The administration has tried to have it both ways on this one, with the President and key proponents arguing how essential the mandate is, while the Justice Department arguing at times that it was absolutely essential, and at times that it was severable. If the DOJ really wanted to keep the bill severable, perhaps they should not have argued in court that removing the mandate while maintaining the remaining requirements of the bill would “inexorably drive [the health insurance] market into extinction.” Those who would falsely accuse the Judge of overstepping his bounds must recognize both the standards for severability, which he properly applied, and the damning concession made on this point by the Justice Department.
The fourth problem for the Obama DOJ: Judge Vinson’s decision is thorough, well-reasoned, and likely will be very persuasive to appellate judges, and eventually Justices, who review the case. He was judicious, ruling against the states on the spending clause claim and for them on the Commerce Clause. The most important document in any appeal is the decision below, and Judge Vinson’s will give the court of appeals much to consider. Put simply, Vinson has just made the Obama DOJ’s job much more difficult.
The fifth problem, the Judge granted declaratory relief to the parties, which includes 26 states. Because the entire act was struck down, the future requirements to expand Medicaid programs will be suspended, at least as to these 26 states, and these states will be relieved of their obligation to make plans for such expansion in the immediate future. At a time when many states face insolvency, the removal of this burden is welcome news. The Obama administration, rather than fight the relief for these 26 states, should extend it to all 50 until the case is finally resolved.
Obamacare: A Uniquely Vicious Form of Corruption
Published February 4, 2011 | By dditton
From Power Line:
If you haven’t already seen it, don’t miss Karl Rove’s column in today’s Wall Street Journal. Rove explains the vicious strategy at the heart of Obamacare: pass terrible legislation, and then collect a toll by exempting your friends–those who pay you lots of money–from that legislation, while your enemies have to live with it. We have had various forms of corruption over the years, but I don’t believe we have had, within memory, anything quite this disgusting. The worst malefactor here, besides President Obama himself, is AARP:
The Obama administration’s behavior to date suggests that it will not hesitate to take care of its friends. The Senate Republican Policy Committee’s health policy analyst, Chris Jacobs, points out that the administration has already given an extravagant gift to the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons), a key player in passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
The AARP provided a big chunk of the $121 million spent on ads supporting the bill’s passage, as well as $21 million on lobbying in 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. HHS’s proposed regulations on Dec. 21 exempted the AARP’s lucrative “Medigap” plans from the rate review and other mandates and requirements. …
The AARP is also exempt from the new law’s $500,000 cap on executive compensation for insurance executives. (The nonprofit’s last CEO received over $1.5 million in compensation in his last full year, 2009.) It won’t pay any of the estimated $14 billion in new taxes on insurance companies, though according to its 2008 consolidated financial statement, it gets more money from its insurance offerings than it does from dues, grants and private contributions combined. Nor will it have to spend at least 85% of its Medigap premium dollars on medical claims, as Medicare Advantage plans must do; the AARP will be held to a far less restrictive 65%.
It’s not hard to connect the dots. The Obama administration is using waivers to reward friends. On the flip side, business executives will be discouraged from contributing to the president’s opponents or from taking any other steps that might upset the White House or its political appointees at HHS.
We’ve heard a lot about “crony capitalism” in recent years, but this is something worse–crony socialism. The Obama administration is running, in effect, a protection racket–nice business you have here, too bad if something should happen to it. We’re passing legislation that may destroy your business, but don’t worry–if you pay us our protection money, we will give you a waiver. By American standards, this is corruption of a uniquely vicious sort
Big Government Pays Google to Direct Searches to Pro-ObamaCare Propaganda
From Moonbattery:
If you type “ObamaCare” into Google, the first link that comes up is to HealthCare.gov, a government site extolling government control of the healthcare sector paid for with government money — that is, your money. Also paid for with your money was the link itself.
Politico’s Ben Smith, in a post entitled “HHS Buys ‘ObamaCare,'” quotes an official from Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), who confirms that this clear attempt to influence what Americans read about Obamacare does, indeed, represent your tax dollars at work: “‘We are using a bunch of search term[s] to help point people to HealthCare.gov. [It’s] [p]art of our online efforts to help get accurate information to people about the new law (i.e. [we] also use Facebook, Twitter, blogs and webcasts),’ an HHS official confirmed by e-mail.”
The “accurate information” that Americans will glean about the massive health care overhaul from this HHS website is of the same sort that President Obama has supplied all along — such as that Obamacare would lower health costs (only 17 percent of Americans believe this), increase the quality of care (only 22 percent believe this), and reduce deficits (only 17 percent believe this).
You won’t find anything on the HHS site about how the Medicare chief actuary projects that Obamacare would bend the cost curve upward by $311 billion by 2019 in relation to costs in the absence of Obamacare; about how the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that, by 2016, in the non-group market, the average American family’s health care premiums under Obamacare would increase by $2,100 per year in relation to what those premiums would be without Obamacare; about how the CBO projects that Obamacare would cost over $2 trillion in its real first decade (2014 to 2023) alone; or about how the administration’s internal (“midrange”) estimates are that more than half of all employer-provided health plans wouldn’t be grandfathered in under Obamacare — and that, therefore, if you like your health care, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get to keep your health care.
For that sort of information, you’ll have to consult sites that — because they don’t use taxpayer dollars to pay Google to list them first — appear somewhat lower in the pecking order.
The vicious circle turns and turns: the bigger government gets, the more of your money it has to promote its own growth.
ObamaCare Already Preventing Hospital Construction
ObamaCare is already doing its work — depriving us of healthcare, destroying jobs, and suppressing free market competition:
Under the headline, “Construction Stops at Physician Hospitals,” Politico reports [yesterday] that “Physician Hospitals of America says that construction had to stop at 45 hospitals nationwide or they would not be able to bill Medicare for treatments.” Stopping construction at doctor-owned hospitals might not seem like the best way to boost the economy or to promote greater access and choice in health care, but that exactly what Obamacare is doing.
Kenneth Artz of the Heartland Institute explains, “Section 6001 of the health care law effectively bans new physician-owned hospitals (POHs) from starting up, and it keeps existing ones from expanding.” Politico adds, “Friday [New Year’s Eve] marked the last day physician-owned hospitals could get Medicare certification covering their new or expanded hospitals, one of the latest provisions of the reform law to go into effect.”
This little-noticed but particularly egregious aspect of Obamacare is, by all accounts, a concession to the powerful American Hospital Association (AHA), a supporter of Obamacare, which prefers to have its member hospitals operate without competition from hospitals owned by doctors. Dr. Michael Russell, president of Physician Hospitals of America, which has filed suit to try to stop this selective building-ban from going into effect, says, “There are so many regulations [in Obamacare] and they are so onerous and intrusive that we believe that the section [Section 6001] was deliberately designed so no physician owned hospital could successfully comply.”
But on the positive side, cronies with a special seat at the Big Government table (like the AHA, the AMA, and established giants in the pharmaceutical and insurance industries) stand to profit, at least in the short-term, at the expense of the rest of us.
Obamacare: The Price Controls Begin
Published January 18, 2011 | By dditton
The Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday that, starting next year, health insurance companies must receive permission from the Obama administration before they can raise rates higher than 10%. As we warned before Obamacare even became law, this is a form of price control, a government intervention that has a long and well established history of failure.
Way back in 1993, Heritage Foundation scholar Heritage’s Ed Haislmaier was detailing the shortcomings of price controls in health care:
Price controls would not work in health care because they attack the symptoms of runaway costs, not the cause. Medical costs today are soaring because consumers are largely insulated from them…and because the tax system discourages consumers from seeking good value for money in health care.
Most policy makers who favor health care price controls view them as a way to curb rapid medical inflation. But most of the blame for that same inflation can be traced directly to previous government health care policies that they support or maintain. Health care price controls also are attractive to Members of Congress because they provide a benefit (cheaper medical care) to a favored constituency (health care consumers) at the expense of less favored constituencies (doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and insurance companies). This is why some Members of Congress are so quick to blame the health care industry for escalating medical costs, when in fact it is largely government laws, regulations, and policies that are responsible.
Obamacare Endgame: Doctors Will be Fined or Jailed if they Put Patients First
Published November 22, 2010 | By dditton
If Obamacare is completely implemented, doctors will no longer be practicing medicine. They will instead become the drones tasked with deciding who gets the meager healthcare crumbs doled out by the bureaucrats who have the ultimate power over patient life and death. Those who are deemed to have illnesses that require treatments which are not cost effective can expect a one way ticket to a hospice.
Like so many bills passed by Congress, there was a hidden provision in the Stimulus bill passed in 2009. It spends 1.1 billion dollars to create an important piece of the framework for the healthcare bill called the Coordinating Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. It is based on the false premise that doctors in consultation with their patients don’t have the ability to make the right healthcare choices (see executive summary). The council consists of 15 people appointed by the President.
They all have one thing in common–they are all isolated from day to day patient care; and therefore, are insulated from the real practice of the art of medicine. It makes it easy to see patients as a cost center to be controlled. With views of members like Dr Emanuel, who champions the complete-lives system, it is hard to ignore the probability that senior citizens, those with chronic illness, and the very young will be on the outside looking in. This council is another example of the people of this country being told by the government that it knows what is best for us.
The framework set up by the stimulus bill merely set the stage for the implementation found in the healthcare reform bill. How can the government get doctors to participate in Obamacare thereby a) willingly destroying the doctor patient relationship, and b) betraying their Hippocratic Oath to provide treatments that they deem to be effective? Simple – fear and intimidation.
A second board created by the stimulus bill called The National Coordinator for Health Information Technology “will determine treatment at the time and place of care”. They are charged with deciding the course of treatment for the diagnosis given by the doctor. Now it becomes obvious why there has been a big push towards the implementation of universal electronic medical record use. It becomes a tool to completely control the physician and the patient. Those physicians and hospitals that choose to practice individualized patient care in consultation with their patients will be punished because they are not “meaningful users of the system over time.” Beginning January 1, 2013 penalties for doing the right thing for a patient will cost the doctor $100,000 for the first offense and jail for the second offense. This will have a chilling effect and may be the straw that completely breaks the foundation of good medicine – the doctor patient relationship.
46% of physiciansin a survey by The New England Journal of Medicine stated that they would leave the practice of medicine if Obamacare was implemented. This will only further decrease the quality of healthcare when the 30 million more people enter the system. Maybe that’s why there is a big push in the healthcare bill to increase the number of other providers such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners. There is no question that rationing will become our future. If you add 30 million more people into a system with fewer resources how could you possibly avoid rationing? Perhaps those members of Congress who passed this nightmare don’t care since they made sure that it wouldn’t apply to them.
A Doctor’s Diagnosis of the ObamaCare Problem
Published November 1, 2010 | By dditton
Gov. Mitch Daniels on Obamacare’s Devastating Consequences
Published September 1, 2010 | By dditton
We’ve been through a global recession. Now we’re fighting through a stalled recovery. Revenues are the lowest they’ve been in half a century. Their finances a wreck, many states have effectively sunk into bankruptcy.
Indiana is still afloat. In fact, we’ve fared better than most. We continue to meet our obligations without raising taxes, and the reserves we carefully built and protected will get us through the downturn.
But as if we did not already have enough on our plates, the passage and implementation of Obamacare presents us with a whole new set of challenges and a costly to-do list.
I note with special sadness that first and foremost amongst the bill’s consequences will be the probable demise of the Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP). This program is currently providing health insurance to 50,000 low-income Hoosiers. With its Health Savings Account-style personal accounts and numerous incentives for healthy lifestyle choices, it has been enormously popular and successful.
Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, soon to cover one in every four citizens, will not only scoop up most of HIP’s participants, but will also cost the state between $3.1 and $3.9 billion over the next decade. It is hard to see how my successors as governor will be able to avoid a steep state tax increase to pay for it. Meanwhile, our medical device companies and small businesses will shed jobs as they wrestle with the taxes and penalties levied to help finance Washington’s “reforms.”
Read the rest at The Heritage Foundation.
Posted in National Issues, ObamaCare | Tagged Mitch Daniels, ObamaCare
It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first. — Ronald Reagan
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A Regency Boy
Portrait miniatures, silhouettes, portraits & an omnium-gatherum of historical interest & character.
Enquiries and orders
cynthia@wigsonthegreen.co.uk
John Field, circa 1820
John Field (1772-1848) is prominently placed amongst the finest and most collectable silhouette artists working during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. His career began during the 1790s when he was taken on as an assistant to John Miers in his London studio. That opportunity transpired into the start of a lifelong friendship and a prolific partnership that only ceased when Miers died in 1821. The business was at that point jointly willed to Field and Miers’s son, William, but the dynamics had clearly been altered too much as within a few years the business filed for bankruptcy. Field continued to paint profiles during the 1830s but from a studio that he now shared with his own son.
This example of John Field’s work dates from about 1820 and shows a smartly dressed boy in a frilled chemise and stock, his hair brushed forward and ruffled over his forehead, as was the fashion of the day.
The silhouette is painted on a plaster base and is expertly bronzed. It is housed in the original papier-mâché frame with convex glass, a decorative surround and ormolu leaf hanger. The frame is backed with the artist’s unbroken trade label no. 12, as used on Field’s finest work.
There are a couple of chips to the edge of the plaster base, the main one at four o’clock. This must have happened before the silhouette was framed as there is no sign of plaster dust under the glass. The profile itself is in good condition with just tiny spots of paint loss that are only visible under magnification.
Item Ref. 6044
Size: framed, 148 x 124mm (5⅞ x 4⅞")
Copyright © Wigs on the Green 2021
Castlegate IT
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tipitaka network ... his life, his acts, his words sabbe satta bhavantu sukhi-tatta
News at Tipitaka Network
Meditation no cure, but it helps
by Eleanor Limprecht, The Australian, Saturday, December 13, 2008
WHEN Guy Corrigall was two years in remission from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, he began meditating.
Not just any form of meditation, but mindfulness meditation, an increasingly popular practice for alleviating stress, depression, anxiety, and pain.
In Corrigall's case, he was hoping to curtail the depression that had crept into his life since the diagnosis. "Not that I wanted to throw myself off a tall building, but I had shut myself off from life ... The meditation was a wonderful safe place where I could just go and be," he says.
The 63-year-old financial planner now meditates for 40 minutes every day, and says it comes as naturally as brushing his teeth. "It's not a cure for the cancer, but it helped me accommodate it. It has been enormously rewarding and valuable."
One might assume Corrigall learned his practice in a Buddhist temple or during a yoga retreat, but it was actually at the Sydney Cancer Centre at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, in the Sydney suburb of Camperdown.
Clinical psychologist Elizabeth Foley runs the mindfulness clinic at RPA for cancer patients. In the past couple of years she has worked with over 200 such people.
"Because treatments are improving, 90 per cent of the time people are living with cancer. Certainly mindfulness helps people live with cancer, lets it be part of their lives without taking over their lives. It's about quality of life, about coping with the illness and having a really rich, wonderful life in spite of the diagnosis," she says.
Mindfulness meditation isn't new; the practice is derived from Buddhist vipassana meditation, but its acceptance into mainstream medicine is a recent occurrence, particularly in Australia.
In mindfulness meditation, participants are taught to focus their thoughts on their immediate physical sensations -- including ones normally taken for granted, such as breathing in and out -- in a way that helps them cope more easily with physical pain and to minimise any worries or anxieties they might have about the past or future.
The practice was popularised in the west by Jon Kabat-Zinn, emeritus professor of medicine and founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Centre for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In the 1970s, Kabat-Zinn developed an eight-week course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), in which he used meditation to teach patients the act of "paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally". Kabat-Zinn also ran clinical trials which found that MBSR resulted in reductions in chronic pain, anxiety disorders and psoriasis.
The form of mindfulness meditation that Foley uses in the Mindfulness Clinic is Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), a modification of MBSR developed at Oxford to target the cognitive processes associated with relapse into depression. A recent randomised controlled trial of MBCT that Foley ran with 115 clinic patients showed significant improvements in depression, anxiety and distress, and a trend for improved quality of life in the treatment group compared to a waitlist control group.
"Many of these patients have found it life-changing," she says. "The main thing clients tend to learn about is kindness. Developing kindness towards themselves rather than being so judgmental."
Corrigall recalls his own participation in the trial fondly. "It was highly structured and very disciplined. And as I'm a mathematician, I found it very well based." But that's not to say it was easy. "It's quite demanding. You have to say 'look, this isn't for fun'. You have to have a very strong purpose. Meditation is a discipline. It's something you have to concentrate on, like daily exercise," he says.
Overseas, studies of mindfulness meditation have been sprouting with increasing frequency since 2000. It has been credited with helping to increase immune functioning and preventing relapse or recurrence in major depression.
Bruno Cayoun, a clinical psychologist and research consultant in mindfulness-based research at the University of Tasmania, says Australia is lagging in its acceptance of mindfulness meditation, but gradually picking it up. "Had it not been called mindfulness or associated with Buddhism, it wouldn't have taken so long to catch on," he says.
But in psychology, according to Cayoun, the results mean everyone is now talking about mindfulness techniques. "It is coming from the floor -- clients are saying I want this because of the results -- and that is almost unheard of in therapy."
In 2009, Cayoun will be running an eight-week course in mindfulness for staff at Hobart's Risdon Prison, who will in turn teach it to inmates. "In America, it has been shown to reduce recidivism by 90 per cent," he says.
"If I train my brain twice a day not to react to sensations, when I have an emotion I'm not going to react. I'm going to feel it, but I'm going to be more tolerant of it and let it go. I'm not going to ruminate on it."
According to Griffith University psychology PhD student Angela Morgan, mindfulness can also be useful for people who suffer from eating disorders. In recently completed research with colleague Michelle Hanisch, Morgan ran a randomised controlled trial of group-based mindfulness intervention for binge-eating related disorders.
In two-hourly sessions over an eight-week period, they used mindfulness meditation to teach 128 women to tolerate and manage emotional experiences without using food.
"The mindfulness treatment resulted in significant improvements in the frequency of binge-eating episodes and compensatory behaviours (vomiting, laxative use, excessive exercise and fasting) per week," Morgan says. "At the end of the treatment the majority of the participants no longer met diagnostic criteria for eating disorders."
Morgan says 62 per cent of participants were no longer binge-eating and 80 per cent were no longer using the compensatory behaviours. The improvements were all maintained at a one month follow-up.
The effects of mindfulness meditation on the elderly are also being examined. In October the Tasmanian branch of Alzheimer's Australia began a risk-reduction program for healthy adults between the ages of 55 and 80 called Active Cognitive Enhancement (ACE) to combat mental decline. The program results will be evaluated as part of a research project at the School of Psychology at the University of Tasmania. During every two-hour session, participants practise cognitive training exercises, listen to educational lectures and engage in a brief period of mindfulness meditation.
Social worker Malcolm Tyler, with the Tasmanian Department of Health and Human Services, says sessions are short, but participants are often picking up the practice at home as well. "People are reporting increased cognitive effects already," Tyler says.
The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners says it recognises the clinical benefits of mindfulness meditation and the growing body of scientific evidence supporting its use in clinical practice.
The college offers Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points to GPs for several mindfulness meditation courses in Australia.
But Sydney GP Gillian Deakin says the medical community has not embraced mindfulness nearly enough. She considers the practice an essential part of good health, but says that puts her in the minority among medical practitioners.
"We tend to be enamoured with the power of the mind and the thinking mind in medicine, whereas meditation is beyond thinking," she says. "Medical training is a total anathema to this. I consider it a gross failing in medical training that they don't train all medical practitioners in the art of mindfulness. For the distress the average GP sees, largely the best form of treatment would be mindfulness training."
Deakin recommends mindfulness meditation to patients, but says she doesn't do so until physical causes are ruled out. She refers patients to Open Ground, a mindfulness-based stress reduction program that consists of weekly 2 1/2-hour group sessions over eight weeks. The program doesn't come cheap at $660, but director Timothea Goddard says there are payment plans and concessions.
Goddard tells of an 84-year-old man who came to the course having been through cancer and a number of bad accidents. "He was on massive amounts of painkillers and over the eight weeks he got off them. He said, 'I have pain, have bad pain every day, but I'm not making the same meaning of it. I'm interrupting the reactivity that says 'why me, I feel so miserable'. The pain is there and I choose to go and have a life'."
source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24786640-23289,00.html
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Buddha sāsana.m cira.m ti.t.thatu.
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Torquing Point
Thread: London 2020
Nigel Incubator-Jones
Milner for PM!
Croydon, Surrey
What with car shows being off, I have to occupy my time somehow...
I sensed that my adrenal glands were going to be put to work as soon as I walked masklessly into East Croydon station. There aren’t normally police patrolling the station but there were on this occasion. Fortunately, their job seemed to be to encourage Covid compliance by way of intimidation rather than physical force, and they didn’t give me any hassle.
I arrived at King’s Cross at 11.30, having arranged to meet a group of people prior to the protest’s scheduled start at midday. This all fell apart pretty quickly, because there were very few people at King’s Cross save for a plague of policemen. Anyone would have thought someone had reported a bomb.
The scene at King's Cross at 11.30
My photography clearly made me conspicuous, and I was spotted by a fellow protester who informed me that due the heavy police presence at King’s Cross, the start of the protest had been moved to the Angel, so I duly set off in that direction.
Good old-fashioned guerrilla stickering on Pentonville Road
Once again, nothing seemed to be happening there, so I approached a bemused crowd who had got wind that the protest had been relocated again to Marble Arch. That would have been about an hour’s walk from the Angel, so we, a posse of about eight, jumped on an Underground train at Warren Street and alighted early at Bond Street, expecting Marble Arch station to be beset by more hired thugs.
I must recount an amusing incident that took place on the train. Without giving it any though, I sat down, as one does when one sees an empty seat. The man sitting a couple of seats along quickly said to me, “I suppose you’re f—king exempt?”, to which I responded, “I am, yeah.” Quick as a flash, he jumped out of his seat and sat on the opposite side of the train. A moment later, he realised he had only moved nearer to one of my smiling comrades, so he shot up again and sprinted into the next carriage. Lol.
Shortly after getting off at Bond Street, we noticed the protest moving along a side road and so ran to join it, feeling a bit like we were in a film. It must have been getting on for one o’clock at this point. At first, it seemed like the protest was considerably smaller than previous ones, which wouldn’t have been surprising given all the efforts of the police to disrupt it. However, the march didn’t always consist of one single coherent group, as the police tactics seemed to be to force it to disperse in smaller groups. The demographics appeared to have changed, too, compared to previous protests I’d attended. The earlier protests were marked by lots of ‘seasoned protesters’. This one seemed to be attended mainly by ordinary middle- and working-class people, folk had travelled from Durham and Wales and there was notable contingent of Scousers. There seemed to be lots more young people waking up to what’s going on as well.
After moving back and forth through the streets of Mayfair and Soho, the actual scale of the occasion became apparent when we marched in a seemingly unified body along Oxford Street and Regent Street, and it was on this occasion that the police presence really decided it needed to make itself felt. Suffice it to say, these weren’t your normal bobbies on the beat; they were Special Coppers, from the elite band of skull-crackers formerly known as the SPG and now operating as the Territorial Support Group. I don’t know what they make truncheons from, but every policeman was nursing a great big, stiff, hard one.
Heart-warming scenes in Soho...
…and stomach-churning ones. Somewhere in the middle of the coppers, a harmless civilian is lying on the ground.
Busy Old Bill at Piccadilly Circus
As the above pictures show, the TSG operates on the principle of ‘hit people first, hit them again later’. It is its practice to harangue and intimidate peaceful protesters until it succeeds in eliciting a response borne either of anger or fright and, when it gets the response it seeks, you don’t want to stand in its way. One video shows a protester throwing railings at police. I didn’t witness that myself, but I am confident such instances were a response to or defence against police brutality rather than an attempt to incite it, as most of the protesters were generally fearful of being coshed. As my sense of journalistic duty drew me closer to the scuffle pictured above, I caught two people who’d been sent flying having inadvertently stood in the path of Constable Savage and friends. They don’t care if you’re male or female and, if the circumstance was presented, I doubt they would make the distinction between adults and children, either.
It was only on seeing the TSG in action for the first time that I really came to appreciate what makes it so effective. When I witnessed the police throwing innocent civilians onto the tarmac without thought or hesitation, it became painfully obvious that these policemen were not acting out of any sense of civic duty or public-spiritedness, however misguided; I was staring into the face of stark, unregarding stupidity.
Once again, we ended up being broken into smaller fragments, and we wandered around a bit aimlessly, in small enough numbers not to be of any more concern to the police, unsure if we were supposed to be heading for Trafalgar Square, Oxford Circus, or Hyde Park. Somehow, we all managed to reconvene at Hyde Park, where we were once again set upon by the TSG and were chased in a big circle around the park.
This scene from Hyde Park gives a better idea of the scale of the march
Somewhere along the Carriage Drive, the police pulled a somewhat ineffectual trick out of its sleeve…
“You cross zis line, ve arrest you,” were their precise words
We returned to Speaker’s Corner, and managed to stay there for a while. I can only presume the police didn’t have sufficient numbers to deal with us all, and we had free rein for as long as it took for back-up to arrive. The protesters took the opportunity to indulge in a rousing chorus of the protest song We Are the Ninety-Nine Per Cent, set to the tune of She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain, which I didn’t initially take to when I first heard it sung at the end of August. It struck me as somewhat crude and erring too close to the conspiracy theories. Now, though, what the hell, I’m happy to join in. We’re living well and truly in Airstrip One and the ‘poison vaccine’ of the verse is nearly upon us. Besides, I love live music and this is the best I’m going to get for a long time to come.
Sadly, back-up did eventually arrive and we were gradually routed from about three o’clock. Cue more police brutality and nonsensical arrests.
No mask, no neck, no brain, no heart
A brave man, the man in grey
As I was leaving, I witnessed the arrest of the young man in grey, who had nothing to do with the protest. He was simply out for a walk in Hyde Park with two friends. A group of TSG approached him, and said “There’s a protest going on and we’re trying to disperse it. We know you might not be involved with the protest, but you need to go home.”
The young man quite politely stood his ground and told Constable Savage that he was entitled to stay in the park. Whoops! You don’t answer back, silly. It’s the Black Maria for you!
This is where we are, I’m afraid. The pride and respect I feel for the people who turned up to march for their freedom in the face of police brutality is immense. The disgust I feel for the state and its hired muscle knows no bounds. I never gave too much thought to the American gun lobby’s argument that the possession of arms is necessary for the protection of citizens against the state, but after today I feel like they might have a very valid point.
Incidentally, the day had a happy ending, as a chance conversation with a couple of other protesters as I was leaving sparked a new friendship. We enjoyed a spot of socialising after the protest, and ended the day in an ‘illicit Soho establishment’, which isn’t necessarily what it sounds like now that entry into anyone else’s premises is illicit. When I went home at about five, police vans were still bombing around every which way, for no obvious reason other than to put the fear of the devil into people.
fad15
Might as well be part of the furniture.
If its OK with you,I would like to send this text to my MP, whom I have logged my disdain about the Police actions I have seen on UTube today.
You have a PM
Last edited by fad15; 30-11-20 at 06:01 AM.
Plumpcars
United Kingdom Heathrowish.
I fully support the police against selfish cunts.
fabphil
Outside the M25
Sorry guys didn't think this particular forum was for political viewpoints of which ever variety, can we please keep it to automotive and related.
Where ever you go there will always be someone with an opinion 180 degrees out from your own.
Neither opinion is correct, they are just that, opinions.
My daughter works for the Met and has to deal with arseholes and idiots all day every day.
The police do go over the top on occasion, but they do not make the rules, only enforce.
There are always two sides to every story...
Sorry, Phil, I'm afraid I gave into my natural urge to do some documentary reporting. I'll do my time on the naughty step.
Originally Posted by Nigel Incubator-Jones
I love your writing style and general attitude to life. Keep on doing what your doing...
And you still make a joke of it. I've just spent the morning with somebody who has long covid which started in March. I just hope that you never have to do the same. I come here for the cars and to escape the crap going around in the real world. Instead I wake up to this drivel. I'm done.
When you can no longer express an opinion for the fear of upsetting someone that does not hold the same beliefs as you we are all lost.
Just look at whats happening around the country... you are NOT THE ONLY ONE to loose people in this so called epidemic.
They are driving a wedge between people who up to this point were all of the same opinions and values. Seems like we have lost the fight so just hand over your cars and be a good boy......
I have no intention of fighting you or your values so lets just part on good terms.
Last edited by fad15; 30-11-20 at 04:13 PM.
or better yet lets not part but agree to disagree and get back to the car shit
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Johanna Stiebert wins research award
School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science news Wednesday 18 January 2017
Johanna has been awarded a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award through the Humboldt Fellowship Scheme and will be spending a year at the University of Bamberg.
At the University of Bamberg in Germany, Johanna will be mentoring postgraduates and scholars from African countries and embarking on a research project focused on Anglophone African research on biblical texts that link ethnicity with deviance. Her longer-term aim is to produce free-access learning and teaching resources on topics combining biblical studies and social justice.
See all School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science news
The IDEA Pod - a new season of free ethical podcasts
School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science - Tuesday 19 January 2021
HPS in 20: Essay competition winners
School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science - Thursday 14 January 2021
Speak to our international ambassadors
School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science - Friday 18 December 2020
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Kovalcin, Andrew
Andrew Kovalcin
Andrew Kovalcin is Senior Director at Advocacy and External Affairs. Mr. Kovalcin has developed and implemented a comprehensive strategy to promote the importance of IP to jobs, the economy, and American competitiveness. Mr. Kovalcin has extensive experience engaging third-party voices, grassroots, and academics in educating state and federal policymakers on telecommunications, health care, and IP issues. He worked at the Republican National Committee and served as a staff member in the office of Congresswoman Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL).
Most recently, he worked at the DCI Group, a public affairs firm specializing in using a political campaign style to develop and execute strategic lobbying campaigns for public policy issues. Previously, Mr. Kovalcin established the North Carolina chapter of a national healthcare coalition promoting consumer protections, and managed a North Carolina State House of Representatives campaign. Mr. Kovalcin, a graduate of North Carolina State University, has a bachelor’s degree in political science with an interdisciplinary concentration in international relations.
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Prateek
Prateek (pruh - TEEK) has been described as “Not just any guy with a guitar…” by The Boston Globe and perhaps that’s the best introduction to his music besides actually listening to it. The Boston-based artist recorded his debut EP, “Walking in My Sleep,” with only his guitar and two microphones in an attempt to emulate Bob Dylan’s early work. Since then, Prateek’s music has evolved to incorporate gritty electric guitars, silvery backing vocals, and lush strings, all draped around his own soulful, powerful voice. Prateek has been a Kerrville Folk Festival New Folk Finalist and has been nominated for Singer-Songwriter of the Year at both the New England Music Awards and the Boston Music Awards. His music has been played on radio stations including Sirius XM, 98.9 WERS, and 92.5 The River. His most recent EP, "All You Do Is Drown," is available wherever digital music is sold or streamed.
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Home » Questions » What is Cytotec?
When we mention Misoprostol or Cytotec we are basically talking about the same thing.
Misoprostol and Cytotec are actually the same thing. Cytotec is just the trade name given to Misoprostol.
Misoprostol is synthetic analogue of natural prostaglandin E1 (PGE1), used to prevent gastric ulcers, for the treatment of miscarriages, to induce labor, as an abortifacient and to control postpartum hemorrhage.
Misoprostol was invented and commercialized by GD Searle & Company (now Pfizer) under the trade name Cytotec. Therefore Cytotec is just the trade name given to Misoprostol.
There are available several formulas and generic drugs available worldwide.
When we mention Cytotec – 200mcg, we are just talking about the dosage in one pill of Cytotec / Misoprostol. In this case, it would be two hundred (200) micrograms of Misoprostol in each pill of Cytotec – 200mcg.
A successful abortion does not mean pain. Many women have very weak cramping during the abortion procedure.
INCREASE YOUR KNOWLEDGE
How does Cytotec work?
Cytotec pills contain the active ingredient Misoprostol, which is a type of medication known as prostaglandin analog. It is used in the treatment and prevention of stomach and intestine (peptic) ulcers.
Cytotec works by imitating the action of the natural prostaglandins.
Prostaglandins are a group of natural body chemicals found in several parts of the body.
Misoprostol acts on the stomach receptors just as the natural prostaglandins that help to protect the gastric mucosa. By binding to these receptors, it stimulates the stomach to produce a protective mucus.
It covers the stomach and the intestine lining, and also reduces the acid production in the stomach. Misoprostol can, therefore, be used to help curing ulcers in these areas.
The analgesics called nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), such as Diclofenac and Naproxen, can reduce the production of protective prostaglandins in the bowel.
This means that this analgesics have the potential to damage the intestinal epithelium, causing ulcers, bleeding and, sometimes, even holes in the intestine. Misoprostol can be used to help people who are currently taking NSAIDs to manage long-term conditions, such as arthritis, preventing this type of damages in the intestinal lining.
Use with caution in:
People with heart diseases.
Pregnant women (because it results in abortion).
People with high blood pressure (hypertension).
People with cerebrovascular diseases, for instance, individuals who have had a stroke or mini-stroke;
People who suffer from frequent diarrhea, due, for instance to conditions such as Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis or irritable bowel syndrome.
How does Cytotec affect another medication?
Antiacids containing magnesium should be avoided while taking this Cytotec, because they can increase the incidence of diarrhea, which is one of the most common side effects of Misoprostol.
Side effects of Cytotec / Misoprostol
Below we can find some side effects in people who took Cytotec:
In subjects who were taking Cytotec – 400mcg or 800mcg per day, during clinical trials, the most frequent gastrointestinal side effects were diarrhea and abdominal pain. The occurrence of diarrhea with 800 mcg in controlled studies in patients on NSAIDs ranged from 14% to 40%, and, in overall studies (over 5 000 patients), the calculated averaged was 13%. Abdominal pain occurred in 13% – 20% of patients in NSAID trials and approximately 7% in all studies. Nevertheless, there were no consistent differences from placebo.
Diarrhea was related to the dose and was developed during the early stage of the treatment (after 13 days). It often limited itself (typically settling after 8 days), even though sometimes it was necessary to interrupt Cytotec (in 2% of patients). Rare occurrences of heavy diarrhea that led to a severe dehydration have been reported. Patients with underlying conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease or those with signs of dehydration should be carefully monitored when Cytotec is prescribed. Diarrhea can be minimized ´through drug administration after meals and before bedtime, avoiding as well combined administration of Cytotec with antacids containing magnesium.
Gynecological
Women that have taken Cytotec during clinical trials reported the following gynecological disorders: spots (0.7%), cramps (0.6%), hypermenorrhea (0.5%), menstrual disorder (0.3%) and dysmenorrhea (0.1%). Vaginal bleeding after menopause may be related to Cytotec administration. If this occurs, diagnostic investigation should be undertaken to rule out any gynecological pathology.
There were no significant differences in the safety profile of Cytotec in 500 patients aged 65 and more with ulcers when compared to younger patients.
Additional adverse events that were reported are categorized as described bellow:
Incidence greater than 1%
In clinical trials, the following adverse reactions were reported by more than 1% of subjects that were receiving Cytotec and may be causally related to the medication: nausea (3.2%), flatulence (2.9%), headache (2.4%), dyspepsia (2.0%), vomiting (1.3%), and constipation (1.1%). However, there were no significant differences between the incidence of these events with Cytotec and with placebo.
Unknown causal links
The following adverse effects have been rarely reported. Causal links between Cytotec and these effects have not been established, but they can’t also be excluded:
In the body: aches, asthenia, fatigue, fever, chills, weight changes;
Skin: rash, dermatitis, alopecia, pallor, breast pain;
Sensorial systems: taste alteration, abnormal vision, conjunctivitis, deafness, tinnitus, earache;
Respiratory: upper respiratory tract infection, bronchitis, bronchospasm, dyspnea, pneumonia, epistaxis;
Cardiovascular: chest pain, edema, diaphoresis, hypotension, hypertension, arrhythmia, phlebitis, increased cardiac enzymes, syncope, myocardial infarction (some fatal), thromboembolic events (eg, pulmonary embolism, arterial thrombosis and stroke);
Gastrointestinal: GI bleeding, GI inflammation / infection, rectal disorder, abnormal hepatobiliary function, gingivitis, reflux, dysphagia, increased amylase;
Hypersensitivity: anaphylactic reaction;
Metabolic: glycosuria, gout, increased nitrogen, increased alkaline phosphatase;
Genito-urinary: polyuria, dysuria, hematuria, urinary tract infection.
Nervous system: anxiety, change of appetite, depression, drowsiness, dizziness, thirst, impotence, loss of libido, increasing sweating, neuropathy, neurosis, confusion;
Musculoskeletal: arthralgia, myalgia, muscle cramps, stiffness, back pain.
Blood / Coagulation: anemia, abnormal differential, thrombocytopenia, purpura, increased sedimentation rate.
The toxic dose of Cytotec in humans hasn’t been determined. Cumulative total daily doses of 1600 mcg have been tolerated, showing only symptoms of gastrointestinal discomfort. In animals, the acute toxic effects are: diarrhea, gastrointestinal lesions, focal cardiac necrosis, hepatic necrosis, renal tubular necrosis, testicular atrophy, respiratory difficulties, and central nervous system depression. Clinical signs that may indicate an overdose are: sedation, tremor, convulsions, dyspnea, abdominal pain, diarrhea, fever, palpitations, hypotension, or bradycardia. The symptoms should be treated with supportive care.
It is not known if Misoprostol acid is dialyzable. However, since Misoprostol is metabolized as a fatty acid, dialysis highly is unlikely to be a suitable treatment for overdose.
Cytotec – 200 mcg
The pills are hexagonal and white. On one side they are marked with the word SEARLE above and with 1461 below the threshold. On the other side it displays the image of a double stomach.
The pills are rounded and white. The word SEARLE appears in one of its sides, and marked with 1451 on the other side.
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Getting to Lalibela…By Bus!
Africa, Ethiopia, 1 Comment
adventure, Gondar, Lalibela, minibus, Northern Ethiopia, St. Giyorgis, travel, wanderlust
“Batman has to break the mob…while the Flash travels to the past to solve the secret of…‘The Disco of Death!’”
Yes, that’s right, I read my first comic. Where, you ask? In Kombolcha, Ethiopia, after a 12-hour travel day on public buses, while eating an odd (yet tasty) concoction of rice, beets, and honey. Yes, this is my life.
I left Addis Ababa on Saturday, September 7th after a week and a half for our Mid-Service Conference and medical checks. The day’s destination – Kombolcha. Usually seven hours by bus, we had the unfortunate luck of the private buses choosing not to run and we hopped on a public bus by late morning. Two to three hours later we arrived Debre Birhan hoping to make a quick switch to a bus going to Camise/Kombolcha/Dessie – we weren’t being picky. Two to three hours later, we were on the road again. If you ever find yourself in Ethiopia, don’t, I repeat DON’T travel the weekend before the Ethiopian New Year.
While sitting in the bus station, another volunteer who had left Addis much later than we had caught up to us. He joined our bus and we arrived in his site at 7:30. I remember him shaking his head as the three of us said we were going to try and push on to Kombolcha. An hour and a half later, we were in Camise.
My boyfriend went to Camise a year ago for his “demystification trip” and I’ve never heard a kind word about the city. With that said, we had to hire a private minibus to get us to Kombolcha. We got to our friend’s house shortly after 10. One hell of a day. Which is how I came to find myself reading comics and eating rice/beets/honey. Also…while on the bus, I slept through my first camel viewing. Damn.
Day two almost involved sleeping in….almost. Instead, we made our way to Dessie, twenty minutes away to procure direct bus tickets to Lalibela for Tuesday. But to no avail. Thanks to the holiday, all tickets were sold out. There was talk of trying to hop from minibus to minibus and make our way on our own, busing back to Addis and flying to Lalibela (not actually considered given our Addis/Kombolcha trip the day before), and busing to Mekele and trying to fly in from there. In the end we decided to risk the minibuses and leave a day early. With that decision made, we returned to Kombolcha and spent the evening at the beer garden. We also ate the best shiro and salad I’ve ever had. EVER. And…I saw my first camels.
Chandler and I were up BRIGHT and EARLY the next morning to catch a bus back to Dessie, then get on one to Woldiya, and hope that once in Woldiya we could get to Lalibela – either directly or through other small towns nearby. Our bus driver to Woldiya assured us that we could catch a direct bus to Lalibela from there and proceeded to spray air freshener (that smelled like man) all over our bus.
We were in Woldiya by 11:30 and on the way to Lalibela by 12:30. Good timing considering we almost got kicked off our bus before it even left the station. The man wanted 150 birr for a ride whose distance should have warranted a 60 birr fee. So Chandler started haggling and the man very grudgingly dropped the price to 120. We still felt ripped off until we watched every Ethiopian on the bus pay the 150 price. No wonder he almost kicked us off. Lalibela’s expensive…even before you arrive.
But arrive we did, at 5 pm. The last leg of the journey had been beautiful, traveling up in the mountains and through valleys filled with yellow flowers. The final two hours were on an unpaved road, but the scenery was so captivating I honestly didn’t mind. Also, in 1955, Thomas Pakenham visited Lalibela and since there was no road, his trip took four days (from Dessie) by mule. Seriously, no complaints here. We checked into our guest house, found eggs for dinner, took much appreciated hot showers, and passed out.
Day four – Lalibela. Woke up early only to find that it was pouring. Suddenly found myself thankful we had an extra day in Lalibela. We had already purchased a flight to Gondar for Thursday. Went back to sleep and this time, woke up to sunshine. So we made our way to the churches. After a rocky start (it’s hard to swallow the almost 1,000 birr price tag even when you know it in advance) and a bit of confusion concerning the map, we found ourselves in the Southeast Cluster of churches. We started with Bet Gebriel-Rafael.
This is a photo of the entrance. The guidebook told us we would get to cross a rickety wooden walkway…guess they’ve made a few improvements. We had to pass through some underground tunnels to make our way to the next few churches – Bet Emmanuel, Bet Mercurios, and Bet Abba Libanos.
This was the exit of one such tunnel. Don’t know what would have happened had the doors been closed or locked. Another tunnel was completely pitch black. We had to use the red flash on my camera in an attempt to see where we were going.
I’m fairly certain this is Bet Abba Libanos. Legend has it the church was built overnight by King Lalibela’s wife, Meskel Kebre, who was assisted by a host of angels. Not bad for a night’s work. I mean, it’s made it all these hundreds of years.
Then we made our way to Bet Giyorgis. The only church that stands alone from the clusters. Also the only church not covered by a modern shelter. It stands 15 meters high and is the most internationally famous of Lalibela’s churches.
A view of Bet Giyorgis from below. I love the yellow. I know all of my photos are of the outsides of these churches, and I’m sorry for that, but the insides where a bit underwhelming when compared with how majestic they looked from the outside. All the floors had been roughly covered with red carpeting, and while you’re required to be barefoot when entering, I’d have rather walked around on stone
And thus concluded our first day’s tour – and by tour I mean we wandered around because we were too cheap to pay an addition 300-400 birr for a guide. But we preferred it this way. We were never in any hurry and could wander wherever we chose. Dinner was once again eggs and bread (we were on a budget!) and then it was off to bed.
The following day was another early start, and this time we were successful! Because you know it can’t rain on the Ethiopian New Year. Everyone was out and about in their traditional garb of white. We started the day at the Northwest cluster.
This is Bet Madhane Alem, home of the original Lalibela cross. It’s the largest monolithic rock-hewn church in the world, with 36 pillars inside and another 36 on the outside.
Because it was the New Year, all of the monks were out to celebrate. They sang and swayed and played instruments. The view from above was spectacular. To the right of the monks, by the double archway, is the entrance to the rumored location of King Lalibela’s grave (in the Selassie Chapel). It is the holiest place in all of Lalibela and the soil around it is said to have healing properties.
The very right of the photo is the corner of Bet Maryam. It was the first church built and the most popular among Ethiopians. Men and women have separate entrances and inside is a veiled pillar reputedly inscribed with the 10 commandments in Greek and Ge’ez, as well as the story of how the churches were excavated and the story of the beginning and end of the world. Legend has it that the pillar glowed until the 16th century and it is now too dangerous to be viewed – hence the veil.
Afterward we made our way to Bet Danaghel and Bet Meskal, also in the same courtyard. Then we walked around to the outside and entered Bet Debre Sina. This church is connected to Bet Golgotha, which is another entrance to the Selassie Chapel, so only men are allowed inside. The priest was gone for the day however, and his teenage son was left in charge. He left the door between the churches open when he let Chandler in so I could take a peak as well. The previous photo was taken inside Bet Golgotha and is a carving of one of the apostles.
And with a quick peak inside Adam’s Tomb (don’t know who Adam is…but the photo is of me standing in the doorway), we were finished. We spent a little more time back at Bet Giyorgis and then had a final supper of eggs and bread! Our flight left early the next morning…and then it was on to Gondar.
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Jason stratham dating
Home meet my friend dating » Jason stratham dating
Statham was able to break into Hollywood and appeared in two movies in 2001: the science fiction action horror film Ghosts of Mars and the science fiction martial arts action film The One.
Statham was offered more film roles, and in 2002 he was cast as the lead role of driver Frank Martin in the action movie The Transporter, written by Luc Besson, in which he was responsible for his own stunts (Statham has made this choice for all of his films).
An avid footballer and diver, he was selected by Britain's national diving team to compete in the 1990 Commonwealth Games.
In his first film of 2011, Statham starred in the remake of the 1972 Charles Bronson film, The Mechanic, as Arthur Bishop.
A theatrical trailer depicting Statham's character "shooting a man's head off" was banned from circulation by the Advertising Standards Authority for showing excessive violence.
Statham stated "We've got a movie we're trying to do, written by David Peoples and Janet Peoples, in the vein of an old film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
It's not a remake or anything, but it's a little bit like that, about relationships and how greed contaminates the relationships these three people have.
Statham was asked to promote Crank during the 2006 San Diego Comic-Con Convention.
In 2008, Statham starred in the British crime thriller The Bank Job and Death Race, a remake of Death Race 2000 (1975).
He has played his character in the latter, Deckard Shaw, in Fast & Furious 6 (2013), Furious 7 (2015), The Fate of the Furious (2017), and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019).
His career as an actor and producer has been criticized for lacking depth and variety; however, he has also been praised for leading the 2000s and 2010s action movie resurgences.
Throughout his film career, Statham has regularly performed his own stage combat and stunts.
Born in Derbyshire, England, he began practicing kung fu, kickboxing and karate recreationally in his youth while working at local market stalls.
A spokesperson for the high street clothing chain said: "we chose Jason because we wanted our model to look like a normal guy.
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Manif d’art 9 – The Quebec City Biennial
Until APRIL 21, 2019
MANIF D’ART 9 – THE QUEBEC CITY BIENNIAL IS TAKING OVER THE CITY
The spotlight is on talent from here and abroad, monumental works, and Indigenous art
Manif d’art – The Quebec City Biennial, produced in collaboration with the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ), is pleased to announce its ninth edition. All the exhibits in the winter biennial will be open Until April 21, 2019, in a multitude of locations throughout Quebec City. The main exhibit will be in the Pavilion Pierre Lassonde at the MNBAQ. All exhibits and activities can be found on our website.
This year’s biennial, orchestrated by guest curator Jonathan Watkins, director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, raises essential questions about the relationships between humans and nature, their environment, each other, and even about their very future on Earth.
The notion of excess, very much in keeping with the theme of Small Between the Stars, Large Against the Sky*, will find expression in sites all over the city of Quebec. Several artists will present monumental works as part of the MNBAQ exhibit or as public art pieces. Among them are Beat Streuli (Switzerland, Belgium) and Marianne Nicolson (Dzawada̱’enux̱w, British Columbia), respectively covering with imposing murals the windows fronting the Marie-Guyart building and the glass façade of the Monastère des Augustines. At the MNBAQ, visitors will be dazzled by the spectacular, sprawling work of Krištof Kintera (Czech Republic) and the gigantic phantasmagoric pieces by the duo of Jim Holyoak (Canada) and Matt Shane (Canada). They will also be intrigued by the curious flock of swan pedal boats by the artist Shimabuku (Japan), a strange sight in the winter landscape of Lévis, near the ferry crossing.
Spotlight on talent from home
In addition to well-established artists from abroad – such as Christiane Baumgartner (Germany), Haroon Mirza(England), Rika Noguchi (Japan), Dinh Q. Lê (Vietnam, United States), Cornelia Parker (England), and George Shaw (England) – Manif d’art 9 –The Quebec City Biennial is proud to fulfil its mission by placing a special emphasis on Quebec talent. Whether emerging or emeritus, more than 40% of the artists taking part in the biennial are from the province of Quebec. They include, to name just a few, Patrick Bernatchez (Montreal), Daniel Corbeil (Val-d’Or), Caroline Gagné (Quebec City), Fanny Mesnard (Quebec City) and Reno Salvail (L’Ange-Gardien) in the main exhibit at the MNBAQ, as well as Amélie Laurence Fortin (Quebec City) and Anne-Marie Proulx (Quebec City), who will present their works in solo shows and as part of the public art exhibit.
Falling in love with Indigenous art
The international curator of the biennial has fallen in love with Indigenous art, and visitors will reap the benefits. The artists from Indigenous culture, with the special relationships they perpetuate with nature, land and the environment, are a perfect fit with the theme of Manif d’art 9. In the main exhibit, 25% of the works are by Indigenous artists, including Manasie Akpaliapik (Arctic Bay, Nunavut), a well-known artist whose work is featured in the Art inuit. La collection Brousseau – Ilippunga collection in the Pavillon Pierre Lassonde at the MNBAQ, Britta Marakatt-Labba (Sami, Sweden), and Meryl McMaster (Siksika, Ontario), as well as Shuvinai Ashoona (Kinngait, Nunavut), recent winner of the prestigious Gershon Iskowitz prize recognizing established Canadian artists. Nadia Myre (Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, Quebec) and Hannah Claus (Montreal, Quebec) will present their work at Le Lieu and the Musée Huron-Wendat in solo exhibits.
Young curators warm to the theme
Thirteen Young Curators will put forward their own interpretations of the biennial’s theme in 10 exhibits and one lecture. These discoveries are sure to please lovers of emerging contemporary art from Quebec City.
Manif d’art 9: Contemporary art for all
For art buffs and neophytes alike, the public art exhibits in Old Quebec are a must-see. Visitors can bask in the beautiful old city while taking in nearly 10 works. Murals, installations and even a sound piece will surprise passers-by until April 21, 2019.
For its ninth edition, Manif d’art has increased its family activities. As part of the P’tite Manif, families are invited to attend an exhibit designed just for them and to take part in various activities, including creative and technical exploration workshops, a discovery rally, and philosophy activities at the Méduse, Quebec City libraries, and the Maison Tessier-Dit-Laplante. Parents can choose from a panoply of possibilities to inspire their children with art and play.
Manif d’art would like to thank the Bureau des grands événements, the Ville de Québec, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications, the Canada Council for the Arts, Quebec City Tourism, Canadian Heritage, lg2, ICI Radio-Canada, Maison Simons and Méduse.
* “STORIES OF THE STREET” BY LEONARD COHEN. COPYRIGHT © 1993, LEONARD COHEN, USED BY PERMISSION OF THE WYLIE AGENCY (UK) LIMITED
Follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
Manif d’art
600 Côte d’Abraham, Québec, QC G1R 1A1
info@manifdart.org
Manif d’art – The Quebec City Biennial
Additional Venues
Expressive Arts Therapy Training Program, Fall 2021
Various Dates & Deadlines
The Create Institute
Institutional Healing: Public Talk with Marysia Lewandowska
School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD), York University
Distance makes the heart grow weak
Artlab Gallery, Western University
Basic Income: An Artists’ Commission
January 30 & 31
Media Arts Network of Ontario / Réseau des arts médiatiques de l´Ontario (MANO/RAMO)
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Cori Bush joins fellow progressives in celebrating her primary victory
Lea en Español
Bush will move on to her first general election after also running in 2018 as Rashida Tlaib defended her seat from a moderate challenger.
by Oscarl
Cori Bush joins fellow progressives in...
By Oscar López
The primary results from elections on Tuesday saw Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib, two progressive women of color, overcome the odds and are now sure to be in Congress next year.
If Bush were to win in November, she would be the first Black woman to represent the state of Missouri in Congress.
It will also be her first time serving in public office at any level, but this is the second time she ran for Missouri’s first congressional district.
Her district, which encompasses the city of St. Louis and its northern suburbs, has a +29 partisan voting index that leans Democrat, which makes it one the most liberal voting regions in the country according to The Cook Political Report.
Bush ousted 10-term incumbent congressman Lacy Clay and with his father, Bill Clay, holding the seat before him, also meaning she put an end to a 52-year dynasty.
Before showing political aspirations, Bush, 44, worked as a registered nurse, pastor and she is also a single mother.
The murder of 18 year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., a city north of St. Louis, in August 2014 made Bush become more involved in politics.
In the protests that followed the shooting she served as triage nurse, but then became an organizer. That involved facing tear gas, mace and rubber bullets from the Missouri National Guard.
This year, Bush also took part in the protests for police reform that sparked after the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
She first ran for Congress in 2018 as part of a progressive wave of candidates that sought to challenge establishment and conservative Democrats. Clay won that primary, receiving 56.7% of the vote.
The push to get hundreds of working class progressive people to run in the midterm elections was organized by Justice Democrats.
They are a political action committee founded in part by prominent online political commentators Cenk Uygur and Kyle Kulinski in 2017 to further promote the policies championed by Senator Bernie Sanders in his 2016 presidential run.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the standout progressive candidate to win in 2018 as she unseated 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley, who was the Chair of the House Democratic Caucus and represented New York’s 14th Congressional District.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez faced a primary challenge in June from Michele Caruso-Cabrera, a CNBC anchor and former Republican, but won in a landslide with over 70% of the vote.
Both Bush and Ocasio-Cortez featured in a Netflix documentary titled Knock Down The House followed the struggles four women faced in running for Congress.
Paula Jean Swearengin was also featured in the documentary as she took on West Virginia’s U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, but she only obtained 30.2% of the vote.
Swearengin won her state’s Senate primary in June and will now face Republican Shelley Moore Capito, who is seeking a second term, in November.
Rep. Tlaib is another Justice Democrat who won a seat in Congress in the 2018 midterms. She currently represents Michigan’s 13th congressional district, which includes the western half of Detroit and surrounding suburbs.
She is a member of the “squad” which is a coalition of four progressive women of color in the House. The other three members are representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar and Massachusetts’ Ayanna Pressley.
She formerly served in the Michigan House of Representatives and is the first woman of Palestinian descent to serve in Congress.
Her primary challenger in Tuesday’s election was a familiar rival to her, President of the Detroit City Council Brenda Jones.
In 2018, there was a special election held after John Conyers resigned following sexual assault allegations. The winner of the election would serve for the remainder of Conyer’s term.
Both Tlaib and Jones ran in the special election, and the city council president narrowly won, but the former state legislator won the election to serve in Congress for the 2019-2020 term by about 900 votes.
When the two met again the contest was not as close, it was called on Wednesday morning and Tlaib had two-thirds of the vote.
She celebrated her victory on Twitter and referenced when she was labeled the “most vulnerable ‘squad’ member” by multiple outlets.
Headlines said I was the most vulnerable member of the Squad.
My community responded last night and said our Squad is big. It includes all who believe we must show up for each other and prioritize people over profits. It’s here to stay, and it’s only getting bigger.
— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) August 5, 2020
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CMO Strategy
Pepsi adopts a new tagline, ‘That’s What I Like,’ and promises to stick with it
The brand had recently been using a varying—and some would argue forgettable—array of lines in the U.S.
By E.J. Schultz. Published on January 02, 2020.
Milka tries a little tenderness in its first work from a broad WPP team
Pepsi is known for memorable taglines, from “Taste of a New Generation” to “Joy of Pepsi.” But lately, the soda’s catchphrases have been pretty forgetful—mostly because it hasn’t stuck to a single line in ads. But starting today, the brand is going for a more consistent approach with a new tagline, “That’s What I Like,” that will be used for all Pepsi varieties including regular Pepsi, Pepsi Zero Sugar and Diet Pepsi.
The U.S. campaign includes five national TV ads that show people breaking into dance during everyday situations, like riding on a subway or grilling out. Omnicom Group’s Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Alma worked on the campaign.
The spots will run on digital in addition to TV programming such as the “Golden Globes.” Pepsi has not commented on its Super Bowl ad plans, but it seems likely the line will underpin its marketing in and around the game, which includes sponsorship of the halftime show headlined by Jennifer Lopez and Shakira. Shakira's "Whenever, Wherever," is the soundtrack for one of the new spots (above).
The ads are meant to appeal to people who “are comfortable in their own skin [and] enjoy life unapologetically without really worrying about what other people think,” says Pepsi Marketing VP Todd Kaplan, noting that the the brand’s consumer research revealed that the approach plays well with Pepsi loyalists.
In recent months Pepsi has used different taglines for each season. In the fall it began running a National Football League-themed campaign dubbed “Always Be Celebrating,” while its more recent holiday campaign starring Cardi B used the line “Gift it Forward.” For its Super Bowl campaign a year ago, Pepsi ran an ad it dubbed “More than OK” because it challenged the oft-asked question at restaurants, “Is Pepsi OK.” Using a strict definition, that campaign did not technically include a tagline because “More than OK” never really appeared on-screen in text form.
There is an claim to be made that taglines are less relevant in an age when brands pump out constant digital content that in many cases is designed to play off of some sort of current news event or cultural trend. Kaplan argues that taglines still matter in the sense that they provide consistency. “Having something that is sticky enough and that is very clear and concise … will only really help re-emphasize our brand point-of-view,” he says.
The ads are tailored for the U.S. market. Globally, Pepsi had been using the tagline “Live for Now” for about seven years before switching to "For the Love of It" about a year ago. That line has not been used in the U.S.
E.J. Schultz
E.J. Schultz is the Assistant Managing Editor, Marketing at Ad Age and covers beverage, automotive and sports marketing. He is a former reporter for McClatchy newspapers, including the Fresno Bee, where he covered business and state government and politics, and the Island Packet in South Carolina. He has won awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the Jesse H. Neal Awards, the Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the South Carolina Press Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors. A native of Cincinnati, Schultz has an economics degree from Xavier University and a masters in journalism from Northwestern University.
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Home / Sports
EAGLE JUNIOR GRIFFIN Paradee attacks the paint as Tiger junior Gabe Dunn defends during Tuesday’s boys’ basketball game at Mount Abraham. The visiting Tigers prevailed in overtime to highlight high school basketball play earlier this week. Photo courtesy of Mark Bouvier
High school basketball wrap for Feb. 13
ADDISON COUNTY — The Middlebury boys made it a season sweep of Mount Abraham in local high school basketball action early this week. Elsewhere, the MUHS girls split two games, a D-I visitor knocked off the Vergennes boys, and the Otter Valley girls lost on the road. TIGERS-EAGLES In a back-and-forth contest, the Tiger boys’ basketball team got two free throws apiece from Jeffrey Lokatys and Karic Riche late in overtime to nail down a 60-57 victory at Mount Abraham. The Eagles outscored the Tigers, 18-5, in the third period as Liam Kelliher scored seven of his 19 points. Mount Abe led, 41-36,...
Karl Lindholm: Say it isn't so, Mookie!
One hundred years ago last month (Jan. 5, 1920), the Red Sox unloaded their best player for financial reasons. They sold the best left-handed pitcher in the American League, a versatile 25-year-old who had begun to play in the field on occasion because he could also hit: George Herman “Babe” Ruth. How’d that work out? Will my children and their children be lamenting the Curse of Mookie after I’m gone? Mookie Betts is one of my favorite Red Sox players ever. I place him in the exalted company of Nomah and Pedro. I like him even better than Papi, and that’s a high bar. Mookie looks like a high...
Women's hockey closes in on No. 1 seed
MIDDLEBURY — The Middlebury College women’s hockey team swept visiting Trinity this past weekend, 1-0 on Saturday and 4-1 on Friday, to retain first place in NESCAC. The Panthers, ranked No. 2 in NCAA Division III, improved to 15-2-3, 10-1-1 in league play, while Trinity dropped to 5-11-2, 0-10-2 NESCAC. Middlebury has four games to go in the regular season before the NESCAC playoffs open. The Panthers can clinch first place and the top seed for the league postseason if they can sweep defending champion Williams in a home-and-home series this weekend. The Ephs (11-6-4, 8-4-2) are in a close...
Girls' hockey tips Colonels in OT
MIDDLEBURY — The Middlebury Union High School girls’ hockey team edged Brattleboro, 3-2, in overtime on Monday in a game postponed from the previous Friday. The victory pushed the Tigers’ record to 10-5-1, good for second place in Division II heading into a Wednesday game at Essex, D-I’s second-place team. The Tigers will return home on Friday for a 5 p.m. game vs. U-32. On Monday Avery Gale netted the overtime game-winner, assisted by Bella Gale. Bella Gale gave the Tigers the lead in the first period, with an assist from Audrey Schnoor. Kenene Otis, assisted by Camille Malhotra, made it 2-0...
Middlebury men's basketball grounds Cardinals
MIDDLETOWN, Conn. — The Middlebury College men’s basketball took a big first-half lead and cruised to a 95-79 win on Sunday over host NESCAC rival Wesleyan. The Panthers improved to 19-3, 5-3 in league play, while the Cardinals dropped to 13-9, 2-6. Middlebury’s record is good for a fourth-place tie with Trinity in the NESCAC standings, but Trinity owns the head-to-head tiebreaker for a home quarterfinal if the teams finish tied in the standings. The Panthers close out the regular season by hosting Tufts (18-4, 8-0) on Friday at 7 p.m. and Bates (11-10, 3-5) on Saturday at 3 p.m. Trinity is...
Panther men's hockey splits two on the road
MIDDLETOWN, Conn. — The Middlebury College men’s hockey team split two NESCAC road games this past weekend, with Saturday’s victory at Wesleyan marking both the end of a nine-game winless streak (0-3-6) and the return of senior goalie Brian Ketchabaw from a Jan. 3 injury. Ketchabaw improved his record to 5-1 by making 29 saves in the Panthers’ 4-1 win over the Cardinals, and has a .940 save percentage. The Panthers (8-9-3, 6-5-3 NESCAC) remain in the hunt for a top-four seed for the NESCAC postseason, but have a tough schedule. This weekend they play second-place Williams (13-6-1, 10-4...
Snow geese hunting season about to begin
VERMONT — Vermont’s spring snow goose hunt will be held from March 11 through April 24. Since 2009, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has annually issued a Conservation Order to allow the reduction of the population of migrating greater and lesser snow geese as well as Ross’ geese. The numbers of these geese have grown so high that they are destroying habitat for themselves and other species. Eight states in the Atlantic Flyway (Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Vermont) will hold a similar Spring Snow Goose Conservation Order in 2020. ...
Scoreboard and schedule for Feb. 13
Here's what happened in Addison County high school and college sports this past week. See below for this week's schedule of games and events. *** SCOREBOARD HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS Boys’ Hockey 2/10 MUHS vs. CVU........................... 3-0 2/12 St. Albans vs. MUHS.................. 3-1 Girls’ Hockey 2/10 MUHS vs. Brattleboro......... 3-2 (OT) 2/12 Essex vs. MUHS........................ 4-1 Girls’ Basketball 2/10 Winooski vs. MUHS............... 40-23 2/11 MUHS vs. Missisquoi............. 35-31 2/11 Windsor vs. OV...................... 80-28 2/12 Mt. Abe vs. Milton................... 47-14 2/12...
EAGLE JUNIOR FORWARD Koby LaRose gathers himself between Commodore defenders Gage Lalumiere and Jake Russell before going up for two points during the Mount Abe boys’ hoop team’s win over VUHS on Saturday. Independent photo/Steve James
Eagle boys put clamps on Commodores
BRISTOL — The Mount Abraham Union High School boys’ basketball team on Saturday used tough defense and full-court pressure to limit visiting Vergennes to 25 points through three quarters on the way to a 57-46 victory. The 8-8 Eagles were not always crisp in their set offense, but they were more effective than the Commodores — who also played well defensively — in creating points from turnovers. Ten Eagles scored, four between nine and the team-high 11 points tossed in by senior Liam Kelliher. A surge early in the fourth quarter pushed their lead to 25 points, enough to withstand a late surge...
Falcons top VUHS girls' basketball
VERGENNES — Visiting North Country got at least nine points from four players on Saturday and defeated the host Vergennes Union High School girls’ basketball team, 58-42. Falcon McKenna Marsh scored 13 points to lead the Falcons as they improved to 8-5. NCU hit seven three-pointers in its win. Kate Gosliga tossed in 14 points to pace the Commodores, who slipped to 7-6, but remained in 8th place in the Division III standings. VUHS heads on the road this week to take on D-I Mount Mansfield on Tuesday and Mount Abraham on Friday. The Commodores will be looking to sweep the season series with the...
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Draining the Intelligence Community Swamp: New Hires Will All be Israel's Poodles
Draining the Intelligence Community Swamp: New Hires Will All be Israel’s Poodles
The appointment of U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as interim Director of National Intelligence (DNI), a position that he will apparently hold simultaneously with the ambassadorship, has been criticized from all sides due to his inexperience, history of bad judgement and partisanship. The White House is now claiming that he will be replaced by Texas Congressman John Ratcliffe after the interim appointment is over, though sources in Washington suggest that Ratcliffe might have some problems in being approved by Congress.
But such criticism, including my own, has somewhat missed the point, which is that what we are already seeing is a purge orchestrated by Grenell of federal employees in the White House and national security apparatus who are holdovers from the Obama Administration and who are therefore considered to be unreliable. That is why Grenell will continue to be ambassador as well as DNI as it is envisioned that his wrecking ball will have completed its task within six months and he will be able to return to Berlin, in spite of the fact that he is despised in Germany and many officials there even refuse to meet with him, which characteristically doesn’t appear to bother the White House at all.
Presumably many current senior employees in the intelligence community (IC) will be given non-jobs away from the White House and replaced by new appointees who are distinguished by their loyalty to the president, not by their accomplishments or skills. That means that competence will be secondary, if not irrelevant. It should be assumed that many of the new hires will be drawn from the pool of neoconservatives that proliferated in the George W. Bush administration.
Many who believe the CIA and NSA to be evil organizations will, of course, welcome the de facto destruction of both organizations for ideological reasons. But those critics should bear in mind that there are potentially serious consequences to the possible changes. First of all, if one thinks that the illegal surveillance, regime change programs and assassination plots that have come out of the IC over the past twenty years have been a disgrace, just think for a moment how bad it could get if the security organs begin to ignore all constitutional and legal restraints after their assigned mission becomes de facto protecting the president and everything that he seeks to do.
Second, having large numbers of new employees learning on-the-job will mean that the quality of intelligence produced will go down. Again, some will object that the quality is already bad, but a careful analysis of what has gone wrong since 9/11 would suggest that the real problem has been political, that information is cherry picked or even falsified by the highly politicized IC leadership to support a certain agenda and is then spun to arrive at a particular conclusion supporting the White House. This has gone on since George W. Bush, if not before, but under Trump it is operating largely out in the open.
A third point is that the people who will be in charge of what is characteristically being described as “draining the swamp” are not necessarily acting in support of identifiable national interests. They are ideologues who are acting to create a policy decision-making process whereby the president of the United States will be empowered to do more-or-less whatever he or she chooses to do in terms of national security and foreign affairs. That continues what has been happening in any event since 2002, but it creates a very bad precedent moving forward. And it pari passu strengthens what has been one of the most disgraceful aspects of Trump foreign policy, the incessant and irresponsible pandering to Israel.
Whitney Webb of Mint Press Newshas explored the depth of Grenell’s engagement with Israel and with Zionist individuals and groups in the United States. There is already a very top-heavy presence of Israel advocates in a Trump administration that has already proven to be the most pro-Israel ever, even exceeding the completely suborned Bill Clinton. Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, both Christian Zionists head the list, but there is also presidential special advisor Jared Kushner, Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin and the Mormon head of the National Security Council Robert O’Brien.
The State Department is fully staffed with Jewish Americans who are ardently pro-Israel at every level that relates to Middle East policy, to include David Schenker as head of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and Nathan Sales as Counterterrorism Coordinator. Elan Carr fills the bizarre position of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism and Cherrie Daniels is the Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues. Morgan Ortagus is State Department spokesman.
In Congress American Jews considered to be strong supporters of Israel are prominent in Committees that deal with national security or the Middle East. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has described himself as “shomer” or “defender” of Israel in Congress. Congressman Adam Schiff, head of the House Intelligence Committee, recently featured in the attempted impeachment of Trump. Eliot Engel chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he is joined by Brad Sherman, Ted Deutch, Andy Levin and Lee Zeldin. The House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism, chaired by Max Rose, an Israel partisan, recently held hearings about “ confronting the rise in antisemitism and domestic terrorism.”
And then there is the president himself and his paymaster Las Vegas casino multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who have been the driving forces behind moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, endorsing Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights, and dropping the description of the Israeli occupation settlements as “illegal.” It was all accomplished while closing the PLO representative offices in Washington, defunding the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and eliminating security assistance to the Palestinians. Along the way Trump’s Zionist mouthpiece Ambassador David Friedman has endorsed every Israeli atrocity and war crime, to include the mass shooting of unarmed Gazan civilian protesters.
Trump has also been promoting a “take it or leave it” peace plan that permits the Palestinians only a small bit of non-contiguous West Bank land completely surrounded by Israel with no actual sovereignty. Fifty European foreign ministers and senior officials have recently denounced the plan as little more than “apartheid.”
Webb observes that “…overlooked…are Grenell’s ties to the powerful American pro-Israel lobby and Israeli politicians alike, including organizations and individuals with a history of espionage and blackmail against the United States. Grenell is merely the latest example in a series of appointments over the past few years that have seen individuals with deep ties to the pro-Israel lobby rise to top positions in the U.S. intelligence community, including the NSA’s current director of Cybersecurity Anne Neuberger as well as the leaders of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB).”
Grenell’s consulting firm Capitol Media Partners has done work for Arthur Finkelstein and Associates, which Webb describes as “a firm of the late Republican political operative of the same name.” Finkelstein has been directly involved in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s first campaign in 1996 and has since worked with far-right wing parties and politicians in Israel, to include that of the extremist Avigdor Lieberman. His political philosophy is that “the only way to win an election is by running a negative campaign.”
Shortly after becoming Ambassador to Germany, Grenell arranged a meeting with Netanyahu at Berlin Airport. Afterwards, Netanyahu told the media that Grenell is a “big fan of Israel.” For his part, Grenell has said that American support for Israel is a “biblical mandate,” adding that he has visited the country “more times than he can count.”
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has also “strongly praised” Grenell’s appointment as acting DNI. ZOA president Morton Klein issued a statement: “I am proud to say that during my long personal friendship with Ambassador Grenell, it became powerfully clear to me that Grenell is…a man who understands the importance of our country’s great alliance with Israel in promoting U.S. security interests. There has never been a better friend of a strong U.S-Israel relationship than Ambassador Grenell.”
Meanwhile over at the NSA, there is Anne Neuberger, an Israeli by birth who is married to Yehuda Neuberger, chairman of AIPAC’s executive council in Baltimore. Her job at NSA places her in charge of a division that “unifies NSA’s foreign intelligence and cyberdefense missions…to prevent and eradicate threats to national security systems and critical infrastructure.” That would include the U.S. election infrastructure.
Back at the White House, both the head and deputy of the PIAB, which promotes itself as having “immense and long-lasting impacts on the structure, management, and operations of U.S. intelligence,” have similar close ties to Israel. PIAB “exists exclusively to assist the President by providing him with an independent source of advice on the effectiveness with which the Intelligence Community is meeting the Nation’s intelligence needs, and the vigor and insight with which the community plans for the future. The Board has access to all information needed to perform its functions and has direct access to the President.”
PIAB Chairman Stephen Feinberg, the billionaire owner of Cerberus capital management, is a close friend of Jared Kushner, and has been involved in major investments in Israel as well as with Israeli partners. Cerberus owns the scandal-ridden US national security contractor DynCorp. The New York Times has claimed that Cerberus was involved in “orchestrating secretive deals that transgressed legal and ethical boundaries.” Feinberg’s capacity to oversee the ethically-challenged IC is consequently troubling. Through Dyncorp, he has also been linked to Saudi intelligence.
The PIAB’s current deputy is Samantha Ravich, who previously was an employee of the notorious pro-Israel lobby group Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a spin-off of AIPAC organized in 1984 to protect the parent organization when it was investigated for spying on Israel’s behalf against the U.S. government. Ravich also is a senior advisor to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), which works directly with Israel’s government. Per Webb, Ravich also “worked for the consulting firm of Michael Chertoff, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security whose mother worked with Israel’s Mossad.”
Webb also notes how Ravich has specifically promoted “a ‘cyber project’ to the U.S. Senate that would protect member countries from cyber threats but exclude nations that endorse or fail to condemn the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that supports Palestinian rights and Israeli compliance with international law.”
The presence of many American Jews and Christian Zionists with close ties to Israel in the upper levels of the White House, State Department, the Intelligence Community, the Pentagon and the National Security Council is not a new phenomenon, though the numbers of such “players” has increased. It is in part a process of positioning whereby Zionists already in place bring in other Zionists and godfather them into key jobs in the bureaucracy. Note, for example, how Richard Perle brought in Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz to the Pentagon, with disastrous consequences that led to the Iraq war.
When challenged, the individuals who fill the posts in question tend to fall back on the claim that the United States and Israel have more-or-less the same security interests, which is demonstrably false. Webb notes correctly that the presence of numerous Israel-firsters in the national security apparatus means that the foxes will be guarding the hen house. Ostensibly alert to any signs of so-called “foreign interference” in the 2020 election, they will be completely blind to what Israel is up to. Noam Chomsky once observed that “First of all, if you’re interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Israeli intervention in US elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done…” There is little to add beyond that, but one has to wonder why the Administration, aided and abetted by congress and the media, persists in promoting and placing in sensitive positions individuals whose ultimate loyalty is to a foreign country.
By Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D.
Source: The Unz Review
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by Paul Zollo July 3, 2020, 11:11 am
The songwriter of “Laura” composed over 400 movie scores
It was 1999 when David Raksin met us at Froman’s Deli in Encino for an interview. He’d been working daily on his memoirs, he said, and was up to 500 pages and wasn’t past his childhood yet. This was a man with many stories to tell.
He died in 2004 at 92 after completing his book, entitled If I Say So Myself, although he didn’t live to see it published.
What he did see in his long lifetime is the stuff of legend. He worked closely with Charlie Chaplin, studied with Schoenberg, knew the Gershwins and Stravinsky, wrote songs with Johnny Mercer and composed so many great film scores – over 400 – that he was dubbed “the Grandfather of Film Music.”
His most famous song was “Laura,” from the 1944 movie of the same name. With lyrics by Johnny Mercer, it’s one of the most recorded songs of all time.
He landed the job of scoring Laura when both Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman turned it down. Raksin distinguished himself by writing the entire score around a single haunting theme song, an unprecedented, powerful use of melody in a score which has rarely been matched since. He cunningly never used the melody in its entirety, which created a fleeting sense of musical yearning. To Raksin, it was about using the music as a connection between “the ephemeral girl and the interrupted melody.”
Frank Sinatra, “Laura,” written by David Raksin.
He was born in 1912 in Philadelphia. His father, Isidor, was a composer and conductor, and gave his young son a clarinet. David taught himself to play and organized many bands as a teen.
He became an accomplished arranger early on, and did an expansive orchestral arrangement (with horn and string sections) of the Gershwin classic “I Got Rhythm” for Jay Savitt’s band. The arrangement became famous, and so impressed was the composer, Oscar Levant, by its ingenuity that he told his friend George Gershwin about it. Gershwin invited Raksin, who was only 19 at the time, to come out to Beverly Hills to meet him.
“George did not make me nervous at all,” said Raksin over a brisket sandwich. “He recognized that I was a colleague who knew what I was doing. He was eager to play me his new songs. He played me ‘Love Walked Right In.’ He didn’t sing, he would just play the melody.”
Gershwin recommended Raksin to the music publishing company Harms Music, who gave him his first break: He was drafted to be Charlie Chaplin’s musical assistant on the landmark film Modern Times.
Chaplin composed his own scores, but like even some modern composers, was a “hummer,” unable to transcribe his scores by himself, instead humming or singing them to a transcribing musician. Chaplin was notoriously tough on those who took this job, not one of which lasted for more than a single movie.
It was from this score that an American standard was born-the song “Smile,” with a melody attributed to Chaplin and lyrics, later added, by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons.
Chaplin had “little notions for the music,” Raksin said. “Sometimes he’d play three-fingered chords, sometimes a melody.” Raksin, though only 23 then, was vocal about his opinions on how to enhance the music. Chaplin didn’t appreciate his input, to put it lightly, and summarily fired him.
That’s when Alfred Newman (Randy’s uncle, the legendary film scorer) came to Raksin’s rescue after seeing the musical sketches he’d made. He told Chaplin he’d be crazy to fire Raksin, and convinced him. Charlie hired him back (after a private meeting between the two men in which Raksin refused to be a musical “stooge”), and together they completed the Modern Times score.
It took four months, which Raksin said “was not that long, considering the movie was 100 percent music.”
Though Chaplin received total credit for the score-and for the song “Smile” that was adapted from it, Raksin said he wrote much of the music in the score and many of the melodic phrases in “Smile.”
“I didn’t get credit on the song,” he said, “but there was no point in making anything out of it, ‘cause that’s how things were done in those days.”
Like”Smile,” his most famous song, “Laura” was adapted from an existing movie score. This time Raksin got to choose his own lyricist, and so he chose the greatest there was: Johnny Mercer.
“I gave Mercer a record of the music and he went home and wrote the lyric,” said Raksin. “He wrote it very quickly. He was a highly skilled professional. I made two changes in the lyric where he wasn’t sure which word to use. I told people I made suggestions about how to write a lyric to Johnny Mercer and they thought I was crazy.”
Raksin, who had studied with Schoenberg and wrote an arrangement for Stravinsky, wrote what many in Hollywood considered to be avant-garde music, and for that reason was relegated for many years to scoring horror films. He went uncredited on the first 48 films he scored. The gloriously melodic score of Laura changed everything for him, and he went from uncredited to being heralded as one of Hollywood’s premiere melodists.
From then on he worked with legends. Hitchcock was one of the first. His comeback to Hitch provided a famous Hollywood anecdote. Hitch told Raksin that for the oceanic Lifeboat there should be no music at all, no score, because he felt audiences would wonder where music was coming from in the middle of the sea.
Raksin said, “Ask Hitch where the cameras are coming from.”
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Ghana’s first Toyota-assembled vehicle to be available by August 2020 says Toyota CEO
By : Mr
Tag: Toyota
The President and Chief Executive Officer of Toyota Tsusho Corporation, Ichiro Kashitani, has told President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, to expect the first Toyota vehicle to be assembled in Ghana to be outdoored by August 2020.
Thanking the government of President Akufo-Addo for its help and support towards the realization of this project, Mr. Ichiro Kashitani stated that “we consider the project of the assembly plant a marriage. It lasts for life, and it is a long-term project.”
The President and CEO of Toyota Tsusho made this known on Thursday, 29th August, 2019, when the Government of Ghana and Toyota Tsusho Corporation signed a Memorandum of Understanding for the establishment of a Toyota and Suzuki Assembly Plant in Ghana.
The Chief Operations Officer of the company in charge of the Africa division of Toyota Tsusho, Mr. Imai Toshimitsu, who was also at the meeting noted that the decision to set up in Ghana has been necessitated by the favourable economic climate prevailing in the country.
“We are willing to participate in the automotive industry in Ghana. I am very happy that we have reached the consensus and principal agreement to start the Toyota and Suzuki assembly plants. We are planning to kick-off the project immediately, and, hopefully, we will have first car made in Ghana this time (August) next year. Thank you very much for your support,” he added.
Mr. Imai Toshimitsu stated that details of the work to be undertaken in Ghana, including the volumes and models of the vehicles to be produced, are contained in the MoU.
“The products to be assembled in Ghana include the Toyota Hilux pickup, which is already popular in Ghana. Since it will be locally produced, I hope it will be more popular. We are also planning to introduce small passenger cars, with two Suzuki brands,” the Toyota COO explained.
The decision to assemble Suzuki vehicles in Ghana, according to Mr. Imai Toshimitsu, follows the acquisition on Wednesday, 28th August, 2019, of a 4.9% stake in Suzuki by Toyota Tsusho, thus making Toyota a “principal shareholder” in Suzuki.
“So, Suzuki products will be assembled and sold in Ghana. The cars which will be produced in Ghana are our core models for Africa and Ghana customers,” he stressed.
On his part, President Akufo-Addo stated that the signing of the MoU with Toyota Tsusho falls in line with the vision of making Ghana an automotive hub for West Africa and the larger African market.
With the coming into force of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the President noted that “Ghana is the base to reach this larger African market”.
He continued, “We are attaching a great deal of importance to the initiative and development. We want to assure you that, whatever it is we can do on the side of the Ghana Government to provide you with the necessary support and assurance that the investment you are going to make in our country will be worth your while, you can count on us to do that.”
Visit to Jubilee House
It will be recalled that, in March this year, officials from Toyota Tsusho Corporation, Suzuki Motor Corporation, and CFAO announced a joint venture arrangement to assemble and distribute vehicles in Ghana.
During a courtesy call on President Akufo-Addo, on Tuesday, 19th March, 2019, at Jubilee House, Mr. Koyote Suzuki, General Manager for the Middle East and Africa of Suzuki Motor Corporation, told President Akufo-Addo that “our next phase of growth will come from Africa, but we need to find the right partner in Africa for manufacturing and distribution after sale of our vehicles.”
He stated that “we came to know from Toyota that the Ghanaian government is planning to roll out a new automotive policy. We heard this from Toyota executives who paid a visit here last month. We are highly interested in participating in this initiative by the Ghanaian government. We wish to start production here, grow it and expand it.”
Mr. Masafumi Yamashita, from Toyota Tsusho Corporation, in his remarks, noted that Toyota Corporation and CFAO have the largest automotive distribution network in Africa, and have an ambition to contribute to and support further development in African countries.
“Our vision is with Africa and for Africa. This time, we commit to work together with Suzuki Motor Corporation for the future development of the automotive industry here in Africa, as a strategic partner,” he added.
Source: Graphic
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Home Interview: Gustavo Rodríguez Pt.2
Interview: Gustavo Rodríguez Pt.2
from Contra Info, translated by Anarchist News
Part 2 of: Interview: Gustavo Rodríguez Pt.1
Received on 11/05/2020.
C.I. Tell us, what repercussions have your contributions had in the anarchist galaxy, and how do you see the reception and/or rejection –depending on the sectors– of your reflections, particularly about the participation of anarchist individuals and groups in popular movements and intermediate level struggles, as you express in the trilogy, Letters to a Chilean, about the current situation (I, II, III), synchronized with the social conflicts in that region (which begun on October 18, 2019 and lasted up until right before the Covid-19 lockdown). ¿Do you believe our participation is important in popular movements and in the development of intermediate level struggles?
G.R. I'm unaware if my contributions have had any type of “repercussion” in the anarchist galaxy so I would be lying if I commented about the possible reception or rejection of those reflections. It's undeniable that my reflections circulate and are diffused, which could suggest the existence of a very small “circle of receptors” but it's impossible to know the degree of acceptance or rejection that they find. The truth is that I'm not interested in persuading anyone. Within the theoretical limitations and from my own autodidact and anti-disciplinary formation, I've tried to express some reflections, to open up questions. That is to say, I abstain from giving answers. I highlight our lacks and weaknesses, in order to stimulate reflections by all our comrades in affinity. But when I insist on inciting "reflection", I don't refer to deepening our self-absorbed rumination, nor surrendering to abstract meditation, nor adding new pages to philosophy, nor anything of that sort. It's about “seeing”. That is to say, opening our eyes and looking at what surrounds us. Something that the human animal has stopped doing for a long time now in their obsession with distancing themselves from other animals in search of a “purpose of life”; what has lead to creating in the collective subconscious (with all the fascist implications of the Jungian term) the “happy world” of the Emerald City –the magical land of Wizard of Oz(1)– and making mandatory the use of green-tinted glasses, so that the deluded think that everything that surrounds them is emeralds .
That's why when I affirm the necessity of seeing, I do so also from the visual angle of multiple planes, adding the necessary color and lighting. If the feminists of the end of the previous century exhorted us to see reality with “purple glasses” (Gemma Lienas); as anarchists in turn it's up to us to SEE with an optometrist's lenses.That is to say, constantly changing the lens gradation – just like non-human animals do – and, why not, constantly alternating the color of the filters and even contracting or expanding the iris, until we recover the night vision we've lost. Only then will we be able to recognize the expiration of the prevalent models of struggle, and the urgency of a new anarchic paradigm that facilitates the action of the lone wolves and informal insurrectional anarchist minorities.
To give answers or “give a party line” –like marxians called the vertical imposition of alignments– does not only require a superlative vanity, but the total abandonment of our most elementary theoretical and practical foundations.To paraphrase Nietzsche: “leading is as odious to me as following”.
Concerning the question about the participation of anarchists in the so-called "popular movements," I've been expressing my perspective for about twenty years now and it has been recorded in different moments, showing evidence of the radical evolution of the anarchic struggle. If we re-read some of my contributions from the decades of 1980 and 1990, we will find a certain “critical optimism” that gave the benefit of the doubt to these “movementist” strategies that – broadly speaking – took shape around the Mexican Neo-Zapatismo towards the middle of the last decade of the previous century and, a bit later, around the “alter-globalization” and “anti-globalization” discourse, reaching its climax in The Battle of Seattle. Not to forget the subsequent movementist outbreaks (that some like to lump together), like the Argentine uprising of December 2001 and, the Bolivian one of October 2003, and even the continuation of the development of the struggle of “the landless” in Brazil.
In reality, around that time, we were witnessing the death rattle of the so-called “proletarian movement”. In such a way, the absence of the historical mission of the proletariat was confirmed and the revolutionary subject “destined to drive Humanity to communism” was fading away.
Facing the unraveling of the communist parties and the mutilation of the budget of guerrilla structures –consequence of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of “truly existing” communism – the remnants of all that workerist/populist rhetoric (now taking refuge in the so-called “social organizations”), along with unions and hyper- activists of various stripes, would put on display their last strident tantrum at the start of the millennium, not for the sake of the definitive destruction of capitalism, but for its renewal, dragging voluntary servitude towards the defense of work and the consolidation of populist governments in the name of "Another world is possible". That's to say, “Another capitalism is possible”.
Not the alter-globalization movement of movements (Seattle, Washington, Prague, Quebec, Genoa, Barcelona, Thessaloniki, Warsaw), nor Mexican Neo-Zapatism, nor the Brazilian movement of “the landless”, nor the Argentine (2001) and Bolivian (2003) revolts; none of these had even the most minimal anarchic motive nor did they throw themselves into the destruction of domination. Despite that, due to the absence of a paradigm, all these stunts were susceptible to a mistaken anarchist reading, which motivated countless comrades, myself included, to get involved in an ersatz struggle (some even gave their lives) that reaffirmed in practice the alienation of work and consolidated the tripolar hyper-capitalist world that we suffer today.
Since then, and in spite of the strong expectations it generated, the movementist degeneration continued at a fast pace until ending up trapped in the reformist strategies of postmodern Leninism that bets on gatopardismo and the reform of the system. Just like it's happening in Chile in this moment, or here in North Amerikkka, to name a pair of concrete examples of the so-called leftist opposition in the world.
And well, about the so-called “intermediate struggles” and the anarchist participation in these specific events, I could only corroborate everything I've just said. In my opinion, that we continue to speak in these terms is once again proof of the absence of an anarchist paradigm in the 21st Century. We mustn't forget that the theoretical development of all those concepts -"intermediate struggles", "autonomous base nuclei",“generalized insurrection”, etc.–, responded directly to the needs of an epoch and certainly, our comrade Alfredo Bonanno was the best exponent of that resounding response in that concrete historical moment.
Alfredo knew how to systematize, like few comrades can, our long list of failures and with practice as the starting point, he committed not just to promoting the definite rupture with all the anarcho-syndicalist distortions and with synthesis federationalism, but also to theorizing anarchist insurrection in the last third of the previous century, gifting us veritable jewels that allowed us to understand the struggle in that particular context. Yet all those valuable contributions now only help us understand the past and trace new trajectories that correspond to our time. To speak of “intermediate struggles” presupposes the hypothetical arrival of a great "final struggle" and the secular faith in a “generalized insurrection” –an increasingly chimerical scenario– that would put an end to domination, initiating a new period in the history of Humanity. Today--with the arrival of the 4th and 5th Industrial Revolution and the consolidation of technological hyper-capitalism in a tripolar world--demands the definitive desertion of the utopian vision and the categorical rupture with the millennarian syndrome of the imminent catastrophe and the subsequent paradise, and pushes us to discern spaces for anarchic intervention, developing the permanent insurrection parting from informality and the extension of illegalism.
C.I. What conditions do you think the new normality imposes on us, reconfigured for the control of society and the use of the Covid-19 pandemic to keep us on a sort of house arrest, a new normality in which State powers reinvent themselves and make the best of the situation to let loose the army and the police on the streets to repress and surveil, inciting voluntary submission and the social worship of those who govern and those who wear uniforms, presenting them as protectors of health; yet, the only ones that increase their profits are the multinationals of the pharmaceutical industry, the owners of agro-industrial corporations, and the hierarchs of the States that are allied to this devastating strategy, while the excluded die from lack of access to the healthcare systems, or their health quickly deteriorates due to bad nutrition and the fear that confinement produces.
G.R. Other comrades have already ventured to answer this question. Yet, I could comment what I perceive, without wanting to consult with the Oracle of Delphos, but instead taking into account the current scenario; that's to say, the accelerated changes that we're living -- exacerbated by the new technologies -- the enormous increase in alienation, the extension of citizenism, and the different strategies that the remasterized States have implemented due these particular conditions.
No doubt that the system of domination is transforming, and that this event demands the imposition of a change of reality.The deliberate manipulation of human emotions that accompanies the communication strategy with respect to the pandemic is also not a mere coincidence. We're assisting a convergence of digital, biological, and physical technologies that drive the establishment of a hyper-technological capitalism without boundaries. And I want to insist in its development "without boundaries" because, unless we live in one of those "uncontacted communities" in the most interior of the Amazon, in Papua, or some of those scarce territorial remnants of India and Indonesia, what's true is that in the immense majority of aboriginal communities, technological contamination is a done deal in spite of supposed "cultural resistance". And I don't refer to the use of certain techniques that some may qualify as innocuous, but instead to the use of chemical fertilizers, of transgenic seeds, and the socialization of new technologies (cellphones and Internet).
In that sense, hyper-technological capitalism is being consummated in all the corners of the Planet. We're saying good bye to the world as we know it. Cyber-Leviathan is before us. In the middle of a “sanitary emergency”, a new, much more authoritarian paradigm of domination is making its way, it's reconfiguring capitalist management in the hands of new technologies. Its development is irreversible. Of course, it's clear that the hegemonic imposition of this new paradigm will be carried out gradually, although every day the unemployment in the manufacturing sector and the accelerated segregation of technologically "unproductive" people will be more evident. Nevertheless, this juncture will not be favorable for the development of future rebellions (like some comrades hasten to foresee). On the contrary, the new Nation-State will take care of these "burdens" by increasing their handouts. Each day the proposals in that line are more frequent ("Universal Basic Income", "social salary", "food allowance", etc), ensuring the continuity of consumption in all the strata, stimulating demand and the participationist illusion, in the promiscuity of multiple forms of regime, with their particular democratic interpretations (liberal representative, centrist, direct, theocratic, etc.).
With regards to the situation that the excluded face, motivated by the lack of access to healthcare services, I consider that that domination will not leave them "helpless" for much longer. On the contrary, the constant cuts to public spending and the increase of taxes to the productive sectors of the so-called "middle classes", are heading towards that end. The nano-technological experiments and the advancements in the chemical industry will cheapen the production of allopathic medicines and will facilitate the clinical intervention at very low costs, which will undoubtedly widen the gap between first-rate medicine and second-rate, but this evidence will not suffice to provoke an awakening of the consciences. On the contrary, in spite of the poisoning and the mass addiction (products of allopathic medication), it will increase the effect of gratitude in the heart of voluntary servitude, facilitating (even more) the recuperation of all dissidence.
About the morbidity and mortality caused by alimentary deficiencies, and the fear of confinement that's now being prescribed as a "sanitary measure"; the only thing I can underline is the immense responsibility that the excluded have in staying in the miserable conditions that are imposed on them by domination.
The marxian maxim that the anarcho-syndicalists and the anarcho-communists eagerly take up -- sharing the same economicist vison -- that "the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves", already clear since 1864, in the General Statutes of the International Workers Association, that the end of "servitude in all its forms, in all its social misery, intellectual degradation, and political dependence" necessarily passes through the self-emancipation of the workers. Keeping the appropriate distance with this workerist vision, without a doubt, the emancipatory resort can be extrapolated to the needs of the excluded.
Nevertheless, if we still dream with the self-emancipation of the excluded, it's because we continue to be anchored to the utopian vision of 19th Century anarchism, and cling to the myth of "human progress" that the christian faith engenders in the unalterable march towards the final salvation, and/or the secular faith in that the future will always be better than the past and any present: feeding the myth of the great march of Humanity ever forward. Every day that passes, it becomes more axiomatic that Humanity does not march anywhere and that the mythical self-emancipation, in practice is reduced to the struggle for human survival; that's to say, in a struggle against itself without beginning nor end.
Definitely, any initiative for so-called improvements in the conditions for the excluded, places us inexorably in the field of reforms and sugarcoated measures that feed the myth of human progress. That's to say, it places us in the role of collaborator with the system of domination, working towards its reaffirmation and perpetuity.
C.I. Recently, you made reference to the advancement of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Without a doubt, we're facing an old enemy but recharged, formatted with the label of hyper-technological Capitalism, that, under the slogan of "information and development" is imposing a decadent life, dependent on technological use, of virtual tools, that facilitate surveillance and provoke the struggles to retreat to the computers, transforming the (real) permanent insurrection into a (virtual) confrontation in cyberspace. How do you consider that the anarchist insurrection should respond to this new imposition of the system? How can we position ourselves in this struggle? How do you think the new anarchist insurrection can expand in our days?
G.R. Before answering the three questions that you laid out, maybe it's opportune to abandon some hypotheses that we took for granted and that, in our days, the bad smell of which warned us of their imminent expiration. In the first place, I consider that it's fundamental to be aware that we're not confronting an "old enemy but recharged" but instead a completely new one, that has had the capacity to implement an unprecedented system of domination. Once this is clear, we can disqualify from combat that "recharged anarchism" that pretended to erect itself as a subversive paradigm at the start of the century and continued to harbor hopes with regards to Revolution as a unitary-and-final event, that would end all human miseries.That "recharged" anarchism only shook off the dust it picked up along the way, lightly covering the stains of rust and the wear from erosion, with a patina (too watered down) that gave it certain a circumspect aspect, the ability to pose in the photo of the millennium; with the condition that the lens didn't zoom in too much. In effect, that "recharged" anarchism could not stand up to a close inspection that would show its hundreds of scars, its decrepit dentures, and its anachronistic clothing.
In second place, it seems important to give context to this "decadent life" which you reference. Reflecting a bit, I'd dare to affirm that the decadence that the human animal has taken on as life, is not ultimately a product of the impositions of domination, but the other way around.That's to say, the absolute submissiveness of the human animal -- always willing to make and accept anything to ensure its survival, hanging from the cliff of handouts -- was what lead to the domination of our days. Yet, parting from the premises of liberalism (and also of 19th Century anarchism), the idea of "human regeneration" was always fomented, taking for granted that Humanity had been corrupted throughout history by the State, Capital, and Church; attributing to these authoritarian and criminal institutions, the origin of all our woes. It's not a mere coincidence that Mexican radicals, organized around the figure of Ricardo Flores Magón, named their official propaganda organ, Regeneration. Obviously, they bet on putting an end to "human degeneration" by suppressing those institutions that, without a doubt, are indisputable pillars of corruption and authority, but, that simplistic optic that identified the genetic residence of power and the origin of all subjugation and human degeneration in the so-called "Hydra of three heads", left without explanation the undeniable presence of corruption and power throughout and across ALL human institutions, including the family and any other alternative institutions; which situates the core of the problem in the human animal.
While it's true that classical anarchism always spilled ink and unleashed its subversive potency against school, the monastery, the army, the mad house, and the factory, pointing at these institutions as transmitters of the "principle of authority"; it naively considered that this principle could be subverted through actions, discourses and practices; being unable to detect the presence of power -be it institutionalized or not- in each human relationship, like a "strategy of domination", in the Foucauldian sense. Nevertheless, in the heat of the Parisian spring of 1968, even with all of the important theoretical-practical contributions that were registered in the scope of that event, the same 19th century persuasion would be repeated with singular optimism. In spite of the strong criticisms foisted on the past, in practice, they gave continuity to the struggle assuming that the “strategy of domination” could also be reversible with actions, discourses and practices of opposition and resistance, assigning once again a destination point to History with the same rhetoric “inexorable evolution” and the “unstoppable progress” of Hegel, Marx and Kropotkin.That being said, I'll try to answer these questions parting from my intuition, and we'll have to take into account all the theoretical limitations that implies. In that line, I consider that the first question has an implicit answer. From the moment that we recognize that we're facing "a new imposition", we should consider new forms of responding. That's to say, we'd have to think of new weapons, new forms of organization, new methodologies, new projects of struggles and, why not, new objectives. For that, it's necessary to develop a new anarchic paradigm that, without renouncing our foundational elements, is capable of confronting the new enemy. To pretend that we can confront it with our old MP-28's -as much as we polish off the rust and as much as we try to keep them greased up- that's an illusion that invokes fleeing and or suicide.
With regards to how to position ourselves in this new struggle, it seems to me that it goes hand in hand with the previous considerations. I think that we will only be able to materialize an original and non-transferable position, reaffirming the theoretical-practical conceptions that constitute us as anarchists and strengthening our radical and unrelenting confrontation against each and every form and strategy of power, from a renewed vision of struggle, of institutions, of trends and practices of sociability and of domination as a whole; that's to say, abandoning the old classist conceptions of history and of revolutionary change anchored in the theoretical understandings of the 19th and 20th centuries. For that, we'll have to throw overboard -without regrets- all the notions, projects, organizations, and practices that belong to classical anarchism and therefore are excessively tied to a certain utopian millenarianism dressed up in scientism (and dialectic verbosity), that induces us to lay our hopes, or that of the coming generations, in the inexorable drive of history and the infallible march of Humanity towards "progress".
Convinced that history doesn't lead us anywhere predestined and that Humanity is a fiction, we'd have to accept then that the archaic image of Revolution, as a definitive assault on the heavens, is baseless in our days. But this assertion -- that entails the renunciation of a past that is charged with heroism -- doesn't mean resignation at all, much less any abdication of fighting. Neither does it imply the exaltation of a sort of "anarchic pessimism" by all means innocuous. On the contrary, it enthusiastically affirms the development of a new form of struggle that is resoundingly destructive, in the face of the specific context in the terrain of the new domination that is being imposed on us and in the framework of permanent insurrection and the transgressive conquest of our present.
Tying to answer the third question, again I stand by the previous reflections. In this sense, I think that it's possible to expand the new insurrectional anarchist breath, animating a set of practices that can only be inscribed in the potency of anti-authoritarian negativity; understood a dis-utopian negativity, that's to say, far away from that negative utopianism that belongs to national-socialism and other political religions.Our task is to be the destruction of all that exists, persuaded that there's no room for hope, emulating the nocturnal activity of termites. As I commented (in one of the first responses): demolishing, demolishing, and demolishing, while being aware that the insurrection is permanent. If we ever successfully devastate the current edifice of domination, we will have to set out to demolish the new structures of the nascent power, be it called "direct", "alternative", "popular," or whatever.
C.I. How would you define Anarchy in one word? How would you describe it in one act? And how would you represent it in one action?
G.R. One word: negation. Conceived as the radical rejection of all that exists. One act: informality (everyone else is against it!). One action: liberation! Understood as a function of totality; that's to say, what they call “the total reality”.
——————– (1) Baum, Lyman Frank, The Wonderful Wizard of OZ (1900), Editorial Mirlo, Madrid, 2020.
Gustavo Rodríguez
A new anarchist paradigm?
Submitted by anon (not verified) on Sun, 11/29/2020 - 13:04
I don't get his insistence on this. Build it an they will come?
He says that he doesn't want to persuade anyone, but if he's only speaking to those who agree on "destroy" as the end-all be-all, what function does a new paradigm serve to whom?
Why does he latch on to words like "theory" and "paradigm", are these mere hangovers that denote his age?
Maybe Gustavo Rodríguez should enroll in Shawn P. Wilbur's workshop in which by the of it each of the participants will construct their own theory of anarchy.
I think the main difference
I think the main difference or paradigm shift that is suggested in the transition from the insurrectionism of bonanno and it's adaptation to current times is that people interested in "insurrection" have understood that if the goal is "generalized" insurrection, then by definition it cannot be anarchist, but must by necessity be populist; and by permanent insurrection, what's addressed is a lived tension and conflict that is not resolved or leading up to a single grand event. This last notion is also compatible from a populist lens, be it from the left or right, with different degrees of overt or subtle authoritarianism or liberalism.
Anarchists can only really exist as an anachronistic larping (what most people who call themselves anarchist, which are actually liberals with a fanciful label and references) or as the discordant note in every aspect of society. It cannot be seen as a mass movement, much less a homogeneous mass like a black block, but a troublemakers in every sphere, an annoyance to everyone.
If an emphasis is made on attack and destruction, then there's not much to say, and much to do. I don't see how this inclination is different from any form of activism in its inclination towards busywork. Sure activism does not hit where it hurts, but any self-aggrandizing lone wolf will not make any dent. Is it just for the personal satisfaction? Is it the ideology of praising the affect of satisfaction? Anarcho-satisfactionists, anarcho-hedonists? All this holds up by itself, mind you, and so does various nihilist positions as stated by this and that, but there's not much "new" to say much less by way of a "paradigm".
Also paradigm shifts are dependent on the adoption by a community, if we're referring to how Kuhn described it. Anarchists of the deed are few and apart, do not communicate much, a great deal are behind bars, they stand by what they did, what is there to change in their minds towards a new paradigm? Is it the rest of the mainstream anachronistic larpers who ought to switch to the fanciful inclinations of the "destroy" enthusiasts? If they had any compatibility with this sort of inclination they'd had never find their progressivist hyper-civilized myths so appealing in the first place as to go as far as enthusiastically identifying with them.
The destroy inclination has made writing obsolete to it, despite the insistence of compulsive blabberers. Does an inclination to attack need texts around which to consolidate a cult? On the other hand, I do agree with most of the critiques expressed by Gustavo Rodríguez , even if they're very longwinded and use plenty of vacuous figures of speech that serve as filler more than clarification.
to your last paragraph,
Submitted by lumpentroll (not verified) on Sun, 11/29/2020 - 16:36
to your last paragraph, please know that I appreciate you asking a good question!
this compulsive blabberer would argue, yes, a lot of things are needed to consolidate attack and writing doesn't hold a candle to the social conditions that produce intelligent people with a great deal of anger and nothing much else to lose. then again, finding the writing is how they develop their analysis, increasing their effectiveness.
I've never cared for models that veer too close to their counterparts in other ideologies, commonly referred to as "stochastic terrorism" in counterinsurgency land. of course, I despise this model too but they can recognize a death cult as a political weapon, same as me. the old trick where you pour poison in the ears of angry kids and toss them in the meat grinder is as does.
"but a troublemakers in every
"but a troublemakers in every sphere, an annoyance to everyone. "
What's wrong with that? All what society needs is just more and more trouble.
It’s my preferred option in
It’s my preferred option in the way i framed it.
Less is more.
Man, what is the deal with autistic insurrecto theorists dressing up their ideas in gaudy jargon and infinite wordsalad? Say it, don't spray it.
If the insus want their theories to "generalize" maybe they should write them according to the Laconian principle, i.e: the minimalist rhetorical style of the Spartans who were known for their clear and succinct speech and writing style. Insu analysis is important, perhaps now so more than ever. But it seems like every text coming from the Euro and Latino insurrectos these days requires a university degree to be comprehended.
Is there a TL;DR?
Everyone I don't like is 3 sec ago
that's funny, I'd say this 2 min ago
why would it? that's not the 9 min 17 sec ago
he's definitely railing 10 min 42 sec ago
Gelderloos is asking old 20 min 6 sec ago
"your experiences" suggest 21 min 49 sec ago
you're attacking a strawman 26 min 39 sec ago
> I fucking called it. 40 min 49 sec ago
Welcome to the covid gulags. 1 hour 22 min ago
Local shopper in aisle 4 1 hour 42 min ago
Poverty fetish is a big 3 hours 40 min ago
Noam did more to get 9 hours 13 min ago
"ideology is strong enough 15 hours 31 min ago
Sorry he hasn't shown up for 16 hours 20 min ago
That's not what me or Le are saying fooh 19 hours 18 min ago
I know you are Lumpy 19 hours 22 min ago
Why he forget the 19 hours 30 min ago
Oof, mostly okay reflections, 19 hours 43 min ago
Genuine question: Are there 19 hours 54 min ago
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925 699 5100 andy@andrewmartinmiller.com
Former Polycom CEO Andrew Miller Continues his Support for the Moment By Moment Foundation
by | Feb 27, 2018 | News | 0 comments
ALAMO, CALIF. (PRWEB) FEBRUARY 27, 2018
Former Polycom, Inc. CEO Andy Miller is continuing his campaign to increase support for under-recognized charitable organizations like the the Moment by Moment Foundation. Moment by Moment works with professional photographers who volunteer their time to create memorable portraits of families with children who are battling life-limiting illnesses.
This is the second consecutive year that Miller, through the Andrew Miller Foundation (AMF), has provided financial support to Alamo-based Moment by Moment, which sends volunteer professional photographers into hospitals and outpatient facilities to take pictures of families with terminally ill children. After their free photo session, families receive a flash drive containing the resulting full-resolution images, as well as a gift card to print and frame their pictures.
Karen Henrich, founder and director of Moment by Moment, says that her organization, with help from about 50 volunteer photographers, has created portraits of more than 3,000 families in the San Francisco and Sacramento areas over the past dozen years. This year’s goal is to photograph 600 additional families, she says, but that will require substantially more funds.
“Moment by Moment helps families to record priceless memories of what are often some of their last happy moments together with their children,” says Miller. “This remarkable program deserves wider support, and a great way to accomplish that is by attending one of its upcoming fundraising events.”
Moment by Moment’s next fundraiser is scheduled for March 21 from 6-9 p.m. at the Auburn Lounge wine bar in Danville, Calif. Attendees can enjoy an assortment of fine wines, appetizers, desserts and a silent auction for $85 per person. Raffle tickets for a $3,500 resort stay at Tucson’s Miraval Arizona Resort and Spa are also available, and the winner need not be present to win. For more information, event reservations, to buy tickets or to contribute to Moment by Moment, please visit: http://www.momentbymoment.org.
Miller, a veteran technology-industry CEO who has served as CEO of Polycom and Tandberg, and in other senior positions for companies including Cisco, IPC Systems and Monster Worldwide, launched the AMF foundation last year to increase awareness and financial support for under-recognized charitable organizations. Besides Miller’s own initial funding, the foundation raises additional support from other donors, with all funds raised going directly to selected charities or scholarships.
Miller has more than two decades of executive experience in industry leading technology and telecom companies. As a senior operating executive, he has excelled in focusing on strategic growth areas, leading global expansion, and driving improved profitability. As a director, he has collaborated on successful enterprise communications IPOs, including Gigamon (GIMO).
In addition to guest lecturing at UCLA, USC and Stanford, Andy has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos and has given keynote addresses at Microsoft’s Worldwide Mobile Congress and the Aspen Ideas Festival.
For more information about the Andrew Miller Foundation, visit: http://andrewmillerfoundation.org/.
5214F Diamond Hts Blvd #256 San Francisco, CA 94131
©2017 Andrew Martin Miller
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DVD / November 15, 2010
Have A Laugh! Volumes 1 and 2
Walt Disney Productions (1937-2007), Walt Disney Home Entertainment (October 26 2010), single discs sold separately, 73 and 63 mins respectively, 1.33:1 original full frame ratio (with one 1.78:1 exception), Dolby Digital, Rated TV-G, Retail: $19.99 each
Two volumes of classic Disney cartoons get “remastered, restored and remixed”…
What a delightful surprise! Far from being the “remixed” degradations of classic Disney animated shorts that these packages might initially suggest, both volumes of the Studio’s new Have A Laugh! series provide a shocking bombshell for any discerning Disney fan. We’ll get to the good stuff in a bit, but up front let’s clear the way for it…
Little more than a year ago, around the run up to The Princess And The Frog’s release when Disney was at pains to remind us how great traditional Disney animation of the old-school was, I began to notice some odd variations on some of the Studio’s original cartoons start to pop up as television program filler and online content on the Disney website under a new brand name, Have A Laugh! It seemed that the Studio had taken a selection of their animated shorts and cut them down to three-minute bite-sized chunks, remixing the musical scores and – whoa! – recording new vocals for Mickey, Donald, Goofy and the gang using the current vocalists.
It took me a few minutes to puzzle out what was going on: the cartoons sported a rubber stamp “Short Version” logo on their title cards, and they weren’t quite as I remembered them. They were quicker and zippier than before, not “sped up” as such, but faster paced, edited down from their original six and eight minutes to less than half those lengths, the music expertly shortened and the new voices providing such a perfect recreation that I wondered how they had achieved such a clean audio restoration before logic told me they must be new recordings. But, most of all, the images looked brand new, totally remastered and restored to near the quality of the exceptional current Blu-ray editions of Walt’s theatrical features.
Despite how great they looked, I was initially disappointed: why cut down what were only short films to begin with? And wasn’t it a shame that the original cartoons would probably never enjoy this kind of digital cleanup due to time and the budgets no doubt needed? Well, color me very pleased, because the big surprise here is that on top of the (totally redundant, it has to be said) cut-downs, the original, full-length cartoon shorts have been restored to better than they’ve ever been seen before, and they’re all included here!
Split into two volumes, the caveat is that the selections aren’t always the very best that the Disney Studios have to offer in the way of classic cartoons. Disney’s was never really the place to go for the all-out knockabout humor of the hysterical kind that was a stock-in trade across town at Warner Bros’ Termite Terrace or Tex Avery’s unit at MGM, choosing instead to place a narrative structure over character routines and blackout gags. This didn’t mean the Disney cartoons couldn’t be fun: there are plenty that feature terrifically amusing scenarios and gags as well as the lush backgrounds and expert animation that we expect from the Studio, but it’s a pretty mixed up and random selection that we find here.
On Volume One, the stand-outs are the excellent 1938 ghostbusting precursor Lonesome Ghosts and – another surprise – the recent return to the big screen for Goofy, How To Hook Up Your Home Theater, perfectly produced in the style of The Goof’s classic demonstration films of the 1940s and 50s. Each cartoon is presented in either its “Original” version or an “Edited” edition, marked “Short Version” on the cartoons’ actual title card. Although there’s a Play All option, this turns out to be fairly redundant, since it’ll cycle through the full-length cartoon and then its cut-down: interesting to compare, but ultimately you’re not, essentially, going to want to watch the same cartoon twice right after one another!
The disc itself kicks off with Mickey And The Seal, a sweet but ultimately uneventful cartoon that comes from the Mouse’s late 1940s downturn in popularity, resting more on the antics of Pluto to raise some of the laughs, though it was Oscar nominated for best animated short in 1948. The cut-down, which comes with newly produced Have A Laugh! branding and recreations of the title credits now placed on the end, doesn’t really achieve its aim on increasing the laughs, but then again it’s pretty subdued to begin with (I should point out that all the full-length shorts’ titles remain intact as they were originally produced).
Next up is Lonesome Ghosts, which has always been one of my all-time favorites for its terrific grouping of Mickey, Donald and Goofy, here beating Murray, Aykroyd and Ramis to the ghost hunting game, and I’m so pleased it’s included among the titles picked to benefit from these restorations, especially for the lavish haunted house backgrounds and spectral apparition effects. As a packed cartoon to begin with, the Short Version makes a good job of cutting it in half, though it misses out several of the best gags. Winter Storage is next, with Donald facing off against an acorn hording Chip ‘n’ Dale, funny in both original and cut-down editions, though running such a cartoon back to back only reveals the subtleties between Clarence Nash and Tony Anselmo’s takes on the Duck.
How To Hook Up Your Home Theater is the welcome surprise in the first volume, in more ways than one (more on that below, in the Ink & Paint aspects), and does a good job of restoring the comical feel of the original Goofy shorts, from Michael Giacchino’s use of the second theatrical Goofy theme, to the artists depiction of the vintage character design. The intention was to make a “lost” Goofy cartoon that could have come right out of the vault, but dealing with a modern day topic, and they pull it off well.
The cut-down loses mostly the middle of the short, and actually doesn’t seem to miss it that much, though in either version watching The Goof trying to set up his multi-cabled high-tech home theater will strike a chord with anyone who has attempted to do the same thing! Finally on this first volume, Pluto gets his fill of Chip ‘n’ Dale’s antics in Food For Feudin’, a so-so outing for the pub from 1950, which otherwise plays out like Winter Storage and so doesn’t really add anything different to this collection, the cut-down basically lopping the front end off and deleting some later sequences.
Volume Two’s cartoon selection kicks off with another all-time great. In the Mickey, Donald, Goofy style of Lonesome Ghosts, Clock Cleaners is another grouping of the trio, again featuring some spectacular backgrounds and comic timing. Also of interest is that Donald’s original “Says you!” line – cut from previous releases for stupid reasons – has been reinstated here! Not only that, but it’s possibly the absolute best looking of the classic cartoons on both volumes, which is good news. The cut-down, too, while I’m not sure I agree with their use, does an extremely good job of whizzing through the short, showcasing the wonderful music, with emphasis predictably placed on Goofy’s hair-raising, high-flying hi-jinks!
Mr Mouse Takes A Trip, though extremely well animated, is an otherwise routine outing for Mickey and Pluto, though many will recognise this one as the cartoon being recorded in the footage of Walt performing as the Mouse that has surfaced as supplemental material on some collectors’ sets. Though it’s referenced elsewhere on both volumes, it’s nice to have the original version of The Art Of Skiing included, which with its dry narration and slow build-up, leads to some typical Goofy shenanigans, the cut-down playing out the more physical aspects.
Although Early To Bed isn’t the best “Donald can’t get to sleep” shorts, it contains a few chuckles, and the cut-down is again slightly mystifying in what it drops as a way to break the length in half, since it keeps some slow moments and loses some of the funnier gags. Finally, Pluto’s Sweater is a pick from the short-lived series of Pluto, Minnie and Figaro the kitten cartoons, and unfortunately, typically well observed Pluto characterization and animation aside, it’s ultimately not a particularly hilarious outing, though the cut-down shows just how spot on Russi Taylor is as Minnie’s current vocalist.
Though not actually designated bonus material, and selectable from the Cartoon Selection menu, both volumes of Have A Laugh! come with a series of Blams! and one Re-Micks (see what they did there?) apiece. On Volume One, scenes from How To Play Football, Double Dribble and How To Play Baseball are mixed together to form a Sports compilation of body slams, smashes and whacks…all emphasized, through audio effects, freeze framing and slo-mo replays, to sound as if maximum pain has been inflicted.
I’m not sure what the point of them are: Disney’s cartoons were never the most violent and yet here they are re-cut and showing our favorite characters getting all kinds of stuffing kicked out of them. The Art Of Skiing and The Hockey Champ are reduced to Skiing and Ice Skating Blams respectively, though if anything the constant messing around with the original cartoons makes these 90 second filler clips even more tedious to sit through. Volume Two’s Blams! feature more from The Art Of Skiing in Skiing 2, an Arctic Adventure derived from Polar Trappers, and Clock Cleaning – using (pre-restored) footage from Clock Cleaners, natch!
The Re-Micks are little better, basically serving up scenes from a cartoon matched to a track from Disney’s vast music library. Volume One gets Touchdown Mickey running to a two-minute cut-down of Queen’s Another One Bites The Dust (though the track is almost buried under the new sound effects), and for Volume Two Disney moppet Hannah Montana sings He Could Be The One over a montage of Mickey and Minnie moments, although with the footage for both in black and white, I’m not sure how attractive either clip will be to the no doubt aimed-for audience, no matter how rocked up they may be.
An option to “Improve Your View” merely promotes the benefits of Blu-ray, while Sneak Peeks are included on both volumes, with a Blu-ray spot, Bambi: Diamond Edition, Tangled and Phineas And Ferb: A Very Perry Christmas playing on start-up and, from the menu option, previews for the Movie Reward program, DisneyParks, The Lion King Diamond Edition, Toy Story 3, A Christmas Carol and the Fantasia/Fantasia 2000 double feature set.
It’s the packaging descriptions that truly lets down both Have A Laugh! volumes, boasting “5 Full-Length Original Shorts” and “5 Restored Versions” not really making mention that the “original shorts” are restored as well, and that the “restored versions” are actually the half-length cut-downs. In fact, if the purpose of the edited titles was to put a fun new spin on Mickey and Co’s adventures, then the packaging has uniquely failed, since it just looks like a repackaging of shorts, drawing some attention to the freshness with the repeated proclamation they have been “remixed, remastered, restored” without further detail. But, those shortcomings aside, the sleeve art, replicated on a shiny embossed slipcover, is actually bright, colorful and funky, and while it’s not quite true that these are “the funniest toons”, they certainly are “like you’ve never seen them before”, both in their newly mixed editions and the fantastic original length restorations.
If I haven’t gushed profusely over the image quality enough yet, let me clarify: these classic Disney shorts now look almost as brand-spanking clean as the likes of Snow White and Pinocchio’s recent reissues. I say almost because they haven’t been quite as scrubbed clean to the point where the backgrounds look completely static: there’s a very nice, very fine layer of grain that keeps the toons looking authentically like film, but they’re miles ahead in terms of freshness and clarity than Warners’ Looney Tunes remasters or Disney’s own work on the Disney Treasures restorations, with nary a print mark in sight (except a couple of very faint tramlines reoccurring throughout Food For Feudin’, which suggests a problem with the original element).
In fact it’s ironic that most of them look better than Volume One’s How To Hook Up Your Home Theater, which provides yet another surprise: both the short Have A Laugh! version and the full-length original will fill your own home theater setups with an unexpected (and unannounced on the packaging) 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer! The only note of caution here is that for some reason, the full-length edition has been sourced from a film print as opposed to a direct digital conversion (like the cut-down), meaning that some heavier grain and not an unnoticeable amount of gate weave somewhat diminish the excitement of owning the cartoon (though only a bit).
While the re-recorded shorter editions predictably come loaded with 5.1 surround tracks (themselves not bursting from the speakers but still wider than usual for this vintage), the original full-length soundtracks are pretty dynamic too. Disney Studios was always careful to provide separate dubs for foreign markets, meaning that music and dialogue stems even for the shorts were preserved and can now be remixed for releases such as these. Any previous background or signal noise is now history, and the music scores have a nice warmth to them. Whatever else, when these (and hopefully others) make it to Blu-ray, they’re going to be benchmark quality for other classic cartoon releases to match. English, French and Spanish dubs and subs are all bundled in.
If fudging around with the classic Disney shorts is what the Studio has to do in order to fund these terrific restorations, then I’m all for it, leaving the cut-downs to play as television filler (with the knock-on effect of introducing these cartoons to new audiences) while the originals look and sound better than ever before, inevitably destined for collector’s editions and high-definition. My only grumble would be that these aren’t the greatest or funniest Disney cartoons in the catalog, and at little more than an hour each (the total of all the content on the disc, not just the original toons), $20 for each is steep for what is reissued footage, new transfers or not.
$15 would be more reasonable, though there’s no reason why Disney couldn’t be smart and combine both volumes for a super-value two-hour disc that I think could sell at $25. As it is, the first volume’s anamorphic inclusion of Goofy’s Home Theater short makes it a no-brainer purchase, and if there are other cartoons that appeal then you can be rest assured they look and sound great, but wait for a price drop or deal on picking up both together: a combined retail of near $40 for both just isn’t going to put a smile on your anyone’s face, whatever the quality.
The Best Of Casper: Volumes 1 and 2
Aesop’s Fables: Volumes 1 & 2
The Legendary Laugh-O-Grams: Fairy Tales by Walt Disney
Paul & The Dragon: Cartoon Laugh-O-Therapy with the Film’s Creators!
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Posted by: Lisa Hill | August 4, 2010
Between Sky and Sea, by Herz Bergner, translated by Judah Waten
I had hoped that the ascendancy of Kevin Rudd as prime minister had brought about the end of the demeaning debate about ‘boat people’ in this country, but alas, our new political leaders seem just as willing to demonize refugees as ever. It’s very discouraging.
I should declare my bias, I suppose. When my family migrated to Melbourne, we soon moved to Caulfield in Melbourne, which was home to many Jewish refugees in the 1960s and 70s. The people in our street were mostly Holocaust survivors although our next neighbour Mr Kuperholz had fled Stalin. I liked these people. They were hard-working, generous people who had somehow survived with their spirit and sense of humour intact. One way or another they made a valuable contribution to Australian life and we would be the poorer without them. So I don’t have much patience with the idea that it’s ok to ‘feel anxious’ about refugees and even less with pledges to turn the boats back to sea. For humanitarian reasons and because Australia as a developed nation should take its share of refugees however they arrive, I think we should have a mature and honourable response to people who flee war and oppression. I’d like to see our political leaders show some integrity on this issue instead of pandering to ignorance, prejudice and irrational fear.
Presumably the people at Text Publishing think so too. They have taken the step of republishing this book, Between Sky and Sea, which has been out of print for over 50 years, because it addresses the issue of asylum-seekers being denied a port to land at.
It’s a simple story really. A rickety old Greek freighter is carrying a group of Jewish refugees from the Nazi invasion of Poland, but it’s denied entry at a succession of ports. Supplies are running out, and internal tension wracks the ship. These people are traumatized after suffering enormous losses and they fear that no one will take them in.
There are children on this ship, as there are children on today’s ships. Imagine this:
A small girl [approached] the group of children. In her hand she held a white bread roll which some sailor, who had taken pity on her, must have given her. To the children who hadn’t seen such a thing for weeks the piece of baked dough gleamed so white that it must have come from fairyland. They were drawn to it and they stopped their play and circled around the child with the roll like moths round a lamp at night. They drew nearer and nearer, stretching out their hands and begging for a little piece. The child broke off crumbs with a mean little hand and distributed them among the outstretched hands. Her eyes shone with pleasure and she was full of self-importance. She played the role of a patron, pinching off tiny pieces with two fingers. But the children demanded more an more. Then she noticed that there was hardly anything left in her hand, and she didn’t want to give anyone any more. Helplessly she sat down on the floor and clutched to herself, with both hands, the remains of the roll. Then the others fell upon her, tore the piece of roll out of her hands and quickly disappeared. (p107)
The story of Ida and Nathan is heart-rending. Both had lost their spouse and children when they fled the bombing, and they are bound together by the trauma which at the same time makes it impossible for them to love anyone. They are haunted by memories and guilt, and they fear loving again because the risk of loss is more than they can bear. For Fabyash – brash, assertive, cocky – it is the losses that he suffers aboard the ship that bring him undone.
And in the end, a shocking climax.
Between Sky and Sea won the Australian Society of Literature’s gold medal for book of the year in 1948. It’s an important book which deserves to be widely read. I wish our political leaders would read it.
Sue reviewed this a while ago at Whispering Gums, and Alan Gold reviewed it for The Australian. See also Life Matters on Radio National, and John McCrystal’s review at the NZ Herald.
Update 24/8/18: See also this article at the Sydney Review of Books about Yiddish-Australian literature and the history of migrant writing in this country.
©Lisa Hill
Author: Herz Bergner
Title: Between Sky and Sea,
Translated by Judah Waten
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2010, first published 1946
Source: Review copy courtesy Text Publishing.
Posted in 20th century, ALS Gold Medal, At Sea (settings), Aus 1946, AusMale, Australian Authors, BERGNER Herz, FICTION - AUSTRALIAN, Male authors, Polish authors, Read in 2010, REVIEWS, Text Publishing, Victorian authors | Tags: Between Sky and Sea, Book Reviews, Herz Bergner, Judah Waten translator, Refugees, Text Classics, Translations
« The Age Book of the Year Shortlist 2010
G. by John Berger, Winner of the Booker Prize in 1972 »
Nice review Lisa … so totally agree with you about our leaders not pandering to ignorance and fear. So, so disappointing. Where’s the vision, where’s the courage? There’s not much in evidence is there?
By: whisperinggums on August 4, 2010
Since the people you describe here sound a lot like the people in my work, I agree: sometimes the people who exist under duress are the greatest gift to any country.
By: Shelley on August 5, 2010
We have precisely the same debate here in the UK, the debate being angrier because of our over-population and creaking services. This sounds like a wonderful book, but I find it hard to read books which are quite as harrowing as that.
By: Tom C on August 5, 2010
Tom, I think it’s because I’ve read a little about refugee numbers in France and the UK, and the pressure that causes on infrastructure, that I feel so embarrassed about the way Australians carry on about it. I saw a wonderful French film not so long ago, called Welcome, and it was about a Kurdish refugee trying to get from Calais to his girlfriend in the UK. It was an even-handed film, showing the desperation of the refugee, varying responses from the people he met, and the difficulty the authorities were having managing such large numbers of people.
Well, here we have a strong immigration program but we get very few asylum seekers by world standards (because we’re so far away and hard to get to, I suppose). We could be, and IMO should be, more welcoming.
In my career I’ve met Vietnamese and Cambodian ‘boat people’ and Afghans, Iraquis and Iranians, and honestly, they have all been assets to our country in every way, which is more than I could say about some coming under the family reunion program!
By: Lisa Hill on August 5, 2010
Other than the book’s subject matter and its relevance to today’s refugee-related issues, how does the novel stack up as a work of literature on its own terms?
By: Evan on August 7, 2010
Hello Evan, thanks for joining in the conversation. Between Sky and Sea stacks up well as a work of literature on its own terms. It wouldn’t have lasted the distance nor won that medal were it not so. (Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist sank like a stone, and so did Sandy McCutcheon’s The Ha-Ha Man because their political good intentions weren’t matched by the writing in these books.)
I can’t comment on the language much: it seems to me that the translation from the Yiddish is smooth and near undetectable as a work-in-translation, but having witnessed so many lively conversations in Yiddish I’m not sure if it captures the dynamic spirit of Yiddish. Yiddish-speaking Arnold Zable, (who wrote the introduction) seems a bit ambivalent because apparently the author interfered a bit with Judah Waten’s translation – but, in the end, as with all books in translation, we have to take it as it is, and the language worked for me.
I can comment further on the book’s literary qualities. The setting on the boat is a study in contrasts: the claustrophic conditions on board, and the relentless sea and sky around them as a metaphor for oppression and isolation – that’s superbly done. The characters are vibrant and entirely credible. I haven’t commented much on them because I wanted to avoid plot spoilers, but they are (as you’d expect) a mixture of types, some bossy, foolish, or spiteful; some generous, wise or thoughtful. None are idealised; they have human failings as well as qualities we like to admire. The story begins slowly as the characters emerge, and concludes with an ending I did not expect. That’s good plotting, IMO.
So for me, it ticks all the boxes.
Sounds good, Lisa. I have this sitting on my shelf and hope to get to it soon (after finishing JG Farrell’s Troubles, which, IMHO, is an absolute cracker of a read). I have another Bergner work, Light and Shadows, that I picked up at a library sale in Sydney. I was amazed to discover that Melbourne once had a relatively buzzing Yiddish-language literary scene, but this should not be too surprising, given the relative prominence of Yiddish culture among the city’s Jews. I too have heard Yiddish still being spoken by some elderly residents of Caulfield and thereabouts – it’s something you don’t get too much of in Auckland.
As a teenager I used to love going up to my local park where people would be playing chess and having passionate conversations about whatever…I didn’t understand a word, of course, but it inspired me for life. These were people who had suffered unimaginably, and yet they were determined to rebuild with whatever they had left, and live a good life. The only other people I have known with as much spirit were the Cambodian refugees I met in the 1970s – they too had survived horror and come here to rebuild their lives with dignity and grace and courage.
You are reading Troubles – – that’s a wonderful book – I love Farrell’s writing. I have one of his books left on my TBR, The SIngapre Grip and I am hoarding it against a reainy day when nothing else seems good to read.
BTW as a New Zealand reader, can you recommend a good book blog that would help me to keep in touch with the NZ Literary scene?
Sorry to say, Lisa, that I do not read a lot of NZ Lit :(. Come to think of it, I’ve probably read more books by Australian authors than NZ authors. As an English teacher, I can safely say that Katherine Mansfield is near-untouchable, but she’s hardly indicative of the current NZ literary scene. Janet Frame is always worth a look – if you’ve yet to read her, start with The Lagoon – it’s a near-perfect collection of short stories. After that, go for Owls Do Cry, her first novel.
The last “recent” NZ novel I read was Lloyd Jones’ Mr Pip, which made something of a splash internationally – it’s a nice read. The Book Of Fame by the same author is also a very good book – and has been published in Australia by Text Publishing.
Hope that serves as a taster.
I do like Katherine Mansfield, and am re-reading her stories on and off (on the Kindle when I’m having a coffee in cafes) but as you say, time has moved on. I read some of Frame a while ago now, but not The Lagoon. I’ll have to hunt that one out.
Of contemporary work, well, I read Mr Pip too, and thought it was terrific. I’ve got something else of Lloyd Jones on my TBR – Paint Your Wife, but I haven’t got to it yet…
Well, Lisa – I finished Between Sky and Sea last night. As a work of Yiddish literature, it’s probably not as accomplished as say, Isaac Bashevis Singer at his best, but it was an engrossing read and I’m glad I discovered it. It’s really more a novella than a novel and it adheres to the compactness of the form very well (the ending was a bit of a disappointment, though).
By: Evan on August 21, 2010
Hello Evan, thank you for taking the time to comment:)
I am interested in what you say about Yiddish literature, and would be interested to know more about it. I’ll check out Singer in due course, but are there others you’d recommend?
PS I was disappointed in the ending too, but for me, it was an emotional response. I had come to care about the characters, and well, without giving away spoilers, let’s just say my hopes for them were dashed.
By: Lisa Hill on August 21, 2010
Singer is the only Yiddish writer that I’d read a lot of. Perhaps it’s unfair of me to make the comparison, considering I’ve only read one novel of Bergner’s (thus far, that is – I have his only other novel in translation, Light and Shadows and plan to read it before the year is out). Singer has a nice range – he has written some very good novels (e.g. The Family Moskat is a nice family saga set in Warsaw between World Wars I and II and The Certificate is a like a Polish-Jewish Catcher in the Rye, of sorts) but his best works are probably his stories (read the collection Gimpel the Fool first – it’s a superb introduction).
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This site is no longer maintained and is presented for archive purposes only
http://blog.crohn.ie
Mycobacteria
Mycobacterium paratuberculosis
Mycobacterium avium
Financial cost
Similarity to mycobacterial disease.
Overview of medical research.
Important recent research.
Animal paratuberculosis.
Paratuberculosis in Crohn's tissue.
Immune reaction to paratuberculosis.
Treatment with antibiotics.
Does Mycobacterium paratuberculosis cause Crohn's Disease?
Site first published:- Saturday, 15th March 1997. Site contents last updated:- Thursday, 24th June 1999.
Update: Please read this Important notice
For up-to-date news and information, visit the Paratuberculosis Awareness & Research Association
Since Crohn's disease was first recognised in the early part of the twentieth century, it has been theorised that the disease is caused by a bacterial infection, with the principal suspect being mycobacteria, and more specifically in recent times, Mycobacterium paratuberculosis. Recently, research is making advances in understanding this organism, and is indicating more and more that at least some cases of Crohn's disease, if not all, are caused by paratuberculosis infection. Most importantly, the majority of Crohn's patients treated with antibiotic treatment which has activity against Mycobacterium paratuberculosis go into clinical remission.
This is important information for sufferers of Crohn's disease, because Mycobacterium paratuberculosis is endemic in foods derived from cattle in most areas of the western world. Mycobacterium paratuberculosis causes a chronic Inflammatory Bowel Disease in cattle, and many other species, which is similar to Crohn's disease. In some countries, the percentage of cattle herds infected with Mycobacterium paratuberculosis is extemely high. In the United States, 40% of large dairy herds are infected with Mycobacterium paratuberculosis.
Mycobacterium paratuberculosis is present in the milk, faeces and meat of infected cattle. There is a large body of evidence which indicates that Mycobacterium paratuberculosis is not killed by the standard food processing techniques that we rely on to protect us from disease-causing bacteria, such as pasteurization and cooking. Mycobacterium paratuberculosis may also be present in water supplies in areas where the faeces of infected cattle wash into the water supply, and standard water treatment methods do not kill it.
Up to now, the beef and dairy industries have preferred to defer action on removing Mycobacterium paratuberculosis from herds of food animals until it is proven that Mycobacterium paratuberculosis causes disease in humans. That proof has now arrived. In February 1998, a paper was published in the British Medical Journal which documented the first proven case of M. paratuberculosis causing disease in a human being. The patient, a seven year old boy, developed a M. paratuberculosis infection in the lymph nodes of his neck. This was followed, after a five year incubation period, by an intestinal disease that was indistinguishable from Crohn's disease. See Mycobacterium paratuberculosis Cervical Lymphadenitis followed five years later by terminal ileitis similar to Crohn's Disease for more details.
In order to facilitate self-education about this important subject, I have put together this web site, which contains either the full-text or abstracts of most of the relevant medical research. The information is broken down into various sections, as listed in "Contents", along the left hand side of this screen. All of the medical references have been taken from the Medline database. There is also an Index of the research papers which are available in full-text.
For information about the methods/author of this web site, see site information. For a summary of the contents of the site, see the page "Summary of main points". For a list of links to important sites for Crohn's disease sufferers and for medical professionals, see the page "Links to other information resources on the Web". For a list of changes/updates that have been made to this site, see the page "Changes".
For a description of Crohn's disease, see the page What is Crohn's disease?.
For further information about the situation with Crohn's disease and Mycobacterium paratuberculosis in the United States, please visit the Paratuberculosis Awareness & Research Association, an organization of sufferers of Crohn's disease that has been formed to address important questions about research into the connection between Mycobacterium paratuberculosis and Crohn's disease and the presence of Mycobacterium paratuberculosis in food derived from cattle.
Summary of main points
Index of full-text papers on this site
WWW Links
List of web site changes
Paratuberculosis Awareness & Research Association
What are mycobacteria?
Mycobacteria are a genus of bacteria. There are many different species of mycobacteria, widely spread throughout the environment. They are broken into three main groups.
non-pathogenic mycobacteria, are usually harmless to humans, and exist in the global environment without human interaction.
obligate pathogenic mycobacteria (i.e. known to cause disease) mycobacteria, cause disease in humans and other animals. Also, they require the benign environment of a host animal to multiply. Well known examples of pathogenic mycobacterial disease in humans are tuberculosis and leprosy. Disease caused by these obligate pathogen organisms is always chronic (long-lasting), since they take long periods of time to multiply, and are difficult to eradicate. Not all humans mount a successful immune response to these mycobacteria, and they can be fatal in those people if untreated.
potential pathogenic mycobacteria, can exist in the environment independent of humans but can also cause disease if the immune defences of the host they infect are impaired or suppressed. These potential pathogens are often referred to as opportunistic pathogens, because they become pathogenic when presented with the right opportunity.
Follow this link for more information about mycobacteria.
Table of mycobacteria
Mycobacteria in general
Mycobacterium paratuberculosis.
Mycobacterium paratuberculosis is an obligate pathogen, i.e. it cannot multiply outside the cells of animals. It is known to cause disease in a wide variety of animals, including primates and humans. See the page "Mycobacterium Paratuberculosis in Animals" for more information. In common with other obligate pathogens, the environment required by Mycobacterium paratuberculosis for multiplying is the environment found inside mammals and other animals. In animals, the most common site for infection by Mycobacterium paratuberculosis is the gastrointestinal tract, where it tends to cause a chronic inflammatory disease. The most well studied animal paratuberculosis is BJD (Bovine Johne's Disease), the name given to the disease as seen in cattle. Mycobacterium paratuberculosis occurs in two forms, the bacillary form and the spheroplast form. Many paratuberculosis bacteria of the bacillary form may be required to cause clinical disease. In contrast, only a few paratuberculosis bacteria of the spheroplast form will cause disease. This difference between diseases caused by the two forms of paratuberculosis is a result of the infected hosts immune reaction.
Whether Mycobacterium paratuberculosis causes disease in humans has been a question for researchers for over a hundred years, since the organism was first discovered in 1895, causing disease in a german cow. Since that time, paratuberculosis has been recognised in many species of animals, in both its bacillary and spheroplast forms. The bacillary form is easily detected in animals, since it grows in large numbers and is identifiable by a simple chemical test. In contrast, the spheroplast form, since it comes in only very small numbers and cannot be easily be identified, was not detected until the advent of modern genetic testing techniques.
This question of disease causing ability was finally answered in a paper published in the British Medical Journal in February 1998. This paper describes the case of a young boy who developed a M. paratuberculosis infection in the lymph nodes of his neck and, after a five year incubation period, developed an intestinal disease which was indistinguishable from Crohn's disease.
Information about Mycobacterium paratuberculosis, its environment, etc, are available in the paper "Mycobacteria and the aetiology of Crohn's disease". This paper also refers to Mycobacterium avium. At the "Johnes Disease Information Center", there is
an electron micrograph of some bacillary form paratuberculosis bacteria.
A history of research into Mycobacterium paratuberculosis.
Information on the biology, environment, host range, etc, of Mycobacterium paratuberculosis.
A history of research
Information about M. paratuberculosis
Biology of M. paratuberculosis
Mycobacterium avium.
Mycobacterium avium is an opportunistic pathogen, and comes in two forms, the bacillary and spheroplast form. Both of these forms can cause disease in animals. The spheroplast form also causes disease in humans. The people who most often contract disease from Mycobacterium avium are sufferers from AIDS, whose immune systems have been suppressed by the HIV virus. In immunocompromised people, Mycobacterium avium invades the white blood cells of the infected person, and uses them as sites to multiply.
What is Crohn's disease?
Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory disease of the gastrointestinal tract. Its affects hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Its cause is unknown. The disease is autoimmune in nature, i.e. it causes the immune system to attack and inflame the bodies own tissues, most often in the gastrointestinal tract, but also in other parts of the body. When the disease is active in a patient, treatments include long term administration of immunosuppressive drugs and surgery, involving removal of segments of the damaged bowel, and sometimes the fitting of ostomy bags. Two of the main drug treatments are steroids, often in high doses, which have an immunosuppressive anti-inflammatory effect and "6-MP" based drugs, which suppress the action of the immune system, and are used after organ transplant surgery to prevent rejection of transplanted organs.
For a detailed description of the wide range of symptoms experienced by sufferers of Crohn's disease, including a discussion of fatality and Crohn's disease, see the page What is Crohn's disease?.
National Institutes of Health:- Crohn's Disease
The epidemiology of Crohn's disease.
Epidemiology studies of Crohn's disease have been conducted in many countries. They yield some important insights into the disease. These include
There is strong evidence that Crohn's disease is caused by an environmental agent.
Incidence of Crohn's disease is increasing in most parts of Europe and North America.
Crohn's disease is beginning to make an appearance in parts of the world that have not experienced it before.
For more information on these topics, see the page "The epidemiology of Crohn's disease".
Epidemiological comparison of Crohn's disease and the mycobacterioses
National Institutes of Health:- Digestive Disease Statistics
Crohn's disease costs billions of dollars across the world.
In the United States, in 1990, Crohn's disease cost between 1.0 and 1.2 billion dollars. Other countries with a high prevalence of Crohn's disease are:- Canada, Sweden, Norway, Germany, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and many countries of Eastern and Central Europe. For a brief discussion of the worldwide cost of Crohn's disease, see the page "The financial cost of Crohn's disease."
The Epidemiology of Crohn's disease
The similarity of Crohn's disease to mycobacterial diseases.
The symptoms of Crohn's disease are extremely similar to symptoms of diseases caused by known pathogenic mycobacteria, particularly intestinal tuberculosis, caused by the obligate pathogen, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. So much so, that intestinal tuberculosis is often misdiagnosed as Crohn's disease. This confusion is contributed to by the fact that there a degree of commonality of treatments between the two diseases. For a comparison of the symptoms of known mycobacterial diseases and Crohn's disease, and discussion of the known commonalities between the two diseases in terms of diagnosis and treatment, see the page "Similarities between Crohn's disease and mycobacterial disease.".
Also, there is evidence that Crohn's disease presents in two main forms, the aggressive "perforating" form and the contained "nonperforating" form. This is a feature that Crohn's disease shares with the mycobacterial disease leprosy, which also presents in two forms, the aggressive "lepromatous" form and the contained "tuberculoid" form. See the page "The polar manifestations of mycobacterial diseases and of Crohn's disease" for more details.
Similarities between Crohn's disease and other mycobacterial disease
Association of M. paratuberculosis and Crohn's disease
History of Crohn's/Paratuberculosis Research.
Crohn's disease was first recognised by a Glasgow surgeon, Dalziel, in 1913. He recognised that it was a different disease from intestinal tuberculosis, but believed that it was so similar to that disease, and to paratuberculosis in cows, that it must have a mycobacterial cause. He failed to prove this connection, because of the inability to demonstrate visible bacteria from tissue samples. In 1932, Crohn et al., on the basis of this same inability to demonstrate visible bacteria, classified the disease as not having a mycobacterial origin. Nonetheless, this classification was not universally accepted, and research into whether Crohn's disease is involved with Mycobacterium paratuberculosis has been carried out since then. See the page "History of early research on Crohn's disease" for a description of early research and the work of Crohn et al.
History of early research on Crohn's disease
Mycobacteria and Crohn's Disease: a historical perspective
History of Johne's Disease
Milestones of Crohn's/Paratuberculosis Research.
An important milestone in paratuberculosis research in recent years was the discovery in 1985 of a genetic code (the IS900 insertion sequence) that is unique to Mycobacterium paratuberculosis. The sequence is found in both the bacillary and spheroplast forms of Mycobacterium paratuberculosis. Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) techniques make it possible to detect small numbers of Mycobacterium paratuberculosis against the background of other DNA signals present in the human body. Knowledge of this sequence permits researchers to state with certainty (depending on the care with which this highly complex test is conducted) whether the organism is present in any given sample. It also permits them to rule out the presence of other forms of mycobacteria.
In December 1994, attention was drawn to the fact that Crohn's disease, in common with known mycobacterial diseases, is not a uniform disease and may present in two main forms, the "perforating" and "nonperforating" forms. See the page "The polar manifestations of mycobacterial diseases and of Crohn's disease", for a detailed discussion of this. No research to date has considered this division.
A vital piece of research in the paratuberculosis puzzle was very recently uncovered. As described in the paper Mycobacterium paratuberculosis Cervical Lymphadenitis followed five years later by terminal ileitis similar to Crohn's Disease, M. paratuberculosis has been proven to cause disease in humans. This paper describes the worlds first documented case of bacillary form M. paratuberculosis being isolated from a human being. The patient involved was a seven year old boy, who developed a M. paratuberculosis infection in the lymph nodes of his neck. Due to the proximity of the infection site to the mouth, it is most likely that the boy contracted M. paratuberculosis from consuming M. paratuberculosis contaminated food. The boy went on to develop, after an incubation period of five years, an intestinal disease which was indistinguishable from Crohn's disease.
I have tried to organise the medical research here, by breaking it down into six main areas, as listed below. Each item in the list is a link to a page that contains a brief explanation of what the research is trying to achieve, and contains links to abstracts from the actual medical research papers. In order to aid you in understanding what questions are being addressed in the medical research, I have written a basic primer of infectious disease that explains some of the terms that you will need to understand.
Animals affected by mycobacterium paratuberculosis.
The search for Mycobacterium paratuberculosis in Crohn's disease.
The search for a human immune reaction to Mycobacterium paratuberculosis.
Treatment of Crohn's disease with antibiotics.
The prevalence of BJD (Bovine Johne's disease).
Basic primer of infectious disease
Source: http://archive.crohn.ie/welcome.htm
This is the top level page.
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Ruth Millett Papers
Archives and Special Collections, Mary Couts Burnett Library
Correspondence, photographs, printed material, programs, invitations, announcements, speeches, writings, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, and newspaper slicks document Ruth Millett’s life and career from 1927 through her retirement in 1967. The bulk of the papers are clippings and full page reproductions of her columns, We, the Women, and Mind Your Manners, written for the Newspaper Enterprise Association syndication service from 1937-1967. We, the Women addressed women’s issues of the mid-twentieth century, from education and career, to homemaking, etiquette, personal relationships, and popular culture. Of note are Millett’s columns addressing the changes in women’s lives brought about by the Great Depression, World War II, and cultural movements of the 1950s and 1960s.
1927-1967, undated
Lowry, Ruth Millett (Person)
Copyright has been transferred to Texas Christian University.
Ruth Linwood Millett Lowry was born February 10, 1912 to Ralph and Alice Millett in Dallas, Texas. The family soon moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where Ralph Millett, was a columnist and editor of the Memphis Press-Scimitar. The Milletts were a close family, and Ruth and Ralph Jr. both pursued their father’s profession, journalism. Ruth graduated from the University of Iowa, worked briefly in Missouri, then moved to New York City where she began writing two syndicated columns, Ruth Millett Says . . . (later titled We, the Women) and Mind Your Manners, for the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA). She married Dr. Frederick Lowry and had twins Peter and Lynne. The family moved around the Midwest a bit before settling in Austin, Texas. Millett continued with her career as a columnist until her retirement in 1967. She died April 16, 1997 in Austin. Millett’s columns, which ran as often as six days a week in more than 450 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, included interviews with celebrities, commentaries on the effects of World War II on American families, discussions of behavior of elected officials and first ladies, and advice on topics such as whether women should work outside the home and how children should be educated. Millett received thousands of letters from readers and was named one of the U.S.’s top ten most powerful women by Pageant magazine in 1953. She was also honored by the New York Newspaper Women’s Club, Theta Sigma Phi, a fraternity for women writers, and named the Austin American Statesman Career Woman of 1963.
Arranged in three series: I. Personal Papers, 1927-1967 ; II. Newspaper clippings, 1930-1957 and undated ; and Series III. Slicks and newspapers, 1930-1967
Vault: TT E1 - 4
Gift of Peter Lowry, 2014.
Advice columnists -- United States
Child rearing -- United States
Clippings (information artifacts)
Consumer education -- United States
Etiquette for children and teenagers
Life skills -- United States
Newspapers -- Sections, columns, etc.
Op-ed pages
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
Women journalists -- United States
World War, 1939-1945 -- Journalists
05. Alumni Papers
Guide to the Ruth Millett Papers
Compiled by Miriam Villanueva Mary Saffell Special Collections staff
Code for undetermined script
Part of the Archives and Special Collections, Mary Couts Burnett Library Repository
http://lib.tcu.edu/spcoll/
TCU Box 298400
2800 S. University Drive
Fort Worth, Texas 76129-0001
LibSpecialCollections@tcu.edu
Ruth Millett Papers. Special Collections, Mary Couts Burnett Library, Texas Christian University. https://archives.tcu.edu/repositories/2/resources/142 Accessed January 20, 2021.
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Kathleen Ellis (1887-1968)
Home / Kathleen Ellis (1887-1968)
10 October 2016 October 9, 2019
Ellis, Kathleen Wilhelmina (1887-1968)
Born in Penticton, Ellis graduated from Baltimore’s John Hopkins School of Nursing in 1915. During WW1, she was matron of the Vancouver Island Military Hospital in Victoria. After positions in Detroit and Toronto, she returned to Vancouver to become Superintendent of Nurses at the Vancouver General Hospital and Principal of the School from 1921 to 1929. In collaboration with Ethel Johns, she helped develop the five-year baccalaureate nursing course at UBC and VGH. She was the 6th president of the Graduate Nurses Association of BC. From 1931 – 1936, she was Director of Nursing at the Winnipeg General Hospital. During WW II she was secretary-treasurer and national emergency adviser for CNA. In 1937 she received a BS from Columbia University, New York and from 1930-1932, was First Vice-President of CNA. For 13 years, she was registrar for the Saskatchewan Registered Nurses Association.
In 1938 she opened the University of Saskatchewan School Of Nursing and was Director of Education. From 1946-1950, she was Professor and Director of the School where she remained until her retirement to Penticton in 1950. She received an honorary degree from the University of Saskatchewan in 1955 and a Centennial Medal in 1967. In 1956 the new nurses’ residence at the University Hospital in Saskatoon, was named “Ellis Hall” in her honour.
Contents of Biographical File
Biographical Information file from The Canadian Nurse.
Materials in support of nomination to the RNABC Memorial Book.
Biographical information.
U of S citation for the presentation of an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.
Citation for 1967 Centennial medal.
“Miss Kathleen W. Ellis”, The Canadian Nurse 26 (12) (December 1930), p. 649.
“A Forward Step”, The Canadian Nurse 33 (5), (May 1937), p. 219.
“The C.N.A. Appoints a General Secretary and National Adviser”. The Canadian Nurse 39 (9) (September 1943).
“Nursing Profiles”, The Canadian Nurse 46 (11) (November 1950), p. 902.
“Miss K.W. Ellis Honoured by University”, The Canadian Nurse, August 1955.
Excerpt from Legacy: History of Nursing at the University of British Columbia.
Grace Fairley (1881-1969)
Catherine Ebbehoj (ca. 1953-
Welcome to our Archives
Artefacts-old
Biographical File L-Mc
Biographical Files N-S
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now you see me 2 streamcloud
[39] It was later confirmed that Lizzy Caplan would reprise the role of Lula May, and Benedict Cumberbatch would join as a new cast member. Lizzy Caplan was nominated as Choice Summer Movie Star: Female. [44], "Harrelson creates very different twins in 'Now You See Me 2, "Sanaa Lathan To Arrest Tricksters In 'Now You See Me 2, "First look at Daniel Radcliffe in magic heist Now You See Me 2", "Lionsgate Sets Dates for Now You See Me 2 and Dirty Grandpa", "Daniel Radcliffe to Play Michael Caine's Son in NOW YOU SEE ME 2", "Film Briefs: Weinsteins Will Distribute Quentin Tarantino's 'Hateful Eight' Worldwide; Lionsgate, eOne Expand Joint Agreement", "Now You See Me 2 Cast And Plot Revealed", "Now You See Me 2 trailer: Jon M. Chu answers questions", "Henry Lloyd-Hughes Conjures Role In 'Now You See Me: The Second Act, "Official Title For 'Now You See Me' Sequel Revealed: 'Now You See Me 2: The Second Act' Release Date Set For 2016; Cast Details And Plot Unleashead", "And so it begins... Now You See Me...again", 周杰倫 Jay Chou 【Now You See Me】Official MV (120s), "Now You See Me 2 Home Release Date Announcement", "Box Office: 'Conjuring 2' to Ward Off 'Warcraft,' 'Now You See Me 2, "Weekend Box Office: 'Now You See Me 2' Steals $23 Million Debut", "Now You See Me 2 doubles down on giddy ludicrousness", "Teen Choice Awards 2016: See the full list of winners", "Lionsgate to Make Chinese Spinoff of 'Now You See Me' (Exclusive)", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Now_You_See_Me_2&oldid=991545086, Films about the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Album articles lacking alt text for covers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. [38], In May 2015, Lions Gate Entertainment CEO Jon Feltheimer announced that they had "already begun early planning" for a sequel to Now You See Me 2. Walter arrives, having manipulated Daniel into believing he was in contact with the Eye, and Dylan fights Walter’s men as Daniel escapes with the chip. RickWade30901144. The Four Horsemen resurface, and are forcibly recruited by a tech genius to pull off their most impossible heist yet. Dave Franco was nominated as Choice Summer Movie Star: Male and "[36], Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune gave the film a mixed review but considered it "more fun" than its predecessor. Macau, China 27 of 28 found this interesting Interesting? Anya Taylor-Joy. - Thaddeus Bradley. The film's music was written and composed by Brian Tyler. Plot Edit. Soundtrack Credits . Realizing the chip they have is a fake, they resolve to stop Walter from acquiring the real chip, and are joined by Li and Bu Bu. Teddington Lock, Teddington, Middlesex, England, UK 22 of 23 found this interesting Interesting? They explain how they had misled the three into thinking they had won and reveal Jack had hypnotized Chase into throwing them out of the plane as planned. Posing as potential buyers, they infiltrate the Macau Science Center, using cardistry and sleight of hand to sneak the chip past its supervisor, Allen Scott-Frank. The plot has the Four Horsemen and their leader Dylan Rhodes recruited by Walter Mabry, a criminal mastermind, to steal a data chip. With Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco. One year after outwitting the FBI and winning the public"s adulation with their Robin Hood-style magic spectacles, The Four Horsemen resurface for a comeback performance in hopes of exposing the unethical practices of a tech magnate. (4K) AppuSeries. "[34] Randy Cordova of The Arizona Republic, who preferred the film to the original, said of the villain character that "In [Radcliffe's] hands, he is a spoiled and petulant baddie, alternately creepy and hilarious. Showing all 5 items Jump to: Filming Locations (5) Filming Locations. They go to Macau, and Dylan finds Daniel waiting to give the chip to the Eye. Because mark my words, you will get what's coming to you in ways you can't expect. Tvideo . On July 3, 2013, the film was officially announced to be in development. [40][41][42] Lionsgate revealed in April 2020 that Eric Warren Singer would be the screenwriter for the film.
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