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A titan of Latin Jazz and Salsa music, Eddie Palmieri, known as "El Maestro," is still making musical history. At 81 years old, the multi-Grammy Award winning pian<|fim_middle|> between musicians, listeners, and now with young students with interactive technology. Full Circle begins yet another chapter in the Palmieri legacy. | ist and music legend today releases his new album Full Circle. Featuring 8 classic salsa tracks recorded with stunning cast of musicians from New York and beyond, the album is his first album released on Palmieri's newly launched imprint Uprising Music via Ropeadope.
The album release coincides with the release of the Palmieri Salsa Jams App, the world's first interactive Salsa music app on Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah's Stretch Music App platform.
Watch a demo video of the app HERE, and listen to the album on Spotify HERE.
A recipient of The National Endowment for the Arts' distinguished Jazz Master Award and the Latin Academy of Recording Arts & Science Lifetime Achievement Award, Palmieri has always been at the forefront of major shifts and modernizations in the music industry.
From using a front line of trombones rather than the trumpets customary in Latin orchestras in his heralded "La Perfecta" band, to breaking the three and a half minute industry imposed standard recording length with his nine and a half minute recording of "Azucar Pa' Ti," Palmieri has always pushed the creative envelope. The release of some of his greatest Salsa classics in the form of an interactive app is just another in a long line of firsts for the music icon.
Full Circle finds Mr. Palmieri teamed with world-class musicians from the New York scene that have played with him over the last decade; "Little" Johnny Rivero, Luques Curtis, Jonathan Powell, Louis Fouché, and many more. On Full Circle listeners will find the basic harmonic and rhythmic structures of the original recordings but with Eddie's solos freer and more aggressive than ever. These tracks are true representations of Palmieri at the peak of his creative powers.
The Palmieri Salsa Jams App (powered by Stretch Music and Spectrum) is sure to please musicians and audiophiles alike. It gives musicians the ability to completely control their listening, practicing, and learning experience by customizing the player to fit their specific needs and goals. The app has the capability to mute, solo, pan and fade any instrument chosen along with tempo control, looping and sheet music for each part.
As he has throughout his 50+ year career, Eddie Palmieri is once again pushing boundaries by building bridges; | 465 |
Funerary Portraits: Snapshots in Stone
Henriette Cauvin, née Baral, died January 20, 1882, aged 34
For many people, a cemetery is a morbid location, a reminder of the hopefully distant but unavoidable end to our earthly tenancy; it would be the last place to visit in search of enjoyment, especially during a summer holiday. I have never been one of those people. I won't say I feel at home in cemeteries (let's not tempt fate too flagrantly) but these highly atmospheric and deeply revealing sites of remembrance have always struck me as some of the most fascinating places to visit when traveling. All of human life is there, so to speak, and these labyrinthine cities of the departed can also offer a great deal of architectural pleasure.
A couple of weeks ago I was staying in an apartment by the port in Nice, in the south of France, and on the other side of the building, rising steeply next to the street, there was a hill covered with trees. I had no idea until I climbed it soon after arrival that the city's<|fim_middle|> Nice cemetery are marked "Concession à perpétuité" as though the vicissitudes of time could somehow be held at bay by a legal ruling.
Strangely, with the portrait sculptures, time has wrought some subtle enhancements. In mimicry of the lives they record, which ended 80, 100 or 130 years ago, these stone memorials have aged and in the process acquired a patina, character and presence that it's hard to believe freshly carved, or newborn, stone could ever have possessed. You look into their eyes and they seem to look back at you with an age-old knowledge and gravitas across the void of time. They have gone (I'm afraid I believe there is no celestial drawing room: they really have gone) yet thanks to the sensitivity of these uncredited funerary sculptors — did they work from photographic portraits, paintings or death masks? — the person's spirit, or at least some idealized representation of it, survives; if, that is, we restore the departed for a moment by stopping to look at them. How long does a sculpture, one of so many in a necropolis that plenty of those holidaying below in Nice will never visit, wait between the occasions when someone pauses, takes it in, feels its reality, speculates about this unknown personality, and gives a long-gone human a brief moment of afterlife?
Josephine Tomatis, née Navello (?), died June 6, 1930, aged 80
Louis Bonzano, died September 7, 1908
As I left the cemetery for the first time, I was beginning to think I would like to write about the sculptures, though I knew that I needed more pictures to make a good set. But I hadn't noted down their names, for lack of pen and paper, and it was unthinkable to "resuscitate" these strangers without recording who they were. They were already slipping into obscurity again. I would need to go back, attempt to retrace my random steps and find them. Even when I had located them all, along with some new sculptures, which took two more visits, it was sometimes difficult to determine, with tombs bearing several family occupants, the sculpture's identity. In one case, with some misgivings — despite my positive intentions I felt like a tomb raider — I had to lift a heavy stone cross to one side to reveal the damaged lead lettering it concealed. In another, I have indicated uncertainty in the caption with a question mark. Other information is incomplete.
Victor Sabatier, born May 19, 1823, died March 9, 1891
Georges Fighiera, born March 28, 1883, died November 28, 1912
I did some rudimentary searching for all of these people — and found nothing. Their families were citizens of substance, wealthy enough to afford these impressive memorials, but all of the occupants are forgotten now. Only one of the individuals I photographed, Victor Sabatier, a painter of local landscapes, who sports a magnificent though broken moustache and beard, is in any sense "famous." I wish I could say I had heard of him before.
Louise Dalbera, born March, 14, 1861, died January 30, 1880
Raoul Cottalorda, 1895-1918, killed in the Somme, reburied in Nice, March 3, 1921
Photographs: Rick Poynor
On My Screen: Bill Morrison's Decasia
Every Poem an Epitaph: The Protestant Cemetery in Rome
Posted in: Arts + Culture, History, Photography, Social Good
Dear Rick,
great essay. All this remembers me the phantasmagoric Joy Division's 'Closer', designed by Saville. Cemetery in Geneva, not Nice.
Best from Argentina,
Lucas López
I share the same feelings. My husband Marc and I visited twice a famous cemetery in Buenos Aires in one of our annual visits to Argentina. There is so much to look at, so much history and and so many stories to uncover. At the Cementerio de la Recoleta in Buenos Aires rest some of the most relevant figures in Argentinian history, politicians, scientists, poets, priests and leaders.
Here are some of my photos if you are interested:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/constanzapacher/sets/72157606208097840/
Best from Edmonton,
Constanza Pacher
Lucas, yes, Saville's Closer cover remains a key visual reference when it comes to transporting funerary architecture and art to a more contemporary context, where it can have great power.
Constanza, thanks for sharing your set of pictures, which I very much enjoyed. I particularly like Fighting Demons, You Shall Not Pass (both close in spirit to cemetery pictures I have taken myself, not shown here), and your untitled final picture with its intriguing conjunction of old statues and modern geometrical architectural details, which takes us back to the old/new mood of the Closer cover.
Rick Poynor | main cemetery was situated at the top, with views in all directions, out across the rooftops of Nice, to the Bay of Angels and the distant hills. The Cimetière du château, which is divided into Christian and Jewish sections housing 2,800 tombs, is an exceptionally lovely site. My sensation upon walking through the gate was closer to rapture at the prospect of exploring its avenues and ascending levels than to melancholy. There were many statues among the neo-classical tombs and chapels and I knew I would take plenty of pictures.
Cimetière du château in Nice, France
I hadn't been wandering very long before it occurred to me that there were more portrait sculptures adorning the tombs than I have seen in many other cemeteries. With so much to look at, it's easy to treat a cemetery visit as a series of general views without lingering to study what might prove to be more salient details. When you do pause to read a name, a date, or an epitaph, you are powerfully confronted with the reality of a person's life and the emotions of those they left behind, also now dead in many cases. The funerary portraits, some executed in the round, some in relief, actualize the dead with a frequently startling vividness. I decided to search for the sculptures and look at them closely. Although I continued to take other pictures during my visit, I would concentrate on recording these individualized images in stone.
Docteur Louis Lehouco, 1834-1928
Zenon Nowacki, died September 27, 1914
It's common in some countries to place photographs of the deceased on the tomb and the cemetery in Nice has sporadic examples, though the practice appears never to have become a fashion. The desperation implicit in this over-literalness is always a little uncomfortable and incongruous for the disengaged viewer. Eventually, decades in the future, as the picture fades, no matter how fervently the bereaved sought to keep memory alive, the same thing will happen that always happens to a grave and even a grand tomb. It will cease to be visited and tended, inscriptions will slowly lose their definition in the air, lead letters will become detached and lost (there are many examples in Nice), headstones and crosses will lie broken, and metal frames will rust and corrode — a particularly poignant and final form of dilapidation. Some tombs in the | 516 |
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McNichols in Live6 area being resurfaced — and reimagined
MJ Galbraith | Tuesday, July 7, 2020
The portion of McNichols Road slated for improvements, from Greenlawn to Livernois Avenue, borders the Fitzgerald and Bagley neighborhoods. City of Detroit
With the orange barrels having been delivered on Monday, July 6, construction is officially underway on the McNichols streetscaping project.
It's a sight that is no doubt a relief to project organizers; commencement of the McNichols streetscaping was delayed for several months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Such construction projects weren't allowed, and City Council was forced to recess. Once they did return, a backlog of tasks forced a delay even further.
But now a stretch of McNichols Road — what's known colloquially as Six Mile — is not only being resurfaced but completely reimagined.
From Greenlawn Avenue to the west to Livernois Avenue to the east, McNichols is set to undergo a transformation, incorporating a host of measures aimed to make the area safer for pedestrians and more appealing for businesses and<|fim_middle|> been built to ease parking concerns.
"The people that I hear from are excited. Right now, businesses are only getting the customers that already know they're there," says Lashawna Manigault, the business liaison to the district for the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation.
"These improvements will create a new image and attract people from across the city and the state."
Got a development news story to share? Email MJ Galbraith here or send him a tweet @mikegalbraith.
Read more articles by MJ Galbraith.
MJ Galbraith is Model D's development news editor. Follow him on Twitter @mikegalbraith.
Development, Placemaking, Redevelopment, Sense of Place, Transformational change, Transit, Transit-Oriented Development | their customers alike.
The street will be resurfaced and reconfigured to implement traffic calming measures. New sidewalks will be built with landscaping, street trees, and lighting. Bike lanes, pedestrian crossings, and bus station islands will be built to improve safety.
Construction is expected to be completed in November.
Part of Live6 (Livernois and Six Mile), the area is anchored by the Marygrove Conservancy and University of Detroit Mercy.
"The street itself is set up in a way that already feels like a quaint shopping district — not like the wide avenues of Grand River. So it already makes development easier," says Caitlin Marcon, the city's deputy director of Complete Streets and leader of the project.
"It's surrounded by wonderful single-family-home neighborhoods like Bagley and Fitzgerald. And there are existing businesses like Detroit Sip and Lucki's Cheesecakes already doing great things there.
"There's a lot of energy around McNichols, so it made sense for the city to double down on our investment there."
That investment is part of an $80 million project to revitalize 26 commercial corridors throughout the city, which is part of the network of Neighborhood Framework Plans, made possible by a $125 million bond in 2016.
The streetscaping plans happening throughout the city are an effort to bring "downtown-type projects to the neighborhoods," Marcon says. While private investment helps to bring those projects to fruition in the city center, it wasn't until the city's finances and credit rating improved that it could fund such projects on its own.
Still, for all the optimism about the streetscaping plan, concerns about the effect construction will have on existing businesses are ever-present. And that was the case well before the COVID-19 pandemic occurred, complicating things even further.
The city has partnered with the Live6 Alliance to help communicate with the community. They'll put out sandwich boards and feather flags to advertise that businesses are still open. Construction contracts stipulate that crews must maintain pedestrian access to area businesses. And a temporary parking lot has | 423 |
Team spirit<|fim_middle|> | is spreading at LinkedIn following the professional network's debut of its Teammates feature, which enables members to ensure that they see updates from the people they work directly with.
Teammates will begin rolling out on desktop and mobile in the U.S. in the coming months, with worldwide availability following shortly thereafter.
Members with access to the feature will see an Add Teammates option in the left panel of the My Network menu, where they can add connections including managers, peers and direct reports. After doing so, activity from those people—posts, comments, likes, shares, work anniversaries—will be prioritized in feed.
LinkedIn also added more artwork choices to the Kudos feature it introduced last June as a way for members to express gratitude to their coworkers and colleagues.
Li said 3 million Kudos were shared in the first few months that the feature was available, adding that LinkedIn members now have more ways to send personal Kudos within the professional network's messaging feature. | 196 |
Marie André's video work incorporates various genres, like narrative fiction, portrait, documentary and<|fim_middle|>án.
° 1951 Brussels (Belgium). Lives and works in Brussels. | performance and always starts from observation. Her subjects show a strong inclination towards the elegance of everyday gestures and intimate details, with a predominantly female approach. André's fascination with the eloquence and significance of everyday gestures, particularly those of women, finds its perfect correlative in the post-modern choreography of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Over a period of six months in 1985, André recorded De Keersmaeker's dance group Rosas, as members rehearsed and developed the piece 'Elena's Aria', in which ordinary movements are isolated and transformed. In 'Répétitions', André's rhythmically composed interpretation, she observes the intensity and concentration of the female dancers as they repeat a series of precise, gestural movements taken from everyday life: brushing their hair back, crossing their legs, sitting down. Repetition and rehearsal are both the theme and structure of this elegant work, as André documents the progression of the rehearsals and celebrates the process, rather than the final production, of the dance. In 'Temps d'hiver', made in 2001, a filmmaker is at work in the heart of winter. Her work encompasses her life, the place of her body in within the season, her past, cinema, her friends and colleagues from Brussels (which includes Alexandra Dementieva and Boris Lehman). These observations by André are visualized in a minimalist way, but also with intimacy and richness in emotions and detail. They accentuate the lyrical qualities of the static, the elegance of the natural. In this self-portrait, shot on 16mm, the film itself is considered as a perishable medium, to be preserved in a dark, cool place – in between the jam and fresh potatoes – so that, when the time is right, the celluloid can submerge as if it were a sparkling diamond.
André's work has been shown on a worldwide scale, and it received awards at festivals in Locarno and San Sebasti | 408 |
Here are our 10 top tips to keep your pets safe, happy and<|fim_middle|> Sunscreen exists for animals too.
Don't let white, light skinned or pink nosed pets sunbake in the yard during the sunny days. Any pet who has a short coat or exposed skin can and will suffer from excruciating sunburn which can in turn cause melanomas if the skin is consistantly damaged. If you are interested in pet sunscreen or pet friendly zinc give us a call on (02) 4959 5766.
Add some of your pets favourite foods into an empty ice cream container and then fill it with water and freeze. This will keep your pet entertained and cool while not working up too much of a sweat.
Please ensure your dog is fully up to date with their vaccinations. Deadly virus' like the Parvovirus are much more active in the summer months and people are much more likely to be walking their dogs who could be carriers or even infected themselves. If you are unsure of your pets vaccination history please give us a call on (02) 4959 5766.
9. Padded feet will burn.
Avoid exercising your dog in the heat of the day. The ground can get extremely hot and if you wouldn't walk barefoot then you cannot expect your pooch to do so. If you feel your dog desperately needs exercise that day then do so just before sunrise or in the evening if a cool change has come through.
Do not take your dog to the park or the beach or out to play on hot days. You may think they will do themselves good to cool off at the beach or the pool but your pet will reheat quickly with the excitement of seeing other people or dogs and this could do much more damage then just staying home, cool and dry in the air conditioning.
If you think your dog is suffering from heat stress please call us immediately on (02) 4959 5766. | healthy this summer!
1. Allow free access to cool, clean water.
Ensure all of your pets have a water bowl they are comfortable using. Sometimes it can help to add ice cubes to their water to chill it but it is best to supervise this for the first time as some pets may be put off by foreign objects in their water.
We recommend filling one or two spare water bowls or buckets just in case one gets knocked over, dirtied or emptied while you are not home.
If you have air conditioning inside and are able to bring pets inside comfortably please do. Some animals may panic if they are not used to being inside the house so it is important to work on this during cooler months to ensure they are prepared to enter the house safely. Small pets such as mice, birds and rats should not be under the direct flow of the air conditioner but still kept in a cool room on very hot days.
3. Stay on top of your parasite prevention.
Animals who are using their energy to scratch and chew at themselves will overheat quicker than calm, still pets. We all suffer from fleas in the warmer months so it is very important to have a product that you know and trust and continue on your routine schedule throughout summer.
4. Naked bellies are cool bellies.
Some pets may appreciate having a quick groom just before summer. This can just be their stomach so they can cool their bodies quicker by lying on tiles or cool concrete but also exposes the skin to heat, it is best to speak with us or a breed specific groomer before undergoing this task.
One of the RSPCA's requirements for a pet safe area is to have adequate shade from the elements. In summer this could mean access to underneath a roof or a shady spot under the trees. Try to keep this area clear for your pet. Some will dig a small indent to lie in, this helps cool their bodies as well.
6. | 386 |
The memory of humans is limited; this<|fim_middle|> by the skillful management of the two. The firms have found managing this specific task an essential but a period consuming process. | is why every process must get recorded. Individuals cannot remember every little bit of information forever. Organization transactions are the main event of each business and a human being mind can't ever remember so various entries accordingly businesses use something to record entries i actually.e. bookkeeping system. The necessity of keeping such data in a well-organized manner drives organization towards employing proficient accounting specialists. All records prior to the preparation of trial equilibrium is the whole subject material of bookkeeping therefore several techniques are being used to manage both of these different varieties of data. In the beginning the transactions are documented in journals and ledgers after that these records choose additional proceeding. A bookkeeper handles responsibilities right from entering cashflow in journal and ledger to planning final statements. If you're a business proprietor and buying bookkeeping expert then NY is the place to purchase highly qualified and specialized bookkeeping providers.
Accounts payable along with Accounts receivable is usually a significant process in fiscal accounting, the first being truly a liability and the next a liquid asset. . Proper operations of accounts payable and accounts receivable guarantees the correct inflow and out-movement of cash. Basically the cash flow is determined | 229 |
I played with the girl, one of the top rated girls in her age category in Canada, placed quite a few times. She had White and started with Italian game, here is is. It went along the lines of the old variation, which I studied in the past. 9. bxc3 wasn't the best move, 9. d5 is better. After Bd3 I had to defend my knight and my f5 wasn't the best either, I felt it later. Bishop on f5 looked unstable and undefended, but Fritz shows it was OK, I just had to calculate a bit more.
As a result of the opening she was a pawn down with two bishops being some compensation for that. I thought that Bxe4 wasn't a good move and Fritz confirms it. I saw that my bishop has nowhere to go after Ng<|fim_middle|>. When his clock showed 1 second left I mated him with 2 pawns, king and a rook.
I was (and still is) very satisfied with my positional play, it was probably my best French game with Black from this point of view.
Yes, I couldn't find the decisive strike, at least I tried.
It was a case when I didn't get upset with Giuoco Pianissimo as I usually do when I get it on FICS. After previous misadventures I thought it's OK to play something quiet. So my opponent had White, here is the game.
Fritz approved my 9… Qd7, he didn't risk to take on b7. 17… b5 wasn't good, I didn't see his Nc4, I just didn't know what to do and defending b7 was annoying. His 18. d5 was losing a pawn without any compensation and I started to look optimistically into the future. After 24… Ne3 I didn't find the next move 25… Nfd5 which according to Fritz was just winning. Then I missed a really nice combination – 27. Qxh4, which was winning a piece and a game.
Nevertheless in the following complications I managed to get into knight ending with a spare pawn. Of course it would be better for him to keep queens. I didn't play precisely that ending, but in the end my remote passed pawn served it's purpose and I had N+2P vs. N. It was a matter of technique, I managed to stay calm with my time decreasing (in the end I had about 5 minutes left). After he gave up his knight, I stopped writing the moves. I remembered that knight should stand behind the pawn (so if he takes the knight the pawn queens). When my king approached the pawn, he resigned. | 5 (because of Qb3) and decided to concentrate on my knight.
I saw her Rab1 coming and thought that I can combine my planned Nc4 with a little trap – leaving pawn b7 en prise. She couldn't take it because of exchange on e3, then on f1 and Qa3+, but … she took. The game was over after that, but you know, kids play until the bitter end, they hope that something will happen. Nothing happened, except she lost another rook and then it was mate.
This Murphy's law can be applied very well to the yesterday's game. I was in the new club, got White with a guy I drew with Black before. I was under attack in that game and escaped with perpetual in the queen endgame.
So, we started with Ruy Lopez, here is the game. His 5… Nxe4 was unexpected, nobody played yet Open variation against me. I knew that I have to play 6. d4, but I also knew that there are some lines, where I am without a pawn, also there is Riga variation, which I didn't remember, so I played Re1. As a result, he got 2 bishops out of the opening.
I thought I can organize something on the kingside, but he maneuvered and eventually it was me who had to look after the kingside to defend h3, etc. My 20. Qf1 move was just for that, but I missed his tactics and lost a pawn. Then, trying to get some counterplay, I made another mistake with 36. Qe4, after which he could win an exchange. He didn't see it. We both were low on time, having less than 20 minutes each. It was one more mistake, playing with the same tempo as my opponent. That tempo was too slow for me and having complicated position with that time left wasn't good.
Then something like a brain-cramp happened. I got distracted by the kids playing blitz loudly (they were stopped) and don't even remember, or I forgot that I didn't make a move or just thought too long, but suddenly I looked at the clock and saw that it's my move and I have 5 minutes less than my opponent. I got nervous and quickly played 38. Kg2, thinking that taking on b7 is too dangerous (wrong!). Then I made that stupid Kh3 move, intended to free my bishop. It decided the game. Next 2 moves were bad too, but the game was already over.
Yesterday I got that boy that I played against twice recently. I decided to play French again, I thought I can improve on my first game 5 months ago. We played the same variation, Milner-Barry, this time he offered a pawn, I didn't want to suffer for that and declined, just exchanging his bishop. Here is the game. I remembered that I was too slow and not careful on the queenside and tried to fix it. I have to say that I did it quite well, getting nice post on b4 for my knight and stopping all possible threats on the kingside.
He started to play passively after that and I occupied "c" line with my rooks. He spent an awful amount of time by move 20, having about 30 minutes left vs. my 1 hour. It got even worse later. After 27… Qc8 I missed the move that would probably win the game quickly – 28… Nc2. Then I was trying to find a decisive blow and couldn't. Fritz showed a nice way to win an "a" pawn with 33… Qe8.
His time trouble deepened, I remember having 45 minutes vs. his 4.5. He started to play faster. We went into the endgame, where I thought I would have some advantage due to his weak pawn d4. I could win his rook after 55… Rd2, but missed it having already a few minutes left myself . He had 20-30 seconds when he made decisive mistake allowing (actually forcing) bishops exchange, after which I got 2 connected passed pawns in the center. The rest was technique. He managed to make a few moves when his clock was showing 2 seconds and it didn't change! I was astounded by that but continued to move quickly having less than 2 minutes myself | 923 |
Depart William Creek and fly to Lake Eyre over the vast cattle<|fim_middle|>See the beauty of Lake Eyre and the stunning Painted Hills in one spectacular flight over Australia's red centre. | country of Anna Creek Station to the gibber shelf on the Western shoreline of Belt Bay (lowest point in Australia), Silcrete Island and some of the eroded peninsulas that jut out into the salt bed, Jackboot Bay and over the Southern end of The Warburton Groove before flying over the Halligan Bay viewing station.
Continuing over and into Dalhousie Artesian hot springs where you can relax and soak in the largest thermal ponds in Australia which range in temperature 38 to 43°C. Experience the native flora and fauna in this idyllic, isolated environment.
The trip will include a picnic lunch (with beverage of your choice) so that you can truly relax in style before returning the William Creek in the afternoon.
National Heritage-listed Dalhousie Springs have been used by Aboriginal people for thousands of years as a source of food, shelter and medicine.
Enjoy the visual extremities of Lake Eyre, Australia's largest inland lake situated in South Australia.
Depart William Creek on a unique trip to view the stunning Anna Creek Painted Hills - Australia's Grand Canyon.
| 226 |
Some years ago when we visited one<|fim_middle|>) knew of it, and one of our guest bloggers offered it up here a couple of years ago.
The ingredients are few: a bag of frozen hash brown potatoes, canned cream of chicken soup, chopped onion, sour cream, a bag of shredded cheese, salt and pepper and margarine, topped with crushed corn flakes.
A good family side-dish, but then I started thinking . . . it's just the two of us at home now, and I'm not in any hurry to get dinner on the table. Plus I enjoy cooking, after a day spent staring at my computer screen. So I wondered: what if I deconstruct the recipe and make it high-end? Just a bit more elegant? So I gave it a try.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a casserole dish.
You can shred the potatoes by hand or use the shredding blade of a food processor. The shreds should be fairly fine. The same for the cheese.
To make the sauce: melt the butter in a small pan over medium heat and saute the shallots until they are soft. Add the flour and mix, then let cook for a minute or so. Pour in the milk/cream combined with chicken stock, stirring constantly until the mixture is smooth. Cook over low heat just until it begins to thicken.
In a large bowl, combine the potatoes, the sauce, the shredded cheese, and salt and pepper, and mix well. Spoon into the casserole dish and sprinkle the top with dry bread crumbs or panko (depending on how much crunch you want). Dot with additional butter if you wish.
Bake for one hour in the preheated oven, until the crust is golden.
Serves four as a side dish, but can easily be doubled for a larger crowd.
By the way, there's this new book coming out next Tuesday (along with a lot of other great ones, including some of my fellow authors here at MLK). There are potatoes in this dish, so I guess that qualifies it as an Irish recipe, right?
Or I could call it Mhias Prátaí le cáis.
I love the fact that you took a tasty, but not very healthful, recipe and revamped it. I bet this tastes great, whether you eat it with a French accent or an Irish brogue!
This reminds me of noted chef Marco Pierre White's steakhouse in Dublin, where my husband and I ate in November. One of his signature dishes there is his rice pudding. Yup, plain old rice pudding--but it's excellent. Simple can be good if done well (with plenty of cream!).
Sheila, it looks lovely. And the fancy name. Doesn't that make it simply taste better? Wishing you a great launch!
Comfort food is always a crowd pleaser. Here in New York, chefs are finding upscale ways to make mac and cheese, so your clever, high-end reinterpretation of a quick potato casserole is very much in style. Thanks, Sheila.
Sheila, I love the way you prepared this in a shallow casserole. That way you get lots of the delicious crunchy topping. This recipe is a keeper!
I think this sounds much better than the original recipe. We're big on potatoes around here, so this is going on the list of recipe to try! | of my husband's sisters, who lives in Indiana, she served us a potato casserole that our daughter fell in love with. She requested it often while she still lived at home, and even now and then when she visits.
It's one of those quick and easy recipes that everyone seems to have come across at some point—my sister (in Kentucky | 72 |
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Air taxi firm Lilium extends funding round to over $275 million
Posted: 9 June 2020 | Sam Mehmet (Intelligent Transport)
The recent extension of the current funding round brings the total investment to date to more than $375 million.
Lilium, the Munich-based aviation company developing an all-electric, vertical take-off and landing aircraft for air mobility, has welcomed respected investment management partnership, Baillie Gifford, as a new investor. Known for their investing in high-impact technology companies such as Amazon, Tesla, Airbnb, Spotify and SpaceX, the partnership has invested $35 million in the company, extending the current funding round to more than $275 million.
The news comes less than three months after Lilium confirmed it had received $240 million in additional funding from existing investors including Atomico, Freigeist, LGT and Tencent, who led the investment round. Combined, these funds will reportedly support the further development of the Lilium Jet as well as underpinning preparations for serial production in Lilium's newly-completed manufacturing facilities. The company recently celebrated the completion of the first stage of flight testing, with the five-seater<|fim_middle|> early stage, we believe this technology could have profound and far-reaching benefits in a low-carbon future and we are excited to watch Lilium's progress in the years ahead."
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By Mark Evers - Transport for London | Lilium Jet demonstrator flying at speeds exceeding 100km/h, and it plans to operate a regional air taxi service as early as 2025 in several regions around the world.
Commenting on the new investment, Christopher Delbrück, Chief Financial Officer, Lilium, said: "Baillie Gifford is one of the world's most influential tech investors and their commitment to Lilium represents a significant vote of confidence in both our physical product and our business case.
"We look forward to working closely with Baillie Gifford as we seek to bring emissions-free, regional air mobility to the market as early as 2025. The funds raised during this round give us the security to weather the challenging economic landscape we see around us and we're grateful to be able to stay fully focused on our mission."
Michael Pye, Investment Manager at Baillie Gifford, added: "We are delighted to support the remarkable team at Lilium in their ambition of developing a new mode of transport.
"While still at an | 215 |
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Valerie Grenier wins the first Canadian victory in Golden Fox history
( 07. 01. 2023 )
Valerie Grenier won the first giant slalom of the 59th Golden Foxes with a lead of 0,37 seconds, making her the first Canadian Winner in the history of the competition.
The Canadian not only successfully defended, but even increased her advantage from the first run and thus secured her place on the top step in the company of Italian Marta Bassino (+0.37) and Slovakian Petra Vlhova (+0.40). Mikaela Shiffrin - in accordance with her own predictions - did not manage to win this time, but shared 6th place with the Frenchwoman Coralie Frasse Sombet in the final tally. A successful downhill also awaited Ana Bucik, who improved her ranking from the first run and finished the competition - to the great joy of the Slovenian fans - in eighth place.
The first place surprised even Grenier "First run I had a lot of mistakes at the top but then I somehow got into my rhythm and held it all the way until the end. It was very unexpected to come out first so I was a bit nervous before the second run. The second run felt good, I made a couple of mistakes along the way but managed to hold the lead until the end."
The second-placed Marta Bassino could not hide her disappointment in the finish line, but after her head cooled down a bit, she was nevertheless satisfied with the final result: "I really like Kranjska Gora and its steepness. It was really fun skiing today because the snow was perfect. I think I can be<|fim_middle|> for first place."
She was a bit more self-critical after Petr Vlhova's second run: "I'm definitely happy with the podium, but in some parts I'm not too happy with my performance. I had to attack a lot, but it paid off in the end. The snow was not too icy today and I was able to ski quite aggressively. Tomorrow I will do my best again and I hope to be on the podium again."
The starting order of the 2nd giant slalom will be decided today at 18:00 at a public draw in Kranjska Gora, where the performance of the band Leonart will also brighten up the event.
Alpski Smučarski Klub Branik Maribor
Mladinska ulica 29
2000 Maribor +386 2 220 88 31 info@zlatalisica.si
HomeContactsAuthorsCookies | even better in some parts, so I'm looking forward to tomorrow when I'll get another try | 19 |
Holden: "We Needed To Move The Ball Quicker."
First team boss Dean Holden was understandably disappointed with his side's 2-0 away defeat at Crawley Town yesterday.
Two first half goals from Izale McLeod and Richard Wood sealed victory for the Red Devils and Holden admitted his side lacked a cutting edge in front of goal.
He<|fim_middle|> week and the 35-year-old is now looking for a response from his players.
"We need to bounce back. It's a challenge we keep setting the players when we have these little bad results and we have to respond.
"We have done it up to now but then we seem to have a set back and we can't go on a run. That's what we'll be working to this week; to lift the players and pick a team that will compete with Sheffield United on Saturday."
Watch the full interview on Latics Player. | said: "I think we have controlled the game but without affecting their goalkeeper many times. He made a good save from Jones in the first half at the free kick and a good save from Rhys [Turner] in the second half.
"We had a lot of joy around the penalty box without really creating anything. It came to a flat pancake as we had all the play but we just didn't have enough dynamic movement around the box to work their goalkeeper.
"We needed to move the ball quicker but they put a block up in front of their goal. They parked the bus and if you bang it up to Conor [Wilkinson] and Rhys [Turner] you aren't going to get anything that way so we kept trying to move it but we didn't move it quick enough to disturb their back four."
Latics welcomed back several players from injury yesterday and one that returned was captain, Liam Kelly. "It was great for him to be back out there," admitted Holden.
"Mills and James Wilson were back in but unfortunately we lost a few at the other end and we are still missing seven which is disappointing.
"Looking at the system and the players available, we thought Mills would give us the best option in there [midfield]. He's very attack-minded and creative."
Sheffield United are the visitors to SportsDirect.com Park next | 273 |
The Barbican's Development team, in collaboration with the Barbican Centre Trust, leads the Barbican Centre's fundraising activities. Together we raise operating and capital income to sustain and develop world-class arts and learning for everyone. The Barbican has a growing number of loyal supporters who enjoy their involvement and want to make an impact.
Working as part of the Development team is dynamic and wide-ranging. Team members work closely with Trustees and colleagues from across the Centre, making a difference in every part of the<|fim_middle|> proficient in IT skills, with experience of Microsoft Office, in particular Access, Excel and Word. Demonstrable experience – and enjoyment – of working with data (and a ticketing system and/or a customer relationship management system) is an advantage.
To apply online, please visit our website via the button below.
Alternatively, please contact 020 7332 3978 (24hr answerphone) quoting reference number BC756. A minicom service for the hearing impaired is available on 020 7332 3732.
Closing date: 12pm (midday), Monday 22 October 2018. | Barbican's arts and learning programme.
The Barbican Development department is seeking to recruit an Individual Giving Operations Officer who will report directly into the Individual Giving Manager. You will provide operational support to underpin the success of the Development Department and play an important role in supporting growth and success of an ambitious fundraising team.
Effective data analysis, including the ability to identify and illustrate trends/patterns in giving and creating reports for business planning and KPI monitoring Accuracy and attention to detail in administering the donor database, including gift processing.
Supporting the development and delivery of our Direct Marketing, and other audience giving programmes.
Ability to create and analyse customer lists to help generate prospects and build pipelines for individual giving programmes, with respect for data privacy regulations. A highly professional approach and confidence in building relationships with a variety of people at all levels – both internal and external.
The role is suited to individuals with excellent organisational skills who enjoy communicating and collaborating with a range of people. Strong candidates will be able to juggle a number of tasks while remaining flexible to switch between priorities in a pressured environment. People who are organised and efficient, with a natural, engaging communication style will stand out, as will those who always aim for the highest standards of accuracy.
You will need to be highly | 253 |
Fred Gissoni
By Michael McCarty - March 23, 2010
An Interview with Fred Gissoni, who passed away September 21, 2014:
In 1988, Fred Gissoni joined the Customer Relations Department of the American Printing House for the Blind (APH). Fred retired from APH at the end of 2011, marking over 50 years working on behalf of people who are visually impaired and blind. Fred took the job at APH after a 30-year career and retirement from the technical services unit of the state agency that was then called the Kentucky Department for the Blind. While at APH, Fred provided tech support for various APH products, but he also generally answered questions. He was so renowned for answering a seemingly infinite variety of questions that APH's database and blog created to disseminate information on every aspect of blindness was named for him: Fred's Head from APH.
Fred Gissoni was born in New Jersey. Blind since birth, he did not, as he tells it, go to one of the five widely renowned schools for the blind in that area, but rather, to a resource room in a public school, first in Garfield, NJ, and later in Hackensack. He was interested in amateur radio at age six or seven, and although it would be a while untill he actually obtained his license, that marked the beginning of a lifelong passion for all things technical.
His first job was in a factory, drilling holes in radio brackets. He had already obtained a four-year degree from Rutgers University (or "universable" as he says in his whimsical way) and had begun work on a master's degree at New York University. During his internship with the New Jersey Commission in 1954, he met the love of his life, Betty, who was also working as a teacher for the commission. The two were married in her home state of Kentucky in 1956, the same year that Fred took a job with a subsection of Kentucky's Department of Education. His boss was the legendary Tim Cranmer, a combination that would bode well for blind people everywhere.
Gissoni and Cranmer learned the abacus together, and Gissoni wrote detailed instructions for its use. That book, Using the Cranmer Abacus, is still available from the American Printing House, as is the abacus itself. Fred wrote and taught a course on use of the abacus for the Hadley School for the Blind as well.
His passion for sharing information and teaching others has been so widespread and abundant, it's difficult to catalog. While he worked some conventional resume builders into his full-time career (part-time teaching at the University of Kentucky, for example) he has written and shared how-to and other information far and wide throughout the blindness field. He wrote for Dialogue magazine for four years, and developed materials for the Hadley School for the Blind. He was one of the earliest contributors to TACTIC magazine, a quarterly publication on access technology. Whenever I received an article from Fred, I knew it would be interesting and require little editing. What made his contributions particularly unusual, though, was I never had to ask. If Fred learned something new or interesting, or just thought of a new or interesting way of accomplishing a task, he would write an article about it.
In terms of the technology blind people are using today, what stands out most notably in the work of Fred Gissoni would probably be the development of the Pocketbraille and Portabraille, collaborations of Fred Gissoni and Wayne Thompson, while the two were colleagues at the Kentucky Department for the Blind. The Pocketbraille was built to be housed in a videocassette box (one for a VHS cassette, which was state-of-the-art in the mid 1980s.) One could enter data from a Perkins-style keyboard and hear it spoken through speech. When Fred learned of a braille display manufacturer in Italy, the project grew into a refreshable braille device called Portabraille. With the Portabraille, a person could enter data and read it in braille,<|fim_middle|> to him as a legend. He is that. But Fred Gissoni is also a treasure -- who has shared his tips, techniques, knowledge, genius, and generous spirit with blind people everywhere for 80 years -- and is still having fun doing it.
Article Source: Cool Stuff in Every Pocket: An Interview with Fred Gissoni by Deborah Kendrick, AccessWorld, November 2009
Assistive devices Assistive technology Blindness Mathematics Note-taking Personal stories Role Models
Susan said…
I have been a Fred Gissoni fan for years. What a great blog post on Fred!
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When Deane Blazie showed the Braille 'n Speak to Fred Gissoni, Fred was so excited he did what his generous teacher instinct always prompted him to do. He shared the information. He sat down and made a recording, explaining all of the amazing features of this brand-new product. He also wrote an article which appeared in the Fall 1987 issue of TACTIC, recommending the product as a portable, versatile, $895 constant companion. When asked about his own inventions, though, Fred Gissoni does not distinguish between high tech and low. He is particularly proud of the Janus Slate, for example, the double-sided interline braille slate that holds a three-by-five index card for brailling on both sides. When I asked him why the name Janus, he replied, "Well, Janus was the Roman God of portals. But I like to tell people that he was the Roman God of braille, and since we didn't actually have braille for several hundred more years, he didn't have much to do." And yes, that is a sampling of what I like to think of as vintage Fred Gissoni banter.
Other inventions he developed for APH were also small items including a pocket braille calendar and a gadget he called FoldRite, which simplified folding an 8-1/2 by 11 sheet of paper into thirds.
Similarly, when asked about his proudest accomplishments, he doesn't mention Portabrailles or courses teaching blind people to be competitive in math class. Instead, his reply involved people. "I think my proudest accomplishments would be introducing Larry Skutchan to APH and, on another occasion, letting a capable woman who worked switchboard know about a job in customer relations, hoping that she would apply. She did and went on to head the department."
Where does this spirit of generosity come from? Fred seems unaware of his own generosity, of course, but when pressed for explanation he points out that many people were generous with him when he was young. There was a high school teacher, he recalls, who made raised-line drawings for him (by hand and on his own time) to clarify concepts in science and math. And there were many people involved with amateur radio who shared information willingly as he was learning.
Although he has plenty of tech savvy (using a computer daily and providing tech support for such products as the APH Braille+ Mobile Manager), he continues to use the abacus and is never without a slate and stylus. "Batteries die and chips fail," he says simply.
Ham radio has been a favorite pastime for Fred Gissoni since childhood, and still claims much of his time (although he says the apartment he now lives in is "electronically noisy." He is active with his church, on the parish committee and has a variety of duties including putting up signs for Sunday school. In the past, he enjoyed swimming, some cross-country skiing, and for over 30 years walked to work each day, but today he gets a ride to work from a friend and is more likely to be found exercising hands and brain exchanging emails or working out a technical problem. You can find him on the social networking site LinkedIn, but he says this is only because he responded to the invitation of a colleague and not due to any personal interest. Don't ask him to sign up for MySpace or Facebook, he says, because he doesn't have time for that sort of thing.
On the Fred's Head web site, APH refers | 938 |
ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) Kaleb Wesson was alone behind the defense, with a chance for an easy dunk or layup.
Zavier Simpson - 9 inches shorter - never gave up on the play.
Simpson hustled back and blocked Wesson's shot , and soon after that, No. 5 Michigan broke the game open against rival Ohio State, beating the Buckeyes 65-49 on Tuesday night. In addition to that blocked shot, Simpson finished with a triple-double - 11 points, 12 assists and 10 rebounds. The Michigan point guard also had no turnovers in 35:51 of action in an emotionally charged game.
Jordan Poole scored 15 points for the Wolverines (20-1, 9-1 Big Ten), who led by six at halftime and kept the Buckeyes frustrated after that. Ohio State (13-7, 3-6) has lost six of seven, and the Buckeyes' chances of an upset in Ann Arbor were done in by their 19 turnovers.
It wasn't the easiest night for either team offensively, but Michigan ended up 10 of 27 from 3-point range, and Ohio State (5 of 21) didn't come close to matching that. Wesson led the Buckeyes with 1<|fim_middle|> more work to do later in the week.
Ohio State: The Buckeyes will have a chance to get back on track with a couple home games - against Rutgers on Saturday and Penn State next week. | 2 points, but much of that was early.
With sub-zero temperatures in the forecast, Michigan canceled classes Wednesday and Thursday. That may have brought the student fans to even more of a fever pitch for this matchup with the rival Buckeyes. There were profane chants throughout the night, and the crowd roared with just under 3:00 remaining, when Simpson's 10th rebound gave him the triple-double.
Michigan's football team lost 62-39 at Ohio State in November, and it was fair to wonder if Beilein's tenacious team would allow that many points in the basketball matchup. On the contrary, the Wolverines held the Buckeyes under 50 for the first time in this rivalry since Jan. 29, 1949 - 70 years ago to the day. Michigan won that game 54-48.
Simpson, who is from Ohio, exemplified the chip on Michigan's shoulder against the Buckeyes.
Ohio State: The Buckeyes have been without injured forward Kyle Young for three games. They snapped a five-game losing streak with a win at Nebraska last weekend, but they don't appear to have righted the ship. Once Michigan started shooting better, Ohio State had no answer.
Michigan: It was a comprehensive win for the Wolverines, even if it stayed close for a half. Beilein now has 120 regular-season Big Ten victories, tying Johnny Orr's school record. Beilein also holds the overall school record with 268 wins.
It was an impressive win for Michigan, but not a particularly surprising one. There's | 336 |
Tear it down and build it again!
Grab your hard hat and get to work on the LEGO® City construction site, featuring Easy to Build vehicles including a dump truck, digger with rotating back arm, and a demolition crane with wrecking ball, plus a building under construction. Designed for those new to construction play, LEGO Juniors sets are age-appropriate build and play experiences for children 4-7. Includes three minifigures.
Includes three construction crew minifigures.
Features a dump truck, digger and demolition crane, plus a building under construction.
Dump truck features a minifigure cab and tilting open-box bed.
Digger features an elevating front bucket and lifting back arm, and an opening cage on the minifigure cab.
Demolition crane features a stand with a ladder at the back, rotating seat for a minifigure and a rotating arm with wrecking ball.
Building includes a door with frame, roof and wall that can be knocked down with the demolition crane.
Tilt the dump truck back to unload the building materials.
Swing the wrecking ball on the demolition crane to bring down the old building wall.
Load the dump truck with the digger.
Accessory elements include tools, two roadblock signs, cones, building bricks and a walkie-talkie.
With bigger pieces and a simple guide, these Easy to Build models get kids building and playing quickly.
This set offers an age-appropriate build and play experience for children 4-7.
Building measures over 3" (8cm) high, 1" (4cm) wide and<|fim_middle|>) long and 2" (6cm) wide.
Demolition crane with ball retracted measures over 5" (13cm) high, 3" (8cm) deep and 1" (5cm) wide.
This is a good set. My son likes playing with the truck and the digger. Good play value. | 1" (4cm) deep.
Dump truck with open-box bed down measures over 3" (8cm) high, 5" (13cm) long and 2" (6cm) wide.
Digger with arm raised measures over 5" (13cm) high, 7" (20cm | 70 |
This isn't<|fim_middle|> the apples.
Bake for 40 – 45 minutes until tops are golden brown and crispy. *Tip: covering the baking dish for the first 20 minutes will speed up the baking time but be sure to remove it half way through so your crumble can crisp up.
By the way, if you're confused by the difference between a crumble and a crisp, it's all in the oats (as in crisps don't have them). This traditional dessert also gets mistaken for a cobbler, a buckle, or a brown betty. We found this article that explains how to tell all of these similar desserts apart.
One thing we know for sure, they'd all taste great with Ambrosia apples! | your Grandma's Apple Crisp!
Have you been inspired by the recipes in our Ambrosia Apple Chef of the Year Contest? If you've tried them all (and voted!) then here's one more yummy dessert option to test out. It's simple, delicious and reminiscent of Grandma's favourite recipe (but with a twist – it's gluten free!).
We love to serve this piping hot right out of the oven with a tiny scoop of vanilla bean ice cream melting on top. Some traditions are worth keeping!
Here's how to make Gluten Free Ambrosia Apple Crumble.
Prepare the crumble first by mixing all of the topping ingredients in a bowl, adding butter one cube at a time. The mixture should look a bit like breadcrumbs.
Place crumble mixture in the fridge as you prepare the filling.
Core, peel and cut Ambrosia apples into 1/8th wedges.
In a large mixing bowl, combine filling ingredients and toss until apples are well coated.
Portion out coated Ambrosia apples into individual ramekins or a 9″ ceramic or glass dish. Make sure it's not too shallow or the apples might bubble over and make a very big mess!
Sprinkle crumble topping evenly over | 248 |
David Arctur Makes Major Gift to the iSchool
David Arctur has worked as an electrical engineer, a software architect and an urban planner among other things. His career has taken him from Austin to Africa to Silicon Valley and back to Austin. His academic titles include research fellow in the Jackson School of Geosciences and the Cockrell School of Engineering and instructor at the iSchool.
He jokes that he should be retired by now.
But now is not the time to bow out. The scientific community is facing a crisis: how to preserve records, fossils, and data. Too much has already been lost. And Arctur knows the iSchool will play a critical role in tackling the problem.
It struck me that digital preservation is one of the subjects studied in the iSchool, and it's not a subject of primary study in geosciences or engineering. But (those schools) have the subject material that needs preservation.
That's why he established endowments to the iSchool and the Jackson School. The David K. Arctur Endowment for Innovations in Interoperability and Digital Preservation will help both programs to pursue grants such as National Science Foundation funds to improve curation and inventory of geologic samples.
Arctur, who has taught GIS (geographic information system) software at the iSchool, also made a bequest to the iSchool and the Jackson School that he hopes will fund post-docs and research fellows in the years to come.
<|fim_middle|>," Arctur says.
The iSchool's faculty and students have the expertise to help choose what information is needed, how to preserve it and how to make data accessible to other scientists - an endeavor Arctur is particularly devoted to.
It's difficult, he says, to develop standards for long-term archives, and many museums aren't satisfied with the PDF/A (Portable Document Format Archive) system.
"They would really like original source material and metadata and information about the data - where it came from and what process it went through," Arctur says.
iSchool faculty and students face a daunting task in this regard. But Artctur says he's "eternally hopeful."
"We've got really engaged people with a lot of knowledge and connections networking in the communities around the world, and we've got a lot of resources here," he says. "What I've noticed is it really just takes a champion to want something to happen."
Faculty News Alumni Archives, Records, & Knowledge Management Research | The key, Arctur says, is cross-campus collaboration. And he's eager to help get the ball rolling.
"Here I am in Geosciences and Engineering ...and teaching GIS at the iSchool," he says. "And it struck me that digital preservation is one of the subjects studied in the iSchool, and it's not a subject of primary study in geosciences or engineering. But (those schools) have the subject material that needs preservation."
He cited a recent study that found some 80 percent of scientific data is lost within two decades.
"Why is this? It's because software changes, hardware changes, media goes bad," he says. "We understand the reasons very well, but that doesn't make it easy to fix."
The Jackson School, for example, recently acquired half a million geo samples, which presents a challenge but also an opportunity to "nurture some collaboration | 183 |
A special edition of Science Café OSU on oil and gas exploration will be held Nov. 20 at 6:30 pm at Stillwater Public Library. The program, "Forum: Oil and Gas Exploration Updates," features Dr. Todd Halihan with Oklahoma State University, seismologist Amberlee Darold with the Oklahoma Geological Survey and state Rep. Cory Williams of Stillwater.
Halihan, OSU professor of hydrogeophysics, was recently added to Gov. Mary Fallin's Coordinating Council on Seismic Activity. He will<|fim_middle|>arian@stillwater.org or calling 405-372-3633.
The Stillwater Public Library is located at 1107 S. Duck St. | provide an update on the geological aspects of hydraulic fracturing issues in Oklahoma. Darold, a research seismologist, will talk about the Oklahoma Geological Survey, current seismic activity and provide monitoring updates. Williams will talk about the oil industry and related activity in the state legislature.
"Discussions over oil and gas exploration and seismicity are increasing at the state level. This program is designed to help keep the public informed," said Karen Neurohr, associate professor, community outreach and assessment librarian for OSU and Science Café OSU coordinator.
A structured question and answer session will follow the presentations.
The program will be broadcast live and can be viewed at www.ostate.tv.
Science Café OSU community series sponsors include the OSU Library, Stillwater Public Library, the OSU Chapter of Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society and the office of the OSU Vice President for Research.
All events are free and open to the public. For information, contact the OSU Library at 405-744-2376 or email lib-pub@okstate.edu. Information is also available by visiting the Stillwater Public Library website at library.stillwater.org, emailing askalibr | 240 |
With my resupply package, I now had enough food to get me to my next resupply point at Kennedy Meadows – 136 miles and seven and one-half days away. What I didn't have in my resupply box was junk food, but that problem was quickly rendered moot by a quick trip to the grocery store located across the street and through the parking lot. Within a half hour, I was back in my room with a six-pack of chocolate pudding that I consumed at one sitting, a quart of chocolate milk, a box of Chips Ahoy!, and a bag of<|fim_middle|> the rotors down. | Red Vines licorice. They, too, didn't last through the night.
At four in the morning, I was dressed and ready to get back on the trail. Ted said that the best place to get a hitch out of town would be at the Oak Creek Road on-ramp to the overpass that crossed over the main highway going through Mojave.
Denny's Restaurant just happened to be next to the on-ramp, so I headed there for breakfast first before trying to get a ride out of town. My breakfast selection was the Lumberjack, the biggest breakfast item I could find on the menu. It was okay; I liked the syrup on the pancakes the best. The power went out in the restaurant just as I was about to pay my tab, thus, the computerized cash register wouldn't work, and I had to pay with cash, which reduced my emergency funds a bit.
I left my motel room early as I wanted to be the first hitchhiker at the on-ramp. By 5:00 a.m., I was standing there with my thumb out; it was just beginning to get light and the traffic was sparse. After an hour, I was still standing there. A lot of traffic went by, mostly workers going to their jobs at the wind farms, and they didn't stop because they weren't going as far as I need to go.
In disgust, I left my post at the on-ramp and walked back to the Motel 6, intent on calling Ted, the trail angel, for a ride back to the trailhead. He had told me the day before that for five dollars he would give rides back to the trail, but because I had wanted to leave so early, I hadn't thought it proper to call him. Now, at 7:00 a.m., I gave him a call, and told him that I'd pay him ten dollars for a ride. He said he'd be there in twenty minutes, and he was.
As we drove west back towards the trailhead, Ted told me about the wind turbines. He said each turbine can produce enough electricity to meet the power needs for six hundred households for a year, all of which is sent to Southern California. The optimum rotating speed of the giant propellers is 33 miles per hour, and at 45 miles per hour automatic braking systems will shut | 486 |
JERSEY CITY'S 3 ACRES PROVIDES PERFECT LIFESTYLE FOR TWO FORT LEE REAL ESTATE PROFESSIONALS
Tuesday, May 10 2022 @ 04:16 pm
JERSEY CITY, NJ -- As a real estate industry professional with a focus on the New Jersey Gold Coast, Joseph Hemmerich knew exactly what he was looking for when searching for a new home along the Hudson River waterfront.
Mr. Hemmerich, who works in property management at a residential high-rise in Fort Lee, was intimately familiar with the luxury rental market and leveraged his knowledge to conduct an in-depth search of apartments within a reasonable commute of his workplace.
"I was living in a garden-style apartment in Mount Olive, New Jersey," Joe said. "I work in Fort Lee, and the commute was terrible. I looked at any safe areas within a 20-mile radius of my employment. Ideally, I preferred Jersey City or Hoboken."
With a good idea of his desired Gold Coast locale, Mr. Hemmerich put his expertise to work, researching online a broad range of apartment types, from garden-style communities to high-rise buildings.
"I looked at dozens of apartment buildings," he said. "I wasn't bound to any specific style."
During his groundwork, a brand-new rental community in Jersey City's burgeoning West Side neighborhood stood out. 3 Acres, a collection of 629 upscale rental homes, was celebrating its opening at 400 Claremont Avenue. Its designer homes and wealth of onsite amenities enticed Mr. Hemmerich to make 3 Acres the first community he would visit in person. It would turn out to be the only community he would visit.
"I was mostly using apartment search websites when I found 3 Acres on Google," he continued. "It was the one and only place I toured. After seeing the building and apartments, I was immediately sold. Working in the same industry, I knew 3 Acres had so much potential to be the place where people would want to be. After living here, I fully believe<|fim_middle|>, car and electric scooter rentals, and shuttle service to the Journal Square PATH Station.
The building's onsite retail experience has been enhanced by the recently opened Three Thirds Café coffee shop and will soon feature The Lobby Bar, Table at 3 Acres restaurant.
Located just west of Downtown Jersey City near the banks of the Hackensack River, 3 Acres is situated in a neighborhood dotted with dining, recreation, and nightlife options, while retail shopping can be found at the nearby Hudson Mall. The 273-acre Lincoln Park features open space, twenty-one public tennis courts, three playgrounds, a dog run, nature trails, several sports fields, and Skyway Golf Course, a scenic 9-hole layout lined with colorful fescue, magnificent dunes and rolling fairways.
3 Acres is well connected to downtown Jersey City and Manhattan via the Hudson Bergen Light Rail's West Side Avenue Station located across the street. The building is also a quick drive to the New Jersey Turnpike and Routes 440 and 1 and 9, allowing residents to reach all the businesses and highly popular recreational options in northern New Jersey and the famed Jersey Shore.
For more information on 3 Acres, please call 201-733-3000 or visit www.3AcresJC.com. The building is located at 400 Claremont Avenue, Jersey City, NJ 07304. | that to be true."
For Mr. Hemmerich, 3 Acres was the total package.
"I was mainly concerned with having modern in-home appliances and access to a pool," he said. "3 Acres' amenities blew my ideal hopes out of the water."
Mr. Hemmerich leased a studio home with an alcove.
"The apartment has wonderful finishes, and I love the aesthetic. Having a walk-in shower, a washer and dryer, new stainless-steel appliances, and a view of the World Trade Center were all appealing to me. I also love the soft-close cabinets, and the dark gray wood finishes. The smart home lock system and central AC/heating is also so convenient and controllable via an app.
"I am in love with my apartment," he said. "The layout is wonderfully designed. My alcove studio feels bigger than it is. I have room for everything I need – a couch, dining table, Queen-sized bed, desk for my computer, etc. To my friends and family who ask me what it's like to live here, I tell them I feel like I'm living in a spaceship. Everything I need is in my apartment or onsite."
One friend that took close notice was Anthony Corbo, who helped Joe move into 3 Acres and had visited the building countless times since. Anthony was also looking to rent his first apartment and had been searching for options in vibrant urban areas like Montclair, Hackensack, Hoboken, Jersey City and Edgewater until he discovered 3 Acres had everything he was seeking.
"I was looking for a home with an in-unit washer/dryer, new appliances, and amenities such as a gym, pool and covered parking," said Anthony, who also works in property management in Fort Lee. "3 Acres had all the amenities I was looking for and a reasonable commute to work. It was also more competitively priced than homes I had seen elsewhere. Having a friend in the building made the transition even easier.
"The layout of the studio apartment homes stood out to me," Anthony continued. "I like that they offer studios with alcove spaces because it makes it feel more like a one bedroom. I also liked the finishes, appliances, and that 3 Acres felt very 'homey.' The amenities provided all the convenience of having everything where I live."
Joe and Anthony aren't the only ones who found what they were looking for at 3 Acres as more than 500 apartments have already been leased at the community, with hundreds of residents moved in, according to The Marketing Directors, the community's exclusive marketing and leasing agent.
Monthly rents for 3 Acres' collection of residences currently start from the mid-$1,700s with Grand Opening incentives that include one month free on a 13-month lease. Immediate occupancy is available.
Residents can choose from a wide variety of floor plans ranging from straight studios, studios with alcoves that mirror the space of a one-bedroom home, traditional one-bedroom layouts, and two-bedroom residences. A selection of studio homes is furnished by Resource Furniture, a leader in transformative and multifunctional spaces, which features three-in-one pieces that quickly transform living areas into work and sleep spaces.
Upscale finishes and appointments include central heat and air conditioning, in-home washer and dryer, complimentary window treatments, and kitchens with quartz countertops, stainless steel appliances and soft-close cabinets. Lavish baths are adorned with porcelain tile floors and vertical, ceramic subway tile shower walls, while integrated technology features include a Smart Home entry system and thermostat and lighting control.
An impressive 70,000 square feet of amenities includes an elegant, attended lobby, state-of-the-art fitness center, infrared saunas, conference room, work pods, a chef's table with demonstration kitchen, multi-sport simulator and screening room, resident lounge with a saltwater aquarium, and a game room with a mini bowling alley, ping pong, shuffleboard, pinball and arcade games. On-site musical entertainment emanates from a Steinway Spirio digital grand piano in one of the lounge spaces that self-plays pieces from a vast library of musical content, as well as simulcasts live performances from great pianists around the world.
Extensive outdoor space is highlighted by a rooftop terrace with BBQs and a pool with jacuzzi and sundeck, cabanas, and loungers. Three distinctive outdoor courtyards feature barbecues and private dining areas, lounge seating and firepits, outdoor Yoga, bocce, chess,, and ping pong. There's also a community garden and a dog run.
The 3 Acres resident experience is further enhanced by the onsite presence of LIVunLtd., a global luxury concierge and amenity management brand that will oversee a robust calendar of private residential events and creative activation to help bring 3 Acres' social spaces to life. Additional conveniences include resident and bike storage, covered, climate-controlled parking with electric charging stations and auto wash and detailing | 1,003 |
Andrés Jaque. Phantom. Mies as Rendered Society Intervention at Mies van der Rohe Pavilion<|fim_middle|> decided to impede entrance to it, to prevent the space being used for exhibition purposes.
PHANTOM. aknowledges the existence of this basement, concealed from the public eye, as a phantasmatic one, a spectral yet inseperable part of the Modern Movement's Icon preservation. Several pieces of broken glass, showing early attempts to match the shade of the original windows in the Carpet Room, stacks of cushions that reveal how many visitors have sat on the iconic Barcelona chairs wearing them out, piles of discolored red velvet curtains, broken slabs of travertine and flags that used to hang on the flagpoles, are all drawn up from the darkness of the basement to the physically transparent space of the pavilion, each accompanied by a detailed description of their origin and history. In the architect's words "As Dorian Gray's portrait, the basement is the place where the pacts in which the upper floor gets to be constructed as a social reality are retained".
Photography is by Miguel de Guzman.
At the invitation of the Fundació Mies van der Rohe and Banc Sabadell Foundation, the exhibition is the latest in a series at the Barcelona Pavilion, following an installation by Japanese architects SANAA and others by Ai Weiwei, Antoni Muntadas and Miralles-Tagliabue. It will remain open to visitors until 27 February. | .
PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society is an intervention created by Madrid based practice Andrés Jacque Arquitectos at the Barcelona Pavilion, juxtaposing arrangements of ordinary objects found in the maintenance and storage facilities the iconic structure sits on, to it's immaculate, sublime image.
Designed in 1929 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as the German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona and dismantled shortly after, The Barcelona Pavillion became a key-point reference to 20th century architecture. As part of celebrations for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the pavillion was decided to be reconstructed. The reconstruction, commenced on 1983 and completed by 1986, was based on black and white photographs of the time and extremely accurate, so much that the location of the pillars, fitted exactly those of the original foundation. The team responsible for the reconstruction however, made an addition to the original structure. They decided to create a basement, to serve as storage and maintenance facilities. They also | 220 |
Home / Inductees in the News / Internet Experts Split On Impact of Digital Life
Internet Experts Split On Impact of Digital Life
A survey of more than 1,100 technology experts and scholars shows that the Internet's impact on daily lives, while far-reaching, is somewhat of a mixed bag.
The non-s<|fim_middle|> this is what everyday life would be like today, I'm not sure what I'd think."
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Read More about Antarctic Selfie Sent to Space | cientific study, conducted by the Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center, asked experts to share at least one personal anecdote about how technology has changed their lives – for better or worse.
As part of the ninth "Future of the Internet" study, the project's authors solicited responses from more than 10,000 people, including individuals who are actively involved with global Internet governance and access research entities, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force, the International Telecommunications Union, the Association of Internet Researchers and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. About half of the respondents chose to remain anonymous.
The results primarily spread across eight themes, four positive and four negative, including trolling and other personality identification issues and the ability to invent, reinvent and innovate through easier access to information.
"I probably spend more waking hours looking at a screen than not. And this seems to be the new normal, which is a bit jarring," National Opinion Research Center Scientist Timothy Leffel wrote. "If you'd told me 10 years ago that | 217 |
There's no question that e-commerce has been a rewarding sector for investors. The best of these companies have delivered blockbuster returns, and that pattern is likely to persist as we do more of our spending online.
Driven by faster delivery and increasing convenience as companies like Amazon strive to make the e-commerce process as seamless as possible, we've grown accustomed to shopping from our homes, or anywhere else, through our laptops or smartphones. Shopping online for books and electronics has been common for years, but more recently consumers have embraced e-commerce for things like clothes, groceries, and restaurant takeout.
E-commerce -- short for "electronic commerce" -- is online retail. If a company's primary business involves selling goods over the internet (either directly or through a marketplace) or, more broadly, facilitating e-commerce transactions (with software, payments, or logistics), it can be considered an e-commerce stock.
Faced with the rising threat from online-only retailers, brick-and-mortar chains have stepped up their web-based offerings by lowering free shipping minimums, speeding up delivery, and giving shoppers options like in-store pickup that online retailers can't match. In other words, physical retailers are doing their best to leverage their real estate as an advantage in the retail wars, as many weaker competitors have been forced to close stores.
E-commerce also tends be less profitable than traditional retail. Though online retailers can avoid store-based costs like rent and staffing, it's difficult to generate a profit selling on the internet, thanks to factors like the cost of shipping and handling returns, expenses for marketing through tactics like paid search, and steep price competition online.
So you're looking for e-commerce companies with strong revenue growth and a path toward (greater) profitability, and ideally you want to see companies that benefit from a unique strength or a competitive advantage in their industry. With that in mind, the chart below shows five e-commerce stocks to consider for 2019.
Let's take a closer look at what each one has to offer.
Amazon's stock has pulled back since its peak of around $2,050 per share last year, trading down about 14% from that all-time high, which makes now an appealing opportunity to pick up shares. But there are several additional reasons to pick up shares of the e-commerce giant.
In addition, the company has ramped up its advertising business, taking advantage of the popularity of its website and vendors' demand to make sales on Amazon. Digital advertising is a high-margin business, having generated billions in profits annually for online ad leaders Alphabet and Facebook; its growth should also help Amazon, which has already become the third-largest digital advertiser.
Finally, the company's cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, remains a juggernaut. Not only is it the most-used enterprise cloud provider in the world, but it's also growing quickly and putting up fat profit margins, with 47% revenue growth last year and an operating margin of 28.4%. As that segment takes up a greater share of Amazon's overall revenue, the company will also grow more profitable.
As a result of those shifts, Amazon's profits jumped 273% in 2018 and should continue to ramp up in 2019. Though the company currently trades at a lofty price-to-earnings ratio of around 88, compared to 21 for the S&P 500, that valuation seems more than justified based on its network of competitive advantages and expanding profitability. Amazon looks like a good bet to outperform the broader market once again this year.
Another e-commerce company with fast growth and an impressive set of competitive advantages is Grubhub, the leading online marketplace for restaurant takeout and delivery. Grubhub has been growing quickly by adding users to its existing platforms and markets, expanding into new markets, and making acquisitions, which included Seamless, Eat24 (from Yelp), and LevelUp. It's also forged partnerships with restaurant chains like Yum! Brands and Jack in the Box.
Revenue jumped 47.5% in 2018, driving earnings per share (adjusted for share-based compensation and one-time items) up 38% to $1.66. Other key metrics are growing quickly as well: Active customers rose 22% on a year-over-year basis to 17.7 million; daily average orders increased 31% to 435,900; and gross food sales (the company's version of GMV) were up 34% to $5.1 billion. Because of its marketplace model, Grubhub is able to generate wide margins, with an adjusted profit margin of 15.2% last year, and those should expand as the company gets bigger. More than 20% of Grubhub's revenue currently goes to sales and marketing costs.
The competition in the sector isn't surprising. Online restaurant takeout is growing at a healthy pace, driven by its embrace by millennials, improved technology, and the popularity of the "stay-at-home" economy -- consumers can now take advantage of services like online shopping and video streaming without having to leave their house. Meanwhile, more restaurant chains are embracing delivery. According to industry research firm Technomic, restaurant delivery is expected to grow 12% annually over the next five years.
Like Amazon, Grubhub is trading at a discount from its peak last year; the stock has fallen nearly 50% from its all-time high. However, that sell-off seems overdone, as Grubhub recently traded at a reasonable P/E ratio of 42.6. Analysts are also expecting the company's profits to decline modestly this year with increasing competition from UberEats and DoorDash, potentially giving the stock a low bar to hop over in 2019.
Now seems like a particularly opportune time to pick up shares of XPO: The stock is trading at a discount, falling more than 50% from its all-time high in September. The stock plunged over the past few months from a combination of the broader market sell-off, a customer bankruptcy leading to a guidance cut, another earnings warning, and a short-seller report by Spruce Point Capital; the report said the company's debt burden was unsustainable, and called<|fim_middle|> smaller site has largely deflected the threat and its growth has been uninterrupted. Sellers have noted that Amazon's terms were less friendly than Etsy's -- charging higher commissions, among other differences -- and Etsy has millions more listings.
Like Amazon itself, Etsy benefits from network effects. Sellers in the online flea market go where the buyers are, and buyers go where the sellers are. There's no stand-alone site that comes close to direct competition with Etsy.
Since Josh Silverman's appointment as CEO in May 2017, Etsy has delivered six straight quarters of accelerating gross merchandise sales, clocking in at 22.3% in the fourth quarter of 2018. The company has seen even faster revenue growth recently, after raising its seller transaction fee from 3.5% to 5% and adding new higher-service tiers called Etsy Plus and Etsy Premium, which offer sellers more benefits at an additional cost. With the help of the higher transaction fee, revenue jumped 46.8% in the fourth quarter, and for all of 2018 it rose 36.8% to $603.7 million. Etsy has said it will invest the extra revenue in marketing and in improving its online platforms.
As a result of that growth and the power of its marketplace model, operating income nearly tripled from $29 million in 2017 to $83 million last year. Adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization), the company's preferred metric, grew a healthy 74.4% in that same period, rising to $139.5 million. | out CEO Brad Jacobs' involvement in a previous accounting scandal at United Rentals. XPO, for its part, called Spruce Point's report "intentionally misleading" and full of "significant inaccuracies," then announced a $1 billion share-repurchase authorization in its aftermath.
XPO's shares recently traded at a P/E ratio of just 20.6, and the company has several catalysts working in its favor this year. In 2018, the company launched XPO Direct, a service that rents warehouses to customers, taking advantage of its network of warehouses that allow two-day delivery to 95% of the U.S. population. Deutsche Bank predicted that XPO Direct would grow to $1 billion in revenue in a few years.
XPO is also prepping to make acquisitions again, after a break, and said it could spend as much as $8 billion to add new companies. That should add a boost to XPO's already solid top-line growth, making the stock look cheap after the sell-off.
The age-old question of "What should I wear?" is at the center of Stitch Fix's business model. The company is the leader in the niche industry of subscription and on-demand clothing boxes. Stitch Fix is an online personalized styling service that sends five items of clothing at a time based on customer preferences such as style, fit, and budget; customers keep what they want and return the rest. Stitch Fix competes against similar services like Nordstrom's Trunk Club and Bombfell, but it's the biggest of the bunch, with almost $1.4 billion in revenue over the 12-month period ending in January 2019.
Part of the stock's volatility stems from the fact that Wall Street doesn't really know what to make of Stitch Fix. It's the only pure-play styling service stock, and its industry is brand-new. The market isn't sure if fashion boxes are a real growth market or a fad. The collapse of Blue Apron has spooked some investors, who are afraid the clothing-box industry could go the way of meal-kit services, which found profits hard to come by due to fragmentation and have since had to consolidate.
Stitch Fix is a risky stock, but that's partly what gives it such upside potential. The company is profitable and has been for several years, with $50.4 million in net income over the past four quarters.
It also has a number of competitive advantages. In additional to personal stylists, the company uses data science and algorithms to select clothes for its customers. It has gobs of data on fit and style preferences that it learns from customer feedback -- brick-and-mortar competitors get none of that information when they make a sale. Such knowledge informs not just the styling process, but also Stitch Fix's inventory purchases and the development of its private-label brands. In many ways, Stitch Fix's model seems to borrow from Netflix, which also uses data to make customer recommendations and inform its production of original content.
Stitch Fix's numbers are evidence of its competitive advantages. For example, its gross margin of 43.7% last year was significantly better than many mainstream retailers, including Macy's, Gap, and Kohl's.
In a world where Amazon dominates nearly every corner of online retail, Etsy has a rare and valuable asset: a niche that can't be co-opted by big corporations. Shoppers visit to be surprised and delighted by unique and whimsical items, not to buy the kind of utilitarian products that are the bread and butter of retailers like Amazon and Walmart. Amazon actually tried to challenge Etsy directly, launching its copycat website Amazon Handmade. However, the | 749 |
How to Coach Employees
Larry O'Toole of Gentle Giant Moving Company talks about how to give employees feedback.
Courtesy company
Publicity stunts are on my mind this week. This past Sunday night on the premiere of Mad Men, Peggy suggests paying women to fight over a ham, and scores press coverage for her client. I arrived in Manhattan<|fim_middle|> world. Make cupcakes? Send some to Lindsay. Offer career coaching? Give it to Mel Gibson, he'll need it. But don't just put something out into the universe without a bigger plan. PR is an ongoing process. One good piece should lead to another. It should foster growth inside and outside the organization. The blessing of a good media piece is a powerful growth tool, both to clients and to employees as well.' A timely example: Beach Bum tanning salon did a 'Free Lindsay Lohan' rally the other day.
Once you've pulled off your 'stunt' you need to be able to capitalize on the publicity you've generated. Can people find your store, business or site online? Do you have a special offer for people who have shown up for the first time because of your stunt? Do you have a way for them to sign up for a permission-based email list so you can keep in touch with them in the future?
Doing something people will talk about around the water cooler (real or virtual) is an accomplishment. But being able to capture the attention and turn it into leads and sales is the real trick.
What can your startup learn from the value of pulling a simple stunt?
Jim Kukral, author of the book, "Attention! This Book Will Make You Money",(http://attentionthebook.com) as well as a professional speaker, blogger and Web business consultant has worked with large brands like Fedex and Sherwin Williams. He told me about this small biz example from his book. 'Grasshopper.com provides a virtual phone solution for entrepreneurs who want to sound professional and stay connected…Grasshopper knew that in order to stand out and get some buzz going, and new customers, that they had to do something different. Their solution? Package up 5,000 packs of real chocolate covered grasshoppers and send them out to 5,000 influencers on the Web. People like bloggers and technology pundits and in general people who could, and would, talk about them…This got them a 4,911% traffic increase from April to May, 144,843 video views with 162 comments, 1,500 tweets, 120 blog posts in one month and 7 national TV mentions.'
Peter Shankman, founder of HARO http://helpareporter.com/ and Author of 'Can We Do that?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work – And Why Your Company Needs Them' http://www.amazon.com/Outrageous-Stunts-Work-Company-Needs/dp/047004392X told me 'A stunt for the sake a stunt is pointless. Tie it into something in the news, tie it into what's going on in the world. Make cupcakes? Send some to Lindsay. Offer career coaching? Give it to Mel Gibson, he'll need it. But don't just put something out into the universe without a bigger plan. PR is an ongoing process. One good piece should lead to another. It should foster growth inside and outside the organization. The blessing of a good media piece is a powerful growth tool, both to clients and to employees as well.' A timely example: Beach Bum tanning salon did a 'Free Lindsay Lohan' rally yesterday http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/27/beach-bum-tanning-salons-free-lindsay-rally-only-a-publicity-stunt/ . | on Monday morning to find Herald Square turned into a park with an artificial hill, trees and a new Ford Explorer 2011 (which had been revealed on Facebook only two hours prior.)
Launching your business should be a deliberate, calculated event. You should prepare, have press materials ready, generate online materials as well, to make sure that people who want to find out more about you can do so easily. But you might consider the value of a stunt to generate attention and sales.
Jim Kukral, author of the book, "Attention! This Book Will Make You Money", as well as a professional speaker, blogger and Web business consultant has worked with large brands like Fedex and Sherwin Williams. He told me about this small biz example from his book. 'Grasshopper.com provides a virtual phone solution for entrepreneurs who want to sound professional and stay connected…Grasshopper knew that in order to stand out and get some buzz going, and new customers, that they had to do something different. Their solution? Package up 5,000 packs of real chocolate covered grasshoppers and send them out to 5,000 influencers on the Web. People like bloggers and technology pundits and in general people who could, and would, talk about them…This got them a 4,911% traffic increase from April to May, 144,843 video views with 162 comments, 1,500 tweets, 120 blog posts in one month and 7 national TV mentions.'
You might not generate as much excitement as Grasshopper.com. But something as simple as 'Free Ice Cream to the first 10 people who prove they're our Fans on Facebook or show us this Tweet' can be just as much fun on a small scale.
Peter Shankman, founder of HARO and Author of 'Can We Do that?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work – And Why Your Company Needs Them' told me 'A stunt for the sake a stunt is pointless. Tie it into something in the news, tie it into what's going on in the | 437 |
It's hard to believe summer is almost over! I haven't had a chance to write about this incredible custom mens<|fim_middle|>! | ring I had the honor to make! This was a special project for someone who reached out to me from Australia. Tys had recently had a job promotion and had promised himself this ring once he achieved it. It was so much fun to work with someone who had such a clear vision for what they wanted. He had very specific ideas of each aspect of the ring.
Once i found the perfect ruby I got to work on the wax! To accommodate the stone we made the band a little taller then the photoshop rendering. Also, we decided to make the ridges more uneven and organic feeling as opposed to straight across as the photoshop file had been.
The ring has many subtle textures on the band, bezel, and ridges to give it a more aged and antique look. It was so much fun to work on it as I was able to use different approaches then I have with my more recent designs.
The final piece was cast in 10K yellow gold and features a gorgeous Ruby center and one gray diamond in the top right.
It was such an honor to make this ring and help bring something Tys had only imagined and thought about to life. Wishing much continued success to Tys | 241 |
M<|fim_middle|> Sum."
Joe Cambray, PhD
Provost, Pacifica Graduate Institute - Past-President IAAP
"Anyone interested to learn more about the history, the politics, the culture and the literature of Hong Kong, known in English as Fragrant Harbor, and the effect on individual development, should read this book. It is one of several books and research projects emerging from Jungian analysts and past routers working in cross-cultural partnerships in different parts of the world. Marta Tibaldi and her five colleagues are to be congratuleted for producing a book that is of interest at many different levels."
Jan Wiener
Director of Training, Society of Analytical Psychology, London
Vice-President IAAP, 2010-2013, Co-Chair IAAP Education Committee, 2007-2013 with special responsibility for Eastern Europe
"This unique book gathers the biographical journeys of students and senior members of the Hong Kong Analytical Psychology community, all of them highly influenced - inspired really - by teaching, supervision and treatment from Marta Tibaldi and her Western Jungian colleagues. In this way, it represents the way that their influence has not only taken root in Hong Kong, but has already led to the beginnings of a ramification of analytical ideas and work in this unique Chinese-Western cultural mix."
David E. Scharff, MD, Editor Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China
Pubblicato da Marta Tibaldi a 5:52 PM Nessun commento:
Etichette: Attività professionali/Professional Activities, Cina/China, HKIAP Hong Kong, Libri/books, Psicologia analitica/Analytical Psychology, Transculturale/Cross-cultural
Marta Tibaldi with Teresa Chan, Marie Chiu, Mars... | arta Tibaldi with Teresa Chan, Marie Chiu, Marshall Lee, Brian Tam, Emma Ting Wong
Transcultural identities.
Jungians in Hong Kong
Artemide Edizioni, Roma 2016
"A heartfelt collection of narratives which serve as a bridge to the world of analytical psychology in Hong Kong.This remarkable corner of the world has produced a number of gifted clinicians who work in multiple languages with highly diverse populations. Master storyteller Marta Tibaldi weaves a set of tales from this group into a wonderful, rich study of transcultural encounters. Treat yourself to a delicious read at this psychological Dim | 125 |
One of the driving forces in our nation is the spirit of volunteer service. In<|fim_middle|> love to hear about it.
If you are looking for an alternative to costly dental insurance, please check our our discount dental plans which start at just $79.95 per year. | the dental community countless dentists, hygienists, and other support staff offer free dental care through free dental clinics. These clinics do not only serve the poor and the homeless, but also the working poor and the uninsured.
There are a few organizations that I want to highlight that work to put together these events in multiple states. You can check their websites to see if there is an upcoming clinic in your area.
If you have never seen what one of these events looks like, I wanted to share this video with you. It also gives you a look behind the scenes into what it takes to put such as event on.
If you are dental professional, I encourage you to get involved in one of these events as there is not much greater satisfaction that giving out of what we have.
If this article helps you or someone you know get the dental care that you need, we would | 176 |
L<|fim_middle|> his fiscal 2020 budget request released earlier this month.
To contact the reporter on this story: Michaela Ross in Washington at mross@bgov.com | aptops to Stay in Bags as TSA Brings New Technology to Airports
March 29, 2019 4:18 PM By Michaela Ross
Agency awards contract for upgraded carry-on screening
TSA expects shorter airport wait times with new technology
Air passengers at a growing number of U.S. airports will no longer need to remove electronics, liquids, and other items from their carry-on luggage at security checkpoints as the Transportation Security Administration rolls out new technology.
The TSA took a major step in a broader plan to revamp its overall screening process with faster, more advanced technology when it signed a contract Thursday for hundreds of new carry-on baggage screening machines, Administrator David Pekoske said on a press call Friday. The agency has tested the new technology at more than a dozen airports since 2017, along with the relaxed protocols that allow passengers to leave items such as laptops and toiletries inside their luggage.
The rollout of the computed tomography, or CT, machines will begin this summer, Pekoske said. The $97 million contract will buy 300 machines, but the list of airports receiving them has yet to be made final, Pekoske said.
A Transportation Security Administration worker screens luggage at LaGuardia Airport in New York City.
The technology creates 3-D images of bags' contents and will eventually be able to detect items automatically that the TSA now asks passengers to remove, he said.
"It's not a little bit better, it's a lot better," Pekoske said of the technology.
In total, the agency expects to replace its more than 2,000 X-ray machines with the CT equipment over the next eight years, he said. The five-year contract was awarded to Edgewood, Maryland-based Smiths Detection, but the next phase of procurement may include multiple vendors, he said.
While the CT pilot program didn't show reduced wait times at participating airports, the agency is expecting the technology will speed up lines as passengers and staffers get used to the new processes. Pekoske said he expected more staff to be needed initially as the new machines are put in place.
President Donald Trump called for another 300 CT machines to be funded in | 459 |
BOARD, COMMITTEES & STAFF
ADDRESSING ROOT CAUSES
SUPPORTING THE SAFETY NET
ADVANCING SUSTAINABLE INNOVATION
AHF in the Community: October
On October 1, enrollment for the Affordable Care Act began, and since then the ups and downs of the program have occupied much of the health & wellness conversations in the media. While these conversations are important, as is creating awareness for healthcare coverage options for those that were previously denied access, the organizations in our community were incredibly active, and Sylvia and I had the opportunity to attend many of their events and meet with their leaders.
This is a recap of the places we went and the people we met. We hope that sharing our travels with you will build awareness for programs and organizations in our community and inspire others to get involved, to collaborate, and to spread the word.
Oct. 1: I had lunch with Dan Chavez, the Executive Director of the San Diego Regional Health Information Exchange. He told me about how they are connecting hospitals, clinics, County HHS, and other medical providers.
Oct. 2: I met with Dr. Sara Browne, Principal Investigator for the UC San Diego Wireless Observed Therapy (WOT) project. The project aims to determine if TB patients are more compliant with taking medications using a wireless method of ingestion tracking. Later in the day, I attended a San Diego Grantmakers board meeting to discuss charitable giving in our communities.
Oct. 4: Don Stump, CEO of North County Lifeline, hosted a meeting to discuss how community service providers can work more collaboratively in mental health services. Scott Bechtler-Levin, Executive Director of Community Information Exchange, and Aimee Zeitz of United Way were in attendance as well.
Oct. 5: I attended a Home Start's Hallo-Wine event with Laura Mustari, Executive Director. Other community leaders came out to support the event as well. Some highlights: Patricia Sinay and John Brown of the SD Human Dignity Foundation, Dave Titus of SD Venture Partners, and Todd Kaprielian of St. Paul's Senior Homes.
On the same day, I attended the first annual gala for Access Youth Academy (AYA) with AHF Board Trustee, Elizabeth Dreicer. The gala was hosted by Blair Sadler, Board Chair for AYA and Renato Paiva, AYA Executive Director. AYA is changing the lives of disadvantaged youth through the sport of squash, which is the conduit to college scholarships. Their four pillars include: health, leadership, community service and academics.
While I was at the Home Start and AYA events, Sylvia attended the North County Lifeline Youth Art Auction & Benefit, a fundraiser for at risk youth. At the benefit, Executive Director Don Stump and Board Chair Jim Hagar shared stories of the challenges youth face with homelessness, mental health issues, and foster care.
Oct. 8: While Sylvia attended the San Diego Grantmakers Steering Conference Committee, I met with Anna Crotty of Mission Edge. We talked about how to effectively measure the impact nonprofits are having in our community. Later, I had lunch with Sister Tricia from Father Joe's Villages to discuss community efforts to end homelessness.
Oct. 9: I attended a La Posada de Guadalupe open house with Catholic Charities to learn about a new homeless shelter in Carlsbad. Sylvia attended the Fannie Lou Hamer Legacy Luncheon in Southeast San Diego with AHF's Selina Forte, Non-Profit Management Solutions Executive Director Lenore Lowe, and other leaders supporting and providing services in San Diego's Southeast community.
Oct. 10: Sylvia and I attended a Summit Society Social event in Encinitas, an appreciation event hosted by Outdoor Outreach. This organization engages under-served youth via outdoor recreational and sports activities.
Oct. 11: Sylvia attended the San Ysidro Mobile Clinic ribbon cutting ceremony in National City with Nick Macchione, Director of the SD County Health Dept. and Fernando Sanudo from Vista Community Clinic. The event used the grand opening of the mobile clinic as an opportunity to host a health fair as well<|fim_middle|>08, EAA/EN301548, ACA/AODA, and IS5568 compliant. Stay informed. | .
Oct. 12: I attended the Chief's Gala, which was held to support the Burn Institute.
Oct. 13: I bid farewell to Kevin Keenan at his ACLU going-away party. He will be missed.
Oct. 15: I had lunch at Taverna Blue to support ElderHelp, and Sylvia—alongside many of our grantees—attended the "For Impact" Workshop at UCSD.
Oct. 16: I stopped by the Pitch & Partner event, which pairs non-profits with each other and facilitates funding support.
Oct. 17: I participated in an open house with John Fanestil of Foundation for Change and Rev. Laura Coskey of Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice. Sylvia celebrated National Above the Influence Day with San Diego Youth Services and the Moyer Foundation's Camp Mariposa, two organizations that serve children impacted by addiction.
Oct. 18: I joined Laura Mustari, CEO of Home start, and Alexis Parker, Executive Director of HomeAid, for a Home Start ribbon cutting ceremony.
Oct. 19: I joined Stan Lewis from our Board of Trustees at The San Diego LGBT's Center 40th Anniversary Gala. Special thanks to Dr. Delores Jacobs, CEO, for the invitation.
Oct. 22: Sylvia facilitated a workshop in Spanish at the Bayside Community Center for the members of the Resident Leadership Academy. The program provided community members, mostly monolingual in Spanish, with the tools to advocate for themselves and their community on all social issues.
Oct. 23: I participated in a Ford Foundation presentation with Nick Macchione, Director Health & Human Services; Dan Chavez, Executive Director, San Diego Health Connect; Scott Bechtler-Levin, Executive Director, Community Information Exchange; and John Ohanian, CEO, 2-1-1 San Diego. This collaborative presentation explores how San Diego is using innovative technology to connect providers with information they need to be more effective and efficient in providing care in our community. Through this effort we will reduce costs, improve quality and increase capacity.
While I was at the Ford Foundation presentation, Sylvia visited the Alzheimer's Association and met with Executive Director Caroline Harwood and her staff, Mary Ball and Shelita Weinfield.
That evening, Sylvia and I attended the Crew Rendezvous – CHIP (Community Health Improvement Partners) annual dinner with Kirsten Garrett, CEO.
Oct. 26: Sylvia attended a Crystal Ball Gala held by Casa De Amparo, an organization working to treat and prevent child abuse and neglect.
Oct. 28: I met Tonya Torosian, CEO of Promises2Kids, for lunch. We discussed her organization's efforts create a brighter future for foster children.
Oct. 29: I participated in the Interfaith Shelter Network community listening meeting. This group is looking for community feedback about what's working in our community. If you are interested in learning more contact Trisha Brereton, new Executive Director, attrisha@interfaithshelter.org.
Oct. 30: Sylvia and I participated in the San Diego Grantmakers Annual Conference. Later, I visited the Stop & Listen Asthma Forum in El Centro with Aide Fulton, Asthma Educator. Student groups presented on how to have a positive impact on asthma in Imperial County.
Oct. 31: Zara Marselian, CEO of La Maestra Community Clinic, met with me for lunch. We discussed her clinic's idea of having a mobile mammography & ultrasound clinic especially for Imperial County.
Thank you to everyone that invited us to be a part of their work, and thank you to everyone who is working to make our communities healthier and happier. We are looking forward to an active November. If you would like to be involved in these meetings, events, and discussions, please email me. The more we can share our support and encourage collaboration, the more good that we can do.
Nancy L. Sasaki, Executive Director
nsasaki@alliancehf.org
Alliance Healthcare Foundation
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You are here: Marathon Home / Pre event / Kenenisa Bekele for Dubai Marathon
Kenenisa Bekele for Dubai Marathon
Dubai will be next Stage in Kenenisa Bekele's Marathon Quest
Kenenisa Bekele's next marathon will be in Dubai. The organisers of the Standard Chartered Dubai marathon in conjunction with Dubai Holding announced the news at a press conference in the Desert Emirate on Sunday. The major investment conglomerate Dubai Holding, supporter of the marathon, has engaged Bekele as its ambassador for its Corporate Wellness Programme. The marathon will be run on its super flat and fast course on January 23. Taking into account shorter distances held in conjunction, around 25,000 runners are expected to participate. Entries can be made online at: www.dubaimarathon.org
Kenenisa Bekele is without doubt one of the greatest long distance runners of all time. The 3<|fim_middle|> past Kenenisa was always especially strong when he ran cross-country in the winter. He had to prepare for that, ie, he had to train with intensity during the winter. That's also the case for the Dubai Marathon. He recovered fast and the training for Chicago will also help in his build-up for Dubai."
Kenenisa Bekele has learned the lessons from the race in Chicago. "I saw that I had to train more and in a different way if I were to be successful in the marathon," said the Olympic champion, who also has a new and well-known coach from Italy: "Renato Canova has taken over my training since Chicago. He is with me in Addis Ababa and the training is going well."
Kenenisa Bekele for Chicago
Kenenisa Bekele ready for debut
Filed Under: Dubai, Featured, News, Pre event Tagged With: Dubai Marathon, Kenenisa Bekele, Pre-event | 2-year-old has won three Olympic titles over 5 and 10,000m, five world championship titles on the track and still holds the world records at both distances. This year the man who has won eleven world titles in cross-country decided to move to the marathon. After a commanding debut in Paris where he ran 2:05:04 to break the course record, he also broke 2:06 in his second race at 42.195 kilometres although his time of 2:05:51 was only good enough for fourth place when Bekele himself had expected more. He wants to make amends in Dubai, where Ethiopian debutants in the marathon have produced brilliant performances to break 2:05 in each of the last three races. In 2012 Ayele Abshero set the current course record of 2:04:23.
"I've followed the race in recent years and know that the Dubai course is very flat which should make fast times possible. Of course, switching to the marathon is not easy but I'm delighted at the challenge offered by Dubai and hope, as Ambassador for the Dubai Holding Corporate Wellness Programme, I can motivate people of all ages to run if I produce a fast time," said Kenenisa Bekele at a press conference for the race which offers the biggest prize in marathon running: $200,000 each for the men's and women's champions of the Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon.
As for his possible time, Kenenisa Bekele explained: "I've learned from my first two marathons and will be better prepared for Dubai than for Paris and Chicago. I hope we can attack the course record of 2:04:23. Of course, I can't forget Haile Gebrselassie's Ethiopian record of 2:03:59 – it would be great if I could break that. But the priority in Dubai would be to improve my personal best and set a course record if possible."
The Event Director Peter Connerton believes that Kenenisa Bekele's participation could have the same effect – in terms of raising the popularity of the race – as did Haile Gebrselassie's who won the title for three consecutive years from 2008. "Just like Haile, Kenenisa has made the move to the marathon after he has won everything on the track and in cross-country," said Connerton. "So far he has made a better start to his marathon career than did Haile and Paul Tergat. Kenenisa is determined to reach the next level in the marathon. We're proud that he believes that Dubai is the right place for the next advance in his extraordinary career."
Jos Hermens, Bekele's manager, also believes that his athlete has still much more to give in the marathon: "Haile Gebrselassie and Paul Tergat also needed a few races before they ran world records," said the Dutch agent. Hermens is optimistic that Bekele can produce a very good performance in Dubai: "I'm sure that Kenenisa will be better prepared for the Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon than for his first two marathons – he didn't have the capacity in those races to break 2:05. He's a runner who needs competitive pressure. In the | 701 |
Reflections on Library Licensing
The way libraries acquire basic content for their readers has been completely upended in the last two decades. I have worked in research library collections and acquisitions through most of that period, from the days of the first subscriptions for electronic journals. The old days were good—or at least we had understood for decades how the rules worked: libraries purchased a book (or journal or microform or other tangible format) and, under the right of first sale in the US Copyright Act, they placed it on a shelf and users borrowed the item and returned it, until/unless it fell apart years later. At that point, the library could purchase another copy, or make a reproduction as permitted within Section 108 of the US Copyright Act. Life in library acquisitions proceeded as in a production shop: orderly and careful.
No more. In this rapid electronic environment, content providers are pressed to enhance and update existing products or to produce competitive new products, with ever-increasing functionality and with great uncertainty about what users will pay for and how much they will pay. At the same time, numerous new producers are entering the electronic marketplace. We are living in an information Wild West, which can put libraries and publishers face to face on Main Street at high noon, often without the third-party subscription agents or book jobbers we used to depend on.
Increasingly, libraries gain access to electronic content with a bundle of sometimes confusing and customized rights of use, often without the benefits of ownership. Those rights are codified in a license, which is notionally a contract between two parties: a willing buyer and a willing seller (in the library case, between it and the information provider). Under license, the institution has those rights that are expressly an agreed part of the contract. As all the stakeholders know, there are pros and cons and serious issues along this new path, which will be with us for many years to come. The expertise that library (and publisher) staff nowadays need in order to acquire materials has been ramped up. In addition, academic authors have jumped into the mix, adding to newness and complexity. Exciting? Yes. Headache-making? That too.
How did we get to this place?
Why are we not using copyright law to govern today's electronic information transactions? There are a number of reasons. Many authors and publishers feel that copyright law does not effectively address issues specific to this new world, wherein users have the advantage of high-powered copying and instantaneous redistribution technologies. Today, in theory, it would be possible to distribute worldwide thousands of copies of a digital information object in seconds. Copyright does not protect materials in the public domain, yet many publishers are packaging public domain materials in new digital ways and looking to monetize the added value— copyright law by itself can't help them very much. In these kinds of situations, licenses can help information providers gain some control over and income from electronic materials. And licenses are not as vulnerable to ongoing legislative changes as copyright-protected materials may be.
How do we know if the licenses offered are good ones? The most objective test is the market's test: do the offers find takers? As long as they do, the market is telling the content providers that they are successful. One common response of libraries to seemingly expensive materials with imperfect terms of use has been to license joint deals for coherent groups of institutions— and library consortia are now common participants on the users' side of contractual arrangements.
So we now see consortia/publisher agreements that reach not merely into the millions of dollars but the tens of millions of dollars per year in a single negotiation. Not infrequently, government and funding agencies have become interested in supporting electronic resource negotiations, with the goal of delivering access to all the citizens or researchers in a given discipline, state, or nation. In those scaled-up situations, the pressure to secure a contract is increased. The volume of generated business is attractive to publishers, as is the time saved in not negotiating with numerous individual institutions. Buyers get a better deal. All this is serious business, bearing little resemblance to standard library<|fim_middle|>s, one of my first tasks was to review and sign a renewal contract for a major database, at that time delivered via text format (the web had not quite taken hold yet). Totally without licensing experience (though with experience of reading other types of contracts), I was in the same position as most of my colleagues at the time—vastly underpowered for this new assignment. Imagine my surprise as I read the contract renewal terms: "No reproduction may be made from this resource by any means, mechanical or electronic." I phoned the provider: "Does this mean that if my user copies citations with pen on paper, s/he is in violation of the license?" "Yes," I was told, "but why not just sign—this will be the library's fourth renewal." And thus it began. Happily, the publisher was pleased to discuss what a reasonable substitution would be. I cited snippets from Section 107 of the US Copyright Act (Fair Use) by way of example, and we adjusted the contract. It was an exciting moment—to have the opportunity for serious and productive discourse with the "other side" and to begin a process of mutual education. Unfortunately, not all publishers were as open minded and willing, and some language had been written by cadres of lawyers who had no idea what libraries and users were about. Over the years, many colleagues have spent endless hours in intractable negotiations, starting with lousy user terms that have been changed only with sweat and tears, and sometimes over a few years. These kinds of experiences led a number of organizations to issue useful licensing principles [1] and model licenses. [2] Over time, there have been many advances in the real benefits publishers allow for users.
Should we prefer copyright or license?
Copyright and licenses (contracts) share certain characteristics. Both accept the existence of the concept of intellectual property, where rights include those of the property owner and of the user and or purchaser. They are also very different. Copyright law is the law of the land. It varies widely across national borders, changes from time to time, and tends to be high in principle and low in specificity in certain crucial points. US copyright law, for example, famously guarantees the right of "fair use," outlining high-level generalities about what criteria we should use for determining whether a given use is fair. Licenses are transaction-specific, and in the US contracts are governed at the state level.
As time passes, we may be able to develop copyright laws that dispense with the need for e-resources contracts, though I am skeptical. And this may not be the best outcome. We may be most successful when the law is paired with thoughtful, well-written contract language, firmly grounded in copyright principles. A license also includes important provisions that are not copyright-related: agreements about pricing and other business terms, content inclusion, who are the customers, and much more. The license defines every aspect of the business arrangement, such as what users can do with the property; where, when, for what costs; and what both parties commit to in the deal.
A good license also makes clear the conditions under which it is to be enforced, e.g., specifying the jurisdiction in which legal action would be taken. But it's worth emphasizing that library license agreements have rarely—perhaps indeed never—been made the basis of litigation among major parties.
Licenses can restrict rights granted by copyright (undesirable from the library point of view), can incorporate copyright definitions and principles (such as interlibrary loan or fair use), and can clarify and even extend rights granted by copyright. (If a license fails to address a specific reader right, copyright then provides the answer by default.)
These days, it's all about rights
These days everyone's interested in his or her rights. Authors often want to hold on to copyrights rather than transfer them outright to publishers; publishers want to keep control over use, future use, and revenue; and libraries insist on gaining the rights to use materials broadly—in numerous ways for teaching, scholarship, research, and collaboration with other libraries. Library users demand the right to download, share, and re-use information. And universities are increasingly seeking to become globally visible and to influence the economics of the industry by asserting ownership of the works of faculty and staff—or at least controlling the character of outlets that their colleagues may use.
While not at the core of academic business, commercial authors are nonetheless important contributors to newspapers, magazines, trade books, and other materials that libraries make available and readers need. Over recent years, many of these authors have pushed back at some practices of their publishers. See, for example, New York Times Co. v. Tasini, which was finally decided in favor of the authors by the US Supreme Court. [3] In this case, members of the National Writers Union brought successful suit against five major publishers, charging copyright infringement when the freelance authors' previous works were licensed for re- use in electronic databases without explicit permission or payment. Through recent court actions against the HathiTrust, the Authors' Guild and two other plaintiffs asserted, unsuccessfully, that authors' rights had been infringed via the Google Books Project. [4] Without a doubt, as a result of these and other actions, author/publisher contracts have been closely scrutinized by both sides and revised so as to give both what they need in a digital age.
The motivations of academic authors, particularly those writing journal articles, are as intense as those of commercial authors, though generally less from financial need. In the majority of situations, academic authors wish to assure that their works are widely available, distributed, and re-used. Those who in the solely print environment automatically signed standard publisher copyright transfers now have different requirements and expectations. These days, an author-reader of "traditional" copyright release forms is likely to observe that the publisher, in effect, requires a transfer of all rights, leaving the author possibly unable to use the work freely in the classroom, or to post publications on his/her own website, in an institutional repository, in a subject repository elsewhere, or in a mandated site (NIH, for example), to name some common situations. Open access, with a growing number of assorted mandates (by institutions, funding agencies, or governments), and with strong organizational impetus (SPARC)[5] and ARL [6], for example) and personal advocates, has also had a powerful effect on the old copyright transfer form.
The Creative Commons was founded in 2001 [7], explicitly to help authors license their works freely for certain uses, under certain conditions, or to dedicate them to the public domain. An author could develop his/her own license and present it to a publisher, but Creative Commons offers a standardized set of vocabulary, definitions, and tools with ongoing updates, as well as a growing user base. In this changing landscape, a growing number of publishers accepts and even offer "license to publish" agreements to authors. Some publishers are routinely using Creative Commons licenses such as CC-BY, the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. [8] For example, this is the case for all journals participating in the global High Energy Physics open access project, SCOAP3. [9] For the most part, materials covered by such licenses are freely enough available to libraries—and are meant to be—without complex negotiations or money changing hands. But they can still require at least the application of local education in making sure that the terms of use are understood and respected, and in making library users aware of what can be very valuable resources by incorporating them in library catalog and discovery systems.
To be fair, it is possible—and some publishers do this—to use a copyright transfer form that gives back to academic authors all the rights they might possibly want (at a given point in time), while leaving the actual ownership with the publisher. Such publishers observe that, in the event of dispute, it is more effective to retain large sets of rights, which enable them to take action against abusers. However, where an academic author is willing to manage his or her copyrights, the position of ownership is the stronger one.
Wikipedia defines publishing as:
"The activity of making information available to the general public....Traditionally, the term refers to the distribution of printed works such as books (the 'book trade') and newspapers....With the advent of digital information systems and the internet, the scope of publishing has expanded to include electronic resources, such as the electronic versions of books and periodicals, as well as micropublishing, websites, blogs, video game publishers, and the like."
More important is their description of the publishing function:
"Publishing includes the stages of the development, acquisition, copy editing, graphic design, production...and marketing and distribution...." [10]
Long-time academic publishers have made or are making the digital transition, often very successfully. Additionally, the last two decades have seen rapid development of digital communications technologies and tools that entice new entrants into the publishing arena. There are start-ups that deliver formal, for-pay journals (author or subscription funded—many being open access) and databases; university initiatives; collaborative works; and self-published "grey literature," to name some. A recent high-visibility topic is that of "Libraries as Publishers." Libraries in academic settings, in response to user needs (students or faculty), their own needs (digitizing collections, e.g., to preserve them or make them accessible to users), or those of their universities (visibility) are now creating sites that range from informal "attics" to carefully curated materials to partnerships on campus (with university presses or IT centers), and wider partnerships. A few are even able to provide publishing services in response to RFPs from outside organizations.
All types of academic publishers, old or new, share similar desires: get the work out and find sustainable ways to support it—whether through charging fees to writers or libraries; or re-allocating institutional resources such as time, tools, and expertise; or finding backers. All want to be sure of the right to produce and make available their work; none want the work to be abused, whether financially or morally. Today's variances are in investment to be made in acquisition, writing, editing, production, and marketing. Formal publishers are likely to do all these things; most library publishers will do some of them but not all; individuals may do even fewer. However, all share a desire to control their product, protect their investment, and be seen as responsible agents. Licenses can offer the most satisfactory way to achieve those goals.
Libraries and their end users
The digital revolution has given the owner of a laptop, tablet, or smartphone powers unimaginable twenty years ago. Hundreds of millions of those users have learned to expect information at their fingertips in an instant, malleable to their every wish. They have learned how to get a lot of academic information at seemingly no cost. Whatever is possible begins to feel like a right. Their expectations often come a cropper when they encounter carefully curated digital resources measured out in teaspoons and hedged with restrictions on copying, quotation, and use. Limits on simultaneous users or on quantity of copying or downloading begin to seem unnatural intrusions on an important cultural and academic freedom. Accordingly, there is often a great tension between the terms on which publishers are comfortable distributing information and at least some of the expectations that users bring. It is reasonable to expect libraries to be forthright, if not downright aggressive, in seeking terms of use that allow the maximum flexibility and interoperability of information use. The history of the last two decades tells us two slightly conflicting things: that it is possible, through good-faith negotiations in a spirit of collaboration, to find ways for publishers to be comfortable granting terms of use far more generously than one might have imagined, and that it's very difficult to imagine publishers—seeking to meet their costs through revenue from the users of their products—ever being able to meet fully the desire for instantaneous, transparent, freely manipulated information of every kind.
Shrink or click
The commonest forms of end-user licenses include some that libraries prefer not to go near—but are part of many everyday lives. These are what we call contracts of adhesion: "take it or leave it" licenses, e.g., the "shrink wrap" licenses that took their name from the protective coating on the boxes in which software may be delivered.
Such licenses are presumptively agreed to when the purchaser rips open the wrapping. These have been largely supplanted by the "click through" licenses that pop up as an online dialog box prior to installation or use. We see these less frequently in institutional settings. They may be legally binding in the US, but there has been no definitive legal tests of that. When encountering such language today, librarians generally go back to the publisher and insist on negotiating something that meets current professional standards. Similarly, the individual one-user license is not a practical reality for library settings where resources will get serious use.
Site licenses
Most commonly, as individual institutions or in groups, libraries seek to negotiate "site licenses," tied to the physical or virtual facilities of the institution(s) and its/their constituents. While these may notionally be limited to the campus of a university, all such licenses nowadays recognize the practices of institutional users working off-site and connecting to the resources through proxy servers or virtual private networks. As well, site licenses generally recognize that branch libraries, branch campuses, and campuses abroad exist; how publishers choose to charge for these, or not, is often a critical part of negotiations. A vexing piece of negotiation is finding a way to measure the quantity of use and to match price to that quantity. For example, one measure of reference has been "historic spend," wherein the publisher assesses how much an institution had previously spent on its print resources; another measure might be the FTE count of some or all of the user population—faculty, faculty plus students, students alone, faculty-students-staff, or some combination. Such practices are increasingly challenged by institutions offering large distance/online learning programs, whether for tuition-paying (and thus FTE-countable) students or for the global public (as in a MOOC). In general, libraries aim to retain the right to define (according to institutional measures) and authenticate users into the system and resist such cumbersome practices as providing publishers with regularly updated lists of authorized users. (Outside the US, the consortium idea has led to near-national site licenses. For example, it has proved possible in countries such as the UK and Canada to gain terms effective across much of the tertiary education sector of a nation. In such cases, government or significant foundation funding may have kick-started the arrangements.)
Access in developing nations
Outside the US, one heartening movement has seen the growth in developing nations' initiatives in content licensing. Publishers recognize the high value that their content often has in economically and societally challenged settings, where normal pricing would effectively prevent dissemination and use. Various initiatives have made it possible for researchers and libraries in developing countries to have favored access to important resources at little or no cost. Hundreds of publishers voluntarily participate in initiatives led by various UN organizations under the banner of Research4Life [11], and individual providers such as JSTOR have also mounted their own initiatives [12]. NGOs such as eIFL and INASP, along with others, work in developing countries on a large scale [13]. The basic terms of licensing may remain essentially the same: what differs is mainly the price. Some programs are free while some initiatives have tiered pricing: free to a small number of least advantaged states, deeply discounted to a group of others, etc.
Even with the growing skills being brought to bear on negotiations, there is need for a still higher level of expertise. Conditions, practices, laws, and regulations change; publishers innovate; and user expectations develop. Various institutions have developed and published "model licenses" that set out in clear form what concrete license language and terms can look like in order to achieve libraries' purposes. Since 1997, I have coordinated the LIBLICENSE Project, which has three components: (1) a website rich in general resources on licensing, (2) a lively discussion forum where current issues are reviewed in real time, and (3) model license language and software to support creation of new license agreements [14]. The Project's first Model License dates to 2001, and at the same time it created and made freely available software to allow for do-it-yourself customization of academic libraries' best practice licensing language to produce contracts for specific situations. There have been various revisions, most recently the November 2014 rewrite [15]—the most ambitious in our history, based on broad consultation with stakeholders. We are at present working to incorporate the wisdom of this document in a new generation of shareware DIY license-writing software. Throughout, this Model License respects and relies on industry standards and best practices.
Current issues in licensing
The work on the LIBLICENSE Model License has arisen from, and in turn sharpened, awareness of newly emerged issues facing those who negotiate and manage academic e-resources licenses. A few new topics include:
Text and Data Mining (TDM, Content Mining)
During revision of the Model License, this area received the most comment and interest. Users are increasingly interested in being able to reach into datasets of every sort and ask customized, sophisticated questions—more than just "searching the archive." The more sophisticated users want to be able to pull information from multiple datasets at once, to find correlations and connections that can never be found in one set alone. So research library contracts need language designed to allow for broad and flexible use, without users becoming trapped into enumerating specific cases and asking permission. There should be explicit license rights to engage in TDM for scholarly and educational purposes, to share the results in scholarly work, and to make outputs (effectively, new, derivative datasets) available for use by others. There is a need for arrangements that allow users to download the data directly, rather than depend on a vendor-provided API. (The publishers often resist this, sometimes out of a desire to retain control of the data, but also perhaps to observe and learn from the kinds of queries pursued.) In some cases, publishers have attempted to levy extraordinary charges for the supply of copies: thus, more negotiation is needed. TDM is these days a contentious issue between many publishers and their customers.
Use in Discovery Systems ("Content Neutrality")
As sophisticated discovery systems developed by publishers or third parties allow users to reach into their libraries' content resources for information of interest, it becomes necessary to require publishers to provide to the licensee's discovery service vendors, on an ongoing basis, the citation and descriptive metadata (subject headings, abstracts, keywords) and full-text content necessary to facilitate optimal discovery. Here, as everywhere, time no longer marches forward but rather sprints, so the new Model License needed to be reviewed in light of the most recent NISO Open Discovery Initiative release and also industry practices [16].
There is increasing interest in ensuring that institutionally affiliated authors are able to re-use their own works for scholarly and educational purposes and to deposit their works in institutional or other open repositories. The Model License reads, in part, that institutional authors "shall retain the non-exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty- free right to use their Work for scholarly and educational purposes, including self-archiving or depositing the Work in institutional, subject-based, national, or other open repositories or archives (including the author's own web pages or departmental servers), and to comply with all grant or institutional requirements associated with the Work." We have taken guidance here from the Model Authors Rights language endorsed by the Association of Research Libraries [17].
Open Access Reporting and Article Processing Charges (APCs)
Keen interest on all sides in the development of open access publishing leads to new emphasis on usage information. The Model License language now asks providers to report annually on the number of open access articles published and encourages good-faith discussions about subscription fee impacts, with a goal of reducing such fees in proportion to the amount of open access (particularly APC) revenue received. The goal is to manage the economic impact of local open access authorship in a way favorable to the research and library communities and to watch for double-dipping (where publishers, inadvertently or otherwise, charge twice for the same publication). Recent announcements from Jisc regarding their "Total Cost of Ownership" approach [18] suggest it is possible to reach agreement in contract negotiations [19].
The realization that digital data make institutions and individuals vulnerable to loss of cherished security has pumped substantial energy into discussions of these related issues. We speak of confidentiality when it comes to maintaining control over data about the licensing deal and its operations—e.g., over handling of usage statistics, financial terms, and institutionally privileged data. Those concerns can be intense but pale in comparison to burgeoning global concern over information privacy. In academic settings, normal concern over privacy of personally identifiable information extends as well to a need to maintain the integrity of the research process. Privacy concerns are leading, as well, to divergent legislation and government practices around the world, making it harder for information providers to establish a single set of protocols to apply everywhere. The Model License was able to address some of these issues, but much more time needs to be invested in this issue in the future, by all stakeholders.
Experience has taught libraries to seek additional or updated licensing provisions and we have attempted to address them in the new Model License. For example:
Perpetual Access
Licenses increasingly include affirmation of right of perpetual access to licensed resources— essentially that access should continue for resources that libraries previously licensed/paid, even if the resource is discontinued, the library cancels its active subscription, or the resource changes publishers. In the latter case, library licenses these days include clauses requiring the transfer of obligation, when the intellectual property managed by one publisher is acquired by another; the Transfer Code of Practice [20] is the standard here.
Holdings Lists
Libraries may wish to seek the right to obtain itemized holdings lists annually or on request, in KBART-compliant format [21]. This may be of especial interest in determining content completeness when digitized backfiles, newspapers, or commercial collections are created and then licensed.
This has become a focus of attention in recent years. Libraries have various concerns about the use of DRM, which can restrict otherwise legal copying, sharing, reformatting, or changing electronic information, particularly in purchased e-resources. Not only may DRM impede access to resources that might be normally permitted by copyright law; but DRM also can make it impossible for a library or consortium to exercise its full rights of perpetual access [22]. (DRM tools, intentionally or otherwise, can also be seen as intrusive on the privacy of individual users.)
The new LIBLICENSE Model License aims to be format- neutral, i.e., to be applicable not just to e-journals, but also to other scholarly electronic formats such as books, databases, reference works, AV material, and so on. Special circumstances can apply to different formats and careful negotiations must address those. For example, of significant concern these days are licenses for e-books—whose numbers are now growing, seemingly as rapidly as e-journals did between 1995 – 2005. Some library and user-experienced problems are well outlined by Walters, who addresses "restrictions on viewing, printing, downloading, circulation, and ILL." [23] Herman provides an academic user's perspective [24]. Both of these pieces raise a number of issues that, for better or worse, librarians and publishers must work together to resolve, and licensing must play a key role.
It is impossible to describe the world of licensing without showing some of its nuances and complexities; nor is it possible to cover all of these in a short article. The conditions under which publishers most typically acquire the right to publish and then manage the business of preparing, distributing, and accounting for what they have, do not lend themselves to simplicity as often as the players would like. My strong belief is that the licensing regimes we have developed have allowed us to advance science, scholarship, and learning in dramatic ways, for all that the environment is an imperfect and confusing one. Libraries will continue to work toward arrangements that gain their users the greatest possible access to the widest and deepest possible range of information resources. That means getting appropriate terms of use and reasonable prices from every provider. Where it is possible to drive down the price, librarians can and will do that, while attending to the risks of making information unavailable (if publishers can no longer provide it on terms librarians are willing/able to meet) and the risks of making information more expensive (if alternate funding strategies, such as author publishing charges, turn out to be less efficient or less fair than traditional subscription models).
The end of librarians' licensing labors often comes invisibly, transparently, and wonderfully. A scientist in her laboratory reaches out and finds just the article or
just the dataset that makes a crucial difference in the next discovery that will make the world safer or cleaner or healthier. We know well from experience that when such an "aha" moment occurs, that user may not be aware of the role librarians have played in opening the pathway through which that knowledge has flowed. Nonetheless, librarians know that they have wizardry of their own, and they will do what it takes to maintain those powers. One hopes this magic will happen in an increasingly cooperative world between librarians and the information sector.
(aokerson@gmail.com) has been working with the Center for Research Libraries as Senior Advisor on Electronic Strategies as of Fall 2011. She is one of the active, founding spirits of the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC). She founded the NERL consortium and led it for 15 years, through summer of 2011. In particular, she has been a leader in licensing electronic scholarly resources, having created the LIBLICENSE Project, which includes a newly- re-written Model License, whose previous versions were adapted widely by libraries and organizations.
Ann Shumelda Okerson
Senior Advisor on Electronic Strategies
The way libraries acquire basic content for their readers has been completely upended in the last two decades. In this rapid electronic environment, content providers are pressed to enhance and update existing products or to produce competitive new products, with ever-increasing functionality and with great uncertainty about what users will pay for and how much they will pay. At the same time, numerous new producers are entering the electronic marketplace. We are living in an information Wild West, which can put libraries and publishers face to face on Main Street at high noon, often without the third-party subscription agents or book jobbers we used to depend on. This article discusses how we got to this place; whether one should prefer copyright or license; the differing view of rights by authors, publishers, libraries and their end users; different types of licenses; and current issues in licensing.
Okerson, Ann Shumelda. Reflections on Library Licensing. Information Standards Quarterly, Winter 2014, 26(4): 2-12. http://dx.doi.org/10.3789/isqv26no4.2014.02
1. "Principles."LIBLICENSEBibliography. http://liblicense.crl.edu/resources/bibliography/
2. "Additional Model Licenses." Model Licenses. LIBLICENSE.
[Links at the bottom of the webpage include models from California, CIC, and others.] http://liblicense.crl.edu/licensing-information/model-license/
3. New York Times Co. v. Tasini (00-201) 533 U.S. 483 (2001).
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-201.ZO.html
4. Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust, No. 12-4547 (2d Cir. 2014).
http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca2/12- 4547/12-4547-2014-06-10.html
5. SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)
http://www.sparc.arl.org/
6. Author Rights. Association of Research Libraries.
http://www.arl.org/focus-areas/copyright-ip/author-rights#.VHjk6YeCaiw
7. Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org/
8. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY) license
9. SCOAP3 – Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics
http://scoap3.org/
10. Publishing. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishing
11. Research4Life
http://www.research4life.org/
12. Developing Nations Access Initiative. JSTOR.
http://about.jstor.org/libraries/developing-nations-access- initiative
13. Developing Nations Initiatives. LIBLICENSE.
http://liblicense.crl.edu/licensing-information/developing- nations-initiatives/
14. LIBLICENSE: licensing digital content – a resource for librarians
http://liblicense.crl.edu/
15. The LIBLICENSE Model License was created by a team comprising Ivy Anderson (CDL), Julia Blixrud (ARL), Craig Olsvik (CKN), Tracy Thompson (NELLCO); Christa Williford (CLIR); Lisa Macklin (Emory University) as Legal Advisor; and Ann Okerson as Convenor.
LIBLICENSE Model License.
http://liblicense.crl.edu/licensing-information/model-license/
16. Open Discovery Initiative. NISO.
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/odi/
17. Author Rights Model License Language. Association of Research Libraries.
http://authorrights.wordpress.com
18. Releasing open data about the Total Cost of Ownership. Jisc Collections, July 21, 2014.
https://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/News/Releasing-open-data-about-Total-Cost-of-Ownership/
19. Taylor & Francis/Jisc Collections agreement. LibLicense-L Discussion Forum, November 14, 2014.
http://listserv.crl.edu/wa.exe?A2=LIBLICENSE-L;a00d8503.1411
20. The Transfer Code of Practice. UKSG.
http://www.uksg.org/Transfer/Code
21. Knowledge Base And Related Tools (KBART). National Information Standards Organization (NISO).
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart
22. Digital Rights Management Tip Sheet. Digital Content and Libraries Working Group of the American Library Association, July 2012.
http://connect.ala.org/files/94226/DRM%20Library%20 Education%20Tip%20Sheet_DEFINITIVE_
7_11_12.pdf
23. William H. Walters. "E-books in academic libraries: Challenges for sharing and use." Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 46(2): 85-95.
24. Peter C. Herman."The Hidden costs of E-books at University Libraries." Times of San Diego, September 29, 2014. http://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2014/09/29/hidden-costs- e-books-university-libraries/ | book or serial purchasing. When I took up an academic position as Director of Collections Development at a major institution in the mid- 90 | 28 |
Well-known cannabis investor<|fim_middle|> industry thought leader and want to be heard? Let us know your story. | Alain Bankier recently participated in the 'Thought Leaders In Cannabis' Series, co-hosted by PotBotics & Greenhouse Ventures. Bankier, who has been involved with New York Angels for a decade and who is an active member of The Arcview Group, was formerly the CEO of The Manischewitz Company. He is a Managing Partner at VS Tech Ventures, which also includes Brian Vicente, Christian Sederberg, Josh Kappel, Steve Fox and Marion Mariathasan. The firm provides legal services, software, funding and advisory services to cannabis startups.
Bankier shared four attributes he likes to see in the founders of the companies in which he invests. First, he looks for people with business experience that have a good understanding of the problem they are trying to solve with a record of success in overcoming problems. Second, though he doesn't require the founder to have prior cannabis industry experience, he likes to see someone on the team that does. Finally, he prefers teams rather than solopreneurs, so Bankier advises younger or less experienced entrepreneurs with good ideas to partner early on.
Are you a cannabis | 229 |
Ok! Now read the bold text below and the gist of this story… Now exactly who are these 5 regulators back in October and did they have anything to do with the settlement discussion? Maybe the media should have put this puzzle together for us and explained it in a better report.
"The regulators are under a lot of pressure," said Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, an advocacy coalition that filed a comment letter urging that the draft rule be strengthened rather than watered down.
The New York Times published a column by its leading financial experts, Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story, on November 22, 2011 which contains a spectacular charge against the Obama administration's financial regulatory leaders. I have waited for the rebuttal, but it is now clear that the administration does not contest the charge.
The specific example that prompted the NYT article ("Financial Finger-Pointing Turns to Regulators") was a civil action against a former executive of IndyMac. IndyMac was supposed to be regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS). OTS was the worst of the federal financial regulators – which is a large statement. It was so bad that the Dodd-Frank Act killed it. I used to work for OTS. One of the things I did to make myself unemployable during the S&L debacle was to testify before Congress against the head of our agency, Danny Wall, and our head of supervision, Darrell Dochow. Wall resigned in disgrace and Dochow was demoted and sent back to run the obscure office he had once run in Seattle.
Almost 65 years ago, in 1947, the U.S. government sued 17 leading Wall Street investment banks, charging them with effectively colluding in violation of antitrust laws.
The U.S. argued that the top Wall Street investment banks – – including Morgan Stanley (MS) (the lead defendant) and Goldman Sachs — had created a cartel by which, among other things, it set the prices charged for underwriting securities and for providing mergers-and-acquisitions advice, while boxing out weaker competitors from breaking into the top tier of the business and getting their fair share of the fees.
Oh Boy! What will they do now without these magical words?
During 2009-2010, Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac lost $121.6 Billion and took $94 Billion from US taxpayers, who paid the top six executives as the government-owned mortgage giants more than $35 Million.
Washington, DC—Ranking Member Elijah E. Cummings issued the following statement on a new GAO report issued regarding AIG. The report found inconsistent accounts of attempts by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to negotiate with AIG's counterparties to lower U.S. taxpayer exposure.
Cummings was one of the Members of Congress who asked GAO to examine the decision to provide AIG with taxpayer funds. The report echoes the findings of investigations conducted, at Cummings's request, by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (SIGTARP) which found clear shortfalls in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's negotiations with AIG counterparties regarding the payments they would receive for credit default swap contracts they held.
Financial Crisis: Review of Federal Reserve System Financial Assistance to American International Group, Inc.
In September 2008, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Federal Reserve Board) approved emergency lending to American International Group, Inc. (AIG)–the first in a series of actions that, together with the Department of the Treasury, authorized $182.3 billion in federal aid to assist the company. Federal Reserve System officials said that their goal was to avert a disorderly failure of AIG, which they believed would have posed systemic risk to the financial system. But these actions were controversial, raising questions about government intervention in the private marketplace. This report discusses (1) key decisions to provide aid to AIG; (2) decisions involving the Maiden Lane III (ML III) special purpose vehicle (SPV), which was a central part of providing assistance to the company; (3) the extent to which actions were consistent with relevant law or policy; and (4) lessons learned from the AIG assistance. To address these issues, GAO focused on the initial assistance to AIG and subsequent creation of ML III. GAO examined a large volume of AIG-related documents, primarily from the Federal Reserve System–the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY)–and conducted a wide range of interviews, including with Federal Reserve System staff, FRBNY advisors, former and current AIG executives, AIG business counterparties, credit rating agencies, potential private financiers, academics, finance experts, state insurance officials, and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) officials. Although GAO makes no new recommendations in this report, it reiterates previous recommendations aimed at improving the Federal Reserve System's documentation standards and conflict-of-interest policies.
While warning signs of the company's difficulties had begun to appear a year before the Federal Reserve System provided assistance, Federal Reserve System officials said they became acutely aware of AIG's deteriorating condition in September 2008. The Federal Reserve System received information through its financial markets monitoring and ultimately intervened as the possibility of bankruptcy became imminent. Efforts by AIG and the Federal Reserve System to secure private financing failed after the extent of AIG's liquidity needs became clearer. Both the Federal Reserve System and AIG considered bankruptcy issues, although no bankruptcy filing was made. Due to AIG's deteriorating condition in September 2008, the Federal Reserve System said it had little opportunity to consider alternatives before its initial assistance. As AIG's troubles persisted, the company and the Federal Reserve System considered a range of options, including guarantees, accelerated asset sales, and nationalization. According to Federal Reserve System officials, AIG's credit ratings were a critical consideration in the assistance, as downgrades would have further strained AIG's liquidity position. After the initial federal assistance, ML III became a key part of the Federal Reserve System's continuing efforts to stabilize AIG. With ML III, FRBNY loaned funds to an SPV established to buy collateralized debt obligations (CDO) from AIG counterparties that had purchased credit default swaps from AIG to protect the value of those assets. In exchange, the counterparties agreed to terminate the credit default swaps, which were a significant source of AIG's liquidity problems. As the value of the CDO assets, or the condition of AIG itself, declined, AIG was required to provide additional collateral to its counterparties. In designing ML III, FRBNY said that it chose the only option available given constraints at the time, deciding against plans that could have reduced the size of its lending or increased the loan's security. Although the Federal Reserve Board approved ML III with an expectation that concessions would be negotiated with AIG's counterparties, FRBNY made varying attempts to obtain these discounts. FRBNY officials said that they had little bargaining power in seeking concessions and would have faced difficulty in getting all counterparties to agree to<|fim_middle|> AIG was required to make, FRBNY influenced the company's filings about federal aid but did not direct AIG on what information to disclose. In providing aid to AIG, FRBNY implemented conflict-of-interest procedures, and granted a number of waivers, many of which were conditioned on the separation of employees and information. A series of complex relationships grew out of the government's intervention, involving FRBNY advisors, AIG counterparties, and others, which could expose FRBNY to greater risk that it would not fully identify and appropriately manage conflict issues and relationships.
Why we do what we do. Please watch to understand.
Because enough is enough and the corruption has finally exploded back in their faces.
Boy oh Boy… I think everyone in Florida needs to examine, re-examine exactly what the heck is going down there. All this funny business is beginning to seem like the new norm.
TALLAHASSEE — For a second time, e-mails to and from Florida Gov. Rick Scott have been deleted in possible violation of state law.
Scott's team acknowledged in August, months after a Times/Herald request for transition records, that dozens of e-mail accounts had been deleted from a private computer server where the documents were stored.
Now, Scott's office has confirmed e-mails stored on Scott's iPad were deleted when a Governor's Office staffer in charge of technology tried to print the documents. Both incidents have been described as accidental.
An "unprecedented crackdown." That's how Commissioner David Stevens described a get-tough program that took place under him at the Federal Housing Administration from mid-2009 until April of this year. As part of the push, the FHA's Mortgage Review Board issued more administrative actions against lenders in Stevens' first year than it had in the prior eight years combined. | a discount. While FRBNY took actions to treat the counterparties alike, the perceived value of ML III participation likely varied by the size of a counterparty's exposure to AIG or its method of managing risk. While the Federal Reserve Board exercised broad emergency lending authority to assist AIG, it was not required to, nor did it, fully document its interpretation of its authority or the basis of its decisions. For federal securities filings | 87 |
Lorde Confirms Third Album and Celebrates 'Melodrama' Anniversary
Over the weekend, Lorde shared a rare personal Instagram Story celebrating the second anniversary of her sophomore album release, Melodrama, as well as an update on her upcoming third album.
She began her post by thanking fans for taking the album and making it their own. "Swells my damn heart<|fim_middle|>odrama' Anniversary
Filed Under: Lorde
Categories: Celebrity News, Music News, News | thinking about your love for it and your willingness to go there with me and to dance the way we did together," she wrote about Melodrama.
Lorde shared that on the album's release day on June 16, 2017, she completed a jigsaw puzzle in her New York City hotel room and didn't realize how she would feel after releasing the record into the world. "I felt so emptied, I didn't really know yet that you make a record and get filled up, and then releasing it empties you... and slowly fills you up again."
She admitted that she was emotional and even called herself a baby at the time, adding that she has grown a lot since then. Since the release of her album, she stated that she's traveled to Antarctica, adopted a dog and cat, can bake bread and cook a full dinner, and joked she can even keep her plants alive.
Referencing her upcoming album, Lorde also dropped the big news that the "third one in the oven." No other details on the new album have been released just yet, though she did thank her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, "who was always there."
Read her full message, below:
Lorde's Most Intense Performance Faces
Source: Lorde Confirms Third Album and Celebrates 'Mel | 267 |
Grab-led (NASDAQ: GRAB) Digibank Consortium to Get Malaysia Digital Banking License
Grab Holdings Limited (NASDAQ: GRAB) and Singtel confirmed that GXS Bank Pte. Ltd., their digital bank joint venture, and a consortium of Malaysian investors including Kuok Brothers Sdn. Bhd has been awarded a fully digital banking license in Malaysia. The license will be awarded after fulfilling all of Bank Negara Malaysia's regulatory conditions.
The digital bank joint venture would own a 55.45% interest in the proposed Malaysia digital bank, which will be overseen by Ms. Pei Si Lai. Ms. Pei Si Lai is a financial services industry veteran with over 25 years of<|fim_middle|>SMEs) in particular are projected to benefit greatly from digital banking. They are the foundation of the Malaysian economy, accounting for over 97 percent of all businesses, providing around 38 percent of national GDP, and employing about half of the working population.
Digibank Consortium
Grab Holdings Limited
GRAB Stock
NASDAQ: GRAB
Elon Musk Reportedly Sells $4B Tesla Shares for Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) Deal
Kennedy-Wilson (NYSE: KW) Announces Acquisition of Three Mountain West Multifamily Communities | expertise. Ms. Lai has been named the company's CEO candidate and will lead a specialized team tasked with redefining banking for Malaysia's estimated one-in-two underserved or unbanked citizens.
Ms. Lai has substantial experience and strong client-centricity refined over 25 years in retail banking, wealth management, corporate finance, product, and business management, as well as governance, in both local and international markets as CEO designate of the Malaysian digital bank. She previously worked at Standard Chartered in Malaysia as Managing Director and Country Head, Consumer, Private, and Business Banking.
Ms. Lai will gather a team with varied experience in banking and technology to establish the Malaysia digital bank, which will attempt to deliver smooth and secure financial services tailored to match consumer expectations. By launch, around 200 positions are expected to be filled, including those in product and design, data, technology, risk, and compliance.
Furthermore, local micro-SMEs and other financially underprivileged segments, such as gig economy employees, will be able to access a range of financial services through the Malaysia digital bank consortium's digital bank, which will serve them throughout their lifecycle. Small and medium-sized businesses ( | 242 |
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MSc and MPhil/PhD in Epidemiology
Postgraduate Diploma in Health Research and Epidemiology
MSc and MPhil/PhD in Nutrition
CAIHR Alumni
2022: NIHR: A syndemic approach to the prevention of diet- and physical activity-related NCDs (GDAR SPACES) – Global Health Research Group on Diet and Activity (GDAR) - Dr. Georgiana Gordon-Strachan
New Grant Funding
The Global Diet and Activity Research Network (GDAR) was established in 2017 its work aims to prevent non-communicable diseases (NCDs) a growing cause of death in Lower and Middle-Income Countries. The network's research focuses on unhealthy diet and physical inactivity, two important NCD risk factors. The proposed work builds on an existing body of work in GDAR 1 which explored how policy, community and commercial systems shape diet and physical activity environments and behaviours in LMIC's.
GDAR SPACES considers the risks of urbanization and climate change and their effect on diet and physical activity. These risks are referred to as syndemic hazards, the interaction of urbanisation, climate change, and diet and physical activity behaviours is one example. This project will use the syndemic approach to develop interventions that will work in two ways: first by reducing the exposure of individuals in cities and second by reducing the vulnerability of the wider built and food environments to these hazards.
The project, led by The University of Cambridge and funded by the NIHR UK, will be conducted in Cameroon, South Africa, Kenya and Jamaica, Nigeria, and Brazil and will be done in collaboration with UN Habitat.
Investigators: Principal Investigator (Jamaica): Georgiana Gordon-Strachan. | 375 |
https://almanacnews.com/blogs/p/print/2016/08/16/san-francisco-wine-shop-to-open-in-palo-alto
By Elena Kadvany
San Francisco wine shop to open in Palo Alto
UPDATE: Biondivino will take over the Town & Country<|fim_middle|> host food pop-ups, as they do in San Francisco.
Smith said they were drawn to Palo Alto as a hub of activity with "great restaurants" -- and ideal rosé weather. | Village space vacated on Aug. 23 by high-end bakery Tout Sweet Pâtisserie.
Biondivino, a popular 10-year-old Italian wine shop in San Francisco, is expanding to Palo Alto, owner Ceri Smith confirmed Tuesday.
She'll be opening her second outpost in a yet-to-be-announced location at Town & Country Village on El Camino Real, hopefully in October.
Biondivino offers what Smith calls a "living wine list" that reflects "all the wines that you would find at a great restaurant list, without being commercialized," she said in an interview. She opened Biondivino after working for several years with Italian-wine distributors and retailers and becoming frustrated that they valued recognizable brands over quality wines that served in top restaurants.
So at the shop, you'll "food-friendly focused wines," many small producers and an emphasis on organic and biodynamic wines, Smith said. Biondivino's selection is almost entirely Italian, with few exceptions. (Smith said she'll dabble in Austria or Spain, and also sells some French rosé and champagnes, but nothing from California.) They're the kind of wines you would find at San Francisco Italian restaurants like A16, Acquerello and Quince, she said. Smith has also led the wine program for San Francisco's Tosca Cafe for the last three years and previously did the same for Flour + Water.
Peruse the wines in Biondivino's online shop here.
The name of the shop pays homage to Smith's Italian great grandfather, Settimio Biondi. He came to San Francisco the day after the 1906 earthquake, and that year built some apartments on Mason and Green streets, Smith said. A century later, in 2006, Smith opened her shop close by on Green and Polk Street.
The Palo Alto store will be "almost identical" to the San Francisco original, Smith said. Her team is currently looking into licensing and regulations to see if they'll be able to have tastings and possibly | 422 |
A few days ago we saw in images the campaign Secret Garden IV (fourth installment) of Rihanna for Dior. Today we show you the fabulous fashion film starred by singer, where he shows us her most seductive side, and with Steven Klein at the front of the address.
It is the first time that the firm was committed to a singer as an image of one of their campaigns. Rihanna plays a futuristic guest that is reflected and contrasts in the mirrors of the Palace, thus, creating an enigmatic dialogue between the refinement of the 18th century and a contemporary Dior woman attitude. And at the same time we<|fim_middle|> it reached a point that merges the style of East and the West. | can enjoy the Esprit Dior collection which was shown in Tokyo last December. Garments of angular cuts, contrast stitching, short skirts and tops of sequins, floral details, jacquards… proposals also taking Tokyo as a source of inspiration and where | 51 |
Tenure-track Assistant or Associate Professor Games and VR/AR/XR/Animation
Requisition Number: JPF04623
UCLA Department of Design Media Arts
Tenure-track Assistant or Associate Professor – Games and VR/AR/XR/Animation Start date: July 1, 2020
Deadline to apply: October 20, 2019
Applications will only be accepted online: https://recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF04623
The Department of Design Media Arts (DMA) within the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant or tenured Associate professor position in the area of Games and VR/AR/XR/Animation. We are especially interested in candidates whose work is socially, critically, or theoretically motivated. Ideal candidates should have an approach that is both conceptually and formally strong, and engaged with experimentation and use of current tools, technologies and processes. We are seeking applicants who would contribute to the diversity of the department, enhancing its offerings not only with superior technical and artistic skills, but also with cross-cultural perspectives. The candidate would contribute to further developing the UCLA Game Lab, a creative research lab situated between the School of Arts and Architecture and the School of Theater, Film and Television; and work to advance the Lab's mission to merge artistic and design practice, social responsibility, and cultural inquiry with gaming and related fields, such as live performance based games, virtual reality, digital puppetry, mixed reality installation, location based augmented reality, autonomous or networked virtual environments, motion capture and photogrammetry. Candidates must have a Master's Degree and a strong record of professional achievement; evidence of teaching is recommended.
We seek candidates whose experience in teaching, research, professional activity, or community service has prepared them to contribute to our commitment to diversity and excellence. Service within the department and university are expected as part of this position.
For more about the department, please visit: http://dma.ucla.edu.
Applications must include the following:
One-page cover letter with a description of creative research and teaching experience.
Personal statement that discusses the applicant's artistic and educational philosophy and approach to teaching.
Curriculum vitae.
Evidence of teaching effectiveness. As applicable, please include evaluations, syllabi, and examples of student work.
A statement with a description of past or potential contributions to equity, diversity, and inclusion. Contributions to diversity might include teaching, mentoring, research, or service towards building an equitable and diverse scholarship environment and/or increasing access or participation of individuals from historically underrepresented groups.
A portfolio that is specifically curated for the search committee, prioritized with your most accomplished work, and includes, as appropriate, documentation of your artwork, your own writings or statements, and notable reviews or articles discussing your work. This can be an on-line link to a web site or PDF format file.
Names and contact information (mailing address, email address, and phone number) of three professional references. (Letters of recommendation are not requested at this time).
The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age or protected veteran status. For the complete University of California nondiscrimination and affirmative action policy, see: UC Nondiscrimination & Affirmative Action Policy: http://policy.ucop.edu/doc/4000376/NondiscrimAffirmAct
For full application instructions and position description, please visit: https://recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF04623
The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color<|fim_middle|> University of California, Los Angeles
UCLA is known worldwide for the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. UCLA offers undergraduate degrees in more than 127 majors and graduate degrees in 198 program areas. UCLA has 11 highly regarded professional schools. Eight are ranked among the nation's top 15 in their field by U.S. News & World Report. UCLA is consistently among the most popular campus in the nation for undergraduate applicants. The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status. Benefits: UCLA offers a comprehensive benefits package, including an average of three weeks' vacation per year; an average of 12 days per year sick leave; 13 paid holidays per year; health, dental and optical benefits; life insurance; disability insurance; the University of California Retirement Plan with 5 year vesting and various voluntary UC Savings Plans. There are also special programs and privileges available, such as accessibility to cultural and recreational programs, athletic events, and the University Credit Union.
MPA Career Center is Just One of the Benefits.
Discover what else MPA has to offer!
The job you are trying to reach from was originally posted at MPA Career Center. | , religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age or protected veteran status. For the complete University of California nondiscrimination and affirmative action policy, see: UC Nondiscrimination & Affirmative Action Policy, https://policy.ucop.edu/doc/4000376/DiscHarassAffirmAction
Copyright 2017 Jobelephant.com Inc. All rights reserved.
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About | 128 |
The Essex Library has an entire section devoted to parenting in our Children's Department. Our Parenting corner includes book shelves with how-to manuals, anecdotes, information about sharing difficult topics with children and more. Please visit our literacy corner aimed at beginning readers and have many literacy based games and audio kits here for your use as well. We also use our parenting corner to display magazines for your enjoyment and local happenings for families. Before leaving the parenting corner, stop by the archway which contains a binder of local organizations, schools, scholarships, and summer programs as well as an area with information about literacy for children at every age.
Birth to Three – A Connecticut sponsored site to help families meet the needs of infants and toddlers with delays<|fim_middle|> online-based home school community, dedicated to sharing information, knowledge and resources that support home school families. | or disabilities.
Connecticut Parent Magazine Book Shelf – Articles from local librarians about what to read with your kids.
Guys Read – Author Jon Scieszka's reading list that connects boys with books they will want to read.
Safety Net for the Internet – Practical tips and guidelines for parents on children and the Internet.
Home School Legal Defense Association – Offers support and information on laws affecting home schoolers. HLSDA is Christian-based and partners with religious and secular groups to promote home schooling.
CT Home School Network – An independent, | 107 |
Ono-area farm featured on HGTV
Here's when it will next be on television.
Ono-area farm featured on HGTV Here's when it will next be on television. Check out this story on ldnews.com: http://ldne.ws/2sRC19Q
Daniel Walmer, danielwalmer@ldnews.com Published 5:12 p.m. ET June 11, 2017 | Updated 12:46 p.m. ET June 12, 2017
This home at 10804 Jonestown Road near Ono is featured in the HGTV show "We Bought the Farm."(Photo: Submitted)
Ono-area residents watching HGTV recently may have seen a familiar sight.
Becky and Scott Dubinsky's 6.3-acre "farmette" at 10804 Jonestown Road is featured on an episode of<|fim_middle|> stated the title of the episode involving the Dubinsky's farm and the upcoming air times.
Read or Share this story: http://ldne.ws/2sRC19Q | the cleverly titled "We Bought the Farm" that first aired on Saturday, according to TV Guide.
"In HGTV's We Bought the Farm, families wishing for wide-open spaces head to the great outdoors to search for the luxury farmhouse of their dreams," the show's online description states. "From hundreds of sprawling acres to classic, quaint country living, follow along as they look for the perfect homestead and discover some of the most affordable and beautiful locations, proving you don't have to be a millionaire to buy the farm of your dreams."
More: Handicapped veteran receives a home of his own
On the show, a couple looking to buy a farm tours four properties, weighs the pros and cons, and then reveals the one they chose at the end of the show, said daughter Ashlee Dubinsky, who grew up at the home. The Ono farm was not chosen.
The property, which includes a 2,300 square-foot, four-bedroom farmhouse, a barn and several storage sheds, a one-car garage and an inground pool, is advertised on real estate website Zillow for a $329,999 price tag.
The farm can be viewed on Season 2, Episode 6, an episode titled "Everything's Coming up Lavender." The episode will next air on June 24 at 11:30 p.m. and on July 25 at 2:30 a.m., according to HGTV's website.
A previous version of this article incorrectly | 310 |
Can Traditional Apparel Retailers Really Graduate to Fast Fashion?
While it might be premature to speculate that the traditional business model of fashion retail is dead in the water, it can't be denied that currently, as more and more apparel retailers shift to meet the "fashion on demand" shopping preferences of consumers, the fast fashion business model is King.
In fact, enterprises that ignore fast fashion or underestimate the amount of change needed to compete, are losing serious business to brands like Zara, Uniqlo, H&M, and Mango.
Perhaps least at risk of losing out to fast fashion, are those small, boutique "eTailers" operating online in very specific niches. For larger entities though, it seems the only way to compete successfully is to abandon the traditional two-season cycle of sales, speed up, and focus more on what's going on in the street than on the runway.
But what does it take, from the supply chain perspective, to make the transition from traditional to fast retail? That's the focal theme of this article, in which we present our research into the global goings-on of apparel retail chains disrupted by fast (and now ultra-fast) fashion.
Along with some general observations about making the aforementioned transition, we'll also seek to answer three rather specific questions, which may be of interest to fashion retailers seeking expansion into new markets with an omnichannel fast fashion business model.
1) What are the factors for success in setting up and running omnichannel fashion retail operations?
2)<|fim_middle|> with consumers, more and more of whom are counting ethical and environmental concerns among their criteria for selecting where to shop.
Whichever way the pendulum swings though, fast fashion leaders can teach traditional retailers a thing or two about agility, which is wisdom that should never go amiss in an age of customer-centric commerce. Hopefully this report has captured some of that wisdom, and will be helpful for any fashion retailer planning to advance market position on a domestic or global level.
An informative and well written article, Thank you. | What are the primary considerations with regard to imports and exports across a continental region?
3) How do successful fast retailers measure supply and demand?
First though, we'll explore some of the conditions that appear most favourable to retail companies wishing to compete with industry disruptors, beginning with the way the supply chain is integrated.
It's not called fast fashion for nothing. The companies that have been most successful with this business model are those, like Inditex (owners of Zara) and H&M, that have shortened their supply chains and secured direct control over design, production, and logistics, if not raw material supply.
This would seem to indicate that any apparel company with a vertically integrated structure has a good foundation on which to base a transition to fast fashion.
Of course, ownership of retail stores also goes a long way to enabling fast fashion, as long as certain other performance factors are implemented and executed effectively.
These factors will be discussed in detail later in this report. It's worth mentioning at this point though, the primary necessity to connect with in-store customers continually, to find out (and hence respond to) what they really want at a given point in time.
This rapid response approach is a major requisite for any apparel vendor wishing to capture the benefits of a fast fashion business model.
As might be surmised from the term "fast fashion," the emphasis is on speed in every aspect of the business operation, and vertical integration offers the possibility to react in near real-time to consumers' taste du jour, accurately assess demand and then respond quickly by utilising fast-cycle manufacturing processes.
Hong Kong's Esprit chain, which introduced a vertically integrated, fast-to-market business model in 2013/14, to combat a decreasing share in its European and Asian markets, is a fine example of how this type of operation can improve competitive capabilities.
Whilst it may be preferable to be vertically integrated in order to achieve a short, fast, and responsive supply chain, there are other factors which can also help.
The physical distance between raw material resources, production facilities and the target markets is of particular importance. For this reason, the apparel industry is seeing a significant degree of activity in terms of near and re-shoring activity, as retailers seek to compete with fast fashion leaders.
For example, 12% of re-shoring activity in the United States in 2014 took place in the apparel industry, according to a reshoring Index published by A.T. Kearney.
Further evidence that fashion companies are localising production can be found in reports from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, which show that apparel production output in the United States rose by 4% between 2013 and 2014. That was the second fastest annual growth rate in output among all industry sectors.
Similar conditions exist in Europe, as Western companies deal with the need to speed up supply chains, mitigate against quality concerns and supply disruption, and escape rising production costs in China, the traditional outsourcing destination for many retail chains.
The need for near-shore manufacturing could be good news for Asian fashion retailers wishing to exploit the proximity of relatively low-cost production services to compete with the fast fashion giants.
After all, Asia is home to the very qualities that Western enterprises desire in textile manufacturing and processing. Opportunities may exist to fill the vacuum left as some Western companies move production closer to home.
Certainly Zara and its chief competitors believe in the need to source and manufacture as close to base as possible, regardless of whether production services are kept in-house or outsourced.
Among the big names that have shifted manufacture back to domestic or near-shore locations are Burberry, Saks, American Apparel, and Brooks Brothers. Meanwhile newer companies such as ASOS, Boohoo, and Misguided are leveraging near-shore production to introduce products to market in five weeks or less.
Zara itself sources around 60% of products from within European borders, predominantly in Spain (where the company is headquartered) and Portugal.
Vertical integration and local or regional sourcing/manufacture are two of the most important elements in maintaining the supply chain agility needed to compete with fast fashion trailblazers like Zara. However, agility can be said to begin at the last stage in the supply chain—the point at which consumers make their purchase in-store or place their orders online.
Above all else, in supply chain terms, agility means responsiveness to demand, not just with regard to volume, but also to what consumers want to buy or order.
It's this quick-response mentality that enables Zara (and similar companies) to break free from the traditional cycle of spring/summer-autumn/winter fashion collections and create their own "mini-seasons" through the year.
They're able to gather feedback from consumers (via direct communication with their store and regional management teams), turn it into demand data, analyse it, and respond by continuously launching new clothing ranges—which they introduce to market in around a month.
Zara may be the master of this retail model, but other companies have been able to achieve success with variations on the same approach.
United Kingdom apparel retailer Topshop for example, while not able to provide fashion "on demand" in the same way as Zara, has instead mastered the art of responding quickly to celebrity fashion statements and catwalk trends, leaping on them to design and launch corresponding ranges while hype is peaking, to secure flourishing sales.
Naturally, this level of agility requires tight collaboration between business units and functions, to a degree that's just not possible without alignment of people, processes and especially information technology tools.
Companies planning to compete with fast fashion leaders must be prepared to invest in people and technology since the goal is to get as close to real-time responsiveness as possible. Information systems should be capable of supporting non-linear information exchanges, enabling store managers to pass feedback and requests directly to those in the organisation best equipped to respond.
If there's anything more important to fast fashion agility than communication, it's visibility. That's why successful players use advanced technology to gain transparency throughout the supply chain.
Perhaps the most valuable IT solutions for competitive fashion retailing are enterprise resource planning (ERP) and product lifecycle management (PLM), along with the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) to feed real-time inventory data to these systems.
With the cost of RFID continuing to fall, affordable, yet durable tags can be attached to individual garments to trace every movement, from when they leave the production plant to the point of purchase. Some retailers are going a step further, using woven RFID tags sewn onto the garments to provide visibility throughout the lifecycle, even after purchase by consumers.
Since consumer pressure is mounting for fast fashion retailers to be more proactive about environmental preservation, woven-in tags may become indispensable before long.
For instance, they can be used to evidence responsible disposal or recycling of garments after their useful (or fashionable) life is exhausted, as closed-loop lifecycle management becomes more commonplace.
ERP continues to be the mainstay of fashion retail process management, but more and more enterprises are adding PLM solutions to their IT networks—not to replace ERP, but to complement it.
Integrating ERP and PLM platforms ensures that no gaps exist in visibility or information transfer between the innovation and design phases of a product's life and the processes which take over from production onward.
Of course when supply chain speed is of the essence, fashion retail leaders know that as well as in the management of information, they must exploit technology (especially automation) wherever possible in the physical processes that make up apparel manufacture and distribution.
Saks 5th Avenue, Gilt Groupe and Gap are all using highly advanced robotic fulfillment solutions in their warehouses and distribution centres, while automatic storage and retrieval systems (ASRS) are also becoming commonplace in the apparel supply chain.
Even the best technology solutions will not improve agility if bureaucracy is allowed to get in the way, so fast fashion ideally requires a fairly flat organisational structure, free from the hierarchical headaches that stifle the flow of information up and down the supply chain.
Apart from Zara, a lot of up and coming fashion retailers, especially those focused on the eCommerce market, are employing flat structures. Clothing and shoe retailer Zappos and Revolve (a successful online fashion company) are two such examples.
However it should be noted that developing a flat organisation is not without its own inherent difficulties, although the well-publicised challenges experienced by Zappos may have been more to do with the company's "self-management" initiative, which went a lot further than simply compressing the organisational hierarchy.
Ownership of manufacturing facilities (or of manufacturing enterprises).
Close control of any outsourced parts of the manufacturing process.
Sourcing and manufacturing activities located close to company HQ/regional markets.
Simplification of clothing designs to speed up manufacture.
Deploying automation as much as possible in the production process.
Maintaining reserve manufacturing capacity in readiness for the need to tweak or overhaul the design of a garment (or range of garments).
Manufacturing in small batches, using short production cycles for each garment design. This creates scarcity, promotes impulse buying by consumers, and reduces the need for price markdowns.
It might also be possible to use postponement methods to reduce the risks of obsolescence in materials and finished goods. For example, Zara to some extent constrains its design options by basing them on whatever inventories of fabric are in place. This is a tradeoff which the company deems worthwhile, since it enables more effective procurement planning.
Similarly, a company with the capabilities to dye fabric in-house can save money and reduce obsolescence by purchasing uncoloured fabric and dying it as necessary once a new collection is ready for production. This is just one example, but there may be other elements of production that apparel companies can postpone until sales orders are placed, and then carry out further down the supply chain.
After a decade or so of speculation, first that online, then brick-and-mortar fashion retail was doomed to go the way of the dodo, it's now readily apparent that actually, either model will become increasingly hard to sustain without the presence of the other.
However, the complexity involved in integrating the two forms of commerce into a multichannel operation is considerable.
The challenge is even greater for companies trying to meet consumer demands for the omnichannel experience, where for example, a shopper can browse for clothes on a mobile device while sitting on a bus or train, head home to place an order online via his laptop, then pick up the item in a brick-and-mortar store the same day.
The potential difficulties though, haven't stopped the growing number of online apparel retailers establishing a real-world presence, nor has it left the world of eCommerce bereft of the big names in high street fashion.
In the following sections of this report, we'll explore some of the innovations and best practices employed by fashion enterprises that have established successful eCommerce operations.
It seems there's little benefit to simply adding eCommerce as a new channel to complement a real-world fashion retail presence. The companies enjoying most success are the ones that manage to integrate physical and eCommerce retail channels and enable consumers to switch seamlessly from one to another.
Obviously this requires intelligent use of information technology, process management, and resources. Companies making the transition to omnichannel will probably wish to add CRM to the list of IT platforms, as this is vital to keep track of customer activity across channels, as well as ensuring efficient communication.
A good CRM system will also help to fulfill the communication and internal networking needs mentioned earlier, enabling store teams to capture data about customer preferences for consumption by decision-makers in the design and production functions.
For fashion retailers with store chains already established, a key advantage exists in terms of last mile distribution. Retail stores can be used both as staging posts for local home distribution, and also as collection points in a "click-and-collect" operation.
Click-and-collect is a popular omnichannel option among consumers and for many, is preferable to home delivery.
That said, there are both benefits and drawbacks for operators using this model. On the one hand, click-and-collect gets online shoppers into brick-and-mortar outlets, potentially increasing sales opportunities.
British apparel retailer New Look for example, has found click-and-collect to be a great vehicle for increasing sales. According to a 2015 article in RetailWeek, 25% of click-and-collect customers went on to make extra purchases while visiting outlets to collect their orders.
On the other hand, a click-and-collect operation requires store operators to deal with the extra complexity of managing receipt, storage, and checkout of online orders.
Then there is the consideration of whether to fulfill click-and-collect orders from retail outlet inventory or to route orders to distribution centres/warehouses for delivery to the appropriate retail store.
The most successful click-and-collect retailers are able to combine both fulfillment methods, but again, good information systems are necessary, preferably with the ability to trace orders and lines in real time, all the way from production to the final customer delivery/collection point.
For retailers seeking to expand into new regional or even global markets, the establishment of an eCommerce operation can facilitate first forays, without necessitating real-estate investment.
Home deliveries can be made with the help of a logistics partner—preferably a regional, rather than global carrier, to keep transportation costs down—and click-and-collect services might be made possible by partnering with another retail chain (ideally a non-competing one) to make use of its outlets as collection points.
The use of bonded warehouses in a new market-country to store inventory close to the market and defer the payment of duty/taxes.
Renting small spaces in existing commercial buildings to serve as "pop-up" retail stores or showrooms. Showrooms require fewer local employees to run and can quickly be set up to allow walk-in customers to place orders online with the help of showroom sales associates.
Outsourcing shipping, warehousing and transportation to a regional third-party logistics (3PL) provider.
Partnering with a fashion distributor in the target country/region.
One important key to expanding into new regions is to experiment on a small scale, perhaps by adopting some of the strategies listed above.
Athletics apparel retailer Lululemon is a successful exponent of such strategies, having used showroom experimentation to expand methodically into Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and China.
To be successful in eCommerce, fashion retailers must accept and embrace the fact that consumers expect to be able to return garments if they don't like them. Furthermore, they expect the return process to be fast and straightforward.
Unfortunately, the more straightforward the returns process for the customer, the more convoluted it tends to become for the retailer. There's really no easy way to process returns, even in a traditional retail operation, and when multiple channels are involved, it becomes even tougher.
However, some fashion retailers have found ways to improve the process, primarily with the aid of RFID technology to make returns easier to trace as they move through there reverse logistics flow.
Others prefer to outsource reverse logistics to specialist logistics providers, an increasing number of which are commissioning dedicated reverse logistics centres to cater for the explosion in eCommerce returns.
Partnering with such an organisation might well be the best solution for retailers selling across international borders, especially if a provider can be found that has warehouses in each of the market-countries. It may be possible to have returns shipped from consumers back to local warehouses, from where they would be forwarded to a returns centre in the retailer's home country to be consolidated on a periodic basis.
Cross-border Fashion Logistics: Outsource or Not?
For any apparel retailer intending to compete with the likes of Zara, Uniqlo, H&M, or Mango, the need to establish a global presence is paramount. With this however, comes the complexity of managing cross-border commerce.
The use of outsourced cross-border logistics has already been discussed in this report, especially in the previous section on managing returns, but there are many more reasons to consider international logistics outsourcing—including the simplification of import/export operations.
Aside from anything else, expanding into overseas markets required knowledge of the tariffs and duties involved in shipping goods into and out of the target countries.
Unless a retailer has (or is prepared to employ) a team of specialists with deep knowledge of customs and taxation in those countries, outsourcing shipping activities to a 3PL might be advantageous.
Some companies of course, are quite prepared to invest in the hire of import/export specialists to work with freight forwarders and customs brokers, in which case it can be well worth considering the establishment of bonded warehouse operations, especially if apparel will be sold in a multi-country region such as Southeast Asia.
A bonded warehouse located in Hong Kong or Singapore for example, could be used for a number of purposes, while allowing duty payments to be deferred until inventory leaves the warehouse.
This can be a cost-effective way to store inventory close to the target market and at the same time, to run a localised packaging operation or perform other activities to prepare inventory for sale to foreign customers. It's important to note though, that the activities which can be carried out in a bonded warehouse are limited and controlled by the local customs authorities.
It's highly unlikely for example, that any form of manufacturing or even finishing processes will be permitted. Still, depending on the circumstances of the retailer, bonded warehousing might well be worth exploring as a way to reduce the total cost of shipping garments between countries.
Retailers that don't have strong internal expertise in customs and duty matters though, can probably save money by working with appropriately skilled and knowledgeable logistics service providers, some of which may specialise in shipping exports and imports through a network of bonded warehouses.
Regardless of market-scope, sales channels, scale, or expansion plans, fashion enterprises must plan as accurately as possible to meet demand, if they're to avoid the losses associated with stock-outs or obsolescence.
The latter has always been a troublesome problem in the fashion sector, as consumer tastes are fickle. A garment or collection might sell like hotcakes for a few weeks then suddenly die a death, leaving the retailer with large quantities of suddenly unfashionable clothing which must be sold at marked-down prices.
Another challenge in forecasting relates to the continually changing style collections, which offer no opportunity to base forecasts on historical data, except by looking through a lens of similarity. Even this approach can be difficult however, as styles continue to evolve and similarities between old and new lines may be tenuous at best.
Some of the leading fast fashion companies have been innovative in countering the difficulties of forecasting apparel demand. Zara for example, has all but eliminated the need for far-horizon forecasting by turning its model into one that creates rather than predicts demand.
Close monitoring of consumer purchasing and in-store activity on a day-to-day basis.
Systematic examination of early sales data to help predict future demand for new collections and styles.
Development of a quick-response business methodology, enabling Zara to adapt quickly to changing consumer tastes.
A short, fast, and agile supply chain, which enables inventory to be moved quickly from production facilities to retail stores (anywhere in the world within 48 hours).
Creation of scarcity (or the impression of scarcity) by producing collections and garments in small quantities which once sold out, are replaced with new designs.
Because Zara is able to exercise this high degree of speed and agility, the company only tends to practice conventional demand forecasting for certain raw materials and components.
For example, Zara purchases uncoloured fabrics in bulk before the traditional fashion seasons commence. These purchases are based on conventional demand forecasts, since long resupply lead times mean shortages of base fabrics during the season would be highly undesirable.
At the same time, buying fabrics in an uncoloured state helps Zara reduce the overall need for long-distance prediction. Clothing designs and colours are determined in reaction to shopping trends and the fabric is dyed as part of the manufacturing cycle. As a result, the likelihood of having a glut of unused green fabric for example, at the end of the sales season is pretty low, as is the risk of running out of a given colour.
Another leader in fast fashion (although it doesn't view itself as a fast fashion retailer), Uniqlo, takes a very different approach to matching demand with supply. Uniqlo combines the use of sophisticated forecasting technology to predict demand trends, with a just-in-time supply chain strategy straight from the Toyota playbook.
The result is not hyper-accurate forecasting, but a supply chain that can react so fast to changing circumstances that forecasting inaccuracies are rarely damaging.
In fact, not only can Uniqlo's production facilities create and manufacture new clothing ranges in record time, they're even able to receive and repurpose designs which underperform. If a collection or range fails to sell well, the garments are returned from the company's retail outlets to be transformed into something different.
With some exceptions (such as H&M, which extensively outsources production) it would seem that to compete successfully with a fast fashion business model, a company must already be—or should prepare to be—vertically integrated.
Control over every stage of the design, production and distribution process if not essential, is certainly very desirable.
However, when expanding internationally, partnering with 3PLs, bonded warehouse operators, and in some cases, other retailers can help to reduce logistics costs and enable an experimental approach to be taken in new markets. It also appears somewhat easier for retailers with an online sales component to gain a foothold in new overseas markets.
In any case, consumers' appetites for fashion on demand are at an all-time high, leaving any apparel vendor at a disadvantage of eCommerce operations aren't harmonised with traditional retail methods.
Indeed, transformation from traditional to fast fashion retail almost certainly means embracing the integration of real-world, online, and mobile marketing, sales, and supply operations into a seamless omnichannel experience.
Other key factors for success in the transition include a short, agile supply chain, proximity of production to the target market, a data-driven approach to capturing consumer preferences, and the development of a "quick response" methodology to adapt to market trends in real-time (or as near to real-time as possible).
What's on the Fast Fashion Horizon?
Finally, it's important to note that at the time of writing this report, questions are arising as to which way the fast fashion train is going to head next. As any fast fashion aficionado knows, success as an apparel supplier depends upon connections | 4,560 |
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The Iron Dynasty, DeLaRose Role Play Group » Valeria, Discord Hosted » Avalon The Lions Gape » Chapter Two - Part One
Chapter Two - Part One
1 Chapter Two - Part One on Fri May 03 2019, 14:12
DesdemonaZankoku
Rank: : 0
Experience: : 12 Years
Guild: : N/A
Location : A comfortable spot under the bed
First Rpc: Desdemona Zankoku
Second Rpc: Elaira
Third Rpc:
Roxy:fox:/Adina:leopard:03/17/2019
Adina hunkered down in the small tunnel, her ears pinned back and her tail tucked between her legs. This was the most afraid she'd been in since she lost her old teacher all those years ago. She gave Valerie a nod, agreeing with her. Even though she hated confined spaces, she was happy they were safe... For now. "Yeah, they sure are," she whispered back. Her ears picked up the sounds of the shop from above getting destroyed and her only thought was how this was going to affect Valerie. That monster was going to get to the rest of the elixir, it was only a matter of time and the entire block including the shop above was going to be gone. Would the tree survive? She could only hope. Now that they were in a safe spot, she strapped her gauntlet to her left hand so she could be ready to use it when needed. The weapon was brown and mostly made of leather, except the giant green jewel and claws which were of diamond. "Sewers? Ugh my fur is going to hate me for this. At least we are okay," she said, her voice a bit shaky. After going through the doors, Adina sighed with relief. Now she could actually stand and not hit her head on the ceiling. She looked down to Valerie and spoke back quietly. "Do you know what's going on? This is the doing of that Black Sun group isn't it?" She whispered. "Looks like they caught up to Avalon..." Her eye would quickly adjust to the darkness and she took in her surroundings. It was absolutely disgusting and the horrible smell wasn't helping. "Val... What's your plan here? Where are we going?"
Guinevere03/17/2019
Val shook her head to Adina's questions, sighing softly as they continued along their way, "I don't know who is responsible for all of this, but I intend to find out." Turning a corner, they finally reached the sewers. The smell alone would make the hairs on anyone's heads curl, but that was to be expected from such a place. What was not expected was the level of blood that traveled through it, adding to the already rich aroma. Coughing lightly, she put out the lantern as there was enough light coming through the tunnel, setting it down out of sight behind a rock, "My plan is to get you out of here safely. Then I am going back to my shop and kicking some demonic ass. No one, and I mean NO ONE, destroys my shop.." Hearing snarls further down the sewer, she grabbed Adina's arm and pushed them both up against the wall, reaching up to cover Adina's muzzle. Narrowing her eyes, she peaked around the corner to see a Dire Hound. Eyes widening, she recognized it from a painting she had once saw. Moving back, she slowly released Adina and dug into her pocket, pulling out a vial of her latest creation. Looking up at the woman, she gave a half grin, half smile, "Looks like this is going to come in handy," she whispered, pointing down the tunnel at the creature, "Might want to cover your ears."
Adina looked at what she was stepping in and she wanted to puke. She had lived in the wilds and even tread the swamps, but all that was natural, this was the waste of the city and the blood didn't help any. Her mind began thinking of the people above and who's blood this belonged to. She thought of the people she may never see again, the children that played in the streets everyday, the friendly neighbors and even the rude ones. Simon then came to mind, causing her to shred a tear. Why must the innocent die? What was the point? Adina gave Valerie a nod. "They must be stopped. What of the castle's troops? They are highly trained, you think they may have a chance?" When she told her the plan, Adina shook her head. "If you're going back, I am too! There's no wa-" Valerie had cut her short as her muzzle was covered by her hand. She could hear snarls as well and her ears pinned back, knowing exactly what it was. She looked to Val and smiled. "I always did like the way you thought. Let's see if that creation can really cause some damage," she grinned. She attached her spear to some straps on her back and covered her feline ears, getting ready for what was to come.
Taking a steadying breath, Val thought to herself that she would deal with Adina's objections to her going back alone after they were not being stalked by shadow creatures from the beyond. Some things were best left for slightly more relaxing circumstances. Leaping out into the main sewer line, she shivered as the splash she created smacked against her cheek. Taking a deep breath, she called out at the creature, "Over here you otherworldly bitch!" The Dire Hound spun around and roared at the girl. Val's courage seemed to wane, but only for a moment. Yelling back at it, she took the elixir in hand and hucked it at the creature as hard as she could muster. The vial sped towards the Hound as the creature began taking bounding leaps towards her. Not expecting the Hound to be so quick on the attack, her eyes opened wide as she realized what was about to happen, "Damn.." As the vial and the Hound met halfway, the explosion that followed was devastating. Not only did the sound in such cramped quarters strip Val of her senses, but the shock wave that was created sent her flying backwards into the sewer. As she landed, the liquid of the sewer engulfed her from head to toe. the experience nearly knocking her unconscious. Sitting up in the filth, she spat out a mouth full and retched to the side, staggering to the feet and using the side of the sewer wall for support. Vision slowly returning, she looked down the way the Hound had been, only to see she had caused a complete cave in from that direction. Spitting a bit more bile, she called out, "Don't mess with an alchemist!" Hanging her head, she took a moment to breath, only to freeze a moment later. She could feel the breath on the back of her neck before she heard the growl. Closing her eyes with a grin, she sighed as the growling became louder, "Damn..."
Adina watched the brave woman yell down to the dark beast, then at the same moment Valerie threw the elixir, Adina thought of something. "Wait! Val dont-" it was too late. The potion was flying in the air and made contact with not only the target but Val too. The explosion was loud and whatever else was down here was sure enough to hear it. The feline watched helplessly as her boss was thrown into the deep end of the sewers. "Val!" She cried. Not caring about the sewer waste any longer, she jumped in and hurried her way to Valerie, as she was the only thing that mattered the most. Seeing that the woman was indeed okay and getting out of the muck, she sighed with relief, but it was a short victory. Another beast was just inches from Valerie and it made Adina's heart stop. She shook the remnants of her fear. If she wanted to do more with herself and be a true mage of the castle, she needed to let go of this fear. Her mind flashed back to when her old teacher was taken from her by witch hunters and how she could do nothing at the time because of fear, not this time. "No not again!" She screamed. She pulled out her spear and the jewels began to glow on her body as well as the weapon. Sparks of electricity emitted from it, getting it's energy from it's lightning enchantments. "Ahhhh!" She ran full force at the beast, pushing Valerie to the side and out of reach from the monster before them. "You will not take her from me!" She then shoved her weapons in the direction of the beast's face, hoping she could hit it. If she could, it would release tons of volts in the creature's body, cooking it from the inside and turning it to charcoal.
Slowly turning and looking up at the Dire Hound directly behind her, she used what few seconds left of her life and placed her hands on her hips, tilting her head to the side, "You are one ugly motherf..." Her words were cut short as Adina behind her screamed out and charged, taking the creatures focus from Val. Being shoved to one side, Val fell back into the sewage as Adina slammed her weapon into its face. As the electricity surged, the Dire Hound roared in pain, rearing up on its hind legs and falling backwards into dust. The electric attack though also effected the two women, being surrounded by liquid, giving them both a decent shock as well. Ripping her head from the sewage, Val hacked up a lung before retching again, the combination of recent events plus being electrocuted on top of it causing her body to begin the slow process of shutting down. Looking over at Adina weakly, she coughed again, "Remember your elements girl!" Staggering to her feet once again, she stumbled over to her, helping her up, "We need to leave. Now."
Jeff/Iggy/Bellarose/Ulysees/Aku03/20/2019
(Adina, for killing a beast of Sin, you have gained one level. please pick one level 1 ability and add it to your character card.)
There was a jolt of pain that surged through Adina's body as she killed the beast. Like usual, she attacked before thinking and she paid the price, even hurting her friend in the process. She winced and held her side where the shock hurt most. Her head turned to Val and she dropped her spear, terrified she may have hurt her. "Val! Oh by the ancestors I'm so foolish. I'm so sorry" She hurried to her side and helped her to her feet and in the process, she took one of the healing potions from her bag. "Before we move, you need to take this, get your strength back up..." She pulled the cap off and lifted the bottle of red liquid to Valerie's lips. "I'm such a stupid enchantress... Don't know what you see in me at times..." After giving her some of the potion, she slipped it back in her satchel and got to her feet, picking her spear back up as well. "Where do we go now? There's bound to be more of those." Her tail curled around one of her legs and she shivered. The cold air mixed with the sewage water was taking it's toll. She looked to her gauntlet, remembering that it could create fire. "This could keep us warm, but you gotta stay close to me." Her weapon glowed, making it hot causing it to warm the air around them.
Val accepted the potion, though not willingly at first. Feeling that it made her weak, she was reluctant at first, but drank it down if only to prevent Adina from having anything to say about it, "Better take some of that yourself.. never know what might be around the next corner. And don't forget your spear." Forsaking the heat the gauntlet provided Val trudged through the muck in the direction of the Hound Adina killed, peaking around the corner of the next intersection and sighed relief, waving Adina over, "Coast is clear for the moment. Lets get a move on. Only ten more city blocks before we reach our destination, and I would rather not come face to face with another one of those things.."
Adina shook her head. "I really don't want to risk using more than we need to. We really don't know how long we'll be away from the shop," she responded. She bent down and retrieved her spear before hooking it on one of her straps on her back. "You definitely needed it... I'm sorry again for hurting you, I should have thought before making a move, but I feel I may have not gotten there in time if I did, I wasn't going to let you go like that." As they walked, Adina continued to stay close to her boss, keeping her eye on both her and their surroundings. Once knowing the coast was clear, she turned the corner with Valerie, still curious and concerned where they were actually going. "... We've gotta talk about this, 'making sure I'm safe' plan. I'm not leaving you alone and that's final. We both know how stubborn I am.." Her tail would curl around one of her legs as they tread through the muck. Even though she gotten used to the smell, it still stung her senses and she couldn't wait to be in a place more forgiving to her nose. Reaching further down the tunnel, the feline turned to Valerie, remembering what her thoughts were before they were interrupted by the cultist. "Val... If anything were to happen to you, I don't know how could move on... You've been such a good friend and inspired me to be fearless and take chances." She would sigh, she wanted to tell her the truth, but now was not the time.
Val shook her head as Adina apologized to her, shrugging it off, "Simply be more cautious of your surroundings. I know you acted on instinct, and if it weren't for you, I would be dead right now. You have my gratitude, but lord girl that did not feel pleasant." She glanced back at Adina with a grin, indicating she was only giving her a hard time. As they continued along there way, Val sighed before explaining her plan, "These sewers run to every corner of the city, including the castle. The castles entrance and exits are well protected, but I know my fair share of the guards, and that is where we are going. You will be safe there." She halted as Adina put her foot down about come back with her, turning to face her, "You may be stubborn, but I am more so than you will ever be. You WILL remain at the castle. It is not up for discussion. Your talents are needed there to heal the wounded. My place is back in my shop. End of story." Turning, she continued onward, listening to the woman and laughing softly, "I am nothing special. Just your average short, Earth obsessed woman. But I know what you mean. If anything happened to you, the Underworld itself would not stop me from avenging you."
Adina did her best to keep a watchful eye as they continued along sewer system, her ears flickering, listening to what her boss had to say about her reactions. "I know, I gave myself a good shock as well. I'm so-" she glanced back to Valerie, seeing that she was smiling, which meant she was giving her a hard time. The feline looked away and chuckled. "Heh, even when times are looking bleak, you find a way to put a smile on my face." She looked forward, wondering if the threat had reached the castle yet and if they were able to defend it. Who knows, the castle could already be infiltrated, which wouldn't be any safer. Her smile faded once Val stopped in her tracks and gave her the order. She'd never seen her so firm and strict before and that's when she knew that there was no changing the alchemist's mind. Adina even teared up when Valerie spoke. She wanted to talk back to her, tell her there wasn't a point in going back, but her mind was surely made up. A irritated sigh escaped through her lips and she began to walk again, her tail dragging through the muck sluggishly. "Yes... Okay Val. As much as it hurts me to say it, I'll do as you say... But, don't put yourself down. I've never known anyone more dedicated to their work than you. Nothing average about you, and that's something you can't change my mind about." What Valerie said after, gave her a half smile. It brought her happiness that she thought of her in a similar way.
Knowing that Adina would follow her to hell and back, Val continued trudging along in silence, more than aware she had hurt the woman's feelings with her words. Keeping her safe however was more important to her at the moment, and those feelings would be mended once everything was said and done with. Fortunate to not have run into any further issues down in the sewers, Val spotted what she was looking for; a small ledge up ahead built into the side of the wall. Along the wall ran a ladder, a brilliant thing in the disgusting place, inlaid with silver that moved all the way up to the surface. Next to the ladder was a small wooden box that was equally crafted, and inside looked to be a metal pipe of sorts vanishing into the wall itself. Quickening her pace as best she could, she gripped onto the lip and pulled herself out of the muck, taking a moment to breath. The air from above and gently blew downwards through an open manhole, though tainted with the smell of blood, was far more refreshing than the smell of the sewer. Val looked at Adina with a half hearted smile, "Finally.. Now, lets make sure we are safe for the moment." Forcing herself to her feet she moved over to the box on the wall. Glancing up at the uncovered exit, she frowned a bit before looking back. Lifting a fist, she knocked on the metal pipe within the box in a specific order: twice quickly, twice slower and three times rather sluggishly. Stepping back from the box, she looked at Adina while raising a finger to her lips. After a moment, footsteps could be heard from above, followed by a young child sticking her head down the hole at the top. A hand joined the head, pinching her nose shut as she made a face, "Ewww... it smells funny down here.." Once the girl eyes adjusted to the dim lighting below, her face brightened as she saw the two, "Val?!" Her head vanished from the opening, the little ones cries of excitement being faintly heard above.
Val sighed with relief, looking back at Adina with a grin, "Eh, cant forget an adorable face like this, even if its literally covered in shit." She looked back up at their exit nodding, "Alright. This is where we part. I am sorry you do not like the idea, but I need you here to help tend to whomever needs the help." She looked back with a grin, "Oh, and don't let the Steward push you around. He may be the caretaker of the castle, but he is certainly not the King."
Adina kept quiet for the remainder of the time, just following her boss, her mind lost in the last few hours and the events that took place. How could such a good day turn to utter crap in so little time? She thought of her boss and what was to come of her after they parted... This was not how she wanted to leave her, not like this. When they finally reached their destination, Adina's heart sank. Even before Valerie said it, she knew it was time to part ways. Adina's ears flickered to the sounds of footsteps and then there was a shine of light from a hole above where a child stuck her head out from. Hearing that the little girl knew who Valerie was, the feline turned to her boss. "I was unaware how famous you were," she teased, trying to lighten the mood. She looked back to the hole and then Valerie finally said it. Adina wanted to say no so bad, tell her that she wasn't going to leave her, that she shouldn't go back to the shop, but she knew that the stubborn girl wouldn't budge. A tear fell from her single eye as she gave Valerie a nod. Her hands became shaky and they slowly reached for the ladder as she was about to come up. Though, There was hesitation and she stopped. She couldn't leave, not like this. Adina quickly turned around and pulled Valerie into a tight embrace. "I can't leave," she cried. The cheetah looked down in the young woman's eyes. She was so beautiful, even if she was covered in filth. Her skin so smooth and those eyes, those spellbinding eyes. Why has it taken her so long to tell her how she felt? Adina would put her hand on the top of Valerie's head, brushing through her hair and back behind her ear, then resting it on her cheek. "I... I love you Val." She lifted up her chin so she could gaze in her eyes more clearly and suddenly leaned in to kiss her, her head would turn to the side and their lips would interlock.
Val grinned at the comment about being famous, looking up at Adina with a bit of a laugh, "Ain't all that famous, really. You remember the times I went to the castle to hand out medicines and potions? That little girl is one of them who needs them, and she knows me quite well by now." She looked back up towards the exit, "Never underestimate the memory of a child.." Without warning, she was placed in a rather large hug, a crying Adina buried into her. Pulling away and looking into her eyes, her face lit up even through the filth as Adina claimed her love for her, eyes widening in shock as she was kissed. Closing her eyes slowly, Val kissed back, wrapping her arms around the woman's shoulders. After a moment, she broke away from the kiss and smiled, looking back into Adina's eyes, "And I love you too. Do not worry. We will see one another before long, I promise." Releasing her, Val gently nudged Adina towards the ladder, "Now off with you. We both have work to do." Turning, she hopped back into the filth, making a noise of disgust as she began trudging her way back towards her shop, muttering the entire time to herself, "Things I have to do.. to keep that damn place in one piece.. clean clean clean.. never a moments peace....."
Adina's lips stayed firm against Valerie's, but the kiss remained soft, gentle, slow. She held it for a few seconds before Valarie broke away. A small smile formed on her muzzle when she said she loved her back. There was so much regret within her. She could have told her this long ago, but she was just too afraid. The feline let out a sigh and the made a little chuckle as she was nudged. "Don't blow yourself up while I'm away now," she said nudging her back. She wiped off the tears from her cheek and looked up the ladder where the little girl had been. "If anything happens..." She paused and turned to Valerie. "If anything happens, you come back here, you run as fast as you can from the threat. Just... Just promise me you'll come get me if you need help, okay?" With that, she began to climb, her gauntlet making clanging noises every time her claws came in contact with the bars. Soon enough she was on the top and about to peek her head through the hole.
(Adina enters Avalon Castle)
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The LG G4c, which is an affordable variant of company's flagship phone LG G4, is now available for pre-order in the UK. The popular retailer Carphone Warehouse has listed the handset with an expected delivery date of June 8th. It is available for the starting monthly installment of £15.50 on contract from retailer's iD virtual operator, which works on Three's network.
With the above monthly tariff, the operator offers 300 nationwide minutes along with 5000 texts and 500MB of 4G data. If you are huge data eater, then Vodafone's £36 monthly tariff on standard 2 year contract will give<|fim_middle|> In terms of camera, the handset features an 8MP rear unit and a 5MP selfie camera. | you 10GB of 4G data with unlimited text and minutes. To check all the tariff options for all the four operators including EE and O2, click the source link below.
Running Android 5.0 Lollipop and powered by a quad-core 1.2GHz CPU, the LG G4c has 5 inch display, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of expandable storage, and a 2,540mAh removable battery. | 97 |
SwissBau is largest<|fim_middle|> videos on iOS and Android devices, using the YouTube or Vrideo mobile apps. | event in Switzerland highlighting building materials and trends, held in the Basel Messe (of Art Basel fame) the event brings together people with the latest in building technologies. We worked together with Vision360 and Stratac AG to produce a 360 / VR short film for the Swiss Metallbau Union, a key trade group in supporting the use of steel as a building material in Switzerland.
For this project we utilized 360 imaging combined with VR animations to give viewers a feeling of the potential for steel as a building material in past and future constructions. We were able to film inside the BernMobile Tramdepot, a beautifully constructed building with an expansive interior of steel trusses and columns. We worked together with Vision360, a leader in Switzerland for 360 imaging to film inside the Tramdepot and at the Bern Bahnhof. Animations were built with various tools including Adobe After Effects, Red Giant Trapcode, Element 3D and Mettle Skybox Studio.
Our goal for the project was to give viewers a sense for how steel structures integrate into their lives, and form a part of the fabric of society. We also wanted to highlight the feeling of creation, of building from an initial ideal to the final structure, and imagine what could come in the future for society.
During the SwissBau 2016 event 360 images were produced for IrisWirz C&P Communications and also custom Google Cardboard viewers were delivered to participants to view the Metallbau hat Zukunft 360 video. Alongside the event the website spaces360.ch was launched as a landing page for visitors to understand how to load 360 | 348 |
I was so thankful to learn that I didn't<|fim_middle|> Charlotte Brenner, Jack Rowley, Jack and Bonnie Thornhill and Marjorie Blessing with us. God bless them.
Reverend Lonnie Phillips has moved from Seguin FUMC.
There have been some changes – and we have the memories – good memories.
These pictures were probably taken about eight years ago (if memory serves); it was a good time!
Photo Memories . . . | lose all of my photograph albums after the devastating Flood of 1998. Fortunately, some of the older albums were on the very top shelf of the linen closet – and thus escaped damage.
Alas, the albums on the lower shelves were mostly photographs of the grandchildren (for we would look at these pictures over and over again); these were irreparably damaged or lost.
Now, I'm searching through old high school photo albums for snapshots to include in the next Scorpio Tales Alumni Newsletter.
I must have given the original of these photographs to someone – I found the 'proof' sheet in one of my snapshot boxes.
Remembering the good times with the Sharers' Class. We no longer have Nancy Stoffel, Guy Nunnelly, Betty Nunnelly, | 158 |
Home The State Culture A Tribute to Unsung Heroes
A Tribute to Unsung Heroes
The Oklahoma Firefighters Museum shines a light on truly brave individuals.
Carol Mowdy Bond
Did you know that Oklahoma City is home to one of the nation's largest firefighter museums? Located east of the OKC Zoo in the Adventure District, the 10,000-square-foot Oklahoma Firefighters Museum and Fallen and Living Firefighters Memorial Complex includes exhibits of the Oklahoma fire service; antique fire apparatus and equipment dating back to the mid-1700s; and over a dozen restored fire trucks.
"Completed in 1969, this building is totally funded by Oklahoma State Firefighters Association members," says Gene Brown, the museum director and a retired firefighter. "And they keep it going through their dues. We're working now towards a $9 million expansion because we've outgrown this building."
Founded in 1894, the OSFA was Oklahoma and Indian Territories' first firemen's association. Today, the OSFA is a clearing house for training, safety and legislative initiatives related to its members.
The OSFA museum houses Oklahoma's first fire station, originally located at Fort Supply in Indian Territory. Inside the 1869 structure is the hose cart, which drew water from horse troughs and ponds – although bucket brigades still existed at that time.
"The Guthrie Fire Department was one of OSFA's founding members, and we have their 1919 Seagrave Engine," says Brown.
There's also a Hunneman & Co. hand pumper, built in Boston. The company, owned by Paul Revere's apprentice William Hunneman, built the apparatus, fabricating some parts in Revere's copper rolling mill. A firefighter's helmet from the 1871 Great Chicago Fire is on display, alongside 5,500 firefighters' patches from around the world.
"We've got tidbits of everything," says Brown. "We have a fully functioning, early 20th century fire alarm system that would have been mounted on a pole, and opened with a key, to report a fire. And although we have a lot of Oklahoma artifacts, we also have global artifacts. We get visitors from everywhere, including a lot from Europe."
All school grades and age groups can enjoy the museum, which gives a half-price admission discount for groups of ten or more. And the gift shop offers many souvenirs, including some made by firefighter-owned businesses.
"Oklahoma has about 944 fire departments, and probably 85% of them are volunteer fire departments," says Brown.
Volunteer fire departments get a lot of their operating funds through events, such as pancake breakfasts. But any fire department fundraisers appreciate support. Donate to OSFA, a 501c3, through their website: osfa.info.
The museum is open Monday-Saturday, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. at 2716 N.E. 50th.
Among attractions at the Oklahoma Firefighters Museum include a Guthrie Fire Department 1919 Seagrave Engine and<|fim_middle|> Living Firefighters Memorial, sits just outside. Names of Oklahoma firefighters are engraved on 48 panels, with up to 500 names on each. Names of those who died in the line of duty, from 1894 to the present, are engraved in the Wall of Valor.
"Visitors often tell us about their relatives who died fighting Oklahoma fires, and the names aren't listed on the wall. We add those names if our research verifies the information," says Brown.
The memorial includes "Just Another Day," a monument designed by artist Shahla Rahimi Reynolds, wife of an Oklahoma City Fire Department battalion chief.
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Digital Edition January 23
Wedding 101
Uniquely Oklahoma
Jami Mattox - June 24, 2015
Alaina Stevens - January 26, 2023 | engraved panels with names of fallen Oklahoma firefighters.
Photos by Carol Mowdy Bond
Important Memorials
The museum's sobering monument, the Fallen and | 31 |
Archive for the 'friendship' Category
Opposites Attract: The Jerry Falwell and Larry Flint Friendship
Folks, I've been thinking a great deal about friendship. Must we always be just like our friends? (You know I'm going to say no.) Can't we appreciate different things in different people? (I would assuredly hope so.) And have other people managed to find common ground despite their differences?
Too many people get caught up in their "tribes" of folks who say they believe every single thing down to the last jot and tittle as themselves. They don't challenge themselves, or their assumptions; they aren't strong enough, perhaps, or maybe they just see no need.
Yet Larry Flynt — the famous owner of Hustler magazine (a men's magazine that, shall we say, specialized in raunchiness rather than photographic artistry) — and Jerry Falwell, the famous Protestant minister, ended up friends after fighting like cats and dogs for years due to their obvious differences. (To say that Falwell did not approve of pornography, much less graphic porn like Hustler, is a severe understatement.)
How did they become friends?
Well, there's a story behind that, and it goes like this: After Jerry Falwell lost a big lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court, he went to Flynt and said, "I believe God wants us to be friends. Goodness knows we've tried everything else." (This is my best paraphrase from several things I've read over the years.)
Flynt had some God-fearing friends, such as Ruth Carter Stapleton (former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's sister), and had converted, at least for a short time, to Christianity in the 1970s. (I think he made it about a year before he again proclaimed he was an atheist.) He respected them despite their differences. But no one, not him and probably not Falwell, would've believed that these two wildly disparate personalities would become friends.
Why? Well, to put it mildly, most people do not become friends after they lose such a high-profile lawsuit. (Or any lawsuit.)
Yet Falwell extended Christian charity to Flynt, and Flynt responded. Flynt once said (again, from my best paraphrase), "We had almost nothing in common, yet he was a great friend."
These two were unafraid to discuss their differences, too. They knew in many ways they were diametrically opposed. Yet…they also had some things in common, such as beliefs in integrity and fair dealing. They also believed people should honestly confront themselves, plus both believed in the rights of people with disabilities to fair treatment and understanding. They also were both, adamantly, against the death penalty, and Flynt backed it up when the gunman who paralyzed him was on death row as Flynt asked for the death penalty not to be applied.
In writing circles, we have a few other "opposite attracts" friendships, including the professional collaboration and long friendship between David Weber and the late Eric Flint. I know from my own knowledge of reading various posts by both men at Baen's Bar (find it by going to baen.com and look for the link) that both men were intelligent, spirited, and tough but fair when discussing their various differences. (The respect between the two men was never in doubt.) What they had in common was personal integrity, honesty, commitment, a strong work ethic, and a willingness to work together to write excellent fiction.
My late husband Michael was a major admirer of David Weber, years ago. He had all the Honor Harrington books, plus the Bahzell books, and several other ones. (I can't remember all the names now, but I'd probably recognize the various covers.) Michael, like myself, believed in traditional small-l liberal values and tended to vote for centrist candidates. (This was quite right-wing for San Francisco, he proudly used to say. I think Michael loved being contrary. But I digress.)
See, it is possible to respect and admire someone no matter what providing people are of good will and no malice. Flint and Weber worked together, were great friends, and appreciated each other. And the oddest couple of all, Flynt and Falwell, certainly became great friends and appreciated each other.
Knowing of these friendships makes me believe that people in general can, still, become friends with folks who seemingly have nothing in common.
So, when you abhor the state of the world — and truly, there are very difficult things going on all over the place, including a ton of stupidity — remember this:
It is possible to be friends with someone of a different political party. It is possible to become friends with someone of a different gender or sexual expression. It is possible to become friends with someone who worships differently than yourself…and it definitely is possible to be friends even if all of these things are present, providing we are people of goodwill and do as much listening as we do talking.
(That's hard for me, but I'm working on it.)
Anyway, what "opposites attract" friendship have you wondered about? Tell me about it in the comments!
Posted in friendship, in general, Inspirational stuff, Michael B. Caffrey, Prescient observations, Religion, Remembrance
Tagged with David Weber, Eric Flint, Jerry Falwell, Larry Flynt, opposites attract friendships, unlikely friendships
Fantastic Schools Hols Just Released — Look for my Newest Elfyverse Story There!
As the overly long title to this blog says, Fantastic Schools Hols has just been released.
Now, as to why I explicitly put "look for my newest Elfyverse story there" into the headline…there lies a (brief) tale.
See, as I'm not well-known, I'm not among the named authors on the front of the book. (I'm instead part of the "many more.") Amazon has something weird going on where only nine authors in addition to Chris Nuttall (the biggest name here, and by far the draw as well) were able to be listed…I don't understand this. Maybe it was just a quirk in the system.
The upshot of that is, if you don't know my story is in there, you won't find it very easily. Not unless you go to my Amazon Author Page, which does have it included. (Amazon's customer service there was outstanding; the customer service rep fixed it within two hours, I think, and got it on my page.)
So, you might be wondering what the story is about. (Ha! It's time to tell you…insert not-so-evil Halloween crackling voice.)
It's called "Jon and Leftwich Have a Holiday Adventure." As every story had to deal with a holiday from magical school, mine dealt with Bruno (then named Jon) and his best pal, Iarlait Leftwich, who goes only by his last name as Iarlait is just too silly of a name to be borne (so Leftwich has told me, and I'm not messing around with that…ahem.) It's Ba'altinne there, or Beltane as we'd have it; they have an important religious ceremony there called Blessing of the Beasts. Every single animal has to be blessed by someone…the high muckety-mucks get Lady Keisha Madhrogan (the equivalent of our Pope), who is an important character in the two Elfy novels. But Joe Schmoes like Bruno and Leftwich are at this point in their lives get postulants, not full priests.
The adventure starts when Leftwich's dog, Annbess, decides she doesn't particularly want to be blessed today. She takes exception (or at least is fascinated by) the necklace the postulant, Karenna, is wearing; it looks like a map of the stars, and as such, it means the owner plans on committing a great deed that's worthy of such an important gift.
Well, Annbess somehow gets the necklace off the postulant and runs off. The two boys have to somehow find Annbess, hope she has the necklace still (or at least get some idea as to where else it might be), and they only have their wits plus their magic (mostly Bruno's magic, as Leftwich is too scattered by all of this to help much) to get the necklace back before Karenna's Reverend Mother gets involved.
At any rate, I hope this little blurb (or synopsis, or call it what you will) has whet your appetite for downloading Fantastic Schools Hols and reading all the stories there (not just mine). If you have Kindle Unlimited, it is free to read…and I don't know about you, but "free" in this economy is one of my favorite words, ever.
Before I go, I'll explain where the chronology of this story is. It would be the first story about Bruno (again, then named Jon) doing anything of a magical nature, but it's told as a frame story from after the rousing events of the two Elfy novels. ("Hey, do you remember when Annbess ran off…?") So it's both first and last, chronologically…which suits me fine, as I tend to be silly like that.
I do hope you will read the story, you'll get a few chuckles out of it, and that you'll start reminding me of my promise to finish up an Elfyverse collection and get it out by the end of the year. (Still working on it, honest!)
Come back and let me know if you've read it, hey?
Posted in Elfy, Elfyverse, friendship, Writing
Tagged with "Jon and Leftwich Have a Holiday Adventure", Fantastic Schools Hols, Magical school anthologies
Remembering Del Eisch, My First Band Director
Folks, last week, my first truly good band director died. (In all senses.)
Delbert A. Eisch — or Del, as he urged everyone to call him — was eighty-five, and had lived a good, long life. In that life, he'd done many things as a conductor, a trombone player, as an activist for live music, and much, much more. He taught in Racine for thirty-six years, and also conducted over 640 concerts while the conductor of the Racine Concert Band (previously named the Racine Municipal Band).
Much of this information can be gleaned from his obituary, which you can find here, but I wanted to summarize it before I got into what Mr. Eisch meant to me.
As I said, he was the first good band director I'd ever known. When I joined the Racine Municipal Band (not yet called the RCB), I was only fourteen. I played the oboe, then; I hadn't picked up either the sax or the clarinet as of yet. I'd played in the Kiwanis Youth Symphony as an oboist and had played in my junior high school band and orchestra at Gifford (it's now a K-8 school, but back then it was solely a junior high — our term for middle school at the time). But the junior high band was limited to what most of the performers were able to play, meaning I didn't get a chance to play high-level pieces, nor did I get much sense at that time of what good band literature was all about.
Mr. Eisch knew how to program for his band, though. I figured that out immediately. We played marches — John Philip Sousa, Henry Fillmore, etc. — as nearly all bands do, but we also played more. We played show tunes. We played overtures. We played incidental pieces composed to be heard behind ballerinas, or with movies (as we certainly played selections from movie soundtracks). And we played the big pieces for concert band, including the two Gustav Holst Suites for Band, as well.
Mr. Eisch was extremely encouraging to me when I was a young musician. This was essential, as at the time I felt completely lost in my life. I loved music, loved to play, but otherwise I was a misfit. I read too much. I enjoyed talking with people much older than myself. I studied history and geography and some mathematics along with reading everything I could get my hands on, because I'd started to write stories and poems and wanted to be knowledgeable about my chosen subjects.
I loved science fiction and fantasy, of course, even back then. I was fortunate that my local TV station regularly played episodes of Star Trek (now called "The Original Series"), and I was even more fortunate that my junior high's library had an excellent selection of SF&F books along with copies of Downbeat Magazine and other musically oriented magazines such as Rolling Stone. (That dealt with commercial music, sure. But things were applicable across all disciplines, and I tried to learn whatever I could, wherever I could.)
Anyway, I think Mr. Eisch knew, from all his years teaching at Gilmore School, that I was a bit of an odd duck. (Or at least that I felt like one.) He was gentle, kind, and patient with me as I learned the music — which wasn't too hard for me, as even then I was quick on the uptake and an excellent sight-reader — and how to get along with the people in the band.
He encouraged my talents, to the point that I played oboe solos in front of the band, then later a clarinet duet, a saxophone solo, and finally a clarinet solo before I was off to my first undergraduate school. (Me being me, and more importantly being married to a guy who was then an Army Reservist and later in the active-duty Army, I needed to go to three different colleges/universities to finish my degree.) He also added in twelve bars for an improvised solo when I played "Harlem Nocturne" with the band, so it sounded a little jazzier and helped to give me a better experience as a musician.
My tale picks back up approximately ten years later, when my then-husband and I were back in Racine after his military service ended. Our marriage was breaking up, which I didn't know then (but can clearly see now), and I needed music as an outlet. (I always had, so why not then?)
Mr. Eisch warmly welcomed me back to the band. (My soon-to-be-ex-husband also joined the band as a percussionist.) He had a need for an additional clarinetist, so would I mind playing clarinet?
I did not mind.
It was interesting, as I got to hear many of the same pieces in a different way than before. I learned how the various parts interrelated and asked Mr. Eisch many questions about music and conducting that he patiently answered. (At the time, I was hoping to eventually be a conductor myself. This is a dream that didn't come to fruition, but the knowledge I gained was still invaluable.)
When I finished my Bachelor's degree at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, I started looking for graduate schools. (I wanted to teach in college, and that was the way forward. Plus, I wanted to learn even more about music, harmony, melody, music theory, music history, etc., as I loved everything about music.) I discussed the merits of them with Mr. Eisch, along with several other wonderful musicians in the band; eventually, I decided on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Once I finished my degree there (it took me a few additional years due to family health concerns), Michael and I married. We knew we'd go back to his home in San Francisco sooner or later, so I didn't rejoin the band at that time.
A few years passed. Michael and I had moved to Iowa. I'd looked into perhaps going to the University of Iowa as a doctoral student, once I qualified for in-state tuition…then Michael died, suddenly and without warning.
I have to include this, to explain the rest.
I didn't feel like playing my instruments for years. I rarely composed any music, either. It was hard to write. Hard to do anything. I barely even recognized myself in the mirror, I was so upset.
So, because of that, I didn't attempt to rejoin the band, or even find out if they might have a use for me.
I did, however, rejoin the Parkside Community Band in October of 2011 (not too long before my good friend Jeff Wilson passed away). And doing that led me back to the Racine Concert Band, where Mr. Eisch was now the band's business manager (and conductor emeritus).
Mr. Eisch and I had several conversations along the way, once I rejoined the band. Some were to do with the band and its need for funding and fund-raising. Others were about life, and about loss, and about faith, as well as music.
Mr. Eisch then retired as business manager, and completely stepped away from the RCB. We did see him at concerts for a few years after that…then COVID hit.
Anyway, the last time I saw Mr. Eisch was earlier this year. I was going into Ascension All-Saints Hospital for an appointment; he was coming out of there, being medically discharged. He was happy to see me, and I was happy to see him; he asked how I was doing, how my family was doing, and asked me to tell my parents that he'd said hi (as he knew them both well, too, especially my Dad as he played in the RCB for ten years, himself, as a drummer).
I didn't know that would be the last time I ever saw him, or I would've told him just how much his kindness and dignity and example had meant to me, along with all of the musical knowledge he'd imparted along the way.
Mr. Eisch was a very kind man. He was also a gentle man, in the best of senses. He loved music, of course he did, but even more so, he loved his family and friends.
Good men, good people, are sometimes hard to find. But when we get a chance to be around them, we hopefully reflect the light they can't help but give out a little brighter. Then that light goes on, and on, and still on, for as long as people last…or at least as long as our memories do.
I truly hope that his widow, Anne, will be comforted by his memory. Always.
An Addendum: I wrote this today, on the eighteenth anniversary of my beloved husband Michael's death, because I wanted everyone to know just how much Mr. Eisch meant to me.
Michael only met Mr. Eisch once, I think. We were at the grocery store, or maybe at the mall…anyway, he did meet Mr. Eisch, and told him it was a pleasure to meet one of my formative influences.
I'd like to think that Michael again met with Mr. Eisch in Heaven, Eternity, or whatever The Good Place (TM) truly is, and that Michael has passed on what I've just said — as he knew I felt this way, because he knew me extremely well — just in case Mr. Eisch still did not know it.
Posted in friendship, Michael B. Caffrey, Remembrance, Widowhood
Tagged with Band Conductors, Del Eisch, Delbert A. Eisch, obituaries, Racine Concert Band, Racine Musicians and Conductors
My Thoughts, As A Widow, On Recent "This is Us" Episodes
(What a pretentious title, huh? But it was the best I could do…moving on.)
My Mom and I have watched NBC's TV show "This is Us" about the Pearson clan for several years. (I can't recall if we watched it regularly until the third year, but we did watch.) I've had a great deal of empathy for various characters. I remember Randall (played by Sterling K. Brown), the Black man raised in a white family, meeting his biological father for the first time. That was both difficult and heartening, all by itself; when the Pearsons, en masse, decided to welcome William (Randall's bio father), it became something more.
Anyway, the matriarch of the Pearsons is Rebecca, played by Mandy Moore. We see her when she's young and heavily pregnant; we see her when she's in her late twenties/early thirties, raising her kids; we see her in her fifties and sixties, after her first husband's passed away and she's married her second one; we see her, finally, with Alzheimer's disease, dying with her kids and grandkids around her.
Rebecca's story is the one that I took to the most, over time. (This is not surprising, I suppose.) She loved her first husband Jack with everything that she had, and when he died unexpectedly, still in his prime, her world collapsed.
I understand how that feels extremely well.
Rebecca, unlike me, had three children who were all teenagers. She still had to be there for them. She also had good friends, including Miguel (the man who later became her second husband), her husband's best friend. The friends helped Rebecca and her kids accustom themselves to a life with a Jack-sized hole in it.
This was not easy for any of them. Jack was an interesting, kind, funny, hard-working, loving man who adored his wife and was so ecstatic to be a father. He had his faults, including battles with alcoholism, that he tried to hide from his wife (and mostly did hide, successfully, from his children). But his virtues far outweighed his flaws.
Obviously, Jack's loss was hardest on Rebecca. She was still in her prime, in her late thirties/early forties. She hadn't expected to be a widow, much less so soon. But she was one, and she had to adapt on the fly, just as her kids were starting to flee the nest.
As her kids married, divorced, remarried, had children, and lived their lives, one thing was clear: even if their spouses had been divorced, they were still part of the Pearson clan. They were still welcome at every family function. They were included, not excluded, because the Pearsons believed "the more the merrier," which probably came from Rebecca being pregnant with triplets in the first place. (The third triplet died, which is why Rebecca and Jack adopted Randall, who was born on the same day and needed a family as his mother had died and his father — then — was completely unknown.)
Of course, there were oddities that happened to the Pearsons. (How else? Life itself is strange.)
One of them was when Randall's father, William, made contact with Rebecca and Jack when Randall was quite young. William felt Randall was better off where he was, as William was battling a drug addiction along with poverty and much frustration; that was an extremely hard decision, but one that reaped major dividends late in life when Randall (in his thirties, roughly) found that William had known a) he was Randall's bio father and b) where Randall was the entire time. Randall forgave William, in time, and as I said before, the Pearsons welcomed William until the day William died.
That said, for many fans, the oddest oddity of them all was the fact of Miguel marrying Rebecca. We knew Miguel was with Rebecca from the start (or nearly), because "This is Us" has always told its story in a non-linear fashion. We also knew that Miguel was Jack's best friend, that he was appreciative of Rebecca from the start (he told Jack to make sure he married Rebecca, because "someone else" would; maybe even he didn't know that someone else, someday, would be Miguel himself), and that while Jack lived Miguel made no moves (as a quality human being, of course he didn't).
Because of the jumping back and forth in time effect, though, until the last few episodes it was impossible to tell when Miguel had married Rebecca. (That Rebecca had developed Alzheimer's, and Miguel was caring for her until his own death, was something explored in great depth this past season.)
Well, Miguel didn't get an episode revolving around him until a few weeks ago. That's when I found out that Miguel had waited several years, had moved away to a different state, and made sure his feelings were real (and not something conjured out of pity and the deep, abiding friendship he'd always had with Rebecca while Jack was still alive) before he married Rebecca.
We still didn't see his marriage, which was the second marriage for both of them. (Miguel's first marriage ended in divorce.) But we saw how he took care of Rebecca. He was tender, kind, compassionate, loving, and altogether the right person for her after Jack died.
I was happy she found another good man to love.
This may sound odd, if you've read my blog for years. I thought for quite a few years that my heart was not big enough to admit another love — romantic love, anyway — after Michael's way-too-early death.
While I found out that was wrong, the two men I've cared about in the past few years did not end up growing with me in the same way. They did not want the same things. (Or in one case, even if he had, he could not express that. He is neuro-divergent.)
The man who might've been "my Miguel" was Jeff Wilson, who died in 2011. Jeff didn't know Michael, so that part wouldn't be analogous. But Jeff knew I was the person I am because of Michael. Jeff also was my best friend of many years (seven, at the time of his death), and during his fatal health crisis said to me, with a weary yet humorous tone in his voice, "Can we please proceed to the dating phase now?"
I'll never know what would've happened had Jeff lived. But I knew I was going to try, and I told him that.
Then he died, after he'd been improving; his death was unexpected, and he was only a year older than Michael had been when Michael died.
So, two men. Both interesting, intelligent, funny, hard-working, creative…both themselves, indelibly themselves, and I cared about them — loved them — both. (I did not yet have romantic love for Jeff, but I certainly was getting there at the time of his death. I definitely had agape love and philios also.)
Anyway, Rebecca's death episode was this past Tuesday. She was pictured on a train. She saw William (acting as the conductor); she saw her obstetrician (acting as a bartender). She saw her kids, possibly including her deceased triplet (I wasn't sure about that), at various ages. She heard the various well-wishes of the Pearson clan, including from her daughter's ex-husband, her son Kevin's wife (he'd only married twice, to the same woman, but many years apart), and her sons. But she was waiting "for something"…
As she's waiting, she sees Miguel, a passenger on the train. He salutes her with his drink, and tells her she's still his favorite person.
This made me cry.
Miguel got no more time in that episode, which upset me. I thought Rebecca should've gone to him, hugged him, and said "thank you." Her mentation has been restored, on the train; she knows that Miguel helped her while she was so ill with Alzheimer's. She also got a second wonderful husband in addition to her first, which is very rare…yet while she smiled at him, and seemed happy to see him, she didn't go to him.
This made me even sadder.
The end of the episode came when her daughter, Kate, was able to get there (she'd been overseas). As she says goodbye, Rebecca clearly crosses over and enters "the caboose," where her first husband, Jack, waits.
That's where the episode ended.
I don't know what'll happen in the finale of "This is Us." I do hope that Miguel's contribution to Rebecca's life, and to the entire life of the Pearson clan, will somehow be recognized. (Her children all told her to say "hey" to their father for them, but no one asked her to hug Miguel if they saw him. That, too, bugged me, but maybe the writers wrote it and they had no time to get it into the episode.) It's obvious that without him in her later years (even before she got Alheimer's), there wouldn't have been as much acceptance and love from the Pearsons as a whole.
Anyway, my take as a widow is that I want there to be some recognition of how much good Miguel did for Rebecca, and that Jack had no problems with it as Miguel both made her happy and helped her as her mentation declined. (Miguel also still saw Rebecca as the same person, even with her mind going; her own children couldn't always do that, as her daughter Kate pointed out in a recent episode.)
To be able to love again after such tragedy was wonderful. To not express thankfulness and gratitude for loving again…well, had it been me in that position, I hope I'd have done better.
(And yes, I know they're all characters. Not real people. But they surely felt real, which is why I hope that Mandy Moore wins an Emmy for her portrayal of Rebecca and that Jon Huertas wins an Emmy as well for his excellent supporting work.)
Posted in Criticism/critique, friendship, heartbreaking stories, Heartwarming stories, in general, love stories, Persistence, Pop Culture/TV criticism, Prescient observations, Remembrance, romance, Writing
Tagged with Alzheimer's disease, caretakers, caretaking, Emmy Award caliber performances, Jon Huertas, life, life in all its messy complexity, Mandy Moore, Miguel Rivas, Randall Pearson, Rebecca Pearson, second marriages, Sterling K. Brown, This is Us, TV episodes
Updates on Ukraine, the Empathy Gap Essay, and a Discussion of Muslims, Cigarettes, and Virtue-Signaling
Folks, I wanted to write a blog today about Ukraine along with updating last week's blog about the empathy gap. I also veer into a discussion of smoking that may surprise you. So do keep reading, OK?
Sometimes, a news commentator utterly surprises.
Why am I saying that? Well, Malcolm Nance, a longtime MSNBC analyst, has joined the international force doing their best to push Russia right back out of Ukraine. He is a Navy vet, and he said that he was "done talking." Therefore, he went to Ukraine, where he's been now for over a week, and has been doing whatever he can to aid the fighters there.
I'm glad Ukraine continues to resist Russia's stupid and pointless invasion. (Well, not stupid and pointless to Vladimir Putin, Russia's President. He wanted the Ukrainian bread basket, as the land is exceptionally fertile there. And rather than pay for the grain like anyone else, he thought he'd just take the country, so he would just get the grain as well.) But it saddens me to see the destruction of once-beautiful cities like Kyiv and Mariupol.
Not to mention the loss of human lives, which is utterly incalculable.
I hope that whatever Malcolm Nance continues to do over there works. He has always struck me as a highly intelligent man, though I didn't always agree with him. (I don't always agree with anyone. Even with my late husband Michael, we had an occasional disagreement. Spice for the mix, I always thought, especially as we made sure to "fight fair" and not drag up old and dead issues over and over.)
Anyway, the next piece of old business has to do with my essay on empathy a week-plus ago. Paul, a regular reader, asked why I didn't bring up someone on the left who's sparked my ire as much as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert have on the right. Another reader, Kamas, mentioned Maxine Waters — a very able legislator in her way, but also someone who seems to enjoy verbal conflict and hyperbole from time to time. And I'd brought up two other D legislators who seem to get into trouble on a regular basis, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
Rep. Omar is in the news right now for calling out a double standard on airplanes. Apparently, a church group that had just come back from working with Ukrainian refugees sang a Christian hymn on the plane. This upset her, as she believes Muslim groups would be shut down from singing on planes. (Maybe this has happened to her, but if so, she hasn't said so specifically.)
My view of this is simple. The folks who went to Ukraine or the borders of Poland and Romania and elsewhere that border Ukraine, and did good work, deserve to celebrate any way they like. If their song wasn't bothering anyone else on the plane, let them sing.
Mind, I'd also say the same thing for a Muslim hymn. There are many uplifting Muslim hymns, I believe, but we almost never hear of them — much less hear them — because Muslim in the US tends to equal "Shia or Sunni rebel" rather than pious person doing their best for God and country.
Still, why Rep. Omar waded into this one with both feet, I don't know.
Centuries ago, the Muslim people were often literate, learned, urbane, and often had no trouble with other "People of the Book" (meaning Christians and Jewish people). The Muslims came up with algebra, created music and art and poetry and architecture, and did many wonderful things.
We tend to forget all that with the current crop of fundamentalists over in Iraq and elsewhere. Those rigid, ruthless sorts are not what being a Muslim is all about, any more than, say, the so-called Christians who helped burn down Minneapolis and Kenosha and other places in the last few years have anything to do with most actual Christians. (The Christians who protested are fine. The ones who burned for the sake of destruction are not. We forget about the former because we have had to dwell on the latter in order to rebuild.)
I have an online friend, a doctor, who's a proud Muslim woman. She lives in India. I've known her now for several years, while she's been at university, then started medical school in earnest (from what it sounds like), to studying for boards (which sounds harrowing) and being a medical resident (which, like the US and the UK, consists of many hours of work for not that great of pay, and is exhausting).
Tajwarr, my friend, loves makeup, loves to dress up, does not wear a hijab (not in the pictures I've seen of her), and writes poetry. She has many gifts, including that of putting people at ease. She is unfailingly polite, and does her best to be cheerful with patients, family, and friends without losing one ounce of authenticity.
I admire her.
In India, where she lives, Muslims are being persecuted. Hindus, by far, have the upper hand there. And like anywhere else, the folks with the most seem to lord it over those with less. So the populous Hindus have made it harder for Muslims — an ethnic minority in India, I think — to enjoy being themselves and to enjoy their own culture, religion, music, etc.
I say all this to point out one, simple thing: You can't put all people in a box. Not all Muslims. Not all Christians. Not all Neo-pagans. You just can't stereotype people like that.
One of the folks I know, who I worked with on Hillary Clinton's campaigns in 2008 and 2016, worked on behalf of Joe Biden in 2020. She is a Black woman. Very smart, able, all that. She knew Biden would not be perfect, but she worked for him anyway. Part of the reason for this might have been that Donald Trump signed a bill that raised the minimum age to smoke from eighteen to twenty-one. She felt that was no one else's business, and that if you're old enough to go to war, you're old enough to smoke.
(Even though I don't smoke, I agree with her.)
My friend has always smoked menthol cigarettes, such as Newports. But Biden's FDA banned menthol cigarettes citing their "adverse affects on Black Americans." (This was often the phrase used by journalists and TV analysts when this happened last year.) Menthol, you see, masks some of the harshness of the tobacco, and it apparently opens up additional nicotine receptors. (I have never smoked, so all I can say is apparently.)
At any rate, my friend was absolutely furious about this. She felt it's her body, her choice. Alcohol is allowed in many flavors, and alcohol kills many more people than cigarettes.
She also was deeply unhappy, and remains deeply unhappy to this day, about how people who smoke get treated like second-class citizens. Being a smoker is now worse than being a drinker, and that's just wrong.
I'm not saying any vice is good. But I have two vices of my own: lottery tickets, and diet soda. (Well, three if you add in Snickers bars.)
Most of us have at least one vice, and for most of the time, this vice is harmless or reasonably harmless. (Some folks, knowing that I am a plus-sized woman, probably would tell me that a Snickers bar is not harmless in my case. Too bad. I definitely agree with my friend regarding "my body, my choice.") Those who drink in moderation are not shamed in the same way as those who smoke in moderation.
My late husband, and my late grandmother, and most of my grandmother's family before her, were all smokers. My grandma lived to be 89 years old. My husband's heart attacks were almost assuredly not caused by smoking (this from the ME at the time), though it probably didn't help. Most of grandma's family lived to be 75 and up…they drank, smoked, gambled, some of the men probably wenched, and they enjoyed life to the fullest until the day they died.
Look. I am asthmatic. Smoke and smoking can cause trouble for me. Michael, my husband, knew it, and did his best to smoke outside. The smell on his clothes was minor that way. He used breath mints and did his best to keep the nicotine taste out of his mouth so when we kissed, we had a better experience.
In short, he did his best to minimize the effects of smoking. Plus, he was trying hard to quit — he tried at least six times during our marriage (we only got two-plus years together as a married couple, remember, so this is actually rather impressive), and was down to only four cigarettes a day from a pack-and-a-half habit. (He could not use the patch because of his skin issues. He didn't do well with the gum because of his dentures. And the only other option for him, nicotine water, was so foul that he could not stand it. I didn't blame him.)
Therefore, I cannot and will not censure any smokers. And, quite frankly, I do not understand anyone who does unless they're "virtue-signaling." (Yes, me, a left-of-center more-or-less liberal person, is using that term.)
We all have faults. We all have vices. We all have "Achilles heels."
Lording it over anyone because you do not like their legal vice is not just stupid, pointless and wrong. It's also cruel. So if you're someone who's told yourself, a non-smoker, that smoking is evil and have forgotten all about how the cigarette companies did everything they could to keep people hooked by altering the levels of nicotine, etc. (look up the old "60 Minutes" episode if you don't believe me), and have decided to blame the smoker rather than the cigarette company, you need to stop doing that.
Posted in Criticism/critique, Faith, friendship, in general, Michael B. Caffrey, Politics, Prescient observations, Public figures, Religion, Remembrance, Writing
Tagged with cigarettes, empathy, Malcolm Nance, Muslim faith, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ukraine, vices, virtue-signaling, War in Ukraine
Sunday Musings: The Empathy Gap
Recently, I've thought a great deal about one thing. Empathy.
Why? Well, the United States, as a country, don't seem to be showing a lot of it lately.
Whether it's because of how individuals have handled Covid-19, or because of the ascension of politicians with more mouth than brain (including current US Reps Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nicole Boebert), it seems trendy now to behave badly and blame it on someone else.
I read a lengthy article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel recently about this very thing. (I am not linking to it because it was for "subscribers only," meaning unless you have a subscription, they won't let you see it.) It talked about the differences between what good, empathetic behavior is and bad behavior, and discussed how two decades — the 1970s, or "Me Decade," and the 1980s, or the "Greed is Good" Decade — have changed public discourse for the worse.
I'm not sure it was just because of those two decades, mind you. But it is possible that folks who were born in those decades changed their parenting style, and their kids grew up with fewer "guard rails" against bad behavior along with perhaps lesser consequences for said bad behavior.
I think most of us have seen someone treated badly because of Covid-19. Whether it's a customer cussing out a store employee for wearing a mask (as they mostly have had to do due to local or state regulations), someone being happy that another person who's died because they didn't get the vaccine and felt they wouldn't get sick (schadenfreude, in other words), or a store employee (in a state/county that does not require masks) ask someone to remove their mask because said store employee didn't like it, there seems to be very little tolerance for any behavior besides one's own.
I have a very good friend who went to the post office recently where she lives. The clerk there is an anti-masker and possibly also an anti-vaxxer and complained when my friend (who is immunocompromised) did not remove her mask after she was asked. She explained this, but the clerk did not care. It was all she could do to stay in the post office until her business was done due to being so upset.
I have another friend who lives in Florida. He is also immunocompromised, but his doctors believe he should not be vaccinated. (I'm not sure why.) He has kept himself from just about everyone now for almost three years. It's been a tough life, as he is gregarious and loves to talk with people about just about anything. But he's risking his life with or without a mask, and as he lives in Florida — where people have disdained wearing masks even at the worst of the Covid-19 breakout stages — he sees no other way but to stay home, live quietly, and hope Covid goes away.
Other than the nurse who comes in to give him treatments, he sees no one. He hears many, mind, as there are people roundly cursing each other out at his apartment complex at all hours. (That we're all under much more stress due to Covid is a given, granted.) But he sees no one.
There hasn't been anyone to bring him food, or talk to him outside (making sure there's no one around at the time so it'll be safe for him, with a mask if he wants one, to do that), or do any of the small, kind human gestures that show empathy for someone who's suffering, much less through no fault of his own.
(He lives too far away for me to help, or I'd have already visited. But I digress.)
I could give more examples, but I'll stop there because I think my point's been made.
You, as an individual person, should be free to lead your life any way you see fit. But you also should not be rude to someone who needs a mask even if mask mandates have been relaxed; you should not be rude to someone because her autistic son cannot wear a mask; you should not be rude to someone, like me, who has asthma and has great difficulty and distress wearing a mask but tries anyway because of two parents "of a certain age." You also should not be so rude as to say, "I'm glad he's dead" when you hear of a prominent anti-vaxxer dying due to Covid.
Why has it become so controversial to say these things, anyway? (To say what I just said, mind. Not to be outright rude, which seems perfectly fine to many for reasons I just don't understand.) Why must empathy now be politicized, as if it's something bad to actually care about others?
What I want this Sunday — not to mention every single day of my life — is for everyone to take a moment and step back. Realize that we are all human. We are all deserving of care, empathy, trust, and love. And we should start to show the best of ourselves to others, quietly, not as an Instragrammable moment but because our shared humanity deserves that.
If we can do that, the world will become a much better place.
Posted in Criticism/critique, friendship, heartbreaking stories, Informational Stuff, Politics, Prescient observations, Public figures, Truly horrible behavior, United States Politics, Writing
Tagged with bad behavior being celebrated, empathy, Empathy Gap, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nicole Boebert, schadenfreude
Holidays, Schmolidays: A Rant
I read an article online about a young woman who planned a "Friendsgiving" dinner (Thanksgiving dinner, with friends), but no one showed up. Her boyfriend, thankfully, asked a lot of his friends to show up instead, and the food and drink she'd so carefully amassed and cooked was consumed.
This article was frustrating to read, in more than one way.
First off, if you have friends, treat them like gold.
In other words, do not stand them up. Do not forget to call if you're going to be late (or can't come at all). Do not do what happened to this poor young woman, as it's beyond rude.
Second off, if you have even a smidgen of empathy, you need to realize that how you treat others shows how you, yourself, should be treated.
So, if you can't be bothered to let a friend know that you aren't able to be with them…or if a long-distance phone call is planned, and you aren't able to make it…or if there's some other reason that keeps you away from their presence after they've made so many plans, there's something the matter with you.
And I say that knowing full well I, myself, have had to beg off plans at the last minute due to health concerns. (In fact, I wasn't able to be at my father's birthday celebration yesterday because I had a migraine. This cost me a chance to see my sister and niece, too.)
I was ill, so I texted my sister and made my apologies. That was all I could do. (My father doesn't text, and doesn't understand it. I knew my sister would tell him, and she did. I'll try to make it up to him later, if I can.)
So, if I can do it through a migraine, what is everyone else's excuse?
This poor woman was expecting at least ten friends to show up (by how many place settings she had sitting out), and none showed. Not one person had the decency to call or text her, either.
That's just plain wrong.
The only good excuse for not being able to let someone know what happened to you if time was planned (online and/or off) to be with you is a quick trip to the hospital, unconscious. (I might reluctantly accept a work emergency, too, depending. Might.)
Third off, why must people be so obnoxious?
Life is really hard right now. We have the pandemic, which goes on and on and on. We have the holidays, which are tough, especially for people grieving a new loss (or even an older one where the loss was huge and heartfelt).
(In fact, I wrote a blog post called "Please Remember Those Who Grieve During the Holidays" years ago, because I felt it needed to be said. But as always, I digress…)
And people who've lost loved ones who mattered deeply and desperately to them deserve to know that other people care. That other people are thinking about them. That other people do understand their losses, at least insofar as they have themselves gone through various losses.
So, if you have good friends, cherish them. Do not take them for granted. Do not stand them up on Friendsgiving. Do not treat them like they don't exist, or don't matter.
Pay attention. Stay in their lives. And think beyond your own concerns about others, because that's truly what life is all about.
Posted in friendship, Informational Stuff, Truly horrible behavior
Tagged with Friendsgiving, holidays, rants, Rude behavior, Thanksgiving
Continuing on, Slowly, and Solely…
Folks, I let you all know when I was attempting a long-term, long-distance relationship. Unfortunately, that relationship has now ended; my male friend and I decided we were better off as friends than prospective lovers, but I will admit I was the one to make the break.
What I found, under the pandemic, is that my mood is shorter and sharper. I am much more tired, too. And the usual things I would do to relax, such as playing in the Racine Concert Band, just haven't been available due to the pandemic.
How does that relate to the relationship? Well, I think it made it harder for both of us. I was home more. I was stressed out more. And I couldn't get to see him, where he was, due to Covid-19.
All of that frustration did not help, at all, on any level.
You see, sometimes with all the will in the world, two good people cannot make a go of it as a romantic pair.
That's just the way it is. (But oh, how I hate to admit it.)
I will always care about my male friend, and I hope our friendship will survive. (He said he wishes the same thing, but you never know until you're actually at this point after a relationship ends as to whether or not a friendship will happen or not.) I am glad that we got to find out what we could of each other, even if it didn't turn out the way either of us planned.
I still believe in love, though. There are many kinds of it. Love of friends. Love of family. A higher love, an altruistic love, a spiritual love…as well as romantic love, with all of the wonders and terrors of that very thing.
So, when I said months ago that I was doing my best to get to know someone, I talked of love too soon, I think. Or maybe didn't clarify it, even to myself. My expectations perhaps were too high. Or maybe I just wasn't ready.
Anyway, what I had with my late husband Michael was every type of love there was. Agape. Philios/philia. Eros. All of it. That's why I'll honor that love, and my husband's memory, forever.
And I have to believe that eventually I will find someone else who I can have at least some of all three things (agape, philios, eros). A good friendship, where we understand each other, and want to know more and more about each other for better understanding and more love…excellent communication…a positive feedback loop that bears fruit, perhaps, is the way to go.
Anyway, at this point all I can do is go on, slowly, still dealing with the bronchitis, and put my head up high. I know I tried my best; I know my friend and former love-interest also tried his.
Sometimes, no matter what you want, it just does not work.
Posted in friendship, in general, Informational Stuff, Michael B. Caffrey, romance
Tagged with calling it quits, romance ends<|fim_middle|>house, for example, was simply stunning. And that's only one of the fine dances the two of them created together.)
"But Barb," you say. "What's this about being an individual, and how does that apply to me?"
It's simple. The better you know yourself, the better work you can do. And Johnny and Britt showed that, over and over again, during this season on "Dancing with the Stars."
You know, if you've read this blog for any length of time, that I am a firm believer in being your authentic self. I think it wastes time and energy that most of us don't have to keep up a front. I also think the better you know yourself, the easier it is to get things done.
If you use Johnny and Britt as examples — and I think you should — you can extrapolate a little. For example, the two of them, together, were able to bring a certain style and verve into the ballroom. Johnny is more of an extrovert when he performs, while Britt has a quiet dignity to her. The two, together, were more than the sum of their parts.
And it all started because Britt apparently decided, when meeting Johnny for the first time, to use that uniqueness of his — not to mention hers (though she probably takes that for granted, as she can't see herself from the outside anymore than any of the rest of us) — to create movement and magic.
Granted, if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Johnny's been a figure skater since the age of twelve. He knows about movement. He studied some dance (though I think it was ballet) because that helped him express himself through movement on the ice.
And knowing about movement helped him a great deal, I think. It meant Britt did not have to teach him from Ground Zero.
However, it also may have hampered him a bit, because ballet — and the associated movements of that dance — are nothing like either ballroom dance or Latin dance. They're not even that close to "freestyle" contemporary dance.
What that meant for Johnny was, he had to unlearn at the same time as he learned. And that's tough to do.
How do I know this? Well, Johnny once said, about learning a new technique for one of his jumps, that he was "old." At the age of twenty-five or twenty-six, he said this. (Chronologically, of course, that was just silly. But with the wear and tear of figure skating, I'm sure he did feel old.) And he admitted, at the time, it was not easy to unlearn the previous technique.
(I probably should say "jettison," but learning is not like that. It stays with you. It can't truly be jettisoned. You can only use it, or not, or get past it, or not. But I digress.)
So, Britt taught Johnny, as well as helped him correct various issues, and worked with him and his uniqueness from the get-go. (Maybe all of the pro dancers do this, but it seems to me as a longtime viewer of "Dancing with the Stars" that it was far more pronounced in Johnny's case.)
Being an individual, see, has its charms as well as its quirks. You can do more, if you know exactly who you are. (Again, I think it has something to do with refusing to waste your energy on non-essentials.) Add in the fact that when you're doing more, you are giving your all to it rather than holding some back to "save face." And top it off with a good, healthy dose of self-skepticism, for that matter, as that will keep you from getting too arrogant to be borne. (That last has nothing to do with Johnny Weir or his partner, Britt, but it certainly should be factored in by the rest of us.)
Anyway, the points of this blog are simple:
Be yourself. Be unique.
Don't put on fronts, as they waste your time and energy.
That's the way to "win" at life, you know. Because that's the way you will be remembered: as the unique, powerful individual you are, who touched many lives and did many things and knew many people and tried your level best.
Anything less than that just isn't worth bothering about.
Posted in Framing Narrative, friendship, in general, Informational Stuff, Inspirational stuff, Prescient observations, Public figures, Sports figures
Tagged with Britt Stewart, dancers, Dancing with the Stars, figure skaters, Johnny Weir, learning experiences, self-improvement
What Kind of Person Do You Want to Be?
Lately, I've been thinking of the above question: What kind of person do you want to be?
Do you want to be helpful? Blaze your own trail, while empathizing with those who can't? Following your own dream in your own way, while helping others do the same? While knowing there are such things as love, freedom, spiritual sustenance, and the willingness to grow and deepen as a better person throughout?
Or do you want to be harmful? Someone who actively insults others. Someone who thinks everything and everyone is transactional, a business deal; someone who does not believe in love, or empathy, or happiness, or anything except himself/herself.
Bluntly, the choice is yours.
What kind of person do you want to be? And why?
Think about this, please. (And authors, not just for your characters' motivation.) Because everything you are — everything — relies on your answer to this question.
And refusing to answer this question is, unfortunately, also a choice.
What do you think of this little bloglet? Tell me about it in the comments!
Posted in Framing Narrative, friendship, in general, Prescient observations
Tagged with questions to ponder, words to live by | , sadness, Updates
Johnny Weir, Individuality, and You
Recently, I've been watching the American version of "Dancing with the Stars." I had stopped watching regularly a few years ago (though I would catch it if I happened to be near a TV and someone else was watching), mostly because all the storylines seemed the same.
But not this year.
Nope. This year had my favorite figure skater, Johnny Weir, partnered with a new pro, Britt Stewart (who's Black, dignified, and quite talented). And the two of them danced like nobody's business; they were a dynamic, engaging, and energetic pair that did more interesting things in ten weeks than I'd seen in the previous five or six years on the show.
Now, why do you think that was?
(I know I've been asking myself this question, anyway, ever since Johnny and his partner Britt were eliminated earlier this week.)
My view is this: Johnny Weir knows who he is, as an individual. And Britt obviously knows who she is, too. They both understood each other, down to the ground, and because of that, were able to work together and create some truly amazing dance routines. (Johnny and Britt's tribute to Amy Wine | 255 |
Thieves, motivated by the high copper prices offered by scrap dealers, are stealing large amounts of copper wire from transit agencies. Systems such as Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) and Seattle's Sound Transit have suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages because of the pilfering.
At SEPTA, metal scavengers have cut copper wires from tracks and overhead poles, stopping trains, Jeffrey Knueppel, assistant GM and chief engineer, SEPTA, said.
The agency is spending $300,000 to $500,000 a year to repair and replace equipment damaged by the thieves. SEPTA spokesperson Jerri Williams said the agency has experienced several of these incidents over the past few years.
SEPTA has had to convince law enforcement that the thefts compromise safety and damage equipment because often suspects don't receive severe charges.
In particular, SEPTA is working with police on a case in which a person was stealing overhead wires 70 feet in the air and dropping them next to SEPTA station platforms. The thief climbed a pole which had 220,000-volt electrical lines running over the top of the railroad and cut wires for the electric company and the transit system, Knueppel said.
To prevent future thefts, SEPTA has switched to other materials, including Aluminum Steel Reinforced Strand, which has little to no market value, Andy Gillespie, chief engineering officer of power, said. Knueppel added that the agency switched to tamper-resistant screws and fasteners in stations; a less valuable type of cable that can perform the same function; and buried copper bonding wire, or put it inside a sleeve that's difficult to break into.
Additionally, because many of the thefts are committed overnight, SEPTA is not aware of them until the morning commute. "We think [riders] are going to have a good ride, only to find when the first train in the morning runs, that<|fim_middle|> replacing the cable, at about $216,000, not counting labor, is costly.
Sound Transit is looking into providing better security to the affected portion of the guideway.
As Sound Transit designs future elevated guideways or any other infrastructure with wire in it, Gray said, it is taking the incidents into account. | wires have been stolen and trains are [just] sitting there," he said.
Meanwhile, Sound Transit recently had copper wire taken during construction of its Link light rail line and from other projects. The most recent theft was of 70,000 pounds, or four miles worth of copper cable. Thieves accessed a concrete vault and ripped the wire from inside an elevated guideway. The theft is the biggest the system has ever dealt with, Bruce Gray, spokesperson, Sound Transit, said. Washington state sheriff's department detectives told Gray it's one of the largest copper thefts they've ever seen, statewide.
While there was no impact to service, without the cable in the elevated guideway to absorb stray current from the rail, it can get into the concrete and cause damage. "During the time that this was gone, it won't have impacted the structure," Gray said.
However, | 180 |
11/1/2014 – For the second time in the Tashkent Grand Prix, all six games have been drawn. This means that going into the last round of the tournament Andreikin keeps his lead of half a point over Nakamura and Mamedyarov, while MVL and Jobava are only another half a point away. Caruana and Jobava seem like the survivors today, as both Karjakin and Giri had good winning chances.
Don't miss Simon William's commentary on the Playchess.com server tomorrow!
Andreikin successfully defended against any attempts by Gelfand to create pressure. A timely exchange on c3 liquidated the game to a drawn rook endgame.
Jobavas committed severely to an attack on the kingside, and when it ran out of steam it was Giri's turn to strike. The Dutch player<|fim_middle|>jani could not find a way to win up two pawns.
through MVL's head at some point, but probably not when this picture was taken.
Jakovenko's Lasker Defense holds steady. Despite missing an immediate perpetual the Russian's position was still too difficult to crack and the game was drawn in a queen and rook endgame where one side or another was going to be perpetual checked.
The Italian's attack on the kingside brought no dividends while Karjakin's attack on the queenside left him with a powerful position and a passed a-pawn. Karjakin missed a couple of chances to consolidate, then a brilliancy that would have forced Caruana to resign (which to be fair was almost impossible to find), and finally a transposition into a won endgame. After all that Caruana finally brought home the draw.
Lots of maneuvering in a positoin that was locked up by very powerful knights on d4 and d5 that were supported by more knights. Eventually the game was drawn though there was still life left in the position. | could not finish the game off despite having good chances to a very sizeable advantage and in the end Jobava somehow escaped.
An entertaining queen-less game. After many melees MVL ended up down a pawn but with two bishops to strongly compensate for it. He lost his way and his initiative evaporated, allowing Mamedyarov to win another pawn. Yet, somehow, his position was still not completely hopeless and the Azerbai | 87 |
Queen's University Belfast rises ten places in latest Complete University Guide league table
Queen's University Belfast has climbed ten places to 24th position in the UK in this year's Complete University Guide league table.
The latest table also shows 24 of Queen's subjects are ranked in the top 20 for their discipline.
Queen's has been ranked 1st in the UK for Social Work (up seven places from last year), 1st in the UK for Agriculture and Forestry (retaining top position from last year) and 1st in the UK for Dentistry (up one place from last year).
Two subjects have also been ranked 2nd in the UK, Information Technology & Systems and Pharmacology and Pharmacy.
Both Agriculture and Forestry and Information Technology and Systems subjects have been ranked 1st in the UK for Research Quality.
Other highly rated subjects include:
· 4th in the UK for Food Science
· 5th in the UK for Celtic Studies
· 6th in the UK for Nursing
· 9th in the UK for Accounting and Finance
· 9th in the UK for Biological Sciences
· 9th in the UK for Law
· 10th in the UK for Medicine
· 10th in the UK for Architecture
The Complete University Guide league table is based on ten measures: Entry Standards, Student Satisfaction<|fim_middle|> recognised on Highly Cited Researchers 2022 global list
End of Year Message from the Vice-Chancellor | , Research Quality, Research Intensity, Graduate Prospects – outcomes, Graduate Prospects – on track, Student-Staff Ratio, Spending on Academic Services, Spending on Student Facilities and Completion.
The subject tables are based on five measures: Entry Standards, Student Satisfaction, Research Quality, Graduate Prospects – outcomes and Graduate Prospects – on track.
Speaking on the results, Professor Ian Greer, Vice-Chancellor and President of Queen's University Belfast, said: "Over the past year my colleagues have worked exceptionally hard to deliver a world-class education for our students.
"It's particularly pleasing to see Social Work and Dentistry feature first in the UK for subject rankings this year, and I am delighted to see our Agriculture and Forestry subject area retaining its first place.
"These results are testament to Queen's delivery of world-class education by world-leading academics at the forefront of their disciplines, and to our significant investment in the student experience, resulting in high levels of student satisfaction."
Simon Emmett, Chief Executive Officer of IDP Connect, which runs the Complete University Guide, said: "With more prospective students actively researching their options each year, the 2023 Complete University Guide league tables will serve as an important guide.
"We believe these rankings help them to make the right decisions as they consider their next steps into higher education."
Queen's University research has been recently rated joint first in the UK for Agriculture, Veterinary and Food Science and 4th in the UK for Health and Biomedical Sciences by the REF 2021. Law research has been ranked 8th in the UK.
The recent Research Excellence Framework also highlighted the impact of Queen's research in areas including applied health, conflict resolution, cyber security and engineering.
Have your say: A Net Zero University – Are you with us?
Video Message from the Vice-Chancellor: A Net Zero University – Are you with us?
Queen's staff recognised in New Year Honours List 2023
Influential Queen's academic | 401 |
Moog have released their first polyphonic synth in 30 years
The Moog One will be available as an 8-voice or 16-voice version…
Moog One poly synth
Monday, October 1, 2018 - 08:43
Moog Music have released their first analogue polyphonic synth in over 30 years. Revealed via US retailer Sweetwater, the Moog One has been teased and rumoured for a long time, finally having its pics and specs announced this week. With a Fatar keybed, three oscillators per voice, three-part multi-timbral with FM, hard-sync and ring mod. That means that in Unison mode, you can stack up to 48 voices. The arp and sequencer address each part separately and so can the effects.
Of<|fim_middle|>5,999 while the 16-voice version is a staggering $7,999. More images and details will be released soon. Despite their protesting, it looks like Trump's tariffs haven't effected the Moog One's development, who knows how it will effect future Moog manufacturing. If your budget won't stretch to $5,999, you can build your own Moog synth here.
Moog Moog One Synth dj mag tech | course, Moog's classic ladder filter is included alongside a variable filter that can be used in parallel or series. There's four LFOs, three envelopes and an analogue mixer for balancing all the audio source. FX are purely digital and include Eventide reverbs, while presets and performance settings can be saved and recalled to USB. There's also an audio input for processing external sounds. Basically, it's a beast. As expected.
And for a synth of this power with the Moog name, it's gonna cost you – the 8-voice version comes in at $ | 117 |
SRAM's Cable Cutter w/End Cap Crimper features sharp, spring-loaded diamond-shaped jaws and ergonomic handles to cleanly cut cables and housing every time. It also has jaws for crimping cable crimps. Plus, there's a safety clasp to keep this tool closed when not in use.
You know that $300 carbon bar you just bought? Don't guess when tightening it. Know exactly. Topeak's D-Torq DX is a precision digital torque wrench made from hardened steel. It features an audible alarm when you hit your mark and when you start to over tighten. The reversing ratchet mechanism in the head has convenient thumb articulation and a range of 4-80 Nm. The LCD readout makes it easy to know exactly where you are and can calculate Nm/kg, Nm/cm, inch/lbs and foot/lbs.
You know that $300 carbon bar you just bought? Don't guess when installing it<|fim_middle|>out makes it easy to know exactly where you are and can calculate Nm/kg, Nm/cm, inch/lbs and foot/lbs. | . Know exactly. Topeak's D-Torq is a precision digital torque wrench made from hardened steel. It features an audible alarm when you start to over tighten. The reversing rachet mechanism in the head has convenient thumb articulation and a range of 1-20 Nm. The LCD read | 63 |
Who we are About Liontrust Our vision, objectives and brand values How we manage your money Our culture Our awards Community engagement and sponsorships Board of Directors<|fim_middle|> income team and Phil was Head of Investment Strategy.
The Macro-Thematic team
Stephen Bailey (left) and Jamie Clark (right) have over 45 years of combined investment experience and moved to Liontrust in 2012. Stephen started his career in the mid-1980s and joined Walker Crips in 1987 as investment director. Jamie joined Walker Crips in 2003 and prior to that was a Junior Proprietary Trader at First New York Securities.
The Multi-Asset team
John Husselbee (right) and Paul Kim (left) are two of the most high-profile multi-asset managers with over 60 years of combined investment experience. John launched the portfolio management service at Rothschild Asset Management, was Director of Multi-Manager at Henderson Global Investors and founded North Investment Partners. Paul was instrumental in setting up Investment Manager Selection Ltd (IMS) and was Head of Fund Selection and Multi-Manager at Liverpool Victoria Asset Management (LVAM).
The Sustainable Investment team - Equities
Peter Michaelis (centre), Simon Clements (right) and Neil Brown (left) are the lead managers of a team of experienced investment professionals. With over 45 years of combined experience, the team transferred to Liontrust from Alliance Trust Investments (ATI) in April 2017 and were previously running the Sustainable Future Fund range at Aviva Investors.
The Sustainable Investment team - Fixed Income
Stuart Steven (centre), Kenny Watson (left) and Aitken Ross (right) have more than 50 years of combined investment experience in managing fixed income. They also transferred to Liontrust from ATI in April 2017. | Fund managers Heads of department Sales team Treating Customers Fairly
The Asia team
Mark Williams (right), Carolyn Chan (centre) and Shashank Savla (left) have more than 60 years of combined experience in analysing Asian companies. Mark, with 24 years' experience in investing, has previously run funds at F&C and Occam. Carolyn has 25 years of experience and was previously at Hampton Investment Management.
The Cashflow Solution team
James Inglis-Jones and Samantha Gleave have over 40 years of combined experience and first worked together in 1998. James has previously managed money at Fleming Investment Management, JP Morgan Fleming and Polar Capital while Samantha formerly worked at Sutherlands Limited, Fleming Investment Management, Credit Suisse First Boston and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
The Economic Advantage team
Anthony Cross (centre-left), Julian Fosh (centre-right), Victoria Stevens (right) and Matt Tonge (left) have over 60 years of combined investment experience. Anthony was previously at Schroders and Julian was at Saracen Fund Managers. Victoria Stevens was previously deputy head of corporate broking at FinnCap and Matt Tonge was formerly an award winning trader.
The European Income team
Olly Russ (right) and Oisin O'Leary (left) have over 25 years of combined investment and capital markets experience. Olly joined Liontrust in July 2016, having started his career at investment boutique Orbitex in 1998. Oisin joined Liontrust in June 2017, having previously been an investment analyst at Argonaut Capital Partners across the company's range of funds from September 2015.
The Global Equity team
The Liontrust Global Equity team manages 19 active funds and has an average of 12 years' investment experience between them. Led by Robin Geffen (right), who is the architect of the investment process, supported by James Dowey (left), the team manage a suite of actively managed funds in the form of global and specialised regional portfolios. The entire fund range is managed according to the same investment process, which is founded on collaborative idea generation, a culture of investing with conviction and three silo portfolio construction. The team transferred to Liontrust in October 2019 as part of the acquisition of Neptune Investment Management.
The Global Fixed Income team
David Roberts (left), Phil Milburn (right) and Donald Phillips (centre), who all joined Liontrust in early 2018, have more than 60 years of joint investment experience. Before joining Liontrust, David and Phil worked together at Kames Capital for 14 years, where David was Head of the Fixed | 560 |
Former Amarillo Venom quarterback Nate Davis did not get to celebrate during the team's 2013 Lone Star Football League championship ceremony Saturday before its game because his job was to beat the team he had led to 12 straight home victories in two seasons.
But the postgame atmosphere was not in his favor either.
The Venom beat Davis and the Rio Grande Valley Sol 33-29 Saturday at the Amarillo Civic Center Complex Cal Farley Coliseum to extend their home winning streak two 13 games over parts of three seasons.
"We talk about playing together all the time," Venom head coach Julian Reese said. "We talk about finishing games."
First-year Venom defensive back Tae Evans helped the Venom (2-0) end the Sol's chances at victory when he intercepted Davis' pass for the second time with 2 minutes, 13 seconds left in the game on his own 5 yard line with his team ahead 27-23.
"I just knew we needed a spark so I just wanted to make a play for my team," Evans said.
The Venom scored for the final time with 1:03 to play when wide receiver Raymond Johnson caught a 25-yard touchdown pass from Brendan Crawford.
Rio Grande Valley (1-1) scored a touchdown of its own 32 seconds later but could not recover an onside kick and never again held possession.
"The cornerbacks played extremely well," Reese said. "I'm very proud of those guys. We gave up some touchdowns, but that's what happens. We were able to take (Davis) out of his rhythm, basically midway into that third quarter, so I'm pretty pumped about it."
Davis twice found Sol wide receiver Danny Young for a touchdown in the second quarter after he opened the quarter with a rushing touchdown on a 1-yard quarterback sneak before the Venom defense tightened, although Davis said Rio Grande Valley's failures were more of a factor than the Venom's defensive play.
"They're a great team, but we hurt ourselves," said Davis, who finished 12-of-32 for 150 yards and three touchdowns. "We were in the red zone five times and didn't score."
The Venom scored on their first offensive play of the game when new quarterback Andre Coles, who the team signed days before the game, completed his first pass 30 yards for a touchdown to Johnson, who had five catches for 77 yards and two scores.
However, Coles missed on his next eight passes, and the Sol came back to take a 13-7 lead.
Quarterback Brendan Crawford entered the game for the Venom in the second quarter and completed four of his eight passes for 35 yards and a touchdown before halftime as part of his 13 completions on 23 attempts for 123 yards, two touchdowns and an interception.
The Venom had 195 total yards, but Reese said he thought it was their worst performance to date with dropped balls and problems with coverage on the offensive line, which he attributed partly to the excitement of the pregame festivities and the fact former teammates such as Davis and defensive lineman Jared Williams were part of the opposition.
But Reese said he was also impressed with how Davis and Williams responded to their first game against their former team.
"They did a real good job, very professional," Reese said. "Everybody makes to moves to better them. We can't hold grudges or anything like that. They've got to makes moves for them and their families."
The Venom will return to the road to face the San Angelo Bandits at 7:05 p.m. Saturday at Foster Communications Coliseum in San Angelo.
Passing-Rio Grande Valley: Nate Davis 12-32, 150, 3 TDs; Humberto Cerda 0-1, 0. Venom: Brendan Crawford 13-23, 123, 2 TDs; Andre Coles 1-9, 30, 1 TD.
Receiving-Rio Grande Valley<|fim_middle|>-Rio Grande Valley: Tristian Carter 7-16; Davis 6-16, 1 TD. Venom: Shaka Harris 6-25; D.J. Beshears 1-10.
West Texas Wildcatters at New Mexico Stars, (n). | : Danny Young 4-62; Jorge Mata 3-53; Renato Nunez 3-22; Melvin Stevenson 1-10, Carter 1-3. Venom: Raymond Johnson 5-77; Craig Fulton Jr. 6-40, 2 TDs; Beshears 3-36, 1 TD.
Rushing | 83 |
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Help and advice for Index to "Paupers in Workhouses 1861"
Index to "Paupers in Workhouses 1861" (10% sample)
RETURNS "from each WORKHOUSE in England and Wales, of the Name of every ADULT PAUPER in each WORKHOUSE who has been an Inmate of the Workhouse during a continuous Period of Five Years; stating the Amount of Time that each of such Inmates shall have been in the Workhouse, and the Reason assigned why such Persons are unable to maintain themselves........"
Part 1:- Surnames A-C
Part 2:- Surnames D-H
Part 3:- Surnames I-Q
Part 4:- Surnames R-Y
This national index of paupers in workhouses has been compiled from a Parliamentary Paper, number 490 of 1861. It names some 14,200 adult* paupers in England and Wales who had been in receipt of parish relief for a continuous period of five years or more.
* aged 16 years and upwards
The full name of the pauper is given, followed by "The reason assigned why the Pauper in each case is unable to maintain himself or herself" and finally the full term of the relief in years and months. Another column in the report is headed "Whether or not the Pauper has been brought up in a District or Workhouse School". As this last column was imperfectly completed, the brief notes it contains have not been included here. However, all the other information is contained in the index. which is a strict alphabetical listing of individuals named in the report. (N.B. This on-line version is a 10% sample of the full index which is available on microfiche).
From a genealogical point of view the value of the report cannot be overstated. It was submitted to parliament on the 29th of July 1861, and ordered to be published the following day. The information it contains dovetails nicely with the 1861 census returns. The census that year was conducted on Sunday the 7th of April, so it is certain that the information-gathering processes for the report and the census would have overlapped. The accuracy of the information contained in the report can be proved quite simply by comparing it against the census returns.
It is pertinent to say that a large proportion of the paupers mentioned in the index (about 6,000) were admitted because of old age and infirmity. Almost as many again (about 5,000) suffered from a mental disease. Various combinations of ailments and mental conditions will be noted by the casual user of the index, and among the unusual (or least common) reasons for being admitted to the workhouse are laziness, desertion of the husband, widow<|fim_middle|> their husbands had been sentenced to transportation. There are also a couple of cases of paupers having been born and bred in the workhouse, but Timothy Goss (St George's, Hanover Square), who had been in receipt of parish relief for 70 continuous years was not one of them.
George Bell, Wideopen, April 1997
Find help, report problems, or contribute information Last updated 13 September, 2019 - 17:38 - maintained by Malcolm Austen | hood, destitution and being orphaned. It is interesting, at this late date, to note there are a few cases of wives having been admitted because | 31 |
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Putting research and development, cutting edge design and manufacturing technology at the forefront of everything we do has enhanced the success of our people and our clients. We have a dedicated team that brings diversity of talent and experience which fuels our innovation and dedication. It | 68 |
Birzeit University Celebrates 41st Commencement
Birzeit<|fim_middle|> | University commenced on May 20, 2016 the graduation ceremonies of the 41st cohort of students. The commencement exercises will be on three subsequent days.The Class of 2016 from the Faculty of Law and Public Administration, Faculty of Pharmacy, Nursing and Health Professions and Graduate Studies, were surrounded by their family members faculty, staff, and administrators to celebrate their achievements. Celebrations are attended by the Minister of Education and Higher Education, Dr. Sabri Saidam, Chairman of the university's Board of Trustees Dr. Hanna Nasir and university President Dr. Abdel Latif Abu Hijleh.Abu Hijleh applauded the graduates for showing academic excellence and outstanding service to the university's community and their country. He addressed the students: "Today is a day to celebrate all the hard work that got all of you to this moment. Your graduation marks the end of one era and the beginning of a brand new chapter."Abu Hijleh went on encouraging the students by saying: "You are inheriting a world that is adrift, uncertain of what to do next, and in need of your insight and wisdom."Abu Hijleh spoke about the university's development as one of the most prominent universities in the Arab world. "Throughout Birzeit's history, the university has sought to provide an education that cultivates the imagination, enlarges perspectives, and prepares students to the upcoming challenges. Birzeit University sees its studies programs as one of the oldest, diverse and most well-established ones."Saidam congratulated the students on behalf of the President of the State of Palestine Mahmoud Abbas. He then reaffirmed the ministry's mission to prepare Palestinian youth to contribute to the development of their society, think critically and actively and always seek knowledge and creativity."It is my honor and privilege to have the opportunity to officiate at this important occasion, which is a milestone achievement in our students' future", Saidam assured. "Palestine desperately needs brains and pioneers to overcome the political, economical and social challenges that our country goes through every day. We are responsible for our tomorrow, which we have to bring about through our thoughts and actions that contribute to building the culture of peace."During the ceremony, Nasir conferred an honorary degree to Sameer Owaida, who is considered one of the most influential leaders and generous contributors to Birzeit University and Palestine. "Owaida is a great example of people who have done just what all of us hope to do", Nasir said. "Today we are recognizing the man in the round, his whole career, his contribution to society as well as to the academy."Nasir praised Owaida's strong sense of social conscience and compassion as he has great contributions to Palestine and particularly to Birzeit University where he donated classes, renovated labs and offered a number of scholarships to students.Law student Omran Tamimi, and master's student Noura Mirei' delivered a speech in which they underscored the skills and knowledge that they gained from the university during their study years.Graduates' were handed their certificates after they professed their commitment to the graduates' oath, which was read by Abu Hijleh. | 642 |
A mom's rebirth into the LGBTQ Community
Noreen Olsen
Dreamcatcher in Noreen Olsen's backyard
Noreen Olsen looks young to have had a 28-year-old son.
"I'll take that as a compliment," she says.
She sips coffee at a table outside a suburban Tucson Starbucks, to piped-in smooth jazz. She wears a flowing purple dress, gold hoop earrings and open-toed shoes topped with leather roses. Dusty sharp voice, thick brownish-blonde hair falling past her shoulders. It's hot out but she's not sweating. There's an air of wry self-assurance about her. Says it herself, "I get along with everyone."
At first blush the Brooklyn-born Noreen is PR savvy and says only what she wants to say. It's hardly a wonder she's good at the sell. Mostly houses now; real estate. Broadcast TV media sales in Tucson and Phoenix before that. If not otherwise known, I'd have never guessed she has taken on a community of emotional orphans. That is, helping to nurture the old and the young of Tucson's LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer) community, to prevent tragedies like what happened to her son.
Her only offspring, Colby Olsen, died April last year, a few months after her father passed ("Last year was," she says, "horrific.")
In the early morning hours of April 11, Colby was headed north on Euclid, east of Grant Road. He lost control of his Kia, sped over the sidewalk, flipped and tumbled into a parked SUV in someone's front-yard. He wasn't wearing a seatbelt. His belted passenger was released from the nearby hospital with minor injuries.
Cops said drinking was involved in Colby's death. All of two people have brought that fact up to Noreen, saying, "Well, he was drinking." Mom winces at the thought. "My answer to that is I don't know what happened. The day he died he gave $40 for an Uber because some man was too drunk to drive. He used to always say he hated drunks. I'm not focusing on how he died. I want to celebrate how he lived. He impacted so many lives. In 10 minutes he was gone. That's not how you define someone's life. And anyone who knows me would know that if he was an asshole I would say so."
Three months after Colby's death Noreen began suffering chest pains, and thought it was a heart attack. "I thought, 'Here we go, this is it.' Someone said, call 911. I said, nah. I wanted the heart attack to go on. I wanted clarity." Her heart wasn't bad, her doctor said, just broken. He suggested anti-depressants and sleeping pills. Noreen declined. "I wanted to feel my son's death. Look, I'm a strong person. I wanted to feel every ounce of pain."
She recognized this particular strain of pain, a mother losing her son, and the life-altering darkness. She could succumb to it or do her best to let it expand her senses. She chose the latter and dove deeper into herself, intellectually, emotionally, physically.
"You don't recognize yourself. Even in the mirror. It's just so very primal. I never wailed in my life until my son died. I sounded like a wounded animal."
Tears well in her eyes and she steps from the table to dry her face in the restroom. She returns, apologizing. She continues, talking about<|fim_middle|>'s community is palpable. Surrounded by people who loved her son, she discovered his friends who suffered deep anguishes. She wanted to put herself in that community to feel their pain.
"I wanted to understand Colby's life. His love. I wanted to be in it," she says.
"If you still have parents kicking out kids for being gay and lesbian, what do you think parents are doing to transgender kids? The safety of transgender kids really scares me. And kids are realizing they're transgender younger too." She pauses. "We're going to have a huge problem if parents don't educate themselves."
She's beginning to talk to such parents now. "For some, it's like learning a new language. All people should engage in ideas that challenge."
Noreen soon launched the Colby Olsen Foundation, a 501c3. "OK, I'm a little naïve, a little Pollyanna, but it's amazing what happens when you say, 'I need your help.' I just started reaching out and calling."
The foundation's mission is a deceptively simple answer to a grossly intractable problem: "To raise awareness about issues that affect LGBTQ youth and seniors in our community." Proceeds raised through donations, grants and events are donated to LGBTQ youth and senior organizations.
Noreen did her research into the marginalized worlds by actively embracing the community that embraced her son. Facts came fast, like how 40 percent of all homeless youth are LGBTQ and likely to have been assaulted ("They get kicked out. They're dead vulnerable as LGBTQ. In 72 hours something happens.") How they're homeless because they're not accepted at school and home, bullied and even murdered. How LGBTQ seniors are discriminated against, have limited access to health care, live shorter lives and so on.
The foundation quickly became fulltime work, which Noreen balances with fulltime home sales. It now has 10 board members, and it's a diverse group, she says: "every letter of LGBTQ represented." Earlier this year they lost one board member when Stephanie Donoghue died. More death.
"There have been successes," Noreen says. "Private donors, for one. Working on corporate donors now."
It's most recent event, in June, was the foundation's fourth, a lip-sync contest, sponsored in part by Southwest Airlines. It filled up the courtyard at Tucson's sizable La Cocina bar and restaurant, drawing a cross-section of kids and adults, drag queens and parents, LGBTQ and greater Tucson community members.
The event was a relative success. The foundation was able to donate $1,500 to Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation (SAAF), Southern Arizona Gender Alliance (SAGA) and Southern Arizona Senior Pride (SASP).
Noreen is now ensconced in the LGTBQ community. "If you're a person by association, if your uncle, mom, son whatever is LGTBQ, you are too." There are many LGBTQ-friendly clubs in Tucson, including the long-running Tucson Pride, EON Youth, Tucson GLBT Chamber of Commerce and others. The Colby Olsen Foundation is, she says, "created from love, in my son's honor. But we're here to love each other, heal each other. It's not about me, it's a community foundation."
Colby was born in Tucson, attended Sabino High School, studied anthropology and sociology at UA. Mom married twice and describes Colby's biological father as a "free spirit." Colby's relationship with him she says was "good.""He was more of a mama's boy," Noreen says wrinkling her nose.
Looking back, "I wasn't sure if he was gay. I thought when he's ready he'll tell me." He came out to her when he was 19.
"He said, 'I'm coming out.'"
"I said, 'Where are you going?' And he got mad!"
"Also, he felt bad about me never having grandkids."
"I'd say, 'We can adopt.' He'd say, 'what's this 'we' stuff?'"
Her face clouds over for a moment, then she's back, present, animated. Says, "because true love is a double-edged sword, there's a price you pay for that love. I'm a vessel of his, and some people look at me like I'm crazy."
She leans back, pulls her hair off her neck. "I'm still his mother," she says flatly. "It doesn't change."
Colby is often described as smart and funny, a man curious enough about the world to travel it. He'd been bartending at IBT's, a beloved Tucson gay bar. His memorial was so full, folks had to be turned away.
"Colby was a bright light full of hopes, dreams, fears, emotion and love for everyone he came in contact with," says Kevin DeCook, a foundation board member who met Colby working at IBT's. "We're all trying to carry on that light now."
These Trump times aren't so much different from the '50s when Sen. Clyde Hoey said all homosexuals were moral perverts who constituted government security risks, and President Eisenhower signed an executive order banning gays and lesbians from working for the U.S. government. Trump bud and serial predator ex-Chief Justice Roy Moore wooed a wide voter base by comparing homosexuality to bestiality. It's a deep-rooted mindset, pervasive and brutal. Could be the minority.
Hell, the '69 Stonewall rebellion was kickstarted by transgender women of color, Marsha P. Johnson and teen Sylvia Rivera. LGBTQ rights should've been assimilated into society years ago. Noreen, a white hetero woman—some might say Schwulenmutti—is, alongside other organizations, drawing attention to Tucson's LGBTQ community, as the Supreme Court continues to swing right. The work shouldn't go underappreciated. This is Humanism 101.
Standing in the backyard of her ranch-style home on Tucson's northeast side, Noreen reaches out and touches a dreamcatcher, one of many that hang from the fence, mesquite trees and the porch overhang. The Native American symbols of hope, healing and protection were placed here by many of Colby's friends, after his memorial. "I'm never taking these down," she says.
Sometimes people die for good things to happen. The sacrificial lambs. Noreen fingers a delicate copper-hued dreamcatcher that hangs around her neck, a gift. Her son's death revealed a larger truth to his mother.
"We all have to have a purpose in life," she says. "This is my purpose."
For more information, go to colbyolsenfoundation.org or the Colby Olsen Foundation Facebook page.
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More Tucson Salvage » | the energy, and Buddha. A negotiation of emotions and feelings, pain to spirituality to intellectual logic, how it becomes energy. "A balancing act," Noreen says. "That energy is self-defining."
That energy flipped her internal script; her son's death lined up her future. She returned from the depths through charity and sharing with others: "I'm Jewish; I was into the Kabbalah long before Madonna," she laughs. She swings her hands down in the air over herself. "This is just a shell," she says. "The soul doesn't die. I feel him going through this with me."
"People will go, 'oh, my God, she's cray-cray!'"
In the days following Colby's death, Noreen hatched a plan for a foundation. It helped that there was an outpouring of love from some of Tucson's LGBTQ community, a few of whom had holed up at her house for weeks after his death, so she wouldn't be alone. "I couldn't sleep for days. And I heard all their life stories."
Her kinship with Colby | 229 |
The Builder's Daily Technology
TBD Technology
A Pathway To Affordable, Zero Carbon Emissions Homes by '30
A year-long evidence-gathering process under Wells Fargo's Innovation Incubator (IN2) and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Lab worked with Blokable on a pro-forma to balance affordability and carbon neutrality.
What would happen if a room full of U.S. business leaders in residential real estate and construction and investment were greeted with these five words?
Affordable, zero carbon emissions ... housing
At a moment like that, institutional knowledge, strategic success, strong work ethic, deep experience, trusted relationships networks, shareholder stewardship, valued consumer offerings, and canny economic trends analysis – in other words, all that makes housing's private sector players thrive in today's markets – would be standing at the banks of the Rubicon.
These five words – for many of those in the room – may set off alarms, or, more likely result in crickets. Self-contradiction, mutual exclusion, double-negatives not adding up to a positive, an already-settled and resolved issue – and at the end of the day -- a non-starter business model discussion for a going-concern real estate and construction firm whose simple purpose is to make money, produce homes for people, and develop dirt into American neighborhoods.
Here's how that might look:
Source: NREL
Affordable, zero carbon emissions ... housing – it<|fim_middle|> 36 rental homes available per 100 extremely low-income households, and these households also bear the brunt of climate and energy risks," said Blokable Co-CEO Nelson del Rio. "This is why Blokable has spent five years developing a business model and building system that would address both housing affordability and energy efficiency. NREL helped us evolve our building design to exceed engineering best practices and building code performance metrics. Their research showed us that by adopting our model, we can manufacture NZE housing without adding new costs – thus scaling up a dramatically more efficient form of housing for society."
"Construction costs will continue to rise faster than incomes into the foreseeable future. Unless we invest and innovate right now, the housing crisis will continue to worsen, the cost to governments will continue to grow, and people and the planet will suffer," said Blokable Co-CEO Aaron Holm. "The development sector and supporting building industry have lagged behind other industries in achieving efficiency gains through technological innovation and standardization. The NREL report demonstrates that it is possible to leverage the learning effects of manufacturing to dramatically reduce both the economic and climate costs of housing creation. It means that Blokable can rapidly develop NZE housing that is substantially more energy efficient, at lower costs than conventional approaches."
Building homes and communities for people – it's often said – is a noble undertaking. The depth of knowledge, wisdom, resources, and resolve to do what builders do under the circumstances and conditions impacting their work today is inestimable. Still, what our children's children's children need calls out from the future in a way that impacts that work today.
Why else are we doing this work?" asks Aaron Holm. "To Nelson and me, there's no point in doing this if we're not going to really do it."
Technology building technology net zero energy net carbon neutral decarbonization NZE offsite construction modular construction modular homes industrialization construction costs Direct costs indirect costs automation engineering structural engineering Homebuilding Homebuilders developer land acquisition
Beyond The Walls, Part 3, Scaling A Capability Culture
This is Part 3 of a three-part inside story of Diamond Age, one of new residential construction's most promising technology-powered start-ups, whose goal is to alter the homeownership affordability crisis in the next decade.
Beyond The Walls: Diamond Age's Whole-Home Endgame, Part 2
This is Part 2 of a three-part inside story of one of new residential construction's most promising technology-powered start-ups, whose goal is to alter the homeownership affordability crisis in the next decade.
Here's What Local Capability Means To Making BTR Projects Pencil
Lowering cost barriers for households without sacrificing an acceptable minimum gross margin describes – in one format or another – the generalized challenge of today's mixed-signals economy. | appears -- and the business drivers that determine winning and losing in today's real estate development, investment, and construction sector occupy separate universes, one real and one imagined. That might be the reflexive response of most of the people in that room full of housing's leaders.
Or, those five words – as outlandish as they may sound, glued together like that – could signify a bright line that marks precisely where technology and human capability can change the past into the future of residential investment, construction, community development. The future nests their plausibility – not the present, certainly. For the present, they amount to an oxymoron. In the future, though, they – urgently – must not only be imagined but real.
It may be humbling, but it's probably true that the entirety of what the best and the brightest know from experience and wisdom in residential construction pales in comparison to what the best and the brightest must continue to learn.
If, fused in this way together, the words "affordable, zero carbon emissions ... housing" could inform us as an oracle from a necessary future, they describe a goal line.
That goal line – should housing's leaders determine it to be worth working to cross – will be reachable only with a cost. That is, if the sum and total of the entire knowledge base, experience, trust capital, resources and networks, resolve, and wisdom of real estate investment, development, and construction's past and present now open the sluice gates to what the future – human generations, economic dynamism, environmental resilience, cultural evolution – has to teach us.
Current means and methods will not get near the goal line. Only evolved and evolving ones, ones that ask and discover what the future needs from the totality of architecture, engineering, construction, and real estate investment and development's applied brilliance can and will cross that Rubicon.
And, now, by the way a 10-year "pro-forma" for getting from current means and methods to a likely state of fusion between affordability and zero carbon emissions is fully laid out for all to consider.
This week, an announcement.
Blokable, the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2), and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), released a report detailing actionable pathways to developing net zero energy (NZE) housing without increasing costs, yet still reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
On its surface, a privately-held modular factory-based builder developer, Blokable, has teamed up with a Federal agency, and with financial support from Wells Fargo, has produced research, data evidence, modeling, and a set of theses that roll up into a white paper scenario called Decarbonization During Predevelopment of Modular Building Solutions.
Get past the title, which could be mistaken for the name for a sleep aid.
What's inside is a business pathway that weld's together a common purpose shared by most of the people who are making careers, livelihoods, fortunes, and networks in the fields related to housing and a future that's bearing down on the present with greater urgency these days than ever.
Here's the claim underlying why you might want to know where that pathway leads, and what traveling along it might be like.
NREL compared Blokable's prototype designs with its scaled up, full production engineering model. The study found that by 2030, compared to conventional housing construction methods, Blokable's model for the manufacturing and development of NZE housing can decrease total lifecycle GHG emissions by 60%, reduce construction material waste by 91%, and avoid the release of 2.4 million tons of CO2 equivalent. Moreover, when Blokable adopts this model, it can achieve these metrics without any added manufacturing or development costs.
What Builders Need to Know
There's a lot to unpack, however, in doing so, builders might find ways out of an echo chamber where challenges self-reinforce, and where growth, improvement – learning – is blocked out.
Aaron Holm – who's worked with his co-founder Nelson del Rio for five years to start and design and engineer and create fabrication facilities and weave repeatable, scalable output of all those expertises together with the orthogonal value stream of property investment, home and community development, and management – considers those five years to be Blokable's prototype period.
What the team – design, engineering, fabrication – have been focused on for the past two years is the building system's manufacturability, its ability to be standardized and perform repeatedly," Holm says. "In our first phase we wanted to develop a pre-build specific product solution in the factory and work out a lot of issues in design, and process and constructability and performance, and the second phase is about industrialization, and then we can release and leverage the learning effects of that into advanced manufacturing, where you achieve both the cost impacts and the carbon emissions goals."
The critical importance of "learning effects" recur in Holm's account of what Blokable's been doing, and what its immediate-term and longer term business arc may look like. Here's what "learning effects" are in a tech-and-data enabled human capability venture.
Learning effects ... benefit from consumers and businesses pursuing their own self-interest to purchase the best products, but they are less the result of gravitational accretion than of finely tuned technology and product development efforts that require constant intervention and recalibration in order to tie together data, intelligence, product innovation and user/customer growth.
As a result, even though learning effects are partially the product of automated learning, they are by no means automatic. The data generated from new customers must be of the right kind and of sufficient volume to enable new learning. This learning must be optimized effectively enough to create new product value. And this value must be strong enough and productized well enough to attract more customers. Any break in this chain means there is no self-reinforcing cycle and hence no learning effects.
Learning effects are like a person on a bicycle vs. one running. Holm believes the study can serve now as a fully-baked pro-forma, a roadmap to a future that fuses "affordable, zero carbon emissions ... housing" into an achievable business value proposition.
Simplistically, to achieve net zero emissions in a building today for the specific Blokable building system, the extra first cost amounts to $8 per $100 of input costs.
The NREL-Blokable research gamed out a goal of reducing both cost and carbon emissions – via manufacturing improvements, scale, process improvements, etc. – that $8 premium per $100 of construction costs to $1 or less – in the context of a volume of 10,000 manufactured homes by year 2030.
After we set up the testing protocols with NREL, we tested the building systems three times in the factory and twice in our site at Blokable at Phoenix Rising site, near Seattle, then the evidence started coming in. We were struck by the amount of carbon in the construction process – the vehicle miles, the materials waste, all the people that travel to the job site – and that's not even including the construction materials, and the other life cycle costs of the of operating the home."
Holm and his partner del Rio have had to be patient. They're trying to get at housing affordability and zero carbon emissions simultaneously, which you'd expect would require a long time in research and development, prototyping and piloting.
Here's what they each say about where they are in their plan.
In the U.S., there are only | 1,550 |
Four new members joined the vibrant Castlegar and District Library board, and two members departed after completing their service to the board and all of its books and services.
March 13 was a pleasant AGM, what with the turn to good weather and influx of people wanting to be on the board. Leaving the board were chair Katrina Vermette and member Gord Turner, both having completed eight years of exemplary service.
Board members partway through their terms are Jill Seaborn, Denise Maier (Area J), Camille Roberts (Area H) and Shannon McCready. Other members re-elected and serving a second term include Jerry Vandenbilche and Jay<|fim_middle|>440 online resources accessed, 116,937 items circulated, 10,457 library memberships noted, 571 new library members, and 2,372 reference questions dealt with. | me Jones.
These stalwart board members have been joined by Jesse Ellis, Terry Gerling, Mike Phipps, and Sheemahu Goodenough who have been elected to their first term overseeing the library, its budget, its programs, and its numerous services. City of Castlegar representative to the board is councillor Cherryl MacLeod.
Among the statistics in the written AGM report were 360 programs, 87,699 in-person library visits, 15,990 public computer sessions, 18, | 114 |
Here's a situation that might ring a couple of bells: you have a website that hasn't been updated since 2005, half the links are broken and many of the images have been reduced to ugly red crosses on the page where high res photos used to be. There's no Facebook link because back then social media was only for techies and students. You face up to the fact that your website is the online equivalent of that car your Granddad passed on to you when you were 17.
So you email a couple of web developers wanting to see how much it is going to cost to fix your website up – and instead of coming back with a price, the first question they ask is "What is your budget"?
The cynics among you might respond by suggesting that it enables the web designer<|fim_middle|>So, have a realistic budget in mind when making queries to web designers, but also have a clear idea about what you want to get for that money as well. Take a look around for a number of quotes, and speak to some experienced designers to see what is possible within your budget. | to come back with a quote that is always only a couple of pounds less than the budget you'd quoted, whatever that figure may be. But putting such pernicious thoughts aside, there are a couple of very good reasons why this is the first question a designer asks.
1. It avoids them giving you a wildly unrealistic quote. Web services vary widely in price. A 'skin' for your Facebook page or blogger site might cost £200 or less, but a 'smells & bells' ecommerce package could run into the thousands. By asking you your budget a designer avoids quoting you for services you don't need and aren't in a position to afford.
2. It allows them to tailor their services to suit your needs. A good web designer will always try to work within your budget and give you the best service possible within those parameters. If you come across a web designer who gives you the "I don't get out of out of bed for less than £10k / I only take on large projects" spiel, then wish them luck and run.
That's right; your website is about your business, not about the designer. A good designer should first determine what functionality you need from your website so that they can offer you services that genuinely suit your needs and are going to make your life easier. They then ask for your budget in order to figure out the most affordable way this can be achieved for you. If they don't ask this question then the services they offer are not tailored to you, no matter how low or high their quote is.
| 317 |
~Sarah Sharpe is probably my favorite character that I've written so far. She is raw and real and tough and vulnerable. A contradiction of steel and glass all wrapped up in her complicated self. I LOVE her! I see both the beauty and the fragility of life through her struggles and in her honesty.
I met Sarah after my own "Subway incident" (see the opening scene of The Carpenter's Daughter), and walking with her through her journey has challenged me in ways that I didn't expect (and didn't always like). I really believe God gave me this imaginary friend so that I could understand Him and myself better. I'm so terribly grateful!~ Jesse is a real guy. Only I never met him, and I don't know his actual story, so I made that part up. But I know there's a guy sorta kinda like him out there. Several years ago my husband met him when he was volunteering for a Habitat For Humanity build. He came home and told me about this young man, a roofer, who traveled around<|fim_middle|>. His easy grin seemed genuine. Something inside my chest fluttered—an odd and ridiculous sensation. Especially for a butch girl.
I lurched away and double-timed it to the truck, agonizing over both humiliations. Maybe Subway was the only fast-food joint in town, but there was no way I was going back. Dad and Uncle Dan would have to deal with Wonder Bread and peanut butter. | , volunteering for programs like Habitat. Man I wished I'd have met him!
No. You don't. And you never know what your words, whispered or not, can do.
I was reminded of the Proverbs where is says, Life and death are in the power of your words.
Indeed, they are. I am challenged to be more careful with both my spoken words and with the thoughts I allow to take root.~Lastly (and a bit lighter J)…my sister was the cover model for The Carpenter's Daughter. We chose to go without a face (sorry to all the decapitated cover haters—they're usually not my fave either—but this time it seemed necessary) because we wanted the reader to imagine the before and after Sarah, and to imagine their awkward neighbor, their loner acquaintance, or even themselves holding her hammer and walking life through her steel-toed boots.
My world stalled as those words swirled behind me, sent into the air by a woman I'd never met.
I had stepped through the Subway door two minutes before, my only thought centered on satisfying my howling stomach. Cold air had kissed my sunburned cheeks, and I shivered as the sweat on my back cooled. A crowd had gathered in the restaurant for the Saturday dinner rush. Weekend warriors and little-league fans lined the length of the counter. I'd taken a place at the end of the line and was reading the options posted above the sandwich counter, right up to the moment that gashing remark registered in my brain.
Me. They were talking about me.
Heat raced across my face, which had nothing to do with the fact that I hadn't worn my "filthy" hat on the roof most of the morning. Never in my life had I felt spat on by a conversation. Minden, Nebraska, wasn't a big town, and I was known there. Dad was a respected general contractor, and I'd been his foreman for three years, since I turned eighteen. Nobody ever thought anything about my appearance. In fact, few seemed to notice me at all.
But we weren't in Minden that week. A job had us on the road, working in a town a hundred miles west.
I tugged on my hat bill, trying to hide. Staring at my reflection in the Plexiglas separating people from food, I took in my grimy face. Yuck. My examination dropped to my man-hands. Ugh. My gaze fell further, until it settled on my steel-toed work boots.
Butch. My throat constricted with strangling force.
I blinked. Of course I wanted bread. What was the kid talking about?
"Wheat." I cleared my throat and commanded my attention back to the errand.
A torturous amount of time passed before I had the bags of food in one hand and three Cokes precariously positioned in the crook of my other arm. I wanted to run out the door.
Pushing the exit open with my backside, I involuntarily rebelled against logic.
Two women stared back from the middle booth. One had dyed blond hair cut short and trendy, and the other's longer black hair had been styled and sprayed to perfection. Early to midfifties. Flawless skin on both faces, which contrasted dreadfully with their contemptuous eyes. The darker of the two actually shook her head.
My stomach hurt, like a rope had been looped around it and yanked tight. I spun out the door. A pair of large, rough hands caught me as I smashed into the solid barrier of a man's chest.
"Whoa there." His voice grabbed my attention and pulled it upward. Of all the horrible moments to bump into—literally—a good-looking guy.
"Let me help you." He reached for my bag of sandwiches.
I juggled the cups against my middle. The icy soda seeped through my T-shirt. Add slob to butch. Covering a groan, I looked into the man's vivid green eyes, which were framed by chocolate-brown brows | 837 |
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National Geographic Dynamic maps, atlas and other mapping | 166 |
A few days ago, Elon Musk announced Tesla's decision to delay the Semi unveiling to focus more on lending a hand to Puerto Rico as it recovers from the recent hurricanes. The Semi reveal had previously been scheduled for October 26th.
This decision also stems from the company's desire to smooth out the kinks with Model 3 production. Musk has claimed that the company is "deep in production hell" and that more details would be posted later on. Musk estimates that it will be another 6-8 weeks before the Model 3 design studio for non-employee reservation holders would be available.
Tesla's decision to postpone the Semi reveal to help Puerto Rico is a generous gesture appreciated by both residents and Governor Ricardo Rossello. Musk and Rossello had a 25-minute phone conversation this past Friday to brainstorm how Tesla could help speed the island's recovery by implementing the company's solar energy products.
Tesla has<|fim_middle|>6th as well its exciting collaboration with Puerto Rico to help revamp its power network. | already succeeded with its solar projects in Hawaii and American Samoa. According to USA Today, Musk believes that they can introduce a larger version of these systems to Puerto Rico. We await further details from Tesla about the Semi reveal on November 1 | 47 |
Ford Mustang High-Performance Features
<|fim_middle|> Escape Towing Capabilities Ford Escape Ford Engines Ford Super Duty Ford Flex 2020 Ford Edge Ford Technology Ford Explorer pickup truck Ford Mustang | The Ford Mustang is an automobile name that revolves in our Welford Harris Inc dealership within Siler City, NC. It is one of the firmly rooted automobiles in the sports car category here at Welford Harris Inc. Its highly rated performance by our dealership is mainly attributed to the following performance features.
Ford Ranger: Power Reinforced with Technology
The Ford Ranger is engineered with power for the extreme off-road adventures. But that is not all. The incorporation of tech features adds to it the confidence it depicts while being driven. The arrays of technology have been specifically put in place to increase your user experience.
Top Benefits of a Certified Pre-Owned Ford Revealed
Ford has one of the top Certified Pre-Owned (CPO) programs of any automaker today. That's why there are more CPO Ford vehicles sold than ever. Let's take a look at some of the top benefits of a CPO Ford vehicle.
All Ford CPO Ford vehicles have passed one of the toughest inspections available. In total, the vehicle is checked at 172 points from bumper to bumper. If there is any issue detected with the vehicle, it is repaired by Ford trained technicians. The result is a CPO Ford vehicle that will give you years of quality driving.
Categories: Pre-Owned Inventory
Adventures Made Easier with The Ford Explorer
Ford has challenged its competitors to produce vehicles with technology half as good as what it offers. We Welford Harris Inc are honored to unveil the Ford Explorer to the people in Siler City. The kind of technology featured in the Explorer model is precisely what consumers want to see in vehicles.
The Ford Copilot is a system that comprises some features to enhance the safety of the driver and the passengers. A quick peek into the system will show a rear-view camera, Auto beam Headlights, the lane-keeping system, the Blindspot Information system and Automatic Emergency braking.
Get Impressive and Reliable Performance from the Ford F-150
The F-150 owes its popularity over the years to being reliable, durable, and sturdy. The latest models may be customized for daily commutes, light- or heavy-duty jobs, or simply for recreation purposes. The full-size pickups have several engine configurations that enable new owners to choose a powertrain for any occasion.
Ford Flex: Big, Brawny & Brainy
Great safety, performance, and a roomy interior are just a few reasons why Ford Flex continues to be a very popular three-row midsize SUV. The team at Welford Harris Inc. and our customers also love this SUV's standout technology features. The following two are wonderful examples.
Get to Know the New Ford Edge at Welford Harris Inc.
If you like driving a crossover SUV for the comfortable seating, great handling, convenient cargo options or all of the above, the Ford Edge is sure to appeal to you. Our showroom is the place in Siler City, NC to find this popular vehicle line, and we invite you to stop in for a test drive today.
The 2020 Ford Expedition: Power and Performance
You'll quickly and powerfully be able to get where you need to be in the 2020 Ford Expedition thanks to a 3.5-Liter V-6 engine and 10-speed automatic transmission.
Advanced Performance Features of the Ford Fusion
If you are looking for an affordable mid-size sedan with excellent performance, consider the popular Ford Fusion. This top-selling sedan offers several performance features that make it stand out from the competition. Here's a look at two performance features now available.
The Super Duty is Designed to Last
Dependability and durability are two of the features that the designers of the Ford Super Duty kept in mind throughout the engineering process. The popular heavy-duty pickup truck has been built to provide tremendous rugged performance over the long haul. A tough body with materials that strike the right balance between weight and strength make this truck one to watch.
new Ford inventory new Ford models Ford new inventory Ford SUV Ford F-150 Ford Expedition Ford Edge Ford truck heavy duty truck Ford Ranger Ford EcoSport Ford Fusion Ford Sedan New Ford | 840 |
Dig in now - with cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower transplants - and a healthy harvest of these cancer-preventing vegetables will be ready to serve within two or three months<|fim_middle|> a 10-foot row yields about 10-20 pounds. For each person, raise about 8-10 pounds, depending on how much the members of the family like it. This plant requires 65-110 days from planting to maturity. Multiple harvests can be made from each plant.
Cabbage - a 10-foot row produces 10-18 pounds. Plan to raise 15 pounds per person. Allow 65-100 days from transplanting to maturity.
Cauliflower - a 10-foot row makes 15-20 pounds, and one should allot 8-10 pounds per person. From planting to maturity, count on 65-90 days.
All of earth is crammed with heaven, and every bush aflame with God.
"Beautifully illustrated and practical Are you ready to take your garden from good to great? Learn how to build your soil...and more!
Discover how to easily build an attractive and affordable greenhouse that will grow anything in any conditions. Also, building your own greenhouse just makes economical sense. You can build a greenhouse at just a fraction of the cost of buying a pre-built one. Most pre-built greenhouse you buy need to be assembled anyway, you are really just paying hugely inflated prices for the material. | .
It is not too late to plant broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower, even in September in most places. These vegetables will survive most winters and then be ready to harvest in February through March.
Cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli are among vegetables known as cruciferous - so named for the cross-like shape of their flowers - and have been widely documented in research around the world as having properties that prevent cancer.
These vegetables should be planted in a sunny location, in rich, well-drained soil. All are hardy annuals that will tolerate evening temperatures in the 40-70 degrees range, so gardeners should watch weather reports and cover plants during occasional freezing spells which last 24 hours or longer.
One can easily plant these vegetables in existing flower beds around the home if a formal vegetable garden space is not possible.
Broccoli - | 170 |
My cupboards at home rarely contain any treats. on any given<|fim_middle|> cucumber, kidney beans, and tomatoes with red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, and paprika. yum.
I must have been a squirrel in another life because I am only am peace when I have about 2 months' worth of food supplies in my cupboards, fridge and freezer. And I lived through the ice storm in semi-rural Ottawa ;) But you are SO RIGHT about eliminating temptation. I only crave sweets at work, where they stare me in the face. This salad looks yummy and healthy. Love that it can be thrown together in a pinch. | day the most exciting things you will find is a can of Tuna (or sardines) rice cakes, chia seeds and a few cans of beans, and maybe, just maybe some chocolate chips for baking. Having my pantry bare, forces me to eat fresh and eat foods that have an expiration date (Fruits, veggies). And when it's not in the cupboards, it's very unlikely for me to actually trek out to a grocery store for something full of sugar or savory, like chips. In my mind, nothing is worth the comfort of my home, or the cold blistering snows of winter. For those of you who are trying to get back on track, empty your kitchen cupboards and pantry of all the foods that you know you shouldn't be eating (cookies, chips, sweet spreads etc.) and donate non-perishable items to your local food bank. NOT having these items at home will make it less likely for you to sabotage your own progress. Believe me I have a big sweet tooth and if cookies were staring me in the face I would eat them…but since they're not there an apple does nicely. What most people don't remember is that an apple or a bowl of berries (or your fruit of choice) is just as likely to curb cravings for sweets as a bowl of ice cream, but without all the guilt.
On this fall day, I was craving something both savory and sweet. I had a few apples kicking around, a cucumber and some celery that needed to be eaten up before a weekend getaway. I also really wanted to stay away from meat so I decided on making a salad using up all the leftover perishable food I had. I used everything I could find in my pantry as well as my fridge and came up with concoction!You cna use whatever seasonings you like or your own additions of veggies (if I had any, I would have included red onion, peppers and maybe even kale).
Whats your Favourite Homemade Salad Recipe?
Mmmm, that looks so yummy! I eat a ton of salads all summer, but this one is probably one of my faves.
rarely contains canned food, i mainly buy fresh produces/fruits for my family. It is true that if you dont stick up the processed foid, you will most likely force yourself to eat healthier options. However, i start to think that it woukd be good to stock up on canned food for emergency.
I'm not sure why I don't use canned beans on salads more often. They are seriously so easy!
That looks tasty but I am so picky I wouldn't eat it, ha ha.
Looks so yummy. I needed a chic pea recipe so thanks for that. My fave salad recipe is: red bell pepper, | 562 |
The inspection of the conveyor system trolley wheels is now fully automated.
Power-and-free conveying is a variation of an overhead chain conveyor that allows the the carrier to disengage from the drive chain — and creating an opening for an inspection technology that monitors component parts and system performance.
Metalcasters are familiar with power-and-free conveyor systems, which are used to transport molds or cast products in a variety of foundry operations. A power-and-free conveyor is a variation of an overhead chain conveyor; with the latter, the carrier is fixed to an overhead drive chain; but with a power-and-free conveyor the carrier can disengage from the drive chain and "idle" as the chain stays in motion.
Power-and-free systems consist of two tracks: An overhead ("power<|fim_middle|>ly production downtimes are a thing of the past." | ") track that holds a conveyor or carrier chain and a lower "free" track. The overhead track transports the chain-driven trolleys. It's this type of system that Volkswagen uses in its Golf assembly line in Wolfsburg, Germany. The final assembly work is done while the vehicle bodies are hanging from the power-and-free conveyor system before the cars proceed to the next production stage. The high throughput has a considerable effect on the line components. When the chain link slackens, for example, the trolley bolts can be deformed or break off due to wear and abrasion.
Also, the trolley wheels are subject to extreme stress. Wheel breakage and damaged ball bearings lead to costly production downtimes. If material fatigue is not detected in time, the production process can be impaired or even interrupted, resulting in unexpected downtime and lost profits. Jammed or unhinged trolleys require tedious repairs. Defective trolley wheels can lead to damage to the materials or parts in production.
Until recently, specially trained workers inspected the trolley wheels, and inspections had to be performed about 10 feet above ground with the inspector in an uncomfortable position. With a throughput of approximately 2,200 trolleys per day, it was an exhausting task and not all errors were detected.
The Volkswagen plant's managers wanted an automated solution. "A product that was quick to install and would provide a reliable trolley wheel inspection was important to us. We wanted to proactively detect material fatigue to avoid corrective measures," according to Wolfsburg maintenance manager Jürgen Bastek.
A technology developed by PSI Technics (www.psi-technics.com/E) provides the solution. The package involves fully automated industrial image processing using 3D and 2D cameras. 3D cameras monitor the trolley wheels on both sides of the overhead tracks of the power-and-free system that transports the empty trolleys back to the beginning of the assembly line. The images are analyzed directly inside the cameras. If certain trolley wheels exceed the predefined tolerance limits, the corresponding data is saved in a database.
The 2D cameras read trolley ID codes and store them in the database. When tolerance limits are exceeded, a command is transmitted to the PLC and the corresponding trolley is removed from current production for service. Then, the maintenance technicians can perform a detailed inspection or repairs, if necessary.
Volkswagen has been using the PSI Technics Inline Control System successfully since June 2011. It was installed in just a few hours during planned, production-free maintenance periods. All additional tasks, such as system configuration and adjustment, took place during regular production. Once the system had been configured, no additional maintenance was necessary. PSI Technics provided the complete Inline Control System, including all required interfaces and documentation.
Thanks to the Inline Control System, VW's maintenance team can concentrate on strategically important projects, rather than repairing defective trolleys retroactively. "The fully automated inspection of our power-and-free installation guarantees a smooth production process," according to Bastek. "Cost | 622 |
3 Punch Combo: Notes on Saturday's Top Rank Card and Friday's 'Sho-Box' Overture
THREE PUNCH COMBO — Light heavyweight is currently one of the deepest divisions in boxing. While superstar Canelo Alvarez appears to be one-and-done, the top end is still loaded with talent and just a step below are many viable contenders knocking at the door. In order to get a title shot against one of the division's elite such as Artur Beterbiev (15-0, 15 KO's) or Dmitry Bivol (17-0, 11 KO's), these contenders must square off against one another to separate themselves from the pack.
This Saturday at the Turning Stone Resort & Casino in Verona, NY we see two such contenders meet when former WBO light heavyweight champion Eleider Alvarez (24-1, 12 KO's) squares off against Michael Seals (24-2, 18 KO's). The winner is all but guaranteed to get a much bigger fight later this year.
Alvarez (pictured) is a former decorated amateur who holds some big wins as a pro against several former world champions. The biggest of those wins came in August of 2018 when Alvarez shockingly knocked out Sergey Kovalev to take Kovalev's WBO light heavyweight title. However, in the rematch six months later Alvarez would lose a lopsided decision in a fight in which he was easily out-boxed.
Alvarez, 35, is by trade a boxer-puncher. Technically sound, he likes to work behind the left jab looking to land the right behind it. This is how he set up the fight-altering knockdown of Kovalev in their first fight. In addition, Alvarez is an excellent counterpuncher and generally keeps a very tight defense.
His biggest flaw is his work rate. He is not a high-volume puncher and can get out-worked as we saw in the rematch with Kovalev.
Seals, 37, does not have a comparable amateur background or resume as a pro. But what Seals does have is natural athleticism. Similar to Alvarez, Seals is a boxer-puncher who will look to work behind the left jab. While he may not be as technically proficient as Alvarez, Seals does possess much quicker hands and has more power in each of his fists. And he has shown a willingness to keep his hands busy even if that means getting into a firefight.
Defensively, Seals has some issues. He often holds his left low and does not exhibit much head movement. In short, he is not hard to miss and this could be an issue against Alvarez.
I like this fight a lot as each fighter has the tools to expose the other's weaknesses. Alvarez could find a home for the right hand behind<|fim_middle|> What we do know is that his gaudy record was built on subpar opposition; he's faced only three fighters with a winning record. His best win came his last time out in April when he won a ten round unanimous decision over 41-year-old journeyman Fidel Hernandez.
On paper this looks a showcase for Shishkin. But Sierra's unbeaten record adds a little intrigue. I am interested to see how Shishkin performs as he could very well get a title shot before the year ends.
Related Topics:Andre WareArtur BeterbievBoxingBryan VasquezDmitry Bivoleleider AlvarezFelix VerdejoIsmael SalasManuel Rey RojasMatt AndrzejewskiMichael SealsSergey KovalevThe Sweet ScienceTSSUlises SierraVladimir Shishkin
In Praise of Referees
Fast Results from San Antonio: Munguia TKOs Brave but Out-gunned O'Sullivan | the left jab with frequency, but Alvarez will also have plenty of dead spots and Seals with his quick hands should dominate those moments. There is plenty of intrigue to this bout and I have been looking forward to it since it was announced.
The Return of Felix Verdejo
One time blue-chip prospect Felix Verdejo (25-1, 16 KO's) will make his return to the ring on Saturday when he faces Manuel Rey Rojas (18-3, 5 KO's) in the Turning Stone co-feature. a scheduled ten round lightweight bout. This will mark just the third time Verdejo has fought since his stunning loss to Antonio Lozada in March of 2018 and will mark his first fight with new trainer Ismael Salas.
2020 is a critical year for the now 26-year-old Verdejo whose career, for a variety of reasons, has not gone as planned. But as I have alluded to in the past when writing about him, the talent is still there and he still has time to get things turned around.
In his last fight in April, Verdejo scored arguably his best win as a pro when he won a ten round unanimous decision over Bryan Vasquez. But his performance lacked sizzle. He gets a chance at a fresh start with Salas in his corner to start 2020 and will need to put on a show to get some buzz back in his career.
Rojas is a 26-year-old journeyman who is on six fight winning streak since getting stopped by Andy Vences in the second round back in December of 2015.
On paper, this is a spot where Verdejo will shine. Anything less would be a major step back. But assuming Verdejo can look like his old self, he could soon be in line for a major fight. With Vasiliy Lomachenko likely to fight Teofimo Lopez in the first part of the year in a major lightweight unification fight, Verdejo could find himself in the ring with the winner or loser in what would be a big fight towards the end of the year.
ShoBox Returns
The popular prospect-oriented series ShoBox returns on Friday with a tripleheader from the WinnaVegas Casino & Resort in Sloan, IA. The card is headlined by fast rising super middleweight Vladimir Shishkin (9-0, 6 KO's) who takes on the unbeaten Ulises Sierra (15-0-2, 9 KO's) in a ten round contest.
Shishkin, a 28-year-old Russian who trains under Javon "Sugar" Hill in Detroit, reportedly had more than 300 amateur bouts. He is coming off a pair of impressive performances.
In October of 2018, Shishkin stopped former world title challenger Nadjib Mohammedi in the tenth round of their scheduled twelve round fight. The following August, he made his U.S. debut on ShoBox against Andre Ware.
Ware was coming off an upset over the highly touted Ronald Ellis and many thought he posed a threat to Shishkin. But from the opening bell, Shishkin consistently found a way to land precision, heavy handed shots on Ware until the fight was stopped in the eighth round.
Shishkin can best be described as an aggressive boxer-puncher. He likes to press forward working combinations behind a ramrod-like left jab which is itself a major weapon. His footwork is excellent as evidenced in the Ware fight and he often positions himself at just the right angles to land precision heavy handed combinations. His hand speed is above average and his defense surprisingly very sound for such an aggressive style.
In this day and age in boxing, usually some video exits on everyone. Well, for Ulises Sierra, 30, there is almost nothing out there on him. | 796 |
Phew!<|fim_middle|> | What a weekend! Shattered doesn't even begin to cover it. A couple of quick emails from the reserve have seen me taking on 3 extra days this month (not bad for a newbie!).
Friday and Saturday at the Ayr Country Show and Sunday on the reserve, brilliant fun!
My "weekend" started at 6 am on Friday morning, getting ready to go help Rita set up the stand (which basically meant Rita capably organised everything, and I helped shift stuff from the car and basically got under her feet. And it was FREEZING. We shivered away as the school kids trooped past and grabbed the occasional coffee and hot soup where we could!
The Saturday I got a lovely lie in until 7:30 as I was picking up extra stock from the reserve and we did a steady trade in fluffy owls and pin-badges. With me occasionally disappearing to find things to stuff my face with or visiting the excellent Shaw's Meats stand (I ended up buying venison stew mix, wood pigeon breast, wild boar salami, biltong, and ostrich, kangaroo, springbok and vension burgers!). Our stand was handily next to one from the Great Grog Company, who sent us away with a few nice taster bottles. Both of these companies deliver and I can heartily recommend their wares!
Attempting to convince a nice Irish man that Buzzards aren't all that bad!
Sunday it was slinging it down. And my attempts at getting any good pictures on the reserve were pretty much thwarted. Everything looked damp and miserable, however, there was high drama on the pond when a marauding heron went for our teenage ducklings (a big mouthful for any predator).
The rain kept the centre pretty quiet and allowed us to get on with moving some stock, but the birds came to the feeders regardless, looking for an easy (if a little damp) meal. So remember guys - even if it's raining - come in and say hello, get yourself a hot chocolate, and enjoy some comfortable birding! Happy spotting!
"These one's are wet, I want his..." | 440 |
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Grant Langston talks "harmony" in online dating and in work4 min read
By Jaime Luis Aldecoa | Mar 22, 20<|fim_middle|>," Langston shares. That company was eharmony.
He did marketing and copywriting work for a startup that pioneered online dating. Langston did pretty much did every non-technical job in the company for 15 years.
"The word "trajectory" suggests some kind of uniform direction, but my career has been anything but uniform," he said.
The board asked Langston to be the CEO of eharmony three years ago. He never dreamed that he would be entrusted with a huge responsibility.
eharmony helped make matches
Langston said in an interview with Thrive Global that "it was hard to believe the industry was capable or interested in helping people." That perception changed once he saw the results the company was making.
Eharmony made matches and became involved in each one. Langston got to see how these relationships evolved and grew through the years.
"eharmony was putting people together who were so well-matched, and who would have never found each other otherwise," Langston explained.
To be involved with something that was so significantly impacting people's lives has been fulfilling, to say the least." – Grant Langston, CEO of eharmony.
Langston on the future of online dating.
"Nobody benefits from the development of features that people find creepy or unnerving," according to Langston. He believes that people should not feel uncomfortable when it comes to online dating.
"As long as consumers feel safe, artificial intelligence and other kinds of technology can make online dating more accurate and effective in specific ways," he said.
Langston said he has seen presentations on the integration of DNA matching. He remains skeptical however that people will be willing to provide samples.
Langston on work-life balance
According to Langston, work-life balance is better today than it was in the past. He shared how people back in the day used to prove their work ethic by sitting on chair and working the entire time.
"In years past, the idea that you might leave work and go exercise during lunch would have been laughed out of the room," he explains.
He also enjoys the fact that it is now acceptable to honor your family responsibilities and take care of your health.
Langston explains that the best way to have a healthy work-life balance is to really contribute when you're working. He said that it becomes easier to step away and get space from your job when needed.
If it is balance you seek, try these five home-based jobs.
Langston to younger generations
Langston said he would urge his younger self to "worry less and continue to make wise choices."
His tip to younger generations is to get their foot in the door and start providing value for the business they want to work in. Organizations are constantly seeking people that take work seriously and understand the broader business perspective according to him.
He also has a tip for those frustrated with their current situation:
"The best advice I can give for someone who feels that they aren't on the path they want is this: Look for the ground floor of the opportunity you want." – Grant Langston, CEO of eharmony.
For Langston in action, check out his take on machine learning, below:
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Jaime Luis Aldecoa
Jaime Aldecoa is a staff writer at Grit Daily. He is an avid traveler, YouTube vlogger, and podcast host. He holds a degree in Mass Communication.
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It's true: Many millennials date as a "hobby" rather than for the thrill of winning someone over for the long term.
But that's changing, at least according to eharmony CEO, Grant Langston. Langston spoke with Grit Daily Executive Editor, Jordan French, last November at Web Summit in front of a packed audience numbering over 1,000.
Could dating tastes be changing? Are millennials — in particular — moving away from their hook up-centered ways? No doubt, dating apps have had an affect. Behavioral Scientist and Bustle contributor Clarissa Silva agrees, saying:
"Dating apps are creating a paradox effect in dating: it's giving off the illusion of many choices while making it harder to find viable options."
So here's former Southern rock star (literally) Grant Langston's take on the matter.
Working with eharmony
Grant Langston in his "CEO days."
Despite studying to be a lawyer, Langston's real passion was music. The eharmony CEO moved to Los Angeles to play music when he was 21.
He had to find work to sustain his passion. After a decade of doing dreary day jobs, one phone call would change the trajectory of his career.
"I got a call from a friend who asked me if I was willing to come and help a start-up | 275 |
The<|fim_middle|> housing policy.
A point perhaps worth adding to this debate? Until the DWP might attempt to redraft the legislation, neither the local authority nor the DWP is the final arbiter of whether or not a LHA or HB size related determination is justified. All such decisions carry a right of appeal by the HB claimant to the First-tier Tribunal, and then onward on a point of law to the Upper Tribunal. If number of rooms has been redesignated, then the HB authority decision maker either allows the revised room allowance, or it does not. If it does not, (even under threat of subsidy loss) then the claimant can appeal. | first problem for the DWP is, of course, that there is a clear and justifiable reason for redesignation. There is a statutory definition of room size, and box rooms, alcoves and walk-in cupboards don't meet it.
Initially the English policy was supposed to bring rents into conformity with a common standard by 2012. The rent rises demanded were unmanageably high, the deadline has slipped back, and it is now scheduled to be done by 2015/16 unless the Bedroom Tax upsets it further.
Do make allowances if I get this next bit wrong; I don't work in England, but I trust that my English readers will set me right. From what I can decipher, while the government would have liked bedroom size to be a determinant of rents, it hasn't quite happened, and it is not always obvious what proportion of rent is attributable to the number of bedrooms. In places, it seems that the main effect of the DWP demanding a deduction of the proportion of rent attributable to bedrooms will be to limit the scale of increase in rents that the DCLG has been requiring social landlords to make. It looks, then, like a case of government pulling in two directions at once; it's also a mark of a wider failure to understand that Housing Benefit is not just a benefit, but an instrument of | 276 |
Submerge is the new kid on the Bristol Festival block. Combining electronic music, audiovisual arts and live performance it makes<|fim_middle|> an international feel about it, which artists from as far afield as the USA, Canada, Italy, New Zealand, The Congo and Italy coming to take part.
Venues will include an 18th Century Church, former coroner's court and the unexplored vaults under Colston Hall. As a result it should be a real journey of discovery.
The theme for the festival is 'Fathoms' and all the performances will encourage audiences to take a deep breathe and dive in.
You can find all event details and ticket prices in the programme. | its debut this year.
From November 18th-20th this hybrid arts and music event will bring together live performance, audiovisual art and electronic music.
Organisers say Submerge is for the adventurous and therefore perfect for those who like an immersive experience.
The festival has | 57 |
Rochelle Foundation
GRANT POLICY & PROCEDURES
AREA SERVICE PROVIDERS
The future depends on what you do today." - Mahatma Gandhi
Rochelle Area Community Foundation › About Us
ABOUT THE ROCHELLE AREA COMMUNITY FOUNDATION
The Rochelle Area Community Foundation offers an opportunity for individuals, families, and businesses to leave a legacy for future generations that will sustain the quality of life which we have enjoyed for decades. The Community Foundation is a public, charitable organization designed to attract gifts that will be shared with Rochelle Area non-profit organizations for the benefit of the entire community.
About us: Left Side
How does the Rochelle Area Community Foundation work?
The Foundation provides a simple and flexible way to invest in the future of Rochelle and neighboring communities. The Foundation allows individual or business donors to contribute to one organization that benefits many, allowing donors may to achieve their charitable goals.
The Foundation Board, with a diverse membership, will manage the funds to achieve the goals of the non-profit community foundation. Gifts to the Foundation will provide a lasting endowment, and the Foundation will provide caretaker services for the funds.
Donors either may be specific about where their gifts are used or may allow the Foundation to assess the needs of the community and fund projects accordingly. The Foundation plans for a broad focus of beneficiaries that include the arts, education, health and community services, and community development. The greatest advantage of the Rochelle Area Community Foundation for donors flexibility. The projects and organizations selected will ensure that the needs of the community are met.
About us: Right Side
What ensures the Foundation is lasting?
Through the endowment process your gift will grow, and the board of directors will determine its use. A small percentage of the funds are distributed annually, while the remainder is wisely invested. As the investment grows, more and more money is returned to the Rochelle Area Community's needs.
Are gifts tax-deductible?
Yes, all gifts are tax-deductible. Gifts are federally exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Service code.
How may I become a contributor to the Rochelle Area Community Foundation?
There are many ways to support the Foundation. No gift is too small, and all gifts are important to the success<|fim_middle|> by NMD | of the Foundation.
A single gift or an annual gift may be given to the Foundation, or your contribution may also be made through a designation in your will.
Who do I contact?
Call us at 815-561-3600. By email: [email protected] »
A generous, vibrant, and sustainable community where a helping hand is always within reach.
To offer those with a philanthropic heart a simple way to make a positive difference in the community.
Be a vehicle for philanthropy and empower community nonprofits through donor stewardship.
Q: What is the Rochelle Area Community Foundation?
A: The Foundation was a vision of Leonard Carmichael's and he gathered a core group of community volunteers in 2004 and 2005 to explore the feasibility of establishing a Community Foundation. The RACF was incorporated in December 2005 and was granted not-for-profit status by the Internal Revenue Service in November 2006. Board members are volunteers and serve a maximum of two, three-year terms.
Q: Why another Foundation?
A: We primarily focus on other not-for-profit organizations, which enable the RACF to serve the charitable interests of the entire community. Gifts are invested in an endowment fund. This differs from a capital or operational fund because it will last forever.
The RACF is a vehicle for philanthropy.
Q: How is the money invested?
A: Currently the funds are invested with the DeKalb County Community Foundation.
Q: How are gifts awarded?
A: We serve not-for-profit organizations in the Rochelle area and our boundaries mirror the Rochelle Township High School District. Each year agencies and organizations have an opportunity to apply for funds. Grants are generally awarded for programs or needs outside of operational expenses.
Q: How do I make a gift?
A: We welcome gifts of all amounts. The gifts may be designated or undesignated and are fully tax deductible to the extent allowed by law. Our Executive Director, Kim Montgomery or any board member may help with your donation.
Q: How can I help?
A: There are many ways that you can help the Foundation and your community. You can advocate for the RACF as you prepare your estate. You may also contribute to the RACF Founding Circle. Finally you may know of someone or another group that would like to hear this message.
Leonard Carmichael
RACF Founder
Leonard Carmichael was a lifelong farmer and owner of Maplehurst Farms in Rochelle. He fulfilled his longtime dream of giving by establishing the Rochelle Area Community Foundation in 2006. He passed away on December 12, 2009 at his home in Rochelle with his family by his side.
BM: Trisha
Trisha Vaughn
Trisha was born & raised in Rochelle, she earned her B.S. at Bradley University followed by a D.V.M. from Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine and J.D. from Northern Illinois University College of Law. Trisha resides in Rochelle with her husband, John and their three children. Trisha serves on the Board of the Rochelle Elementary School and is an active volunteer.
BM: Carol
Carol Hayenga
Carol was born and raised in the Rochelle area. She attended the University of Illinois where she earned a degree in Accounting. She lived in Chicago and worked at Grant Thornton for 3 years before moving back to Rochelle and working at Maplehurst Farms. She is currently a board member of the Rochelle Township High School, RTHS Alumni Association, Rochelle Christian Food Pantry and Maplehurst Farms.
BM: Marisol
Marisol Martinez
Marisol works at HOPE of Ogle County, serving adults and children who have experienced domestic abuse. She has also been a long-time employee of Alfano's restaurant. Born and raised in Rochelle, Marisol is passionate about serving her community.
BM: Jeff
Jeff Fiegenschuh
Jeff Fiegenschuh has served as the City Manager for the City of Rochelle since 2017. Prior to his time in Rochelle, Jeff served the Village of Rantoul and the City of Princeton in the same capacity. He has over 17 years of experience in local government management and looks forward to brining his skillset to the Rochelle Area Community Foundation Board. Jeff is active in both the ICMA and the ILCMA. He has three children, Courtney, Abbey and Carter and spends his spare time exercising, spending time with family and friends and watching baseball.
BM: Dennis
Dennis Berg
Dennis graduated from RTHS and went on to attend WIU. Retired from a thirty three year career with Contel/GTE/Verizon. Dennis served ten years on the Rochelle City Council and is married to Avis, his wife of 43 years.
BM: Kara
Kara Kettleson
Kara Kettleson was born and raised in Rochelle and now raises her 4 children in Rochelle also. She received her bachelor's degree from Northern Illinois University in Visual Communications. She has worked locally for many years at Holcomb State Bank and the Rochelle Chamber of Commerce. Kara currently works at News Media Corporation located in Rochelle as the Digital Systems Manager of the technology department.
BM: Kathy
Kathy Hollonbeck
Kathy has been actively involved in the community since moving here with her five children in 1972. In the process of retiring from her real estate investment business, KGH Investments, she hopes to have more time for family and her many hobbies.
BM: Stephanie
Stephanie Williams
Stephanie is a local business woman, wife & mother of two. Raised in Rochelle, she went on to earn her degree from Eastern Illinois University where she met her husband, Danny. The two own and operate Lifeworks Photography Studio. Stephanie has served on the Boards of the Rochelle Child Care Center and the Rochelle Chamber of Commerce.
BM: Greg
Greg Folmar
Greg Folmar is an Investment Advisor with Holcomb Bank. An active member of the Rochelle Rotary Club, Greg also brings together a volunteer corp to work on community projects as the need arises.
BM: Jacob
Jacob Becker
Jacob is the Marketing & Technology Manager for Crum-Halsted Insurance & Risk Management as well as a marketing consultant. He received his bachelor's degree from Bradley University and is on the Rochelle Planning & Zoning Commission and the Retail Advisory Board. Jacob is an avid outdoorsman and enjoys traveling, spending time with his family, and reading a good book.
BM: Ashley
Ashley Jackson
Ashley holds a degree in Business Management from NIU, and has been employed as a Financial Consultant with Central Bank's Investment Division for 17 years. Ashley, her husband Paul, their two daughters Rylee and Taylor along with Maggie the dog reside in Chana. Ashley formerly served as a member of the Board of the Rochelle Child Care Center and is a member of the Rochelle Rotary Club.
BM: Terry
Terry Dickow
Terry is a retired teacher. His family moved to Rochelle in 1971. Daughters, Julia and Emily attended school in this community. He started at the Rochelle News Leader in 1969 but in 1981 he went back to school for a teaching certificate. He has been active in VCCT and at one time served on the park board and library board. He is currently on the museum board and involved with the history walk of the downtown area during the summer.
BM: Tony
Tony Doyle
Originally from Ashton, Tony graduated from Eastern Illinois University with a degree in Education followed by a Masters Degree from National-Louis University in Wheaton. Tony joined the Rochelle Elementary School District as a building Principal in 2006, and is honored to serve as Assistant Superintendent for both the Elementary and High School Districts in Rochelle. Tony lives in Rochelle with his wife, Krista and daughter Riley. He enjoys spending his spare time with family and friends.
BM: Kwami
Kwami Gati
Kwami is a Commercial Merchandiser and Logistics Specialist for CHS Ethanol in Rochelle. Originally from West Africa, he earned a Master of Science in Agronomy for University of Lome'-Togo West Africa and later a Master of Arts Economics from Western Illinois University in Macomb. Kwami Lives in Rochelle with his family and is a member of the Rochelle Rotary Club.
BM: Doug
Doug Forsberg
Doug grew up near Cleveland, OH and remains a diehard Browns and Indians fan. He graduated from Westminster College in 1994 and married his wife, Amy, in 1997. After graduating from Princeton Theological Seminary in 2002, Doug served churches in Newport, RI and Wrightstown , PA. He moved to Rochelle with his family in 2013 to serve as the Senior Pastor of First Presbyterian Church.
HOME DONORS GRANT SEEKERS APPLY GRANT RECIPIENTS GRANT POLICY & PROCEDURES YOUTH IN PHILANTHROPY ABOUT US NEWS & REPORTS AREA SERVICE PROVIDERS CONTACT emailContact
Site designed | 1,909 |
This workshop by Professor Gordon Cheung presents Latent Variable Growth Curve Modelling (LGM) for analysing longitudinal studies with latent variables.
Mplus syntax for testing LGM.
Chan D (1998). The conceptual<|fim_middle|> Vandenberg RJ, Self RM (2000). Latent growth models of individual Change: The case of newcomer adjustment. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 83, 107–140. | ization and analysis of change over time: An integrative approach incorporating longitudinal mean and covariance structures analysis (LMACS) and multiple indicator latent growth modeling (MLGM). Organizational Research Methods, 1, 421–483.
Chan D & Schmitt N (2000). Inter-individual differences in intra-individual changes in proactivity during organizational entry: A latent growth modeling approach to understanding newcomer adaptation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85, 190–210.
Duncan TE, Duncan SC, Strycker LA, Li F, Alpert A (1999). An introduction to latent variable growth curve modeling: Concepts, issues, and applications. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Lance CE, | 161 |
Anthems throughout Her Story 2 Series
Written by Women
Laura Seaman
The anthems during the Her Story 2 Sermon Series are written and/or arranged by women.
Sunday, January 20:
This Sunday's anthem is composed by Jane Marshall, a composer of choral music, a hymnist, poet and teacher. She's a longtime member of the Meadows School of the Arts theory faculty and the Sacred Music graduate faculty at Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She is now teaching in the summer continuing education program there and is active as a clinician for choral organizations around the country. A distinguished alumna of SMU, Jane has been honored twice by the Southern Baptist Musicians Conference and recently by the Fellowship of United Methodist Musicians for her contributions to church music. She is the author of Grace, Noted, a collection of homilies, essays and hymns published by Hope Publishing Company. She and clergyman/poet John Thornburg have collaborated in two newly released hymn collections titled Can God Be Seen in Other Ways, published by Abingdon Music Press, and What Gift Can We Bring, published by Wayne Leupold Editions.
The anthems during the Her Story2 Sermon Series are written and/or arranged by women. Today's anthem is composed by Kathleen Armstrong Thomerson, a native of Jackson, Tennessee. Thomerson spent portions of her childhood in Mississippi, California, and Texas. She attended the University of Texas, receiving a bachelor's degree in music in 1956 and a master's degree in 1958; she also studied at Syracuse University, with Flor Peeters at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp, and with Jean Langlais in Paris. She worked as the music<|fim_middle|> Very Thought of Thee was written by Joan J. Pinkston. She was born in Chicago where she early displayed unusual musical gifts. She began serving as pianist of her church at age ten and appeared regularly as a pianist on local television and in classical music concerts by age twelve. She continued her training at Bob Jones University, where she earned a BA and MA in piano performance. Joan has published numerous traditionally styled sacred choral pieces, primarily with SoundForth and Beckenhorst Press. In 2002, Joan's 816-page hymnbook, Hymns of Grace and Glory, was published and features more than seventy of her own hymn tunes. During her 40 years as a professional musician she has published over 400 pieces of music, given over a hundred workshops on composing and arranging, and performed numerous sacred concerts. Her hymn arrangements for piano and orchestra are featured on the recording Our Great Savior released by Sacred Music Services in 1994. A recording of her piano arrangements, Our Song of Praise, was released in 2010. Joan has also written five film scores. Joan has taught music theory, hymn improvisation, orchestration and choral composition at Bob Jones University for more than forty-five years.
This Sunday's anthem, Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho is by Patti Drennan. Patti earned a Bachelor of Music Education at Oklahoma State and a Masters of Music Education at the University of Oklahoma. She taught Choral Music for twenty-eight years, where she was voted Teacher of the Year. An active composer and arranger with over two million copies sold , Patti has almost 500 choral octavos, piano and piano/vocal books published with thirteen major publishers. She has been guest director at numerous "Composer Weekends". She has been an adjudicator for school choral contests in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kansas. For almost ten years she served as Music and Worship Arts Director at First Baptist Church, Norman. Patti enjoys writing, leading music reading sessions for publishers and singing in a professional gospel choir. Her Christmas CD recorded with her daughter entitled "A Mother Daughter Christmas" is now available on I-Tunes, Amazon, GooglePlay and here.
Walleye Game
Scout Sunday
Mr. Ed Caldwell: Special Interview Guest
Run the the Word
Holy Week Services 2023
Dr. Swisher, Do you have any tips for living a Happy and Successful life? Dr. Swisher, How can we have a good New Year? Milagro, Toledo Is it possible to find true Joy and Peace this Christmas? Gina, Toledo | director of University UMC, and taught organ at the Saint Louis Conservatory and at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville; she has also worked as organist and music director at Mt. Olive Lutheran Church in Austin, Texas. She is a Fellow of the American Guild of Organists. As a writer of hymns, Thomerson is best known for the text "I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light", written in the summer of 1966 after a visit to the Church of the Redeemer in Houston and set to her own tune, Houston. She has composed other hymn tunes as well, including several for publication in the 2005 collection A Taste of Heaven's Joys: A Collection of Original Hymns, written with Patricia B. Clark. She published a bio-bibliography of her teacher Langlais in 1989, and a biography of Marie-Claire Alain in 2002.
This Sunday's anthem, Jesus the | 203 |
When we lived in Minnesota, our next door neighbors were Bill and Lois. They are still some of our dearest friends. Bill is really smart and very kind. He is also a character. One day, he decided he was going to cut down the tree at the corner of his house. He had it rigged so that it would fall out into his back yard, missing his garden, the garage, and all the other trees around. It was a good plan. But you know what they say about the best laid plans.
I had just come home with the kids. We came out of the garage and started up the driveway and then stopped because Bill was taking a chain saw to a tree. We knew something exciting was about to happen. And it did. The tree fell, but instead of taking the preferred path down, it came out at an angle from the house, in a direct line with where my son, who was seven, was standing. I was not concerned, because I knew the tree was not tall enough to make it to the driveway, but he didn't. The tree fell, taking out their clothesline and ours, the ground shook, and Curtis burst into tears. Lois came out of the house and yelled at Bill for upsetting Curtis. Bill got his chain saw, cut up the tree, and righted the clotheslines.
So you can imagine my interest yesterday when hubby came home from Saturday breakfast with the boys to tell me that they were going over to one of the guys' house to cut down a tree. Where's my camera? Bill, you may want to take notes.
Lots of ropes controlling the path of the limbs.
The first of two big limbs coming down, spewing smaller limbs everywhere.
Now that the second big limb is down, it's a matter of cutting it up and cutting the trunk down to a stump.<|fim_middle|> our Bill stories and we love our Bill stories. And you called me purdy!
Are you sure Curtis wasn't crying because he saw Bill without a shirt? I cried a little now just looking at the picture.
jeff - No, Bill was actually wearing a shirt when he was cutting down the tree. He only took his shirt off after Lois yelled at him. I think getting into hot water made him sweat!
I do recall Lois getting a little upset just because I knocked down two clothes poles. Tell Curtis to be sweet because I was thinking of something for his wedding. How about a new Porshe?
I hate to go to weddings because girls can't keep their hands off me. As a matter of fact, they can't stop kicking me either! We will be there, Lord willing. That is if you don't hit like the rest.
bill - Well, there will be a lot of girls there, so watch out. That's awesome that you are coming, we can't wait to see you both! Ask Lois to give Jeff a great big hug for me at his release party tomorrow, that's exciting!
Jeff is busy, I accept all the free hugs! | When that was done, they loaded it onto a trailer using a crane. Then they hauled it to the dump, where it weighed in at 1540 pounds.
I'm just glad no clotheslines were harmed in the cutting down of this tree.
That reminds me of the time that Danny and a friend were trimming trees for extra money. They dropped a limb through the roof of the house next door to the one where the tree was. Needless to say, they made no extra money for that job, and it was the last time that they trimmed trees for anyone.
di - Yeah, I can see where that would cut into the profits!
My husband is pretty good about the ropes and such when he's cutting down a tree, but I still get nervous nonetheless.
Only in Oklahoma can three men cutting down one tree become a ceremony. Actually I had heard that trees seldom grow tall enough there to cut down, before they get burned up or blown away in Tornado Alley. We have too many tall trees here to make a project out of a drop. Rental tools are for sissies. Real men just use a sharp saw, and are ready to run. I admit I did take down one tree and two clothes poles with one cut, when you were here. Don't forget, I missed both houses. Besides, I got distracted when I realized a pretty neighbor was watching!
heather - Yeah, it's hard to know where it's going to go. That's why those tree removing companies can charge so much. I stood well back with a good zoom lens!
bill - You did a good job. We just like to tell it because it is one of | 339 |
Looking shoes that provide comfort and style? Look no further than FlipSlips ballet flats! Their ballet flats are comfortable and stylish, but their versatility and makes them perfect for wearing everyday! They're also waterproof, lightweight, and foldable for ultimate portability so they can be taken anywhere. That's why they're the best shoes for traveling, whether you're walking up and down cobblestone streets or taking a seaside stroll. They're the perfect "antidote" for weary, achy, and tiresome feet during your travels. Your feet will thank you! They truly give my feet the breather they need. Their comfortableness surely doesn't sacrifice their articulate style since they're undeni<|fim_middle|> Esther Flatto, FlipSlip's Founder. "We believe an active woman should be able to be comfortable no matter where she goes, so we designed a shoe that evolves throughout her entire day".
This post is in partnership with FlipSlips. | ably classic and exude style and sophistication.
The FlipSlips ($79) are also not your ordinary pair of ballet shoes since they come with 3 sets of interchangeable ankle straps enable you to style each pair in 5 different ways. You can wear them with the silver or gold straps, matching straps, which are reversible with reflective color for a sportier style; or simply strapless! They're available in timeless colors like black and white as well a bountiful of vibrant colors like yellow, green, purple, red, and orange.
"Our goal was to design a shoe that was portable enough to fit into a small purse, yet versatile enough that it could be worn all day", said | 141 |
<|fim_middle|> piece of work for the red meat industry's broader sustainability agenda.
"CSIRO's biochar research strongly aligns with MLA's commitment to the CN30 initiative which is Australia's red meat industry ambition of being carbon neutral by 2030," he said.
"It is important that efforts to achieve carbon neutrality have the dual objective of improving profitability for red meat producers and this research is a great example of this: it has the potential to boost productivity and profitability in red meat production systems while reducing emissions."
For details about the 13 RD&A projects approved, click here.
Source: MLA | Productivity, emissions reduction benefits in new bio-char R&D project
Beef Central, August 22, 2019
A NEW research project could help red meat producers improve productivity and decrease greenhouse gas emissions by adding custom designed biochar to cattle and sheep rations.
The project aims to define biochar production processes that will produce fit-for-purpose biochar for inclusion in ruminant feeds and then quantify and validate the effects on animal productivity and emissions.
The project is one of 13 new on-farm research, development and adoption projects to receive Meat & Livestock Australia investment of $6.2 million in levy funds in 2018-19. This investment in industry driven R&D is a result of MLA's regional consultation process, which enables producers to have input into the direction of RD&A funding most relevant to them.
The biochar research will be led by Dr Rob Kinley, a Livestock Systems Scientist with CSIRO Agriculture and Food, in consultation with Professor Phil Vercoe of the University of Western Australia.
Biochar is a charcoal that is generally associated with carbon sequestration, absorption of gases and soil enrichment.
The use of biochar as an ingredient for improved livestock productivity has so far indicated promotion of a more efficient rumen. Dr Kinley says there is huge diversity in biochar types, but no biochars have been designed to be fit-for-purpose for ruminant production, which is a primary objective of this project.
"We know that producers are also interested in feeding biochar to cattle and sheep because there is evidence that soil health is improved through distribution of biochar in the soil, with help from dung beetles," Dr Kinley said.
"We also have some on-farm evidence that liveweight gain is improved in Angus-cross cattle fed biochar, with producers and scientists showing interest in its potential.
"It's about filling a knowledge gap and ensuring resources are directed towards a supplement specifically designed to enhance production with a co-benefit of decreased methane emissions."
Producer input
As part of the research, CSIRO will partner with producer groups across Australia to customise the process and parameters of biochar production to optimal feed supplement techniques and rations that maximise productivity and minimise emissions from livestock systems.
Researchers will use a range of parent materials to generate the biochars, including various woody plants and fodder, with emphasis on industry and agriculture waste streams.
MLA general manager for producer consultation and adoption, Michael Crowley, said the project was an exciting and important | 510 |
Hello I am the parent of a 4th grader that is doing a science project that is due in the last days of January 2015. She has decided to do her project on Crystals and she has started on experiments and I have helped her make them.
We already have at least 4 different crystals (she used Alum as the Soluble) and has done one Salt experiment.
She decided to use 2 different types of water in the experiments (she used Plain Tap Water and Distilled Water) she also used 2 different types of Temperatures when doing each crystal experiment and had 2 different types of solutions and crystals from each experiment.
The problem she is facing is trying to come up with the right way to explain her hypothesis on the different types of waters affect the growth of the crystals.
This is because when she made one of the solutions using Plain Tap Water and Alum, the crystals came out big, however when she did the next solution using Distilled Water and Alum, the crystals came out even bigger than the lest solution she had made. When we did some research on why the different types of water affects the size of growth of the crystals online to help her research the hypothesis behind it.
Online results kept coming back that Plain tap Water was the best at making large crystals, when her observations of her experiments told her different results than the computer did.
Now she's confused because she keeps researching online and in books on what affects Distilled Water has on crystal growth and she cannot find an answer that sounds like what her experiments concluded.
She would like to understand the hypothesis for the experiment she has done.
She also has Temperature experiments on the crystals growth as well but she is stuck a little there as well, although that part she is starting to understand and explain in her hypothesis.
The problem is the different water types and the crystal growth.
She made seed crystals also to show the growth of each after the solution had formed the crystals and to show the size while in the solutions.
Could an expert please help her figure the way to explain the situation she is having difficulties with and so she can understand it as well, so that she can make complete since of what her experiments showed her<|fim_middle|> the way it did (other ions--impurities--in the tap water interfered with the growth of the crystals, keeping them from growing as large as the one in distilled water).
Last edited by tdaly on Fri Oct 31, 2014 7:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
Thank you for providing the link to the website that will help my daughter with her answer. Thank you for explaining the results that she had come to with her experiment, thanks for providing the answer and for helping me understand the answers so I can help her understand them as well. | regarding the difference between water types and crystal growth.
Just to make sure I'm clear on the experiment: Your daughter is growing alum crystals and salt crystals using both tap water and distilled water, correct? Do the different temperatures refer to the temperature of the water the solutes were dissolved into or the temperature the solutions were kept at while the crystals were growing?
I'm assuming that all of the crystals were grown for the same amount of time.
Tap water has dissolved solutes in it that vary depending on where your tap water is coming from (e.g., reservoir or groundwater; rock types in the area). Distilling the water removes all of these solutes. Crystals grow as solute atoms stick onto the seed crystal. But, the atoms can't just stick onto the crystal in any way they want to. Crystals have very specific arrangements of atoms. Let's say you are trying to grow crystals of A (A could be salt or alum). Atoms of A are dissolved in the water and start to stick onto the seed crystal of A. The crystal grows larger. But, if there are atoms of B dissolved in the water as well (B would be the "other" solutes already present in the tap water), then B atoms might stick onto the crystal of A. This changes the surface of the crystal, and can make it very difficult for more atoms of A to stick onto the crystal. This process can actually stop crystal A from growing. In the science world, this is called "second phase pinning".
I suspect that this process is the explanation for your results. The solutes that are naturally in the tap water may be interfering with crystal growth, "pinning" the size of the crystals so that they cannot grow as large as the crystals grown in distilled water.
Thank you for answering my question, I am responding to your question in the reply. Yes my daughter is doing the Alum and Salt crystals in both tap water and distilled water. She has done half her project using alum with tap water and then the other half of the project using alum and distilled water. She also has done the salt crystals the same way (half in tap water and other half in distilled water).
Each solution was made and left to sit undisturbed for the same amount of time. She decided to leave the solutions at room temperature to sit undisturbed to compare the experiments after they were complete.
The answer to the question you have regarding the temperatures, was that the temperatures of both solutions were kept at while the crystals were growing (so while they sat during the growing process was only at room temperature).
She has already done the experiments and has the proof to show but she does not understand the reason why the crystal made with distilled water actually grew much bigger than the other solution made using tap water.
Because when she did the experiment on both, she came up with different data then what she had researched in books and online.
Does that provide you with more detail regarding the issue my daughter has regarding the findings of her experiment and how she can give her hypothesis in a way that she understands the findings and so she can be able to explain it so that the science fair judges understand what she has concluded.
Thank you for this additional information. It is very helpful! It sounds like you controlled all of the right variables so that the difference must be due to using different kinds of water.
Take a look at the answer Vince Calder (of Argonne National Laboratory) gave when someone asked a similar question: http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/g ... n99889.htm. I agree with him--other ions dissolved in tap water are probably interfering with crystal growth in your daughter's experiments. Tap water may have additional nucleation sites (which other scientists at Argonne point out in that post), but the impurities in tap water can actually stop crystals from growing larger. Those impurities aren't present in distilled water, so the crystals in distilled water can grow to larger sizes. That's the explanation for the result of your daughter's experiment.
As far as presenting her hypothesis and findings goes, your daughter's hypothesis shouldn't change after her experiment. A hypothesis is an educated guess about what will happen--you make it before doing the experiment. Her conclusion should (1) state whether her hypothesis was correct or incorrect, (2) say what the results were (crystals grew larger in tap water), and (3) briefly explain why the experiment turned out | 903 |
Is George Lucas Gearing Up to Give Big?
Every time George Lucas is in the news, Star Wars fans' ears perk up. But this time, the director wasn't talking about Lucasfilm's $4 billion sale to Disney or the next round of Star Wars flicks. Instead, Lucas made the first hint at how he might spend his billions, proposing a visual storytelling museum for San Francisco's Presidio park.
He's ready to pay in full, too. Lucas said he would foot the bill for construction of the museum, which he estimates would cost between $250–300 million, and he's also ready to provide a $400 million endowment for the museum, with more financial support coming in the future.
Since selling his Lucasfilm empire to Disney late last year, Lucas hasn't discussed what he might do with his wealth. In several interviews, the director signaled he wanted to continue work in education and would donate a large portion to educational causes, but this project would be the biggest move in philanthropy he's made since the sale.
The Lucas Cultural Arts Museum — as it's being called now — would be a gathering place for families in the Bay Area, housing an enormous collection of art Lucas has been building over the years. The museum would focus on visual storytelling and populist artwork, showcasing comics, children's books, and other illustrations. Programs from Lucas' educational foundation Edutopia, which he founded in 1991 to transform the K-12 learning process, would also be featured at the museum.
"At this scale, there's nothing that has ever been done like this," Lucas said in a recent interview with the San Francisco Chronicle.
The project is also right in line with Lucas' other philanthropic work, as he's always been a strong supporter of the arts. His Lucasfilm Foundation is one of the nation's top funders of the arts, ranking in the top 20 arts giving foundations according to the Foundation Center.
The project could be the tip of the giving iceberg, as well, leading to bigger grants for arts funding in the Bay Area. Since the Disney sale, Lucas has kept quiet about what he might do next. He's now retired from Lucasfilm and was also an original signer of The Giving Pledge. So whatever his next move is, it will likely include a great deal of giving in arts and education.
Of course,<|fim_middle|> the Presidio Trust, and there's some tough competition for the space. Lucas' proposal was one of 16, with others including a New Deal museum and an environmental center, and the location is in some prime real estate — sitting in the shadows of the Golden Gate Bridge. | before the museum can become a reality, the proposal will have to be accepted by | 16 |
San Antonio – St. Mary's University's women's basketball team was picked to finish second in the Heartland Conference this season in a poll of the leagues' head coaches and sports information directors,<|fim_middle|> Tournament. Jason Martens, who has served as the Rattlers assistant coach the last two years, took over as head coach for the 2006-07 season. St. Mary´s returns four starters from last season. | it was announced by the league office.
The Rattlers received two first place votes and a total of 61 points in the poll. Montana State University-Billings was picked as the preseason favorite in the poll, with 10 first place votes and 76 points. St. Edward's was third in the poll with 60 points. Oklahoma Panhandle State University received the last two first place votes, but was picked fifth.
Charlena Rodez (Sr., Cedar Park) was one of five players named to the Heartland Conference preseason all-conference team. Rodez finished second on the team in 2005-06 with 12.2 points and 4.2 rebounds per game. She hit on 51.8 percent of her shots from the field and 75.8 percent of her shots from the free throw line.
The Rattler women finished the 2005-06 season with a 17-13 record and won the Heartland Conference Tournament, earning a berth in the NCAA | 222 |
Do you always feel like you never have the time to get done what you need to, that you always seem busy but are never making much progress? Do you feel like you are always spinning your wheels? If that is the case, you may be causing these problems yourself. Here are a few things you may be doing wrong.
When we have a lot to do and are anxious about getting things done, we tend to go on autopilot and simply do the tasks that are in front of us. We grind away, simply trying to get through as much as we can without considering how important the work is.
Before just diving in and pushing through like a bulldozer, we need to first step back and look at our entire workload. We need to take the time to look at what is really important, not just what is urgent, and focus on that. It is a matter of prioritizing tasks and projects. This way you won't waste time on things that really do not matter all that much.
Again, when we have a heavy workload and are under pressure to get things done, we often simply focus on the things right in front of us. Our thinking becomes one-dimensional. We lose any flexibility and creativity in our thought. There is only one thought uppermost in our mind – get through the work.
We overlook things that might make our work easier. Step back a little and look at your presuppositions. If you are looking at the extremes, maybe there is a choice in between that will work better, rather than an all or nothing response.
Also, take breaks. This will give your mind a break and allow it a little more breathing room to consider different possibilities.
3. Procrastinating on routine tasks, rather than creating a system for doing them.
Again, you need to get a little breathing room to examine these tasks. For example, do you find that you are always neglecting to charge your phone? Bring a charger to your office and have one for the car. When traveling, do you always find yourself having trouble<|fim_middle|> making stressful decisions simply to reduce anxiety. There are many other ways people use to escape, such as binge-watching TV or spending too much time on Facebook.
To handle this problem, you again want to step back a little from the situation and examine your thoughts and feelings about it, so you can work through them. The important thing is to be aware when you are using an escape mechanism to avoid doing something you need to.
If you are looking for work, Winston Resources can help. We work closely with all of our job candidates, learning about them and their background, to find a job that is the best fit. Give us a call today. | deciding what to bring? Make a list of items to take whenever you travel.
4. You look for escapes from anxiety producing situations.
We may put off doing things that are anxiety producing, such as talking with a supervisor, or, conversely, rush into | 52 |
Category Archives: Speculative Fiction
Science fiction and/or fantasy.
April 4, 2020 Books, Speculative FictionMax Gladstone, Science FictionWesley
Vivian Liao, heroine of Max Gladstone's space opera romp The Empress of Forever, is a tech billionaire. Elon Musk is mentioned by name as a colleague and/or competitor. This is… an interesting choice. Not that this novel is all "Yay tech billionaires!" It's all about confronting Viv with the consequences of her own supervillain instincts, deconstructing part of the genius entrepreneur myth. It doesn't appear to notice there are other parts it's failed to question.
Viv is a nice billionaire. Sort of. Yes, she got rich by designing Clearview-style surveillance software, but she gives her workers free housing (in "targeted congressional districts") and gets relief workers (branded with "Liao Industries livery") to hurricane victims before FEMA. Her self-dealing charity has pissed off the vaguely defined near-future government. At any moment Viv expects to be hauled off to a black site for torture. So she disappears and hatches a cunning plan to hack into and take control of all the computers in the world, which is apparently a thing she can do. For high-minded purposes, mind you. She plans to save the world. (And maybe crush her enemies just a little.)
So Viv breaks into a very important server room and uploads a virus. In a welcome non sequitur, a green glowing Empress pops out of nowhere and sticks her hand into Viv's chest. When Viv wakes up it's thousands of years in the future and a space monk is fighting a knife robot.[1] What follows is portal science fiction, throwing a contemporary character into a space opera the way a portal fantasies send their protagonists to fairyland. It has a typical epic fantasy plot, the overthrow of a tyrannical monarch–a few thousand years ago, to avoid attracting alien predators called the Bleed, the Empress took over the galaxy and started pruning overly ambitious civilizations.
Structurally, Empress of Forever is an episodic story bookended by plot, like a TV series balanced between a continuing story and self-contained episodes. Viv visits different planets, deals with local problems and accumulates allies–Hong, the monk; Zanj, a crabby three-thousand-year-old warlord; Xiara, a pilot; and Gray, an intelligent mass of grey goo. Viv levels up and seeks out the Empress for a confrontation and a plot twist most readers will see coming long before Viv catches on. (I will have no compunction about spoiling this in a few paragraphs.)
Shortly after Viv wakes up she and Hong find themselves diving into a miles-long elevator shaft and wrestling a robot in free fall. During fights Zanj grows extra arms, hangs in midair, or moves faster than Viv can see. Like a Hollywood blockbuster, this book tends to resolve situations with action set pieces, and it's the exaggerated, hyperkinetic action encouraged by unlimited CGI budgets. The result is that Viv's adventures can feel arbitrary. This is one of those stories where you come away unable to recall what the characters did, but remembering how their relationships developed. Viv's ultimate plan is "get everyone together and do a handwavy thing so we can reach the Empress and beat up on her," which doesn't feel clever. It's more like a middling episode of Star Trek: Voyager where the crew solves the space anomaly of the week by emitting particles. But the important part of the climax is the thematic meaning and emotional core of Viv's showdown with the Empress. The mechanics of how she gets there aren't interesting. Luckily the novel is actually good at developing those relationships and delivering that emotional core, so they don't necessarily have to be–although if they were, it would have been a nice bonus.
Empress of Forever keeps the narrator invisible, sticking to close third person. It feels less jumpy than books with this narrative style usually do because it has fewer points of view and stays in them longer. The novel only strays from Viv when her POV doesn't have access to a vital chunk of story. The prose is readable–nothing special, but good enough for a lightweight adventure story, which is, after all, what this is. Stylistically it's space opera written as epic fantasy. In SF terms, everything is full of nanites and internet; some characters mentally merge with entire fleets of spaceships, others are intelligent gray goo. Everyone's constantly online, their minds uploaded to the space internet–the "Cloud"–which can rebuild their bodies and teleport them through space. In practice, everything is described in mythic language. People talk about the Cloud like a spiritual realm that holds their "souls." They're disturbed Viv doesn't seem to have one.
The story explicitly riffs on Journey to the West (it's most obvious when Zanj shows up; she has fur and a monkey's tail). It literalizes, if not actual Buddhist philosophy (I don't know enough about it to judge), at least a typical Western understanding of Buddhist philosophy. Viv finds she can escape handcuffs and see doors Hong can't because she's not hooked into the Cloud. The Cloud isn't telling her (as it is Hong) that the handcuffs are locked and the door isn't there. The Cloud is illusion, and Viv can see through it. Later Hong helps the gang escape from the Empress's traps by recognizing they have no stable selves for the Cloud to pin down and bind: "There are pieces of me in all of you, and pieces of you in me. We are all empty of inherent form. Trace the threads of each of us, and you find not just the others, but the entire universe." Their individual identities are shaped by the people around them, so they bleed into each other.
Which segues into the book's other theme, undermining the Randian myth of the genius entrepreneur. The Empress is Viv, a few thousand years after taking control of Earth; Viv is a simulation of her earlier self given flesh. Viv branches away from the Empress when, forced to choose between a friend's safety and victory over her enemies, Viv chose her friend. She learns to connect and cooperate with people instead of controlling them from the top down, nudging them with intrusive software or just ordering them around. Instead of treating people as minions or tools she puts their needs on par with her own. The solution to the Bleed is one Viv could come up with but the Empress couldn't: to recognize it's not an enemy, just a Cloud-based life form fighting the Empress's control the only way it knows how.
But the book's treatment of the genius tech entrepreneur myth is where we run up against its limitations. Yes, it realizes the lone genius is a myth. But why does it take the idea that Viv is any kind of genius at all at face value?
Vivian Liao is a recognizable type. Our culture sees certain entrepreneurs and certain companies as geniuses, innovators. They're CEOs with the personae of gurus, people who get profiled in magazines. They're young and enthusiastic about technology to the point of self-parody. They run tech or tech-adjacent companies like Uber, Facebook, Theranos, and WeWork. They have apps. That's the kind of billionaire Viv is: the celebrity innovator. Her braid is her trademark, like Steve Jobs's black turtleneck. She turns up on magazine covers.
Most of these people aren't that bright.
They have programming skills, and they're clever in specific ways that help them make wads of cash. Often this just means they have the charisma to talk investors into backing nonsense. Even the successful tech companies rarely do anything new or useful. Uber is just unregulated taxis you call through an app instead of a phone number, Facebook is a restrictive replacement for personal websites that sells your information to advertisers. Tech companies build smart juicers that do nothing customers couldn't do with their bare hands and design algorithms camouflaging prejudice as math.
Ask a tech genius to solve a real problem and they'll try to put it on a blockchain and feed it Soylent. Soylent is the archetypical example of modern innovation, actually, because it incompetently "solves" nonexistent problems in two ways at once: hardly anyone finds food so inconvenient they're willing to trade it for joyless glop, and anybody with an actual need to go on a liquid diet already had better options.[2] I'm skeptical that the golden children of Silicon Valley would handle getting tossed into a space opera as well as Arthur Dent, much less the schoolteachers, stewardesses and office temps on Doctor Who.
Empress of Forever takes place in a world where entrepreneurs really are scintillatingly brilliant. Viv is exactly the sharp, adaptable prodigy the typical gushing profile would imagine her to be. This seems… well, unlikely. It doesn't help that Viv's vocabulary is full of ridiculous jargon: "She'd almost said minimum viable escape plan instead of a way out of this, but somehow she doubted the Mirrorfaith, whatever that was, knew much about development methodology." She actually thinks of her decision making process as an "OODA loop." But Viv's knowledge of tech-industry philosophy and management-babble is precisely what Empress of Forever identifies as her superpower!
"[Viv] didn't know this place," says Empress of Forever, "but she knew how to manage a team." Viv doesn't understand the world she finds herself in and can't access the all-important Cloud, but she's a natural leader. At one point the gang's spaceship is crashing. Viv doesn't know how anything works but she knows (better than the 3000 year old woman!) what everybody needs to be doing, and coordinates it. Viv's character arc is about learning to lead without dictatorial control. That's a lesson a lot of real executives could use: the corporate world has pushed workplace surveillance to levels that would creep out Frederick Winslow Turner. But the issue is how Viv leads; that leadership is her natural talent is never in question.
One of the foundational myths of American business culture is that anyone with management training can manage any organization at<|fim_middle|> of distress on a regular basis. In the same situation, any classic Doctor–even the often abrasive 3rd or 6th Doctors–would have come up with something helpful to say.
The idea that the Doctor isn't competent at people skills is new, and, I think, entirely a product of the modern cultural assumption that thought and feeling are opposed, and smart people necessarily bad at emotions and empathy. This assumption makes it hard for contemporary writers to see certain characters clearly. Take modern depictions of Sherlock Holmes, who is not nearly as cold or thoughtless in the original stories.
The other interesting thing about the "socially awkward" line is that it isn't a line so much as a description of what the line is meant to do. If "Can You Hear Me" had come out under Russell T. Davies or Steven Moffat, the Doctor might have said something that demonstrated she wanted to help but didn't know how, but without coming out and saying so. By contrast, a fair amount of Chibnall-era dialogue has this… let's say schematic quality.
For instance, "Praxeus" has its guest character baldly diagnose his own mental hangups to Graham. In a real person this would be a great psychological breakthrough and probably the first step to healing. As drama, it's perfunctory.
Ryan's confrontation with his father in "Resolution" is also literal. They don't reveal their motivations and feelings through their dialogue, they just come right out and lay them on the table. Again, in a real conversation this would be healthy, and I don't think it's impossible to make a good story from it. But here it's all text and no subtext. There's nothing for the audience to interpret or dig into.
This brings up another point. It's strange that this subplot is resolved when Ryan rescues his father from a Dalek. The emotional question at the heart of this plot is whether Ryan can trust his father to be there for him; it seems obvious that to really resolve this thread Ryan's father needs to save Ryan. The emotional closure doesn't logically follow from the action. There's a series of exciting action set pieces, and then the resolution you'd conventionally expect at that point in the episode, and it's sort of implied the latter happened because of the former. But that's only because they happened in sequence, not due to any actual causality.
This is an occasional problem with the show's plotting that I think relates to the dialogue problem. Events happen because we've reached the part of the episode where they should happen, even if they weren't properly set up. It feels like they're nodes in an unfinished plot outline the writers didn't quite finish connecting, just like the "socially awkward" line feels like a utilitarian placeholder for finished dialogue that was never written.
Relatedly, "Can You Hear Me" is resolved when Tahira, a guest character, learns to "control her fears," thus controlling the fake monsters the villain had pulled from her nightmares. But we never see how Tahira learns to control her fears–she spends most of the episode standing in the background, until at the right time the Doctor just says she's learned it. It's like the writers knew that was how the episode needed to end but weren't sure how to get there, so they just sort of said that's what happened. It's a description of what the plot is meant to be doing.
I hate the common writing-advice doctrine of "show, don't tell." It's badly overused and taken far too literally, especially in written fiction; too many novels drag on longer than they need to because their writers think they're forbidden to summarize. But I have to admit it has its place. The last couple years of Doctor Who is the rare case where "show, don't tell" might be good advice.
Perceval Landon, "Thurnley Abbey"
August 10, 2019 Books, Horror, Speculative FictionGhost Stories, Perceval Landon, Weird FictionWesley
Perceval Landon is one of those writers remembered for a single story, the ghost story "Thurnley Abbey." He was a journalist, a close friend of Rudyard Kipling, and travelled the world as a special correspondent for the Daily Mail and The Times. He accompanied Britain's 1904 invasion of Tibet and wrote a book called The Opening of Tibet. Otto Penzler in his brief bio of Landon for The Big Book of Ghost Stories calls him "powerfully British in his attitudes and judgments," which is probably a diplomatic way of calling him an enthusiastic imperialist. If so, his attitudes aren't obvious in "Thurnley Abbey" beyond the assumption that a stint in India is a normal thing for a gentleman to have in his background.
Landon's fiction was pretty much limited to a 1908 collection called Raw Edges. Apart from reprints of his one famous story it doesn't seem to be available anywhere.
Generally I think criticism ought to minimize the time it spends summarizing plots. But sometimes working through a summary is the simplest way to pick apart what a story is doing, so that's how I'll organize this post. I'll try to keep the description-to-analysis ratio within reason.
Like a lot of Jamesian ghost stories "Thurnley Abbey" has a framing narrative. The narrator is on his way to India, waiting for his ship to sail, and the prologue captures the feel of a tedious journey: "We slept after luncheon; we dawdled the afternoon away with yellow-backed novels; sometimes we exchanged platitudes in the smoking-room, and it was there that I met Alastair Colvin."
Colvin is an obvious gentleman–later he gives his club as a reference–and makes "the usual remarks in the right way" but seems preoccupied. After dinner he makes a strange request: he asks to sleep in the narrator's cabin on the ship. "And he coloured a little as he said it," says the narrator. That flash of deeper feeling seems out of place in Landon's polite, orderly prose. Gentlemen exchange pleasantries and platitudes. This puncturing of reserve–admitting weakness to a stranger–just isn't done.
Colvin explains. His story begins as leisurely as the narrator's; it's not slow, it just doesn't feel hurried. In India Colvin made a friend named John Broughton, who inherited a large estate and returned to England. Eventually Broughton decides to move into his manor, Thurnley Abbey. It's rumored to be haunted; supposedly the ghost is an "immured nun." Further details are thin on the ground.
Broughton thinks a former tenant spread the rumors to scare trespassers; certainly, he was known to enhance them by playing tricks with lights. He and Colvin agree that if one ever did see a ghost, one ought to talk to it. Broughton has workers in, laughing at their nervousness, and fixes the roof and installs electric lighting. He gets married, and Colvin goes back East. When Colvin returns to England Broughton asks him to visit, and do him a favor.
Colvin arrives to find a standard country house party of the sort Hercule Poirot detects murders in. A couple of guests trot out the standard lines about how they wouldn't live in the Abbey for any amount of money. A woman at dinner goes on for a while about how wit is vulgar and all truly great art is melancholy and tragic.[1] Broughton can't bring himself to tell Colvin what the favor is–he keeps putting it off until morning. He seems "somehow ashamed of himself," trying to bring the conversation around to ghosts but changing the subject when Colvin asks directly. The most Broughton can manage is an odd joke as he drifts off to bed: "'Mind, if you see a ghost, do talk to it; you said you would.' He stood irresolutely a moment and then turned away."
Colvin tells the first half of his story lightly but with emotional reserve. The prose maintains a polite distance from the reader. Colvin calls Broughton "a light-hearted soul" but "steady and capable" and steady is high praise. Gentlemen keep their upper lips stiff. They talk in bright pleasantries and banter ("'Good old nun!' said Broughton"). They're undemonstrative, uncomfortable with and embarrassed by strong emotion. Broughton avoids asking Colvin for a favor because the favor is bound up with a shock. Talking about it would break the rules.
So it's a big moment when Colvin wakes in the night and feels something: "I know that my heart stopped dead, and my throat shut automatically." And the feeling comes before we learn what the feeling is about. That Colvin feels anything this strongly is more shocking than the shock that caused it. After 4,000 words of calm Englishness, this is the story's first moment of heightened emotion.
Then another unusual thing happens: just for a moment, we return to the frame story. Everyone else is in bed and the narrator and Colvin stare out over the water into the night. The story decelerates to a moment of absolute stillness. Colvin continues his story, and because Landon wrote this bit extraordinarily well I'll quote the next paragraph in full:
Leaning over the foot of my bed, looking at me, was a figure swathed in a rotten and tattered veiling. This shroud passed over the head, but left both eyes and the right side of the face bare. It then followed the line of the arm down to where the hand grasped the bed-end. The face was not entirely that of a skull, though the eyes and the flesh of the face were totally gone. There was a thin, dry skin drawn tightly over the features, and there was some skin left on the hand. One wisp of hair crossed the forehead. It was perfectly still. I looked at it, and it looked at me, and my brains turned dry and hot in my head. I had still got the pear of the electric lamp in my hand, and I played idly with it; only I dared not turn the light out again. I shut my eyes, only to open them in a hideous terror the same second. The thing had not moved. My heart was thumping, and the sweat cooled me as it evaporated. Another cinder tinkled in the grate, and a panel creaked in the wall.
I've rarely come across a fantasy or horror story that better depicts a certain kind of fear or shock, the kind where time seems to stop for a moment while your brain processes what's happening. "Thurnley Abbey" has been anthologized a lot, and some editors call it one of the most frightening ghost stories in the English language. If so, it's not because the events of the story are particularly frightening (the same plot could just as easily be turned to comedy). It's just particularly good at convincing us its narrator is afraid.
This paragraph is, again, very still. Colvin's description is precise and clinical, and the slow cataloguing of detail reads like one of those moments when absolute shock slows time to a crawl. His playing with the dangling lamp-switch is perfect, the kind of thing people do when their minds haven't caught up to their situation. And again there's a new intensity to his reactions, a previously unsuspected emotional range: "my brains turned dry and hot in my head," "My heart was thumping, and the sweat cooled me as it evaporated." These are palpably physical states the reader might have been in, or can at least imagine, and they're more vivid for the contrast between this scene and the story's earlier reserve. The emotional contrast and Landon's masterful control of pacing make Colvin's awakening feel like a night terror or fever dream on paper.
Then, from a dead stop, "Thurnley Abbey" floors the gas pedal. Colvin decides the figure is a dummy set up as a practical joke. Like a switch his utter terror flips to white-hot rage. He leaps forward and punches it in the face. When it doesn't resist he pulverizes it, pulling it apart, stomping the skeleton, leaving not a single bone in one piece. It's sheer mindless frenzy.
Colvin grabs a skull fragment and bursts into Broughton's bedroom, screaming something-or-other, but Broughton doesn't react as Colvin expects. Broughton is too terrified to speak, only shrieking when he sees the bone. He grabs it, makes for the door, but trips and drops it. Everyone hears shuffling footsteps coming down the hall.
Here the story takes another unexpected emotional turn. Broughton and his wife hide their faces in the bedclothes and after a moment Colvin joins them. This is awe, in the old-fashioned sense. What you'd feel if a god descended from the sky. It's not just that no one wants to see the Nun, it's like they're not even worthy to gaze upon her. She comes softly into the room and gently picks up her bone. Then she just leaves. "At the end of the corridor I thought I saw something that moved away. A moment later the passage was empty. I stood with my forehead against the jamb of the door almost physically sick."
These emotions feel vivid partly because of the contrast with the story's first half. Another reason is that "Thurnley Abbey" pays attention to the fallout. A common ghost story strategy is to stage the climax, then get out while the reader is still reeling, but "Thurnley Abbey" covers the next few hours of Colvin's life. He and the Broughtons are explicitly traumatized–in modern terms, they may have actual PTSD. They sit up together until dawn, barely speaking; "we all three knew that our reason had gone very near to ruin that night." They have to negotiate what to do in the morning because no one can stand to be alone. Eventually Mrs. Broughton thinks she might be all right alone for five minutes, with the windows open, while Broughton and Colvin check Colvin's room. They do, and apart from some blood where Colvin cut his hand there's no sign of the mess. Broughton only says "half as a question, half as a reproach, 'You didn't speak to her.'"
It's an intense story. On my first reading it didn't even occur to me to wonder: why has Broughton never spoken to her? Living with her as he does, he must have noticed the Nun is benign. At no point does she do anything but watch and endure. There's no sign that she's even offended at being torn apart, which, given the speed at which she reassembles herself, has got to be a minor inconvenience. She's quiet, curious, and patient, and Broughton and Colvin's reactions seem to have almost nothing to do with her. She seems to unconsciously carry an aura of terror, harmless in herself but a catalyst for loss of emotional control in the living.
I'm not a strict death-of-the-author adherent, but writers often really do write more than they intend. I don't know Landon's intentions; probably he just wanted to write a scary story. But it feels like something deeper is going on here. People don't run from the Nun, they hide their faces. "Thurnley Abbey" feels suffused with shame.
Maybe it has to do with those "powerfully British" attitudes. Remember, Broughton came back from soldiering in India to accept his inheritance. Colvin still travels back and forth and reads himself to sleep with a volume of Kipling.[2] So maybe it's significant that Broughton has taken possession of the Abbey, become its master, and rebuilt it to his liking… but the place has a prior inhabitant. One he can't subordinate, kill, or move along. No matter what, she endures, an undeniable fact he has to confront. Is it any wonder he can't bear to speak to her?
Then again, maybe it's about the destruction of Colvin's self-image. Colvin thinks of himself as a gentleman. He belongs to the right club, knows the right things to say and to do. He's cool and steady; his honor and dignity are unimpeachable. He's above everything. Until he encounters something he thinks is mocking him, at which point he discovers his reserve and honorable deportment are a thin veneer masking his chaotic, animalistic, rage-filled true self. In the Nun's presence, he's no gentleman. What's worse, his tantrum doesn't even accomplish anything. His rage is impotent. The victim of his violence can't actually be harmed, and won't go away; she pieces herself together and reproachfully continues to exist.
Either way, the Nun is a mirror. Colvin and Broughton can't look at her because she shows them things they're ashamed to recognize in themselves—most importantly that the world, and their own lives and selves, aren't as much under their control as they like to think.
"Of course I am much better now," says Colvin, "but it is a kindness of you to let me sleep in your cabin." Now that Colvin knows himself, it's hard to sleep soundly.
This is a common attitude even today; a lot of people think only morbidly grim stories are truly Serious. ↩
An advocate of empire whose stories are still reprinted mostly because they seem so uneasy about their own imperialism. ↩
W. F. Harvey, The Double Eye
July 18, 2019 Books, Horror, Speculative FictionGhost Stories, W. F. Harvey, Weird FictionWesley
M. R. James was unusual among ghost-story writers in that every story he wrote was at least mildly interesting; most weird writers of his vintage aren't as consistent. But many have a handful of good stories and sometimes I even find one that hasn't been reprinted to death.
W. F. Harvey is one of those writers. The Double Eye collects most if not all of his weird stories and it's a mixed bag. Some of his stories are brilliant, the rest you'll forget as soon as you read them. They're all very short–my two favorites are both under 2000 words. Harvey is jocular without writing outright comedy. He's sometimes ironic but only mildly so; for instance, a potential murderer might be reported to a psychiatrist by the accomplices he'd tried to recruit. Harvey usually avoids outright ghosts and it's often unclear whether something supernatural is going on or his characters are having mental breakdowns. (He wrote at least two stories about a man thinking he'd been cursed by a woman who might merely be upset with him.) The worst story in the collection is mildly racist, has a mild racial slur for a title, and would have been better buried and forgotten. At the other end of the quality scale are the two stories most people will have heard of, "August Heat" and "The Beast With Five Fingers."
"The Beast With Five Fingers" is the ur-story of the disembodied hand subgenre. "August Heat" is weirder. (And takes hardly any time to read, so you might as well do so.)
One hot morning, James Withencroft, an artist, draws a picture of a prisoner on trial. He has no idea why–it just popped into his head. Withencroft has never seen the man before in his life but he's distinctively large, so when Withencroft goes for a walk and passes that exact man Withencroft spots him at once. Mr. Atkinson and Withencroft are immediate friends. Atkinson is a monument-carver, carving a sample tombstone for an exhibition. Withencroft's name is on it, and today's date. Atkinson has no idea why–it just popped into his head. The coincidence creeps Withencroft out, so Atkinson invites Withencroft to stick around until midnight, just to make sure nothing happens to him. As the story closes, Atkinson is sharpening a chisel while Withencroft reflects with an odd detachment that the heat "is enough to send a man mad."
"And it was only the day before yesterday," he said, "that I told Maria there were no such things as ghosts!"
Neither of us had seen a ghost, but I knew what he meant.
"August Heat" has been reprinted in a lot of ghost story anthologies–not just weird stories, ghost anthologies specifically. Which is interesting because it doesn't have a ghost, or anything supernatural beyond two extraordinary coincidences and the implication, putting them side by side, that something is about to follow from them. But why? It's the obscurity of the story that's disturbing. There's no Twilight Zone irony, the characters haven't brought them on themselves through character flaws. There's no suggestion that Atkinson is a hidden psychopath, or anything other than the genial man he appears to be. Withencroft and Atkinson have had premonitions of a murder which is about to happen only because they had premonitions of that murder. The event has no beginning; the effect is its own cause. The story feels haunted not by an apparition but by a strangely meaningless future.
My favorite W. F. Harvey story is "The Clock." It's one of his less anthologized stories, but googling turned up the text online. It is, again, short but effective.
"The Clock" is an excerpt from a letter to an old school friend. The unnamed writer is asked by a friend of her aunt to go to her shut-up house and retrieve a travelling-clock. She agrees. The story vividly conveys the uncomfortable feeling of being the only person in a dark, silent, deserted house where she'd normally have no legitimate reason to be: "I did in fact feel rather like a burglar, and I thought that if anyone did happen to see the front door open, I might have difficulty in explaining things."
The writer heads upstairs and finally finds the clock in a back bedroom. It's still ticking. Which is weird, because no one has been in the house, so who's been winding it? "Then, without quite knowing why, I shut the door on to the landing, locked myself in, and again looked round the room." Then she hears something coming up the stairs. Not walking, but "hopping up the stairs, like a very big bird would hop." Then it pauses, and starts scratching at each of the doors in turn. The writer flees out the window, and as she looks back she sees the window has shut behind her.
Another book I read recently was Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie. I found Fisher's ideas an interesting lens through which to look at Harvey's work. Fisher identifies "Weird" and "Eerie" as modes often used by weird fiction.[1] The Weird is easy to describe: it's something alien and out of place that intrudes on the mundane world, like the crawling hand in "The Beast With Five Fingers." The Eerie is trickier. It's an impression of meaning, intelligence, or agency out of place–either present where it shouldn't be, or absent where it should. Fisher gives the example of an "eerie cry" for the first type, as in the cry of an animal which seems to carry some unusual intelligence or meaning. An example of the second is a mysterious ruin which once had a context and purpose that's now entirely forgotten. Something is happening here, and you don't know what it is.
W. F. Harvey's main interest is the eerie. He does tell weird stories–"The Beast With Five Fingers" is a good one. Another is one of his rare outright ghost stories, "Account Rendered." But Harvey is less fond of ghosts and monsters than most weird writers–he likes coincidences that might not be coincidences, delusions that might not be delusions, and people or animals who might be more than they seem. "August Heat" is both his most famous story and the one that best represents his work; its paradoxical tangle of precognition and predestination is thoroughly eerie.
In that light, "The Clock" is an interesting case. It's certainly weird. But unlike the Beast With Five Fingers, the whatever-it-was in "The Clock" is never seen and has no hint of backstory, and the purpose of its behavior is obscure. The complete lack of context makes the story feel as eerie as it is weird.
That sense of the eerie doesn't have anything to do with Harvey's prose–not all his stories are alike, but like I said earlier, most are breezy and jocular, specializing in a sort of light detective-novel style. He only occasionally dips into stream of conciousness[2] or varies his tone or pacing much. When Harvey's on form his plots are inherently disquieting even when baldly and simply described, and the lightness of tone contrasts ironically. Contrasting horror and wit is a common strategy in weird stories of Harvey's era, especially in stories by British authors. It's often very effective.
Look, for instance, at "Account Rendered." A Mr. Tolson hires a doctor to put him under anesthesia for half an hour around midnight. While Tolson is under an old man like "a timid but inquisitive tortoise" opens the door, sticks his head in, and observes that Tolson is busy but there's no hurry and he'll come back another time. Later the doctor investigates and discovers Tolson hires a different doctor every year on the same night, and no matter where in the world he is, at midnight the old man puts his head into the room. The premise of this story is memorable in itself–I've read a lot of ghost stories and among the less inspired ones ideas repeat, but this is new. And there's something disconcerting in the mundanity of the ghost and its polite relentlessness.
"The Follower" is one of Harvey's less successful stories. A writer, like Harvey himself, lives near a couple of academics named Canon Rathbone and Dr. Curtius who are researching ancient manuscripts they brought back from overseas. One night while gazing at their house he gets an idea for a story based on them. The next day the academics happen to drop in. The protagonist's sister suggests he could write about Canon Rathbone's work and the Canon gets flustered, stammering out that he's really not into fiction–it's too sensationalistic. As the academics leave, the writer feels obscurely that he's been warned off.
The outline of this story has a lot of eerie potential, but in Harvey's style it doesn't work. It's too ambiguous. If "The Follower" had been written by (for example) Robert Aickman it would have been suffused with odd details suggesting something weighty moving under the surface of things. In Harvey's story Dr. Curtius makes a few odd gestures–nodding at odd moments, stirring his tea in a way the writer thinks is strange–but nothing he or Canon Rathbone do seems all that unusual, and they aren't in any way menacing. Rathbone seems more embarassed than anything. It feels like the writer is getting worked up over a mundane coincidence.
W. F. Harvey's weird tales are at their best when the overt events are undeniably strange. When they could be just funny coincidences… well, then, they probably are just funny coincidences. The voice he uses in most of his stories encourages me to assume the least extraordinary explanation for everything. It's reliable, sincerely friendly; I compared it to a detective-story voice, and it feels like, as in a fair play detective story, it's not palming any cards. When Harvey's working, though, he really works. The Double Eye feels padded, but Harvey wrote enough great stories that you could fill at least one volume of more modest size.
(Other stories not mentioned above that I'd include in a notional Best of W. F. Harvey include "Midnight House," "Across the Moors," "The Tortoise," "The Ankardyne Pew," "The Tool," "The Dabblers," and "The Flying Out of Mrs. Barnard Hollis." "The Star" and "The Man Who Hated Aspidistras" are also good, but are comic stories with no weird content and would be an odd fit.)
Fisher doesn't claim these are the only two modes or effects weird fiction has; they're just the ones he's concerned with. ↩
There are exceptions; for instance, "The Sleeping Major." ↩
Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera
July 13, 2019 Books, Speculative Fiction, UncategorizedCatherynne M. ValenteWesley
Catherynne M. Valente's Space Opera gets compared to Douglas Adams a lot. That's not because it's an Adams pastiche. Space Opera and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy have different agendas and preoccupations, and are written in different styles to fit. Hitchhiker's has the polite, straight faced, reassuring voice of a travel guide. Space Opera is extravagantly glittery, with sentences you can get lost in carrying you through unexpected scenic routes. The one similarity is that both have plenty of phrases that make you imagine something vividly or see it in a new way, Space Opera having at least one per page as good as Adams's "hung in the sky like bricks don't." "Watching a kebab slowly revolve in front of a space heater like a sweaty meat planet," say, or "mumble-crooning artificial grit," which is as good a description of a currently popular style of folk-rock as I've ever seen.
The reason for the Adams comparison is that Space Opera is absurdist space opera. Adams is the best known example of that subgenre, though there's also Robert Sheckley, and Stanislaw Lem's The Star Diaries and The Cyberiad.[1] The comedy isn't the point of the exercise. It's an excuse to go full Jonathan Swift. These books can have aliens who embody human failings and foibles, and wild ideas that wouldn't fit logically world-built, internally consistent universes whose realities refuse to be rubbery or loopy. Space Opera has, for instance, a viral strain of space-zombie gentrifiers and a planet of screw-ups that becomes an important trading hub because wormholes are alive and feed off regret.
There's real political and philosophical scaffolding under the humor. These books use their license to be weird to play with serious ideas and some on the less jokey end approach Borges or Calvino territory.[2] The best ones–Space Opera included–are grounded enough to deal with real emotion.[3] Unlike Duck Dodgers' 24th-and-a-half century, you can imagine living in these worlds.
Science fiction on the Adams-to-Borges spectrum is an under-appreciated and underserved subgenre. Space Opera is the best addition in years.
The disastrous Sentience Wars are over. Now the galactic community settles its differences with the Metagalactic Grand Prix, a Eurovision-style song contest. It's time for Earth to enter, or else. See, the Great Octave judges new species' sentience on whether they can cooperate well enough to pull off a decent musical number. If humans place last on their first attempt the Octave will declare us non-sentient and render us extinct so Earth can evolve someone cooler. Due to the vagaries of alien taste, Earth's least implausible representatives are the two surviving members of glam one-hit-wonder Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes: Decibel himself, a has-been with the aesthetic of early David Bowie but not the talent; and Oort St. Ultraviolet, an undramatic session musician with two kids, a cat, and a divorce. Unfortunately Mira Wonderful Star, the deceased member of the trio, was the one who kept them working together.
Space Opera is a celebration of music and theatre and glamor. A couple of passages have been repeatedly approvingly quoted online and it's easy to get the impression they sum up the book's Message. First, the end of the chapter explaining the galactic community's justification for the Grand Prix:
Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it's monsters who do that…. Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play?
Do you have soul?
And Decibel's philosophy as stated in an argument with Oort:
"Because the opposite of fascism isn't anarchy, it's theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down."
And if this were really all this book were saying, it would merely be self-congratulations for smug hipsters. But Space Opera is more complicated and ambiguous than that. Yes, Valente is sincere in celebrating music and theatre and glamor, and why not? They're genuinely wonderful. But it celebrates music and theatre for the wonderful things they really are, without ascribing to them superpowers they don't posess. Glamor isn't everything. And music isn't the only thing the book celebrates.
The first thing you notice about the Esca, the big blue bird who makes first contact with Earth, is that it looks like the Roadrunner. Y'know, the one the Coyote is after. One of the first things we learn about Decibel is that, as a serious young person, he was frustrated by his grandmother's insistence that Dess' "serious and meaningful" science fiction films were not as good as Looney Tunes: "mine is bright and happy and makes a colorful noise, so I put it on top of yours that is droopy and leaky and makes a noise like the dishwasher."
Which is interesting. Both pop music and Looney Tunes are "bright and happy and [make] a colorful noise" but they're otherwise opposites. Pop music is cool and glamorous. Looney Tunes are goofy and corny, descended from vaudeville and slapstick. Their mascot is Porky Pig, who is the exact opposite of cool; you feel for him because he tries so hard but he'll never not be awkward.
Space Opera loves goofy cartoons as fiercely as Eurovision. Decibel wants to be David Bowie, but he's really the Coyote, chasing things he never catches and not noticing the cliff until he's already over it. Not that this is a problem; SF is glutted with super-competent heroes and we need more books about awkward, mediocre people (who are, after all, us). Anyway, it might not be a problem if he'd just embrace it:
"That is what Mira and Oort forgot, having been, if not popular, always cool. No matter how mad, bad, and dangerous to know a civilization gets, unto every generation are born the lonely and the uncool, destined to forever stare into the candy-store window of their culture, and loneliness is the mother of ascension. Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species."
This kind of bright happiness requires a willingness to risk looking stupid, a vulnerability that's incompatible with cool but sometimes necessary if you want to be open to new experiences or new people. One of Space Opera's refrains is "Life is beautiful and life is stupid." If you can't be beautiful being the Coyote kind of stupid is nothing to be ashamed of.
Douglas Adams wrote a lot of jokes, but one of his sharpest was the Golgafrincham B Ark.
One day the leaders of the Golgafrincham announced their world was doomed. So they built three big arks. The A Ark would take the leaders and scientists and artists. The C Ark would take the workers, the people who do and make things. And the B ark would take the people in the middle: account executives, security guards, management consultants, telephone sanitizers. And the B Ark would go first, because it was important for morale that the new world be well managed. As the B Ark warped away, the A and C Golgafrincham shared a laugh and congratulated themselves on getting rid of their useless middlemen. Although not for long, as the whole species was shortly wiped out by a disease spread by unsanitized telephones.
It's an ingenious bit of sleight-of-hand. When you read comedy you assume it and you are on the same side, sharing the jokes. So you laugh at the clever trick the Golgafrincham pulled on their consultants and middle managers and ambiguously useful tradespeople. Aren't those people annoying? Don't you wish you could just launch them into space? And Adams is making fun of them; most of the B Ark people are in what David Graeber calls "Bullshit Jobs" and the ones we meet are "useless bloody loonies." But once you're lulled into your smug sense of superiority, Adams drops the real punch line. The Golgafrincham are all dead, because bullshit jobs are a real phenomenon but you're probably not as good as you think you are at identifying them, and there sure as hell aren't any useless people. Incidentally, the B Ark people are the ancestors of the whole human race, you included.
This is an unexpectedly angry joke, and all along the target was you. What Adams is really doing here is asking you to consider whether you might be an asshole.
Pay attention when Hitchhiker's fans bring up the B Ark, and it's amazing how often they miss the point of the joke.
Some background on Eurovision is in order. Every year, every European country submits a new pop song. They're all performed on live television, and the audience votes for their favorite. It started in the 1950s, around the time international live television broadcasts first became practical. At the time Europe was still recovering from World War Two and Eurovision was meant to bring Europe together and promote international understanding.
There's one important difference between Eurovision and the Metagalactic Grand Prix. The Metagalactic Grand Prix is how the galaxy distributes "communally held Galactic Resources." Even if you've passed the entrance exam coming in last does a number on your economy, and it's a very low number. And according to the rules, "If a performer fails to show up on the night, they shall be automatically disqualified, ranked last, and their share of communal Galactic Resources forfeited for the year."
Which explains why the minute Decibel and Oort step out onto this year's host planet someone shoots at them.
The fundamental question every war is asking, according to Space Opera, is "Which of us are people and which of us are meat?" Eurovision was created to encourage Europeans to see each other as people. The Metagalactic Grand Prix is a different way to sort out who's the meat. The participants maneuver and strategize. They try to knock out the competition, usually not fatally. They downvote planets they don't like to mess with their economies. The dodgy backstage deals certain people offer Decibel and Oort are deliberate tests, to see if the humans will betray each other. But meanwhile the established species are scheming for real.
Music, here, is war by other means. And Earth might be a casualty, because just before he has to go on a Smaragdin gives Decibel a potentially terminal case of laryngitis.
"I never did say we were good; just sentient," apologizes the Smaragdin.
Which raises the question of what sentience is, exactly.[4] The Great Octave has exterminated a few species. The one we learn about in detail is Flus. You can understand why they offed this one, actually; it's legitimately self-defense.[5] Flus is a totalitarian hive mind that assimilates other life forms like the Borg.
The same chapter introduces us to the Voorpreet, sentient Galactic Family members in good standing, who are… um, a zombie virus that assimilates other life forms like the Borg. Who everyone bends over backwards to accommodate as best they can while still staying safe, or safe-ish. Space Opera introduces Flus and the Voorpreet together and explicitly asks "how different was a Flus infection from a Voorpret infection?"
The Voorpreet are cool. They're the creative class, wealthy Silicon Valley gentrifiers: "Yes, yes, they obliterated the natural biodiversity of any region they touched, but wherever their infection took hold, they opened a lot of delightful bistros and shops and start-up tech companies with whimsically casual workplace environments and fusion food trucks and artisanal blacksmithing co-ops and performance-art spaces."
The lyrics to the one song Flus knows go like this: "It is awesome to be Flus / If you are not Flus, you are not awesome / and will promptly be consumed / also your children and pets."
The difference between Flus and the Voorpreet is that Flus says the quiet parts loud.
Flus is a group mind–not a species so much as a single threatening individual–so this chapter doesn't deal with the fundamental problem with the idea of destroying an entire species–humans, say–for their cruelty. You are by definition destroying the victims with their oppressors. The inherent cruelty of some humans is proven by what they do, and the inherent cruelty of the rest is proven by the things the first group did to them. It's in the tradition of destroying the village in order to save it, or, more recently, freeing Iraqis by bombing the hell out of them.
You get the impression the Octave is looking out for opportunities to just flat out take somebody's stuff, like the fine old human tradition of liberating nations that coincidentally happen to have something you want. On first contact, the Esca assures Earth that if humans must be exterminated, "all memory of your collective existence will be lovingly collated and archived, your planetary resources tenderly extracted."
When the Esca entered their first Grand Prix they called their song "Please Don't Incinerate Us, We'll Be Good from Now On, We Promise."
Being declared non-sentient is a lot like being declared a rogue state, or part of an Axis of Evil. It's not that these places are not at least sometimes genuinely dangerous. But our condemnations are arbitrary: Pinochet was cool, Saddam Hussein was not. We talk about protecting freedom and democracy, but in practice a lot of American foreign policy is just about keeping the oil flowing.
The galactic community is the Nixon/Reagan/Bush/Trump U.S.A., splashed across the heavens and wearing a shallow dusting of glam. Space Opera's aliens embody our own human failings; they're us. If any readers actually thought the Metagalactic Grand Prix was a great idea, or that theater was incompatible with fascism, they may have missed the point.
"But galactic society is still… well, society. And society is rubbish," says the Smaragdin. "Good lord, the Grand Prix is the best thing we've ever done, the utter best, and it's just a bit of song and dance, isn't it?"
If you read the premise way back in section 2, you might think you have some idea how this story is going to go. The unlikely misfit who overcomes all odds to become a celebrity is one of Hollywood's standard narratives. Decibel and Oort will settle their differences at the last minute, give a kick-ass performance that also symbolically resolves their emotional arcs, and prove humans can rock, right?
Oh, hell, no. Decibel can't even pull himself together enough to manage the minimal obligation of writing a song. Also, the laryngitis. The Absolute Zeroes manage not to lose, but the reason is more interesting than just having talent.
What saves Earth is that Decibel has a mutually agreeable one-night-stand with an Esca. (Yes, this is a novel where the Coyote sleeps with the Roadrunner.) And that Oort meets an alien who resembles a hyperactive red panda and forms a real friendship. And on the night of the Grand Prix their actions bring about a pair of miracles that elevate their performance from a disaster to… well, not a disaster, anyway.
What proves Decibel and Oort's sentience–and in this they're considerably more sentient than most humans and most of the Extended Galactic Family–is that they don't divide people into people and meat. They don't divide people into those like us, the special shiny people and the other ones, who we can do what we want with. Strangers and foreigners are not threats, not prey, not lesser beings they can steal from or forcibly remake into versions of themselves. Decibel and Oort can look at people nothing like themselves and see them as people. They open up to people who are utterly strange to them and risk admitting they're not starmen at all, just stupid useless bloody loony tunes like everyone else. Acknowledging your own non-specialness and uncoolness–your inner Coyote or your Porky nature–is the first step towards accepting strangers as equals, or even friends. The friends Dess and Oort are able to make help them create a performance they couldn't manage on their own.
At this point it's relevant that Decibel was born Danesh Jalo and Oort was once Omar Calișkan and the Absolute Zeroes are the children of immigrants in a long-past-Brexit England. Xenophobia and fascism are constant threats running through the background of Space Opera. After yet another wrong government comes to power, Mira's Uncle Takumi dies in a racist riot and Dess's grandmother, the one who tried to show him the beauty in a cartoon rabbit, is deported. This is a near future in which we have not learned much of anything.
On the whole, it's just as well the best representatives Earth could come up with were two thirds of a one-hit-wonder glam pop trio.
The real test of a civilization isn't how it treats its musicians. It's how it treats its Others–more precisely, whether it even has Others. Foreigners, immigrants, asylum seekers. The real test of sentience isn't whether you're shutting someone's rhythm down, it's whether you're keeping children in cages.
It's tough to say what the long-term critical perspective will be on a book that's only been out a year, but my guess is that Space Opera will become a classic. It has something in common with most great comedy: underneath the jokes, it's angry.
On the fantasy end, Terry Pratchett and Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher are close cousins. ↩
i.e. some of Lem's work, or Ursula K. Le Guin's Changing Planes. ↩
Not something Adams is especially associated with, but I find much of his work–Marvin's death in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish is one example–genuinely affecting. ↩
What happens if the Octave finds a species that doesn't even have a sense of hearing? Will they be allowed to be sentient? ↩
This is a smart move; a straightforward mass murder would have made a mess of the novel's tone. ↩
J. U. Nicolson, Fingers of Fear
July 3, 2019 Books, Speculative FictionHorror, Weird FictionWesley
This is an odd book. Not a good enough odd book to recommend to everybody, alas, but it's stuck in my memory.
Fingers of Fear is an Old Dark House story. Not just a story about an old dark house–a story in the gothic subgenre typified by James Whale's The Old Dark House (which is great) and its source, J. B. Priestly's novel Benighted (which I haven't read). The whole story takes place in an isolated mansion inhabited by an eccentric, fractious family on the edge of disintigration. An intrusion from outside kicks off the inevitable breakdown, and by the end everybody's either escaped or self-destructed.
It's the Great Depression, and Selden Seaverns is broke. (Blurbs on some editions call him Selden Seaforth; I have no idea why.) Luckily his old friend Ormond Ormes hires him to catalogue the library at the Ormes mansion, Ormesby, and write a history of New England literature. At Ormesby Seaverns meets Ormond's sister Gray, the only person who can control the vicious dogs roaming the grounds. In the morning he discovers a red mark on his neck, like a vampire's been sucking at it.
Seaverns is smitten with Gray until she has a weird psychotic episode and tries to bite him, leaping for his throat like a wolf. (Seaverns is a little confused as to exactly what supernatural creature the Ormeses resemble.) Soon it looks like she's killed one of the servants and Seaverns sees her standing naked and bloody in the library. Seaverns angsts over this for a while before discovering the murder was in fact committed by Gray's previously unmentioned twin sister Grayce, who was also the one who went for Seaverns' neck. So that's all right then, aside from the part where Grayce escapes and kills again.
Ormond comes home with Seaverns' ex-wife Muriel, who he hired to help him with a blackmail scheme. This is a total coincidence; Ormond had no idea they knew each other and Muriel didn't know Seaverns would be there. Ormond starts to act unstable himself. Seaverns learns Ormond's parents' bodies are in the old cistern. They got there courtesy of Aunt Barbara, who has a pipe in her closet she dumps bodies into. She also slides down it herself when she doesn't feel like taking the stairs. Also, there may be ghosts. Or maybe not. I haven't covered every weird thing in this book, just the main points.
Fingers of Fear is narrated in first person and Seaverns does a lot of ruminating. The book gets into a rhythm where a weird thing happens and then Seaverns spends paragraphs theorizing about what it means, what other people's motivations are and what they're up to, and what he ought to do next. He spends more pages reacting to what happens than describing it.
This is the novel's main weak point, and the reason I'd only recommend it to someone who really likes Old Dark House stories. Seaverns' rumination sessions tend to drag, and sometimes the story slows to a crawl when it ought to speed up. This wouldn't be a problem if Seaverns were a deep thinker but Nicolson is not exactly Melville and Seaverns is no more interesting and philosophical than your average suspense novel hero. Fingers of Fear would be paced better if it were 10 or 15 percent shorter.
On the other hand, I have a lot of time for novels where the characters spend a lot of time thinking things through. And it creates a feeling of paranoia and claustrophobia. We're stuck in Seaverns' point of view, and he's stuck in his present, his rumination focused almost entirely on the Ormeses. We learn the bare minimum about his past. His life is divided into before and after Ormesby. Ormesby is an inescapable parallel world–Seaverns and Muriel are there for months and after a while they start thinking they need to get away, but they don't. Ormesby sucks them so far in they seem to lose any other frame of reference. By the end Seaverns decides to protect Gray from scandal with a complicated plan to disguise Grayce's killings as dog attacks. It's a drawn out and nightmarish operation and he sort of wonders why he's doing it, but he does.
"This depression in business is having strange results," says Muriel, which is an understatement. "We can't blame it directly, of course, and yet, if it hadn't brought us here, we wouldn't have become involved in such things." Fingers of Fear isn't a deep book, but it's not without a theme. As wrapped up as it is in Ormesby it never forgets there's a Depression going on. "It's changed something in the lives of everyone in the country, maybe even in the world," says Seaverns. It's changed him into someone who covers up murders.
The Ormeses spend the book looking for a hidden stash of bonds. When the hiding place is finally tracked down the contents turn out to be… well, not bonds. The Ormeses are a cursed bloodline. You get the sense their wealth and their curse are linked. Maybe cursedness is the natural state of people of the Ormes's class. The natural corruption of the rich led to the depression, and the depression corrupted people like Seaverns who hadn't had all that much money in the first place. When he finally gets away he declares "I would not return to the city and the ways of cities for all those fellows' collective wealth."
The rich are different from you and me. They're vampwolves. | all, even with no experience in its field, moving from marketing to health care to higher education. Empress of Forever takes this idea at face value. Viv founded Liao Industries; of course she can zap thousands of years into the future and immediately captain a starship. How hard could it be?
There's precedent for this in fantastic fiction. One common character is the naïve but earnest person whose power is a talent for collecting friends and inspiring them to be their best selves. Think Farscape, or The Wizard of Oz. The hero may not be strong or brave or know the world very well but, like the Dude's carpet, they really pull the group together. That's what Empress of Forever is doing. So am I just looking for something to object to? Why did this story rub me the wrong way?
Well, it's one thing when the natural leader is a wisecracking astronaut, or a kid. I'm more uneasy when it's a wealthy entrepreneur. Our culture tells us these are our natural leaders even though they're just clearly not, and that any leader can lead anything even though they just clearly can't. And as I write this, thousands of Americans are dying from COVID–19 because a few million Americans thought a reality TV host could manage the executive branch of the federal government, and that President thinks his real estate developer son-in-law can manage a pandemic response. So on this subject I'm in the mood to be cranky.
Empress of Forever is a fun book. But it's a book that sets out to teach us a lesson about billionaire entrepreneurs and ends up worshiping them anyway.
The few comments on the excerpt I linked complain about the "tonal shift" and speculate on whether it's deliberate. I've said this before, but SF fans are the most unimaginative and unadventurous readers in the world. ↩
Also, the Soylent guy thinks it's more efficient to buy new clothes and give them away when dirty than to do laundry. ↩
March 22, 2020 Books, Speculative FictionDino BuzzatiWesley
The title story of Dino Buzzati's Catastrophe is narrated by a passenger on a train. As it leaves the station he watches a man rush up to a woman, apparently with important news. In the next town people seem agitated. As the train travels on, everyone outside seems to be fleeing in the opposite direction. A torn newspaper blows in through the window; it bears an ominous but frustratingly incomplete headline. It's impossible to deny something is happening, but none of the passengers talk about it. Talking about it, whatever it is, would make it real. Finally the train pulls into a deserted station. The story ends as the narrator hears someone, somewhere, scream.
That's typical of the stories in Catastrophe which are, indeed, mostly catastrophic. (A few off-theme stories creep in at the end of the book.) A couple of stories cross the line into actual sadism, but the best stories (and most of the stories count as best) feel like ominous dreams. Everything seems surface-normal but something is coming. You can't tell what it is; everything just feels increasingly off. You wake up just as everything is about to fall apart.
My favorite is "The Alarming Revenge of a Domestic Pet." A woman visits her aunt, who has a weirdly intelligent pet resembling a bat despite not looking like a bat at all. (It has the drooping face of a dog, and webbed feet.) The woman is repulsed. The pet wants her attention. The two have a battle of wills which ends when the pet tries to serve her liqueur. When she refuses, it angrily flips the switch on a nearby lamp and "there was a violent series of tremendous explosions and the distant crash of bombs echoed through the whole city, shaking the houses: the air was filled with the roar of a thousand planes." (What's most striking about this story is the contrast with the first lines, and the tone of the woman's narration; Buzzati introduces the story like it's a particularly interesting anecdote this woman told him at a cocktail party.)
"The Collapse of the Baliverna" is about a man who climbs the side of a building and breaks part of an old grating. Moments later, the whole building collapses. Was it his fault? Did anyone see? Is the man who just walked into his shop a blackmailer? It all ends there. Often these stories feel like the beginnings of longer ones, but carrying them on into actual plots would ruin them. They'd be too definite, too conclusive, no longer uncanny. And, anyway, doesn't it capture how hard it sometimes is to imagine what the world might be like, after the worst has happened?
In "The Slaying of the Dragon" a hunting party rides out to kill a dragon. It turns out to be a feeble, aging mother dragon dependandt on the goats left by nearby villagers. The hunters stubbornly push on to the end of their quest, though it's clear long before then they won't come out looking like heroes. In "The Opening of the Road," a party of civil servants travel into the country to officially open a new road. As they get further from civilization the road is always a bit further ahead, until the remaining officials find themselves grimly pressing on into a desert.
Buzzati's best insight into catastrophes is his grasp of how, so often, they happen because no one acknowledged what was going on until it was too late. Everything is normal. Everything is always normal. It's not polite to point out the thing we refuse to speak of; talking about it would make it real. In "The Epidemic" a Colonel comes down with the flu just as a secretary for the Dept. of Intelligence declares the epidemic only infects the disloyal. As his headache and fever get worse, the Colonel keeps coming in to work. He doesn't want to be an inconvenient fact.
March 14, 2020 Books, Speculative FictionAlix E. Harrow, Fantasy, John W. Campbell, Science FictionWesley
Alix Harrow's fantasy novel The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a very good book, and I enjoyed it. I'm a little conflicted about my enjoyment. The Ten Thousand Doors of January got me thinking about two kinds of subtext running beneath some types of speculative fiction to which it bears a distant family resemblance.
These themes aren't related–at most, they sometimes intersect–so this essay will ramble, and I'm not sure how coherent it will ultimately be. Just bear in mind I'm not trying to tie everything together; I'm describing a Venn diagram where the circles ever-so-slightly overlap.
Subtext #1: You Flatter Us
There's a subgenre of science fiction and fantasy written to flatter people who like science fiction and fantasy. Its heroes are smart, imaginative, and interested in strange ideas. In stories set in anything resembling the real world, they usually read actual SF or fantasy. People find them strange, dismiss them as impractical dreamers, or bully them.
All this is, if not like speculative fiction fans, at least like their self-images: Today geek culture is mainstream, but older fans still nurse grudges over lectures from teachers or bullying from peers about their then-weird obsessions. That's why it's a kick when a hero's geek traits turn out to be superpowers. Science fiction geek heroes may be the only one who can solve a problem due to their ingenuity and special geeky knowledge. (Ernest Cline's books are shameless examples.) Fantasy heroes either have honest-to-god magical powers connected to their imagination, intelligence, or love of reading, or are among the privileged few who can see magic or have access to portal or wainscot worlds.
At their smuggest, the lessons of flatter-the-fans stories are:
Science fiction and fantasy are very special genres, and the fan culture surrounding them is also very special!
Being, or at least resembling, a SF fan is a sign of intelligence and sensitivity!
I understand why sci-fi fans love this stuff–I can enjoy it, too, in the right mood. But I'm not sure stories telling fans they're special are the stories they need right now. Again, these days stuff fans like is mainstream. Most pop culture caters to them already, and to the loudest, most aggrieved fans most of all.
Subtext #2: The Special People
Modern culture, geek culture especially, values people for what they are more than what they do. Sherlock Holmes has privilege but what makes him a hero are his skills, which theoretically anybody could learn with study. Contemporary pop culture heroes might be skilled, but they're heroes because of powers or privileges nobody else can access. Our standard hero is the superhero. Superheroes are special because they're aliens, or mutants, or just so rich they can build a batcave and train all day instead of getting a job. Even in a comic-book universe, any kid can't grow up to be Superman.
It's interesting watching existing characters evolve to fit the trend. The latest Star Wars protagonist, Rey, went from an impoverished nobody to the daughter of the emperor in two films (mostly because fans were loudly dissatisfied with the former option). The 1960s Captain Kirk was a man in his 30s who'd worked his way up through Starfleet; the new Captain Kirk is handed the Enterprise straight out of the academy. Doctor Who used to be a mediocre, underachieving Time Lord who fled Gallifrey out of boredom; now she's an ex-super-spy whose superior alien genes are the original source of every Time Lord's ability to regenerate. (And for a while now she's been the last Time Lord in the universe, just to ensure no one has the authority to boss her around.)
The Part That's Actually a Review of The Ten Thousand Doors of January
The Ten Thousand Doors of January is about January Scaller, a young woman at the dawn of the 20th century. January voraciously reads pulp novels and tales of adventure. (SF isn't really a genre at this point, but she comes as close to fandom as she can–she even voluntarily reads Tom Swift books.) She can see doorways to other worlds. And she has the magical power to make things she writes come true, which she uses to open more doorways. She's not just a fan; she's become a writer herself, opening doors to worlds of her own.
So, yeah, The Ten Thousand Doors of January is wish fulfillment for fantasy readers. That's no problem. I am a fantasy reader. And, honestly, The Ten Thousand Doors of January is an excellent novel of its type. I'm not saying it's deep–it's unambiguous, easy to interpret, and unlikely to confound or challenge most readers. As with a lot of SF, I get the sense this book is pitched younger than the adult audience it's marketed to. Unlike a lot of SF, it feels like a novel, not a pitch for the Netflix series many writers seem to want instead. It's a book about learning, uncovering information, more than presenting breathless action.
Its metaphors don't work only one way; they rhyme with each other. It's a novel about doors, and traveling between worlds, but January is also liminal herself: as an upper class mixed-race woman in 1900s America she moves between social worlds. January alone is perceived differently from January in the company of her wealthy white guardian.
We see a couple of worlds in detail, one independent world and one pocket-universe refuge for people marginalized by 1900s America. They're both vivid. The larger world, a place of islands, tattoos, and word-magic, feels more distinctive and complete than most epic fantasy settings in a fraction of the space.
Ten Thousand Doors' prose has style, not an attempt at styleless transparency. It's sensitive to narrative voice, even down to the niceties of capitalization. As the novel begins it's already asking us to notice the difference between a door and a Door. Which comes in handy, since the book has two narrators: January herself, and a nonfiction book on Doors that becomes a biography of Adelaide Larson, a woman who travels through them.
(That second strand sold me on the novel. Fantasy and science fiction don't spend enough time exploring the worldbuilding and storytelling possibilities of fictional nonfiction. If nothing else it saves time when you can just come out and tell the reader about the world instead of implying everything through plot, and it's often the more interesting option.)
And then–here's where I start revealing the things that ought to surprise you on first reading–that biography neatly transitions into an autobiography of Yule Ian, its otherworldly author, then connects back to January's plot, which loops around to the very beginning of the novel as she sits down to write, and then past it.
One of my cranky literary opinions is that every story has a narrator. Yes, even when they stick to close third person, or "transparent" style, the whole way through. You're getting the characters' thoughts and feelings because someone is telling you them. Sometimes this narrator is a persona the author wants to present to the audience. Sometimes it's a persona the author doesn't realize they're presenting. One interesting question to ask about any novel is who is telling this story, and why? Even stories in first person don't always consider the second half of that question.
Here, it's easy to answer. Ten Thousand Doors is a first person narrative wedded to a mostly third person narrative that gradually lets the first person take over. Each narrator is writing to a specific audience for a specific reason.
Meanwhile the real-life readers are in the position of those characters, being addressed by the narratives. The nonfiction strand, addressed to January, ultimately explains her background and powers: you are magic. January's story turns out to be addressed to an amnesiac boyfriend: an unsuspected magical girlfriend is looking for you. Both reinforce the book's wish-fulfillment aspects.
On a higher level, both narrators are metaphorical fantasy authors–dreamers, writers, fascinated by Doors–making their cases for the importance of fantasy. But they do a weirdly lousy job of selling what's so awesome about it.
Everybody Wants Their Genre to Rule the World
Doors are a metaphor for books. Speculative fiction, mostly; books about other worlds and presumably other possibilities.
Doors, The Ten Thousand Doors tells us, are also change. They're the source of wonder and innovation, where revolutionary ideas slip into our world from fundamentally different ones: "revolution, resistance, empowerment, upheaval, invention, collapse, reformation—all the most vital components of human history, in short."
The European rebellions of 1848 hung like gun smoke in the air; the sepoys of India could still taste mutiny on their tongues; women whispered and conspired, sewing banners and authoring pamphlets; freedmen stood unshackled in the bloodied light of their new nation. All the symptoms, in short, of a world still riddled with open doors.
Are they, though? There's a step missing here: The Ten Thousand Doors never tells us what these changes have to do with Doors. It's like the cartoon about the scientist who solves a complicated equation by writing "then a miracle occurs." The book insists Doors are change but can't come up with a concrete example of the world changing because of a Door.[1]
You'll notice these revolutionary movements happened in the real, Doorless, world. This is one of those fantasy stories set in the real world, which puts it in a bind. The novel can't introduce changes that never happened or the world won't look like ours anymore. It also can't give Doors credit for real-world changes without denying credit to the real people who worked for them. True, a lot of social movements were in part inspired by books… but most of them weren't the kind of books January reads. They were books like Das Kapital, or Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, or A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, or occasionally realist novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin or The Jungle.
Mostly Doors aren't about changing this world, but escaping into other ones. Adelaide finds Yule Ian's world and her true love. January's African governess slips into a world free from European colonialism. A community of outsiders and marginalized people take refuge on an uninhabited Earth. And there's nothing wrong with this. Sometimes people need an escape, a refuge. Weird, bullied people, or those who've been genuinely marginalized: The Ten Thousand Doors makes sure to provide portals for the non-white, non-male readers who rarely got to star in the fantasies of decades past. This is all good!
It's just that there's a gap between what Ten Thousand Doors wants to make of fantasy and what it actually provides. It tells us stories can change the world, but only ever shows them leading people inwards to their own private worlds. In a way, Doors are change–but only for the select group of people who get to travel through them.
A Bad Witch
I might not have given The Ten Thousand Doors of January a shot if I'd remembered Harrow had also written "A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies,". "A Witch's Guide" has a similar central metaphor but isn't as smart, or as kind. It's one of the most obnoxiously smug flatter-the-fans stories I've ever come across. It still won a Hugo Award. That might be why it won a Hugo Award.
"A Witch's Guide to Escape" is about a librarian/witch who sees her job as connecting people with The Right Book, or, as she puts it, "divining the unfilled spaces in their souls and filling them with stories and starshine." I must emphasize here that at no point in this story is there any hint of irony.
You get a sense of the narrator's personality when she says "There have only ever been two kinds of librarians in the history of the world: the prudish, bitter ones with lipstick running into the cracks around their lips who believe the books are their personal property and patrons are dangerous delinquents come to steal them; and witches." She's the kind of person who thinks there are two kinds of people. And, like a Josephine Tey character, she thinks she can know a person by looking at them. The patrons she's concerned about are kids. She barely speaks to any of them, but brief glimpses as they pass through her library "kind of [tell] you all you need to know" about their lives. She knows what they need, and what they need is always the same thing. Fantasy, king of literature and the literature of kings!
"And you really can't do anything for the people who only read Award-Winning Literature," she says, "who wear elbow patches and equate the popularity of Twilight with the death of the American intellect; their hearts are too closed-up for the new or secret or undiscovered." Which is amazing. I mean, if the internet has taught me one thing it's that sci-fi/fantasy fandom includes some of the most incurious and unimaginative people on earth. And a lot of people they'd dismiss as "mundane" are smart, thoughtful readers. The narrator can't imagine anyone might read "Award-Winning Literature" and find things in it that are new, or secret, or undiscovered. I read fantasy and Award-Winning Literature and off the top of my head I could come up with a half-dozen "literary" novels with more of the new and undiscovered in them than in Brandon Sanderson's entire oeuvre.
A social worker brings one boy in and suggests he read some nonfiction about his depression instead of another fantasy novel. She's not as diplomatic as I'd be, but she's not wrong. I read fantasy, and I've dealt with depression. I need some escape sometimes but I can confirm nonfiction is better long-term help in this area than fiction of any genre. The witch is incensed: "Anyone could see that kid needed to run and keep running until he shed his own skin, until he clawed out of the choking darkness and unfurled his wings, precious and prisming in the light of some other world." And, I mean… does she not realize it's possible to read more than one thing? No, fantasy solves all problems! Fantasy is the most important literature.
So the witch steers kids to the books she thinks they need. It doesn't work–one kid, pregnant and desperate, kills herself. So the witch swears she'll give the boy one of the really magic books, the ones witches keep from the public. And she does, and it's a literal portal, and the boy vanishes into it. The story says this is a happy ending. Maybe from the boy's point of view it is. We don't know. The witch is telling this story, and she's so disengaged from the kids they barely have any dialogue; we never get his point of view. From everyone else's POV, both he and the pregnant girl are equally gone from the world. What's the difference?
But everyone else's point of view doesn't matter. The witch is a fantasy fan, "A Witch's Guide" is here to tell us fantasy fans are wiser and more sensitive than the common herd.
Guarding the Doors
January's guardian belongs to the New England Archaeological Society. The NEAS collects powerful artifacts from beyond the Doors. Then they close the Doors behind them so just anyone can't do the same. The NEAS are special, better than the mundanes. They know what's best.
The NEAS are SF fans. They're the fans who police the boundaries, set pop quizzes to sort "real" fans from poseurs, and whine when their comic books start to look less white and male. They memorize canons and amass Funko pops while blockading the doors to divide themselves from the herd, keep the club exclusive. What kind of world would this be if January could get in?
But even a lot of fans on the right side of these fights, who want to open the doors, are more like the NEAS than they'd care to admit. January's magical powers, remember, mark her as sensitive and creative. She's a character the Witch from "A Witch's Guide" might like to see herself in. The Witch is a speculative fiction fan, and she doesn't want to keep anybody out–quite the opposite. But, well, some people are just too dead inside to get with the program, am I right? If they had any imagination they'd gladly be assimilated into her Borg. She won't accept that people who love literature beyond fantasy could feel the same love for it or get the same rewards. Fantasy is her refuge. She can't stand the suggestion that anything outside her fandom could be as important.
I've seen aggrieved SF fans set up psychological barricades to protect themselves from ideas that might pop their SF-is-special bubbles. They don't consciously police boundaries, but they have the same combative grudge about other kinds of art that they imagine litfic readers have about SF. They get defensive over even mild criticism of the things they love. They question the imaginations of the non-genre readers, performatively sneer at the books they were assigned in high school, or dismiss litfic as books about professors having affairs with their students.
The result is that SF is so frustratingly small. From the golden age onwards, most popular writers have come out of the same fan culture and read the same books. Most SF draws from a limited range of styles, themes, and subjects. During the "golden age" we got pulp potboilers starring white, male soldiers and engineers. Today, the standard is a low-subtext Hollywood-style thriller. At all times, the style hasn't strayed far from the contemporary understanding of "transparent prose."
The core, non-small-press part of the speculative fiction genres don't learn from anything outside themselves. If SF is so special and powerful, and its readers so especially imaginative and sensitive, what could the outside world have to teach?
Super Genres and Supermen
Alec Nevala-Lee's brilliant book Astounding is part biography of Astounding Science Fiction editor John W. Campbell (along with Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard), part cultural history of his disproportionate impact on science fiction. Campbell was a man of strong opinions, most of them bad. He was convinced science fiction was not ordinary literature–it might even be the most important literature. He once told Barry Malzburg "There's going to be a moon landing because of science fiction. There's no argument." By that point he'd spent his entire career trying to prove science fiction could change the world.
Campbell spent World War II looking for ways sci-fi might contribute to the war effort, imaging Astounding as a laboratory where smart people could brainstorm new ideas. He sometimes pitched schemes at actual government employee Robert Heinlein. Campbell was so desperate to prove his genre could lead to a world-changing breakthrough that after the war Hubbard suckered him into using Astounding to introduce Scientology.
Nevala-Lee writes Campbell saw Astounding as "an evolutionary collaboration between authors and fans to develop ideas at blinding speed… his ultimate goal was to create a new kind of person in both the magazine and its audience—a competent man who might pave the way for the superman to come." Campbell wanted to be one of those competent men. He was a reasonably smart man who thought he was brilliant–the Dunning-Kruger Effect in human form. He'd grown up precocious, and bullied.[2] The lesson Campbell took was that ordinary people can't handle genius.
Science fiction of Campbell's era was stocked with superhumans–people who were naturally smarter than the common folk. A. E. van Vogt's Slan and Zenna Henderson's People stories are famous examples. Campbell published Wilmar H. Shiras's "In Hiding,"[3] about a child psychologist who discovers a boy is hiding his true intelligence because the people around him Just Don't Understand. The story consists of the kid explaining seriously and at length how smart he is–running selective breeding experiments with kittens, publishing stories in magazines whose editors don't know he's twelve. The boy isn't just bright–normal people can't educate themselves up to his level through hard work. He's an atomic mutant, genetically superior. Brains are in his blood.
January, meanwhile, is special because she's literally magic, and she's magic because her father is from another world. January's a better person than the NEAS, she's not interested in excluding anyone, but she can't help being special. The abilities that metaphorically mark her as a fan and a creator are hereditary powers no mundane human could learn. January masters them instinctively. They're in her blood. She's a superhero.
(Magic powers are often hereditary in fantasy. If you don't want magic to be absolutely ubiquitous, restricting it to a small part of the population is an obvious solution. But it's weird that it's usually genetic. Why does it need to follow the rules of heredity? It's magic.)
The significant, plot-moving characters in The Ten Thousand Doors are people who know about Doors. Few non-door-aware people get names. The novel cares about how they support or hinder January, or her parents or governess, or her enemies. It rarely hints at what goals they might have of their own. The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a struggle for control of fantasy fandom. Here, it's the only world that matters.
One of the best small moments in The Ten Thousand Doors of January involves Adelaide's journey to the island world. She needs a ship, and her Door is on top of a mountain, and she hires two Hispanic men to lug it up, and they're the last people to see her before she disappears. And the book acknowledges the trouble this causes them! They're not disregarded as extras–Adelaide's biographer names and quotes one of them. We may not learn what January plans to do for the world outside her charmed Door-savvy circle, but this book knows January and her friends and family have responsibilities to others. The novel is calling Adelaide on her privilege–not just her white privilege, but her hero privilege.
The NEAS aren't special–but neither are January and her parents. It's easy to reject a villains' assumption of specialness. Remembering to question a story's assumptions about the hero's specialness is harder. They usually aren't conscious on the protagonist's or the author's part, so they're more hidden.
Stories of special, magical people that lose this sense of perspective can be toxic. Heroes who are more special than everyone else aren't held accountable for the collateral damage incurred by their adventures. Superhero movies often center the hero's self-actualization while disregarding the background extras' health and safety. They divide people into the special ones and the mundanes, and encourage the audience to identify with the special ones.
I know this post has rambled. I'm not sure it's entirely cohered. But I do see points of connection between the gatekeeping fans; and the defensive, incurious fans; and stories about special people; and stories where those people are fans. The Ten Thousand Doors of January has the perspective and self-awareness they lack. On top of that, it's genuinely well-written. Still, this book feels like a candy bar: I loved it, but I know if I consume too much of this stuff I'll make myself sick.
In reality, the biggest changes SF and fantasy made to the world are Scientology and the Disney corporation's monopoly on the American imagination, neither of which were a win. ↩
Which, though it doesn't justify anything, was probably partly in reaction to Campbell's own obnoxiousness–for instance, he recalled "solving" games like hide-and-seek. ↩
Recently reprinted in the Library of America anthology The Future is Female. ↩
March 1, 2020 Books, Horror, Mysteries, Speculative FictionElizabeth Hand, Jean Giono, Margaret Irwin, Weird FictionWesley
Jean Giono, A King Alone
Jean Giono's A King Alone is a realist novel, but just for its uncanny tone it would probably appeal to fans of M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood. It takes place over the course of several winters in a 19th century mountain village hemmed in by snow and fog. It's a cloudy limbo where a man climbing down from a tree seems to come from thin air. Anything can happen.
What does happen is a murder mystery, followed by a wolf hunt, followed by.. what? The title might be more literally translated as A King Without Diversion. The "king" is Langlois, the hero of the first two plots, decisive in a crisis, quick with a gun, and the idol of the villagers. A King Alone deconstructs the adventure-novel hero. The real measure of a person's strength isn't how they cope with a crisis but how they cope with ordinary life.
A King Alone does interesting things with narration. The story is told by a village historian living a couple of generations after the events, reporting tales of Langlois secondhand, and seamlessly transitions into the voices of their original sources. The narrator is as often "we" as "I," like the spirit of the village is piecing Langlois together from collective memory.
This book's best asset is its otherworldly feel and uncanny imagery. A tree cradles murder victims in its branches, the pursuit of a killer is a weirdly slow and calm walk through clouds and snowdrifts.
Margaret Irwin, "The Book"
I recently came across Margaret Irwin's story "The Book" for the second time–the first was in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's anthology The Weird. It's good, but I still haven't read any of her (apparently few) others. She collected them in a book called Madame Fears the Dark which is not in print and not affordable used.
It's a deal-with-what-might-be-the-devil story about a grimoire that's found its way onto the shelves of a mild-mannered middle-class businessman. The plot's predictable–the book presents Mr. Corbett with newly-written investment advice, asking for increasingly-alarming favors in return–but not every story needs a twist ending.
What's distinctive is how the grimoire seduces Mr. Corbett. It haunts his library. He doesn't notice it's there at first; it's just one of a batch of books inherited from an uncle. But every night the second shelf on the dining-room bookcase gains a strange gap, like something's left to wander around. And Mr. Corbett has suddenly gone off books. Dickens isn't funny anymore: "Beneath the author's sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering." Jane Austen is "a prying, sub-acid busybody in everyone else's flirtations," Charlotte Bronte is "a raving, craving maenad seeking self-immolation on the altar of her frustrated passions." The classics suck, and Mr. Corbett is the first person to notice! Obviously, this is because his mind is "so acute and original he should have achieved greatness," but until then, Mr. Corbett reads to explore "the hidden infirmities of minds that had been valued by fools as great and noble." When he finds the one book on the dining-room shelf not newly revealed as idiotic, he's ready and willing to fall under its spell.
In other words, the grimoire corrupts Mr. Corbett by turning him into a smug, edgy contrarian. Anyone who's seen too many Twitter threads of the Hey, what's the worst book you had to read in high school kind might not find the idea too farfetched.
Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall
Any interesting writer (even a writer of the "every book is different" kind) will have subjects or themes they return to, because to be interesting a writer has to have interests. I'm only somewhat familiar with Elizabeth Hand's work–I've read this, her mystery novels, and a few short stories–but her go-to theme seems to be counterculture types of the 1960s and 1970s dealing, gracefully or not, with aging, and leftover damage from decisions made decades ago.
Wylding Hall is one of those stories. It's written as an oral history of Windhollow Faire, a Fairport Convention-style folk rock group, and their legendary final album, recorded at and named after the titular country house. There's no "objective" narrator, just interviews with the surviving members responding to questions we never hear. The one missing voice is Julian, their lead singer, who vanished during production.
In form Wylding Hall a blend of folk horror and Arthur Machen. Under the surface this is a story about the proverbial kid who goes a little too far in search of something more and drops out or burns out. As with "The Book," if you're genre-savvy you can guess where this story will end up. That doesn't matter: it's effective in its details and watching it get there is affecting and chilling. This is one of the best stories of its type I've read in ages.
It helps that I'm a sucker for the horror tropes Wylding Hall leans on. The hall is a House of Leaves-style impossible space, accumulating styles like a centuries-long physical history of British architecture, expanding and contracting and revealing different rooms to different people. We also get uncanny media: a song may also be a spell, photos show something (and it's quite a thing) nobody knew was there. And then there's the fictional album at the center of the story: even in reality, there's an uneasy aura around last recordings, final books, any artifact created just adjacent to a sad ending.
The key to pulling off this kind of story is to explain neither too much or too little. The multiple viewpoints help; Julian vanished forty years ago, and a lot of these people spent the summer stoned, and the proceedings have just the right amount of fog. In the end it's not even clear whether Julian's end was, from his own perspective, horrible or happy. Like A King Alone, this is a story where we only see the lynchpin character from outside. From outside it's often hard to tell.
Random Thoughts on Recent Doctor Who
February 16, 2020 Doctor Who, Speculative FictionWesley
(I've expanded this post from some thoughts I had on Twitter. If you don't care about Doctor Who, it probably won't interest you.)
Earlier this month Doctor Who aired an episode called "Can You Hear Me." Afterwards the BBC thought they had to apologize for it. See, at the end of the episode Graham tells the Doctor he's scared his cancer might come back, and she replies "I'm quite socially awkward, so I'm just going to subtly walk towards the console and look at something. And then in a minute, I'll think of something that I should have said that might have been helpful." And a lot of viewers hated that was the best she could come up with.
I thought this line was inept, but not in the way most fans thought.
Yes, the Doctor's response is disappointing, but that's clearly intentional; anyone who thought it was meant to be cute or funny missed some cues. (For instance, look how the episode juxtaposes this scene with Ryan's fears that traveling with the Doctor means not being there for his friends.) I sometimes feel like modern audiences have trouble interpreting fiction that doesn't explicitly, unambiguously spell out how they're meant to feel.
Instead, I was struck by two things. One points to a change in how the writers of post–2005 Doctor Who think about the Doctor. The other points to a weak spot in the show's writing under the current producer, Chris Chibnall.
First: is the Doctor socially awkward? Most of the time the 13th Doctor's distinguishing feature is that she's more in touch with her companions' feelings than usual. And I think that "usual" is new. The Doctor's social awkwardness is a creation of the post–2005 series. The original series Doctors were eccentric and alien to ordinary day-to-day life. But they understood emotions, were usually empathetic, and charmed people more often than they offended them. They comforted their friends in times | 8,097 |
The year is 1963, the night: Halloween. Police are called to 43 Lampkin Ln. only to discover that 15 year old Judith Myers has been stabbed to death, by her 6 year-old brother, Michael. After being institutionalized for 15 years, Myers breaks out on the night before Halloween. He stalks a teenage girl (Curtis) and her friends while his doctor (Pleasence) chases him through the streets trying to stop the blood bath.
The Halloween movie launched a sequel (Halloween II, 1981), but Carpenter didn't direct it, however, he did write it with Debra Hill. Curtis and Pleasence reprised their roles and a franchise was born. It also launched a couple remakes by Rob Zombie.
Halloween delivered the scares in the pre-CGI world of 1978, and it still delivers today, it makes you check the locks on your door before you go to sleep. It is scarier than the boogey-man, because Michael doesn't hide, he goes straight for you, hoping to impale you with his knife. The best of cheesy-B-horror one stab at a time.
The sleepy seaside village of Antonio Bay is about to learn the true meaning of the word vengeance. For this seemingly perfect town masks a guilty secret... a past steeped in greed and murder. Exactly 100 years ago, a ship was horribly wrecked under mysterious circumstances in a thick, eerie fog. Now, shrouded in darkness, the long dead mariners have returned from their<|fim_middle|> it is drenched with an atmosphere of creepiness and dread (the kind only Carpenter can deliver). It's Grade-A-entertainment, with a bountiful slice of cheesy-B-Goodness.
In the future (1997), crime is out of control and New York City is a maximum security prison. Grabbing a bargaining chip right out of the air, convicts bring down the President's plane in bad old Gotham. Gruff Snake Plissken, a one-eyed lone warrior new to prison life, is coerced into bringing the President, and his cargo, out of this land of undesirables.
Escape from NY delivers one of the funnest action-hero characters in a Carpenter film, Snake Plissken played by Kurt Russell. The film is dated with the Narrator at the beginning saying "In 1988, the crime rate in the United States rises four hundred percent. The once great city of New York becomes the one maximum security prison for the entire country". Ignore the narrator, forget the date, and just enjoy the film for what it is, an action romp that travels the road through cheesy-B-goodness and beyond.
Snake Plissken continued his adventure in Escape from L.A. (1996), from East Coast to West Coast, it's over-the-top action, humor and fun, but it falls a bit short of New York. There was even a rumor for awhile that there might be a third film called Escape from Earth, but it never took flight. | water grave to exact a bloody revenge.
First, like The Thing, they tried a remake of The Fog in 2005 starring Tom Welling (Smallville), but skip that one and watch the original. Really, without Barbeau (who looks hotter in this than The Swamp Thing), Curtis (the original scream queen from Halloween) and Carpenter (The Master), the remake gets lost in its own hazy fog.
The Fog is a classic ghost story mixed with a bit of revenge. It is not the scariest movie ever made but | 112 |
Located in New York City, Bond Street Loft was designed by Axis Mundi Design.
Description by Axis Mundi: This NoHo apartment, in a landmarked circa 1870 building designed by Stephen Decatur Hatch and converted to lofts in 1987, had been interestingly renovated by a rock<|fim_middle|> referenced the various artworks. Major furniture pieces – a sectional in the library, a 12-foot-long dining table–along with a rich blend of textures such as leather, linen, fur and warm woods, helped bring the sprawling dimensions of the loft down to human scale. For more information visit Axis Mundi Design. | musician before being purchased by a young hedge fund manager and his gallery director girlfriend. Naturally, the couple brought to the project their collection of painting, photography and sculpture, mostly by young emerging artists.
Axis Mundi accommodated these pieces within a neutral palette accented with occasional flashes of bright color that | 59 |
← Missing Jews. Preliminary Remarks About the Function of Jewish Spaces in the Making of "New Germany"[1]
"Welcome to Jerusalem" in the Jewish Museum Berlin: Ideas, Reflections, Questions →
On Modern Warfare
The following is a long quote of Talal Asad, in Formations of The Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford University Press: 2003, p 116-118. The key-sentence is this: "Human life is sacred, but only in particular contexts that the state defines." Possibly, this<|fim_middle|> to inflict cruel death upon civilian populations even when these weapons are not actually used. In brief, cruel modern technologies of destruction are integral to modern warfare, and modern warfare is an activity essential to the security and power of the modern state, on which the welfare and identity of its citizens depends. In war, the modern state demands from its citizens not only that they kill and maim others but also that they themselves suffer cruel pain and death. Human life is sacred, but only in particular contexts that the state defines.
So how can the calculated cruelties of modern battle be reconciled with the modern sensibility regarding pain? Precisely by treating pain as a quantifiable essence. As in state torture, an attempt can be made to measure the physical suffering inflicted in modern warfare in accordance with the proportionality of means to ends. That is the principle supported by the Geneva Convention. The principle states that the human destruction inflicted should not outweigh the strategic advantage gained. Only necessary punishment of noncombatants should be used. But given the aim of ultimate victory the notion of "military necessity" can be extended indefinitely. Any measure that is intended as contribution to that aim, no matter how much suffering it creates, may be justified in terms of "military necessity." The standard of acceptability in such cases is set by public opinion, and that standard varies as the matter moves in response to contingent circumstances (for example, who the enemy is, how the war is going)."
Francisco Goya, Las mujeres dan valor (The women are courageous), plate IV of series "Los desastros de la guerra" (The disasters of war), 1st edition Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes San Fernando 1863
[1] J. Keegan, The Face of Battle, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1978, pp. 329-330.
[2] Daniel Headrick, "The Tools of Imperialism: Technology and the Expansion of European Colonial Empires in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of Modern History, vol. 51, 1979, p. 256. | is banal, or can be thought of as banal, but it pushes one to think "beyond states." I think that this move is intellectually neccesary, if not politically feasible at this point in time.
I re-read Asad in the aftermath of the latest flood of pictures about the horrors of warfare in Syria (or what once was Syria), in an attempt to understand something beyond that inevtiable feeling of numbness and apathy. How much is too much? Who decides how much is too much? For whom? Why do we think in terms of states, when states fail as frameworks, that safeguard human dignity? I am not sure, right now, if there is any "use" in these questions, as I am not even sure anymore in all of this intellectual reasoning being something more than self-referential exercises of thought, that do not change a thing. My point in posting/quoting this is simply to have people engage in a more "profound" thinking about state-violence, about the linkage of states and violence, and the violences that can be unleashed by "formations of the secular." So here is the quote:
"The military historian John Keegan wrote of the new practices of "deliberate cruelty" over two decades ago when he described some of the weaponry employed in twentieth-century warfare: "Weapons have never been kind to human flesh, but the directing principle behind their design has usually not been that of maximizing the pain and damage they can cause. Before the invention of explosives, the limits of muscle power in itself constrained their hurtfullness; but even for some time thereafter moral inhibitions, fueled by a sense of the unfairness of adding mechanical and chemical increments to man's power to hurt his brother, served to restrain barbarities of design. Some of these inhibitions – against the use of poison gas and explosive bullets – were codified and given international force by the Hague-Conventions of 1899; but the rise of 'thing-killing' as opposed to man-killing weapons – heavy artillery is an example – which by their side-effects inflicted gross suffering and disfigurement, invalidated these restraints. As a result restraints were cast to the winds, and it is now a desired effect of many man-killing weapons that they inflict wounds as terrible and terrifying as possible. The claymore mine, for instance, is filled with metal cubs…, the cluster bomb with jagged metal fragments, in both cases because that shape of projectile tears and fractures more extensively than a smooth-bodied one. The HEAT and HESH rounds fired by anti-tank guns are designed to fill the interior of armoured vehicles with showers of metal splinters or streams of molten metal, so disabling the tank by disabling its crew. And napalm, disliked tor ethical reasons even by many tough minded soldiers, contains an ingredient which increases the adhesion of the burning petrol to human skin surfaces. Military surgeons, so successful over the past century in resuscitating wounded soldiers and repairing wounds of growing severity, have thus now meet a challenge of wounding agents deliberately conceived to defeat their skills."[1] (Incidentally, the mushrooming or "dum-dum" bullet, invented in British India in 1897, is reported to have been "so vicious, for it tore great holes in the flesh, that Europeans through tit too cruel to inflict upon one another, and used it only against Asians and Africans."[2])
One might add to this that the manufacture, possession, and deployment of weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, and nuclear) must be counted as instances of declared governmental readiness | 739 |
Canada Begins Curbing Cross-Ownership
Canada's communications<|fim_middle|> A Lineman's Tips to Ground an STL Pole
Also more about gas discharge tubes and metal oxide varistors
C-Band 5G Spectrum Auction Begins
Pai highlights pace of process, "years ahead of schedule" | regulator has instituted a new media ownership policy to maintain "a diversity of voices" in the country's broadcasting system.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has established a new policy restricting cross-ownership. A person or entity will only be permitted to control two of three types of media serving the same market: a local radio or television station or a local newspaper.
Consolidation in broadcasting has raised concerns that a large group could achieve a dominant position through acquisitions and reduce diversity of content, the CRTC feels. Therefore, for TV, after a deal goes through, one party now cannot control more than 45% of the TV audience in the market as a result of the transaction. The agency also will not approve transactions between companies that distribute television services, such as cable or satellite companies, that would result in one person effectively controlling delivery of programming in a market.
The CRTC left unchanged limits on how many radio and TV stations one company can control in a market.
The new policies apply only to private broadcasters; the commission will focus on public broadcasters and diversity in upcoming proceedings for the CBC and provincial educational broadcasters. The commission also plans to review its policies relating to community broadcasters soon.
NAB to Supreme Court: Deregulation Is Statutory Prime Directive in Ownership Rule Review
Files brief in advance of oral argument on FCC broadcast ownership decision
Letters: AM Digital, FM Translators, Lightning Dissipation
Readers write in to tell us what they think
SiriusXM's New Satellite Is in Orbit
SXM-7 launched Sunday; another goes up next year
Workbench: | 323 |
Choosing plants from your local nursery or via a catalogue is one of the most exciting parts of gardening. It's the optimism that grows as you think how this plant will fit into your garden or hopefully improve that spot that's been screaming out for some attention.
But, just as much fun as this activity is, choosing plants without wisdom is like encouraging your children to stay sugar-free and then giving them a voucher for the the lolly shop. It can be a ton of fun but once you're back in your garden that pleasure turns into dismay when you realise that most of your choices probably won't make it.
Choose Plants for your Growing Zone – no matter how good that plant catalogue from India looks you can discount it if you're living in Wisconsin. For the most success, always stick to searching out your local garden center or choose plants from catalogues that offer plants relevant to your growing zone and climate.
Account for sun or shade – not taking into account the sun requirements of your chosen plant can be just as painful. Finding out that your new purchase requires full-sun while your garden lies under the canopy of a large elm can be quite depressing. It pays to think these things through before handing over your hard-earned cash.
Style of Garden<|fim_middle|>ogue.
All-Year Flower or Foliage Colour – when you first started gardening the focus was always on Spring. Annuals, bulbs, spring-flowering perennials adorned your garden and made it look beautiful for the next 3-6months. But once autumn turned up your garden began to look a little drab and winter compounded the effect. Consider choosing plants that will retain some composure throughout the year offering flowers in the cooler months or foliage that warms your garden up.
Perennials vs Annuals – Do you want to replace your plants in the future or prune them? This is an interesting point when choosing plants for your garden. Annuals offer incredible blooms during their flowering season but can leave a hole in your garden once they're spent. However, pruned perennials don't look that much better in their dormant season either. Your choice!
Risk Analysis – when choosing plants it pays to assess the risks that this plant brings into your garden. Do you have pets or children who might find those berries extremely attractive? Or, will the roots of this plant become invasive and cause problems for your underground services and reticulation? Think through all the possibilities that may eventuate should this plant take up residence at your place.
Do you really need it? – are you joking! You're a gardener – of course you need it.
Choosing plants is a wonderful pastime to consider the future growth of your garden. But, take these tips and apply to your next plant choices. You'll be thankful you did.
Could Watering Restrictions Force You to Quit Gardening?
I love item 10. For me, it is not about need, its about want! | – is your garden more Mediterranean than Cottage? Xeriscape instead of parterre? This obviously makes a difference when it comes to choosing plants. Consider how the rest of your garden fits together at the moment and whether your new plant choices will blend in or stick out like the proverbial "sore thumb".
Work with Textures, Shape and Colour – one tip I was given many years ago was to try arranging your new plant choices with specimens already growing in your garden right there on the nursery floor. Basically you create a mini-garden that will illustrate for you how your new choices will meld with the old. Obviously try and steer clear of making this aspect look the same by contrasting different foliage colours, shapes and textures.
Check Watering Requirements – this is a common mistake made by new gardeners. You've found a plant that conforms to your growing zone, loves dappled shade, offers some variance in appearance but unfortunately requires heaps of water while its future neighbours are all drought-tolerant. This may not seem like an issue until you get going and find that the soil is now too wet for its peers or to dry for your new plant.
Be Mindful of Fads – for some gardeners trendy plants are what keep their hobby interesting and so they always look for the newest and hottest. There's nothing wrong with new-fashioned plants but it does pay to know that this may be the case and within the next 12 months your garden could be completely out of v | 300 |
Whitney & Murphy Funeral Home
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SVOB, GEORGE J.
February 18, 2012 5 Condolences
83, born April 10, 1928 in Clarkdale, AZ passed peacefully in his sleep on February 15, 2012. Preceded in death by Ethelbert (2006), his loving wife of 49 years, George is survived by his sons, Michael (Kay) and John (Kim), his daughter, Diane, and his five grandchildren, Mikayla, Elena, Stefanie, Christopher, and Stephanie. An Arizona native and graduate of Arizona State College, George was proud to teach Industrial Arts at Sunnyslope Elementary School and serve as district consultant to other teachers in the Washington Elementary School District. He loved camping, fishing, fixing things, and visiting with people<|fim_middle|> wonderful time to share. My last seeing your dad and Diane at Carrie's wedding was a treasured time as well. We wish we could have arranged to see you this summer in ND. Our prayers are with you. Your dad was a very special, caring person. May the grace of God comfort you.
Dianne and Jack
Dave Woeste
Just heard about Uncle George's death today, as Lynnette called. Diane had left a phone message with Aunt Jean, but she didn't see listen to it or act upon it. Lynnette heard it went she went over for another matter.
I took the liberty to send the information to all of the relatives for whom I have e-mail addresses.
I will always remember him as a very gentle, loving, caring person with a quiet sense of humor. He would do anything for anybody. May he rest in peace.
John Woeste
Uncle George was a wonderful man. He made me feel good. I could feel he loved me. My heart-felt sympathy goes out to his family and anyone who loved and lost him.
Dan and Susan Gietzen
Sorry to hear of your dad's passing. I always respected him as an Uncle and a man. I remember the times he spent at the farm always in a good mood, wanting to fix things that needed repair. I'll miss him.
He was an amazing man and often times I considered him to be the kindest person and at times. He loved the church and the bible and could sit in his wheelchair for so long and just simply speak with an honest heart. He stood by his wife and was strong about it and for that he to me is a dignified man.
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Copyright © 2021 | Whitney & Murphy Funeral Home, 4800 East Indian School Road, Phoenix, AZ85018 | Phone: (602) 840 5600 | Email: info@whitneymurphyfuneralhome.com
Contact | Directions | Obituaries | Funeral Pre-Planning | Site Map | Phoenix AZ: Funeral Home & Cremation Services | Website by FRM Websites | . In his Catholic faith, he loved the Lord with all his heart, showing his faith in how he lived his life, always treating others with complete respect and kindness. As a volunteer for St. Vincent de Paul, the Parish Youth Organization, Boy Scout troop leader, Eucharistic minister, and loving member of our community, George would selflessly do anything for anybody. With love and patience, George devotedly helped care for his wife in her final years and then with dignity and grace, suffered his own physical trials as he closed the last years of his own life. He will be forever loved, respected, and truly missed. Visitation will be held Sunday, February 19th between 5:00 – 8:00 pm, with a Rosary at 7:00 pm, at Whitney & Murphy Funeral Home, 4800 E. Indian School Rd. Funeral Mass will be celebrated at 10:30 am, Monday, February 20th at SS Simon & Jude Cathedral, 6351 N. 27th Ave. Immediately following, a reception will be held at the church hall. Burial will be at Holy Cross Cemetery, 10045 W. Thomas Rd. at 1:30 pm. The family respectfully requests donations to the St. Vincent de Paul Society, c/o SS Simon & Jude Cathedral, 6351 N. 27th Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85017.
Offer Condolence for the family of SVOB, GEORGE J.
Filed Under: Obituary
Dianne and Jack Jordan
We were so sorry to hear of your father's passing. I have many special memories of your family. You parent's visit to Kiawah with Mom was a | 372 |
I'm working with black slip to concentrate the light emitted through the polar ice porcelain on the surface on these lamp shades. These are still in progress and have not been bisqued or fired to full temperature so the slip looks lighter and greyer than it will when the shades are finished.
Same shade on all sides.
This is one of the medium sized shades. 14 lbs of porcelain, approximately 11" tall.
March: class registration. New lights too.
Class registration starts tomorrow morning. I will be teaching 3 classes at the Douglas Park Community Center this term (april-june): clay play (age 3-5 tues AM), clay club (age 6-13 after school, tues), and handbuilding (adult 6;30-9 PM, tues).
Some new lights are coming along too! Tacofino is opening a 3rd Vancouver location in June and I<|fim_middle|> designer/architect Shiloh Sukkau, and the great owners Kaeli Robinsong, Jason Sussman, Amy Bockner, and Ryan Spong. Check back for more images of the lights in progress. As well as details about other new projects I have on the go.
Above: in progress porcelain shade with black slip.
Above: studio shot of one of the prototypes.
Above: one half of the 12" pendant lamp shade on the wheel.
Above: 12" pendant shade in progress.
At the beginning of August (2014) I started this great new project--20 pendant lights for the a new Tacofino space soon to open in downtown Vancouver. There has been a lot going on in the studio this month. 4 white clay--'Moony's'. and 16 red clay--'Pinata's'.
These Moony's will be around 13"x13"
The Pinata's will be around 13"x7" | have been asked to produce 20 pendant lamps for the new Yaletown space. I'm really excited to be working again with | 27 |
Jerry Schumacher is a fine coach
By Larry Eder on December 27, 2017 10:51 PM | 0 Comments
Jerry Schumacher was named the 2017 Nike Coach of Year for USA Track & Field. Jerry is the coach at the Bowerman Track Club. Before that, Jerry was distance coach at the University of Wisconsin.
Schumacher lives and breathes the sport, his family, his athletes. The man is devoted. Jerry Schumacher is also not really fond of interviews, media inter action, etc. This is not a bad thing, Jerry Schumacher is just old school, he wants his athletes to get the praise and he values his privacy. I kind of like that.
INDIANAPOLIS (USA): Jerry Schumacher whose Bowerman Track Club athletes in 2017 won three medals at the IAAF World Championships, as well as an historic marathon victory, has been named USATF's 2017 Nike Coach of the Year, USATF announced. Schumacher will be honored at the 2017 Jesse Owens Banquet on Saturday, December 2 in Columbus, Ohio, as part of the USATF Annual Meeting. Photo from @letsrun, #usatf, #bowermantc
A post shared by RunBlogRun (@<|fim_middle|> a 44 year involvement in the sport of athletics. Larry has experienced the sport as an athlete, coach, magazine publisher and now, journalist and blogger. His first article, on Don Bowden, America's first sub 4 minute miler, was published in RW in 1983. Larry has published several magazines on athletics, from American Track & Field to the U.S. version of Spikes magazine. He currently manages the content and marketing development of the RunningNetwork, The Shoe Addicts and RunBlogRun. Of RunBlogRun, his daily pilgrimage with the sport, Larry says: "I have to admit, I love traveling to far away meets, writing about the sport I love, and the athletes I respect, for my readers at runblogrun.com, the most of anything I have ever done, except, maybe running itself."
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This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons License. | runblogrun) on Nov 27, 2017 at 1:13pm PST
Most years before Jerry Schumacher was coach for a Nike sponsored club, we would see each other at the Stanford Invitational. Watching Jerry Schumacher, Pascal Dobert, and now Alistar Cragg coach and manage this fine team, one observes, from afar, an amazing devotion between the athletes and coach.
Kara Goucher, Jerry Schumacher, Shalane Flanagan, Marathon Trials 2012, photo by PhotoRun.net
Jerry Schumacher prepares his athletes to compete against the best in the world. I recall a few conversations with Jerry after races with his athletes. Jerry was always there, he was there for the good days and the bad days. The bad days are the learning days for a coach like Schumacher.
The performances of Matt Tegenkamp, Evan Jager, Chris Solinsky, Shalane Flanagan, Emily Infeld, Amy Cragg, Kara Goucher, Chris Derrick and Courtney Frerichs, among the many in this fine Nike sponsored club, came all after long time coaching with Jerry Schumacher.
Jerry Schumacher won the Nike Coach of the Year award the old school way: he earned with by being a fine coach and role model.
Larry Eder
Bio: Larry Eder has had | 288 |
Adena Health Focus August<|fim_middle|>-779-4300. | 09, 2017
Put Vaccines on Kids' Back-to-School List
As parents start preparing to send their children back to the classroom, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says it's a good time to remember that vaccines play an important role in keeping kids healthy.
Make sure your child is up-to-date on immunizations and fully protected from diseases such as measles, diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough), the agency advises.
"Parents should know that vaccines protect children from many serious illnesses that come from infectious diseases. The risk of being harmed by vaccines is much smaller than the risk of these serious illnesses," said Marion Gruber, FDA's director of the Office of Vaccines Research and Review.
Most vaccine side effects, such as soreness at the injection site or a mild fever, are minor and temporary.
When getting your child vaccinated, review the vaccine information sheets, Gruber suggested. By law, health care professionals must provide the documents, which outline the benefits and risks of a vaccine, Gruber said.
Before your child is vaccinated, inform your health care provider of any health conditions or concerns.
For more information about vaccines, or to schedule an appointment with Adena Pediatrics, call 740 | 262 |
Replaced by Gates - Rumsfeld is formally replaced by Robert Gates on December 18, 2006. According to a retired general who worked closely with the first Bush administration, the Gates nomination means that George H.W. Bush, his close political advisers—Brent Scowcroft, James Baker—and the current President Bush are saying that "winning the 2008 election is more important than any individual. The issue for them is how to preserve the Republican agenda. The Old Guard wants to isolate Cheney and give their girl, Condoleezza Rice, a chance to perform." It takes Scowcroft, Baker, and the elder Bush working together to oppose Cheney, the general says. "One guy can't do it." Other sources close to the Bush family say that the choice of Gates to replace Rumsfeld is more complex than the general describes, and any "victory" by the "Old Guard" may be illusory. A former senior intelligence official asks rhetorically: "A week before the election, the Republicans were saying that a Democratic victory was the seed of American retreat, and now Bush and Cheney are going to change their national security policies? Cheney knew this was coming. Dropping Rummy after the election looked like a conciliatory move—'You're right, Democrats. We got a new guy and we're looking at all the options. Nothing is ruled out.'" In reality, the former official says, Gates is being brought in to give the White House the credibility it needs in continuing its policies towards Iran and Iraq.
Iran Open to Engagement - Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki says Iran is "ready for new approaches by the United States." Mottaki adds that Iran would consider the idea of allowing the US to open a diplomatic office in Tehran. The last US diplomatic office was closed in 1979.
US Still 'Deep<|fim_middle|> the Security Council," Rice says. "And its continuing refusal to do so will only cause pressure to increase." Rice says the US remains "deeply concerned about the threat that Iran's nuclear program poses to the region, indeed to the United States and the entire international community." She adds, "We look forward to engaging in vigorous diplomacy that includes direct diplomacy with Iran, as well as continued collaboration and partnership" with the other four permanent members of the Security Council—Britain, China, France and Russia—as well as Germany. | ly Concerned' about Iran's Nuclear Program - Rice says that Iran must meet UN Security Council demands to suspend uranium enrichment before the US will be willing to discuss its nuclear program. "The dialogue and diplomacy must go hand in hand with a very firm message from the United States and the international community that Iran needs to meet its obligations as defined by | 69 |
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