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+If you are a first-time buyer, be aware that many lenders and government agencies, like MassHousing, offer below-market interest rates for qualified buyers who are purchasing their first home.
+Real estate professionals are familiar with most local lenders, as well as special government sponsored programs for qualified buyers, and they may be able to provide about lenders to provide necessary financing. Their intimate knowledge of a wide variety of loan types and programs can be invaluable to buyers, particularly those who are relocating, or who are shopping for their first home.
+B) Mortgages and loans
+There is a wide range of mortgages and loans available in today's world of sophisticated financing. Buyers may ask their local REALTOR® to provide information about the various insured mortgage programs available such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, private and commercial loans. In addition, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have information available directly from their respective web sites at and.
+There also is a wide range of loan types. For example, adjustable rates, fixed rates, graduated payment adjustable rates, growing equity mortgages, balloon loans, assumable mortgages, bridge loans, buy-down loans, FHA/VA loans etc.
+C) Consumer Protection Laws in Financing
+Consumer protection laws in the Commonwealth require that lenders not discriminate in providing loans and other financing, and that real estate agents disclose referral relationships. These are called Truth in Lending Laws.
+For example, it is required that an agent make full disclosure of Controlled Business Arrangements (CBA), in which a person has an affiliate relationship or ownership interest of over one percent in another business which provides settlement services, and directly or indirectly refers business to that provider.
+The Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) was enacted in 1974 to provide consumers with disclosure about closing costs and to prohibit unearned fees (kickbacks/referral fees). This law prevents real estate agents from unlawfully earning income for such referrals.
+Additional information about Truth in Lending laws, can be obtained through your local REALTOR®. (For specific details about closing costs, see section III of this report: The Transaction Explained.)
+D) Tax breaks for buyers
+There are significant tax advantages to home ownership, most prominently that interest payments on mortgages and property taxes are, in most cases, tax deductible. In addition, some home equity loans also are tax deductible, and many people use their home equity loans to consolidate their debt, thereby making all the debt interest tax deductible. To get more information on the tax benefits of being a homeowner, ask you accountant or tax preparer or view the IRS.
+IV. The Transaction Explained
+A) Making an offer to purchase
+Once you have found the house you want to buy, there are a number of procedures that must be followed to secure a binding legal agreement. The first step most buyers take is making an offer to purchase. Your real estate agent may assist you in this process by transmitting your offer to the seller.
+The offer to purchase also may contain stipulations to the sale, as well as the buyer's financial offer. For example, the offer to purchase may be contingent upon the seller finding suitable housing within a given period of time; or it may be contingent upon the buyer's ability to secure financing.
+Massachusetts law requires that the listing agent present all offers to the seller forthwith, and when the listing is exclusive, offers are presented to the seller through the exclusive listing agent.
+It is not uncommon for an offer to purchase to be followed by a counter offer by the seller, and can even be countered again by the buyer. Depending upon how it is written, an offer to purchase can be viewed as a legal contract that binds both the seller and buyer.
+The offer to purchase outlines the initial agreement between the buyer and seller regarding the purchase price and any provisions to be included in the subsequent purchase and sale agreement. Depending upon the intentions of the buyer and seller and the language contained in the agreement, acceptance of an offer may be sufficient to create a binding contract between the parties.
+The purchase and sale agreement contains a list of inspections, services and fees agreed upon by both buyer and seller. There may be as many as 30 clauses in a purchase and sale agreement, so buyers should be intimately aware of their responsibilities prior to signing. Because most sellers typically require a larger deposit when the Purchase and Sale Agreement is signed, buyers should make sure they understand their rights and obligations before signing. Buyers with specific legal questions or concerns should consult an attorney who is familiar with real estate law.
+Although brokers are not attorneys, they may complete a standard offer to purchase form and are aware of its content and importance in the home buying process. In most cases, the purchase and sale agreement is the final written and binding agreement for all terms and conditions of the transaction.
+C) The up-front money
+Buyers may be expected to put down a deposit, sometimes called earnest money, at the time of the purchase and sale agreement to secure the property is presented. This money will be credited to the buyer at closing.
+Buyers are typically expected to pay for any and all inspections performed on the building prior to closing. If, however, the seller agrees to pay for such inspections, such an agreement should be spelled out in the purchase and sale agreement. The cost of these and other inspections varies, but buyers should be clear about what inspections they will require, and what the cumulative costs will be. (see Section IV. Inspections Required & Recommended).
+Aside from inspections, buyers will need to calculate the amount of down payment money needed to secure financing, and tax escrow expenses. Tax escrow in Massachusetts varies depending upon the month of closing. The following is a chart of what buyers can expect to put into escrow. For specific property tax rates, check with your REALTOR®.
+If Loan Closes in the Month of:
+Bank Will Require Escrow of:
+January
+4 months
+February
+5 months
+March
+6 months
+April
+1 month
+May
+2 months
+June
+3 months
+July
+August
+September
+October
+November
+December
+Points are the pre-paid interest charged by many lenders and often vary from 0-4 points depending on the loan type selected by the buyer.
+V. Inspections
+Inspections can include, but are not limited to, a building (home) inspection, well water inspection, pest inspection, radon and lead paint inspections, as well as a UREA formaldehyde foam insulation inspection. Additionally, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts now requires all homes with septic systems or cesspools to undergo a Title 5 inspection to insure compliance with local health ordinances.A) Building inspections, though not required, are commonly used by buyers in order to get an unbiased professional review the condition of the property. Home inspections give you, the buyer, detailed information on potential problems and a means to evaluate the physical condition, structure and mechanical systems of the house.
+In some cases, the cost of the home inspection, which often costs between $200-$500, can be applied as part of your down payment, as with a HUD insured mortgage.
+Buyers should consider making a successful home inspection a contingency of their purchase and sale agreement in the event serious structural problems cause them to rethink their commitment.B) Title 5 is the common name for a Massachusetts environmental code governing septic and cesspool use. Inspections are mandatory before any home serviced by a septic system can be sold or enlarged.
+An inspection is required within 24 months prior to a sale or transfer. If weather prevents an inspection within this time period, one must occur as soon as weather permits, but not later than six months after the sale or transfer.
+In most instances, systems that fail inspection must be repaired within two years. In addition, applications to install new systems require a soil evaluation test performed by an evaluator approved by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental protection (DEP).
+The owner of the property is responsible for compliance with Title 5. The price of inspection is not regulated. On average one can expect to pay $300-$500 for a Title 5 inspection. However, the seller and the buyer may decide who will pay for the costs of the repair or upgrade, which can be negotiated as part of the sales agreement. Some mortgage lenders may require any repair or upgrade to be completed before closing or that the funds for the cost of the repair be placed in escrow before closing.
+Financial assistance is available to aid property owners faced with Title 5 upgrades and repairs. Ask your REALTOR® what assistance programs, if any, are available in your area.
+Additionally, in 1997, the Massachusetts Legislature authorized an income tax credit to ease the financial burden placed on homeowners. Eligible property owners can qualify for a tax credit of up to $6,000, or 40 percent of the cost of a septic system upgrade, whichever is less, over a five-year period. The credit applies to primary residences only.C) Radon is a naturally occurring ground gas. Short-term tests include charcoal canisters, alpha track detectors, electrician chambers, continuous monitors and charcoal liquid scintillation. In most cases, an elevated radon level can be corrected simply and economically. Buyers who are interested in conducting a radon test should read the directions carefully and make sure they are followed.D) Termites and pests also can be detected during the inspection process. This inspection can cost approximately $150, but may be well worth the money, particularly for older homes and/or if termite damage is detected at the home inspection. Termites and pests can be exterminated and prevented from returning.E) Lead Paint. If you are purchasing a home built before 1978, the seller or REALTOR® will give you a state-approved Lead Paint notification form that explains this issue in more detail. You have the right to test the property for lead paint if you want. Massachusetts law requires that all homes where children under the age of six live must be lead-safe.
+VI. Closing the Deal.
+A) closing date will be set, at which time all the parties to the transaction must have completed their requirements to consummate the sale. The bank's attorney is responsible for conducting the closing, and will calculate and compute a number of financial requirements including at least some of the following:
+1) Bank attorney's fees, check with your lender to find out what these will be 2) Recording fees for new deed and mortgage (approximately $60) 3) Appraisal fee, which is approximately $250, and which is required by Massachusetts state law 4) Credit report (approximately $50 each) 5) Private Mortgage Insurance (required for purchases with less than 20% down payment 6) Title search (often included in bank's attorney fees), and title insurance (approximately $1.50 per $1,000 of the mortgage amount) 7) Survey/plot plan (approximately $150) 8) Municipal Lien Certificate (approximately $25) 9) Real estate tax adjustments and interim interest (depending upon the number of days/months left in the year)
+Buyers are not required to hire an attorney to represent them in the closing transaction, but may choose to as a precaution against any potential problems. The bank's attorney has an obligation to ensure all legal requirements are met, but represents the bank only and not the buyer. A buyer's attorney can review all the documents to ensure your needs, as a buyer, have been fully met.
+Finally, the buyer should bring a number of items to the closing.
+The buyer must present an insurance binder at the closing, covering the property for one full year.
+The buyer should bring a certified check or bank check payable to him/herself for the closing costs and purchase price, less the amount of deposits and mortgage amount. The bank's attorney will give you an exact figure.
+The buyer also should bring a checkbook in case there are any last minute adjustments, such as for fuel.
+Duuuhhhh I tink I gets it naow. Johnny shuz be some dud B meets ups wit. Johnny should be a seperate guy.
+(Waits for replies.)
+Feb 29, 2012 -- 8:37PM, Jikko wrote:Duuuhhhh I tink I gets it naow. Johnny shuz be some dud B meets ups wit. Johnny should be a seperate guy.
+(ok. Sounds best to me. Typing chapter two now.)
+(oooooh man!!! I just thought up the best thing ever!!! I'm including Trouble With Clones in this and it's going to be a big surprise!! *looks at achievements and nods.* hehehehe. Oh Johnny is himself but who is Johnny Tag? >:) :P lol.)
+here you go!!
+B was chilling in the Cafe when a man and a guitar walked in and took a seat. Strangely enough the man even in his outfit looked familiar. B looked back to his laptop and read an article from a few weeks back.
+The article read. "Johnny Gat alive? Rumors circulate about the notorious gangsters fate. Some speculate he is undercover and no longer in the saints."
+It then showed some pictures of a man who was walking the streets of Steelport and in to a Image as Designed shop. A video was available as well. B watched it. It was a video of somebody recording Gat as he walked in. It fast forward to later but Johnny didn't come out of the store. The guitar guy did though. B smiled.
+Oh so Johnny you're undercover now are you? B thought. Well I think your biggest fan should say hello.
+B looked up as the man walked out of the cafe. B closed his laptop put it in his carrying bag and followed who he assumed was Johnny. After a few blocks Johnny turned in to an alleyway. B followed him but was surprised to see a dead end and no Johnny.
+"Huh?" B said.
+He heard a shepard click behind him and B gulped. He turned around to see the guitar man pointing a shepard at him. He had hid behind a dumpster.
+"Why the f*ck you following me kid?" He asked. He sounded just like Johnny.
+B had to be careful in what he said or end up with a bullet in his head.
+"I umm..uhh...I jus thought you looked familiar and wanted to see who you where." B said.
+The guy lowered his shepard and put it away.
+"I'm nobody kid. Now get lost before I change my mind. My trigger finger has been really itchy since the plane." He said.
+B gasped. It was Johnny.
+"Wait You're Johnny Gat! I'm your biggest fan!! OMG could you sign this for me? I.." B said before being interrupted by Johnny.
+"Sorry kid I don't do any of that sh*t anymore. Not after what the saints have become. Maybe, I'll go back if they change but for now I'm just going to be a normal person." Johnny said then paused. He was thinking.
+"You know what I have a better idea. How would you like to become a saint?" Johnny asked.
+B was ecstatic.
+"Would I ever!!" B said.
+Johnny grinned and came over and punched B in the gut making him double over. Johnny then lightly beat him up. B was on the ground and stood back up with a black eye and bruises.
+"What the hell?!" B asked dusting himself off and holding his cheek.
+Johnny laughed.
+"Canonizing. Everybody has to go through it." Johnny said.
+B had forgot about that. He had heard of this canonizing before but damn that hurt!
+"All right new blood this is what I want you to do. First off here is $300 dollars go buy some new clothes. Make sure you have some purple so people know you are a saint. After that get in to the HQ and by my inside guy. If they change from being celebrities then let me know. For now Though don't say a word about me to them. I don't want to be a part of all that bs." Johnny said.
+B nodded.
+"Good. Here's my cell number. Call me when anything important happens." Johnny said giving B his number and then he took off.
+B headed for the closest planet saints store. He bought a Hills casualwear with purple undershirt, a gold saints fleur chain, black OG pants, some broseph sneaks with purple laces, and a gold and purple family jewels ring. His brown hair was in the bad boy style and he had the executive beard as well. After 15 minutes and paying for the goods B walked out in his new style. Next he headed to the nearest gun store. He had just enough money to buy a Kobra and some ammo for it. After leaving the store B looked for the nearest car. Sure enough a bootlegger was parked nearby. B busted the driver side window out with his Kobra and unlocked the door. After getting in he opened his laptop up and remotely started the car.
+"Have to love technology." B said.
+He put his laptop away and drove off to the Saints HQ. He arrived shortly and made his way in. Everybody thought he was a saint. He got in to the elevator and went to the penthouse. He found Pierce and Oleg at a game of chess. B made his way over to the kitchen and got something to eat. The boss (The saints boss looks like and sounds like the default Caucasian character.) came in to the room and headed over to Pierce and Oleg. He stepped over the couch.
+"Pack it up we got a move." The boss said.
+"I got twenty K on this game!" Pierce told him.
+The boss kicked the table knocking the pieces over.
+"Damn!" Pierce said.
+"Now it's a draw." The boss said.
+Pierce pointed at Oleg.
+"This isn't over. sup?" Pierce asked the boss.
+"It's not safe here. You guys clear this place out I'll buy you some time." The boss said and walked off.
+Pierce and Oleg got up and started rallying the saints to leave. B made his move.
+"Yo Pierce, the boss is going to need some heavy firepower. I have a feeling those new ass holes are going to be involved soon." B told Pierce.
+"Ya I agree with ya. What'd you have in mind to fight STAG?" Pierce asked. Pierce didn't know this new saint but if he had an idea to help the boss Pierce was all over it.
+B smiled.
+"I know where we could get some hardware for bombing runs in case those futuristic ass holes show up." B said.
+Pierce smiled.
+"Hell ya lets go!" Pierce said waving off Oleg to do whatever was needed.
+Pierce had all the saints load up in trucks. Oleg called the boss.
+"Pierce is loading up the trucks. I will create a distraction at the park." Oleg said.
+Oleg headed off with a few saints to the park while B and Pierce with others packed up. Pierce got a call. B overheard it.
+"Pierce hows the pack up going?" The boss asked.
+"Slow we got a lot of sh*t." Pierce said.
+"Just take what we need." The boss said.
+Pierce became a little agitated.
+"Watcha think I'm doing?!" Pierce said as he started to pack his chess board and pieces.
+"Pierce.. leave the chess board." The boss said.
+"Man that's cold!" Pierce said and hung up. He still packed his chess board.
+B chuckled.
+"You sure you want to do that after he said no?" B asked.
+Pierce shook his head.
+"Hell ya chess is my game!" Pierce said.
+B noticed the bottom of the box was about to break and held back a laugh. Pierce picked it up off the table and after a few steps the bottom broke and the glass chess board and pieces fell to the floor shattering. Pierce's mouth was wide open.
+"Maaaaan that is some bulllll sh*t!" Pierce said.
+B laughed and so did a few other saints.
+"Karma Pierce." B said patting his shoulder.
+"I don't even know you and you're already as bad as the boss." Pierce said.
+B chuckled as they headed downstairs to the cars. They got in to the cars and took off from the HQ. B was driving one of them. Pierce got another call.
+"Pierce get things moving I have their attention." The boss said.
+"We're rolling out in the convoy now. I'll let you know how the streets are lookin." Pierce said as they drove. After a while they came up to a STAG roadblock. Pierce called the boss.
+"Looks like STAG left a road block ahead of us. Without help we ain't getting by." Pierce told him.
+After waiting out of range a VTOL flew by and started destroying the STAG roadblock. After a bit it was gone.
+"All right we're good to go now." Pierce said over his phone.
+B and the other Saints started driving again. After a while and hearing distant explosions around the city Pierce got another call.
+"Pierce tell me you're close." The boss said.
+"We're trying to keep a low profile here. We can't go speeding through the streets." Pierce said.
+"Well they've got a AWACKS plane flying with a lot of escorts." The boss said.
+"You're serious?!" Pierce said.
+"Look just get there. I'll think of something." The boss said.
+Pierce hung up.
+"Man he's a crazy mofo." Pierce said.
+B laughed.
+"Oh ya I heard the story of the saints grand appearance in Steelport. Sucks about Johnny though." B said.
+Pierce was quiet for a bit then talked.
+"Ya, but we all knew the risks in joining a gang. Just have to keep moving on you know?" Pierce said.
+B agreed but deep down he knew Johnny was in the city undercover waiting for the right time the Saints stepped down from being media whores.
+Another smaller roadblock blocked the convoy and they started firing on the saints. B kept driving while firing his Kobra out the window. The other saints did the same thing. They passed the convoy with relative ease. Pierce called the boss.
+"Almost got stopped by STAG. Hit them harder boss!" Pierce said and hung up.
+B kept driving to the new location. After a bit they arrived. Everybody hopped out and looked up to see a jumbo STAG plane falling down. Pierce called the boss.
+"The moves all done. No worries on our end." Pierce said.
+"Aww and I was just starting to have fun." The boss said and hung up.
+Everybody moved in to the HQ building and waited for the boss to return. After a bit he came back in the VTOL and landed. He got out and headed to the penthouse.
+"Sup everybody. Tell you what we keep getting hardware like this nobody will f*ck with us." The boss said.
+Everybody chuckled. Boss noticed B.
+"A new saint? I thought we recreated enough already. Oh well the more we have on our side the less on the Syndicates. So what's your name kid?" The boss asked extending his hand out for a handshake. B took it.
+"Brandon sir. People just call me B though." B said.
+"Well B welcome to the saints." The boss said and noticed his laptop.
+"Are you a computer person as well?" The boss asked.
+"Yes sir, I'm really good at them to." B said.
+Boss chuckled.
+"We have a computer genius with us as well. I bet you two will get along just fine." The boss said pointing over to Kinzie.
+B went white in the face. Kinzie looked right at B the same way. The boss picked up on that.
+"What's wrong with you two?" The boss asked.
+Kinzie got up and came over. She looked B up and down then slapped him.
+"Ow." B said.
+B was holding his cheek. Kinzie then gave him a hug.
+"Why didn't you call me?!" Kinzie asked and backed away.
+B scratched the back of his head.
+"Sorry, I was busy and kind of forgot." B said.
+The boss was puzzled.
+"What hte f*ck is going on here?" The boss asked.
+Kinzie looked at him.
+"Oh B and I go way back. We're best friends. We used to have little competitions in video games and hacking." Kinzie said.
+"You left out the part where I beat you all the time." B said.
+Kinzie hmphed.
+"And you left out the part where you and Matt are friends." Kinzie said.
+OH sh*t. B thought and looked at the boss. The boss didn't really care.
+"Already dealt with him so, nothing to worry about." The boss said.
+B let a sigh of relief out.
+"Ya Matt was her rival I helped her get in to his system for the avatar and a few other times as well to help you out." B said.
+The boss patted B's shoulder.
+"Good job. I would probably be dead if you didn't. Well I'm tired after today. I'm sure STAG has more in store for us after all this sh*t." The boss said and headed for his room.
+Kinzie walked off as well as everybody else. B decided to crash on the sofa. Before he did though he texted Johnny what had happened.
+"STAG huh? Sound like a bunch of p*ssy's to me. Back in my day getting stabbed or taking a shotgun to the knee made you tough. f*cking world has gone soft." Johnny text back.
+Johnny was a bad ass end to end no ifs, ands, or buts about it. B thought.
+B put his phone away and layed down on the couch. As he drifted in to sleep faint memory's of his childhood started to pop up. It was going to be another nightmare night but alas a new dream. He saw himself in the saints and nothing was bothering him.
+Good. B thought before slipping in to sleep.
+End chapter 2
+Well I think this will be a good start to this story :) Don't you love how I put myself in lol. Oh and the chess board and pieces part made me go lulz. I accidentally woke up my mom who sleeps in the living room because my dad snores lol because I was laughing so loud. She read it and laughed as well. :)
+Tight, I lke it alot its pretty cool. Maybe Johnny should hold off some reinforcements on the mission where you go and burn down the banners. Or he's fighting a clone and it turns into zombie gat.
+Mar 1, 2012 -- 6:09PM, Jikko wrote:Tight, I lke it alot its pretty cool. Maybe Johnny should hold off some reinforcements on the mission where you go and burn down the banners. Or he's fighting a clone and it turns into zombie gat.
+(This is going to go through Saints Row 3 story. I might add a few things like that while B is helping the saints out.)
+Cant wait for more chapters dude i like how this is going
+Sorry for the wait guys and gals! Again I've been so busy and all that crap that happened before. Also Destroyer has gone dark on emails....but I'm a little suspicious about some things right now that I won't mention. Let's just say people around here for sure have been planning things.
+*Shifty eyes*
+B woke up on the couch in the morning right when the sun was coming up over Steelport. He checked his phone. No new messages.
+"Well Johnny is probably trying to keep a super low profile for now." B thought.
+B was the only one up in the room. Most of the lesser saints where spread around the room either wasted or asleep. B got up and went over to the kitchen to get some cereal. He found his favorite cereal which was Saint Charms and poured ihmself a bowl. He went over to the refrigerator and opened it to get the milk. Without looking he opened the door a little hard and heard somebody say, "Hey look out next time."
+B looked up to see Shaundi who had somewhat of a angry look on her face.
+"Sorry about that. The door was stuck." B said reaching for the milk and taking it out.
+He begin to pour it in to the bowl.
+"It's ok, I really need to get the boss to fix this thing." Shaundi said pulling out a pre-made sandwich and a can of saints flow.
+B seemed disgusted.
+"That sh*t tastes like ass." B said finishing pouring the milk and putting it up.
+Shaundi chuckled.
+"Ya it does but I'm lactose intolerant so I'm stuck with it." Shaundi said making her way over to the couch and sitting down.
+"Didn't know that." B said. Shaundi didn't hear him.
+B took out the best looking spoon he could find. Most of them where dirty but he found one that was clean. B sat down on a bar stool and ate his cereal. About 20 minutes later when he was done the boss came in with Viola.
+"Yo B come out with me and Vi. Pierce wants to show us something at the comic book store." The boss said.
+"All right." B said putting his empty bowl and spoon in the sink.
+He followed the boss and Vi to the elevator. The boss hit the basement button.
+"So, B tell me about yourself." The boss asked.
+B didn't like talking about himself to much.
+"Well I come from a lower middle class family and am really good with computers. Besides that my dad kicked me out when I was 18 and I've been mostly floating around since." B said. (This didn't happen btw. Still in my parents house lol.)
+The boss nodded.
+"Ya same thing happened with me. My pops kicked me out at 18 as well. I joined the marines though. Came home to Stilwater two years later and the whole gang thing started that day." The boss said.
+B hmphed. He never figured the Saints boss to be a military man. Then again he was a crazy son of a b*tch so a former marine would definitely fit the bill. The elevator stopped at the basement and the three made their way to one of the many 4 door cars. The boss drove while B sat in the back. Vi sat in the passenger seat. They started to head for the comic book store.
+"So, boss what do you think Pierce wants us to see?" Vi asked.
+The boss shook his head.
+"I don't know what but if it helps us to get at STAG and the Syndicate I'm down for it." The boss said.
+They arrived at the comic book store. The three got out and headed in. B noticed one of his old friends Jimmy Torbitson and headed over. Jimmy was looking at a Gangsta's In Space magazine when B put his hand on Jim's shoulders. Jim about jumped out of his skin.
+"Relax Jim it's just me." B said.
+Jim relaxed.
+"Oh God you scared the crap out of me." Jim said.
+"I do that sometimes. Say is that Johnny's comic? I didn't know he had one." B said.
+Jim nodded.
+"Yes, I'm the saints biggest fan!" Jim said.
+B got an idea.
+"Hey I don't know if you realize by my new attire but I'm in the saints and with the boss right now. You could get this signed." B said.
+Jim about died of happiness.
+"Oh my gosh really?! They're in the store right now?!" Jim asked.
+B chuckled and pointed to them.
+"Yep." B said.
+Jim headed over.
+"Um, umm, umm, excuse me. Could you sign this?" Jim asked the boss and handed over the comic.
+The boss looked perplexed.
+"The f*ck is this?!" The boss asked in surprise.
+"Dude that's Johnny's comic. He sold his likeness to Ultor. They're making a movie out of this sh*t." Pierce said.
+The boss signed the comic.
+"Remind me to call Legal Lee about this." The boss said handing the comic back to Jim.
+"Thank you." Jim said and ran off screaming yes back to B.
+B stopped him from running in to a display case.
+"Wow man slow down." B told him.
+Jim recomposed himself.
+"Thanks Brandon." Jim said shaking his hand.
+"Any time if you need anything let me know." B said returning the hand shake.
+B walked back over to the Saints.
+"That's why I need you and the new girl." B heard from Pierce as he came back.
+Viola put her hands on her hips.
+"My name is Viola." Viola said annoyed.
+Pierce got a smile on his face and lifted up the Nyte Blayde comic.
+"Your name is the Bloody Canoness." Pierce said.
+Viola took the comic and looked at it.
+"You can't be serious?!" Viola said.
+The boss looked over at the comic and nodded.
+"Works for me." The boss said.
+B chuckled and Viola heard and gave him an are you serious look. (Think the Fry meme.) B stopped chuckling. The boss came over and talked to B.
+"Yo think you could get these costumes for us?" The boss asked.
+"Ya sure thing. I'll be back in a few." B said and left the comic store.
+He could hear Viola and Pierce arguing about their plan. B just laughed. B headed for let's pretend. After about 10 minutes he made it their. He found Kinzie in hte store about to leave and started talking to her.
+"Hey Kinzie what's up?" B asked.
+Kinzie seemed a little embarassed to be caught in the store.
+"Oh nothing just getting some things." Kinzie said hiding the white bag the best she could. B saw Dominatrix gear. He had heard of her "special time" before. B smirked.
+"Well I hope Mr. teacup has some fun." B said joking.
+Kinzie dropped her mouth in shock then replied.
+"Oh whatever. There is no Mr. Teacup. Machines are better anyways." Kinzie said sticking her tongue at B.
+Kinzie just shook her head and left. B called out to her.
+"That's at least the 20th time I've beat you!" B yelled out.
+Kinzie flipped him off without looking. B chuckled and went in to the store.
+"May I help you sir?" The clerk asked.
+"Yes, I need two costumes. The Cardinal and Bloody Canoness." B said.
+The clerk nodded and headed to the back. B waited for her to return. After a bit she returned with both costumes wrapped up.
+"That will be $250." The clerk said.
+B grunted. He didn't have that kind of money and he forgot to ask the boss for some. A man walked up and handed over his credit card.
+"I'll pay for it." He said.
+B noticed it was the guitar man so it was Johnny in disguise again. B chuckled.
+"What's up?" B asked.
+Johnny looked at him.
+"Do I know you? I'm just doing this to be nice." Johnny said.
+B nodded. He understood. Johnny was staying undercover and in character. The clerk swiped the card and gave it back to Johnny. She then handed the costumes to B.
+"Here you go. Have a nice day sir!" She said as B and Johnny left.
+Johnny stopped by.
+"Yo, what's going on?" Johnny asked.
+B turned around.
+"I don't know but the boss and Viola need these costumes." B said raising them to Johnny.
+Johnny noticed the color schemes and laughed.
+"Ah I see they are getting back at Josh for the bank job. Well I have to go. If anything ever pops up give me a call and I'll f*ck sh*t up." Johnny said and left.
+B hopped in the car and drove back to the comic store. When he arrived he gave the costumes to the boss and Viola.
+"Here you go boss." B said.
+The boss thanked B and headed inside the comic store to the bathroom. He came back out moments later in the costume. Viola did the same afterwards and came out in her costume. B whistled.
+"Damn Vi maybe, you should dress like that more often." B said.
+Viola hmphed in disagreement.
+"Watch what you say B. I may not look like it but I can be a serious b*tch." Viola told him.
+The boss laughed.
+"Come on Vi lets go get Shaundi's boyfriend. B you can go back to HQ. Thanks again." The boss said heading over to his car.
+B headed to his own car and he heard Vi say something about feeling ridiculous. B chuckled and got in his car and headed back to HQ.
+After waiting at the HQ for about an hour the boss with Viola and a knocked out Josh arrived. The boss put him on the couch and headed out after he changed his clothes. B looked at Josh.
+"That's Nyte Blayde?" B said disappointed.
+Viola laughed.
+"Yep that's him all right." Viola said.
+Shaundi came in to the room and about had a heart attack seeing Josh. Josh woke up and the first person he saw was Shaundi.
+"Shaundi will you marry me?" Josh flat out asked.
+Shaundi became angry.
+"Oh no! Hell no! He is not staying with us!!" Shaundi said in anger.
+Shaundi came over sat down and pointed a Shepard at Josh.
+"Don't you f*cking move. I don't know what the boss is planning but I'm going to love when he is done with you because then I get to mess you up." Shaundi told him.
+Josh chuckled.
+"I will go through anything for you my love." Josh said.
+B knew this was going to really piss Shaundi off.
+"Again Shaundi will you marry me?" Josh asked.
+Shaundi sighed in anger and threw her phone at Pierce.
+"If the boss calls you answer it. I'll be busy telling this prick no." Shaundi said.
+"Ok." Pierce said.
+B definitely knew this was going to get interesting.... My return to the forums (Not me who made this. Guy just has same first name.)
+What to expect from me in the next chapters of Quartet. Just let these song give you a few hints.... and... and... and...
+and finally... (you can guess who this is. I mean he's been planning this sh*t since the beginning.) not in any particular order. The names don't mean anything either. Just listen to the music to get an idea of that part. Music may or may not be used. >:)
+All I will say is things will escalate from just a gang verse gang war on a global scale. cough cough
+One more
+Douglas A. Pessefall
+Shareholder
+Milwaukee
+o: 414.298.8311 f: 414.298.8097
+dpessefall@reinhartlaw.com
+Douglas A. Pessefall is a shareholder in Reinhart’s Tax, Litigation, and Corporate Law practices. Doug represents and advises taxpayers in connection with state and local tax (SALT) planning; state, local and federal tax controversy; tax exempt organizations; and general business matters. He provides legal representation to clients on the nature or extent of their tax reporting obligations, tax compliance or tax liabilities arising from exemptions, audits, assessments, voluntary disclosures or claims for refund, which include sales and use tax, property tax, ad valorem tax, gross receipts tax, franchise tax and income tax.
+Prior to establishing a successful law practice, Doug led community and economic development, public relations and tax recovery initiatives for local governments and worked as an executive director for two nonprofit business improvement districts. He also worked with the Internal Revenue Service Office of Chief Counsel for the Tax Exempt/Government Entities Division in Chicago.
+Doug’s collective professional and legal experiences prove to be invaluable to his clients as he brings an in-depth and unique understanding of issues facing them from both sides the table. Doug’s ability to view matters from multiple angles enables him to effectively represent individuals, businesses and nonprofit organizations before state, local and federal tax authorities.
+Clients appreciate Doug’s ability to draw on his vast knowledge and experience base to provide creative, cost-effective and practical solutions for a wide array of complex legal issues. In addition to his legal practice, Doug is a frequent speaker and publisher on tax matters.
+Education
+J.D., cum laude, The John Marshall Law School (Chicago)
+B.A., University of Dayton
+Bar Admissions
+Wisconsin
+Court Admissions
+U.S. Tax Court
+U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Wisconsin
+- Represented property owners in successful challenges to property tax assessments, achieving significant annual tax savings, including a $2.3 million reduction in the assessment of a medical office building based on functional obsolescence, a $4.7 million reduction in the assessment of a multi-family residential rental property when the municipality failed to recognized the purchase price accepted by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court as indicative of fair market value, and a $1.8 million reduction in the assessment of manufacturing property based on functional and economic obsolescence
+- Represented clients in connection with sales and use tax planning, audits and appeals, including creation of wholly-owned or affiliated transportation subsidiaries to allow tax free purchase of motor vehicles used by contract or common carriers; supply companies to allow tax free purchases by real property construction contractors on behalf of exempt organizations; and/or aircraft companies to allow tax free purchases of corporate aircraft for lease to reduce potential business liabilities associated with operation of aircraft and to defer the payment of sales tax
+- Represented clients in connection with compliance and/or reporting of previously undisclosed foreign bank and financial accounts, including participation in and opting out of the Internal Revenue Service’s Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Initiative, and Streamline Domestic Offshore Procedure
+- Represented international air carrier in connection with ad valorem tax audit defense and counterclaim for hub facility exemption
+- Represented Wisconsin-based insurance companies in connection with refund claim litigation involving the calculation of license fees based on gross premiums received
+- Represented Wisconsin trade association in successful effort to obtain an informal prior letter ruling that reversed an administrative decision relating to a multimillion dollar annual sales and use tax issue
+- Represented clients in connection with the preparation and litigation of property tax exemption requests, including property owned and used by colleges and universities in excess of the 80-acre limitation, cemeteries, religious organizations for student housing and hospital for an outpatient medical center
+- Represented numerous partnerships, corporations and individuals in connection with federal and state tax audits, criminal tax investigations, summons enforcement, administrative appeals, audit reconsideration, refund claims and tax litigation before the U.S. Tax Court, U.S. District Court, Wisconsin Tax Appeals Commission and Wisconsin Supreme Court, including issues relating to passive activities, reasonableness of compensation, unreported income and business deductions
+- Represented hundreds of tax exempt and nonprofit organizations in connection with formation, tax compliance and audits, and management and governance issues, including charitable and religious organizations, private foundations, health care and social service organizations, trade associations, social clubs, sports and amateur athletic organizations, arts and cultural organizations, charter schools, community and economic development corporations, affordable housing corporations, governments and other tax exempt organizations
+Honors
+- Named to The Best Lawyers in America® in Litigation & Controversy-Tax and Tax Law (2013-2015)
+- Named a “Leading Lawyer” by M, Milwaukee’s Lifestyle Magazine (2012-2015)
+- Named a “Rising Star” by Wisconsin Super Lawyers (2012)
+Affiliations
+- State Bar of Wisconsin, Taxation Section Board of Directors, Immediate Past Chairperson
+- Wisconsin Nonprofits Association
+- Milwaukee Bar Association, former Chair Taxation Section
+- Milwaukee Tax Club
+- Wisconsin State and Local Tax Club
+- Institute for Professionals in Taxation
+- Wisconsin Institute of Certified Public Accountants
+- American Bar Association
+- Co-author, Wisconsin Corporate Income Tax Portfolio, published by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (BNA)
+- Foreign Bank Accounts and Assets Add to Tax Controversy, IBMadison.com, March 27, 2012 (Author)
+- Policymaking: Nuances of Lobbying, Educating, Advocating – What You Can and Can’t Do From Where You Sit, 9th Annual Wisconsin Comprehensive Cancer Control Summit, March 29, 2012 (Presenter)
+- Foreign Bank Accounts and Assets Add to Tax Controversy, BizTimes Milwaukee, March 19, 2012 (Author)
+- Technology transfers involving non-profit organizations: Special tax considerations, Wisconsin Technology News, March 15, 2010 (Author)
+- UPMIFA Expands, Journal of State Taxation (CCH), September-October 2009 (Author)
+- Illinois to Allow the Organization of Low-Profit Limited Liability Companies, Business Law News (State Bar of Wisconsin), September 2009
+- States Seek to Measure Charity, Health Care Compliance Letter (CCH), March 10, 2009 (Author)
+- State of the States: States Seek to Measure Charity (Part II), Tax-Exempt Advisor (CCH), January 2009 (Author)
+- State of the States: States Seek to Measure Charity (Part I), Tax-Exempt Advisor (CCH), December 2008 (Author)
+- States Place Different Premium on Premiums, Journal of State Taxation (CCH), November-December 2008 (Author)
+- States Seek to Measure Charity, Journal of State Taxation (CCH), July-August 2008 (Author)
+- Top 10 State and Local Tax Issues, Reinhart CLE Seminar, November 15, 2016 (Presenter)
+- Recent Developments in Wisconsin State and Local Tax, Schenck S.C., Webinar, November 8, 2016 (Presenter)
+- Recent Developments for Nonprofit Organizations, Wisconsin Institute of Certified Public Accountants Annual Tax Conference, Milwaukee, November 4, 2016 (Presenter)
+- Clarifying Nexus Confusion and Reviewing Recent Developments, Sales and Use Tax in Wisconsin, National Business Institute, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 18, 2015 (Presenter); Middleton, Wisconsin, November 17, 2015 (Presenter)
+- Emerging Tax and Governance Issues for Nonprofit Organizations, Wisconsin Institute of Certified Public Accountants, Waukesha, Wisconsin, November 18, 2015 (Presenter); Eau Claire, Wisconsin, September 16, 2015 (Presenter); Appleton, Wisconsin, September 11, 2015 (Presenter)
+- Unrelated Business Taxable Income and Advising on Operational Issues, Tax Exempt Organizations from Start to Finish, National Business Institute, Pewaukee, Wisconsin, August 11, 2015 (Presenter)
+- Emerging Tax and Governance Issues for Nonprofit Organizations, State Bar of Wisconsin Annual Conference, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, June 25, 2015 (Presenter)
+- State and Local Tax Updates, Wisconsin State and Local Tax Club, Milwaukee, March 18, 2015 (Presenter)
+- State and Local Tax Updates, Milwaukee Tax Club, Milwaukee, February 9, 2015 (Presenter)
+- Wisconsin Tax Update, Wisconsin Institute of Certified Public Accountants Annual Conference, Milwaukee, November 7, 2014 (Presenter)
+- Wisconsin State and Local Tax Issues that Arise in Deals, Professional Institute of Tax Study, Inc., Milwaukee, October 8, 2014 (Presenter)
+- Reporting Offshore Accounts, 64th Annual Tax School, Taxation Section of the State Bar of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, December 6, 2013 (Presenter)
+- Sales and Use Tax in Wisconsin, National Business Institute, Madison, Milwaukee and Green Bay, October 2013 (Presenter)
+- Nonprofit Governance Issues, Wisconsin Institute of Certified Public Accountants, Madison, October 18, 2013 (Presenter)
+- Tax Exempt Organizations from Start to Finish, National Business Institute, Pewaukee, August 15, 2013 (Presenter)
+- Top 10 State and Federal Tax Issues for Nonprofit Organizations, Wisconsin Institute of Certified Public Accountants, Appleton, May 17, 2013 (Presenter)
+- Top 10 State and Federal Tax Issues for Nonprofit Organizations, Wisconsin Institute of Certified Public Accountants, Madison, November 9, 2012 (Presenter)
+- Policymaking: Nuances of Lobbying, Educating, Advocating – What You Can and Can’t Do From Where You Sit, 9th Annual Wisconsin Comprehensive Cancer Control Summit, March 29, 2012 (Presenter)
+- State and Local Tax Traps, Wisconsin Institute of Certified Public Accountants, March 16, 2012 (Presenter)
+- IRS Attacks on Taxpayers with Offshore Accounts: The Saga Continues, State Bar of Wisconsin PINNACLE Seminar, March 8, 2012 (Presenter)
+- Property Tax Valuation & Exemption: Opportunities and Obligations for 2012 and Future Years, Wisconsin State and Local Tax Club, January 2012 (Presenter)
+- Nonprofit Property Tax Exemption and PILOTs Panel, Wisconsin Nonprofits Association Annual Summit, September 14, 2011 (Presenter)
+- From the State Rotunda to the U.S. Capitol: The Top 10 Tax Issues for 2011 and Beyond, Kiwanis Club of Milwaukee, March 9, 2011
+- Advocacy Nuts & Bolts, Wisconsin Nonprofits Association Annual Summit, May 18, 2010 (Presenter)
+- Illinois to Allow the Organization of Low-Profit Limited Liability Companies, Business Law News (State Bar of Wisconsin), September 2009
+- Wisconsin Tax Updates, Institute for Professionals in Taxation-Milwaukee, June 4, 2009 (Presenter)
+- State Bar of Wisconsin 59th Annual Tax School, Madison, WI, December 2008 (Program Chair)
+- Wisconsin State Tax Update 2008, Professional Education Systems Institute, LLC, September 2008 (Presenter)
+- Wisconsin Property Tax Update, State and Local Tax Club, Inc., Milwaukee, January 2008 (Presenter)
+- What’s It Worth? Practical Perspectives on Charitable Giving, Planned Giving Council of Eastern Wisconsin, Milwaukee, September 2007 (Presenter)
+- Practical Perspectives on Private Foundations, Planned Giving Council of Eastern Wisconsin, Milwaukee, March 2006 (Presenter)
+Download the video: free-quick-640x360_512kbps.mp4.
+Download or watch in HD:
+free-quick-1600x900_2mbps.mp4
+One of the common questions I get after talking about image backups is “Great – how do I make one?”
+There are many ways and tools with which to make image backups. Detailed instructions will vary, of course, depending on exactly which tool you want to use.
+In the brief video linked above, I’m going to show you the steps to create an image backup using Macrium Reflect’s free edition (there’s a link to the transcript of the video at the end of this post). This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive how-to, but rather a very quick demonstration of just how easy it can be to create an image backup. As brief and simple as it is, it’s possible that this may be all you need to create your own backup image.
+Become a Patron of Ask Leo! and go ad-free!
+Macrium Reflect Free
+You can get Macrium Reflect Free from their website, here. Be sure to get the free version, and not the trial version of their paid product. The free version is all we need for this.
+Download and install it as you would any other application downloaded from the internet. Naturally, that means always choosing the non-default or “custom” install, if there is such an option, and paying careful attention to the options presented. Macrium has no history of including foistware, but it’s a habit you should always use when installing downloaded software.
+Once installed, run Macrium Reflect. It will present you with the user access control dialogue, since it needs administrative level access.
+It may ask if you want to create a rescue disk.
+We do not need to create a rescue disk at this time. That is something you would use if you needed to restore the image at some later time, and you can make the rescue disk when and if you ever need it.
+Backing up the system
+Macrium then presents a display of all of the hard disks found on your system. On my example machine, I have two internal disks and one external (our backup drive).
+Click on Create an image of the partitions required to backup and restore Windows. That automatically selects the disk we boot from as well as the C: drive on that disk.1
+This will back up the system drive.
+The destination is going to be our external drive, which, in the example above, is attached as z:. (It may be a different drive letter for you.)
+We’ll use the image ID as the filename. If you prefer, you can specify a more descriptive name to help you remember what it is.
+Click Finish.
+Thats it! The backup proceeds.
+After starting Reflect, it took only four clicks of the mouse to make it happen.
+The backup process
+How long the backup takes depends on many factors, including but not limited to:
+- The amount of data on your hard disk to be backed up.
+- The speed of your internal hard disk.
+- The speed of your external hard disk.
+- The speed of the connection used for your external hard disk (USB2, USB3, your LAN, or something else).
+- The impact of other software running on your machine at the same time as the backup.
+- …and probably more.
+It could be minutes; it could be hours.
+The result of a backup
+If we look at the results of the example backup using Windows Explorer, we see a backup image file on my external backup drive.
+Macrium Reflect creates “.mrimg” files that contain whatever it is you’re backing up, be it one drive or many, one partition or many. Should you need to restore, that’s the file you need.
+But what about restore?
+I want to be very clear here: having the backup in the first place is much more important than knowing how to restore. Once you have the backup, you have options, including learning to restore the entire image, picking out individual files to restore, or finding a knowledgeable friend or technician to do it all for you.
+As long as you have a backup image, you have options. Without it, you don’t.
+Nonetheless, “How do I restore?” is the question that people always ask every time I talk about creating a backup.
+Performing a full restore is beyond the scope of this article, but I will show you one handy trick: double-click on the mrimg file.
+Reflect will run, if it’s not running already, and will bring up a dialog box to ask you to specify a drive letter.
+Check the box in front of the partition listed – the C: partition, for example – and Reflect will propose a default drive letter to assign. You may change that to another letter if you like – I selected drive “O:”. Click OK..
+You now have a backup
+The bottom line is, we’ve created an image and we can see what that image contains. Save that for a rainy day, just in case something ever goes wrong.
+Learn more
+As I mentioned, this article is simply a brief overview of exactly how simple creating a backup image can be. In many cases, this is all you ever need.
+There are also several articles covering Macrium Reflect – both the current version as well as previous ones – here on askleo.com. I’ve linked to several in the Read More section below.
+If you want to learn more about backing up with Macrium Reflect, including how to schedule your backups to happen automatically, how to manage disk space, and the complete answer to that oh-so-common question “How do I restore?”, I do have a book on the topic that goes into all that and more: Saved! Backing Up with Macrium Reflect. It’s available as a downloadable PDF bundle with an accompanying video course, and as a standalone book in PDF form, as well as on Kindle and paperback from Amazon.
+You can check it out and buy your copy here.:52 — 6.4MB)
+Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
+53 comments on “How to Create a Backup Image Using Macrium Reflect Free”
+when I open the email I get the following message: “Your browser does not support the video tag”. If I click on either free-quick download, I get your voice and only the wallpaper on your PC.
+What can I do?
+Thanks in advance,
+Brian
+Right click on the download and save it to your computer somewhere. Then open it using a media player like Windows Media Player, VLC or others.
+Thanks much, Leo, I should have realized this. I now have the Macrium Reflect premium edition as well as both books on Macrium Reflect and your book on Backing up withEaseUsToDo. Have you any plans of doing a brief free video such as this one on Macrium?
+Regards,
+Brian
+Leo has done a brief video series on how to back up and restore using the EaseUS Todo Free backup. You can sign up here to view them:
+I don’t understand … this is the free one on Macrium?
+Sorry Leo, my bad! I was trying to say “Have you any plans on doing a brief free video on EaseUs ToDo” such as this one you did on Macrium? I can’t seem to find the one Mark is referring to. Is it just me again?
+Brian
+Leo, my bad again. Please ignore my last comment. I had lost the video you have made on EaseUs ToDo but have now found it. My apologies to Mark as well.
+Brian
+I have used MacRef v5+ multiple times with great success on my XP machines after heeding the advice of Gizmo Richards’ “Never Reinstall Windows Again” articles. In each of these instances, the Linux recovery CD was used to retrieve the MacRef image; I was never able to get the WinPE recovery disk to even boot. So you can imagine my dismay when MacRef v6 came out featuring only WinPE recovery. My strategy going forward is to stick with MacRef v5/Linux and forget about v6.
+P.S. With the exception of Bart’s rendition of WinPE, none of the other WinPE-based software such as Avast’s anti-virus boot CD have worked, either.
+I have an external disk that actually came from an old computer. It has 74gb free space. I tried Macrium Reflect to backup just the main partition of my laptop. It says that is 96gb. Seems there was the option of shrinking the backup to a smaller size, so I selected 70gb….let it run for over an hour, then it said. Failed, not enough space, or similar. Is there any way to make this work or do I throw away that external disk and purchase a huge one?
+The estimated compression is often inaccurate. As for the recommended size of a backup drive, Leo generally recommends a minimum of 3 times the used space on your system drive. Considering the price of drives, a 1TB or greater (more is always better) drive is not a bad idea to allow for keeping a few generations of backups.
+I wouldn’t throw away that external disk, it might be useful, but it does sound like a larger disk is called for.
+I am unable to image my hard drive. I’ve tried the fixes I’ve been able to find, any suggestions would be appreciated.
+Macrium Reflect image error message Backup aborted! – Unable to read from disk – Error Code 1117 – The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.
+Motherboard: Acer Aspire 5742Z (CPU)
+Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
+CPU: Intel Pentium P6200 @ 2.13GHz Motherboard Acer Aspire 5742Z (CPU) 48 °C
+RAM: 4.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 532MHz (7-7-7-20)
+Storage: 232GB Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250G (SSD) 29 °C
+One flaw with Macrium Reflect, and I believe some other backup programs, is that if there is a bad sector on the OS drive, the backup stops and gives you an error without telling you what to do. I had that same problem. In my case, I found that I hadn’t backed up for about 20 days. I ran chkdsk /r on my OS drive and it fixed the bad sector and that solved the problem. Since I use the paid version of Reflect, I have it send me a message on the success or failure of the backup. If you are using the free version, you should regularly check to see if the backups are being created.
+I had the same problem with Macrium Free 6. After several failed attempts I ran Chkdsk. It required me to reboot the computer to run. A lot of files were found to be corrupt and were fixed. After that Macrium ran smoothly.
+As an aside, the only instructions I had were those you provided for the paid version of Macrium. However, the free version is simple enough that it was easy to make the adjustments between the two. Thanks for the expert guidance you give us.
+That typically means that there is indeed a hard disk error of some sort. This is Macrium’s weak spot. I recommend running CHKDSK /R to scan the hard disk surface and potentially repair any errors that it finds. If it does repair errors then attempt the backup again.
+Is there a reason that the free Macrium Reflect version won’t let me do an image backup of my laptop to my external hard drive without wiping out what’s already saved on the external hard drive? I have a prior image saved there from last month and want it archived just in case the current attempt at making the image fails…Macrium Reflect won’t let me save it though.
+If it wipes out the previous image backup. it’s usually because the new image backup is being saved with the same name as the previous one. Changing the name of the older backup or saving the newer backup with a different name should solve that problem.
+There is no reason that it should wipe out what’s already there. As long as you saved to a different name it should simply save an additional image file to that external hard disk.
+Hi,
+What should be the size of the external hard disk. how to connect that with the computer to take the back up? Is that , the external hard disk could be connected like pen drive? or is that to be connected with the MOBO? Please.
+Leo has suggested to back the hdd . Could the rescue disk be done on the same hard drive ?
+Would not pen drive support the back up with rescue disk? These are natural questions before i attempt to take back up.
+One more question? Would the rescue disk ask for device drivers as in window install?
+Can one copy the device drivers for the system from user computer? Please
+Leo generally recommends a minimum of 3 times the used space on your system drive. Considering the price of drives, a 1TB or greater (more is always better) drive is not a bad idea to allow for more data and keeping a few generations of backups.
+The backup should be done to an external HDD which works essentially the same as a pen drive. Plug it in, and your computer assigns a drive letter, and you’re ready to back up.
+The rescue disk should be either a CD or a bootable USB pen drive.
+I typically recommend a hard disk that is at least three times the size of the amount of data you are backing up. An external USB drive is also what I typically recommend. No, the rescue should not be to the same hard drive. A rescue disk or rescue media is intended to be a separate CD or flash drive from which you can boot. In some cases a rescue disk might require additional drivers, this is why I so strongly recommend testing the rescue disk before you need it.
+Leo, I believe you missed one thing I find very important. If I just missed it, my apology. In the area of backup, you I didn’t see clicking the Advanced Options, clicking on Auto Verify, and putting a check mark in the box on the right side. This verifies that the backup went good and you can rely on the backup being good when you need it. What other option might be of benefit on these Advanced Options?
+Also, after the backup destination screen is a screen with backup options you don’t cover and explain for the people that may not understand what these options do. There could be benefits for some in understanding these options on this screen as well.
+There could indeed be benefits, but I could only cover so much in one video. I wrote a book on Macrium Reflect that covers more. (But even then the only advanced options I ever care about are increased encryption, and verify. And I don’t even use verify myself … my experience has been quite reliable without it.)
+Hi, Leo thanks for your comments.
+The rescue disk needs drivers part of your answer. What should be the size of rescue disk. is 4 gb pen drive is enough? cd or dvd. These are necessary points i feel one should know before attempting.
+Would the rescue disk wizard alert missing of drivers if any?
+Do you mean a kind of bootable usb drive. What drivers that a pen drive need. Would it not support, if it is used for install.
+I know that trials and errors improve. But , if suppose, the storage could not used , then there is problem of using the back up.
+These days a 640MB CD is still sufficient, so I would expect any flash drive larger than that would also be fine. Lack of drivers will vary from machine to machine, as will the symptoms of not having the right one. MOST machines don’t need additional drivers. Trial and error is, unfortunately, probably your best bet.
+Hi,
+Another pre requisite is the support of pen drive support in bios. If the pc’s bios would not support pen drive recognition, then there is a problem in retrieving the data. particularly in older intel pendium iv computers.
+secondly, Would the rescue disk, boot and retrieve the data from a pen drive, which supposedly has the image backup, to a hdd which has the data but not in boot -able stage. Will it auto format the hdd. I had not used it but intend to use this backup, incase of any failure.
+Less has been said about rescue disk in this article. Pl give the link if avialable in leo site.
+Hi, Where is disk controller drivers that are stored in my pc. Normally the absence of these drivers would not allow past Setup screen in usual install. But i suppose, that these drivers are present, in the system, when i take a backup image. all other drivers could be downloaded or installed after the success of process. Hi, what is the location of those drivers in a running pc. Could it be saved to a separate pen drive if any alert is there of missing drivers, while retrieving.
+How the rescue disk works , whether it will show set up or other screens when retrieving the back up are the doubts that i have.
+Hi, all
+This is the disk controller driver, that i had problem with while installing windows from dvd. It would not allow past setup initial screen. Unless you get the drivers, you could not proceed further. It took me 2 days to unfriendly intel site, and other site to download a possible driver, not in exe form, to a pen drive and make the use of it by choosing command prompt and browsing the pen drive. It suddenly found the driver in one such sys file and allowed me to go further.
+“You may be aware that during this installation process, WinPE can see some hard disk controllers. Back in the day (win NT 4.0, 98 etc) it could see IDE controllers, but not SATA, or 3rd party, or many SCSI controllers. If you had a new motherboard, or add in card – you would have to press F6 and put a floppy disc in. WinPE would load drivers from the floppy, and then it could see the SATA controller, or scsi device, and installation to the disk on that new controller could then continue. The problem here is similar”
+I still do not know, why the windows 7 asked me to browse for the disk controller drive. Normally it auto finds the drivers attached to the system. Or was there a failure in hdd i do not know. I was trying to connect the hdd with disk controller ports available in the mother board box. I was lucky that i could get the drivers. Why it did not find the suitable sata/pata drivers during install is real a mystery. i have not changed any bios setting.
+Would those driver problem would emerge if you want to retrieve the data using this program. Any help would be appreciated
+I think my comments are part of the above discussion in that there seems to be no mention anywhere on the internet about what happens in incremental and differential backups to files/folders that are deliberately removed from the primary drive. I think I understand how everything else works, except for the following situation:- for files/folders that have changed, they would be included in an incremental/differential backup, but what about files/folders that are deliberately removed from the primary drive – are they removed from the latest backup? Not sure if I have made myself clear, but I hope so. Need to know before I start using my Macrium Reflect (free version from you web site)
+This is something I’ve wondered about – my conclusion would be (though not proven through testing), that each “backup instance” (i.e. incremental or differential) should represent the state of the disk at the time it was made. Therefore, to go back to access a deliberately deleted folder/file, it would be necessary to go to the “backup instance” made prior to the deletion. This can be done, via Macrium’s “browse image” for the particular incremental/ differential needed.
+Hope that helps.
+Hi
+Does anyone know if the .mrimg file can be successfully copied? I ask, due to the following scenario:
+Backing up of one of three internal hard drives to an external USB drive.
+USB connection seems to drop out a lot during process, at which point Macrium stops (not surprising).
+So, instead, backed up drive 2 to spare space on drive 3. All OK. Then copied the .mrimg image file to the USB drive (successfully).
+However – and here’s the issue – Macrium does not now recognise the .mrimg file as a valid image file!
+On closer investigation, the “properties” of the file as shown by Windows Explorer do not show any content in the “Macrium Reflect” tab in the copied file, whereas it does in the original.
+Is this related to “alternate file data streams”? I copied using Windows Explorer. Should I use a different method to copy the file?
+Is there any good reason why what I attempted cannot be done?
+(Macrium Reflect v5.3, Std Edition, licensed version)
+Thanks for any suggestions !
+You should be able to copy mrimg files wherever you like. It sounds like the file was corrupted for other reasons … like the USB connection dropping out.
+If you used anything pre windows 10* then it’s absolutely no use to me!
+[*where I’m getting stopped saving any System Image backups]
+At least please, for the love o’ God, tell us when it’s tested and how it works on Windows 10?
+It’s not a Windows 10 problem. It works fine on Windows 10 for me. Jumping to conclusions on the cause of a problem is counterproductive in solving the problem.
+Hi. I have just used Macrium Reflect to create an image of my Hard Drive. As a destination I used a 128GB USB Flash Drive. Seemed to work fine, but resulted in about a dozen 4GB imgae files rather than just 1 big image file that I expected. Is this OK/normal ? Thanks.
+There is a setting for that. That is a setting to allow backing up to backup to DVDs (no longer recommended) I don’t have Macrium installed on the machine I’m using now to tell you how, but you can either look for it or Google how to change it.
+Backing up to flash is better than no backup, but flash memory is less dependable than a magnetic hard drive and has a higher risk of losing everything.
+“We do not need to create a rescue disk at this time. That is something you would use if you needed to restore the image at some later time, and you can make the rescue disk when and if you ever need it.”
+Presumably I will then need to reboot from this rescue disk if my Windows dies. On a UEFI activated system, how do you boot from the rescue disk? (Do I have to disable UEFI’s and use BIOS instead. In which case I’d be restoring to a system with a different firmware and I ran into that problem trying to restore a Windows System Images using the Window’s Repair Disk.)
+Hello I have previously used Macrium free to restore an image in an XP computer no problem and have created Macrium images for my current Win 7 desktop & win 8 laptop plus boot disks. My concern is, does restoring the image first wipe my hard drives & windows recovery partitions within them ? As I dont have Windows OS disks for these machines ,( not supplied nowadays ! ) if my image restore fails I will have no Windows OS, files or programs on either pc ,, Is this correct ? or do I have other options in the event of image restore failures? Help appreciated
+Restoring from a backup image will wipe everything on the backed up partitions of the hard drive and restore all of the partition in the state they were in when the backup was taken.
+It depends on the image, but you should be able to restore ONLy the partition containing the OS without wiping out the other partitions if you want to. The default is to restore everything, which means wiping out everything. However restoring a recovery partition with a backup of that same recovery partition shouldn’t be an issue either.
+Hi Leo, Thank you for providing such good information. I am thinking of using Reflect to back up the System Files onto the same drive I have my data backed up on. Is that OK? It is a 1TB drive with about 377 GB free space left. Would it cause any problems doing that or would the system files be too large?
+Sorry I didn’t give the following information.
+I’m using a Windows 7 64 bit operating system on a laptop.
+Processor AMD A6 3400M APU with Radeon(tm) Graphics 1.4 GHz ,
+6 GB memory(5.48 usable)
+Not sure how much space is necessary for the System Files?
+No way to know, really, Just make sure your backup drive has more room than the amount used on the drive containing your system and data, and you should be fine.
+Hello Leo, I have used reflect to clone my drives on an HDD and I am able to access the saved drives on the HDD using windows explorer as you have mentioned above. My question is that can I copy additional files from my computer to the cloned drives on the HDD?. Thank you.
+Sure. The Macrium files are just files and there’s no harm if there are other files around, as long as you can keep everything straight.
+I am hoping it’s not too late to get some help. I followed the advice given here and successfully made an image of my own computer. Doing my computer, when the process was finished, I have ONE (1) .mrimg file.
+However, when I did my elderly aunt’s computer using the same method, I received MULTIPLE (18) .mrimg files. I don’t why this happened. I believe I performed the same process on both computers. The only thing different in the two processes was that I was remoting in to my aunt’s computer using TeamViewer. But I can’t see why this would make a difference in the number of .mrimg files produced.
+I am concerned that the multiple .mrimg files can not be joined and therefore will be useless. Can anyone offer some advice, please? Thanks!
+Laurie
+It’s possible / likely that the backup drive was formatted differently and can’t handle large files. Macrium then splits things into files of a size that fits. There’s also a setting in the configuration of the backup that allows you to control this.
+Hello Leo,
+I have installed Macrium Reflect 7 free edition, just for performing a one-time image backup.
+Currently my machine has a lot of problems (different errors in the EventViewer, sudden restarts),
+and, unavoidably, Macrium Reflect is one of the suspected culprits, because it is the only thing that was changed before the problems started.
+So, I would like to disable it completely.
+I tried to disable the Macrium Service, but it however reappears on reboot.
+Is there any possibility to COMPLETELY DISABLE Macrium Reflect and keep it installed just for using it ON DEMAND,
+for occasionally performing full image backups ONLY ?
+Thanks a lot & Best Regards,
+Iudith Mentzel
+Can anyone tell me where I can obtain a Flash Drive that is shipped WITH a Master Boot Record ? Macrium seems to recommend this but comments that Flash Drives are frequently shipped without them. I cannot find ANY that have them.
+If you install the .iso file on the rescue flash drive, it will contain a master boot record (MBR) and boot into the Macrium Reflect program directly.
+This article explains how to do that How Do I Create a Bootable USB Thumb Drive from an ISO?
+Hello,
+I just installed Macrium Reflect 7 (free version) to test it and perform an image backup.
+It all worked correctly, according to Leo’s instructions per his video “Creating a Backup Image Using Macrium Reflect Free”.
+However, Regarding the section where one “Mounts the Image” to be able to expand the drive in Explorer :
+(For Reference: )
+.”
+I discovered that when I right-click on the drive in Windows Explorer, an error window immediately pops up and says ” Windows Explorer has stopped working”
+” Windows Explorer is restarting ” … (But it never does).
+I then discovered that all of those “mounted drives” disappear upon a system restart.
+This is occurring on Windows 7 Pro and using Macrium Reflect 7 (free version).
+Please advise and thanks,
+Yes, I would expect the mounted drives to disappear on a restart — they are not auto-mounted on boot.
+As for the Explorer failure — that’s a little tougher. I’d start with a reinstall of Reflect to see if that clears anything up.
+Hello Leo,
+Thank you for your reply..
+I removed / reinstalled Reflect 7 (free) per your suggestion… and unfortunately
+got same results in Explorer… –> ” Windows Explorer has stopped working”
+Anyone else get these results when trying to “unmount” the drive in Explorer ?
+Just curious..
+Thanks
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+Financial Management: Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee Program (25-MAY-01, GAO-01-714R). This report discusses the Emergency Steel Loan Program. GAO found that there has been only one guaranteed loan disbursed by a private lender for $110 million. With an 85 percent guarantee, the federal government's potential loss is $93.5 million, assuming no repayments and no recovery from property pledged as collateral. The financial condition of program applicants is not strong and repayments of loans depend upon many future factors. Economic analysis noted a flat demand for steel, moderate prices, and static imports of foreign steel forecasted for 2002 and 2003. Due to the low loan amount, the program through March 31, 2001, has had a minimal overall effect on the U.S. steel industry. -------------------------Indexing Terms------------------------- REPORTNUM: GAO-01-714R ACCNO: A01067 TITLE: Financial Management: Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee Program DATE: 05/25/2001 SUBJECT: Financial management Government guaranteed loans Steel industry Loan repayments Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee-714R GAO- 01- 714R Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee Program United States General Accounting Office Washington, DC 20548 May 25, 2001 The Honorable John McCain Chairman Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation United States Senate Subject: Financial Management: Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee Program Dear Mr. Chairman: In a February 1, 2001 letter, you expressed concerns about repayments of federally guaranteed loans by borrowers under the Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee Program and the effect of the program on the U. S. steel industry. As agreed with your office, we conducted a financial analysis of the program and an economic analysis of factors relevant to the U. S. steel industry. Our financial analysis covered program background; the status of program funding; loan guarantees applied for, approved, and disbursed; the federal government?s maximum potential loss for the program; the financial condition of approved borrowers; and factors that affect the borrowers? ability to repay loans on time. Our economic analysis considered general factors that influence steel industry production, capacity, consumption, pricing, and international trade, as well as specific factors relating to the program. Our work was conducted in March and April 2001 in accordance with U. S. generally accepted government auditing standards. On May 1, 2001, we briefed your office on the results of our analysis, including the status of the Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee Program from its inception on August 17, 1999, through March 31, 2001. This letter transmits the material from that briefing showing that there has been only one guaranteed loan disbursed by a private lender for $110 million. With an 85 percent guarantee, the federal government?s maximum potential loss is $93.5 million, assuming no repayments and no recovery from property pledged as collateral. We noted that the financial condition of program applicants is not strong and repayments of loans depend upon many future factors. Our economic analysis noted a flat demand for steel, moderate prices, and static imports of foreign steel forecasted for 2002 and 2003. Due to the low loan amount, the program through March 31, 2001, has had a minimal overall effect on the U. S. steel industry. However, the program is currently accepting loan guarantee applications through August 31, 2001, and may, by law, extend the application date through December 31, 2001. As agreed with your office, this concludes our work on the program at this time. GAO- 01- 714R Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee Program Page 2 We are sending copies of this letter to Senator Ernest Hollings, Ranking Member, Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation; Representative W. J. Tauzin, Chairman, and Representative John D. Dingell, Ranking Minority Member, House Committee on Energy and Commerce; the Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee Board, and other interested parties. This letter will also be available on GAO?s home page at http:// www. gao. gov. If you have any questions, please contact me at (202) 512- 2600 or by e- mail at steinhoffj@ gao. gov or Jeanette M. Franzel, Acting Director, at (202) 512- 9471, or by e- mail at franzelj@ gao. gov. Key contributors to this letter were Roger R. Stoltz, Richard R. Kusman, and Stephen M. Brown. Sincerely yours, Jeffrey C. Steinhoff Managing Director Financial Management and Assurance Enclosure 1 Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee Board Loan Guarantee Program Financial and Economic Assessment Briefing for the Staff of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation May 1, 2001 2 Introduction/ Objectives * On August 17, 1999, the Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee Act of 1999 (Public Law 106- 51) created a program to provide loan guarantees to qualified steel producing companies. On February 1, 2001, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation requested that we review the program to address two specific questions: Will borrowers be able to repay loans on time or is a federal bailout likely to be needed? What is the effect of the program on U. S. steel production, capacity, and steel prices? 3 Modified Objectives The Board has approved very few loans for guarantees and their repayment depends upon future events. Accordingly, as agreed to by Committee staff, the borrower?s ability to repay and the financial implications for the federal government have been addressed in our financial review as follows: What is the status of program funding? Since program inception, how many guaranteed loans have been applied for, approved, and disbursed? What is the federal government?s maximum potential loss for the program? What is the financial condition of approved borrowers under the program? What factors affect the borrowers? ability to repay the loans on time? 4 Modified Objectives Also as agreed to by Committee staff, the effect of the program on U. S. steel production, capacity, and steel prices has been addressed in our economic review as follows: What are some general characteristics of U. S. steel industry production, capacity, and consumption? What are some general characteristics of U. S. steel industry prices? What are some general factors of international trade that affect the U. S. steel industry? What specific factors of the program affect U. S. steel industry production capacity and pricing? 5 Scope and Methodology In order to meet the modified objectives, we interviewed the program?s executive director, general counsel, and officials representing the three board members from the Department of Commerce, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Securities and Exchange Commission; reviewed and analyzed program legislation, applications and requirements for loans, and board minutes; reviewed the consultant?s model for estimating subsidies consistent with the Credit Reform Act of 1990; prepared schedules on the status of program funding and loan applications as of March 31, 2001; assessed the federal government?s maximum potential loss for the program; identified factors affecting loan repayment; and obtained and analyzed economic information on U. S. steel production, prices, and international trade issues. 6 Scope and Methodology Scope Limitations We did not perform detailed analysis of approved loan applicants? financial condition. All forecasted amounts are dependent upon future events. Board Comments We received comments on a draft of these briefing slides from board officials. These comments are discussed on the last page of this briefing. Government Auditing Standards Our work was conducted in March and April 2001 in accordance with U. S. generally accepted government auditing standards. 7 Background The Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee Program is headed by a three member loan guarantee board. The board?s staff consists of an executive director, executive secretary, a general counsel, a receptionist, and consultants. The program provides for loans by private lenders to qualified steel companies with up to $250 million to a single company. The total amount of loans outstanding may not exceed $1 billion and federal guarantees may not exceed 85 percent of loan principal. Interest is not federally guaranteed. The first application window was from October 27, 1999 to February 28, 2000, and a second window from November 1, 2000 to August 31, 2001. The act provides that the board may not make commitments to guarantee loans after December 31, 2001, and all loans must be repaid by December 31, 2005. The act does not provide a termination date for the board. 8 Results in Brief From program inception through March 31, 2001: 14 loan applications totaling $924 million have been received; 7 loans have been approved for $544 million*; and 1 loan has been disbursed for $110 million. The federal government?s maximum potential loss for the one disbursed loan is $93.5 million assuming no repayments and no recovery from property pledged as collateral. The financial condition of program applicants is not strong, and repayment of loans depends upon many future factors. Flat demand for steel, moderate prices, and static imports of foreign steel are forecasted for 2002 and 2003. The program has had minimal overall effect on the U. S. steel industry due to the low loan amount. *The Board expects that at least 4 approved loan applications will not be updated by the lenders. 9 Part I - Financial Review Table 1: Status of Program Funding from Inception to March 31, 2001 (Dollars in millions) Budget Actual Guaranteed loans $1, 000. 0 $110.0 Estimated credit subsidy* $140.0 $12.9 Administrative costs 5.0 2.0 Total costs $145.0 $14.9 One- half percent guarantee fee revenue** $5. 0 $. 6 * The Credit Reform Act of 1990 requires all federal direct and guaranteed loan programs to estimate a credit subsidy. Accordingly, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimated a credit subsidy rate for this program of 14 percent for principal only and the Board re- estimated the rate of 11.7 percent. ** P. L. 106- 51 provides for a fee to cover costs of the program not to exceed 0. 5 percent of the principal amount of the guaranteed loan. 10 Part I - Financial Review Key Documents for Guarantee Loan Applications 1. Application for loan guarantee. 2. Environmental assessment. 3. Loan documents to be signed. 4. Borrower certification, which includes granting GAO audit access. 5. Lender underwriting analysis. 6. Lender certification that its underwriter analysis is the same as for a nonfederal guaranteed loan and the borrower is a qualified applicant. 7. Description and appraisal of collateral. 8. Audited borrower financial statements for the previous 3 years. 9. A 5- year history and projection of revenue, cash flow, and price and production costs. 10. Documentation that credit was not otherwise available from other sources. 11 Part I - Financial Review Table 2: Current Status of the Loan Guarantee Program from Inception (October 27, 1999) Through March 31, 2001 (Dollars in millions) Board Activity: Applications Amount Total loan guarantee applications received 14 $924. 3 Adjusted loan guarantee application amounts* (50.7) Loan guarantee applications denied or withdrawn 7 (329.3) Total loan guarantees approved 7 $544. 3 Lender Activity on Board Approved Guarantees: Loans pending lender update of loan materials** 5 $415. 0 Loan disbursed by lender 1 110. 0 Loan pending lender disbursement 1 19.3 Total loan guarantees approved 7 $544. 3 * Difference between the application amount and the approved amount by the Board. ** The Board expects that at least 4 of the 5 approved loan applications will not be updated by the lenders. 12 Part I - Financial Review Interest Rates on 7 Approved Loan Guarantees Interest rates are prime rate plus basis points*. Most loans cite LIBOR** prime rate as the accepted index of cost of funds for lenders worldwide. Interest rates are variable and adjust frequently as lender cost of funds change. Interest rates for the 85 percent federally guaranteed are lower due to no lender risk. Interest rates for the remaining 15 percent vary based upon lender risk assessment. Basis points range from 100 to 2,200. *100 basis points equals 1 percent interest. ** London InterBank Offered Rate (LIBOR). 13 Part I - Financial Review Table 3: Use of Proceeds on 7 Approved Guaranteed Loans Amount Percent Debt refinancing $216.0 39.7 Capital expenditures 191.0 35.1 Bankruptcy financing and other 95.9 17.6 Working capital 41.4 7. 6 Total $544.3 100.0 14 Part I - Financial Review Balloon Payments on 7 Approved Loan Guarantees Repayment schedules call for quarterly interest and minimal principal payments that result in $423 million (78 percent) of balloon payments due by December 31, 2005. If the balloon payments are not made, the loan is in default and the lenders most probably will seek immediate payment of the 85 percent federal guarantee. After federal payment to a lender, the amounts become a government claim with three options for recovery: --- sell the loan to another financial institution, --- negotiate a repayment schedule as a direct loan, or --- foreclose and sell the property pledged as collateral. 15 Part I - Financial Review Table 4: The Federal Government?s Maximum Potential Loss on the Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee Program Based upon the one guaranteed loan disbursed as of March 31, 2001, the government?s maximum potential loss for the one disbursed loan is $93.5 million assuming no repayments and no recovery on property pledged as collateral as follows: (Dollars in millions) Loan disbursed $110. 0 85 percent federal guarantee $93.5 14.0 percent credit subsidy estimated by OMB $15.4 11.7 percent credit subsidy re- estimated by Board $12.9 If the loan is repaid $0 16 Part I - Financial Review Financial Condition of 7 Approved Borrowers We did not perform detailed analysis of the 7 approved borrowers? financial condition. Applicants are not in strong financial condition because to qualify for a guarantee loan they must have experienced layoffs or production or financial losses since January 1998 and be unable to obtain credit from other sources on reasonable terms and conditions. Additionally, 6 of 7 approved applicants have either been through bankruptcy, are currently in bankruptcy, or are emerging from bankruptcy. 17 Part I - Financial Review Some Factors that Affect Ability to Repay Loans Factors are heavily dependent upon future events and include: Generating cash flow to pay loan principal and interest when due. Ability to maintain short- term liquidity to pay suppliers and employees. Ability to generate sales and profits, particularly in a declining market. Extent of dependency on major customers for sales and profits. Stability and commitment of top company management. 18 Part II - Economic Review Some General Characteristics of U. S. Steel Industry Production and Capacity (See figure 1) U. S. consumption of domestic and foreign steel rose from about 94 million tons in 1990 to about 120 million tons in 2000 for an increase of about 28 percent, or about 2.5 percent annually. Forecasts are for relatively flat consumption levels in the next few years. U. S. steel industry production reached a near- record level in May 2000, but has generally been flat since then. U. S. steel industry capacity has increased from about 108 million tons in 1994 to about 130 million tons in 2000 for an increase of about 20 percent, or about 3 percent annually. Recession concerns about the current and near term economy. Some growth in new ?mini- mill? production relative to traditional ore based production. 19 Part II - Economic Review Figure 1: Domestic Steel Capacity, Production, and Consumption by Year from 1990 Through 2003 60 80 100 120 140 160 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 Year domestic capacity domestic production domestic consumption Source: Standard and Poor's DRI. Million s o f shor t ton s Forecast Actual 20 Part II - Economic Review Some General Characteristics of U. S. Steel Industry Prices (See figure 2) Standard and Poor?s composite of 8 carbon steel product prices was $317 per ton in February, 2001-- a record low since 1980. Current prices for almost all types of carbon steel are well below a low of $350 per ton which occurred in the first quarter of 1999 at the height of the Asian financial crisis. Forecasts are for prices to increase modestly over the next few years, but they are likely to remain below 1997 levels. Large inventory build- ups at mills and distributors are still being worked off. Low steel prices can negatively impact cash- flow and profits. 21 Part II - Economic Review Figure 2: Spot price Per Ton of Eight Carbon Steel Products by Quarter from 1990 Through 2002 (In nominal and constant dollars) Source: Purchasing Magazine and Standard and Poor's DRI. Note: The 8 steel products are: hot rolled sheet, cold rolled sheet, galvanized sheet, plate, structurals, rebar, cold finished bars, and wire rods. $200 $300 $400 $500 $600 1990:1 1990:3 1991:1 1991:3 1992:1 1992:3 1993:1 1993:3 1994:1 1994:3 1995:1 1995:3 1996:1 1996:3 1997:1 1997:3 1998:1 1998:3 1999:1 1999: 3 2000 : 1 2000:3 2001:1 2001: 3 2002: 1 2002:3 year and quarter actual, nominal $ forecast, nominal $ actual, constant $ forecast,constant $ $ pe r s hor t ton 22 Part II - Economic Review Some General Factors of International Trade that Affect the U. S. Steel Industry (See figure 3) Significant growth in foreign steel (expressed as a percentage of total domestic consumption): about 1 percent of consumption in 1950, about 18 percent in the early 1990s, to about 33 percent in 2000, peaking at about 34 percent in 1998 at the height of the Asian financial crisis. Over the next few years, forecasts are for steel imports to be about 28 percent of domestic steel consumption. Internationally, there are issues of government involvement in steel production in many countries, which distort market signals and add to global over- capacity in the steel industry. U. S. companies have referred many below cost ?dumping? of foreign steel and other import relief practice cases to the Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission. Lower foreign labor costs and some new technology issues. 23 Part II - Economic Review Figure 3: Foreign Steel as a Percent of U. S. Consumption by Year from 1990 Through 2003 Source: Standard and Poor's DRI. Per c ent age of d o m e sti c cons umpti o n 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 Year imports as share of total consumption 24 Part II - Economic Review Program Factors that Affect U. S. Steel Industry Currently, the program has had minimal overall effect on the U. S. steel industry as only one loan for $110 million to a diversified product producer with no significant segment of the market has been disbursed through March 31, 2001. However, loans may have significant local or regional effect and may affect the quantity of certain steel products. 25 Agency Comments We provided a draft of these briefing slides to officials of the Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee Board for their review and comment. They agreed with the contents of the briefing slides and provided comments that we have incorporated where appropriate. 194029 *** End of document. ***
+Bear with me as I step with trepidation into philosophical murk with this question: If one accumulates a great deal of small quantifiable things, does it necessarily, by accumulation, equate to something larger, more complex?
+Huh? Get to the tl;dr dude!
+No way. I am never that organized. I might not even be sure what I am going to write.
+But this is a question, not any kind of argument, nor an attempt to take potshots at … badging.
+It does seem to me that an implicit assumption for Badge Advocates is that by accumulating a large number of micro-credentials represented by the badges, that they do somehow signify a more holistic set of skills, capabilities. A lot of little achievements in a pile, what does that pile signify?
+I will say that a lot of people working in badges are not thinking this way, but the cloud of for service consulting firms, and maybe a lot of people out their perceive this is the way things will work.
+The Badge Alliance does recognize this in their working document Open Badges for Lifelong Learning:
+There may be different types of badges such as ‘smaller’ badges may be used for motivational and formative feedback purposes, like those used on the popular forum site Stack Overflow, and ‘larger’ badges used for certification purposes. For the former, it may be possible to have a lot of badges, perhaps defined by the community as they go and tied to smaller behaviors or achievements. The latter may have more rigorous or defined assessments and be endorsed by organizations or other authorities. Multiple motivational badges or certification badges may be aggregated into higher-level ‘meta’ badges that represent more complex literacies or competencies. It may be that these meta-badges are developed top-down, created and issued by organizations to target specific sets of skills, or bottom-up, as reflections and narratives around sets of badges important within a certain community or for a particular individual. Badges give us the flexibility to support learning innovation, recognize skills and achievements at multiple stages and granularities and create taxonomies of achievement that help people discover learning opportunities and extend the value of that learning.
+They go on to described ways in which the badges might be put into some kind of hierarchy, or there being a system of pre-requisites/pathways.
+This of course is a lot of “may”s. It is conceptual.
+But this does imply that there is more to making a cohesive picture of skills and abilities than the badges alone. This likely is in play some where; I am still doing the research (aka a call for help).
+I could turn this around. A quote unquote traditional educational experience is a build up of smaller “stuff”. In one class, I complete assignments, write papers, engage in discussions, this adds up to some assessment of my performance for that class. I build up a pile of class experiences as a program / major, and some organization says that is a degree. And so yes, it makes sense to be able to include into a “who Alan” is image all the other stuff I do in life. Just piling up my myriad experiences, without the meaning I can make of them, looks to me like a pile of bison skulls.
+Or try this. I will take computer programming, part of my skill set, and the common topic that is easily badged. I had some formal education (high school FORTRAN class, 18 credits of undergraduate enough for a minor), but almost everything I rely on today I have learned outside of any formal entity. Do I need some system to show all the little things I did to get here, or does my body of public work demonstrate it (ignore the typos).
+There are critical things in programming that are foundational. Variables. Logical expressions. Arrays. Equivalence. Abstraction. I can march through a series of lessons, and pass some micro examinations for all the foundation skills.
+They are important- I am not sure how you could code without these foundations.
+Yet, all these things on their own- they do not make me a programmer. It’s how you are able to apply, extend them, to synthesize, experiment, make, break, improve. All the stuff you learn when doing a real project that real people must use. I am not even sure I can list all the things which get you into a place where you can not only do all the stuff a curriculum says you should do, but enough confidence to do all the other things you don’t know how to do.
+How the heck do you badge that? The “Alan Has the Skill To Learn What He Does Not Know” badge?
+No, your work in the world shows that, and your ability to describe it to others.
+I was still pondering the accumulation of achievements questions. In a much broader context. I needed some philosophical input, so I thought of a few colleagues who have cred here and emailed them- Rob Farrow (who has “philosopher” in his twitter handle), Stephen Downes (who goes deep in theory, and writes more words per square mile than anyone, often with a philosophical perspective), and Mariana Funes (who also comes at this from a Buddhist angle).
+My question was thus:
+This might sound like a philosophical riddle. A premise of badging or micro credentials us that if you accumulate many small granular records of achievement that combined that it will on its own add up to something larger -that such things are purely additive.
+I am looking for a metaphor or a real example of something maybe complex or just larger/valuable that does not arise solely from adding up many small components (the human spirit perhaps not being just the combination of natural components, but that might be a bit too spiritual). Monkeys typing not producing shakespeare? Cliche.
+Got any ideas? Are there fields that look at the dynamics of small / large things?
+First of all, every person responded with more than just an pithy response; each gave more or less a blog post in an email (well Stephen did ask and posted his response later as a post)).
+I might be mix and matching the responses, but here are some ponderings from my panel…
+Rob suggested the Gestalt approach ‘The whole is other than the sum of its parts’ which is often incorrectly as ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts’. Important difference. The Wikipedia article provides a lot of detailed example different visual examples that play with the idea of how our perception works more at a holistic level than the details, for the idea of Emergence, appropriately introduced via of all things, a dog: appears as a whole, all at once. Gestalt theory does not have an explanation for how this perception of a dog appears.
+And Mariana too mentioned Emergence suggesting David Chalmers’ paper on Varieties of Emergence
+“Practically, reductionist education is the frame used in micro-credentials, you end up with people who can only think in fragments.”
+Emergence was the second topic Rob recommended (and was also the focus of Stephen’s response) of Emergentism:
+A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself unexpected and different from them.
+Stephen elaborates this idea further, suggesting that Recognition is the means of identifying Emergence, which leads to thinking about recognition in networks:
+The mechanism for identifying emergent properties is recognition. For example, pattern recognition enables us to identify shapes out of a complex array of perceptions. Recognition is a result of the interaction between a perceiver and the entities being perceived.
+For examples where “the whole is other than the parts”, Stephen provided:
+- A journey is not composed merely of many small trips. The very same set of small trips can either mean “a pilgrimage to Mecca” or not, depending on the intentions of the traveler.
+- A school of fish (or a murmuration of starlings) is not made up solely of individual fish; they have to be swimming as one unit, not merely happening to be in the same place at the same time.
+- A holiday is not merely a sequence of days with no work (the same thing could describe unemployment).
+- A song is not merely a collection of noises; they have to be arranged in a particular way, and they have to be pleasing to a listener.
+- A fact is not merely a collection of perceptions or observations (not even if joined together with logic).
+And Mariana added a few more examples
+Water puts out fires, hydrogen and oxygen make it worse.
+Some argue that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain – no bit can be pointed to yet it emerges. Murmuration is emergent. You can badge each bird for flying but you will not be awarding a badge for the murmuration behaviour.
+At the same time, people who support the idea of accumulation of experience markers say it does matter, as everything we do are part of who we are. Carla Casilla makes an argument to douse the Myth of the Lightweight Badge -those being the ones that you get for showing up at an event. Serge Ravet contends they should not even be called badges, more like tickets, but that they count for something.
+Carla summarizes:.
+offering as an appeal to the classics:.
+But that is the rub. As a composite, we are more than an assemblage of parts or of experience markers. You can break down the human body to an assemblage of chemical elements but that is not what makes us human.
+And thus it’s not the piles of things that matter, but how we make sense of it, how we do what machines cannot do. Again, as I tried to say earlier, it’s not a batter of just Badges Great / Badges Are Poop it’s what we create around them as context, connection that gives them meaning.
+I am not quite sure that software / automation can really do that job.
+Top / Featured Image: Sometimes a free toss of hope into Google Image search pays off. It did today, my search on
+pile of small things(with of course limits to open licensed images) got me this image of a giant pile of bison skulls. If I read the information right, the photo is from 1870, and in its volume representing the slaughter of bison for fertilizer, is outright repulsive. Am I using that metaphorically? Not quite yet.
+It’s a public domain image in Wikimedia Commons but more than that, it’s a Featured Picture a Picture of The Day just the meta data on the Wikimedia Commons is a story in itself
+The post "Piles of Things" was originally pulled from under moldy cheese at the back of the fridge at CogDogBlog () on March 29, 2016.
+4 Comments
+[…] via Piles of Things — CogDogBlog […]
+Hi Alan:
+I think badges are good but not sufficient indocators of learning. Yes, they can be sequenced and aggregated, but typically only within a particular badge system where all the pieces can be worked out in advance. Cross-context situations will inevitably lead to to gaps and overlaps, a bit like credit transfer. I went to 3 universities before I got my degree, leaving orphaned courses in my wake.
+Although algorithms may be able to recognize patterns (that’s why there have been some learning analytics summits for Open Badges such as OBIE 2015 tacked onto LAK), I don’t think this kind of learning recognition will automated for the foreseeable future.
+I do think personal spaces like portfolios are good places to curate badges and fill the gaps with reflection, curation and constructive alignment. And heck, maybe some gap training.
+That’s why, in a blog post a few weeks back, I said:
+.
+I hope that’s helpful.
+If you’re interested in digging further into small pieces adding up to bigger pieces, you may want to poke at what Andrew Downes of Rustici is saying about the interface between xAPI, LRS and Open Badges. Here’s a starting point:
+Thank you Don, this is immensely useful, it’s like getting a blog post for a comment, I’d give you a badge if I had one.
+My mom calls this kind of questioning as relating to “age and stage.” As you get older, you divest yourself of stuff, pare yourself down to what matters.
+Younger students and younger teachers are still in the shiny thing acquisition stage, and this badge movement is for them, not for us older folks. Make badges for them.
+Patient Testimonials
+J.B. - Congestive Heart Failure
+J.B. suffered from congestive heart failure, diabetes, hypertension, lung infection, shortness of breath, wheezing, gout, and arthritis in his knees. Because of the arthritic pain, J.B. could not run or walk like he used to do. J.B. had an autologous bone marrow transplant performed. Throughout the week following the procedure, he said that pain had gone and he felt an increase of energy, enough to resume his walking schedule. Within two months, his heart function was improving (his cardiac ejection fraction had increased from 24% to 49%). He states that he rarely experiences shortness of breath now and that his breathing is much better.
+M.A. - Dementia
+M.A. was brought to my clinic for dementia. She had difficulty remembering, communicating and only able to say one or two words at a time. After her bone marrow transplants, her family reported that she looked better, had more energy and was able to speak in full sentences. Her daughter was very thankful that she was getting her mother back again.
+P.B. - Heart Arrhythmia
+P.B. had been experiencing severe arrhythmias that were occurring several times a week. Two months after her bone marrow transplant, P.B. reported with great enthusiasm and gratitude that there had only been one arrhythmia incidence during the entire month of June. P.B. has been referring her friends to the clinic ever since.
+P.C. - Pancreatic Cyst
+P.C. came to us with concerns about a pancreatic cyst and intestinal pressure following colon surgery. He had a bone marrow transplant and reports "significant" improvement in his health. Within 24 hours the pressure in his gut was gone. He says he felt "unbelievable" like he was 20 years old again. A month later, he had a second treatment. On the next CT scan of his pancreas, the cyst was no longer visible.
+T.F. - Parkinson's Disease
+I was diagnosed with Idiopathic Parkinson's Disease. A few weeks later, I had the bone marrow transplant. It's a relatively painless procedure that had me up and walking the same day. My life is better. I've been able to control my sleep patterns, increase my lung capacity, have more energy, and most importantly, have the mental clarity to function day to day without being overwhelmed by anxiety - a prevalent symptom of Parkinson's. If you have been diagnosed with Parkinson's, there is hope, don't give up. I won't and neither will the good doctor ever give up on finding solutions for the tough problems that we bring him.
+C.M. - Stroke
+C.M. is a professional pianist. He had a stroke and a week later, he came to our clinic. His right hand was paralyzed. He was frequently losing his balance. His speech was slurred and he had diabetes and end stage renal failure. After his first bone marrow transplant, his legs were stronger. He reported having more energy and there was less tendency to fall. After his second treatment, his speech began to improve. By July, C.M. was mowing the lawn, his blood pressure was normalized and he was playing the piano again. By August, he was beginning to urinate again and his fingers continued to move easier as he practiced day after day to regain what had been lost.
+E.C. - Multiple Sclerosis
+Just wanted to let you know that as of 02/04/10 it will be a 1 1/2 years since I received my umbilical cord stem cell treatment for MS and I've got my life back!! My only residual symptom has been a limp. I can feel my hands again after over 15 years, I can walk without having to hold onto my son's baby carriage, I have not had any vision issues, and too many other improvements to list!! Hope this gets legalized soon here in the states!! I keep telling my hubby that if I ever require a booster I'd still like to go back to San Diego to have it done even if it was legal in MA by then!!
+K.D. - Traumatic Brain Injury
+K.D. was in a car accident over five years ago and has since been paralyzed. He has had two umbilical cord stem cell treatments from Dr. Ramirez so far. This is his latest report. I'm now down to 110 micro-grams/day of baclofen and my breathing has returned to normal! I'm not taking a breath directly after the other like I had been doing since the accident. I can now take a breath pause for a sec or 2 then take another. I also sat unassisted for 3min. My saliva glands are beginning to work. I never wake up with dry, cracked lips anymore. I need to come back for another treatment.
+F.M. - Stroke
+F.M. was in a coma for seven weeks following a stroke. Before the treatment with Dr. Ramirez, F.M. was wheelchair bound. He required a tracheotomy for respiration and a G-tube for nutrition. There was little movement in his arms and legs and he had challenges with short term memory. Four months after his treatment, the trach was removed and he is able to eat solid foods again. There has also been improvement in his motor control and cognition. He can move his legs back and forth and turn his head. F.M. is more attentive and interested in what is going on. He can also voice his needs more.
+B.A. - Stroke
+We were very grateful to you all and those at the Mission Viejo clinic for your kindness while we were with you and the positive support and encouragement we received. We have seen subtle changes and our physical therapist has been very thrilled with the changes she has seen in B.A.'s body resulting from the treatment. Her brain has been "fired up" and she has made a big step up in response to the treatment she is receiving with her brain functioning better. She is much brighter, laughs more, jokes around and is more aware of things around her. She has also began to actively read more. She is speaking as well as she was before the stroke. She was able to explain to her physical therapist that her blurred vision was like a grid across her eyes. She was not able to discern like this before her stem cell treatment. Her left eye on the impaired side looks normal and her eyes coordinate perfectly. She can even wink and move eyes independently. Her left ankle and knee joints rotate together as do the elbow and wrists of her left arm. She can now flatten her left foot and bend her knee inwards so this happens and is practicing walking without a splint sideways and forwards and backwards. Her vision has improved as well as her wooziness. Her therapist is hopeful she will walk without a splint and have her hands and fingers functioning by the end of the year!
+D.B. - Cerebral Palsy
+DB was severely underweight. Since her stem cell treatment, she has been gaining enough weight to now be in the normal range for her age and height. She is opening her hands more and able to play with the toys and turn pages. Her head and trunk control are much better and she can sit on her own now. She is more aware of the world around her and participates more with friends and family. Her story was on Channel 9 news and can be seen at.
+J.W. - Spinal Cord Injury
+J.W. was in a car accident in the Summer of 2007. His T3 vertebra was severely crushed, resulting in paralysis. In the Spring of 2008, J.W. underwent a transplant in Mexico under the direction of Dr. Fernando Ramirez. J.W. received four vials (6 million stem cells) of umbilical cord derived stem cells. Within four months, the nerve pain was gone from his arms and neck and he was able to move his legs. His side muscles were also strong enough by then to support his walking with braces. J.W. reports that he has also been able to gain back his bowel and bladder control. He has also regained sensation in his lower body.
+C.S. - Cerebral Palsy
+Dr. Ramirez often treats severe cases of cerebral palsy. C.S. is one of these children. With about 40% of his brain damaged, the physicians were doubtful if C.S. would respond to the treatment. The parents wanted to try anyway. This was their last hope. A catheter procedure was done so that the cord stem cells could be placed directly in the damaged area of the brain. Within two months, the seizures had significantly decreased. C.S. is now stronger, more alert and he is talking more.
+T.K. - Genetic Disorder
+Dr. Ramirez has treated several cases of genetic disorders with human umbilical cord stem cells. T.K. is the latest and most dramatic case. T.K. is a two year old who was diagnosed with William's Syndrome. This syndrome involves a chromosome 4 inversion that causes severe atherosclerosis and early death. T.K. had severe blood vessel blockage to her heart and was given two to six months to live. Could stem cells help? The parents wanted to find out. Dr. Steenblock prescribed pomegranate powder to help reduce the atherosclerosis and a couple of weeks later, Dr. Ramirez administered 1.5 million stem and progenitor cells to her. Within a week, her skin color had improved. Within three months, her veins and most of her arteries were normal. Her blood vessels had also grown, which her physician did not expect. By the time she had another check up, her systolic blood pressure, which had previously been over 200 mmHg, was down to normal. T.K. was now strong enough to undergo surgery to repair some remaining stenosis in her heart valves. With increased vitality, T.K. was also beginning to walk and talk for the first time in her life.
+P.Y. - Hypertension
+Within the first 24 hours after P.Y.'s first treatment she started walking she was also able to drink liquids without being thickened. After a couple of days her skin color looked better. At her first doctors appointment in Arkansas her blood pressure was normal (previously 200 and above). 6 months after her treatment she had a CT scan done of her heart. Her doctors told us that all of her veins and arteries except for the aorta and coronary were normal. They said her veins have grown which was not supposed to happen. She also became more verbal and is now saying small phrases. And her energy level is a lot higher.
+K.B. - Stem cell procedure
+I just wanted to thank you for making my experience with the stem cell procedure so smooth and easy. I was so nervous until wonderful Gina made me feel so comfortable. Then when doctor came in and was so light and funny, I really relaxed and felt very good about how every thing went. You have such a good thing going there and are helping so many people. I feel so fortunate to have found you!
+E.S. - Obesity
+Dear Dr. Steenblock, I want to thank you so much for getting us on the road to good health. Everyone is impressed with our weight loss, our outlook, and our energy. But they can't know how great we feel! I've known we're in a lot better health and condition than the day we walked into your office on February 8, 1994. We are having monthly follow up chelations as you recommended with Dr. Robert Snider, Massena, NY. We located him (as we did you) through the ACAM directory. Both of us have our usual annual physical scheduled in October with our family doctor in Georgia. Bob has written to him about our chelation and new nutritional lifestyle, and has sent him copies of pre and post test results. We think Dr. Hayes is quite competent, intelligent, and open to alternatives. We'll see, won't we? Meanwhile we are going forth with the message, as you suggested. Nearly everyone responds positively and asks for more information. One of our friends, a farmer cosmetic surgeon, is most receptive and interested, particulary in studying alternatives such as acupuncture and nutrition. I've considered ourselves most fortunate to have chosen your clinic (we had contacted both Julian Whittaker and Richard Casdorph), primarily because of the specialties you listed in the ACAM directory and because of the impression made by your wife in explaining your program to us when we called. Your diagnostic program confirmed the quality we were expecting, and your testing and consultation after each 5 chelations gave incentive and confidence. You have an excellent staff. Alyce did an excellent job with our finances. I recovered over 90% of my pre testing and 100% of the past from my private insurance. Although we weren't inovolved with HBO, I go tot know and appreciate Kevork.
+B.H. - Stroke
+Dr. Steenblock and staff, Thank you all so much for your support and caring during our stay. We met so many wonderful people here. It made B.H.'s life so much easier. Thanks again for everything!
+R.S. - Aging
+From the day we arrived we felt completely at home here - thanks to a terrific staff who are not only very skilled in what they do, but certainly know how to give a lot of TLC! We wish so much we could manage to stay longer. Yet in just 4 weeks Ray is showing improvement. He definitely has more energy. He is sleeping much less and no longer needs his two doctor's today! We're so glad we came! We will certainly tell everyone we know about out time here. Our hearfelt thanks to everyone!
+S.L. - Traumatic Brain Injury
+Dear Dr. Steenblock, I want to give you an update on S.L.'s progress since he left your center three weeks ago on August 24. We have been very pleased with the progress S.L. is making. As you know I came to you with three main goals. For S program. I had heard that the oxygenation process would continue for some time after the treatments were stopped. This appears to be true, for S.L. has not thrown up now for three weeks. God bless you and your HBO treatments. Not only did we reach my original three goals, but S.L. is more alert, is talking better, and initiating conversations, and reacts to commands more quickly. His doctor has seen the improvement. She knew we were going to see you, but was skeptical because 15 of her patients did some type of HBO and all had no improvement. I believe that your program is a combination that works, and would recommend it to anyone with a brain injury. His arm and leg movements have continued to improve even though we have not yet started PT etc. God bless, and thank you for being there.
+K.R. - Traumatic Brain Injury
+If I would have only known that Dr. David Steenblock and his office existed, I would have insisted that the hundreds of thousands of dollars that was spent at the LTC facilities/rehab centers, would be spent on treatment at Dr. Steenblock's office, for the healing of TBI injuries, instead of the maintenance which my husband received until we came here.
+C.H. - Trauma
+This is a long overdue thank you letter for the care you gave my husband June, 2000. You are an awesome doctor, you cared, you researched, you stayed late, you did everything you could to make my husband better. You understood his needs and you cared more than any other doctor. C.H. made some very significant improvements:
+- He gained feeling to his body that he had not had since the accident. He could feel it when you touched his feet. His feeling had been very limited before.
+- No delay in his movements and he regained his ability to move. Before when he followed a command there would always be a pause as he figured out which muscles to move and got the signal down his nerves for the muscle to move. Though his body was very weak, when he followed a command, that delay was gone.
+- He regained his hearing.
+- He was able to use a urinal. (about every two hours during the day)
+- X-rays showed his hip was healing nicely. Dr. C who specializes in hip replacement surgery had said this was the worst break he had seen.
+- Jaw spasms stopped. I wish we had come sooner! Thanks for all you did for us. I appreciate also your quickness to praise the Lord for any progress.
+Please tell all the staff we appreciate them and regard them as friends. We loved our days in California- even though it was tough. Mission Viejo, Lake Forest, Dana Point, Laguna Beach, La Jolla's all so beautiful, especially with all the paved trails along the creeks and through the neighborhoods where I could take the wheelchair.
+We had always planned to come back but the summer heat tired C.H., he lost his strength fast and his heart weakened and his lungs were filling with fluid. He died Oct. 29,2000. We both tried our best. I miss him but I also feel very satisfied and thankful for the extra two years we had together.
+F.R. - Macular Degeneration
+At age 82 I experienced a stroke which led me to the door of Dr. David Steenblock's Office in Mission Viejo, California, for 20 hyperbaric oxygen treatments. The stroke actually occurred in December of 1996 after several months of depression. There results were exceptionally successful.
+However, I wish to briefly discuss an unexpected fringe or cross over benefit I received which deals with a macular degeneration condition of my left eye which I carried for 73 years. A 12%-15% improvement proved welcome but puzzling after my 20 HBO treatments. However, I was grateful. I realized this event about a week after my treatments. I later casually mentioned this to Dr. Steenblock. He raised his eyebrows and was somewhat puzzled.
+Dr. A.W., an Australian eye surgeon, made me aware of this condition many years ago. After examining my eyes in preparation for a new pair of glasses, he asked if I was ever struck on my left eye by a blow. Yes, of course, I said, when I was about 9 years old. I was boxing with an older brother while we were testing a new pair of boxing gloves given to us. More than 70 years later, I can still see a huge flurry of stars as a pigskin glove landed squarely on my left eye. I never associated my visual problem with that incident until Dr. W. popped the question. The result was that the lumpy feeling behind my left eye disappeared: The pitch black circular center of my left eye is now an opaque or powdery grey. There also appeared to be a slight fragmentation at the base of the center most part of this eye. I often wondered if additional HBO treatments would improve this condition further. I am flirting with this idea. This unexpected fringe benefit is warmly welcomed.
+Mentally I am on cloud 9. Clarity of mind and the extended efficiency of my thinking processes is an exhilarating experience. Despite my age, I continue to spend about 45 minutes with my daily exercising ritual. I bless the good Lord every 24 hours.
+After my very successful 20 treatments for stroke in 1997, I decided to go back to this very same clinic in Mission Viejo for maintanence- 18 additional treatments for stroke. About 5 days I fulfilled my reservation for an HBO chamber for 18 sittings, another strange visual experience occurs. This time a more dramatic and significant change in my left eye snaps to my attention. Holy Cow! I see an improvement of about 60%-65%! The former circular black ball in the center of my left eye is now replaced with a soft semitransparent film of light beige. Superimposed in dead center of my eye is a narrow and slightly darker perpendicular stipe also in beige. Excitement catapulted when I peered closely in to my bathroom mirror while wearing my glasses and saw my eyeball for the first time in 73 years! I saw the entire eye starring at me in disbelief. Quite a thrilling experience. I could do nothing but repeatedly thank the good Lord. I have become euphoric. Will additional HBO therapy bring my eye back to its original state? What will they say at the Department of Motor Vehicles when I take my next eye test or is this too premature? Next time I encounter Dr.Steenblock, I will present him with the most expensive cigar I can find. Life can be beautiful! Amen!
+D.K. - Aging
+At 86 years and very active I must share my thoughts on some of the reasons for my good health. On July 17th I completed 35 one hour treatments of ECP - my observations are as follows.
+-My blood pressure is down an average of 20 points, although I must continue using accupril and lopressor.
+-My heart beat is very rarely irregular- before treatments I missed 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 regularly.
+-By machine records my flow improved from low 60's to upper 90's. Before treatment my shortness of breath was very pronounced- now I walk and dance regularly and I sleep better than before ECP.
+-Prior to ECP I seldom voided more 4-6 oz. from my bladder and the pressure on my bladder was very high- Now I relieve my self less than 1/3 oz. before and void 12-16 oz.
+Comparing others of my age to myself I find I out perform physically in anything we do.
+J.Z. - Stroke.
+I await the passing of time with the fervent hope that the stem cell therapy of Dr. Ramirez will have a dramatic impact on my body and my life. The staff of the clinic has been great in providing the help and support so necessary for my recovery. A special thanks is extended to each and every individual involved in my treatment.
+L.C. - Cerbral Palsy
+Hello Dr. Steenblock, Dr. Lacroix and George
+I have some amazing news about L.C.. On July 12th we took her to her eye specialist, he ran several test including a prevoked potential eye test and L.C. has 95% functional vision in her right eye! She started at less than 18% prior to the stem cell treatments we did in May. Also L.C.'s brain is responding to the signal from a 5-15 second time frame. L.C. prior to stem cells was diagnosed as visually blind, now she can see us and the wonderful world around her. She did have some minor improvements in her left eye but still the signal is not connecting. On July 22nd we met with our physical therapist and she noted that L.C. has stronger trunk control, better head control and is using both her hands now. Also the degree of motion in her legs has improved from 125o to 138o so that is all exciting to us. We look forward to seeing you again soon and hope that one day your research will be approved in the United States as the miracle it is.
+God Bless!!
+M.K. and J.K.
+An update on M.K. and J.K.:
+Both our boys underwent both Adult and Umbilical Cord stem cells, we have seen improvement in both boys. M.K. has cut his insulin useage in half, and feels a little stronger in his muscle groups. J.K. has a whole new look about him, he makes eye contact with us now moves his arms and legs more then he ever has in the past and is trying to talk everyday. Thank you Dr. Steenblock and thank you to all your staff for the help you have given us in our journey to get our boys back to good health. We our planning to make another trip to southern California for more Stem Cell treatments in the near future!
+L.B. - Diminished sight
+Your clinic called today to ask how L.B. is doing. Thank you very much! We love the phone calls.
+L.B.'s vision continues to improve. He can see more clearly. than after the first stem cell transplant. He has better contrast that allows him to read lettering that is med. blue on light blue background. At night while riding in the car, he can see a car coming at a distance and as it approaches, he can see the car as it moves closer and closer. Before, he would lose sight of the car in the "drusen areas" where his vision was blocked and pick the car back up again in his peripheral vision. He can read smaller print and can read the newsprint again. Before he had to quit reading the newspaper because the paper was gray and the print ink was gray. There was not enough contrast between the "grays " for him to see the lettering. He can read all of the letter sizes on the Amsler grid. He can see 10 letter words with his right eye and 4-5 letter words with his left eye. When he looks out at a distance, he can see the deer and birds at 150 yards. He can"t tell what kind of bird it is unless he recognizes the shape. He moves around much better because he can see better. He can see things on our kitchen countertop. Our top is granite look alike. Before any stem cell treatment, he couldn't see many items on the counter because there wasn't enough contrast between the object on the counter and the countertop.His focal point has improved. Before, he would reach for things on the table and miss the target by about an inch. That is not happening at all now. He met with a new opthmologist yesterday. His vision tested at 20/400 in his left eye and 20/200 in the right. At his previous opthmologist, in May his vision was 20/200 left and 20/80 right. In September, 10 days after the first sten cell transplant, the same opthomologist's report was 20/80 left and 20/40 right. The Snellen chart yesterday that he was trying to see was terribley dim lit. I have good vision and thought it was VERY dim. L.B. couldn't see the letters. At home we have a Snellen eye chart. And at 20 feet, L.B. can read the 20/70 line with his left eye and 20/40 line with his right eye without glasses.
+Thanks for all you do for us.
+love G
+Pete - Parkinson's Disease
+"... We believe the treatments helped. Pete is shaking a lot less, and he does not have feet dystonias like he did every day for years, each lasting for an hour or so. That is when his feet curl up, hard as a rock, and hurt so much, a seizure of sort... apparently typical of Parkinson's. No massage and nothing else we tried helps while it's happening. We just have to wait it out till it goes away. Two days ago, he had a small seizure for half an hour, the first in over a month! ..."
+Read the full story here
+Cookbooks make great last-minute gifts. For accomplished cooks, getting a new collection of recipes can open doors to unusual cuisines. For novices, they can help sharpen techniques while cutting down on kitchen disasters. And for noncooks, they can act as a sort of culinary guidebook, showcasing what's great about the world of food.
+The trouble with giving cookbooks, though, is figuring out what's worth putting under the tree without relying on things like the cover design, in-store displays or sale prices.
+That's where FOODday comes in. In the past year hundreds of cookbooks have crossed our desks, and we've been doing plenty of sifting. While some of this year's crop are outright duds and others mere oddities -- did the world really need a cookbook from TV host Mario Lopez or a baking monstrosity with the dubious title "Cake Pops"? -- the standouts were clearly focused, well-written and loaded with tantalizing recipes. Among our favorites are collections celebrating Italian, French, Thai and Japanese cooking, as well as books devoted to two of our palate passions: cocktails and baking.
+If you've got a cook on your gift list and you still haven't started your shopping, one of these books is certain to please. If you're a cook, use these recommendations when coming up with your wish list for Santa. And if you leave him a batch of Rocky Road Bars on Christmas Eve, we're sure you'll get exactly what you wanted.
+-- FOODday staff
+"Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen" by Ethan Stowell and Leslie Miller
+Ten Speed Press, $35, 228 pages as chef/owner of Union, Tavolata, How to Cook a Wolf and Anchovies & Olives. Vivid, stylish photographs put you right in the kitchen as Stowell demonstrates how to prep geoduck, dismantle an artichoke for frying and truss quail. Recipes for the most part speak to intermediate or advanced cooks, with ingredients that are local to our region but might be challenging to procure, such as rabbit saddle, pork jowls and octopus. A bonus for cheese lovers is the dessert chapter, suggesting cheese pairings (Robiola With Gooseberry Compote) and other simple, elegant finishes to a meal.
+There's also plenty here for less ambitious cooks to enjoy, including a soup chapter, and especially Stowell's engaging prose, light on ego and packed with personality, stories and cooking lessons.
+Recipe we liked: Blood Orange Salad With Shallots and Taggiasca Olives
+-- Leslie Cole
+"In the Kitchen With A Good Appetite: 150 Recipes and Stories About the Food You Love" by Melissa Clark
+Hyperion, $27.50, 464 pages
+I admit to getting a serious girl crush after paging through Melissa Clark's new book, "In the Kitchen With a Good Appetite." Clark, who writes the popular "A Good Appetite" food column for The New York Times, loves food and, once inspired -- which is pretty much every meal of the day -- she'll go to almost any length to create a recipe that satisfies her craving. But like any home cook, Clark will substitute ingredients, skip steps if that means not washing an extra pan and make the dish her own way, and it's usually better than the original.
+The result is a collection of 150 mouthwatering recipes that are both simple and sophisticated. There's a lemon-scented red lentil soup that sprang from a friend's dinner party, a silky steamed salmon that she cribbed from chef David Bouley (she writes that she accepted a book project with him in part to get that recipe), and a sweet-salty granola whose secret ingredient is olive oil. As much as that, it's a book that expresses her personality. The chicken chapter, for instance, has exactly one recipe for the ubiquitous boneless, skinless chicken breast. Clark much prefers drumsticks and thighs: "I like the gristly, fatty sinewy bits. I like the deep flavor and moist texture," she writes.
+In fact, I got so wrapped up in Clark's musings and recipes, it took forever for me to notice that there were no photos in the book. Thanks to her vivid word pictures, I have no trouble picturing what I'll be cooking next.
+Recipe we liked: Roasted Chicken Thighs With Apples, Gin and Coriander Soup
+-- Leslie Cole
+"One Big Table: A Portrait of American Cooking" by Molly O'Neill
+Simon & Schuster, $50, 828 pages
+For her lastet book, former New York Times food columnist Molly O'Neill spent 10 years "stalking the country's best cooks by region." She found plenty, and then whittled them down to 600. The result is a wide-ranging portrait of what we eat as a nation, illustrated with home snapshots, historic photos and vintage advertisements. Though charming, it's also somewhat disjointed -- a 20-page history of bread pops up between soup and salad chapters -- but ultimately, it's a cheerful celebration of home cooks and our nation's culinary diversity. You'll find recipes for the likes of Texas Tamale-Stuffed Turkey, Southern Squash Casserole and, from Oregon, Shoo-Fly Pie and Rogue Blue Cheese dressing. And though 828 pages is a lot for a cook to bite off, the book is an interesting cultural portrait, one that proves that despite claims to the contrary, Americans have not stopped cooking.
+Recipe we liked: Scappoose Senior Center's Chocolate-Sauerkraut Cupcakes
+-- Leslie Cole
+"Gennaro's Easy Italian" by Gennaro Contaldo
+Headline Publishing, $29.95, 253 pages
+I certainly didn't need another Italian cookbook, but one flip through "Gennaro's Easy Italian" had me hooked. Gennaro Contaldo, a native of the Amalfi Coast and longtime mentor to celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, cooks in true Italian style: Great ingredients put together simply produce easy weeknight meals that are both sophisticated and full of vibrant flavors.
+Dishes like griddled goat cheese with warm sautéed plums, penne with cauliflower and sausage, and an awesome Sicilian almond-tomato-green olive pesto, are now in regular rotation in my kitchen.
+Recipe we liked: Pappardelle With Leeks, Pancetta, Orange and Walnuts
+-- Ivy Manning
+"Forgotten Skills of Cooking" by Darina Allen
+Kyle Books, $40, 600 pages
+Darina Allen has been dubbed by some the "Julia Child of Ireland," but the instructor at the famed Ballymaloe Cooking School in County Cork is her own woman, and "Forgotten Skills of Cooking" is her masterpiece. In sincere language, Allen conveys everything your great-grandmother knew about food: foraging for pennywort and whelks, raising chickens, making beef jerky, preserving, salt curing, even yogurt making.
+You might be tempted to pass on this book as too fuddy-duddy (who hangs game anymore?). But with modern touches like churning butter in a stand mixer and hundreds of contemporary dishes like curried brussels sprouts and homemade paneer cheese, this book is perfect for DIY cooks of any level.
+Recipe we liked: Fresh and Smoked Seafood Chowder
+-- Ivy Manning
+"Thai Street Food" by David Thompson
+Ten Speed Press, $60, 371 pages
+A follow-up book to famed Australian chef David Thompson's tome "Thai Food," "Thai Street Food" is a coffee-table-size love letter to the art of Thai food hawkers. Recipes are grouped by time of day, juxtaposed with tons of colorful photographs of Thai street carts that paint a picture so vivid you feel as if you're there.
+The recipes range from the familiar -- pad Thai, pork satés -- to more adventurous but definitely doable dishes like whole fish steamed in banana leaves with fiery chile and lime sauce, and sang kay fak tong, a sort of inside-out coconut custard pumpkin pie.
+Just be warned that many of the dishes will require a trip to an Asian market.
+Recipe we liked: Grilled Pork Skewers
+-- Ivy Manning
+"Kansha," by Elizabeth Andoh
+Ten Speed Press, $35, 304 pages.
+First, she offers a few basics, like the correct way to make Japanese rice (chances are, you're using too much water) and noodles, which are cornerstones for so many of the dishes that follow. A chapter on soup offers numerous miso variations, and the section devoted to pickling will give you new ideas for what to do with radishes, ramps (wild onions) and eggplant. And if you think tofu is blah, a dozen different interpretations may change your mind. Most recipes are accompanied by tantalizing photos, showing how beautiful and complex Japanese vegan fare can be.
+Recipe we liked: Crispy and Creamy Kabocha Croquettes
+-- Grant Butler
+"Fresh and Fast Vegan" by Amanda Grant
+Da Capo Press, $15.95, 230 pages
+This collection of recipes from British food editor Amanda Grant actually is more than a decade old, but it has been significantly updated and refreshed to coincide with plant-based eating becoming more mainstream. The reissue includes more than 140 recipes built around ingredients found in most groceries -- no running around to find some obscure grain or a type of flour you'll only use once.
+The beauty of Grant's recipes is that most of them require minimal prep time. For instance, a simple Fresh Ginger and Basil Pasta comes together in 20 minutes. Some dishes, like Roasted Garlic Polenta With Sautéed Tomatoes, or Moroccan Spiced Red Potatoes With Chickpeas, require more cooking time -- but that's mostly inactive simmering, so you can prepare other dishes or have a glass of wine while waiting for a dish to be ready.
+Recipe we liked: Malaysian Vegetables
+-- Grant Butler
+"Absinthe Cocktails" by Kate Simon
+Chronicle Books, $19.95, 112 pages
+When absinthe won legal status just three years ago, bottles flew off the shelves. But once everyone brought the Green Fairy home, few had any idea what to do with it. To right this wrong and keep the once-taboo spirit from getting shoved to the back of the home bar, local author Kate Simon collected 50 stellar recipes for her new book, "Absinthe Cocktails."
+The petite hardcover book devotes about a third of its recipes to classic absinthe cocktails like the Sazerac, Monkey Gland and Remember the Maine. But the bulk of the recipes come from what Simon describes as "The New Guard" -- the country's most talented bartenders, including three from Portland -- who use the anise-flavored spirit in inspiring ways. This could be a curse, as many mixologists like to test the limits of their skill, and their bars, by crafting drinks with laundry lists of obscure ingredients. But Simon has guided her contributors well, with a majority of the recipes calling for spirits and ingredients common to a well-stocked home bar. For the uninitiated, a helpful buying guide in the front of the book can help steer you toward a brand of absinthe just right for you.
+Recipe we liked: Minor Threat
+-- Danielle Centoni
+"Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies" by Alice Medrich
+Artisan, $25.95, 384 pages
+Unlike many cookbook authors these days, who have built their popularity on tight blouses and spiky hair rather than recipes that actually taste good, baking maven Alice Medrich has built her loyal following and stellar reputation solely on the solidity of her recipes. Her latest book, "Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies," is no exception, giving readers hundreds of no-fail recipes for cookies of all stripes, from Spicy Carrot Masala Macaroons to Pecan Penuche Shortbread.
+Clearly this is no ordinary collection: Medrich has a pastry chef's flair for the unexpected and her book -- a mix of new recipes and those from her previous books -- is perfect for anyone who craves something a little different. Still, you'll find plenty of familiar faces like Snickerdoodles as well as a good supply of easy recipes, like Rocky Road Bars you can throw together in minutes. The book is organized by texture, which can be a bit maddening, but a "Smart Search" index helps, organizing recipes by categories like "Wheat-free" (which includes a surprising number), "Quick & Easy" and "Cookies That Keep Two Weeks." Each recipe has weight equivalents, as all baking books should.
+Recipe we liked: Rocky Road Bars
+-- Danielle Centoni
+"Salted" By Mark Bitterman
+Ten Speed Press, $35, 312 pages
+The subtitle of "Salted" says it all -- "A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral" -- because this book isn't really a cookbook, not in the recipe-driven sense of the word. It's more of a user guide, and an inspiring one at that from author Mark Bitterman, who owns the North Portland salt boutique The Meadow..
+Bitterman's passion is infectious -- especially after reading his Salt Reference Guide, which takes up the bulk of the book and provides poetic mini-essays on dozens of salts. The Salish Alder Smoked, for example, "sizzles with intense smoke flavor. ... grinding a few crystals over hearty dishes effortlessly evokes the traditional flavors of the Pacific Northwest." How can you not want to cook with that salt? Short bulleted lists describe the salts' characteristics at an oft-hilarious glance -- one salt's crystal structure is described as "heavy-bottomed shot glasses for mice"; another has the flavor of "electrified frost." Though borderline silly, the playful guide does give readers a sense of what to expect from each salt and how best to use it.
+Recipe we liked: Flambéed Bananas With Cyprus Hardwood Smoked Salt
+-- Danielle Centoni
+"Baked Explorations" by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito
+Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $36, 208 pages
+When I bake, I leave fussy, architectural sweets to the pros and look for simplicity and honest flavors. Though "Baked Explorations" sounds more like a trek through the Sahara Desert, this cookbook does a brilliant job of giving homey American recipes a touch of sophistication while respecting their authenticity.
+Lewis and Poliafito are owners of two well-known bakeries, both called Baked, in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Charleston, S.C. They describe their recipes as "classics," but several were new to me, including Sawdust Pie, Buckeyes and Sunday Night Cake -- which makes the book even more fun.
+But don't think that just because you may have seen some of these names at a church bake sale that these are your grandmother's recipes. Selective use of some higher-end ingredients, like mascarpone or fleur de sel, plus interesting and clever writing, make this a fresh collection.
+I love that regional American cooking is finally getting its due, and books like "Baked Explorations" make a terrific contribution. Our only quibble is that the tiny type used for the ingredient lists will likely mean that anyone over age 40 will have to pull out their reading glasses.
+Recipe we liked: Double-Chocolate Loaf With Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Spread
+-- Katherine Miller
+Also recommended
+You didn't expect us to limit ourselves to just a dozen cookbooks, did you? Here are quick glimpses of 12 more that impressed us this year.
+1. "Around My French Table" by Dorie Greenspan: The baking guru shares 300 of her favorite homey French recipes.
+2. "Barefoot Contessa: How Easy Is That?" by Ina Garten: The Food Network star simplifies recipes for stress-free entertaining.
+3. "Veggie Burgers Every Which Way" by Lukas Volger: Delicious alternatives to blah veggie burgers from a freezer box.
+4. "The Conscious Cook" by Tal Ronnen: Vegan cooking rooted in French culinary technique.
+5. "Stir Frying to Sky's Edge" by Grace Young: Recipes and insights to make you a master at the wok.
+6. "Fiesta at Rick's" by Rick Bayless: Mexican dishes for entertaining, from one of America's fastest-rising chefs.
+7. "Good to the Grain" by Kim Boyce: The secrets of nutritious baking with whole-grain flours.
+8. "Heart of the Artichoke and Other Kitchen Journeys" by David Tanis: Classic California cookery from a longtime chef at famed Chez Panisse.
+9. "My Calabria: Rustic Family Cooking From Italy's Undiscovered South" by Janet Fletcher: A culinary journey to the toe of Italy's boot.
+10. "Southern Pies" by Nancie McDermott: Deep South decadence, served a slice at a time.
+11. "Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jellies" by Joan E. Aller: 100 soul-satisfying recipes from southern Appalachia.
+12. "DIY Delicious" by Vanessa Barrington: Do-it-yourself, from-scratch cooking from the pantry.
+Casting my vote for Grace Young's, Stir-frying to the Sky's Edge. Excellent.
+The present application claims from the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 61/896,808, entitled “Designing, Parsing and Mining of Game Log Files,” filed Oct. 29, 2013, the entirety of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
+This disclosure is related generally to game/simulation-based assessment and more particularly to the design, parsing, and mining of information in game/simulation log files for educational assessment purposes.
+Game/Simulation-based assessment (G/SBA) has a number of advantages over traditional assessment, and is widely considered as an important future direction for assessments. A player's progress through the game/simulation is typically recorded in a log file for subsequent assessment. The log file thus plays a central role in reconstructing the player's performances in the game/simulation and is the major source of information for generating an assessment score.
+Analyzing a G/SBA log file typically involves parsing for relevant information therein and extracting performance indicators therefrom. However, these tasks are often complicated by sub-optimal log file structures. For example, a log file may be a chronological information dump, lacking any defined structure, from the game/simulation. To make matters worse, some log files, in addition to including information related to performance assessment, also include troubleshooting information to be used by software developers to debug the game/simulation. The lack of a well-designed information structure and the inclusion of extraneous data irrelevant to the assessment make the task of mining for information within such log files inefficient. Moreover, the lack of structure also makes it difficult to implement generic analysis tools for such log files.
+According to one aspect, exemplary data structures designed for log files of game/simulation-based educational assessments are described. In some embodiments the data structure may have predefined structured elements where some are static and some are extensible by developers of the assessment tools to include additional user-defined elements that is in a format specified by the log file data structure. The data structure would guide developers to output properly formed log files that include all the information useful in educational or proficiency assessments.
+According to one example, a data structure is described. An exemplary data structure may comprise at least one session element representing an assessee's participation in an educational assessment session; a session identification element identifying the educational assessment session represented by the session element; an assessee identification element identifying the assessee participating in the educational assessment session represented by the session element; an events element representing a collection of events occurring in the educational assessment session represented by the session element; an event element representing one event in the collection of events; an event time element indicting a time associated with the event; an event performer element indicating a performer of the event; an event target element indicating a target of the event; and an event result element representing a result of the event.
+According to another aspect, a method for assessing whether a data structure of a log file conforms to a schema is described. The method comprises receiving a log file containing data and identifying a data structure in which the data is recorded in the log file. The method further comprises determining whether the data structure elements of the log file properly correspond to predetermined structured elements of a schema, the schema. If the data structure elements of the log file properly correspond to the predetermined structural elements of the schema, a message flag is generated to indicate that the log file is suitable for further analysis of information relating to the assessee's performance on the educational assessment. If the data structure elements of the log file do not properly correspond to the predetermined structural elements of the schema, a message flag is generated to indicate that the log file is not suitable for further analysis of information relating to the assessee's performance on the educational assessment.
+According to another aspect, an exemplary a method of logging and analyzing progress made within a game-based or simulation-based educational assessment is described. The method comprises accessing a schema with predefined structured elements, the predefined structural elements. The method further comprising receiving a log file for an assessee's participation in the educational assessment and verifying whether the log file conforms to the schema by determining whether data in the log file are structured corresponding to the predetermined structured elements of the schema. The log file may be analyzed using the predefined structured elements of the schema to synthesize information from the log file relating to the assessee's performance, and a result may be generated to indicate the assessee's performance on the educational assessment based on the synthesized information.
+FIG. 1 is a block diagram depicting an embodiment of a game/simulation log analysis package integrated with a game/simulation-based leaning assessment.
+FIG. 2 is an exemplary data structure defined by the game/simulation log analysis package.
+FIG. 3 is a block diagram depicting aspects of an embodiment of a game/simulation log analysis package integrated with a game/simulation-based leaning assessment.
+FIGS. 4A, 4B, and 4C depict example systems for use in implementing a game/simulation-based educational assessment that uses a game/simulation log analysis package.
+The present invention describes a game/simulation log analysis package (hereinafter “LAP”) that addresses several shortcomings of the conventional game/simulation based assessment framework. In general, the package provides a programming framework with a well-defined data structure for structuring log files and a library of software tools/functions for analyzing and visualizing in-game events. The design of the data structure, which dictates the structure of well-formed log files, is important in allowing the tools/functions to operate efficiently. With such an analysis package, psychometricians can liberate themselves from the non-trivial tasks of designing, generating, and extracting information from log files, and instead focus their work on designing assessment rubrics.
+FIG. 1 depicts an exemplary process flow for a game/simulation-based educational assessment 110 utilizing LAP 170. An assessee 100 may participate in a game/simulation-based educational assessment 110, which is an assessment administered via a simulated or virtual interactive space. The simulation/game may provide a simulated scenario where a participating assessee's interactions therein may seem continuous and the simulation/game would respond according to a large state machine. As the assessee progresses through the game/simulation, events in the game/simulation may be recorded in a log file 120 in accordance with a data structure 180 defined by LAP (e.g., the data structure may be implemented using an XML schema). The data structure 180 may include predetermined data elements as well as extensible data elements that allow assessment designers to define his own data elements. Once the assessee finishes the assessment 110 and the log file 120 is complete, the next step in the assessment process may be to analyze the log file 120 to extract information or find evidence indicative of the assessee's performance. Extractions of information 130 (e.g., event patterns, statistical information, etc.) from the log file 120, which may be validated against the LAP's predefined schema 180, may be performed by functions provided in the LAP's function library 190. The information extracted 130 may then be used by an assessment model 140 to generate an assessment score 150 for the assessee 100.
+A data structure is a description of how data elements are structured and what the data types are for each element. For the same amount of information, there can be many different data structures, depending on how much details one wants to include. Generally speaking, the elements in the data structure can be classified as “atomic” and composite. Atomic elements refer to the part of the data that cannot be reduced further while the composite elements refer to the part of the data that can be derived from other parts of the data. Thus, in implementations where the goal is to specify a concise yet complete data structure, the data structure should be defined using atomic elements since other composite elements can be derived later on in the processing stage. It is worth noting that there are some elements that cannot be easily constructed based on data later on, but rather easy to be recorded during the game/simulation. In some implementations, such elements would be treated as atomic elements.
+In terms of data space/dimensions, the possibilities are infinite in games/simulations. However, given that the LAP is designed to be used for game/simulation-based educational assessment, the types of data elements logged may focus on those that are relevant for assessment purposes. This constraint narrows down the possible data space significantly and allows a concise yet complete data structure to be defined for most of the game/simulation-based assessment tools. In some implementations, this data sub-space may be further narrowed based on known characteristics of the game/simulation and assessment metrics. For example, if an embodiment of the LAP is designed for single player games/simulations (rather than multi-player), the data structure may be structured accordingly under that assumption. If the assessment is designed to gather a certain kind of evidence of assessees' ability, the data structure may be designed for recording that evidence. Such assumptions and considerations serve to filter out many complex processes that may not be relevant for assessment purposes.
+FIG. 2 depicts an exemplary data structure for a LAP log file that includes a concise and complete set of predefined structured data elements. In this example, the basic unit for analysis is defined to be a Session 200, which represents each time an assessee participates in the game/simulation. The Session 200 may therefore be identified by a child element/subfield, Session ID 205 and an Assessee ID 210. In addition, since an assessee may attempt playing the game/simulation multiple times, an Attempt ID 215 may also be included as a child element/subfield in the data structure to track that information.
+During a gaming/simulation session, the assessee may encounter/trigger/experience a collection of events, represented in the data structure by the Events node 230. The Events node 230 may include any number of child Event nodes 235, each representing a single event. The type of event may be identified or characterized by an Event ID 240 (e.g., a code identifying the event, an event name, an event description, and/or the like). In some implementations, each Event 235 may also have a child Event Scene ID 245 to identify the particular game/simulation context in which the event took place (e.g., the level, stage, quest, location, and/or the like). Rather than an identification code, the Event Scene ID 245 may alternatively be described textually (e.g., “Hallway”), and/or it may be further specified by several child elements, such as the location's spatial coordinates (e.g., x-position, y-position, and z-position). An event may have an Event Time 250 (e.g., a start time) and, where applicable, an Event End Time 255 (e.g., the Event End Time 255 may be set to an invalid time value or the same time as the Event Time 250 to indicate that no end time is applicable). An Event 235 may have an Event Performer 260 as a child element, which specifies the person, character, thing, etc., that triggered or caused the event. For example, the Event Performer 260 may be the assessee (e.g., the assessee opening a door), a character in the game/simulation (e.g., a boss asking a question or attacking), the game/simulation system (e.g., the system giving the assessee a new gaming objective), or any other trigger of an event. The Event 235 may also have a child element Event Target 265, which is the person, character, thing, etc., that the Event 235 is directed towards. For example, when an assessee opens a door, the Event Target 265 may be the door; when a boss asks the assessee a question, the Event Target 265 may be the assessee; when the system gives the assessee a new gaming objective, the Event Target 265 may again be the assessee. If the particular event does not have an Event Target 265, the data field may be left unspecified or a predetermined value may be given to indicate that no Event Target 265 is applicable. The Event 235 may also include an Event Result 270 child element, which as the name suggests is the result of the Event 235. For example, the assessee opening a door may result in the door being opened or failing to open; the boss asking a question may result in the assessee answering the question correctly or incorrectly; the system giving a new game objective result in the assessee accepting, denying, or requesting another objective. Each of the data elements described above may itself have one or more elements/attributes to further specify or define the element. For example, the Event Performer 260 may have one or more child elements/subfields in case there may be one or more events performs that caused the event. Similarly, the Event Target 265 may also have child elements/subfields to accommodate situations where an event has multiple targets. Since an Event 235 may have multiple results, the Event Result 270 element may also have multiple child elements.
+The above described elements all have predefined data types. However, each assessment developer using the LAP may have its unique data requirements or interests. To accommodate the potential unknown needs of users, the LAP data structure also includes elements that allow a user to specify his own data types. In some implementations, the LAP data mode may include extensible elements that allow users to define custom elements at the session level and at the event level. For example, if the user wants to specify data elements at the session level, he may define one or more key-value pairs 225 under a predefined data element called Session Extension Data 220. In some implementations, each key-value pair 225 may include a Pair element that has two child elements, a Key element and a Value element. For example, if a session developer wants to log a session's duration, he may do so by having his game/simulation output a session key-value pair 225 with “SessionDuration” as the “key” element, and whatever the actual duration of a session as the “value” element. Similarly, if the user wants to specify data elements at the event level, he may do so using the Event Extension Data element 275 under the Event element 235. The Event Extension Data element 275 also may have one or more key-value pairs 280 that can be used to log user-specified data types. For example, if an assessment developer wishes to track the status of an opponent during an event, he may design his game/simulation such that it outputs an event key-value pair 280 with “Opponent Status” as the “key” and a numerical status indication as the associated “value.”
+The definition of the data structure depicted in FIG. 2 may be implemented, for example, using an Extensible Markup Language (hereinafter “XML”) schema. The schema, in turn, describes the structure of valid XML documents, which in this case would be the log files. An example of an XML log file is provided below:
+It is worth noting that while the data elements are described using XML elements, one of ordinary skill in the art would recognize that XML attributes may be used instead. For example, Session ID 205 may be an attribute of the Session element 200. At a more general level, an XML element or attribute of an XML schema may be referred to as a data field of a data structure or data structure. Just as an XML element may have child element, a field may have a subfield.
+FIG. 3 provides a block diagram showing how an embodiment of the LAP may be used by a game/simulation-based educational assessment tool. The game/simulation-based educational assessment tool 300 may include a game/simulation component 303 and an assessment engine 305. The game/simulation log analysis package (i.e., LAP) 350 may include a schema 353 as described above, an XML validator 355, and one or more functions 357, which will be described further below.
+When an assessee 301 plays the game/simulation 303, the game/simulation 303 may use the LAP's schema definition 353 to generate a structured log file 390. The data structure of the log file 390 should conform to the schema 353 definition. Once the assessee completes the game/simulation 303 (or completes a session) and a corresponding log file 390 has been output, the assessment engine 305 may then assess the assessee's 301 performance based on the log file 390. In some implementations, the assessment engine 305 may call the LAP's validator 355 to validate/verify that the log file 390 conforms to the schema 353. In some other implementations, the assessment engine may use its own validator to perform substantially the same task. For example, when a log file is received, the validator may identify a data structure in which the data is recorded in the log file, and then determine whether the data structure elements of the log file properly correspond to predetermined structured elements of the schema. If the data structure elements of the log file do not properly correspond to the schema, then the validator may generate a message flag indicating that no further analysis may be performed on the received log file (e.g., no further extraction of information from the log file). On the other hand, if the data structure elements of the log file do properly correspond to the schema, then the validator may generate message flag indicating that further analysis may be performed. The message flag may be a Boolean indicator, which other methods/functions of the game/simulation-based educational assessment may use to determine whether to proceed with analysis of the log file.
+Once the log file 390 has been validated/verified, the assessment engine 305 may use any one of the LAP functions 357 to process the structured log file 390 and synthesize information 395 therefrom. The functions 357 assume that the log file 390 it processes is a valid (i.e., conforms to the XML schema definition 353). Since the structure of the XML log file 390 is known, the functions 357 may be implemented to efficiently extract data from the file. For example, one function 357 may output the frequency of particular event n-grams. An n-gram may be defined as consecutive sequence of n events. For example, a tri-gram event may be a user answering three questions correctly twice, followed by an incorrect answer. Such n-gram may be found by analyzing the event ID (e.g., to identify events related to the assessee's actions in the game/simulation environment), event performer (e.g., to identify events performed by the assessee), and/or event result (e.g., to determine whether a certain kind of building/structure has been correctly added to a simulated situation). Occurrences of the n-gram pattern in the log file 390 may be counted and a frequency of occurrences 395 may be output by the function 357. As another example, a function 357 may match a given event sequence to the event sequences within the log file 390 and calculate an edit distance (i.e., a numeric measure representing the degree of difference between the given sequence and the observed sequence). Another function 357 may find a specified event sequence from the entire list of events. A function 357 may also perform filtering operations, such as filtering the events by a specified time tolerance before and/or after a given event. The functions 357 may also perform statistical analysis. For example, the functions 357 may perform auto-correlation analysis, Fourier analysis, and other event-time series analysis, as well as clustering events by their temporal separation. These functions may be implemented using any conventionally known programming language, such as Python, Java, C++, Pearl, etc.
+By using the LAP functions 357, the assessment engine 305 may efficiently synthesize information 395 from the log file 390 without having to implement the functions itself. The extracted synthesized information 395 may then be used by any assessment model defined by the assessment engine 305 to generate an assessment 399 result indicative of the assessee's 301 performance on the educational assessment. Generating the assessment 399 result may be accomplished, for example, by scoring individual aspects of the assessee's performance, such as the accuracy in completing the task, the time it took to complete the task, whether the assessee utilized any built in assistance through help functions to complete the task, etc., and then combining those individual scores into an overall score, which may be represented as a simple point value or a percentage of available points, for instance. The assessment 399 result may then be outputted (e.g., displayed, printed, electronically communicated, etc.) to an assessment administrator, the assessee, a teacher, a data store, etc.
+Additional examples will now be described with regard to additional exemplary aspects of implementation of the approaches described herein. FIGS. 4A, 4B, and 4C depict example systems for use in implementing a retrieval system described herein. For example, FIG. 4A depicts an exemplary system 400 that includes a standalone computer architecture where a processing system 402 (e.g., one or more computer processors located in a given computer or in multiple computers that may be separate and distinct from one another) includes a game/simulation-based assessment 404 being executed on it. The processing system 402 has access to a computer-readable memory 406 in addition to one or more data stores 408. The one or more data stores 408 may include the game/simulation-based log analysis package 410 as well as a predefined data structure/schema 412.
+FIG. 4B depicts a system 420 that includes a client server architecture. One or more user PCs 422 access one or more servers 424 running a game/simulation-based assessment 426 on a processing system 427 via one or more networks 428. The one or more servers 424 may access a computer readable memory 430 as well as one or more data stores 432. The one or more data stores 432 may contain the game/simulation log assessment package 434 as well as a predefined data structure/schema 436.
+FIG. 4C shows a block diagram of exemplary hardware for a standalone computer architecture 450, such as the architecture depicted in FIG. 4A that may be used to contain and/or implement the program instructions of system embodiments of the present invention. A bus 452 may serve as the information highway interconnecting the other illustrated components of the hardware. A processing system 454 labeled CPU (central processing unit) (e.g., one or more computer processors at a given computer or at multiple computers), may perform calculations and logic operations required to execute a program. A non-transitory processor-readable storage medium, such as read only memory (ROM) 456 and random access memory (RAM) 458, may be in communication with the processing system 454 and may contain one or more programming instructions for the game/simulation-based assessment and the game/simulation log analysis package. Optionally, program instructions may be stored on a non-transitory computer readable storage medium such as a magnetic disk, optical disk, recordable memory device, flash memory, or other physical storage medium.
+A disk controller 460 interfaces one or more optional disk drives to the system bus 452. These disk drives may be external or internal floppy disk drives such as 462, external or internal CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW or DVD drives such as 464, or external or internal hard drives 466. 460, the ROM 456 and/or the RAM 458. Preferably, the processor 454 may access each component as required.
+A display interface 468 may permit information from the bus 452 to be displayed on a display 470 in audio, graphic, or alphanumeric format. Communication with external devices may optionally occur using various communication ports 473.
+In addition to the standard computer-type components, the hardware may also include data input devices, such as a keyboard 472, or other input device 474, such as a microphone, remote control, pointer, mouse and/or joystick. and may be provided in any suitable language such as Python, Pearl, C, C++, JAVA, for example, or any other suitable programming language. Other implementations may also be used, however, such as firmware or even appropriately designed hardware configured to carry out the methods and systems described herein.
+The systems' and methods' data (e.g., associations, mappings, data input, data output, intermediate data results, final data results, etc.) may be stored and implemented in one or more different types of computer-implemented data stores, such as different types of storage devices and programming constructs (e.g., RAM, ROM, Flash memory, flat files, databases, programming data structures, programming variables, IF-THEN (or similar type) statement constructs, etc.). It is noted that data structures describe formats for use in organizing and storing data in databases, programs, memory, or other computer-readable multimedia for use by a computer. Further, as used in the description herein and throughout the claims that follow, the meaning of “each” does not require “each and every”.
+Astrology Of October 2018: Turn The Beat Around
+Reaching into the water and down into the silt and sand which beds beneath, we feel our fingers slip into the fine materia and parting serpent scales probe the orbs and egg-sacks for a single pearl unlike the plethora. This one, which glows and hums, vibrating in its medium, speaks and sings, in a moaning tone, somber and hungry, diverting attention, asks for something else; we cradle it in the palm of our hand, and wish to cast it out into the grey wash, but the ocean cries out in curls of grey fog, billows up to us and prevents our ejection; we must hold on to this thing, this kernel of yearning that stirs our passions, our loins a shifting cradle of sortilege, the sticks tumbling into a random order around the pearlescent pulse in the halls of water in a hush of bellows breath, the subterranean springs haunted by Nereids deprived of sunlight. They sing with sea stone hearts, pining for that which they’ve never seen or experienced, lusting for a world they have never known.
+Meanwhile, a process has played out and finishing knots lay upon the edge. We fold what we have weaved and tuck it under our arm to go and follow the chime of social clamor; clinking glasses and beckoning triangles, the pleasant sound of chit chat blooming out of champagne foam. Simultaneously drums pulse and stalk in our guts, miles below the surface of our stomach, in the place where the Hermit paces and with his lantern exposes that which we had forgotten, stows away in private from our previous incarnations. They say the damned are not stuck in Hell but may migrate up to the heavens where they merge with their guiding star. The rumor roils in the seedy bathhouses, contaminated waters belching sulphur. ‘The way out is through’, and for that we must find our footing; where we can stand centered, framed by denizens of the cardinal kings and withstand any type of turbulence. With dimly glowing pearl as our guide, in slanting silver light, toasted by copper glint that frays the sullen grey as chariot wheels roll near the piping still; the flavors of the feminine metals colloidal in our saliva. Is it blood? Ours or theirs? Is it serum, elixir, ambrosia? We intoxicate ourselves by sucking sap from the heart-meat. Is it sexual fluids? If so they are too sweet so we fear they might have been poisoned, or at least drugged; laced with a chain of vowels and soft consonants that lull us to superior sleep, where the Pharaohs of our dreams undress and show themselves as the Universe first crafted them; more animalistic, nearer to the pattern of perfection, which is surprisingly more apocalyptic than we would normally like to imagine. Fire and brimstone, leviathan.
+Have our emotions churned and splashed their way into our brains, and that grey nut become a sponge which likes to drink up the phlegmatic fluid? We vamparize our subjects, and they lay before us as slaughtered lambs; is this then a sign? Is our love a thing slain and our lust a play for power, and responsibility a thing that calls from the core that we must crank our trunks in the torture chamber of nature’s structure? Yes and no; as of course it can’t be any other way. The air tosses our lovers hair and we watch from a nearby perch, a collection of ocean shore boulders set down by God for us to relinquish languid and consider our reflections, and in paintings our bodies appear broken, smitten.; the mirror of others, and the challenging sting of the Other; the prick of the thorn which enters through a wound and whispers into the streams of blood a new way to work which in mere moments echo in the brain. We have wandered beyond equinox, the Sun secedes, the air cools, the pond flips, our bellies lurch, the diabolical baby kicks, libidinous engines crank, turn over, belch black smoke, old incinerations emitted, we change our course, set our sites somewhere between the flower that has gone and a strange bloom we never noticed, we’re pulled forward, attracted. As the Moon swells, pregnant with sensual bombs.
+Mercury rushes into a dissonant void as he squares Pluto around 8pm (EST) on Tuesday October 2nd, our negotiation and dialogue abilities clash with powerful, unknown forces in large scale architectures and constructions. We may be challenged to apply diplomatic logic to overwhelming and unprecedented situations, some of monumental proportions. Earlier in the day the Moon passes through a Grand Water Trine in her own sign of Cancer harmonizing with Neptune in Pisces and Venus in Scorpio. Intuitive, mystical, imaginative emotions flow into our deepest and realist needs, as well as voracious hungers and sexual mystery. This pair of configurations could ring a strong bell that reverberates into Venus’ retrograde narrative, especially as Mercury squares Pluto from her domicile. Keep your eyes peeled here for clues and components, and feel it out as well as go easy.
+The Sun progresses into the 2nd decan of Libra in the wee hours of the following day (Wednesday October 3rd), deepening our attention to maintaining agreements and bonds we share with others and whether or not they are in sustained accord. By afternoon Mercury moves into Libra’s 3rd face where he works to juggle a variety of cultural perspectives simultaneously and is able to operate under multiple paradigms at once. He has recently emerged from combustion so his expressions begin to be visible, and the logic of his actions emerge into consideration.
+On Friday, Venus’-day, October 5th Venus turns retrograde around 8pm (EST), beginning the inversion of our likes and dislikes especially in the realm of intimacy and pleasure or intense relationships as this occurs in Scorpio. What we are most intensely attracted to may shift, where we derive pleasure may migrate, how and what we create may meander into new and unknown territory. We may find ourselves following the scent of secrets, salivating for forbidden flesh, plunging into primal pools, feeling our way through the dark, intoxicated predators pursuing their prey, or animals in rut required to mate. These deep drives can find us wandering way off map, in pursuit of pleasure and aesthetic satisfaction elsewhere. Her retrogrades occur in the same area of the zodiac every eight years, drifting about two degrees per complete cycle, touching five points around the ecliptic one every year and a half, drawing an elegant flower with her orbit, a five pointed star, a pentagram that drifts two degrees every eight years. In this process we change and refine our tastes over time; we investigate new flavors and sensations. This makes for a perfect opportunity to try something new, but complicates romance, as Venus rules love; it is much riskier to try a new person than it is to try a new flavor ice cream, so if possible put off any changes in relationship status until after the retrograde, they might be painfully regrettable.
+Just before midnight on Monday October 8th we receive a New Moon in Libra, and a new cycle of bond, agreement, pact, accord, and union is quietly incepted. This is both Sun and Moon in Libra, entering the tunnel of the Via Combusta, where they both find their falls, and though considered inauspicious by some, it is a stretch of zodiac (15 Libra to 15 Scorpio) that brims with magical and necromantic potential, studded with stars of Crows and Herdsmen, archetypes that populate shamanistic myths such as the Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge. Divination via the dead and other darker works may begin here; especially significant for those working with Hekate.
+By the afternoon Mars finally exits his retrograde shadow, and may now enter fresh territory in the cycles and story of actions, confrontation, competition and so on. We may begin to encounter new battles and challenges rather than toil over the same few since last May. At last we move on, and hopefully with a sense of completion and accomplishment.
+Mercury ingresses Scorpio in the evening of Tuesday October 9th intensifying logic and fixing concentration, priming our brains for an espionage type intellect, one intent on action rather than mere intelligence. As this is subterranean Scorpio, dirty or dark thoughts may filter freely in and also lace our breath, as well as becoming fixated on the primal drives in life, such as hunting, mating and fighting for territory, as well as initiation rituals. Here he exits the beams of the Sun and emerges as evening star, so communication and idea thinking becoming more extroverted, integrating into the manifest narrative; our analytical minds become less reflective and more pro active.
+Wednesday morning October 10th sees Mars proceed into the 2nd decan of Aquarius where he tends to fight for principles as conventional and visionary ideas clash, highlighting the revolutionary-political-manifesto directives of Saturn’s air domicile. That Mars squares a very slow and retrograde Venus, finding potential revolutionary violence in tension with inversions of primal intimacy; Be exceedingly careful here of regrettable sexual storms. The Moon separates from conjunction with Venus, so this episode carries deep emotional weight, and is followed by Luna trining Neptune, so emotions are likely washed in delusional swells; also allowing for intensely intuitive creative expression, a chance to channel sexual fantasies and frustrations into obscure outlets.
+By midday Mercury in Scorpio opposes Uranus in Taurus; primal logic and intense fixity of mind needing to balance with disruptions of organic rhythm and pace as well as destabilizations within material resources. Mercury is best at receiving Uranus’ lightening, converting chaos into discovery, so make sure to keep it experimental here and receive a eureka. This opposition occurs on the bends of the nodes, so it is likely pulling on tensions of the past year and a half’s eclipse narrative: the flowing from obscurity into the light and embracing a central role in your own story.
+The Sun squares Pluto on October 11th, which may echo Mercury’s square on the 2nd. Identification with and focus on mutual agreements clashes against powerful unknowns in monumental scale construction and system assembly. This could feel like a weight of the world versus the functionality of the local culture tension. In the small hours that follow (early October 12th) Venus returns to Scorpio’s 1st decan, and the danger of returning to deleterious pleasures of past grows more raw and tangible. Mercury then sextile’s Saturn providing the lubrication for primal logic and fixed intellect to somehow work hand in hand with the laws and limits of territory, nature and society.
+24 hours later (5:30am October 13th) the Sun enters Libra’s third decan and the attention is less on one on one agreements and more on the general equilibrium and accord of the whole. As the Solar eye sights the final degrees that lead to Scorpio’s excesses, the polarities of balance and imbalance are also very visible.
+Mercury catches up to and conjoins Venus on Monday October 15th, and our primal logic and fixed intellects become one with primal pleasures and dangerous inversions of intimacy. Mind and attraction, logic and creativity, art and expression all unified in themes of hunger, hunt, sex, secrecy, war, witchcraft and howling desire. This consolidates our fixations and intentions, but also allows us the opportunity to think over what has recently aesthetically, romantically or creatively capsized. This occurs sextile the Moon in Capricorn, so our notions are likely willing to endure to meet needs of labour, or inversely feel overworked and starved of what we need.
+October 16th Mercury proceeds into Scorpio’s second face where his logic and communication skills are directed toward intense, sustained mental intercourse and mutual exchange. Imagine the two Scorpio’s you know locked in an intense and deep conversation in the corner throughout the entire party, unwavering even through the turbulence of the bacchanal. The Moon moves into her second quarter here, delivering a ramp up in manifestation and energy via the management of empire type needs.
+By the 19th Mercury comes to trine Neptune, and though a friendly aspect, this dissolves and muddles Mercury’s normally careful organization; the sustained mental intercourse is blended with and thus contaminated by the imaginal. The Scorpio corner is getting quite carried away with themselves, and true tales grow a little taller as the night passes. At 1pm Mercury squares Mars and locked mental exchange clashes against ethical and principled agendas of aggression and defense. The mood of personal tall tales might have tread upon some triggers. Interestingly the Moon in nearby Aquarius is trine to the Sun in Libra reflecting how the need to emotionally disentangle is harmonized with a focus on general equilibrium.
+On Monday October 21st at 9am the Sun draws near Venus and she goes combust in the reach of his rays, disappearing from the sky and entering the Underworld to find and retrieve lost love, lost pleasure, lost creative inspiration, lost aesthetic value. We don’t know anymore what we love and look for it in dark places, the past or where we have never explored before. This begins the process of her purification, where outdated and stale values are burned away.
+Mercury sextiles Pluto on Monday afternoon October 22nd, where intense and deep mental intercourse can collaborate with powerful unknowns in monumental construction. This is an interesting precursor to the Sun’s ingress into Scorpio around 7am on Tuesday October 23rd, as our general focus shifts to intense desires and identification with being able to seize and take, receiving gnosis of primal hunger. Venus’ Underworld journey becomes more the general story as the two bodies drift together. Mercury moves into Scorpio’s 3rd decan a few hours later, pushing logic and language into awareness of deprave dynamics such as addiction and vampirism; the mind intuitively connected to the more dark and polluted human nature psychologies. This is where twisted psychological thrillers are born, and to add the cinematic sense of destabilization and urgency the Sun opposes Uranus by 8:30pm, randomizing the pace and material resources available in our state of yearning and brooding.
+Venus sextiles Saturn the following day, Wednesday October 24th, a possibly sobering moment where our inversions of hunger for primal pleasure play along with natural limits. Just after noon the Moon reaches Fullness at 1 degree and 13 minutes of Taurus, just after having passed over Uranus. The blossoming of a cycle expressing through materials, sensuality, craft, the hands on, the satisfying, the rhythmic occurs in a radicalized and volatile mutation. This is another event on the bends of the Nodes, placing it in a pivotal point in the delivery of the nodal storyline, of emerging from the fringes into the spotlight.
+The Inferior Conjunction of Venus and the Sun occurs at 10:15am, 3 degrees and 6 minutes Scorpio. Intense focus and identification on primal drives, hungers and desires leads to finding new loves and pleasures and creativity and aesthetic sense in primal depths of hunt and hunger, sex and death and predatory mystery. Here the Sun and Venus are one in the realm of personal intimacy, primordial thirst, secrecy, night maneuvers, lust. For some this follows all the goth aesthetics associated with Scorpio, and for others, it may be a deep stirring of a general ‘lust for life’. This is our sense of Values connecting to deep materiality and a vision of what is beautiful underneath in the normally hidden layers, the undercurrents of our libidos, a realignment of our art with what really turns us on, a realization of what we are horny for resonating into the deeper chambers of our organism; this is not about remembering what makes us feel nice, but instead what gets us off, even if its a little, or a lot, dangerous.
+Unsurprisingly, the Sun sextiles Saturn the next day, Saturday October 27th at 11pm, earthing our realizations, we begin to connect them to reality and figure out how we can acheive that which we hunger in actuality, from where we currently stand. Monday morning (October 29th) at 7am Mercury conjoins Jupiter in Scorpio’s third face, logic and language filtered through the psychologically depraved swells into greater awareness of such things and expands into coherence, wisdom and a more elevated mind. Perfect timing, we get the details in context of the big picture. As this occurs in a grand trine with Neptune and the North Node in Leo on the cusp of Cancer, it is in a way the revaluations of Venus and the resultant realizations and contextualizations that foreshadow the activity of the next eclipse cycle beginning this winter; it is this fall that we realize what we really need to love our lives, and then the following couple years we prioritize our needs to incubate our growth; this takes imagination and creative lust to for fuel.
+Venus exits combustion on Halloween, and here on a day marked by dressing in whatever costume we desire and exploring alternate versions of ourselves we bring our new loves into the light, and search for a place for them to exist in our lives. Venus has gone from Evening Star to Morning Star after having been in the Underworld for 10 days; she is now not only the enchanter of our dreams, but the creatrix of our waking world.
+Mercury ingresses Sagittarius just after noon on October 31st, where he is in detriment, confusing or coopting details for the sake of big picture prerogatives. He excells at motivational language, even though he can easily sugar coat and deceive, its normally for the sake of a higher purpose, the sake of the mission. this is propaganda, which is useful and effective, but should be monitored well so we don’t all end up on a crazed crusade.
+Finally, Venus returns to her domicile in Libra, where she goes to conclude her retrograde in the weeks to come. All of our inversions of love, pleasure, and aesthetic begin to seek equilibrium and balance so that they may become integrated into the cultural discourse and accepted. Now her explorations are less spiny, she’s been purified and returns to the place where she rules and belongs. She may have brought back to the banquet things that are curious and highly strange, but somehow they go with the decor, and the gala is more memorable by it; the band strikes up a unexpected note, and party goers drop their garish masks, revealing charming visages decorated in exquisite cosmetics, the dance commences. Up seems to be down, and left seems to be right, feminine and masculine swap their meanings and what is right and wrong, polite or rude also step into each others positions, but somehow the whole thing measures out perfectly into a rather charming affair.
+______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
+October 2018 Herbal Forecast for Liminal Light
+Suzanne Stone, Moon Of Hyldemoer Herbals.
+October begins with the Moon in Cancer forming a Grand Water Trine with Neptune in Pisces & Venus in Scorpio. The harmony of this Water trine can be called upon & looked back upon for messages as we pass into the murky, sultry depths of Venus heading into retrograde in Scorpio on October 5th. This waning Moon in Cancer reminds me of the Rugosa Rose (Rosa rugosa) along the sea, full of nourishing love, Neptune in Pisces tells of Dulse (Palmaria palmata) & Bladderwrack (Fucus vseiculosus), the salty fluidity of the plants of the sea & Venus in Scorpio of the beautiful Water Lily (Nymphaea spp.)& Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) of the murky swamps, the dazzling sensuatlity rising from the muck. Any combination of these can be called upon throughout the month to access the messages of this harmonious trine. Caveat: Skunk Cabbage’s raw roots are toxic & raw leaves can burn the mouth.
+Soon after this, Mercury in Libra squaring Pluto, who recently stationed direct in Capricorn, may bring sigils of the foundation of the Underworld & archaic language rising from tombs. Love-in-the-Mist (Nigella sativa) also called Fennel Flower is a wonderful Mercurial herb to call upon here. A close look at the black seeds of this plant, also called Black Cumin, shows the inconspicuous furrows, almost hieroglyphs, etched into the outer shell. Black Cumin was found in the grave of the pharaoh Tutankhamun & the physicians of the pharaohs often called upon Black Cumin seeds for digestive aid as well as to treat infections, toothaches, colds & headaches. It is a delicious, flavorful spice that aids in immune health, allergies & gives succor to those dealing with asthma. As Mercury heads into Scorpio later this month, on October 9, Black Cumin can continue to be used for deciphering messages from the great Beyond.
+On October 3, the Sun ingresses into the 2nd decan of Libra, while Mercury moves into the 3rd decan of Libra. Emerging even further from combustion, Mercury, in dignity here in Libra’s 3rd decan,has the clear view as if from a mountain top, able to see all sides & able to breathe the fresh air of diverse perspectives. To guide this openness, call upon Mercury ruled Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) or Fenugreek (Tirgonella foenum-graecum) tea for sharp thinking & clear passages for intuition to flow. As well, Schisandra berries (Schisandra chinensis) with their five flavors, salty, sweet, bitter, pungent, & sour, tells of Libra’s ability to see all sides & aids in this adeptness. Schisandra is at the same time stimulating to the central nervous system, enhancing performance & mental clarity, as it is calming, relieving anxiety & stress. It assists in preventing stress-induced immune system depletion. It is enhancing to the function of the endocrine system including increasing the strength of reproductive hormones.
+Friday, Freya’s & therefore Venus’ day, October 5, is when our planet of love, desire & relation begins its retrograde in Scorpio, at 8 pm EST. This Venus retrograde season, we
+will need to call upon those Venus herbs that remind us of our inner love as we traverse these necessary dark caverns of relationships. Of course, one will need to carry six Pomegranate seeds (Punica granatum) throughout this time, or place them on ones altar, so to call upon Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld, for guidance in her realm. Rose (Rosa spp.) is another crucial herb of this time period, an herbal ally that has been called upon during the many months of this year. Venus ruled Rose allows our hearts to open, but has the thorns of protection for this grand opening. Rose thorns will be important to carry on ones being or placed on ones altar for protection form others & from our own possible brash actions during this time.
+Our brambles, Blackberry (Rubus villosus) & Red Raspberry (Rubus idaeus) leaves make wonderful teas & tinctures for nourishing our reproductive organs that are ruled by Scorpio & Venus. As well making a protective wreath of brambles & briars & placing at the entry of ones home or altar space will help filter Underworld messages of this time.
+Our Lady’s Mantle (Alchemilla mollis), another Rose family astringent, has a leaf that is in the form of a cloak made of small hearts all woven together which can be called upon during this time to know what really needs to be purged from our lives as that which is not needed & does not offer us love & respect separated out from that which needs our patience. Periwinkle (Vinca major) is another Venusian ally that Culpeper states, “The young tops [of Periwinkle] made into a conserve are good to prevent nightmares.” This is another one worn in ones hair, or close to ones heart will assist with this time of Venus feeling in exile in the Underworld. ‘Vinca’ means ‘to bind’ & has often been called “sorcerer’s violet”, being used to drive away “wycked spirits”. Vince has also been used to strengthen the inner eye.
+As Venus visits the Underworld, much can be brought forth & need to be cleared. Calling upon some of our Lymphatic support herbs can assist with clearing that which comes up & does not serve, from the body. Calendula (Calendula officinalis), Cleavers (Galium aparine), & Red Root (Ceonothus americanus) are three of the great Lymph clearers all assisting strong flow through our bodies & keeping movement strong in this possibly swampy mire.
+As well, our other Benefic, Jupiter, in Scorpio, & having been here for nearly one year, will be wise to call upon for guidance in the Underworld. Sumac (Rhus glabra) is wonderful Jupiterian ally here. Make oneself a crown of Staghorn Sumac antlers, have some in tea & infuse some of these red berries in vinegar for this red elixir of life understands what it is to hold be in life at the same time as hold death’s hand or paw. Sumac is an ally for those who are nervous, anxious, have great fear & desperation. Sumac’s astringent qualities dry up excess mucus in the body & help to ease joint pain. When drinking of infusion of the berries, be sure to strain this well as the tiny, salty hairs of the red Sumac berries have the ability to irritate ones throat.
+The New Moon in Libra, on Monday, October 8, is a time to gather under the grand balancing Oaks (Quercus alba) where one lives & make offerings of Oak leaves, Lavender infused Honey, Poppy seeds & Pomegranate to Hekate or other chthonic deities. Garlands of Rose family Rowan (Sorbus aucuparia/S. americana) & Hawthorn (Crataegus spp.) can be strung & given as offerings. These make a wonderful tea along with Hibiscus (Hibiscus rosa-sinensis) that is grounding, opening & protecting all at once. This a time to balance ones relationship with the spirit world, to pause from ones own strifes & make great offerings to the great Beyond. Licorice (Glycyrrhiza glabra), the great Harmonizer, may also be one to call upon as our two Luminaries dance in Libra.
+As well, on the 8th, Mars exits his retrograde shadow. Let us celebrate with a steep pot of Nettle (Urtica dioica) tea, a burst of hot & spicy Forty Thieves Vinegar, heavy on the
+Horseradish & Cayenne, or a rousing Martian Hopped (Humulus lupulus) brew, offering the first libation of course to the warrior spirits now heading in a forward motion.
+Mercury exits Libra & heads into Scorpio on Tuesday, October 9th. Continue with five-flavored Schisandra here to be proficient at all languages that could arise from the Underworld. Bittersweet (Solanum dulcamara) with its toxic purple and yellow flowers that turn into bright red berries, can be placed in bouquets on ones altar. This is not to be ingested as one can paralyse ones central nervous system with consumption of this herb. It once was tied around the neck as a cure for vertigo or dizziness. Its presence will offer steady footing in the dark caverns we are transgressing.
+On Wednesday, October 10, Mars moves into the second decan of Aquarius as well as squares Venus in Scorpio. Continue with the chosen Martial herbs here, especially Nettle, to have the stamina with this possibly explosive square. Aprhodisiac Damiana (Turnera diffusa), in the past was used to reach the meditative state during Tantric sex rites. Often associated with Mars or Pluto, Damiana can help one steer ones life with confidence & knowing of what one desires. Damiana can also help this same day when Mercury in Scorpio opposes Uranus in Taurus with the ability to believe in oneself & to be ready for any twist of turn Uranus wishes to spring forth.
+There is more Pluto energy on the 11th of October as the Sun in Libra squares Pluto in Capricorn. Keep adding Damiana to ones daily tea blend or carrying some dry herb on ones body so to keep this self-aware confidence during this tension. Venus also returns to Scorpio I so keep those red berries strong in ones daily ritual.
+Monday, October 15 sees Mercury joining Venus in Scorpio I. This seems a great space of art, creativity, & sexuality meeting. Mercury & Venus ruled Wormwood (Artemisisa absinthium) &Venusian Mugwort (Artemisisa vulgaris) are both great allies here. We are looking to herbs to assist us with navigating the hidden realms. As well, some of our poison path plants, European Mandrake (Mandragora officinalis) & Henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) can be called upon with wisdom & caution. These are great altar plants or used for creating magical talismans as both are deeply connected to the Underworld. European Mandrake has been often called upon as the ‘Hand of Glory’, seen as possibly the hand of a hanged man in the grimoire ‘Le Petit Albert’ (1706) for fertility & hence creativity. American Mandrake (Podoohyllum peltatum) is often used interchangeably for magical purposes with the European Mandrake, but as one can see from their different botanical names, they are different plants entirely. They both grow in woodlands, have fragrant, white flowers, & both offer golden fruits which when fully ripe, are not poisonous, unlike the rest of the plant’s parts. American Mandrake spreads into stands with rhizomes (more Uranian), making new crowns & above ground plants as it spreads across the forest. European Mandrake has a long tap bulbous taproot that grows deeper & deeper, but does not creep. This growth difference alone would not recommend the use of the two interchangeably as there is different energy offered here.
+Mercury in Scorpio trines Neptune in Pisces on the 19th causing clarity to be blurred & the imaginal realm to rule communication. With a later squaring of Mars to Mercury this day, we are wise to call upon the Sun in Libra trining the Moon in Aquarius so to smooth over unnecessary conflicts. The peaceful warrior, Mars ruled Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus) will be an important ally here. Burning the needles, allowing the smoke to waft into a room, placing some needles in a pot of water simmering on a woodstove or kitchen stove, or drinking some Pine needle tea will bring peace clarity & forthrightness to a situation.
+Monday, October 21st, at 9 am EST, Venus goes into combust as the Sun draws near. This is a step into the alchemical laboratory of our subconscious, where the fire of the Sun will help to burn away that which is outdated in our lives. Two Sun ruled herbs that have deep
+connections to the Underworld as well are Black Cohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa) & Calamus (Acorus calamus). Black Cohosh, an at-risk medicinal herb, should be called upon sparingly or in spirit. This dear ally has dark roots in the Underworld, yet in the Summer, sends a spire of beautifully scented white flowers that mimic the stars themselves. This ally has been called upon for deep depression as it brings up the depths of our shadows & allows us a safe space to work with these, allowing our shadows to become our strengths. If this work is undertaken with Black Cohosh, make sure one has a strong support system as it is difficult to meet these parts of ourselves we have buried, often for a reason. But if one is ready to work on these with the support of loved ones, Black Cohosh is a great ally. Sun ruled Calamus root (really a rhizome) resides in the murky swamps that Scorpio rules. The Sanskrit name for Calamus is vacha which means invocation, or the power that resides in voice. Calamus is often called upon to restore ones voice, physically or emotionally & brings forth the “bright yang of consciousness”. It helps one who is unable to grasp words & suffers from nervousness from this. It is an aromatic, warming & drying bitter so is a great carminative, increases the strength of the digestive process & can warm & dry cold, damp rheumatic conditions of joints. It is also an herb that is sacred to Hekate.
+October 22nd sees Mercury sextiling Pluto & then the next morning, the Sun ingressing into Scorpio, Mercury moving into Scorpio III & the Sun opposing Uranus by 8:30 pm. This chaotic Underworld symphony, like some of Pendericki’s work, for example, “Kosmognia’, can be unsettling & continue our journey into places that do not feel comfortable for some. The adaptogen fiery, Martian Ashwaganda (Withania somnifera) came to me dream last week as the perfect ally for our Persephone style yearly wandering into the Underworld during the Autumn. Especially here, with the Sun joining Venus in Scorpio, let us walk with confidence & determination that this calming adaptogen can bring. The name Ashgandh comes from Hindi & refers to the odor of the root that is like the sweat of a horse. The Sandskrit, Âshwa meaning horse & gandha meaning smell tells of this earthly odor. It is said that Ashwaganda offers the stamina & strength of a stallion. In Ayurvedic medicine, Ashwaganda is a Rasavana, or an herb that has such vitality that it offers great nourishment, assists in eliminating toxins & promotes longevity. It is called upon for stimulating the mind, increasing ones life force, & assisting those in convalescing after an illness. Even further, Ashwaganda is placed in a subgroup of Rasavanas called Medhvarasayanas. Medhva speaks of the mind & mental capacities & of Ashwaganda’s ability to prevent dementia & Alzheimer’s, as well as neurodegenerative dis-orders like Parkinson’s & Huntington’s. In studies, Ashwaganda has been shown to halt & reverse neuritic atrophy & synaptic loss, two main roots of neurodegenerative dis-eases.
+On October 24, as Venus in Scorpio sextiles Saturn in Capricorn, this may be a time to begin the solidification of some of the dredges Venus has encountered, to make this into a bundle to be burned for release & purification. Take these personal dredges & add them to Venusian Mugwort, Rose & Rose Geranium leaves & flowers to send them forth. This same day, soon after noon, the Moon becomes Full in Taurus, just after passing over Uranus. Uranus, loving lightning quick change, makes this fullness of the Moon in Taurus, a place that is usually a place of groundedness & building, possibly more chaotic & unstable. One may wish to ground themselves in Taurus ruled Speedwell (Veronica officinalis). This herb grows close to the ground, supports kidney health as well as respiratory health. It also aids in peaceful sleep, helps to calm the nerves & offer the vitality & uplift of new Spring growth.
+During the Inferior Conjunction of Venus & the Sun, I would recommend to continue to call upon Ashwaganda for its stallion strength & stamina. This will help us to gather in this fierce energy that may be felt here & almost be ridden or the one riding, or both at the same time.
+The Sun of course sextiles Saturn the next day, October 27 at 11 pm EST. Ground oneself with Solar Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) through smoke, tea, tincture or meditation. Our dear remembrance ally will bring aromatic clarity to the Sun’s Scorpionic visions.
+Then, 7 am Monday morning, October 27, Mercury conjoins Jupiter in Scorpio. This is a wonderful gift of expansive messages of the depths. Calling upon Sumac again here would aid ones transmissions. As well burning Jupiter ruled Hyssop (Hyssopus officinalis) & drinking a roasted Dandelion hot beverage will allow the smoke & taproot into the depths.
+On All Hallow’s, October 31, Venus exits combustion, & becomes our morning star. Mercury ingresses into Sagittarius, in his detriment & Venus retrogrades into Libra again, in her exaltation. Licorice, the great Harmonizer, ruled by Mercury, may be able to guide Mercury through such possibly expansive confusions in Sagittarius. Demeter, Persephone’s mother, has created a grand feast to hear the tales of the Underworld & nourish her daughter after the journey. Venus is no longer in exile & joins the celebration with a bit more wisdom than before, but with the equilibrium of Libra to behold the tales of her six pomegranate seeds. These as well as the Rose thorns can be put aside until the return to Scorpio. These red berries: Schisandra, Hawthorn, Sumac, Rose hips & Rowan are now jewels of the journey to be worn as reminders of growth.
+References:
+Culpepper, Nicolas Culpepper’s Color Herbal Sterling Publishing Co., 1983.
+Cunningham, Scott. Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs Llewellyn Publications, 1997.
+Dawson, Adele. Herbs: Partners in Life Healing Arts Press, 1991.
+De Bariracli Levy, Juliette. Common Herbs for Natural Health Ash Tree Publishing, 1997.
+Edwards, Gail Faith. Opening Our Wild Hearts to the Healing Herbs Ash Tree Publishing, 2000.
+Grieve, Maude. A Modern Herbal Volumes 1 &2 Dover Publications, 1971.
+Hopman, Ellen Evert. Tree Medicine, Tree Magic Pheonix Publishing Inc, 1991.
+Hopman, Ellen Evert A Druid’s Herbal Destiny Books, 1995.
+Roth, Harold. The Witching Herbs Weiser Books, 2017.
+Winston, David and Maimes, Steven. Adaptogens, Herbs for Strength, Stamina, and Stress Relief Healing Arts Press, 2007.
+Wood, Matthew. The Earthwise Herbal: A Complete Guide to New World Medicinal Plants North Atlantic Books, 2009.
+Wood, Matthew. The Earthwise Herbal: A Complete Guide to Old World Medicinal Plants North Atlantic Books, 2008.
+Moon of Hyldemoer, Suzanne Stone, Community Herbalist.
+This information is not a substitute for a health care practitioner. Not to be reproduced without permission
+I can't believe BBAW is over already! I also can't believe how many months of planning 5 short days takes!
+I was thrilled to see so many people enjoying BBAW. I haven't had a chance to read very many posts yet but I hope to over the next week...I am going to Washington D.C. next week for the National Festival of Books (but really I'm just going to hang out with bloggers if I'm being honest--I haven't even looked at the schedule yet and like a complete and TOTAL nerd I'm excited for the tour of the Library of Congress we're going on) so I don't know how much time I'll have.
+Like last year, I learned some valuable life lessons while working on BBAW. I suppose it's impossible to devote so much time to something and not learn from it. I plan to blog more personally and more in detail about that later, but I definitely hit some lows on this journey...but I also hit some really great highs!
+And I want to take a moment to say a HUGE Thank you to the bloggers who were part of a VERY BIG SURPRISE for me this week. I was completely surprised and deeply touched. I don't think I've even processed what a beautiful gift you've given me. But thank you, Trish, Michelle, Shelly, Rebecca, Ana, Dawn, Katie, Florinda, Laura, Jennifer, Beth, Kristi, Jennifer, Jennifer, Julie, Ann, Kathy, Raych, Wendy, Serena, Swapna, Jill, Kristina,
+TLC Book Tours, and Sheri.
+It was completely unnecessary but very much appreciated. I really really thank you and I got teary when I let it sink in and I want you to know that when I get my new Sony eReader this December that I will be telling you all about it. THANK YOU!!!! I love you!
+40 comments:
+Can't wait to hear all about your trip and your new reader in December!
+I really enjoyed my first BBAW, thank you to you and your friendly elves for all your hard work. I really enjoyed it and look forward to next year. I'm glad you enjoyed it too, for the most part :)
+: D
+You are very welcome and I can't wait to hear your final thoughts on BBAW.
+Thank you so much for creating BBAW and all of the hard work you put into it! We Book Bloggers appreciate it and YOU!
+You did a fantastic job and I am positive that 99% (I really hope it's 100%) of bloggers out there realize and appreciate you and what you've done.
+Thank you for this fantastic event and I can't wait for the next year already.
+Thank you for doing this for us! You did a wonderful job putting this whole week together and I think we all appreciate enormously all the effort you've put in. It was a fantastic week.
+Amy, you are amazing and BBAW was so much fun this week. As a first-time participant, I loved every minute, and it was evident in how smooth everything seemed to go how much planning and organization this took. You deserve a pat on the back (and that e-reader!) Thank you, Amy!!!
+We love you and appreciate all the time you devote to the community, Amy. YOu deserve so much more than any of us could afford to give you.
+It's been a great week - thank you for masterminding the festivities! (And I have a slight idea of how much work is involved...but I'll be back on the team next year, if you want me!)
+I'm so glad you'll enjoy your gift, once you're able to use it :-).
+I had so much fun this week and met many (more) wonderful bloggers and blogs. Thanks Amy _ I know I can not even imagine the amount of time and effort that goes into something like this.
+Thank you!
+Oh, hooray! I'm happy for you.
+No, Amy, thank *you* -- you are the best and deserve every good thing.
+Amy, the amount of thought, energy, dedication and most of all, love that you put into BBAW could never be repaid by any gift. I do so appreciate everything you've done and look on in amazement at all that you do. You handle even the "lows" with more grace than most people handle the "highs." Thank you again.
+Thank you. It was a lot of fun for us and a lot of work for you, but it also brings this wonderful community together. Thank you. Thank you!
+Thank you so much Amy. This was my first year participating and I had a blast. Really appreciate all the work it took. You deserve something special - glad you getting a reader.
+This was my very first BBAW and I really enjoyed the experience! Appreciate the efforts you put into making it such a success, Amy. It really inspired me to do even more with books on my blog. (I'm an author, but I do feature authors, book excerpts, virtual tours, etc. on my blog. Now I would really like to do more book reviews as well - those are a little few & far between.)
+And that was a wonderful gift from your fellow bloggers.
+This was my first year participating in BBAW, and I had alot of fun. I look forward to next year.
+This was my first time participating in BBAW, and, yes, I had fun. Thanks for your hard work and I also thank all the people who worked with you to make BBAW happen this year!
+You did a wonderful job with this massive event! Take some time to relax with a good book now that you should have some free time!
+You totally deserve it! Thank you for everything you've done, and thank you for letting me participating.
+Also thank you for understanding how busy I was! I'm so glad I got to participate in the behind the scenes aspect of BBAW. It was such an honor!
+thank YOU for being so awesome! BBAW was fantastic this year and I'm still amazed at how much work you had to do to get everything done. Everything was perfect.
+Nothing but the best for the best! You put together another fabulous BBAW...thank you!!!
+This was a wonderful week for everyone involved. Thank you again for putting together such an amazing event!
+It makes me sad to hear that you hit lows, but understand why. You put your heart and soul into this project, and have done so much for the community. You are never going to make everyone happy, I suppose. But you are much appreciated and loved!
+Thanks for all of your efforts. What a great way to bring the community together!
+Thank you for BBAW, Amy! I had a great time--I only had time to do a fraction of the stuff set up, but I really enjoyed it. :) I'm looking forward to it next year.
+Thank you Amy, for creating BBAW and making it even better this year. I loved the articles each day and read them all, and it was my first time tuning in to BlogTalk radio. I called w/ a question but there were too many people ahead of me. I loved hearing everyone's voices!
+You sure planned BBAW's timing well to get people revved up for the book festival! Wish I was going.
+Amy, there's not enough that anyone could do for you.
+You teach us all about heart.
+Much love and safe travels,
+Beth
+It's definitely been a fantastic week and such a great way to bring together a fast-growing book blogosphere! Thanks for all the hard work you put into it!
+Thank you, Amy! It was a blast.
+I hope I'll get to meet you at the festival. I'll be going with The Girl, Serena, and her mom. I won't be able to go on the LOC tour, though, since I have to work.
+--Anna
+Diary of an Eccentric
+Thank you so much for putting this together! I had a ton of fun. Wish I was able to go to DC. Sounds like it's going to be a lot of fun. Enjoy!
+Enjoy and thanks so much for all your hard work. I know that you've hit lows. Hopefully the highs you've had and the highs of us all will overshadow it as completely as possible. Thanks for the great ride!
+You deserve a huge thank you, Amy! I can't wait to hear about your highs and lows. :)
+I've only seen the tip of the iceberg of what happens in the background of BBAW - I can't imagine all it has taken to pull this together!
+It was a fun week! I think most of us are a little wiped out from reading and writing posts, but it has been like one big party - worth a little lack of sleep (and red eyes) to have enjoyed such a huge celebration of books and blogging!
+Have a great time in DC! I'm so happy for all of you who can go (maybe a tad envious :) ), and will look forward to reading all about in in your posts (and pics, please!)
+Enjoy it!! You totally deserved it!
+Congratulations on a wonderful week Amy. You're hard work is appreciated! I can't wait for you to get here already, LOL
+Thank YOU, Amy - another fabulous BBAW. You deserve a surprise now and then :) Hope you will enjoy your gift when it finally arrives!!
+I had such a great time, I really did and I can't wait to do it again next year! You have created a wonderful community =) Congrats Amy....and you do deserve it =)
+I came across BBAW in my web surfing a few days ago (I'm a newcomer to the book blogging community), and what fun! Thanks for organizing. It's inspired me to expand my book blog reading list...
+I just want to tell you again I think BBAW was awesome! This was my first year participating and it was really fun and enjoyable -- if a bit overwhelming! You certainly provided something for everyone and I'm amazed at what you and your team were able to pull off. I hope to help out next year -- I'm sure it will be even bigger and better. Thank you for all your hard work.
+?.
+Thanks Admin. I think I understand it now. But don’t ask me to explain it.
+BTW, the link kept crashing my internet browser.
+Ugly? Not a word unfamiliar to Cornwall residents.
+Finucan and friends (eg. turfed politicians) have more than a pa$$ing interest in our section of the St. Lawrence, what with Verdant Energy and the Cornwall Ontario River Energy (CORE) project to generate power with underwater turbines.
+It’s not just the St. Lawrence that smells fishy… watch out for post-election lining of pockets, feathering of nests, and sweet under the table deals.
+Simon CFN will be vigilant with the help of the community. So far the new council has two red flags. I’m hoping for the best; but actions always speak louder than words…
+Hi Simon,
+The federal and Quebec governments put money into a Quebec company to develop an underwater turbine . . . . and 2-units have been churning away under the St Lawrence River just south-west of Montreal. The only place where those turbines will be installed commercially would be on some rivers in Northern Quebec near first nations reservations . . . those reservations presently use diesel generators to produce electric power.
+Given the politics of Canada, the product from the Quebec company will definitely be considered for Northern installations
+Hi again Simon, All the webpages on the project you mention, are several years old . . . dating back between 2007 and 2011. During that time, both New York Power Authority and Ontario Hydro have upgraded their respective side of the international dam. They have raised power output from 1600MW (megawatts) to almost 2000MW . . . that’s an extra 400MW and many, many times the projected output of the river project mentioned in the old webpages. A few years ago, New York Power Authority vetoed a proposal for a mass installation of river turbines near Ogdensburg . .… Read more »
+Simon et al, Cornwall receives electric power from Quebec while Ottawa receives most of their electric power from ONTARIO . . . even though Quebec is right across the river. Queen’s Park restricts the amount of electric power that Ottawa Hydro can import from Hydro Quebec . . . . the cheapest electric power in North America. Without that restriction, electric power prices in Ottawa could drop. As a result, there would be no need for heavily subsidized solar farms and wind farms across Eastern Ontario. With regard to river turbines, some 8-companies were given government funding to develop such… Read more »
+Do you think the Ontario government would allow Ottawa to import electricity from Quebec and lower prices? Not a chance, as long as they have Hydro One, etc. sitting there heavily in debt.
+Jamie, Simon raised a good point about the political friends and the government funded energy project. Cornwall Electric’s contract with Hydro Quebec will expire within the next 24-months. Should they renew with Hydro Quebec, then Cornwall will be assured of competitive electric power prices. HOWEVER, political friends who represent energy industry associations have been quietly lobbying Queen’s Park . . . . opposing initiatives to import electric power from Quebec. These associations represent sectors of the energy industry that will generate electric power at much higher prices than Hydro Quebec . . . their technology requires subsidy. While Southern Ontario… Read more »
+Our electricity here in Ottawa is a lot higher than that of Cornwall’s and yes it is Ottawa Hydro who is in charge of this and I wanted to point something out is that at times when you need the electricity to work like at supper time, etc. it is mighty weak like a candle when you put on your stove. At first we thought that it was just the apartment buildings that they were doing this to until we spoke to our friend Robert and some others who own single homes and it is the same thing. There is… Read more »
+I just hope that Leslie fares out a great deal better than Bare Ass and I keep telling myself how worse can it ever be after experiencing all this corruption of Bare Ass and company. When money changes hands there are no friends only business partners. Well we have to have some kind of hope and if things go sour then what. People would have really lost it if there are no improvements. I am literally disappointed in three who were re-elected and one newbie. I am like a push and shove both into one and we will see the… Read more »
+Jules…..at peak demand times if demand is greater than supply electricity is rationed out.
+With regard to electric power in Cornwall, there is the possibility that people with political connections to Queen’s Park may attempt to ran Hydro One on to Cornwall, just as Cornwall Electric’s agreement with Hydro Quebec comes due for renewal. There is much anti-Hydro Quebec sentiment going on in Ontario these days, especially amongst people who have political connections to Queen’s Park and who are connected to the power industry.
+The current contract between Fortis and Hydro Quebec expires Dec 31st 2019. This contract was given an exemption until its completion date under the Green Energy Act. Under the current legislation Fortis will not be permitted to enter into any further agreements with Quebec Hydro. Energy must from that date forward be purchased from an Ontario supplier.
+Under federal legislation Quebec Hydro cannot charge more internally (Canada) than it does on the international market (USA) This means currently that if Quebec Hydro was to enter into agreements with Ontario jurisdictions the cost would be in the 7-8 cent per kwh range on a long term contract basis. While this would benefit all Ontario customers it does not conform with the current and past Liberal government ideology. The electorate rewarded the Liberals with a majority in the most recent election sending the message that the majority are in favour of higher taxation, higher energy costs, and greater expenditure… Read more »
+Oh joy, David Oldham, you’re just full of good news today aren’t you? Just what we want to hear that come 2020 our hydro bills are going to skyrocket.
+I didn’t ask for Wynne and her government. But I have to accept the will of the uninformed.
+Hugger, it was actually the Cons who made sure that Wynne would win. They couldn’t have chosen a more repulsive and stupid leader.
+Keeping ones head buried in the sand creates the illusion of safety.
+Sort of agree with Furtz. But to me it was uninformed voters who gave the Cons the thought that they could win with Hudak.
+David Oldham….I NEVER bury my head in the sand. It makes it hard to breath.
+I think the voters sent a strong message to the Cons about Hudak two elections ago. They didn’t listen. Both those elections should have been cakewalks for the Cons.
+Burying one’s head in the sand keeps the woodsmoke out of the lungs.
+Mr. Oldham is absolutely right folks and I have been reading plenty about this for some time now. We are all going to face high taxes on everything and yes Ontario is broke literally. There will be a terrible strain on heating, lighting your home, etc. I spoke yesterday about we here in Ottawa not getting the full power in homes and apartments and Hugger answered me that it was being split between people because of demand and it is a big strain on the system and it is going to get a great deal worse than what it is… Read more »
+Here’s hoping Leslie O’Shaughnessy and Brock Frost have enough sense to declare their conflicts of interest when it comes to their real estate dealings. After watching Elaine MacDonald’s non-action on conflicts of interest in the last council I’m hoping for proper action by Leslie O’Shaughnessy and Brock Frost. But Elaine MacDonald did declare her conflict of interest in the Agape Centre the last time they were up for discussion. But then she continued to discuss AND vote on the motion. She just doesn’t get it or doesn’t understand what conflict of interest is. Carilyne Hebert is another I’m concerned about.… Read more »
+TO David Oldham, Thanks for clarifying the situation with regard to Cornwall receiving electric power from Hydro Quebec . . . so we get Quebec power until the end of 2019. While Ontario’s green energy supplies 4% of Ontario electric power, it accounts for about 20% of the power bill, see article: David, you revelation confirms my suspicion . . . . the behaviour of the political friends of Queen’s Park, who live in this area, were literally dropping hints of an impending hijacking of electric power in Cornwall. As a result, Cornwall’s economic future is literally screwed unless… Read more »
+OK people . . . . can we take a stand to fight for access to continued cheaper electric power after 2019. Yes, we’ll be going up against some politically well-connected friends of both Queen’s Park and Cornwall’s soon-to-be former mayor. These political friends have their own ambitions and interests . . . and Cornwall’s continued access to hydroelectric power from Quebec is neither an ambition nor an interest of theirs. So perhaps during the term of Cornwall’s next mayor, some of us may be able to stir up the electric power situation and protect our right to free of… Read more »
+Mr. Valentine and folks you will be paying considerably higher electricity if Cornwall goes under Ontario Hydro. I won’t forget out hydro bills here in Ottawa when we rented a duplex and then a garden home. My husband and I would yell about the bills back then and we were really careful like misers and didn’t have the things that we have today and were working all day and never home until the evening and WOW it hit us between the eyes to see what we had to pay out. That was back in the early 80’s when we went… Read more »
+An UNELECTED bureaucrat likely made the decision to end Cornwall getting electric power from Hydro Quebec at the end of 2019 . . . . and the elected MPP, elected mayor and elected council are required to put up and shut up and submit to the high-handed behaviour of an unelected government employee or political appointee. This is nothing more than an act of abuse of governmental power being enacted by officials at Queen’s Park against the citizens of Cornwall, who are going to be required to cover the cost of excessive spending by earlier Ontario governments. The decision to… Read more »
+Mr. Valentine there will be more shocks yet to come and wait for the humoungous rise in water that everyone will be paying. Up goes my rent again. That will come do in March since the owner screwed up as usual and put the increases for the following year. Food is a nightmare in the stores. Some time ago I even suggested to people to grow their own food if they have yards. Food is going to be out of this world and already people are starving in many areas of the world. Many shocks are yet to come and… Read more »
+Harry Valentine said: What the hell kind of government is Premier Wynne running in Ontario ??
+I hope that was a rhetorical question.
+2020 is 5+ years away. There is still time to right the ship. We can get this deal where Cornwall Electric can’t buy electricity from outside the province fixed.
+Good luck Hugger1. I have been trying to get a city councilor to respond on this very issue for three years. Either they simply do not understand the ramifications or they don’t care. The economy of Cornwall is fragile at best and offers far to many service, call centre or warehouse type jobs in relation to careers which offer a wage capable of supporting a family. With a substantial welfare population and a large aging demographic Cornwall’s ability to withstand a changeover from an affordable Quebec power source to an outrageously costly Ontario supplier is rather limited. I would propose… Read more »
+Harry I was opposed to the sale of the city owned electrical utility, Cornwall Electric. Council of the day saw dollar signs and were blind to the future consequences of their short sighted vision.
+Yes they were.
+Calling it blind, I think, is being polite. Ottawa still owns their hydro utility and get massive profits from it every year.
+David Oldham, A few members of Cornwall City Council had political loyalties to Queen’s Park . . . so there was no way that they would challenge the Green Energy Act. The bureaucrat(s) who concocted the Green Energy Act would likely have been McGuinty appointees . . . and closely connected with the office of the former premier. So there was little chance for Cornwall to have challenged aspects of the Green Energy Act that would end the flow of electric power from Quebec. At the time that act was implemented, Charest was the premier of Quebec. Dalton McGuinty out… Read more »
+Harry I agree with your comment concerning political loyalties around the horseshoe at city hall. I suspect that the next four years will not only be challenging for the government but troublesome for the taxpayer as well. With a debt of over 288 billion dollars costs to service this debt are placing a strangle hold on budgets. Short of the government reigning in spending on a rather large scale taxation(fees) will have to climb. The reality is that regardless which direction the government chooses the average person is going to be worse off in four years time. The old concept… Read more »
+Hugger 1 said Ottawa still owns their hydro utility and get massive profits from it every year.
+Another view on that is the users are over paying to what amounts to, an extra tax revenue source to misspend by politicians to get photo ops.
+Eric…not really. The rates are set by the OEB, not Hydro Ottawa.
+Long time no see Eric. Welcome back to CFN.
+David et al,
+Let us recall that the citizens of Oakville/Mississauga rebelled against the natural gas plants that McGuinty and Co. were going to ram into their neighbourhoods. Their protest worked . . . and the Ontario Government cancelled the gas plants at a cost of several $-million.
+So there is hope for Cornwall to take a stand to protect getting low cost electric power from Quebec. We are part of a united Canada that includes Quebec . . . . NOT part of the sovereign independent dictatorship of Ontario.
+RE: Cornwall’s former CAO David et al, Did Cornwall’s former CAO who was implicated in the whistle-blower case, know about December 31, 2019 when Cornwall was going to lose access to hydroelectric power from Quebec? If he did’nt know, why was he the CAO. If he did know, did he advise Cornwall City Council? If not, then why not ?? If they knew about it, why the silence ?? Are they silent due to political loyalties to some special friends ?? Cornwall city administration needs to make a public statement about their knowledge over prospects of Cornwall’s future loss to… Read more »
+I really never left Admin, I still enjoy coming here. I have just been too sad to respond since Stellabystarlight stopped posting. LOL
+Hugger 1, the OEB can set rates, but 10’s of millions of dollars sent from Hydro Ottawa to City Hall annually, is over charging at one government type entity and giving to another.
+Stella refused to adhere to our new posting policy. If she (or he) ever wishes to comply they are welcome to join.
+Don’t expect much in the coming years in Cornwall because Ontario is in an enormous debt mostly do to the stupidity of McGuinty and we Ontarions have to pay for their dirty dealings. Electricity will become mighty high not to mention the water bills will rise not only in Ontario but all over Canada. Taxes will rise and people will have less in their pockets. There is a big drought just now in California so get ready to dish out more money for food. This coming spring get your ground ready in your back yards and make a garden for… Read more »
+I miss StellabyStarlight and was going to ask you Jamie where he/she is. This person had good postings.
+Jules Stella refused to comply with the posting rules for using pseudonyms when we switched over as you and other chose to do.
+All that Stella had to do was register his/her pseudonym just like I did and others. Your the only paper that I like and would not go to another. You have the best paper for Cornwall and so many do not appreciate your hard work and are also “envious” of you as well.
+While I hope something will be done to maintain Cornwall’s hydro rates past 2019 I also realize Cornwall (46,000) is small potatoes compared to Oakville (183,000) and Mississauga (713,000). Here’s hoping our local and provincial representatives make this a priority before it’s too late.
+Eric, I agree. Overcharging on hydro rates to give the city of Ottawa a big dividend cheque makes no sense. Robbing from Peter to pay Paul makes no sense.
+Thank you Harry for injecting some critical thinking into the debate.
+Very interesting questions Harry Valentine. I’d say that the former CAO knew about the 2019 cut-off date. If some average citizens know about the cut-off date then certainly the former and current CAO knows about it. And certainly city council knows. Here’s hoping everyone gets off their behinds and this problem becomes a priority to solve.
+Former US president Delano Roosevelt said back in the 30’s era that nothing just happens in politics and that you can be well sure it was well planned in advance. How mighty true that is. I believe that Fitzy knew all about the 2019 deadline where the Quebec Hydro will end for Cornwall. Politics at all levels is all planned ahead and no surprises for the politicians only for the general public.
+Of interest, Ottawa Hydro owns several small hydro-electric power stations on the Ottawa River and one at Rideau Falls. The little power dams date back to 1890, were mothballed for several years until being recently re-activate to generate about 100-megawatts of power (about 10% of the output of the Canadian side of Moses Saunders power dam). If some of Cornwall’s political elite were hoping to have Finucan’s turbines generate electric power for Cornwall, they may be getting far less than they may expect. About 5-years ago, Transport Canada banned kinetic turbines from being installed under commercial navigation channels . .… Read more »
+Dr. Andrew Wakefield Speaks Out on CDC Vaccine Science of children through the total lack of government oversight. It has to stop.
+July 27, 2015.
+"It was a very dark time. ...It's rather like a nightmare where you see a catastrophe taking place before your eyes. You've got all of these parents coming and saying the same thing whether they live in India, or Europe or America, they are telling you the same story. They're not making it up. . . . They realize they have a story in common with so many other parents. So you're seeing a lot of children being damaged. At the same time your ability to do something about that is being stripped from you. You can't help them clinically, you can't help them scientifically. What do you do? And that is a nightmare.
+"What's interesting is ultimately, when you lose everything, when you lose your career, and your income, and the letters after your name, it's strangely liberating. Strangely liberating because you think, right, everything's gone, you've got nothing left you can take away from me, so I'm going to become your worst enemy. And with my great friend, Polly Tommey, we decided that if you're going to take on the media, you have to become the media. . . ."
+Wakefield pointed out that the push to end exemptions and remove parental rights is bringing this to a head. He went on to talk about the whistleblower. He said that in 2001, CDC scientists tested the hypothesis that the younger a child receives the MMR vaccine, the greater the risk for autism. They found it was correct--and they were told to bury the data. Thompson refused to announce the fraudulent findings at the IOM Meeting in 2004. Instead, as Dr. Wakefield said, "The lead author, Dr. Frank De Stefano, went up there and lied. He presented the false data, said there is no problem. The IOM said, that's it, no further funding should be given to vaccine safety research. In Vaccine Court, 5,000 cases were pulled, based on that decision. . . ."
+Wakefield continued explaining how William Thompson broke protocol and contacted Dr. Julie Gerberding, then head of the CDC, about the data they found. For doing that, according to Wakefield, what Thompson got was "a threat to sack him for trying to expose the truth. And the whole thing then was covered up. Julie Gerberding left and went to Merck, to become the head of vaccines on some huge salary." Wakefield also explained how the whistleblower's story came out.
+The upcoming rally at CDC's headquarters in October was talked about. Dr. Wakefield said he would be there along with Tony Muhammed of the Nation of Islam, and Robert Kennedy, Jr. "We will get the kind of attention that this deserves because it is an utter disgrace. It's an utter disgrace that you can take, even in this day and age, a particular racial subgroup, who you know are at very high risk, and you can consider that acceptable collateral damage for your policy? . . .
+"One of the senior authors of that paper. . . is an African American woman. Watching this happen. . . . It's reminiscent of . . . the CDC, the public health experiments in Tuskegee with syphilis. The experiments in South Central Los Angeles with a measles vaccine that was known to be highly reactogentic, very dangerous. It was causing deaths in children in developing countries.
+"What are we thinking? What are we thinking to allow this to happen? Did they think this would never come out? Did they think they would be able to conceal this forever? Clearly they did. That's the thinking of the people who are in charge of the health of this country."
+Wakefield went on to describe the differences between the mercury additive, thimerosal, the aluminum used in vaccines, and the live virus MMR vaccine. He called for recognition of autism as a medical condition, not a psychological one.
+Wakefield made a dramatic appeal for our country to address the future needs of this disabled generation. "We cannot watch them just fall upon the mercy of a system, a society that does not care." He said that Polly Tommey in Austin, TX, had started a center for adults with autism that addresses their specific needs called. The continuing disaster will involve the coming adults that we're not prepared to handle or pay for.
+Here is an interview between Alex Jones and Andrew Wakefield which Youtube cannot take down. It is from Brighteon which, as I am sure most of you know, Mike Adams created to overcome the increasing risk of censorship.
+Posted by: susan welch | January 29, 2019 at 06:58 AM
+Video has been taken down😔
+Posted by: Christine | January 28, 2019 at 04:57 PM
+Great interview. I am a vaccine injured patient, when I talk to any pediatrician, they seem to be completely unaware of adverse effects of vaccines, they just try to convince us to get all the shots at once for the kids.. how in the world they are not informed about this.. Big pharma is least bothered, it is just interested in filling their pockets at the cost of public's health.
+Thank you both for this interview.
+Posted by: Anti-vacc | January 12, 2016 at 06:24 AM
+Amanda Mary a GcMAF Mother Nature and You doc in danger. Another accident or suicide going to happen?
+Posted by: All | August 09, 2015 at 02:35 PM
+Wanted to add my thanks for an enlightening interview.
+Truth to power.
+Posted by: Greyone | August 08, 2015 at 05:58 PM
+Dr. Andrew Wakefield is right. However the problem is far broader of the discussed example. Human population are very diverse in terms of genetic susceptibility to any infectious disease. Over 90% of World-wide population possess inherent immunity to all known infections and thus do not need to be vaccinated. Far less than 10% of any populations do not possess hereditary immunity. The morbidity and mortality conditioned by infections is predestined by existent minority of genetically defenseless individuals and isolated ethnic groups. That means the principle of total vaccination is at least 10-fold more excessive then real necessity
+Rumyantsev SN. Hereditary Immunity: Fundamental Principles and Exploitation in LifeStudy and Health Care. New York: Nova Biomedical Books, 2008. Rumyantsev SN. Biological Weapon. A Terrible Reality? Profound Delusion? Skillful Swindling? New York:Vantage Press, 2006. Rumyantsev SN. Is Bioterrorism Idea a Delusion or Skillful Swindling? Puurs, Belgium: UniBook, 2010.
+Posted by: Sergey N. Rumyantsev | August 08, 2015 at 08:26 AM
+This was a great interview. Thank you Dr. Wakefield for your wisdom, integrity, humanity and courage, and thank you Stacy for your professional independence and courage too. The justice pendulum is rapidly swinging toward vaccine injured children and their families, and away from criminal vaccine poisoners. I believe that Nobel prize is in your future, Dr. Wakefield. You deserve it more than any other doctor.
+Posted by: no-vac | August 05, 2015 at 05:25 PM
+Well spoken Dr Wakefield and one of your old sayings was "the long haul" yep! and yep! again!, were not finished yet.
+MMR RIP
+Posted by: Angus Files | August 05, 2015 at 03:20 PM
+I, for one, am very grateful that Dr. Wakefield refused membership in Doctors Without Balls.
+Posted by: Carol | August 05, 2015 at 01:13 PM
+The statement about what is happening to all those young men made me cry. This is the best interview so far. I hope the march brings lots of publicity.
+Posted by: Birgit Calhoun | August 05, 2015 at 12:42 PM
+Hi Aline
+Is anyone investigating Fombonne?
+Posted by: John Stone | August 05, 2015 at 08:12 AM
+Dr Fommbonne is in a heap of trouble and the vaccine industry knows it. When the public starts to put all this together, they will be through with these "scientists." They will catch on that the most vocal critics of vaccine safety are paid spokesmen who either a) Work for disgusting industry front groups (ie, American Council of Science and Health Trustee Paul Offit), b) are utterly corrupt and dishonest (Eric Fombonne) or c) are pathologicallly criminal (Poul Thorsen - by the way, where IS he?) orégon portland
+Posted by: aline | August 05, 2015 at 06:34 AM
+Dr Fombonne MCH montréal ; OregonDr Fommbonne est dans un tas d'ennuis et de l'industrie du vaccin sait. Lorsque le public commence à mettre tout cela ensemble, ils seront à travers avec ces «scientifiques». Ils seront prises sur ce que les critiques les plus virulents de la sécurité des vaccins sont les porte-parole qui soit a) travailler pour des groupes avant de l'industrie dégoûtant (payés à-dire, du Conseil américain de science et fiduciaire de la Santé Paul Offit), b) sont totalement corrompues et malhonnête (Eric Fombonne) ou c) sont pathologicallly criminelle (Poul Thorsen - en passant, où il eST)?
+ORÉGON portland
+Posted by: aline | August 05, 2015 at 06:33 AM
+In 1980, California had a law for a marriage license to be issued, the woman has to get the MMR if she was unsure if she had these as a child. I did not know nor were there records, so I did get the injection one August day, 1980. Labor Day, jerry Lewis TV fund raiser was on and I was bedridden for 2 weeks, fevers, flush, muscle cramps.
+Was it the batch or me, the MMR or something else.
+Another nurse had the same exact reaction.
+You cannot take it back.
+I am bummed and have lived with it and the affects since. Note I have known others and the debate goes on.
+CDC, and the lobbyists get paid to say what they do, it is not always the truth and mostly not.
+AC
+Posted by: AC | August 05, 2015 at 03:55 AM
+Thank you Dr. Wakefield and Stacy Francis for exposing the truth!! I will be at the CDC rally in October!
+Posted by: Lucy Cole | August 05, 2015 at 02:00 AM
+Finally, an interviewer with a hunger for the truth. And with the decency to treat a true hero with the respect he deserves.
+Posted by: Barry | August 04, 2015 at 08:30 PM
+The website with all of the rally details should be live within 48 hours. Please keep checking: Rally Demanding Truth & Transparency 10/23-25
+Posted by: Michelle F | August 04, 2015 at 05:37 PM
+Outstanding! Stacy is a fine interviewer, and Dr. Wakefield never disappoints. He is the mother country's best gift to us ever. Rare it is to find honorable and noble behavior in a public figure. An eloquent champion for all that is right. I will be at the march in October. No issue is more important for our nation.
+Posted by: Gary Ogden | August 04, 2015 at 05:16 PM
+Dr. Wakefield -
+Every time I read something that you have written or watch you in an interview, I am profoundly inspired by your courage.
+It has helped me be braver.
+Posted by: Aimee Doyle | August 04, 2015 at 03:45 PM
+This is why they are terrified to let Dr. Wakefield speak (and why that coward Dr Offit refuses to debate him).
+Such an excellent interview! I believe Dr. Wakefield should receive the Nobel prize some day (hopefully soon). I can't think of anyone more deserving. Such a hero.
+Posted by: AnneJ | August 04, 2015 at 03:14 PM
+Dr. Wakefield will get the Nobel Prize in Medicine one day.
+HEY tell us more about this rally at the CDC? When, where, how, etc! Time to plan a trip to DC! DC to the CDC, DC to the CDC.
+CDC causes ASD
+Posted by: I'm IN | August 04, 2015 at 02:22 PM
+Thank you Stacy !!!
+You are doing what the rather debunk show of 60 Minutes used to do...
+30+ years ago it was the same thing with the "whole cell DPT shot" which was killing children until it was taken off the market.
+"SIDS was then invented" to try to explain to parents what was happening to their children because of the DPT vaccine.
+Posted by: go Rand | August 04, 2015 at 02:00 PM
+Anne, thank you for alerting us to Stacy's interview.
+@Benedetta, what you said!
+Posted by: Jeannette Bishop | August 04, 2015 at 12:38 PM
+Julie Gerberding and Frank DeStefano would have been hanged for treason years ago. They are first class thugs and need to face charges. People like Jake can say what they want about the handling of Dr. William Thompson but he is still alive.
+Posted by: False scientists make me laugh | August 04, 2015 at 12:14 PM
+Well they all should have know for 30 years and not 13 years. It is not like parents were not there complaining about the DPT shot. Even now the DTaP is causing great harm.
+By the way: "When you take everything away - it causes freedom -- I am now your worse enemy. "
+Heroes are few and far between cause - it ain't easy to be a hero. Wow!
+Love the interview, wonderful!
+Posted by: Benedetta | August 04, 2015 at 09:53 AM
+Okay, so the headline is an inside joke.
+But watching the Capitals and Rangers play three overtime periods Wednesday night, where you like me in hoping they’d go to a fourth? And a fifth? And a sixth…?
+I don’t know, I always think that maybe I’m gonna get to see some type of history in the making in these things. Like 11 overtimes of sudden death or something. I mean, Ryan McDonagh only played 53 minutes and 17 seconds. What would he have looked after 100 minutes? How many shots would he have blocked by then? He was already halfway to 16.
+Anyway, I would have never picked Marian Gaborik to end things, even though he was the Rangers top goal scorer in the regular season. That was his first in the playoffs since Game 1 against the Senators.
+For a guy who earns a team-leading salary of $7.5 million, he’s not exactly what you’d call a big game player.
+And who wouldn’t have bet that the Nashville Predators would rally without the boozin twins, A. Radulov and A. Kostitsyn? Think Barry Trotz will re-instate them for Game 4?
+I wouldn’t.
+Why did the song have to end, Soupy?
+Okay, so the headline is an inside joke.
+That’s a tough question. If they sit them out agan and win then the move is a good one but Radulov is a potential game breaker so if they lose a close game and go down 3-1, the move would look terrible. They only scored 2 goals in their last game so I would at least play Radulov.
+Of all the people in the business (players, ex-players, coaches, ex-coaches, commentators, pundits) Dum Cherry was the only one who thought Barry Trotz was making a mistake. Indeed, he called his decision to sit Radulov and Kostitsin, “a political move” and implied it was to manage perception. What hog wash. After the Predators won the game the Clown Prince of HNIC went on to suggest Trotz put he and team in a difficult position as it relates to who would/should dress for the next game! As far as I am concerned, the call is a simple one; after the tough call for the two stars to sit, it is an easy one to allow them to play.
+Trotz, the Rodney Dangerfield of NHL coaches, made his point and it was a good one an several levels:
+- the fans in Nashville, most of whom like we fans in Ottawa are hard working stiffs, learned there are consequences for irresponsible/selfish acts. As much as they may have been upset at the players (and equally doubtful with the teams ability to wint without them) I am sure they have gained some respect for the organization;
+- with the win, they fans were inspired and excitement is contagous;
+- the players who toed the line all year and into the post season know there is only one set of rules and they apply equally to all no matter the situation or who the players may be;
+- for the team to win without 2 of their leading scorers had to make the team that much more confident they have the horses to be successful;
+- knowing they can win with guys like Tootoo the players will have that much more confidence with the reinstatement of Radulov and Kostitsin.
+So, you have my answer, I would most defintely play them. Radulov and Kostitsin should be embarrassed (I am not sure they can be) and if they are, they will want to make ammends to pacify their team mates, coach, the GM and the fans. Both know they are show casing their skills for contracts next year. It has to be a good go in Nashville; the team is emerging as a contender, the city is great and weather wonderful, the Coach is a super guy. As you suggest Mikey, only two goals were scored and the team is infinitely more dangerous with the Ruskies in the lineup. The decision to sit them was risky, but it was a calculated risk. The Preds were successful before the Rad/Kit arrived but, they have been that much better with their arrival.
+Mikey, you don’t need to appologize for agreeing with me. Sometimes, burried in all the “hate” I do can some sense. You concede accurately that Gonchar looks terrified but fail to say the same about Karlie, why? Kuba goes from the outhouse to the penthouse after one season, go figure. Can the team win with all the soft (and some very slow) defence? No they can’t!
+Don’t you find it odd that the Sens want to sign Kelly after letting him go? Isn’t amusing to see all the support for it by the media in this City (the very same who endorsed the trade that sent him away). It made sense to move him (for some inexplicable reason) and now it makes sense to reacquire him. He NOW, can mentor players like Smith (I guess he couldn’t do it before?). Smith is always the one mentioned, not Android who scored only 2 more goals playing with the teams best, not Foligno, Condra, and the host of other ham and eggers. Kelly is a year older and will come at a higher price than when he left, so, somebody please, explain to me why it made sense to let him go and why now it makes sense to get him back?
+Shane Obrien, who the Sens could have gotten for very little, is now being mentioned as a someone who should be considered as is Bryan Allen. These are the very two guys I suggested the team should have tried to get two years ago. Both are very physical, both can take care of business, both block shots and both are CANADIAN! These two wouldn’t be giving “free passes” inside the blueline like the current contingent do!
+Murray drafted Zibby and I say he has potential but could (should have?) have drafted Coutourier. While Zibby was scoring 5 goals in the soft and relatively weak Swedish Elite League, the 19 year old Courtourier was scoring 13 goals in the NHL and he registered a plus 18! The 6-4 Coutourier also has 3 goals and 4 points in the playoffs (plus 2). He plays against the other teams very best and he is one of the two team leaders in TOI! But, this hockey club doesn’t need Canadians and certainly does’t need French Canadians. But they do more Yanks, Scandanavians and Parisiens!
+It is fascinating to me that in Eugene’s open letter he fails to mention the brilliant year that Spezza had:
+- 4th in the entire league with 84 Points in 80 games (+ 11);
+- 3rd in the league in even strength points (no “padding stats” on the PP);
+- 15th in the league in Goals (3rd among centermen);
+- 9th in the league for Assists (6th among centermen);
+- 1st in the league for Points Scored on the Road (42);
+- 1st in the league in Face Off Percentage;
+- 2nd in the league in percentage of Face Offs Taken (35.5)
+– led team in post season with 5 points in 7 games, was + 2 (3 games playing with kids who never played a game in the NHL before);
+- yet his line was plus 6 but the guy “who was Ottawa’s best player”, Alfredsson, had 2 points, was minus 3 and his line a big fat minus 6!
+Spezza is neither a King or God, but is a great hockey player!
+Bobby,
+I agree now that it appears the Sen’s should have drafted Couturier instead of Zibanejad, although Zibanejad very much could still turn into a very good player. Before the draft, the knock on Couturier, deservedly or not, was that he didn’t seem to show up for the playoffs and was lazy. That may explain why a 6’4″ scoring centre dropped to 8th over all in the draft instead of going higher. That being said, we will probably be able to assess which player was a better pick after about 5 or 6 years. Some players start off their careers very well and then fade.
+I agree with you about Spezza. He doesn’t get the credit he deserves. If it wasn’t for his 7 million dollar salary, I’d feel sorry for him.
+Mikey, Coutourier suffered from a long bout with Mono in his draft year; he didn’t shine the way he should have had he been healthy at the world juniors that year and that’s why he dropped in the draft. Certainly all the scouts should have known that! I remember seeing him play as a Junior and he was unbelievable! He is only 19 playing in the best league in the world and he is excelling. I like Canadian kids for a variety of reasons.
+Spezza gets not respect and I don’t get it. He’s made everyone who played with him, much better: Heatley never scored scored 50, or 40 goals again after leaving Ottawa and playing with Spezza. God had his best years playing with Spezza. Michalek had his best year in his career playing with Rocco in the middle and the Android scored only when he was on the first line with Jason. All merely a coincidence?
+Number 19 was 4th in the league in scoring this year, how does that compare with any Sen in the last 20 years? Keep in mind, he accomplished that feat playing with anybody and everybody on the right side! Everyone goes crazy over Getzlaf but he couldn’t carry Jason’s jock strap. What do you think Spezza would do if he had the league’s MVP last year, Perry, on his line? Perry is big, tough/nasty and a gifted goal scorer. But it doesn’t stop there, Getlaf also enjoys the luxury of Bobby Ryan on his line another tough and talented winger! What would Jason have done with the big, very tough James Neal on the left wing like what Malkin enjoys. He also has Kunitz another skilled and very tough winger. If you messed with their centermen, these wingers could step in a take care of business and they often did! I think Michalek is great but he isn’t tough and there was always a zero on the right side.
+This is what drives me crazy Mikey, with 616 points in 606 games (plus 77) and 51 points in 53 post season games, he would be celebrated in any other NHL city but not in Ottawa. His playoff numbers would have been better if didn’t have to play with two kids in 3 games and no legitimate 1st line right winger! He had an outstanding year but who noticed? Since Ottawa was ousted, the Sun and the other newspaper have polluted their pages with stories about King and God. Supersaturation is not in their venacular. Indeed, when Spezza had a bad game, he was the reason for the team’s failure. Not once did anyone point out the failings of the Norris Trophy candidate or the Captain. Spezza’s 5 points in 7 games and plus 2 blew God’s 2 points and minus 3 away but, many including some who contribute to this blog suggested Alfredsson was Ottawa’s best performer. Why? It is like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” but instead of replicating the bodies, the “aliens” have taken over everyone’s mind! Spezza’s line even with a man short, were plus 6 to Alfredsson, Turris and Foligno’s minus 6 but hey, lets not let fact get in the way of a feel good story.
+So, I ask you Mikey, who really was Ottawa’s MVP in…
+So the Sens played a great series and came oh, so close but in the end the Rangers kitty bar the door technique won out. I don’t see them being able to win the Cup though. If they can make it past the Caps then either Jersey or the Flyers will take them in 6 or less.
+So many comments and so many expected comments it will be impossible to address them all but I will pick out some highlights:
+Vis, once again you expose yourself as just an instigator, not a fan.
+- Arvedson was “the machine” not Dackell but both did account themselves very well while in Senators uniforms
+- The Senators, like every other team in the league fortunate enough to make the playoffs consistently have lost many playoff series with many players so not sure what your point is about Karlsson
+- Silverdud – my you are original. It seems you have taken to sophomoric humour to try and gain favour with Bobby since he is the only one who ever agrees with you and is also a fan of making up names for players. I expect you won’t be making fun of Silfverberg for long
+- Michalek a plug? This comment shows your ignorance more than most of your drivel
+- Anderson actually did come out and shake hands
+- Stone did make a good play on that assist but it was obvious he needs to continue to work on his skating as he was not keeping up the play in transition at all although he will be good in the offensive zone
+Bobby, same old refrain so I won’t debate your views on Karlsson although I will say again it is tiresome to read you post the same stuff over and over…that said, a few notes on Karlsson’s season to match your comments on Spezza. BTW, Spezza wasn’t #1 in Faceoff percentage – he was well down the list but he did take the most faceoffs. In fact, both Konopka and Winchester were better than Spezza on the draw
+- 10th in the entire league in scoring
+- top scoring even strength defender (4 more PP than Spezza – no padding stats)
+-#1 in goals for D and scoring
++16 and 16th in league for D playing on a team that scored 7 more goals than it gave up
+4th in the league in assists
+Scored more points than any D in almost 20 years
+Had largest margin between himself and other D since P Coffey
+Norris candidate and some would say favourite
+He also played hard the entire series and showed he can be physical when required. He didn’t give himself up to take unnecessary hits even though some (even Sens fans) would love to watch him get pasted into the end boards. Already a star and a hair away from being a super star.
+Very interesting that Team Canada shrugged it’s shoulders when Spezza asked to play in the WC…especially with the Olympics now only a little bit away – I wonder what part of his game they don’t like?
+WAY too early to be passing judgement on Zibby – we have no idea how he will turn out so not even worth a discussion at this point. As for being upset that Silf decided to go back, I like that he has the mental strength to do what he felf was right -…
+You’re right Dave, I was wrong again. Indeed he was way down the list, 10th? But, he did faceoff 1700 times which was a minimum of 300 more than the next guy and as many as 1100 more than others who were ahead of him.
+Dave I am disapointed in you actually. You know the game but as much as I will concede bad games played by Spezza you will never do the same for Karlie. For you to suggest Karlie played hard, is just plain silly. If Karlie is not getting points, he is of no value. In 7 games in the post season he never skated with the puck past two lines; he didn’t quarterback the power play; he never used his speed; he didn’t block shots; didn’t hit anyone; was soft in his own end; coughed it up when pressured; never went into a corner; and, he got only one point on a fluke goal scored from behind the red line. Is this playing hard? I have OFTEN said he had an amazing year, but he was invisible in the playoffs, so for you to spew back his regular season numbers is a waste, I know what he did.
+I take it then Dave, you support Hockey Canada’s decision not to allow Spezza to play in the World Hockey Championship? That’s another disapointment. Getzlaf is a better choice? He played in all 82 games this year and scored 11 goals with 46 assists for 57 points. He did ALL THIS playing with Perry and Ryan on the wings! Oh yes, he was -11. He was 27 short of Spezza’s total of 84 and 22 behind in the plus/minus (I know, it’s a meaningless statistic). So these numbers would make Spezza a liability in the WHC? Afterall, he didn’t lead Team Canada in scoring last year, he was only second behind John Tavares. Indeed I was wrong about the Leading the league in FO% (never said I was smart, dumb as spit actually) but he did league the league in number of FO taken; are the other stats are meaningless Dave?
+- 4th in the entire league in Points
+- 3rd in the league in even strength points
+- 15th in the league in Goals (3rd among centermen);
+- 9th in the league for Assists (6th among centermen);
+- 1st in the league for Points Scored on the Road (42);
+- LED TEAM IN PLAY OFF POINTS WITH 5 IN 7 GAMES AND PLUS 2.
+If Karlie played hard with one fluke goal, how did Spezza do playing 3 games with kids? Are you one of the many who suggest God’s 2pts and minus 3 was better?
+No one can predict the future Dave, we can can only comment on what we see. What I have witnessed is Zibby scoring only 5 goals in the SEL and Coutourier (a French Canadian) 13 in the NHL. I like Zibby (he may be Swedish but his parents are Iranian and Danish) but I will say I am terribly disapointed with his numbers this year. Of course you loved Rund’sbad and Butler got Butlered too and it was way too earlier to pass judgement on them.
+I shouldn’t be surprised that you celebrate the 21 year old Silfverberg’s decision to not test his game in preseason against NHLers the way the 18 year old Zibby did (as well as Petersson and Hoffman) but I am.
+OD:
+No one gives a crap about what Karlsdottir did in the regular season, it carries absolutely no weight in the playoffs, does not give you a first-round bye or an automatic win. When Karlie elevates in the post-season and leads this team to a championship I’ll give a crap about him. Untl then he’s a stat-padding softie like Mr. Toronto Jason Spezza.
+Spezza is Pierre Turgeon. He gets points in meaningless, low-pressure games but when it comes to the clutch in the playoffs he disappears and he can’t make his linemates better. Karlsdottir 78 points in the regular season, 1 point in the playoffs? Spezza a handful of points one empty net goal and another goal that bounced off Neil.
+This is supposed to be impress me?
+Bobby, Spezza is going to be our CAPTAIN.
+A CAPTAIN that goes to TORONTO every summer instead of staying in OTTAWA.
+A CAPTAIN that can’t elevate in the PLAYOFFS.
+A CAPTAIN that has never led ANYONE to victory.
+A CAPTAIN with no championships of ANY kind under his belt.
+A CAPTAIN whose greatest accomplishment is an AHL scoring title after which he was shut down by Scranton-Wilkes Barre iirc…sound familiar?
+It’s not my choice who the next captain is, but if Spezza is given the “C” I sure hope that when he’s along the boards and has a chance to make a hit and dislodge someone from the puck that he does so…and that he carries his team in the post-season and that he takes accountability for his actions instead of going “It’s not my fauly it’s everyone’s fault” and that he won’t pack and leave for Tranna in the summer, leaving the residents of OTTAWA wondering why their captain doesn’t like HIS TEAM’S city.
+Then I read that Don is shocked that some of us here in Ottawa DARE to want Murray replaced. Unbelievable I know but since you guys in the papers and radio won’t ask hard questions I will:
+1)How does Murray making jokes constantly and acting in a folksy manner reflect on the national capital and the spotlight place on its team? This is a city of white collar professionals living from the avails of country folk.
+2)Why has no one mentioned tha tthe Bingo Sens went from Penthouse to Outhouse?
+3)Why play Silfverberg when he has no NHL-sized experience?
+4)Why keep drafting these Euro-softies when you can get Canadians that have cut their teeth on NHL regulation rinks, smaller ice surfaces in a full-contact game?
+5)When will Murray have to win a playoff round? It’s been five years and this assembled team has not gotten it done.
+So many questions and no answers to be had!
+Bobby,
+Ottawa’s MVP is Daniel Alfredsson.
+He was a BEAST in game 7. He played shorthanded about 3 minutes, was on the PP and scored the team’s only goal. As usual, he was a two-way force. He put in more work and more effort than Softzza did and that’s shameful for Jason given Alfredsson is 39 and Softzza is 27 or so.
+Jason got points? Fantastic!
+One of the points was stat-padding after the team was down 4-0 and the game out of reach.
+One point into an empty net. Big whoop. Need I remind you what Al Iafrate said about empty net goals? “They’re for (rhymes with maggots)”.
+One goal nice shot on Lundqvist.
+Shutout in one of the games, Spezza took three dumb penalties.
+Game 7 completely invisible. Spezza without Alfredsson on his wing is mediocre. Period.
+As I said if he is going to be captain here then he and Erik need to worry less about stat-padding and more about an efficient two-way game that keeps games close, in other words playoff hockey!
+How can a guy who was 4rd in the league in scoring playing with bums on the right side, not be considered for MVP? Who led the league for points scored on the road? Exactly how do you pad your stats? Did God’s 2 points and big fat -3 make him a star in the playoffs? He didn’t inspire his linemates, as a unit they were -6 but, Spezza playing with kids was plus 6! In case you forgot, that means he was on the ice for 6 more goals for than against and that equates to 12 more than God and his linemates! Perhaps if the rest of the lines on the team were plus 6, the Sens may have advanced to the second round. I couldn’t care less if the Captain summered in Ottawa or on the moon; I am not one of the many who think they owe me more than providing entertainment on the ice. I don’t call privildged athletes great community contributors because they are asked to represent some charity and show up once in a blue moon when the media are on high alert. It’s all so very contrived, manipulating, and God building…but the lemmings eat it up. Don’t care! When do you ever see God out in public; he is extremely private and like the Kennedy’s stays on his compound and I say good…we get too much of him all year! I guess he isn’t a leader either; he never led the best team in hockey to a championship, did he? I guess Iginla isn’t a great leader, did Calgary win a cup on his watch? If God was such an inspiration, why didn’t he play with Silfverberg and Stone? Spezza is mediocre withough God? I think it’s just the opposite mon ami. Spezza had a great year playing a bunch of games with Bulter got Butlered, Condra and the Android who can’t carry the puck without falling down. How do you explain Heatley’s best years with Spezza and numbers going south since leaving Ottawa and Spezza? How do you explain God’s best years with Spezza as his center and numbers never coming close since being removed from his line? How many goals did Android score when he didn’t play with Spezza, not many Pierre and he went almost 20 games without a goal until he was reunited. Spezza should have starred with Silfverberg for two games and Stone for one? He still was plus 3 and your MVP, God, was minus 3…inspiring indeed. I was with my girlfriend and bumped into God at the Civic Hospital. Whereas she idolizes the man, I have met many hockey players and haven’t idolized a hockey player since I was 11. I see the man and tell her it’s Alfredsson and she goes up to say hello. He tried several times to get away saying he had appointments and late. I told him she was inspired by him. Only then did he make an uncomfortable effort to treat a very dedicated fan with a little bit of courtesy. There were not flash bulbs and no reporters in fact, there was no one in the hall, just the 3 of us. I stood away and allowed my GF some time with him. He spent 5 minutes with her and bolted. She, a PTSD sufferer, donates her time to DIFD, YKWIA, ROH and Roger’s House and more. She’s a real hero!
+Pierre, “Wild Thing” was not a member Mensa and I/we even rejected his application at Densa. I remember how he celebrated after his selection in the NHL draft; he took a gun and shot out street lights.
+You have to wonder what Hockey Canada’s agenda really is and how/why decisions are made. Do they really want to win hockey tournaments? Really? Every year they have made bone head moves to select lunch pales hockey players over stars. Why do we take this defence first posture? Canadians are the best hockey players in the world and other countries should be building teams to prevent Canucks from scoring goals. Russia and Sweden build their teams based on skill! Weren’t Gretzky and Stamkos “7th forwards? Tofoli wasn’t even invited to try out for the WJC team. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins was cut but, a year later he is invited to play in the WHC against men. Now to some this may make good sense but not to me and my twisted logic it does not. Interestingly, Spezza was rejected and Nugent-Hopkins’ game is tailored after Jason’s (Spezza is his favourite hockey player). The Nuge pulls on a Team Canada jersey and the older, stronger, experienced Sen watches. Go figure. I didn’t see Getzlaf help in the game the Canadian’s lost to the US. Does the Hockey Canada incestuous clique of incompetents really think a Junior will increase their chances to win games? Are there no better players from NHL or AHL teams that have been ousted? But these are the same guys who ignored Hunter and his .700 winning percentage but named Cam-moron who never won anything at any level as a coach for the WJC. And, these are the very same bunch who invited sons of ex-NHLers who didn’t belong to play. Someone, anyone, please help me understand. I never really cared a hell of a lot what happened at the “Worlds” but this year I do; I care even less. When ever is see/hear Bob Nicholson interviewed I get ill.
+Klesla should have been penalized much longer than the one game suspension. His hit sending the Predator is the most dangerous in hockey. Head shots can cause concuss but hits like Klesla’s can paralyze and kill make me cringe.
+I endorse the Regin signing. It is a shame he has been hurt for the last couple of years. I love players who possess speed and even more when they want and can do so something with the puck on their stick. To some like the much celebrated Greening, the puck is a boat anchor. Regin is one of the best penalty killers the team has. I have always believed that skilled players can be better at all parts of the game; they can be called upon to focus on defence but an unskilled player will never be a goals/point getter.
+LA looks strong and Drew Doughty a horse. He has all the offensive skills but, unlike Karlie, when the points don’t come he can and wilg deliver much more: punishing body checks, blocking shots, physical in front of his goalie, going into corners and retrieving the puck, not being caught out of postion as a 4th forward.
+I see Karlie has a point in the tournament; he assisted on a goal when Sweden had a 4 on 3 advantage. Getzlaf has 2 points in 3 games even after playing the equivalent of a Senior A team France. Stefan Da Oatsa touched the puck a couple of times that game (but the few transplanted French Canadians did well). The Junior player, Ryan Murray, looks like a fish out of water. Isn’t it interesting that of all the coaches that could have been selected to coach Canada in the mens WHC Hockey Canada settled on liver lips Sutter? Is it within the realm of possibility that he may be the Coach for the Edmonton Oilers next year? With The Nuge and Eberle in the lineup and of course the ever present Lowe, I strongly suspect the decision to select Sutter was a convenient one. What do you think? With the genius Yzerman orchestrating all the moves where do you think Team Canada will finish this year? If I were Jason Spezza, I would never answer the bell again if Hockey Canada ever came calling. The organization and the core group of the not so secret society, make me sick.
+Bobby,
+I was shocked when Spezza volunteered to play for team Canada and they told him the team was full. Since when does the Canadian team not wait until the entire first round is over to add players like Spezza and Richards? I agree, it has become a joke. They didn’t want the 4th leading scorer in the best league in the world? Unbelievable.
+Aint it the truth Mikey. But, there is at least one on this blog who supports the decision to rudley dismiss Rocco.
+Who would have thought the Devils would take out Philly. Certainly not me. I have been entirely wrong in my selectins this year. I now have to go with a “…from LA to New York and from New York to LA….” (a movie from the 80′s). It would be a final the NHL Brass could only dream about. I have pick LA to go….all….the….way! Hitcock said they were toughest team they played against and…Drew Doughty the best player! He has been asked by Sutter to play ‘more defensively” and that he can do very well and punish the opposition. As we have witnessed in since his first year in the NHL as a 19 year old, he can score goals too. No single dimension to his game.
+Bobby, what other conspiracy theories do you believe? Once again you are on the topic of being so much smarter then everyone else – we are all lemmings destined to follow whatever Bruce&Don or the Team 1200 tell us to follow.
+The funniest part of your rants over and over and over and over and over about Karlsson are that the EXACT same things can be said about Spezza – your golden boy who can do no wrong.
+Spezza had 0 points in the first three games of the play-offs and even one might have been able to help the Sens take a 2-1 lead instead of being down 2-1. i would hope that the 4th leading scorer in the regular season and a player that is supposed to help carry a team would have more of an impact – especially a player in the prime of his career.
+Did Spezza block any shots? Did he hit anyone? Did he decide to play tenacious D or to make the opposition pay for making plays? Not one hit on a D during the forecheck – the Rangers knew they could take all the time they wanted when the VERY LARGE Spezza was on the ice because he wasn’t going to bump into anyone unless it was by accident.
+Of course Spezza also reverted back to his old ways and started giving up golden opportunities to shoot the puck as well, happier to make a fancy play and turn a scoring opportunity into a turn-over (but those don’t count, right Bobby? They are at the other blueline…3-1 and 2-1 from the far blueline in don’t matter, only give aways inside the Sens blueline – which Spezza does plenty of as well I might add).
+Or what about his penalties? Game 3, when the Sens needed to keep momentum and maintain home ice advantage saw Spezza take a dumb penalty very early and then proceed to take 2 more. Combine that with his lack of energy and the Sens lose on home ice 1-0 (there was no God to guide him that game and show him what a real leader plays like in the play-offs).
+I hate that I even give you the satisfaction of replying to your constant Karlsson bashing but it is shocking and amazing to me that you don’t see that the very things you complain about in a 21 year old Norris trophy finalist (even the media themselves are lemmings – maybe one day they can see with your clarity) are typified in Spezza’s game. The only difference is that Karlsson made huge strides in his defensive game this season (not 10 years into his career) and that at about 35lbs lighter and 3″ smaller than Spezza he shouldn’t be expected to be a rough and tumble D.
+You also are full of it when you say you give Karlsson credit and call out Spezza – a handful of times you might say Spezza was brutal and I have mentioned when Karlsson has had bad games. I just don’t happen to think he was that bad in the playoffs.
+You only give Karlsson credit within context. He is good for an offenseman, he is good inside the other teams blueline (then go on and on about Doughty, etc…), Spezza could do what he is – even Ryan Shannon could be Karlsson if given a chance!
+And by the way Bobby – Spazz’s best years were when he was with Alfie and Cheatley as well…it goes both ways.
+Lastly, I LIKE SPAZZ. Giggles is an excellent player and the Senators are fortunate to have him but he is far from perfect and I will say again – the things you don’t like about Karlsson are the exact same things missing from Giggles game so it is disappointing for me to watch you write your constant (and I mean that in the very definition of the word) attacks on Karlsson. Now you are trying to pick his game apart at the Worlds?! Since you love to compare Karlsson to other guys with completely different skill sets I can say I wish Spezza had the heart and drive of Crosby, Malkin, Giroux (name any player who gives a damn and plays like it; how about Alfie?) I wish he would use his body like Crosby, Malkin, Perry, Getzlaf, St. Louis, Lecavalier, Iginla, etc…I could do that all day too but I don’t because I understand that there are a handful of complete players but Spezza, just like Karlsson, has gifts that the Senators are very fortunate to have at their disposal.
+You say you don’t hate but I don’t know I can believe you anymore – how about you are obsessed with Karlsson? For whatever reason you have decided that our superstar, uniquely talented 21 year old Norris candidate is your main whipping boy and you are completely blinded to anything positive he does. I, me, by using my own eyes and my own experience in hockey watched Karlsson, for the most part, play hard and be physical (as the play-offs dictate) during the 7 game series agains the Rangers. Did he have the impact I hoped? Not even close. He had flashes where he was a one man break out and he had the most shots on net (10 more than Spezza) but he also had long stretches where he wasn’t noticeable. It was a tough, grinding series and every inch and goal was hard to come by – if he or Spezza (or if Alfie didn’t miss 31/2 games) or Turris or Z. Smith (how he missed that open net…twice! In game 7 I won’t every know) could have put in one more goal the Sens might still be playing. The series wasn’t lost by one, two or even three players – it was just lost to a team that fought like hell to keep the puck out of their net and had a few fortunate bounces go there way. I do not concede that the better team won.
+Vis, you have your own views but as far as Spezza and Karlsson’s contributions in the regular season not mattering all I can say is it matters enough to make sure the Sens can make the play-offs. I don’t believe that Murray makes the decisions on the line-up but I do know that Silfverberg came off a fantastic regular season and play-offs and with his size and speed he wasn’t going to be out of place there.
+I personally didn’t like that he played – I thought Butler should have played since he had some experience and when he was inserted in game 3 he was all over the place and creating scoring chances while being good defensively too. I don’t think it…
+You are right Dave; Karlsson is really good for a guy who is 3 inches smaller than Spezza and 35 pounds lighter. I think you are on the right track, offer qualifiers when describing Karlsson. He is a fantastic defenceman outside his own blueline; he is unbeleiveable when he isn’t pressured. He is very phyiscal for an softie. When the puck hits him, he does block shots. Yep, thats the ticket. The reality is Dave, he did very little for the last five weeks of the season and even less in the post season. In the month of February, he had 4 games in minus category and 5 with 0 and if it wasn’t for his 3 pts and plus 5 game against Winnipeg, his numbers would have been far worse. His disinterested play continued into March; in 4 games he was 0 in the plus/minus, plus one then minus 2 and minus 1. He didn’t carry the puck, he didn’t quarterback the power play and he didn’t use his best asset, his speed. I never expect him to hit but every player in the NHL needs to go into a corner, sometime. If you think this is great hockey, then we are simply think differently. Spezzza in the months of February and March had but 3 games in the minus category. I say a Spezza was brutal a handful of times because that is all it was, a handful of times. Afterall, he did have to endure Butlere got Butlered, Condra, Greening, Silfverberg and Stone. Yes, Spezza gave up opportunities to score and that is why he ended up only 4th in the league in scoring oh, he and Karlie both gave the puck away 84 times and Spezza has the puck on his stick far more often.
+How else might you explain the mass manie but describe the followers as lemmings? Why boo a guy who has 616 pt in 606 games. Why celelbrate a man who scored 2 points and was minus 3 in the playoffs? Why celebrate a scrawny little kid who is afraid and did absolutely nothing in the post season? I suppose Dave you endorse Hockey Canada’s decision not to include Spezza on their roster.
+Would you like to bet another beer on whether Karlsson will get as many points next year Dave? You are a member of the overwhelming majority who love the kid, I am a member of only two who don’t (me and Pierre) and that is fine. I would take Doughty, Letang and a host of others over him and I will predict that Pietrangleo will win a Norris before Karlie will. I will predict that Doughty or Letang will win it next year. For a tiny litlle scared one dimensional offenseman, Karlsson is great.
+Bobby,
+You just don’t get it. There’s a big difference between saying Karlsson is great to saying Karlsson is horrible. If it were up to you, Karlsson would be cut from the team. If it were up to the “Voice of Reason”, both Karlsson and Spezza would be cut from the team, preferably by management threatening to spread nasty rumours about them.
+Essentially, both of you think the team would be better off without these players.
+You say that Karlsson is brutal but you compare him to elite defenseman like Doughty, Letang, Pieterangelo etc..Which is it? Is he in Campoli and Schubert’s class (both of whom you’ve rated ahead of Karlsson)? Or is he an elite defenseman?
+I might also take Doughty, Letang and Pieterangelo over Karlsson. But I like them all and it would be no reflection on Karlsson’s skill.
+In any case, contributions by you can be summed as “hate everything to do with Ottawa, but love Spezza”. From Visitor it’s “hate everything to do with Ottawa”. Nothing ever new or impartial. You guys are a broken record.
+Wow, I really got you there, didn’t I? You completely avoided anything that resembled an answer on Spezza’s deficiencies and once again took to attacking the Norris finalist and potential winner.
+You didn’t even reply to why Giggles is so soft and doesn’t do any of the physical things you expect out of a leader and someone who wants to win in the play-offs (he is Canadian after all…or is he? In your world all Canadian hockey players will give their blood to win, right?).
+You endorse one of the biggest guys in the league being a pansy who won’t throw a hit or take a hit. His sideways slide while reaching out with his stick is a classic Spazz move…almost as classic as his drop passing it to the other team for a breakaway or one that I love but is rarely mentioned, his blind pass to the slot from behind the net – he did that several times in game 6 and that broke up some good pressure the Senators had because he fired it right out of the zone.
+And you are interpreting my post wrong Bobby, I am not qualifying Karlsson by detailing the size difference between him and Mr. Blind Pass I am condemning Spazz for being scared and soft. Please offer some reasoning as to why the much smaller Karlsson is a scared kid for not being as physical as you like but Spazz isn’t? By the way, Karlsson out hit Giggles in both the regular season and play-offs by a 2:1 ratio.
+Both Karlsson and Super Slow Drag Move had one goal that mattered in the series and both came in victories. Chuckles got lucky on his pass to Carkner (right through the slot – could have given the Rangers a gimme goal) to give him 2 points that meant anything in the grand scheme of things – as the best player in the world and a guy who can do no wrong, I expect more.
+As for the give-aways I doubt Mr. CHL One-On-One Moves has the puck more than Karlsson since Karlsson played almost 5 1/2 minutes more per game, logging more than 400 more minutes than Giggles over the course of the season. Something you will again say is irrelevant is the fact that I would love to see how Karlsson’s game stacks up to Giggles 7 years from now – I believe he will have fine tuned his craft far more than Spezza was able to do at this point in his career.
+You can take Letang now and I will keep Karlsson…he is far better offensively already with far less weapons at his disposal and in 4 years, when Karlsson is 25 (like Letang is now) I expect he will have at least as good a defensive game.
+Good thing that Karlsson went into such a funk for the last 5 weeks or he would have embarrassed Spazz in the points department! Only 6 points behind despite such awful play down the stretch…can you imagine how many more lemmings there would be if that had happened?
+I think Spezza is perfect for the Worlds – big ice and no hitting. But he won’t get a sniff of the Olympic team because we need real Canadians there who know what it takes to win and have the guts to put it all out there.
+Davey, Davey, Davey…I didn’t know you hated Spezza. Wereyou one of the Lemmings booing him that fateful night at the Bank. You are so hell bent for leather to defend Karlsson you have ignored his horrendous play the last 5 weeks of the regular season. I have never ever suggested Spezza was physical, have I? As soft as he may be, he goes into corners and retrieves the puck; he doesn’t let others do the work for him. He shows up for games out of town. He wins face offs. He showed up in the post season with 5 points in 7 games and plus 3 so he must have done something right. If King and God were plus 3 and God’s line not minus 6, perhaps the team would have advanced; what do you think Dave? Me smart? Unfortunately I am not blessed that way; I am an honourary member of Densa. I wish Rocco had the heart and sould of others too, but he was upset after being ousted and wasn’t smiling ear to ear and swapping spit with Lundquist like the Girly Man Karlie. Karlie is horrendous in his own end. He doesn’t even make an effort. He exits going slowly for fear of being hit. When pressured he fires it off wildly. You loved his game the last 5 weeks of the year, I hated it, You loved his game in the post season I hated it. You celebrated God’s 2 points and minus 3, I didn’t. You see Dave, you miss the point. I favor defencemen with courage and that is sadly lacking with Karlie. As I have said, often, should you look at the stats, he is far down the list for blocked shots, hits and he is afterall, a defenceman. In spite of what you say, I never see him go coast to coast unless of course the coast is clear. I did see Campbell do it often though. You are a loyal fan I love that about you and most on this blog. I am a hockey fan first and Sens fan second. I will not celebrate scared, one-dimensional offenseman. Whether that be Karlie or anyone else. I didn’t like Rund’sbad because he was slow and scared (Phoenix doesn’t like him either, but you loved him). You loved Gilroy. You have endorsed every move the Murrays have made and I say great, you are a loyal fan. I will ask why two kids (who may never make it) didn’t get a chance to play for the team all year and in the playoffs but the 21 year old Silfverberg and 19 year old Stone did (and why did they play with Spezza for 3 games?). You wont. I suspect you thought that gave the team a better chance to win? It is comical you call Spezza gutless, I’ve heard lots of name calling but have never heard him called gutless and for a guy who loves Karlie, it is pretty funny. I put it out there again Dave, do you want to bet another beer on Karlie’s numbers next year?
+I think you are right Dave, Spezza will not play in the OIympics; Hokey Canada would look foolish if they changed their position and why would they want a guy who was 4th in the league in scoring with plus 11. They are far better off with a guy who finished the year with 25 fewer points and minus 11 playing with Ryan and Perry.
+Hi Dennis, I only hate decisions made that do not put the team in the best position to win hockey games; I don’t hate players, but I do hate the way some play? Karlie is a one dimesional kid softie. To me and my twisted logic, I think defencemen need to take the body; they need to go into the corners; they must be hard on the opposition in front of the goaltender; they shouldn’t expose the team by being caught up the ice many times ever game; they shouldn’t allow the opposition behind them and they should be great skating backwards. Call me crazy. I never liked Daisey the Air Rifle; OmyGod’brien works hard but is a bum like Daisey. The Missing Klink has averaged 11 goals in his professional career in the AHL. Butler, Condra. Everyone wanted Konopka out until the playoffs. Gilroy was another soft but slow defenceman. Da Costa got overe 20 games to showcase his emense skills. We got to witness them again when Canada played France. All the decisions made earlier that made the team old and slow (Smith, Richards to Comrie, Stillman to Kovalev and Gonchar, I hated. I also hated the decision to play two kids that never played a single game in the NHL in critical games in the post season over others who have shown they can play tough North American hockey at the professional level. I hated the decision to play Gilroy over Carkner in the first game and Butler 56 games in the regular season and 4 in the post. I hated 2 kids (one who was afraid to try his game in the pre-season against NHLers) playing with Spezza. Why not put them with God for inspiration!
+I didn’t like the Murray’s going after Rund’sbad; to me he was yet another soft offensive defenceman and this team has had many under Bryan Murray’s watch: Bell, Campoli, Picard, Wiercoch, Lee (although he changed his game and is infinitely better than Gilroy), Gilroy, Kuba, Gonchar and of course Karlie.
+I compare Karlie to the others you think (as I do) are much better because Karlie is up for the Norris and some here think he is great. He is great, in only one area getting points in games that don’t really matter. We will see how committed he is to getting stronger. It is my understanding, like going into corners and in front of his netminder, he doesn’t put in the effort. I love guys like: Smith, Neal, Spezza, God (although I am sick with the supersaturation and cannonization), Turris, Carkner’s and impact on others, Michalek, Anderson, Bishop, Lehner. I like Greening but he is a 3rd or 4th liner at best and only if he is physical.
+The 6-5, very physical Schubert scored 9 goals his second year in the league but the team didn’t invest in his development like Karlie. He watched from the press box while Richardson and Smith played. Campoli at that point in his career was better than Karlie on the PP (that is what I said). I like Canadians but Murray will draft yet another Swede. We will soon see how good Silfverberg and Zibby are (could have had Coutourier, a Canuck).
+Bobby I knew before that I would never see you change your mind about Karlsson but it is just now I realize why. None of your feelings or hockey thoughts are based in logic.
+You love Spezza and every part of his game, completely blind to the fact, or completely dismissing that he and his big frame shy away from contact at all costs. This is because for reasons only you know, you loved him when they talked about him as a 15 year old. At that moment you made up your mind he was great and nothing will sway you from that opinion.
+In the same vein you decided the moment that Karlsson was drafted that you didn’t like him and that he was a small, scared kid. Nothing will sway you from that opinion. The reality of the situation is that the things you spot as glaring weaknesses in Karlssons game are in fact glaring weaknesses in Spezza’s game. For no logical reason you decide one is a terrible player (which in itself is laughable and shows the depths of your dislike more than any unsupportive stats ever will) while the other is a misunderstood superstar whom the masses are too stupid to realize is the best thing that has ever happened to hockey.
+I now understand completely and once again will do my best to not attempt to understand your reasoning (because there isn’t any) but to understand it is just how you are.
+For the record, since you like to make things up about my opinion, let me clarify a few things:
+1. Don’t like Gilroy and if you search the archives I am sure it will show on this blog that I said I didn’t understand trading Lee when he was getting his act together although I did also say that Gilroy is supposed to come with some offensive upside so I was willing to see how it went. Terrible trade and I would go so far as to say I think that move very well could have been the difference in the tightly fought first round loss against the Rangers.
+2. I didn’t like having Stone or Silfverberg inserted into the line-up but specifically I didn’t like Silf being inserted for game 6 when he only had a pregame skate with the club. I didn’t mind him being in the lineup for game 7 as he had time to practice and get adjusted to NA (in game 6 he HAD to be jetlagged). Most of all, I didn’t like them inserting players that would only get a handful of minutes. You won’t agree with this either but I wanted Butler back in the lineup – if Spazza had played with Butlers jump in game 3 the Sens might have won.
+I know you don’t give credit for the Turris trade because you will question why Rundblad was picked up in the first place but that was a clear win. Getting Anderson was a clear win. Stealing Bishop was a clear win for Murray. A few very good wins but it would seem that Murray has too much of your character trait in him – decide on a guy and never let that opinion go. For whatever reason he just didn’t like Lee and despite his improved play decided to let him go…too bad.
+As for your bet – although it is completely one-sided to you (I mean, Karlsson did things this year that hadn’t been done in decades – even though anyone could do it at any time if they never played D – it’s just that players don’t WANT to score that many points) I will take it too.
+I am happy to get together and buy some beers for the play-offs bet as well. I can drown my sorrows over the Senators loss while you can gleefully toast to the Rangers victory and Spazz getting some meaninless points at meaningless times.
+We should make it happen at the 19th tee – if we buy beers perhaps we can get Bruce or Don to join us. I think at least one of them is Clublink and my membership is on hold but could still get us out at Eagle Creek…I have become a bit of a golf snob since I don’t get to play very often so would prefer a decent track.
+Dave, I am not going to talk about Karlie anymore…I am done…my point has been made and we will see what kind of hockey player he becomes. I suspect you are absolutely correct, the bet would be totally one sided; for him to equal what he did this year would be virtually impossible. He is entertaining and gifted but lacks the stuff I like to see in a defenceman.
+I don’t know why you suggest, that I would gleefully celelbrate the NYR victory; you know that’s not true. You see Dave, you bet with your heart, I will bet with what is left of my brain. NYR are bigger and deeper than Ottawa and they have one of the two best goalies on the planet, so why would I bet on the Sens. I cannot stomach Yosemite Sam. I think Sather is an idiot and has authored some of the worst contracts in the history of the NHL. I don’t like looking at Messier anymore and outside of playing the game, what the hell has he ever done?
+Not too long ago you celebrated Spaz now it is all about venom; why? Is it a conscious effort to cause me some grief (you are better than that). If his 5 points in 7 games was meaningless, his plus 3 isn’t and his line at plus 6 for the series with 2 rookies who never played in the NHL previously on his line for 3 of those games, is very impressive; don’t you think?
+I guess Karlie’s 1 fluke goal and zero assists was meaningful. Certainly God’s 2 points and minus 3 helped the team in the 7 games series, right? Sweden and Russia will take their stars to the WHC but Hokey Canada leaves the league’s 4th leading point getter behind; why am I not surprised. Getzlaf came through I see getting 3 assists against the Borat Bombers testerday. The did do one thing right and it is something I have advocated for 20 years, they invited a centerman and he is playing wing. Gifted centermen can easily play the wing and many gifted wingers (if they are decent at the draw) can play center. I allways favor getting the best and leaving the ham and eggers at home.
+I love golf too Dave. I played with yesterday and it was spectacular. It was my first game this year (but I have hit quite a few balls). I would love to play a game. As a side note, I do hate it when PGA professionals withdraw because of an injury when really they are quitting because they played poorly. I like Cabrera and suspect his 9 on 17 had something to do with his withdrawl for “personal reasons”. Baird withdrew too because of a shoulder and several others. One even withdrew before making one shot. Eldrick withdrew earlier citing an achilles heal but, was playing less than a week later. The TPC has by far the strongest field of all the tournaments on tour including the Majors and most certainly stronger than the weak field played in the Masters. It is a damn shame to take someone’s spot and then throw in the towel.
+Bobby the points I bring up about Spezza are only to contrast what you say about Karlsson. The fact that it riles you up is just a side benefit
+I can’t understand how you love Spezza for being a one dimensional forward yet are disgusted by Karsson being an offensive D.
+I also know you don’t like me to bring it up but I believe age and size are important when comparing the two. A 28 (almost 29) year old vet who is well above the average size for NHL players refuses to initiate contact and who just recently decided it made sense to maybe try and backcheck a bit should have more expected of him than a 21 (just looked, he will be 22 at end of May) year old who is well below the average size of an NHL player.
+As for the plus minus and points statistics – you know as well as I do that many statistics are misleading yet you keep bringing up stats to try and suit your beliefs. Karlsson had a better +/- than Spezza in the regular season while playing many more minutes, plenty of them against the other teams best players yet somehow Karlsson is such a defensive liability. Karlsson had twice as many hits as Spezza in the regular season and the play-offs, yet somehow only he is a scared kid. Do you see from that how I and I believe others are confused about your rational? As for the play-offs if you believe Spezza was a force and Karlsson and Alfie (who only played in 3 games by the way, 2 after coming back rather quickly from a concussion) were the reason that the Senators lost, fair enough, we agree to disagree. Spezza’s stats don’t fool my eyes – I saw what I saw and for too much of series Spezza was just like the rest of the team, bottled up an unable to play as wide open as he wanted.
+You can dislike Karlsson and his game all you want – I don’t think he is even close to as bad as you depict but I do understand which parts of his game would give you or anyone else pause. He isn’t a physical force, he does make bad reads but he is only 21 years and his slight frame does make it harder for him to gain position and battle for the puck, no question,. That said, his defensive game took a huge leap this year compared to previous years and I would expect he will continue to improve.
+Lastly, I may have bet with my heart only because I believed the Sens and Rangers were equal and given the regular season stats (Sens owned the Rangers), the Senators depth at forward and the Rangers youth on D I think it was a pretty good call. It came down to a 1 goal difference in game 7 and the NYR outscored the Sens 13-12 for the series. It was as close a series as it could have been and quite frankly I still think the better team lost.
+I haven’t even touched my clubs and won’t be able to for a couple weeks yet but am totally serious when I say we should hit the links. If anyone else here is a golfer they are welcome to join us. During the week is best for me but I could pull off a weekend round if need be.
+Dave, your comments about Rocco only serve to confuse me (and as I have often said, that’s unfair because it is so easy to do). They do not rile me in the least. As for you not understanding why I love Spezza but not Karlie, the reasns are many:
+- among league leaders for being on the ice when goals scored against
+- horrible in his own end and simply does not even make an effort
+- abandons anyone in front of the net (resorts to the hockey equivalent of a “reach around”
+- will not venture into a corner but will get credit for take aways for being a picker after others do heavy lifting
+- is completely invisible in tough games
+- goes down very easily and does the “soccer thing” feigning injury looking to the reffs but, never misses a shift
+- will not hit, will not block shots
+- will not be used to kill penalties
+- disappeared the last 5 weeks of the season (when games were more meaningful and tougher)
+I am one of only two who doesn’t like Karlie. I favor defencemen who do what he does, but much more. To me, there are some things defence must do to be called defencemen and that is why I call Karlie an offenseman. Spezza had a great year this year, he scored 84 points and led the league for points scored on the road! But he is soft and pads his stats. His 84 pts was only 8 short of his best year when he played with God and the 50 goal scorer Heatley! He tied his best goal scoring year with 34 and for most of the year he played with a bum on the right wing, yet, he still had 84 points! How many goals would Perry and Ryan score with Spezza in the middle and how many points would Spezza get?
+Dave, there are hits and then there are hits; I saw Karlie hit somebody once, I think. You put qualifications on Karlie like: for a little guy he is this or that. I don’t care if he is slight, he shows fright! I have never seen anyone jump out of a corner and completely abandon the puck and leave it gift wrapped for the opposition like Karlie. It is embarrassing and impressive at the same time. He is like a mongoose darting to avoid being bit by a King Cobra!
+God was minus 3 and he played in 4 games and that is even worse than I thought! God’s line was minus 6. Spezza and Michalek played with snot green rookies for 3 games and still posted a plus 6! Is that better, worse or equal to God’s line and their minus 6? BTW: Praise Alfie can’t be hurt too bad Davey, afterall, he is playing for his country.
+You keep referring to his Karlie’s age, look at Doughty’s game and he is only 22 and has played in the league sine he was 19. Letang has been playing in the league since he was 19 as well and they will be put on the ice to kill penalties. You reference how slight Karlie is but look at how Turris plays and he is only 5 pounds heavier and 1 inch taller. Look at how the 19 year old Nugent Hopkins plays at 175 and 6′, 1″. I think he was AWOL in the post season you don’t. I don’t like him, you do and that is that Dave.
+I give up – you just don’t and never will get it.
+Rant away with tunnel vision at your leisure.
+Oh, I would love to play golf with anyone at anytime and anywhere. There are many here I would play with: Dennis, Dan, the Pavinator, Potts, Kev (even though he chears for the leafs and likes Lord Burke), Mikey of course, yourself, Pierre, Choke and our hosts. I wouldn’t walk across the block to play golf with Yosemite Sam even if it was on Pebble Beach or Augusta National and cost me diddly squat. Maybe I would though, I think it would be fun to help him look for a ball in the woods and slap right on the hole in his haircut right where he departs it, in the middle of the skullet. I would play with Jone but, I think he would be better carrying my clubs for me. I wouldn’t ask him any yardages though, his judgement is way off.
+Davey, I do love golf and some would suggest I am obsessed. Over the past 12 to 15 years I get out about 12 to 15 timesw only and that is it. If I could I would retire to play golf and drive all you guys crazy blogging and sharing my twisted virgin of the world on ya. Not to worry about playing if it isn’t doable and will can always do a carry over for the bets that were made. It should be interesting what will happen with the Sens the next 2 years. I will be watching with anticipation. I will say one thing, the team is set for the next few years at center with Rocco
+but will have to shore up the old, slow and soft defence. Maybe Daisey the Air Rifle will again find his scoring touch and score 4 goals next year; that would qualify him for right winger with Spez and Milan! Maybe the team can reacquire Runds’bad at the same time they reacquire Kelly (Bruce and Don wont/can’t tell us the logic for such a move. He will be paid more than what he made!). I hope Silfverberg will do more than the no hits, not shots, no goals and no assist he showed in his two games in the post season and his 1 assit in 7 games in the world hockey championship. I hope questions will be asked to explain decisions that are made that make no sense. I hope the morons with Hokey Canada consider Spezza for future tournaments, allthough Sharp’s 6 points look good, 5 of them were scored in one game against the Borat Bombers. Who says Rocco couldn’t be on the wing with Tavares, Dechense, Toews etc. If Spezza centered Stamkos, the Tampa winger would score 75 goals. I wonder if the Peterssen, the right winger for Spezza the next ten years will get an opportunity to play for the big club. Will OmyGod’Brien still be on the team, the Missing Klink, Butler got Butlered, Dasiey the Air Rifle, Da OatslikeCosta. What will the 5 goal man Zibby do? How will Peumpel and Noesen do? And, will Hoffman elevate his game to be a positive contributor at the NHL level. Will Le Moustache and Cam-moron figure out the PP. Will Karlie break out of his 5 week slump. Will Kuba continue to be the stabalizing force playing with Karlie. Will Carkner be healthy enough. Will Gonchar be traded. And, Will God retire and be Cannonized?
+951 F.2d 892
+UNITED STATES of America, Appellee,
+v.
+Richard CASEY, Appellant.
+No. 90-1368.
+United States Court of Appeals,
+Eighth Circuit.
+Submitted Aug. 26, 1991.
+Decided Dec. 11, 1991.
+Curtis Blood, Collinsville, Ill., argued, for appellant.
+James Steitz, Asst. U.S. Atty., St. Louis, Mo., argued, for appellee.
+Before McMILLIAN, WOLLMAN and MAGILL, Circuit Judges.
+McMILLIAN, Circuit Judge.
+Richard Casey appeals from a final judgment entered in the District Court1 for the Eastern District of Missouri, following Casey's guilty plea to two counts each of mail fraud, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2, 1341, and tax evasion, 26 U.S.C. § 7201. The district court sentenced Casey to a non-guidelines sentence of two years imprisonment to run concurrently on each of the mail fraud counts followed by three years of probation to run concurrently on each of the tax evasion counts and a special assessment of $100.00 on the mail fraud counts. For reversal, Casey argues that the district court erred in not holding an evidentiary hearing prior to denying his motion to withdraw his guilty plea. For the reasons discussed below, we affirm the judgment of the district court.
+FACTS
+Richard Casey, a medical doctor, was charged by a seven-count indictment alleging four counts of mail fraud for obtaining insurance payments by mail for medical services not performed or covered by insurance, two counts of tax evasion for the years 1983 and 1984, and one count of obstruction of justice. Casey initially pleaded not guilty to all charges, but on February 3, 1989, following plea negotiations and a hearing, Casey entered a guilty plea to two counts each of mail fraud and tax evasion. The other three charges were dismissed. At the February plea hearing, the district court explained to Casey his right to a jury trial, that the verdict must be unanimous, and his right to appeal any verdict from trial. Additionally, the district court asked if anyone had threatened him into pleading guilty or if the plea was against his will and Casey responded "no" to each question. The district court explained that he would not be permitted to change his mind and that the guilty plea was final, and asked Casey several times if he had any questions or wished to speak to his attorney. Following the government's summary of the facts and a statement of the maximum penalty, the district court asked Casey about the mail fraud counts as follows:
+The Court: [D]id you mail these claims to the insurance companies or to the Medicaid officials, asking for money for services which had not been rendered or for services which were unnecessary?
+The Defendant: Yes, an employee of mine did that.
+The Court: And you knew that?
+The Defendant: Yes.
+The district court then asked about the tax evasion counts and Casey responded that he was guilty of those charges. The district court then gave Casey a final opportunity to speak to his attorney and accepted the guilty plea.
+On January 19, 1990, following a psychiatric evaluation of Casey, a sentencing hearing was held. Casey requested a continuance of his case and that request was denied. Casey then stated "Well, quite honestly, Judge, because of the prosecution's intimidation, coercion, threats of scandal and slander, and almost downright blackmail, I think, under any ordinary circumstances, one might consider a plea of guilty." Casey stated that he was not guilty. The district court explained to Casey why it believed that his plea was voluntary, citing Casey's education and his responses to the district court's questions. The district court stated, however, that it would treat Casey's comments as an oral motion to set aside his guilty plea. Casey responded by explaining that he did not file income taxes because of his emotional state and had always intended to file. Additionally, Casey said that the government owed him $15,000, so if he did have any tax liability, which according to his calculations he did not, it would be offset by the money owed him. As to the mail fraud counts, Casey said that he did not pay close attention to what his employees were doing and was unaware that his employees were filing false claims. Furthermore, he claimed that his employees intercepted the money and thus profited from the false claims. Finally, Casey argued that he had over $200,000 in legitimate Medicaid claims which he did not submit, and thus he did not profit from any scheme to defraud. The district court denied his request to vacate the guilty plea and sentenced Casey to a total of two years in prison and three years probation under the pre-guidelines sentencing scheme. Additionally, the district court filed a written order denying Casey's request to vacate his plea. United States v. Casey, No. 88-048-CR(4) (E.D.Mo. Feb. 12, 1990). Casey now appeals to this court.
+ANALYSIS
+Casey argues that he is entitled to a hearing on his motion to withdraw his guilty plea and that the district court abused its discretion in failing to hold an evidentiary hearing. Under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 32(d), a motion for the withdrawal of a plea of guilty prior to sentencing may be permitted "upon a showing by the defendant of any fair and just reason." The burden of proving a fair and just reason is on the defendant. United States v. Thompson, 906 F.2d 1292, 1298 (8th Cir.), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 111 S.Ct. 530, 112 L.Ed.2d 540 (1990) (citations omitted) (Thompson ). We review a district court's denial of an evidentiary hearing under the abuse of discretion standard. United States v. Boyd, 610 F.2d 521, 524 (8th Cir.1979), cert. denied, 444 U.S. 1089, 100 S.Ct. 1052, 62 L.Ed.2d 777 (1980).
+In arguing for an evidentiary hearing, Casey states that disputed issues of fact should be decided by a hearing on the merits, but he does not state what facts, if any, are disputed in his case. Furthermore, Casey points to the fact that he proclaimed his innocence at the sentencing hearing and that the government has not shown how it would have been prejudiced by the plea withdrawal. Finally, Casey argues that the district court did not adequately explain the "intent" element of the mail fraud counts at the plea hearing. While the district court asked him if he was aware that his employees were mailing fraudulent claims, Casey argues that the district court should have determined whether he had knowingly and intentionally defrauded the government and insurance companies and had not simply been carelessly letting his employees mail fraudulent claims without his knowledge.2
+We hold that the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying Casey's oral motion to withdraw his guilty plea without holding a separate evidentiary hearing. "A court entertaining a motion to withdraw a guilty plea need not hold an evidentiary hearing if the allegations in the motion are inherently unreliable, are not supported by specific facts or are not grounds for withdrawal even if true." Thompson, 906 F.2d at 1299 (citations omitted). This motion was not made until he was before the court for sentencing. The district court treated Casey's declaration of innocence as a motion to withdraw his plea and allowed Casey to testify as to why he was innocent and his plea should be withdrawn. The district court thus converted the sentencing hearing into a hearing on the motion to withdraw the plea. Most of the statements by Casey did not support the withdrawal of the plea as all of his arguments that he was not guilty of tax evasion because the government owed him $15,000 and that he was not guilty of mail fraud because he had $200,000 of unreimbursed Medicaid expenses do not negate his guilt. The only facts supporting his motion to vacate the plea are the allegations that the government had coerced his plea and the district court inadequately inquired into his intent to commit mail fraud. Casey provided no specific facts as to how the government coerced or blackmailed him or why his plea was not voluntary. The district court explained to Casey that even if he had just been careless or indifferent to the activities of his employees, he would nonetheless be responsible for the mail fraud. Additionally, while Casey contended at the sentencing hearing that his employees mailed the fraudulent claims without his knowledge and intercepted the money, this directly contradicted inculpatory statements at the plea hearing and the government's statements that the checks were deposited into Casey's account, not his employees'. The district court gave Casey an opportunity to respond to the its analysis, but Casey did not provide an adequate basis for the withdrawal of his guilty plea.
+We hold that the district court adequately allowed Casey to present his motion for the withdrawal of his guilty plea3 and did not abuse its discretion in denying the motion to withdraw the guilty plea.
+Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the district court.
+It is unclear whether Casey is also alleging a deficiency in his Fed.R.Crim.P. 11 plea hearing. To the extent to which a challenge to plea hearing is made, we have carefully reviewed the transcript of the plea hearing and hold that the district court met all the requirements of Rule 11. The district court made full inquiry into the voluntariness of the plea and on several occasions asked Casey if he wished to speak to his attorney. The district court fully explained to Casey the consequences of a guilty plea and that he would not be permitted to change his mind. The district court questioned Casey about the factual elements of both the tax evasion and mail fraud counts. As to the mail fraud counts, the district court confirmed that Casey was aware that the fraudulent claims were sent and the government added that Casey had cashed the reimbursement checks for those fraudulent claims. Additionally, following these questions about the mail fraud counts, Casey was given the opportunity to speak to his attorney
+Note: Measurements taken in the anechoic chamber at Canada's National Research Council can be found through this link.
+I’ve long been intrigued by Focal loudspeakers, but while I’d heard them at audio shows, I’d never had a pair in my listening room. My curiosity is always piqued by a speaker maker that manages to produce what is arguably one of the finest speakers in the world, the Grande Utopia EM Evo ($229,000 USD per pair), as well as models that most audio enthusiasts can afford -- not to mention Focal’s lines of headphones, and professional and car-audio products.
+The subject of this review, the Spectral 40th loudspeaker, is priced at $9999/pair. The Spectral 40th was designed to celebrate the company’s 40th anniversary, in 2019, but it’s only one of five commemorative products Focal is releasing. The others are: the Scala 40th loudspeaker ($79,999/pair), a Scala Utopia Evo with a cabinet finished in black silver; the F40th car-audio component kit of drivers and electronics ($5499); the Symphonie 40th headphones ($15,000), an amalgam of Focal’s finest headphone models, the Utopia and Stellia, along with their Arche amp-DAC and Questyle QPM player, housed in a case veneered in Macassar ebony and lined inside with beige microfiber; and a new edition of Focal’s Solo6 Be pro-audio speaker in an elegant black finish and stamped “40 year” ($1499 each).
+Description
+The Spectral 40th was inspired by such legendary Focal models of the 1990s as the Spectral 913.1, the Futura Antea, and the Vega. But of all their 40th-anniversary products, the Spectral 40th is the only one that’s an entirely new design. It’s a four-driver, three-way, floorstanding speaker measuring 45.2”H x 11.9”W x 16.7”D and weighing 101.4 pounds. Focal specifies the Spectral 40th’s sensitivity as 91dB, its nominal impedance as 8 ohms, and its frequency response as 34Hz-30kHz, ±3dB.
+The cones of the Spectral 40th’s two 7” woofers are made of Focal’s new K2 sandwich material, based on their Poly-K (for Polykevlar) material, introduced in 1986 and used in the Vega and Antea lines. Poly-K comprised two layers of aramid fiber (hence the distinctive yellow color) with a hollow microball internal structure. In 2016, Focal refined and evolved Poly-K and renamed it K2, which comprises a very light layer of foam sandwiched between layers of aramid fiber and fiberglass.
+The woofers hand off at 280Hz to a 6.5” midrange driver mounted above the tweeter. This single-skin driver has only a layer of aramid fiber atop a layer of foam, with no fiberglass layer. The midrange is crossed over at 2.7kHz to a K2 M-shaped tweeter with a 1.3” inverted dome -- a change from the beryllium-diaphragm tweeters used in all higher-end Focal speakers of the last few years.
+Below the woofers on the front baffle is a port, with another port on the rear, in an alignment Focal calls Powerflow. Also on the rear panel are a single pair of high-quality binding posts and an inlaid, silk-screened metal plaque announcing Focal’s 40th anniversary.
+The Spectral 40th’s cabinet is not rectangular in cross section: its nonparallel sides and front baffle are curved, and its top panel slopes down slightly toward the rear. The sides are finished in a rich, dark walnut, and the front, back, and top in a gloss black with a sparkly metallic sheen similar to what you’d see in a high-quality automotive paint job. All of this sits atop a matte-black composite plinth. The speaker is beautiful to look at -- pictures don’t do it justice. I thought the Spectral 40th looked much better with its grilles -- each speaker has two, one each for the midrange and woofers -- but the hardware affixing the drivers to the cabinet is a little too noticeable with the grilles off. I left them on.
+The cabinet is an example of Focal’s stiff, damped Gamma Structure, which combines extensive MDF internal bracing, a curved baffle of 2”-thick MDF, and curved sidewalls of MDF. My knuckles can attest to the stiffness and inertness of these cabinets.
+Setup
+Unpacking the heavy Spectral 40ths took some work, including help from my wife. When we’d wrestled them out of their boxes, I placed them in the positions usually occupied by speakers in my 15’L x 12’W x 8’H room: 15” from the long wall behind them, and toed in toward my listening position by 18°, the speakers and my high-backed recliner forming a 9’ equilateral triangle. Each Spectral 40th comes with four adjustable metal spikes. Aside from the instruction manual, their boxes contained nothing else. Hmm. The combination of this speaker’s formidable size and my relatively small room immediately had me worrying about bass boom -- but the Spectral 40th doesn’t come with port plugs with which to cure this possible problem. Ah, well -- it would all come out in the listening.
+My dedicated basement listening room has wall-to-wall carpet over concrete slab. The side and speaker walls are treated with broadband absorption, and there are bass traps in the front corners. The wall behind the listening position has a variety of diffusion.
+I connected the 40ths to the 8-ohm output taps of my McIntosh Laboratory MC302 power amp. Upstream, I used a Bluesound Node streamer as a source, connected via fiber-optic interconnect to a miniDSP DDRC-22D processor with its Dirac Live room correction turned off, its digital volume control set to maximum and its digital output connected via a TosLink optical link to the DAC in my McIntosh C47 preamp. The C47 was connected to the MC302 via balanced (XLR) interconnects through my two SVS SB-4000 subwoofers, both turned off. (The SB-4000s’ line-level outputs are internally straight-wired to their inputs.) When the DDRC-22D is in the signal chain with Dirac Live turned off, the miniDSP merely upsamples all incoming PCM data to 24-bit/96kHz. The Node, used as a Roon endpoint, was operated via the Roon Remote app installed on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S; the Roon Core software was installed on a laptop computer running Windows 10.
+When reviewing a floorstanding speaker, I typically stick with what I feel to be the most appropriate and informative comparison: my Bowers & Wilkins 705 S2 minimonitors run full-range, their output below 50Hz reinforced by my two SVS subwoofers, without Dirac Live. However, after spending some time with the Spectral 40ths, I was so impressed with their sound that I felt the only way my reference system could hope to compete was with the full Dirac Live treatment. I matched the levels of the two pairs of speakers using a 1kHz warble tone and found the Focals to be 4dB more efficient than my B&W-SVS combo. Each time I switched between speakers, I adjusted the volume on my preamp accordingly and, in the case of the Focals, switched off the subs and disengaged Dirac Live.
+But before doing any serious listening, I played music at a decent volume through the Spectral 40ths for a few days to ensure that they were broken in.
+Sound
+The Spectral 40th’s midrange and top end were the best I’ve heard in my room. Focal’s ad copy describes the speaker’s sound as “vibrant” and “expressive,” and I agree. The midrange was quite forward but also impossibly smooth, and oozing with detail. Voices leapt from mixes, but never sounded edgy or irritating. There was an organic, reach-out-and-touch-it quality to the midrange that, though it may not have been perfectly flat, was intoxicatingly beautiful. I’d never heard quite this level of realism in my room before. Images of voices effortlessly floated in space with eerie palpability, with no hint of strain or cabinet colorations to spoil the illusion. I was in love . . .
+But the Spectral 40ths didn’t excel only with voices. At the beginning of Jann Arden’s duet with Jackson Browne on her song “Unloved,” from her album Living Under June (16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC, A&M), the plucked strings of two acoustic guitars were -- the Focals’ cabinets did a great job of “disappearing” from the music, which hovered in the room. When Arden starts singing front and center, her voice’s presence, rich smoothness, and realism were haunting. She was there, standing in my room, her voice above and behind the speakers. And when Arden and Browne belt out their lines, though both voices are mixed close to the center, I could clearly hear them distinct from each other. They may have been sharing a space in the center of the soundstage, but the edges of their vocal images were separate from one another -- Browne was slightly behind and above Arden -- and every texture and intonation was laid bare. There seemed to be no barrier between me and this musical event.
+There is excessive sibilance on Arden’s voice in this.
+Curious about the Spectral 40th’s unique sound, and as I always do when reviewing speakers, I measured its frequency response in my room with my calibrated UMIK-1 microphone. The first thing I noticed was a rise of 2dB or so in the “presence” region between about 400 and 800Hz, which might at least partially explain the speaker’s magical midrange. Second was the plot’s high-frequency region, which was essentially flat (perhaps a 0.5dB rise) from 2 to 16kHz. Many would find this to be perfect; however, I prefer a gentle downslope of 0 to -2dB from 2 to 16kHz. This explains why I felt the Spectral 40ths produced a soupçon too much high-frequency energy in the sibilance region of 5-6kHz. Also worth noting is that I had this minor complaint only with the very few recordings I listened to that themselves overemphasize sibilants.
+“Symbolistic White Walls,” from the Matthew Good Band’s Last of the Ghetto Astronauts (16/44.1 FLAC, PolyGram/Tidal), was a change of pace. This well-recorded track has very good, punchy bass, and a complex layering of guitars, drums, and voices. It turned out that my concern about the lack of plugs for the Spectral 40ths’ ports -- speakers of this size can sometimes overwhelm my relatively small room -- was unwarranted. While I can’t say their bass was the best I’ve heard in my room, it was definitely the best bass I’ve heard from a passive, unequalized loudspeaker. When the kick drums enter at the start of this track, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. The bass was full and satisfying, but also tight, very fast, and rhythmic. My room was filled with topnotch bass -- I could feel it thump and slam my chest. Although there was a just bit of boom, due to a peak between 40 and 50Hz that almost all speakers produce in my room, the magnitude of that peak was within acceptable limits, which kept the bass completely under control. Because the Focals’ bass was so satisfying without overwhelming my room, it’s possible that they’d underwhelm in a much larger listening space -- but that’s impossible to determine without an actual demo. I went back to my in-room measurement to determine the Spectral 40th’s -3dB point: a very respectable and satisfying 29Hz.
+With this track, the same patterns reemerged in the midrange as had with Arden’s “Unloved.” The simple opening guitar chords, imaged to left of center, had bite, and I could hear into the structures of the varying notes. Matt Good’s voice was rendered with superlative presence and body, and was clearly delineated from everything else in the mix. There’s some very subtle reverb on the voices in this track, and the Focals didn’t miss it. In the complex chorus, I could hear all the layers of the grungy rhythm guitars at hard left, the impressive extension of the cymbal crashes, the lead guitar to the right, and always Good’s voice, smooth and present. I could play the 40ths as loud as I wanted without compression -- they always sounded buttery smooth, never edgy or bright, without giving up detail, despite their somewhat forward midrange.
+I cued up “Make a Mistake,” from Colin James’s Traveler (16/44.1 FLAC, Warner Music Canada). I chose the track for its simple arrangement, which includes well-recorded cymbals, and the width of its soundstage, on full display in the chorus, where backing singers can be heard hard right and hard left, presumably recorded out of phase. Admittedly, the soundstage width on this track may be somewhat unnatural, perhaps even a mastering trick, but that doesn’t mean I can’t thoroughly enjoy it. Once again, the Focals not only did not disappoint, they exceeded my expectations. The cymbal crashes at left of center, behind James’s voice, materialized with very impressive attack without ever sounding aggressive, shrill, or etched. They sounded almost sweet, with a delicate shimmer, and the decay seemed to go on forever. James’s voice, as by now I expected from these speakers, was eerily real, with imposing presence, detail, and body. And when the backing singers enter for the chorus, the 40ths hid nothing from me -- I could hear every layer of voices, and the width of the soundstage, real or ersatz, extended past the speakers’ outer side panels.
+Focal Spectral 40th vs. Bowers & Wilkins 705 S2 & SVS SB-4000 subwoofers (2) with Dirac Live
+For this comparison I used my reference setup: B&W 705 S2s ($2500/pair) high-passed at 120Hz with a custom balanced crossover ($495), and reinforced below 130Hz by two SVS SB-4000 subwoofers ($2998/pair), all room-EQ’d with a miniDSP DDRC-22D processor running Dirac Live ($725), for a total cost of $6718, compared to the $9999 for a pair of Focal Spectral 40ths.
+Without Dirac Live engaged, my B&W-SVS combo stood little chance against the Focals. The 705 S2s and SB-4000s could hold their own in terms of transparency and imaging, but as for midrange detail, tonality and richness, and accuracy and control in the top end . . . well, it was no contest. In my first comparison with the B&W-SVS combo subjected to EQ by my Harman-inspired target curve, it was still no contest -- the Focals’ magical midrange was missing from the sound of my reference rig. Which makes the Spectral 40ths the first speakers I’ve reviewed that have led me to revisit my Dirac Live target curve. After a bit of tweaking and comparative listening, I added a 2dB bump in the presence region of my target curve, peaking between 500 and 700Hz, closely matching the measured in-room response of the Spectral 40ths in this bandwidth.
+In the world of equalization, it’s always better to take away too much of a good thing than to add something that was never there to begin with. My 705 S2s naturally exhibit a bump between about 400Hz and 2kHz and centered around 600-700Hz, followed by another bump between 3 and 19kHz (centered around 7-8kHz). By adding a 2dB boost in the presence region, I was now actually taking away less than I was in my original target curve, which was essentially flat through this range. From 2 to 19kHz I was maintaining my slow 2dB dip, completely removing the 705 S2’s bump in the treble. Armed with my new, improved target curve, which now actually preserved more of my reference speakers’ inherent midrange frequency response, I was ready for some direct, level-matched comparisons with the unequalized Focals.
+On balance, I still preferred the Focals through the midrange, though I got the sound quite close with my B&W-SVS combo. I preferred my reference system’s top end, but only on sibilant recordings; otherwise, it was a toss-up. For example, through the Focals, that ever-so-slight sibilant edge in Jann Arden’s voice in “Unloved” wasn’t there with my EQ’d reference setup. The entire midrange delivery, however, was more satisfying to listen to through the Spectral 40ths -- from the extra sparkle and presence in the plucked guitars to the smoother, less edgy, yet more present and holographic-sounding voices, the Focals took the day. The imaging prowesses of the Focals and my reference combo were equally good -- the B&W 705 S2s are exceedingly adept in this department, so for the 40ths to live up to them is high praise for the French floorstanders. The delineation of the two voices in this track, and the space and air between them in the center and the guitars to the left and right, were effectively identical through both pairs of speakers.
+With Matt Good’s “Symbolistic White Walls,” it was the same story in the midrange. Good’s voice had more presence and body through the Focals. In the complex chorus, the Focals also threw a slightly larger soundstage with a bigger sound, and seemed to play slightly cleaner at very high volumes than my reference setup. But as good as the Focals are in the bass, with this track they couldn’t quite match my pair of EQ’d powered subs. This is no indictment of the Spectral 40ths -- no passive, un-EQ’d speaker optimally placed for stereo imaging that I’ve experienced can compete against the subs in my room. It’s a simple matter of room acoustics and the laws of physics. Still, the B&W-SVS combo did deliver slightly more bass slam and pressure to my chest, and a bit more extension with the lowest bass notes, creating a more satisfying sense of fullness in the lower half of my body.
+I played Colin James’s “Make a Mistake” and turned my attention to treble performance. This was a tough call -- both pairs of speakers sounded beyond reproach in this part of the audioband. The Focals’ extra energy in the top end made the cymbals sound slightly louder, but I didn’t find this better or worse than my reference combo, just slightly different. Dispersion and decay, too, were very close, and the B&Ws’ soundstage was perhaps just a bit wider -- again, a very tough call.
+Back to the midband, and a track I use to judge the presence of chestiness or thickness in male voices -- or, to put it another way, too much energy between 200 and 300Hz. With “Home,” from Michael Bublé’s It’s Time (16/44.1 FLAC, Reprise), I marginally preferred my reference combo to the Focals. Both systems sounded very, very good, but through the Focals Bublé’s voice had a hint of chestiness, whereas the EQ’d B&W-SVS combo presented this track with more separation between Bublé’s voice and the bass notes.
+I then turned to a track that can exhibit the opposite problem: “Bad Timing,” from Blue Rodeo’s Five Days in July (16/44.1 FLAC, Warner Music Canada). Jim Cuddy’s voice leans toward the higher register, certainly compared to Bublé, and can sound a little shouty or edgy when he leans into the mike. In this track, the extra body in Cuddy’s voice had me easily choosing the Focals over my reference combo. The Spectral 40ths reproduced Cuddy’s voice with more presence, smoothness, and ease, and also nailed the imaging of the backing singers, just inside the right speaker, above the tops of the speakers and behind Cuddy -- all with the buttery smoothness that I continued to find so enchanting.
+Conclusion.. But in this regard, my reference Bowers & Wilkins 705 S2 speakers, playing unequalized, are far worse. The Focals’ bass was tight, fast, ample, and completely satisfying, without ever booming in my relatively small room. The Spectral 40th’s transparency was also topnotch -- I could hear every detail of the music, but never did I “hear” the cabinets.
+The Focal Spectral 40th is expensive, and could never be called a steal. Is it worth $9999/pair? No question. In their beautiful, superbly finished cabinets, the Spectral 40ths provided me with stunning sound that always left me grinning from ear to ear. Highly recommended.
+. . . Diego Estan
+diego@soundstage.com
+Associated Equipment
+- Speakers -- Bower & Wilkins 705 S2
+- Subwoofers -- SVS SB-4000 (2)
+- Power amplifier -- McIntosh Laboratory MC302
+- Crossover -- Marchand Electronics XM446XLR-A , Roon Core
+- Analog sources -- Pro-Ject Debut Carbon Esprit turntable with Ortofon 2M Red cartridge
+- Speaker cables -- 12-gauge, oxygen-free copper (generic, locking banana plugs)
+- Analog interconnects -- AmazonBasics unbalanced (RCA), Monoprice Premier series balanced (XLR)
+- Digital interconnect -- AmazonBasics optical (TosLink)
+Focal Spectral 40th Loudspeakers
+Price: $9999.00 USD per pair.
+Warranty: Five years parts and labor
+Focal-JMLab
+108 Rue de l’Avenir
+42350 La Talaudière
+France
+Website:
+ the workmen that the War Between the States (aka Civil War) had begun. When the Philadelphia artisans working inside were told about the war, they immediately laid down their tools where they were standing and left, never to return.
+For many years the tools lay right where they left them. On this trip we found they had been moved, but my friend, Linda, who was touring Longwood with me and has toured it several times in years past, remembered seeing them scattered all about on previous tours.
+Linda generously shared the photos she took that day with me and I’m glad she did. When I started going through mine to create this post, I noticed I was so busy concentrating on detail shots, I missed getting some of the larger room views inside. Linda’s photos are watermarked, Shared on Between Naps on the Porch while the ones I took are watermarked with the standard, Between Naps on the Porch.net. Thanks so much to Linda for sharing her beautiful photos!
+Longwood Plantation was designed in a style known as Moorish Revival, an ornate and exotic architectural style popular at that time with architects in Europe and America due to their fascination with Oriental design. Longwood has the distinction of being the largest octagonal-shaped house in America.
+Once completed, the home would have had 32 rooms, 26 fireplaces, 115 doors and 96 columns. Only 9 of the 32 rooms were ever finished and those are all on the lower level/basement of the home. That’s where the family lived for the rest of their lives.
+It took more than a million bricks to build Longwood and they were all made on the grounds of the plantation.
+Due to its octagonal shape, Longwood has many beautiful balconies.
+What is it about Spanish Moss. Everything is just a little more romantic and enchanting when viewed through its soft, swaying arms.
+On the front porch of Longwood, we get a look at a few of the 96 columns surrounding the home.
+Wow! So beautiful!
+Such a pretty cathedral window over the front door.
+So, are you ready to go inside? Brace yourself, the outside completely betrays that which awaits within.
+Longwood would have been awe-inspiring inside if it had ever been completed. Even though Haller Nutt was a union sympathizer, he lost his fortune as a result of the war. He died of pneumonia in 1864, three years after the workmen left. Many believe he died of a broken heart.
+The next three pictures show the plans for the home. We were allowed to tour the basement rooms, the only furnished rooms in the home and where the Nutts lived the rest of their lives, but unfortunately none of the Natchez plantations would allow photos since another plantation, Stanton Hall, had an item stolen after the home was featured on TV.
+All the photos in this post were taken on this level, the main level of the home.
+We weren’t allowed to go up the stairs to the 2nd floor of Longwood so I wasn’t able to take any photos upstairs.
+Longwood is said to have many ghosts. Julia is often seen on the staircase pictured below while Mr. Nutt haunts the gardens. To learn more about all the ghosts sightings at Longwood, just Google “Longwood Plantation Ghosts” and you’ll find plenty of links. Warning: Don’t do that late in the evening before going to bed. Not a good idea!
+I just noticed, this is the only photo I saw in my photos and in Linda’s where an orb is present…and it’s kind of near the steps. Creepy, huh?
+In the center of the main level you’ll find an octagonal room that has the rotunda/cupola overhead as previously seen in the exterior views. As you step into the gallery room and look up….
+…this is what you see. Cue the goosebumps!!! It gave me chills standing underneath looking up!
+Especially after hearing stories of how the home is haunted.
+I could almost imagine I was seeing faces staring back down.
+The rotunda was designed to have a system of mirrors inside the cupola to reflect sunlight down into many of the rooms. Also, the shape of the cupola was designed to pull hot air upward toward the top of the cupola, creating an updraft drawing fresh air through the lower floors.
+You would never guess when seeing these gorgeous windows outside…
+…the inside looks like this!
+The ceiling…
+An ancient trunk waiting to be opened…
+This is where the men worked mixing and preparing the things they were using to build the home.
+Many of the furnishings bought for the home were purchased in Europe and shipped across the Atlantic where they would eventually be delivered to the Nutts via steamboat up the Mississippi River, then via wagon from Natchez.
+Packing crates from that time period still remain inside the home.
+In this 1936 photo taken by James Butters for the Library of Congress for their Historic American Buildings Survey, you can see at one point the dome lost its finial. If I’m remembering correctly, it happened during a big storm.
+Here’s what’s left of the original finial.
+The outside has been restored and a new finial was built for the byzantine onion-shaped dome.
+In 2010 the Longwood mansion was used in the HBO series, True Blood. In the show it was the fictional Jackson, Mississippi home of Russell Edgington who played a vampire. Is that right? Anyone see the series?
+Longwood Plantation is now a house museum, owned by The Pilgrimage Garden Club in Natchez. It’s open for tours year around. I do recommend touring it when you’re next in the area. It truly is unlike any other historic home you’re ever likely to tour. I recommend going in early spring or in the fall when it’s not so hot and muggy.
+Love touring historic homes as much as I do? Check out Greenwood Plantation (pictured below) in this previous post: Greenwood Plantation, St. Francisville, Louisiana You’ll find tours to other historic homes under the Home Tours category at the top of BNOTP and here: Historic Home Tours
+Anyone else ever visited Longwood? If so, did it give you chills, too?
+We toured Longwood in 1998 and it was so amazing! The tools were still there in the upper floors and we actually got to see them. No ghosts were seen, but we were there in March and when we toured, we (six of us, me, my husband, son, daughter-in-law, daughter and son-in-law) were the only ones on the tour so we had lots of time to view. It was lovely and at the same time, quite sad.
+It is sad. I can’t imagine how Julia Nutt felt living the rest of her life out in the basement of the home, surrounded by their broken dreams overhead. I think I would have had to move, especially after Mr. Nutt died. One of the sadest parts of touring plantation homes is listening to docents name all the folks who died of yellow fever and illnesses like pneumonia that are so curable today. We really have it good today!
+I visited Longwood about 1979-1980 with my family. We did see tools where they were left all those years ago and I wish they were still in their original spots. It made an impact to see them and think back to the day the workers left the area. Too bad today’s visitors can not have the same experience. Seeing the shipping crates , nail barrels and trunk trigger lots of emotions though. I would have loved to see one of the former owners, but did not. Maybe Ghost Hunters will visit one day.
+I wish they were, too. I wondered why they decided to move them.
+More than likely a liability if someone got hurt. So probably the insurance was outrageous also.
+Just my guess.
+Guess I need a typing lesson — change 1998 to 1979
+I am taking this week off so pretend I am not here! I just wanted to share with you that I live an hour from Natchez! My daughter April worked for the newspaper as an intern last summer. She wrote articles and did some photography. She has an article in the late summer 2013 Natchez The Magazine. The article “Stepping Stones In Time”. The article goes on to discuss the area’s most significant historic sites. Just thought you might wanna know!!
+Would like to have read that article…sounds interesting! Have a wonderful week off!
+I visited Longwood about 25 years. Such a heartbreaking story. Yes, it gave me chills as well. Such craftsmanship in this gorgeous plantation. It was my 30th birthday! We stayed in a lovely B&B on the Mississippi River.
+Did it look pretty much like it does today when you visited, Mary? It is a very sad tale. Almost every home we toured had a sad story in there somewhere.
+Yes, Susan, it looked just as you saw.
+I know, so many sad stories. Such grand homes but I believe their lives were tough. I live just a block from the Mississippi River just outside of New Orleans. Destrehan Plantation is about 30 minutes from me. Elmwood Plantation was only 5 minutes away. It burned down a number of years ago and now has about 5 homes on the site. I have a print of Elmwood in my den. Perhaps, I can take a picture and email you?
+Mary, is Elmwood in one of the pictures shown in this search:
+There’s a book called Lost Plantations and it also popped up when I searched for Elmwood. I’ve been tempted to buy that book a few times but I know it would depress me to read it so I haven’t bought it. I hate to see a beautiful home destroyed, especially an historic one.
+Yes, the second photo on the right. Also, looks like a photo of the partially burned structure down a bit on the left. If you scroll down anotherb one that is framed. Some of the beautiful oak trees still remain! Thank goodness.
+It was also a restaurant in the 70s. That would be a good book to have. I should get it too.
+All I can say is Wow! Amazing and gorgeous home . The floor plan is very exciting, I really like it. It would be wonderful to see it furnished – maybe a Designer Showcase Home. It would be fantastic. I think the ghosts make it more exciting. My husband and I stayed in a few large historical places in Virginia that had ghosts. The mansions always had a good vibe. One supposedly had as many as 23 ghosts- Berry Hill Plantation in South Bosten, Virginia. Loved your tour once again, Susan. Thank you.
+Peggy, I kept thinking that I wish someone would build it today so we could see the Nutt’s dream home come to life. Wouldn’t that be awesome?! The ghost do def make it more exciting…maybe a little too exciting. lol Wow, 23 ghosts! I’ll have to google Berry Hill and read about it. Thanks, Peggy!
+Now that’s one of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard! Such a beautiful exterior! One can only wonder about the grandeur that would have been in the interior, if not for the war!
+I know, would love to see it built today!
+Bonjour chère amie,
+Je viens de passer un très agréable moment à admirer vos merveilleuses photos accompagnées de vos commentaires concernant cette magnifique propriété.
+Une architecture impressionnante.
+Nul doute qu’il est très intéressant de pouvoir visiter une telle demeure.
+Je vous souhaite un bel été.
+Gros bisous ♡
+Here’s a babelfish translaton of what Martine posted:
+Hello friend, I just spent a very pleasant moment to admire your wonderful photos along with your comments on this beautiful property.
+Impressionnan architecture
+There is no doubt that it is very interesting to visit such remains.
+I wish you a great summer.
+Big kisses
+We toured Longwood a few years ago during the spring pilgrimage. Natchez has many very interesting homes and is a beautiful city.
+It really is…some sadly are falling into ruin. Judy, check out this old post:
+OK, Susan, you are making me want to go to Natchez again….but then it doesn’t take much to make me want to go there. I’m so glad that you could use some of my pics. Wonderful tour. Let me know when you are ready to go back!!!!! I’m in Salt Lake City for a Stampin’ Up! Convention and we did a bus tour of the city and, oh my gosh, there are some beautiful old mansions and Victorian homes that I would love to sneak inside. You and I are definitely romantics at heart!!!!
+I know…I’d go now if it weren’t so far away! 🙂
+I live in Jackson and have made frequent trips to Natchez. Longwood has always been a favorite spot and I am sad to learn that the tools have been moved – they were still strewn about when I was there last. There are so many interesting stories around there, one of which is Prospect Hill Plantation. The abandoned house near Port Gibson is getting some long overdue attention finally. The history of the place involves the owner’s decision to have all of his slaves freed after his death and sent to Liberia as part of the Colonization movement. Burning Prospects by Melissa Miles is a great historic novel based on the story and she is a direct descendant of plantation owner Isaac Ross. I enjoyed revisiting Longwood with you!
+Marsha, were they also strewn about on the main level when you visited…the one shown in this post? We weren’t allowed upstairs so the tools may still be that way up there, but downstairs, they were not scattered around now. I think Linda told me they used be on that level, too. Wonder if they felt it was a tripping hazard or something. Prospect Hill sounds fascinating…will Google and read more about that. Thanks for sharing that info!
+I visited Longwood many years ago when I was a little girl. This may sound a little foolish, but I’ve always wished someone would complete the mansion. I would love to see the different rooms fixed up! Pipe dreams, I know!
+Me too, Mary. Or at least build it somewhere else. Maybe one day someone will decide to build one like it…would love to see that.
+Mary, a spectacular, abandoned house has recurred in dreams for many years. Turns out it is Longwood. My strongest memories are of the shafts of light coming through the gaps in the dome, and birds flying inside. In the dreams, the dome roof is decaying and the central portion of house is succumbing to water damage. Second story and up never completed. The only area still habitable was the first floor gallery of rooms, and occupied by a loose-knit group, perhaps squatters. The basement area was never visited, in my dreams. I did make a trip along the Natchez trace in early childhood, and we visiting some antebellum mansions. I seem to remember Longwood – it was not open for tours, but it seems there was an elderly black man onsite as a caretaker (note that “elderly” is relative, given the eyes of a child). I seem to remember he allowed us to look inside the home (hence, perhaps, my memory of the dome), but would not allow us to tour the house (which causes me to wonder why the floor plan is so familiar, in dreams). Does any of this ring a bell? I’m very curious about this unexpected familiarity with Longwood. No family history there, that I know of. But I get a pit-in-the-stomach response to the old photos during the worst of times for Longwood. As though I was there. In the dreams, I lived there during the period of decay, and the dreams were before I found where “there” was. In your experience, is this common? Maybe I’m crazy, but I’m remembering something. It came before I found the place. But it could be a very elaborate embroidery of a childhood memory.
+My visit to Longwood (if there was one) would have been in early ’60’s. Was there a black caretaker on site then? Just trying to figure out what is real, and what I’ve imagined.
+Deb, maybe you saw a TV program about it when you were small? Or saw pictures in a book and it triggered the dreams. It’s a spooky place to go inside.
+i love seeing historic homes. when we travel i try to see if they’re are any around. my husband who is usually my traveling companion does not share my enthusiasm for this activity. i just checked your page for historic homes and that is a helpful resource. is there any particular publication that one could find these homes and also are there any travel groups that a woman alone could join to see them? i would appreciate any advice you or your followers can supply. thanks. ann
+Ann, I don’t know of any travel groups off hand. Here in the state of Georgia, The Georgia Trust puts on two excellent rambles each year and you see a lot of homes on those. In Natchez they have pilgrimage tours in the spring. If you have a particular city/town in mind where you would love to tour the old homes, you may want to contact their historical society or their Chamber of Commerce and asked where you can find info about tours. Several towns/cities in GA have Christmas home tours, also. There are a good many books out there showcasing historic homes in various cities. If you have a particular home in mind, they probably have their own website for that house and you can get info there, too. There are a gazillion books on Amazon about historic homes in LA and MS, too…many I never knew about until I purchased some of the books. Hope that info helps a little.
+Such a sad story. I have never visited the Plantations in MS, need to get a road trip set up for the fall. I would also love to see Longwood finished, but then we would lose that history. The nosy snooper in me wants to see it furnished with all those European antiques. I do think it is historically important to actually see how the Civil War affected families. Makes you stop and think for a minute and feel very blessed for what we have now.
+Wouldn’t that be wonderful. Someone needs to build it somewhere so we can see it finished!
+Susan, that gave me the same chills as some of the neglected stately homes and castles in Europe. I would feel so let down touring the interior after seeing the wonderful exterior.
+A few years ago, I toured, all on my own, no one else around, a ruined castle with walls still standing (my hubby doesn’t like them either) and high in the battlements, there was a room which was complete, upon which walls there were very old hand paintings. By this time, I was feeling really creepy and jumped a mile when I came upon a student sitting on the floor copying the painting!!!
+.
+What a sad story. Thanks for sharing. Have a great week!
+We toured this plantation as week as the others in Natchez. Loved them all!
+Oh how sad and tragic. It is still a magnificent home. Just makes you wonder what could have been. I love the Historical home tours. Thanks so much for sharing.
+Thank for sharing another beautiful home with us. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone took on the project of building a model of the home as it would have appear had it ever been finished?
+It’s such a shame that there are a few people in the world who feel entitiled to take a ‘souvenier’ from wherever they happen to be touring. I volunteer at an historic home in Portland, Oregon and when we were setting up a new display one of the paid staff was saying that even though these home-canned goods were behind a glass doors they expected that a certain number of them would just walk out the door.
+I used to live in Natchez and Longwood was a favorite of mine. Yes, the tools and even the dried up paint in the buckets shouted such a melancholy, mournful story in such a quiet, serene setting. So haunting…so lovely…so lonely.
+Thank you so much for sharing this post and photos of Longwood. We toured Longwood in March of 1984 while on our honeymoon in Natchez. I have many of the same photos. As I remember, one of the crates had contained a piano which was not opened until the 1980’s. Longwood’s story has always been so interesting and so sad.
+Hi Susan this beautiful home reminds me so of the castle Neuschwanstein in Barvaria , we visited it in 2012 and it was stunning but the story of King Leopold who spent all of his countries money on his castles and died before it could be completed was so sad. It is worth looking up though , I felt the same wish that it could be finished and lived in.
+Nice post, Susan!
+I sure have not seen something like this around Downtown Charleston! If there was, it would have been a big attraction, even for a place with a number of old homes.
+Incomplete, the house manages to amaze still. Its grandness in sheer size and exotic design will simply catch the eyes from the outside. But, spooky as the unfinished interiors are, you can still see the genius of the plan behind the construction. If only the house was completed, it would have been such a wonder to behold – haunted or not. I really love seeing the combination of bricks, wood, and glass in these old homes. They make a house look so lovely and full of character. I would have loved a tour inside this house, maybe I’ll go there someday too.
+Thanks for sharing this, Susan!
+Susan,
+You have brought back wonderful memories of my trip south in 1983. I went with my parent (now both passed) and spent 3 days in Natchez for the Garden Tour. The costumed guides were wonderful and the antique shops were such fun. I will have to locate the photos I took on that trip and see if I can scan them an send them.
+We also stayed overnight at Nottoway Plantation in White Castle LA. Unforgettable.
+rick
+I love this place..been to a couple parties here.my husband george samrow rebuilt the finial.that was something to see.he’s in the museum section putting it up.I have pic of him drawing it out and installing it.he’s gone now but he left his mark all over natchez and la..
+We stopped 2 days ago and toured the home and grounds. The price of admission was RIDICULOUS for what you get to see ($60 for 2 adults and 2 children). We weren’t allowed to take any pics of the living area in the basement, or given any time to view pictures or objects in the rooms. We were marched in, told a brief description of the room, and marched out. No one is allowed to go into the home without being in a tour group and escorted by a Garden Club member…and these weren’t the most warm and friendly ladies to be around. The entire $60 tour took almost 20 minutes. The house slave quarters are closed, locked, and off limits. The regular slave quarters aren’t even mentioned. I learned more about the home and family online and after the tour. You must pay before even seeing the exterior of the home, and you can’t just walk the grounds without the garden “ladies” getting your money. I certainly won’t go back. This is the most expensive plantation tour I’ve ever taken, and I’ve been on dozens, and seen MUCH nicer. There are numerous other homes in Natchez and in nearby St. Francisville to visit without dealing with this mess.
+We had a similar experience, it may be because it’s mostly run by volunteers, I think. I’m glad I saw it but it was disappointing that we weren’t allowed to take any photos in the areas that were furnished. This was probably my least favorite tour out of all the ones we took.
+My favorites were Greenwood Plantation (super friendly and so nice there!) Rosedown Plantation (gorgeous home and you could take all the pictures you wanted) and Oak Alley…again could take all the photos you wanted. The French Quarter home of General L. Kemper and Leila Williams was also wonderful. You can see the tours I’ve posted so far from my trip to LA and MS here:
+I’ve never have gotten around to posting all of them…need to do that!
+Revisited Longwood around the year 2000. Exxon on Bob Vila show and we are there in the next week touring. It was absolutely amazing and I believe it is haunted. When we got home I was viewing the video that we shot from outside and on the third story window of the house you could see the figure of somebody moving around upstairs in the window. Zoomed in on the camera actually when we were there and it looks like somebody wearing a 1860 style suit.
+Wow, pretty creepy!
+Jim my name is Herman I just visited the home yesterday and was amazed to see that it is in such good condition I first saw it in 1999 on Bob vila’s program tour of historic homes in the south in that program the tools were in place on scaffolding so sad that they have been moved the guide could not remember her lines took one hour was supposed to take 45 minutes end of the day her boss was watching her this was very very unprofessional $20 was the fee and I knew more about it than she did
+I visited Longwood in 1981. I was 14 yrs old. I have never forgotten it. Thank you for this post. It brings back a lot of memories.
+Yes, my husband and I viewed it a few years ago while we were visiting Natchez (one of our favorite getaways) and yes it does give you the chills. So sad it was never completed. So very interesting to visit. Also we visited Melrose plantation while we were there. The guide told us one of the children had died in one of the up stairs bedroom. When we made it upstairs it was quite a different feeling from downstairs talk about giving you the chills. It was a very sad feeling and cold. Beautiful home, I don’t know that I would want to visit it again.
+I have visited Longwood since I was a child, back when you could go as far up as you wanted. Never creepy always beautiful….. I’m 62 now and still my favorite Mississippi antebellum home….. still visit it.
+[[quoteright:220:]]
+->''One of the heroes even wears the penis of a minotaur on a string around his neck. I hate it when that happens.''
+-->-- '''Creator/RogerEbert's [[ review]]'''
+''Your Highness'' is a 2011 adventure comedy film directed by David Gordon Green of ''Film/PineappleExpress'' fame that could best be described as a tongue in cheek take on the sword and sorcery genre.
+The film centers on Prince Fabious (Creator/JamesFranco) and Prince Thadeous (Danny [=McBride=]), who are of the bold/valiant and slovenly/slacker variety, respectively ([[AndZoidberg and Courtney.]]) Fabious' bride to be, Belladonna (Creator/ZooeyDeschanel), is spirited away by an evil wizard, and her fate rests in the hands of the two princes, who embark on the journey of journeys to rescue her. Joining their quest is Isabel (Creator/NataliePortman), a warrior skilled in the art of deadly combat with her own personal agenda for stopping the wizard. Together, the trio faces a variety of deadly and at times hilarious dangers, from witches and knights to minotaurs and hydras.
+----
+!!This film contains examples of:
+* TheAce: Fabious.
+* ActionGirl: Isabel, who's also an archer.
+* ActorAllusion: Isabel has moves worthy of [[StarWars Darth Maul.]] One of her weapons is even a staff with two blades! For added points, she first shows up in an arena with a monster in it.
+** Zooey Deschanel as Belladonna also counts. Her character was said to have been kept in the tower her entire life. Thusly she acts quite strangely, is absolutely unable to do basic things like eat dinner using utensils and other 'quirky' behavior.
+* AffirmativeActionGirl: Isabel, in order to allow Belladonna to be a DistressedDamsel.
+* AndTheAdventureContinues: The movie ends with Isabel [[IncrediblyLamePun coming]] to Thadeous with his next quest.
+* AcquiredPoisonImmunity: Since Thadeous smokes pot on a regular basis, the Wize Wizard's smoked herbs do not really affect him.
+* ArmoredClosetGay: Given the large amount of HoYay in the film, [[spoiler: Leezar certainly seems to give this sort of impression considering what he says when trying to complete the ritual with Belladonna.]]
+-->'''[[spoiler: Leezar:]]''' I'm just not attracted to you!
+** Also [[spoiler: Boremont]], who confesses his love for Fabious [[spoiler: just before he dies]]
+* BarbieDollAnatomy: Julie. No explanation is given, though it's likely it's simply that he's a neuter homunculus.
+* BlackComedyRape: The entire plot centers on the impending (less commonly played for laughs male-on-female) rape of Belladonna as part of casting a spell. The jokes mostly have to do with Leezar's reluctance to do the deed, either because he doesn't really want to or has some sort of severe performance anxiety. [[spoiler: later this gets inverted when the early stages of the spell temporarily turn Belladonna into a sexually aggressive Succubus who, herself, won't take no for an answer.]] But also...
+** Courtney and the minotaur.
+** Fabious and the Wise Wizard.
+* BloodKnight: Isabel. It kind of creeps Thadeous and the others out.
+* BoobyTrap: One of these quickly kills The Barbarian. Also a very literal instance when the characters first meet the White People.
+* BreadEggsMilkSquick: Many examples, but one stands out: Thadeus' servant Courtney is skilled at pickpocketing because he grew up as a sex slave for gypsies. This helps them reclaim a MacGuffin and is never mentioned before or after explaining that.
+* BrickJoke: Not in the finished movie, unfortunately, but gets started in one of the Deleted Scenes on the DVD. [[spoiler:After having escaped Marteetee's arena, Isabel threatens to cut off Thadeus' dick and wear it as a necklace. Now guess what happens with the Minotaur's "horn".]]
+* ButtMonkey: Courtney. Also, Thadeous to a lesser extent.
+* ChekhovsGun: [[spoiler:Isabel's chastity belt, first shown during the OutdoorBathPeeping scene.]]
+** Also, Isabel's arm band.
+* TheChosenOne: Leezar believes he is this.
+* ClusterFBomb
+* ADateWithRosiePalms: Several jokes rely on it; mostly on the part of Thadeous and Leezar.
+-->'''Thadeous''': Courtney, hold my dick.
+-->''*Hands Courtney his "trophy" taken from the Minotaur.*''
+** Also the line from Thadeous: "Isabel, I was just about to finish thinking about you."
+* DeathTrap: Julie hooks Fabious up to one of these.
+* DecapitationPresentation: Of a cyclops's head, no less.
+* DiggingYourselfDeeper: Thadeous's attempt to explain his encounter with the Dwarf queen.
+* DirtyOldMan: The Wise Wizard, very much so.
+* DistractedByTheSexy: Happens to Thadeous on Marteetee's land.
+* DistressedDamsel: Belladonna.
+* DyingDeclarationOfLove: Boremont to Fabious. fabious thinks he means "brotherly love", like between himself and Thaddeous. Nope. ''that'' kind of love.
+* EvilOverlord: Leezar fits this trope to a T.
+* EvilTowerOfOminousness
+* FaceHeelTurn: [[spoiler: Boremont and his knights.]]
+* FakeBrit: Basically the whole of the cast, but WordOfGod says it's more or less a takeoff on all those sword and sorcery epics with actors attempting to replicate British accents and not always succeeding.
+** Averted however with Toby Jones and [[{{Life}} Damian Lewis]].
+* FanserviceExtra - Most of the "White People" are played by topless glamour models.
+* FetishRetardant: Invoked. The three witches cast a sex spell on Belladonna that winds up giving her an ''Film/TheExorcist''-possessed voice.
+* {{Fingore}}: Marteetee loses fingers due to being [[{{Synchronization}} synchronized]] with his hydra.
+* GladiatorGames: Marteetee's arena.
+* GenderBlenderName: Courtney and Julie are both men.
+* HaveAGayOldTime: Fabious tells Thaddeous he wants him to "be gay" (meaning "be merry" in archaic English) with him and their father. Thaddeous prefers to fence shadows and brood.
+* HereWeGoAgain: Gotta get rid of that [[spoiler: cursed chastity belt.]]
+* HighFantasy
+* HorribleJudgeOfCharacter: Fabious when it comes to the Wise Wizard [[spoiler:and Julie]].
+* HoneyTrap: The "White People" trap adventurers by sending out a lovely young woman to run around naked so [[DistractedByTheSexy they're too busy concentrating on other matters to defend themselves]].
+* HypnotizeThePrincess: Apparently of the possession variety. It backfires.
+* IHaveYouNowMyPretty: Lazar's entire plan revolves around raping Belladonna to produce a dragon during the joining of the two moons. He also licks her cheek when he kidnaps her from the wedding.
+* KarmicDeath: In the space of ten minutes, [[spoiler:Julie is thrown down a shaft and lands on the DeathTrap he put Fabious in, and Boremont's BladeBelowTheShoulder is sliced off (with his arm!) and shoved into him.]]
+* KilledMidSentence: [[spoiler: Marteetee, with Isabel's spear through his guts.]]
+* LargeAndInCharge: Marteetee.
+* TheLastOfTheseIsNotLikeTheOthers: A TV spot advertised the film as starring "UsefulNotes/AcademyAward Nominee James Franco, Academy Award Winner Natalie Portman and 5th Grade Class President Danny [=McBride=]."
+* LecherousLicking: Lazar licks the face of Belladonna when he abducts her from her wedding to Fabious.
+* TheLoad: Thadeous.
+* TheLoinsSleepTonight: Poor Leezar has trouble concentrating with the battle going on around him
+* LovableCoward: Also Thadeous.
+* LoveAtFirstNote: Fabious fell in love with Belladonna before he even saw her from hearing her sing.
+* ManChild: Thadeous is a lazy, petulant brat who always wonders why he's TheUnfavorite compared to his brother.
+* MeaningfulName: Belladonna is Italian for "beautiful woman".
+** Of course it is. Incidentally, it's also Latin for Deadly Nightshade.
+* MaleFrontalNudity: The Minotaur.
+* MedievalEuropeanFantasy: All of TheMiddleAges are blended together, along with elements of indigenous tribal, Roman and Far Eastern cultures. Oh yes, and [[SchizoTech Simon, the sentient clockwork bird]].
+* MoneyDearBoy: Natalie Portman admitted she only did this movie because there was some uncertainty if ''Film/BlackSwan'' would get greenlit by a major studio. She signed on to this film for a paycheck and use it to help finance ''Black Swan'' herself, should the need have ever risen. However, ''Black Swan'' got greenlit and went underway fairly easily, and Natalie got stuck doing this film having already signed on.
+* MysteriousWoman: Isabel, before she reveals her backstory to the heroes.
+* NewPowersAsThePlotDemands: Apparently Isabel's arm band is able to repel magic lightning. Who knew?
+** It's vaguely hinted by observation. In the opening scene we have her knight ancestors blocking the magic with their armor and Isabel later claimed that her armband was made from her brothers' shields, assuming to be of the same make of the armor of their ancestors.
+* NighInvulnerability: Leezar.
+* NoCelebritiesWereHarmed: The Soul of the Maze that totally isn't SeanConnery.
+* NoOntologicalInertia: The sex spell on Belladonna ends as soon as Leezar's mothers are killed.
+* NoSocialSkills: Being locked in a tower since she was a young girl, Belladonna has no real clue about many social conventions, such as forks and choreographed dancing. She also confuses "cervix" with "service".
+* OffhandBackhand: Leezar to Isabelle. With a fireball, no less.
+* OutdoorBathPeeping: Shortly after the group meets Isabel.
+* PowerFist: Thaddeous dons a spiked gauntlet as an off-hand during the climax.
+* PrecisionFStrike: Leezar
+-->'''Leezar:''' Magic...[[ThisIsForEmphasisBitch Motherfucker.]]
+* PsychopathicManChild: Leezar and Marteetee.
+* PunBasedTitle: ''Your Highness'' features two members of royalty who in one scene get stoned together.
+* RapeAsComedy: Implied between Courtney and an undoubtedly sex-starved minotaur.
+* RedShirt: The two nameless prisoners alongside our heroes in Marteetee's arena.
+* ScarilyCompetentTracker: Manious. Also a bit creepy/squick in that he ''tastes'' the blade of grass that he states has been urinated on, rather than just smelling it.
+* ShoutOut:
+** The barbarian the heroes meet in the bar is a clear shout-out to Conan the Barbarian. [[spoiler:He's not quite as successful as Ahnold, however.]] Similarly, the practice moves Thadeous goes through after he obtains the Blade of the Unicorn mirrors a scene from that movie.
+** Simon, Fabious's mechanical bird, is a reference to Bubo from ''ClashOfTheTitans''.
+** The Wise Wizard is [[StarWars Yoda]] crossed with [[Literature/AliceInWonderland the smoking caterpillar]]. Leezar and his mothers even have Force Lightning.
+** The chastity belt revelation is borrowed from RobinHoodMenInTights.
+** To just about every fantasy movie from the eighties on, really. Much of the design and special effects resemble ''Film/{{Willow}}'', not least of which is the multi-headed dragon. A scene in a montage references the Gates of Argonath from ''Film/TheFellowshipOfTheRing''. The set during the Labyrinth sequence is very similar to, well, ''Film/{{Labyrinth}}''.
+** Belladonna, having NoSocialSkills due to her backstory, uses a [[Disney/TheLittleMermaid fork as a comb]] before being instructed on its proper use.
+** In the scene where [[spoiler:Julie]] is chanting magic words to communicate with Leezar, you can clearly hear him say "[[HarryPotter Hufflepuff]]".
+* SophisticatedAsHell: The language of the realm, pretty much.
+* StrangeSalute: "...Crossed swords and touched tips" sounds like yet another gay joke. However, Fabious and Thaddeous do this in the climax as a sign of mutual respect; it really does involve swords and the crossing thereof.
+* SuckOutThePoison: LampshadedDoubleEntendre.
+* SwordOfPlotAdvancement: The Unicorn Sword is the only thing that can kill Leezar. .
+* ThisCannotBe: Leezar's reaction when he sees Fabious is wielding the Unicorn Sword.
+* ThisIsGonnaSuck: When Thadeous is first introduced, he's about to be hanged for sleeping with a dwarf queen and simply says, "Oh, fuck me."
+* ThongOfShielding: Isabel is shown to wear one while bathing in her small-clothes.
+* ThresholdGuardians: The Soul of the Maze.
+* TookALevelInBadass: Thadeous
+* TotalEclipseOfThePlot: Leezar's ritual must be performed during "the joining of the two moons", which appears to be an eclipse of one moon by the other, and happens once every hundred years.
+* ThrowItIn: Reportedly, the whole script was like this. The film's writers (one of which was also the star) had written an outline but ended up filming without a finished script and let the actors ad-lib everything.
+* TheUnfavorite: Thadeous feels like this.
+* UptownGirl: Gender inversion - Thadeous is a prince and while ''his'' reputation isn't great, all indications are the kingdom is rich and important. Meanwhile Isabel is a commoner and a homeless adventuress.
+* WackyWaysideTribe: The {{Nubile Savage}}s led by FatBastard Marteetee.
+* VirginPower: Leezar's ritual will only work with a virgin.
+* VulgarHumor: Gay jokes? Check. Sex jokes? Check. Characters unable to go a few sentences without at least one swear word? [[ClusterFBomb Oh so very check.]]
+* YeOldeButcheredeEnglishe: Mostly averted, but randomly shows up a few times for no apparent reason. Usually for a low-brow joke that relies on [[HaveAGayOldTime archaic English to work]].
+* YouKilledMyFather: What motivates Isabel to get revenge on Marteetee.
+** Also what motivates her to join up with Thadeous and Fabious: Leezar's "mothers" killed her six brothers.
+----
+Presidents Address at Gala Nite of 19th Obong Sampson Udo Etuk Excellence Awards
+AN ADDRESS BY THE INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT OF MBOHO MKPARAWA IBIBIO, AKPARAWA (ELDER) MONDAY ETOKAKPAN, JP, FCIL, ON THE OCCASION OF THE 19TH OBONG SAMPSON UDO ETUK EXCELLENCE AWARDS AND GALA NIGHT ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 07, 2015 HELD AT MBOHO HEADQUARTERS, UDO UDOMA HOUSE, UYO, AKWA IBOM STATE
+PROTOCOL
+- INTRODUCTION
+It gives me utmost pleasure to welcome you all to the grand finale of this year’s Obong Sampson Udo Etuk week and to our excellence awards and gala night.
+Mboho Mkparawa Ibibio prides itself as an off-shoot of the legendary Ibibio Union. And so we celebrate this unsung hero and father of Nigeria’s socio-cultural development biannually.
+BRIEF HISTORY OF THE IBIBIO UNION AND SAMPSON UDO ETUK
+On the 28th April, 1928 Obong Sampson Udo Etuk and his friends got together to form Ibibio Welfare Union. This Union later amalgamated with the Ibibio Mainlanders Association earlier formed in Calabar to form the Ibibio Union. Mr Sampson Udo Etuk was then elected the first National President of the Ibibio Union. This Union was the sole propelling force for the education, economic and social emancipation and development of the Ibibio people.
+The thrust of the programme of the.
+However shortly after the formation of the Union came the Great Depression of the 1930s which has remained the worst global economic recession in the last century far worse than the recent economic melt down our own generation has experienced since 2009 to date. Trade was all but non-existent. Shops were closed down here and there. The quays and docks and the rivers in Calabar, Eket and Ikot Abasi (then Ibekwe Opobo) that used to teem with British and foreign ships had become totally idle. For example a tin of palm oil, our only produce, which was selling at 10 shillings before the recession crashed down to 10 pence a drop of over 1000 percent. The situation was totally gloomy and hopeless. Yet undaunted, the pioneer leadership of the Ibibio Union with Obong Sampson Udo Etuk’s encouragement remained focused and pressed ahead, having braced themselves for action and drawing down from the sterling qualities of creativity, resilience and entrepreneurship of the leader of the Ibibio State Union himself.
+And so in August 1938 the singular news of the six Ibibio scholars having sailed abroad for higher education under the auspices and sponsorship of the Ibibio Union led by Obong Sampson Udo Etuk took Nigeria by storm. It was sensational. It was novel in the continent of Africa. It was topical and formed the subject of conversation throughout the country for a long time. It inspired editorial comments in many Nigerian Newspapers, which extolled the achievement of Ibibio Union coupled with exhortations directed towards other communities to emulate this rare example of benevolent leadership and organization. Taking a cue from this trail blazing example from the Ibibio leadership other tribes in Nigeria followed suite.
+The points of those superlative reviews were the resourcefulness and prudence in mobilizing such amount of funds at a time of global economic depression. It was also the ingenuity and rancor-free selection of six students without dissension and disputes employing methods seen by winners and losers as fair and transparent and not the least the wisdom and vision in the choice of courses to be pursued: agriculture, law, medicine and education. The Ibibio Union under the Presidency of Obong Sampson Udo Etuk became a reference point in shrewd leadership excellence.
+And then for the best, Obong Sampson Udo Etuk stoutly turned down all entreaties to have him included among the beneficiaries even though he was eminently qualified and rightly entitled to do so. His reason was that it would be self-serving to labour like he did to start a scholarship programme only to stand as one of the beneficiaries. To him it was nobler to serve others than one-self.
+THE UNSUNG HERO OF NIGERIA
+I have had to take you through this lengthy route to refresh our history of the Ibibio Union and its epochal leadership so as to lay the foundation of my main call tonight. This call is that Obong Sampson Udo Etuk has remained an unsung hero for too long now and it is high time we the Ibibio Nation got up and redress this injustice.
+We are calling for justice to immortalize this father of Nigeria’s socio-cultural organization.
+We call for justice in naming important State and National monuments and institutions after this pioneer of self-help and self-development.
+We hereby make an appeal to the Executive Governor of Akwa Ibom State, His Excellency, Mr Udom Emmanuel to work with the State Legislature to name an edifice and or a centre of importance after this icon of self-less service.
+Many of the products and bye-products of this visionary leadership have themselves become household names in social, economic and political development of modern Nigeria. To be honoured this night is one of the off-spring of the famous Ibibio six.
+In celebrating Obong Sampson Udo Etuk Mboho Mkparawa Ibibio celebrates
+- Leadership
+- Patriotism
+- Vision
+- Entrepreneurship
+- Self-less Service
+- Equity
+- Excellence
+- Resilience
+THE 2015 AWARDEES
+This year’s awards are in the categories of leadership, patriotism, public service, entrepreneurship, creativity and self-less service,
+As in the previous editions the selection process was rigorous and breathe-taking. This was due to the high number of worthy nominees in every category. And in keeping with our tradition we chose to keep the number of awardees low deliberately to continue to make the awards highly coveted honours. Usually those not accommodated this year receive consideration in the next edition. It is Mboho’s version of the Nobel Prize and we are working and hoping to complement the tokens with material and monetary value. Awardees are usually taken by surprise and there is no room for lobbying whatsoever.
+WHO ARE WE
+From the humble beginning of 12 young men nearly three decades ago in a small apartment, Mboho has grown up to become a brand with an audacious presence of over 20,000 members in 55 chapters across four continents of Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. It is now sitting in an imposing Community Centre in the prestigious Udo Udoma Avenue, Uyo with a group of schools catering for Nursery, Primary and College needs all housed in MMI’s purposed-built facilities in Idu Uruan, Uruan Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State.
+Our members have served, and are still serving, in various capacities in the private and public sectors at State and national levels at various times and in various dispensations. Just two weeks ago we had taken our brand and presence to strategic nerve centres in Nigeria and abroad notably the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja where we have been received by the Senate Minority leader in the National Assembly. Overseas Mboho Mkparawa Ibibio continues to be a cynosure of all eyes, a model and an example of a people proud and desirous to retain their identity.
+We are strong in the United States and Canada with 5 vibrant chapters and still counting. We are very strong in the United Kingdom where we have 4 strong chapters in London, Manchester, Essex and Heathrow. Plans are afoot to establish a chapter in Italy during the first quarter of 2016.
+We have concluded plans, after a pre-inauguration visit, to establish a chapter in South Africa. Assessment is still on-going for a prospective chapter in Israel as a stepping stone into the Asian Continent.
+We recall here some of the battles we have taken on and won to protect and restore the interests of Ibibio and Akwa Ibom people which came under attack in the leadership, hierarchy and administration of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (Mfon Usoro in NIMASA), Nigerian Customs Service (Faith Umoh in NCS), Nigerian Maritime Academy Oron, Resource Control Agitation (AKS and 13 Percent Derivation Struggle).
+We recall here the leadership role MMI played in ensuring that an Ibibio son, former World Heavy Weight Boxing Champion, Samuel Peters was brought back to receive his due honour and reward from both State and Nation for his gallant contribution in projecting the country in bright lights in his field of endeavour.
+In the unification of the State we recall the elaborate, expensive and innovative Mboho Unity Tour around the 31 Local Government Areas of Akwa Ibom State in our self-imposed tedium and drudgery of campaigning through the State to help pull it back from tipping over following unpatriotic and self-serving disposition of our political leaders which left the State precariously divided and dangerously polarized along ethnic lines. This had pushed the State to the precipice and stressed the strings of unity that hold the It to its elastic limits.
+Mboho Mkparawa Ibibio also single-handedly sponsored and facilitated the amalgamation of all Akwa Ibom State Clergies in Lagos numbering over 100 under one umbrella known as Akwa Ibom Clergy Forum (AICLEF) under the pioneer headship of Pastor Daniel Akwatang of Qua Iboe Church, Lagos. Also noteworthy is the one-day MMI/UNICEF Consultative Forum which we invited UNICEF to come partner with us to combat human-trafficking of Akwa Ibom children into slavery in Lagos at the height of this societal ill in the years 2000 and 2001.
+In practical terms MMI has now acquired a number of landed property which are at various stages of development in addition to our International Headquarters complex in Uyo. Notable among these are one in our birth place, Calabar in the prime location of Murtala Muhammed Highway- a property donated by the Grand Patron of Mboho Mkparawa Ibibio Elder (Air Marshal) Nsikak Eduok; another one in Lagos in the bubbling centre of commerce Ojuelegba- property donated by Nka Ikemesit Iban Ibibio, Lagos; then one in Eket Town and one in Nsit Ubium both acquired through members’ contributions. As I speak a number of our chapters in Akwa Ibom State are not left behind in this drive for establishment of physical presence wherever we are.
+In the past we have made tangible efforts at empowerment of members with some results through ventures and programmes like the Mboho Microcredit Scheme, Mboho Farms and Mboho Cooperatives. Presently having learnt from our experience we have come out to promote a more ambitious model The Mboho Microfinance Bank. We are confident that with blueprints from the subject-matter experts amongst us, the strict regulatory framework, the vast experience and the fail-proof safeguards in place the MMFB will be there to meet our twin needs of returns on investment and empowerment of members who often stand in genuine need of cheap credit lines.
+The review of the Mboho’s constitution is ongoing and at advanced stages of completion. It is expected that the product when completed will make it more adaptive to our circumstances, peculiarities and contemporary needs.
+The Mboho’s Microfinance Bank project is still gathering momentum and we again appeal to all our members to invest in this economic venture.
+As part of these reviews we are tinkering with the idea of consolidating and globalizing our yearly Conventions and rotating these among the three continents where MMI has strong presence namely, Africa, Europe and North America..
+OUR CHALLENGES
+MBOHO UNITY SCHOOL
+The Mboho Unity Schools (MUS) remain the centre-piece of our development agenda. As an off-shoot of the iconic Ibibio Union MMI understands that education is the surest way to empower, emancipate and equip a people to attain self-actualization. We understand too, that education is not cheap after all. This is why the MUS has remained the single largest consumer of our financial resources. Each review the operation of the schools we easily come to the conclusion that our group of schools can, and, indeed, will attain a self-sustaining status that we all wish it does but some minimum investment needs to be made first in order to take it to the standard of learning centre of excellence.
+Specifically we are in need of financial support to the tune of
+- N5miilion to complete the perimeter fencing.
+- 2 Hostel blocks for boys and girls in the high School section
+- Recreation facilities and equipment for both indoor and outdoor games
+- Nursery playground,
+- Basket ball pitch construction,
+- Handball pitch construction,
+- Volley ball pitch
+- Lawn tennis facility.
+I should inform you that your interventions in the schools are yielding the desired results as the students have been doing excellently well in all external examinations of Junior and Senior Certificate categories returning 100 percent pass rates.
+APPEAL FOR SUPPORT
+I hereby appeal for the support of Akwa Ibom State Government, all our members, friends and other partners towards the completion of all the on-going projects and programmes of the organization.
+CONCLUSION
+Mboho Mkparawa Ibibio turned 28 years some months back. After 28 of existence we have come of age, indeed the age of maturity. We might have achieved quite a lot. But a lot more remains to be done. We must strive harder to remain, in all material particulars, in the vanguard for the unity, prosperity and emancipation of the Ibibio nation through economic and fiscal autonomy.
+My administration will continue to keep our doors open for objective and useful suggestions and criticisms. It is our collective responsibility to build a strong and virile organization upon the foundation already laid so that the labours of our founding fathers shall not be in vain.
+Yak isong ado ukana.
+May God bless Mhoho Mkparawa Ibibio.
+Akparawa ( Elder ) Monday Etokakpan, FCIL, JP.
+International President,
+November 07, 2015
+
+Again, I want to introduce some breads that I make over and over! My family loves these bread as I can tell is they don't complain to me that they are tired of these bread. They ask me more slices of these often.
+First, This bread was posted by Daisy_A () I posted this bread before, but I got a lovely letter from one of my husband's coworker who loves bread. She said that this was the best bread I ever had! she and her mother ate every bit of crumb until it was completely gone! I was really happy to hear that they enjoyed this loaf. I love this bread, too. I can't count how many time I made this. It is sourer that I usually attempt for the other bread. This bread shloud be the way, and this has a lot of flavor, too.
+I used 125% sourdough culture this time. It was difficult to put it in the tin but it was worth it! It has more moist in the crumb!
+Thank you, Daisy and Katie and rebecca!
+Second, Franko posted this recipe but he used 100% spelt flour that is more challenge for me. Although I posted it this recipe using 100% whole wheat, and 80% whole wheat. this time, I used white sourdough culture instead, and 50% white bread flour, 50% whole wheat flour and some wild rice and oats for the soaker. I also decreased the water amount down to 9% as like I made the other mutilgrain bread before. I have shopped some stuff for baking recently.. I can't still afford to buy spelt flour.... I will buy it and other flour that I want to try for other recipe when I can spend more money for extra.
+I sprinkled some toasted sesame seeds and oats on the top. I got this idea from Karin who posted a fabulous Straun on Khalid's blog. Thank you, Kharin. It tasted really really good! Thank you, Franko!
+In the end, This is the first time to post this bread that was posted by Hansjoakim. I have made some of his rye bread that were excellent. This is his pain au levain. I love this bread. I tasted sour and sweet on the first day when I sliced them when it was slightly warm yet. I regreted that I did. As RobynNZ suggested me that I should have waited until it was completely cool. I always appreciate her help. Many thanks to you, Robyn. The next day, the taste was wonderful. We ate toasted 2 slices of this bread each with butter for this breadfast! Yummy!!
+Thank you, Hansjoakim!!
+I am really appreciate for all of you and Floyd who keeps the website peace and safe. Thank you, everybody.!!
+When I prepared to make "36 hours + sourdough baguette" that is posted by Txfarmer last night, I mixed the sourdough culture and flour instead the water and the flour by my mistake because I was ready to feed my starters in the same time. The sourdough culture that is my keeper was taken out from refrigerator.( 6 ℃) I didn't want to throw it away, so I continued ...
+1 Baguette
+The day before:
+100% white hydration sourdough starter 75g ( from refrigerator : The was my keeper. I keep my 100% starter at the roomtemperature and feed it twice a day )
+Ice water 160g
+* Mix them and put it in a refrigerator for overnight.
+The final day:
+flour 53g
+salt 5g
+Method:
+1. The final day- mix the starter mixture and flour →Autolize 30 minutes →Add the salt and mix ( strech and fold way while giving it strokes)
+2. Fermentation ( I did 3 hours ) Strech and fold every 30 minutes ( as Tyfarmer's recipe)
+3. Shape
+4. Proof ( I did 2.5 hours) Temerature was 68F.
+5 Bake 470F for 7 minutes, 450F for 13 minutes , and shut off the oven left the baguette for 5 minutes in the oven.
+In fact, I tried her recipe a couple days ago, but it was a failure because it was burst on the bottom.I think that was under-prooved. It was very tasty and it was chewyer than this baguette above. it was also cruncher, too. I really thank Txfarmer who sharing the best baguette's recipe I ever tasted.
+Last night when I made the mistake, I made another batch of the baguette. I hope that it will be successful tomorrow...
+---Next day---
+The result was good. But it was still underprooved. I should have let it rise for the final fermentation.
+And, I set up another one last night to use my mistake version. I took 4 hours for bulk fermentation and 3 hours for final fermentation. I let it rise double in bulk in the test dough. I usually bake when it is 1.5 times in bulk. I enjoyed to make these baguettes. Thank you so much, txfarmer. She is an amazing baker.
+-----Our family's favorite bagels------------
+When I have a lot of starter that is keeper in a refrigerator, I make Susan's bagels .
+I will try the other Susan's bagels soon.
+This is the bagels that I used 100% white wild yeast by Sourdolady.
+My daughter who is 4 years old made a special one. She call it " A human bagel" One of my friend said " It looks like a frog!"
+The bagels are that I used 100% rye sourdough culture by Hamelman.
+I think they are softer than the other one. But I like them too.
+They are made by my daughter again. From right on the top, a car, a regular bagel, and a christmas tree. I like to make bread with my daughter who makes me laugh while making.
+Thank you, Susan!
+I started to make a wild yeast sourdough starter on 21st August this year ( from here --) and my first sourdough was Susan's one.
+You can see my sourdough diary here ---
+I couldn't solve the problem for a while until I saw Vogel's blog---
+After I use the technique ( take some dough and put it into a glass ), I don't make any rubbery-slipper bread anymore. I also use finger test too. That is very helpful.
+I tried some recipe that are posted here and they became my favorite.
+1) Simple white sourdough loaf that was posted by Daisy-A.
+Again, I made another one that I used soaker that I didn't plan to do. I was trying to make 70% rye that is posted by hasjoakim but I found mold in the sponge next morning so that I used the soaker for this loaf. It came out nice bread. I felt that I need 1-2g more salt to this loaf when I tasted.
+Thank you, Daisy! When I shape this loaf, I give the dough tension like this video. There are a moment that we can't see what he is doing but you will see at the end. :)
+2) I make nut-sourdough that is posted by hansjoakim. My husband loves this bread,So do I!
+I used walnuts instead of Hazelnuts but it was very good although I scorched the surface. I will make this bread again. Thank you, hansjoakim.
+3) 5 Grain levain bread by Hamelman: I really love this bread. But I can't shape it nicely. As you see the picture, The gloom looks like a bump after a child hit his or her head on the wall or something. I used the shaping method by Hamelman's book. Please let me know if you have some ideas to solve this.
+Thank you for reading, everybody.
+*Large fresh tomatoes ( Peeled and diced)
+2
+*Basil
+6-7 leaves
+*Garlic (grounded)
+1 clove
+*Olive oil
+4Tbsp
+*Parmesan cheese
+2Tbsp
+*Salt
+2 pinch
+*Freshly grounded black pepper
+1-2 tsp
+French bread ( sliced and toasted)
+1 baguette
+Cream cheese
+As much as you want!
+My husband had been diagnosed with hypoglycemia. The worsest thing is that he has been suffering from panic attack since he pasted out at the work 3 years ago. I was too silly that I hadn't tried to use 100% whole wheat flour on my recipe. ( My old recipe was 54%(Actually 54.5%)whole wheat bread) And yet he likes 55% whole wheat bread more than than 85% or 100%.
+So, this is My 100% whole wheat bread and 85% whole wheat bread and 55% whole wheat bread recipe
+(23cm x 10.5cm x 10.5cm) 100% -13cm height and 85% -13-14cm height and 55%- 13-14cm height after baking.
+Note: When you proof the dough too much before baking, You will have really tall bread, but the top part will be really light.
+This is 55% whole wheat bread
+*Yeast
+5.3g
+*Warm water ( 40℃ or 100F)
+180g
+*Honey
+24g
+*Molasses
+18g
+*2 Egg yolk (L ） +Heavy whipping cream =
+To warm up :10seconds in a microwave using normal mode.
+80g
+*Whole wheat flour for 100% or All purpose flour or bread flour for 85%
+#All purpose flour for 55%
+*100g
+#200g
+*Whole wheat flour for 100% and 85%
+#whole wheat flour for 55%
+*340g
+#240g
+Salt
+8g
+Butter
+To soften :20 seconds in a microwave using defrost mode.
+Melted butter for brushing after baking
+#I always use all purpose flour.
+1. Put * ingredients in order except *the flour in a big bowl and mix. Add *the flour and mix. Set aside.
+2. LEFT: Put whole wheat flour and salt in a midium bowl. Right: set the butter in a small bowl. Top: No.1.
+3. Put the flour and salt mixture in the food processor and hit pulse 5.6 times until combine.
+4. Add *dough mixture and the butter run until combine about 40 seconds or so.
+5. Take the dough out from the food processor, and clean *dough mixture bowl. Put the dough back in the food processor and run until combine.
+6.Time to knead by hand for 15 minutes. Push it down and stretch and fold and repeat over and over. This is very important to get strong gluten development.
+7.Put some shortening on a large bowl, and place the dough in. Proof at 28℃ or 32F for 50 minutes or until the loaf double in size.
+8.Punch down to degas gently,Turn the dough onto a counter and divide in 2 and shape. ( It is much better to have beautiful loaf when you measure it) rest for 20 minutes.]
+9. Shape : Both oval's height should be around 20cm. * pinch very well!
+.
+: Japanese bakery way
+: My way: to have taller loaf. Rolling on the second process. Take a look below.
+10. Place each of the dough in a loaf pan like the picture below.( It will rise equally)
+11.Pace the dough have equal space in the pan.
+: Japanese bakery way ( This picture is white sandwich bread version →)
+:My way
+12. Proof at 38℃ or 100F until the dough rises up a little over the top of the pan. ( around 1.2 hours for 100% whole wheat bread and 1hour for 85% whole wheat bread) * The time is vary depends on the temprature.
+13.Preheat the oven to 200℃ or 400F. Decrease 180℃ or 350F and bake for 30 minutes.
+14.Drop the pan with the loaf onto a ground about 15cm height to give the dough shock, and remove it immediately from the pan and cool on a rack for at least 1 hour or so, before slicing or serving. ( * Optional: Brush melted butter on the surface.)
+100% whole wheat bread
+85% whole wheat bread
+Busting the myths about the Crusades
+Across the 12th and 13th centuries, the noblemen of Europe conducted a series of ‘Crusades’ in the Holy Land. Over six or seven centuries, this period history was largely neglected, but then the 20th century saw a resurgence of (negative) interest in these Crusades, which generated a number of myths that took over popular opinion.
+I don't know how many times over the years I have found myself flummoxed in evangelistic conversations when the question is thrown at me, “What about the Crusades?”
+Now, during my high school Scripture teaching years, I often had a formally parallel question thrown at me: “What about evolution?” After this gauntlet was thrown down with appropriately monotonous frequency, I honed an equally monotonous answer: “Well, what about evolution?” But I never thought of using an analogous answer to my anti-crusading friends: “Well, what about the Crusades?” I now realize that this is exactly the answer I should have given.
+In both situations, the questioner believes the weight of the evidence is on their side, and it is therefore not necessary to supply any of it to knock Christianity out of the ring. The high school brain seems to readily absorb the myth that evolution overturns the Bible with no real knowledge of the science or the Scripture. The 20th-century myth-makers have done such a good job that, with no real knowledge of the Crusades or Christianity, your average human being seems to know that one cancels out the other—even if he/she doesn't quite know how or why.
+Now, back then, I may have had some knowledge about Christianity, but I had absolutely no knowledge of the Crusades—apart from what I picked up as a boy, watching a television show about Robin Hood, in which they awaited the return of Richard the Lionheart from his Crusade. In other words: I knew nothing.
+Such ignorance made me ask the right question, but of myself: “Okay, what about the Crusades? Is there something here that I should be embarrassed about, or worse, is there something that overturns the Christianity that I stand for?” If only I knew what these things were. But whenever I was confronted by the question, I tapped my watch and remembered I had another appointment.
+However, I have now finally reached the item on my ‘To do’ list that says: “Read something on the Crusades”. And I have reached it at exactly the right moment, for Rodney Stark (a favourite author of mine) has recently published God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades (HarperCollins, New York, 2009). This is an excellent book, and busts apart the various myths about the Crusades. His own summary of the book is as follows:. (p. 248)
+Particularly at this moment in human history when all things Islam are back on the agenda in such a big way, this myth-busting book is well worth the read.
+Who provoked the Swedish Crusade to modern day Finland or Danish crusades to modern day Estonia. And if this was not for “land, loot, or converts” then what were those for? Is Stark pushing the Christian agenda again and defending Christians who believed for killing in the name of God?
+sounds interesting Peter, although the sense that you are serving in Gods batallion doesn’t solve all the problems, as Marc points out. Does the case for Christianity really rest on our ability to defend the actions of christians throughout the centuries?
+Hmmm, that sounds like a good way to respond. Can we look forward to reading more of your insights from the book?
+A question I rarely hear asked is - why were there Muslims in Jerusalem at all during this period? It was conquered by the Caliphate, of course, in the early 7th century. Muslims are not really in a position to assume the moral high ground there…
+Craig, when it comes to Jerusalem, is anyone in a position to assert the moral high ground?
+Peter, does the book actually defend (broadly speaking) the actions of the crusaders, as one reading of the title suggests?
+Marc, the book is about the five crusades conducted with the holy land in view. I am not sure what you have in mind by ‘pushing the Christian agenda again’—surely anyone interested in the truth would be on board the attempt to set the record straight if myths have arisen? Or is the search for truth the peculiar domain of ‘the Christian agenda’?
+Mike, I wouldn’t say the case for christianity rests on the ability to defend the action of Christians. There is plenty in this book that I wouldn’t want to defend (neither does Stark)—such as the belief that a crusade atoned for a persons sins. But there are attacks on Christianity that often arise like a heavy smoke screen, that still should be dealt with (if possible), for such things (at least for some people) may get in the way of hearing the true case for Christ.
+I take it that Craig is hinting at one thing Stark points out (and it is obvious), namely, that the Crusades were not unprovoked. Just 80 years after Muhammad’s death in 632, ‘a new Muslim empire had displaced Christians from most of the Middle East, all of North Africa, Cyprus, and most of Spain’ (p.12)—an invasion replete with the slaughters usual for the warfare of the day. Jerusalem surrendered in 636. By 732 a large muslim army was pressing into France.
+But the other factor in the mix was that now Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land began to be harrassed, persecuted and slaughtered, and later Christian sites (such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre) were destroyed. This went on for some centuries, and this long back story combined with the latest threat from the Turks, to give rise to Pope Urban’s 1095 call that launched the first Crusade.
+So, Stark’s first point: contrary to what is often said, the crusades were not unprovoked.
+Rob, the book does defend the actions of the crusaders, as you put it ‘broadly speaking’—although, as said already, that doesn’t mean every action is decreed to be right.
+Stark is a sociologist. A recent trend in sociology is to provide ‘emic’ (from the inside) descriptions, rather than ‘etic’ (from the outside). The latter was a mistake made by many in the ‘soft sciences’ for a long time. So, an anthropologist would try to understand the practices of a village in way-off-somewhere-else, by reference to European standards of life (to put it extremely). An ‘emic’ description would be to seek to describe the practice as those who are engaged in it would do. This, of course (we can say now with the wisdom of our superior hind sight) is the beginning of real understanding.
+As in sociology, so in history. So, for example, it is anachronistic and misguided to apply the rules of warfare that arose after the Geneva Convention, to battles from an earlier age. The conventions governing the beseiging of cities were quite simple: the beseiger offered the beseigee terms of surrender. If they were accepted, well and good. If they were rejected, when the city eventually fell, the inhabitants were slaughtered, or enslaved, and the city became the plunder of the victor’s troops. Thus when the First Crusade launched the attack on Jerusalem on 13 June 1099, the Egyptian Fatimids who had taken the city from the Turks one year before, did not accept terms of surrender. The next day the crusaders stormed the walls and slaughtered the muslim army and many others in the city as the looting began (pp.155-156). This is one of the major ‘blemishes’ on the Crusader’s record.
+‘The case for the crusades’ at this point would say, however, that, despite the Geneva convention, 1) this was all according to the conventions of the time; 2) if the Crusaders were to be condemned for this massacre, then the muslims should also be condemned for the many similar and earlier massacres (i.e. it wasn’t one sided); and, perhaps even, 3) if this is deemed a blemish, what do we say of the string of later cases where the crusaders were beseiged, accepted the terms offered by their muslim beseigers and, contrary to the conventions of the day were then slaughtered as they came out of the city?
+‘Broadly speaking’ is this a defence? Yes, for it is an attempt to understand Crusader motives and actions from the inside and according to the conventions of the time; and yes, because it is an attempt to neutralise unfair and one-sided attacks, and expose a series of recent myths.
+Hi Peter
+Thanks for your summary. I agree with prefering emic over etic descriptions within sociology and history. Stark’s aim to expose the myths surrounding the crusades is also commendable and welcome. Also, in our judgment of the crusaders’ actions, it is helpful to be reminded of the context and convention of warfare in their time. I guess they may have been like most Christians of most ages, who followed the conventions of their day rather than the crucified messiah who called his disciples to turn the other cheek and carry the cross. Much easier said than done.
+Peter,
+Stark often seems to have a Christian agenda by ignoring some facts and drawing conclusions trained historians don’t necessary see. Surely anyone interested in the truth would also have read real historians who have refuted Stark’s books. Which historians have you read who challenge Stark’s views? Have you read about Crusades from a Muslim point of view?
+Regarding “pushing the Christian agenda again”
+Notice that first you quoted “The Crusades were not unprovoked”
+When I challenged this with valid examples you changed the statement to
+“the five crusades conducted with the holy land…”
+To me the truth statement is that a Christian sociologist who often writes about Christianity thinks that the five crusades conducted with the holy land were not unprovoked. This is where I have to leave it until I have a chance to read it.
+So search for truth is not the peculiar domain of ‘the Christian agenda’ as Christians often overstate their case like what you quoted first. The real truth only comes out after challenging the Christian view.
+See how this Christian meme is going wild in the Internet. Google: “Crusades were not unprovoked” Stark
+You’ll notice how this half truth is now becoming a Christian fact.
+Marc Aleso,
+If I have followed your argument correctly, you are suggesting that Peter has done something wrong by speaking of the “Crusades” when it would have been more precise to speak of “the first five Crusades in the Holy Land” and that somehow this is a culpable overstatement of the case.
+This seems a bit strange, I have to say. “Crusades” is a term with a fair degree of flexibility in medieval studies. Most of the time when medieval scholars discuss the “Crusades” they use it the way Peter has - as referring to the attempts to reconquer the Holy Land, and especially Jerusalem. They don’t feel the need to say “The Crusades in the Holy Land every time, even though they are quite aware that Crusades were, over time, initiated in other contexts.
+Most people tend to think of “the Crusades” as meaning “the Crusades in the Holy Land” as its baseline meaning.
+As for refutation of Stark, what Peter has said about his argument (my only information on the book at this point) is so uncontroversial that I am surprised it is making any waves at all.
+Go to almost any general secular academic discussion of the Crusades from the last century and there should be some recognition that the lands were previously Christian and had been conquered by Muslim forces; that the growing phenomena of Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem was experiencing shabby treatment at the hands of Muslims; and that, especially in places like Spain, Muslim forces had come close to conquering significant stretches of Christian Europe.
+As far as I can see, none of that is in any way controversial or even noteworthy in medieval studies. It’s on a par with saying that the period was characterised by feudalism - it’s just basic knowledge.
+If Stark’s book is making waves by presenting those points in a popular fashion, then that can only indicate that people are quite ignorant of basic details of the period such that even a basic familiarity shatters widely held notions.
+I saw this comment on your post:
+Mark Baddeley,
+If you talk to medieval scholars they can tell you there were about 10 major and more than 10 minor Crusades motivated by various reasons. (Read about Crusade of 1101, Alexandrian Crusade, Fourth Crusade and the Crusades around the Baltic Sea)
+You can use the term “the Crusades” as “the Crusades in the Holy Land” if it is clear from the context. In the quote above it was not. If most people tend to think of “the Crusades” as meaning “the Crusades in the Holy Land” it does not mean it is right and maybe people need to be educated. If people want to know the real motivation of religiously authorised Crusades this article does not help the situation. People should know this at the time we are involved in a war president Bush repeatedly called a Crusade.
+I pointed out non-provoked Christian crusades yet you seem to advocate that it is ok to propagate the pro-Christian idea that “The Crusades were not unprovoked”. This goes to my point pushing the Christian agenda. Christians are happy to promote slightly misleading info if it supports Christian agenda, but they complain if someone tells misleading info about Christians. What ever happened to attempt to set the record straight with the full truth?
+Marc Aleso,
+We agree that there are two misconceptions that exist among people generally.
+1. Most people think of attempts to reconquer the Holy Land from Muslims when they hear the word “Crusades”.
+2. Many people think that the attempts to reconquer the Holy Land from Muslims are so morally indefensible as to fatally damage any Christian claims.
+Peter was only addressing point 2. And his argument was hardly a justification of those Crusades, merely that they were not entirely unprovoked - you can see from the comments that most Christians hardly considered that justification. So I don’t see the blanket self-justification that you are claiming here.
+But more fundamentally, most people use the word “Crusades” to refer to attempts to reconquer the Holy Land, and Peter (and Stark) are only addressing that issue if they use the word “Crusades” with the same, limited, focus.
+Only someone like yourself, aware of the broader possible meaning of the term could conceive that it was a defense of other “Crusades” because only somone like yourself is aware of the broader meaning.
+As to educating people to understand things better, sure, I am always in favour of that.
+But when someone says, “What about the Crusades?” I’m not sure that they are inviting you to educate them on the existence of 20+ Crusades. They are saying “The attempts to reconquer the Holy Land were inhuman unprovoked aggression against peaceful Muslims and so disprove Christianity” or the like. In that context, Stark (and Peter) are making a limited, but valid response.
+If you want to launch a crusade for the fuller education of the public on the Crusades as well, then you are free to do so, and as someone who has lectured on Medieval History I would consider it a noble work.
+Sorry don’t know what happened to the previous post.
+Rob Taggart makes an excellent point in his last post.
+Peter Bolt says
+This “justirication” amounts to nothing more than “it was ok by secular standards at the time” and “what we did was ok ‘cos they did worse”.
+You ask
+I’d say YES but it’s your moral reasoning rather than the unChristian activities of the Crusaders that has done it.
+By relativising CHristian morals according to the time and others’ actions you’re undermining any Christian claims of moral discernment based on THE truth of GOd’s word. If what is “right” is changeable according to time and place then God’s word stops being the ultimate authority.
+Four young men, all past ministry apprentices, in today’s language, went with Afgan Border Crusade in the early 1980s to investigate Jesus discipleship ministry ways there. I was one of those men. I was privileged to be tutored by Alan Tippett for a year prior to going, benefited from Wycliffe training and had prior experience in making disciples on campus and with grads. Little did we know what to expect. I set myself the goal of going through primary school civics texts, daily bible reading and study (following Ken Short’s example) on top of daily language learning. This was the early days of non traditional work ie outside compounds and with a discipleship focus. We quickly learnt the need for understanding, love, patience, kindness, the need to rejoice, realism, prayer, discipline and that suffering was as daily aspect of life. What am I saying - cast out the notion of conquest, convert, colonise/control and focus on rejoicing and worshiping our Lord and growing a servant heart. Let people see you as Jesus followers, be involved in their lives, live at their level, listen. Within two years our visas were cancelled, I was sick and we returned. A lost cause. No way!!! To undo the legacy of the Crusades, and there are modern day parallels, involves rethinking deeply - this remains a current need. A substantial biblical training (theo college) and teaming up with like minded people are essentials. We were weak on these fronts. However, we all did have a disciplemaking passion. ... My two cents. Yes, I returned did a triple major in cultural anthropology and now in retirement I am at theo college- full time! Kill the notion of retirement as a western world, twentieth century invention ... WE have a job to do!! Go for it Peter Bolt an excellent initiative. This should be a standing task.
+Good morning. The dog days are upon us.
+Gov. Eliot Spitzer shut down reporters’ questions about Troopergate, saying he’s answered all of them already. A friend of the governor’s on the State Ethics Commission recused himself.
+Spitzer talks about his agenda for the working poor.
+From the weekend, a report on Spitzer’s day at a NASCAR race.
+An appellate court says the Oneida tribe has to go forward with a lawsuit it brought over property tax issues - even though it doesn’t want to.
+More on the new Region 4 chief at DEC.
+Newsday columnist Larry Levy is moving on.
+And if you’re wondering what former Assemblyman Mike Bragman is up to these days, here you go.
+In ’08 news:
+Rudy Giuliani says the U.S. will be in Iraq at least through ’08, and will need to maintain a presence there for some time. He’s expected to talk about immigration today.
+Giuliani will be in London next month for a speech and some overseas fund-raising. More here.
+A panel debates Giuliani’s role in New York City’s drop in crime.
+Hillary Clinton unveils her first TV ad, aimed at voters in Iowa. More here and here.
+At the Clinton presidential library, thousands of documents on the former First Lady remain under wraps.Â
+Clinton follows a nurse for a day.
+“Gov. Eliot Spitzer shut down reporters’ questions about Troopergate, saying he’s answered all of them already”
+Well, it worked for Joe Bruno’s FBI investigation, I suppose it would only be fair to expect it will work for Spitzer’s ethics investigation.
+I guess reporters will have to wait until the dust settles and the wrists are slapped and the lawyers and investigators working for the FBI and the DA and the ethics commission move on to other sources of taxpayer income.
+RUDY AND MITT – DUELING EGOMANIACS
+What was more insulting over the past week? Rudy Giuliani claiming that he did more at Ground Zero than 9/11 rescue workers? Or, Mitt Romney’s ridiculous suggestion that his five sons on the campaign bus were doing as much for America as our brave troops who put their necks on the line every day in Iraq and Afghanistan?
+It’s Republican egomaniacs on parade! …
+As the New York Daily News reported: .
+‘This is not a mayor or a governor or a President who’s sitting in an ivory tower,’ Giuliani said. ‘I. ‘I personally find that very, very insulting,’ he said.”
+In a similar vein, the Associated Press noted: “Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Wednesday defended his five sons’ decision not to enlist in the military, saying they’re showing their support for the country by ‘helping me get elected.’
+Romney, who did not serve in Vietnam due to his Mormon missionary work and a high draft lottery number, was asked the question by an anti-war activist after a speech in which he called for ‘a surge of support’ for U.S. forces in Iraq.”
+Just two more profiles in (phony) courage from the GOP!
+MORE TAX BREAKS FOR THE RICH PAID FOR BY THE POOR
+You can’t keep a reverse Robin Hood down.
+Not content to already have handled billions in tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans, President Bush is now upping the ante with calls for even more cuts that would come at the expense of … you guessed it! … the poorest taxpayers.
+As the Washington Post reports:  ‘inclined’ to send a corporate tax package to Congress, although he expressed uncertainty about its political viability.”
+No kidding!
+It sounds like basically the entire administration has recused itself, not answering any pertinent questions, then claiming everyone has cooperated fully and answered every question asked.
+We asked for it, we got it NY.
+“Giuliani will be in London next month for a speech and some overseas fund-raising.”
+Let me get this straight, good for Guiliani but bad for Gillibrand?
+The Grand Oil Party hypocrisy is blinding.
+Anyone else without phone service today? Have heard there is a fiber optic outage in the Capital Region. I guess NYS government work grinds to a halt.
+You know its a DEAD ISSUE when the only clowns chasing the nothing-gate story are the bottom feeders at the moonie and murdoch toilet papers!!!
+Can you say IRRELEVANT???? ROTFLMAO!!!!
+…… Poor JJ!! Having to post such total crap just to keep the dead enders’ from having a collective stroke!!! …. As appealing as it would sound to us in the reality based community!!! …. Oh well ….
+Yup …. the oil grab is going just peachy!!
+U.S. Deaths Confirmed By The DoD: 3682
+Reported U.S. Deaths Pending DoD Confirmation: 11
+Total 3693
+“U.S. Deaths Confirmed By The DoD: 3682
+Reported U.S. Deaths Pending DoD Confirmation: 11
+Total 3693″
+Persons killed in auto accidents in California (2005 alone): 4,304
+I guess Baghdad’s a safer commute than LA for Americans. . .
+By your reasoning, Must-Be-Smoking-Something-Joe, we’d better pull out of Detroit as well.
+#8 – CrackheadJoe (D-Taliban) – how many bad guys have been killed?
+THE REPUBLICANS LAME SHOWING IN IOWA
+The lackluster GOP presidential field has a new problem. Before it was just that they couldn’t raise money. Now they can’t even get the party faithful out to vote.
+As Rob Kall explains in Op-Ed News: “No surprises in Iowa. Money won. Mitt Romney, the wealthiest in the Republican primary pack, spent millions to get 4,000 some votes …
+The big loser– Tommy Thompson, who’d said he’d pull out if he didn’t come in second. He ended up coming in last among those who worked the state hard.
+When the Republican candidates get down to huckstering to the right wing hordes, you get to see the real right winger in them. It can be ugly and it can be funny. Tommy Thompson, Tom Tancredo– they were a laugh, parroting the old Republican talking points almost verbatim, as though that made them special. ‘I support the right to bear arms.’ ‘Tighten up them borders.’ Pitiful!
+At least Huckabee and Paul seem to have minds, and talk more like real people. Of course, their independence makes them less likely to garner the PAC money they’ll need to compete with Romney’s wealth and Giuliani’s PAC money. The worst? Tancredo is a nutcase. Of course he’s probably desperate to get attention. He’s a national embarrassment– talking about blowing up Mecca.
+The winner, Romney pulled in a bit more than 4,000 votes. I’m guessing he spent better than $500 bucks a vote, maybe even more than $1000 a vote– considering that he made 200+ stops to the state and he had dozens of family members scouring the state and he fed and entertained all the attendees.”
+5.
+Gillibrand isn’t get heat for doing fundraising overseas. She’s getting heat for lying about it. Get your facts straight before you start ripping someone.
+#9 (upstatesdumbest) & #10 (upstatewacko) …… Is that really the best you hacks can do???? ….. No wonder the gop is DEAD!!!!
+Uh oh CHICKENHAWKS ….. Americans aren’t buying your PATHETIC talking points!!!
+—————
+CBS poll: More than 60 percent want troop reduction.
+According to a new CBS News poll, 29 percent of Americans believe that the escalation is having a positive impact..
+For the benefit of gunga dan and John Galt, apropos yesterday’s Rochester blog thread.
+gunga wanted to know how I paid for law school and made a few other comments. A repost of my response:
+gunga:
+I BORROWED the money and worked 10 years to pay it off, ok? And it was paid in full.
+“5 million prosperous citizens are being replaced by 4 million non-citizens who traditionally earn a lower income…â€
+I am flabbergasted, gunga. I really thought you knew much much more about the world then that. Obviously, I was the one who did the overestimating here.
+If we have 5 million prosperous Amurrikunn citizens here in the Empire State, then why do you rant and rave endlessly about welfare, social programs, lazy, dumbed down kids, gang violence, etc.? Apparently no one born in this country is blind, disabled, impoverished, out of work, down on their luck, homeless, tapped out or destitute? You have apparently mistaken New York for the planet Trafalmadore.
+And as for those alleged 4 million “non-citizens†(a figure you obviously pulled out of your hat), yeah,.
+Your conservatism or reactionism or whatever you want to call it has nothing to do with why your statements are stunningly bigoted and mean-spirited, just like I said they were..
+Thank you for your 20 years’ military service, from the bottom of my heart. You are still a deeply flawed human being.
+The reich-wing putting your tax dollars to work for who????
+WHACKOS!!!!!!
+FREAKS!!!!!!
+#5 Condick,
+Did you see anyone defending Giuliani on this blog? That is the difference between Conservatives and Liberals. We don’t put up with crap from our side either.
+Fundraising overseas? Bad for Giuliani…Bad for Gillibrad…Bad for America.
+SmokinJoe,
+Always nice to see you take delight in the casualty reports!
+On a serious note …… Godspeed Scooter!!!
+#17 let me introduce you to #12.
+Conflicting messages.
+See what happens when Karl Christian Rove resigns and stops feeding you talking points?
+#5: calling it a “lie” doesn’t it make it so.
+Prove that she lied………
+condick …… give up trying to get the extremely desperate reich-wing to admit their talking points are all BOLD FACED LIES!!! ….. it’s their collective pile of horse manure and they’re sticking to them!!!
+# 20 Condick,
+All I see on # 5 is someone rightfully saying Gillibrand lies. I do not see a defense of Giuliani, and if I had, I would not agree. And I have never met Karl Rove, much to my detriment.
+Your hatred of Rove betrays how badly you feel that he has thoroughly kicked the collective a—s of the Democrat party for more than a decade. I understand your pain, I am not too fond of Carville.
+Also, do you use his middle name to point out that he is a Christian?
+Talk about village idiots.
+These two should be awarded matching dunce-pies.
+Newt Gingrich believes the GOP can win the presidential race if the candidate adopts the winning strategy of France’s new President,Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy was a member of Jacques Chirac’s cabinet. Sarkozy beat the Socialist’s Segolene Royal by declaring his independence from Chirac’s policies.
+Gingrich suggests the GOP candidate should declare independence from Bush’s policies.
+Mitt Romney appears to be moving in that direction. He should go further. Romney would do well to advocate a containment foreign policy re the ‘global war on terrorism’. Containment worked in the 50-year Cold War. Today’s containment would be along the lines of what Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman call ‘ethical realism’ (Ethical Realism). Unlike Bush and the neo-cons foreign policy, it would stress prudence,patriotism,responsibility, humility,and an understanding of other nations. It would apply the ideas of George Kennan, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hans Morgenthal (See also Ian Sharpiro,Containment).
+Romney’s operation in Iowa’s was a family-led jaggernaut. If we want a president who can organize,Romney is the one.
+The religious right did well for Sen.Brownbeck and Gov. Hucklebee. I don’t believe we are ready for a President named Hucklebee.
+——————————–
+Joshua Green,Atlantic senior editor, has a good NYT op.ed. this morning describing how Karl Rove has worked for a fake conservative ‘nanny state’ that has alienated the GOP grass roots.
+For the benefit of mike, apropos of his deep sense of narcissism that compels him to reply to comments made in a different thread.
+Now, for the Fisking
+“then why do you rant and rave endlessly about welfare, social programs, lazy, dumbed down kids, gang violence, etc.?”
+Go ahead mike, post my “rants and raves.” Good luck finding them.
+“And as for those alleged 4 million “non-citizens†(a figure you obviously pulled out of your hat)”
+Well, I did round up from 3.9 million (sue me!), a figure I obviously got from an official NYS website and provided you a link.”
+Generally: “without reference to or disregarding particular persons, things, situations, etc., that may be an exception.” I thought it would be helpful to provide you with a definition of the word, since that is the one I used to describe our immigrant population. What is your estimate of the percentage of immigrants are not skilled or educated?
+“The city may now be experiencing the largest wave of immigration in its history, with immigrants and their children making up to as much as 60 percent of the city’s population. Most of today’s immigrants come from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the former Soviet Union and are, for the most part [note to mike, this means the same as "not all"], younger and darker than immigrants from the past.”
+.”
+I provide links and data, and yet I am “ignorant” with no basis in fact. Ummm, OK.
+The funniest thing is that in your goal of painting me as a deeply flawed, racist bigot (Hello, Sen. Byrd!), you completely missed my point (not surprisingly), which was that the demographic tide is turning; older and/or wealthier taxpayers are moving away and being replaced with a younger population who are frequently consumers of government services.
+Who are the liberals going to tax then?
+#24: Nice name calling Condit.
+I am glad to see that Rove’s tactics didn’t resign with him.
+Recess is over, back to class.
+Vitter, I fully expect you to admonish SmokinJoe for name calling. He will do that from time to time (as in every post). I am glad to see that Carville’s tactics didn’t leave with him.
+gungaboy, while you’re crunching numbers, you are ignoring real people.
+Bigots love to use generalizations which ignore specifics to justify their vile stereotypes.
+no ,gungaboy, I have neither the time nor the desire to do a research project for you. Go to hell. and have a good trip.
+THE TKC SUNDAY SPECIAL!!! MAINSTREAM MEDIA CONSPIRE TO KEEP MURDER OF TONI ANDERSON SECRET DESPITE THREAT OF KANSAS CITY 'JACK THE RIPPER' KILLER!!!
+Let's start with a warning . . . This post might offend more timid souls so those who can't handle stress or deets regarding REAL LIFE in Kansas City . . . Stop reading now. Braver souls are welcomed to continue . . .
+Moreover, this is an even better place to start . . .
+KANSAS CITY FAKE NEWS IS ON LOCK DOWN REGARDING THE TRAGIC DEETS OF THE TONI ANDERSON KILLING!!! ONLY A FOOL WOULD BELIEVE THAT SHE WASN'T MURDERED!!!
+Keyboard theorists claim that she might have driven into the lake whilst drunk . . . However, KICK-ASS INSIDERS remind us that she was pulled over by a police officer and given a warning before her phone went offline so it's unlikely that she was sloshed or just started drinking at the witching hour.
+Similarly . . . Shame on the irresponsible, horrible and mostly drug-addled prostitute friends of Toni Anderson who have the gall to implicate police in her demise and rage against authorities via social media . . . Or anyone who dares to call out their despicable role in leading this young woman to her tragic fate.
+As for driving conditions on the night of her disappearance . . . Kansas City didn't have a winter this year and the streets haven't been very icy nor was there much in the way of fog or road hazards during the weekend when Toni Anderson was declared missing.
+However, those claiming that she simply drove off the road without offering any context of what she was doing in the area not only insult the intelligence of the public but also the memory of Toni Anderson.
+Moreover . . .
+It's Sunday so let's be honest . . .
+POLICE DON'T RESPECT KANSAS CITY MAINSTREAM MEDIA AND DON'T SEEM TO THINK SHARING THE DEETS OF THIS MURDER IS IMPORTANT!!!
+Frankly, I can see their point . . . There's a homicide just about every few days in Kansas City and most reporters don't really care about this fact. As we noted previously, the murder rate in KCMO has spiked 44% this year over last for the current calendar date . . . And so, we can respect that the KCPD have their hands full and this killing shouldn't be any more important than any other . . . Given that they're all important.
+Now here's where things get tricky and increasingly sordid . . .
+IN 2013 WE NOTICED THIS SAME TYPE OF MEDIA CRACKDOWN AND FAKE NEWS WHEN A SERIAL KILLER MURDERED A GREAT MANY KANSAS CITY HOOKERS WITH VERY LITTLE MSM MENTION OR DEETS FROM AUTHORITIES!!!
+Terry Blair is an American serial killer, who raped and killed at least seven women in Kansas City, Missouri.
+Reality . . . He probably killed closer to 20 but, unforgivably, nobody really seemed to care or remember because most of his victims were Black and Latina women in the urban core.
+By contrast, Toni Anderson was a beautiful but troubled young woman caught in dangerous lifestyle and the circumstances of her demise confound local news which is aimed at prudish suburbanites and their phony middle-class manners.
+Sadly, so many keyboard warriors rage against "snowflakes" and political correctness but it's that same kind of classic "Kansas City nice" which keeps media from revealing so many more facts in this case as they've done before (and not so long ago) when a serial killer threatened the public.
+Let's make it plain, dismiss with pretend 101 "journalism" parlor games and share something from the soul . . .
+ANY SOURCE CLAIMING TONI ANDERSON WASN'T MURDERED IS NOTHING MORE THAN FAKE NEWS DISTRIBUTING PROPAGANDA!!!
+Another key detail . . .
+The search near English Landing Park by friends and family at the outset of the Toni Anderson disappearance myth-busts the contention that her corpse was drudged up NEAR THAT VERY SAME LOCATION is some strange coincidence.
+Still so many sources are regularly played by authorities because the news is just a crappy job to most of these folks.
+Like it or not, TKC is invested in Kansas City . . . I'm neck deep in this wicked little town. This is my home and that's why I blog and TYPE TRUTH TO POWER when corporate hacks can't or won't do as much.
+To wit . . .
+What we know for sure is that Toni Anderson is dead, her car was found and this IS A HORRIFIC MURDER THAT THREATENS ALL OF KANSAS CITY that local media and authorities don't really want to discuss in the midst of an ongoing investigation.
+LINKS
+KCTV5: Nonprofit's assistance was crucial to finding Toni Anderson's car
+Fox4KC: Discovery of Toni Anderson’s car leaves friends with even more questions
+KSHB: A private company managed to locate Toni Anderson's vehicle after police missed it.
+Fox4KC: Memorial for Toni Anderson appears at Platte Landing Park where car was found
+Daily Mail: 'OMG I just got pulled over again': Body found in submerged car of missing woman, 20, eight weeks after she vanished following last text about police stop that officers originally denied took place
+You decide . . .
+121 Comments:
+Again, I say, especially on Sunday. Pray for the family. Find a way to support the family. They are the ones who really need help from people during this time.
+Lots of blood in this city. Kansas City has a horrible murder problem on our hands. Why isn't Mayor Sly James doing more about this?
+Kansas City = Worse than Detroit.
+That week in January when she disappeared the real feel was over 40 degrees.
+Tony, seriously? You have lost your damn mind. There is no murder conspiracy for the love of Christ! The poor unfortunate wayward soul wrecked her car into the river. That's it.
+^^^ Good morning KCPD!
+Has anyone said that she had any wounds gun shot or stabbing? If we knew the exact timeline of when she left QT and the last ping of her cell phone we could look at it a different way. A lot of people use GPS to get from point A to B these days. It could be possible that she looked at her phone wrong and drove down the boat ramp into the river. From QT to where she ended up is about a 15 minute drive. Just my 2 cents.
+For some reason everything keeps pointing to KCPD but when she was last seen, she was in Northtown, drove into Riverside from there and then directly into Parkville where her phone last pinged and the car was found. Jurisdiction wise I'm struggling to see how KCPD is to blame. It seems that they only led the investigation because the missing person report was made in their city and they have the most resources. If she was murdered or however she ended up where she did, that's a Parkville case and Platte County jurisdiction.
+Weez gunna zolve diz caze like the profezzionalz we iz!
+Love this dumb arse blog on a Sunday morning.
+LMAO
+Let see if we can beat 95 comments on this Jack The Ripper thingy.
+Ready, set, go!
+^^^ LOL
+96..
+Talk about FAKE news
+Got things to do today so I won't be posting 60 comments on one post today just to kill time.
+Cheers!
+Beautiful?
+LOL you need to raise your standards dude.
+Tony raise his standards? Good luck with that.
+KCPD with egg on their face again. I'm glad I live in a burb with real cops.
+I think Alonzo will team up with Toni Bones to find Tony Anderson's killer. It will be Luke Cage and Jessica Jones all over again.
+THE GAMES!
+Any good games on TV today?
+7:49 I am also trying to figure that out.
+^^^ No but this blog is fun to fart around with when your bored.
+Either Jack The Ripper drove her to Parkville, then put her in the driver seat and pushed the car into the river
+or she was being chased by a cop impersonator and lost control of the focus when she thought she was making onto a road and flipped into the river
+Life is strange!
+Police don't have the time and money to investigate this case let's just be honest about it.
+Because people are too worried about swinging from his sack, and fail to realize he elected into the position at a perfect time. The economies recovery has made his job sooooooo easy and people try to say it was because of him rather than the national economy as a whole. Just look at the actual important things happenning in the city. Murder rate is sky high, infrastructure falling apart, budgets depleted, and taxes rising. Who cares if we got an all star game or he set a curfew on the plaza that has done nothing.
+Sonar!
+Come on cheer up. Spring is on the way! Lot's of partying to do here in vibrant KCMO!
+Tony if you weren't stuck here in this shit hole going broke where would you live and in what style?
+This could be a hot topic. Where would you live if you had a choice to leave the corrupt and dysfunctional shit hole KCMO!
+^^^ Leawood...in a big house with a trophy wife.
+Park Avenue New York, with a second home on Green Acres.
+Briarcliff with Kay as my neighbor!
+Raytown with Clay & Emmanuel. Michael Mahoney Bologna.
+In Overland Park across the street from Yael. Three car garage, nice well maintained lawn, pool, and privacy fence.
+Leawood Estates. Live with all the developers who are building all those big generic box apartment monstrosities in KCMO.
+Lovely and secluded Riss Lake in Parkville. Lot's of well to do attorneys who come into town to scoop up tax incentives and subsidies for their friends and clients live there.
+Look what Sly and the police are saying in this case basically comes down to the same thing they've been saying for the past six years.
+Your on your own and good luck
+No one gives a shit.
+Life is cruel, nasty, vicious and short.
+So she drove off the embankment and into the river, probably while texting...won't be the last chick to do it...they're about as smart as a brick wall. As far the the serial killing thing, are you reverse flagging and trying to make some kind of point?? Thats the only thing I can figure
+Probably staring at her phone for status updates rather then paying attention to the road ahead of her.
+There is no shortage of idiots addicted to social media these days.
+This is getting really sad. Fucking people are nutballs. This hysteria reminds me of the OKC bombings where folks were touting conspiracy theories involving everyone from Pee Wee Herman to terrorists to the KGB. No one could accept that a couple of rednecks could get juiced up in PBR and pull off the bombing, but that is exactly what happened.
+For some folks it is just too simple that a stripper may have had an accident. It has to be Jack th Ripper, drug lords, the mob, a jealous man ...Tinkerbell! To call people fools for not believing a homemade horse shit theory by a couple pf local screwballs before there is an ounce of evidence is so damn irresponsible and immature it defies human reasoning. My suggestion would be that someone grow the fuck up and stop feeding this monster until there are facts. Even if there is the slightest chance that a theory is right this is not the time to be trying to make yourself look right and play the Sherlock Homie. Stick to yer fucking nutty ass racial and cooked up social issues until you actually know something for a fact. Surely someone has the maturity of at least a 12 year old around here.
+Look at the other side heaven now has another angel to look over all of us poor suckers stuck down here in the pits of hell.
+Could it be Bigfoot?
+Creature of the lost lagoon?
+Comments reflect that everybody seems sure she just drove into the river.
+Only the police and forensics will know if she was dead before the car went into the water.
+Seems logical to just wait and see if she drowned or had her neck twisted by a pimp or was full of bullets.
+And the 'driving off the road' theory? There's no 'road' in Parkville where that boat ramp is. It's clearly marked dead end with a park with a boat ramp.
+Da Britz have picked diz up on Da Mail so weez gittin zome international expozure.
+...So what is the theory on why they were even looking in the river where she was found...Is this spot known very popular for hiding dead bodies?....
+9:30
+Ur fulla shit.
+A black dude killed her and you know it.
+Speaking about Toni case, stroll over to Balonzos twitter. He is on one now. Calling out some girl who is accusing him of her death just as he does others. He is on some racist shit with her like because shes black she should respect him and if not your serving the white masters and your a uncle tom. Somebody tell this fool he is an embarrassment to this city. He is a racist sob.
+Hire Sonar Man maybe we'll pull thousands of cars from the river.
+Alonzo Washington @kccrimefighter 7 hours ago
+Viny Ramirez go suck a White dick. I'm sure you have many times you cum drinking bitch!
+HAHAHAHAHAHA! Mr. Washington at his finest
+It's not often I agree with the Star, but I do this time. Calling it a murder now, however probable that may seem, would be guesswork. Better to report a car in the river, it's likely to be the missing young woman, cause of death to be determined, stay tuned.
+Only thing they need to do is get a step ladder to put this case on top of the stack of local unsolved homicides.
+^^^ Haha!
+What is OMG?
+Mr. Washington always seems to shoot himself in the foot hourly which is why nobody will accept his efforts pertaining to anything.
+He's a loud mouth media whore whose only goal is to gain attention for himself while looking stupid doing it.
+If he had unbiased views paired with two cents of common sense he might actually be able contribute something worth paying attention to.
+Youz talkin' bout, badmouthing Tonyz buddie dere zuper dave!
+Honestly Scarlet, I don't give a damn.
+What a fucked up freaking mess. Welcome to KCMO
+Just shut up and pay your taxes! And don't forget all the new ones you'll be slapped with this year!
+Just SHUD UP!
+There is a special place in hell for everyone. KCMO for example...
+Tony and I agree, that we will not always agree with one another.
+That's what Free Speech is all about.
+Not what several of you in here think it is.
+"If he had unbiased views paired with two cents of common sense he might actually be able contribute something worth paying attention to."
+I was thinkng the same thing about you Larson.
+^^^^^^^Too bad you didn't do the same before speaking 10:55. You just put yourself in the same category as Washington.
+Rock on Super Dave, don't let this hater hold you back.
+Someone this obsessed would point to their involvement in the crime.
+Where were you that night, Tony? Can you account for your whereabouts?
+Better start thinking. MY kickass KCPD insiders will be looking at your posts. as you seem to know some things about it no one else knows...
+Typical Buttholio flake. His ego takeS precedence so you get deleted. Fucking Clown!
+I believe it goes "frankly my dead, I don't give a damn"
+IDIOT BLOGGER IMPLICATED IN SUSPICIOUS LOCAL DEATH
+"Dear"
+Yeah don't hold back Stupor Dave. Keep being stupid!
+It's what u do best!!
+Seems like everybody forgets the 2nd Suv. You mean two people drove into the same river, same spot, around the same time? Something is very fishy about this story.
+Tony keeps saying that she's beautiful. That's not a fact, that's an opinion, & it's not relevant, though it is a part of the Missing White Women Syndrome: "She wasn't like the other victims, she was a beautiful white woman." Yes, she was probably murdered, but it does not logically follow that there must be a "Jack the Ripper" who's killing prostitutes. Her death may have nothing to do with her profession, which brings me to her family: "fuck 'em". Spare me the crocodile tears, if they cared about her she wouldn't have been a prostitute. It doesn't follow that a "beautiful" woman must be a prostitute, but it does follow that a beautiful woman who feels unloved, especially by her father, would seek extreme forms of validation. Kansas City doesn't need to fear a serial killer, it's worse than that, they need to fear going out after dark, because that's when the predators stalk; your police force does not own the city, the muggers, & gangs do.
+Weez don't need thiz celebrity zhit. With facebook and inztagram everyone iz now a celebrity.
+I have to say that I agree that Toni was murdered. This has all the appearance of a car/body dump, at a site that has been used for this purpose before.
+Usually, when a druggie goes missing and turns up dead, their involvement with drugs is usually the reason why.
+I am waiting to see if the ME finds a bullet hole in Toni's skull. Toni had to have been disabled or already dead when her car entered the water or she would have escaped. Toni was a lifeguard and swim coach after all.
+Byron knows all about being "loved " by his Father.
+^^^ Your Ugly
+12:35 Got any facts to go with that dream?
+Staring at the phone and ran off the road
+12;42 Toni admitted on social media that the police caught her in possession of quantities of both MDMA and LSD and that she 'luckily' avoided getting charged, but she didn't want to go into detail about that. It sure sounds like she became a CI. CI's tend to get dead.
+Read about it at the WS forum
+12:42 limky
+Who needs proof? This is the website where facts come to die!
+What happened to her boyfriend Sanchez?
+Byron thinks the family is crying "Crocodile Tears".
+Because of course, after Byron had evaluated all of the evidence, using his laser-like, perspicacity, he sees the psychological implications and internecine family paradigms that would bring Toni to a watery grave.
+Then, after enlightening us all with this remarkable insight, he says, and I quote, "fuck em".
+Byron would need a psychiatrist armed with an exothermic torch to get to the bottom of all his "issues", which are mostly manifested in an extreme ethnomasochistic, self-loathing blather, occasionally interrupted by spewing vitriol at all of "You Racists".
+Get back on your meds.
+Hey, I bet if someone in West Virginia threw a brick at Byron, he would duck.
+We all want our fuckin money back Byron.
+I hope the $10,815 that appears to be sitting in the Go Fund Me account is given to the team that located her car in the river.
+And yes Byron is an asshole!
+The roads were slippery
+Hasn't she been humiliated enough by Alonzo and TKC dirt bags already?
+Suck yo mama's titties young Clay ChasANALstain.
+Jean penis bakers will solve the crime with Alonzo washingtons "help".
+Tweet facts bang fest
+Byron lord of all our bases belong to Fortye
+Tony and I agree, that we will not always agree with one another.
+"Fuck me in the ass Super Dave!"
+"Not tonight sweetie."
+LIFE OF CONFUCIUS
+Confucius says:
+Young woman who Focus on her T 'n A instead of brain, will drown in shallow thoughts.
+Ironic that the worst attention whore species--fake crimefighters and fake journalists--are obsessed over the predictable end of another one who just happened to be a stripper.
+Unbelievable how many people are dumping bullshit theories just dying to be the first one to guess right. For fuck sakes people we are all going to know in a few days and all this crap and guessing and playing Dickless Tracy only proves YOU are the attention whores. Fucking give it a break. The whole worked will know the truth and all the "I told you so" horseshit in the world wont change a damn thing. The dirt ball is not going to get any deader and given her lifestyle I am real damn sure she wont be rising from the dead..
+KCPD still thinks she a runaway.
+and we pay for this shit.
+You are an ignorant asshole. I'm amazed you were able to tear yourself away from your Xbox long enough to write your pathetic little message. Tell me, does it get cold down there in your mommy's basement? Watch out dirtbag, Karma's a bitch.
+bob berdella
+Niggawhat?
+Clay Chasanalstain.
+LOLZ at headline guy chiming in.
+Gay. Gay stool.
+Que Quag
+KCPD is the absolute worst police department.
+Nothing good is going to happen at 4:00 AM, especially in KC. Time to go home, ladies (and gentlemen too). We have certainly had various serial killers over the years. Blair was just one. Lorenzo Gilyard bagged his share, and we had Bizarre Bob killing gay men. The numbers just seem to add up.
+KCPD (and the National Guard) could shut this down quite easily. What would be the comments about Martial Law? What does KCPD and Forte have to do with black kids killing each other over arguments about a girl or who knows what? Specifically, how would you like Chief Forte do stop black kids from killing each other? KCPD aren't the Keystone Cops. As far as this case about the so called "cute" stripper, unlikely it was a crime. Kelsey Smith was cute but I suppose this isn't real relevant and doesn't need to be debated at the moment.
+Why do you say that
+Who was her online pimp for the escort work?
+Thank you for keeping it real now the Johnson county racist can suck a big black one.
+Again and again, pray for the family. This is a sad case and they need our support not so much fighting.
+I like "frankly my dead dear, I don't give a damn" better. Lol
+People commit suicide all the time at these boat launch areas. That could be why they are saying no foul play- that's usually what they say when it is a suspected suicide.
+KCPD is the biggest scam in town.
+>Nothing good is going to happen at 4:00 AM, especially in KC.
+look at this man who never ate at Chubby's
+You do realize she was found in Parkville right? Not Kansas City
+Play in the world of vice, run into people not nice, put your body on ice, drugs strippin 4am parties, add to that she looks like a mudshark, wat does rap talk about shooting off guns on niggers, fucking whores, imagine a guy high as a fly, bathing his brain on that rap gospel, and is bitch made sensitive ego thug,,, not a surprise u hang intimately with that,all her KC friends low down whoores,, lay with dogs they will find u in the river
+My question is who was the NKC police officer that pulled her over? Why is the KCPD speaking on behalf of the NKC police department...these are two separate cities with two separate police departments.
+Weez got over a hunred commentz on diz post! Jack The Ripper leadz juz deal wit it!
+^^^ Unique Visitorz!
+Really letting her rip on the comments today.
+Could have stripped the article down to one paragraph.
+A deer darted across the road in front of her and she swerved to try to miss it.
+Or she could have suddenly swerved to avoid a head on collision with some drunk driver coming around the corner in her lane also.
+Lots of bloggers hate women. But not even Cum Rape Guy jumped into this conversation. Not because he knows the man next to the man who killed Toni but because Cum Rape Guy believes in consensual sex between adults. Which is the at the essences of kink shaming.
+Someone on social media said Alonozo did it. I wonder if that's being checked out by law enforcement.
+Is Alonzo the dreaded Jack the Ripper?
+OMG that is sooo weird if it turned out to be him!
+KCTV 5
+There, she drove onto a boat launch that was icy and her car slid into the river.
+End Story
+FACT :
+The Reason that KC News Media doesn't want the rest of Naïve, ignorant Kansas Citians and the rest of the world to know that Kansas City has a Serial Killer running loose, is that it would hurt their so-called Tourism, and that might totally Fuck-Up, their Fantasy, Illusionary TOY TRAIN STREET Car bullshit they've been blowing up everybodys Naïve Dumb Ass the last few years !!!
+and Lordy they couldn't have that, now could they ,,,,,,,
+FACTOLA : Kansas City seems notorious for harboring Serial Killers
+BOB BERDELLA is one who murdered and buried his victims in his back tard, like 20 of them ,,,,,
+Even FBI Agent Starlings brings mention of Serial Killers in Kansas City, Missouri, (SILENCE of the LAMBS) while talking to Serial Killer Dr. Hannibal Lector in the Movie !!
+Watch it for yourself and see
+For years Kansas City Homicide has been asllep on many cases, as they are usually inept and incompetent, naïve & clueless.
+Just ask Dr. Hannibal Lector and FBI Agent Starlings they know !
+and as USUAL, "IF" you know anything about this crime - be sure to Sing, the same ol' shitty tune Call 474-Tips !!
+28 Feb Spring Break in L.A. … With Kids!
+Four Seasons Blog
+Spring Break in LA with Kids
+For on- the -go families who seek that perfect mélange of top notch service and kid friendly ambiance, glory can be found in spending Spring Break at the Four Seasons Los Angeles at Beverly Hill.
+LA is known as an adult playground. But, it is also my go-to getaway for a family vacation. The sun shines. Heated pools and canyon hiking trails beckon. Museums abound. And one can magically move from the California Science Center to a dip in about forty-five minutes. Translation? Awesome Spring Break destination.
+The Four Seasons LA at Beverly Hills has been my SOCAL home away from home for 15 years. At this property-conveniently located at the juncture between West Hollywood and Beverly Hills- guests are presented with a quandary: should I stay or should I go? Shopping, hiking and many of the best restaurants in LA are just moments away. But, once lounging amidst the cactus studded oasis of a pool area, the chill factor kicks in and the lure of the city often evaporates.
+A MELTING POT
+From fashion and food to art and architecture, Los Angeles is a melting pot. One thing I love about this city is way that that this sense of fusion extends to a family vacation. A style writer, I always want to try the latest restaurant and visit the newest shops. My children want to swim and visit museums. So, our days were expertly layered like a Reuben sandwich. Sample itinerary: Hike →breakfast at old school diner→Swim at hotel→ lunch by pool→. Museum.→Sugary- fab Snack. Detox juice for mommy-Minor shopping excursion for mommy (Robertson Blvd (Chanel, Kitson, Coffee Bean and Georgetown Cupcakes is an easy 4 block walk from the hotel )→hot tub. Dinner at trendy restaurant. Sound like heaven? I assure you, it is.
+GOOD HOTEL, GREAT HOTEL
+FACT: There are good hotels and there are great hotels. Great hotels pay mega attention to the most minor elements of a property: the vibrancy of the flowers, the crispness of the linens, the rapid fire response of the concierge, the availability of hypo allergenic pillows and blankets. To parents, a measure of a great hotel is the amount of attention paid to children. My kids felt special upon arrival. At check-in, they were offered a stuffed animal from a fabulous red wagon. In our room a personalized note welcomed the children along with a selection of cupcakes. At the hotel’s delightfully low key Italian restaurant Culina, the food and beverage director came over to chat with us. When the charming Matteo heard that we were going to Florence over the summer, he insisted that my daughters try an array of Italian desserts. The tortino, affogato and a selection of gelati promptly appeared with extra fluffy dollops of homemade cotton candy. The sweets (and my limoncello) sent us straight to the Italian version of cloud nine. A can-do concierge can make a huge impact on a family trip. Barbara helped us to organize activities (distinguishing true distance is challenging in LA because the traffic can be very heavy) and restaurant reservations. When I inquired about a special activity for my daughter Brette’s birthday, mani/pedis were organized poolside. This was the piece de resistance for my princesses. We nestled into a private cabana-smoothies in hand- and had our nails done together in the sunshine. As we relaxed, a chocolate ganache cake arrived (with Brette spelled in berry coulis) for us to enjoy. Perfection.
+ACTIVITIES
+Science and art buffs, my girls researched the museums and worked with me to create the itinerary. Downtown LA is the new IT destination. Twenty minutes from the hotel is Exposition Park which houses days’ worth of culture: the African American Museum, The California Science Center, the Natural History Museum, The Rose Garden and a super cool Imax Theater. Of significant interest is the Endeavor space shuttle which is now on view at The California Science Center. With just five days, we decided upon the California Science Center, LACMA, The La Brea Tar Pits/Page museum, the Griffith Observatory. Each of these museums have multiple interactive exhibits that take no more than one hour to visit. Tip: When visiting LACMA, sign your children up for the NexGen program. To boost kids’ interest in art, the museum offers a free membership to kids 17 and under which allows one adult to visit for free. So, two kids=two free adult passes. LACMA is next to the La Brea Tar pits on Wilshire Blvd; only ten minutes’ drive from the hotel. We also organized a day at Sea World in San Diego. Helpful hint: You can book a VIP experience at Sea World which gives you behind the scenes access to the animals, preferential seating at the shows and a fast track ticket for rides. For crowd averse people like me, this is a game changer. Once you remove the chaos and stress of long lines, all you have left is pure fun.
+GET MOVING
+An avid hiker, I convinced my children that hikes were, in fact, scientific in nature as one might encounter snakes and exotic birds in the canyons. From the hotel, it took us ten minutes to drive up to the Hollywood Hills to Runyon Canyon. Incredibly, the urban sprawl disappears as we hiked through the mountain. The sweat was worth it. The sweeping views of LA were great fun for the kids to experience.!
+After a week on the Left Coast both parents and kids were all relaxed and inspired.
+We Heart LA!
+MOM TIP: When planning a trip, always tap into concierge’s vast wisdom. They understand how far apart your planned activities are and can often make VIP reservations for special exhibitions and restaurants.
+A GUIDE TO MY LOS ANGELES
+GRIFFITH OBSERVATORY
+The Griffith Observatory is both a great hike.
+Weekdays (Wednesday – Friday) Open Noon – 10:00 p.m.
+Weekends (Saturday – Sunday) Open 10:00 a.m. – 10:00 p.m.
+Closed Mondays and most Tuesdays
+Price: Free.
+Open 9:30 am to 5 pm every day of the year (Except Christmas, New Years Day, Fourth of July and Thanksgiving)
+Children 2 Free
+Children 3-12: $5.00
+Youths 13-17, Seniors 62+, and college students with I.D.: $9.00
+Adults: $12.00
+Free general admission on the first Tuesday of every month except July and August.
+THE CALIFORNIA SCIENCE CENTER
+Outdoor science plaza? Check. In- depth exploration of ecosystems? Check. In. Also on site is the Space Shuttle Endeavor and La’s largest IMAX theater.
+Open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. except for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day.
+EXPOSITION PARK
+FAVORITE RESTAURANTS:
+The Little Next Door
+8164 W 3rd Street
+Los Angeles, CA 90048
+323.951.1210
+Like a welcoming French brasserie, the ambiance is low key and warm and the food is delightful for lunch and dinner. Think Steak Frites and French onion soup.
+Cecconi’s
+8764 Melrose Avenue
+West Hollywood, CA 90069
+310.432.2000
+Yes, it is chic. But, this Italian hotspot is family friendly and perfect for dinner with kids. And, hey, don’t be surprised to see some elite members of young Hollywood waltz in for the restos prized truffle scented pasta.
+Culina
+300 South Doheny Drive
+Los Angeles, CA 90048
+310.860.4000
+Deemed one of the A List “power dining” spots, a mom wouldn’t think that this celebby eatery would be kid friendly. Think again. They restaurant offers kid menus, quick service and the perfect mélangeof flavorful dishes for kids and parents.I am a fan of the crudo bar, sushi and almond crusted lamb chops. My kids, of course, favor pizza and pasta
+Pizzeria Mozza
+641 North Highland Avenue
+Los Angeles, CA 90036
+323.297.0101
+Open from 8:00 a.m. ’til dusk.
+The Standard 24/7 Restaurant
+8300 Sunset Blvd
+323-650-9090
+If you love retro ambiance, head over to The Standard hotel for excellent comfort food with a side of groovy LA attitude.. Seemingly frozen in 1973, the uber styled Standard hotel is one of my favorite post hike casual breakfast spots.
+Mel’s Drive In
+8585 W. Sunset Blvd
+310-854-7201.
+SEAWORLD VIP TOURS
+1-800-25-SHAMU,
+VIP tours must be booked in advanced to guarantee a private tour guide and the best experience for your group.
+$1,200 for a group of up to 15 people
+VIP Expedition includes:
+- A privately guided three hour walking tour.
+- (Additional time is available at an hourly rate.)
+- Animal encounters such as:
+1. A poolside interaction with our bottlenose dolphins.
+2. The opportunity to touch a shark behind-the-scenes of the Shark Encounter.
+3. Feeding endangered sea turtles, Caribbean flamingos, California moray eels, bat rays, California sea lions, or harbor seals.
+4. Visiting Humboldt penguins in their behind-the-scenes habitat. The best seats in the house for two animal shows.
+- Front-of-the-line privileges for select rides.
+- A behind-the-scenes look at how we care for animals, including a visit to our state-of-the-art Animal Care Center.
+- Animal experts sharing their knowledge and experiences of caring for these unique animals.
+- Learning how you can help save these animals from the challenges they face in the wild.
+“Le Roi et Mort. Vive le Roi!”
+When Mystical Tutor was banned in Legacy I was concerned that the format might get bogged down into a morass of Counterbalance/Top and Lands slow and methodic decks built to prey on creatures. As usual my predictive powers failed miserably just as they do with most everyone else who writes about Legacy.
+Instead creatures seem to be defining the new Legacy metagame. Rather than Zoo or Goblins these creature decks are base blue with resistance to combo possessed of the ability to use Force of Will against critical opposing spells. I'm talking about everyone's favorite “bad” deck Merfolk and its upstart cousin Madness. Let's take a look at each deck track their dominance in the post-Mystical Tutor format and think about what decks and cards might lie in wait as the format evolves.
+Grand Prix Columbus
+There's been plenty of coverage of this tournament the first major event for Legacy after Mystical Tutor was banned. Much hubbub was made about the seven copies of Emrakul in the Top 8 but it appears that three other decks in this tournament are the most important. You're probably familiar with them but just so we're all on the same page: Saito's Merfolk Durward's Madness and Cook's TES.
+Legacy Champs
+Legacy Champs was the first large American Legacy event after Grand Prix Columbus and the Top 8 was wide-open reflecting eight different decks and a metagame still in flux. Merfolk was present in this Top 8 but Madness was not. Legacy Champs is known for having a wide-open metagame that often differs from other Legacy events of similar size; consider that 2009's event was won by Dredge and 2008's was won by Meathooks (also known as Counter-Slivers).
+StarCityGames.com Legacy Open: Denver
+This was the first StarCityGames.com Legacy Open event after Columbus and here we start to see the ascendance of the three decks I linked to earlier. The winner of this event was Merfolk (in this case mono-blue) while Madness again made theTop 8. As with Legacy Champs Goblins was a major player in this event presumably due to its strength against Merfolk Counterbalance/Top and Emrakul decks all of which were key performers at GP Columbus. Cedric Phillips discussed the reasons why one might choose Goblins and how you might build it in his recent article Goblins in Legacy. TES also put Bob Yu in theTop 8 of this tournament showing that Bryant and Ari's results at the Grand Prix weren't a fluke.
+StarCityGames.com Open: Minneapolis
+This tournament is probably where people started paying serious attention to Madness as it put two players into the Top 8 and another three into the Top 16 for an impressive total of five of the top sixteen spots. Merfolk missed the Top 8 here but had two players in the Top 16. Goblins and Zoo together held only three spots with Zoo in particular showing a sudden and dramatic decline in the post-Mystical Tutor format.
+StarCityGames.com Open: Baltimore
+Here come the decks with which I started this article: Merfolk Madness and TES. In Baltimore we had a Madness vs. Merfolk finals with Merfolk (this time U/W) taking home the trophy. Madness took four of the top sixteen spots in this tournament while Merfolk had five and TES two; together these three decks accounted for nearly 70% of the Top 16.
+As I did above I'll show the top performing version of each deck so here are: Lynch's U/W Merfolk Patraw's Madness and Peyton's TES.
+Rather than analyze these decks as has already been done I'm going to instead take a look at how the metagame may react and how it's already reacted to the ascendance of these decks (in the case of Merfolk and Madness) as well as some further examination of TES and why it is a player in this format.
+Merfolk – Actions and Reactions
+Merfolk's theoretical strength comes from its ability to disrupt and defeat Counterbalance decks and combo decks and its weakness theoretically comes from a poor matchup against other creature decks. Zoo has often been a foil to Merfolk due to its abundant removal and larger creatures while Goblins has been able to out-draw Merfolk and out-maneuver it using Goblin Piledriver and Siege-Gang Commander.
+One of the first major changes for Legacy Merfolk is Coralhelm Commander a card which has largely replaced Merfolk Sovereign and has given Merfolk the ability to defeat a resolved Moat. Commander is a perfect fit for Merfolk decks that use Standstill which at this point is mostly all of them.
+Saito-style Merfolk from the Grand Prix attempted to address these weaknesses using a U/B build of Merfolk with black supplying Engineered Plague for Goblins and Perish and Nature's Ruin for Zoo. Instead of buying time with Submerge Saito just took it to the opposing creature archetypes with straight-up removal.
+Paul's build using white instead of black is actually a really impressive metagame choice. He's used U/W Merfolk before including to a Top 16 finish at StarCityGames.com Open: Philadelphia (actually ninth on tiebreakers); Swords to Plowshares gives his deck an edge against opposing Merfolk decks as it has a removal spell for the lords and for Llawan Cephalid Empress out of the sideboard. It also means that this build has maindeck outs to Goblin Piledriver and Tarmogoyf and he has preemptively adapted to the use of cards like Peacekeeper.
+Beyond StP Paul made a number of interesting choices in his sideboard. While he lacks Engineered Plague he again played Absolute Law. This card is pretty ridiculous against Goblins and also gives your creatures immunity to Firespout burn spells from Zoo and even more importantly Grim Lavamancer. (So you can hold your Plows for the large green monsters.)
+Even more sublime: Hibernation. Yes go ahead and hover your cursor over it; I'll wait.
+Certainly this is useful as a broad Submerge to clear a Zoo player's board but I'm relatively certain the real purpose is to Time Walk Madness players. Keep in mind this is all green permanents so you're hitting Survival of the Fittest as well as all the creatures inclusive of any mana creatures. It also hits Progenitus against Natural Order decks.
+For whatever reason Merfolk has long been a deck that internet writers have loved to hate even when it has proven itself as a serious competitor again and again. We may start to hear a different tune as Merfolk continues to win tournaments: the meta may acknowledge and react to Merfolk instead of vice versa.
+So what are Merfolk's weaknesses?
+One easy way to foil Merfolk is to play most of the Painter's Servant decks as those decks have traditionally played a large number of Red Elemental Blasts and Pyroblasts. When I played Painter's Servant for almost a year I looked forward to the Merfolk matchup.
+Merfolk's lack of removal and mostly conditional counters makes it rather vulnerable to Painter's Servant strategies whether they are more combo-centric like Ken Adams' winning deck from Minneapolis or more of a control version such as the Counter Painter deck Nick Walters used to hit Top 16 in Baltimore. There are also cards that discourage attacks such as Peacekeeper Ghostly Prison Ensnaring Bridge and Propaganda that are powerful options against Merfolk and easy to splash given the abundance of mana-fixing in Legacy.
+In many respects Madness is a potential foil for Merfolk. The decks operate in a similar design space utilizing a fast clock with the support of blue counterspells and a light mana-disruption package. Madness has a reasonable Counterbalance matchup and a lot of flexibility by nature of its design including the ability to tutor for bullets like Llawan Cephalid Empress in the Merfolk matchup. Once a Survival hits the table most Merfolk builds aren't really able to do anything about it. Did you notice the Scryb Rangers in Blake's sideboard in Baltimore?
+Merfolk has benefited from being a deck people didn't respect but as time goes on Merfolk will have to adapt to the fact that people are actively sideboarding against it including other Merfolk decks and Madness decks. As Zoo continues to recede from the format players are likely to continue to replace Zoo sideboard cards with those that target Merfolk.
+Whether Merfolk can continue to flourish in a format that finally acknowledges it and turns hostile to it remains to be seen.
+If the metagame acts as it normally does and should — if players turn from generic creature answers (like Firespout) to cards specifically good against Merfolk (like Peacekeeper) or to decks with inherent strength against Merfolk (like Painter's Servant) — those adjustments have repercussions in other matchups; specifically it seems likely that the format will adjust to Merfolk and open itself back up to Zoo to some extent.
+Peacekeeper may dam up the Merfolk but it doesn't lock down the Zoo. I suspect Emrakul decks deprived of their Zoo victims will remain minimal players in the format as well again opening the door to traditional creature strategies. Additionally as graveyard hate ebbs Dredge is always waiting in the wings poised for a breakout tournament.
+Madness – Actions and Reactions
+The Madness deck is one of the more exciting developments in Magic this year. I'm not at all surprised that the deck has taken off as U/G decks have always been popular whenever they're viable. Madness decks give you the protection of Force of Will in a deceptively fast and aggressive deck and the shell itself is highly customizable. Within a few weeks of the Grand Prix there were already versions trying to incorporate a number of cards including but not limited to:
+Fauna Shaman
+A reasonable backup to Survival obviously slower but still a game-winner in some matchups where you have time to develop. Helps support the use of a bullet strategy closer to normal Survival decks.
+Intuition
+Intuition is a powerful and flexible tutor for a strategy like Madness. Intuition for triple Vengevine helps give the deck an alternate method of binning and triggering Vengevines. It can also tutor up Force of Will Survival or sideboard cards (such as Natural Order).
+Shrieking Drake
+Drake is a neat way to trigger Vengevines repeatedly and also a way to finish a Survival chain when you've fetched a basic Island.
+Cursecatcher
+Cursecatcher can also finish off Survival chains when you have an Island and further can help you resolve Survival in the first place.
+Natural Order
+Many Madness players are using the Natural Order and Progenitus combo out of the sideboard sometimes paired with a Dryad Arbor. Progenitus is a nice fit in this deck as even without Brainstorm you can shuffle it back into your deck using Survival.
+Brainstorm
+The lack of Brainstorm in this deck is a bit of a hot-button issue. Some people suggest that keeping hands with Brainstorm and without Survival just tricks you into misplaying with the deck while others suggest that Brainstorm smooths out some of this deck's awkward draws.
+Swords to Plowshares
+In Baltimore Eli Kassis ran a white splash for Swords to Plowshares giving his build of Madness a removal spell that traditional versions lack.
+So how can the field adapt to Madness?
+No seriously tell me how the field can adapt. This deck is getting out of control y'all.
+You were hoping I was going to tell you? I guess that is kind of my job. Let's see what we can come up with.
+One thing that makes this challenging is the fact that this deck isn't done evolving yet. In case you missed it amongst the coverage from Baltimore here's Alix Hatfield's mono-green take on Madness.
+A good place to start is in figuring out what this deck lacks; while Eli added white for Swords to Plowshares most Madness decks don't have removal. They're aiming to win by exploding ahead in resources and using Wonder to bypass any blockers. Jitte attached to a flying creature is the closest thing to removal you'll usually find in these decks.
+This suggests that cards like Peacekeeper are effective against Madness just as they are against Merfolk. In addition some Madness players are cutting Trygon Predator (which was missing from Eli and Alix's builds in Baltimore) so cards like Ghostly Prison and Propaganda may also be effective against Survival as they are against Merfolk. Unlike Merfolk Madness makes use of two things that can be attacked: Survival and the graveyard.
+Destroying or countering Survival itself significantly slows Madness down so perhaps Annul is an option worth exploring as it's hardly dead in other matchups. Pithing Needle is a potential preemptive option and Meddling Mage is rather disruptive again due to the deck's lack of removal.
+Scars of Mirrodin offers a powerful option in Leonin Arbiter one which seriously impairs the function of Survival; could this possibly be a tool for U/W Merfolk and Counterbalance decks against Madness?
+Similarly graveyard hate can prevent the Vengevine engine (which is really the heart of the deck) from ever going online either by way of Tormod's Crypt or Relic of Progenitus or even further through the use of cards like Leyline of the Void. Another nice option is Extirpate which can strip away the entire Vengevine engine. Unfortunately graveyard hate is often mediocre against this deck as it can always just cast creatures and beat you; other creature decks always have to acknowledge that this deck can win via other routes including going aggro with Jitte or siding into Natural Order to side-step your graveyard and Survival hate.
+Probably the sickest thing to do is to play Gather Specimens and just take all the creatures but good luck making that happen on turn 2.
+Madness is a versatile powerful deck that can dodge and play around most attempts to shut it down. Still the deck isn't nearly as resistant to combo as most blue decks. That brings us nicely to…
+TES (The Epic Storm)
+I wrote about TES recently after playing it in a local forty-player tournament where I enjoyed it enough to bring it to the StarCityGames.com Legacy Open in Baltimore. Going into this tournament there were a few different versions Storm to consider all with different strengths and weaknesses. Note that this specifically refers to non-Doomsday builds as those involve a completely different set of decision trees and deck construction options.
+Option 1: U/B/g
+This is actually the farthest from the Bryant Cook Five-Color TES model from Grand Prix Columbus. Ari Lax's version isn't quite as explosive relying instead on a critical mass of cantrips and tutors including the rarely seen Grim Tutor necessitated by the lack of Burning Wish. It also needs to bring the Ill-Gotten Gains into the main and lacks Empty the Warrens.
+What do you get in exchange? This deck is more resistant to mana disruption as it has the extra Preordains that can dig for mana and actually plays more lands (seventeen versus TES's lower count of thirteen) and five basics. The fact that this deck can steadily deploy lands including basic lands makes it more resistant to the conditional counters played in Merfolk; Dark Confidant and Thoughtseize out of the sideboard give the deck even more weapons for post-board games. A green splash in the board gives this deck nominal resistance to Counterbalance but without Pyroblast or Orim's Chant.
+Option 2: U/B/R and Option 3: U/B/R/g
+This version takes Bryant's deck and cuts the five-color lands for a more traditional fetch/dual/basic land setup. The actual land count doesn't change here so you're still using Chrome Mox where Ari's version has extra lands but it at least gives you some resistance to Wasteland to help in the Merfolk and Madness matchups. This build replaces the Orim's Chant/Silence package with a set of Thoughtseizes or possibly three and one more land. An alternate take includes a Tropical Island in the sideboard for access to Krosan Grip and/or Xantid Swarm.
+Option 4: Five Color TES
+Thus far this is still my favorite version of the deck. Orim's Chant is such an incredibly versatile card giving you a functional Ill-Gotten Gains against Force of Will decks; against decks like Zoo and Goblins Orim's Chant can buy you the single turn you need to win the game. Still if hate for Storm is supplanted by hate for Merfolk and Madness a build designed to combat those decks specifically might be the right call.
+The key card that gives TES a shot against Merfolk and Madness is this little guy Xantid Swarm:
+Note that the correct flavor text for this card is actually as follows:
+“Bees! Bees! Bees in the car! Bees everywhere! God they're huge and they're sting crazy! They're ripping my flesh off! Run away your firearms are useless against them!”
+If you choose to play Xantid Swarm over say Pyroblast you're basically accepting an even worse Counter-Top matchup in exchange for a potentially much better post-board matchup against Merfolk and Madness. Remember those decks generally lack removal and if they do have it there's a good chance those Swords to Plowshares are coming out. Additionally for those of you not inclined to researching such things the number of Counter-Top decks among the Top 16 of the last three SCG Legacy Opens is as follows:
+Denver: 4
+Minneapolis: 0
+Baltimore: 1
+Overall that's only five of forty-eight or 10.4% and excluding Denver that drops to 3.1%!
+Still math only gets you so far. What eliminated me from Top 8 contention at Baltimore? Counter-Top Depths.
+Pipe Dreams
+It'd be really awesome if there were some way for Imperial Recruiter to not cost a trillion dollars as that card being readily available would do some sweet things to Legacy such as making Imperial Recruiter Bomberman and Aluren considerably more accessible and probably more popular. There's no real point to this section as there's no easy fix for this situation that doesn't ruin the people who bought Recruiters. I just wish that there were.
+Pipe dreams.
+Affinity
+Is there an Affinity build waiting to break out in Legacy? The archetype has picked up a number of relevant cards over the past few years and Scars is likely to provide a few more. All builds of Affinity have more explosive power than ever with access to Mox Opal an accelerant and color-fixer all rolled into one. Every time I've seen someone suggest such a thing he's been dismissed on the argument that Zoo is a “better” aggro deck. It's true that when pitting Zoo against Affinity you'll generally find Zoo winning thanks to ample removal Path to Exile with no drawback damage no longer on the stack and Qasali Pridemage.
+Is this really the point though? Even on its more popular days Zoo represents around 10% of the field and considerably less as tournaments go on; while this may change that's the metagame we're in right now for most of the larger tournaments. This is highly relevant because comparing Affinity to Zoo is counterproductive. We need to look at Affinity against the other popular decks and see if there's any merit there.
+For example I could see an explosive Erayo version as being plausible. Such a build could support Force of Will out of the sideboard and might look something like this:
+Creatures (27)
+- 4 Arcbound Ravager
+- 4 Frogmite
+- 4 Master of Etherium
+- 4 Memnite
+- 3 Myr Enforcer
+- 4 Ornithopter
+- 4 Erayo, Soratami Ascendant
+Lands (15)
+Spells (18)
+- 2 Relic of Progenitus
+- 2 Tormod's Crypt
+- 4 Engineered Plague
+- 4 Force of Will
+- 1 Nature's Ruin
+- 2 Perish
+Sideboard
+One of the main issues for Affinity was Zoo in that Zoo had better guys and removal spells but with Zoo on the decline Affinity can leverage its strengths. It's faster than Merfolk dodges Counter-Top and can utilize hate cards like Relic Tormod's Crypt Thorn of Amethyst and Chalice of the Void easily and effectively when the metagame calls for them.
+For the creature-centric matchups you have access to the same green sweepers as Goblins and Merfolk and can also leverage Engineered Plague against Goblins. An aggressive version of the deck now has access to not just Shrapnel Blast but also Galvanic Blast.
+Creatures (27)
+- 4 Arcbound Ravager
+- 4 Frogmite
+- 3 Master of Etherium
+- 4 Memnite
+- 4 Myr Enforcer
+- 4 Ornithopter
+- 4 Disciple of the Vault
+Lands (15)
+Spells (18)
+- 4 Chalice of the Void
+- 2 Relic of Progenitus
+- 2 Tormod's Crypt
+- 4 Engineered Plague
+- 1 Nature's Ruin
+- 2 Perish
+Sideboard
+This version has considerable reach playing off the early beats Affinity has always been able to hand out and then pulling out of the red zone to win with burn spells that hit for four and five plus Disciple. I suspect this version would play better against opposing creature strategies as Affinity has never had a burn spell for R that deals four damage before.
+It's quite possible that in this latter version Aether Vial is the correct call over Springleaf Drum.
+Also a mix of Memnite and Arcbound Worker or just one or the other might be better in this build; one of the things that has changed for Affinity is the lack of damage on the stack making modular not as powerful but testing would be needed to determine whether the faster deploy on Memnite is worth the absence of modular here (as in the Erayo version you obviously want the free robot).
+I also like how this deck can sideboard selectively to make great use of Chalice of the Void on one.
+Other options include running more of the anti-green board sweepers to hedge our bets against Zoo using Pithing Needle or Pyroblast out of the board looking at Thoughtseize or Extirpate… There are a ton of options with the Affinity strategy as the builds now have terrific color-fixing at their disposal and don't need to play anti-hate cards as they did in Extended.
+Neither of these decks are tested so they may be terrible or just in need of refinement but it's really exciting to think about how truly wide-open the Eternal formats are right now. Brainstorming in these formats is entertaining surely but it should come with some caveats as well.
+More on that next time…
+Matt Elias
+Voltron00x@gmail.com
+Voltron00x on SCG TMD and The Source
+Us.
+The great notion dropped by Doug Logan, CEO of USA Track & Field continues to live a kind of half-life. The JAF is now responding about putting the events on in 2010, which gives Logan some additional airplay and cache. Kudos to Logan for noting that he will be involving the various stakeholders in the sport. As of March 31, none of the managers of the major athletes had been contacted or approached by Mr. Logan or his team. He has a year, the conversations will have to be held. That's just good business.
+And then there is the problem with sponsorship. The US squad will be called to race in US (Nike) uniforms, cutting their number of appearances down in their (adidas, ASICS, Reebok, PUMA) primary sponsors apparel. The Jamaican Federation is sponsored by PUMA, so the same thing holds-major athletes there are sponsored by adidas and Nike. Part of the move here, in these economic times, seems to be, for the federations to push their cache with the sponsors and remove much of the control that managers and elite athletes have on the current operations of the sport.
+More than one footwear sponsorship mogul has noted to this writer that the continued addition of dual meets, and anything that calls for federation uniforms lessens the need for individual contracts. At the end of the day, however, one wonders if the meets will even come off, as the intangibles of major event production in this modern day are what stop events. Or as musician Steve Forbert penned two decades ago in the song, Cellophane City, " you can not win, if you do not play."
+Finally, finally, maybe we just do not get it. My belief is that Doug Logan was sent to USA Track & Field to do the unseemly work of changing a headstrong federation into a docile kitchen pet for the USOC. I think that Mr. Logan expected a much tougher fight--and was ready for it. However, to his consternation, and that of one former USOC CEO, USA Track & Field has gone through a decade of changes, some truly important and life changing, with barely a street brawl. And in less than one year!
+I am quietly impressed with the new board: able people who want to make our sport better, who love the sport, and who, for some reason, will give up weekends with their families so our sport can grow and prosper.
+However, we must consider this: the battle for the future of the sport was fought during the search process for a new CEO. Trying to appreciate the gravity of that process, by gathering information from various sources, has convinced me that what we were told about the process and the reality of the situation were quite different. The term, realpolitik, coined by Otto von Bismarck, the prime minister of Prussia, in the nineteeth century, would be appropriate in describing the single mindedness of the search company in guaranteeing the desired outcome. The control that the head hunter held in this process reminds me of a coronation rather than an election. I have no issue with monarchies. My issue is that a process that was supposed to give us confidence in the search procedure could hurt the effectiveness of the new CEO and board of USA Track & Field.
+The hard part of being a CEO is in the nature of governance. In trying times, human beings naturally gravitate to strong minded leaders. In the absence of strong leadership, the loudest voice tends to stand out. I wish Doug Logan and the new board the best of luck in this new endeavor.
+Now, comes the hard work: governance. Be careful what one wishes for....
+OLYMPIC WINNER TO OPEN IN KINGSTON
+ORLANDO (USA): Jamaican olympic 200 m winner and 100 m world champion Veronica Campbell-Brown plans in May to compete at two meetings. This will be also her season openers, most probably at 100 m. First on May 2 at Jamaica Invitational in Kingston. Followed by adidas Track Classic on May 16 in Carson, California. She was not competing indoors, her last start was that excellent run in Shanghai in September where she clocked despite very bad start still 11.01.
+DINIZ TO DOUBLE IN BERLIN
+DUDINCE (SVK): French walker Yohan Diniz explained after his Saturday´s new French record at 50 km that he aims to double at World Championships in Berlin. That means to compete in both walking events, the 20 km and 50 km. In the world championships nobody so far won both events at one championships, but Poland´s great Robert Korzeniowski achieved that historical feat at Sydney Games in 2000. Second placer in Dudince Slovak Matej Toth plans only 50 km in Berlin, but wants to contest prior to championships three 20 km races – on April 25 in Podebrady, Czech Republic than at European Cup in Metz and on June 6 in Borsky Mikulas at national championships.
+OTHER NEWS
+LONDON (GBR): UK Athletics announced that Ed Warner will remain as chairman of UKA until after the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Informs David Martin..
+PARIS (FRA): Ghani Yalouz 1996 Olympic silver medallist in greco-roman wrestling was officially named technical director of French athletics. Yalouz succeeds Franck Chevallier.
+BRAZZAVILLE (CGO): The 2009 edition of the Brazzaville meet has been cancelled
+MODESTO (USA): As trackandfieldnews.com reports, the California Invitational Relays will take a one-year hiatus before returning to the national track calendar in 2010. The world-renowned track and field competition, which moved to the state capital late last year following a 67-year run in Modesto, was originally scheduled for May 9 at Sacramento State’s Hornet Stadium. Meet Director Gregg Miller said it was a very difficult decision to cancel the 2009 meet and delay the event’s Sacramento debut, but he expressed confidence that it is the best decision for the event’s long-term future. The California Relays produced 32 world records by such all-time greats as Ralph Boston, Dutch Warmerdam, Bobby Morrow, Jim Hines, Hal Connolly and Stacy Dragila.
+KINGSTON (JAM): The much-anticipated 99th 2009 ISSA/Grace-Kennedy Boys‘ and Girls‘ Championships begins on Wednesday the two big questions are: Can Kingston College (KC) unseat defending boys‘ champions Calabar High? Will Holmwood Technical have enough to hold off the challenge of Edwin Allen High and pocket their seventh straight girls‘ title? Writes Jamaica Star. Over the next four days, one thing is for sure, the competition inside the National Stadium will be hot with St Jago, Jamaica College (JC) and Wolmer‘s adding to the mix among the boys and Vere Technical and Manchester High there to keep the heat on the top contenders in the girls‘ events. A record 40 international journalists have been accredited to cover the event.
+OTTAWA (CAN) : Canadian public television channel CBC announced reduction or elimination of sports coverage including international figure skating, skiing, world aquatics, world athletics and soccer as part of the cuts to cope with a CAN $171-million deficit. “Coverage of world championships in aquatics, athletics and rowing will be pruned back. Most likely, CBC will pick up the world feed and have announcers call the events off monitors” Chris Zelkovich of the Toronto Star reports.
+INDIANAPOLIS (USA): The USA vs. Jamaica Challenge Series will debut in 2010 (probably in March), USA Track & Field and the Jamaica Amateur Athletic Association announced on Tuesday (31). The meets would feature male and female athletes in the 100, 200 and 400 meters; 100/110m hurdles and 400m hurdles; long jump; and the 4x100, 4x400 and sprint medley relays. „We look forward to taking on our American friends in head-to-head competition in 2010,“ said JAAA President Howard Aris. „We are confident that this kind of team competition, featuring the most exciting events in athletics, will prove captivating to fans around the world.“ Informs trackandfieldnews.com.
+TATA (HUN): István Rózsavölgyi, who was the undisputed king of 1500m in Hungary winning the national championships five times in succession between 1956 to 1960, was honoured by naming the athletics stadium in Tata with his name to commemorate the 80th birth anniversary. Rózsavölgyi was one of the favorites for the Olympic Gold medal in 1956, after setting a new world 1500m record of 3:40.6. Even thought he failed to win any medal in Melbourne, four years later he was back to his best and went on to win the bronze medal at the Rome Olympic Games in 1960. Informs European-athletics.org.
+EUGENE (USA): The International Olympic Committee (IOC) Award for Sport and the Environment has honored the Local Organizing Committee for the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team Trials and the Oregon Track Club with its highest honor, the Sport and the Environment Award, for their environmental and sustainability efforts during Eugene 08, goducks.com informs. The sustainability initiatives during Eugene 08 were a combined effort of the Cities of Eugene and Springfield, the University of Oregon, State of Oregon government officials and hundreds of volunteers..
+NEW YORK (USA): Race Results Weekly reports, that UniversalSports.com will provide coverage of the spring marathon season, including live video coverage of Sunday‘s Fortis Marathon Rotterdam. Also, the Boston and Flora London Marathons will be carried live on UniversalSports.com on April 20 and 26, respectively.
+BRUNSUM (NED): Agent Ricky Simms provided each km splits for Micah Kogo 10 km road world record 27:01 on last Sunday. From that it is seen that the fastest was the 5th km followed by last 10th and 2nd. The slowest the fourth and third. The splits: 2:41.00 – 2:39.96 – 2:46.29 – 2:49.24 – 2:36.26 – 2:40.36 – 2:42.61 – 2:42.81 – 2:43.41 – 2:38.04.
+HARARE (ZIM): As local media are informing, it is not that easy with top sprinter Brian Dzingai compete for Bahrain. He needs a “genuine reason” to turn out for the oil-rich Gulf State Bahrain soon or wait for a three-year stand down period to be stripped of his national colours, the National Athletics Association of Zimbabwe (NAAZ) has said. With waiting he will be 31 years old. Joseph Mungwari, the NAAZ president said the association was not being “punitive” but were simply, following the rulebook and had informed Dzingai of the implications of his move. Mungwari said the “stand down period” could be reduced on “humanitarian grounds” to 12 months.
+However, according to correspondence, the General-Secretary of the Bahrain Athletics Association (BAA), Abdul Rahman Askar, wrote to NAAZ earlier this year requesting that the trio (Nyongani, Makusha, Dzingai) be released to turn out for his country. At least one of the athletes, Dzingai wrote to the NAAZ seeking clearance to turn out for Bahrain. 400 m runner Talkmore Nyongani and long jumper Ngozi Makusha have indicated they are not interested in moving to Bahrain.
+MOSCOW (RUS): Pole Vault queen Yelena Isinbayeva confirmed that she will compete at each of the A*F Golden League meetings. She also plans three other meetings inbetween. That gives together with World Championships in Berlin 10 competitions, also ten possibilities to improve the world record. The 26-year-old, last year’s World Athlete of the Year said for IAAF that she doesn’t currently see any “serious rivals” in her event – “My main rival is myself” she said – and instead finds her motivation in the fans of the sport. During indoor season 2009 she won all three meetings she contested (Donetsk, Birmingham, Praha).
+WACO (USA): Double world champion Jeremy Wariner who lost his quest for second Olympic gold at 400 m in Beijing last year to LaShawn Merritt is ready to learn from his mistakes. „I learned from the races that I lost, what I did wrong. I learned how to correct them,“ he was quoted. After already 200 m races he plans his first 400 m for Drake Relays on April 25.
+CARLSBAD (USA): The field for Sunday’s Carlsbad 5 km road race will feature four U.S. Olympians, two each in the men’s and women’s races. Says universalsports.com. Fresh off winning the USA 15k Championship, steeplechaser Anthony Famiglietti will make his Carlsbad debut with sights set on Marc Davis’ 13-year-old American record of 13:24. His main competition will likely come from NCAA 5,000m champion Bobby Curtis, an All-American at Villanova, who will be returning from the World Cross-Country Championships in Jordan. Leading the women’s field will be Shannon Rowbury, who will be making her 2009 debut after bursting onto the international scene last year. She will be joined by fellow 1,500m Olympian Christin Wurth-Thomas, who paced world record holder Meseret Defar of Ethiopia during her 2007 victory in this race.
+GABORONE (BOT): 400 m runner Amantle Montsho has broken yet another record becoming the first woman in a long time to win the Sports Person of the Year Award at a glamorous Botswana National Sports Council (BNSC) awards ceremony last weekend. The last year 400m African Champion, once again won the Sportswomen of the Year award beating Tsholofelo Retshabile of volleyball and Nshingi Mosalagae of karate. Informs African Athletics website.
+RESULTS
+POINTE-A-PIERRE (TRI, Mar 28-29): Jamaican sprinter Xavier Brown achieved hand timed 10.0 (-0.5) and 20.9 at 200 m. In the shorter dash he beat home Keston Bledman who was credited with the same 10.0. Trinidad´s sprinter Reyanne Thomas showed improvement with 11.3 (+0.5) and 23.1 (-0.6) in women races. Tilastopaja informs.
+PRETORIA (RSA, Mar 28-29): Yellow Pages South African Junior, Youth and Under 23 Championships produced two new SA Junior and one SA Youth record as well as many qualifying standards for the IAAF World Youth Championships in Bressanone, Italy, in July. Annemie Smith who turned 17 on 24 March, turned in one of the many star performances. She not only smashed both the SA Junior and SA Youth records in the hammer throw and easily qualified for the World Youth Championships but her winning distance of 54,21m moved her into sixth position on the South African all-time list in the event. The other SA junior record fell to promising decathlete, Willem le Roux of Boland when he won the junior title with a points total of 6623 points to better the existing record by 268 points. Caster Semenya the new star in middle distance running, captured two titles by winning the 800 metres in a fast time of 2:02, 04 and the 1500 metres in 4:25, 75. In the hurdles Cornel Fredericks won the 110m hurdles and 400m hurdles titles for juniors in fast times of 13,91 secs and 50,64 secs respectively. Informs SA federation website.
+For more on the sport, please click
+The GOP’s Political Deficit Talking debt politics with Keith Olbermann on “Countdown” (Current TV, 7/22/11)
+127 thoughts on “The GOP’s Political Deficit”
+gracious host in the wee small hours of this morning:
+“Bob, today’s heat presents an argument for public nudity.”
+thinking of critters scurrying around critterville au natural is not a good way to start the weekend, boss.
+btw, could those one on ones between prez and speaker have been a way to float various ideas, run stupid flags up the pole and fling feces at the wall to see what sticks by leaking fake plans?
+it’s too hot to woo hoo
+wooohooo
+We’re up very early because the Russian River Peace Navy is setting sail this morning as part of the Healdsburg Water Festival…we’re escorting Vira the only mermaid certified by the state of California….
+I wonder what Obummer will serve at the meeting this AM
+humble pie, crow…
+Been wondering whether or not he who must not be named is still an obot, or whether we can write up the obotuary for that relationship, too.
+Politics is the art of culling your supporters until you can all meet in a phone booth, or a restroom stall for repubs.
+I wonder if obummer has reached the phone booth stage yet.
+Swear to God, I’m writing in Hill C or Al Gore come primary time--
+Didn’t watch KO last night, despite knowing Gracious Host would be on. Had company all PM, so we watched Paranormal Challenge & made snide remarks about Zak Bagans’ strange taste in shirts. Will try to download this video later though.
+PS The thought occurs to me: if it’s hot enough in DC to warrant public nudity (thank God, it’s not quite that bad here in Knobite Corner yet), I’m sure we’d have a lot of questions answered--like whether Boehner is that color not found in nature all over for starters--
+The only way the President can stage a comeback is the time-honored method of forcing resignations and saying, “I got bad advice.”
+I particularly hope we see the end of geithner’s pubic career.
+Here is another great example of Free Market Capitalism, the race to the bottom of the barrel in the grand USA. This sounds like a case for Medicare fraud that you can count on.
+More than four in 10 Americans now meet their end in hospice care. Hospice got its start in the 1960s as a social movement. Volunteers, often meeting in schools and church basements, organized care so patients could die at home with loved ones, instead of at the hospital laced with tubes. Hospice care has evolved from its charitable roots into a $14 billion business run mostly for profit.
+During the 2000-2009 period when Medicare’s hospice rolls doubled to 1.1 million patients, the government’s bill quadrupled to $12 billion. The average for-profit patient costs the government $12,609, 29 percent more than a non-profit patient, because the for-profits find people who live longer. Patients stay an average of 98 days in for- profit hospices versus 68 days at non-profits, which have a 0.2 percent profit margin, according to Medicare. The margin at for- profits is 50 times higher at 10 percent. VistaCare ran hospices in 30 states and was bought by Gentiva last year for $1.09 billion. Vitas’s average patient stay is 79 days [$15,721]; Gentiva’s is 92 days [$18,308].
+Kevin J. McNamara, the CEO of Chemed, told analysts in January the key to making money in hospice is minimizing labor costs and increasing back-office efficiency. Vitas’s arc to the top of the industry began when its purchase by Chemed was completed in 2004. Chemed earned $81.8 million last year on $1.28 billion in revenue, with Vitas and its 58,000 patients responsible for 98 percent of profits. Chemed’s other operating unit is the Roto-Rooter drain-cleaning and plumbing chain. Vitas’s efforts to save money on labor have hurt patients, former employees and patients’ relatives said. In 2009, a Medicare oversight report found nearly a third of hospice patients were not getting services in care plans that describe the treatment and visits providers promise to give them.
+Remember that the way you leave hospice is in a box.
+Here is the scary article from Bloomberg.
+Hospices Neglect End of Life
+By Peter Waldman, July 22, 2011 12:04 AM EDT
+I thought I was foist…or I never would have woohoooed
+My Friend Helen Part I
+I have a friend I’ll call Helen. She is 71. During campaigns we address and stuff envelops together. Helen was not quick–minded and she had a speech impediment. Helen’s mother abused and neglected her, and convinced Helen that she was inferior. Through seven decades, Helen’s chief affliction has been her lack of self confidence. But, Helen worked through High School to help support the family, and graduated with her peers when she was 18.
+Helen never married. She supported herself spartanly by working at counter jobs that neither paid well, nor contributed to her health care or pensions. Still, during the 60s and 70s at least, she put a little money into a savings account. She worked diligently on the unyielding concrete floors of W.T. Grant and Woolworths for 50 years.
+To be continued…
+My Friend Helen Part II
+On a sleety November morning, Helen stepped out of the little North End cabin she rented, and slipped. She hurt her knees. Over the years arthritis has made things much worse. Now Helen moves around mostly by wheelchair.
+Helen’s income is her Social Security pension money, about $550 per month, which is supplemented by Medicare. She plunders her savings account to pay for supplemental insurance, and to pay for her medicines. She shops at Goodwill, doesn’t drink, gamble, or take dope, but it is still hard for her to get to get by.
+Now, the man for whose campaign she addressed and stuffed envelops, wants Helen to sacrifice a little, so that the bankers, whose swindles nearly broke this nation, can have even lower taxes. That man ought to be ashamed to show his face in public.
+Ms Cracker,
+No one is accusing of woo-hooing under false pretenses, or of misappropriating another person’s rightful woo-hoo.
+XR
+The one small bright piece of news for your friend Helen is that if plan proposed reorganizing SS comes about, it would bring her up to almost twice what she receives now presuming she could live long enough for it to go into effect.
+In the meantime, shouldn’t Medicaid act as the supplemental insurer??
+Bethy,
+You make so much sense!
+X,
+Terrific posts this morning. I just lov yah!!
+I called DC to speak with my Toad, Joe (You Lie!) Wilson early yesterday afternoon. The fella who answered the phone said he was on his way back to the district. I asked what he would be doing back here. Was told meeting constituents and going fishing.
+I didn’t unload on the nice fellow (he’s an active duty USMC officer) but asked him to pass my greetings to the Rep along with my take on the economics of the situation and the Goopers role in creating and ‘solving’ it.
+The Marine had served three tours in Iraq, is an Infantry major and insisted on calling me sir despite my remonstrations that he not do so.
+Hi Flatus,
+Been wondering about you, glad to see you!
+Flatus
+Many states are slashing Medicaid to balance their budgets. It would depend on the state. Probably Helen qualifies given her circumstances but no guarantees and certainly no surety in the amount. That’s what makes all this balancing on the back of middle and low income so heinous.
+From the previous thread:
+Hillary isn’t the same as Obama. Yes, she is a bit too hawkish. However, she knows how to stand up and fight for what she believes in. She would never let the repubs walk all over her the way Obama has.
+As for a primary challenger, Hillary is probably the only one who would stand any chance against Obama. But even she would face an uphill battle since Obama still has a substantial group of supporters who blindly support him. It would take someone with high name recognition, the ability to raise huge sums of money, and a spine of steel. Hillary is the only one who meets those three conditions. Furthermore, I don’t think she wants to run. All the sexism and racism charges made against her and Bill in ’08 would surface again; we’d have a bloodbath, I believe. We’d weaken Obama more than he has weakened himself, giving the repubs a better shot at the presidency. Hillary knows that. She’s won’t be a party to it.
+Hospice is for people who haven’t long to live, which is why people don’t get out of hospice alive. Both my mother and my mother-in-law died post 2000 with the aid of two different non-profit Hospice organizations. One mom died nearby at her own home, Sweetie and I moved in to serve her. The other mom died here in our home. Both moms were terminally ill, otherwise they would not have been allowed into the hospice programs. Both were very well cared for by their hospice staff and by us. Both died in our arms.
+The savings to Medicare, Blue Cross, and Humana were extraordinary, because these two women decided to avoid expensive, but ineffective palliative therapy procedures and long hospital stays. Inexpensive morphine and breakfast in bed worked just as well.
+The dangers of for-profit hospice are three, one of which Purple noted @ 9:34 : declining standards of care in order that the ceo can take more money. Another is that for-profit care givers are strongly motivated to sell ever more care to confused and vulnerable people, defeating one of the very purposes of hospice. The third is that any savings always accrue to the ceo, rather than to patients, staff, stockholders, or insurers.
+Nanny,
+I agree totally! Hillary is to hawkish for me and i hate her stances on Libya and the other wars but she’s a fighter for Democratic principles. We need someone to stand up to these Republican thugs and be a Democrat!
+Flatus,
+How does wilson rate having a Marine Major answering his phone ? My rep has a pimply college student.
+I was wondering the same thing, Flatus.
+So, who do we want to challenge this bustard in dove’s clothing ? As far as I know, Bernie Sanders is the only one who has openly opined that we need a real Dem to challenge obummer.
+Question for the press corps to ask, when they aren’t too busy on that terribly important anthony casey story :
+“So, if we all have to make a little sacrifice, Mr. President, what sacrifices are the koch brothers, rupert murdoch, richard scaife, and donald trump going to make under your plan ?”
+X, Nanny, I figure it’s because he’s a retired colonel. Why answering the phone? I didn’t ask, but because the boss was gone and it was Friday afternoon, the major let the troops off early and he stayed to watch over the office. He seemed like a thoroughly nice guy. From Pennsylvania.
+But I thought active duty military personnel were prohibited from engaging in political activity. Is that a misconception on my part?
+He’s assigned there as a staffer for a one-year period--part of a probably worthwhile program of helping critters understand the serving military and vice versa. The officers picked to serve in such positions are hand-picked from a pool of volunteers.
+In so far as their staffing touches the political side of the critter’s activities, special dispensation is granted; but there is no passing of posters or fundraising or anything as tawdry as that.
+ronnie, taxes and debt ceilings:
+“….……
+…. during Reagan’s two terms, he presided over 18 increases in the debt ceiling. He even publicly scolded Congress for playing hardball politics with the debt limit and bringing the nation “to the edge of default before facing its responsibility.”
+I just had an idea for erasing a fairly large chunk of the debt : sell some assets.
+We don’t really need Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama, and what they’ve got, we can get cheaper from China. They’re expensive to keep up, and hardly worth the effort. We could save tons of money by selling them.
+The trouble will be, once these undesirables become part of India, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, or Japan, how do we keep them from creeping back into the US as illegals ?
+000ps. I forgot to write ‘Satire Alert’
+We could probably get more for our chunk of Antarctica than we could for South Dakota or Arkansas, but at least we wouldn’t have to take care of them.
+I expect that the Indian casinos would want to buy Dakota for the sacred Black Hills, and they have walleyes in those huge reservoirs.
+Arkansas has access to Some Big Reservoir, plus…uhh.
+We could sell the Alamo. The Zetas would love it. And, they can afford it, and could pay in bales of greenbacks. Those Mexican drug gangs own most of the money in Texas, you know -- make the koch brothers look like trailer trash.
+I know that a few Texans would be angry if we sold the Alamo to Mexicans, but most Texans come from somewhere else, like Mexico, and don’t really care much.
+And, if Texans don’t want the Zeta’s to buy the Alamo, they can stop the deal by not buying the Zeta’s dope. Between the Alamo and the dope, we know which Texans really care about. ‘Bye, Alamo.
+The part where the light dawns.
+by Taylor Marsh
+This from Taylor’s piece.
+Jamie,
+Where can I find this “plan” proposed reorganizing Social Security that would bring Helen up to almost twice what she receives?
+I have a friend in Pennsylvania that is on Social Security and was on Medicaid last year. As a result of the 2010 election, Pennsylvania is now solidly Republican with new governor and both branches of the legislature. With the Republican war on social programs including Medicaid he is now $47 over the amount to qualify for Medicaid. He is appealing the ruling.
+Purple,
+I wish your friend good health and good luck.
+All I have heard are various plans to either slow the increase in SS benefits or to cut payments approximately $500 from each Soc Sec recipient, about 7.5% of Helen’s annual benefit. These whacks at the well-being of seniors are “balanced” by a plan to permanently lower the top income tax rate to 23%, which stupidly supposes will spur job growth.
+re tax rates spurring job growth, if there were any job growth our rip up rulers would say (in the privacy of their antique chestnut panelled boardrooms) that we have to export more jobs.
+X,
+Heck with selling off Antarctica--it’s yet too unexplored, Let’s just use our eminent domain and convert the littoral of Alaska to condo space with toasty-warm beaches compliments of Global Warming supplemented by Tokyo Electric and the Japan Current.
+I’m really getting tired of Obama talking about the Democrats as if he isn’t one himself.
+Perhaps he is right.
+Jeez, Flatus you are a genius. Good thing I didn’t have a mouth full of coffee.
+Anyway, yah ! And, the funky little restaurants on the boardwalk can sell self-broiling fish.
+What OD said!
+I feel badly for Amy Winehouse and for those who loved or cared for her.
+I’m not really familiar with her music. It is always tragic when someone is destroyed by their addictions.
+PIT
+I published it a few days ago with the chart. Apparently, the lowest amount paid will be 125% of poverty less the Medicare payment. For a single person this was a check of about $1100.
+I’ll see if I can find it again. The ones who got whacked were on the upper end plus proposed means testing. Nothing legislated or even in writing yet.
+PIT
+That 125% of poverty was in the Gang of six proposal
+Here is the chart: For a single person, this would be $13,613 or $1134 a month less the approx $100 Medicare payment, so your friend would get a shade over $1000. Whether she would be entitled to any additional state assistance on top of that would be the question.
+If a gentleman named Cooper drops in and I’m not around to do the introduction honors, say hello. He is from and a really interesting person.
+Corporate tax holiday in debt ceiling deal … say what?
+Obama: We Offered Cuts to “Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security”
+By: Jane Hamsher
+Ha, I hope Jane doesn’t hold her breath waiting for a storm from Democrats??? Not gonna happen..
+If the Democratic Party doesn’t stand up to the sanctimonious, lightweight Obama; it deserves to lose.
+Thanks for the info on the SS proposal, Jamie.
+I really enjoyed Captain America…lots of fun…
+Jamie,
+Here is my, and others, analysis on the Chained CPI-U issue. Just let the G.W. Bush’s 2001 & 2003 tax cuts expire! That will provide about $4 trillion in revenue over 10 years or until Washington, D.C. screws it up again.
+C-BOB,
+|
+|
+V
+httpv://......
+CBob, everything u need to know about video in the “Add Video To Comments” tab on the drop-down menu of “How to Comment” above or at end of the right sidebar
+NOTE TO ALL: Anytime you need help on using comment tools, click HOW TO COMMENT above for the drop-down menu (It’s also laid out at the end of the right sidebar). I’ve tried to include explainers on every tool available to you. If you need more, please send email to help@craigcrawford.com
+CBS is reporting that DoJ screwed up a subpoena of Indymedia.us
+Let the dam’ bush tax breaks expire.
+But sell SD, anyway. The ruling Whites have treated the Indians out there so badly for 140 years, it would be really great if the Indians could buy the place and put the Whites on a reservation for a while. HAHAHA
+Rockford’s answering machine.
+Dam’, how I loved Rockford.
+Former Chief of Staff General John Shalikashvili died at 75.
+I suppose the neo-cons will throw a party.
+CNN Poll: Drop in liberal support pushes Obama approval rating down
+By: CNN Political Unit
+The president wins another round
+But with liberal support at risk, Obama should think twice about a “grand bargain” to cut entitlements
+BY JOAN WALSH
+Obama’s escalating war in Yemen
+BY JUSTIN ELLIOTT
+Introducing the GOP’s Divine Right Pledge
+By Michelle Cottle, July 20, 2011 8:16 PM EDT
+Perry is hardly the first to receive a presidential summons from his Heavenly Father. George W. Bush used to speak of how God had made clear that He wanted W. to become commander in chief.
+IMO
+People that talk to God are religious and it is called payer.
+People that God talks to are psychotic and it is called auditory hallucinations.
+Anyone hearing voices? Palin, Bachmann, Perry!
+Interesting article in MoJo about those Indian call centers.
+The Australians aren’t at all happy bout their portrayal in the training
+Ah, me. I also would like to know how he who must not be named is feeling re his hero. Someone said o talks re dems as if he weren’t one, and that made me think. Maybe he feels he isn’t a dem anymore, just as Ike was no longer military after he became pres. Hmmmmm. His vagueness in his first two years gave away his biggest strength, a dem congress, and now he is evaporating. Pretty soon there won’t be a pres,
+don’t you think? But as for the dem party considering a new candidate -- HA! The party is responsible for him in the first place. Donna Brazile and all the other o pushers need to be got rid of, and that ain’t gonna happen. We just can’t let a repub get in the white house and need to be getting used to the idea. Maybe a minder for o.
+This heat and drought is beyond a nightmare. Where are all the doubters who snickered and sneered last winter cuz it snowed?
+I haven’t heard much of Amy Whitehouse’s singing, but I liked what I heard. What a shame.
+General Shalikashvili is the general that republicans claimed betrayed us by not agreeing with rumdum and cheney.
+CBS : .”
+These Assistant US Attorneys sometimes need training wheels before they are allowed out on the front walk.
+I’m guessing that 2 -- 3 Supreme Court seats will open up in the next 5.58 years.
+Would we like to see a 30 something antonininny replace the senile one ? Would we like to see 30 something alito replace ginzberg ? Would we like a Supreme Court Justice who believes the Donation of Constantine is the basis for US law ? Think of scalia and his intermittant ‘originality’ doctrine, thomas and the “Let’s scrap it and start over fresh” doctrine, alito and the ‘talking wallets’ dogma. How crazy can rip ups make them ? As reagan would say, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Just something to think about it.
+I’m going to change that estimate. I think 3-4 seats will open up.
+Good morning,
+May the Republican’t Brand go down in flames. They are over-brewed!
+What is going on with the media? The Central Florida Pipeline spills 30,000 gallons of jet fuel into a creek that feeds into Tampa Bay and there is almost no mention of the event including the St. Pete Times with nothing. When Exxon Mobil spills 42,000 gallons of crude oil into the Yellowstone River there is major outrage from the media. Double Standard?
+Officials try to prevent fuel from spilling into Bay
+The Central Florida Pipeline, which carries jet fuel between Orlando and Tampa, was shut down after a section near Mango ruptured Friday night. More than 30,000 gallons of fuel gushed into a creek near E. Broadway Avenue and Williams Road, officials said.
+BW
+What a nice hibiscus! I like.
+‘Super Congress': Debt Ceiling Negotiators Aim To Create New Legislative Body
+Ryan Grim
+New York Gay Marriage: First Gay Couples Marry At Midnight
+CAROLYN THOMPSON
+“…sell SD…. it would be really great if the Indians could buy the place and put the Whites on a reservation for a while”
+xr, can’t sell. questionable title. don’t own big junks therein like black hills and maybe rapid city.
+speaking of reservations, where’s old friend rez?
+Why a New Poll in Ohio Spells Trouble for Obama in 2012
+William Galston
+Obama leads Christie in New Jersey
+byJed Lewison
+Thanks, Tony…it was one of the first flowers this spring.
+Wow, a ‘super congress’ composed no doubt of ‘super congressmen’. Sounds like a ‘super clusterf--k’ to me.
+Am still looking but can not find any constitutional basis for such an act.
+How dumb can these people get?
+Time for Obama to go it alone, and leave congress out of the equation, they have shirked their responsibility,and can no longer be considered a relevant player.
+jace, welcome home. how was the vacation?
+thinking of rez. thinking of vacations. thinking of lazy sunday music.
+patd,
+Hello. The vacation was wonderful.
+Spent time with both our families, and enjoyed the view of a country that has had more than abundant rainfall this year. The country was beautiful and the crops were amazing. Rarely if ever will you see WY and NE as green and lush this time of year.
+Ate well , drank well, and did a lot of sitting on the front porch reading books and listening to music.
+Good to be home and to begin to reconnect with the world, dismal though it be, and begin to catch up with all here.
+Have a good one.
+Pat,
+No questionable title. We bought it from Napoleon. At Ft. St. Antoine on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi, the French claimed everything to the west. Presumably, that meant all the way to Alsace. This may be a fatal flaw in French title. However, we cured that flaw when we stole South Dakota fair and square from the Indians, by extorting a peace treaty out of the Oglala, Siseton, Hunkpapa, et alia. Now, we can make out like bandits by letting the same folks redeem it.
+Or, we could sell it to the most crowded country on earth, Monaco. Monaco really needs the lebensraum, and they could have plenty of space for their Grand Prix without having to disrupt businesses. Win-Win.
+The people of Greenland would probably like a place that isn’t all black and white. South Dakota is rich in beige.
+The re-enactment of the Battle of Bull Run was inconclusive. The reb re-enactors are claiming victory, but they make lots of stupid claims.
+It looks like we are in for a long and fake bloody war of re-enactments.
+I don’t know if I would want to fly right now. Another example of stupidity at work.
+FAA Shutdown Leads to Widespread Job Loss, Cheaper Airline Tickets
+July 23, 2011
+Nearly 4,000 people are temporarily out of work and federal airline ticket taxes have been suspended after efforts to avert a shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration failed Friday amid political wrangling over a $16.5 million cut in subsidies to 13 rural communities.
+The subsidy cut was included by Republicans in a House bill extending operating authority for the FAA, which has a $16 billion budget. Senate Democrats refused to accept the House bill with the cuts, and Republican senators refused to accept a Democratic bill without it.
+Typical Michele Bachmann, says one thing and does the opposite. She voted against the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act.
+Bachmann changes tune on ‘Cut, Cap and Balance’ pledge
+By Peter Hamby, July 16th, 2011 02:30 PM EDT
+.
+H R 2560 RECORDED VOTE 19-Jul-2011 8:23 PM
+QUESTION: On Passage
+BILL TITLE: Cut, Cap, and Balance Act
+Republican Ayes 229, Noes 9, Not Voting 1
+Democratic Ayes 5, Noes 181, Not Voting 7
+TOTALS Ayes 234, Noes 190, Not Voting 8
+Welcome home, Jace. Glad you had a great time. Now, it’s time to live with the beige and the heat, eh?
+Eprof,
+Good to hear from you. Yes beige is the right word.
+As for hot that goes with out saying, in fact it is so hot just now that I can only hope that some of the less intelligent republicans, take your pick, will be consigned here for eternity. Would serve them right.
+How goes it down in your neck of the woods? Much the same as here I suspect.
+Stay cool, and stay in touch.
+This is day 50 of 100 degrees or more for us, although we have cloud covering right now and the temp is only in the low 90’s but with very high humidity. We’re hoping for rain one of these days. Less than an inch so far for the year.
+AZ politics are the usual crazy. Now, people are upset that weather reporters used the Arab word, Haboob, to describe the massive dust storm we experienced on the 5th of July. Russell Pearce of sb1070 fame is facing a recall election in November from his Mesa district. Not going to happen. It will probably only strengthen his anti-immigrant politics. We now have a private financed fence building project on the border with prison labor. Two new laws will make it harder for public service folks, including teachers, to unionize or stay in a union in the future. Brewer is her usual bat-shit self as she gets ready to run again for governor. Other than that, you didn’t miss much in two weeks.
+xr, black hills still in limbo land
+xr, interesting map of indian land areas judicially established in 1978. take a look at s.d.
+Jace,
+I agree, time for the president to go it alone. WELCOME HOME!
+Tony,
+Thanks, good to be back, and good to hear from you.
+Eprof,
+I would say that it has been a rather busy two weeks from the sounds of things. I can’t blame the Arizona political climate on the heat, because it is always hot down there. I can only think that in Brewer’s case at least, the peroxide has gone clear to the brain. As for Pearce he just has shit for brains.
+Is sheriff Joe directing the fence building? Sounds like it might be right up his alley, convict labor and what not.
+In the meantime our good friend XR is trying to sell off my native Wyoming along with my wife’s home state of Nebraska, and the beautiful Black Hills of South Dakota.
+Fightin’ words if you ask me, not that anyone did.
+I think that we would do well to be ever vigilant, lest he throw in Arizona, just to sweeten the pot.
+another little girl blue….Janis’s turn.
+Guess we better rename Algebra.
+so many little girls blue
+admiral
+أمير amīr, commander. Amīr al-bihār = “commander of the seas” was a title in use in Arabic Sicily, and was continued by the Normans in Sicily in a Latinized form, and then adopted successively by Genoese and French. Modern French is “amiral”. An English form under King Edward III (14th century) was “Amyrel of the Se”. Insertion of the ‘d’ was doubtless influenced by allusion to common Latin “admire”.[2] [1]
+adobe
+الطوبة al-ṭūba or at-tūba,[3] “the brick”. The first record of the word in a Western language is in 12th century Spanish.[4] It entered English from Mexico in the 18th century. The Arabic dictionary of Al-Jawhari dated about year 1000 made the comment that the Arabic word came from the Coptic language.[5] [2]
+albatross
+الغطّاس al-ghaṭṭās, literally “the diver”, presumably a cormorant or others of the pelecaniform birds, which are diving waterbirds.[6] The derived Spanish alcatraz has its earliest record in 1386 as a type of pelican.[4] “Alcatras” was in English in the 16th century borrowed from Spanish and did not include albatrosses.[7] Beginning in the 17th century, every European language adopted “albatros” with a ‘b’ for these Pacific Ocean birds, the ‘b’ having been mobilized from Latinate alba = white. [3]
+alchemy, chemistry
+الكيمياء al-kīmiyā, alchemy. The Arabic entered medieval Latin as alchimia, first attested in about the year 1140 in an Arabic-to-Latin translation by Plato Tiburtinus.[4] The Arabic word seems to have had its root in a late classical Greek word (the alchemy article has more details). The late medieval European words alchemy and alchemist gave rise in the 16th century to the words chemical and chemist, beginning in French and Latin. [4]
+alcohol
+ha ha ha ……alcohol is an arabic word……
+haboob
+“habu:b”, a large dust storm occurring in the desert.
+harem
+حريم harīm, women’s quarters in a large household. The Arabic root-word means “forbidden” and thus the word had a connotation of a place where men were forbidden. (Crossref Persian and Urdu Zenana for semantics.) 17th century English entered English through Turkish, where the meaning was closer to what the English is. In Arabic today harīm means womenkind in general. [65]
+hashish
+حشيش hashīsh, hashish. Hashish has the literal meaning “dried herb” and “grass” in Arabic. Its earliest record as a nickname for cannabis is in 12th or 13th century Arabic.[47] Earliest record in English is in a traveller’s report in 1598. [66]
+henna, alkanet, alkannin, Alkanna
+الحنّاء al-hinnā, henna. Henna is a reddish natural dye made from the leaves of Lawsonia inermis. The English dates from about 1600 and came directly from Arabic.[48] [67] Alkanet dye is a reddish natural dye made from the roots of Alkanna tinctoria and this word is 14th century English from Spanish alcaneta | alcana, and medieval Latin alchanna, from al-hinnā.[49] [68]
+hummus (food recipe)
+حمّص himmas, chickpea(s). Chickpeas were called himmas in medieval Arabic and were a frequently eaten food item.[50] Himmas was later borrowed into Turkish as humus and entered English from Turkish in mid 20th century. The Turkish and English hummus means mashed chickpeas mixed with tahini and certain flavourings. In Arabic that is called himmas bil tahina. All evidence points to the origin of the recipe in Syria and Lebanon. See hummus. See also Addendum for Middle Eastern cuisine words below. [69]
+this is the most fun I’ve had all afternoon.
+Alcohol in it’s earliest form is obviously -- White Lightning.
+till I read that list I woulda thought “haboob” would perfectly describe someone who became offended at someone on tv’s describing a dust storm as a haboob….
+Prediction: Bachmann will implode. She’s too tightly wrapped to go the distance with the big boys…..the “headaches” was just a shot across the bow.
+I mean, she’s no Sarah Palin…….
+So if alcohol is an Arab word, why are they so touchy about the stuff? And this haram thing, when you have a good idea run with it.
+It seems to me that the Arabs may well have been some of the earliest proponents of drinking and chasing women.
+Sturg,
+How can someone be tightly wrapped, and a loose cannon at the same time?
+I don’t care how or where she implodes as long as it is live on the tube.
+I would love to see Bachmann have her ‘Howard Dean’ moment, but I fear that she is too smart. If some of her previous comments and nonsense have not disqualified her, nothing will.
+She is a bit like Palin in that the more outrageous she becomes the more coverage she gets. In the press at any rate, outrageous is the new normal, and Bachmann gets a pass as a result.
+One of the most detailed articles I’ve seen on the Norway massacre. apparently Anders wants to wear a “uniform” for his hearing.
+The first alcohol was beer made in Sumeria. Sumerians developed hundreds of beer recipes before they were demographically swamped by Semitic and Caucasian settlers by 1500 BCE.
+The Sumerian goddess of beer (beer making was women’s work unlike in Medieval Europe where women were forbidden to approach the brewery lest their ‘impurity’ sour the wort) was named Siduri. Siduri sat on the bank of the river consuming the ingredients and regurgitating lager.
+This is why I drink wine.
+Jamie,
+Thanks for the Norway link. This is one of the toughest and depressing stories that I have come across in a long while. In truth I have been more or less avoiding it.
+Ugly and demonic is the best description I can come up with, the carnage simply defies imagination.
+XR,
+It is bad enough that you consider selling of my native state of Wyoming, now you have sullied all my romantic notions about beer and it’s origins, not to mention it’s usefulness to modern man.
+Alas man, have you no shame?
+Oh, Oh,
+My comment is awaiting moderation.
+Just to be perfectly clear , I never do anything in moderation.
+This right wing Christian fundament-ist, who killed ?98? Norwegians is apparently too foghing stupid to know that now the Muslims have 98 (plus him) fewer to kill, when his idiots’ crusade begins.
+He doesn’t want Norwegian Kultur to be swamped by Muslims. Presumably, he wants to protect Max’s Voertoel (a beer made north of Trondhejm out of rye, for heaven’s sake. It is the worst beer I ever tasted) from being replaced by ka’at or hashish. Presumably, he doesn’t want lutefisk replaced by shawirma, doesn’t want the old ship barrow replaced by a Taj Mahal, or the old village stave church replaced by a Blue Mosque. Pretty weird, eh ?
+He wants to be arraigned in a uniform. Okay. How about the uniform of a psych ward patient : A smart, well-starched straight jacket over a hospital hospital gown (open at rear) and hospital slippers ? If he really insisted they could put epaulettes on the straight jacket, and a foil helmet on his head.
+xrep…
+He’s just another Republican Reichwinger.
+Jace,
+Shame ? Have I any ? No. Not when my country is at risk of dishonoring it’s checks ! THAT would be shame.
+You, sir, could save your native land from ignominy by placing a subtantial bid for the place. Otherwise the Arapahoes will probably get it. Or -- horrors -- exxon !!!
+Btw, if WY is so great, what are you doing in 140F AZ ?
+I spent some glorious time in Norway, and never met a creep or villain there, although I suspected that there must be a couple, at least. I mean, they can’t all have been killed off in the constant Viking vendettas, or bred out by raping Irish, British, German, Lett, French, Dutch, & Finn maidens.
+Welcome home, Jace.
+I like ‘Reichwinger’. I think that I hafta steal that word, if you don’t mind. Or, at least rent it.
+jace says: July 24, 2011 at 10:55 pm : “Oh, Oh, My comment is awaiting moderation.”
+Always be moderate in your moderation, lest you become immoderately, or even pathologically, moderate.
+Not mine, but feel welcome to use it.
+Good night.
+This correspondant has heard that during the Battle of Bull Run Re-enactment the Confederate re-eactors swept forward and came upon convertibles occupied by some of the well-to-do of Washington, DC who had driven over to witness the mock battle. My informant tells me that the Confederate re-enactors were very polite to the ladies present, even though they be from Northern parts.
+I fear that the re-enactment of the Civil War will be long and harrowing for the families of the re-enactors, and the nation generally. May God have mercy on our souls.
+Not yours, Mr. Paranoid ? Well thanks anyway for letting me use it.
+Sleep well. Your reichwing protectors are ever vigilanting
+XR,
+Here is my sad story, I left Wyoming because I did not want to be the last liberal left standing in a less than liberal state. I arrived in Arizona, only to find that there was a bounty on liberals here.
+I would have put in a bid for WY, a long time ago, however circumstances were such that I was unable to afford a ticket to a free lunch.
+I love this place for reasons that still escape me, I especially love it during the winter months, and I consider the heat a small price to pay for not having to own a snow shovel or a lawn mower.
+Good as always to hear from you.
+Tonight I pretended that I was president Obama.
+I wanted steak and red wine for dinner.
+Cheryl, thinking that it was too hot to cook offered me beer and deep fried tacos. I dithered and protested enough to look good however in the end I went for the beer and tacos. Kind of an Obama compromise. It really did not cure my need for steak, but it did leave me feeling as though we had compromised. I think that I will call a press conference for tomorrow.
+Jace, good to see you back in the neighborhood. On the moderation thingie, occasionally our new automatic spam filter gets backed up and takes a moment to clear a comment but usually gets it done in a few minutes. If not, just shoot an email to help@craigcrawford.com
+Craig,
+Not to worry, I think that happened to me once on another occasion.At this hour of the evening my comments could probably stand some moderation.
+Good to be back.I think that you all have been busy.
+Love the videos of you on Countdown. Don’t get Current so this is the only way I can see you there.
+Keep ‘em comin’
+Thanks Jace.
+Don’t want to be geeking out on everyone, but just so you know how the filter works, it actually scans every comment through its ever expanding database for spam potential before posting. Although very fast, every now and then there is a slight delay.
+More about it on WHY WAS MY COMMENT HELD? under HOW TO COMMENT drop-down menu above (or on the right sidebar).
+Hey, just because you might get moderated on occasion is no reason to be moderate.
+Thanks Craig,
+That is good to know.
+I don’t do moderation well.
+It seems to me that I am the only one who is given the option to delete or edit at the ends of my comments. Is this a not-so-subtle suggestion>
+Bethyboo, the editing tools only appear for your comments, as it does for all other commentators. Each commentator will see the tools for their own posts but not for others.
+NEW THREAD
+And You Thought Notre Dame’s #1 Ranking Was a Fraud!
+Naughty, naughty — apparently the most egregious sports overhype since Charlie Weis turns out to have a deceased girlfriend from Canada. I guess that ends the suspense over who the Jets will be making their #1 pick this year!
+Weigel: “My girlfriend was so devastated at the Manti Te’o news I had to pick her up from work, at the Jukt Micronics office.”
+…Well, now we know what Stephen Glass is up to; his explanations have, however, become less plausible.
+…Chait: “The story is utterly shocking, unless you’re familiar with the history of the mythology of Notre Dame football.”
+(Erik:) Dave Zirin: “The only conclusion one can draw is that he was either the victim of an insanely elaborate grift whose ingenuity would humble David Mamet, or something stinks in South Bend.”
+That Te’o, boy, he sure has the intangibles.
+More like No Dame amirite fellas
++6
+What, no ninja attack?
+And then a spaceman came!
+Lennay Kekua died for somebody’s sins but not mine.
+Actually, i dunno, long-form trolling the entire sports-media complex is a thing I want to find funny, but I’m having trouble getting past the whole invasion of privacy angle w/r/t “Reba.”
+Yeah, that was seriously creepy – especially the “hey can you take a photo with this sign for a sick friend” thing? eeeew
+Lennay Kekua died for somebody’s sins but not mine.
+FTW
+I swear to freaking god, I was once in a soho restaurant with Patti Smith sitting at a table to my left and Jon Corine at one right behind me….speaking of sinners.
+Held onto my wallet pretty tight.
+Corzine
+Needs more Byrd.
+Also, since we’re riffing on lyrics…Te’o know all there is to know about the crying game.
+Will Notre Dame football ever get cut any slack? Getting student videographers killed, brazenly suppressing the pleas for justice of sexually assaulted girls who then commit suicide, having Nick Saban breezily expose the fraudulence of its #1 ranking, and now being complicit in an elaborate Internet hoax. Will it ever end for the Domers?
+It’s a dangerous and ungodly world out there.
+It has all the ingredients of a wacky buddy comedy. High school football buddies create Canadian girlfriend, then one becomes famous and they have to keep up the pretense and arrange a fake death story. There was a MASH episode like that.
+Stuff like that doesn’t turn out to be so amusing in real life. At least, since she’s not real, she can’t ever receive a storm of threatening texts telling her not to mess with Notre Dame Football by telling the truth about rape.
+Many of us still mourn Captain Tuttle.
+Never forget.
+Maybe I’m too trusting, but the man says he was the victim of a hoax, and I don’t see much evidence to the contrary.
+Except he supposedly met her several times. So the hoax steers had a girl who looked like the picture arrange to meet Manti and woo him? This thing doesn’t make any sense to me
+The girl who is actually in the picture had no idea, and is appearently kind of creeped out.
+This is wacky.
+Here’s a guy who claims he met her before Te’o:
+Yeah, I agree with Richard — the main problem with his story is that it’s ludicrously implausible.
+Unless Manti made up the part about meeting her because he didn’t want to admit falling in love with someone over the Internet and by phone. If that’s the case, he’s both victim and fraudster. But even for this scenario, you would need someone to play the part of the dying girl on the phone for hours of conversations. Pretty unlikely In my opinion
+How is that any less plausible than a famous college football player conspiring with several others to invent a fake dead girlfriend to buttress his Heisman stock?
+See below. Manti now says he only met her over the internet and on the phone and was tricked. I’m leaning to the view that Manti was in on the hoax but we’ll know more later. Hard to believe that he participated in the hoax to buttress his Heisman chances – not sure that a Heisman was ever awarded to someone because of his sob story (but since I dont follow college football that closely, I cant even be sure of that)
+I think by far the worst part is watching the embarrassed media trip over themselves to f*ck his brainhole (leaving off whether he deserves it). The self-serious handwringing we are going to see out of these clowns will make their inability to vote for the baseball HOF look like child’s play.
+Anyhow, there is nothing good out of this at all.
+Whether:
+1) Hoax victim compounded by lies after personal discovery of it- so death was the way out
+2) Gay compounded by hoax/lies- again it had to have spiraled of control.
+3) Straight hoax- ce nest pa probable.
+4) Hoax perpetrator
+I don’t really want to be reading about this for a couple of weeks.
+Lance Armstrong appreciates it I am sure, and Oprah is going to try for a weekly gig I guess.
+It just isn’t good. I can’t say that I can feel happiness that someone did something dumb and will be made to pay by an even dumber establishment, but serious kudos to Deadspin for wondering why nothing made sense.
+Given that the hoaxster was a man, who was Te’o supposedly talking to on the phone?
+At any rate, there’s tons of demonstrable falsehoods in what Te’o and his family told the press. That he met Kekua at the Stanford-Notre Dame game in 2011. That “their stares got pleasantly tangled, then Manti Te’o extended his hand to the stranger with a warm smile and soulful eyes.” That “every once in a while, she would travel to Hawaii, and that happened to be the time Manti was home, so he would meet with her there.”
+Te’o's family told ESPN that Te’o and Kekua had a “ritual of falling asleep on the phone together”. I’d be willing to bet that not only was Manti Te’o in on it but his family as well.
+What, were they curled up next to little Manti along with his comfort blanket?
+“Goodnight room. Goodnight moon. Goodnight pig flying past the moon. Goodnight Manti, and the white noise from the phone…”
+This isn’t definitive, but:
+A more plausible scenario: Closeted gay man invents a long-distance “girlfriend” who just happens to die before anyone can meet her.
+Minus the dying, this is exactly what my pathological liar roommate did freshman year of college. The full saga is too long to tell here but the shape of it was:
+-Roommate invents hot high school senior chick he met online; never introduces her to us or shows us any pictures
+-A few weeks after disappearing on a trip for a few days
+(supposedly to seduce high school senior chick), roommate starts telling tale about the high-school-age male “cousin” his parents have saddled him with as said cousin visits our college;
+-A few weeks later, roommate introduces us to said cousin; cousin stays in roommate’s room two solid weeks
+This. I have a pathological liar for a brother and the lengths he will go to perpetuate even the slightest of fabricated stories is literally unbelievable. I caught him once creating fake dentists notes. (Remember the Seinfeld when George takes his not-to-be in-laws to his fake house in Montauk. Picture that but George really believing there will be a house there when they arrive and then making a story up about why there isn’t) Creating fake girlfriends is amateur hour for him and if I worked hard to rack my memory I probably find one that he said died at some point. If you have never been in regular contact with a true pathological liar you really don’t know what it is like. And the sad thing is, and what people may need to prepare themselves for is that this kid lied the whole time but he really believes his story to be true at this point and it will take some kind of irrefutable evidence made public before he admits he lied even to himself.
+I am not a psychologist, but the one thing that seems unusual if we assume Te’o is a pathological liar is that Tuiasosopo must have been a full co-conspirator. Now, pathological liars certainly have friends and enablers who will accommodate them to absurd lengths without really being in on the con. But do they really work in teams with one another? Seems at odds with the personality we’d expect from a pathological liar – when you’re this manipulative, can you really trust anyone else (even a lover) enough to coordinate your lies with them?
+There’s always the “Te’o and Tuiasosopo were lovers, and together invented the fake girlfriend as a beard, and then things got out of control” theory.
+♫ Her name is Alberta, she lives in Vancouver…♫
+I wonder what Joe THEESMAN has to say about this.
+Just wait for Peter King’s sage ruminations in Ten Things I Think I Was Thinking And Where The Hell Is My Butternut And Guava Latte?
+I assume you’re already aware of the weekly takedown of PK over at Kissing Suzy Kolber; if not, you certainly should be.
+I am aware of the relevant internet traditions.
+Bro didn’t go to his fake girlfriend’s funeral? Shenanigans.
+You’d.
+Oh, man–those lyrics make me feel 16 again …
+Who did Charles Pierce pay off to get this and the Brooks’ syllabus in the same week?
+From The Keys, pg. 345 of Luther’s Works, Vol. 40
+Annnnd Erick the Son of Erick chimes in to ruin everyone’s fun. His comical take, I shit thee not:
+“Told my wife I needed to smack her to make sure she’s real. She said if I did all my questions about life and death would be answered.”
+Again, I shit thee not.
+Those right-wingers are such nice people.
+Why does all right-wing humor involve hurting people?
+Why do you restrict it to humor?
+I think H.P Lovecraft summed the whole story of When Manti Met Lennay up pretty well:
+“That is not dead which can eternal lie. Yet with strange aeons even death may die.”
+Strange aeons indeed.
+You know, we’re laughing now, but we’ll feel pretty silly when it turns out we’re all just figments of Manti Te’o's fecund imagination.
+[exhales, puts down bong]
+Have you ever looked at
+your handNotre Dame football? I mean, really looked?
+Manti has released.”
+Of course, this statement is totally at odds with the reports that he met her in person several times. Since I wasn’t following the story at all earlier this year, I dont know if Manti was making those statements or if they were press reports or whatever. I’m willing to give the kid the benefit of the doubt but there is obviously going to be more on this
+Hoaxster was a dude. Who was he talking to on the phone?
+Hoaxster could have a female friend in on it. With all the other things that don’t make sense in the story, this isn’t a head scratcher.
+From my understanding, a lot of this story is from the South Bend newspaper.
+It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they kept badgering him about his “girlfriend” until he upped his story (oh, ya, I totally met her!) to improve it.
+Or even if the South Bend press just wrote in their own details…
+Not to put too fine a point on it, but the guy is a football player.
+And a mormon.
+Well, he says he’s a Mormon.
+Who would lie about that?
+I’m trying to remember a creepier, more bizarre lie than this, and I’m drawing a blank.
+The cake.
+The cake is not a lie.
+Not to steal Weigel’s reference, but if you watched the BCS title game you’re not surprised Te’o would be Jukt out of his pants.
+He wasn’t missing tackles, he was hugging his girlfriend.
+The thing I don’t get about this (OK, one of the many things I don’t get about this) is that apparently no one in the press, not even one of the tabloids, thought to do a background check on this woman to see if there was any dirt on her. I would have thought that was standard operating procedure from the press as a soon as a new name pops up. Because it’s not like the tracks were particularly well covered in this hoax.
+Reporter: “He says she’s in another coma.
+Editor: “Sounds suspicious. Try and follow up after the season, if they don’t stay undefeated.”
+What do you mean “any dirt on her”? I can see looking into her story to get quotes from her family, etc. But dirt?
+Maybe I have a cynical view of the media, but I assumed someone would have looked at the story and said, “Wonder if there’s some other angle to this,” and started doing background checks to see.
+Turns out Gene Wojochowski at ESPN did actually investigate and could not find an obituary or any press account about a previous car accident. When he asked Te’o about this, Te’o told him to back off, so Wojo did and ran the story anyway even though he couldn’t verify any of it.
+Not a great day for sports journalism.
+That’s really weak on Wojciechowski’s part.
+It’s hard to blame him. He works for ESPN.
+ESPN = Egregious Suckers Producing News
+It seems really odd that they didn’t ask around at Stanford. She would have had former teammates and coaches there, and some quotes about what a wonderful young woman who really loved life she was (not to mention how much the relation with Te’o meant to her) would be standard profile filler. I can’t imagine what was in it for the writers, either.
+If 2012 has taught us anything, it’s that you can always take the word of a Mormon.
+“Lying for the Lord” takes on a new dimension.
+I always assumed it was “lying” in the biblical sense.
+Turns out I’ve been a bad Christian…
+He was running for the Heisman, for Pete’s sake!
+CNN is reporting it as Teo being the victim of a hoax. ND says he told them on Dec. 26 that something was hinky.
+But who did he meet at the Stanford game? As far as I can read, he claims to have met the girl – at least once once. Does someone say that he has girlfriend after meeting someone once? Did they ever kiss? Go on a date?
+Did Te’o really use the word “hinky”?
+Letterman fan.
+According to the exposé, he claimed to have met her at the game and then met her in Hawaii several times since. But now he’s saying he only met her on the Internet and over the phone. Lot more to this story is going to come out
+From the South Bend Tribune article:
+And who was he talking to on the phone? The hoaxster, again, was a man.
+Did you read the Deadspin article all the way to the end? There is a woman, apparently knowingly involved, who posed as FDGF’s sister some time around the beginning of the unraveling. If Manti or Brian Te’o ever met or spoke on the phone with anyone they believed to be FDGF, it was probably her.
+Here’s another weird angle:
+He claims the same dude who stole Reba’s pictures for FDGF’s Twitter page introduced them. I find it impossible to believe that Te’o was not aware (“RIP and no I don’t want your obit for my wallet or your family to come to senior day.”) but there seems also to be some other con at work here.
+It’s a bit unclear if Donna Tei was knowingly involved. That being said, even if she was, there’s no way she was having 8 hour daily phone conversations with Te’o, as claimed. Maybe she was the one talking to his parents, and they weren’t in on it. I find it seriously hard to believe that he didn’t know, given the number of blatant, outright lies he’s told throughout this story.
+I believe that Manti Te’o had to have known a long time ago. Whether from the inception or at some later point, I don’t know. It seems equally plausible to me that he’d go in on it, or that he figured it out after he felt he couldn’t back out and hoped it would blow over.
+It seems Tuisosopa has an “in” to the Samoan football community, at least enough of one to get close to the players at charity events, and may have been fishing for a target. Whether his goal was to pull a scam like a fake charity, to pull a prank that got national attention, or to eventually help a Manti Te’o to get undue publicity and accolades . . . well, how the hell do I know?
+Reagan Mauia, a fullback on the Arizona Cardinals, is saying he was apparently a target for the same scam before Te’o.
+OK, now we’re getting into serious WTF territory.
+Deadspin appears to have cracked the case, found the phantom “girlfriend,” and the dude who swiped the real woman’s photographs.
+That’s what started this whole thing.
+Easy question: Manti, what was your “girlfriend’s” number? If he won’t answer that question, you know it was a big lie and he was part of it. If he can give you a number, it ought to be possible to trace the account holder.
+Exactly. There’s a 99% chance all his calls were from his cell. If he really has nothing to hide and was the innocent victim of a bizarre hoax, then it should be trivial to produce his phone records showing that he frequently spent lots of time talking to an identifiable person.
+“Slightly creepy personality cults based on dead fictitious women have no place here! This is Notre Dame!”
+10 Hail Lennays for you
+Please accept this internet in recognition of this comment.
+At this point, its a matter between Man and God. After the offending parties apologize to Oprah, she can tell us what to do next.
+I bet Manti Te’o didn’t see that quote becoming prophetic in quite this way…
+Leap of faith followed by plummet of reality.
+I know somebody who was grifted by his girlfriend faking having cancer (though this was a IRL relationship), so it’s entirely plausible to me that T’eo was the subject of an elaborate con… but it does seem he needs to start supplying some proof.
+There is also the theory that it was all to hide the fact that he is gay, which is really dumb but also plausible.
+The explanation I find least likely… the one that would make this guy a really terrible sociopathic person… is that T’eo conspired with several other people to invent a fake girlfriend to “kill” simply for the purpose of publicity.
+If he was just the victim of a con, why has he lied so much?
+How did he lie? As far as I’ve read and heard, he was as duped as anyone. Perhaps once he uncovered the scam, perpetrated by a close friend, he lied to avoid embarrassment, but I think that’s pretty understandable, unless you want to confess how you crapped your pants when you were just out of diapers.
+He either lied about meeting her in person or he’s lying now about it being entirely an online relationship, but there is substantial reporting in the Deadspin piece of him (or his father) saying that these two had met in person.
+It’s a little unclear whether he said he met her on several occasions or whether the Indiana paper reported that. And now with two NFL players claiming to have met her before Manti knew her, we are getting into serious strangeness
+That is the most bizarre part of the whole thing, from what I can see. Did they meet the girl whose picture was all over the place? If so, could she be in on it and have snowed the Deadspin guys?
+Because having an “internet girlfriend” is still the subject of a lot of scorn? I think telling sports reporters “Well, she’s my girlfriend, but we haven’t actually met in person yet…” would get him ridiculed.
+If he’s embarrassed, why talk about her at all?
+It’s not entirely clear how many of the lies are his. The story about meeting at Stanford apparently came from his father. It could be Manti lied to his Dad, could be his Dad embellished. Could be reporters embellished to make a better story. The South Bend Trib story reads like it was juiced up a bit.
+Still, I’d wouldn’t bet that he’s just a victim.
+I can’t imagine that either his father or the South Bend newspaper would simply make up stories that they met in person. Those have to have come from Te’o.
+(I guess his father might have, but only if he is in on the scam)
+There doesn’t seem to have been any financial payoff for whomever was behind the hoax, however, so it’s hard to see why someone would con Te’o.
+The imaginary medical issues could have been the grift. She doesn’t have health insurance! She needs experimental treatments that insurance doesn’t cover! However T’eo wasn’t rich yet, and he has not claimed that he sent her any money or anything.
+At least now we know what Shelly Miscavige has been up to.
+The meta-question is, why does ANYONE care?
+Well, I saw this train wreck once from a safe distance. And i usually slow down at wrecks on the highway, so that explains why I find it interesting.
+Well, I’m learning how thoroughly disconnected from college football I’ve become post-Sandusky. Was this thing really a big story back in September? I don’t remember hearing a thing about it.
+I thought everybody knew that a “Canadian girlfriend” is always made up. In Buffalo they are– come September a lot of guys go back to school with stories about this girl they met from St. Catharines.
+There are a few days left to put in a submission on the Electoral (Registration of Sentences Prisoners) Amendment Bill.
+The bill would allow prisoners serving sentence of imprisonment under three years to vote, essentially restoring the status quo ante that existed before the members bill advanced by then National MP Paul Quinn was passed by a slim majority
+For anyone interested in my views, they're published below. I've been sufficiently organised this time to publish them here a few days before submissions close, so if there are any errors, please let me know.
+The Justice Committee
+Electoral (Registration of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Bill
+Submission of Graeme Edgeler
+Overview
+My name is Graeme Edgeler. I am a Wellington barrister with a strong interest in electoral law. I thank the Committee for the opportunity to make a submission on the Electoral (Registration of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Bill (“the bill”). I look forward to the opportunity to speak to my submission.
+I support the overall intention of this bill. Indeed, I believe it should go further. I consider that being sentenced to imprisonment should not, by itself, remove the right to vote. I would welcome any further opening up of the right to vote, including, for example, raising the threshold, and encourage the Committee to recommend this to the House.
+I recognise that a policy decision has been made, so while I touch on the arguments for this, I also address some other matters of policy and drafting raised by the bill.
+My submission addresses the following matters:
+- Whether denial of electoral rights is ever justified as part of criminal punishment.
+- The need to avoid arbitrariness in the application of law, including around the timing of sentences, and the applicability of bail laws.
+- The inconsistency between the treatment of civil prisoners and service prisoners.
+- The proposed changes around the unpublished roll.
+Is Denial of Electoral Rights ever justified as part of a criminal punishment?
+I accept there are situations where it may be justifiable to temporarily remove an otherwise qualified voter’s right to vote. But I would limit this to circumstances of offending where that offending has a connection to the electoral process.
+One example would be that contained in section 100 of the Electoral Act, which provides for names to be included on the corrupt practices list, where a person is convicted of a corrupt practice, or found to have committed a corrupt practice on the trial of a (civil) election petition.
+An alternative to a system whereby imprisonment is the determining factor could include one where upon conviction, a judge has the power to order that someone be entered onto something like the corrupt practices list for a time. With appropriate criteria, this could present a justifiable limitation on the right to vote. This would also avoid some of the arbitrariness I will discuss later: under the current law, placement of the corrupt practices list is for three years, ensuring that everyone on it suffers the same penalty (missing one general election and one local election).
+A process of this nature could even apply to some people convicted but not sentenced to prison, where the nature of their conviction was such as to undermine the integrity of the electoral system (for example, offending related to an election, but charged as forgery, as we saw with the conviction of Daljit Singh, who was sentenced to community detention).
+Avoiding Arbitrariness
+People should not lose their rights on an arbitrary basis, and the law should not provide that two identical sets of offending have different consequences based on matters beyond any person’s control.
+This can occur under the law as it stands. And while the bill reduced the possibility of arbitrariness, unfortunately it will not eliminate it.
+Home detention
+One anomaly the bill will fix is the distinction between short term prison sentences and home detention. A sentence of home detention is only available if a convicted person’s offending was so serious that they would have been sentenced to imprisonment: if the sentence is short enough, and the aims of sentencing can still be met by home detention, it can be imposed.
+However, for some convicted people, lacking in financial means, or living in precarious or overcrowded accommodation can mean they are effectively ineligible for home detention, and may be sentenced to imprisonment where a more wealthy person would receive home detention.
+The three-year rule removes this anomaly, because home detention is only available for sentences of two years or less.
+Arbitrariness in Sentencing Dates
+Under the Electoral Act, the determinant of whether a convicted person is eligible to vote is whether they are in prison under a sentence of imprisonment. This can mean that a person sentenced to six years imprisonment, and paroled after serving 40% of their sentence may never actually lose the right to vote in a general election, if their sentence is timed right, but a person sentenced to six months in prison, serving only three months, may lose the right to vote if the sentence is imposed shortly before an election.
+The determinant of this timing may not even by the timing of the offending. Two near identical offences committed at the same time might have different outcomes depending on where they occur in the country, which could mean the local policing priorities or resourcing result in quicker charging, or waiting times at different courts may result in different trial and sentencing dates.
+Changing the rule to require a three-year sentence does reduce the likelihood for inequity, but it does not eliminate it.
+Arbitrariness in Application of Bail Laws
+One consequence of the law, diminished but not removed by the bill, is the possibility that it may treat more hardened offenders less severely.
+Appropriately, both the current law and this amendment permit remand prisoners to vote. This means that a person who serves a substantial period of their sentence in pre-sentence remand spends less time ineligible to vote than a person who does not.
+This could even apply with two co-offenders, charged with the same crime, one denied bail throughout the court processes (perhaps because of a more extensive criminal history), the other bailed early in the process. After 18 months awaiting trial, both are convicted and receive the same sentence: 4 years’ imprisonment. Two people convicted of the offending, and receiving the same sentence, but one serves the entire non-parole period of their sentence eligible to vote, the other serves it while ineligible to vote.
+Again, while the bill will reduce the incidence of this arbitrariness, it does not eliminate it.
+Service Prisoners
+These types of arbitrariness are a consequence of the policy decision taken under both the current law, and as evidenced in the bill, however there are other apparently arbitrary distinctions that the law and bill make, which could be addressed without altering the fundamental policy choices involved.
+The Armed Forces Discipline Act provides for different sentences than the civilian courts, including a sentence of detention, and a more serious sentence of imprisonment. The effect of the current law, and the bill as drafted is that a service detainee (that is a person convicted at court martial and sentenced to a sentence of detention) retains the right to vote while serving their sentence. This is appropriate.
+However, the effect of both the current law and of the bill is that a service prisoner (that is a person convicted at court martial and sentenced to a sentence of imprisonment) is entitled to vote, even after conviction. However if a service prisoner is transferred from a service prison to a civilian prison, they would lose the right to vote (a service detainee transferred to a civilian prison would retain the right to vote).
+There are several aspects to this that are arbitrary. While there are service specific offences, courts martial can also be held in respect of ordinary civil offences. A person’s entitlement to vote after being convicted and sentenced to imprisonment should not turn on whether the conviction was in a military court or a civil one. It especially should not turn on the decision of a military authority to move a prisoner from a service prison to a civil prison or back. Under both the current law, and the amendment, it does.
+Unpublished Names
+Clause 8 of the bill provides for an automatic right for prisoners eligible to vote, while in prison, and all prisoners upon release, to be placed on the unpublished roll if they wish.
+This not a right accorded to non-prisoners. A person must ordinarily make an application to the Electoral Commission, and must satisfy the Commission that their being placed on the unpublished roll is necessary.
+While I am of the opinion that being sentenced to imprisonment should not result in a person having fewer electoral rights than other citizens, I cannot accept that it should result in the prisoner having more electoral rights.
+Prisoners who have reason to think that the inclusion of their names on the published electoral roll would be prejudicial to the personal safety of themselves or others should have to meet the same requirements as any other person.
+If there is a particular need, then, at most, the amended section 115(4) could provide for an additional type of document that might be used to satisfy the test (for example, allowing a statutory declaration from a prison employee/case officer/social worker, etc, in the same manner as paragraph (c) currently provides for police officers.
+It may be that the Committee thinks that the current requirements are too stringent. If that is so, they should be relaxed for everyone.
+Conclusion
+I would prefer that this bill went further than it does. While it removes some of the inequities present under the current law, it does not remove all of them:
+- The Committee should consider whether there are other, less restrictive means of achieving the bill’s aim or ensuring that certain categories of prisoner should not be able to vote, while avoiding the anomalies the bill maintains.
+- The Committee should consider whether the bill should treat service prisoners in the same way as civil prisoners, in particular, it should reconsider the distinction the Electoral Act and Corrections Act make based on where a service prisoner is directed to serve a sentence of imprisonment.
+- If there are changes to the requirements for going on the unpublished roll, these should apply equally to prisoners and non-prisoners.
+I look forward to appearing before the Committee in support of my submission.
+Graeme Edgeler
+Andrew Geddis,
+Hi Graeme,
+Your headings "Arbitrariness in sentencing dates" and "Home detention" are mixed up.
+Otherwise, it's great. I haven't written anything yet. Can I join yours?
+Dunedin • Since Nov 2007 • 206 posts Report
+Graeme Edgeler, in reply to
+Web Twitter
+Happily that, and the erstwhile error in the headline are artefacts of the copy paste process, and not errors in the submission itself.
+Yes.
+Wellington, New Zealand • Since Nov 2006 • 3207 posts Report
+Hilary Stace,
+Thanks for doing this, Graeme.
+Wgtn • Since Jun 2008 • 3218 posts Report
+Venetia King,
+Thanks for sharing this. One question - what threshold are you referring to in your overview, where you state "I would welcome any further opening up of the right to vote, including, for example, raising the threshold"?
+Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 117 posts Report
+Graeme Edgeler,
+Web Twitter
+If they are going to ban some prisoners from voting, maybe those serving 5 years, or with non-parole periods of three years?
+Wellington, New Zealand • Since Nov 2006 • 3207 posts Report
+Venetia King,.
+Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 117 posts Report
+20th November 2009
+Editors, The Maccabees, Wintersleep
+It’s not so long ago that I discovered EDITORS for myself, but I quickly feel in love with their way of doing things and the extraordinary voice of Tom Smith, so it was absolutely clear to me that I wanted to attend one of the shows, and Bielefeld would be the place. What a debut.
+Wintersleep
+Canadian outfit WINTERSLEEP has formed in 2001. 2003 would see the release of their self-titled debut album on Dependent Music. Two years later, after the release of the band’s sophomore, they would spent a long time touring Canada, the US and Europe before returning to their native. It didn’t take long for them then to start working on their third strike already, the album that is known now as ‘Welcome to the Nightsky’. The record has received overwhelming critical acclaim. Along with JOEL PLASKETT, WINTERSLEEP was selected as one of the opening acts for PAUL MCCARTNEY's concert at Halifax Common on 11th July. Currently, they’re working on their fourth, yet untitled album. WINTERSLEEP is Paul Murphy (guitar, vocals), Mike Bigelow (bass guitar), Tim D'Eon (guitar, keyboards) Jon Samuel (keyboards, backing vocals, guitar) and Loel Campbell (drums). /
+Music & Performance
+I had no idea what was coming up now with WINTERSLEEP. The name just didn’t cross my path as of yet and then such a surprise. The five-piece took positions and started right away with a strike for the legs with the upbeat ‘Archaeologists’ and a melancholic flavour. Next one threw a little progressiveness into the ring as well with one a little uncommon time signature and complex manner in contrast to Paul Murphy’s brittle, bell-like vocals. He always was sunken deep into the songs, it seemed. No matter if he was rocking along, kicking down a synth in the course of it or standing behind the microphone. Following the gospel-like ‘Weighty Ghost’ was the wry ‘Murderer’ starting out as instrumental jam session, which the band had an awesome fun to perform, developing into an anthemic cut before ‘Search Party’ struck calmer, ethereal tones and raised plaintive sound walls. A song, supposedly 10 minutes long and full of arpeggios and vital trickery ended the set. The audience, even if they had come for the EDITORS alone, rewarded the band with warm applause to every song. It’s always an ungrateful job to be the opener but WINTERSLEEP mastered it very well.
+Rating
+Music: 8
+Performance: 8
+Sound: 7
+Light: 7
+Total: 7.7 / 10
+The Maccabees
+THE MACCABEES came to life in 2004and one year later already released their first single, which received some airplay on a well-known British radio station, but didn’t gain much attention. That first came with the second single ‘Latchmere’ and eventually led to them signing a record deal and releasing their debut ‘Colour It’ in 2007. Following this were a tour through the US with BLOC PARTY and one through the UK. ‘Wall of Arms’, their second and current album, hit shelves in this year’s May to positive reviews from the press and fans. THE MACCABEES are Orlando Weeks (vocals & guitar), Hugo White (guitar), Felix White (backing vocals & guitar), Rupert Jarvis (bass) and Sam Doyle (drums). /
+Music & Performance
+Evening’s next act came out of the EDITORS’ neighbourhood so to say. Unlike their Canadian tour mates, they set on a more earthly, powerful and very rhythm driven style of indie rock that had no other intention than getting everyone out of their personal hibernation in no time. The rattling ‘No Kind Words’ was the choice for opening the set and you could see and feel the band’s dedication, how they bowed to the rhythmic arrays fired towards them and the audience by Sam Doyle. Another characteristic of their music is the shimmering, ringing, delicately melodic yet powerful guitar work, which came to show best during the title track of their newest album ‘Wall of Arms’ or ‘Young Lions’, a song they dedicated to the EDITORS, switching between those two states over and over again.
+Not just a few people around got infected by the music and enjoyed themselves to the chords, and more than once an applause could be heard after a song had ended. A band in top form and an entertaining performance!
+Setlist
+01. No kind Words
+02. One Hand holding
+03. Wall of Arms
+04. Dinosaurs
+05. Can you give it
+06. Young Lions
+07. Because
+08. William Powers
+09. Love you better
+Rating
+Music: 6.5
+Performance: 8
+Sound: 7
+Light: 7
+Total: 7.1 / 10
+Editors
+EDITORS are a studied four-piece hailing from England’s agrarian periphery. The band’ s name came bout upon signing their first label deal with Kitchenwave Records in October 2004 after operating under the moniker of SNOWFIELD. The limited debut single ‘Bullets’ saw the light of day in January 2005 and sold out on the day of release. The full-length ‘The Back Room’ followed summer of the same year, went platinum eventually and also became an incredible critical success. The band released their second album ‘An End Has A Start’ in June 2007. The album went straight to #1 of the UK album’s chart. After the album’s release, the band played a couple big festivals such as Glastonbury and Pukkelpop, as well as their first tour dates in Australia and New Zealand. Many other dates covering the US, Canada and Europe would follow. The third album ‘In This Light and on this Evening’, released in October, sees the band exploring a much more synthetic and rawer sound than on their previous releases. EDITORS are Tom Smith (vocals, guitar), Chris Urbanowicz (guitar), Russell Leetch (bass) and Ed Lay (drums). /
+Music & Performance
+The room got packed during the time the changeover went down and you had to be lucky and fast to still find a place with a clear view on stage. As soon as the shapes of the band members and especially of Tom Smith took shape on stage, the audience was all riled up for the show and cheered loudly after the distinctive synth line of ‘In This Light and on this Evening’ opened the show. Tom sat down at the piano and sonorously intonated the lines of the soundtrack-like piece: That was before he jumped up like following an inner urge, grabbing the guitar and racing over the stage to the distorted guitar and drum inferno. A hymn followed right up with the second album’s title track ‘An End Has A Start’, seeing the audience sharing the vocal duties with Tom and creating an amazing atmosphere. ‘Bullets’, going back in time to the first album, would follow suit until another song from the new album came up with ‘You don’t know Love’.
+At first it seemed there’s been no change compared to the studio version, but halfway through the song with the distinctive guitar motive emerging, acoustic drums were added, giving it a rather organic note. ‘Bones’ and ‘The Racing Rats’ followed, the latter one with Tom playing the piano instead of moving much as he used to with the previous tunes. ‘The Boxer’ wouldn’t give him a chance to do that either, but instead he’d deliver awe-inspiring vocals to the track, equipped with fresh synth drum sounds and additional acoustic counterpart. Stars were sparkling in the background all the time through the song, projected on a glass wall from behind the stage. Right in time for ‘Blood’, the stage got drenched in red lights. The entire band got into action just like the audience which made it a rousing experience. Later, Tom showed his talent of working with mimics and gestures on the extroverted ‘Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool’, which has an awesome groove and catchy chorus by the way.
+The introverted counterpart was ‘Fall’, a song where you automatically focus on taking in the mood and atmosphere surrounding that gem. Every show must have an end; this one’s was called ‘Bricks & Mortar’. That song was made for playing live and the band, as well as audience had visibly fun with it. Of course it was only the end of the main set, since an encore followed barely a minute later with ‘Walk the Fleet Road’ for starters, culminating in a stunning performance of ‘Papillion’. That was me writing about my first EDITORS concert and it surely won’t be the last. Simply great!
+Setlist
+01. In this Light and on this Evening
+02. An End has a Start
+03. Bullets
+04. You Don’t Know Love
+05. Bones
+06. The Racing Rats
+07. The Boxer
+08. Blood
+09. Escape the Nest
+10. Like Treasure
+11. The Big Exit
+12. Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool
+13. Fall
+14. You Are Fading
+15. Smokers outside the Hospital Doors
+16. Bricks & Mortar
+---
+17. Walk the Fleet Road
+18. Munich
+19. Papillion
+20. Fingers in the Factories
+Rating
+Music: 9
+Performance: 9
+Sound: 8
+Light: 9
+Total: 8.9 / 10
+All pictures by Daniela Vorndran ( / /)
+{jos_sb_discuss:17}
+ held our 2014 Chapter Meeting via webinar on 5 Dec 14. We
+enjoyed an excellent CME lecture by COL(Ret) Glenn
+Wortmann, FACP entitled "2014 Updates in Infectious
+Disease. " COL Jeanne Tofferi, FACP followed
+this with an update on Army General Internal Medicine. Next, we
+heard 5 excellent research presentations from the residents.
+LTC Ramey Wilson, FACP, Chair of the Awards
+Committee, then revealed this years' award winners (detailed
+below). Finally, we enjoyed the annual Doctor's Dilemma competition
+between the residency programs, led by CPT(P) Rohul
+Amin.
+I am very grateful for the efforts of many in our chapter to
+make this meeting a success. First and foremost, I would like to
+thank MAJ David Callender, FACP, the meeting
+leader. He ran the meeting smoothly and professionally-he even made
+arrangements so that deployed members, like me, could hear the
+meeting from around the world. I listened in from Afghanistan! I'd
+also like to recognize MAJ Joshua Mitchell, FACP,
+for leading the resident research and clinical vignette
+competitions, LTC Wilson and CPT(P)
+Amin for their contributions as above, COL(Ret)
+Wortmann and COL Tofferi for their talks,
+the AV staff at WRNMMC for their excellent support, and all the
+chief residents and judges for their time and efforts.
+We awarded four chapter awards, two resident awards, and one
+resident team award.
+This award is designed to honor a member, fellow, or master of
+the Army Chapter of the ACP who has demonstrated excellence in the
+design, performance, and publication of peer reviewed research
+which exemplifies the characteristics displayed by COL
+William Crosby MC (Retired). The recipient should be
+recognized in both the military and civilian academic community as
+having made significant contributions to the scientific literature.
+LTC Ellis, of the Uniformed Service University
+(USU), published 28 peer-reviewed articles, has received over
+$6,000,000 in research grants, and is an internationally recognized
+expert in MRSA (for all awardees, I have summarized their
+accomplishments briefly, not comprehensively).
+COL William F. Kelly. COL Kelly, also of USU, demonstrated this by winning
+multiple teaching awards, including the 2014 William P. Clements
+award (given by the graduating USU class to the most outstanding
+uniformed faculty educator), the 2014 Outstanding Module Director
+Award at USU, and a distinguished service award from the American
+College of Chest Physicians for his many years of teaching at their
+meetings.
+In addition to running the meeting, MAJ David Callender,
+FACP, won the COL Robert H. Moser Award
+This award Callender maintains a busy
+practice as a WRNMMC hospitalist. Additionally, he serves as an
+Associate Transitional Year Program Director, WRNMMC, is a member
+of numerous committees at WRNMMC, and in particular has mentored
+numerous residents' quality improvement projects that directly
+improved WRNMMC's system of care.
+MAJ Charles D. Magee, FACP, won the 2014 Excellence in
+Operational Medicine Award
+This award is designed to honor a member of the ACP in the ranks
+of CPT through COL who has demonstrated dedicated care of patients,
+outstanding leadership and novel innovation in an Operational
+Medicine environment. MAJ Magee, also of USU,
+deployed as the Battalion Surgeon for the 1-504 PIR, 1BCT, 82nd ABN
+Division. The unit deployed to Afghanistan in 2014 in support of
+Operation Enduring Freedom. He supervised the fastest walking blood
+bank in the area of operation, safely delivering over 40 units of
+whole blood, always in less than 7 minutes. While deployed, he also
+undertook a performance improvement project to bring attention to
+and eliminate the use of harmful supplements in deployed
+Paratroopers.
+In the resident competitions, CPT Victoria
+Sullivan of Madigan Army Medical Center won the research
+podium competition with her presentation entitled "Ketamine by
+Continuous Infusion for Sedation in Septic Shock". CPT
+Michael McMahon of Walter Reed National Military Medical
+Center won the clinical vignette competition with his case entitled
+"A Dab of Danger: A Case of Severe Respiratory Failure
+Following Inhalation of Butane Hash Oil".
+Finally, we had the annual Doctor's Dilemma competition. To meet
+the teams and see the rules, click
+here Walter Reed took first place in a hard fought competition.
+Team members CPT Adam Barelski, CPT Jack Hutter,
+and CPT Michael McMahon, along with CPT
+Sullivan from her research podium win, will represent the
+Army Chapter at the National
+ACP meeting in Boston, MA from 30 Apr - 2 May 15.
+Congratulations to these residents and their mentors for their
+excellent performance!
+Unfortunately, the nature of the Webinar does not permit the
+many clinical vignette posters and presentations that we enjoy at
+the in-person meetings. The next best thing we could do was to post
+them. All resident submissions (and one medical student, 2LT Cyrus
+Askin) that met the judges' minimum quality score can be found
+here. I hope you can take the
+time to review some of these timely and fascinating cases. For
+instance, Dr. Wortmann's lecture included a section about
+Chikungunya. You can read about a case of this disease, described
+by CPT William J. Wadzinski of SAUSHEC, on page
+41. To further pique your interest, there are TWO cases about
+kissing!
+Top
+A few months ago, after I sent out a list of previous chapter
+award winners, one veteran ACP member pointed out that the list was
+missing an award that he had won. Of course, it's bad form to leave
+out anyone who won an award, but it's particularly bad when that
+person is a valued mentor and former boss.
+Being the thorough person that I am, I thought if there is one
+error, there's probably more. So we went through old records and
+newsletters to find the truth. The documentation for most winners
+was easy to find. For others, we only have a few details.
+To get an accurate, complete list, I have decided to "crowd
+source" the problem. If you have ever won an ACP Chapter
+award, please review the site and ensure that it is listed
+correctly. We particularly need clarification of resident awards
+prior to 2003. Please e-mail me with corrections: kent.dezee@yahoo.com
+Even if you have never won an ACP Chapter award, perusing the
+list might be fun. You may find one of your leaders/mentors has not
+won an award, but they are clearly deserving of one. You may also
+make some interesting connections. For instance, three of the
+current IM residency program directors won the Moser Award before
+they became PDs! It's not too early to think about who should be
+the next Moser Award winner.
+We are once again hopeful for a return to an in-person meeting
+this year. We are working diligently on this and will update you in
+the next newsletter.
+Congratulations to all the new
+fellows! I was privileged to present Dr. Brian
+Haney's FACP certificate personally, since I replaced him
+in Afghanistan.
+Congratulations to Dr. Michael Morris and
+Dr. Harry E. Davis II for their election
+Mastership in the ACP!. Only 56
+physicians were elected this year. The Army Chapter is privileged
+to have a current member, Dr. Michael Morris, and a former member,
+Dr. Harry E. Davis II elected to MACP.
+After reading the nomination letter by Dr. Daniel F.
+Battafarno, MACP, it's easy to see why Dr. Michael
+Morris, MACP was elected to Mastership. Dr. Morris
+graduated from Eastern Virginia Medical School in 1987, and then
+completed his internal medicine residency and pulmonary/critical
+care fellowship at Brooke Army Medical Center. He served in many
+executive capacities in the U.S. Army Medical Corps to include
+Assistant Chief of Clinical Investigation, Director of Graduate
+Medical Education (GME), and Associate Dean for the San Antonio
+Uniformed Services Health Education Consortium (SAUSHEC). After
+retiring from the military with 21 years of service, he was
+recruited to remain at BAMC and currently serves as Associate
+Program Director for Internal Medicine, Acting Chair of the
+Institutional Review Board, and Professor of Medicine of the
+Uniformed Services University. Even with these extensive
+responsibilities, he has published 70 manuscripts and 11 book
+chapters. All the more impressively, he has mentored 87 trainee
+research presentations. He has actively supported both the Army and
+Southwest Texas ACP meetings in every possible position (judge,
+etc.) over the past 15 years. He deployed with the First Infantry
+Division to Iraq in Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, earning
+the Bronze Star Medal and the Combat Medical Badge. Finally, he has
+participated in 6 medical missions to Mexico, Venezuela, and El
+Salvador. As Dr. Battafarano summarized in his nomination letter,
+Dr. Morris has had a phenomenal impact on medicine as a Soldier,
+clinician, researcher, and Professor of Medicine, and his
+commitment to internal medicine, community medicine, and the ACP is
+extraordinary.
+Dr. Harry E. Davis II is a retired Army General
+Internist and currently member of the Texas Chapter of the ACP.
+I'll defer to my Texas Governor counterpart to relay his impressive
+story. In brief, Dr. Davis had a long and distinguished military
+career, starting as a resident at Letterman Army Medical Center,
+San Francisco, CA. He followed this with assignments in Pusan,
+Korea; MAMC; the Office of the Surgeon General; Ft. Riley, Kansas
+(as the Division Surgeon, 1st Infantry Division); Command and
+General Staff College (class president); Bremerhaven, Germany
+(Hospital Commander), and finally WBAMC (several roles, including
+Chief of Medicine). He continues to collaborate with WBAMC as he
+practices at Texas Tech University Medicine Sciences Center, El
+Paso, Texas. Both Dr. Zacher, our former Governor, and myself had
+the privilege of working with him when we were program directors at
+WBAMC.
+Late breaking news: I wrote the section below last month. As
+many of you have hopefully heard, the ABIM, as a direct result of
+excellent advocacy by the ACP, has made some changes to the
+MOC process In particular, the practice assessment criteria,
+which I describe below, is not a requirement for the next two
+years. However, the module I describe below is a useful activity
+that earns 20 MOC points.
+For staff physicians (residents, your day is coming), there are
+many questions about the ABIM's Maintenance of Certification (MOC)
+process. The ACP is here to help. Don't know where to start? Click
+here.
+Need to earn points? Use your
+ACP benefits
+So, getting back to the title of this section, how do you make
+something count three times? Just supervise residents or fellows
+seeing patients. The first time it counts is by supervising patient
+care, as attending physicians in training programs are required to
+do. The second time it counts is by doing Mini-CEXs for the
+training program. Many, if not all, IM programs require trainees to
+complete a certain number of Mini-CEXs per year. You would be
+helping the trainees and programs meet this requirement. The third
+time it counts is by using these same Mini-CEX experiences to count
+for the MOC.
+Here's how it works. Assuming you have registered for the MOC,
+go to and click the "Physician Login" in the
+upper right hand corner. After you login, you will be taken to your
+home page on the ABIM site. Next, click "Choose a Practice
+Assessment Activity" in the bottom center of the page. A list of
+available options will appear. Select the "Clinical Supervision
+PM". From there, the module will guide you. It is fairly
+straightforward. You need to do at least 10 mini-CEXs, document
+them on the ABIM website, and do a reflection activity at the
+end.
+Here's how I accomplished the Mini-CEXs. At the beginning of
+clinic, I would go to the residents and tell them "I am doing some
+mini-CEXs today. I'm going to watch you do something. What would
+you like it to be?" They'd review their patient list and choose
+something, such as history taking, physical examination, or
+counseling. Then I would observe them as planned. Immediately after
+the observation, I would record three behaviors (good and bad) that
+related to their goal for the mini-CEX. As soon as possible after
+the encounter was complete (by the end of the day at the latest),
+we'd have a 5-10 minute feedback session, based on my observations.
+Then, as time permitted in between supervising other patients, I
+would log on to the ABIM website and enter the required data, which
+took about 5 minutes. Before I would hit send, I would open another
+window and cut and paste essentially the same data into TAMC's
+Mini-CEX program, which took about 2 minutes. The ABIM also
+requires that you enter chart data into their site for each
+mini-CEX, which takes approximately another 5 minutes.
+After I completed 10 Mini-CEX's, I moved onto the reflection
+phase. The program allows (forces) you to review a summary of your
+data. Did I get anything out of this besides 20 MOC points?
+Actually, yes. I found that 4 of the 10 residents I supervised made
+physical examination errors. I knew that residents make physical
+examination errors (which is why I check the important stuff), but
+this project caused me to change my teaching. Whenever appropriate,
+I will now have the resident demonstrate the physical examination
+findings to me, rather than me verifying/demonstrating the physical
+examination. That way, I can simultaneously evaluate their skills
+and verify the physical exam.
+Do you have some MOC tips, particularly as they apply to
+military practice? Please e-mail me so that I can share with the
+chapter. I'm sure many from our chapter would greatly appreciate an
+easy, productive way to accomplish this requirement.
+Stay safe everyone and thanks for your service to our
+Nation.
+LTC Kent J. DeZee, MD MPH FACP
+U.S. Army ACP Chapter Governor
+In MN, Massive Police Raids On Suspected Protestors 961. (Score:5, Insightful)
+FUCK THE POLICE!
+Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Informative)
+If only it were the police; it looks like the FBI may be involved as well [salon.com]
+For the sake of the country, the people responsible for these raids must be fired (and very possibly sent to prison) for this. This is utterly unacceptable.
+Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Insightful)
+For the sake of the country, the people responsible for these raids must be fired (and very possibly sent to prison) for this
+If you think that will actually happen, can I have some of what you are smoking?
+Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
+Don't give him any, he's a mole!
+Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Insightful)
+Re:Oblig. (Score:4, Insightful).
+Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Insightful)
+Denver police went to a house that had been rented by the protest group Unconventional Denver as a convergence center, and despite seeing no illegal activity, two protesters were arrested, with one reportedly slammed on his head during the arrest.
+Sorry no comparison.
+Re:Oblig. (Score:4, Insightful)
+So what? They are involved in all of it, not just at the RNC. They messed with people at the DNC, too, documented here [infoshop.org], and here [recreate68.com], and here [indybay.org].
+The point being that they do this everywhere (with the FBI and other armed bureaucracies involved). So it's the same thing they always do. They aren't doing anything "special" for the RNC.
+Re:Oblig. (Score:4, Insightful)
+I really hate to break it to you but yes the state or your nation is generally bound to the competence or incompetence of your current administration. When crap like this occurs and they say nothing, then they are complicit. Of course not to throw all the blame upon the republican administration, although as the 'Administration' it is largely their responsibility but a share would also have to go to the US congress and Senate for failure to investigate these and similar abuses of justice.
+The catch with it all in the US system, is most of the egregious behaviour falls to the State Governor to ensure the principles of law and justice are adhered to within the state excluding of course the political involvement of the FBI which is of course a federal abuse.
+Of course your post has a clear political bias which manages to equate questionable arrests at public venues when people are attempting to express the political opinions, to pre-emptive raids in suburban neighbourhoods, complete with the blatant theft of computers and personal property (when the warrant is so clearly bull shit it is theft) added, to that the extreme danger of no knock, guns drawn warrants with trigger happy law enforcement with emphasis on force, represents to those communities and especially the victims of those raids (in this case they were definitely the victims and the police where clearly displaying criminal behaviour).
+So if Republican administrations says nothing about it and gives it the tacit approval, then, yes, they are quite content for the authorities to stomp all over the people's rights. By the same token if the Democrats say nothing or fail to initiate an investigation of these abusive in the proper venue, then they can be painted with the same brush and, to bring it all home, if the typical US citizens fails to do something about it, then you can bloody well expect at lot worse to happen, good luck.
+Re:MN governor (Score:5, Insightful)
+Your making a mountain out of a mole hill just because coincidence supports your opposition.
+I know it is easy and fun to do but your ignoring a lot of things like this isn't the first time something like this has happened. It has happened under Bush, Clinton, and the three presidents before him. It was increased after Reagan was shot and this type of activity was seen as a real threat. When a cop car was torched in California, they became a lot more proactive then reactive. Taking ancillary information and attempting to pursue a point of grand conspiracy is often what makes conspiracy nuts look like the NUT case that lends their name.
+The bottom line is that cops-officials were able to infiltrate these groups and after learning of intended wrong doing, they waited until they started putting plans together and swooped in. It doesn't really matter who the part in power it or who the governor is at this point. Someone's right to protest does not include the ability to disrupt an event or cause physical damage to anyone or their property. "or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." does not infer damaging someone's property or attempting to take their free speech away. Something I have never understood is when people claim the speech is such a protected point that they have the right to stop others from using it. The constitution clearly says that no rights inferred or protected by the constitution shall be used to deny others of their rights of the same. But somehow, these groups manage to think their right to free speech means they have a right to stop someone else from their speech and when they are stopped in their tracks, they have people like you buffaloed into thinking some grievous infringement has occurred. It's simply amazing.
+Re:Oblig. (Score:4, Insightful)
+Right. Instead of blaming the Republicans, these widespread police state tactics should be blamed on whatever fuckwit party is currently running the oountry.
+Republican bashing??? It's ILLEGAL!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
+What the hell is wrong with you?
+Re:Republican bashing??? It's ILLEGAL!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
+You're a dumbass. The OP clearly said he thought it was wrong regardless of who was doing it.
+He was merely pointing out that somebody is pushing an agenda. The story submitter could have just as easily linked to *both* stories about illegal arrests before both conventions. Instead, they linked to the single story and spun it as "look what Republicans are doing."
+Re:Republican bashing??? It's ILLEGAL!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
+Anyone who RTFA would see the author's observation."
+So if the submitter had an agenda to conceal that abuses happened in Denver, he did a crappy job of it.
+However, the Denver abuses seem to have been mostly garden-variety police thuggery; these Minnesota raids involved the FBI [salon.com] and included months-long espionage and infiltration. One of the groups specifically targeted is "I-Witness Video", a group that did a great job capturing exposing thuggery and perjury by police during the 2004 Republican convention.
+I have some news for you. (Score:5, Interesting)
+Not to mention the attitude of the FBI. The FBI, after all, has demonstrably adopted the attitude of the governing administration over the last 8 years. It is to be expected that if the FBI overreact, it will be in regard to the Republican convention, not the Democratic. Thus, bias is built into the system by the very people who complain about the "offenses".
+Second, if you really, honestly, wonder why Republicans have been bashed so much lately, maybe you should consider the fact that a great many (a majority, in fact) of the American people are PISSED OFF at the Republican Party over the outrageous botch job they have made of our government over that same 8 years.
+Do not misunderstand me! I am NOT a Democrat! But any person who pretends to possess some objectivity about the matter MUST admit that the Republicans have gone a very long way to make a hash out of what used to honestly be a perfectly decent democratic republic form of government. They have botched literally everything: foreign policy; domestic social policy; privacy; "the war on terrorism" (what a joke); "the war on drugs" -- an even bigger joke; fiscal policy; education; the economy; taxes; and the personal freedoms of the citizens of this country. Not ONE of those areas is better off today than it was when Bush took office. Not one. And during most of those 8 years they were IN CONTROL over not only the white house but Congress as well.
+THERE IS NO EXCUSE. There is nobody to blame. The Republicans have f*cked things up so badly that I despair of things returning to normal within my lifetime.
+Once again: I am not a Democrat, and I do NOT trust Democrats to fix everything. But that has NO bearing on whether the Republicans messed things up. They did. Badly, and big time.
+The argument that things have been worse at other times in our history won't wash. All of those things were BETTER, 8 years ago. Period. And the Republicans literally have nobody to blame.
+So before you go accusing people of discriminating or acting preferentially against Republicans, you should ask yourself: "Do they have legitimate REASONS for doing what they do?"
+You might find, if you are honest with yourself, that the answer is "yes".
+Re:I have some news for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
+One more time: MOST of these last 8 years, the Republicans were in charge of both the White House and Congress. Trying to say that the Democrats are to blame "too" just doesn't hold water. THEY had the controls; it does not do any good to try to blame someone else.
+And despite "rebate" checks, if you are an average American your taxes went UP during this Republican administration, not down.
+"Pesonal citizen freedoms have not changed." ??? How do you try to justify this outrageous claim??? I am not the one smoking crack here, dude. It's easy enough to say (as you do more than once) that someone else does not have a clue, but you are supplying no clues of your own. In fact I really don't think it is me who is demonstrating lack of clues here. Please come back and chime in some day, AFTER you have done your research.
+Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Informative)
+For the record, when I submitted this I hadn't gone more than a few paragraphs into the articles, and hadn't realized it was for a Republican event. This wasn't submitted for any sort of bashing, more of an "oh my god people need to know about this" submission.
+Nothing is wrong with protesting an event. (Score:5, Insightful)
+The problem comes in where protesters make a disruption at the event (usually during the middle of a speech). This seems to be an effort to stop that kind of activity.
+Where is there any evidence anything illegal was planned? Or is this going to be an "oops, we made a mistake" after the convention is over?
+Falcon
+Re:Nothing is wrong with protesting an event. (Score:4, Insightful)
+From TFA: [startribune.com]
+I'm not saying it's right to raid their houses and arrest them just for having it, but I'm having a hard time coming up with legal ways to protest using buckets of urine and equipment for disabling buses.
+Weird....there are TWO FA's.. (Score:5, Informative)
+I was going to accuse you of inaccurate quoting, but now I find (while writing my comment) that there are TWO articles: the one you link to and the one the summary links to, which I checked first. In the article I read first I found this:
+Quote
+The alleged urine[...].
+End quote
+I haven't seen anything about coltraps or equipment for disabling buses in that one either. All I found was that
+Quote
+[The sheriff] displayed a number of the confiscated items: a gun, throwing knives, a bow and arrows, flammable liquids, paint, slingshots, rocks and buckets of urine.
+End Quote
+I have not enough time to read all of the article you link to (gotta go to work
+:-( ), but I find this interesting...
+To be clear: I quoted from the linked article.
+The weird thing is that the article you link to is on first sight
+Re:Weird....there are TWO FA's.. (Score:5, Insightful)
+Gun - Legal (and quite normal) if you have the papers
+Knife - Legal (in a private residence)
+Bow and arrows - Legal
+Flammable liquids - Legal
+Paint - Legal
+Slingshots - Legal
+Rocks - legal
+Buckets of Urine - Legal (odd, but Legal)
+So they had this stuff in a private residence, all of it legal, and
+....
+Re:Nothing is wrong with protesting an event. (Score:5, Informative)
+From TFA [startribune.com]:
+Deputies seized a variety of items that they believed were tools of civil disobedience: a gas mask, bolt cutters, axes, slingshots, homemade "caltrops" for disabling buses, even buckets of urine.
+From another article by the same newspaper, the Star-Tribune [startribune.com]:
+."
+As for the rest you list, when were they made illegal?
+I'm not saying it's right to raid their houses and arrest them just for having it, but I'm having a hard time coming up with legal ways to protest using buckets of urine and equipment for disabling buses.
+One bucket of urine in an illegally occupied apartment, the occupant of which had nothing to do with the protest group. And again, when was the other stuff made illegal?
+Falcon
+Re:Nothing is wrong with protesting an event. (Score:4, Interesting)
+Molotov cocktails are even more common than most of the other items on the list.
+I have all the ingredients in the back seat of my car right now. A few empty glass bottles (used to contain iced coffee), two pints of motor oil (gee, why would anyone carry *that* in their car?), and a couple of old T-shirts that have been sitting in the back seat for a month or two because I never get around to bringing them back inside when I'm home.
+According to the videos that have been posted, the search warrants included such things as "cloth, flammable liquids, glass bottles" and "metal, plastic, or cardboard boxes."
+The hard part would be to find a house in America that doesn't have all of those in it.
+Re:Oblig. (Score:4, Insightful)
+These people were sick fucks. Their "tools of civil disobedience" were buckets of urine, flammable liquids, knives, etc. If you have any sympathy for them you are a sick fuck too.
+So can we assume that you yourself are not allowed to possess flammable liquids, knives, or urine?
+If you were allowed to light a BBQ that uses charcoal (not one of those yuppie gas grills), you'd know that it's mostly done with a flammable liquid.
+They had duct tape, too! Auto tires! Chicken wire! A slingshot! Maps! All seized by the vigilant Fearless Fosdicks. Sheer criminal masterminds, obviously. (Good thing it wasn't my house, because I've got all of those things and firearms, too!)
+Re:Rock bottom (Score:4, Interesting)
+Your comment made me laugh, it really did. Go look at the civil liberties raped over and over by both sides during the American Civil War or during the First World War in the US, then compare/contrast to the current "erosion" of civil liberties.
+What has gone on for the last eight years is nothing compared to what happened in the past. How many languages have been outlawed in the last 8 years? None, go back to the teens, the government did the equivalent of making Spanish outlawed when the German language was all but criminalized.
+In 1918, these 'anarchists' would be getting deportation hearings right now, even if US citizens or born here.
+Re:Rock bottom (Score:5, Funny)
+Well they DID ban French fries for a while.
+Re:Rock bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
+Right, so what you're saying is that because it's not as bad as a century ago, it's OK? There was also a point where not actively following the state's religion would get you killed. That doesn't make today's religious hysteria acceptable, even if it's not as bad relatively speaking (though it seems we're headed back in that direction).
+Please get out of the country now, for everyone's sake.
+Re:Rock bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
+I'm talking about the political and legal history of the United States since 1860. Compared to the American Civil War, the First World War and the Second World War, the crackdown on civil rights has been tame, compared to the dangerous faced with new asymmetrical weapons and tactics.
+Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because what happened before was worse doesn't make this ok.
+Falcon
+civil war (Score:5, Interesting)
+The US civil war had concentration camps (both sides equally and wretchedly, little to no rations meaning starvation, no clothes or shelter winter or summer,just whatever uniforms they were caught in that soon turned to rags, and that's it, disease was rampant, etc) and a lot of generic genocide involved with it, especially the rape of the south, Sherman burned everything, farms, cities, he didn't care, total war as he went, he burned and hung. And both sides used what weapons they had extensively. The only reason they didn't use poison gas is it wasn't invented yet. The weaponry though was still horrific, and medical care started out with no pain killers and went downhill from there. Causalities, direct battle deaths or later on from injuries and disease, was around 600,000 for a combined around 4.5 million soldiers. For comparison, WW1 - 115,000 US deaths, WW2 400,000.
+The US civil war was a *big deal* not to be discounted as some little popgun war.
+It's more complex (Score:5, Informative)
+The horrible number of casualties were the result of
+A) First and foremost, failure to adapt fast enough to new weaponry and tactics. E.g., took an awfully long time to sink in that a rifled gun shoots accurately to IIRC 300m, while against muskets it was reasonably safe to march to 100m and stand tall. (Oh, you could get hit by musket fire too, but, as an officer in the age of muskets put it, only if it was aimed at someone else;) There were years of horrible massacres, where thousands of soldiers were marched in formation to 100m, and then they shot essentially point blank at each other, standing tall and taking the volley.
+B) Incompetent charges that ignored the officers' advice and marched some soldiers to slaughter. E.g., Picket's Charge.
+C) Essentially, the first attempt in history at having a broad front war. Previously war had been historically a set-piece affair, where two armies would meet, fight, and that was it. E.g., when the Gauls invaded Rome, or Rome smacked Carthage, or whatever other historical war, don't think that they had a front across Italy. It was basically the army of one side vs the army of the other in _one_ point, and that decided the fate of the war. They might leave a detachment behind to besiege some city or whatever, but there was no coordinated effort by multiple armies. The American Civil War was arguably the first where that was even attempted, and it resulted in hideous casualties as essentially there were more battles all over the place and more generals trying to win some glory by breaking the opposite line in some God-forsaken place.
+D) Railroads. Unlike previous times in history, it was now trivial to keep reinforcing and resupplying a lot of army. Where previously you'd admit defeat or fortify and wait for reinforcements for a year (see Hannibal), here it became a case where it was possible to throw more soldiers at anything. And they did. With the logical results.
+E) Lack of modern medical care. Wars had always been a crappy affair in that aspect. The Minnie ball caused horrible wounds, and there were no antibiotics or even anesthetics.
+Additionally:
+1. Focusing on _US_ casualties in WW1 and WW2 is rather misleading. The USA took only a minor part in the trench battles of WW1, for example. The finance and industry of the USA played a bigger role in both world wars, than the actual soldiers in the trenches.
+For the countries which actually held the line in those wars, the casualties were a lot more horrible. The USSR in WW2, for example, lost ten _million_ soldier and some thirteen _million_ civillians in WW2. Let that sink in a bit, next time the "we won WW2" willy-waving contest comes by. China lost some 4 million soldiers and 16 million civillians, and their contribution to the attrition and over-extending lines of the Japanese should not be overlooked in the Pacific War. On the Axis side, Germany lost 5.5 million soldiers, and almost two million civilians. You don't think you were that good that you fought Germany single-handedly and caused 10 times more casualties than you took, do you? But at any rate, that's what WW2 was really like, for those in the middle of it. There's an estimated 72 million people who died in that war.
+In WW1, the Brits took almost 60,000 casualites just in the first day of the Battle of Somme. Almost half of what you took in the whole war. And while I'm too lazy to look up numbers, France almost depleted their manpower to the point where they were out of conscripts for many years after the war. There's a reason for the pacifism and (in the USA isolationism) after the war. Humanity had never seen such carnage before, and was thoroughly shocked.
+So writing only the USA casualties for both wars is IMHO highly misleading.
+2. Again, the fact that something has happened before, doesn't excuse the present.
+The general history of humanity started from ritualized mass-murder and slavery, and we had a long way to gradually become more... civilized. And I don't mean just having TV and Sla
+Re:Rock bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
+And compared to Joe Stalin, Jeffrey Dahmer was a piker at murder. Your point?
+I'll also note that WWI and WWII were actual declared wars. We are not in a state of war with any nation at the moment.
+More people die from drowning every year than were killed on 9/11; to claim that we face a terrorist danger necessitating that we abandon our civil liberties is ridiculous.
+Re:Rock bottom (Score:4, Insightful)
+Your comment made me laugh, it really did. Go look at the civil liberties raped over and over by both sides during the American Civil War or during the First World War in the US, then compare/contrast to the current "erosion" of civil liberties.
+You're a tool in every sense of the word. It's 'enablers' like you that try to justify every wrongful action. Who cares if it was worse a century ago, who cares if Mexico is worse. The only reason we're better NOW is because we iterated towards a better society.
+How exactly is defending this going to make the world a better place? Indifference is the enemy of progress and you're worse. You're a piece of garbage weighted around the ankle of positive change.
+Ba'athist Party in Iraq (Score:5, Informative)
+The Ba'athist parties are about all thats left of that classical Socialist-Fascism
+And guess who supported Saddam and the Ba'athists in Iraq in the 1980s? Republican presidents Reason and Bush Sr. Guess who was on Bush's staff or is now on Jr's staff who helped Saddam? Here are some photos of Rumsfeld and Saddam together [google.com]. They're shaking hand like old pals. At first Secretary of State Cheney also supported Saddam during Bush Sr's term in office. Support for Saddam only ended after he invaded Kuwait who, Saddam had accused of and was later verified, was slant drilling [wikipedia.org] into Iraq to pump Iraqi oil as if it was Kuwaiti oil. Before his invasion of Kuwait Saddam could do no wrong no matter how many people he used chemical weapons against.
+Falcon
+Re:Rock bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
+So aircraft flying into some of the tallest buildings on Earth, and one flying to the largest office building on Earth and leaving 3,000 dead is an "idea"?
+No, that isn't a war. That's a CRIME. Like a bank robbery or somebody going off to kill everybody in the local school or church or post office. Like, for that matter, Timothy McVeigh and his buddies. Oh, make no mistake, it was a horrific crime. One even more effective that the Japanese subway gas attacks. I assure you that I take no pleasure in being in the World Trade Center Health Registry, like all the tens of thousands of us who still don't know how much damage those attacks did to us.
+But it was not an act of war. Especially since even if we want to blame the Taliban, most of the world's governments, including our own, were loudly proclaiming that they weren't the legitimate government of Afghanistan even before 9/11.
+Re:Rock bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
+Women still don't get equal pay for equal work
+and from the other side, men still pay 25% more on average for medical, life, and auto insurance, and are treated in the media like emotionless "things" to be leeched from and divested in divorces of half their assets as a business.
+The sexism cuts both ways.
+Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Insightful)
+this is scarier because of your reaction. if there had been any physical altercation, we'd be hearing about police brutality and terrorism, and we'd be hearing it a lot. but because people (like yourself) are willing to let it get swept under the rug when it's "dirty hippies" getting their voices silenced, the fascists will just continue to erode your rights. not oppression indeed...
+Re:Oblig. (Score:4, Insightful)
+First off people that pull of the gloves or at least threaten to should always be delt with in a manner that involves a punch in the teeth. That is what these groups do, and they got what they asked for.
+Where's your proof any of the protesters threatened anyone with violence?
+So what we had here was a bunch of people planning on making an ass of themselves by engaging in criminal/border line criminal behavior
+Where's your evidence?
+I grow weary of children who cry about how "bad" it's getting when they don't even know how bad it really was before they even came along.
+I lived through the '60s and '70s, through COINTELPRO [wikipedia.org], and through Wstergate [wikipedia.org]. Did you or were you too young, not born yet?
+Falcon
+Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Insightful)
+And now you post this. Do you realize that some of the people attacked (yes, attacked) by the authorities were NOT people planning protests, but rather people (and legal reps) planning merely to OBSERVE protests and videotape them to insure that people's rights are not violated? To make sure that the authorities don't commit crimes?
+But no, you applaud this, because you're an authoritarian fuckwit hypocrite who is happy to see the law violated and rights trammeled upon, as long as the victims are people you don't like.
+Actions like the police have done are eroding our civil rights - your civil rights. But you still have some. Stop now and think of those rights you still have. Now stop and realize, if you're capable of it, that the reason you HAVE those rights is because the people you detest - the liberals, the ACLU, the civil rights activists - fought for them. Fought for them in the streets and in the courts, against the attacks on them coming from people who think like you. People who are like you.
+The people you detest fight for your rights against the attacks of people like you.
+Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Interesting)
+This is the best part of the Greenwald story:
+Once Gustav gets here, I'm sure all of this will blow over.
+Re:Oblig. (Score:4, Informative)
+This is utterly unacceptable.
+I agree and I've written to Obama/Biden headquarters (again) to let them know that we citizens are expecting them to give us back the Bill of Rights. Writing here [barackobama.com] to express our concerns should be more effective than all of us bemoaning the situation on
+/.
+If anyone knows of a site where the GOP candidates are also asking for comments (and having someone read them), please post it also.
+Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Interesting)
+Tonight, I was coming home from a sign painting party for the Campaign for Liberty, here in the Twin Cities. I stopped at Walgreens and saw a police car in the parking lot. It said, "Federal Protective Services" "POLICE" "Department of Homeland Security". I had never heard of this organization before now. There is an article on them here: [wikipedia.org]
+What I find chilling is the words "Federal" and "POLICE" put together. And this was not any typical FBI-style black unmarked job. It was a police car in every way. Lights and all.
+Yes. In eight short years, we have been transitioned into a police state. Mind you, there have been many attempts over the last several decades to in one way or another federalize the local police. These efforts have been resisted by grass roots organizations. Through the Patriot Act, this has now been accomplished. All local police are now arms of the Federal government. And we have bona-fide Federal Police running around.
+It Will Only Get Worse. And it does not matter one whit who wins in November. Either candidate will work to extend and consolidate federal power, and further restrict liberty.
+Re:Buckets of urine (Score:5, Funny)
+unless someone has a better (serious) explanation for the buckets of urine.
+Maybe they didn't pay their sewer bill.
+Re:Buckets of urine (Score:5, Informative)
+unless someone has a better (serious) explanation for the buckets of urine.
+Maybe they didn't pay their sewer bill.
+There was no toilet in the apartment where the only bucket of urine was found. The other buckets were filled with dirty water, to flush the toilets that were in the building. But they, whoever they is, will turn off water. I live in Minneapolis in an apartment and so far this year we have gotten 3 notices the water will be turned off if the bill is not paid.
+Falcon
+Re:Buckets of urine (Score:5, Insightful)
+If you have a house full of people waiting to protest and the toilet backs up, where else are you gonna go?
+Also possessing buckets of urine, slingshots, bows 'n arrows, and guns is perfectly legal (or was the gun illegally registered, or otherwise illegal?) Certainly there are plenty of illegal things you can do with all of the above items, but unless there is actual evidence that crimes were to be committed with the items, simply having them isn't a crime.
+So at this point it looks like we just have to wait and see what evidence comes to light, including a reasonable explanation of why there were informants in the groups to begin with.
+Re:Buckets of urine (Score:5, Informative)
+Here's your "better explanation." Not that it will change your thinking in the least.
+Also, since when was ownership of a firearm evidence that someone intends to perpetrate a crime? The NRA would like to have a word with you.
+Re:Buckets of urine (Score:5, Informative)
+The Star-Tribune SUCKS. Can't trust them. I've lived in Twin Cities.
+My sources (in MN) say that that most the buckets were gray water and a few were because there was no bathroom (the place was over crowded.) Not to mention there is no crime for pissing in a bucket.
+In addition, the Star Trib spends time on the anarchist group when most the raids were OTHER groups that were not anarchist and the paper didn't explain that and left it for the reader to mis-characterize all the other people involved in the raids when most of them were peaceful people gathering on private property.
+They were NOT civil to reporters in all situations. Plus in some cases the people they held were the people asserting their constitutional rights. (there no warrants in most cases.)
+Plus if you have been following, there were reports of the FBI trying to get students to be informants for them... One student spoke out about it months ago; one wonders what kind of characters volunteer for it-- and how trustworthy they are if they hate these protesters to begin with and that is why the agreed to be a voluntary government spy.
+here is another link [twincities.com]
+also (Score:5, Insightful) (Score:5, Insightful):also (Score:4, Insightful)
+while I agree the country would have it's fair share of racists, there would be other reasons to be proud to fly a confederate flag, when the southern states economy was being sacrificed for the northerns piece of mind, they chose to secede. Basically a 'fuck you for not looking after us too', which is similar to what USA did to the english some time earlier,
+lesson learned, try to secede, win and your considered heroes by the population, lose and you'll be cast the villain forever, the victor writes the history.
+Re:also (Score:5, Insightful)
+My reference material is all at home, or I could provide citations here -- but prior to later (early-1900s) revisionism of its teaching in American textbooks (and certainly in its immediate aftermath), the Civil War was well understood to have had the issue of slavery at its heart.
+Re:also (Score:5, Insightful)
+informants (Score:4, Informative)
+There was an informant inside this organization that told authorities what was planned.
+Here's a link about your informants: "Moles wanted" [citypages.com]. Informants only get paid if an arrest is made. Let's see, I'm a mole and I know if the info I give doesn't lead to an arrest do I tell the truth or do I lie?
+Falcon
+Re:also (Score:5, Insightful)
+What? First, the RNC isn't "the government." Second, yes they are anarchists. From their website [nornc.org]:
+They intend to block the bridges into and out of the city. The blockades are going to be categorized as "red zones" (prepared for "self-defense"), "yellow zones" (peaceful but assertive), and "green zones" (aiming to avoid risk of arrest.) I don't see how holding public property by force is at all non-violent.
+I agree however, people should protest. They should protest these hooligans who don't believe in the core basis of the USoA: that ideas will not be propagated by violence. Differing opinions will be discussed and if your opinion isn't the most popular you don't get to enact your ideas. Perpetrating acts of violence, intimidation and seizing property for long term use (a goal described on their website) aren't something any civilized country should be getting behind.
+Re:also (Score:5, Interesting)
+let me point out that "non violent" doesn't mean you do everything you're told, that's called "complicity" or at best "complacency". Having 50k people arrive at a location and sit down and refuse to leave may not be convenient, and might even put some people at risk (say, you were in the middle of hte crowd and had a heart attack), but that is not "violence".
+"violence" involves destruction, pain, intimidation and real risk of bodily injury. *some* anarchists are into that sort of thing. But "Anarchist" covers a wide variety of people, just like "republican" does. Some "Republicans" don't think it's ok to kill anyone arab just because some arabs hate us. Some think we should "turn the middle east into a parking lot".
+it's not fair to judge all republicans by the violent assholes within any more than it is to judge all anarchists by the same measure.
+I also don't think that seizing property that is not being put to use when there are people who need shelter in the streets is so radical that "no civilized country" should get behind it.
+further, I wouldn't demonize anyone who looks at the current state of our country and thinks that maybe we're getting close to the point where words alone is not sufficient response to the ongoing mismanagement, misinterpretation and appropriation of our government to anyone with suitable ambition and a large enough checkbook.
+I'm not at that point myself, but I can't say that it would be impossible to get there in my lifetime and sometimes I do wonder if I'm just playing the game laid before me by "the house", and the house always wins.. witness RealID and the basic conception among most people that you "can't challenge the federal government", constitutional or not.
+Re:also (Score:5, Insightful)
+What?!? I must have completely misunderstood the modern US history of the last 8 years or so. I had no idea that the CORE BASIS of the USA was that ideas wouldn't be propagated by violence. Speaking as someone living outside the USA, your foreign policy hasn't led me to believe that either.
+Come to think of it, maybe the violent rebels of 1776 should have rembered it too.
+Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Insightful)
+This is not how you stop riots... (Score:5, Insightful)
+Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
+Yes, indeed. The "anarchist" morons from all over the country came to Seattle looking for a riot , the the equally brain-dead cops gave them a reason.
+"Anarchists" and Repugnitans, a match made in heaven.
+Re:This is not how you stop riots... (Score:5, Insightful)
+Re: (Score:3, Informative)
+When was the last time that caused a riot? (Score:3, Insightful)
+Bottles are broken every single day.
+I see a different broken window at local businesses at least once a month.
+Those events do not cause riots.
+They are "minor". They are resolved by arresting / fining the idiot(s) who did it.
+I am also in Seattle.
+Re:This is not how you stop riots... (Score:5, Insightful)... (Score:4, Insightful)
+Your country is lost. Might as well vote for McCain. No need to drag it out. Only thing gonna save you is retaking the Reality Studio. But that takes guts and you folks have been sittin' on your butts too long watchin' Judge Judy and American Idol and the great hypnosis machine where black is white and freedom is slavery and we spread democracy by murdering elected leaders.
+Re:This is not how you stop riots... (Score:5, Insightful)
+In a sane society, wouldn't the warrant be required before actually bashing down doors? Oh wait, I forgot that isn't necessary anymore. Obviously the new FBI powers aren't intended to only be used to protect us from terrorists, but from those damn protesters too.
+textbook example (Score:4, Interesting)")
+Re:This is not how you stop riots... (Score:5, Interesting)
+... this is how you START them. This coming from someone from Seattle who lived on Capitol Hill during the WTO riots and had police overreact and create a situation when none existed.
+Exactly. You may have heard about similar unrest at the APEC summit in Vancouver in 1997, where I was living at the time. The overreaction to protests by police is a distraction tactic.
+In Vancouver when Prime Minister Cretien first visited after APEC, again there were protests that turned violent. The police formed a "bike line" about 150' from the entrance to the hotel where Cretien was, meaning police with bicycles stood about 25' apart and ordered everyone not to pass them. Since it was not even remotely intimidating everyone marched right past them. But having done so, they can then be arrested and charged with disobeying a legal police order.
+So they had uninhibited access to the hotel front doors, which were recessed from the sidewalk and therefore private property. Once they were on private property, asked to leave, and they did not, they were then trespassing as well. As luck would have it, there just happened to be a legion of police with full riot gear in the hotel lobby to engage the protesters with batons and pepper spray.
+Either they were giving out gourmet donuts, or it was a deliberate tactic to entrap the protesters into committing crimes. They report to the press that the protesters had access to areas within vocal range of the Prime Minister, but forced their way through the "barricade" with the intent of engaging the Prime Minister violently, so reciprocal violence was justified.
+In the end, the violence upstages the protest, and nothing gets done about the human rights violations they were trying to bring to the public's attention. It's been a popular tactic in North America since the 1960's. Now it appears they're taking preemptive actions to make sure the protesters are going to put on a good show. Makes sense, given the level of apathy these days.
+I advise anyone involved in a protest to enlist the aid of people trained in conflict resolution (i.e. bar security staff) to quell any troublemakers among the protesters, and have a lawyer on site to act as a liaison with the police. You're probably going to need one eventually, and you know you'll have to deal with the police. Who deals with the police without a lawyer? Criminals, idiots, or both.
+Re:This is not how you stop riots... (Score:4, Insightful)
+The police knew the protesters were predisposed to ignore warnings and proceed where there were not adequate physical barricades to obstruct them.
+Yes, so what? Is that supposed to be an excuse: "the police knew we like to break the law, so they should've just let us do it"?
+Look up the legal term "due diligence". The police did not exercise due diligence in preventing the protesters from committing crimes, nor warned them of the consequences.
+The police aren't obligated to prevent crime -- well, IANAC, so maybe they are up there, but I doubt it. They certainly don't owe it to potential criminals to stop them from getting themselves in trouble, though.
+As for the consequences... what exactly did the protesters think was going to happen when they ignored a warning from police, walked through a barricade, and trespassed on hotel property after being asked to leave? Perhaps they thought they could just shout "king me!" and the PM would have to accept their demands?
+That is the very nature of entrapment, no different than manipulating the motivations of a lonely man into hiring a prostitute.
+Sorry, but you're wrong. Entrapment is about convincing people to commit a crime they otherwise wouldn't have committed.
+It's very different from manipulating someone into hiring a prostitute. No one was manipulated into crossing that barrier or staying on hotel property; in fact, they were told not to do it. That's about as far away from entrapment as you can get.
+In Soviet Russia. (Score:5, Insightful)
+In Soviet Russia, you didn't have the right to peaceful assembly or to travel without showing your papers.
+I wish there was a joke I could make here.
+Re:In Soviet Russia. (Score:5, Informative)
+Actually, you COULD travel inside the USSR without showing papers. Train and airplane tickets were anonymous and you did not need to show ID to board a train or an airplane.
+Re:In Soviet Russia. (Score:5, Insightful): (Score:3, Insightful)
+Yes.. that's what "suppression" means.
+Re:In Soviet Russia. (Score:4, Insightful)
+Anarchists? (Score:5, Funny)
+Re:Anarchists? (Score:5, Funny)
+Ferdinand was a classmate of John McCain, you insensitive clod!
+Not suprising (Score:3, Insightful)
+Unconventional weaponry (Score:3, Funny)
+Personally I'm surprised that, upon finding "buckets of urine" that the police decided to take it with them.
+Re:Unconventional weaponry (Score:5, Interesting).
+sad day (Score:5, Insightful).
+No protesters at the DNC? (Score:4, Interesting)
+Could the fact that we didn't see such an article about last weeks DNC be because there wasn't anybody bothering to protest? HBO's Real Time had footage from the "Free Speech Zone" in Denver which had more kids on bikes than protesters.
+Re:No protesters at the DNC? (Score:5, Insightful)
+Repeat of the NY Republican Convention (Score:5, Informative).
+And you guys want to bring democracy to others? (Score:5, Insightful)?
+Re:And you guys want to bring democracy to others? (Score:5, Insightful)
+And then the W guy comes up and talks about spreading democracy in the middle east? How about spreading it in Minneapolis?
+I want to quote something directly from one of Greenwald's updates to the piece here, which directly addresses this point:
+During the Olympics just weeks ago, there was endless hand-wringing over the efforts by the Chinese Government to squelch dissent and incarcerate protesters. On August 21, The Washington Post fretted:
+Six Americans detained by police this week could be held for 10 days, according to Chinese authorities, who appear to be intensifying their efforts to shut down any public demonstrations during the final days of the Olympic Games. . . . Chinese Olympic officials announced last month that Beijing would set up zones where people could protest during the Games, as long as they had received permission. None of the 77 applications submitted was approved, however, and several other would-be protesters were stopped from even applying.
+On August 2, The Post gravely warned:.
+Would The Washington Post ever use such dark and accusatory tones to describe what the U.S. Government does? Of course it wouldn't.?
+COINTELPRO 2.0 (Score:4, Insightful)
+So peaceful!!! (Score:3, Informative)
+Re:So peaceful!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
+You'll find those and other items in many houses. A quick glance through my apartment revealed the following suspicious substances and items:
+Very sharp knives longer than 5 inches (I cook)
+Precursors for biological weapons (I cook with very hot spices, good enough for pepper spray)
+Nerve toxins (I smoke and drink coffee)
+Percursors for explosives (aspirin)
+Precursors for drugs (acetone)
+Information and tools to invade computer systems (I work in IT security)
+Dispensers for aerosols (my deodorant bottle)
+Highly aggressive chemicals (toilet cleaner)
+Camoflage kit (shoe polish)
+Rubber gloves (I hate to touch my toilet without, especially with the cleaner involved)
+Equipment to create an electronic bomb timer (welding gun and a few ATMegas)
+Hydrogen peroxide (I wear contact lenses)
+Drug containers (plastic bags and tin foil)
+Equipment to create pamphlets and other propaganda material (I have a printer for my computer)
+Equipment to remotely detonate an exposive device (I fly RC planes)
+Heavy metals (lead, to balance out the planes)
+Need I go on?
+You will find a similar collection of "highly suspicious and potentially dangerous" items and "equipment" in many homes. There mere existance doesn't prove anything.
+The other side? (Score:5, Insightful)
+In my experience, hearing just one side of a story almost always leaves out important facts.
+Before we go apeshit, shouldn't we maybe get the government's / police's side of the story?
+I'm not saying that nothing bad happened here, just that until we know (or at least give an opportunity to be voiced) both sides of the story, we're really flying blind.
+My weird similar experience in NYC in 2002 (Score:5, Interesting)
+In February 2002, the World Economic Forum was held in New York City, and I planned to (and did) protest it. The alter-globalization movement had been protesting these things for years. New York newspaper headlines screamed that "anarchists" had better not come to NYC and cause trouble with the WTC still smoking and all of the claptrap. What made it even more nonsensical is it hadn't been planned for an NYC meeting, Giuliani had convinced them to move the meeting to NYC after 9/11/01, despite knowing the WEF always brought out massive demonstrations since evil types like Bill Gates always hobnobbed at such events. So working to bring a demonstration magnet to NYC after 9/11, and then decrying that there demonstrators would bother New Yorkers still grieving from 9/11 sounded a little hollow.
+Anyhow, a friend of mine suggested we go to a building in New York called ABC No Rio. They are a "progressive community space" type of place they have art shows there, live bands, a progressive/zine library, a feed the poor group Food Not Bombs and that type of thing. Anyhow we went in and they were organizing a demonstration. I should point out I had never been there and my friend had rarely been there, we were just nearby and at the spur of the moment he wanted to see if a friend of his was there.
+I should also point out that of all the progressive demonstrations in the US in the past twenty years, I can't recall an instance of physical violence against someone. There may have been one or more cases, but I can't think of any. A handful of way-out folks smashed windows in Seattle, burned down some new unoccupied houses in a new housing development somewhere out west and the like, and in the case of the latter a massive federal investigation sent some of those people to jail. So one has to question the need for a massive federal "monitoring" of progressive groups is needed for. Especially considering the history of these things - Nixon had a bunch of burglars break into the Democratic Party election headquarters, the FBI used these extraordinary powers granted to it to interfere in the political sphere - stating as a goal the need to stop a "black messiah" from arising, which including bugging Martin Luther King Jr. and leaking tapes they made of him to the press, particularly extra-marital affairs. When Warsaw Pact secret police did such things in their countries, it was decried as tyranny here - when our secret police work to dismantle organization of African-American and progressive people (as the FBI did, Google COINTELPRO), it is soon forgotten and you hear the need for the PATRIOT Act and the like giving power to the same people who abused it for political purposes before.
+Anyhow me and my friend leave ABC No Rio. We hail a taxi and go about half a mile to Greenwich Village. My friend wants to go to a bar he went to a few months before, but can't find it. Anyhow, he realizes we are headed in the exact opposite direction than we should be, so we both do a 180 degree turn and start walking the way we had been coming. A man in his late 40s who looks very out of place for Greenwich Village on a Friday night was about 10 meters behind us. He sees us loop around and then has a look in his eye for a second, and then he also spins around and walks the other way. All things considered, especially his facial reaction when we both did a sudden 180 and began walking towards him, I know as sure as the sky is blue that he was following us, and that he was following us because we had gone into ABC No Rio. ACLU lawsuits and that type of thing after the WEF protests, and after the Republican National Convention talked about the extent of the surveillance, and fortified in my mind what I already instinctively knew was true. What scared me was the extent of the surveillance. I would dislike, but would not be as alarmed by them monitoring who went in and out of that building (where nothing was even happening! Except for planning a legal political demonstration that even the AFL-CIO was protesting in). But to follow two guys across New York City, through cab rides, on foot, who had very little to do with even organizing the demonstration much less doing anything violent during it, spooked me.
+Re:My weird similar experience in NYC in 2002 (Score:5, Interesting)
+I just have to sit there while people plot to destroy my city to make their political points and then once they have destroyed the city I can do what to them.
+Conspiracy to commit a crime is in many cases a crime. When you have proof of that, you can arrest people. Until that point, they're just citizens.
+It is the people like me, the ones you call enablers, who will have to pay the price for picking up all the garbage and repairing all the damages so the city can function again.
+Your notion is that the financial costs of cleaning up after a protest are so high that it justifies preemptively arresting a wide variety of people who haven't committed crimes and most of whom won't?
+By that logic, we should certainly arrest the VFW, as their memorial parade makes more of a mess than any three protests I've seen.
+Fear the Dye! (Score:4, Interesting)
+I worked with a group of kids when I was in my teens one Summer. --You know, games and sports and arts & crafts and such. This one day, we made tie-dyed shirts.
+Well the shirt I made turned out pretty good and I wore it for the whole afternoon and kind of forgot it was on me. Then after the kids all went off back home, me and a few of the other 'leaders' decided to head out for a movie and burgers and stuff. At the end of the evening, we all split off and I was on my way back home alone.
+My opinion of humanity then began to plummet.
+Taking public transit, I was getting all these freaked out looks. Everybody was acting as though they were scared of me. --I was used to being totally ignored, but people were really, really nervous. It was baffling. It happened not just with the occupants of one bus, but on another and on a train as well. I didn't work out it was the tie-dye shirt they were all reacting to until this one Stephen Colbert clone actually measured me up and down with an expression of abject, "Small-guy-on-his-first-day-in-prison" and then made a comment about the Grateful Dead being really cool in some kind of weird effort to. . , not get hurt by me? It was utterly unreal. I couldn't believe just how limited a set of lives people must lead in order to react in such a manner. As just a teen-ager, (back when I wasn't aware of politics in the slightest,) even I had worked out that hippies were the last form of political life you needed to back slowly away from.
+I filed the incident away under, "Fear and Ignorance" for later reference and have dusted it off for you today.
+-FL
+Re:Disruption != peaceably assembling (Score:5, Interesting) (Score:5, Informative) (Score:5, Insightful).....
+Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
+Transportation Troubles...
+Sounds like a Critical Mass rally.
+Re:Disruption != peaceably assembling (Score:5, Informative)
+Note the quote from the police - Police said despite the massive traffic disruption on the motorway, the man had the right to protest peacefully.
+Bob
+Re:Disruption != peaceably assembling (Score:5, Insightful)
+The police have a higher standard to hold to because they're the professionals. If they can't follow the law then they have no business enforcing it.
+Re:Disruption != peaceably assembling (Score:5, Insightful)
+TOUGH SHIT.
+Re:Disruption != peaceably assembling (Score:5, Informative):Selective Citations? (Score:4, Insightful)
+And pretty please explain to me why it's illegal to have pvc pipes, chicken wire and duct tape.
+Re:RTFA you twats (Score:5, Insightful)
+Well, I dunno where you pee when your plumbing is shot, but my neighbor got really pissed last time I used his door, so please enlighten me what would be a more suitable receptacle for my waste than a bucket.
+Aside of that, what are "these kind of rally groups"? What gives you the goddamn right to assume I'm going to be protesting violently just because someone else has in the past? If I did, ok. It is under some circumstances allright to assume that I may protest violently again if I did in the past. To issue the recommendation back at you, RTFM. Nobody ever had any problem with those college kids whose houses were raided. So what visionary powers give you the idea that they would be?
+Oh. Right. "these kinds of rally groups" are always like that. Ain't stereotyping fun? It saves the thinking.
+IF they get violent, arrest them. Until then, I cannot see any good reason to use the force that was used.
+)
+Posted by Suzie at 8:26 AM 26 comments Links to this post
+Thursday, August 28, 2008
+Baby Swap
+My Dad and Susie’s Dad are first cousins and Susie and I go back a rather long way. I have a photo somewhere of her Dad holding me as a baby, under one arm and my Dad holding her under one arm..quite casually ..as if we were groceries. There are no other parental figures around which is not a good sign as our Dads were constantly ‘up to no good’. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were just about to play some prank where in public they would pretend to be meeting for the first time and then decide to swap babies.
+‘What does your do?’
+‘Not much yet..but if you feed it it might eventually start talking. It’s a bit expensive though.’
+‘Mines a bit heavy…want to swap?’
+‘Sure.’
+Once, when Susie and I were about 7 years old, I stayed over at their house in Golders Green in London. In the morning her Dad asked us what we wanted for breakfast. We, having been up all night working on our naughtiness, began to shout lunatic orders at him. ‘We want..apples! And we want..chicken! And we want..coke! And we want…pickles! And we want…..chocolate! And we want ….whiskey!’ This last from me in a true attempt to shock him. A seven year old demanding whiskey for breakfast? I thought he would faint but oh nooo, not Susie’s dad. Five minutes later, without batting an eyelid, he had purloined everything we had requested from the fridge and set it up on the breakfast table instead of our usual cereal and toast. He’d even, to Susie’s mum’s consternation, tipped drops of whiskey into tiny glasses. Then he insisted we ate ..everything. I laughed so much I stopped making any sound….just lay on the floor clutching my stomach in silent uproar. And that was breakfast!
+I loved staying with them.
+Still do.
+Susie has her Dad’s sense of the ridiculous and her Mum’s thoughtful intellect. Both attributes as I am sure you can see from her posts have been essential in her survival as career mum and blogger.
+I flew over the pond from Cambridge UK recently to see see Susie in New York and her folks took the train down from Philly for the day. Susie’s dad has transferred his fabulous and lunatic parenting skills to grand-parenting skills. He and B form an irrepressible ,hyper energised vortex while the serene baby S looks on with her lovely azure eyes. After decimating a seafood restaurant we traverse Chelsea with Susie’s dad haring off with B, shrieking with joy, in the push chair and Susie’s mum trying to guide me (I am visually impaired and use my cane..especially in New York where it doubles as light sabre) and point out relevant architecture at the same time.
+Susie’s other half has long since gone back to work..with what looked strangely like relief to me.
+We arrive back at the apartment looking as if we have just been battling tornados but there is still something called ‘bath time’ to get through. I am handed a glass of wine and told to stand well back and Susie’s dad rolls up his sleeves and wades in (literally) to douse B whilst Susie tackles the baby.
+Half an hour later Susie’s dad is asleep on a chair, still soggy but blanketed in towels. B and S, pristinely clean and fresh nappied (sorry diapered) are asleep in bed and cot, Susie’s mum and the dog are out shopping for biodegradable trash bags and finally Susie and I sit, in the sudden calm, side by side on the couch and sip wine.
+‘Have you ever thought about having kids?’ she asks.
+I look around at the blasted room littered with towels, clean diapers, pacifiers, toys and snoring grandparent.
+‘Not recently’, I say.
+‘No kidding!’ she says. ‘More wine?’
+Posted by Suzie at 6:43 AM 13 comments Links to this post
+Labels: guest blogger
+Wednesday, August 27, 2008
+Wordless Wednesday
+I have a plan this
+Day
+instead of just spending the day
+I want to
+All I need to do is
+and if I can get
+in there too
+the
+will be
+all day! Weeee!!!!!
+Posted by Suzie at 6:45 AM 32 comments Links to this post
+Labels: wordless Wednesday
+Tuesday, August 26, 2008
+To All the Jobs I've Had Before
+Since Labor Day is coming up I thought I would do a tribute to some the wonderful jobs I have been fired from though out the years. Please take my hand and join me for this wonderful trip down memory lane where you're fired is more than a catch phrase.
+I was an ironing girl where I worked in a dank windowless basement with a hot press. I was surrounded by women who looked like life had just sucked the souls out of them all. Oddly enough I loved this job. I loved seeing the wrinkly clothes get nice and smooth. I loved it so much I sang. Yes I sung show tunes at the top of my lunges and apparently unless you are singing one of those galley songs from Ben Hur the soulless troupes who inhabited that basement just didn't like it. They glared at me with their beady red eyes wincing at the light I brought to the basement with my cheerful tunes. I mean who doesn't like to hear Oh What A Beautiful Morning at 7am? .....they didn't so I was fired.
+I was fired from being a go-go girl. Yes, I danced in a night club. (Slutty huh?) We were told to dress in skimpy clothing so I showed up in a full dress that went down to my ankles and up to my neck. I danced like a goth (I was pretty darn gothy at the time) waving my arms wildly and putting my hand to my forehead in mock gothy grief. I thought I was being sexy but apparently I was being just sort of strange so ...yup I was fired.
+I was also a coat check girl. I worked at a fancy theater. One night in the middle of the allergy season I got a terrible nose bleed. It was the end of the night and hundreds of patrons came rushing out to get their coats. As I handed an old lady her fur coat the tissue I had shoved up my nose to stop the bleeding came loose. They thought I was making a statement for Peta I was actually making a statement for Clariten. So by by coat check girl.
+Thank you for joining me on this trip down the lane of jobs I have lost. You may ask, "Suzie are you ashamed? Being fired is pretty awful." No I say No! I will continue to hold my head high and say yes I have been fired not once not twice but a whole bunch of times and yes they were pretty awful job to begin with. But so what? What makes you so great? Who do you think you are anyway? Sigh....
+Posted by Suzie at 9:17 AM 22 comments Links to this post
+Monday, August 25, 2008
+Why I hate Class Trips
+On Friday we took a class trip to the aquarium. I hate these trips. I know they are great for the kids and families but as an administrator I get all sweaty just thinking about them. My mother put the fear into me with stories of her teaching days as she lost a child on the subway (the child was found later at his home he had apparently taken the subway back to his house). On trips I count kids like someone with OCD. And taking the subway with two classes of 3-5 year old ages me about the same amount. But I went.
+The trip involved a long long subway ride to get to the fish house. I spent the ride counting compulsively and stopping children from licking various parts of the subway car. Everywhere I looked a child was absent mindly licking something, poles, windows even seats. My son of course was a repeat offender licking everything while sporting a big black smudge on his moth and nose.
+We got there and had a pretty nice time. We saw fishies and penguins it was all a lot of fun. It was hot though and by the time we left everyone was pretty whiny and tired (the kids were too).
+We walked back to the subway were greeted with one of those gates that looks a little like a cheese grater we all groaned preparing ourselves for an unpleasant entrance to the train. One of the parents walked through and opened the door for the kids to make thing easier. An alarm went off. The next thing I knew all the parents and kids were jumping the turn style and going through the gate(I paid! I'm no vagrant) Suddenly two police officers came running down the stairs. They looked at us with squinty knowing eyes.
+I went into panic mode. I saw all of us, kids included, being handcuffed and taken downtown. I saw kiddy mug shots. I saw the six o'clock news headline:
+Who steered them wrong? Who's to blame? Was it this woman?
+More at 6.
+I broke into a flop sweat. Just when I was ready to confess and turn in everyone else (I paid after all) the train came. I gathered all my hooligans and shoved them quickly on the train. As I pried my sons tongue off the plastic subway seat I took a deep breath and vowed never again to take one of these rotten trips .
+Posted by Suzie at 8:57 AM 30 comments Links to this post
+Labels: insane mommy, work
+Friday, August 22, 2008
+And the Winner is.....
+After careful preparation by a licensed winner picking guy (my son) the winner has been chosen at random (I named my desk random by the way) get ready here goes
+And the winner for an all expense payed trip for two to the Caribbean to spend a weekend with a naked Justin Timberlake on his own private yacht goes too....
+No wait...
+And the winner who will have a year's worth of maid, nanny, and home bar tending service is...
+Nope not right either...
+And the winner of three lousy DVD...sorry I mean wonderful terrific Baby Einstein DVD's is..
+Erica at Mom's Journal
+Yes Erica you are the proud winner of three DVD's guaranteed to give you at least enough time to go the the potty while your child is mesmerized by these DVD's.
+Now the question you have all been waiting for "Suzie do you feel cheep ho-ing yourself for comments? Do you feel dirty? Do you feel ashamed?"
+And the answer is...
+NO No I feel great! I feel rich and sassy! I have so many comments I'm swimming in them. Weee!!!!! I'm a Ho and I don't care!!!
+Now please be sure to comment (I'm sick I know it) and have a great weekend.
+Posted by Suzie at 7:20 AM 25 comments Links to this post
+Thursday, August 21, 2008
+I Dont KNow What to Say
+Today I am out of bloggy ideas I tried I wrote and wrote and erased and wrote. I mean I'm at work people. This is too much pressure!!! I need a manicure and a massage not an empty blog page saying do it write on me be creative be funny. I hate you empty blog page! Why do you say create on top? Its like a taunt! I am trying! I am! But I am only human. I cant I cant I have nothing left to give...sob...sob...
+Ok so in honor of my nothing to say day I turn to google. Thank goodness for google and the wakey people and perverts who use you daily. According to google not only do I have nothing to say but I tend to say it in quiet a random way. I mean look at how people found my bloggy goodness on a keyword search:
+why does my pup lick his paws and butt
+cactus prickers
+poem for crabby hubby
+bad bugs killer
+how to make bad bug go away
+how to get rid of water bugs
+getting rid of my scale
+dog bars
+dipiliatory
+sexy moms
+chickens
+how do you know when you've lost yourself?
+dog leaves wet spot at night
+water bug killer
+moms sexy
+And my all time favorite :
+big wet butts in high hills
+Hmmm...... strange. I seem to be obsessed with bugs and dogs. Who knew. I don't recall writing about big wet butts in high hills but who knows I feel like Ive been blogging since I was a wee lass or at least since last year so it could have happened.
+So if you came here for big wet butts in high hills you are outta luck. Its just little me hoping for comments and maybe a little love and some peanuts and maybe a frozen Margaretta.
+Posted by Suzie at 10:29 AM 16 comments Links to this post
+Wednesday, August 20, 2008
+Never Wordless Wednesday
+What do you do when you run out of
+in the middle of the night?
+I've heard of using
+or
+or even
+Sometimes in parenting you need to be creative but some things just do not work such as:
+or
+or even
+and its not for lack of trying!
+Posted by Suzie at 9:30 AM 27 comments Links to this post
+Labels: parenting, wordless Wednesday
+Tuesday, August 19, 2008
+Moms= Sexy Superheros
+I was walking down the street and heard someone say , "You're born alone you die alone." I got so angry wanted to stop and yell "What you crazy man? Are you nuts? Who is born alone? Wasn't your mom somewhere in this birth scenario? In fact I guarantee being born is as not alone as you can get you ungrateful person now go call your mom and apologise" Its just like moms are invisible and don't count at all.
+There are signs all over.
+Do mom's get recognized for 15-48 hours of labor on their child's birthday?
+No!
+Are stretch marks the new sexy must have appearing in all the fashion magazines?
+No!
+Are leaky nipples a status symbol?
+No!
+Well why the hell not?
+Since writing this blog I have heard such tales from the pit it would make your head spin.
+Who gets so tired staying up with the baby they mistake their husband shaving cream for toothpaste?
+Mothers!
+Who wrangled, pantie liners, moths, condom wrappers and toilet soaked toothbrushes from their children's mouths?
+Mothers!
+Who improvised using a sanitary napkin and a pair of Speedos for protection for their baby's new pink dress when they ran out of diapers?
+Mothers!
+And what about my own mother? A great woman, very smart, lovely and very forgiving mother. Very very forgiving and so so great. So forgiving in fact that she would totally not hold a small comment made innocently on another's blog against her own daughter. Who is so secure in her daughters love and admiration that she would not get upset even if it stated something like "I know I just spent a week with my mother and it will take weeks to get over it." A mom who would laugh and throw back her arms and say "thats my silly daughter". Now that is a mom truly a mom worthy of praise.
+So lets hear it for mothers(and my own wonderful forgiving mommy)! We are truly the superheros of the universe deserving of praise and lots of money and a few first class tickets to the Bahamas. Go Moms! (I'm so ashamed)
+Posted by Suzie at 8:45 AM 26 comments Links to this post
+Labels: blog, insane mommy
+Monday, August 18, 2008
+The Scum Buffet
+This weekend we went to the park as all city families are forced to do by that rotten family guilt fairy who loves to make you do things that kids love and parents hate
+Hubby and I entered the park (or as we call it the time warp, life sucking, place where all light and joy are funneled out its wrought iron gates) Little B entered Nirvana (i.e. the park)where petting unicorns and swinging by his feet on bars made of candy canes is an every day experience. Little S apparently entered a buffet of yummy filth and grime.
+If you haven't figured it out already we aren't those kind of parents that monitor a child's every move. We are jaded second time parents who assume a kid will get into some trouble another words were too tired and sleep deprived to keep a really good eye on our little darlings.
+An old lady who was sitting behind us first alerted us to Little S's first trip to the buffet as she shouted "Hey your baby has some old chewing gum in her mouth!" In horror and some slight annoyance I thanked her and shoved my finger into her mouth (the baby not the old lady) and removed an old nasty piece of grape gravel covered bubble gum.
+I sat back again staring into space hoping time would move along faster or a cart filled with frozen cocktails pushed by greased up mute muscle men would mysteriously appear before me. When again the old lady piped up , "Hey your baby is eating an old band aid." I hoped up and again shoved my finger into her mouth. S yelled in anger reciting baby law number #32 section c. which clearly states that any old band aids found by said baby were clearly hers for the eating.
+I sat back again keeping more of an eye on the old lady than the baby knowing in my heart of hearts it was only a matter of time before I heard , Hey lady your baby is eating a : an old toe nail (this one did happen no kidding it was a big one too) cigarette butt, baby wipe, doll head and or crack vile.
+Crumbling under the pressure of the old lady's stare I made an executive decision and decided the scum buffet, Nirvana land, life sucking time warp park had served its purpose. We were all tired out hot cranky and filled with lots of trash. Taking the crack pipe from S's little hands and giving the guilt fairy a smack our little troop went on to greener pastures and had a healthy dinner at old Mc Donald's instead.
+Posted by Suzie at 8:53 AM 26 comments Links to this post
+Friday, August 15, 2008
+Pass The Chicken Soup
+You guys are great. I am sitting here with a warm Dr.Pepper with lemonade eating fire balls and snubbing the NyQuil that no longer contains the good stuff. My throat still hurts but I do feel very loved.
+I have decided one of the reasons my sore throat is only marginally better is due to distinct lack of chicken soup. When I was a kid I hated the stuff. My Dad used to make it for me as a child it always looked green and slimy although in retrospect I'm sure it was delicious. The problem was it was not Campbell's. I would desperately wish for the canned stuffed with its lily white noodles and salty broth. But chicken soup equalled love in my family so no canned stuff for me.
+My Grandmother in Israel used to make it too. I would beg for some canned stuff but she poop pooed that idea instead I would receive real chicken soup. Nothing was more real than her soup. It was in fact more like a reality show soup than a chicken soup but that's the way Grandma rolled. This is her recipe:
+1. Go to the nasty chicken farm pick a live chicken and grab it by the feet.
+2. Take the live chicken on the bus. Give nasty looks to everyone who does not want to sit next to a very unhappy, doomed, bird
+3. Go to the kosher butcher. Not just any kosher butcher thee kosher butcher. The butcher who can out kosher the kosherest butcher. Lets call him Super Kosher butcher man.
+4. Watch Super Kosher Butcher Man kill the bird because who knows if he'll slip up and do something not...well..kosher
+5. Get back on bus. Give nasty looks to anyone who does not want to sit next to an old lady holding a dead bird.
+6. Pluck bird assuring everyone this can be done without glasses. No really I can see just fine.
+7. Throw whole bird into soup ignoring the feather floating on the top.
+8. Stir by grabbing onto feet.
+9. Serve with pride!
+Grandma did fill that soup with love...and feather... and chicken feet... somehow I could never get past the yuck factor to get a really good taste of the stuff but it sure gave you an incentive not to get sick.
+Forget the soup I think I'll just stick to the Dr. Pepper instead.
+Posted by Suzie at 8:46 AM 26 comments Links to this post
+Thursday, August 14, 2008
+Oh NyQuil Where Art Thou
+I no longer feel like an empress or the bell of the ball (although 33 comments yesterday weeeeeeee I do feel a little royal). But I also feel sick. I feel like a big ball of sick. I want some soup, some hot tea and my mommy. My ears hurt so does my throat and I'm so achy. I just wanna put my head down and whine and whine.
+I know I've already mentioned this in my WW but I would love love some NyQuil. I remember being sick and taking that little cup of green nasty liquid and immediately falling on my face in a full out NyQuil stupor and waking up oddly refreshed and nowhere near as achy. But alas nursing and NyQuil do not mix. I imagine if I did take it my milk would immediately become green and minty my Little S would fall into a stupor of her own and while tempting (I bet I would get a full night sleep) it's a no go.
+I told Little B I was not feeling well and that my throat hurt so I would not be doing much talking he responded with, "Why does your throat hurt mommy? Huh? Why? Why does it hurt? How did you hurt it? You can't talk? Why can't you talk? Huh? Why? Why cant you? Huh? Mommy? Huh?" Until I shrieked in my very patient and caring motherly way. "CAUSE I"M SICK!!!..umm..honey." Thus causing my throat to spontaneously bleed and sending me into spasms of pain.
+So I guess I'm stuck parenting and working today with what seems like the flu. If you get a moment could you please get me a cup of tea with honey or a hot toddy would be great. I would get it myself but I don't know if I've mentioned this but I just don't feel good.
+Posted by Suzie at 8:35 AM 23 comments Links to this post
+Wednesday, August 13, 2008
+Wordless Wednesday
+Posted by Suzie at 8:58 AM 35 comments Links to this post
+Labels: sick, wordless Wednesday
+Tuesday, August 12, 2008
+I Am the Empress of the Blog Universe!!!
+Oh OH Oh! So many comments. My precious my comments. I'm all a flutter. I can barely blog through all the greedy laughter all of your comments have created. I now realize I am one of the in crowd, I am one of the cool kids yes maybe I am empress of the BLOG WORLD!!!!!!! Yes I may have had to bribe some of you to comment promising you the riches of Baby Einstein DVDs but no matter it does not tarnish this moment. I AM JUST SO COOL.
+I have tried to convince my family of this. As little S sits in the dog water bowl getting ready to drop the TV remote in the water I shout "Little baby do you know who I am? It is I Suzie the cool gal who got 29 comments yesterday. Please do not drop that TV remote in the dog bowl. Did you not read the Laundress's comment who said "I am not commenting because I want the giveaway...I'm commenting because I think you are frickin' hysterical!" You would think that would stop her in her tracks and cause her to gaze in awe at her wonderfully commentful mother. But she just laughed and dropped the remote.
+My son who should really appreciate the wonder that is me has not veered away at all from riding the dog around the house or smearing yogurt all over the couch even when confronted with the comment from Vered "You KNOW I would leave a comment on your blog regardless of a giveaway!" I mean that proves I'm cool right?
+Even my Hubby who can even read the comments has not picked up his smelly socks or taken out the garbage even when confronted with Sara's comment "Me, me pick me..........PICK ME"
+Heathens all of them just wait until I rule the blog universe then they shall see yes then they shall see. (Please insert maniacal laughter here)
+Posted by Suzie at 8:57 AM 21 comments Links to this post
+Monday, August 11, 2008
+My First Giveaway!!!!
+I love pizza and martinis. I love rainbows and sunsets and to hell with all that I love comments. Yes I am a ho for comments. I looked today and 45 comments (thank you all for your wonderful birthday wishes) and my heart soared. I love comments. Comments make me feel all warm and fuzzy. Comments make me feel like I could fly. Comments ahh comments. So to enable my comment obsession I am doing a giveaway. Why for money for riches for fame? Nope for comments. So I can feel I am not alone on this swirling planet we call earth. So I can feel like the cool kids from high school have allowed me to sit at their table during lunch. So I can feel like Paula, Simon and Randy have let me go to the next round. Yes comments make my world go round.
+You might say to yourself hey how did this obsession happen to a smart gal like you? I say hey back off! Don't judge me! Who do you think you are anyway?
+Yes I'm shameless so I will be doing a Suzie is a Ho for Comments Give Away. All you need do is leave a comment at this post and you can win three
+Posted by Suzie at 8:50 AM 50 comments Links to this post
+Friday, August 8, 2008
+Happy Birthday Dear Suzie
+I'm as old as can be
+I'm older than Britteny
+and snoop do-o-gy
+OK actually my birthday is tomorrow but as I don't blog on weekends I thought I would celebrate it bloggy style today (hee hee that sounds dirty). B and I are making blue (yuck) cupcakes tomorrow ( I plan to eat at least three) and hubby and I will have a dinner out. I'm the kind of gal that loves being sung to in restaurants the louder the better as it helps to drown out the sound of old age approaching.
+Well make yourself at home and don't forget to leave a present on the way out.
+Posted by Suzie at 8:40 AM 48 comments Links to this post
+Labels: blog party, party
+I Love You Blogger
+What? What is this? Is this my new template loaded? I am so happy I could cry. I love you blogger I do. You may have lost my blog roll and all my awards even though I saved them and I did spend the last 72 hours doing nothing but trying to load the new template but who cares! You are sexy, inelegant and such a gentleman. What a wonderful blogspot you are.
+Posted by Suzie at 8:26 AM 10 comments Links to this post
+Thursday, August 7, 2008
+Why Blogger Why?
+ARGHHHHHH!!!!!! My template has gone crazy!!!! It's making me nuts. I tried to load a new one. It was so pretty. It worked for one second and them boom, gone. No more.
+Oh Blogger I tried you in explorer, safari and still you will not load my template. I have erased all my widgets. I have sung you songs taken you out to dinner, combed your hair, given you marshmallows and still you rotten blog spot you refuse to work! Why why wont you work you rotten blogger why??????????? Did I tell you it is my birthday on Saturday? Does that help? No? Well I hate you too.
+Posted by Suzie at 9:18 AM 16 comments Links to this post
+Wednesday, August 6, 2008
+Wordless Wednesday
+It's all
+fault
+I had big plans. I had a new template it was
+and
+and
+I was so excited!!!
+I felt I was finally
+enough to pull it off.
+I went to post and got
+I tried again and got
+and yet again
+all I can say is
+Posted by Suzie at 9:34 AM 28 comments Links to this post
+Labels: wordless Wednesday
+Tuesday, August 5, 2008
+Super B
+Yesterday I was making dinner and the baby was sitting outside of the gate playing with an empty old picture frame. She was cooing happily and waving the frame around. I was humming a tune feeling all was good in the world. I walked into the living room and put Little S into her high chair and saw what appeared to be red magic marker all over her hand. On closer inspection I saw it was not marker but blood.
+I ran her into the bathroom cleaned it up and saw she indeed did have cuts on her hands. She cooed happily and splashed in the water. I went into nurse mommy mode and grabbed a tissue pressing it on her chubby little fingers hoping to stop the bleeding. My happy little baby went into angry little baby mode and fought and kicked and screeched. B looked up from his Blues Clues trance asked me what I was doing and I calmly explained while wrestling my little angle I was putting pressure on her cuts to stop the bleeding.
+B got up with blankie trailing behind went to the bathroom returned with a tissue grabbed my high pitched frenzied baby's hand and applied pressure. S went silent she looked into her brothers eyes and began to coo. B said "elbow please" (he rubs my elbow raw when he is nervous) and rubbed my elbow while nursing his sisters wounds. When he was done he handed me the bloody tissue stuck his pacifier in his mouth and resumed watching Blues Clues.
+Ahhh my little hero.
+Posted by Suzie at 8:52 AM 21 comments Links to this post
+Labels: insane mommy, siblings, sick
+Monday, August 4, 2008
+Late night Debauchery and Sausages
+I woke up this morning and discovered my bra smelled a lot like an Italian sausage? Obviously I was disturbed. I thought it best to retrace my steps to see how and when this occured.
+Well I did go to a party last night. I can't remember the last time I went to a party with real grown ups who talked about real grown up things like...well I can't remember what grown ups talk about but I do know it didn't involve Elmo or Thomas the Tank Engine. I was nervous about going. It was a dinner party and I wasn't sure if I could refrain from cutting other peoples food and wiping peoples faces. Plus my hubby was staying home to "babysit" so I was on my own.
+I got to the party after a surprisingly calm subway ride (no frantic searching for potties in the underground) and felt a little rusty doing the whole conversing thing. I kept catching myself moving glasses away from the corners of tables and hiding matches lest anyone play with them and set the house on fire. The dinner was pasta with fresh spicy Italian sausage (WAIT A MINUTE!!). I had a glass of wine (maybe two) while the hostess cooked. I ended up feeling a little cooked myself. By the time the food was done I was regaling the party goers with tales about my three day labor with little S and the wonders of epidurals. I looked at my watch and it was 9:30 AT NIGHT!!!!! I don't remember the last time I was awake and partying so late! Yes I am a party animal! Watch out!
+However as I look back on this crazy night of 2 glasses of wine, going to bed at 10pm debauchery and pasta I have no recollection of dancing on any tables with a sausage (that sounds bad doesn't it?) and I certainly have no recollection of stuffing any sausages in my bra.
+I guess its a mystery best left unsolved.
+Posted by Suzie at 9:03 AM 19 comments Links to this post
+Friday, August 1, 2008
+Who Needs Sleep Anyway
+I am very very tired. S was up at 4am to watch early morning infomercials and have a little sip of boob juice. Afterwards she stretched out let go a big fart and went back to sleep.
+I climbed back into bed with an hour and half left to sleep and thoughts of the super vac and bow flex in my head and started to drift back to sleep. Suddenly I felt a hurricane of wind strike me from the side. My hubby's c-pack mask (a device for people with sleep apnea that causes a high pressure of air to go in ones nostrils to control breathing) came loose. I yelled above the rushing air "Honey fix your mask". He gave me a thumb up sign and fell back asleep. I pulled myself against the torrid of air and tried to adjust the mask myself. Finally I got it.
+I curled back up and closed my eyes and again was hit with force of wind knocking me against the head board. Apparently he had turned over and pried it loose. I yelled "Honey please the c-pack please." Again the thumbs up sign and no move to adjust anything. My hair whipping in the wind I crawled across the bed and stuck my fingers in his nose. He woke up horrified. "Your C-pack" I stammered "please". He rolled over furiously and stuck the mask back on.
+I laid back down again. Ahh 45 min left to sleep. If I could just SLURP SLURP SLURP...... Yes my neurotic dog had started licking his butt and whoosh the air hit us both knocking me off the bed and into my already crazy dog.
+Needless to say I am very tired and we are now the proud owners of a Time Life collection of 80's love songs and 32 bottom of the foot detox patches.
+Posted by Suzie at 9:04 AM 24 comments Links to this post
+DEMONS IN THE DARK
+By Pink Rabbit Productions
+She rode through the village, hair and cape spread on the wind behind
+her in dark streaks, blood on her sword and a smile on her face. The
+villagers fled in the face of the conquering army, their screams echoing
+through the fiery night. Everything was burning around her, she could
+feel the heat of the flames. Cirra...no...Potedeia...Amphipolis? They
+had all become the same, just one more village to be conquered, one more
+town to grind under her heel.
+A woman, young and pretty, her red gold hair glinting with the lights
+of the fires dancing all around them, broke from the crowds of fleeing
+peasants. She faced down the oncoming army with courage in her eyes and
+no more than a staff in her hands.
+"Xena!!" the little peasant's call reminded her of
+something she should already know, or do. Had she seen the peasant,
+earlier in the battle when she drove Cortese and Draco to their deaths?
+It was the heat and the flames that were making it so hard to think,
+and Xena's hand floated up to her temple, struggling to remember. A
+sword cut left a trail of blood on her arm, and she whirled in time to
+see a horse and rider flash by. Her assailant brought her mount around,
+a mad smile glittering on a face that would have been beautiful if not
+for the insanity that played there. Blonde hair blew back from a narrow
+face, and she lifted her sword, spurring her horse forward in a hard
+driving charge.
+The fire burned Xena's skin, sending pain through every nerve ending
+and slowing her reflexes. She tried to get her weapon up in time, but it
+wasn't possible, and the madwoman's blade left a wake of blood as it
+knocked her from her mount. Xena tumbled to the dirt with a whoof,
+fighting to drag cool sweet oxygen into parched lungs. A soft hand
+landed on her forehead, bringing her eyes up.
+"Xena?"
+It was the little peasant, her hazel eyes round with worry. She slid
+a hand under the warrior princess, and Xena felt herself drawn against a
+soft and welcoming breast.
+"It's all right...you'll be all right..." the girl
+whispered as she brushed sweat soaked hair away from the warrior's brow.
+Xena leaned into the gentle touch, struggling to remember something
+she knew was important. "Gabrielle?" she rasped at last.
+"That's right," a tender voice whispered. Cool hands petted
+Xena's forehead, banishing the pain even as rain trickled down, chasing
+back some of the flames threatening to burn them all. Soft lips touched
+her cheek. "You'll be fine..."
+"Don't let the fire..." Xena whispered, then trailed off as
+darkness overtook her.
+Xena came awake with a start, blinking rapidly to bring her vision
+back into focus. A hard swallow made her aware of the scratchy pain in
+her throat and the ragged quality of every breath she took. Dark hair
+hung in lank strands across her face, and she pushed it away, surprised
+by the amount of effort that simple gesture required. A soft fire glowed
+warmly a few feet away, casting dancing lights across mineral smooth
+walls. She was in a cave of some kind, wrapped in her own blankets. The
+smell of smoke and cooking rabbit hung in the air. Someone had gone to
+some effort to make things more comfortable. The warrior massaged her
+temple, struggling to remember how she'd gotten here. A narrow opening
+was faintly visible in the soft light, and the sound of rain echoed off
+the walls. As she watched, a cloaked figure stepped through the cave
+entrance, then peeled back the voluminous hood. The newcomer's features
+were silhouetted in darkness, but the faint light cast by the small fire
+glittered off her red-gold hair.
+"Gabrielle?" Xena whispered in a voice that sounded raspy
+even to her own ears.
+The girl's chin snapped up. "Thank the gods," she exhaled.
+She stripped off her rain soaked cloak, spreading it over a rock near
+the fire. She was carrying two heavy skins of water, and she laid them
+down as she moved to kneel by her friend. She brushed a gentle hand over
+Xena's brow. "I was beginning to think you'd never wake up,"
+she admitted, remembered fear glittering in her eyes.
+Xena swallowed hard again, in an effort to wet her dry throat.
+"What happened?" she panted.
+Gabrielle grabbed a small water skin that lay near the warrior's
+sleeping pallet. "Here," she said gently. "Not too
+much." She carefully helped Xena lift her head, pouring a small
+amount of water into her mouth.
+The warrior swallowed gratefully.
+Gabrielle recapped the water skin and lay it aside, then rested a
+hand lightly on Xena's chest "Don't you remember?"
+The warrior thought about it for a moment, frowning as she struggled
+with the confused jumble of memories. "There was a fire...and...Callisto...you
+were there too..."
+Gabrielle frowned in confusion. "There was no fire, Xena, and we
+haven't seen Callisto since she and her men were turned over for trial.
+We were on the road to Thrace when you started to get sick..."
+"No," Xena shook her head, "I never get sick."
+"That's what you said then too...except you kept getting worse.
+You wouldn't even stop when it started raining."
+Xena shook her head again. "No...no...I never get sick,"
+she repeated.
+Gabrielle sighed softly and brushed her inner wrist against her
+friend's forehead. They'd already had this argument, and she was in no
+hurry to repeat the experience. It had ended with Xena pitching face
+first into the mud. Gabrielle had thought she was dead for a moment.
+Once she realized the warrior was still breathing, she'd begun to get
+scared. If any of the other travelers on the road had realized who they
+were ...well, there were more than a few warriors out there who'd love
+to build up their reputations by killing the warrior princess, and her
+unconsciousness would only be an added bonus. "Well," she
+grumbled at last. "Then you've done one heck of an impression of a
+sick person, because you've been feverish and mostly unconscious for the
+last four days."
+Xena started to argue, but harsh, convulsive coughs shook her frame,
+cutting off any possible words. Gabrielle disappeared for a moment, then
+reappeared carrying a clay jar of something foul smelling.
+"Drink some of this," the bard ordered, sliding one hand
+behind the warrior to help her sit up.
+Xena's nose wrinkled, as she struggled to slow the rough hacking long
+enough to get a small amount of the potion on her tongue. It tasted as
+bad as it smelled, swallowing hurt, and the coughing started again the
+moment she got it down. Unconsciousness might not have been such a bad
+thing. "Not sick," she groaned stubbornly. Finally, the
+hacking coughs slowed, then finally stopped, leaving her drained and
+exhausted. She rolled onto her back, eyes half closed. "Jus'
+tired," she groaned weakly. "Sleep now..."
+"That's right," Gabrielle murmured, petting dark hair with
+gentle hands. "Sleep," she shifted into a slightly more
+comfortable position, and stayed that way for a long time, trailing her
+fingers over Xena's hair as she watched her sleep. She wasn't well yet,
+but her breathing had eased, and some of the awful heat had drained away
+from her skin. Gabrielle trailed a hand over a smooth bare shoulder. Her
+temperature wasn't normal yet, but she wasn't burning up either. For
+most of the last four days, Xena had twisted and turned in the fever,
+calling out, lost and alone. More than once, she had seemed to fight
+phantom enemies, swinging her fists, until Gabrielle had to back away to
+avoid getting hurt.
+Helplessly watching the contortions, the bard had been nearly
+convinced her friend was doomed. She'd seen the fever take so many when
+she was growing up. It would move through a village, stealing the old,
+the young, and the weak, but also snatching men and women who seemed
+strong and able. It was all frighteningly familiar, skin fevered, breath
+coming in ragged rattles, while the mind seemed to go somewhere else.
+Gabrielle had treated her with potions purchased from a local healer,
+but she'd braced herself for the worst.
+She touched Xena's cheek very lightly. She was so beautiful,
+Gabrielle didn't know what she would do if anything had happened to the
+warrior. She could never go back to her old life. She'd never again be
+the young girl who had left Potedaia. "You're going to be all
+right," she soothed the sleeping woman. "You've got to
+be."
+The fire had burned out, leaving the village little more than a
+smoldering mess. Xena struggled not to cough as she strode through the
+smoking ruins, eyes alert and ready. Something was after her, something
+she should recognize.
+"Join me," Ares smooth voice cut through her thoughts, and
+she turned to find the handsome god standing only a few feet away, a
+sensual smile curving his full lips, his eyes alight with conquest.
+The heat rose at her back, driving her toward the god.
+"You were always mine," he drawled.
+"No." It was the little peasant, her hair flying, staff up
+in a fighting position. She bounded between the two. "You're
+staying with me, Xena...I love you...."
+The warrior stood, faintly befuddled as rain began to trickle over
+her skin, banishing the heat from the still simmering fires.
+"Mine...." Ares hissed, but the girl's voice overcame even
+a God's.
+"I love you, Xena...come back to me...."
+"Gabrielle," Xena snapped awake to the realization that the
+bard was holding her. Her skin and hair were damp with sweat, her teeth
+chattering with cold.
+"That's right," the young woman whispered, her eyes
+glittering with relief. "Your fever finally broke."
+Xena slipped a hand into Gabrielle's protective hold.
+"Ares," she gasped in confusion.
+The bard shook her head. "He's not here, it's just you and I...I
+promise..."
+The warrior sank back into the girl's gentle hold. "Just
+dreams," she exhaled.
+Gabrielle pressed a light kiss to her forehead. "That's
+right..."
+"Love you too," Xena sighed as she slid back into the
+welcome arms of sleep.
+Gabrielle's eyes widened as she realized Xena must have heard her
+softly whispered words, in her confused dream state. She had talked to
+the warrior as she bathed her, chasing away the fever. Through it all,
+she talked about herself, her feelings, the love she was just beginning
+to admit to. "I do love you," she breathed.
+Gabrielle awake with a start, reaching for the figure that should
+have been next to her on the sleeping pallet. She jerked upright as she
+realized she was alone. She was on her feet in a heartbeat, and moving
+toward the mouth of the cave. "Xena!" she called, panic
+threading through her voice. It was dark outside, and, while the rain
+was no longer pouring in thick sheets, it still pattered light and
+steady. If the warrior had fallen, or lost consciousness again, it would
+take pure luck to find her before morning. "Xena!" she called
+again, stumbling through the narrow entrance, her cloak and staff
+forgotten.
+"I'm here," the low, husky voice reached Gabrielle's ears
+as a hand landed lightly on her shoulder.
+Careless of the rain spattering down on her head and shoulders, the
+bard spun toward the black cloaked figure that emerged from the shadows.
+"Xena," she exhaled in relief, then reached out quickly,
+catching her friend when she might have fallen. She hauled an arm across
+her shoulders, taking much of Xena's weight, to help her back inside.
+"You're frozen," she panted angrily. "What did you think
+you were doing, going outside? If you had collapsed, or--"
+"Yell at me later," Xena groaned, throwing off her cloak to
+sink down onto the sleeping pallet. She wore her boots and cotton
+underdress, and both, like her hair and skin, were soaking wet. Her skin
+was cold to the touch, and she shivered violently.
+"We've got to get you out of those clothes," Gabrielle
+muttered and began peeling off her boots. When Xena's feet were bare,
+she backed away long enough to stir the fire, whipping the flames so
+that they burned brighter and cast more heat. When she turned back, Xena
+was only half out of the sodden cotton undergarment. With a soft curse,
+Gabrielle grabbed hold of the fabric, pulling it free with an
+unceremonious tug. She tossed it over a rock near the fire, then
+retrieved a blanket. Because of the nightsweats that tormented the
+warrior, she'd been changing their blankets every day, using one set,
+while laundering the other. Now she used one of the freshly washed and
+dried sheets to rub Xena's skin and hair dry, hands moving quickly to
+both dry and create a warming friction. "What were you doing?"
+she demanded, struggling to ignore the smooth flesh, separated from her
+touch by only the thinnest strip of cloth.
+The warrior worked a hand through her wet hair, pushing it away from
+her face. "I woke up," she whispered through chattering teeth.
+"You were sleeping, and I just wanted...a bath..."
+"So you went down to the pond?" Gabrielle clarified.
+Xena nodded. "Not too bright, huh?' she coughed.
+Gabrielle shook her head and resisted the urge to curse. Still half
+sick, walking through the rain to an ice cold pond qualified as more
+than 'Not too bright,' but Xena already knew that and it seemed somehow
+cruel to point out that she wasn't as invincible as she tended to act.
+Gabrielle just moved behind her, nudging her closer to the fire with the
+muttered comment, "Let's just worry about getting you warm
+again." She wrapped another blanket around the warrior, then sank
+to her knees behind the taller woman and began toweling her hair dry. In
+her haste, she forgot her own wet state and didn't even realize that her
+own teeth were chattering with cold until Xena twisted, her voice low as
+she spoke.
+"Gabrielle." She laid a hand over one of the bard's,
+stilling her. "I'm not the only one who's freezing, and the last
+thing we need is for you to get sick." She was forced to pause as a
+hacking cough shook her shoulders. "I don't think I can take care
+of you, right now," she groaned when she could breathe again. She
+reached out, tugging Gabrielle's sodden shirt. "You need to get out
+of these."
+The young woman started and looked down at her brief skirt and
+blouse. They were soaked, and tracking water into the sleeping blankets.
+She pushed away, and began peeling out of her clothes, tugging the last
+spare blanket around her shoulders. She wrapped herself tightly in the
+rough fabric, but the shudders wouldn't stop.
+"Come here," Xena said gently. And patted the space in
+front of her.
+Gabrielle debated momentarily, then gave way to that quiet tone of
+command, sinking down with a soft sigh of exhaustion. She'd been going
+steady since Xena had fallen ill and it suddenly all caught up with her.
+"Just lean back," Xena whispered and tugged the younger
+woman back against her breast. She had warmed up, but Gabrielle was
+still freezing. Pressed together like that, the warrior could feel every
+hard shiver that shook her delicate frame. She rubbed the blanket firmly
+against the young woman's slender arms, then her breasts and belly and
+up over her shoulders, working warmth back into chilled muscles. Cold
+driven shudders gave way to tremors of another kind.
+"I'm fine now," Gabrielle gasped abruptly, afraid of
+blurting out the truth if the warming stimulation continued much longer.
+Not that she entirely understood the truth. She only knew that her skin
+seemed to vibrate with every brush of her friend's hand, further heating
+the warm, wet center between her thighs. They had been unclothed
+together before -- swimming, dressing in the mornings -- but this was
+different and the close contact made her intensely aware of the woman at
+her back. Uncertain how to deal with these feelings, she would have
+pulled away, but Xena's hold tightened, tugging her back in spite of
+herself.
+"Not yet," the warrior husked roughly. She worked long
+fingers through Gabrielle's bangs, combing them away from her face. As
+weak as she was, she felt a familiar burn of pleasure at their
+closeness. The young bard had pulled her from the flames of her own
+making -- both in dreams and in reality -- and she was far from certain
+she could have resisted the temptations of her old life without
+Gabrielle's innocent wisdom. Certainly, she would have faced a far more
+difficult time refusing the god of war's tricks and overtures.
+Argo's saddlebag lay near the bedding, and Xena snagged it over with
+a hand, quickly digging through to retrieve a comb. "Our clothes
+are wet, and we're both still cold...." Her hand brushed against
+Gabrielle's bare shoulder as she moved her hair back, and they both
+shivered. Xena's throat abruptly went dry, and this time, it had nothing
+to do with being ill. Concentrating to keep her hands from shaking, she
+began combing the tangles from Gabrielle's silky hair, enjoying the
+slide of the wet strands through her fingers.
+Desire. The realization burst through her with something akin to the
+violence of a volcano throwing fire and brimstone in the air. The
+knowledge was everywhere: her mind, where she accepted that she loved
+her young companion, her hands, and their need to do more than simply
+touch with the barrier of a blanket between them, her mouth, which
+longed to taste and tease, her eyes, which sought more than a glimpse of
+pale, bare flesh. It had been so long since she had felt genuine desire,
+unbound to politics or power. Even making love to Marcus had been tied
+to gratitude and the wish to offer comfort to a condemned friend. She
+swallowed hard, tamping down the rush of emotions. Gabrielle was far too
+innocent for such things. One day, she would find someone as innocent
+and kind as she was. She didn't need to be bound to a warrior whose dark
+past would never be completely forgotten or forgiven.
+"Xena?" Gabrielle's soft voice was worried, and Xena
+abruptly became aware that her hand had stilled against sleek blonde
+hair.
+"It's nothing," the warrior growled, her tone forbidding.
+Startled by the sudden change, Gabrielle twisted, laying one hand
+over her friend's hand. "Are you all right?" she questioned
+worriedly.
+The change in position led to a brush of bare shoulder and breast,
+calf and thigh. Xena's eyes glowed like an electric arc of blue
+lightning, and Gabrielle swallowed hard as she saw her own awareness
+mirrored in the crystalline depths.
+Xena saw it too. The knowledge was there in her face before she
+averted her eyes to deny the obvious.
+Gabrielle reached up, fingertips barely brushing Xena's cheek. That
+faint touch was enough to bring the warrior's head back around.
+"Don't turn away," the bard pleaded.
+Xena swallowed hard, struggling against the tightness in her throat
+to answer. She understood far more than Gabrielle and that only made the
+situation more difficult. "I have to."
+"I know you're still weak, but we can lie here together."
+Gabrielle didn't entirely understand what she wanted, but she knew it
+was more than this simple bit of contact.
+"It's not that," Xena said gently, fully intending to
+explain it all away. She started to brush Gabrielle's shoulder, only to
+pull her hand back. Her eyes dropped from the bard's.. "One
+day," she began carefully, striving to keep the fear from her
+voice. "You'll find someone as...good...as you are..."
+Gabrielle's mouth worked, and she started to deny the charge, but
+Xena laid a finger over her lips, silencing her.
+"I'm not..." the warrior began hesitantly.
+"Right...for you..."
+"That's not true," Gabrielle swore passionately, unable to
+stay silent any longer. "I've never known anyone more right."
+Xena's eyes slid closed for a moment, and her lips moved in something
+that might have been a prayer. When she opened her eyes again, utter
+terror glittered in the crystal depths. "If this goes any farther,
+I don't know if I can ever let you go...it isn't a game...and just
+because I'm a woman doesn't mean it won't count..."
+"I know," Gabrielle whispered. "I love you."
+Xena swallowed hard, not wanting to let go and afraid she was doing
+the wrong thing if she didn't. "This isn't just about loving like
+sisters, or best friends...this is about loving and making love."
+Gabrielle swallowed hard and nodded. "I want that... with
+you...."
+Xena froze, wanting what was offered, uncertain it was best.
+In the end, it was Gabrielle who made the first move. She curved her
+fingers to the back of Xena's neck, feeling the power of the muscles
+just below the surface as she drew her head down. The warrior jumped,
+neither aiding nor resisting the first tentative brush of soft lips.
+"Please," the bard begged without completely breaking the
+kiss. Days of worrying had forced her to look at her feelings, while
+exhaustion stripped away the barriers they both usually kept in place.
+Faced with the pure love in the young woman's eyes, Xena couldn't
+turn her away. She spread a hand across Gabrielle's upper back, drawing
+her close. The kiss was long, slow, sweet, and only broke when Xena
+pulled away to trail her lips along a silky cheek. "I do love
+you," she whispered near the delicate shell of Gabrielle's ear,
+then abruptly turned away as another round of wracking coughs shook her.
+Gabrielle wrapped her arms around the woman, cuddling her close.
+"Maybe this isn't such a good time," she sighed.
+Xena braced a hand on the pallet to keep herself upright.
+"I'll...be...all right...in a...minute," she gasped between
+hacks.
+"No, you won't," Gabrielle disagreed, and pushed her down
+into the blankets. "We're both too tired," she soothed,
+petting Xena's hair tenderly as the spasms passed. The warrior burrowed
+against her lover, seeking closer contact. Whatever she might have
+wished, she was far too weak to do anything more than she already had.
+"Just sleep now," the bard soothed and pulled the blankets
+around both of them, forming a protective cocoon.
+Xena wrapped her arms tightly around the bard's waist, already losing
+her battle to stay awake. "I never want to lose you," she
+groaned.
+Gabrielle trailed her fingers through thick, dark hair. "You
+won't...I'll never leave you...." Limbs tangled together, both fell
+into the warm comfort of sleep within minutes.
+Ares, Callisto, Talmadeus, Cortese, Draco...all gone. The fire in the
+village had long since burned itself out. Even her army was no more.
+Xena knelt among the ashes, head down, careless of her surroundings.
+No longer a warlord, she was alone, and uncertain of her own identity.
+She was still kneeling there when a cool hand landed on her shoulder.
+Her chin lifted until crystal blue eyes met clear hazel.
+"Your army's gone," the little blonde peasant murmured.
+"Xena's dead," the warrior princess exhaled.
+The girl dropped to one knee in front of the former warlord, her
+answering smile infinitely gentle. "No, she's not," she
+exhaled, and brushed several strands of hair away from Xena's brow.
+"Xena's just begun to live again."
+The warrior shook her head. "I don't know who I am..."
+Again the gentle smile. "You're Xena...the warlord was someone
+else...."
+"I don't ..." the former warlord whispered uncertainly. She
+swallowed hard, sounding lost. "I only know I'm alone."
+"No, you'll never be alone...I've always been here...I'll always
+be here."
+Xena reached out, fingers brushing a velvet cheek.
+"Gabrielle," she exhaled at last.
+Xena woke with her lover's name on her lips. She was coiled like a
+child against the smaller woman's side, her head pillowed on her chest,
+dark hair spread across bare breasts. Moving carefully, she pushed up
+one hand to stare down at the sleeping bard. Her face incredibly soft in
+slumber, Gabrielle looked almost a child. Xena carefully lifted the
+blanket aside, eyes running over the smaller woman's slender figure. The
+soft curve of her breasts rose and fell steadily, signaling deep sleep,
+while one small hand lay loosely curved, near her cheek. Unable to
+resist the temptation, Xena reached out, resting one hand lightly in the
+warm valley between Gabrielle's breasts. Startled by the arousing power
+of the contrasting hues of peach and tan, she could only stare.
+"I love you, Gabrielle," she husked at last.
+"I know," the lazy reply came as the younger woman blinked
+sleepily. She reached up, sliding a hand up the center of Xena's body,
+her touch innocently sensual. "But it took you long enough to admit
+it."
+"Things aren't always as simple for me as they are for
+you."
+A wry smile twisted Gabrielle's lips. "You think you aren't good
+enough for me," she interpreted wisely. She'd seen this side of the
+warrior more than once. After the things she'd done, she didn't think
+she deserved any happiness.
+"Sometimes I think it's my own...greed...that makes me keep you
+with me, not what's best for you."
+Gabrielle shook her head. "I can decide what's best for
+me," she chastised gently. "And you didn't choose to keep me
+with you...I wouldn't go...remember?"
+"I could have made you go," Xena pointed out.
+"Ahh...but I wouldn't have stayed."
+"Really?" the warrior drawled doubtfully.
+"Really," Gabrielle confirmed and slid the hand on Xena's
+chest down and around her waist, tugging gently, until the warrior got
+the hint and leaned over her, her weight resting on her palm where it
+was braced against the floor near Gabrielle's head. "I knew we were
+meant to be together the first time I saw you."
+Xena smirked. "You didn't even know we could be
+together," she teased.
+A soft answering laugh echoed through the cave. "I didn't
+understand," the bard admitted, "but I knew."
+The softly uttered words set Xena's normally cool pulse pounding. She
+leaned down until their noses were a few scant inches apart.
+"Gabrielle," she breathed almost inaudibly, "will you let
+me make love to you?"
+The girl's answering smile was full of equal parts affection and
+love. "I won't let you not make love to me," she
+murmured, and ran a lazy finger up one of Xena's muscular forearms.
+With a low chuckle, Xena made words obsolete as she leaned down to
+claim a pair of warm lips. The kiss was slow, searching, a learning
+experience for both women. Gabrielle traced her hands up Xena's back,
+drawing her closer, as she opened her mouth to a questing tongue, then
+pressed to taste her lover's mouth for her own. The kiss only broke when
+Gabrielle pushed Xena over onto her back and began kissing her way
+downward. "I've thought about this for so long," she breathed
+as she feathered impossibly light kisses over Xena's breasts and down.
+She caught one of Xena's hands and kissed her way along her inner wrist
+and hand. She nipped lightly as she reached the tips of well made
+fingers, then ran the sharp edges of her teeth over the bony rise of
+knuckles.
+Xena groaned softly, startled by the erotic power of the simple
+caresses.
+Gabrielle dropped a hand, sliding her palm over the warrior's flat
+belly, feeling the rise and fall of banded muscles as they twitched in
+response. Her fingertips touched a dusting of dark brown hair, and rode
+the storm as hips thrust upward in silent plea. Gabrielle's sole
+experience of sex came from self pleasuring, but that had taught her
+enough to recognize the sensitive nerve endings that lay only inches
+from her fingertips. She heard the soft gasp as she slipped her fingers
+downward, exploring slowly. She ducked her head again, mouth roaming
+over firm flesh while she used her fingers to draw gasps and shudders.
+It was all a learning experience, and Gabrielle warmed to the task,
+listening to the soft sounds her lover made and noting the way muscles
+jumped and pulled taut in response to each caress. She laved her tongue
+along a silver white scar that crossed the warrior's ribs in silent
+reminder of her past life, then tasted each breast before arching up to
+share another slow kiss.
+The warrior slid a hand down her lover's side, then over her hips,
+cupping long fingers around her thigh. Muscles flexing with controlled
+strength, she guided it over and between her own thighs so that their
+legs were scissored together. Gabrielle jumped a second later as strong
+fingers darted into her intimate flesh with quick, teasing strokes.
+Still kissing Xena, she thrust her hips against the agile caresses,
+tasting every shared gasp of pleasure. The sweet lovemaking went on for
+long minutes until both of them were gasping and begging for completion.
+It was Xena who chose to slow things down, lifting her hands to
+Gabrielle's shoulders to push her over onto her back. Breathing hard
+with passion, she arched over the smaller woman.
+"You're so beautiful," the warrior whispered huskily and
+trailed a single fingertip down the center of her body. She ducked her
+head to press the lightest of kisses over full lips, before moving on to
+bury her face in the curve of her throat. "I've wanted this for so
+long," she exhaled. "But I never thought�."
+Gabrielle wrapped her arms around her lover, holding her close,
+feeling the tension drain from her muscles. She pressed her lips to her
+lover's temple. "Sleep now," she whispered, knowing the Xena
+was still weak from her bout with illness.
+"Tired," Xena mumbled and rolled to one side, cuddling
+against Gabrielle's warmth. She opened electric blue eyes to stare at
+Gabrielle for a long moment, gaze trailing hungrily over soft features.
+"I'd forgotten what it could be like when you love someone,"
+she admitted, her tone awed. She petted silky hair away from the bard's
+forehead, then folded her arm across Gabrielle's midsection.
+When it broke apart, Gabrielle gently brushed dark hair away from
+Xena's eyes. Even in the faint light cast by their small fire, the
+exhaustion was easily evident. "Go back to sleep," she advised
+gently. "You're still weak from the fever."
+Xena's eyes slid closed, her breathing slowing. "Still say I
+wasn't sick," she exhaled.
+Gabrielle brushed a gentle hand along her brow. "We'll talk
+about it later," she murmured.
+A strong hand tightened momentarily on the bard's waist. "You'll
+be here when I wake up?" she questioned.
+"I'll be here," Gabrielle assured her lover. "I'll
+always be here."
+This time, when she dreamt, there were grass and flowers, and the
+golden haired girl never left her side. |
+Thoughts from our President
+December 2016
+This has been a busy Chamber month for me with some exciting events. We began November with a Greenwich breakfast presentation by Matthew Pennycook, MP for Greenwich & Woolwich, and finished with a drinks reception with the guest speaker, The Rt. Hon. Nick Raynsford – President, Town & Country Planning Association. Unfortunately, Matthew could not join us to hear his predecessor speak due to the arrival of his son, a few days earlier. Congratulations from the Chamber on the arrival of Baby Pennycook.
+In between the Greenwich events, I attended the Bexley breakfast meeting with Gareth Bacon, Assembly Member for Bexley and Bromley. Gareth was elected last year as AM for Bexley and Bromley, but prior to this, he was a London wide AM, elected in 2008. Gareth gave us such an illuminating talk, it is recorded in full under the Bexley Breakfast Event. The Chamber looks forward to working with Gareth in the future in his duel capacity as a GLA member and Bexley councillor.
+I attended the networking lunch at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. London’s International Drama School is set in the most beautiful surroundings of Lamorbey Park in Sidcup. Sadly, I could not attend the student’s afternoon performance, but I look forward to the Chamber returning to this beautiful location in 2017.
+As a Living Wage Employer, I was delighted to represent the Chamber at a breakfast meeting hosted by Sir Steve Bullock, the Mayor of Lewisham. Under Sir Steve’s guidance, Lewisham was the first London borough to introduce the Living Wage in 2012.
+Since September, I have continued Bob’s blog as President. My blog will continue, but not in the current format. This will be the last issue of Inspire and in January, a new quarterly print magazine will be sent free of charge to members. The Chamber has entered into a contract with Benham Publishing who will produce the magazine and they will be responsible for advertising sales. To assist this, we are sharing our membership database with them and they will be contacting members. All advertising is welcome and Chamber members will receive a discount on the published rates.
+Benham work with many other Chambers across the country and we looking forward to working in partnership with them. The new glossy magazine will be called Masthead. Many of you will remember this was the name of the Chamber’s monthly newsletter, and now is the time to bring it back as the masthead of our flagship journal.
+Our electronic communications with members will also change. We will issue a weekly electronic newsletter called Masthead Light, which should appear in your Inbox mid-morning each Friday.
+Masthead Light, will contain news and links to book into our forthcoming events. The Chamber is delighted to have sorted out its various mailing lists and we now have one comprehensive database.
+Please continue to send the office all your news and we’ll share it with the database. This includes Chamber members, officers and councillors of the four boroughs within our catchment area. Plus, all our local MPs and GLA members.
+I will be in touch again, in early 2017.
+November 2016
+My Chamber life is getting busier and I am enjoying wearing the Presidential Gong at events. The months of planning the Talent Chamber were worth it. The Chamber was invited to attend the University of Greenwich, Graduate Fairs at Avery Hill and the Old Royal Naval College. Students are signing-up with enthusiasm and we will be working with the other universities and colleges of higher education in our catchment area. Once we have a good database of students, we will approach our members to use the site for recruitment.
+As President of the Chamber, I am very proud to have been invited to join the board of the new London South East Colleges. This is the three-way merger of Bromley College of Further and Higher Education with Greenwich Community College and Bexley College; giving LSEC a combined turnover of £50m. I look forward to attending the first board meeting early next year. Apprenticeships will be at the forefront of the Chamber’s activities next year and we are planning events at LSEC and with our partner, Lewisham Southwark College.
+I attended the launches of the Royal Greenwich Partnership and the Royal Greenwich Fairness Commission and I am pleased the Chamber is now a working partner on both bodies. Next month, I look forward to telling you more about our new quarterly magazine which launches in January.
+As always, please send me any ideas you may have for the Chamber’s activities in 2017.
+October 2016
+I enjoyed my year as Vice President working with former President Bob Harris on new ideas and initiatives for the Chamber. The strategy for the Talent Chamber has taken time, but we are very pleased with the result. The Chamber’s breakfast meetings, regular lunches and Link ‘n’ Drink dates are in place for the remainder of the year. We are currently planning a full year of events for 2017 and we welcome ideas for events from you all. 2017 will see the launch of a regular printed magazine and a new electronic method of keeping everyone informed of events and news. I am delighted to have become your President along with Terri Johnson who is now the Vice President. Bob Harris has resigned to live in the south of France and Paula Hines, Peabody and David Sayce, Digital Marketing Consultant have joined the board. Together with our excellent office staff, we are a cohesive and strong team eager to take the Chamber forward: we are in business for business and I look forward to us working together.
+September 2016
+Well my last blog as President and in fact soon almost, certainly my last act in public ending 37 years working in the Greenwich and South East London community.
+At the AGM I will stand down as President and finally retire from active public life. The last two years have been a bit of a roller coaster and challenging times for the Chamber and there has been much to do behind the scenes to secure our future.
+The context of doing business is changing dramatically and I am pleased that I feel the most important achievement during my term of office has been to create a new agenda for the Chamber to follow and the consideration of new services and products to pursue.
+At the AGM we will launch the Talent Chamber; it has been hard work in its gestation and will be a major challenge in delivery. If it takes off I have no doubt that it will bring the South East London business community, the Chamber membership and that body of talent out there that want to do business and develop ideas and try things, a new digital home.
+On the horizon, and as London grows eastwards, I see finally the emergence of a new heart of commerce in Abbeywood. Yes many years off, but the new transport links and potential river crossing will pave the way perhaps to renew the riverside, bringing prosperity to the hinterland South East London.
+There are too many people to thank individually, the staff, the directors and the loyal members who have all made a contribution to a fresh start, but I thank you all. I have only scratched the surface of what can be achieved, others can take the agenda forward and I wish them every success.
+Good luck to all and thanks for the opportunity.
+August 2016
+Since I last put down some thoughts the business environment has changed dramatically as we enter the first post Brexit period.
+A new Chancellor, new approach to trade and industry, falling of the pound, it will be good for some and a challenge for others. We know that the next period will be one of uncertainty for many of our strategic partners and only time will tell how this will all play out, but I personally see major threats for the new Mayor of London in his desire to promote and develop the small business sector.
+The Chamber has had a more profitable year and we shall launch at our AGM (15th September) our new ‘product’ or service the Talent Chamber - where we strive to showcase local talent and broker opportunities for both members and non-members to recruit new talent and grow businesses. We hope to have John Lewis the new Director for Peabody at Thamesmead, to address us and I shall take all those present through the Talent Chamber proposal.
+Between now and the Rio Olympics take place, it seems only yesterday we were cheering the success of the London 2012 Games. What little summer we appear to have is an opportunity for us all to get out of the workplace and refresh our relationships and if you have time I suggest attending a Chamber event would fit the bill.
+I hope to see you all at the AGM and the Talent Chamber workshop in September.
+July 2016
+The vote is done and dusted and people have had their say. Though there is considerable uncertainty both politically, economically and culturally - one thing is clear London voted to remain and is likely to see the most of the difficult economic effects. It is likely that jobs will be lost from London, investment will stall, companies will move, prices will rise, unemployment will rise and talent will leave. A large percentage of those directors who lead London’s industry fear the worst. The biggest worry for me is that younger people who predominantly voted to remain will lose the most, through the lack of growth and the loss of access to training and development.
+The business community at all levels has a role to play to mitigate the negative effects of the decision, though the South East London Chamber of Commerce is but a small cog in the machinery of London. We will stick to our task of sustaining and developing the sub regional economy and contributing wherever possible to the South East London brand and to our local prosperity. We shall analyze things over the coming months and listen to our members and devise wherever possible events and programmes to ensure our members thrive and prosper.
+June 2016
+Trust all is well and business is good. The Chamber has been going through a process of renewal and training, needs analysis to identify key skills that we need on the board. As a result of this I am pleased to announce that Rupert Chichester (partner Boulter and Co), Peter Wilson, (formerly Greenwich Council) and David Warnes (Executive Director Business and Commercial operations Bromley and Orpington College) have joined our board. Rupert brings much needed legal skills into our mix, Peter Wilson much needed strategic advice and David Warnes a lifetime experience of business experience in the formal training sector, we thank them for volunteering and stepping up to the plate. We also welcome our new partner Peabody, who will be sponsoring our new Talent Bank project.
+It is time to say goodbye to Peter Scott-Wilds our recent President and long term supporter of the Chamber both in leadership and financial support; we will miss him and Julie Askew, who though has not been with us for long , was full of commitment and ideas.
+It’s the Universities showcase time, I attended the University of Greenwich’s Maths Talent evening and was very impressed with the scope of work placements and projects delivered, local businesses need some of this talent for data analysis and programming so you’ve missed an opportunity! Seriously though wherever you can, try to attend graduate shows at our local institutions Ravensbourne, University of Greenwich, Trinity Laban, Goldsmiths and Rose Bruford - the standards are very high and graduates have transferable skills!
+The referendum is upon us I am not going to add to the plethora of information or disinformation that’s out there, safe to say it’s important that we all vote our democracy needs all the support it can get!
+Don’t forget to come to a Chamber event soon!
+May 2016
+Peter’s Blog
+The Chamber's President, Bob Harris is currently in France without an Internet service due to a local technical problem and he has asked me to take over his May blog.
+As I am about to take up a directorship role for the second time with your Chamber, I thought it only proper, that you should know a little of my background and by stating that I have lived in South East London all my life.
+During the 1960s, I attended the same school as Ken Livingstone (Tulse Hill Comprehensive) and what a wacky place that was; the Masters used to wear Public School gowns with matching head wear!
+I left in 1967 and worked in Carnaby Street where I met the likes of Jimmy Hendrix and other '60s icons, which was all very exciting at the time and I seem to recall being proud photographed wearing a pair of two toned trousers or slacks as we called them then!. Therefore, like other City Freeman I am entitled to take my flock of sheep over London Bridge at any time, although I suspect I won't bother. my old school mate, and I have set myself a number of objectives, which I list below.
+Working closely with the President elect, Helen McIntosh who takes up the role later this year. Together we intend to promote more networking events to be held in the numerous exciting venues across the four boroughs within the Chamber, and once again, with the intention of re-introducing monthly networking lunches, which I know have been sorely missed by the majority of members. During my secondment years, these networking lunches were very popular and often attracting well over 100 attendees.
+It is also my intention to help heighten the profile of the Chamber by assisting Bob Harris, who has been instrumental in formulating the proposed Smart Chamber and the employment Talent Bank programmes which will be unveiled at the AGM in September when Bob stands down. I very much hope that he will stay on the Chamber's board to oversee these two new strategic Chamber projects.
+It will also be my intention to work with the Chamber's Local Government Liaison director, Steve Nelson to try and identify procurement opportunities across the four boroughs, which we will then be promoted to Chamber members.
+Finally, I would welcome any ideas that Chamber members might have to improve the Chamber's services.
+In the meantime, I very much look forward to meeting up with as many of you as possible over the next few months.
+April 2016
+I believe members will welcome the support of the SME’s budget announcement and the Chamber looks forward to the benefits coming on-stream.
+In this blog we can formally announce that Peabody the national housing company, has recently taken over the residential and commercial developments in Thamesmead (across Greenwich and Bexley boroughs) and that will be contributing significantly to the regeneration of South East London has agreed to be the lead sponsor of our Talent Bank which we expect to go live in September. They also become a new strategic partner Peabody have ambitious plans for Thamesmead and we hope to play a part in them.
+Recently the Chamber supported the ‘Great Gathering’ event at the Royal Naval College endorsing the work of a team of undergraduates from the University of Greenwich where over 400 pounds was raised for the Demelza Charity. We congratulate the students for organising a lively event and informative speech about the Greenwich World Heritage Site delivered by Brendan McCarthy, CEO of the Old Royal Naval College. It is the Chambers policy to encourage wherever possible new enterprise and innovation from young people who will form the business of the future.
+We wish you all good trading, networking and socializing and hope to see you soon at a Chamber event!
+March 2016
+Thanks to all who attended our event recently held at the O2 and I am sure those who did enjoyed the event. It’s important to remind members of the value of coming to our events and meeting other businesses, making new contacts and winning new business. If you didn’t attend then make a point of putting one of our events in your diary soon!
+The proposed SELC Talent Bank becomes one step closer with Peabody joining the Chamber as a strategic partner and agreeing to sponsor the Talent Bank when it comes online in the upcoming months, it is great to welcome Peabody into the Chamber - another major company with whom we can all do business and who recognizes the work of the Chamber in its new and developing agenda.
+We are hoping to run events both in the National Apprentice week in March and during Responsible Business week in April, these are key dates in the National Calendar and an opportunity to focus on growing the business in South East London and making a success of business in the local community. The Chamber champions will run and responsible business and as such we believe that well run business grows and succeeds.
+Many of you will know Peter Wilson, who for many years has been a key face and force for business support in Greenwich has decided to move on and I am delighted to say that, from April will be spending some of his time with the Chamber helping us develop and grow.
+Lastly the In/Out debate, yes the referendum is going to happen on June 23rd and the Chamber directors will organize an opportunity for both campaigns to put their case in the upcoming weeks prior to the vote
+Hope to see you at an event soon!
+The Great Greenwich Gathering – Thursday 10th March
+Breakfast Meeting – Monday 14th March
+National Apprentice Week – Wednesday 16th March
+Feburary 2016
+Happy New Year and on the behalf of the Chamber I wish all our members a busy and prosperous 2016.
+Cold weather has descended and its not a friend of mine, but it looks like things will warm up a bit before to long!
+I believe it is not the best practice to talk about any New Years Resolutions but I trust that any made are willingly adhered to and benefit us all.
+We are very pleased to welcome Christian Toth to the team as a University of Greenwich graduate Intern. Christian has a first class honours degree in International Business and is helping develop potential new offers for chamber members and conducting further research into opportunities to create a ‘Smart Chamber’ in South East London.
+We congratulate all those locally who have made it to the UK’s 2016 honours list and especially Sam Parrett The Principal of Bromley College with whom the Chamber has strong and developing ties, who was awarded the OBE in New Year’s Honours List. I hope that those who made it to our Xmas lunch had a great time I certainly did the food was excellent, seasonal, brilliantly presented. The new facilities at the Orpington Campus of Bromley College are second to none and our thanks go to the chefs and the students for a job well done!
+We have some superb events coming for you in the near future - including the Business Networking Lunch on 10 February at The Slug and Lettuce in Greenwich.
+Look forward to seeing you there!
+NB
+January 2016
+The first blog of 2016 sets the scene for the year ahead.
+2015 ended on a high with our Xmas lunch, and I think everyone who attended truly had a good time, good food with good company. Our thanks go to Bromley College and their Catering and Hospitality programme at the Orpington Campus. Which features state of the art facilities in a great location. They pulled out the stops to provide a classic, but innovative menu. It was great to enjoy such an event knowing we were contributing to the education and training of the next generation of staff across the sector. We shall be back and I encourage all local business in Bromley to get involved!
+Bromley features again with the good news that FLR Spectron Ltd announces its third year as a Chamber strategic partner. This award winning multi services business has played a blinder in helping develop the Chamber in recent times and we thank them once again.
+However, it is not all good news, we have been caught up in the cuts to BIS announced in the recent Autumn Statement and as such we shall not be able to benefit from the second stage of the Growth Accelerator scheme. This will slow our ability to bring the Talent Bank scheme live and slow the development of the Chamber as a Smart Chamber.
+Next year will see the introduction of our new business intelligence service and we are pleased to welcome Christian Toth, a first-class honours student from the University of Greenwich (another strategic partner) who for the next three months will be working as a graduate intern developing a business analyst research programme to help introduce this new facility.
+On the behalf of the Directors and staff of the South East Chamber of Commerce we wish you a peaceful, prosperous and profitable 2016.
+27th November 2015
+The festive season is upon us and this edition of my blog will do its best to address that!
+But first, it was interesting to see the recent report that makes is clear how little money is getting to those SMEs that need to invest to grow and develop, despite the introduction of many new sources.
+There are many new options available to businesses such as crowd sourcing, challenger banks, credit unions, peer to peer lending, and this for me has become a strong argument to ensure that our new Talent Bank must signpost opportunities to companies in SE London to enable them to grow and prosper. The Talent Bank website portal is currently going through a competitive tender process, but soon we hope to go into production!
+We say hello to Stella Degazon our new Office Operations Manager who is going to be our day-to-day person managing all things Chamber and the first point of call for many of you. Over time we will all get to know her well, but in the meantime we wish her every success in her new job. She comes from the entertainment frenzy of The O2 and brings her event skills and experience to our highly successful events programme.
+We also say hello to Sandra Idio and Emma Bernard, our two new apprentice graduates who will be with us for the next period of time and we hope are making the first steps along new and successful careers.
+And sadly we say goodbye to Shirley Nelson, who has been the rock behind the Chamber for over six years and to whom I owe an immense vote of thanks for contributing to the Chamber in difficult times and helping us take the Chamber into the next chapter of a fine history. Shirley has decided to retire and enjoy her leisure time whilst contributing to the family fortunes.
+We also say a sad goodbye to Cheyenne who has been a fine apprentice and I hope has gained valuable experience whilst contributing to keeping the Chamber on the road! She has decided to travel and see a bit of life before her next challenge.
+Those who have booked will have the opportunity to wish Shirley and Cheyenne well at our Christmas lunch on 9 December at Bromley College and taste the fabulous food at their new hospitality venue.
+See you there!
+23 October 2015
+Now the dust has settled from the AGM my blog this week will turn to my presidential year and the year’s programme.
+We shall of course continue to push business to business activity and procurement in order to do our very best to help companies win new business.
+With the help of Branduin we shall be able to run business clinics for new members, but for those of you who are well established it cant hurt to have an MOT! Let us know if you want to take up this offer.
+Don’t forget we are working in partnership with South East Enterprise to run free training and development sessions for Greenwich businesses on e-business, including a free initial digital ‘health check’. Sign up if you haven’t already done so.
+I will be working with the team to plan some special events throughout the year hopefully to stimulate business development and global enterprise.
+The development of a new Talent Bank moved a step closer with the board giving the go ahead to move to build the new portal to service this activity and hopefully we will be able to launch in the new year.
+It’s really important that if you have any ideas or activities that you would like to see the Chamber run on your behalf let us know!
+We hope to be able to introduce a new business intelligence service and renew our business directories again as a service for members.
+At the end of November we lose our apprentice Cheyenne who has been with us for 9 months who has decided to go travelling. We thank her for her hard work and wish her well.
+Lastly we shall be waving goodbye to Shirley at the end of December who is taking a well-earned rest before taking on other challenges. If you want to say a personal goodbye then make sure you come to our Christmas event on the 9 December.
+Hope to see you at that event or one of the many chamber offerings we organise for you soon.
+29 September 2015
+For this week’s blog, I’d like to report on the Annual General Meeting. I noted at the AGM how important the membership of the Chamber is to me and to my fellow Directors of the Chamber. The Chamber is first and foremost about its members.
+During my Presidential year with a challenging economic backdrop it’s really important that members keep in touch, attend events, and participate. We need you to engage, turn up to events let us know what we are doing right and more importantly when we do things wrong. Our aim is to create a dynamic interactive business community, winning business from each other, growing strong, employing more people, and contributing both to the prosperity of our geography and ensuring south east London is a great place to live and work.
+We are as strong as the total sum of our members and our network punches well above its weight in the big strategic issues of the day and there is much going on locally that the Directors need to engage with and push for.
+We are not well served by superfast broadband and there is a long-term decline in industrial floor space. The local authorities in membership are pushing hard to support business: Lewisham is developing three Enterprise centres at Ladywell, Catford and Deptford, and Bromley is developing Biggin Hill. Greenwich has invested in one of the largest e- commerce programmes to be seen locally, and hopefully these innovations will stimulate business-to-business activity.
+At the AGM we said goodbye to Clive Barker who has been a key Director over many years and we wish him the best for the future.
+I would also like personally to thank Peter Scott-Wilds of FLR Spectron Ltd whose Presidency has ended after two successful years, and for his terrific contribution to the Chamber during that time and the many years prior to that when he’s been an active member and board director.
+Thanks to all who have attended our events recently and I hope to see you at a chamber event in the near future.
+24 August 2015
+South East London Chamber is at its heart a membership organisation and the most important date in the year is the annual meeting. This year 9 September is the chosen date and the event, which is to be held at Charlton Athletic, is an opportunity to get feedback from members for the Directors in order to plan and assess the best way of spending limited resources.
+It’s also an opportunity to review our achievements and make plans for the future. It has not been an easy year with a considerable change of membership, and the Directors have spent time concentrating on a change agenda in order to make the Chamber more appealing to the changing face of business in South East London.
+We have concentrated on a number of initiatives designed to widen the Chamber’s appeal and to attract new members as well as listen to the needs of those who have supported us over the years.
+We continue to provide events, workshops and meetings to deliver business-to-business activity across the board. We have introduced sector working, a new micro business rate, launched South London Wired and the Pub Clubs, and encouraged the Local Authorities to be more proactive in placing orders locally.
+We have developed the South East London Talent Bank and hope to go live in the Autumn of this year. We are supporting local business campaigns and working closely with developers to ensure the right sort of commercial premises are provided to encourage growth and innovation within our geography.
+We have engaged with a number of other significant partners such as the Greenwich Tourism Partnership and the new Enterprise hubs in Lewisham and continue to play a role in economic development in Bromley and Bexley.
+We continue to play a sub regional economic development role with key agencies and opinion formers but fundamentally we need you the membership to work with us to help develop the services that you need to sustain and grow your business. So do come and participate and contribute to UK PLC.
+And if you are interested in becoming a director of the company then let us know.
+Hope to see you at the AGM.
+1 June 2015
+Good news!
+The Chamber has won a small lottery bid to help create a new Social Enterprise sector for South East London. The social enterprise sector is the fastest growing new business network in the UK, and the sector is broadening its business base throughout South-East London. As we do all new business, we will be welcoming this new initiative and doing our best to recruit them into the Chamber to benefit from our business activity and support. This means we shall be able to undertake a mapping exercise and create a focus within the Chamber as we have done for the Construction Industry. It is also really good to celebrate the work of Berkeley Homes one of our strategic partners who are always interested in supporting the development of culture. Berkeley Homes are also the destination for the new cultural buildings based in the Royal Arsenal provided by Greenwich Council and celebrated by the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival recently. Berkeley homes have also created and new quality farmers market which focuses on quality, artisan food produced in the Royal Borough of Greenwich and is being launched on Saturday 11 July at 10am at Berkeley Homes’ Royal Arsenal Riverside development in Woolwich. Other Chamber members are encouraged to support this initiative I hope you do!
+.
+Interview
+Interview.
+Tiziano T. Dossena:.
+Tiziano T. Dossena:.
+Princeton Memorial ceremony at Monument Hall (Click on the picture to view a video on YouTube of Dr. Mary Rorro’s program for the veterans)
+Tiziano T. Dossena:.
+Tiziano T. Dossena:.
+Tiziano T. Dossena:.
+Tiziano T. Dossena:.
+Dr. Mary Rorro plays the viola for the mother Gilda in the occasion of her memoir’s presentation to the public
+Tiziano T. Dossena:)
+Tiziano Thomas Dossena:.:.
+The cast of Diamond Lil’ in 2013
+Tiziano Thomas Dossena:.
+Tiziano Thomas Dossena:.
+Tiziano Thomas Dossena:.
+Interview.
+Written By: Tiziano Thomas Dossena
+James (Jim) L. Ferraro is a practicing litigation attorney, and the founding shareholder of The Ferraro Law Firm in Miami, Florida, and one of two founding partners of Kelley & Ferraro LLP in Cleveland, Ohio. His firms currently represent nearly 50,000 asbestos claimants. The Ferraro Law Firm also has an office in Washington, D.C. that specializes in corporate tax fraud and tax whistleblower cases.
+A native of Greenwich, Connecticut, Mr. Ferraro graduated from the University of Miami with a Bachelor of Business Administration in 1978 and a Master of Science in Accounting in 1979. He became a Certified Public Accountant in 1980, and taught accounting at the University of Miami in 1982 while in law school. He received his law degree from the University of Miami School of Law in 1983. He is a member of the Ohio, New York, Florida, District of Columbia, and Massachusetts Bars; the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation; the American Bar Association; the Florida Institute of Certified Public Accountants; the American Association for Justice; the Florida Justice Association; The National Trial Lawyers: Top 100 Trial Lawyers; and the Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum. He is a Florida State Coordinator for The Public Justice Foundation.
+Mr. Ferraro has fashioned his law practice in the areas of mass torts, product liability, wrongful death, medical malpractice, environmental and family law. He has specialized in asbestos and mass tort litigation for almost thirty years, and has successfully tried many cases that resulted in multi-million dollar jury verdicts. In 1995, he received the largest compensatory award in the state of Florida for a mesothelioma case; and in 1997, Mr. Ferraro also had the highest compensatory jury verdict ever in the nation for a non-malignant asbestos case. Most recently, in August 2015, Jim tried an asbestos case against Georgia-Pacific with his oldest son, James, resulting in a $17,175,000 verdict. Based on that verdict, CVN Florida voted Jim 2015 Plaintiff’s Attorney of the Year.
+He was one of ten national finalists for Trial Lawyer of the Year in 1997 for trying the first case successfully prosecuted against a chemical company for causing a birth defect. Mr. Ferraro proved that a pregnant woman’s exposure to the fungicide, Benlate, caused her child to be born without eyes and held the chemical company, DuPont, accountable in Castillo vs. E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company and Pine Island Farms. The trial was covered in its entirety on Court TV and received worldwide attention. Seven years after trial, the Supreme Court of Florida affirmed the trial court verdict. The trial has also been documented in a book, Blindsided, just recently published.
+Christian Slater said of the book: “Blindsided is a compelling and important story that holds as much social relevance today as it did when the trial against DuPont took place.”
+Here is the exclusive interview he gave to Tiziano Thomas Dossena:
+Tiziano T. Dossena: How did you meet the Castillo family, plaintiffs for the now-famous Castillo vs. DuPont case? What made you decide to take the case, unique and challenging as it was, both legally and financially?
+James Ferraro: I received a call from an old college friend of mine, telling me about the Castillos’ story and asking me to meet with them. I was reluctant because I knew how tough these cases were to win, but I agreed to have Donna Castillo come to my office and meet with me.
+Donna was very emotional and suffered a grave injustice. However, I was not going to take the case due to the extreme level of difficulty. After some limited research we found a study where the chemical was tested on pregnant rats and 43% of the rat offspring were born with no eyes or other ocular abnormalities. Even though the deck was stacked against us, we decided we would take a shot.
+Tiziano T. Dossena: Are you still in contact with the Castillo family? How has little Johnny fared since then?
+James Ferraro: I have had limited contact with the plaintiffs over the years as a form of respect to their privacy and to allow them to move on with their lives. I know the family is doing well and I am very happy that we were able to make a difference in their lives. Because of the outcome of the case, Johnny was able to afford to attend the Perkins School for the Blind.
+Tiziano T. Dossena: This celebrated litigation being the milestone and reference for many other cases, do you feel large corporation have changed somewhat their behavior since then because of it? Do you believe the average person has now a better chance to fight these Goliaths because of the outcome of that historical lawsuit?
+James Ferraro: The case set a precedent as the first of its kind, because it was the first time a chemical giant was successfully prosecuted for causing a birth defect. It also allowed the chemical Benlate to be removed from the market. However, it’s still a very difficult case, and we have a long way to go. I believe a true change will be when a law is passed at the Federal level that holds corporations accountable to the information (science/data) that is submitted to a governmental agency for licensing purposes, making that information admissible in court.
+Tiziano T. Dossena: Do you feel that, notwithstanding the enormous success of your firm with scores of legal actions and your highly respected reputation with Mass Tort and Federal Tax Whistleblower practices, the Castillo vs. DuPont case is the one you are going to be remembered for? Is that what you would like or do you feel there are other actions and instances for which you should be celebrated or remembered for?
+James Ferraro: I think I am best known for this case due to it being the first successful prosecution of its kind and also the heart wrenching story behind it. But I’ve also successfully tried many cases that resulted in multi-million dollar jury verdicts, specializing in asbestos and mass tort litigation. In 1995, I received the largest compensatory award in the state of Florida for a mesothelioma case; and in 1997, I also had the highest compensatory jury verdict ever in the nation for a non-malignant asbestos case.
+Most recently, in August 2015, I tried an asbestos case against Georgia-Pacific with my son, James, resulting in a $17,175,000 verdict. Based on that verdict, I was voted the 2015 Plaintiff’s Attorney of the Year.
+Tiziano T. Dossena: Large corporations have used experiments funded by them to get approval by the government to use a particular chemical and then called the same experiment ‘junk science’ when a lawyer from the plaintiff side wants to use the same experiment in court against them, often getting away with their action (junk-science defense.) You were the promoter of a law to allow an experiment, which was previously used to obtain a license to sell a chemical, to be used as evidence in court. Has that initial movement gained any strength and support since then and what can people do to help with this issue?
+James Ferraro: Currently, defendants like DuPont seek to exclude science under the guise of junk science. In this particular case, DuPont was seeking to exclude some of the science that they submitted to the EPA to get their product licensed. I believe a law should be written whereby a corporation or individual who submits scientific data to a governmental agency for licensing purposes is admissible in a court of law.
+Unfortunately, It’s not going to happen right now with the current administration. They’re anti-climate change, so this is not the right time. After the mid-term elections, if the balance of power shifts, that might be the right time to do it. The book will be out for about a year and a half, and the movie should be pretty close to being finished at that point in time.
+Tiziano T. Dossena: Reading the book, one can perceive the persistence and determination that drove you to achieve this enormously important win over this powerful industrial giant and will feel in awe of it. Have you at any point almost lost that determination? Was there anything that almost drove you to let go of it?
+James Ferraro: It was a monster undertaking. I originally wasn’t going to take the case. Once I saw the rat studios, I said, you know what, we can make a “state of the art” case, meaning you don’t have to have actual knowledge of the dangers of the product to be liable. When we went through Dupont’s document depository in Delaware, where they buried documents, we found studies that they did on their own that showed they had bad results from the rat studies too. I knew it was going to be pretty big when I got into it, but I didn’t know how big. I personally took every deposition: 63 depositions in four countries. I was sleeping four hours a night. I became like a marine.
+It definitely took a toll on my personal life, and I wouldn’t recommend it to any young lawyer starting out. But I never lost determination. The more I knew Dupont was guilty, the more I was motivated to keep going and bring justice to the Castillos.
+Tiziano T. Dossena: What exactly is Project Blindsided and how can people get involved with it?
+James Ferraro: ProjectBlindsided.com is my website, which not only has information on myself and the book, but allows the public to stand with me and fight for a stronger EPA. The EPA is the police force for the environment, and the environmental policies that keep our food, water, and air safe from poisons. Many in Washington are trying to strip the EPA of regulatory muscle. A weakened EPA puts each one of us in danger and will lead to widespread disaster in the lives of Americans, resulting in devastating maladies from birth defects to cancer.
+There’s a page where readers can add their name to show their support for a strong EPA or any government agency (state or local) that will commit resources and tools needed to protect us and the environment from corporate polluters.
+This great book may also be purchased at Amazon!
+Coming Home
+We have just come back from a weekend in Florence – my son had never been so we rather wanted to experience the atmosphere just before Christmas and, of course, to wander along the cobbled streets, through the markets, churches and museums and to catch up with friends there. Children are never quite as keen as their parents on this sort of thing but whatever his thoughts, I enjoyed spending time with him.
+Florence is particularly evocative for us, as Highclere’s Saloon is inspired by the same principle of construction as that of Brunelleschi’s Cathedral Dome. The view into the Saloon from the staircase is framed by four classic “quinto acuto” arches, its virtue is that it visually allows as much space as possible inside the building, whilst best absorbing the stress of the weight of the floors above.
+Florence is, of course, only a short flight from London. But, growing up with five sisters, we would often travel by car or boat rather than plane, taking a few days to reach our destination each time. On one memorably long journey down to Spain, one of my sisters, Penny, sang Rupert the Bear, and only Rupert the Bear, with just two lines of words, for about 12 hours whilst Nanny fed her Ryvita biscuits with ketchup. The miles are still etched in my memory but somehow it has not put me off the idea of travel. Several generations of the Carnarvon family were great travellers, returning to Highclere with ideas: the Italian inspired building you see today, 1661 leather wall coverings from Spain, sculptures commissioned of their children (one is still on the stairs), a pietra dura table and many new friends.
+The 5th Earl, a great archaeologist, spent each winter from 1906 to 1922 in Egypt, travelling in somewhat better style than my car journey and taking over two weeks to reach Luxor. He had begun his career studying at Cambridge University but not for long, as he seemed to prefer either scouring antique shops to improve the decoration of his rooms, or racing. After a year, his father could see it was not a profitable path and therefore decided his son should travel and thus acquire an education.
+Travel had long been considered part of the education of any gentleman, reaching perhaps its height with the 18th century “Grand Tours” undertaken by European aristocracy, but others encouraged it as well. It was part of improving skills in drawing and observation for those engaged in architecture or painting, a chance to swap ideas, to find something no one else had found or to test oneself. I think there is simply a joy in exploring; to see, to discover and thus understand the pageantry of other people’s lives.
+Whilst travel is utterly absorbing, there is nevertheless, a deep sense of belonging when one turns to come home. Home is about my family and my friends who then travel to stay with us, about the dogs and the old familiarity. We have our last Charity event this year tonight: a party in aid of a pioneering children’s cancer unit in Southampton Hospital who need to raise the last tranche of money in order to succeed in their project. I hope we get there. The courage of the children undergoing treatment and the never-ending kindness, care and treatment from the doctors and nurses is inspirational. It is a journey of a sort for each family involved, facing a suddenly very different world with a mixture of determination and exhaustion. Tonight’s event is in a small way a thank you to the dedicated staff as well as a fundraiser and I hope everyone thoroughly enjoys themselves – coming together in support is also part of the journey.
+God Bless you for your efforts on behalf of this wonderful charity. I will have the privilege of fulfilling a dream and visiting your wonderful home on May 28th of next year. Thank you for all you have done and are doing to restore and maintain this marvelous piece of history.
+Beth Whittaker
+Prince Edward Island Canada
+I am looking forward to seeing you then and you (Canada) are kindly giving us a tree – to greet the New Year – I hope you will admire it in May!
+I enjoy the coming and goings of life at Highclere. I also loved travelling but was always pleased to return home to the familiar. God bless you for all of the charity work that you do. Have very happy Holidays. Will be looking forward to hearing of them.
+Thank you !
+Dear Lady Carnarvon,
+I do always enjoy reading your blog so very much…it makes my day! Funny enough this time about travelling with your son as we coincidentally booked our next journey with our kids just yesterday… to England and Highclere Castle in August next year! After we also visited Florence and Spain some times (…by car), the kids did enjoy England with all the castles and beautiful towns much more as we spent our holidays there last year (…also by car)! We have already visited your lovely home then and we all liked it very much! My daughter (6) especially fell in love with the rocking horse in one of the bedrooms and my son (9) enjoyed the Egyptian exhibition very much! After we visited the battle prom concert at Highclere this year we will be back to see the castle again next summer! We are all very much looking forward to that!!!
+A very happy Christmas to you and your family and best wishes from Berlin, Germany!
+Liane Voss
+Danke schön! Frohe Weihnachten
+Another Merry Christmas from Germany‼️
+Out of my passion to horses, England, culinaria and the countryside I founded Britan Tours & Taste, offering very small exclusive group tours to England 3-4 times per year. Finally I will have the opportunity to visit Highclere next July. I’m very excited!
+It will be a pre visit for 2019 since I will organise a Downton Abbey tour for six members then. I hope to get tickets. Thank you very much for sharing words in your interesting blog – I will now subscribe!
+Many Christmas Greetings From Germany
+Ulla Michel
+Fröhliche Weihnachten – PS haben Sie das Buch “Zu Gast in Highclere” gesehen?
+Do enjoy travel time with your son before he is old enough to be on his own. Yes, they might not be quite the happy travelers at a younger age, they will definitely look back when they are older and realize how much they enjoyed that special time with mum and dad. I love to travel (my hubby hates flying, so we don’t go anywhere we can’t reach by car) and someday I would love to visit England…. As Jane Austen said, “There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.” (or something like that). So true! Thank you for sharing!
+Thank you and I hope these are glimpses of life here you can enjoy from your own home
+Dear Lady C, what a delightful blog! Travel is such an important part of education…enriching and expanding. As a child I had very few experiences but as an adult, I have been able to visit several countries and each time I come home with lovely memories to ponder. The sights of Italy were some of the most beautiful and memorable. The Cathedral in Florence is one of those special memories.
+We have a wonderful Children’s cancer hospital, St Jude’s in Memphis has been at the top of our donation list for many years. How wonderful that you have the opportunity to do even more than sending money by sponsoring such a worthwhile event.
+Christmas seems to me a public event, one where many gather as well as the intimate family gatherings after time apart.I hope it worked this evening! I think everyone enjoyed themselves!
+Dear Ruth G
+My husband does not fly either, but we drive to NYC and take the Queen Mary 2 to Southampton… and return the same way. Every five years we do this. We sail in Sept 2018. But alas too late for Highclere… their public openings end before we arrive. I am so disappointed not to be able to make a tour of Highclere… I am 78 and not in great health and this will probably be our final trip.
+Lady Carnarvon is there another castle and gardens you could suggest.?
+We arrive Sept 17 2018 in Southampton.
+Sandie Carpenter Whitefish Montana
+It all depends on other provisional diary dates…
+Hello Sandra,
+I feel very sorry for you for probably not having the opportunity to visit Highclere, because it is really special! After having spent five succeeding summer holidays in England and Wales, and having visited a substantial number of castles and Palaces, it is difficult to pick one out and recommend it. But if you’ll travel to Cornwall, Lanhydrock is one of the most beautiful and impressing I have ever been to!
+I will pray for you and your husband and I really do hope that you will be able to take this trip!
+Kind regards from Germany
+I agree – Cornwall, with its gardens, ancient churches and broach beaches is special.
+DEAR LADY CARNARVON,
+O PASSEIO DE MILADY DEVE TER SIDO MARAVILHOSO, CONTINUO CONVIDANDO MILADY PARA CONHECER O NOSSO BRAZIL.
+SO SOL,SAL E MAR.UM PARAISO NA TERRA.
+MERRY CHRISTMANS FROM BRAZILLLLL.
+Thank you and I met some lovely Brazilians here this evening – doctors!
+Dear Lady Carnarvon,
+This has brought back happy memories for me, I visited Florence a few years ago, and loved the buildings, and Cathedral, Italy, is one of my favourite places to visit, with all it’s history, and lovely people, I think it was learning at school, about the 5th Earl of Carnarvon and his discoveries in Egypt, which got me interested in travel and archaeology, I find it all very interesting.
+Good luck with the charity ball, a very worthy cause.
+May I take this opportunity to wish you, your family, and all your animals, a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Best wishes. Lorraine.xx
+I wondered why I had taken so long to return to Florence, it was a couple of magic pottering days
+It’s hard to pry my husband away from home to visit other places and lands, but I did manage to get ourselves to England a few years ago on a genealogical quest. We still talk about the places we visited including your lovely home. Can you clarify something for me? The lovely fireplace surround in the Saloon (such a beautiful room) has dragons on both sides. I always equate dragons with Wales, though. Is there a Welsh connection in the Herbert/Carnarvon family?
+I enjoy your blog each time it shows up in my incoming email and get to relive our tour through your eyes! Thank you so much.
+Margaret
+P. S. How is the old barn rebuild coming along? Fascinating place.
+Thank you Margaret – the dragons are wyverns associated with Wessex which is the old Anglo-Saxon name for this part of southern England but they are associated with Wales as is the Herbert family in the 15th century.
+I am planning a video of the barn to show you where we are in January. I hope you might enjoy that and I can share what we have done in a written blog as well
+I whole heartedly agree that traveling is so educational! We need to see how other people live – I even get excited to go one hour to my hometown of San Francisco these days! Always good to return home as you said – there is nothing like that feeling….God Bless all your charity efforts – gives me faith and hope in this otherwise uncertain world. Merry Christmas!
+Thank you so much – Happy Christmas
+Thank you. You are a total star
+Wishing you and your family a very Happy Christmas. It was a truly magical evening.
+Compared to the courage of the children,compassion of the nurses and skill of the nurses…. but magical evenings help us all go on! There were some lovely kind people who came
+Lady Carnarvon:
+Thank you so very much for this post as it brought back wonderful memories of my visit to Florence and the feeling of breathlessness when I visited “The Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower”; the Baptistery and the Brunelleschi’s Dome. I was so impress with what I learned that later I hunted for a book that would sate my appetite for more information on it. I did find such a book “Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture” by Ross King and I was not disappointed.
+The door of the Baptistery was another impressive part of that complex and later on I discovered that there is a replica of that very door at the Grace Cathedral in the city of San Francisco, California, the “Doors of Paradise”.
+The point here is memories made when we travel last a life time and are no doubt wonderful food for young minds!
+Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
+Bev
+Amazing city and I just pottered, no schedule, heaven
+I’m quite confident that your goal for the charity will be met – a very worthy cause and wonderful way of sharing with the staff members. We have a similar unit in our local children’s hospital and I know how important their work is. And have a wonderful Christmas at Highclere…as always, a lovely blog!
+It was a good evening and had a lovely atmosphere..
+I have many happy memories of long drives to destinations in Italy as a child (my father was southern Italian and we never flew) and the year I took my art A Level I persuaded the family that we needed to make a stop in Florence for a few days…I loved the art and the history and my little brother over indulged in Gelato! Nowadays my (Spanish) husband and I drive several times a year from the South coast of England to Southern Spain with two small dogs…so it’s quite the adventure. All the very best with your fundraising for such a wonderful cause.
+Thank you – Happy Christmas!
+Have a lovely Christmas your family are so kind I have many memories of my cousin Ivy and cousin Johnny and uncle Jess love from Louise xx
+Have a lovely Christmas xx
+Dear Lady Carnarvon,
+I do always enjoy reading your blog posts, and I agree that childhood family car journeys do seem to linger in the memory.
+In my own case, growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s, I have vivid recollections of journeying on family touring holidays.
+While most adults in my family seemed to own either an Austin Princess, a Triumph Toledo/Dolomite, or a Morris Marina (at a time when it seemed like there were few other alternatives), my parents opted for a Honda motorbike for city runabouts, and a little Austin Mini 850 for touring farther afield.
+The Mini of course was highly fashionable at the time. No home was complete without one……and though most people had the good sense to also have a “family sized” car for long distance journeys, such thinking did not pervade our household.
+And so it was that off we would rumble in our little Mini 850, with deck chairs and all manner of other things lashed to the roof rack, while suitcases hanged precariously out of the rear luggage compartment, tightly strapped onto the boot lid with a piece of rope.
+Inside the car, and somewhat in each other’s pockets, were my father at the wheel, and grandfather in the front passenger seat, while my mother, grandmother, and teenage cousin were all squeezed onto the back seat.
+I, being deemed too young to require a seat of my own, was usually perched on one of my mother’s knees, while a pressure cooker was perched on the other ! Proper family holidays were self catering after all, and where would the 1970s housewife be without her pressure cooker ?
+It is highly doubtful that such an arrangement would have ever crossed the minds of the British Leyland engineers who designed the little car. And so, with a fair degree of inevitability, our journeys would often grind to a snail’s pace at the foothills of even the slightest gradient.
+The little Mini would voice its disapproval in the strongest terms by doing what at the time was referred to as “pinking”; chugging up the hill (slowly) with a great deal of coughing and spluttering all the way.
+Now, in adult life, as my work often occasions me to pilot my modern car effortlessly up the A34 past Beacon Hill near Highclere, I often think back to our poor little Mini 850 huffing and puffing up far less challenging gradients.
+Nevertheless, somehow we always made it to our destinations, and back again, though I never knew quite how. Wales, Devon, and even Ireland, and many other places in between, were all viable family touring destinations when one owned a Mini 850 and a roof rack !
+By the early 1980s, BL had a new car on the market, the shiney new and ultra modern mini Metro. Lady Diana Spencer (later the Princess of Wales) had one….and so we just had to have one too, brand new and straight from the factory.
+With an upgrade in engine capacity from 850cc to 998cc (the higher powered 1300 option being deemed by my father to be just a little too racy), came a commensurate upgrade in touring ambition.
+My father had the novel idea of adding a tow bar to the back of the mini Metro. And so, as well as the overloaded roof rack, and standing room only interior, we also gained the addition of a little trailer that followed behind us wherever we went.
+Thus, with the pressure cooker now relegated to the trailer, I had the luxurious choice of two knees on which to spend my journeys, and could alternate between one and the other.
+I can honestly say that ours was the only mini Metro I ever saw towing a trailer, and may indeed have been unique in that regard.
+Needless to say, “pinking” nevertheless remained a constant feature of our journeys.
+Although in my early adult life, once out of university and earning my own way in the world, I acquired a much more comfortable 2 litre Rover car in which to pursue my own tours farther afield into Europe, those childhood senses of adventure and wonder (and at times sheer terror) experienced on family tours were rarely recaptured.
+Perhaps one day, for old times sake, I may buy an old Mini 850 from a classic car dealer and take it on a new adventure up and over Beacon Hill to visit Highclere castle. Maybe just maybe……
+Dear Lady Carnarvon,
+I hope that the Charity night was a great success. A most worthy and important cause.
+It is quite apt to be mentioning charity and Florence in the one Blog. Florence was not only the “Cradle of the Renaissance” for the arts and architecture, but it also was ahead of its time in charitable affairs.
+The famous Hospital of the Innocents was (to quote from a Guide to Florence) .”
+We are indeed fortunate to be able to share such amazing experiences with our children. The weekend in Florence that you have described with your son will undoubtedly always be treasured and fondly remembered by both of you.
+And it reminds us to enjoy and make the most of every moment with our children and indeed all of our loved ones. Enjoy today, because it is a gift. That’s why it’s called “the present”.
+Merry Christmas and Seasons Greetings to you, Lady Carnarvon, your family, and all readers of this Blog and their respective loved ones. May 2018 be a very special year for you all.
+Kindest regards,
+Jeffery Sewell
+You are so kind – thank you
+What a great family trip! Touring a stunning city without a schedule or the constant demands of modern life is a true luxury. Tasting new foods, checking out gorgeous architecture and exploring new landscapes is always educational and fun. The rewards are many – great memories to last a lifetime, new friendships and interesting experiences.
+I recently returned home from a brief trip to Charleston, South Carolina, and I felt the same way. It was my first unscripted trip in fourteen years. No schedules, just exploration. What a slice of heaven! It was nice to return home feeling refreshed and renewed.
+Wishing you much success with your fundraising efforts on behalf of the children!
+We ate well! Thank you Happy Christmas
+Lady Carnarvon:
+I forgot to extend best wishes and good luck with your charity event for children fighting cancer. It is always heart breaking when little ones are afflicted. Then, you see and hear them and your heart swells with joy because their resilience and surprisingly their wisdom comes through. I sincerely hope that this event surpasses your expectations and will go on to help to cure or make life easy for these little angels.
+Prayers for Blessings on you and your family at Christmas.
+Regards,
+Bev.
+You are kind – a lot of people are very kind, my role is honestly very small… Happy Christmas
+Lady Carnarvon. It’s always a pleasure to read your posts! You are a wonderful mum to spend time with your children and travel as you do. I’m a former flight attendant of 22 years with United Airlines here in the states. It was like pulling teeth to get my parents to travel anywhere so I could show them the world! I no longer fly and I miss traveling and to visit Highclere Castle is definitely number one on my bucket list. I hope to visit in 2018! Again, thank you for your posts. Living vicariously through you here in the states! Happy Holidays! Cheers.
+Thank you- Happy Christmas
+Lady Carnarvon, we too traveled as a family when I was a child and my wanderlust is still very real. That desire to travel and see new things prompted me to ask for and receive for Christmas, tickets to your charity event Monday night. I was fulfilling a dream to see your home and could “see” myself looking at that beautiful tree. But, it was not to be. The devastating fires at Hartfield-ATLANTA airport on Sunday caused our flight to be cancelled and therefore my husband and I missed the event. I am still grieving!! Due to the heavy volume of travelers we will arrive in London on Friday. I do look forward to seeing our friends and our Son-in-law’s family but I’m so very heartbroken to have missed Highclere. Perhaps it will happen at a later day. Merry Christmas and a blessed and happy New Year.
+Vicki Duncan
+I am so sorry – how awful – please let us know when you might next fly over so we can make it up! I saw the airport news on TV – it is often an airport I have used flying in for speaking engagements – Have a good Christmas!
+Florence is so magical, one of my favourite cities…
+I always enjoy your blog, my best wishes for Christmas and 2018 to you and your family.
+Happy Christmas to you and your family!
+Nice trip to visit Florence, I have not been but it must be beautiful. As for long car trips, they are always remembered with that nostalgia but they are nice to do with the family. To me in particular, I love to travel as a family although my daughters are already 26 and 23 years old. As soon as we can, we all escape. In Spain where I live, there is a lot of leather art in medieval works, in pottery etc. In Toledo it is a good visit to go and see it since there are authentic works of art. And if you can buy better hahaha. When I had to study geography in school, I always said that it would be better to study it traveling, that would be my passion.
+As for collecting, I hope it went well and they have enough to continue investigating cancer.
+Greetings and Merry Christmas!!!
+Thank you – the hospital is inspiring!
+Dear Lady Carnarvon,
+I’m sorry to say that I missed all the 6 seasons of Downton Abbey. I know it’s been years since it’s been shown out here in the US. Sorry but in my line of work it truly is hard to watch television after a hard day. I bought the dvd collection to Downton Abbey and as I kept watching it, your home became part of the characters and story line. What a beautiful place. I hope to visit some day.
+Thank you – a world apart…
+Dear Lord and Lady Carnarvon,
+So happy for the people who were able to attend your Christmas functions at Highclere as they are definitely highlights in my and my daughter’s lives. We hope to make it back another time!
+Happy Christmas to you and your family, may God bless you with the best year ever.
+Bonnie Ashley
+Happy Christmas
+What a delightful blog Lady C. Wish you and your family a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year.
+Happy Christmas
+Dear Lady Carnarvon,
+It sounds like your family had a lovely pre-Christmas vacation. Florence is truly one of the most beautiful cities in Italy (or the world.) I have not had the pleasure of traveling to Italy yet, but I hope to go there someday. I think Europe is such a beautiful continent and there are so many lovely destinations. I had my dream of visiting the UK (England and Ireland) realized last year and it was everything I dreamt of and more. I am of Irish and possibly partly English descent so visiting the United Kingdom resonated with me very strongly. I also visited lovely Highclere Castle at that time. I still think it must have been a dream. I have pictures from my journey, so maybe not! I’m delighted that you got to show your son Florence. He will always cherish those memories with you, and you with him. Christmas at Highclere awaits, so enjoy the happiest and merriest of holidays!
+Happy Christmas to you and your family,
+Ann Catherine Flood
+Thank you – we had a lovely time on Florence – wandering … looking – happy Christmas to you and family!
+I love your insightful thoughts: “I think there is simply a joy in exploring; to see, to discover and thus understand the pageantry of other people’s lives.”
+Chatting with Suzanne Johnson
+Q: Welcome! Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your book?
+Thanks for having me! River Road is the second in the Sentinels of New Orleans urban fantasy series (with a big dash of romance), although it can be read as a standalone. It’s about the aftermath of what happens in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina tears down the borders between our human world and the world Beyond, where all the paranormals live. In this book, we have two clans of Cajun mermen feuding over territory in the Louisiana wetlands, someone is killing off New Orleans wizards (and the heroine, DJ, is on the hit list), and something is poisoning the water of the Mississippi River. And did someone mention weregators?
+Q: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
+I’ve always written—journals, bad poetry, horrible short stories. But I never really considered being a writer until it came time to choose a college major and I realized journalism and English interested me a lot more than biology and physics. Until that time, I’d been following a pre-med path. So I became a journalist. I only began writing fiction about four years ago.
+Q: Are you a plotter or a pantster?
+Definitely a plotter. I don’t have time to be a pantser. I have a full-time day job and am writing two series, plus a daily blog, so I have to maximize my time. A week or two up front plotting a novel can save months of drafting and revision.
+Q: What are you working on now?
+I’m finishing up revisions on the third book in the Sentinels series, Elysian Fields, which comes out next August, and working on proposals for two new projects. And I have a new digital short for Kindle and Nook, Christmas in Dogtown, that just came out. It’s set in Louisiana but isn’t tied to the series.
+Q: Do you have any suggestions for aspiring writers?
+Don’t dabble. Ask yourself how badly you want to be published, and what you’re willing to sacrifice for it. Because being an author is hard work, even after you’re published. You’re going to be working long hours, and you’re most likely not going to get anywhere near rich. I have friends who are talented writers—really, really talented—but they always have a reason for not writing. The house needs cleaning. The new episode of Supernatural is coming on. I’m tired from my day job. Honey-pie wants to go out to dinner. My head’s just not in the right space now. On and on and on. If you wait to write until you have time and all the stars are aligned, you don’t want it badly enough. It has to be the top priority.
+Q: What book or series can you read over and over again without getting bored?
+JR Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series. Those books are a clinic in writing flawed, emotional characters. And, um, they’re sexy!
+Q: If you decided not to be a writer, what would your other dream job be?
+I’d love to be a hermit and live in the mountains. Oh, wait. Guess that’s not a job. I would be a fabric artist. Before I got caught up in writing, I enjoyed making paper-pieced art quilts and loved playing with color and design. One of the bad things about writing novels is I don’t have time to do that anymore.
+Q: What is the scariest thing you’ve ever done in your life?
+Going through Hurricane Katrina as a New Orleanian. I was evacuated for more than six weeks, sleeping on a friend’s daybed. I had one pair of shoes and two days’ worth of clothing with me. For over a month I didn’t know if my house had survived (it was damaged but salvageable), whether my friends had made it out (some did, some didn’t), whether my job would be there when I was allowed to return (thankfully, yes), whether my city would ever come back from it. I was scared and I was heartbroken. I learned a lot about myself during those days, good and bad, and thought a lot about my life. It led to some major changes—one of which was writing my first novel. Six novels later, I say that was the best thing that came out of it.
+Q: Who is the one person that has singlehandedly inspired you the most in your life?
+Probably my mom. We fight like crazy, but she’s incredibly smart and strong and resilient. I hope I got my mom’s strength and my dad’s kindness.
+Q: If you could take a trip to any foreign country RIGHT NOW, which one would you choose? Why?
+Scotland. I’ve done a lot of my family’s genealogy, and most of my ancestors came from Scotland back in the 1600s. Some of the Clan Sandilands (Americanized to Sandlin) castles and such are still standing and I’d love to visit the area of the lowlands they came from.
+Q: What is one talent that you’re hopeless at, but you wish you had?
+Singing. I love music. I’m a music junkie, and love singer-songwriters. But my singing voice is somewhere between sick monkey and banshee.
+Q: What TV show are you most addicted to?
+Swamp People. Love that show. Ice Road Truckers is a close second. Yeah, I know. Pathetic. At least I can say I’ve never watched Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo.
+Q: If you were stuck on a deserted island, name three objects and three people you would want with you.
+Well, I assume there is no way to charge batteries so my Kindle and iPhone are off-limits. I’d take singer-songwriter Zachary Richard because he could sing to me and help me with my French lessons. Eustace Conway of the “Mountain Man” show because he could figure out how to survive. My BFF Dianne because she could make me laugh (once she got over being pissed off at me for dragging her to a deserted island with a Cajun songwriter and an eccentric survival dude). Objects: a guitar for Zachary; a big tent; and a bigger knife.
+Q: What is one trait or physical characteristic that you are proud of/love about yourself?
+I’m loyal to a fault.
+Author Bio: | Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Publisher Page
+Amazon Barnes & Noble Book Depository Indiebound.
+Cheers,
+20 Responses to Chatting with Suzanne Johnson
+Enjoyed the Q&A. I am a big fan of The Sentinels of New Orleans series. I think River Road is much better than Royal Street and liked both. Highly recommend this series when ever I can. D.J. is by far my favorite character. Christmas in Dogtown is a fun read.
+Suzanne, “working on proposals for two new projects”, Great news. Projects mean books, right, am I right, right? LOL.
+Thanks, Roger! “Proposals” means ideas for books and I see if anyone wants to publish them, so fingers crossed for both Suzanne and Susannah (and DJ)!
+hum could those be the spin off you hitted during absolution blog tour?
+more books^^ great news^^
+i hope you will be able to visit those places one day^^
+2 days and i read an review christmas in dogtown ^^ first read of december can’t wait^^
+Thanks, Miki–hope you enjoy “Dogtown”! Yes, one of the proposals is the spinoff for Penton, so keeping my fingers crossed on that one :-)
+Suzanne Johnson recently posted: Q&A with Author Helen Marshall (& W*n a Choice of Book from the ChiZine Catalog)
+I’m enjoying all of the posts on the tour. Maybe they should make being a hermit a job. It doesn’t sound like a bad thing too do some days.
+I think hermit sounds like a great occupation, Sandy! Maybe I could go into town (small town) once a month for supplies and so I’d remember how to make conversation :-)
+Suzanne Johnson recently posted: Q&A with Author Helen Marshall (& W*n a Choice of Book from the ChiZine Catalog)
+LOVE this interview! It’s wonderful to hear more about you, about who inspires you, what you’d do as another career (very cool, BTW), and about your heritage! You should set a story in one of your clan’s castles:) Gives you an excuse to travel there too!!
+Thank you:)
+ccfioriole at gmail dot com
+A couple of my Scottish ancestors were knights…so I do think a research trip is in order. Great idea–LOL.
+Suzanne Johnson recently posted: Q&A with Author Helen Marshall (& W*n a Choice of Book from the ChiZine Catalog)
+We’re addicted to the survival shows at our house as well. “Mountain men”, “Yukon men”, and “Call of the Wildman” are all favorites. I think I’d like the guy from Montana though over Eustace. At least he got his hair cut in the spring. Really enjoyed Royal Street and am waiting eagerly for River Road. Thanks for the giveaway.
+Yes! Another survival show junkie! I really liked the guy from Montana (the Alaska guy was a disaster), but Eustace is a little younger so I thought he might have more energy to build shelter from scratch. He is eccentric, though! Glad you enjoyed Royal Street!
+Hi Suzanne, Well it seems that you and I have something in common! I would love to be able to one day visit Scotland!!! My son and his wife have done a genealogy on our family and have found that our family also came from Scotland. I have read many series that have been based in Scotland and I find them very interesting. Lydia Dare has a series about werewolfs that are based in Scotland and London.
+Thank you for sharing all that you shared with all of us today!!! :) I always love to hear about the lives of the authors that write my books. And also what inspires them to write what they write. I write some poetry and know that inspiration is so important when writing. So it does interest me to know what there inspiration are to write the books they do.
+Happy reading and writing*
+Teresa
+Hi Teresa, my fellow Scot! I also like series set in Scotland–the Lydia Dare Black Douglas books are special favorites since my Sandlin relatives were part of Clan Douglas!
+I’d love to go to Scotland too! Ireland is beautiful as well…love the food. Thank you for the Q and A…they are always fun :)
+Thanks, Tanya–yes, I’d love to go to Ireland as well. The ancestors who weren’t Scottish were from Northern Ireland. I guess that’s true of a lot of Americans, especially Southerners!
+Oy @ Honey Boo Boo. I haven’t seen that one either. But I love Ice Road Truckers and Discovery’s The Deadliest Catch. Just watching those guys do those jobs is fascinating (and scary).
+Another fan! Yes, I like Deadliest Catch as well. But love IRT–I think it’s the sound of the ice cracking under the truck tires that gets me!
+you and hubby have tv in common and honey booboo is a train wreck if your watching you cant’ turn away lol. I’d love to go to scotland to.
+LOL–I have friends who watch Honey Boo-Boo and I just don’t even want to get started. (Never mind that I could be RELATED to some of those people!)
+Suzanne Johnson recently posted: Q&A with Author Helen Marshall (& W*n a Choice of Book from the ChiZine Catalog)
+I’d love to visit Scotland as well. I don’t know if I have ancestors from there… but it just looks so beautiful! Great interview.
+Allison recently posted: New Blog Look
+Great interview. Thanks for taking the time to do it and share.
+Article Text
+Abstract
+OBJECTIVES It has been shown that atrophy of medial temporal lobe structures such as the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex shown on MRI may distinguish patients with Alzheimer's disease from healthy controls. However, the diagnostic value of visual inspection and volumetry of medial temporal lobe atrophy (MTA) on MRI in a clinical setting is insufficiently known.
+METHODS Medial temporal lobe atrophy in 143 patients was visually rated from hard copies, using a 0–4 rating scale and a comparison was made with the volumes (cm3) of the medial temporal lobe as estimated with volumetry, using a stereological method. All patients were recruited in an unselected way in a clinical setting in the centre for memory impairments at the Huddinge University Hospital. Patients with Alzheimer's disease (n=41), patients with other dementias (vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and unspecified dementia; n=36) as well as non-demented subjects (n=66) were included. Medial temporal atrophy and volumetry were evaluated as a diagnostic tool by performing logistic regression analysis including age, sex, and mini mental state examination (MMSE) score and calculating the sensitivity and specificity and percentage correct classification.
+RESULTS Visual and volumetric analysis yielded statistically significant differences between patients with Alzheimer's disease and non-demented subjects, as well as between those with other dementias and non-demented subjects. Combining MMSE scores and visually rated MTA ratings yielded a sensitivity of 95% for Alzheimer's disease, 85% for other dementias. Non-demented subjects were identified with a specificity of 96%. Volumetry did not have an added value over the MMSE score alone.
+CONCLUSIONS Visual rating of MTA is a clinically useful method for differentiating Alzheimer's disease from controls and is both quicker and more accurate than volumetry.
+- dementia
+- volumetry
+- medial temporal lobe
+- magnetic resonance imaging
+- Alzheimer's disease
+Statistics from Altmetric.com
+Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become a complementary diagnostic tool in the evaluation of dementia.1 Many studies have shown that medial temporal lobe atrophy (MTA) is a sensitive marker for Alzheimer's disease.2 3 To estimate MTA several techniques are available—namely, volumetric assessment, linear assessment, and visual qualitative rating.4 Volumetric assessment techniques are mainly used in studies on selected groups of patients and controls. These measurement techniques rely on specifically developed software and are undertaken separately from the clinical examination procedures using postprocessing equipment.
+The evaluation of MTA as a tool in the diagnostic procedure of dementia in a clinical routine setting is far from complete. A clinically accessible method for estimation of MTA must be rapid, simple, and reliable, to be used together with the clinical and neuroradiological examinations. Moreover, the method must be able to differentiate between Alzheimer's disease and other dementias as well as between Alzheimer's disease and non-demented subjects. A visual rating scale of MTA, with an acceptable within and between rater reliability, has been developed by Scheltens et al.5 6 In a recent study,7 this method was found to correlate well with stereological assessments of MTA in a large (n=194) sample of demented and non-demented subjects. Visually rated MTA was shown to have moderate sensitivity and specificity for Alzheimer's disease in small selected (five) and unselected (three) samples. Earlier volumetric work showed that volumetry could distinguish patients with Alzheimer's disease from controls with sensitivity and specificity figures over 80%,8 but the distinction with other types of dementia yielded lower figures.9 10
+To investigate further the diagnostic capacity of the visually rated MTA and to compare it with volumetry we used both methods in a large number of consecutive patients screened for dementia. We compared specificity, sensitivity, and percentage correct classification of both methods using the ultimate clinical diagnosis at follow up as the gold standard.
+Material and methods
+SUBJECTS
+The patients enrolled in this study have been described in detail previously.7 Here we present the results from a subsample of this population. The diagnostic procedure was as follows. All patients referred for dementia investigation at the geriatric clinic at Huddinge University Hospital from 1993 to 1995 were enrolled in the study. A validated Swedish version of the mini mental state examination (MMSE)11 was used as the standard screening instrument. The investigation further included a complete physical, psychiatric, and neurological examination as well as comprehensive psychometric tests. Brain MRI was performed as routine to exclude other brain pathology. In addition, in each patient blood and CSF samples were collected and an EEG and SPECT scan were performed. A cohort consisting of subjects selected as control persons in a study on car driving and dementia12 and of members of the family with an APP mutation who were not mutation carriers, were subjected to the same procedure (except for SPECT ).
+After this procedure all subjects were diagnosed using the guidelines in DSM-III-R13 for assessing dementia, the NINDS-AIREN criteria for vascular dementia,14 the Lund-Manchester criteria for frontal lobe dementia,15 the ICD-10 criteria16 for unspecified dementia, and the NINCDS-ADRDA17 criteria for probable/possible Alzheimer's disease. If none of these diagnoses was applicable the subject was designated as non-demented. After the diagnostic investigation 10 patients had to be excluded because of a space occupying lesion and another nine were excluded because of poor MRI quality, yielding 143 subjects whose diagnoses were confirmed at follow up examinations 6 months after the initial investigation (table 1).
+Demographic data on the study groups
+MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING
+All examinations were performed with a Siemens 1.5 Tesla Magnetom. A standard examination was first performed obtaining 24 T2 and proton density weighted, transaxial images through the brain. The volumetric measurements were based on a 3D magnetisation prepared rapid gradient echo sequence (3D MP-RAGE, TR=10 ms, TE=4 ms, flip angle=10°). This sequence yields 64 continuous coronal slices covering the whole brain with a good separation of grey and white matter and between brain tissue and CSF (T1 weighted). The slice thickness was 2.8 mm and the partial volume effect was small. The coronal plane was chosen to be perpendicular to the line intersecting the anterior and posterior commissures in the midsagittal plane (the AC-PC line).
+VOLUMETRIC ESTIMATION
+A description of the method has been published previously.7 The volumetric measurements were performed using the method of stereology with a program, CV-Stereo, developed by Context Vision AB, Linköping, Sweden. The point counting stereological method used in this program is based on the Cavalieri theorem of systematic sampling. The computer program generated a grid which was randomly placed on the MRI slices, and the number of intersecting points over the area of interest were counted. The size of the grid depends on the the structure to be measured; as a rule of thumb the total number of test points should be around 100 to give a reasonable accuracy. The volume was estimated with the following formula: (number of measured points)×(area of a square in the grid)×(distance between slices). The requirements for this method is that the structure should be sampled at equal and perpendicular intervals, and the sampling should begin at random. The above described imaging technique meets the basic requirements for the stereological method, as the first slice intersects the brain at random.
+The medial temporal lobe including the amygdala, hippocampus, and parahippocampal gyrus, was measured in 10 slices between the anterior commissure and posterior commissure, using a point distance of 0.5 cm in the test point grid. The intracranial volume (ICV) was defined as the whole volume inside the skull with the lower border defined by the caudal region of the cerebellum, temporal lobes, and orbitofrontal cortex. The brain stem was not included in the ICV. The ICV volume was measured in eight slices with a test point grid of 2 cm. The within rater variation between two measurements on the same image set was 3.5% The within rater variation defined as the mean difference between two measurements done by one operator on two different image sets of six subjects being examined twice in the MRI scanner with a time gap of 2 weeks, was 3.5%. As these variations were identical, the measurements seemed to be relatively independent for image quality and positioning of the patient in the scanner. The between rater variability between two raters on scans of six subjects was 4.5%. The stereological method has also been compared with a method using manual outlining plus thresholding.18 In 28 patients investigated for suspected dementia bilateral medial temporal lobe volumes were measured with both methods. The stereological method gave systematically lower medial temporal lobe (MTL) volumes with a mean volume in the patient group of 13,3 cm3 (SD 2.2) compared with 14.9 cm3 (SD 2.4) with manual outlining plus thresholding. This difference (−1.6 cm3) was statistically significant (p< 0,001, pairedt test). The correlations between the two methods were high (0.84, p<0,001, Pearsson correlation coefficient 0.71, p<0.001 within class correlation (Kendall τ)). Sex differences were also detected by the two methods. Men (n=11) had a 2.9 cm3 larger MTL than women (n=17) using manual outlining+thresholding and a 2.2 cm3 larger MTL using stereology. Both differences were statistically significant (p<0.01,t test). These data clearly showed that despite the not surprising systematic difference between the two methods there was a good agreement in ranking the relative relation between volumes within the group. This means that the faster stereology method should be comparable with manual outlining methods for sensitivity.
+VISUAL RATING
+The MTA was assessed visually by one rater (PS), who was blinded to the subjects' age, diagnosis, and sex. Scores ranged from 0 (no atrophy) to 4 (severe atrophy). The rating scale is based on a visual estimation of both the volume of the medial temporal lobe,, left and right side separately.5 Rating was performed on T1 weighted coronal slices (hard copies) according to example images published earlier.6 This visual method of scoring has a reasonably good between and within rater reliability.6 For this study a modification was made to rate left and right MTA separately.
+STATISTICAL METHODS
+One way ANOVA and χ2 were used for group comparisons. Tukey-Kramer HSD was used for pairwise comparisons. The discriminative power of volumetry and visual rating between the pairwise combinations of groups (Alzheimer's disease-non-demented, Alzheimer's disease-other dementias, and other dementias-non-demented) were analyzed by using three logistic regression models (main effect models). The first model included MMSE score only, the second model MMSE score and volumetry and the third MMSE score and visual rating (left and right combined). We wanted to test the discriminative power only of MMSE, volumetry, and visual rating and not of age and sex. For this reason we decided not to include them into the models and found this to be justified by the finding that including age and sex into the models resulted in only marginal changes.
+The volumetry variables were continuous and the visual rating variable comprised three categories: 0 (reference), 1, and >1. The cross classification was based on the estimated logistic probabilities from the three models. The chosen cut off point was 0.5. Those with predicted probabilities above 0.5 were classified into one group and those below 0.5 into a second group. The results are shown as sensitivity, specificity, and an overall rate of correct classification (percentage), calculated from the cross classification of observed and predicted group membership. In addition, 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) were calculated according to the method described by Carrington Reid19 as follows: sensitivity±1.96 (sensitivity×(1−sensitivity)/n). A p value>0.05 was considered not significant.
+Results
+The demographic data of the study group is presented in table 1. The results of the visual ratings and volumetry are presented in tables2 and 3. Both methods yielded statistically significant differences between the diagnostic groups and non-dementias, but not between Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. The patients with Alzheimer's disease showed significantly smaller MTA volumes than those with non-dementias measured both visually and with volumetry. Also the other dementias group had smaller MTA than the non-dementias group.
+Distribution of the rating of MTA in the study groups AD, OD, and ND (left/right)
+Volumetry in AD, OD, and ND
+Diagnostic value for volumetry and visual rating of MTA.
+Diagnostic value of volumetry and visual rating of MTA
+Diagnostic value of volumetry and visual rating of MTA
+The first model including the variable for MMSE score was significant in all comparisons. In the second and third models, the variable for MMSE score and volumetry/visual rating were significant (comparing Alzheimer's disease and non-dementias, and other dementias and non-dementias). When comparing Alzheimer's disease and other dementias only the variable for MMSE score was significant. Thus the final diagnostic accuracy was calculated using the scond and third logistic regression models adjusting for MMSE score. In tables 4-6 the specificity, sensitivity, and percentage correct classification, based on the three models, are given. The tables show that visual rating yielded a diagnostic gain for Alzheimer's disease over the MMSE, whereas volumetry did not. In separating the other dementias from non-dementias, visual rating added almost 30% to the sensitivity, but nothing to the specificity, whereas volumetry did not add to the MMSE despite the significant variables. In distinguishing Alzheimer's disease from other dementias both MTA assessments had no further predictive value (non-significant variables) over MMSE score, adjusted for sex and age.
+To further clarify the results of the logistic models we plotted the predicted probability for each subject to group membership (only Alzheimer's disease or control) in the figure A–C.
+Plots of predicted probability (p values) using three logistic regression models to differentiate patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) from controls (C). Each circle represents one subject. The cut off level used was 0.5, and the misclassified subjects are marked.
+The actual time needed for volumetry (only the point counting of the medial temporal lobes and the volume) was 10–12 minutes/subject and for visual rating 1–2 minutes/subject.
+Discussion
+In this study we compared two methods for measuring medial temporal lobe atrophy in a large sample of patients evaluated for dementia. We found that both methods yielded significant differences in patients with Alzheimer's disease compared with patients with other dementias and non-dementias. However, in terms of diagnostic gain over the screening MMSE score only, visually rated MTA added to the sensitivity in separating Alzheimer's disease and other dementias from non-dementias. Visually rated MTA also added to the sensitivity in discriminating Alzheimer's disease from other dementias whereas volumetric MTA assessments had a limited value in this.
+We investigated patients who were referred to our clinic for evaluation of suspected dementia. The patients were unselectively and consecutively recruited and no exclusions were made except for secondary dementias (n=10) and those patients for whom the MR images were of poor quality (n=9). By doing this we tested the methods in a true clinical setting. Using the clinical diagnosis made by clinicians not involved in this study at follow up and having the MR images evaluated by researchers unaware of the clinical data, we aimed to avoid investigation and review bias.19 In addition we focused on the clinical usefulness of the methods, defined in this context as a method that is both easy to use and gives satisfactory discriminative power. To this end we used a different way of evaluating the sensitivity and specificity for the methods by including a comparison with the discriminative power of MMSE scores, to reflect more the clinical decision making situation, in which the MMSE is usually done before ancillary studies are ordered. Moreover, a comparison was made between patients with Alzheimer's disease and patients with other dementias as well as between these two groups and non-dementias.
+We found the diagnostic accuracy to be very high for the combination of MMSE and visual rating of MTA, differentiating Alzheimer's disease from non-demented patients with a sensitivity of 95% (95% CI 88–98%), a specificity of 98% (95% CI 95–100%), and a correct classification of 96% (95%CI 92–100%). Our volumetric method showed a slightly lower degree of correct classification (93% (95% CI 86–98%)) which is in agreement with findings of other groups. For instance, Laakso et al 8reported an overall correct classification of 92% discriminating Alzheimer's disease from controls using volumetry in a slightly larger sample.
+Of special interest is the reasonably high sensitivity (82 (CI 75–69%)) of MTA for the diagnosis of other dementias, which included vascular dementia (n=21), frontal lobe dementia (n=4), and unspecified dementia (n=11), but were grouped together as other dementias for statistical reasons versus non-dementias. As could be expected the MMSE had low sensitivity for other dementias, but the added value of MTA suggests medial temporal lobe involvement in some of these non-Alzheimer's disease dementias.20 21 This also explains the weaker performance of MTA in discriminating Alzheimer's disease from other dementias. Few other studies have considered the problem of discriminating Alzheimer's disease from other dementias using MTA or MRI. Laakso et al 9have compared Alzheimer's disease with Parkinson's disease (with and without dementia) and vascular dementia and found no differences between the groups for medial temporal lobe volumes. Recently, Frisoniet al 10 compared volumetry of the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex in patients with Alzheimer's disease and patients with frontotemporal dementia and found equal atrophy in the entorhinal cortex but more severe hippocampal atrophy in Alzheimer's disease. However, in all these studies, including ours, coexistence of Alzheimer's disease and the other dementias could not be ruled out, despite a follow up period of 6 months in our study. In a recent study on patients with histologically confirmed dementia with Lewy bodies and patients with Alzheimer's disease; however, visually rated MTA on MRI was able to differentiate both groups with high accuracy.22
+Our volumetry focused on the MTL, but visual rating probably also included more lateral parts, which were found to raise the correct classification of Alzheimer's disease from 80% to 91% in a study by De Leon et al.2 This is further supported by findings from Frisoni et al 23 in which a sensitivity of 85% and specificity of 95% were found in discriminating patients with Alzheimer's disease from controls, using a combination of the width of temporal horn, width of choroidal fissure, and height of hippocampus.
+It is not fully evaluated which substructures of the medial temporal lobes best characterise Alzheimer's disease—the entorhinal cortex,24 the hippocampus,8 or both.25 Juottonen et al 25 evaluated the discriminative power of the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus. The sensitivity in detecting Alzheimer's disease was similar for both (80%) but the entorhinal cortex was 3% more specific (94%). Adding sex to the regression analysis increased the sensitivity to 90%, but had no influence on specificity. This illustrates that including other variables into the discriminant models may increase the diagnostic accuracy. We also included, apart from sex and age, MMSE scores into the discriminative model and when adding rating and volumetry this resulted in very high sensitivity and specificity.
+It could be argued that the comparison of visual and volumetric analysis is hampered by using a less valid stereological method instead of semiautomated manual tracings and by using a slice thickness of 2.8 mm instead of the 1.5 mm typically seen in studies such as this. The first argument is dealt with in an earlier study18 in which we compared both methods and found that there was a good agreement in ranking the relative relation between volumes within the group under study. This means that the faster stereology method should be comparable with manual outlining methods for sensitivity. Using a smaller slice thickness would limit the investigation to highly selected research samples as both scan time and image analysis time would be significantly increased. There is also a trade off between high resolution (and longer scan time) and movement artifacts, especially in large clinical samples such as these. The slice thickness we chose may thus be regarded as a compromise. Most importantly, the present paper compared two different methods on the same set of images. Probably both methods could benefit from a smaller slice thickness. However, this was not regarded as a major objective of the present study.
+Taking into account that visual rating is rapid (1–2 min/subject) and can be applied to all kind of (coronal) MRI images regardless of type of imager or protocol, the method could be implemented into the standard clinical routines in dementia investigations, provided that the rater has some experience in visual assessment of MTA.
+Acknowledgments
+The research of PS at the Karolinska Institute was funded by The Karolinska Institiute Research Funds and Hjärnf.
+1. Why was this debt allowed to reach such an unacceptable level?
+2. Why was the this debt not reported to Councillors much sooner?
+3. Why was this large and significant debt not brought to the attention of Councillors when the annual budget for 2013-14 was agreed earlier this year?
+The District Auditor asked the Council's Chief Executive to respond to my questions. I reproduce the Chief Executive's reply in full reply below. This reply to my questions provides the most detailed explanation of events surrounding the TansEuropa debt saga to date. It also raises some extremely serious questions about how the Council managed these events, not least of which is how the people of Thanet and the vast majority of their elected Councillors were kept in the dark about the huge gamble with public money for 3 years, and the apparent absence of robust due diligence into TransEuropa and its Italian Investor. I will be raising these questions in future postings on this blog site.
+You could help me by post any questions you may have on this scandal and please, please let me have any information you may have which you think is relevant. This is without doubt one of the most serious financial scandals to have hit Thanet Council and I want to ensure that the truth is made public!
+Detailed discussions began with Transeuropa back in November 2010. At that time Transeuropa wished to review the tariff agreement it had with the council due to escalating fuel prices. These discussions culminated in a meeting in Ostend in March 2011 with both Transeuropa and the council’s Ostend counterparts. Due to the increased fuel prices and the price war being waged between the cross channel operators (particularly as a result of the French government’s deficit funding for Sea France), Transeuropa requested temporary support to ensure the ongoing future of the business. A three month extension of payment terms for fees was subsequently agreed alongside a payment plan to 2014 for existing debt. Ostend also agreed to provide support by temporarily waiving an element of their charges. Transeuropa then entered into discussions with potential investment partners and requested that the deferral of fees be extended until an investment partner was in place. This was agreed subject to regular review and on condition that payments of £80k per month were received in respect of the outstanding debt. Ultimately an agreement was reached with an Italian investor in November 2012 and the council reiterated the need for normal payments to recommence. A third vessel commenced sailings in February 2013. However, in April 2013, this vessel had to be returned to P&O as the promised funding had not been released from the Italian investor. Some of Transeuropa’s creditors subsequently took the opportunity to seize the remaining two vessels causing Transeuropa to cease operations and prompt insolvency proceedings. A sum of circa £3.4m now remains outstanding to the council. This debt can be broken down as follows:
+2010/11 £734k
+2011/12 £1255k
+2012/13 £1188k
+2013/14 £225k
+1. Why was this debt allowed to reach such an unacceptable level?
+Throughout the negotiations with Transeuropa, the council was keen to ensure the continuation of Transeuropa’s business. The council worked closely with its counterparts at Ostend who were also keen to work with Transeuropa to help secure their future. The council extended its credit terms on the basis that it was both necessary, to help Transeuropa stay in business, and reasonable, as similar arrangements had also been agreed with the Ostend port.
+Discussions with Transeuropa began during 2010/11 when the council first became aware of their financial difficulties. A payment plan in respect of 2010/11 debt was agreed in March 2011, together with a three month extension of payment terms for fees. Discussions during 2012 showed that Transeuropa were actively in negotiations with potential investment partners and it therefore seemed reasonable to allow them time to complete these discussions. A sum of £80k per month was paid off the debt in each month from July 2012 through to September 2012 which was a positive sign that the position was improving. Indeed, in November 2012 agreement was signed between Transeuropa and an Italian investment company. The purpose of this agreement was to secure the long term future of the operation and also to provide significant investment in the operating line.
+On 22 November 2012 officers met with Transeuropa and their Italian investors. The council was advised that a 4 year repayment plan had been agreed with both the fuel supplier and with Ostend. They also advised that an agreement had been signed with P&O in respect of a third vessel. The Italians agreed to settle the 2010/11 outstanding debt in two payments of £367k and to pay the balance of the debt over a 4 year period with interest at 3.25%. The first payment was due in January 2013. A draft heads of term was drawn up to reflect this and circulated for comments. All parties agreed that the priority was to get monies flowing again and safeguarding the jobs of all employees associated with the line and the supporting services. At this time, therefore, the council was being given firm assurance that their debts would be repaid.
+The introduction of a third vessel to Transeuropa’s fleet, which commenced sailings in February 2013, provided further, material assurance that the new partnership had improved Transeuropa’s fortunes.
+However, the payment of the historic debt from the Italians was not forthcoming despite the council chasing by e-mail from February through to April 2013. The Italians also did not provide the promised funding to Transeuropa which resulted in the third vessel having to be returned to P&O. The other creditors consequently seized the remaining two vessels in the Ostend port. There was nothing that the council could do at this stage to prevent Transeuropa ceasing operations.
+2. Why was this debt not reported to Councillors much sooner? Throughout the negotiations, the course of action with regards to the management of the debt was shared with the Cabinet Leader and Finance Portfolio holder in administration at that time. The current administration were also kept in the picture with regard to the debt position. However, as there was every reason to believe that the debt would be repaid in full in the fullness of time, there was no reason to report this in a Cabinet report to members.. Indeed, the first three repayments had been received at the time of the signing of the accounts which provided the auditors (and the council) with assurance that Transeuropa would honour the debt repayment plan.
+3. Why was this large and significant debt not brought to the attention of Councillors when the annual budget for 2013/14 was agreed earlier this yearAt the time that the budget was set, Transeuropa had entered into an agreement with the Italian investors and the council had no reason to believe that the Italians would not provide the promised funding to Transeuropa under the agreement and also pay the council the historic debt as agreed. There was also no reason to make allowance within the budget for a loss of income from Transeuropa moving forward as it was assumed that the Italian investment had secured the future of Transeuropa’s business.
+However, as part of the budget process, the council makes a financial risk assessment of the level of reserves that it should hold. This includes an assessment
+of the risk of a major council customer going into liquidation. The 2013/14 financial risk assessment of reserves was shown as annex 2 to the budget report that went to Full Council in January 2013. The table within this annex which assessed the appropriate level of the General Fund balance allowed for a sum of £2.2m in respect of a major customer (including Transeuropa) going into liquidation. This was classed as being a medium risk as it was thought that the agreement with the Italians had helped to mitigate this risk. However, as a result of this and the other risks identified, the Council increased its recommended level of General Fund balances to 12% of the net revenue budget requirement. The General Fund balance is currently at this recommended level.
+More questions than answers and clearly a case of the Council being left wrong-footed while other creditors took appropriate action to secure their credit lending and seized the ships. Why does McGonigal even mention draft heads of terms. A useless piece of paper unless signed. We have been let down again by a slick operator with clever lawyers who has shafted us, assisted by the naivety of McGonigal.
+What I would like to know is why Ian Driver is the only councillor kicking up a stink about this. Are the rest of them really so cowed by the "leaders" who have led the way into this mess that they can't bring themselves to question how it happened. I would particularly like to hear from the newly elected UKIP members. Have they been prevented from raising questions by their leader, a former leading light in the party which made this stupid decision...or do they just not care?
+Hear, hear! Cllr Driver should circulte his findings to each TDC councillor and state that he will publish their responses and if he receives no response or refusal to comment that this will be publish too. A deadline of one week should be imposed...they all have email!
+UKIP are new on the Thanet political scene and have no knowledge of this fiasco. I am more concerned why not a single Labour or Conservative councillor has spoken out about this appalling state of affairs. When they had the opportunity to support my proposal to set up an internal scrutiny review 2 weeks ago Labour and Conservative councillors voted against it. The reality is because both Labour and Conservatives were complicit in setting up and maintaining the debt deal with TEF they are now working together to block and investigation and protect their arses. Shame on both parties for trying to cover up this scandal.
+That may be true Ian but UKIPs convert leader ROGER LATCHFORD was a Conservative Deputy Leader under Sandy Ezekiel!
+Hart is responsible for most of this, but Bayford is probably not entirely without criticism. This is why the two of them agreed not to turn the item into a slanging match at the last Council meeting. As for UKIP members, I doubt either Wiltshire or Duncan have the ability to understand let alone ask meaningful questions. Driver is the only one who is not in someone's pocket.
+So, what McGonigal seems to be saying is that it's OK not to report a massive debt to the councillors as long as you "think" it's likely to be repaid. If I read the reply correctly, TDC approached the auditors to ask if it was OK to hide the debt from councillors and the auditors agreed. The reply doesn't explain WHY the officers and leadership were trying to hide the debt from our councillors.
+I find it extraordinary that the auditors agreed to this arrangement. Accounts are supposed to provide a true and accurate picture of the finances. They can't possibly be true if they include sums listed as income when those sums have not, in fact, been received. It's OK to put those sums in a budget because budgets are forward-looking and you can't know that you won't receive the money until you don't. Accounts, on the other hand are backward looking. They list income received and expenditure made. You aren't supposed to list it as income if you haven't received it and you aren't supposed to list it as expenditure if you haven't spent it. That's why people who work in companies aren't allowed to spend money until the start of the financial year and why they have to spend any additional money in the budget before the end of the financial year. Did the District Auditor sign off the council's accounts?
+Was there just euphoria that Transeuropa had got an Italian bank on board, or was the bank's standing assessed with reference to bodies that monitor same. What were the percentage risk levels, what was their reputation/track record, did they have the scale of resources to withstand market fluctuations without "pulling the rug", What checks and questions were asked.
+If this is the response of the Chief Executive and S151 Officer of the Council it is an admission of a total lack of judgment both in terms of financial reporting and protecting the public purse. These responsibilities cannot be deflected onto the Councillors. Nobody so naive or negligent of their role should ever be in any such high ranking position. What else has been going on? Nobody running the smallest business in Thanet would have made these disastrous decisions once let alone continually unchecked over more than two years. To cap it all it was only the actions of other creditors that means we know anything about this at all today. The Chief Executive and S151 Officer was negligent in allowing this debt to spiral out of control for years with no security at all it seems to fall back on.
+[Part Three of a three-part story about what happened when my kids decided we should “Help Haiti” in 2010.]
+Recap of the previous two posts about Compassion and the Earthquake in Haiti: Five years ago a catastrophic 7.0 quake struck Haiti. My five year old twins heard about it and wanted to help. This was new. We tried to listen and equip them to try something. We did a little bake and craft sale with a $500 goal. Our friends, neighbors, school, church, and facebook community responded with lavish generosity. We became a bridge for sending $33,000 to Haiti that year. It was completely unexpected. [For the full scoop read “Compassion Catapult – The Earthquake in Haiti” and “Contagious Compassion – The Earthquake in Haiti.”]
+- Valentines Day Ornaments 2010
+- After raising $37,000 for Haiti in 2010
+- ©Aimee Fritz
+Whenever people hear this crazy story they have lots of great questions:
+Why do you think this happened?
+Why did your kids want to do something?
+Why did the school want to help?
+Why did you keep saying Yes?
+Why was it so contagious?
+Why did it get so big?
+I have the same questions. I think these are deep Soul questions. Based in deep Soul hunger. And I think the questions and hunger are the same for all of us.
+I have some answers. But first I must make some things clear. The outpouring of Compassion wasn’t from a certain quality of parenting. It wasn’t from a special knack for witty facebook posts. It wasn’t from having perfect children. It wasn’t from right choices or hard work.
+I think there is a reason my kids wanted to help Haiti on Tuesday, January 10, 2010. And I think it’s because of what happened on Monday, January 9th.
+On a quiet wintery night after long busy day, Chris took over the whole bedtime routine for our three kids. After putting little Greta in her crib, Caleb and Zoë snuggled in for a story with Dad. They were especially interested in stories from The Big Picture Story Bible and asked lots questions – “what does it mean that Jesus said he could rebuild the temple in 3 days?” “why does that lamb have blood on it?” “what does it mean to be born again?” I’m so glad laid-back Chris had tuck-in duty that night! They had never asked me questions like that before.
+Chris sensed something stirring. He listened. He gave simple, short answers. It’s not something we had ever directly talked about with them, but then Chris went for it: He asked Zoë and Caleb if they would like to talk to Jesus, ask him to forgive their sins, and ask him help them to follow him every day. He wasn’t expecting any clear responses to such big, weird, intangible questions. There was no hurry. He was just throwing it out there.
+But my kids each wanted Jesus that night. They prayed. Chris told them it was a very, very special night because something amazing had happened. He told them we’d been quietly praying for them since before they were born, that they would choose Jesus someday, and that it was the most important thing they could ever do in their whole lives. The kids went to bed smiling.
+I wrote the date and a note in the book so they could remember that night whenever that story was read. At breakfast the next day I put a birthday candle in each of their cinnamon raisin English muffins. We sang “Happy Birthday” to help explain how their souls were given a new start that night, like being born again. Looking at the candles I talked about the little flame inside their hearts now that Jesus was inside, and how they could guard that flame and help it grow as they learned about and loved Jesus. It was a sweet morning. Greta cheered and shouted “more!” when we sang.
+The earthquake in Haiti happened later that day. Caleb and Zoë noticed me tearing up on our 5 minute drive home from school when NPR reported on the quake. They asked many, many questions. That night at bedtime the kids asked more questions about Haiti curled into me on my bed. We prayed for our usual things, and I added, “Lord, please show us what you’d like the Fritz Family to do to help Haiti.”
+Caleb sat up and said, “I want to send LOTS of food, Mama.”
+And Zoë said, “That’s a good idea, Caleb, but we need to do a >program<.”
+I asked Zoë what a “program” was and she said, “Mama, you’ll go to churches on Saturdays and Sundays and talk to them about Haiti. Then they’ll want to give money to help them. Then you’ll bring it down to Haiti and they’ll get stronger and help the other people.” I quietly asked her who “the other people” were. She replied, “Haiti can help, like, Mexico, and Mexico can help Africa, and Africa can help another country. See, the whole world will be better if we help Haiti get stronger.”
+I was speechless. We had never talked about anything like this ever.
+I asked Zoë where she heard this great idea and she said, “Well, Mama, you just asked God to give us ideas, and this is the idea I got.” So was she telling me the idea was, like, from God?
+Caleb told me he was a very good builder and that he wanted to go build a house in Haiti so kids wouldn’t be in the street. We prayed for little babies without mommies and mommies without babies and for broken bones.
+My heart was swollen with love and gratitude and pain all at once.
+What had just happened?
+I think God was changing their hearts. I think when they asked Jesus to come into their hearts the night before, he actually did. I think they were being transformed.
+I know this sounds so mystical and outlandish. But I don’t know how else to explain it. When we ask Jesus to come into our lives, at any age, everything changes. My kids started becoming different people the very next day – curious about others, talking to God expecting answers, and coming up with big ideas out of nowhere.
+And it didn’t stop that night. They continued to ask big questions and expect big things all through the ever-growing Haiti fundraisers. To rebuild a house cost $2000, when thousands more kept coming in, they asked, “Mom, it’s not just a house for Haiti – it’s a whole city!” They believed they were making a difference. There was a lot of spontaneous dancing.
+They never asked to keep any of the money handed to them. That didn’t feel normal. Kids love to get new stuff. When Caleb found a quarter on the sidewalk he shouted, “More for Haiti!” and plunked it in the jar at home instead of wanting to buy candy. During dinner one night, Zoë told us, “You know what I would do with $100? I would buy a hundred $1 toys for kids that have no toys. And I would give them most of my toys, too.” So when her next birthday came she asked for money for Haiti instead of presents for herself. All her idea. (Caleb wanted presents and that was 100% okay with us.)
+Please note: There was/is still plenty of bickering, crying, lying, and whining. Our home didn’t suddenly become a happy musical where we danced through our days and laughed off problems. Life was/is still hard.
+When we finally put away the sprinkles, glitter, and poster board in 2010, the Compassion stayed. Jesus had moved in.
+So what’s the answer to all those questions? The simplest way to say it is: Jesus.
+Compassion took root in our family and our community because of Jesus.
+Of course there are millions of people doing amazing compassionate things that don’t care about Jesus at all. So many of the people that participated in our fundraisers didn’t like Jesus and thought Christians were terrible. But they were hungry to do something good. They wanted to help people. Their hearts were broken by deep suffering and they were compelled to act. I think that was Jesus in them, calling them to love.
+I think so many kids at school scoured the junk drawer for spare change because they wanted to be a part of something good. I kept saying Yes to the requests for help because I couldn’t stand thinking about an elderly woman sleeping in the dirt in front of her leveled house. More people forwarded facebook posts and sent money because the hope was contagious. Friends and strangers got swept up in the idea that change was possible in a place as desperate as Haiti.
+I think Jesus is at the root of those desires, that sense of justice, that hope, and that vision. His deep, unchanging, relentless love for us (his compassion for us) is contagious. When we begin to grasp that love we begin to copy it. And when we do, we seem to be rewarded with a heaping measure of contentment and hope.
+Our family lives in this by having a Family Compassion Focus each year. We look for new ways to love and serve people we didn’t know before. Every year has been so different. We’ve focused on Orphans, Clean Water, and Homelessness. Our kids keep coming up with unique ideas. Chris and I keep trying to stay out of the way. This year the kids voted for Haiti again. Who knows what will happen.
+I just read this whole thing to my Zoë, home from 5th grade with a touch of the flu. Over her bowl of rice she laughed remembering how fun it was to make all the Valentine ornaments and to give her birthday party to Haiti. I asked her why she still keeps wanting to do all this Compassion stuff. She said,
+“Because it feels good inside, Mom. It feels right. It feels warm.”
+You are loved.
+I hope you have tons of questions about Jesus, your Soul, and Compassion. It’s never too late. You can ask them in the comments below. If you are looking for more ideas, I have some on the page called Soul. I really hope you find what you’re looking for.
+© Aimee Fritz and Family Compassion Focus, 2014-2015
+Pakistan vs. South Africa: Scorecard, Session Recaps for 1st Test in Abu Dhabi
+Pakistan vs. South Africa: Scorecard, Session Recaps for 1st Test in Abu Dhabi
+Pakistan and South Africa commenced battle in the first of a two-Test series in Abu Dhabi, knowing defeat would instantly end their chances of overall victory.
+The world's leading Test side were made to pay the price for some poor batting on a decent pitch as Pakistan's spinners made the difference.
+Here is the team news, toss details and session-by-session updates from the match.
+A live, in-running scorecard can be found here on Cricinfo.
+Abu Dhabi, Day 4, Result
+South Africa 249 & 232
+Pakistan 442 & 45 for 3 (13.5 overs)
+They made hard work of the job, but Pakistan eventually completed a seven-wicket victory over South Africa in the first Test on Thursday.
+Requiring 40 runs to win, the hosts certainly did not threaten any records with the way they went about the chase, apart from—perhaps—the world's lowest score when they were reduced to 7 for three.
+Vernon Philander had Shan Masood caught behind by AB de Villiers to start the mini-collapse, which continued when Dale Steyn outwitted Azhar Ali.
+When Khurram Manzoor also fell to the Philander-de Villiers combination, concern was clear on the Pakistan pavilion.
+Misbah-ul-Haq (28) and Younis Khan (9) eventually saw the team home, clinching victory with a six.
+Abu Dhabi, Day 4, Tea
+South Africa 249 & 232
+Pakistan 442
+A total of 40 runs is all Pakistan require to wrap up victory against South Africa on Day 4 of the first Test.
+The hosts finally killed off the South African tail thanks to Saeed Ajmal, who took three wickets during the afternoon session.
+Faf du Plessis saw another three runs added to the tourists' lunch total before he handed a return catch to the spinner, and then Junaid Khan removed AB de Villiers for 90 as South Africa's last established batsman tried to attack.
+Ajmal picked up the wicket of Vernon Philander before registering another caught-and-bowled to claim Morne Morkel—ending the innings.
+Pakistan will now emerge from tea with the simple job of completing an impressive victory.
+Abu Dhabi, Day 4, Lunch
+South Africa 249 & 130 for 6 (55 overs)
+Pakistan 442
+AB de Villiers did his best to delay the inevitable by hitting a half-century during the first session of Day 4, but South Africa still reached lunch looking certain to taste defeat against Pakistan.
+Trailing by 63 runs, the tourists will do well to even make Pakistan bat again in this Test match. They have four wickets with which to achieve that consolatory aim.
+De Villers will be key. Set on 52 not out, South Africa will need him to make a big century to even have a chance of rescuing the match.
+Faf du Plessis will resume alongside de Villiers on eight not out, having stubbornly seen off 47 balls so far.
+Nightwatchman Dale Steyn (7) was the first batsman to depart on Thursday, misjudging the flight of Zulfiqar Babar's left-arm spin to leave his stumps exposed.
+Junaid Khan then struck the legs of JP Duminy to remove the middle-order man for a duck, leaving South Africa on 109 for six.
+Spin has been one of the decisive factors in the Test match, swinging it in favour of the hosts, who will surely polish off their rivals by the end of Day 4.
+Abu Dhabi, Day 3, Stumps
+South Africa 249 & 72 for 4 (26 overs)
+Pakistan 442
+South Africa are heading for a heavy defeat in the first of their Two-Test series against Pakistan, after finishing Day 3 with a 121-run deficit.
+Graeme Smith's men only have six wickets with which to rescue what is now a dire situation, after they failed with the bat for a second time on Wednesday.
+They made the right type of start to the day's final session after tea, removing Pakistan's remaining batsmen for a total cost of 13 runs. Dale Steyn claimed the wickets of Adnan Akmal (32) and Junaid Khan (3), leaving South Africa with a 193-run deficit to close.
+However, Akmal was instantly busy behind the stumps as Pakistan's bowlers turned the heat on their tourists, claiming two catches and a stumping.
+Alviro Petersen departed for 17 off Mohammad Irfan before Smith was teased out of his crease by Ajmal. Jacques Kallis was out for a duck, making it five runs from two innings for the veteran.
+The hammer blow was still to come as Hashim Amla, centurion from the first innings, also found Akmal's gloves off the bowling of Zulfiqar Babar to leave South Africa in dire straits.
+AB de Villers (11 not out) and Steyn (0 not out) will attempt to rescue the situation on Thursday.
+Abu Dhabi, Day 3, Tea
+South Africa 249
+Pakistan 429 for 8 (135.2 overs)
+South Africa finally made some inroads into the Pakistan batting lineup during the second session of Day 3, but Misbah-ul-Haq's century was the highlight as he led his side on to 429 for eight.
+Misbah made exactly 100, including eight fours, which goes some way to highlighting the intelligence of his innings. There were few thunderous blows to the boundary as he consistently picked holes in the field to keep the scoreboard ticking over.
+Dale Steyn eventually trapped Misbah lbw, at which point Pakistan were 394 for six. Asad Shafiq had earlier fallen for 54 to JP Duminy.
+Saeed Ajmal later departed to Vernon Philander, and tea was called after the second ball of the 136th over when Zulfiqar Babar was run out by Steyn.
+Adnan Akmal and Junaid Khan will resume the final session, hoping to extend Pakistan's lead of 180.
+Abu Dhabi, Day 3, Lunch
+South Africa 249
+Pakistan 352 for 4 (112 overs)
+Pakistan added 89 runs for the loss of a solitary wicket as they increased their lead on Day 3 of the first Test against South Africa.
+Khurram Manzoor's magnificent innings finally came to an end after he made 146 to give Pakistan a fantastic platform. Manzoor set a new record by a Pakistan batsman against South Africa, surpassing Azhar Mahmood's previous best of 136, per Cricinfo.
+Vernon Philander was the man to make the breakthrough, encouraging an outside edge through to Jacques Kallis at slip.
+However, there was little else to encourage the tourists, who made little use of the new ball on a lifeless wicket.
+Misbah-ul-Haq, arguably Pakistan's most in-form batsman, brought up his half-century early in the day and will resume on 78 not out. He has a well-set Asah Shafiq, who reached lunch on 40, for company.
+The lead currently stands at 103 runs with six wickets remaining.
+Abu Dhabi, Day 2, Stumps
+South Africa 249
+Pakistan 263 for 3 (84 overs)
+Pakistan finished Day 2 in Abu Dhabi leading South Africa by 14 runs with seven wickets still remaining, following a fine century from opener Khurram Manzoor.
+The 27-year-old struck his first international ton to finish the day on 131 not out, scoring steadily at a strike rate of just over 50.
+South Africa did manage to claim two wickets in the final session, AB de Villiers taking a low catch to dismiss Azhar Ali off the bowling of Vernon Philander for 11.
+Younis Khan soon followed, with the veteran batsman scoring just one before he received a sharp, bouncing delivery from Morne Morkel—the pick of South Africa's bowlers—which he gloved to Alviro Petersen.
+Misbah-ul-Haq helped steady the ship, though, scoring 44 runs before the close to see Pakistan into a first innings lead at the end of the day's play.
+Abu Dhabi, Day 2, Tea
+South Africa 249
+Pakistan 155 for 1 (51 overs)
+JP Duminy was the only South African to make a breakthrough as Pakistan's top order continued to defy recent form on Day 2 in Abu Dhabi.
+Duminy denied Shan Masood a debut Test century when he trapped him lbw for 75. It ended a 135-run opening stand for the hosts.
+Masood, after his nervy start, showed a full range of strokes in exchange for eight boundaries. Scoring at marginally better than a run every two balls, he suggested at a promising future in the game.
+South Africa would have hoped Masood's removal would spark an avalanche of Pakistan wickets, but Azhar Ali merely dug in to make sure there were no more setbacks before tea.
+He will resume on 7 not out, while Khurram Manzoor leads the way on 72 not out.
+Abu Dhabi, Day 2, Lunch
+South Africa 249
+Pakistan 77-0 (22 overs)
+Pakistan finished the opening session of Day 2 in command after they required 19 balls to wrap up South Africa's innings upon resumption.
+Hashim Amla, so imperious on Monday, fell to his second ball on Tuesday, caught in the slips off Mohammad Irfan without adding to his overnight score of 118. South Africa added four runs in total to reach 249 and then failed to respond with the ball.
+Debutant Shan Masood looked every bit the rookie during the early stages of his innings, edging his first delivery safe before giving Jacques Kallis a chance that the veteran put down. It was the start of a man desperate to impress.
+However, he eventually settled to put on an unbroken 77-run partnership with Khurram Manzoor before lunch—Pakistan's first half-century opening stand in over a year, per Cricinfo.
+Manzoor looked more comfortable, particularly against Australia's spinners, and completed the session on 41 not out to hand Pakistan a solid foundation on which to build a match-winning position.
+They trailed by 172 runs at lunch, with all 10 wickets still intact.
+Abu Dhabi, Day 1, Stumps
+South Africa 245-8 (90 overs)
+Zulfiqar Babar emerged from a slow start to his Test debut in order to rip through South Africa's middle-to-lower order, surely handing the first day's momentum to Pakistan.
+Zulfiqar, making his first Test appearance at the age of 34, took three wickets in a six-over spell to damage the great work done by Hashim Amla, who finished the day unbeaten on 118.
+South Africa appeared in control on 199 for four, with JP Duminy well set alongside Amla on 57. However, Duminy attempted one too many sweeps as he top-edged behind square to start the tourists' collapse.
+Zulfiqar did his damage by bowling round the wicket, with Faf du Plessis next to depart for a solitary run as he edged to gully.
+Robin Peterson was then done through the gate as Zulfiqar completed an electric session, but there was still time for Saeed Ajmal to trap Vernon Philander lbw for three.
+Amla remains South Africa's chief form of resistance heading into Day 2, after he posted his 20th career Test century to reach stumps alongside Dale Steyn (13).
+Abu Dhabi, Day 1, Tea
+South Africa 152-4 (55 overs)
+AB de Villiers was the only man to fall as South Africa rebuilt during the second session of the first day. They added 86 runs for the loss of one wicket between lunch and tea, meaning the final session will determine which side enters Day 2 on top.
+De Villiers departed for 19 having never looked comfortable during his 76-ball stay. His dismissal came in crazy circumstances, run out after he held his pose for an extended period of time.
+An initial lbw shout from Pakistan prompted de Villiers to hold his stride—with the aim of showing the umpire he was a long way forward. However, his back foot was not behind the line, allowing the hosts to run him out for gully.
+Crucially for Graeme Smith's men, Hashim Amla remained at the crease on an unbeaten 71, which included eight boundaries. He looked solid and classy, as did JP Duminy who returns from tea on 36 not out.
+Debutant Zulfiqar Babar was Pakistan's most expensive bowler, conceding 40 runs from 10 overs, but Mohammad Irfan, Junaid Khan and Saeed Ajmal have all worked hard to keep the run rate down.
+Abu Dhabi, Day 1, Lunch
+South Africa 66-3 (26 overs)
+South Africa failed to capitalise on the toss as they lost three wickets prior to lunch against Pakistan on Day 1 of the first Test in Abu Dhabi.
+On a relatively batsmen-friendly wicket, openers Alviro Petersen and Graeme Smith both departed for a total of 19 runs to hand Pakistan an early boost.
+Mohammad Irfan took both scalps, finding some extra bounce to remove Petersen before having Smith caught behind.
+The South Africa captain had looked rusty prior to that moment, so it brought some calm to the innings when Hashim Amla arrived at the crease. He put on an unbeaten 30 alongside AB de Villiers (11).
+Jacques Kallis was the other man to depart, making five before Junaid Khan found an inside edge.
+Toss and Team News
+South Africa skipper Graeme Smith won the toss and opted to bat first in Abu Dhabi.
+There was only one significant piece of team news for South Africa, who welcomed back batsman JP Duminy.
+Pakistan handed debuts to opening batsman Shan Masood and left-arm spinner Zulfiqar Babar, but Abdur Rehman missed out due to a back complaint.
+The pitch, per Cricinfo, was mostly dry and primed for heavy scores.
+Like the new article format? Send us feedback!
+By Dan Gwartney, MD
+The entire “abs” phenomenon has become overly complicated. Videos and trainers talk about upper abs, lower abs, mid abs, etc; devices have been constructed whose origins could possibly be traced to the Marquis de Sade; fitness routines gyrate the mid-section in directions Elvis couldn’t match. People are certain that the secret to showing off a great set of abs involves some specific geometric angle that can only be achieved in a zero-gravity environment.
+Here are the cold, hard facts: abs can be developed by performing about 5 minutes of a combination of floor exercises, probably the same ones taught in gym classes in the 1950s. The single-most common mistake that can be made in regard to getting a “six-pack” is overtraining
+The “abs” refer to the rectus abdominis, a set of connected muscle bellies separated by fibrous bands that give the hallmark six-pack. Additionally, the obliques provide those serrations along the frontal sides, seen so often on magazine covers, but rarely in one’s everyday experience. [Purists will point out that there are two layers to the obliques and alert uncaring fellow commuters to the failure to acknowledge the transversalis muscle, but the internal obliques and transversalis are not visible.] The abs are predominantly fast-twitch fibers, meaning they respond best to brief, high-intensity contractions.
+Bear in mind, focusing on the abs for 5 minutes does not suggest that the muscle is resting the remainder of the day. The abs are involved in core stabilization (somehow, this became a trendy phrase) and stabilizes the trunk during other high-intensity movements. In fact, the abs can be incorporated into many other lifts to augment the daily training volume and intensity. Take for example the lat pulldown. Using an underhand grip and bringing the bar down in front of your face/body/frontal plane, you can contract and relax the abs with the movement, allowing the muscle to participate in the exercise and benefit from increasing resistance as the lats get stronger. Focusing on the abs during the lat pull will also tend to slow the movement, preventing the jerky motion seen frequently in the gym and hopefully reducing the risk of soft tissue injury. Similar involvement can be included in the triceps pushdown, bar curls, dips, etc. The possible exception to the brief, high-intensity movements for abdominal muscle development may be, shockingly enough, Pilates. The “lengthening and strengthening” techniques have provided impressive results for some practitioners.
+The final words in regard to developing the abs are a) brief, high-intensity sessions for focusing on the abs; b) abdominal muscles inclusion in other movements and for core stabilization is highly beneficial; c) Pilates-like activities can provide complementary benefits; d) overtraining is detrimental to abdominal development.
+DROP THAT BODY FAT
+What is truly amazing, when one steps back and considers the issue, is that most people trying to “get abs” often have good-to-excellent abdominal muscle development. The failing most people have in realizing abdominal success is an inability to see (or display) their abs due to the blanketing effect of subcutaneous fat. What is necessary to reveal abs developed through dedicated exercise is a reduction in body fat. Regardless of how well developed a person’s abs are, they will remain hidden unless a person can drop his or her body fat. How lean the body composition needs to be varies a bit from person to person, but most people will need to drop the body fat percentage below 10 percent, without catabolizing away the hard-earned muscle.
+Unfortunately, this requires hypocaloric dieting in addition to exercise. However, there have not been any clear recommendations from the scientific literature as to what combination of diet and exercise best preserves (or builds) muscle mass while reducing body fat. Certainly, there are shelves of books from diet and exercise gurus, but with rare exception, most of these are concerned with merely dropping pounds, not developing a muscular physique.
+It is old news by now, but just a few years ago, the concept of low-carbohydrate diets was considered innovative by some, blasphemous by others. Over time, this method of dieting has been proven to be at least as effective as traditional, low-fat diets and appears to have equal or better clinical safety.1 While low-carbohydrate diets have shown themselves to be effective in weight loss, there has not been as much research beyond the most basic designs. Surprisingly, until this last year, researchers have not looked at relative effectiveness of low-carbohydrate diets compared to low-fat diets, when combined with exercise, in maintaining/building lean mass during fat loss.
+Undoubtedly, many bodybuilders and fitness buffs already realize the value in maintaining a higher protein intake and cutting high-glycemic foods, especially during catabolic times such as the precontest period, when body fat is stripped to low single-digit percentages. Further, the practice of carb-depletion has been used for decades to tighten the skin. Thus, there is a body of “field experience” in regard to using low-carbohydrate diets to maintain/build lean mass while “cutting up.” Now, there is black-and-white evidence about what the best way to train is, if lean mass maintenance/growth during fat loss is the goal. Many personal trainers will likely look at the results and begin applying the formula for many of their clients after reviewing the data presented in these three studies.
+LOW CARBS + EXERCISE WORKS BEST
+The first study, performed at the University of Illinois, studied 48 overweight or obese women who were placed on a high-protein diet (1:1 ratio carbohydrates to protein) or high-carbohydrate diet (4:1 ratio of carbohydrates to protein).2 The diet groups were then divided, with half exercising (five days walking, two days weight training each week), the others not. The high-protein diet groups lost more weight, more fat mass and preserved more lean mass. Exercise helped preserve lean mass in the high-carbohydrate group as well.
+The second, performed at the University of Guelph, Canada, compared four groups of overweight and obese women.3 The subjects were randomly assigned to exercise or non-exercise, and then those two classes were further divided to high-carbohydrate or low-carbohydrate weight-loss programs. The high-carbohydrate group consumed carbohydrates to protein at a ratio of 3:1, whereas the low-carbohydrate group consumed a ratio of 1:1. All the groups lost weight over 12 weeks, ranging from 4.5 pounds for the high-carb, no exercise group to over 15 pounds in the low-carb, exercise group. In fact, the low-carb, no exercise group lost more than the high-carb, exercise group by more than a pound. The authors concluded that a high-protein diet combined with a mix of aerobic/resistance training was superior to a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet with or without exercise in promoting weight loss and improving body composition.
+A third study was performed at the University of Connecticut; professors William Kraemer and Jeff Volek participated in the research, familiar to those well-read in the field of exercise science, in addition to lead author Kevin Ballard.4 This study compared a low-carbohydrate diet to a low-fat diet; alone or in combination with resistance exercise in middle-aged, overweight or obese men. Consistent with previous studies comparing low-carbohydrate and low-fat diets, the low-carbohydrate diet was superior in reducing weight, BMI, percent body fat and abdominal fat. Adding resistance training to a low-carbohydrate diet improved percent body fat lost further. Exercise increased lean mass in subjects consuming both types of diets similarly. In communication with Dr. Volek, he noted that the results reported in this latest study were more dramatic, with the greater weight loss being due, perhaps, to the greater carbohydrate restriction (this diet was ketogenic).5 Also, an increase in lean mass and strength was noted in these subjects (15 percent increase in bench press and squat), as opposed to a reduction in lean mass loss noted in the earlier studies. This may represent a gender effect, as the male subjects would have a greater propensity to build muscle in response to weight training.
+What is the take-home message from these studies? People looking to maintain or even build lean muscle while losing body fat are best served by combining a low-carbohydrate diet with exercise. In men, following a very low-carbohydrate diet sufficient to induce ketosis may be the optimal plan. Further, the exercise should include a significant weightlifting component to stimulate muscle growth, something that does not occur to the same degree with exclusively aerobic exercise.
+Is this likely to be a case where science actually applies to real life? It is highly likely, as it supports the decades-long experiences of bodybuilders who have combined carbohydrate restriction and weight training to develop the washboard abs the drive fitness magazine sales.
+References:
+1. Gardner CD, Kiazand A, et al. Comparison of the Atkins, Zone, Ornish, and LEARN diets for change in weight and related risk factors among overweight premenopausal women. JAMA, 2007;297:969-77.
+2. Layman DK, Evans E, et al. Dietary protein and exercise have additive effects on body composition during weight loss in adult women. J Nutr, 2005;135:1903-10.
+3. Meckling KA, Sherfey R. A randomized trial of hypocaloric high-protein diet, with and without exercise, on weight loss, fitness, and markers of the Metabolic Syndrome in overweight and obese women. Appl Physiol Nutr Metab, 2007;32:743-52.
+4. Ballard KD, Quann EE, et al. Effects of diets restricted in fat and carbohydrate with and without resistance training on body composition and cardiovascular risk. (Abstract). Presented at Experimental Biology 2008, San Diego, CA; April 5-9, 2008.
+5. Personal communication with Jeff Volek, via e-mail, April 17, 2008.
+6. Volek J, Campbell A. Men’s Health TNT Diet: The Explosive New Plan to Blast Fat, Build Muscle, and Get Healthy in 12 Weeks. Rodale Books, New York;2007. ISBN-13: 978-1594866593
+Saturday, May 29,
+1999
+The mutiny of
+Connaught Rangers
+A
+slice of history
+By Thakur
+Ranvir Singh
+IN the history of the British
+armed forces, two mutinies took place. One was the famous
+naval mutiny, well known as the Mutiny on the Bounty, and
+the second but lesser known was the mutiny by an Irish
+regiment in India shortly after World War I in the summer
+of 1920. This mutiny, which lasted for a month, had its
+roots in the political struggle of the Irish people.
+The rebellion or mutiny
+by the famous Connaught Rangers, running parallel to the
+Irish freedom movement under De Valera, was considerably
+influenced by the Indian struggle for Independence.
+Nearly a thousand Irish men who rebelled had no real
+reason for that action except their deep love for their
+motherland and passionate patriotism. They strongly felt
+that British colonial rule was perpetrating grave
+injustice by crushing their countrymen. Hearing of the
+ugly happenings in Ireland, where the Britishers were
+hunting down, torturing and executing freedom fighters,
+the Irish soldiers inwardly simmered.
+The British ensured that
+the newspapers in India did not cover Irish incidents,
+but news of the cruel and inhuman measures taken by
+Britishers against the Irish occasionally filtered into
+the barracks of the Connaught Rangers in Jalandhar
+cantonment where they were stationed. During that
+turbulent period of Irish history, many pitched battles
+were being fought between the Irish Republic Army
+the Sinn Fein and the British security force
+Black and Tans. The news of these battles reached
+Irish soldiers, thousands of miles away in India where a
+similar wind was blowing.
+The fuse blew when one
+of the Rangers got the shocking news that his brother in
+Ireland was hanged by the Crown for giving shelter to
+rebels. He went berserk and beat up an English officer.
+This set off a chain reaction. The soldiers captured the
+armoury, took English officers as hostages, declared
+Jalandhar cantonment as the seat of the free Irish
+Government-in-exile in hardly two days. Caught
+unawares, the British Government in India was shaken to
+the core.
+The Irish soldiers in
+India were not fighting for a piece of territory, but for
+a fundamental principle. Therefore, when they felt
+confident that they were the masters of Jalandhar
+cantonment, they started negotiations for the freedom of
+Ireland in lieu of returning the hostages, releasing the
+armoury and returning the territory of the cantonment.
+How could the British pay heed to such nonsense? To them
+it was tantamount to an act of mutiny, but to the Irish
+soldiers it was a "protest" against the
+Crowns cruelty and breach of the repeated promise
+of giving Ireland its freedom.
+In the barracks, a lot
+of argument and heated discussion went on to decide the
+next course of action. One of the major groups was for
+capturing more territory and strengthening their
+positions so that the British could be taught a lesson
+and the world would know of their plight and
+Irelands struggle for freedom. Some level-headed
+men, however, argued that as violence would be
+self-defeating, the only way to tackle the British would
+be through negotiations. The most vocal of this group was
+one Jim Daley.
+He pointed out to his
+enraged comrades that as long as they did not take to
+arms, it would not amount to a mutiny, but would be a
+"sit-down protest" to express their concern for
+the motherland. Eventually, they wrote a long petition to
+the King and ceremoniously handed it over to British
+officers. But no reply ever came. The King obviously
+never received it!
+The British authorities
+and the top military brass, though caught unawares,
+reacted fast. They quickly moved eight White regiments
+from Amritsar, Ambala, Lahore and Simla cantonments and
+surrounded the Jalandhar cantonment with a tight ring of
+tanks, guns and infantry. Having cordoned the Irish, they
+cut off the supplies of food and provisions and finally
+switched off the water mains also. From a position of
+strength, the British now asked for a peaceful surrender
+by the mutineers. The Irish however, had
+enough provisions and water from one or two wells inside
+their territory to withstand the siege. Thus,
+for a while, it was checkmate. In the meantime, all the
+Indian regiments were moved away from Jalandhar. A tight
+censorship was clamped with the excuse that some secret
+war exercise was being conducted in the area. Thus,
+neither the Indians nor the outside world knew of the
+high-tension drama taking place in the heart of India.
+Having taken all
+security precautions and after tightening their grip, the
+British sent a deputation to demand an unconditional
+surrender. The team was flabbergasted by what they saw
+when they reached near the regimental barracks. The
+scenario that greeted them was one of total abandon and
+gaiety. The Irish tricolour flew majestically not only on
+the tall flag mast of the regimental quarter guard but
+atop every single barrack. Most of the Irish soldiers
+were singing patriotic ballads in the barracks while some
+danced to Irish jigs instead of listening to the British
+delegation.
+This act of defiance and
+rowdy behaviour angered the British but they felt that
+attacking the Irish would be politically suicidal. What
+would the world say to white men killing white men on
+Indian soil where the situation was already explosive! It
+would not only tarnish the British image all over the
+world but also ignite innumerable political fuses. Thus,
+having an upper hand, they preferred to wait.
+It was almost two weeks
+after the outbreak of this mutiny, which began in
+mid-June 1920, that the Rangers had their first casualty.
+A young soldier died of malaria. The heat of the Punjab
+plains, dwindling food stores, shortage of drinking
+water, lack of sanitation and on top of it the scourge of
+malaria.... all of it started to weaken the iron will of
+the dauntless Irish. The regiment broke up into various
+groups, each with different ideas and desperate plans.
+The British mounted their pressure for surrender, but the
+Irish did not budge. They firmly and resolutely stood
+together on the assumption that with courage they could
+win.
+The drama of
+uncertainty, heightened tension, arguments, frayed
+tempers, boozing and brawls went on. It was only the
+logic and convincing arguments of Jim Daley and his group
+which kept a lid on the boiling situation, but even they
+could not keep everyone pacified. As soldiers by training
+and temperament believe in instinctive action, some of
+them blew up a part of the armoury hoping that it would
+attract the attention of the world. The British were,
+however, wily enough to cover it up as an unfortunate
+accident during the war games. The whole matter was thus
+hushed up and again no one knew the exact nature of the
+happenings in Jalandhar.
+After this incident,
+Daley ran from barrack to barrack to calm the angry and
+desperate soldiers before they could commit any further
+suicidal acts. He and a few of his friends requested the
+British to let them send a delegation to Delhi to present
+their point of view, but no one paid heed to the request.
+It was now the third week and the tricolour continued to
+flutter proudly in that little Ireland inside India. It
+was only after malaria and cholera gripped the barracks
+that the situation became desperate. Daley and his
+comrades made frantic efforts to jack up the dwindling
+spirits.
+At this stage, Daley
+started concentrating on finding a way out of the impasse
+as he did not wish to see his brave countrymen die like
+flies and sick dogs. As an honourable surrender appeared
+to be the right solution to him, he set out with a white
+flag to meet the General-Officer-Commanding and offered
+the proposal of surrender for the sake of his sick and
+dying brethren. His main condition of surrender was that
+all men would be honourably discharged and sent home as
+citizens of Ireland. The cunning British agreed because
+it was one way of bringing down the curtain on the
+mutiny which had already lasted for three
+gruelling weeks.
+The rains were late that
+year and the seltering heat in the month of July was
+unbearable. Living in tents in such uncongenial climate
+was like being literally in hell. Due to lack of
+sanitation and without medical cover, Irish soldiers
+started dying a dozen a day. Daley tried reasoning with
+the British military authorities for a fair treatment and
+early repatriation as agreed, but the high command
+obviously had other plans. When they saw that the sick
+and weak Rangers were demoralised and in a vulnerable
+condition, they broke them into small groups on the
+pretext of providing them accommodation in different
+bungalow until a special train could be arranged to carry
+them to a port. They were thus moved to various buildings
+around the cantonment, overpowered, and then moved to
+Simla.
+This was to be the final
+enactment in the tense drama of the Irish mutiny. The
+military machine was set in motion to decide the fate of
+the mutineers. In August, 1920, court martial proceeding
+against 800 men began. The proceedings were conducted at
+the army headquarters at Simla. Day after day, sentences
+were passed. Hundreds were to be shot, many sentenced to
+life imprisonment and the remaining awarded 10 to 20
+years of hard labour in lock-ups.
+Back home in Ireland,
+the struggle for independence was gathering momentum. The
+British knew that they would not be able to hold down the
+valiant Irish for long. The Viceroy and the
+Commander-in-Chief of India deliberated on the situation,
+and took a political decision. This decision was
+considerably influenced by the situation prevailing in
+India which was not the least comfortable. All those who
+were to be shot were pardoned. Sentences of imprisonment
+were reviewed and remitted. The famous Connaught Rangers
+were disbanded and their colours shipped back to the King
+in England where they still hang at Windsor Castle.
+However, there had to be a show of military discipline
+and justice. Any defiance by a soldier amounted to an act
+of mutiny and this had to be firmly established for the
+dignity and honour of military tradition. To achieve
+this, somebody had made a scapegoat symbolic of
+fair but firm treatment.
+The one so chosen was
+Jim Daley. He was led blindfolded to be shot by a firing
+squad in one corner of Jalandhar cantonment in November,
+1920. Under security cover, the body of Daley was buried
+in an inconspicuous place, without a cross, and then
+forgotten. He, who should have been awarded a Nobel Prize
+for peace, was instead awarded bullets. The other
+soldiers were packed off to England to serve their
+respective sentences.
+Later, in the fifties,
+Jim Daleys mortal remains were dug out on the
+request of the Irish Government and interned in a
+churchyard of Simla. They were finally sent to Ireland a
+decade later, to be buried with honour in the bossom of
+his motherland.
+I recently attended a holiday open house celebration at East End Community Services in Dayton, Ohio. The celebration was two-pronged: to commemorate the organization’s completion of its 84th single family affordable home and to hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the group’s expanded youth center.
+East End is a multi-faceted nonprofit service provider, offering homeownership opportunities as well as supporting community development, youth development, and workforce development for residents of east Dayton. Launched in 1998, East End Community Services provides programming that is part of a holistic neighborhood transformation initiative meant to help each child succeed to the best of his or her abilities, in order to become successful adults who can give back to the community.
+To achieve its goal, East End provides crucial support to both children and adults. Through their housing development, community building, afterschool and summer programming, educational initiatives, and services for teens, parents, single adults, and seniors, East End reaches more than 3,000 individuals a year. That figure rises to more than 4,000 when you count all the children from the families they serve.
+A few things struck me that evening at the open house. First was the overall sense of community among those in attendance. Second, the diversity of attendees: community folks, local stakeholders from banks and foundations, East End staff members, various non-profit groups, government officials, even a former Ohio Governor came out to the celebration. And finally, the feeling of shared accomplishment for the East End and a genuine sense of joy at their success.
+As I was leaving I spoke to Doug Thompson, chief financial officer for East End, and I want to share a little of our conversation. Doug recently participated in a meeting with the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington D.C. I won’t go into details about the meeting here—perhaps we can discuss that in a future post—but I wanted to tell you about Doug’s reaction to the experience. He told me he had to pinch himself to make sure he wasn’t dreaming—he really was at the Federal Reserve in D.C. Doug considered it a privilege, being asked to participate in the meeting, and said he felt honored to share his experience working at East End. He called the trip to D.C. a highlight of his non-profit career, and said he appreciated that his opinion and expertise were valued by us.
+It was uplifting listening to Doug tell me about his experience. For me it is always humbling listening to the stories of organizations like East End’s. Their mission and dedication are inspiring, but more important, their work is critical for those they serve and the neighborhoods they work in. Non-profit work is hard and at times slow going. That’s why it is fun to have a chance to celebrate a success story. It was a pleasure to be part of such an inspirational celebration for the East End community, dance team and all.
+I recently told my 15-year-old daughter that the Cleveland Fed was hosting a SWAG meeting and she laughed. Her urban slang definition of “swag” is confidence and style—think the rapper Jay-Z. She apparently had a hard time imagining a swag gathering of this kind at the Fed. And who can blame her? In this case, SWAG stands for Strategic Workforce Alignment Group, an effort led by Cuyahoga County business leaders and workforce development agencies. SWAG and its component workgroups have been meeting throughout 2013 to figure out how to better align employer needs—in terms of skills for current and future jobs—and the curriculum of trainers, including nonprofit organizations, community colleges, and technical schools.
+More than 70 employers attended the meeting at the Fed on October 28. The day began with a panel of large employers—RTA, Dominion East Ohio, University Hospitals, and a recruiting agency—whose representatives described their firms’ hiring challenges. These include an aging workforce; a pipeline of inadequately trained mid-skilled workers; high volumes of applicants for low-skill jobs; and difficulties achieving diversity. They also described how they addressed the lack of soft skills in their applicants, the re-entry (from prison) population, persons with disabilities, and incorporating newer certifications into hiring decisions. Soft skills are basically job readiness skills, such as showing up on time and being able to work on teams and interact with other people. Among prospective employees, panelists noted that ex-offenders and the disabled often face a variety of barriers to employment, including stigmas, although many companies that hire these populations attest to their work ethic and productivity. (See also our recent Fed Commentary, “The Employability of Returning Citizens is Key to Neighborhood Revitalization.”)
+Breakout groups drilled down further. One session that focused on re-entry featured a potentially promising practice: the Edwin’s Leadership and Restaurant Institute, a recently opened culinary school that trains ex-offenders for jobs in the hospitality industry. The Institute helps applicants meet their basic needs, including housing and transportation, for the six-month training period to help ensure successful completion of their culinary education.
+Challenges discussed at this SWAG meeting have also surfaced as themes from our outreach meetings and roundtables through the course of this year, as both Paul Kaboth and Joe Ott have described in previous “Notes” entries. Be sure to look for our future reports on the results of our research and outreach in both Ohio and Pennsylvania.
+I’m more and more amazed at how fast time passes. This year is rapidly coming to a close, with Thanksgiving less than a month away. Before we can say “Kris Kringle” it will be December and then the New Year. Back in late 2012 when my staff and I were planning our outreach, external programs, and research agenda, we recognized that 2013 would be a blur of non–stop activity. We were correct. And while reflecting at this point may seem akin to stores putting out Christmas decorations in October, I’d like to take a look back now for two reasons: to share what we’ve accomplished so far and to ask for your input as we look ahead to 2014.
+We had three major goals for 2013:
+- publish impactful research on the housing market,
+- become engaged in and more knowledgeable about workforce development issues in our district, and
+- provide high–quality, relevant public programs on issues where we have expertise.
+While we have a few weeks to go and some work to finalize, I think we’ve accomplished each of these goals.
+We released two notable research papers this year that have received more than a little attention (our third research piece will be published in 2014). The first, “Policy Considerations for Ohio’s Housing Markets,” offers policy options to improve the foreclosure process for abandoned properties in Ohio. The second, “Low–Income Rental Housing Options in the Fourth District,” discusses the operational characteristics of the two most prevalent federal programs for affordable rental housing—the low–income housing tax credit and the housing choice voucher. Both papers build on our work in housing, and have prompted requests for presentations and more information on the topics from municipal leaders, academics, and policymakers alike.
+With respect to becoming more knowledgeable about workforce development issues, our outreach team has participated in some 30 meetings with individuals and entities from across our district engaged in this area. In one such effort, we partnered with the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia to hold listening sessions across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to learn from administrators and professionals who work daily to train or place the unemployed. In Ohio, we met with state and federal staff, high school and community college administrators, and professionals from chambers of commerce, business associations, and social service agencies to learn about the demand for and challenges in training workers. In Kentucky, we’ve engaged with state officials and grant makers as part of this learning process. We are summarizing all of this work, and what we’ve learned, in a report that will be published by the end of the year.
+Finally, I believe we’ve succeeded in providing interesting, challenging, and meaningful public programming to our stakeholders. To mention a few highlights, almost 300 community development practitioners, public officials, and researchers attended our 2013 Policy Summit in September (you can access videos, research papers, and presentations from the Policy Summit here), which we co–sponsored with the Philadelphia Fed. We partnered with a regional policy group on a series of problem–property webinars for county and municipal administrators across Ohio. We held workshops on access to credit and capital for small business. We also partnered with three Reserve Banks on “Redefining ‘Rust Belt,’” a series of videoconferences that brings together leaders from Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Detroit to share ideas for community revitalization. The feedback from all these efforts has been extremely positive.
+Now it’s your turn to weigh in. If you’ve read our work, met with us this year, or attended one of our public programs, I thank you and would very much like to hear how our work helped you in completing your mission. More important, what can we do to build on and improve our efforts to support community and economic development in our region?
+If you haven’t looked at the work on our website, I encourage you to do so. We’ve begun planning for 2014 and our menu of activities is as aggressive and diverse as it was this year. Have a suggestion for where we can add value? Let me or someone on the team know. And check back with us often to learn what we’re working on and how it may fit your needs. We appreciate hearing from you!
+This past summer, the Community Development teams from the Federal Reserve Banks of Cleveland and Philadelphia collaborated on a series of listening sessions in Pennsylvania to better understand the issues and challenges in workforce development. The impetus for our conducting these sessions was to develop a broader understanding of the lower labor force participation rate and skills mismatch of young people between the ages of 16 and 24, particularly in post-industrial cities and their surrounding regions. Additionally, we wanted to identify local strategies that encourage the alignment of education and employment initiatives to improve job opportunities for this demographic, as well as ways to facilitate engagement and collaboration among a broad group of stakeholders.
+In all, we traveled to five cities (Erie, Harrisburg, Scranton, Pittsburgh and Johnstown) and met with more than 100 workforce practitioners to gather information.We will share what we learned from the sessions this fall in a joint Cleveland/Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank publication; however, here are a couple of general observations I’ll share now.
+For most complex issues, there are many diverse stakeholders taking different approaches to address problems …and workforce development is no different. Stakeholder focus (including type of client served), background, funding and expertise vary widely within and across regions. For the sake of manageability, we convened only a segment of each region’s stakeholder groups (on average 25 experts in each location). However, total staff focused on workforce development easily number in the hundreds within each of our selected geographies.
+Along with the diversity in representatives, we were amazed at the variation in their viewpoints. To give you a sense of the variety of players involved (there will be a comprehensive list in the upcoming publication) and the breadth of their perspectives, consider that we invited K-12 school districts, community colleges, chambers of commerce, social service agencies with workforce development programs, and community foundations to participate, because they are all actively working in the field. These organizations, along with local Workforce Investment Boards (WIBs) and Pennsylvania’s CareerLink systems, represent only a subset of the total workforce development infrastructure. Not surprisingly, each of these organizations faces different challenges and has opportunities to excel where others cannot.
+Given the wide scope of worker training needs, it seems natural for such an array of stakeholders to be involved. The variation in worker age, education, skills and employment opportunity lends itself to a broader network of service providers to address the different and complex needs of worker training. However, having so many providers in the delivery system does add a layer of complexity. Because worker training needs vary so much, efficiency and scalability may be harder to incorporate into the workforce development infrastructure; however, based on the information we gathered, it appears that additional effectiveness and efficiency can be realized. To that end, we learned about a number of effective and efficient practices currently in place to connect workers to employment opportunities. Additionally, we identified several organizations that were partnering with one another to realize efficiency on specific programs and initiatives. Nevertheless, it is not clear that partnering is systematic across the Commonwealth. Furthermore, we noted that regions generally are not actively collaborating with other similarly situated regions. The good news is that we identified practices that can be shared, incorporated, and replicated into the delivery system to increase effectiveness and efficiency while still being responsive to particular locales and constituents.
+As I note above, the intent of this post is simply to provide some high-level, general observations gleaned from our joint initiative. Currently, we are working on our joint publication with the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank; this publication is scheduled for release later this Fall. In the meantime, here are a couple of resources you may find useful in thinking about workforce development:
+- Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia; Cascade Community Development Publication: No. 78 Fall 2011;
+- Federal Reserve Board of Governors; Report; A Perspective from Main Street: Long-Term Unemployment and Workforce Development; December 2012
+- Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland; Economic Trends; Educational Attainment and Demographic Differences in Employment; March 2013
+We’ve all heard of “bundled services,” where a provider—say, your local telecom—offers area residents discounts if they opt to purchase telephone, Internet, and cable television services in a single package. The advantages to consumers include cost savings and the convenience of dealing with a single provider for service issues and billing. Advantages to providers are increased volume of services purchased and economies of scale in providing those services.
+Now that concept is being tried in community development. Last fall I attended the grand opening of CityLink Center in Cincinnati, a project 12 years in the making. The original idea for the center was to provide services for homeless citizens in the city’s Queensgate neighborhood. Over the years, the focus broadened from providing services strictly for the homeless to providing a range of support services for the working poor. The $12 million project was funded largely with private donations through a faith-based organization.
+Here’s how the newer model works: CityLink combines many agencies at the same site to offer a one-stop shop for individuals in need of support. The services may include financial education, workforce development, education, transportation, health and wellness, and even daycare for individuals while on site. CityLink’s approach is based on the idea that support services are much more effective when they work together. A growing movement for this integrated, co-located services approach includes organizations using this bundled model in helping people overcome poverty.
+This bundling of services comes from a model developed by the Center for Working Families (CWF), an organization pioneered by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and supported by several other foundations as a means of helping low-income families reach financial stability and make their way up the economic ladder. Prompted by feedback on why programs to fight poverty were underutilized—reasons ranged from an inability to get childcare or transportation to lack of awareness and embarrassment in asking for assistance—CWF devised bundling to address the multifaceted challenges low-income, working adults and their families face.
+CityLink integrates multiple services and offers a holistic solution to these barriers by offering financial education, employment-readiness services, and access to publicly available resources in a single location. This bundled services model is now being used in a variety of organizations across the United States, including
+- The MET Center in St. Louis, a regional workforce training program with a wide variety of clients, partners and public-sector funding streams,
+- The Bon Secours of Maryland Foundation, a smaller, community-based program in West Baltimore, and
+- Central New Mexico Community College, a large regional college mostly serving low-income working adults.
+The Casey Foundation published a report in 2010 evaluating and detailing how these three organizations had each incorporated an integrated services approach to fostering family economic success. The report also includes key principles for successfully implementing the CWF model in any organization.
+Many individuals came to support CityLinks at its grand opening--politicians, bankers, social service providers, and representatives from faith organizations, foundations, learning institutions, and more. I counted 68 groups listed on the program! The desire to help is evident; here’s hoping this is a lasting model to assist people who want to build a better life for themselves and their families.
+Reflecting on a series of visits to Erie, Pennsylvania, this year, I find that one of my most notable takeaways is the passion and commitment to the region of those working in community development. Many of the Erie stakeholders we’ve met with mention the great quality of life the region offers—including the affordability of the market, its amenities (including recreation opportunities the lake provides), and the creative spirit of its residents. Erie has its share of community development issues that need to be addressed, such as pockets of blight within communities, the lack of sufficient jobs for its residents, and the need for better land–use strategies for future development. However, Erie stakeholders are also making a number of positive investments that will benefit the future of the region. The mere fact that multiple stakeholder groups are organizing to address these issues demonstrates that Erie is moving in a positive direction.
+Community development issues
+Similar to many smaller, older industrial cities facing like challenges, Erie leaders are placing a considerable emphasis on housing and economic opportunity. The City of Erie has an oversupply of housing, as well as more than 4,000 vacant lots. Additionally, there appears to be a spatial mismatch between the areas in which residents live and available housing. Erie’s downtown district, for example, sports very low vacancy. According to local developers, market–rate rental housing in this district—filled for the most part with empty nesters and young professionals—has a vacancy rate of less than 2 percent. At the same time, developers report shortages in affordable rental options. It is worth noting that, according to some reports, approximately 92 percent of new homes constructed in the City of Erie are subsidized in some way. Though the types of subsidies depend on the type of project, efforts are being made to focus investments in a manner designed to yield the greatest return. However, similar to many municipal investment strategies, investments should periodically be reviewed by local leaders to ensure efficiency. Finally, 75 percent of Erie’s homes have values that are lower than their respective replacement costs (this figure includes the City of Erie and the City of Corry). On the surface, some may view this figure as a badge of Erie’s affordability; however, this is concerning to many because of the likelihood of a much higher instance of vacancy and abandonment.
+Properties with values lower than their replacement costs are common in many 4th District communities. What are your thoughts on the best way to address this issue? Please feel free to contact me with your ideas. Also, look for my next post on workforce development listening sessions we’re conducting in partnership with the Philadelphia Fed.
+The need for better and integrated data to address policy and social issues is a recurring theme that comes up time and again in our outreach. For example, on a visit to Warren, Ohio, we learned from the Trumbull Neighborhood Partnership (TNP)—the only community development corporation in Warren—that the biggest community development problem in town is the significant number of scattered vacant and blighted properties. In order to strategically address the blight, TNP first needs data on properties and their conditions so they can determine which properties are candidates for demolition or for repair. TNP is using a recent HUD Community Challenge grant award to thoroughly inventory all property parcels in the city in a survey of their condition and occupancy status. In cases of extreme dilapidation, TNP advocates for demolition by the city. TNP also runs a side lot program for the Trumbull County Land Bank wherein neighbors can buy vacant lots resulting from demolition in order to expand their properties.
+Having an inventory is important to address blight, as is having data more generally. As one community development practitioner puts it, to know where you are going, you need to know where you are. This knowledge is also important in broader regional economic development conversations. Economic competitiveness is one topic we’ve been hearing about in Northeast Ohio. For example, the question of how to make cities like Warren, with shrinking populations and dwindling employment opportunities (both of which contribute to vacancy and abandonment), economically competitive is very much on the minds of staff at the Raymond J. Wean Foundation. Local conversations on regional economic development in the Mahoning Valley have focused on talent development and inclusion. Foundations and decision makers recognize that data—and the ability to manipulate it—is integral to understanding the issues at hand and to monitor changes in response to investments. One such issue that we hear repeatedly in our outreach, particularly in Northeast Ohio, is how to expand job opportunities for traditionally hard-to-employ populations.
+Northeast Ohio is lucky to have NEO CANDO, a free and publicly accessible social and economic data system managed by Case Western Reserve University’s Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development. The system has data for the 17 counties across Northeast Ohio. What data resources are available in your community? And what resources would help you do your job?
+Related resources:
+- NEOCANDO integrated data system for northeast Ohio
+- REO & Vacant Properties: Strategies forNeighborhood Stabilization, a compilation of essays published in 2010by the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and Cleveland and the Federal ReserveBoard
+- Land Bank 2.0: An Empirical Evaluation, a 2012 working paper of the Federal Reserve Bank ofCleveland evaluating the Cuyahoga County Land Bank
+I recently became aware of a trend funders are using to identify key strategic partners. Before joining the Cleveland Fed last year, I worked in the nonprofit industry. One of the challenges we faced was competing with other nonprofits for a finite pool of money that funders typically awarded to individual grantees. Organizations like mine all worked separately to make a case for how we could put those dollars to best use. The success of a project was determined by the capacity of the individual organization to deliver and the impact the project had on a neighborhood.
+Now funders are employing a more holistic model, where multiple entities work together to solve complex issues facing communities. Multiple organizations working together can not only enhance and deepen understanding of the breadth of these issues, but they are also better equipped to devise and effect solutions. This collaborative approach aligns a cross-section of agencies, including non-profit, government, corporate, and philanthropic, and allows for coordination of resources. Organizations working together toward the same goal can use the same methods to measure outcomes. This collective impact approach can be applied to a range of complex issues involving community development, education, workforce development, and health.
+So, what does this mean for organizations seeking a foundation's support? One key is to become the lead organization in a strategic partnership. Funders are looking for organizations to take a leading role in strategic partnerships. Strategic pairing of organizations allows for capacity building for communities. With resources becoming scarcer, funders are looking to achieve the highest and best use of their investment dollars with organizations that collectively can produce the desired outcomes.
+Here's an example of what can happen. A nonprofit whose board I serve on will receive funds because it is a lead organization in a strategic partnership. What this means is the organization will go from building one or two homes a year to redefining its community's central business district. It will be able to bring multiple new businesses into the neighborhood, change the dynamic of a community by providing an art center, and provide affordable safe rental housing in its community.
+We are also considering providing a community kitchen. Many exciting ideas came out of a community quality-of-life planning session this past summer. These changes occurred because there was cohesiveness among many organizations and the right leadership in place to organize multiple entities. This wasn't an easy process; it took years of getting the right leadership in place to achieve these goals and be in the position to impact this neighborhood in a significant way. In the end, though, such collaborations can yield wonderful benefits to a community.
+And that's the name of the wooing game these days.
+
+EGLD Price Prediction; July 2021: $131.3727: August 2021: $243.8654: September 2021: $275.3319: October 2021: $295.7852: November 2021: $338.2650: December 2021: $454.6910: January 2022: $490.0909: February 2022: $747.3296: March 2022: $881.0622: April 2022: $1,030.5281: May 2022: $959.7285: June 2022: $1,195.7273: July 2022: $1,282.2602: August 2022: $1,431.7261: September 2022: $1,140.6609: October 202 No, Elrond (EGLD) price will not be downward based on our estimated prediction. In 1 year from now what will 1 Elrond be worth? The price of 1 Elrond (EGLD) can roughly be upto $156.47 USD in 1 years time a 2X nearly from the current Elrond price
+Elrond Price Prediction 2021 Based on the 2021 price chart above, the price EGLD seems poised to increase by an average of 41.04%. It is expected to reach as high as up to $398.73 by May, although it is expected to suffer a bit of a dump in the months after before prices start to ascend again .com we predict future values with technical analysis for wide selection of digital coins like Elrond. If you are looking for virtual currencies with good return, EGLD can be a profitable investment option. Elrond price equal to 87.837 USD at 2021-06-14. If you buy Elrond for 100 dollars today, you will get a total of 1.138 EGLD. Based on our forecasts, a long-term increase is expected, the price prognosis for 2026-06-06 is 1428.690 US Dollars. With a 5-year investment, the. According to WalletInvestor, EGLD is a profitable investment and its price could go up from $183.97 to $548.26 in the coming year and reach $1983.75 by the end of 2026. Digitalcoinprice. Digitalcoin price analysts predict the ELGD price would reach $265.49 by the end of 2021 and $555.16 by the end of 2025. Our Elrond Price Prediction Capita
+Elrond's (EGLD) price prediction for 2021 is up to $500. Elrond's (EGLD) bearish market price prediction for 2021 is $66.239 alone predicting the future of a novel, highly volatile financial asset like Elrond One Elrond (EGLD) is currently worth $81.29 on major cryptocurrency exchanges. You can also exchange one Elrond for 0.00225683 bitcoin (s) on major exchanges. The value (or market capitalization) of all available Elrond in U.S. dollars is $1.43 billion What do you think the price of elrond coin will be in 2021? Who saw the egld prediction? I think it will be. Menu; Home; SafeMoon Coin; Top Stacking Coins; ZeroSwap - Zee Token; Blog; Contact Us; Search for. Switch skin; Telegram; Tumblr; Reddit; Pinterest; Twitter; Facebook; RSS; Home/Elrond - EGLD Coin/ EGLD COULD BOUNCE BACK IF THIS HAPPENS! ELROND PRICE PREDICTION. Elrond - EGLD Coin. No, Elrond (EGLD) price will not be downward based on our estimated prediction. In 1 year from now what will 1 Elrond be worth? The price of 1 Elrond (EGLD) can roughly be upto $185.06 USD in 1 years time a 2X nearly from the current Elrond price
+EGLD is trading at $150, which is 40% below the year-to-date high of $245. According to CoinMarketCap, its market cap has crashed to more than $2.57 billion and its ranking fallen to 46. At its peak, Elrond was among the 25-biggest digital currencies Bitcoin Price Prediction. Ethereum Price Prediction. Ripple Price Prediction. Bitcoin Cash Price Prediction. Cardano Price Prediction. Litecoin Price Prediction. NEM Price Prediction. IOTA Price Prediction. Bitcoin Gold Price Prediction. Stellar Price Prediction. Monero Price Prediction. NEO Price Prediction. Ethereum Classic Price Prediction. DASH Price Prediction. ZCash Price Prediction The EGLD price is at $183, which is 102% above the lowest level in late February this year. Its market cap has risen to more than $3.2 billion, while its ranking has dropped to 43. What happened: Elrond was one of the fastest-growing blockchain project early this year. This saw its price soar by more than 800% between January and February This is a quick technical analysis, helping you find the best entry point for each currency by only looking at the technical data. We compare each currency. Elrond Price Prediction: Will EGLD Price be $500 in 2021? What to know what is Elrond? Where to buy EGLD? Is Elrond staking profitable? What..
+History, trading idea, where to buy that helps price prediction Get live Elrond (EGLD) price sticker, candlestick, EGLD/USD, EGLD/BTC, logarithmic chart & news. Market Cap: $1.57T • 24h Volume: $328.73B • BTC Dominance: 40.1% • BTC Price: $33,620.1 Elrond Price Prediction: EGLD gains $1 billion in market capitalization after colossal surge. Elrond price is up by more than 100% in the past 24 hours. The digital asset has reached $3 billion in.
+CSPR Price Prediction; July 2021: $0.4002: August 2021: $0.7430: September 2021: $0.8388: October 2021: $0.9012: November 2021: $1.0306: December 2021: $1.3853: January 2022: $1.4931: February 2022: $2.2769: March 2022: $2.6843: April 2022: $3.1397: May 2022: $2.9240: June 2022: $3.6430: July 2022: $3.9066: August 2022: $4.3620: September 2022: $3.4752: October 2022: $4.1463: November 2022: $4.9132: December 202 ICON (ICX) coin price predictions. 1 . OMG Network (OMG) Coin Price Prediction. 1 . NAGA (NGC) Price Prediction. 1 . Ethereum Smart Contracts - how they work? Welcome to Reddit, the front page of the internet. Become a Redditor. and join one of thousands of communities. × • • • Elrond Price Prediction: Will EGLD Price be $500 in 2021? (self.alex_tamm) submitted 4 minutes ago by alex.. Prediction: Accuracy : CVIX: Price: Prediction 24h: Prediction 30d: Prediction 1y: 1: Bitcoin predictions: 73.6%: 50: $39 237.89: 2: Ethereum predictions: 66.4%: 62: $2 488.13: 3: Tether predictions: 94.8%: 1: $1.00: 4: Binance Coin predictions: 67.6%: 71: $361.19: 5: Cardano predictions: 68%: 69: $1.54-8.73% 6.04%; 170.56%: 6: Dogecoin predictions: 67.6%: 73: $0.322850: 7: XRP predictions: 66.8%: 71: $0.873673: 8: USD Coin predictions 
+EGLD price prepares for an 85% liftoff as it nears the end of a bullish pennant pattern. Elrond Network's latest development is significant, especially considering the hype around prediction markets. Mirroring the bullishness of the recent integration, the EGLD price prepares for a massive bull run as it nears the end of consolidation A list of the top Elrond markets across all crypto exchanges based on the highest 24h trading volume, with their current price. Market. 24h volume. 1 EGLD/USDT Binance. $ 16.39 million Mega Price Crypto. Digital Coin Price predicts that the DGB price might reach $0.114563 by the end of 2025. This also looks like a conservative approach to the DigiByte price predictions. Digital Coin Price. DigiByte is becoming prominent over the days, and in 5 years or so, DigiByte might stand undefeated against its peers and might go up the ranking order. Its adoption rate might increase.
+Our Verdict On Zilliqa Coin Price Prediction 2020... TRON Price Prediction For 2021, 2022, 2023. At TradingBeasts, we do our best to provide accurate price predictions for a wide range of digital coins like TRON. We update our predictions daily working with historical data and using a combination of linear and polynomial regressions. No one can, however, predict prices of cryptocurrencies with. Gold Coin Price Prediction. Tradingbeasts sees the coin at $12.87 in december 2022 and at $16.01 in december 2023. In the beginning price at 161 dollars. 1950 Franklin Half Dollar PCGS MS67 For More Details & To from. The bitcoin gold price is forecasted to reach $101.822 by the beginning of june 2021. 34 rows egld price prediction; 83% of the total supply (17,513,924 btg) is.
+Coin Predictor states that ZIL will cost $0.013624 by the end of the year. Zilliqa price prediction 2020 heavily depends on technological development. Zilliqa may grow exponentially as it moves in the direction of expanding more exchanges and may even offer a challenge to the real digital forms of money. According to the source, by the end of 2020, the NIM coin can slightly go up to $0.003. The Nimiq cryptocurrency price will gradually increase so that in 2021 it can reach $0.004, in 2022 - $0.005, and 2023 - $0.006. There is another Nimiq price prediction. The similar service, Wallet Investor, predicts the following NIM price to the next. Die BitTorrent (BTT) Coin oder TRC-10 Token ist eine Kryptowährung, die auf dem BitTorrent-Protokoll aufbaut und ein Produkt der Zusammenarbeit zwischen der TRON Foundation und der BitTorrent Foundation ist. Ziel war... Rene. Add comment. Prognosen. Verge Prognose 2020, 2021, 2025 | XVG Kurs Prognose. Die Informationsmenge im digitalen Raum nimmt jährlich rapide zu. Vertraulichkeit und.
+About Fts Coin Price Prediction. Unlike other crypto coins, Fts has improved the slow transactions, high charges and complex system. The coin's current price is $3.60, and the percentage of the change in price for the next 24 hours is -10%. You can also read about crypto price in apps Binance Coin (BNB) Price Prediction: How to buy Binance coin 2021 After the emergence of the Binance in mid-2017, BNB tokens were traded there for 10 cents apiece for some time. Now, this token.. Elrond (EGLD) Price Prediction: How High Can EGLD Realistically Go This Market Cycle? by The Token Metrics Podcast published on 2021-04-28T09:48:07Z. Users who liked this track ybevojivoni. Cody Binkley. Users who like Elrond (EGLD) Price Prediction: How High Can EGLD Realistically Go This Market Cycle Coin Price Forecast is predicting Dogecoin will smash through $1 in the next six months. They say Dogecoin can reach as high as $1.18. They say Dogecoin can reach as high as $1.18
+In any case, this would put the price of a single coin at around $400,000. Interestingly, Edstrom believes Bitcoin could become the world's default currency. Mike Novogratz - $7.5 trillion market cap (2029) @novogratz. Mike Novogratz is a former hedge fund manager who's been investing in Bitcoin and blockchain technology for a long time. He's made several price predictions in the past.. Litecoin price prediction..
+. Crypto is now witnessing a boom period. Various recent coins like Doge and Shiba Inu are enjoying their recent growth. The same is with the Dent coin. At the time of writing this article, the coin is currently trading at $0.00696 showing a surge of 17% in the last 24 hours. Will Dent Coin Reach 1$? But. Their ALGO price prediction for 2021 is also represented graphically on the website, giving you clues about the coin's price movement in the year. Crypto-rating's ALGO Price Prediction The website presents a detailed Algorand price prediction that gives a better insight into the current ALGO market situation, future expectations concerning the price action, and Algorand market capitalization
+Bitcoin price prediction 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. DON'T BUY OR SELL BITCOIN UNTIL YOU READ THAT. Bitcoin price predictions and forecast for every month. BTC forecast. Current Bitcoin price in dollars. Bitcoin trend outlook. BTC-USD converter Next 24 hours brief prediction. Price of BTC is now on EDGE at $35820.0. So the next scenario is able. If price will go up it will spend next in CHANNEL near to $37050.0 with $38640.0 as upper border and $35820.0 as bottom. If price will go down, it will FALL with support level $35820. To analyze.
+Ravencoin Price Predictions And Expert Forecasts. Wallet Investor. Wallet Investors has a bearish stance on Ravencoin potential, offering a RVN price prediction where the asset falls to extreme lows or just $0.001. Coin Predictor. Cryptocurrency forecasting website Coin Predictor offers a Ravencoin forecast where it falls in the short term. BitTorrent (BTT) Price Prediction 2021. BTT was part of the pack that enjoyed a USD price hike thanks to bitcoin but the project itself saw no significant rally against BTC. BTT also had spurts of dizzying price action where it outpaced bitcoin and was among top gainers in the whole market Bitcoin Price Prediction for June 2021. Ashish Sood. June 9, 2021. Analysis. Bitcoin is in recovery mode and bulls may push for $40k and above levels as the positive sentiment is fuelled by long term hodlers . The crypto market remains in the recovery mode after witnessing record price dips across the board last month, most prominently in the case of Bitcoin. Influencers are branding the. The price prediction for the Aelf coin for 2025 is above 3 dollars. These are our predictions, we are not financial advisors, and no one knows where the Aelf coin price will finally go. Suppose you want to invest in Aelf coin, only invest what you can afford to lose. Investing in cryptocurrency is always a bit of a gamble Elrond Price Prediction 2021-2025 | EGLD Forecast | CaptainAltcoin..
+Elrond Price Prediction: EGLD enters calm after massive explosion, before another storm? 0. By FX Street Published: Feb 11, 2021 15:17 GMT | Last Modified: Feb 11, 2021 16:17 GMT Crypto News. Elrond price has experienced one of the biggest rallies in the past two days. A crucial indicator is on the verge of presenting a massive sell signal for EGLD. EGLD has reached a $3.3 billion market. Silver Price Prediction 2021-2022. Silver price started in 2021 at $26.52. Today, Silver traded at $26.02, so the price decreased by -2% from the beginning of the year. The forecasted Silver price at the end of 2021 is $35.48 - and the year to year change +34%. The rise from today to year-end: +36%. In the middle of 2021, we expect to see $29.79 per 1 Silver. In the first half of 2022, the.
+These predictions take several variables into account such as volume changes, price changes, market cycles, and similar coins. Future price of the asset is predicted at $11 (1000% ) after a year according to our prediction system. This means that if you invested $100 now, your current investment may be worth $1000 on 2022 May 29, Sunday Harmony (ONE) coin price prediction 2021-2025. Harmony has gained popularity as one of the most innovative sharding protocols to scale Ethereum dApps. The technology allows it to scale blockchains without compromising decentralisation and security. No wonder that it bodes well for the potential increase in ONE price. To round off our Harmony (ONE) crypto analysis, let's take a look at some. SHIB coin predictions revealed. InvestorPlace.com recently did a deep dive into the SHIB coin, saying that price predictions are heating up in the wake of its enormous gains. However, analysts aren't exactly foaming at the mouth to put money into the cryptocurrency yet. So InvestorPlace.com recently collected a number of predictions. Here's what it found: WalletInvestor said SHIB isn. In this VeChain price prediction, we'll look into the coin's past price trends, developments, and market opinions to help determine its possible price in May 2021. As of this writing, VeChain is the 13 th largest cryptocurrency according to its market cap of $15,278,050,846. In the last 24 hours, VeChain had a trading volume of $4,291,202,046. The cryptocurrency has a circulating supply of.
+Binance Coin forecast, Binance Coin price prediction, Binance Coin price forecast, BNB price prediction, BNB forecast, BNB price forecast. These are some other terms to define this Binance Coin (BNB) technical analysis page. Note: This predictions/forecast are done using various different types of Algorithms applied on the historical price of Binance Coin (BNB) . We do not give any guarantee. Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR) Price Prediction: Will HBAR Price Cross 10x ($3.0) By The End Of 2021? Copy Link. Headlines News Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR) Price Prediction: Will HBAR Price Cross 10x ($3.0) By The End Of 2021? Share. Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR) Price Prediction: Will HBAR Price Cross 10x ($3.0) By The End Of 2021? Coingape 2 months ago. Published on March 18, 2021 11:20 GMT+0 edited on Marc DENT - Dent Price Prediction for tomorrow, week, month, year & for next 5 years. The forecast is based on our in-house deep learning (neural network) algo They predict that the coin could climb as high as $600 through the end of the year. Equally bullish is the Economy Forecast Agency . The outlet is valuing LTC at a price of $614 by December, but. Coins. ICOs. Correlations. Calendar. News. Degov (DEGOV) Last Price - Market Cap - Degov Price Prediction. As the latest value of DEGOV is missing it is impossible to use our Degov prediction program for a worth forecast. TOP RATED COIN FORECASTS. EVENT-BASED ACCURACY: Bankera. 71.43%. CampusCoin. 66.67%.
+Binance Coin (BNB) Price Prediction for 2021 Signals. SL: N/A. TP: N/A. Trade Now Trade Now See more. Closed Forex Signals P/L (Profil/Loss) Economic Calendar. Wednesday, June, 30 2021. 09:00 GMT. Cardano Alonzo Hard Fork USD. 12:00 GMT. ARPA ETH 2.0 BLS Signature Standard Integration USD. Economic Calendar . BUILD YOUR WATCHLIST Track signals, important economic events and save articles in. egld price prediction : Related News. Apr. 28, 2021 - Price Prediction: EGLD prepares for lift-off after clearing critical resistance barrier -; Apr. 30, 2021 - Price Prediction: EGLD wants to head higher, but bulls lack conviction - FXStreet; Apr. 29, 2021 - Price Prediction: Levels to Watch Ahead of the Fed.. Take any Pi coin price predictions you do come across with a pinch of salt, as there's not much trustworthy information to underpin it. Remaining vigilant for scams is crucial and, although the Pi Network is free, you shouldn't discount the possibility that the project isn't benefiting from its users in other ways. We have asked all of the questions posed by this article to Pi Network. VET coin appears to have broken out of the market retracements and the trader expects the cryptocurrency to head towards $0.40, followed by $0.60. At each price target pullbacks are predicted to occur. In the long run, the trajectory identified by the trader suggests VeChain to be heading near $1 - the 4.5 Fibonacci retracements to occur at.
+Find out the top Binance Coin BNB Price prediction forecast for 2021 and beyond and discover how much BNB could be worth in 2021-2025. The market-wide bull run that gathered speed in December 2020 has sent the price of most major cryptocurrencies soaring. But although the media may be consumed with the performance of Bitcoin, one of the most exciting developments has got to be the ERC-20 token. Bitcoin Price Prediction for 2050. Assuming BTC does in fact reach over $1,000,000 by 2030, it's possible that Bitcoin can reach $10,000,000 if it's still in its current form and has not been. Coin Price, another cryptocurrency prediction website, predicts that the Litecoin price might grow as high as $124 by the end of the year. This is another very positive prediction. #3 Litecoin Price Prediction 2020 by Long Forecast Long Forecast says that based on their research, Litecoin price might reach $55 as the year ends. This site takes a more cautious bullish approach than the above. Binance Coin price prediction on Monday, June, 14: minimum price $363, maximum $417 and at the end of the day price 390 dollars a coin. BNB to USD predictions on Tuesday, June, 15: minimum price $361, maximum $415 and at the end of the day price 388 dollars a coin. Binance Coin price prediction on Wednesday, June, 16: minimum price $354, maximum $408 and at the end of the day price 381 dollars.
+AKT is currently valued between 6 to 8 USD range. According to Wallet Investor; AKTis an awesome long-term (1+ year) investment. Their price prediction is $19.038. Akash Network has proved itself, but if you are thinking to become a part of it, do not forget to make your own due diligence as always! AKT Altcoins Price Predictions. They burned another $60,000,000 before at Q3 2020 with more than 3 Million BNB but at that time price of the BNB was only $17.40. CLEVER Coin (CLVA) Price Prediction: Will it reach 10$ | Weekly Technical Analysis May 2021. By Zexprwire. Posted on May 19, 2021. Share. Tweet. Share. Share. Email. The whole market will have a greater fear index for the first time in 2021. Bitcoin price has fallen 27% over the last ten days, making it the largest ten-day loss since the March 2020 collapse and the second-largest since.
+Trust Wallet Review and TWT Price Prediction 2021. This video is a Trust Wallet Review and TWT Price Prediction 2021. *Sources - Trustwallet.com, Coinmarketcap.com, Twitter.com, Viktor Radchenko, CZ, Binance, and Tradingview.com. Check out the links below for free referral bonuses and help support the channel! #kirfinance #letstalktoken Charts: TradingView The best chart website Elrond (EGLD) Price Prediction and Technical Analysis | Token Metrics AMA by The Token Metrics Podcast published on 2021-03-22T09:29:31Z. Users who reposted this track. Users who like Elrond (EGLD) Price Prediction and Technical Analysis | Token Metrics AM They expect the coin to have a strong capitalization that would give it a concrete value per coin boost. Cardano Price Prediction: Verdict. Based on the technical analysis and the developments taking place in the DeFi space, Cardano's price could maintain an upward trend for the better part of 2021. Importantly, the coin is good for solving issues of scalability and interoperability, which. The price prediction and outlook for the next 3 to 6 months will be based on a conservative approach—but anything can happen with cryptocurrencies and major price movements can happen at any point in time, like how BNB early in 2021 went from $40 USD to over $500 USD in just a few days. Based on factors considered, our price prediction for Vechain will be from $0.015 to $0.040. This is due. Bitcoin Cash Price Prediction 2021, 2022, 2023 And 2024. In 2 weeks LTC to USD predictions on Friday, June, 25: minimum price $139.6, maximum $160.6 and at the end of the day price 150.1 dollars a coin. Litecoin price prediction on Monday, June, 28: minimum price $153.8, maximum $177.0 and at the end of the day price 165.4 dollars a coin
+Testimonials
+I just wanted to reach out and let you know how pleased we are with the project to date. The original timeline was completely accurate and we have been so
+happy with all the artisans that have been working on the project. Last week Devon came over to make some change to the drywall and had I not seen him
+leaving, I would have never known he was in the house. Everyone has been so respectfully to us and our home which has made the project go smoothly.
+Constantine is a pleasure and is doing a great job prepping for the tile.
+-Sandi
+When we looked around for builders to construct our custom home, Menard Construction stood out above all others in the bid process. Our home took almost 2 years to design with our architect, so we wanted to be certain that we were selecting a builder who could deliver on the quality that we expected. Menard Construction did not disappoint. Tom Menard and his project manager were always available to make sure that we stayed on schedule, and their attention to detail even exceeded our expectations. Menard Construction’s reliable team built our home as if they were building it for a family member, and they even stayed on budget, which is unheard of for other construction companies. When visitors come into our home for the first time they always comment on the quality craftsmanship, and we ALWAYS recommend Menard Construction to anyone looking to renovate their home, or begin new construction.
+-Richard, Mountain Lakes
+It’s been several months since we moved into our beautiful lakefront home in Mountain Lakes. We couldn’t be happier with the brand new house. The home is truly a credit to the very professional and efficient team that makes up Menard Construction. Being new immigrants, we were very careful when it came to pick the right builder for our very first home in this country. We had six bids from different contractors all over the county. Throughout the bidding process, Menard construction was the only one consistently showing us a high level of service in addition to their reasonable quotes. Till today we are still very glad we made the right choice by having Tom Menard and his team build our house. The construction process was also very smooth, which allowed us to move into the house only 8 months after we signed the contract. Despite the tight schedule, Menard Construction managed to complete the project on time without compromising the quality of their work. The quality of workmanship inside and out of the house is far above others in the business. It is largely because Menard carefully picked some reliable and trustworthy vendors, making the entire process a hassle free experience for us. We strongly recommend Menard Construction to others and certainly we will work with Menard again.
+-Yvonne and Peter, Mountain Lakes
+We hired Tom Menard and his team from Menard construction to work with us, using our architectural plans to rebuild after Sandy destroyed our cottage down by the Jersey shore. Menard Construction has an office in Boonton and one in Brick. They handled the demo of the old building and the permitting and construction for our new home and deck. Tom hired excellent subcontractors and we are very pleased with the quality of construction and the final result. His local team, Jason, Melissa, and Chris, were some of the nicest people to work with. We are so happy with our home and would certainly recommend Menard Construction.
+-Susan, Brick
+Working with Menard construction was a pleasure. We now have a beautiful home that looks as good at a year and a half as it did on day 1. Tom and his people were very responsive to all our concerns and questions.
+-Karen, Mountain Lakes
+An extremely challenging basement project was executed to perfection by Tom Menard of Menard Construction. Together with his professional team, Tom proved why Menard is such a respected name in Mountain Lakes construction and remodeling. Engineering excellence, precision craftsmanship, and professional project management transformed my inoperable basement into a prized entertainment area. I would recommend Menard Construction for your next project and will gladly serve as a reference.
+-Werner, Mountain Lakes
+When our oceanfront home was badly damaged by Sandy, I turned to Menard Construction to assess the damage, help me plan the needed repairs, and to perform the construction. Like many houses in the area, our home needed plumbing, electrical, roofing, mechanical, structural, exterior and interior repairs, and finishing. Tom Menard and his team have been building and renovating high quality homes for decades both at the Jersey shore and in Northern New Jersey.
+-Jim, Mantoloking
+Menard Construction’s experienced team and high quality subcontractors treated my home like their own. They helped me navigate through inspections and paperwork to get my utilities restored and then turned to rebuilding our house, which they did on budget and ahead of schedule. By Memorial Day weekend, our family had our home back and looking the same (better actually) than before the storm. From the heavy construction to re-hanging of curtains before we moved back in, Menard Construction’s attention to detail, workmanship, and personal touch was outstanding. I’m glad they were there for our family and recommend them for any family who truly loves their home at the shore.
+-Bob, Bay Head
+We had a terrific experience with Menard Construction, from the early planning stages to the completion of our new home. Tom, Chris, and the rest of the crew were courteous and professional. They communicated well and finished our new home on time and on budget. We are thrilled with the end product.
+-John, Point Pleasant
+Menard Construction has completed several projects in my home: renovation of my master bath, as well as finishing the third floor of my home and converting a storage room into an additional bedroom. The work on both projects was excellent, and the staff was both courteous and neat.
+-Bonnie, Mountain Lakes
+As an architect, Tom and I have worked together and have had many satisfied clients, including the ones on Crestview Road and Lookout Road in his portfolio. He is one of the premier contractors in North Jersey because of his experience and professional attention to each project regardless of size.
+-Lawrence Korinda, Architect
+Tom and his whole team are consummate professionals. They did a major addition to our home on several floors as well as an redo of some existing space. The craftsmanship was excellent and they communicated and explained throughout. Also, the contractors he recommended were competent and did a great job for us. Highly recommend Menard Construction for large and small jobs.
+-Jeff, Mountain Lakes
+Menard Construction did a major renovation on our home. They added a level, put on a new exterior to match the historical architecture in our town, and updated electrical, plumbing, and A/C. The price initially quoted was competitive and very close to the final costs paid. They came in with a realistic timeline and had a great project manager, Chris, who took care of all issues that came up and made the project run smoothly. I would highly recommend using Menard Construction.
+-Mary, Mountain Lakes
+Tom Menard and his team of skilled craftsmen have completed several home renovation projects for me, all of which were completed to the exact standards that they had promised. This is an excellent contractor that does exceptional work.
+-Mark, Mountain Lakes
+Very knowledgable, trustworthy, and a pleasure to work with. They completed a whole house renovation 4 years ago, and I still get compliments on the beautiful job that Menard Construction did. A few months ago, we rehired them to finish our basement. Another successful project. I can’t wait to hire them again!
+-Lorraine, Mountain Lakes
+I have used Menard Construction for multiple projects. They renovated my home, and did a total gut job and full reconstruction of a building that we purchased as an office for my business. Both were complicated and big jobs. We were very happy with the end product and Tom worked within our budget. Tom, his project managers, and his workers are all very conscientious about quality of their work. They seemed to take pride in the satisfaction of their customer. We had previously worked with a few contractors/subs that oversold and under-preformed. That was not the case with Menard Construction. They are responsive to inquiries, personable, and fair. I will use them again on any future work we need done.
+-Michael, Mountain Lakes
+Hired Menard Construction to renovate the Boonton Opera House which was originaly built in 1850. Renovation included demolition and rebuilding of the stage, excavation and rebuilding of a new floor under the stage , demoiltion and rebuilding of new entrance ways for the front and back of the building. Very experienced and knowledgeable and provided me with good options and alternatives throughout the process. They worked well with my architect and coordinated well with all the subcontractors.
+-Pat, Boonton
+We hired Menard construction to work with our designer on our basement remodel. Their attention to detail was excellent and they were on time and budget (except for a few small electrical additions). Very professional and high quality work.
+-Diana, Mountain Lakes
+Menard Construction built our home in 2010, and we have continued to work with them to finish our 3rd floor in 2011 and our basement in 2013. Their work is of the highest standard. Their employees and all of the subcontractors are respectful and clean up after themselves. We completely trust Tom and have found working with him to be a very positive experience.
+-Bonny, Boonton
+I hired Menard construction after Superstorm Sandy for the restoration of damage to my beachfront home in NJ. I knew that Menard Construction had a reputation for high quality and service inland in NJ and a history of quality development projects in the local shore area. Tom Menard personally oversaw the work and his team and sub-contractors performed high quality work on time, slightly below budget and in a very professional manner. That time period was difficult – even getting access to the area to assess damage, move in materials and restore basic functions such as power, water, etc. Menard Construction personnel helped me to do all that as I was not able to live in the home at the time – this included coordination of inspections, meeting the municipal service providers to restore utilities, meeting the CAFRA and commercial insurance inspectors (who were many hours late and not easy to deal with) and also recommending the best materials, fixes and replacements within our budget. They helped not only to restore the home, but to make it better than it was before – including finishing touches like moving furniture back in place, hanging curtains and touching up areas that were not under the original work scope without charge to conform them. I had expected high quality workmanship based on their previous work in the area and in central NJ, but was not expecting the level of service they provided – truly above and beyond – as if it was their own home. The home is very important to our family and they seemed to really understand that in our time of need and do all the little (and big) things, on time and below budget. A++ for service and professionalism at a time when the last thing our family needed is to battle a contractor over issues while we were battling everything else that was dealt to us. I would recommend them highly and without reservation for people who truly care about their home, whether for repair, remodel or new build.
+-Joseph, Mantoloking
+Menard Construction did a basement remodel project for us 2 years ago. Their professionalism is second to none. What I liked best was Tom’s creative ideas for the space. We were not sure how to handle certain aspects and with Tom’s help we made a room that the whole family loves, complete with a ventless gas fireplace which has been awesome. Prompt, clean, professional. A go-to guy for future projects.
+-Chris, Mountain Lakes
+Tom Menard and his team provided an extremely positive construction experience for us. Their attention to detail and craftsmanship is second to none. The initial proposal was delivered swiftly and somehow seemed to land smack-in-the-middle of the median estimates that we’d been seeing across multiple bids. Tom in particular has a rare calming quality during brainstorming sessions – whereby he made us feel as though “everything was going to be ok,” while cross-referencing photos and number-crunching from assorted other remodeling projects that MCC Inc had handled for similar projects. Meaning; that they seem to have executed so many projects over the last 2 decades, that their experience and savvy in the field enables them to operate from a much more well-informed knowledge base. Home improvements (as we all know) can be a stressful venture and we really enjoyed how he and his crew worked with us to get the project completed under deadline whilst keeping true to our aesthetic vision. We strongly recommend MENARD CONSTRUCTION CO. Inc. (Caution not to confuse them with a similarly named company in CT.)
+-Bill, Mountain Lakes
+Tom and his competent staff guided us through a successful kitchen addition. They brought great ideas to the table that enhanced the architect’s design. They were professional, safe, courteous, and considerate to the fact that my family need to live in the house while they performed a major kitchen addition. The job came in on budget and on schedule. Great job to Tom, Chris, Meryl, Pierre, and all the fantastic subcontractors
+that worked on the job.
+-Earl, Mountain Lakes
+Author's Note: This scene was compiled from several sims written by all three writers for Tristam Core, Roshanara Rahman, and Aron Kells.
+The events in this SIM occurred in 2397.
+((Captain’s Quarters, USS Veritas))
+Rahman: You finished packing yet?
+Core: Phinished packing- whowhat? Finish packing phor whowhat?
+He poked his head out from the bathroom door, toothbrush lodged in his mouth mid-brush. His eyebrows were caught in a deep frown, black eyes staring at Roshanara in bewilderment as she flew from one end of the quarters to the other, picking up various pieces of clothing to throw into her over-sized luggage.
+Roshanara walked from one end of her quarters to the other, annoyed as she grabbed some additional garments to throw into her luggage.
+Rahman: You’ve known about this trip for months now!
+Core: Eysersh-- ::he pulled the toothbrush from his mouth, using it to point at her.:: And in that time, you have scheduled, postponed, re-scheduled, and then cancelled!
+Indeed, this trip to Krios Prime had been planned to take place last year, but the life of a Starfleet captain had pushed it back week by week. Truthfully, perhaps Roshanara herself hadn’t minded so much. Despite reassurances—and knowing Tristam and Del would be there with her—there was a part of her that very much did *not* want to go to the home world of her species.
+Rouiancet: =/\= Bridge to Captain Rahman. =/\=
+Tristam rose an eyebrow, returning to the bathroom to finish brushing his teeth.
+Rahman: =/\= Yes, Rahman here. =/\=
+Rouiancet: =/\= I have a fleet captain on the bridge for you, Captain. =/\=
+Oh? But before she could inquire further, she heard the unmistakable voice of Captain Kells.
+Kells: =/\= It's only me, Roshanara. I wondered if we could chat. =/\=
+Rahman: =/\= Captain Kells. Of course. I’ll be up there in a moment. =/\=
+Kells: =/\= There's no need. I'll come to you. This isn't official, it's just... it's about Del. I wanted to tell you what's been going on. =/\=
+Del? She frowned on the other end of the call.
+Rahman: =/\= All right, I’m in my quarters. Please stop by when you can. =/\=
+Kells: =/\= See you there. =/\=
+Silence permeated the room for a few minutes. Roshanara called to him.
+Rahman: What do you think that’s about?
+Teeth fresh and shirt on, Tristam swept out of the bathroom directly to their clothing drawers, his toothbrush still in hand.
+Core: Not sure, but--
+He opened the drawers, taking a pile of clothing and dumping it into a much smaller luggage bag. For good measure, he dropped the toothbrush on top of the pile, and shut the suitcase.
+Core: There. I'm packed.
+The Kriosian gave him a sharp glance before continuing with her packing.
+((A few minutes later, outside the Captain's Quarters))
+Aron hesitated a moment before he chimed outside Roshanara's quarters. He didn't like to give bad news of any sort, to anyone, but he knew too that Roshanara would want to hear this from him. He gave it another moment, and then rang. When Roshanara called for him to come in, he entered to find her with Tristam Core. He smiled, momentarily pleased by his own forgetfulness -- he'd forgotten that they were in a relationship, and was delighted at the reminder.
+Rahman: Captain. I thought I might have missed seeing you when you were aboard earlier with Secretary Ventu.
+Kells: (with another smile) Then it's lucky for you I'm harder to get rid of than a Bolian green rot.
+Rahman: Please, come in. Tristam and I were just finishing our packing. ::glances over at Tristam:: Weren’t we?
+Core: I finished ten minutes ago.
+Aron smiled more widely. They certainly seemed comfortable with each other, and he was delighted again to see the relationship in action. But, as he remembered again why he was there, the smile faded a bit.
+Kells: You heard why I wanted to talk to you, so (beat) yes.
+Roshanara led him gently to a seat and then sat down herself, appraising his vocal stumbles correctly as systemic for the moment.
+Rahman: So what is this about Del?
+Kells: He's been at the Neurological Institute on Starbase 32 since (beat) the incident
+Tristam glanced between the pair, once CO and XO respectively. With his eyebrows far up his forehead, he pursed his lips and jutted out his chin with an uncomfortable grin. He was... a little bit of a third wheel at the moment.
+Core: ...should I give you two some privacy?
+She didn’t think it was necessary, but Captain Kells answered hesitantly.
+Kells: If you don't mind? This isn't a secret, and (to Roshanara) you can pass this all on, but (to both) just so I can get it out.
+Rahman: I understand, captain, but Tristam was coming with Del to this trip. Whatever’s happened, he should know as well.
+Oh.
+The Rodulan blinked as Roshanara took her seat. She turned and gave him an expectant looking, gesturing to the chair across from her. He did so, but he had many questions, and reservations about being present while Kells laid bare everything happening with Del. He didn't feel comfortable with Tristam there -- so why force that?
+Then again, Roshanara might not feel comfortable without Tristam there. The Rodulan found himself in a minor ethical conundrum. Perhaps if he remained silent for the most part, he might not disturb Kells too much, yet be able to still occupy a space for Roshanara...
+Rahman: Please continue, Captain.
+Kells: Right, so, the incident. He was stabilized on the hospital ship Taussig for the trip, and I met him there. I was with him on Starbase 32 until the tour headed this way, but I think he was happy for a little alone time for now.
+Her voice lowered a bit, softer. It wasn’t the voice of a captain inquiring about her former chief medical officer but instead that of a woman concerned about her best friend.
+Rahman: How is he?
+Kells: He seems eager to get back. There shouldn't be much lasting damage, though he might have last mobility issues.
+After he said those last few words, Aron bit his lip. Generally speaking, starships were fairly accessible -- but suppose Del returned to Veritas (or any other ship) and wasn't able, for example, to use a Jeffries tube during an emergency, and the transporters were offline?
+She let out a deep breath. First Blake, now Del. Having previously required her own lengthy physical rehabilitation after the accident that had left her horrifically scarred, she had sympathy with the long road to recovery both officers now had ahead of them.
+Rahman: How long until he gets from there to here?
+That was a curious way to put it.
+Core: You mean how long until he gets back on his feet?
+The Kriosian frowned at him.
+Rahman: Well, if it’s going to take a long time, then maybe we should postpone.
+Her sad green eyes glanced down for a moment.
+Core: oO It wouldn't be the first time. Oo
+And doubtful it'd be the last. The Rodulan merely shrugged, lips pursed to one side. She was insistent upon going with Del, and frankly, Tristam thought it was a good choice. Nic del Vedova had a good head on his shoulders -- he was her friend. It was important to her.
+Kells: He's been asking about you, too. Wanting to make sure that his absence hasn't been "detrimental to the ship."
+He rolled his eyes. As if Del had ever been the picture of a "duty first" officer! It was, Aron was sure, his coded way of asking how Roshanara was doing.
+That caused a slight smile to creep back up across Roshanara's face. She knew what that phrase from Del meant. The jerkface. God, he better be okay.
+She looked back up, grin now fully apparent.
+Rahman: You tell him if he doesn’t get himself well enough to return, I’ll hunt him down like he’s the most wanted pirate in all of the Shoals.
+Kells (with a smile): I'll tell him.
+Rahman: Has he mentioned anything about wanting to return to duty, and in what capacity?
+Kells: I'm sure he'll want to, as soon as he's able, but -- I'm not sure. You might want to keep him away from any official post for a while. Plus, well, I was thinking I might stick around while he adjusts. If that's okay with you? The tour can miss me for a while, I've already talked to the secretary about it.
+Rahman: Of course, captain. You’re welcome to stay as long as you’re able to.
+The captains exchanged a nod. Kells reached for Roshanara's hands to hold.
+Kells: Thank you.
+Rahman: Actually, I don’t know how much he told you about this trip.
+He leaned away with a thoughtful frown.
+Kells: Nothing, I don't think. Or at least I don't remember anything. Tell me.
+Rahman: A member of the Kriosian royal staff found me on Earth. Tristam was there.
+Core:::grumbling:: For what good it did...
+Rahman: Yes, well his name is Jatann. He believes that I might be the answer to a mystery—or rather a missing person’s case from decades ago.
+Kells: (confused) What did he think you could do?
+Roshanara rolled her eyes as Kells glanced a Tristam. The Rodulan hesitated.
+Core: He thinks Roshanara may that missing person.
+She rolled her eyes, sitting back in her chair.
+Rahman: I find the whole thing preposterous. My parents have the records—and their memories. They adopted me on Moselina IV, which my birth certificate verifies.
+Kells: (slowly) But this man, this Jatann -- he thinks that you're...?
+Core: Nadira, the missing Kriosian child from 2361.
+Rahman: I don’t know… perhaps I’m growing more cynical with age, but I can’t help but be suspicious of their intentions. I mean… I’m not exactly unknown—certainly not after the whole Ross affair.
+She saw Tristam’s eyes look over towards her, checking to see if she was all right. She gave a subtle nod back letting him know she was fine, really. Time might not truly heal all wounds, but it helped the memories fade a bit.
+Kells: That's understandable. I would like to think that the Ross situation was the exception rather than the norm (beat) but there's no denying that my guard would be up, if I was in your position.
+Core: All things considered, you weren't exactly unknown before the Garuda incident anyway. You're a doctor in your field, you've been published, multiple times.
+Rahman: Exactly. So why come find me now?
+Kells: (hesitant) I don't suppose you've made any enemies during your time in the Shoals?
+At that, her Rodulan let out a laugh before coughing. If there wasn’t a fleet captain present, he would have found a pillow thrown at his head.
+Core: ...it wasn't that funny. I apologise.
+She took a deep breath before looking over at Captain Kells.
+Rahman: Sir, would you consider joining Tristam and me—and Del if he’s able still—to Krios Prime?
+The deep look between them was as solid as a duranium beam. Through years—decades even in an alternate future—they’d formed a bond far greater than that of just a former chief engineer-turned-first officer to her former CO. An older, time-displaced Kells had helped steer Roshanara away from a destiny of solitude and failure.
+Rahman: I’d feel better if you were there with me. To have your judgment by my side.
+Kells: Of course I will.
+She didn’t realize until then how much she needed to hear that, a wide smile escaping across her face.
+Rahman: You will?
+Kells: I'm sure Del will insist on going, and then I would feel remiss if I wasn't watching out for him, too.
+Still beaming, she nodded at her old captain.
+Rahman: Thank you. That makes me look forward to this trip much more.
+Kells: (with a brave face) Besides, if we all go missing, then it'll be your ship and crew and the Secretary's extended mission who come searching for us, and I don't think there's a force in the universe that could stand against those two united fronts.
+Core: Oh yes. Jinx us all. It's not like any time we set foot off Veritas, a catastrophe happens.
+She looked over at Tristam and shushed him with a dismissive wave of her hand.
+Rahman: Hush and look cute. ::looks over at Kells:: He is cute, isn’t it?
+Kells: Of course.
+Captain Kells reached out just then to hold each of their hands.
+Kells: I'm in this with you, for as long as you want me.
+Rahman: Be careful of what you offer, sir. I just might hold you to it.
+Tristam grinned before looking back at her.
+Core: Does this mean I don't have to unpack my suitcase?
+Rahman: It means you better be ready. ::to Kells:: You, too.
+Core: Just say when we leave. Transport is already sorted.
+She looked between the two men, her partner and her old captain. With her bestie Del coming along too, who else would she need beside her on this trip? Surely the brave Roshanara Rahman could handle whatever awaited her on Krios Prime.
+Rahman: Then gentlemen… the word is given.
+TBC…
+In-between Things
+V238208LV0
+&
+Components Specialist
+USS Veritas
+C238803SB0
+On Leave
+I238705TZ0
+BURTON, Michigan — Bentley, Genesee and Kearsley board of education seats are among those being contested in the May 5 election.
+While four names will appear on Bentley ballots, candidate Tim McComb advised The Burton News on Friday that, if elected, he will decline serving due to a work conflict and voters are advised to choose two candidates from the remaining three.
+Voters who'd like to learn more about their candidates, read on:
+Bentley
+(Choose two)
+Vincent Bontumasi (i)
+•Age: 43
+•Years in Bentley district: 16, lived in area all my life.
+•Occupation: Process engineer for Durakon Industries in Lapeer.
+•Family: Married with two children: Cristina, a Bentley sophomore and Rosalia, a 1996 Bentley graduate.
+•Bentley Board of Education meeting attendance: Has attended board meetings more than five years.
+•Education/experience: Served four years as school board member, attended classes through Michigan Association of School Boards, served on Bentley committees, including personnel, finance and building and grounds.
+•Plan to address district issues: Balancing the budget every year is the ongoing struggle. Student enrollment is really low. We're in the process of eliminating a school. I'm interested in the task force evaluation that will come back to us. I can see pros and cons of consolidating districts, but I prefer a small school. We will have to make some cuts, I don't know where yet — I'm always open to learning.
+•Why vote for him: I'm pretty straightforward. I don't sugarcoat things. I'm a parent, involved in boosters, my kids go to Bentley. I've been on the board four years and I'm always open-minded. Coming into (the school board) you can't have an agenda, you have to be open-minded to everything.
+Penny Kentish McWilliams
+•Age: 44
+•Years in Bentley district: 43
+•Occupation: Elementary principal for Byron School District.
+•Family: Husband Joe McWilliams, five children: Koehn, April and Carl Kentish, all Bentley students; Jaylyn and Jared McWilliams, Byron students.
+•Bentley Board of Education meeting attendance: About 100 meetings.
+•Education/experience: 1983 Bentley graduate. Served one year on Bentley Board of Education and board committees, including curriculum policy, finance and building and grounds. Education specialist in school administration; earned master's degree in early childhood education from Oakland University; earned bachelor of science in elementary education and bachelor of business administration from University of Michigan-Flint.
+•Plan to address district issues: Like most schools, student enrollment numbers are declining. There's been discussion on moving to two buildings. The majority of money is spent on staff salaries. I think the only ways to get close to a balanced budget is to go to two buildings. It can be done. I grew up in Bentley and would like to see it stay Bentley, but if it comes to a point where you can't balance the budget and the state is looking at taking it over, I think the only option would be to consolidate with one of the neighboring districts.
+•Why vote for her: I think I have a lot of educational experience. I can bring a perspective about things that have been successful in other places. I get a lot of reports from the state and kind of have an insider's view.
+Vickie Morgan (i)
+•Age: 48
+•Years in Bentley district: About 20.
+•Occupation: Retired bus driver for Grand Blanc School District.
+•Family: Married with two grown children, both Bentley graduates.
+•Bentley Board of Education meeting attendance: About 15-20 meetings.
+•Education/experience: Graduate of Flint Southwestern High School. Served one year on Bentley Board of Education, attended classes through Michigan Association of School Boards.
+•Plan to address district issues: The budget is the No. 1 issue. I think everyone — in schools countywide and statewide — is dealing with this. We're just working together as a team to find ways to control our budget and yet make it a great place for the students to learn. I don't want to comment on consolidation.
+•Why vote for her: With my experience, I'm ready to work for the community. I'd be happy to do it again for the next four years.
+Genesee
+(Choose one)
+Steven Elkins
+•Age: 19
+•Years in Genesee district: Lifelong resident
+•Occupation: Student of business management at Baker College, work part-time at a custom lawn care office.
+•Family: Mother, Richelle, and brother, Scott, who is a Genesee student.
+•Genesee Board of Education meeting attendance: Have attended most meetings in the past six months.
+•Education/experience: 2008 Genesee High School graduate and an Eagle Scout. Studying business management at Baker College. I'm learning how to run a business and am interested in a career in politics. Ultimately, school is like a business, and the school board is really supposed to serve students and parents. Being a student at Genesee myself for 13 years, I have a very good idea of how things go.
+•Plan to address district issues: Enrollment is an important issue. I'd like to encourage parents to bring their students to Genesee through something like the Kalamazoo Promise (scholarship program). It's also important to offer a larger variety of extracurricular classes and work on test scores.
+•Why vote for him: It's important that the school board members remain in touch with the students. Being a new graduate, I know exactly what it's like. I know the teachers, I know what I need to learn.
+Roger Haas (i)
+•Age: 68
+•Years in Genesee district: Attended Genesee schools through 10th grade (Genesee's highest grade available at the time). Lifelong Genesee connection. Although college/career took me away for a number of years, I returned to Genesee in 2001.
+•Occupation: Director of maintenance and construction for Genesee County.
+•Family: Married to Roberta with four adult children (two are teachers) and six (soon to be seven) grandchildren.
+•Genesee Board of Education meeting attendance: Near-perfect attendance during four years on Genesee Board of Education.
+•Education/experience: 1956 graduate of Kearsley, studied civil engineering at Michigan State University, earned master's degree in business administration from Arizona State University.
+•Plan to address district issues: The challenge is fulfilling our vision to be the top-performing district in the county in the face of falling enrollment and the resulting decrease in state funding. We need to support our superintendent in developing community support, improve teacher/administrator/support staff performance and seek additional funding sources.
+•Why vote for him: The first four years of experience on the board have given me a strong knowledge of the issues the board must deal with -- including both the academic and financial aspects of maintaining and building a strong small school that serves its community and its children well.
+Paula March
+•Age: 37
+•Years in Genesee district: We've been a part of the district 12 years total (lived in the district, children commuted to attend Genesee schools while we built our house). Have lived in district seven years.
+•Occupation: Pharmacy tech for VG's.
+•Family: Married with four children in the Genesee district, ages 7-18.
+•Genesee Board of Education meeting attendance: Have attended four or five meetings.
+•Education/experience: Former athletic booster treasurer.
+•Plan to address district issues: I would look at some of the rules as far as student-athletes and eligibility to play with bad grades. Education should be first.
+•Why vote for her: I will bring to the table ideas to help make our small school grow and will bring some much-needed change to the school as well as a woman's opinion and a mother's voice.
+Kearsley
+(Choose one)
+Kevin Houle
+•Age: 30
+•Years in Kearsley district: Lifelong resident of the district.
+•Occupation: Electrical engineer working on hybrid technology and motors in the automotive field.
+•Family: Married to Michelle Houle with three daughters: Natalie, 6, Isabel, 3, and Julia, 2.
+•Kearsley Board of Education meeting attendance: Attend about two meetings each year.
+•Education/experience: My wife and I serve as the Sunday school preschool directors at Faith Tabernacle Church in Burton. My wife was also a school teacher. which has allowed me to learn a lot about students. I also volunteer time working with the students in automotive classes with two other districts.
+•Plan to address district issues: It is important to keep the best interest of the students and parents in mind and create a new form of communication between them and the board members because the superintendent does what the board members decide.
+•Why vote for him: Because I am honest and have integrity. I also was raised with good morals and believe this should be carried into the schools as an example.
+Terri Koprowski
+•Age: 42
+•Years in Kearsley district: 14
+•Occupation: Executive assistant to chief executive officer for WorkLife Financial in Troy.
+•Family: Married to Pete Koprowski. We have two children: Andy, 16, is a Kearsley sophomore; Reggie, 15, is a Kearsley freshman.
+•Kearsley Board of Education meeting attendance: Attended about 10 meetings
+•Education/experience: Earned bachelor's degree (majored in management with minor in accounting) at Baker College. I believe my work experience and my education, both in the business field, are assets that will allow me to be a beneficially contributing school board member.
+•Plan to address district issues: I will work closely with fellow board members throughout the county and with members of the community and school administration on issues of reduced student funding, declining enrollment, declining health care costs and increased graduation requirements with no additional state funding.
+•Why vote for her: I've been in the schools as a parent volunteer working with parents, kids and staff personnel and have learned the value of working together as a team. My educational background and work experience have provided me the needed experience to make good business/educational decisions for the students and the district.
+(i) = incumbent currently in office
+The Clouds Should Know Me by Now - Selections
+Chia Tao (779 –843)
+Translations by Mike O’Connor
+Introduction
+Chia Tao was a buddhist poet of the Middle T’ang dynasty. Born into an impoverished family near today’s Beijing, he became a Ch’an (Zen) monk early in his youth, with the religious name Wupen. While scant biographical detail of his monastic days exists, his official biography does note that upon arriving at the Eastern Capital, Lo-yang, Chia Tao wrote a poem protesting a curfew forbidding monks to go out after noon. The poem caught the sympathetic eye of the eminent Confucian poet Han Yu (768–824) and led to the latter becoming Chia Tao’s poetry mentor.
+A more famous account—a literary anecdote—describes the meeting of the poets this way: Chia Tao, while riding a donkey on the way to the marketplace, was deeply absorbed in trying to choose between two words, push (t’ui) and knock (ch’iao) in the line “Under the moon, a monk [knocks at, or pushes] the gate.” Reciting the line over and over, Chia Tao became oblivious of his surroundings and collided with a sedan chair carrying Han Yu. Han Yu, waving off apologies from Chia Tao, became interested in his poetic impasse, and immediately opted for the word “knock.” The compound “push-knock (t’ui-ch’iao)” thereafter became the traditional term to describe, not only Chia Tao’s assiduousness of craft, but any poet’s exacting labor to find the mot juste, or to make careful stylistic distinctions.
+What is known factually is that Chia Tao, at about age thirty-one, abandoned monasticism to devote himself to a secular life of poetry, supported by subsistence civil service. He was encouraged in this by a circle of prominent poets, including Han Yu, Meng Chiao (751–814) and Chang Chi (ca. 776–ca. 829).The group was based in the political and literary capital Ch’ang-an, modern Xi’an, the largest city in the world at the time and Chia Tao’s principal home until his “banishment” late in life to provincial posts—an apparent victim of slander.
+Although he left the Buddhist order, his heart never really left the world of “ mountains and clouds”—the secluded communities of religious adepts who were dedicated to some form of the Way (Tao), and whose practices collectively brought forth one of the great religious ages. Though his poems reveal that he chided himself for not being more deeply realized, it may be that his sense of limitation in this regard only enhanced his admiration of those who were.
+As a poet with a monk’s background, he was welcome at temples and hermitages alike. He was, in fact, given the literary name Lang-hsien ,Wandering Immortal, and his poems record his sojourns among not only the religious elements—clerics, poet monks, and hermits—but among the lay community of literati as well.
+If Chia Tao’s search for Buddhist enlightenment was an unfulfilled one, so too was his search for a significant civil-service position. In fact, it is not clear that he ever passed the examination and received his chin-shih degree. In his mature years, his deepest quest was for poetic mastery and, related to this, in finding chih-yin, people who understood and appreciated his poetry—a time-honored quest in Chinese literary history.
+Chia Tao writes a quietistic poem that features nothing more dramatic than a parting, a viewing of landscape, thoughts of a distant friend, or a stay overnight. Atmosphere, or mood, in many instances, is what the poem is most about. His lyrical work at its purest has the beauty of inhospitable, or remote, mountains; yet when speaking to themes of friendship, Chia Tao’s human empathy is the measure of the peaks. The edge of sorrow running through his poems was honed in part by his chronic poverty, but it rarely gives way to bitterness or self-pity.
+Though the poet does not overtly preach the Dharma, his life and training as a monk naturally influenced his artistic temperament: the poems are spare, technically hard-won (t’ui-ch’iao), and morally serious. In his early discursive poems, probably influenced by Han Yu, Confucian values surface as well.
+As with the poet monks, Chia Tao’s poems are filled with the imagery of remote temples and stone chimes, looming peaks and wind-twisted pines. But with Chia Tao, as with Wang Wei (701–761) before him, Buddhism is largely internalized; its expression is aesthetic, not philosophical.
+Some of Chia Tao’s contemporaries and literary descendants found his poems inclined to pessimism, and the poet Su Tung-p’o (1037–1101) wrote critically that Chia Tao’s work was “lean” and Meng Chiao’s “cold.” Meng Chiao, upon first encountering the tall, imposing figure of the younger Chia Tao, even called him “a lean monk lying in ice”—and this from an old poet who himself was a poverty-saddled recluse!
+Chia Tao’s extant poems number four hundred and four. Of these, the “Farewell Poem” is most widely represented, accounting for nearly one hundred. As scholars have pointed out, this poetic subcategory resonated deeply with Chinese of the T’ang era, owing to the huge distances of China, the rudimentary transportation, and the strong ties of friendship and family. For Chia Tao, a poem on the theme of farewell was, at least ritualistically, a gift to the traveler, as well as a means for the poet to ease his own sadness of separation.
+His favored poetic form was the lu-shih, or the regulated form of the eight-line verse. In this form each line contains either five or seven characters, obeys rules for rhyme, and has verbal and tonal parallelisms. Tu Fu’s (712–770) achievement in this form was a standard for poets such as Chia Tao, who came on the scene after the High T’ang period. Chia Tao refined the form and took certain liberties with it, thereby gaining many disciples in the Late T’ang and beyond.
+The poet died in humble circumstances. His only known possessions were an ailing donkey and a five-string zither. He was survived by his wife, but no children. Still, ChiaTao never anticipated worldly rewards. He attained a high degree of poetic excellence that has earned his poetry grateful readers down to the present.And in the course of his arduous life, he had the consolation of enjoying the friendship of the leading scholars, poets, and sages of his time. As Chia Tao put it, writing on the occasion of a visit from his friend Yung T’ao:
+Not having to be alone
+is happiness;
+we do not talk
+of failure or success.
+Winter Night Farewell
+At first light, you ride
+swiftly over the village bridge;
+Plum blossoms fall
+on the stream and unmelted snow.
+With the days short and the weather cold,
+it’s sad to see a guest depart;
+The Ch’u Mountains are boundless,
+and the road, remote.
+Memento on the Departure of a Friend from Yeh,
+Last Day of the Second Moon
+In flowering willows,
+we rein in our horses;
+at parting, we are free
+to drink all the wine we desire.
+But the winds of spring
+sweep slowly north;
+clouds and wild geese
+do not fly south.
+Tomorrow
+dawns the first—
+already the third
+month of the year!
+Touch whip to lean horse and go
+into the colors of dusk;
+mist is rising
+on far peaks.
+Morning Travel
+Rising.
+Poetic Minds Complete the Greater Elegance: The Nine Monks and Chih Yuan, Poet Monks of Early Sung China
+(Late tenth century)
+Translations by Paul Hansen
+Introduction
+In the early decades of the Sung dynasty, nine Buddhist monks from widely separate areas in China, attracted by their mutual interest in poetry, sent poems back and forth, visited one another for small poetry gatherings, played music together, and probably traveled in one another’s company. Some of them were acquainted with notable officials and hermits of the times, for we find mention of K’ou Chun and poems addressed to Ting Wei, Ch’ung Fang, Lin Pu, and Wei Yeh. Beyond those interested in the poetry of monks, only one of the circle, Hui Ch’ung, achieved recognition for his small landscape paintings.
+Very early in the eleventh century a selection of their poems was made, called Poems of the Nine Monks, although the poet monks themselves may never have used that collective name. The Poems of the Nine Monks, a small volume of 135 poems, was already hard to find a few decades after the monks vanished from the scene around 1010. It experienced a precarious existence for several hundred years until it was reprinted in 1787 and reprinted again in the great collections of this century.
+Beyond their very general areas of origin, what we know about the monks themselves is only what their poems tell us. Though aspects of the Late T’ang style, in which they crafted their work, were already being discarded for something new in poetry, the poems of these monks remain crisp and well crafted. Indeed their diction, in the tradition of hermit poets, is appropriately “rugged,” i.e., the word order is challenging, unusual, and potentially ambiguous. However, I feel it is their ultimate literary attainment that in their accomplished poetry these monks offer intense and nondogmatic insights into moments of Buddhist life from the perspective of those traditionally central to it.
+We do know something more about Chih Yuan. A native of Hangzhou, he was born in 976 and became an apprentice-monk at the age of seven, when he “left home” (a Buddhist term meaning to leave the secular life and enter the order of monks and nuns) at the Lung-hsing Monastery in that city. In his youth he made notable progress in his study and application of the teachings of the T’ien-t’ai School of Chinese Buddhism. Later he was abbot of Mao-nao Monastery on Ku-shan Island in West Lake, just outside the city. There, he and the cultivated Taoist hermit Lin Pu became friends and probably exchanged poems, though none of the latter’s poems to Chih Yuan remain today.
+Chih Yuan was well read in traditional Chinese philosophy and literature as well as the scriptures of Buddhism, and many poems in his collection arose from his extra-canonical studies. Other than Buddhist practice, study, and writing poetry, he actively pursued his duties as abbot of Mao-nao Monastery and made a number of improvements there. In 1022, after gathering his disciples together and composing a final Buddhist verse for them, the noted abbot passed away. Like the work of his colleagues the Nine Monks, Chih Yuan’s collection of poems experienced vicissitudes and has not been independently preserved; the remainder, though, a collection of eleven chuan, is in the Japanese Continuation of the Tripitika, and, like that of the Nine Monks, has been reprinted in the Complete Sung Poetry.
+The ability of these monks in poetry led to their being called poetry monks, a term some might employ in a disparaging sense. Yet from earliest times spontaneous verses have always been a part of the Buddhist tradition. The stanza concluding the Diamond Sutra offers a superb example:
+As stars, a fault of vision, as a lamp,
+A mock show, dew drops, or a bubble,
+A dream, a lightning flash, or cloud
+So should one view what is conditioned
+In a tradition of spiritual poetry and at a great distance of time and culture it is frequently these immediate revelations of language that bring the experiences of earlier Buddhists, august and humble, to us most vividly today: the other-worldly truths of the Diamond Sutra, or a monk washing his clothes.As the Monk Wei Feng points out in defense of the art for Buddhists:
+Poetic
+Minds complete
+The Greater Elegance. The intent
+Of the patriarchs employs every method.
+I would like to take the pleasurable opportunity to thank all those who helped me with this project.The late Professor Hellmut Wilhelm, who first pointed out the work of the Nine Monks to me; Professor Maureen Robertson, Bill Porter, and Michael O’Connor, who have seen parts of the present work at various stages; Sam and Sally Green, who published an earlier selection of my translations from the Nine Monks; Paul Hunter, whose shared insights made significant improvements on the final draft; and my wife Jennifer Clarke, for her constant help and warm support in these curious efforts.
+Broken Tablets
+A slice
+Of precious stone
+The pressing cold has split.
+In the fallen script
+I see broken bugs.
+Sinking
+At a distance
+On the hill’s grass edge, or half-revealed
+In an icy stream, deeds writ down, how
+Could the people exist? Years
+Melted away, their affairs
+Already empty.
+I only hear
+Cypress on the wrecked
+Mound mourn together,
+As the grieving wind Rises.
+Hsi Chou
+Sent
+to Huai Ku
+Hearsay
+You’ve hid out
+Around T’iao-yin, where Chinese
+And Ch’iang cook-smoke
+Half-merge.
+Autumn
+Gets deeper, the border
+Day shortens, wind stronger,
+The dawn piping long. Wooded terrain
+Splits around a single rampart,
+The river current rises
+On a distant steppe.
+Far off
+I know the traveler
+Who visited our grove
+Chants hard-wrought poems,
+Forgot with Zen
+At night.
+Hsi Chou
+Early Spring
+at the Capital,
+Sent to the Honorable Kuan
+A wanderer’s mind
+Constantly recalls seclusion.
+Early this morning I got
+Your invitation.
+Our date
+To watch the Moon
+Has problems. A quiet visit
+To discuss the mountains is far off.
+On a distant road scant sunlight
+Grows. By midnight
+The final snow
+Will fall.
+Sitting, I see
+The willows by Blue Gate,
+Soft-softly sprout again
+New sprigs.
+Hsi Chou
+Autumn Path
+Fir, bamboo,
+And pure shade merge.
+As I stroll, the mind
+Has inclinations.
+A chill
+Springs up just
+When rain has passed.
+As stillness stretches out, monks
+Suddenly return. Bug tracks wind
+Into obscure holes. Moss
+Traces connect broken
+Eave corners.
+My thoughts
+Turn to a place
+Of deep reclusion,
+Down from the summit
+Ridge after ridge.
+Pao Hsien
+Written
+on the Wall
+at Master Wei Feng’s
+The grassy path
+Leads to a deep cloister.
+Arriving in Autumn
+Eases my heart
+Even more.
+In town
+No one I’ve known long.
+Outside the gate, another mountain.
+Exploring the silence gives poetic
+Thought birth. Fasting
+Confers a sick look.
+On freezing nights
+You arrange to meet me often:
+Silent talk beyond
+Human space.
+Pao Hsien<<
+OVER THE WATER
+“I’ll take you with me over the water, over the water when I go”
+As I began this process of writing about songs that act as soundtracks for my photographs a few months ago now I came to a realization recently. Looking back, there were a number of years when I had a lot of muddled thoughts in my head. Not having a creative outlet kept them all inside I think. That eased up when I began getting a positive reaction to some of my photographs but it felt like there was something missing still. When I sat down in a coffee shop in October and scribbled down some notes about ideas for getting myself out of a personal and professional rut, the genesis of this blog somehow escaped that muddle. In recounting all of this to someone recently I thought about bands and singers that have been around for a long time and how for some the creative process dries up, or never returns from the heights of youth. Albums are released but without the excitement or effort that existed years before. Or in the case of some artists, they simply get better with age.
+For this installment of The Soundtrack Of A Photograph I chose the music of the Oysterband and their song Over The Water, a song whose imagery made my job a lot easier to pair with my photographs. I say this because the lyrics themselves are actually very reminiscent of photographs. Little lyrical snapshots are what this blog is about in many ways and the way little vignettes pieced together become something more substantial. The seemingly sparse arrangement of the song at the beginning gives way to a complex array of textures, again much in the way that the depth of a good photograph is not immediately revealed upon first view. Thinking about this I came to another realization. Though some photographs I took a long time ago were decent even with the dubious cameras mentioned in the last installment, it has only been in the last few years that I have really felt a deeper connection to photography, along with greater personal satisfaction at the results. Now combined with this blog I have a true outlet for sharing them in a way that makes sense for me. Just like those photographs the music of the Oysterband has become more satisfying as the band has continued. Though there is over 30 years worth of great material to explore, they are a rarity amongst bands that have been around that long. For a new listener I would not hesitate to say to buy their latest album and work backwards. That is not at all what you say about most bands but then again, Oysterband are not most bands.
+- Old Pier Remnants
+That latest album was just released as I finish writing this installment and my copy is crossing the ocean as we speak. Entitled Diamonds On The Water it promises to further continue that tradition of solid and challenging musicianship developed over 30 plus years together. But if Oysterband happen to read this, I hope they will forgive me for going back 7 years here to one of their best albums they have made to date (though from the snippets made available from Diamonds On the Water I am pretty sure my mind may change!). Released in 2007, the album Meet You There set off a whirlwind of activity for the band individually and collectively, with seldom a chance to catch a rest in between it seemed. Touring non-stop around that album brought them right up to their 30th Anniversary and then the recording of a retrospective in celebration of that milestone. That then gave way to various solo albums, which gave way to a powerful collaboration with June Tabor. Over 20 years ago, June Tabor along with the Oysterband had collaborated on the excellent album Freedom & Rain and 2011 brought a long awaited follow up- Ragged Kingdom, chosen by many in the press to be not just Folk album of the year, but one of the best albums for the year period. After the touring commitments with June were completed it was time for the band to think about a fresh collection of new Oysterband material, and Diamonds On The Water is the result. I do not feel bad about looking back here however at Meet You There because it still sounds fresh and relevant today. I have listened to it something like 974 times since its release and it has never lost its grip on me and the same goes for my wife and many of my friends I have played it for. It is just that damn good.
+“We slid in silence through the dockyard, rusted cranes against the sky”
+Because this blog is a new idea, I doubt that it will include too many brand new songs. I think as listeners we need more time for songs to absorb into our system. Having year’s worth of photographs to use as soundtracks, and thousands of songs to choose from, I think I can let the reviewers tackle the new material by artists while I focus on something more personal for me. Taking a page from the Oysterband themselves they have often said how sometimes the meaning or the feel of a song often does not reveal itself until some time has passed. To illustrate that point, twice now they have released retrospectives that rather than looking back, look forward instead with new arrangements of old songs. Often these new arrangements come to light after the song has been put to test on the road, so what was loud and aggressive has become quieter and introspective, and what was gentle becomes powerful and forthright. In fact there is one Oysterband song called The Oxford Girl which has been arranged 3 distinct ways at this point as an example!
+Over The Water starts the Meet You There album off and it begins with a fade in of a mbira before the expressive vocals of John Jones joins in with a promise of taking us over the water where the wild winds blow. As the rest of the band then comes in with subtle accompaniment we realize that love has been discovered and though the reason for going over the water is not readily apparent, this verse certainly helps us understand why it may be necessary-
+“The spirit of a troubled life
+Is all I have to give to you
+The simple curse of a wayward life
+Is all that I can bring to you”
+Over The Water is one of those songs whose musical arrangement seems to fill in more of the storyline than the words themselves do. The open arrangement and subtle percussion, sweeping violin and cello fulfill the romantic notions of travel, of going over the water in anticipation of what is on the other side. Somehow the nuance of the guitar parts played by Alan Prosser seem to act more as a counterpoint to me, almost making the journey sound more ominous or menacing. To me it seems like a reminder that going over the water may not solve that troubled life. Yet in the end the soaring vocals of John Jones swoop in and allay the darkness and fear. Going over the water might be all you have. It might be the only choice, and having a wide eyed girl to join you on the journey makes it much easier.
+“Harbour lights across the water, we went dancing in the rain”
+Well that is my interpretation of it anyway and one of the best things about music or the arts in general is that is encouraged. Everything is right and nothing is wrong generally speaking. I must admit that through the years the lyrics of the Oysterband have always had somewhat of a mysterious side for me. Some are clear and direct, particularly the no punches pulled politically inspired material they have always been known for, but others are like those pieced together snapshots I mentioned above. They are more elusive and thought provoking, and challenging to deconstruct meanings. There are some repeating themes the band has touched on through the years however and the photographs I am using here match what I feel Over The Water is about. Primarily there seems to be a certain amount of loneliness and desolation lyrically, with tinges of hopefulness and subversive humor mixed in for good measure. There also seems to be a number of songs with an element of industrial landscape, of urban sprawl and city streets and decay which have a type of desolation of another sort. It can be as easy to feel alone and alienated in a city of millions as it is in the most isolated corner of the world. Certainly at times I have felt that way. All of this probably explains why I key in on certain phrases in Oysterband lyrics, rather than the song as a whole. Doing so helps me find some connection with the song, much in the same way a simple photograph can evoke many feelings. In Over The Water it is that idea of the harbor as the impetus for the journey, it can be the point of departure, or the point of arrival. Anyway you look at it, it is a journey.
+Over The Water is the second song I can think of by the Oysterband that mentions rusted cranes. Harbor lights, and oil fed rainbows on the water are also mentioned in the song, and anyone who has lived in a port city knows all about that sort of imagery. There is something about a harbor that is photographic on so many levels. In New York City we can see on a daily basis the bustle of activity between a cross section of commercial container ships, tug boats and barges, tankers interacting with massive cruise ships and ferries of every size, combined with pleasure boats darting around the harbor and under bridges. Then you have remnants of the old waterfront buildings or piers that once housed industry, now largely derelict or paved over with shiny new residential or commercial properties. Interspersed within all that, you can still find the occasional icon of the past such as cranes, or harbor walls or fortifications that have managed to survive for years. Because of all that activity and movement, I have always enjoyed walking around the waterfront here. It is a given that there will be something to photograph at any point throughout the day or night. The cranes and other mysterious shapes one sees become silhouettes in the fading light of dusk, and in the light of morning the reflections of sunlight on the harbor make everything glisten. All prime tools for a photographer of course to make use of.
+Beyond the practical or business side of a harbor such as New York, there is of course a more romantic side going on as well. It is that romantic side that is on display in Over The Water, and indeed when the weather is nice there is nothing so wonderful as seeing the harbor lit up at night. Stars are seldom seen in the sky here, so I think we instead rely on the lights at waters edge or the ships in the harbor as our stars instead. It is comforting seeing the lights out on the dark waters of the harbor. Being in a city with so many immigrants, you are also inevitably reminded of the journeys many took to get here. Of how many people stood on a shore somewhere and thought about going ‘over the water’. The notion of over the water is a powerful one for it can mean something to everyone. It can mean for love, or emigration, or as a metaphor of change. Whenever I walk on the waterfront, camera in hand these are some of the things I think about. When I get home and review the photographs I have taken there is usually much to think about. No matter where I am while taking photos I like to think about why I took certain ones, what the appeal was. That can help to prevent future mistakes about lighting, perspective, and approach. That is often where the first thought creeps into my brain and says, this kind of reminds me of that song. As I have mentioned in previous entries, that can come from vastly different sources. But in the last few years whenever I take any type of harbor photo, be it of ships on the water or the sun setting on the harbor outside my office window, there is one song that pops into my head. So for the way it subtly speaks of love and hope, of uncertainty and promise, and most importantly of a journey, Over The Water by the Oysterband is this installments Soundtrack Of A Photograph.
+“I’ll take you with me over the water, over the water when I go, I’ll take you with me over the water, over the water where the wild winds blow.”
+Postscript-
+In 1989, I had just heard the Oysterband for the first time in my exploration of anything folk music related as I mentioned in Part 1. Now thinking back, in March of that year when this video was filmed, I was almost assuredly in college in Massachusetts. It made me smile when I saw this video for the first time a few years ago for the traditional song New York Girls. To think all these years later that I would be writing about the Oysterband in my blog and have a video courtesy of them that shows what I am writing about!Namely, there the band are in New York Harbor, on the Staten Island Ferry, and…..as seen in a few places at one of my favorite places in the city, the South Street Seaport also as mentioned in Part 1. Not to mention the great old ship Peking, and a glimpse of the Wavertree at one point as well. Funny how these things work sometimes isn’t it?! Now why couldn’t I have been around when they filmed it!
+Over The Water-Words and Music by Chopper/Jones/Partis/Prosser/Telfer
+New York Girls-Traditional, arranged by Oysterband
+All photographs by Robert P Doyle
+All images in this blog are available in limited supply for purchase as unframed prints. Sizes may vary. Contact via robpatdoy@hotmail.com for details.
+2 thoughts on “Soundtrack Of A Photograph, Part 7”
+First of all, I love the pictures of the Old Pier Remnants & The 69th St Transfer Bridge. I find pictures of industrial decay very evocative somehow and have a particular thing for disused railway stations.
+Meet You There is a tour de force and came along just at the right time I think. There was a sense that the band were losing their potency at the time. There is good music on the previous couple of albums (Rise Above in particular) but they did not have the impact of the band’s earlier work. Meet You There changed that. I don’t know any Oysterband fan who does not regard it amongst their finest works. Not a bad song anywhere and several deeply moving ones which have become part of their classic repetoire. My own associations for the album are less with the sea than with hills as I used to regularly listen to it whilst hiking over the South Downs, long before JJ started reluctantly rambling!
+Great stuff as always.
+Many thanks Al-you are so correct about the album. For me the mark of a good album is how you can hit play and very easily find yourself at the end of the album in no time because it flows that way. Especially with Ipods and all, it is so easy to skip tracks these days, and I think from day one of getting Meet You There, I NEVER skipped songs. I always played it straight through. Thanks again!
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+Make your own chair-leg pads from felt or craft foam for another way to protect the floor. Trace the chair legs onto paper; then use the cutout paper as a template on the felt or foam.
+How to Build a Dance Floor for Cheap | Sapling
+A dance floor may be required for a dinner party, an outdoor wedding, and for many other special occasions. You may only need the floor one time. If it's portable, you could store it away, sell it or lend it out for future events.
+Cheap Outdoor Playground Floor - Outdoor Play Floors
+Outdoor Playground Turf When it comes to affordable outdoor playground floor options, our Play Time Artificial Grass Turf Roll should be at the top of your list. This quality, yet cheap outdoor playground turf creates an eye-catching, refreshing look for your playground, and it maintains its brilliant green hue year-round.
+How to Create an Outdoor Room - The New York Times
+Create a Floor. Demarcate the area of the outdoor room — and make it feel like a destination that stands apart from the rest of the terrace or yard — by changing the flooring material where .
+24 Ways to Make the Most of Your Tiny Apartment Balcony
+The goal was to create a space that felt like an extension of the home's interior. Beautiful weather-resistant pieces made it all happen. An outdoor rug with a vibrant scroll pattern covers the concrete floor. A faux-wicker sofa and coffee table set made from resilient polypropylene bring the comfort of indoors outside.
+41 Cheap And Easy Backyard DIYs You Must Do This Summer
+Go outside! You look like you need a little sun. . Use latex floor paint to color cement tiles on an outdoor patio. . Save your prunings so you can make awesome little twig fences for your .
+Low Budget Pallet Outdoor Lounge : 5 Steps (with Pictures .
+Use the rake to make a flat surface. Use the spirit level to check if its real flat! Build up the terrace floor by . placing the pallets one after one always adjusting the heigth of the new pallet to the rest. screwing the new pallet to the other using brackets. Its better to do this together with a friend - its good to have dog for a helping .
+33 Simple Tips on How to Cool Down a Room Without AC
+So one of the things I did was to strategically open our windows. I’m an early riser, and I’m up when it is still cool outside in the mornings. So I’d open up the windows in the morning to cool the house down, then shut them when it got warm outside. That way at least our home would be at a decent temperature in the mornings. 10.
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+A THOUGHTFUL SOLUTION TO A REAL LIFE PROBLEM IN TRAVEL
+Interview with Jen Rubio, Co-Founder and CBO of Away, which produces modern travel essentials.
+I had the pleasure of connecting with Jen Rubio, Co-Founder, President and Chief Brand Officer of Away, which produces thoughtful travel necessities for modern travelers, well known for their suitcases. A business stemming out of a real life need for change, Jen not only shares her business experience but also her advice to women entrepreneurs, her goals going forward and her favorite travel recommendations.
+Hey Jen, it’s great to connect. You and your co-founder, Steph Korey, have created Away, an impressive luggage company, which thoughtfully solves real travel problems. In one sentence, how would you describe the last two years?
+JEN RUBIO: Steph and I launched Away in 2016 with one perfect suitcase and the belief that we could make travel more seamless by creating a range of products and experiences that would inspire people to plan their next trip, and today we've sold over 300,000 suitcases!
+5 years ago, where were you and what did you imagine you’d be doing? Had the idea for Away been brewing for a while before coming to fruition?
+JEN RUBIO: My whole career has been built around connecting brands with consumers—I’ve always been naturally interested in how people and companies communicate with one another. Before launching Away, I’d worked in several roles (both in-house and on the agency side) helping brands identify their unique point of view, and how they could share that with the world.
+Five years ago, I was leaving Warby Parker after having been the Head of Social Media, overseeing partnerships, content, and social for the brand. I was taking what I had learned about brands and retail to move to London and do it at a global scale for AllSaints as their Head of Innovation.
+The concept for Away wouldn’t come for a few more years. The idea actually stemmed from a personal need. My suitcase broke while I was traveling, and the rest is history.
+There are a lot of people with business ideas who either don’t know how to begin or may be hesitant to. What would you say to them?
+JEN RUBIO: Start.
+I think a lot of entrepreneurs are really stifled by the idea of failure, rather than embracing the fact that it’s a natural (and even healthy) part of building a business. Being flexible enough to try new ideas, and resilient enough to land on your feet when they don’t work out, will allow you to iterate and grow at a much quicker pace.
+As a company with two women co-founders, the statistics weren’t on your side—female founders got 2% of venture capital dollars in 2017. But you and Steph have raised $31 million! Why do you think you were successful, and do you have any tips for people seeking funding?
+JEN RUBIO: Confidence was key for us throughout the fundraising process. It helped us to position every ask as one that was pitched as an opportunity for the potential investor, not as a favor they were doing for us. Pitching is just persuasion! You’re aiming to show investors why it’s a great opportunity, and why you’re willing to work tirelessly to make it a success.
+But don’t be afraid to walk away from a potential investor if it doesn’t feel like the right fit. It’s important to pay attention to the cues they give you during those first meetings—the way they treat you in early interactions says a lot about how they might treat you down the line, so trust your instincts. Similarly, be grateful for the ones who turn you down; those quick nos allow you to iterate on your pitch and move on to your next investor meeting more quickly.
+Storytelling plays a huge role in Away’s brand awareness. You created a book with 40 interesting, creative stories, called The Places We Return To to launch the company, that sold out before you even had a physical suitcase. This is marketing genius. And now you’ve built out an in-house media arm that includes the Away podcast, Airplane Mode, and a print and digital magazine, Here. What do you hope people get out of these stories?
+JEN RUBIO: The book wasn’t just a tool to encourage customers to pre-order a suitcase, it was an introduction to who we were as a brand—we wanted the company to stand for something, and to inspire people to plan their next trip. Our storytelling efforts have centered around that idea from the beginning, and our voice is one that’s as familiar as a good friend.
+When we looked at the luggage industry as a whole, brands were talking about the features of their products, but none were talking about travel. At Away, we know that the difference between a good product and a good brand is emotion, and that context is everything. To that end, while the wheels or the zippers on our suitcases are great (and, really, just table stakes in today’s economy given the incredible amount of choices consumers have), what gets people more excited is when they think about what they can do with that suitcase.
+Whether it’s through Here, our podcast Airplane Mode, or through the content on Away’s Instagram, all of our brand channels are designed to showcase thoughtful content that tells a broader story. We’re telling stories that don’t exist elsewhere. Yes, you can find great recommendations for your next trip, but the content goes far beyond that. They celebrate the voices and experiences from people all over the world.
+What’s next for Away?
+JEN RUBIO: We want to fix everything that’s wrong with the travel experience. The business has really evolved over the last two years, and it’s been incredible to see what the team has accomplished. We’re expanding our product line, leaning into our media arm, opening additional physical retail locations, and listening to what our customers want us to solve next.
+We believe that traveling can truly enhance your life, so we’re on a mission to continue to inspire more people to do it. There’s so much more we can do in the travel space—luggage is only the beginning!
+What is your communication like with your customers? How do you respond to their feedback?
+JEN RUBIO: It’s the foundation of our business! Before we even launched, we spoke with hundreds of travelers (potential customers!) to understand what they might want out of a suitcase. We used that feedback to design The Carry-On, and we haven’t stopped listening since.
+One of the biggest benefits of our direct-to-consumer model is that we’re able to maintain a constant feedback loop, which means we can react in real-time to give our community what they’re asking for. We’ve prioritized listening to their feedback as a primary driver for considering the business’ next steps—they’re helping to inform which products we create next!
+You grew up traveling the world, and you’ve lived in several places—in New York and London most recently. What are your favorite places in the world, and what destinations are next on your bucket list?
+JEN RUBIO: My favorite place in the world is Tofino, British Columbia. I have a serious love for the Pacific Northwest (I recently wrote a love letter to Vancouver for Here), and Tofino is like a small slice of heaven on earth for me. After that, my favorites include Cape Town, South Africa and Palawan in the Philippines.
+Next on my list are Namibia and the Faroe Islands—both are beautiful places that I’ve been meaning to visit for far too long!
+I travel a lot, and am currently on the road/plane for the next couple of months. A lot of my friends wish they could travel more but never do because they don’t have time or it’s too expensive. What would you say to them?
+JEN RUBIO: I know that I’m incredibly lucky because my role at Away requires me to travel and regularly takes me to so many amazing places, and I also know this isn't the case for most people. But if you’re like me and love to travel, there are a few tricks I’ve learned that can help you make the most out of mixing travel with your busy lifestyle. If you’re traveling for work, try to add an extra day or two at the beginning or end of the trip to explore and experience the area. Websites like The Points Guy can help you find last-minute travel deals; if you’re looking for hidden gems and the best things to do in different cities, magazines (like Here!) can help you discover those. I’d also say embrace day trips! For me, that might mean taking a morning train to a town in upstate New York—meaningful travel doesn’t have to cost a lot of time or money.
+Of course you must travel with Away luggage, what are other products that you wouldn’t travel without?
+JEN RUBIO: I always travel with at least two pairs of headphones—Bose noise cancelling ones for drowning out a range of disruptive plane sounds, and Apple AirPods for taking crystal clear calls no matter where you are. If you’re heading somewhere where you don’t speak the language, I’d also highly recommend the Ili translator. It’s small, works offline, and its one-way translation allows you to speak into the device and play back an accurate, fast translation. Supplements are also great for keeping your immune system in check, and I’m a big fan of Four Sigmatic Chaga Elixir because they make individual packs that are easy to throw in your bag and mix with water or whatever liquid you have on hand. Lastly, I always pack a hydrating mist because air travel is incredibly dehydrating for your skin. Right now I’m loving Aesop Hydrosol Immediate Moisture spray.
+What are your go-to recommendations for entertainment while you’re on the move? Books, podcasts?
+JEN RUBIO: I take The Great Courses audio classes—the last one I did was a 20-part course on classic mythology. For podcasts, I can’t get enough of NPR’s How I Built This and Sophia Amoruso’s Girlboss Radio. It’s always interesting to hear about other entrepreneurs’ journeys, since no two are the same!
+Check out the Away Collection, and get inspired through their Instagram, magazine, Here, and podcast, Airplane Mode.
+Getting Sick off Candy? More Like Getting Sick of These Costumes
+Hang on for a minute...we're trying to find some more stories you might like.
+Trick or Treat! Smell my feet! We’re sick of seeing these costumes on repeat. Every year, we always see the same exact costumes. What may seem like a good, last-minute idea turns out to be just another overplayed outfit. So without further a-boo, here are thirteen of the most overused costumes of all time.
+13. Clown
+Coming in unlucky number thirteen is the clown costume. There are a few things that fueled this increase of clown costumes, including the 2016 clown epidemic and one of the highest-grossing movies of 2017, It. But this costume has been around way before then. Back in Ancient Egypt, African Pygmies, known as Dangas, would amuse the royal court by dressing up in leopard skins and masks. They would dance and mimic their gods to entertain those of a higher class. Today, many people have a fear of clowns—also known as coulrophobia, which makes it one of the easiest ways to scare someone, adding to the popularity of the costume. Yet, as scary as they can be, seeing nine of them on one street is even more horrifying.
+12.Where’s Waldo
+Looking for a last-second costume? Throw on a red-and-white striped shirt, a hat, some glasses, and voila! You’re officially dressed up in a cute, clever costume, perfect for people of all ages to enjoy. Where’s Waldo is a series of children’s puzzle books, in which the goal is to find the iconic character, who is hiding in a crowd of people, buildings, and random objects scattered throughout the picture. It was started in 1987 by Martin Handford, a British illustrator. It would take up to eight weeks to finish a single picture, and some even contained three to four thousand people in one image! The book was published in nineteen different languages. Depending on what country you live in, Waldo’s name changes; he goes by “Waldo” in the U.S. and Canada, “Wally” in the U.K., “Charlie” in France, “Walter” in Germany, “Ali” in Turkey, “Efi” in Israel, and “Willy” in Norway. Whether you dress up as Waldo, Wally, or whatever you choose to call him, you’ll be sure to know that all night, everyone will point at you (and a dozen other “Waldos”) and shout, “There he is!”
+11. Powerpuff Girls
+Sugar, spice, and everything nice. These were the ingredients chosen to create the perfect, little girls. But Professor Utonium accidentally added an extra ingredient to the concoction—chemical X. Thus, thousands of these costumes were born. Let’s be honest here, we’ve all seen someone dressed up as the Powerpuff girls before. The Powerpuff Girls is a famous series about three artificially-created girls—Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup—who fight crime using their superpowers. It started as a short and was created in 1992 by Craig McCracken. At that time, the trio didn’t even go by the name of “Powerpuff Girls.” Cartoon Network changed the name after it was labeled as too offensive and aired the pilot in 1995. The series dominated the cartoon industry from the late 1990s until the early 2000s. The show met its end after the producers decided not to do a seventh season, but the series got a reboot in 2016. Today, the Powerpuff Girls are a popular costume choice and a perfect way to dress up with a group of friends.
+10. Morphsuit
+If only this actually counted as a costume. A morphsuit is a costume that covers the wearer from head to toe in a mixture of polyester and spandex. It hides all features of the wearer, including their face, which allows them to remain completely anonymous. While some morphsuits are used for other costumes, such as Slenderman and Spiderman, many people use morphsuits for showing school spirit, opting to wear them in their school colors. However, some people wear these suits on Halloween to “dress up.” For a lame, unoriginal idea, it’s astonishing how many people wear these boring outfits.
+9. Wednesday Addams
+Whether you are familiar with The Addams Family or not, chances are you know this iconic character. Wednesday Addams, the youngest girl in the crazy, creepy family known as the Addams, is the epitome of a typical teenager. Moody and apathetic, she brings everyone back to that stage when they were a seventh-grade, emo kid. She’s dark in all the best ways, and you can’t help but to be in awe of her. She’s a legend, an icon, and a mood. So why does everyone dress up like her? Because many people already own a black dress and can easily tie their hair into braids. It’s so easy to become one of the most legendary characters of all times. What a shame hundreds of people had the same idea.
+8. Scarecrow
+There are two different ways you can go when it comes to a scarecrow costume: scary or cute. Both options, however, are equally easy. Just slap
+some face paint or makeup on, throw on a flannel (and maybe even some overalls), and tug on your straw hat to get a simple scarecrow costume. Scarecrows are human-shaped figures that are usually made from hay and are dressed in tattered clothes. They started as a way to scare or discourage birds (hence the name) from eating seeds and crops. With time, birds will get used to the dummy and continue to eat the seed anyway. Likewise, the same goes for humans. The effect wears off.
+7. Harley Quinn
+Harley Quinn is one of the most famous female characters in the superhero world. She’s brassy, bold, and brazen, as well as the Joker’s self-proclaimed girlfriend and henchman. Harley Quinn made her way into the spotlight in September 1992 on Batman: The Animated Series. She was supposed to be nothing more than a one-episode character, but she grew to become a well-known, well-loved character that changed the Batman series forever. She even became famous enough to earn herself a backstory; her real name was Dr. Harleen Quinzel, and she was a psychiatrist who fell in love with the Joker. Harley Quinn is a play on the word “harlequin,” which inspired her jester-like outfit. However, with the arrival of the 2016 movie Suicide Squad, this villainous villainess got a reboot. This also sparked the beginning of a Halloween of thousands of Harley Quinn costumes from all over the nation. Although it’s been a few years and the movie has since lost its appeal, you can still find that Harley Quinn is one of the most popular costumes to date.
+6. Anything Disney-related
+While the most famous one is Minnie Mouse, it’s safe to say any Disney character is an insanely popular Halloween costume. From the pretty princesses to the talking animals and all in between, Disney costumes are seen on people of all ages. Sheridan Hildreth, a junior and a member of National Spanish Honor Society, states, “I believe that Disney costumes are so popular because children at a young age, especially girls, are exposed to princess movies. They become attached and want to be like a princess, so when they get the chance to dress up as one during Halloween, they won’t pass it up.” The monopoly started in Los Angeles, California, on October 16, 1923, by Walt Disney. His first cartoon character was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, but after learning he didn’t own the character and losing the rights to him, Disney created Mickey Mouse. This famous rodent attracted hundreds of people and became immediately popular. Today, the Walt Disney Company owns many iconic assets, including Marvel, ESPN, and Pixar. You can’t go into a store without seeing something Disney-related. The same goes for Halloween night.
+5. Nerd
+And as we finally reach the top five most over-boo-sed costumes of all time, we come across number five:
+the nerd costume. A simple, last-second costume, this outfit consists of anything from glasses, ties, suspenders, braces, pigtails, long socks, collared shirts, and more. It allows for creativity while still being incredibly easy to accomplish. The “nerd” started back in 1950 when Dr. Seuss used the word in his book If I Ran The Zoo. The following year, the word appeared once more in teen slang in Detroit, and it was used to describe someone who was uncool and untrendy (also known as a “drip” or “square”). In the 60s, the spelling became “nurd” and spread amongst the younger generation, but the word itself was still mostly unknown. In 1965, it was somewhat connected with the intelligent, dorky type we currently know, especially at MIT, where the majority of people wore backward clothing styles. However, in 1975, the “nerd” really took off when National Lampoon issued a poster that established the “nerd” we know and love today. This poster accurately shows a model of a boy wearing “geeky” clothes and has the caption “Are You a Nurd?” Today, it seems everyone dresses up as the boy on this poster, but with their own unusual take. However, as much as they combine their wardrobe and their own personal style with the stereotype, we still see hundreds of the same cliché costume.
+4. Skeleton
+Skeletons are symbolic of Halloween, so we can’t be too
+mad at seeing them on the streets. They have roots in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, the celebration that Halloween originates from. Skeletons are also symbols of death, and sugar skulls are often used in Day of the Dead (or Día de Los Muertos) celebrations, a holiday in Mexico which celebrates the lives of deceased family members through parades, parties, and the decoration of alters. They also believed the dead could temporarily return to the living world on this day. Because skeletons are such a huge part of Halloween, we can’t get upset about it. But because we see multiple variations of these bony beings (cute, scary, cartoony, and realistic, just to name a few), these spooky, scary skeletons aren’t impressing us anymore.
+3. Superhero
+From a young age, many people fall in love with superheroes from every universe. While some prefer Marvel and some prefer DC, we can all agree that superheroes have become a large part of our culture. Because of this, everyone sees them every year. Men and women, adults and children, everyone dresses up like a superhero. There is a common misconception that Superman is the oldest of all the
+superheroes; however, this is incorrect. There were actually a quite a few, including Zorro (whose first appearance was in 1919), Buck Rogers (1929), and Mandrake the Magician (1934). The Golden Age of Comics occurred within the 1930s through the 1950s. Superman, the supposed king of the superheroes, first appeared in Action Comics #1, which was published on April 18, 1938. This was the spark that ignited the explosion of many other superheroes, including Batman, Captain America, Captain Marvel, The Flash, The Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman. Since then, America has fallen in love with
+these characters and the action-filled comics that house them. Movies and TV shows now replace these old-timey picture books and appeals to more and more people, and the majority of people have become familiarized with these characters. Because everyone is so acquainted with these heroes, it makes sense to see many costumes at stores and on Halloween night. But they still aren’t anything we look forward to seeing. You may think you can save the world with this costume, but thousands have already beat you to it.
+2. Cat
+Let’s be honest: we all expected this one. You
+cannot go without seeing someone dressed up like a cat on Halloween. But why? What makes this animal so appealing compared to others? Bree Chance, a junior and a clarinet in the band, states, “It was easy because I didn’t plan on doing anything until five minutes before I made it. So I made some ears and put it on a headband. […] I felt like I wasn’t wearing a costume, and that was good because I hate wearing costumes.” Many others agree and believe that it’s such an easy, last-minute costume, and it allows you to wear your everyday clothes. As long as you draw on a nose and whiskers, you can classify as a cat. Many people associate cats with femininity (particularly because of a cat’s gracefulness), so this costume is often used when someone wants to look more sensual. Cats have always been popular and have been an important part of culture
+and media since the olden days. In Ancient Egypt, cats were held in the highest esteem, and they even worshipped a cat goddess named Bastet. In June of 1940, Catwoman made her debut in Batman #1 as his love interest. In 1980, Cats, a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and T. S. Eliot, first premiered. Today, the cat has become one of the most popular Halloween costumes of all time. This is because, according to Disney, “Everybody wants to be a cat.”
+Before we get to number one, let’s point out some honorable mentions.
+Regina George
+Couples Costumes
+1. Anything with a Tutu
+No matter what costume someone chooses to wear, you can guarantee that a tutu will be seen. Whether it’s for a superhero, a cat, or even a dinosaur, everyone wears tutus. Tutus made their first appearance in 1832 at the Paris Opera and were introduced by Marie Taglioni during the production of La Sylphide. It quickly became popular and became known as the Romantic tutu. In the 1940s, wire hoops were used to make the skirt stand out, and tulle replaced tarlatan. Today, tutus are still associated with ballet, but many people wear them to show off school spirit and enhance Halloween costumes. However, they have become so popular that we’ve become sick of them. So let’s say it louder for the people in the back: Tutus are not costumes; they are overplayed, overused, and overdone.
+There are so many creative costumes to choose from. Between characters from books and movies to creatures (both mythical and realistic), the options are endless. Halloween is the one day a year that you can dress up like anything you want. Lexi Atilano, a junior and an active member of FBLA, HOSA, National Honor Society, National English Honor Society, National Spanish Honor Society, Beta Club, Science Club, and Academic Team, states, “My favorite part of Halloween is dressing up. I like dressing up in my costume because I get to express the parts of me I don’t get to express on a regular daily basis.” However, when everyone is “expressing” themselves the same way, it loses its meaning. So next year, when you’re trying to find a good costume, just remember that even though an outfit is popular doesn’t mean we want to keep seeing it.
+Full text of "Annual report"
+See other formats
+t J ^ -He i!^<:.\X "Bi »<*iO-i>t Given By Boston Fire Department ANN'"^^ '^: ^" ■^"^■^ORT .FIRE DEPARTMENT (^n^^ OF BOHT YEAR ENDING DECEMBER 31, 1930 PRINTING DEPAETMEN'f-' ANNUAL REPORT FIRE DEPARTMENT AND WIRE DIVISION CITY OF BOSTON YEAE ENDIISTG DECEMBER 31, 1980 .L,_^iiy«„ ,,' ) ^ % o', CITY OF BOSTON PRINTING DEPARTMENT 1931 OFFICIALS OF THE DEPARTMENT. Edward F. McLaughlin, Fire Commissio7ier.. William J. McNally, M. D., Medical Examiner. Digitized by the Internet Arciiive in 2010 with funding from Boston Public Library [Document 12 — 1931.] ANNUAL REPORT OF THE FIRE DEPARTMENT FOR THE YEAR 1930. Boston, March 30, 1931. Hon. James M. Curley, Mayor of the City of Boston. Dear Sir, — I have the honor to submit herewith the report of the activities of the Boston Fire Department for the year ending December 31, 1930, as required by section 24, chapter 4, of the Revised Ordinances of 1925. Fire Loss. The total fire loss of 1930 in the City of Boston, estimated by the insurance companies amounted to $5,151,541. There were sixty-five (65) fires where the loss was over fifteen thousand dollars each. The out- standing fires in this group were as follows: January 15, North Harvard street, Harvard Athletic Association $119,446 March 1, 227 and 229 Washington street, Thomp- son's Spa 105,034 June 6, L Street Drawbridge 250,000 July 4, 141-153 Medford street. Palmer, Parker Company et al 193,133 December 10, 96 Essex street. Economy Um- brella Company et al 159,960 December 24, 11 Columbia street, John Hether- ington & Sons et al 116,043 2 City Document No. 12. During the year there were 8,701 alarms of fire of which 4,593 were box alarpis and 4,108 were still and automatic alarms: 698 false alarms were received during the year. There were 28 arrests and 25 con- victions of sounding false alarms. Fire Prevention. The personnel of the Fire Prevention Division was increased during the year in order that the work of this division might be more effective. During the year all classes of buildings, with the exception of one and two family dwellings, were in- spected by the inspection force. Number of inspections (initial) Number of reinspections Complaints reported Conditions corrected by personal contact Conditions corrected by service of order Number of personal inspections by officers of Prevention Division Oil burners inspected Oil burners reinspected Oil burner defects corrected .... Fire 361,246 24,835 10,224 22,111 520 2,852 2,482 807 861 Reports of hazardous conditions were sent to other departments as follows: To Building Department 2,727 To State Fire Marshal 39 Eight hundred and ninety-four notices were sent to owners and occupants to correct hazardous conditions and 520 personal services and orders of reinspection were made by the constable attached to the Fire Pre- vention Division. There were twenty prosecutions for violations of the fire prevention laws. One hundred and sixty-five fires were reported as suspicious and forty-one from unknown causes. In- vestigations of these fires were made by attaches of the Fire Prevention Division. These fires were also re- ported to the State Fire Marshal, Police Commissioner and the Boston Board of Fire Underwriters. The number of inspections made by district and com- pany officers during the year, in addition to those of the Fire Prevention Division were as follows: Fire Department. Building inspections .... Theatre inspections .... Schoolhouse inspections . Public building inspections Inspections at Long and Deer Islands Car house inspections Total number of inspections made by Fire Prevention Division, district and company officers (includ- ing initial and reinspection of all types of build- ings) 62,760 4,178 3,848 909 24 108 464,036 Eighteen thousand, three hundred and eleven dollars and twenty-five cents was collected in fees for permits issued by the Fire Prevention Division. During the Christmas holiday season a detail of fire prevention inspectors was maintained in and about the shopping and high value districts and other locations where there was congestion due to shopping. Buildings. On Monday, November 10, 1930, the Fire Depart- ment occupied the new fire station erected in Bowdoin square. Engine Company 4, Engine Company 6, Ladder Company 24, Rescue Company 3 and Water Tower 2 and the District Chief of District 4 moved into the building on this date. The buildings formerly occupied by Engine Company 6 and Ladder Company 24 were turned over to the Public Buildings Department. The building formerly occupied by Engine Company 4 and Water Tower 1 was demol- ished in connection with the new fire station. Rescue Company 3 was transferred from its temporary quarters at Engine 50 in Charlestown. The new station is a first-class modern fireproof building, erected at a cost of $347,905.03, excluding the land. Extensive alterations and repairs were made at the quarters of Engine Company 9 and Ladder Company 2, Paris street, East Boston, and a reinforced concrete floor installed. The old building, formerly occupied by Ladder Com- pany 5 on Fourth street and temporarily used by this department as a storehouse, was transferred to the Public Buildings Department. City Document No. 12. Fire Apparatus. Thirty-six motor vehicles were purchased, tested and placed in service, viz, : 10 American LaFrance combination hose cars (booster pumps). 1 American LaFrance combination pump and hose car. 2 American LaFrance aerial ladder trucks. 1 American LaFrance 85-foot aerial trailer. 2 Federal chassis with special type bodies for rescue cars. 9 Hupmobile sedans. 4 Hupmobile coupes. 1 Mack emergency truck. 1 l|-ton Brockway truck. 1 2^-ton Sterling truck. 4 Ford cars with pick-up bodies. Eleven (11) pieces of major equipment, ten (10) smaller cars and three (3) trucks were traded in as part payment for the new equipment. The motor equipment at the present time consists of the following: Pumping engines Steam engines (tractors) . Hose cars Aerial ladder trucks City Service trucks Water towers Chief officers' cars School car Rescue oars Fuel cars Portable lighting plants . Wrecking car Motorcycle (fire patrol) . . Commercial trucks Emergency cars (Ford) . Ford coupes High Pressure Service. The records of the two high pressure stations for the year are as follows: OLD QUARTERS OF ENGINE COMPANY 4, BULFINCH STREET, REPLACED BY NEW FIRE STATION IN BOWDOIN SQUARE. Fire Department. Station No. 1. Station No. 2. Total alarms to which pumps responded Water discharge recorded on Venturi meters * 267 104,000 gallons 216 413,000 gallons * Owing to the construction of the Venturi meters, they do not record flows under 600 gallons per minute. Hydrants. The following is a list of the hydrants in service for fire purposes as of December 31, 1930, showing the number and different types of hydrants: Public. Private. Ordinary post Boston post Lowry Boston Lowry '. Batchelder and Finneran post. Boston High pressure Chapman post Ludlow post Matthew post. .■ Coffin post 3,874 133 2,734 22 873 33 403 5 2,813 5 123 112 451 S4 55 5 13 4 1 Totals. 11,361 382 Fire Alarm Service. The Fire Alarm Service of the department has been maintained at its usual high standard. In order to increase the efficiency of the operating force two addi- tional men were appointed. A change in the manner of striking alarms received from the Boston Automatic Fire Alarm Company was made. Upon receipt of an alarm the Boston Automatic Fire Alarm Company transmitted the signal directly to the stations in the section where the fire occurred. It was deemed advisable to abandon this method and to strike the signals to the Fire Alarm Headquarters. Upon receipt of the signal in the Fire Alarm Offi.ce a special signal was sounded on the tappers to all depart- ment stations. More fire alarm boxes than usual were installed during the past year. Of seventy-seven put in service fifty- 6 City Document No. 12. nine are owned by this department, three by the School- house Department and fifteen by private owners. Sixty-eight of the old sector boxes were replaced by boxes of the latest type. All street boxes and posts were painted. Considerable work was done in the Fire Department Stations in order to maintain the electrical equipment in the department in an efficient working condition. A contract was made during the year to furnish equipment for ''floating" storage batteries and for 2,500 cells of batteries to replace batteries worn out in service. The power equipment consisted of 130 recti- fiers, 2 motor-generators, switchboard apparatus, rack for supporting rectifiers, and incidentals. With this change in method of supplying electric current to the system many beneficial results are expected. Opeeating Records. First alarms Second alarms Third alarms Fourth alarms Fifth alarms Total . 4,593 104 23 5 2 4,727 Box Alarms Received but not Transmitted. Same box received two or more times for same fire . 379 Adjacent box received for same fire .... 309 Received from boxes but treated as stills ... 7 Total 695 Still Alarms Received and Transmitted. Received from citizens by telephone .... 2,794 Received from Police Department by telephone . . 247 Received from Fire Department stations . . • 1,128 Received from boxes but treated as stills ... 7 Mutual aid alarms (adjacent cities and towns) treated as stills . 55 Emergency service treated as stills .... 128 Total . 4,359 Still alarms received by telephone for which box alarms were afterwards received and transmitted, 306 OLD FIRE STATION OF LADDER COMPANY 24, NORTH GROVE STREET, REPLACED BY NEW FIRE STATION IN BOWDOIN SQUARE. Fire Department. 7 Still alarms received by telephone which were after- wards followed by box alarms that were not pulled (11 p. m. to 8 a. m.) 282 Automatic and A. D. T. Alarms. Boston Automatic Fire Alarm Company: Transmitted by company to this department . . 142 Department box received and transmitted in con- nection with same: Before automatic alarms 6 After automatic alarms 11 Automatic alarms transmitted which were followed by box alarms that were not pulled ... 33 Automatic alarms struck after still alarms were trans- mitted 1 American District Telegraph Company: Received at fire alarm office ..... 85 Department boxes received and transmitted in con- nection with same: Before A. D. T. alarm was received .... 8 After A. D. T. alarm was transmitted ... 4 A. D. T. alarms transmitted which were followed by box alarms that were not pulled .... 35 A. D. T. alarms received but not transmitted after still alarms were transmitted .... 5 A. D. T. alarms transmitted to department . . 72 Summary of Alarms. Alarms received: Box alarms, including multiples . . . . . 5,422 Still alarms, all classes ....... 4,572 Boston automatic alarms 142 A. D. T. alarms 85 Total received from all sources 10,221 Exclude following: Multiples 134 Box alarms received but not transmitted ... 695 Still alarms for which other alarms were trans- mitted 588 Automatic alarms for which other alarms were transmitted 51 A. D. T. alarms for which other alarms were trans- mitted 52 1,520 Total alarms, with eliminations, to which apparatus responded 8,701 City Document No. 12. Multiple Alarm Fires. With two alarms With three alarms With four alarms With five alarms * With six alarms 87 20 3 1 1 Mutual Aid Response. To Milton . To Somerville To Everett . To Newton To Norfolk To Marlboro To Cambridge To Dedham 31 15 1 4 1 1 1 1 Fire Alarm Box Records. Boxes from which no alarms were received . Box tests and inspections Note. — All street box doors are tested weekly. 339 10,716 Total number 1,574 Owned by Fire Department 1,116 Owned by Schoolhouse Department 259 Owned by Boston Automatic Fire Alarm Company 52 Privately owned 147 Fire Alarm Boxes in Districts. District 1 93 District 9 109 District 2 74 District 10 126 District 3 42 District 11 145 District 4 86 District 12 95 District 5 75 District 13 . 148 District 6 102 District 14 135 District 7 105 District 15 114 District 8 124 Division 1 370 Division 2 475 Division 3 728 And one in Chelsea. * Five alarms from one box and one alarm fram an adjacent box. OLD QUARTERS OF ENGINE COMPANY 6, LEVERETT STREET, REPLACED BY NEW FIRE STATION IN BOWDOIN SQUARE. Fire Department. Summary of Work Done in 1930. Approximate Number of Feet. Line wire used in new work and replacements . . 84,600 Line wire removed from service 11,000 Aerial cable installed 5,075 Conductors in same 21,050 Aerial cable removed from service 750 Conductors in same . . 4,920 Underground cable installed 30,154 Conductors in same 465,835 Underground cable replaced 5,900 Conductors in same 143,600 Conduits laid underground 4,331 Ducts in same 4,818 Ducts abandoned 1,024 Manholes built 2 Fire alarm boxes installed by this department . . 59 Fire alarm boxes installed by Schoolhouse Department, 3 Fire alarm boxes installed on private property . . 15 Fire alarm boxes relocated 4 Fire alarm boxes removed from service ... 2 Box posts installed . 33 Box posts relocated 8 Box posts reset or replaced by new .... 9 Cable post relocated 1 Cable post replaced with larger post .... 1 Cable posts removed 2 Underground cable boxes attached to poles ... 12 Underground cable boxes removed from service . . 6 Wire Division. In accordance with chapter 240 of the Acts of 1926, the following streets were prescribed for the under- ground district for 1930, from which all poles and over- head wires were placed underground, making a total distance of four miles as prescribed by law: East Boston. — Paris street, from Sumner street to Bennington street. South Boston. — N street, from Columbia road to East Second street ; B street, from West First street to West Seventh street; C street, from West First street to Old Colony avenue; E street, from West Broadway to Old Colony avenue. Dorchester. — Baird street, from Blue Hill avenue to Morton street; King street, from Adams street to Neponset avenue. 10 City Document No. 12. Brighton. — Winship street, from Washington street to Chestnut Hill avenue; Mapleton street, from Murdock street to Market street. Jamaica Plain. — Centre street, from Holbrook street to the Arborway; South street, from Centre street, a distance of 2,665 feet to a point within 65 feet of the Arborway. In these prescribed streets, from which poles and overhead wires were to be removed, there were standing on January 1, 1930, a total of one hundred and seventy- nine (179) poles (not including the trolley poles of the Boston Elevated Railway which are exempt), owned by the Edison Electric Illuminating Company, New Eng- land Telephone and Telegraph Company, and Boston Elevated Railway, supporting a total of five hundred and thirty thousand eight hundred (530,800) feet of overhead wires owned by the Edison Electric Illuminat- ing Company, Boston Elevated Railway, New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, Boston Fire Depart- ment (Fire Alarm Branch) and Boston Police Depart- ment (Police Signal Service). During the year there were 107 fires and 10 accidents due to electricity. The total of fire losses in so far as could be determined was $146,222.93. The income for the year for permits to perform electrical work was $70,282.33. Interior Division. This division made inspections of all new installations and continued its inspection of all installations in so far as possible. Regular inspections were made of electrical equipment of theatres, places of amusement, public halls, miniature golf courses, etc. Following is a table showing a summary of the work of the division: Notices of new work received .... Number of permits issued to turn on current Number of incandescent lamps inspected Number of motors inspected . Number of buildings in which wiring was com^ pletely examined Number of inspections made . . . Number of inspections made of theatres, places of amusement and public halls Fires in interior of buildings . Fires on poles . . . . . Fires in manholes 20,271 15,709 2,346,106 17,710 3,883 35,530 1,428 100 3 3 Fire Department. 11 Miscellaneous fires 1 Injuries to persons ....... 10 Exterior Division. During the past year the inspectors of this division have reported one hundred and seventy-seven (177) poles decayed at the base and thirty-one (31) poles leaning, or a total of two hundred and eight (208) poles, which were replaced by new poles or reset by the various companies at the request of this department. Five (5) abandoned poles were also reported by our inspectors and were removed at our request. The following table shows the overhead work for the year, from January 1, 1930, to December 31, 1930, inclusive : Number of new poles in new locations . . . 183 Number of poles replaced, reset or straightened . 875 Number of poles removed 200 Number of poles now standing in the public streets 18,019 Number of defects reported 1,574 Number of defects corrected 1,475 (Other defects in process of correction.) Number of notices of overhead construction . 8,851 Number of overhead inspections .... 17,457 Number of overhead reports 7,215 Amount of overhead wires removed by owners (in feet) 1,776,910 Underground Construction. The ducts used for the underground conduits of the dra wing-in system are of the following type: 1. Vitrified clay (laid in concrete). 2. Fiber (laid in concrete) . 3. Iron. 4. Wood. In side or residential streets, special underground construction for electric light and power purposes (110 and 220 volts), of a type known as the ''Split Fiber Solid Main System" has also been installed. The electrical approvals for underground electrical construction numbered 4,103 Number of inspections of underground electrical con- struction 9,004 Number of reports of underground electrical con- struction ■ 3,065 12 City Document No. 12. Table Showing Underground Work for the Year 1930. Company. 1 o O o 01 a o 1 O °'3 is i^ Boston Elevated Railway 1,874 27,627 85,961 7 Boston Consolidated Gas Com- pany, successor to Charlestown Gas and Electric Company. 595 3,408 43,284 7 22 Edison Electric Illuminating Com- 41,605 500,733 1,548,905 250 2,880 pany. Boston Fire Department (Fire Alarm Branch). 155 155 30,454 Boston Police Department (Police Signal Service). 13,000 New England Telephone and Telegraph Company. 15,163 70,791 165,729 38 118 Boston Low Tension Wire Asso- ciation. 35 35 Western Union Telegraph Com- 606 2,071 7,368 2 pany. Totals . . 60,033 604,820 1,894,701 304 3,020 Note. — "Split Fiber Solid Main Systems" of the Edison Electric Illuminating Com- pany and Boston Consolidated Gas Company are included in the above figures, comprising 4,286 feet of conduit and 8,046 feet of duct for the former company, and 287 feet of conduit and 574 feet of duct for the latter company. Table Showing the Amount and Distribution of Boston's Electrical Power, December 31, 1930. Company. lie "Sol Capacity of Incandescent Lamps in Kilowatts. ^ o.'S o S & & o o 111 11 43,664 54,424 239,370 292,816 4,296 * 300 125 140 15 * 365,512 * 4,0C0 106 80 88,080 * 2,000 220 20 Edison Electric Illuminating Company, Boston Consolidated Gas Company, successor to Charlestown Gas and 64 1 620 500 400 363 1 1 Totals 99,208 532,949 4,861 15 369,698 90,300 87 * Unknown. (Meter capacity connected to lines of Edison system 1,101,810 kilowatts.) Fire Department. 13 Fire Department Band. In May, 1930, a call was issued to the department for members of the department who were interested in a band to meet at the quarters of Engine Company 26. The response to this invitation was beyond all expecta- tions. Approximately one hundred and fifty men attended the meeting and plans to organize the band started. On September 17, 1930, the band made its first public appearance on the streets of Boston in the Tercentenary Parade, and for its accomplishment and appearance won the admiration of the hundreds of thousands of people who watched the parade. The organization, instruction and equipping of this band required no expenditure of the city's money and has placed no financial burden on the City of Boston. The expenses of the band were met privately by the Fire Commissioner, assisted by those men who undertook the purchase of their own instruments. The establishment of a band in the Fire Department has done much to increase the interest and efficiency of the personnel in its work. The band has for its purpose a constructive organization to perform some beneficial service to the families of members of the department who may lose their lives in the performance of their duty. The raising of funds and the furnishing of relief to the families of members of the department who lose their lives in duty is a matter which has practi- cally been left entirely with the firemen themselves. A musical organization of the type and character planned for the Fire Department Band will be the means of assisting in raising of money for the relief of these families. The band has not been organized with any commer- cial object in view, but solely for the purpose outlined above and to appear on public occasions as a repre- sentative organization of the Fire Department. In addition it has for its purpose the aiding of any great public charity or benefaction, when the times and cir- cumstances require its aid. Re commend ATI ons . The principal objective of the Fire Department is the protection of life and property against fire, with the thought always in mind to bring about a substantial 14 City Document No. 12. reduction in the fire loss. In order that these purposes may be accomplished the department must at all times be maintained at a very high state of efficiency. Today the personnel and equipment of the department is in first-class condition. Certain improvements are neces- sary during the coming year to maintain this present high standard. 1. A new fireboat should be built and placed in service in the department to replace one of the three fireboats now in service. Once each year the boats are taken out of service for annual inspection by the United States Steamboat Inspectors. Such repairs as are required by the inspectors are made before the boat is placed back in service. As the boats grow older the annual repair bill becomes more and more extensive. The replacement of one of the boats by a new boat, more modern in type, will result in a tremendous increase in the waterfront fire protection and reduce the repair bill of the department. I urgently recom- mend consideration of this proposition. 2. A new fire station should be built in the South Boston district to provide quarters for Engine Company 2 and Ladder Company 19. These two companies are housed in two old stations, inadequate and anti- quated, without proper facilities for modern fire com- panies and automobile fire apparatus. At Ladder Company 19 the station is too small to place an aerial truck in service and considerable delay is caused in responding to alarms because of the narrowness of the street. At Engine Company 2 there is not room enough for a hose car so that the company has to operate with one piece of apparatus. An up-to-date fire station on a wide street will provide this section of the city with the fire protection it should have. 3. A study of the causes of fires throughout the city shows very apparently that many of the fires are due to arson. This condition exists to such an extent that it is a matter of grave concern, and it is prevalent in the residential districts as well as in the commercial and mercantile sections of the city. The Fire Com- missioner is without statutory power to investigate suspicious fires as this authority is placed elsewhere by law. While an honest effort is being made to trace arson in this city I believe that if the Legislature gave to the head of the Fire Department authority to conduct investigations better results would be obtained. I Fire Department, 15 recommend, therefore, that at the next session of the General Court legislation be introduced to give this authority to the Fire Commissioner in the City of Boston. 4. It is a well known and accepted fact that constant study and application are necessary to keep a person properly equipped to perform the duties of his position. The necessity for such training applies in the Fire Department just as it does in any other form of employ- ment. I have found however that no organized system has been in effect in the Boston Fire Department to keep the officers and men properly informed as to their work. I propose to devote considerable time and effort to establish a fire college in Boston which will be without equal in the country. There is no doubt that this can be accomplished with the result that all members will be fully informed as to their obligations and at the same time methods of operation in the department will be standardized. Respectfully submitted, Edward F. McLaughlin, Fire Commissioner. 16 City Document No. 12. RECAPITULATION OF EXPENDITURES 1930. Fire Department .... $4,642,216 53 Wire Division .... 103,225 10 Fire Station, Brighton . . . 19,964 74 New Fire Station, West End Dis- trict, Building .... 330,597 53 Fire Station, West End District, Site 361,209 01 New Fireboat 44,864 41 ),502,077 32 ANNUAL REPORT OF REVENUE, BOSTON FIRE DEPARTMENT, YEAR OF 1930. Income. Permits for fires in open spaces; fireworks; blasting; transportation and storage of ex- plosives; garage and gasolene storage, etc. . $18,311 25 Sale of old material (condemned hose) . . 419 66 Sale of old material (junk) 613 89 Sale of badges 505 75 Property damage (cable) 137 40 Property damage (fire alarm boxes and posts) . 904 29 Property damage (fire apparatus) . . . 692 85 For labor performed by this department in June and July 262 11 For refund on cable refels in July .... 60 55 Sale of coal, tires, old lantern beds (miscellaneous) , 104 00 Wire Division: Permits Oil 75 70,282 33 Total 5,294 08 Fire Department. 17 CHIEF OF DEPARTMENT. Henry A. Fox. The chief is in charge of the fire protection of the city, which is divided into three divisions, each com- manded by a deputy chief, which are subdivided into fifteen districts, each commanded by a district chief., 40, 47 (fireboat), Ladders 2, 21, 31. District 2. District Chiefs, Philip A. Tagite and Hamilton A. McClay.. 18 City Document No. 12., Napeen Boutilier and Michael F. Minehan. Headquarters, Engine House 22, Warren Avenue. Apparatus Located in the District. — Engines 3, 22, 33, Ladders 3, 13, 15. District 8. District Chiefs, Louis C. Stickel and Daniel Martell. Headquarters, Ladder House 12, Tremont Street. Apparatus Located in the District. — Engines 13, 14, 37, Ladders 12, 26. District IL District Chiefs, Thomas H. Andreoli and Cornelius J. O'Brien. Headquarters, Engine House 41, Harvard Avenue, Brighton. Apparatus Located in the District. — Engines 29, 34, 41, 51, Ladders 11, 14. Division 3. Deputy Chiefs, Walter M. McLean and Frank A. Sweeney. Headquarters, Ladder House 23, Washington Street, Grove Hall. This division comprises Districts 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15. Fire Department. 19 District 9. District Chiefs, William H. McCorkle and Edward J. Locke. Headquarters, Engine House 12, Dudley Street. Apparatus Located in the District. — Engines 12, 23, 24, Ladders 4, 23, Rescue 2. District 10. District Chiefs, Francis J. Jordan and Charles H. Long. IJf.. District Chiefs, James Mahoney and James F. Ryan. Headquarters, Engine House 46, Peabody Square, Dorchester, Apparatus Located in the District. — Engines 16, 20, 46, 52, Ladders 6, 27, 29. District 15. District Chiefs, John P. Murray and Michael D. Sullivan. Headquarters, Engine House 48, Corner Harvard Avenue and Winthrop Street, Hyde Park. Apparatus Located in the District. — Engines 19, 48, 49, Ladder 28. 20 City Document No. 12. ft CO Ul O aT (J <1 •p9i?oa:}8aa ^It^^ox IN ^ iH '-' '-' CD atq'BjapiSTioQ aS'BniBQ to CO CO Oi CO cq o CO cs CD CM CM 00 CM CO CM CO !D c^ CO CO IN . 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Hot ashes in barrel 90 Incendiary and supposed, 152 Lamp upsetting and ex- plosion 6 Miscellaneous 585 Oil burners 70 Oil stove, careless use and 1,703 68 90 793 1,753 57 Alarms, false, needless, bell and still Alarms out of city Automatic alarms, false and accidental Automobiles Brush, rubbish, etc Careless use lamp, candle, Careless use matches, set by rats 427 Careless use pipe, cigar, cigarette 1,046 Chimneys, soot burning . . 407 Clothes near stove 1 Defective chimney, stove pipe, boiler 72 Electric wires, motors .... 283 Fireworks and firecrackers, 54 Gas jet, gas stove 15 Gasolene, benzine, naphtha 6 Grease in ventilator, oven, 41 explosion 22 Overheated furnace, stove boiler 83 Set by boys 146 Sparks from chimney, stove 138 Sparks from locomotive, engine 31 Spontaneous combustion.. 195 Thawing water pipes 21 Unknown 54 Total 8,409 Fire Extinguished By 1930. "3 a 1 "S "o 1 s ffl a "3® ■ S8.S o B S m 1 >> p. a 3 Ph u o o g o i January 102 23 110 32 69 71 45 89 22 107 35 65 78 37 101 115 106 96 102 98 39 53 40 26 40 21 161 164 162 115 120 106 99 174 87 66 83 55 98 84 104 60 63 49 131 158 77 57 43 51 41 55 36 42 July 46 August 47 September 100 33 137 110 51 58 51 126 109 118 33 26 22 162 139 135 88 63 38 66 44 70 65 99 87 44 60 58 Totals 1,262 378 1,618 930 823 975 562 Fire Department. 23 Fires Where Losses Exceeded $15,000. Date. Location and Owner. Loss. 1930. Jan. 2 7 Jackson street, Atlas Garment Company et al $25,670 3 556-570 Washington street, E. Oilman et al 17,889 Jan. 12 37-41 Court street, F. X. McGrath et al 31,128 Jan. 13 121 Gove street, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church 15,040 Jan. 13 67 Broad street, High Grade Shoe Repairing Company etal. 17,452 Jan. 14 20 and 22 Canal street, General Furniture Company et al. 36,080 Jan. 15 North Harvard street. Harvard Athletic Association. . . . 119,446 Jan. 29 Rear 80 Border street, Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corpo- ration. 34,000 Feb 1 20,037 Feb 9.. 15,739 Feb. 12 220 Friend street, Massachusetts Gas and Electric Com- pany et al. 18,733 Feb. 13 439 Albany street, Boston Elevated Railway 88,881 Feb 19 16,753 March 1 227 and 229 Washington street, Thompson's Spa, Inc. . . 105,034 1 6 il2 27,639 Marcl: 92-100 Portland street, Modern Curtains Company etal. 18,376 March 22.. 16,063 March 22.. 22,975 March 23 21,182 March 27 556-570 Washington street, R. H. White Company, etal. 63,068 April 6 195-205 A street, Economy Grocery Stores Corporation etal. 46,713 April 22 34 and 36 India street, Natural Products Company et al. 66,191 30 32,390 May 8 53 and 55 Portland street, A. H. Morrison & Sons et al. 47,806 May 19 252 and 254 Congress street. United China Company etal. 15,108 27 50,150 31 16,718 6 250,000 June 7 15-21 Bromfield street, J. Tarr etal 20,207 June 11 25-43 Kneeland street, Fashion Cloak and Suit Com- pany et al. 16,129 June 23 104-112 A street, J. J. White Company, Inc. et al 23,297 24 City Document No. 12. Fire Losses. — Concluded. Date. Location and Owner. Loss. 1930. June 25 June 28 July 4 July 16 July 29 July 31 Aug. 5 Aug. 8 Aug. 17 Aug. 19 Sept. 6 Sept. 18 Sept. 24. ...:.. . Oct. 1 Oct. 10 Oct. 15 Oct. 18 Oct. 24 Nov. 1 Nov. 2 Nov. 2. Nov. 7 Nov. 19 Nov. 20 Nov. 26 Dec. 4 Dec. 10 Dec. 13 Dec. 19 Dec. 22 Dec. 23 Dec. 23 Dec. 24 Dec. 27 107 and 109 West Brookline street, United Furniture Factories. Off Austin street, Boston & Maine Railroad 141-153 Medford street, Palmer, Parker Company el al 9-19 Braintree street, E. T. Ryan Iron Works, Inc. et al. 217 Newbury street, M. E. Casey et al 146 Northern avenue. New York, New Haven and Hart- ford Railroad et al. 7 and 9 Dixwell street, F. E. Burnes et al 221 and 223 Endicott street, Sneirerson Brothers et ah 60 Factory street. Park Mills etal 309-315 Huntington avenue, Rush Company etal 265 Tremont street, Shubert Theatre Corporation 19-27 Sudbury street. Prime Upholstering Company et al. Rear 368 Albany street, Cronin Lumber Company et al. 1044 Washington street, Apollo Theatre Company et al 479 Beacon street, Oscar Bauer et al 560 Harrison avenue, Phoenix Shoe Company et al 91 Summer street, Abbott's, Inc. et al 186-192 Portland street, Standard Upholstering Com- pany et al. 594-616 Washington street, Marvin Shoe Stores et al. 25-29 Tremont street, Martin's Women's Shop, et al. . . 44 and 46 La Grange street, A. Steinert et al 153 and 155 Fulton street. National Distributing Com- pany et al. 26-32 Atlantic avenue, Philip Goldstein Company et al. 34 and 36 South street. Old Colony Rynak Leather Com- pany et al. 15 and 17 Columbia street, Adler Richards Company et al. 133 and 135 Essex street, Glaser Brothers et al 96 Essex street. Economy Umbrella Company et al. 201-213 Essex street, B. Shir etal 55-63 Summer street. The New Hat Frame Company et al. 102-106 South street, H. Goldberg & Co. et al 6-10 Beach street. Queen Quality Undergarment Company et al. 392 and 394 Boylston street, George Gechijian et al 11 Columbia street, John Hetherington & Sons et al. . . 162 and 164 Lincoln street, Sobel Shoes, Inc., et al . . . . $19,653 45,000 193,133 33,658 37,466 24,287 21,124 24,025 31,871 31,387 20,852 18,578 22,624 18,600 23,145 15,152 19,391 24,362 20,916 24,875 39,197 16,275 21,161 74,755 16,840 37,469 159,960 19,542 20,148 27,920 20,906 27,849 116,043 18,895 Fire Department. 25 ® Cv r^ o e^ oo» / CN fsi\ <N in \ es * \ CO o\ n » \ s • \ r>. /M f^- / '^ CK g «5 ( N© O <N1 t> 00 O^ ui /(S r^ /« ©V j t> "tP "~'\ fN ©. \ « • ro -^V (N "* \, Cs r^ Tr\ (N "^ \ Ov 3 \ L • \ t» S^ Ov in o o o o O « o o o o © o o ® o o o o a« O »« ® t^ o o i^ o 00 00 t>» S>. O V© in ^ ^ 26 City Document No. 12. Statistics, Population, January 1, 1931 (estimated) Area, square miles .... Number brick, etc., buildings . Number wooden buildings Fires in brick, stone, etc., buildings Fires in wooden buildings Fires out of city .... Not in buildings, false and needless Total alarms .... 2,004 1,549 68 4,788 805,400 47.81 42,879 92,304 8,409 Fire Loss for the Year Ending December 31, 1930. Buildings, loss insured . $2,319,726 Contents, loss insured 2,273,936 Total loss insured . $4,593,662 Buildings, loss not insured (estimated) . $328,798 Contents, loss not insured (estimat Total loss not insured ed) . 229,081 $557,879 Marine loss $23,130 Yearly Loss for the Last Fifteen Years. Marine Loss not Included. Year ending January 1, 1930 4,129,926 " 1, 1931 4,593,622 Fire Department. 27 Alarms for the Past Ten Years. Year. Bell. Still and Automatic. Totals. 1930 4,601 4,473 3,867 3,492 3,762 3,798 3,640 3,239 2,733 2,359 3,808 3,979 3,829 3,840 4,108 3,904 4,353 4,002 3,401 2,888 8,409 1929 8,452 1928 7,696 1927 7,332 1926 7,870 1925 .... 7,702 1924 7,993 1923 7,241 1922 6,134 1921 • 5,247. Roll of Merit. DEPARTMENT,
+Please note: This post contains affiliate links.
+Full-Time Affiliate Marketer
+It’s never been less complicated or more easily accessible to make money online than today in 2020. The problem is digital marketing and also sales opportunities are so varied and varied that it feels like you need an MBA just to learn the fundamentals. Nevertheless, also for someone with absolutely no business or marketing experience, there’s no easier moneymaking strategy to understand than marketing. Make Money Online UK Legit
+Even if you’ve never thought about being a marketer before, you can learn “the advertisement biz” faster than perhaps any other method of electronic marketing that’s around. All you require is a great product to sell, a person to pay you to sell it, and a location to put your ads. Appears easy? Make Money Online UK Legit
+Why Do Companies Pay A Lot for Advertising? Make Money Online UK Legit
+Every single corporation in the world that makes or generates a product wishes to sell it. Now, what do you assume costs much more for that organization? A permanent salaried-and-commissioned sales representative with office space, a corporate vehicle, as well as a business charge card? Or an independent advertiser gaining a payment on each sale, for doing all of the so-called “heavy lifting” of getting in touch with the consumer?
+Independent marketing representatives are much more cost effective than full-time salespeople. Consequently, there is a never-ending need for digital marketers to help offer items for businesses, both big and also little. You end up being the business’s affiliate rep whose work is to advertise and also market those products. You then get an agreed-upon payment for each and every sale. This process of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” is called affiliate marketing. Make Money Online UK Legit
+Just how Do I Locate Corporations Who Work With Affiliate Marketing Professionals?
+Just go look! If you pay close attention anytime you visit an ecommerce website, you’ll frequently find a web page (typically provided near the bottom with their “Contact” web page) explaining an affiliate program. Businesses in every industry leverage affiliate marketing, from sporting goods shops, to SAAS services, to home landscaping firms. However scoping out every single individual business that you can promote is a mammoth job by itself. Because of that, your best bet is to join an affiliate network like ClickBank.
+Affiliate networks are systems that partner with a big group of firms using affiliate programs. Because their focus is on pushing high volumes of affiliate sales, an affiliate network can usually strike much better deals with each affiliate than you can as a person. Because of this, you can make money with ClickBank much faster as well as much easier than you can by arduously constructing your very own custom affiliate group. Make Money Online UK Legit
+How Much Do You Make on ClickBank? Make Money Online UK Legit
+ClickBank pays some of the most rewarding affiliate compensations on the internet right now, with some products paying out as high as 70%.
+Appear a little insane?
+Do not fret, these commissions are genuine. Some items (like electronic items, for instance) are generated with little or no overhead costs and can frequently be sold for inflated rates. Because of this, sales are so valuable that the affiliate can pay an ultra-high payment to incentivize each one.
+Now, not every affiliate on ClickBank pays quite so high. However the average payment ends up being anywhere from $20-$50 per sale. There are also companies that pay several hundred bucks per sale! If you choose one of those firms, you can earn $1,000 conveniently with just 3 sales a day. Do that daily, and you’re on your way to as much as $30,000 a month or even more, PER PRODUCT, just making money on ClickBank. Make Money Online UK Legit
+As we’ll see later on, the No. 1 ClickBank affiliate marketer on the planet makes 6 figures in a solitary week with a straightforward, 3-step ClickBank affiliate marketing strategy. While this degree of success takes a little time, it’s achievable with just a few hrs daily of effort. And all it takes is an excellent product that people intend to get (which is already supplied on ClickBank) and an excellent website (which is currently generated by the firm marketing the product, so you do not have to construct it). Actually all you have to do is push people to a website!
+Can You Really Make Money With ClickBank? Make Money Online UK Legit
+Definitely, you can. We’re going to talk about the various courses to making money with ClickBank now … Despite which method you choose, you can learn a whole lot about making money with affiliate marketing just by utilizing on the internet resources.
+The most popular methods to make money on ClickBank include:
+- Direct advertising with an email list, for which you will certainly need an email address for each person that sees your ad
+- SEO-driven affiliate blog post
+- Using Facebook ads with an affiliate link
+Each one of these techniques comes with its advantages and disadvantages. We’re thinking about the quickest as well as simplest methods to get started making money with ClickBank regardless of your experience (or lack thereof). Taking a look at that checklist, do you understand much concerning the very first two things? However you recognize precisely what advertising is! Make Money Online UK Legit
+If the largest corporations in the world are tossing multiple millions of bucks at ads, after that you can throw a few dollars at ads and make money online to pay for your living expenses. Once you start to make money online, you’ll never want to work one more “day job” ever again. Trust me, ClickBank can pay you all right that you’ll never ever have to.
+How Can I Earn Money From ClickBank Fast?
+The most effective method to make money with ClickBank fast is to concentrate on paid ads, to get your affiliate products in front of as many appropriate customers as you perhaps can. We’ll get into this more later. For now, just know that promoting ClickBank products via affiliate links makes you money the fastest when you create ads with great content that draws your target market to the affiliate website. Make Money Online UK Legit
+Using Facebook paid ads works so well due to the fact that, once you have the excellent equilibrium of the right audience and also the best imaginative content, all you need to do is, as they state, “spend money to make money.” The most successful ads set you back a little in advance and then continue to generate profits for extensive periods of time.
+They do this by getting to new consumers quickly over time, which you can increase better by just enhancing your advertisement budget. When you have actually obtained the best equilibrium, the revenues are phenomenal. (And also this actually takes just a couple hrs a day! Any kind of one up for a video game later on?).
+Where Do I Purchase before some of the most ideal prospects within the boundaries of your predefined spending plan. Basically, you have full control over how much you spend on ads and who you intend to see them.
+Using Facebook to make money online is a timeless technique, as well as you don’t have to develop your very own items to do so. You can select any variety of ClickBank’s affiliate products to market. Make Money Online UK Legit
+How to Utilize Paid Ads with ClickBank Make Money Online UK Legit
+We have actually talked about why paid ads work, and also we’ve covered the benefits of selling affiliate products with ClickBank. Now let’s discuss integrating the two and just how to start your own hustle marketing somebody else’s product to place MASSIVE AMOUNTS of money in your own pocket.
+Below is every little thing fundamentals set up, you’ll prepare to begin examining ads to make money with ClickBank. The startup prices right here come primarily from the development of your ad material. You might additionally create a website if you desire, yet it’s not called for. If you select to do that, webhosting is commonly a few bucks per month. Make Money Online UK Legit
+Once you have actually truly perfected the basics of making money with Facebook ads and ClickBank, you’ll learn that – if you do select to create a website – that website can become an even greater part of your electronic advertising and marketing strategy, bringing you much more passive profits as you work to enhance your marketing. ClickBank products include a killer landing page and also website where you will direct your affiliate links, so that part is DONE FOR YOU!
+Exactly How to Make Profitable Facebook Ads Make Money Online UK Legit
+It’s easy enough for people to claim, “just run some ads and spend great deals of money.” Yet if you simply throw some cheap words into an advertisement as well as pump cash money into it, you might as well have discarded that money into a slot machine. There are a ton of ideas and also tricks of the trade one has to learn in order to craft a paid Facebook advertisement that will certainly make money.
+You have to know the basics of putting together a Facebook advertisement. You want to make sure you maximize your bucks earned per click. To put it simply, you want each click on your advertisement to spend as little of your budget while making as much income as possible. Let’s speak about the nuts and bolts of making that happen.
+Craft Your Advertisement Effectively
+When you develop your very first advertisement in the Facebook Ad Manager portal, you’ll see a long list of alternatives to pick from. We’re going to speak additional regarding several of the choices you can take into consideration, yet first, you need to establish your ad correctly. Make Money Online UK Legit
+In this section, you’ll establish the link to your preferred product or landing page. In many cases, you’ll obtain referral credit for consumers that complete online or register for their services. For your Facebook advertisement, you’ll drive traffic to a unique landing page or website, and afterwards aim those readers via your affiliate link to the product creator’s web page where they can find out more regarding the ClickBank item and also eventually buying it.
+In other typical situations, you could receive credit from producing sales on the affiliate’s shopping shop. You’ll desire your ad to generate clicks to the website where you then make the sale in support of your affiliate. It’s not needed, this could be your very own landing page which can be a sales web page or a blog post.
+In either situation, you’ll want your advertisement to reveal a much more legible and unforgettable link for your client to keep in mind. You can fill in the “Display Link” field to reveal a shortened LINK. As an example, Commission Hero – a training course aiding literally countless people with zero experience achieve $1,000 days on-line – could intend to drive their clients to a long, detailed LINK. Their Facebook ad, nevertheless, can rather display the extra friendly web link CommissionHero.com.
+Treat Your Ad Campaign Like a Corporation Make Money Online UK Legit
+You’re beginning to see exactly how exceptionally simple it can be to get involved in business of affiliate marketing using Facebook ads. Don’t be misled by the quality and simplicity of the procedure. The job itself can be challenging and, like any kind of company, contributes some quantity of risk.
+You may be attracted to allow your marketing campaign operate on auto-pilot when you start making money every day. This is just one of the greatest errors any kind of net online marketer can succumb to. So much of the process is automated for you, it’s still up to you to improve and also better your business to guarantee its ongoing success. Do not fret. As soon as you’ve got the ads refined, we’re speaking about a small amount of time to keep things running well. Make Money Online UK Legit
+Make sure to check in with your marketing campaign each and every single day. While you do not need to stress over every number and also every fad on a daily basis of the week, you must have a close eye on the progression each advertisement is making, which ads are surpassing the others, and also where you might be bleeding unneeded ad dollars.
+Know Your Suitable Client
+This is an integral part of the marketplace research you must do before you ever create your very first ad. It’s prudent to research your market’s target customers as well as vital demographics before you also choose the product or products you desire your advertisement to target. Otherwise, you’ll miss out on the social media traffic just itching to locate your product. Make Money Online UK Legit
+Your ad campaigns will certainly make more and also spend less money if the content is highly specialized to the specific purchasers who have an interest in your product. (Notice we really did not claim “who MAY be” interested.) It’s a whole lot more rewarding to reveal your ad fewer times to a much more determined purchaser than it is for your advertisement to show hundreds of times to visitors you couldn’t ever really call purchasers.
+As they connect to your product, you’ll wish to take into consideration demographics like:
+- Age group
+- Gender
+- Income range
+- Marital status
+- Number of children
+If you’re offering colorful cloth diapers, do you desire to invest money showing your promotions to unmarried men in their forties with no youngsters, or do you want to show them to married young mommies of newborn twins?
+After that, beyond the basic demographics of your buyers, think about what truly drives them to invest their hard-earned dollars on any kind of product. What encourages somebody to convert? Addressing this concern will certainly help drive even more traffic to your ClickBank affiliate links. Make Money Online UK Legit
+To address this question, see if you can recognize the “pain points” that keep your customer awake at 3 a.m. Our wedded young mother has newborn twins. Non reusable diapers can add to $900 throughout the first year of a newborn’s life, and also she has two of them! That’s enough to keep anyone awake during the night. Tell your buyer how you can relieve this stressful economic worry with your economical and also reusable product.
+Compose High-Quality, Socially Targeted Copy Make Money Online UK Legit
+In order to in fact get your consumers to click your ad, you need to tell them something they want to hear. Everyone scrolling through their Facebook and also Instagram feed understands that they’re seeing a battery of advertisements. While that may discourage some folks from ever clicking a “Sponsored” message, that doesn’t suggest there aren’t a lot of prepared buyers around. It just indicates that the buyers in this atmosphere are more diligent about what they click. Make Money Online UK Legit
+As you learn more about online marketing, pay close attention to exactly how various other marketers speak with their clients. The ads you see over and over again are the ones that talk with their customers like people, like friends, or like close and relied on advisors. Your advertisement should read like a discussion at a celebration, holding a level of passion and also intrigue from start to finish. There will certainly be plenty much more possibilities for you to high-pressure salesmanship to these consumers once they get to the landing page. Make Money Online UK Legit
+Web content that turns clicks right into sales is content that buyers in your market want to check out. If they’re on social media, they’re seeking material that matches their topics of interest. As well as since you did market research in the last area in order to recognize your customer, you now understand what type of content suits their interest on social media sites.
+Steal Focus from the Social Media News Feed
+You’ve determined your best customer and you’ve obtained some awesome content that will make them click your affiliate links, however just how do you convince them to “quit the scroll” in their limitless news feeds? Make Money Online UK Legit
+The very following message in their feed is likely to be much more interesting to them than something they determine as a promotion. As well as on Facebook, the word “Sponsored” is typically one of the very first words buyers see in an advertisement.
+There is no exact scientific research to say precisely what will certainly result in the best for your certain product and each marketing campaign. This is an area where just examining as well as finding out can instruct you a lot concerning what works as well as what does not. Create a folder of “interest grabbers” that have made you stop in your tracks on your social media feed. This collection of sales strategies as well as content that’s confirmed efficient is called a swipe folder.
+Each time you see an additional marketer display ads that stops you and excites you regarding their product, screenshot it and also include it to your swipe folder. Additionally, gather any type of materials you discover being continuously used in paid advertisement sections like Facebook as well as Google AdWords. If an organization is continually investing money on a specific ad, then the probabilities are their ad is doing something correct. Duplicate what they do to learn what products to promote, to see what type of advertisements get the best traffic, as well as to discover exactly how to make the best landing page to convert that traffic.
+Video vs. Images
+Speaking of videos (and, for that matter, grabbing interest), you’ll swipe a whole lot more eyes from the news feed and obtain even more clicks if you can utilize video web content in your advertisements. According to Databox, marketers use approximately a 50-50 ratio of pictures versus video clips as their featured advertisement material. Their data suggests that video clips boost conversions by as much as 30%, with 60% of surveyed marketers claiming that they saw an overall rise with video clips over images. Make Money Online UK Legit
+If you think about the web content that makes someone “stop the scroll,” just think of how much time that web content requires their attention to get the message across. Simply a photo of a lovable puppy may stop an audience member for a few seconds, long enough for them to value it and move on. Even a 30-second video of the puppy having fun with a stuffed toy stops the viewer as well as provides you time to blast them with advertising messages.
+In fact, the video clip web content of an ad doesn’t have to be especially pertinent to the narrative or message in the advertisement if it stops the visitor as well as convinces them to take notice of the message. Take into consideration pharmaceutical commercials that show a happy household in the background while telling you how their medication remedies hideous and awkward intestinal signs and symptoms. Like we said, if the large marketing firms do it, and also you see it done over and over, then there’s most likely a method to the madness. Make Money Online UK Legit
+Leverage Clear Calls-to-Action
+While you may have gotten your purchaser’s focus and secured their interest with an awesome advertisement, you still need to gain their click. Among the irritating difficulties in internet marketing is that consumers never ever seem to go where you want them to go. Customers are fickle, and also many of them have actually restricted skills in connecting with technology.
+It’s up to you to assist. Even if you have actually got your customer in your back pocket, they can not purchase from you if they do not recognize just how to do so. Your web link needs to be clear, front and center for them, as well as you must inform every one precisely what to do with it, or a couple of of them are bound to get lost. Facebook makes it very easy to catch this traffic.
+The Facebook Ad Manager provides you a selection of options for a stylized call-to-action button. There are numerous ideal options you might choose depending upon the actions you’re attempting to get from your purchaser: Make Money Online UK Legit
+- Shop Now
+- Download
+- Learn More
+- Subscribe
+- Watch More
+Notice none of those selections say the dreadful “click here.” That archaic non-call-to-action is leaking with marketing stereotype that drives buyers away. Notice, instead, that these terms give customers specific directions concerning what follows, all wrapped up in a nice clickable button that takes them precisely where you want them to go. Your photo or video web content should additionally consist of a specific call-to-action that matches the one in your web link.
+ClickBank items can be found in all shapes and sizes. Make sure to be familiar with your ClickBank deal to make sure that you can provide people the right call-to-action to the landing pages.
+Always Test and Re-test
+Once you have actually constructed the most effective Facebook campaign you can, it’s time to start running them. Making use of a reduced budget you feel OK with (and also thinking about the cost of each click, which Facebook will certainly help you to identify), introduce your material, and also meticulously examine the top performers over the first couple of weeks. Your initial set of ads is an investment in future ads, operating as a collection of data to educate you concerning what your target market responds to.
+When you’ve established your top advertisement, format your various other ads to incorporate the same type of aspects. Make use of the top-performing ad as a layout for other similar products. After that, see if that product carries out equally as well, or if a various ad functions best for that other product. Make Money Online UK Legit
+Testing and retesting is extremely important as well as it never stops. As long as an ad is making a profit, it’s an excellent ad, particularly for ClickBank. However an ad can go stale. So make it a routine to test new ads. You will certainly much better recognize what the current market responds to this way.
+Is ClickBank Still Profitable in 2020?
+Absolutely it is. If you’re not convinced yet, have a look at a few of the revenue pictures from Commission Hero. Robby Blanchard earns more in a solitary week than many working folks make in a few years, all through the ultra-high payments supplied on ClickBank. And also he does it all in a few hrs a day! (What could you do with all that additional money and time?). Make Money Online UK Legit
+Robby’s approach concentrates heavily on the power of Facebook ads promoting ClickBank items throughout a series of sectors. While you shouldn’t necessarily expect to make a million bucks in your very first year, you can quickly accomplish success in a couple of months with the best product and also strategy.
+Robby’s complimentary Commission Hero training enters into fantastic depth regarding how to perform your Facebook ad techniques, as well as he additionally provides a paid program that holds your hand, step by step, as you accomplish success.
+Investing in the complete Commission Hero training course acquires you a massive amount of special expertise that countless people with NO experience are making use of to make substantial money with ClickBank affiliate marketing. It additionally consists of a lot of tools to give you suggestions (and also shortcuts) along the way like: Make Money Online UK Legit
+- Proven ad images from million+ dollar projects
+- Robby’s 3-step system to making high commissions online
+- “Done for you” landing pages on which you can just plug-and-play your very own product information
+- Advertising and marketing training for other social media systems like SnapChat
+- Accessibility to Robby’s network of digital entrepreneurs as well as other individuals who are discovering how to make lots of money like you
+- Weekly mentoring Q&A sessions to discover anything from product selection to the nitty-gritty details of affiliate marketing
+Hundreds of people have been registering for (and also making BIG money off of) Robby’s affiliate sales strategies. Developing an affiliate network is a basic principle, yet it takes real initiative to grow an affiliate marketing company to the excellent figures very easy for also a beginner to advertise your ClickBank product by marketing on Facebook. You can additionally market your product through various other means like using Search Engine Optimization to drive natural traffic to your website to read a blog post. In addition, you can try to reach people with direct advertising messages that promote a ClickBank product.
+You can also build an email list, as well as produce blog post content as well as DM messages that hard-sell your existing consumer base. Simply make sure to order each client’s email address on your sales web page, blog post, or better yet, as a part of signing up for your affiliate products!
+People are hunting social networks for the one product or service that relieves that elusive pain point keeping them up all night. These are the people that make the traffic you’ll drive to your ClickBank web links. If your ClickBank advertising corporation is set up right, you’ll have the ability to promote ClickBank full-time. (Well, not full-time considering that it just takes a couple of hours a day!). Make Money Online UK Legit
+This is why numerous people turn to Commission Hero to help them create significant.
+We were traveling south from the harbor of Morro Bay, a lovely little town along the central coast of California.
+When we sailed out to sea, the weather reports were acceptable. We decided to chance it. Our 37-foot Tayana sailboat would do a maximum of about six knots, almost 7 miles per hour. We were some sixty miles from our destination of Oxnard, or at least nine hours from safety.
+Leaving had been a bad decision. As we followed the strong Japanese current south along the coastline, the waves continued to grow in size and force. Once south of Santa Barbara, there were no safe harbors or good places to anchor until Oxnard and the Channel Islands Marina.
+My concern of the moment was the ever-growing waves. The sound they made was scary - an enormous roar that wouldn't stop. It got louder and louder, and normal conversation became impossible. Shouting was soon equally useless unless we were inches from one another.
+"Magellan" was equipped as well as any sailboat could be. She was custom outfitted with all the latest and best nautical equipment obtainable. The radar, automatic pilot, and electric and hydraulic systems were more than adequate in normal conditions. But these were not normal conditions.
+The sea wouldn't allow us to turn back against the strong current, winds, and waves. We had no choice but to go forward to Oxnard. There were no alternatives because the rocky shore meant certain death. In good weather, the Channel Islands anchorages are, at most, adequate. In these conditions, they'd afford no safety whatsoever. I was becoming worried.
+Our boat had never before acted this way. The autopilot was clearly unable to handle the conditions. This meant I was going to put on my foul-weather gear, go out on deck, and steer by hand. It took several minutes to put on all of the clothing and gear: boots, slicker, pants, and mountain climbing equipment.
+The mountain-climbing gear was a series of very strong straps, forming a complete harness around my body. At strategic locations on deck, there were large metal rings with swivels to attach the four, six-foot-long webbed straps I wore. Each strap ended with a sturdy spring-loaded hook, called a carabineer.
+I took a last look around the cabin. The radar and satellite navigation were on, everything was battened down, the storm doors were in place. The wind gauges, however, added to my concern. The wind-direction gauge and wind-speed gauge were spinning because they were way beyond their capacity and virtually unusable. The radar screen was becoming a solid, useless, unreadable green, so I was no longer sure where the land was. This was not a good situation. A few moments later, the autopilot became completely inoperative. So none of the instruments were working, we were sailing blind, and I was scared.
+Barbara was white with fear. I switched off the now useless radar as I yelled to her that NO, I did not want to go out into the cockpit to steer. No, I did not know what I was doing. No, I did not know exactly where the land was. No, I was not certain at all I could find Oxnard harbor.
+This was certainly not what we had in mind when I decided to give up my career a trial lawyer to sail the exotic spots of the world. We had looked forward to moderate excitement, but here I was, forced to go out to steer in a life-and-death situation, afraid to face the powerful forces of nature that were ranged against us.
+The force of the wind made opening the cabin door a major struggle. Once the door was opened, I was hit square in the face with the stiff wind and needles of spray. My glasses were instantly useless. I ripped them off, and threw them into the cabin as I started up the steps to climb into the cockpit. The first wave hit me before I was out of the door. I was already soaking wet, the foul weather gear not withstanding. I attached the first of the caribineeners to a large deck cleat, and pulled myself through the door. I landed hard on the wooden grate of the cockpit and quickly found another ring to attach a second large clip.
+It was crucial to my life that I have at least two of the mountain-gear straps firmly hooked on to the large metal ring attachments before I moved at all. This required crawling and pulling myself along with whatever handholds I could find, attaching another clip and then reaching back and releasing the first one I had attached. It was going to take several minutes just to get into position behind the spoked wooden wheel, where I could steer the boat. This was not a good situation.
+Without the mountaineering gear, I would have been thrown into the water with the first wave. This was more than crazy. As I surveyed the situation during my journey to the wheel, I saw that it was even more dangerous than I had imagined. Certainly worse than I had indicated to my wife.
+I finally made it to the wheel. I used all four of my straps and clips to secure position. The cogged belt from the autopilot to the drive wheel was slipping more than it was holding. It was not steering the vessel at all, so I reached down and released it. The wheel spun in my heavily-gloved grip. We were in severe trouble.
+Finally behind the wheel and hooked in, I could now take a look around. That is, as best as I could with the constant wind and spray. It was more of a squint around than a look around. Imagine trying to look into a garden hose being turned on full blast and aimed at your face in a hurricane-force wind. This, added to the blackness of the night, made visibility impossible. The large and properly gimbaled compass above the wheel was spinning and mostly useless. The small light it provided only hampered my night vision. I could tell from the direction of the waves that we were going sort of south, and at least that was good.
+The noise was dramatically louder than it had been inside of the cabin. I cannot describe the volume and intensity. Close proximity to rock-concert speakers wouldn't come close. My ears hurt from the sound. My eyes hurt from the salt spray and wind. It was hard to breath in the water-laden air. I was gulping air and gasping to get enough oxygen into my system. I was so consumed with seeing and breathing at that moment that I became unconscious of the rest of my body. I was in a state of total fear and anxiety, but didn't have time to dwell on these emotions. Steer. Find Oxnard. Survive.
+I finally got a grip on the wheel and managed to keep it from spinning through my hands. The compass was now gyrating less wildly, but was still useless. I wedged my feet in to give myself purchase and leverage on the wheel. I pushed with my legs as hard as I could to keep my back against the bulkhead for support. Just then a giant wave crashed over the entire boat. I didn't see it coming and it was a shock.
+I was stunned by the volume, strength and temperature of the water. It was frigid. I was left sputtering. I knew that Barbara was in the cabin on our sofa, tied down and trying to hold on, as Magellan rocked and tossed in every direction at once.
+I was beginning to acquire some night vision after the bright cabin lights. But now that I could see the sea and waves, I wasn't too sure that this was a good thing.
+The swells were coming upon us from the rear (aft of the vessel). The waves were traveling much faster than the boat, so each wave overtook us. We were lifted along with the wave to its top. I had never seen waves this large before. They were awesome and very scary.
+The top of the single mast of Magellan was 58 feet above the water line. The waves were now almost as high as the mast. 50-foot waves. The volume of water and the power contained in a 50-foot wave is almost beyond imagination. It contains hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, moving fast with inertia, and weighing seven pounds per gallon. This adds up to millions and millions of pounds of thrust. Any one of these giants could crush my boat.
+There were walls of water in every direction I looked. There was no apparent escape route from the liquid battlements. Upon reaching the top of a wave we would slide or surf down the face of it.
+This surfing action was the most dangerous; it was the same motion that a board surfer uses on a normal wave coming into shore. The trick is to take the wave at just the correct angle. Going down the wave too straight will cause the nose of the surfboard or sailboat to bury in the trough of the wave. When the nose of a surfboard buries, you just fall off and get a dunking. When this happens to a sailboat, the boat does a "pitch pole," a somersault into the wave. As the vessel goes upside down, the mast is torn off and the boat fills with water and sinks like a rock. The consequence of a pitch pole is almost always instant drowning and death.
+If you take the wave at too great an angle, the boat rolls over sideways. Again it goes upside down. The ocean removes the mast, and again you die.
+It was therefore necessary to surf down the face of each wave at just the exact correct angle. I must avoid the pitch pole and avoid the roll. There is no way to practice this maneuver. There is no simulator or machine on which to practice. This is the first time I had seen these kind of ocean conditions, and there was nothing to do except to get it right.
+Just as I had gone through this evaluation of the situation, here came the next huge wave.
+I waited until we were at the very top of the wave and then I picked the angle of descent which I thought was correct. It worked. The motion of the boat calmed down dramatically. The only side effect was that the speed of the vessel increased substantially as well. I estimate that we were going 15 knots, about 17 MPH. Now for a boat with a maximum hull speed of 6 knots, 7 MPH, that was quite a feat.
+The trough at the bottom was scary. The water was white foam. No black water could be seen, just frothy foam. Before I had a chance to reflect on that most interesting and unusual sight, the next wave was upon us, lifting us up, and up again.
+After a dozen or so of these waves I was beginning to get the feel of the waves and the steering. Incredibly, I was starting to have fun.
+Here I was in a truly life threatening situation having a great time. The juices were starting to flow. The excitement was great. The adrenaline rush going down the face of each wave was as great as I had ever experienced. Skiing at Vail in the deep powder was fantastic, exhilarating, and a rush, but nothing compared to this exhilaration. The terror had vanished. That probably was not a good thing, given the extreme danger of each and every wave, but it was an unforgettable feeling.
+Another couple of dozen waves went by, each one having a great, fast, surf down its face. Every seventh wave is a little larger than the others - that's just the way it is - and it was a little faster and scarier than the others. But soon I was also getting the feel of the big ones. The problem was the pull of the steering wheel itself. It took all of my strength to keep a grip on the wheel. Each turn of the wheel required that I push with my legs and brace myself in order to control the fine-tuned steering which was required for the precision of the surfing action.
+My hands were now numb and frozen to the wheel. I couldn't release them had I wanted to, which I did not. I knew that if the wheel got away from me it could be a deadly error. Once spinning it would be difficult to stop and control.
+At this point, I had no idea how long I had been behind the wheel. I was totally consumed by watching the waves relentlessly overtaking us, and then reacting to each in its turn. Since the next wave followed close on the heels of the last wave, there was virtually no time for contemplation or thought of anything but what I was doing at that very moment. I was totally focused, paying complete attention to sailing.
+How often had I wished to be able to concentrate on one thing and one thing alone for an extended period of time. A very difficult thing to do. Well, now I found the answer: Put yourself in a life-threatening situation where 100% concentration is an absolute requirement, and the mind takes care of the rest by itself.
+Suddenly the lights from the cabin jarred me. The cabin door opened and Barbara poked her head out to see how I was doing. She yelled that she needed me to help her as she was becoming quite sea-sick from the extreme motion of the boat, and from her very real fear. I yelled back that there was simply nothing I could do at the moment. I could not leave the steering wheel for even an instant.
+Barbara then wanted to know if I wanted something to eat or to drink. No, I can't let go of the wheel at all. And there is no way you can come into the cockpit now, it's too dangerous. She poked her head outside of the hatchway far enough to see the 50-foot waves on all four sides and yelled, "We are going to die!" I told her to go down below, get as comfortable as possible, and pray. The great fear in her voice sharpened my resolve to stay alive.
+I was the captain of my ship. This sounds a bit egocentric and perhaps chauvinistic to the land-bound person. Believe me, on a vessel at sea, even in very good conditions, there must be one person in charge. The captain can listen to suggestions or request help, but there must be a boss. Democracy is fine when sitting comfortably in a protected anchorage or tied to a dock in a harbor, but it has no place while under sail, and particularly in a situation of stress or danger.
+Barbara is a truly liberated woman. She's a very successful businesswoman with her own views and positions, and she'd never let me impose my will on her. I love the fact she's fully independent and her own person. It had therefore taken some time living on Magellan and sailing the seas before the concept of a "captain" had become acceptable to us. I never attempted to impose my authority upon her as "the captain," which would have been silly. Nevertheless, we came to understand that there must be a captain who, at the appropriate times, is in charge, the full and complete boss.
+So Barbara promptly complied with my orders, went below, and shut the cabin door. I was screaming to her not to try to open it again as it was destroying my night vision. We had a built-in sofa with oversized down pillows for protection, and it had lee curtains, which are like the sides of a crib, so you can get yourself in a secure place. It was designed to keep us as comfortable as possible in bad conditions, so we would not be moved about even during severe movements of the boat, in conditions such as these.
+As soon as Barbara shut the door, the light was extinguished and I realized that my night vision had evaporated. This was frightening because I could no longer see the waves coming, nor the troughs between them. For the next couple of minutes I was steering by feel and the experience I had gained in the last several hours. Or however long it had been.
+The break was good, however, as it intensified my will to survive. I was more alert than I had been. The sight of my beautiful wife and the panic in her voice heightened my awareness of the true danger we were in. I was fully responsible for our safety, which is one big drawback to being the captain. We were either going to make it through this mess or die, and it was up to me. The decisions about how to steer and what to do were all mine, I had to be focused, fully alert, and right.
+I was being pushed to the edge of my abilities. This, coupled with the blackness, and a feeling of loneliness and isolation, was oppressive. It was also challenging, but to be honest, too challenging for my taste.
+As my night vision improved again, I was further shocked and distressed. I was trying to gauge the size of the waves. They were now above the top of the mast. They had grown from the 50-foot monsters into 60-foot behemoths. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. How could these horrific conditions exist here, just off the coast of California?
+The ocean never ceases to surprise and amaze me. Just as I think I have a handle on what to expect, it throws something new at me. I was still a novice sailor, and did not realize how very little I knew at this time. I was to be amazed, shocked, exhilarated, and terrified many more times while aboard the good ship Magellan.
+So now the waves were bigger. OK, I will handle it. There was really nothing I could do about it, except continue to do what I had been doing: Surf the waves at the correct angle - not too steep an angle, and not too shallow an angle. Just right. The next wave I took was fine. Bigger sure, higher, sure. But that's OK. The only problem was that our speed down the face of the wave had also increased. We must be doing 20 knots. Wow!
+The exhilaration of the surfing action was tempered by my fear of losing control. When we reached the trough of the wave I had to react quickly and at just the right instant, turning the wheel to straighten out the rudder so that we were lifted in a straight line up to the top of the next wave. If the hull was not straight, given the size and force of these enormous waves, I could lose control and we could easily roll over, with the dire consequences. Straightening out the line of direction was not easy. The wheel was not cooperating and we had no power steering. The power was from my arms and legs, which were starting to tire and ache. I was sore, and it was very hard work.
+My hands were frozen to the wheel and I couldn't really feel them. That was good, I guess, under the circumstances. My feet were wedged in where I had placed them when I first took the wheel, and they also no longer seemed like part of my body.
+My attention was glued to each wave and its shape, the angle of descent, and the correction at the bottom of the wave. At this point the waves, which up until now had been just giant swells, were starting to break at their tops. They had been black, streaked with white foam and spray. But now the top couple of feet were completely white, and starting to break, as a wave does when it approaches a beach. This wasn't good. I knew, or at least I believed, that we were still several miles offshore. I had no way to know for sure. The radar was still not functional due to the weather overload. I had been going "sort of southward," and therefore should have been going out to sea more, rather than closer to the shore. But all of this was pure guesswork (see Map C).
+In any event, I couldn't change my course because my steering was controlled completely by the waves. I had to concentrate on the angle of descent, and I could not worry about our course.
+The next wave was substantially above the top of the mast. My estimate is that it was a 70-foot wave. Things were not improving. Our speed again increased going down the face of this ridiculously large wave. I didn't think there were waves of this size except for a Tsunami. Well, wrong again, and humbled again.
+The waves were now increasingly streaked white. The black was disappearing altogether. The ocean was now almost completely white. The whiteness of the ocean against the blackness of the night and the sky was dramatic.
+The beauty of the scene alternately mesmerized me and scarred me to death. We had come face to face with insurmountable seas and winds, but there was no time for contemplation. Steer the boat. Pay attention.
+I felt that I had been at this for many hours, although I had lost all concept of time. My attention was riveted. Over and over I replayed my actions. I was getting good at it. I was developing a feel for the motion of the sea and the action of the waves. I was taking better and better lines down the face of each wave, which helped the motion of the boat. We were going faster than I could estimate, but Magellan was handling it. I was handling it. We were still alive and going forward.
+Again, I began to have a good time. I was enjoying the speed. I was enjoying the feeling of danger mixed with accomplishment. It was a very strange combination of feelings. However, as exhilarating as it was, I would not care to repeat it.
+I was jarred back into total dread of the danger as Magellen did a little slide sideways. This periodic slides were caused either by the wind or a wave with a slightly different shape than most of the other waves. I came close to burying the nose a few times. Some of those close calls were my fault, and some were beyond my control.
+I now became more scared and frightened than exhilarated. Nevertheless, there remained a component of joy and ecstasy in the mix of emotions. Weird. Strange. Exciting.
+Time became irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was the next wave. And then the next. And then the next.
+And then there was the first glimmer of daylight, which put a new spin on reality. I could now see the waves more clearly. I could now grasp better their size and power. This was not altogether a good revelation. It increased my apprehension and fear.
+At the same time, I was now able to see the land. As I reached the top of a wave the coastline was now visible. First just a black outline backlit by the dawn, and then very quickly a beautiful sunrise over the mountains. The details of the coast were quite clear within a short time, and I knew exactly where we were. The wind was dying down a little, and the noise was less intense.
+There was now no question in my mind that we were going to make it into a safe harbor. At this point I experienced a feeling of violent exhaustion and hunger.
+Barbara peered out of the cabin door and screamed, as we happened to be in the trough of an exceptionally large wave. The result was that in whichever direction you looked you saw nothing but a wall of water. No land was visible from that viewpoint, just water. Scary, big water. This was not the same kind of scream you hear when your wife sees a large spider in the house. This was a blood-curdling scream of real terror. The waves were actually smaller than they had been only a short time before, so it was good that she saw them when she did and not a few moments earlier.
+I calmed her down while fighting to control the boat. At least we could talk again, as the noise level was lower, signifying a decrease in the wind speed. I assured her that all was just fine and under control. At that moment I made a decision: We are going into Channel Islands Marina, a nice, big, proper breakwater, with calm, flat, quiet water inside.
+I was again thinking logically and analytically. What compass heading to steer? What should I do with the sails? I was going into that harbor.
+I shouted out a barrage of quick orders to Barbara. First turn on the engine. I am going to need all the power we have to get into the harbor. Second, check all the gauges and see what their status now is and report back to me.
+Within moments the Perkins diesel was humming. Still in neutral but running fine. A moment or two later Barbara reported that the wind gauge was working again and we were only showing 20 knots of wind. A nice fresh breeze, quite safe.
+We had just gone far enough south and east that the headland of Point Conception was now blocking the worst of the wind. The waves were no longer breaking on their tops, and they were smaller. The conditions were not good, but much better than they had been. They were now very large swells rather than waves, which improved the motion of the boat.
+I yelled out, "See if the Sat Nav's working!" Within a couple of moments Barbara had our exact position from the Satellite Navigations system. This was 1986, well before the invention of the GPS (Global Positioning System), but far better than the days of no electronic position-finding and the use of a sextant. Columbus and the real Magellan would have killed for what we had. It did not pinpoint your position as the GPS does within yards, but it gave you a reasonable fix on latitude and longitude.
+I always did the navigating, but I still could not leave the wheel. I shouted instructions to Barbara to plot our position and determine the compass heading, all the while cursing myself for not having taught her how to do this while sitting in some quiet anchorage. There had always something else - either I was too busy, or she was too busy, or one of us was too tired. That error was going to be quickly corrected at our next dock stay.
+Her first several tries were not even close. I pointed out to her that the courses she was giving to me would put us in Hawaii. The next try was going to get us to Alaska. But finally, with much shouting from her, and from me, we agreed on the proper course.
+I engaged the transmission into forward with a nudge from my knee and pushed the throttle with my forehead. At the same time I came to the course heading we had agreed on.
+The sudden addition of the power from the engine and the change of course was jarring and made the ride quiet uncomfortable again. But we were heading for the safety of the breakwater. I now needed some sail to keep the nose up and our heading correct. Barbara was compelled to put on her foul weather gear and harness, and to come out into the cockpit to help.
+Once safely in the cockpit and firmly hooked on with her mountaineering gear she went about following my instructions. It was necessary to deploy a forward sail, the staysail. Magellan was rigged with self-furling sails, which means that the sail winds up like a window shade on itself. The sail can be set either on the port (left side looking forward) or on the starboard (right side looking forward). In this particular sailing condition, with the wind almost due aft of the boat, it didn't matter on which side the sail was set. The crucial matter was getting it unfurled and set quickly, to stabilize the bow and help the steering.
+I looked at the repeaters (gauges in the cockpit that copy and repeat the information shown down in the navigation station), the wind direction, wind speed, and boat speed, and decided how much sail to put out and on which side to deploy it. All of the gauges were operating again, as was the radar.
+The setting of the sail is done with ropes, which lead back to the cockpit. You take a few wraps around a large and powerful winch with the selected rope, insert a large winch handle for a mechanical advantage, and crank away. Out comes the sail bit by bit. As the wind catches the sail, even just a couple of inches of it, you can feel the resultant change in the boat. It lifts out of the water and speeds up. You literally feel it in the seat of your pants. It is a feeling similar to the one you get while flying a small airplane. It is not measurable, but it's very apparent. It's also very reassuring and comforting, particularly when in distress, that the boat is behaving as it should.
+The boat was performing slightly better again. Not comfortable, but less uncomfortable. We put out several feet of sail. The staysail is a versatile sail, which can be used for a number of purposes. Here we were using a very small piece of it mainly for stability and handling, and it was working great.
+It was easier to maintain my course now. And there in the distance were the lights and skyline of Ventura California. We were less than an hour away from peace, quiet, and safety.
+As we got closer and closer to shore we were going more east than south. The protection of the coastline (see map) was becoming more pronounced. The waves, although still very large, were no longer gigantic. They were again very large swells rather than waves. There were no boats coming out of the Channel Islands Harbor; it was simply too awful a day for anyone to go for a pleasure cruise. That was very good for us, as I could ignore the "rules of the road" and common courtesies. Boats operate under rules very similar to automobiles. Stay to the right; pass only on the left, etc. Traffic patterns are established for entry and exiting into all harbors.
+I could hear the pounding of the surf on the beach. I could see the waves breaking on the sand. And there, just ahead, were the green and red lights of the entry into the breakwater. We flew into the entrance. We had come face to face with seemingly insurmountable obstacles of nature and had come through. Altogether this had been fantastically exciting, testing, and extremely dangerous.
+Once behind the breakwater, even just a dozen yards, the water calmed down quickly. The sounds, which had been so terrible, softened. We almost ran into a US Coast Guard Cutter anchored just inside the rocks of the breakwater. He hailed us with his bullhorn and inquired where we had come from, and why we were so very stupid to be out in the ocean in the conditions that existed. He further pointed out to us that his duty was to prevent idiots from leaving the harbor and going out to sea in such foolhardy conditions.
+The Coast Guard's admonition did not improve my mood. I replied rather caustically that it had been very good heavy-weather practice. Which it had been. Which I should have avoided at all cost, but once there we had responded, and we had survived. Good for us, I thought, as we headed Magellan for the guest docks.
+Once along side the rather nice wooden docks, Barbara and I launched into our docking procedure. We had done this many times and had it down fairly well. It was at this point that I discovered a new problem. My hands were frozen to the steering wheel. I could not undo my fingers. I could not move my legs at all.
+I had been gripping the wheel with such intensity and bracing myself with my legs for so many hours that they had lost all feeling. I could not jump up and set the docking lines as I usually did. So for the very first time Barbara did it, and she did it well. We were docked. There had been a substantial amount of anxiety between us during the docking process, and great satisfaction once we were tied up.
+We started to laugh uncontrollably. Loud, raucous laughter. We laughed so hard we cried. The situation seemed very funny after reaching safety. We were thrilled to be alive and safe. When the laughter subsided, my first thought was of food. Denny's was just across the way: pancakes, eggs, and of course lots of hot coffee.
+The only problem was that I couldn't move. Barbara went down below and returned with a large pot of hot water in one hand. She then poured the water over my gloved hands and my legs little by little. She then helped me to pry loose my fingers one at a time. We have tried to estimate how long this process took. I swear it was a hour; she says more like 25 minutes. Well, it felt like a hour. And it hurt. Every part of my body was extremely sore, and I was certain I would never fully recover.
+I could not undress myself. I could not undo a zipper or a clasp. Barbara had to do everything for me, but eventually I was out of my foul weather gear. I was myself quite foul and in need of a shower and a bed, but first food. It was a real struggle to climb off of Magellan and onto the dock. The first several steps were truly painful. But little by little my body responded and I walked. Like an 90 year old man, but I walked. By the time we reached Denny's I was much better. My hands would be sore for many days, and I would wake up with cramps in my legs and in my arms, but after a couple of days I was functional again. Despite the stress and danger of the experience that we had just gone through, we nevertheless believed that we had made a good decision to sail the oceans of the world.
+I wolfed down the largest breakfast special on the menu. I had pots of coffee. I took a long hot shower. I do not recall anything else about the next 24 hours, as I slept a deep sleep. After so many hours of the cruel battering by the seas, defying all odds, we were safe.
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+Abstract
+The steadily increasing incidence of kidney injury is a significant threat to human health. The current tools available for the early detection of kidney injury, however, have limited sensitivity or specificity. Thus, the development of novel biomarkers to detect early kidney injury is of high importance. Employing mouse renal ischemia-reperfusion and streptozotocin (STZ)-induced renal injury as acute and chronic kidney injury model, respectively, we assessed the alteration of microRNA (miRNA) in mouse urine, serum and kidney tissue by TaqMan probe-based qRT-PCR assay. Our results demonstrated that kidney-enriched microRNA-10a (miR-10a) and microRNA-30d (miR-30d) were readily detected in mouse urine and the levels of urinary miR-10a and miR-30d were positively correlated with the degree of kidney injury induced by renal ischemia-reperfusion or STZ diabetes. In contrast, no such alteration of miR-10a and miR-30d levels was observed in mouse serum after kidney injury. Compared with the blood urea nitrogen (BUN) assay, the test for urinary miR-10a and miR-30d levels was more sensitive for the detection of acute kidney injury. Furthermore, the substantial elevation of the urinary miR-10a and miR-30d levels was also observed in focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) patients compared to healthy donors. In conclusion, the present study collectively demonstrates that urinary miR-10a and miR-30d represent a novel noninvasive, sensitive, specific and potentially high-throughput method for detecting renal injury.
+Citation: Wang N, Zhou Y, Jiang L, Li D, Yang J, et al. (2012) Urinary MicroRNA-10a and MicroRNA-30d Serve as Novel, Sensitive and Specific Biomarkers for Kidney Injury. PLoS ONE 7(12): e51140. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051140
+Editor: Partha Mukhopadhyay, National Institutes of Health, United States of America
+Received: September 26, 2012; Accepted: October 29, 2012; Published: December 13,. 2012CB517603, 2011CB504803), the grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 30988003, 30890044, 30800946, 30871019, 30890032, 31071232, 31000323, 90608010 and 90813035), and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK2011013). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
+Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
+Introduction
+The incidence of kidney injuries, including diabetic nephropathy and drug-induced side effects, is steadily increasing worldwide [1]. Acute kidney injury is considered to be an important risk factor for progression to end-stage renal disease [2]. The early detection of kidney injury would make it possible to diagnosis acute kidney injury in a timely manner, but such detection remains a difficult task, due to the lack of reliable biomarkers. Current metrics for renal function, such as blood urea nitrogen (BUN), lack the sensitivity and/or specificity to adequately detect kidney damage at early stages of the injury [3], [4]. Recently, kidney injury molecule-1 (Kim-1) was identified as a highly sensitive and specific urinary biomarker for kidney injury [5]. Subsequent preclinical studies also showed that Kim-1 is a promising early diagnostic biomarker for monitoring acute kidney tubular necrosis [6]. Whether Kim-1 can serve as a suitable biomarker for various types of kidney injuries, however, requires further investigation using a large number of different renal injury samples.
+MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are ~22-nt long noncoding RNA molecules that have emerged as a new class of gene regulators at the posttranscriptional level. It is widely believed that miRNAs regulate nearly 30% of protein-coding genes and are involved in almost every aspect of developmental, pathogenic and tumorigenesis processes. Accumulating evidence demonstrates that miRNAs serve as mediators in chronic kidney disease [7]. Studies of conditional dicer-knockout mice [8], [9] revealed critical roles for miRNAs in regulating kidney development and maintaining the structural and functional integrity of the renal collecting system and the glomerular barrier. The determination of miRNA expression profiles in normal kidneys and their constituent cells has suggested that specific miRNAs may serve special functional roles in these cells [9]. Kato and co-workers [10] reported on the expression and function of miR-192 in diabetic kidney glomeruli. Employing mouse renal ischemia reperfusion injury (IRI) model, Godwin et al. [11] identified a miRNA signature in kidney tissue that was tightly correlated to renal IRI. Recently, studies by our group [12], [13] and others [14]–[19] have demonstrated that miRNAs can be released by cells and tissues into circulation and that these circulating miRNAs in the serum, plasma, urine, and other body fluids are stable and can serve as noninvasive biomarkers for various diseases and tissue injuries. When studying the serum and urinary levels of the miR-200 family, miR-205 and miR-192 in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), Wang et al. [20] found that the levels of most of those miRNAs from patients were lower than the levels of controls, suggesting that miRNA may take part in the pathogenesis of SLE and that miRNAs in the urine and serum could be biomarkers for SLE.
+In the present study, we hypothesized that the levels of specific circulating miRNA species could be used to detect and monitor the pathological development associated with kidney injuries. Using different mouse renal injury models, we reported that miR-10a and miR-30d were readily detected in urine and that their levels specifically correlated with mouse kidney injury induced by renal ischemia-reperfusion or STZ treatment. The elevation of the urinary levels of miR-10a and miR-30d was also confirmed in urine samples from patients with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS).
+Materials and Methods
+Ethics Statement
+All animal experimental procedures were carried out in accordance with the National Institutes of Health Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals and were approved by the Animal Care Committee of Nanjing University (Nanjing, China).
+Mouse renal ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI)
+Male C57BL/6J mice (6–8 weeks old, 22–25 g) were assigned into three groups with ten mice per group: the sham, unilateral and bilateral ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) groups. Renal I/R was performed according to an established procedure [21]. Briefly, mice were under general anesthesia with 0.4–0.5 g/kg chloral hydrate and kept on a heating pad to maintain the body temperature at 37°C. After a midline abdominal incision, the renal pedicles were exposed by blunt dissection, and a microvascular clamp was applied for 40 minutes. The kidneys were observed after removal of the clamp(s) to assess reperfusion. After reperfusion, ~0.8 ml of pre-warmed saline was placed in the peritoneal cavity, and the abdomen was closed in layers. Sham control mice were subjected to an identical operation without renal pedicle clamping. Mouse urine was collected using a metabolic cage at 18~24 h and 30~36 h after reperfusion, respectively. Mice were sacrificed at 24 and 36 h after reperfusion and blood samples were collected and the kidneys were removed. Part of the kidney tissue was fixed in 10% phosphate-buffered formalin followed by paraffin embedding for histological study.
+Renal function determination
+Renal function was monitored by measuring the BUN concentration using analytical kits according to the protocols specified by the manufacturer (Rongsheng Biotech, Shanghai, China). Mouse blood samples were collected when mice were sacrificed. Samples were centrifuged to separate plasma.
+Histological staining
+Renal histology was examined by hematoxylin/eosin staining. Briefly, kidneys were collected and fixed in 10% phosphate-buffered formalin at 4°C overnight. The kidneys were subsequently paraffin embedded and sectioned (4 µm). Sections were stained with hematoxylin/eosin for general histology. Images of representative fields were recorded.
+RNA extraction
+Total RNA was extracted from 100 µL samples (serum or urine). In brief, 100 µL sample was mixed with 300 µL diethylpyrocarbonate-treated water, 200 µL acid phenol, 200 µL chloroform. The mixture was vortex-mixed vigorously and centrifuged at 12000 g for 15 min at room temperature. After phase separation, the aqueous layer (~400 µL) was mixed with 2 volumes of isopropyl alcohol and 0.1 volumes of 3 mol/L sodium acetate (pH 5.3). This solution was stored at −20°C for 1 h. The RNA pellet was collected by centrifugation at 16000 g for 20 min at 4°C. The resulting RNA pellet was washed once with 750 mL/L ethanol and air-dried for 10 min at room temperature. Finally, the pellet was dissolved in 20 µL of ribonuclease-free water.
+Streptozotocin (STZ)-induced kidney damage
+Kidney injury was established in STZ-induced diabetic mice as previously described [22]. Male C57BL/6J mice were divided into two groups (eight mice/per group) after measuring the body weight. Group 1 was intraperitoneally injected with 50 mg/kg of STZ dissolved in 10 mM citrate buffer (pH 4.5) for 5 consecutive days. Group 2 was given an equal volume of citrate buffer. At week 8 post-injection, individual mice were placed in metabolic cages to obtain 24 h urine collections. Blood glucose levels from the tail-vein were measured using the OneTouch Blood Glucose Monitoring System (LifeScan, Milpitas, CA) at 2, 4, 6 and 8 weeks post-injection. The mice were fasted for 4 h before blood glucose measurement. Freshly voided spot urine samples were collected at 1, 4 and 8 weeks post-injection. Urinary albumin was measured by ELISA kits (Bethyl Laboratories, Houston, TX). After mice were sacrificed, kidneys were collected, washed with saline, dried with filter paper and weighed with a precision balance.
+Urine and blood samples from healthy donors and FSGS patients
+The present study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Nanjing University (Nanjing, China) and written informed consent was obtained from each participant. Urine and blood samples (10–15 mL) were collected from 16 healthy donors and 16 FSGS patients (Table 1). Renal function was monitored by measuring BUN, blood pressure, urinary protein, serum creatinine, BUN, uric acid, creatinine clearance, triglyceride and total cholesterol.
+Table 1. Clinical features of 16 FSGS patients vs 16 normal volunteers.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051140.t001
+TaqMan probe-based qRT-PCR of miRNAs
+Total RNA including miRNA was isolated from various tissues of C57BL/6J mice and mouse or human urine and sera using TRIzol reagent (Invitrogen, CA) as previously described [12], [13]. Stem-loop qRT-PCR assays using TaqMan miRNA probes (Applied Biosystems) were performed [13], [23]. Real-time PCR was performed using a TaqMan PCR kit and an Applied Biosystems 7300 Sequence Detection System. The reactions were incubated in a 96-well plate at 95°C for 10 min followed by 40 cycles of 95°C for 15 sec and 60°C for 1 min. All reactions, including no-template controls, were performed in triplicate. After the reactions, the cycle threshold (CT) data were determined using default threshold settings, and the mean CT was determined from the triplicate PCRs. A comparative ΔCT method was used to compare each condition with controls, and values were expressed as 2−ΔCT. The relative levels of miRNAs in tissues were normalized to U6, a ubiquitously expressed small nuclear RNA. For quantification of sera and urinary miRNA, an equal amount of the synthetic plant MIR168a was spiked in each serum sample prior to RNA extraction to serve as internal control.
+Statistical analysis
+For each experiment, qRT-PCR assays were performed in triplicate. The data shown are represented as means ± SEM for at least three independent experiments. Differences were considered statistically significant at p<0.05, as assessed using Student's t-test.
+Results
+Identification of miR-10a and miR-30d as kidney-specific miRNAs
+The role of miRNA in kidney function has been illustrated previously by investigators through the specific knockdown of Dicer activity in podocyte cells [8], [9]. Tissue profiling assays further demonstrated that the kidney and its constituent cells contain unique miRNAs, particularly members of the miR-10 and miR-30 families [24] and miR-192 [10]. Depending on the species, the profile of miRNAs in the kidney might be different. Employing Solexa sequencing, we previously analyzed the miRNA expression profile in various mouse tissues, and as shown in Table S1, different tissues have different miRNA profiles. For mouse kidney, after rule out the miRNAs with very low total signal, we found that miR-10a and miR-30d, as well as other miRNAs in miR-1 and miR-30 families, were relatively enriched in kidney tissue. This result was further validated using a TaqMan probe-based qRT-PCR, we detected the expression of miR-10a, miR-30d and miR-192 in various mouse organs: the heart, spleen, kidney, colon and lung. The expression of miR-122, a liver-specific miRNA, served as a control. To compare the expression of a miRNA in various tissues, we normalized the expression level of miRNA against the expression of U6 in the same tissues. As shown in Figure 1, we found that mouse kidneys contained a significantly higher level of miR-10a and miR-30d than did other tissues, confirming that these two miRNAs are kidney specific. Although miR-192 was detected at a high level in the kidney, it was also strongly expressed in the liver and colon. In agreement with a previous report [25], miR-122 was predominantly expressed in mouse liver.
+Figure 1. Identification of miR-10a and miR-30d as mouse kidney-enriched miRNAs.
+RNA from various organs of normal C57BL6 mice was extracted, and the miRNA levels were determined by qRT-PCR assay using U6 as an internal control.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051140.g001
+Elevation of the level of kidney-specific miRNAs in mouse urine after kidney injury
+Based on the tissue distribution of miRNAs determined by qRT-PCR assays, miR-10a and miR-30d were selected as kidney-specific miRNAs for further analysis. Next, we tested whether miR-10a and miR-30d are released into animal urine under normal and injury conditions. In this experiment, we employed unilateral and bilateral renal ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) in mice as a kidney injury model. Urine samples from normal male C57BL/6J mice (6–8 weeks old, 22–25 g) and male C57BL/6J mice with kidney injuries were collected, and absolute levels of miR-10a and miR-30d were assessed. As shown in Figure 2A, unilateral and bilateral renal I/R caused pathological damage to mouse kidneys in various degrees. Compared with the sham control group, transient ischemia caused marked tubular injury, as shown by loss of brush border, tubular dilation, and intratubular cast formation; unilateral and bilateral renal I/R kidney also showed glomerulus atrophy with enlarged capsular spaces and tubule atrophy with compensatory hypertrophy of the adjacent glomeruli. Although no fibrous connective tissue desmoplasia or inflammatory cell infiltration was observed in the injured kidneys, part of the tubule, particularly in bilateral I/R kidneys, exhibited cellular and hyaline cast formation and significant tubular dilatation. Several tubular epithelial cells had papillary hyperplasia and granular degeneration. The kidney injury was also determined using the BUN assay (Figure 2B). In agreement with this, we also detected an increased level of KIM-1 [26] and neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL) [27] in I/R kidney (Figure S1). As can be seen, blood urea nitrogen was elevated in mice with bilateral I/R but not the mice with unilateral I/R. Because the tissue section and pathological analysis clearly suggested damage to the mouse kidney under unilateral I/R, the failure to detect the elevation of BUN in the mice with unilateral I/R is indicative of the sensitivity limitation of this method.
+Figure 2. Elevation of the urinary miR-10a and miR-30d levels in mice with renal I/R-mediated injury.
+A, mouse kidney injuries caused by unilateral (SS) or bilateral (DS) I/R. B, BUN assay of mouse kidney injury by I/R. Note that the BUN assay was able to detect kidney injury caused by DS I/R but not that caused by SS I/R. C–D, significant elevation of the urinary miR-10a (C) and miR-30d (D) levels in mice with either SS I/R or DS I/R. E, no alteration of miR-16 in mouse urine after I/R-mediated kidney injury. The data are presented as means ± SEM for six independent experiments; three mice were used in each experiment. *, p<0.05. **, p<0.01.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051140.g002
+Conversely, we found that miRNAs were normally expressed in mouse urine at 0.1–15.0 fmol/L range and were readily detected by the qRT-PCR assay. More importantly, the levels of urinary miR-10a and miR-30d were significantly increased in mice with either unilateral ischemia/reperfusion or bilateral ischemia/reperfusion. Compared with the sham control group, unilateral and bilateral ischemia/reperfusion kidney resulted in 5.5- and 19.5-fold elevations of urinary miR-10a, respectively (Figure 2C), and 5.4- and 10.0-fold elevations of urinary miR-30d, respectively (Figure 2D). The urinary levels of miRNAs that were not specifically expressed in kidneys, such as miR-16, were not altered following either unilateral or bilateral ischemia/reperfusion (Figure 2E). Together, these results strongly suggest that urinary miR-10a and miR-30d could serve as sensitive and specific biomarkers for kidney injury.
+Previous studies by our group and others have demonstrated that the alteration of the serum miRNA expression profile can be used as a molecular fingerprint for various diseases [12] and organ injuries [17], [20]. Therefore, we also detected the levels of miR-10a and miR-30d in mouse serum with or without renal I/R. Interestingly, we found that the miR-10a and miR-30d levels in serum were not correlated with kidney injury. As shown in Figure S2, no alteration of miR-10a or miR-30d in mouse serum was observed after unilateral renal I/R. After bilateral renal I/R, the level of miR-30d in serum was still unchanged, while the level of miR-10a was reduced. The elevation of kidney-enriched miR-10a and miR-30d in urine (Figure 2) but not serum (Figure S2) during renal I/R indicated that these miRNAs may be directly correlated with kidney injury.
+Next we determined the levels of miR-10a and miR-30d in mouse kidney tissue with or without renal I/R. As shown in Figure S3A, both miR-10a and miR-30d in mouse kidney were significantly reduced during renal I/R. Interestingly, the levels of pre-miR-10a and pre-miR-30d in mouse kidney tissues were not changed (Figure S3B). Moreover, pre-miR-10a and pre-miR-30d were not detected in mouse urine by qRT-PCR (data not shown). These results collectively suggest that elevation of mouse urinary miR-10a and miR-30d during renal I/R is likely due to the release of mature miR-10a and miR-30d from mouse kidney tissue.
+Chronic diabetic conditions generally lead to kidney injury [28]. To test whether urinary miR-10a and miR-30d can be biomarkers for diabetes-induced renal injury, we employed streptozotocin (STZ)-treated diabetic mice as another kidney injury model. In this experiment, type 1 diabetes was induced in C57BL/6J mice with STZ treatment. In specific, mice were fasted for 4 h, followed by intraperitoneal injection with STZ at a dose of 50 mg/kg body weight for five days consecutively. Blood-glucose level test showed that STZ-treated mice maintained a hyperglycemia condition. Compared to the normal mice, the levels of kidney weight, blood glucose and 24 h urinary protein were all significantly increased in 2 month STZ-treated mice (Table 2). As shown in Figure 3, the urinary levels of miR-10a and miR-30d were significantly higher in STZ-treated mice compared with those in vehicle-treated control mice. In contrast, compared with the normal mice, the mice with only hyperglycemia showed either moderately decreased or unchanged levels of miR-10a and miR-30d in serum. Although the 24 h urinary protein level was not significantly increased after one month treatment with STZ, ultrastructural analysis indicated that, comparing to normal distribution of podocyte foot process, diabetic mice with one month STZ treatment showed apparent segmental podocyte foot process effacement (Figure 3E, arrow). These results suggest that the elevation of urinary miR-10a and miR-30d levels may specifically reflect hyperglycemia-induced kidney injury.
+Figure 3. Elevation of the urinary miR-10a and miR-30d levels but not serum miR-10a and miR-30d in mice with STZ diabetes-associated kidney injury.
+Note that the levels of urinary miR-10a (A) and miR-30d (B) were significantly increased in mice with STZ diabetes-induced kidney injury, whereas the levels of serum miR-10a (C) and miR-30d (D) were not altered. E, a represented image of electron microscopy showing that mice with 1 month STZ treatment have segmental podocyte foot process effacement (arrow). The data are presented as means ± SEM for six independent experiments; three mice were used in each experiment. *, p<0.05.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051140.g003
+Table 2. Mouse kidney weight index, blood glucose and 24 h proteinuria (Mean ± SEM, n = 14).doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051140.t002
+Elevation of miR-10a and miR-30d levels in the urine of FSGS patients
+To find out whether the elevation of urinary miR-10a and miR-30d also occurs in patient with kidney injuries, we assessed the levels of urinary miR-10a and miR-30d in FSGS patients. Renal dysfunction of FSGS patients was also monitored by measuring blood pressure, BUN, serum creatinine, uric acid, urinary protein, urinary red blood cell, serum creatinine, creatinine clearance, triglyceride and total cholesterol levels. As shown in Table 1, FSGS patients had a significantly higher proteinuria level that the healthy controls. The levels of triglyceride and total cholesterol levels in these patients were also higher than those in the healthy controls. Next we compared the levels of miR-10a and miR-30d in urine from healthy volunteers with those from FSGS patients. As shown in Figure 4, compared with the levels of urinary miR-10a and miR-30d from healthy donors, the urine from FSGS patients contained about 13- and 10-fold higher concentrations of miR-10a and miR-30d, respectively. High levels of urinary kidney-enriched miR-10a and miR-30d clearly indicate the kidney injuries in FSGS patients.
+Figure 4. Alteration of the urinary miR-10a and miR-30d levels in FSGS patients.
+Urine samples were collected from 16 healthy donors and 16 FSGS patients. Note that, compared with healthy donors, FSGS patients had strikingly elevated levels of urinary miR-10a and miR-30d. **, p<0.01.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051140.g004
+Discussion
+Urine is regarded as a source for biomarkers, given its easy availability and reduced complexity when compared with serum. Many urinary proteins, such as neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL) [27], N-acetyl-β-D-glucosaminidase (NAG) [29], and ectodomain of kidney injury molecule-1 (Kim-1) [5], have been evaluated as noninvasive indicators of renal injury. However, problems with the reliable use of these proteins to identify and monitor kidney injury, including instability in the urine, modification due to physicochemical properties of the urine, delayed appearance, inconsistency of upregulation with different models of nephrotoxicity, and the absence of sustained elevation throughout the time course of renal injury to monitor the progression and regression of injury, limit the wide application of these marker proteins. As endogenous small noncoding RNAs, miRNAs hold great promise as unique accessible biomarkers to monitor tissue injury because of their size, abundance, tissue specificity, and relative stability. Indeed, accumulating evidence has demonstrated the usage of circulating miRNAs in various body fluids as an indicator for tissue injury [17], [20]. In the present study, we observed increases in the urinary concentrations of miR-10a and miR-30d corresponding to kidney injuries. Furthermore, urinary miR-10a and miR-30d exhibited a diagnostic sensitivity that was considerably superior to that of BUN when the results were correlated to the histopathological results.
+Kidney-enriched miRNAs are readily detected in human and animal urine
+To serve as a biomarker, urinary miRNAs must be present at a considerable concentration to be readily detected. Our study clearly demonstrated that urinary miRNAs are stable and can be reliably extracted and assayed by qRT-PCR. By comparing the levels of miRNA in sera and urine, we found that kidney-enriched miRNAs, such as miR-10a and miR-30d, were present in urine, and their concentrations were approximately 1/10 of those in sera. Importantly, when kidney injury occurred, the levels of miR-10a and miR-30d in urine were strikingly elevated, while their levels in the serum were not increased. These results strongly suggest that urinary miR-10a and miR-30d can serve as ideal biomarkers for kidney injury. We used both I/R-induced acute kidney injury and STZ diabetes-induced chronic kidney injury animal models and showed that changes in the levels of urinary miR-10a and miR-30d occurred as a result of renal damage. Therefore, the relative concentration of kidney-enriched miRNA species has a potential to become a sensitive indicator for detecting and monitoring kidney injury (Figure 2).
+Because miR-10a and miR-30d are enriched in kidney tissue (Figure 1), urinary miR-10a and miR-30d are probably derived directly from the kidneys, particularly when kidney injury has occurred. The recent work by Godwin et al. [11] showed that the expression profile of kidney miRNAs was significantly changed following renal ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI). It is reasonable to hypothesize that certain upregulated miRNAs in the kidney may be released into the urine after IRI. Leakage of miRNAs from damaged cells or tissue has been reported previously [14]. However, it could also be true that renal cells and tissues actively release more miR-10a and miR-30d into circulation under the stress. Recent studies by our group and others have shown that, in response to various pathophysiological stimulations, cells can actively package miRNA into microvesicles and release them into circulation [30]. The high stability of urinary miRNAs suggests that they may be primarily encapsulated in kidney cell-secreted microvesicles.
+Urinary miRNAs are sensitive and specific indicators for kidney injury
+We demonstrated using well-established models that kidney injuries can be precisely detected and monitored using a small number of circulating miRNA species. In our study, this miRNA-based method was more sensitive and probably more reliable than the current BUN method for detecting kidney injury. Elevation of the urinary miR-10a and miR-30d levels can be detected in mice with unilateral I/R in which the protein levels were not changed, suggesting that the urinary miR-10a and miR-30d levels can reflect mild or early kidney injury. In addition, urinary miR-10a and miR-30d are highly enriched to the kidney; therefore, the elevation of these miRNAs may be directly linked to the injuries of kidney. This hypothesis is supported by our observation that the elevation of miR-10a and miR-30d concentrations occurred only in urine and not in serum when mice were treated with renal I/R. Interestingly, recent study by Lorenzen et al. [31] showed that miR-10a was released into urine and could be detected in kidney transplant patients at the onset of acute T-cell mediated rejection, which may suggest a mild acute kidney injury during the process of T-cell mediated rejection.
+The role of tissue miR-10a and miR-30d in kidney function also strengthens our conclusion that urinary miR-10a and miR-30d can serve as indicators for kidney injury. Previous studies have shown that miR-10a can target IL-12/IL-23p40 expression [32] and pro-apoptotic protein Bim [33], while miR-30d can negatively regulate apoptotic caspase CASP3 [34] and tumor suppressor p53 gene [35]. Through decreasing the levels of these apoptotic or pro-apoptotic proteins and inflammatory cytokines, miR-10a and miR-30d might provide a protection to kidney tissues/cells. In contrast, reduction of miR-10a and miR-30d in kidney cells would cause cell apoptosis and damage, which may finally lead to renal dysfunction. Indeed, it has been reported that during nephrogenesis, nephron progenitors highly expressing miR-10a and miR-10a can target Bim [24]. The study by Shi et al. [8] demonstrated that podocytes strongly expressed four members of the miR-30 family that may target genes such as vimentin, heat-shock protein 20 and immediate early response 3. Through the silencing of these target genes, the miR-30 and miR-10 miRNA families play an essential role in podocyte homeostasis and podocytopathies, which is in agreement with our finding in the present study. By measuring the levels of miR-10a and miR-30d in mouse urine (Figure 2) and mouse kidney tissue (Figure S3A) before and after kidney injury, and comparing the levels of pre-miR-10a and pre-miR-30d in kidney before and after kidney injury (Figure S3B), we found that during kidney injury, elevation of urinary miR-10a and miR-30d levels might be due to the leakage of miRNAs from the injured or damaged kidney cells. In other words, the elevation of miRNAs in urine is correlated to the reduction of miRNAs in kidney organs. Therefore, an elevation of urinary miR-10a/miR-30d levels correlates to a decrease of kidney miR-10a/miR-30d levels, which links to cell apoptosis and kidney injury/damage. Serving as negative regulators of cell apoptosis, miR-10a and miR-30d have been found to be upregulated in various cancer tissues, such as prostate cancer [36]. Clarifying the role of miR-10a and miR-30d in the tumorigenesis processes of these cancer cells may be helpful for understanding the correlation between urinary miR-10a/miR-30d and kidney injures.
+Interestingly, although the chronic hyperglycemia caused an elevation of urinary miR-10a and miR-30d likely due to the kidney damage, a short period of high blood glucose exposure did not increase the level of these kidney-specific miRNAs in urine. By challenging 12 h–fasting mice with an intraperitoneal injection of glucose (2 g/kg of body weight), we found no elevation of urinary miR-10a and miR-30d within 1–3 h (data not shown). These results may suggest that the increase in urine miRNA levels in the diabetes mouse model is not due to a glycosuria-induced osmotic diuresis.
+The results for the human urine samples further confirmed the feasibility of using the urinary miR-10a and miR-30d levels to detect kidney injury in humans. As shown in Figure 4, we found that the urinary miR-10a and miR-30d levels in FSGS patients were significantly higher than those in healthy volunteers, indicating the severity of the kidney injuries in these patients. In summary, our study demonstrated that miR-10 and miR-30d are stably present in human and animal urine and that the elevation of the urinary miR-10a and miR-30d levels can serve as a novel urine-based biomarker of kidney injury.
+Supporting Information
+Relative levels of KIM-1 and NGAL gene expression in mouse kidney with/without renal ischemia-reperfusion injury. The levels of KIM-1 and NGAL mRNA was assayed by qRT-PCR. The data are presented as means ± SEM for three independent experiments; three mice were used in each experiment.
+doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051140.s001
+(TIF)
+Level of serum miR-10a and miR-30d in mice with/without renal ischemia-reperfusion injury. A, the serum miR-10a level was decreased in DS I/R mice but not SS I/R mice. B, no alteration in the serum miR-30d level in mice with either SS or DS I/R treatment was observed. The data are presented as means ± SEM deviation for six independent experiments; three mice were used in each experiment. *, p<0.05.
+doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051140.s002
+(TIF)
+The levels of miR-10a, miR-30d, pre-miR-10a and pre-miR-30d in mouse kidney tissues detected by TaqMan probe-based qRT-PCR with U6 serving as an internal control. A) Levels of miR-10a and miR-30d in mouse kidney with or without renal I/R. B) Levels of pre-miR-10a and pre-miR-30d in mouse kidney with or without renal I/R. Note that, following renal I/R, the levels of mouse kidney miR-10a and miR-30d are decreased whereas the levels of pre-miR-10a and pre-miR-30d are not changed. The data are presented as means ± SEM for three independent experiments. *, p<0.05. **, p<0.01.
+doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051140.s003
+(TIF)
+Relative enrichment of miRNAs in various mouse tissues detected by Solexa sequencing. Nine mouse organs including kidney, liver, spleen, brain, intestine, lung, etc. were assayed. After normalization, the miRNAs with total counts from in nine mouse organs >2000 were selected. The ratio of miRNAs in other tissues such as lung, brain, etc. was not shown due to the limited space.
+doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051140.s004
+(DOC)
+Author Contributions
+Conceived and designed the experiments: KZ CYZ JWY. Performed the experiments: NW YZ LJ. Analyzed the data: DHL. Wrote the paper: KZ.
+References
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+A pair of Highland Park house flips that violated preservation rules. Photos from Redfin
+Highland Park is a hotspot for home flippers, investors who buy, fix up and then resell homes as quickly as possible. But some of the flippers have run afoul of the rules that govern the historic district, which includes about 4,000 Highland Park homes and buildings. Last month, the board of the the Highland Park-Garvanza Preservation Overlay Zone reviewed the case of two house flippers that had been caught replacing original wood doors and windows with vinyl windows and other materials that did not fit into the homes’ historic character.
+Board president Charles Fisher said he is sympathetic to homeowners who may not be aware that they are required to seek approval before changing out windows and doors. But flippers are another matter, he said. “The flipper has got some money. They should know better.”
+In fact, swapping original wood windows and doors has been the biggest problem when it comes to Highland Park home flippers, Fisher said. “We have some are flippers who know their stuff,” he said. But the normal routine is for them to “just gut everything and start changing windows.”
+Why does it matter if someone replaces a wood window with a new vinyl or metal window? Fisher said the historic preservation rules governing changes to building exterior are focused on protecting historic architectural features. “You want to keep the character defining features of these homes, and the windows are one of those character defining features.”
+Ideally, the Highland Park board would prefer that any exterior changes reflect the building’s historic style and features. But, in some cases, the board is fine if only windows and doors that are visible from the street be preserved or replaced with something of a similar style and material.
+That was not the case of the two flipper properties that came before the most recent Highland Park HPOZ meeting. The current owner of 610 N. Avenue 54, which was purchased in December for $218,000 and was put up for sale at $299,143 last month, agreed to replace the new windows, porch railings and front door with something more historically appropriate for the 104-year-old bungalow, a plan approved by the board.
+Meanwhile, the owner of 238 E. Avenue 41, a 92-year-old wood-sided cottage that went on the market in March at an asking price of $299,000, agreed to replace the vinyl windows that has been ripped out with wood replicas. That plan also met with the board’s approval.
+While the replacement of wood windows at both properties violated the historic preservation rules they did not seem to bother buyers all that much. Both homes went into escrow less than a month after being put up for sale.
+is there something on the books for the eagle rock area in regards to this?
+LA has 29 HPOZ’s. Eagle Rock was surveyed in 2005 I think, but does not have an HPOZ (yet)?
+Once the burglar bars go up, no one will be able to tell the difference.
+No need for burglar bars, mine were removed with no problem for the past 12 years. Most of Highland Park IS safe. Never assume!
+You must be new here. It’s a bit of a past-time.
+I’ve been here more than 25 years. I have louvered windows that anyone can get in. No burglar bars. No problem.
+Locks are to keep honest people honest. Bars be damned. Take that shit of your windows man, you are only fucking up your own view!
+Good work! These people SHOULD be busted for doing this to homes in historic areas. If flippers want to make a buck here they’d better do it in a way that shows some respect for the unique character of these neighborhoods. There are plenty of other neighborhoods elsewhere for them to use their vinyl windows and cookie-cutter rehab methods.
+Let’s face it. Highland Park has gotten a pretty raw deal over the past 50 years with dodgy developers, slumlords & opportunists defacing many of the historical buildings without following the guidelines of the HPOZ. Considering this new wave of flippers and rehabbers over the past 5 years we have the opportunity to restore some of the dignity and charm to this neighborhood (the largest HPOZ in Los Angeles). The work is being done now to many of the houses and buildings is largely commendable and this redevelopment or so to speak will be the new face of Highland Park & Garvanza for the next 50 – 75 years. It is our duty to protect the integrity of this neighborhood with any of the work that is done to a contributing historical structure. When it all boils down, you will INCREASE the value of a home by doing quality work that reflects the original character of the house. Original windows and doors rehabbed look awesome or you can have exact replicas made locally by Vent Vue (Frogtown)and it does not cost as much $$ as people would think. Anything but those horrendous vertical aluminum vertical sliders… and as for the stucco’d buildings…. ughhh.
+Let’s continue to make this neighborhood great!
+Andrew Ward
+134 N. Ave 54
+90042
+How much more does a 4′ x 4′ replica wood window cost than a Vinyl window? I think it is obvious that EVERYONE likes historic wood windows more than vinyl windows…just like I would much rather live in South Pasadena than Highland Park, but unfortunately, I can’t afford South Pasadena or wood windows.
+If I have original inoperable low efficiency wood windows, what are my options? I have a real problem with my neighbors dictating what I can and can’t do with my own home. Especially when Highland Park is so run down and any improvement is better than nothing.
+Then don’t move into a HPOZ area where you already know there are rules regarding how your house looks.
+@BB Bombshell, You could also look into getting your current inoperable wood windows repaired. I’m amazed at how well mine turned out after some new cords and weights were installed. It was WAYY less cash than even a newer vinyl window.
+I’d like to live in South Pasadena also but like many I have to live within my means too. However, if you do spend the $$ on the short term in repairing the original windows or replacing them with exact replicas you will add significant value to your property on the long term. Overall the HPOZ in Highland Park is a massive benefit to the long term vision and sustainability of our community. Call Ed Sanchez who does window restoration and repair
+Good Luck!
+that website should read:
+The reason you would probably prefer to live in South Pas, is because of the pride of ownership in the neighborhood – which leads to better everything. Pride of ownership entails respecting the history and integrity of the house. I agree that some improvements are better than nothing, but that’s what they said about stucco 30 years ago and look where we are now!
+Look into places like Habitat for Humanity and The ReUse People of Los Angeles. I have purchased a brand new 8’x4′ wood window with framing for $400. It’s going to take a little extra work on our part to fit it into the original window spacing, but we’re already replacing a window so a few extra steps is not that big of a deal.
+I have to tend to agree with BB Bombshell…and not all of us are RECENT residents…I have lived here since my parents first bought our house in ’72 so I see the condition of the area, and agree that some “improvements” actually look WORSE than the original condition of the house, but I’d rather have someone replace brokendown, falling apart windows with vinyl (if that’s all they can afford) than alluminum, or worse yet, than leaving them all dilapidated!
+One big reason that the shady flippers don’t use the proper wood windows, in addition to the cost of materials, is time; the offenders are typically doing all of their remodeling work without permits and are trying to get it done fast and cheap, without regard for quality beyond a ‘shiny and new’ appearance. Ordering wood windows typically takes at least 3 weeks and work done with proper permits and inspections certainly delays the rehab process for them. These people truly fit the definition of a “fly by night” operation and are not improving these areas with their methods.
+I also agree with earlier comments about repairing original windows when possible. Old wood windows were typically built with better wood (old growth lumber) and better quality than most of what you can get today. Sometimes they’re too far gone due to termite damage, etc. but often they can be saved!
+What’s wrong with new vinyl windows? I think they look nice, but maybe I’m not cultured enough to understand why one would care about windows when their neighbors house has a blue tarp roof, is clad in wrought iron, and provides shelter for eight dogs that bark all night long…typical misguided sense of priorities which is so prevalent in Los Angeles (and a large reason why Los Angeles is such a $***hole).
+In a historical home or area there are very strict laws that must be followed. Don’t ever remodel a home in a historical area without consulting the city building and safety.
+If you’re an HP RE Agent, why not list your name and business?
+That way I will know to never hire you to help me find my future home!
+Oh K, we both know you will be a renter for life.
+Obviously you’re super psyched about the neighborhood. Which makes me super psyched that you’re a real estate agent here. While we can’t do anything about what is already in existence, we can make the right changes when change is happening. If you’re going through the trouble of replacing windows, do it right. The reason the neighborhood deteriorated to the place it is, is because there was a progression of acceptance of sub-standard housing. Tearing down houses for apartments, putting up stucco (as an improvement) instead of replacing wood siding, and the best improvement of all, putting in aluminum windows to replace ‘bad’ wood windows. I am the proud owner of a 1919 Craftsman that underwent horrible plastic surgery in the 70s and 80s and 90s. The only reason my house exists today is because of some vigilant neighbors who said ‘HELL NO’ to the non-stop bulldozing of homes in the 80s. So while vinyl windows may seem inconsequential compared to some problems that exist, where do we draw the line?
+It’s a historical neighborhood. If you want to live in suburbia of tract housing, don’t live here.
+Some info on window repair and replacement:
+A good book:
+Historic preservation has long ago been proved to benefit communities. What might seem like petty aesthetic choices now (vinyl vs wood) do turn out to be important factors in how a physical neighborhood holds up over time.
+Does anyone know wha happens if you do not comply with what the HPOZ wants? We had a fence installed that the hope is now asking that we change to period correct or remove. Our house is considered a non-contributing structure .
+The HPOZ has rendered the word “historic” meaningless. When nearly 50% of the homes in L.A. are in the HPOZ what is the point? “Historic” should actually mean something, not just a title slapped onto to an old home to appease the greed of the majority homeowners (yet under informed) whom actually believe such designation increases the value of their home. The absurdity should be obvious upon examination. HPOZ proponents seem to only talk about higher wealth areas such as Pasadena and Eagle Rock while ignoring the litany of historic homes in lower incomes areas such as South Central Los Angeles which show on its face the HPOZ has nothing to do with values. When the time comes to replace a lousy 8 windows, the costs can easily be over $25,000 instead of about $2500 because all the special ordering of unique parts, accessories, etc. that these windows need. My example of costs is not an exaggeration in any capacity. Many flippers have less money than the neighboring homeowner next door to their own project contrary to popular belief as many flippers are just small time entrepreneurs partnered with friends or family trying to fix-up a home to make a little bit of money. In fact, flippers should not necessarily “know better” as it pertains to removing windows. How would they, especially if the flippers are new to the area? The HPOZ could have legitimate function, but unfortunately its current function is overbroad and overreaching devaluing itself with dilution on the magnitude of many fold.
+Oh, Korea. It's something I say almost daily, in the same way you sigh at things that amuse or frustrate you. It's a common saying here and sometimes the only thing you can say as explanation escapes some of what we see in this land of contradictions. I asked some friends to help contribute to this one, so thank you for the input. Initially I was just going to put a list of material things down but decided to do away with borders and just write down everything that I find uniquely Korean. Some good, some bad, some weird. In no order...
+1. Ribbons on pizza boxes
+2. White gloves for driving. I don't know what they are used for - to keep the car/hands clean or to prevent your hands tanning?
+3. Hello Kitty toilet seats
+4. Kimchi. Kimchi everywhere.
+5. Amazing stationery. At low prices. It's cheap, it's cheerful and there's a ton of it! The craze at school seems to be these really little food erasers, which come apart and do everything except seem practical for erasing stuff.
+6. Extensions for your t-shirts in Summer (arm socks). You roll them up your arms, presumably to avoid the sun.
+7. BB Cream. It's make-up/cream, like foundation, that Koreans use to lighten their skin. It stands for 'blemish balm' and is used as cream, sun screen, foundation or primer depending on how much coverage a person needs. Some women take it too far and end up with pale faces that look out of place against their darker skin. I don't use it but some people now swear by it!
+8. Ondol heating. It's underfloor type heating that is the BOMB in Winter and almost everywhere has it. No need for heaters - just use the ondol to keep the frost at bay.
+9. Phones. No matter where you are, you will be surrounded by people with phones attached to their hands. Even at the gym. It's a huge part of the culture here with every tom dick and harry having their preference: iPhone, Samsung, LG...all the big players are here.
+10. Key pads. I really wish my apartment had a keypad instead of a regular lock. It makes getting in so much easier as you pop in your code and bam, you're in. Locks automatically and looks really cool too.
+11. Fast, cheap internet and wifi, for everyone.
+12. Korean socks are the shizz. They are cute, fluffy, and really like nothing else I've ever seen. Because socks are worn with pretty much every shoe, even in Summer, Koreans really love their socks and for me - the cuter the better.
+13. Spitting. Can't get used to it; there is nothing worse than walking anywhere near a man who decides to bring up a spit ball and release it on the floor in front of you. Or a woman at a coffee shop spiting into her empty cup. It's disgusting.
+14. Taking off your shoes. Most traditional restaurants will expect you to take your shoes off when coming in, and no one wears shoes indoors (houses, businesses, schools etc) unless they are 'inside' shoes. I used to think it's strange but now I think it's totally logical...read point 14 again and think about what you'd be walking into your house.
+15. Ties in with #5: these super awesome magic machines that you put sticky tape into and it cuts your tape into neat little pieces whenever you need them. Also, doughnut shaped sticky tape holders (is that a thing?!).
+16. Call buttons in restaurants Most of us agree that these are the best things ever. In a restaurant, the staff don't hang around you like flies but disappear and can be called with one push of a button. Literally.
+17. Related, no tipping at restaurants. Like ever. If you do, they'll give it back.
+18. In a restaurant the staff might leave you be but walk into a shop, the beauty shops especially, and don't expect to get a minute alone as the attendants will follow you and stand right by you as you try to decide which BB cream suits you best.
+19. Foot peels. Apparently that's a thing here.
+20. Gmarket. Internet shopping. Need I say more?
+21. Family Mart aka CU: convenience stores are EVERYWHERE, making them very... convenient.
+22. Outdoor gym stations. These random things can be found on mountains outside schools, in parks or in the middle of nowhere. Just little stations of 3 or 4 simple exercise machines in case you're coming home from Family Mart and decide you need a public workout.
+23. Jimjilbangs: public bathhouses. These are super popular in Korea; I know that at gyms back home you would often be exposed to other naked bodies while changing and showering but a jimjilbang is much more than that. Men and women come to these to unwind, bath, and get scrubbed down by each other or someone else if you so desire. Obviously the men and women are separated in the actual baths (where nudity is mandatory) but can come together again (clothed) inside to enjoy some food, a sauna or two, even gym (most gyms have a jimjilbang as part of the package). Often they include sleeping areas, as a lot of people use these as accommodation when away. I've done it twice and just cannot enjoy it, but I know a lot of people swear by it. I will say they are very clean and professional, I just don't fancy being naked in front of a whole bunch of ajjumas as they clean every inch of themselves.
+24. Soju and the miracle drink. Soju is cheap and deadly...trust me on this one. But you can save yourself from the dreaded hangover the next day by knocking back a special miracle drink "Dawn something something" or "Morning Care" which is supposed to help. I don't know how it does it and have never had it myself but apparently it's the stuff of rainbows.
+25. It gets cold here, seriously cold. So the availability of USB heated cushions and slippers is not just quirky, it's lifesaving.
+26. Service-e. I don't mean "Telkom coming to fix my phone line(like that'll ever happen, amIright?)" service but going to a shop, buying something, even if it's \3000 and getting something for free. Sometimes it's awesome like all the beauty samples and cotton wool you'll get at cosmetic shops or an extra cookie at the coffee shop but sometimes it's random but still useful...like paper towel with your shampoo. They like their free stuff and packages of things (see #40).
+27. Hooks with adhesive that you need to heat up in order to stick to the wall - they work amazingly!
+28. Pickles with everything.
+29. Constant top ups when eating out: if the water, kimchi, salad, radish etc runs out...just ask for more and it will keep coming. Also, just the vast amount of food you get for relatively cheap!
+30. Sweet bread. Sweet crisps. Sweet dressing on sweet bread for sweet sandwiches. Why Korea?
+31. Awkward bathroom situations: shower/sinks in one, washing machines in bathrooms, squatter toilets and my WORST - how the doors to men's toilets are often open and you can see straight in!
+32. Couples clothing. Down to the underwear.
+33. No trash cans anywhere. Ever.
+34. Coming from South Africa, it's really nice to see no burglar bars, no barbed wire or huge gated communities. I feel safe living on my own here.
+35. Toilet paper on the outside of the stalls...you need to estimate how much to take in with you and if you forget, better hope you have tissues handy.
+36. Very efficient bus and train systems and taxi drivers who show you how real multi-tasking is done - watching a drama, checking their phone and driving you around!
+37. Coffee shop culture: coffee shops are everywhere, they are cute and warm in winter, offer free wifi most of the time and I love it.
+38. The independence of children...I've mentioned it before but I am constantly amazed by how these students just get stuff done. They get to school, to after school activities hagwons and home, having fed themselves and been on time. They just do it, no adult supervision needed.
+39. The stubborn use of Internet Explorer.
+40. Bulk buying. I know it has to do with families often living all together but I don't need 12 toilet rolls right now or 15 toothbrushes...I just want one!!!
+Okay I'm going to make the cut off there because I could probably keep going and will maybe do another post on this before I leave. Not all of these are good vs bad, they're just things I've only noticed or come to use in Korea. I love this crazy place and a lot of what I've mentioned above I'm going to miss terribly. I know a lot of you reading might have things to add so please don't hesitate to comment :)
+I love writing this blog, but am running out ideas. Any feedback with suggestions of topics or things you'd like to know would be great.
+As always, thanks for reading and happy weekend everyone ^^
+Bron your #35 comment about the toilet paper on the outside -> the bathrooms at china mall are exactly the same. Now i understand why - weird asian custom :)
+Oh and #22, can you imagine having those in SA with all our tanned steroid gym bunnies!! "Ey boet, check out my huge guns ey! How kiff are these bad boys!" hahahahaha!!
+I liked this post my bron, made me smile :)
+Awesome blog my friend!!! Loved reading it!
+Haha, I loved reading this list. Coffee shops are one thing I will truly miss about Korea. They're everywhere, almost as convenient as convenience stores.
+- Think of it this way: everyone can have a press. If you have something people will want and can promote it, the old gatekeepers can't stop you from reaching the market.
+- An overview of the typical activities of one of the new jobs emerging as companies engage in social media.
+January 2009 Archives
+As Triangle Tweetup, our local gathering of Twitter fans, was getting started last night, I noticed a series of great points coming out of the social media discussion at IABC Toronto at the same time. Surrounded by over a hundred energetic Twitter users, I wondered how associations like IABC, AMA, PRSA, CIPR, and CPRS—forgive me for not knowing all of them around the world—could tap into the energy of local social media communities. Once the initial culture shock wore off, I think they would find huge benefits from a total immersion experience.
+I promise this won't become one of those overdone "Twitter's so cool!" posts, but let me point out what happened within the span of, oh, 30 seconds last night:
+- The quick presentations at Triangle Tweetup started (good stuff).
+- I got a direct message (DM) through Twitter about a possible speaking opportunity (very good stuff).
+- I started seeing very good points being made in a panel discussion 700 miles away (#iabcto). Sorry I couldn't be there, but the distance... (and there was a tweetup I needed to attend).
+Hmmm...
+For the association folks whose members want (need) to learn their way around social media: What would happen if...
+- your association sponsored a gathering of the local social media crowd and promoted the (free) event to your membership?
+- your association teamed up with the social media crowd for a cobranded event?
+- your chapter leaders explored the local social media scene to discover local speakers for meetings?
+- your members figured out how much they can learn when they discover tweetups, Social Media Club, or Social Media Breakfast?
+The only question is, can old-school marketers and communicators handle the unfiltered social media experience? We don't want any heads to explode.
+- Another example of pipelining data through multiple processing services with RSS to build an application without programming.
+News from the companies of social media analysis. Launch week, apparently.
+Companies and services
+- 27 January - MightyBrand launched their social media monitoring and engagement platform, previously known as BlueSwarm.
+- 28 January - BuzzGain launched the public beta of their "do it yourself PR" platform. Note the promised integration with CRM tools.
+- 13 January - BuzzDing entered private beta for their online reputation management platform.
+- 24 January - BuzzNumbers announced the opening of their Tokyo office and the launch of the Asian version of their platform.
+- 27 January - CyberAlert announced the recipients of its annual PR grants to not-for-profit organizations in the US and Canada. press release
+- 26 January - Island Data has changed its name to Overtone. The Insight RT product has been renamed Open Mic. press release
+- Quirk eMarketing released the second edition of their eMarketing Textbook. The book is available in print or as a free download.
+- The Pew Internet & American Life Project released Generations Online in 2009 (PDF). They had me at "Contrary to the image of Generation Y as the 'Net Generation,' internet users in their 20s do not dominate every aspect of online life."
+-.
+-
+- SETQA-NLP 2009 (Boulder, CO, 5 June), due 6 March.
+- Workshop on Online Social Networks (Barcelona, 17 August), due 6 March.
+- Good role-playing exercise here. What do you do when a customer video of bad customer services shows up at CNN? And how would your response be better than what the company did? Hint: The correct response involves both communications and customer service.
+- Making the case for blogging; the benefits are too important to ignore. Here's a related thought: Listening to social media is a business requirement. Ignoring online activity is an unnecessary risk.
+- Notes from a panel discussion with McDonald's CMO on the company's efforts in community engagement and social media.
+So many times, I've heard that (pick one) only humans can identify sentiment in text, or the software is very good now. I don't call it a debate, because I don't see the sides talking. Setting aside the question of software maturity, what is it we want the computer to do, and how far along are the tools?
+When I need to explain the concept of text analytics for the first time, I usually summarize it as "teaching the computer to read," which—no surprise—isn't an original phrase. It goes back at least to the early '90s. But reading for meaning is still more of a goal than the current reality. Today, the tools are somewhere on a continuum, which I think looks something like this:
+- Content discovery
+The challenge is social media analysis starts with the attempt to "read the Internet" (all of it). The simple approach to selecting the part we care about is to use a keyword match or Boolean query, but probabilistic and semantic approaches are out there.
+Success criteria: recall (completeness) and speed
+- Filtering for relevance
+Source data is cleaned, removing spam, duplicates, and off-topic items. Company names that are also words make relevance filtering important and a point of differentiation for some vendors.
+Success criteria: precision (% relevant content)
+- Extracting concepts
+Natural-language processing (NLP) yields a list of key words and phrases, which generates those brand-association and leading topics reports. Also very useful for grouping items for end-users of the system. More advanced approaches group related topics and synonyms.
+Success criteria: usefulness (low noise), accuracy
+- Extracting facts
+NLP identifies factual statements based on grammatical analysis of content. This is helpful for understanding the reason behind sentiment and potentially huge for competitive intelligence and finance applications.
+Success criteria: accuracy, useful summarization
+- Determining opinion
+If you want to start a good argument, bring up sentiment (although I never seem to find opposing viewpoints on human vs. machine analysis in the same place). It's popular as a PR metric and useful as a filter, so it's one of the usual metrics in social media tools. Some vendors go beyond tonality (positive/negative) and provide an analysis of the emotional content of the text.
+Success criteria: accuracy, consistency, depth
+- Reading for meaning
+What we really want: the computer reads mountains of text and, after accounting for source reliability and influence, delivers an accurate summary and metrics, cross-references sources, and synthesizes an accurate view of the situation.
+Success criteria: not holding my breath.
+I hear claims of 90% and better accuracy on sentiment, but a test would require a comparison with imperfect, human coding. In any case, one text analytics provider I talked with said that specific accuracy rates are not a client concern. Their focus is on the value of the resulting analysis, and good enough is good enough.
+I'm not a scientist, and somewhere out there is a computational linguist whose left eye is twitching over some mistake I've made. Comments are open—go for it.
+- This goes well beyond the basic social media policy into areas such an analysis of legal issues, employee/employer issues and tactical recommendations.
+- Interesting analysis of five social media policies and the message conveyed by their language.
+I.
+- CMO Council survey finds most companies haven't figured out social media. "56% said their companies have no programs to track or propagate positive word-of-mouth; 59% don't compensate any employees based on improvements in customer loyalty or satisfaction; and only 30% rated their companies highly in their ability to handle or resolve customer complaints."
+So much talk about a few American companies and their adventures in social media. They're good stories, but what's happening everywhere else? I'm looking for some good examples for upcoming projects—both speaking and writing. Do you have a good example to help me avoid relying on the usual suspects?
+This request started with an invitation I recently received to speak at SaskInteractive's Summit09 in March. I've accepted, and I think it would be good form to have more Canadian examples. I know there's more than Molson, but I don't have a good list of them, yet. And it's not just Canada; I'd really like to know more about what companies are already doing around the world.
+Here's an example of what I'm looking for: Jon Husband wrote last week about the introduction of a community site by the French railroad company SNCF. I want more of those examples, and I know that the people who read this blog know some good ones.
+So, all you folks who wonder why the American companies get all the attention, who's doing social media in your neighborhood?
+A?
+News from the companies of social media analysis. Are you making it easy to pay attention to your company with an RSS feed of your news? (I know, it's on my to-do list, too.)
+Companies and services
+- 21 January - Tealium launched Tealium Social Media, a hosted service that links web visits to mentions of the company on previously visited, third-party sites to generate conversion and ROI metrics for PR activities. press release
+- 20 January - Radian6 announced that they closed their series B financing round of just over $6.5 million in December and will receive a separate investment of up to $2.9 million from the Atlantic Innovation Fund.
+- 20 January - Twingly announced the launch of Twingly Microblog Search, which searches Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Pownce (using historical data), Bloggy (Swedish) and Bleeper (German). via Matt Hurst
+- Software updates: Spiral16, Techrigy
+- Jim Schwab joins Techrigy as vice president of sales and marketing. Schwab was previously senior vice president of sales and marketing at Harris Interactive.
+- Warren Sukernek joins Radian6 as director of content marketing. Sukernek was previously a senior digital strategist at VML.
+- CIC released its IWOM Watch review for the second half of 2008 (PDF). The report focuses on the Beijing Olympics, the growth of social networks, and the convergence of social media and e-commerce in China.
+-
+- International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Data Mining (Athens, 20–22 July), due 30 January. via Marc Smith
+-.
+- Social Media Platform: Layout out how it supports marketing, PR, community building and customer relations goalsBottom-up approach to brainstorming social media tactics. Start with the media categories and think about them individually with each affected functional group.
+- Hill & Knowlton's visual model for planning, executing and measuring social media initiatives.
+- NewsGator CTO Greg Reinacker’s answer to the "Enterprise RSS is dead" discussion. RSS in the enterprise isn't about reading blogs, it's an enabling technology for new capabilities and efficiencies.
+- Looking for new sources from academia?
+-
+News from the companies of social media analysis.
+Companies and services
+- Amber Naslund joins Radian6 as director of community.
+- CMO Council released Track the Yack, a study of online opinion by Fractal Analytics for its Reinvent Mobile campaign. press release
+- The Communications Network released Are We There Yet? (PDF), an introduction to communication evaluation by Asibey Consulting. via Intelligent Measurement
+- The Pew Internet & American Life Project released Adults and Social Network Websites (PDF). It's no surprise that the survey found a much higher adoption rate among teens, but because of the larger adult population, most social network users are adults.
+- 21 January - SAS is presenting a free webinar, Predictive Analytics - Optimizing Business and Reducing Costs Across Verticals, 3:00 PM EST (GMT -5). Eric Siegel will summarize business applications of predictive analytics and how each provides business value by predicting customer behavior.
+-.
+- The flip side of gaining management buy-in: what do you do when management is on fire with a bad idea?
+- When it's time to send a message to someone who asks too many questions that could be answered with a quick search. Generates a Google query URL for you to send in response.
+- Links to some publicly available corporate social media policies.
+The standard advice on social media is to listen first, and if you read this blog, you've noticed that I pay a lot of attention to the companies who can help with listening. Despite the articles that group them all together, it's important to note some distinctions. The most obvious is between service- and software-oriented approaches, which differ in emphasis even in companies that offer both.
+This is a topic I've been working on for a while (and have a report to finish), but a Friday comment from Joseph Fiore (of the software-oriented RepuMetrix) moved it up the line:
+Further to your comments, we have learned over the years that social media reporting is most effective when it functions dynamically. Whether that be for sales automation, or leveraged as a PR device."It depends"
+For agencies, the advantage with online reporting tools means that any postponed meetings with clients won't require placing a second order for our custom reports, or showing them a week-old report absent of incidents which may have happened in-between rescheduling.
+The same applies with our experience in sales automation - the "freshness" factor is where the aforementioned client found the real value of using SM as a sales tool. Again, this may appear to be going above and beyond, but there was one incident where a rep had won an account when he passed his tablet around the meeting room, revealing a timely blog incident that the prospect knew nothing about.
+In the decision between tools and services, everyone's least-favorite consultant answer applies. As Joseph points out, software used by the client has the advantage of near-real-time insight. You can look at what's happening in the very recent past (minutes), and you can explore the data interactively, versus waiting for an outside analyst to answer your questions.
+On the other hand, the professional services approach offloads the learning curve and resource requirements that can be an obstacle. You gain the experience and insight of the specialist, in exchange for some loss in response time and flexibility, and the cost structure is different. If your company doesn't have information producers ready to do the analysis internally, you can still benefit from listening strategies with outside help.
+The right tool for the job
+It's a tradeoff—both approaches have benefits and costs. The question (as always) is, what are you trying to accomplish?
+- Competition among agency categories to "own" social media. Interesting to imagine the client as a "combatant" in a battle with its agencies over control of social media activities. If a company wants to run social media engagement in-house, how exactly do agencies fight that?
+- So many places to look for company reputation and brand associations. Here's an interesting way to think about Delicious data.
+News from the companies of social media analysis. I'm catching up from the holidays, what's new with you?
+Companies and services
+- 15 December - Clarabridge announced a partnership with Teradata to combine the companies' text analytics and data warehouse technologies. press release
+- 18 December - Omniture announced the addition of Visible Technologies as one of 15 new Genesis application providers. The partnership allows Omniture customers to integrate social media data from Visible with Omniture's web analytics data. press release
+- 7 January - VibeMetrix announced the start of beta testing for their AlertRank add-on for Google Alerts.
+- 4 January - TechCrunch reported that SkyGrid plans a free version of their dashboard.
+- Software updates: Radian6, Techrigy
+- Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) released Exploring the Link Between Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media (PDF).
+- UMBC eBiquity Research Group released Geolocating Blogs From Their Textual Content (PDF). via Akshay Java
+- Netlash released Predictions 2009 (Dutch, PDF).
+Events
+- 14 January - Society for Word of Mouth is presenting a free webinar, Social Media: Effective Measurement, 2:00 PM EST (GMT -5). The session features Dave Evans, author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day
+.
+- 15 January - Techrigy is presenting a free webinar, Business Cases for Beating the Recession Using Social Media Monitoring, 2:00 PM EST (GMT -5). Connie Bensen will demonstrate the use of Techrigy SM2 to identify and benefit from online engagement opportunities.
+- 15 January (London) - MeasurementCamp, 10:00 AM at BSG House, 226-236 City Road.
+-
+- Workshop on Online Social Networks (Barcelona, 17 August), due March 6.
+The usual starting point for social media analysis—whether you're more interested in the monitoring or measurement variants—is to ask, "what are people saying about us?" That's a reasonable starting point, but if we take a few steps around to other parts of the elephant, we discover other applicatons. Today, for example, I talked with a marketing exec at a capital equipment supplier who was interested in consumer intelligence as a major account sales tool. I can think of quite a few companies who could do what he described, but I couldn't think of any who have.
+The idea is simple. Use a common snapshot report to generate insights about a major customer account, based on what their customers have to say about them. Package the results for your major account team. You could also use a more general view of your customers' industry for your entire sales force.
+What are my customer's customers saying?
+Start with a typical reputation snapshot report—volume, sentiment, leading topics, trends. Instead of focusing on your own company, focus on your customer (bonus points for finding trends that mention both your customer and you or a competitor). It's a simple keyword substitution away from the traditional question: "what are people saying about them?"
+When you get the report, the first benefit will be in growing your understanding of your customer's business. But the eye-openers will probably be in a leading dissatisfiers list (top issues filtered by negative sentiment). How would your sales team like to know about your customer's issues with:
+- Problems associated with your products
+- Problems associated with competitors' products (bonus!)
+- Problems your products can help solve
+- Emerging opportunities for your customer supported by your products
+I did a lot of this kind of demand-chain analysis in my previous career—looking at consumer trends and their impact on customer demand for my products. This is valuable intelligence for any company whose customers use their products to deliver their own products or services. If you do this for sales, just remember to share the results with your marketing and product groups.
+(Update: It may be more accurate to describe this as industrial marketing, as opposed to B2B.)
+Nice theory, but who's doing it?
+I suspect I could dig through my files and find examples of vendors who offer this type of report, but off the top of my head... nothing. The usual, $10–15K report is overkill, but a package of basic customer snapshots focused on identifying sales opportunities might have potential. Is anyone doing this with clients now?
+I'm also curious what this topic does to your comfort meter. Does the thought of running analytics on your customer's market make you uncomfortable?
+For those of you in the business, this came out of a casual conversation, but if it were a live request from a client, it's the kind of question I would send out on my new mailing list for vendors. If you don't have your invitation, drop me a note and I'll add you. And yes, I do plan to follow up on today's conversation with what I learn.
+- Lee Odden found more free tools to try. These are more search-oriented than monitoring or measuring.
+- Videos and slides from ICWSM 08. Free time? What free time?
+Foodpharmacy Blog: Bath, Feminine Hygiene, Feminine Pads, Reusable Pads
+Charlie Banana, Super + Feminine Pads, White, 3 Pads + 1 Tote Bag
+$16.50
+Product name: Charlie Banana, Super + Feminine Pads, White, 3 Pads + 1 Tote Bag
+Quantity: 3 Count, 0.15 kg, 11.9 x 8.9 x 8.4 cm
+Categories: Charlie Banana, Bath, Personal Care, Feminine Hygiene, Feminine Pads, Reusable Pads
+2 Snaps, The Softest, Absorbent and Stylish Washable Pad, Reusable Feminine Pad, Color: Floralie,!! Includes: 3 Feminine Pads + 1 Carry Tote Bag.
+Even though they had been told that menstruation would happen, most did not immediately tell care providers or friends about it. Add the rinsed pads to the laundry on wash day (Don’t add the soaking water- pour that down the sink safely. 3, Change your gladrag (Holder and inserts) about as often as you would change a disposable pad. The average woman will use close to 17,000 disposable pads and/or tampons in their lifetime. it’s employees and their dependents and treatment for the general public at a subsidized cost. A firmer cup pops open more easily after insertion and may hold a more consistent seal against the vaginal wall (Preventing leaks), but many women find softer cups more comfortable. Do not rinse the pads after use- put them in the plastic bag and rinse or soak them when you get home. They offer regular pads and thinner pantyliners, all of which get good reviews on amazon (Where several users have pointed out how allergy-friendly they are).
+Charlie Banana, Super + Feminine Pads, White, 3 Pads + 1 Tote Bag: Reusable Pads, Feminine Pads, Feminine Hygiene, Personal Care, Bath
+The larger size is recommended for women who are over 30, have given birth vaginally, or have a heavy flow. Incineration is a better technique to dispose of menstrual waste but burning of pads releases harmful gasses that effects health and environment. Instead of having to keep a handful of pads and tampons around, you need just one cup. Menstrual cups are considered a class ii medical device, just like pads and tampons. We found that menstruation presented a significant challenge to school attendance, and that the provision of sanitary pads reduced fears of soiling outer garments allowing better school attendance. Do they absorb as much as a disposable pad? After all, regular pads and tampons scream hygiene, with their whiteness, packaging and scents. I try to hang dry all of my pads, but sometimes one sneaks into the dryer from time to time. I only started using reusable pads as an adult, living on my own. While i was endlessly proud of my amazon woman prowess in taking care of things while out in the wilds of cottage country, i knew upon arriving home a few days later that it was most definitely time to build up my stash of good quality products.
+In addition, among women reusing absorbent material, candida but not bv or tv – infection was more frequent who dried their pads inside their houses and who stored the cloth hidden in the toilet compartment. Run the pad under the cold tap or soak to remove stains. It makes a huge difference in how well your pads stay where they need to be and how quickly they wick your discharge away from your skin. The medium is the same length as most large pads. Cloth is so much more comfortable, i can change them frequently and i actually get excited to use my pads. But your period can be a monthly reminder to take extra care of yourself. In rural areas, women do not have access to sanitary products or they know very little about the types and method of using them or are unable to afford such products due to high cost. Since i have grown quite comfortable with my menstrual cup, and it proved to be significantly more awesome than tampons, i decided to see how cloth pads compared to disposables. This study follows-up the menstruation and the cycle of poverty trial; a quasi-randomised controlled trial of the impact of reusable sanitary pad and/or puberty education provision on school attendance amongst girls in rural uganda. It was a simple cycle, so do not think you need 20 pads for one cycle the way you normally would with regular ones. Pul could prevent leaks, microfiber is super absorbent, bamboo charcoal fiber is antibacterial and soft, most importantly, it’s comfortable and healthy to wear for women’s skin.
+The place where women normally change their absorbent material was also associated with bv after adjusting for confounders (Changing inside a toilet facility was found to be protective for these infections). If i was paying for my cloth pad stash myself and trying to go frugal i might not bother, but in my opinion, they are totally a luxury worth splurging on, if you can. I also found a sewing kit from real simple for $9,99, later that day, i traced the outline of a cloth pad onto some paper to make a pattern. Cloth menstrual pads are free from irritating materials, so you can avoid unnecessary exposure to the synthetic ingredients in disposable pads and tampons. The current study cannot ascertain whether this association is causal, but it suggests that having a secure, comfortable, and hygienic place where women can practice mhm without stress and with access to water is important. Men who are in politics support menstrual hygiene management by making girls/women friendly policies, by providing sanitary materials free of cost or at affordable prices, by providing water and sanitation in their areas, and by conducting seminars and workshops in rural areas. I have inflammatory bowel disease and like many women with ibd, i experience an increase in symptoms when i have my period.
+Girls using afripads or cloth washed, dried and reused them. Recommendations for menstrual hygiene include drying absorbents outside to benefit from air-flow and the antimicrobial properties of sunlight. Some people prefer to use the soaking method and keep a small container in the bathroom for soaking their cloth menstrual pads before washing. I do not like advertising that i am wearing a pad. Providing afripads also reduced financial burden on girls. Buying pads or using rags monthly may seem more affordable than purchasing a menstrual cup, though the lifetime cost is higher. I started using cloth pads and a cup when my flow came back after i finished breastfeeding. The beauty of using washable pads is you can change them as often as you like. All joking aside, i loved the pad i purchased from her and am going to be ordering some more pads from her in the near future. The biggest medical risk with any menstrual hygiene product that sits against your vulva is inadequate absorbency. These fab cotton topped pads are soft and comfortable so they are suitable for both for both everyday wear and protection when it’s needed, for both menstrual and incontinence purposes. The pad is also a little too short, which could cause leakage worries on heavier-flow days. I have used naty for a number of years now as was experiencing itching and other symptoms when using ordinary pads which supplied no details of what materials were used.
+Charlie Banana Reusable Pads
+By rinsing a heavily soiled pad before you put it in the tub, you can prevent the need to change the water before wash day. But that just means changing the cup more often, just like you might change a pad or tampon more often with a heavy flow. It can handle it better than any of my other pads. Cloth pads and panties can be washed by hand or in a machine in any temperature water with your regular laundry detergent. And just being aware of every time something leaked out was enough to make me run to the bathroom to make sure these things were working. Teachers should be educated and trained to impart knowledge about menstruation and menstrual hygiene management among students. Still, there can be other benefits to using organic pads: For women who are prone to irritation (Like external itching, chafing or rashes, and even imbalances of their vaginal flora), ditching synthetic products for organic ones can provide some relief. Makes vegan-friendly organic cotton tampons, pads and liners as well as condoms.
+There are several studies looking at providing women with reusable menstrual cloths designed specifically for menstruation in countries where women have limited access to products for menstrual hygiene. No differences in the growth of staphylococcus aureus, or health harms were identified among school girls provided with menstrual cups compared to those using sanitary pads, or continuing their usual practice in rural western kenya. They may be a new technology for poor women and girls and an alternative to sanitary pads and tampons. These cloth pads are reusable so they are cost-effective, easily available, and ecofriendly. Of graduate women queensland freda bage fellowship in support of her doctoral studies. Menstrual hygiene management should be an integral part of education curriculum. They offer a variety of tampons and pads, which can be found in whole foods stores (Obviously), as well as on amazon (Shop here).
+In rural areas, the most preferred absorbents are reusable cloth pads and in urban areas women prefer to use commercial sanitary pads. I really love my conventional pad, but it does irritate after a while and the thought of the chemicals is not too pleasant. She also offers wetbags, which are handy to store your used pads in until you are ready to do a load of wash. The provision of sanitary pads reduced fears of outer garment soiling, although did not address other menstrual hygiene challenges such as changing and drying the reusable pads. A few girls reported that parents had purchased pads, but most did so inconsistently. Beyond this group, no other girls sewed their own pads. In public places, prior to having knowledge about the consequences of flushing the pads, they flush them in the toilets or wrap and throw them in the dustbins. We heard from at least one woman who does this, and says that it works fine. They pile up in landfills or sewers after women unthinkingly throw them away; each year, 20 billion disposable menstrual products end up in north american landfills alone. Of notable exception were the few girls whose parents regularly provided disposable pads and funds for painkillers. We realise this appears expensive compared to disposable pads, however, these pads will last many cycles and so save you money in the long run.
+Different menstrual products used by women/girls are discussed below (Figure 1). Most pads when rinsed or washed correctly, will not stain. While reviewing literature, we found that little, inaccurate, or incomplete knowledge about menstruation is a great hindrance in the path of personal and menstrual hygiene management. An additional advantage of the menstrual cup over pads and tampons is that you need to carry only one with you, not a handful. Featuring crotch lining: To protect against leaks (Use with pad or tampon): Knixwear, dear kate (Also makes yoga pants with leak-proof crotch).
+Oh, that Melodramatic Shuffle!
+This was basically me after 24 episodes of Shuffle!
+Originally, I was going to use this post solely to mindlessly bash Shuffle!, but when I woke up the day after finishing this putrid pile of piss (yes, you can’t pile piss; I was just going for the alliteration, you nitpicky bastard!), I thought to myself, “No, that would be far too easy!” Plus, I spent all my time watching Shuffle! bashing it on Twitter, so I figured why waste any more time beating that dead, retarded horse. (Note: I actually do waste more time beating that dead, retarded horse, but not as much as originally planned.)
+No, instead, I’d rather use the show to springboard into a topic that is of slightly more interest to me and others: Melodrama in anime. Just as a warning, I will spoil the shit out of some of Shuffle‘s more melodramatic plot twists, so if you’re concerned about being spoiled for that shitpile, then, uh, don’t read this post, I guess.
+If you’ve been an anime fan for more than a few months, then you’ve probably noticed that anime is a highly melodramatic medium, both in style and content. Obviously you have the Key-type stuff where girls have ridiculously tragic backstories that are meant to pump as many tears from the audience as possible, but those aren’t the only sources of melodrama in the world of anime, despite sometimes being characterized as such. Code Geass, for instance, is one of the most melodramatic anime of the past few years — every twist in both the first season and R2 is meant to push the audience to the very brink of emotion, and the visual and aural style of the show is not exactly subtle in how it supports this endeavor.
+Now, I don’t think melodrama is in and of itself a bad thing. Several of my favorite anime either have highly melodramatic elements or are full-blown melodramas: Revolutionary Girl Utena, Rose of Versailles, Gankutsuou, Kare Kano, Clannad ~After Story~ (obligatory apology to chii lolololol), etc. If I didn’t appreciate melodrama to at least some degree, then I sure as shit would not watch so much anime. But my enjoyment of melodrama does not take place in a vacuum; I don’t often appreciate drama for its own sake, unless 1) It’s incredibly well-written (which is rarely the case in many mediums, much less anime), or 2) It’s poorly-written to a hilarious degree (which is also somewhat rare; most bad drama is just boring).
+A prime example of No. 2 if I ever saw one.
+Generally, my enjoyment of melodrama rides on one element: The characters. Give me characters I can sink my teeth into, and I will ride to hell and back with them. I generally enjoyed Clannad and was mostly bored with Kanon. Why? Because the former gave me characters I generally liked (especially Tomoya), while the latter gave me characters that made me go meh. (It didn’t help, of course, that the first four episodes or so of Kanon are mind-crushingly dull.) The melodrama in AnoHana and Moshidora is in all honesty no more extreme than in many other anime (though all the crying is sort of lulzy), but neither truly connected with me because the characters never fully clicked. And on and on and on.
+This may be different for many people, but for me, there are generally two ways for characters to click with me: Obviously, an interesting personality will do it. Not just one quirk that is the character’s sole definition, but a legitimately interesting personality, whether that character is likable or despicable. I didn’t like Light from the start in Death Note, but at least the guy was interesting. The second option is to make the problem/conflict/whatever the character faces interesting. This is often where I see anime go, even though it might honestly be the more difficult path; how often do you see a problem pushed until it plunges into self-parody?
+Aside from the stupid, creepy harem bullshit, the lack of anything interesting to latch onto in the face of intense melodrama is the biggest problem I have with Shuffle! The first half of the show is spent with Rin fucking around like an idiot, and the girls all falling over themselves to please him so that he’ll fall in love with them and they can get married and have a thousand babies and they can cook for him and clean for him without a care in the world like a good wife should and fuck me this sentence should have ended a long time ago. By the time the harem shit slowed down, and the Serious Business portion of the anime began, I loathed everyone in the series and wished nothing but the cruelest torture upon them. And that is basically what I got in the second half, and the reaction it received was mainly mocking, derisive laughter rather than the (I assume hoped for) reaction of, “OMG THAT’S SO HORRIBLE ;___________;”
+Melodrama has a decidedly mixed reputation, and a big part of that, I think, is that it is meant to aim straight for the emotions, logic be damned . . . that already alienates a fair amount of people who don’t absorb their fiction emotionally (or through the emotional process that melodrama targets, anyway). Shitty character development is I think another big part of its ill reputation; when one does not give a shit about the characters, melodrama comes off as a desperate grab for attention, a “LOOK AT ME EVERYONE, I’M DOING CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZY STUFF” moment that’s just sad and pathetic.
+If a story spends a certain amount of time not giving the audience a reason to give a shit about characters, then eventually the damage will be irrevocable. If I spend 12 episodes despising Shuffle‘s retarded harem antics, then why am I all of a sudden going to care when Bad Things start happening to everyone? On Twitter, ADayWithoutMe recently brought up one of the reasons she wasn’t fond of Madoka Magica: Much of it came off to her like suffering purely for the sake of suffering. That is bad melodrama in a nutshell (although I did like Madoka Magica).
+In the first half of Shuffle, Primula is a stoic loli who’s there to speak one word at a time and do fuck all while everyone is at school; suddenly, she’s an experiment subject whose powers could destroy the world! Nerine absorbed the spirit of her clone! Sia has another personality that came when she absorbed the spirit of her twin sister in the womb! Kaede is crazy because she’s devoted her life to Rin after mistreating him most of her life out of the mistaken belief that he caused her mother’s death! Asa is actually a demon like Primula, Nerine and Sia, and if she doesn’t release the magic building up inside her, she will explode into tiny pieces! Also, Rin cuts himself! Yay!
+These are all MUCH MORE RIDICULOUS in the context of the show, by the way. It’s all cheap, stupid melodrama that tries to mask its shittiness through ridiculousness. The Kaede arc is the most praised, and to be fair, it at least tries to build drama through a somewhat sympathetic situation (even if the set-up is ridiculous and convoluted), but I couldn’t get into it because Kaede was frankly the character I loathed the most out of everyone, and I thought the explanation for her behavior was just a stupid way to have an indentured servant in a harem. The payoff for that arc is as dumb as all the others, too. “Oh, just let me keep on loving you, Rin, even if I never have a chance, because my life revolves around you and I have no other qualities or aspirations in life!” fucking bleh
+Melodrama at its best can add a kick of heightened emotion to a good series; at its worst, it’s tiresome, stupid and a waste of time. (For some, the latter basically categorizes all melodrama, haha.) I’ve got a mixed relationship with melodrama, but really feeling the emotion when it’s actually done well is worth suffering through all the tripe when it’s done poorly, I think. But maybe I would feel differently if I actually bothered watching all the series where it’s done poorly.
+07/25/2011 at 9:20 pm
+Silly Rin, everyone knows you have to cut down the street and not across the street for that to work! Sheesh!
+07/26/2011 at 1:09 am
+If only he had cut down the street, then perhaps Asa’s magic may not have worked, and the ending may have been much better. So sad!
+08/03/2011 at 3:15 pm
+I did like Asa’s hair.
+07/29/2011 at 11:27 am
+Is it possible for a show to be melodramatic purely through the plot, without major character development? Madoka’s a good example of one (seriously, those people were zero-dimensional), but that wasn’t as through the plot as it was through ‘woah we weren’t expecting this this is totally NEW and ORIGINAL and thus it is good’.
+07/29/2011 at 1:55 pm
+Actually, depending on how cynical one is, you might say that is the entire point of melodrama. One of the biggest criticisms of melodrama is that it paints everything in broad strokes — characters, plot developments, etc. to appeal to emotions rather than thought. In its purest form, there would be no major character development other than, “I AM YOUR FATHER” or something like that.
+07/29/2011 at 7:15 pm
+Purely through the plot as in a story that has people, whose names and personalities are never even mentioned, people who appear only once in one second during the entire show.
+Come to think of it, that would be a very interesting show, to appeal to emotions without developing any characters. Also, before you say ‘we can have aliens destroy humanity and everyone would be sad’, ‘humanity’ in itself would then be a character.
+In this day and also age, the method your organisation operates online can make or damage you.
+Just how do most organisations currently have a visibility online?
+Web sites.
+The truth of the matter is, however, that sites have actually significantly developed over the past decade – and also the techniques of old are no longer useful for modern business.
+Back then, it would certainly be adequate to have a simple internet site with a home page, services, rates, regarding us, and also contact pages.
+A prospective consumer would certainly go to your site, scroll around, go to the different pages as well as eat web content as they please.
+However, if you are a company investing any type of money on advertising, you wish to manage just what consumers are learning more about on your website, existing offers at the right time, and optimize the revenue you make from each individual.
+Exactly how does one achieve this?
+Utilizing sales funnels.
+Get in ClickFunnels
+ClickFunnels is the simplest way to earn high converting sales and also advertising funnels.
+It is a distinct device developed specifically to turn prospective consumers into buyers.
+It actually is an all-in-one option to develop sales funnels and also includes touchdown web pages, email integration, payment, webinars, membership websites, therefore much more. No surprise it has promptly become a preferred device for marketing professionals.
+Below is my in-depth ClickFunnels Review, including preferred attributes, prices, pros/cons, as well as comparisons against competitors.
+: However First, Just What Is a Sales Funnel?
+Sales funnels (likewise called marketing funnels) are multi-step projects that are designed to relocate possible prospects with your sales process, as well as transform them into customers.
+Picture a real-life funnel. At the top, you pour fluid in, which limits towards one taken care of destination.
+In sales, a comparable event happens. At the top, visitors arrive at your website, yet not all who get in make it from the various other end as buyers.
+Numerous points need to occur from the moment a site visitor enters your funnel, to the moment they take action as well as efficiently complete a purchase.
+By breaking down the consumer’s journey into smaller sized actions, you can be more accurate regarding how when you present an offer to your audience.
+The detailed steps in a funnel may look something similar to this:
+- Unqualified lead gets to touchdown page
+- Page connects the initial offer (something totally free to accumulate an e-mail).
+- As soon as email is collected, major deal is pitched.
+- Lead becomes a paying customer.
+- More email communication delivering consumer worth.
+- Further partnership structure
+- Persisting sales.
+ClickFunnels additionally has a visuals that clarifies this in a simple method:.
+Exactly what is ClickFunnels?
+As stated earlier, ClickFunnels is the very best sales funnel software application around today.
+The business makes the strong claim of giving you everything you should market, sell, and supply your products online – and they definitely supply.
+A conventional funnel will make use of an opt-in web page (to accumulate email addresses), an email automobile responder (to send out e-mails to your clients), plus an extra sales page with some material and an order kind, potentially complied with by extra content, a subscription site, etc
+. Formerly, you would certainly have to use various platforms and tools to accomplish all these tasks such as:
+- Develop a site
+- Find Hosting
+- Locate an autoresponder service
+- Locate membership site software application
+- Find split-testing software program … etc
+Yet ClickFunnels takes care of every little thing with their platform. You not only conserve a lots of money by not needing to acquire various products/services, yet you also stay clear of the technical mess of having to set everything up, as well as could concentrate on exactly what’s actually crucial – expanding your business.
+ClickFunnels provides a Complimentary 14-Day Test, so you reach explore the device and also actually see if it’s best for your organisation.
+Preferred Functions
+* Rapidly Create Pages Using Layouts and also Aspects *.
+Before getting as well much, it is very important to recognize that a funnel is a collection of pages assembled in a calculated order, with the objective of transforming as numerous potential customers right into clients. And also a page is just a collection of various aspects made to obtain someone to take a certain activity.
+ClickFunnels offers even more than 50 various elements to help you build the best page. The editor is very simple to use and all you have to do is drag as well as go down different elements on the page, and also upgrade the text as well as look to fit your demands – no coding abilities called for!
+ClickFunnels additionally makes your life less complicated by offering you with a ton of cost-free layouts.
+Actually, ClickFunnels provides over 37 kinds of web pages for you to mix and also match with. These are damaged down right into the following 10 classifications:
+- Presell Pages: Survey Web Page, Post Web Page, Presell Web Page, Clickpop Web Page
+- Optin Pages: Press Web Page, Reverse Capture Web Page, Lead Magnet, Discount Coupon
+- Thank You Pages: Thank You Web Page, Offer Wall, Bridge Web Page, Share Page
+- Sales Pages: Video Sales Web Page, Business Letter Page, Item Launch Web Page
+- OTO Pages: Upsell Web Page, Downsell Page
+- Order Forms: 2 Action Order Web Page, Standard Order Web Page, Video Clip Sales Letter Order Web Page, Sales Letter Order Page, Item Introduce Order Web Page
+- Webinar Pages: Webinar Registration Web Page, Webinar Confirmation Page, Webinar Program Space, Webinar Replay Area
+- Subscription Pages: Gain Access To Web page, Participant’s Area
+- Affiliate Pages: Gain Access To Web Page, Affiliate Location
+- Other Pages: Application Page, Ask Web Page, Shop Front, Web Page, Hero Web Page, Hangout Web Page, Live Demo Web Page
+The pre-built layouts are totally customizable, and also are just what most users use.
+You have the ability to choose a theme, modify or change the aspects with your very own, and your new web page prepares to go.
+You can additionally link any kind of channel you create with your personal e-mail advertising solution (if you don’t utilize the one consisted of in ClickFunnels), and also utilize the ClickFunnels built in invoicing system.
+This is additionally a great time to discuss that ClickFunnels gives really beneficial as well as easy to understand training video clips when you first sign up. I extremely recommend undergoing those since they quickly allow you to utilize the tool at its full capability, and you’ll have more fun messing around.
+* Produce One-Click Subscription Websites *.
+One of the best attributes with ClickFunnels is the capability to quickly develop subscription sites and also supply content to your audience in one location.
+Your subscription website will certainly come complete with registration web pages, membership access web pages, and also content web pages which you can quickly lock or drip feed to your clients according to purchases they made in your channel.
+ClickFunnels subscription websites enable you to send out e-mails, conveniently handle your emails, as well as construct a neighborhood all while getting rid of the anxiety that’s related to various other remedies such as Kajabi, or WordPress platforms.
+It’s actually useful to not need to acquire a different software program as with any other e-mail advertising and marketing platform, Actionetics is a lot more.
+I enjoy Actionetics due to the fact that it not only replaces your e-mail marketing however messenger advertising and marketing as well as SMS advertising and marketing software applications as well. This takes automation to an entire brand-new degree as well as helps you connect the excellent message to your consumers, specifically when they need it. A video clip summary of Actionetics will be given further below.
+* Invoicing and Settlement Integration *.
+A remarkable attribute within ClickFunnels is the capacity to accumulate all the billing details from your customers exactly on your sales page. Selling is made so much less complicated when consumers do not have to leave your website.
+ClickFunnels integrates discount plan (suggested).
+I’ll explain for each and every of these plans below.
+1. ClickFunnels Standard Plan – $97/month.
+The standard strategy includes all of the attributes you would need within ClickFunnels, but with constraints on the number of funnels (20) and also pages (100) you could have in your account, in addition to how many visitors (20K) can watch your web pages per month.
+You additionally do not receive innovative performance such as ClickFunnels very own email advertising and associate tracking devices.
+2. ClickFunnels Etison Collection – $297/month.
+This strategy includes all the bells and whistles of the typical plan, with no restrictions. It also features two added products created by ClickFunnels called Actionetics (email advertising) and Backpack (affiliate monitoring platform).
+In Actionetics – you can manage all your get in touches with that subscribe to your list, send email programs, as well as create a host of various other automations.
+The difference between both plans actually is the restrictions, and Actionetics/Backpack. If you are a basic user as well as don’t expect to utilize greater than 20 funnels in your account – the Criterion Strategy need to be enough.
+Nonetheless, if you prepare to have an affiliate program or intend to maintain your e-mail marketing within ClickFunnels as well as not make use of a third party software program, the Etison Collection is for you.
+You can constantly begin on the lower plan and also upgrade if needed.
+3. Funnel Hacks System – $997
+For any individual that’s severe about their organisation, also guides to help you get the most out of ClickFunnels!
+ClickFunnels Advantages And Disadvantages
+Pros:
+- Developing funnels is extremely straightforward, easy, and fast
+- All-in-one system with everything your company has to win
+- Split screening and also conversion monitoring included
+- Repayment processing capacities within ClickFunnels
+- ClickFunnels is always adjusting as well as upgrading to the times
+- There is always sustain readily available (whether live or not).
+- Unbelievably energetic Facebook Team Neighborhood.
+- Free 14-Day Trial – permits you to try it take the chance of totally free.
+Disadvantages:.
+- As amazing as ClickFunnels is, it definitely is not an economical remedy and requires a continuous registration to make use of
+- Support isn’t always the fastest as well as might extract from 1 min to 24 Hr depending on the concern.
+ClickFunnels versus Everyone Else.
+Many people ask just how ClickFunnels as compares to various other landing page builders such as Leadpages, Unbounce, and also Infusionsoft.
+Generally it’s not truly a reasonable comparison since each of these devices excels is one area or the various other.
+The graph above provides a detailed evaluation – yet I’ll highlight a few of the significant contrasts listed below.
+ClickFunnels vs Leadpages
+Prior to ClickFunnels, Leadpages was the big pet.
+Leadpages is just a lead capture software program – nothing even more. You could develop landing web pages, lead boxes, accumulate leads … that’s pretty much it. Additionally, the Leadpages themes are also restricted on modification.
+ClickFunnels is much more functional – it’s a lot easier to utilize as well as does so a lot more compared to develop lead capture pages.
+Simply put, Leadpages is actually simply a landing web page builder, while ClickFunnels is focused around developing extremely incorporated funnels.
+ClickFunnels vs Infusionsoft
+Infusionsoft is not a landing page or sales web page contractor. advanced as Infusionsoft.
+Infusionsoft is also exceptionally pricey as well as pressures every brand-new client to pay $2000 for a compulsory kickstart coaching package simply to discover how you can make use of the complex system (which is notoriously challenging to use).
+ClickFunnels Associate Program
+There are 2 primary courses people go down as ClickFunnels users.
+Those that decide to use the device for their organisation – in hopes of eventually accomplish the Two Comma Club (over $1M in revenue).
+And also those that want gaining passive income as a ClickFunnels Affiliate and winning the Desire Auto Contest (where they pay $500/$1000 in the direction of your desire vehicle if you reach 100/200 active monthly signups, respectively).
+With a whopping 40% monthly recurring payment, ClickFunnels conveniently has among the greatest associate programs of any type of platform out there.
+That’s right – you earn money a continuous 40% payment on every affiliate signup you make with the ClickFunnels Affiliate Program. But, what does that truly equate to?
+The basic plan is a $97/month financial investment and also the Etison Suite strategy is a $297/month investment. as a result you make $38.80 each standard strategy as well as $118.80 each Etison Collection plan … every single month!
+On average, every 100 signups will generate $4000/month in associate compensations (essentially depending on how many Etison Plan users remain in there).
+Go here to find out more concerning becoming a ClickFunnels Associate.
+All-time Low Line
+ClickFunnels is pass on the best platform if you are planning to conveniently construct high transforming sales funnels.
+Since it was developed from scratch to be the most effective sales funnel builder, it defeats every one of the competitors in that regard.
+Externally, it might not be the cheapest item out there – but if you use it to its full ability, your service will certainly end up being a lot more lucrative and you will certainly save cash from not having to utilize various other tools.
+If you have actually read this far into my ClickFunnels Review, I suggest you see on your own with a Free 14-Day Test below.
+San Francisco 2013, Part 1 - Day 0
+2 hours until my connecting flight takes off...
+"Do you have an ESTA?" asks the Air New Zealand lady behind the check-in counter.
+"A what?" I reply.
+"An ESTA. Or maybe some kind of travel Visa?"
+"I... I didn't think you needed anything like that."
+I can't recall the rest of the conversation; just that, in my mind, I was holy-shitting myself that I had forgotten some very vital documentation or process that I needed to get into the US. I didn't need a travel visa the last time I went to the US. When was that? Oh... 1999.
+Shit.
+I wave my dad over, who was waiting to the side while I was hoping to check in, and have him listen to all the information the Air NZ lady was telling me. I was doing a good job of keeping my emotions in check, whereas my dad was quietly swearing to nobody in particular and running his palm over his face as the implications of this 'missing ESTA' start to hit him.
+The lady gives me a website to start the ESTA process, and I thank her for it. Meanwhile, my dad had rung up my mum to tell her about the sudden and massive roadblock that has positioned itself between myself and my flight. I don't know what he intended to achieve by doing that; all the call managed to do was make both of my parents worry on my behalf - I could hear my mum on the other end of the call also swearing and imagined her running her palm over her face.
+Great, I think, now I've got 2 distraught parents to worry about, on top of not having a travel visa.
+And thus began my holiday to San Francisco and the SpringOne 2GX conference, at which I would be speaking at, in Santa Clara.
+I guess any veteran travellers reading this right now would be balking at my stupidity at having forgotten to get a travel Visa for the United States. In my defense, I travel very little - the last time I left the country was for a meager 3 days to Melbourne, Australia, which is so close to New Zealand and with whom we have such a great country-to-country relationship that it barely counts as international travel.
+So my dad and I sat down at one of the tables set aside for any of the customers of the 2 airport-priced (read: unnecessarily expensive) restaurants either side of us, and decided what to do next. I already had a plan: it was a Monday, so my travel agent, through whom I planned and arranged most of this trip, would be at work. I would give her a call, and between the 2 of us we should be able to figure something out.
+"Hi," I say, in reply to her greeting, "Emanuel here. So I was about to fly out, but I seem to be missing an 'ESTA'?. Any idea what that might be?"
+"Oh, wasn't there a note attached to your flight times to get that sorted out?" she asks.
+"No, or I don't think there was. I'll look through my e-mails again. Is there anything you might be able to do to help me out?"
+"Sure, I can get on it right away. When does your flight leave?"
+"In 2 hours."
+"Oh good, that's plenty of time. Leave it with me, and I'll get back to you in about 15 minutes."
+The first thing I did when that call ended was to check my e-mails to make sure that there was no hidden note that I missed. It didn't take long for me to not find that e-mail, because my flight times were never sent to me - I suddenly remembered that I went to her office that day to pay for the flights and pick those up. So there was no note, but there was no e-mail either. I don't think either of us could really have taken the blame then.
+My dad recognizes an old workmate of his and goes to speak to him. I can tell by the way he's gesturing and the other guy is looking at me that he's recounting our little travel visa troubles to his workmate. Still, I fail to see how this would achieve anything, but I guess a little sympathy or shared plight helps to ease the trouble on his mind. Well, whatever works for him I guess. Unfortunately for my mum she can't employ that kind of therapy as she's home alone, and so is possibly running around the house like a headless chicken.
+I call the travel agent again in 20 minutes, leaving a message on her answering machine. 5 minutes later she returns my call, letting me know that it's all done and sorted. There was a little cost associated with it, but I was prepared to bear a much more significant price to see it through. I thanked her far too many times for her help, ended the call, told my dad it was all sorted, and proceeded to check-in to my flight. For real this time.
+Lesson learned: if you're travelling to the US, you need a travel visa / ESTA.
+3-and-a-half hours later, 1 hour before my international flight takes off...
+Oh God, is that the CEO? I wonder, sitting comfortably in one of the gates of Auckland International Airport. I'm on this vacation to get away from work, and here is the head of my company, and I haven't even left yet.
+I started work at Xero only a month ago, so there's slim chance he'd recognize me. Regardless, I position my iPad between him and my face, just in-case.
+Wait, is he boarding? They only called Business Class passengers up fir... ah. Sunnovabitch.
+The jealousy is only token at that point, but doesn't really make an impact until my good-old Economy Class row gets called up and I find myself in the classic tiny seat that I remember from the last time I flew overseas all those years ago.
+It was a lot worse for the guy sitting next to me, Justin, a 6-foot-something basketball player who had just finished his season in Australia and was heading back home to San Francisco. He was slouching just a little bit in his chair, but by doing so his knees were already touching the seat right in front of him. We thought for a moment that he could spread out to the window seat if nobody sat down there, but of course the window seat is always taken. Cue our window seat buddy, Nicole, a petite Australian cheerleader who was the last of us to arrive, so Justin and I got out of our seats to make way for her, and it wouldn't be the last time we'd have to do that this flight either.
+It didn't take long for all 3 of us to discover that she had the smallest bladder out of all of us, having to go to the toilet at least 5 times that flight, including when I was asleep and Justin had to wake me so she could get through. That time, when she had just started walking down the aisle towards the toilets in the dark, Justin and I looked at each other, half-smiling and half-laughing at our situation, but only half because, just like everyone else on this flight, we were tired and hoping to catch some kind of sleep before we got to our destination.
+"I don't know how you guys can do it." she said to us after she returned and we had all sat back down. "I don't think either of you have had to go yet!"
+True enough, I felt no urge to go to the toilet on this 9-and-a-half-hour flight. Then again, she was the only one who said 'yes' to wine for drinks - it was just juice or water for us guys.
+It didn't look like any of us were getting to sleep, so we talked.
+Turns out Nicole was a cheerleader for an basketball team, so she and Justin knew a lot of the same people between them. She was going to San Francisco to meet up with some friends and, from there, start a month-long trip across the United States with friends and distant family. She also got food before either of us since she had to order gluten-free food. We talked at length about food after that: Justin trying to think of places she could eat in San Francisco, and me talking about my recent forays into gluten-free baking.
+Justin was just looking forward to going home. He told us stories of the things he and his family would do at family gatherings, the kinds of food his mother would cook - the things one talks about when the topic is home and home is being missed.
+And me, well I told them what I had been telling everyone else in the months leading up to today: that I was speaking at a conference in Silicon Valley and was spending the week before the conference in San Francisco for a holiday.
+We each eventually managed to find sleep to wake up to airplane food breakfast and a view of California before we touched-down. All I could remember of the approach to America the last time I was here was that the city of Los Angeles was covered in a haze of pollution, visible from the air as a thin yet eternal fog, and visible from the ground as a layer of grey over the horizon. San Francisco didn't seem to have any of that as we flew alongside the coast and looked out our small porthole of a window.
+A quiet overtook us as we walked off the plane and into San Francisco International; relief at having made it to our destination. I was thankful for my plane buddies as they really helped make that long flight time just pass by, but the moment that thought crossed my mind, Justin said his goodbyes as Nicole and I wondered why he was saying goodbye so soon. Then we looked ahead of us and saw why. We were being split into 2 groups: US Citizens, non-US Citizens.
+Ah, customs. I remember. My mind recalls the barriers of entry to a country and the gatekeepers that keep those barriers running.
+Justin took the shorter line into the US, whereas Nicole and I waited in a line that reminded me of those preceeding the most popular Disneyland rides.
+Once passed customs and into the open air of San Francisco, Nicole and I said our goodbyes as she made her way to the shuttle that she had booked a seat on beforehand.
+As for me, this was the beginning of the part of my vacation where there were no plans. From here on out, I was playing it by ear, and hoping I didn't get stabbed in the process. My first solo vacation, I thought, and smiled.
+Welcome to San Francisco.
+PC World: Some things weren't in the air at Expo
+Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from the Today@PC World blog on PCWorld.com.
+“There’s something in the air.”
+That was Apple’s tagline for this past week’s Macworld Expo, and by that, they probably meant the MacBook Air. The ultraportable laptop was the show-stealer of Steve Jobs’s keynote address, but it may not have even been Apple’s most significant product announcement of the show.
+For everything that was “in the air” at Macworld Expo, there were pre-show rumors that didn’t pan out, products that didn’t receive enough attention, and announcements ripe for second-guessing. Here’s a recap of what didn’t show its face at Expo, what happened instead, and whether any of it will make a difference in the long run.
+Not In the Air: Jay-Z
+? Hoax! Despite the pre-Macworld rumors that rapper Jay-Z would be tapped to spearhead an Apple music label, nothing of the sort happened. Randy Newman was the only musician to perform live at the keynote, and he’s pretty much the opposite of Jay-Z. One reason for Jay-Z’s absence may have been a last-minute beef with Steve Jobs over Jay-Z’s cameo appearance in Bill Gates’s CES farewell video. But that reason’s completely made up… just like the whole “Jay-Z left Def Jam for Apple” rumor.
+In the Air Instead: NAS
+Looks like NAS took this round against Jay-Z. Unfortunately, rap-beef aficionados, that’s NAS as in “network-attached storage,” not “Illmatic.” Apple’s new Time Capsule, a wireless-N router with a built-in 500GB or 1TB hard drive, is aimed to ease back-up and storage in conjunction with Mac OS X Leopard’s Time Machine application. Could this be the reason for Jay-Z’s absence? Maybe he heard NAS would be at Macworld and steered clear of the Moscone Center.
+Not In the Air: Penryn MacBooks
+The timing seemed too good to be true: Intel released its energy-efficient Mobile Penryn processors about a week before Macworld Expo. Naturally, Intel’s new 45-nanometer processor would be the centerpiece of any new Apple laptops, what with their battery-saving efficiency and beefed-up L2 cache. Right? Well, no… at least not yet.
+In the Air Instead: Custom Core 2 Duo
+There’s something in the Air, but it’s not Intel’s current-gen chip. Instead of the brand-new Penryn processor, Apple worked with Intel to build a customized, shrunken-down version of its 65-nanometer Core 2 Duo processor. This CPU joins the MacBook Air’s miniaturized motherboard and non-removable battery in the ultraportable’s list of unique internal components. With all that internal customization, will Penryn show up in the MacBook and MacBook Pro before the Air? And will there need to be a customized version of the Penryn processor in future versions of the MacBook Air, or will the normal Penryn processor work?
+Not In the Air: HSDPA, WiMax, or EV-DO
+WiMax was a major buzzword at CES this year, with Sprint Nextel pasting advertisements for its far-reaching, high-speed, semi-pronounceable Xohm wireless network all over the place. Sprint and Verizon already have EV-DO networks, untethering anyone with a laptop and an EV-DO card from Wi-Fi hotspots. And while anyone with an iPhone currently has to settle for EDGE and Wi-Fi connections, AT&T has an HSDPA network of its own that could lay the foundation for the much-coveted 3G iPhone. The MacBook Air is sleek and light, but a cellular card would make that extreme portability even more attractive to potential buyers: they could wander anywhere with a solid cell signal and stay connected away from a Wi-Fi hotspot. What’s more, a combined monthly iPhone and MacBook Air HSDPA bill through AT&T could be a nice way to consolidate bills (albeit one that could induce serious sticker shock). Hey, Apple’s great at integrating iPods with everything. Why not use those integration skills for the bills?
+In the Air Instead: Wireless N
+With an 802.11n card on board, the MacBook Air make a trade-in. Instead of the “stay connected everywhere” nature of a cellular card, it gets the better-than-802.11g range and speed of a wireless N network. Keep in mind that you’ll need a wireless N router to make the most of the MacBook Air’s 802.11n card. Of course, Apple’s AirPort Extreme router and its new Time Capsule device provide that high-speed Wi-Fi access. And if you have other computers on your network that only connect at 802.11b/g speeds—or if you leave your Wi-Fi home network open for anyone to hop on the Web—keep in mind that any device with a wireless-G or wireless-B card can slow down that 802.11n network. That’s even the case if you’re connected to a wireless-N router with a wireless-N device.
+Not In the Air: Ethernet, FireWire, and USB Ports
+Adding to the MacBook Air’s connectivity limitations is the lack of an Ethernet port, which means Wi-Fi’s the only way to go. Well, kind of: you could pick up a USB-to-Ethernet adapter to ensure you’ve got a back-up connectivity option on the road, but that would take up the MacBook Air’s sole USB port. Speaking of USB ports, you’d also max them out by plugging in a USB mouse, which is common for the kind of road warrior that might be attracted to the MacBook Air. At least the Ethernet and USB conundrums have workarounds; the lack of a FireWire port on the MacBook Air could be a serious deal-breaker for anyone planning to edit video on it. For a company that prides itself on its multimedia chops and its “for the people” media-editing apps, FireWire is a curious omission to the MacBook Air’s array of ports.
+In the Air Instead: Best Touchpad Ever?
+Could the MacBook Air’s touchpad be a USB-mouse killer? The nifty, gesture-friendly touchpad looks enticing enough to make using a mouse with the Air less likely, even for road warriors. Still, there are plenty of people out there who don’t like using touchpads, so having only one USB port might be something to think about if they swear by a travel mouse.
+Not In the Air: 160GB MacBook Air
+As Harry McCracken points out in this analysis of the MacBook Air, the 80GB MacBook Air uses the same 1.8-inch hard drive found in the 80GB iPod Classic. So why not release a 160GB version of the MacBook Air with the same 1.8-inch hard drive found in the 160GB iPod Classic? Fear of cannibalizing potential Time Capsule sales?
+In the Air Instead: 64GB solid-state MacBook Air
+The 64GB solid-state drive (SSD) option on the MacBook Air got a lot of people excited, but it comes at a hefty price. With the solid-state drive and the slower 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, the MacBook Air will cost just short of $2,800. With the base configuration (80GB hard drive and a 1.6GHz CPU), the Air comes in at $1,799. That means it’s an extra $1,000 for the solid-state drive option alone — that’s about the same price as a MacBook. Still, the SSD could mean a faster start-up time, a very quiet computer, and great battery life for the MacBook Air in that configuration.
+Not In the Air: Higher-capacity iPhones and iPods
+The same “why no 160GB MacBook Air?” argument applies here, except in reverse. If the MacBook Air can house a 64GB solid-state drive in its ultra-thin frame, why not pack that same amount of solid-state storage into the iPhone and iPod Touch? The iPhone maxes out at 8GB and the iPod Touch hits the ceiling at 16GB. A 32GB version of the iPod Touch would most likely be a hot seller, as would a 16GB version of the iPhone. Those higher-capacity portables are probably coming soon, but it would have been nice to see them now.
+In the Air Instead: New iPhone and iPod Apps
+Finally, iPhone users can text-message more than one person at a time. The new Google Maps location-finding feature is also a great addition to the iPhone firmware, as is the ability to bookmark Web pages and launch them from an icon on the iPhone home screen. Plus, the new iPod Touch apps (e-mail, Google Maps, stock info, a notepad, and weather information) truly make it the same thing as the first-released iPhone without the phone. However, Apple is charging $20 for these iPod Touch firmware updates; iPhone owners get them for free. I’ve talked to a few iPod Touch owners who don’t appreciate the nickel-and-diming.
+Not In the Air: MacBook and MacBook Pro price cuts
+Back in September, Apple ruffled some feathers when they dropped the price of the iPhone without introducing a new model or new storage capacities for the phone. Now, they’ve announced a new laptop without making price cuts to the other notebooks in its stable. Could the MacBook and MacBook Pro’s prices be dropping soon? Well, it might not even matter. Both are better buys than the MacBook Air as it is.
+In the Air Instead: Getting a MacBook or a MacBook Pro anyway
+At least in terms of price, Apple is positioning the MacBook Air as its mid-level laptop, shoehorned in between the entry-level MacBook and the high-end MacBook Pro. When you look at each laptop’s features and components, however, the Air is actually the lowest-end laptop Apple offers. For $1,099, the base version of the MacBook has a faster processor (2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo), equal storage capacity (80GB), an internal combo drive, and a better array of ports (Ethernet, FireWire 400, and two USB ports). The high-end configuration of the MacBook has an even faster 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, a 160GB hard drive, a double-layer SuperDrive, and the same array of ports… all for $300 less than the MacBook Air. At 5 lbs., the MacBook isn’t exactly an anvil, either. As for the MacBook Pro, the 17-inch fully loaded version features a NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics card, a wider array of ports (including a FireWire 800 port and an ExpressCard slot), and a 2.4GHz or 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo processor for $2,799. That’s still less than the 64GB SSD / 1.8GHz MacBook Air. Unless sheer sleekness is what you’re after, the MacBook and the MacBook Pro are both smarter buys.
+Not In the Air: HD DVD and Blu-ray
+The lack of any talk involving high-def DVD formats underscored one of the main differences between Expo and CES. At CES, much of the buzz was about the HD DVD format being “dead,” thanks to Warner Bros. announcing right before the show that the studio would be going Blu-ray-only. But at Macworld Expo? With no optical drives in the MacBook Air and Apple TV’s rebirth as a standalone set-top video rental and purchase box, Apple’s banking on the fact that the future of high-def movie delivery isn’t on a disc or in any other tangible format. And they’re probably right.
+In the Air Instead: High-Def iTunes Downloads
+HD DVD? Blu-ray? How about neither. Apple is positioning itself to be a leader in the HD download war, a fact that could be a catalyst in making both high-def DVD formats obsolete. The bulk of the time in Steve Jobs’s keynote was devoted to presenting the Apple TV’s new video rental service and computer-free features. With all the major movie studios on board for the rental and purchasing options, Apple turned an also-ran announcement at last year’s Macworld Expo—the Apple TV—into a more intriguing device with a bright future. Netflix has a set-top box in the works, and the Vudu set-top box already lets you rent and buy movies from your couch. However, thanks to Apple TV’s wider focus—YouTube videos, music from iTunes, podcasts, and Flickr photosets—it looks like Apple TV has the edge in terms of content options, brand recognition, and buzz factor. Most importantly, Apple TV 2.0 may prove to be the best convergence of online and television experiences yet.
+Not In the Air: The CES Glazed-Over Mosey
+Macworld Expo is not like CES. CES is all about clamoring for attention; with so many vendors announcing new products, so little time to see it all, and so much ground to cover, every company is in a competition to grab your eyeballs. The impact on show-goers’ psyches is noticeable after a couple of days. The combination of over-stimulation, information overload, mental/physical exhaustion, and the sheer amount of people in the Las Vegas Convention Center has created a signature “CES walk.” Around the middle of day two of the show, you’ll notice most people wandering around somewhat aimlessly, somewhat emotionless, with their eyes glazed over.
+In the Air Instead: The Chaotic Macworld Free-For-All
+Expo, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. Everyone’s there for the same thing. Everyone’s there for one company. Apple doesn’t need to clamor for attention; they’re there, they’re in charge, and they know you want to know what they’ve been up to. Throw in the fact that people who love Apple seriously love Apple, and you can probably guess what it’s like when the doors open for Steve Jobs’s keynote. It’s an insane rush to the front, complete with elbowing, grunting, sprinting, screaming, and general apathy for the other showgoers. Apple doesn’t need the Beatles on iTunes; Apple is the Beatles.
+
+Dementia Care Aging Innovation
+6 Pages
+0 Downloads
+Words: 1928
+Date added: 17-09-15
+Category: Advertising Essay
+NMIH306 The Challenges of Ageing 3463205 Michelle James Assignment (Essay) 40% The ageing of the world’s population is a global phenomenon increasing the demand for adequate health care services available population, will double over the next 40 years and in addition to this the World Health Organisation (2006) estimated that there are 18 million people living with dementia, which is expected to double to 37 million by 2025. Dementia is a general term indicating changes to cognitive function that result from a range of specific, usually progressive and irreversible disorders of the brain.
+The most common of these disorders is Alzheimer’s disease (50-70% of cases) (Alzheimer's Association 2007). The symptoms of dementia include loss of memory, confusion and problems with speech and understanding (Alzheimer's Association 2007). Innovations in care for older people aim to demonstrate major shifts in the aged care workforce to improve the future supply and adaptability of the workers, therefore enhance and improve older peoples’ health outcomes and health services.
+This paper will address and discuss the issues and challenges involved with creating environments that enhance dementia care, a key innovation in care of older people. ‘Design of the physical environment is increasingly recognised as an important aid in the care of people with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. … Design is regarded as a therapeutic resource to promote well-being and functionality among people with dementia. ’ Day, Carreon & Stump (2000) According to Nay & Garrett (2009) the impact of the social and physical environments on older people who have dementia is critical to their care outcomes.
+An effective innovative concept aims at providing a physical environment for people with dementia in order to achieve their full potential and avoid causing disability. Research and practice has and continues to gain a better understanding of dementia and design innovations in regards to specialised dementia care. This innovative notion of providing dementia friendly environments is emerging, with significant evidence that it has a positive impact on the lives of people with dementia (Nay & Garrett 2009).
+The Alzheimer's Association (2007) supports this innovation, and acknowledges that the environment should support the functions of people with Alzheimer disease, accommodate behavioral changes, maximize abilities, promote safety and encourage independence. They acknowledge that care settings for people with dementia should provide positive, therapeutic stimuli. Alzheimer's Association (2007) highlights that best practices in dementia care have been developing for close to two decades and during this period the physical environment has been considered a fundamental component of best practice.
+The physical environment in an aged care residential facility can become a challenge to people with dementia, however this innovation to design an environment to specifically meet the needs of people with dementia enables them to utilise their retained abilities with minimal frustration, and experience the highest possible quality of life (Alzheimer's Association 2007). According to Nay & Garrett (2009) a dementia-friendly environment can be achieved through providing an appropriate physical, social and organisational environment.
+It is acknowledged that a home or home like physical environment is beneficial. The appropriate environment design for personally meaningful activities should be established as it aims to reinforce the individual’s identity and sense of autonomy in areas such as dining, grooming, dressing and bathing, offering a range of abilities and experiences during these times (Nay & Garrett 2009). Underpinning the social environment in order to support personhood is also important as a sense of self is preserved during dementia, though the ability to communicate it may be hindered.
+In order to promote independence for people with dementia, the physical environment should offer support and orientation cues so that they can find their way around the facility along with the essential hand rails and resting spots to adequately promote and support mobility (Nay & Garrett 2009). Outdoor spaces provide diverse stimulating opportunities for people with dementia but must be planned with appropriate safety precautions and wayfinding cues to avoid falls and ensure orientation (Nay & Garrett 2009).
+According to Blackman, Schaik & Martyr (2007), older people with mild to moderate dementia should be encouraged to be active outdoors, as this can be facilitated by small environmental modifications. Over 20 years worth of research into the design of environments for people with dementia has proved that people with dementia can either be helped or harmed by the environment in which they live (Fleming, Forbes, & Bennett 2003). In recognising this reality Fleming, Forbes, & Bennett (2003) have developed and executed an empirical study for ‘Adapting the ward for people with dementia’ under the NSW Department of Health.
+From this study they developed a manual consisting of ten principles from which the design of environments for people with dementia can be derived. The manual is based on following ten principles in order to offer an environment to provide care and maintain the abilities of people with dementia (Fleming, Forbes, & Bennett 2003). The first principle acknowledges the need to be safe and secure due to the confusion which accompanies dementia, therefore there is a need for safety features to be built into the environment such as a secure perimeter, hot water control and safety switches in the kitchen.
+Secondly, be small, referring to that fact that the larger a facility, the more confusing it is likely to be for patients. High-quality care for the mobile, confused and disturbed is easier to provide in small groups of 8-14 (Fleming, Forbes, & Bennett 2003). The third principle addresses the need to be simple and provide good ‘visual access’ as a uncomplicated environment may reduce confusion . The simplest environment is one in which the patient can see everywhere she wants to get to or from wherever she is.
+This principle limits the inclusion of corridors in the design and results in staff being able to see the patients almost all the time. This reduces anxiety in both staff and patients (Fleming, Forbes, & Bennett 2003). Fourthly, the need to reduce unwanted stimulation is acknowledged, as people with dementia may find it difficult to cope with a large amount of stimulation. The unit must be designed to reduce the impact of stimulation that is unnecessary for the well-being of the patient, and can be achieved with entry and exit points and noise must being kept to a minimal (Fleming, Forbes, & Bennett 2003).
+Highlighting helpful stimuli is the next principle in the manual and involves highlighting toilet doors, exits to safe outside areas, aids to recognition on bedroom doors and some light switches. Blackman, Schaik & Martyr (2007) concur with this principle and address the need for planners and designers to make more use of simple text signs as aids for navigation in identifying the purpose of objects and places in the environment. The sixth principles suggests that it is important to provide for planned wandering as wandering is sometimes a feature of the behaviour of people with dementia.
+The design should allow it to take place safely but should not encourage it (Fleming, Forbes, & Bennett 2003). The seventh principle suggests the need to provide surroundings that are familiar to them. This may mean that the decor should be such that it would have been familiar to the patients in their early adulthood as people with dementia can associate more so with their distant past than the present. The eighth principle advices that opportunities are provided for both privacy and community as people with dementia require a range of opportunities for social interaction (Fleming, Forbes, & Bennett 2003).
+Providing links to the community is the next principle, which gives people with dementia the chance to remain part of their social network after admission. This can simply be achieved with amenities available to visitors, so that links with family and friends are not broken. Finally, be domestic. Providing an environment for people with dementia that is homelike as possible can help to maintain the person’s abilities for as long as possible (Fleming, Forbes, & Bennett 2003).
+This is also researched and encouraged by Anne Conner (2009), as she notes that the physical environment can also act as a means to enhancing a positive sense of self. She gives the example of a kitchen setting being a familiar feeling of the warm sense of home, activating memories and conversations (Connor 2009). Zeisel et al. (2003) performed a study to describe the associations found between seven special care units’ environmental design features and agitation, aggression, depression, social withdrawal, and psychotic symptoms of residents with Alzheimer’s disease.
+The environmental features associated with the care units included privacy and personalisation in bedrooms, residential character and an ambient environment that residents could understand and resulted in both reduced aggressive and agitated behaviour and fewer psychological problems (Zeisel et al. 2003). Characteristics of the environment associated with reduced depression, social withdrawal, misidentification and hallucinations included common areas that vary in ambiance and exit doors throughout the care unit.
+It was found that there were in fact associations between each behavioural health measure and particular environmental design features, thus demonstrating the potential that environment has for contributing to the improvement of Alzheimer’s symptoms (Zeisel et al 2003). This study concluded that a balanced combination of pharmacologic, behavioural and environmental approaches is likely to be most effective in improving the health, behaviour, and quality of life of people with Alzheimer’s disease.
+This is just the beginning for further exploration into environmental design as one important non-pharmacologic treatment for people with Alzheimer’s disease (Zeisel et al 2003). As for implementing this innovation into practice it is imperative that we address reasons why dementia friendly design features are dismissed, with existing regulations being the common cause, including building codes, fire regulations and aged care regulations (Nay & Garrett 2009).
+It is therefore an important recommendation that collaborative approaches are taken to gain partnership to advance regulations and ensure that care providers continue to advocate and educate about the essential need for enhanced environments for people with dementia (Nay & Garrett 2009). Future studies are needed in order to identify the optimum balance and arrangement of treatment for those with dementia, including drug treatment, supportive environments, and focused caregiving (Zeisel et al. 2003).
+It is clear through current research and studies that environmental factors have the potential and do improve Alzheimer’s symptoms. The greatest likelihood for this approach of environment to make a significant contribution to those with dementia is to provide it as part of their care in collaboration with pharmacologic and behavioral care. This will enable the quality of life, health, and behaviour of people with Alzheimer’s disease to improve, and will therefore enable them to live more satisfying lives (Zeisel et al. 2003). References Alzheimer’s Association 2007, Designing a Care facility, Viewed 01 August 2010,
+Blackman, Schaik & Martyr 2007, Outdoor environments for people with dementia: an exploratory study using virtual reality, Ageing & Society, Vol. 27, pp. 811–825 Australian Bureau of Statistics 2009, Population by Age and Sex, Australian States and Territories, no. 3201. 0, ABS, Canberra Connor, A 2009, Design & Environment: Dementia friendly environments and wellbeing, Dementia Supplement, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 52-54 Day, Carreon & Stump, 2000. ‘The Therapeutic Design of Environments for People with Dementia: A Review of the Empirical Research,’ The Gerontologist, Vol. 0, No. 4. Fleming, R Forbes, I & Bennett, K 2003, Adapting the ward for people with dementia, NSW Department of Health, Sydney, Australia. Nay, R & Garratt, S 2009, Older people: issues and innovations in care, 3rd ed, Churchill Livingstone, Sydney. World Health Organisation 2006, Age-Friendly Environments Programme, Viewed 08 August 2010, Zeisel, J, Silverstein, N, Hyde, J, Levkoff, S, Lawton, M and Holmes, W 2003, Environmental Correlates to Behavioral Health Outcomes in Alzheimer’s Special Care Units, The Gerontologist, Vol. 43, No. 5, pp. 697-711.
+After eight days in Scotland, it was off to Ireland for the duration of our Europe trip. My mom and sister had been to neither country, so I was excited to play tour guide for both. I’ve been to Ireland three or four times—it was a quick jaunt from Edinburgh when I was living there—and as luck would have it, our arrival in Dublin coincided with Arthur’s Day. I knew nothing about this Irish holiday, but like everything else worth celebrating, the city goes all out for the occasion.
+In a nutshell, Arthur’s Day is the celebration of the founding of Guinness, which took place in 1759. The company is older than my country—how’s that for comparison?—and all of Ireland celebrates accordingly, with many big-name acts like Mumford & Sons and Ellie Goulding playing surprise performances at bars across the country. (We tried to track down M&S to no avail…turns out they were in Cork while we thought we were hot on their trail in Dublin.) So naturally, it was the perfect time to visit the place where Guinness was born.
+The last time I visited the Guinness Storehouse in 2003 with my friends Francie and Evan, we just poked around a bit and had a pint at the Gravity Bar. If you’re there on your own, you can get an audio guide as you explore (included in your €16.50 admission, along with a pint at the top of the storehouse). If you have a group of six or more, you can organize a guided tour, which is offered in pretty much every major language (including Chinese). In fact, since we were there, they’ve even started offering a fancier tour, the Connoisseurs Experience, in which you get to taste MULTIPLE kinds of Guinness. Every beer-lover’s dream!
+When Arthur started Guinness, the company occupied four acres of land; today, the storehouse is spread out over 55 acres. The original lease was a 9,000-year contract that cost an initial deposit of £100 and is £45 a year. (I’d say Arthur got the better deal in that bargain.) We even got to see said lease, as they removed it from its vault for the occasion—the last time it had been out in public was when the Queen made a visit to the factory.
+Guinness produces four million pints a day, two million of which are exported (and I guess the Irish consume the rest? no big surprise there!). Production uses four million liters of water per day, which come from the nearby Wickelow Mountains. The water was the reason Arthur decided to settle in the first place; it’s soft and doesn’t need to be treated.
+After we had an hour-long tour of the facilities and learned the science behind the brewing process, it was time to learn to pour!
+Truth be told: I would never order a Guinness in a bar in the United States. I’ve just never liked it much. And then I went back to Guinness and had not one, but three pints, and I learned why I don’t like it at bars in the United States: They have no idea how to pour! A Guinness always needs to be served at 42 degrees Fahrenheit. If there’s too much head on the beer, the glass is too warm.
+In addition, one must follow these six steps:
+- Position the glass so the golden harp faces you and make sure the glass is clean, dry and cool to the touch. (Guinness glasses are special for a reason; the shape plays a factor in the taste.)
+- Hold the glass under the tap at a 45-degree angle.
+- Start to pour. Pull down quickly and in one motion. Stop when the beer reaches the point between the center and the top of the harp.
+- Leave it on the tray to settle. (This—the waiting process—is the hardest part, in my opinion.)
+- Fill it up. Bring the head up to the glass.
+- Present your beer to the customer with the Guinness label facing toward them. Feel free to add your own personal touch (like a four-leaf clover) to the head if you like!
+Then, we poured some more. This time, Kari attempted to fancy it up a bit with a design. (She’s an ace pourer, that one. Guess she did inherit something from her father other than her big feet.)
+And then we “graduated” from the Guinness Academy and were made to drink what we poured. (Oh, darn.)
+My mom doesn’t drink beer either, so that left even more for Kari and me to consume.
+We lingered so long—downing three pints a piece of thick, chocolate-y Guinness is no quick task—that Keith came back and asked us if we’d like to meet a living Guinness. I mean, who’s going to say no to that? The great-great-great-great-great grandson of Arthur, Rory Guinness, flew in for the occasion and did a small meet-and-greet with some of the guests.
+He was absolutely delightful. There were probably 20 people in the room, and he came to each table and chatted up all of his guests. Then, he did a brief presentation in which he told about his five-times-great grandfather Arthur (he had 22 children! all by the same wife!) and showed us the Guinness commercials through the years (because let’s be honest: Guinness has the most genius ad campaigns of any company, ever).
+And then, we all drank Guinness. As if there were any other possible conclusion to the event.
+We loved our time in Ireland but my I think my husband enjoyed our visit to Guinness the most! Learning how to pour is really an art and the the view from the bar at the top is really incredible. Great experience!
+Robert and I spent much of our time in Ireland marveling at how much better Irish bartenders are at their craft than Americans. It’s not just the Guinness pours, it’s how they serve every drink in its appropriate glass and take time to carefully craft a mixed drink. It’s no wonder we spent so much time drinking on our trip.
+Did you try an Irish whiskey? Kari and I were offered one by a bartender one night and became obsessed to the point we would order them at 10am!
+In that case you need to go to the Jameson’s distillery on your next trip to Dublin! You can do a tour very similar to the Guinness one, ending in a whiskey sampling (they get you to taste test the basic, fancypants and very very fancypants whiskeys and compare them) and then soak up the booze with lunch, it’s great.
+You got to meet a Guinness? That’s so cool! Also I had no idea there was a. Arthur’s Day, and b. a correlation between too much head on the beer and too warm of a glass. I wish I would’ve taken the Guinness tour when I was there!
+Just so you know; It’s not an Irish holiday, it’s a marketing ploy by Guinness to sell more. Only started a few years ago. Seems to have worked!
+(oh, and Wicklow doesn’t have an e in it)
+Big feet… hmph… thanks, sis
+I’ve been wanting to go to Ireland and the Guiness storehouse ever since I came to Europe. Looks like so much fun.
+Maybe because I’ve not drank Guiness in Ireland is why I never cared for it.
+Ditto. I am not one to order Guinness ever, but it is so darn tasty in Ireland! Even for a non-beer drinker like myself.
+I had something intelligent to say and then I saw the note about 22 children. Wow.
+She must have been pregnant for pretty much her whole life. Can’t imagine…
+It’s awesome that you were able to travel with your sister and mom! Some friends from college and I are thinking about an international trip, and Ireland is on our short-list. The Guinness Tour would be a huge hit!
+If you do, definitely email me and I’ll give you my must-dos and must-don’ts. I’m actually not a huge fan of Dublin–I would suggest flying in and out of Shannon instead if possible–but the Guinness tour alone makes it worth a day at least.
+I love your outfit Kristin… Great photos… Thanks for sharing…
+Low Carb Diet Meals
+Thank you! I’m all about some plaid these days =)
+Hee hee I can teach you to put a shamrock in the top of your pint if you like! I worked in an Irish bar for 3 years as a student and had all sorts of requests over the years from shamrocks to hearts and even peoples names! My best tip is always to finish off the pint by “back-pouring”, once your pint has settled, tip the Guinness pump back instead of pulling it towards you to top it off, you get a smoother pour as the beer comes out slower this way! 🙂
+Cheers!
+Oh please do! I think we have an agenda for Monaco in April 😉
+Now that is definitely a plan! 🙂
+It looks like you guys had some serious fun there..Good to see you were able to have some good family time. Thank you for sharing your experiences.
+Love this post! We arrived in Dublin too late from our road trip from Belfast but these pictures make me want to visit once we go back—TBEX anyone? So cool you got to do this and experience the right way to “pour”!
+What a fun experience!
+Haha, thanks for the sharing. Enjoyed your writing and the pretty pictures! This is going to be my 2nd favorite European holidays now, after the Fête des chandelles (the French celebrate this religious holiday by eating lots of yummy crepes!).
+OK, now THAT sounds like MY kind of holiday. Crepes (preferably stuffed with bananas and a generous serving of Nutella)? Yes, please!
+I am soooo jealous you got to do this! Yet, also inspired. I’ve heard of friends going to Ireland and having the perfect Guiness, but I did not know you could do this type of thing. Great information!
+In my opinion, it’s the only real reason to go to Dublin!
+SO COOL. I love it when breweries are that interactive and that much of an adventure.
+I absolutely love Guinness and the Storehouse (total hibernophile over here) — how very cool that you got to meet a living relative of Arthur Guinness!
+.""
+Not piracy (Score:5, Funny)
+Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
+Re:Not piracy (Score:4, Funny)
+Wait, the crimes are unauthorized? Are you trying to confuse me?
+Re:Not piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
+Essentially the crimes are not authorized unless you fill out the authorization forms first.
+And by authorization forms I mean the documents needed to start a corporation.
+Or win an election.
+Thats how you get authorized.
+Re: (Score:2)
+Re: (Score:2)
+what's the point? (Score:2)
+More than likely the little ships will get pirated (Score:3, Interesting)
+This shit is getting fucking unreal.
+The next step in evolution (Score:5, Funny)
+Zombie robot pirates!
+Do you realise just how much more awesome the world is about to become?
+Re: (Score:2)
+Re: (Score:2)
+Re: (Score:2)
+Re:More than likely the little ships will get pira (Score:2)
+Heck grab two and verse a friend.
+Re:More than likely the little ships will get pira (Score:4, Funny)
+Re:More than likely the little ships will get pira (Score:2)
+Then all you need for global terrorism is some hackers together tha facilities to refuel and rearm these boats.You don't even need to control a thousand of them, about 20 ambusing a passenger ship will get you global coverage.
+Re:More than likely the little ships will get pira (Score:2)
+Re:More than likely the little ships will get pira (Score:3, Interesting)
+Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
+So do the same with the robot boats... hijack them in a way that will go undetected, so whoever owns them will continue to fuel and maintain them for you. Once you've taken over a good number of them, and they're all fueled up, you're ready to strike!
+Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
+Pirates (the real kind) apparently have little trouble getting hold of fuel and munitions. Even in the days of sailing ships gunpowder didn't grow on trees...
+Re: (Score:2)
+Maybe someday we'll have war where all the silly humans can just stay home and watch it on television.
+Robot pirate hunters? (Score:5, Funny)
+Re: (Score:2)
+Re: (Score:2)
+They could be robots sent by the MPAA or RIAA...
+Global Warming (Score:5, Funny)
+Ooh arrr, what be a Jetski anyway? Russian Hanna-Barbera futurist?
+Keep it a Secret (Score:3, Insightful)
+Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
+Re:Keep it a Secret (Score:5, Informative):Keep it a Secret (Score:5, Funny)
+Re:Keep it a Secret (Score:4, Funny)
+Re: (Score:2)
+Yeah, but what's gonna suck is all those posers wearing testosterone-laced naugahyde froo-froos. I mean, that stuff starts to smell after ten minutes of body heat... Ick. So people, when you go shopping for your hormone-laden froo-froos, do not spare the cows! Make sure they're genuine leather, mmm-K?
+Way to go, Nazis! (Score:2)
+One thing that Nazi Germany undeniably got right was uniform design. Think what you will about the people in them and the things they did, most German uniforms of that era were brilliant, powerful designs of astounding beauty and (usually) high function. I know if my local cops dressed like the SS, I'd think twice about getting on their bad side.
+Of course, my local cops tend to *act* like the SS, but that's a
+Re: (Score:2)
+Re: (Score:2)
+Or
+It could just shoot the **** out of the survivors. Robots are a good solution for some tasks. However, none of those tasks involve firearms.
+Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
+Re: (Score:2)
+While we're at it, we should back these bots up with some kind of amphibious mines based on Rhoombas-with frikkin' lasers.
+Re: (Score:2)
+If you'd ever been in a gunfight you might have a different opinion about putting your own wetware on the receiving end of "tasks involving firearms".
+Re: (Score:2)
+Not only do you have the posibility to such a device machinegunning survivors you also have the problem of how to stop pirates hijacking it...
+Re: (Score:2)
+Well the rationale is all over the place.
+There are more Freudian slips in the article per line than in anything I have ever seen.
+The bigger boat marketing name is "Protector", right? Well in the title of the article it is called " Predator " and on the second page " Interceptor ". That is where the laugh begins, but it does not stop there. On the second page you get "The 55-mpg Interceptor could become the long-range patrol boat of the future, while the jetski-size Sentry (inset) could help a terrorist
+Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
+Only if the robot boat is cheaper than a regular boat and a fool.
+"high-tech piracy on the open seas" (Score:2)
+Good lord, waterproof robot pirates? We're DOOMED!
+Snowcrash (Score:3, Insightful)
+Or, if you prefer reality to science fiction: Robert Work, a retired Marine officer and analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, said piracy is a "persistent threat" that the Navy has worked to address in recent years. [...] "Essentially, you don't want to use a billion dollar DDG [guided missile destroyer] to suppress pirates [military.com],"
+Re: (Score:2)
+Re: (Score:2)
+That would be so cool!
+Can it do a full can of peaches, next?
+Pirate Dread (Score:5, Funny)
+If only we had a remotely-operated wheelbarrow... That would be something!
+Re:Pirate Dread (Score:5, Funny)
+Awesome! (Score:2)
+apologies to spongebob (Score:5, Funny)
+ROBOT GUNBOATS!
+Dangerous and deadly and fatal they be!
+ROBOT GUNBOATS!
+If nautical mercy is something you wish,
+ROBOT GUNBOATS!
+Then put up your hands or sleep with the fish!
+ROBOT GUNBOATS!
+MOD PARENT UP (Score:2, Insightful)
+Autonomous boats sounds like a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
+Very true, and also... (Score:5, Insightful)
+For one thing, we read here every day about the endless ways in which software farks up.
+Furthermore, I find the whole notion of armed robots cruising around freely in any kind of environment - war zone or not - extremely disturbing. How do we ensure they only kill what we want them to kill? Who is accountable when they do kill things? Does the extra layer of separation between commanding officer and 'target' make it more likely that decision makers will authorise killing?
+These toys are very neat from a tech perspective, but they create a perception that killing human beings is like a video game of some description.
+Re:Very true, and also... (Score:4, Insightful)
+Re: (Score:2)
+From the article, I gathered that they are only programmed to kill Pirates, or Human Beings who are breaking THE LAW.
+So there is nothing to worry about at all. Nothing can possibly go wrong.
+Re: (Score:2)
+There's also an issue of how easy it is to tell these apart from other boats (UAVs at least don't look too much like regul
+Re: (Score:2)
+Lots of anti-aircraft missiles, for example, are completely independent after being set loose. And perfectly capable of independently finding, engaging and destroying the target, indeed that's their sole reason for existing.
+You against those too ? If not, for how many seconds/minutes is a armed vehicle allowed to go independently hunting for humans ?
+Re: (Score:2)
+Re: (Score:2, Informative)
+"While the Interceptor could be fitted with a water cannon or other non-lethal offensive system, its primary mission is to serve as a sentry. "
+Re: (Score:2)
+It's just a boat with a machine gun. There's not a fighting force on earth that couldn't already field a boat with a machine gun. The robotic aspect is just a labor-saver to cut costs. It doesn't add capability, in fact it's almost certainly less capable in most respects than a boat with a few armed guys onboard. The infrastructure and maintenance required for these kinds of toys only ma
+Re: (Score:2)
+This is really why it makes sense. You can send the ro-boat to investigate without having to worry about whether it gets blown up or shot up when it runs into trouble. Of course, until they make a robot boarding party its use is still going to be limited.
+Re: (Score:2)
+The only possible advantage is that it may have more range and more endurance than a manned boat. Since the weight saved by not having a crew can be used for ammunition and fuel. Though one of it'
+Re: (Score:2)
+Re: (Score:2)
+Robot ships also wouldn't be much good against being boarded/hacked by pirates.
+Re: (Score:2)
+Automated systems can operate complex equipment in controllable (i.e. measurable) situations beautifully - the problem is there's no one to blame, a'la the Captain of the Valdez, when something, inevitably, goes wrong.
+Re: (Score:2)
+If they were just after the guns and the ammunition then they are probably not too concerned about "non destructive capture" techniques.
+Unlike a UAV, it seems like it would be pretty easy to catch one of these surf
+I feel safer already (Score:3, Interesting)
+"YOU HAVE 10 SECONDS TO COMPLY"
+As the old saying goes: (Score:2, Funny)
+if ( by land ) {
+return C;
+}
+else
+return ++C;
+}
+Is it bad if... (Score:5, Funny)
+Re: (Score:2)
+Re: (Score:2)
+A tragic error in scale... (Score:5, Insightful).
+Re: (Score:2)
+"And both the Navy and the Coast Guard have expressed interest in the Protector, a 30-ft.-long USV built by BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and Israeli defense firm RAFAEL. "
+That is the trawler.
+"This past summer, Florida-based Marine Robotic Vessels International (MRVI) unveiled a USV that emphasizes reconnaissance over firepower. The 21-ft.-long Interceptor can travel at up to 55 mph, and is designed to be piloted both remotely and autonomously. "
+A smaller stealth based model
+Where hav
+Re: (Score:3, Funny)
+Re: (Score:2)
+Who measures the speed of boats in mph?
+Re: (Score:2)
+Journalists.: (Score:2)
+Hmm... a jet ski sized robot attempting to observe and engage in the open ocean.. I wonder if any of these guys have actually been in the open ocean?. [greenpeace.org]
+Re: (Score:2)
+Fully agree, being on a destroyer is hell (Score:2)
+All I can assume is that these machines will designed to ignore the wash. Without
+Re: (Score:2)
+But possibly not too much use against a real MTB.
+Re: (Score:2)
+Ships (even boats) with "pirates" or "terrorists" on may well be themselves armed. Even if not thier crews typically are.
+N4v33 Pw0n3d (Score:3, Funny)
+I Only read the title, but ... (Score:3, Insightful)
+If this stuff is not what dreams are made of, then I'll eat my eye patch.
+This is the only question that needs asked (Score:2)
+Fast maned anti-pirate vessels (Score:2)
+Re: (Score:2)
+Still I take your point, a ship that can do 60knots/hr (110kmh) ought to make a pretty decent pirate chasing vessel for sure. Just get someone else to build it because my country seems patently incapable of actually producing the wondrous military innovations we produce. The Avro Arrow, the.
+Re: (Score:2)
+Most likely a real pirate will interpret this as "...PROVIDE 64 bank account access codes or 6 RPGs..."
+Really easy way to deter high-seas piracy (Score:2, Insightful).
+Re: (Score:2)
+Obligatory PBF comic (Score:2)
+Surveillance satellites? (Score:2)
+Among its potential duties is intruder investigation, which could include scouting out unidentified boats,
+So what can a small scout vessel report back that a surveillance satellite couldn't?
+OK, maybe the name painted on the side of the ship. But that's about it, isn't it, and that's not necessarily the most important detail? It can't carry any decent weaponry - a 7.62 cannon wouldn't be much use against a ship and I doubt a small vessel is a stable enough platform to snipe the crew.
+This news makes Al Gore very sad... (Score:2) [venganza.org]
+Robot Pirate Island (Score:2, Funny)
+Popular Mechanics? (Score:3, Funny)
+Re: (Score:3, Funny)
+I mean, the boat part isn't so important, so long as it has a massive gun. Right?
+Re: (Score:2)
+And obvious technical mistakes to boot... (Score:2)
+Someone didn't proof read the caption, either: 55-mpg?!? The only boat that gets that kind of economy is a sailboat. They obviously meant 55 mph, which is mentioned in the article itself. A typical jet-ski gets somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-12 mpg, largely depending on how you ride it and its engine configuration (carbureted two-stroke, direct injection two stroke, or fuel injected four stroke). A boat the size described will be lucky to hit 4 miles to the gallon.
+Re:Sigh. I love American grammar... (Score:4, Insightful)
+Re: (Score:2)
+Choose a service:
+The benefits you’ll enjoy from working with us
+Our years on the market have revealed to us all that customers really want and expect from their air duct cleaning & repair company. We have invested time and effort into building a team and a solution that provides for every need. By working with us you can enjoy:
+Other nearby areas we serve:
+Transparent pricing
+We will not increase our rates if we arrive at your location for an emergency service or a last-minute reservation. Our rates are consistent.
+An excellent customer service
+We won’t just stop at offering a flawless solution. We also believe it is crucial to treat our clients with respect and invariably work with a positive mindset.
+Dedicated technicians
+All of our experts enjoy their work and you can quickly discover this by the way they approach every task.
+Enjoy professional maintainenance of your AC systems effortlessly!
+Duct cleaning in Flinders
+Have you heard that air ducts can end up being dirty too? Although the central air system is not a home unit most people connect to regular disinfecting, it does require precise maintenance. And it’s not connected to its appeal. The HVAC system won’t alter its appearance if left to accumulate dirt particles. However, it will completely change the condition of the air you are breathing in your house. When turned on, air ducts accumulate a variety of dirt particles, debris, and dust, which can result in significant consequences such as respiratory conditions and others. Luckily, we’re here to help!
+The perks of this service:
+- A disinfected and crisp air
+- Better working HVAC system
+- Lower utility expenses
+- An extended lifespan of your air conditioner
+- A quiet and easy operation of your HVAC
+Similarly to anything else, air ducts age too. When this takes place, they hold pollutants that clog the filters or enter your property. Our duct cleaning technicians will carefully remove any dust accumulation even if {hidden|difficult to spot||invisible}. We will take care of every component of your AC system to make sure that you get the following benefits:
+Our professionals always arrive prepared with all the essential appliances to complete the service. All you need to do is contact us and schedule a service.
+How is the service performed?
+To ensure quality outcomes each time, our air duct cleaning team sticks to a process following the same range of instructions. We do customise our solution where possible to make sure our clients receive the best service considering their individual necessities and situation.
+1. We invariably begin by examining the air conditioner hidden dirt.
+4. At last, we will physically wipe the inlet entry, grill, and clean the particle filters.
+Duct repair in Flinders
+Healthy and well-maintained air ducts mean a faultless circulation of hot or cold air between all parts of the property and a lower utility charge that won’t dig a hole in your pocket. Sadly, this is not something that many house occupants are able to relate to. aged and poor air ducts will not simply harm your home’s coziness and comfort but will give a rise to your utility cost each month. Simply operating your AC with inadequate sealing can drastically increase your monthly costs. We cooperate with some of the best and most trained experts in duct repair to provide a reliable service for you.
+Benefits of Nifty air duct repair in Flinders
+Getting your air ducts repaired indicates that your ACair conditioner won’t need to use as much energy to provide the same outcomes – a flawlessly cooled down or heated home. Our duct repair solution will furthermore help you cut down your monthly energy costs and enjoy loosening up at home at the ultimate temperature. Not only that, but the temperature will be evened out in all parts of the room.
+How do you know if you need an air duct repair service?
+Have your utility expenses increased in recent times? Is your air conditioner making eerie sounds that you haven’t heard it make before? Are you struggling to maintain the right degrees in the house or are you seeing that some sections of the room are extremely hot but others are left cold? If you have responded yes to part of these questions chances are that it is time to have your air conditioner inspected.
+Expert duct cleaning in Flinders, 3929
+Can you picture when you last cleaned your air ducts? AC systems commonly get mistreated by owners of homes or residents. As long as the AC is running – everything is good, right? Well, no. The air ducts in your living space or work environment accumulate a lot of grime, slime, and other germs over time when used. Not disinfecting it consistently means that unpure air circulates around the house or office, risking your health and safety.
+Pros of this service:
+Our professional duct cleaning service will thoroughly clean any stored grime in your AC, improving the air condition and omitting the risk of developing undesired health problems. Sanitised air ducts also mean a better working system in addition to reduced utility bills and annoying noises. You will see a change in the smells in your house for the better and your HVAC system’s lifespan will be stretched.
+We work with some of the most skilled duct cleaning experts who can confidently meet your your requirements.
+The duct cleaning service explained in detail
+When they reach your location, our professionals will carry out an examination of your AC system to determine the best cleaning method. They will take out the grill of each duct and insert a pressure hose. The service cover will be placed and the vacuum cleaner plugged in. We will trigger the system and clean the bacteria. Once the vacuum cleaning is finished, we will physically wipe the parts of your air conditioning system. Lastly, we will apply a special sanitizer for professional use to defend your house against contamination.
+Duct Mould Removal
+Ducts are often subject to to mould when not looked after and disinfected properly. Other factors such as a moist surrounding or excessive moisture could also cause mould issues and the spread of deadly parasites.
+To keep yourself and your loved ones protected, it’s best to get help from mould removal experts to keep your ducts safe.
+You can rely on our experienced duct removal specialists in your area to eliminate any sign of mould and help you stay away from the causes and potential dangers. We deliver quick, affordable, and proven duct mould removal services.
+Return Vent Cleaning
+Seeking an expert to come back and clean your vents? We’ve got a solution! Our team of professionals is always eager to support clients and provide a safe and sound space for living and working. We always operate with tested and proven cleaning products and agents, designed for vents. Our vent cleaning technologies and methods additionally stick to safety regulations and are among the most chosen on the market.
+You can take advantage of same-day return vent cleaning, enjoy our affordable and accessible rates, and enjoy peace of mind thanks to our safe and reliable services. Stop risking your health by consuming allergens, dust, and germs as a result of filthy vents and poorly maintained acknowledge them and look after them properly. They are always there to support us every time we need them and keep us warm and safe throughout the winter. Yet, if we forget to frequently inspect and clean them, they could turn into our worst nightmares. Heating units are able to produce damaging pollution and vivid dust. Even though you may be eager to tackle the problem by yourself, it’s recommended to leave the dirty work to qualified technicians.
+If you’re in search of a budget-friendly cleaning service for your heating ducts, you’ve reached the perfect place. We never compromise with quality but we deliver our services at inexpensive rates to make the services accessible for all. You can depend on getting a customized heater unit duct cleaning service from certified and high-quality professionals. Our big number of loyal clients is the unbeatable sign that we offer one of the leading duct cleaning services near you.
+Duct Sanitisation and Deodorisation
+Through the use of specific and high-quality antimicrobial treatments and tactics, our devoted dust sanitisation and deodorisation professionals promise 100% clean and fresh ducts. Don’t let the air you take in become toxic and dangerous for your wellbeing. Act now by making sure that your ducts are kept completely sanitised and disinfected all the time.
+After receiving the service, your ducts will be 100% rid of any dangerous and smelly allergens. Your ducts will smell fresh and clean for longer, meaning that you consume air of perfect quality in the house or your working space. Our licensed experts work with advanced and top in the market sanitation and deodorising agents that invariably guarantee unmatched results.
+Central Ducts Cleaning
+Among our most loved services is the central ducts cleaning. You can book this service for livin or working spaces of any size. We invest in all the relevant equipment and leading technology to take care of any project. Our central duct cleaning professionals will successfully remove any dirt and bacteria that have been stored inside your central duct system.
+Remaining unseen inside your HVAC, bacteria, mould, and dirt all put your wellbeing at risk. Research shows that individuals living or working in homes and business premises where the air ducts are not often cleaned are more exposed to respiratory problems and other health concerns. Stop this from becoming your reality by calling us. We have what it takes to keep your central ducts in top state.
+Split System Air Conditioning Cleaning
+Our professionals are also qualified to offer a complete cleaning solution for your split system air conditioning. We operate with safe for the environment detergents and invest in modern and leading technology that allows us to perform our cleaning at the highest standards. The technicians that we work with are fully devoted and committed to answering the expectations of every client. You can expect a detailed split system cleaning service for your air conditioning that pays attention to the smallest detail.
+Don’t postpone until your HVAC system no longer works the way it used to or should be be substituted with a new one due to insufficient maintenance. Act early on and guarantee you are tlooking after it regularly. Our experts are available to help! Just call us.
+Duct Heating Unit Services
+Our trained duct heating experts will make sure that your duct system works at its best throughout the year, with no compromises. Our years on the market have allowed us to design the ultimate duct heating unit service that our customers can rely on anytime. We offer complete duct cleaning and duct servicing in your area and work with sophisticated and first-class services that never fail us. We are always prepared and have educated our technicians to work based on the highest standards to meet customers’ expectations and exceed them.
+We will help you maintain your home secured and comfy during warm summers and chilly winters. You just have to call us, tell us your problem, and a qualified professional will be sent to visit your address promptly.
+Carbon Monoxide Checkup
+Carbon monoxide may be a threat to your wellbeing due to the fact that it is seriously unsafe to consume. It displaces oxygen in the blood, leading to lack of oxygen for the heart, brain, and other important body organs. If certain amounts of CO are released in the air you consume, you will feel the outcomes soon after. You could suffer from loss of consciousness and suffocation.
+Furthermore carbon monoxide is an invisible gas. It’s hard to locate and is produced by appliances like gas stoves, ovens, and gas heaters. To guarantee you are protected and safe, it’s best to book frequently a carbon monoxide checkup once in a while to determine the amount of CO in your home or office. Our trained specialists have the know-how and equipment to carry out a detailed carbon monoxide test.
+Cooling Vent Cleaning
+Cooling vents are commonly used throughout the warm seasons of the year when they offer us the comfortable temperatures that we are after. However, poor care and irregular or insufficient cleaning can quickly result in a flawed system, broken vents, and large repair costs.
+To avoid these negative scenarios, rely on our duct cleaning professionals for a modern, personalized cooling vent cleaning solution. We will inspect the system, create a step-by-step plan, and exploit our sophisticated and tested cleaning tools and technology. You can book our solutions 24/7, bank holidays and weekends included. Enjoy the fresh air that you deserve and ensure your safety and that of your loved ones.
+Specialised duct repair in Flinders, 3929
+Ignoring to get expert duct repair support from the specialists can be a dangerous decision resulting in increased expenses in the the future. If your air ducts are damaged and unhealthy they will have to work extra hard in order to provide the same outcome. This means more energy usage and expenses. Even if you assume you are cutting down on costs currently, this misinterpretation might cost you more over time. Stop this from taking place by booking our services!
+Perks of Nifty air duct repair in Flinders
+Our duct restoration service won’t just clean the air in your house or office. It will help you pay lower utility bills on a monthly basis and will make your HVAC system more effective and dependable. Besides, addressing the issue during its early stages is certainly less expensive than having to buy and install a brand new air conditioner.
+Signs that tell you that you need an air duct repair service:
+- Your central air system is making unnatural and annoying sounds
+- You invest more on utility bills than previously but can’t discover the cause
+- You are just not able to get the right temperature – there are hot or cold sections in the rooms
+- Part of the ducts are not in the right location and seem misplaced
+Why partner with us
+We are a customer-oriented company that puts your fulfillment as the top priority. Our devoted experts will do their best to leave your ducts in flawless condition.
+Proven Methods
+Our air duct cleaning and repair technicians work with result-proven and checked processes and routines. We have years of experience in the sphere and are prepared with new age tools.
+No Overtime Charge
+We will not charge extra if you book us during weekends or on official holidays. Our rates remain the same for your comfort.
+Certified Technicians
+All of our experts have completed professional training and development. They are licensed and you can rely on exceptional services.
+The right duct cleaning & repair partner
+When selecting a duct repair or duct cleaning partner we feel you ought to select mindfully. After all, you will be welcoming the specialist into your personal space, depending on them for sanitised air and depending on their skills to end with decreased energy expenses. We only partner with qualified and certified air duct professionals that guarantee complete satisfaction for any project they start. We invest in our staff and know that regular coaching is essential for success.
+Are there additional fees for the service?
+Never, our pricing model is clear and consistent. You will simply be charged the sum we’ve shown for the service you’ve booked.
+What can I expect from the duct cleaning services?
+Our duct cleaning service is comprised of a complete cleaning and disinfection of your duct system installation. This includes services like duct mould removal, elimination of dirt, pest termination, duct odour removal, and more. Our technicians can also offer a carbon monoxide inspection to locate any dangers and threats. In the end, you’ll receive flawlessly working ducts and fresh air.
+Can I book a duct cleaning service during the weekend?
+Yes, our experts are there for your 24/7, weekends and bank holidays included.
+What type of cleaning detergents do you work with?
+We work with the highest quality of cleaning methods and products. All of our cleaning detergents are harmless and environmentally friendly.
+Our Duct Cleaning Method
+Once they’ve arrived, our local duct cleaning experts will conduct a thorough check via video to establish the duct’s condition. Throughout this phase, we will look for any dirt, dust build-up, and animal droppings. When we have identified the issue, we’ll take out the covers and ensure they are free of all imperfections and dust particles. We ensure this by using innovative cleaning machines and processes. The third step is to insert a hose and a rotating brush head to reach perfect results and clean from within. All elements will be disinfected, cleaned, and returned to their original place. Finally, through the use of an antimicrobial mist, we’ll fog the ducts and ensure all microbes are gone for good. The best part is that this also results in a nice, fresh scent that will be felt in the air.
+How to Know When Your Air Ducts Should Be Cleaned
+In most cases, your ducts are definitely in need of cleaning but homeowners or tenants are unable to understand this. One of the certain indications that can inform you that your air ducts need to be sanitised is seeing wisps of dirt flying out of the air duct once the heating ventilation in the premises is working. In some situations, you can even notice dust or pet hair blocked in the vents. In other situations, you’ll pulling out the air filter. If it’s full of dust then it’s likely not operating at its best as the airflow is being stopped. All of these signs and more may mean that your ducts are dirty and not working to their full potential.
+Why Duct Cleaning is Important?
+Duct cleaning is an essential part of maintaining your HVAC system and heating ventilation. Dirty ducts might not only be the cause for a damaged system and the necessity to spend money on a new one but are also a threat to human health. To be able to transport air correctly in the premises, your air conditioning system requires clean ducts and an clear path. However, mould, allergens, bacteria, and other flaws lead to obstructions. They also make their way to your body as the air you breathe will be impure and threatening. This is why it’s recommended to maintain your ducts and benefit from regular advanced duct cleaning services.
+Nifty Duct Cleaning
+We clean and repair domestic and commercial ducts.
+© 2020 Nifty Duct Cleaning Ltd.
+OUR SERVICES
+OTHER PAGES
+As part of a three month long investigation, Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Police confiscated roughly 400-kilos of cocaine and $1.5 million from a mystery plane operating out of a private airstrip on the Hilton family owned Rancho Horizonte.
+Here’s how Baller Alert broke it down:
+“Three Nicaraguans were arrested, one of which was a trusted employee of the HIlton’s who is said to be responsible for the illegal use of their runway. Police are still trying to find the owner of the Cesna.
+Both of Paris Hilton’s parents, Kathy and Rick Hilton frequently visit the 6,000 acre property but it’s unclear whether they had any idea it was being used to transport cocaine. For now, they aren’t suspects.”
+Yea they guilty it ain’t all hotel money and everybody wanna be a gangsta or hustler, except the ones who have to get it like that smh
+Truth
+True
+How you think they got the money to invest.
+Supposedly they made their money in bootlegging like the Kennedy’s… there was once a BI bout Paris and how nobody can stand her, but she gets the best coke so she will always be around….they prob hav that coke in their hotels! Ever wonder how Britney,Lindsey got in trouble but not Paris? Coke in her purse, and all she has to say is it’s not hers?! I guess these celebs are drug runners
+Told yall!
+if a Hilton gets arrested for anything the world will never be the same.
+No surprise! I bet the one busted was the not the major player in this drug Trade! WHo owns the Ranch? Now there is your answer.
+Correct.
+She wears sunglasses for reason folks. Always on coke. No doubt they know. But they have $$$ to act naive.
+So true! Celebs that ALWAYS wear sunglasses are covering up pupils and glassy eyes.
+Of course the Hiltons’ r the brains behind this. But they will not serve 1 day in jail. The fall guys have been arrested & the Hiltons’ continues with their lives without missing a beat.
+JUST LIKE RIH WHITE PEOPLE ALWEAYS DO.
+I knew the Hiltons money didn’t just come from those hotels. I bet they won’t help ones arrested get a lawyer, send the people who take the fall a package or if worst comes to worst; put money in their prison acct. smh
+I’ll bet if they weren’t who the are, with the resources they have, That whole place would be shut down, and all of them would’ve went to jail. Especially the owners.
+It has always been said that Paris always has the best coke. Now we know why.
+Yep! That’s how she stays in the loop with the celebs.
+they knew and best believe they got a share of the profit.
+Michael Vick went to jail because his house was used for illegal dog fights–
+Well now, that’s why they built a house there–generational wealth is founded by criminals.(often)
+ALWAYS!
+You are quite correct on that note…
+The same can be said for Kennedy, Chase, Rothchild, Rocafella, Bush…the family names go on & on. Not a single one you can think of has generational money from anything legitimate & honest. All their businesses of today were created from bootlegging, extortion, drug dealing, murder, political corruption & straight out thievery.
+Now we KNOW the Hiltons are drug dealers. We will NEVER hear a word of this ever again.
+@ Mrs.Reg Have you ever heard of Margie Schoedinger? She’s a blackwoman from Tx.that was rumored to be his mistress of 20 years that later filed Rape charges against Bush while he was president back in 2000 and of course the media suppressed it and nothing came from it.She was later found dead of a apparent gunshot wound to the head and a so-called suicide which we both know is BS.There’s also a female who ran for Gov in Vegas by the name of Leola McConnell who wrote a book about Bush enjoying the Alternative Lifestyle and she also vanished and have not been heard from in years.Moral to the story is the higher Elite can do whatever they want and evade prosecution.
+Holy shit! I know he was gay/bi(cheerleader for Yale) but the black woman! That would have been the greatest story EVER!
+I truly believe we are living in the end of days…where all hidden truths will be revealed. Like roaches these people can’t hide forever…..not when the light shines. If anything people like this are afraid of the light….too much dirt and misdeeds. What has been done in the dark will coming to light….yes lord!!!
+WOW @BA…
+OMG, I don’t know why I’m so surprised at your recall of that debacle. There was a huge “media blackout” on the story, as no one, with the exception of a few local newspapers & internet sites reported the story. Word in certain media reports was that “Mrs. Schoedinger was mentally ill.”
+Will Pitt investigated this long ago & found nothing but a seriously disturbed woman…SUPPOSEDLY!!! The long story made real short is simple…we know the drill:’To suppress the truth simply discredit the person telling the truth by making them look crazy &/or dangerous, then have them murdered by way of “a tragic accidental death, drug overdose or suicide.” This is the same formula we’ve all noticed most recently, however, it’s nothing new by any means.
+“the Defendant also informed the Plaintiff.
+For those who don’t know or don’t believe Black Anastasia & I’m including a link for your review. Mrs..
+Correct Ms.Reg Hey,if you can find a photo of Margie please provide a link because I’ve looked everywhere and have had no luck finding any info on her.Margie was no head case she was a professional college educated Republican Blackwoman who owned a Travel Agency and several other businesses.The nerve of these people to try a taint my Sister.
+@BA…
+I must admit…just like you, I couldn’t find one single image of Margie Schoedinger. It’s as if any visual proof of her physical existence has been completely erased in such a way to lend notion to the idea “there’s no proof without a body” or in this case, not even a mere picture!
+Give me a day or so. This will take time & digging, however, doubt we’ll come up with much due to the fact she was tied to the misdeeds of that vile bastard Bush…Smh!
+OMG…@Black Anastasia,
+I’m not sure you’ll revisit this conversation but I HAD to share this with you. While looking for a picture of Margie Schlesinger I ran in more things about Leola McConnell. What’s most fascinating to me is how “Leola McConnell’s story actually corroborates Margie Schoedinger’s story of having sex with Bush on several occasions.” I have to admit I did NOT comprehend “rape” from what I read so much as it she attended events where sex was the theme & expectation. This in my opinion does not mean she wasn’t raped at some point in time but from what I gathered..this wasn’t the kind party you go to if you didn’t want to have sex. I also get the impression her husband was somehow involved in all this though he’s not mentioned.
+None of what I just said was what I really wanted to tell you…smh.
+THIS is…(you may already know about it but my mouth was hanging open)
+“Leola McConnell also claims to have firsthand knowledge that Bush had an affair in the mid-1980s with Victor Ashe, the former mayor of Knoxville, Tenn., who has served as the Bush’s ambassador to Poland since 2004.”
+@ Ms.Reg I agree.I’m assuming that since IRS been rumored that Margie was paid to partake in orgies with Bush and others that does alarm me alittle about her subsequent Rape claims.However I’m thinking she was later either raped or taken advantage of or she perhaps became less compliant and then the harassment started.Nonetheless, I do believe her allegations because she was later being harassed,her husband was fired from his job and her bank accounts were frozen.The fact that she started to be harrassed and put under surveillance after her lawsuit give creedance to her claims.Leola MvConnel also said that Margie was Bush’s mistress for 20 and he had a love/hate relationship with blackwomen.
+@BA…
+Since you brought Leola McConnell to my attention I’ve been reading my ass off about her. I believe most if not all of her & Margie Schoedinger’s claims about Bush. Did you catch what else Leola McConnell said? I wasn’t sure if you ever heard that…I hadn’t until you mentioned her & started digging.
+“Leola McConnell also claims to have firsthand knowledge that Bush had an affair in the mid-1980s with Victor Ashe, the former mayor of Knoxville, Tenn., who has served as the Bush’s ambassador to Poland since 2004.”
+@Black Anastasia,
+Returning to our previous conversation.. You mentioned Leola McConnell out of Las Vegas. I did NOT know of this lady, however, I made a quick call to my friend’s dad & “ooh wee honey child” is ALL I can say about what he told me!
+See, he works directly for a particular casino owner in spite of “technically being retired from SFPD.” (He’s a fixer but NEVER will admit to such) To repeat any of what he said would take up way too much space here on HSK so I’m listing a link to the place he says the “story is most accurate.” He also told me Leola McConnell wrote a tell-all book straight up naming names & HUGE details which is partly why she “disappeared from sight.”
+@ Ms.Reg Also,a guy by the name of James Hatfield wrote a book about Bush called “Fortunate Son” where he alleged Bush was arrested for drugs in the 70’s and had his record expunged with the help of his daddy and several other misdeeds.But of course afterwards he was threatened and later committed suicide supposedly.
+Thanks Ms. Reg!
+Well damn!
+@BA…
+I’m not even going to say anything. Wait until you connect these dots…
+Wouldn’t want to be in debt to the cartels though. Let’s hope they can cover the loss.
+400 books aint shit to them at $5000 each
+The hiltons can cover that!
+Drug game run this country. Check out the movie the Street Kings w/ Keanu Reves.
+Look at how skinny she is, this is not suprizing at all
+It was while they were tied up trying to process that crime scene, the real load was snuck in right under their noses. 4,000 keys came in. But at least we know why Paris Hilton never gets busted going out to by cocaine, her little errand boy will never ever get caught in a sting cause they drop it on her back porch big the key.
+Exactly
+White DEVIL GOT AWAY !!!!! I’M SHOCKED !!!!! – Not.
+Watch how these White motherf*ckers never serve one day in jail because of this. This corrupt system will let these filthy white devils walk away.
+That is how this hoe will get married. They will find her a cokehead
+That sex tape set her back with the elites (i thought). She used to get Billionaires abd niw gets nobody’s. Maybe the elites dont want to get caught up in trashy Hilton crap. But this story makes me wonder bout Lionel Richie, the Kardashians and OJ. Coke was ever so popular in the 80’s. I bet they had this farm back then. Katy and Rick were known for thier parties
+Of Course they know what’s going on.. It’s their property, their plane, their landing strip and they don’t know. Let this have been the Jackson’s or some other famous black family everybody would have been arrested and the details sorted out later. C’mon now.
+The Black Market Is The Bigger Economy…Always Has Been! No rules, regulations, taxes, etc. Let’s name the cities? Las Vegas, New Orleans, Miami, Los Angeles, just to name a few. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that The Hiltons had a side hustle in Central America. The Snowman carries weight in Tinseltown. Griselda Blanco… I Think Not!
+- K2: The Vitamin, Not the Mountain (32)
+- { Stella, the article you’ve linked to is about all statins at all doses. The author of the book was commenting on a particular statin at… } – Oct 05, 3:38 AM
+- { “If the statement that high-doses of Crestor are associated with crippling side effects in most people is “demonstrably untrue”, then why not demonstrate it? According… } – Oct 04, 1:32 PM
+- Did a high ranking whistleblower really reveal that the CDC covered up proof that vaccines cause autism in African-American boys? (1206)
+- { Yes, that experiment was done by the CDC starting in 1932. The researchers justified it because they figured these people didn’t have access to medical… } – Oct 04, 10:13 PM
+- { I’ve looked at several autism vs (fill in the blank) studies and have yet to find one that screens test subjects for Fragile-X syndrome. Since… } – Oct 04, 7:46 PM
+- { the CDC did that horrendous syphilis experiment???wth! } – Oct 04, 1:25 PM
+- Announcement: “Integrative oncology” – Really the best of both worlds? (149)
+- { Avijit, I hope you do not get cancer, because even if you developed a curable type you would probably refuse treatment for it and die…. } – Oct 04, 2:01 PM
+- Brain Research in the 21st Century (30)
+- { I noticed that the discussion poked along in a desultory manner, covering the BRAIN initiative with a “ho hum” tone. Then suddenly, when the question… } – Oct 04, 9:14 AM
+- { So, you think that you have discovered that something, by yourself, with no outside second opinion and now your screen people for it. Are you… } – Oct 03, 8:40 PM
+- { An anecdote. Ho hum. I was a 92 pound weakling. I tried lifting weights. I tried running marathons. Nothing worked for me. Then I found… } – Oct 03, 8:34 AM
+- { As a sufferer of Irlen and now a screener, your dismissal of Irlen needs some attention. I was 57 years old when i discovered I… } – Oct 03, 6:39 AM
+- { Oh, dear- this threading defeats me. Anyway- @Devout Catalyst WHAT a terrific site! Thank you! } – Oct 02, 1:53 PM
+- Bad News and Good News from Down Under: Science-Based Medicine in Australia (20)
+- { “That said, if it is nutrition that plays the main role, perhaps it should be dieticians and not naturopaths working alongside pharmacists!” Absolutely! Not naturopaths,… } – Oct 03, 1:03 PM
+- { I also am an Australian health professional and whilst I believe having a naturopath working alongside a pharmacist can send a confusing message to the… } – Oct 03, 12:41 PM
+- “Mystery” Illness in Colombia (222)
+- { @DW – Ha! Just saw this. I will just say – Language is my second language. If you are one of those folks to whom… } – Oct 03, 9:52 AM
+- { The thing to do is use the correct psychiatric terminology. Per the DSM 5, the conditions you’re talking about are – as noted in the… } – Oct 02, 11:17 PM
+- { Mouse, I do hope you mean you are their descendant and not a decedent :) } – Oct 02, 10:45 PM
+- { Wait, in fairness, while she did say that at first, Whoa did then afterwards agree that some women found bras comfortable. She implied that was… } – Oct 01, 12:31 PM
+- { You certainly created the impression in my mind that you were gobsmacked that any woman could possibly have an attitude toward bras that differed from… } – Oct 01, 11:26 AM
+- How “they” view “us” revisited: Mike Adams goes off the deep end (123)
+- { I love in Lords and Ladies when the morris dancers cannot stop. } – Oct 03, 8:36 AM
+- The false hope of “right-to-try” metastasizes to Michigan (223)
+- { Oh! And he ran for President (yes, of the United States!) in 2004. } – Oct 02, 4:30 PM
+- { State official sues `Doc Mike’ over health Web site September 19, 2003|By Meg McSherry Breslin, Tribune staff reporter. Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan filed suit… } – Oct 02, 4:25 PM
+- { doc mike witort,r.p.md. Mike “Doc” Witort L.C., H.F. Doc Mike Witort, PLRN Which is it? Windriven, E.I.E.I.O } – Oct 02, 2:10 PM
+- { Really? This source indicates that you were sued for violating the state’s Consumer Fraud Act, not for curing cancer. } – Oct 02, 1:41 PM
+- { i was jailed in 2006 in illinois for curing cancer..please call me asap doc mike. 708 488 8887 } – Oct 02, 1:07 PM
+- Rationalizing the Ridiculous (256)
+- { One case report is one anecdote, which is exactly what the authors said in the discussion. } – Oct 02, 11:56 AM
+- { I was reading one of your archived articles regarding Colloidal silver. I came across something that may interest you regarding Pseudomonas aeruginosa. J R Soc… } – Oct 02, 9:42 AM
+- Naturopathy vs. Science: Facts edition (497)
+- { Typical stigmatising ignorance. You don’t like something I do or say so blame it on a DSM label instead of addressing the issue. No, your… } – Oct 01, 7:29 PM
+- { cabrogal “I only represent myself when speaking of coping strategies. And when I specifically did so you and several others immediately cut in and claimed… } – Oct 01, 1:52 PM
+- { Yawn. Random insults, lack of evidence, appeal to imaginary things like vitalism. Nothing to see here, move along. } – Oct 01, 1:13 PM
+- One more time: No, wearing a bra does not cause breast cancer (306)
+- { I did do a bit of a Google, and this was my favorite description of the study: } – Oct 01, 6:14 PM
+- { “As Nelson points out, most of the center’s grizzly bears were deemed “problem bears” in the wild and were brought to WSU as an alternative… } – Oct 01, 5:13 PM
+- { Bears also like donuts, and will move a box to get at them: } – Oct 01, 4:17 PM
+- { I don’t know about your bears, but my bears definitely don’t get soggier wearing a bra. But then my bears don’t mind being soggy as… } – Oct 01, 4:13 PM
+- { Don’t care- comfort over beauty. } – Oct 01, 12:32 PM
+- Lemons and Lyme: Bogus tests and dangerous treatments of the Lyme-literati (244)
+- { “This however, is called blinding the observer to the samples.” Facepalm – with nosebleed. Thank you. } – Oct 01, 3:45 PM
+- { As to randomizing, it would seem to me important for the PCR test to accurately sort supposed CLD sufferers from controls naive to the bacteria…. } – Oct 01, 2:50 PM
+- { @MadisonMD As is clear, I envisioned a much larger trial and with controls and blinding. And still the hard costs – say $50k – are… } – Oct 01, 2:16 PM
+- { Perhaps I was unclear. Take 5 patients who you believe have CLD, collect their blood, and run PCR. If you demonstrate persistent Borrelia, you are… } – Oct 01, 1:44 PM
+- { “There was such naiveness in the “$200″ comment…” Naivete? No. Madison was noting that PCR could be done for ~$200. Per subject. In a study… } – Oct 01, 8:38 AM
+- Multiple Chemical Sensitivity: Separating facts from fiction (317)
+- { I think there’s somatogenic IEI, psychogenic IEI and IEI misdiagnoses. And we need to very carefully select IEI study participants to filter out the later… } – Oct 01, 3:43 AM
+- { We need a starting point, so it’s fine to define an idiopathic illness based on characteristics without objective findings. Not every emerging illness will readily… } – Sep 30, 11:12 PM
+- { I have MCS so I know it exists Great. Here is how Uptdodate defines the illness you have: Idiopathic environmental intolerance (IEI), formerly called multiple… } – Sep 30, 11:24 AM
+- { I have MCS so I know it exists, so any studies suggesting otherwise are flawed or ambiguous. My MCS is very justified and clear-cut, but… } – Sep 30, 4:35 AM
+- A balanced look at gluten sensitivity (95)
+- { This doctor is changing the world of personal health: After watching the video, visit: } – Sep 30, 6:15 PM
+- Diet Cults vs. Science-Based Healthy Eating (210)
+- { This doctor is changing the world of personal health: After watching the video, visit: } – Sep 30, 6:14 PM
+- Privileged Antivaxxers (386)
+- { Oh my, I meant “gist” not “just.” That was terrible, my bad should have re read that one. } – Sep 30, 6:08 PM
+- Hiccups: From Acupuncture to Quantum Touch (66)
+- { The easiest method for stopping hiccups that I’ve yet tried is to turn on the mask seal check function on my cpap (gives 15 cm… } – Sep 30, 4:02 PM
+- { I guess that an amount of Hyoscyamus niger will get rid of hiccups pretty fine, as they will deprive the subject of vital signs. But,… } – Sep 30, 3:25 PM
+- { Eating chilli peppers on a dare- the trick is to keep a really straight face for as long as you can, while talking in a… } – Sep 30, 8:11 AM
+- Why People Continue to use SCAMs (303)
+- { Dr. Pavlov said: All the studies on Vit C and viral infections has shown… nada. Intravenously delivered vitamin C has shown lower mortality on guinea… } – Sep 30, 11:07 AM
+One of the great things about 3D printing is that you get to experiment with different sorts of new things. You can always test your hand at creating or improving models using new techniques.
+Many users wonder whether they can combine two different materials within a single 3D model.
+Simply put, users want to know if they can print, let’s say, a PLA component on an ABS base. They are curious to see if it would stick together and stay stable.
+If you’re one of those users, you’re in luck. I’m going to answer those questions and more in this article. As a bonus, I’ll also include some other tips and tricks to help you while printing with two different filament types. So, let’s get started.
+Can I 3D Print Different Types of Filament Together?
+Yes, it’s possible to 3D print different types of materials together, but not all materials are going to stick together very well. There are certain materials with complementary characteristics that enable them to be printed together relatively trouble-free.
+Let’s take a look at some of the most popular materials and how they stick to others.
+Does PLA Stick on Top of ABS, PETG & TPU for 3D Printing?
+PLA, short for (Poly Lactic Acid) is one of the most popular filaments out there. It enjoys widespread use due to its non-toxic nature, cheapness, and ease of print it offers.
+So, does PLA stick on top of other filaments?
+Yes, PLA can stick on top of other filaments like ABS, PETG, and TPU. Users have been combining PLA filaments with others to make multicolor prints. Also, they have been using these other filaments to serve as support structures for the PLA model.
+However, PLA doesn’t stick to all filaments well. For example, PLA and ABS fuse well and cannot be separated by conventional means. The same also goes for TPU.
+But when you try to print PLA with PETG, the resulting model can be separated with little mechanical force. Therefore, it is advisable to combine PLA and PETG only for support structures.
+When combining PLA with other filaments, keep in mind that failure can be very close if you take the wrong step. Many prints have failed due to the wrong settings and configurations.
+To ensure a smooth printing experience, here are some basic tips to follow:
+- Print hot and at a slow speed to avoid warping from the ABS.
+- Keep in mind that TPU sticks well to a PLA bottom layer, but PLA doesn’t adhere well to a TPU bottom layer.
+- When using PETG for support materials for PLA or vice versa, reduce the amount of separation required to zero.
+Does ABS Stick on Top of PLA, PETG & TPU for 3D Printing?
+ABS is another popular 3D printing filament. It is known for its good mechanical properties, low cost, and excellent surface finish.
+However, ABS does have its disadvantages, like the toxic fumes it gives off and its high sensitivity to temperature changes during printing. Nonetheless, it is still a popular material for printing among 3D printing enthusiasts.
+So, does ABS combine well with PLA, PETG, and TPU?
+Yes, ABS combines well with PLA and forms prints with good mechanical strength. It also fuses well with PETG because both of them have close temperature profiles and are chemically compatible. ABS combines well with TPU when it is the bottom layer, but you might have some trouble printing with ABS on TPU.
+For the best print quality, here are some printing tips to follow when printing ABS on top of other materials.
+- It is usually better to print at a slow speed.
+- Too much cooling with ABS can lead to the layers warping or stringing. Try and adjust the cooling temperature.
+- Print in an enclosed space if possible, or use an enclosed 3D printer. The Creality Enclosure on Amazon is a great option to control temperature.
+Does PETG Stick on Top of PLA, ABS & TPU in 3D Printing?
+PETG is a thermoplastic filament made from the same materials found in plastic water bottles and plastic food packaging. It is often viewed as a high-strength alternative to ABS.
+PETG provides almost all the positive properties ABS has to offer- good mechanical stress, smooth surface finish. It also has other great features including, ease of print, dimensional stability, and water resistance.
+So, for those looking to experiment with PETG, does it stick on top of other materials?
+Yes, PETG can stick on top of PLA, but the connection is not very strong. Both materials will separate if a little force is applied. PETG bonds well with ABS, but like PLA, most users have reported that the mechanical strength of the bond isn’t great. The print can still be functional, but it cannot be subjected to too much stress.
+Like other materials, it does with varying degrees of success depending on the filament type.
+PETG sticks well on top of TPU. The mechanical strength of the bond is decent and it can serve some functional purposes. However, you have to experiment for a while before you get the right print settings.
+To print PETG successfully, here are some tips:
+- As usual, make sure you print slowly for the first few layers.
+- Your extruder and hot end should be able to reach the temperatures required for PETG 245°C
+- It doesn’t warp like ABS so you can cool it faster.
+Does TPU Stick on Top of PLA, ABS & PETG in 3D Printing?
+TPU is a very intriguing 3D filament. It is a highly flexible elastomer capable of withstanding high tensile and compressive forces before it eventually fractures.
+Due to its durability, decent strength, and abrasion resistance, TPU is very popular in the printing community for making things like toys, seals, and even phone cases.
+So, can TPU stick on top of other materials?
+Yes, TPU can print and stick on top of other materials like PLA, ABS & PETG. Many people have had success combining these two materials within one 3D print. It’s a great way to add a unique and custom feel to your standard PLA 3D prints.
+So, if you are looking for a flexible rubber addition to your parts TPU is a great option to consider.
+For the best quality prints, here are some tips to consider:
+- Generally, when printing TPU, a slow speed like 30mm/s is best.
+- Use a direct drive extruder for the best results.
+- Keep the TPU filament in a dry place so it doesn’t absorb moisture in the environment
+How to Fix TPU not Sticking to Build Plate
+When printing TPU some people can have trouble getting it to stick to the build plate. A bad first layer can lead to a lot of print issues and failed prints.
+To combat this problem and help users get that perfect first-layer adhesion, we’ve put together some tips. Let’s take a look at them.
+Make Sure Your Build Plate Is Clean and Level
+The road to a great first layer starts with a level build plate. No matter the printer, if your build plate is not level, the filament may not stick to the build plate and can lead to a failed print.
+Before you start printing, make sure the build plate is level. Check out the video below for instructions on how to manually level your print bed.
+Using the method in the video below will easily show you which sides are too high or too low, so you can adjust the bed level as things are printing.
+Dirt and residue from other prints remaining from other prints can also interfere with TPU sticking to the build plate. They form uneven ridges on the print bed that interfere with printing.
+To get the best results, make sure you clean your build plate with a solvent like Isopropyl alcohol before printing.
+Use the Right Print Settings
+Using the wrong print settings can also interfere with the formation of a great first layer.
+The main settings you want to calibrate with TPU is:
+- Print Speed
+- First Layer Speed
+- Printing Temperature
+- Bed Temperature
+Let’s talk about speed first. Printing flexible filaments like TPU at high speed can lead to problems at the beginning of the print. It is better to go slow and steady.
+A speed that works for most users tends to be around the 15-25mm/s mark, and around 2mm/s for the first layer. With some types of TPU filament, they are designed to be able to print at higher speeds up to 50mm/s.
+You would have to properly tune up and calibrate your 3D printer, as well as use the right filament to achieve these results. I’d definitely have a direct drive extruder if you want to use higher speeds.
+Cura has a default initial layer speed of 20mm/s which should work well for getting your TPU to stick well to the build plate.
+Another setting is temperature. Both the print bed and the extruder temperature can affect a 3D printer’s build plate adhesion when it comes to flexible materials.
+TPU doesn’t require a heated build plate, but you can still experiment with it. Just make sure the bed temperature does not pass 60oC. The optimal extruder temperature for TPU is between 225-250oC depending on the brand.
+Coat the Print Bed with An Adhesive
+Adhesives like glue and hairspray can work wonders when it comes to first-layer adhesion. Everybody has their magic formula for sticking their prints to the build plate using adhesives.
+I recommend using a thin coat of glue like Elmer’s Disappearing Glue from Amazon. You can apply a thin coat of this glue to the build plate and spread it around with a wet tissue.
+Use a Reliable Bed Surface
+Having a reliable material for your bed surface can also work wonders, with a bed like BuildTak. Many people also have good results with a warm glass bed with PVA glue on it.
+Another bed surface that plenty of people vouch for is the Gizmo Dorks 1mm PEI Sheet from Amazon, which can be installed on any existing bed surface, ideally borosilicate glass since its flat. You won’t need other additional adhesives when using this bed surface.
+You can easily cut down the sheet to fit your 3D printer’s size. Simply remove both sides of the film from the product and install it. Users recommend using a brim to help you remove the prints after printing.
+Cover the Bed with Painter’s Tape
+You can also cover the print bed with a type of tape called Blue Painter’s tape or Kapton tape. This tape enhances the adhesive properties of the bed. It also makes it easier to remove the print once it’s done.
+I’d recommend going with ScotchBlue Original Multi-Purpose Blue Painter’s Tape from Amazon for your 3D printing bed adhesion.
+If you want to go with Kapton Tape, you can go with the CCHUIXI High Temperature 2-Inch Kapton Tape from Amazon. One user mentioned how they use this tape, then supplement it with either a layer of glue stick or unscented hairspray to help 3D prints stick.
+This can work very well for your TPU prints. You can leave the tape on your print bed for multiple 3D prints. Another user mentioned how Blue Painter’s Tape didn’t work very well for them, but after using this tape, ABS prints hold very nicely.
+If your print bed gets too hot, this tape can work well to cool it down and make sure it doesn’t bend or warp from the heat.
+When laying down the tape on the bed, make sure all the edges line up perfectly without overlap. Also, on average, you want to replace the tape after about five print cycles to keep it from losing its efficiency, though it can be longer.
+There you have it. I hope I’ve been able to answer your questions about combining filaments. I hope you have fun experimenting and creating with different material combinations.
+March, 2006
+A Bioinformatics Summit, organized by the Division of Allergy, Immunology and Transplantation (DAIT), was held on February 16-17, 2006 at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center. There were 94 participants in attendance the meeting on Feb. 16 and 41 people participated in group discussions on Feb. 17. The participants were from many NIH institutes including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National Institute on Aging (NIA), the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), the Center for Information Technology (CIT), and other Federal agencies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Additionally, non governmental organizations such as Oracle, Northrop Grumman, SAIC, SRA, Georgetown University and DAIT funded grantees and contractors attended.
+On the first day of the meeting, Dr. Daniel Rotrosen, Division Director of DAIT, started the meeting by discussing how bioinformatics fits into the broader mission of the Division and NIAID. The Associate Director of the Office of Biomedical Informatics, Cheryl Kraft, gave an overview of bioinformatics challenges in supporting clinical and basic immunology research. She discussed the NIH roadmap project for unifying clinical research, gave an example of different kinds of DAIT funded research, and highlighted the Bioinformatics Integration Support Contract (BISC) funded by DAIT to warehouse both clinical and basic research data generated by the DAIT funded research community. The meeting was organized into two sessions, one to highlight DAIT-funded bioinformatics activities and one to educate the participants about other NIH funded bioinformatics projects.
+In the first session of the summit, 10 speakers involved with projects and programs funded by DAIT described their projects and the bioinformatics challenges they face.
+Dr. Mark Musen from the Immune Tolerance Network (ITN) introduced his team’s approach to integrating clinical data from clinical trials with laboratory data from mechanistic studies. He proposed an ontology-based application that will treat concepts used in both clinical and basic research as the building blocks of a software application or a workflow pipeline. Using this kind of application, one can build case report forms used in clinical trials by pooling existing concepts and/or defining new concepts in the application. Additionally, project specific forms can be used to guide data elements in downstream data collection and these data elements will become the basis for data analysis. Dr. Musen described an application that may contain many modules such as an ontology browser, a case report form builder, a trial protocol builder, and a data format builder. Investigators can open the case report form builder and select data elements from the ontology browser to build forms for a clinical trial. Similar exercises can be done to define the process and data elements of data collection and data processing. Since the same ontology can be used for different clinical trials and different data collection processes, the data generated from those clinical trials and mechanistic studies can be easily integrated based on common concepts or ontology. If enhancement of the existing concepts is necessary, only the ontology needs to be changed, and all other changes in the data processing pipeline will be automatically implemented. When evaluating existing ontologies, Dr. Musen indicated that the existing ontologies for health care and life sciences such as SNOMED, MedDRA, and CDISC are used either by FDA to enforce government regulations or to manage patient care. They are lacking concepts to support basic life science research. Therefore, there is a definite need to expand existing ontologies to facilitate research oriented clinical and basic studies.
+Dr. Tiepu Liu and Dr. David Iklé introduced activities carried out by PPD in supporting DAIT funded clinical studies, including the ITN data coordinating center, the statistical and clinical coordinating center for the Cooperative Clinical Trials in Pediatric Transplantation (CCTPT) and the Clinical Trials in Organ Transplantation (CTOT) consortiums. At PPD, Oracle Clinical and Oracle RDC have been used as the database platforms to support bioinformatics activities such as clinical data collection, specimen tracking and data storage. Their system is enforced by controlled vocabularies such as CDISC, and MedRA. Their data models can generate object-oriented electronic Case Report Forms (eCRFs). Their system can also support data analyses utilizing the programs from Oracle clinical, SAS, SPlus, and JMP, etc. Dr. David Iklé emphasized that they made a special effort to share common data elements in protocol design with ITN in clinical trial protocols of both the CCTPT and the CTOT projects to leverage what has been developed and avoid redundant effort.
+Dr. Bjoern Peters from the Immune Epitope Database (IEDB) project gave an overview of the IEDB. He introduced the ontology developed by the IEDB team, ontology experts and by guided manual literature curation. He also demonstrated a query interface driven by ontology and controlled vocabularies. When discussing analysis tools, Dr. Peters introduced a web-based analysis platform that is used in the IEDB. The results of user queries can be easily streamlined in an analysis tool without data format changes or the need for copying and pasting. He emphasized the importance of developing a domain specific ontology in the early phase of the project. He also emphasized the importance of performing inter-field data validation and developing effective data exchange mechanisms such as XML for data submission to the IEDB, which ensures data quality in the IEDB.
+Dr. Herman Mitchell from Rho expressed his concern with the effort to define a unified process for all clinical studies. He believes that the variations among different clinical trials with different clinical phenotypes for different study objectives are the driving force to advance science and medicine. He suggested that we should pay special attention to preserving the ability to have clinical variations when unifying common data elements. He was concerned that a common structure would not allow for the variability that is inherent in clinical research. Dr. Dennis Wallace from Rho introduced their data management system to support the Autoimmunity Centers of Excellence (ACE). He emphasized the importance of keeping the raw data collection separate from the processed data for analysis. He also emphasized the efforts of multi-level data validation from the time of data collection to the point of data analysis.
+Dr. Daniel R. Salomon, Principal Investigator (PI) of the Genomics for Kidney Transplantation Program funded by DAIT, presented the bioinformatics challenges within his program. Dr. Salomon emphasized the uncertainties in research at the cutting edge of science. Large scale and high throughput research platforms are used in his program, such as gene chips to detect gene expression profiles, SNP chips for genome typing, tandem mass spectrometry to study proteomics of transplantation. as well as integrated analysis to leverage the results generated from different research platforms. There are technological challenges in research ranging from how to compare results across experimental platforms to what quality assurance is necessary to evaluate the quality of research results, to how to organize the data for analysis. There are also challenges in clinical practices, such as the lack of standards in sample collection procedures, sample preparation protocols at each clinic, sample storage conditions, RNA, DNA and protein isolation at each lab, sample amplification, and probe labeling. Dr. Salomon emphasized the need to build a bioinformatics infrastructure to support new types of research in the genomic era.
+Dr. Richard H. Scheuermann and Dr. David Karp, PI and co-PI of the BISC project, introduced the Immport system. Dr. Scheuermann focused his presentation on methods for capturing experimental data generated from various research platforms. He presented challenges in supporting current immunological research, such as genetics studies, genomic analyses, large-scale gene expression analyses, cellular studies of immune cells, and in proteomics studies. He emphasized the need for data models to capture the metadata of experiments that are as detailed as possible and as flexible as possible. He also emphasized the need for a controlled vocabulary in data capture and ontology driven knowledge inferences to make the archived data more useful for long-term use by the research community, the ultimate goal of NIH data sharing policy. Dr. David Karp emphasized that new types of bioinformatics activities such as the centralized data archive created in the BISC project, have required changes to the IRB process and patient consent. He raised the issue that lack of an NIH-wide guidance to protect patient privacy when sharing the data generated by genome wide genotyping studies is a problem.
+Dr. Donald Stablein, the president of EMMES Corporation, presented their newly developed web-based system to manage clinical trials. He said that EMMES decided to build this new system in 1999 since the old system was not able to handle the rapidly growing requests to support new clinical trials. The new system has a web form builder developed in 2000, an offline data entry and forms caching capability built in 2003, protocol monitoring and automatic MedDRA processing modules deployed in 2004, and query resolution and file attachment modules launched in 2005. Currently, their new system manages over 40 projects, more than 250 protocols, and coordinates clinical studies carried out at over 1000 sites on all continents. Their experience clearly shows the effectiveness of a well-built bioinformatics support system in managing clinical studies.
+In the second session of the summit, invited speakers from non-DAIT funded projects gave the audience a broader view of what bioinformatics support can do to help biomedical research. Dr. Kevin Becker from NIA introduced their low budget, but on demand database, which stores genetic association study results abstracted from published literature. Mr. Eric Miller, coordinator of semantic web technology in health care and life sciences from W3C.org, emphasized that in order to build a flexible system, we need to focus on building modules with common interfaces that can glue the modules together. Dr. Jeffrey Grethe, the scientific coordinator of the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) project funded by National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), introduced their experience in managing the storage of large brain imaging files at different sites and the integrated analyses of image files generated by different investigators. These files also contain meta-data and use a unique imaging calibration approach.
+Mr. Joe Mychaleckyj from the Type 1 Diabetes Genetics Consortium (T1DGC) introduced what they learned in supporting a large worldwide genetics study of Type I diabetes. Many synergies exist between the T1DGC and the BISC projects. Several data types used in the T1DGC project such as the HLA typing data, SNP genotyping data, and genetic analysis tools are very similar to the data types managed by the BISC project. The analysis tools used by the T1DGC are also very similar to the tools needed by the Population Genetics and HLA Region Genetics projects supported by the BISC program. The T1DGC was willing to share their data model to manage disease phenotype with the BISC team, such as managing the demographic and physiological traits of patients, tools for genomic analysis, genetic database ontology, and their experiences in balancing patient privacy and research data dissemination.
+Dr. Peter Covitz from NCI introduced interoperability in the cancer biomedical informatics grid (caBIG) project. He indicated that the key challenge in interoperability encountered by the cancer research community is in the area of data interpretation consistency when data are accessed and analyzed at a central repository and at individual research site. To deal with these two key areas, NCI compiled a series of caBIG compatibility guidelines and funded various efforts to define programming and messaging interfaces in an attempt to enforce syntactic interoperability. At the same time, NCI put together ontologies, common data elements and information models to facilitate semantic interoperability. NCI hopes that these efforts will lay a foundation for federated data integration in the cancer research community.
+On the second day, two separate groups were created by random assignment comprised of people from the audience and invited speakers. These groups were given the task of discussing a set of questions developed by the NIAID Program Officers aimed at resolving the issues raised in the previous day’s presentations. One group discussion was facilitated by Dr. Mark Musen from Stanford and the other group discussion was facilitated by Dr. Richard Scheuermann from University of the Texas Southwestern. After one and a half hours of discussion, the two groups came together, exchanged their comments, and gave the following comments and recommendations.
+Participants agreed that the foundation for data integration and data sharing is data standards. To establish a widely accepted set of data standards, we need to identify common needs within the research community and take an approach that will allow the community to define and agree upon the best set of standards for immunology research rather than NIAID dictating the standards that should be used. In order to formulate a user-friendly set of data standards in a rapidly changing biomedical research field, we need to build a dynamic, flexible and sustainable infrastructure to manage data standards and integrate data standards with working databases and applications at each individual site. It is essential that NIAID take the lead in organizing groups to work toward data standards and provide adequate funding to individual research sites to support this effort.
+Lack of interoperability of data is the main problem. It implies the need for standards.
+Is a unified common data element resource such as the resource in CaBIG necessary for the immunology community?
+There is a need for flexibility but there is also a need for core elements. Standards should be developed locally that can be mapped back to broader standards. We should start simple and focus on a shared vocabulary, not necessarily complex ontologies.
+The NIAID/NIH may accomplish this through its funding resources, leadership, better coordination among institutes, and incorporation of the general immunology community.
+back to top
+Last Updated July 17, 2006
+Dissemination activities in the former Yugoslavia
+02-09-1996 Operational Update
+Throughout the war in the former Yugoslavia, the most basic of humanitarian rules were consistently ignored and deliberately flouted. From the outset, ICRC delegates worked relentlessly to prevent violations and -- through bilateral contacts, the local media, seminars and the distribution of publications -- urged combatants on all sides to respect international humanitarian law (IHL) in their conduct of hostilities. Promoting the Red Cross, its aims and working principles, was and still is an integral part of the ICRC's operation in this region.
+Now that the guns are silent, the climate is more favourable and people are more receptive to a humanitarian message, although regretfully this was not the case when the conflict was in full swing. Soldiers and civilians alike feel concerned about what happened to them during the war and would not like to see it repeated. Thus, in addition to its usual assistance and protection activities, the ICRC's programme to disseminate IHL to soldiers and to spread traditional human values among members of the different communities appears as a very concrete step towards lasting peace.
+The law of war and the armed forces
+It's an encouraging sign: the armed forces in the former Yugoslavia are increasingly open to the idea of integrating IHL into their training programmes. The moment is propitious, as all of them are in the process of restructuring. The ICRC has seized the moment to approach the respective Ministries of Defence, and agreements have already been signed for coopera tion in this field in the medium and long term.
+What is international humanitarian law?
+International humanitarian law (IHL), or the law of war as it is also known, is a set of rules established by treaties or custom which are specifically intended to solve humanitarian problems directly arising from international or non-international armed conflicts. They limit, for humanitarian reasons, the right of the parties to a conflict to choose the methods and means of warfare and they protect persons and property that are, or may be, affected by conflict. IHL is composed of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977, which aim to safeguard military personnel who are placed hors de combat and persons not taking part in hostilities, and of the Law of The Hague, which determines the rights and duties of belligerents in the conduct of operations and limits the choice of methods of warfare. Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Conventions also largely pertains to the conduct of hostilities.
+In the Republic of Croatia, the ICRC and the Croatian army signed an agreement in November 1995; since then, a total of 75 senior officers have already taken part in a three-day basic course and received materials to help them pass on what they learned to their subordinates, junior officers and soldiers. As a complement to this basic course, ten officers were designated by the Ministry of Defence to become future IHL instructors. As part of a special ICRC workshop they were given the opportunity to conduct law of war courses, which included the war game BATEX (Battalion Exercise, see box below).
+In April, in a three-day seminar on IHL and human rights held in Zagreb, 17 senior officers of the Military Police were introduced to the relevant bodies of law covering various situations of violence, ranging from in peacetime to in times of international armed conflict. Special emphasis was laid on the problem of arrest and detention. A dissemination programme for members of the joint Croatian-Serb police force to be deployed in Eastern Slavonia also got under way; to date, more than 450 Serbian police officers have attended one-hour presentations.
+In the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia , a similar programme of dissemination to the armed forces is expected to begin in the last quarter of 1996, after a framework agreement for cooperation in the dissemination of IHL, effective for a five-year period, was signed with the Federal Ministry of Defence on 10 July.
+In Bosnia and Herzegovina , six seminars have so far been conducted for the respective armed forces (VRS, HVO and ARBIH) in Banja Luka, Mostar, Sarajevo, Tuzla and Zenica. A total of 150 senior officers were able to benefit. A first Trainers'Workshop held in Capljina (south of Mostar) provided the basis for a continuous IHL training course for the HVO: 25 battalion commanders and staff officers were instructed in the use of the ICRC teaching file, translated into their language. Similar events are scheduled to cover the forces of the Republika Srpska and of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
+The ICRC has expressed its willingness to contribute to the education of senior officers with responsibility for national training by granting them scholarships to take part in the international military course on the law of armed conflict at the San Remo Institute for Humanitarian Law in Italy and the international military course for national instructors on the law of ar med conflict in Geneva. In so doing, the ICRC hopes to ensure that coherent IHL training programmes are developed and implemented.
+Is it worth it?
+According to officers attending the course, who had experienced the war, the scope of the subject matter dealt with in the seminar was "enough to have a positive influence on the participants in an armed conflict." Their comments at the end of the course:
+"In my opinion there would have been much less evil perpetrated in areas of the former Yugoslavia if such seminars had been organized for all the warring parties at the very beginning of the conflict. However, it's never too late to inform soldiers and their superiors about IHL norms for the sake of generations to come.""As for the law of war, I was acquainted with a lot of things before, but this seminar taught me how to transfer this knowledge to my subordinates.""Try to organize as many such seminars as possible for the other side. Thank you."
+In central Europe a delegate for dissemination to the armed forces (DAF) based in both Zagreb and Budapest has the task of disseminating IHL in an area stretching from Poland to Greece; for three months he was assisted in Bosnia and Herzegovina by an IHL instructor from the ICRC pool, freed of his routine obligations by the Australian Defence Forces. Due to the success of his three-month mission, the ICRC now intends to train and deploy a permanent DAF delegate in the region for a two-year stretch.
+BATEX : Soldiers learn the relevance of IHL
+The ICRC's message to senior officers is simple: military missions can be accomplished, often more efficiently, while respecting the law of war. Their individual responsibility is the execution of their mission in such a manner that a normal situation can be rapidly restored after the fighting. BATEX (Battalion Exercise), the war game developed by the ICRC, is an interactive training tool in form of a map exercise. Tactical operations of attack and defence have to be planned and conducted by the students, who must try to cause the least suffering and damage while achieving their military objective. They are challenged to integrate humanitarian considerations, such as how to deal with civilians, the wounded, prisoners, cultural objects, etc., into the planning and execution process. The four stages of the game are preceded by introductions to IHL, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and the ICRC, control of armed conflict, the law of neutrality, command responsibility, behaviour in action and the law of occupation. Further exercises (from brigade to platoon level) are currently being developed by the ICRC.
+The ICRC Division for Dissemination to the Armed Forces consists of a team of eight specialized field delegates world-wide, assisted by five delegates at headquarters and 25 IHL instructors who are available for short-term missions of up to six months; all of them are experienced military commanders. A small pool of police specialists will reinforce the unit in the near future .
+Think mines !
+Nobody really knows how many landmines and unexploded ordnance are scattered throughout the former Yugoslavia. Official estimates tend towards 7 million f or the region. The mines are mainly concentrated in areas along the former confrontation lines, but as these often ran through cities and moved back and forth, the mines could be anywhere, hidden by grass and dirt. Children, who are naturally curious, farmers tending their land, and displaced people returning to their former homes in deserted villages are specifically at risk. The process of removing landmines is very slow and very costly: in 30 years there will still be people injured by mine explosions in the region.
+" All through the war we had people brought to us in pieces whom we tried to patch together. With the end of the war we thought that would be over. But now all these civilians come in with mine injuries, many of them children. It is unbearable! " bewails the head of the traumatology department in Kosevo hospital in Sarajevo. To reduce the number of victims, the ICRC has launched a mine-awareness campaign designed to make everybody " think mines " wherever they go.
+ICRC mine awareness campaign
+The objective of this campaign is to alter people's attitudes and behaviour with regard to landmines and unexploded devices as long as they remain in the ground. It was initiated in spring 1996 and is based on two pillars:
+- A nation-wide media campaign with the aim of apprising as wide a public as possible of the dangers of landmines and instilling in them a sense of personal responsibility for their own protection. TV and radio spots, posters and leaflets were devised in Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb so as to be appropriate for all target groups, whichever of the local languages they speak.
+A programme run with the Red Crosses of the region to train a group of local trainers, who will then spread their knowledge within their community and alter there attitudes and behaviour with regard to landmines.
+The strong involvement of the local community, Red Cross societies and local structures and their extended networks at this stage is essential, as they will need to take over once the ICRC leaves. Relying on local structures such as these also facilitates the gathering of important information, such as:
+- What is risk-taking behaviour?
+- Who is taking the risk?
+- What is the rate of accidents reported in specific areas?
+Appropriate messages can then be formulated for the different publics at risk.
+In the Republic of Croatia , since March 115,000 brochures and 10,000 posters on mines have been distributed to Red Cross branches in the areas deemed to be most contaminated by landmines and unexploded devices. Radio and TV spots were delivered to ten local radio and three TV stations, with a request that they be played twice daily. Since then, three new TV spots, two radio spots, three print advertisements and new posters were produced and will be distributed. Children's exercise books with mine information are currently being printed, for distribution at the beginning of the next school year.
+The training programme has also taken a step forward: one Croatian Red Cross Programme Coordinator and eight ICRC locally employed field officers have been educ ated as " master trainers " , who will now teach local Red Cross volunteers. The volunteers have been selected and their training phase should start by end-August in Vukovar, then in Osijek, Knin and Vojnic: the target is to have 100 trained volunteers by the end of September. Specific didactic material in Croatian and Serbian has been prepared for them, including a 20-page flipchart combining photos and drawings, a teaching guide, wooden models of mines, examples of mine markings and leaflets for general distribution.
+In Bosnia and Herzegovina , since mid-April two spots have been broadcast twice a day by five TV stations; ten spots have been broadcast four to five times a day by 20 radio stations; 150,000 leaflets written in Serbian Cyrillic and in Bosnian were distributed; 37,000 posters were printed. The training programme was initiated, with six ICRC local field officers from Bjeljina, Gorazde, Pale, Trebinje, Tuzla and Zenica educated as " master trainers " , who will now impart their knowledge to local Red Cross volunteers. Most of the volunteers in both the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska have been selected and a first training workshop has taken place in Trebinje; the target is to have 60 of them trained by mid-September. Some 500 T-shirts with the slogan " Think mines " were printed for children taking part in summer camps.
+Reviving humanitarian values
+Five years of war in the area will undoubtedly leave a deep scar on the collective consciousness of the people for many years to come and threatens to undermine the basic humanitarian values necessary for social stability. The impressionable minds of young people are especially affected. They have grown up in the midst of war and the intense hatred it has engendered, when all community-based activities f or young people have virtually disappeared. The absence of meaningful activities may lead them to explore damaging alternatives, such as mindless violence, alcoholism or drug abuse. Conducting educational programmes for community schools may help revive traditional humanitarian values among the young people.
+In the Republic of Croatia , the youth department of the Red Cross (with an existing network of 107 branches) came to an agreement with the Ministry of Education that one hour a week would be made available to the Red Cross in the primary and secondary schools. This provided the opportunity for the Red Cross to develop a programme in cooperation with the ICRC called " Promoting Red Cross Ideas and Activities in Croatian Schools " . The idea is to motivate young people in a positive, constructive manner, encouraging them to respect and care for others and create Red Cross youth structures in their schools. By the end of 1996, some 150 volunteer teachers in 150 schools throughout the former war zones will be trained as initiators of Red Cross activities in their schools, translating humanitarian ideas into action.
+In the course of a three-day workshop teachers are acquainted with the history of the Red Cross and the fundamental principles, are taught interactive educational methods and receive didactic material. Two workshops for 50 teachers representing 40 schools in the municipalities of Slavonski Brod, Zupanja and Vinkovci (Eastern Slavonia) have already taken place; more are planned in Vukovar, Osijek, Knin, Vojnic and Okucani, thus covering the whole territory. Six ICRC field officers in five sub-delegations received ten days'training in July so as to be able to further develop this programme all over Croatia. Their task is to train teachers and to support and supervise youth initiatives.
+The most humanitarian person in the world
+Teachers are taught to encourage participants in their courses to interact using exercises such as this:
+Participants are split up into four groups and are given a large sheet of paper with a picture of a smiling face, entitled "the most humanitarian person in the world". Underneath are three headings: a) behaviour in everyday life; b) behaviour in times of social tension; c) behaviour in times of war. The groups then list what they think are the relevant attributes under each heading, after which they present their thoughts for discussion with the other participants.
+In Bosnia and Herzegovina, a team of seven local dissemination officers were trained to carry out a continuous dissemination programme throughout the territory. They have developed a master dissemination presentation file, which can be adapted to the various target audiences, and have been equipped with appropriate audio-visual materials. To date, six seminars have been held in Banja Luka, Gorazde and Trebinje for some 120 members of the International Police Task Force (IPTF). Further sessions are planned for such publics as the local Red Cross branches, the IPTF and IFOR. In the Republika Srpska, the local Red Cross, with the ICRC's financial support, is organizing summer camps for young people at its centre in Modrica. For the first time in five years, children aged 8-13 are able to enjoy a holiday, with activities centred on the Red Cross: four shifts of 50 children each are given some first-aid knowledge and shown activities to enhance solidarity to perform once they are back at school. With regard to the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, summer camps were organized by the Maglaj, Bihac and Cazin local Red Cross branches for a total of 220 children injured or orphaned by the war. In each of these camps the ICRC takes charge of two days, with games and activities around the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and its seven principles, as well as around landmine awareness.
+Dissemination team
+Six dissemination delegates, two mine-awareness advisers and two DAF delegates take care of the ICRCs dissemination activities in the former Yugoslavia. They do so with the support of 27 locally hired staff.
+INTERVIEW
+Greg Ross
+Einstein wrote that "pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas." If that's so, then Donald Coxeter (1907–2003) was one of the foremost such poets of the 20th century. Born in London, the mathematician studied under Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge and did postgraduate studies at Princeton, but he established his name during a remarkable 60-year tenure at the University of Toronto, during which he revitalized the fallow field of classical geometry, driven by an almost obsessive love of its beauty.
+Coxeter was 94 when journalist Siobhan Roberts profiled him in an article for Toronto Life, following him to the last geometry conference he would attend, in Budapest in the summer of 2002. The article, "Figure Head," won a National Magazine Award, and Roberts has expanded it into a book-length biography, King of Infinite Space (Walker & Co.). She's also developing a documentary film on Coxeter. American Scientist Online managing editor Greg Ross interviewed Roberts by e-mail in November 2006.
+How was geometry regarded when Coxeter came to the field?
+When I was first getting to know Coxeter and followed him to geometry conferences in Banff and Budapest, his colleagues and admirers kept telling me, "This is the man who saved geometry from extinction." So it's well known among the cognoscenti that classical geometry was considered old-fashioned and in decline, if not nearly dead, by the time Coxeter embarked on his career in the 1930s—it had been relegated to a recreation, a trivial tinkering with toys and something fun to do on a Sunday afternoon, but certainly not worth staking a career on. The fashionable trends in mathematics tended toward the abstract and algebraic—prickly, undulating equations but no shapes and diagrams. The epitome of this trend was the Bourbakis, a secret society of crème-de-la-crème French mathematicians founded in the 1930s. When Bourbaki was at its peak, circa 1960, one of the founding members, Jean Dieudonné, the Bourbaki scribe, famously declared, "Death to triangles!"—that sums it up rather graphically, so to speak.
+Did Coxeter see it differently? What attracted him?
+He did truly did "see" it differently—he was attracted by the very visual and hands-on quality of geometry. He loved polytopes, a class of shapes that reside in any number of dimensions. Polytopes include two-dimensional polygons, like the triangle, and three-dimensional polyhedra, like the five Platonic solids (the cube and the tetrahedron are perhaps the most common, but there's also the octahedron, the icosahedron and the dodecahedron). Coxeter was particularly fond of trying to envision higher-dimensional polytopes, and the fourth dimension, he said, was his favorite. Usually the fourth dimension is thought of as time, but dimensions can be thought of simply as extra coordinates that quantify existence—say, the daily temperature, or President Bush's poll numbers. Geometers, naturally, prefer to think of the fourth dimension in terms of space. Coxeter was so preoccupied with the fourth dimension when he was a teenager that he was dismally behind on some of the mathematical basics. To compensate, when he was cramming for the entrance exams to Cambridge, his tutor forbade him from thinking in four dimensions except on Sundays.
+Polytopes became an enduring passion, and he spent much of his career investigating and classifying the symmetries of these shapes. Today his work on symmetries is applied in pretty much every realm of science—for example, his "Coxeter groups" are being used by string theorists in conjunction with Einstein's gravity equations in the search for supersymmetry. Of course, these applications were inadvertent as far as Coxeter was concerned. He was a huge fan of the rational nonsense that runs through Alice in Wonderland, and when I asked him to explain why, he said, "It's like reading about a part of mathematics that you know is beautiful but that you don't quite understand. Like string theory. That's as much a mystery to me as it is to anyone who can't make head nor tail of the 11th or 16th dimension."
+So he was interested more in pure mathematics than in applications?
+Coxeter was a pure mathematician, yes. But he didn't observe the rigid divide that sometimes separates the pure and applied sciences. His curiosity was piqued by applications in nature. He was particularly fond of a phenomenon called "phyllotaxis," which describes the "leaf arrangement" of certain plants whose leaves or buds or petals grow in patterns governed by the golden ratio (1:1.618)—pineapples and sunflowers are two examples, and Coxeter was known to grow his own sunflowers and bring them to class with the whorl of their seeds highlighted with dots of red nail polish. He was also interested in the spacetime continuum and the shape of viruses (the common cold, which I'm fighting at the moment, is the shape of an icosahedron—a spheroid structure comprised of 20 triangles). It is interesting to note, though, that Coxeter was never interested in applications pertaining to computers; computers were the bridge too far for him. There is a funny story about him collaborating with a communications man, Gord Lang, providing some sphere-packing research for Lang's work to develop a modem, but when Coxeter was presented with the application he was a tad horrified. He always thought computers would lure students away from pure mathematics.
+Ironically, as it turns out, the computer has been a big force behind geometry's renaissance. The antigeometry trend of the early to mid-20th century was largely due to the fact that geometry, with its shapes and diagrams, was visual, and the visual sense, being subjective, was fallible and allowed the geometer to be led astray and to succumb to erroneous visual reasoning. Modern mathematicians sought a more rigorous and rational methodology, and algebra, with equations either balancing or not, provided that certainty. When geometry merged with the computer, however, the uncertainty of the visual component was eliminated—because the computer has all the algebraic axioms programmed in and won't allow the user to take an errant path or make any of those visual mistakes. So computers provide the geometer with better tools, with a souped-up geometry kit.
+Coxeter became friends with the graphic artist M. C. Escher. How did this inform Escher's work?
+The two struck up a correspondence, and a collaboration of sorts, after they crossed paths in 1954 at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam. One of Coxeter's geometric figures—a tiling of the hyperbolic plane—directly inspired the artist's Circle Limit III prints, depicting a sphere full of multicolored fish that become infinitely smaller and smaller as they swim off the orb's horizon. When Escher worked on his Circle Limit series he would say, "I'm Coxetering today!" But Escher accomplished his mathematically inspired art sheerly by intuition, relying on Coxeter's geometric pictures, because Escher had no training in mathematics. Coxeter was always delighted by Escher's pieces, and wrote several papers about them and sent the artist letters full of mathematical analysis. Escher always maintained he understood not a word of Coxeter's explanations, dismissing it all as Coxeter's "hocus-pocus math."
+What of his relationship with Buckminster Fuller? Fuller wasn't a trained mathematician either.
+Coxeter had all the patience in the world for amateurs, but his regard for "Bucky," as he came to call him, ran hot and cold. Even before he met Fuller in 1968, Coxeter was entranced by Fuller's geodesic domes—he first saw one at Expo '67 in Montreal, where a geodesic dome was built as the American Pavilion, and subsequently when Coxeter's cottage burned down he contemplated a geodesic dome as a replacement, though this never came to pass, probably because it was too expensive for the penny-pincher in Coxeter.
+But at times Coxeter found it difficult to stomach Fuller's tendency to take perhaps more credit than was his due—Fuller, for example, liked to rename things, and he gave the name vector equilibrium to a solid that had long been known as the cube octahedron, which miffed Coxeter. Bucky, perhaps to compensate for his lack of training, also had great bravado and gave talks with a lot of hype. As a result, Fuller became more famous for his polyhedra work than the original polyhedral adventurers. And in turn, the carbon 60 molecule, when it was discovered in 1985, was named the buckminsterfullerene, which also dismayed Coxeter—the structure of C60 was one of the Archimedean solids, the truncated icosahedron, so Coxeter felt it would have been better named after the great Archimedes.
+Coxeter didn't have much patience for this aspect of Bucky's persona, but he admired his work, and over the years they enjoyed a steady correspondence and exchanged intellectual gifts of various kinds, sending ideas and papers and models back and forth. And Fuller dedicated his book Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking to Coxeter, praising him as "the geometer of our bestirring twentieth century ... and in thanks to all the geometers of all time whose importance to humanity he epitomizes." Coxeter was flattered with the dedication but didn't think so highly of the book.
+It's commonly said that math is a young man's game, but Coxeter was still active in his nineties. What accounts for this, do you think?
+His daily headstands, perhaps—Coxeter often joked that taking up his father's habit of a headstand every morning before breakfast was his intellectual elixir, and he kept doing them into his 90s. I once asked him why he kept at geometry into old age, and he said that he considered himself an artist, and like any other artist he was driven by an all-consuming obsession—it was just that his obsession was for patterns and shapes. Whatever the reason—"use it or lose it" must also have made a difference—Coxeter simply had a superior brain. It's being studied by the neuroscientist Sandra Witelson at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and she's also studying Einstein's brain. Her results on Coxeter's brain so far indicate that he, like Einstein, had an abnormally large parietal lobe—and, fittingly enough, this is the region of the brain responsible for visual thinking and spatial reasoning. I went to visit Witelson a couple of months ago, and I not only saw Coxeter's brain, which Witelson said was remarkably plump and not nearly as atrophied as you would expect for a man his age (he was 96 when he died, although he had the brain of a much younger man), but I also held Coxeter's brain, and that experience defies description. Writing his biography, I'd spent four years trying to get into the man's head, reading all his diaries and letters, and then there was the essence of his being, the organ that guided his thoughts, resting in my hands.
+Did he achieve everything he set out to do?
+He once remarked that he had more problems percolating through his mind than he would ever have time to address, so his curiosity as a geometer would never be satiated. He regretted in retrospect that he had spent so much time on his career and had not given enough attention to his family. Though at the same time, at the end of his life he was frustrated and saddened that his body was betraying his mind, and that he couldn't keep going with geometry—a couple days before he died he was pulling books on "convexity" off his bookshelf and starting another paper for yet another conference he had been invited to, in Budapest. But in terms of one tangible thing, he once told me he wished he had collaborated directly with his longtime friend Paul Erdös and achieved the coveted status of an Erdös number of 1 [signifying a direct collaboration with the prolific Hungarian mathematician]. Coxeter had to settled for an Erdös 2, via his collaboration with John Horton Conway at Princeton, which of course is nothing to sniff at. Conway is a huge fan of Coxeter's and his work, and in many ways is considered Coxeter's spiritual successor as a geometer.
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+HYMN TO APHRODITE
+THE ORPHIC HYMN TO APHRODITE
+FOTO: Twice25 & Rinina25 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. File:Caserta-reggia-15-4-05 177.jpg - Wikimedia
+55. Εἰς Ἀφροδίτην.
+HellenicGods.org
+HOME GLOSSARY RESOURCE ART LOGOS CONTACT
+Introduction to the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodíti
+In the Mystíria (Mysteries; Gr. Gr. Μυστήρια) we speak of Ouranía (Gr. Οὐρανία) Aphrodíti (Aphrodite; Gr. Ἀφροδίτη) whose dominion is the Natural Law of Harmony, for it is she who harmonizes the soul, mythologically represented by her union with Áris (Ares; Gr. Ἄρης) producing the child Armonía (Harmonia; Gr. Ἁρμονία). The Orphic hymn to this most important Goddess opens with the epithet (Οὐρανία) immediately calling all this to mind. But the bulk of the hymn glorifies her other, more familiar aspect, that of Pándimos (the common or popular; Gr. Πάνδημος) Aphrodíti, she who blesses the physical union of mortals. The hymn heaps praise upon her ability to cause the reproduction of all the creatures of the Kózmos (Cosmos; Gr. Κόσμος). It can be easy to forget in a world which seems to condemn sex, that our religion has a different point of view: procreation is so essential that it is sacred. And it is blessed and governed by this most beautiful of Goddesses of Ællinismόs (Hellenismos; Gr. Ἑλληνισμός), the ancient Greek religion. And then near the end, the hymn invokes sacred Ádohnis (Adonis; Gr. Ἄδωνις), representative of the deification of the soul, tying the poem together with its beginning, reminding us again that she is also Ouranía, the great transcendent Goddess of the Sky. Let us now examine the hymn and get closer to lovely Aphrodíti.
+The original ancient Greek text
+55. Εἰς Ἀφροδίτην, ὕμνος.
+Οὐρανίη, πολύυμνε, φιλομμειδὴς Ἀφροδίτη, 1η, ζεύκτειρα, δολοπλόκε μῆτερ ἀνάγκης·
+πάντα γὰρ ἐκ σέθεν ἐστίν, ὑπεζεύξω δέ τε κόσμον·
+καὶ κρατέεις τρισσῶν μοιρῶν, γεννᾷς δὲ τὰ πάντα, 5
+ὅσσα τ’ ἐν οὐρανῳ ἐστι καὶ ἐν γαίῃ πολυκάρπῳ,
+ἐν πόντου τε βυθῷ· σεμνὴ Βάκχοιο πάρεδρε,
+τερπομένη θαλίῃσι, γαμοστόλε, μῆτερ ἐρώτων·
+πειθοῖ λεκτροχαρής, κρυφίη, χαριδῶτι ἄνασσα,
+φαινομένη τ’, ἀφανής τ’, ἐρατοπλόκαμ’, εὐπατέρεια, 10
+νυμφιδίη, σύνδαιτε, θεῶν σκηπτοῦχε, λύκαινα·
+γεννοδότειρα, φίλανδρε, ποθεινοτάτη, βιοδῶτι·
+ἐνζεύξασα βροτοὺς ἀχαλινώτοισιν ἀνάγκαις,
+καὶ θηρῶν πολὺ φῦλον, ἐρωμανέων ὑπὸ φίλτρων·
+ἔρχεο, Κυπρογενὲς θεῖον γένος, εἴτ’ ἐν’ Ὀλύμπῳ 15
+ἐσσί, θεὰ βασίλεια, καλῷ γήθουσα προσώπῳ,
+εἴτε καὶ εὐλιβάνου Συρίης ἕδος ἀμφιπολεύεις,
+εἴτε σύ γ’ ἐν πεδίοισι σὺν ἅρμασι χρυσεοτεύκτοις
+Αἰγύπτου κατέχεις ἱερῆς γονιμώδεα λουτρά,
+ἢ καὶ κυανέοισιν ὄχοις ἐπὶ πόντιον οἶδμα 20
+ἐρχομένη χαίρεις νεπόδων κυκλίῃσι χορείαις·
+ἢ νύμφαις τέρπῃ κυανώπισιν ἐν χθονὶ Δίᾳ,
+θυιὰς ἐπ’ αἰγιαλοῖς ψαμμώδεσιν ἅλματι κούφῳ·
+εἴτ’ ἐν Κύπρῳ, ἄνασσα, τροφῷ σέο· ἔνθα καλαί σε
+παρθένοι ἀδμῆται νύμφαι τ’ ἀνὰ πάντ’ ἐνιαυτὸν 25
+ὑμνοῦσιν, σέ, μάκαιρα, καὶ ἄμβροτον ἁγνὸν Ἄδωνιν.
+ἐλθέ, μάκαιρα θεά, μάλ’ ἐπήρατον εἶδος ἔχουσα·
+ψυχῇ γάρ σε καλῶ σεμνῇ ἁγίοισι λόγοισιν.
+Reuchlinian transliteration of the ancient Greek text:
+(See this page: Transliteration of Ancient Greek)
+55. Eis Aphrodítin.
+Ouraníi, polýimnæ, philommeidís Aphrodíti, 1
+pondoyænís, yænǽteira thæá, philopánnykhæ, sæmní,
+nyktæríi, Zéfkteira, doloplókæ mítær anángis;
+pánda gar æk sǽthæn æstín, ypæzéfxoh dæ kózmon;
+kai kratǽeis trissóhn miróhn, yænnás dæ ta pánda, 5
+óssa t'æn ouranó æstí kai æn yaii polykárpo,
+æn póndou tæ vythó, sæmní Vákkhio párædræ,
+tærpomǽni thalíisi, gamostólæ mítær æróhtohn;
+Peithí læktrokharís, kryphíi, kharidóhti ánassa,
+phainomǽni, t'aphanís t’ æratoplókam' efpatǽreia, 10
+nymphidíi, sýndaitæ, thæóhn skiptoukhæ, lýkaina;
+yænnodóteira, phílandræ, potheinotáti, viodóhti;
+ænzéfxasa vrotous akhalinóhtisin anángais,
+kai thiróhn polý phýlon, ærohmanǽohn ypó phíltrohn;
+ǽrkhæo, Kyproyænǽs theion yǽnos, eit' æn' Olýmpo 15
+æssí, thæá vasíleia, kaló yíthousa prosóhpo,
+eitæ kai evlivánou Syríis ǽdos amphipoléveis,
+eitæ si y' æn pædíisi syn ármasi khrysæotéfktis
+Aiyíptou katǽkheis iærís gonimóhdæa loutrá,
+i kai kianǽisin ókhis æpí póndion ídma 20
+ærkhomǽni khaireis næpódohn kyklíisi khoreiais;
+i nýmphais tǽrpii kyanóhpisin æn khthoní Día,
+thiás æp' aiyialís psammóhdæsin álmati koupho;
+eit' æn Kýpro, ánassa, trophó sǽo; ǽntha kalai sæ
+parthǽni admítai nýmphai t' aná pánd' æniaftón 25
+ymnousin, sæ, mákaira, kai ámvroton agnón Ádohnin.
+ælthǽ, mákaira thæá, mál' æpíraton eidos ǽkhousa;
+psykhí gar sæ kalóh sæmní ayíisi lóyisin.
+BREAKDOWN OF THE HYMN
+Εἰς (in regard to) Ἀφροδίτην. (Aphrodíti) - Ἀφροδίτην is the epic accusative of Ἀφροδίτη which follows the preposition εἰς, a convention in some titles of hymns. Unlike most of the hymns, there is no suggestion for an incense offering; this author likes to offer her powdered rose petals as this flower is traditionally sacred to her.
+Οὐρανίη, - Ouranian, of the heavens, of the Sky. Aphrodíti was born of the foam which formed when the genitals of Οὐρανός fell into the sea.
+πολύυμνε, - much sung of, famous. (πολύυμνος is fem./masc. nom.)
+φιλομμειδὴς (laughter loving, famous epithet of the Goddess, adj. fem./masc. nom.) Ἀφροδίτη, (Aphrodíti) - laughter-loving Aphrodíti
+ποντογενής, (adj. fem./masc. nom.) - born of the Sea
+γενέτειρα (birth-giver, mother, fem. nom.) θεά, (Goddess) - birth-giving Goddess
+φιλοπάννυχε, - friend of all-night festivity (φιλοπάννυχος, fem./masc. nom.)
+σεμνή (fem. nom. of σεμνός, holy) , - revered or holy
+νυκτερίη, (of the night) at night
+ζεύκτειρα, (one who causes to mate; fem. of ζευκτήρ, one who yokes) – she who causes beings to mate
+δολοπλόκε (wily) μῆτερ (mother) ἀνάγκης· (Necessity) - wily mother of Necessity
+πάντα (all) γὰρ (for) ἐκ (from) σέθεν (you) ἐστίν, (be, comes) - for all comes from you
+ὑπεζεύξω (yoked) δέ (but, then, yet) τε (you) κόσμον· (Kózmos) - and you have caused the Kózmos to couple
+καὶ (and) κρατέεις (are sovereign) τρισσῶν (triple) μοιρῶν, (parts) - and are sovereign over the Three Realms. Taylor translates μοιρῶν as the Fates, but this is likely incorrect. The Fates or the Mírai (Μοῖραι) are minions of Zefs alone. Actually μοιρῶν (gen. plural of μοῖρα) has many definitions depending on context. It generally means "lots" or "portions," but portions of what? The hymn is likely referring to the three realms of existence (the sky, the earth, and the sea) which includes everything, that her ability to effect the yoking of mortals gives her, in a way, sovereignty over all.
+γεννᾷς (origin ) δὲ τὰ πάντα, (all) - you are the origin of all
+ὅσσα (as much as) τ' ἐν (in) οὐρανῳ (sky) ἐστι (to be) καὶ (and) ἐν (in) γαίῃ (Earth) πολυκάρπῳ, (fruitful) - as much as in the Sky as to the fruitful Earth
+ἐν (in) πόντου (Sea) τε (and, and also) βυθῷ· (depth) - and also in the deep Sea,
+σεμνὴ (holy) Βάκχοιο (Vakkhic) πάρεδρε, (sitting beside) - holy attendant of Vákkhos (Diónysos)
+τερπομένη (delight) θαλίῃσι, (festivities) - delighting in festivity
+γαμοστόλε, (bridal) nuptial
+μῆτερ (mother) ἐρώτων· (Ǽrohtæs) - mother of the Ǽrohtæs (Ἔρωτες, the winged attendants of the Goddess representing the various qualities of desire and love)
+Πειθοῖ (Persuasion) λεκτροχαρής, (enjoying the marriage-bed) - Oh Persuasion, enjoying the marital bed
+κρυφίη, - secretive
+χαριδῶτι (joy-giving) ἄνασσα, (queen) – joy-giving queen
+φαινομένη - making appear
+τ', ἀφανής - invisible
+τ', ἐρατοπλόκαμ', - bearing lovely locks
+εὐπατέρεια, - daughter of a noble father
+νυμφιδίη, - bridal
+σύνδαιτε, - companion at table
+θεῶν (Gods) σκηπτοῦχε, (sceptered) – sceptered by Gods
+λύκαινα· - she-wolf
+γεννοδότειρα, - giver of heirs
+φίλανδρε, - man-loving (φίλανδρος)
+ποθεινοτάτη, - much-desired
+βιοδῶτι· - life-giving
+ἐνζεύξασα (yoke) βροτοὺς (mortals) ἀχαλινώτοισιν (unbridled) ἀνάγκαις, (necessity) - you couple mortals in unbridled necessity
+καὶ (and) θηρῶν (wild beasts) πολὺ (many) φῦλον, (tribe, race) - and the many tribes of wild beasts
+ἐρωτομανῶν (mad for love) ὑπὸ (under) φίλτρων· (love-charms) - frenzied from your charms of love.
+ἔρχεο, - Come
+Κυπρογενὲς (Kýpros-born) θεῖον (Goddess) γένος, (offspring) - child of Kýpros
+εἴτ' (seated) ἐν' (in) Ὀλύμπωι (Sky) - seated in the Sky
+ἐσσί, - be
+θεὰ (Goddess) βασίλεια, (royal or queen) - royal Goddess
+καλῷ (beauty) γήθουσα (delighting) προσώπῳ, (face) - delighting in your beautiful countenance
+εἴτε (be) καὶ (and) εὐλιβάνου (rich in frankincense) Συρίης (Syrian) ἕδος (sitting-place) ἀμφιπολεύεις, (waiting on) - and while being attended at your seat in Syria rich in frankincense
+εἴτε (be) σύ (you) γ' ἐν (in) πεδίοισι (plain) σὺν (together with) ἅρμασι (chariot) χρυσεοτεύκτοις (golden) - or riding through the plain in your golden chariot
+Αἰγύπτου (Egypt) κατέχεις (possess) ἱερῆς (priests) γονιμώδεα (fruitful) λουτρά, (bathing place) - or taking seat with the priests of the fruitful river of Egypt
+ἢ καὶ (and) κυκνέοισιν (swan) ὄχοις (carriage) ἐπὶ (upon) πόντιον (of the sea) οἶδμα (a swelling or surge) - and riding your swan-drawn carriage upon the swelling of the sea
+ἐρχομένη (going, coming) χαίρεις (rejoice) νεπόδων (young ones) κυκλίαισι (wheels) χορείαις· (dance) - rejoicing in the little ones as they dance about in circles
+ἢ νύμφαις (Nymphs) τέρπῃ (gladden, cheer) κυανώπισιν (dark-eyed) ἐν (in) χθονὶ (earthy) Δίᾳ, (Goddess) – delightful to the Goddess are the dark-eyed Nymphs of the Earth
+θῖνας (beaches) ἐπ' (upon) αἰγιαλοῖς (sea-shore) ψαμμώδεσιν (sandy) ἅλματι (leaping) κούφῳ· (lightly) - as they lightly leap upon the sandy beaches of the sea-shore
+εἴτ’ (seated) ἐν (in) Κύπρῳ, (Kýpros) - seated in Kýpros
+ἄνασσα, - oh queen
+ττροφῶι (nurse) σέο· (you) - oh nurturer
+ἔνθα (where) καλαί (beautiful, invoke) σε (your) - where you are invoked
+παρθένοι (maidens) ἄδμηται (unwedded) νύμφαι (girls, maidens, Nymphs) τ' ἀνὰ (throughout) πάντ’ (all) ἐνιαυτὸν (year) - by maidens and unwedded Nymphs throughout the year
+ὑμνοῦσιν, - singing
+σέ, - for you
+μάκαιρα, - happy one
+καὶ (and) ἄμβροτον (immortal) ἁγνὸν (holy) Ἄδωνιν. (Ἄδωνις) - and immortal holy Ádohnis
+ἐλθέ, - come
+μάκαιρα (blessed) θεά (Goddess) μάλ' (exceedingly) ἐπήρατον (lovely) εἶδος (form) ἔχουσα· (possess) - blessed Goddess possessing a very lovely form
+ψυχῇ (soul) γάρ (for) σε (you) καλῶ (summon) σεμνῇ (σεμνῇ, holy) ἁγίοισι (pure) λόγοισιν. (words) - for I summon you with pure words and devout soul.
+All this work yields a more literal translation of the Orphic hymn to Aphrodíti
+55. Aphrodíti.
+Ouranía, of whom many sing, laughter-loving Aphrodíti, 1, 5, 10, 15, 20; 25
+They sing for you, happy one, and immortal holy Ádohnis,
+Come, happy Goddess who is so ineffably beautiful,
+For I summon you with pure words and devout soul.
+Interview: Linus Torvalds
+On August 11, while attending LinuxWorld Expo in San Jose, California, I had the privilege of having lunch with Linus Torvalds. While we had met briefly before, this was the first time I had talked to him face-to-face rather than by e-mail. He turned out to be a very personable young man—very self-assured and articulate. At his keynote the night before, he had exuded this same calm presence, answering questions with aplomb and the confidence that comes from knowing his subject well. He surprised me at lunch by admitting to being nervous about public speaking—it certainly does not show—so I guess he is human after all! I steered clear of the normal topics (Linux and Transmeta), hoping to give you a picture of who exactly Linus is. Here's our conversation.
+Margie: Let's start at the beginning. Where were you born? When?
+Linus: Helsinki, Finland, December 28, 1969.
+Margie: Practically a Christmas birthday!
+Linus: Yeah, it isn't a good time to be born if you like getting presents. You always get combination presents, but it turned out okay for me. It's a good day. In Finland, it is known as the day of “the children without fault”—not exactly “without fault”, more “almost perfect”.
+Margie: Looks like it's true. Did you grow up in Helsinki, or did you move around?
+Linus: I lived in Helsinki all my life, until two and a half years ago. I was as much of a city kid as you can be in Helsinki. It is not a big city—it has half a million people. I basically lived in the central parts of Helsinki all my life. I wouldn't know nature if it jumped out and bit me.
+Margie: Oh, you never did the outdoors thing—go to the mountains, or...?
+Linus: No, I never did the outdoors thing. Moving out here to Silicon Valley was like moving out into the suburbs—very different. I am used to living in a five-story building. Here, having a small house with a back yard feels definitely rural.
+Margie: Well, people here don't consider living in a house rural.
+Linus: No, I mean it's very different the way people think about living. Cities in the U.S. are much more sprawling because people want to live in their own houses. European countries are older; most people live in—not skyscrapers—but certainly buildings with five, six or seven stories.
+Margie: How about brothers and sisters?
+Linus: I have one sister who is sixteen months younger than I am, and I have one half brother who is nine years younger—he is twenty now. I actually have two half brothers in addition to that who are younger than my older daughter. My dad is very virile—more virile than is good for him! What can I say?
+Margie: Well, it happens. Did you have a fairly happy childhood?
+Linus: I'd say I had a happy, fairly normal childhood. My parents got divorced when I was small. I lived with my mother and also my grandparents. My mom was a working mother, so I ended up being at my grandparents' house for a large portion of the time—fairly normal years. Probably what happens is you grow up to be fairly independent when you come from a family like that.
+Margie: That could be. Your parents are both journalists, right?
+Linus: My whole family is journalists. Everybody—my mom, my dad, my sister is getting into the journalistic thing, my uncle, my grandfather on my father's side—everybody.
+Margie: Wow—what kind of influence did that have on you?
+Linus: It doesn't make much of a difference because they are all different kinds of journalists. My mom was a translator; she wasn't the kind of journalist who goes out and searches for stories. She worked for the Finnish newspaper doing translations and news graphics. My dad was more of an “out there” radio journalist, so he was really excited when the Chechnyan war was going on. So he went there and had to wear a bullet-proof vest—he is that kind of person—remember, virile. My uncle works for Finnish TV.. My grandfather used to be the Editor in Chief of a newspaper. Mainly, the whole family had a kind of book-learning experience. It was considered good to know English and important to read well. So it was very natural to go to university and stuff like that.
+Margie: Did it make you more political? Are you interested in politics?
+Linus: I'm absolutely uninterested in politics. Probably because—I don't know—it was a fairly political family, so I may have reacted against that by being non-political. I'm not very interested. I'm much more to the left than the right in the U.S. kind of political sense. I'm fairly liberal, but at the same time, I really don't want to go into politics. My parents in the sixties were kind of radical people—they have calmed down a lot! They are not political anymore, but I grew up in a fairly political environment.
+Margie: The sixties were pretty much like that.
+Linus: I still meet people who say, “Oh, I knew your Dad! And I remember when you were crawling around under the kitchen table at your home when they had student meetings!” or whatever.: So, were you shy as a child? Or an extrovert?
+Linus: I was an absolute geek—no social graces whatsoever.
+Margie: None, eh?
+Linus: None!
+Margie: Not popular with the girls?
+Linus: No, I can't claim I was. I was a complete nerd. I was not unpopular; I wasn't alone or unfriendly or anything like that. But I was certainly not one of the people known by everyone.
+Margie: So you liked going to school?
+Linus: Yeah, I liked it. I also liked the social parts. Especially at university, my studies were probably less important than being part of the student organization and going to parties and stuff like that. But especially before university, I had my own thing, which was computers and that is what I did.
+Margie: When did you start using computers?
+Linus: I started when I was like ten or eleven. Fairly early on, and it was early enough that you didn't have computer classes because there weren't enough people who had computers in the early '80s. I don't know, not even here probably. If you did computers, you mostly did it on your own. Maybe I had one or two other people in a class who used computers, and I met them once a week to compare notes and stuff like that. I was never into BBSs or anything like that or the Internet, either.
+Margie: How did you get a computer that early, then?
+Linus: My grandfather on my mother's side owned one. He was a professor of statistics at Helsinki University. He got a computer because, to him, it was a programmable calculator. This was a home computer and not a very powerful one, but compared to a calculator at the time, it was light-years ahead. He did his own programs and had me kind of help him. Although I wasn't much help, he liked having me around. I was typing in programs—stuff like that. He probably wanted me to learn, but I didn't realize that at the time. And I was doing some playing. He wasn't interested in the games. I was reading the manuals that came with the computer and doing simple things: typing in example programs and expanding on those, like people did. It didn't start off like, the first day I saw the computer I was instantly in love. It was more like, over the years, I just spent a lot of time on the computer until it was apparent that it was my hobby.
+Margie: Did you have a motorcycle when you were a kid?Margie: Did you have a motorcycle when you were a kid?
+Linus: Nope, I didn't have a motorcycle. I had a bike. I don't have a motorcycle now, either. I'm afraid of the damn things.
+Margie: Are you?
+Linus: Well, you feel so unprotected on them. They are so hard to control. Just like you have to learn to ride a bicycle, you have to learn to use a motorbike, and I haven't.
+Mopeds are really big out in the countryside. That's the way people get around. Before you get a driver's license, you can still get a moped. But I always lived in the absolute center of Helsinki, so I could walk anywhere, take public transportation and whatnot. So I never got into cars or mopeds or anything like that, and I never owned a car until I moved here. Most places in Helsinki, a car is more bother than it is worth. Unless you need it for some specific reason, like transporting a kid. If we had had children then, we probably would have bought a car.
+Margie: How about sports? Did you play football?
+Linus: No, I didn't. I was not really bad at sports, but it was never something I found interesting. I played basketball for a while, which was ludicrous because I was always one of the shortest guys in my class. Whatever I am—5 foot 8—I'm not going to be a basketball player! I played basketball basically because my dad thought I should play a sport.
+Margie: Oh, the virile thing again...
+Linus: Yeah, he was more of an action kind of person. He's very intelligent, too. In fact, he is one of the more intelligent people I know, but he has his quirks. I was never much of a sports fan.
+Margie: How about music?
+Linus: The same. The way I listen to music still is that I put on a radio station that is basically classic rock most of the time.
+Margie: What do you consider classic rock?
+Linus: '60s, Beatles, whatever. Perhaps the Beatles is a bit before what I consider classic rock, but it's kind of borderline.
+Margie: Where did you go to university?
+Linus: Helsinki University. There are two of them: one is the Helsinki University of Technology, which is actually not inside Helsinki but just on the border outside. Then there is the real University of Helsinki, which is the kind of old-fashioned, European-like university where you have lots of courses like philosophy and languages. They do have a technical department, too, but it's not about technology. For example, computer sciences is really computer science—it talks about complexity analysis and things like that. I went to the real University, so I went through all the complexity analysis, what NT completeness means and the spherical side. That was kind of fun, and people always wondered why I wasn't at Helsinki University of Technology which is much more engineering-oriented. I just liked going—I also liked math, so I fit right in at Helsinki University, and at the same time, I had Linux as a side project—the practical side.
+Margie: When did you start working on Linux?
+Linus: Spring of 1991—eight and a half years ago. I had taken a course in UNIX and C, the fall semester before. The first time I actually touched UNIX was fall 1990, when I had a UNIX course at Helsinki University. Actually, it was the first UNIX course they ever had at Helsinki University, because it used to be a VAX and VMS place. They had just gotten a UNIX machine for trying out that newfangled thing, and it turned out to be a huge success. Within a few years, they had switched over everything to UNIX. But that first machine was used for this small course in UNIX and C, and I immediately felt that this was what I wanted to have. It made sense. Then when I bought a PC, I wanted UNIX on it, and the rest is kind of history.
+Margie: Was there a particular professor who influenced you?
+Linus: There were a lot of people who kind of had a large influence, but none who were really fundamental. I mean, apart from my grandfather, I usually did my own thing. I wouldn't recommend my method of study to anybody else, as it is not very organized. It basically took me eight years to get a degree.
+Margie: It was a master's, right?
+Linus: It was my master's, but it should not take people eight years to get a master's! But, the way I study!
+Margie: So you were having fun, right?
+Linus: Hmmm, yes.
+Margie: Well, social life is important too.
+Linus: Yeah. In Finland, you can afford to take your time because universities are essentially free, and you get subsidies from the government to study. So you can actually live on that subsidy, even though you won't be living well. I was also teaching at the university, being a T.A. at first, and then a junior research assistant, then a junior research person—slowly moving up the ranks. By the time I was starting to get my degree, I had long since realized that I actually didn't like writing papers. I had a hard time writing my thesis, and I decided I couldn't stay at the university forever. Because if you don't like writing papers, then you really don't want to stay at a university. So, that's when I said, “Okay”, and started thinking about something else, and the result was moving to the U.S.
+Margie: Well, having computers as an early interest gives you a wide range of choices as far as what you might do.
+Linus: Well, even two and a half years ago when Linux was new—it wasn't known like it is now; it was known only in technical circles—I had my share of interesting job offers. Most people, who get out of university in Finland and go to work, start small—Nokia is obviously very big in Finland as an employer. I had the choice of a number of very interesting and exciting places.
+Margie: How did you decide on Transmeta?
+Linus: The timing was good. They flew me over and gave me a tour after I signed an NDA. After the first day, I just thought these people are crazy—they were so far out. Then I went back to the hotel and basically slept on the issue. By the time I came in for the second day of interviews, I had just decided that, “Hey, if I wanted to work for a place that did something exciting, it had better be a bit crazy!” Nobody else was doing anything as exciting. At Transmeta, I had the feeling that, “Okay, this is a company that is doing something nobody else in the world is doing.” And I still think that. Even though I can't say what it is, Transmeta is still a good company to work for. You feel that, hey, we're doing something that if it works, it will make a large difference.
+Margie: Where did you and Tove meet?
+Linus: We met at university; she was already a kindergarten teacher, which is her real job. She had a degree in child care, a bachelor's. She was thinking of not necessarily being a kindergarten teacher all her life, so she was doing other stuff too. And computer science was actually just an interesting sideline, so we met up at University of Computer Science. That's how we met—not very romantic—no exotic cruising in the Mexican Gulf.
+Margie: Ahh. When did you meet her?
+Linus: About six years ago. It was after Linux got started, but certainly long before it made a difference to anyone else.
+Margie: Was it love at first sight?
+Linus: No.
+Margie: It's usually not, right? Seems to me I heard something about her being a martial arts champion or something?
+Linus: Yeah, for six years running she was the Finnish champion in karate, but she basically stopped doing that after a while. She was into the Kata, the forms—she was doing some fighting too—but Kata is actually doing the forms of karate, correctly, at the right speed, with precision, stuff like that. The competitions she went to were basically showing what she could do.
+Margie: What about the kids? Tell us their names and ages.
+Linus: Patricia is the older one. She was born in Finland just two months before we moved, so she is two years and eight months. Daniella is the younger one; she is fifteen months. She was born here.
+Margie: They are very pretty and well-behaved!
+Linus: Yeah! They are very well-behaved, and they are used to traveling. Partly because we moved here, we didn't have grandparents to take care of them, so wherever we go, we always take them with us. So they are used to being outside with people and being at restaurants.
+Margie: Are you planning on having more children?
+Linus: My wife is—she is still working on me. I'm kind of resigned to having a third one. I like kids. There already will be more time between the second and third than there was between the first two. I think we should wait a bit. Life has been quite hectic with two little kids.
+Margie: Is Tove wanting a boy?
+Linus: Well, she always mentions it as a boy, and I bet that if she has another girl, she will start talking about a fourth one!
+Margie: You better plan on that boy, then!
+Linus: I am happy with two girls! Maybe when they've grown up a bit, I'll be ready for another. they are a scientology school, and they don't mention the fact that they are associated with scientology anywhere in their literature. And that kind of makes me nervous. I don't want to put my child in a scientology school by mistake. We have Patricia enrolled in a school with a good name in the area, and we will see how that goes. She is actually starting preschool this year. Assuming it all works out, we won't have to worry about school that much, not like we used to.
+The difference between the U.S. and Finland is just huge in that area. In Finland nobody worries about school, nobody even thinks about it because it's obvious that you go to public school. People who don't send their kids to public school have some particular reason, like their kid needs special attention. There are a few private schools that specialize in languages and stuff like that, but it is uncommon for kids to go to those—normal people usually don't do that. Here, you have to really think about the issue. There are a lot of bad schools and a lot of really good schools—it's more of a decision. Just that difference made us nervous, so we will see.
+Margie: So you are happy here in the U.S.?
+Linus: We are happier now. My wife is very happy here too, though she was not at first. She has a much closer-knit family, so our telephone bills used to be totally horrendous. We like the area. I like it from a purely technical standpoint, as well as the weather and things like that. And my wife has just grown to like the area. So we'll see. We are definitely staying here for a few more years, unless the INS puts us out.
+Margie: Well, I doubt that!
+Linus: Well, I don't know.
+Margie: As long as you are gainfully employed, I thought they left you alone.
+Linus: They do have certain rules, like for example, the visa we have is for three years and we can renew it once. In the meantime, we are trying to get a green card, and we are supposed to be real close now, but “real close now” to the INS might mean a week or four years.
+This area is the worst in the entire U.S. The INS is just completely backlogged. They've had cases where they just lost files, and because they lost them, people who have been waiting for a year or two find themselves starting over with the INS saying, “I don't actually know about you.”
+Margie: What do y'all do for fun?
+Linus: Usually we are so busy, that we just take the kids out to nearby parks during the week. On weekends, we sometimes go to a small petting zoo close by; we are members, so we get in free. Sometimes we go to these natural reserve areas and just walk. Most of the time, we just stay home and go shopping and stuff like that.
+Margie: You don't even go to movies?
+Linus: We have not been to a movie in two and a half years!
+Margie: Is this because of the children?
+Linus: It's because of the kids. They are just now becoming the age where we are starting to say, “Hey, one of these days we could go to a kid's movie.”
+Margie: They have a nanny, right?
+Linus: We have a few babysitters; we get out sometimes. But again, we don't have grandparents close by who would take them for an evening at the last minute. Instead, we have to decide a week in advance to go out next Friday and get the babysitter—basically, that never happens.
+Margie: How about fame? You seem to handle it very well.
+Linus: It doesn't affect me much.
+Margie: You don't get bothered a lot?
+Linus: No. I only notice it during the conferences. Otherwise, it happens maybe three or four times a year—other than that, not at all.
+Margie: What about all the people like me bothering you for interviews?
+Linus: My e-mail box is a complete disaster area! It's grown over the years from about ten messages a day to a hundred messages a day. I've just gotten used to it. It can be painful; going on vacation for a week means you know beforehand that when you come back, you are going to have to spend two days just reading e-mail.
+Margie: Do you read it all?
+Linus: No, but I try to glance through most of it. I handle technical mail better than non-technical mail. They are much easier! You can glance and tell it's important and put it aside or handle it on the spot, and that is a fairly straightforward decision to make. But for non-technical e-mail, you say, “Hmmm...what should I do about this?” You don't have time to decide and handle it right then, so you just put it aside and forget about it.
+Margie: I think that's the only kind of e-mail I get—the ones that need decisions. Many people in the community think of you as a hero, a role model. Who is yours?
+Linus: I don't have any. I never had any teen idols or anything like that. I mean, if I had to pick anybody it would have to be my granddad. And then maybe more of the scientist kind of people, like Einstein, people like him. I thought that quantum physics was just the most interesting thing when I was small. But then, that was not very personalized—there wasn't just one person.
+Margie: What kind of influence did your granddad have on you?
+Linus: I don't know; he got me into math and computers. He was the kind of “absent-minded professor” type, so often, even when he was there, he wasn't necessarily there mentally! But at the same time, he was probably one of the closest people to me. He died when I was 15. He was there mainly during my early school years rather than later.
+Margie: Okay, a couple of silly questions. If you could have any car in the world, what would it be?
+Linus: Oh, God! We are actually looking at buying a car and have picked a minivan. Yes, it's not the sexy sports car. We're getting a lot of friends and family over from Finland and whenever we go somewhere, we have to take two cars and that is just a pain. So we are getting to be a “real American family”, and we will have a minivan. But that was not the answer you were looking for!
+Margie: That's okay! Would you rather have a Porsche?
+Linus: No, I never liked that kind of muscle car—the Corvettes, I didn't like. I find those to be uninteresting—a toy car. I like the Miata, but it's too small; however, the BMW Z3—that kind of car—that, I like. But it's just too impractical when you have two kids. We have considered maybe getting a convertible. When we moved here, we didn't think about that, but actually in California it does make sense much of the time. But we have to get a four-seater anyway, so even then it's not going to be one of the really “fun” cars; it's going to be one of the practical ones.
+Margie: Do minivans come with sun roofs?
+Linus: Maybe sun roofs, yes, but not convertible!
+Margie: What's your favorite color?
+Linus: It was blue when I was small—the classic boy color. I think it's yellow now. Yellow is a hard color, okay? You can do it too light and it just looks pee-colored. Or you can do it too dark and it becomes too orange, so you have to be careful—blue is safer.
+Margie: What message would you like to give our readers?
+Linus: Linux didn't start out as a message to the masses. Unlike Richard Stallman, I really don't have a message. He has one and can go on about it forever. I'm just an engineer. Let's see: Do things well! Do them with heart! What other strategies can I come up with...?
+Margie: That will do. Thanks very much for taking the time to talk to
+Found the interview very
+Found the interview very interesting. Didn't agree with his views on religion and think his reasoning is faulty, but otherwise great interview. Thanks for the post.
+At this rate, we’ll need ten more federal elections to reach gender parity in Ottawa
+January 12, 2022
+Photo by Library of Parliament
+2021 marked the centennial anniversary of the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons in Canada, Agnes Macphail. But, despite dramatic shifts toward greater gender parity in politics over the last 100 years, women are still vastly underrepresented in office. This bore out again this September when Canadians elected 235 men and just 103 women to serve as their MPs, an increase of 3 women from the previous Parliament. 70% of elected federal officials in 2021 are men. With more public calls for gender parity, why is this social change so slow to come?
+Compelling answers to this question already exist and point to several reasons. A 2019 CBC article investigated the relationship between gender, party financial support and election outcomes. The conclusion? Female politicians are more likely to be set up to fail – they are more likely to run in hard to win ridings, and less likely to receive financial support from their parties compared to male candidates. Other explanations point to gender bias in candidate preference or argue that parties and institutions have failed to make safe spaces in Canadian politics for women. As a result of these additional barriers, among others, women have a steeper hill to climb than men when convincing the public that they are electable.
+Are women less electable than men?
+In 2020, Data Sciences conducted an internal online experiment using a technique referred to as a conjoint analysis in the social sciences. When using traditional polling methods, survey respondents sometimes answer questions as though someone was looking over their shoulder. They may indicate support for the candidates who they think they’re supposed to support, even if in real life they would actually vote for someone else.
+Conjoint analyses aim to reduce these biases by measuring effects as it does not ask respondents to relay opinions, and only measure the impact of particular traits indirectly and subtly. In our experiment, respondents were exposed to pairs of randomly generated candidate profiles and asked to make a few choices between each pair. Importantly, a number of personal and professional traits were varied among the hypothetical candidates, including their upbringing, their family, their career, their experience, and their age. Gender was randomly assigned and subtly indicated by the use of either male or female pronouns (e.g. “She has lived in the riding for five years” or “He was a doctor before getting into politics”.) A representative sample of over 5,000 Canadians participated in this experiment and rated thousands of combinations of traits. We then used statistical methods to assess the impacts of each trait on the perceptions of the candidates.
+Our results suggest that all else being equal, being female actually provides a slight boost to a politician’s popularity and credibility: women were generally more likely to collect respondents’ votes (+2.8%) and were more likely to be perceived as sharing the respondent’s values (+3.7%) and be seen as an effective MP (+1.7%)
+So, the Canadian public is open to electing women. However, being female (vs. male) was also associated with a 2% decrease in perceived likelihood to win.
+This may seem like a small effect, but it is important to note that in September, 45 MPs were elected by a margin of 5% or less. For close races, these biases, especially when combined with our electoral system, can make a big difference. Approximately 22% of Canadians considered themselves primarily strategic voters1 at the time of our survey – that is, they would not vote for their preferred candidate, but rather for the candidate that was most conducive to the government they wanted to see in Ottawa. Instead of voting for the Liberals or the NDP, they voted against a Conservative leadership or vice versa. Nearly ¼ of the country voted for the ‘tolerable’ candidate in their riding that they believed most likely to win. Nearly ¼ of the country voted for the ‘tolerable’ candidate in their riding that they believed most likely to win. The impact of gender on perceived electability and election outcomes in this system is difficult to estimate, but to put that into more concrete terms, 10 ridings in Canada won by men in 2021 could have been the result of this bias in perception (where the difference in vote share was within 4% between male and female candidates and the female candidate came in second).
+Another finding was that throughout the experiment, women were more frequently penalized for failing to be “ideal” candidates. Negative traits had a larger negative impact on female (vs. male) candidates. Having a privileged background was a disadvantage for any candidate, but more so for women, driving down their support by an additional 7.6% compared to men. We observe the same effect for female newcomers; female candidates who were described as ‘new to politics’ were less likely to receive support (-5.6%) compared to male candidates. This is doubly penalizing, as the historical legacy of gender imbalanced Parliaments means that women are not only more likely to be newcomers but will also be more heavily penalized for lack of experience by the electorate, creating a vicious cycle that will require dedicated effort to break. In comparison, none of the tested traits that could impact a candidate’s perceived electability — e.g. age, experience — had a more negative impact on men than on women.
+One possible reason why voters may believe that women are less likely to be elected is that voters do, consistently, see female candidates lose more often than male candidates. This election was no exception. Among the five federal parties with Parliamentary representation, 18% of female candidates won their election, compared to 31% of their male counterparts.
+Can gender parity efforts contend with the power of incumbency?
+This effect is partially structural. Politicians are historically much more likely to be male, so incumbents – who win at a higher rate than not – tend to be men. In fact, 69% of 2021 candidates running in seats that had been won by their parties since in or since 2015 were men. 2021 female candidates running for the four major political parties were more likely than their male counterparts to run in harder-to-win, unheld ridings (see graph).
+One of the best opportunities parties have to support women in politics is to encourage and promote the nomination of female candidates when a spot in a ‘safe riding’ opens up, i.e. when a male incumbent decides not to run again in an upcoming election. In 2021, this does appear to be happening:
+- The Conservative Party of Canada replaced 2 female and 7 male incumbents with 4 female and 5 male candidates, doubling the number of female candidates running in these held seats;
+- The Liberal Party of Canada replaced 4 female and 10 male incumbents with 8 female and 6 male candidates2, also doubling female representation in this cohort;
+- The New Democratic Party replaced 1 female and 2 male incumbent with 2 female and 1 male candidate, a 33% increase;
+- As the only party that already achieved gender parity at 47% female representation, the Bloc was the only party that did not use incumbent’s exits to boost female representation in 2021, replacing one male and one female incumbent with two male candidates.
+In case the advantage of this position wasn’t clear, these newcomer candidates running in previously held ridings did appear to wield the advantage: 90% were elected as MPs.
+Formally reserving these opportunities for female candidates is one strategy that could be used to increase gender parity. However, it cannot be over-relied upon. Only a minority of incumbents retire each election cycle, and not every male incumbent will be replaced by a female candidate.
+At our current rate of turnover and replacement, it might take another 10 federal elections before we reach gender parity standards in Ottawa unless other actions are taken.
+What more can we do?
+Reaching gender parity in government isn’t going to happen solely by encouraging women to run, although these efforts must be continued. Parties and other political institutions need to recognize that there are real barriers women and other members of underrepresented groups face when running for office and be strategic – while also ensuring that once elected, women and minority group members are supported and that a reasonable course of action can be taken to address any discrimination3. Upholding gender parity in cohorts of nominated candidates and in the cabinet, promoting more examples of women and gender diverse individuals in public leadership roles, increasing representation of these individuals in their strongholds, and helping to increase funding support for candidates from under-represented groups are just some other actions political organizations can take to increase diversity among their ranks. Recent successes of women in key municipal elections in Quebec are auspicious signs for our future, and hopefully unpacking these wins will elucidate strategies for other women running for office in the future.
+Lastly, to work towards greater diversity of thought and perspective in government, we will need data. To our knowledge, there are no publically available datasets that can speak to the realities of other minority group candidates in Canadian politics. As such, we were unable to include these groups in our analysis, but doing so could have provided important nuance to our findings. Vital segments of our society – including BIPOC, members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, or people from lower economic status backgrounds – are crucially underrepresented in the House. How underrepresented is hard to measure at this moment. Elections Canada and others should consider implementing programs to release key indicators of diversity goals and inclusion in government to enable tracking of these important metrics over time. Canadians are ready for more diversity of representation in federal politics— but whether this is achieved in the short term or in 100 years depends on our capacity to understand and analyze our political system’s shortcomings, and implement effective strategies to overcome them.
+Footnotes
+- 74% reported voting for the leader or the party values, while 4% cited other reasons.
+- This includes all Liberal candidates who were running, at the time of writ drop, in a riding that had an incumbent Liberal MP (excluding formerly Liberal independent MPs).
+- For example, the Standing Committee on the Status of Women through their investigation found that 67% of female MPs experience gender based heckling in the House of Commons, compared to only 20% of their male colleagues.
+(all photos in this post are courtesy of other people’s cats I’ve befriended on the street, and the lovely cats at the wonderful Sheffield Cat Shelter, where I am lucky to be a volunteer)
+While this is not a linguistic post as such, it does address the issue of pets and animal rights, which I am very passionate about.
+For those who haven’t had the dubious pleasure of going to one, cat cafes sprouted around the world in dazzling speed in the last two decades. It began with the Taiwanese Cat flower Cafe opening their doors to their cats and folk in 1998 with the aim to provide lonely jaded urban dwellers with access to cats. However, this trend really took off when the Japanese Neko no Jikan Kita-honten in Osaka gave people living in small, rented flats the opportunity to be around cats again in their cafe. These cat cafes are now found in many cities worldwide and I have also visited a few in my travels, experiences which raised questions regarding pet-ethics and animal rights.
+In the UK many animal charities criticise cat cafes for not providing cats with an appropriate environment such as access to the outdoors, keeping too large a number of cats, ignoring cat personality mismatches that lead to aggression and unhappiness, not to mention the lack of proper regulation of the cafes.
+“Until the day all breeding stops (hopefully by way of government policy), people should adopt companion animals from sanctuaries and shelters“
+Let me begin by situating myself in this discussion. As a vegan and animal rights activist I do not support the notion of pet ownership. For me, while I take the argument that dogs and cats today are an adapted species, symbiotically living with humans, I witnessed this through my vet studies and working at a vet clinic as a man-made problem that involves many levels of cruelty to animals from breeding to improper care (that often leads to death of the animal) and abuse. My vision is that all animal breeding for human purposes (including the meat, dairy and egg industries) will halt, and eventually and gradually all ‘pets’ be retired in sanctuaries and homes – to extinction. This may indeed be controversial and I am saddened to imagine a world with no dogs or cats to cuddle, but this feeling simply highlights to me my very own anthropocentric selfishness. There can be a whole post written about this but I do not want to detract from the aim of this discussion. Until the day all breeding stops (hopefully by way of government policy), people should adopt companion animals from sanctuaries and shelters.
+The underlying assumption regarding pet ownership that supports the adoption of rescue animals is that we are able to glean whether our furry friends are reasonably happy. Anyone who cohabited with a cat (or dog! or ratty!) has developed an understanding of their companion’s moods. and vice versa. A mutual language most positively occurs. Of course, we can never know definitively how animals feel or what they think which, to me, represents the most important caveat in support of pet ownership.
+In what follows I will attempt to put forward some concerns related to cat cafes from personal observation and readings. I don’t want to drag any particular cat cafe into this discussion but rather outline my thoughts on this issue. While cat cafes vary in sizes, care and approach to their establishments, I believe they face some or all of the following challenges:
+The obvious question of the suitability of the environment
+Let’s get this obvious stuff out of the way first. Clearly, some cat cafe spaces do not allow cats access to the outdoors nor do they regulate the temperature inside the establishment. As it is a cafe, the cats are constantly exposed to human food, cakes and the like that can be harmful if ingested. Although most cat cafes require prior booking and attempt to regulate the number of people at any one time in the cafe, the cats are still exposed to a never ending stream of different people coming and going and anyone who has been in a regular cafe knows that this can be tiring and irritating. The space of the cafe itself is often too crowded and noisy, not giving the cats a break. Animal behavioural studies have found that at times, cats would pretend to sleep to avoid receiving attention. Well, if they are cats at the particular cafe I’ve been to, pretending won’t help. Customers are not discouraged (albeit in some cafes I’m sure they are) from disturbing the cats while they’re resting. Not having access to fresh air and a walk outside, I have personally witnessed cats vying to go outside, attempting to sneak past the double security doors -alas unsuccessfully.
+A proper business plan – if you go under, what will happen to the cats?
+It is a well established fact that catering businesses are a fragile sector and most go out of business within two years of opening their doors. Although it may seem reasonable at first thought to embed a charity within a business model in order to generate funds, considering the precarious nature of this type of venture, without an appropriate and solid business plan that sets clear contingencies for adverse business turnout, the cats could find themselves back on the streets. By the way, this is also goes for many of the animal sanctuaries who may have their hearts in the right place but risk the lives and futures of their animals by not engaging with proper planning and risk mitigation.
+Sourcing of cats and types of customers
+While some cat cafes have a strong ethos of not engaging with the commercial sector of animal breeding and approach their cafe as a social and animal care enterprise, some cat cafes view their endeavour from a purely profit making stance. Therefore, cats may be bought from breeders, further entrenching the vicious cycle of stray cats (potentially not neutering them), and supporting an exploitative industry. In relation to this, we should also ask what kind of clients does this attract? Do the people who frequent cat cafes do so in order to financially support the cat cafe as a you would a sanctuary? Because if not, this is no different to going to the zoo, a cruel prison most readers I’m sure would not support. Does the ethos (discussed further below) of the cat cafe influence the motivation and types of people who visit? (By the way, this would be an interesting research project if anyone would like to collaborate).
+“We can ask: what does the cat cafe stand for?”
+Adoption
+Some cat cafes boast re-homing their cats. While in principle this sounds like the best scheme, combining more comfortable shelter than provided by a traditional cat shelter with socialisation that is so vital for the re-homing process, in practice this presents a number of obstacles.
+Firstly, cats like most animals form bonds with humans and other cats. The re-homing turnover in the cat cafe cannot be the priority for the cafe nor is it feasible. Let me elaborate on this point. In a ‘real’ cat shelter, keeping a cat in a room or cage costs money. Approximately £87 per day (for a good shelter). Therefore, the aim of the shelter is to re-home. Full stop. Cats occupying space and resources that another cat in need could have is the driving force behind the hard work of a cat shelter (not without its problems, admittedly). Conversely for a cat cafe, there are other considerations and priorities to contend with. To start with, most cat cafes’ (as is the case for any charity really) priority lies with securing funds through sales and as it is a business, most (human) resources go on cultivating the business, leaving little time for re-homing endeavours (which are very demanding and include vetting possible homes which as can be imagined takes a lot of time in relationship building).
+Another big problem that is created by the very nature of a cat cafe that allows the cats to get to know one another and staff, as I mentioned earlier is bonding. Because the cats spend a long time with others due to the low turnover rate, they get attached to their friends and carers which makes re-homing rather painful and difficult. In cat shelters, volunteers and staff routinely rotate between the cats as to minimise this bondage (but also allowing cats to get used to being around humans). Another related issue that also touches on the problem of sourcing mentioned in the previous point above is that of what I will call ‘star’ cats. A cat cafe, wanting to attract clientele (=funds) with the best of intentions would opt for cats that are ‘interesting’. By this I mean cats that would be attractive or different so as to draw people’s attention. This then could entails choosing kittens rather than older cats, buying specific breeds, and so on. Some of these cats become icons for the cat cafe (on Instagram) and regulars’ favourites, making the cafe reluctant to re-home them, and thus lose their ‘star’.
+The last question to consider in under this section is post-rehoming care. Most cat shelters have a procedure in place for keeping track of how the adopted cats are doing, for example by obligating the adopting family to only visit the shelter’s veterinary practice. Do cat cafes have similar protocols in place and could they spare the human resources to follow up on this?
+Qualification of staff
+As I have not formally investigated this, having a cursory look through different cat cafes, none boast their experience or qualification in caring for rescue cats nor do they screen for staff who possess appropriate qualifications. While it is true that cat owners, like those who own the cats in the cafe are not screened for qualification, this raises a the question of the role the cat cafe plays: does it act as a type of cat shelter? If so, the staff should be fully vetted and qualified (yep, taking the pun) as other staff in respectable charities are, or at the very least have a care plan for the cats with regular vet trips. However, if the cat cafe is not claiming to be a stop between forever homes then there is an even more urgent question of legitimacy. Indeed, loving cats is not enough.
+Ethos and veganism
+Lastly, we can ask: what does the cat cafe stand for? Not all cat cafes have been established with the ethos of promoting compassionate adoption and raising awareness of the problem of stray cat misery and poor treatment of animals in general. I don’t wish to get into the discussion of whether cats should go vegan, but the cafes themselves, while some do offer vegan options, suffer from a lack of pro-intersectional stance in their activity. By this I mean that caring for animals extends to more than just cats. As I see it, if a cat cafe’s ethos is to promote compassion and protection of animals it should do so, loud and proud and extend it to all animal rights and human rights. I see a cat shelter as a hub of positive activism, where the rescue of the resident cats is only a small portion of what the space offers. In other words, what good does it do if the cat cafe rescues cats, but serves cow’s milk and a ham sandwich? What good does it do if there are no flyers promoting a feminist action or a gay parade?
+Finally, although I recognise there are far worse cruelty and mistreatment causes to fight against than cat cafes and indeed my priority in the protection of animals does not lie in this single issue, cat cafes remain troublesome. There isn’t a conclusion on this from me, at least not at this time, but I do find myself leaving the cat cafe with a bitter-sweet aftertaste, and not from the coffee and vegan cake I had.
+2 thoughts on “Some thoughts on cat cafes”
+Thanks. Interesting post. Some issues that I hadn’t considered.
+I visited this cat cafe in Ghent couple of months ago. Working together with cat rescue organsations, aimed at rehoming the cats and offering vegan cake. There were very strict rules for entering the cafe, and a vet was present.
+LikeLiked by 1 person
+Thanks for stopping by and commenting! I’m glad to hear you visited a dedicated cat cafe. The pet issue is not talked about enough, like a taboo topic, don’t you find?
+PhD (Economics), MSc (Banking and Finance), MA (Academic Practice), PGCE (HE)
+English, Russian, Italian
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+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2014). Building professional discourse in emerging markets: Language, context and the challenge of sensemaking. Journal of International Business Studies. 45(5), pp.583-599.
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+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2011). Looking for Ways to Increase Student Motivation: Internationalisation and Value Innovation. Higher Education Quarterly. 65(4), pp.353-367.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov, YM. Mirkin (2011). The rocky road to modernity: 20 years of the Russian capital market. Thunderbird International Business Review. 53(5), pp.661-673.
+R. Kapelyushnikov, A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2011). Diversity within capitalism: The Russian labour market model. Employee Relations. 33(4), pp.395-412.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova, Y. Mirkin (2011). The Russian Capital Market: The First 20 Years. History of Finance Journal. 7,
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2010). The role of stakeholders in shaping managerial perceptions of CSR in Russia. European Journal of International Management. 4(3), pp.257-272.
+O. Kuznetsova (2010). Organisation and Development of Russian Business: A Firm-level Analysis. EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES. 62(5), pp.869-872.
+O. Kuznetsova (2010). Can Russia Compete? Enhancing Productivity and Innovation in a Globalizing World. EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES. 62(6), pp.1028-1031.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova, R. Warren (2009). CSR and the legitimacy of business in transition economies: The case of Russia. Scandinavian Journal of Management. 25(1), pp.37-45.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2008). Gaining competitiveness through trust: the experience of Russia. EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT. 2(1), pp.22-38.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2005). Business culture in modern Russia: Deterrents and influences. Problems and Perspectives in Management. 3(2), pp.25-31.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2003). Crisis of governance: Why market solutions to economic problems are not popular in Russia. Journal of East-West Business. 9(3-4), pp.11-26.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2003). Institutions, business and the state in Russia. Europe - Asia Studies. 55(6), pp.907-922.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2003). Corporate Governance: Does the Concept Work in Transition Economies?. Journal for East European Management Studies. 8(3), pp.244-262.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (2001). The virtues and weaknesses of insider shareholding. Journal of East-West Business. 6(4), pp.89-106.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (2000). Why is the progress of marketisation slow in russia?. Journal of East-West Business. 5(1-2), pp.57-73.
+A. Kuznetsov, F. McDonald, O. Kuznetsova (2000). Entrepreneurial qualities: A case from Russia. Journal of Small Business Management. 38(1), pp.101-107.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (2000). The Impact of Institutional Collapse on the Formation of Cultural Values of Russian Managers and Entrepreneurs. European Journal of Cross-Cultural Competence and Management. 2, pp.145-166.
+ANDREI. KUZNETSOV, FRANK. MCDONALD, OLGA. KUZNETSOVA (1999). NETWORKING AND ENTREPRENEURIAL SUCCESS IN A TRANSITION ECONOMY. Journal of Enterprising Culture. 07(04), pp.331-345.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (1999). The state as a shareholder: Responsibilities and objectives. Europe - Asia Studies. 51(3), pp.433-445.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (1999). The Financial Services Sector in the CIS Countries. The Vienna Institute Monthly Report. 12, pp.24-29.
+O. Kuznetsova (1998). Dealing with the New Russia: Management Cultures in Collision by N.Holden, C.Cooper and J.Carr. John Wiley&Sons Ltd., Chichester, UK, 1998, 304 pp. Journal of Transnational Management Development. 5(1),
+O. Kuznetsova (1998). Dealing with the New Russia – Management Cultures in Collision20001Nigel Holden, Cary Cooper and Jennifer Carr. Dealing with the New Russia – Management Cultures in Collision . Buffins Lane, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 1UD, England: John Wiley & Sons 1998. pp. 290 Soft cover, ISBN: ISBN‐ 0‐471‐96456‐5 £18.99. Journal of Transnational Management Development. 5(1), pp.176-176.
+S. Moss, O. Kuznetsova (1998). Modelirane Protsesa na Formirane na Pazara. Ikonomicheska Misl. XLIII(3), pp.72-84.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (1998). Post-Communist Economies and Conventions in Cross-Cultural Competence: From a System-Specific to Country-Based Approach. European Journal of Cross-Cultural Competence and Management. 1, pp.171-202.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (1997). Privatisation and Efficient Management: A Conceptual Approach. Journal of Contemporary Management Issues. 2(2), pp.57-65.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (1996). Who Controls Russian Companies? Privatisation and the Emerging Corporate System of Russia. The Vienna Institute for International Studies Monthly Report. 6, pp.14-21.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (1996). Privatisation, shareholding and the efficiency argument: Russian experience. Europe - Asia Studies. 48(7), pp.1173-1185.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (1996). From a socialist enterprise to a capitalist firm: The hazards of the managerial learning curve. Communist Economies and Economic Transformation. 8(4), pp.517-528.
+K. Olga (2019). Sustainable Cities and Communities - Volume 3 (Section Editor). W. Leal Filho, U. Zaeiteiro, AM. Zaul, L. Brandii, P. Gokcin Ozuyar, T. Wall. In: Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Springer: Cham (Switzerland),
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2017). Institutions, business and the state in Russia. S. Fortescue. In: The Russian Economy (Critical Concepts in Economics). Routledge,
+O. Kuznetsova (2014). Banking and Finance. C. Cooper. In: Wiley Encylopedia of Management. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
+O. Kuznetsova (2014). Market. C. Cooper. In: Wiley Encyclopedia of Management. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
+O. Kuznetsova (2014). Moral Hazard. C. Cooper. In: Wiley Encyclopedia of Management. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons,
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2011). Corporate Governance in Russia: Concept and Reality. RW. McGee. In: Accounting Reform in Transition and Developing Economies. NY: Springer, Dalian; Dongbei University of Finance & Economics Press, China (in Chinese),
+O. Kuznetsova (2010). The Russian system of corporate governance: Promises and realities. In: Handbook of Business Practices and Growth in Emerging Markets. pp.141-160.
+O. Kuznetsova (2010). CSR in the Emerging Market of Russia: Finding the Nexus Between Business Accountability, Legitimacy, Growth and Societal Reconciliation. S. Singh. In: Handbook of Business Practices and Growth in Emerging Markets. Singapore: World Scientific Publisher, pp.119-140.
+O. Kuznetsova (2010). Emerging Shortcomings of the Russian Corporate Governance. S. Singh. In: Handbook of Business Practices and Growth in Emerging Markets. Singapore: World Scientific Publisher,
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2009). Corporate governance in Russia: Concept and reality. In: Accounting Reform in Transition and Developing Economies. pp.445-457.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2008). Corporate Governance in Russia: Concept and Reality. RW. McGee. In: Accounting Reform in Transition and Developing Economies. New York, USA: Springer, pp.445-457.
+N. Holden, O. Kuznetsova, G. Fink (2008). Russia's Long Struggle With Western Terms of Management and the Concepts Behind Them. S. Tietze. In: International Management and Language. London: Routledge,
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova, R. Kapelushnikov (2006). Ownership Structure and Corporate Governance in Russian Firms. T. Mickiewicz. In: Corporate Governance and Finance in Poland and Russia. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan,
+O. Kuznetsova (2004). External Trade Policy. F. McDonald, S. Darden. In: European Economic Integration. London: Longman,
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova, F. McDonald (2003). Entrepreneurship in Russia. P. Harris, F. McDonald. In: European Business and Marketing. Sage Publications,
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2002). The Objectives of the Northern Dimension Research Programme in the Light of the New Institutional Economics. E. Siivonen, S. Huikiri. In: Workshop on Studies for Northern Dimension. Helsinki: Government Institute for Economic Research (VAAT): Helsinki, FInland,
+O. Kuznetsova (2002). Vatican City. S. Pendergast, T. Pendergast. In: Worldmark Encyclopedia of National Economies. Farmington Hills, MI, USA: Gale Group,
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (2001). The Virtues and Weaknesses of Insider Shareholding. A. Kuznetsov. In: Russian Corporations: The Strategy of Survival and Development. New York: International Business Press,
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (1999). Why Is The Progress of Marketization Slow in Russia?. GR. Iyer, LA. Masters. In: Marketing Challenges in Transition Economies of Europe, Baltic States and the C.I.S.. New York, London, Oxford: International Business Press,
+O. Kuznetsova (1999). Energy and Raw Materials. P. Heenan, M. Lamontagne. In: The CIS Handbook: Regional Handbooks of Economic Development: Prospects Onto the 21st Century. Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers,
+O. Kuznetsova (1999). Financial Services. P. Heenan, M. Lamontagne. In: The CIS Handbook: Regional Handbooks of Economic Development: Prospects Onto the 21st Century. Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers,
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (1998). Privatisation, Shareholding and Efficiency Argument. F. McDonald, R. Thorpe. In: Organizational Strategy and Technological Adaptation to Global Change. London: Macmillan Press Ltd,
+S. Moss, O. Kuznetsova (1996). Modelling the Process of Market Emergence. J. Owsinski, Z. Nahorski. In: Modelling and Analysing Economies in Transition.. Warsaw: MODEST,
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (2018). Sustainability-centred view on the impact of marketization of higher education on employee relations. In: EURAM 2018 e-proceedings. Reykjavik, Iceland, 19/6/2018.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznzetsov Sustainability-centred view on the impact of marketization of higher education on employee relations. Reykjavik, Iceland, 19/6/2018.
+A. Raj, O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (2018). Evidence from Indian agribusiness firms: Are CSR motives in developing countries different?. In: EURAM. Reykjavik, Iceland, 19/6/2018.
+O. Kuznetsova (2017). 25 Years of Marketization of British Higher Education: Repercussions for Employee Relations. 6/7/2017.
+A. Bernardi, O. Kuznetsova, H. Mathieson 25 Years of Marketization of British Higher Education: Repercussions for Sustainability of Employee Relations. Copenhagen (Denmark), 6/7/2017.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (2017). Relevance Discovery in the International Knowledge Transfer Process: Knowledge Gatekeepers and Contextual Interpretation. In: Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Academy of International Business. Dubai, UAE, 2/7/2017.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova Relevance discovery in the international knowledge transfer process: Knowledge gatekeepers and contextual interpretation. Dubai (OAE), 2/7/2017.
+O. Kuznetsova, V. Vaiman, N. Holden (2016). Macro-perspective in global talent management: Application in the Russian context with a view to learn. Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen (Denmark), 3/10/2016.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova Contextual Constraints and Knowledge Relevance: Tutors as Knowledge Gatekeepers. Anaheim, CA, USA, 5/8/2016.
+A. Bernardi, O. Kuznetsova, H. Mathieson (2015). Marketization of Higher Education Institutions: Repercussions for Employee Relations. Genova, 17/9/2015.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2015). The Role of Discourse in Sensemaking under Condition of Radical Change. Vancouver, Canada, 7/8/2015.
+O. Kuznetsova Discursive Constraints of Sensemaking in the Situations of Abrupt Change. Bengaluru, India, 1/2/2015.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova, Y. Mirkin (2014). Financial Depth of Russia in Comparison to Other BRIC Countries. Budapest, 9/10/2014.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2014). Tackling the Liability of Foreignness: MNCs, Local Business Discourse and Sensemaking. In: Academy of Management Proceedings. Philadelphia, PA, 1/8/2014. pp.10965-10965.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2014). Talking the Talk: MNCs, Business Professional Discourse and Local Embeddedness in Transition Economies. In: K.Meyer and T.Kiyak (Eds) Local Contexts in Global Business AIB 2014 Proceedings. East Lancing (MI): AIB.. Vancouver, Canada, 23/7/2014.
+O. Kuznetsova Developing collaborative research: multi-, cross-, inter-, or trans- disciplinary?. Institute for Science Ethics and Innovation, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK, 8/7/2014.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova Nonstandard Work Arrangements and Regulatory Enforcement in the Russian Labour Market: The Case of Compensating Institutional Mechanisms in a Transition Economy. Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 3/7/2014.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova Tackling the Linguistic Dimension of the Liability of Foreignness: Challenges to Professional Discourse in Emerging Markets. Valencia, Spain, 4/6/2014.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova, Y. Mirkin (2013). Financial Depth of the BRIC: The Russian Dimension. In: Bridging the Divide: Linking IB to Complementary Disciplines and Practice. Istanbul, Turkey, 3/7/2013.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (2013). Language as a Barrier to Understanding: Professional Discourse and Business Sensemaking in Transition Economies. In: Bridging the Divide: Linking IB to Complementary Disciplines and Practice. Istanbul, Turkey, 3/7/2013.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov Understanding the Lion: Challenges of Building Business Professional Discourse in Emerging Markets. Roehampton University, UK, 15/5/2013.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov Challenges of Building Business Professional Discourse in Emerging Markets. Aston Business School, Birmingham, UK, 25/2/2013.
+O. Kuznetsova (2013). Relations Between Business and the State in Liberal Theory, In Russia and Elsewhere. Preddvor, Slovenia, 12/9/2012.
+A. Kuznetsov, R. Kapeliushnikov, O. Kuznetsova Measuring Property Rights Protection in a Transition Economy: An Empirical Study. Boston, USA, 3/8/2012.
+R. Kapeliushnikov, O. Kuznetsova The Informal Component of the Russian Labour Market Model and Its Influence on Employment. Boston, 3/8/2012.
+A. Kuznetsov, R. Kapelyushnikov, O. Kuznetsova Market Institutions and the Russian Labour Market Performance. University of Perugia, Italy, 10/11/2011.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov Looking For Ways to Increase Student Value: Internationalisation and Value Innovation. San-Antonio, 12/8/2011.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova The Russian Labour Market Model and Varieties of Capitalism: Where Does Russia Fit. In: Published in International Business for Sustainable World Development. Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Academy of International Business, Nagoya, Japan: AIB. Nagoya, Japan, 24/6/2011.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (2011). Looking For Ways to Increase Student Motivation: Internationalisation and Value Innovation. In: International Business for Sustainable World Development: Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Academy of International Business, Nagoya, Japan: AIB. Nagoya, Japan, 24/6/2011.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2010). Does the Stakeholder Theory of CSR Fit the Russian Reality?. In: Published in Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Academy of International Business, East Lancing MI: Academy of International Business. East Lancing, MI: Academy of International Business, 25/6/2010. pp.214-214.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov Looking For Ways to Increase Student Satisfaction: Internationalisation and Value Innovation. Preston, UK, 22/6/2010.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2008). Business Legitimacy and Corporate Social Responsibility in the Russian Context. In: Published in proceedings. Tallinn (Estonia), 11/12/2008.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (2008). Business Legitimacy and Corporate Social Responsibility in the Russian Context. In: Published in proceedings.. Tallinn (Estonia), 11/12/2008.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova, R. Warren, J. Jahansoozi (2007). Managers' Attitude Towards the Legitimacy of Business in Russia. Roskilde University, Lund, Sweden, 27/9/2007.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova, R. Warren CSR, Legitimacy and Institutions. Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, 11/9/2007.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (2007). Some Aspect of CSR in Transition Economies. 9/9/2007.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (2007). Fighting Poverty: The Role of Social Capital and Trust. 9/9/2007.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova Trust and Efficiency of Inter-Firm Cooperation in a Weak Institutional Environment. Vienna, Austria, 5/7/2007.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov, R. Warren CSR and the Legitimacy of Business: Some Evidence from a Transition Economy. University of York, 16/4/2007.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov Closing the Gap Between Big Business and Society in Russia: The Role of Corporate Social Responsibility. Belfast, UK, 12/9/2006.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova Deficiency of Trust and National Competitiveness: Big Corporations and the Development of Co-operative Social Relations of Production. Belfast, UK, 12/9/2006.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (2004). Poverty, Economic Growth and Corporate Social Responsibility. CEES, Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark, 26/8/2004.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov Born Illegitimate: Why Russian Capitalism is Different?. Jean Monnet Centre for Excellence, University of Cambridge, 12/3/2004.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov Crisis of Governance: Why Market Solutions to Economic Problems are Not Popular in Russia. Antalya, Turkey, 10/7/2002.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova The Objectives of the Northern Dimension Research Programme in the Light of the New Institutional Economics. Helsinki, Finland, 30/5/2002.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov Institutions, Business and State. MMU, Manchester, 8/3/2002.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov Institutional Hurdles in the Transitional Race: Consequences for Firm Restructuring. Split-Hvar, 24/5/2001.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov The Progress of Market Culture in Russia and Managerial Response. MMU, Manchester, 6/4/2001.
+O. Kuznetsova Tug-of-War: Market Players Against Market Forces. Institutional Commentary to Russian Transition. School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College of London, 21/11/2000.
+O. Kuznetsova Why Market Solutions to the Economic Problems are not Popular in Russia. MMU, Manchester, UK, 8/11/2000.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov The Reality of the Insiders' Threat: Shareholding and Restructuring in Russian Corporations. Hillerod, Denmark, 17/8/2000.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov Institutional Collapse in Transitional Russia: Consequences for Managerial and Entrepreneurial Culture. Grenoble, 10/12/1999.
+A. Kuznetsov, F. McDonald, O. Kuznetsova Networking and Entrepreneurial Success in a Transition Economy. Singapore, 15/8/1999.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov How Real is the Insiders' Threat? Managerial Control in Privatised Enterprises in Russia. Sibenik, 27/5/1999.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetov Entrepreneurial Culture in Transitional Russia: Contradictions and Influences. Copenhagen, Denmark, 4/2/1999.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova Corporate Governance in Transitional Economies: Has Everything Being Done to Make the Concept Work?. Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark, 20/8/1998.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov Could Socio-Cultural Background of Russian Managers be Blamed for Poor Development of Marketing in Russia?. Universita della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland, 4/6/1998.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov Corporate Governance Under Transition and the Role of the State: The Case of Russia. City University Business School, London, 3/4/1998.
+A. Kuznetsov, F. McDonald, O. Kuznetsova The Successful Entrepreneur in a Transition Economy: Main Qualities and Specific Features. University of Mannheim, Germany/European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management/Belgium, 26/11/1997.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov Efficient Management of Newly-Privatised Firms: Are the Criteria Met?. Split-Brela, Croatia, 22/5/1997.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov Post-Communist Economies and Conventions in Cross-Cultural Competence: From a System-Specific to Country-Based Approach. Vienna, Austria, 10/4/1997.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (1996). Managerial Culture and Behavioural Choice in Transition Economies: How Reliable are Stereotypes?. Stockholm (Sweden), 15/12/1996.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova Crisis Management and Business Environment in Transition Countries. Centre for Post-Soviet Studies, University of Reading, UK, 29/11/1996.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova From a Socialist Enterprise to a Capitalist Firm: The Hazards of the Managerial Learning Curve. University of Geneva, 12/7/1996.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova Privatisation, Shareholding and Efficiency Argument. MMU, Manchester, 25/3/1996.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (1995). Privatisation, Company Organisation and Disciplinary Mechanism in the Emerging Corporate System of Russia. Wirtschaftsuniversitat Wien, Austria, 15/11/1995.
+O. Kuznetsova, S. Moss Modelling of Market Emergence. Warsaw-Madralin, 28/9/1995.
+O. Kuznetsova (2017). Book review "Chatterjee, Choi, Kirschenbaum, Lisa A. & Field, Deborah A., Russia’s Long Twentieth Century. Voices, Memories Contested Perspectives. Abingdon & New York, NY: Routledge, 2016, xi + 277pp., £24.00 p/b. ". Europe-Asia Studies.
+O. Kuznetsova (2017). Book review. Rogers, Douglas, The Depth of Russia. Oil, Power and Culture after Socialism. Ithaca, NY & London: Cornell University Press, 2015, xix + 370pp., £18.95/$27.95 p/b. Europe-Asia Studies. 69, 177-178.
+O. Kuznetsova (2014). Book Review: Bear Traps on Russia's Road to Modernization.
+O. Kuznetsova (2011). Book review: "Tomasz Mickiewicz, Economics of Institutional Change: Central and Eastern Europe Revised. Second Edition. Studies in Economic Transition. Houndmills: palgrave Macmilan, 2010, xii p 244pp., £65.00 h/b". EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES. 63, 1298-1299.
+A. Platonov (2004). Soul.
+O. Kuznetsova, A. Kuznetsov (1999). Entrepreneurial Culture in Transitional Russia: Contradictions and Influences.
+A. Kuznetsov, O. Kuznetsova (1996). Privatisation, Company Organisation and Disciplinary Mechanism in the Emerging Corporate System of Russia.
+S. Moss, O. Kuznetsova (1995). Modelling the Process of Market Emergence.
+- World Symposium on Sustainability Science and Research: Implementing the 2030 United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development (MMU, Manchester, UK, 5-7 April 2017): member of scientific committee, member of organisation committee
+-The 28th European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE) annual meeting (MMU, Manchester, UK, 3-5 November 2016): conference co-chair, member of the organisation and research programme committees
+- The 2nd World Symposium on Sustainability at Universities (MMU, Manchester, UK, 3-5 September 2014): member of scientific committee, member of organisation committee
+Editorial roles:
+Journal of World Business: editorial review board member
+European Journal of International Management: editorial review board member
+International Journal of Emerging Markets: editorial review board member
+Encyclopaedia of the Sustainable Development Goals: Transforming the World We Want: co-editor and associate editor with a special task ‘Goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’
+International Journal of Business and Emerging Markets
+Integrative Approaches to Sustainable Development at University Level, Springer International Publishing AG: volume editor (2015)
+Review of Business
+Journal of Eastern European and Central Asian Research
+Social Business
+2017: SAMS-Society for the Advancement of Management Studies
+2017: The British Academy
+2016: The Royal Economic Society
+2015: MMU RKE project support
+2015: Marketing Manchester
+2014-15: The Eurasian Economic Commission for ECU and EES
+2014: MMU FoBL Small Research Grant
+2013-14: SAMS-Society for the Advancement of Management Studies
+2012: CRCE-Centre for Research into Post-Communist Economies
+2012: The Royal Economic Society
+2010-11: The British Academy
+2004-2008: ESRC
+2003-06: The British Academy
+2004: EU INTAS
+2001-04: EU INTAS
+1997-2000: EU INTAS
+1997-2000: DFID-Department f
+or International Development Know How Fund
+The Eurasian Economic Commission for ECU and EES
+OECD
+World Bank
+Institute of Scientific Information for Social Science of the Russian Academy of Science (INION)
+The Boston Consulting Group
+Samsung
+CIMA – Charted Institute of Management Accountants
+PricewaterhouseCoopers
+Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation
+ANO New Development Technologies, Russian International Affairs Council
+Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia
+ESRC (The Economic and Social Research Council)
+The Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) of the Russian Science Foundation (RSF)
+The Project Management Agency of the German Aerospace Center (PT-DLR)
+Horizon 2020-MSCA-IF
+Horizon 2020-MSCA-RISE
+Higher Education Academy (HEA)
+FP7 Research Projects for Host-Driven Actions (ITN)
+German Aerospace Agency (DLR) ERA.Net, .ERAfrica
+FP7 IAPP (Industry-Academia Partnerships and Pathways)
+The Ministry of HE of Russia
+International Bureau of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Germany)
+New Eurasia Foundation
+FP7 REA (Research Executive Agency) ECO-SOC panels (IEF-IIF-IOF)
+FP7 REA (Research Executive Agency) ECO-SOC (INT)
+INTAS EU
+FP6
+International Journal of Business and Emerging Markets (IJBEM)): Book Review Editor
+Integrative Approaches to Sustainable Development at University Level (2015), Springer International Publishing AG: volume editor
+Journal of Business and Emerging Markets (IJBEM): Book Review Editor (01/07/2014 – 01/07/2017)
+Review of Business (USA): UK regional corresponding Editor
+Journal of Eastern European and Central Asian Research (USA): Editorial Board member
+Social Business: Special Issue Guest Editor
+Royal Economic Society
+Academy of Management
+AIB
+Regional Studies Association
+Sustainable and Responsible Business SIG at BAM
+International Association of Cross-Cultural Competence and Management
+Stakeholders Strategy Interest Group of the Strategic Management Society
+Gerson Lehrman Group Policy&Economic Council
+Higher Education Academy Fellow
+Singing America the Beautiful for night two of WrestleMania was Jessie James Decker, accompanied by some guy who thought he was better on the piano than he was…On the other side of another opening montage narrated by Mark Wahlberg, WrestleMania Sunday kicked off with a surprise appearance from Triple H. On the mic, Triple H said he came to say thank you, welcome us to WrestleMania and leave his boots in the ring.
+RAW Tag Team Championship – RK-Bro (Randy Orton and Riddle) (c) vs. The Street Profits (Angelo Dawkins and Montez Ford) vs. Alpha Academy (Chad Gable and Otis)
+The opening contest was the RAW Tag Team Championship Triple Threat Match with RK-Bro defending against Alpha Academy and the Street Profits. As the bell rang, Chad Gable shooshed Riddle and Montez Ford and received a stiff chop for his trouble. The match then broke down very quickly and all six competitors fought in and around the ring. Once the match got back in the ring, Alpha Academy isolated Riddle from tagging out of the match. They then decided that this would actually be a triple threat match and Angelo Dawkins joined the match and Gable tagged Otis, completely confusing who was legal and what the rules of this match were. The Street Profits took control of the match and got a nearfall but as Ford got ready to deliver a big splash, Riddle shocked him with an RKO from the top rope. Gable tried to shock Orton but he himself was caught in mid-air by an RKO from Orton. Randy made the cover to get the 1-2-3 and pick up the win for his team. After the match, RK-Bro and the Street Profits brought Gable Steveson into the ring to join them. Chad Gable tried to interrupt and received a Belly to Belly Suplex from Steveson for his interruption.
+Jez’s Pick: RK-Bro
+Dan’s Pick: RK-Bro
+Winner: RK-Bro
+Jez 7 – Dan 7
+Bobby Lashley vs. Omos
+The next match was quite literally the biggest match on the card, with the giant Omos taking on the All Mighty Bobby Lashley. After the bell, Omos very quickly took Lashley down to the mat with clubbing strikes but the All Mighty tried to get back into the contest with his strength. This worked to a point but Omos continued to overwhelm the former WWE Champion. Lashley refused to quit, though, and eventually fought his way back delivering a huge suplex to the colossus, delivered a Spear to the back of Omos and punctuated it with one to the front that allowed him to pick up the win.
+Jez’s Pick: Lashley
+Dan’s Pick: Lashley
+Winner: Lashley
+Jez 8 – Dan 8
+Anything Goes Match – Johnny Knoxville vs. Sami Zayn
+Up next on WrestleMania Sunday was the Anything Goes Match between Jackass star, Johnny Knoxville, and former Intercontinental Champion, Sami Zayn. Zayn started the match with a quick Helluva Kick but he was not content to collect a quick win and continued the attack around the ring. After Zayn became distracted by the Jackass crew at ringside, Knoxville got back into the match with a fire extinguisher and weapons were introduced to the match. After clapping the head of Zayn with trash can lids, Knoxville found himself on the wrong end of a Belly to Belly Suplex through a table. As Knoxville recovered, some dude from Jackass entered the ring and got his jackass out in a thong but Zayn soon dispatched him. From one Jackass to another, though, Wee Man entered the match and delivered the smallest body slam in the history of WrestleMania. Knoxville surprised Zayn by setting off the pyro from the turnbuckle and followed it up with a bowling ball and punt machine to the groin. Zayn’s special place received more punishment in the form of a tazer before Sami was thrown through a table covered in mouse traps. Knoxville then trapped Zayn in a giant mouse trap and picked himself up the win.
+Jez’s Pick: Johnny Knoxville
+Dan’s Pick: Johnny Knoxville
+Winner: Johnny Knoxville
+Jez 9 – Dan 9
+Women’s Tag Team Championship – Queen Zelina and Carmella (c) vs. Sasha Banks and Naomi vs. Rhea Ripley and Liv Morgan vs. Natalya and Shayna Baszler
+In the next match, the Women’s Tag Team Champions, Queen Zelina and Carmella defended against Sasha Banks/Naomi, Rhea Ripley/Liv Morgan and Natalya/Shayna Baszler. The rules were more clearly defined in this match but it still was not a Fatal Four Way tag team match with only two women in the ring at a time. This said, the referee did very little to prevent illegal women from entering the ring and the match quickly descended into a finishing move showcase and spotfest. With no team able to maintain their momentum for too long, the match came to an end when Naomi and Sasha Banks worked together to take down Carmella and become the Women’s Tag Team Champions.
+Jez’s Pick: Carmella/Vega
+Dan’s Pick: Carmella/Vega
+Winner: Banks/Naomi
+Jez 9 – Dan 9
+Edge vs. AJ Styles
+The next contest was the very personal affair between the Phenomenal AJ Styles and WWE Hall of Famer Edge. Edge played mind games in the early going and tried to frustrate Styles. Edge went for the Spear early but Styles avoided it and the match reset. Styles went for a Phoenix Splash but Edge got his knees up and control of the match shifted his way as he targeted the ribs of his opponent methodically. Despite this injury, as well as a potentially separated shoulder, Styles fought his way back and the two men wore each other down. Styles delivered a Suplex on the ring apron and both men were nearly counted out but just about beat the count. Styles hit the Phoenix Splash on his second attempt but only got a two count. Styles ducked a Spear and delivered the Styles Clash but once again could only get two. Styles set up for the Phenomenal Forearm but was distracted by Damien Priest who simply appeared at ringside. As Styles leaped towards Edge, he was taken down with a cutting Spear and Edge pinned AJ to pick up a huge WrestleMania victory.
+Jez’s Pick: AJ Styles
+Dan’s Pick: AJ Styles
+Winner: Edge
+Jez 9 – Dan 9
+The New Day (King Woods and Kofi Kingston) vs. Sheamus and Ridge Holland (with Butch)
+The next match saw The New Day team of King Woods and Kofi Kingston take on the Fight Night crew of Sheamus and Ridge Holland. The fighting started before the bell but eventually began. With Butch flying around all over the place, Sheamus was able to Brogue Kick Woods behind the referee’s back and Holland was able to deliver Northern Grit and pick up the win.
+Jez’s Pick: New Day
+Dan’s Pick: New Day
+Winner: Sheamus and Ridge Holland
+Jez 9 – Dan 9
+Pat McAfee vs. Austin Theory
+After two spectacular entrances, the next contest was between Mr. McMahon’s new chosen one, Austin Theory, and SmackDown commentator Pat McAfee. McAfee started hot showing off his wrestling ability but took a little too long to capitalise and A-Town took over for a time. With the crowd fully behind McAfee, he beat down Austin Theory off the announce table and went for a Swanton Bomb but once again he took too long and Theory regained control. McAfee continued to show off his athleticism and was eventually able to surprise Theory with a roll-up to pick up a shock win.
+Jez’s Pick: Austin Theory
+Dan’s Pick: Pat McAfee
+Winner: Pat McAfee
+Jez 9 – Dan 10
+After the match, McAfee celebrated and Mr. McMahon took off his suit jacket and a second match got underway between the Chairman and McAfee. McMahon took Pat down with repeated Clotheslines and bounced him off the top turnbuckle. Austin Theory dragged McAfee crotch first into the ringpost and McMahon followed it up by kicking a football into the head of the former punter before pinning him to pick up a win. The moment still wasn’t over here, as McMahon and Theory celebrated, Stone Cold Steve Austin came to the ring. Austin verbally dressed down McMahon before stunnering Theory. He offered Vince a beer but, obviously, Stunnered him as payment. Stone Cold invited McAfee in for a beer too but, of course, he caught a Stunner as well. Stone Cold hit the ropes and continued the celebration before strolling out of WrestleMania for the second night in a row.
+Winner Takes All match to unify the WWE Championship and WWE Universal Championship – WWE Champion Brock Lesnar vs. Universal Champion Roman Reigns (with Paul Heyman)
+After all the excitement of a two night WrestleMania, it was finally time for the main event. In a winner take all match, the WWE Champion, Brock Lesnar, took on Universal Champion, Roman Reigns. Brock took off his gloves as the bell rang and immediately went to work on the Universal Champ and took him to Suplex City. Brock took the fight outside and was immediately distracted by Paul Heyman. Roman capitalised on this opportunity and Speared Lesnar through the barricade before hitting another Spear inside the ring and achieving a very close near fall. Reigns delivered a pair of Superman Punches and went for a third but Reigns was taken the German quarter of Suplex City. The Tribal Chief did rally back and hit the third Superman Punch but when he went for another Spear, Lesnar sidestepped and hit the F5, getting a nearfall of his own. Reigns speared Lesnar into the official, hit Lesnar with a low blow and nailed him between the eyes with the Universal Title. The referee stirred and Lesnar kicked out of the cover. Reigns went for another Spear but Lesnar countered into the Kimura but Roman reached the ropes. Brock went for the F5 but Reigns wriggled out and delivered yet another Spear and pinned Lesnar to finally get the win over the Beast Incarnate.
+Jez’s Pick: Brock Lesnar
+Dan’s Pick: Roman Reigns
+Winner: Roman Reigns
+Jez 9 – Dan 11
+Final Rating
+Dan awards 2.5 out of 5 Undisputed WWE Universal Championships
+Jez awards 3 out of 5 Undisputed WWE Universal Championships.
+Will?
+Hacker says that algebra is unnecessary and should be abolished because kids are getting bad grades, they suffer, and some of them drop out of schools because of algebra. I believe that if you read the previous sentence, you may save your time and skip reading the rant in the Grey Lady because it contains no other ideas, just vacuous meaningless babbling and unsubstantiated anti-mathematical screams.
+These observations that the math class is tough are surely correct, statistically speaking. The average grade in algebra is worse than the average grade in cheaper subjects. Mathematical subjects are much more likely to be the reason why young people drop out of schools, and so on and so on.
+The deterioration of the society is fast. A year ago, such stupid opinions would be a domain of fictitious beauty contestants in satirical videos. In 2012, however, they're what hackers seriously advocate in America's most prestigious newspapers.
+However, what is wrong is Hacker's conclusion (and the conclusion of most of the Miss USA contestants in the famous funny video above) that these observations imply that algebra shouldn't be taught. In fact, they imply exactly the opposite.
+There are many independent reasons why mathematics must be taught. I am convinced that no person whose IQ is closer to average people in 2012 than to average people in the Idiocracy Movie doubts that mathematical subjects are essential for people to independently exist, and especially lead others, in a civilized world – especially in all those human activities where people make living differently than by getting money from others "for nothing tangible". Most of the "vital parts" of the human activity that the civilization couldn't survive without crucially depend on mathematics; the other human activities are pretty much about the redistribution and "funny flows" of the wealth created by the activities that do depend on maths.
+Algebra is needed to calculate which mortgage is better for you, it is a cornerstone of economics as well as physics and some other natural and technical sciences and engineering, and it is crucial for trillions of other things I don't want to list here. Some other people have discussed those self-evident things.
+But I want to focus on Hacker's arguments that remind me of arguments of a spoiled and lazy teenager whose buttocks should be severely spanked. (I would recommend this treatment even if Mr Hacker weren't a teenager anymore; however, his emeritus status may earn him an exception, after all.)
+He says that in other subjects, everyone gets a good grade, and that's why schools should emphasize those subjects. But this is complete rubbish – a proof that Mr Hacker has made an algebraic sign error in his reasoning. If all people are getting good grades in a subject, it shows that these students and schools are really wasting their time (or times if the time isn't the only one). Why? Well, it really means that schools are spending more time with that than what is needed for most people to get it.
+On the other hand, if only some people manage to reach a certain level of algebraic skills, it shows that the teaching process makes a difference. Needless to say, the right way to level the field – and make algebra more analogous to cheaper subjects when it comes to the grades – is to increase the time dedicated to algebra so that even the slower students increase their chance to get from an F or a D to a B.
+However, I am afraid that Mr Hacker won't be able to understand my argument – concluding that bad-grade subjects should be dedicated more time, not less time, and easy good-grade subjects could be shrunk – based on the law of diminishing returns if he hasn't even understood why algebra is important.
+The same comments apply to the issue of dropouts and all other "arguments" by Mr Hacker. The fact that mathematical subjects are the reason why some people are dropouts while other people aren't is what makes mathematical subjects important at school, what inserts meritocracy rather than nepotism and emotions to the grading process and to many other phenomena in the real world.
+The deficient and utterly illogical character of Mr Hacker's argumentation only helps to emphasize how completely inadequate his knowledge and thinking is. People who want to preserve the civilization and avoid the future according to the Idiocracy Movie are facing a double challenge: they must improve the teaching of mathematical subjects so that the deterioration helped by unchecked populism is stopped; and they must protect the society against the influence of breathtaking dimwits such as Mr Hacker himself who were unfortunately taught how to write (e.g. for The New York Times) but they have never learned how to think and who can no longer be efficiently treated in the way that spoiled lazy kids should be treated.
+See also Czech conservative president Václav Klaus regrets declining prestige of maths and try to figure out whether the leftwingers or conservatives are more anti-science.
+Well, it (the NYT drivel) is quite typical opinion of the intellectuals. If they hate something, than it is reality check. And just as you can put lipstick on the pig, and it will remain a pig, you can slap the college diploma on a moron, but you cannot teach him even simple algebra.
+Recently I have heard the nice expression which is appropriate for the situation and for Mr. Hacker: "Often wrong but never in doubt."
+Mathematics is nourishment for the brain. Without math the brain slowly deteriorates into a vestigial organ serving no useful purpose. Algebra, of course, is the very heart of mathematics. I cannot envision granting a college degree to any person who cannot do simple algebraic manipulations for such people can never make creative contributions to society. It is not possible.
+A political science professor questioning the value of mathematics?
+Gimme a break! To quote the great American physicist Richard Feynman,
+"In my experience, I find social scientists to be neither."
+I concur.
+I love mathematics. I hated doing it in school because I felt I was doing busy work-I hadn't found a level that actually intellectually challenged me. But in College, I finally took a physics class, (science classes at lower levels were the same, un-descriptive, qualitative crap at every grade level-but I did like biology in spite of that-and chemistry might have been nice, but I had a piece of shit liberal teacher who showed Al Gore's movie (this was not the sole thing that made him shit-he was just an objectively bad teacher) that I really began to appreciate the use of mathematics for describing the physical world (actually, I got this a little earlier in High School from sources outside the educational system, but didn't get to learn how to use it myself extensively). Truly mathematics is wonderful.
+It is interesting to hear that the coverage of advanced science is relatively good in NYT. I get my coverage of high level physics from you Lubos. Why would I go for "relatively good" when I can get the best? ;)
+Unfu@king believable! With the dumbing down of teaching and mark inflation, we have kids working at cash registers who can't make change. The register makes the change and dispenses it. Anyway, just why do we learn things in school? Isn't it to be able to think rationally, create the ability to evaluate and continue to learn things, and perhaps function in society. I would argue that innumeracy and illiteracy are equally hobbling. Without some minimum understanding of math and science, even the best writers, historians, etc
+are horribly mentally unprepared to live in the 21st century and to understand things that aren't simply surface scum of human virtual reality that they call "society". Just think what would happen if all of the mathematically/scientifically/engineering literate people
+disappeared leaving only people like poly sci professors who don't know simple algebra....
+I also argue that numerate folks should also be required to take writing courses, but really, without some math and science literacy you are back to the dark ages.
+The argument that students don't "need" algebra is like the spectator in Paris watching the ascent of a hot air balloon who vented to Benjamin Franklin--"What good is it?" Franklin famously responded, "What good is a newborn baby."
+Articles like this NYT one are frightening. The idea that everyone should get great marks is frightening. There was an article on some local girl getting a Phd in some social "science" for sampling an elderly population who regularly walked, and a sedentary sample and concluding that exercise improved elderly cognition.
+GAD. Astounding! Just compare this with the effort involved in obtaining a Phd in math, or physics, or computer science, or engineering. And there are much much worse examples in "X studies" programs....enough of a rant....
+Hmmm, much more concise than my rant, cynholt.
+Agreed Werdna, even if we disagree on politics etc. I like reading mathematics, but find that most people find this to be quite weird.
+Talking about dark ages coming, some are welcoming, inviting them. See the quote from Texas GOP 2012 platform:
+2012
+REPUBLICAN PARTY teh democrats want to stay competitive. ;-)
+I don't know about you, Gordon, but I'm also getting rather sick and
+tired of being bombarded with news headlines like this one entitled,
+"Alcohol Harms Thinking in Older Adults, Researchers Say" (see link
+below) -- coming out of the medical-industrial complex, no doubt --
+making claims that if you do this or that, or if you don't do this or
+that, you'll either live longer or be healthier or happier. Such broad
+and sweeping Ag and Big Oil!
+Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of funding research that leads
+to better understanding of diseases and better drugs to treat diseases.
+But funding research that tells you such things like drinking alcohol is
+good for you under one set of circumstances, but is bad for you under
+another set of circumstances, is a total waste of time and money.
+Bottom line: all research studies that meet the definition of common
+sense.
+Algebra is fun when it is well explained, with a teacher who truly enjoys it too. As a kid I remember how excited I was when I could find the unknown number out of an algebraic equation for the first time. It felt really cool. Where it gets complicated is when one hits calculus :-/ ... On this 3mn TED video this math teacher thinks that instead of learning calculus we should learn statistics. What do you think Lubos ?
+Gordon -- Perhaps Kansas board of education is right about evolution being just a
+theory. Retards all over the place are proving Darwin is wrong.
+There's exactly one short tiny paragraph - the paragraph with the algebraic identity, the only truly valuable part of the article (I am sure that the whole social science department worked on it for months) - that tries to discuss what the math teaching is actually said to be good for. He wrote:.
+So in his viewpoint, the purpose of the school system is to make people have "credible political opinions" and able to make "social analysis". Quite a professional deformation for a political scientist. However, I don't believe that this viewpoint on the role of school is really compatible with education in democracies. It's not schools' business at all to prescribe the political opinions - and not even ways how to reach the political opinions - to the students. Political opinions and modes to do social analysis depend on the person's experience, innate aptitude and character, education in families or by people who are "personally trustworthy", and simple interests depending on the person's status and "classes" where he feels to belong. Schools are just not meant to be shaping students into one of those categories. They are meant to help them do things at all and do them right and use technically right arguments to think about them, and this is really brought by exact enough subjects only. Social science subjects are only able to prescribe the resulting beliefs to the students.
+In some sense, what he openly calls for are "schools as tools of political indoctrination about easy things" instead "schools as institutions where one learns the things that would be otherwise hard to know".
+How can one have a sense of proportion without mathematics?
+Does that explain the actions of those guided by naked social scienceless?
+I don't have anything of real importance to say, but Hacker's article boggles my mind so much that I feel I HAVE to cast a vote. This guy is a pernicious moron. I'm reasonably confident it's true that some people can't do math, but Hacker blows this way out of proportion. He seems to want effort-free school.
+I'm baffled by his idea "citizen statistics." It seems to be something for which there's no need of a mathematical grasp of things, or any ability to make inferences.
+"Most philosophy" is not "junk humanities". I'm not talking about post-structuralist bullshit by Derrida or Foucault, the darlings of English and X studies departments all over the Western world - I'm referring to Western analytical philosophy. Have you ever taken a class in it? Western analytical philosophy is so rigorous that it has become irrelevant, as no one has ever been smart enough to build an airtight theory for anything - but I think it is a worthwhile subject to study since it teaches very rigorous critical thinking skills which can be applied to all kinds of fields.
+not really--eventually many of them win Darwin awards :) (or become politicians)
+Student: Coach, I got 4 E's and a D this semester!
+Coach: I think you spended too much time on one subject.
+That is a correct assessment and description of CUNY. Feel-good-ism is the new know-nothing-ism. Those are the same old regressive, or retrograde ideas as are now ascendant in Islamic fascism.
+Back to the ignorant future!
+I can be a bit of a luddite when it comes to television. There are times when I miss the warmth of the cathode ray tube and the warmth of its colors… and its ability to render black and white shows and movies correctly. I am certainly in no hurry most days to jump on whatever the latest trend is.
+On the other hand, I do eventually catch up and have been at times in the vanguard. We had a DVR from ReplayTV back before Tivo came and went as a generic term for the device. With streaming channels we were able to start off with Netflix and Amazon on our PlayStation 3 when they launched.
+But a combination of events pushed us into streaming as the default television mode at our house, and the first of those events was Baby Yoda. Or Grogu, as we now know his name.
+My wife wanted to watch The Madalorian, which was only available on the newly launched Disney+ service. However, as the PS3 was days from going out of support Disney declined to build an app for it, so we needed another device. I got a recommendation from a friend who works over at Roku and we picked up one of their Roku Stick devices in order to stream.
+Then, or course, came the pandemic. That meant we were home a lot more watching TV. But sports were cancelled… my wife watches ice hockey… so we were looking for something to fill the void on that front.
+And then there was Comcast/XFinity, which implemented a new compression algorithm which makes their HD channels look as grainy and dull as standard definition. In comparison content streamed through the Roku look sharp and clear.
+So from some point in February forward we have pretty much watched only stream on demand video content. The only ads we have seen are the previews for other titles that sometimes get padded into the front end of shows on demand. We have watched when we wanted to, often as many episodes in a row as we have wanted to, all from the comfort of our couch.
+Based on that, I have the following thoughts.
+- No commercials is pretty nice
+I would have underestimated this, but then we went to watch 60 Minutes live on cable to see the presidential candidate interviews and the commercials were interminable. Even when we record things on the DVR I have to fast forward and skip back to get past them… and the cable channels are wise to this and have deliberately started injecting quick scenes from the show your watching into the middle of five minute commercial blocks to make you stop and check to see if you’ve missed something. Not dealing with that at all… and not watching any commercials… has changed my tolerance level for them.
+- I still won’t buy pay-per-View
+I like a service where you pay a monthly fee and can watch all you want from their selection. And since that is readily available in the form of Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and even HBO, the value proposition of spending $6-$20 on a single showing of show or a movie when there are so many other options is a non-starter for me. If it is special enough that I need to see it now, I’ll go see it in the theater… back when they re-open. And the idea of “owning” digital content that the provider can take away from you later is ludicrous. Comcast has literally screwed my on that with the one thing I bought from them.
+- There are too damn many streaming services
+I mean, we knew this already. But when you go to the Roku channel store and see the multitude of services available, you start to get a feeling of how big the eventual culling will be. And even the big channels are eyeing some consolidation. Hulu has had all of the FX stuff folded into it and it feels like Hulu and Disney+ might eventually co-join.
+- Finding things is hard
+The most difficult part of coming to the end of a show is that you now how to find something new to watch. My wife and I spend time comparing notes with friends and reading online articles about the ten best things to watch on this service or that. And it is a multi layer problem. The UI on any given service is quickly overloaded by too much choice. There are multiple services and some content swaps between them. And when you can find things, then figuring out what is worth the effort and investment can lead to decision paralysis.
+- I am torn on weekly versus all at once content
+I complained in one of my binge watching posts about services that still dole out episodes once a week rather than just giving us the whole series to consume at once, the way Netflix does. But for a popular show, where everybody watches on the same day lest they be beset by spoilers, or when everybody in our house is invested in the show, the once a week schedule still works out and becomes a point in time when we all get together on the couch.
+- We have been biased towards shows versus movies
+For whatever reason our pandemic binge watching has been heavily biased towards series. When we sit down in the evening a two hour movie is a commitment, but a show that is 22-60 minutes per episode is something you can take in pieces. The irony here is that we almost inevitably watch two hours or more when we settle in after dinner, but we have this idea that a movie is too much. Well, that and movie selection can be odd. There is still a very old school, HBO monthly selection situation going on where movies come and go and are on this service then that for short stints. So even finding a movie you want to watch on a service to which you are currently subscribed can be even more of a chore than finding shows.
+- I could cut the cord were it not for sports
+Seriously, I could turn my back on the cable company… well, except for the fact that they are also the internet company. But my wife likes to watch hockey and texts back and forth with her pals about the game and, while I can get the games on a stream, they are inevitably 30-60 seconds behind what is on cable and my wife hates hearing that one side or the other has score before it happens on our screen.
+- It really sucks when the internet goes down
+The cable company is also the internet company… that is our only high speed internet option and we live in the middle of Silicon Fucking Valley… so when they go down or are doing maintenance, you get a quick and hard accounting of just how much you depend on that pipe for your entertainment.
+- It does not replace the theater experience
+I know a bunch of people who are not at all sad that movie theaters are in trouble and that many may not open back up when the pandemic passes. I still value the theater experience though, and miss it. Seeing something on the big screen, like a James Bond or a Star Wars film, is not something that can be at all replicated in our living room, no matter how big of a TV we purchase. Of course, most everything I would have gone to see on the big screen has been delayed due to the pandemic, so if there are theaters this summer I hope to return.
+- I still cannot watch exactly what I want on demand
+I wrote a few years back that the most cost effective way to watch exactly what you want is to get an old fashioned, disks through the mail, Netflix subscription and get things that way. That remains true today. I saw that Geoffrey Palmer had passed away and wondered if I could watch some of the early things he was in, like The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.
+Nope. Not available. I could get it on DVD from Netflix through the mail, but even the niche British TV streaming services like BritBox, GranadaVision, BoB, and Acorn, don’t have it. There isn’t even a pay per view option, not that I would use it.
+Others on this topic:
+That is such a good set of bullet points and so congruent with my own experience that I may well steal the headings and run a post of my own using them. Just in case I don’t, I’ll mention that I have exactly the same psychological issue over tv shows vs movies on streaming services now. Literally exactly the same.
+I used to watch a lot of movies, both on broadcast tv and on vhs back in the days of video as well as at the cinema and I had absolutely no problem whatsoever donating two or three hourts of my time to a film. These days that seems like a huge commitment that I just can’t bring myself to make… and yet I watch multiple consecutive episodes of tv shows every night now, usually totalling the exact same two to three hours.
+I used to put this down to playing mmorpgs. It was that hobby that basically stopped me watching any movies or tv shows for over a decade. I can’t really make much of a case for it now, though, when I’ve gone back to watching almost as much screen entertainment as I did before I started playing EverQuest back in 1999.
+As for working out what to watch next, my best source is mmo blogs, believe it or not. I watched Bojack Horseman because you mentioned it (and I’m sitting beneath a five foot pink flag of Princess Carolyn as I write this) and I’m currently half-way through Season 2 of Kim’s Convenience because you mentioned it. Also, Derry Girls was one of your recommendations. I watched Umbrella Academy, Tales from the Loop and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina because various bloggers mentioned them and I have The Good Place on my watchlist from a blog mention.
+LikeLiked by 1 person
+@WIlhelm:
+Great post and echoes my sentiments perfectly. In Australia we are subbed to Netflix, PrimeVideo, Disney+, and a local Australian entity called Binge. We are lucky enough to have very good internet (1000/50 NBN fibre to the home) so it almost never goes down and our TV watching is almost never interrupted or unavailable.
+Between the above four we have a good choice if we want to watch shows and films legally. We only sub to Disney+ and Binge if there is a show we really want to watch during a particular month.
+Luckily I am not a sport watcher so I am not forced to sub to something I don’t really need or limited too.
+@bhagpuss:
+Lot’s of great shows in that list and we have watched them all. We also watch The Expanse, Star Trek Discovery, The Last Kingdom, Vikings, and Virgin River.
+I could cut the cord were it not for sports
+Ain’t this the truth.
+I’m a college basketball junkie, and from November through early April there’s almost always a game on that I can watch. Ohio Valley Conference, Big Sky, Mountain West, A-10, or Big Ten, it doesn’t matter. I’ll watch. But converting that to a streaming service? About the best I can do right now is ESPN+, and even then I’m missing a lot that’s shown on the regional Fox Sports networks (or whomever owns them now).
+But for me the biggest hurdle is internet access.
+I live in a city that has a MLB, NFL, and MLS team, yet I’m stuck with either subscribing to Spectrum (who has kinda/sorta fast internet speeds) or the local telco (who has fast fiber if you can get it). I currently subscribe to the telco, but in spite of years of cajoling and begging, our neighborhood still hasn’t gotten fiber. But we may finally have some movement here, because they were recently bought out by an international consortium and one of their stated goals was to get the region to 95+% fiber in a couple of years. Once they do, DirecTV is going the way of the dodo.
+Pingback: Binge Watch Sorrow 2: Electric Boogaloo | Indiecator
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+1. Methodology background
+Back to table of contents
+2. Important points about Construction Price data
+The Construction Output Price Indices (OPIs) provides our best estimate of inflation within the UK construction industry.
+Index values are produced for every month but are published on a quarterly basis.
+Index values are formed from a weighted ratio of aggregated values on the base period of 2015=100.
+The OPIs estimate costs related to different types of construction projects, and provide aggregated measures for all new work, repair and maintenance and all construction work.
+For all projects, three types of input costs are estimated: materials, plant and labour. A mark-up is applied, which accounts for profit. The result is then used as a proxy for output prices.
+Material costs are estimated using individual Producer Price Indices (PPIs), plant costs are measured using the Services Producer Price Index (SPPI) for construction plant hire and labour costs are measured using the Average Weekly Earnings (AWE) index for construction.
+Revisions are subject to the revisions policies of component series; for routine revisions the series will remain open for a period of five months, in line with PPI, its main component.
+The OPI will also be revised on an annual basis to account for the profit mark-up margin update, introduced as part of the methodological improvements in the July to September 2017 release. It would be expected these changes would take effect in the April to June publication each year, although this may depend on the availability of the data. Alternative sources for profit mark-up data are currently being investigated as a future possibility to improve the timeframe and provide data continuity.
+3. Overview of the output
+The Construction Output Prices Indices (OPIs) provide a best estimate of inflation within the UK construction industry. The OPIs are compiled using existing Office for National Statistics (ONS) data sources on a project cost basis.
+This approach involves input costs, which are material, labour and plant, weighted together for a selection of types of construction projects, with a mark-up being applied to account for profit by the construction firm. The result is considered a proxy for output prices. The basic concept of producing each output price index is as follows:
+The ONS took responsibility for publishing these statistics on 1 April 2015. The indices were previously known as the Construction Price and Cost Indices (CPCIs) and were published by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), now known as the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), before the publication was suspended in December 2014.
+As a result of their suspension, the CPCIs were de-designated as National Statistics in December 2014, as detailed in a letter from Ed Humpherson, Director General for Regulation.
+The first quarterly publication of the OPIs by the ONS was in June 2015, with indices published back to January 2014. Prior to Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2017, the methodology that was used to compile the indices was considered to be an interim solution, whilst a longer term methodology was investigated.
+In September 2017 an article was published by the ONS that detailed improvements to construction statistics. As a result of these improvements that were implemented in Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2017, the methodology is no longer considered to be an interim solution. However, the OPIs remain as Experimental Statistics to involve users in their development. We continue to work towards their reaccreditation as National Statistics.Back to table of contents
+4. Output quality
+This document provides a range of information that describes the quality of the output and details any points that should be noted when using the output.
+We have developed Guidelines for Measuring Statistics Quality; these are based upon the five European Statistical System (ESS) quality dimensions. This document addresses these quality dimensions which are:
+relevance
+timeliness and punctuality
+accuracy and reliability
+accessibility and clarity
+coherence and comparability
+More information is provided about these quality dimensions in the following sections.Back to table of contents
+5. About the output
+Relevance
+Relevance refers to the degree to which a statistical output meets users’ needs in terms of content and coverage.
+The Construction Output Price Indices (OPIs) are produced using existing data sources, all of which are National Statistics. The OPIs measure changes in the total cost of different types of construction projects, a project cost approach. Projects are split into two main categories: new work and repair and maintenance.
+Within new work we provide a measure of costs for the following types of work:
+housing
+infrastructure
+public (other than housing)
+private industrial
+private commercial
+Within repair and maintenance, we provide a measure of costs for the following types of work:
+housing repair and maintenance
+non-housing repair and maintenance
+Alongside these individual measures of inflation, we also provide three aggregated measures of inflation within the UK construction industry: new work, repair and maintenance and all construction. Information on how these are delivered are represented in section five.
+The OPI series were rebased in Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2017 and are now operating to a base year of 2015=100. Prior to this the series were using a base year of 2005=100.
+Stage 3 and Stage 4 (high-level) weights are updated annually, usually in February after data for the previous calendar year is available, using values for construction output taken from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Output in the Construction Industry release. Stage 1 and Stage 2 (low-level) weights have been constant since the first ONS publication. There are currently no plans to update these weights. For more information regarding weights see section five.
+The OPIs are Experimental Statistics to involve users in their development. Guidance on using indices in indexation clauses is also available.
+Timeliness and punctuality
+Timeliness and punctuality describes the time between the date of publication and the date to which the data refers, and the time between the actual publication and the planned publication of a statistic.
+The OPIs are monthly index values that are published on a quarterly basis. Publication is approximately six weeks after end of the quarterly period. Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) data is published in the second or third week of February.
+For the up-to-date release schedule and related releases, please see the Office for National Statistics (ONS) release calendar.
+Accuracy and reliability
+Accuracy and reliability is how close the estimated value in the output is to the true result. The accuracy and reliability of the OPIs is dependent on that of the source data. For more information please see the QMIs for the respective sources:
+Producer Price Index (PPI) Quality and Methodology Information
+Services Producer Price Index (SPPI) Quality and Methodology Information
+Average Weekly Earnings (AWE) Quality and Methodology Information
+Revisions within the OPI series are also dependent on the revisions policies associated with their component series. For routine revisions, such as inclusion of late respondent data the OPIs will be open to revisions for a period of five months, in line with the Producer Price Indices (PPI), its main component.
+Accessibility and clarity
+Accessibility and clarity is the ease with which users can access data, and the quality and sufficiency of metadata document.
+For information regarding conditions of access to data, please refer to our terms and conditions (for data on the website) and guidance on accessibility.
+In addition to this Quality and Methodology Information, basic quality information relevant to each release is available in the Quality and methodology section of the relevant statistical bulletin.
+Coherence and comparability
+Coherence and comparability is the degree to which data derived from different sources or methods, but that refers to the same topic, is similar, and the degree to which data can be compared over time and domain, for example, geographic level.
+As discussed in section two of this QMI, the OPIs have been produced by the ONS after publication responsibility was transferred from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial strategy (BEIS). The construction price and cost indices (CPCIs) remain available to users who wish to extend the series. Guidance on how to link the series is available in the other information section of this document.
+The OPIs are reflective of the UK construction industry as a whole and regional data is not currently available.Back to table of contents
+6. How the output is created
+To measure price change for all new work and repair and maintenance projects, price changes for three categories of inputs are measured: materials (split into new builds and repairs and maintenance), plants and labour. These are weighted together and a profit margin applied. Each of these steps is explained in more detail below.
+Materials – new work
+An aggregate of relevant individual Producer Price Indices (PPIs) is used to measure changes in material costs for new work projects. PPIs measure changes in the price received by UK companies for goods they have produced that are sold within the UK. The selection of PPIs used is based on the data ONS submits to Eurostat as part of the European Price Comparison Programme used to calculate the Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs).
+The objective of the PPPs is to compare the purchasers’ prices actually paid for a basket of comparable goods and services between countries. Included in this basket are buildings and civil engineering works, and as part of the European Price Comparison Programme, the UK must submit prices to Eurostat for a selection of projects on an annual basis. The approach taken is for experts in each country to provide a price for a selection of “fictitious but representative” projects.
+The projects are intended to be representative of UK construction. The projects for which the UK is asked to return prices to Eurostat as part of the PPPs are: detached house; “Nordic”-style housing development (a single-family home consisting of one and a half storey); apartment; factory building; new office building; asphalt road; and a bridge. The representative projects chosen for use in the construction output price indices for each type of work, selected as they are considered to be most reflective of the type of work undertaken in each category, are shown in Table 1. These input costs are also reflected within repair and maintenance projects, albeit plant is significantly less weighted compared with the new work projects.
+Bills of quantities
+The cost of each project is determined using Bills of Quantities (BoQs). Each BoQ provides details of the quantities of different materials needed for each project type, with materials typically grouped into nine “material categories” (for example “concrete” or “earthworks”). These categories are the same for each of the BoQs and are listed in Table 2.
+Table 2: Weighting structure of materials categories for Private Industrial, UK
+Download this table.xls
+Indices are compiled for materials for each of the representative projects using a selection of PPIs. These PPIs are aggregated into a single index for materials using values in the BoQs that are submitted to Eurostat, as part of the European Price Comparison Programme. The overall index for all material costs is then created by weighting the material categories by their relative estimated cost in the whole project. Table 2 provides an example of this weighting for a factory building used for Private Industrial new work. It is worth noting, however, that the values that are submitted in the BoQs represent the total “work cost” so include the costs associated with the materials and plant required to use the materials within the construction project. The expenditure weights for each materials category is updated annually.
+Materials – repairs and maintenance
+The approach taken to measure input costs of repair and maintenance work differs from new work and also between housing and non-housing repair and maintenance.
+The housing categories of materials that are used for housing repairs and maintenance are shown in Table 3. Since there are no BoQs for repairs and maintenance, materials have been selected using information collected from the Annual Purchases Survey, which collects data on business’ expenditure on energy, services, goods and materials that are used up or transformed by the business activity.
+The same index is used for both private and public housing repair and maintenance as we are unable to split the services element of this work to account for differences in the amount charged for private and public clients. However, it is likely assured that repair and maintenance prices will move in a similar way for both private and public housing.
+Non-housing repair and maintenance uses a similar approach to that of housing repair and maintenance. However, since the materials used for non-housing will be different, the list of PPIs selected has been amended to better represent non-housing materials.
+To do this, the materials that are considered to be most representative of repair and maintenance work have been combined separately for an office, a factory and for infrastructure, and then combined into an overall index for materials.
+This list of materials is similar to those used for housing repair and maintenance, but excludes wallpaper, particle boards and central heating radiators, and includes:
+tiles, flagstones and bricks of cement, concrete and artificial stone (instead of ceramic and clay as in the housing list)
+aggregates (gravel, sand, stone, granules, chippings and powder, pebbles, bituminous mixtures based on natural and artificial stone, articles of asphalt)
+glass (surface ground, polished, mirrors and insulating units)
+ceramic sanitary wares
+articles of cement, concrete, plaster or artificial stone and prefabricated structural components for buildings or civil engineering
+paints and varnishes (acrylic and polyester based)
+metals (tubes, pipes, hollow profiles and related fittings, metal structures and parts of structures, grills, netting, fencing, aluminium bars, rods and profiles)
+tubes, pipes, hoses and fittings
+Labour
+The seasonally adjusted Average Weekly Earnings index (AWE) for construction excluding bonuses is used to measure changes in the price of labour in all new work projects. AWE measures money paid to employees in Great Britain in return for work done, before tax and other deductions from pay. The estimates do not include earnings of self-employed people and are not just a measure of pay settlements since they also reflect compositional changes within the workforce. Since the AWE is not available at a more detailed level than all construction, the same index is used to represent labour costs for each of the sub-indices produced.
+For housing repair and maintenance, a combination of the CPI for “services for the regular repair of dwelling” is used to measure changes in labour costs.
+The CPI for “services for the regular repair of the dwelling” is compiled from the hourly rate for plumbers, electricians, carpenters and decorators and therefore measures the price paid by consumers when hiring trades people to carry out repairs and maintenance on their homes. This index does not include the price paid for builders which is why it is used for repairs and maintenance only and not for new work.
+Plant
+The Services Producer Price Index (SPPI) for construction plant hire is used to measure changes in the price of plant used in construction. This index measures changes in the price received by UK plant hire companies when providing plant without an operator to other UK companies and government. It includes items such as cranes, earth-moving equipment and site accommodation and, since it is compiled on a quarterly basis, interpolation is used to produce estimates on a monthly basis. Similarly to labour, the SPPI for construction plant hire is not available for specific construction work types so the same index is used for each of the sub-indices produced. Plant costs are measured using the same index for new work and repair and maintenance.
+Weights
+Weights are applied to account for the varying balance of material, labour and plant costs related to each individual project. The overall index structure used to compile the top-level index for all construction can be seen in Figure 1. The weights for stage 3 and 4 are updated annually, whilst stage 1 and 2 weights remain constant.
+Figure 1: Construction Output Price Indices (OPIs) structure
+Source: Office for National Statistics
+Download this image.png
+Stage 1 – Labour, materials and plant weights
+Data used to weight the individual labour, materials and plant components for a construction business comes from the Annual Business Survey (ABS) seen in Table 4. Information from the monthly construction survey is used to calculate the sector split of all construction work.
+To calculate the labour, material and plant weights for the housing indices, the median cost is calculated from the labour, material and plant ratios of businesses that focus on housing work. The same process is repeated for the other sectors. The median measurement is used, rather than a weighted mean, because 5, for the 2015 reference year.
+Table 5: Weights used to combine the labour, materials and plant components for the new work and repair and maintenance indices, UK
+Download this table.xls
+Stage 2 weights
+For new work, two representative projects have been used for both housing and infrastructure. The resulting indices having been weighted together using weights estimated from data provided by Barbour ABI. The weights are fixed and are as follows:
+Housing –
+Detached house (65%) and Apartment building (35%)
+Infrastructure – Road (90%) and Bridge (10%)
+Stage 3 and 4 weights
+To produce the all new work, all repair and maintenance and all construction indices weights, data is aggregated using values for construction output taken from the ONS’s Output in the Construction Industry release. Weights are updated annually as data becomes available. Weights can be viewed in Table 6.
+Table 6: Weights used to compile indices for all new work, all repair and maintenance and all construction, 2017, UK
+Download this table.xls
+Mark-up for profit margin
+As announced in the Construction development: Impact of improvements to construction statistics article in September 2017, a mark-up method was introduced in collaboration with Dr Xuxin Mao of the University College London (UCL). The mark-up addressed a limitation of the old methodology which assumed that input costs move in the same way as output prices. This meant that previously we were measuring the margins of construction businesses a zero constantly throughout criterion 2, in the form of the resulting monthly mark-up values. A constant mark-up is currently used from the end of 2015 onwards, with a view to updating the values once sufficient information is available. A forecasting approach has been considered as part of this work and will continue to be investigated as a future possibility.
+Figure 2: Monthly mark-up figures, construction industry
+Great Britain, January 2012 to June 2017
+Source: Office for National Statistics
+Download this chartImage .csv .xls
+Other information
+Linking to a previous series
+Users wishing to link the BIS CPCIs (prior to 2014) and our new construction OPIs (from 2014 onwards) to create longer-running time series, have many options. One approach would be to use a linking factor based on a common time period.
+To do this, select the nearest equivalent index published in the OPI (2005=100) series and then calculate a linking factor as follows:
+For example, users who are using the BIS (2005=100) indices in long-term contracts and wish to extend the series beyond Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2014 (the last quarter for which CPCI data are available), the following approach would be suitable.
+Then multiply the Office for National Statistics (ONS) (2005=100) index values beyond March 2014 by this linking factor to extend the BIS (2005=100) time series.
+The same principle can be used to extend the ONS (2005=100) series, which was published for the last time in the August 2017 release, to the 2015=100 series, which will be published from Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2017 onwards.Back to table of contents
+As part of our #Outlook15 series, we asked heads of online properties listing companies – 99Acres, MagicBricks, IndiaProperty, Housing.com, and PropTiger about their focus areas for 2015, and the challenges that the online properties listing ecosystem needs to address. Answers have been shortened for brevity.
+– Which according to you were the top developments and roadblocks in the online property listing segment in 2014? Why?
+Sumeet Singh, 99Acres
+– With sluggish demand and unsold inventory piling up, developers and property advertisers have had to find new avenues for promoting and selling their properties. They have started realizing that they not only have to come up with attractive deals and packages but also improve their service.
+– With more choices, buyers now demand better information quality in an online listing and better servicing too. They are also increasingly looking more closely at a property before making the purchase decision, which has led to better visualization models like ‘3D View’ & ‘Panoramic View’ and providing decision aids like ‘Map Search’ and ‘Price Trends’.
+– We have also seen a lot of investment coming into the sector in 2014 from new as well as existing investors like NewsCorp, Softbank and Tiger Global etc.
+Sudhir Pai, MagicBricks
+– Problem of data quality and verified listings is being solved, at least to a large extent.
+– The online real-estate category has grown in traffic terms by about 20% in the last 3 quarters.
+Ganesh Vasudevan, IndiaProperty
+– A tremendous focus on improving the user interface across players. Almost all sites have a far cleaner UI design than a year back.
+– Lot of effort has gone into improving the quality of data provided in listings.
+– All leading players including us have invested significantly in processes to verify various aspects of a real estate listing.
+Advitiya Sharma, Housing.com
+– More and more developers not only want to market online but also want to sell their projects online.
+– Real Estate search will soon shift to completely mobile.
+Prashan Agarwal, PropTiger
+– We saw global investors put their trust with almost $300 million invested in various online property portals.
+– Online property portals also invested significantly in product development to address the core issues faced by customers while buying/selling a property right from 3D floor plans, video walkthrough, floor plan, 360 degree panorama, aerial shots, map based searches, price heatmaps and many more.
+– What are the consumption patterns (online & mobile) that you observed in 2014?
+Sumeet Singh, 99Acres
+– Increased adoption of mobile among our users. Around 30-35% of our traffic coming from the mobile properties.
+– The mobile adoption was accompanied by a very significant increase in our overall traffic.
+Sudhir Pai, MagicBricks
+An increasing pattern of cross-device usage leaning towards mobile. Mobile now accounts for 40% of traffic on MagicBricks, from less than 25% last year. We also revamped our entire mobile suite covering WAP, iOS and Android.
+Ganesh Vasudevan, IndiaProperty
+As expected, mobile web has lead the swing into the non-desktop usage of portals across property and transaction types.
+Our non-desktop traffic has grown 3X in the last 12 months and contributes almost 25% of our traffic. This is not just a metro centric phenomenon but one that is gradually increasing in tier 2 towns as well.
+Advitiya Sharma, Housing.com
+– Desktop: Our avg time spent on desktop is 21 min, which beats engagement times for television. Our depth of data has also helped millions of people to perform a thorough research of different projects.
+– Mobile: We had 300,000 App downloads in the last 6 months and more than 30% of the traffic on Housing.com is mobile. People used our app to find properties that met their requirements in a locality real time, when they didn’t get many options on the day of visit to a location.
+– After the launch of our Slice View platform, we have also received over 1,000 requests from builders all over the country to exclusively sell their projects online.
+Prashan Agarwal, PropTiger
+– Significant increase in consumption of information through the mobile platform. Almost 40% of customers today access real estate information on mobile.
+– How has the sector changed from 2013 to 2014?
+Sumeet Singh, 99Acres
+2013 was more of a period of anticipation. Investors resisted entering the real estate market due to the upcoming general elections. Most metro cities held unsold inventory but did not see price correction. There was a lot of talk of price cartelization among builders.
+Property prices stood stable in most cities, mainly due to positive investor sentiments for the period after general elections and soaring cost of construction. However, the markets did not pick up pace even after the General Elections in 2014, which led to a slight fall in real estate prices across various cities.
+Sudhir Pai, MagicBricks
+Consumers have started to use the portal for more than just listing and price discovery.
+Ganesh Vasudevan, IndiaProperty
+– 2014 may well be the inflection point for the sector. There is a large market to be addressed and there are 5-6 well funded players going after it.
+– There has been a collective shift in focus to the user- in terms of better UI, improved data quality and verification services to name a few- and these are steps in the right direction.
+– The sector has attracted large sums of capital which will lend room for more technology driven innovations going forward.
+Advitiya Sharma, Housing.com
+Huge adoption of online as a medium to showcase properties, with traditional ways of marketing not able to effectively help builders and property sellers. We’ve onboarded over 8,500 builders on our “New Projects” platform in just 6 months!
+Prashan Agarwal, PropTiger
+– No. of customers who research the Internet before buying as well as mobile led consumption has seen tremendous growth from 2013 to 2014.
+This has also helped the broker community adopt Internet to further their business. Today, all the industry participants, builders or brokers, are very well versed with the benefits of Internet and are willing to try out new concepts with online portals.
+– What sort of transition have consumers made from offline to online in 2014? Why? What are your observations?
+Ganesh Vasudevan, IndiaProperty
+– Property buyer’s information needs changes as he/she progresses along the search journey. Understanding which stage of the search the user is in is critical for an online portal to offer an appropriate experience and effectively engage the user.
+The medium has to evolve, particularly on two dimensions– #1 quality of data and #2 analytics layers on top of the data to provide contextually relevant information and insights to the user. Progress on #1 has started in 2014, and the consumer response to this has been fantastic.
+– We are also seeing multi-device usage growing rapidly, with nearly equal engagement on mobile devices as much in desktop web.
+Advitiya Sharma, Housing.com
+Online real estate is seen as a far better option, as it allows the user to remotely find, explore and search multiple properties as opposed to making several site visits. Users are also able to select and book houses online.
+Prashan Agarwal, PropTiger
+As per a latest Google survey, consumers contributing to 89% of real estate business by value are online today. And 57% of the buyers are influenced by Internet in the decision making process. I see this number growing very rapidly over the next 12 months.
+– What is one trend that surprised you in 2014? Why?
+Sumeet Singh, 99Acres
+Quick and eager adoption of ‘Online Booking’. Builders as well as buyers both are increasingly showing interest in booking real-estate deals online. This is surprising because unlike other e-commerce segments, real estate is a highly involved purchase decision.
+We witnessed this during the recently concluded Great Online Shopping Festival to offer over 300 exciting real estate deals to prospective buyers. More than 200 premier builders across 20 cities participated in this initiative confirming the potential of this offer of online booking.
+Ganesh Vasudevan, IndiaProperty
+– The total number of listings across players has not grown significantly over the previous year. With slowdown in sales and pressure on margins, one would have expected large scale adaptation of a high ROI medium like online.
+Online searches and traffic have not dropped in line with market reality and logically, inventory supply should have migrated online and this didn’t not happen to the expected extent.
+Advitiya Sharma, Housing.com
+Online home booking of houses was the biggest surprise for Real Estate in 2014. We sold more than half of the inventory across 4 projects in just 5 days, with our Slice View technology and people sitting in USA, Africa were booking homes in Bangalore. This meant Rs 60 Cr sales for Tata in just 5 days.
+Prashan Agarwal, PropTiger
+Customers are not averse to booking a property online. This year saw about 200 – 300 apartments getting booked online. With the technological advancements, I see this trend gaining momentum.
+– What are the likely trends that you expect to see in 2015? Why?
+Sumeet Singh, 99Acres
+– Mobile platform (web and apps) playing an even bigger role as the smart phone penetration and acceptance increases.
+– Usage of online platform for booking the desired property and not merely restrict oneself to research and due diligence.
+Ganesh Vasudevan, IndiaProperty
+– Emergence of data led analytics to provide actionable insights for online property seekers.
+– A significant improvement in the quality and quantity of real estate information available online.
+Advitiya Sharma, Housing.com
+A move to a completely mobile platform is on the cards. Since Housing is foremost a map-based portal, it makes logical sense to move to a mobile platform; where we can combine our UI with accurate and reliable home search.
+Prashan Agarwal, PropTiger
+Lot of innovations will happen to move the entire home buying process online – from research, comparison, shortlisting, site visit and even booking with the developer.
+– What are the challenges in the online property listing segment that needs to be addressed in 2015? How do you think these challenges can be addressed for the growth of the sector?
+Sumeet Singh, 99Acres
+– Ensuring accurate and rich information to investors and buyers of real estate so as to help them in their property selection and purchase decision.
+– Developing engaging visualization models and decision aids so that builders can better showcase their property.
+– Providing a more personalized service to online real-estate buyers.
+Sudhir Pai, MagicBricks
+– Build scale by increase penetration in the category even further – both at the user as well as at client end.
+– Continue to improve data quality and listing accuracy.
+Ganesh Vasudevan, IndiaProperty
+Less than 30% of property supply is available online today, so growing online penetration in the category is a priority.
+The enablers to drive adoption of online as the preferred marketing medium however differ between market segments. For example, the approach for new builds is different from that for used property. The challenge is in balancing the effort and degree of curation required with the scale to which it is to be done for network effects to kick in.
+Prashan Agarwal, PropTiger
+Most of the activities in the real estate sector is restricted to about top 10 – 15 markets. I think more awareness and penetrations needs to happen in the next year from a coverage point of view.
+
+MasterChef is an online shop for artisan food and drink, and makes the perfect reward or incentive for a foodie amongst your customers or team.
+From chocolatiers to wine merchants, master butchers to MasterChef Cookery School - a MasterChef gift card has it all.
+Whether you're buying for a cake lover, a craft ale fan or an aspiring chef, your gift can be spent on thousands of fab foodie choices online at MasterChef.
+MasterChef eCode – End User Terms and Conditions
+These Terms and Conditions apply to Your eCode and its use by You. By using Your eCode You are deemed to accept these Terms and Conditions which shall form a legally binding contract between You and the Purchaser. You must read them carefully.
+Your eCode is operated by Us for and on behalf of MasterChef Gift Card. Your eCode is an E-money product and is issued by Us.
+The Financial Services Compensation Scheme does not apply to Your eCode. For Your protection, all funds held from time to time on Your eCode are held by Us in trust and safeguarded in accordance with the Electronic Money Regulations 2011. Your eCode does not provide You with any protection under the Consumer Credit Act 1974.
+1 Definitions
+In these Terms and Conditions, unless the context otherwise requires, the following words and expressions shall have the following meanings:-
+1.1 ‘eCode’ means the 14 digit number issued to the Purchaser by PCS which is then gifted to You to be used to purchase Goods from Artisan Retailers at;
+1.2 ‘E-money’ means electronic money as defined in the Financial Conduct Authority Handbook of rules and guidance;
+1.3 ‘Goods’ means goods and/or services which are available from a Retailer via and can be paid for using eCodes. Some Retailers may not accept Your eCode to pay for certain goods, including, but not limited to, their own vouchers or gift cards or the payment of a credit account;
+1.4 ‘MasterChef Gift Card’ means CKG Gift Cards Limited (trading as MasterChef Gift Card) (Company Registration No. 10457948), whose registered office is at The Bramblings, Hollins Lane, Forton, Preston, PR3 0AB;
+1.5 ‘PCS’/‘We’/‘Us’/’Our’ means Park Card Services Limited (Company Registration No. 3280082), the E-money issuer, whose registered office is at Valley Road, Birkenhead, Merseyside CH41 7ED;
+1.6 ‘Purchaser’ means the person who paid for the eCode;
+1.7 ‘Retailer’ means those artisan retailers who have from time to time agreed with MasterChef Gift Card to accept Your eCode in payment for Goods;
+1.8 ‘Shine; and
+1.9 ‘You’/’Your’ means the person to whom the eCode has been gifted to by the Purchaser as part of its incentive/reward scheme or such other permitted user of the eCode from time to time.
+Card Services
+Telephone: 0344 770 9015 – Automated services – Available 24/7
+0344 375 0739 – General enquiries – 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday
+Website:
+MasterChef Gift Card General Enquiries – If a Retailer is unwilling or unable to accept Your eCode in payment for any Goods You should contact MasterChef Gift Card directly.
+Telephone: 01524 805034 between the hours of 9am and 5pm Monday to Friday.
+Website:
+2 Your eCode
+2.1 The eCode is issued to the Purchaser. We will assume, unless and until we are notified to the contrary, that the person who uses the eCode at any time is the rightful user of the eCode.
+2.2 The eCode -
+2.2.1 cannot be exchanged for cash and no exchange can be given by Us; and
+2.2.2 can only be used to purchase Goods from Retailers online at.
+2.3 The eCode is denominated in GBP (£s).
+2.4 You will not earn any interest on any funds loaded onto the eCode nor receive any other benefit related to the length of time you hold the eCode.
+2.5 We will not issue a statement in respect of your eCode but details of how the balance of Your eCode can be obtained are set out in clause 3.1.
+2.6 Unused balances are not transferable.
+2.7 Both You and the Purchaser must be over the age of 18 and resident in the United Kingdom or the Channel Islands.
+3 Lost, Stolen, Damaged or Destroyed eCodes
+3.1 If You lose Your eCode or it is stolen or misappropriated, or You suspect that Your eCode has been used by an unauthorised person, or Your eCode malfunctions or is damaged or destroyed or a transaction is incorrectly executed You must notify Us without undue delay by telephoning Our 24/7 automated telephone service on 0344 770 9015 and quoting Your eCode number.
+3.2 Upon receipt of Your eCode number in accordance with clause 3.1, We will, at Our sole election, either suspend or cancel Your eCode as soon as reasonably possible. eCode. You are liable for a maximum of £35 for any losses incurred in respect of any unauthorised payment transactions arising from the further use of Your eCode after You notify Us of the loss, theft, misappropriation or unauthorised use of Your eCode, in accordance with clause 3.1.
+3.4 After such security checks as We may require, We will, unless We believe that fraud may be involved, and subject to clauses 3.1 and 3.3, at Our complete discretion either arrange for a replacement eCode to the value of the balance on Your eCode at the time it is reported lost, stolen, damaged or destroyed, and subject to clause 3.3, to be issued to You, or refund such balance to You. If We refund the balance, We will do so in accordance with clause 10.
+3.5 Valid claims will be completed within 10 working days and if a replacement eCode is issued We may (at Our complete discretion) charge You a fee of £8.90.
+4 Charges
+All charges referred to in these Terms and Conditions will be automatically deducted from the balance on your eCode.
+5 Expiry of the eCode
+Your eCode will expire on the date set out in the email notifying you of the eCode number following which it will no longer be valid and neither You nor any other person will be able to use the eCode.
+6 Redemption
+The eCode has been given to you. You have no right of redemption nor any right to require the Purchaser to exercise a right of redemption prior to its expiry.
+7 Complaints
+7.1 If You have a complaint concerning Your eCode or Our service then in the first instance please contact MasterChef Gift Card on 01524 805034 between 9am and 5pm Monday to Friday or thereafter Card Services.
+7.2 All complaints will be dealt with as quickly and as fairly as possible in accordance with Our complaints procedure, details of which can be obtained by telephoning Card Services.
+7.
+8 Data Protection
+Both We and MasterChef are committed to maintaining all data which is collected or processed in accordance with all applicable data protection legislation and both will take reasonable steps to ensure that all information concerning You or Your eCode is kept secure against unauthorised access, loss, disclosure or destruction.
+9 Use of the eCode
+9.1 Full instructions on how the eCode is used can be found on the personalised email(s) you have received.
+9.2 You must:-
+9.2.1 treat the eCode as if it were cash;
+9.2.2 take all reasonable precautions to ensure that the eCode is not lost, stolen, damaged or destroyed eCode;
+9.2.3 let Us know without undue delay if your eCode is lost, stolen, damaged or destroyed.
+9.2.4 Keep the email which contains the eCode safe.
+9.3 The eCode can only be used to purchase Goods from Retailers online at.
+9.4 We will debit the amount of all purchases of Goods from the balance on your eCode immediately the purchase is completed.
+9.5 If we need to investigate a transaction on the eCode then You must co-operate with Us, the police or any other authorised body if this is reasonably required.
+9.6 The maximum amount You can spend is the amount of the eCode. If You attempt to spend more than the balance the transaction will be declined.
+9.7 The eCode must not be sold by You, or by any other holder of the eCode from time to time, but it may be gifted by You to any person to use to pay for Goods. If you gift an eCode to another person You will be responsible for all use of the eCode and You must ensure that such person understands and complies with the obligations contained in these Terms and Conditions, particularly those relating to the security and use of the eCode.
+10 Disputes with Retailers
+10.1 For the avoidance of doubt, We and MasterChef Gift Card will not be liable for any Goods supplied by Retailers and paid for with Your eCode. Any queries or complaints concerning such Goods must be addressed to the relevant Retailer. Your eCode does not provide You with any protection under the Consumer Credit Act 1974.
+10.2 Once You have used Your eCode to make a purchase We cannot stop such purchase and the amount of that purchase will be debited to Your eCode immediately when the purchase is completed.
+10.3 Each Retailer will have its own return policy and this is listed on their individual retailer webpage when redeeming your eCode, and they will handle Your returns in accordance with that policy. If a Retailer becomes liable to make a refund to You, the Retailer cannot credit the amount of such a refund to Your eCode; refunds are between You and the Retailer.
+10.4 If at any time You believe that a purchase has been incorrectly debited to Your eCode You must let Us know without undue delay by contacting Card Services. We will make all reasonable endeavours to resolve Your query as soon as possible so that Your eCode.
+10.5 If Your eCode is refused a Retailer may explain the reason why to You or You may ring MasterChef Gift Card or Card Services to obtain an explanation.
+11 Regulation and Protection
+11.1 We are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (firm registration number 900016) to carry on the regulated activity of issuing E-money.
+11.2 Although the E-money product is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, it is not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. No other compensation scheme exists to cover losses claimed in connection with eCodes. This means that in the event that We become insolvent, any E-money on Your eCode may become valueless and unusable and may be lost. For the protection of eCode-holders, all funds held from time to time on eCodes are held by Us on trust in accordance with the terms of the Park Card Services Ltd E-Money Trust.
+11.3 To comply with money laundering regulations, We may require proof of Your identity and address, prior to activating any eCodes purchased. We will seek to obtain these electronically as a consequence of which:-
+11.3.1 the search may be carried out by a third party;
+11.3.2 the third party may check Your details against a database (public or otherwise) to which they have access;
+11.3.3 a record of the search may be retained and passed onto other parties for the purposes of anti-money laundering.
+12 Our Liability
+12.1 We cannot guarantee that a Retailer will accept Your eCode. The reasons for any non-acceptance or non-authorisation could be beyond Our reasonable control, for example a system failure or a concern by the Retailer that Your eCode is being mis-used.
+12.2 If a Retailer is unwilling or unable to accept Your eCode in payment for any Goods You should contact MasterChef Gift Card on 01524 805034 between the hours of 9am and 5pm Monday to Friday.
+12.3 We and MasterChef Gift Card shall not be liable to You for any loss or damage You may suffer in the event a Retailer refuses to accept Your eCode.
+13 Rights of Third Parties
+These Terms and Conditions do not create any right enforceable by any person who is not a party to them, except that:-
+13.1 these Terms and Conditions may be enforced by Us;.
+14 Governing Law and Jurisdiction Variation. eCode before any variation is applied in accordance with Clause 8 above (save that no redemption fee will be payable).
+15.3 Notification of any changes will be provided to You by email, by post, via Our and/or MasterChef Gift Card’s website, and/or by other agreed means and You agree that this is an appropriate method to vary these Terms and Conditions.
+16 Licence Agreement
+We have entered into a licence agreement with Shine TV, which owns and produces the MasterChef television series broadcast on the BBC. Neither Shine TV nor the BBC operate or control any part of the MasterChef Gift Card Website () and we are fully responsible for the operation and content of this website. Any reference to any product or supplier on this website should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by Shine TV, the BBC and/or the MasterChef television series.
+|||
+ Faculty
+About
+Our Purpose
+History of Cathedral School of Saint Mary
+School Information
+Our Administration
+Our Faculty
+Our School Advisory Board
+Our Location
+Employment
+Cathedral School of Saint Mary is blessed with an outstanding faculty. The faculty and staff of Cathedral School of Saint Mary educate the whole student – mind, body, and spirit – each and every day
+.
+Ms. Alison Aguilera- Pre-K 3
+aaguilera@cssmaustin.org
+Ms. Aguilera is the lead PK 3 teacher at Cathedral School of Saint Mary. She comes to us from St. John Neumann Preschool. Before that, she spent many years working in accounting for a non-profit organization as well as for a local city council member. She attended UTSA and Austin Community College. Ms. Aguilera has a long history with Cathedral School. She herself is a graduate of the CSSM class of 2000. When she is not working hard to shape the minds of tomorrow's leaders, Ms. Aguilera enjoys fishing and spending time with family and friends.
+Mrs. Katie Teitelman- Pre-K 4
+kteitelman@cssmaustin.org
+Mrs. Teitelman graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a BA in English. She has worked in the early childhood field for 16 years with children ages 6 weeks-13 years. In that time she taught preschool and Pre-k classes. She was also an administrator for 6 years at Country Home Learning Center in San Antonio. Mrs. Teitelman is married and I has two sons ages 8 & 2 years. During her free time she enjoys spending time with her family, doing arts and crafts, watching movies, and teaching art workshops during the holidays and summer vacation.. Joy Huebel
+-
+Kindergarten
+jhuebel@cssmaustin.org
+Mrs. Huebel is the PreK 4 teacher at the Cathedral School of Saint Mary. She has 37 years of experience in education. She graduated from Lamar University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Elementary Education for grades 1-8 and a Master’s degree in Administration. She is also licensed by the state of Texas to teach Kindergarten and Elementary Speech. Mrs. Huebel has taught several different grade levels in her career, teaching the longest in Kindergarten for eight years. She taught in Orange, Texas and in Pflugerville for a total of thirteen years. Mrs. Huebel served as an elementary principal for 14 years in Pflugerville ISD. She retired in 2009 and has been an educational consultant for Region 13 Service Center for the last five years. Upon attending the 2014 Gala for the Cathedral School Mrs. Huebel was so impressed with the school that she felt a calling to go back to where her career began which was in the classroom teaching young children. Mrs. Huebel and her family have been members of Saint Albert the Great Catholic Church since moving to Austin in 1988. Mrs. Huebel is married and has a daughter and a son who both live in Austin. She enjoys reading, baking, sewing, and painting in her spare time.
+Mrs. Liz Haisler, Kindergarten Teacher Assistant
+lhaisler@cssmaustin.org
+Mrs. Haisler decided to follow the passion of education that has been exhibited by her husband and daughter, after her previous experience working in corporate and serving the elderly in an assisted-living center. Mrs. Haisler attended Park University in Austin. Her hobbies include fishing, kayaking, and being with family, especially her nine grandchildren.
+Ms. Katie Crandall 1st Grade
+kcrandall@cssmaustin.org
+Ms. Crandall is delighted to be the 1st grade teacher at CSSM. She earned her Bachelor's degree in Geography with Honors from Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. During college she was a tutor and a peer mentor. After graduation, she moved to New York City and joined a convent to discern her vocation. She discerned God was calling her back to Texas, and she took a position as the manager of a local Catholic non-profit that ministers to young women in crisis pregnancy situations. She then became an English tutor for students preparing to take the SAT/ACT. While doing this, she decided she wanted to devote her life to education, so she earned her EC-6 teaching certification through Texas Teachers. When she is not in the classroom, Ms. Crandall enjoys reading novels and poetry, going to Alamo Drafthouse, cuddling with her sweet kitty, swimming at Barton Springs, or playing soccer with her friends.
+Dcn. Christopher Schroeder 2nd Grade
+cschroeder@cssmaustin.org
+Deacon Schroeder is the 2nd grade teacher at Cathedral School of Saint Mary. He has been teaching at CSSM for eighteen years. He attended The University of South Dakota and received a Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education. Dcn. Schroeder has had numerous and varied teaching opportunities in Tanzania, East Africa and Bronx, New York. He has a Master’s degree in Divinity from the Maryknoll School of Theology and was a Fulbright-Hayes Scholar in 1977 in India. As a child, he attended St. Agnes Catholic School in Vermillion, South Dakota. While teaching at CSSM, he was ordained deacon in 2007. Dcn. Schroeder and his wife Maragwa have been blessed with two children; both are graduates of Cathedral School of Saint Mary! He enjoys reading, music, sports, traveling with his family, learning new languages, and experiencing different cultures.
+Mr. Donald Boyles 3rd Grade
+dboyles@cssmaustin.org
+M
+r. Boyles is the 3rd grade teacher at Cathedral School of Saint Mary. He is one of six children and attended St. Patrick’s Catholic School in Dallas, Texas. Mr. Boyles came to CSSM after spending six years teaching in Austin ISD. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Southwest Texas State University. He received his teaching certification from ITeach Texas in 2004.
+Mr. Boyles oversees after-care for Cathedral School. In his spare time, he enjoys sitting in the sun, fishing, and watching University of Texas baseball games. He and his wife have been married for over 25 years! They have two children and one grandchild.
+Mr. Mark Garcia 4th grade
+mkgarcia@cssmaustin.org
+Mr. Garcia is the 4th grade teacher at Cathedral School of St. Mary. He is originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico where most of his family still resides. He decided to follow his passion for education after being inspired by many great teachers in his life. He graduated with a BA from the University of Notre Dame and is currently in his first year as a member of Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education. He values Catholic education because of its mission to develop not only the mind, but the heart as well. Additionally, he is the school director for the PSIA team. In his spare time, he enjoys playing board games, reading the Harry Potter books, playing tennis, and being around his friends and family. He is blessed with his incredible 4th grade students, they spend their time in the classroom learning. laughing, and loving God.
+Mrs. Molly Street 5th grade
+mstreet@cssmaustin.org
+Mrs. Street is the 5th grade teacher at Cathedral School of Saint Mary. This will be her first year teaching at CSSM. She will also be coaching volleyball at CSSM…go Eagles! She recently moved to Austin from Indiana where she was born and raised. Mrs. Street is a devout Catholic and is looking forward to sharing in her faith with her students. She graduated with her Bachelor’s Degree in Elementary Education with a concentration in science from Indiana University. Mrs. Street is a passionate teacher who is devoted to fostering a safe and prosperous learning environment for all students. She enjoys integrating technology, music, movement, and nature into all subject areas whenever possible. In her free time, she enjoys running, baking, reading, and playing volleyball. Mrs. Street feels very excited to join the CSSM community and is looking forward to the many blessings ahead!
+Mrs. Katherine Coonan 6th-8th Grade Science
+kcoonan@cssmaustin.org
+Mrs. Coonan is the 6th - 8th grade Science teacher at Cathedral School of Saint Mary. This is her third year at the Cathedral School of Saint Mary. She has Bachelor Degrees in both Geology and Geological Engineering, as well as a Master Degree in Geological Engineering. Mrs. Coonan earned her teaching certification through the UTeach Natural Sciences certification program here at the University of Texas – Austin. She loves to travel and spend time with her husband of 30 years, Steve, and their three grown sons, Dan, Tim, and Adam, who attended St. Louis Catholic School here in Austin for 16 years. During those years she enjoyed coordinating Science Fairs and volunteering for the Parent-Teacher Organization and the School Board. Now she feels twice-blessed as she is welcomed into the Cathedral School of Saint Mary community!
+Mrs.
+Julie Sigety
+6th-8th grade Mathematics
+jsigety@cssmaustin.org
+Mrs. Sigety received her Bachelor's degree in Mathematics with Distinction from the University of Illinois, where she received her training for teacher certification in 4-12 Mathematics, 4-8 Science, 9-12 Physics, and English as a Second Language. Mrs. Sigety Strives to incorporate the use of technology appropriately and meaningfully in the classroom and is excited to be a part of CSSM's one-to-one blended learning environment. Mrs. Sigety and her husband moved to Austin in 2011 and enjoy biking, watching football, and catching a new movie at the theater.
+Ms. Marina Alcantar 6th- 8th grade Language Arts
+malcantar@cssmaustin.org
+Ms. Alcantar is the 6th-8th grade English Language Arts teacher at the Cathedral School of St, Mary. Ms.A earned a Bachelor's Degree in Education with a certification in both elementary and special education, as well as a Master's in
+Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in Reading and English from the University of Texas at El Paso. Ms. A is also certified to teach Advanced Placement English and Gifted and Talented students. She is a seasoned veteran of public schools and has worked at the elementary, high school, and early college high school ( dual-credit) levels. Prior to coming to Cathedral School of Saint Mary, Ms. A was as an English Instructional Coach, assisting teachers in the classroom. Ms. A enjoys reading, cooking, and listening to all the types of music Austin had to offer.
+Mrs. Catherine Jarmon 6th - 8th Religion & Social Studies
+cjarmon@cssmaustin.org
+Mrs. Catherine Jarmon is the Middle School Social Studies and Religion teacher at Cathedral School of Saint Mary. Mrs. Jarmon received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Religious Studies from Saint Edward’s University in Austin and is currently pursuing a Masters of Science in Education from Purdue University. Prior to starting her teaching career, she worked as a fundraising consultant for political campaigns and non-profit organizations. Not only did Mrs. Jarmon attend Cathedral School, but her mother and her 7 aunts and uncles did as well. In addition to teaching, Mrs. Jarmon is also the Cheerleading coach. She is married to one of Cathedral School’s favorite volunteers, Mr. Jake Jarmon. The Jarmons live in Niederwald, Texas, with their adorable baby girl Joyce.
+Mr. Quinn Bobek - Athletic Director, P.E. & Health Teacher, Technology Teacher
+qbobek@cssmaustin.org
+Coach Quinn Bobek is the Athletic Director, Physical Education teacher, and Technology teacher at Cathedral School of Saint Mary. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from Purdue University in 2002. Soon after graduating, Coach Bobek moved to Seattle and worked as an outside salesman. After moving to Austin in 2010 however, he followed his passion to teach. He was hired in 2011 and is going on his third year at Cathedral School. His favorite role is coaching the flag football, volleyball, basketball, and soccer teams. He lives in Austin with his wife Alissa and their baby girl, Vera. Quinn enjoys spending time with his family, dining out in Austin, playing golf and basketball as well as being outdoors as much as possible.
+Mrs. Peggy Hall Art Teacher
+phall@cssmaustin.org
+Mrs. Hall comes to us with 35 years experience in education. She retired in 2010 from Pflugerville ISD. She previously taught for Brunswick City Schools, Brunswick, Ohio and Del Valle ISD, Del Valle, Texas. Although she was a classroom teacher most of her career, the last thirteen years she taught K -5 Art. Because her known formal education began at St. Joseph's Catholic School in Edinburg, Texas, upon retirement she felt a strong calling to get involved in Catholic education. She began subbing at CSSM and then was hired as an art teacher and paraprofessional in Early Childhood classes.
+Brother Joseph Harris- Advanced Math
+jharris@cssmaustin.org
+Brother Joseph is the Advanced Math teacher for 5th-8th grades. Brother Joseph, a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross, received his Bachelor’s Degree from St. Edward’s University and his Master’s Degree from the University of Connecticut. He has taught in middle schools, elementary schools and is presently teaching Math for Liberal Arts Students and Mathematics for Elementary teachers at St. Edward’s University. During the late 1970’s and until 1985, Brother Joseph taught and then became principal of Cathedral School of Saint Mary.
+Ms. Dianna Suarez - Spanish
+dsuarez@cssmaustin.org
+Mrs. Sheree Naquin- Music Teacher & Honor Choir Director
+snaquin@cssmaustin.org
+Sheree Naquin is delighted to be part of the Cathedral School of Saint Mary as music teacher where she can share her love for God through music, one of His greatest gifts. Mrs. Naquin brings over 25 years experience as a professional musician, piano teacher and music educator. She is a Summa cum laude graduate of Texas A&M University with additional studies in piano performance and music education at the University of Louisiana, Lamar University, and Southern Methodist University. With a history of significant community involvement, she has served as a dedicated staff piano accompanist in the church setting and has been a director or accompanist for graded, youth or adult choirs for over 30 years. Additionally, Sheree has been an active piano accompanist for school choirs, theater productions, and U.I.L. She has composed commissioned works for area choral festivals, orchestrated choral accompaniments and directed a 75-member children's community choir.
+Mrs. Naquin's overall tenet for the music curriculum at CSSM is to help each student better understand how music relates to history, to society, and to culture by fostering continued interest in the universal language of music. With a focus on music literacy, she has initiated a music technology lab with guided tutorials, giving students expanded practice on theoretical skills as well as creative activities such as composing.
+Mrs. Jody Gigliotti- Skill builder/Librarian.
+NDEs & PDVs
+You've got to check out this fantastic book I've just finished reading! Click here for detailed info & reviews.
+Enraptured
+That's the best word to describe the state of mind and spirit I've been in as I've read voluminous accounts of near-death experiences and pre-death visions over the past few months. I can't seem to get enough, and have probably gone through a dozen books on the subject now. And my appetite only intensifies as I delve more deeply into the topics surrounding movements between the earthly and heavenly realms. What's most striking to me, and I'm sure would be to anyone who decides to explore the phenomenon, is the consistency of the themes each of these "messengers" is exposed to on the other side. Some of them may really surprise you. I'm going to begin listing them here, and expect to add more and refine them in the coming weeks:
+1) The transition from this dimension to the next is seamless, so much so that one might not at first realize what has happened.
+2) Some remain in the place where they have 'died' for a while, during which time they typically observe themselves with little recognition or interest. They will also slowly come to understand that the living can't see, hear, or feel them. But, at the same time, they feel more "real" than at any time in their life.
+3) Either immediately or soon after realizing they have passed over, the common phenomenon of a tunnel with an intense beckoning light is experienced. The tunnel may also appear as a hallway, Speed through it may vary somewhat, depending on whether or not there are things of interest along the way.
+4) "The Light" is breathtakingly beautiful, as is the scene they first encounter. Some are met by relatives or other loved ones (even pets), who emanate incredible love. They appear as they did in whatever was the prime of their lives. Others are met by what they perceive to be loving guides or angels, and still others (even atheists) are met by what they immediately KNOW to be Jesus. Apparently, each individual will at first encounter what they most need/want to see.
+5) The experience of colors and harmonious music never experienced on this side is common. There are landscapes places that resemble those on earth, such as rivers, grassy hills, trees, flowers and other vegetation, but they are perfect and more vivid in appearance.
+6) They become suddenly aware, and are delighted by the fact that communication with others is telepathic, and an unlimited amount of information can be transferred at once.
+7) Movement through space is rapid or instantaneous. One can travel to where they desire to go just by having the thought.
+8) There is a realization that time does not exist in this new dimension. Many observe that they're not able to tell if something has taken seconds or weeks.
+9) There is an awareness of what are perceived to be angels, but their appearance is not as they are depicted in our culture. They are typically winged, but are tall, strong looking, and often seem more male than female. They are too numerous to try and count, and all see to be about appointed tasks both in the heavenly realm and as unseen beings on earth.
+10) Prayers are often observed, and appear as streaking lights emanating from the earth heavenward.
+11) As they are gently and lovingly escorted by their guides through the heavenly realm, they inevitable observe groups of people who appear to be busy with some type of work, and many seem to be engrossed in higher learning of some sort.
+12) Building are magnificent, and entire cities are observed. They vary in appearance, and somewhat similar to certain buildings on earth, but glimmering, pristine, often of gold or totally jeweled. Doors and entrance ways are massive and awe-inspiring.
+13) Almost without exception (usually for children) this time in heaven involves a "life review." The review takes place in the presence of deity, and is described at being like a panorama of screens with scenes or like a movie in which every single event in their life is seen and felt, including the impact and thoughts of all the individuals they've encountered on earth along the way. All are awed by this process, because, despite being comprehensive, everything is somehow be observed all at once.
+14) The life review is of utmost importance during a near-death experience. God or His representative in this phase communicates telepathically with the individual, completely aware of all their thoughts and responses to what they are viewing. Questions and answers go back and forth, as to how one has lived their life, but the overwhelming feeling throughout is one of overpowering, unconditional love and acceptance, never one of judgment, even though the person typically feels quite ashamed and judges him/herself as unworthy. The enveloping comfort they are given by God is greater than any that could be expressed in the earthly realm, even by the most loving of mothers.
+15) Often, the individual is taken before a group of "elders' surrounding a table, and these men of incredible wisdom discuss what the disposition of their soul should be, Usually this is about whether or not they should remain in heaven or be sent back to resume their life and mission. Sometimes the person has a say in the matter, but others are informed that their presence is needed back on earth.
+14) Transport back to earth and bodies of flesh is dramatic, rapid, and jolting, not at all pleasant, especially if the person had been critically injured. Some describe it as a feeling of being sucked through a vacuum with intense pressure.
+15) Sexual orientation is not of any concern in heaven. This is something many inquire about when before God. Sorry to inform anyone who's been of the opinion that God hates homosexuals. Near-death experiencers discover that our sexual exploits aren't of concern to God, unless they have been devoid of love and caring for one another. In fact, souls that have oppressed or mistreated their gay brothers and sisters will typically have to pay a self-imposed price.
+16) As to hell. Many do not experience this realm at all. For those who do, it varies, and the individual knows that they have committed acts or held attitudes that they themselves feel makes them candidates for suffering. Yes, some do witness fiery pits, being chained, being trapped in loops of wretched periods of their live. One very dramatic story (of a mean-spirited, self-absorbed atheist) involves slow tearing away of his flesh by beings who've slowly morphed from helpful guides to cunning, bitter, and hideous vipers. But even this man was given an opportunity to experience the unconditional love of heavenly beings, though he felt so unworthy that he even tried to avoid and reject being present in the glory of his Creator God.
+17) What we know of the universe does not even begin to scratch the surface of what we will have access to, and we become free to explore, travel to, and become whatever we desire. Yes, what we conceive of as alien life forms do exist, in innumerable forms and environs. Life of infinite variety is all over our galaxy and others. Sorry, scientific types, but much of this life is in forms we don't have the technology of ability to detect. Just because we send scouting detectors to planets in our own solar system, we have no way of being able to assert that any of them does or did support life, because it exists in different types of dimensions.
+18) Our planet's ecosystem is something of deep concern to God. His intent for us was never to become so industrialized and focused on the development of material goods. The earth was created to nurture us, and we are to nurture it in return.
+19) None of the near-death experiences have characterized God as emoting any anger, displeasure, or desire to punish His children. He is only unconditional love, joyfulness, and concern. He delights in us! And one of the best things they discover is that He has a wonderful sense of humor!
+20) Suicide. Don't do it.
+21) The fervent prayers of a dozen righteous believers can, and has, prevented a war.
+22) Reincarnation. Yes, it is a reality, but of our choosing, so that we may continually learn and elevate ourselves. Here's the interesting part: because time doesn't exist in heaven, these incarnations are actually occurring all at once!
+23) Creationists are not wrong.
+24) you can create your own abode in the heavenly realm, just by conceiving of it, and it can be as simple or as expansive as you want.
+25) People with disabilities, minorities, and other disadvantaged individuals have (willingly) reincarnated as such to learn what it's like to be discriminated against, misunderstood, and at the mercy of others.
+PLENTY MORE TO COME...
+Click here to visit the most comprehensive online resource on this fascinating topic!
+A condensed bio of my daughter, Kyndall Mikhaela (3/10/95 - 4/31/96)
+This was something I wrote in response to a recent visitor to my blog. He'd related a story about a baby girl who lived only a few weeks, but was recognized by all who came in contact with her as an "old soul."
+I had another daughter sixteen years ago, who died at 13 mos. We knew before she was born that she had a chromosomal abnormality, Trisomy-13, that typically results in miscarriage, stillbirth, or death shortly after birth. We thought our daughter was dead when she was delivered, blueish gray and not breathing or moving. But they took her to the NICU, dressed her in a cute outfit and bonnet, and gave her to us to spend time with. All our family was around. My son, who was five, kissed her and put his head next to hers. He sang into her ear this song: "Surely, the presence of the Lord in is this place. I can feel his mighty power and His grace. I can feel the brush of angels wings; I see joy in every face. Surely, the presence of the Lord is in this place." When he finished, she turned her head toward his, and began to breathe on her own. Long story short, though two months premature and having practically every disability under the sun, she was with us for the next year. It was the most difficult time of my life, but the greatest period of growth and learning for us all. Kyndall, my daughter, had the same effect on doctors, nurses, and therapists that you describe that baby having. She rarely cried, was playful, funny. When she was near the window in her room, she'd look out with her one good eye, and I know for certain she was seeing angels, because a broad grin would spread across her face and she would giggle. She never, ever did that under any other circumstances, not even for me, as hard as I tried to coax it out of her.
+The best gift my daughter ever gave us was on the day before she died. We'd been trying to teach her to wave for months, to no avail. Every morning when I dropped my son off at school, I'd have her with me, oxygen and all, and he'd kiss her and wave goodbye. On that morning, she lifted her little hand and waved back. My son had already started walking away, and I got so excited I called him back to the car, "She waved! She waved!" He came back and she did it for him. He was thrilled. On the way back home, Kyndall stopped breathing. I pulled over, and was able to resuscitate her, but over the next twelve hours her condition deteriorated. She had a fever of 106! But still, she waved to everyone who spoke to her.
+I knew the end was nearing, stayed right beside her, watching and trying to cool her down all night. In the morning, our favorite home health nurse dropped in. It wasn't her day to come, but she said something told her she should visit. We went in to look at Kyndall, who'd finally cooled down enough to fall asleep just an hour before. As soon as we looked down at her, she took one deep breath, and then was still. Her nurse and I looked at each other after a half minute of not seeing her chest rise again. She said, "Do you want me to check her?" She had a stethoscope in her pocket. I nodded, yes, and she bent over, listened. Then she looked at me and shook her head. No heartbeat. I called my husband, her doctor, and then spent the next little while taking out tubes, shutting down monitors, bathing her, and putting on her favorite outfit. I did her hair the way she like it and painted her fingernails, which she also liked. She looked like an angel. It was not a time of grief. We were all weary. It was her time to go back home, and she'd finished what she'd come to do.
+This was a beautiful story.
+Wow. Tearing up here. Thanks Lemelia. John Melody
+The Hisense R6090G is an okay entry-level TV. It's one of the few options in Hisense's lineup that comes with Roku TV instead of the Android TV found on most of their models. The interface is easy-to-use and there are a ton of apps you can download through the app store. It has a VA panel with an amazing contrast ratio that helps it display deep blacks when viewed in the dark. It lacks many extra features, such as local dimming, but still delivers decent picture quality and upscales lower-resolution content without any issues. Unfortunately, it has narrow viewing angles, so it's not suggested for wide seating arrangements as you lose image accuracy when viewing from the sides. It doesn't deliver a good HDR experience either due to its low peak brightness and inability to display a wide color gamut. Lastly, most casual gamers should enjoy its excellent low input lag and decent response time.
+The Hisense R6090G is an okay overall TV. It performs best in dark rooms thanks to the VA panel's amazing native contrast ratio. Its low input lag and decent response time make it a good choice for gaming. Sadly, it has narrow viewing angles, so it's not suggested for watching TV with a large group of friends or family. Also, it doesn't provide a satisfactory HDR experience because of its low peak brightness and lack of a wide color gamut.
+The Hisense R6090G is okay for watching movies. It has an amazing contrast ratio that helps it display deep blacks, so it's a great choice for watching movies in dark rooms. However, it doesn't have a local dimming feature to further improve the black level. It also displays 1080p and 4k content perfectly and removes judder from native 24p sources.
+The Hisense R6090G is decent for watching TV shows. It doesn't have any trouble upscaling 720p content, such as from cable boxes. It has good reflection handling, but it doesn't get bright enough to combat glare in well-lit rooms. It also has narrow viewing angles, so you lose image accuracy when viewing from the side.
+The Hisense R6090G is alright for watching sports. It has a decent response time, but there's still some motion blur with fast-moving content. It has good reflection handling, but it's best to avoid using it in well-lit rooms as it doesn't get bright enough to combat glare. It's also not suggested for watching the game in a large group because it has narrow viewing angles.
+The Hisense R6090G is decent for video games. It has an excellent low input lag that should please most gamers. It also has a decent response time, but you still may notice some motion blur. Also, it's limited to a 60Hz panel and doesn't support any variable refresh rate (VRR) technology to reduce screen tearing.
+The Hisense R6090G is alright for watching HDR movies. It has an amazing contrast ratio, and it displays deep blacks when viewed in the dark. However, it lacks a local dimming feature to further improve picture quality in dark scenes. It also doesn't get bright enough in HDR to make highlights pop, and it can't display a wide color gamut.
+The Hisense R6090G is okay for HDR gaming. It offers good gaming performance thanks to its very low input lag and decent response time. It has an amazing contrast ratio, but HDR content doesn't look all that different from SDR content as it can't display a wide color gamut and has low HDR peak brightness.
+The Hisense R6090G is good to use as a PC monitor. It supports most common resolutions at 60Hz and displays proper chroma 4:4:4. It also has a low input lag to deliver a responsive desktop experience. However, it has narrow viewing angles, and the image may look washed out at the sides if you sit too close.
+The Hisense R6090G is an entry-level 4k TV in Hisense's 2020 lineup. The Roku-based R6 Series sits alongside the Hisense H65 Series, which has Android TV instead, and below the Hisense R8 Series. It competes with the TCL 4 Series 2020, Toshiba Fire TV 2020, and the Vizio V Series 2020.
+The Hisense 55R6090G looks a lot like the Hisense H6570G with a decent style. It has slim borders on three sides and a slightly thicker bottom border, and it looks nice in any setting. It's made entirely out of plastic, and even though there's nothing premium about it, there's nothing bad about it either.
+The back of the Hisense R6090G is exactly like the Hisense H6570G. It has a thin plastic back panel that feels like metal, and the plastic at the bottom feels more solid. Sadly, there's no cable management.
+The Hisense R6090G has okay build quality. It's entirely made of plastic, which feels solid near the inputs, but bends easily everywhere else. It wobbles quite easily and feels like you can torque the entire screen. These shouldn't be issues if you just leave it in one spot, but it may pose a problem if you constantly need to move it around.
+Update 02/25/2021: We retested SDR peak brightness after measuring the HDR peak brightness in Game mode. This resulted in slightly lower SDR peak brightness.
+The Hisense R6090G's peak brightness is disappointing. It doesn't get bright enough to combat glare, even in dim-to-moderately lit rooms. It maintains its brightness extremely consistent across different content, except small highlights are slightly less bright.
+We measured peak brightness after calibration in the 'Movie' Picture Mode with Backlight at its max and Gamma at '2.2'.
+If you don't care about image accuracy and want a slightly brighter image, set the Picture Mode to 'Normal', Color Temperature to 'Normal', Gamma to '1.8', and TV Brightness to 'Brighter'. We reached 306 cd/m² in the 10% window using these settings.
+Update 12/04/2020: We incorrectly listed it as being edge-lit, when the backlight is direct LED.
+This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature. The video above is provided for reference only.
+This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature. The video above is provided for reference only.
+Update 02/25/2021: We retested HDR peak brightness after measuring the HDR peak brightness in Game mode. This resulted in slightly lower HDR peak brightness.
+This TV has poor peak brightness in HDR. It doesn't get brighter than in SDR and it's not enough to make vivid colors pop. Once again, small highlights are slightly more dim than larger highlights.
+We measured HDR peak brightness in the 'Dark HDR' Picture Mode with Backlight at its max and everything else at their default settings.
+The EOTF follows the target curve fairly well until the roll off at its peak brightness, except some scenes are slightly over-brightened. HDR brightness in 'Game' mode is the same as outside of 'Game' mode. We used the same settings as the testing for the regular HDR peak brightness.
+The Hisense 55R6090G has mediocre gray uniformity, but this may vary between units. Our unit actually looks a lot worse than it does in the picture as the edges are visibly darker. It's noticeable in real content with any full-sized image or videos where there isn't a lot of movement. There's also dirty screen effect in the center, which could get distracting during sports. The uniformity is better in near-dark scenes, but the vignetting is still visible.
+The Hisense 55R6090G has outstanding black uniformity. However, it looks worse in person, and like with the gray uniformity, there's noticeable backlight bleed and vignetting along the edges. It's visible in real content and could be distracting when watching movies in dark rooms. Note that black uniformity may vary between units.
+The reflection handling is good. It performs well with a moderate amount of light directed towards it, but it's best to avoid placing it in a well-lit room as the reflections may become too distracting.
+The Hisense R6090G has good out-of-the-box color accuracy, but this may vary between units. White balance and most colors are only a bit inaccurate, and the color temperature is close to the 6500K target. However, gamma seems to follow a target of 2.3 instead of 2.2, so most scenes are darker than they should be.
+The Hisense 55R6090G has outstanding color accuracy after calibration. Any remaining inaccuracies can't be spotted with the aid of a colorimeter, and the color temperature is almost spot on with the 6500K target. Gamma follows the target much better, except some really bright scenes are slightly too bright.
+You can see our recommended settings here.
+This TV displays native 4k content perfectly, and unlike the Hisense H6570G, there aren't any obvious artifacts.
+Like the Hisense H6510G, the Hisense R6090G has an okay color gamut, but it's not considered a wide color gamut for HDR content. It has good coverage of the commonly-used DCI P3 color space, but limited coverage of the wider Rec. 2020.
+The EOTF follows the target curve fairly well until the roll off at its peak brightness, except some scenes are slightly over-brightened. It's the exact same with Game Mode enabled because you can enable it in any Picture Mode, as seen in this EOTF. color volume is disappointing. It displays dark, saturated colors well thanks to its amazing contrast. However, it's limited by the lack of a wide color gamut and by its low peak brightness.
+The Hisense R6090G has okay gradient handling. There's noticeable banding in all shades, especially with gray and green. The Noise Reduction setting in the Roku app doesn't improve the gradient handling at all.
+There are some very minor signs of image retention after displaying a high-contrast static image, but it's not detected in our testing. However, this may vary between units.
+We don't expect VA panels to experience permanent image retention, as the VA panel in our long-term test appears immune.
+The Hisense R6090G doesn't have a Black Frame Insertion feature. The backlight flickers at 180Hz at all backlight levels below 100.
+This TV doesn't have a motion interpolation feature.
+Due to the TV's somewhat slower response time, there's not much stutter when displaying lower-frame rate content.
+The Hisense R6090G automatically removes judder from native 24p sources, such as from Blu-ray players or native apps. There's no setting needed to remove it.
+This TV doesn't support any variable refresh rate technology.
+The Hisense R6090G has an excellent low input lag, and it's a significant improvement over the Hisense H6570G and the Hisense H6510G. It stays low as long as you have Game Mode enabled, but it significantly increases with a 1440p resolution, so it's not ideal for 1440p games with the Xbox One Series X. If you want to use it as a PC monitor and want the lowest input lag possible, you just need to enable Game Mode.
+This TV supports most comment resolutions at 60Hz and displays chroma 4:4:4 at any resolution. If you want to use it as a computer monitor and for it to display chroma 4:4:4, you just need to enable Game Mode. It also accepts 1080p and 1440p @ 120Hz signals, but it skips frames and doesn't display proper 4:4:4. For full-bandwidth signals, enable HDMI 2.0 for the input you're using.
+The Hisense R6090G has one USB input, but the Hisense R6E3 variant at Walmart has two.
+This TV can pass both DTS and Dolby Digital via ARC or optical, which is great, but it doesn't support eARC. For ARC to work, simply enable ARC and set S/PDIF and ARC to 'Auto Passthrough'.
+The Hisense R6090G has a bad frequency response. It doesn't produce any bass and doesn't get loud, either. However, it has a fairly well-balanced sound profile that helps with listening to clear dialogue.
+The built-in Roku TV interface is easy-to-use and the menus are very smooth to navigate. We did experience one bug during testing; when we went to the 'Home' page and back to the input we were originally on, the screen would cut in half vertically, as seen in this photo. Returning to the 'Home' menu and back to the input once again resolved the issue the majority of the time. If you have this TV and experience the same issue, let us know.
+There are ads and suggested content on the 'Home' page and there's no way to opt-out of them. We couldn't get a picture of them, but you can see the ads on the TCL 5 Series/S535 2020 QLED in this photo.
+The Hisense R6090G comes with the same Roku remote as other TCL Roku TVs, such as the TCL 6 Series/R635 2020 QLED. It's a basic remote with quick-access buttons to popular streaming services. It doesn't have voice control but you can use the voice control feature in the Roku app on your mobile device. It allows you to change inputs and search for content, but you can't ask it to change settings on the TV.
+We tested the 55 inch Hisense R6090G, and we expect our results to be valid for the 43 inch (43R6090G), 50 inch (50R6090G), and 65 inch (65R6090G) models as well. It's sold under different model names at various retailers, which are listed below, but we don't know for sure how those models perform. Note that the R6E3 model at Walmart has two USB inputs, while every other variant has one. The R6E3 model is available in a 43 inch, 50 inch, 65 inch, and 75 inch size; however, we aren't sure which retailers carry them. It's also sold in Canada at Walmart and Costco as the Hisense R61G. We aren't aware of any variants outside of North America.
+If someone comes across a different type of panel or if their Hisense R6090G doesn't correspond to our review, let us know and we'll update the review. Note that some tests, such as the gray uniformity, may vary between individual units.
+The unit we tested was manufactured in June 2020, and you can see the label here.
+The Hisense R6090G is an okay overall TV and performs better than most budget-friendly options. It has much lower input lag than the Hisense H6510G, and it perfectly displays native 4k content, unlike the Toshiba Fire TV 2020. However, it costs more than most entry-level TVs, so if you don't need the low input lag for gaming, there are cheaper options elsewhere. Also see our recommendations for the best Roku TVs, the best 4k TVs, and the best budget TVs. 5 Series/S535 2020 QLED is much better than the Hisense R6090G. The TCL has a full-array local dimming feature, it displays a much wider color gamut, has much better gradient handling, and has a quicker response time. However, the Hisense has better reflection handling. R6090G is better than the Toshiba Fire TV 2020. The Hisense has better contrast, better out-of-the-box color accuracy, displays native 4k content perfectly, and has lower input lag. However, the Toshiba gets brighter in HDR and has a quicker response time.
+The LG GX OLED is significantly better than the Hisense R6090G. The LG has an OLED panel and it can individually turn off pixels, resulting in an infinite contrast ratio and perfect black uniformity. It also has wider viewing angles, better reflection handling, and it has a bunch of gaming features like VRR support. However, the Hisense doesn't have the risk of permanent burn-in the way OLEDs have.
+Boy, that was quick, wasn’t it? It didn’t seem like very long ago we were doing a 2016 season preview for the Dodgers, and wondering what the year had in store. And just like that, as fast as a Yasiel Puig throw from right field, it’s over.
+Ok, I know it’s not technically over, and the Dodgers still have something to play for these last few games. Not only do they have a chance to earn home field advantage in the first round of the playoffs, but they can also knock off the arch rival Giants this last weekend, and ensure they don’t make it (which would just be lovely, wouldn’t it?) Still though, after claiming their 4th straight division crown this past Sunday, the regular season sure does feel complete, and most fans just can’t wait for post season baseball.
+[button color=”red” size=”big” alignment=”center” rel=”follow” openin=”newwindow” url=””]Dodging Bullets: The Best Moves L.A. Didn’t Make[/button]
+Like any year, the Dodgers’ 2016 season had its share of ups and downs, twists and turns, good times and bad times. There were some positive surprises, as well as some disappointments. Before we go forward into the playoffs, we take a look back here at some of those.
+Pleasant surprises:
+Corey Seager’s rapid development: I honestly didn’t think I’d put Seager on this list. Reason being, I had really high expectations for our young rookie (even higher than most) and wouldn’t have been surprised at all to see him have a very productive year. With that said, he found a way to exceed even my expectations.
+Entering this year, there was a lot of hype surrounding Seager, and plenty of talk about him being the top prospect in the game. A little pressure maybe? Pffft. He was able to live up to all that, and then some. Not only is he a lock for this year’s Rookie of the Year award, but you can also throw his name in the MVP conversation as well. Sure, due to Kris Bryant putting up some otherworldly numbers, Seager probably won’t win the award, but he’ll still likely end up in the top 2-4 in voting.
+Seager made the All-Star team in his first full season. He broke the Dodgers club record for most hits by a rookie in a season. He’s been the team’s most consistent hitter and most valuable player. All this, and he’s only 22 years old. The Dodgers have not only found their star for the future, but also their star of today. And that was probably unexpected in his first year.
+Bullpen: If you would have told me after the first month of the season, that I’d be doing an article placing the Dodgers bullpen under “pleasant surprises,” I would have told you that you’re crazy. I mean, how would you know what I’m going to be writing about 6 months from now? Then, I would have told you that you’re also crazy about the Dodgers bullpen.
+It was anything but a pleasant surprise early on in the year. But after the first month or two of the season, the relievers really stepped it up. The Dodgers bullpen skyrocketed to one of the best in the league, and currently sits at the top of all ML bullpens in ERA (3.21) and 2nd in BAA (.215.)
+And it’s not just their performance that makes the bullpen unexpectedly stand out, but it’s their constant use as well. They’ve logged the 2nd most innings pitched in all MLB, but they haven’t let that overuse affect their performance. That has been a key factor in the Dodgers success this year.
+Young Arms: Recently, I wrote about this very issue, asserting my belief that the Dodgers young arms could (and should) play a vital role in October. You can read more about that here.
+Twenty year old phenom Julio Urias made his debut earlier this year, and has continued to improve each time out, showing flashes of why he’s such a highly regarding prospect. Fellow prospect Jose De Leon finally appeared in September and has looked pretty good in his few starts. Other guys like Brock Stewart and Ross Stripling also made significant contributions to the team over the course of the year.
+These kids weren’t supposed to be such a mainstay in the starting rotation this year, but due to various injuries to the Dodgers’ staff, they got their chance. And they definitely didn’t disappoint. If it weren’t for these young pitchers rising to the occasion, the Dodgers likely wouldn’t be where they are now.
+Unexpected Role Players: Depth was something the Dodgers were already hoping to have. In an ideal world, where everyone stays healthy (does such a world exist?) the Dodgers would have had “role players” coming out the wazoo. But baseball happened.
+Andre Ethier and Trayce Thompson got injured. So did Scott Van Slyke, but only after struggling mightily while he was healthy. Kike Hernandez is still batting below .200 and we’re at the end of September. All these factors opened the door for other guys to get an opportunity. Names like Chris Taylor, Charlie Culberson, Rob Segedin, and my personal favorite, Alvin Andrew Toles, all made an impact.
+These players all made contributions this year, which no one could have predicted. And the Dodgers were fortunate they did.
+Disappointments:
+Health/Injuries: There’s no one to blame for the injuries the Dodgers suffered this year. It just happens I guess. Still, it was extremely frustrating to watch player after player go down with another injury. It just never seemed to stop, and eventually, the Dodgers would set an MLB record for placing the most players on the DL in one year (28.)
+And these weren’t little injuries either. Dodgers ace, and best pitcher on the planet, Clayton Kershaw, went down for 2 ½ months with a back injury. In fact, everyone in the starting rotation not named Kenta landed on the DL at some point. Kershaw’s injury was the really disappointing one, as he was having his best season to date, which is saying a lot. He was well on his way to another Cy Young Award and possibly another MVP.
+Every successful team needs to overcome some adversity, and the Dodgers certainly did that by enduring all their injuries this year. It was still disappointing to deal with, but the outcome could have been a lot worst.
+Scott Kazmir: I feel a little bad about putting Kazmir down here. I mean, I’m not trying to call the guy out or anything, but when it comes to key players under-performing this season, I don’t think another one stands out more. No one expected Kazmir to fill the defecting shoes of Zack Greinke, but he was signed as the projected #2 guy when the Dodgers gave him a 3 yr/$48 mil deal this past off-season. And he hasn’t been that at all.
+Kazmir wasn’t completely terrible. But he wasn’t very good either. He was consistently inconsistent, and his 4.56 ERA is the highest among Dodgers starters this season. He returned from the DL this past weekend, but was forced to exit his start early yet again, pitching only one inning before leaving with another apparent injury. His season is likely done.
+[graphiq id=”jyFIGlC4nnn” title=”Scott Kazmir 2016 Complete Pitching Splits” width=”600″ height=”759″ url=”” link=”” link_text=”PointAfter | Graphiq” ]
+Kazmir can opt-out of his contact this off-season, but coming off of a disappointing 2016 campaign, he likely won’t do that. Hopefully, he can regain his form next year.
+Goodbye to A.J Ellis: This was a tough pill to swallow for many Dodgers fans. Ellis was a fan favorite and even though he hadn’t put up very good offensive numbers for a few years now, everyone seemed to appreciate him for who he was. A knowledgeable player, a great teammate, and Clayton Kershaw’s favorite battery-mate buddy.
+Baseball is a business, and blah blah blah. I really get annoyed by hearing that every time a player is dealt away, regardless of how true it is. But I get it. The team comes first, and moves are going to be made by any front office if they feel it improves the club. Although, one could certainly argue if the “upgrade” from Carlos Ruiz was worth the intangibles lost by letting Ellis go. Either way, it was a sad day for Dodgers fans, and we all still wish nothing but the best for A.J in his career.
+Struggles against LHP: I shudder just thinking about the word… “southpaw.” Scary stuff, indeed. At least for the Dodgers offense it is. The Dodgers have yet to figure out how to hit lefties with any consistency, and are easily the worst hitting team in baseball against LHP this year.
+They rank dead last in all of the following categories: BA (.215), OPB, (.294), Slg % (.338), OPS (.632.) And again, that’s dead last in all MLB.
+Even when Dave Roberts stacks the lineup with right handed hitters (and believe me, he does) it has little effect on their struggles. But maybe that’s part of the problem. Roberts continues to play the lefty/righty match-up game, and goes with the likes of Kiki Hernandez and Charlie Culberson more times than not, leaving guys like Joc Pederson, Josh Reddick, Andrew Toles, and Chase Utley on the bench. And thus far, it hasn’t helped much.
+On the flip side, it’s not like those left handed hitters are giving Roberts any incentive to give them a shot. Pederson is currently batting .093 against LHP (no typo there, his avg. is really .093.) Reddick has the same amount of extra base hits against lefties this year as I do… zero. Toles is the one guy who you could argue deserves more of a chance against LHP, but I guess Roberts hasn’t been sold on his small sample size just yet.
+Some might think the Dodgers woes against LHP are over-blown. I don’t. The numbers don’t lie, and I think they have legitimate issues against them. But hopefully they can figure it out for the playoffs, and at least make some needed improvements. Either that or maybe they can convince Jon Lester to throw underhand to them? Perhaps that would help.
+Be sure to check out Part II of my 2016 season review tomorrow, when I cover the most memorable moments of 2016. Go Dodgers!
+[button color=”red” size=”big” alignment=”center” rel=”follow” openin=”newwindow” url=””]Why September Baseball is the Best Baseball[/button]
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+Course Descriptions
+Courses for Non-Majors (BIOL)
+BIOL 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, and 122, 123 will satisfy the core curriculum requirement. BIOL 101, 102, 104, 105, and 106 are three hours of lecture weekly. None of these courses will satisfy requirements for the major or minor in biology.
+Courses for Biology Majors (BIOL)
+101, 111 Survey of Biology / 3 UNITS
+A one-semester course in the general concepts of biology providing the non-major with an overview of the living world and the principles of life processes. BIOL 101 is lecture only, 111 is two hours of lecture per week and one laboratory every other week.
+102, 112 Ecology and Environmental Biology / 3 UNITS
+Investigation of the natural environment and the relationship of its biotic and abiotic components. Topics will include the ecosystem concept, population growth and regulation, and our modification of the environment. BIOL 102 is lecture only, 112 is two hours of lecture per week and one laboratory every other week. Laboratory will include field trips, one of which will be an overnight trip to the desert. Cross-listed as ENVI 102.
+103, 113 Plants and Peoples / 3 UNITS
+A one-semester course about humans and their knowledge, uses, and abuses of plants. The biology of plants, selected protists, and fungi are considered from a scientific viewpoint; included are ecology, anatomy, morphology, physiology, taxonomy, and biotechnology. These organisms are also considered with regard to resource utilization and agriculture: the uses and abuses of plants for fibers; foods; beverages; medicinals and other ends occupy the majority of the course. BIOL 103 is lecture only, 113 is two hours of lecture per week and one laboratory every other week.
+104, 114 Topics in Human Biology / 3 UNITS
+This is a course in general biology with a human emphasis for non-majors. The general principles of evolution, genetics, biochemistry, and physiology are illustrated by reference to normal and abnormal human body function. Behavioral biology and ecology are also treated from a primarily human viewpoint. BIOL 104 is lecture only, 114 is two hours of lecture per week and one laboratory every other week.
+105, 115 Physiology of Exercise / 3 UNITS
+A study of human physiology and how the body accommodates physical exercise. Training procedures, health, and importance of nutrition and ergogenic aids are emphasized.BIOL 105 is lecture only for 3 units, BIOL 115 is three hours of lecture and one laboratory weekly.
+108 Biology of Birds / 3 UNITS
+This integrated lab and lecture course covers a wide variety of subjects related to birds. The lecture addresses their evolution and ecology, their anatomy and physiology, and their behavior, especially during reproduction. The laboratory portion of the course illustrates the unique anatomy of birds and explains how they are classified, but most of the laboratories comprise a series of field trips to different local habitats to identify the large variety of avian species in San Diego. One field trip may be overnight to the desert. Two hours of lecture and one hour of laboratory weekly.
+110 Life Science for Educators / 3 UNITS
+A one-semester course in the general concepts of biology tailored for the Liberal Studies major. The course is designed to meet the subject matter requirement in Life Science for the Multiple Subject Teaching Credential. Topics covered include an overview of the scientific method, biochemical molecules, cell structure and function, anatomy and physiology of animals and plants, genetics, evolution, and ecology. Field trips and laboratory assignments will provide experience with selected biological principles and practices. Prerequisite: PHYS 105. Students majoring in Liberal Studies cannot take this course pass/fail. Two hours of lecture and one laboratory weekly.
+212, 213 Anatomy and Physiology I and II / 4 UNITS / 4 UNITS
+A two-semester course on the fundamentals of human anatomy and physiology. The biological function and structure of the cells, tissues, and major organ systems in the body will be covered, along with basic concepts of chemistry and physics. The course will also cover the pathological conditions that are most often seen by medical personnel, and will discuss how the loss of homeostasis leads to pathology or disease. BIOL 212 is the prerequisite for BIOL 213, and this combination is inteneded to meet the requirements of students preparing for allied health occupations. This course will not satisfy Core Life Science requirement or requirements for a major or minor in biology. Three hours of lecture and one laboratory weekly.
+Courses for Biology Majors (BIOL)
+190 Introduction to Evolution / 3 UNITS
+This one semester foundation course for Biology majors provides an introduction to the mechanisms of inheritance, evolution, and ecology. Three hours of lecture weekly. No prerequisite. (Every semester).
+221 Introduction to Organismal Diversity/ 3 UNITS
+This one semester foundation course for Biology majors provides an introduction to the major groups of organisms with an emphasis on their structure, function, and evolutionary relationships. Three hours of lecture weekly. Concurrent registration in BIOL 221L is strongly recommended. Prerequisite: BIOL 190. (Every semester)
+221L Introduction Organismal Diversity Laboratory / 1 UNIT
+A laboratory course to complement the lecture material presented in BIOL 221. Prerequisite: BIOL 190, and concurrent registration in BIOL 221 or consent of the instructor. (Every semester)
+225 Introduction to Cell Processes / 3 UNITS
+This one semester foundation course for Biology majors provides an introduction to the concepts of structure and function in biological systems at the molecular and cellular level. The topics of cell structure and function, biological macromolecules, respiration, photosynthesis, molecular biology, and selected areas of physiology are covered with emphasis on regulatory mechanisms. Three hours of lecture weekly. Concurrent registration in BIOL 225L is strongly recommended. Prerequisites: BIOL 190(can be taken concurrently), and completion of, or concurrent registration in CHEM 151. (Every semester)
+225L Introduction to Cell Processes Laboratory / 1 UNIT
+A laboratory course to complement the lecture material presented in BIOL 225 .Prerequisite: BIOL 190, and concurrent registration in BIOL 225, or consent of the instructor. (Every semester)
+300 Genetics / 3 UNITS
+A general course covering the mechanisms of inheritance at the molecular, organismal, and populational levels. Elementary probability and statistical methodology appropriate for the analysis of various genetic systems are introduced. Three hours of lecture weekly. Completion of BIOL 221 and 221L is stonrgly recommended. Prerequisites: BIOL 190, 225, and 225L.. (Every semester)
+301L Biostatistics / 4 UNITS
+An introduction to data analysis and statistical testing. This course will prepare students for their upper-division courses and independent research by teaching them the basics of hypothesis testing and the most common statistical tests used in biology. It will also cover basic experimental design, teach students how to use computer software for simple tests, and introduce students to modern nonparametric tests. Three hours of lecture and one laboratory weekly. (Spring semester)
+305 Ecology / 3 UNITS
+A study of the distribution and abundance of organisms. This survey course will include a discussion of the physical environment, biogeography, and ecosystems. Community and population ecology will also be addressed and quantitative approaches will be emphasized. One or two weekend field trips may be required. Marine Science majors or Environmental Studies Majors may substitute MARS 300 for BIOL 305.Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, and 221L. (Every semester)
+309 Research Methods/ 2 UNITS
+Development of basic methods and skills common to all research in Biology. Topics include use of literature, hypothesis formation and hypothesis testing with statistical inference, and critical evaluation of data. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L and 300 or 305 depending upon instructor. (Every semester)
+310 Evolution / 3 UNITS
+A study of the fundamental concepts of evolution. The nature of variation, isolation, natural selection, and speciation will be discussed. Special topics include molecular, behavioral, developmental, and human evolution. Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L and 305.
+320 Evolution of Vertebrate Structure / 4 UNITS
+The evolution of vertebrates is one of the most compelling stories in comparative biology. For millions of years vertebrates have flourished in the seas and on land by employing a variety of morphological specializations for feedings, locomotion, and reproduction. Yet, all vertebrates retain similarities in their design regardless of how structural components function in different lineages and environments. This course examines the shared and transformed anatomical attributes among vertebrates in the context of function and phylogenetic history. We pursue that objective by integrating lecture discussions with laboratory observations and directions. Two hours of lecture and two laboratories weekly Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L, and 305.(Fall semester)
+340 Desert Biology/ 4 UNITS
+This course provides an introduction to the formation and climate of the local Colorado Desert and the evolution, ecology, physiological adaptations, and relationships of the organisms found there. The lab portion includes five days hiking and camping in Anza Borrego Desert State Park during Spring Break, where the floral and faunal communities of several habitat types will be studied through trapping, tracking, and experiment. Three hours of lecture and one laboratory weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L and 305. (Spring semester)
+342 Microbiology / 4 UNITS
+An introduction to the microbial world, with emphasis given to bacteria, archaea and viruses. The diversity of prokaryotes is examined with particular attention devoted to differences in cell physiology, energy metabolism and ecology. Interactions between the human immune system and microbial pathogens are examined. The laboratoy stresses techniques in light microscopy and procedurs used to culture and characterize microorganisms. Two hours of lecture and two laboratories weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L and 300. (Fall semester)
+344 Plant Systematics and Evolution/ 4 UNITS
+An introduction to the study of plant diversity. The evolution and relationships of plants is examined from the perspective of geological and ecological history. Significant plant groups will be discussed, with special emphasis on the flowering plants. Field identification of plant families will be empasized in the laboratory sessions. Three hours of lecture and one laboratory weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L 300 and 305. (Spring semester)
+346 Vertebrate Natural History / 4 UNITS
+A course in the biology of vertebrates. Although vertebrate structure, function, and development are studied, emphasis is on the behavior, evolution, and interaction of the vertebrate organism as a whole, or at the population level. Techniques of identification and study are covered in the laboratory and field. Three hours of lecture and one laboratory or field trip weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L and 305. (Spring semester)
+348 Insect Biology / 4 UNITS
+An introduction to the biology of insects, including their identification, evolution, structure, function, physiology, ecology, behavior, and conservation. The course includes compilation of an extensive insect collection and an overnight field trip to the desert. Three hours of lecture and one laboratory weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L, 300 and 305. (Spring semester)
+350 Invertebrate Zoology / 4 UNITS
+A survey of the invertebrate animals with emphasis on evolutionary relationships among the groups as expressed by their morphology and physiology. Three hours of lecture and one laboratory weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L and 305. (Spring semester)
+361 Ecological Communities of San Diego County / 2 UNITS
+A general survey of the ecological communities of San Diego County will acquaint students with local marine, freshwater, chaparral, and desert habitats. The course is primarily field study, and one overnight trip to the desert will be included. Identification of organisms and their ecological relationships will be stressed. One laboratory weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L and 305. Cross-listed as ENVI 361. (Spring semester)
+364 Conservation Biology / 4 UNITS
+Lectures address conservation topics from historical, legal, theoretical, and practical perspectives. The laboratory includes discussions of classic and current literature, student presentations, computer simulations of biological phenomena, analysis of data, and field trips to biological preserves, habitat restoration sites, and captive breeding facilities. Three hours of lecture and one laboratory weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L and 305. Cross-listed as ENVI 364. (Fall semester)
+376 Animal Development / 4 UNITS
+This course explores embryonic development emphasizing mechanisms of differential gene expression and pattern formation at a cellular, molecular, and genetic level. Vertebrate and invertebrate model organisms (e.g. Xenopus, Drosophila, Caenorhabditis) which illustrate common developmental mechanisms will be examined in detail. In laboratory, living embryos and prepared slides will be studied, and molecular techniques will be employed to identify genes and examine gene expression. Three hours lecture and one laboratory weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L and 300. (Fall semester)
+382 Techniques in Molecular Biology / 4 UNITS
+An introduction to recombinant DNA techniques including bacterial culture, transformation, DNA purification, restriction analysis, cloning, hybridization, polymerase chain reaction, RNA isolation, library construction, and recombinant protein expression. Computer-based sequence analyses include database accession, BLAST, alignment, restriction analysis, and gene-finding. An investigative project will be undertaken. Two hours of lecture and two 3-hour laboratories weekly. Completion of CHEM 301/301L is recommended. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L and 300. (Spring semester)
+416 Population Biology / 4 UNITS
+The mechanisms of evolution and the dynamics of ecosystems are studied through the development of mathematical and computer models. The mathematics and computer programming experience required in this course beyond the level of MATH 130 (Survey of Calculus) will be introduced as needed. Research techniques used in investigating population phenomena are emphasized. Three hours of lecture and one laboratory weekly. Biostatistics is highly recommended. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L, 300 and 305 and MATH 130 or MATH 150. (Fall semester)
+432 Electron Microscopy / 4 UNITS
+An introduction to the theory, development, and operation of the electron microscope, with emphasis on development of knowledge of cellular fine structure. The laboratory portion of the course will focus on tissue preparation, microscope operation, and evaluation and presentation of electron microscopic data. Two hours of lecture and two laboratories weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L, 300, and 305. (Spring semester)
+451W Biological Oceanography / 4 UNITS
+An integrated study of marine organisms and their environments, stressing ecological, behavioral, and physiological relationships. Nearshore, deep sea, and open ocean environments will be covered. A weekend field trip may be required. Cross-listed as MARS 451W. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L, 300 and 305. (Fall semester)
+460W Ecology / 4 UNITS
+An integrated approach to plant and animal relationships in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The lecture investigates ecosystem energetics, population dynamics, community structure, and physiological adaptations. The laboratory concentrates on population and community problems in a few environments. There will be one overnight field trip to the desert. Three hours of lecture and one laboratory weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L, 300 and 305; and MATH 130 of MATH 150. Biostatistics recommended. (Spring semester)
+472 Plant Physiology / 4 UNITS
+An introduction to the basic processes occurring in vascular plants. Movement of water and solutes; photosynthesis and respiration; plant growth and development, including plant hormones and growth regulators; and plant reactions to environmental stress will be studied. Three hours of lecture and one laboratory weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L,300 and 305; and CHEM 151, CHEM 151L and CHEM 152, CHEM 152L. (Fall semester)
+477 Invertebrate Physiology / 3 UNITS
+The study of key physiological systems of invertebrate organisms with an emphasis on metabolism, respiration, osmoregulation, thermal relations, membrane, and neural physiology. The function of these systems will be examined by comparing invertebrates from various taxanomic groups and diverse habitats. Three hours of lecture weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L, 300, and 305. (Fall semester)
+477L Invertebrate Physiology Laboratory / 1 UNIT
+Laboratory-based study of several physiological systems of invertebrate organisms. Both traditional and recently developed techniques will be employed to demonstrate the functioning and integrative nature of these systems. One laboratory weekly. Concurrent registration in BIOL 477 required. Prerequisites: BIOL : 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L, 300 and 305 (can be taken concurrently)(Fall semester)
+478 Vertebrate Physiology / 3 UNITS
+A detailed comparative examination of life processes in animals. Particular focus will be upon energy utilization, gas transport, kidney function, and muscle function of organisms from diverse habitats. Three hours of lecture weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L, 300 and 305. (Spring semester)
+478L Vertebrate Physiology Laboratory / 1 UNIT
+An intensive exploration in a research setting of metabolic pathways, temperature acclimation, gas exchange, and ion regulation in a variety of animals. Particular focus will be upon energy utilization, gas transport, kidney function, and muscle function of organisms from diverse habitats. One laboratory weekly. Concurrent registration in BIOL 478 required. (Spring semester)
+480 Cell Physiology / 3 UNITS
+Mechanisms of cell functions are emphasized. Topics covered include: membrane structure; membrane transport; endoplasmic reticulum and Golgi functions; cell motility; energetics; mechanisms of hormone action; cellular immunology; and control of the cell cycle. Three hours of lecture weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L, 300 and 305 and CHEM 301(can be taken concurrently), CHEM 301L(can be taken concurrently). (Spring semester)
+480L Cell Physiology Laboratory / 1 UNIT
+The laboratory exercises introduce the student to some of the modern methods used to study cell function. One laboratory weekly. Concurrent registration in BIOL 480 is required. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L, 300, 305 and CHEM 301.(Spring semester)
+482 Molecular Biology / 3 UNITS
+A study of the structure and function of genes, emphasizing the understanding of gene regulation at many levels. The course will examine DNA structure and mechanics of replication, repair, transcription, and translation in prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Critical experiments will be studied to examine the development of concepts in molecular biology. Other special topics may include the molecular biology of development, cancer, HIV, and whole genome analysis. Three hours of lecture weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L, 300, 305and CHEM 301. (Spring semester)
+484 Immunology / 4 UNITS
+A comprehensive introduction to immunology, focusing on vertebrate immunity. Topics covered include molecular and cellular components of the immune system and their regulation, long term protection from disease, immune response to cancer, autoimmunity, hypersensitivity, immunodeficiencies, and transplants. Laboratory exercises will introduce students to immunological techniques and their applications. Three hours of lecture and one laboratory weekly. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L, 300 and 305. (Fall semester)
+490 Research Project / 4 UNITS
+Students work on individual reserach projects that apply appropriate research techniques to test hypotheses. Completion of course will require oral presentation of results. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L and 309 with a grade of C- of better.
+491 Science in the Public Domain/ 3 UNITS
+Students will design and implement science projects that demonstrate a basic scientific concept for elementary school students in an after school program. Students explore methods of pedagogy and the role of outreach and community service learning in communicating science. Tasks include practicing grant-writing, hypothesis testing and assessment. Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L and 309 with a grade of C- of better.
+494 Topics in Biology / 1-4 UNITS
+An in-depth evaluation of selected topics in the biological sciences. Issues of current or historical interest are addressed. May be repeated when topic changes. A total of 3 units may be applied to the Biology major or minor.Prerequisites: BIOL: 190, 221, 221L, 225, 225L and 300 or 305 depending on topic.
+495 Biology Capstone Seminar/ 2 UNITS
+The techniques of seminar preparation, presentation, and critique will be refined through collaboration with faculty and peers, culminating with each student presenting a public seminar on their Research Experience. Enrollment for credit is limited to seniors. (Every semester)
+496 Research / 1-3 UNITS
+Students develop and/or assist in research projects in various fields of biology working with a Biology Department faculty memeber. The study may involve literature searching, on and off campus research, and attendance at seminars at other leading universities and scientific institutions. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. Total credit in BIOL 496 is normally limited to 3 units. (Every semester)
+497 Techniques in Biology / 1-3 UNITS
+Training and practice in those areas of biological science of practical importance to the technician, teacher, and researcher. To include, but not be limited to: technical methodology, preparation and technique in the teaching laboratory, and routine tasks supportive to research. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. Total credit in BIOL 497 is normally limited to 3 units. (Every semester)
+498 Research Internship / 1-3 UNITS
+This course offers experience in the practical and experimental application of biological principles. Students will be involved in research projects conducted by agencies and institutions outside the University, such as state parks, zoos, and biological industries. Enrollment is arranged on an individual basis according to a student’s interest and background, and is dependent on positions available and faculty approval. A maximum of 3 upper-division units can be earned toward fulfillment of the requirements of the major. (Every semester)
+PW has already named its Best Books 0f 2011, but since readers rarely get to see the faces behind the scenes, we thought we’d let our staff share the best book they read in 2011, because deep down, we’re all just book nerds. Here are our staff picks. Let us know your favorite book you read this year in the comments!
+Andrew R. Albanese, senior writer:
+How to Fix Copyright by William Patry. If you know me at all, you know this appeals to the copyright geek in me. Before she left for NPR, my friend and colleague Parul Sehgal asked me what I was reading, and I said this book, “because…” She cut me off. “Because you’re you,” she said. Yup. That’s pretty much right. But this book appealed more to the artist and creator in me, than the policy wonk. It is a follow up to Patry’s 2009 book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, which examined the way we’ve come to frame copyright around moral issues—theft, piracy, plagiarism. Creativity, however, is all about building on what has come before us, Patry argues. This book struck a chord with me for its simple premise—that copyright is not the basis for creativity. A heady mix of law, history, practice, and a genuine appreciation for what goes into the making of art and culture, this is a fascinating read not just for those of us in the publishing business, but for anyone interested in maintaining a healthy, creative culture.
+Peter Cannon, senior reviews editor:
+Since I’m still plowing my way through Arguably, I’ll have to nominate Hitch-22, the autobiography of the late Christopher Hitchens, who as a provocative clear thinker ranks up there with his idol, George Orwell. You don’t have to agree with Hitchens on every issue to appreciate his brilliance and his wit. Who else would’ve been the first to notice that there’s no Lenin figure in Animal Farm?
+Jessamine Chan, reviews editor:
+As of today, I’m halfway through rereading Revolutionary Road, which I first read in my early twenties, when the story seemed 90 percent depressing and 10 percent wondrous. Today, it seems 90 percent wondrous, 5 percent super depressing, 5 percent sharp and funny. Tormented young married people – can’t get enough of them. Next up – Anna Karenina.
+Michael Coffey, co-editorial director:
+Michael McClure’s Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems, published early in 2011 by California, was an enormous delight. Although well-known as a figure on the beat scene in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, his poems recognizable by the centered lines and frequent use of all caps, McClure’s lifetime of work, beautifully selected by the late Leslie Scalapino, sings its celebration of body and spirit with a radical purity, and does so even the more in the new poems here by an octogenarian going strong.
+Rachel Deahl, senior news editor:
+My first brush with Jeffrey Eugenides was in 1999. I had just gotten out of college and I was interning for a publishing company in Manhattan, taking the Metro North line from my parents’ house in the suburbs, to and fro, every morning and evening. I read The Virgin Suicides on those train rides, and I remember feeling unusually attuned to the longing and mystery in the novel—the sense of loss and despair, of being young but feeling old—and becoming heartbreakingly wrapped up in the narrators’ obsession with the thing that was so close yet so far away: the Lisbon girls living on their block. I’ll still take The Virgin Suicides over Middlesex any day of the week. This may be why I love The Marriage Plot so much; it felt like Eugenides’s return to that wonderful beginning. Ostensibly it’s not about much—a love triangle between three Brown grads during the 1980s—and yet, of course, it’s about quite a bit. The Marriage Plot is a love story for people who love love stories, but (maybe stupidly, maybe arrogantly) think they’re too smart to be lured in by their charms. It’s engrossing, hard-to-put-down and it reminds you, whether your poison is Victorian novels, primetime soaps or Katherine Heigl rom-coms, why, for better and for worse, fiction is inextricably intertwined with our love stories happening off the page.
+Louisa Ermelino, reviews director:
+Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. Those were the days! When writers moved to Paris instead of Park Slope.
+Sarah F. Gold, senior reviews editor:
+I’ve become engrossed in 19th-century American social history, and my reading led me to the best book I’ve read this year: Debby Applegate’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (and shame on me for not reading it sooner).
+Applegate found a brilliant story and tells it brilliantly. Henry Ward Beecher was the celebrated minister of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church (and the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe). Beecher’s life encompasses most of the 19th century, and he was in the eye of almost every political, religious, and ethical storm of that turbulent era. Applegate plumbs all the complexities of a man who was loving and generous, a religious and political reformer, an anti-slavery leader—and also an ambitious self-promoter, the luxury-loving son of a Puritan preacher, and a religious figure who became embroiled in sexual scandal. His charisma carried him through it all. Applegate gives us a quintessential American who embodied the 19th century and prefigured much of the 20th. Her book is a magnificent recounting of Beecher’s life and times.
+Gabe Habash, news editor:
+The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan is so fantastically weird and funny that I found myself extending its 180 pages into five days. I can’t remember the last time a book actually made me slow down because I didn’t want it to end. I was reading sentences two and three times before moving on to the next.
+Mike Harvkey, deputy reviews editor:
+There But For The by Ali Smith. This was the one book I read in 2011 that I was prepared to go to the mat for, and it’s the one great book among many great books—The Marriage Plot, The Sisters Brothers, The Devil All the Time, Frankenstein—that has stuck with me, incessantly making a case for itself, much like the mysterious character whose refusal to come out of a guest bedroom gives Smith something solid from which to spiral away, repeatedly, in order to address a fascinating mélange of issues facing Britain today. Smith’s writing is the most ebullient of any book I’ve read this year, absolutely overflowing with energy and ideas. It’s formally audacious, told from the perspectives of four different people who had at some point in their lives come into contact—however fleeting it might be—with the man upstairs (the guy in the guest room, not God). Of all the many books I read this year, this was the only one I finished by slamming it shut and saying out loud, “What a great book!”
+Claire Kirch, midwest correspondent:
+Ever since I lived in France briefly in the mid-1980s, I’ve been fascinated by that land, its often inscrutable people, and its colorful history. I’ve also always been intrigued by social constructs, particularly the construction of race and class. Ma’s Dictionary: Straddling the Social Divide (Greysolon Press, 2011) by Milan Kovacovic is the memoir of a man born into poverty in Slovakia, who, thanks to the wealthy family his immigrant mother cooked for in Paris, succeeded in attending the most elite schools in that city. But when Kovacovic emigrated to the United States with his mother as a teen, he returned to a life lived in poverty, before pulling his way up the social ladder and eventually becoming a university professor though he doesn’t hold a college degree. Kovacovic’s memoir proves to me — once again — that real life truly is stranger than fiction.
+Jim Milliot, co-editorial director:
+In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson. I heard him speak at BEA and his discussion about presenting what it was like for Americans to be in Berlin as Hitler rose sounded interesting, and the book delivered the goods.
+Marcia Z. Nelson, reviews editor:
+I just finished reading The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. How silky and subversive it was. This Anglophile was punting down what seemed to be the quiet river of the narrator’s life, and suddenly: hidden rocks and a deft twist. I was back in English lit class, thinking about unreliable narrators.
+Calvin Reid, senior news editor:
+My favorite read this year has been Big Questions, a mammoth graphic novel by Anders Nilsen from D&Q, which is also one of our Best Books of 2011. Indeed much like the title of the book, the narrative asks big questions about life, how it’s conducted and for what reasons, as well as how living things go about acquiring an often imperfect understanding of the world around them. In this case, these big questions are being asked by a cast of delightful and often small animals from birds and snakes to wild dogs after a plane crashes and bomb falls in their midst.
+Sonia Jaffe Robbins, managing editor:
+One of my favorite books (I’m incapable of having just one favorite) was The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination by Javier Cercas. The Spanish novelist dissects a 35-minute videotape of an abortive coup in Spain in 1981 (just five years after Franco died) and manages to give the reader a history of 20th century Spain, profiles of three political figures from the tape plus several other coup participants and adversaries, analysis of what’s known and not known about the coup itself, as well as a mini-memoir about his relationship with his father and the Spain they both grew up in. By immersing himself, and the reader, in the same events through many different perspectives, he recreates the sense of history happening, and changing, moment to moment and how anything can happen, until it has happened.
+George Slowik Jr., president:
+Since this is “favorite” rather than “best”, I’d single out Tune in Tokyo by Tim Anderson as a laugh aloud treat. If you’ve been to Japan you’ll enjoy his send-ups of some of the idiosyncratic locations and cultural anomalies experienced by a gay English teacher immersed in Japanese culture. The book and author were featured in our first issue of PW Select last December. I finally got around to reading it while in China.
+Craig Morgan Teicher, director of digital/poetry editor:
+I’ve read so many wonderful books this year; my favorite tends to be the one I’m reading at the moment someone happens to ask about my favorite. So right now I’m 90% of the way through State of Wonder, and I wish I could burrow into a hole with a flashlight and do nothing but read it instead of everything else I have to do.
+State of Wonder is an adventure story, a take on Heart of Darkness, about an American doctor working in a native village in South America to develop a revolutionary fertility drug, as well as something more powerful, controversial and important. Annick Swensen isn’t quite Kurtz, but she’s a hell of a character, short tempered, deadpan to the point of wisdom, and full of little surprises. Meeting her is well worth the perilous trip into the jungle.
+As I said, I’m not done with the book yet, and I suppose it’s possible that everything could go wrong from here, but I seriously doubt it…
+25 Jan Everything Dental Blog – January 2016
+Everyone will be impacted.
+These changes will touch everyone in the dental community.
+There has been a lot written about the state of the dental market place and its future. After years of analysis I have concluded that the future is in our hands. There is no doubt that the business of dentistry is changing rapidly. The clinical, regulatory and administrative responsibilities of operating a healthcare facility are more demanding today than they were a few years ago. The consolidation and competitive landscape is undeniable and it is impacting distribution and the dental services industry. It’s not only affecting practices, laboratories, manufacturers and dental societies, it is impacting workers.
+There is big change coming to the dental workforce. The sophistication and digital workflow of today’s progressive dental practice will alter traditional work roles. There will be significant changes in job availability, job descriptions and compensation models. For some, it will create serious challenges but for the highly motivated, well-educated and effective, there will be opportunity. Small businesses now have access to valuable data and analytics creating a work place with emphasis on performance. Owners can make business and financial decisions based on real-time data that allows them to assess operational, employee and provider performance. Everyone will be more accountable as their performance will be appraised against internal and national norms. The internet will continue to play a role as catalyst and nemesis for people who provide products and services available on the web. If a job can be replaced by a software application, machine or outsourced for less, it probably will. Everyone will be impacted.
+The Burden of continuous improvement
+This period of accelerated change has taken its toll on everyone. For some it’s been a wakeup call, for others it’s created an environment of uncertainty and disorientation. It’s hard to keep up with all the apps and updates and for some, the generational divide is widening. There are many dentists who are at odds with the fast pace of change and the high cost of technology. They are reluctant to invest in technology because they view the monthly lease payment as an assault on their personal income or just another expense forced on them. I empathize with this thinking but historically, practices that make these investments benefit clinically, operationally and financially. In many instances the technology will provide marketing and patient attraction opportunities!
+Dentistry can be rewarding and it can be very challenging.
+Here are some things that I know to be true;
+- Dentistry is a great profession. We help people. Keep them healthy and take them out of pain. We change lives with cosmetic dentistry!
+- Most dentists are in the top 1-5% of earners in America.
+- Offices that invest in practice management training run a better shop than those that don’t.
+- Dental Practices that mandate Perio charting on each hygiene patient have better hygiene and Perio activity than those that don’t.
+- Offices that support and employ personnel who have certification and pursue continuing education run more efficiently and profitably.
+- Dental facilities that incorporate 2D/3D imaging increase their Implant and Ortho activity.
+- Offices that have digital impression scanners have more precise crown and bridge, and happier patients.
+- The dental practices that provide more services under one roof do more business.
+- Offices that incorporate Cad/Cam dentistry (crowns in about an hour) attract more patients, reduce their overhead and become more profitable.
+- Practices that deliver uncompromised customer service, have better treatment acceptance and get more referrals!
+Thinking about the New Year and your future?
+As I reflect about my own roadmap for 2016 I have decided to share some concerns and suggestions for my friends and colleagues. Dental distribution is changing and young dentists have different priorities and preferences. We have the gift of the internet providing instant information and a framework for comparison shopping. We will have a shrinking number of decision makers (independent dental offices) to partner and collaborate with. Over time, the groups will expand their presence and the buying and/or billing will be done centrally. In this scenario my clinical, marketing and operational expertise, may not serve me as well.
+Here are some thoughts and suggestions for my friends and business associates to consider so we can put a positive spin on the New Year.
+Associates: Should focus on the business side (operations) of running a dental facility and they should learn their CDT codes. Don’t take one insurance seminar (especially one sponsored by an insurance company) and think you’ve mastered insurance utilization, reimbursement and optimization. Don’t depend on the office manager to maximize your insurance claims or teach you best practices, if they don’t receive regular training. Attend seminars by industry Gurus’ if you truly want to know how to navigate the maze of insurance submission and reimbursement. Associates should master third party financing (Citi Health and Care Credit) if they want to close more and larger cases. I believe all associates should strive towards certification in one or all of these areas; clear braces, Implant placement and Rotary Endo. This will lead to more career options and better income opportunity. Establish trusting relationships with staff members and patients. This how case acceptance happens!
+Hygienists: should work towards expanded certification. Be certain to stay current and embrace technology. A strong hygienist is very focused on re-care and Perio and they are vital to any practice with a soul and a mission. No dental office can provide great care without a great hygiene department. Hygienists must be open to more responsibility, clinically and administratively. In group practices, management will evaluate the performance of all providers against the rest of the organization and they will develop compensation models to support those initiatives. Certain procedures like fluoride varnish, child and adult sealants, perio charting and local antibiotic usage for Perio treatment will be monitored.
+Assistants: Who seek greater job satisfaction and more opportunity should be focused on the digital workplace. Tighten up your computer and clinical skills now. Invest in your career and become a certified dental assistant. Learn Cad/Cam design and become a certified Planscan designer. A good assistant manages the lab activity and should be proficient at “in house” lab work. Making night guards, take home whitening trays and sports guards can be very lucrative for the practice. An assistant who fabricates two whitening and two night guards a week will produce over $100K in production annually with virtually no chair timeJ. This work will make them more valuable to the practice. This transformation from worker to producer has profound effects on morale and relevance. Assistants must engage the patients and create a friendly, professional atmosphere. These activities will lead to a more satisfying career.
+Administrators and office managers: Go to seminars. Learn your practice management program like an expert. Join AADOM (American Association of Dental Office Managers) and meet others in your field and learn from them. Expand your network and grow your work beyond insurance verification and reception. Be the champion who makes the ultimate customer service experience happen in your office! Be proactive about training and implementing new processes and protocols to improve patient flow and the patient experience. * I visit hundreds of offices every month and the spectrum of engagement and the value a dentist or organization puts on that front desk position speaks volumes about their operation. The person who answers the phones, greets the patients, manages the P&L, fills the schedule, handles the patient insurance and eligibility should have ongoing training. In many respects, they are the practice to your patients just like I am Henry Schein to my customers and prospective accounts!
+Social Media Junkies: Talk to your employer about using your tech savviness and social media prowess for the office. See if you can get 20 minutes a day to manage the office��s posts and responses with management oversight. Who knows? You may like the work and get compensated for it.
+Dealer reps and manufacturer reps: Must become customer centric. Dealers must be competitive on price. Dealer reps must demonstrate sincerity and some area of expertise. Today’s progressive dealer rep will challenge his customer to perform and stay focused on their business plan while providing valuable resources and services to help them. The better dealer and manufacturer reps will establish a high level of trust with their select clients. Dealer reps must streamline the ordering process and audit product selection and utilization. If a practice has several doctors and multiple locations, a dealer rep must look for ways to manage the unintended proliferation of inventory and supply costs. There are materials and sundry items that are cost prohibitive for certain types of practices. A good dealer rep will maximize and process free goods for his loyal customers. They will promote preventive maintenance on operatory equipment, technology and utilities to avoid costly down time. A good manufacturer rep will provide clinical expertise, staff training and continuing education credit. They will acknowledge the cost differential on me too [commodity] products, and will provide deviated pricing strategies to keep that business. Lastly, an engaged dealer or manufacturer rep will identify unique opportunities for their clients such as acquisitions and mergers. I predict a change in the mix of products provided by the dealer representative. Reps will be talking about the benefits of outsourcing certain processes to control human capital costs and yield improved performance. I also predict we will have 20% less dealer representatives selling sundries on the streets in five years from now.
+As a sales professional and entrepreneur I have a great deal of windshield time. I drive approximately 160 – 200 miles every day and generally spend an hour or two on the side of the road with my hot spot on and my laptop open. There are times I manage my work with ease and there are days that I am overwhelmed. Truth be told, it’s more about my focus, ability to manage the work load (return calls, texts and e-mails) with clarity and effective time management. Being alone on the road triggers all kinds of self talk and it gives me great content for my blog. I am also a realist. The growth of the groups means tougher competition for my clients and less buyers for me to call on. I am confident that I will remain a valued resource to my clients because I have made the investment in my education and network. I hope my clients and colleagues see value in my recommendations and no one is offended by my directness.
+
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+5 Awesome Kitchen Chairs For Seniors –
+The Razer Iskur. Photo: Retailer
+Kitchen Chairs with Arms for Elderly Furniture – YouTube | Kitchen Chairs For Seniors
+It has been a continued time aback the apple begin a new chair. But in the apartments and dens of mostly adolescent men and women, beyond from the soon-to-be-upgraded PC and assorted screens, there is one, alien in the accomplished decade and a half: the gaming chair, congenital for stress-free full-body abutment aback the keyboard and able abrasion appear out. It’s wheeled like an appointment chair, but it’s additionally article else. Although both types abutment the spine, with seats and armrests advised to accumulate knees and elbows at the optimal ergonomic 90-degree bend aback amphitheatre or alive at a desk, gaming chairs about board a greater ambit of movement. Abounding of the seatbacks can recline to 135 degrees, for cockpit-like play, while the armrests can be adapted advanced to back, ancillary to ancillary and angled against or afield from the body. They additionally about appear with adjustable pillows to abutment the lumbar and neck. Is a gaming armchair sports equipment? Is it an appointment chair? Is it claimed billboard? The acknowledgment is all of the above, and the boundaries are collapsing.
+The communicable has rewritten the rules of assignment amplitude vs. comedy space, and that changes area we absorb our time and area we absorb our appliance money. The New York Times appear that Amazon saw a 300 percent access in the sales of gaming chairs during the aboriginal months of the pandemic, and a bazaar assay by Technavio estimates 12 percent year-over-year advance for 2020. It’s additionally spurred above advance in the video-game industry itself, with an estimated $159.3 billion in all-around acquirement this year and double-digit advance in time spent playing. The $1500 that a gaming armchair can bulk is a reasonable bulk to absorb on a sofa. Aback adorning agency logging into Discord, or Twitch, or Counter-Strike, why not get adequate as you face the screen? To advance in what you are absolutely accomplishing — area you are absolutely sitting — adeptness assume like accedence but is additionally self-care.
+These chairs aboriginal appeared in accessible actualization with the acceleration of able video gaming, via streamed broadcasts of aggressive e-sports. Lately, though, in a communicable aback best nonessential workers are about alive from home, it’s adamantine not to apprehension how generally they pop up abaft the active of accompany and acquaintances who you’ve never accomplished were enthusiasts. For able gamers, the armchair has continued been a advance — absolute acreage for hire, with the characteristic arrangement of the armchair architect aerial about the player’s arch and shoulders. Everyday gamers, streaming, Steam-ing, Twitch-ing, YouTube-ing and contrarily benumbed out the communicable from abaft their action stations are the stars of their own nightly shows.
+Herman Miller and Logitech’s Embody: sleeker, lighter, somewhat beneath Xtreme.
+The aboriginal mass-market gaming chair, by best accounts, was alien by DXRacer in 2006, aback the aggregation pivoted from its primary business accomplishment affluence car seats. (That’s not a agrarian leap. The bold ambassador is captivated a bit like a council wheel, and abounding amateur are antagonism simulations.) That aboriginal archetypal created the outline for ancestors of chairs to follow, with a head-high backrest, authentic accept support, adjustable armrests and the advantage of a abysmal recline. The attending appropriate the charge for speed, admitting the actuality that gamers were physically activity nowhere.
+And that artful ashore — atramentous anatomy with blithely atramentous piping, seats with billowing muscles, constructed materials, all advertence an affection with the physiques and abstracts of concrete sports. (Meanwhile Recaro, a maker of affluence sports-car seats that additionally sells them as appointment chairs, added a band with “extremely active appearance” in 2017, i.e., a beanbag that looks like headlights.) What sets one armchair afar from the abutting are about attenuate differences in the contour up top, as able-bodied as altered logos on the headrest.
+Kitchen & Dining Chairs with Casters Wayfair | Kitchen Chairs For Seniors
+The aftermost big armchair accession afore this was Herman Miller’s Aeron, advised by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf in 1992, with its flared aback and anon identifiable mesh. Aback the babysitter Heng Zhi put up the “Seats of Power” exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum in 2018, Herman Miller’s beforehand Eames Executive Appointment Armchair fabricated it into the actualization but a gaming armchair didn’t, admitting the actuality that the closing absolutely fit its belief for media assimilation and character formation. Aback again appointment chairs accept gotten lighter and lighter in appearance, with spine-like structures and achievement webbing. Gaming chairs went the added direction, with padded, faux-leather seats that cup the anatomy and extend all the way up into headrests. Just as our activated calm time this summer began to crest, Herman Miller alien its aboriginal band of gaming chairs in July, in affiliation with Logitech. Herman Miller had the abode history, and Logitech the tech cred: Its wireless keyboard and abrasion are admired for their admiring contours and accessible controls. The top-of-the-line Herman Miller x Logitech G Embody has a shoulder-high back, minimalist lines, and comes for the aboriginal time in black, the bigger to bout best absolute PC gaming set-ups. HM additionally produced versions of the Aeron and Sayl chairs in gamer-friendly colors.
+“There was a growing annoyance with the racecar-style chairs, for aesthetics and additionally abundance and ergonomics” that wasn’t reflected in the marketplace, says Jon Campbell, now administrator of gaming at Herman Miller. Campbell — whose bold of best is Counter-Strike — pushed the aggregation against advance in the category, and believed Herman Miller’s modernist sensibilities could compete. Quiet can be loud. “When we assignment with influencers on Steam, you can’t see the chair,” Campbell says. “The absence of that logo has been a absolute force. Bodies are asking, What are you sitting in? Why?”
+The DXRacer Unicorn, marketed to women.
+The gaming Embody costs $1,500. The better changes from the absolute chair, beside the color, is the accession of a band of copper-infused cream that’s engineered to cull calefaction abroad from the anatomy aback compressed, as able-bodied as added abutment authoritative it added adequate for continued periods of time. (The Twitch banderole Renee, accustomed one in July, appear “no swamp butt” on Twitter.) Aback I approved one out at Herman Miller’s Manhattan showroom, I admired the collapsed bench-like bench — some gamers like to sit criss-cross-applesauce — and that the bench abyss could be adapted from 16 to 18 inches, accessible for shorties. (Renee: “Fits my 5’4 self,” prayer-hands emoji.)
+Tim Rogers, a video-game developer and analyzer on his own Action Button channel, sees gaming chairs as allotment of a arrangement of articles that abutment players’ visions of themselves as a star. “This is the abutting best bodies will get to actuality casting as the advance amateur in a movie. They get to ascendancy the [onscreen] guy or babe authoritative all the decisions, which makes bold players feel important, which makes them actual affected to actuality awash products,” he says, and the designs aback up this analysis. (Some of them absolutely anatomy the player’s face in lights; LEDs accept continued been a accepted add-on to set the affection in blurred rooms, like the gamer agnate of blink lights.) Rogers has RSI, and his bench of best is a Steelcase Gesture chair, an appointment armchair battling to the Embody, which he believes has the best armrests.
+Office chairs allege of backbreaker and anteroom life, article purchased for you as a low-level employee, rather than article about you. In Rogers’s view, the gaming armchair took ergonomics out of the branch of accumulated adeptness with a addition agnate to Axe Anatomy Wash’s business campaign. One was soap, but Xtreme and cool; the added was Your Spinal Health, but Xtreme and cool. If the academic straight-dude acquirement is a sprawling, brown-black-or-gray exclusive to go in advanced of the TV, here’s the battle-station equivalent. The gaming armchair adeptness additionally be advised a aberration on the abnormality Ashley Fetters empiric in the dude-ification of kitchen appliances: “steel it, matte-black it, and accomplish it heavier.”
+Upgrade Your Dining Room with These Types of Chairs Wayfair | Kitchen Chairs For Seniors
+Although the atramentous is advised to bout the absolute artful of the action station, an arrangement of screens, keyboard, mouse, pad and lighting with its own reddit thread, one can’t advice but anticipate that the class is accomplished for added than minimalist disruption. So far, it’s accessible to atom the brands that are aggravating to action article for the ladies. Like razor manufacturers afore them, they’ve adopted the “pink-it-and-shrink-it” approach. The Kawaii TechniSport has a heart-shaped lumbar abutment pillow; the DXRacer Unicorn looks like a Pokémon that could be alleged Chairish. Pokimane, the top-ranked changeable Twitch streamer, has a throne-like white EPIC from Noblechairs.
+Which blazon of ergonomic armchair to bold from ultimately comes bottomward to claimed preference. Alan Henry, account editor at Wired and host of the magazine’s Twitch actualization Bold Therapy, has a Maxonomic Titanus XL (not to be abashed with the Secretlab Titan XL, with its characteristic heraldic T). “Back aback the DXRacer was the alone armchair on the market, I was like, What are these antic attractive chairs? and I adopted the Embody,” he says. But afterwards gaming and alive from home for months, “I like the activity of actuality nestled into the chair, with the accept wings and the bench bumps on the side.”
+Razer, which added the Iskur armchair to its band in October, sells aggregate for gamer life, laptops and headphones and keyboard and mice, but additionally speakers and sweatshirts and activity drinks, so that no allotment of your cocky goes unbranded. The Iskur stays accurate to the anatomy with a black, padded, constructed covering seat, its beanbag like a cobra’s profile, belted in green. The ergonomic accession is a snakeskin-patterned, structured lumbar abutment that is assuredly absorbed to the chair, cradles the mid- to lower area of the spine, and has a ambit of motion of 26 degrees. “It gives you the adeptness to get into the aforementioned constant sitting aspect every time,” clashing a moveable cushion, says Razer’s Jeevan Aurol, a chief administrator in artefact marketing.
+The Iskur costs $500, and the aboriginal assembly run awash out in two days. “In accepted bodies [who buy these] animation amid awful able-bodied engineered appointment chairs and gaming chairs, which fundamentally do the aforementioned thing,” says Aurol. “The appointment armchair is slim, with ergonomic cobweb fabric. Again you go home and it’s like accepting abaft the bench of a Porsche. One is adequate and practical, the added makes me feel special.”
+It’s accessible to get afraid up on the aesthetics of gaming chairs — as I text-chatted to one source, Even if a gaming aggregation offered one to me for free, I still don’t appetite that in my abode — but there are absolute after-effects to spending eight-hours at a board job and again two to four hours of breach in the aforementioned spot. Gaming is absolutely worse for your anatomy than appointment work. It can advance to the affectionate of repetitive accent abrasion that affected a reckoning in the abode in the 1980s, aback computers and wheeled, body-embracing chairs became allotment of the appointment landscape.
+As Herman Miller’s Campbell says, “We capital to actualization the amateur as an athlete, with the ambition of befitting bodies advantageous for an continued aeon of time. The constancy of the e-sports amateur is one to three years. We ask football players to accident their active together, and they are still abiding five, ten years.”
+5 Pc small Kitchen Table and Chairs set -square Dinette Table and 5 Kitchen Chairs | Kitchen Chairs For Seniors
+The New York Institute of Technology launched an e-sports aggregation in 2017, and opened an e-sports amphitheatre on their Old Westbury campus in December 2018 with chairs donated by OPSEAT and Vertagear. “There are accepted issues that face best bodies in the assignment environment, sitting in a armchair or computer,” says Mark Gugliotti, e-sports concrete therapist for the NYIT Center for e-sports Medicine. You apperceive the drill: aback cocked and supported, thighs horizontal, knees and elbows at 90 degrees, awning arm’s breadth away. “The alone big aberration is abiding hours or competition.There’s a addiction to appetite to blunder forward, to absolutely be in the game,” says Gugliotti. This change in position agency the back, arch and close are no best actuality supported, and the wrist and easily appear out of alignment, potentially acute on the fretfulness and causing repetitive accent injuries. Gaming chairs abode these credibility of affliction via lumbar supports for the lower back, molded accept and headrests, and awful maneuverable armrests that acclimatize both advanced and aback and sideways. Some gamers additionally like a abysmal recline. “I see them about laying bottomward while competing, but I don’t see them adjusting their screen” aback they are in that position, Gugliotti says, “putting disproportionate ache on their neck.”
+Galen Cranz, a assistant emerita at Berkeley and columnist of The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design, has continued advocated a banal with beneath sitting and added changes in position. Aback I alleged to ask about gaming chairs she said she had never heard of them, but again she initiated a search. Her aboriginal acknowledgment was horror: On Google Images, best of the gaming chairs actualization their adjustable lumbar supports comatose on the bench … which is boilerplate abreast your lumbar vertebrae.
+The alone armchair that absolutely captured her adorned was the Scorpion, an H.R. Giger–esque, $3,299 “computer cockpit” that transitions alluringly from bench to lounge and has mountings for your screens on its the stinger-like tail. It looks as acceptable to eat you as to abutment the aback in its optimal S-shape, but absolutely embodies the down-covered band amid assignment and comedy accident now. Cranz herself works in a lounge configuration, lying on a allotment of appliance which supports her accomplished body, bringing her computer keyboard against her on an arm that’s a little like the Scorpion’s tail.
+Checking out the Embody, she approves of the apparent ambit at the abject of the backrest, as able-bodied as the adjustable bend of the bench but again … “Cooling foam? So you can sit there always and never accept to get up, which is actual bad for you.” Whether you’re sitting in a Porsche or sitting on an Aeron: “A desk affairs leads to aboriginal death.”
+The one adventure you shouldn’t absence today, called by New York’s editors.
+Kitchen Chairs For Seniors
+| Allowed to be able to my blog, on this moment I will demonstrate about 5 Awesome Kitchen Chairs For Seniors. And today, this can be the first graphic:
+Disability Kitchen Chair in 5 Adjustable chairs, Kitchen | Kitchen Chairs For Seniors
+Originally published in Evening Weekly
+Article by Ahmed Rushdie
+Ever since I saw Seezan’s ‘short’ movie, ‘E Reyge Fahun’ (After that Night) at Olympus theatre, and nearly killed myself laughing at the scene where ‘Dr. Zeenath’ diagnoses one of her mental patients who sees and talks to jinnis as ‘Personally Disordered’, I have been looking forward to seeing his next unintentionally funny movie. In my experience unintentionally funny movies are even funnier than movies that are marketed as comedies. For proof you need not look any further than any of Muhammakalo’s movies; all of them alleged comedies. If it were up to me, I would have put all of his so-called comedy movies in the Mystery genre because even by the end of the thankfully short movie, not even Sherlock Holmes would have been able to solve the mystery of where the funny scenes had disappeared to.
+With ‘E Reyge Fahun’, Seexan (or possibly C-zan as he seems quite unsure of the spelling of his name and ends up using every conceivable combination for it in movie credits) managed to prove that he was as capable of ripping off a Hollywood movie (in this case, the Halle Berry supernatural thriller, Gothica) and reducing it to a confusing and muddled mess as any other local director was of doing to an unfortunate Hindi movie. Seaxan even went the extra mile and managed to make ‘E Reyge Fahun’ not just plain silly, but about as exciting and suspenseful as watching linoleum curl on a mildly hot day.
+So when I heard that Seaxun had directed a new movie called ‘Kiss Jazbaath’, apparently a psychosexual thriller, I couldn’t wait to see it. Unfortunately, due to the adult nature of this movie it wasn’t being screened at any of the theatres in Male, but was only available to buy as a VCD. A bit put off by this fact I decided it wasn’t worth it and gave up on it until I started hearing about the ‘sizzling hot’ sexually provocative scenes that seemed to saturate the movie. Some who had watched the movie even referred to it as ‘soft porn’. Intrigued, and somewhat skeptical, I finally managed to borrow it from a friend who was of the opinion that ‘there were scenes in the movie that had never before been seen in a local movie.’ After watching the movie, I was inclined to agree. There were scenes in this movie that has never been seen or should ever be seen in any movie. Period.
+There isn’t much of a plot or story in “Kiss Jazbaath” and that isn’t such a surprise as most adolescent boys' wet dreams hardly concern themselves with plot or story. And this is what Kiss Jazbaath basically is: an adolescent boy’s fantasy. And strangely enough the story was written by a woman.
+The film begins with the heroine, Ameela, emerging from an apparently refreshing dip in the sea of a resort island. She gazes intently into the camera, does a little posing and walks in slow motion out of the water and onto the jetty. She is wearing a white T-shirt that just barely reaches her thighs over a two piece bikini, ensuring that the wet T-shirt clings in very revealing ways as she sashays in slow motion towards the camera.
+The scene reminds me of an old Dhivehi movie, Yusuf & Zainab, in which the actress, Mariyam Rasheeda, comes out of the sea all wet, and wearing a light green dress. The drenched dress leaves almost nothing to the imagination and it is even obvious that she wasn’t wearing anything else under the dress. How the director managed to convince her to do the scene is beyond me. The scene in “Kiss Jazbaath” is nowhere near as revealing as that scene was but it’s still pretty close.
+Next Ameela goes to her room and takes a long, long shower which presents the opportunity for the director to linger the camera on some of her physical attributes a little more, but this time with water running down the said attributes. By this time, it is apparent to any Maldivian viewer that the movie has already managed to show more skin in its first three minutes than most local movies are able to during the whole movie.
+After the lengthy shower she puts on a top and jeans that would probably get her arrested if worn on the streets of Male (but that’s not a problem as she is apparently a receptionist at one of our resorts) and pampers herself in front of the mirror when she gets the phone call that gets the ‘story’ moving. This is where things begin to get scary. After the phone conversation she gets ready to go for her shift but then decides to open the door to her room and go outside for a while. A few seconds later she comes back in to find her boyfriend standing in the middle of the room. Weird. Where did he pop out of anyway? Teleportation? This sort of teleportation seems to be very common throughout the movie and since no one seems surprised by the sudden appearances I have to assume that this sort of futuristic transportation is everyday occurrence at the resort.
+Anyway, nothing of interest happens after the teleporting boyfriend scene (the two are apparently having a lovers spat because the guy is never around when the gal needs him, mostly on cold nights) so we move on to the introduction of the hero. The hero, Cxn, enters screen right and meets the girl of his dream, Ameela, on the left. She is manning the counter at the resort and pops out (accompanied by the sound of jingling bells) from behind the counter like a Jane-in-the-box when Cxan comes to the counter. The reasons behind Ceaxahn’s trip to the resort is apparently because he has fallen head over heels for the girl who loves taking a long showers and has followed her to the resort to woo her, and as fate would have it he meets her in his very first scene. But he doesn’t know yet that Ameela is the object of his desire as he has only read an article she had written before becoming smitten with her. Ah, love sure does work in mysterious ways.
+The movie then suddenly goes into “Silent Movie” mode where although the actors are talking, no sound is heard except for the background music. It remains soundless for many minutes until Ameela gets a phone call from her boyfriend and she takes a time out from her duty to tell him off, all under the watchful gaze of Seaxon.
+Several long, boring scenes later (during which Momma’s boy, Seizon, makes a call to his mom to explain why he has run away from Momma, promises to call Momma twice a day, spends a lot of time posing on the bed looking forlorn and having long drawn out dramatic soliloquies) we find our heroine feeling lonely in her room that night and waiting for her lover.
+Frustrated she takes a walk and poses dramatically (this happens a lot) against a hapless coconut tree when Seezahn comes upon her. One of the worst pick up lines in the movie history follows:
+Seizon: Why so lonely?
+Ameela: (startled, but recovering magnificently) Loners are cursed to stay alone.
+Szn: Oh? A loner like me? Good. So why not we get together and banish the loneliness?
+Ameela: How?
+Ceizahn: By drinking a coffee in the name of friendship.
+Can't a girl even pose dramatically against a tree without Seasun popping up behind her?
+By golly, does this man have a way with woman or not? Anyway, during this scene Cixon accidentally finds that the girl is the very object of his desire, the very reason he has come to the resort. The wooing scene follows:
+Seixahn: What a lovely night?
+Ameela: Hmm
+Cxahn: This kind of nights are very special for lovers.
+Well, he sure doesn’t waste any time, does he? But then he hits a snag when he finds out that Ameela actually has a boyfriend which immediately turns our unstoppable hero into a stalker. It’s Stalking Season now. Pun intended.
+Next we take a detour into Khaja’s (I would have spelled it Khajja, but I didn’t make the movie credits) bathroom where she is taking a bubble bath. The cameraman manages to get into very awkward positions to give the audience a few minutes worth of shots of naked wet limbs emerging from foamy and bubbly depths. Eventually and quite reluctantly, the cameraman manages to reach her face. Then suddenly, we get the first of two Breaks in the VCD. Very thoughtful of the producers as I would imagine a hot movie such as this would require a short bathroom break every now and then for the men to take a cold shower before continuing with the movie. Or maybe it was just to give everyone a chance to splash some water on their faces to keep from nodding off through the boring movie.
+After the break we see some more shocking revelations. Ameela’s boyfriend is cheating on her with Khaja. Ameela’s relationship with her boyfriend gets worse because of this. Seexon spends a lot of time stalking Ameela, day and night, without any rest. Eventually Stalking Season passes over into Pervert Season and we find Sexan peeping into Ameela’s room while she is making out with her cheating boyfriend or watching her shadow undress in the window. By this time Sezahn has several failed attempts to woo Ameela under his belt and is becoming increasingly desperate; much like the audience who will probably have to resort to desperate measures in order to stay awake. Every time Ameela has an argument with her boyfriend (and this is what most of the movie is filled with) guess who is standing just a few feet away? Yep, C-zahn. If the corny dialogues don’t make you explode with laughter, then the sound of the crew feeding the actors the lines from behind the camera is sure to. Soliloquies abound as each character poses dramatically on the bed or against a wall reflecting on their sad and loveless lives.
+Stalker Season. In danger of becoming a permanent fixture at the resort.
+Eventually the cheating boyfriend manages to convince Ameela that he is not cheating and then we move on to another bathtub scene. This time with both Ameela and her boyfriend in the tub. Lots of skin and cleavage shots, topped off with a sexy song in the background along with several suggestive gestures by Ameela make this a song to watch. Several shots of the boyfriend lazing around shirtless in the tub make it a song to avoid watching. But Seaxun doesn’t mind and he is back to Stalking Season mode. After the hot scene we are given time to take a breather and a cold shower. It’s Break time again.
+We meet up with the lovebirds after the break, and we find that the boyfriend has spent the night in Ameela’s room and by now has Ameela eating out his hand, so to speak. And of course when they come out Seizen is out there in front of her room, presumably in danger of becoming a permanent fixture of the resort without having even moved a muscle for most of the movie.
+Empires rise and fall but Season doesn’t change as the movie moves forward at glacial pace and since all this time there had not been a scene where Ameela had been required to wear a revealing negligee this is where that scene comes in. Ameela makes the most of the shots and stretches and languishes in ways that would make a cat suffer a hernia. A few minutes of that and suddenly Ameela and Sizzon are sitting at a table near the beach, talking about dreams that made no sense to me and apparently for Ameela either. Not sure what really happened there but next thing Ameela knows Sixxon is leaving the resort and it is back to introspective brooding for Ameela. Meanwhile the boyfriend is cheating with Khaja again. Boy, is this guy busy.
+When Ameela calls him up and finds that his mobile phone is turned off her womanly intuition goes into overdrive and accompanied by the exciting sound of a building crescendo of banging drums she marches out. And barges in just when the boyfriend is getting cozy with Khaja in her room.
+Busted and caught red-handed the boyfriend does a good job trying to wiggle out in face of the evidence at hand but the banging drums win out in the end and Ameela marches out from his life. But sadly, not from the movie.
+Ameela packs up her belongings and goes to the jetty to leave the resort. She obviously doesn’t have access to the teleportation technology that both Ceason and the boyfriend has so she does it the old fashioned way. The boyfriend teleports to the jetty to give it one more try and asks for her forgiveness. But she is having none of it and goes and leans against one of the wooden supports of the jetty as the boyfriend shuffles away.
+Then in the single most shocking moment of the movie, an apparently two dimensional Sezzan comes out from behind the beam which can’t have been more than 7 or 8 inches in width. How long he was hiding there, or how he managed to hide behind the beam in the first place (unless he was 2D and turned sideways to disappear) is unclear and Ameela remarks on it:
+Ameela: (shocked) How did you come here?
+Seyzohn: Let’s not talk about that. I already told you that I would be next to you any time you were in need of me. Let’s go.
+Here ends the fantasy… I mean, movie and thankfully the credits start rolling.
+I would encourage every one to see this movie at least once in their lifetime. I don’t think anyone can handle a second viewing unless it’s just specific parts of the movie where we see a lot of Ameela. It’s great that someone in the industry has tried to make a movie for the adult audience but next time hopefully it won’t be as bad as this one was.
+Wednesday, 7 February 2007
+C-Zan's Kiss Jazbaath? Sexy or just plain silly?
+Popular Posts
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+- Stolen from The Voice Original article by Ahmed Rushdie Several months ago, after watching Amjad “Amjay” Ibrahim’s so-called “horror mov...
+- Originally published in Evening Weekly Article by Ahmed Rushdie Ever since I saw Seezan’s ‘short’ movie, ‘E Reyge Fahun’ (After that Nigh...
+- by Mohamed Headset Fans of Umar Naseer, self-proclaimed ‘tough cop’ and attention-whoring leader of the Islamic Democratic Party (IDP), rejo...
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+The only think worse than this movie ... is the fact that you took the time to write about it. Geez, man, that was a lot of unwanted review. But then again, any garbage on this Dhivehi "film" crap is worth reading about. Keep it up!!!!
+hmm.. saw a similar, if not same, piece of review at another site...
+maybe its just a site specialised in rippin off the best work of others.
+Wonder why you are writing about a movie that you think is so stupid?
+As if this site and you are all perfect. Kiss the jazbaath is not for Maldivians, but the other movies... You're probably a negative person.But there are positive things about those. Why dont you make your own movie better than the rest
+@last anonymous: FINE!. YOU ASKED FOR IT!.
+This comment has been removed by the author.
+i really want 2 watch da movie
+can u pls tell me where can i get it
+bythe way ur review is great
+Donno, it might still be available in some video shops in Male', or torrents, or YouTube... Have fun hunting.
+Contents:
+Inaugural ceremony
+Election of President and keynote addresses
+Participation
+Choice of an emergency item
+Debates and decisions of the Assembly and its Standing Committees
+1. Inaugural ceremony
+The 124th IPU Assembly was inaugurated on 15 April 2011 at a ceremony held at the ATLAPA Convention Centre in Panama City, Panama, in the presence of H.E. Mr. Ricardo Martinelli, President of the Republic of Panama. Inaugural addresses were delivered by Mr. José Muñoz Molina, Speaker of the National Assembly, Mr. Joseph Deiss, President of the United Nations General Assembly, and Dr. Theo-Ben Gurirab, IPU President. The ceremony concluded with a statement by the President of Panama, who declared the 124th Assembly officially open.
+2. Election of the President and keynote addresses
+The 124th Assembly opened at the ATLAPA Convention Centre on the morning of Saturday, 16 April, with the election by acclamation of Mr. José Muñoz Molina, Speaker of the National Assembly of Panama, as President of the Assembly.
+The President said that it was a great honour for him to have been elected to preside over the Assembly's work. After opening the general debate on the overall theme of Parliamentary accountability: Living up to people’s expectations, he invited Ms. Michelle Bachelet, Executive Director of UN Women, to deliver a keynote address.
+Ms. Bachelet said she was very glad to take part in the IPU Assembly and have the opportunity to present the new UN entity for women, UN Women, to the IPU membership. Respect for women’s rights and the achievement of gender equality were core tenets of progress not only for women, but for society as a whole. Parliaments and their members - men and women - had an important role to play in the promotion of gender equality as legislators, overseers of government action, representatives of the people and opinion leaders.
+UN Women was currently developing its three-year strategic plan. It had identified five thematic priorities for its operational activities: (1) enhancing women’s economic empowerment; (2) expanding women’s voice, leadership and political participation; (3) ending violence against women; (4) strengthening implementation of the women’s peace and security agenda; and (5) making gender-equality priorities central to national, local and sectoral planning and budgeting.
+Ms. Bachelet described the situation of women in politics, highlighting recent progress in some regions and countries as well as interesting initiatives taken to secure a minimum number of women in decision-making positions, including through the adoption of positive action measures. Much more needed to be done and new challenges had to be considered and researched, such as the role of political parties, the often short career of women in politics, and women’s reluctance to enter politics.
+Parliaments and the IPU were natural and important partners in the achievement of gender equality and the goals set by UN Women. Areas of cooperation with the IPU included: facilitating women’s access to parliament, including through legislative and constitutional reform; providing capacity-building support for women in parliament; helping parliaments ensure respect for women’s rights; carrying out cutting-edge research in new fields; and working together to combat violence against women.
+Ms. Bachelet welcomed the IPU’s latest global survey on gender-sensitive parliaments, which would provide new avenues for cooperation and strategies to promote gender equality. She called on parliaments to develop and adopt gender priorities and plans at the beginning of each legislature, and pledged UN Women’s support in that endeavour. She repeated her wish for stronger cooperation with parliaments and the IPU.
+After her address, Ms. Bachelet answered questions from delegates relating to the contributions of the IPU and parliaments to the Commission on the Status of Women, to an inclusive process in political decision-making, to the promotion of young women’s participation in politics and to rural outreach.
+In the morning of Sunday, 17 April, the Vice-President of Panama and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Juan Carlos Varela, addressed the Assembly. He was very proud to present to the Assembly Panama’s views on the agenda items. In the two decades since it had emerged from a dictatorship, Panama had continually strengthened its democracy. Panamanians were proud of the progress made since the first general elections, which ushered in a peaceful political transition. The new Electoral Code allowed for free, fair and transparent elections. At the international level, Panama supported all initiatives aimed at reinforcing democracy. The Government of Panama condemned populist demagoguery, which tended to limit democratic rights, and the use of religious dogma to void fundamental freedoms of their substance. It had no army, but was home to strategic installations that were key for international transport. Panama was deeply attached to respect for international law, the guarantor of regional stability. It had worked to consolidate the United Nations Inter-Agency Regional Centre and strengthen the Americas regional logistics centre. It was committed to fighting organized crime by establishing a third regional centre, in coordination with other Latin American countries, to reinforce coordination on security issues and fight trafficking in drugs and arms and all other forms of organized crime. The Government had strengthened its action on economic issues; Panama was now a member of the Central America-European Union trade agreement; it had adhered to the agreement on the exchange of fiscal information, and therefore appeared on the list of countries considered to be transparent in that field. Panama had encouraged the ratification of a trade treaty with the United States and was negotiating free-trade treaties with Canada, Colombia and Peru. It had ratified the principal human rights instruments. At the subregional level, Panama had been deeply involved in finding a political solution to the crisis in Honduras. In 2012, it would celebrate the 500th anniversary of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific Ocean, which it would commemorate at a large number of international events. For all of that, the Government requested the support of the world’s parliaments. Lastly, Panama supported the powerful movements for democracy that had emerged in a number of Arab countries, which it believed would herald the birth of the democracy that was indispensable for the well-being of the people. On behalf of Panama, of a land open to the world, where paths crossed and minds met, Mr. Varela wished the 124th Assembly fruitful deliberations.
+At the closing sitting of the 124th Assembly, on 20 April, Ms. S. Ataullahjan (Canada) reported briefly on the field visits carried out in Panama City on Sunday, 17 April. Organized in cooperation with UNICEF, the visits had focused on child-related issues in marginalized areas. Ms. Ataullahjan concluded by expressing renewed appreciation for the excellent cooperation between the IPU and UNICEF.
+3. Participation
+Delegations from the parliaments of the following 119 countries took part in the work of the Assembly: Afghanistan, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Congo, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea Bissau, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Iraq, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Latvia, Lesotho, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mexico, Micronesia (Federated States of), Monaco, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Romania, Russian Federation, San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Syrian Arab Republic, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United Republic of Tanzania, Uruguay, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
+The following Associate Members also took part in the Assembly: the Andean Parliament, the Central American Parliament, the East African Legislative Assembly, the Inter-Parliamentary Committee of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU), and the Latin American Parliament.
+Observers comprised representatives of: (i) the United Nations system: United Nations, International Labour Organization (ILO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), UN Women, World Health Organization (WHO), Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO); (ii) African Union, International Organization for Migration (IOM); League of Arab States and Organization of American States; (iii) African Parliamentary Union (APU), Arab Inter-Parliamentary Union (AIPU), Asian Parliamentary Assembly (APA), Confederation of Parliaments of the Americas (COPA), European Parliamentarians for Africa (AWEPA), Inter-Parliamentary Assembly of the Commonwealth of Independent States (IPA CIS), Inter-Parliamentary Assembly of the Eurasian Economic Community, Inter-Parliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy, Inter-Parliamentary Commission of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC), Inter-Parliamentary Union of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IPU-IGAD), Pan-African Parliament, Parliamentary Assembly of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (PABSEC), Parliamentary Assembly of the Turkic-Speaking Countries (TURKPA), Parliamentary Assembly of the Union of Belarus and the Russian Federation, Parliamentary Union of the Organization of the Islamic Conference Members (PUOICM); and (iv) Socialist International, Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Parliamentary Forum on Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW), and the Cluster Munitions Coalition (CMC).
+Of the 1,190 delegates who attended the Assembly, 615 were members of national parliaments. The parliamentarians included 35 presiding officers, 44 deputy presiding officers and 182 women (29.6%).
+4. Choice of an emergency item
+On 16 April, the President informed the Assembly that five requests for the inclusion of an emergency item had been initially received. The delegations of Indonesia, Islamic Republic of Iran and New Zealand had subsequently decided to present a joint proposal entitled "Strengthening democratic reform in emerging democracies, including in North Africa and the Middle East". That had left three proposals to be considered by the Assembly: "Call for urgent global action to assist earthquake- and tsunami-hit Japan and to prevent the impact of the disaster on the region as a whole", submitted by Pakistan, "Parliamentary action to strengthen the right to self-determination of peoples within the framework of international law", submitted by Venezuela, and the above-mentioned joint proposal.
+Ms. F. Mirza, Speaker of the Parliament of Pakistan, explained the reasons underlying the Pakistani proposal. At the request of the Japanese delegation and in a spirit of cooperation, Pakistan was prepared to withdraw its proposal on the understanding that the President would make a declaration on behalf of the Assembly on the disaster in Japan. The President informed the Assembly that he intended to issue such a declaration.
+Mr. D. Vivas (Venezuela) explained that the Venezuelan proposal focused on events in North Africa and the Middle East, and the acts of aggression by the US imperialism and its allies against the people of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Considering that some of the ideas expressed were included in the joint proposal put forward by Indonesia, Islamic Republic of Iran and New Zealand, he withdrew the proposal.
+Ms. N. Ali Assegaf (Indonesia) expressed her deep condolences and sympathy to the people of Japan. She was confident that the resilience and strength of the Japanese people would help them to recover. The IPU should help countries manage transitions democratically and peacefully and she hoped that the joint proposal would be adopted.
+The President of the Assembly noted that of the three remaining proposals, two had been withdrawn. The Assembly therefore adopted the joint proposal submitted by Indonesia, Islamic Republic of Iran and New Zealand and included it in the Assembly agenda.
+At the beginning of the closing session, the President of the Assembly read out a declaration, which expressed solidarity with the people of Japan in the face of the earthquake and tsunami that had caused enormous loss of life and devastation. It called on the international community to provide generous human, material and financial support.
+Mr. T. Morimoto (Japan) expressed deep appreciation for the declaration, which was a source of encouragement and hope to all those working tirelessly to reconstruct the country. As in the past, Japan would share its experience with other countries and international organizations, and would continue to contribute to common efforts to reduce the effects of natural disasters whenever and wherever they struck.
+5. Debates and decisions of the Assembly and its Standing Committees
+(a) General Debate on the political, economic and social situation in the world (Item 3)
+The general debate on the political, economic and social situation in the world, under the theme of Parliamentary accountability: Living up to people’s expectations, took place in the morning and afternoon of 16 and 17 April and in the morning of 19 April. A total of 104 speakers from 90 delegations took part in the debate, which was chaired by the President of the Assembly. During the sittings, the President invited several Vice-Presidents, members of the delegations of Costa Rica, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iceland, Jordan, Lesotho and New Zealand, to replace him in the Chair.
+(b) First Standing Committee (Peace and International Security)
+(i) Providing a sound legislative framework aimed at preventing electoral violence, improving election monitoring and ensuring the smooth transition of power (Item 4)
+The Committee held three sittings: two on 16 April and one on 18 April, with Mr. S.H. Chowdhury (Bangladesh), Vice-President, in the Chair. In addition to the reports and the preliminary draft resolution prepared by the co-Rapporteurs, Mr. J.D. Seelam (India) and Mr. W. Madzimure (Zimbabwe), the Committee had before it amendments to the draft resolution submitted by the delegations of Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Morocco, Sweden, Venezuela and the Latin American Parliament.
+The first sitting began with the presentation of the joint report and preliminary draft resolution by the two co-Rapporteurs. A presentation was also made by Mr. T.A. Diabacte, Deputy Director of the United Nations Electoral Assistance Division. In all, 48 speakers from 42 parliaments and one parliamentary organization took the floor during the debate, after which the Standing Committee appointed a drafting committee composed of representatives of Argentina, Bangladesh, Gabon, India, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Palestine, Republic of Korea, South Africa, United Kingdom, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Mr. Diabacte was invited to participate in an advisory capacity.
+The drafting committee met in the afternoon of 16 April and the morning of 17 April. It appointed Mr. G. Schneeman (South Africa) as its president and rapporteur. It examined 89 amendments submitted by 11 delegations and by the Meeting of Women Parliamentarians and adopted many of them.
+The First Standing Committee considered the consolidated draft in the afternoon of 18 April. Several delegations took the floor, seeking clarification, proposing that amendments which had been rejected or accepted by the drafting committee be re-examined, or expressing support for the text. Some of the proposed amendments were adopted by consensus, while others were put to a vote. The Standing Committee adopted the draft resolution by consensus and requested the drafting committee rapporteur to present it to the Assembly.
+The draft resolution was submitted to the plenary sitting of the Assembly in the afternoon of 20 April and adopted by consensus, with reservations expressed by 18 delegations on preambular paragraph 6 and by three delegations on preambular paragraph 8.
+(ii) Selection of subject item and co-Rapporteurs for the First Standing Committee at the 126th Assembly
+The Bureau of the First Standing Committee met on 18 April with Mr. S.H. Chowdhury (Bangladesh), Vice-President, in the Chair. It examined seven proposals submitted by IPU Member Parliaments for the subject to be debated by the Standing Committee at the 126th Assembly. The Bureau was unable to reach a consensus, and decided to bring the choice of subject item to the Committee’s next plenary sitting. Three proposals were debated; one was subsequently withdrawn by its sponsor, and the committee voted on the two remaining proposals. Following the votes, the First Standing Committee proposed the following subject to the Assembly for inclusion in the agenda of the 126th Assembly: Promoting and practising good governance as a means of advancing peace and security: Drawing lessons from recent events in the Middle East and North Africa. The subject item was subsequently approved by the Assembly, which appointed Mr. J.J. Mwiimbu (Zambia) and Mr. M. Gyöngyösi (Hungary) as co Rapporteurs.
+(c) Second Standing Committee (Sustainable Development, Finance and Trade)
+(i) The role of parliaments in ensuring sustainable development through the management of natural resources, agricultural production and demographic change (Item 5)
+The Second Standing Committee held sittings on 17 and 19 April, with its President, Mr. P. Martin-Lalande (France), in the Chair. In addition to a report and preliminary draft resolution prepared by the co-Rapporteurs, Mr. A. Cherrar (Algeria) and Ms. K. Ferrier (Netherlands), the Committee had before it amendments to the draft resolution submitted by the delegations of Belgium, Canada, China, Cuba, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Morocco, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, Venezuela and the Latin American Parliament. Two additional sub-amendments were submitted by the delegation of Norway.
+A total of 47 speakers took the floor during the plenary debate, after which the Standing Committee appointed a drafting committee composed of representatives of Australia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Gabon, Ghana, India, Namibia, Norway and Peru.
+The drafting committee met on 18 April. It appointed Mr. D. Adams (Australia) as its president and Mr. T. Wickholm (Norway) as its rapporteur. It examined 128 amendments to the preliminary draft resolution, adopting some either in full or in part. A number of other amendments were accepted in letter or spirit.
+In the afternoon of 19 April, the Second Standing Committee examined the consolidated draft resolution paragraph by paragraph and made a number of further changes. It had to vote in four instances.
+In the afternoon of 20 April, the draft resolution was submitted to the Assembly, which adopted it unanimously.
+(ii) Selection of subject item and co-Rapporteurs for the Second Standing Committee at the 126th Assembly
+The Bureau of the Second Standing Committee met on 19 April with the Committee President in the Chair. It examined proposals submitted by IPU Member Parliaments for the item to be debated by the Second Standing Committee at the 126th Assembly. The Bureau voted to approve the subject item Redistribution of power, not just wealth: Ownership of the international agendas, which it subsequently submitted to the Second Standing Committee. The Committee also voted on and approved the proposal, which was subsequently approved by the Assembly for inclusion in the agenda of the 126th Assembly. The Assembly appointed Lord Judd (United Kingdom) and Mr. O. Benabdallah (Morocco) as co Rapporteurs.
+(d) Third Standing Committee (Democracy and Human Rights)
+(i) Transparency and accountability in the funding of political parties and election campaigns (Item 6)
+The Third Standing Committee held three sittings, on 16, 17 and 19 April, with its President, Mr. J.C. Mahía (Uruguay), in the Chair. The Committee had before it a report and preliminary draft resolution prepared by the co-Rapporteurs, Ms. M. Kubayi (South Africa) and Mr. P. Moriau (Belgium), along with amendments to the draft resolution submitted by the delegations of Canada, France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Morocco, Romania, Sweden, Venezuela, and by the Meeting of Women Parliamentarians.
+In all, 47 speakers took part in the debate.
+The Committee designated a drafting committee composed of representatives of Bahrain, Canada, Ecuador, Ghana, Indonesia, Malaysia, Monaco, Philippines, Switzerland, Togo and Uruguay. It met on 18 April and began its work by appointing Mr. C. Cellario (Monaco) as president and Ms. M. Kubayi (South Africa) as rapporteur. It considered the proposed amendments and incorporated some of them into the draft resolution.
+On 19 April, the Third Standing Committee considered the consolidated text of the draft resolution presented by the drafting committee and adopted the amended resolution. The delegations of Algeria and Sudan expressed reservations on operative paragraph 9 and preambular paragraph 17 respectively.
+The Assembly, meeting in plenary on 20 April, adopted the resolution by consensus.
+(ii) Selection of subject item and co-Rapporteurs for the Third Standing Committee at the 126th Assembly
+The Bureau of the Third Standing Committee met on 18 April with the Committee President, Mr. J.C. Mahía (Uruguay), in the Chair. It examined various proposals submitted by Member Parliaments for inclusion in the agenda of the 126th Assembly. At its sitting on 19 April, the Third Standing Committee decided to add the subject item Access to health as a basic right: The role of parliaments in addressingkey challenges to securing the health of women and children to the agenda of the 126th Assembly. It took note of the nomination of Ms. P. Turyahikayo (Uganda) as co-Rapporteur. Ms. S. Ataullahjan (Canada) and Mr. C. Sardinha (India) were also nominated as rapporteurs after the Committee’s meeting. The item and proposed co-Rapporteurs were subsequently approved by the Assembly on 20 April.
+(e) Emergency item
+Strengthening democratic reform in emerging democracies, including in North Africa and the Middle East (Item 8)
+The Assembly referred the emergency item it had adopted on 16 April to a drafting committee composed of representatives of Australia, Belgium, India, Indonesia, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Oman, Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, Togo and Venezuela. It appointed Ms. N. Ali Assegaf (Indonesia) as president and Mr. H. Jenkins (Australia) as rapporteur. It met on 17 April, and drafted a resolution that was adopted unanimously by the Assembly on 20 April.
+>>!
+544 comments:1 – 200 of 544 Newer› Newest»
+i am at the doors of the bookstores. is rodrick going to miltary school to?
+Can't wait. I will be buying three copies for my library and one for my house. It's the only series that my son has read cover to cover without complaining!!
+I can't wait! I've been counting down myself. I am always the first person at the library to read the new books in the Wimpy Kids series, but I think I'm going to buy this one. Sometimes, they are just a little too slow, but I still love 'em!
+Good luck on the release! :)
+I can't wait! I'm so excited I've been goin to wimpykid.com since Christmas. Are you going to New York City on the tour February 7th? If you are, please reply me back. My username for this thing is the same as E-mail address, so please reply
+yo i love this book
+hi what is the 4th book called. please reply
+Cant wait. I have bought all 3 books.im sure ill buy this one!
+OMGOSH I love these books I've read them to other people and when ever I read something funny I would hear them laugh... I'm so excited for the 3rd one to come out I wish it came out tomorrow! I think its unacceptable that its only the 5th of January it needs to be the 13th!
+This looks awesome and I am going to get it the day it comes out! I love theese books.
+i want to see the third book of diary of a wimpy kid
+i like all the wimpykid books
+it'd be cool if there'd be a preview of the 1st few pages of the book b4 if comes out.
+Jeff Kinney you are the best author,I have read both of your books and the second best so far I hope you out did yourself.
+Your books are really funny, and sometimes I feel sad for Greg. I think Rodrick likes to do things without Greg in the way and soon, Mom and Dad find out. That's when the trouble happens. - B., age 8, MA (supervised by Mom)
+I can't wait! You're coming to my town Jan 14th. Im counting the days!
+wait, will there be books to buy at the library when you come the 14th?
+I really want the new book. I was about to buy the do it yourself book but my mom said that you could be reading real books so i got this lame book.
+I really want the new book. I was about to buy the do it yourself book but my mom said that you could be reading real books so i got this lame book.
+OMG i cant wait these book are so awesome rofl. :D :D :D :D :D
+u should make more books after this they're so funny.
+Hi Jeff, I love Diary of a wimpy kid and i might be going to the final straw launch party in Springfield New Jersey:) Where will you be going on tour to? Can't wait for book 3!
+From your fan,
+Matt
+i can't beve that diary of a wimpy kid the last stral is all most out. it will be the BEST BOOK OUT EVER.
+Cant Wait till the next book
+it's the 8 of january, and i went to the mall and my brother was looking for a book. i was standing there and i saw the newest book on the shelf. i got and so far it's funny
+Awesome! Hope you come to Pittsburgh and I reserved a copy of it! It's gonna be awesome!
+i think the fourth book is called bummer vacation but i do not know, i have just heard that
+i cannot wait!!!
+We went to Borders today to reserve our copy of the new book because I love your books so much!! These are the best books I've ever read in my life. I loved them so much that I didn't sleep until I finished them (at 12:15 am but I didn't tell my Mom about it). I heard that there is going to be a movie made from the books, is that true??? If it is...will the movie have stick figures or real people?? Or..animation???
+Thanks!!! John L. (8 years old)
+WHOO-HOO! I'm excited myself Jeff.
+Congratulations on a job well done.
+Good luck with books 4 and 5, I already know they will be great books.
+Your #1 fan,
+Carlos
+This series is AWESOME! I recommend them! Hope you sell a LOT of the 3rd book! I know I will be buying one! :)
+one more day until awesomness happens
+OMG I love diary of a wimpy kid books. One night when I was reading it I bursted out laughing. this is the best comoedy series have ever read.
+Im going to buy all the books!!! Read the first one it was awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
+awesome books Jeff awesome BOOKS!!!
+Hey dude! Your coming to a barns and noble near me and I meeting you! CANT WAIT! I started to read the book and it is hillarios!
+Im going to the one in NY! My names Tate so i hope to see you!
+I read the whole book cover to cover in 2 hours AND IT WAS AWESOME!!!!!!!
+I can't wait to book 3 comes out. I wish i could recieve book #2,and #3.
+I loveeee your books! They are so funny, I can read them all day even if I finished it already:)
+I read the new book! IT IS SOoOoO Funny!!!!!!!!! I met you the other night and you signed the book! THANKS SOoOoOo much! I Just hope you get these comments!!
+Kids in line at school to check out Book 3! What a joy it is to be a librarian in this place, at this time! The Wimpy books have made my job of demonstrating that reading IS fun, so easy. Thank you, Jeff. Please, can you come to Borders in Germantown or Clarksburg again?
+Ellen the Librarian
+Butler School
+Darnestown, MD
+I brought my kids to the signing on Long Island last night and while the crowds overwhelmed and the wait was looooong my kids loved it. And you were so sweet to my son who said he was your #1 fan. Thanks!
+jeff i just bought the book good luck and i hope you make 4 more new books from tyler
+Hello, You were at Barnes and Nobles last night- TUESDAY AT 7:00. I didn't get it sign there was over 1 million people. Wow! you're populaur.
+I just got the book and I'm starting the read it I go it Jan 14 , 2009.
+I like your books. I am 8 years old and live in northwest Indiana. They're funny. Greg reminds me of me.
+--Blair
+I like your books. I am 8 years old and live in northwest Indiana. They're funny. Greg reminds me of me.
+--Blair
+i have "the green book"
+i have read all the books so far i am starting "the green book"
+hey love the books :o) the are sooooo funny
+i heard there was a fourth book coming out lol i cant wait i am so glad i found this blog !!!!!!!!!
+omg!!! I cant believe gregs going to military school. He disevers it just kidding!!!
+i can't wait to get the new book
+I love all of the books.
+I read the first 2 in one day.
+Then I took a nap....
+It was on mother's day.
+I think she enjoyed the peace and quiet.Just today I finished the latest book. I started at 7 and ended at 8:45... I hope this isn't the last diary of a wimpy kid book... Please write more books they're great!
+I HAVE ALL THE DIARY OF THE WIMPY KID BOOKS.THEY ARE REALLY GOOD.I CAN NOT STAP READING THEM.ONCE I ALMOST READ THE WHOLE BOOK.
+GREAT BOOKS! I READ THEM FOR HOURS.I GOT ALL SERIES OF DIARY OF A WIMPY KID.MY WHOLE CLASS LOVES THESE BOOKS.
+GREAT BOOKS
+loved all the outher books to and i even did a book report on 1 and 2 for the 2 different terms and now when we go into the third term im going to do another book report in this third book well congrats and thanks because if it wernt for you and your book then i wo8uld have never had so much fun on my reading and report well thanks and bye!!!!!!
+from:
+ACfan150
+hey i am making a book call the diary of the alien kid and it a really good book.
+do you have a list of where your going?
+i was at barnes n noble at 12:00 in the morning to get this book and it is awesome.
+i like cant read any of these it tells to much about the book lol i have to finnish it i like tottaly love the blog it like an on line book club for the wimpy cant wait to finnish love your books jeff!!!!
+i think im going to get my brother to start reading lol!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
+That was the best book I have ever read! What's up with the underoos?
+Jeff, you are a genius! Your books are amazing/1
+awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!
+I can't wait until the 3rd book comes out! I love these books!
+If this gets to Jeff Kinney, I love your books my mom is a librarian at a school and she says:I have boys and girls reading them!I have seen seventh graders and even second graders reading them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
+Write more books!!
+My friends love your book please tell me more later
+sinseraly,
+keenan davis
+My son loved Part 1 and Part 2..and we got Part 3 the same day of the release at our local Barnes & Noble bookstore.
+He got so excited and read the whole book in one day (same as the others when they first came out).
+He also loved the Do-It-Yourself book. He is still working on it!
+We can't wait for Part 4 and Part 5 series!
+Hi Jeff,
+Could you post a schedule for your appearances? My son and I saw you in Nashua, NH on your last book tour, but we had to leave before he could get your autograph. He was so disappointed. We're hoping to catch you again.
+Thanks!
+hey cant wait for the forth book
+hi
+I have all the books so far!
+I got the book are you coming to Winston-Salem,North Caroline
+A.D
+i can't wait unti the book comes out i really enjoyed the last two books. is rodrick even meaner thaen the last one?
+i read book 3 3 times
+OMG!!!!! i love diary of a wimpy kid!! i got it the first day it came out at borders, and i was the first person to bring it in into my class and everyone wants to read it!!! Thanks Jeff Kinney!
+it is in book stores!!!!!!!
+I love Diary of a wimpy kid!I read it non-stop for 34 mins.I can't wait 'till it reaches my country!
+good book
+My middle son (5th grade) just bought Book 3 yesterday with a Barnes & Noble gift card he received at Christmas.
+Pure comic gold!!!
+You had me at the New Year's Resolutions.... As if you could read my middle-school-self mind!
+i love both the online verson and the book, but i like the web verson better
+I just got the book!!!!
+OMG. This 3rd book is hilarious. It is like you used our 13 yr old to write this book. Every turn of the page just makes us laugh harder. Granted my son just shakes his head but he knows it is all true. Great job. Looking forward to future books.
+I have already read this book 6 times from front to back. For all those people with questions here are my answers...
+No Rodrick's parent don't want him to go to Military School, but they want Greg too.
+The 4th book is called "Bummer Vacation" and the cover will be yellow and the 5th (lastbook) is called "My last year" !!
+dear diary of A wimpy kid movie. now I know a lot of kids are going to try to get into the movie you guys are making. but belive me if you put me in the movie as Greg Heffly. I try 110 pecent so if you think I am right for the part then go ahead. love Jack.g
+i love the wimpy kid books because there so populur at almost all the schools
+oh yeah i have all 3 books and the threed one is relly cool so far
+OMG! I GOT THE BOOK 2 DAYS AGO AND I READ IT! IT'S AMAZING!WAY TO GO JEFF! I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE NEXT ONE! IF YOU ARE STILL ON TOUR AND PASS BY LA, I WANT TO MEET YOU SOOOO BAD!
+I can't wait to get book 3!!!!!!!!!! And if you are coming to PA I Would relly want to meet you!!!!!!
+this is such a good book.
+go manny! go manny!
+I really love your books. As soon as I found out book three was out I raced begging to my mom to buy it. A day later my mom bought it for me and surprised me after school. I am at page 70 already on the first day I got it! I was so happy... I cant keep my eyes off it. I am reading it right now while on the computer playing games. I have all 3 books and got them at least 2 weeks after they came out and plan on keeping them. I love the covers. And the pages. It looks like real paper. Good job. Cant wait until book four comes out. I am guessing its yellow??? xD
+I just started series. Book 3 sounds exciting!!
+hey writer i think your books rock i hope you make a new book soon!!
+I'm going to buy it as soon as I find it anywhere. I don't care how much it cost, I WANT THAT BOOK!
+hey jeff i'm single and hot want to marry me?
+I love your books
+Your books are excellent. My 4th grader can't wait til the next one comes out. Do you plan on writing more Diary of A Wimpy Kid books?
+as another adult
+(once phobically shy-turned TV journalist)
+I LOVE these books!!!
+Keem 'em coming!
+somebody on my bus has that new book... and im sooooo jealous! anyways, ur books are so AWESOME! :D
+I love your books
+Tag you have the cheese touch
+So at my school I made up the cheese touch and we be playing it with the teachers
+And so my dorky friend wants me too tell you about her stupid book club
+So
+I'm looking forward to see your next book
+I love this series, and I preordered so as soon as it came out in stores, it was on my doorstep! Several of my students have read your books, so they are excited as well. I have even blogged about it on our school's blog site. Check it out at.
+oh my I am your biggest fan i cant wait to read the new book
+I'm gonna try to buy the book today!
+Cant wait to get your new book!!!!!!!!!!!!
+I still dont have the last straw and I am dieing for it.I made a promise to my self that I wont read any other book until I finish the series.
+I want to get the last straw.I have been waiting for it. I cant live without it. the people said it will be here on January 13,2009but gess what I cant find it. I hope I find it soon.
+Way cool! I love this series!!!!!
+The book is great and funny. I hope a book number 4 or 5 is going to come out!
+Lol i read the 3rd one funny! I own all book's!
+OMG> I love the book! i read it in ONE DAY!!! its so hilarious! i wonder what color the next book will be in??? yellow? black? brown?
+Hellow everyone i've been WAITING FOREVER i already read book 1 and 2 i bet book 3 IS GOING TO BE AWSOME!!!!! CANT WAIT =]
+where is my post??
+I really want to read the 3rd book! I loved to 1st and 2nd there sooooooooooo funny!
+I read it ...
+AND IT WAS GREAT
+i will read it!
+i can't believe i have the whole collection!!
+that was so funny i read over and over again !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
+what is the next books name?
+what is the name of the 4th book? can i know,please.
+i have all your books. i'm so happy. i can't wait for your 4th book. what is the name of you 4th book,can i know please.
+I love this book
+i have read every one!!!!
+i cant wait until the 4th!
+from ur #1 fan lol
+hi again everyone! i read it AGAIN in one day. not to brag. ;)
+I love the books I have the do it your self book. Jeff kinney you are the best author in the world!! Your books ae sooo!! FUNNY!! How did you become a great author like that. I cant wait for the movie to come out I will defently watch it!!! Ahmerie from washimgton -HELLO
+Everone out there I LOVE THE BOOKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Read thm all!!!! I love to draw and I can draw like greg heffly im not braging ok Everyone bye
+I CAN'T WAIT! I LOVE the books. YOU ROCK OUT LOUD! I read the 3rd in 40 Minutes! THAT, MY FRIEND, IS HOW INTO IT I WAS.
+Well, this is like really old. Why am I posting on this site? Oooh, ice cream and a big cookie sound good right now. If any of you have cookies, Give them to me. Oh, how silly of me! You don't know who I am. I'm . . . wait a second, I'm not falling for that! Nice try.
+I really wanted the book to come out. Now I am going to get it in the school book orders. I liked it so much I am writing my own version of it.
+book 3 is awesome
+you rock jeff kinney
+sweet cover,I am your biggest fan dude,even see my blog.I can't wait to get it.
+cord esplin
+Hi Jeff
+What is the title of the fourth book going to be? I just can't wait!
+My 8-year-old daughter just finished your first book, her first real chater book. We are bringing it to your VA appearance on 2/14 for you to sign. We are both very excited.
+I've read this book and I think it is my favorite out of the three. I hope the fourth one comes out sooner than this Fall.
+My son received his book on a Thursday after school, and he finished reading it on Saturday morning. He thought it would probably be the worst book ever, because when I got the do it yourself book, it's not that I didn't like it. It was so frustrating that I did not want to read another Jeff Kinney book again because it was so repetitive, but when I read the third sequel, I now look at the Jeff Kinney books in a whole new light and I give him 5 stars!!! I am really looking forward to the next book.
+This is such a funny book!!!!!!!!!!I mean there"s all ready like 5 kids in my class that want to read it. And ones all ready on page 30. wierd huh. Well thats only because he rides my bus so yah.
+O yah one more ting what is the 4 book called? this is the same person to.How started with this book is so funny!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
+Hey Jeff,
+I love your books and I was wondering if you are coming out with another one? I have all of your books so far, can't wait for more!!!
+Hey Jeff I LOVE your books I have
+1,2 and do it yourself!But I don't have 3 yet.I can't wait to get it! I wonder what book 4 wiil be called.I heard about the movie coming out!any news on the release date?
+I LOVE DIARY OF A WIMPY KID!!! I LUCKILY LOOKED ON THE WEBSITE, AND IN LARGE LETTERS IT SAID, DIARY OF A WIMPY KID 3 COMES OUT TODAY!!
+IT'S DEFINITLEY YOUR BEST SO FAR!!!
+I LOVE DIARY OF A WIMPY KID THE LAST STRAW!!!!
+Love your books- our library will have several copies of "...Last Straw". Our kids love them.
+wimpy kid has a lot of humor in his life!!!!!!!!!!
+I love when Greg goes into the girls bathroom!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
+Yay! Its Hear! I sooo getting it! I love the books and im a girl! I cant wait to see if Greg is going to that place. I cant spell it so i just put that place. i hurd that tire will be a Movie? If thire is i realy realy realy realy want to see it. I cant wait to see who plays the little brother. He must be funny 2. I love the name of Rodrick's band. Ok gtg cya!
+This book is the funniest book! it is the best.
+I've already read the entire book!
+CAN U PLZ GIVE EVERY ONE A HEADS UP!!!!!! WHAT IS THE NEXT BOOK CALLED???????¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿Or even a little page from the 4th book??
+Great I can't wait to read it!!!
+I love the other two books.
+cant wait for read it jeff your book its awesome
+Dear Jeff Warner,I love your books. They are so funny. I hope you make many more! I am going to Seattle on friday the 6th in febuary to get the last straw!!! I can`t wait! I have all your books. There great. Well thats all i wanted to tell you. I well keep on writing if you keep on writing your books!!!!!!!!!! :)
+This book looks sooo good! I am going to buy my copy this weekend. Can't wait to read it!
+i like all the wimpykid books.
+Hey This weekend I'm gona get my copy of the "green book"!!!!!!!!!!
+So i'll have all the wimpy kid books!The wimpy kid series is the best comedy book seriies i've EVER read! Can't wait till book number 4 comes out!My favorite book so far
+is the 2nd one but I might like 3 even better!I'm looking forward to more news o the upcoming books!
+i posted a comment earlier this morning(dont know if it got through) but it said i was gonna get my copy of book three on saturday. Turns out we went to the bookstore and i picked up a copy today!!!! so far it is really great. I read it in the store, in the car, and at home for an hour and a half. Next I am gettin the journal one. Also i made book review on squidoo about it heres the link to check it out:
+I am soo happy it is out i've been waiting since november. When I went to the book store and the person said I had to wait till January I flipped out and now that it is here i am soo happy!!!
+JEFF KINNEY IS #1!!!!
+when is book 4 coming out
+I cant wait
+I just got book 3 and I love it! I re-read it twice a day and I can't get enough of it! But I don't know why you can only get Book #2 at the library, but not book #1. Anyways, I begged my mom to buy me book 3 and I can't wait 'till book 4 comes out.I love this series,it's as good as the Series of Unfortunate Events!
+What color will books 4 and 5 be?
+I loved your three books! When is number four and five coming out? When you answer this go to my website at kdjplushtoys.blogspot.com PLEASE!
+Is rodrick getting pranked?
+Diary of a wimpy kid is the best book I ever read. I hope the next two books come out soon. So far all the books I read that you made were pretty good, but I bet the next two books are even better.So i'll just tell you this make more books and you will become famous. Well at least I think so.See ya I will continue on the third book DIARY of a Wimpy Kid the Last Straw.So far that book was as good as a pony going across on the rainbow.Just to let you now that i'm a boy not a girl.I just did'nt want you to get the wronge idea.My time is over and I need to read Diary of a Wimpy kid for my school.I know I reapeted "Just" a couple of times but just let me tell you this, your number one!!!!!!!!!!
+Blake.H
+February 8, 2009 2:40 PM
+i think it's going to be funny because greg is wimpy, and i want to see what happens in the book
+Hey! I can't wait for the new book to come out! What;s your favorite book?
+I love wimpy kid books.I have the entire series and three do-it-yourself books.I really love Greg and roderick.RODERICK REALLY RULES!!!!!!!!!!
+Hi Jeff Kinley!
+I LOVE Diary of a wimpy kid! I Used to read them OVER and OVER in school....Until my teacher said my reading level wwas to high for it.
+(8th grade level) I Went To the greenvile booksmith last friday and they didn't have it yet. I did get the do it your self book though!
+When are you gonna make a 4th Book?!
+New Movie Is So cool!
+Maddie,
+(9 year old at greenville elementry) :--)
+the books are is so funny,and the best part of the books is that I don,t read a lote put i finsh the book in 2 days. and they are at alest 215 pages. i gust want to have four copie.ps THE BOOK ROCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.
+i luv your books in book one i like the comics. but you left me hanging when you said something about six flags and how rowly got to go in june
+I love your books.They are the best.I can't wait to buy the next book.Your books rock!
+Hi Mr. Kinney! I wanted to know how you posted your website on google. Please go to my web site (kdjplushtoys.blogspot.com) and leave a comment to tell us
+Your #1 Fan,
+Jared
+I've already read all the books! I have them on display. I can't wait till the next to books come out and I also can't wait till the movie comes out!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
+Oh, and please visit my blog at
+i love your books i am your biggest fan
+yo greg is awesome write moree awesome books
+i will be buying this one awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
+I have read the "green" book! It is awesome! The best one yet! (although they're all great!) I hope your coming to Knoxville,TN or Maryville,TN! If your not,please do! My favorite book series
+! Write more! They are awesome! I want to be in the movie too! But they only have boys! Can I be Holly Hills? Or the new girl that they meet?
+Hey! I love this book. How did you come up with the code words? My favourite part of this book is when David Nester spit out a piece of gum to Greg's hair and he said "Raspberry plastic tickle bear". It was so funny I burst into laughter. And when will ever book 4 come out?
+I'm gonna buy one I can't wait I love this book!!!
+I was recently introduced to the book by my sister because I have been having a difficult time getting my 7 year old to read anything (he finds every book I get him "boring"). Well, he can't stop reading the 1st book; he read 28 pages in less than an hour. I could hear him laughing and having a great read. So, I started to read the book...I am in love. This book is genius. I am a 32 year old mother, and I can't stop reading. On my way to the book store to get the others books...lol. Mr. Kinney, please keep them coming.
+I only read from 3 authors:
+1.Patricia Wrede
+2.Ryder Windham, and most IMPORTANTLY,
+3.YOU!!
+I'm on your books like flies on a moldy hot dog!! Write as many as u can!!!!!
+is this the last book since its the last straw if so i wish it wasent
+I love doary of a wimpy kid. it is one of my favorite books
+I have students who love your books and they have motivated my more reluctant readers to read. Thank you!
+I think the third book (DWK: The Last Straw) is the best book out of all 3!!! I bought this book the first day it came out!!
+i luv the wimpy kid!!!!!!! i was going to go see you, but the closest place was still too far...... :( I've read the first book SOOOOO many times. I lovvvvve manny- he's my favorite character. GO MANNNNNNNY!!!!!!!!!!!!!
+i like Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It is my favorite book series. I read the last book in 4 and a half hours because is so good. joshua 6 years old
+love your books love them love them keep it comen the only books i like to read
+from centralia Washington state age 13
+can't wait to see the 4th book i want to read more
+cool book wimpy kid!!!
+May I know if you are coming to Singapore?
+Please reply i really love your books!
+lol plese make 3 more lol
+Hey i've read ALL the books and have them all even my dad is reading them!LOL iI hear him laugh ALL the time.Hope you make MORE books!
+what color is book 5.............i think its purple or black
+p.s. i love your work!
+All the kids in my class have it!!! I was the first one to finish all 3! All I have to say is this...MAKE THE NEXT TWO AND MAKE'EM FAST!!!
+I love your books there so fun to read. I try not to read the whole thing in one day because ther are no books that are good to read exept your:)
+"Ha, haha ha, ha, ha!" (That's what I do when I read your books.)
+I love diary of wimpy kid hope I get to meet Jeff Kinney in years to come I am still so maybe
+I love diary of wimpy kid hope I get to meet Jeff Kinney in years to come I am still young so maybe
+I love the book! Funny, AGAIN! I can't wait for the next book to come out!!!!
+Hello i love you blogs and i have my own too. go on and you can see my blogs.
+I love diary of a wimpy kid and I LOVE this 1.Ru making another 1
+Hey there, I just bought this book at my school's book fair today, and I LOVE IT. I'm almost done, and I've only had it for about 6 hours. I was sneaking in some reading in the middle of math class, and thankfully, I didn't get called on. So far, I think "The Last Straw" is the best book of the three. I'm going to get the fourth as soon as it comes out. C:
+Love,
+Just another fifth-grade girl
+I herad about yhe movie and I was thinking about if you are putting other characters accept Greg?
+Please send me back a notice to my account?
+from your fan of The Diary of the Wimpy Kid
+Rehabilitation Research and Practice
+Volume 2018, Article ID 8180901, 8 pages
+Clinical Approaches of Whole-Body Vibration Exercises in Individuals with Stroke: A Narrative Revision
+1Departamento de Educación Física y Deporte, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain
+2GRESPI, Research Group in Engineering Sciences, University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France
+3Australian Catholic University, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Paramedicine, Victoria, Australia
+4Laboratório de Vibrações Mecânicas e Práticas Integrativas, Departamento de Biofísica e Biometria, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
+Correspondence should be addressed to Mario Bernardo-Filho; moc.liamg@mohlifodranreb
+Received 5 July 2018; Revised 13 August 2018; Accepted 5 September 2018; Published 24 September 2018
+Academic Editor: Maria Gabriella Ceravolo
+Copyright © 2018 Borja Sañudo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
+Abstract
+Stroke is associated with long-term disability and patients experience numerous physical impairments including muscle weakness, particularly in the paretic limbs, balance, and functional mobility. During acute stroke rehabilitation, when individuals are less likely to be functionally independent and rely on rehabilitative care, the efficacy of low skill interventions that can reduce sedentary behaviour should be established. As such, this narrative revision focused on the use of empirical studies of whole-body vibration exercise (WBVE) on different health outcomes in stroke patients. The effects of WBVE on neuromuscular performance (muscular strength and power), mobility, spasticity, and cardiovascular responses have been highlighted. Although some positive results were reported we can conclude that there is no solid evidence confirming the beneficial effects of WBVE among people with stroke compared with either other types of physical activities or sham WBVE. Therefore, further research should be performed in this area, testing the feasibility and efficacy of using WBVE in a more homogeneous sample of stroke patients or comparing different WBVE parameters.
+1. Introduction
+The relevance of clinical approaches to promote and to maintain health, wellbeing, and quality of life in the context of cardiovascular diseases has been highlighted [1]. Stroke (cerebrovascular accident) is the second leading cause of death and the third leading cause of disability [2]. In this framework stroke was associated, in general, with long-term disability [3]. These patients may experience numerous physical impairments including muscle weakness, particularly in the paretic limbs, balance, and functional mobility [4, 5]. The prevalence of spasticity is also high in this population which can negatively affect gait and cause pain [6] which is strongly associated with limitations in performing activities of daily living [7]. Therefore, stroke has a considerable socioeconomic impact worldwide [8]. Therefore, strategies centred in the prevention and management of this condition are of interest for health care decision makers.
+Stroke predisposes an individual to a sedentary lifestyle (especially during acute rehabilitation, when individuals are less likely to be functionally independent and rely on rehabilitative care) that leads to decreases in the cardiorespiratory capacity compared with physically inactive nonclinical individuals [9]. The consequences of this condition persist over time and thus, chronic individuals (with more than 6 months poststroke) have the greatest demand for assistance in their management. Evidence suggests that these physical impairments are, at least in part, reversible with appropriate exercise interventions designed to enhance functional independence in long-term survivors with stroke [10]. Potentially less invasive interventions that could include reducing sedentary behaviour are an important addition to rehabilitation [11, 12] and thus, to face these limitations, numerous forms of training have been suggested, among which we find WBVE as an alternative to other forms of training. As such, this narrative revision focused on the use of empirical studies of whole-body vibration exercise (WBVE) on different health outcomes in stroke patients.
+1.1. Whole-Body Vibration Exercise
+As a relatively simple and low skill demand mode of physical activity, WBVE has primarily been used in athletic [13, 14] and aged [15, 16] cohorts to improve outcomes such as muscular strength and power [17, 18] and reduce sedentary time [13]. Moreover, as a mode of physical activity, WBVE has been identified as a feasible intervention with little to no adverse events [19, 20]. WBVE has progressively been applied with beneficial outcomes to various clinical populations including stroke [7, 21], obesity [22], rheumatoid arthritis [23], diabetes [24], spinal cord injury [25], chronic kidney disease [26], fibromyalgia [27, 28], multiple sclerosis [29], cerebral palsy [30, 31], Duchenne muscular dystrophy [32], osteogenesis imperfecta [33], osteoarthritis [34], and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease [35]. The effects of the WBVE may be due to neuromuscular responses to the interaction of the mechanical vibrations with the body and the tonic vibration response [36–39]. Among clinical populations, various beneficial effects have been associated with WBVE, such as enhancement of the muscular strength and power, improvement of flexibility, gait speed, blood flow, and balance, and diminishing pain and risk of falls. Consequently, the associated improvement in the quality of life in various domains has been reported in various clinical populations [36–40].
+Despite these positive effects, the appropriate application of WBVE to clinical populations requires further investigation. There is a lack of synthesis about the safe and effective prescription of WBVE as a mode of physical activity added to rehabilitation. There is a need for clinicians to be provided with clear recommendations about the biomechanical parameters related to the mechanical vibration on the oscillatory/vibratory platform, i.e., frequency (Hz), amplitude (mm), peak-to-peak displacement (mm), and gravitational load (g) that will be tolerated by suboptimal health populations during rehabilitation and practice. Moreover, clinicians need clearer recommendations about the duration of exposure to mechanical vibration, rest intervals, type and length of intervention, and body posture on the platform during WBVE [36–39, 41].
+Mechanical vibrations are postulated to stimulate the muscle spindles and the alpha motor neurons initiating muscle contractions similar to that of resistance training. Thus it is somewhat understandable that, in the past decade, WBVE has been widely used among people with stroke [10, 42–60]. However, inconsistent results have been observed. Individuals living with chronic stroke are the clinical subgroup that has generated the greatest interest in applications of WBVE. Therefore, the aim of this narrative review was to present the main findings related to the use of WBVE in chronic stroke individuals.
+2. Effects of Whole-Body Vibration Exercise on Different Health Outcomes in Chronic Stroke Patients
+2.1. Effects of WBVE on Neuromotor Performance Poststroke
+Eight randomized controlled studies have examined the efficacy of WBVE on different aspects of neuromotor function poststroke, such as leg muscle strength, balance, spasticity, and mobility [21, 42, 44–48, 50]. Improvement in muscular strength attributed to WBVE was found in three studies [45, 50, 56]. van Nes et al. [43] reported comparable gains in muscle strength in 23 stroke patients and 23 elderly controls in which both groups received WBVE. However, most of the studies have not found such effects [21, 47, 48]. Among the positive results, Boo et al. (2016) [56] performed WBVE training in a sitting position (<30 Hz) and improved muscle tone in chronic stroke patients, although results should be considered with caution as the study included a limited number of subjects and there was no control group. Further, Tihanyi et al. [45] reported increased leg muscle strength after 4 weeks of conventional rehabilitation therapy in combination with WBVE. By contrast, Tankisheva et al. [50] used a frequency ranging from 35 to 45 Hz and found significant increments in the isometric knee extension strength after 6 weeks of WBVE training. In view of the used frequency it was suggested that intensive WBVE might potentially be a feasible way to increase muscle strength in adults with chronic stroke. In the same line, Liao et al. [61] suggested that higher WBVE intensities should be more effective than lower intensities in improving leg muscle strength. One possible explanation for these changes can be attributable to differences in muscle activation. Thus, recently Huang et al. [59] reported that WBVE at 30–40 Hz would be more appropriate to activate leg muscles. Similarly, various studies that assessed the effect of WBVE on muscle activation in stroke patients reported increments of the maximal voluntary contraction (10-25%) with frequencies between 20 and 30 Hz [53, 60]. The same group [57] recently performed a study on 30 stroke patients submitted to different WBVE conditions: (a) low-intensity WBVE (20 Hz frequency with 0.60 mm amplitude) and (b) high-intensity WBVE (30 Hz, 0.44 mm). Participants performed 8 dynamic exercises (3 sets of 45 each exercise) resulting in a significant increase in EMG amplitude of leg muscles, especially at higher WBVE intensities. Additionally, the muscle activity in the paretic leg achieved a greater relative activation compared with the nonparetic side. By contrast, Liao et al. [62] delivered WBVE training three times a week for a total of 30 sessions comparing low (20 Hz, 1 mm) or high (30 Hz, 1 mm) magnitude of vibration. Authors indicated that none of the protocols confer additional therapeutic effect for strength outcomes. A recent meta-analysis came to the same conclusion and showed that WBVE induced no significant effect on isometric and eccentric knee extension strength among individuals with stroke [62]. In another review [63] also assessed the effects of WBVE training on chronic stroke patients and concluded that WBVE training had no beneficial effects in muscle strength (isometric knee flexion or extension strength). One possible explanation of these inconsistencies might be the insufficient stimulus to induce a tonic vibration reflex and/or muscle spindles.
+A decline of neuromotor performance is associated with reduced postural control, muscle power, and mobility, which is known to increase risk of falling [64]. However, a limited number of studies have assessed balance and falls in individuals with stroke [21, 42, 44, 46–50]. In 2004, van Nes et al. [43] published the first study which aimed to assess postural control in 23 chronic stroke patients. After 6 weeks of WBVE significant improvements in standing balance with the eyes closed and proprioception were observed [44]. Years later, Lau et al. (2012) [47] examined the efficacy of WBVE on neuromotor performance and risk of falling in chronic stroke patients. Forty-one participants received 9–15 min of WBVE (20–30 Hz, 0.44–0.60 mm) while performing dynamic leg exercises three times a week for 8 weeks. The study showed that WBVE was not effective in reducing the incidence of falls in patients with chronic stroke. Lee (2015) [52] also investigated the effects of WBVE on the motor function and balance. On this occasion vibration was delivered in the horizontal direction (15 min/day, 3 times/week, 6 weeks; 1-3 Hz, 30 mm) followed by conventional rehabilitation (30 min/day, 5 times/week, 6 weeks) leading to significant improvements in the scores of the Berg Balance Scale. Hwang et al. (2016) [54] assessed the immediate effect of WBVE on postural sway. In this study, when vibration was delivered at 10 Hz nonsignificant changes in postural sway were observed while with 40 Hz the postural sway in the mediolateral direction was improved. However, the study showed that WBVE was not helpful for improving the immediate balance ability of chronic stroke patients. The sample size in most of these studies was relatively small and relatively shorts (3-12 weeks of training). Only one of these studies reported positive results [63]. A recent systematic review revealed that the effects of WBVE on muscle strength and mobility performance remain inconclusive on patients with stroke [60]. Authors considered that these discrepancies can also be due to the differences in WBVE parameters (i.e., frequency, duration, and type of exercises) but also to the characteristics of participants across studies. Therefore, the evidence is insufficient to support the use of WBVE training in improving balance. In general, WBVE training yielded similar results on postural control compared with other types of physical activity [44, 46].
+2.2. Effects of WBVE on the Mobility of Individuals Poststroke
+Improvements in mobility have also been observed after WBVE in different studies [42, 46, 51]. Merkert et al. [46] reported better performance in the TUG test in the WBVE group after 3 weeks of training. Silva et al. (2014) [51] also reported positive effects of WBVE in gait performance (Six-Minute Walk Test and TUG test) in stroke patients. Acute significant improvements in walking speed were observed by Chan et al. [42] after a WBVE stimulus (12 Hz and amplitude of 4 mm for 20 minutes). Recently Choi et al. (2017) [58] investigated the effect of WBVE combined with treadmill training on walking performance in patients with chronic stroke. The study demonstrated that this training protocol improves the walking performance (i.e., walking speed, step length, or stride length). By contrast, no significant effects were found for the TUG [21], gait speed [21, 47], or Six-Minute Walk Test [21, 47] compared with a control therapy or sham WBVE stimulation.
+2.3. Effects of WBVE on Spasticity Poststroke
+Reductions in spasticity have been reported after WBVE [42, 49]. Resistance to passive movements in the ankle and knee on the paretic side was estimated according to the Modified Ashworth Scale [21, 42, 49, 50] and by the subjective experience of the influence of ankle spasticity on ambulation (using a visual analogue scale) [42]. After a single WBVE session (10 min, 12 Hz, and 4 mm), a significant decrease in ankle spasticity associated with improved mobility and speed has been observed [42]. Pang et al. [49] also reported improvements on knee spasticity. On the other hand, Brogärdh et al. (2012) [21] reported no significant treatment effect of WBVE on leg spasticity compared with sham WBVE. This finding was later supported in the findings of Tankisheva et al. (2014) [50].
+2.4. Effects of WBVE on Cardiovascular Responses Poststroke
+Only one study has explored the acute effect of different WBVE protocols on cardiovascular responses in the stroke population [53]. A modest significant increase of oxygen consumption and heart rate was found. Finally, a recent study [54] used 3 sessions/week of 5 min WBVE (4 weeks; 22-26 Hz, 2.1–6.5 mm) to assess the efficacy of short-term WBVE training on indices of arterial stiffness, although nonsignificant improvements were observed.
+3. Summary
+At this point we can conclude that there is no solid evidence confirming the beneficial effects of WBVE among people with stroke compared with either other types of physical activities or sham WBVE. Despite this, a modality of exercise could be an alternative for those clinicians who want to prescribe WBVE as part of rehabilitation in patients unable or unwilling to participate in traditional exercise training. In any case, further research should be performed in this area.
+4. Future Research Directions
+Possible explanations for the lack of significant differences between the groups include the discrepancies in WBVE protocols used. Table 1 shows the different characteristics of the included studies in order to compare the variables used. It would be interesting to compare the effects of different WBVE frequencies, intensities, number of training sessions per week, and exercises used (e.g., dynamic versus static exercises) to assist the prescription of WBVE for people living with stroke. Further research is required to compare different WBVE parameters. Perhaps a more homogeneous group of patients with more severe neuromotor impairment would benefit more from the WBVE training [47]; thus, future directions also included the necessity to test the feasibility and efficacy of using WBVE in a more homogeneous sample of stroke patients.
+Conflicts of Interest
+The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
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+Marley Marl & Craig G: Search And Rescuebut as an invitation extended from one generation to another. The game has changed, but these two friends are still chasing after one of the few things that will always remain constant: the perfect chemistry that is created when a dope beat pushes an artist to compliment it with the perfect rhyme. It's really that simple.
+HipHopDX: I guess we should start with the title. Naming the album Operation Take Back Hip Hop makes it pretty clear how you guys feel about the state of the game and your position in it.
+Craig G: Ive always been saying that Im not the only one that feels this way. Its been said over and over again. The funny thing is, when a rapper says it everyone looks at him like a hater. At the same time, no one wants to talk about it. I just want to get the dialogue started about why the game is lopsided right now and why theres no more balance in the game. Even from the beginning, theres always been wack Hip Hop, but theres just no balance anymore.
+There was a point where if I wanted to hear some hardcore shit, I could go listen to N.W.A. I could go listen to A Tribe Called Quest [click to read] if I wanted to chill. There was Public Enemy if I wanted to get political, but we dont have those choices anymore. Thats pretty much my problem with it, and I dont even blame the rappers. It aint really the rappers faults. The machine thats pushing Hip Hop right now feels like were under communist rule. Thats basically why the title of the album is making that statement.
+DX: When you look at a Stakes Is High or Hip-Hop is Dead, how thin is that line between constructive criticism and complaining?
+CG: Like I said, Im a fan. Dont get me wrong, there is good Hip Hop out there. As far as the mainstream level goes, 80% of it is just [copying] the last thing that was out. Theyre not looking for originality anymore and thats whats killing us. I dont personally believe what Im saying is the most original thing, but I just felt it had to be said.
+DX: Ive heard you shout out Bon Jovi, Def Leppard and a bunch of other stuff, Craig. When we look at all these other genres, there isnt that negative stigma attached with being dominant in an earlier era.
+CG: That disgusts me, man. If it was up to me I would banish the term old school. I think its real condescending. If you look at The Rolling Stones, The Eagles or any of these dudes they call "Classic Rock," they sell out arenas without having product out on the street. The Eagles just sold seven million off that last album independently. The fans of that genre hold their artists in a higher regard. As far as Hip Hop and the powers that be making it so youth driven, its almost like they push us to the side. I wont say its all of us, but theres a whole bunch of us from our era that are still great artists. We dont get the time to be looked at because were labeled with that word old school. Why cant it just be "classic"?
+Marley Marl: Or just call it retro.
+CG: Yeah, old school almost sounds like an insult. In these other genres, these dudes made songs that were timeless. Timeless. Theyre fans will step over their mothers to get tickets to their concerts.
+MM: The funny shit is Rolling Stones old school stuff is outselling everybody new. [Laughs]
+CG: [Laughs.] Exactly. And to me its a bad thing. It is what it is, but at the same time it makes me want to prove myself.
+DX: One record that really stands out is Made the Change. As much as people claim Hip Hop kept them off the streets, no one seems to ever address it directly like you do in that song.
+CG: That song was basically me thinking about where I would be without dudes like Marley and without Hip Hop. Its not really about bragging about how your hood is, but a lot of people where were from in Queensbridge only saw one ending. They were either dead or in jail. I feel like I owe Hip Hop, because who knows what Id be doing if it wasnt for it. Thats why that song is important to me. And the beat is like an aluminum bat to the back of the head.
+For me it was more or less talking about coming from nothing and finding something, or something finding me. [Hip Hop] allowed me to go all over the world, and it hasnt made me a millionaire, but it allowed me to be able to make different choices in my life. I didnt want to glorify anything; its about glorifying Hip Hop and making me change what I could have been. A lot of my friends were hustling; a lot of my friends were running around shooting people and what have you. It was funny to me that when I was 16, the hustle game was crazy and a lot of my friends were getting mad money. Wed be shopping, and Id have the same amount of money, if not more than them, and I didnt have to lift a finger on the block. Thats what was dope about it, and thats what inspired that song.
+DX: With people who represent Queensbridge like Prodigy and Tragedy Khadafi serving time right now, I imagine it really hits home.
+CG: Like I said, I love Hip Hop, and the thought of not being able to do it would really kill me. The simple fact that I can go in the studio with Marley and have him paint that canvas with the perfect beat is priceless. The best feeling making this album was sitting back and listening to songs. Once they were done Im watching Marley scrunch his face up thinking, Yeah, I know he likes it. Marley doesnt really tell you if he likes the song, so youve gotta look. To me, being creative is the craziest thing to me and I dont know what Id do if I was unable to do that.
+DX: That chemistry between you two resurfaced in 2003, when you guys did Lets Get Up. Is there any difference in the chemistry and the approach to doing a song together versus an entire concept album?
+CG: Nah, not to me. The album kind of grew into its own, but as far as me and Marleythis is like my brother. I look at him as the dude that put me on. We do a lot of shows together and wed make music together regardless. When we started this it wasnt even about doing an album. We were just making joints and it happened to grow into an album. When me and Marley work together it just like, Lets do some hot joints, B. Thats how it always comes about, and it keeps going and going. Before you know it were looking at each other like, Damn. You know weve got like 30 songs here, right?
+MM: Plus when we get together its like, Alright, lets see where were at. Im looking to see where youre at lyrically and you want to see where Im at beatwise.
+CG: Ill be like, Alright, man. Let me see what you got. Hell tell me to hold on for a minute and start playing with stuff and cueing the beats up. And as soon as I hear that one, Im like, Hold on, whose beat is that?
+MM: Its yours if you rock it right.
+CG: Then I go, Okay. Hold on. Give me like an hour. Thats our approach.
+DX: So you two are still trying to push each other to bring out the best after all these years?
+CG: Yeah. I mean, Marley is like the Svengali when it comes to this. As early as I can remember hed be like, Yo, I got this beat, but youve got to rock it. If you dont rock it Im giving it to Biz [Markie].
+h Youve got to think about it. We did Droppin Science [click to read] together. There arent too many records that came out before or after that I can say were fuckin with that. Its still here, so I guess we keep trying to top Droppin Science.
+CG: Yeah, exactly. I believe lightning in a bottle can be caught twice, but sometimes it just takes working.
+MM: Son was on The Symphony [click to read]. Come on!
+DX: [Laughs.] So the bar was raised so high from the beginning that it just stayed up there?
+CG: Sometimes you need that. I can honestly say that Marley pushes me, and not a lot of producers do that. I respect that because its easy to get content. Theres mad takes on this album that I had to do over.
+DX: Thats a good point. Being in your position its easy to say, I was on The Symphony. I shouldnt have to lay that verse down again.
+CG: Thats the other thing for us. Its great that we did those songs, and those songs are etched in time. Ill speak for myself, but Im pretty sure Marley feels the same way when I say this. We still got heat, man. Its almost a shame to not want to hear it and be pigeonholed because of the classics we made. Its like riding a bike. When I go to the studio or to Marleys crib and hear him throw on I beat, I just smile to myself. Im just sitting there thinking, This dudes still got it. Aint nothing changed. The only thing thats changed is that Ive got to write harder to keep the beat. Come to think of it, thats always been the same too.
+DX: When people visit overseas they always mention how Hip Hop is still practiced as an entire cultural movement. Do you guys experience that as artists?
+CG: Ah, man. When I disappear for good, Ill be in Amsterdam with a record shop. Ive never been places, like how Ive been overseas, and see a Jeru The Damaja song make everybody jump on the dance floor. You wouldve thought they were playing [Its All About the] Benjamins. Ive never seen that, and it still amazes me to this day. For some reason, theyre not as pretentious about their music over there. They dont care if you dont like it. As long as they like it, thats it. Theyre not trying to like it because everyone else does. Its a good feeling. Whenever we come back, I always tell my brother, Check your superstar bag at JFK cause were back in America.
+DX: So its safe to assume that Amsterdam is your favorite spot?
+CG: Amsterdam, Copenhagentheres a lot of cities that make me almost not want to go home. Marleys got me into Japan now, so Im heavy into Japan too. Its amazing that, even with such a language barrier, the people know the music better than some people at home.
+DX: How about you, Marley?
+MM: I love going to London.
+CG: Yeah, London is dope too. Theyre so pure as far as the music is concerned too.
+MM: France is my second [favorite].
+DX: While were talking about live shows, the A3C Festival exposed the Juice Crew to a whole different generation of fans. How did it feel?
+CG: Marley and a few other people in the crew were the ones who really got me thinking it was time. A lot of groupsa lot of collectives based what they do on us. I could sit up and complain saying, We never got the shine we deserved. But, when I got out on that stage and saw the reaction I was like, Maybe Im wrong. Maybe it was the timing and we didnt get the feedback before, but the vibe was just real appreciative this time around. Marley is really hard at work trying to turn this into a tour and Im just waiting. For that first show, Ive never been more focused in my life. Once I saw Marley scrunching his face up on the side of the stage, I was like, Okay.
+DX: Another thing that is reintroducing you to todays fans is this upcoming movie, The Vapors.
+CG: Ill let Marley talk about that. I dont wanna say too much about that.
+DX: You can weigh in real quick. What was your reaction when you heard the story of the Juice Crew was coming to the big screen?
+CG: Its about damn time, basically. You know whats funny, though? One of my favorite movies is [The Temptations]. Without divulging too much, I can say that our story is crazy. For us all to still be here and for people to still recognize it is crazy to me. I think the story needs to be told. Marley and them are the ones behind the scenes taking care of that, so I can just sit back and wait for my check. I know its in good hands. Im just a willing participant, because I feel the story needs to be told. Marley can explain all the other aspects of it.
+DX: So what kind of progress are you guys making, Marley?
+MM: Theyre still on the funding tip right now. As soon as we get all of that together we should be doing some dates. The funny thing about it is, now that the word is out, other production companies are starting to get in touch with me in regards to that too. Its still moving forward though.
+DX: How did Furquan Clover get involved?
+MM: He worked with me on another projectone of my earlier movie scoring projects was the Wendy Williams movie. He was involved with that, and one day I told him about this idea for The Vapors when we were sitting back chillin. The next thing I know he was sending my lawyer a contract.
+DX: There were rumors of Cuba Gooding Jr., David Banner and others being cast [click to read]. Is any of that true or is it still being worked out?
+MM: Its still in the works right now.
+DX: As far as your stories, you guys come from a completely different era of Hip Hop. Aside from anything in the movie, is there one particular thing that stands out as a favorite memory from those days?
+CG: For me personally, Ive gotta say getting in the studio with Marley for the first time. I was a kid and it was all exciting. Back when we were doing it hardbody you really had to be a good rapper to make a record. You couldnt just say, Ah, man my cousin works here. It was exciting because I felt like I was chosen for a golden opportunity.
+MM: Id say being back in the beginning and hearing myself on the radio for the first time. When I first heard my song on the radio, I remember thinking someone was playing it in their own box or off of a tape. Thats what bugged me out the most, and thats the aspect of the game that really got me into it. When I saw the reaction my music could give people it kept me in the game.
+DX: You can make an objective argument for the Juice Crew being the most talented collective in Hip Hop history. How do you rank some of the crews who came after you like Death Row, Wu-Tang or the Dungeon Family?
+CG: The one thing I could say about Wu is they always readily admitted that they based it on us. A lot of collectives know they did the same, but Wu were the only ones who said, We looked at The Juice Crew and we wanted to do that. In terms of then and now, the finances were different in terms of how Hip Hop makes money. By those standards wed probably be considered the greatest. Everything is based on finances with the fans these dayswho sold what and whos making this much. We came at a time when it wasnt really about that. It was just about leaving your mark. So, I would honestly say the Wu because they readily admitted it. If you look at all their early interviews they shouted us out.
+MM: The great thing about Wu-Tang was that everybody was able to stand on their own as an individual artist. Thats the whole premise of The Juice Crew. Everybody was able to stand on their own as an artist and do what they had to do. Thats why I would put [Wu-Tang] up there with us as one of the top crews to ever do it; damn near everybody was dope. Everybody had their own moment.
+DX: Last year, Nelson George gave How to Kill a Rapper so much love. He said his only beef was that younger, more mainstream artists didnt make records like that. Any thoughts?
+CG: To me its
+MM: I got this one, Craig. You know what it is? Its the ignorance of the audience right now. It seems like the dumber the subject is, the more youll sell. The more ignorant, the stupider and the less [coherent] it is, the more likely it is that people will jump on it. I think How to Kill a Rapper is too intelligent. It doesnt seem like the most intelligent concept, or the smartest thing to talk about, but even thats too intelligent.
+Look at songs like [Hurricane Chris'] A Bay Bay, and stuff like thatthats peoples IQ level. In rap right now, if you talk about something too intelligent, thats clouding up the brain. If its something stupid, or it has a one-syllable chorus, it seems like people are all over it. People are more ignorant now than theyve ever been.
+CG: I agree 100%. People would rather get silly these days.
+DX: Wouldnt you say thats true of society in general, not just Hip Hop?
+MM: Yeah, thats what Im saying. Its not our fault as a people, because education is not there for us. Most of the people are kind of dumb. College niggas cant be rappers, man.
+DX: I almost forgot. When you mentioned the machine earlier, what does it take to change that part of our culture?
+CG: Stop complaining and support real Hip Hop. I understand everybodys going to download albums, or what have you, but if you really like it buy it. What happened to the days of buying an album and reading liner notes? We need to get back to that.
+MM: Thats too intelligent, baby. [Laughs]
+CG: [Laughs] I guess well just have to make a DVD with the liner notes, thank yous and all the credits. Ima do a little Smack DVD with only the album credits
+DX: [Laughs] Or you might just have to put it on MySpace.
+MM: Yeah, there you go. Just throw all the album credits.
+Hilla completed his basic school education at the Government Middle School, ... He subsequently completed a Diploma in French at the Sorbonne University, ...
+Limann government
+This is a listing of the ministers who served in Limann's People's National Party government during the Third Republic of Ghana. The Third Republic was inaugurated on 24 September 1979. It ended with the coup on 31 December 1981, which brought the Provisional National Defence Council of Jerry Rawlings to power.
+This is an excerpt from the article Limann government from the Wikipedia free encyclopedia. A list of authors is available at Wikipedia.
+This is an excerpt from the article Limann government from the Wikipedia free encyclopedia. A list of authors is available at Wikipedia.
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+This is a listing of the ministers who served in Limann's People's National Party government during the Third Republic of Ghana. The Third Republic was ...
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+Hilla Limann - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
+Hilla Limann (12 December 1934 – 23 January 1998) was the President of ... Hilla completed his basic school education at the Government Middle School, ...
+en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilla_Limann
+3
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+Hilla Limann, 64, Ex-Leader of Ghana - New York Times
+Jan 26, 1998 ... Former President Hilla Limann, who was ousted in a 1981 coup in Ghana ... He had been in and out of the hospital, the Government said in a ...
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+The Civilian Interlude - Ghana Districts - A repository of all districts in ...
+THE CIVILIAN INTERLUDE Ghana under Hilla Limann: September 1979 - December 1981. Hilla Limann assumed the reins of government on September 24, ...
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+Limann was born and named Babini but he was brought up by his uncle, Heli ... 1946 - 1949: Government Middle School, Tamale (NIR) 1952 - 1955: District ...
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+Nov 27, 2011 ... In September 1979, the civilian government of Hilla Limann inherited declining per capita income; stagnant industrial and agricultural ...
+articles.ghananation.com/articles/republic-of-ghana/3271-economy-of-ghana-limann-government.html
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+Limann, Hilla | Infoplease.com
+Limann, Hilla , 1934–98, president of Ghana . ... leader, Jerry Rawlings, handed over power to Limann, who had been elected to head a civilian government.
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+President Honours Dr Limann - ModernGhana.com
+Mar 31, 2011 ... The government has honoured the memory of Dr Hilla Limann, President of Ghana in the Third Republic, by naming the senior high school at ...
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+This is a listing of the ministers who served in Limanns Peoples National Party government during the Third Republic of Ghana. The Third Republic was ...
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+The Arthur Liman Public Interest Program supports the work of Yale law students and Yale law school graduates through Liman Fellowships as well as undergraduate ...
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+Hilla Limann - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
+Hilla Limann - Wikipedia
+Wɔwoo Hilla Limann Mumu-Ɔpɛnimba 12 afe 1934. ... 1941 - 1945: Lawra Confederacy Native Authority School [UIW]; 1946 - 1949: Government Middle School ...
+Hilla Limann - Wikipedia
+Wɔwoo Hilla Limann Mumu-Ɔpɛnimba 12 afe 1934. ... Confederacy Native Authority School [UIW];; 1946 - 1949: Government Middle School - Tamale [NIR]; ...
+Dr Hilla Limann - Ghana Web
+Limann was born and named Babini but he was brought up by his uncle, Heli ... ( UIW); 1946 - 1949: Government Middle School, Tamale (NIR) 1952 - 1955: District ... France (Diploma in French); 1962 - 1965: University of Paris, (Ph.D. Political ...
+Hilla Limann: Biography from Answers.com
+Limann, Hilla , 1934-98, president of Ghana (1979-81). ... rule, Ghana's new military leader, Jerry Rawlings, handed over power to Limann, who had been elected to head a civilian government. ... Licensed from Columbia University Press.
+Limann, Hilla – FREE Limann, Hilla information | Encyclopedia.com ...
+Limann, Hilla – Encyclopedia.com has Limann, Hilla articles, Limann, Hilla pictures, video and ... Licensed from Columbia University Press. ... Rawlings, handed over power to Limann, who had been elected to head a civilian government.
+Let's uphold the practice of democracy – Mrs. Limann ...
+Jul 14, 2011 ... Mrs Fulera Limann, wife of the President of the Third Republic, Dr Hilla ... the Limann government was truncated by the Provisional National Defence ... Mrs Limann commended the authorities of the University of Ghana for ...
+Mohammed Limann | LinkedIn
+View Mohammed Limann's professional profile on LinkedIn. ... at Vodafone Ghana; Lecturer (Part-Time) at Ghana Technology University ... Public sector sales 4.
+President Hilla Limann Was Not An Nkrumaist | Feature - Opinion
+Aug 15, 2010 ... President Hilla Limann Was Not An Nkrumaist. ... A Monument After Limann, PNC Asks Government” (See MyJoyOnline.com). ... Unfortunately, it soon became clear to the mild-mannered and erudite University of Paris-trained ...
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+Ghana, Political and Constitutional Developments
+Ghana, the torch bearer of African Independence from the yoke of colonial bondage, has been pushed to the background from its earlier pre-eminent position in international as well as African affairs.
+Africa and IMF Conditionality: The Unevenness of Compliance, ...
+The AFRC handed over power to Dr. Hilla Limann on September 24, 1979, (a week earlier than planned)but withmuch admonishment and warningonthe need for the Limann's government to uphold the virtues andtenetsof the AFRC ...
+The Politics of Government-Business Relations in Ghana, ...
+Hopes that Limann's government might embrace theseaims soon faded. Limann displayed quite astonishing inertia and ineptitude inhishandling of the economy ( Chazan,1983; Jeffries, 1989; 1991). Meanwhile,damaging scandals and ...
+My First Coup d'Etat: And Other True Stories from the Lost Decades of Africa
+ comi...
+Ghana Country Study Guide
+Many observers, therefore, wondered whether the new government was equal to the task confronting the state. The most immediate threat to the Limann administration, however, was the AFRC, especially those officers who organized ...
+Business, Politics and the State in Africa: Challenging the Orthodoxies on Growth and Transformation econom...
+Ghana: 50 Year of Independence
+The Limann administration, as stated earlier, was a regrouping of the defunct CPP government of Dr. Nkrumah. As such, the proWest, proBritish foreign policy of the new government did not go down wellatall withthatsectionof the party ...
+African Military History and Politics: Ideological Coups and Incursions, 1900-Present
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+State Burial For Harry Sawyer | Ghanaian Chronicle
+Ghana News, Sports, Opinions, Politics and entertainment. Read all the latest news stories.thechronicle.com.gh/state-burial-for-harry-sawyer/
+Veep unveils government's plans to honour late Prez Limann - ModernGhana.com
+Government has approved an undisclosed budget to redesign the mausoleum of the late President Dr. Hilla Limann and the Gwollu Palace as part of measures to mark the 10th anniversary of the death of the former Head of State of Ghana. Hilla Limann who was the President of the Third Republic an
+Let's uphold the practice of democracy – Mrs. Limann - ModernGhana.com
+Mrs Fulera Limann, wife of the President of the Third Republic, Dr Hilla Limann, has called on Ghanaians to work towards upholding the culture and practice of democracy. She said the entrenchment of democracy was the key to the growth and development of the country, and that Ghanaian
+Dr. Hilla Limann SHS has 90 per cent volunteer teachers | VibeGhana.com
+Ninety percent of the teaching staff of the Dr. Hilla Limann Senior High School (SHS), in the Sissala West District of the Upper West Region are volunteer teachersvibeghana.com/2013/10/10/dr-hilla-limann-shs-has-90-per-cent-volunteer-teachers/
+President Hilla Limann Was Not An Nkrumaist - ModernGhana.com
+On June 16, 2010, the leading privately-owned Ghanaian radio station JoyFm published a brief news item on its website captioned Name A Monument After Limann, PNC Asks Government See MyJoyOnline.com. The contents of the article itself were laden with such elementary errors as Dr. Hilla Limann hav
+The Survival Of President Mahama In The Case Of Hilla Limann
+Tribute to the late Dr Hilla Limann, President of the Republic of Ghana 1979 – 1981 – The Ade Sawyerr Blog
+Tribute to the late Dr Hilla Limann, President of the Republic of Ghana 1979 - 1981 From Ghana Union London The road to democracy is often long and torturous, there are several hostages, martyrs and committed people for whom the principles of democracy are more important than whatever office they eventually attain. I feel very…adesawyerr.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/255/
+Ghana’s Jerry Rawlings: The Man, The Myth, The Legend : Africa and Diplomacy sites.davidson.edu/cis485/?p=3279
+Gabby backs fuel prices increases - ModernGhana.com
+Gabby Otchere Darko, Executive Director of the Danquah Institute, has on Multi TV and Joy Fms Newsfile backed fuel price increases announced by the National Petroluem Authority yesterday.The National Petroleum Authority NPA made an upward adjustment on prices of some petroleum produc
+# A JOURNALISTIC LEGEND RETURNS […]
+123
+More cyclopaedia entries
+6. Limanowski
+8. Limanskaya
+11. Limanski Raion
+14. Limanskii Raion
+17. Limanskiy Raion
+18. Limanskoye
+21. Limansky Raion
+26. Limapontia nigra
+27. Limapontiidae
+28. Limapontioidea
+30. Limapuluh Koto
+32. Limari Province
+33. Limari River
+34. Limari Valley
+For centre of the universe. Though it may sound impossible, it’s actually simple to accomplish.
+Where do you rate on the self-esteem-o-meter? The following quiz will help you gauge your feelings and identify areas that need improvement.
+Me-ology: The Self-Esteem Dipstick
+To rate your self-esteem, choose the answer that most closely reflects your likely reaction to the following situations:
+1. You know you’re good at creating databases. Your boss asks you and several co-workers for a volunteer to organize a new client information database, and another volunteer to write a company newsletter- which you have no idea how to do. You:
+A. Volunteer for both, because you’re so brilliant you’ll be able to figure it out - even at the expense of embarrassing the company the first few times you write a terrible newsletter.
+B. Volunteer for the database- and when Fred Jones also volunteers, gently point out that you’ve had more experience, but would be happy to teach him what you know as you go along.
+C. Remain silent. Someone else is surely better at it than you, and the boss would never pick you anyway.
+2. You’re out with friends and you’ve just passed gas noisily in the middle of a restaurant, so you:
+A. Immediately blame a passing waiter or someone else at your table. You are completely serious in your accusations, and there’s no way anyone will be able to pin it on you. If they even think about it, you’ll let them have it.
+B. Crack a joke about that four-bean salad you had for lunch.
+C. Attempt to crawl under the table, then excuse yourself and head to the bathroom. You can’t face any of them for the rest of the night, and you consider paying the entire check right now and leaving before they notice you’re gone- if they notice you’re gone.
+3. When you watch Jeopardy or play Trivial Pursuit, you:
+A. Laugh at the other players when they get the answers wrong. You know them all, and if you ever went on Jeopardy you’d clean them out.
+B. Have a blast. You know some of the answers and try to guess at the rest. You love to learn new things.
+C. Don’t watch Jeopardy or play Trivial Pursuit. You’re not smart enough for stuff like that.
+4. You’ve decided to go after that promotion at work. You:
+A. Make a bunch of other people look bad so there’s no way you’ll be passed up.
+B. Let your boss know you’re interested in the promotion, and then put in some extra effort to prove you’re good for the position.
+C. Decide on the drive to work that you’re not going to go for it after all. You won’t get it no matter what you do, so there’s no point in trying.
+5. When making a tough decision, you:
+A. Choose the option that sounds best for you at the moment, and then stick to your decision no matter what, even if it turns out to be the wrong one.
+B. Weigh your options and think about the advantages and disadvantages of each one before deciding on your final choice, but remain open to change if it turns out there is a better way.
+C. Decisions? You can’t make decisions. You always pick the wrong thing and wind up making everyone miserable. You’ll get someone else to decide.
+6. You’re faced with an entire evening alone. You:
+A. Gloat, because you don’t have to spend time in the company of those miserable cretins who think they’re your friends, but can’t hold a candle to your brilliant and sparkling personality. You know they’re all sitting around wishing they could hang with you, anyway.
+B. Take the time to do something you enjoy, like take a long bath, read a good book, or fix yourself your favourite dinner. It’s nice to relax once in a while and be alone with your thoughts.
+C. Resign yourself to being miserable all night. You might as well go to bed early and hope someone’s around tomorrow.
+7. When performing a task that requires your full concentration, you:
+A. Don’t. Whatever it is you’re doing, you could do it in your sleep. You don’t have to bother concentrating on things.
+B. Are able to tune out most distractions and complete the task to the best of your ability. You are determined to put your best foot forward.
+C. Can’t. You’re too nervous about screwing things up to concentrate, so you tend to work on projects in short bursts and often end up finishing things late because you’re so distracted.
+8. A friend introduces you to someone new. You:
+A. Prove that you’re a better person by saying something witty or clever that lets them know your friend is paying attention to you right now, not them. If the new person is worth knowing, they’ll make the effort to get to know you.
+B. Greet him or her warmly, introduce yourself and ask an open-ended question such as “What do you do for a living?” or “Where do you live?” You’re prepared to actually listen to the answer and will reserve judgment until you get to know the person better.
+C. Mumble “hello,” and then slink off in search of a friend who’s not talking to someone you don’t know. Whoever the new person is, they wouldn’t want to get to know you anyway.
+9. You walk in to your house and you’re greeted by an awful stench: the refrigerator is unplugged, and everything in it is spoiled. You:
+A. Immediately assume someone was screwing around with it and launch an investigation to find the culprit.