Biblioteca Atrium de la construcción / ed. Francisco Asensio Cerver.
Material type: Book Publisher: Barcelona : Atrium, [199?]Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: 69.00 B 582 v1] (5).
Source: Ville GiardiniMaterial type: Article Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: Ville Giardini 275 1992] (1).
Tratado de construcción : elementos, estructuras y reglas fundamentales de la construcción / Heinrich Schmitt.
Edition: 5.ed. aum. y puesta al día.Material type: Book Publisher: Barcelona : G. Gili, 1976Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: 69.00 Sc455t5] (7).
Casa, vivienda, jardín : el proyecto y las medidas en la construcción / Peter Neufert y Ludwig Neff.
by Neufert, Peter | Neff, Ludwig.
Material type: Book Publisher: México : G. Gili, 1999Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: 72.012 N4825] (1).
Edition: 13. ed.Material type: Book Publisher: Barcelona : CEAC, 1974Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: 729.95 C 984 c13] (2).
Chimeneas y estufas de calor integral.
Material type: Book Publisher: Barcelona : CEAC, c1997Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: 729.95 C 984] (1).
El fuego en el hogar / Manuel Rapoport.
Material type: Book; Format: print ; Literary form: Not fiction Publisher: [S.l. : s.n.], 1999Dissertation note: Trabajo final (Diseñador Industrial)--Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, 1999 Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: TF0022] (1).
Manual de conceptos de formas arquitectónicas.
Edition: 2a. ed.Material type: Book Publisher: México : Trillas, 1993Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: 72.011 W583 m2] (2).
Manual de construcción de edificios.
Edition: 2. ed.Material type: Book Publisher: México : G. Gili, 1998Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: PG 69.00 C559m2] (2).
Técnicas de representación en color : una guía para arquitectos y diseñadores de interiores.
Material type: Book Publisher: México : MCGRAW-HILL, 2000Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: 742 D 682] (1).
Suecia / compilado por Hernán Barbero Sarzabal ... [et al.].
by Barbero Sarzabal, Hernán  | Castiglione, Sergio  | Woern, Karin  | Woern, Rasmus .
Material type: Article; Type of continuing resource: periodical Publisher: Buenos Aires : Kliczkowski, 1999Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: Casas internacional, 63] (1).
Diseño arquitectónico : guía para arquitectos y diseñadores / C. Reznikoff.
Material type: Book Publisher: México : Trillas, 1995Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: 744 R467] (1).
Material type: Book Publisher: Barcelona : CEAC, 2000Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: 729.95 C984c] (2).
Brickwork : architecture and design / Andrew Plumridge and Wim Meulenkamp.
by Plumridge, Andrew | Meulenkamp, Wim.
Material type: Book Publisher: London : Seven Dials, 2000Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: 693.2 P 736] (1).
Manual de construcción de edificios / R. Chudley.
Edition: 3a. ed.Material type: Book Publisher: México : G. Gili, 2001Availability: No items available Checked out (1).
Source: ExperimentaMaterial type: Article; Type of continuing resource: periodical Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: Exp. 47-48 2004] (1).
Il mattone a vista : conoscerlo bene per usarlo meglio.
Material type: Book Publisher: Roma : Andil Assolaterizi, [19--]Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: CONSTRUCCIONES Caja 15] (1).
Edition: 2a. ed.Material type: Book Publisher: Madrid : A. Aguado, 1948Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: D 747 F294c2 v1] (2).
Riscaldare con la bellezza = Beautiful heat / Daniela Patanè.
Source: OttagonoMaterial type: Article; Type of continuing resource: periodical Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: Ottagono 208 2008] (1).
Mirador en la torre de descarga del colector de salmueras, San Joan Despí, Barcelona, España : Pepa Morán Núñez.
Source: Paisea. -- Material type: Article; Format: print Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: Paisea 11 2009] (1).
Chimeneas metálicas : 24 modelos / Antonio Ferrero Guerra.
Material type: Book; Format: print Publisher: Madrid : Paraninfo, 1982Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: 692.711 F386] (1).
Previsioni d'ambiente il design si fa caldo = Forecast for the home : design heats up / Silvia Airoldi.
Source: OttagonoMaterial type: Article; Format: regular print ; Type of continuing resource: periodical Other title: Forecast for the home : design heats up..Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: Ottagono 228 2010] (1).
Source: Experimenta,Material type: Article Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: Exp. 63 2009] (1).
Cocina de verano en Korvamäe.
Source: C3.Material type: Article; Type of continuing resource: periodical Availability: Items available for loan: Biblioteca [Call number: C3 312 2010] (1).


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Magazine | Cars
How could we possibly forget the Autech Zagato Stelvio?
A forgotten footnote in the history of Zagato, the Autech Stelvio exemplifies everything that's great about the century-old Milanese design house. We don't expect everyone to take to the curious Japanese saloon, but polarising opinion has always been Zagato's forte. Let's dive in, shall we?
For every great Zagato design, there is a handful more that haven't stood the test of time. Few could deny that the Aston Martin DB4GT Zagato, for example, is one of the most beautiful and desirable sports cars of all time. But the same certainly couldn't be said for the Bentley Continental GTZ and the Ferrari FZ93. That's not to say they don't have their merits or, indeed, their following. After all, the appeal of the Milanese design house's striking creations surely is that not everyone finds them appealing.
This brazenly styled saloon is one of those forgotten Zagato designs, whether rightly or wrongly is for you to decide. The reason you've probably never come across it before is because it was based on a Nissan and sold solely in Japan. Yes, in the mid-1980s Nissan's native tuning subsidiary Autech was tasked with spicing up the humble Leopard, presumably to capitalise on the wave of wealth that was sweeping the country at the time.
Autech could handle the grizzly bits like the powertrain and chassis, no sweat – its president was Shinichiro Sakurai, father of the Skyline, after all. But for the bodywork, it needed something that would strike people like a karate chop from Mr. Miyagi himself. Who else to turn to but the craftsmen at Zagato in Italy who, judging by their latest of-the-era creations, were enjoying a super-strength harvest of the local grappa?
The styling is, for want of a better word, plain weird. But not necessarily in a bad way. The boxy dimensions and sharp, jutting angles were characteristic not only of Zagato but automotive design in general in the late-1980s, and it had a face that only a mother could truly love. But overall, the proportions and stance are pretty good – there are definite shades of the Aston Martin V8 Zagato and the Alfa Romeo SZ. They, too, weren't the most conventional looking cars.
You have to wonder what the designers were thinking when they dreamt up some of the aesthetic features, though. We can just picture cocaine-fueled big wigs inexplicably excited about the NACA ducts in the wheels and the side mirrors shrouded awkwardly in the front wings. It almost looks as though the Italian designers gave up halfway through – no doubt lured to a dinner table somewhere – and left the caretaker to finish it off.
Beneath the bulging bonnet resides a V6 officially rated at 280HP (though we all know it kicks out well over 300), while all that power is sent to the rear wheels via a four-speed ZF gearbox – not the spriteliest of 'boxes, but at least it's got an overdrive. Compared to the exterior, the Stelvio's interior can only be described as an anticlimax. But that said, it looks like a lovely place to sit and there are myriad gadgets and even a few Zagato cues.
Priced at 18m yen, the Stelvio was astronomically expensive. In fact, you could buy a Honda NSX-R for less. Together with the divisive styling, it was this that was to be the car's undoing. It's believed Nissan sold around just 88 examples before the model was replaced. Of those, only a very few have escaped Japan in the years since, including this silver example – chassis number 31 – that's currently for sale at JB Classic Cars in the Netherlands.
Zagato will celebrate its centenary in 2019, and while you'll no doubt see numerous celebrations of the design house, featuring its most famous creations, spare a thought for those which didn't win the public's adoration to the same degree such as the Autech Stelvio. It's rare, quirky, and entirely befitting of the excessive era in which it originated.
It's the 18-million-yen question – it plays with our judgement, tearing us from loving to loathing and back again. It's everything that's great about Zagato, but also a lot of what's not. Of course, we'll leave you to make up your own mind about the Stelvio. All we know is that it's not a car best forgotten, and we actually really rather want one.
Photos: Jerôme Wassenaar for JB Classic Cars © 2018
You can find this 1990 Autech Zagato Stelvio AZ1 listed for sale in the Classic Driver Market, in addition to JB Classic Cars' entire inventory of stock.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Last night was the first class of the five, and to make sure that I wasn't late, I left work slightly early to make sure I had enough time to get downtown and find the school, and by "slightly early" I mean that I left at the time that I officially work till as directed by the employee handbook and my job description.
I don't know what it is, but I've been having amazing luck lately when it comes to the subway. It seems that I either arrive right as a train is pulling in, or about to pull in. During rush hours, I never need to wait more than two minutes for one. And yesterday afternoon was no exception. As I was going down the stairs to the N/R/W tracks, there was an empty train pulling in. Within 15 minutes, I was at 23rd and 5th, getting rained upon.
I easily found the building at 50 W. 23rd Street and there was a sign in the lobby that had my class name on it and directed me to go to the fifth floor, which I did. On the fifth floor I was able to find a reception area and, after checking in, was given a name tag and a binder with the course material. I was also instructed to wait in the reception area with about ten or so other people.
After about ten minutes, the receptionist informed us that we were in kitchen 1402, on the 14th floor, second on the right. It took two elevators, but we all went up and found the kitchen. It was a large kitchen with ovens and burners on both sides, sinks in the back, four refrigerators, an area for non-refrigerated items, and three tables shaped like parallelograms.
There were chairs set up around one of the tables, so we all sat down on them and our instructor, Chef Jane, introduced herself to us. She then dove into the course material and told us what she thought about the equipment checklist and some of the items that we would really need in our kitchens, as well as the different types of cookware (stay away from copper — too expensive and other types are just as good). She also mentioned some things about food safety, why washing meat and chicken in water is bad, what kind of cutting board to use, and how to keep a cutting board from sliding around while you use it (place a wet paper towel underneath it).
She then talked about the different types of herbs and passed many around so we could smell each to see how the were different. Mmm, mint. She also passed around different varieties of vinegars to show how they may have had a similar aroma, but what they were made from greatly enhanced the flavor.
She then moved on to some general knife skills, by first showing us the different types of knives, some pluses and minuses of each type, how to hold them, and then how to cut different vegetables, with an emphasis on the ones we would be cooking with that evening such as onion, carrots, bell peppers, oranges, and garlic.
We then started to talk about Lesson One and the food we would be making that evening. Each portion of the meal had at least two options, but most had more. By breaking us up into groups, we would be able to make a nice variety of the menu which would give us a chance to taste different dishes, as well as different dishes prepared different ways by different people.
After making the groups, we decided what each group would be making, and then we got down to the business of slicing, dicing, sautéing, and macerating. I assisted in making the gazpacho by dicing an onion and a green bell pepper. I also measured out the appropriate amount of vinegar, oil, and tomato juice. After we made that, I started prepping broccoli for blanching and sautéing. After that, I and my teammates, surprisingly, blanched and sautéed the broccoli.
Once everything was done, we sat down to a nice meal of soup, salad, lamp chops, sautéed potatoes or broccoli, and several different type of macerated fruit for desert. Wine was served, and we spent the next few minutes enjoying the food we made as well as sort of getting to know our fellow students. At about 11pm, after clearing our places, we started filtering out.
Get this…I have homework. There are four recipes at the end of the lesson that should use some of the techniques we learned in class and I have to make one of them. I think the easiest would be the veal cutlet piccata, but I think I'm leaning towards the sautéed pork tenderloin with mustard-herb butter, especially since I didn't make any compound butter in class. Guess what I'm doing Saturday?


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Revere Receives Generous PPE Donation
by Journal Staff • November 25, 2020 • 0 Comments
Class of 2020 Graduates Continue to Struggle With COVID-19 Disappointments
By Melissa Moore-Randall When schools were closed for two weeks this past March , most Revere High School (RHS) students were thinking about unexpected vacation. However, as weeks turned into months and in-person learning and athletics were cancelled for the…
Arrigo Seeks to Start Public Art Commission
by Cary Shuman • November 25, 2020 • 0 Comments
Revere Project Manager Elle Baker appeared at the City Council meeting Monday to speak on behalf of Mayor Brian Arrigo's request to establish a five-member Public Art Commission. The Council enthusiastically embraced the idea. Baker opened the discussion by terming…
As Holidays Approach, Arrigo Shares Update on Work to Keep Revere Seniors Safe: Urges Residents to Remain Vigilant This Week
Ahead of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, today Mayor Brian M. Arrigo shared positive updates on the work being done to protect the health and safety of Revere seniors, and urged residents to remain vigilant in their actions this week. New…
Revere's Own Frankie Fannabla Urges Residents to End the Large Gathering "Malarkey" In a cry for help, Revere's own Frankie Fannabla returns, this time at the Revere Suffolk Downs COVID-19 testing site. Fannabla, who became a viral hit in the…
Hill School Updates Revere Public School Committee on Remote Learning Progress
by John Lynds • November 25, 2020 • 0 Comments
At last week's Revere Public School Committee meeting, James Hill Elementary School Principal Melissa Lomas said she was excited to present to the committee the work that her 3rd grade team has been doing with regards to remote learning. "This…
Outstanding in His Field: Selevitch Receives Innocence Program's Investigator Award
Robert Selevitch has had a distinguished career in the field of private investigation for 40 years. He has worked on some of the state's most high-profile cases. Selevitch was honored in a ceremony on Nov. 17 with the Massachusetts Innocence…
Zonta Club: Of Chelsea & North Shore News & Notes
The Zonta Club of Chelsea has been serving and advocating for women & children locally and internationally through out the years. The Zonta Club was started in Chelsea in 1980 by local professional women with the desire to volunteer and…
Boncore Honored as Legislator of the Year by MAPC
Senator Joe Boncore, Chair of the Joint Committee on Transportation, was recognized last week by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) as "Legislator of the Year." The award is given to honor a legislator who has exhibited leadership in promoting…
Lovin' Spoonfuls' 10th Annual Ultimate Tailgate Party Brings Together Over 300 Attendees Virtually in Support of Food Rescue
On Wednesday, Nov. 18, the 10th annual Ultimate Tailgate Party to benefit Lovin' Spoonfuls (sponsored by Constant Contact, Tito's Handmade Vodka and Whole Foods Market) drew over 300 attendees to celebrate Spoonfuls' impact over the last year and to generate…
Mascon Medical Donates 400,000 Pieces of PPE to Revere and Chelsea
The Cities of Revere and Chelsea will receive a large donation of personal protective equipment (PPE) from Mascon Medical to help fight the spread of COVID-19. Revere and Chelsea are among the first cities to receive some of the more…
Ceremony Held for Newly Renovated History Museum and Sonny Myers Park
The eastern corner of Beach Street and Winthrop Avenue – where Sonny Myers Park is situated, with the Revere History Museum right next door – never looked so good. Mayor Brian Arrigo joined Revere Society for Cultural and Historic Preservation's…
Molly Baldwin, Founder and CEO of Roca, Inc. Receives Prestigious 25th Annual Heinz Award
On Nov. 19, Molly Baldwin was awarded the prestigious 25th Annual Heinz Award in recognition of the founding, leadership and outstanding results of Roca Inc. www.rocainc.org Baldwin is recognized for Roca's proven work in changing the lives of young people…
Construction Update: HOV Lane on I-93 Southbound in Medford, Somerville Re-Opens
The Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) is announcing that effective on Monday, November 23, the High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane on I-93 southbound in Medford and Somerville will re-open on weekdays between the hours of 6:00 a.m. and 10 a.m. …
Workers and Riders Rally Together for a Safe Transit System Ahead of MBTA Meeting
Transit riders, workers, and community leaders came together Thursday, Nov. 19, to oppose significant service and job cuts proposed for the MBTA. The rolling demonstration through downtown Boston ended with a rally at the State Transportation Building, and emotional testimonials…
Council Honors Retiring Rep. RoseLee Vincent
The City Council honored one of the city's most beloved public officials, State Rep. RoseLee Vincent, during the Council meeting Monday night. The meeting was held remotely, so Rep. Vincent and her husband, Richard Vincent, watched the award presentation in…
Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, tracing its roots back almost 400 years to the Pilgrims, long before there was even a thought of a United States of America. Thanksgiving is the ultimate family-centered holiday. It has no religious meaning,…
Enjoy the Holiday Safely
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Guest Op-Ed: Thanksgiving 2020, Home, But Not Alone
By Karen Lee Sobol Has your sense of time shifted lately? Does avoiding people feel bizarre, and has Purell become your new best friend? Do you spot beauty in surprising places, and feel the rhythm of your breath inside your…
Crimson and Gold: Harvard Freshman, Olympic Hopeful Gabbie Izzo Trains at Cronin Rink
By day Gabbie Izzo is a first-year college student who happens to be attending the oldest and most prestigious university in the United States. Gabbie Izzo is also one of the nation's elite figure skaters. The 19-year-old Harvard College freshman…


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Campaign Success: Freetrade
Crowdcube, Fintech
Freetrade is a commission-free trading app who has successfully launched six campaigns on Crowdcube, raising nearly £20m. We interviewed Co-founder and CMO, Viktor Nebehaj to hear their Crowdcube success story.
Since 2016, you've launched an equity crowdfunding campaign every year. What keeps you coming back?
There are two main reasons. First off, it's a great way for startups like Freetrade to raise the capital they need to pursue their goals. A corollary of that is it gives you a huge, built-in audience that has a vested interest in you succeeding. That's incredibly powerful when you want to spread the word about your start-up.
When you launched your first two campaigns, Freetrade was still being developed. How important do you think it was to use equity crowdfunding at this early stage to validate the idea?
Extremely! Those early rounds of funding were really rewarding and let us know we were definitely on to something. As I said before, it also gave us this awesome group of people that have supported us along the way, helped us build a better product and spread the word about Freetrade.
Freetrade has gone from raising £170k in 2016 to nearly £7m in your most recent campaign. Has Freetrade's approach to equity crowdfunding changed as the company has grown?
Not especially, no. The change in fundraising comes as you develop your product. People are more willing to invest in a successful product than an idea. We've grown to over 150,000 customers in about 12 months. That means more people are more willing to invest. It also means we need more funds to continue expanding and pay the costs associated with having a growing team.
How do you prepare for your equity crowdfunding campaigns?
It's chaotic but a lot of fun! Ultimately, it's about communicating in simple terms what your company does and the problem it solves. Equity crowdfunding itself is interesting because you get people investing with one-offs, but you also have this strong community of people that regularly invest in campaigns. I think Freetrade has done a good job at reaching both groups of people which is positive.
How effective has equity crowdfunding been for acquiring users (and talent)?
I actually joined as Adam's co-founder after investing in the first campaign. I invested the maximum amount in that crowdfunding round. I met Adam afterwards, we got talking, and eventually, I joined him to build the product and the company. So equity crowdfunding has definitely been a useful tool for Freetrade. The excitement around it has been instrumental in us gaining new users and team members.
What would be your top equity crowdfunding tips?
Make sure you are properly communicating the problem you are solving, and that you have product/market fit. For us, it was providing commission-free access to the markets via a well-designed app. That may sound simple, but no one else in the UK was doing that. The other thing to do is to communicate with your investors and potential investors, well before your campaign. They are your community, and they will be of tremendous help to you in so many different ways, from feature testing to spreading the word.
Campaign Success: monva
monva is an intelligent consumer comparison platform for financial products. The team launched their equity crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube earlier this month and raised over £500k from
Campaign Success: Honcho
Honcho is the UK's first reverse auction marketplace for financial services. To date, the company has raised over £4m across four campaign on Crowdcube and
Campaign Success: Clim8
Clim8 is a sustainable investment app who has raised £1.5m from over 1400 investors on Crowdcube. We spoke with Founder and CEO, Duncan Grierson, to


They say that from age arises wisdom. If that is true then there is probably no wiser of a veteran than the Steelers James Farrior.
He may be right. Nonetheless, that fails to make an 18 game season a good idea, and it does not mean that the NFL Players Association should not fight this tooth and nail.
I do not make the above statement lightly. A decision by the NFLPA to put its foot down on the 18 game season would likely elevate the probability of a lock out from highly probably to something near metaphysical certitude.
Judged solely from a "how does it affect the Steelers" view point, a protracted lockout leading to a canceled 2011 season would be a disaster.
No football in 2011 could easily mean the end to the careers of Aaron Smith, Hines Ward, and perhaps Farrior himself. It would mean that the next time Casey Hampton set foot on a football field he'd be 35. Brett Keisel would be 34 and so would James Harrison. Troy Polamlau would be 32.
Much has been made of the age of this group of Steelers. Nonetheless it is perfectly plausible that this core of men could make another run at a Lombardi in 2011, regardless of how the current season concludes.
But what about 2012? Add another year to a couple of key players, and you're much, much more dependant on rookie contributions.
But the game is bigger than the Steelers, which is why the 18 game season must be fought.
To listen to Roger Goodell, fans are really demanding the 18 game season, because they're fed up with preseason football.
Nonetheless, I understand and respect the argument of season ticket holders who object to being forced to buy preseason tickets, and of other fans who are forced to pay full price for something that is less than the NFL's top product.
On top of that, preseason has changed. Those over 30 or so might remember the Sports Illustrated commercials that began shortly after the 4th of July, hyping "the time that helmets are strapped and hands are tapped and protected." As SI told the story, the dawning of NFL training camps was a time to them to spring into action.
Those spots ran in the 1970's and 1980's. Back then, preseason was a beacon of hope for a populace that had been starved of football in 5 or 6 months. There was no internet then, and even if there was, free agency did not exist and OTA's were just blurb to fill out unused space in Sports sections.
The fact that a site like Steel Curtain Rising can publish over 570 posts in 3 years – from Buenos Aires, Argentina — shows just how drastically the landscape has changed.
Coaches play starters sparingly in the 1st and 4th games anyway. A three game preseason might give their reps in and rookies could still get a decent look.
Similar to the first proposal, but this one would give rookies, undrafted free agents, and guys who simply hang on practice squads year-in and year-out a bigger shot a prime time.
Owners could roll the costs into the regular season and/or provide incentives (such as greater chances to buy additional playoff tickets, points that you can accmulate to get better seats) to purchase preseason tickets. This would also allow non-season ticket holders a better shot at games.
Having teams play 1-2 preseason games at a site outside of either team's home field would help expand the NFL's fan bases by giving other communities a chance to see NFL football.
The fallacy of the "need" for an 18 game season because of problems with the NFL Preseason is self-evident.
But that says nothing of the why going to an 18 game season would be fundamentally bad for the game. Stay tuned for Part II where we'll bring that out in detail.
This entry was posted in Pittsburgh Steelers Fan Club of Buenos Aires and tagged James Farrior, League Matters, Pittsburgh Steelers. Bookmark the permalink.


Assist in travel and accommodation expenses to attend these events.
Registration and membership fees can be paid directly by the AARE Office. Any funds for reimbursement will be paid after the conference on submission of itemised receipts.
a short statement about what you wish to gain from attendance at these events.
Selection process: Applications will be considered by a selection panel convened by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research SIG Executive. The panel's decision will be final and no further correspondence will be entered into.


CAPYAC is a surreal dance act with as much Berlin/Detroit/French electronic influences as jazz, funk and the swirl of modern genres mixed in. Started in Austin, TX with a consortium of collaborators, the founding duo is now based in Los Angeles, CA regularly featuring guest vocalists, dance troupes, and fish mongers to elate and enlighten.
Their debut single "Speedracer" set the stage for an avant-garde aesthetic alongside chill Rhodes piano, slowed nudisco beats and funky guitars. With "Headlunge", "Fis" and "Who is Donny Flamingo?" multi track releases, we saw the musical partners P. Sugz and Potion dabbling in minimal techno, spy-movie theme songs, trap jazz and every genre amidst the kicks and snares. With regular contributions from saxophonist Papa Mongoose, MC Rudi Devino, vocalists, nay jesters Oolaf & Bean and percussionist/daredevil The Hollywood Jingle, their live shows are infamously full of antics you'll only see at a CAPYAC show -be it freshly griddled pancakes tossed from the ACL Fest stage, wild musical and theatrical improvisations at Capitol Hill Block Party, Twilight at the Pier and Euphoria Fest or puppeteering across California's finest stages.
Appearing alongside CLASSIXX, Washed Out, Holy Ghost, Tennyson and more; since 2016 they have performed 250+ shows across the US, MX and throughout Europe to much acclaim and confused smiles.
EMÆL is an eclectic group that has converged many genres of music ranging from their classical roots to indie/alt-pop influences.
Based out of beautiful Orange County California, and inspired by the best of the old and new, The Moon Jays bring a fresh and unique brand of pop rock to the table. On the heels of recording their debut EP, Discovery, the band is bringing their vision to life of making pop rock musically impressive again. Justin and James share a perfect blend of strength and beauty with both vocals and guitar. Ryan's bass will put rhythm in your soul, and Josh's beats behind the drum kit will pull anyone from their seat to the dance floor. Together, through great songs and an exciting live show, The Moon Jays create music that brings people together.


Find out about the council's MOT and ATF centres.
Council MOT centres don't actually perform repair work on site we simply conduct MOT tests.
We will only fail your car or recommend repair work if it's necessary for your car to pass the MOT test.
All new taxi applications must be tested at one of our MOT facilities.
Council MOT centres don't actually perform repair work on site we simply conduct MOT tests.
Please see details of our three test centres below.
8am to 3pm, Mon to Fri.
8am to 3pm, Monday to Friday.


Tis the season … the harvesting and canning season that is.
The mystery of the missing juice … solved.
Just a towel … but it makes me smile.
I just can't help myself … I LOVE these flowers.
A little baking … or not.
A little news … ok really, it's HUGE news!


Baltimore police have canceled leave next week for officers "out of an abundance of caution," as jurors are expected to begin deliberations as early as Monday in the case against Officer William G. Porter.
All sworn personnel will be assigned to 12-hour shifts, under a plan by Commissioner Kevin Davis to ensure the Police Department is adequately staffed.
Attorneys are expected to present closing arguments Monday in Porter's case. He is one of six officers charged in connection with the April arrest and death of Freddie Gray; all six have pleaded not guilty.
Davis announced the decision to cancel leave on Friday, but he did not provide many details. Gray's death sparked widespread protesting and rioting across the city, the Baltimore Sun reports.


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US President-Elect Joe Biden's Trade Policy Will Aim At China; Unite Allies
BusinessGlobal EconomyUS President-Elect Joe Biden's Trade Policy Will Aim At China; Unite Allies
Joe Biden on US Economy: His top economic policy is to revive the economy slammed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Global EconomyReutersUpdated: November 08, 2020 11:55 am IST
Joe Biden trade policy
President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to work more closely with U.S. allies in confronting China on trade, and is seen as unlikely to roll back his predecessor's tariffs on imported steel, aluminum, Chinese and European goods any time soon. "I've been told that if you close your eyes, you might not be able to tell the difference" between the Biden and Trump trade agendas, said Nasim Fussell, former Republican trade counsel at the U.S. Senate Finance Committee. "Biden's not going to be quick to unravel some of these tariffs." Biden, who captured the presidency on Saturday after days of vote counting, was elected with the strong backing of trade unions and progressives who have been skeptical of past free trade deals, so he will face pressure to maintain protections for vulnerable industries, such as steel and aluminum.
His top economic priority will be to revive an economy slammed by the coronavirus pandemic, so trade agreements will likely take a back seat to stimulus efforts and infrastructure development.
Biden advisers say he will seek to end "artificial trade wars" with Europe and would immediately consult with U.S. allies before deciding on the future of U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods, in a bid for "collective leverage" against Beijing.
Former Trump and Obama administration trade officials say that in order to roll back tariffs on Chinese goods, Biden would likely demand the same basic concessions from China that Trump did: curbing massive subsidies to state-controlled firms, ending policies that force U.S. companies to transfer technology to Chinese counterparts, and opening its digital services markets to U.S. tech firms (another big Biden donor constituency).
"Any president will have these on their agenda, but they're going to be really difficult," said Jamieson Greer, who served until April as chief of staff at the U.S. Trade Representative's office.
A Biden administration will be more predictable on trade after Trump's abrupt shifts and tariff threats, said Wendy Cutler, a former USTR trade negotiators.
"The days of advisers scrambling to implement what they learn through presidential tweets will be in the past," said Cutler, vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
Biden is not seen likely to try to revive the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the 12-country Pacific Rim trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration but abandoned by Trump in 2017.
Instead, reforming the badly damaged World Trade Organization with new rules against subsidies and other non-market practices is viewed as a bigger priority.
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BETHEL MUSIC PUSHES CORPORATE WORSHIP BOUNDARIES WITH ITS
FIRST EVER INSTRUMENTAL ALBUM WITHOUT WORDS MARCH 5
FIRST EVER BETHEL MUSIC U.S. TOUR LAUNCHES MARCH 6
"Nights of Worship & Ministry" Tour Features Brian and Jenn Johnson,
Jeremy Riddle, William Matthews, Steffany Frizzell-Gretzinger
NEWS SOURCE: Hoganson Media
Continuing to push the creative boundaries of corporate worship while inviting listeners to experience fresh encounters with God, Bethel Music will release its first ever all instrumental, full-length CD, Without Words, March 5, 2013 with global distribution through Integrity Music. Featuring tracks inspired from its critically acclaimed and No. 1-selling album released last fall, For The Sake Of The World, and other compelling Bethel Music anthems, Without Words began as an instrumental experiment by the Bethel Music community.
"Each song on the recording has been deconstructed and rearranged into versions that hint at original melodies through unique instrumentation and a variety of sounds," says Brian Johnson, who, along with his wife Jenn, are the senior worship pastors at Bethel Church and oversee the Bethel School of Worship. "Creating a dynamic, ambient and cinematic atmosphere, free from lyric and discourse, this album ventures into new territory and explores what it is to worship Without Words."
The full Without Words track listing follows:
1) What Does It Sound Like
2) God I Look To You
3) Forgiven
4) For The Sake Of The World
5) Angels	6) Come To Me
7) To Our God
8) One Thirst
9) Worthy Is The Lamb
10) I Will Exalt
Immediately following the release of Without Words, Bethel worship artists Brian and Jenn Johnson, Jeremy Riddle, William Matthews and Steffany Frizzell-Gretzinger will embark on their first U.S. tour. Hosting "Nights of Worship & Ministry" in six cities, as well as a two-day Bethel Worship Conference, the tour launches March 6 in Miami, FL and travels throughout the Southeast.
Leading songs from For The Sake Of The World and other well-known original Bethel Music songs of praise, such as "One Thing Remains," "Love Came Down," and "Deep Cries Out," tour tickets and more information can be found at www.bethelmusic.com/springtour. A video tour announcement can also be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm9JwcGWUFs, and the full itinerary follows:
March 6 Miami, FL	The Harbour Church
March 7 Tampa, FL	Iglesia de Dios Pentecostal
March 8-9	Atlanta, GA	Bethel Worship Conference, New City Church
March 11	Wilmington, NC	Kenan Auditorium
March 12	Charlotte, NC	(Location to be announced)
March 13	Mobile, AL	First Baptist Church North Mobile
"Join with us in a powerful time of worship and encouragement as we pursue His kingdom on earth as it is in heaven," says Johnson.
About Bethel Music:
Bethel Music, formed as an organic extension of Bethel Church, represents the worship of the church, which leads a rapidly growing "Global Legacy" association of nearly 2,000 churches around the world. The heart of Bethel Music is to be a steward of the worship being created and released at Bethel Church, making it a resource available to the world. In addition to the thousands of people that attend Bethel Church's weekly worship service, another 100,000-plus people subscribe to the online stream of the services at www.ibethel.org. More about Bethel Music can be found at www.bethelmusic.com, www.facebook.com/Ibethelmusic and www.twitter.com/bethelmusic.
About Integrity:
Integrity Music is a division of David C Cook, a nonprofit global resource provider serving the Church with life-transforming materials. Headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Integrity Music's resources are distributed in more than 160 countries and sold worldwide. Additional information can be found at www.integritymusic.com.


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April 4, 2014 Fiction, Issue 07, Issue 07 Fiction
By STEPHEN O'CONNOR
We decided to start with a con. She was small, with blonde hair and an unidentifiable accent that gave her voice the warped vowels and ee-haw rhythms of a handsaw. She approached him on the footbridge, made a startled noise, and looked down. His eyes followed hers, and there—exactly midway between them—was a golden ring. She picked it up first, having been, after all, the one who had put it there the instant before he caught sight of her.
We liked this situation because it posed a challenge: How could anything ever develop between them if the sole reason they met was that she was trying to extract money from him? But it only took a couple of uncertain glances and an obliging tilt of the head to make clear that he was the perfect foil for her: not stupid so much as ignorant and slow on the uptake.
He was twenty-eight; she was twenty-two, but they both had the cautious gestures and expressions of people decades older. There was pain in their eyes. His showed the expectation that he would be hurt, but also an alertness to the pain of others. He was more comfortable with those who had suffered: the victims of this world. Her eyes revealed the history of her pain—but only in the form of her determination never to experience it again.
"Oh!" she said.
He said, "Wow!" and pulled back his hand as she picked up the ring. "Incredible!"
Without meeting his eye, she asked, "How you think it get here?"
"I don't know…I mean, it couldn't have just fallen off."
The ring looked like a wedding band, but broader than most—and so it seemed a little tacky, as if its owner had cared too much about showing off gold.
The woman held it up and pointed to a small symbol on its inner surface. "What this say?"
Slightly farsighted, he had to squint. "I don't know. It looks like a jeweler's mark."
This was good: Their intersecting gazes and the nearness of their heads were creating a small intimacy in a wilderness of indifference. We jazzed it a little with a puff of breeze that caused a lock of her blond hair to trail aesthetically across her cheek and lips, and with a sun gleam off a river wave to set the mossy green of his eyes aflame.
But then she pushed things too fast: "Here." She dropped the ring into his hand.
"Wha—" His eyebrows pointed toward the center of his forehead; his lips made an "O" of infantile confusion.
He tried to give the ring back, but she pushed it away. "No!" She held up her splayed hand so that he could see her fingers. "Too big for me."
"But you found it." This time he managed to place the ring in the palm of her hand.
"No. You did. I just pick it up."
This was the moment he experienced his first inkling that he was being conned. It came to him as a sort of gastric pang, which is to say as something to be ignored.
"You keep." She put the ring back into his hand. "For your love."
This was her masterstroke. He had no love. He wanted love. (We had made sure of that in the beginning.) And so his mind whirred and he lost all independence of will.
A tender smile that was also part wince crossed her face as she folded his thick, soft fingers over the ring. His lips parted, his eyes did that quicksilver glint that betokens the immanence of speech, but no words came.
As she turned away, her face went dead. Then she was hurrying across the bridge, in the direction from which he had just come. One of the reasons why we had chosen her was that she had appealingly compact and spherical buttocks, and so would always make a good final impression. And indeed his eyes focused on that part of her as she hurried away, his lips still parted, his mind still whirring.
His name was Philip. Hers: Esme.
As soon as he was alone, Philip began to turn in circles, surveying the people passing in both directions across the narrow footbridge, looking for whomever might have lost the ring. According to one report, he had a remarkably precise image in mind of what that person would look like: A woman. Sixty years old. Fat. Head bent, eyes sweeping right to left, left to right, as she moved across the bridge, clearly having to restrain herself from moving faster, equally clearly already convinced of the futility of her search. Hence, the single tear streaming down each cheek. Hence, the quiet noises of despair periodically escaping her lips and nose.
Philip was so intent on finding this woman that he didn't even notice Esme had returned until he felt her fingers jab his shoulder.
"Excuse me," she said. "Mister."
He looked at her.
"You give me money for sandwich." She gestured toward her mouth with clumped-together fingers as if she were cramming a morsel into it.
Philip's eyebrows pointed, once again, toward the center of his forehead. His lips made that zero. "Hunh?"
"Sandwich." She gestured again. "Me hungry. You give me money for sandwich."
"Oh," he said. The truth had arrived, and the world was suddenly simpler: no old woman to search for; gone too that ache of lost opportunity he had felt as he watched Esme walk away. Now everything was easy.
He handed the ring back to her, but she pushed it away.
"No. For you." She pointed at the center of her chest. "Me, hungry. You give me money for sandwich."
A look of perturbation on his brow. The world getting less simple again. He plunged his hand into his pocket, pulled out some coins and gave them to her.
She snatched them from his fingers, and plunged them into her own pocket. "No. Not enough. I need money for sandwich."
His perturbation intensified. He put his hand into his pocket and gave her his remaining change.
"No," she said. "You buy me sandwich."
"That's all I have," he said, but he didn't turn away.
"More." She put both hands on her stomach. "I very hungry." Seeing him waver, she added, "I give you ring. You buy me sandwich."
He was helpless before the notion that a pretty girl he had never seen before should have given him a gift—especially as he had not yet definitively concluded the ring was brass. He took out his wallet and gave her two bills. "That's it," he said. "I'm not going to give you any more."
This is the moment we ended up talking about so much afterward: Her gaze lifted from the green of the bills remaining in his wallet to the green of his eyes. It seemed, at first, that she was going to ask for more, but then her expression went somber.
Some of us argued that she felt a twinge of shame, others that she was merely cutting her losses.
In any event, without another word, she turned and walked away.
He stood watching as she grew smaller and smaller and finally disappeared amid the swarm of pedestrians moving along the esplanade on the far side of the river.
Philip's was the loneliness of a man to whom nothing had ever really happened: Dust furze under his bed, ochre splotches on the toilet rim, a tendency to eat meals out of the pans in which they were cooked, but all of his books aligned with the edge of the bookshelf, no empty bottles scattered on the floor, no knives plunged up to their hilts in the sheetrock.
Esme's was the loneliness of a woman whose younger sister came home every day at dawn, and went to sleep with a pistol under her pillow. Whose mother could not move the left side of her mouth, her left arm, or her left leg, and only made it between bed and bathroom by pivoting on a crutch and hopping on her right foot. Whose father, long ago, in the country they had left forever, had been dragged into the street by soldiers, and reduced to a jolting rag doll by an extended machine-gun blast. This was the same country where her mother had once drawn faces on acorns, placed them in cabbage flowers, and said they were elf babies. Where her sister had hung by her knees from a bar on a swing set, the skirt of her dress completely covering her face, and had swung back and forth crying, "Look at me! I'm a church bell! Ding-dong! Ding-dong!" The same country where, when Esme was four years old, her father had come home from work wearing a red tie dotted with winged hamburgers. She laughed in such delight at the tie that her father took it off right there in the kitchen and knotted it around her bare neck, the silk so smooth and cool.
In other words, Esme's was what we call "packed" loneliness: less isolation than a dance between hopelessness and rage. From our point of view it was the most interesting variety of loneliness, in that it predisposed her to extremes of action and mood. But, by that same token, it was volatile, unpredictable, and very hard to manipulate.
The day Esme met Philip, she placed eight bills, a handful of change, and the three remaining rings of the seven she had gone out with on the bed beside her mother's knee. "Do you think this is a vacation?" her mother said. "Do you think you don't have to work? Your sister is willing to work. Do you think you are better than your sister?" Her mother swept the bills, coins, and rings off her bed with her one good hand, causing them to clatter, roll, and whisper on the floorboards. "Pick that up," her mother said. And when Esme had restored the money and the rings to the place beside her mother's knee, her mother said, "How are we going to eat if this is all the money you bring home? How are we going to pay the rent?" Her mother gestured with her crutch. "Why should your sister do all the work? Do you think you're a princess?" Esme looked at the floor and waited. "Talk to your sister," her mother said. "I don't care how you make your money. Talk to your sister. If your sister can do it, so can you." Her mother closed her eyes, and spoke without opening them again: "Put the money in the drawer."
When her mother's eyes were closed, Esme couldn't recognize her. That woman's body lying on the bed was not her mother's body. That face bloated, crooked, discolored, that face like a pillow left out in the rain, was not her mother's face.
"Put the money in the drawer," her mother said. "Leave me alone."
Later, when Esme was curled in her own bed, her back to her mother, we introduced into her thoughts the memory of the befuddled longing in Philip's eyes when she told him the ring was for his love. The humanists among us were waiting for some sign of her susceptibility: a tear, a sigh, a remorseful wince. Nothing. She closed her eyes, and, not long afterward, her mouth fell open and a noise began to rise from her respiratory tract like shovelfuls of walnuts rattling down a wooden chute.
One of us became obsessed with the idea of snow. Then another suggested slush, and that inspired us all. But even a wet snowstorm would be very hard to arrange, given that this was October. The expense would be enormous; we'd have to call in political favors and act expeditiously. Any feeling that might have been awakened between Philip and Esme would die if neglected too long. Within seconds of making our decision, we were dashing up and down the stairs, making phone calls, booking flights. This was just the sort of challenge we liked most, the sort that gave our lives meaning.
On cold and windy days, Esme stayed away from the rivers, and generally worked Palace Park because of all the tourists, while Philip, precisely to avoid those tourists, would commute to his job along Modicum Alley, half a block away. So the first thing we did was shut down the alley for repairs, and direct pedestrians up Dangerfield toward the park. That turned out to be a lot of fun. I got to be one of the construction workers, and wore a yellowish reflective vest and an orange hardhat. When I saw Philip approaching along the sidewalk, the crinkle of bafflement on his forehead rearranging itself into irritation, I waved my ultra-orange plastic flag up the avenue and said, "This way, this way," as if by uttering these same two syllables all morning I had achieved a Zen empty-mindedness and no longer knew what I was saying. It worked perfectly. Philip did exactly as directed without even noticing me. The instant he was out of sight, I flung my vest, hardhat, and flag into the back of a van, and headed up to Palace Park in a watch cap and bubble coat.
The truth is, we never quite managed the slush, only dirty snow. But maybe that was better, since it made the ring harder to see. Esme had taken her usual position, just past the Underground entrance, where the sidewalk opens up in front of the park gates. She kept uttering her startled, "Oh!" without anyone noticing the ring lying right in front of her. Every now and then, it would get buried in the snow, and she would have to pick it up, walk around the Underground entrance, and surreptitiously drop it again. "Oh!" she cried again and again, "Oh!" "Oh!" "Oh!"—her face always the perfect image of innocent astonishment. But no one ever spotted the ring, and almost no one even gave her a sidelong glance.
Philip himself might not have noticed her had I not brought him to a halt by barreling across his path, head lowered, ranting into my cell phone about a child custody battle. Philip watched Esme long enough to see her exclaim at the ring more than once, her shoulders hunched inside her jean jacket, her fingers and nose radiantly red, snowflakes on her eyelashes. When, at last, he stood right in front of her, the "Oh!" went silent in her throat, and she only stared at him, as if she were waiting for him to hit her.
"Here," he said, handing her all the money he had in his wallet. "For your love!"
"Oh," she said, softly, hardly glancing at the money as she stuffed it into her pocket. When she raised her eyes again, he was gone.
Here is a photograph of Philip sitting on the edge of his bed that very night. He is thinking of the bewilderment he witnessed in Esme's tight, cold face. The snowflakes on her eyelashes. The photograph is a little too blurry for you to be able to tell, but the reason his hands are together in his lap is that he is fingering the ring. Do you see how his eyes are turned toward the ceiling? That's an indication, I think, of how intently he is occupied by the circle of brass between his fingertips, and by the images it suggests.
After his first encounter with Esme, he had thrown the ring into a bowl on the shelf over his kitchen sink. But from now on he would keep it in the drawer of his bedside table.
That night, several of us wanted to insert some erotic fantasy into his thoughts, but I argued that it was too soon, that if we upped the stakes so high, he would be too self-conscious the next time he saw her. Reluctantly my opponents acceded.
After a while, Philip stopped cutting through Modicum Alley on his way to work, and walked instead via Dangerfield and Palace Park West, lingering at the Underground entrance as if he were fascinated by its stoic, postwar anti-aestheticism. Sometimes he would return to the park at lunchtime, or take the esplanade along the river, and walk back and forth across Sullivan Footbridge, which was where he first encountered Esme. It was more than a month before he saw her again—a warm lunch hour in early December. People were walking around with their winter coats unzipped, their scarves stuffed into their pockets. But Esme's jean jacket was buttoned to her neck, the collar flipped up, her nose radiant red again, her fingers also, and there was a bluish duskiness under her eyes.
She was talking to a gorilla-gutted man, with long, silver-wired hair fanning out from under his baseball cap. The man was holding out something very small between his thumb and index finger. As Philip watched, Esme pushed the man's hand back toward his chest and clearly spoke the words—although Philip was too far away to hear—"For your love." The man laughed and, for a moment, seemed not to know what to do. Then he flicked the ring into Esme's face and walked away.
Philip, too, walked away, possessed by an emotional constellation none of us could read. Anger seemed to predominate, although whether that anger was primarily at himself or the man who had flicked the ring was impossible to ascertain. One memory clip kept replaying in Philip's mind, however, not just as he hurried from the park, but that night and for days afterward. He kept seeing the shock and pain in Esme's face as the ring struck just below her eye, then her fury as she shouted after the man, veins bulging on her forehead and neck. But what Philip most paid attention to was how, the instant she stopped yelling, the anger went out of her face. Her cheeks blanched, and her eyes shifted without focusing, as if she were watching something inside her head. That was the last Philip saw of her before he turned away.
He next encountered her one frigid Saturday afternoon, about a week later, as he was crossing Rosenberg Square on his way to the Browridge Museum, where he was a conservator in the Ancient and Imaginary Musical Instruments Collection. She was standing by the boarded-up fountain, practicing her trade, but no one ever stopped, no matter how many times she opened her mouth in surprise and gestured at the fallen ring. Her face had gone gray with the cold; her nose was blue. She trembled visibly inside her jean jacket. Philip turned his back, and disappeared down Fifth Street. When he returned he was carrying a white paper bag.
He walked straight up to her. "Here."
She took the bag, reflexively, if only to stop it falling to the ground, then looked at him uncertainly over its rolled-up top.
"It's a ham sandwich," Philip said. When she only seemed to grow more puzzled, he added, "I hope that's okay. After I got it, I thought maybe I should have gotten you roast beef, or turkey. If you want, I can get you another."
Her face went impassive. She put her hand into the bag and pulled out the sandwich: a hero, plastic-wrapped, a barcode sticker slapped on the side. "No, this good." She rocked the sandwich from end to end, staring at it as if she couldn't quite believe it was real.
"Are you sure?" Philip said. "It's no problem."
"No. This good." She lifted the sandwich by way of demonstration. "Thank you." Then she smiled.
This was the first time he had ever seen her smile. Objectively the smile ruined the proportions of her face, causing her cheeks to bulge into knobs just below her eyes, and broadening her jaw, making it squat, spadelike. Also it was a closed-lip smile, a smile that wanted to swallow itself, a smile that felt it ought not to have come into the world.
Philip smiled too—not a closed-lip smile, although that might have been better, since his teeth were crooked, chipped. In part because of his teeth, his smile did not seem so much childlike as canine—expressing all the guilelessness of a puppy whose rear end is being whipped back and forth by its happily snapping tail.
She was looking at the sandwich as if she couldn't wait to open it. A shiver passed from one shoulder to the other.
"You can't eat that out here," Philip said. "Maybe we should go someplace." Philip had not intended to make this suggestion, and as it passed his lips, he began to sweat inside his winter coat.
Esme's face, on which the traces of her smile still lingered, went dead. Then she gave him a new smile, but it, too, was dead. "Sure. Where you want?"
"We don't have to if you don't want to."
"No," she said. "I want." Her smile was replaced by a look of tremulous uneasiness that made her seem more like someone Philip could talk to.
He jerked his head in the direction of Fifth Street. "There's a café near here. Let's get something hot to drink."
"Okay." Without looking at him, she added, "If that what you want."
They hardly spoke as they walked. Philip made remarks like, "It's just over here…. We're almost there…," to which Esme only nodded, or made barely audible throat noises.
The café was called Mud. They both got cappuccinos, and took seats at a table in the back. She sat on her hands to make them warm. He folded his hands around his cup. The wrapped sandwich lay on the table between them.
"You should eat that," he said.
"Yes." She peeled back the tangled plastic and put the end of the sandwich into her mouth. The whole time she ate, she looked down at the table or out the window, as if he wasn't there.
"Do you remember me?" he asked.
"Yes." She fixed her eyes on the crumpled sugar packet beside her cup, took another bite and chewed for a while. "You give me money. Thank you." She glanced at him, but her gaze revealed not one iota of gratitude.
"I was surprise," she said. "A lot of money." No glance this time. She stuffed the sandwich into her mouth and bit off more than she could comfort- ably manage.
"Do you remember meeting me before?"
It was a long while before she could speak, and when she did, he saw a mush of bread and a couple of slivers of lettuce on her tongue. "No."
"On the Sullivan Footbridge," he said.
She had taken another bite, but a smaller one, so only nodded. After a moment, she swallowed and wiped her mouth on the back of her wrist. "Oh, yes. I remember."
Philip suspected that, in fact, she didn't remember (he was wrong; she did), but he couldn't think of a way of finding out that wouldn't make him seem pathetic or weird. He wanted to ask her about her life—where she came from, why she had to stand out on the street in all weathers—but her averted gaze and the sullen set of her lips made it impossible for him to talk.
He and Esme sat side by side in total silence for most of ten minutes, her bites growing smaller and smaller, every one of them taking longer to chew, as if she were a prisoner on death row, forcing herself through her last meal only as a way of staving off the inevitable. Philip's hands and face were dewy with sweat. Why had he invited her to have a coffee with him? He felt like a fool.
When at last she had finished her sandwich and poured down her final swallow of coffee, she went silent and motionless and seemed to grow dingy. After a moment, she crumpled up her napkin and dropped it on the table, her fingers hovering indecisively in midair—trembling.
"Well!" Philip put both hands down flat on the table. "Want anything else?"
Her voice was barely above a whisper. "No, thank you." She gave him a frightened glance, looked away, then looked back again and gave him another of her dead smiles.
"Guess we better be going," he said.
"Okay." She wiped the crumbs from her lap and stood up. She had not unbuttoned her jean jacket the entire time she had been in the café.
"Goodbye," Philip said out on the sidewalk. "Hope everything…you know…." He shrugged helplessly, and half turned to leave.
She was looking at him now, her face unstable with worry. When she spoke, her voice was so quiet it seemed to subtract more than it gave to the street noise: "Goodbye."
Philip had already taken a step when she called out behind him, "Wait!"
He turned and saw that the instability on her face had intensified to something like hysteria. "I can show you," she said, "how thank you I am. You want? We go someplace. I can. You know. Make you happy. I can make you happy for. You know. Thank you."
She took hold of his wrist with one hand and grabbed his fingertips with the other. She was smiling again. Not her dead smile, or not exactly. There was something both pathetic and malicious about it, and Philip could not bear to look at her.
"That's okay," he said. "That's not what I…. That's not why—"
He walked away without finishing his sentence.
Esme stood for a long while watching him disappear down the block. When at last she set off in the direction of Rosenberg Square, her step was lighter than it had been all day.
There was a lot of heavy sighing and head-scratching at our next Morning Council. Most of us thought that Esme and Philip's interaction at the café and, especially, out on the sidewalk had been an unmitigated disaster, and that when they ran into each other again, their embarrassment would be so extreme they would pass without talking, without even acknowledging they had seen each other. "Well, gentlemen," said Carmine, "perhaps the time has come to put this project in the box and move on to more productive ventures. Anyone want to second my motion?"
"Not at all," I said. (Gentian, I saw, agreed with me instantly.) "We wouldn't have had a prayer of success if Esme hadn't made her proposition and Philip rejected it. Now that he has, she's hooked. She'll be putty in our fingers."
"Hear, hear!" said Gentian.
"But what about Philip?" Carmine asked. "It strikes me that, from now on, his feelings about Esme are going to be decidedly less…"—Carmine looked out the window, as if searching for the missing word among the treetops and clouds—"…well, less sentimental."
"Trust me," I said. "There is absolutely no limit to Philip's sentimentality."
"Hear, hear!" said Gentian, and a couple of others.
"It's all a matter of circumstance," I said. "You'll see."
Philip's primary duty at the Browridge was to reconstruct musical instruments known only through references in ancient manuscripts or their depictions in art. He had recently begun working on an Amenhotep avian organ: a water-powered assemblage of bellows, ivory flutes, and music-box-style pronged copper cylinders said to have been owned by Pharaoh Amenhotep III in the fourteenth century BC, and reputedly capable of imitating the song of every bird on earth. Philip's reconstruction had been going exceptionally well until he discovered that half of all the birds that had existed at the time of Amenhotep were now extinct. In despair, he took to wandering the parks, hoping that if he listened attentively enough to the harsh voices of the winter birds—jays, crows, ravens—he might be able to intuit the multitudinous songs that had once poured from the avian organ, and thus divine how to sculpt the interiors of the elephant-tusk flutes and where to place the prongs on the copper cylinders.
Technically we were forbidden to bring extinct species back to life (or, for that matter, to undo any other committee's work), but that did not mean that we couldn't introduce variations. One afternoon, as Philip was walking beneath the lindens on Liberation Boulevard, we placed an emerald-throated hoopoe on a low and leafless limb, where it proceeded to emit a cascading fugue of trills, pops, tremolos, tweets, and plaintive cries that might have been the voice of the world's very first spring. In fact, there has never been any such bird as the emerald-throated hoopoe, nor is the metallic hooting of an actual hoopoe worth more than two seconds of attention, but, knowing none of this, the instant Philip heard the song, he stopped midstep, his mouth fell open, and his eyes goggled.
No sooner had the hoopoe attracted Philip's attention than—exactly as she had been trained (I had, in fact, spent weeks at our aviary training her myself)—she began to flit from tree to tree, then from lamppost to cornice to fire escape, leading Philip across Carbolic Avenue, down through Noontown to the Steppes, where she dove, midsong, straight under the front wheel of a truck. (We had no choice in this matter; nonexistent things—UFOs, ghosts—are only allowed fleeting passage through the actual.)
Philip, aghast, nauseated, was standing on the corner watching the wind-wakes of cars and buses suck zebra-striped, hamster-brown, and emerald feathers all down the block, when Esme, in almost an identical state of mind, came staggering toward him across Thirty-Seventh Avenue. She was so distraught that she did not even see him. He didn't quite see her either, registering only that someone familiar was at his side.
He touched her shoulder and pointed to the mound of gore and feathers in the middle of the road. "Look."
"What?" she said, absently, without even glancing where he was pointing.
Only once he realized that the remains of the hoopoe were indistinguishable from a squashed pigeon did Philip finally understand who was standing beside him.
Esme's blue eyes had gone so pale they seemed chips of arctic ice. Her face too was blue, but that blue which is really the midpoint between purple and gray. She was wearing only an open-necked, tropical-flora-pattered shirt. No jean jacket. Her shoulders were shaking. Her jaw was clamped shut so firmly that her chin was corrugated.
"You okay?" Philip asked, but she didn't hear him.
An hour later, they were sitting in a pub, each on a second pint of lager. The plate halfway between them was streaked by imperfectly mopped ketchup, and had three twig-black French fries resting on its rim. Esme wanted to tell Philip the story of her morning, but she was waiting for a sign that by making herself weak in front of him she would not be opening herself to more pain. The story she had to tell was of nothing but pain. What she did not know— and would, of course, never know—was that, grim as that story might have been, she was lucky to be able to tell it. She also didn't know that the mere fact of her sitting across from Philip was an indication of how radically the parameters of her existence had been recalibrated.
Up until the very instant she first encountered Philip on Sullivan Footbridge, she and her whole family had been under the management of a Fatal Con committee—that is, a committee charged with the perpetration of "permanent and/or fatal consequences." As a Mod Con committee—authorized to perpetrate only "modifiable consequences"—once we identified Esme as the perfect foil in the plot we were cooking up for Philip, we had had to petition Central Control for the right to take over her management. The substance of our petition was that the Fatal Con committee's plan for Esme was boring and utterly predictable. To our considerable surprise, the Central Control review officer entirely agreed. And so Esme had been spared a fate far worse than the events about which she wanted to tell Philip. There was one drawback, however: While we now had considerable leeway regarding the luck, bad breaks, and fateful moments we might prepare for Esme, we could do nothing whatsoever to alter the predictable and grim destiny that the Fatal Con committee had arranged for her family. This meant, of course, that we would always have to contend with powerful downward pressures on her overall level of happiness—and this, too, was a fact she would never know.
"Esme," said Philip. "I mean, maybe you don't…you know, want to say anything, but…"
This was enough of a sign for Esme, and so she started to speak.
Shortly before dawn, she told Philip, she had been awoken by a scratching at her apartment door, and had found her sister, Saskia, lying in the dark hallway, looking as if she had been turned inside out. Where Saskia's eye ought to have been, there was a creased purple mound the size of her fist. Her mouth was a pulp of split flesh and blood. Her teeth were jagged stumps and impossible absences. The whole front of her coat and her dress beneath were black with blood. But what most disturbed Esme was the expressionless flaccidity of Saskia's face. Her hands lay on the floor like wax models of hands. Her chest neither rose nor fell.
"Saskia!" Esme cried. "Saskia!"
Nothing. Esme might as well have been shouting at a photograph of her sister. Only when she picked up one of those limp, cold hands, and then— in horror—let it drop did a low moan arise from Saskia's chest.
Esme went back into the apartment, and returned with a bottle of vodka, a few droplets of which she poured into a corner of Saskia's mouth. Another moan. A clicking of the tongue. After a few more drops, Saskia opened her one good eye. After a mouthful, she was able to sit up and, with Esme's help, stagger to her bed.
As Esme gingerly dabbed her sister's wounds with a warm washcloth, she asked questions that Saskia answered in gasps. Who had beaten her? "Boyfriend." Why? "Angry." Why was he angry? "Leave me alone!" Do you want to go to the hospital? "No." Are you sure? "Yes. Sleep…. Want sleep." The police, of course, were out of the question, but when Esme brought up their cousin, James, who knew people who could teach the boyfriend a lesson, Saskia's response came as a ragged hiss: "No! Leave me alone! Sleep. Just let me sleep."
After that, Saskia wouldn't talk.
When, at last, she had fallen into slumber, Esme sat at the end of her bed, washcloth balled up in her hand, feeling nothing at all. The world had suddenly become a place where feelings served no purpose, or rather where the actions her feelings would inspire were impossible, senseless, terrifying. So she turned off.
Time passed.
The light around the window curtains went from ash-gray to smoke-yellow.
There was a sigh so small it might have come from a sparrow.
Esme's mother was sitting up in her bed, her eyes wobbly with bewilderment.
"Oh, Mama," said Esme, getting up from Saskia's bed and walking over to her mother's. "Oh Mama, Mama, Mama." She put her head on her mother's soft shoulder. She wrapped her arms around her mother's huge, warm body and squeezed. "Oh, Mama, what are we going to do?"
Her mother remained silent, and was exactly as responsive to Esme's hugs and caresses as an armchair.
Esme pulled back. A fixity had come into her mother's gaze that made her look blind. Esme took her mother's hands. "What are we going to do, Mama?"
The eyes twitched and met her gaze.
"What are you talking about?" her mother said.
"Have you seen Saskia?"
"Yes." The older woman's eyes shifted away from Esme's, and it was a long time before she said, "My heart is breaking."
"Oh, Mama!" Esme threw her arms around her mother's shoulders, but the older woman pushed her away.
"No," she said softly. And then, in a firmer voice: "We have to be strong."
Esme lowered her hands into her own lap. "What are we going to do?"
"Stop saying that," said her mother.
"We have to do something! We can't just go on like this!"
"Stop, I said. There's no point."
"But look at what's happened to Saskia!"
Her mother turned her gaze to her younger daughter's swollen, bloody face, and then she turned back to Esme.
"You disgust me," she said in a low voice.
Esme could not make sense of what she had heard. "What?" she said.
"You're disgusting!"
"Mama! Why are you saying that?"
"How dare you think you're superior to your sister!" There was a cruelty in her mother's expression that was halfway to joy. "You would have starved if it wasn't for her. It's because of you that this happened!"
Esme both knew and didn't know what her mother was saying, and so she couldn't speak.
The joylike cruelty intensified, becoming a sort of light: brilliant, piercing, cold.
Esme's mother was shouting now. "Your sister did everything she could to help us. But what have you done? Tell me! Have you done anything? Have you? And what are you going to do now? Are you just going to let us starve! Do you think you're so precious? Do you think you're a saint because you don't have the guts to do what your sister did?"
Esme didn't respond. A white cloud had descended upon her, erasing most of the room. A ringing hum filled her ears. Her whole body shook, but she couldn't stand. She couldn't even move her hands.
Her mother opened her mouth as if to speak, but then a groaning wail rose from deep within her chest, and she swept her crutch across the top of her dresser, sending bottles, brushes, and a porcelain egg crashing to the floor.
That egg had been the solitary decorative object the family had brought from their old country. It was a bowl, really, the top half of which was a lid, filigreed in autumn-colored vines and leaves. As a little girl, Esme had imagined that the egg had been laid by a firebird. She would make a nest for the egg on a pillow, and then make another nest inside the egg, on which she would place a tiny plastic chicken that she had painted yellow and orange. When they had first come to this country, her mother had used the egg to store a garnet necklace and earrings. But her jewelry was long gone. When the egg shattered, it spilled only a paperclip, a rubber band, and a black marble onto the floorboards.
Esme's mother nudged the largest shard with her crutch, then looked her daughter defiantly in the eye, as if to say, "There! See what I can do!"
When Esme still didn't respond, her mother wedged her crutch against the wall, and—her face clenched in fury—sent her dresser toppling to the floor. She lunged out of the bed and careened about the room, knocking over chairs, the table, ripping pictures off the wall (prints of Jesus, the Virgin, a photograph of a roofless cathedral), heaving a stack of dishes from the sink, and sweeping an oil-filled skillet off the stove—wailing with every destructive act as if she were falling, again and again, from an immense height.
Esme sat mute and half blind, with ringing ears, still clutching the balled-up washcloth.
Saskia was speaking.
Saskia was sitting up in her bed, hissing between broken lips and teeth.
"You bitch!" she said. "You crazy bitch! You fucking crazy bitch!"
Blood dripped down her chin, onto her chest. Droplets sprayed from her lips to the bedclothes and floor.
"Is then I know I have to go," Esme told Philip over to top of her pint. "If I stay, something terrible happen. Terrible, terrible. I have to go. I never go back. I die first."
Philip made a bed for Esme on the couch in his living room, and she fell asleep immediately, even though it was only eight in the evening. In the middle of the night, he heard what he thought was the click of his front door being opened, and came out to find Esme in her underpants and tropical shirt, standing in front of his coffee table, a horrified expression on her face.
"You okay?" he said.
She didn't answer until she had picked up her pants from the floor and put them on. He was only in his boxer shorts. "I am fine," she said, but still looked so frightened he didn't dare move.
"You sure?"
"Yes." She buckled her belt. "Maybe I am hungry."
"Of course," he said. "All you've had are French fries."
Philip crossed his living room gingerly, as if Esme were a wild animal that had mysteriously appeared in his apartment. He turned on the light in his closet-sized kitchen, and opened the refrigerator, cupboards, and drawers. "Help yourself to anything," he said. "Would you like some fruit? Cereal? Should I make you some eggs?"
"No. Is all right."
She no longer seemed frightened, but her expression was sullen, wary.
"Okay," he said, backing a half step out of the room. "Just ask if you need anything."
She glanced in the direction of his boxer shorts, then averted her eyes. In a toneless voice, she said, "Thank you."
Philip returned to his bedroom but did not fall back asleep for more than an hour—until he had heard the zip of her pants, followed by the squeak of the couch springs and the muttery flutter of the covers.
He would never figure out what that locklike click had been (her belt buckle striking his wooden coffee table as she groped in the dark for her pants), but when he woke in the morning she was still asleep, her lips pressed against the pillow, partly open, glossy with saliva, her eyes closed as delicately as one snowflake resting upon another.
For a long time he stood just watching her—his life no longer making sense to him, in ways that were equal parts wonderful and unsettling.
She was still asleep when he was ready for work. He left her a note on the coffee table, giving her his cell phone number, and telling her when he would be home. He surveyed his apartment as he stood in the doorway. The only possessions he would hate to have stolen were his laptop and iPod, and these were both in his briefcase. He pulled the door shut and descended the stairs.
She didn't call. When he phoned around ten, she didn't answer. He decided to go back home during lunch, and shopped along the way as an excuse. Entering the apartment, he found her bolt-upright on the couch, watching him as if she were only waiting for him to turn his back so she could jump him.
The apartment smelled of chlorine.
He went into the kitchen to unpack the groceries, and found his breakfast dishes gleaming in the drainer. The sinks, countertops, and floor were cleaner than they had ever been during the five years he had lived in the apartment. The same was true of the bathroom. He also found that his bed had been made with new sheets, and that the living room had been straightened out, dusted, and swept.
"Thank you," he said.
"Is nothing," she answered, seeming vaguely annoyed.
When it was time for him to head back to work, he told her, "I'm sorry that I don't have a spare key. If you need to go out, I'll be back at six and can let you in."
"That okay. I am happy here." She smiled, but without looking at him, as if her happiness embarrassed her.
That night, he made her a Greek-style chicken stew, with lemon, feta, and spinach. They shared a bottle of wine, and he asked her a little about her country, and about what she thought of this one ("Is okay. Maybe people not so friendly.").
About halfway through the meal, she started to eat like a condemned prisoner again. "You don't have to worry," he said. "I don't want anything from you. I just want you to have somewhere to stay until you can find your own place."
She looked at him as if she didn't believe a word. "I am not worry."
The following night they ordered in pizza and ate it side by side on the couch, watching television. They hardly spoke, but when they did, he found that he had come to like the complexity of her vowels and the handsaw rhythms of her speech. Her eyes were the blue of a winter sky at dusk.
Bedtime. The TV a black rectangle.
He helped her spread her blankets and sheets.
That done, he stood at her side in front of the couch. Her head was bent and turned slightly away, as if she were examining the pillow she had just placed against the couch arm.
She had put up her hair while watching TV, keeping it in place with a balsa wood chopstick she had found in his drawer. The fine hairs at the base of her neck made a golden fog. Her ears were swirls of pink with modest, plump lobes. Her cheeks were faintly freckled, lightly downed, and seemed as if they would be as soft to the touch as flowing air.
Entirely without intending to, he drew the backs of his index and middle fingers lightly across her cheek. But instead of lurching away, she pressed into his touch with a just-audible moan. Then she was looking into his eyes, and an instant later he was kissing her. Not long afterward they walked, together, into his room.
When he woke in the morning, he could hear her in the kitchen singing softly in her own language. When he stepped out of the bathroom, she met him at the door with a mug of steaming coffee.
The following morning, he woke to find her still asleep, her pelvis against his belly, his lips beside her cheek. He lay still, listening to the slow susurrus of her sleepy breathing, feeling the warmth of her body, remembering how she had pulled him deeper into her as she reached her orgasm, and how she had whimpered into his ear.
That night they went out for dinner at an Italian restaurant, and when they returned home, before they had made love, before they had even begun to kiss, she said, "I never know man like you."
"You good man. I never know good man like you."
Some hours later, he reached into the drawer of his bedside table. "Hold out your hand," he said.
"Why?" Her smile alternated between uneasiness and delight.
She held out her hand, fingers cupped, and he covered her palm with his own.
When he drew his hand away, the brass ring lay at the center of her palm. "There," he said, folding her fingers over the ring. "For your love."
We are professionals, so we didn't pop any champagne corks until the lab work came back confirming that Philip's and Esme's oxytocin, dopamine, and adrenaline levels were sufficiently elevated to qualify them, according to the Schacter-McPhee Eroto-Amorosity Quotient, as "in love." Esme's 36.733 quotient actually placed her love in the "passionate" category, while Philip's 27.008 only earned him a solid "monogamistic" ranking.
None of us were surprised by these results. Over the month that Philip and Esme had been living together, they had engaged in all the usual behaviors: bashful grins across the breakfast table; shower lovemaking; randomly occurring gasps, sighs, and moans. And, of course, we had tested them both: reversing street signs so that Esme kept turning left instead of right, and thus arrived forty-five minutes late at the restaurant where Philip was waiting; bombarding Philip with subliminal messages that caused him to constantly call Esme "Jenny," the name of his college girlfriend. But nothing we did inspired more than fleeting incidences of disconcertion. Philip and Esme were both clearly happier than they had ever been. He said as much. She had an aversion to acknowledging the good in her life, but the smile with which she dismissed his proclamation made her true feelings obvious.
The night we got the SMEAQ results, we convened at an Asian fusion restaurant to celebrate, and, indeed, did share several bottles of champagne. The truth is, however, that our celebration was more ritualistic than heartfelt. Our labors on this project had succeeded well beyond any reasonable expectation, and we all knew that our next assignment—an ordinary suburban adultery case: soccer mom, soccer coach; quick kiss behind a dugout, followed by years of shame—was not likely to be remotely as rewarding.
We were well into our fourth bottle, and all beginning to show the effects, when Gentian leaned back in his seat, crossed his arms, and shook his head. "I don't know," he said ruefully.
Everyone stopped talking and turned his way.
"The more I think about it," he continued, "the more I think we weren't so successful after all. Or perhaps we were too successful. I mean, haven't we just wound up on a bunch of clichés—love conquers all, the reward of the virtuous, happily ever after? Doesn't that all seem woefully beneath us?"
Flax nodded, and was about to speak when I cut him off.
"I beg to differ," I said. "This relationship could hardly be more unstable. Esme is entirely dependent on Philip—not just emotionally, but for immigration, and for the sake of her mother and sister. She's keeping all that to herself, of course, but that's what she has to be thinking; we all know how her mind works. Whereas Philip has the luxury of believing in the purity of their love—which is to say he hardly needs her at all. And on top of that, they don't even speak the same language! So their love is still—what? Sixty, seventy percent fantasy? Absolutely anything could happen. This situation is just exploding with potential."
"So what are you suggesting?" Gentian asked with a mischievous squint.
"What else?" I said. "Don't you think it would be a good idea to teach Philip a lesson on the limits of his own virtue?"
"You mean," Photius asked, "that we introduce him to that girl in public relations after all?"
That girl—Margaret was her name—was Philip's spiritual doppelgänger: a failed musician, happiest as a sensitive sufferer among sensitive sufferers, possessed of a sexual history characterized exclusively by disappointment. She had been scheduled to be the great love of Philip's life before we decided to make things interesting by bringing him face to face with Esme on the Sullivan Footbridge.
"As it happens," Gentian said, speaking slowly, savoring the implications of his words, "she is on the guest list for the Imaginary Instruments opening."
An excited murmur rose all around the table.
I called for a resolution. It passed unanimously on the first vote.
Stephen O'Connor is the author of two collections of short fiction, Here Comes Another Lesson and Rescue.
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2014 Fiction Issue 7 Issue 7 Fiction Stephen O'Connor
Con 04.04.2014
Podcast: Mary O'Donoghue on "Safety Advice for Staying Indoors"
MARY O'DONOGHUE
Mary O'Donoghue speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story "Safety Advice for Staying Indoors," which appears in The Common's fall issue. Mary talks about crafting a story that explores two points of view within the same Irish family, both stuck inside during a strong storm, both coping with loss. She also discusses her work translating Irish-language poets, her interest in stories that require the reader to connect their own dots, and what it's like to edit fiction for AGNI while writing her own short stories, too.
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The night Barack Obama was elected president, Roger Sinclair and his family gathered in his living room to watch the results come in. And there Roger—lifelong Democrat, city councilman, local party chair—drank a bottle of Merlot and elbowed his granddaughter Emily in the cheek.
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JANE MCCAFFERTY
Ah, last day of the semester. The professor goes on a long walk into the winter woods near the Highland Park Reservoir, her pale face chapped with cold. She's had one glass of wine. OK two and a half. It's perfect out here! The sky looks pink, sweet and pillowy.