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Five Possible Ways to Kill a StateNeal Ascherson
Vol. 33 No. 24 · 15 December 2011
Five Possible Ways to Kill a State
Neal Ascherson
Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe
by Norman Davies.
Allen Lane, 830 pp., £30, October 2011, 978 1 84614 338 0Show More
'Don't you come that stuff, Jim Garland. We always were English and we'll always be English, and it's just because we are English that we're sticking up for our right to be Burgundians!' Those were famous lines, from a half-forgotten film made in a vanished kingdom. The Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico was shown in 1949, in a battered, dirty, rationed Britain which was nonetheless confident that the old United Kingdom had a happy and glorious future. Why, the war had just shown that Britain was invincible, with a little help from Uncle Joe and the Yanks. And indestructible, for all the Luftwaffe's efforts. Unlike some other ropey foreign places which had vanished or come to bits under the strain.
In the movie, a bomb unearths a long-buried charter revealing that the London district of Pimlico was detached from England in medieval times and ceded to the Duchy of Burgundy. The locals (Pimlico was a shabby, ungentrified place in those days) decide to take the charter at its word. They barricade their streets into a foreign enclave, where everything is off-ration and Tube trains jerk to a halt for Burgundian customs inspections. But it's too good to last. Black marketeers and spivs flood into Pimlico, and the British government places the enclave under siege. The last straw is moral, when the new Burgundians are accused of lack of patriotism and disloyalty to England. Then something snaps. 'Don't you come that stuff!'
On the face of it, this film is about a revolt against the restrictions of postwar Britain. But to read Norman Davies's new book is to see many other ideas, some conscious and others perhaps unrecognised by the scriptwriters, stamped on the pages of Passport to Pimlico. Burgundy, as it happens, is one of the vanished kingdoms he visits. England is not, and yet reflections on the nature of political Englishness and the increasing frailty of the British state recur in chapter after chapter, from 'Alt Clud' (the post-Roman kingdom of Strathclyde) through 'Rosenau' (the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty) to 'Eire'. Back in 1949, it was still possible to talk about 'English' virtues – in this case, a defiant and imaginative spirit of independence – without nervously vacuum-packing them as 'British'. Those fictional Pimliconians understood themselves as part of a nation they knew as England. And that was an understanding which allowed them to grasp the difference between nation and state, and to rebel fearlessly against a government whose 'Britishness' was part of its distance from ordinary people. Might it not be more English to become 'foreign' rather than to accept stupid regulations made in Whitehall?
As a historian, Davies made his name with studies of Eastern and Central Europe, Poland in particular. Especially during the Cold War, he grew aware of the ignorance and condescension of 'the West' about the nations and polities east of the strategic divide. To his very great honour, he confronted a lazy, established historiography which had come to assume that Europe's navel had always been located in Strasbourg or Frankfurt, and – not quite single-handed – shifted that centre to somewhere between Prague and Kraków. The same experiences taught him how effectively powerful and stable states can bury the past of less fortunate kingdoms, empires and republics. The general sense of Vanished Kingdoms is that all 'earth's proud empires pass away', as the hymn has it, and that the greatest principality is no more than an artefact with its ultimate decay built into it. But some states are much less aware of transience than others. 'Imperial nations, and ex-imperial nations, are particularly reluctant to recognise how quickly reality moves on.'
He cites the case of Britain. 'Having led a charmed life in the mid-20th century, and having held out against the odds in our "Finest Hour", the British risk falling into a state of self-delusion which tells them that their institutions are above compare, that their country is somehow eternal.' The English 'in particular are blissfully unaware that the disintegration of the United Kingdom began in 1922, and will probably continue'. Davies is right to notice the distinction between countries which assume themselves to be immortal and others, smaller and weaker, with a sense of their own mortality. That's not just a matter of statehood. There are nations which can envisage their own cultural extinction: a Czech or Welsh novelist, or an Estonian poet, can imagine an approaching century when nobody in the world will still speak Czech or Welsh or Estonian. But other, more firmly founded, bossier nations simply can't make that imaginative leap. Here, too, Passport to Pimlico has resonance. Those ingenious cockneys are so confident of their 'eternal' English identity that they can declare themselves politically Burgundian without the slightest fear that anything fundamental will change. Vanished Kingdoms returns to Europe's past and shows how mistaken that sort of confidence has often been.
A mixture of motives propelled Davies into writing this huge book. One, as he says, was the suddenness of the Soviet Union's collapse. Although he had studied and written about the place for years, he was as surprised as anyone else. What, he wondered, were the causes of 'state death', and could some sort of aetiology of its symptoms be built up by a fresh look at European history? Another motive, he admits, was his own mulish inclination to walk in the opposite direction to the crowd. 'When a few events in the past are remembered pervasively, to the exclusion of equally deserving subjects, there is a need for determined explorers to stray from the beaten track and to recover some of the less fashionable memory sites.' In other words, a duty to be inquisitive. He uses the metaphor of dodos and dinosaurs, whose study builds up 'a true picture both of our planet's condition and of its prospects. The present exploration of a selection of extinct realms has been pursued with a similar sense of curiosity.'
Not all his realms are in fact extinct. Estonia and the Irish Republic have risen from the grave, while the empires which once entombed them have fallen apart. Beyond that experience of obliteration, temporary or final, Davies's chosen places may seem at first sight to have little in common. Their dates range from the Roman period to the 20th century. Some, like Byzantium, endured for a thousand years, while Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia's independence lasted for less than two days. Some were gigantic in expanse, like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was a microstate. Some were genuine kingdoms for all or part of their life; some were pretend kingdoms effectively run from somewhere else, and some were duchies, 'grand' or less grand. One or two were or became republics. Quite a few of them stumbled through all those forms in turn before expiring. Almost all of them, from Tolosa (the Visigoth kingdom north of the Pyrenees) to 'CCCP' (Davies's jokey way of referring to the Soviet Union, in a chapter which is almost exclusively about Estonia), are shown to be memorable. The Davies technique is to divide each chapter into three: a lively journal of his own explorations in the territory where the 'realm' once existed; an account of its historic rise and fall; finally, a summing-up of what memories survive and – most often – of how the truth about the past has been buried under lies and silences. And from that method emerges another factor which does connect most of the 'vanished kingdoms'. In the second millennium they usually fell victim to the empires: Prussian-German, Russian, Ottoman, Habsburg and French.
Davies is often described as a Polonophile. This is only partly true. He certainly shares some traditional Polish attitudes and one of them, as this book constantly shows, is an absolute mistrust of Russia past, present and future. Why not? Politicians who lack that mistrust can be found but are better avoided. All the same, his attributing of the worst possible motives to all Russian actions for the past five centuries can grow monotonous. It's misleading, too. Davies is often critical of Poland and Polish behaviour, and there's a better way to describe his link with that country. He is a Jagiellonian.
That refers to the great polity which arose from the marriage in 1385 of Jogaila, the pagan Grand Duke of Lithuania, to the Christian princess Jadwiga, heiress to the Kingdom of Poland. Like the convergence of England and Scotland, but more slowly, this union of crowns developed into a royal and parliamentary union in which each partner – kingdom and grand duchy – kept much of its identity. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth dominated East-Central Europe for four centuries, from the Baltic almost to the shores of the Black Sea, from the Oder in the west almost to Smolensk in modern Russia. The jealous imperial neighbours, Russia, Prussia and the Habsburg Empire, tore it to pieces and partitioned it at the end of the 18th century.
The Jagiellonian realm was a pre-modern state. Fussy-minded historians used to call it 'ramshackle'; it's better called 'dispersed', and that's what attracts Davies. It contained Balts and Slavs of many varieties, Germans, Jews, Armenians, some Tatars and even some Scots. Their religions might be Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Calvinist, Lutheran, Jewish or Muslim. But, with lapses, they got on with one another, perhaps because little was required of them beyond loyalty to the king and grand duke. The commonwealth's boundaries were fluid; its constitution (kings elected by acclamation, parliament subject to the veto of a single member) was a controlled chaos. To its swarming nobility, it felt like a sort of democracy – 'golden freedom'.
The shadow which darkened over the commonwealth is the same shadow which hung over several other 'vanished kingdoms' in the book: the rise of 'modern' despotism. Either side of Poland-Lithuania, grim, authoritarian, centralised states, culturally backward compared to the commonwealth but obsessed with their vast armies, began to drill their subjects. For their kings and emperors, diversity and toleration were contagious diseases to be stamped out. They cauterised the Jagiellonian spirit in their own times, and their successors – Hitler and Stalin – completed the job.
Davies visited the town of Ustrzyki Dolne, once part of the multinational province of Galicia (the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, in Austro-Hungarian times). Its Poles were deported to Siberia by the Soviet invaders after 1939; its German minority was removed and sent heim ins Reich to the annexed Pozna´n region; its Jews, once the town's majority, were murdered at Sobibór in 1942; the local Ruthenian Lemko population was rounded up and expelled after the war by Polish Communist forces. Ustrzyki became a ghost town. But the ghosts, wandering among ruined synagogues, charred wooden churches and weed-hidden Catholic graves, had Jagiellonian features.
Few people, even in Poland, remember Galicia. Even fewer remember Carpatho-Ukraine, capital Khust, which in March 1939 experienced three regimes in 36 hours: a Czechoslovak region (Podkarpatsko) until breakfast time, an independent republic proclaimed later that morning, invasion and occupation by Hungary the following afternoon. But here, before the reader has a chance to start a patronising smile, Davies attacks the forming thought. Ruritanian? 'A squabbling mix of obscure ethnic groups; a mass of near unpronounceable names in unfamiliar languages; a brew of "fanatical nationalisms", and a tragi-comic outcome for which the Ruritanians alone need be blamed?' This is typical of the way Western intellectuals think about Eastern Europe, Davies says: 'a widespread, but often unspoken assumption about Western superiority'. He is particularly annoyed by the late John Plamenatz, who contrasted 'the healthy "civic nationalism" of Western countries with the supposedly unhealthy nationalism of their Eastern counterparts'. Annoyed not least because Professor Plamenatz of All Souls was actually a Montenegrin. Given the fate of his own tiny country after the First World War, Davies thinks he should have grasped sooner than anyone the way great powers push small nations aside – and then invite the world to dismiss their victims as backward and comical. He uses most of a chapter ('Tsernagora') to explain how the Versailles diplomats allowed Montenegro to be gagged and bundled into Serbia, and then into the new Yugoslavia, for the next 87 years.
As a writer, Davies's attraction is that he gives us the music of the past, and not just the narrative libretto. That became clear in God's Playground (1981), the two-volume history of Poland which was his first major work; stanzas of poetry and verses of song helped his complicated story forward. Vanished Kingdoms uses the same tactic much more liberally. Just as pages of dynastic marriages and tortuous feudal relationships begin to grow dull, the music brings relief. His 'Aragon' chapter, which contains some heavy going of that kind, gives the reader a break with – among dozens of other quotations – beautiful troubadour verses in Occitan, a gorgeous description of the coronation of Alfonso el Benigno from the 14th-century Chronicle of Muntaner, the Andorran national song, the Chanson de Roland, the Catalan 'Els Segadors' and the Barcelona anti-Franco hymn 'L'Estaca' (given in Polish, because it somehow became a Solidarity anthem in 1980). His 'Tsernagora' section includes a solemn ode to King Nikola of Montenegro by none other than Don Marquis, author of Archy and Mehitabel. (How on earth did he come across that?)
And Davies is always willing to stop to pick up a promising hitchhiker. It was worth giving a lift to Theodoric II, King of the Visigoths, if only for the sake of his inch by inch physical description by the yearning bishop Sidonius Apollinaris: 'The nose is finely aquiline, the lips are thin and not unduly enlarged … Every day the hair springing from his nostrils is cut back.' Nor will the reader regret giving a lift to Count Wilfred the Hairy, and certainly not to Leopold Weiss, born a Galician Jew, who went to Palestine as a Zionist, converted to Islam, moved to Saudi Arabia and ended up as Pakistan's first ambassador to the United Nations. Nor to Jacques-François de Menou, Napoleon's butcher of the Vendée, who also became a Muslim and then governor-general of Tuscany, and his crony General Radet, who kidnapped the pope.
Davies also has a cunning habit of slipping into big palaces by a small side door. You see more that way. In 'CCCP', the story of tiny Estonia sets out to be more eloquent about the realities of the Soviet Union than a full-frontal treatment. 'Etruria', the tale of the erratic little kingdom set up in Tuscany by Napoleon, reveals more vividly than anything I have read how staggeringly transgressive and imaginative the Bonaparte dominion over Europe really was. In only 12 years, this bunch of Corsican siblings deleted millennia of history, invented gaudy principalities from Warsaw to Madrid, crowned themselves as kings and dukes and generally played the continent like a nation-building computer game ('Civilisation 6'?). If it hadn't been for the oceans of blood they spilled, Europe would never have been able to take itself seriously again.
A third example is 'Rosenau', the chapter on Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and its dynasty, which gradually turns out to be a way of talking about Britain and its Windsors. Here Davies grows irritable. Pretence about the past annoys him, and he uses most of a page to list more than fifty titled German families, double or triple-barrelled, to whom the royals are more closely connected than to any Plantagenets or Stuarts. 'Most of their subjects do not know that Lady Diana Spencer (1961-97) was the very first person of primarily English descent who ever came near the British throne in the whole of its 300-year history.'
His view, anyway, is that old 'Ukania' is rapidly veering towards history's landfill. 'That the United Kingdom will collapse is a foregone conclusion … Only the "how" and the "when" are mysteries of the future.' He goes on to quote from 'an exhaustive study of the many pillars on which British power and prestige were built … [which] indicated that all without exception were in decline; some were already defunct, others seriously diminished or debilitated; it suggests that the last act may come sooner rather than later.' That 'study' turns out to be his own earlier book The Isles: A History (1996). He has clearly held this opinion for some time, but events in the intervening 15 years have only hardened it.
In an essay titled 'Will-o'-the-Wisps of the Dead', Andrzej Stasiuk – who comes from what was once Galicia – writes about nostalgia. Unusually, it's not the small, drowned kingdoms Stasiuk misses but the Austro-Hungarian Empire which once enclosed them. 'Who knows if the fondness for those times … doesn't arise out of nostalgia for a period in which a person's own individual identity was, quite naturally, a part of a larger universal reality?' He goes on to suggest that the empire, with all its imperfections, may one day be seen as the prototype of a united Europe.
Nobody could charge Davies with that sort of sentiment. The Austrians, as he repeats, were much less brutal to their conquests than the Prussians or the Russians. The horrific atrocities that took place in 19th-century Galicia after the partitions were wreaked not by foreign tyrannies but by its inhabitants on one another. But he has no soft-focus regrets for the Danubian monarchy. All empires, like all states, have to die; what matters is that justice be done to them by historians, and the reasons for their death disentangled from the lies of posterity.
Playing the academic coroner, Davies lays out some 'scientific' categories of state death. The older binary division – voluntary or involuntary extinction – is hopelessly crude, as his book demonstrates. Instead, he suggests at least five possible 'mechanisms'. These are implosion, conquest, merger, liquidation and 'infant mortality'. The Soviet Union imploded, and so – less obviously – did Austria-Hungary. Conquest, much the most frequent cause of death, did for Tolosa, Burgundy, the Byzantine Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Prussia. Merger with other polities brought an end to Aragon, which became part of Spain, and to Savoy, dissolved into France and Italy, but not all mergers have been total (witness England and Scotland after 1707). Liquidation is another slippery category. Davies suggests that it's 'a concept well understood in company law; and there is no good reason why it should not be applied by analogy to the particular circumstances in which a state entity or "political company" is deliberately suppressed.' But, as he says, some liquidations are more consensual than others. The Velvet Divorce which wound up Czechoslovakia in 1993 was consensual, at least among the politicians: nobody asked the people whether they wanted it until well afterwards. The dummy Grand National Assembly which consented to Montenegro's liquidation in 1918 did not represent the population, cowed by Serbian thuggery. There were referenda to legitimise the liquidation of the Baltic states by the Soviet Union in 1940, but they were mere exercises in police terror and fraud.
Then there is infant mortality. Some polities are stillborn, without developed organs, like Carpatho-Ukraine. Others die as soon as parental nourishment is withdrawn: Davies points to the kingdom of Etruria and all the other Napoleonic creations. Some are strangled soon after birth, like the range of independent republics around Russia – Ukraine, Belarus, the nations of the Caucasus – which arose during the Civil War and survived until the victorious Bolsheviks turned their bayonets towards them. The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, in contrast, never really existed even as an embryo. Its institutions amounted to little more than a handsome cut-flower arrangement by a conqueror, lacking the power of decision or movement on their own.
States have to die, then, but the truth about them and their subjects does not have to share their graves. One of the strengths of Vanished Kingdoms is the author's awareness that 'state death' is just that; human life carries vigorously on under the walls of the fallen city, endlessly adapting. Physical genes survive intact, but cultural genes mutate under pressure. 'The capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated. In reality … a stationary population, if subjected to a changed linguistic and cultural environment, can quite easily be persuaded to follow suit.' (The Picts seem to vanish suddenly from history, as if exterminated by the Dalriadan Scots. In reality, the Picts probably survived by abandoning their language and their culture, and learning to speak Gaelic in public places.) So there is no teleology in this book, no advance to higher, better statehoods. In Europe's past and present, as in the rest of the world, everything flows but nothing is washed away without trace.
Neal Ascherson's The Death of the Fronsac, his first novel, came out in 2017. He was for many years a foreign correspondent for the Observer and wrote scripts for the documentary series Cold War and The World at War.
Imperial Narcotic
White Sheep at Rest: After Culloden
Scribbles in a Storm: Who needs a constitution?
More by Neal Ascherson
Vol. 34 No. 2 · 26 January 2012
I'm not sure why Neal Ascherson calls Jacques-François de Menou 'Napoleon's butcher of the Vendée', which suggests that Napoleon was somehow responsible for Menou's actions there (LRB, 15 December 2011). In 1793-94, when the worst of the fighting and repression was taking place in the west of France (mostly overseen by Carrier and Turreau), Napoleon was down on the Mediterranean coast, first as a mere captain of artillery, then as an artillery commander at the siege of Toulon. He remained on the Franco-Italian front until the spring of 1795, when he was ordered to take command of the artillery of the Army of the West in the Vendée. Given his special interest in, and knowledge of, the Franco-Italian front, he regarded this as ridiculous, refused to go, and went on sick leave. It wasn't until the revolt of Vendémiaire in Paris that Bonaparte 'overtook' Menou, but he still wasn't a prominent figure. Paul Thiébault describes going to the Convention and asking for Menou, whom he took to be the commander. '"Menou?" they replied. "Mercy of God! That traitor is no longer commanding us. Barras is our general-in-chief, and Bonaparte is his second." "Bonaparte?" I said to myself. "Who the devil is that?"' Napoleon wasn't always in charge of everything.
Martin Boycott-Brown


A week ago we have reported about the launch of Coinbase Ventures, whose goal is to help the most compelling companies to flourish. Its focus is on building strong relationships and helping to spur on the development of the ecosystem. It has emerged that Coinbase is going to buy the open source, decentralized application and wallet, Cipher Browser.
Cipher Browser is the full-featured mobile dapp browser and wallet for the Ethereum blockchain, which allows users to interact with dapps powered by Ethereum on mobile devices, and makes it easy to securely store, send and receive Ether and ERC20 tokens.
Both companies are committed to building the best Web 3 experience on mobile, as the Cipher Browser stated.
Previously we have reported that Coinbase announced that in the coming months it will provide its users with the opportunity to withdraw coins that appeared as a result of the forks of the Bitcoin network.


1. Prof. Nnamdi Tobechukwu Ekeanyanwu: National Coordinator/President; Department of Communication Arts, University of Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, NIGERIA.
2. Dr. Abdullahi S. Bashir: Deputy National Coordinator;Head, Department of Mass Communication, Modibbo Adama University of Technology, Adamawa.


I decided to take your suggestion #3 and start with a clean machine. I have a second computer from which I removed all smarthome related software using Add/Remove. I also deleted all instances of SDM3.exe. I am also using a different PLC (2814U) on this computer. I installed houselink and then the utility. At this point houselinc and the utility show up in Add/Remove, but there is no Device Manager listed. The SDM3.exe is located in C:Program FilesSmartLabsHouseLinc Desktop. This is the default location installed by houselinc.
But at this point the utility runs fine. On my main machine the Device Manager shows up in Add/Remove, it does not show up now. Do I also have to install the SDM308 separately for it to show up in Add/Remove, and if so what location. The default is C:Program FilesCommon FilesSmarthomeDevice Manager, which is different from what Houselinc did above.
So far, I only have only installed houselinc and the utility on this computer with the above results. Any other suggestions ?


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text:
Backstreet Boys' kids and wives star in adorable 'No Place' music video
Carly Mallenbaum
If the Backstreet Boys are going to release a new music video without side-by-side dancing, there'd better be a good reason.
Phew, there's a very good reason.
In the Boys' new video for "No Place," off the forthcoming album "DNA," the man-band is showing of their Backstreet Broods.
As Kevin Richardson told USA TODAY, "That's a song that we were inspired by our families and children to make. … I've been all around the world, done all there is to do, but there's no place like home."
What that means for BSB fans is glossy video footage of each member's wife and kids. Richardson dances with his wife on a sunny hike. Nick Carter goes swimming with his baby boy. Brian Litrell plays basketball with his mini-me. Howie Dorough watches his kids on the swing set. And A.J. McLean does ballet with his pink-clad daughters, one of whom demands "Again. Again," after he asks whether she likes the song "No Place."
It's sweet.
Of course, the video still has that boy-band corniness we know and love: The guys would never skimp on dramatic lip-synching to camera.
More:Exclusive: Backstreet Boys are back with new album 'DNA,' single and world tour

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Martin, along with other 'Grey's Anatomy' cast and crew, took on the Tough Mudder 2016 challenge in L.A. this Sunday April 17th. Team Grey's Anatomy represented and raised funds for My friend's Place, an organization that helps and inspires homeless youth in L.A.
Martin and 'Grey's Anatomy' cast mate Giacomo Gianniotti at the finish line. Image from Martin's official Instagram.
See photos and an in-depth interview with Martin in the April/May 2016 issue of Da Man magazine.


Libby Purves is able to put her finger on the nub of what makes sailing so enjoyable, so amusing and so exasperating. Re-printed here are the pick of her highly entertaining Yachting Monthly column. 90 pages. PB.


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The ghost of Adina Astra's lover is the sole motivation for Astra heading to the Forest and thus enacting the events of Lost Constellation in the first place.
Adina was traveling to the Frozen Lake in order to have a chance to see the ghost of her lover. As Adina travels on the icy surface, the ghost appears right behind her, completely invisible barring their reflection. Adina is pleased to hear the voice of them, and they talk, as the ghost reveals that the Ghost Star does indeed exist, as part of the "Lost Constellation", which Adina gets to witness. Eventually, the ghost dissipated permanently, returning to wherever the souls of the dead go.
This article is a stub. You can help Night in the Woods Wiki by expanding it.


text: The hero of the latest installment of Mission Impossible--Fallout, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is saddled with the task of saving the world. His tragic flaw if he can be said to have one resides in the fact that he's obviously a student of Philippa Foot's famed "trolley problem." You may recall from your course in ethics, it's the idea of whether you should or shouldn't sacrifice one person for the sake of the many. The villain of the movie, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, is a millenarian anarchist named Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) who ascribes to the dictum: "the greater the suffering, the greater the peace." Mission Impossible could be called Mission Implausible since the action sequences ie 99% of the plot all derive from classic montage where the girl is tied to the tracks and the train is coming. Armageddon is waiting at the end of the film and in the last 15 minutes there are girls tied to tracks everywhere. Like the James Bond movies Mission Impossible is a travelogue in which beautiful people chase each other around equally exotic or iconic places. The current installment in the franchise starts in Berlin and ends in the snowy mountains of Kashmir with the Indian army amassed to protect a wounded hero. But the enjoyment is the tongue in cheek way in which the film treats biting sociopolitical issues (like terrorism) while also thoughtfully tipping its hat to musings on subjects like the humanity of the Ubermensch--and yes, the theme of the one versus the many which motivates both the forces of good and evil.


text:
Engineering Competition
Moray House
Wooden Stuff by Rory Cowan
Whitehall Build
St Ayles Skiff
Arctic Tern – MOONSHADOW
Spikeskiff – MOONBEAM
Oar Development
Oar Repair
Lofting
Log Box
Lofting is a technique to move from a table of offsets to a set of full sized plans from which you work to build a boat. Many different things can be derived from the lofting process, but probably the most useful thing is almost subliminal – you get a feel for the boat you are about to build, the frames, the shape and how you are going to go about building it.
Lofting is a technique mostly associated with boat building, but can apply to the creation of any structure where there are a load of curved lines – such lines do not really lend themselves to mathematical calculation and even when you think you've got it cracked you may find that some lines do still have a curve and need fairing. Lofting is particularly useful in boat building, when it is used to draw and cut pieces for hulls and keels. These are usually curved, often in three dimensions.
Traditionally loftsmen at the mould lofts of shipyards were responsible for taking the dimensions and details from drawings and plans, and translating this information into templates, battens, ordinates, cutting sketches, profiles, margins and other data, however now it is possible to digitise drawings and reproduce them by computer. This is progress, however it is just possible that this takes the builder a step too far away from the project and away from the feel of what he is creating. Lofting on a full scale basis is still my preferred route to take as I still have a feel for the size and shape of the scantlings and don't sit there looking at a computer generated component wondering if it will be large enough and strong enough and finding myself blindly trusting a computer programme I have had no part in creating. Yes, I will probably build a little heavier than ideal, but then the sea can play those tricks same on you as well and just when you don't want them!!
(Source of definition: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lofting)
© 2019-2020 Rory Cowan All Rights Reserved


MIDSUMMER DAY had hardly begun to cool in Black Creek Ravine when Hank George took up his station outside the cavern known as the Doorway. His waist-length, iron gray braids fell heavy in the humid heat, but that didn't account for the way he felt, as though stones weighted his chest and shoulders.
Inside the rock, the luminous halls of the cavern led to a series of tunnels. The Road Between, it was called. Many generations past, the Others had come to Earth by that dark path. Decades later, they'd traveled the same route back to the world that was their home.
A Guardian had watched at the Doorway ever since.
Hank had been watching for more than fifty years. Countless days he'd listened to the ethereal song of the breeze sighing through the cavern. A strange sound always, but never before had it raised the hairs on the back of his neck. He sat down on his favorite stump just outside the cave's entrance; though he remained outwardly calm, tension thrummed through his muscles like voltage through power lines. He rose and took a step toward the entry. A blast of air colder than January cut through his thin shirt and blew back his braids. Perhaps anticipation seized him, maybe dread.
Something was coming. Something was about to begin.
ALONE IN his dilapidated wooden tower, gray-bearded wizard Thurlock leaned out the west window to survey the hundreds of partygoers making merry in the vale that dipped between the Sister Hills. He tried to laugh at toddlers' antics, dancing couples, and smiling old folks tapping arthritic feet to the music of fiddles and pipes. He watched Luccan run across the grassy North Rise, where he and L'Aria, his friend for life, endeavored to fly their new kites. He tried to enter into the prevailing Midsummer joy.
He failed miserably. This was Luccan's twelfth birthday, the day the boy should have received his cardinal name so he could begin to gather the strength it would impart. Knowing a little of what his fortune might hold, the wizard thought surely the youngster would soon need all the strength he could find.
Across the vale stood the neat, sunlit windows and varnished logs of Sisterhold Manor, Luccan's home. Beyond that, in the near distance, Oakridge rose from the hillside like a monument to history. When Luccan was only two hours old, Thurlock had brought him out into the summer dawn and fumbled him into his father's strong but equally fumbling hands. The man had carried his child to the sun-sparked granite on the ridge and whispered a name into his ear, a powerful name known only to them, witnessed solely by the wind.
Now, because of what Thurlock had not done then, disaster threatened—for Luccan, for Sunlands, perhaps for all the world of Ethra. The infant, of course, had forgotten the name. His father had become lost. And the Gods' Breath, fabled dawn wind of the Sunlands, kept its secrets.
PRIVATELY, ISA thought it would be best to kill the boy and have done. Granted, the recent strange behavior of time brought opportunity. And true, the boy's unformed powers might boost her own—in the service of her master, of course—if she could subvert them.
Yes. She would bow to the wishes of the Ice-Lord, Mahl, and alter her course. The boy would live, long enough at least to determine if he could be put to use. If the costs in time and effort grew too vast, the boy's death would destroy the enemy's hopes, and Mahl would be appeased.
She took stock of her image in the looking glass. The light filtering through the icy walls of her keep lit her eyes with blue fire and emphasized her long bones and sharp angles. The reflection pleased her. Gone was the soft-faced girl of ages past, the girl who had been a fool. Staring back from the silvered glass was a woman of power, a witch who could wait for reward.
Yes. She would sow seeds now for the Sunlands' defeat. Later, when she reaped vengeance against the one man who mattered, the fruit would be that much sweeter.
From glass shelves holding bottles, boxes, and vials, she gathered the bits she would need for the spell.
Midsummer stood on the cusp. The moment for cold, hard magic had come.
WHEN LUCKY stepped off the asphalt at the end of Twelfth Street and into the weeds, it was twilight, a time of day that should have stretched at least an hour on June 21, which was, after all, Midsummer. But Lucky only made it halfway across the mile-wide strip of open land that separates Valley City from Black Creek Ravine when night took him by surprise. It had fallen way too fast.
He tried to laugh it off, even joking aloud with himself, All I did was blink! But the darkness had already taken him, and now it crept up his spine, cold like something witched from its grave. He tried to convince himself he could handle the eerie feeling. It'll be okay, Lucky, he said. It's been a creepy day, that's all—and it's almost over.
The day in question—which happened to be his fifteenth birthday—had staggered by, every hour weighted down by Lucky's sincere wish that it would move along and get itself over with. Now, as he made his way home, the wind moaned in the pines nearby, and the moon hung like a bloodred bubble in the sky between the rock spires known as Death of the Gods. Frogs and crickets went stone silent just ahead of his every step, and webs appeared out of nowhere, as if hungry spiders by the thousands rode in on moonlight to stretch traps in the grass.
Lucky stopped and leaned forward, hands on his knees, needing to catch his breath. He wasn't sure what had him so winded. Was it because he had to lift his long, bony legs so high to get through the tall grass? Or was he spooked by the sinister night?
After a moment, he pushed back his exasperatingly thick hair—it was always in his eyes—and marched on. Before he'd gone ten more steps, Maizie, the big yellow mongrel he'd raised from a pup into a best friend, started barking. Lucky slowed, scanning the field around him and the shadowed trees looming ahead. He felt sure Maizie had seen, heard, or smelled something that didn't belong. She never barked when he was coming home. She hardly ever barked at all.
Chill, he told himself, and then he started walking again. Seconds later, Maizie bounced out of the trees like a big ball of animated sunshine and greeted Lucky with her whining, toothy grin, just like every night. He had to laugh despite his mood.
Okay, girl. He dropped a bag of groceries so he could use a hand to fend off Maizie's sloppy tongue and rough up her thick yellow fur. Her tail wagged hard enough to mow the weeds flat in a circle around him, and for those few seconds he didn't feel quite so cursed.
But she bounded off toward home, and as he picked up his spilled groceries—mostly pouches of ramen noodles, precious even at three for a dollar—the shroud of unease dropped around him once more. He didn't even try to shake it off. Hefting his grocery bags, he forged ahead through the whispering weeds until he reached the edge of the wood.
In the pines, an owl called who. In Lucky's strange state of mind, it sounded like some sort of challenge, so even though he felt completely silly doing it, he answered, It's just me. He almost wanted to laugh again, but that feeling didn't last long. When he emerged from the trees and caught sight of the shack he called home, he stopped and stared while a chill prickled over his scalp like a tattoo needle made of ice.
For the comfort the sound of his voice might offer, he spoke aloud again. Don't be stupid, Lucky. You know your way home by now.
He shoved his hair out of his face and sighed. You think too much, Lucky, he said, trying to snap a leash on his imagination. He forced himself to take one step, then another, and strode to the door with Maizie close and quiet at his heels.
See? he said, glancing at Maizie as he pushed open the shed's door. It's exactly the way we left it. Blankets, toothbrush, half-empty bag of kibble, everything remained in place. Nothing was moved, nothing mussed, nothing touched. Nothing's wrong at all. It was a lie. Lucky knew that even as he said it, and like all lies, it hurt him like ice in his bones.
His sanctuary had ceased to be safe.
He sat down hard on the shelf he called his bed, hung his wearied head in bruised hands, and stared at his knees. Instead of seeing those scarred joints, though, he watched in his mind a replay of the day's events. He tried to pinpoint the moment when things had gone from bad to worse. He wanted to figure out why an ordinary day had become a nightmare. But then, it was Midsummer, it was his birthday, and his birthdays were never ordinary. Possibly this hadn't been his worst Midsummer ever, but it had been close.
The morning had started with a dream about a key he had in his possession, one of a handful of inexplicable objects that were all that remained of his childhood. And a woman with golden hair and eyes shaped like Lucky's but green rather than coppery brown—he'd dreamed about her before. She had pushed the key into his palm and flung him some cryptic advice he could no longer remember. Then she'd vanished, shrieking, and some cold, dark, horrible thing had taken her place. Lucky screamed himself awake and bolted upright, smacking his head on the shelf above his bed. He'd been left with a lump the size of a duck's egg on his forehead.
It throbbed, and it had turned purple by the time he reached the bus stop at Twelfth and Main an hour later.
He sat down to wait for the number sixty-eight bus, wishing for shade. With his arm draped over the back of the bench and his feet sprawled out nonchalantly, he hoped he looked cool despite the heat wafting from the asphalt. When an old man trundled up wearing gray sweats and combat boots, he ignored the fact that the stranger looked weird, even for downtown Valley City.
After waiting some time, Lucky wondered if maybe he was late and the bus had already come and gone. He turned to the old man, hesitated, but then said, Excuse me, sir. Do you know the time?
Time? Excellent question. He fished in a jacket pocket Lucky never would have guessed existed and brought out a pink paper bag, then opened it to show crullers with maple frosting melting in the heat. Lucky inhaled deeply but tactfully refused the implied offer. When the old man set the bag on the bench between them, it rolled itself up. That couldn't possibly be true, of course, and briefly Lucky wondered if the bump on his head had affected him more than he'd thought.
Then the stranger said, I've brought enough for both of us, which seemed an unlikely thing for him to say, considering they'd never met. While Lucky debated whether to respond, the man brandished a huge yellow umbrella and flourished it open over their heads just in time for rain to begin falling from the still cloudless sky. Eight forty-six. Out of the same invisible pocket that had produced donuts, he'd pulled a large clock with a glass housing, gears whirring and clicking inside quite independently of each other, and hands, but no clock face.
Lucky fought the hypnotic effect of the device, forced his gaze away, leaned his elbows on his knees, and cradled his throbbing head.
The old man asked, Not feeling quite yourself today?
What the hell does he mean by that? Lucky didn't answer the old man; instead he stared out into the street, which had gone strangely quiet. He ran a hand through his hair, as if getting his hair out of his eyes could clear the weirdness from his vision. One car, a hulking Ford Crown Victoria, idled at the stoplight. By some trick of the light, its white paint reflected bloodred, and the windows were tinted a blue so dark the driver looked like a ghost.
Without warning, the odd old man dropped the umbrella in front of Lucky's face. When he snapped it shut a moment later, the white car had vanished, the traffic had returned, and the rain had ceased.
LUCKY'S DAYS, generally, were built on routine. Unlike most fifteen-year-old people, he worked for a living—self-employed. Valley City was small, but he wasn't the only teen living on his own. For the first year, he'd done what the others did, namely live on the streets and find any way he could to get a few bucks for food and necessities. Except he couldn't lie or steal—not wouldn't, couldn't. He didn't want to be a thief, but he would have done it if he could—it seemed to work for other people, and sometimes he'd been really hungry. But the first time he tried to steal, he got horribly, stupidly, embarrassingly sick. That seemed a cruel blow by fate, all the more so because nobody could explain it. Maybe he would have an explanation if Hank had still been around. Hank had been the closest thing Lucky'd had to a grandfather, but he didn't like to think about Hank anymore. That was a sickening story all on its own.
Stealing was out, so he was left with panhandling or letting people pick him up and pay him to do things he didn't want to think about—not in that context. He got pretty good at panhandling—surprising what people will give you if you tell them the truth—but when he was desperate, he did what he had to do to stay fed and warm. The so-called adults who'd wanted to touch him made him sick too, but that was way easier to explain than vomiting every time he tried to lie.
After he settled in his shack, though, Lucky started to think he should try to find another way to make a living. The fact was, Lucky was different from the other teens on the street—even more lost if that were possible. Not because he was gay… or bi, probably, if he was being honest. Some of the friends he shared street corners and dumpster sandwiches with were straight, some were gay, some were too hungry or too messed up to care. It wasn't the most important thing. All of them were on the street because their families had put them there, one way or another. They all came from crap homes, and they all had crap choices for getting help or doing anything about their situation at all.
But all the others had one thing Lucky didn't have—an identity.
Someday, with luck, they would become adults. Their adult lives would surely be an upstream swim, but the possibilities remained: they could get an education, they could work, they could rent homes, they might have a future.
Lucky's circumstances were different. He didn't remember a crappy home or a mean parent; he didn't remember home and parents at all. He couldn't remember anything before his twelfth birthday. He had no ID, no school records, no birth certificate, no last name. He thought he had something in common with the migrant workers who came to the valley to work. Most worked on the farms, but some got jobs in private homes, and ultimately Lucky took his cue from them.
His first customer had been unintentional: Safianu, a man from Cameroon with a delightful, joyful accent and a history of drug addiction. No longer addicted, he was old—maybe sixty—and sick, so finally the state thought him worthy of food and shelter he didn't have to lie or steal for. Lucky hadn't been thinking of a job when he'd cleaned up Saf's apartment. He'd been thinking of helping an old friend. But Saf had been the kind of generous man who would share whatever he had, including both money and hard-won self-esteem.
Lucky, he'd said, his accented speech musical in a way that commanded attention while at the same time tickling something inside, you are a good person. I will pay you for your work.
Saf! You don't have enough money to pay people. I'm doing this because I want you to be a little more comfortable. Anyway, you already fed me twice. That's plenty.
Saf slammed a hand down on the table, making Lucky jump and look up. You will not disrespect me. You work, you will be paid—at least what little I can manage! He took Lucky's hand and laid a crisp ten-dollar bill across his palm. Finish here. Come back next week.
What Lucky liked about that first job was that it felt clean; it was work he could do and not wish at the end of every day that he could escape his life. Sure, not all his customers were as worthy as Safianu, nor as beautiful. Lucky had seen pictures of Saf as a young man—oh my! But lots of people made enough money through vice or petty crime to pay him a few bucks—and everybody likes clean clothes and made beds. In very little time, he'd set himself up in business as a chore boy to Valley City's low-level underworld, usually making at least enough money to feed himself and Maizie.
So Lucky wasn't aimlessly wandering the city on his fifteenth birthday, and he wasn't waiting idly for bus sixty-eight. He needed to get out and drum up some business. Getting up late and smacking his head on the shelf had already set him back, and he didn't need some crazy old loon with a strange clock and a yellow umbrella to screw things up even worse. He needed to get his day back on track—find some customers, and avoid police, social workers, and the truancy patrol. When the sixty-eight finally rolled to a stop and the doors popped open, Lucky practically leapt aboard and swung into his usual seat on the curb side and two back from the driver, whose name was Rob.
Hey, Lucky, Rob said after pulling away from the curb.
Rob, Lucky answered. How's it going?
You don't look so good today. Who'd you get in a fight with?
A wooden shelf, Lucky answered and then smiled when Rob laughed.
Conversation went on hold while they waited at the next stop to pick up a mom with uncooperative twin toddlers and let off a beat-up looking man who smelled like sweat.
As they pulled back out into the street, Rob spoke over the engine's whine. Cops pulled a vice crackdown last night, Lucky. Thought you might want to know. Streets are pretty empty today.
Crap. Rob knew how Lucky made his living, and he knew downtown very well, having driven this same route for years. What it meant when Rob said the streets were empty was that apparently a bad dream, a crack on the head, and a strange old man hadn't been trouble enough; the day would also be tough, businesswise. Most of Lucky's usual employers would likely be eating cheese sandwiches and waiting to see the judge.
Lucky scraped for work most of the day, made no more than a few dollars, and finally in desperation went out to the Langdon brothers' uptown bungalow to see if they could use some help cleaning up after last night's party. The brothers, Benny and Johnny, were always flush with cash, and they partied every night. Lucky had no doubt they'd have a humongous mess. They always did, because they and all their friends used any drug they could lay their hands on and generally courted insanity. Lucky guessed there was no such thing as a quiet night at the Langdons' house.
Not long after he arrived, Lucky stood in the center of the cyclone-struck kitchen, waiting for any special instructions and preparing to wrangle for money. There's barf in the green bathroom, Benny Langdon said, his eyes mostly closed against the sun beating down from the skylight. He riffled his blond hair, either trying to wake up or scratching some itch, and shook out a rain of blue glitter. Did you bring gloves?
Of course he had. After a year in the laundry-and-chores business, Lucky had certainly learned to come prepared for the gross and the yucky. He had other things on his mind. The Langdons' sprawling house was always sliding into chaos, and though Lucky was sure they had every intention to keep their word, working for them was risky business. Lucky had to be sure nothing came between him and his money.
Half, Benny said, patting at his jeans pockets. The other half later. His brow scrunched in a puzzled look and then cleared as he apparently clicked on a mental link. Oh… yeah, my cash is in my jacket. Wait a minute and I'll find it. He started to work his way around the room, shifting bottles, cans, and pizza boxes on the counter and kicking at piles of litter on the floor.
Silent, dark-eyed Johnny—the other Langdon brother—had been standing by, looking a bit like a zombie. But now he picked up a Frisbee-shaped object, which was leaking ketchup and had pickles poking out the sides, and found a stash of limp bills on the table beneath it. He pinched a twenty and a ten in his fingernails and held them out. His stiff, sour face dared Lucky to object.
Lucky needed groceries. Maizie needed a flea collar. Cash was cash. He rinsed and blotted the bills, folded them in a paper towel, and stuck the packet in the hip pocket of his cutoff cargo pants.
Three hours later, he congratulated himself for having had the foresight to insist on the advance. The job had gone fine until he'd disturbed one of the Langdons' friends, a young, burly woman with a black Mohawk and serpent tattoos for bracelets. Lucky thought she was striking and even thought he could be attracted to a woman like her, but only if she wasn't crazy. She happened to be lurking behind a closed door doing… who knows what? She took offense when the vacuum cleaner bumped the door one time too many, yanked it open, and started yelling. When she stopped yelling and reached for him, Lucky ran.
He was blocks away and still running when his shoe broke and he fell down an embankment. At the dusty bottom of a dry wash, he lay low among litter and tumbleweeds and took the opportunity to catch his breath, hoping also to give the woman time to lose interest. Fifteen minutes later, give or take, he climbed up to street level and picked his way through a forest of sticker bushes and signs telling him who should get his vote and what herbal remedy could help him lose twenty-five pounds fast. His pursuer had gone, but his relief was short-lived. Beyond belief, the blue-glassed Crown Victoria that had been stopped at the light when the strange old man was messing around with his umbrella crept by just then.
I hate omens, Lucky said, talking to himself again. Omens were never normal, and he desperately sought normal. And that car! Everywhere he'd ventured all day, he'd encountered the big sedan with its bug-eye windows, through which he could just make out the driver's wild-haired, haggard, hook-nosed profile.
Later, as the sun began to sink, with his broken sole slapping annoyingly on the pavement, he trudged from the Twelfth and Main bus stop across the parking lot to the Quick-Shoppe on the same corner, calculating what he could buy and what he and Maizie would have to do without. He now sported enough bruises for the Guinness book, a headache thumping like the bass in a gangster's car, and a rare but heartfelt nasty mood that did not improve when he saw the Crown Victoria cooling in the market's parking lot.
Seriously, he thought. Enough is enough.
The store's sixties-vintage automatic doors tried his patience but eventually huffed open and admitted him to the familiar glow of fluorescents and the rattle, beep, and clink of the aging market's interior. He accepted a cart from a teenage bagger with a red pimple, a salon haircut, and brand-name cross-trainers. And a real job. And a future full of everything Lucky could not look forward to, such as a driver's license, high school graduation, and a scolding from a loving parent if he stayed out too late on Friday.
Envy began to smolder uncomfortably in his gut until it cut loose with a sharp jerk—strangely, he actually felt it happen, as if someone reached in and gave his personality a twist. Then he started feeling mean. Really mean. And for the first time ever, being mean felt good.
He almost ran down a little kid with his cart, and he didn't even say he was sorry. A lady reached for the best, juiciest apple, and he snatched it right out of her hand. He knocked down a rack of Cuddle Soft toilet paper and made a point not to feel bad as the rolls bounced under an old lady's bedroom slippers, tripping her up. While this was all going on, part of him stood back and wondered what was happening to him—he didn't even recognize himself. Still, he felt so alive, energized, and it lasted right up to the moment when a tall, horrid woman cut off his progress down the pasta aisle.
When he saw her beak nose and frayed hair, he knew instantly where he'd seen her before—she was the shadow behind the Ford's blue windows. He peered at her from the far end of the aisle, letting his thick hair fall forward to hide his gaze.
Those have got to be the ugliest eyes I've ever seen, Lucky said but only under his breath. She couldn't have heard, yet suddenly she closed the distance between them and stopped, legs planted wide and hands on hips, less than two feet away. She stared, eyes wide, and Lucky drew back, horrified. What he'd said was true.
Her eyes were ugly, indescribably so: pale, pale blue, bloodshot, and wicked cold. Their chill bellied over his skin like snakes of ice and froze him to the spot. His throat closed as she slowly reached out a sharp-fingered hand toward his neck.
Hate, she said in a voice that could have crushed stone. Anger. It's good, isn't it? Powerful—that's how it feels. She laughed, a slithering sound, and then whispered, Don't let anyone fool you, boy, and don't try to fool yourself. You love that feeling of power. Everyone does.
Her claw-fingered hand was an inch from his bare neck and creeping closer. That part of Lucky standing in the wings watching insisted This is not really happening in the grocery store, but the rest of him panicked. This woman seemed strong, immense, a giant, a glacier.
She could kill me with one squeeze, he thought and imagined the sound of his own neck bones snapping.
A crash and the shatter of glass cut off her words and broke the hold of her gaze. Lucky turned toward the sound and found the floor and his bare shins splattered with something red. The sight of glass shards poking through that shining liquid shifted his heart into high gear, and panic threatened to paralyze him. Finally, after a couple of time-warped seconds, the scent of garlic and basil got the message through to his brain. Not blood, spaghetti sauce.


Q: I am trying to serve a person for a civil matter, but they refuse to accept it; what can I do?
(e) if it is not practicable after reasonable inquiry to ascertain the name or address of an owner, lessee or occupier of premises on whom the document should be served, by addressing the document to him by the description of "owner" or "lessee" or "occupier", as the case may be, of the premises (naming them) to which the document relates, by affixing it, or a copy of it, to some conspicuous part of the premises.
How long after I am served a summons do I need to respond to the court?
I recently took my childfather to court for child support. He is a police prosecutor at that court in question, wat is de best advice you can give since i think he might get curry favor over me.


A Columbian Squire's Call Open House is set for Tuesday, Oct 19th. It will be in the new St. Thomas More Parish Building, Room 109.
The Squires are for 10 – 18 year-old kids, grandsons, and Catholic friends with potential young kids.
Our Council's aim is to build the leadership quality of the kids (maybe your own), through excellent and fun-filled leadership activities and programs with guidance by our own certified counselors.


text:
Q: Grep surnames from multiple files to multiple subdirectories I'm trying to pull the lines from text files scattered in tens of thousands of subdirectories which contain [surname] from 15 text files of ~100 lines each in the format:
[firstname] [surname]
or
[firstname] [middlename] [surname]
So carry out the ~1500 searches into all subdirectories and compile all of the lines into one single file surnames.txt
Thank you.

A: If all files in the directory (and subdirectories) are only the .txt files you want to search, then the following should suffice.
grep surname -rh . > surnames.txt

where the flags mean:

*

*-r recursively searches subdirectories.

*-h prevents the filename from being printed out.

If not all files are .txt files, you should narrow your search to only .txt files using find:
find . -name \*.txt -exec grep surname -h {} + > surnames.txt

If this is something you're gonna do often, you should look into doing this search in parallel, something akin to this.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
59 (Fifty-Nine!) Binary Neutron Star Merger Simulations
By	Astrobites on	 6 November 2018 Astrobites
A series of simulations of merging neutron stars has revealed new information about mass ejection and other processes during mergers. The above frame from one of the simulations captures some of the beautiful behavior of the ejecta. [Adapted from Radice et al. 2018]
Editor's note: Astrobites is a graduate-student-run organization that digests astrophysical literature for undergraduate students. As part of the partnership between the AAS and astrobites, we occasionally repost astrobites content here at AAS Nova. We hope you enjoy this post from astrobites; the original can be viewed at astrobites.org.
Title: Binary Neutron Star Mergers: Mass Ejection, Electromagnetic Counterparts and Nucleosynthesis
Authors: David Radice, Albino Perego, Kenta Hotokezaka, Steven A. Fromm, Sebastiano Bernuzzi, Luke F. Roberts
First Author's Institution: Princeton University
Status:Submitted to ApJ
Neutron star mergers are absolutely fascinating. These events are not just sources of gravitational waves but of electromagnetic radiation all across the spectrum — and of neutrinos as well. If you missed the amazing multimessenger observations last year that gave us a peek into what binary neutron star (BNS) systems are up to, please check out this bite about GW170817! The observations had major implications for many fundamental questions in astrophysics. The gravitational-wave signal from the merger was detected along with the electromagnetic radiation produced. As a result, we were able to confirm that neutron-star mergers are sites where heavy elements (those beyond iron) can be made via the r-process.
While all of this has undoubtedly been extremely cool (and we're holding our collective breath for more data), there's a lot of work that remains to be done. We need accurate predictions of the quantity and composition of material ejected in mergers in order to fully understand the origin of the heavy elements, and to say whether BNS mergers are the only r-process site. To investigate such questions, we require theoretical models that include all the relevant physics. Today's paper presents the largest set of NS merger simulations with realistic microphysics to date. By realistic microphysics, we mean that the simulations also take into account what the atoms and subatomic particles are doing. This is done by using nuclear-theory-based descriptions of the matter in neutron stars, and by including composition and energy changes due to neutrinos (albeit in an approximate way).
Simulating Neutron-Star Mergers
Modeling BNS mergers is a complex multi-dimensional problem. We need to simulate the dynamics in full general relativity, along with the appropriate microphysics, magnetic fields and neutrino treatment. Remarkable progress has been made, particularly in the last decade, since the first purely hydrodynamical merger simulations were carried out. Still, the problem remains extremely computationally expensive and simulation efforts have traditionally focused either on carrying out general relativistic simulations while sacrificing microphysics, or on incorporating advanced microphysics with approximate treatments of gravity. If you care about the merger dynamics and the dynamical ejecta, i.e., material ejected close to the time of merger due to tidal interaction and shocks, you need fully general relativistic simulations, like the ones presented in today's paper.
The authors carry out 59 high-resolution numerical relativity simulations, using binaries with different total masses and mass ratios. They also use different descriptions of the high-density matter in neutron stars. Neutrino losses are included in all cases, and some simulations include neutrino reabsorption as well. A few simulations even include viscosity. The authors systematically study the mass ejection, associated electromagnetic signals, and the nucleosynthesis from BNS mergers.
Mass Ejection
Fig 1. Electron fraction for an example simulation. The neutron stars are 1.35 Msun each and neutrino reabsorption has been included. The bulk of the ejecta lies within a ~60 degree angle of the orbital plane. [Radice et al. 2018]
Fig 1 shows the electron fraction of the material in one of the simulations over time. First, material is ejected due to tidal interactions, close to the orbital plane. Next, more isotropic, shock-heated material is ejected. This component has higher velocity and quickly overtakes the tidal component, as seen in the figure. The two components interact and the tidal component gets reprocessed to slightly higher electron fractions.
The authors also find a new outflow mechanism, aided by viscosity, that operates in unequal mass binaries. This ejecta component, called "viscous-dynamical ejecta", is discussed in detail in a companion paper.
Using their results, the authors fit empirical formulas that predict the mass and velocity of ejecta from BNS mergers. Even more material can become unbound from the remnant object on longer timescales ("secular ejecta"), but this is not studied here due to the high computational costs of running the simulation for that long.
Nucleosynthesis
The authors study in detail how the r-process nucleosynthesis depends on the binary properties and neutrino treatment. Sample nucleosynthesis yields are presented in Fig 2. You'll notice that the second and third r-process peaks are robustly produced while the first peak shows more variation. In fact, the first peak is quite sensitive to the neutrino treatment as well as the binary mass ratio.
Fig 2. Electron fraction (left) and nucleosynthesis yields (right) of the dynamical ejecta. "A" refers to the mass number of the nucleus. The different colored lines represent binaries with different mass ratios. The green dots show solar abundances. [Radice et al. 2018]
Electromagnetic Signatures
The radioactive decay of the r-process nuclei produced powers electromagnetic emission, referred to as a "kilonova". Other electromagnetic signals can also be produced due to different ejecta components.
The authors compute kilonova curves for all their models. They find that binaries that form black holes immediately after merger do not have massive accretion disks and produce faint and fast kilonovae. When the remnants are long-lived neutron stars, more massive disks are formed and the kilonovae are brighter and evolve on longer timescales. Example kilonova curves are shown in Fig 3.
Fig 3. Kilonova curves in three bands for three different models: binary with prompt BH formation (left), binary forming a hypermassive neutron star (middle), binary forming a long-lived supramassive NS (right). Solid and dashed lines correspond to the viewing angle. [Radice et al. 2018]
The authors also compute the synchrotron radio signal due to interaction of the ejecta with the interstellar medium. Example radio lightcurves are shown in Fig 4 along with the afterglow in GW170817. A small fraction of the ejecta is accelerated by shocks shortly after merger to velocities >0.6c, producing bright radio flares. The flares can probe the strength with which the neutron stars bounce after merger and in turn probe matter at extreme densities. Some of the models predict that the synchrotron signal from GW170817 will rebrighten in months to years after the merger!
Fig 4. Radio light curves of the dynamical ejecta of one model at 3 GHz, compared with GW170817. The ISM number density n is a parameter of the model used for generating the curves. [Radice et al. 2018]
Systematic investigations are key to understanding complex events such as neutron-star mergers. Improved theoretical modeling, with a push towards incorporating all the relevant physics in merger models, will not only help us understand what we saw last year but also set us up for the next set of observations!
About the author, Sanjana Curtis:
I'm a grad student at North Carolina State University. I'm interested in extreme astrophysical events like core-collapse supernovae and compact object mergers.
compact binaries mergers neutron stars
Pingback: AAS Nova – New
27 December 2019 Features 0 Selections from 2019: Discovery of an Intermediate-Mass Black Hole
16 December 2019 Features 0 Selections from 2019: Neutrinos and Gravitational Waves from Cosmic Catastrophes
11 December 2019 Features 4 An Extreme Pulsar Seen in Gamma Rays
8 November 2019 Features 0 A Standard of Black Hole Mergers
29 October 2019 Astrobites 0 A Second Mysterious Radio Outburst from Magnetar XTE J1810-197


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Dolly Parton and Pentatonix Team Up for Stirring 'a Cappella' Version of Her Classic 'Jolene' – WATCH
Andy Towle September 17, 2016 Leave a Comment
Dolly Parton and Grammy-winning a cappella group Pentatonix have teamed up for a new arrangement of Parton's classic "Jolene".
The track was originally released in 1973, and Parton told NPR in 2008 that it was the most recorded song of any she has written, having been recorded by more than 30 singers around the world. We can now add Pentatonix to that list.
Added Parton: "It's a great chord progression — people love that 'Jolene' lick. It's as much a part of the song almost as the song. And because it's just the same word over and over, even a first-grader or a baby can sing, 'Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.' It's like, how hard can that be?"
Parton tweeted that working with Pentatonix on the track, which was ranked #217 by Rolling Stone on its '500 Greatest Songs of All Time' list, was "pure magic" and the group answered back that they would "never forget" the experience of singing with Parton.
Singing with @PTXofficial was pure magic, and we had lots of fun rearranging the song! #PTXDollyJolene
— Dolly Parton (@DollyParton) September 16, 2016
It was magical singing with YOU!! We will never forget it! <3 #PTXDollyJolene https://t.co/tRldEnMoNr
— Pentatonix (@PTXofficial) September 16, 2016
Pentatonix is about to embark on a world tour starting tonight in Singapore.
Listen to the song, below:
play-rounded-fill
Parton recently spoke with PrideSource about her gay fans and her introduction to the gay community:
As I started to be a teenager there were a couple of guys downtown that everybody was sayin' were queer, ya know? I know they often said that about anybody who was odd or different – "they're just queer, just strange and odd" – but the way they would talk about these two guys they would say, "Well, they're sissies, they're girls." I was a teenager then. But in my early days we did not know (what gay was). It didn't take me long to know that people were different and that was always fine with me 'cause I was different too, and I embraced and accepted them and I knew them. I knew them well. But no, in my early days I did not know. But I know a lot of them now! I have a huge gay and lesbian following and I'm proud of 'em, I love 'em and I think everybody should be themselves and be allowed to be themselves whoever they are, whatever they are.
Topics: Music, towleroad, World More Posts About: Jolene, Music Video, Pentatonix
Dolly Parton Hits the Humble, Generous High Notes: 'Honored And Flattered' Lil Nas X Covers 'Jolene,' Says It's 'Really, Really Good'
Tyler Glenn Wants the Mormon Church to Know He Lives a Life So Shameless – WATCH
Singer-Songwriter Craig David: 'I Find It Weird When People Get Very 'No! I'm Not Gay"
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We are a new type of design brand and platform for the digital age of product. Unlike traditional design brands, we co-create all of our products with our customers. Through our platform, you can tweak, personalize and re-design our products directly from your browser in real-time.
Your product is then 3d printed on-demand and shipped from a factory local to you.


16-year-old Andrew nonchalantly asked his mother and father if they would drive him from their Barrie, Ont., home to a hotel in nearby Midland, where he planned to meet a 42-year-old woman with whom he had been having a secret relationship over the Internet. The Grade 11 student was found Thursday afternoon, after his parents spent two days desperately appealing for his safe return. On Wednesday, police had released pictures of Lauri Price, a Texas mother of four who had allegedly flown to Toronto and driven a rental car to collect the teen after striking up a relationship with him while playing the popular online game.


Dina Emerson, native of Santa Barbara, CA, lived & worked in NYC from 1988-2000, and moved to the SF bay area in 2002. Since age 16, when she first heard the recordings of Meredith Monk, Robert Ashley and other cross-disciplinary artists, Dina has avidly pursued to integrate the separate media into performances that is are at once installation, concert and theatrical event.
Originally trained in theater, Dina began her serious study and exploration of voice after graduating from Bennington College in 1988 and moving to Brooklyn. She subsequently became a fixture in the New Music and Interdisciplinary Performance world of New York, joining the Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble in 1990 and remaining a member until the present. With Meredith Monk and others, Dina has toured The US, Europe and Asia and performed at the SF Symphony, Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Theatre de l'Odeon in Paris and many other venues.
In addition to Meredith Monk, other artists with whom Dina has worked include Tan Dun (2 world premieres), Gary Lucas, John Kelly, Nam Jun Paik, Ken Butler, David Soldier with Komar & Melamid, Jonathan Segel, Miya Masaoka, Nicholas Brooke, Lance Grabmiller and various New York theater companies including Tiny Mythic Theatre Company, Cucaracha Theatre and The Talking Band.
In 2000, Dina was invited to replace the lead singer temporarily in the acclaimed Cirque du Soleil production, "O," at Bellagio in Las Vegas. This position was extended into a full-time contract when Dina moved to Cirque's other resident Las Vegas show, "Mystère". Dina stayed with Cirque du Soleil until January, 2002, continuing to return as a sub for them until permantly rejoining the company in 2007, currently performing in Mystère.
Concurrent with her work with other artists, Dina Emerson has created a body of original pieces that spans from 1992-1999 (in 2000, performing with Cirque du Soleil eclipsed the possibility of creating new works for the time being; research and development has again commenced since moving back to California). Venues at which she was presented include PS 122, HERE, The Knitting Factory, Cucaracha Theatre, The Kitchen, and Thread Waxing Space.
Combining voice, text, electronics, physical theater and specifically chosen physical objects/materials, these works defy categorization. They could be monologues with extended vocal techniques and songs, or collages of images, sounds and movement, or an installation that is built as a function of the performance. There has been a definite progression from exploring more electronic techniques (digital delay & looping, for example) to ultimately letting those technical aspects fall away in favor of a much more "handmade" emphasis on the voice itself and the materials that make up the performance/installation.
Negativland "Escape From Noise" Wordless Vocals "You Don't Even Live Here"
Touring & CD recording, "Atlas"
Creation of solo version of Goethe's "Faust"
Cirque du Soleil's "O" & "Mystère"


Jacki Weaver has been a constant on Australian screens for more than half a century -- from appearing on Bandstand to iconic roles in Stork and Picnic at Hanging Rock.
She's a face and a name the nation feels they truly know.
But in an intimate interview with 60 Minutes reporter Charles Wooley, the two-time Oscar nominee revealed there is one thing her audiences were unaware of.
"I was told I could die," she told Wooley. "It was frightening for myself, my husband and my family."
While gearing up to film her new Stan original series, Bloom, Weaver spoke of her most terrifying moment for the first time, the health condition that very nearly cost her life earlier this year.
"I had a pheochromocytoma," said Weaver.
"It's a very rare tumour on the adrenal gland. They're usually as big as twenty cents and mine was as big as a mango."
Weaver revealed the surgery to remove the tumour lasted for seven hours -- and she has the scars to prove it.
"Six scars right across my abdomen. They were trying to save my kidney and my spleen because they thought I'd lose them as well," she said.
It's the first time Weaver has spoken out about her health troubles and she says she kept it to herself -- out of the spotlight of gossip magazines and social media.
"I kept it quiet. I was a little bit shy about it, but now I'm 100 per cent again," she told Wooley. "I'm only missing a mango-sized tumour and one adrenal gland, and the other one seems to be working fine."
Weaver -- now in good health -- will be back on Australian television screens shortly, starring in the Stan original series Bloom, to be released January 1, 2019.
She was able to channel the frailty of her health scare into her new character -- a woman living in pain and with dementia, who is granted a chance to restore her youth after a mysterious plant appears in a small Australian country town once ravaged by disaster.
The new show was filmed in Clunes, country Victoria -- and Weaver is glad to be back in Australia, doing her bit for the homegrown film industry.
It's a stellar career the 71-year-old actress hopes to continue for many years to come, toasting a glass of champagne with Charles Wooley to her good health and great spirits.
"I reckon I can do another 20 years of this or maybe 25 -- because Betty White's 96 and she was acting until last year," she told Wooley.
"I wouldn't mind still acting when I'm 90. There wouldn't be much competition for the roles."


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Essential Qualities
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2021-2022 Enquiry Form
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Working at NCIC-Immersion School
About Shenzhen
Welcome to the NCIC-Immersion School Website and thank you for your interest. We are proud of the Immersion School as a dual language, dual culture setting where students are both nurtured and challenged to become active contributors as global citizens who think creatively and critically.
Offering a primary and middle school program, the NCIC-Immersion School follows research-based best practices in English as an Additional Language. We use the US Common Core State Standards in our design to prepare students for US-Style college preparatory high school. Guiding our daily work are the Six Principles for English Language Learner's Instruction from Stanford University, along with our beliefs in; the family's role in an individual's development, active involvement as essential to learning, a common culture and language around learning to foster the highest levels of achievement, and the ability of all individuals to learn.
In an additive model of language learning, students will continue to build academic proficiency in Mandarin as the first language while adding new and lasting experiences in the English Language. In this model, students develop confidence and self-esteem as they learn to make effective decisions and communicate with others by building on their own background knowledge and strengths.
Working in education for the past 15 years in both the United States and Internationally, I am honored to be a part of a learning community of the quality and dedication to best practices here at NCIC-Immersion School in Shenzhen. Here, family and school work together in partnership to create an intellectual life for children that is without limits.
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CANNES — Cohen Media Group has partnered up with Agnès Varda and dynamic artist known as JR on an untitled documentary.
Cohen Media Group has picked up North American distribution and world sales rights outside of France, Germany and China.
Now in production, the docu project is a celebration of images, still and moving, and the way they are shown, shared and exhibited.
Varda is an iconic filmmaker whose credits include "Cleo from 5 to 7," "Vagabond" and "The Beaches of Agnès." JR is a famed artist who exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors.
"Agnès Varda is a visionary director. Her curiosity about the world she lives in has fed her amazing work for more than 60 years, and she finds yet more to say and reveal in this unique work that will captivate all who experience it," said CMG's Charles Cohen.
The untitled project will focus on faces, encounters, huge images related to people and mostly the growth of an unlikely friendship between a 33 year old youngster and an 88 year old lady.
"As my life draws to a close, I find myself wanting to see ever more faces, to film or photograph them, to keep them in images if not in my memory. JR, with his imagination and talent, gives me the opportunity to create with him new ways to share images," said Varda.
Deal was brokered by CMG exec producer John Kochman and producer Rosalie Varda on behalf of Varda's Cine Tamaris and JR's Social Animals.


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Svijet

Otkrića

Osnivanja

Događaji

Nagrade i priznanja

Rođenja

 25. kolovoza  Hans Adolf Krebs, njemačko-britanski liječnik i biokemičar († )

Smrti

Hrvatska i u Hrvata

Otkrića

Osnivanja

Događaji

Nagrade i priznanja

Rođenja

Smrti

Izvori

Vanjske poveznice

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


How do I use the ColorShot Digital Photo Printer?
What type of instant color film does the ColorShot Digital Photo Printer require?
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What software drivers are available for the ColorShot Digital Photo Printer?
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Setting up the ColorShot is quite simple.
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The ColorShot Digital Photo Printer uses a 10-pack of commonly available Polaroid Spectra Platinum Instant Color Film. According to Polaroid, Platinum film is the highest quality instant film ever made. This film has consistent high quality and is specially designed to bring more color and greater sharpness to instant color prints. This is a general purpose, high speed, medium contrast, integral film for high definition instant color prints.
Spectra Platinum Film should be stored in a cool, dry place. It may be stored in a refrigerator, but it should NEVER BE FROZEN. It should be taken out of the refrigerator at least an hour before it is used, allowing it to warm up to room temperature before use. The film should always be kept in its carton until it is ready to be used. The most important part of the film package is the foil, which seals out harmful humidity.
The ColorShot Digital Photo Printer is fully supported with software drivers for Windows 95/98 and Linux. They are available for download here. Software drivers for DOS, Windows NT, and Windows 2000 are in development. In addition, a comprehensive Developer Kit is available for porting ColorShot drivers to other operating systems and/or embedded devices.
Prints glossy, continuous-tone color images. The printed image is dot-dithered, which may not produce an accurate color representation, nor is the color-tone continuous.
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The ColorShot Digital Photo Printer requires only instant color film. Inkjet printers require paper and ink cartridges.


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Cobra Clutch by A.J. Devlin
It's fun to read a debut author's first mystery. It's even more interesting when it's a book I never thought I'd pick up, but I discover I enjoyed the character and the story. In fact, I'll look forward to A.J. Devlin's followup to Cobra Clutch.
When "Hammerhead" Jed Ounstead retired from pro wrestling, he took a job as a bar bouncer. Occasionally, he helps his father, an ex-cop turned private detective, by running a few errands. He had no plans of becoming a detective, despite his father's hopes. But, when Jed's former tag-team wrestling partner shows up, Jed doesn't have much of a choice. He owes his successful career to Johnny Mamba.
Someone kidnapped Johnny's python, Ginger. He loves her, and he uses her in his entrance to the ring. He insists he can't wrestle without her. There's a ransom demand for Ginger. Jed agrees to look into it, but he doesn't make himself very welcome at the X-Treme Canadian Championship Wrestling building. But, before he can investigate further, Johnny Mamba and Ginger are murdered.
Now, it's more than a job. Despite the investigating officer who was his father's protege, Jed insists on looking for the killer. Jed involves his Uncle Declan, a former IRA operative turned bartender. But, he can only help so far. Jed's house is trashed. He's beaten up, kidnapped, and nearly shot to death. He finds himself involved not only with the pro wrestling world, but with a case involving drugs and bikers. But, "Hammerhead" was more than a nickname. Jed isn't going to quit.
Cobra Clutch is a fast-paced, action-packed, debut. The violence is graphic. There are traces of humor, usually provided by Declan. But, the angry, flawed sleuth is bold and competitive in this gritty original story. If you tried and liked Glen Erik Hamilton's Van Shaw novels, give this one a try.
A.J. Devlin's website is www.ajdevlin.com
Cobra Clutch by A.J. Devlin. NeWest Press, 2018. ISBN 9781988732244 (paperback), 270p.
FTC Full Disclosure - I received the book to review for a journal.
Labels: A.J. Devlin, Canada, Canadian literature, Debut author, Debut Mystery, Pro Wrestling
I have this one on order, and I'm really looking forward to it.
I'll be interested to see what you think, Glen.
See Also Proof by Larry D. Sweazy
Tasting Paris by Clotilde Dusoulier
Bottom Feeders by John Shepphird
Winners and an Exotic Giveaway
Ten Year Stretch edited by Martin Edwards and Adri...
Claws for Concern by Miranda James
The War Bride's Scrapbook by Caroline Preston
Sunday Reading Corner & Promises, Promises
Antique Blues by Jane K. Cleland
Winners and "P" = Murder Mystery
Have You Heard? Killer Insight by Victoria Laurie
Shot in the Dark by Cleo Coyle
A Shimmer of Hummingbirds by Steve Burrows
Winners and the Deadly Female
St. Louis Trip, April 2018
Fiction Can Be Murder by Becky Clark
Scot Free by Catriona McPherson
A Death of No Importance by Mariah Fredericks
Necessary Ends by Tina Whittle
Winners and a Cozy Giveaway
Date with Malice by Julia Chapman
Hard Aground by Brendan DuBois


British potato farmers have been given a helping hand by Tesco after the worst growing conditions since the 1976 drought hampered the growth of this year's crop.
Unseasonably freezing Spring temperatures in parts of Britain followed by the summer drought severely hit potato growers across the country.
For many UK growers it meant a struggle supplying potatoes to supermarkets because of crop specifications set by retailers governing the overall look and quality of fruit and vegetables.
But to help British growers and prevent otherwise perfectly good potatoes from going to waste Tesco widened those specifications to ensure they will still go on sale.
The move has resulted in Tesco, so far, taking an extra 4000 tonnes of potatoes.
And for shoppers it means that a greater variety of different but perfectly good potato sizes will now end up on supermarket shelves across the UK.
"We've worked with our potato growers to use as much of the crop and prevent perfectly good spuds from going to waste.
"We want to support our growers wherever we can – and although some potatoes might be smaller and larger they still pack the same great taste our customers expect.
Tesco increased the size of baby potatoes by 3mm which allowed its growers to keep these potatoes in the ground longer and get higher yields.
It has decreased the size of other lines by 5mm which has allowed growers to increase their yields of already harvested crops.
The aim of this was to stretch out supplies of British potatoes and avoid the need to import at the end of the season in May and June.
Branston, based in Lincolnshire, are one of the UK's top five potato packers, handling around 350,000 tonnes a year.
"The extreme cold of the Beast from the East delayed planting in the spring, then the extended heat and drought of the summer impacted on crop growth and development.
"Potatoes need a good water supply to help them to grow evenly and bulk up, especially when it's hot.
"This means that the fresh potatoes available to pack are generally smaller, and the shape and skin finish is not as smooth as consumers may be used to.
The spec widening is in place until June when the first of the new season's crop comes in.
"It continues to be critically important that retailers provide flexibility on specifications during difficult growing seasons in order for British farmers to do what they do best – producing food for the nation.
When Tesco signed up to the NFU's Fruit & Veg Pledge in 2017, they committed to a set of principles that are flexible and led by production, including commitments to minimise waste and utilise as much of the crop as possible.


Follow bestselling author, speaker, and pastor James MacDonald as he delivers the biblical hope of God's promises in the midst of life's storms.
2 Peter 1:3 refers to certain portions of God's Word as exceedingly great and precious promises. Great promises are ones that don't fall apart during difficult times; they reveal hope in the midst of the storm. Precious promises are ones that we find strong enough to hold us up and resilient enough to get us through. God's promises become exceedingly great and precious to us when nothing else will do.
By digging into the theology of God's promises, Pastor James uncovers 5 major categories of promises in the Bible and the 5 areas God repeatedly makes promises concerning. From dealing with fear and doubt to God's goodness, help, and victory, the Bible has much to say about God's presence in our difficulty.
Always True will point you to God's promises, which are just that: always true.
JAMES MACDONALD is the founding and senior pastor of Harvest Bible Chapel in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. Pastor MacDonald has written many books, including Lord, Change My Attitude...Before It's Too Late and Gripped by the Greatness of God. Pastor MacDonald's teaching can be heard on Walk in the Word, a daily 30-minute radio program heard on outlets across North America. Pastor MacDonald and his wife, Kathy, have three children and reside in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.


Three years diploma in hotel management in 1993.
Worked for The Park Hotel, New Delhi [1993 to 2003] as a demi chef de party.
Worked for India Habitat Centre [2003 to 2006] as Kitchen Executive.
No, not really. When I was a teenager my mum was too sick, so I had to help her in her cooking. That help gradually created a passion and made me be perfect. This gave me an option to pursue my passion into Profession. Apart from that I love different kinds of food.
To maintain hygiene and food presentation.
My mom she is a very good cook I'm inspired by her.
Great atmosphere for work, and power to demonstrate your abilities.
Our homemade Garam Masala in Delhi 'O' Delhi.
Most 'eyebrow rising' menu item?
Mopala Murg and leg of lamb.