Many hikers that I know also have some sense of adventure and so are happy to look for somewhere with a bit of climb in the hike. Now we are talking about easy climbs that require no special climbing equipment or skills are are really more of a scramble than a climb.
Note: I have deliberately left off some of the more difficult but famous climbs such as Peasants Ridge at Mt Barney or Tibrogargan in the Glass House Mountains. This article is going to focus on the easier hikes and climbs, though some do require a good level of fitness.
Table Top mountain is the hike to do to see if you are going to enjoy a climb with your hike. Much of the trail involves hopping over rocks, a bit of scrambling and there is one section that requires scrambling up a near vertical wall. Nothing particular hard about this hike and Toowoomba locals will run past you as you make your way up and down the cliff.
The view from the top makes it worth the effort. The treeless plateau of the summit is a nice place to walk around for views down the Lockyer valley before heading back down.
This is a short fun little hike that can be incorporated into a trip to Toowoomba and surrounds. Not a difficult or dangerous hike if you take your time and don't rush.
Mt Warning in Northern New South Wales is the climb that is on nearly everyone's bucket list, especially the night climb to see the sunrise. This is by far the longest climb on the list but it is made much easier by the chain and footholds cut into the rock.
Mostly people can finish the walk to the summit in about 2 hours, but you want to give yourself plenty of time as the walking part involves heading uphill most of the way even before you come to the climb. If you are walking up in the late afternoon, watch the time or at least bring a flashlight with you.
The view from the top, especially at sunrise makes this worth the effort. My tip is to walk up to the start up the climb before first light, and then do the climb with the pre-dawn light with plenty of time to see the sunrise.
The lovely little climb up The Pinnacle at the end of an unmarked bush trail is a fun scramble to see great views of Springbrook national park. Finding the start of the unmarked part of the walk is not that difficult. There is a big switchback on the Warrie Circuit track, and this is the track to The Pinnacle starts. You might consider buying topographic maps of the area or downloading them for free from QTopo.
The track is easy enough to follow as it is on the top of a gently sloping ridge. If you start going downhill, then you are off the track. There are also plenty of trail markers left by hiking groups, though when we did it we ran into someone who had lost the trail and was backtracking. .
The top of the Pinnacle is not particularly difficult, though the sandy soil means you should test every hand and foot hold on the way up and down. There is also only limited space at the top as well, so if you go with a large group you will have to take turns.
If you do this walk as part of the 17 km Warrie Circuit, it will add another 4 kms to the walk. If you just want to do the Pinnacle then walk the Warrie Circuit in a counterclockwise manner then back track the way you came. But this will mean you miss out on the best parts of the Warrie Circuit.
The 6 km return hike up and down Mt Maroon took us 5 hours, though the National Parks guidelines suggest giving yourself 6 hours. We were going fairly slow and very fit hikers will complete it in around 3 hours. The walking part of is steep and goes along very rough trails, and there is some climbing when you go up the gorge and at the top.
The gorge that you scramble up can seem fairly steep and difficult at first glance, however it really is not a challenge. There is one section shorter people might need a hand up, but other than that, it is fairly straight forward. Whatever you do, don't attempt the gorge while it is raining as it funnels the run off water and becomes very dangerous.
At the top, the track becomes less defined, but basically you get to the top of the gorge and turn left and make your way up the various rocky sections to the very top for amazing views of the surrounding area.
For this hike you will need a fairly good level of fitness, but it is not dangerous if you take you time and don't rush. Also the steepest section is fairly enclosed so you don't have too much of a problem with vertigo.
Most people who visit the Glass House Mountains wonder if they can climb any of the hills. Excluding Beerwah and Coonowrin which are closed, all the hills have tracks to the top. Tibrogargan is the one that attracts the most attention but it involves a long and difficult scramble up a steep rocky face. However the most interesting of the remaining hills is Tibberoowuccum.
There are two challenges to hiking the 220 m high Tibberoowuccum. The first and most difficult is finding the start of the track. You start at the Trachyte Walking Circuit car park on Marchs Road (not the one off Barrs Road). Then walk along Marshs Road in the direction away from Tibrogargan (roughly westerly) for about 100 metres. You will see a fire trail to your left. Walk up this fire trail for 300 or 400 metres until you see a small pile or rocks on your left. This pile has been left by hikers to mark the start of the trail up Tibberoowuccum.
Once you have the track, it is easy enough to follow up to the top. Then you turn left and follow the ridge until you come to the bottom of Tibberoowuccum's rock dome. Climbing this dome is not difficult though it can look a little daunting.
The top of the rock dome provides 360 degree views of the glass house mountains and is well worth the walk. When going back down you can retrace your steps or look for a path on your left that goes back down. Both paths rejoin the fire trail.


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It's the Final Countdown! Best Books Blogged 2015
At least for this year. With luck, The Passing Tramp and the world will still be around a year from now for yet another countdown of the best books blogged. In the meantime, here's #'s 5-1. #'s 10-6 can be found here.
#5 The Night of the Fog (1930), by Anthony Gilbert (reviewed 27 July)
The best detective novel that I have read by the prolific second-string English mystery writer Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatrice Malleson) is this tale of murder at a moldering, candlelit manor house--enshrouded, on that fateful night, in fog. A highly atmospheric setting, with more realistic (if glum) characters and a good mystery plot (with true detection), Fog is a real winner from the dark heart of the Golden Age of detective fiction.
#4 The Listening House (1938), by Mabel Seeley (reviewed 3 June)
More squalid realism--though urban and American in this case--is found in this intelligent and spirited updating of the old HIBK novel by Mabel Seeley, once considered one of the brightest rising stars on the horizon of mystery fiction. Real-life events are referenced to great effect in the novel, which is set in a fictionalized St. Paul, Minnesota. Seeley believed terror was more terrible, because more credible, if "aroused by incidents which are within the reader's possible experience." Certainly this formulation triumphs in The Listening House, an atmospheric, eerie and well-plotted mystery with memorable characters and a compelling heroine acting as amateur sleuth.
#3 Banshee (1983), by Margaret Millar (reviewed 21 August)
Ingenious plotting coupled with insightful explorations of troubled human emotional states makes Margaret Millar one of the all-time greats in crime fiction. Banshee is an excellent late novel by the Canadian-American author, the wife of Kenneth Millar (aka Ross Macdonald), combining a tricky plot with a moving look at modern childhood. One hopes that Margaret Millar's inclusion in Sarah Weinman's new Library of America anthology of women suspense fiction writers will give this talented author more of the attention that she deserves.
#2 Black Money (1966), by Ross Macdonald (reviewed 18 October)
And here is Mr. Millar, with what is, I think, my favorite novel by him from the 1960s: his moving meditation on the Great Gatsby legend, something which clearly touched a deeply personal chord of memory within him. Complexly plotted yet not nearly so reliant on the inter-generational family dysfunction plot that came to so preoccupy him (see my discussion of Macdonald's The Instant Enemy in the linked piece), Black Money represents Macdonald at the apex of his considerable abilities.
#1 The Last Talk with Lola Faye (2010), by Thomas H. Cook (reviewed 8 March)
Thomas H. Cook's novel belongs here, in the august company of the Millars, one of mystery writing's all-time "power couples." Cook resembles the Millars in his ability to construct complex, compulsively page-turning plots that include insightful examination of the human condition in the manner of the mainstream novel.
Cook, an Alabama native, is especially fine when when he looks at the American South, as he does in Lola Faye. The sense of place in the novel, which dexterously weaves back and forth from the past to the present, is palpable, as in the best suspense novels of the late, great Ruth Rendell. Lola Faye is a superb novel from one of our finest modern crime writers, satisfying the desires of crime fiction readers for a story that is both deftly plotted and emotionally affecting, touching both the mind and the heart.
Well, there you have it. I just noticed that this is my most temporally diverse "best" list ever, with three books from the Thirties, one from the Forties, one from the Fifties, two from the Sixties, one from the Eighties, one from the Nineties and one from the new century. Just shows you the great riches of crime fiction over the last hundred years. A Happy New Year to you all! I hope to discuss many more books on the blog in 2016.
Waiting for the Countdown: Best Books Blogged in 2015
It's that time of year again, where we count down the best books blogs the past year at The Passing Tramp. As Lindsey Buckingham sings, I've been waiting for the countdown. But then haven't we all?
Typically I count down the top twenty crime novels annually blogged here, but in past years I have reviewed over 100 such books annually on the blog, while this year, busy as I have been with other projects, I probably only achieved about half that. Plus, 2015 is fast ebbing. So I'm doing just ten this year. So, let us begin with #'s 10-6. I'm leaving out of consideration books I have written introductions for and discussed on the blog this year (quite a few), but they are of course recommended to vintage crime fiction fans.
#10 Meet Me at the Morgue (1953), by Ross Macdonald (reviewed 29 August)
In this, Ross Macdonald's centenary year, there has perhaps been a tendency to undervalue the author's Fifties crime writing in favor of his Sixties work. However, the author produced some excellent work in this earlier decade. Macdonald later disparaged the novel in a letter to Eudora Welty, but at the time of its publication he had seemed rather pleased with Meet Me at the Morgue, a dexterously-plotted tale that signaled an early, notable move by the author away from the Chandler-Hammett tough school of hard-boiled mystery toward a more humanistic vision. The younger Macdonald was right to feel so.
#9 The Player on the Other Side (1963), by Ellery Queen (reviewed 10 November)
The sleuth Ellery Queen returned in novel form after a five year hiatus in The Player on the Other Side, in one of his most interesting performances. Here the author devised a deliberately artificial tale about members of a wealthy New York family being bumped off one by one, with an ingenious variation on a favored gambit. Here sleuth Ellery encounters, as he so fervently desires, a murderous opponent truly worthy of his mettle.
#8 The Grindle Nightmare (1935), by Q. Patrick (reviewed 28 November)
A notable Thirties fictional excursion into the dark criminal bypaths of horrific sadistic violence, The Grindle Nightmare, by Richard Wilson Webb (probably with some collaboration from his young living partner and future full time fictional collaborator, Hugh Callingham Wheeler), at times feels like a precursor to certain critically-lauded sicko suburbia novels by Patricia Highsmith. But don't worry, fainthearted readers, the whole thing is properly intellectualized as a formal problem detective novel, in fine Golden Age tradition.
#7 Wisteria Cottage (1948), by Robert M. Coates (reviewed 11 January)
If Violence peaked out at us from behind a curtain in The Grindle Nightmare, in Robert M. Coates's Wisteria Cottage it rips away the curtain and pursues the reader with a bloody butcher's knife. This dark novel about the descent into madness of a dangerously disturbed young man is a deeply unsettling novel, even in 2015, and it reminds us that mid-century "domestic suspense" was not entirely the demesne of women crime writers. Stir in as well some of Jim Thompson's hell's broth and you get Wisteria Cottage.
#6 A Sight for Sore Eyes (1998), by Ruth Rendell (reviewed 13 December)
The late and much missed modern mistress of psychological suspense, Ruth Rendell, produced one of her finest essays in the art of unease with A Sight for Sore Eyes. Ultimately less cold and clinically bleak than Wisteria Cottage, the novel nonetheless boasts a memorably creepy climax and is, like all the best Rendell, compulsively readable throughout its considerable length.
RIP Ruth Rendell. Happily for Rendell's readers her fine work lives on after her, to be read and reread.
Numbers 5 to 1 are coming soon!
Posted by The Passing Tramp at 3:06 AM 1 comment:
A Really Late Christmas Number: Corpus Christmas (1989), by Margaret Maron
"Writers with something profound to say write poetry, writers with something serious to say write novels, but writers with nothing to say write genre fiction. I shall become a mystery writer."
He handed her another wet pot. "Don't look so sad. I shall try to be a very good mystery writer."
Sigrid smiled. "Tell me about your plot."
"Actually I don't have one yet," he confessed. "That's the one drawback. I don't want to write suspense or thrillers or, God forbid, one of those dreary down-these-mean-streets-a-man-must-go sort of social tracts. No, I want to write classic whodunits, elegantly contrived puzzles....but that's almost impossible anymore....there are no good [murder] motives left."
These lines from Margaret Maron's first of two Christmas mysteries, Corpus Christmas, took me aback somewhat, given that I had always assumed, based on the evidence of Maron's much-praised Judge Deborah Knott series, that Maron long harbored loftier literary ambitions for her writing within the mystery genre.
To be sure, the lines quoted above were uttered in the sixth novel in Maron's lesser-known Lt. Sigrid Harald series. Maron's reputation as a mystery writer is largely based on her second series, the one about Deborah Knott, which she launched in 1992, three years after the publication of Corpus Christmas, and ended just this year, with the publication of Long upon the Land. Conversely, only two more Sigrid Harald mysteries followed Corpus Christmas (although Harald appears in a recent Knott mystery, Three-Day Town).
Concerning her decision to end the Deborah Knott series with its twentieth installment, Maron wryly explained to Mystery Scene Magazine:
Several years ago, two close friends and I made a pact. We had watched other authors keep writing about the same character over and over, hashing and rehashing the same material until they debased some of the reputation they had formed with their earlier books. "If that happens to me," each of us told the others, "Promise that one of you will come and kill me."
Maron added that, after she had made her retirement announcement concerning Deborah Knott, she had received numerous comments from fans "bemoaning the fact that the series has ended" yet thanking her for the "years of pleasure" they had derived from the series. "Some feel as if Deborah and her kin are part of their own extended family," she observed, "and they feel as if there's been a death in the family."
I think this gets to what drives so much modern mystery, be it "cozy," as Maron's Knott series has been described, or gritty, as, say, Ian Rankin's Rebus series has been designated: not so much mystery plots, but the author's evocation of particular people and places. Whatever we term these sorts of mysteries, they have in common that what draws people in both are the series detective as a character, the setting in which the detective acts and the colorful locals that the detective encounters. If there's actually a good mystery plot as well, that's a bonus, but it's not a prerequisite.
Mystery readers never became attached to Lt. Sigrid Harald, a New York police detective, like they did to Deborah Knott and her North Carolina kin. Indeed, easily the least popular novel in the Knott series, judging by Amazon.com reviews, is Three-Day Town (2011), the one book in the Knott series in which Harald appears. A lot of the Amazon reviewers of that novel seem to view Harald as an irksome interloper. (I should add, however, that Three-Day Town won the Agatha for best mystery novel in 2011.)
Speaking of bling, Corpus Christmas was the only novel in the Harald series to get awards recognition, netting the author her first Agatha and Anthony nominations, yet despite this fact I can only give the novel a lukewarm review as a mostly unexceptionable Eighties American police procedural (of sorts), albeit one with a female lead sleuth.
Perhaps it's unfair to the author on my part jumping into a series midstream, but Sigrid Harald did not strike me as an especially interesting or appealing character. Perfectly okay, in short, but kind of meh. This would not be a problem for me, were Corpus Christmas stronger as a puzzle. Yet while the novel offers the form of a classic puzzle mystery (more on this below), it cheats readers of its substance.
On page 177 of a mystery of 182 pages, Harald's "subconscious threw up something she'd overlooked till then....The more she thought of it, the surer she became." Harald then conducts a search of X's abode, finds the murder weapon and the problem is solved.
I'm afraid that I found this rather a unsatisfying approach, in that the mystery might just as easily have been solved on, say, page 82, shortly after the police have been called in to investigate the crime. In retrospect the intervening 95 pages felt like the author (along with her detective) was simply spinning her wheels until the proper page count was reached.
Admittedly, the "form" of the novel is an attractive one, concerning murder at a Victorian house museum, the Breul House, during the Christmas season. Maron has some interesting back story concerning the original owners of the house, but I wish that more had been done with this. (Even as it is, this aspect of the story is much better than another present-day subplot, which feels like padding.) Additionally, the house museum is the repository of an art collection, which allows Maron to add another dimension of interest to the tale.
As far as the characters in the case are concerned, there was frustration to be found here as well. Harald's older boyfriend, Oscar Nauman, is a famous modern artist who may do a retrospective exhibition at the Breul House; and there's a bit of a love triangle introduced into the story, as Harald, who has only recently learned to use makeup apparently, encounters a dazzling former lover of Nauman's. All this seemed over-familiar to me, however. How often do we encounter in books the plainer (yet still interesting looking) woman who bests her beautiful rival at the game of love? This story line (and its male correlative) no doubt has its appeal to readers, given that most of us are not beautiful, but it gets rather predictable.
I think the most interesting story line concerns Rick Evans, a young Louisiana-born photographer on assignment at the Breul House, and his relationship with the similarly youthful Pascal Grant, the beautiful but somewhat intellectually disabled handyman at the Breul House. (Throughout the novel Maron lays great stress on young Grant's angelic beauty.) Yet it's given shorter shrift than it merits and is presented so circumspectly that I still wasn't certain by the end of the novel whether the two were lovers or simply, well, extremely close friends who really enjoy listening to jazz records in each other's company. (Similarly disappointingly, Harald has what I took to be a gay male housemate--the would-be mystery writer quoted at the top of this piece--who flits campily in and out of the story, but doesn't develop as anything other than a caricature.)
Was the author inhibited by the state of this sector of the genre back in 1989 (the novel was published by the Doubleday Crime Club)? Certainly the book won't come out and say, in reference to another person-to-person physical interaction in the story, blunt words like erection and ejaculate and semen, confining itself to cloying, Harlequin-like insipidities such as "the sweet liquids of youth" and "first hot rushes of manhood."
Although Corpus Christmas was published one year shy of the 1990s, already it seems dated in terms of technological references, which shows how far we have come in a quarter-century. However, there was this reference, more topical than ever this year:
"Yes, you might say Oscar Nauman's a painter. Like Donald Trump's a carpenter or Pavarotti sings a little."
Technology may come and go, but evidently narcissistic People coverboy tycoons are timeless.
Based on my reading of Margaret Maron, I suspect her second series sleuth definitely will outlast her first; yet maybe I should give Sigrid one more go. In the meantime, I'll be taking a look at Margaret Maron's Deborah Knott Christmas mystery novel.
Previous Christmas numbers:
26 December 2011 (Mystery in White, since reprinted by the British Library as we all know)
26 December 2012 (Murder for Christmas--not the one you may think)
Previous Margaret Maron mystery review:
26 February 2014 (Shooting at Loons, a Deborah Knott mystery)
Coming Attractions! More Ianthe Jerrold Mysteries: Let Him Lie (1940) and There May Be Danger (1948)
I would be remiss not to mention that the fabulously well-read Michael Dirda, in "Beyond the Bestsellers," his Washington Post review column from last week, included my new book The Spectrum of English Murder (2015) on his list of a dozen recommended books for the holidays, along with such diverse selections as The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories and The Poems of T. S. Eliot. (Of course readers of this blog will know that Eliot was a great fan of detective fiction.) This was so nice to see--especially as Spectrum was published by a small (though excellent) press and is not exactly what one could call a massively publicized tome!
Spectrum, about the Golden Age crime fiction of Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher (Henry Wade) and GDH and Margaret Cole, is a companion volume of sorts to my 2012 book Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery, about the austerely puzzle-oriented mystery writers Cecil John Charles Street (John Rhode, Miles Burton), Freeman Wills Crofts and Alfred Walter Stewart (J. J. Connington). The six authors were all founding members of Britain's Detection Club, a social organization of many of the era's finest mystery writers. (Martin Edwards has written about the Detection Club during the Thirties in his recent popular history The Golden Age of Murder.)
Michael Dirda also mentioned my work with Dean Street Press, who has followed the British Library in reissuing quality editions of vintage English mysteries. As readers of this blog will know, I have written introductions for DSP's reissues of detective novels by Ianthe Jerrold, another charter Detection Club member, E. R. Punshon, an early Detection Club member, and Annie Haynes and Harriet Rutland, two quite different, but both very interesting, Golden Age crime writers who book-ended the era.
With my introductions for DSP reissues of these authors' works, I've enjoyed expanding what is known about writers like Jerrold and Punshon (with the prolific Punshon I've written introductions to fifteen of his novels so far, totaling over 15, 000 words) and, in the case of Haynes and Rutland, recovering what essentially were forgotten lives. I'm doing this all again with seven DSP reissues in January, two of them Ianthe Jerrold's forgotten mysteries written under the pseudonym "Geraldine Bridgman" (Let Him Lie and There Might Be Danger) and five of them detective novels by another almost entirely forgotten mystery writer (more on him coming soon).
In the two newly reissued Ianthe Jerrold novels, the author abandons her brilliant amateur detective, John Christmas, who appeared in her earlier books The Studio Crime and Dead Man's Quarry, in favor of intrepid women sleuths who are drawn into crime investigation out of their sense of empathy for the plights of others, especially children.
These two fine mystery novels, which reflect events from Ianthe Jerrold's own life in the 1940s (more on this later), look ahead to the modern crime novels of authors like Ann Cleeves, I would argue; and I'm very happy to see them back in print after, respectively, 75 and 67 years!
Worst. Parents. Ever. A Sight for Sore Eyes (1998), by Ruth Rendell
The awesomely prolific late crime writer Ruth Rendell (1930-2015), produced two dozen Inspector Wexford novels in the half century that spanned 1964-2013, but over her career she also published 28 non-Wexfords, mostly psychological thrillers, under her own name, as well as 14 crime novels under the pen name Barbara Vine. Rendell's 66th and final crime novel, Dark Corners, was published posthumously late this year and has received pretty good reviews, not only from paid print reviewers, who have tended broadly to praise everything Rendell wrote, but from lay readers, who, truth be told, have been more apt to voice negative criticism of Rendell's work over the last fifteen years.
My own feeling is that Rendell's writing peaked in the 1990s, when she produced not only a series of interesting, socially engaged Wexford novels (Kissing the Gunner's Daughter, 1991, Simisola, 1994, Road Rage, 1997, Harm Done, 1999), but also some of her best Vines (Asta's Book, 1993, No Night Is Too Long, 1994, The Brimstone Wedding, 1995) and "psychological" Rendells (The Crocodile Bird, 1993, The Keys to the Street, 1996, A Sight for Sore Eyes, 1998).
Between 2000 and 2015 Rendell published an additional twenty crime novels, none of which, of the ones I have I have read, I would really rank with her best, barring perhaps The Blood Doctor, 2002). By the time of her last novel, Dark Corners, the terrain the author explored had become quite familiar, and her books were no longer the same compulsive reading for me anymore, though I made a point of never missing an extension of the author's long-running Wexford saga, where the series characters had become like old friends, the ones where you don't mind it when they ramble on a bit.
As with crime fiction generally, Rendell's novels became much longer in the 1980s and 1990s, compared with her books in the 1960s and 1970s. From lean, classic thrillers like A Demon in My View (1975), A Judgment in Stone (1977) and The Lake of Darkness (1980), Rendell's novels by the 1990s had become sprawling monsters of 140,000 words or so. But for me Rendell, in contrast with many other modern crime writers, often makes this length work: her best books are classic page turners, even when there are vast numbers of pages to turn. So it is the case with A Sight for Sore Eyes, perhaps Rendell's last great psychological thriller.
Beginning with books like A Demon in My View and especially The Lake of Darkness, Rendell, like some malevolently crafty Black Widow spider, began crafting creepy crime thrillers wherein she patiently wove together various seemingly disconnected plot strands, gradually entangling her characters in her intricate web of doom.
While I admire the economy with which Rendell accomplished this in her earlier novels, I also appreciate the spaciousness of A Sight for Sore Eyes, which reminds me of some of her richly developed Barbara Vine novels. In A Sight for Sore Eyes about 40% of the book passes before the two main characters even meet each other, but I didn't mind, because what happened before that fateful meeting was transfixing.
Like a Barbabra Vine novel, A Sight for Sore Eyes has a wide time frame, extending from 1965 to the late 1990s and introducing a large cast of characters who eventually collide with each other, often with most unhappy results for these characters. At its heart however, Eyes is a book about the horrific consequences of rotten parenting. The novel's male main character, Teddy Grex--for some reason Teddy Brex in the American edition of the novel--is nurtured, if that's the right word (actually it's really not), by the most horribly neglectful working class parents, while the novel's female main character, Francine Hill, is raised by a maniacally overprotective white collar professional class stepmother and an abysmally weak and inept father.
Rendell showers these parental figures with disdain and for good reason, considering how she portrays them. Her seeming distaste for the English white working (or not working, as the case may be) class, whom she portrays here as feckless, oafish and selfish, reminded me a lot of her portrayal of the same social "types" in Harm Done, the Wexford novel she published the following year. During Teddy Grex's gestation, we, the appalled readers, learn:
His mother had lived on croissants with butter, whipped-cram doughnuts, salami, streaky bacon, fried eggs, chocolate bars, sausages and chips with everything. She had smoked about ten thousand eight hundred cigarettes and drunk many gallons of Guinness, cider, Babycham and sweet sherry. But [Teddy] was a beautiful child with smooth, peachy skin, dark-brown silky hair, the features of a baby angel in an Old Master, and perfect fingers and toes.
Unfortunately, angelic-looking Teddy Grex grows up a sociopath: a skilled craftsman with contempt for humans but adoration for beautiful objects. Meanwhile grave and lovely Francine Hill survives childhood trauma--the murder of her mother--and the overbearing and oblivious management of her stepmother, an incompetent child psychotherapist ("or as she put it, a paedopsychiatrician"), "whose qualifications were a teaching-training certificate and a diploma from a counseling crash course." Rendell, I must admit, is every bit as biting in her portrayal of Francine's awful stepmother, Julia Gregson, as she is with Teddy Grex's repulsive family.
To be sure, the author directs satire at ill-trained and something less-than-competent psychotherapists. Rendell appears dismissive of the use of doll therapy with children, writing, for example,"Julia had Francine playing with dolls. There was no escaping those dolls, Francine sometimes thought.") However, her criticism in this case seems more focused on one spectacularly obtuse and blundering woman. (Interestingly, Rendell's son is a psychiatric social worker, according to this Telegraph article.)
I don't want to say too much about the novel's plot turns after Teddy and Francine finally meet, but let me just add that there is a denouement that is one of the most disturbingly memorable things in the Rendell oeuvre. Is A Sight for Sore Eyes better than some of her early classic suspense novels? Whether it is or not, it's certainly an important part of an impressive line of crime fiction by Rendell, of which, sadly, we will never see, with her death this year, additional new examples. Yet at least we can always console ourselves, if you will, with such unforgettably unsettling classics as A Sight for Sore Eyes.
A Really Late Christmas Number: Corpus Christmas (...
Coming Attractions! More Ianthe Jerrold Mysteries:...
Worst. Parents. Ever. A Sight for Sore Eyes (1998...

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The prettiest little needlepoint of a bird and roses. This exquisite embroidery is worked in a very fine stitch. The work is extremely neat, thus enhancing the detail of the scene; a stem of blowsy pink roses and as yet unopened rosebudsamongst which nestles a vividly coloured blue and yellow bird. A gorgeous little picture for adding a touch of pretty vintage elegance to the hall, sitting room, conservatory, bedroom or bathroom!
6.75"/17cm approximately in diameter, in its faux gilt non wood frame.
Proof were it needed that the best things in life really do come in small packages!


The challenge of international development requires a medley of ideas. At the Multilateral Investment Fund, we work in an array of topics that are at the forefront of efforts to spur the economic development of the private sector in Latin America and the Caribbean. This blog "Trends" brings you our latest research and thinking.


The sheriff and his deputies raised the flag burner from the ground and led him to their car. I wondered why they were putting so much effort into the arrest. It's not like he set off a bomb. But again, looking around at the shocked faces, I suppose lighting up the US Flag in the center of town was just as bad for these folks.
"You go ahead. I'm going to go rest." Charlie walked off towards the hardware store, I presumed, to count cars and sleep.
I waited outside the medical clinic until the dark clouds rolled passed sunset. A steady stream of thunder boomers headed north to Nebraska and maybe Iowa to dump rain, hail, and certainly a tornado in a corn field. The thunderstorms this spring seemed to roll away from Pretty Prairie. Even though I could use the work clearing debris, I am no fan of tornadoes. The thought Mother Nature can swat me away like a flea tends to send lightening bolts to my boots.
I lit another cigarette and looked through the glass window. They still had the flag burner locked inside for a medical evaluation. He probably had to look at pictures of patriotic children saluting the flag to see if he was squeamish. Goodness, who burns a flag in one of the most backwater places in America? Certainly, not for the TV trucks. He had to be nuts for even trying it here.
Besides wondering what was going to happen to the guy, I also wanted to get a second look at him. My brother Dan died when he stepped on one of those homemade explosives in Afghanistan. He was clearly dead. I went to the funeral. So why did this guy look so much like him? There had to be a believable explanation.
I dropped the stub of the cigarette and crushed it with my toe. As I reached for my another, a weary Army truck stopped in front of the clinic. It looked somber like it needed a shine. A baby soldier climbed from the driver's side and ran around the truck. He soon followed a cranky soldier wearing a dusty green field shirt with a bunch of patches above the words "US Army" and a patch on his right arm indicating he was a Ranger. He seemed important enough for the baby soldier to rush to open the door. Then they went in without even looking my way.
I decided to follow them inside. I creaked open the door and heard shouting. The Ranger demanded to see the flag burner and the young girl at the reception desk was stammering.
"I…I…can't let you go back there," she managed to squeak out.
A older man in a white robe entered the reception area followed by a deputy. The doctor took no time in confronting the angry man.
"You need to leave," he said. "We are not allowing anyone but family." The deputy placed his hand on his gun as a precaution.
The cranky soldier let out a blast of air like a punctured tire and placed his flat hand on the reception desk. He leaned there staring at the doctor who stared back. He inched closer to the doctor in a threatening way and he got into his face. This went on for a few minutes until I decided to speak up.
"That seems pretty far fetched," said the doctor.
The soldier interrupted. "He's a deserter, an enemy, and he needs to go with me. This guy is just one of his anarchy friends." The soldier gave me a look of disdain.
I told them about my brother Dan and how this guy looked a lot like him. It couldn't hurt to talk to him, and besides, as soon as I cleared this up I could go to bed. The cranky soldier, the baby soldier, and the doctor waited for me to go on. Honestly, I didn't have much more to say. But I did want to clear up this thing about my brother Dan.
The doctor stared at me until he finally broke the silence.
I squeezed passed the Ranger and he snarled as I went by.
"Don't you worry Colonel Cox," the deputy said. "He won't spill any state secrets." He laughed and the cranky soldier huffed as he turned around.
I followed the doctor and the deputy through the clinic until we reached a back area with a large counter. In the middle of the room, the sheriff and another deputy towered over the flag burner who sat wearing handcuffs and a restraining belt. I could tell he had been struggling and still wanted out of the chair. The deputy stood over him like a bull terrier. The flag burner wasn't going anywhere.
"What's your name?" asked the doctor.
The wind kicked up and whistled through the vents. Every now and then something would hit the utility pipes on the roof and leaves and broken branches danced over the skylight. The edge of the storm had moved closer to Pretty Prairie and was taking some of our garbage with it.
I looked at the flag burner. His eyes were brown, while Dan had blue eyes. His chin seemed a bit wider than Dan's, but it looked pretty close. He had Dan's blonde hair, slender nose, and my thin lips. But deep down when he looked at me I felt something familiar, like I had eaten breakfast with this guy or hung out in our Charger drinking beer. It was a closeness, like we shared a secret. I wanted to talk to him.
The stranger looked at me. "Do you remember the time we set off bottle rockets and nearly took down the Pine Street bridge?" The guy continued to stare. "How about the time we slid down the ice sheet and ended up sliding across the road in front of those cars?" The flag burner looked into my eyes and I tried to see some recognition. He looked at the deputy and shuddered. He returned to my eyes and started to laugh.
"This is my brother Jakey." The flag burner went from pointing and laughing to pointing and crying. "It's my brother Jake," he mumbled.


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Steve Havins, Roger Allonby (CORR), Paul Hinkins and Joff Sharpe.
One of the UK's most inspirational business leaders has told Herefordshire firms they must be prepared to fail fast and reinvent themselves to succeed.
Former British SAS officer Joff Sharpe, who is currently the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at British Land PLC, imparted his expert business advice during a speech at the Business Growth and Export Show on March 19.
Around 50 delegates attended the free breakfast event held at Hereford Racecourse to listen to Mr Sharpe as well as visit the Department for International Trade's Export Hub truck which rolled into the event to help businesses grow their export markets.
Mr Sharpe talked to businesses about the lessons he had learned from his career to date from serving in the British Army, including a stint as an SAS officer during which he was based in Hereford, to more than 25 years in a variety of senior roles, working to improve the performance of blue chip companies.
Those attending heard how fundamental principles underlying the success of the SAS could be applied to SMEs to improve leadership and prosperity.
Mr Sharpe, who has previously worked for global brands including Mars, PepsiCo, News International and Vodafone but still has links to the city through British Land and its involvement with Hereford Shopping Centre and the Cathedral, said: "There are a number of key components to business success starting with a vision of what you want to achieve and the fabric and substance of the organisation that will deliver.
"Assembling diverse and versatile team members, bound by a common value system, is key.
"They then need to be clear on how to execute their plans at speed and be capable of reinventing themselves and adapting to changing circumstances.
Author of 'Who Dares Wins in Business' (2014) Mr Sharpe advised businesses to be versatile, employ people with multiple skills and learn to 'fail fast' to succeed.
Speaking after his presentation Paul Hinkins, Chair of the Marches Growth Hub, said: "Businesses thoroughly enjoyed Mr Sharpe's presentation and I'm sure all of us have been able to draw synergies with the points he highlighted.
"Learning in business is about continuous improvement. No matter how good we are, we can always do better.
Lyndsay Francis, Economic Development Officer at the growth hub, said they were delighted with the turn out at the export event – a first for Hereford.
"Mr Sharpe gave an inspiring talk and we are confident his advice will enable business owners to look at their own organisations in a fresh light.
"Some of the principles Mr Sharpe talked about in relationship to motivation, courage, failure and resilience will resonate strongly with many people running their own company.
"The Export Hub truck also proved a hit with businesses looking for advice on how to grow their export markets.


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The Waning Reign of Monarchs
by Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan from The Washington Post
CERRO PELON, Mexico — High on a remote mountaintop, Alfredo Cruz Colin gazed at a panorama of giant pines and firs where millions of orange and black monarch butterflies spend the winter after flying up to 2,000 miles from Canada and the United States. He saw two things: one of North America's most spectacular natural wonders and trees that could be sawed down and sold for $300 each.
"We can contemplate the butterflies," said Cruz, a lawyer. "Or we can send our children to school and feed our families" with the cash from the cut trees. "It's a tough choice."
The winter migration of monarch butterflies to Mexico, a stunning sight that draws vast numbers of tourists to mountain forests 100 miles west of Mexico City, has been devastated this year. One of the chief causes is logging that destroys butterfly sanctuaries, according to Mexican and U.S. environmentalists.
The butterfly population this winter is the lowest since researchers began detailed surveys 12 years ago and perhaps the smallest since the 1970s, when international scientists first discovered the colonies in central Mexico, according to Lincoln P. Brower, a biology professor at Sweet Briar College in central Virginia and an authority on monarch butterflies. He estimated that the population was at least 75 percent smaller than last year's.
In the last two years the butterflies carpeted an area spanning more than 20 acres, but this winter they cover a little more than five acres, said Ernesto Enkerlin, chief of protected areas for the Environmental Ministry. "We are not happy about having fewer monarch butterflies," he said.
The reason for the dramatic drop appears to be a combination of particularly cold, stormy weather in North America in recent years, herbicide use in the United States and Canada that is killing milkweed plants where butterflies lay their eggs, and persistent illegal logging in Mexico, according to a report issued last week by a panel of monarch researchers chaired by Brower.
Experts and officials agree that all three factors have contributed to the decline in the butterfly population, but there are differing views on whether the greater blame lies with nature or man. Brower said that without further study, it was impossible to determine what portion of the damage was caused by each factor.
But it is clear that the northeast face of this mountain has "been stripped of forest and burned," completely destroying long-established butterfly sanctuaries and leaving only one small butterfly area this year, said Brower, who has visited the site almost every year since the mid-1970s.
Conservationists are also concerned about threats from herbicides, which they say are killing thousands of acres of wild milkweed plants in the midwestern United States and Canada. While genetically engineered crops such as soy beans and corn are resistant to the chemicals, the weed-killers are causing massive destruction of butterfly eggs on milkweed leaves, they said.
"Why should we care?" said Brower. "For the same reasons we should care about the Mona Lisa or the beauty of Mozart's music."
On this chilly mountaintop, reachable by a long, steep horseback ride up to 10,000 feet above sea level, butterfly colonies hang like enormous orange-and-black beards of Spanish moss. As they stirred to life this past weekend, warmed by the afternoon sun, and took flight by the thousands, Elidio Renya Corona, a park ranger, lamented that the size of the colony had shrunk this year and that loggers were "wiping out" the butterflies' winter home.
Officials at U.S. and international conservation organizations, which have donated millions of dollars to protect the migrating butterfly, said they were also alarmed at the shrinking population. They noted that in Chincoteague, Va., and Cape May, N.J., two important stops along the monarch route to Mexico, researchers also reported a record low number of migrating butterflies as they passed through last fall.
Scientists agree that the monarch has a great capacity to recover from dramatic die offs. In the winter of 2001-2002, as many as 80 percent of the butterflies in Mexico perished in an unusual winter storm, and the following year their numbers rose again. But scientists said they were more disturbed by the steady deterioration of the butterflies' North American habitat.
"All of us firmly believe that the butterfly is capable of rebounding, but there is a limit," Brower said. "How many bales of hay can you put on a camel's back before the last straw breaks it?"
The butterflies begin arriving on this mountaintop each November, resting on the native oyamel fir trees as they do in more than a dozen sanctuaries in central Mexico, most of them in the state of Michoacan
Enkerlin said he believed the low count was mainly due to the small numbers that arrived from breeding grounds in the United States and Canada. He said the Mexican government had recently sent in soldiers and other federal law enforcement officials, and installed surveillance cameras, to seal off core areas of the reserve from illegal logging.
But a press release last week from the Environmental Ministry played down logging as a cause for the small butterfly population this year, prompting angry responses from environmentalists.
"It is a lie" to say illegal logging is not a huge problem, said Homero Aridjis, an environmentalist who grew up near the sanctuaries. He said the forests were under "systematic, criminal" attack by loggers. He also said that Mexico, Canada and the United States were not doing enough to protect this prize of nature.
Under a 1986 presidential decree, the sanctuaries were declared a national park where logging was forbidden. But officials and local residents said thousands of people continue to cut down trees inside the protected area, which covers 135,000 acres. Some of the logging is organized, with groups armed with guns and chain saws filling trucks with freshly cut trees. Other culprits are individuals with axes, cutting a tree to get cash for food or clothes.
Many local residents, nearly all poor farmers, said it was unfair for the government to forbid them from cutting down trees in the forests as their fathers and grandfathers had. "They care more about insects than people," said Hector Ramirez, who lives on Cerro Pelon and guides tourists into the sanctuary. "The forest is the only thing we have."
Omar Vidal, director of the World Wildlife Fund office in Mexico, said that between 2000 and 2004, $1 million in private funds from the United States and government funds from Mexico had been paid to local residents as an incentive not to cut trees and for their help in conserving the forests.
But Cruz said the money wasn't enough to stop the logging. Residents interviewed here said that two years ago, each family received about $150 to $200, but that last year the amount dropped considerably. Cruz said a typical family needed about $800 a year to survive.
Early Saturday morning, before a stream of tourists reached the top of Cerro Pelon on horseback to marvel at the spectacle of the butterflies, more ominous noises echoed through the pine forest: the rhythmic thunk of an ax and the roar of a chainsaw.
©2005 The Washington Post Company
Greed and Noise in the Southeast


BeMyDD is a new transportation service in Columbus that gets customers and their cars where they need to be when they can't drive.
BeMyDD's rates compare to taxi rates. The company also gives customers the convenience of keeping their own cars with them.
BeMyDD's "Designated Driver Service" is $12.50 per hour. The service gives customers a designated driver who drives where the customers ask for at least three hours, waits for them and drives them home.
The company also offers a "Pick Up You AND Your Car Service" for $2.95 for the first 10 miles, $1.50 per additional mile and a $25 flat rate that is split between the company and the driver.
All of the company's drivers are at least 25 years old, hired locally, insured and undergo background checks. Drivers are on-call every day of the week at any time, but reservations for drivers are made at least two hours in advance. The service in Columbus has 30 drivers.
Scullion, a full-time professional driver who also works for BeMyDD, said his motivation for being a part of the company is to keep people, including his 6-year-old daughter Mercedes, safe.
The company does not only cater to people who have had too much to drink.
Some students like the idea.
BeMyDD started in Cleveland on March 14 and is also operating in Columbus and Cincinnati, with plans to expand out of state. BeMyDD can be contacted at 1-877-823-6933 and BeMyDD.com.


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Women Who Submit
Empowering women writers to submit their work for publication
About WWS
Submit . . . to Us!
WWS Leadership
Behind The Editor's Desk: Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is the Editor-in-Chief of The Offing, an online literary magazine that began as a channel of Los Angeles Review of Books. As described on the site, "The Offing is an online literary magazine publishing creative writing in all genres and art in all media. The Offing publishes work that challenges, experiments, provokes — work that pushes literary and artistic forms and conventions. The Offing is a place for new and emerging writers to test their voices, and for established writers to test their limits."
I spoke with Dr. Prescod-Weinstein about being an editor, and the future of The Offing.
As an editor, what do you look for in submitted work? What separates good submissions from really stand-out ones?
I am always looking for works that give me the feeling that I will be thinking about them for a long time to come. I should caveat this by saying that the department editors make almost all of the publication decisions, although occasionally I will be asked what I think about a potential piece. I want us to publish work that is unfamiliar but captivating. I want it to keep crossing my mind hours, weeks and months later. For example, Scarlett Ji Yeon Kim's from the Koreana Cycle is a bilingual series that experiments with form in both English and Korean. Months after we published it, I'm still returning to it because it speaks to me as a third culture kid. I've also been drawn repeatedly to Khadijah Queen's I HAVE QUESTIONS, which is a deeply personal and provocative think piece in verse about constructing a world without anti-Black police violence.
At Women Who Submit, we encourage women and gender-nonconforming writers to submit their work to literary journals, collaborate, and share resources for clarifying the publication process. We believe in celebrating our rejections and sharing our strategies for dealing with rejection. You've been published in both the academic world and the online literary world. What do you do when your work is rejected?
Sometimes the reasons for rejection are frustrating, like I want to write about racism in science and a magazine has recently had a piece about sexism that doesn't talk about race at all, and they say, "It's too similar." In that case I hang onto the piece and maybe submit it elsewhere. Other times, I ask a friend to look my work over and give me feedback about how to strengthen it. When I graduated from Harvard, I couldn't write for crap. The fact that my work doesn't sound robotic is something that required a lot of practice. I still see myself as a beginner who is learning, and I am usually willing to accept that my writing needs work. As Kiese Laymon says, "we're not good enough not to write four hours a day." So, I know that the more I write, the better I will get, and I hope that this will translate into fewer rejections. I believe in the power of practice.
There have been a lot of structural transitions to The Offing this year with regards to editorial directorship, LARB, and funding. What has that transition been like?
I'm happy to report that I am no longer in the not-sleeping-showering-eating-properly stage of the transition. The first month was hard and involved a significant learning curve for me. It's hard to get to know a staff that is spread across three continents, where we're all volunteers, and all have day jobs. The editors, even the ones who decided to step back from being involved, have been magnificent. They worked so hard to ensure I didn't take things personally, for example, and I think even when I am nagging them about something that isn't fun but is necessary like fundraising, they hear where I'm coming from. I appreciate them so much.
I'm still learning a lot both from working with the editors and also on the occasions I've worked directly with authors, like the piece Stacy Parker Le Melle wrote about the dynamic between Black artists and #BlackLivesMatter. I try as I can to pay pay close attention to what the department editors are selecting, to understand what they are looking for, which I hope will improve my eye. On top of that, Executive Editor/Micro Editor Mahogany L. Browne has been a phenomenal mentor. She stops me from making mistakes while also encouraging me. Executive Managing Editor Andrea García-Vargas has been remarkable about keeping things running smoothly even when for example I became unexpectedly very sick during August and September.
I've loved getting to know all of the editors and writers I've met over the last few months. I hate that I have to worry about money constantly and that this sometimes requires me saying no to an idea that I actually love.
One great aspect of The Offing is the dedication to intersectionality and elevating the voices of writers of marginalized identities. Do you have advice to editors who want to uphold that same mission?
As a theoretical physicist, I'm used to hearing from senior faculty and top administrators that, "We want diversity but we don't want to sacrifice quality." It's so pervasive that for example this was a comment that the former MIT Provost made to a room full of mostly Black, Latinx and Native American scientists while I was a researcher there. So, when I think about this question it's coming from: how do I respond to that? The suggestion that there is tension between my race/gender/sex etc. and my excellence is of course wildly offensive. But it's also tremendously unimaginative. I regularly read works by white people where it's clear that the writing would have been better if they were able to have a more intersectional viewpoint. Let's say they are reviewing a TV show that involves characters of color but they don't take race into account. The writing would have been so much richer if they had been willing to consider all of the show's moving parts.
So, my advice for editors is to look for what's missing from the writing of people who don't write inclusively, and instead of trying to improve that writing, notice that people with marginalized identities often already have that quality built in. It's a form of excellence that is ignored because seeing the whole picture isn't always valued. It's important to see that this isn't about pigeonholing for example Black writers as "Black writers" but rather recognizing that whether a Black writer has written about Black people or not, their point of view has a standpoint that is affected by who they are as a Black artist. The other thing is that I know The Offing isn't perfect on this point, and I have tried to pay attention to what voices I think we're not hearing from often enough. You can't be passive, and you can't be focused on how things make you look. You have to think about getting it right, even if that means admitting that mistakes — serious mistakes — have been made.
I don't feel like I should have to make the case for why marginalized voices matter. We're people. So, we just do. White women's writing is also not a placeholder for everyone else. If you are an editor who can't seem to find excellent works by people who aren't white, probably what's missing is an expansiveness in your point of view.
Originally from east Los Angeles, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein holds degrees from Harvard College, University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Waterloo/Perimeter Institute in Canada. One of under 100 Black American women to ever earn a Ph.D. in Physics and an expert in theoretical cosmology, Chanda is internationally recognized for her anti-racist, feminist, and pro-queer speaking and activism. She currently holds a research position in theoretical physics at the University of Washington and divides her time between Seattle and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her academic work has been published in Classical and Quantum Gravity and Physical Review D, while her social commentary and popular science writing have appeared in Gawker, The Toast, and Physics World. She is also a contributor to the forthcoming On Antisemitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice in Palestine and wrote the introduction for the young adult book Hidden Human Computers: The Black Women of NASA. Chanda maintains a blog on science, society, and social justice at Medium.
Featured image from http://www.cprescodweinstein.com
Posted in: Behind the Editor's Desk
Highlight on WWS-San Francisco: An Interview with Chapter Co-Lead, Dominica Phetteplace
A WWS PUBLICATION ROUND UP FOR NOVEMBER
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Congratulations to Grace Jahng Lee and Sibylla Nash for being the recipients of the Kit Reed Travel Fund sponsored by Kit Reed's family. Grace will be attending Bread Loaf and Sibylla will be attending Joya: AiR. Born stateless in Seoul, Grace Jahng Lee has received awards/residencies/fellowships/mentorships from VONA, Kundiman, Yaddo, Brooklyn Arts Council, the Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, AIR Budapest, Asian American Writers Workshop, and Hedgebrook, among others. She is working on a book about a Korean American immigrant/military family that deals with addiction, mental health, intergenerational trauma, and the search for home. Sibylla Nash is an LA girl with Jersey roots. A freelance writer, her work has appeared in Vibe, Essence, and The Chicago Tribune. She has written two novels, Dream City and Bumped, and a guide for parents, Baby Modeling & Beyond: From the Stroller to the Red Carpet.
Antonia Crane
Arts Collide
Bettina Judd
Gingerbread Woman
Iris De Anda
Jacqui Morton
Jay O'Shea
Kate Maruyama
Laura Warrell
Lisa Cheby
Melissa Chadburn
Monapily
Stephanie Abraham
Tisha Marie Reichle
Toni Ann Johnson
Vickie Vértiz
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo


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Goblin's Cave
Goblin's Cave might look like a 3 reel slot with a classic influence at first, but don't let that fool you. This game, with its 3 paylines, innovates quite a bit, using both a Hold feature and a wild symbol to insure that you're still going to have fun with it. The goblin theme isn't that successful to be honest, at least not the way it's designed here, with few details involved in the background graphics, but I feel that the game itself makes up for the lack of focus with the graphics. Playtech did a pretty good job here, even though it's not the best looking slot out there.
In Goblin's Cave, the action takes place in a cave as you might imagine, and yes, there is a goblin inside and he's working the reels. The actual spinning of the reels are done by the goblin, as you will notice whenever you hit the Spin button. Inside the cave, there are lots of gold coins and treasures to be had, if only you can get the right symbols to line up on the reels. The Hold buttons are at the bottom of the reels, and you can use them as you want during each round. The game has a pretty long list of symbols, starting with the wild ruby symbol, then three types of crowns (red, purple and green used along with the gold), three tea pots made out of gold and using lots of ornaments, three rings, a gold coin and a lamp.
The wild symbol is an obvious feature here, giving the player an extra chance to form a combination, though it has its own payouts that it brings to the table, for 1 to 3 symbols of this type appearing on an active line.
The Hold feature is the real gem of the slot though. You start the game by clicking on the Spin button, and you will notice that three symbols appear on the bottom line while the other two remain empty. You click on the Hold button of the symbols you want kept, after which you click on Spin again. The symbols that are held will occupy the entire reel they're on, while the rest will spin as they would usually do. You can Hold all three reels if the symbols are the right ones, which would give you three paying combinations at the same time.
Goblin's Cave is a classic slot that's worth checking out, whether you're a fan of this style or not. Its features are the real attraction though, it has nothing to do with the choice of theme or design.
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Theoretical payout N/A
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Before the bench
Cases heard before South and East Cheshire Magistrates Courts
Rhiannon McDowall
Recent cases from South and East Cheshire magistrates court:
Walter Peterson Abbey, 41, of Lansdowne Street, Macclesfield, admitted three charges of theft. He was given a eight week prison sentence suspended for 12 months.
Richard Ennis, 37, of no fixed abode, admitted stealing two bottles of vodka. He was jailed for six weeks.
Nathan James Boyd, 22, of no fixed abode, admitted using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, and assaulting a police constable. He was fined £160.
Carla Sjoerdsma, 32, of Lansdowne Street, Macclesfield, admitted two charges of theft and breaching a conditional discharge. She was sentenced to prison for eight weeks suspended for 12 months.
Paul William Lewis Wardle, 27, of Coronation Street, Blackpool, admitted using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour in Macclesfield and breaching a conditional discharge. He was fined £80.
Macclesfield Town match stopped for fowl play
Macclesfield Town FCGround staff were in a flap as they chased the large bird around the pitch during the Silkmen's defeat to Grimsby Town


In response to a need for a simpler, more cost-effective and environmentally responsible solution for treatment of wastewater, Ontario Genomics, alongside an NSERC Engage Plus award, supported a partnership between Bishop Water Technologies (BWT) and Dr. Christopher Weisener and his colleague Dr.Rao Chaganti of the University of Windsor. They are working together to find a solution for BWT's product, BioCord, that would be affordable to communities, environmentally responsible, simpler to operate, and compliant with Federal and existing provincial regulations.
A 2015 video testimony from Don Bishop of Bishop Water Technologies (BWT) describing how genomics can be a solution to make wastewater plants more effective and cheaper. Specifically, he talks about his organization's experience using metagenomics to help improve and optimize BWT's "BioCord" technology for municipal and industrial wastewater treatment.
Water contaminants can lead to deadly diseases such as dengue fever, cholera, dysentery, and diarrhea. DNA-based technologies can quickly and accurately detect pathogens in a water supply, identifying unsafe water before it can make people sick. KB-1 is a value-recovery tool for contaminated groundwater discovered by Dr. Elizabeth Edwards of the University of Toronto and now marketed and sold by SiREM, which is being adapted to identify a variety of contaminants, applicable across the unique conditions of developing countries.
ENDETEC, a global company focused on innovative sensor solutions for water safety, in collaboration with Drs. Heinz-Bernhard Kraatz of the University of Toronto and R. Stephen Brown of Queen's University, will develop a DNA biosensor for simple, low-cost, fast, on-site detection of bacteria in water samples. "DNA biosensor technology can potentially be a game-changer for water monitoring, providing truly rapid monitoring and expanding the range of organisms that can be detected," said Mr. Doug Wilton, VP Operations for ENDETEC.


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About PortsToronto > Media Room > News > Air Canada to Begin Service from Billy Bishop May 1
Air Canada to Begin Service from Billy Bishop May 1
The Toronto Port Authority today announced that Air Canada and the City Centre Terminal Corporation (CCTC), which owns the terminal building at the popular Billy Bishop Airport, have reached an agreement on a terminal lease arrangement that will see Air Canada start operations by May 1, 2011.
The agreement was required for the Toronto Port Authority, which runs the airport, to finalise its operating agreement with Air Canada. Upon the completion of its terminal lease agreement, Air Canada finalized its operating agreement with the TPA.
"We are very pleased that these negotiations have been successful," TPA CEO and President Geoff Wilson said "Opening the airport to new carriers is a key element of our long-term business plan, and can only serve the best interests of the passengers who love the easy access of our downtown airport."
Media Contact Suzanna Birchwood, Public Affairs, TPA
416 863 2036 (w)/416 317 6405 (mobile)