text:
Captain Phillips: Colliding with the Real
Saul Symonds
Ghost Town Anthology: An Interview with Denis Côté
Kazan, Elia
A Tribute to Éric Rohmer: The 26th Belfort International Film Festival
Film Remakes by Constantine Verevis
Banquo's Chair (episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents)
A Certain Kind of Semiological Infinity and Excess: The 51st Sydney Film Festival
Film has always involved a certain materiality and a certain immateriality, a certain technology and a certain semiology. And a film festival reflects this on a larger scale: it is a total fact that always involves both quantity and something that cannot be quantified, a matrix into which a conglomerate of films, each with its own specificity and traceable genealogy, is embedded. A film festival thus involves both a quantitative seeing and a more qualitative activity of understanding and feeling. But one should not minimise the importance of what one fails to understand or misunderstands, or of what one fails to even see or discern, and more importantly, one should not minimise the importance of viewing so many films so closely together in such a short time. This quantitative condition produces a qualitative effect, a forceful interaction or dissemination of image and meaning that operates between films at a festival and creates passing affinities that are felt with an undeniable clarity but would never be noted in any other situation. The double-property of a film festival, then, is discovered both in the number of films shown or seen and in the richness of meanings produced.
Up here in Sydney the festival's venues tend to draw different people. The State Theatre, a plush old picture-palace restored to its former glories smack in the city-centre, draws an older crowd of cinema-goers who give every impression of being steeped in culture and art. These are people who savour the moment when lights dim and curtains slide apart with a barely audible rustling. A second venue, the Dendy Opera Quays, is situated on the harbour, a stone's throw from the Opera House and the Rocks, and tends to draw younger, more cosmopolitan crowds. Here uni students rub shoulders with old fellas sporting unkempt beards, and in the lobby accents from across the globe mix to form an acoustic cocktail with an almost hypnotic effect. Running to catch a 5pm session I realised for the first time in my life how incredibly the sun sets in this part of Sydney. This is where the Antonioni retrospective screened, as did the left-leaning political documentaries, the films on cult icons like Charles Bukowski and Metallica which always screened to packed houses, and the new Jim Jarmusch film, Coffee and Cigarettes (2003).
"New" may not be the right word here. Coffee and Cigarettes is new, and then again it isn't. It is a composite made up of eleven shorts threaded like beads on a string, whose cinematic origins go back to 1986. This reiterative structure means that the film has no single inaugural gesture, no single beginning, but rather a repeated sense of return that functions like the initiatory beat of a shaman's drum. The repetition of a situation with small but significant variations is characteristic of the way Jarmusch establishes his points with a subtlety that's almost silent. (Aaltra's [Benoît Delépine, 2004] black-and-white visual style at first reminded me of early Jarmusch with its laid-back quietly-nuanced anti-dramatic delivery. Then, as I watched, it reminded me more of Kaurismäki. After half and hour it reminded me only of itself. To call this film a black comedy would be to betray it by allotting it a standard classification. It is deeply idiosyncratic and deeply subversive of audience expectations. It breathes a dark Nordic humour and focuses with wry clarity on the comic nature of human obstinacy, idiocy, pettiness and irresponsibility.)
In Coffee and Cigarettes Jarmusch returns the audience again and again to some corner inside some coffee shop. The coffee shops change, but the scenes are always interior, always around a table, and the camera never allows us to stray from this one section of the café. We never see the whole, only the part, the intimate part that establishes a context for Jarmusch to explore his thematic interest in the difficulties and humour of communication, especially communication between friends. All the conversations embedded in Coffee and Cigarettes are built upon the assumption that human communication is filled with misunderstandings and difficulties that are as comic as they are inevitable. At the end of the film, and before the credits roll, we hear a voiceover saying, "and now, for the news". This penultimate moment (the ultimate moment being filled by Iggy Pop's Lou e Lou e played over the credits) represents a type of communication which is not only inherently uni-directional, but is based on the fundamentally mistaken belief that meanings can simply be passed from one person to another like cars passing from one side of a bridge to the other.
Jarmusch's recurrent overhead shots of the table provide an objective visualisation of the often unspoken connections that exist between siblings, friends and acquaintances. Objects that ordinarily would be considered insignificant become mutely articulate. An image: Roberto Benigni is sitting in a cosily lit corner of a coffee shop. The nervous energy emanating from him seems to belie the fact that all he is doing is sitting. This carefully constructed scene, however, speaks to us not only through the five-or-so half-drunken espresso cups lined-up on the table in front of Benigni and not only through the cigarette he's avidly drawing on, but also through the cracked paint on the wall behind him. One way to condense Coffee and Cigarettes into a single line might be: worn friends, worn people, worn corners, and insignificant objects and situations that become imbued with significant and living meaning. Somewhere in Coffee and Cigarettes Tom Waits says to Iggy Pop, "we're the coffee and cigarettes generation". You could almost say that each type of drug comes with a particular cinematic culture: alcohol can be associated with the film noir of the '40s, hallucinogens with the New American Cinema of the late '60s and '70s, and heroin with a swathe of hard-edged socially-aware techno youth films from the late '80s and '90s. However unlike alcohol, which is a depressant, or hallucinogens, which are associated with an awareness of alternate realities, or heroin, which sends a rush up and down the spine that leaves you in a dream-like state close to sleep, coffee and cigarettes are both nerve-stimulating chemicals. Throughout the film Jarmusch's characters refer to their properties with ironic comments such as "what are you, a fucking moron or something, those things'll kill you" and with constant variations of "you should have a proper lunch" and "that's not nourishment". But you come out of Coffee and Cigarettes feeling that human beings need more than just regular nourishment. Perhaps they need a different kind of nourishment, and coffee and cigarettes are of that kind. They are something like the Tesla coils that are referred to several times, but rather than act as conductors of electrical current, they act as conductors of the semiological resonance that plays through and around these gentle conversations between strangers or friends.
Gettin' the Man's Foot Outta Your Baadasssss! (Mario Van Peebles, 2003) is as loud as Coffee and Cigarettes is quiet. Nevertheless, it's a complex texture of oppositions: a film about the making of a film, a son directing a film in which he plays his father directing a film. It's about White America and Black America, the record of an unmistakable challenge to the American mainstream that said, "we're not going to bow down to the man anymore". And it has a peculiar rhythm, at once casual, like breezily strolling down a street, and intense, like an obsession. I remember it as an amalgam of images – Sweetback's motorbike, open highways, deserts, cigars, nightclubs and parties – and moods – dreams, obsessions, obstacles, attitude, disappointment, financial difficulties, deteriorating health, racism and violence. Jotting down some quick notes in the cinema at the end of the movie I found the film's moods and images spiralling inwards and concentrating themselves in a single line stated by the son playing the father, "the man ain't gonna carry no message for free". This film records how a film once did create its own vision and carry its own message. And it's the familiar but peculiar way that Mario Van Peebles' film reproduces his father's odyssey in making Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971) that impressed me most: it's both distant in being a record of the making of a film, and intimate in expressing a son's connection to his father. In showing that the price of fighting the system is always exacted in more than just dollars, Gettin' the Man's Foot Outta Your Baadasssss! is talking not only to us as the immediate audience, but also of and to a specific community, the Black American community, and also of and to a specific person, Melvin Van Peebles. In the end, both the film of the son and the film of the father, despite their differences and divergent aims, seem to reach a point of mutual rapport in believing that sometimes you need your dreams to survive.
The Canadian Consul General Richard Kohler introduced the screening of The Far Side of the Moon (Robert Lepage, 2003) by stating that the director's work is a mixture of "the intimate and the infinite". I have to admit that the exalted sound of these terms perfectly matched the environment of the State Theatre in which the audience was sitting (as if in some magnificent magnified lounge-room). If Kohler had said this in French, that most philosophical of languages, I might have been convinced, but I wasn't. William Blake's poetry intimate and infinite? Yes. Lepage's film? Perhaps. Lepage's philosophical leanings, however, are obvious. With quotes such as, "The earth is the cradle of man, but man cannot spend his whole life in a cradle", who could doubt it? And Lepage does consistently connect familiar small-scale details of everyday life to large-scale, even cosmic, realities. The moon, which is a recurrent image throughout this film, embodies this contrast. The moon, which always shows the same face to the earth as it orbits, represents a familiar reality that has been the subject of representation from the earliest known mythologies to contemporary cinemas. The moon's far side, however, exists as something unfamiliar, facing the depths, always looking away from the earth, always unknown, and therefore always full of potential. Perhaps this sense of potential, when Lepage mines it, could be said to be close to a sense of the infinite.
In The Far Side of the Moon Lepage weaves a narrative about the need to move beyond established boundaries through the story of two very different brothers and the way in which they come to grips with their lives, the world, each other and their recently deceased mother. It is particularly through their talk about their mother, their memories of her, and their discussions about what to do with her possessions, that Lepage establishes the importance of transcending one's bounds. This concept of boundedness is underlined by the fact that both brothers circulate within a closed economy of meanings. One brother still lives in the house where he was born, and clearly cannot move beyond the context established by his birth. The other, successful and ostensibly happy, circulates within a wider, but equally closed economy of meanings established by the urban lifestyle that his money secures (this stress on boundedness, and on the crossing of boundaries, is not yet a sense of infinity, is it?). Having both brothers played by the same actor leaves us in no doubt that Lepage wishes to make a statement, not just about two idiosyncratic individuals, and not just about sibling relationships, but about human nature in general. Such philosophical undertones are further emphasised via dialogue. Characters say things such as, "space exploration in the 20th century is motivated by narcissism", a statement which establishes a circular paradox: exploration suggests a desire or need to move into the unknown, to transcend the boundaries established by nature or culture, whereas narcissism suggests that one inevitably stamps the new with the shape of the old, that one inevitably molds the unknown into one's own image or into the image of one's society.
The most profound aspect of Lepage's film, however, lies in the unusual conceptual connections that he makes via images reminiscent of the types of conceptual imagistic connections made by early 20th century Cubist and Surrealist artists. In one sequence he shows us the older brother, Phillippe, waiting in a laundromat. The camera seems to be viewing the laundromat from a position inside a washing machine. Phillippe walks over to the washing machine and peers in, his face framed by the circular window of its door. The image fades to black-and-white and the circular window framing his face pulls back to reveal itself as the window of a space-pod drifting out into the blackness. A similar sequence is shown in flashback: we see Phillippe's very pregnant mother sitting in a laundromat. The camera moves close to her belly, then cuts to a grainy image that appears to be a foetus slowly floating about its own umbilical cord inside her womb. As this impressionistic image resolves, however, it reveals not a foetus, but an astronaut floating in space.
The film's final scene: Phillippe is in an airport waiting for a connecting flight. Unexpectedly, some of the objects from his travel bag rise into the air. Eventually, he too, rises weightlessly into the air while other passengers walk past. Their obliviousness to his condition intensifies our own awareness of his weightlessness. This scene distils much of Lepage's conceptual and stylistic approach. The airport itself provides a locus for connecting flights moving from a known point of departure to a known point of arrival. It is a metaphor of circulation within a limited economy of meanings, and stands in contrast to Lepage's metaphoric use of space exploration to imply an alternate movement that travels from a known point of departure to an unknown point of arrival. Phillippe's weightlessness is reminiscent of Surrealist imagery but, within the context of this film, encapsulates a meaning that has nothing to do with the Surrealist attempt to establish the creative existence of a sur-reality. Rather, it represents the expression of the simple and familiar need to cross borders, boundaries, and limits of all kinds, to become something more than one is, and the simple and familiar awareness that the repercussions of the known always echo into the unknown.
This analysis, however, should be mistrusted. It is certainly jostling in an all-too-narrow festival passageway where incompatible meanings are crushed together. In my mind Lepage's film is contaminated with the experience of Bukowski: Born into This (John Dullaghan, 2003), a revealing unsentimentalised portrait of a hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-writing Beat poet. In explanation of his lifestyle, and perhaps also of his anti-poetic posture, he throws out a gruff "we don't want poets, we want hard-living fuck-machines". The public laps up Bukowski because of the boundaries he breaks. Wildness and danger are the essence of his appeal – and what he wants to give the world, what he wants to spread, isn't poetry, but a way of living and I guess a way of dying. A way, if you want, of breaking through boundaries. When we finally arrived at the point of Bukowski's death the woman next to me was crying. As the lights came up she was still crying. A tear dropped onto the armrest. I watched as it was slowly absorbed into the fabric of the chair and, quite literally, into the fabric of the cinema. Another boundary crossed: I had watched Bukowski's pain translated from the unreality of cinematic images to something as concrete and real as a chair.
A profoundly thoughtful film, a real-time meditation on reality, and the film that surely scored the most walk-outs of any film I attended at the festival was Good Bye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003). This film takes place in and around a crumbling movie-house and parallels our viewing the film with the characters viewing of the Taiwanese martial arts classic, Dragon Inn (King Hu, 1967). The use of real-time is readily associated with the commercially slick television series 24, but the difference of approach between 24 and Good Bye, Dragon Inn couldn't be greater and seems to reflect a traditional East-West cultural divide. Whereas 24 is so full of activity that it creates the paradoxical effect of making a single day seem like a month, the use of real-time in Good Bye, Dragon Inn is characterised by emptiness. This emptiness, however, is not always an absolute absence of human beings, but rather the presentation of a space whose opaqueness (you could even call it "mystery") is accentuated by the fewness of the people present. In constant interplay with this opaqueness and mystery is an interest in communication expressed through a sombre mannered style that verges on that of silent film, and through the physical placement of actors. Tsai activates a sense of austerity that restricts communication to a closeness of bodies: in an almost empty cinema strangers sit side-by-side, in an almost empty urinal strangers stand side-by-side. The film has a homoerotic subtext, but it not only makes you aware of the proximity of the male bodies in the film itself, but also generates an awareness of proximity of the actual bodies of viewers around you. Further, the duplication that results from being positioned in a cinema watching characters in a cinema deployed in real-time results in an acute awareness of being involved in the activity of watching a film. At some moments it seemed that what was happening in Tsai's film was real. And like the story that Chuang-tse is said to have told of a man who, upon waking, could not determine whether he was a man who had dreamt that he was a butterfly, or whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man, I found it possible to wonder whether Tsai's characters were real people in real-time watching a film like me or, whether I was in their world watching a film like them.
Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho, 2003) radiates outwards from a single unsettling thought: that all the mechanisms erected by society to protect its citizens are sometimes wholly inadequate to stop a single killer. Its narrative revolves around the sex crimes of an actual serial killer who was never caught and was active in South Korea sometime in the '80s. Three impressions have stayed with me: the sound of the rain, a field of tall grass undulating in the wind beneath an overcast sky, and the opening image of a young boy gazing directly into the lens of the camera which is linked to a closing image of one of the police investigators gazing into the camera in a similar way, a visual link that connects innocence to the knowledge of evil. These three things – a sound, an image, and a gaze – sum up the desolation tinged with sadness that seeps from the narrative and the mood of this film. Bong Joon-ho effectively utilises a sense of the evil lying beneath the most ordinary facade to generate an undercurrent of anticipation, an anticipation that tends to displace the more overt use of suspense that characterises many Western thrillers. Despite the film's brutality (intensified by its juxtaposition with a comic sensitivity on one side, and with a series of almost poetic visual images on the other), its expressive modality is pervasively understated. In Memories of Murder's closing scene, an ex-policeman involved in the unsuccessful investigation of the serial killings drives past a field in which the first body was found. He stops his car, gets out, and crouches to peer into the pipe where the body was dumped. A curious young girl asks what he is doing. She tells him that another man had visited that very spot a few months before, and when she had asked him why he was staring into the pipe he replied vaguely that he had done something there a long time ago. When the ex-policeman asks "do you remember what he looked like?" she replies only that, "he was very ordinary…" Bong Joon-ho's equation between evil and ordinariness is all the more powerful for being so simple.
If Heraclitus is to be believed, "there is harmony in opposing movements". Certainly one of the highlights of a film festival is not only the screening of new films but the screening of old films. Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (Chor Yuen, 1972) is an old Shaw Bros film with a timeless title. It is lurid, shifts from the brutal to the sentimental in a matter of seconds, and is melodramatic to the point of being humorous. Further, it has everything that anyone could ever confess. Freud would have loved it. Tarantino does love it. This is Hong Kong style lowbrow popular entertainment. But a movie like this is also an artefact from a particular time, and indicative of a whole strain of Hong Kong cinema that's been endlessly parodied and referenced. The print that the festival screened was an un-restored original negative complete with missing frames, grain, and general degradation. Viewing an older film isn't like viewing a new one. The degradation of the film stock continually asserts itself, and given a now common aesthetic attitude whose genealogy can be traced in a branching line from the Dadaists of the 1920s onwards, it is easy to see in such degradation something worn and beautiful. You are aware not only of looking at a film, but of looking at an artefact, of looking back in time as it were. And you are aware not only of the film's narrative and formal shortcomings, but equally of its place as a forerunner of today's postmodernist action films, and of the huge distance that exists between the time of the making of this film and contemporary cinema, a distance constituted not only by changed cultural sensibilities but by a changed set of audience expectations and an enriched audience sophistication. Time itself conspires with this film to render it in the eyes of a contemporary audience comic and banal and crude and beautiful all at once.
Amongst this year's screenings of older titles the central attraction was the near-complete Michelangelo Antonioni retrospective (one notable exception being The Passenger [1975]: Jack Nicholson owns the copyright and for reasons that I have been unable to ascertain has refused to give permission for the film to be screened). Rolando Caputo of the Cinema Studies Program at Melbourne's LaTrobe University spoke to audiences about each film before and after the screenings. I caught up with Rolando on the second last day of the festival. We managed to find a quiet corner in the Menzies Premier Hotel at the far end of the Canberra Suite to discuss Antonioni.
Saul Symonds: The first thing I wanted to ask you wasn't actually a question, it was more a point I wanted to clarify. I was reading about Zabriskie Point (1970) and this website said that the final scene was originally of a plane skywriting the words, "Fuck you America", and of course it said that the studio made him delete that. I was curious if you're able to verify this.
Rolando Caputo: I'm not sure about the skywriting, but I have heard people say that there was some variation regarding the ending. I believe that the issue was about the female character getting back into the car after the explosion. There was talk that Antonioni wanted to end with the explosion and leave it somewhat ambiguous whether it was a projection of her imagination or whether it had a real status to it. The shot of her getting back into the car makes it appear that it could only have been a fantasy projection of hers. The ambiguity has been removed. But this is pure speculation, I've seen no definitive evidence about alternative endings to the film.
SS: One of the things that struck me at yesterday's screening of The Mystery of Oberwald (1980) is that if you look at the Carlo Ponti trilogy (Blow-Up [1966], Zabriskie Point and The Passenger) you see over the course of these three films Antonioni moving his established themes into new areas, and I guess The Passenger is sort of a culmination of everything that he's been developing. Now when he returns to Italy and makes this film with Monica Vitti again he almost seems to pick up thematically where Red Desert (1964) left off, and presents her as the same "suffering female" that she played in many of his earlier films. It seems to me that this, what I'll call "suffering female" for lack of a better word, is a recurrent character in Antonioni's Italian films and in Italian cinema in general – whether you're looking at the way Federico Fellini used Giulietta Masina in La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957) or the way that Roberto Rossellini used Ingrid Bergman. Do you feel that this is a particularly Italian way of presenting women, or is there something idiosyncratic about the way Antonioni presents them?
RC: Firstly, just about Mystery of Oberwald and the Monica Vitti character. I don't think that her character in that film has any real link to the Vitti films from the '60s. Her performance is radically different and she looks radically different. In other words, Antonioni's not trying to evoke the former Vitti in that at all. As for the suffering women, I don't really think that Antonioni belongs in that vein. Principally because they're not women who suffer in any overtly melodramatic way, it's an existential suffering that we all share. It's not just the women, I think the men equally so. Antonioni's not somebody who presents women as victims of anything.
SS: But if you compare Antonioni's female characters to his male characters, you see that it's not so much existential angst or suffering the men endure, but more of a disassociation from the world around them.
RC: You're right about the men being much more disassociated than the women in relation to reality, but that may go back to Antonioni's famous statement about why he uses women in his films as focal points. And I'm paraphrasing, but the quote had something to do with women providing him with a better or subtler filter of reality. In one sense I think he believes that women have a greater attachment to reality and men possibly retreat from it. And you get that sense in the Ponti trilogy definitely, where there's a certain dissociation between the male characters and the world. But there's still an existential quality about that disassociation.
SS: I wanted to ask you about the disappearance of characters. The most famous example is in L'avventura (1960), but in a large proportion of Antonioni's films characters disappear without explanation, almost as if they're swallowed up by the environment. How do you understand the significance of this disappearance of characters in his films?
RC: One aspect of it is just the relation between narrative and non-narrative. Antonioni's films are narrative films, but the narrative may not necessarily dominate and provide the solutions that spectators are used to. There is the possibility that the story may come to a termination but there is still something left. So in L'eclisse (1962) what effectively happens, narratively speaking, is that the two characters, Alain Delon and Monica Vitti, make an agreement to meet that evening – the famous last words, "same time, same place". Neither of them turn up to the appointed location, and we don't know why they don't turn up. But what does happen in an extraordinary way is that the camera turns up. And even though the narrative has lost its characters it continues in some form which is not specifically narrative. It is the camera which has been liberated from the story elements. So in essence, the disappearance of character or story isn't going to derail any of the films.
SS: You mentioned at the forum that all of Antonioni's films are weighted in a psychological direction. Yet it's definitely not the psychological realism of, say, Dostoyevsky. Although Antonioni does seem interested in the inner lives of his characters, he time and time again renders their actions and motivations opaque. How would you explain this seemingly paradoxical strategy?
RC: With a film like his first feature, Chronicle of a Love Affair (1950), it seemed to critics no longer possible to just talk about neo-realism in terms of a social neo-realism, and the term that arose was psychological neo-realism. Somehow a shift had taken place between the neo-realism of Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945) or Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) and what is occurring in a film like Chronicle of a Love Affair. It seems to me, and the parallel has been drawn by others and I guess Antonioni himself in certain interviews, that the kind of psychological realism he's dealing with in effect is similar to Flaubert's. We ultimately don't know the motivations of Madame Bovary. Flaubert will describe the world, will depict the characters, and we think we're getting insights into their motivations, but there is something that remains unexplained. And I think if we want to talk about the psychological realism of Antonioni we could refer back to a writer like Flaubert, even though, finally, the worlds they're describing are radically different.
SS: It's interesting that you broached psychological neo-realism, because when you presented Chronicle you spoke of how it wasn't considered neorealist because of Antonioni's favouring of psychology over social problems, even though it had properties of that movement. Do you think it would be instructive to place this film within neo-realism and analyse it in terms of that context, or do you think it needs to be looked at separately?
RC: Well, that's a complex question because it depends how you define neo-realism. It's not so much the films but the issue is: what did critics believe neo-realism to be. If you take certain more conventional definitions, I guess Antonioni differentiates himself from it – that's certainly what he's doing in Chronicle. So if you take it from simple things to do with content, depiction of content, depiction of the world, yeah, there's a slant towards some sort of gritty social realism that is about the conditions of Italian society in the later war years and the immediate post-war years. Somebody like Rossellini would say that all neo-realism is, is a moral vision of the world. That's almost a philosophical definition of neo-realism and has very little to do with what's being depicted in the films. And if you go into film theory you'll get somebody like Gilles Deleuze, and to him neo-realism is about the emergence of a new relation between time in narrative work, and as far as he's concerned there is therefore a link between all these filmmakers, between Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Fellini and Antonioni. For him there is a common element which could be initially called a formal element and which then becomes a philosophical element, and he continues to see the nucleus of the work within the term neo-realism. So Deleuze has broadened the whole notion of what neo-realism is: for him it's a movement that has to do with fundamentally revolutionising the cinema's relationship to time, and with the shift from what he would call the movement-image to the time-image. So to tie Antonioni to neo-realism, the real question you would have to ask is: what definition of neo-realism are you looking for?
SS: On a less profound note I want to speak about cars, which feature prominently in Antonioni's films. The scene I am thinking of at the moment is in La notte (1961) where after the party Jeanne Moreau goes for a drive with the man she meets. The way Antonioni uses cars often reminds me of the way Paul Schrader uses cars in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), American Gigolo (1980) and Light Sleeper (1991), where they're objects that allow people to drift through the world and avoid connecting with it. What are your views on this?
RC: The cars are there but I don't think he's stressing anything in particular about them. In the scene in La notte with the car, the car becomes an element of design for the composition. I don't think it's particularly the car itself which is important, but the kind of space that a car could contain. But Antonioni's equally fascinated by all means of transport. Planes are very important. Even in films where planes don't appear you get references to them, like the propeller in Blow-Up. But the planes are there in L'eclisse, they're there in Beyond the Clouds (co-directed with Wim Wenders, 1995), they're there in Zabriskie Point.
SS: Often Antonioni's characters are unable to escape from their cycle of alienation and existential angst. Do you feel that Antonioni presents some form of escape from these predicaments and psychological states, or are human relationships merely a wasteland whose disintegration he can only chart?
RC: I don't think he necessarily charts just disintegration. If disintegration is happening, he's fascinated by the new patterns and forms that will emerge out of that disintegration. If our cities disintegrate then something new will come out of that disintegration. When he made his famous statement at the Cannes Film Festival about the emergence of a new man, what he meant was a kind of new psychological frame of reference for humanity. He's partly looking at what is dead, but also what is to emerge.
SS: Ennui has become a kind of definitive term used to define Antonioni's body of work, particularly in reference to L'avventura. If you had to choose a word or constellation of words to sum up his work, what would they be?
RC: Ennui and alienation don't register with me for one reason or another. I'm not saying that they're not there in Antonioni's films, but they're not as overwhelming as people believe them to be. They are part of our lives, they have a role to play in the 20th century. Antonioni isn't the only filmmaker who's touched upon ideas of existential angst and ennui and boredom and so forth and so on. But people often forget that there is optimism in Antonioni – there's the optimism that comes from facing the world and not making any excuses for it.
SS: So where would you find optimism in Red Desert or L'eclisse?
RC: The optimism in Red Desert is the final words of the character Giuliana, when the boy asks her about the poisonous smoke and says "the birds will die", to which she replies, "no, the birds have now learnt, they fly around it". In other words they adapt, as she has. And a lot of the messages of Antonioni's films are about showing whether we're capable of adapting and transforming ourselves, of moving out of a kind of static way of experiencing things and the world.
SS: But if you look at this within the context of the themes of knowledge and innocence in Antonioni's films, it seems as if she's telling her son that the birds fly around the poisonous smoke because she doesn't want to tell him the truth. Her answer seems ridiculous in a way – the birds are going to fly through the smoke and get killed, and there is no escape, and the boy will find out about it eventually, but at the moment he's young enough for her to still lie to him.
RC: Yeah, but Antonioni's referring to revolutionary ideas. He's analysing a fragment of the course of humanity across this planet. The cosmos is a real thing for Antonioni. At the end of Zabriskie Point the blowing up of the house is not just the blowing-up of a material thing – as you watch it you realise he's showing you the cosmos and the galaxy – all those bits of waste have now become a kind of Milky Way of planets that are spinning around one another and floating in space – and Beyond the Clouds, that reference of getting above the Earth, the Earth is just one part of a bigger kind of cosmos.
I walked away from my discussion with Rolando pondering Antonioni's films in the light of the relationship between meaning and film in general. Meaning attaches itself to the surface of a film. Film itself, any film, can be viewed as a flowing imagistic surface where one image emerges from another creating a spreading layer of meaning that eventually, pushing up against an invisible boundary (perhaps this boundary is culture, perhaps convention, perhaps ourselves), begins to fold back on itself. More than once during a break between screenings I returned to the thought of film as a bounded surface marked by infinite folds of meaning. I have often felt that Antonioni presents his own filmic images as an endless peeling back of layers. But while the viewer is peeling back, the film itself is continually augmented by folds of new meaning. And the Antonioni retrospective proved at least this: that this augmentation of meaning, this over-laying, this intricate folding continues with every re-viewing. The task of understanding then, is an impossible one, or at least, is one that involves an engagement with a certain kind of semiological infinity and excess. And thus Antonioni's secret, the secret about which each of his films, and about which his entire cinematic oeuvre, seems to orbit, remains intact, shining, forever distant and mysterious, because the imagistic flowing surface of his films and their meanings are always in transit, always in motion, always in the process of still being developed.
Heraclitus could have been advising film critics, theorists, and festival reporters when he said, "You can never step into the same river twice". Which raises the question of legitimacy, and therefore, of illegitimacy. How legitimate is a report such as this, written as it were, in a post-festival haste for something in words? Is not such a report the illegitimate child of two wild weeks, born before the over-stimulated over-tired powers of consciousness are fully recuperated? Can a report such as this, in any real sense, represent the cinematic cascade of a film festival? Can it, in any real sense, do justice to the festival's double-property of quantitative number of films and qualitative richness of meaning? The answer is as simple as it is unavoidable: it can't. Too much slips through or slips by the structure of its analysis. From a quantitative viewpoint, I have not even mentioned the screening of a restored print of the Australian classic The Sentimental Bloke (Raymond Longford, 1919), complete with live musical accompaniment. Nor the twenty-odd documentaries that I watched as a junior-juror on the FIPRESCI jury, including The Five Obstructions (Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier, 2003), Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003) and Addicted to Acting (Andres Veiel, 2004). From a qualitative viewpoint, this report accepts openly that these films have often become bound too closely together to be always successfully separated. But if they are a set of mutually contaminated meanings, then so be it. I accept them as Derrida accepts what he calls "the anguish of writing" and which he describes as "the necessarily restricted passageway … against which all possible meanings push against one another, preventing each other's emergence. Preventing, but calling upon each other, provoking each other too…" (1). In the case of a film festival, however, this "restricted passageway" through which meanings push and provoke each other, functions not as "anguish", but as the fascination that a film festival exerts.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1978.
Ford Till '47
Daily Reports from the 53rd Melbourne International Film Festival
Saul Symonds runs the online film journal Light Sleeper: Late Night Writings on Cinema.
After the Storm – the 8th Pusan International Film Festival
Jungyeob Ji
Stop Motion: Transformation and Stasis at the NYFF's Views from the Avant-Garde
Jared Rapfogel


Located in Waterloo at the corner of King Street and Union Street, near the Grand River Hospital, Voila Uptown was Voila's first salon to open. Now with a recently renovated spa, three pedicure stations, two manicure stations, and one treatment room, Uptown also boasts our newly renovated upstairs colour room. Complete with nine cutting stations, Uptown has it all–including parking available on site.


The Panama dining setting has a beautiful large rectangle glass table making it perfect for entertaining larger groups of friends or family. With options to seat 2 to 10 people and with plenty of table room, the Panama offers a very stylish, functional and affordable outdoor dining solution.
The Panama sling dining chair offers both style and comfort with its double sling construction. Boasting two layers of sling material and supported with Dacron filled internal sections, the Panama provides comfort and support for dining and entertaining.


Click here to download the "help.zip" to your computer.
Make sure you save it in a location you can remember, and once downloaded double click the file to extract it to your computer.
Double click the "TeamviwerQS" icon to start the remote session.
Give the "Partner ID" and "password" to the Focus IT technician when requested.


Every Kid Wanted One: Ever heard of the Slinky? The fun toy that sold more than 250 million units worldwide?! The creators of the Slinky were just ordinary people that came up with a simple product idea. And that simple product idea produced more wealth then they could have ever possibly imagined!
Here's the fascinating story: Richard James, a Naval Engineer, noticed a spring coil drop on the ground at work. He was intrigued by the fact that this torsion spring bounced around the way that it did. He took the torsion spring home and showed it to his wife Betty. The two realized that this cool spring would actually make a great toy! And that is how the simple, yet amazingly successful Slinky idea was born!
Richard and Betty had no experience in the Toy/ Retail Industry, but they took a chance. They just had a feeling that people would absolutely love their new toy idea. So, Richard and Betty borrowed $500 to manufacture the Slinky. They had never manufactured anything before, but just took the necessary steps to figuring out the most effective way to get their product produced.
Once Richard and Betty figured out how to manufacture their product, they decided it was time to approach retailers. But Richard and Betty's first attempts at getting their products on the shelves of retailers proved to be very unsuccessful!
They tried selling their spring toys to Small Retailers, but no one wanted to buy. At one point, they almost gave up! But they didn't. And with sheer determination and a conviction to succeed, they finally convinced Gimbels Department Store to buy 400 units of their Slinky Toy during the Christmas holiday season.
Within an hour and a half, Richard and Betty James sold their entire inventory at Gimbels and a multi-million dollar toy empire was born!
The morale of the story is this: Ordinary people can produce extraordinary results if they believe in their product idea and take actions to ensure success. Richard and Betty James could have easily conjured up their brilliant Slinky idea but not taken the necessary steps to succeed. Instead, they created their Slinky toy product and made millions! And they did this by not giving up when times got tough.
Therefore, if you have a fabulous product idea, I urge you to take the necessary steps to succeed today. You could be the next million dollar success story!


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Millennials have their own ideas about food – and that's changing the entire system
(Sascha Kilmer/Moment, Getty Images)
Like the baby boomers before them, millennials tend to do things their own way, and that's not just a reference to their often-stereotyped love of avocado toast.
Surveys have shown the generation born between 1981 and 1996 – people aged 24 to 39 at the end of 2020 – favor organic foods, dine out more often and value convenience.
How will their distinct food and dining preferences change the food industry? If 27-year-old Laura Godenick has anything to say about it, the result will be healthier and more sustainable.
A third-generation vegetarian, Godenick grew up eating a diet rich in organic fruits and vegetables. That was more difficult at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where she was disappointed by the campus cafeteria's limited vegetarian options and lack of transparency about where the ingredients were sourced.
Seeking to make change, Godenick co-founded a local chapter of The Real Food Challenge. The organization trains students to lead campaigns to increase the number of sustainable, local, humane and fair food sources available on campus. They wanted to shift 20% of USC's cafeteria purchasing in that direction.
"If we can change our food system on a university level, then we can do it in other institutions as well," Godenick said. "We the people who are eating the food should be in control of the food that we consume."
It's a sentiment shared by many of her peers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, millennials have nearly surpassed the baby boomers in buying power. The way they are wielding that power is rippling throughout the entire food system.
A U.S. Department of Agriculture report found millennials dine out at restaurants about 30% more often than older people, the vast majority at least once per week.
Millennials also have embraced fast-casual concepts, a hybrid between fast food and sit-down restaurants that often offer more customization and healthier foods at a lower price point.
Meal delivery apps are likewise growing in popularity. Indeed, the National Restaurant Association found 67% of millennials are more likely to order from places that offer home delivery.
That might explain why millennials frequent grocery stores less often than other generations and spend less money on food at home generally.
That's not necessarily good for public health, said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, an associate professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia University in New York City.
"Restaurant meals are usually saltier and higher in saturated fat than foods prepared at home," St-Onge said.
In addition, the USDA reported that while millennials buy less grain, white meat and red meat than other generations, they spend more on prepared foods, pasta and sweets. That worries St-Onge.
"If you have a well-balanced diet, it's OK once in a while to have some cake or a treat," she said. "But hypertension is rampant, people have elevated cholesterol levels and Type 2 diabetes is occurring at earlier and earlier ages."
On the other hand, millennials eat more fresh and frozen vegetables than other generations. In fact, a 2017 study found millennial parents buy more organic food than any other cohort.
One recent study found 26% of millennials are either vegetarian or vegan, and 34% of meat-eating millennials eat at least four vegetarian dinners each week.
"Whether organic or non-organic, increasing consumption of fruits and vegetables will have a good impact on health in general," St-Onge said.
Start-up companies are responding by developing convincing plant-based meat substitutes, some of which claim to have a smaller carbon footprint than a real beef burger.
Established food companies also are getting into the game, investing in plant-based alternatives to meat, chicken and dairy products.
Restaurants are changing too. A vast majority of adults polled by the National Restaurant Association believed today's menus offered healthier options than in past years.
The overall health impacts are not yet clear. But a key step in helping people make healthier choices is to bolster innovative approaches for building a healthier food supply, according to a recent science advisory from the American Heart Association.
"Any move towards a healthier product in the food supply is a good thing for public health," St-Onge said.
Godenick shares that sentiment. While The Real Food Challenge did not achieve their goals during her time at USC, she believes raising awareness about sustainability will ultimately pay off in a healthier and more transparent food system. "It's a long-term goal," she said.
Laura Godenick at a friend's farm. (Photo courtesy of Laura Godenick)
After graduating from college, she moved to Salt Lake City and joined a permaculture collective that teaches its members about growing food sustainably and regeneratively. She quickly connected with other millennials who are embracing vegetarianism and plant-based foods.
"There is a shift happening for sure," Godenick said. "Millennials care more about where their food is coming from, and that's a good thing on so many levels."
Processed vs. ultra-processed food, and why it matters to your health
Organic Food: Fact vs. Perception
How to Eat More Fruit and Vegetables

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Helping to counter the effects of Climate Change is a global effort. This list of videos will help make it easier to understand how and where to get started.
Climate Change 101 with Bill Nye | National Geographic - Duration: 4 minutes, 10 seconds.
Why humans are so bad at thinking about climate change - Duration: 9 minutes, 45 seconds.
What Could Happen in a World That's 4 Degrees Warmer | WIRED Brand Lab - Duration: 14 minutes.
The environmental cost of free two-day shipping - Duration: 5 minutes, 37 seconds.
Can A City Run On 100% Renewable Energy? - Duration: 14 minutes.
Could You Power Your Own Commute? | Living Off Grid with Maddie Moate | Earth Lab - Duration: 8 minutes, 49 seconds.
The Biggest Lie About Climate Change - Duration: 9 minutes, 3 seconds.
Scientists really aren't the best champions of climate science - Duration: 8 minutes, 15 seconds.
Al Gore Answers the Web's Most Searched Questions on Climate Change | WIRED - Duration: 5 minutes, 16 seconds.
Climate scientists reveal their fears for the future - Duration: 8 minutes, 52 seconds.
Forest Man - Duration: 16 minutes.
With so many ways to recycle, reduce waste and cut back on disposables available these days, more people are taking advantage and learning how to reduce their carbon footprint on the world. It's not as hard as you may think.
What Are You Wasting For? | Documentary - Duration: 14 minutes.
12 Cheap & Easy Tips for Reducing Your Waste - Sustainable Zero Waste Hacks - Duration: 8 minutes, 28 seconds.
Two adults, two kids, zero waste | Bea Johnson | TEDxFoggyBottom - Duration: 14 minutes.
I Tried Minimalism For A Week - Duration: 8 minutes, 55 seconds.
How To Fit Two Years Of Trash In A Mason Jar | shift | msnbc - Duration: 7 minutes, 41 seconds.
Day 26: Ditch Junk Mail / 31 Day Zero Waste Challenge - Duration: 2 minutes, 12 seconds.
50 THINGS I DON'T BUY | Minimalism Series - Duration: 19 minutes.
Zero Waste Kitchen Tips - How to reduce your waste in the kitchen - Duration: 6 minutes, 11 seconds.
I TRIED LIVING PLASTIC FREE FOR 30 DAYS! | Sorelle Amore - Duration: 10 minutes.
How San Francisco Is Becoming A Zero Waste City - Duration: 4 minutes, 16 seconds.


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Arlene Livingston
Arlene Williams Livingston, 87 years old, passed away peacefully on December 2, 2022. She is survived by her children, Gary (Lesa) Livingston of Coral Spring Fl, Sharon (William) Arnold of Fruitland Park FL, and Terri (Scott) Leslie of Nevada IA. She was also survived by 4 Grandchildren, Christopher (Alyssa) Stout of Marshalltown IA, Chase (Kaylee) Stout, Colton Leslie of Nevada IA and Jessica (Lucas) James of Wildwood FL. She was also the proud Great Grandmother of Atley and Jack Stout of Marshalltown IA.
Arlene was predeceased in 2019 by her husband of 64 years, Jack Livingston and her parents, Arley and Rosa Lee Williams of Gadsden AL. She was also predeceased by 2 sisters, Barbara Kelley and Georgia Hubbard.
Arlene was born on April 18, 1935 in New Hope AL but grew up in Alabama City and graduated from Emma Sansom High School in 1953. She was a stay at home Mom and homemaker. She and Jack retired to Florida in 1994 and enjoyed many years of travel to include Hawaii, Mexico, Aruba and Europe. They spent weeks in the Spring and Summer traveling to Iowa to attend the Grandsons ballgames.
Arlene could always be counted on to provide a delicious meal for family and neighbors and was known from Florida to Alabama to Iowa for her chocolate fudge cake.
Arlene loved watching the Alabama Crimson Tide football games and did her share of armchair quarterbacking.
Arlene was a wonderful Wife, Mother, Grandmother, neighbor and friend. She will be greatly missed but she spent her last days preparing those she left behind to accept her passing. Until the end, she was still looking out for her loved ones.
Arlene was a Baptist and served in many capacities including Sunday School teacher and GA Leader.
Arlene and Jack will be honored in a committal service followed by interment at Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell Florida on January 11, 2023 at 11:00AM.
Sally lit a candle:


In order to supply products of consistently high quality and reliability, Haogenplast Ltd employs stringent Quality Assurance protocols and procedures as part of its overall Quality, Safety & Environment management system.
that attest to the quality of its products.
These include ISO 9001 (2008), DIN, SKZ. B.B.A., CE. ISI, CSTB, FM, OHSAS 18001, ISO 14001 and RAL-GZ 716/1.
Haogenplast only works with suppliers who comply with its strict quality standards. This is a part of the company's ongoing efforts to achieve and maintain exceptionally high quality in all aspects of pre-production, manufacturing and product finishing, and to guarantee excellence and reliability of its products and services to clients.


Commemorating the 35th anniversary in celebration of the life and legacy of Elvis Presley, the story by Lee was originally created as part of an exclusive hardcover, collector's item anthology entitled, "Graphic Elvis" which is limited to only 2,500 copies worldwide and available through select online retailers and at http://www.GraphicElvis.com.
Liquid Comics is now making Stan Lee's, 'Elvis' story available to thousands of people for free as part of Free Comic Book Day, the industry's biggest annual giveaway of free comic books across the country on May 5th. Artwork for the Stan Lee short story was created by acclaimed Indian artist, Jeevan J. Kang.
In addition to the physical book, an interactive digital and mobile app entitled, "Graphic Elvis: The Interactive Experience," is also now available for $9.99 and features all of the content from the Graphic Elvis collectors book with bonus videos, animation and interactive features.
Elvis shared the impact of comic books on his life in his famous acceptance speech for the 1971 Top Ten Outstanding Men of America award. "When I was a child ladies and gentlemen, I was a dreamer. I read comic books and I was the hero of the comic book… so every dream that I've dreamed has come true a hundred times," he said.
Stan Lee was joined by some of the most acclaimed graphic novel creators in the industry to portray the King of Rock 'n' Roll in unprecedented visual styles. Graphic Elvis creators included, Jimmy Palmiotti, John Cassaday, Paul Gulacy, Ryan Kelly, Paul Pope, Greg Horn, Jeevan J. Kang, Mukesh Singh, Steve Rude, Saumin Patel, Tony Millionaire, Samit Basu, Gilbert Hernandez and many more.
Beyond the original illustrations, Graphic Elvis also features numerous hand-written notes and musings, never before seen by the public and written in the margins of various books owned by Elvis, making the hardcover collector's book and the digital app a must have collectible for Elvis fans around the world.


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Chapter 206: Truth, or (3)
Edit: Sephtair
Screech- Screech-
With a sound of metal being scratched, the spiders spewed out their threads.
Zzzeeeeek!
Everything touched by the threads was melted, and from the mouth of the spiders, a powerful ray of fire that destroyed everything shot out.
"Where did such monsters pop up from?"
"Where are the garrisons? Where did they go?!"
The people couldn't help but be confused. Before the invaders arrived at the Great City, the garrisonsshould have stopped them, or notified them of invaders, but there were no signs of either.
The spider monsters that suddenly appeared destroyed the walls and climbed up them to attack the people.
Their numbers were in the hundreds. There seemed to be about 500 of them.
"Shit!"
"Run away!"
There were more than 100,000 people living in the Great City. Among them, more than half were able to fight when they were needed.
But, their attacks didn't work against the spider monsters.
They were helpless.
But, within the Great City, there were many guilds.
In the past, the Great City had quickly recovered and strengthened their defense after suffering a lot of damage due to the appearance of the Sky Devil.
Soon, many people wearing the identical jackets appeared.
"Long-range attack team, forward!"
"Forward!"
The very first to act was the Luminescent Guild.
With their blue jackets bearing a symbol of light radiating, they appeared and started to deal with the chaos after quickly analyzing the situation.
The long-range attack team of 300 people stood in a horizontal line and prepared to attack.
"Bahamude! The Luminescent Guild has arrived!"
"Even the rising star, Kim Taehwan came!"
The people who weren't able to run away cheered. The Luminescent Guild was one of the guilds who developed rapidly after they were faced with the Sky Devil's Trial.
The guild master of the Luminescent Guild, Bahamude, shouted as he raised his greatsword from his shoulder.
"Destroy them all, Wolves of the Luminescent Guild!"
500 guild members who held short-ranged weapons quickly moved.
Their teamwork was also good. The melee warriors distracted the spider monsters, while long-ranged attacks bombarded them.
It went smoothly, as if they were one body.
It looked as natural as breathing.
You could tell how hard they had trained from how this scene played out.
The last two years. After the Sky Devil's Trial occurred, the Great City was clearly divided between those who progressed, and those who were unable to cope with thechanges.
And the results of this progress showed.
"Pl, please save me…!"
A woman fell on the ground and screamed out loud. The spider monsters didn't distinguish between men or women. They killed humans as soon as they saw them.
A spider that saw the woman on the ground was approaching her.
The monster grew more terrifying as she saw it rip humans apart with its eight legs as if they were toys.
As the spider was about to tear the woman into pieces, a man appeared.
The man crashed into the spider with a loud sound.
Due to his huge silver shield, the spider was repelled.
"Are you okay?"
"Th, thank you…"
"Please get away from this place. Have trust in us Wolves. Go!"
The woman forcefully held her sprained leg and stood up.
Then, the blue-coated Wolves surrounded her.
"Captain Taehwan. I think they are using the immune skill."
The man called Taehwan got up with his huge shield and looked at the spiders again.
Behind him, 100 members stood in rows.
'Immune skill.'
The man, Taehwan, observed the spider's movements.
It seemed to absorb other people's attacks and was recovering.
'Why does only my strength work on them?'
Taehwan quickly thought about this.
The strength he could control.
Eradication.
It rejected illegitimate power.
Naturally, this power was extremely pure.
Taehwan looked at the battlefield.
It wasn't that people's strengths weren't working on them at all.
Natural types of skills. Although it wasn't much, they definitely hadan effect.
"Everyone, lose your magic weapons!"
"What do you mean?"
Get rid of their weapons?
The team couldn't help but be confused.
The veins on Taehwan's neck bulged.
"Impure powers don't work against them!"
Taehwan quickly discovered the spiders' weakness.
If one were to count those who worked the hardest over the last two years, Taehwan would definitely be on the list.
However, Taehwan was still unsatisfied.
This was because his goal was too great. There was no time to waste if he was to catch up with the man that was still firmly embedded in his mind.
The team replaced the weapons that had all sorts of magic.
And held just swords, shields, and spears made purely of metal.
Screeeeek-!
The spider that fell back quickly moved to attack Taehwan.
But, it couldn't pierce him. Taehwan was a rising star who was known as the 'Shield Guardian'. He got the title because even if his opponent's ability surpassed his, if he was holding his shield, nothing could pass through.
In the blink of an eye, the spider was bounced back.
'Who is it?'
Taehwan frowned.
Two people suddenly appeared and started throwing spiders around. They didn't belong to his group of Wolves.
A woman, and a man with a large build, both wearing masks!
They looked like they were enemies of the monster spiders. Like an intense wind, they ripped spiders apart.
While doing so, the masked woman looked at Taehwan.
As their eyes met, the woman bowed her head down, then stomped on the ground and flew up into the air.
"Who is she?"
"A master with a mask?"
The team also didn't seem to know.
There was no information about two masters wearing masks.
Taehwan thought about the woman's eyes for a moment.
"Don't doze off!"
Screech!
There were still a lot of spiders.
Suzy bit her lips.
'Taehwan-oppa…'
It was a face she hasn't seen in a while. It seemed like at least 5 or 6 years since they saw each other last.
But Taehwan was the same as she remembered. Besides having slightly more muscles and a hardened expression, it was still the same Taehwan in her memories.
He had settled down and was now leading 100 members.
And so, she wore a mask.
As she didn't want to be a burden to him.
She even forced the Fighting King to wear one as well. The Fighting King had a lot of enemies in the Great City.
"Eight! Suzy, I think I'll be winning this competition!"
The Fighting King chuckled as he tore the leg from a spider.
Suzy took out the bottle of liquor she hid. She smiled as she poured out the liquor from the ceramic bottle.
"Then, shall I start now?"
Spattt!
The air popped.
The air near Suzy quickly expanded. Then, as Suzy stomped her feet on the ground, the ground sank down.
It was a skill that utilized the exquisite principle of the ten thousand weight hammer, Mangeunchu.
At that moment, Suzy disappeared.
She reappeared on top of a spider.
As she wielded the sword she suddenly took out, the spider's body became like a beehive. And like a canvas, from the holes bloomed cherry blossoms.
The swordsmanship of the Heavenly Maid Clan!
As the Heavenly Maid's swordsmanship utilized increased weight and pure energy, the spider monster couldn't withstand her attack.
"Hmm, you mixed something weird in there."
The Fighting King clicked his tongue as he watched her.
She showed off her new Mystery Door technique as she mixed the principle of Mangeunchu with the movement. As the movement had a good balance of energy, even the Fighting King couldn't keep up with the speed.
At least, in terms of speed, she was in the top 10 of humanity.
Suzy was like a fish in water.
She quickly caught up to the game that started at 8:0.
"I shouldn't be playing around any longer."
The Fighting King smiled.
He now understood how one great pupil was better than ten average pupils.
However, as a teacher, he couldn't lose this game.
The Fighting King also gave his all.
While this was occurring, other guilds started to slowly appear after finishing their preparations.
It seemed like the spider monsters were slowly dying off.
Screeech!
Screeeek!
That is, until more spiders climbed up the walls.
"H, how many are there?"
"The wall is collapsing!"
"Ahhh…"
When they were almost done clearing 500 spiders, as if that was just the beginning, more spiders climbed up the walls.
No, they just destroyed the walls.
The people who saw the scene outside the walls couldn't help but be astonished.
Giant spider monsters were endlessly heading towards them.
Muyoung admired the scene.
He couldn't help but admire them.
By what he recalled from 2 years ago, he thought 500 spiders would be enough.
However, the resistance of the Great City was strong. They quickly learned how to deal with the situation and destroyed the spiders.
'The Great City changed after facing the Sky Devil's Trial.'
This was truly the benefit of a Trial.
This was the hope humanity had.
Not being dormant. Just by this, they had gained much greater strength than they had two years ago.
They collaborated their strength and, unlike the past, they weren't divided. They knew how to fight together against one common enemy.
However, trials needed to be done periodically. For their unity to not die out, they needed a continuous driving force.
'Why couldn't they do this in the past?'
The past, before Muyoung returned.
Humanity was weak. One would wonder how it was possible for them to be so weak.
It was because of the Forest of Death, as well as the Clans' and Guilds' self-centered interests.
However, everything had changed after the Sky Devil's Trial. The original selfish bastards mostly died or were in critical condition.
Their vacancy was an opportunity for young, idealistic people.
They became hope for the weak.
This was why the present was different from the past.
'Now it is possible… they can change.'
Muyoung didn't expect this.
He never expected them to change so much in two years.
Muyoung was slightly thrilled.
It had changed. It wasn't just a possibility. It was a result.
'I'll become an enemy to all.'
As he confirmed the result, Muyoung took the role of villain without hesitation.
At Muyoung's gesture, additional Ellarsigo started to move.
Let's fight. As fighting endlessly was the only way live!
"Someone is quickly approaching."
"We will get rid of him."
Then, the five nine-tailed foxes who were assisting Muyoung started to move.
Muyoung also noticed the presence of something approaching him.
At least in terms of quick movement technique, he was excellent. Someone was breaking past all the monsters and quickly heading towards where Muyoung was at.
Perhaps, they had realized someone was controlling the Ellarsigo.
The nine-tailed foxes swished their tails before vanishing.
Their method of shortening distances was Shukuchi.
Muyoung ignored them all.
Right now, he wanted to give the Great City his full attention.
There was a reason why he stopped so near to the Great City.
By using a bead one of the nine-tailed foxes had left behind, Muyoung could watch the situation in the Great City in real time.
'The past has changed. We have changed.'
Just like how Muyoung had moved on from his past.
Although they hadn't experienced it yet, they would definitely become different people from the past.
Then, two chunglangs bared their teeth.
It seemed like the nine-tailed foxes were unable to stop the person.
An unknown presence was felt from nearby.
As he turned his head, a woman wearing a mask slowly approached him.
"Kill."
Grrrrr!
As soon as Muyoung gave out the order, the two chunglangs immediately ran towards the woman.
The masked woman was already covered with wounds.
There was no way she'd be fine after going through all the monsters and the nine-tailed foxes.
However, the woman in the mask even passed through the attacks of the chunglangs.
"Amazing."
Muyoung made a small remark as he faced the woman who was approaching him.
The woman, holding a sword, leapt forward to pierce the sword toward Muyoung's front.
However, the sword never reached Muyoung.
This was because, as soon as the woman saw Muyoung's face, she suddenly stopped.
"Mi…ster….?"
After saying this word, the woman fell on the ground. Blood gushed out from all the wounds on her body.
Kyaaack!!
An enraged chunglang then chomped down on her.
With its teeth pierced into her body, it wanted to eat her.
Seeing this, Muyoung raised one hand.


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What listeners think
"No one probes beneath the surface of modern culture as patiently, calmly, incisively, and theologically as Ken Myers. Of course, Ken will say his guests are the real stars of MARS HILL AUDIO, which is true mainly because Ken refuses to hog the mic or manipulate conversations toward his own opinions. That humility, too, is part of Ken's genius — his rare gift for attentive listening — that brings out the best in his guests. Ken Myers is a gift to the Church, and MARS HILL AUDIO a treasure."
— Peter Leithart, President, Theopolis Institute for Biblical, Liturgical, & Cultural Studies, Birmingham, AL
"In the many years that I have been a subscriber to the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, I have yet to receive a single issue that did not change my thinking in some permanent way. In every volume, without fail, there has been at least one interview that has opened up for me a new way to approach some fundamental matter regarding faith and culture, a new way to try to fashion a genuinely human existence in the world. MARS HILL AUDIO is "counter cultural" in the best sense of the phrase. The consistency of the quality of the people Ken Myers has on his program, and his ability to bring out the bright core of their thinking, whether by offering a summary account in his own well-chosen words or asking some penetrating question, is simply astonishing. Whenever I receive the announcement of a new volume, I experience the thrill of knowing not only that I have in store a couple of hours absolutely riveting listening, but that when the two hours are over, I will have been introduced to a whole new world of books and ideas to explore while I wait for the next volume."
— D. C. Schindler, Professor of Metaphysics and Anthropology, The John Paul Institute at The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.
"One of the great challenges of the pastoral life is to keep learning. Perhaps for understandable reasons, too many of us allow our habits of mind (which in turn affect our gospel imagination as well as our virtue) to become stale; as a result, our preaching, our own sense of engagement with the good news, our pastoral care and leadership follow suit. Since the earliest days, MARS HILL AUDIO (then known as the MARS HILL Tapes) has been a primary source of encouragement for me, connecting orthodox Christian thinking with cultural matters in a way that honors the full Trinitarian vision of creation and what it means to be human in the image of God. My book budget is blown to smithereens as a result of Mr. Myers's bi-monthly interviews; I am glad that the Journal isn't published more often!"
— Allan Poole, Pastor, Blacknall Presbyterian Church, Durham, N.C.
"There are still, I'm certain, in some moving box that was never unpacked, copies of MARS HILL cassette tapes — listened to, listened to again, and again, and saved as valuables. I have for decades been an avid fan of Ken Myers's thoughtful and thought-provoking programs. My only regret is that I haven't the time to follow up on more than a fraction of the fascinating authors, books, and topics presented. In addition to being intellectually stimulating, MARS HILL AUDIO is a source of encouragement. While facing the difficulties of our troubling age forthrightly, Ken and his guests demonstrate the Christian virtue of hope, taking every thought captive to Christ who is Lord and King."
— James Tonkowich, Director of Distance Learning, Wyoming Catholic College, Lander, WY
"My husband and I have enjoyed listening to MARS HILL AUDIO for over a decade. It has been valuable for pulling us out of the busyness of our lives, and encouraging us to think in new ways about cultural issues both past and present. For people like us, who don't walk in academic circles but enjoy engaging in intellectual conversation with other believers, Ken is a guide who aids us in exploring the best thought and writing of our day."
— Liz Horst, Violin Instructor, Studio Allegro and Rockbridge Academy, Crownsville, MD
"MARS HILL AUDIO has been a ministry partner for over two decades. The ideas conveyed, the books I have read, and the truths I have been exposed to have shaped me and have filtered through every place I have served and every church I have been involved with planting. Today, I run a global mission agency, and much of the core of my philosophy of ministry has been shaped and guided by MARS HILL AUDIO."
— Stephen Leston, President/CEO, To Every Tribe, Los Fresnos, TX
"I have been a MARS HILL AUDIO listener since the '90s, and find this audio journal to be an indispensable part of my intellectual and spiritual life. MARS HILL AUDIO provides a unique resource for thoughtful Christians — and especially pastors — who seek to understand the complex nature of our culture. The range of topics covered, from music to medicine, viewed through the lens of historic Christianity, is not available anywhere else."
— Gregory Edward Reynolds, Pastor Emeritus, Amoskeag Presbyterian Church (OPC), Manchester, NH


Form elements styled by RadFormDecorator provide the same set of keyboard navigation shortcuts that you usually get from the standard, unmodified elements by the browser.
Most of the skinned HTML elements like check boxes and buttons have a limited, well known selection of keyboard shortcuts. The select element, however, offers a longer list in order to allow you to show/hide the drop-down and select elements from its list easily via the keyboard and to navigate through the list items.


One of SkillOn Net's latest results is a themed video slot-Tattoo Mania. The game consists of 5 reels, 30 paylines, a multi-tier Bonus Game, Wild and Scatter symbols. Cash prizes in Tattoo Mania can only go to real money gamblers, even though the game is also available in free mode.
The slot starts with a rockin' music theme, setting the tone for what comes next, and that is 5 reels filled with classic old-school tattoos. Every spin is followed by a fast paced guitar solo and some cool light effects. This is a pretty awesome slot and if you're into rock music, you will catch yourself head-banging to the slot's music theme and playing the air guitar of course.
The Flaming Dice symbol has a dual purpose, it can be a regular symbol or it can act as a Multiplier. The Wild Horseshoe will complete your winning combinations, substituting for regular symbols on the lines. Tattoo Mania has a Bonus symbol in a shape of a Flaming Heart. This symbol awards Bonus Points, which are then used to trigger a Bonus Round. The Scatter symbol can appear anywhere on the reels, and just one is enough to trigger Free Spins.
Game's Jackpot comes with 5 Flaming Dice symbols on an active line and is 30 000 times your line bet. All wins are multiplied by the line bet, which can go from $0.01 to $5.
To trigger the Second Screen Bonus Round your goal is to collect 1 000 Bonus Points. Don't be intimidated by the number of points you need, because Bonus symbol shows up on the reels pretty often.
1 Scatter icon awards 1 Free Spin, this gradually progresses depending on the number of scatters on the reels; two symbols award 2 free games, 3 award 4 free games all the way up to 5 scatters which award 12 Free Spins.
Tattoo Mania slot has an Auto Play feature that can make things easier for you. The software will spin the reels for you enabling you to sit back and enjoy.


It was still night (3:00) when we left from Elati for our trip to Europe. Our team were two cars with 9 members of climbing club of Pili (OPOP). We crossed Skopje (FYROM) and the long Serbia pass through Belgrad. We were in Zagreb the capital of Croatia in the afternoon. We had a walk in the beautiful city of Zagreb.
We departed early in the morning from Zagreb and we crossed Slovenia and north Italy form Trieste - Venice - Milano and we entered into Switzerland pass form Simplon pass to Visp. Finally late at night we reached Anniviers valley. It took us lot of time to find a place to stay for the night.We found out a hostel in the center of Grimentz, but it was quite expensive compared to the quality.
In the morning we left from Grimentz towards Zinal the last village of the valley. On the upper side of the village there is a small parking for the cars. From the parking starts the path Tracuit. All together we departed our trek to refuge at 10:20. Path was in good condition. First leads straight up and after had some long traverse the steep slopes and reach some alpine grass area in about 2600m altitude. Finally the path cross some rocky fields and that is a 10 meters easy pass via-ferrata a hundred meters before the refuge Cabana du Tracuit at 3260m (16:20). Trek took us 6 hours in total. Refuge is built close to the glacier. Attention! There is no water in the hut for drinking or washing your hands and the cost is high, about 10 euros to buy one and a half liter of water.The behavior of the refuge keeper was unacceptable and it would be much better to stay in tents if we knew it before. We spend the afternoon having nice glimpses from the surround mountains. The dinner at the refuge was really bad.
Finally in the summit team were Lakis, Thanasis, Sotiris and me. We departed at 5 o'clock in the morning to cross the glacier. The first part of the route was easy without inclination. Glacier has no visible crevansses althought there were a few hidden by the fresh snow. Sotiris got very tired and decide to return alone at the altitude of about 3700m. There were many small groups climbing to Bishorn this day.Higher it was very windy and cold, such the ascent got more difficult. We reached the summit of Bishorn at 9:00. After having a break for a half an hour on the summit we returned back with a fast tempo. We reached the refuge at 10:40 where we meet Sotiri who crossed the glacier solo. After having a short rest in the refuge we continued the trek to Zinal where we reach it at 15:30. Here the team was divided. Me,Thalia,John and Alexandra drove to Chamonix. We stayed in the beautiful camping Ile les Barrats located only 15 minutes walk from the center of Chamonix. The other members of OPOP stayed two more nights in Zinal and drove back to Greece.
We spent the day walking and resting in Chamonix.
Our plan was to take the teleferik to Aiguille du Midi but due to strong wind, teleferiks remaind close all day. Such we traveled to Lac d' Emosson, a lake in Switzerland but near to the France borders. The lake is located on 1960 meters altitude.
We left from Chamonix early in the morning and we passed through Martigny, Brig, Visp an over Fourka pass on 2429 m. After many turns of the road we descent to Realp and we passed over Gotthard pass (2106m) to Italy (Airolo). After a long day of driving we passed from Lugano and reached Como lake. Late in evening we found out a camping in Lenno village near Como lake and stayed there for the night. The road around the lake was very narrow and dangerous.
In the morning we reached the city of Como where we had a walk for a few hours. We continued driving to Verona - Venice - Trieste. We continued crossing for a few distance Slovenia and we reached the coast of Croatia. Late at night we crossed the big bridge that connects the mainland of Croatia with Krk island. We camped in Krk village the capital of Krk island in the south part of the island.
The day was very windy and cold. It was impossible for us go swimming in those conditions, such we drove around the villages of the island and walked many hours in the narrow roads of Krk.
Due to strong winds the bridge that connects Krk island with the mainland of Croatia was closed. We had to wait a few hours to open and some more hours in queue in order to pass in mainland of Croatia and continue our trip to Belgrade. In the afternoon we finally were in the capital of Serbia, Belgrade. We found a nice hotel in the center in reasonable price. We had a walk in the very beautiful center of Belgrade.
We spent all day walking around Belgrade. We walked in Kalemegdan garden and war museum. There is very nice view to Duna and Sava rivers from the garden. We crossed the bridge and pass to the other side of the city. Belgrade is a very nice city with many parks.
We left from Belgrade very early in the morning. We crossed the green fields of corn plantation of Serbia and crossing FYROM we reached Greece. It took us about 12 hours of almost continue driving to reach Elati.


Taken 3 has endured quite the beating from critics, with the vast majority of film reviewers agreeing that with this latest installment, the Taken franchise has more than outstayed its welcome. Not that studio heads are bound to care too much, though, as the EuroCorp action/thriller grossed nearly $92 million worldwide against a $48 million budget, just after its opening weekend in the U.S. market.
As such, we have to ask the question... will Liam Neeson play Bryan Mills once again, in Taken 4? The Taken 3 tagline ("It Ends Here") would seem to indicate that's a bad idea... but on the other hand it's not as though the idea of Taken becoming a franchise in the first place really ever seemed like a great one. Of course, there are alternative routes for the studio to take in order to keep the Taken brand alive and well, besides another sequel with Neeson.
Neeson and his Taken 3 costar Forest Whitaker were interviewed by Fox to promote their film, during the course of which Neeson was (unsurprisingly) asked it there is "room" for more Taken films in the future. Taken franchise co-writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, of course, are used to sequel-izing action film properties by now, but even they seem inclined to tap out after three installments of Taken.
"There's always… I think if audiences go and see it and they like these characters, I mean, I'd love to do something with Forest again, and if it's in a 'Taken' 4 scenario… great."
Besson is currently in the process of rebooting the Transporter property on the big screen (with the upcoming The Transporter Legacy) so who knows, he could end up rebooting Taken also, should it come to that (as ill-advised as that sounds). Another possibility, now that Taken 3 has proven to be lucrative, is a prequel about Bryan Mills as a younger man, as Collider proposed to Taken 2 & 3 director Olivier Megaton (see the video interview below, starting at the 12: 36 mark).
Taken 3 had the potential to round out a satisfying three-film arc for Neeson as Bryan Mills, but that didn't happen (in this writer's opinion, anyway). Taken 3 instead played out more like just another sequel, rather than a "last" chapter in a larger saga, so making Taken 4 feels as much like a stretch as... well, making Taken 3 did.
On the other hand, there are certainly moviegoers who would enjoy it if the franchise continued to go the way of the James Bond series and have its protagonist remain constant, even as the world around him (as reflected through the life of his daughter) continues to change. So, if Taken 4 does indeed happen, there should be an audience for it; a diminished one perhaps (after the last two installments failed to impress), but a paying crowd all the same.
How about it: do you want the Taken franchise to live on in some form (be it another sequel, reboot, or prequel)?


Why just throw a party, when you can create an 'event'?
From DJ to Trivia Host to Murder Mystery Parties, Music-Envy promotes guest involvement and participation in all events.
Music-Envy can provide audio and lighting effects, as well as disc-jockey and master of ceremonies services to make your 'event' unforgettable.
Our DJs will play selections from your Playlist to highlight important topics or moments within your 'event', or go-with-the-flow to match the music to the desired mood of your event.
Although we play for many Weddings and Private Parties, we also play at several Public Events. Please check the Events Calendar on our main page to see where you can join us next.


This course is intended to integrate recent neuroanatomical findings that explain and support the clinical practice of manual therapy. The profession has sought to evolve from purely mechanical models that base results on the operation of the musculoskeletal system to models that involve a central nervous system basis for the understanding of our subjective and objective findings. The reality is now supporting a model that shows that there is no real difference between the 2 and that any intervention on the former is also an intervention on the later. As manual therapists, we are uniquely positioned to address these concepts.
Recent changes in how central neurologic mechanisms affect the peripheral system and vice versa are important to understand if we are to continue to improve functional patient outcomes. Functional outcomes include improvements in perception and behaviors, not just of pain, but of other subjective dynamics, as well as improvements in objective measures.
Human function, mental and physical, is an interplay between perceptions to environmental stimulus, activity stimulated by the upper regions of the cortex itself and manual stimulus applied by the therapist. Sorting through the myriad of subject and objective findings can be a daunting task.
In an effort to integrate this information, this course will review relevant scientific findings in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, cellular biology, peripheral and central neuroanatomy, and exercise physiology. It will provide an anatomic and functional review of the relevant neuroscience so that the clinical correlates can be drawn and applied to clinical practice.


This Field Day is for farmers who want to improve their farms' productivity and biodiversity by creating effective shelterbelts. An experienced team will provide information about the benefits of shelterbelts, based on applied research.
And our special guest speaker is John Broster from the Graham Centre and CSU. John's PhD was focused on the design and characteristics of shelterbelts and their influence on survival of new born lambs.


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Western District of New York
Appellate Division
U.S. Attorneys » Western District of New York » News
Buffalo Man Going To Prison For Robbing Four Banks, Attempting To Rob A Fifth Bank, And Threatening His Ex-Girlfriend
CONTACT: Barbara Burns
FAX #: (716) 551-3051
Buffalo, N.Y. - U.S. Attorney James P. Kennedy, Jr. announced today that Vincent Gibson, 39, of Buffalo, NY, who was convicted of bank robbery, entering a bank with intent to commit a larceny, bank larceny, and interstate communication of a threat to injure a person, was sentenced to serve 60 months in prison by U.S. District Judge Lawrence J. Vilardo. The defendant was also ordered to pay restitution totaling $5,000 to M&T Bank.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Seth T. Molisani, who handled the case, stated that the defendant committed four bank robberies, and attempted to rob a fifth bank:
• On September 11, 2017, Gibson robbed the M&T Bank located at 1300 Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo;
• On September 13, 2017, the defendant attempted to rob the Key Bank at 592 Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo;
• On September 13, 2017, Gibson robbed the M&T Bank located at 130 Grant Street in Buffalo;
• On September 18, 2017, the defendant robbed the M&T Bank at 644 Bailey Avenue in Buffalo; and
• October 10, 2017, Gibson robbed the M&T Bank at 1877 Main Street in Buffalo.
In addition, on October 14, 2018, a woman with whom Gibson has a child, was threatened by the defendant via text message after she ended their relationship. Those threats included statements such as, "I'm (sic) kill you and I mean it," "I'm about to get your kids," and "I be at your house you die."
The sentencing is the result of an investigation by the Cheektowaga Police Department, under the direction of Chief Michael Sliwinski; the Buffalo Police Department, under the direction of Commissioner Byron Lockwood, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the direction of Special Agent-in-Charge Stephen Belongia.
USAO - New York, Western
Victim Notification - United States v. Payton Gendron
U.S. Attorney Ross appeared on MSNBC
U.S. Attorney Ross attended Attorney General Advisory Committee meetings this week. When appointed, Ross said she wanted to share issues impacting the WDNY...
U.S. Attorney Trini E. Ross was the keynote speaker as Buffalo State College celebrates Black History Month. Click to hear USA Ross' entire speech...
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Environmental Justice Program
OnGuard Online
Visit the Federal government's website to help you be safe, secure and responsible online.
https://www.onguardonline.gov/
Making sure that victims of federal crimes are treated with compassion, fairness and respect.
Read about our LECC Program
138 Delaware Ave. - Buffalo, NY 14202


Caterpillar band type auto material-feeding platform with new type flat flex belts with strong absorption for wool fabric, realizing continous feeding and cutting with with less labor and material.
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With Oneline control system, Work can be loaded from the Cloud.
Newly desgin, More in according with mechanical engineering. Safe and Durable. Simple Operation with high engraving/cutting speed and high laser power convert ratio.
Double laser head, imporving the working efficiency.
Adopting imported focus lens with high luminousness and mirro with high reflectivity ensure stable power transference.
Advanced USB port Leetro DSP control system with large inner memory device and Fast curvilinear cutting and Optimized shortest path function, Greatly improved the working efficency .
With full-process automatic laser power attenuation compensation , ensuring the performance consistency of engraving/cutting. The High speed motion control programm with pre-buffering function enhances productivity more.


Search Institute is an independent, nonprofit, nonsectarian organization whose mission is to provide leadership, knowledge, and resources to promote healthy hildren, youth, and communities.The institute collaborates with others to promote long-term organizational and cultural change that supports its mission. For a free information packet, call 800-888-7828.
This resource is part of Search Institute's national Healthy Communities • Healthy Youth (HC• HY) initiative, which seeks to motivate and equip communities across the country to build assets for youth. Across this great nation people are trying to find ways to give young people an authentic voice and meaningful roles in their community. More and more, they are using youth-led Youth Summits as a tool to make this happen. This planning guide represents our best learning about how to develop and hold an effective Youth Summit, based on the experience of adults and young people from across the country.


What is career burnout? - Ask Us!
Q. What is career burnout?
A work-related condition of emotional exhaustion in which interest in work, personal achievement, and efficiency decline sharply and the sufferer is no longer capable of making decisions. The condition is brought on by the unrelenting stress of pressure at work and is frequently experienced by individuals in jobs involving considerable involvement with people, who derive a major part of their self-esteem from their work, and have few interests outside it.


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Sci Fi Club Notice
Allan Levy
The Sci Fi Club held its meeting on March 12, and we watched the movie, Godzilla. Godzilla is a 1954 Japanese kaiju film directed by Ishiro Honda, with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya. Produced and distributed by Toho Studios, it is the first film in the Godzilla franchise and the Showa period. In the film, scientists and politicians deal with the sudden appearance of a giant monster known as Godzilla, whose attacks trigger fears of nuclear holocaust during post-war Japan.
Godzilla has since become an international pop culture icon.
The Book, The Mote in God's Eye, was discussed. The Mote in God's Eye is a science fiction novel by American writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, first published in 1974. The story is set in the distant future of Pournelle's CoDominium universe and charts the first contact between humanity and an alien species. The title of the novel is a wordplay on the Biblical "The Mote and the Beam" parable and is the nickname of a star. The Mote in God's Eye was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards in 1975.
The books to be discussed are Colonization, a trilogy of alternate history books by American writer Harry Turtledove. It is a series continuation of the situation set up in the Worldwar tetralogy, projecting the situation between humanity and the Race (the bipedal lizard-like invaders and settlers from Worldwar) nearly 20 years forward into the mid-1960s.
The Race has settled and plans to colonize nearly half the surface of the Earth. Humanity and the Race still jockey for advantages over each other.
The next movie is Jurassic Park; Jurassic Park is a 1993 American science fiction adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Gerald R. Molen. It is the first installment in the Jurassic Park franchise and is based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Michael Crichton and a screenplay written by Crichton and David Koepp. The film is set on the fictional island of Isla Nublar, located off Central America's Pacific Coast near Costa Rica. There, wealthy businessman John Hammond and a team of genetic scientists have created a wildlife park of de-extinct dinosaurs. When industrial sabotage leads to a catastrophic shutdown of the park's power facilities and security precautions, a small group of visitors and Hammond's grandchildren struggle to survive and escape the perilous island.
The next meeting will be held at 6:30 p.m. on April 9, at Allan Levy's house. For more information or reserve your spot, contact Allan Levy at allan@his.com or 301-503-1387.
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Channel 1 for Chelsea Mass Fire Department. Chelsea is directly north of Boston. Chelsea Fire Department is a member of Metro Fire District 13 and a member of Boston UASI Group.
Just got a new radio after the last one failed due to power issues. Should be rock solid now!