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Posted on August 24, 2017 by skipmckinstry
I like superhero movies, if for no other reason than the fact that they're fun to watch with the kids. I have four sons. Trust me, over the years I have seen a lot of superhero movies, although any one of the kids is more conversant with chapter and verse in the DC and Marvel universes than I will ever be. I'm only in it for the special effects and the roller coaster ride. Besides, when I grew up my Mom would not let me read superhero comics. Instead she would purchase, with some reluctance, Classics Illustrated comics. Among the comics she would let me read were The Three Musketeers, Moby Dick, Last of the Mohicans, Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and Huck Finn (I did, after all, live in Hannibal, MO, as a teenager.)
When it came to the honorable hobby of trading comic books, it was nearly impossible to convince a kid to part with his Superman or Spiderman issues. And if they happened to have a copy of Wonder Woman, well let's just say, echoing Jessica Rabbit, "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way." No teenage boy would part with that at any price, except perhaps for the "Action Comics No. 1" issue that introduced Superman in 1938. That one sold a few years ago for over 3 million dollars. Naturally, at the time, I thought the comics prohibition was a form of child abuse, but I do know that Mom had nothing but the best of intentions as she knowingly allowed me to think bad things about her—for my own intellectual good—even if she did lack a little investment foresight.
So I recently ventured out with my second youngest—he's 23— to see if the latest iteration of Wonder Woman for the big screen could live up to the hype. Let me say unequivocally, "It does." It's not a perfect movie, but as superhero flicks go, it is very good. If you like special effects, more or less predictable battle choreography, and most importantly, you don't anticipate seeing something as profound as your average Scorsese film, you'll probably enjoy it. But set your expectations at a reasonable level. This is, after all, about a character that is only loosely related to the Greek Pantheon and that originated in a comic book, although that is arguably at least one step above the Transformers series—which were based on toy cars.
As I understand it now, the folks at Classics Illustrated also released a comic book edition of The Iliad. If mom had let me read that I might have developed some vague knowledge of the pedigree of Princess Diana of Themiscyra, or Diana Prince (Gal Gadot), the name she uses when she walks among us mere mortals. But even then it would not have been any more vague than film's treatment of her lineage. As the story goes, Princess Diana is the child of Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons. The question of paternity is a little fuzzy but according to some fictional genograms (Okay, so all of them are fictional.) Diana is also somehow related to Zeus, the king of the Gods, and to Ares, the God of War, though she desires to use her various inherited divine superpowers for good rather than evil.
Diana leaves her paradise after rescuing a World War I fighter pilot, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) who inadvertently crashes through the invisible barrier that hides the island pf the Amazons. Learning of the Great War, she is convinced that Ares is behind it all (of course he is) and she is equally convinced that she is the only one who can stop it. She further believes that, except for Ares' manipulation, humanity would be a generally peaceful and loving lot. "They're everything you say, but so much more," she claims. More than lust, greed, violence, etc. While this version of the film will likely reboot the franchise, if not the entire DC universe, just as Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy did for Batman, it won't be based on some dark inner angst. Diana Prince, at least so far, is an incurable, almost naive, optimist.
Aside from her intelligence, charm and evident beauty, Diana Prince can move really fast, has truck-tossing strength, and can deflect bullets with her bracelets. Her most powerful weapon, however, is called the "Lasso of Truth." In addition to being able to force the truth out of anyone who is wrapped up in it, the Lasso of Truth even has its own Wikipedia page, wherein you can discover that the Lasso of Truth, indeed, Wonder Woman herself, was originally conceived by the inventor of the lie detector. Honest. (As a good Oklahoman I am compelled to point out the injustice here: not even Will Rogers' lasso has its own Wikipedia page, even though it may have had a more significant impact in real history than a fictitious device used to extract truth telling through vasoconstriction.)
As one would expect, the movie reaches its peak when two "gods" fight, mano a mano, over the destiny of the human race. The scene is part special effects battle and part philosophical discussion. This is where Diana presents her impassioned defense of mere mortal humans, while fending off lightning bolts from Ares (David Thewlis) which he hurls along with accusations about humanity's essentially corrupt nature.
Diana's sympathies for humanity are as hard won as is her defeat of Ares, since she has just witnessed the self-sacrificing, and heart-breaking, behavior of Steve Trevor who blew up the plane he was flying while it was loaded with the lethal gas that the Germans had intended to unleash on their enemies. Ares is dispatched to end the battle, but that may only be temporary given that the need for a sequel is a nearly absolute value in Hollywood—the contemporary version of Mt. Olympus. Unless Steve Trevor manages to escape the explosion via a parachute that we do not see, he won't be back, and coming back as Captain James Tiberius Kirk doesn't count.
But I have to ask a serious question at this point. Who really is the hero here? I do not raise this question to diminish any of the beneficial value of having women in strong roles in film. This Wonder Woman is not the woman pictured on the comic book cover above. Yes, Diana did heroically and single-handedly cross the intentionally-named "No Man's Land" battlefield to effect a rescue that the men could not. Director Patty Jenkins has said that scene was "the most important scene" in the movie. And yes, Diana has (purportedly) sent Ares packing, thereby eliminating his evil and corrupting influence on the world. She is definitely a hero of the movie.
But what is it that Diana really sees in humanity? Perhaps it is exactly the potential for self-sacrifice that Steve Trevor exhibited. Is that a characteristic of human beings or merely a potentiality? For all the superpowers, lusts, sexual misadventures, jealousies, murders, etc., recorded in mythological literature, self-sacrifice was rare among the card-carrying members of the Greek Pantheon.
It is often suggested that the traits and powers of the mythological gods are merely human traits and powers writ large. For all the sturm and drang of those myths, in fact, for all the flash of this wonderful iteration of Wonder Woman, it is possible to miss that the greatest power exhibited in the movie just might be the power of love as demonstrated by Steve Trevor's sacrifice. Perhaps his act is only possible because he, and not the gods of Mt. Olympus, was created in the image of one who chose a cross as his moment of greatest self-revelation.
(This was originally published in 2013 on my other blog, but since it was the only post, I decided to consolidate. I keep telling myself I need to write more, but hey, I'm slow—and that's all I have to say about that.)
Apparently one of Chuck Jones' cardinal rules for Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons was, "The audience's sympathy must always be with the Coyote." They were largely successful on that count. The guy couldn't catch a break, much less a running bird. Just an everyman trying to feed himself in a dangerous and unforgiving environment, Coyote always managed to screw up his elaborate schemes to capture and make a meal out of the Roadrunner. With all due respect to PETA, we all know the Roadrunner would have deserved it. But Coyote was always at the mercy of his own ineptitude and the faulty product design of the notorious, ACME Corporation. He was also easily fooled by skeuomorphs. Admit it. You know you've yelled at your TV screen a few times, "Don't do it, Coyote! Don't do it!"
Skeuomorphism might be the longest word in the average graphic designer's vocabulary—at least it probably is in mine. And since it has become the common enemy of some who think-about-graphic-design-for-a-living, much of the rest of the design community assumes it must be a bad thing. Apparently the mere existence of skeuomorphism causes indigestion among a certain class of design purists who, like the disciples of Walter Gropius, and Adolf Loos before him, believe they have found the Holy Grail of Design and are now equipped to usher in a Utopian age where all pretense, dishonesty and bourgeois ornamentation can be stripped away to reveal Capital-T-Truth. Well, at least this year's Capital-T-Truth.
According to Wiktionary, a skeuomorph is defined as "a design feature copied from a similar feature in another object, even when not functionally necessary." Wiktionary also tells us that use of the word traces back at least as far as 1889, which should serve as a reminder to the design-hipsters cum baristas that they aren't really on the cutting edge of either art or language evolution. (If you want to jump right in to the deep end and really impress the latte crowd, try this debate over the fundamental meaning of the term. As for me, I am using the term to mean what it has become in the vernacular: Apple looks kitschy.)
So when your screen background looks like a piece of "fine Corinthian leather," or your Google earth icon has beveled edges, or your iBooks interface looks like a wooden bookshelf, that is skeuomorphism. The horror.
When Apple first popularized a graphic user interface back during the Stone Age, they were attempting to put a face, or perhaps better, a skin on a technology that few people understood. Steve Jobs and crew were creating the "computer for the rest of us" by using visual metaphors that we all recognized in order to enable us to use this new technological marvel. No longer did we need to know the rudiments of programming language or even "C-prompts" on a green screen in order to navigate around the Matrix. Instead we got familiar-looking file folder icons and document icons that emulated dog-eared pieces of paper, a now politically incorrect bomb with a lit fuse, and the ever-dreadful dead Mac icon with the upside down smile and x's for eyes. We navigated—the term itself is a verbal skeuomorph—through the computer by pointing and clicking at items and buttons on the screen. Pointing, of course, was a violation of the rules of etiquette but we were all familiar with it. The buttons weren't really buttons, they just looked like it. And clicking, especially with the magical transformation that occurred once you did it, gave the user a sense of power. Admittedly it was power in an alien world, but does it get any better than that? For those of us who were familiar with rubber cement, wax, X-acto knives, t-squares, rubylith, type books, proportion wheels, galleys and the stimulating smell of printer's ink, getting to use a Macintosh was like being handed the keys to the Space Shuttle. Once they added color and higher resolution, we were no longer merely orbiting the earth. It was infinity and beyond.
Those first Mac icons, largely designed by Susan Kare, were pretty primitive though brilliant for their time, in a way like the guano drawings on the Magura Caves. You do the best you can with what you have. The original Mac had a bit depth of 1, in other words, black or… wait for it… white. As bit-depth/resolution improved it was to be expected that the detail on those original icons would evolve—and clearly they did. So we wound up with beveled edges, sophisticated shadows and color schemes, backgrounds that look like paper, or wood, or marble, or galaxies or whatever in the real world a designer might imagine, all used with the best of intentions. Looking like an actual notepad can be an immediate way to communicate to the user what a virtual notepad is and how to use it. Early iPhone and iPad icons became celebrations of dimensionality bordering on trompe-l'oeil, as did the interfaces within the applications they represented.
Trompe l'oeil is a recognized and celebrated category of art, unlike skeuomorphism, although both are darn near unpronounceable. You can find some astonishing examples here. If you've been to Las Vegas and seen the ceilings in the Venetian Hotel or in the Via Bellagio, you've seen trompe-l'oeil. Frankly, you could make an argument that the entire Las Vegas strip is a monument to the ersatz—trompe l'oeil and skeuomorphism unabashedly presented as reality. For a more familiar example, but still from a desert in Nevada, think of Wile E. Coyote painting a tunnel on the side of a canyon wall to fool the Roadrunner. When Roadrunner turns the corner and runs into the newly created tunnel, Wile E. tries to follow, with the expected result. He crashes into the canyon painted stone and gets "flattened" against the wall. Despite what ol' Wile E. may have thought, even the kids watching the cartoon knew it wasn't a real tunnel. Kids, of course, are smarter than coyotes (and adults for that matter, most of whom think that Las Vegas is a real place.)
Kids are also smarter than many philosophers of design. At least my kids are. They absorb visual metaphors like breathing. They never, ever had to answer the angst-ridden question of "Mac or PC?" They don't care. If it has a screen they can operate it, and they know without thinking about it that their fingers are not going to slip off a virtually beveled edge. So they are not fooled by skeuomorphic details. Neither are they offended by them. I never had to utter the words, "Son, you know that leather background isn't real, don't you?" Had I done so I would have gotten the same look of consternation when I asked my then six-year-old if he realized the magic in Harry Potter movies wasn't real. "Seriously? Dad? It's just a movie."
Apple's work on interface design ushered in a golden age of ornamentation, perhaps even arresting the Modernist trend to the point where, in 2005, Eye Magazine could declare "The Decriminalisation of Ornament," (a direct reference to Adolf Loos' "Ornament and Crime" which argued "The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use." ) But now, after years of increasingly realistic looking, but fake, bevels, shadows, colors and textures among iPhone visual elements, designers, especially user interface (UI) designers, have scraped themselves off the wall of the virtual canyon and decided they are once again allergic to ornamentation. But these days it is more fashionable to use (or perhaps, misuse) the term "skeuomorphism."
This issue turns out to be a pretty ancient problem. The guano painter in the Magura cave didn't have an alphabet and knew nothing of taxidermy that would have enabled the hanging of a stuffed animal as a trophy on the wall. Instead, he or she drew a picture, with sufficient detail to communicate, but no more. You could even argue that those drawings were the very essence of flatness so desired by modern UX design purists. 15000 years later (though still 17,000 years before Jonathan Ive was even born), the artists of the Lascaux cave paintings added color, dimension, perspective and ornamental detail to the mix. I'm guessing the Lascaux paintings were called skeuomorphic by the art critics of the Paleolithic Era. But I doubt the artist or anyone else for that matter, Wile E. Coyote-style, confused the pictures on the wall with actual animals.
Tom Wolfe, in his brilliant skewering of modern art and architecture, From Our House to Bauhaus, reports an exercise by Josef Albers, an early Bauhaus instructor, that clearly explains the purist attitude toward skeuomorphism:
"Albers would walk into the room and deposit a pile of newspapers on the table and tell the students he would return in one hour. They were to turn the pieces of newspaper into works of art in the interim. When he returned, he would find Gothic castles made of newspaper, yachts made of newspaper, airplanes, busts, birds, train terminals, amazing things. But there would always be some student, a photographer or a glassblower, who would simply have taken a piece of newspaper and folded it once and propped it up like a tent and let it go at that. Albers would pick up the cathedra and the airplane and say: "These were meant to be made of stone or metal—not newspaper." Then he would pick up the photographer's absentminded tent and say: "But this!—this makes use of the soul of paper. …This!—is a work of art in paper"
At the risk of appearing ambivalent, let may say simply, "BS!" If we were to follow his logic—beyond where even Albers seemed to go—we might reach the conclusion that one ought not make anything out of something else, since the original materials are best suited to be just that, the original materials. Wood is best used for trees, not newspapers or cornices; sand is better suited to remain as sand rather than turned into crystal goblets or the glass facades of Bauhaus Big Box Architecture. In fact, by following Albers' logic we might eventually do away with all forms of not merely ornamentation, but representational art and even color, as some Bauhaus influenced trend-setters wanted to do. Although the leading edge of smartphone interface design today looks like Ellsworth Kelly color explorations, you just know someone is going to eventually argue for all black and white. Seen the Drudge Report lately?
I do confess to a certain sympathy with the anti-skeuomorphic crowd. (Then again, I tend to root for Wile E. Coyote, too.) I have a visceral disdain for wood-grained laminate countertops and printed faux-wood wall paneling. It seems to me that if you want your countertops to look like wood, you ought to use wood—especially since a chef friend of mine once told me that real wood has chemistry that helps kill the bacteria on its surface. But even at that, I wouldn't turn down a meal served on a Formica counter. Heretically, I find the iPhone's icon-oriented interface to be more clutter than order, even as executed in iOS7, and although I am an unrepentant Apple fanboy, all those flat squares in Windows Phone 8 are clean, simple and attractive. How effective they are as navigational tools, I have no idea. And I also know that they are "buttons," regardless of how preciously flat they appear.
For Gropius and his followers in the Bauhaus this intense desire to eschew ornamentation was about politics. The assumption was that ornamentation was expensive and therefore, only members of the bourgeoisie could afford it. The search for "flatness" became a political, as well as artistic, movement. Roger Scruton describes the modernists and their agenda this way: "They were social and political activists who wished to squeeze the disorderly human material that constitutes a city into a socialist straitjacket." So it is not surprising that, in an era when the cultural desire for socialism is in ascendance, we might return to a fear of bourgeois ornamentation.
Such simplification is tempting, and when presented as the manifestation of (faux-) humanizing ideals, eliminating ornamentation takes on a certain (equally faux-) nobility. But just because a group of design philosophers want to protect the masses, whom they presume must be fooled by the painting of a tunnel on a canyon wall, doesn't mean we have to fall for that sort of reverse-elitism.
René Magritte, made the point back in 1928, with the inscription on his painting "The Treachery of Images." "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." (This is not a pipe.) We know. We also know that on-screen buttons are not really beveled, the clicking sounds are not mechanical, the calendar doesn't have a real leather border, the picture of our kids on the lock screen is not really our kids, the cars and trucks in Transformers didn't really transform, and Skeuby Doo isn't a real dog. Unless the day comes when we can jack ourselves directly into the Matrix, I imagine that human beings will always prefer a little visual metaphor— maybe even a little kitsch—with our computer interfaces.
(Originally published in the Edge of Faith's premiere issue, February 2017)
The path to reconciliation must begin with the act of confession.—Soon-Chan Rah1
In the summer of 1960 I was eight years old and lived in Little Rock, Arkansas. Most summers I would spend a month or more at my grandparents' house in Wilmar, a small, south Arkansas town in Drew County known as "The Home of Tall Pines and Pink Tomatoes." The soil was red and sandy, and we were near enough to the Louisiana border to have Spanish Moss lend its distinctive grayish-green mystery as it lurked, hanging from the branches of large, live oak trees. The humidity was always on the edge of bursting into rain; the water was so soft you could never quite dry off or feel clean after a bath. I can still taste the faint combination of salt and pine sap in the air.
Each day I woke to the sound of multiple roosters crowing. I got out of bed to help my grandmother and great-grandmother feed the chickens; collect the eggs; dust the house; make biscuits, cakes and pies; and look forward to having a Pepsi-and-vanilla-ice-cream-float every day at 10:00 am and again at 3:00 pm. They called it a Tea Party. Sometimes I would roam the gravel pits and the pine woods with my cousins, playing cowboys and Indians or re-enacting famous battles from the Civil War, especially those few battles that the Confederate Rebels actually won. At night I slept in the same lumpy bed in the same room that my father and his two brothers grew up in. I read Tom Swift novels and Hardy Boys mysteries by flashlight under the covers.
Around 5:00 pm every day I would climb in the old Ford pickup truck and ride with my grandfather a couple of miles to the farm so we could feed the cattle. I always took my treasured pocket knife. Cutting the twine on bales of hay stored in the loft and tossing it down to the cattle feeders made me feel like a real ranch-hand, maybe even a real cowboy. Once in a while I would accompany him to the "bank" he owned, although I never felt like a real banker. The word "bank" is in quotes because it wasn't a real bank. The technical name was "exchange and trust," a forerunner of the modern savings and loan. He couldn't loan money, but he could keep it for people in his cavernous, walk-in safe. I guess he was pretty good at double-entry bookkeeping.
Nonetheless, he was known as the town's banker, and the water commissioner, and the school superintendent, and I think he was even mayor for a time. Everyone called him Mr. Dick. When he died they found a little pocket ledger with a list of initials and dollar amounts next to them. The best guess is that he did loan money—his own. A stern father to his sons, he must have been generous to a fault with everyone else.
The town was built alongside a single highway that ran east and west. Railroad tracks ran parallel to the highway about fifty yards to the south. They had a Methodist, Baptist and a Presbyterian Church and my grandfather attended all three. They had the "bank," two general/feed stores, a gas station, a school, a flour mill with a couple of grain silos, a sawmill with endless mountains of pine wood chips, and a United States Post Office.
My grandfather's brother was postmaster. In a town of 500 people our family was about as privileged as you could get.
There was also the Star Café, one of my grandfather's less than successful entrepreneurial ventures, which may have been a less than transparent attempt to get my great-grandmother out of the house and keep her busy. A little mother-in-law drama was about all the drama they had. Except for the night when the flour mill burned down there wasn't a lot of excitement. Idyllic.
500 people. As near as I can tell, about 300 of them were black. Sixty percent. You can do the math. You already know where the black people lived—south of the railroad tracks in little shacks and pre-fabricated houses. Some of the white folks had pre-fab homes as well, and some lived on the other side of the tracks, but they also tended to have acreage around their houses where they could grow tomatoes to sell to the grocery chains and the Campbell Soup folks in the county seat, and pine trees they could harvest every 15 or 20 years for big money. That kind of real estate was rare for black residents, if it existed at all.
One very slow moving afternoon I was hanging out with a couple of the local kids when one of them suggested we play "Chuck Rocks at the N–––––s." Yes, this was Arkansas, 1960. He used the word.
We gathered our ammunition—small, round, gravel rocks from the driveway. Hiding behind the two-story mother-in-law house in the back of my grandparent's home, we would quickly sneak out and launch a volley across the railroad tracks onto the roof of the small, pink, pre-fab house on the other side. Quickly retreating to our hiding place we would peek around the corner to check the results. The first couple of times, nothing happened. The rocks all fell short or on the roof and it seemed that nobody noticed.
So we did it again. After a couple of volleys a Very Large Black Man came out on the stoop and looked around. Seeing nothing he went back in. Still, the fact that we had elicited that reaction was success to us. Congratulating ourselves on a mission accomplished we wandered off to other adventures.
The thrill of doing something we knew to be completely wrong was more enticing than eight-year-old boys could stand. Even more thrilling was the fact that we seemed to have gotten away with it. So naturally we did it again. And again. For several days
in a row we played our new game, waiting for the increasingly puzzled (we thought), Very Large Black Man to come out on the stoop, look around and go back inside.
Then we would quit. We never considered what would happen if we broke a window. The possibility that someone might get hurt didn't enter our minds.
Of course, nobody was fooled. The people in the house figured out what was going on almost immediately. The deep tragedy is that it took several days for them to do something about it. Mr. Dick was known to be "good to the black folks," but to directly challenge him regarding the behavior of his grandson and two other white kids was a violation of the deeply embedded but unwritten protocols of the existing social order. When white people of the time thought about it—something they seldom did—they merely understood those protocols as the way the world is supposed to be. God's Good Order. Today we call it systemic racism and that is not too harsh a label.
One afternoon, sitting in the breezeway, likely enjoying a round of Pepsi floats, we saw the Very Large Black Man walking across the railroad tracks into my grandparents back yard, seeming to grow Larger with every step. The game was over. We were busted. Before he reached the back door to ask if he could speak with Mr. Dick, my two co-conspirators made a quick exit out the front door. Hiding, I watched from a distance as the two men talked though I could not hear what they were saying. I didn't really need to know; even an eight-year-old has a conscience. I braced myself for the consequences.
Aside from a stern lecture from my grandfather, repeated in a slightly gentler fashion by my grandmother, and then repeated again a couple of weeks later when my parents showed up to take me back home to Little Rock, there were no real consequences beyond being "grounded" for a few days. I have searched my memory to see if, at the very least, they made me go apologize to the Very Large Black Man and his family, but I don't think so.
Later that year, in December, about a week away from my ninth birthday, my mother, my younger sister, and I were getting gasoline at a little filling station on the southeast side of downtown Little Rock. Southeast Little Rock was "colored," as they called it in those days, perhaps even intending politeness. The morning was overcast but the haze was beginning to break up. We were only three years removed from the day when nine frightened but courageous black students attempted to integrate Central High School just a few blocks away. The "Little Rock Nine," as they came to be called, faced an angry mob barring their entrance. They also faced the Arkansas National Guard, which had been called out by Governor Orval Faubus, to "keep the peace." The Guard was clearly there to support the mob and bar the door to the schoolhouse. The nine black students were turned away. Two weeks later they were admitted, but only after President Eisenhower federalized the Guard and sent 1,200 paratroopers to the campus to escort them up the steps of the school. Paratroopers sounds a little theatrical. I'm pretty sure they showed up in Jeeps and trucks. Either way, Eisenhower made his point.
Sheltered in the growing suburbs of northwest Little Rock—read: white flight—the only knowledge I had of the standoff was overhearing my father on the phone telling my out-of-state uncle that we didn't really know anything more about it than he did. We got our news from the paper and the Huntley-Brinkley Report just like everyone else in America.
Aside from housekeepers, gardeners and the occasional "lawn-jockey" statue—yes, it was that kind of neighborhood—African-Americans did not exist in my world. The whole environment was a study in Jim Crow reality. Even the more liberal members of the community believed separate-but-equal was an honorable, even Christian, position—reflective of divine intentionality. This filling station was run, and likely owned, by a white man. Black neighborhood. White-owned business. God's Good Order.
Mom (we called her Nana) pulled up next to the gas pump. The car was a 1955 Pontiac Star Chief, a chrome appointed behemoth with enough presence to herald my father's arrival into middle management, yet not so garish as to outshine the Rocket 88 Oldsmobile driven by his boss. Status was a finely tuned machine in those days.
Nana and I climbed out of the car while my sister sat in the back seat fascinated with her Chatty Cathy talking doll. Even today Chatty Cathy is described on Wikipedia as a "fanciful depiction of a human being…a five-year-old Caucasian girl…blonde hair in a short bobbed style and blue eyes." [Italics added.] It was not until 1962 that Mattel discovered there were people of other colors. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that it was not until 1962 that Mattel discovered that there were markets made up of people of other colors ready to part with their hard-earned money. I wonder that rarity does not explain why collectible Chatty Cathy dolls on eBay tend to be perceived as more valuable if they have the "ghostly white" color found on some models from 1964 bearing a "Patented in Canada" marking.
Nana went inside the station and waited to pay while I watched the attendant fill the tank. This was long before the days of self-service at the "convenience" store. Fascinated with the mechanics of fueling the car and secretly enjoying the mysterious fumes of the gasoline, I watched the friendly, grease-covered, Andy Griffith look-alike perform his liturgy. While the gasoline pumped and I tasted the air, he lifted the hood, pulled out the dipstick, wiped off the end, reinserted it into the pipe, pulled it out again, and inspected the now, oil-covered tip. With a knowing nod of the head and a wink in my general direction, he returned the dipstick for a second time to its proper place in the natural order of auto-mechanical physics and lowered the hood. Then he topped off the air-pressure in the tires and cleaned the windshield.
What happened next was completely outside the realm of the natural order for a nine-year-old white kid from Little Rock, Arkansas in 1960. A boy from the neighborhood, about my age, walked up to me and tried to strike up a conversation. It seems it was his birthday. He was nine years old, very proud of that fact, and he asked me if I knew anyone else who was nine years old. I backed away from him in silence trying to avert my eyes, just wishing he would go away. Something about being the same age as this kid was disturbing. I was not usually that shy, but I didn't respond to his questions.
He was black. The only black people I knew about (aside from the aforementioned service class) were the people from the other side of the tracks in my grandparents' south Arkansas town. My recent, narrow escape from justice was fresh on my mind. What I did know of black people I knew only from a distance. I had heard stories—stories in which men regularly referred to dark-skinned human beings by using the "N-word" and otherwise genteel women referred to them using the condescendingly polite but equally profane term, "Nigra." "Don't let them fool you," I was told, "they are not the same as us. They're okay as long as they stay in their own place, on their own side of the tracks, but you definitely don't want one marrying your sister."
He persisted. Like a black Chatty Cathy doll that could pull its own string, he continued to pepper me with questions, which I continued not to answer. "What's your name? How old are you? I'm nine years old. Do you know anyone who is nine years old? Is that your sister in the car? How old is she? Is she nine years old."
I was pretty certain that the only appropriate response for a child of my "station" was to ignore him. So I did. Nervously and completely unsure of what he might do. You just never know.
Nana watched the whole encounter from the station window.
My mother was raised in east Texas. The word "hardscrabble" was invented to describe her Depression-era childhood. In her poverty she always felt "less than." She spoke often of the rare treat of going to see a motion-picture with her father. Admission was nine cents. She would pray that her dad did not need to keep the extra penny so she could buy a Tootsie Roll. I was always reminded of that story when I took my sons to see the latest superhero movie and I had to spend over $20 for two drinks and a popcorn. While some poverty is real, some is just a first-world problem.
The outsider mindset solidified when she was fourteen. Her parents divorced and she had to quit school to help support the family. Ironically she took a job in a movie theater. At the time, divorce carried an unredeemable social stigma, not merely for the divorced couple, but also for their children. There were no mommy blogs or support groups for single mothers or classes to help the newly-divorced find their way back to normalcy. Normalcy was for other people. To be touched by divorce in those days was to be diminished as a human being, to be not quite a whole person. She could genuinely empathize with someone who, by popular opinion, political compromise and Constitutional provision, was considered to be only 3/5th of a human person—at least until the chicanery of the 13th Amendment. Besides, she was, or so she believed, part Native American, another aggrieved group. That turns out to be mostly true, but not Cherokee as she hoped. A test of my DNA reveals that she was descended from Mexican ancestry and from Cree Indians—darker-skinned Canadians.
As I backed away from the frightening specter of a smiling, friendly, nine-year old black child, Nana walked up behind me. Bumping into her I suddenly felt trapped. With the Pontiac Star Chief on one side and the gasoline pump on the other, she had cut off my only avenue of escape. Putting her hand firmly on my shoulder, she asked, "Are you going to answer his question?"
I couldn't get words out of my mouth. I stammered and stuttered in pretty much the same way I had when a few years earlier I had a face-to-face encounter with a garden snake on my grandmother's front porch. Once my grandmother decrypted my message she took a well-sharpened hoe from the shed out back and summarily dispatched the poor snake.
But my mother was not carrying a garden hoe and this black kid, whatever my misgivings, was no snake. Nana was not coming to my rescue, at least not in the way I hoped. Instead, she struck up a surprisingly genial conversation with this dark, mysterious, and intimidating (at least to me) stranger, this pre-adolescent representative of a tribe that the author of my family genealogy (circa 1952, Blue Mountain, Mississippi) described as the "people of Ham." It must be true; it's in a professionaly printed, hardback book with gold foil embossing on the cover and coated stock on the interior. Although, to be honest, the foil has pretty much worn off now.
That genealogy miraculously manages to trace our family origins all the way back to one of Noah's sons. Impressive, given the fact that the riches of Internet research did not exist in 1952, much less Ancestry.com. Yet he was sufficiently persuaded of our roots to write, "When Japheth stepped out of the Ark and his father delivered that prophecy [Cursed be Canaan…God shall enlarge Japheth…and Canaan will be his servant… Genesis 9:24-29], there rose a kind of Gulf stream of history carrying the promise of the gospel, numerical enlargement and superiority over the people of Ham. These latter are the Egyptians, Ethiopians, colored races, etc."
Don't be overly troubled by that "superiority over the…colored races, etc." thing. According to the author, himself a well-educated Presbyterian pastor, at least one prominent member of our lineage "led family worship in his home" and "had a sense of responsibility that extended to his family and slaves alike." So I guess that makes it all okay, right? God's Good Order.
Of course, as a nine-year-old I knew nothing of family history and it was not until many years later that my mother discovered a copy of the will of the first member of my lineage to settle in America in a dusty county courthouse in South Carolina. It is dated February 2, 1837. In the inventory of his property (pictured above) you will find:
1 Negro man, Lewis$1,000.00
Beck & 2 Children$1,506.00
Rose$ 475.00
Right there, categorically, yet almost casually listed among the farm implements, the household items, the cows and horses and chickens, the jugs of cider and vinegar, and the lard, are five people. Five human beings. And those dollar values? That is what they sold for at auction. Their original valuation was less than $1100.00 all together. When the folks in the HR department talk about the importance of investing in "human capital" it sends a shiver down my spine.
What I did know at the age of nine was entitlement. Not consciously, it was merely something I inherited from my ancestors and absorbed from the culture of the 1950s in these United States of America, the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave," and the southern state of Arkansas, the "Land of Opportunity" for some folks—those fortunate enough to suffer from a modest level of melanin deficiency. Somehow, without even realizing it I had fallen prey, as had much of white America, to the "curse of Ham" myth. There is no truth to, and certainly no Biblical support for, the idea that dark-skinned human beings are that way due to a so-called "curse of Ham." Yet, thanks to a lot of bad teaching and the endorsement of the once nearly ubiquitous Scofield Bible, this false belief dominated much of American theology of the past two centuries and even persists in a few places today. As Dr. Tony Evans puts it, "Myths don't need facts, they just need supporters."2
I didn't need facts. I didn't even need conscious awareness of my inherited prejudice.
I just knew there was something unusual about my mother talking with this boy.
Nana smiled at him and offered that I was almost nine years old. Vigorously prompting me at the elbow, she told me to shake his hand, which I did very cautiously. It was no fist bump or interlocking thumbs, "bring-it-in," kind of "bro-hug." Instead it was typical of what two nine-year-old boys almost always do—a weak, tentative grip, shy and uncertain. What my father would have called "a limp fish." It ended as quickly as it began.
But as our hands touched I discovered something I had not known before. Black skin feels like white skin. It's the same thing. Who knew? Epiphany! Somehow that was comforting to me and although I still couldn't quite hold up my end of the conversation, I did stammer something about my birthday as we got in the car to leave.
My new-found, black best friend looked at me with warranted suspicion and probably wondered why I had been so distant. We waved at each other as the car pulled out of the gas station and I felt different—somehow forgiven even for the egregious sin of rock-chucking the previous summer. My nearly nine-year-old self knew intuitively that my mother had just given me a gift—a gift that I must pass on to my own children and they in turn, to their children—a legacy of infinitely more value than that cloth-covered family geneaology with the faded gold foil. I felt like I had entered a new world—one in which God's Truly Good Order was being restored.
1 Soon-Chan Rah, (2009) p. 71, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity. Downers Grove, Il: InterVarsity Press
2 Evans, Tony (2015-09-24). Oneness Embraced: Reconciliation, the Kingdom, and How We are Stronger Together Moody Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Part of a photo series, A Cautionary Tale, by the author which can be found here: http://bit.ly/2wEEHd2
Stories, at least classical stories, tend to follow what people who study stories call a narrative arc. If you took a high school literature class—and stayed awake for enough of it—you may remember the term "dramatic structure." From the time of Aristotle, a story studier himself, the form was considered to be a beginning, a middle and an end. So maybe you didn't have to be as smart as Aristotle to figure that out, but nonetheless, he got the ball rolling on the idea of literary analysis.
The version of Aristotle's idea that your high school teacher taught you is likely the one conceived in the 19th century by a German novelist named Gustav Freytag. Now Gus had his problems. His most famous work was a novel called Debit and Credit which extolled the virtues of the German people (so far, so good) in contrast to Jews and Poles. Oy! But his literary theory—thankfully less anti-Semitic—caught on. It went something like this:
1. Exposition. This section presents the stuff you need to know for the rest of the story to make sense. The setting, the main characters, a little about the back story, etc.
2. Rising Action. This is where a series of unfortunate (or fortunate) events cause conflict, build tension, and lead inexorably toward part three, the climax.
3. Climax. This is the main point of the story. The lead character, the protagonist, steps up, becomes the hero, or maybe just fixes the problem. Sometimes it goes the other way, the lead character fails. That version is called a tragedy. Sometimes the protagonist defeats the antagonist, but the antagonist doesn't fully realize it yet, which sets up the rest of the story.
4. Falling Action. In this part of the story the protagonist continues to struggle against the antagonist, which may be a person or maybe just an idea. The final outcome may still be in doubt, but the battle continues with varying degress of intensity.
5. Dénouement. You can call it a resolution or a revelation (my favorite). I just always like the sound of the word "dénouement.' In this part of the story, conflicts are resolved, things either go back to normal in which everyone lives happily ever after or they move on to a new normal, with just enough tension to suggest there is more to the story with hints of a possible sequel.
That's a pretty simplisitic understanding of a narrative arc, and probably more dependent of modern movie economics, than Gus Freytag. But it is a pretty common way stories unfold.
Even before Aristotle, there were stories. In fact, long before Aristotle, stories were the primary way that historical knowledge was passed from person to person and generation to generation. The Bible, even before it was written down, was that kind of collection of stories. Each of those stories has its own narrative arc, a lot like your high school teacher would have described. (At least if you went to high school back when it was still acceptable to talk about the Bible in class, which kind of raises the question of why, exactly, can we still discuss the notorious anti-semite, Freytag's theory, but we can barely mention the Bible in a school.)
For the most part the Bible is a collection of stories that go something like this:
God does something wonderful for his people. Something like: Creating an entire universe for them to live in;
Putting them in an exquisitely beautiful garden with an even more exquisitely beautiful partner;
Delivering them out of slavery in Egypt by parting the Red Sea; Providing food for them in the wilderness that they didn't have to grow; Outfitting them with shoes that didn't wear out in 40 years;
Leading them into a land of milk and honey, which always sounded kind of sticky to me and very likely to attract bees. But if you lived in the ancient near east it probably sounded like the Promised Land to you.
They faithfully follow him until they get rebellious or tired or just plain stoopid.
God lets them have their way even though he knows things are not going to end well.
Bad stuff happens.
He calls them back and, often reluctantly, they call on God again.
He forgives them, rescues them and takes them back.
Finally God sends his own son to die for them, making it possible for them to receive eternal life and a brand new heart, one that loves God and desires to do his will—not out of duty or fear but for the sheer joy of participating in the life of the all good and all beautiful creator and sustainer of the universe.
Repeat parts 1 through 6 as often as necessary until you get it through your skull (and your heart) that God really, really, really loves you—so get over your bad self.
Literally, get over your bad self. That's where part 7 comes in. It is his major work in you and it is a work in progress. Philippians 1:6 says, "God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns."
To sum that up, here's the way the story goes: God is good. He does good stuff. We don't believe it. We rebel. We fail. He calls us back. We repent. He restores. And he is ushering in a kingdom where that restoration is permanent.
That's my story. And it is probably yours.
I have had opportunity after opportunity to see first hand how God works all things together for good, for those that love him (however imperfectly) and are called according to his purposes. He has taken the gifts he has given me and placed me in situations where he wanted me to use them. Those situations have seldom looked like what I might have expected or planned, but that is just a reminder to me that this story is ultimately not about me, it's about him.
I look at all the ways I wandered and I don't really know why God allows that. But to be honest, I'm almost glad he did. It probably has something to do with what Paul talked about in Ephesians 2: "For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves; it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance as our way of life."
That may be my favorite verse in the Bible. (It's pretty hard to pick just one.) I always like to remember that the word "workmanship" in that passage is the Greek word "poiema." It literally means we are God's poetry. It makes me think about the book John refers to in Revelation 13:28 and again in 21:27 as "the Lamb's book of life." Traditionally, we have tended to think of it as a ledger. Enough credit (good works, right?) in one column and you get to stay in heaven. Too much sin in the other column and you drop through a hole into a lake of fire.
But what if it is a book of poetry?


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More than 23,000 donors are urgently needed this summer to ensure patients continue to have access to the blood and blood products they need.
Canadians who are unable to give blood can encourage others in their networks to give blood on their behalf. Making an appointment to donate has never been easier.
To book an appointment today, locate a clinic, check for eligibility and more, Canadians can download the GiveBlood app available on iOS or Android or visit blood.ca.


"Carry Me" is the first track from Bombay Bicycle Club's new album, to be released 3rd February 2014 on Island Records. The band have just released a world first interactive music video that allows viewers to have total control over the band's actions; essentially making them the director while the band perform in time to the music! You can watch and direct the video on CarryMe.tv and "Carry Me" is out now on iTunes.


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Health IT »
smart bandage
Martina Abrigo
'Smart' bandage to speed up wound healing
Researchers are developing a 'smart' bandage that can draw bacteria out of wounds and speed up the healing process.PTI | September 07, 2015, 15:41 IST
The researchers found these bacteria rapidly transferred onto fibres coated with allylamine, independent of the fibre size, but did not attach to fibres coated with acrylic acid.
MELBOURNE: Researchers are developing a 'smart' bandage that can draw bacteria out of wounds and speed up the healing process.
Scientists at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia have used a technique called electrospinning - in which polymer filaments 100 times thinner than a human hair are squeezed out of an electrified nozzle - to develop nanofibre meshes that can draw bacteria from a wound.
In the first phase of research polymer nanofibres were placed over the top of films of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium involved in chronic wound infection. The researchers found the bacteria quickly attached to the fibres.
When the fibres were smaller than the individual bacteria, fewer cells attached and those that did attach died as they attempted to wrap around the fibre.
In the second phase, the tiny nanofibres were coated with different compounds and tested on the bacteria Escherichia coli, also commonly found in chronic wounds.
In the third phase of research, the nanofibre meshes have been tested on tissue-engineered skin models in a partnership with researchers at the University of Sheffield in the UK.
"For most people, wounds heal quickly. But for some people, the repair process gets stuck and so wounds take much longer to heal. This makes them vulnerable to infection," said Swinburne PhD candidate Martina Abrigo.
"We hope this work will lead to smart wound dressings that could prevent infections. Doctors could put a nanomesh dressing on a wound and simply peel it off to get rid of the germs," she said.
Tags : Health IT, wounds, United Kingdom, smart bandage, Martina Abrigo, Innovation, healing, bacteria
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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If you want to be yourself and still connect to the society and the world, we're on the same page. I used to lost my self for so long because I wanted to get approval in almost everything I do. Yet at some point, something inside of me just burst out and explode, a sign of they wanting a reclamation. Almost every night, I woke up and cried for no reason. I started to hate people around me because I thought they are the one who responsible for making me not being me. Until one day, I realized I'm free and worth to be my self. God sent me here in this world not to follow what other people think and expect. I'm here to serve the world with my gift. My gift not be the same like others. It's unique in its own way. From then, I learn to see my self in different way. This blog is the journey of being authentic and showing authentic persona to the world. I hope all of us can live with love and peace within the self.
Maida Tiva Althia has educational background of Radio / TV Broadcasting in Illionis, USA. She started her career in Indonesia as a project officer in RAL FM Radio, Manado. At that moment, she start to love the disciple of human development. After successfully increasing the quality of human resources and placing RAL FM back to Manado's favourite radio, this acoustic-enthusiast is even moved to help others in optimalizing their potential and helping them finding their true self.


text:
package scratch2hue

import (
	. "github.com/r7kamura/gospel"
	"testing"
)

func TestScaratch2Hue(t *testing.T) {
	Describe(t, "Scratch2Hue TestCase", func() {
		Context("connect to hue", func() {
			It("create new conneciton.", func() {
				actual := NewConnection("localhost")
				Expect(actual).To(Exist)
				Expect(actual.bridge).To(Exist)
			})
		})
	})
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
James Whitinui Joseph (Blenheim, 21 de noviembre de 1969) es un entrenador y ex–jugador neozelandés de rugby que se desempeñaba como ala. Fue internacional con los All Blacks de 1992 a 1995 y con los Brave Blossoms en 1999, actualmente es su director técnico desde 2016.

Selección nacional
Laurie Mains lo convocó a los All Blacks para participar de la gira a Australia y Sudáfrica 1992; debutó en el partido de exhibición contra World XV y jugó en la gira de los Leones Británico-Irlandeses 1993, enfrentando en los tres test matches a los Lions. En total jugó 20 partidos y marcó 15 puntos (tres tries).

Japón

Participaciones en Copas del Mundo
Mains lo convocó a Sudáfrica 1995 como suplente de Mike Brewer. A Gales 1999 fue llevado, para Japón, por Seiji Hirao ya como titular indiscutido en todos los partidos.

Seleccionador

Palmarés
 Campeón del Super Rugby de 2015.
 Campeón del National Provincial Championship de 1991 como jugador.

Referencias

Personas de Blenheim
Jugadores de rugby de Nueva Zelanda
Jugadores de la selección de rugby de Nueva Zelanda
Jugadores de la selección de rugby de Japón
Entrenadores de rugby de Nueva Zelanda
Entrenadores de los Highlanders
Entrenadores de la selección de rugby de Japón
Nacidos en Blenheim (Nueva Zelanda)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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text:
You are here: Home // World // Voter Turnout Key for Government in Algeria Referendum – U.S. News & World Report
Voter Turnout Key for Government in Algeria Referendum – U.S. News & World Report
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One of my pet peeves is quickly becoming people who check out library books and then mark them up as if they were their own copy. If you want to underline and make notes in a book, buy a copy of the book! I have occasionally had to wade through a book that has not one, but two or three people's notes and comments in the margins.
Well, today I picked up a copy of the Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley and immediately noticed that someone had filled up the last page of the book and the back cover with hand-written notes. For me, that is almost as bad as it can get. As steam was coming out of my ears, and I was mumbling who do these people think that they are that anyone else would want to read their thoughts on Wesley's works… I opened the front cover to see if it had been defaced too.
Ok, so I guess Dr. Outler has a right to write in his own books… and I have to admit I am very interested in reading his thoughts on the Journals and Diaries of John Wesley.
Interestingly, his comments relate to the introduction written in vol. 18 by W. Reginald Ward. And he certainly seems to have had some strong opinions about the content of the introduction.
Equally annoying is that my husband will write notes on the nearest piece of paper he finds. Even if it happens to be one of my books or even my Bible. Usually the notes are unrelated to anything in the book but phone numbers or to do lists.
I share the pet peeve as well. I hate that. But that is a really cool find. I'm surprised the library allowed that copy to be in circulation.
How will you feel when it's not notes in a library book, but crayola colorings from a cute daughter in your personal books? She may not be as famous as Albert Outler, but she's just as important!
Bethany is far more important in the eyes of her daddy than Albert Outler.
as Outler's notes though, but that remains to be seen.
Here's an idea. Our regional library lends musical scores to Choral Societies. Last year, the library decided that all scores would be returned to them without marks regardless of the shape they were in when lent out by the library. If scores were not returned unmarked the choral society would be given a hefty fine. (In the case of the large choral society that I belong to, this would have resulted in a fine of over £500.) The most recent scores we used dated from the early 1950s. I spent close to 4 hours erasing pencil marks from mine. Including someone who had marked 'DV' all over every page. The funniest mark was 'Stand, DV'.
It's a really great way for libraries to get free cleaning.


text:
Abundant sunshine. High 38F. Winds NNE at 5 to 10 mph..
Walt Unks/Journal
N.C. school chief says students are being improperly promoted. School leaders disagree.
By T. Keung Hui The (Raleigh) News & Observer
RALEIGH — State Superintendent Mark Johnson charged Wednesday that thousands of third-grade students have been improperly promoted to the fourth grade when they aren't proficient in their reading skills.
But local school leaders argued against making policy changes that would force them to hold children back.
Johnson said "rogue" former staff with the state Department of Public Instruction have "gutted" the Read To Achieve program to allow social promotions to continue. He made the same accusations in a December memo.
Wednesday, during a State Board of Education meeting, he called for changes to how the Read To Achieve program is implemented.
"There was a law passed by the General Assembly," said Johnson, who participated in the meeting by phone from out of town. "There were bureaucrats at the Department of Public Instruction who did not agree with that law. Through policy, they shifted what the law was intended to do."
North Carolina passed Read To Achieve in 2012 with the goal of ending social promotion by requiring third-grade students to be proficient in reading before they could advance to fourth grade.
Senate leader Phil Berger of Eden, who was the main backer of the Read To Achieve program, echoed Johnson's concerns on Thursday. Promoting a child to fourth grade who cannot properly read is one of the most harmful and cruel actions the education bureaucracy can take, Berger charged.
"Administrative resistance to 'embarrassing' students, and the education bureaucracy's refusal to explain why a child is unable to read, has been allowed to trump providing children with the basic skill necessary for success," Berger said in a statement. "It's nothing short of malpractice and another example of the 'soft bigotry of low expectations.'"
State Board of Education members asked local superintendents and teachers at Wednesday's meeting to describe how they implement the program. They argued they're following the law while taking advantage of its flexibility to decide whether to promote students.
"You have to have both flexibility and accountability," Wake County Superintendent Cathy Moore told state board members. "If you have one without the other, then you're losing the impact of the ability to actually make a difference individually with children. So you need to find a way to do both."
Ending social promotion with Read To AchieveRead To Achieve has been in the spotlight in the past several months because reading scores have declined since the program began. Additionally, there's been controversy over the awarding of a multi-million dollar state contract to evaluate the reading skills of K-3 students under Read To Achieve.
When Read To Achieve was passed, there was considerable fear that the new program would cause thousands of third-grade students to be forced to repeat the grade.
Under the legislation, third-grade students who can't pass the reading exam at the end of the school year or qualify for an exemption are "retained" for the next school year.
The retained students are placed in an accelerated reading class or a transitional 3rd-grade/4th-grade class.
Johnson says the law was violated because many third-grade students classified as retained were placed in fourth-grade classes. He said districts then promoted many of those retained students to fifth grade, despite not passing the fourth-grade exams.
"This is the guidance that superintendents and principals were given," Johnson said. "This is not something that we blame them at all for."
Tensions with state board
Johnson has feuded with the state board since he was elected in 2016. He attacked the board in the December memo but said Wednesday he is not blaming the board for the issues he says have occurred with the Read To Achieve policy.
Johnson said a task force of superintendents will begin meeting this month to develop potential changes to Read To Achieve. He said the goal would be to avoid making changes that cause mass disruption.
But local school officials repeatedly said Wednesday that principals need to retain their authority in deciding whether to promote students at the end of the school year.
Mariah Morris, the 2019 North Carolina Teacher of the Year, pointed to how state law says proficiency is only one factor in determining whether a student is promoted.
"It is important that teachers have a voice in whether a student is retained in a third-grade class, working in conjunction with the parents, the administration," said Morris, a former Read To Achieve coordinator for Moore County Schools.
Greene County Superintendent Patrick Miller warned that if the retention policy is "hardened," more students of poverty and color would be disproportionately retained.
"Teachers, parents and administrators at the local level should have a voice in whether or not a student is retained," he said.
Berger responded to those who argue that low-income students would be disproportionately held back by the policy.
"There is no better guarantor of intergenerational poverty than failing to educate a child. If a child cannot read properly by fourth grade, that child is significantly less likely to succeed," Berger said. "To ignore that reality is to risk that child's potential and perhaps sentence her to a lifetime of underachieving. It's cruel and it must stop."
N.C. personal finance mandate means one less U.S. history class
The State Board of Education adopted on Thursday new graduation requirements for freshmen entering high school in the 2020-21 school year to reflect the new directive for the economics and finance class.
Compared to 2017, fewer Guilford schools are part of state's top tier for academic growth
School leaders pointed to factors outside the district's control that contributed to a decline in the number of schools that exceeded expected growth on state tests.
Phil Berger
Mariah Morris


Unimark Group is a leading real estate development group based in Kolkata. Representing the evolution of Heritage Realty Group into a new era of growth and development, Unimark Group was founded by Mr. Harsh Vardhan Patodia with the objective of creating premium landmark spaces that showcase exemplary architectural design and construction quality and providing a standard of service that is unsurpassed in the industry.
Unimark Group and Heritage Realty share a legacy of innovation and a history of service excellence. The group's portfolio spans across residential, commercial, industrial, retail and entertainment complexes, including developments of over six million square feet in Kolkata, Chennai, and Bangalore. Powered by imagination, innovation and creativity, the company has achieved six million square feet and with over twenty million square feet of upcoming development spread across premium residential complexes, hi-tech commercial buildings, world-class IT parks and new- age integrated townships, Unimark Group is committed to transforming the Indian real estate industry.
Doors – Flush doors & PVC doors for toilets.
Switches – Modular of reputed brand.


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Beattyville/Lee County Tourism
The Kentucky River
Beattyville
Historical >
LeeCountyOralHistory
OHV Recreation
Lee County 150 Celebration
Thunder on the River Offroad Show
Locally Made Market
Old Engine & Tractor Show
Kiwanis Homecoming Fair
Woolly Worm Festival
Kentucky Main Street
Kentucky Right-to-Work State
Jan. 9, 2017 - Press Release from the Kentucky Association for Economic Development
New right-to-work law positions Kentucky as a top choice for businesses looking to grow and succeed
With right-to-work legislation passed and signed into law, Kentucky further distinguished itself as a top choice for new-business location and expansion. Governor Matt Bevin, who championed the pro-business legislation as a top priority of his 2015 campaign, signed House Bill 1 as a measure to help grow the economy, continue improving Kentucky's business climate and provide better jobs and wages for the state's residents.
By preventing union membership from being used as a condition of employment, the law gives employees at unionized workplaces the choice of whether or not to join and financially support collective-bargaining organizations.
Terry Gill, secretary of the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development, said the law puts Kentucky in the running for many more new-location projects and existing-business expansions.
"Right to work gives Kentucky another key advantage in attracting new jobs to the state," Sec. Gill said. "Site selection is a competitive process and without this law we've been passed over too often. Thanks to leadership and vision from the Governor and members of the General Assembly, we now enter a new era of economic opportunity."
Hal B. Goode, president and CEO of the Kentucky Association for Economic Development, called the new law a great step forward for Kentucky.
"Site selection consultants have told our KentuckyUnited partners that many projects are multi-market multi-state searches. These companies look for reasons to eliminate communities or states from their search list and right to work can play a significant role in their decision whether or not to consider a particular state," Goode said. "This step by Gov. Bevin and our legislators will improve Kentucky's ability to compete for projects."
In combination with its right-to-work status, Kentucky's cost of low housing, innovative workforce-training initiatives, industrial electricity prices nearly 20 percent lower than the national average, progressive financial incentive programs, and its ideal location within 600 miles of two-thirds of the U.S. population all make it a top choice for new business locations and expansions. Kentucky's location, as a gateway between the American South and Midwest and with easy access to the Northeast and Atlantic Seaboard, makes it an ideal place for establishing and growing a business.
The commonwealth's logistics and infrastructure advantages include 20 interstates and major highways, rail networks, barge traffic on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, six commercial airports and dozens of regional airports. The state's transportation network can move products easily and efficiently by air, rail, road and water to all points globally.
Kentucky ranks third nationally in air-cargo shipment volume, thanks to the UPS Worldport air hub and Centennial ground hub in Louisville, DHL Americas hub in Northern Kentucky and several large FedEx ground hubs throughout the state. This strong presence by the world's most prestigious logistics companies means products manufactured in Kentucky can get anywhere in the world virtually overnight.
The members of KentuckyUnited promote the many advantages of doing business across the Commonwealth of Kentucky. If your company or client is considering a new location or expansion, we encourage you to take a look at what Kentucky has to offer. Our highly qualified economic development team at the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development can be your single point of contact for the duration of the site selection or expansion process. Begin your search with us today, and let Kentucky make your next location or expansion decision an easy one. Learn more at ThinkKentucky.com, by calling 1-800-626-2930 or emailing econdev@ky.gov.
KentuckyUnited e-mailed this press release today to over 2000 site selection consultants with whom they have shared the advantages of locating to Kentucky.
Dedra Brandenburg
Director of Tourism
Beattyville/Lee County Tourism Commission
Beattyville, KY 41311
Beattyville/Lee County Tourism P.O. Box 738 Beattyville, KY 41311 (606) 464-5038


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Q: Google reCaptcha with Parsley not working Hi have a page in that I would like recaptcha should appear after parsley form validation but recaptcha validation is happening first then form validation again recaptcha appearing
any help would be highly appreciated.

  <title>reCAPTCHA demo: Simple page</title>

  <form action="?" method="POST" data-parsley-validate id="contactForm">
    <input type="email" data-parsley-required />

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A: just add this to form.
data-parsley-excluded="input[name=g-recaptcha-response], input[id=recaptcha-token]"

A: Here's how I resolved this in a cgi script implementation:
<form id="form" data-parsley-validate="" method=POST ACTION="">

<input id="myField" data-parsley-errors-container="#errorContainer" data-parsley-required="true"  data-parsley-error-message="Captcha required" value="" type="text" style="display:none;">

<input type="submit" name="submit" value="SUBSCRIBE">

</form>

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Not long ago, my daughter wanted me to sign a permission slip for something at school. The way she went about it just about drove me crazy. She asked if I would and I told her that I would have it for her before we left for school. Three minutes later she was back in front of me, asking if I had signed it yet. I assured her I would have it for her before we left for school. Three minutes later she was back again. In spite of the fact that I had assured her several times it would happen, and in spite of the fact that my wife and I have a pretty good track record at following through on things like that, my daughter was so focused on it and so insecure about it that she just kept coming back.
Matthew 15 shares the story of a woman at the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to trust. A Canaanite woman had come to Jesus asking that he cast a demon out of her daughter. Jesus ignored her. He ignored her to the point that the disciples finally came to Jesus and begged that he at least send her away because she was driving them crazy too. Jesus announced that he couldn't help her because she wasn't a Jew. The woman barged her way in, falling before Jesus and begging him again. Jesus again told her he couldn't help her because she wasn't a Jew, this time basically calling her with a dog. When she responded that even dogs got scraps, Jesus finally relented and told her that she would get what she asked for. Mark's version of the story adds one more detail. When she arrived home, she found her little girl lying quietly in bed, and the demon was gone (Mark 7:30, NLT).
Why is that detail important? Well, if I was that woman, desperate to help my little girl, and this man had ignored me, put me off, made what I considered racist comments, called me a dog, and then finally agreed but wasn't going to go with me, I don't know that I would have left without him. I probably would have been convinced that he was only agreeing so I would leave him alone. But this woman left. She believed in him enough to take him at his word and go home in faith.
Sometimes, we are persistent in prayer simply out of devotion and discipline. But sometimes we are persistent in prayer because, deep down, we don't really believe that God will do what is best for us. We keep praying, not because we trust God, but because we don't. Like my daughter, who had every reason to believe I would keep my word, we sometimes pester God because we are nervous and insecure, because we don't really believe God will provide for us like God promised.
Persistence in prayer is a wonderful thing when we pray from our faith. But sometimes we must intentionally put our insecurities aside and demonstrate our faith by letting go, moving on, and allowing God to follow through without pestering him in our insecurity. James tells us that we should pray, asking God in faith without doubting. For the doubter is like the surging sea, driven and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord (James 1:6-7, HCSB).
What have you been pestering God about? Have you been persistent in prayer because you don't believe? Maybe it's time to let some things go. Ask God one last time and then trust God to do what is best both for you and to bring God glory. Don't allow your prayers to demonstrate your lack of belief.


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Sewing Divas
Come and spend the day sewing your garment with Michele Lommasson.
She will help you with fit and technique!
1 hour lunch
Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 10:00 am to 4:00 pm
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The community that fought off the frackers
Former Dandaragan local Pauline Cook didn't know whose driveway she had pulled into - until she saw the fancy car and the driver.
Somehow, despite her and all her fellow convoy drivers becoming hopelessly lost, she'd managed to stop in front of the Cottesloe house of the then Western Australian Liberal Premier, Colin Barnett.
Mrs Cook was part of a 60-strong ute-muster that had travelled from Bullsbrook, more than 50km away in February 2017, to protest plans by gas company Latent Petroleum to restart fracking near Dandaragan.
Carting bundles of hay on their trays, the drivers had visited WA's Parliament House, then the famous Cottesloe beach, stopping along the way to take photos and do media as part of their campaign to stop fracking.
Then someone suggested doing a lap of the Premier's street.
"Everyone was a bit lost so we were just following our noses, hoping we were going in the right direction," Mrs Cook said.
"I was the first one down the cul-de-sac, everyone had stopped, wondering where to go, so I stopped as well - I didn't even realise which house was his but then I saw a fancy car with a driver.
"He was on his phone when he saw me doing a u-ie in front of the house. Then I left… I didn't even realise what was going on until I had calls from people saying that I'd missed all the action that I'd started."
Strangely, Mrs Cook's innocent u-turn had morphed in the media into Mr Barnett claiming that members of the muster had tried to dump a giant bale of hay on his front lawn.
"I don't know where that story came from, he must have made it all up," said Mrs Cook.
"I wouldn't waste a bale of hay on him anyway."
The ute-muster, held during the lead up to the 2017 election which turfed Mr Barnett after nearly nine years in power, was just one of many community-driven initiatives to put an end to fracking in the Dandaragan Shire.
The community was first made aware fracking was occurring about 20km from their homes in 2015 when another convoy, organised by the Conservation Council of WA, visited a number of towns in the Northern Perth Basin.
By the end of 2015 a community group called "Dandaragan Groundwater Protection" was formed - so named because Latent Petroleum's Dandaragan Deep fracking project was located immediately adjacent to the only drinking water supply for Moora, a neighboring town within the Moora Shire.
What followed was a textbook grassroots community campaign to drive off the frackers, with energetic community meetings, "Lock the Gate" signs plastered on properties and roadways, and pressure mounted on politicians.
By the time of the 2017 election, three towns in the shire had declared themselves "gasfield free" - Jurian Bay, Cervantes, and Dandaragan itself.
Among those also involved in the campaign was regenerative agriculture farmer Christine Smith, who owns two blocks in Dandaragan West with her husband Kingsley.
In the early days of the campaign, Mrs Smith would visit other farmers throughout the district, sharing information and urging them to hang "Lock the Gate" signs on their fences.
"We felt it was a real environmental stress and a threat to our rights to farm in a clean environment, with clean water, air and soil," she said.
"After we were made aware of the issues, we decided it was really important for us to keep that awareness campaign going."
Following the 2017 election, the newly installed McGowan Labor Government announced a moratorium on fracking in the state.
While the moratorium was subsequently overturned almost 2 years later, a combination of community pressure and technical issues at another nearby fracking project meant, in May 2018, the company surrendered its licence for the Dandaragan Deep proposal.
Due to a clause in the new conditions for fracking projects announced by the McGowan Government, a company could only frack if it had an existing licence in place as of November 2018.
In other words, the local community had won.
"I was very relieved, and I was very relieved for all the farmers in that area, who have important mixed produce operations," Mrs Smith said.
Lock the Gate Alliance WA coordinator Jarrad Thomas said it was clear the community pressure had played a major role in convincing Latent Petroleum to back out of its Dandaragan Deep fracking project.
"At Dandaragan they went a step further by putting signs up, saying 'this road is gasfield free and protected by community'," he said.
"There were yellow Lock the Gate triangles and signs everywhere, It was very hard to miss.
"They didn't just do the survey, and then do nothing about it - they went the full hog."
But while the battle may have been won, the region is not protected from fracking under the new laws introduced by the McGowan Government, and gas exploration licences still cover the area, including over Mrs Smith's farm.
"What I think our experience with the Dandaragan Deep project shows, and the gasfield free declarations, is that as a community we can be very powerful," she said.
"We're not done protecting our land and water yet."


Braces (sometimes called orthodontic braces) can align and straighten teeth and help to position them to improve your dental health and smile.
Many people have crowded or crooked teeth. Orthodontic treatment will straighten the teeth or move them into a better position. This can not only improve their appearance but help to look after the long-term health of the teeth and gums by making them easier to clean. Orthodontic treatment or braces can straighten crowded or crooked teeth.
Crowding, spacing, cross-bites and edge-to-edge bites can lead to a number of long term oral health problems. Getting the right orthodontic treatment will not only improve the appearance of your teeth and give you a confident smile, it's also helps you keep your teeth and gums healthy.
Most people believe that they would need fixed metal braces to straighten their crooked teeth, however modern orthodontics has given us a number of alternatives.
The Inman Aligner can be used to move your front teeth to an ideal position quickly and effectively in a matter of weeks. These are removable braces.
Invisalign clear aligners can be used for more complex cases but are also fast and nearly invisible. These are also removable braces.
Six Month Smiles can be an alternative to Invisalign. Specialised clear braces and small tooth coloured wires gently straighten and align teeth.
Fixed braces use the traditional metal wires and brackets. As not all crooked teeth are suitable to be straightened by Inman or Invisalign aligners these types of braces are still used.
Take the first step towards improving your smile, your confidence and your life by booking a free adult braces consultation with us here at PMA Dental Care, contact us or drop into our practice in Gravesend or call us on 0844 576 9905. You can even book a free consultation now.


Whether at a cottage or beach house, perhaps even in a cosy tent outdoors, the Desert Sand alpaca blanket is the perfect mix of neutral and color. It blends easily to whatever and wherever your sleeping situation is. After a day of fun adventure, it would be nice to have a good night's rest wrapped in a soft and warm alpaca blanket. Sweet dreams, indeed.


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Name some of your favorite fighting games and Share a memory!
By silent253,
November 26, 2022 in Retro Video Gaming!
silent253
One of the most memorable memories for me was when I a first saw Virtua Fighter in the arcades. Its 3D graphics, its polygon fighters and the mechanics. To me it looked amazing in those days. Ultimate mortal kombat 3, Street fighter, Killer Instinct none of those looked revolutionary as did Virtua Fighter in those days.
FreneticZetetic
I'm a die-hard MK fan since the first game! UMK3 is my favorite entry to this day. I play regularly, but miss competitive play. 2006ish saw some AMAZING online community play for that game!
twiztor
Location: DBQ
Nintendo 3DS Friend Code:4914-4241-9313
a couple years ago for my birthday, i put together a fighting game tournament. What i didn't tell people was that it was a BAD fighting game tournament. The games gradually got better, but the first round was pretty abysmal. Featuring such "classics" as Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game, Shaq-Fu, War Gods, and Pit-Fighter.
Rando1975
I wasn't a huge Mortal Kombat fan, but my local arcade was lucky enough to have an early version (I think it was revision 1.0) of Mortal Kombat II. The new characters were cool, new fatalities (although many were missing with this revision) and Kintaro & Shao Khan were BRUTALLY difficult.
12 hours ago, Rando1975 said:
This sounds about right; they definitely released earlier versions of MKII that had yet to be tweaked. Bosses were notoriously difficult, and the AI was even worse than the final product (if you can believe that, lol). That's actually a topic I plan to do a video on in the near future!
I remember playing my first game of MKII in a local pizza shop. I was enamored by the cabinet and attract screen, and insisted my mom give me some quarters while we waited! I don't remember who I ended up picking, but I DO absolutely remember facing Jax first, getting wrecked, and being tossed into the acid of the Dead Pool. That image and sequence left a huge impression on my then-6-year-old mind. From that day on, I've been a die-hard MK fan for life!
So many Mortal kombat memories. Lol. Mortal Kombat will forever be a part of the fighting game history and the reason why the ESRB Ratings was created. Does violence work in videogames? You bet it does!


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Rememoried Review
Aidan Simonds May 6, 2018
There are two words I would use to describe Remeoried; beautiful and abstract. It's a visually stunning game that puts you in a dreamlike world, one that is very obtuse. This game gives you no form of direction, just the occasional voiceover. The most you can do is just start walking, and try to figure out the puzzle you find yourself in.
I'm still not sure what Rememoried is. It could be described as a 'walking simulator', but one that requires you to solve abstract puzzles. My first few times playing the game I pretty much stumbled upon the solution to the puzzle. But that's also kind of the point. Even after I put a grasp on what I was supposed to do in the game, there was always this sense of wanderlust.
This game pretty much drops you right in the middle of the action, with no context or guide whatsoever. This whole game doesn't give you any sort of guidance, and it's up to you to figure out what to do. There's voiceovers scattered throughout the game, but those are just as abstract as the rest of this game.
Rememoried was one of the one most relaxing and therapeutic games I've played. There's no rush or incentive to jump to the next level, or no story to guide you along. Which is a good thing, because sometimes this game can become a little too frustrating. A lot of the game involves jumping, and unfortunately, the platforming isn't great.
The change of pace and locations keeps things interesting, however. The majority of the game is in a monochrome black and white style. Occasionally levels show a pop of color that really stand out. Overall this is a beautiful game, and the visuals really add to the meditative nature of playing it.
Speaking of playing the game, the game has a very unique mechanic that adds to the aimless nature of the game. Aimless may seem like a dig, but it's not here. A main mechanic in Rememoried is forgetting, and the how reality is ever-changing in a dream. Looking away for one second can change the level to your advantage. If you maneuver your way to a platform and see that it's just too high to reach, turn away and look at a different object in the distance. You may just notice that the platform was lowered just enough to jump onto.
Some may think that mechanic is a bit too obscure, and that is true. A lot of the game can be chalked up to just wandering around and not knowing what to do. You may turn around and notice the level has changed. While its fascinating, it also adds a bit of aimlessness to the game. On the other hand, as I mentioned earlier, this game doesn't give you a goalpost of sorts or any sort of time limit, so you can spend your time wandering around this surrealist world.
This isn't a necessarily long game, and that's to its benefit. It doesn't overstay it's welcome, and you can either finish it in one sitting or jump in it every so often. This is a game meant to challenge you, but not punish you. It's just enough of a challenge to get you thinking, but it doesn't go farther than that.
Overall, despite its central concept of forgetting, Rememoried is a very memorable game. It may be too abstract for everyone, but for those who do play it, expect a meditative, relaxing game that also makes you think. You'll be drawn into the game's surrealist world, and you'll want to explore more of it, though the game never really explains anything in detail. Rememoried isn't perfect, but it's not a game I'll forget anytime soon.
REVIEW CODE: A PS4 code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.
Aidan Simonds
Tags:3D, adventure, first-person, Hangonit, PS4, PS4 Review, Rating 7/10, Rememoried, Vladimir Kudelka
Arcade Archives Solomon's Key Review
Battlefield 3 Review
Dead Island: Retro Revenge Review
Frontline: Road to Moscow Review


Pop it frame it fold it! Colorful borders come in pre-cut 3-ft by 3 strips. Display straight or pop it and fold it for three-dimensional fun. Livens up any classroom. Die cut and scored for easy use. Color (s) : N/A; Theme: 3-Dimensional; Design: ABCs & 123s; Height: 3 in.


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Another victory for Koert van Oosten in Gerwen
Koert van Oosten claimed a second victory in Gerwen (Netherlands). After an hour of cycling, the rider from Gouda was the fastest of three leaders on his Cervélo S3. Last week, Van Oosten won his first race of this season in Essen (Belgium). Also youth rider Noël Rokven became first last Easter weekend.
"The course suited me well", Koert van Oosten told after his victory in Gerwen. "It was selective and therefore perfect for attackers like me. Despite that, I didn't feel great at the start of the race. Fortunately, I became better during the race. As with my first victory in Essen, I could escape with two riders in the final. Eventually, I became first in the sprint. I like those challenging races."
Second victory for youth rider Noël Rokven in Werkendam.
Also youth rider Noël Rokven won for the second time this season in Werkendam. This time, Rokven was the fastest after a tough race. Last week, Rokven became first in Huijbergen.
Full results last weekend:


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Variety Plus Icon Read Next: Anonymous Oscar Voters Discuss Andrea Riseborough Controversy: 'If Disqualified, It Would Be a Decimation of the Actors' Choice'
Jan 10, 2023 6:14pm PT
Netflix Becomes First Streamer to Win Golden Globe for Animated Feature With 'Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio'
Writer, director and producer Guillermo del Toro also made history as the first Latino ever to win the animated feature category
By Clayton Davis
Clayton Davis
Senior Awards Editor
byClaytonDavis
Oscars Predictions: Supporting Actor – Ke Huy Quan Has Won 'Everything' So Far With BAFTA and SAG Remaining 8 hours ago
Andrea Riseborough Will Retain Oscar Nomination, but Social Media Offenders Will be Addressed by Film Academy 12 hours ago
Oscars Predictions: Supporting Actress – Will Angela Bassett Become the First Woman to Win for Superhero Movie? 14 hours ago
Taking home the Golden Globe for best animated feature film, "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio" just made Netflix the first streamer ever to win the category. Del Toro made history for himself, too, as the first Latino winner. (Note: there have previously been co-directors on films that have won, such as Charise Castro Smith from "Encanto," but co-directors are typically not official nominees or winners.)
Accepting the Golden Globe, del Toro proclaimed that "animation is cinema," continuing, "Animation is not a genre for kids, it's a medium."
Since the category's inception in 2006, only four winners of the Globes' animation category have failed to win at the Oscars: "Cars" (2006), "The Adventures of Tintin" (2011), "How to Train Your Dragon 2" (2014) and "Missing Link" (2019). They lost to fellow Globe-nominees "Happy Feet," "Rango," "Big Hero 6" and "Toy Story 4," respectively. Steven Spielberg's "Tintin" is the only film to win the Globe and not receive an Oscar nom.
Netflix has received four nods for animated feature at the Oscars — "I Lost My Body" (2020), "Klaus" (2020), "Over the Moon" (2021) and "The Mitchells vs. the Machines" (2022). However, it has yet to win the category. "Pinocchio" was recently shortlisted by the Academy in three technical categories (sound, original score and original song) and longlisted in six at BAFTA (animated film, adapted screenplay, original score, production design, special visual effects and sound).
Del Toro directs the adaptation of the classic tale by Carlo Collodi with Mark Gustafson and serves as a co-writer with Patrick McHale. The film has won over 15 precursor awards from critics' groups including LAFCA. The movie is also nominated at the Critics Choice Awards, which takes place on Sunday, Jan. 15.
To see the current rankings for each category, visit Variety's Oscars Hub. Make sure to bookmark the 2022-2023 Awards Season calendar for all key dates and timelines for the season.
Animated Feature,
Golden Globes,