Textiles are an integral part of our lives. Lounge sets and cushions, tea towels and bath towels, rugs, carpets and curtains - all made by weaving, knitting, crocheting, knotting, or pressing fibers together. Of course we also wear clothes made from a myriad of different fabrics and most of them touch some part of our skin. Bedding is another material we expose our body frequently. We toss and turn, sweat and snore on our sheets, pillow and duvets.
The question is how much of an impact does the fiber our bedding is made from have to our health?
Up until the 20th century textiles were made from natural fibres derived from plant (coconut fibre, hemp, pulpwood), animal (goat hair, llama wool) and mineral (metal and glass fibre) sources. In the last hundred years these were largely supplemented by artificial fibres made from petroleum.
You can get bedding made from natural latex, cotton, wool, silk and buckwheat that is classified as organic by leading certification bodies. Organic farmers spend a lot of time and resources working with enforcement bodies to ensure environmental sustainability and purity of products. Synthetic and toxic doused textiles are quick and easy to produce. This is why, for the short term, until more people start buying organic textile like bedding, the price tag is a little higher.
Natural or man made, if a material has been heavily processed i.e. dyed using chemicals, they are not only eco-unfriendly, they can intensify symptoms of existing health issues. Sheets made from organic fibre, without dyes or bleaches are softer so eczema sufferers find relief in a gentler fabric. Natural fibres are more comfortable and breathe easier than synthetic fibres like polyester and nylon, so anyone who sweats a lot during dream time is likely to find a better, dryer nights sleep on cotton sheets. There have also been reports that organic fibres better protect against dust mite allergens, so are healthier for allergy and asthma sufferers.


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Home » blog , Bulgaria , history , Pliny » Bulgaria - Part 1: Three-Thousand Years of Wine History
Bulgaria - Part 1: Three-Thousand Years of Wine History
By Joey Casco CSW/CSS July 05, 2015 5 comments
July is Bulgarian Wine Month thanks to BulgarianWine.com!
Bulgaria isn't a country that makes the news over here very often and it never comes up in conversation, so it's no surprise that Americans generally know nothing about it. The first thing you'll probably think of when Bulgaria is mentioned is Communism, and that'll likely be the only thing you think of.
So it's pointless for me to say that we don't know enough about Bulgaria and its people. Well, check this out: Your computer, your digital watch and the airbags in your car... invented by the Bulgarians. The world's biggest IMAX 3D is there. The head gestures for yes and no (nodding and shaking) that we're used to are reversed. They're obsessed with yogurt and their national instrument is the bagpipes, which they call gaida. They produce most of the world's rose oil by an overwhelming majority. And their official language iiiissss... *drumroll* ... Bulgarian.
But the very most important thing of all: Bulgaria has 3,000 years of winemaking history and makes A LOT of wine.
Bulgaria is in eastern Europe and right in the middle of a Romania-Serbia-Greece-Turkey sandwich. So because of its location there's been people living there since before the Big Bang, but viticulture and winemaking wasn't introduced until the Thracians popped up around 1000 BCE and started calling the place Thrace.
The Thracians were red-haired and indigenous to the land, a mixed breed of natives and other Indo-Europeans. They were considered barbarians by the Greeks because they preferred rural communities with scattered farms instead of big cities, their living quarters weren't all that enclosed, they had almost no seafaring trade and just had a rather rough lifestyle in general. But they did have a strong culture, spoke and wrote their own language, were excellent singers and well educated. They were just as advanced as the Greeks. With access to the gold of the Balkans, they were lookin' pretty stylish as well.
'SUP, Y'ALL!
However, the Thracian claim to fame was their uncanny ability as warriors. Growing up in an atmosphere where raiding your neighbors was your daily work-out probably had something to do with that. They would even sing while heading into battle, and the Greeks named their battle-hymns titanismos. As history moved along from the times of Ancient Greece, through Persian Empire rule, to Celtic invasion, to the Roman Empire, the Thracians were still around and their warriors were still highly regarded as dangerous mercenaries.
They also loved their wine, and they were the ones that introduced the fermented grape beverage to what is now Bulgaria way back when they first appeared as a civilization, acquiring grapevines from Asia Minor. Our old friend Pliny the Elder claimed the very first viticulturist in Europe was a Thracian named Evmolp. Homer described their wine as black and honey sweet, and Greek historian Xenophont recalls a feast hosted by the Thracian King Sevt where the wine was served in animal horns as part of a ritual. Sevt's tomb, discovered in 2004, contained a two-handled drinking cup made of gold and three amphorae. Some of the indigenous grapes of Bulgaria today are believed to be first cultivated by the Thracians, such as Mavrud, Pamid, and Gamza. Their favorite god was Dionysus, the god of wine and, among other things, theater and fertility.
After the Third Macedonian War (171-168 BCE) the Thracians went under Roman authority. Then their King was murdered by his own wife in 46 CE, and Thrace became an official Roman province. The Thracian people were basically absorbed and eventually disappeared. 1,546 years isn't a bad run.
Under Roman rule, the coast of the Black Sea became the place where the white grapes of the ancient world were literally evolving into something worthwhile. Because of the region's importance in viticulture, Emporer Antonius Pius (138-161 CE) issued the very first vineyard law in history: The Decree for Preservation of Vineyards in Lower Misia (central and northern Bulgaria). Anyone that destroyed a wine-producing grapevine would be punished. But Bulgaria fell victim to numerous invaders until the Roman city of Byzantium (now Istanbul) was established in Turkey with the Bulgarian provinces under its watch. By then the Slavs had moved in, the Bulgars had come from Turkey, and the Avars from the Caucasians were there too. There were many different people of completely different cultures now in Bulgaria, and they all acquired the wine traditions of the Thracians.
Then one man united the Bulgar tribes to take out the Avars. In doing this, Khan Kubrat had created the confederation of the Old Great Bulgaria in 632. The Byzantines probably welcomed, and may have actually helped, the emergence of this new state as they had many enemies and were in dire need of local friends. That peace was short lived and the Bulgars were pushed away and separated by the Byzantines and Slavs. Those that found themselves in the northeastern Balkans created the First Bulgarian Empire in 681. They'd have a love-hate relationship with Byzantium for the next 504 years.
KHAN KRUM THE FEARSOME
In 755 a cute little baby boy named Krum was born to a Bulgar father and Slavic mother. Such a little pumpkin. He would grow up to be the Khan of Bulgaria from 803 to 814 and have adorable nicknames like "the Fearsome", "the Horrible", "the Formidable" and "the Dreadful".
This guy once surrounded the city of Sofia and offered a deal that if the city was surrendered he'd let everybody leave safely. After they agreed and defenses were let down, he slaughtered 6,000 of them instead. His sole motivation for getting up in the morning was to conquer everything in sight and kill everyone that stood in his way.
On the bright side, he would succeed in doubling the size of his empire and the territories gained would make Bulgaria important to trade for centuries to come. He made laws and punishment equal no matter who the offender and their riches (or lack there-of), and tried desperately to abolish poverty. But Krum wasn't happy with the drunkeness of his people and put prohibition into place, ordering all vineyards to be destroyed and intoxication illegal. Of course, it was largely ignored. Even by the Khan himself.
In 811 the Byzantines entered Bulgaria in massive numbers led by Emporer Nikephoros. They caught Krum's army by surprise and beat them down in battle until they were forced to retreat, then marched right into the Bulgarian capital city of Preslav. They burned everything, murdered the citizens, and took all of Krum's personal possessions... including... EVERYTHING IN HIS WINE VAULTS!!! Krum was pissed right the eff off and immediately took action. He ordered a pass in the mountains to be blocked off as the Byzantines returned home. Emperor Nikephoros and his army were trapped while the Bulgarians attacked from the mountains above, handing out a brutal massacre on sitting ducks.
The Emperor's corpse was brought to Krum's tent, where he severed the head and put it on a spike as a trophy. Eventually he had the skull turned into a silver crested drinking cup. Prohibition be damned, he wasn't drinking milk out of that keepsake!
Legend has it that one of Krum's many pet lions escaped its cage and angrily started killing the good people of the city. That same night a peasant man named Mavrud was sloshed off his mother's secret stash of wine and happened to encounter that same angry lion. So what did he do? What any good, upstanding, drunk young man would do. Of course he had to go to court for killing a royal lion because that was illegal, and his mother confessed in a desperate plea to turn the blame on herself that her son had gotten drunk off of her illegal wine. And just like that prohibition in Bulgaria was ended. Krum wanted all of his people to be as ballsy as Mavrud, so he allowed them to drink their courage. One of the wine grapes that the Thracians first cultivated was at some point renamed in honor of brave, drunken, lion-slaying Mavrud. Somewhere, momma is proud.
Or that's how the story goes. Mavrud comes from the Greek word mavro, which means black. Mavrud being a black grape, and its wine deeply pigmented, it's probably more likely that the story was made up to honor the grape rather than the grape being named to honor the man.
ST STEPHEN BULGAR CHURCH
The Bulgarians would take over Hungary under Krum's son and successor Khan Omurtag, then Romania, Maldova and Macedonia under Khan Presian. They became Christians in the mid-800's, which is historically always a good thing for local viticulture and winemaking. As I explained in The Adventures of Aglianico, wine had always been the drink of religion and spirituality, the grapevine coming from the earth and all, but now wine was a necessity for the worship of the Christian God. Quantity, quality and technology of wine increased wherever Christianity hung its hat. The cool vaults under medieval Bulgarian monastaries were among the first wine cellars in the world.
Byzantium conquered the First Bulgarian Empire in 1018 and an uprising gained their independence again with the Second Bulgarian Empire in 1185. With this change, the Bulgarian leaders went from being named Khan to Tsar. This was the golden age of Bulgarian wine, as famous and as revered as those from France and Italy.
The Fourth Crusade brought Gofais de Villardouainne to Bulgaria in 1205 and he would have burnt the city of Assenovgrad to the ground if he didn't hold their wine in such high regard. His famous words "Wait, what? I'm supposed to destroy this place with fire? Bitch, have you tried their vino? Shit... screw this." will echo through eternity.
"Inside the fortress there is a large and elite army, its soldiers are heavily built, moustached and look war-hardened, but are used to consume wine and rakia — in a word, jolly fellows." - Ottoman commander Lala Shahin on the garrison of Sofia
Then... the Ottomans came and took the capital city of Tarnovo in 1393. A terrible thing for wine. The Ottomans were Islamic, and Islam prohibits alcohol. At the beginning of their rule over Bulgaria they held boozing and winemaking to a very strict NO! Grapevines were to only be grown for table grapes. They would loosen those rules after accepting how much cash could be made off of wine trade, and the Ottomans would even introduce dessert wine into Bulgaria's production. Even still, the Ottomans were a major setback for Bulgarian wine, and they were there for almost 500 years. The people of Bulgaria got sick of their occupiers and started revolting, and in 1876 the Ottomans responded with multiple massacres totaling over 30,000 Bulgarian deaths.
The Russians really wanted to make a move on the Balkans and that was enough for them to come to the rescue of several Bulkan countries under Ottoman control. The Russo-Turkish war lasted until 1878 and, in the end, Bulgaria would remain under Ottoman control but they were now the Principality of Bulgaria (AKA the Third Bulgarian State) and they self-governed their own business.
By the 20th century the Ottomans were quickly losing their support and power. Talks of Bulgaria declaring independence were heating up, and with so much else going on in the world both Russia and Austria-Hungary passed up the opportunity to lure them in to joining them. In September of 1908 Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria was transported from his mansion in Hungary back to his home country where the final decision to declare independence was decided on a ship named Krum. The de jur independence manifesto was completed and declared just a few days later and the Ottomans didn't even ask for compensation. Not even money or custody on the weekends. Bulgaria was now its own kingdom and Ferdinand was its Tsar. Within ten years vineyard land went from 63,671 hectares to 114,823.
The Kingdom of Bulgaria would receive the highest casualties of any country in the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and were allies of Germany and Austria in World War I. In 1929, viticulture provided for 100,000 households and 200,000 wine-producing grape growers. Cooperatives began to be established and ten years later they were starting to pick up good export markets in Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria. United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill bought 500 liters a year of Bulgarian wine made from the Shikroka Melishka Losa grape, also known as Melnik.
After trying to remain neutral in World War II, Bulgaria was forced into joining the Axis in 1941 when Nazi Germany threatened to create a war path right through their country to get to Greece. At the time Bulgaria had the largest army in the Balkans so their allegiance had tremendous value. Three years later, Romania quit on the Axis in August of 1944 and they let the Soviets walk right up to Bulgaria's borders. On September 5th the Soviets invaded and the Bulgarian Army was quickly told not to do anything about it and just let it happen. That same day, most likely after changing its underwear, Bulgaria declared war on Nazi Germany, and three days later the Soviets had complete control of the northeastern portion of Bulgaria. Hello, communism. Can I get you a kebapche?
The Kingdom morphed into The People's Republic of Bulgaria later that same year, led by the Bulgarian Communist Party and backed by the USSR's Red Army. The opposition from the people was enormous at first and the PRB pretty much spent most of its time the first few years beating everybody in submission and punishing resistance. Communist leader Georgi Dimitrov returned from exile to his homeland country in 1945 and further promoted the fact that they weren't screwing around. In 1947 they figuratively made a Xerox copy of the Soviet Constitution and called it the "Dimitrov Constitution".
A PRB BOTTLING LINE, 1960
Just like the Soviets and their Soviet Champagne the wine industry in The People's Republic of Bulgaria was run by the state and all about mass production. Everything was now state-owned, including vineyards. Vinprom, a production company that was founded in 1939, was suddenly a communist production company. But unlike the Soviets, they weren't looking to just provide crap wine to keep their people satisfied. Instead, they were completely driven by export sales. They were all about that bla-bling bla-bling, cha-ching cha-ching.
In 1951 the government declared the wine industry a high priority business sector. They immediately started attempting to clone the style of wines that made the big sales in the West. Cabernet, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay were brought in and planted in high numbers, and they took a liking to the land. Rkatziteli from Georgia also was planted and became their main white grape variety. Their variety zoning and growing regions were completed in 1960.
The '60's saw machines for harvesting and winemaking brought in from France and the USSR. Oceans of Bulgarian wine was being exported and the country was one of the top wine producers in the world by volume. A law was passed that fixed prices on grapes every year no matter how good the quality was, so grape growers obviously started to slack and the quality of Bulgarian wine in general went down. But good wine was still being made. The best ones were sent to the United Kingdom and the United States where they did okay in sales under the label Trakia, and their not-so-good wine was sent to the Soviet Union where it was drunk in mass quantity.
My research has lead me to two different scenarios in which California began helping communist Bulgaria with their wine in the 1970's. The first one goes like this: Some California enologists were confronted by Stoyan Kindekov, former director of Vinprom, and asked if they would help Bulgarian wine become competitors on an international scale. They said yes. The second one goes like this: It was a trade. Pepsico could sell their concentrate to Bulgarians so they could have a Pepsi, and in return they'd get the help of University of California, Davis. Either way, it worked. Sales went up and they began competing in Europe, the States and Canada. The Vine and Wine Institute, based out of Pleven, invented a new method of growing vines in the '70's, with tall stalks and rows spaced further apart, and received an award from the government for their efforts. Before this new system, Bulgarian vines were still being grown the ancient bush-like way.
The late 1970's and early 1980's saw great prosperity for Bulgarian wine sales, particularly their Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot as well. But you didn't think it would last, did you? Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbechev began his "dry law" campaign in 1987, partially banning alcohol in the USSR. Prices of alcohol were raised and you could only buy it at certain hours of the day. Being drunk in public was a prosecutable offense. This is Russia we're talking about, where since the invention of vodka it's been socially unnaceptable to not have it on your breath. More money must have been put into public intoxication arrests annually than American tax dollars are put into trials of 19 year old's busted with a few ounces of pot. Anyways, this really hurt the Soviet market for Bulgarian wine, thus hurting the industry overall.
1968 TRAKIA
Then, communism fell. Todor Zhivkiv was the communist head of state for the People's Republic of Bulgaria and had been trying to assimilate the Turkish minority in the country since 1984. The dude even forced them to take Bulgarian names. Deadly riots broke out in 1989 and Zhivkiv told the Turks that they could leave if they wanted. 300,000 of them got the hell out of there within three months. Gorbechev already didn't like him and this was an excuse to finally be rid of him. While a plot was being hatched to dispose of Zhivkiv, he ordered protesters at a political conference to be beaten, while 36 others were driven way out into the boondocks and forced to walk back to the capital city of Sofia. That was the final straw. He was confronted and told to resign or be executed. He resigned in November of 1989 and the Communist Party gave up its right to rule in July of 1990. The People's Republic of Bulgaria became the Republic of Bulgaria, and the first free elections since 1931 were held. The Communist Party won, but they now had to operate under a capitalist and democratic system.
Success continued for Bulgarian wine in the UK and USA until 1991 when Vinprom was disbanded. By then the quality of the wine these countries were getting from Bulgaria had declined anyways. Now they had started to gravitate to newer, more exciting things like Australia and Chile. See, what happened was that after communism fell, all the seized land from 1944 was given back to their "original owners". So if your deceased grampa owned a vineyard back in the day then you suddenly found yourself owning a vineyard. You've never even touched a vine in your life and you don't have any of the appropriate equipment. Some people tried to do it and succeeded, some tried to do it and failed miserably. But mostly they didn't try at all, and there were many cases where nobody even knew who owned the rights to them now, so vineyards sat there and died without any caretaking whatsoever.
Winery privatization finally occurred in 1999 so that helped bring vineyards back from the dead, and the quality of the country's wine industry started to make a comeback by the early 2000's. Then in 2005 both Bulgaria and Romania signed accession treaties to join the European Union, and began taking advantage of the programs offered by the EU to help prospect countries reach the requirements of joining. One of those programs is SAPARD (Special Accession Programme for Agriculture and Rural Development), only available to Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia. It was, and still is, an invaluable tool that continues to help modernize and increase the quality of vineyards, wineries and other farming what-ya-call-it's in those countries. Bulgaria and Romania started 2007 off right by being accepted into the EU on January 1st.
PART 2: THE CURRENT STATE OF BULGARIAN WINE covers the wine regions, indigenous and international grapes that they grow, how Bulgaria has the wine with the most antioxidants in the world, and how they're doing on the market today. A year after these articles came out PART 3: INVINCIBILITY OF RAKIA was released, in which you can learn about the history of rakia and how it's made.
- Joey Casco, CSW
TheWineStalker.net
Part 1: Three-Thousand Years of Wine History
http://www.thewinestalker.net/2015/07/bulgaria1.html
Part 2: The Current State of Bulgarian Wine
Part 3: Invincibility of Rakia
20 Fascinating Facts You Never Knew about Bulgaria
The Oxford Companion to Wine
The World Atlas of Wine
The Thracians and their place in history
History of Bulgaria
The Origins of Bulgaria: Myths and Facts
Bulgarian wines portal
Notes from History: Entwined in history
Not taking prohibition lion-down
Badass of the Week: Khan Krum the Horrible
Brief history of Bulgarian wine making during socialism
Bulgarian wine, Wine-Searcher
Danube.Travel: North-West region (Vidin)
Wine of Bulgaria
Bulgarian wine breaks antioxidant content record!
Caroline Gilby MW, More than words
Vance T. Petrunoff July 5, 2015 at 1:41 PM
This is the coolest story about the history of Bulgaria and its winemaking! Thank you and Nazdrave!
Lori July 5, 2015 at 11:35 PM
Very cool history!!
A very interesting history! I used to drink Bulgarian Cabernet now and again in the early 90s - Domaine Boyar springs to mind - and it was pretty drinkable, especially the "Reserve" bottlings.
Pauline February 11, 2017 at 5:59 PM
Cool! Only the Thracians are still here, the latest DNA confirms it...
chivas 18 blue November 29, 2018 at 10:16 PM
While I normally enjoy my Speysides, sherry finishers and after experimenting with the Laphroigh Select I went straight to this monster. Oh you will be suckered in if you didn't see the proof. The nose is smoke all day long. The palette however, is not at all harsh. The smoke is there and while heavily, highly surprisingly doesn't wrestle you. It's caressing, velvety and soft. Despite being a knock around 54.2% it's very, very smooth and astonishingly the smoke completely disappears on the finish. Hell of an experience and I will definitely return for more.
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July Wine Pick: Mija Sangria

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Karin Krommes 'Sway' (2012) Acrylic on Panel 60 x 40cm.
1.) Before I arrived in the melee I wandered Bristol harbour side to Purifier House where the nomadic art gallery, Antlers hosts the exhibition 'Exploration' featuring the work of three contemporary artists. If you haven't come across Antlers before they're worth keeping an eye on, based in Bristol they use different venues for each exhibition and represent emerging artists. 'Exploration' for want of a better word, explores the idea of technology and/or architecture being used as a means of exploring our environment in pursuit of discovery. In Krommes' paintings, 'Romantic' landscapes featuring snow-filled and haunted looking pine forests become invaded by satellites and swarms of passenger-less drones. Similarly in George Diego Litherland's paintings Eden-like utopias complete with their own self-contained weather system are trapped within octagonal frames or windows suspended within a fantasy or science fiction-like world. Completing the line-up is Jemma Appleby who combines landscape and architecture into precise charcoal drawings based on Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian houses. Are they utopias or dystopias? Devoid of humans it is hard to tell if we are seeing the technology or architecture left behind some terrible event or from the future. The buildings, the drones have are the unnerving presence in these works. Together the work is deliberately quite cold, artificial, isolating and slick. This is echoed in their presentation, as they are highly skilled works that are astonishingly done by hand but at first appear with the precision of a machine. It is also a poignant reminder of our reliance on technology in our day-to-day lives often determining how we navigate, interact and explore our environment.
2.) I eventually make my way to Bristol Museum and Art Gallery where Jeremy Deller's Venice Biennale exhibition, 'English Magic' is currently on display. For the first time in the Biennale's history the exhibition from the British Pavilion is touring the UK. I'd previously seen the work in Venice so it was interesting to see how it varied in a different context and I think the British Pavilion should tour the country every year; it's a great way for the public to engage more with the Bienniale (we'll have to see when Sarah Lucas exhibits in 2015). 'English Magic' gets its name from the 'good' and 'bad', trickery and concealment practised by politicians. It reflects the diverse nature of British society, its culture, its economics and its politics whereby Deller interprets particular events by working collaboratively with the public often with humour and wit. All is not what it seems however, icons of British culture and heritage are mixed, reinterpreted and/or respond to current events. Still I think this shows that we can be proud that Deller represented Britain at the Venice Biennale he showcases many of the 'great' things about Britain but does so by showing that we also have a sense of humour! The work isn't a collection of one-liners, the humour more subtle, wry and satirical. Social upheaval and the economic depression are presented alongside Bowie's tour between 1972-73, William Morris is painted on a wall as a giant lifting Roman Abramovich's yacht from the waters of the Giardini in Venice (in 2011 he moored his 377-foot yacht blocking the quay for tourists visiting the Biennale), a hen harrier is grasping a range rover in its talons, Neolithic hand axes adorn the walls becoming arrows and way markers, there are drawings of politicians connected to the conflicts in Iraq and David Kelly incident by prisoners in the UK and seemingly colourful/abstract banners depict tax avoidance schemes used by international companies.
The themes in these works are presented in the opening film to the exhibition, 'Ooh-oo-hoo ah-ha ha yeah' where at first slow-motion shots of birds of prey are shown swooping in, talons and wings splayed in captivating detail; we are then transported to a scrap heap where giant mechanical claws are lifting and prising up cars at this point the link between the two becoming more obvious. Another shift sees a bouncy castle Stonehenge and its excited participants, young and old bouncing on it. The film finishes with a scene involving the Melodians Steel Orchestra playing Bowie's 'The man who sold the world' (It's a really wonderful version). The film is fun to watch and captivating, there is something uplifting about the sense of community involvement in the work and it highlights the wonderful aspects of Britain, its birdlife, history, people etc. but with a quiet, underlying subversive sense of unease; the Stonehenge isn't real being commoditised to a thing of play, the natural beauty of a bird of prey grasping its prey is compared to the not so obviously/debatably beautiful mechanised version of the car disposal industry , the steel band performing a rendition of the 'man who stole the world' marking a change in what is traditionally played on steel drums as well as being a politically-charged song. I do feel the exhibition worked better in its own compact pavilion in Venice where the work could be read as a whole, the linking and referencing between ideas in the different pieces of work was more clear. Th enjoyment of the work however is not lost in Bristol and still has thought provoking impact with the most notable significant difference being that in the Venice show part of the exhibition was to have a complimentary cup of English tea. Magic!
Gail Harvey 'Light and Movement on the Sea' (2013) Oil on Canvas, 142 x 163cm.
3.) Final destination of the day was 'The Power of the Sea' at the Royal West of England Academy (and also the first time I'd ever been there). In an exhibition that is co-curated by painter, Janette Kerr (pictured) it is not surprising to find it mostly contains paintings! We leave behind the directly conceptual ponderings of Deller's work and delve into the briny depths of surfaces, texture and the stuff of paint. Personally, I love the fact there are so many painters in this show. It's really refreshing for me to be reminded of the joys of making marks and wielding a brush. There are so many big paintings, expressive paintings, abstract paintings where the vibrancy, energy, intensity and often ferociousness of the sea are portrayed in frenetic mark making, gesture, splashes and pouring. Maybe it is because paint is a liquid medium it lends itself so well to communicating the fluidity of water and can capture a moment in time/an action drying to leave a trace, mark or stain?
It is not all painting however there are also sculptures, etchings, photography and film-based works where the serenity, vastness, sustaining and navigational nature of the sea are also explored. Featuring sea inspired/ themed work from British artists from 1790 til present day curating this exhibition must have been no easy task with artists who are essential in telling the story of British artists relationship with the sea such as Turner, Constable, John Miller Marshal, John Piper and Peter Lanyon to others who were certainly less well known to me, such as George Morland and Charles Napier Hemy. The pre 21st century artists are well placed in this exhibition being worth seeing in their own right and for providing a history of the evolution and context for the contemporary artists' work in the second half of the gallery.
Janette Kerr 'Holding my Breath II' (2013) Oil on Canvas 180 x 210cm.
The contemporary responses to the sea are, for me, where things start to get a lot more interesting. There are a lot of paintings, I may have mentioned, some depicting the sea, others using water from the sea and in the case of Peter Matthews' 'Atlantic Drift' and Susan Derges in 'Shoreline 5 October' the sea itself becomes part-creator in the work. In Matthews' a primed board is attached to a rope and buoy before being tossed out to sea and in Derges the tide sweeps over photographic paper creating exposures of the waves. These works highlight one of the most important challenges of capturing the sea in art, movement. The sea is rarely, if ever, still. Even on the calmest of says the reflected light on water from the sun moves and shimmers. Along with their own concerns that each artist brings to their work the one thing most of them also have to contend with is how suspend that moment in time, an impression of the movement of the sea and or as well as addressing the 'movements' of change, tensions with our relationship to both use, navigate and save it. Anne Lydiat has a refreshing approach making a series of spider-like drawings marking the lived experience of bobbing about in a boat at sea. In 'Currents' Annie Cattrell has literally frozen the rippling or effect of light on water in what at first appears as the seemingly impossible, a cast taken off the surface of the ocean (the work is actually created using data scanning techniques to recreate a 3D vacuum formed acrylic model of the surface). Pausing for thought looking at the variety of works in this show I begin to wonder how they begin to alter our impression of, relationship with and how we 'see' the sea. A bit like looking at the actual sea itself, it is all very contemplative and we seem to find some sort of solace or meditation in looking into the surfaces, the depths of these representations. It warrants more thought than I have time or words to explore now.


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Brightwing — One of Crain's 2016 Cool Places to Work
TROY, MI – Brightwing, a recruiting and staffing company headquartered in Troy, MI, is one of 75 companies named to Crain's 2016 Cool Places to Work in Michigan list. The Crain's Detroit Business' Cool Places program recognizes employers that go above and beyond to make employees feel appreciated. Brightwing was named to Crain's Cool Places to Work in Michigan list in 2009, 2011, and 2012.
To be eligible, companies must be a for-/non-profit business or government entity with a facility in Michigan that has at least 15 employees. The business must be publicly or privately held in operation for at least 1 year. Brightwing was among 31 companies honored in the Medium Employee Category (50 – 249 U.S. employees).
"It's an honor to be recognized as one of the coolest places to work in Michigan," said Aaron Chernow, CEO of Brightwing. "Brightwing is about people; it's about championing human potential and creating a work environment and culture around helping employees realize and achieve their true personal and professional potential."
Crain's hired Harrisburg, PA-based Best Companies Group to gather data and survey employees. The employee part of the process, an 80-question survey used to determine, for example, whether employees are aware of the company's long-term strategy and whether they feel the company invests in their professional development, accounts for 75 percent of the final ranking.
"Brightwing wants its employees to succeed – and employees are genuinely passionate about giving their best every day to help Brightwing succeed," said Justin Hochstein, Sr. Recruiter at Brightwing. "Brightwing is a family-centric, work hard/play hard environment; we truly care about each other and work hard every day to support each other. It's an awesome place to work."
In addition to benefits, flexibility, ice-cream runs, on-site fitness room, weekly yoga class, and team lunches, Brightwing goes above and beyond to encourage collaboration and innovation throughout the organization.
"We created an innovation room to provide a comfortable space where employees can openly discuss ideas, current projects, and future goals," Chernow said. "We turned a large wall into a wipe off wall, brought in sofas, foosball table, bubble hockey, and large-screen TV and meeting area to make the room welcoming and versatile to meet a wide range of needs."
Ultimately, being honored as one of Crain's 2016 Cool Places to Work in Michigan speaks to Brightwing's passion: people.
About Brightwing
Founded in 1973, Brightwing is a recruiting and staffing agency dedicated to championing human potential. Brightwing serves engineering/design, information technology, finance/accounting, and human resource positions. Brightwing is headquartered in Troy, MI with offices in Dallas, Texas, Weston, FL, and Pittsburgh, PA (Winter, 2016).
© Brightwing 2020


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How Many Ant-Man And The Wasp Post Credits Scenes Are There?


The Houston Rockets are fresh off a season where they nearly knocked off one of the all-time great teams: the Golden State Warriors. This season, the Rockets are looking to improve on last year's success and win the NBA Finals. With Houston just a 45-minute drive away from your home in Magnolia, TX, we at The Mansions on the Park love going to Rockets games and supporting our local team. Whether you go to the games, watch them in your apartment, or read about them online, we want to make sure you're prepared for an exciting season this year.
Coming off of winning the NBA MVP, James Harden will again be the leader of this team. He is one of the best players in the entire league and his success will directly correlate to how well the Rockets perform this year. Harden averaged 30.4 points per game last season, and he might have to take on even more of the scoring load with the departures of forwards Trevor Ariza and Luc Mbah a Moute in the offseason. Harden's partner in crime will again be point guard Chris Paul. Paul is always one of the best point guards and the shooting and playmaking combo from this dynamic duo can be nearly unstoppable at times. As long as these two are healthy, the Rockets will never finish lower than 2nd in the Western Conference.
Whether they can achieve the ultimate goal, a championship, will rest on the shoulders of two players on different trajectories: Carmelo Anthony and Clint Capela. Anthony is a former star in the league starting to age out of his preferred role. He's going to shoot probably more than he should given the presence of his star teammates, but if he can convert at a high clip, he can add a new dynamic to the Houston offense that was missing last season. On the other hand, Capela is fresh off of a breakout season, emerging as the defensive-minded, rim-running center that this Rockets team needs. He also showed that he can hang with small players on the perimeter in the playoffs last season, which is critical for any team hoping to dethrone the Warriors.
Will the Rockets have the firepower to take down the Warriors this year? If everything breaks right, they definitely have a shot. Let us know what you think in the comments. Be sure to check out the Rockets' schedule and make it out to a game. Thanks for taking the time to read our blog!


A holistic brand identity brings the inner truths of your brand to the surface. At Oscar Bóbolo, we develop the design, product packaging, websites, and environments. Because we only believe in strategy, when it becomes a customer experience.


TEXAS--Getting government financial help for medical bills may be confusing for some senior citizens, but are resources for those who need some help.
Prescription drugs may be an undue financial burden for many seniors. National legislation could improve Medicare Part D, and cover those previously in the "coverage gap."
The Texoma Council of Governments is offering Medicare counseling to help.
Open enrollment for Medicare Part D prescription drug benefits starts November 15 and lasts until December 31st.
After President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in March 2010, more prescription drugs for seniors are expected to be covered beginning in 2011.
"The medicare system is confusing and it's frustrating and it's very difficult to navigate that process sometimes, and so the TCOG counselors are here to help folks make sure they get signed up for the right programs," Susan Thomas said, Executive Director of the Texoma Council of Governments.
Many Part D enrollees fell into the "donut hole" and their prescriptions weren't covered by Medicare previously. The Texoma Council of Governments will provide counselors to help citizens figure out what they're qualified for and exactly how much their discount will be.
Seniors in Grayson, Fannin and Cooke county can schedule an appointment.


Environmental Prosecutions brought by Local Authorities or by the Environment Agency have seen a marked increase in recent years.
The Environment Agency enforces the existing legislation by way of civil penalties but also by a number of criminal offences brought against companies and individual Directors deemed to be criminally responsible. Together with the greater enthusiasm to prosecute, there has also been an increase in the sentencing powers available with substantial fines and awards of costs now the norm. In terms of individuals , the more serious offences can attract prison sentences and confiscation orders for breaches of the environmental regime.
The commencement of an Environmental Investigation can be a confusing and stressful time for a company and early sensible advice is required before any decision is made to agree to attend a PACE interview. All too often the failure to seek appropriate advice at this point can lead to an inevitable prosecution whereas proper representation might avoid this.
If you or your business find yourself facing an environmental investigation prompt action is essential to limit any financial and reputational harm. At THB the regulatory team can properly advise you at all stages of the process and if proceedings cannot be avoided we can utilise our excellent in house advocacy team to secure the best outcome for you.
This remains a very complex and technical area of law and the Legislation is far from straightforward. Contact the regulatory team for an initial assessment and consultation.


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Йосип Михайлович Шилінг (14 лютого 1953, Вороблевичі, Дрогобицький район, Дрогобицька область, Українська РСР — 20 лютого 2014, Київ, Україна) — учасник Євромайдану. Герой України.

Біографія
Під час національного відродження і боротьби за відновлення Української державності Йосип Шилінг як член Української Гельсінської Спілки, а відтак член Української республіканської партії.

Разом з дружиною Анною виховали 2 дочок, мають чотирьох внучок. За професією — будівельник. Останні роки їздив на заробітки до Італії.

На Майдані
На вулиці Інститутській знаходились снайпери, які вели прицільний вогонь по активістах самооборони та людях поблизу готелю «Україна» та Жовтневого палацу.

Застрелений снайпером біля Жовтневого палацу. Куля увійшла в чоло, вище від лівого ока. Смерть настала миттєво.

Постраждалих заносили до фоє готелю «Україна». Йосипа Шилінга — ідентифіковано серед перших убитих. Повідомлення надійшло близько 12:00.

Вшанування пам'яті
Віддати шану Герою Майдану прийшло близько 5 тисяч людей. Серед них — родина і побратими загиблого, священики, представники Євромайдану і Автомайдану, політичних і громадських організацій, депутати, урядовці.

Поховали Йосипа Шилінга на сільському цвинтарі.

1 червня 2014 року, в приміщенні вороблевицькї школи, в якій навчався Йосип Шілінг, відкрито меморіальну дошку Герою Небесної сотні.

Нагороди
 Звання Герой України з удостоєнням ордена «Золота Зірка» (21 листопада 2014, посмертно) — за громадянську мужність, патріотизм, героїчне відстоювання конституційних засад демократії, прав і свобод людини, самовіддане служіння Українському народу, виявлені під час Революції гідності
 Медаль «За жертовність і любов до України» (УПЦ КП, червень 2015) (посмертно)

Примітки

Посилання
  Член УРП Йосип Шилінг загинув від рук снайпера біля Жовтневого палацу
  Небесна Сотня Майдану
  У Києві з вулиці Інститутської по людях ведуть прицільний вогонь снайпери та автоматники
 Снайпери вбивають людей. Фото 20 февраля 2014
 Списки опізнаних загиблих 20 лютого на Майдані Незалежності (оновлено)

Див. також
 Список загиблих учасників Євромайдану

Уродженці Вороблевичів
Учасники Євромайдану
Померли в Києві
Поховані в Дрогобицькому районі

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Margaret Pratt
Roger Pratt
Update from court hearing in St Lucia
Margaret has now had more feedback from St Lucia on the progress towards getting the case against those charged with Roger's murder to trial.
At the last hearing a week ago there was an expectation that the defendants would be asked to plead guilty or not guilty. That stage wasn't reached because there were still two issues outstanding. The main issue which has been outstanding all year, is whether one of the defendants is fit to plead.
It's sad to report that at last week's hearing the outstanding issues were still not cleared.
We therefore understand that the judge has deferred the matters again, this time to 22 January when an expert witness will be summoned to advise on fitness to plead. The judge has now set a revised provisional date for trial of 28 April, subject to all the other matters being resolved.
In May, Margaret was led to believe that the target was to get this final stage wrapped up before the summer recess for the courts. For whatever reasons, matters have now drifted on for a further six months. Let's hope that 2018 will see real progress achieved.
Labels: DPP Margaret Pratt Roger Pratt Saint Lucia St Lucia
Location: St Lucia
Updated: 43 homicides in St Lucia during 2018
Gangsters' Paradise: Should tourists boycott St Lucia?
Progress towards justice for Roger & Margaret's ho...
Open letter to Allen Chastanet, Prime Minister of ...


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The 21st-Century Couple
Technically, Nick and I are spending quality time together, watching the Melbourne Comedy Gala.
In fact, I'm keeping one eye on the television (which has just shown me an advertisement for The Shield —I had no idea that was still going—and a show that, apparently, "just makes courtroom drama look so good" called Conviction , which I've never heard of) while trying to complete my collection of fancy, absurdly named shoes on Packrat.
Nick, on the other hand, is browsing the iTunes store on his iPhone on the opposite sofa, and keeping an eye out for comedians that he likes.
Mind, we did bond over an Arj Barker skit about buying a new bed. I do love a comedian who can use the word "quagmire" in a skit.
There's nothing particularly weird about this; this is how we spend many of our evenings.
My mother is constantly surprised by Nick's tendency to say "Ooh, I've just read something really interesting; I"ll send you the link."
But there's something appealing to me about the online aspect of the relationship. It's more permanent, in a way, than phone calls (and useful, should one of us dispute what was originally said).
Plus, there's no separating Nick from his iPhone right now.
And I only need five more shoes.
Strange Conversations: Part Two
I'm taking a brief break from Green Wing season two to record the following conversation:
NICK: So I've done a bit of design for the site.
ME: But I've never heard of it before.
NICK: Well, I'm telling you now.
ME: You live a secret life on the Internet, don't you?
NICK: You must love my air of mystery.
Things That Have Made Me Happy Recently, in No Particular Order
1. The weather.
Much as I love living in Brisbane, this is largely in spite of the weather, which is frankly rather like suffering a feverish cold for nine months of the year.
But these cold, crisp nights and warm days are lovely: the best part of Brisbane is its beautiful mild winters.
2. The fact that last night's Robin Hood did not, in the end, throw out the entire premise of the episode.
Mind you, it was still completely daft.
3. The hope that at some point in the future I'll be able to use the sentence "Join me again next week on this episode of 'Let's make no fucking sense' when I will be waxing an owl" in everyday conversation.
4. The new teaser trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull .
I must admit, though, that this is tinged with a certain degree of wistfulness, since my own years of working in a university have included far more hours of marking and far fewer instances of grappling with Nazis than these movies led me to believe would be the case.
I suppose it's because I'm not an archaeologist.
5. Reorganising the study, so that one can walk all the way into it and, even more miraculous, actually access all the bookshelves.
On the other hand, the downside of the reorganisation is that I got bored before I had quite finished putting everything back. So there is that.
6. Successfully creating a rhinoceros in Packrat.
Really, success is measured by how low you set your goals in the first place.
However, I did have to sacrifice my kangaroo to do it, and now am unable to find another camel, which is apparently a constituent ingredient of the kangaroo—something that I suspect even Darwin didn't know.
7. A rather nice 2005 Western Australian Chardonnay clearskin that I found in a local bottleshop.
8. The smug feeling that comes from having made a reasonable dint in my marking.
9. A sudden predilection for painting my toenails a shiny pink.
10. The up-coming season of Doctor Who and my state of ignorance about the plotlines.
11. The fact that new Doctor Who means a new year of Doctor Who nights, the highlight of my social calendar.
12. James Marsters's appearances in Torchwood .
13. An unusual number of lovely dinners with people I don't otherwise spend enough time with.
14. Re-starting work on the third of the set of braided rugs for the hallway, and the hope that this means that the rugs might even be finished before we move out of this house (at some unspecified point of time in the future).
What will I do if I move to a house with no hallway?
15. My new pillow.
Nick and I seem to have been having the oddest conversations over the past few days. Of course, the sudden cold snap last night meant I didn't sleep well, so perhaps that's why they all seem to head in strange directions.
We've just had the following conversation, for example:
NICK: Fancy a cup of coffee?
ME: I've just been reading about the Zimbardo Experiment. I knew about the Milgram Experiment, but I don't think I've ever come across the Zimbardo one. Did you know they were at school together?
NICK: Was it a particularly strict Victorian boarding school?
ME: This was in the 1960s, these experiments, so I doubt it.
NICK: Perhaps they travelled through time?
I think somebody is getting a little too excited about the upcoming season of Doctor Who .
And again, this morning:
ME: Honey, I've just noticed that, um, there appears to be a bucket and mop in the bedroom.
NICK: You've only just noticed?
ME: Yes.
NICK: Well, then, you've only got yourself to blame.
And the quintessential conversation, held yesterday on the way to the shops:
ME: That's an ugly Mercedes.
NICK: Which one?
ME: That orange one. Or, no—I suppose you'd call it a warm yellow.
NICK: I'd call it cadmium yellow.
ME: Isn't cadmium yellow like that? (Pointing to a banana-yellow building) No, I suppose that's a cool yellow.
NICK: Cadmium yellow's like that car.
ME: Well, my paints come in cool yellow and warm yellow, so I'm calling that car warm yellow.
NICK: Cadmium yellow is a warm yellow.
ME: Then why are we having this conversation?
The eternal question.
Nick Has A New Gadget
Which means he will be curiously absent for the next few days.
Apparently, the real benefit of this new gadget is that he'll be able to surf the Internet from anywhere in the house.
I don't think he's quite grasped that I don't think this is necessarily a good thing. True, I have a laptop, while he's restricted to his desktop iMistress. But I do at least refrain from surfing the Internet while we're actually watching television or otherwise spending time together. Nick, on the other hand, has been known to dash off to check his e-mail if I get up to make a cup of tea or nip to the bathroom.
Still, such are the sacrifices one makes when one moves in with a geek.
Serial Story Telling
I've mentioned before that I'm a sucker for a serial, especially if the characters attract me from the outset. Then I want to spend more time with them, and serials are the most effective way of doing that.
(Re-reading works as well, if you're that way inclined: I am. I'm a voracious re-reader—and re-watcher—where Nick is not. He will re-read—and I have induced him to re-watch by, unpleasant as it sounds, essentially getting a little sulky if I'm not able to watch things more than once each—but he prefers to move on to new fiction and leave the old material behind. I can't do that. Partly, I suspect, I have a poor memory. But mostly, I suspect, I just like to get back into a particular fictional world. One of my ideas of a personal hell is being told I'm not allowed to re-read Pride and Prejudice any more.)
But really enjoying something that comes in serial form makes re-reading something of a shadowy pleasure. Because with serial story telling, you can revisit the same world and the same characters without having to re-explore the same plot.
This is part of the reason why I prefer television to movies, speaking broadly. (On that note, I seem to be using the construct "part of the reason" or "partly" a lot—either I'm a complex individual, or I just want to think I am.)
Of course, serial story telling has its disadvantages, whether you're talking books or television.
One of these is a tendency to drag on. For this reason, I've never liked soap operas (well, for this reason and for the fact that they're, to my mind, absurdly overblown. I've read and enjoyed my fair share of Victorian melodrama and sensation fiction, but the modern version leaves me cold.) Let things drag on too long and you're bound to have to replace some of the actors, which always irritates me.
(The worst example of this, I think, is the initially charming Nicholas Lyndhurst comedy Goodnight, Sweetheart , about the man who had the ability to travel between contemporary London and the London of the Blitz. When they recast both his wife and the woman he fancied in the 1940s, the whole tone of the show changed, and not for the better.)
I suspect this is why I've always had a soft spot for the sort of television shows that maintain their setting and focus, but don't emphasise the melodrama of personal relationships, like Law and Order at its peak—ah, Jerry Orbach. How we miss you—and the original template of The Bill , which is now a show well past its prime of episodes such as "Burnside Knew My Father."
The other major problem I have with serial story telling is the tendency to either go broadly off the rails at some point—alas, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer still remains my benchmark for this. I loved the opening three seasons, thought the next two had some fine moments, and frankly disliked most of the last two seasons—or to get cut off in their prime—and, sticking with the Joss Whedon theme, Firefly is a good example of this.
Any good work of fiction will make me wish that it hadn't ended, which is where a tendency to re-read comes in handy. A really well-written piece won't make me wish it had never ended, not if it's beautifully constructed, but it will make me wish that I hadn't read or watched it quite so quickly.
But, somehow, this is worse with serial stories, because they induce in you a sense that they will keep going, so the inevitable end becomes harder to cope with. (Television shows are still the best example of this, because their end can be so abrupt and unexpected. Really well-plotted television will bring a season to some sort of ending, but that doesn't always make up for the abrupt loss of an overall story arc. Can you tell that I'm still bitter that David Milch wasn't allowed a fourth season of Deadwood? )
But—not to make a mockery of this entire post—there's a disadvantage to serial story telling that rests entirely with me, not with the form; I'm just not good at dealing with delayed gratification when it comes to stories.
In order to balance a desire for serial story telling and a desire for more-or-less immediate satisfaction, I bless two inventions in particular: trade paperback reprints of comic-book series and DVDs.
With the exception of Fables , I don't read any comics in their monthly instalments: I find the cliffhangers too frustrating. (Perhaps, at age 31, I should have just got over this, but I suspect that my tendency to respond emotionally to texts is part of what makes me successful at the kind of work I do.)
And while I watch live television and enjoy plenty of programmes that I have no desire to own on DVD, there's a certain satisfaction to having an entire season of something to work through at my leisure; I would never have survived watching Deadwood or Dexter live to air.
So while I'm glad that Jane Austen didn't write serials, I'm also glad that studios and (especially in the U. S.) cable companies are starting to put money into writing and producing high-quality television, so I can have at least twelve or thirteen hours of fun, instead of just two.
I'm Becoming a Romantic in My Old Age
I've never actually thought of myself as a romantic. Apart from a period spent wallowing in Sweet Valley High novels that is probably best left unremembered now, I wasn't overly interested in love stories as a teenager.
But I find that these days I'm more interested in a well-constructed romantic plot line, and more likely to get attached to stories that do this well.
(This excludes romance novels generally, although I do have an embarrassingly large collection of Georgette Heyer novels. I can't actually remember why I started reading Heyer; I think it was a reaction to reading Lois McMaster Bujold, although I gave up on her after reading the two-novel anthology Cordelia's Honour , from which I took the lesson that one never goes shopping with Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan. But I do have almost all of Heyer's Regency romances; I read them while I was completing my M.Phil. on Lady Caroline Lamb's novels—it was a way of pretending I was researching while I was just lying around reading. They're variable in quality, but generally fun. But that's not the sort of thing I"m talking about here.)
Basically, I've become a sucker for a happy ending.
And I've developed a strangely conservative streak. I've never been particularly interested in marriage for myself—apparently, you're not a real girl if you haven't been planning your wedding from age 11, but such is life—and I'm not married now; Nick, apparently, fancies living an alternative lifestyle—or at least about as alternative as you get when you're white, middle-class, and straight—so here we are.
But I want my favourite characters to get married. I don't know if it's exactly conservatism, or if I just want to see them safely fettered so I don't have to worry about the ups and downs of their relationships any more, but I'm a sucker for a book or television wedding.
Some of this stems from early reading: Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre wouldn't have been nearly as satisfying without the "Reader, I married him" endings. But it's getting more pronounced.
Partly, I think Fables is to blame for this. Of the 70-odd issues I've read to date—I haven't read the most recent one yet—the two story arcs that really stand out for me from a continually outstanding series are the Boy-Blue-focused Homelands and the Flycatcher-centric The Good Prince , both of which explore the diasporic aspect of the world building and showcase Bill Willingham's ability to find and exploit obscure source material.
But what sucked me in to begin with was the relationship between Bigby Wolf and Snow White. It didn't help, of course, that the third trade ended on a cliffhanger for this relationship. I discovered Fables when I was given the first three trades for my 30th birthday so, when I read the three arcs back to back a couple of days later, I was left wondering about where it was going and spent the next fortnight—in between frantic, last-minute Christmas shopping—searching Brisbane's comic-book stores for the next three trades.
One of those trades was Homelands , which had nothing to do with the Bigby-Snow relationship, but a large part of my impulse was the desire to get to some sort of happy ending.
Maybe romantics develop naturally from people like me, who were lucky enough to find their life partners early in life and live happily ever after (minus the small pinpricks of wondering why one's beloved insists on leaving the electric kettle on the bench instead of putting it back on the rest). I don't know.
But I do know that tragic love stories don't satisfy me these days. I'd rather read a beautifully written tragic story than a prosaic or poor happy one. But these days, what I want for my leisure reading is a beautifully written happy ending.
Reasons Why I Hate My Local Post Office
The closest post office is something of a thorn in our sides.
Partly, this is because the owner seems to run it on a part-time basis. The first time we had to collect a parcel from there, we looked carefully at the collection ticket, which mentioned a 10 a.m. opening for a Saturday, and arrived almost on time. But the sign on the door said it opened at 11 a.m. And the owner himself didn't turn up until almost noon.
When we taxed him, politely, with the discrepancy between the ticket and the door sign, he mentioned he'd only just bought the place and didn't want to pay to have all the tickets reprinted.
If I'd known that was an option, I wouldn't have bothered taking all those takeaway menus home when I worked at the Peking Village, and correcting the solitary typo in front of the television for three evenings. It would have been much easier to just correct people when they came to pay.
Partly, the irritation comes from the fact that we can't actually figure out the post office's system. Last time we had a problem with the arrival of a parcel, I rang to ask why some turned up on my doorstep and some had to be collected. The woman spoke a lot about couriers, registered mail, and parcels too big to fit into the letterbox, which I already knew about, but couldn't explain why my mother's inexplicable gollywog tea-cosy arrived on my doorstep even though it was a large box sent through the regular post.
I also blame the post office, perhaps unfairly, for the loss of my poor ex-Corolla; if they hadn't been insisting on a signature for a Nintendo DS game small enough to fit in the mailbox, then my poor car wouldn't have been parked in the driveway when the Commodore came through the fence.
But today was the last straw, when the owner completely failed to find a parcel that I'd been sent a ticket for. I have no idea why that happens, but it did involve spending twenty minutes waiting in a post office roughly the size of a shoebox, trying to get out of the way of people searching for pre-paid envelopes and occasionally interrupting the man behind the counter to correct his mispronunciation of the name of the (alleged) parcel.
Of course, I say "the last straw," but, really, what can I do? He can be as lax, as random, and as unprepared as he likes, and we have no way of removing our service—unless we arrange for everything to be sent registered mail.
So we're stuck with the local post office and its frustrating business practices. I'll just make sure that I don't park the car in the driveway before going to pick up any parcels, just in case the bad post-office karma continues.
Conversations With My Father
It's my mother's birthday at the end of the week, so I rang my father to remind him (an annual daughterly duty, shared with my sister) and to ask him about what I'd bought.
Unfortunately, I'd gone so far out of my way to find obscure items that I couldn't pronounce the relevant terms and he couldn't remember if they were familiar, so that was a bit of a wash-out.
Then we had the following conversation:
DAD (jocularly): Well, thanks for your advice, not that it was much help.
ME: Well, my main advice was good, which was to ask my sister—she's much better at this stuff. I can help if you want to know about good contemporary fantasy fiction.
DAD: I don't want to know!
ME: No, I know; I'm just saying I could help. But I don't really read much detective fiction.
DAD: I don't know where we went wrong.
ME: Yes, imagine have a highly educated, stable daughter who doesn't read detective fiction. It's a tragedy!
DAD: Well, that's the word I would have used.
There are just too many ways to disappoint your parents. I can't keep track.
Multiple Editions
I often worry slightly that I own too many books—and then worry about the fact that I worry about owning books, when they're really only material objects on one plane of existence (the plane of existence, unfortunately, that requires bookshelves and wall space).
Part of my problem is that I'm fascinated by textuality, by textual scholarship, by bibliographies and reference texts—including one, rather embarrassingly, called Who's Who in Enid Blyton —and by the textual development of stories.
This fascination is integral to my ability to perform the kind of textual criticism on which my work centres, but it also means that I end up owning multiple copies of certain novels.
This afternoon, I moved a bookshelf from the study to the spare room, as part of the ongoing process of opening up the study and making it a more congenial workspace. In the process, I came across such a wide range of multiple editions that I somewhat horrified myself, and ended up getting Nick—slightly melancholic himself, being unable to defeat a boss demon in Diablo —to keep a list for me. (Not, as it turned out, the best idea: I ended up slightly hysterical at the thought of my profligacy, while Nick eyed his vast collection of Doctor Who Target novelisations and sighed.)
But here's a brief list, anyway.
William Beckford's Vathek .
I own four copies of this work: an Oxford World's Classic; a Penguin, complete with additional Beckford stories; another Penguin, in a volume called Three Gothic Novels (which is also the reason why I own two copies of Horace Walpole's The Castle Of Otranto , and far too many copies of Frankenstein ); and a gorgeous Broadview edition of Vathek, with The Episode of Vathek .
The problem is that I can't remember if there even were alternate editions of Vathek or whether I simply own four copies of an identical text, which would be less justifiable.
They do all have different textual apparatuses (except, perhaps, for the two Penguins) and I did need the novel as literary context for the last chapter of my M.Phil. But did I need four copies?
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein .
I also own four copies of this, including the Broadview and the Norton. At least in this case, there are two alternate texts—1818 and 1831—and this was the work on which I produced my first major piece of criticism, my Honours thesis, all those years ago.
But I don't think that's the reason why I keep buying it—it's just such a fascinating, complex, tragic novel, and so thoroughly shocked and surprised me when I first read it that I can't help but buy any edition that might have new footnotes.
(On that note, I can offer in my own defense the fact that I have not replaced all my old Penguins with the new Penguins, even though the new ones have entirely fresh critical apparatuses by scholars who aren't all died-in-the-wool Leavisites. I think that's fairly restrained.)
I also own at least three copies of Bram Stoker's Dracula —I realised while Nick was making the list that there might be another copy somewhere, and indeed the entire list-making process was punctuated by me saying "Did I say three copies of that book? I've just found another one." It would only have been two, however, if I hadn't had to buy a recent Penguin when I last taught Gothic Lit., so that the students and I would literally be on the same page.
I'm not even going to mention how many copies of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women I own—but, to balance that, I don't own a single copy of any of the film versions.
Nick's face fell at the last Lifeline BookFest when he asked what I'd bought and I pulled out another translation of Dante's Divine Comedy . But that one was H. C. Cary's translation from the early nineteenth century, and I really did need it to balance my translations by Mark Musa and Dorothy L. Sayers. I also used Cary as my translation for my M.Phil, but that's not much of an excuse, since I submitted that four years ago.
I discovered two copies of George Eliot's Mill on the Floss today, as well—and, Victorian scholar though I may be, I haven't even read the book. Yet.
Ditto Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Cervantes' Don Quixote —two copies of each—although I swear I am going to read the latter one day. After I have, I may even get around to reading Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote , of which I thankfully only have one copy.
I don't think I need to justify owning three copies of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice , do I? Or two copies of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights ?
Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre , on the other hand—I'm not sure I want to confess this, but I don't actually like it very much. Or, rather, I don't like Jane very much. She's so dreary. Still, it's worth it for the sake of Rochester.
I'm not apologising for my two copies of George Eliot's Middlemarch , because that's a great book. I'm a little uncomfortable with my TV tie-in edition, now, but I can't bring myself to get rid of it—it's got Rufus Sewell as Will Ladislaw on the cover. I'm not that strong-willed.
I probably don't need two copies of Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, though. Or three copies of Northanger Abbey. Or two copies of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde; one isn't even a critical edition, and the texts are identical, so I can't begin to justify that. And I can't remember why I own four copies of Matthew Lewis's The Monk —although the texts do vary.
I can justify my two different versions of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, though. I bought a cheap-and-nasty copy—one of those awful 1960s hardbacks, with the heavy black line drawings picked out in one or two colours, usually purple or red, and a plasticky cover—at a BookFest some years ago, just to have the stories.
(Although, in retrospect, I'm not sure why—I rarely re-read my Andersen, because the stories are so depressing, and often cruelly arbitrary. A little like Wilde's fairy tales, but without Wilde's language.)
Then, I came to write the second chapter of my Ph.D., and I realised I needed a different translation of the tales to make my argument—these are the tales with the half-naked princess illustration, by the way.
I couldn't isolate the exact translation that Eliza Winstanley had used as the basis for her adaptations, so I chose the most contemporaneous; Henry W. Dulcken, who published his translations in 1864-1866.
(Actually, his translations are extremely complex, in how they navigate between Andersen's casual taking-the-Lord's-name-in-vain and Dulcken's middle-class, English, mid-nineteenth-century audience's distaste for seeing the name "God" in a fairy tale—Kirsten Malmkjaer's work on this aspect of his translations is fascinating.)
So I bought a copy of Dulcken's translation, and I thought I'd get rid of my old, plasticky book.
But when I took it off the shelf, I saw that it was Mrs E. Lucas's translations, which I knew from Viggo Hjornager Pedersen's Ugly Ducklings? was much later but still a nineteenth-century translation. And my resolve to remove it from my shelves entirely disappeared.
I can't believe that we live in a world where it's wrong to want to own multiple nineteenth-century translations of a Danish writer's work because the differences in the translations tell us so much about the market for which they were produced.
And, anyway, I've never complained about Nick's Doctor Who novelisations.
For some reason, I've made myself thoroughly melancholic recently—which is ironic, really, because I'm compulsively unable to spell "melancholic" and usually default to "meloncholic"—which I assume is the technical term for something like Midori.
I'm not actually a melancholic person; I have no reason to be.
I suspect this originates in my post-submission exhaustion.
However, I probably haven't helped it along by watching Green Wing , reading Five Little Pigs , writing depressing blog posts, and listening compulsively to Nick Cave, Elvis Costello's Spike —"Veronica" and "Let Him Dangle" are fabulous songs, guaranteed to make me want to weep—and The Crow soundtrack.
So I really only have myself to blame.
What I suspect I need is to put on some cheerful music—which means not letting Nick have a choice of CDs—and actually finish cleaning out the study. Who knows, I may find more books that I'd completely forgotten.
For someone who explicitly said they wanted to blog about reading, I really haven't posted much about reading. Perhaps I've spent too much time watching television, recently: I do like good television. (More so than movies, actually—I'm a sucker for serial story-telling, hence my thesis on serial fiction of the mid-Victorian period.)
But lately I've been on an Agatha Christie bender. Or a re-bender, I suppose, since I've read most of them before. (Oddly, I recently pulled my copy of Crooked House off the shelf and realised, unusually for me, that I couldn't remember where and when I'd bought it, and that I'd never actually read it. It's very good, by the way.)
So I've just finished Death on the Nile (1937) and moved on to Five Little Pigs (1942); this latter, according to Wikipedia, was also published as Murder in Retrospect , which I have to say is the daftest title for a murder mystery ever.
These two were both adapted in the BBC's series of Poirot mysteries in 2003-2004, along with Sad Cypress (1940)—a lovely book—and The Hollow (1946)—a strangely disappointing book, I felt, because it turned on the charisma of the murdered man, and I thought he was a prat. The problem's with the reader there, I feel.
My disappointment in The Hollow aside, I felt this was an exceptional bunch of adaptations. Of course, Poirot adaptations have traditionally been treated more accurately than their Marple cousins; I have no idea why, since there's no discernible difference, to me, in the quality of Christie's plotting between the two detectives. But these four were unusually good.
The newspaper reviewers at the time picked Sad Cypress as the best of the bunch, and it was good. But when I mentioned this to my sister, she disagreed in favour of Five Little Pigs . To her, the tragedy of the story—the fact that these two vital, fascinating, clever, creative people were dead sixteen years before the novel even started, so that the solution of the mystery could only benefit the second generation—made it a far more gripping plot.
I would agree with this, to an extent. I still like a happy ending, although I'm not daft enough to think I could get one out of this book. But part of the reason why I gave up watching Cold Case was because I couldn't deal with the emphasis on the victim; the crimes were significantly harder to deal with in this than in, say, Law and Order . Even though the Wikipedia page says that the actual murder in Cold Case is often omitted "due to the heinousness of the underlying crime which is included with the murder," when "the crime is usually rape or sexual assault of an innocent child or woman," I gave up after the racially motivated Depression-Era rape and murder of a young black woman—that episode was so horrific I couldn't keep watching.
Five Little Pigs works in a similar way, for me. Most of Agatha Christie's work centres on the idea of protecting the innocent; she emphasises in more than one work that the English judicial system has never hanged an innocent person, as in Mrs McGinty's Dead , where the conviction is overturned, and in Ordeal by Innocence , in which the convicted man dies in prison but escapes hanging.
Five Little Pigs falls into the latter category, avoiding direct criticism of the English judicial system by having the convicted murderess die of an illness in prison.
The idea that the English judicial system has never hanged an innocent person is one that I can't entirely support—Derek Bentley? Edith Thompson? Paul Hanratty?—and I'm not sure that, given her emphasis in other books, Christie was actively making a point about the irreversibility of capital punishment. But that's what the book suggests to me.
I've never supported the death penalty in any shape or form, for any crime. It's such a core belief for me, that I'm not going to set out my arguments here; people will either agree with me or not, and I'm not to be moved on this issue.
For me, it was the story of the execution of Derek Bentley that devastated me—I am, in fact listening to Let Him Dangle as I write this. I could not, and still can not, comprehend how any judicial system that favoured an irreversible method of punishment could carry out that sentence.
But for at least two of the Queens of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, it was the execution of Edith Thompson that seems to have caused the most concern. Christie cites Thompson on more than one occasion, and Dorothy L. Sayers's co-written text The Documents in the Case —with Robert Eustace—also evokes the Thompson/Bywaters affair.
Sayers is a more complicated case. She doesn't oppose the death penalty; in at least one novel, she advocates suicide over public ignominy and execution—and references the possibility in another novel—but Lord Peter Wimsey struggles with the reality of the death penalty. This is brought home to the reader most effectively in Busman's Honeymoon , a book that broke my heart when I first read it, many years after reading the other Wimsey novels.
But even there, the objection is less to the execution—the murderer has confessed, and is undoubtedly guilty—as to the fact that Wimsey can't receive absolution from the man that he, and he alone—the police being stymied—brought to the noose. Wimsey is deeply affected by the fact that he ends people's lives, but less from a belief in any flaw in the judicial system than out of a realisation that he pursues detection as a hobby, rather than as a profession. Still, the doubt is there, an integral part of Sayers's detective.
Five Little Pigs is unique, as far as I know, in Christie's oeuvre, since the presumed-innocent character in Ordeal by Innocence was, in fact, guilty. Like any other murder mystery, Five Little Pigs provides the satisfaction of finding out who the murderer is, but it's a melancholic book, not simply because the revelation of the murderer is anti-climactic and because the victims are attractive and charming.
For me, the devastating fact of this novel is that an innocent woman—while not hanged—dies for a crime she did not commit. The texts that provide Poirot with such vital information for the revelation of the real murderer—the letters that a dying Caroline Crale writes to her sister and to her daughter—remind me of an incident from several years ago.
As a postgraduate student, my sister worked at a nineteenth-century prison that had become a tourist attraction, and arranged for my mother and me to take a night tour, complete with candlelight.
The only time I've ever felt distinctly claustrophobic, including many years as a child spent touring limestone caves, was on that tour, when we were enclosed, in the dark, in the cell occupied by convicts on the night before their execution.
The main story for this tour was a famous bushranger, but a secondary story was that of a nineteenth-century baby farmer, executed for killing her charges, who spent the night before her execution sewing a drawstring into her skirt, so that the executioners couldn't see her petticoats when the trapdoor was released. To me, the idea that this woman spent her last night thinking of her modesty is devastating.
When I re-read Five Little Pigs , I think of that story.
When our tour guide told this anecdote, the tour group laughed.
My new hobby is repeatedly checking the viewer logs to this blog.
I like to see who's reading.
And I like to see how people come across the Circulating Library, which means I'm particularly pleased by the Google searches that lead to this site.
A lot of them are searches for "circulating library," but the readers don't stay long; I assume they're slightly disillusioned Victorian scholars.
One search was for "Eliza Winstanley," which makes me think that I should talk a little more about my research and the fascinating woman who emerged over three years of work.
A number of searchers are Googling "shallow bookshelves"; I wonder if my father-in-law—who made my beautiful, book-swallowing, shallow bookcases—should consider taking on commissions?
Another searcher Googled "Marple: Ordeal By Innocence does not match the book"; I think they were disappointed by "If Only His Body Had Been Entirely Composed of Bees," because they didn't stay to read the rest of the site.
But my absolute favourite hit?
"Overcoming clumsiness."
Now that's how I want to be remembered on the Internet.
Why Must You Hurt Me, Torchwood?
Posted 4322 days ago in Doctor Who by Catriona
I looked forward to the first season of Torchwood, very much.
A Doctor Who spin-off? Set in lovely Cardiff? With Captain Jack Harkness? Absolutely count me in.
But then it just wasn't very good. Not in the first season, anyway.
Or perhaps it would be fairer to say it was inconsistent.
One episode—"Captain Jack Harkness"—was sublime, and several others were extremely good, particularly "Countrycide," although I also liked "Random Shoes" and "They Keep Killing Suzie."
But others were slightly disappointing. It never hit the absolute low point that Doctor Who reached with Fear Her. (Thankfully, "Fear Her" was a one-off low, but oh my goodness it was a low.) But it also rarely reached the heights of "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" or "Blink" (yes, showing my Steven Moffat bias again). And nothing ever affected me like the Doctor's flashback to Gallifrey in "The Sound of Drums," when I actually teared up.
But then this season of Torchwood started, and I got excited all over again.
Because this is good. And it's consistent. It's frightening, and funny, and almost feels more like the original Doctor Who that I know and love—in a completely unquantifiable way that I'm going to leave deliberately vague—than the new Doctor Who does.
And Captain Jack Harkness—other prime-time shows have high-achieving, action-hero protagonists. None that I can think of have high-achieving, action-hero protagonists quite like Jack—and his relationship with Ianto is only part of why I think he's significant.
But, damn, the show's depressing.
And it's starting to wear me down.
I like what they're doing, the way they grapple with the idea that dealing with aliens on a planet with no space programme—at least not as we Doctor Who fans understand a space programme—is bound to end badly more often than not, because people are blinkered. They don't want to believe what they see in Torchwood 's Cardiff, and most of the time they don't have to, because the aliens are the exception.
But, perhaps we could save the victim of the week just once or twice?
I hope I'm not an ostrich but I don't want to be a pessimist, either.
Just every now and again, I'd like a happy ending.
And that goes for the makers of Green Wing as well.
Really Lazy
I've been unusually lazy today. Well, perhaps not unusually lazy—but definitely actively lazy.
This week has been a series of petty annoyances . . . the air conditioning not working in the car, housekeeping tasks piling up, lack of parking spaces, forty pieces of first-year assessment to be marked in a week, lack of sleep, rain coming down just as you're heading to a lecture while wearing a white top, unexpectedly becoming unable to distinguish between an adjective and an adverb right in the middle of a lecture.
These little pinpricks are actually something that I enjoy, in retrospect; it's the slowly developing to-do lists of life that make me realise (briefly and ephemerally) that I'm actually a grown-up. Oddly, the fact that I live in my own home, am a wage-earning adult, actually get to choose furniture, and have the ability to control my own television-watching experience doesn't actually bring my maturity home to me, as much as the little irritations.
But the end result is laziness.
The final two weeks of the Ph.D. were so fraught, and the whole experience so exhilarating but exhausting—I feel like I need a holiday. And the mid-semester break coming up doesn't count—I've just finished my first years' marking and the second years have submitted their first assignment.
So, in the absence of a reasonable holiday period, I've spent the day sitting on the sofa (the uncomfortable sofa, for reasons I can't actually explain) and watching the entire second season of Green Wing .
But this is where the problem comes in. I don't want to neglect the blog, because I enjoy it and I don't want to get to the stage where I think "Oh, well—I don't have to update regularly."
But I don't want to blog about Green Wing .
Because I'm obsessed.
I get these obsessions occasionally. I thought—one upon a time, when I made myself stop reading the Narnia series for a while, because I was getting a little funny about them—that they were just part of the exaggerated emotional states in which one spends one's adolescence. Essentially, I thought I'd grow out of them.
But apparently I haven't.
They don't completely overtake my life—they're leisure-time obsessions. So now I just lean into them.
The last one was Fables. And that shouldn't be in past tense. I'm still obsessed with Fables , but it's calmed—although that may be an optimistic claim, because I did become a little worried when one monthly issue was delayed by six weeks.
Before that, it would probably have been Deadwood, which was accidental—I bought it for my brother for Christmas, thinking he'd like the swearing and violence, and then he dared me into watching it.
Green Wing is the latest—and it, too, will settle down over time.
Anything that I develop an obsession with (and it's not a new obsession every week) stays with me—they remain something that I enjoy watching and re-watching over the years.
Okay, except for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I'm not sure where that came from, all those years ago, but I really did enjoy it once.
But I'm not writing about these obsessions while they're still in the early stages. After all, you need to keep the crazy at least slightly under wraps.
Once I've finished watching season two, I might be able to explain why the show delights me so much.
For now, I'm just going with the flow.


Brett Labore/lakeland times Camille Quade races back to the fence as she tries to rob a grand slam for Mosinee on Tuesday, April 9.
Brett Labore/lakeland times Jenna Seidl delivers a pitch to the plate as she works in the fifth inning against Mosinee Tuesday, April 9.
In a game played on an artifical turf field, the Lakeland softball team didn't find anything smooth on Tuesday night.
The Thunderbirds were in action in Mosinee, who took control of the game early and won 10-0 in five innings.
In the first, second and third innings, Mosinee scored one run each inning to make it 3-0 after three innings. The Thunderbirds were struggling with the bats, as they only managed one hit.
Sydni Gburek picked up the win for Mosinee. She went five innings, one hit, no runs and struck out eight without issuing a walk. It was a dominant performance.
The game broke open in the fifth inning when Mosinee put up seven runs. Most of those runs came with one swing of the bat on a grand slam by Zoe Gburek.
That hit provided a ton of momentum and would lead to scoring the 10th run of the game in the bottom of the fifth.
The wind proved to be a challenge as there were times when pitchers struggled with grip and control.
"(Tatum) did have a little bit of a problem keeping the ball down a little bit, not sure if that was because of the wind, it's 40 mile per hour winds," Cox said.
Tatum Morris started again for the Thunderbirds followed by Jenna Seidl, who came in for relief in the fifth inning.
"All in all, I was pleasantly pleased with how their effort was," said Cox.
The Thunderbirds went up against a very strong opponent and have opportunities to learn from the experience. Lakeland was set to host Antigo on Thursday, though that game was in doubt as of press time due to a snowy forecast for the afternoon.


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Home | News & Events | Latest News | Pre-Prep | Hello from Mr Robinson!
Hello from Mr Robinson!
These first two weeks at The Blue Coat School have been amazing! I would like to say a huge thank you to the staff, children and parents for making me feel so welcome and I'm really excited to now be part of The Blue Coat family.
RB have been really busy this week, we have been focusing on the topic of minibeasts as part of our "Walk on the Wild side" theme. We have been designing our own minibeasts using the computers, reading lots of information texts on different minibeasts and even went on a mini beast hunt around the school! In our literacy lessons we have been focusing on the Julia Donaldson book "What the Ladybird Heard" we used this text to explore positional language and had a go at creating our own maps with sets of instructions to go with them. This topic has really infused the children in RBs passion for learning and we can't wait for our trip to West Midland Safari Park!
Mr Robinson


Here are my top 3 favorite eye creams. They are all fabulous and here's why!!
La Mer The Eye Balm Intense: Yes, its a splurge - but I bought it last July and I swear I've barely made a dent! I do not use sparingly either - I slather this stuff all around my eye. I love the cooling feeling of the metal ball tipped applicator. It's always ice cold and feels so refreshing. The balm itself is so rich and heavenly. I have very sensitive eyes and this never burns or stings. I truly feel like the little wrinkles from sun damage are immediately plumped and hydrated. You know how your concealer can crease under your eyes? Since I've been using this those creases are few and far between. I will for sure be buying this again...if it ever runs out! Find it here.
La Roche-Posay Active C Eye Cream: There are TONS of Vitamin C eye creams out there, but this one is hands down my absolute favorite. For starters this is a stabilized Vitamin C cream. The packaging allows it to remain stable until you finish the product. It goes through several layers until it reaches the tip where it comes out. SOOO many Vitamin C products out there are packaged incorrectly allowing air and light to get it. Once the Vitamin C is unstable it is completely useless and allows for free radical damage. This is proven to reduce fine lines, wrinkles, and dark circles and pigmentation. I'm a huge fan of La Roche products and this is one of my favorite products they make. You will not be disappointed! Find it here.
Clinique All About Eyes: A tried and true! This was the first eye cream (it's actaully more of a gel) I ever purchased. Since then I have bought it countless times. It feels so silky and amazing. If your main issue is puffiness - this will be your new best friend! It calms and soothes the puffiness like nobody's business! Keep it in the fridge and it feels even better. Aaahh I want to go slather some on right now! I think keeping the skin around your eyes hydrated (whether you have wrinkles or puffiness) is what really keeps your eyes looking fresh and youthful. If you've never even tried an eye cream this would be an amazing starting point and I guarantee it won't be the first time you buy this! Find it here.
On the best way to conceal those circles visit my sweet friend Amanda's blog - you will be glad you did! Click here!
I keep this little makeup bag in my purse for quick touch ups! I usually switch lip colors out depending on what I'm wearing at the time. This is what I've been toting around lately!
These are all nice staples to keep in your purse just in case!
Yay!! They finally came! I am following up to my post about ordering the Oz palettes. They are here in all their glory, and I'm so excited to share the gorgeousness with you!
I'll start with the Glinda palette because I think it's my favorite! Wow! It is so much prettier in real life. Very girlie with its purples, pinks, and golds. The colors are so pigmented and are absolutely stunning. The eyeliner is the prettiest deep plum and the lipstick pencil would be perfect for everyday use.
The Theodora palette has so many pretty browns, golds, olives - it's a great palette for every day use or to jazz it up a bit at night. I think it would be the most wearable of the two. It comes with a basic dark black eyeliner and a red lipstick pencil. Those are always nice to have handy!


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Q: Shiro redirecting back to login page after wrong/false credentials(username/password) Q1: How can I redirect to unauthenticated url(or any page/way to say user that credentials were incorrect) after credentials entered incorrectly.
Q2: What is the normal/default behaviour for shiro when credentials are incorrect? (does it send -back to login, -unauthorized page, -some message)
INFO: shiro integration with spring. I use my own credentials.
And I have tried to throw IncorrectCredentialsException, WebApplicationException in doGetAuthenticationInfo method of MyRealm when username/password is wrong.
No help. I debugged and it's using MyRealm when login form posted.(debug stopped in doGetAuthenticationInfo method of my Realm)
Here is part of my spring settings for shiro
<bean id="shiroFilter" class="org.apache.shiro.spring.web.ShiroFilterFactoryBean">
    <property name="securityManager" ref="securityManager"/>
    <property name="loginUrl" value="/login.html"/>
    <property name="successUrl" value="/rest/security/redirect"/>
    <property name="unauthorizedUrl" value="/unauthorized.html"/>

    <property name="filterChainDefinitions">
        <value>
            /login.html = authc
            /logout = logout
            /apps/admin/** = authc, roles[admin]

Note: settings for web.xml and others are configured. Authentication, authorization and any other redirects working as a charm except login redirect after wrong credentials.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Even though this app is aimed to Brookdale College students, all CS students are welcome.


The Game Awards 2018 are December's highlight event in the games industry, particularly after Sony decided to skip their yearly PlayStation Experience event in 2018.
Talking to GamesIndustry ahead of tonight's event, creator and organizer Geoff Keighley revealed that 'a ton' of games will go live right after the show after being announced at The Game Awards 2018.
Some of the elements I want to add are also experiential things in and around the event. How do we make it more of a festival? How do we have more hands-on time? It doesn't necessarily have to grow the stream, but it can grow the experience. The core two-to-three hour awards show, I think we have a pretty good model for that. But what could we be doing after or before the show? There are tens of millions of people watching around the world – what do they do afterwards?
As to what we can expect to drop in just a few hours, there are some decent guesses to make. A strong candidate is Ashen, the Xbox One and PC action RPG made by indie developer A44; it appeared briefly on the Microsoft Store (French version) with a December 7th release date. Other than that, we could very well get the next Shadow of the Tomb Raider DLC.
The Game Awards 2018 will go live later today at 5:30 PM Los Angeles time. You can watch the broadcast at 4K resolution via YouTube.