To provide simple and flexible finance solutions for our customers making their next vehicle purchase a reality.
Our Business Managers are specialists in automotive Finance and Insurance. With over 36 lenders at our disposal we can make owning your new or pre-owned vehicle, fast convenient and more affordable than you may expect.
Our extensive range of Finance and Insurance products have been developed to meet the needs of Ford purchasers tailored to your needs, lifestyle and budget.
At Central Coast Ford we offer on-the-spot Finance answers, with competitive rates, saving you time and money.
Low Documentation Loans (no financials required).
A Consumer Loan is used to Finance your new or pre-owned vehicle for predominantly personal use. This kind of loan is flexible and easy to manage with fixed interest rates and fixed repayments. You can choose a "Balloon" payment at the end of your loan, (a percentage put aside to repay later), to lower your instalments with options to resell or refinance at the end of your term.
Benefits of a Consumer loan are that they are tailored for private buyers, flexible deposit, varied repayment periods, ability to add a balloon payment, fixed instalments and a fixed Interest rate.
A Novated Lease enables an employee to salary package their new Ford. Payments are made on your car from your pre-tax earnings which may lead to tax benefits for you and your employer. A Novated lease has flexible terms and can be transferred from one Employer to the next so no need to lose your Company Car and must purchase quickly.
This loan also allows you to choose the car you drive and enter an agreement with your Employer and the Finance Company to achieve the right outcome. With Fixed Monthly rental payments cash flow can be managed.
The benefits include possible tax benefits, fixed instalments, choice of car and choice of term.
An Asset Purchase is also known as a Commercial Hire Purchase (CHP) and is used by Business purchasers to allow for flexibility in their loan terms to assist with Cash Flow. You can tailor a CHP to include a large "Balloon" payment at the end of your Finance and offset some of the costs with potential tax offsets including Depreciation and Interest Charges if your new Ford is used for generating income.
Benefits of a CHP include possible tax deductions, flexible terms, ability to add a balloon payment and free up your Business Cash Flow.
A Finance Lease enables business customers or individuals with a business to acquire vehicles without tying up valuable capital. Preserves cash flow which can be used else where by having the flexibility of fixed lower monthly rentals.
A Finance Lease allows a you to upgrade your Ford as the end of term or extend the lease. There is no Deposit required and you are only paying for the use of the vehicle, not full ownership. GST registered Businesses may be able to claim the GST portion of the lease and this lease can be tailored to your Business needs.
An Operating Lease is like a Finance Lease without the risk of selling off your car at the end of your loan. Subject to "Fair wear and tear" policy, you simply hand your Ford back at the end of your term. This eliminates the risk of depreciation and potentially large pay-outs. An operating lease f fully maintained meaning there is no need to factor in extra money for tyres, maintenance, servicing and registration. All these are included in your monthly lease payments making it easier to manage your cash flow. It also has the option of Fuel Card management and provides comprehensive 24hr accident Management. One single monthly tax invoice for all costs means less paperwork and easier accounting.
Benefits to you include less paperwork, enhanced cash flow, no hidden maintenance costs and 24hr accident management.
A Chattel Mortgage is a Business product tailored to meet the needs of your Business. It offers potential GST offsets with the ability to claim GST up front in some cases. You can tailor your repayments by choosing your loan term, making seasonal extra repayments or adding a deposit. Interest rate is fixed for the life of the loan. You can also opt for a GST refund to be paid into your loan reducing your repayment and freeing up your Business cash flow.
There are many benefits to the Business Customer with a Chattel Mortgage if you are registered for GST and eligible for Input tax Credits.
It is a matter of public record that many of the major insurance companies will encourage panel shops to use NON GENUINE parts in the repair of vehicles involved in accidents. This can badly affect the value of your car at trade-in time, its safety and reliability.
Do you guarantee genuine new parts with all repairs?
Can I have my "choice of repairer" without additional cost?
Do you offer new replacement for cars less than 3 years old?
Do you allow maximum no claim bonus without having held insurance?
Are there additional fees or premium loading for Pay by the Month policies.
Will Genuine New Parts will be used in repairs even after the warranty period – protecting the resale value & maintaining the warranty of your vehicle.
Do you offer Tools of Trade Option – Covers theft and or damage of tools, stock and materials as a result of a vehicle collision; or theft using forcible and violent entry to a securely locked vehicle or tool box, permanently fixed to the insured vehicle.
Can I have my car returned to Central Coast Ford for their factory trained technicians to inspect for compliance to Manufacturers Specifications?
If your car is written off or stolen and your insurer declares a "total loss" your insurance payout may well be less than what you owe your financier. This difference or GAP may leave you liable for the shortfall.
GAP Insurance covers the shortfall - whoever you are insured with, protects you financially - claim your out of pocket expenses, and minimises any interruption to your motoring.
What happens when your earning capacity is restricted due to injury, illness, involuntary unemployment, business failure and or in some cases death?
Loan protection ensures that should any of these events occur, your loan repayments will be made or may even pay out the balance remaining on your finance contract. Ensuring you peace of mind and added security, knowing your family will not have to worry about making your finance repayments.
Please refer to the relevant Product Disclosure Statement (PDS) and Financial Services Guide (FSG) prior to purchasing Insurance products. Any advice contained on this website with respect to Insurance Products is General Advice only.
Factory trained technicians on hand to take care of your service and warranty needs.
Potential improved resale value for the your vehicle.


text:
Wifey Redux
by Kevin Barry, recommended by Graywolf Press
EDITOR'S NOTE BY ETHAN NOSOWSKY
Written by Kevin Barry
Recommended by Ethan Nosowsky
DO NOT read the first sentence of "Wifey Redux" just yet — I don't want to lose you. Because that's the thing about a Kevin Barry story: you never have a chance to settle into your seat before rocketing off at high speed, destination unknown.
Barry is an astonishing stylist, but he's also an excellent storyteller who never fails to entertain. And then there are the characters that populate his stories. He often writes about unreconstructable degenerates, and let us admit that he writes about them with unabashed love and admiration. Kidnappers, cynics, drug dealers, unrepentant alcoholics, self harmers, and a multitude of hopeless dreamers find a comfy home in his fiction.
"Wifey Redux," however, is a domestic story. If you still haven't peeked, here are the first words of the first irresistible six-line sentence: "This is the story of a happy marriage but…" A universe (and a lot of truth) lies in that "but." The narrator next concedes that yeah yeah, he knows, no one wants to read about a happy marriage, and he promises some manner of unstated delinquency that will end with the police banging him against the hood of a squad car. It's a go-for-broke gambit that had me hooked the first time I read it.
Among other things, this story comically exposes the conflict between our fetishization of youthful sexuality and our prudish hypocrisy about it once we become parents. In the second paragraph the narrator lasciviously describes his wife's backside (when they were teenagers) at considerable length, and goes on to boast about their athletic antics in the early, horny years of their marriage. But when their daughter turns 17, the same age they were when they met, and becomes sexually active with a jockish type whom the narrator can't abide, he becomes increasingly unhinged.
What I love about this story, aside from its broad comedy (the daughter and mother share identical lisps, which Barry has good fun with), is the way darkness subtly but surely expresses itself despite the narrator's unstinting efforts to keep it at bay. The surface of the story itself is playful — the action is antic, the dialogue gut-busting — but a steady accumulation of quiet detail makes you realize, once you've finished, that you've read a story about possible alcoholism (hers) and breakdown (his).
In the final line you find yourself back at the beginning, with the squad car. But you're in a very different and more perplexing place.
Ethan Nosowsky
Editorial Director, Graywolf Press
by Kevin Barry
This is the story of a happy marriage but before you throw up and turn the page let me say that it will end with my face pressed hard into the cold metal of the Volvo's bonnet, my hands cuffed behind my back, and my rights droned into my ear — this will occur in the car park of a big-box retail unit on the Naas Road in Dublin.
We were teenage sweethearts, Saoirse and I. She was exquisite, and seventeen; I was a couple of years the older. She was blonde and wispily slight with a delicate, bone-china complexion. Her green eyes were depthless pools — I'm sorry, but this is a love story — and I drowned in them. She had amazing tits, too, small but textbook, perfectly cuppable, and an outstanding arse. I mean literally an outstanding arse. Lasciviously draw in the air, while letting your tongue loll and eyes roll, the abrupt curve of a perfect, flab-free butt cheek: she had a pair of those. It was shelved, the kind of arse my father used to say (in wry and manly sidemouthing) you could settle a mug of tea on. Also, she had a raunchy laugh and unwavering taste and she understood me. In retrospect, with the due modesty of middle age, I accept there wasn't that much to understand. I was a moderately poetical kid, and moderately rebellious, but diligent in my studies all the same, and three months out of college I had a comfortable nook secured in the civil service. We got married when Saoirse was twenty-one and I was twenty-three. That seems impossibly young now but this was the late eighties. And we made a picture — I was a gorgeous kid myself. A Matt Dillon type, people used to say, which dates me. But your dates can work out, and we were historically lucky in the property market. We bought a fabulous old terrace house with a view to the seafront in Dun Laoghaire. We could lie in bed and watch the ships roll out across Dublin Bay, all lighted and melancholy in the night. We'd lie amid the flicker of candles and feast on each other. We couldn't believe our luck.
We had bought the place for a song. Some old dear had died in it, and it had granny odors, so it took a while to strip back the flock wallpaper and tan-colored linoleum, but it was a perfect dream that we unpeeled. The high ceilings, the bay windows, the palm tree set in the front garden: haughty Edwardiana. We did it up with the sweat of our love and frequently broke off from our DIY tasks to fuck each other histrionically (it felt like we were running a race) on the stripped floorboards. The house rose 35 percent in value the year after we bought it. It has since octupled in value.
Those early years of our marriage were perfect bliss. Together, we made a game out of life — everything was an adventure; even getting the tires filled, even doing the groceries. We laughed a lot. We tiddled each other in the frozen foods aisle. We bit each other lustfully in the back row of the pictures at the late show, Saturdays. We made ironical play of our perfect marriage. She called me "Hubby" and I called her "Wifey." I can see her under a single sheet, with her bare, brown legs showing, and coyly in the morning she calls to me as I dress:
"Hubby? Don't go just yet… Wifey needs… attendance."
"Oh but Wifey, it's past eight already and…"
"What's the wush, Hubby?"
Saoirse could not (and cannot) pronounce the letter R — a rabbit was a wabbit — which made her even more cute and bonkable.
I rose steadily in the civil service. I was pretty much unsackable, unless I whipped out a rifle in the canteen or raped somebody in the photocopier room. Hubby went to work, and Wifey stayed at home, but we were absolutely an equal partnership. Together, in slow-mo, we jogged the dewy, early-morning park. Our equity by the month swelled, the figures rolling ever upwards with gay abandon. The electricity of our enraptured smiles — ! ! — could have powered the National fucking Grid. Things just couldn't get any better, and they did.
In the third year of our marriage, a girl-child was born to us. Our darling we named Ellie, and she was a marvel. She was the living image of her beautiful mother, and I was doubly in love — I pushed her stroller along the breezy promenade, the Holyhead ferry hooted, and my heart soared with the black-backed gulls. Ellie slept eight hours a night from day one. Never so much as a teething pain. A perfect, placid child, and mantelpiece-pretty. We were so lucky I came to fear some unspeakable tragedy, some deft disintegration. But the seasons as they unrolled in south County Dublin were distinct and lovely, and each had its scheduled joys — the Easter eggs, the buckets and spades, the Halloween masks, the lovely tinsel schmaltz of Crimbo. Hubby, Wifey, Baby Ellie — heaven had come down and settled all about us.
If, over the subsequent years, the weight of devotion between Saoirse and I ever so fractionally diminished — and I mean tinily — this, too, I felt, was healthy. We probably needed to pull back, just a tad, from the obsessive quality of our love for each other. This minuscule diminishing was evident, perhaps, in the faint sardonic note that entered our conversation. Say when I came home from work in the evening, and she said:
"Well, Hubby?"
With that kind of dry up note at the end of a sentence, that sarcastic stress? And I would answer in kind:
"Well, Wifey?"
Of course the century turned, and early middle age slugged into the picture, and our arses dropped. Happens. And sure, I began to thicken a little around the waist. And yes, unavoidably, the impromptu fucking tends to die off a bit when you've a kid in the house. But we were happy still, just a little more calmly so, and I repeat that this is the story of a happy, happy marriage. (Pounds table twice for emphasis.)
Not that I didn't linger sometimes in memory. How could I not? I mean Saoirse, when she was seventeen, was… erotic perfection. I could never desire anyone more than I did Saoirse back then. It was painful, almost, that I had wanted her so badly, and it had felt sinful, almost (I was brought up Catholic), to be able to sate my lust for her, at will, whenever I wanted, in whatever manner I wanted, and for so many ecstatic years.
I'm not saying she hasn't aged well. She remains an extremely handsome woman. She has what my mother used to call an excellent hold of herself. Certainly, there is a little weight on her now, and that would have seemed unimaginable on those svelte, fawnish, teenage limbs, but as I have said, I'm no Twiggy myself these days. We like creamy pasta dishes flecked with lobster bits. We like ludicrously expensive chocolate. The kind with chilli bits baked in and a lavender dusting. And yes, occasionally, in the small hours, I suffer from… weeping jags. As the ships roll out remorselessly
across Dublin Bay. And fine, let's get it all out there, let's — Saoirse has developed a Pinot Grigio habit that would knock a fucking horse.
But we are happy. We love each other. And we are dealing.
Because we married so young, however, and because we had our beautiful Ellie so early in life, we have that strange sensation of still being closely attuned to the operatics of the teenage world even now as our daughter has entered it. It's almost as if we never left it ourselves, and we know all the old steps of the dance still as Ellie pelts through that skittle sequence of drugs, music, fashion, melancholia, suicidal ideation and, well, sex.
The difficult central fact of this thing: Ellie is now seventeen years old and everything about her is a taunt to man. The hair, the coloring, the build. Her sidelong glance, and the hoarseness of her laugh, and the particular way she pokes the tip of her tongue from the corner of her mouth in sardonic dismissal, and the hammy, poppy-eyed stare that translates as:
"Are you for weal?"
No, she can't say her Rs either. And she wears half-nothing. Hot pants, ripped tights, belly tops, and she has piercings all over. A slash of crimson lippy. Thigh-high boots.
Now understand that this is not about to get weird and fucked up but I need to point out that she is identical to Saoirse at that age. I am just being brutally honest here. And I would plead that the situation is not unusual. It's just one of those things you're supposed to keep shtum about. Horribly often, our beautiful, perfect daughters emerge into a perfect facsimile of how our beautiful, desirable wives had been, back then, when they were young. And slim. And sober. There is a horrid poignancy to it. And to even put this stuff down on paper looks wrong. There are certain people (hello, Dr. Murtagh!) who would see this and think: your man is bad again. So I should just get to the story of how the trouble started. And, of course, it concerns my hatred for the boys who flock around my beautiful daughter.
Oh, trust me. Every hank of hair and hormones with the price of a lip ring in the borough of Dun Laoghaire has been panting after our Ellie. But she flicked them all away, one after the other, nothing lasted for more than an innocent date or two. Not until young and burly Aodhan McAdam showed up on the scene.
Even saying the horrible, smug, hiccupy syllables of that fucker's name makes me retch. He wasn't her usual type, so immediately I was worried. The usual type — so far as it had been established — was black-clad, pale-skinned, basically depressed-looking, given to eyeliner and guitar cases, Columbine types, sniper material, little runts in duster coats, addicted to their antihistamine inhalers, self-harmers, yadda-yadda, but basically innocent. I knew by the way she carried herself that she did not succumb to them. A father can tell — although this is another of the facts you're supposed to keep shtum about. But then — hear the brush and rattle of doom's timpani drums — enter Aodhan McAdam.
"Howya doin' boss-man?"
This, quickly, became his ritual greeting when I answered the door, evenings, and found him in his track pants and Abercrombie & Fitch polo shirt on the checkered tiles of our porch. He typically accompanied the greeting with a pally little punch on my upper arm and a big, toothy grin. He was seventeen, six two, with blonde, floppy hair, and about eight million quids' worth of dental work. Looked like he'd been raised on prime beef and full-fat milk. Handsome as a movie star and so easy in his skin. One of those horrible, mid-Atlantic twangs — these kids don't even sound fucking Irish any more — and broad as a jeep; I had no doubt he could beat the shit out of me. Which meant that I would have to surprise him.
I knew after the first two weeks that they were fucking. It was the way she carried herself — she was little-girl no more. And what did her mother do about this? She went and fetched another bottle of Pinot Grigio from the fridge.
"Saoirse, we need to talk about what's going on back there?"
Wrong, I know, you're supposed to leave these things be. But I couldn't… I couldn't not bring it up. It was poisoning me.
Saoirse and I were in the front den. We keep the bigger TV in there, and the coffee table we commissioned from the Artisans-with-Aids program, and a retro fifties couch in a burnt-orange shade that our shapes have settled into — unpleasantly, it makes it look like we have arses the size of boulders — and stacks upon stacks of DVDs climb the
walls, just about every box set yet issued.
"I suppose you know," I said, "that they're, well… you know."
"Don't," Saiorse said.
I sighed and left the den. The way it worked, Ellie had the use of the sitting room down back of the ground floor; no teenager wants to sit with her parents. She'd had a decorator in — it was got up in like a purple-and-black scheme — and she had a really fabulous Eames couch we'd got at auction for her sixteenth, and I went down there to check on Aodhan and herself. The shade was down, and they were watching some hip-hop crap on satellite, and they were under a duvet. This was a summer evening.
"Yo, Popsicle," Ellie said.
"Hey," Aodhan McAdam said, and leered at me.
I unleashed the coldest look I could summon and tried to say something and felt like I had a mouthful of marbles. I went back to the front den. I settled into the massive arse shape on my side of the couch.
"Do you realize," I said, "that they're under a duvet back there?"
"Mmm-hmm?"
Saoirse was watching a Wire episode with crew commentary and was nose deep in a bucket-sized glass of Pinot Grigio. She drank it ice-cold — I could see the splinters of frozen crystals in there.
"I mean what the fuck are they doing under a duvet? It's July!"
She turned to me, and smiled benignly.
"I think we can pwesume," she said, "that she's jackin' him off."
"Lovely," I said.
"Ellie's seventeen," she said. "The fuck do you think she's
doing?"
"That fucking little McAdam bastard…"
"Not so little," Saoirse said. "And actually he's kinda hot?"
You're supposed to just deal. But my brain would not stop whirring. I lay there that night in bed, and I was under siege. Random images came at me which I will not describe. I was nauseous. I knew it was a natural thing. I knew there was no stopping it. And as the morning surfaced on the bay, I tried to accept it. But I got out of the bed and I felt like I'd fought a war. I thought, maybe it's better that he's a rugby type rather than one of the sniper types. At least maybe he's healthier.
That evening, after work, as I took my walk along the prom, with the cold sea oblivious, I saw them: the rugby boys. They hang out by a particular strip of green down there, sitting around the rain shelter, or tossing a ball about, and chortling all the time, chortling, with their big shiteater grins and testosterone. They all have the floppy hair, the polo shirts in soft pastels, the Canterbury track pants, the mid-Atlantic twangs. Aodhan McAdam was among them, and he saw me, and grinned, and he made a pair of pistols with his fingers and fired them at me.
Ka-pow, he mouthed.
Ha-ha, I grinned back.
He was no doubt giving the rest of the scrum a full account about what went on beneath the duvet. Of course he was! And later he was back for more. Bell rings about ten: orthodontic beam on porch. In fact, he appeared to have pretty much moved into the house. Every night now he was among us.
"Babes!" she squealed, and she raced down the hallway, and leapt onto him, and right there — right in front of me! — he cupped her butt cheek.
Now often, between box-set episodes, Saoirse and I hang in the kitchen — it's maybe our fave space, and it's tricked out with as much cutesy, old-timey shit as a soul could reasonably stomach. The Aga. The stoneware pots from Puglia. The St. Brigid's Cross made out of actual, west of Ireland reeds for an ethnic-type touch. We snack hard and we just, like, sway with the kitchen vibe? But now Ellie and Aodhan were invading. Eighteen times a night they were out of the back room and attacking the fridge. Saoirse just smiled, fondly, as they ploughed into the hummus, the olives, the flatbreads, the cold cuts, the blue cheese, the Ben & Jerry's, the lavender-dusted chocolate from Fallon & Byrne. I watched the motherfucker from the island counter — the way he wolfed the stuff down was unreal.
"Do they feed you at your own place at all, Aodhan?" I said, wryly.
He chortled, and he took out a six-pack of Petit Filous yoghurts, and he made for the couch-and-duvet in my back room. He mock-punched me in the gut as he passed by.
"This ol' boy's runnin" on heavy fuel," he said, and he mussed my hair, or what's left of it.
Later, in the den, I turned to Saoirse:
"He's treating me like a bitch," I said.
She was freezeframing bits of The Wire that featured the gay killer Omar because she had a thing for him. She had lately been waking in the night and crying out his name.
"So what are you going to do about it?" she said.
"I know they're fucking," I said. "I can just… smell it?"
"You need to talk to Doctor Murtagh about this," she said.
"Meaning cognitive fucking thewapy," she said. "Meaning medication time. Meaning this is looking like a bweakdown-type thing again?"
All over the house, I felt like I could hear him… chomping? You know sometimes, in a plane, when your ears are weird, and they flip out the food trays, and you chew, and you can hear the jaw motions of your own mastication in a loud, amped, massively unpleasant way? It was like I was hearing that all over the house —
Aodhan!
Chomping!
Also, he was using the downstairs loo, under the stairs, and of course he pissed like a prize stallion. Saoirse thought it was all marvellous, and she talked increasingly about how hot she thought he was, as hot almost as Omar. We're talking a lunk but angelically pretty — like a beefy choirboy that could mangle a bear? Fucking hideous.
Then summer thickened and there was a heat wave. We garden, and we have a terrific deck — done out with all this Tunisian shit we bought off the lepers in Zarzis — overlooking the back lawn. During the heat wave, Aodhan and Ellie took over the deck space. I watched from the kitchen — I was deveining some king prawns while Saoirse expertly pestled a coriander-seed-and-lime-zest marinade. Ellie lay face down on the lounger, in a string bikini, and he sat on the lounger's edge, and with his big sausagey fingers he untied the top of the bikini, and pushed the straps gently back. Then he shook the lotion bottle, rubbed a squirt of it onto his palms, and began to massage it in, super-slow, like some fucking porno setup. Through the open window I heard her throaty little moans, and I saw the way she turned to him, adoringly, and he bent down and whispered to her, and she squealed.
"Next thing," I said to Saoirse, "they're actually going to have it off in front of us."
"What is she, a nun?"
"I've had enough of this," I said.
I flung the prawns into the Belfast sink and I stormed out of the house. I bought cigarettes for the first time in six months and lit one right there on the forecourt of the Topaz. I smoked, and I took off along the prom. I passed the rugby boys' rain shelter, and it was deserted, and I saw that there was an amount of graffiti scrawled around the back wall of the shelter. I went to have a closer look.
Nicknames, stuff about schools-rugby rivals, so-and-so loves such-and-such, or so-and-so loves ???, but then, prominently, this:
ELLIE P THE BLO-JOB QUEEN
B-L-O! And P! That they had used my surname's initial for emphasis, the P of my dead father's Prendergast! I went and power-walked the length of the pier and back three times. A glorious summer evening, and busy on the pier, with friends and neighbors all about — but I just ignored them all; I pelted up and down, with my arms swinging, and I ground my teeth, and I cried a little (a lot), and I smoked the pack.
I could see the neighbors thinking:
Is he not great again?
Later, in the den:
Aodhan had gone home, and I could hear the thunk, shlank, whumpf of her music from upstairs, and Saoirse had gone into her keeping-an-eye-on-me mode; she was all concerned and hand-holdy now.
"I think we can pwesume, hon," she said, "that he didn't, like, white it himself?"
"A gentleman!" I said. "But even so he's been mouthing off, hasn't he? And it doesn't bother you at all that she's…"
I couldn't finish it.
"She's seventeen, Jonathan."
"I say we front her."
"This is nuts. And say what? That she shouldn't be giving blow jobs?"
"Please, Saoirse…"
"I was giving blow jobs at seventeen."
"As you well know."
"But I wasn't mouthing off about it, was I? I was keeping it to myself!"
"Just leave it, Jonathan…"
Again that night I hardly slept. I developed this incessant buzzing sound in my head. It sounded like I had a broken strip light in there. More images came at me, and you can picture exactly what they were:
Ellie, descending.
And big Aodhan McAdam — ! — grinning.
The next morning I went to her room. Fuck it, I was going to be strong. There was going to be a conversation about Respect. For herself, for her home, for her parents. For duvets. I knocked, crisply, twice, and I pushed in the door, and I could feel that my forehead was taut with self-righteousness (or whatever), and I found her in a sobbing mess on the bed.
Suicidal!
Ellie's tears nuke my innards.
"Oh, babycakes!" I wailed. "What is it!"
I threw myself on the bed. So much for the Respect conversation. Aodhan, it turned out, had taken his oral gratification and skedaddled. It was so over.
She was inconsolable. We had the worst Saturday morning of all time in our house. Which is saying a great deal. She was between rage and tears and when she is upset she behaves appallingly, my angel. It started right off, at breakfast:
A sunny Saturday, heaven-sent, in peejays — it should have been perfection. Saoirse was sitting at the island counter, trembling, as she ate pinhead porridge with acai fruit and counted off the hours till she could start glugging back the ice-cold Pinot Grigio. I was scraping an anti-death spread the color of Van Gogh's sunflowers onto a piece of nine-grain artisanal toast. Ellie was vexing between flushes of crimson rage and sobbing fits and making a sound like a lung-diseased porpoise.
"Oh please, Ell?" I said. "It's only been, like…"
"Eleven weeks!" she cried. "Eleven weeks of my fucking life I gave that dickwad!"
"Look, baby, I know it doesn't seem like it now? But you'll get over this and it might work out for the best and…"
And maybe the blow-job rep will start to fade, I didn't say.
"What's this?" she said.
She held a box of muesli in her hand.
"It's a box of muesli," I said.
"No it is not," she said.
Admittedly, it was an own-brand line from a mid-range supermarket — a rare anomaly.
"Ah, Ellie, it's fine, look, it's actually quite tasty…"
She turned the box upside down and emptied the muesli onto the limestone flags that had cost peasants their dignity to hump over from County Clare.
"This is not actual ceweal," she said. "This is, like, twibute ceweal?"
She began with her bare feet to slowly crush the muesli into the flagstones. Deliberately grinding up and down, with a steady rhythm to her step, like a French yokel mashing grapes, or a chick on a Stairmaster set to a high gradient.
"I want him back," she said.
"Ah, look, Ellie, I mean…"
"I want Aodhan back."
She came across the flags and caught me by the peejay lapels.
"And I want him back today!"
I fell to my knees and hugged her waist.
"But this is madness!" I cried.
Generally speaking, in the run of a life, when you find yourself using the expression —
"But this is madness!"
— you can take it that things are not going to quickly improve. It was half ten in the morning but Saoirse didn't give a toss any more and she went to the fridge and took the cork from a half-drunk bottle of Pinot Grigio. With her teeth.
So! The next development!
I was sent to have a heart-to-heart with Aodhan McAdam. He had, of course, switched his phone off — they are by seventeen experts in avoidance tactics. And Ellie could not and would not lower her dignity by going to find him herself. And Saoirse hadn't left the house in eleven months, except for Vida Pura™ blood transfusions, Dakota hotstone treatments, and Beach Body Bootcamp (abandoned). So it was down to me. I was to find out his mood, his motives, his intentions. Essentially, I was to win him back. Saoirse was as intent on getting him back as Ellie. He was male youth, after all, and she liked having that stuff around the house.
It turned out that McAdam worked a Saturday job. Oh right, I thought, so he's going with the humble shit — a Saturday job! He worked at this DIY warehouse on the Naas Road. I got in the Volvo and rolled. I played a motivational CD. N'gutha Ba'al, the Zambian self-confidence guru, told me in his rich, honeyed timbre that I had a warrior's inner glow and the spirit of a cheetah. I cried a little (a lot) at this. I felt husky and brave and stout-hearted but the feeling was fleet as the light on the bay. Traffic was scant but scary. Cars edged out at the intersections in abrupt, skittery movements. Trucks loomed, and the sound of their exhausts was horrifyingly amplified. Pedestrians were straight out of a bad dream. Everybody's hair looked odd. I drove through the south side of the city, tightened my grip on the wheel and tried to remember to breathe in the belly. The Volvo was grinding like an assassin as I pulled into the Do-It-Rite! car park. I tried to play the thing like I was an ordinary Joe, a Saturday-man just out on an errand, but I knew at once I wanted to climb up the store's signage and rip down that exclamation mark
from Do-It-Rite!
I stormed — stormed! — towards the entrance but that didn't work out, as the automatic doors did not register my presence as a human being. So I had to take a little step back and approach the doors again — but still they would not part — and I reversed three steps, four, and approached yet again, but still they would not part, and in my shame I raised my eyes to the heavens, and I saw that the letters of the Do-It-Rite! signage were so flimsily attached, with just brackets and screws, and this too was an outrage — the shoddiness of the fix. Then a Saturday-man approached and the doors glided open and I entered the store in the slipstream of his normalcy.
I hunted the aisles for Aodhan McAdam. They were shooting day-for-night in the vast warehouse space, it was luridly strip-lit, and I prowled by the paint racks, the guttering supplies, the mops and hinges, the masonry nails, the rat traps and the laminate flooring kits, and some cronky half-smothered yelps of rage escaped my throat as I walked, and every Saturday-man I passed did a double take on me. The place was the size of a half-dozen soccer pitches patchworked together, and the staff wore yellow dungaree cover-alls, so that they could be picked out for DIY advice, and eventually I saw up top of a set of cover-alls the blond, floppy hair, the megawatt grin and the powerful jaw muscles, those hideous chompers.
The grin turned to me, and it was so enormous it dazzled his features to an indistinctness, I saw just that exclamation mark
from the Do-It-Rite! — but when he focused, the grin died, at once, right there.
"Jonathan?"
I went to him, and I smiled, and I took gently his elbow in my hand.
"Can we talk, Aodhan?"
"Sure, man, I mean…"
Now it is a rare enough occurrence in contemporary life that the occasion presents itself for truly felt speech. We are trapped — all of us — behind this glaring wash of irony. But in the quietest aisle of the Do-It-Rite! that Saturday&msadh;drylining accessories — as Aodhan McAdam and I squatted discreetly on our haunches, I spoke honestly, and powerfully, and from the heart.
"Listen," I said, "I know about the blow jobs. That's perfectly natural. I was getting blow jobs myself when I was seventeen. I wasn't broadcasting the fact, and I could spell, but I was…"
He tried to rise from his haunches, he tried to get away, but I had this strange animal strength (your eyebrows ascend, Dr. Murtagh), and I kept his bony elbow clamped in my claw, and I lasered my eyes into his, and he was scared enough, I could see that.
"Ellie Prendergast, or should I say Ellie P., is the most beautiful girl in this city. She is an absolute fucking angel. If you hurt her, I will kill you. I'm telling you this now so you can give yourself a chance."
I slapped him once across the face. It was a manic shot with plenty of sting to it. I told him of youth's fleeting nature. I told him he didn't realize how quickly all this would pass. I told him how it had been for me. I spoke of the darknesses that can so quickly seep between the cracks of a life. I told him of the images I had witnessed and voices I had heard. He began to cry in fear. I told him how my Wifey had been plagued by evil faeries in the night — oh it was all coming out! — and how my Ellie was to me a deity to be worshipped, and I would protect her with my life.
"I have type 1 diabetes!" he sobbed. "I can't deal with this
Oh but I laid it on with a motherfucking trowel. I brought him to the pits of despair and showed him around. My threats were veiled and made stranger by the serenity of my smile. I said I expected him on the porch at eight o'clock, in his track pants and his Abercrombie & Fitch polo shirt. But before that he would have a job to do. We rose from our haunches and I caught the scruff of his neck and I led him along the aisles to the paint racks — Saturday-men watched, staff in yellow cover-alls watched, but no one approached us — and I showed him the white paint, how much of it there was and how cheap it was, and I explained I'd be pulling a spot check on the rain shelter at seven o'clock, sharp.
I let go of him then. I sucked up the last of my calm, and I said:
"Listen, Aodhan, we're doing a shopping run this afternoon… Can I fetch anything in particular? You two go for that barbecue salmon in the vac-packs, don't you?"
I left him ashen-faced and limp. I prowled the aisles some more and now these hot little barks of triumph came up as I walked. The Saturday-men avoided my eyes, and they scurried from my path, and I barked a little louder. As I'm here, I thought, why not pick up a couple of things?
So I bought an extendable ladder and a claw hammer. The automatic doors registered my presence at once and I was let outside to the sun-kissed afternoon. I propped and extended the ladder against the front of the store and I climbed with the claw hammer hanging coolly in my grip. It took no more than a half-dozen wrenches to loose the exclamation mark
from the Do-It-Rite and carefully I placed it under my arm — it was light as air — and I descended. I walked across the car park. I placed it carefully on the tarmac in front of the Volvo — my intention was to drive over it and smash it to pieces — but then I thought, no, that would be too quick. So I got down on my knees and I started to tap gently with the hammer at the blue plastic of the exclamation mark
until it began to crack here and there, and tiny shatter lines appeared, and these joined up, piece by piece, until the entire surface of the
had become a beautiful mosaic in the blue of the sign, like the trace of tiny backroads on an old map — marking out lost fields, lost kingdoms, a lost world — and I was serene as a bird riding the swells of morning air over those fields.
The squad car appeared.
Kevin Barry is the author of the novel City of Bohane, winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the story collections There Are Little Kingdoms and Dark Lies the Island. He lives in County Sligo, Ireland.
Graywolf Press is a leading independent publisher committed to the discovery and energetic publication of contemporary American and international literature. Since 1974, Graywolf has championed outstanding writers at all stages of their careers to ensure that diverse voices can be heard in a crowded marketplace.
Kevin Barry, "Wifey Redux" from Dark Lies the Island. Copyright © 2012 Kevin Barry. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota. www.graywolfpress.org
Recommended Reading opens its doors for submissions today, April 1, for one month only.
Apr 1 - Electric Literature Read
Which WWI Poet Should You Fight?
Obviously you're going to have to throw hands with one of the great warrior-bards of the early 20th century—but who?
Jan 3 - McKayla Coyle
Classic Literature for Babies
We believe literature should be inclusive, so we've made the Western canon accessible to readers under one year old
Dec 31 - McKayla Coyle
Read More Women Literary Trivia Returns!
Avoid smalltalk with your family edition
Dec 27 - Electric Literature

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Meet The 411TV Team
Published in OUR TEAM
Courtney Rashon
Celebrity makeup artist Courtney Rashon is synonymous with all things creative. Known for her ability to transform the ordinary into something breathtaking, her abilities always exceed the expectations. Not only does she possess the skills needed for everyday glamour makeup, she also is a special effects artist as well.
Her career in makeup began while employed in the fashion industry as an assistant. Realizing her love for cosmetics, she began to explore the possibilities of becoming a makeup artist. Providing makeup and men's grooming for Ecko Unlimited Company ads is where she got her first break.
She attended Cosmetology school in New York and received her certifications in Fashion/ Glamour, Character Sciences and Special Effects makeups.
Shortly afterwards, she began working with a variety of artists, directors, industry personalities and tastemakers, delivering makeup looks for music videos and special events. In 2010, Courtney Rashon Industries, LLC was born. Her company consists of a full-service beauty entity that provides glamour/beauty and visual effects makeup application, men's grooming, imaging and mentoring for aspiring makeup artists.
Since the birth of her company, she has produced makeup for artists such as Timbaland, Sebastian and Petey Pablo, reality television personalities, Natalie Nunn, of the Bad Girls Club, Exotic from For the Love of Ray J and director Paul Coy Allen of R&B Divas, just to name a few. Also, she has been the key makeup artist for commercials, short films and the social movement documentary From Fatherless to Fatherhood which aired on OWN and Aspire networks. She has also given demonstrations at Robert Fiance Beauty Schools on specialty makeup subjects including bridal makeup and television and film makeup applications.
As a writer for three online publications, she displays her versatility by writing about an assortment of beauty topics specific for each type of consumer. At Labels Mag.com, where she is the beauty editor, she discusses high-end merchandise and alluring products for consumers that indulge in luxury and opulence. Her column at Shive magazine.com is a forum that reviews cosmetics and glamour tips as it relates to the hip-hop culture. On Examiner.com, she covers cosmetic products for the everyday customer. Her articles are informative and entertaining while keeping you in the loop on the latest runway beauty trends, topics, new products, makeup tutorials and what's current for each season in the world of cosmetics. She is also an honoree of the NV Magazine Movers&Shakers Award for 2015 celebrating urban professionals and entrepreneurs.
Currently, she is penning an instructional beauty book on how to achieve your best looks for every occasion. The publication is due to be released in early 2016 published by Cosby Media Productions and a developing #prettygirlgangcosmetics, which is a petite cosmetic line. Also, she is a co-host on the weekly entertainment and lifestyle television show, What's The 411, as well as a contributing writer for WhatsThe411TV.com
Google.com/Courtney Rashon
Twitter: Courtney Rashon
Instagram: Courtney_Rashon
Facebook: Courtney Rashon
www.courtneyrashon.com
Published in Courtney Rashon
Summer Make-up Tips By Beauty and Fashion Experts Courtney Rashon and Essence Semaj
Beauty and fashion experts give makeup tips to help you look your best in summer heat
In this segment of What's The 411, beauty expert Courtney Rashon and fashion model and TV Host, Essence Semaj, are discussing makeup tips for summer weather.
Published in Fashion, Beauty & Style Tips
Giving Face: A New Book on Cosmetics for Every Occasion Coming Soon
Coming out on Cosby Media Publishing, which is owned by the cousin and nephew of Bill Cosby, is a new makeup book, Giving Face: How to Achieve a Flawless Look for Every Occasion by Courtney Rashon, president of Courtney Rashon Industries.
Scheduled for release in spring 2016, Giving Face: How to Achieve a Flawless Look for Every Occasion, details different looks appropriate for every occasion and different tips and tricks. Also included are some interesting articles on high-end beauty and spa trends.
Giving Face: How to Achieve a Flawless Look for Every Occasion
Published in Authors
What's Poppin'
Biggie Smalls Gets His Street, Jay Z first ra…
Is it okay for children to not share their to…
Abortion Debate in Alabama, Georgetown Repara…
Wendy Williams Staying in a Sober House; Geor…
More breaking news


Doll Furniture Bunk Beds Easy to assemble. No tools or hardware required. Just slide the pieces together for a sturdy attractive bunk bed for your dolls. Finished Dimensions: Height: 24 inches (61 cm) Width: 24 inches (61 cm) Depth: 11 inches (27.9 cm) All of the 11- series plans come with full instuctions for tracing, painting and assembly.
Click the button below to add the Doll Bunk Bed Plans - FREE SHIPPING to your wish list.


I am looking for a PC scope and think that the 3205 will be just right.
I need to look at a differential signal (RS485) on a factory network (ProfiBus), and would normally invert B and then display A+B on a normal scope.
I can't see anything in the manual that allows me to do this on Pico scopes.
Are these features available ?
If not are there any plans to include these in the new release of software ?
It would seem a very basic function to expect from a scope.
Hi and thank you for your email.
You cannot do this directly via PicoScope. There is a way round this, if you choose copy as text and go into Excel, past as a link, this will give you live readings. Channel B results will be under channel A. If you then input a formula to subtract one from the other and plot a graph it will give you a plot of the sum.
You have to be careful though, if you change your trigger point or change your time base and any other settings then your graph may turn out to be incorrect.


text:
Earth, Life, Climate and Evolution
Chapter 19 Armageddon revisited
Published on June 10, 2016 April 30, 2019 by zooks777
An extinction timetable
The K-Pg boundary event
Almost Armageddon – the end-Permian event
Whatever the scale, no matter the fineness of time divisions that we examine, the geological record throws up evidence for sudden, apparently random, events and for cyclical change. This is as true for huge and lengthy events, such as periods of mountain building and the ups and downs of sea level, as for seemingly trivial events like fluctuations in the width of trees' growth rings. For some the explanation is well known. Tree-ring cycles and annual rhythms in some minutely layered Precambrian sediments match closely the tiny fluctuation in the Sun's output caused by an 11-year cycle of sunspot activity. For most there is a great deal more controversy. Perhaps the best documented case of cyclicity extending into the rock record results from the combined signals, with 23, 41 and 100 ka periods, that characterise climate variation within the last 2.5 Ma or so (Chapter 4; Part VII). That astronomical pacing also pops up haphazardly in the sedimentary record as far back as 300 Ma ago. Seeking patterns for curiosity's sake seems to be as much part of our make-up as paranoia. As regards the second, there are conspiracies and something out there is trying to get you. Most patterns and sudden events in the evolution of Earth and life popped out unannounced from increasingly detailed, sophisticated and comprehensive scrutiny of the record. They are there, despite the incompleteness.
For two centuries antiquarians and palaeontologists have recorded the rise and extinction of animal and plant taxa. Darwinian evolution was not at first the central focus of their work, but the ever finer division of Phanerozoic time since useful fossils first appeared. Elaboration of evolution emerges from that practical objective. 'Golden spikes' from radiometric dating calibrate this fossil time-keeping. So, shouldn't we now signify the passage of geological time properly by using equal divisions, of which years to seconds are at the short end? So we might have, had radiometric dating preceded the fossil hunters' inquisitiveness, but it would not have lasted long. Fossils are easily found and their sequences of change pose great philosophical conundrums to curious people. Geological time division in the Phanerozoic is essentially a close reflection of biological evolution (Chapter 5).
Chopping up the rock record starts at the finest division of Zones, which are recognised by the rise and fall of individual species that were distributed over large areas. Each Stage, which includes a number of zones, is defined by the appearance and disappearance of globally distinctive associations of several species and higher taxa. Geological Epochs and Periods (Cambrian, Jurassic etc) begin and end with gross, global changes in flora and fauna, as do the Eras (Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic). The fundamental boundary between the Precambrian and Phanerozoic Eons was set where fossils with hard parts first become commonly found in the rock strata. There are other dividing characteristics, such as evidence for mountain building and erosion, and rises and falls in sea level, but the primary global division is biological. Because it came long before our ability to measure time itself, as the only globally useful means of dividing time in sedimentary rocks, which every geologist knows (or should know), the biological time scale is with us for keeps.
Figure 19.1(a) Diversity of marine animals during the Phanerozoic expressed as the number of recorded families. The curve is built from records of families in groups that dominated the Cambrian, the rest of the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic to modern times, with a smaller addition of those found only in rocks showing exceptionally good preservation. (b) Extinction rate per million years of all plants and animals at the genus level.
Splitting time on a life or death basis is sensible, as a graph of marine-animal diversity through the Phanerozoic (Figure 19.1a) shows. Of the nine System and Era boundaries only two are not signalled by significant ups or downs in diversity at the family level. Looking at diversity at the level of the genus, and at the average rate at which animals in this taxonomic division disappeared, not only signals each major boundary but reveals lots of other apparent events (Figure 19.1b). 'Apparent' is an appropriate adjective because of the incompleteness of the fossil record. How incomplete it is becomes clear by looking at a couple of details on Figure 19.1a. The right end of the graph suggests about 900 families of marine fossils in the youngest of all sedimentary sequences, but there are about 1900 families alive today. The topmost division of the curve – those families known only from those few cases where delicate animals show as fossils – adds significantly to the whole. The fossil record changes all the time as advancing research adds new discoveries, and even when palaeontologists change their minds and reclassify taxonomic groupings. Comparing the diversity of marine families living today in the Great Barrier Reef with that in the North Sea shows the potential for uncertainty in Figure 19.1; diversity depends on environmental conditions. One reason for the patchiness of the geological record is changing sea level. When it stands high it floods flat continental margins where sediment preservation is most likely. Low stands shrink the depositional area of easily preserved sediment and older sediments are eroded away.
Such cautions form one reason for avoiding the use of variations in the numbers of individual species to divide geological time. Incompleteness results in far more species failing to show up than there are those that become fossils. The broader taxonomic divisions of genus or family, which include several species that are more widespread, are more likely to leave us fossil representatives. For instance, a single specimen from just one of potentially many included species signifies the family's presence in the record. The incomplete fossil record is all that we have, yet it is odd enough to encourage explanations, speculative as they might be. Every geologist now accepts that there have been five global mass extinctions, and lots of lesser ones. The magnitudes of the 'Big Five' are fearsome. At the end of the Ordovician 28% of earlier families disappeared. Scaling up to the level of species, using statistics for living organisms, suggests the extinction at the Ordovician-Silurian boundary of as many as 85% of all life forms. The 57% extinction of families at the close of the Permian, and therefore the Palaeozoic Era, suggests a staggering 96% snuffing out of species. Those ending the Devonian, Triassic and Cretaceous are not so extreme. The mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous and the Mesozoic Era has had a big press mainly because that is when the dinosaurs bit the dust. But it is also an event where we know with most certainty that life on land as well as marine animals suffered more or less equally.
Fossil records are more complete in rocks deposited since the end of the Carboniferous Period than from earlier times. They also contain organisms that are taxonomically more like modern ones and therefore easier to classify. So the succeeding 290 Ma are a focus for more detailed studies. Life after the Carboniferous encompassed 10000 genera of marine animals, of which 6000 are now extinct. The data include all groups from unicellular, shelled foraminifera to vertebrates, from a great variety of marine habitats. Figure 19.2 shows the overall rate of extinction since 260 Ma ago. Extinctions at the genus level came in pulses very approximately 30 Ma apart. Since the time series encompasses all marine animals and habitats, a fairly regular emergence of harmful conditions for marine life seems to be inescapable. Marine arthropods (crabs etc.), echinoderms (sea-urchins etc.) and vertebrates, considered alone, do show some gaps. Perhaps those groups were in some way better equipped to survive whatever factors periodically killed more sensitive creatures in large numbers.
Figure 19.2 Time series since the Permian for extinctions at the level of genus of all marine animals. Vertical arrows mark significant mass extinction; red bars show periods of major flood basalt volcanism; red stars are impact craters >30 km diameter.
Despite life's immense complexity, there appears to be an element of simplicity and generality in the record of Mesozoic and Cenozoic mass extinctions. What can it be due to? Any underlying 'pace-maker' has to encompass all the factors that may have sent trials of fitness among living things. The pace itself appears not to be exclusive to life, but may carry through other features of the evolving Mesozoic and Cenozoic Earth System. The timing of major mountain-building events on all continents throughout the Phanerozoic shows a periodicity of between 30-36 Ma. Igneous events that involve the deep mantle to generate flood basalt provinces come in bursts roughly every 30 Ma (Figure 19.2). The curve of sea-level change (Figure 5.5) comprises many superimposed periodicities, the strongest of which comes out at 33 Ma. Oxygen-isotope records of climate for the last 130 Ma show 30 Ma repetitions. Even the record of changes in the Earth's magnetic field, produced in the fluid outer core, includes a 30 Ma signal. For good measure we can also throw in occurrences of evaporite deposits, pulses in sea-floor spreading, and times when unoxidised organic matter built up on the ocean floor. Even the most optimistic poker player would gybe at such a run of coincidences, especially since all these seemingly unrelated processes lumped together share a 26.6 Ma periodicity (Figure 19.3) For such a peak to emerge from random data has odds of 10000 to 1, but a roughly common pace does not necessarily imply a common causality.
Figure 19.3 Spectral power of time series for extinctions and seven global geological processes plotted against the logarithm of frequency in events per Ma. The highest peak indicates a periodicity of about 27 Ma.
Two broad conclusions could be drawn from all this. One is that you can make anything out of numbers, especially if the data are imprecise; as popularised by Mark Twain, there are 'lies, damned lies and statistics'. But applying statistics to scientific information is a 'respectable' and often valuable approach, provided we have a clear sense of perspective; why collect the data in the first place, if they are not to be analysed? The other general conclusion is that there may indeed be a causal link between geological events and mass extinctions. But setting out to tie down the connection from the available, diverse records is a bit like a historian trying to prove the Shakespearian implication that Richard III was a nasty piece of work because he had a spinal deformity, ate a lot of fish and his reign was beset by a run of wet summers – all true.
One view takes empiricism a stage further – and probably much too far – by linking the coincidences to the roughly 30 Ma period in which the Sun wobbles through the plane of the Milky Way galaxy in its orbit around the galactic centre. If that was matched by minute changes in the gravity affecting the Solar System it might perturb the Kuiper belt and Oort Cloud or the main belt of asteroids from which powerful projectiles come. As you saw in Chapter 10, the Earth and Moon do have a common history of bombardment and near-instantaneous releases of energy that dwarf the biblical concept of Armageddon. Big impacts are the worst imaginable trials for life. A hill-sized ball of ice, rock or solid metal arriving tomorrow would be pretty good support for that view, if anyone was still around to document its aftermath. The problem is that the timing of cratering on the Moon is almost entirely relative. Radiometric dating of impact-glass samples returned by the Apollo missions from six points on the lunar surface just confirms that bombardment continued almost to the present day; there is no time series.
The analysis of Earth-wide geological events can serve to support a long-held, suspicion that biological extinction is somehow related to inorganic terrestrial events, including igneous activity, mountain building, fluctuations in sea level and land area, climate change and changes in ocean chemistry. In other words, that periodicity is a property of a dynamic and complex Earth system, for which there is no reason to appeal to outside factors. Many scientists remain deeply suspicious of their 'whizz-bang' colleagues, saying that extraterrestrial forces lack only sex, major crime and the British Royal family as ingredients for tasty global headlines.
The central question stems not from all the suspected factors fluctuating together to reach dangerous peaks on a regular basis – like the days when the biorhythm app on your smart phone warns you not to get out of bed – but the constant pace at which these peaks have occurred, the equivalent of a metronome in the Earth System. There are two broad possibilities: one due to internal causes; the other due to astronomical forcings from the outside. To explore these fundamentally contrasted hypotheses, we start with the last of the 'Big Five' mass extinctions that brought the Mesozoic Era to an end and which caught popular imagination as the Nemesis of dinosaurs.
Reconstruction of the lunar and terrestrial bombardment records by analysing craters during the Apollo programme revitalised interest in catastrophes (Chapter 10). Huge energy deliveries during post-Archaean times, as well as in the pre-4 Ga period, affected both Earth and Moon. A pointer to their possible effects on life systems came from geochemical studies of rocks that straddle extinctions. In 1980 Walter Alvarez and his co-workers reported that material at the Cretaceous-Palaeogene (K-Pg; K-T for Cretaceous-Tertiary is still widely used) boundary in ocean-floor sediments and on continents contain unusually high concentrations of noble metals, particularly that of iridium (Ir), which is the easiest to analyse. Noble metals have an affinity for metallic iron, and on Earth are almost certainly concentrated in its core. Meteorites are rich in those metals. The K-Pg Ir anomaly seems to be the chemical equivalent of a 'smoking gun' that implicates impact by an asteroid. But that is not all. The boundary layer includes droplets of once-molten rock, high-pressure and shocked versions of common minerals and even tiny diamonds. It also contains sooty residues rich in complex hydrocarbons. The event may have involved global fires (Chapter 8), though some of the hydrocarbon residues have characters that link best to what cosmologists consider to be molecules formed inorganically in interplanetary space.
The K-Pg boundary event has such a weight of evidence in support of the involvement of an impact that it came as no surprise when a candidate was found. Exploration for oil in the Gulf of Mexico off the Yucatan Peninsula displayed a near-perfect circular structure on a map of gravity anomaly. Seismic surveys also revealed that the deeper sediments seemed disturbed in a circular pattern. Reappraisal showed conclusively that a crater lay in the area, now called the Chicxulub (pronounced chick-shulub) structure, about 180 km in diameter and due to impact by a body between 10 and 20 km across. At the time of writing (autumn 2016) drilling into the centre of the circular feature was beginning to yield pertinent information.
That the Earth has been hit by large projectiles is undeniable; we can see their scars. Not many, but on the ground and on aerial and satellite pictures they are unmistakable (Figures 10.1, 10.2). Although the Earth must have been hit by comparable objects to those that so obviously scarred the lunar surface, and they must have arrived with a similar frequency (Chapter 10), they are greatly under-represented on the Earth. There are four main reasons why this is so. Weathering and erosion efficiently mute and remove evidence for all but the youngest and the largest impact structures. About 70 percent of the Earth's surface is ocean floor, hidden from direct view and subject to more or less continuous sedimentation. Within about 200 Ma all of it returns to the mantle. Mountain building deforms much of the continental crust to induce rapid erosion as well as obliterating the distinctive shapes of impact scars. Volcanic activity and sedimentation repave large tracts of the continents at different times, thereby hiding any preserved scars from earlier periods. Far more than the fossil record, that of Earth's encounters with extraterrestrial objects is scanty; just 188 confirmed craters. Figure 19.2 shows the timing of the 14 post-Permian craters with diameters >30 km.
Evaluating the likelihood of many animal species having met a swift and terrible end through massive energy delivery from space in the past relies as much on the approach of an insurance company's actuary as it does on geological evidence (Chapter 10). Assessing the probabilities of past terrestrial impact events relies on evidence from the lunar surface. The Moon's record of bombardment is little changed by the wear and tear of time. Moreover, it has a very simple geological history, and one event, the formation of the maria between 3 800 and 3 200 Ma, formed a pristine surface on which all later impacts left their mark. This allows the size-frequency distribution of lunar impact craters to be charted for the period represented by geological time on the Earth (Figure 10.5a). For reasons that I shall not burden you with, we can divide the lunar record into two long, post-maria periods, from 3200 to 1100 Ma and from 1100 Ma to the present day. In the first there are 87 lunar craters with diameters greater than 30 km and 45 in the second. On average, one formed every 24 Ma during both time periods. Because it is bigger and has a larger gravitational field, the Earth always collects more debris than the Moon. About 2500 impact events on Earth may have produced craters larger than 30 km during geological time; one every 1.3 Ma. Craters larger than 300 km have an expected frequency of one every 135 Ma, and the largest single crater likely to have affected life could have had a diameter of about 1300 km.
Looking at the power of such events (Figure 10.6b), for it is the rate at which energy is delivered that disturbs day-to-day processes. Impacts yielding the equivalent of more than a year's sunshine in a second are predicted to have occurred about every 85 million years over the last 3 800 Ma. Powers amounting to instantaneous delivery of the entire nuclear arsenal should have been much more common. A grand total of about ten thousand suggests an average 'waiting time' of about 400 thousand years – a possible ten such impacts while humanity evolved.
How do powers associated with impacts compare with those involved in the normal course of geological processes? The energy available annually from the Earth's internal heat production is equivalent to around 105 megatonnes of TNT, of which only one hundred thousandth is released by earthquakes. Most emerges quietly as heat conducted through the crust or by volcanism on the sea floor. Solar energy flux is very much bigger, but it is distributed over the entire surface and among a large number of ways of doing work. Any single Earth-generated catastrophe has tight limits on the energy involved. Assuming for the moment that it was impacts that triggered mass extinctions, how to judge the size involved in making a dent in the biosphere that we can pick up in the fossil record? Building up a 'kill curve' for impacts is quite simple.
Life has been waiting 3 800 Ma for Armageddon and the geological record of life together with genetic relatedness between all living organisms is good evidence that it hasn't happened. Chances are that some terrestrial life survived one impact that made a hole 1300 km across. That represents the minimum power that might extinguish all life. Geophysical exploration for oil in the North Atlantic off Nova Scotia revealed anomalies with a circular structure, about 45 km wide. Drilling showed it to contain evidence for a major impact around 50 Ma ago. It also provided a complete fossil record bracketing the time of the impact, in which palaeontologists found no sign of significant extinction among marine organisms. The culprit seems to have been a cometary nucleus about 3 km across. This is the largest dated impact for which no tangible effect on life as a whole can be assumed. Its power is the largest from which life can recover unscathed in terms of species diversity. The Chicxulub crater, 180 km across is implicated in the demise of 40% of all animal genera at the K-Pg boundary. That gives three points from which you can easily plot a 'kill curve' for impacts, but one with a great deal of leeway in its shape. Chapter 10 described in some detail the various phenomena that large projectiles probably set in motion as they pass through the atmosphere and strike rock or sea.
For the K-Pg boundary event masses of evidence indicate that it coincided with an asteroid strike, yet, more than 3 decades after Luis Alvarez discovered the first evidence with that connotation, many experts still doubt such a Nemesis or would like to see it refuted. They do not deny an impact, but suggest that the connection was a coincidence. They focus their doubts on several features of the fossil record: two groups of molluscs disappeared more than a million years before the boundary, microfossil extinctions began about 100 ka earlier, and the famous dinosaurs appear not to have bitten the dust suddenly. Fossil evidence appeals to processes that lasted for much longer than the few seconds of an asteroid impact.
The Cretaceous closed with a protracted catastrophe of another kind. During about a million years that spans the K-Pg boundary hot-spot magmatism beneath what is now north-west India poured out 1.5 million cubic kilometres of basaltic lavas to build the Deccan Traps. Scaling up the effects of observed basalt outpourings, volcanologists estimate that over this period 10 trillion tons of SO2 and about the same amount of CO2 belched into the atmosphere. While the greenhouse effect of the CO2 was in operation, the acid rain from sulfur gases would have posed a tremendous stress on most life forms, particularly in the upper oceans. Such volcanism also provides another plausible terrestrial explanation for the iridium anomaly itself. Formed from a superplume rising from the core-mantle boundary, the magmas may have carried noble metals from the core, where they are thought to be much more abundant than in the mantle itself. Recent finds of economic platinum and gold deposits associated with flood basalts lends some support to this notion.
An internal model for the K-Pg event and other mass extinctions involves pulsation in the heat-loss mechanisms within the Earth that probably underlies the broad periodicity of many large-scale phenomena. We can envisage many things linking to jumps in the rate and position at which internal heat is released – continental break-up, flood volcanism, subduction and mountain building, changing sea level, climatic change due to release and absorption of CO2, and changes in the bulk composition of the oceans. Several possibilities for a mechanism present themselves. Maybe it has something to do with changes in the dynamics linking the behaviour of the core to that of the mantle. Changes in the Earth's geomagnetic field show a period around 30 Ma, and this field is generated by electrical and circulation processes in the fluid outer core. Rising plumes in the mantle, responsible for the hot spots that trigger flood volcanism and sometimes continental break up, seem to rise from the core-mantle boundary. The Earth's interior transfers heat by convection, whose overturn may have several modes that 'flip' from one to the other. Mathematicians studying convection through computer modelling have hinted at chaotic behaviour that could show periodicity. The processes whereby sea floor spreads and oceanic lithosphere subducts may have boundary conditions reached in more or less fixed times. For instance, subducting lithosphere may 'bottom out' at the base of the asthenosphere, so 'clogging-up' the system, or lumps may fall off the descending slab due to density changes. Plates themselves may have a limiting size, beyond which they become unstable.
There are many factors that conspire to blur the debates surrounding the K-Pg boundary event. For a start, different times present different numbers of localities to the scientists who collect fossils. Late-Cretaceous times are short on continuous sequences for some of the bigger animals. They were far better for tiny, rapidly evolving creatures crammed into deep-ocean cores, but their miniscule size has its negative side, as too the thinness of the representative layers. Any later animal grubbing in the mud might transport them to higher, younger layers. Re-enter the statistician. The blur on all the fossil records permits both catastrophic and gradualistic models; oh dear! There is a way to resolve this impasse.
Ken Hsu, formerly of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, together with others, picked out different types of planktonic shell from ocean cores that straddle the K-Pg boundary; those of deep water forms and those which lived in the upper ocean. They measured the carbon isotopes in the shell carbonate that the organisms extracted from the water in which they lived. Today, shallow water is rich in 13C because the lighter isotope (12C) is taken up during photosynthesis. The position is reversed in deep water, where dead organic matter enters solution due to decay. There is a normal gradient in carbon-isotope composition from surface to ocean floor, and this shows up in the vast majority of deep-ocean sediment layers. At the K-Pg boundary the gradient switches dramatically, its reverse persisting in some sections for around 500 ka. The switch took less than a thousand years. Hsu and his colleagues saw exactly the same switch in data from modern Alpine lakes, where it forms with the annual winter die-off of minute photosynthetic plants. From the global switch in the oceans at the K-Pg boundary they concluded a catastrophic collapse of this primary biological activity on which all other life depends. To Hsu, the seas then were almost lifeless. He calls such sterile conditions Strangelove oceans after the eponymous, mad advocate of mutually-assured destruction by nuclear holocaust. The method is almost independent of the fossil record, relying only on separating material according to the depth at which it lived and an assumption of continuous deposition on the ocean floor. It is powerful support for a catastrophe, however it was induced, and that it took less than a thousandth of the time during which the Deccan Traps poured out. The Chicxulub impact coincided with ongoing Deccan volcanism; a troublesome time.
Some participants in K-Pg debates, and a great many onlookers, preferred to grind neither axe, favouring inhospitable conditions from the combined effects of both volcanism and giant impact. Chicxulub was perhaps the last straw after several hundred thousand years of Deccan basalt floods. But more detailed and accurate work continues to be done on what remains about the most popular single topic in the Earth sciences. However, the most recent study on the K-Pg by Paul Renne of the University of California-Berkeley deepens, and perhaps muddies, the waters further. It centres on the most accurate dating yet of Deccan basalts, which produced a previously unachievable precision of ±0.1 Ma for times between 65.5 to 66.5 Ma, which nicely bracket the K/Pg boundary age of 66.04±0.04 Ma. Moreover, the study by Renne and colleagues involves a large number of basalt samples. Combined with estimates of the volumes of basalt erupted from flow to flow, they discovered that the rate of magma effusion doubled immediately after the time of the K-Pg event. Does that imply that the Chicxulub impact somehow affected the magma production from the mantle plume beneath the Deccan? It had been suggested early in the debate – and widely rejected – that the roughly antipodean position of the lava field relative to that of Chicxulub may indicate that the huge seismicity from the impact triggered Deccan magma production. Renne and colleagues think that idea deserves another look, at least at the possibility of some linked effect of impacts on magmatism. Perhaps the magma chamber was somehow enlarged by increased global seismicity; other chambers could have been added; magma might have been 'pumped' out more efficiently, or a combination of such effects. Chicxulub's collision was equivalent to an earthquake of Magnitude 12.4, a thousand times more powerful than the largest recorded earthquake with tectonic causes. Even a small proportion of that power transmitted through the Earth and its core could have influenced processes at the antipode.
That may seem a weird concept, and indeed it is hard to grasp because of its magnitude. However, the imagination of geoscientists sometimes beggars belief. In 2004 some at the Geomar Institute of the University of Kiel in Germany, led by Jason Phipps Morgan (now at Royal Holloway University of London), stoked up the controversy by taking a very different view of events. Magma from a mantle plume has to penetrate the overlying lithosphere. Where this is old and thick, as beneath ancient continental cratons such as the Indian subcontinent, it may act like the lid on a pressure cooker. During development of flood volcanism gas pressure might build up to levels sufficient to breach explosively to the surface, when monstrous crustal collapse above the plume head might propagate upwards at hypersonic speeds firing huge masses of lithosphere across the Earth. On re-entry the largest blocks would create craters; the power of the process would create melts, shock the ejecta and create fullerenes and microdiamonds from carbonaceous rock; having begun ascent at the core-mantle boundary the plume itself could release the noble metals that first attracted the Alvarez's attention. The authors dubbed such hypothetical events 'Verneshots' after the founder of science fiction, Jules Verne. In his 1865 book De la terre a' la lune (From the Earth to the Moon) Impey Barbicane, president of the Baltimore Gun Club, creates a huge cannon that fires a capsule containing three adventurers to the Moon. Interestingly, seismic surveys of the Deccan Traps and other flood basalt provinces in Siberia and Yemen show circular fracture systems in the crust beneath, similar to those formed when large volcanoes collapse after large eruptions, but bigger.
The largest documented mass extinction that brought an end to the Permian Period and Palaeozoic Era, although awesome, presents a simpler picture; despite a global search for a contemporary crater, it has no association with evidence of asteroid or comet impact..
The K-Pg mass extinction was but a sideshow by comparison with the devastation that ended the Palaeozoic Era 251 Ma ago. At the time of the Permo-Triassic (P-Tr) boundary life in the sea was all but snuffed out. As many as 95% of all species of marine organisms met their end. So too did many continental vertebrate groups, both amphibian and reptilian; insects were decimated (for the only time since they first appeared); most of the plants that formed the Carboniferous and Permian coal swamps vanished from the record – there are coals from the late Permian but not the early Triassic.
Fruitful research at the K-Pg boundary fuelled analysis of the 190 Ma older event. Despite the search, few chemical pointers to either asteroid or comet impact have shown themselves. Although a large comet would deliver no concentrated noble metals, it would certainly excavate masses of shocked rock and rain droplets of melt across the planet. Shocked grains have been found at the boundary only in Antarctica and SE Australia. But there is a flood-basalt province that brackets the P-Tr boundary. The Siberian Traps represent the largest extrusion of magma in the Phanerozoic, about 2 million cubic kilometres.
The key information for climate change during the Mesozoic Era lies in the muddy sediments of the ocean floors. But, unfortunately, there is no sign of Triassic, let along Permian sediments on modern ocean floors: all have been subducted. However, ocean sediments are sometimes incorporated onto continents – they accompany sheets of oceanic lithosphere thrust upwards instead of down at destructive plate margins. Japan has such an ophiolite with a 50 Ma long sequence of deep-water sediments that spans the critical time across the Permian-Triassic boundary.
The Japanese Permian to Triassic rocks are dominantly mudrocks, now flint-like through lithification. They accumulated from a rain of tiny plankton that secrete shells of silica. They are also bright red, and that is interesting. The colour is due to ferric iron, and indicates that for most of the time deep ocean water was thoroughly oxygenated. At the Permian-Triassic boundary the sediments are very different. Spanning a 20 Ma period they are not red at all, but grey to black, indicating too little oxygen for the conversion of ferrous to ferric iron. This colour change starts at 260 Ma and reverts back to brick red at 240 Ma. Straddling the P-Tr boundary are clays with low fossil contents, and exactly at the boundary is a jet black, hydrocarbon-rich mud that represents perhaps 4 Ma of deposition. Deep ocean waters were devoid of oxygen. Such anoxic hydrocarbon-rich muds occur in all marine sequences of this age, and formed important sources for petroleum reserves when their organic content was 'cracked' by later burial and heating. Carbon isotope studies from one of these oil-prone units in Canada shows the sudden gross shift in the proportions of light and heavy carbon so characteristic of Hsu's Strangelove oceans. At the Permian-Triassic boundary, almost everything living in the open ocean died from top to bottom. The intricate Japanese section shows that its decline started long before, in fact 10 Ma earlier, and this coincides with the dwindling of shallow-water biodiversity elsewhere. Yet the final extinction was sudden, its carbon-isotope signature occupying less than 10 cm in the Canadian section. Assuming a sedimentation rate there of between 40 and 80 m per Ma gives a time of the order of 1000 years; a catastrophe. But rather than coming unannounced, life-threatening conditions had been brewing for up to 10 Ma.
Modelling the effects of ocean anoxia on the oxygen content of the late-Permian atmosphere suggests a fall from around 30 to 16 %. From conditions when it would have as easy to breathe at 6000 metres as it is at sea level today, if fell at Permian sea level to the modern equivalent of an altitude of 2700 m, at which the first symptoms of altitude sickness begin. All land animals that had evolved in the Carboniferous to Permian world had done so when oxygen was at a high concentration. Surviving the late Permian global anoxia would have been possible only in a much reduced, low-altitude land area. Several lines of evidence point to growing CO2 levels in the Permian atmosphere, modelling of which suggests a late-Permian world with mean global surface temperature 8° C higher than now.
Many threats related to hypoxia and anoxia, and to extreme global warming were around during the late Permian. The anoxic ocean-bottom waters indicate that the ocean surrounding Pangaea ceased to circulate and transfer oxygen downwards for 20 Ma; high temperatures had increased overall salinity. Asphyxia is a candidate for long-term killing of marine life but another outcome of anoxic oceans is a switch in the biological mechanism of decay that has a directly toxic product. On the beds of modern anoxic seas, such as the Black Sea, much decay is carried out by bacteria that exploit the energy potential of sulfate to sulfide reduction, the waste product of which is hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas. Disastrous results are warded off in modern anoxic seas by sulfide-oxidising bacteria in surface waters. But production of H2S on oceanic scales when surface waters were warm and less oxygen-absorbing, at a time of falling atmospheric oxygen is a recipe for disaster from the build-up of acid surface waters and toxic gas escapes to the atmosphere.
While chemical stresses were building up sea level fell to an all-time Phanerozoic low. Since continental ice sheets had long disappeared from Pangaea, the only likely agency is a decrease in sea-floor spreading so that cooling lithosphere sagged to increase ocean-basin volume by the late Permian. That implies a long-term slowing of heat loss from the mantle. But radioactivity continually produces heat. Conceivably, it built up deep down, until released by the superplume responsible for the 251 Ma old Siberian Traps. The volcanism coincided exactly with the final, sudden peak of extinctions after all the other longer-term negative changes for life during the Permian. Not only were the Siberian Traps by far the biggest effusion of basalt lava known from the geological record, with commensurate potential for CO2 and SO2 release, they were emplaced through a Carboniferous sedimentary basin rich in coal measures and oil shales, adding to their potential to drive up climatic warming. The older sedimentary basin is pocked by chimney-like structures signifying violent gas release through partly consolidated sediments. Astonishingly, electron microscopy has shown abundant fly ash in the silica-rich deep-marine cherts in Japan that record the carbon isotope signature of the P-Tr mass extinction; a sign of ignition and burning of coal.
In the absence of any plausible evidence for a major impact, and the wealth of data that indicate slowly deteriorating conditions for life and the coincidence of the Siberian Traps with the final throes of the Palaeozoic Fauna shows that the Earth is quite capable of almost sterilizing itself, with no outside help. Examination of Figure 19.2 shows that of the eight significant Mesozoic and Cenozoic extinctions only that at the end of the Cretaceous is associated with an impact crater wider than 30 km. On the other hand, as well as the P-Tr extinction, six coincide with flood basalt events. Whatever the other possible 'drivers' for downturns in diversity, major processes in the deep mantle 'have form' as police officers are prone to say. The end-Triassic member of the Big Five is associated with the start of rifting of South America from Africa and formation of the South Atlantic Ocean, and huge flood basalt piles of that age occur on both sides of the ocean. The mass extinction towards the end of the Devonian Period (Figure 19.1) is devoid of plausible evidence for an impact connection, but neither do truly massive flood basalts figure apart from a 320 thousand km2 area of basalts flows, again in Siberia (the end-Permian Siberian Traps outcrop over 7 million km2). The end-Devonian extinction has been attributed to the climatic influence of the colonisation of the continents by large, coal-forming plants. However, it is becoming apparent that the downturn in organisms involved as many as 10 small extinctions spread over ~20 Ma. If vegetation of the land surface was the driving process it is ironic that most of the genera that ceased to be were marine.
The first mass extinction recorded directly by the disappearance of fossil organisms took place around the Ordovician-Silurian boundary, and it has some differences from the other big ones. The first event (443 to 445 Ma) of a 'double-whammy' mainly affected free-swimming and planktonic organisms and those of shallow seas; near-surface dwellers such as graptolites and trilobites. The second, about a million years later in the earliest Silurian rocks, hit animals living at all depths in the oceans. Between them, the two events removed about 85% of marine species, close to the extinction level at the Permian-Triassic boundary. Neither impact nor flood basalts are implicated. The double extinctions followed major glaciation on Gondwana when the supercontinent lay over the South Pole, resulting in an 80 to 100 m fall in global sea level (Figure 5.5). Glacially-induced sea-level fall would have reduced the extent of shallow seas. Along with global cooling, that could explain the early demise of shallow water, free swimming animals. Yet thermohaline circulation by sinking of dense surface water to abyssal depths, would have provided oxygen to maintain and even increase life deep in the water column. In the absence of any other obvious mechanism, many palaeontologists look to a return to stagnancy and anoxia as glaciation waned, increasing the production of H2S gas by sulfate-sulfide reducing bacteria to result in the second phase of more universal extinction. Neither mechanism has the awesomeness of impacts and basalt floods, and perhaps in those times conditions were on a fine balance between favouring the metazoan animals of the seas and making life insupportable; an easily upset world. More in frustration than strict adherence to William of Ockham's law of parsimony (Ockham's razor: 'Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected') a small minority of scientists have appealed to a 'hypernova' close by in the Milky Way galaxy, which would have exposed the Earth to a gamma-ray burst. If that was the case, high-frequency electromagnetic radiation would have left no trace; the 'perfect extinction'?
Mass extinctions transformed the course of evolution, by leaving few types of organism alive and able to reproduce on land and in the sea. Survivors formed the ancestral stock from which animals and plants of later seas and continents evolved. The Japanese and Canadian sedimentary sequences at the P-Tr boundary show that the oceans at the start of the Mesozoic Era remained almost sterile for maybe a half million years. Nature abhors a vacuum of any sort, and all the vacant niches awaited occupants and competition among them. Evolutionary radiation following shocks to the biosphere forms the theme of the next chapter. Bear in mind that evolution following hard times involves adaptation of those organisms that survived. The traits that fortuitously helped their survival may play a role in later developments.
You may well have lain awake plagued by a nasty cough (or by someone else's coughing). We cannot help it; coughing is a reflex. Oddly, the cough impulse (and also swearing, biting and the kind of rage directed at the cause of sleeplessness) has a direct link with a part of the innermost brain crudely referred to as the reptilian complex. It has that name because its structure resembles that of the entire brain of reptiles. Neuroscientists consider the enclosing structures of mammalian brains to be later additions. It now seems clear that almost all living land vertebrates descend from very few primitive reptile species that survived the P-Tr mass extinction. During long sleepless nights comfort yourself with the thought that this blessed coughing might be the only reason that your far distant ancestor came through the Permian wasteland made acrid by basalt floods in Siberia.
Check out Further Reading for Part VI to see source material and links to articles
If you enjoyed reading this chapter online and want to learn more, Stepping Stones is available to download as an eBook
Tags Adaptive radiation, Diversity of life, End-Permian event, Flood basalt events, Impacts, K-Pg event, K-T event, Mass extinctions
Previous Chapter 18 Life becomes complicated
Next Chapter 20 Reaching for new horizons


The following year Jada returned as an MBV as a student leader, or "CEO". She recalled the challenges presented with leading students who were older than her, as well as students who were learning English. "This was the first time I realized I could be a leader," she explains, "I had to adapt and learn new skills about how to communicate and be assertive." Over the course of camp, Jada's team transformed into a cohesive, award-winning unit under her leadership, "It was an incredible experience to work together and find different ways to create community," she reflects.
Jada's drive is evident in her educational and career plans, and she begins classes at Harvard University in the fall, with plans to study Economics and Computer Science. She attributes MBV as a springboard for her interest in the world of economics, but as she looks to the future, she notes, "communicating with confidence and having an open-mind," were her biggest takeaways from BestPrep's programs.
Jada's confidence and energy have made her an incredible asset to BestPrep's team. She has served as a two-time CEO at MBV, shared her experiences with our Board of Directors, volunteered at our Annual Luncheon, and supported our staff as an intern this summer. Our team could not be more thrilled to have had the chance to work alongside her and watch her personal growth.


text:
Ricciardo 'upset' at missing Brazil podium despite trademark recovery drive
WATCH: Red Bull break pit stop world record at Silverstone
Say What? The best team radio from Great Britain
Raikkonen realistic on Alfa progress despite third straight points finish
McLaren pace was 'quite poor' against midfield rivals, says Norris
Hulkenberg frustrated that Renault 'made life difficult for themselves' at Silverstone
Daniel Ricciardo just can't catch a break at the moment. Ahead of Brazil, he had suffered two successive mechanically-related DNFs, and was then hit with a five-place grid penalty for taking on fresh power-unit elements, leaving his Red Bull down in 11th for the start at Interlagos. That meant a trademark recovery drive was required to stand any chance of a podium finish – and although he fought his way through the field in some style, he came up just short…
The previous two rounds in the United States and Mexico proved to be heartbreaking for Renault-bound Ricciardo - who is parting ways with Red Bull at the end of the season, 10 years after joining their Junior Team - but before those Grands Prix, the Australian produced classic fightbacks in Russia – where he climbed up 12 spots – and Japan, where he made up 11 places.
He repeated those exploits on Sunday, battling his way through the pack and performing superb passes on Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel and Mercedes' Valtteri Bottas to move into the top four. But then he encountered a problem in Kimi Raikkonen, and despite boasting a stronger-than-expected package, he was unable to get ahead of the Prancing Horse.
And while Ricciardo was pleased to have brought his RB14 home in one piece on Sunday, having suffered seven mechanically-related retirements already this season, he couldn't help but feel 'upset' after missing out on a much-craved top-three finish.
"It was fun, for sure, he said. "I don't want this to be another negative interview, it won't be - I'll finish on a positive. But if I'm honest, as soon as I crossed the line I was actually quite upset because the podium was so close and we had the pace.
"I don't have any regrets. I don't feel I lost the podium or the team lost it for me – we did everything we could. I'm not upset about that. I feel every time we start out of position or near the back, we have a fast car.
RICCIARDO: Car was better than P4
"So I guess it's probably a bit of built-up frustration. The race was fun. The battles with Seb and Valtteri, I enjoyed them all. We surprisingly had a very fast car today.
"I know we were better than fourth but anyway, I have one more chance with the team to get up there. Abu Dhabi – let's give it our best."
Red Bull were forced to change the turbocharger on Ricciardo's car ahead of Friday practice in Brazil, with Team Principal Christian Horner revealing that it was damaged when a marshal sprayed the fire extinguisher on the rear of the car following his retirement in Mexico.
And although Ricciardo is well aware that things are not going his way recently, he's looking to finish on a high at the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in two weeks' time.
He added: "No there isn't (anything I can do). I mean I saw the replay, they showed it on Friday I think just to rub salt in my wounds.
"There was another stat that I have had more DNFs this year than Lewis (Hamilton) has had in the last five years or something - they're really throwing some uppercuts at me.
"I saw the replay and I thought it was just smoke but there was a moment when the flames was there. I'm not going to get angry at the marshal for doing that.
"Their job is to put a fire out if they see one. Again it's a bit like today, I'm not angry at anyone – I just wish it would run perfect. I'll keep trying."
What To Watch For in the 2019 British Grand Prix
British Grand Prix: Race Stats and Facts
What the teams said - Race day in Great Britain
Ricciardo happy to 'put smiles back on faces' as Renault get both cars into Q3