text:
Q: Replace "inline style" with a "css class" depending by value of its inline style My site has CMS, so users can directly insert texts and images. CMS ui allows to float left/right images, applying an inline style to IMG tags.
<img src='...' style='float:left'>

I would like to detect when an IMG has a float:left/right style and replace it with a class in order to declare more properties for it like the following example:
.floated-left
{
  float:left;
  margin-right:20px;
  border-left:solid 5px red;
  ....
}

I thought about something like this:
    if ( $("article").find('img').css('float') == 'left')
    {
       this.addClass('floated-left');
    }

But seems that "if clause" never be true. (I know that probably also this.addClass() is wrong, but neither alert() is never fired at the moment)
Can you help me?

A: Use attr instead of css for selecting inline styled objects:
$('article img').each(function() {
   if ( $(this).attr('style') == 'float:left') {

      $(this).removeAttr('style').addClass('floated-left');
   }
});

if some of object's style is different, try this way:
$('article img').each(function() {
   if ( $(this).attr('style').indexOf('float:left') > -1 ) {

      var targetedStyle = $(this).attr('style').replace('float:left','');
      $(this).attr('style',targetedStyle).addClass('floated-left');
   }
});

A: In order to apply more declarations, you could simply achieve that by pure CSS:
img[style*="float:left"],
img[style*="float: left"] {
    margin-right : 20px;
    border-left  : solid 5px red;
}

You could play with CSS attribute selectors to select the valid image/element.


To achieve correctness of code, you must first realize that your code is incorrect.
Too many times I've reviewed code that was written with only the obvious cases in mind. A small step towards writing better code is to think to yourself during (and even before!) coding: "what if?".
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text:
Home > The Netherlands > Regulation and compliance > ESMA consults on proposed implementing measures for Benchmarks Regulation
ESMA consults on proposed implementing measures for Benchmarks Regulation
By Hannah Meakin (UK) and Conor Foley (UK) on May 31, 2016 Posted in Italy, Regulation and compliance, Regulation and compliance, Regulation and compliance, The Netherlands, United Kingdom
On 17 May 2016, the Council of the EU formally adopted the draft Regulation on indices used as benchmarks in financial instruments and financial contracts or to measure the performance of investment funds (Benchmarks Regulation). Our blog can be found here.
On 15 February 2016, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published a Discussion Paper on the Benchmarks Regulation which included its policy orientations and initial proposals both for the technical advice to the Commission and the draft technical standards under the Benchmarks Regulation. Our blog can be found here.
ESMA has now published a consultation paper which follows up on the earlier Discussion Paper with respect to its technical advice to the Commission. The consultation paper has five chapters, dedicated to one of the five areas for which the Commission requested technical advice from ESMA, namely:
definition of benchmarks;
measurement of the use of critical and significant benchmarks;
criteria for the identification of critical benchmarks;
endorsement of a benchmark / family of benchmarks provided in a third country; and
transitional provisions.
Each chapter summarises the relevant provisions and their objectives, provides an explanation of the related policy issues and references to the relevant responses received to the discussion paper. Each chapter also includes draft text of ESMA's technical advice.
The deadline for comments on the consultation paper is 30 June 2016. ESMA will use the feedback received to finalise its technical advice in time for the deadline defined within the mandate received by the Commission, i.e. four months after the entry into force of the Benchmarks Regulation. The Benchmarks Regulation is expected to enter into force in June 2016, and therefore the final report containing the final technical advice is planned to be submitted to the Commission in October 2016.
A second consultation paper dedicated to the draft technical standards under the Benchmarks Regulation is planned to be published by ESMA in the second half of 2016.
View ESMA consults on proposed implementing measures for Benchmarks Regulation, 27 May 2016

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Node.js intrigued me and I wanted to hack with Node.js & CouchDB. I read about Node.js and wanted to install it on my Mac. Here is the guide to install Node.js quickly on Os X.
1. If you are running Snow Leopard then the process is simple. Download the latest package from http://sites.google.com/site/nodejsmacosx/ and install it. Done!!
This problem is solved by upgrading OpenSSL.


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We cannot but think the touching case of Henry Halsall an instance of this, though it does not strike Mr. Keble in that light, who places all the blame on the conduct of the civil authorities. This young soldier, an officer of the Governor's guard, waited upon his clergyman and confessed voluntarily to an undue familiarity with the Governor's housekeeper. The Bishop ordered him to be confined seven days in St. Germain's prison and to perform three Sundays penance; all which was duly done and certified. The Governor then resolved that it was an offence against martial law for Halsall, as one of the garrison, to submit to the censures of an Ecclesiastical Court without his leave-which it does not appear was ever obtained—and he was accordingly tried before a jury, found guilty of that offence, and sentenced to be imprisoned again, and afterwards to run the gauntlet through the garrison, (though that part of the punishment was remitted), and to be drummed out of it, his hat and shoes off. In the following September he died from a fever contracted in the gaol, aggravated, there is little doubt, by the humiliation he had undergone.
Now nothing could be sadder than all this; but it appears to us rather unfair to saddle the whole odium arising from it upon the punishment ordered by the Governor. Mr. Keble does not pretend that the allegation of a breach of martial law was false, and if not false the Bishop must have been supposed to know the law, and to have known also that he was lending himself to such a breach by punishing Halsall as he did. Was it, then, a judicious exercise of his power (we go no further than to quarrel with his judgment), even allowing him not to have strained the law, to subject Halsall, to an imprisonment which involved a violation of his military duties? It seems reasonable enough that a voluntary withdrawal from those duties, or (which is much the same) a voluntary act which was pretty sure to result, and did result, in a withdrawal from them, for seven days-being virtually a desertion-should constitute a military offence, in which case the Governor would have no option but to animadvert upon it.
On the other hand, in a case, in which à priori we should have expected the Bishop, both from his own Church views, and also from the intrinsic merits, to have upheld the ancient discipline and resisted any attempt to undermine it, he surprises us by the ease with which he gave way. And this was on no less an important subject than the dissolubility of marriage. We refer to Hampton's case. This man's wife had been transported for felony, and had sworn never voluntarily to return to the Island without the Lord's permission, although the sentence seems to have been only
one of transportation to Jamaica for seven years; whereupon the husband wishing to marry again, coolly petitions the Bishop to give him leave to do so, and the Bishop (we must say, still more coolly) grants him the permission! Mr. Keble evidently feels oppressed by this decision, and seeks to get rid of it (though not in the way we should have thought the most effective and creditable to the Bishop, namely, by admitting that it was an indiscretion) by supposing the story to be too unlikely to be true; and that the permission attributed to the Bishop must have been a forgery. Yet he takes no exception to the evidence on which it rests; nor does he allege any reason for considering it to be spurious except its improbability. It appears as well authenticated as any other case. Hampton's petition is taken from the Episcopal Registry, so there can be no doubt about it; while the Bishop's answer, though not stated to be taken from the records of any court, must be presumed to be as authentic as any other of his MSS. which are printed in the pages of Mr. Keble. The old English law, it is true, had always attributed civil death to a man banished for life, or who went into a monastery and became a monk professed; and though this disability gradually was extended at least as to general civil contracts-to banishment for a term of years certain, we can remember no instance in which it was held to reach the case of marriage: still less any in which an ecclesiastical court would have pronounced a dissolution a vinculo matrimonii upon it. Suppose, in the present case, the woman had returned to the Island with or even without the lord's permission, what would have been the result? Her disability having ended for all other purposes and in all other respects, was it to continue for the purpose of absolving her from the marriage tie alone? Were life-long obligations to be superseded by a temporary incapacity which had ended? If a sentence of seven years' transportation (which a pardon might have put an end to at any moment) dissolved the tie, why not two years? In short the question was full of anomalies, when closely considered, and there was no end to the difficulties, not to say absurdities, to which Wilson's doctrine might have led.
To return, however, to Halsall's case. This case only formed. part of a system which Bishop Wilson determined to carry out as a whole, and therefore it may be said that he could not, in justice to others or in consistency with himself, have acted otherwise than he did. It is necessary, therefore, to look at that system a little more closely. Great allowance, it must be confessed, should be
made for him in what his enemies called his excesses of church discipline. The Bishop of Man had, as we have seen, peculiar privileges. He had a right to summon a yearly convocation of his clergy, without licence from the Crown, and to pass. laws on spiritual matters, which, with the assent of the Tynwald Court, bound the whole island. He presided over the oldest fixed bishopric of the British nation, and a national church, of which Lord Chancellor King had said that. if the ancient discipline of the Church were lost, it would be found in all its purity in the Isle of Man.' In every parish church there was a throne for him. Above all, he was supported by the attachment, and what Mr. Keble considers the faith, of a people, whom indeed the Reformation had reached, but reached later, and leavened with less of visible change, than any other part of Great Britain. Such was the strength of the Bishop's position, and such the advantages with which he went forth to his mission. And yet, after making full allowance for all this, what man with an ordinary knowledge of lifewe had almost said what man of common sense, who looked only to a reasonable chance of obtaining his object-would have dealt with the people committed to his charge in such a manner? Granting his sole end to have been the glory of God, the advancement of his Church, and the salvation of the sinner-to force the discipline of the apostolic age upon the libertines and freethinkers of the seventeenth century was surely a Quixotic enterprise, and only escaped instantaneous discomfiture because practised on a simple and ignorant people in a country which few comparatively cared for or thought about. Imagine the Bishop of London dressing up penitents in white sheets and sending them the round of the City churches, attempting to put down the 'great social evil' by dragging offenders up and down the Thames at the boat's tail,' or putting an iron bit into the mouth of a West-End gossip or a Billingsgate scold! Nor can we find that the régime was justified by the result. Everywhere licentiousness was rampant; purity of morals made no progress; clerical as well as lay delinquencies multiplied, and at the close of the Bishop's long reign appear to have abounded as much as at its commencement; for the discipline ceased, not because it had done its work, but because there was no one to carry it on.
The Ecclesiastical laws of the island at the time of which we write, which laws were, of course, the bounds of Wilson's authority, consisted (1) Of 145 'breast laws,' i. e. rules of the Ecclesiastical Courts of the island, which had originally rested in tradition or custom only, and the application of which had
resided
resided in the 'breast' of the Judge, in the same way as our own Equity Law, before the tyranny of precedents had reached its present formidable height, was said to depend on the conscience of the Chancellor and the length of his foot. These 'breast laws had, however, been fixed and made certain by being reduced into writing under the reigns of Sir John Stanley and the Great Earl. They related principally to church dues, wills, and administrations, church officers, criminal matters, prerogative, ritual, and marriage, and seem to have stood in the same relation to the general body of Manx Church Law that the unwritten immemorial usage of our Anglo-Saxon and Norman ancestors in ecclesiastical affairs, i. e. our common Ecclesiastical Law, stands in to the body of our own Ecclesiastical Laws. (2.) All the local canons passed in diocesan synods of the island before the Reformation, which were not repugnant to it; to which must be added Dr. Wilson's own Ecclesiastical Constitutions of 1703, which related principally to Confirmation,' the Holy Communion, schools, &c. It should be observed that the Act of Uniformity, and therefore our English Prayer-book, does not bind Man, which was not named in it, and the Bishop has, therefore, power of appointing any occasional prayers. The Manx Church, however, adopted our English liturgy, the only alteration being the very appropriate one for a seafaring population to make, namely, the addition of a suffrage to the Litany, That it may please Thee to restore and continue to us the blessings of the sea, so as in due time we may enjoy them;' and they have always adopted the offertory system. It seems also the better opinion that the canons of 1603 did not bind Man: for they were passed only in a convocation of the province of Canterbury, and did not bind York, of which Man was made a suffragan in the reign of Henry VIII. But at all events they did not bind the laity of Man.
Under the shelter of the above law and peculiar privileges, Dr. Wilson soon proceeded to launch the great weapons to which he trusted for working the reformation of offenders, Excommunication and Penance.
Hendricks' case formed such an important passage in the Bishop's life, and involved principles of ecclesiastical and civil polity so important to the island, that we must do more than refer to it. Mary, wife of John Hendricks of Douglas, was prosecuted at the Chapter Court for adultery with Isaac Allgood, and sentenced to penance in the usual way. Being in contempt of court' for disobeying the sentence, she was, after various admonitions and cautions, excommunicated by the Bishop; and, according to custom, where the party remained obstinate a certain time after excommunication, she was ordered to be committed
to Peel Castle. Of this there was nothing to complain against him; an ancient ordinance, still in force, had said, 'When any is disobedient to the Sumner and Ordinary, then the Ordinary hath used to send for aid to the constable of the castle or of the Peele, who presently ought to send a soldier to bring such offender to the Bishop his prison-and the same soldier to have for his pains of every such offender at the discretion of the Ordinary. However, she proved restive and appealed to the lord of the Isle, and the bishop being cited to appear in such appeal in London, refused to do so on the ground that the appeal lay not to Lord Derby, but to the Metropolitan See of York, and he accordingly was fined for his non-appearance, and thus the question was distinctly raised whether the civil power had appellate jurisdiction in questions of ecclesiastical cognizance. The point, however, was not judicially decided, for the Earl gave way, and the fine was remitted. There was an Act 33 Henry VIII., c. 21, which appeared to be express upon the point, for it had annexed the diocese of Man to York instead of Canterbury, to every effect and purpose according to the ecclesiastical law of this realm in all points as Chester was:' and therefore, it was successfully pressed by the Bishop, it must have been intended to give an appellate jurisdiction to York from the Insular Ecclesiastical Court. Yet even this was met on the Earl's part-for what point of law do not legal doctors find conflicting authorities!-by a clerical law within the Isle, and the opinion of the law officers upon it, that 'any inhabitant finding himself aggrieved by any censure or proceeding in the Spiritual Court may appeal unto the Lord or his Staff of Government (i. e., the governor and council), for it is a prerogative: upon which appeals the temporal may prohibit the spiritual officers from all further proceedings and censures until a different tryal be had.' To this, however, it was open to the Bishop to rejoin, that the clerical law, even though it had all the authority which the Insular Parliament could give it, could not supersede the prior act of the Imperial Parliament which had expressly concerned Man, and which, having carried and united it to York, carried with it also the right which another Act, 25 Henry VIII., had given to all Bishops' Courts, and which it seems the better opinion the common ecclesiastical law of the land would, without any statutory enactment, have given to them, namely, an appeal to the Metropolitan.
So much for Excommunication. Dr. Wilson's other arm of the Church was Penance. To stand barelegged and bareheaded in each of the churches during divine service on Sundays, and at


2. according to led display device classification LED Digital Display: 7 segment display devices for the digital control code, suitable for production of the clock screen, the interest rate screens, showing the number of electronic display. LED dot-matrix graphic display: display device is arranged by a number of uniform composition of the dot-matrix LED stadium display modules, suitable for broadcast text, image information. LED video display: LED stadium display devices are composed of many light-emitting diodes that can display video, animation and other video files.
3. by using the occasion categories Indoor LE Display: LED spots smaller, general Φ3mm - Φ8mm, shows the general area of a few to more than ten square meters. Outdoor Display: dozens of square meters in size to several hundred square meters, high brightness, can work in the sun, with wind, rain, water resistant.
5. Display a static, horizontal scroll, vertical scroll and flip display. One block module control drive 12 (up to control 24) 8X8 Dot Matrix, a total of 16X48 dot matrix (or 32X48 dot matrix), is a single block of MAX7219 (or PS7219, HD7279, ZLG7289 and 8279, and the like LED display driver module) 12 times (or 24 times)! Can use "cascade" approach the composition of any dot matrix large display. Effects, good power consumption, and the MAX7219 circuit than the use of lower cost.


This ancient monastery near Zvenigorod has served as a place of pilgrimage for centuries.
The town of Zvenigorod, some 19 miles due west of Moscow, is one of the area's most picturesque areas. In summer or winter, its location on high bluffs overlooking the winding Moscow River provides rare vistas of an untouched landscape. And at the center of this hilly terrain is the St. Savva-Storozhevsky Monastery.
Although the earliest written reference to Zvenigorod does not occur until 1339, it is possible that a settlement existed there as early as the reign of Yury Dolgoruky (1090s-1157), who is considered Moscow's founding prince.
Indeed, the site provided a clear view against any approach from the west. Its name derives from the words for fortified point (gorod) and "to ring," as in an alarm bell.
During the 14th and 15th centuries, Zvenigorod served as the center of a small principality subordinate to the Grand Prince of Moscow. At the turn of the 15th century, the town was ruled by Prince Yury Dmitrievich (1374-1434), son of Moscow's renowned Prince Dmitry Donskoi.
In the late 1390s, Prince Yury gave his support to the monk Savva to establish a monastery on a small hill known as "Storozha," meaning "guard," or lookout. Savva, who died in 1407, was a disciple of the great founder of Muscovite monasticism, St. Sergius of Radonezh. Both monks served as spiritual advisors to Moscow's rulers. Revered locally after his death, Savva was canonized by the Orthodox Church in 1547.
To get to The Savva-Storozhevsky Monastery take the local train from Moscow's Belorussky Railway Station to Zvenigorod and then take a local bus (№ 23 or № 51) and get off at the "Monastery" stop.
In 1398 work began on the monastery's first wooden structures, including the log Church of the Nativity of the Virgin, to which the monastery was formally dedicated. With the devoted support of Prince Yury, this humble structure was replaced around 1405 with a limestone church that is one of the oldest masonry buildings to survive from medieval Muscovy.
The Nativity Cathedral of the St. Savva Storozhevsky Monastery is modest in size when compared with the great Kremlin cathedrals, but its elevated single cupola, covered in gold leaf, still serves as a dominant landmark.
The west, south and north facades of the cathedral originally had portals set within painted ogival arches, but subsequent additions in the 17th century enclosed all but the north portal, which is still clearly visible. On the east is an apse of three parts, which contains the main altar.
The interior space is segmented by four piers beneath the cylinder, or "drum," that supports the cupola. The walls are covered with frescoes done in 1656 by a group of artists led by the master Stepan Ryazantsev.
During the same period, a large chapel dedicated to St. Savva was added along the south and west facades of the original structure. Its interior is covered with 19th-century wall paintings portraying the life of St. Savva. Over the east part of the chapel is a small but brilliant gold cupola. The chapel also contained the cathedral treasury.
Throughout the 15th and 16th centuries, the monastery was favored as a spiritual retreat by Muscovy's rulers, who paid homage to the relics of St. Savva. In the 1550s the young Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible) and his beloved first wife Anastasia frequently visited the monastery.
At the beginning of the 17the century, the Savva-Storozhevsky Monastery suffered from the chaos of the dynastic crisis known as the Time of Troubles. Occupied by various competing forces, the monastery began a slow recovery following the enthronement of Mikhail Romanov (1596-1645) and the establishment of the Romanov dynasty in 1613.
The monastery's fortunes dramatically improved in the 1650s with the largess of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (1629-1676). By the end of the century almost every part of the monastery, including its walls and towers, had been rebuilt in brick. Even the Nativity Cathedral underwent substantial modifications. The frescoes in the cathedral were also added during the expansion.
The most striking addition was the bell tower, which contained a church dedicated to St. Sergius of Radonezh. Erected in 1652-1654, the bell tower astonishes visitors with its panoply of spires, bright colors and arched openings for bells.
The largest of these bells — the 35-ton "Blagovest," or Good Tidings — was destroyed in the fall of 1941 during an evacuation attempt as German armies advanced toward Moscow; it has now been replaced. Attached to the bell tower on the east is the colorful Trinity Church (1651-52), located over what had been an early east entrance to the monastic compound.
Tsar Alexei was so captivated by the monastery that he made it a summer residence and built extensive chambers within the walls on the southwest side of the monastery. On the opposite side arose chambers for his wife and her attendants.
The monastery walls and towers were also expanded in an imposing display of royal power. Of special note is the Red Tower over the east gate, with a small church dedicated to Aleksii, Man of God, an ascetic who lived at the turn of the 5th century.
After the Soviets came to power, the monastery was closed and the relics of St. Savva were sequestered. In 1998, after complicated negotiations, the relics were returned to the monastery, which resumed its religious functions in 1995.
Less than a mile up the hill to the northeast of the Savva-Sotrozhevsky monastery is a separate compound known as the Skete (or "retreat") of St. Savva. Here, near a sacred spring, the venerable monk retired for prayer and meditation.
In the 1860s the site was enclosed within its own wall, with an attached church and bell tower dedicated to St. Savva. Slightly below the skete is a sacred spring.
In 2007, for the occasion of the 600th anniversary of the saint's death, the shrine was restored and the surrounding territory was embellished with floral paths. At the same time the sacred spring was covered with a capacious wooden chapel. Today, the St. Savva shrine has again become a pilgrimage site, nestled in the quiet refuge of the wooded hill.


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A look at the themes in the novel all quiet on the western front by erich maria remarque
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When The Mermaids Cry:
In Portuguese, Brasil; its citizens are Brasileiros or Brasileiras depending on gender. A year later, Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci sailed to Brazil on a voyage commissioned by the Portuguese crown and returned home with a cargo of hard, reddish wood. The wood was similar to an East Indian variety called pau brasil, which was then popular in Europe for making cabinets and violin bows.
Pau brasil brazilwoodthe first product to be exploited by the Portuguese in this new territory, is the origin of the country's name, Brazil. Because of its size and diversity, Brazil is one of the nations most deserving of the name "land of contrasts.
These divisions are used for administrative purposes such as the national Brazilian census and they roughly correspond to geographic, demographic, economic, and cultural variation within this sprawling nation.
The Northeast has the greatest proportion of people of African descent, the South and Southeast are home to the bulk of Brazilians of European and Japanese ancestry, while indigenous peoples live largely in the North and Central-West.
Still, regional migration and extensive miscegenation racial inter-breeding has made Brazil one of the most racially diverse nations on earth. Aside from the official fivefold regional division of Brazil, a simpler economic distinction is made between the poor, underdeveloped North and the wealthier, more industrialized South.
This distinction is sometimes referred to as the "two Brazils" or "Belindia," with the wealthy South being compared to Belgium and the poor North to India.
Urban, middle-class Brazilians are generally unfamiliar with the interior of their own country and misrepresent it as a region of unrelenting poverty and backwardness—a stark place of few creature comforts that is best avoided.
One consequence of this attitude is that middle-class and wealthy Brazilians are more likely to have visited Miami, Orlando, or New York than to have traveled to tourist destinations in their own country. One is a nordestino northeasterner or a mineiro native of the state of Minas Gerais or a carioca native of the city of Rio de Janeiro.
Nevertheless, Brazilians share a national culture—making Brazil a true case of unity in diversity. The legacy of the Portuguese in language, religion, and law serves to unify this vast land and its people.
Until the mid-twentieth century almost all Brazilians were— at least nominally—Catholic and today, virtually all speak Portuguese and identify with the dominant Brazilian culture. Brazil, the world's fifth largest country in geographical expanse and the Brazil largest nation in Latin America, comprises slightly under half the land mass of the South American continent and shares a border with every South American country except Chile and Ecuador.
It is the size of the continental United States excluding Alaska. Brazil's physical environment and climate vary greatly from the tropical North to the temperate South. The landscape is dominated by a central highland region known as the Planalto Central Brazilian Highlands, or Plateau of Brazil and by the vast AmazonBasin which occupies overone-third of the country.
The central plateau juts into theseaina few areas along Brazil's 4,mile-long, 7,kilometer-long coast, but it more often runs parallel to the ocean, creating a fertile, lowland area. Brazil is a land rich in natural resources, principally iron ore, bauxite, manganese, nickel, uranium, gold, gemstones, oil, and timber.
The physical environment in each region determined the types of crops grown or the resources extracted and this, in turn, influenced the populations that settled there and the social and economic systems that developed.
Brazil's economic history, in fact, has been marked by a succession of cycles, each one based on the exploitation of a single export commodity: Brazil's northeast coast with its rich soils became the most prosperous region early on as vast sugar plantations were created to supply a growing demand for that product in Europe.
Beginning in the seventeenth century, African slaves were imported to provide labor for these plantations. This is why even today the Northeast is the region with the strongest African influence. The Southeast also received large numbers of African slaves during the gold boom of the eighteenth century and the coffee boom beginning in the nineteenth century.
This region also attracted new immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and Japan who established family farms and eventually urban businesses.
In contrast, the South—with a climate unsuited to either coffee or sugar—became the destination of many German and Italian immigrants who raised cattle and grew a variety of crops.
The heritage of the Northeast coast, based on slave labor and a plantation economy, was distinct from that of the South and Southeast, where plantations existed along with small family farms.
Such historical differences partly account for contemporary contrasts between these regions. Another regional distinction, that between litoral coast and interior inlandarises from the fact that settlement in Brazil has always been concentrated near the coast.
To say that someone is from the "interior" usually implies that he or she is from a rural area, even though there are large cities located far from the coast.The abuse went on, day and night, as Sally bore a child, worked morning shifts at the local hospital and stayed up late pumping breast milk for her baby.
When The Mermaids Cry: The Great Plastic Tide. By Claire Le Guern. Last updated in March Introduction. The world population is living, working, vacationing, increasingly conglomerating along the coasts, and standing on the front row of the greatest, most unprecedented, plastic waste tide ever faced.
Health news with a focus on fitness news, wellness coverage and living a healthy Southern California life. largest nation in Latin America, comprises slightly under half the land mass of the South American continent and shares a border with every South American country except Chile and Ecuador.
I: The Great Plastic Tide: Magnitude, Scope, Extent
As we have seen in the United States in vibrant real time over the last several years, the media have become a battleground for the powerful to fight it out with the goal of altering public. Women's health encompasses physical, emotional, and social health associated with female reproductive and sexual development over the lifecycle, or any medical condition more common among women.
The sociology of women's health includes the study of gendered politics within medicine, medical training, doctor-patient interactions, self-care.
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text:
Paper Tiger: Irish Financial Fiction after the Bust
Matt Kavanagh October 11, 2013 | 8 books mentioned 2 10 min read
Situated on the periphery of both the eurozone and the London-New York axis of Anglo-American finance, Ireland offers an intriguing vantage point on the global slump. Not so long ago, buoyed by booming technology and pharmaceutical sectors and juiced by neoliberal reforms, the Irish economy was feted as the Celtic Tiger, but a massively overinflated commercial and housing market left it dangerously exposed when the 2008 financial crisis hit. What started out as a meltdown in the mortgage market soon turned into a sovereign debt crisis as the government made the disastrous guarantee to fully backstop insolvent banks, driving the country itself into bankruptcy and, ultimately, the fiscal embrace of the European Union. Ireland, not Greece, proved to be the opening act in a tragedy that is still unfolding as the bonds holding together the single currency in Europe continue to fray. For the Irish, the consequences, including the imposition of International Monetary Fund discipline and harsh austerity policies, have been dire. Starved for opportunity, many fled the country in search of a better life elsewhere. So many, in fact, that officials from the Central Statistics Office suggest that emigration levels are comparable to the Great Famine years of the mid-19th century. Once again, a great pestilence stalks the land, but this time the contagion is virtual.
Irish writers have begun to take stock of the post-Tiger years in ways that attest to the global nature of the bust. Two in particular, Aifric Campbell and Alan Glynn, offer compelling if wildly divergent responses to the challenge of representing in fictional terms what Campbell calls "the closed world" of the financial industry. If anyone is familiar with this world, it is Campbell, whose literary career was preceded by over a decade spent as an investment banker. She rose to become the first female manager of Morgan Stanley's London trading floor before trading in her Bloomberg terminal for Bloomsbury aspirations. Her third novel, just published in North America, was longlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize and borrows liberally from Campbell's banking years. Set in 1991, with the outbreak of hostilities in the first Gulf War looming in the background, On the Floor tells the story of Geri Malloy, a trader coasting on a reputation built on a single mammoth deal, but lately struggling to keep it all together. Reeling from a devastating romantic rejection, Geri finds herself buffeted on all sides by the demands of the men in her life.
Courting betrayal at every turn, Geri lurches from one crisis to another. She's a hapless mark for those looking to use her for their own purposes because, when it comes right down to it, she doesn't know what she wants; "my life story scripted by three men, and me the willing pawn." In addition to her ex Stephen, there is also imperious client Felix Mann who threatens to take his substantial business elsewhere if Geri doesn't relocate from London to Hong Kong, her noxious boss (nicknamed "the Grope"), not to mention the raucously bro-ish atmosphere of the trading floor. Deep in denial about an unhappy past she mistakenly thought was well behind her, Geri is forced to acknowledge that she will finally have to account for herself. On the Floor is a compelling psychological portrait of a woman whose professional success masks profound personal turmoil, documenting the precise moment when the blithe coping strategies employed since childhood begin to fail her. However, where Campbell's work truly shines is in placing Geri's struggles within the wider context of the changes sweeping through the world of finance.
Though she identifies wholeheartedly with the messy human drama of the trading floor, Geri also has an uncanny facility with numbers. What her fellow traders boozily dismiss as her "circus trick" is really a glimpse of the future, albeit one in which they hardly figure at all. For tomorrow belongs to the so-called rocket scientists in the back office, those quantitative analysts busily deriving the equations that will transform the market. As one exasperated boffin chides Geri and her mates: "Your kind of traders with your finger in the air, making up prices like you were on a fruit and veg stall. You think it's all supply and demand and some sort of intuition, some sort of special touch. You don't even understand the instruments you trade." On the Floor dramatizes the crucial moment in our recent history when the bluff and bluster of the pit gives way to the impersonal operation of exquisitely crafted algorithms, the once-ferocious clamor of open outcry auctions echoing faintly in the miles of cabling and quiet whir of remote servers.
Geri, of course, has a foot in both worlds and a decision to make. Will she continue to obsess over the past or finally realize her losses, mourn them, and move on, thus opening herself to the prospect of future gains? Crucially, the pivotal moment comes only after the intervention of her client Felix, the man whose caprice made her career and could quite possibly break it. He reminds her that the story of her heartbreak is not the story. "I'm not interested in your grubby narrative," he tells her, explaining that "background my dear, is not always essential to the development of the plot." For Felix, plot is the epic corporate dealmaking that Geri's frailties inadvertently catalyze rather than the myopic story of her suffering. By the end of a harrowing series of events, Geri starts to see things his way, admitting that she has been played, most egregiously by herself: "If I hadn't been shitfaced, broken hearted, broken down, malfunctioning, I might have actually paid attention to what was really going on."
On its face, Campbell's novel has little to say about Ireland's post-Tiger malaise — it is set in 1991, after all — but Geri's sense of her own Irishness makes for a striking contrast with the confidence and optimism of the Tiger years, illustrating both how far Ireland has come, as well as how far it has recently fallen.
The very first time I came to Hong Kong five years ago and stood down there at the water's edge, I was struck by the thought that only the British could do something so crazily grandiose as transform a huge rock in the South China Sea into a magnificent power base. I stood transfixed by the Peak in a gaping neck-arch and years of myopic schoolbook history unraveled—a continuous loop of embittered bleating about Cromwell and disemboweling and famine, the coffin ships, the martyrs, the faces of The Six Men, the agony and the ecstasy of dying for your country—all collapsed into the astonishing revelation that The Enemy had in fact, Bigger Fish to Fry. That all the time we were crawling in and out of hedge schools and mustering futile insurrections, the British Empire was gripped by the tentacles of a dizzying ambition that explained the stunning irrelevance of Ireland. Even after Home Rule and a bellyful of potatoes and Rural Electrification, the story of Ireland was still about the same thing: a Self as defined by the Other, an island clinging onto the victim psychology of an identity crisis, trailing a stone-age language through the jostling visa queue of emigrants, licking our own sores as we clutched our one-way tickets in a stampede for the next plane out of there.
On the Floor gestures at a new era of confidence and optimism for both its protagonist and Ireland itself. However, the novel ends on a deliberately ambiguous note because it's not really clear whether Geri's identity crisis has been resolved or merely deferred. Similarly, it remains to be seen whether the Irish will revert to what Geri describes as victim psychology after the all-too-brief age of affluence came to a sputtering halt amidst the global turmoil of 2008 and after. For a time the Irish — and everyone else! — were too busy making money to worry about inequality, but as the pace of economic growth slowed and even reversed, discord became harder and harder to outrun. Today, the specter of an oppressive Other once again captivates the popular imagination, albeit this time in the form of policymakers from the IMF or European Central Bank rather than representatives of Her Majesty's Government. The accents may be different, but the underlying psychological dynamic appears worryingly familiar.
What happened to Ireland during the age of easy money is Alan Glynn's great theme. In contrast to Aifric Campbell, who reports on the closed world of finance with the ease and familiarity of a consummate insider, Glynn is a gatecrasher. Working in the thriller mode, he treats the world of finance as a conspiracy, the ultimate goal of which is to conceal the truth about the unsavory and often criminal origins of great wealth and power. His latest novel Graveland continues in the same vein of international intrigue that informs Winterland (2009) and Bloodland (2011), the previous two entries in a trilogy loosely organized around the shadowy figure of James Vaughn, the reclusive and incredibly well-connected head of the private equity firm Oberon Capital. Winterland opens with a nicely Hitchcockian twist when two men named Noel Rafferty, one a gangster and the other an architect, are murdered on the same evening. Which one was the actual target? Convinced that the police have closed the case too early, a grieving family member launches her own investigation, one that reveals a sordid underbelly of crony capitalism and political corruption that reaches all the way from a controversial property development in Dublin to the highest office in the land.
Winterland is very much a product of the boom, a novel about the overly cozy relationship between politicians and their patrons, as well as the go-along-to-get-along mentality that flourishes so long as no one is looking too closely. Bloodland takes place barely two years later, but in the interim, the game has changed. The global bust has left everyone scrambling, from a down-on-his-luck journalist struggling to make the rent to an overextended tycoon whose empire is coming apart for want of a loan. Recently laid off, Jimmy Gilroy reluctantly accepts a freelance assignment to write the biography of Susie Monaghan, a reality star whose legend only grows after she perishes along with five others in a helicopter crash off the coast of Ireland. Almost immediately, he's approached by a fixer who warns him not to look too closely into the murky circumstances of the accident — a request that makes him suspect his project may be more than tabloid fodder after all. The ensuing action stretches from Dublin to New York and the Congo where an obscure mining concession is at the center of scandal implicating, among others, an ambitious United States senator, a private military company, and the big money backing the next step in drone technology. Glynn is working with a much broader canvas here because in Bloodland corruption is globalized. Ireland's bent political and business elite remain our entry point into the narrative, but they are merely local symptoms of a spreading sickness.
Graveland, the final entry in the Vaughn trilogy, traces this illness back to its source in New York, the financial epicenter of both the 2008 meltdown as well as the new gilded age that preceded it. (Gotham, incidentally, also serves as the backdrop to Glynn's debut, 2001's The Dark Fields, which received the Hollywood treatment and was released as a hit film in 2011 under a new title: Limitless.) Opening with the assassination of two Wall Street figures and seemingly unrelated disappearance of a college student, Graveland alternates between three main narrative perspectives. Ellen Dorsey, who plays a minor role in Bloodland, is an investigative journalist with a hunch that these events may be linked. Frank Bishop is a laid-off architect struggling to keep himself afloat, and is increasingly distraught over the fact he can't get in touch with his daughter. Meanwhile Craig Howley, the number two at the secretive Oberon Capital, is champing at the bit to replace his boss while wondering if he has a target on his back, too. Glynn expertly generates suspense by deftly building up and then subverting our expectations, leaving us uncertain as to the nature of the plot. Is this a kill-the-bankers revenge fantasy? A right-wing myth about the sinister aims motivating the Occupy movement? A grim parable of corporate ambition? Or is it entirely personal, rooted in one family's responsibility for a Madoff-style ponzi scheme?
As Ellen and Frank work through various theories as to who is responsible for the violence and why, their investigation serves as a proxy for a much broader inquiry, one that characterizes the trilogy as a whole. Working within the conventions of the suspense thriller, Glynn attempts to visualize something that remains frustratingly opaque and out of reach: the financial system itself. As recent events have shown, it proves remarkably hard to see. At a time when transactions are increasingly found off-balance-sheet and bankers hide in the unregulated shadows, there is no overarching perspective capable of providing a full and proper accounting, to make the facts as they stand cohere into a lucid narrative (that is, if there ever was…). The "closed world" of finance quite literally resists oversight. For Frank, "the financial crisis of 2008 — its origins stretching back over decades, its aftermath unfolding into the foreseeable future — is a huge, unwieldy subject, a web of interconnecting narratives that cannot be contained in an single text or contemplated in a single glance." Ellen is similarly confounded:
Each new post she reads, or thread she follows, seems to hold out the promise of something, an insight, an angle, a revelation even. In discussing stuff like fractional reserve banking, the creation of the Fed, the Glass-Steagall Act, Keynes, the Chicago School, subprime, securitization, the bailouts, there'll be an initial hint of reasonableness, a striving for clarity — for the holy grail of a coherent point — but sooner or later, and without fail, each contribution will descend into ambiguity, internal contradiction, and ultimately gibberish.
Glynn's solution to this interpretive dilemma is, quite simply, James Vaughn, the head of Oberon Capital and personification of the revolving door between the private sector and government. "Without once being elected or appointed to public office, the man has exerted enormous influence, and mainly by operating in the interstices between federal agencies, private contractors, consulting firms, lobbyists, think tanks, and policy institutes." Although Glynn grants him a legendary backstory (including offhand references to his role in the Kennedy administration, even the swaggering admission that he walked in on JFK bedding his soon-to-be-replaced wife), the octogenarian yet still strangely vital Vaughn is less a fully rounded character than an avatar of global capital: "He's one of those extraordinary guys, and there aren't that many of them, who somehow float between [business and politics], and it's not that he's both — businessman and politician — it's that actually he's neither. He's something else again, something more evolved than that," marvels a character from Bloodland. "It's like he's the very embodiment of money."
Vaughn appears in every volume of Glynn's trilogy, the only character to do so, and thus serves as its main source of continuity. However, from his first appearance as an outside investor in the Dublin property scheme detailed in Winterland to his apparent retirement lap in Graveland, the publicity-shy Vaughn lingers discreetly in the background, visible only in glimpses as the author keeps us otherwise entertained with the tightly wound and frenetic plotting of his conspiratorially-minded tales. As the trilogy moves farther and farther away from its parochial origins in order to situate Ireland's experience in a global context, Vaughn and his outsize role come into sharp focus. Indeed, by the end of Graveland, the pursuit of the Wall Street killers turns into a searching examination of those who made a killing in the markets. Rather than getting caught up in what Frank calls "an ever-widening gyre of speculation and paranoia," Glynn substitutes the story of the secret origins of Vaughn's wealth and power for the frustratingly incomplete and unsatisfying nonfictional narratives of the crash.
Five years removed from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, our tentative economic recovery is marred by the nagging sense that nothing has really changed, that the same people who got us into this mess are still running the show, that no one has been held accountable and, as the shock wears off, that we are back to business as usual. Worryingly, while there is no shortage of answers — journalistic accounts of the financial crisis are one of the few growth areas in publishing — it remains to be seen whether we are asking the right questions. In the face of such uncertainty, it falls to writers like Aifric Campbell and Alan Glynn to take up the challenge of representing the world of finance by reducing it to human scale. Wearing her hard-earned expertise in the banking industry ever so lightly, Campbell grounds her story of Geri's heartbreak in the customs and routines of the trading floor, the workplace rituals that Geri clings to even as they are on the verge of disappearing. Glynn, meanwhile, harnesses the conventions of the popular thriller to the task of rendering transparent a world that otherwise remains abstract and inaccessible, compressing and dramatizing the dance of contemporary capital flows in the figure of James Vaughn.
Image Credit: Pexels/Pixabay.
Matt Kavanagh teaches at Okanagan College in Kelowna, British Columbia. He holds a doctorate in contemporary American literature from McGill University and his current research explores fictional representations of finance, or what he calls the poetics of volatility, in the work of writers like Don DeLillo and John Lanchester. His criticism has appeared in the American Book Review, Maisonneuve, The Globe and Mail and other publications.
MFA Grads and Former Acrobats: Approaches to the Author Bio
Edan Lepucki February 10, 2011 | 8 books mentioned 37 5 min read
The truth is, every published writer has been faced with summing themselves up in just a few sentences. It's not easy, and a bio isn't a fixed thing--or at least not until you're dead. Until then, it (hopefully) evolves with each new publication, each year lived. The decision of what to include and exclude persists throughout one's career.
Edan Lepucki | 8 books mentioned 37 5 min read
Lines of Light and Dark: On Mowing and Writing
Nick Ripatrazone June 2, 2015 | 8 books mentioned 5 5 min read
The weekly ritual of mowing, of men and women walking their property like mechanical monks, is fodder for literature.
Nick Ripatrazone | 8 books mentioned 5 5 min read
Girlhood, Womanhood, Friendship, and Loss
Iza Wojciechowska September 15, 2011 | 8 books mentioned 5 5 min read
It may be true that coming-of-age tropes are prevalent and typical — but I wonder, then, why are they (especially the well written ones) consistently so alluring?
Iza Wojciechowska | 8 books mentioned 5 5 min read
Essays Notable Articles
The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels
Mark O'Connell May 16, 2011 | 8 books mentioned 114 8 min read
I can't say that I enjoyed every minute of it, or even that I enjoyed all that much of it at all, but I can say that by the time I got to the end of it I was glad to have read it. Not just glad that I had finally finished it, but that I had started it and seen it through.
Mark O'Connell | 8 books mentioned 114 8 min read
Great overview on this topic. Thank you for yet another reading list to add to my endless collection. I just finished Broken Harbor by Tana French, in which she embeds the rise and fall of the real estate boom by means of what happens to one young family who fell for it. You can add it to your list!
Matt Kavanagh says:
Thanks, Judy. I'll be sure to check that title out.
A Belated and Brief BEA Debriefing
Buzz Poole June 8, 2008 | 8 books mentioned 1 4 min read
Buzz Poole, the managing editor of Mark Batty Publisher, has written for the likes of The Believer, PRINT, Village Voice and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is also the author of Madonna of the Toast, a look at the cultural ramifications of unexpected religious and secular icons. Keep up with his adventures in surprising iconography at his Madonna of the Toast blog.In light of the many detailed and more timely reports from this year's Book Expo America, this is not so much about BEA, but about how the setting of this year's American publishing-industry high holiday really defined BEA 2008. Unlike the other two events of that paper and ink (and more recently pixilated) trinity – Frankfurt and London – this event ventures out from New York from time to time, and this year it tucked itself into downtown Los Angeles – not quite as sexy as American Apparel would lead you to believe, though it is not difficult to interpret those ads as remnants of lascivious thoughts burped up by Charles Bukowski as he leered at a waitress in some cafeteria in this very same downtown. You can imagine how the fact that I stayed in the Stillwell Hotel, a place right out of a Bukowski book (except this hotel reeked like curry) would skew how I was taking in the days. Like all great cities, Los Angeles has a feel that is unmistakable and, for better or worse, wholly its own.That je ne sais quoi struck me on the flight, in fact. The woman sitting next to me, a relationship expert and author, barraged me with her war stories, from her first publishing gig working at Grove Press, fielding phone calls from Sam Beckett (who was asking where his money was) to schooling me about how you know when a television interview has gone well (hers went well on "Oprah", but not so well on "The Today Show"). And so it began.I arrived on Thursday. A blue-haired resident paying her rent, in cash, delayed my check-in to the Stillwell. Once she counted that $400 out – it took her so long that I worried about her several bags of frozen dinners thawing – I ditched my stuff and was back on the streets. Sunset portioned downtown into stark blocks of shadows and light as I noticed droves of people – young and old, of all ethnicities – snaking into a hotel. I assumed a publishing event, but I was wrong. A toothy, plastic-looking woman informed me that it was a "creating happiness seminar." This notion alone made me pretty happy, so I decided not to attend.After a busy day of meetings on Friday, I kept away from industry parties that night, opting to hang out with an old friend of mine in Santa Monica, but even there the star-studded grip of publishing choked me. Someone I met works for a talent agency and this guy is a celebrity handler, and had been hanging with Slash the night before, who just so happens to have a book out. I know, because I had seen Slash earlier that day, smaller than I would have thought, but wearing his trademark top hat as he signed books. If you're not a celebrity in LA, it always seems like you're only one conversation away from talking about a celebrity.All three days drew people in search of free tote bags and celebrity autographs, but once all of the initial business was done – the true purpose of BEA, the selling of books, foreign rights and film rights, which mostly happened on Friday – things seemed subdued. As Saturday got underway, everyone was talking about how attendance was down. Not only was day one public attendance down by thousands compared to previous years, but everyone was joking about all of the agents, editors and publishers that did not bother making the trip from New York, let alone Europe.And so we were all there, spending the days under artificial lights, nursing hangovers and figuring out where to head at 5pm for some hair of the dog. The big houses threw lavish parties, like Simon & Shuster's late-night star-studded Prince concert, which happened at his abode. The Consortium/Foreword Party at Hotel Figueroa, peppered with celebrities of the indie publishing realm, also exuded that "only in LA" vibe, what with all of us standing around a pool, blinded by the sun. Yes, we were all in Los Angeles, and most of us seemed ready to be back home, especially once the open bars ended.Some other random BEA observations:Leonard Nimoy has spent lots of time photographing obese nude women (Lucien Freud would approve): check out his The Full Body Project.I, like many others, made it a point to get an advance of Robert Bolano's 2666, one of BEA's big stories.Bill Daniel's Mostly True: The Story of Bozo Texino (Microcosm Publishing, distributed by AK Press) and Over and Over (Princeton Architectural Press) represent the two best trades I made over the weekend.Beyond any logical explanation, BEA did include a teeth-whitening booth (right in the mix close to scores of children's book publishers, as well as Continuum and McSweeney's). A session cost $99, and the few times I made it a point to go and gawk, there were always at least three people getting treated, their mouths painted a strange electric cobalt.I've never seen such a booth at BEA before, but it struck me, like most everything else about the weekend, as emblematic of where I was, something about the authenticity of the superficiality. There are lots of us that rely on these trade shows to pay our bills – if sales people don't sell titles, bookstores would be empty and publishers would fold; writers, editors, designers, illustrators, proofreaders and indexers wouldn't get paid; agents and publicists wouldn't have clients; critics and academics would have to… I don't know what they would do.Don't get me wrong: I am one of these people. And when you get a bunch of us together – anywhere in the world – there can be some good times, because one way or another we're all in it for the books. For three days last week, there was an enormous cache of books stored in the Los Angeles Convention Center, yet there was a sense that this year the books mattered less, while being seen was the imperative, for those who bothered to show up. For those of us that did make the trip, what really seemed to come to light were the differences between the independent presses fighting like hell to remind everyone that they exist and the big-money houses that spend more money promoting books than it costs to produce them. Of course, this happens when BEA is in New York (and it happens in Frankfurt and London), but LA really seemed to exert itself. Maybe it was just me. I guess between all of the happiness and teeth whitening, however, there were plenty of folks with nice smiles.
Buzz Poole | 8 books mentioned 1 4 min read
Lost in Translation: Classical Arabic Literature
Kevin Blankinship November 26, 2019 | 8 books mentioned 7 min read
Arabic's great riches: the centuries-old tradition of classical literature and the battle-weary corps of translators bringing it into English.
Kevin Blankinship | 8 books mentioned 7 min read
'There It Is': Vietnam and the Generosities of Fiction
Brian Ted Jones August 26, 2011 | 8 books mentioned 9 8 min read
"The life story of every American soldier who died in Vietnam."
The idea came out of nowhere, just appeared in my mind and stayed, occupying my thoughts with visions of the enshadowed, marching dead. Every single man. The events of his life. The circumstances of his death. Page after page after page. A library for a lost generation.
The stories would be humble, detailed, and clear. "Clarence Rowantree was born in Boston in the winter of 1949. He was educated in Catholic schools, and he played halfback for his high school football team. He had a girlfriend, Cathleen Trencher. He got her pregnant their junior year. Plans were made for the couple to wed, but Cathleen miscarried, and was afterwards sent to live with a spinster aunt. Clarence never saw her again. He was drafted the summer after he finished high school, when he was working in his grandfather's barbershop, sweeping hair into piles, washing combs, and refilling the bottles of tonic. He trained at Fort Sill and was stationed at Mutter's Ridge, near the Laotian border. His friends in the service called him Rowboat. He was very popular. He could stand upright on his hands for an impressive amount of time, and would perform this trick whenever the guys needed a boost in morale. He was also the company's unofficial barber, performing trims and shape-ups for when the brass came around on inspection tours. He died after stepping on a landmine while out on routine patrol in his eighth month of service. He was 20."
The idea moved me greatly, and even though I knew the project would take a long time, I felt rallied by it, and full of energy, so I sat down and did some calculations, to see exactly what kind of commitment I was getting into. I thought that each man's story needed a full day's work, and probably more — but I used eight hours as a base figure for estimation purposes. I multiplied eight by 58,175 (the number of names on the Vietnam War Memorial). The answer came out at 465,400 hours. I divided that by twenty-four to get the number of days, and that number by 365 to get the number of years.
I hit the equals sign on my calculator.
The screen read fifty-three.
My mouth dropped open.
Fifty-three.
I leaned back from my desk and put a hand to my forehead, considering the implications. If I worked nonstop on this project — meaning nonstop, without stopping, at all, for anything, even sleep — I'd be finished in 53 years.
Take that into your heart and tremble at the meaning. If you spent just eight hours composing the life story of every American man killed in the Vietnam war, the job would take you over half a century to complete.
I ran these results by a friend of mine, and even though I was still goggled, he was far less impressed.
"It's a nice image," he allowed, "but it's just a numbers game. You could do that with anything."
"Anything?" I asked.
"You know," he said. "Anything where lots of people died."
He was right, of course, and as soon as I started considering various death tolls (625,000 killed in the Civil War, six million in the Holocaust, fifty million in all of World War II together), it occurred to me just how truly impossible a complete account of those killed in war can be, depending on the war, depending on the number of the dead. In this way, war is categorically different from other kinds of tragedies. When one person dies a tragic death, we seek consolation in the story of who that person was. The details of his life — his flaws and heroics, the people he loved and cared for, the work he did — all that meaningful information has the power to outweigh the fearful or horrifying circumstances of his death.
But when a thousand people die, or a hundred thousand, or a million, or fifty million, the magnitude of loss tilts the scales away from understanding, and toward despair, nihilism, and madness; because we can't find solace or redemption in a million life stories: it's absurd even to try.
What we can do, though, is to seek analogs, avatars — ways of distilling the raw, titanic information churned up by war into something relatable and human.
I'll put it another way: If there were no such thing as fiction, we'd have had to invent it, if we ever wanted to make sense out of a thing like the Vietnam War.
All this was why, earlier in the summer, I set out to read three books on Vietnam: Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, and Dispatches by Michael Herr.
Dispatches, a "New Journalism" account of the war, was the first to be released. It came out in 1977, just two years after the fall of Saigon. It's an odd, free-wheeling set of stories, at times reminiscent of both Hunter S. Thompson and William Faulkner, with the same pawky humor, fractured lensing, dreamlike narrative, and deliberately subjective attitude toward the underlying reportage. The haziness of the book's structure grows organically from the material itself, as does the spookiness of it all, the eerie setting and unpredictable action. Herr pays a lot of attention to the superstitions of the grunts, because through them, the men seem to face and even endure their own unrelenting mortal fear, like the man who carries around a sock containing a months-old, uneaten oatmeal cookie mailed to him by his wife. Then there's the fanatical Lurp, who makes this one chilling war story into a kind of Zen koan: "Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened." Herr speaks to another young man, a marine from Miles City, Montana, who checks Stars and Stripes every day, hoping to learn that someone from his hometown has been killed. "I mean, can you just see two guys from a raggedy-ass town like Miles City getting killed in Vietnam?"
The funky superstitions of the marines run parallel to their own black senses of humor and, because of this, Dispatches is at times spectacularly hilarious. Nothing sums up the book's comic-terrifying take on the war — Herr at one point calls Vietnam a "dripping, laughing death-face" — better than this story from Ed Fouhy, another reporter, about a helicopter ride he took with a torpid, weary young soldier. Fouhy, trying to make conversation, asked the kid how long he'd been in-country.
The kid half lifted his head; that question could not be serious. The weight was really on him, and the words came slowly.
"All fuckin' day," he said.
If Dispatches is Fear and Loathing in Vietnam, then The Things They Carried is Vietnam as MFA: a meditation on the craft of writing as well as a semi-autobiographical account of the war and the things it did to the author and his friends. "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," for example, is explicitly instructive. A story within a story, it presents a character in the frame-narrative who provides a running critique of the interior tale, arguing (Chekovianly) that each element of a story has to play some role in the central action, and that "clarification or bits of analysis and personal opinion" have no place in the tale: "It just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic." Now, O'Brien knows this isn't strictly true — after all, this same character makes his point by interrupting the underlying story O'Brien's trying to tell. But that's how people tell stories to each other in real life, and O'Brien is interested, perhaps more than anything else, in just that kind of storytelling — and with good reason. He thinks it's how you survive a thing like Vietnam.
Take "Speaking of Courage," for instance, a disturbing account of cowardice and grisly death, and its immediate follow-up, "Notes," in which the author breaks through to comment on the construction of the previous story: its emotional core (a returning veteran's simple need to confess about his failure to save a friend's life), its dramatic frame (the story takes place as the vet drives around and around a lake in his hometown), and the symbolic counterpoint between the lake and the muddy field in Vietnam where the vet lost his friend. The vet's need to confess is stifled by the warm, protective, polite cocoon of peacetime society, in which it's not seemly to talk about the realities of war. Without an outlet, though, the poor man suffers, and ultimately takes his own life. In "Notes," O'Brien tells us about the man's suicide, but he also tells us that the prior story — at least, the part about the man's failure to save his friend — was entirely made up. To get at the hard truth — that these guys needed to talk about what had happened to them — O'Brien had to tell a pretty big lie. That's how you raise the stakes, he says. That's how you make the drama that makes the people pay attention so you can show them what you know. That's writing.
A final note: the direct incorporation of these technical aspects of fiction into the final product is something we might today categorize as "meta." But there's something natural, even inevitable, in their use in stories about Vietnam. They suggest a gruntlike impatience with the sleek packaging of professional fiction. In that way, they have an almost jury-rigged quality, as though they were thrown together under fire, and with all the guts still in full view.
Matterhorn (which I've described to friends as The Wire in Vietnam) follows a young Marine lieutenant named Waino Mellas as he survives his first three months in the bush. Waino is a Princeton graduate who abandoned a life of certain professional success to serve as a combat marine, a decision he hopes will come in handy later on (Mellas wants a political career). Although at first the other grunts are suspicious of him, Mellas quickly settles into life at firebase Matterhorn, a hill on the western side of Vietnam, close to the DMZ. Matterhorn is home to Bravo Company, a group of about 200 marines, and they have one big problem. The Company's commander, Lt. Fitch, has gotten on the wrong side of his immediate superior, Lt. Colonel Simpson, a drunk who doesn't like that a handsome young marine like Fitch has received praise and commendation from the higher-ups without having the good sense to share his glory with Simpson (who doesn't actually deserve any, but still).
Partly out of spite, partly out of simple dereliction, Simpson orders Bravo Company to abandon Matterhorn and march for eight days without food or rest in order to build another firebase on a cliff further to the south. This is part of a larger project — driven by political motivations coming all the way down from the Oval Office — that will involve the marines in a useless joint operation with the South Vietnamese army. The North Vietnamese easily exploit this retreat, capturing Matterhorn while the marines are busy elsewhere. Simpson then commands Bravo Company to retake the hill — not because it serves any useful strategic purpose (Simpson orders the company to abandon Matterhorn almost as soon as it's recaptured), but because "the kill-ratios" are all off. And if killing more Vietnamese means that more Americans will have to die, they'll just reclassify the whole thing as a battalion action, rather than a company action, and the numbers will even out.
In spite of such mindlessness, the manly human spirit of Bravo Company endures, even finding a way to turn such evils into acts of spiritual rejuvenation. In the novel's closing pages, a group of marines sit around a fire and sing a rondo about death: "If it's good enough for Parker, then it's good enough for me. If it's good enough for Parker, then it's good enough for me." As they sing, they replace the name of each dead man with the name of another dead man, until they've sung out all the number of their fallen friends. The interchangeability of one grunt with another is a belief that damns the souls of men like Simpson; but in the hands of men like the marines of Bravo Company, that same belief becomes a bond, a testament. A pledge of relentless true faith.
In each of these books and in all the several stories they tell, one thing keeps popping back up.
"There it is."
"There it is" was a common catchphrase among the guys in Vietnam, a sort of verbal asterisk that put the whole affair in proper light. Radios down just when the shit's getting heavy? "There it is." Colonel breathing down your neck about making checkpoints? "There it is."
All the many little ironies of bad luck, incompetent commanders, and pass-the-buck-to-the-bush politicians are summed up in those three little words. Like Vonnegut's "So it goes," there's not much more to the phrase than a simple expression of futility, a throwing up of hands in the air, a sigh at the deadly indifference of the universe. But there's power in these words, and it's the same with these stories: They are each a human reaction to the inhumanities of massive, nonsensical death. Whether it's the cluttered, dreamy information of Dispatches, the transparencies of Tim O'Brien, or Matterhorn's tale of redemption in friendship, the Vietnam War is transformed through each of these books into something we can understand, distilled into something edifying, and saved from the overpowering magnitudes of death. These books close the gap between the untellable story of the dead in Vietnam, and the rest of us, the ones who want to know what happened over there. In this way, they are a powerful act of generosity, both to we, as readers, and to the men who died on the hills and in the jungle, the ones who didn't make it out.
Image credit: hookbrother/Flickr
Brian Ted Jones | 8 books mentioned 9 8 min read
Battle of the Sexes (Part Deux)
Patrick Brown April 26, 2005 | 8 books mentioned 3 min read
I'm glad to see my last post got people talking. I guess I have to get into specifics now. Keep in mind that I've only read about ten books this year because it took me all of January and February to read Robert Caro's massive biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. (Incidentally, if you're looking to tone up for the summer months, I recommend all of Caro's books. Even the paperbacks come in weighty volumes perfect for curls or bench presses). After that it was a real relief to read a couple of books people have been hounding me to read: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.I'd read Atwood's Cat's Eye before and like it a lot, but The Handmaid's Tale is a masterpiece. My girlfriend has been teaching it to her ungrateful undergraduates, and I read it and got a few free lessons on the fascinating language play that goes on in the text. I don't think I've ever read a book that was so filling for both my heart and my head.Housekeeping had been lying around my apartment, and, to be honest, I didn't want to read it. Nobody could really tell me what it was about or anything about it, for that matter, other than that they read it in college, it was beautiful, and they loved it. I read it in twelve hours. It's the kind of book that really ought to be read in a burst like that because its physical world is so distinct and so engrossing, it invites the reader to wander in and stay for awhile. I don't think I'd have liked it as much if I'd nibbled at it for a couple of weeks, but it was the perfect book for me at the perfect time. (Note: I was also, no doubt, caught up in the Marilynne Robinson zeitgeist. I heard her read from her new book Gilead, and for a while here in Iowa, it seemed like Marilynne was all people could talk about).After these two terrific novels, I read Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss. It's a shame that congress passed that law that mandates everyone who writes about Krauss to refer to her as Jonathan Safran Foer's husband in the first three sentences (There, I've done it… I fear the man), because she's an incredible writer. Read the prologue to the book and see what I mean.Of course no year of reading would be complete for me without a couple of books about genocide. Max had a great post on historians and journalists who write about the ugly moments in history, and I seem to be working my way through most of the books on his list. Two years ago I read Philip Gourevitch's We Wish To Inform You… about the Rwandan genocide. Last year it was Anne Applebaum's Gulag (a woman!), and this year it was Samantha Power's book A Problem from Hell. I confess that I forced myself to start this book (even while I was buying it I was apprehensive), but I didn't have to force myself to finish it. Power writes with clarity and precision about American foreign policy in a way that is easily understood without being too simplistic or dumbed-down. I saw Power on Charlie Rose last year and thought she was so smart and interesting. Her book didn't disappoint.And now I'm tearing through Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (I'm ashamed to say I'd never read it). So I've only read a handful of books this year, but I must say that the women are walking all over the men (and that's with Robert Caro and JF Powers on Team Penis). I do find that my "To Be Read" list is still male-oriented, so if anybody has any suggestions of books by the fairer sex, let me know. I'm open to anything.
Patrick Brown | 8 books mentioned 3 min read


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Today I went to Meadowhall with Ryan again. His Mac is really acting up and he went to complain about it. It's the third time he's had to give it in for repairs. Anyway, they gave us four different people to talk to. The woman listened to the problems Ryan's having and took the computer into the backroom to listen if it was making the sounds Ryan said it was. Then we got this chubby man who did the whole trained spiel of listening to the customer's opinion and then stating what the store could do to help him. The really skinny bobbing-head man was the most condescending out of them all. He had the attitude of "I'm right and you're just making all of it up". Really annoying. I was lucky enough to be allowed to tune him out and concentrate on scoping out everyone else in the store. Then we got a Spanish man who was nicest of them all. He also was very understanding and gave Ryan a form to fill in. So now his MacBook Pro is in for repairs once more. Lovely stuff.


These bath oils and foamy bubble baths are fantastic! You must try the "Sweet Potato Pie" Bubble Bath. It smells just like your Mother's homemade pie.
If not that, then the Peach Brandy Shower Gel. It will make you "shout" with glee.
Oh, but the Chocolate Bath Melts are yummie too.
Check out the website and I know you'll be contacting me soon for your merchandise.


Party buses in Ashland city is one of the things that people have been talking about these days here. And, why not this is an incredible service that is making the life of the people easier like never before. These party buses are giving people a chance to make their special events even more special by giving them a chance to party while traveling. In short, these buses have everything inside that can turn around the way your event looks. And, people here are loving it because they are enjoying such luxurious services at such affordable prices.
When looking forward to hiring a party bus or a limo, there is no reason that can worry you. It is because the they are available in a variety for people with different needs. Suppose you are travelling in groups and wish to hiring something for a casual trip, party buses make the best choice. On the other hand, if the tour is a professional one, you should surely hire a Limo for making your journey a luxurious one. Moreover, in these party buses, one can easily load 14, 20, 30, 40, and 50 passengers.
Besides that you can pick a charter bus for large groups and motor coaches for small and medium-sized number of passengers. The list doesn't end here! You will find a variety of Limos including Hummer, Ford Excursion limos, Chrysler, Cadillac, Lexus, and even BMW to make your ride a comfortable one with your friends and family. We also offer some of the best party buses in White House, TN!
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Wondering how expensive these services would be? Well, worry not as it suits every pocket. And, with the availability of so many vehicles here in Ashland City, there is no way you will not get a bus in your budget. Moreover, there are discount coupons that pop up from time to time. So, money will not be an issue. You can compare rates from our selection of limousines in Bowling Green.
Lithia Park – Great place for those who want to connect with nature with their pals and family.
Scienceworks Museum– A perfect place to educate yourself with the scientific and technological matters.
Emigrant Lake – For enjoying water park, camping, hiking, and backpacking.


text:
Legislator steamed over DOE sex ed program
A state lawmaker suing the state for legalizing same-sex marriages says a controversial sex education program being taught in some public schools is inappropriate because it promotes a "homosexual lifestyle as a positive or 'pono' choice."
It is one of seven programs approved by the Department of Education for middle schools to use for sexual health education. It was funded by the federal Office of Adolescent Health and developed by the University of Hawaii at Manoa Center on Disability Studies to help reduce teen pregnancies and prevent sexually transmitted infections.
McDermott said he asked the state Department of Education this week for copies of the curriculum, including teacher lesson plans, student workbooks and handouts, but was denied. He said the University of Hawaii also denied his request for materials.
"It's outrageous that a state legislator … as an elected official and a father of public school children, cannot get this information," he told reporters at the state Capitol Wednesday.
McDermott said he was invited to instead review the materials with supervision, which he declined.
Holding up an enlarged copy of a student's worksheet provided by a parent, he said he's troubled that students are being asked to define such terms as anal sex and oral sex.
"I am a little uncomfortable saying this, but this is what your children, your 11-year-old children, are being taught. To me, this is outrageous because it robs them of their innocence and it's not appropriate," McDermott said. "I can assure you my 11-year-old girl knows nothing about anal sex, and one of the reasons is because she's not exposed to Pono Choices."
DOE spokeswoman Donalyn Dela Cruz said the curriculum is sensitive in nature and can be misinterpreted.
"That's why parents attend informational sessions prior to use and teachers are trained to teach the course," she said. "We have offered the representative, and anyone else interested, an opportunity to meet with those who created the program at UH. He interpreted that as a refusal and that's very unfortunate."
Sen. Sam Slom said he also requested the materials after hearing from parents, constituents and teachers, but was denied.
"To treat us like children … I think it's going to have far-reaching consequences," Slom (R, Hawaii Kai-Diamond Head) said. For one, he said he plans to scrutinize UH's budget request before the Legislature.
The DOE had halted the program at the end of November to review the content and address concerns. It was reinstated two weeks later, and 12 schools are expected to teach Pono Choices next semester.
Parents can choose to have their child opt out of a course or lesson deemed controversial, the DOE said.
http://www.staradvertiser.com/newspremium/20131219__Legislator_steamed_over_DOE_sex_ed_program.html


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Thief: Rebooting Classic 90s Sneak Game
By Edward Smith
Updated February 28, 2014 16:07 GMT
Developer – Eidos Montreal
Publisher – Square Enix
Platforms – Xbox One (tested) PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows
Release date – Out now
Price - £44.99
Thief Review
When playing games, I'm more interested in emotional impact than ludic challenge. I understand the draw of a platform section, a boss fight, a stop-and-start stealth mission, but I'm in it for the sensation. If it means I get to feel more like my character and have more time to appreciate plot and visual design, I don't mind the difficulty being dumbed down. I'd much rather glide through a game with interesting characters and environments than get stuck for hours on the same level of Sonic.
The joy of this game is not spending half an hour finding the best path around enemies, it\'s flowing effortlessly around them
That's why Thief, this new reboot of the classic nineties sneaking series, appeals to me. Yes, the stealth is simple, yes the guards are dumb, but the game gives you space to appreciate its sights and sounds. Some players might be disappointed that they don't have to die and restart more often, but frankly, I'm bored of playing games that way.
If the guards were zealous or the plaforming was more difficult, there are dozens of moments in Thief that would be spoiled. The joy of this game is not spending half an hour finding the best path around enemies, it's flowing effortlessly around them, skimming between rooftops, picking clean strongboxes without anyone noticing. In short, Thief lets you feel like a thief, able to avoid detection and fill your swag bag without breaking a sweat. But there's also balance. Games that, right from the beginning, provide you with powerful weapons and abilities quickly get boring. It isn't steep, but Thief at least has an incline. It takes hours and a lot of work before you have a full bag of tools at your disposal. You'll never struggle but you won't get complacent either.
So richly characterised – such a dark, damp place
A sense of menace pervades Thief. What it lacks, or rather, refuses to indulge in in terms of steep difficulty, it makes up for with atmosphere and dread. The world of Thief is so richly characterised – such a dark, damp place – that you rarely feel relaxed while playing. It's set in a fictional, faux-Victorian London where a Plague-like disease called "the gloom" is rapidly spreading. Governed by a corrupt oligarch, The City, as it's named, is rife with prostitution, black-market dealers and public executions. Truly, it's one of the most miserable game environments ever rendered. The labyrinthine alleys and walkways add to a sense of murkiness, intrigue, claustrophobia.
When you creak open the window of some backstreet terrace house then stand in the hallway, listening to the settling of the woodwork, you can practically smell the dust, the wet clothes drying on the bannister. The guards may act robotically, but the world of Thief is almost alive. It awakens the senses like very few game worlds I've inhabited before.
You have to hunt for your loot
The stealing mechanics certainly add to that. It isn't a case of simply walking your character over a trinket and it being added instantly to your inventory. You have to hunt for your loot. A lot of Thief is spent rifling through cupboards and drawers looking for pieces of silverware and jewellery. Particularly satisfying is when you find a painting with a safe behind it and, using the left stick, have to run your hands around the edges of the frame looking for a secret release switch. I love games where you interact in ways that aren't related to action or excitement, games where you get to do mundane things like sit down or have a drink.
Thief is one of these. The best parts are when you're alone in a house you've broken into, rummaging through drawers, deciding what to steal and what to leave. Though the game doesn't impress it, if you find yourself in the poor quarter of The City, you find yourself facing a moral question. I personally refused to steal anything from a house where it looked like the owner had no money. If I wasn't allowed to touch or examine items in the way Thief permits, I don't think they'd carry as much weight, as much meaning, and that interesting moral dilemma about whether to take them wouldn't exist.
Magic isn't just used as convenient plot-filler
Like the relatively low difficulty I can understand why the supernatural aspects of Thief's story may bother some people. But again, I enjoyed them. Magic isn't just something the Thief writers use as convenient plot-filler – it isn't like The Force in Star Wars or spells in Harry Potter. The writers really run with it. There are some great, playable hallucination sequences, the kinds I used to expect from games like Max Payne or Silent Hill. If properly contextualising these requires a hint of the paranormal in Thief's story then so be it. The City is characterised as such a dark, mysterious place that a certain level of mysticism is perfectly acceptable.
I'm also defensive of how Garrett, the Thief franchise's lifelong protagonist, has been re-imagined. I don't find his dialogue or new leading-man persona endearing but it doesn't anger me either. If anything, I'm pleased that the makers of this reboot have had the courage to stick to their version of an adaptation. With a franchise as holy as Thief, I assume there must have been enormous pressure to re-make the old games, to create absolutely the lowest form of art: fan service. But Eidos Montreal has done Garrett how it wanted, and whether or not I like him feels almost beside the point. I'm just glad that on this rare occasion videogame fans didn't get their way.
A pretty humdrum approach to the sandbox
If I have one criticism of Thief it's that its structure is unambitious. It's laid out like Dishonored, Arkham City, Asssassin's Creed. It ascribes to a sandbox style that's been re-heated and re-re-heated so many times over the past console generation that it's difficult to get excited about. Side-quests are discovered and completed in precisely the ways you'd expect. Collectibles are dotted around. Environments have multiple paths in and out. None of these elements are bad per se. It's just that they're so familiar now, so used up. With a rebooted franchise on a brand new console it would have been interesting to see sandbox conventions mixed up some, tested. But Thief takes a pretty humdrum approach. It's no worse than the sandbox games before it, it just feels like a wasted opportunity to attempt new things.
Nevertheless, Thief is a visually striking, evocative game. It might frustrate purists but that's because it has higher ambitions than a typical sneak 'em up.
Gameplay: 8/10 – Not at all difficult but steady, slow, with a focus on tactile little actions rather than awkward sneaking.
Graphics: 7/10 – Character's lip-syncing is off and even on Xbox One there's some texture pop-in, but The City and the other places you explore are beautifully designed.
Sound: 6/10 – Great voice-acting and some excellent dialogue, let down by an overbearing musical score (it's better to turn it off) and some strange sound-mixing, which often means you can hear conversations happening on the other side of a level.
Writing: 7/10 – There are some brilliant slang-words that the Thief writers have made up and exchanges are, typically, terse and to the point. The supernatural elements aren't entirely convincing but nor are they sacrilege.
Overall: 8/10 – A smart, emotionally led stealth game created by a studio that rightfully refuses to pander.
Related topics : Xbox One PlayStation PS4 Microsoft


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RUTH BLOCH RUBIN
Building the Bloc
Divided Parties, Strong Leaders
Building the Bloc: Intraparty Organization in the U.S. Congress
(Cambridge University Press, 2017)
Building the Bloc offers the first comprehensive theory to explain the logic and development of organized intraparty factions in Congress. For decades, scholars have engaged in a vigorous but increasingly entrenched debate about how to characterize the balance of power between congressional party leaders and rank and file lawmakers. While some have argued that leaders dictate the pace, scope, and substance of lawmaking, others contend that pivotal legislators — members empowered by the majoritarian rules of the House and the Senate filibuster — have the final say. Revealing the origins and impact of intraparty blocs in Congress over the past century, I draw on foundational work from both camps to explain when and how rank and file members are able to successfully defy their leadership.
Using a combination of archival and interview data, I show that even when dissident members of a party's rank and file collectively constitute a pivotal bloc of votes, they often struggle to challenge party leaders for control over policy and procedure. Facing collective action and coordination problems similar to those motivating the creation of congressional parties, members often form groups like the contemporary House Freedom Caucus to secure their shared policy or procedural goals. When they invest in institution-building of this kind, dissidents create opportunities to convert their shared objectives from public goods into excludable accomplishments; provide targeted incentives to reward unity; and develop internal rules to facilitate group decision making. Spanning a full century of legislative politics from the Progressive era through to the contemporary Congress, I detail how these intraparty organizations have shaped major legislative battles and how they mediate the electoral connection.
In 2020, Building the Bloc was awarded the 31st D.B. Hardeman Prize by the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation for the best book on the U.S. Congress, from the fields of biography, history, journalism and political science. In 2018, it won the Alan Rosenthal Prize from the APSA Legislative Studies Section for the best book or article written by a junior scholar.


The veteran DJ/Producer's catalog of hit records include "Get Low", "Turn Down For What", "Snap Yo Fingers", "Bend Ova", "Outta Your Mind", and numerous others. The mega artist continues to DJ the country touring major venues throughout Chicago, Las Vegas, New York, and Arizona, and more. In February 2018, we hosted a Headliner Music Conference with Lil Jon to support his latest single "Alive" featuring Offset and 2 Chainz. Aside from taking pictures with HMC members and hopping on the turntables, the ATL legend also spoke about his production and managed to record custom DJ drops for the members in attendance.