text:
« Jérôme Lambert (Loire) | Main | Vin Primeur 2018 at Caves Augé »
Anne Paillet with Gregory Leclerc
Chargé, Indre-et-Loire (Loire)
There are winemakers who make a difference when there's a gathering of winemakers for a tasting event or a wine fair, the mood will be more eccentric and the vibe wilder if they take part, and Anne Paillet of Autour de l'Anne is one of them (like Pierre Breton, Thierry Puzelat or Brendan Tracey to name a few others). If they're on the list, take it like a further reason to come and be ready for a wild ride...And if you see from afar a vibrant and noisy crowd around a tasting stand in the wine fair there's a good chance Anne is the magnet, and her wines of course which are like her enjoyable and easy to drink.
In her former life Anne Paillet spent years on what many people would consider a good job for a large industrial group based just outside Paris and she decided one day in 2010 that it was not the life she wanted. Her now-husband Gregory (they didn't know each other at the time) samely had a job he didn't really like even if it was closer to wine, he was a reporter/writer for Gilbert & Gaillard, a mainstream publication for wines and Champagnes until he quit in 2005 to enroll in a wine school and subsequently set up his winery, Chahut et Prodige. Anne liked wine already at the time, and I mean real wine here, and they met in 2009 in a wine fair in Paris, she says she fell in love with his Coup de Canon 2008 (a 100 % Grolleau) and with the winemaker himself... She wanted to make wine herself already but not necessarilly in the Loire where Gregory had already his winery by then. She knew quite a few people in the Languedoc and her initial plans before she met Gregory was to go there and start something there.
The winery in Chargé
So she settled with Gregory in the Loire Valley but she still thought about setting up her own thing, she wouldn't be content doing the administrative tasks for Gregory and post stories about the winery events on Facebook. Her goal was making wine herself and in her own style and she decided to get through with making wine in the Pic Saint Loup area using purchased grapes from Christophe Beau, she just changes slightly her plans by having the juice and grapes shipped to Gregory's place instead of having a facility over there. She knew quite a lot of wine people in Paris from her years there, like Kevin Blackwell of now-closed Autour d'un Verre (she named her négoce Autour de l'Anne by reference to his venue), also Bertrand at Que du Bon or Guillaume at Coinstot Vino, Cyril at Le Verre Volé and she turned to them when she had her first cuvée.
Barrel room
Anne shares the facility and underground cellars of Gregory, this is allowed by the French wine administration as long as the respective vats and other vessels are clearly apart and counted. Her volume of wine is the equivalent of 4,5 hectares, she says that's fine for her and she doesn't want to make more. Anne says she likes to make cuvées that are not too big and take care of them, instead of having to vinify cuvées making 80 or 100 hectoliters. For example her biggest cuvée this year, Wonder Woman makes 30 hectoliters and the others are smaller, like 15 hectoliters or 2000 to 2500 bottles. She also likes to change and make different types of wines, not stay on a routine.
Cement fermenter
Anne Paillert buys her grapes from Ludovic Gervais in Pic-Saint-Loup in the Languedoc, the guy is doing a great job in the vineyard and he's also a vegetable grower, all with organic farming of course. He is formost passionate with the growing side, although lately he also took interest to the vinification as well and he's beginning to make wine himself. i ask Anne if it's not worrying for her as he's the grower she relies on for her wines, but she says he has quite a large surface and her purchases there are secure for a long time.
With Wonder Woman 2018
Here Anne stands near another Wonder Woman, namely her Wonder Womanne 2018 on the left in its tank, she says this year the vinification has been capricious this year, actually it was doing too well and too fast in the bottom of the cellar because of higher temperature and vibrant fermentation ambiance in the air, so they moved the juice closer to the door as the following nights were going to get quite cold. For a natural sparkling (a Pet'Nat) you don't want the fermentation to go too fast or you may miss the targeted amount of residual sugar at the bottling. Now she says it's capricious because it got the other way and calmed down too much, that's why they warm the tank a bit with a heating coil.
They enlarged this cellar gallery recently by munching 80 centimeters into the sandstone on one side, in order to make it possible to have two rows of vats and still be able to move one of them out if needed. Again that's the good side with a cellar, you can augment the surface without building permit or additional roof...They subsequently painted the walls with lime, initially because the freshly carved side was contrasting with the brownish ceiling & wall on the other side, but incidently this improved the yeast ambiance the following year, they discovered through this detail that there may have been nefarious activity on ther walls. tHe fermentations were sluggish before and this changed completely with this current vintage, be it for here wines or for Gregory's.
Bottle cellar
Before Anne took over part of this complex of underground rooms for herself much of these galleries were used to park stuff like tools, tractors, there are enough rooms for the two of them to have their separate facility under the same roof, so to say, but they also share some vat rooms, making sure that the vats have different colors so that they're easily recognizable in case of control by the wine administration (Gregory's are blue, hers are grey). The historic winery before they settled there used 3 of the galleries to make wine, using a few large cement vats that are still in place but were designed to make large batches of wine made with lab yeast. They make put down some of these tanks to make room but that's quite an investment just to destroy them. There are a few underground tanks too that make about 100 hectoliters.
There even an open elevator to reach this bottle cellar, they use it to move pallets of wine, it was already in place with the former owner. Here the bottles can age at a stable temperature and without light, and the cellar is healthy and dry. Here Anne keeps also bottles of Pot d'Anne 2017 which she didn't want to sell right away because there was some reduction, she tastes one from time to time and will put them on the market when the issue is gone. There is also in there a batch of Gregory's natural sparkling 2017 which is still in its élevage sur lattes, should be disgorged sometime in next few weeks. Anne poses here in front of Gregory's Gamay 2016 last spring and as the wine had a hard time recovering from the bottling he put the bottles to rest there for a few months.
Custom-made fermenters
I wish I had seen that but here are the plastic tanks used by Anne to haver her juice or macerating grapes begin to ferment in the truck starting in the Languedoc as the tank would fill one after the other and sit in the truck waiting for the move to her facility here in the Loire. And of course during the trip these wines would keep fermenting in whatever stage they were (some grapes were picked earlier than others of course). Anne says that there hasn't been any bad occurence of mildew in the vicinity where she got her grapes in Corconne near the Pic-Saint-Loup area, unlike other parts of the Languedoc (near Montpellier for example). Languedoc is actually much safer than the Loire for natural accidents like frost, hail and mildew; she had a big attack of mildew in 2012 and made very little wine then because of that, but since then no other problem.
Fermenting in a semi-trailer
Here is a video shot by an aide back in the Languedoc when they were loading the semi-trailer with the juice, that's really something unique, possibly the first mass vinification in a truck in France. Of course Anne labels all her wines as table wine (Vin de France), no other way when you take grtapes in a region and bring them in a facility of another region, but here we have yet another dimension, i wonder if the wine administration has ever thought this possible, if yes, they would had invented another more derogatory labelling, like, vin de route (highway wine), who knows ? But like Vin de France it would turn the intent around and become a new cult and sought-after labelling among people in-the-know....
I wished the video who have shown the outside with the trailer and the truck, but there's the picture here on the right. Samuel who was present at the cellar when I made this visit was the driver of the semi-trailer truck and he drove it there as well as helped for the loading of the juice, you can see him in the video, Anne jokes that he wasn't the Chef de Cave over there but the Chef Semi-Remorque... They say that not only the fermentations started in the trailer but some of them finished therre as well, making it a unique experience, I suggest Anne to print it on the label when the whole fermentation took place in the semi (not sure the wine administration like it, though...). Anne says there was also some juice for Greg, some Sauvignon for example. I visualize the truck on the highway bound for the Loire, little chance the unsuspecting motorists guess that they are passing a winery on wheels...
Looks like grapefruit juice
Anne found her labelling machine on Le Bon Coin, the online classifieds site, looking every day with the search word étiqueteuse until she found one. Before that she used an artisanal system designed by a Japanese trainee who used a wooden box where you could lay a few bottles, wipe them clean and put the label. Now she looks for heating coil (canne chauffante) because they may need some for the winter
Here on the picture Anne fills a glass of her worrying Wonder Womanne 2008 (she says it's rather Wonder Poufiasse now...), the tank that was fermenting too fast in the bottom of the gallery and which she moved closer to the door to cool it a bit and have it calm down. Gorgeous color, red-orange, almost tile, she says this is the usual color. Usually the blend is Cinsault, Syrah and Grenache and this year it is Syrah, Grenache and a bit of Carignan, the reason there wasn't enough Cinsault, especially that she needs also some to make Pot d'Anne and Etat D'Anne. That's also because she changed the supplier, Christophe Beau (Beauthorey) who provided her the grapes, has his son Victor who is beginning to make wine himself (at Inebriati), so she found another one, the down side is he has less Carignan (but lots of other, including varieties she didn't have before). The sugar is well down from what I taste, nice juice. she used bottles with blue glass last year, this year it will be black glass.
Her first white
Then Anne walks to another tank where she has her first ever white, a blend of Colombard and Vermentino, two varieties provided by her new source in the Languedoc. She picked all of them the same day because it would have been tricky to manage sepârate pickings for the two varieties (the Colombard was riper than the Vermentino), they lacked time and the truch was full and waiting to move all the tanks to the Loire. so they vinified both juices together (and pressed them together alike), starting in the semi-trailer. they did the pressing in a facility in the languedoc as well as the setlling of the lees (débourbage) for which they has brought along a large white vat in the truck.
Right now the wine is in the middle of its malolactic (the primary fermentation is finished for a while). Tastes pretty good, she says the malolactic may be almost finished, Anne says she likes the result for a first try at a white. She was a bit anxious because she hasn't any experience in whites, plus she's not usually a fan of southern whites, she finds them often heavy. I tell her that for hzer reds she's known to make easydrinking reds with grapes grown in a region where it's difficult to do so. She says she picked at a time other people hadn't yet begun to harvest, or she was picking Carignan when other growers were picking their Cinsault. With the Vermentino part being below maturity she'll have a wine sporting a reasonable 12,7 % alcohol, not bad for the region. I like the aromatic coating feel of this wine, very promising, with this small hint of bitternes, be it related to the finishing malolactic or not.
Greg's Grolleau-Côt
Here Anne helps Gregory rack a fermenting vat of red into another vat, this is a blend of Gamay and Côt. Greg got mildew on his Gamay so he got insufficient volumes of it and he completed the press load with some Grolleau. The vat if now fermenting healthily, Greg says that it may not be cause by the newly painted and cleaned walls and ceiling in the cellar gallery, the yeast ambiance varies from year to year and this one is particularly vibrant. Fermentations are going pretty fast, which is good but they're almost too fast for them to follow the pace, they have a hard time following each vat and tasting everything timely.
Jus de Goutte
we then go taste Anne's Cinsault, at least the free run juice or jus de goutte. This will be part of Pot d'Anne, but part of this juice will also go to Etat d'Anne. Nice turbid color, light as it should be for a free run (picture on right).Superb nose here, quite peppery like a Pineau d'Aunis would be. Anne brings a glass to Gregory so that he can taste too. THe wine is a bit acidic because the malolactic hasn't even begun.
We also taste the press juice from the same Cinsault, the color is quite light too, Anne says that they didn't make long macerations this year (they made 4 or 5 days) because Cinsault is a bit fragile and this time it seems it didn't like the truck stage, she adds. Malolactic hasn't started yet here also. More substance here of course with pretty nice tannic feel, you just have to imagine it with a tamed acidity after malolactic is completed. She doesn't like to taste the wine at this stage between the primary and the malolactic, that's why she doesn't take part in wine tasting events at this time of the year, when winemakers are encouraged to show wines that aren't finished.
Checking the pressure on a floating lid
Then we tasted her Merlot, also a juice she brought here from the Languedoc. She says the last time she had the wine analyzed at the lab, the malolactic was 40 % to completion. This is a new cuvée, she hadn't made any Merlot before, same for Carignan (the vat pictured above), this is the first time she works with these varieties, so the cuvée name is still undecided. The grapes travelled in the semi as well at a maceration stage, part destemmed and part wole-clustered, this will be a try as she doesn't know the variety. As a side question I ask anne if she knows what was the weight of load in the truck on the way back to the Loire, she says 23 tons... The inside of the trailer was divided in two compartments, one for the rosés and white, maintained at 8 C (46,4 F) and the other for the reds at 17 C (62,6 F) which was almost the ambiant temperature (the goal for the reds was mostly to avoid the temperature swings between the night and the day). This year she'll probably have 7 cuvées, she'll have new cuvées but will not make Anne a Wine Again because the Syrah wasn't nice enough, she also will not make CSG and Anagramme (will come back eventually in the following vintages if she has no mildew and she gets enough Grenache).
The good old press
We then taste the Carignan, also from a vat, right next from the Merlot (this is the one she pumps the floating lid of). Here also she had in the truck tanks of destemmed grapes, some with whole-clustered and some with the two modes, in order to see the difference, and here she blended the three, her impression is that Carignan fates better when destemmed. The wine tastes pretty good at this stage, I love it, Anne says that the malolactic is basically over now. She'll rack it soon to another, similar tank, in order to take away the thick lees, then she'll decide if it will bottled by itself or blended with Merlot, with bottling possibly next spring.
Anne Paillet Autour de l'Anne 16 Rue du Général de Gaulle Chargé 37530 phone + 33 6 18 46 07 49 phone (fixed) + 33 9 71 21 39 47 Autour de l'Anne's Facebook page email autour.de.lanne [at] gmail.com
They can write a new part of the famous "Adventures in the wine route" with the title of "Adventures of a routed wine" 8-D
Posted by: Jose | December 07, 2018 at 01:14 PM


text:
Hiring at a startup is no simple task. You're growing quickly, looking for candidates that can do a little bit of everything and can take the initiative to drive your projects to succeed.
You may be dealing with a volatile candidate market and uncertain funding prospects internally. You're building a hiring strategy from scratch and figuring out what kind of people will build your future company culture. Among the challenges and uncertainties, solid startup recruitment with thought-out principles and strategy can guide your growing team.
Castor EDC is one such company, making waves in the medical research space. They're growing quickly with no plans to let up soon. However, they're taking critical steps in preparing to scale- all while maintaining an important focus on people.
In a conversation with Eric Stonehewer, the Talent Acquisition Partner and Employer Branding Specialist at Castor, we were let in on a few secrets behind their scaling team.
So, can you tell me about the Castor story? What's the Castor recruitment process like?
Eric Stonehewer: Castor's recruitment process is already very different from when Castor was first founded and is also currently changing as Castor is a scaling business. During those first few years, there was not really any structure or assessment process as there was not a high volume of applications. In fact, there were no applications! Derk (our CEO) did everything himself. It would have been a lot of networking, connections and him knowing what he needed to help his business take off.
About 12 months ago, when Castor received its Series A investment, we went through our first period of scale. Unfortunately, I was not part of Castor then so I don't really know what recruitment looked like.
I can imagine it was very much high-level thinking about recruitment. For example, one thought was "we need to manage and track applications. We need an ATS." This is where Recruitee came in.
The plans now are to structure and set in place a lot of processes and procedures. Because when we come to our Series B investment round, where we'll probably see an investor offering triple of Series A – we will need to scale at a much higher rate! This will most likely see us go from what is now 45 to maybe 90/100 people.
So when we get to this volume of operational recruitment need, it will be imperative to have those processes and procedures in place. If not, it just won't work effectively for the business and our candidates will have really poor experiences.
At present, our hiring journey is slowly becoming more structured.
For candidates, we try and communicate the process during our very first conversation, that first point of contact with either a recruiter or hiring manager, so they will know the plan from there, keeping them informed along the way.
For example, if I have a conversation with a candidate and their application looks great, we're having a telephone interview. I'm not letting them leave the call without telling them "this is what your process will be." So, they know there and then what to expect.
Not necessarily every one of them is going to be the same because, again, something that happens at a startup is that it can be a little bit chaotic and things can change very quickly, so an internal stakeholder might not be available anymore. So we have to chop and change out the hiring managers that will be involved in the interview process, but the journey should not differ from what's been advised.
It seems like you are focusing quite a lot on the candidate journey. What does the typical candidate journey look like at Castor?
Eric Stonehewer: At the moment, things are still a little up in the air. However, we have plans to really improve the Castor Hiring Journey, which will hopefully look like the below:
It would begin with either a candidate directly applying for a vacancy at Castor, which is always the dream solution right! They may also have been referred to us, or we have decided to approach somebody. So, depending on how they come into the pool, there's always that initial application.
After application, we'd have a first stage telephone interview or video assessment with a recruiter on the team. When I say team, we are very small!
If everything seems like it's aligned on both sides, we will move forward to a first round interview, which will be with the hiring manager. It could be with the hiring manager and one of us from the talent team. It could be with the hiring manager and another member of that team. This interview allows us to dive into some more of the specifics of the technical and soft skills required for the role.
If everything is still aligned, we'll move to a final stage interview day. This would involve a role-specific business case, a second interview, a personal profile interview for some roles, focusing more on purpose-driven mentality and cultural fit and, hopefully, a little bit of gamification might be in the cards for the future (watch this space!).
So that's the ideal candidate journey, three very clear stages upon which we will then look to make an offer.
Something special that we have at Castor is called the Pecha Kucha, which is a very different type of presentation – basically 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide.
Everyone in the business gets an invite to attend and our new 'Castorian' presents their Pecha Kucha as part of their 'welcome.'
The presentation can be on anything about themselves, who they are, what they've been doing, where they went to college, their family, their friends, their hobbies, their favorite holidays, their pets, etc. It allows people to introduce themselves to everyone in an informal, personal, dynamic way. And it really does reflect the culture of Castor – we're an entrepreneurial, engaged, friendly, and social workspace.
One of Castor's core values.
Adrie Smith: Yeah. Wow. I really like that. That's a bit unusual [laughter].
Eric Stonehewer: Yes. And we do that at the moment. As Castor scales, it might not be possible for everyone in the company to meet the new team member, then it might be that we move Pecha Kucha to just their new team. But, at the moment, as we're only about 50 people, it's still manageable for everyone to be there if they want to be. It is a nice way for people to get introduced to Castor.
Adrie Smith: Yeah, definitely agree.
Where did the Pecha Kucha get its start? Do you know?
Eric Stonehewer: I think somebody at Castor just mentioned it to their manager or the CEO and said, "wouldn't this be a cool idea?"
And that's very much how things at Castor happen, "wouldn't this be a cool idea? Let's try this new thing." It either works or it doesn't. And again, that's part of the team culture. You try things, you fail or you don't, and that's how everyone learns and the business grows.
Are there any key points for onboarding that follow directly on from the recruitment process?
Eric Stonehewer: Sure. We've just started with a new HR system called Bamboo; this allows us to set tasks for new team members. When we know someone is starting, we can make sure we set this with a reminder to say: "Make sure you plan onboarding."
Normally, the first Monday of every month we run an insight day, for everyone who joined the team in the last 4 weeks. They'll have a meeting with the CEO to find out all about why he started Castor, the way we work at Castor, how to use our tools, startup culture, our mission, and values (where they came from) and an hour with our very own internal 'fun-squad'!
This is especially helpful for people who have not come from a startup background. It's really great to know how we work at Castor.
Personally, I didn't ever work in startups before, I worked for very large organizations and for me it was a massive shock to the system because it's a completely different way of working. So having someone in a welcome day that says "this is how we work at Castor, these are some of the tools we use. This is the best way to communicate." Like, who knew that email wasn't the way to reach people actually? You need to use Slack! So if you don't know that, you're going to find things quite difficult.
So, you've mentioned that it's a bit of an adjustment for some people to join. Who is Castor's ideal candidate?
Eric Stonehewer: We use Officevibe – a tool that allows us to constantly check in with all of our employees to find out how they're feeling about different workplace topics.
From all of that continuous feedback, especially where it has remained consistent, we try and incorporate it into assessing our ideal candidate.
For example, we find a very high percentage of our employees are really purpose driven. They've joined Castor because they actually really believe in the product and are naturally intrinsically motivated.
It's really important for us to make sure that someone is aligned with what we do and fits our culture. Something that our new recruitment process and candidate journey will have when we sort of align all of this (it's currently a work in process!) is for culture to be a big part of the hiring journey.
So then what's your favorite culture fit question?
Eric Stonehewer: So, it's a bit silly because it's not really about the answer, it's more about how they think and how they take the question on board. But one question I really love is: "Your friend's just been given an elephant, they can't sell it and they can't get rid of it. What would you advise they do with the elephant?"
I like this question because it can be really telling of how someone will fit your culture.
For example, at Castor one of our values is 'To amaze with user-friendly and creative solutions.'
To set some context with this value, for example, our customers are really important to us. They're the medical researchers making important breakthroughs. We want to amaze them when we're developing our product to make sure that they can do the best possible.
Also, at Castor, our people are very solutions-focused and very entrepreneurial.
Relating to those points, this question is really telling in the way someone thinks. Because, if someone just takes that question the wrong way and really can't answer it, it suggests that they might not be as dynamic as they need to be to work at Castor.
[Disclaimer – we don't always use this question if you're reading this and have an upcoming interview with us ;)!]
Adrie Smith: Yeah, I really like that one. [chuckle]
What is the most interesting answer you've had so far?
Eric Stonehewer: A lot of people have actually answered 'open an elephant sanctuary,' which is really nice. I really like those who answered that they'll open an elephant sanctuary, but then one person I asked said they should have paid entry to the elephant sanctuary. I was like, "No one has said that they'd have paid entry before." Yeah. Clever.
I liked it because they thought outside the box in true Castorian fashion!
Adrie Smith: Well yeah, then you get both the creative and commercial in that response.
Eric Stonehewer: Yeah. Very much like that answer.
What are your recruitment goals for the coming year? I know you said you're scaling up and that's going to be a bit of a challenge. What's the primary goal here?
Eric Stonehewer: This year is about setting the processes and procedures. So that we, as a people team and our managers are ready for it. We want to get things in place so we can be really agile rather than having to just do everything from scratch.
We also want to support our managers by training them to use our new methodology. It's just about making sure that everything's set and then educating and empowering our managers to use it this year and then next year when we scale, then hopefully it won't be as challenging as it would be without all of that.
Adrie Smith: Yeah. Well, I think that's a good way of going about it first. I'm interested to see how training your managers goes.
I always like to end interviews on favorite recruitment tools: do you have one?
Adrie Smith: It could be also a recruitment resource, tool, or hack. If you were with other recruiters, what would you say they need to be doing now?
Eric Stonehewer: Yeah. And that is a very good question. I'm going to give an answer solely because I was just looking at something this morning and I've booked a demo!
The company was called Odro and they provide a video tool for interviewing, assessments, etc. However, the functionality that I saw them advertising on their LinkedIn page was that you could use the tool to start a conversation.
Instead of just sending an individual an email or message you can use the tool to film a little video for like 30 seconds as an introduction or approach. Then, you pop it straight in an InMail and off it goes!
Adrie Smith: And automatically you stand out.
Eric Stonehewer: And I just was like "that looks great". I saw it and the first thing that popped into my head was "that could really increase my response rates."
Imagine getting an email and it's a video of someone. You can physically see who they are, they're an actual person and not just a robot – a lovely personal touch to show you're approaching them because you're genuinely interested in a conversation and not just spam messaging 100's of people!
So, yes, on first looks I really liked the look of this tool.
Whether you're scaling a startup's team or hiring from within a corporate, establishing strong recruitment and selection processes is important to sustainable people growth. The Castor hiring team seems to be setting the scene for scaling up. We'll be looking forward to watching their team skyrocket in 2019!
New careers site with new beginnings for Incentro
Hiring with Hourly
Collaborative hiring success with Sofico

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
If you asked me last week, I'd have said it would be a cold day in Hollywood when Bucky Covington outperforms Ace Young on an R&B-themed episode of American Idol. And it was. Over the past several chilly days, snow fell on the desert sands near Palm Springs, blanketed the southern California mountain ranges, and even lightly coated the hilltops of the O.C., my home county.
Stevie Wonder has been an American idol for 40 years, but you wouldn't know that by asking newbies Bucky or Kellie Pickler. Their prior unfamiliarity with Stevie's extensive body of work is mirrored in the American Idol audience, where the cultural gap is also generational.
My son, now a college student, has been exposed to a wide variety of popular music all his life. Chris's personal tastes range from Pantera to Japanese soundtracks, but he is an American Idol fan rooting this season for Paris Bennett and Taylor Hicks. The other day I was driving my four-wheeled stereo around town and Chris was a captive passenger. I had been listening to my favorite Stevie Wonder CDs ever since Ryan Seacrest announced this week's theme.
Suddenly Chris asked me, "Why do people think Stevie Wonder is so great?"
I paused before I answered – only because I was singing along passionately to Songs in the Key of Life. My family teases me about being like that annoying character, Brenda, from Scary Movie who instantly stops whatever she is doing to shriek, "That's my song!"
Anyway, Chris knows full well what to expect when he asks me leading questions, so he got what he deserved: a music history lesson. Then the distinctive opening strains of the next track began to play and I shut up, proving that music does speak louder than words. Pastime Paradise is Wonder's 1976 composition filched by Coolio for his monster hit from 1995, Gangsta's Paradise. With a look of recognition and surprise, Chris observed, "Hey, isn't that Amish Paradise by Weird Al Yankovic?"
Motown, we have a problem.
Stevie Wonder is the quintessential singer's songwriter, not to mention a gifted singer himself, a record producer, and a versatile musician who played nearly all the instruments on his album Music of My Mind. Some songs that showcase a vocalist's power feature a well-placed glory note. Stevie's entire catalog is glorious – but melodically complex even for the most proficient singer. He is one of the few so-called pop geniuses from the 1960s who not only survived but thrived in succeeding decades, dominating and innovating R&B in the 1970s.
As if having to master Stevie's masterpieces wasn't challenge enough, this week the top 12 performed for the first time on the full-sized stage before a regular, noisy, intimidating audience. So – which of the American Idol contestants passed the Stevie Wonder test, who fell short, and who copped out?
Elliott Yamin knocks me off my feet – and, according to my traffic meter, I am not alone. What a faithful tribute to the joyfulness of Stevie Wonder and what an appealing introduction for new listeners. Elliott's talent and humility give me goose bumps. When he was wiping away tears of happiness at meeting his idol, Stevie, I was crying, too.
Over four American Idol appearances, Elliott has performed two of my Stevie Wonder favorites with awe and tender loving care, starting with If You Really Love Me. Elliott's performance this week was the one I anticipated with the most excitement. I hoped he would sing Knocks Me Off My Feet, a gorgeous love song with special meaning for my husband and me. It was a dream come true for me and obviously even more so for Elliott. We already know that Elliott is technically adept, the best among the top 12. So I think he was smart to select a song that, while by no means easy to sing, displayed his warmth and emotion, as well as his skill. The payoff was the most intimate performance of the evening.
Taylor Hicks was, as usual, the most compelling entertainer. The stage may have gotten bigger, but it was still not big enough to contain Taylor's free spirit. If I ruled the world, the AI5 finalists would be Taylor and Elliott and they would have their own weekly two-hour show. Taylor is such a throwback to the wonderful soul greats of my childhood that, watching him Tuesday, I wished my sister were still alive to see him.
Like Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, Taylor has his own unique phrasing, the mark of a confident, naturally gifted singer. My favorite line from his Living for the City: "His parents give him love and a-ffec-tion." He did superb justice to Stevie's gritty tale of racial injustice. Plus, he can really dance. Seriously.
Paris Bennett showed off her eye-catching moves, adorable spunk and authentic soulfulness. I expected her to choose one of Stevie's bouncy hits like Isn't She Lovely or Sir Duke. Performing the relatively unknown All I Do was a bold risk that worked spectacularly. I felt like I was watching the opening number on the Paris Bennett world tour.
Katharine McPhee more than met the challenge of Until You Come Back to Me, immortalized by Aretha Franklin. In fact, she was flat out awesome. Despite a bit of shouting at the top of her register, her pitch and tone were just lovely, especially in her clean, silky ending. Normally Katharine smiles and flirts with the camera even when delivering the saddest lyrics. Her coy self-consciousness wasn't as distracting this week.
Lisa Tucker has been stuck in a rut of seamless ballads, none of which I can recall right now. She tends to be smooth and professional to the point of blandness. On Signed, Sealed, Delivered, she displayed some welcome energy and dynamics. She even stole a "whoo" from Taylor's repertoire. Let's hope being in the bottom three this week shakes this talented contestant out of her bad-choice complacency.
Bucky Covington was my happiest surprise of the evening. His voice isn't the most flexible, but he packs a lot of blue-eyed soul into his growl. I give him maximum credit for venturing outside his comfort zone and not copping out. Considering that he never heard Superstition before, Bucky offered a credible version that compares favorably to Stevie Ray Vaughan's.
Songs in the Key of Ouch
Mandisa picked the wrong song, Don't You Worry 'bout a Thing, and the wrong key. I bet that never happens again. After struggling with her lower register through the first verse, she raised the melody an octave and then lowered it, trying to salvage the song. And yet she still outsang five other contestants. Just imagine what she could have done with Golden Lady or Superwoman - with gender modifications, of course. Sigh.
Kellie Pickler was about as far out of her element as she could get. Her bare bones performance of Blame It on the Sun was subdued, but her tone was winsome. Apparently, Simon missed her trademark shimmy shake and disparaged her outfit, a very flattering yet fairly modest dress. Kellie, just ignore Simon and his bipolar sadism. But pay attention to the vocal coaches.
Kevin Covais. I remember Nikko Smith. Nikko Smith knows how to sing Part Time Lover. Kevin Covais is no Nikko Smith. What happened to our sweet little Kevin? Chicken Little has become the cock o' the walk.
Melissa McGhee started Lately lost and shaky, forgot the lyrics, recovered for a gutsy finish, and won't be back next week.
Ace Young was first to perform and first to disappoint. Ace did an okay version of Do I Do, but Mario Vasquez sang the stuffing out of it last year (see Covais, Kevin). Ace is a tenor with a sensual breathiness and a pleasing falsetto. If he had chosen one of Stevie's lush, romantic songs, like Creepin', he might be on top of the world instead of in the bottom three.
Chris Daughtry was the pre-ordained showstopper – not by Broadway standards, but of the theme park variety where the grand finale is accompanied by deafeningly loud music and blindingly bright lights. Chris was my biggest disappointment of the night. Higher Ground was the most predictable, safest choice of the night. He was out of his depth and he knew it. He was lucky to get a glowing review from the judges – and he knew it. He hit a hideous clunker on the line "Sleepers just stop sleeping." Check it out.
Like Ace, Chris squandered the opportunity to perform a song that would have won new fans and cemented his base. Chris has the potential to be another Aaron Lewis of Staind, one of the most powerful rock singers of the post-modern era. Chris could have taken a hauntingly beautiful Stevie song like Visions with its stripped down arrangement and blown Wonderland away. Instead we have to closely watch the Ford commercials to spot his softer side on Toad the Wet Sprocket's All I Want [note to self: dig out those Toad/Glen Phillips CDs].
Shame on the judges for damning Elliott with faint praise. I have been a Red Hot Chili Peppers fan since the days of Hillel Slovak. Anthony Kiedis is a highly quotable front man, but he's no singing idol.
As long as American Idol is a singing competition, I will take "just a good Stevie Wonder rendition" over a louder, shinier Anthony Kiedis every time.


"The Cloud" is a popular buzzword nowadays, that refers to services that can be hosted entirely on the internet. There is cloud hosting, cloud backups, cloud email…and now cloud printing. In this article, we will explain not only what cloud printing is, but how to cloud print.
Cloud printing is a service that allows you to print to your home or office printers from anywhere in the world, as long as you have an internet connection. All you need is a cloud printing application, and an internet-accessible printer, and you can take your business on the road!
How do I use cloud printing?
Cloud printing is both easy and convenient. Here is a simple guide to using this new technology.
First, you need to choose a cloud printing provider. Be sure to choose one that offers you the products and support that you need – the best value is in cloud computing services that package cloud printing with other cloud solutions.
You will then need to download your provider's cloud printing app. This is the software you will use to connect your PC, laptop or tablet to your printer online.
Once your cloud printing application is installed, you need to configure it to work with your printer. Any printer that connects to the internet will be able to cloud print, but there are also specialty printers that come enabled with cloud printing capabilities.
These printers don't require any additional setup in order to connect them to your cloud printing service. Many of the top printer manufacturers, such as HP, Epson and Brother, now make cloud-ready printers.
Once your printer is configured for cloud printing, you can use that printer from anywhere in the world. As long as you have internet access, you have access to your cloud printer. You can also share your printer with any other device that has the cloud printing app installed. Simply print your file as usual, selecting your cloud printing device as default.


Mulvaney was named acting director following the resignation of Richard Cordray, who left the BCFP to run for governor of Ohio.
Sen. McConnell has scheduled floor time today for the vote, in which Kraninger is expected to be narrowly confirmed. Democrats, especially Sen. Elizabeth Warren [D-Mass.], have been working hard at trying to keep Kraninger from being confirmed, citing her lack of consumer protection experience and her ties to several failed government programs while Kraninger was an associate director at the Office of Management and Budget.
Kraninger was confirmed by the Senate Banking Committee in August in a 13-12 vote along party lines, and a cloture motion to limit debate on her nomination passed 50-49. The vote on her full nomination is expected to be just as close.
Kraninger is expected to continue to push the BCFP in the direction that Mulvaney has pointed the agency, with fewer enforcement actions and more emphasis on educating consumers.
Financial services trade groups, including ACA International, have supported Kraninger's nomination to be the BCFP's next director.


The first trailer has arrived for the highly anticipated sequel to "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," the successful reboot of the 'Apes' franchise. Matt Reeves directs this $120 million-budget outing which is targeting a July 11th 2014 release.
The film is set a decade after Rise's post-credits sequence where a devastating virus has wiped out much of humanity. Caesar now leads a growing nation of genetically evolved apes which is threatened by a band of human survivors. A fragile peace proves short-lived, as both sides are brought to the brink of a war.
The trailer is up at Apple Trailers.


text:
This Is Abrupt Climate Change
Transcribed from the 16 January 2016 episode of This is Hell! Radio (Chicago) and printed with permission. Listen to the full interview:
"In late November 2014 at the Lima COP 20 meetings, a climate scientist from the University of Ottawa in Canada predicted a global average rise in temperature of five degrees Celsius or greater in the span of a decade or two, based on what has happened historically. That takes us right up to the kind of global average temperature that essentially no complex organism survives. Then we reset the clock, and it takes another ten million years or so before complex organisms begin evolving again from microbes."
Chuck Mertz: Climate change is already happening, and the disastrous effects are starting to mount. And soon—sooner than you think—that disaster is going to happen faster—faster than you think—and it's going to be more destructive than you think, even leading to human extinction. And again, not a long time from now, but real, real soon.
Here to tell us is conservation biologist Guy McPherson. He is professor emeritus of natural resources and the environment at the University of Arizona, where he taught and conducted research for twenty award-winning years. Guy is the leading voice of abrupt climate change.
Thank you so much for being on our show this week, Guy.
Guy McPherson: It's a pleasure, Chuck, thanks.
CM: Let's just start with a really basic question about your ongoing essay, which you call the Monster Climate-Change Essay. How long have you been writing this essay? When did you initially post it at your site?
GM: January 6, 2011. I've been updating it every couple of days since then.
CM: Because every day there's more and more news about climate change that's breaking, and it's more and more bad news. But, unfortunately, what we keep hearing is not even the worst news about climate change.
You write, "Almost everybody reading these words has a vested interest in not wanting to think about climate change, which helps explain why the climate change deniers have won. They've been aided and funded by the fossil fuel industry, the memos from which reveal decades of disinformation and a deliberate campaign to deceive the public that continues even today, according to an in-depth analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists in July 2015."
How dangerous is it to ourselves, individually, to be in this kind of denial that you are suggesting? Because what's been happening within American culture over the last twenty or thirty years is this embrace of individualism and the undermining of a collective approach to addressing problems. So shouldn't we be concerned, at least, for our individual safety?
GM: That's the very crux of the issue, isn't it? We think that we Americans are somehow exceptional, that we're not prone to the same kind of misfortune as all those other people, so we continue to act as individuals instead of coming together as a society. And whenever there has been any sort of movement to come together as a society in a beneficial manner (as happened during the Vietnam War era, for example: the people focused on environmental protection and civil rights and ending the Vietnam War were all the same people), it has led to a tremendous fracturing of society.
So we're in this strangely difficult situation—and we've been in it for a long time, arguably since Vietnam, arguably since long before then—and now it's too late to take any real effective action that will prevent climate change from removing habitat for our species. We're in the midst of abrupt climate change, something with which most people are unfamiliar.
CM: Well, that's the thing. How would you prove to somebody who's sitting next to you at the bar that we are already in the midst of not just climate change, but abrupt climate change?
GM: It's a key distinction, between anthropogenic climate change (climate change created by humanity's collective actions) and abrupt climate change (which is beyond the human realm to control). Most people have heard about anthropogenic climate change, are familiar with it, and are even willing to admit that it's underway—particularly if it doesn't involve any action on their part to try to address this now unaddressable issue.
The abrupt climate change topic is the one that goes the next step. There are various indicators which point to abrupt climate change: things like Katrina and Sandy and Haiyan, these superstorms that have the capacity to level cities and overwhelm our ability to respond, much less control; things like wildfires that are too numerous and too large for us to have any control over. Last year, 2015, we saw more acres burned in the United States than had ever been measured before.
These are just minor examples. Food and water disruptions are already underway. São Paulo, one of the world's largest cities, doesn't have access to clean water for their population. That's a problem. There are refugees coming from Syria into Europe; there are refugees coming from the south island states in the Pacific into places like Australia and especially New Zealand.
So: there are people moving to escape the absence of habitat which has been created by anthropogenic climate change and abrupt climate change, there are frequent and powerful storms, there are fires that are unbelievable, there are food and water shortages; there are five million people that die every year as a result of climate change.
CM: When you say "abrupt" climate change, though, just how abruptly will the worst factors of climate change happen and affect the human population?
GM: Well, about 55 million years ago, there was a global average rise in temperature of five degrees Celsius. That's about nine degrees Fahrenheit. That doesn't sound like much. We're capable of adjusting to changes in temperature that rapid, as individuals. But the other organisms on the planet are not capable of making the same adjustments, and they certainly aren't capable of getting up and moving around like we are. They are not capable of taking refuge in Europe or New Zealand. They have to stay right where they are, especially organisms like plants. So when the habitat changes, they die.
That nine degree (Fahrenheit) temperature increase occurred in the span of thirteen years. That's the kind of abrupt change we're talking about. I can't imagine that the human race would survive that sort of abrupt rise in temperature, because of how it would affect our habitat. Ultimately, we're human animals—a lot of us lose track of that, not only because of the notion of American exceptionalism, but the notion of human supremacy. That we're actually different from all the other organisms is a built-in thought with which we've been raised. But it's not a healthy thought to separate ourselves from the living planet, because we actually depend upon the living planet.
Another example is the great die-off of about 252 million years ago, when more than 90% of species on the planet lost habitat and then went away through extinction. More than 90%. The current events with respect to climate change are happening orders of magnitude faster than that event. That one took somewhere between twenty and eighty thousand years for a global average temperature rise of initially a couple of degrees Celsius and ultimately about ten or eleven degrees Celsius. And now we're talking about an abrupt rise in global average temperature far, far exceeding that pace.
Paul Beckwith, a climate scientist at the University of Ottawa in Canada, in late November 2014 at the Lima COP 20 meetings, predicted a global average rise in temperature of five degrees Celsius or greater in the span of a decade or two, based on what has happened historically. That's five degrees Celsius from today. And that takes us right up to the neighborhood of the kind of global average temperature that essentially no complex organism survives. And then we reset the clock, and it takes another ten million years or so before we have complex organisms again evolving from microbes and bacteria and so forth.
CM: But we're told the goal is a two degree Celsius rise in temperature and that these Paris climate talks were a success, even though the agreement is completely non-binding. So what about that two degree Celsius ceiling—how attainable is it to limit the amount of climate change to only two degrees Celsius? What have you learned from your research about that limit?
"Very few people want to turn off the heat engine, and at this point, we've gone so far down the path that it doesn't really matter if we turn it off now or not. We're destined for a loss of habitat for our species in the not-very-distant future, regardless."
GM: That's a great question. You've got a goal, I've got a goal, now all we need is a football team, right?
A couple of things. First, two degrees Celsius has never been the scientific target. The scientific target was set by the United Nations advisory group on greenhouse gases in October of 1990—that's a long time ago—and the target was no more than one degree Celsius. No more. We're above that now, by the way.
The political target was created by a neoclassical economist, of all people, who said that no, the scientists don't really know what they're talking about; two degrees Celsius is the real target. And that's been bandied about for long enough now that people assume it was some sort of scientific target.
David Spratt, a climate science speaker and synthesizer of information, delivered a presentation in summer 2014 saying that the real target should have been less than half a degree Celsius. We blew through that number a long time ago.
So how important is two degrees? It's irrelevant. And not only that, but it's already locked in. Even if industrial civilization collapsed today, even if we turned off all the lights, stopped driving cars, no more electric anything, not able to have this conversation, the whole thing comes down in the next ten minutes, there's something called global dimming. The particulates put up into the atmosphere through industrial activity—including burning low-quality coal, which puts sulfates into the atmosphere—when they all fall out (and it doesn't take long for them to fall out) we lose this protective umbrella we have over the planet created by those particles.
So greenhouse gases, paradoxically, are trapping heat, trapping long-wave radiation, preventing it from going back into space once it enters our atmosphere, and that's warning the planet—but at the same time the particulates produced through the same industrial activity that put the greenhouse gases up there are also providing a protective shield. When that protective shield goes away, we'll experience up to a three-degree (Celsius) global average temperature rise. That puts us well over four in total. That's a big number. And in a matter of days or weeks—that's how rapidly this system will respond to the loss of that umbrella over the planet.
So two degrees is a done deal. It's already behind us. There just isn't any broad recognition of that fact.
CM: You mentioned how an economist changed it to the two degree Celsius ceiling. It wasn't a climatologist, it wasn't somebody who had a PhD in environmental science. This is a little bit off of where your writing goes, but I'm just curious: how much has the influence of the ultra-rich, of the 1%, caused climate change?
How much has the influence of money actually caused climate change?
GM: His name, by the way, is William Nordhaus, and he's quite an influential and well-known economist.
How much has the so-called 1% had influence? I don't think you have to look very far to see the impact of those folks. The Koch brothers and their ilk, for example, have been funding climate denial messages for years, arguably decades, in the same vein as a tobacco company knowing that tobacco was causing lots of disease and death—based on their own research—and not allowing the information to get out into the populace. The anti-science climate change message, one of denial, has been profoundly effective because it's had a lot of money behind it.
If you tell people that it's all a farce, it's all a scam, it's all a liberal conspiracy invented by Al Gore, who makes money off solar panels, that's easy for people to believe, for one thing, because nobody really wants to do anything. Certainly nobody—or a very, very small fraction of the population—wants to terminate industrial civilization, wants to turn off the heat engine. That's how we make our money! That's how we get to go visit people we love, far across the continent or across the sea.
Nobody wants to turn this thing off, which is what it would have taken, years ago. Very few people want to turn off the heat engine, and at this point, because of those particulates in the sky, we've gone so far down the path that it doesn't really matter if we turn it off now or not. We're destined for a loss of habitat for our species in the not-very-distant future, regardless.
CM: You write about how much the science is being silenced on climate change: "In addition, the consolidation of the scientific publishing industry is accelerating, with expected profit-based results." How much has climate science had its research and even its access to the public cut off? And can we just blame the fossil fuel industry, or is there more to blame than just the fossil fuel industry?
GM: I would argue there is much more to blame than merely the fossil fuel industry. For one thing, we're all using fossil fuels, so we point the finger that way and some other fingers are pointed back at us. But again, it's the whole culture. It's this whole idea that we are able to fix anything, and we will recognize when we have a problem far enough in advance that we can head off the problem and fix it.
This isn't a problem, this is a predicament. There is no politically viable approach to dealing with abrupt climate change. Even in 2007, when Tim Garrett from the University of Utah was writing and then submitting his initial article indicating that civilization was a heat engine, I suspect there were very few people at that point who were willing to say, "Well, alright, the evidence says we need to turn off the heat engine, let's just shut it down! Let's ban all flights. Let's not sell any more fossil fuels to anybody. And yeah, a lot of people will die because they won't be able to get water out of the ground and through their taps and so on, but that's what it's going to take to allow our species to persist. So let's do that." I can't imagine there would be even 3% of the population in the United States that would vote for that.
"We're no longer in that slow linear rate of change that recycling and energy efficient lightbulbs will fix. Rather, we are in one of these events that has occurred throughout planetary history, driven by things like methane and moistening in the upper troposphere, these self-reinforcing feedback loops that cause the system to heat up on its own."
Let's look a little bit more deeply at some of the political machinations of the publication process itself. The refereed journal literature, that's the gold standard of science. When something is published in these noted journals, it has gone through an extensive process of peer review. It's very difficult to get anything nonsensical through that process, and if something nonsensical makes it through that process, it is then subject to scrutiny by the entire scientific community, which can then conduct their own research and disprove all that has been found out that we don't really like.
So Tim Garrett started working on his heat engine papers, initially submitting them for publication in 2007. That initial submission was rejected by ten different journals before it was accepted by an editor by the name of Steven Schneider, for the journal Climatic Change. That's one of the premier refereed journals dealing with climate change. And he, as an editor, sent it out for peer review, looked at the comments and the reviews, and said, "Yeah, this is high quality stuff. We're going to publish this." And the electronic version was published in November 2009.
There was immediate kickback from the scientific community. Several scientists wrote to Steven Schneider, the editor, and said, "Whoa, you're talking about the heat engine that is civilization. Turning off civilization? That's just wacky." So the paper was pulled, and it was not subsequently published in print form until February 2011, almost a year and half later.
By that time, there were two research labs that had written responses to the paper; those responses were published, but Garrett himself was not allowed to respond to them in print. Garrett has published a couple of other papers subsequently, and nobody to my knowledge has taken issue with his primary findings: that civilization itself is a heat engine, that it doesn't really matter if we run it with solar panels and wind turbines, that civilization itself is at the root of the predicament.
I suspect Steven Schneider allowed that paper to be published, and shepherded it through the entire process until it reached the light of day, for one reason only—we can't know this for sure, because the reason is he was dying. He has subsequently died. I suspect he was at the point where he just said, "You know, we're going to get this information out there, and it doesn't affect my career anymore because I'm dead in a few months." And then the paper came out.
I think it took a brave man, and a distinguished scholar, in the name of Steven Schneider, to shepherd that paper through the publication process. And that paper is among the least cited and most important papers on climate change I've ever read. Last I checked, it has fewer than thirty papers that had cited it. It's a big deal. And nobody wants to look at it.
CM: You write that it's not only the scientists who underestimate the damage; it's the science itself, too. I think this is an important point. How does science underestimate climate change?
GM: Science is a very conservative process. One of the reasons it has served us so well over the last couple of millennia is that it is conservative. An individual scientist can't write up a paper claiming, for example, that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet, send it in and have one person look at it, an editor, and the editor says, "Yeah! I like that! We're going to publish this, this week!" It doesn't work that way.
It's conservative in that multiple voices are allowed to comment on a paper, and there is a lot of thought that goes into the process, and as with the legal system in the United States—or Great Britain, from which it was derived—there's precedent. To overcome an enormous body of evidence would require an enormous body of evidence itself. It would require significant, solid findings.
So the science itself, once it establishes something—for example, that climate change is anthropogenic, and it's underway, and it's proceeding relatively slowly—then it's very difficult to overcome that with the evidence that says we're no longer in that slow linear rate of change that recycling and energy efficient lightbulbs will fix. Rather, we are in one of these events that has occurred throughout planetary history, driven by things like methane and moistening in the upper troposphere, these self-reinforcing feedback loops that cause the system to heat up on its own, independent of human action. That requires a lot of evidence.
I would argue that at this point, we have a tremendous amount of evidence, but the science, being a conservative process, is slow to react to that new knowledge.
CM: Guy, I have one last question for you, and it's what we call the Question from Hell, the question we might hate to ask, you might hate to answer, or our audience is going to hate your response.
You mentioned earlier how wind and solar are not the solution to this. You mention in your writing that nuclear energy is not the solution to this, that vegetarianism is not the solution to this, that geo-engineering is not the solution to this problem.
But you developed a "comprehensive set of durable living arrangements" in response to the ongoing collapse of the industrial economy and global climate change. You share property in a rural area developed specifically to provide abundant supplies of food and water as well as maintaining comfortable body temperatures in the absence of fossil fuels. You are available for consultation if people are serious about doing the same; you live in an off-grid straw-bale house in rural southern New Mexico, where you "put into practice your lifelong interest in sustainable living."
So if these other solutions—wind and solar, nuclear, vegetarianism, geo-engineering—don't work, can we simply use your lifestyle as a model in order to save ourselves? Or is there no hope for us to survive climate change?
GM:
I was making sure that there was a pregnant pause, so that everybody would be leaning into the speaker when I say no.
When I made the commitment to move here—my wife and I decided to move here in 2007—there was relatively little known about abrupt climate change at the time. There certainly was little evidence to suggest we were in the midst of abrupt climate change. So my personal response is, "Mistakes were made."
I don't think there's any way out of this. I can't imagine what it would be. I have seen no evidence to suggest that there is a way out. Yeah, I have solar panels and I live off-grid—if there's anybody who would be resistant to my message, it's me. Because I turned my entire life upside down. I left a six-figure job doing essentially no work at a university to come out here and make no money living in the rural countryside, where I have very little contact with other human beings.
I'll admit, I was hoping at the time that everyone would follow. I'm a middle-aged white man, and a teacher, I'm just assuming everybody will do what I do. But alas, that didn't happen! Either way, even then it was already too late, I suspect, though I didn't know it at the time. And now I'm absolutely convinced that even had everybody followed my lead in 2007, it wouldn't matter.
CM: Well, Guy, I guess I have to go back to waiting for the aliens to save us.
GM: Yes, you and me both. And by the way, I'm not suggesting inaction as a response. I'm all about action, and I took action here. I recognize now that it was too late at the time. But from a Buddhist perspective, one should take right actions and not be terribly attached to the outcome. So I still promote people taking actions they believe are correct, while not being too hung up on it not working.
CM: Guy, it has truly been an honor to have you on our show this week. Thank you so much.
GM: Thank you, Chuck, the pleasure is all mine.
Earth & Sky
Previous Life Is Beautiful
Next Silopi in Ruins


text:
Baffled – vintage game from Spear's Games
April 13, 2019 by Penny Leave a Comment
It was back last year that we reviewed the game Baffled from Cheatwell Games here on Penny Plays. We'd picked up a copy as a raffle prize at a Blog On conference and enjoyed playing it so much that wanted to share it with you all. I'd assumed it was a new game as I hadn't come across it before. This week I discover I was wrong when I found a vintage copy in a charity shop in Chichester.
This version of Baffled was published in 1991 by Spear's Games. I know that board games over the years become somewhat recycled, but normally a search on the bible of board games (AKA Board Game Geek) shows this up, but in this case Baffled was only listed there as having been published by Cheatwell in 2018.
Baffled – the similarities
On the whole the game of Baffled hasn't really changed between the two versions. You still play in the same way with four players each trying to be the one to stay in longest by memorising the positions of 12 different symbols around the board. You can decide at the start of the game as to how many "lives" each player has and as you work your way around the board the things you are asked to do remain exactly the same in terms of which positions have to swap and which combinations of positions you have to name the symbols at.
Baffled – the differences
Playing the Cheatwell Games version of Baffled
Despite the general game play being the same, there are also quite a few smaller differences between the two versions of Baffled. Both have an elephant on the box, but the 2018 Cheatwell games version majors somewhat more on the elephant theme with each of the four coloured playing pieces bearing a picture of an elephant. In the 1991 Spear's Games version there are just four coloured pieces, one for each player.
Spear's Games Baffled Symbols
Cheatwell Games Baffled Symbols
With the introduction of elephants as playing pieces, there has also been a small change to the symbols that you have to remember. The yellow category contained an elephant and a banana in the Spear's Games version, but by 2018 these had become a lion and a lemon instead. I can see why there was a need to swap out the elephant (which realistically was never yellow anyway!) but I'm not sure what the reason was for the banana going.
Spear's Games Baffled Playing Board
The board layout, and size) also differs between the two versions. In the more modern version the symbols that you are trying to remember the positions of are arrange inside the board. In the old version they are around the edges. I can see why this change has been made as it's far easier to swap pieces around if they're all together in the middle. You're also less likely to knock them when playing than you would be if they were round the edge of the board. The board has also become physically larger.
Spear's Games Baffled playing pieces and symbols
The plastic pieces with the symbols on and the covers for them have also changed between the versions. They were much smaller in the Spear's Games version and also somewhat harder to pick up too. I'm guessing that one of the reasons begins this change is probably driven by the fact that the plastic playing pieces now cost even less to produce than they did back in 1991.
The life cards included in the game have also changed slightly. In the version we reviewed before they either had a tick or a cross on them to symbolise being alive or dead. The Spear's Games version says "Alive" on one side and "Dead" on the other. I wonder if this move to symbols was made to make the game work better in non English speaking countries maybe?
Finally, there's just a subtle change in the rules. It used to be the case that two players could occupy the same square on the Baffled board. By the new version this has changed so that if the square you should land on is already occupied you're supposed to advance to the next un-occupied square. Is this to accommodate the new larger playing pieces? Or a tweak for some other reason.
Baffled twice
I always find it fascinating to compare different versions of the same game as I love discovering what changes have been made over time and trying to work out if the changes are for the better or not. In this case it seems that design is the main driving factor for the changes in Cheatwell's version and I can see that as a good thing. The fact that the game itself has not changed suggests that it's a pretty good game to start with.
You can buy the modern version of Baffled from Cheatwell Games online here. If you take a look on eBay you can often find copies of the Spear's Games version come up for auction. They seem to sell for £7 upwards.
If you're interested in vintage board games then why not head over to Facebook and join our new vintage board games group.
Disclaimer: We bought the Spear's Game version of Baffled in a charity shop. The Cheatwell Games version was given to us as a raffle prize at a Blog On conference. We were not specifically asked to write about it. All opinions remain our own. This post contains affiliate links.
Filed Under: Board Games, Family Games, Vintage Games Tagged With: Baffled, board game, Cheatwell Games, family game, spears games, vintage
Home you go!
March 27, 2019 by Penny Leave a Comment
Could a board game have a title that sounded any more Brexit than "Home you go"? The cover artwork's not much better with a poor blue counter having a look of fear on their face as they're kicked from behind by a red one. Whatever your views on the current political mess here in the UK, let's turn our attentions to this vintage gem from Spear's Games that I found at a car boot sale for a pound.
Home you go! is a game that was actually completely new to me, yet when I shared a picture of us playing it on Facebook loads of people remembered playing it as children, often with their grandparents. I believe this box artwork dated from 1968, but there's nothing on the box I have to tell me exactly how old it is.
The copy I picked up is certainly in good condition though. There's a previous owner's name on the box, and it's very slightly scuffed, but inside everything is laid out exactly as it would have been on the day the game was bought.
Home you go! – Aim of the game
The main aim of Home you go! is to get to the other side of the board. As a game for 2 or 4 players (slightly overlooked when we tried playing for the first time with three of us!) players sit opposite each other, and the aim is to get your five playing pieces across board, rather than round it.
Playing pieces can only move forwards, staying in their lanes, and how many spaces they can move is dictated by the roll of the die. If you land on a square occupied by an other piece then you say "Home you go!" and that players piece has to return to its starting square. You are able to move over and past opponent's pieces if you throw enough to do so.
To get to the other side you have to roll the exact number, and the finishing position can not be already occupied. This would be the case if the opposing player had been sent home. What you can do though is get a larger number and "bounce back" off the last square.
The winner of the game is the first player to have his five men on the opposite side of the board.
We read what the winning criteria where before we started playing and it all sounded quite straightforward. Then we started playing…
What really confused us, and then confused us more when we looked at the (rather brief) instructions, was what happens if the finishing position that you are sat on then becomes occupied by another player's piece. So if you are already sat there and someone else in the game, coming at them at right angles, sends then home. Do they then send you home? Are you aiming to get to the other player's coloured squares, or the row in front of them?
Home you go! – our verdict
I'm going to be honest and say that we didn't exactly fall in love with Home you go! The game just didn't really flow for us, and I found the forceful nature of concentrating on trying to send the opposition back home not really the sort of thing I wanted to do with the kids. It was as if that distracted from the aim of trying to get across the board. Maybe that's just the way my two were playing it? The confusion about exactly where you were supposed to be getting to didn't help either. Or maybe we were just all being a bit dim when playing?
Home you go! – the facts
The vintage version of Home you go! that we played was published by Spear's Games. It is designed for children aged 6 up and two or four players. A modern version of the game is available online.
Disclaimer: This post contains an affiliate link. All opinions remain my own.
Filed Under: Family Games, Games for two players, Vintage Games Tagged With: board games, Home you go, spears games, vintage games
The Cooking Game – the delicious new family board game
February 11, 2019 by Penny Leave a Comment
Finding vintage board games in charity shops can be a bit hit and miss. Some days there is nothing at all. Other days you don't have arms big enough to carry everything you find. The latter was the case when B and I went on a recent trawl round the charity shops of Upminster. We were there to tick off a few District Line stations on our Tube Stop Baby Challenge but decided to use the opportunity to see if there were any vintage board games to be had and I'm so glad we did. Mainly for finding The Cooking Game.
We'd found a variety of games in the charity shops and were feeling very pleased with ourselves when we agreed to just go in one last shop before catching the tube home. That particular shop had one game in that we wanted, but as I walked towards the till I quickly cast my eye over where the jigsaws were as experience has shown me that charity shops often end up confusing the two and there are sometimes games to be found nestling between 1000 pieces scenes of the English countryside.
My mini-detour paid off when I spotted The Cooking Game on sale at a bargain price of just £1.99. Published in 1984 by the The Garden Game Ltd this has the subtitle of "the delicious new family board game" and my interest was immediately piqued. The box shows a variety of outdoor landscape scenes and also a load of food ingredients.
What is The Cooking Game?
Other than a note saying "with recipes by Jane Grigson" the front of the box doesn't really give away much of what the game is about. Turn it over though and you get a black and white picture of the game board and a bit more information. As a game for 2 – 6 players it is described as "fast-moving, funny and informative" and I can see why.
Aim of the game
The aim of the game is to be the first player to collect all the ingredients for at least two courses of a dinner – a main course (consisting of 12 ingredients) and either a starter or a pudding (each consisting of 6 ingredients). The recipes that you are collecting ingredients for are created by Jane Grigson, at the time one of the country's best loved cooks. The recipes all come from different parts of the British Isles, and to add an educational angle to the ingredients on the cards are written in several different languages.
An overview of how to play
The game board is a plan layout of a house. Think Cluedo style, but with a kitchen as the centre of the house. All the ingredients you need for your recipes (plus a few other cards that I will come along to later) can be found in six different places on the game board:
You basically go around the board collecting cards when you land on the doorways to these places. You either collect an ingredient, or in the case of the Front Door you find Front Door Arrivals. These are helpful people that can help with some of the chores that you find as you go around the board. This means you could get a fetching you man delivering a Dishwasher, or a Niece who will dry the dishes. The Front Door can also mean the arrival of various extras to enhance your meal. Possibly a bottle of Campari, or some After Eight Mints.
Between the doorways on the board are a variety of chores and hazards which might involve you having to miss a go whilst you sweep the floor, or possibly even climb up on to the kitchen table to avoid scuttling mice!
Going to the loo
This has to be the only board game that I have encountered that involves going to the loo! Yep, you read that right. If you land on the bathroom doorway then you have to miss a turn whilst you "go to the loo".
Making phone calls
The real twist in the cooking game is the fact that at certain positions on the board a player is able to make a telephone call. You can make a call to ask any other player if they have ingredients that you need for your recipe. It's not as simple as just asking and getting though. You can only ask if you already hold two ingredients for that recipe yourself. Also, whilst on the phone, if successful with your first request, you might ask for ingredients for a second recipe. If they don't hold what you need this time round though the person you telephoned may instead ask you for up to two sets of ingredients.
In other words telephoning someone can be risky business as it might actually result in you losing some of the ingredients that you hold. Phone at your own risk.
End of the game and scoring
The Cooking Game ends when one player has all the required ingredients to make one main course and one starter or desert. You then move on to the scoring stage of the game when I think everyone playing hopes that they haven't consumed so much wine that they can't do the maths involved.
With points allocated to completed recipes as well as for each ingredient in a complete recipe players can also get additional points for extras they may have picked from the Front Door like After Eights or Flowers.
Things then get really complicated though with points for "impure recipes". In other words, if you can convince the other players that ingredients you hold can be combined into an acceptable course then it can score you points!This could be something as simple as Strawberries and Cream, or something much more complicated, with no limit on how many ingredients an impure recipe can contain.
It's therefore quite possible that the person who finishes first isn't necessarily the winner.
It's obvious that The Cooking Game wasn't a big budget production, yet the finished result, although dated, was a quality product. The playing pieces in particular are really weighty and made of metal, rather than the plastic that you might get today.
One of the reasons for this touch of quality is probably the fact that the game had a number of sponsors. The instruction booklet has five pages devoted to them and they also appear throughout the game. I've already mentioned cards bearing After Eights and Campari, but all domestic appliances in the game are from Zanussi, the luxury vinyl flooring in the kitchen is from Amtico and the house's cellar seems to be sponsored by Roberts & Cooper wine merchants.
Even the playing pieces are linked to the sponsors with a bottle of Piat D'Or wine, a tin of Tate and Lyle Golden Syrup and an Oxo cube as playing pieces.
The prize for most obscure sponsor though has to go to the Halifax. At the time proudly still a Building Society, and sponsors of the two spare cards in the game. Random!
Taste of the 80s
We actually had great fun playing The Cooking Game, but it really was like being back in the 80s in so many ways. The style of recipes, the cards and game design, and the whole notion of having elaborate dinner parties. If that weren't enough the instruction book tries to explain how the telephone call part of the game works by giving examples of two couple playing the game – Charles and Diana, and Paul and Linda!
Play with us on the Podcast
If you want to experience The Cooking Game for yourselves then why not join Bonn and myself as we play on the Hobbies and Interests podcast? Look out for the new episode that will be released very soon.
Filed Under: Board Games, Vintage Games Tagged With: board game, dinner party game, family game, game, Jane Grigson, Recipes, The Cooking Game
Kensington – the game
Kensington was a bit of a chance find in the charity shop. Bonn collects vinyl, so he always keeps an eye open for it and when he first picked up Kensington that's what he thought it was. Kensington is certainly packaged differently to any other board game I've come across. The board is inside what looks like an LP sleeve and as it was a game from the 70s I'm guessing that this was done so that it would just slip inside a record rack, which most people seemed to have then. You could almost imagine someone pulling it out with a flourish after deciding what record to put on after dinner.
History of the game
Kensington is described as an abstract strategy game and it was devised by two British guys who, according to the blurb on the back of the game, seemed rather proud of their creation.
"Kensington is the brilliant outcome of arduous research by two eccentric British friends to develop a game of pure skill that can be easily learnt and as enjoyably played by children and adults in each and every country of the world."
The Kensington board is supposedly based on a design found in flowerbeds in London's Kensington Gardens, and that's where the name of the game comes from. It is a geometrical board based on a rhombitrihexagonal tiling pattern, which means that it contains hexagons, surrounded by alternating triangles and squares. All these patterns interlock. The board has a total of 7 hexagons on it. Three at the middle coloured white, two red ones at one side and two blue ones at the other side.
Set up of the game
The two players (or the two teams) in the game are allocated either red or blue and are given 15 counters of their colour. The game starts with all counters off the board. Once play is ongoing counters are positioned on the corners of the triangles, squares and hexagons on the board.
The aim of Kensington is for you to surround one of the hexagons (either a white one, or one of your colour) with one counter on each corner.
Play falls into one of two phases. In phase 1 each player takes turns to position one of their counters on the board. Once this stage is complete you move on to the imaginatively titled phase 2.
In phase 2 players take it in turns to move one counter at a time on the board. To move a counter you can slide it along one of the green lines to an adjacent corner position.
The twist in the game is that if you make a move that means you take control of either a triangle or a square on the board (by occupying all three or four corners) you can then move one (or two if you've taken control of a square) of your opponent's counters. The rules sounds a bit vague here, but having checked online, you are allowed to pick up any counter(s) and put them on any unoccupied position anywhere on the board.
What we thought of Kensington
At first we were a bit bemused by the whole game. We started off by putting our counters on the board, without really knowing, or understanding, where was "good" to position them. We also then went on to make the mistake of forgetting about what happens when you take control of a square or triangle. The game's quite dull if you do that!
Once we'd checked the rules again, and realised what we were doing wrong, we understood better the advantages of positioning yourself so that you can keep taking triangles and squares, and the advantage that gives you in the game. Suddenly you go from something quite pedestrian, to a much more challenging and tactical game.
We can certainly now see why it was compared to chess and draughts in terms of the strategic gameplay needed to try to win.
Different version
Online research (thank you BoardGameGeek) suggests that the version of Kensington we found was actually the second one released. The first came in a traditional board game box and also included 20 of each colour counter, rather than the 15 we have. I understand that made the game even harder, as there was less space on the board to move, or reposition, counters to.
I also came across a Commodore 64 version of the game (on cassette, of course) which vaguely rang some dim bells from childhood. Although I seem to recall it being quite dull and I'm pretty sure that playing against a computer (who would be making their moves following very specific rules) would be somewhat harder.
Gameplay variants
The game's instructions include variants for four and six players. In each case you still have a total of two teams, with each player being allocated a certain number of counters (8 in a two player game and 5 in a three player game). Players then work in a team, but do not communicate with their other team members. Based on my experience of needing to concentrate on what you are doing in Kensington I can't imagine it being a very sociable game to play with six players. More of a strange silence descending on a dinner party.
As I touched upon at the start of this post, the version of Kensington we have is in a record sleeve design. Whilst the board fits nicely inside, this it does mean that the playing pieces are rather strangely attached to the back cover. To be honest they are a complete pain to get out of here, and if you were playing it regularly I can see the packaging getting quite damaged by repeated attempts to get the counters out.
Kensington – the facts
Kensington was published in 1979 by Whale Toys Ltd, and was designed by Brian Taylor and Peter Forbes. It is for either two players, or two teams, which can each have either two or three players in them (so four or six players in total). The recommended age range on the packaging is 7 – 107. I'm not convinced that all 7 year olds would get the strategy aspect of the game, but they certainly would understand the rules of play.
A secondhand version of Kensington is currently available on Amazon here, with further copies available on eBay. Interestingly, Amazon also have available a book with the title Winning at Kensington. Priced at £48 I'm not going to be rushing out to buy a copy, but I'd certainly keep an eye open for it when doing my usual trawls of charity shops and secondhand book shops!
Filed Under: Board Games, Vintage Games Tagged With: board game, Kensington, strategy game, vintage game
January 9, 2019 by Penny Leave a Comment
Transport related games are always a hit in our house and I was therefore intrigued to come across Jump the Queue for just £2 in a local charity shop. I noted that it was from Spears Games and having had so much success with their games previously I didn't really give it much thought before paying for it. After all it was only a couple of quid. But it was £2 very well spent!
About Jump the Queue
Jump the Queue was released in 1989, but the whole game has a very 70s or early 80s feel about it. The illustrations on the board and the playing pieces really remind me of those in some Ladybird books from the early 80s.
The aim of the game is to score the most points by beating your opponents in a race to a beach resort in various modes of transport. Each player has five different vehicles that they are trying to get to the resort: limousine, coach, camper, bubble car and scooter. Just the inclusion of a bubble car in this list gives it a vintage feel.
Each different mode of transport is headed to a different seaside hotel and the player who gets there first gets the best parking space, with the most points attached.
The game starts without any playing pieces on the board. As each player takes their turn they roll the special die which tells them which playing piece they should move, but not how far they should move it. That all depends on how long the queue is.
The way the game works is that you move your playing piece to the first available space on the board, jumping any queue that might be in your way. Hence the name of the game. You can play with up to four players, and this can mean some quite long queues that need jumping!
The die also has on it a "joker" and if you roll that then you are allowed to move any vehicle, but more importantly, you can have three moves. So this could mean that you move one vehicle three times, or instead that you've three different vehicles. Whichever you decide it can make a real difference to how you are doing in the game if you roll a joker.
When you get to the end of the route on the board with a vehicle, moving it over the zebra crossing, you can then park your vehicle at the designated hotel. Each hotel parking slot has points attached to it. If you're the first player there then you get the top parking slot, second you get the second best one, and third the third best one. However, if all three spaces at the hotel are full you have no where to park your vehicle, and so get zero points for it. Hence, you have to be a bit strategic in how you play the game and which vehicles you move when.
Ending the game
The game ends when all five top parking spots are full. This may mean that one or more players still have pieces out there on the board, or maybe have not managed to get a single vehicle to the seaside destination. This is why the order in which you move your vehicles can be so important as the game progresses.
The most complicated part of the game is probably working our each player's score at the end. It does add a level of mystery to the game though as unless you keep on top of everyone's scores you might not know who is actually winning. With five vehicles to park it's not necessarily just a case of getting all five there to win, but depends on when you get there in comparison to the other players.
Jump the Queue – the verdict
Everyone here – aged from 6 up to 70+ – enjoyed playing Jump the Queue. It's got a great mix of simplicity and strategy. Younger players may not concentrate on the strategy element quite so much, but for them the ideal of leap-frogging other (older) players on a board is always an attractive one. The jolly illustrations make it feel very retro
Jump the Queue – the facts
Produced by Spears Games in 1989.
For 2 – 4 players, aged 6 to adult.
At the time of writing there is a copy available to buy secondhand on Amazon UK here and also a copy on eBay UK.
Filed Under: Board Games, Family Games, Vintage Games Tagged With: board game, family game, Jump the Queue, spears games, transport
Seven League Boots
October 3, 2018 by Penny Leave a Comment
We're suckers for board games that look old and interesting in some way. Don't get me wrong, we also love finding the gems from our 80s childhood that everyone remembers, but sometimes it's nice to just try something completely random. That's exactly what we did with Seven League Boots.
About Seven League Boots
Picked up from a car boot sale, the aim of Seven League Boots is to travel all around the board, visiting each corner and collecting an appropriately coloured counter at each as proof.
To make each step of your journey, you need to have either the appropriate footwear, or a pair of magic boots. That's where the Seven League Boots come in.
How to play Seven League Boots
Each player chooses a playing piece colour and places their piece at the centre of the board on the "home square". They also place a counter of their colour in each of the four corners of the board.
The pile of playing cards (27 in total) are shuffled and four cards are dealt to each player. These are your footwear, which allow you to travel around the board. The remaining cards are placed face down in a pile on the table, next to the board.
Each leg of a journey has a picture of a piece of footwear on it. To be allowed to travel along a path you have to have the appropriate footwear. For your turn you can either play a card and move your playing piece one step around the board, or, if you don't have appropriate footwear, you can use your turn to swap. When you play a card, or swap one, you place it face up on a discard pile, and then take a new card from the face down pile.
The twist in the game is if you have a card with the Seven League Boots on it. These cards mean that you can go along a path that has any footwear on it.
The winner of the game is the first person to return home after collecting all four of their coloured counters from the four corners of the board.
What are Seven League Boots?
Seven League Boots come from European folklore and were boots that allow the wearer to take strides of seven leagues per step, where a league is a unit of length. Boots are often presented to the main character in a story by someone magical to help them complete something significant in the story.
In this game's case the Seven League Boots allow the player who has the card the "magical powers" to travel along any path in the game.
What we thought of Seven League Boots
We played Seven League Boots with Master C when he was off school sick one day. I've been on the look out for games to replace Snakes and Ladders and Ludo for someone like him who can't yet read properly, but loves playing board games.
Once we'd explained the rules to him and how he needed the appropriate footwear to travel along each path he was well away. He thoroughly enjoyed the game, especially because he won. It was nice and simple enough for him to follow what going on and also for him to strategically plan ahead and retain cards that he could see would aid him in getting to where he wanted to go.
For the adults playing, the game had enough complexity to keep us entertained, whilst also being simple enough that my son didn't need help. The design of the board and the playing cards have a very 70s feel about them, giving the game a retro charm befitting of its age.
I can definitely see it as a game that we will come back until Master C graduates on to the next level of board games.
Seven League Boots – the facts
Number of players: 2 – 4
Age range: 5+
Believed to have been first published by Condor under their Condor Playvalue name in 1974, the game is copyright Seven Towns Ltd.
Filed Under: Board Games, Vintage Games Tagged With: appropriate footwear, board game, family game, footwear, journey, journeys, paths, Seven League Boots


Praveen Nair (206-719-1070) is a personal Insurance Agent with Farmers Insurance. As a client you are his number one priority. He is available to meet his clients almost anywhere at most anytime that is convenient for them; even on weekends. We strive to make sure that our clients are happy with what they have and trust us to take care of them. Be assured that you will be treated with the respect and excellent customer service you deserve. We know you could go to another company but why not have a personal agent just like your family doctor.
turn to a trusted professional with the experience and skill to handle your needs. It's the same when it comes to insurance.