This is a genuine item which is supplied by the original equipment manufacturer for use with Homelite and Ryobi chainsaws. It is an identical replacement for a missing or damaged oil tank which was installed on a new unit, please make sure to refer to the appropriate diagrams of your model for the correct location and application of this component. This high-quality item is made of durable plastic material and is sold individually.
This is a genuine OEM replacement part, it is sold individually. This is the threaded cap for the 5836201 Oil Tank. It is commonly used with chainsaws, and is compatible with the models listed below. This part prevents oil from spilling out, and is needed to keep the tool running properly. No tools needed for installation, simply thread onto the oil tank.


Active children are more likely to mature into physically active adults. Benefits of sport and physical activity for children include reduced risk of obesity, increased cardiovascular fitness, improved coordination and balance, better sleep and improved social skills. Reducing sedentary time may be as important for health as increasing exercise time. Best of all, getting moving is fun.
Youth sports today are quite different than they were when we were young. With travel teams and year-round participation, it's very easy for you and your child to get caught up in the time commitments needed to excel in sports -- and sometimes at the expense of school studies or other important developmental life experiences.
As you examine your child's sport schedule, take time to consider how much of his or her schedule should be devoted to sports, school and other growth opportunities. Balance is key. Children who distribute their time and energy more equally between sports, school, the arts and various other social endeavors are often happier, more confident and well-rounded.
Introduce your children to "life-long" sports such as golf, tennis, racquetball, cycling, sailing, rock climbing, jogging, kayaking, rowing, or canoeing. Participate with your children in activities like bike riding, hiking, skating, sailing, and running. Encourage them to play different sports and avoid early specialization. They may be less likely to become burned out, leaving them more energized, confident and interested in the various things they do.
Look for leagues and clubs that balance sports, family and school life. Make sure the program emphasizes having fun more than winning. Children shouldn't be penalized for missing practice because of a test, school trips, or family activities such as weddings or birthdays. Also, playing sports is a privilege. Your child must maintain a certain level of academic success, or accomplish specific goals at home, in order to play sports, and parents have to enforce that responsibility.
Explain to your child why a healthy balance between sports and school is important for future life success. As your child begins to master time management and organization skills, note all of his or her accomplishments. Help your child identify and use athletic-transferable skills. Most kids take for granted or don't understand how setting goals, handling adversity, getting focused and motivated for competition and working together on a team are valuable life lessons. Help your child use these same skills, as well as the countless other athletic-transferable skills your child is learning through sports, and apply them to the classroom for academic success.
It is possible to create balance within your family's everyday life, even with children who participate in sports. But it is up to the parents to make certain that your children don't over schedule and that they establish the right priorities.


There's plenty of good advice available on the subject. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, Ben Franklin's autobiography, Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking, Frank Bettger's How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, and Maxwell Maltz's Psycho-Cybernetics are all helpful.
There is, of course, no guarantee that just because you've developed a workable strategy that you won't still be a casualty in the battle for financial survival. There is such a thing as plain bad luck. But, as Damon Runyon said, the bread may not always go to the wise, nor the race to the swift, nor the battle to the strong—but that's the way to bet.
By the end of the day, Scrooge has a mountain of fish: three cubic acres' worth. As much of the new money as he had of the old. He looks at the cold, clammy fish and asks himself…how to count the new money? By the pound or by the inch? How to keep it? And how to spend it before it goes bad?
Sorrowfully he realizes that fish isn't as nice to play with as his old money. Fish don't feel good and they smell bad.
All of the sudden, he doesn't want to be rich anymore. He hires a trucking fleet to take the mountain of fish to Donald, who always wanted to be rich. Donald's house is buried under dead fish.
The next step in your plan is to start earning to add to your grubstake—that is, create more money. It was key to Scrooge's second fortune, and it's key to yours.
But it's necessary to have the skills necessary to provide goods and services to others. Scrooge made his fish fortune by his skills at business, but there are thousands of others.
This Sunday at midnight, we're closing our lifetime membership offer, Casey Platinum, to the public. The doors won't open again for perhaps an entire year. If you would like to get all of our stock research, for a tiny fraction of what others might pay, CLICK HERE NOW.
All over the news, billionaires like George Soros and John Paulson are buying gold hand over fist. But unknown to the mainstream media, a group of 112 billionaires are poised to begin a historic gold buying spree. They're preparing for a major December announcement that could rock markets… And spark a $3 TRILLION wave of buying that sends gold to $5,000, virtually overnight. There's no time to sit on this one. Click here for the full story.
It would be a tragic mistake to devote all your resources to accumulating gold, hoarding commodities, devising clever tax schemes, and speculating, to the neglect of much more basic intangibles. The government may negate a lot of your efforts through its inflation, taxes, and regulations. And even if you overcome them, market risk—a bad judgement, an unexpected development, a failed brokerage house—can wipe you out. As can fraud, theft, a fire, or a war.
The single wisest thing you can do with your money is not buy gold. It's to take courses and acquire knowledge in other fields, as unrelated to what you are now doing as possible. Anything related to science, and particularly, technology would seem especially suitable. Computer science, medicine, mechanics, agriculture, and electronics are all going to remain in demand.
How will you protect yourself during the next crisis? Doug Casey's latest video will show you exactly how. Click here to watch it now.


By Beth Walker, chinadialogue's U.K.-based Culture Editor and Editor of The Third Pole, and Liu Qin, an Editor in chinadialogue's Beijing office. This article was first published by chinadialogue.
As outlined in China's national climate plan, submitted to the United Nations last month, the country's aim to peak greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 or sooner will rely heavily on a shift from coal to use of non-fossil fuels.
To many, that would seem a clear win for the environment in coastal megacities and mining areas, where air, water, and soil pollution are a potent toxic legacy of China's long-term addiction to fossil coal.
Hydropower is responsible for far fewer greenhouse gas emissions than coal. But shifting away from coal in favor of water-driven electricity entails major risks.
These include the low-generating efficiency of hydropower, heightening the need for back-up coal power during sustained periods of low rainfall, weak grid systems, and potential for large dams on international rivers to spark conflict with neighboring countries.
Hydropower is China's second-largest energy source after coal, and the country's installed hydropower capacity is set to rise to 350 gigawatts (GW) by 2020, up from 300 GW today. The country is already home to half the world's 80,000 dams, more than the U.S., Brazil, and Canada combined.
Chinese authorities hope that a large-scale rollout of hydropower can help reduce toxic smog that has triggered public outrage and health scares both at home and abroad.
Hydropower has already helped slow growth in China's greenhouse gas emissions, some experts claim. China's coal use fell by nearly 8 percent in the first four months of this year—in part, says Greenpeace, due to power fed into the grid by hydro plants since brought online.
"Hydropower is one of the main ways for the power sector to replace fossil fuels, save energy, and reduce emissions," points out Zhang Boting, Deputy Secretary General of the China Society for Hydropower Engineering.
China is already the largest dam builder in the world, but its vast hydropower resources are underdeveloped compared with its potential, meaning the country is overwhelmingly reliant on coal, says Zhang.
If China exploited its remaining hydropower resources it could meet a fifth of China's peak energy demand and displace about 1.3 billion tonnes of coal, he adds.
Replacing coal with hydropower may lead to cleaner air for citizens on the east coast, but there will be a high environmental price to pay for people who live in the more remote and ecologically fragile southwest, where at least 80 percent of the new dams will be built.
Chinese environmentalists have called for an urgent halt to large hydro projects, pointing out that the country's dash for dams has already destroyed river ecosystems, fish habitats, and raised fears about safety in earthquake-prone regions.
Other cascades will pack China's last free-flowing international rivers—such as the Mekong and Brahmaputra—which will stem water flow and could spark tensions with India and southeast Asian countries downstream.
So-called "green" hydropower is in fact spurring the construction of new coal-powered plants in the southwest, says Fan.
There is anecdotal evidence that for every new hydropower dam built in the southwest, an additional coal-fired power plant is also constructed, often as back up.
Guizhou province has built more coal-fired generating capacity than hydropower to ensure a stable supply of power in the dry season. Sichuan, Guangxi, and Yunnan are doing the same.
China's installed capacity in hydro is impressive, but its contribution to the country's overall energy mix is far more modest. Due to rushed construction and other industry problems, Chinese dams are highly inefficient, with an average capacity factor of 31 percent—about two-thirds the world average. Capacity factor refers to the amount of electricity produced compared to the installed capacity.
And since the bulk of new hydropower plants will be built in remote mountainous regions of the southwest, electricity has to be transferred vast distances to manufacturing hubs of southern China—meaning a lot of electricity is lost along the way.
Click here to see original image.
China could be losing enough hydroelectricity to power the U.K. and Germany for a year as a result of poor planning and weak grid infrastructure, Reuters recently reported.
Meanwhile, hydropower development has further spurred energy-hungry and polluting industries, as provincial governments try to absorb the extra electricity generated in remote areas. One example is the Lijiang aluminum refinery, which is close to one of China's top tourist destinations in Yunnan.
But despite the high financial and environmental costs, hydropower will play an essential role in any low carbon future, argues Darrin Magee, a U.S. academic and energy specialist who has been working with the Rocky Mountain Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, and the Chinese government think-tank, Energy Resource Institute (ERI) to explore the future of renewable energy.
The radical 2050 roadmap—published in April this year—predicts China could get almost 86 percent of power generation from renewable energy by 2050. ERI sits in China's National Reform and Development Commission, the country's powerful planning ministry, and is responsible for drawing up energy strategy in the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020). The ERI's views often carry a great deal of weight in policymaking circles.
In a well-managed grid system, hydropower can replace coal by providing a baseload power and smooth out vagaries of the sun and wind since these plants would be able to be switched on and off in a matter of minutes, Magee explains.
These new lines will also enhance the ability of hydropower to interconnect with solar and wind stations. The world's largest solar-hydro hybrid station—recently connected to the grid at Longyangxia on the Tibetan plateau—is a sign of things to come.
And if renewables and hydropower are to displace coal, smart grid technology will have to be deployed to curb surges in demand and avoid the need to run extra coal plants.
China's State Grid Corporation aims to have a nationwide smart grid by 2020. It will allow real-time electricity prices to be transmitted to homes and factories and will encourage greater efficiency.
In the long term, encouraging consumers, factories, and cities to consume less electricity could render new dams obsolete.
For example, an ERI study estimates that replacing incandescent bulbs with more efficient LED lighting by 2020 alone could save as much electricity every year as the Three Gorges Dam produces.
Chinese policymakers are beginning to realize the potential of switching to energy-efficient light bulbs on an industrial scale, Magee points out in a recent paper published in the Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies.
Second, excessively cheap energy and electricity prices in China mean consumers are less frugal. Weak prices also deprive utilities of the necessary revenues to plough back into energy efficiency measures.


The Gallery exhibits at Art Copenhagen together with sixty international galleries.
The Radial Gallery of Strasbourg will be also present on this contemporary art fair.
The artists presented by the gallery will be: Patrick Cornillet, Elisabeth Fréring and the photographer Olivier Lelong.


…except for "the white stuff" (aka the raw matchstick-cut Golden Beet) in the accompanying salad. He didn't mind it as long as he could stuff it on the taco, but it cost me a 0.01 rating decrease for every bite I insisted he eat after that (resulting in a net of 4.65). I don't blame him, it wasn't high on my list of raw experiments either.
WTF do I do with the leftover oil? I grew up in the suburbs, we didn't fry stuff by dousing it in an oil bath – we left that to Colonel Sanders. My first experience with a frying pan full of oil was a few years ago, when my Cordon-Bleu-trained friend Wendy prepared schnitzel with noodles to accompany an authentic Sound of Music Sing-along at my house. It was delicious, but I didn't know what to do with the leftover oil then and I still don't. Please help – the only two choices I can come up with are (a) sop up the oil with dozens of paper towels until it disappears, or (b) abandon the pan on the stove and pretend it isn't there (and hope that my dog, Billy takes care of it).
This one was a winner! Rich and I both rated it 4.9. It would have been 4.95 on the Rich-o-Meter, but it lost 0.05 because the Poblano Peppers weren't quite cooked enough. Point taken, lesson learned. We'll definitely be doing this one again.
When our Mexican week box showed up, we had high expectations – we both love Mexican food. But this meal nailed it. Are you old enough to remember Euell Gibbons, and his "ever eat a pine cone?" ads? We are. And that's how I felt when I was presented with two giant cactus leaves for this meal. I trusted BA, and boy did they come through. In fact, as I was cooking this meal, I found myself thinking that corn might have been a good ingredient. Guess what? The diced Poblano Cactus Pad filled the bill – same texture, less sweet. The result was the highest combined score to date: 4.9 for me, and 4.95 for Rich. There was nothing wrong with it, but he's holding out for the Perfect 5.
Rich and Wade's Isle of Man Adventure (2014): Part 7 – Aftermath, Race Photos, and What's Next?
If you came here from Part 6 – Race Day, you're up to speed on how this story has evolved. If not, I suggest you start at Part 1 – Background. When we last left our heroes, they had overcome a series of ridiculous obstacles and had earned a 64th-place finish (out of 90 starters) in the 2014 Manx Grand Prix with a 1992 Suzuki GSXR 1100 that was built in our garage. The bike and tools are packed and ready for shipping, so now they can enjoy the awards banquet and three days of sight-seeing and visiting friends.
As I mentioned in the last post, Rich reported that Wade was able to hobble up to the podium to accept credit for his 64th place finish. Just surviving the race is such an accomplishment that everyone who finishes gets acknowledged at the banquet. Rich also pointed out that the awards banquet had a nice pub, and that the Barkeepers give the racers one heck of a pour.
Until the race was in the books and the crates packed, every moment was spent overcoming adversity and tending to business, which included daily laps of the island in the rental car to familiarize Rich with the course. As I mentioned earlier, those laps were critical to giving him the perspective he needed to interpret to the feedback he was getting from Wade and make appropriate tuning adjustments to the suspension and the engine. But they didn't really count as touring.
The IOM actually has three race courses and we hot lapped each one in our rent'a'racer.
Lunched in Ramsey sitting by the quay enjoying the sea air and just relaxing.
Met up with Peter and Jean Tucker, locals who have known Wade since the mid-1990s but didn't manage to cross paths until after the race. Peter later sent me this photo of the four of them.
After Wade and Rich got home, I scoured the internet for photos and found these gems. Dave Kneen, Manx Photos Online, you ARE the man! As always, click on the photos to see the full-res version – trust me, it's worth it, especially for the Ballaugh Bridge photo.
Gooseneck, Practice, Friday 8/22. Note his left hand shading his eyes against the sun!
And of course, the one you've all been waiting for, the iconic Ballaugh Bridge airborne shot, Wed 8/20 (his first day on course). Remember, he's about to land on a broken right foot!
Getting home seems anti-climatic after what they've been through. I know, you probably expected to hear that the volcano in Iceland stranded them for weeks. Or that their plane vanished in the Bermuda Triangle. Or that the cargo ship sank with all of the Team USA bikes aboard. But none of that happened. Wade and Rich made it home as scheduled without incident, and they calmly cooled their jets for 2-1/2 months until the ship with the bikes wandered into port just before Thanksgiving. BTW, here's what the shipping crate looked like when it showed up in the driveway on the trailer after being picked up from the Port of Oakland, with tool boxes and lifts stuffed in every nook and cranny..
"Betty Boop", the 1992 Suzuki GSXR750 we've grown to love in this tale, will be making a repeat appearance, but in the Classic TT Formula 1 race instead of the Senior Manx GP. She has a new engine, but the venerable eBay motor will be along for the ride as a spare.
"Purple Yam", the 2015 Yamaha R6 that spent about 10 minutes in its new-from-the-showroom configuration before it was unceremoniously stripped and rebuilt with all new parts and bodywork, will be entered in the Junior Manx GP.
Yes, all of the bikes have nicknames. Just like our pets.
In 2015, the goal is to win a replica award. These are special trophies given at three levels – Gold, Silver, Bronze – only to those who finish within a percentage of the winner's time.
You can bet there are more episodes of this Isle of Man Adventure to come!


BOSTON - Attorney General Martha Coakley??s Office has reached an agreement with a Pennsylvania based engineering and utility infrastructure contractor to settle allegations they failed to pay 54 employees the proper state prevailing wage. Henkels & McCoy, Inc., of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, has agreed to pay $145,000 in restitution as well as $15,000 in penalties to the Commonwealth as a result of the violations.


WIDESPREAD power and communications failures are hampering relief efforts in Donggala and Palu, Indonesia, following a 7.5-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami which caused massive damage across Central Sulawesi. Thousands of homes in the region have been destroyed or severely damaged, leaving many people homeless and sheltering under tarpaulins. The Salvation Army has a substantial presence in the region, including schools and hospitals, but has also sustained serious damage to several of its properties.


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Q: MSM 5 site setup with a common 404 page redirect So I am working on a site with 4 sub-domains under the main. They already have an MSM license so I am using that to break out the subs.
My question is:
What is the best way to handle the 404 redirects for all of the sites? I want to use a common 404 page for the main site and all of the sub-domains.
On the main site, it is easy enough.
{if no_results OR segment_3!=""}
    {redirect="404"}
{/if}

But wouldn't the other sites just register a page view for things like analytics if I were to just add:
{if no_results OR segment_3!=""}
    {embed="default_site:_includes/404"}
{/if}

I would like to be able to have the same results site wide and catch all 404 stats.
Thanks,
Brian

A: Ok, So what I ended up with was the following:
I created a template group of "_includes" in each site. I then created a template "404-Page" in each of those sites' template groups. (This was really just for ease for remembering. They could be in whatever template group, template config you want)
Each one of these contained the following:
{embed="default_site:_includes/404-Page"}

Then under each site, under: Design => Templates => Global Preferences
I set the site to "Enable Strict URL's" = 'Yes' and "404 Page" = "_includes/404-Page"
I checked this in the header sent and it triggers the 404 fine. One of the issues I ran into was this running on a Windows server under IIS7. I also had to disable the 404 Errors in the web.config file and process a custom 404 code like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <httpErrors errorMode="Custom" existingResponse="Replace">
            <remove statusCode="404" subStatusCode="-1" />
            <error statusCode="404" path="/index.php/_includes/404-Page.html" responseMode="ExecuteURL" />
        </httpErrors>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

I placed this web.config file in each of the site's root folders. Being the paths were named the same, this was a simple paste/dump.
I hope this helps someone else out.   ;)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


A two–party system is one where two major political parties dominate voting in nearly all elections at every level of government. As a result, all, or nearly all, elected offices are members of one of the two major parties. Under a two-party system, one of the two parties typically holds a majority in the legislature and is usually referred to as the majority party while the other is the minority party. While the term two-party system is somewhat imprecise and has been used in different countries to mean different things, there is considerable agreement that a system is considered to be of a two-party nature when election results show consistently that all or nearly all elected officials belong to only one of the two major parties, such as in the United States. In these cases, the chances for third party candidates winning election to any office are remote, although it's possible for groups within the larger parties, or in opposition to one or both of them, to exert influence on the two major parties.
There is strong agreement that the United States has a two-party system; historically, there have been few instances in which third party candidates won any elections. In countries such as Britain and Spain, two major parties emerge which have strong influence and tend to elect most of the candidates, but a multitude of lesser parties exist with varying degrees of influence, and sometimes these lesser parties are able to elect officials who participate in the legislature. As a result, some commentators have described the political system in Britain, for example, as being a two-party system, in the sense that two parties are strong and influential although other lesser parties exist and have an influence. A report in the Christian Science Monitor, for example, suggested that Spain was moving towards a "greater two-party system" while acknowledging that Spain has "many small parties." In political systems based on the Westminster system, which is a particular style of parliamentary democracy based on the British model and found in many commonwealth countries such as Bermuda and New Zealand as well as other countries such as Pakistan and Israel, a majority party will form the government and the minority party will form the opposition, and coalitions of lesser parties are possible; in the rare circumstance in which neither party is the majority, it's called a hung parliament. Sometimes these systems are described as two-party systems but they're usually referred to as multi-party systems. There is not always a sharp boundary between a two-party system and a multi-party system.


A cartulary or chartulary (derived from the Latin chartularium) is a collection of charters, title-deeds and other documents relating to a specific, most often religious, institution. They survive in the form of books and, less commonly, rolls. Some are finely copied and decorated, but the majority are plain productions. This reflects their functional purpose as repositories of records that were essential then – and highly useful now – for understanding the administration of the land, property and finances of a cathedral, monastery, parish church, hospital, or fraternity. The British Library possesses around five hundred cartularies or similar gatherings of documents, including the earliest example from a religious house: Cotton MS Tiberius A XIII, from Worcester Cathedral Priory, made in the first half of the eleventh century. A large proportion of these were part of the 'foundation' collections of Robert Cotton and Robert Harley and his son Edward that were brought together with the creation of the British Museum in 1753.
The newest addition to our collection of cartularies was in 2011, with the accession of those of Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. In two volumes that each retain a medieval binding, these are now Add MS 88973 and Add MS 88974. They have been fully digitised and have recently been loaded to our Digitised Manuscripts site.
The first, 'older' cartulary contains copies of some of the earliest charters relating to the Abbey and its foundress and first abbess, Ela, countess of Salisbury (b. in or after 1190, d. 1261). Possessed of royal connections of a sort through her marriage to William Longespée, an illegitimate son of Henry II, Ela was also the sole heiress of William Fitzpatrick, 2nd earl of Salisbury. She thus commanded considerable wealth, which she used to found and endow a new abbey over several months in 1229/30. Her original plan was for a house of Cistercian nuns, but the decision in 1228 by the General Chapter at Cîteaux not to accept responsibility for any further female houses left Ela little choice but to accept the Bishop of Salisbury's recommendation in April 1230 that the house follow the rule of St Augustine.
The manor and village of Lacock formed the nucleus of the Abbey's possessions, which were augmented in stages by further benefactions not just from Ela, but from her son William Longespée (II).
The charters in the first volume are arranged in a very rough chronological order. The core part of the manuscript was copied in stages between the mid-13th and mid-14th centuries. The involvement of numerous scribal hands of different periods indicates that the volume was produced in fits and starts, an impression confirmed by the insertion or stitching in of loose sheets of parchment, or copying of additional charters in blank spaces at later junctures.
The second volume, 'newer' cartulary, by contrast, appears to have been copied by a single hand and is arranged in such a way as to suggest a concerted attempt to impose order on the abbey's documents. They are sorted topographically into eighteen sections, providing a convenient geographical overview of the extent of the Abbey's holdings: from Calne and Heddington to the east, Sherrington and Chitterne to the south, Winterbourne to the west and Chippenham to the north.
The second volume, though later and containing duplicate copies of many charters, was by no means intended to replace the first. That they were intended to function as a pair is suggested by their very similar binding – they may have been bound around same time, probably no later than the mid-fourteenth century – and confirmed by their contents. The first volume contains marginal cross-references to documents in the second, allowing the reader to gain a chronological and geographical overview of the abbey's holdings.
The Lacock cartularies join another manuscript relating to the history of the Abbey: Cotton MS Vitellius A VIII, which combines the Annals and the Book of Lacock. Unfortunately, it was badly burned in the fire in 1731 at the Ashburnham House, where the Cotton collection was kept prior to its deposit at the British Museum. Much of the Book of Lacock is entirely illegible, though luckily a copy made in the late 16th century survives as Harley MS 5019. The two cartularies acquired by the British Library are thus especially important for the study of the history of this Abbey, its endowments and administration.
Do you describe anywhere the actual process you use to digitize these documents? thanks!


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Tag: UK politics
No booster [update 10-12-2021]
The UK government is apparently desperately eager to get the whole population fully protected with three doses of Covid vaccine, to try and head off the mounting omicron wave. In a particularly awkward mixed pharmaceutical metaphor they promised to put the programme "on steroids". But not so eager that they're willing to resort to extreme measures like… just letting people get vaccinated.
The NHS website says people will be contacted for appointments six months after their second dose. But the government announced more than a week ago, following new advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunisations (JCVI), that "the booster will now be given no sooner than 3 months after the primary course."
Having been initially vaccinated in Germany I can't get on the list for an appointment anyway, so I decided to cycle down to Kassam Stadium, south of Oxford, the only nearby vaccination centre offering walk-in service. The fellow managing the queue was friendly and helpful, but told me that the current regulation — until they get new rules from the government — is actually a completely arbitrary seeming five months gap for people over 50 years of age (which I haven't seen reported anywhere) — and six months for people over 40. (And no boosters for younger people.
So, no booster yet for me…
Update (8/12/2021): The NHS has now opened up boosters to people who had their second dose more than 3 months ago. Except, the bad people who had their first doses in foreign lands — including, if I understand correctly, Scotland — are still excluded.
[update 10-12-2021]: Yesterday mid-afternoon the official NHS website for vaccination information reported that anyone over 40 could get a booster at a walk-in site 3 months after their second dose. So I cycled down to Kassam Stadium again this morning. And again I was turned away. This time they agreed that I was eligible according to the NHS rules, but they have their own rules at this centre, and they're not changing until Monday.
Not that it matters, because they also — my partner found this out when she went in the afternoon — decided spontaneously as of 2pm today to stop accepting walk-ins at all.
Author steinsaltzPosted on December 7, 2021 December 10, 2021 Categories Personal reflection, Politics, SocietyTags covid-19, public health, UK politics, vaccines1 Comment on No booster [update 10-12-2021]
Conversion ratio
The attempted terrorist bombing of a Liverpool hospital a couple of days ago was apparently carried out by a Christian convert. As far as I can tell from reports in the press, Christian leaders — including the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury — have declined to condemn the attack, or engage in any soul-searching about violence in their communities. The bishop who confirmed the bombing suspect has professed to be "shocked and saddened" by the act, while denying having any specific recollection of the man, and dismissing any possibility of a connection between the conversion and the terror attack:
I know that he would have been thoroughly prepared with an understanding of the Christian faith. It seems that, sadly, despite this grounding, the bomber chose a different path for his life.
Where are the headlines about the "terror bishop"? Speculation about the Liverpool Cathedral terror cell?
In all earnestness, I doubt that this man was specifically motivated by Anglicanism to bomb a hospital, but at the same time, I come from a country (the US) where a significant fraction of terror attacks are committed by people adhering to Christian churches, and often claiming inspiration by their Christian faith. If the would-be terrorist has had been a Muslim convert would the press have devoted nearly so much space to the religious leader responsible for his conversion, lamenting that he had not taken the promised religious path? Instead, we get reports suggesting that there are many fake conversions, of Syrians hoping to strengthen their case for asylum.
Author steinsaltzPosted on November 17, 2021 November 24, 2021 Categories PoliticsTags Christianity, Islam, journalism, religion, terrorism, UK politics1 Comment on Conversion ratio
Opine borders
Boris Johnson has aroused the ire of many classical historians for his dubious claim that the Roman Empire was destroyed by "uncontrolled immigration". What is most striking is the unquestioned implication that when Romans moved outward, conquering and enslaving their neighbours, that was GLORY, and much to be lamented when it was (possibly) destroyed by their ultimate failure to prevent people from "the east" from migrating in the opposite direction. It seems to me, if there's anyone who had a problem with uncontrolled migration from the east it was Carthage.
Author steinsaltzPosted on November 1, 2021 Categories Academic, PoliticsTags Brexit, conservatives, history, migration, UK politicsLeave a comment on Opine borders
Possibly we misheard Michael Gove
From The Guardian today:
Gove has been subjected to a lot of mockery for supposedly having dismissed the value of (economic) expertise during the Brexit referendum campaign, but perhaps he was misquoted. Maybe what he really said was
people in this country have had enough of exports.
Author steinsaltzPosted on September 2, 2021 September 2, 2021 Categories PoliticsTags Brexit, conservatives, language, trade, UK politicsLeave a comment on Possibly we misheard Michael Gove
Thinking about exponential growth and "Freedom Day"
The UK government is holding fast to its plan to drop all pandemic restrictions as of 19 July, even in the face of rapidly increasing infection rates, hospitalisation rates, and Covid deaths — all up by 25-40% over last week. And numerous medical experts are being quoted in the press supporting the decision. What's going on?
To begin with, Johnson has boxed himself in. He promised "Freedom Day" to coincide with the summer solstice, and then was forced to climb down, just as he was from his initial "infect everyone, God will recognise his own" plan last March, on realising that his policies would yield an unsustainable level of disruption. The prime minister has, by now, no reputation for consistency or decisiveness left to protect, but even so he probably feels at the very least that a further delay would undermine his self-image as the nation's Fun Dad. At the same time, the the new opening has been hollowed out, transformed from the original "Go back to living your lives like in pre-pandemic days" message to "Resume taxable leisure activities, with the onus on individuals and private businesses to enforce infection-minimisation procedures." Thus we have, just today, the Transport Secretary announcing that he expected rail and bus companies to insist on masking, even while the government was removing the legal requirement.
But what are they hoping to accomplish, other than a slight reduction in the budget deficit? The only formal justification offered is that of Health Secretary Sajid Javid, who said on Monday
that infection rates were likely to get worse before they got better – potentially hitting 100,000 a day – but said the vaccination programme had severely weakened the link between infections, hospitalisations and deaths.
Javid acknowledged the risks of reopening further, but said his message to those calling for delay was: "if not now, then when?".
"Weakened the link" is an odd way of putting a situation where cases, hospitalisations, and Covid deaths are all growing exponentially at the same rate. What has changed is the gearing, the chain and all of its links is as strong as ever. In light of that exponential growth, what should we make Javid's awkward channeling of Hillel the Elder?
I'll talk about "masking" as synecdoche for all measures to reduce the likelihood of a person being infected or transmitting Covid. We need to consider separately the questions of when masking makes sense from an individual perspective, and from a public perspective. The individual perspective is straightforward:
On the societal level it's more complicated, but I do find the argument of England's Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty… baffling:
"The slower we take it, the fewer people will have Covid, the smaller the peak will be, and the smaller the number of people who go into hospital and die," he said.
By moving slowly, he said modelling suggested the pressure on the NHS would not be "unsustainable".
Prof Whitty said there was less agreement on the "ideal date" to lift restrictions as there is "no such thing as an ideal date" .
However, he said a further delay would mean opening up when schools return in autumn, or in winter, when the virus has an advantage and hospitals are under more pressure.
We may argue about how much effect government regulations have on the rate of the virus spreading, but I have never before heard anyone argue that the rate of change of government regulation is relevant. Of course, too rapid gyrations in public policy may confuse or anger the public. But how the rapidity of changing the rules relates to the size of the peak seems exceptionally obscure. To the extent that you are able to have any effect with the regulations, that effect should be seen directly in R0, and so in the weekly growth or contraction of Covid cases. If masking can push down the growth rate its effect is essentially equivalent at any time in terms of the final infection rate, but masking early gives fewer total cases.
To see this, consider a very simple model: With masking cases grow 25%/week, without masking they shrink 20%/week. So if we have 1000 cases/day now, then after some weeks of masking and the same number of weeks without masking, we'll be back to 1000 cases/day at the end. But the total number of cases will be very different. Suppose there are 10 weeks of each policy, and we have four possibilities: masking first, unmasking first, alternating (MUMU…), alternating (UMUM…). The total number of cases will be:
Strategy Total cases
masking first 57 000
unmasking first 513 000
alternating (MU…) 127 000
alternating (UM…) 154 000
Of course, the growth rate will not remain constant. The longer we delay, the more people are immune. In the last week close to 2 million vaccine doses have been administered in the UK. That means that a 4-week delay means about 4 million extra people who are effectively immune. If we mask first, the higher growth rate will come later, thus the growth rate will be lower, and more of the cases will be mild.
The only thing I can suppose is that someone did an economic cost-benefit analysis, and decided that the value of increased economic activity was greater than the cost of lives lost and destroyed. Better to let the younger people — who have patiently waited their turn to be vaccinated — be infected, and obtain their immunity that way, than to incur the costs of another slight delay while waiting for them to have their shot at the vaccine.
The young were always at the lowest risk in this pandemic. They were asked to make a huge sacrifice to protect the elderly. Now that the older people have been protected, there is no willingness to sacrifice even another month to protect the lives and health of the young.
Author steinsaltzPosted on July 14, 2021 Categories Politics, TechnicalTags covid-19, public health, UK politicsLeave a comment on Thinking about exponential growth and "Freedom Day"
Auto-antonyms: Drawing a line
The BBC is being scourged for having been — 25 years ago — once insufficiently open and honest with its rightful liege lords (in this case, the then Princess of Wales). Apparently they tried to trick her into giving an interview, though the BBC says it has a handwritten note from her saying she didn't mind, and she would have done the interview anyway.
In the course of discussing this Diana's brother is quoted saying "he 'draws a line' between the [BBC] interview and her death two years later." It's an interesting phrase, of a rare sort that I call auto-antonyms. The same words might mean two diametrically opposite things. I think he means to say that the two events are causally connected — as though by a straight line. But he could also mean that even though one event followed the other, he considers them to be completely separate — to emphasise which he would draw a (dividing) line between them.
Author steinsaltzPosted on May 21, 2021 Categories Politics, SocietyTags language, UK politics, UK societyLeave a comment on Auto-antonyms: Drawing a line
Oxbridge Delenda Est
I've been thinking for a long time that for all their merits as individual institutions, and all the advantages they offer to their faculty (like myself), students, and alumni (like myself), the hierarchical structure of tertiary education that defines their role, from which they benefit, and which they nurture, is fundamentally destructive.
I wrote an essay on this theme, and it has now appeared in the political magazine Current Affairs.
Author steinsaltzPosted on February 17, 2021 Categories Politics, SocietyTags competition, education, Oxford University, social equality, UK politics, universitiesLeave a comment on Oxbridge Delenda Est
Why is Jacob Rees-Mogg spitting on the Union Jack?
Some people have a funny way of showing their love…
Author steinsaltzPosted on February 6, 2021 February 9, 2021 Categories Politics, SatireTags conservatives, patriotism, UK politicsLeave a comment on Why is Jacob Rees-Mogg spitting on the Union Jack?
Can't look away
Many years ago I read to my daughter a children's book in which a little girl learning to ride a bicycle keeps running into objects like trees and lampposts. A bicycle instructor explains to her that when you become too fixated on an obstacle it exerts a strong psychological pull, so that the very exigency of evading it leads to a crash.
I used to wonder whether this was a real phenomenon. I don't anymore…
Actually, I've long thought the second Iraq War was an example of the same phenomenon. There was no possibility that there wouldn't be a war, because once they'd started to consider it Bush and Blair couldn't bare not to see how it would turn out.
Author steinsaltzPosted on December 13, 2020 Categories Personal reflection, PoliticsTags Brexit, children, psychology, UK politics, warLeave a comment on Can't look away
Political football
Guardian: The shadow Northern Ireland secretary, Louise Haigh, accused the government of using the region as a "political football".
Too generous. Calling it a "football" suggests the government has some goal in mind.
Author steinsaltzPosted on September 8, 2020 Categories PoliticsTags conservatives, metaphors, UK politicsLeave a comment on Political football

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


RENO, NV -- (Marketwired) -- 12/03/13 -- New Q3 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Cisco held on to leadership of UC collaboration with a 24% market share, while Microsoft, which has been inexorably closing the gap on Cisco, dropped off the pace a little in Q3 with its share slipping to 19%. Avaya reversed a trend of market share decline by boosting UC application and telephony sales, a sign that it remains a strong competitor. Worldwide revenue from UC collaboration -- which includes enterprise voice systems, UC applications, telepresence, collaborative workspace software, email software and enterprise social networks -- reached $5.7 billion in the quarter, marginally up on Q3 of last year.
Revenues from enterprise voice and telepresence continued to soften due to a combination of factors, including a growing shift to software-based pricing, strong competition amongst vendors and competition from disruptive technologies such as cloud UC. The quarter saw particularly strong growth in email software and enterprise social networks, while on a rolling annualized basis collaborative workspace software has seen the strongest revenue growth -- a segment in which Microsoft enjoys a 47% market share.
"In the premise equipment market we continue to see a strong transition in spending away from legacy technologies and towards software-based collaborative applications," said Synergy Research Group's founder and Chief Analyst, Jeremy Duke. "Microsoft and other vendors that are transitioning to a software pricing model are benefiting from this spending shift and we anticipate that this change will continue to have a positive impact on future revenues. Notwithstanding the temporary blip in Q3, Microsoft continues to gain share in UC collaboration and is closing the gap on market leader Cisco."
Synergy provides quarterly market sizing and segmentation data on enterprise voice, UC applications, telepresence, collaboration technology and related markets, including vendor revenues by segment and by region. Data is provided via Synergy's uniquely flexible SIA database which enables rapid analysis and provides a range of graphic data presentation options.
To speak to an analyst or to find out more about how to access Synergy's colocation market data, please contact Heather Gallo @ [email protected] or at 775-852-3330 extension 101.
RENO, NV -- (Marketwired) -- 12/03/13 -- New Q3 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Cisco held on to leadership of UC collaboration with a 24% market share, while Microsoft, which has been inexorably closing the gap on Cisco, dropped off the pace a little in Q3 with its share slipping to 19%. Avaya reversed a trend of market share decline by boosting UC application and telephony sales, a sign that it remains a strong competitor. Worldwide revenue from UC collaboration -- which includes enterprise voice systems, UC applications, telepresence, collaborative workspace software, email software and enterprise social networks -- reached \$5.7 billion in the quarter, marginally up on Q3 of last year.
\"In the premise equipment market we continue to see a strong transition in spending away from legacy technologies and towards software-based collaborative applications,\" said Synergy Research Group's founder and Chief Analyst, Jeremy Duke. \"Microsoft and other vendors that are transitioning to a software pricing model are benefiting from this spending shift and we anticipate that this change will continue to have a positive impact on future revenues. Notwithstanding the temporary blip in Q3, Microsoft continues to gain share in UC collaboration and is closing the gap on market leader Cisco.\"


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Have you received a Single Justice Procedure Notice for a Driving Offence?
If so, are you struggling to know what to do with it? Then read on...
What are Single Justice Procedure Notices?
These are relatively new and have been introduced supposedly to save court time. The Police are using Single Justice Procedure Notices in conjunction with speeding and other motoring offences. The Police issue Single Justice Procedure Notices for non-imprisonable offences which can only be dealt with by a Magistrates' Court.
Often, the types of offences dealt with by Single Justice Procedure Notice may be uncontested, and therefore (theoretically) a court hearing is unnecessary. Whilst there is some logic behind the theory, in reality, they're still being issued for offences which really warrant a court hearing. For example, higher level speeding offences eg. 110mph in a 70mph limit are very likely to result in a disqualification. Therefore, when the court makes such a decision, the defendant driver should be present. In such a case, the court is likely to list the matter for a hearing in order for the driver to attend.
Single Justice Procedure Notices are also commonly issued for driving offences such as driving while using a mobile phone and careless driving (driving without due care and attention).
Q: What should I do if I receive a Single Justice Procedure Notice?
Unlike with a Summons, the defendant driver must complete the Single Justice Procedure Notice. However, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't seek advice before responding. It may be that you do in fact have a defence or that there are Special Reasons available to you. These could make a significant difference to the outcome. The Single Justice Procedure could have the effect of encouraging some defendants to plead guilty to an offence because it appears to 'make light' of the offence by suggesting a solicitor is not necessary.
Even if you don't have a defence or special reasons, it's important that you make the court aware of any mitigating circumstances. It's also important that you tell the court about the impact various penalties would have on you and/or others. You may feel comfortable explaining this yourself, or you may be worried that you will 'say the wrong thing' so that the court may misinterpret it. You may be worried that you will miss something out. It may be that you don't know what sort of factors are relevant to the court's decision-making process.
It's entirely up to you if you'd like help or not, and we're here if you need us.
Q: Should I plead guilty?
Receipients of a Single Justice Procedure Notice may feel they are being put under pressure to plead guilty. The notices refer to a discount of 33% for pleading guilty at the earliest opportunity and warns of the likelihood of increased prosecution costs if you don't. This does not mean that you should plead guilty to an offence if you are not guilty of it.
However, it is beneficial to give consideration to your plea before returning the documents or entering a plea online. If you do not have a defence, then it is usually best to plead guilty as soon as possible to preseve credit and to get the best outcome. You should be aware that it can be difficult to retract a guilty plea once entered, so if you are in doubt, get advice before entering your plea.
Conversely, it is very easy to change your plea from not guilty to guilty. You can do this at any stage in the proceedings, even in the middle of a trial. Of course the later you leave it, the less credit you will receive for your plea.
Q: What happens if I don't respond?
If you don't respond to a Single Justice Procedure Notice, the court is likely to proceed in your absence. This means that you could be convicted of a motoring offence without having the opportunity to put forward your side of the story. If you are convicted in absence, you are unlikely to be given credit for pleading guilty so the fine you receive is likely to be greater than if you had entered a guilty plea.
An example of how the discount applies for pleading guilty
Say you are convicted in absence of a speeding offence by travelling at 40mph in a 30mph limit, you are likely to receive a fine of around £660, with costs of around £85 and a victim surcharge of £66, making a total of £811.
The financial penalty you would have received if you had pleaded guilty would depend on your income details you provided to the court. If for example you earn £400 per week (after tax), you would normally receive a fine of no more than £200 (although usually even less) with costs of £85 and a vicitim surcharge of £30, making a total of £315.
The discount will not apply to penalty points imposed or a period of disqualification. If you have provided mitigation ie. an explanation of why you committed the offence to the court, this can influence the points/disqualification imposed.
Q: Will I definitely avoid having to go to court?
Not necessarily. The Single Justice Procedure Notices use standard wording regardless of the seriousness of the offence. The theory is that it avoids unnecessary court hearings. However, if disqualification from driving is a possibility, the court must warn the driver beforehand. This usually the court inviting the driver to a court hearing. Driving whilst disqualified is a very serious offence which can result in a prison sentence. For that reason, courts must attempt to ensure the driver is aware of the ban before imposing it. So, depending on the offence and the number of points on your licence, you may still need to attend court at some point.
Also, you will have to attend court if you contest the matter and it proceeds to a trial. The same goes for if you intend to put forward special reasons or exceptional hardship to avoid points or disqualification.
Q: Are there any examples of when drivers will usually still need to attend court?
The following are examples of when a later court appearance will be likely:
- A driver has six penalty points for two speeding offences. The driver committed the speeding offences in the three years prior to the current alleged mobile phone offence. Driving while using a mobile phone is an offence for which the court will impose a minimum of six penalty points (unless there are special reasons). The court won't be able to deal with an offence of driving while using a mobile phone without the driver attending court because the driver would be facing a 'totting up' disqualification.
- A driver is facing an allegation of driving at 55mph in a 30mph limit. The magistrates' court sentencing guidelines suggest that the court should impose a period of disqualification of between 7-56 days or six points. The court should request that the driver should attend court so it can consider disqualification. This does not mean that the court will definitely impose a driving ban, but it is a very real possibility.
In either of these cases, it is important to seek legal advice at the earliest possible stage.
If you've received a single justice procedure notice, give us a call. Similarly, if you'd like to discuss a possible defence or special reasons argument for speeding or any other motoring offence, then get in touch.
Q: What if there is a mistake on the Single Justice Procedure Notice?
It will depend on the nature of the mistake as to whether or not it can be amended at court. If for example, your name has been spelled incorrectly, it doesn't automatically mean that the notice is invalid and you can ignore it. The police can ask the court to allow them to amend the papers and unless you are able to show that you would suffer prejudice as a result, the court will grant the application.
If there is a significant error which results in you being disadvantaged, the court may either choose not to allow the amendment to be made. The other option is that the court may allow the amendment but grant an adjournment for you to prepare your case further.
Certain errors cannot be rectified such as if an entirely different name or entity is stated on the Single Justice Procedure Notice. You should seek advice before pleading not guilty solely on the basis that a notice is defective.
Q: What happens if I miss the 21 day deadline?
You should contact the court immediately to let them know the situation. Ideally, you should enter your plea as soon as possible to allow the court to deal with your case if it has not yet been heard. Often matters are not dealt with until 28 days or more after the postal date on the Single Justice Procedure Notice. However, you should enter a plea within the deadline if at all possible. If you do not, you risk the court convicting you in absence.
Don't feel under pressure to enter a plea if you have not had time to consider it properly. If in doubt, you may choose to enter a not guilty plea whilst you take advice, but this can impact on the credit you receive (see the questions 'what happens if I don't respond'). If you are going to plead guilty, you should do so at the earliest possible opportunity. It is however easier to change a plea of not guilty, to one of guilty, than to change it the other way around.
If you have missed the 21 day deadline for responding to a Single Justice Procedure Notice, then take advice as a matter of urgency.
Q: Can Pragma respond to the Single Justice Procedure Notice for me?
Yes we can, provided we have your full instructions and have advised you accordingly. If you instruct us, we will deal with the court on your behalf, enter your plea, deal with any issues and put forward any mitigation or defence as appropriate. You may still have to attend court at a later date, depending on the nature of your case. We can represent you at that hearing.
Please do contact us as soon as possible so that we can ensure we are able to meet any deadlines. That said, if your deadline is looming or has already passed, we will still be delighted to help you.
Q: Can the court throw the case out if I have a defence?
The prosecuting authority (usually the police alone or together with the Crown Prosecution Service) makes the decision about whether to proceed with an allegation. It is not up to the court to make this decision. A court can only dismiss a case in the following circumstances:
The prosecution issues a Notice of Discontinuance, offers no evidence or withdraws an allegation (this means that the police or Crown Prosecution Service are choosing not to proceed).
The court accepts a submission of no case to answer - often referred to as a 'half-time submission'. This is where the court decides that at the conclusion of the prosecution case, no reasonable jury could convict the defendant.
The court finds the defendant not guilty after a trial.
That said, sometimes the court may indirectly put pressure on the prosecution by questioning its decision to proceed where it is clear that the case against the defendant is extremely weak. This rarely happens at Single Justice Procedure Stage unless without prior agreement between the court and the prosecution.
Q: Isn't there a 6 month time limit for Single Justice Procedure Notices?
The new Single Justice Procedure Notice is diffferent from the longer standing Summons procedure and the rules are different. Whereas with a Summons, the prosecutor would 'lay the information before the court' and the court would then issue a Summons, the Single Justice Procedure is dealt with by the prosecuting authority. With a Summons, the information would have to be laid before the court within 6 months of the date of the offence.
The Single Justice Procedure requires the police prosecutor to issue a Written Charge and Single Justice Procedure Notice within 6 months of the offence. The police prosecutor must issue a Written Charge and Single Justice Procedure Notice to the court (usually electronically) within the 6 month time limit. The Single Justice Procedure Notice may not be posted out to you within 6 months, but the law does not appear to require that.
However, the whole purpose of the 6 month time limit for summary only offences is presumably to allow people facing less serious offences to be able to 'draw a line under the matter' after a reasonable period of time. For this reason it seems unfair if the Single Justice Procedure Notice is sometimes not sent out for 7 months or more. Unfortunately, there isn't yet a relevant Divisional Court decision binding on lower courts but one is currently pending. Hopefully, once that case is determined it will provide certainty for those receiving Single Justice Procedure Notices well outside 6 months. We will keep you posted!


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The Spontaneous Quarantine Writing that Became a Hit in Japan
Barry Yourgrau on the Story Behind His Pandemic Collection Botticelli
By Barry Yourgrau
"Then a woman with lips blue with cold… whispered in my ear—(we all spoke in whispers there):
'Could you describe this?'
I said, 'I can!'"
–Anna Akhmatova
I'm a writer specializing in very short fiction with a surrealist tinge. Starting in April, as the sirens wailed out my window in locked-down New York, I took to writing fable-like stories, and sending them—as emotional dispatches from a city in trauma—to Motoyuki Shibata, my longtime Japanese translator, in Tokyo. Quickly gathered into a little chapbook, these dispatches seem to have struck a deep chord half way around the world.
As you surely know, New York this spring found itself the world's epicenter of the coronavirus. And ethnically diverse Jackson Heights, where I live, and the surrounding dense, low-income Queens neighborhoods marked the epicenter's epicenter. A mere six blocks from me Elmhurst Hospital, whose services I've blithely used over the years, became the global image of the city's unfolding horrors: the rain-sodden crowds outside trying to get tested, the waiting refrigerated morgue trucks, the overwhelmed corridors within. New York went into lockdown late March, and life flipped into a siege of unrelieved, tumultuous dread. Ghostly streets. People suddenly desperately in masks (where did they get them?). Confusing or non-existent local safety guidance, besides the stunning neglect and pathology from the White House. Shortages—of testing, disinfectants, groceries.
And this public trauma revived a personal one. The respiratory nature of the disease brought back my mother's dying from lung cancer, helplessly gasping for breath as I helplessly looked on. That's how you died from coronavirus—alone. For several days I had a strange "cold" (was it?) with shortness of breath, chest pain. I spent nights seared rigid with anxiety.
The sirens converged on Elmhurst Hospital round the clock. I read the Facebook post of a friend, an ER doctor in Brooklyn—a short, piercing account of how he propped his cell phone by an elderly woman about to die from the virus, so that her desperately pleading son could gulp out a prayer of farewell to her through his tears, as she lay unconscious. I read this and I sobbed at my laptop.
My twin brother's father-in-law near Boston succumbed, with his family saying their goodbyes on FaceTime, thanks to the kindness and humanity of his caretaker. I wept again.
It was all too much. The world was ending. In anguish I shut off the news with its infection rates and fatality counts and lack of PPE, shut off Twitter, the catastrophic lies and ravings from the White House.
From this silence, my first story came bursting out. In the streets the magnolias were in blossom; my masked and gloved lockdown walks took me past their luscious pinks and whites, heart and head dark with dread and turmoil. And this grotesque dissonance gave me the sudden, savage inspiration to invert everything—to recast the disease as gilding its victims with the most ravishing beauty the more it ravaged them. (An opposite fate, I noticed later, from Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death.") "There were beauty contests," I wrote, "in the ICU's." Ugliness became a strutting badge of health. I called the affliction, and the story, "Botticelli."
New stories came pouring out as almost daily dispatches, eleven more over two weeks, April into May, as the virus raged on and New York's lockdown was extended.
I sent it right away to Moto Shibata in Tokyo—something I often do—telling him I'd written it "for sanity's sake." A friend and colleague of Murakami, Moto is probably Japan's preeminent translator of contemporary American lit. He's done my books for years, some solely published in Japan. He translated "Botticelli" immediately and read it next day on the radio. He asked for more.
"This is a very strange context we are in now," he wrote, "and something in addition to literary qualities may make a story work miraculously on readers."
With this, new stories came pouring out as almost daily dispatches, eleven more over two weeks, April into May, as the virus raged on and New York's lockdown was extended. I'd written my fiction about traumas before—my parents' deaths; a shattering romantic breakup—but never mid-experience. I didn't want to write directly now, factually head on. (That's not how I write.) I wanted intimate authenticity, but I needed a certain poetic remove—to be fable-like, as with "Botticelli," for the innocence and darkness, and Kafkaesque haplessness, too, a fable offers. The scale of the pandemic required, for me, a quasi-folkloric sort of voice. "Plague" was the term I used, with its age-old resonance. Never "coronavirus" or "covid."
My second story featured the ambulances that hurried through the streets, the sight of them at once so fearful and yet poignantly consoling. Some sirens pulsed in an eerie, almost oceanic register, and I imagined the ambulances as whales: great gravely heroic gentle beasts brought in to ferry the sick on their broad backs, red lamps strapped to their heads, until they give out in mortal exhaustion—"nature straining its best to help us reckless, helpless sufferers," I wrote. I was thinking of nurses and doctors and caretakers as well, surely.
Shopping provoked another dispatch. At one point only a few supermarkets in Jackson Heights were open; even the bodegas were shut. My first anxious venture out to a supermarket, late evening with my girlfriend, turned chaotic, I returned in fever of guilt that I'd gotten us exposed by rashly hurrying us inside. My girlfriend wasn't ready, she kept protesting, she was the one who did all our shopping, she had her safety routine. She was beside herself. I wrote about finding a little girl on the street overcome with panic and distress—inconsolable because she's lost her shadow. (There's an HC Andersen tale about losing one's shadow, I found out later) I try to reassure her, but I know how dangerous her situation is. And I don't know how to help her.
I was, I realize, summoning images and correlatives that would set off the release that deep tears bring—for the loss of people and a world, the sadness and fear, the overwhelmed confusion. I was coping with the pandemic, as I could, by weeping over my vision of it constructed with a ballpoint from Staples. I wrote about imploring authorities to stop an unbearable video on TV that keeps showing a simple family picnic, such as once were, no masks, no gloves, plates passed around, cups refilled, a sing-along on shared blanket. I wrote of an old man drowning on our escape route from the infected city, how his humbly attentive ghost troubles my dreams until I have to tell it to leave. (I realize now this came from the passing of my sister-in-law's father, and my own father's, too, long ago.) I wrote about bewildering health edicts involving mirrors. About a safe hilltop village where they fly clouds like kites for innocent sport, and gather to gaze down at the dismal quarantined town below. By the end, I was even going for laughs (I'm usually a comic writer) with a disastrous tour of my locked-down writing studio, inspired by the 18th century house-arrest memoir, Voyage Around My Room.
The book I found myself turning to most wasn't by Camus or Boccaccio or Defoe. It was a 1972 Soviet sci-fi novel by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic concerns the Zone, a terrifying area of earth where the laws of physics have gone haywire in the debris-strewn aftermath of a visit by aliens. Tarkovsky's film, Stalker, was loosely drawn from the novel. The Strugatskys wrote the screenplay—removing all the book's sci-fi, to Tarkovsky's delight, though retaining a version of the Zone.
Moto Shibata arranged for the stories—which have not yet appeared in English—to be rush-published late May in his translation.
Stalker (pronounced "Stullker" by the Strugatskys) is a movie that seems to enrapture people (Geoff Dyer, for example) or bore them stiff (myself). Roadside Picnic with its hardcore sci-fi frights has always been more compelling to me. And I felt we were now living in the novel's Zone: trapped, and in isolation, in our home neighborhood of Queens. In choking shock at how some malevolent fate had shrunk the worst of the planet's contagion, forget Wuhan, right to where we were.
I paid homage to Roadside Picnic in a mini-tale of alien artifacts that glisten with unsuspected catastrophic luster, much like the Strugatskys' sinister alien cobwebs glittering in the dimness of an abandoned Zone garage. I set my version of the Zone in a remote jungle site. My story is actually a prelude, though. A "stalker"-type, a relics' poacher, goes after those shiny artifacts deep in the heart of the jungle—unaware of the horrors that await him, and the world . That "stalker"-type is me.
Moto Shibata arranged for the stories—which have not yet appeared in English—to be rush-published late May in his translation. When the mail from Japan worked again, I held in my hand the post-card sized chapbook we'd titled Botticelli: Fables from a Plague Time. Fittingly, the Japanese call ultra-short fiction "palm of the hand" stories. Now the little book with its red blurb band nestles among my assorted facemasks and bottles of Purell, on its front cover a freely-drawn woman who seems in bed but also dancing; on the back, something floating like a Matisse cut-out of a microbe. In between sit the transformations that got me through my suffering—abstract now to me in Japanese. A beautiful, foreign object that's also my own so-intimate talisman.
Despite the publisher, Ignition Gallery, being an indie arts outfit that eschews Amazon, Botticelli received coverage in all of Japan's major newspapers and within a month went into a third printing. It's now in its fourth.
"Imagination," novelist-of-the-moment Mieko Kawakami (Breasts and Eggs) wrote of the stories, "is the best way to grasp the depths of this disaster seemingly without end."
"I think for us, these stories were—are—mirrors that beautifully exaggerate what we ourselves have been going through."
I asked Moto why Botticelli resonated with Japanese readers.
"I think for us," he replied, "these stories were—are—mirrors that beautifully exaggerate what we ourselves have been going through. Our own experience, exquisitely distorted. Magazines and newspapers have published a lot of diary-style accounts of the pandemic, but almost no one had thought of making it into fables. And I realize now," he added, "I was relying on your stories to come to grips myself with what was unfolding."
During April and May, Tokyoites dutifully stayed home, Moto noted, and greeted each day with bated breath. "But we weren't tired yet—we didn't have the sense we have now."
The sense things might drag on for many months, even years…
Still. At summer's close, New York had one of the country's lowest infection rates, and life has returned to the streets around Elmhurst Hospital.
I hold my breath thinking of what fables the fall might bring.
Three Stories from Botticelli
The grotesque irony of the disease was how the infected became more and more beautiful, the more the plague ravaged them.
There were beauty contests in the ICU's. Painters and photographers, poets and balladeers, flocked to the hospital wards to capture and celebrate the loveliness on display in the fever-soaked bedding. The perfections of forms resembled, or perhaps even surpassed, creations from the sublime hand of Botticelli, of Rafaello. Such eyes, such profiles, such grace of sweat-shiny limbs.
The disease was called Botticelli or, by some, Rafaello.
And sometimes, as the artists crowded in, a sudden gasp of horror would be heard, as a painter would all at once realize, from the depth of his or her avid concentration, that those around were now staring at him or her with widened, ravished gazes. And the painter would fumble out the hand mirror everyone carried with them, and groan in wrenching despair at his or her sudden telltale onset of comeliness. The mark of loveliness.
We all were consumed by mirrors, then. In our houses we draped them, and would lift a corner of the cloth to peer, wincing with dread, for the first signs of a finely shaped nose, a creamier or rosier complexion, a more lustrous eye, more luxuriant tresses. Pinker bows of full lips. Nobler brows.
And how we envied those whose plainness and ugliness remained unassailed, perverse badges of their vitality and health. How they would strut about now, smirking, scratching their flabby bellies or their dandruff, stroking their warts, flaunting their flat, bony, sallow cheeks, their crooked chins, their small, dull eyes. They ambled the galleries and museums, the ones that stubbornly hung on open, grunting in triumph and contempt at the centuries of beauty on display.
And so the great reinterpretation began.
"The Whales"
The new leaden stillness spread across the streets. Through the dragging days, the shut-in nights, the stillness was pierced, at first—ominously, wrenchingly—by the wail of ambulances rushing their desperate cargos through the streets to the hospitals.
Then the ambulances broke down or were contaminated and abandoned.
Up from the stillness now, through the windows, rises an eerie oceanic bleating. It's the whales that have been brought in and put to the ferrying task, being impervious to contagion, it turns out.
If it isn't rainy, we creep with terrible caution to our roof terrace with a view of the chastened metropolis and its skyscrapers. From there we can watch the great creatures from the ocean deep as they maneuver along below with their majestic tails through the streets newly in leaf, with the red lamps harnessed to their brows pulsing, and their great broad backs bearing the stricken in modified stretchers to the emergency rooms. Their eerie primordial bleating is comforting now, is fearful comfort and a terrible poignancy…nature straining its dumb best to help us reckless, helpless sufferers.
Some days, when we test our courage with an anxious walk to the park, we come upon a prodigious collapsed corpse hauled to the side of the street—dead from exhaustion or from being unable to cope with the change of habitat, so far from deep waters. Young guys would climb up onto the great hulks to pose for triumphant selfies, until the police warned them down.
Many of us have vowed to make a special visit of gratitude to the pens outside the harbor where the whales are brought to from the sea, and housed. But the dangerous days, the weeks, are still too much with us. So we sit by our windows for now, our hearts pierced with fear and a terrible, heartbreaking gratitude, searing as grief, as we hear the bleating and see the great creatures, red-lit, toiling on their errands under the dimming trees as evening returns to the streets.
First the film production was paused, temporarily. Then the plug was pulled on the whole project.
The film set was abandoned. It had been built with dirt-cheap local labor, so its size was enormous. In fact, in sheer mass, it was the seventh largest city, there deep in the jungle, of the whole country.
When the aliens landed, they settled in the abandoned film-set city for a time. Being deserted, it must have presented a good base to them for their exploratory mission. Or perhaps their mission wasn't exploratory, exactly, and this was more like a moment in their intergalactic wanderlust when they could pause a while.
At any rate, they were not accustomed to residing in buildings, at least not the ones they found themselves among. So they stayed camped in the streets.
The jungle therefore had little hindrance when it began to encroach on the buildings, and envelope them in ravenous greenery, in lush fibrous vines that covered the structures and bore deep and invasive into the floors, the walls and roofs, the foundations. Heat and humidity did their job too. Soon the engulfed buildings began to rot. Insects flourished and multiplied, stupendously. Particularly a certain kind of mosquito.
The aliens, despise their intergalactic navigations and their hyper-acute technologies, had curiously little immunity against mosquitos. They were helpless. Their spacecraft gleamed, but the ravenous vines had invaded its vital power cells, somehow. They began to perish like, well, like flies. They lay in the streets, gasping fainter and fainter in fright and helplessness until they succumbed.
All of them ended this way. All but one of them.
He took to the river, clinging to logs.
Hundreds of miles away, down the turbid river, he was carried into the ramshackle district hospital where I was working as an accountant. The doctors thought he was an indigenous person of some kind, from one of the tribes, deformed and maddened by malnourishment and a miscellany of chronic jungle ailments. They shoved him away in a back room by himself. And it was in that shabbily tended room where I looked in, idly curious, that he showed me, gasping faintly, a piece of alien metal he had with him. A spoon, to be specific.
The spoon gleamed like treasure from a fairytale.
Before he succumbed—there were mosquitos here, too, it was the bad month for them, the spraying had been careless—he communicated to me the whereabouts of the abandoned film-set city, and the space craft…whose metal, no doubt, gleamed like treasure from a fairy tale.
I quit the hospital. They shrugged at the news; I was an unreliable accountant, given to reading cheap fantasy novels at my untidy desk. I got hold of a boat.
Now I'm on the river, have been for three days. I'll need one long day more to reach that abandoned film-set city, I calculate, as I crouch by my river bank fire, the spoon gleaming on its oil cloth for my hungry eyes to feast on again. My gun is now starting to rust in the jungle humidity, I notice, despite my oilings. Never mind, it's a sturdy old gun. I smile, patting it. Yes, a sturdy old gun.
If I could foresee what one long day more brings, I would wish to have known about the scavenging rodents, puny sorts of vermin that came creeping into the enjungled, ruined film set, drawn by the stench of the alien fallen. Whom they fed on, naturally. And then they didn't slink back into the undergrowth, although some of them died almost immediately from the contagion that had fermented, you might say, in the dead alien flesh. Yes, of course I have my rubberized box of standard medications with me, the pills, sour powders, acrid disinfectants. But the jungle is a vast, tireless laboratory vat of infectious invention. "Standard" is not much use against vermin and their mutant strain of microbes that shimmer like wisps of gleaming silicate, like a haze of tidbits gnawed from gleaming metal ornaments on ruined alien bodies.
If only I could have foreseen what I'm about to learn, I could have turned around and warned the whole world. But alas, that's not what happens.
Barry Yourgrau
Barry Yourgrau is the author Mess, and the story collections Wearing Dad's Head, and The Sadness of Sex. He also starred in the latter's film version. He's appeared on MTV and NPR, and written for the New York Times, New Yorker.com, Paris Review, and Vice. Born in South Africa, he lives in New York and Istanbul.
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Serious Minnesota Medical Mistakes Set Record
St Paul, MN (KROC AM News) - An annual report on serious adverse medical events in Minnesota shows they hit their highest total in the 15 years they have been documented.
The Minnesota Dept. of Health report shows there were 384 events between October 2017 and October 2018. That's 42 more than the previous report.
The report shows preventable mistakes led to the deaths of 11 people and 118 injuries. Three of the deaths were newborns.
Kim David/Townsquare Media
Mayo Clinic-Rochester reported 41 of the events and one death. The death was the result of a fall.
The department says falls and pressure ulcers accounted for nearly 60-percent of the events.
The department says despite the increase in reports, "these events remained very rare and their very low frequency – far below 1 percent of hospitalizations – has remained steady over the past 15 years of reporting."
The department's report covers 29 serious events, such as wrong-site surgeries, severe pressure ulcers, falls and serious medication errors," which should rarely or never happen."
News Update: Stewartville man saved by persistent first responders.
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Source: Serious Minnesota Medical Mistakes Set Record
Filed Under: Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, olmsted county, Rochester, University of Minnesota


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HomeFeatured StoriesPoverty Beat: Land Bank Program Offers Much Needed Change
Poverty Beat: Land Bank Program Offers Much Needed Change
August 1, 2014 Featured Stories, Poverty 0
In January Philadelphia became the largest city in the country to approve the creation of a land bank, an entity that will regulate the sale of the city's 40,000 abandoned properties.
A coalition of for-profit and non- profit entities came together under the umbrella of The Philly Land Bank Alliance to advocate for its creation. Beth McConnell, policy director of the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations (PACDC), one of the groups that compose the Alliance says the process towards establishing the land bank was complex.
"Anytime you're talking about reforming a very complicated system such as how we deal with vacant properties in the city can be very confusing. Getting people to kind of understand how complex the problem was and understand how a land bank could be an effective and useful solution was certainly a challenge," says McConnell.
The initiative seeks to make the sale and maintenance of vacant and dilapidated properties more efficient. Currently, three government agencies are responsible for publicly owned land but the Department of Public Property, Philadelphia's Redevelopment Authority and Philadelphia's Housing Corporation manages the largest share of publicly owned vacancies.
The current multi-agency system makes it difficult for potential buyers to find out information about properties and the approval process for buying the land often takes years. In the current system, potential buyers can look for properties in a city database, Philly Landworks. The buyers can express interest in the properties but they then have to wait for the agency that manages the properties to get back to them and that could take years.
Although the land bank will makes it easier for people to acquire abandoned land it is still not as easy as buying property on the open market.
"One of the key tools the land back will offer the city over time is the opportunity to begin to consolidate the ownership and get more and more pieces of land into one owner at the land back in preparation for finding a new use," said John Carpenter, deputy executive director of the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority.
In order to spur development the process of buying vacant land has to be more streamlined. One of the key elements of the land bank bill is that it creates a more efficient process for buying land.
A vacant piece of land off Diamond Street near Temple University. Photo/ Mamaye Mesfin
Potential buyers will need approval from city council, the Land Banks Board of Directors and the Vacant Property Review Committee. The Land Banks Board of directors will consist of 11 members, five appointed by the mayor, five by city council and one by the board itself. The inclusion of city council helps establish community-level voice regarding the decisions made in the land bank.
Philadelphia has struggled to spur development for years. In 2001 the city launched the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative and one of the main goals of the NTI was to make it easier for the city to utilize vacant properties. At the time the NTI was largely unsuccessful at doing just that because it was difficult for city agencies and individuals to acquire tax delinquent land.
" The way cities have dealt with abandonment and essentially deteriorated properties is that they put a lean on the property so what happens is that those leans actually become more expensive than the value of the property. So even if someone is motivated to do something about fixing up the property the economics of it don't work," said Liz Hersh the executive director of the Pennsylvania Housing Alliance.
There are around 30,000 privately owned vacant and dilapidated properties in the city, 17,000 of which are tax delinquent. What the land bank legislation provides is series of measures that gives local governments more authority in confiscating tax delinquent properties and clearing leans, which makes the process of acquiring land much easier.
In a city like Philadelphia with a vulnerable financial climate, the establishment of a new government agency seems dauting. The office will most likely be located in the current Philadelphia Housing and Development Corporation and will cost around $4 million. The cost of running the day-to-day operation of the land bank will be covered by the sale of properties, but at a time where more than 20 Philadelphia schools have been closed due to budget cuts, $4 million looks like a pretty penny.
However PACDC policy director Beth McConnell says the city must invest in a program like the land bank now more than ever.
"A vacant property is not generating any money for our school district. We did a study that estimates it costs at least $20 million a year to maintain vacant parcels across the city in terms of police and fire and code enforcement. That's a lot of money that the city doesn't have to waste on vacant properties and would rather put into our schools," said McConnell.
Revitalizing communities is a complex issue, and poses as many threats as it does opportunities. As much as the new legislation can aid communities in creating equitable development strategies it can also do the opposite; it all depends on how the community decides to use the land bank. To John Carpenter the land bank has the potential is create real change on the neighborhood level, but only if residents are engaged.
" It doesn't solve the fundamental problem that people in neighborhoods are going to have about making a project work, once they've identified a project they still have to go and find the resources to make it real," said Carpenter.
It costs the city millions of dollars a year to maintain vacant land. Photo/ Mamaye Mesfin
abandoned lots
Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations
Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority


Each prize includes 2 tickets to the Awards Ceremony on 6 September 2017 in London, UK with Champagne drinks reception, 3-course dinner with a bottle of house wine per person, awards presentation and the after-party.
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Entrants, winners and their guest must be practising private client practitioners.
The closing date for the competition is 23:59 on 12 May 2017 (GMT). The winners will be announced on STEP's social media pages on 15 May 2017.
The three winners will be chosen from a random draw of entries received in accordance with these Terms and Conditions.
If a winner does not respond to STEP within 14 days of being notified, then STEP shall be entitled to select another winner in accordance with the process described above (and that winner will have to respond to notification of their win within 14 days or else they will also forfeit their prize). If a winner rejects their prize or the entry is invalid or in breach of these Terms and Conditions, the winner's prize will be forfeited and STEP shall be entitled to select another winner.
STEP accepts no responsibility for any costs associated with the prize and not specifically included in the prize.
STEP retains the right to substitute the prize with another prize of similar value in the event the original prize offered is not available.
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Forget the heatwave, would summer work for non-league?
August 6, 2018 August 6, 2018 Neil Fredrik Jensen
THE World Cup ends and a fortnight later, we're on the brink of a new campaign, although some clubs have been playing pre-season games since the start of July. I doubt too many people have thought about it, but in four years' time, we have a World Cup starting in November and ending a week before Christmas. I'm talking of Qatar, of course, when we are faced with a schedule-busting World Cup in the desert.
While the top level of the game will be forced into hibernation for more than a month, how will non-league football cope with 2022? Will it continue, or will it also have a break? The effect of playing during a World Cup could be disastrous for non-league, with crowds impacted very negatively – my local club had a normally lucrative annual fixture coincide with a World Cup game and saw the normal attendance drop by more than 50%.
On the other hand, managed properly, it could also be a winner for fans eager to watch a game. It is difficult to judge and forecast how it will affect crowds at local football grounds, but having two or three home games decimated by the World Cup can have a significant influence on matchday revenues.
But how about a shift to summer football for the 2022 season, if not before? As I write this article, I'm in my office, sweltering in 30-plus degrees of heat. The mere thought of summer football seems complete and utter madness, but I've long thought that non-league could benefit from detaching itself from big-time football in terms of its scheduling to maximise its audience and income potential.
Why? Midweek is just one aspect, with the obvious distraction of the seemingly never-ending Champions League football. But when the weather pays havoc with fixture lists and the blood circulation and hip joints of the crowd (which invariably averages well over 50 years of age), it is worth considering some "seasonal" adjustments. So, I'm tabling a switch to a season that results in some summer football. A campaign that begins in late March and ends in November. This gives non-league football the chance to have the football arena to itself for at least two months of the year. It also takes out the very cold months of December, January and February.
Some people are bound to ask about the FA Cup and how clubs will accommodate it. Well for non-league clubs, that's usually over by November, with the odd exception. Furthermore, if the non-league game is recalibrated, the qualifying competition can be structured around the season's start. The FA Trophy and FA Vase can also be adjusted to fit the new format. Summer football may also give the professional game the chance to loan-out players to non-league for experience and, in the case of injured players on their way back, a place for rehabilitation.
Late spring and summer football would attract bigger crowds, of that I am certain. The bone-numbing midweek game would be a thing of the past and balmy afternoons and evenings watching non-league football could become the new norm. Another benefit, with the warmer weather, is that the clubhouse will also do good business.
The school holidays would fall in the middle of the season, so there would be great opportunities to offer special deals to engage kids, including periphery activities like coaching courses. The new schedule may eventually change the demographics of the non-league game and get more young people involved, something which is vital for the future of the game at this level.
Summer football does exist across Europe – in fact, in the Republic of Ireland, they switched their domestic programme some years ago. And in Scandinavia, some leagues play on through the warmer months.
Of course, the climate has to be considered and the past few weeks have reminded us of the big issue of global warming and a deteriorating eco-system. Certainly, football at 30 degrees is not to be recommended, but one must hope that this current heatwave is a one-off. It's a reminder that football in a Qatari summer would have been unbearable, hence the winter World Cup. But as an experiment, summer football at non-league level might just be worth a try.
This article first appeared in the Non-League Paper.
Categories: Non-LeagueTags: artificial pitches, featured, Non-League, Scandinavia, summer football, weather
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Maybe if an england game clashes with a non league game say 3pm allow clubs to move games to 12:30pm or even the evenings so people can watch game in clubhouse


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Q: Get gitlab file archive for most recent release This will let me get an archive from a repo:
GET /projects/:id/repository/archive.tar.gz
Is there any way to pass a parameter such that I get an archive for the latest release rather than just the HEAD?

A: You can get the tags of repository using the following API:
GET /projects/:id/repository/tags

As the docs describe https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/tags.html#list-project-repository-tags

You get a list of repository tags from a project, sorted by update date and time in descending order
In combination with the archive API
GET /projects/:id/repository/archive[.format]

We can have the latest release with the following one-liner:
curl  --header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: <private token>" https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/<project id>/repository/archive.tar.gz?sha=$(curl -s --header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: <private token>" "https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/<project id>/repository/tags" | jq '.[0].commit.id' | sed 's/^"\(.*\)"$/\1/') -o /path/to/file