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Everywhere at the End of Time…Part 2 (my reactions)
Posted on November 27, 2020 by luckyotter
(Continued from Part 1)
All artwork illustrating the stages of dementia are by Ivan Seal.
Yesterday I gave you a bit of background about Everywhere at the End of Time, a musical and artistic masterpiece by "The Caretaker" (James Leyland Kirby), a British composer and musician who became deeply interested in Alzheimers Disease and the process of dementia, and composed a six album work of musical art depicting what the descent from near normality to the empty void of total memory loss would feel like.
I suggest you read both these articles first (and watch some video reviews about it first), before diving into this thing. I will warn you right now: it's dark and at times both tragically sad and existentially terrifying. You may feel overwhelmed or have strange physical sensations such as cold chills. You might feel scared or paranoid. You likely will cry. In my opinion, listening to this is not a lot different from taking a mind altering drug like ayahuasca or another psychedelic. You should set aside an entire day because you might need to focus on your feelings and thoughts and have time to process everything and think about what you just heard. Some people prefer to listen to it over several days because it's hard to take it all in in just one sitting.
I'll post the link again for the entire six and a half hour long album.
https://thecaretaker.bandcamp.com/album/everywhere-at-the-end-of-time
It's also on Youtube (you can also find it divided up for each stage if you prefer that).
All that said, let's dive in. I'm going to describe each Stage as best as I'm able, and talk about how each stage made me feel.
Stage 1 and 2 correspond to the earlier stages of Alzheimers/dementia. This is when a person begins to forget things, such as car keys or has momentary embarrassing memory lapses.
They may forget names, but usually this forgetfulness doesn't extend to close friends or family members, and it's fleeting. The person is still functional, may still be able to work or drive a car, but may begin to realize something is wrong.
Stage 1 is composed of mostly upbeat ballroom pop songs, very similar to the haunting 1920s/1930s music from the movie The Shining. In fact, Kirby was so inspired and haunted by the ballroom music in that movie that he decided the same kind of music would work for this album (in fact, he adopted the handle "The Caretaker" after the Jack Nicholson character in that film). He liked the sense of nostalgia the ballroom music evoked, the echoey sound of it that made it seem like it was coming from empty, cavernous rooms, and also the feeling of it being "a long time ago," since Alzheimers usually affects the elderly. The music was just haunting enough, without actually sounding "off," that while a pleasant listening experience, it could also be thought of as depicting the very earliest stages of Alzheimers, with the person displaying no symptoms yet but tending to focus on the past and losing themselves in nostalgic reverie about romantic interludes when they were still in their prime.
The album notes make the same observation in different words:
Here we experience the first signs of memory loss.
This stage is most like a beautiful daydream.
The glory of old age and recollection.
The last of the great days.
Stage 1 is definitely the most listenable stage, not at all offensive, but as the pretty music does sound like it's coming from empty, cavernous ballrooms and I associate it with The Shining, one of the scariest movies I ever saw, it's still a slightly unsettling listening experience. You also know what's coming. The very first song, here called "It's Just a Burning Memory," appears again and again in every subsequent stage, each time sounding less and less like the original. Sometimes you can only hear a few of the chords behind waves of static, or the chords are so drawn and stretched out they sound like whale calls, or it just sounds really "off." I'll explain more about this as we move on. I think this particular song represents the patient's most cherished memory, the one they never want to lose. The struggle to hold onto this memory throughout the course of this disease is one of the central themes that makes the dementia experience so emotionally harrowing.
From the album notes:
The second stage is the self realisation and awareness that something is wrong with a refusal to accept that. More effort is made to remember so memories can be more long form with a little more deterioration in quality. The overall personal mood is generally lower than the first stage and at a point before confusion starts setting in.
This is the last album in the series that one might call pleasant listening, though I found it HIGHLY unsettling and could not listen to it for more than a few minutes at a time because of how edgy and uncomfortable it made me feel. While this stage still depicts early Alzheimer's and the person is still more or less functional, we are at the point now where the patient is aware something is very wrong, may have received a diagnosis, and is terrified, knowing there is no cure and it will only continue to get worse. This existential dread and terror is evident in the music, which comes across as an unpleasant dissonance, rising waves of static (brain noise?), songs that appear to stop and start, and then stop again, as if something has been "forgotten" and the person is trying to remember. The ballroom music here, while still pretty, sometimes sounds sour, off key, or as if it's coming from inside the person's head. The song "What Does It Matter How My Heart Breaks" is a reprise of Stage 1's "Just a Burning Memory" and while clearly recognizable as the same song, is chillingly distorted and diminished somehow.
The artwork used on the album cover perfectly captures the feeling of Stage 2. It's pretty, just flowers in a vase, but the flowers look sad and wilted, and the vase itself is just…wrong. Like something in a state of decay.
I can't listen to any of Stage 2 without feeling a sense of impending doom, though it's hard to pinpoint exactly why. I don't like it. But this is nothing. Things only get worse from here.
Stage 3, in some ways, is the most terrifying to me. At this stage, the dementia patient is beginning to have more severe memory lapses and may now need help with everyday activities. They may fade in and out of being aware and outside awareness.
The album notes state that
Here we are presented with some of the last coherent memories before confusion fully rolls in and the grey mists form and fade away. Finest moments have been remembered, the musical flow in places is more confused and tangled. As we progress some singular memories become more disturbed, isolated, broken and distant. These are the last embers of awareness before we enter the post awareness stages.
This is the last stage in which the patient is still aware they have a problem. They are standing at the edge of a bottomless abyss.
Stage 3 is nearly unlistenable to me. Though it still can be classified as "music" rather than the "noise" that is to come, it's increasingly disjointed, dissonant, chaotic, and garbled, at times edging into walls of static, which keep getting louder. By the end of this stage, the wall of static and noise seems to be becoming dominant over the music, which fades in and out, stops and starts in fits, sometimes to be taken over by another snatch of a different song (melody), in a mighty struggle against this disease which wants to consume all memory. "And Heart Breaks" is the Stage 3 reprise of the song that was in Stages 1 and 2, and like its shortened title (as if some words have been forgotten), it seems like a truncated version of its original.
To me, Stage 3 this depicts the person, still aware they are ill and will continue to get worse, desperately clutching onto memories, any memories, as they come up, but they are quickly swept away in the ocean of static, competing memories, and confusing, dronelike noise, leaving the person adrift in a sea of helplessness, despair and terror.
Stage 3 was very frightening to me. It made the goosebumps stand up on my arms and I felt ice cold and shaken for a good hour or two after listening. I did not want to be alone, and felt so spooked I had to turn on all the lights and check to make sure the doors were locked. I was unable to continue listening that day, and had to save Stage 4 for the next. I have no idea how I got any sleep that night. Maybe I was just exhausted, as this music can do that to you too.
The artwork, once again, is very fitting and accurately evokes feelings of chaos, confusion, dread and terror. While I think this is supposed to be a broken vase or a bunch of tangled weeds (or a vase exploded by the tangled weeds?), its spidery, sinister outlines and bizarre shapes remind me of dancing demons. There's a strong feeling of suffocating evil in this image.
After this Stage, the person enters the more advanced stages of dementia, and is no longer self aware. They may be easily confused by things they used to understand and no longer recognize loved ones.
If you thought Stage 3 was chaotic, confusing, and scary, it's nothing compared to Stage 4, which can no longer properly even be called music. From this point on, the "songs" become long 20 to 30 minute pieces, exploring deepening phases of dementia and brain decay. Three of the four pieces in this stage are called "Post Awareness Confusions," which is exactly what they are. While they are subtly different from each other, at times they remind me of nothing so much as a radio dial frantically trying to tune into any station at all, failing to pick up more than a few seconds of garbled memory (music) snippets, and disappearing into the maddening static. The third piece, called, "Temporary Bliss State," is really anythig but. It seems to take a pretty, but repetitive and maddeningly pointless melody that goes nowhere and keeps repeating, and overlays it on top of the static and background noise. It's as if the person's decaying mind is desperately trying to think happy thoughts to drown out the horror that is actually playing out, but failing miserably. To call this a "bliss state" seems almost ironic, though it may still be a respite from the constant horror of a breaking brain that only keeps getting more broken.
According to the album description,
Post-Awareness Stage 4 is where serenity and the ability to recall singular memories gives way to confusions and horror. It's the beginning of an eventual process where all memories begin to become more fluid through entanglements, repetition and rupture.
The artwork, depicting what appears to be a woman turned partly away from us, in close up, shows a masklike face without features. I feel like this represents the fact that it's during Stage 4 that a person may no longer know who they are or who they were, and may no longer recognize close friends and family members.
WARNING: There is a "jump scare" in the transition from Stage 4 to Stage 5. As if you're not scared enough already.
We've crossed the line into advanced Alzheimers/dementia and at this point the patient is no longer able to perform even the most basic self care, and is probably in full time nursing care by now. They probably don't understand or comprehend anything that's going on in their environment. If they still speak, they may have no idea what they are talking about.
Post-Awareness Stage 5 confusions and horror.
More extreme entanglements, repetition and rupture can give way to
calmer moments. The unfamiliar may sound and feel familiar.
Time is often spent only in the moment leading to isolation.
This is an absolutely terrifying stage, and the disease, which has reduced a feeling, thinking human being with a lifetime of cherished memories into an undead shell of what they once were, now sets about ravaging what's left of the person's brain in earnest. Each of the 4 "songs" (again, about 20 to 30 minutes in length for each one) convey 4 horrifying stages of brain decay: two of "Advanced Plaque Entanglements," followed by "Synapse Retrogenesis" (the synapses between neurons, which formed early in life, are now breaking apart) and finally "Sudden Time Regression into Isolation."
This last is the most profoundly depressing and scary thing on this album so far. The "isolation" in the title is significant, for after a harrowing 20 minutes of deafening static and ambient drone obscuring distorted and sometimes bizarrely stretched out snatches of ballroom melody that appear and disappear like ghosts in a black hole (I interpret the static here as the "zapping" and destruction of any remaining memories), only silence (isolation) remains. The silence isn't total silence though; there is still faint static, that infernal droning, and snatches of remaining memory that sound like they're light years away. But there's also a kind of peace that finally seems to descend into this howling wilderness: the blissful peace of oblivion. The peace of an empty, unthinking mind that exists now only in the present because there's no longer any mechanism to retreat into the past.
The painting for this album is incredibly upsetting to me. I'm not sure what it is, though it kind of looks like a woman standing on a staircase holding an umbrella or walking stick. There's also an object that might be a fan. But it also looks like something disgusting and organic, like a cancer or an infection, or a mysterious and dangerous sea creature from the hadal depths of the ocean. I really can't look at this image without the little hairs standing up on the back of my neck.
Post-Awareness Stage 6 Is without description.
At this stage, the last stage before death (most Alzheimers patients die of something else first), the person is bedridden, and cannot move. Everything has been forgotten, not just all memories and awareness, but also the primitive brain functions that tell the person how to breathe or swallow. The brain is so destroyed that the person may no longer be able to eat or breathe without medical intervention.
To give you an idea of the severity of the physical destruction that's taken place, here's a comparison of a normal brain with a brain destroyed by Alzheimers:
And yet, there's still activity there. The first "song," A Confusion So Thick You Forget Forgetting" is mostly just…silence and emptiness. But not quite. Listen carefully; there is a distant dull droning and occasional bursts of static and heavily distorted musical chords recorded at such impossibly low frequency they sound like whale calls…but are actually, unbelievably, the corrupted remains of what were once ballroom pop ditties (memories). The moment I realized what these low, droning, chordlike sounds actually were…it's hard to explain the sense of horrified shock but simultaneous satisfaction I felt. It was almost the exact same feeling I got during the movie The Shining, when Wendy looks into the model hotel maze in the lobby and it suddenly becomes impossibly vast…or the scene in the 1979 horror movie When A Stranger Calls, when Carol Kane answers the phone, only to be told by police that the phone calls she has been getting are coming from inside the house. You know that feeling. You've had it in your nightmares. It's the emotional equivalent of a jump scare.
There's a kind of peacefulness in Stage 6 that is almost a relief after the relentless confusion and terror of Stages 4 and 5. In a way, it's almost relaxing, though it is also unspeakably sad. You may feel sleepy, or just feel empty and exhausted. You may even cry. But if you thought this was sad, it's nothing compared to the last piece, "Place in the World Fades Away." I don't want to spoil anything, but holy fuckballs, Batman. I have never been this emotionally moved by any piece of music, anywhere, ever. It's a sadness of such depth and intensity it transforms into a kind of joy.
I know I said I didn't want to spoil anything, but I do need to point out that I don't think the sudden return of coherent music at the very end was "music heard at the old folk's home but not comprehended as music" as the young guy in second reaction video (in Part 1) explained it. No, in fact I think the music represented a sudden return of full awareness and even temporarily recovered memories. Yes, even in their mentally and physically degraded state. There is a fairly well known phenomenon familiar to people who work in hospice and with advanced dementia patients called Terminal Lucidity. Shortly before death, sometimes days or hours before, there is a surge of DMT from the pineal gland, buried deep in a part of the brain Alzheimers does not affect. The brain is suddenly bathed in DMT, the strongest known hallucinogenic drug, which is made naturally in the human brain and helps a person transition while dying. Before death, the chemical may temporarily bring back their mental faculties. There have been cases of advanced dementia patients, patients in comas for years, who were believed to be brain dead, who suddenly, just before they died, "woke up" and became fully aware of their surroundings and able to talk to their loved ones. This may be nature's way of allowing the person one last hurrah before death, as well as helping them make the final transition. Terminal lucidity is what I believe was actually happening when the music suddenly reappeared after hours of nothing but static, noise, and corrupted, fractured pieces of what had once been music. The choir voices that supplant the piano music seem to indicate the person has finally freed themselves of their broken mind and body, finally able to find peace.
The artwork for Stage 6 is an empty canvas with some pieces of tape stuck on it, forming a box or a window. Or, maybe it's the back of a canvas with the real painting turned away from us, hidden so it might as well not even exist. I'm not sure, but whatever it is, this image depicts Emptiness.
Since I had this experience, I have felt a great sense of regret and sadness over my MIL, who had Alzheimers and passed away in 2003. Because she was no longer able to live on her own (she had become a danger to herself), we took her into our home. My husband had never had a good relationship with his mother, and under the ravages of dementia, her aggressiveness, hostility toward him, and mood swings became worse. My husband at the time, not a patient man, frequently lost his temper, belittled and yelled at her for her forgetfulness and things such as wetting the bed or leaving the stove on. I am ashamed to say I enabled him in this behavior and sometimes participated in it myself. At the time I was dealing with a lot of personal demons and wasn't very empathetic to her. Our attitude toward this helpless woman also set a bad example in front of our kids. Eventually, her condition became so severe we could no longer take care of her needs, which by now included other medical conditions. We were forced to put her into a nursing home, where she got excellent care until she died. I've been thinking a lot about her, about older people and dementia in general, and struggling with regret and sadness for not having treated her with more kindness and empathy. It must have been absolute hell to be inside her mind, succumbing to dementia. I had no idea. I hope God will forgive me for that. I hope she has too, wherever she is. I think people working with dementia patients should be required to listen to this album. It teaches and I think, enhances empathy.
I do feel like my empathy has increased overall. I feel more generally loving toward humanity as a species and have a newfound reverence for the fleeting beauty and fragility of life. We all dance in the sun, and fade away.
I'll stop here. Everywhere at the End of Time is an artistic masterpiece you should experience for yourself. Each person's experience is unique, even though there are universal feelings we all can share. Great art should make you uncomfortable. It should make you squirm, get angry, cry, and quake in terror. But in the end, it should make you a better person. I am a better person than I was before I listened to this.
I feel like I should warn you though. if you are currently depressed, suicidal, or prone to anxiety or panic attacks, I would avoid this experience and save it for a later time, maybe. Like I mentioned before, this kind of artistic immersion is not unlike a psychedelic drug and can intensify emotions you're already struggling with.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Alzheimers Disease, ambient music, art, ballroom music, dark ambient, dementia, diseases of aging, Ivan Seal, James Leyland Kirby, memory, memory loss, music, neurodegenerative disease, noise music, terminal lucidity
Everywhere at the End of Time (by "The Caretaker"): this album broke me.
Cover art for each of the 6 albums (each representing a different stage in the progression of Alzheimers/dementia) by artist Ivan Seal.
This is the first post of two.
I didn't think the first post I'd write in more than two months would be about a six and a half hour long ambient album I stumbled across on Youtube because some Gen Z kids decided to challenge themselves to cry on Youtube after listening to it and thus made the original video (not their reactions, as interesting as they were) go nearly viral. But here I am and that's what I'm going to write about (the album, not the bored Gen Zers). Life is weird, what can I say?
Actually, I have a lot to say. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you this was the most profoundly emotional musical experience I've ever had. It broke me, and then it changed me. For now I'm just going to focus on the music (if it can be called that) and its immediate effects on me.
But first a little background.
Everywhere At the End of Time is an experimental/ambient musical art project (technically, "dark ambient") by British musician and composer James Leyland Kirby (he bills himself as "The Caretaker," after the Jack Nicholson character in the horror movie The Shining, which was also the inspiration for the haunting 1930s ballroom music that opens this album and reappears in more distorted versions at intervals throughout). The Caretaker wanted to convey, using music and later, degenerated music that can only be called noise, what it's like to experience dementia from inside the deteriorating mind of a sufferer.
Everywhere at the End of Time is divided into six entire albums, each one roughly corresponding to the 7 medically recognized stages of Alzheimers Disease (or dementia due to other neurodegenerative diseases such as Lewy Body Dementia, a form of Parkinson's that affects the brain rather than the body). The six albums were released during a three year period, from 2016 to 2019. Kirby felt that by releasing the albums over a long period of time, listeners would get more of the feel of the long slow decline of dementia, and also experience the sense of waiting the patients' loved ones go through. Kirby said he became so fascinated with dementia, particularly Alzheimer's dementia, that after studying its effects on the human mind and body, he was inspired to depict its ravages in musical form.
Kirby was kind enough to make his masterpiece available to everyone. All six and a half hours of it can be found here:
If you prefer, the album in its entirety can also be found on Youtube:
Before I set out to describe each Stage and my reactions to them, I want to mention some other reaction/review videos on Youtube. Here is one of the best ones (this is in fact the one that sent me down the rabbit hole):
And another, which I really liked a lot:
Before I go into my reviews and reactions, let me explain why there are so many reaction videos, which seem to be mostly from geeky young men and gamer types. Shortly after its release, it became a kind of meme to "challenge yourself" to listen to the entirety of Everywhere at the End of Time (because it's not an easy listen and at times can be profoundly depressing or existentially terrifying) and then post your reaction to it. The challenge started on Tik Tok and eventually moved to Youtube.
Some critics of the reaction videos felt that these millennials and Gen Z'ers were making light of a serious album about a dark subject and turning it into a kind of game. They believed that cheapened what Kirby's project was trying to convey. But Kirby actually wasn't bothered. When he found out about the Everywhere at the End of Time "challenge," he said that if his music was causing younger people to develop empathy toward (mostly older) people with dementia and Alzheimers (and since almost all of them cried, empathy could be assumed) and making a "challenge" out of it was the the avenue that inspired them to actually listen to the entirety of something so dark and serious, then it was a good thing. This genre of music (dark ambient/drone) isn't exactly catchy pop and would never get radio airplay, but because the Tik Tok/Youtube challenges made Kirby's project go near viral, it's getting a lot of attention it otherwise would never have achieved. And that's educating a lot of people about dementia and voluntarily experience, through the music, what it FEELS like to have this illness. It teaches empathy for people with this devastating disease. One woman I know who works with Alzheimers nursing home patients, says she has developed a level of empathy for these patients she never had before listening to Everywhere at the End of Time. Even I, who was never very patient with my ex husband's mother, who lived with us while suffering from early to mid stage Alzheimer's, now feel sadness and regret that I wasn't kinder to her while she was with us. This disease must have been pure hell for her but she was unable to express her terror and grief coherently. She passed away years ago; I wish there was a way I could tell her I'm sorry.
Like many others, I was scared to listen to Everywhere at the End of Time at first. It was the video I posted above called "This Album Will Break You" that first caught my interest. The clips I heard in that were pretty damn unsettling. I wanted to listen to all six and a half hours, but I was afraid to in that same way some people are afraid to take LSD or another psychedelic drug if they've never done so before. They're afraid they might lose their minds. I sensed this album was going to take me mental and emotional places I wasn't sure I wanted to confront, but at the same time, I knew that doing so could be potentially life changing. In the comments under the videos, I saw I wasn't alone in my trepidation. Many people are literally afraid to listen to this album because they know how unsettling, upsetting, and even terrifying it can be. One way around this is to make your first listen "with" someone else who is narrating it for you. So my first listen was with PizzaManSteve, who plays the entire album and reacts and comments throughout. His loud reactions and crying at the end are a bit distracting and makes it hard to hear the music, but it's a genuine reaction that many people seem to share. The first time you listen, you may want to listen to his video first, as you'll feel less "alone" than listening to the full album posted above without any commentary at all. I was afraid that would freak me out. Yes, it's that intense.
Before I move on to my reactions, I want to mention the artwork by Ivan Seal. The six paintings used to illustrate each stage of dementia are absolutely perfect in conveying exactly what the stages FEEL like. The objects they depict are difficult or impossible to identify, but they still look and feel familiar, the way an Alzheimers patient might look at a person or an object, and not quite be able to place who or what it is, and yet know they have seen it before. The feel of these paintings is similar to the "name one thing in this photo" viral AI photograph that shows a bunch of familiar looking objects that you just cannot identify. This was supposed to depict what things look like to stroke victims.
The paintings look organic, disorganized, or decayed. Even the flower vase in Stage 2 is unsettling. The woman's masklike face in Stage 4 depicts loss of self awareness a patient with dementia experiences at that point in her illness. It also may be how others start to appear to her, as she loses her ability to remember the names and faces of even her closest family members.
All the images are incredibly unsettling in ways that are hard to describe (much like the music itself), but for some unknown reason, the artwork for Stage 5 frightened me the most. Stage 5 is advanced Alzheimer's, nearing the end. During this stage, the brain literally self destructs, destroying whatever memories still remain. Its "songs" have titles like "Advanced Plaque Entanglements," "Synapse Retrogenesis," and "Sudden Time Regression into Isolation."
Holy hell, that sounds absolutely horrifying.
Back in the 1990s, an artist named William Untermohlen, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimers in 1995 at the age of 61, decided to paint himself at intervals throughout his illness. Each portrait here (except the first) roughly corresponds to the stages depicted in Everywhere at the End of Time. As Untermohlen's memory and sense of self declined, you can see these changes in this series of self portraits (the first was a self portrait from 1967, years before the onset of his illness).
End of Part 1.
Go on to Part 2.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Alzheimers Disease, ambient music, art, ballroom music, dark ambient, dementia, Everywhere at the End of Time, James Leyland Kirby, memory, memory loss, music, neurodegenerative disease, nostalgia, old age
Bless the Beasts and the Children.
Posted on July 4, 2019 by luckyotter
On this Fourth of July, I want to dedicate this lovely ballad sung by the late Karen Carpenter to all the migrant children trapped in cages at the Mexican border and being so cruelly treated by the heartless Trump regime who don't even think they're worth a bar of soap or a bed.
I am also dedicating it to every vulnerable person in America (adult or child), and every endangered, neglected, or abused animal, and all others who lack a voice in a world currently dominated by those without a heart or soul.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 1972 pop hits, ballads, Bless the Beasts and the Children, Carpenters, children and animals, Karen Carpenter, music, pop music
Augustana: Hey Now (and thoughts about 2008)
Posted on February 9, 2019 by luckyotter
"Hey Now" is incredibly nostalgic to me. Although it came out in 2008, it has a distinctive '90s sound. Without going into too much detail, even 2008 seems like "simpler times" to me now. Obama's election made it seem as if racism was finally a thing of the past. How wrong we were. (But that's another topic for another time).
2008 (eleven years ago!) was also one of the last years actual rock music was still being played on commercial radio, but Augustana (grouped in a catchall category called "modern rock" which included more well known indie-pop bands like The Fray, Snow Patrol, or O.A.R) never caught on big. I believe their biggest hit was "Sweet and Low," from the same album.
I purchased Augustana's 2008 album "Can't Love Can't Hurt" and almost all the songs are great, but this one, which was never released to radio, became my favorite song on the album and possibly of that year.
This comment on Youtube sums it up best:
This is one of those songs that confirms that some of the best most epic songs exist in the "unknowns/seldom exposed" category. If this song was released in the late 90s, it would be played in the cycle of those nostalgic 90s sound most of us loved. I don't think that sound every ended. It just fell asleep, while bands like Augustana and Blue October kept that timeless mood alive for another day.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 2000s bands, 2000s rock, 2008 songs, alternative rock, Augustana, indie pop, indie rock, modern rock bands, music, rock bands, the year 2008
"Praying" documents Kesha's transformation from bad girl to mature woman.
Posted on August 18, 2018 by luckyotter
I heard this song, "Praying," for the first time today and when I found out it was Kesha I thought I was being punked.
I'm blown away by Kesha's transformation from her shallow, partying "Tik Tok" days to the woman she has become. I'm also blown away by her incredible, powerful voice. I always thought she was a lightweight vocally, more a rapper than a singer really. How wrong I was!
The raw emotion and spiritual depth she shows here is so different from the cartoonish "bad girl" image of 2009. She fought hard to get here.
Yes, the dollar sign in her name is gone. It would no longer fit. Something tells me she was never that shallow, cartoonish bad girl, but was always a butterfly struggling to emerge from its chrysalis. I'm a fan now (though truth be told, "Tik Tok" was damn catchy).
This song is emotionally cathartic for me. It may be for you too.
"Praying" was released last year. Kesha is a warrior who not only managed to conquer her own demons of bulimia and depression, she also held her own against a controlling and abusive manager who tried to destroy her. From her psinful struggle, she learned that it's from the greatest pain that empathy can be born and true forgiveness can occur. Few ever learn this valuable truth. She writes:
"Praying" was written about that moment when the sun starts peeking through the darkest storm clouds, creating the most beautiful rainbow. Once you realize that you will in fact be OK, you want to spread love and healing. If you feel like someone has wronged you, get rid of that hate, because it will just create more negativity. One thing that has brought me great relief is praying for those people. Being angry and resentful will do nothing but increase your own stress and anxiety — and hate is the fuel that grows the viruses. Don't let anyone steal your happiness!
In this emotional interview from Good Morning America, Kesha talks about her spiritual and emotional journey (and sings too).
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged "Praying", 2017 songs, Kesha, music, new music, pop ballads, pop music, pop stars, songs about empowerment, songs about trauma
Music for cats.
Posted on April 28, 2018 by luckyotter
The other day I received my copy of The Humane Society's magazine (All Animals), and read an article about a cellist, David Teie, who joined up with a team of animal psychologists to create a new form of music just for cats.
It turns out that cats don't particularly enjoy human music. What may be soothing and relaxing to us may irritate or disturb cats, who hear at a higher frequency than humans. A lower tone which we might find pleasant or relaxing, can be perceived as a threat to them (growling and feline distress sounds tend to be at a lower frequency).
Science has found that human babies develop their sense of rhythm and music in the womb, so most beats in our music are based on the heartbeat that the fetus hears. Cats, whose brains are much less developed while they are in the womb and who cannot hear until they are born, therefore develop their sense of music as tiny kittens, from the sounds of suckling and purring which were the first sounds they heard. Teie has combined simulated purr-like, bird-like, and suckling-like sounds with a higher frequency and many more sliding notes (based on cats' vocalizations) with a cello baseline (which cats can't hear but make the music more palatable to the humans who will play it for their cats) to make a kind of musical catnip that relaxes and reduces stress in many cats — or just makes them listen.
Musicforcats.com includes a sample of what Teie's cat music sounds like, and you can also find some of Teie's cat compositions on Youtube. To me, most of the cat music sounds otherworldly and mournful, almost sad, like this one (which is my favorite so far):
Some of his compositions are much more energetic and playful-sounding, but those are harder for me to listen to than the slower, more pensive tunes. I really like the rising, sliding sounds in these compositions. which sound eerie and very cat-like.
Teie has created other species-specific music (most notably tamarin monkeys), and is currently working on music for dogs. It's hard to imagine what the dog music would sound like, since dog vocalizations occur at many frequencies depending on the size of the dog, and there seem to be fewer sounds that would be associated with dog learning and early puppyhood (outside of suckling and littermates whimpering).
Here's a fun video of some cats reacting to their owners' playing Teie's music (you can hear samples of some of the songs here too). But — and I know this has nothing to do with cats or the music — what exactly is going on with the dog at 2:55?
I must secretly be a cat because I actually really enjoy this music. I played some of songs for my cats, and only Sheldon really seemed to cotton to it, actually rubbing up against the speakers and becoming more affectionate. The other two didn't seem to care one way or the other.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged animals, cat behavior, cat music, cats, composers, David Teie, music, Music for Cats, pets
Hey Mickey (Toni Basil)
This song from 1982 has been stuck in my head for two days. Major nostalgia! I just learned Toni Basil was 39 years old when she made this video. This is one of the greatest one hit wonders ever made.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 1980s music, 1982 songs, Hey Mickey, music, New wave music, one-hit wonders, pop music, Toni Basil
Every pop song of the last 40 years in one Awesome song (Axis of Awesome)
Posted on March 28, 2018 by luckyotter
The Australian comedy rock trio Axis of Awesome made an earth-shaking discovery: many if not most pop songs of the last 40 years use the same 4-chord progression:
I – V – vi – IV
Example: In the key of C major, this would be: C–G–Am–F. Whatever key you start in determines the mood of the song. Other than that, I know nothing about writing music, so I dare say no more. You can play around with the chords if you're so inclined.
Anyway, it seems that if you write a song using these 4 chords, you will have a guaranteed hit, especially if you write a catchy melody to go over it. These four chords are also the reason why so many pop songs all sound the same.
All you have to remember is the melody and lyrics are the skin, but the chords are the bones. The bones may stand on their own with very little skin attached to them (generic commercial pop songs that are catchy but easily forgotten fall into the "bones without much skin" category), but a bunch of skin with no bones (bones could be other types of chord progressions) will collapse like Jello when it's dropped on the floor.
We humans seem to be wired to especially favor the I-V-vi-IV sequence of chords, so if you want to become a filthy rich superstar, write a song using them. Conversely, if you want to be an artiste who turns their nose up at anything commercial or too popular, avoid them like the plague.
Here's a hilarious (and surprisingly listenable!) video by Axxis of Awesome that proves almost every pop song written since forever uses the same four chords.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Axis of Awesome, chords, chords in pop music, I-V-vi-IV, music, pop music, what makes a song popular
Keane: Somewhere Only We Know
Keane's "Somewhere Only We Know," released in 2004, seems like it's from another lifetime, because everything has changed so much since then. It seems like the world was more innocent then and so were we. Fourteen years is a long time, but not so long to make me feel like we're in an entirely different eon. This piano rock ballad, already melancholy enough, is made even more so for me for this reason. I still love this song.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 2004 songs, alternative rock, folk rock, Keane, love songs, music, piano ballads, pop ballads, pop-rock, rock ballads, singer-songwriters
Composing music in a dream.
Posted on February 26, 2018 by luckyotter
Credit: Stacy Martian, Covermyfb.com
I'm not at all musically inclined. I've never even played an instrument. I can barely sing. I'm always in complete awe of people who can just sit down and come up with the music for a new song and then set lyrics to it (or write the lyrics first and then hear music for them inside their heads). It's an ability that seems so mysterious and out of reach to me, almost bordering on the supernatural. I always marvel, how do they do that?
But a few times in my life, I've actually been able to compose music in my head — well, maybe. It happened to me again last night. Very occasionally, I have a dream in which I hear a song and then I wake up and realize I've never heard that song before. I dreamt I was riding in a car and a pop-rock song came on the radio and I turned it up, saying "Oh, I like that song." The song itself was unremarkable and sounded like a lot of other pop-rock songs, but was very catchy, with a sort of '60s vibe to it. I can't remember much else, except the chorus contained the words, "mister, mister."
Google is a godsend for checking lyrics online. I typed in "mister, mister" which was all I could remember, and while there is a group called "Mr. Mister," there doesn't appear to be any song that has those words in the lyrics. So I concluded that what I heard in my dream must have been an original song, at least lyric-wise. Maybe the melody was someone else's and I had heard it a long time ago or something and just can't consciously remember it. Unfortunately, there's no way to check a melody on Google the way you can check lyrics. I don't consciously remember ever hearing a song with that particular melody though, even it was so similar to a lot of other pop-rock songs (like I said, the style of the song was pretty cookie-cutter). No wonder so many musicians get sued for copying someone else's melody. They probably didn't really steal it at all, but unconsciously used someone else's, thinking it was their own. It's completely understandable why that happens so often. How would you go about checking something like that?
The few times I've "composed" songs in my dreams, I've always really liked the song. A couple of times the songs have been absolutely amazing. I've always wished I knew how to write music or play an instrument, so I could wake up and immediately pick out the chords on a guitar or tap it out on a piano, and then write down the music for it.
I imagine this is how some musicians come up with the music for a song. I think it's largely a function of the unconscious (all creative pursuits are), and probably comes in the form of dreams a lot. Other musicians say they think of the lyrics first, and then a melody for them just sort of comes to them. That would also be the workings of the unconscious. I think it's such an awesome thing to be able to do that.
The fact I have these dreams at all makes me wonder if I have some latent musical talent that I just never developed or knew I had. Or maybe they happen to everyone and it's nothing all that special.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged composing music, composing music in dreams, dreams, hearing songs in your head, music, music dreams, musical ability, unconscious mind
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The parent child make tofu diligently from early morning. They treated us with piping hot, fresh Yushi tofu with a tender smile saying, "This is the best in the morning." In Okinawa, there are tofu shops in each community, supporting the healthy lifestyle longevity of the community.
The blessing of the ocean secret of longevity is concentrated in shima tofu.
that it is effective in relieving menopausal symptoms.
a perfect food for dieters.


text:
Philip Kennicott/
Rediscovering Bartok's Anxious, Hypnotic, Intellectually Exhausting Quartets
Senticus/Shutterstock
There are occasional moments in Bartók's String Quartet No. 1 when the gloom lifts, when the densely woven musical lines pause momentarily for a spot of pure, consonant sunniness. In the string quartets of Beethoven or Brahms, these rare and radiant episodes would have a temporal and harmonic meaning, they would bring the argument to a conclusion, or summation, before moving on with a new idea. But in Bartók's musical language, the effect is almost visual. They don't suggest closure, or rest. Rather, it seems as if the music has been pierced, like sun through a canopy of trees, or the enlightenment of a restless mind finding something definite and tangible in its search for certitude. In a small, intimate way, they remind the listener of one of the most thrilling moments in all of twentieth-century music, the "fifth" door of "Bluebeard's Castle," Bartók's sole opera. When opened by Bluebeard's relentlessly inquisitive new wife, the tyrant's majestic realms are represented in a gigantic, brilliant blast of orchestral sound, with the stage direction: "in a gleaming torrent, the light streams in."
The first quartet was completed in 1909, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a brutal but still vaguely coherent project, when Hungary still held large swaths of Transylvania where Bartók would collect his beloved folk music, and before World War I would remake the map of Europe, geographically, intellectually, artistically, and spiritually. The usual narrative used to explain Bartók's six monumental string quartets maps their evolution along two axes: the composer's musical development and relation to the folk tradition, and his experience as a Hungarian during five of the most tumultuous decades in European history. The first quartet, arguably the composer's first masterpiece, is a prelude to the other five, still connected to the nineteenth century, expressive but less rigorous than the later ones, and not yet fully representative of the peculiar tendency to formal order and motivic complexity that folk music inspired in the older composer. Even those moments of light and illumination are unique to the first quartet, and have no reprise in the more ferociously energetic, even brutal style of his later exercises in the form.
In January, the Takács String Quartet, one of the most respected ensembles performing today, brought complete cycles of the six Bartók quartets to New York's Carnegie Hall, Washington's Kennedy Center, and Stanford University's Bing Concert Hall. Played over two nights, the concerts in Washington were almost sold out, though a ferocious snow storm and bitter cold snap depressed attendance. Yet empty seats made for an even more intense artistic event, whittling an already self-selecting audience down to the most passionate and engaged. These works, a summit of the twentieth-century repertoire, are intellectually exhausting when heard individually; gathered together, they present a challenge to the listener that is almost overwhelming.
The Takács recorded these works twice before, most recently in the 1990s; the response then was admiration, mixed with the caveat that there was still room for their readings to grow and deepen. Today, they are completely at home in the music. Beyond the sheer technical challenge of performing the fiendishly difficult score, the major interpretative issues have to do with finding a workable balance between extremes: complexity and clarity, polyphonic austerity and folk-inflected high spirits. Without a trace of fussiness or ostentation, the Takács finesse the underlying challenge, remaining true to the abstraction of the music while referencing its worldly engagement with infectious rhythmic patterns, its occasional humor and even brief moments of Mahlerian irony (in the last movement of the fifth quartet). Even things that might at first seem a weakness to their approach are, after sustained listening, obvious virtues. Is the violin tone perhaps a bitter spidery and thin? Perhaps, but the resulting ensemble texture is the more unified and balanced for that. Is the viola just a tad wooly and woofy? Possibly, but its distinctive timbre makes it easier for the ear to find easily lost inner lines.
There is a bad habit of pretending that concert music needs the charisma of folk music to widen its appeal.
A note in the program book tells listeners that the Takács often collaborate artistically with the Hungarian folk ensemble Muzsikás, "whose sense of adventure and joyful abandon has hopefully crept into our performances." This is worrying. The influence of folk music, processed in Bartók at a level far deeper than quotation or pastiche, is everywhere present in these quartets, but there is a bad habit of pretending that concert music needs the charisma of folk music to widen its appeal. Bartók, and his Romanian counterpart George Enescu, turned to folk music for reasons quite different than, say, Vaughan Williams or Dvořák, who sought engaging, ready-made melodic material. The folk music of Eastern Europe was disruptive, dissonant, and dizzyingly complicated on the rhythmic level. The turn to folk music was not, for Bartók, nostalgic, but rather a way forward. What he found there wasn't simplicity, but density, and in that density was a modernity as vital as anything hatched in the musical systems of Paris and Vienna.
Transylvanian folk style also foregrounded ornament in a way that breaks down the usual sense that ornament is something inessential but attractive pasted onto the deeper, structural substance of the music. In Bartók's processing of folk music, these small turns and mordant-like figures become essential motivic material, and even the most alert listeners rely on their recurrence to find a way through the musical thickets.
So one wonders whether inspiration from an actual folk ensemble may well be misdirection, leading the interpreters to highlight a superficial sense of folksiness that Bartók never intended. Fortunately, whatever the Takács may have learned from Muzsikás, it hasn't resulted in any simple-minded fetishization of the ostinato patterns, modal melodic figures, or the freely improvisational "hora lunga" style he occasionally used as a thematic template. Compared to another great Hungarian ensemble, the Végh Quartet (which produced an important Bartók cycle in the 1970s), the Takács keep rusticity at bay, acknowledging it but always within its appropriately processed and abstracted musical frame. Lesser Bartók performers, determined to make the music more engaging, make it more episodic, and everything that falls between the occasional episodes of fiddling, dancing, and perpetual motion breathlessness just sounds like filler. The Takács' readings are more integrated and organic, with the focus on the music's continual and frenetic development rather than its pure drama and atmosphere.
The more one listened, the more remote and odd Bartók's aesthetic seemed. The musical voice, the stylistic fingerprint, was always recognizable over the course of almost four hours of music. But compare the Bartók quartets to the 15 quartets of Shostakovich, and one hears an almost desperately single minded consistency in the former. Shostakovich's cycle is deeply personal, and often imbued with a profound sense of fear; Bartók's is strangely depersonalized, and more focused on anxiety. Although fear can be based on a false sense of danger, anxiety is a more ungrounded emotion, free floating, detached from immediate causes or explanations. While fear can be dispelled, anxiety is ever present, lifting on occasion but always settling back in. Even at its most calm and reflective, as in the lento movement of the Fourth Quartet, one never senses any slackening of Bartók's obsessional need to keep control of the music. His relation to his musical materials is like our relation to the world: One must keep a grip, and keep moving.
So the music is always anxious, always driving forward, which is both exhausting and exhilarating, and perhaps that's why Bartók's endings—ironically anticlimactic, humorously flippant, pompously emphatic—are so appealing. By the time Bartók ends something, no honest listener could claim to want to hear more. The idea, the gesture, the mood has been wrung out, used up, finished off. And then it's on to the next thing, with renewed energy and relentlessness.
When the critic George Steiner published his T.S. Eliot Lectures (delivered in 1971 at Kent University), he chose a title from Bartók: "In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture." The opera inspired him because of the metaphor of the door, the obsessional need to keep opening them, even at our peril.
We open successive doors in Bluebeard's castle because "they are there," because each leads to the next by a logic of intensification which is that of the mind's own awareness of being. To leave one door closed would be not only cowardice but a betrayal—radical, self-mutilating—of the inquisitive, probing, forward-tensed stance of our species.
This was Steiner's best hope for hope, after the brutality of World War I, the obscenity of Hitler, ages of anti-Semitism, and the terrors of the post-war age, especially its predation on what was once called, without embarrassment, Culture. It is also a perfect description of the powerful, dutiful, heroic denial of self in Bartók's string quartets, which also proceed by a logic of intensification, and which leave the listener grasping at "the mind's awareness of being." Leaving the second concert, I slipped into a taxi, the driver of which was playing something loud, pop, and auto-tuned on the radio. I didn't recognize it, not just the artist or the song, or the purpose or the meaning, but the basic imprint of authentic human creativity. But it was engaging noise, and I drifted off into a dull submission to its repetitive energy. With a fleeting sense of sadness, "the inquisitive, probing, forward-tensed stance of our species" fled from the mind, replaced by something easier and emptier, neither serene nor focused, but hypnotically disengaged. After hours of Bartok, the very category "music" seemed incapable of stretching wide enough to encompass what the Takács do, and what the singer on the radio was doing.
Music, Culture, Orchestras

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Karen Pinkus has dedicated a decade of work on the relationship between the humanities and climate change.
Pinkus uses tools from the humanities, such as critical theory, philosophy, and literary analysis, to separate fuel from energy and to examine our relationship with fuel.
The humanities bring thoughtfulness to scientific endeavors in climate change.
The humanities bring cultural and historical dimensions as well as provide a critical framework for thinking about the implications of climate change.
"The Atkinson Center has inspired me to talk to scientists and work with them in a way that I never would have before," says Pinkus.
Pinkus, however, is no scientist. She is a humanities scholar through and through. Her background is in Italian literature and film. Pinkus is working on a book tentatively titled Autonomia/Automata: Machines for Writing, Laboring and Thinking in 1960s Italy in which she examines Italian art, literature, film, and politics of the decade to explore the relationship between labor and automation.
At the same time, Pinkus is deeply concerned about the environment and believes that the humanities can bring a critical research component to solving the problems of climate change. She has now spent a decade dedicated to working on the relationship between the humanities and climate change. She has completed the book Fuel, which examines different types of fuel from the everyday fossil and renewable fuels to fantastical fuels. Pinkus uses tools from the humanities, such as critical theory, philosophy, and literary analysis, to separate fuel from energy and examine our relationship with fuel itself.
The book is structured as a dictionary of fuels, including familiar ones like sun and wind, as well as less typical ones, such as fleece, gold, magnets, and Zoline, a powder fuel proposed in a letter to Henry Ford. Pinkus spent time at the Ford archives in Dearborn, Michigan where she read many letters from people as young as teenagers, saying they've invented a new fuel. "These fantasies around fuels are very old. They're nothing new," says Pinkus.
In addition to archival research, Pinkus writes about literary works, from Homer's The Odyssey to Jules Verne's nineteenth century science fiction books to Italian writer Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1975 novel Petrolio (a copy sits on the desk next to Pinkus' computer). Though she acknowledges the growing body of contemporary literary work that explicitly addresses climate change, Pinkus says that she is more interested in studying texts before the term climate change came into circulation.
Pinkus is deeply concerned with the environment and believes that the humanities can bring a critical research component to solving the problems of climate change.
"I look at texts that somehow anticipate climate change or have such a complex and chaotic narrative structure that they become more commensurate with the chaotic temporality of the geological period that we are in," Pinkus says.
Her book, however, is not a guide to thinking about climate change, nor does it offer a dogmatic approach to the problems. Instead, it explores climate change philosophically and lays out the possibility that fuels are materials that have "very complex relationships with our own thought structures, fantasies, narratives, or ways of being in the world." If there is any direct message in the book, it is that we can't toss one fuel out for another. Rather, we need to think more deeply about what fuel is, what it does and how deeply it is intertwined with human life itself.
Pinkus' next project is a digital publication titled Terranes of Climate Change: Subsurface, Surface, Atmosphere. Terranes is a term from geology that allows her to think about spaces in multiple dimensions—vertical, horizontal, historical. The project, between geology and cultural geography, also applies literary and visual texts to thinking about how humans may attempt to control chaotic changes by unifying these three realms. Pinkus wants to undo this kind of mastery and allow difference and contradiction to exist, underlining how unfathomably wicked climate change is.
Thoughtfulness is what the humanities can bring to scientific endeavors in climate change. At Cornell, Pinkus is especially grateful for the stimulation of the Society for the Humanities, which brings scholars from all over the world to Ithaca; it sponsored a workshop that Pinkus organized on critical theory, design, and climate change. The Society also supports a sustainability initiative.
Pinkus says that she is interested in how humanities research can move beyond passive reflection and become actively engaged in solving specific problems. She is in the planning stages of collaborating with scientists and hopes to engage with research projects as a co-principal investigator. One example for collaboration is with a group of scientists and engineers involved in carbon sequestration. This is a problem for engineers, but Pinkus thinks that it's also a problem where a humanist would be essential. "The humanities could bring the cultural dimension to it; they could help to think about how this would work in terms of the built environment and the cultural and historical dimensions, as well as provide a critical framework for thinking about the implications," she says.
Pinkus' goal is to develop a truly interdisciplinary relationship between humanists and scientists in which both parties bring their strengths to the problems of climate change. Pinkus says that she has already engaged in conversations with colleagues across campus, thanks to being a part of the David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.
Traditional humanities research involves many solitary hours with books. "We sit in the library or at our desk, and we very rarely interact with people. We certainly very rarely interview subjects," says Pinkus. After many years of such work, Pinkus says that she wants to rethink humanities research much like her latest book asks us to rethink our relationship to fuel.


Sustainable wood mobilisation is a key element to an eco-friendly economy.
Central Europe, especially Germany, Austria and Switzerland, is a densely wooded area. Forests cover a third of the German and Swiss national territory and almost 50% of Austria. Despite a highly professionalized wood sector, the region carries a lot of hidden potential concerning the mobilisation of wood resources. In light of an increasing demand for wood in construction and energy, a sustainable utilization of dormant reserves, e.g. from privately owned forests, is needed.
In correspondence to the needs of the region, special emphasis will be on engaging a wide range of stakeholders, from forest owners to architects and energy providers, in the dialogue on wood mobilisation. A goal of the hub activities in the framework of ROSEWOOD is to find innovative solutions for unlocking the wood resources of privately owned forests. Questions addressed in this realm will be e.g. how to equip forest owners with necessary instruments and know-how for harvesting more wood.
By becoming a member of the ROSEWOOD Central Europe Hub you will get exclusive access to the events and trainings offered by the Hub.
As active member you have furthermore the opportunity to share your views on wood mobilisation with the forest and wood community.
You would like to become a stakeholder of the ROSEWOOD Central Europe Hub?
Please sign the Membership Form and send it to the Central Europe Hub Manager (contact below).
You will find further information on the ROSEWOOD partners' contribution to the Hubs here.
Information on the ROSEWOOD project and the Central Europe Hub is also available in German!


3 Reasons – Why You Need a Responsive Website?
There is an ever-increasing number of people who access the internet through their mobile devices. A responsive website is a natural solution to create a good user experience for the mobile and tab users.
A Responsive Website is easy to rank in Google. Since Google recommends a responsive design pattern, it gives priority to a responsive website, if content and other factors too are optimized properly.
Our designs have the best UI which in turn gives best UX as well.
Our websites are created to rank high for any keywords in Google.
Our Designs work great across all platforms and screen sizes.
Coding is maintained clean and adjusted according to the industry best practices.
With the (rapidly) growing increase of mobile traffic to your website, are you serving your customers the simplest user experience? If a website is not optimized for mobile devices that website may not be serving your business purpose.
Responsive style websites permits you to alter components on your page to retort to totally different screen sizes. It changes the layout of the page and supports the device that the user happens to be using. this permits you to be in charge of user experience on various devices and will be able to present your customers with the simplest web site viewability available.
Bootstrap is a framework for developing sites in a very responsive manner quickly and efficiencly than trying to code it from beginning. it's a free package of tools specifically designed for webistes and web applications. it's typically composed of interface elements that may be taken and organized on a website to create it according to the device in user's hand.
Bootstrap may be a good way to inexpensively move your website to a responsive style while not sacrificing plenty of development time. Webhawks has in depth expertise in utilizing Bootstrap in custom solutions as a mobile responsive framework for thriving websites.


text:
Pharrell Williams among 2015 Billboard Music Award nominees
Princess Anne High School graduate Pharrell Williams has yet another reason to be "Happy." The mega-performer and music producer is nominated for six 2015 Billboard Music Awards including Top Male Artist and Top R&B Album. Award finalists were chosen based on digital song and album sales, radio airplay and online streaming statistics, social media interactions and touring ticket sales. The 2015 Billboard Music Awards will be given out during a live television broadcast May 17.
2015 Billboard Music Awards
Top Male Artist:
Top R&B Artist:
Beyoncé "Beyoncé"
Chris Brown "X"
Michael Jackson "Xscape"
John Legend "Love in the Future"
Pharrell Williams "G I R L"
Top Digital Song:
Mark Ronson Featuring Bruno Mars "Uptown Funk!"
Sam Smith "Stay With Me"
Taylor Swift "Shake It Off"
Meghan Trainor "All About That Bass"
Top Radio Song:
John Legend "All of Me"
MAGIC! "Rude"
Nico & Vinz "Am I Wrong"
Top R&B Song:
Chris Brown Featuring Lil Wayne, French Montana, Too $hort & Tyga "Loyal"
Jason Derulo Feat. 2 Chainz "Talk Dirty"
Jeremih Featuring YG "Don't Tell 'Em"
Notable Achievements Princess Anne High
Kindergarten Registration scheduled for April 28 → ← Volunteers of VBCPS: Tim Jennison
DAR names 2019 history award honorees
History enthusiasts of all ages packed the School Administration Building Feb. 21 for the Daughters of the American (DAR) annual awards ceremony. "This is such a wonderful event each year […]
Princess Anne High alumnus wins Grammy Award
Jason Arce's love for music began at an early age while looking through his dad's old record collection. Being a member of Windsor Oaks Elementary School's choir reinforced that love […]
VBCPS grad featured in Certification Magazine
In the April 2018 issue of Certification Magazine, Virginia Beach City Public Schools graduate Chris Hultin credits both certifications and an Advanced Technology Center (ATC) instructor for his successful career […]
High schools celebrate Signing Day
Wednesday, Feb. 7 was the 2018 National Signing Day, a day when high school students across America sign letters of intent to play sports at the collegiate level. While various […]


text:
High School SportsHigh School Football
Class B loses 11 football teams as MHSA finalizes reclassification
HELENA – The Montana high school sports landscape is receiving an overhaul.
The Montana High School Association executive board took final action on many items at its annual meeting at the MHSA office on Monday. These actions will affect the 2017-18 school year.
The largest and farthest-reaching item is the adjustment to each classification's enrollment guidelines. Several schools from Classes A, B and C will reclassify their sports programs for the next school year, while Class AA is – so far – unaffected by the changes.
The new classification enrollments, which include an additional 10-percent leeway that allows schools to remain in lower classifications, are as follows:
Class AA: 779 students or more (compared to 826 students or more previously)
Class A: 307-778 students (compared to 340-825 students previously)
Class B: 108-306 students (compared to 120-339 students previously)
Class C: 107 students or fewer (compared to 119 students or fewer previously)
However, football will have its own classification guidelines, with the ability to apply the same 10-percent rule:
Class AA: 901 students or more
Class A: 351-900 students
Class B: 131-350 students
8-Man: 66-130 students
6-Man: 65 students or fewer
Class B is most affected by the new rules, losing 11 football teams. Libby and Ronan are moving back up to Class A in all sports, while nine teams will be dropping to Class C 8-Man football.
Choteau, Forsyth, Joliet, Lame Deer, Lodge Grass, Rocky Boy, St. Ignatius, St. Labre and Troy, will be fielding 8-Man teams, though they will remain in Class B for other sports. The classification agreed to its divisional realignment for football on Monday, but will solidify its schedule and formula for determining playoff teams at the Class B caucus. The playoff discussion will likely include the possibility of decreasing the total playoff teams from 16 to 12.
Lame Deer and St. Labre did not field Class B football teams this year, but the two schools will play 8-Man next season.
Class B is breaking into four divisions. The Southern Division will have eight teams, while the Eastern, Northern and Western Divisions will each have seven teams.
The new Class B football divisions, which at this point have not been divided into conferences, are as follows:
East: Baker, Colstrip, Huntley Project, Poplar, Roundup, Shepherd, Wolf Point.
South: Jefferson, Columbus, Townsend, Manhattan, Red Lodge, Big Timber, Three Forks, Whitehall.
North: Conrad, Cut Bank, Fairfield, Glasgow, Harlem, Malta, Shelby.
West: Anaconda, Bigfork, Florence, Eureka, Missoula Loyola, Deer Lodge, Thompson Falls.
In addition to the nine teams from Class B, the Class C 8-Man field will gain two teams from the 6-Man ranks, while sending three others down.
Hot Springs, which won the 6-Man state championship on Saturday, and Box Elder are moving up, while Power-Dutton-Brady, Shields Valley and Wibaux are moving down. The Longhorns announced their decision to drop from 8-Man earlier this fall, but the move was finalized by the MHSA board on Monday.
Hot Springs appealed the move to 8-Man, with superintendent Mike Perry arguing that the Savage Heat will have only 10 boys on the football team next year. The MHSA board denied the appeal based on Hot Springs' projected enrollment of 88 students next year and 83 the following year.
The board approved appeals from Chinook, Drummond-Philipsburg and Plains to remain in Class C 8-Man, and Forsyth was permitted to drop to 8-Man after dissolving its co-op with Rosebud.
With the additional teams, the Eastern C will grow from six teams to 10. The Southern C will also have 10 teams, while the North and West will each have 12 teams. The divisions are as follows:
* indicates team placed in new division
East: Circle, Culbertson, Fairview, *Forsyth, *Lame Deer, *Lodge Grass, Plentywood, Broadus, *St. Labre, Scobey.
South: Absarokee, Broadview-Lavina, Ennis, Gardiner, Harlowton, Hobson-Moore-Judith Gap, *Joliet, Lone Peak, Park City, Denton-Geyser-Stanford.
North: Belt, *Box Elder, Cascade, Centerville, Chester-Joplin-Inverness, Chinook, *Choteau, Fort Benton, Great Falls Central, Hays-Lodgepole, *Rocky Boy, Simms.
West: Arlee, Charlo, Darby, Drummond-Philipsburg, *Hot Springs, Plains, *St. Ignatius, Seeley-Swan, Alberton-Superior, *Troy, Twin Bridges, Victor.
(Note: Darby was accidentally excluded from the initial list. It has been added to the West.)
Only four teams that did not play 6-Man football this year will be joining the classification next year – Wibaux, Shields Valley, Power-Dutton-Brady and Lima. The Bears are returning to the 6-Man West after not fielding a team last year. The co-op between Power and Dutton-Brady is up for renewal this year, but both programs have expressed an interest to continue the co-op.
Westby-Grenora's appeal to remain in 6-Man was approved.
The 6-Man divisions are as follows:
East: Bainville, Ekalaka, Froid-Lake, Jordan, Richey-Lambert, Savage, Terry, *Wibaux, Westby-Grenora.
South: Bridger, Custer-Hysham, Fromberg-Belfry, Grass Range-Winnett, Northern Cheyenne, Reed Point-Rapelje, Roy-Winifred, *Shields Valley.
North: Augusta, Big Sandy, Geraldine-Highwood, Heart Butte, North Star, *Power-Dutton-Brady, Sunburst, Valier.
West: Lincoln, *Lima, Noxon, St. Regis, Sheridan, Valley Christian, West Yellowstone, White Sulphur Springs.
The smaller classifications weren't the only ones to undergo changes. Class A is expanding to 22 teams, with Libby and Ronan returning to the classification. The board also approved moving Browning to the Northwestern A from the Central A, leaving only four teams in the Central Conference.
Frenchtown also shifted from the Northwestern A to the Southwestern A, giving each conference in the Western Division six teams.
The new Class A conferences, for all sports, are as follows:
Eastern Conference: Billings Central, Miles City, Glendive, Hardin, Laurel, Sidney.
Central Conference: Belgrade, Lewistown, Havre, Livingston.
Western Division
Southwestern Conference: Dillon, Butte Central, Corvallis, Hamilton, Stevensville, *Frenchtown.
Northwestern Conference: *Browning, Columbia Falls, *Libby, Polson, *Ronan, Whitefish.


text:
from leather.shapes.base import Shape, style_function
from leather.shapes.bars import Bars
from leather.shapes.columns import Columns
from leather.shapes.dots import Dots
from leather.shapes.line import Line

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


ASA Monitor 05 2016, Vol.80, 70-71.
The Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research (FAER) created the Medical Student Anesthesia Research Fellowship (MSARF) Summer Program in 2005. By providing fellowships to medical students with an interest in anesthesiology and research, FAER aims to expand the scientific talent in the specialty. This is an important aim for anesthesiology for three reasons: 1) The number of physician-scientists has been steadily declining1,2 ; 2) Anesthesiology has been historically underrepresented in NIH funding3 ; and 3) Less than 20 percent of medical students are interested in research as a career.1,5 These factors, when combined, make it especially competitive for anesthesiologists to receive the level of funding required to have careers as independent investigators, and even more challenging to create new knowledge that advances medicine.
Joy L. Hawkins; Encouraging Students in Research Is an Encouraging Investment. ASA Monitor 2016;80(5):70-71.


text:
Bright Spots On Ceres Just Keep Getting Weirder As Dawn Spacecraft Sends More Images
James Maynard, Tech Times 11 June 2015, 04:06 pm
White spots on Ceres have generated discussion and controversy among professional scientists and the general public alike. Now, NASA is reporting there are a cluster of the features on the dwarf planet, joining the two known bright areas.
The latest image, taken by the Dawn Spacecraft on June 6, shows the two large bright spots surrounded by several smaller bright white dots.
The Dawn spacecraft launched in 2007 on a mission to explore two of the three known protoplanets of the solar system, the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. When it arrived at Ceres, Dawn became the first spacecraft to ever explore a dwarf planet. The newest image, recording the area in unprecedented detail, was recorded as the robotic observatory orbited 2,700 miles above the dwarf planet. The image is among the first returned from the second mapping orbit of the Ceres segment of the mission.
The largest bright spot in the photographs measures roughly 55 miles from one side to the other. Program managers and other researchers at NASA are perplexed trying to explain the processes that could form the highly-reflective regions.
"The bright spots in this configuration make Ceres unique from anything we've seen before in the solar system. The science team is working to understand their source. Reflection from ice is the leading candidate in my mind, but the team continues to consider alternate possibilities, such as salt," said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission at the University of California, Los Angeles.
NASA is asking the public for their opinions on the nature of the strange spots on Ceres. People participating in the survey are asked to choose between volcanoes, geysers, rock, ice, salt or "other." As of June 11, 40 percent of respondents believed the unusual features are caused by something other than the suggested materials in the survey. Of the other choices, ice is the in the lead with three of every 10 votes. Rock is the least popular explanation, selected by just six percent of the poll's participants.
Some online sources are claiming the bright spots on the dwarf planet are hanger doors for UFOs or navigational lights for extraterrestrials visiting the Solar System. However, NASA scientists dismiss such notions, saying the features are a natural phenomenon, although similar features have not been seen on any other body explored by the human race.
Dawn will direct into a lower orbit at the end of June, traveling to just 900 miles over the surface of Ceres, an altitude the spacecraft will reach early in August 2015.
Tags: Ceres Dawn Bright Spots
Watch Ceres Flyover Video From Dawn Spacecraft In New NASA Video
Ceres Mystery Bright Spots Grow Stranger In New Color Images Of Dwarf Planet
NASA Dawn Spacecraft First To Orbit Dwarf Planet Ceres: What Will It Find?


And so begins Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. You most likely read this book as a girl and probably have a copy given to you some Christmas or Hanukkah decades ago in an attic somewhere.
Today is Christmas and I just happen to be spending it near Concord, Massachusetts where the real events upon which the book is based took place and where it was written. This coincidence got me to thinking about the book and the profound influence it has had upon my life.
Like many girls and young women, I grew up wanting to live in the world of the Marches and be like the sisters in the book. More than any other book I read when I was young, Little Women shaped my view of what women should be; the goals they should be able to pursue; the traits of honesty, perseverance, charity, and humor that lead to happiness and success; and how women should relate to one another with respect and love. I doubt I would be writing this blog if not for this book.
As I reflected on the book from an adult perspective, I began to realize how amazingly effective it is for empowering young women, especially given that it was written at the height of the Victorian era. It is revolutionary, but in a way that transforms by teaching, by simply presenting a portrait of real life where women are truly respected and believe in themselves. It is a book that deserves a second look as we look for new visions of the future, though it was written 140 years ago.
In Little Women, the primary relationships are among women, the sisters and their mother. The male characters seem to exist mostly to move the plot along. Jo's engagement in the final chapter comes across as the compromise it was; Louisa wanted to keep Jo single, as she was herself, but was forced to marry her off by her publisher.
The girls are each expected to find her innate talent and develop it. When the family needs money, Jo and her sisters assume they will go out and find work, though their choices are limited. In real life, when Louisa could not enlist in the Union Army she became a nurse and turned her experiences into the truthful and poignant book Hospital Sketches. She also spent many years working to support her family. She develops this theme of the importance of women working in her delightful novel Work.
Perhaps most importantly, each of the sisters is a fully developed young woman with some characteristics that are contrary to those of a "good young woman" of that time or our own. They are sometimes grumpy, obstinate, fed up, shallow and more, yet each is respected for who she is. Individuality is prized in this book.
Yet, other books for young women have been written with these same qualities, books that I read when I was a child but that never affected me as much as Little Women. What is it about this book that makes it such a force for the inner transformation of young (and grown-up) women? As I thought about it, I realized that it carries another important message: the real, daily lives of young women are as important as those of any celebrity, any glamorous heroine, any fictional character in some extraordinary circumstance. Nothing outside of normal daily life happens in Little Women, yet every decision they made and action they took is considered to be one more step in the girls' progress towards becoming strong, independent women who really do go out and change the world. What we do everyday makes a difference – what an encouraging, inspiring, liberating message this is in a world where so much seems to be beyond our control, where misery engulfs women on every continent, where challenges on the road to a world where everyone is cared for and respected can seem insurmountable.
Perhaps this Christmas you'll want to lie on the rug, like Jo, and enjoy again the gift Louisa May Alcott gave you so many years ago. Or, if you have never experienced it, read Little Women and some of her other works like Work and Hospital Sketches for the first time. Hers is a world worth spending time in at any age.
I read the abridged version as a child and then the big fat hardcover somewhat later. And today I have a copy of Little Women that my mother gave my daughter a couple of years ago. It's a bit difficult for her to read, but just right for me! Great idea!
I hope she loves it! It is a wonderful companion for young women.
I just finished reading this magnificent post on Louisa May Alcott and I simply could not agree with you more in every word you wrote. Indeed I have just recently been rereading Little Women once again, and tend to read it once every few years. It is one of my most treasured books and I have several old editions of it.
What a wonderful Christmas post!! Although I have come to it now in March, I am so glad to have stumbled upon this special site.
Thank you so much for your kind words! Yes – I've always thought that Louisa would have felt very much at home in our time – she really does speak to both girls and women of the 21st century.


Here comes the power!. Do you want to cut your cleaning and scrubbing time in half or more ? Are you tired of doing it all the cleaning by hand ?
If yes, then here comes the power brush scrubber. The cleaning tool which is helping hundreds of people in cleaning and maintaining their bathroom surfaces, tiles, tubs and tyres. This amazing tool will turn your regular drill or impact driver into a powerful, quick-cleaning tool to do all the cleaning in matter of seconds.
The three piece power scrubber tool will thoroughly clean up blemishes, scum, stains, water stains and years of annoying accumulation in record time.
All three brushes have quarter inch QUICK CHANGE shafts.
Brushes were little more than three weeks in the wilderness of Western Siberia. The pile is hard, good. Satisfied with the order.
Nice item. Very good store.
excellent. brushes pleased have. hard enough, after the first use they did not get out. the quickly and perfectly cleared bath. was weeks 2 the order. was packed packets two in it. received breakages any without order the i. the store recommend i. perfectly. порадовали brush. enough tight, вылезли not after the first use. excellent отчистилась bath and fast. walking in order 2 weeks. two pack was packed. without the whole order дошел breakdowns. seller recommend.


Would you squeeze your way into a shoulder-width, pitch-dark storm water drain to rescue a kid as it flooded? Would you knowingly cop a 20,000 volt electric shock to save a friend and his child?
Tells the story of Tony "Bomber" Bower-Miles, a sapper in Vietnam in 1969/70. He followed the Viet Cong into their underground strongholds as a "tunnel rat", but most of his work revolved around land mines, laying them and clearing them.
I still burn with indignation about what happened to Roseanne. The judge said it himself.
A week or two after we handed in the manuscript for The Road to Mount Buggery, the heir to the Nepalese throne, Crown Prince Dipendra, donned military fatigues, armed himself with automatic weapons, walked in on a quiet family gathering, and, without a word, mowed down his family before turning a gun on himself.
Coming off the back of a serial killer book, getting in a four-wheel drive with a tent, an unreliable car fridge and a beautiful girl who could write like a storm seemed like a perfect change in direction.
This book consumed four years of our lives.
We wanted to look at what forces created this guy. We knew he hadn't come from nowhere. And in a way it did start to look like his life was always heading inextricably towards murder, yet of course there were forks in the road and he could have taken any like those around him did.
Les and I had our training wheels on for this one, the story of the serial killer who stalked Sydney's north shore in the late 80s. I don't think I'd ever read a true crime book until I started reading up in the genre as we set out to write one.


text:
Author: Kevin Leathers
Kevin Leathers hasn't written a profile yet. That's ruddy mysterious...
Manga Entertainment
Vampire fans rejoice, because this series is just for you!
Usually when an anime is based on another media, be it a light novel, manga or game, the anime does it's best to introduce newcomers to the title. Obviously there are exceptions to this; such is the case in the .hack franchise. But most of the time viewers will want the more important information presented to them - Black Blood Brothers will require a trip to Wikipedia.
The series revolves around a vampire named Jiro. He and his brother Kotaro are on their way to the Special Zone, a city where vampires can live without prejudice and work with humans to make a better life for themselevs. Jiro needs to protect Kotaro from the Kowloon Children, a race of vampires that turn both humans and vampires into their kind and are considered a threat to any they encounter. Things are further complicated by the Order Coffin Company, and when mixed together all four elements become quite... messy.
Black Blood Brothers has the potential to be a truly fantastic series. Unfortunately by the time the credits on the last episode were rolling on the first disc, this potential has yet to be fully realised. The 12 episode format (which encompasses the entirety of series one) rolls well enough and is an enjoyable series in it's own right, but it never quite reaches as far as it indicates it could, and this is a shame.
The animation has some excellent tuches, though quality does tend to vary from scene to scene. The character designs are also memorable, especially Jiro's hat which is strikingly similar to the sorting hat from the Harry Potter films.
A special mention has to be made for the opening sequence. While the animation is what you would expect from a supernatural series, the accompanying music is God-awful. This is the headline act of my concert for terrible opening songs -it sounds like a heavy metal band playing on a selection of strung up cats and hitting them with hammers, mixed into an a church organ solo for a supernatural flavour. If this is an example of Japanese goth metal then it can stay in the crypt and be buried under a few tons of concrete to make sure no one ever hears it again.
Beyond the frustrations of the plot's pacing and unanswered questions, Black Blood Brothers is actually quite an enjoyable watch. Not much really happens until the 4th episode, but once we get there things really do start to pick up. If you like your supernatural anime and are looking for something a little less bloody than Hellsing, then Black Blood Brothers could be right up your street. For a £12 purchase, you could do a lot worse and you certainly won't feel cheated for the hours you'll spend watching it.
An unfinished anime for sure, but not totally without merit.