Add the numbers. Your chances that your cancer will recur, as measured by rising PSA five years following surgery, are shown in Table 7.
Additional nomograms, developed by Michael Kattan and his colleagues at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, are widely used by physicians and are commonly referred to as Kat-tan tables.4 The nomograms utilize information such as size of the cancer and evidence of invasion at surgery, or radiation dose and length of radiation therapy. A major shortcoming of all systems is that they are based on the experience of men treated in past years, whereas treatments are continuing to improve and past experience may not necessarily be applicable.
Once the cancer has recurred, as indicated by a rise in the PSA, its progression is highly variable. If no treatment is given, the PSA will continue to rise relatively rapidly in approximately half of all men, slowly in a third of men, and very slowly in the remainder. In 7 percent of cases, the PSA will not reach a level of 10 in less than twenty years.6 Thus, some men will have a continuously rising PSA and progression of their cancer, while others will have almost no progression for many years despite receiving no treatment.
2. Progression from PSA rise to metastasis: The single best predictor of the continuing progression of recurrent prostate cancer is the PSA doubling time. As the name implies, this is the time it takes for the PSA level to go, for example, from 1.1 to 2.2 or 4.2 to 8.4. The shorter the doubling time, the worse the prognosis for men treated by either surgery or radiation. If the PSA doubles in less than six months, it is likely that the cancer has already metastasized to bones or other organs; if it doubles in more than twelve months, the cancer is probably still localized near the prostate bed.
Having a shorter PSA doubling time doubles the chances that a man will have metastases by seven years after the PSA rise, other things being equal. Note that these predictions are a best-case scenario, since they represent the outcome for 304 men who were an average age of 58 when operated on for prostate cancer. There is evidence that younger men with prostate cancer have a better prognosis, so older men are likely to have a higher rate of metastasis than these numbers predict. Among the men followed at Johns Hopkins, the median time from PSA rise to metastasis was eight years, but varied from two to twelve years.
note: The numbers are based on 304 men who had a rise in their PSA following radical prostatectomy at Johns Hopkins Hospital between 1982 and 1997. The average age of the men at surgery was 58. Younger men generally have a more benign course than older men; thus, these predictions may be overly optimistic for older men. source: C. R. Pound, A. W. Partin, M. A. Eisenberger, et al., Natural history of progression after PSA elevation following radical prostatectomy, Journal of the American Medical Association 281 (1999): 1591-97.
The distinction between stages of disease is an arbitrary one. There is no single moment when Victor's cancer ceased to be something he lived with and became, instead, something that was killing him. It was killing him from the beginning and he lived with it until the end. Still, there is some reason to divide the experience into periods. There was a time when Victor lived a more or less normal life despite the disease, and it was followed by a period that was not like normal life at all, when we understood that his life itself was nearing its end. There was no defining moment that separated one period from the other, but they were nonetheless different.
In summary, the sooner the PSA rises following treatment for prostate cancer, the worse the prognosis. Thereafter, the faster the PSA doubling time, the sooner the man is likely to develop metastases. And the sooner he develops metastases, the sooner he is likely to die. The duration from initial treatment to rise in PSA averages three to four years but may be as long as fifteen years. The duration from PSA rise to metastasis averages six to eight years, and from metastasis to death three to five years. Thus, for men whose cancer appears not to have spread at the time of initial diagnosis, the average time between initial treatment and death will be approximately fifteen years for those who are destined to die from their cancer. This prediction is not valid for men whose cancer has already spread at the time of initial diagnosis.
Always keep in mind, however, that predictions are merely predictions. As in all recurrent cancers, one subgroup progresses very rapidly, one subgroup progresses hardly at all, and the vast majority of men fall between these two extremes. There are always those who defy predictions. Consider the 45-year-old man who in 1976 was diagnosed with prostate cancer that had already metastasized to his bones and distant lymph nodes. He was treated with hormone therapy and twenty-seven years later was still doing fine.9 All of us who have prostate cancer hope that we too will do better than the average predictions.


Published 04/26/2019 07:11:20 am at 04/26/2019 07:11:20 am in Wilmington Plumbers.
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I'm really pleased to say that our SS/2013 catalogue is almost finished. The files are going to the printer on Tuesday evening and if you have requested a copy or receive the previous issues in the past, our gorgeous catalogue will land on your doorstep on 19/04/2014.
To be honest, I think this is our best catalogue EVER!
I don't say this lightly because when it comes to BODIE and FOU, I'm a perfectionist but out of all the catalogues we've produced including our first one which received an ECMOD Award, this is my favourite! There isn't a spread (double-page) I don't like and I'm hugely proud of what our team has achieved with that baby!
The photos above are from the //NATURALS collection I styled and photographed with Francois. I don't know if you remember but after losing my two beloved grand-mothers in a very short time at the end of last year, this year, the only thing I wanted was for life in general to be more gentle and kind to everyone and I really put our collection with that in mind, sourcing beautiful, simple objects that would make our homes more serene and calming so this one is very very close to my heart and I hope you will love it as much as I do.
Last but not least, today is my birthday (can't really remember how old I am, I stop counting when I turned 35) but can you believe that instead of a new bag, I asked Steve to get me Bikram Yoga classes!!!
So today, I will go to Bikram yoga and then have a great time with my friends and family. I wish you a fantastic weekend and lots of love.
J'ai commencé le yoga il y a six mois et dès le premier cours je savais que je ne pourrais plus m'en passer. C'est tellement fort, tellement apaisant… (c'est le seul moment de la semaine où j'éteins mon téléphone, qui est allumée day & night).
Et puis, très joyeux annviversaire Karine !
Next PostI always knew the kind of woman I wanted to be….


Sean Markham is certified by the South Carolina Supreme Court as a specialist in bankruptcy and debtor-creditor law. Sean has an AV rating from Martindale-Hubbell, which is their highest rating for ethical standards and legal ability. In 2017, he received the William E. S. Robinson Public Service Award from the the South Carolina Bankruptcy Law Association.
Sean handles a wide range of business and consumer insolvency matters throughout the state of South Carolina. Representations include bankruptcy matters, collections, settlement negotiations, and other matters related to debtor/creditor law. Sean's broad range of bankruptcy representation includes representing debtors and creditors in Chapters 7 (liquidation), 11 (reorganization), and 13 (consumer reorganization). Sean's experience also includes representing large corporate debtors, corporate creditors, banks, unsecured creditors' committees, trustees and liquidating creditors trusts in Chapters 7 (liquidation), 9 (municipal), and 11 (reorganization). In addition, Sean works with his clients to avoid bankruptcy filing through non-bankruptcy workouts.
Sean's goal is to provide effective and solution-oriented representation for his clients. He recognizes that each client's situation is unique and he works with each client to determine the best individualized course of action.


text:
["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published May 3, 2021] ©2021
You know that life around you has become too perpetually noisy when you hear a sound that you can't quite place but seems familiar. Then you realize it's birds chirping. In fact, it's your own aviary birds.
The eerie quiet is unsettling. What happened to the leaf blowers and chain saws and jack hammers? Has the city been evacuated and you weren't notified?
For a while, I used to think that my nice residential neighborhood has always been really noisy but I didn't realize it since I was at work all day. Or, that once the current construction projects were finished, the serenity I think I remember (but could have hallucinated) will return.
But nope, I've been retired for a while. This is the new reality.
One obvious source of noise is lawn mowers, tree trimmers, and leaf blowers. San Diego's year-round growing season blesses us with perpetually lush greenery. Which needs to be trimmed. Constantly.
I grew up in the Northeast where lawn mowers (generally teenager-powered, and very quiet, except for the complaining) were strictly a summer event and leaf blowers didn't exist. No snow-blowers then either, just kids shoved out the front door with shovels at 6 a.m. to clear the driveway so we could get to school (kids) and commuter train (Dad). There was nothing my mother feared more than a snow day.
It would only be fair to note that on Wednesday mornings, the mowing and leaf blower noise comes from my house (and my next-door neighbors' whose lawn service comes at the same time, creating a cacophonous mind-numbing stereo). And I have to cop to a half day of really noisy tree trimming recently too.
I realize that leaf blowers save lawn guys a lot of time. But I really hate the noise, and even more the fact that these machines are blowers not vacuums. At my house, they simply relocate all the leaves and dust from point A to Point B, the latter being all over the lawn chairs stored on my back porch.
We used to have a local kid doing lawn maintenance who was a holy terror with a leaf blower. I'd be puzzled as to why my kitchen was full of leaves and dirt. With his iPod turned up full blast, "Bentley" failed to notice that he was blowing all the detritus from the patio through my kitchen window. One had to admire the technical skill that got so much lift in those leaves that he could get them up and over a four-foot high pass-through. The stuff that failed to achieve altitude settled like Mt St. Helens ash on the plants.
But it's the on-going construction noise, both residential and commercial, that is really doing me in. By 7 a.m. six days a week, there are jack hammers, nail guns, cement mixers, skill saws, thundering lumber deliveries, and assorted power tools going on in seeming Surround Sound.
Our (truly lovely) next door neighbors did a 2.5 year remodel a few years ago, having been promised by their contractor, "Ralph," that it would be "six months maximum." (I stuck a lot of pins into Ralph dolls during that time.) My husband and I maintained that the noise was at least offset by our gaining a second language from the Tijuana radio station the construction guys boomed some seven days a week. (But did they have to sing along?)
The average spec McMansion remodel seems to take at least two years (really). Then whoever buys it remodels it again to customize it and "make it their own." If I were mayor, I'd make it a law forbidding any house from being remodeled less than three years from the last remodel. And I'd also make the those spec house/house flipper contractors live in the house for one year after the project was finished to give the neighbors on both sides opportunity to exact revenge. Lots of revenge. The Flipper Pay Back Act would allow anything short of arson, and only because then you'd have to start building again.
It isn't just a multitude of construction and gardening noise. There are at least six different kinds of helicopters that buzz regularly over our home: military, police, news, Coast Guard, tourist, and INS. Some days it sounds like the Ride of the Valkyries scene in Apocalypse Now.
The changing flight path from Lindbergh Field seems to be adding to the aerial pollution although I have to confess, I've been pretty good at tuning that out.
And that's the issue. Tuning it out. There's only so much noise you can tune out. The batteries seem to have permanently crumped on my inner tuner-outer.
The (truly lovely) next door neighbors have just alerted us that they need to do an "upgrade" to correct some problems with the remodel they finished two years ago. Three months max, they promise.
Oy. Just so long as they don't hire Ralph.
In Memoriam: Post-It Note Inventor
'Prevailing Medical Advice" Doesn't Seem To Prevai...
Too Much Of A Good Thing

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: Reading file from different directory with htaccess I want something like this:
If a request comes to domain.com/photos/1.jpg it should read file from new_photos/1.jpg directory. But url should still look same. I tried with this line to do this:
RewriteRule ^photos/(.*)$ new_photos/?$1

It doesn't work. How can I fix it?
Edit:
My full htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/system.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/?$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php/?$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^app.domain.com$
RewriteRule ^robots\.txt$ robots-subdomain.txt

A: If the  file is in /new_photos dir ,You can use this :
RewriteRule ^photos/(.*)$ new_photos/$1 [NC,L]

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
International Draft Prospects
Summer to Fall: Jianghua to Splitter
A summer full of youth competitions left us with the authoritative triumph of the Chinese Junior National team, led by MVP Chen Jianghua in the U18 Asian Championship. A few days later, saying hello to the autumn, the Spanish SuperCopa turned the green light for the season in Europe. None other than Tiago Splitter earned MVP honors while leading Tau Vitoria to victory in this four-team opening tournament.
No Competition for China and Chen Jianghua
That was pretty much the story of the Asian Junior Championship. Not one single team gave the least bit of trouble to China on its way to the final victory. The average score margin exceeded the 44 point mark, ranging from 16 to 94 points. It was the South Koreans in the final being the only squad that could keep the margin below the 20-point barrier, but there wasn't even the slightest sense of fear for an upset all game long. The competition was just too poor, with teams that severely lacked size and talent.
In this context, it was Chen Jianghua that won the MVP award. Actually, he didn't hoard the spotlight as much as expected for a guy that was just coming off the World Championship. Most of the core players in China got a fair share of prominence on the court and points in the stat sheets. At least, that's what we managed to deduct from the last three China games, the ones that we were able to watch; as FIBA Asia doesn't provide any kind of box-scores, which we can't find anything but embarrassing. Others shining for China probably had a lot to do with to the fact that Chen barely played point guard during the tournament and that the level of competition didn't force him to assume bigger responsibilities.
Anyway, even if he didn't abuse his skills, Chen operated at will on the court, as virtually no defender could keep up with his incredible quickness, excellent ball-handling skills and footwork. Creative finding his teammates off the dribble, he also looked in love with his one-handed layups (he removes his left hand sooner than usual) that he delivers attacking relentlessly the basket. He's also in love with his off-the-dribble jumpers, executed with nice quickness coming off the drive (particularly in terms or elevating off the floor) or after a pump-fake and a dribble. Still a bit of a streaky guy, he looked fairly reliable shooting the ball, indeed more reliable than in past occasions, showing better shot selection.
He did often take over the point guard role in transition, either going all the way for the layup or distributing the ball, many times early in the fast-break with long full-court passes. He has a knack for pushing the ball up the floor quickly.
Despite playing as off-guard, Chen is a playmaker all the way when we think about his future. Fortunately his team Guangdong Tigers seems to think the same, as that's the position he played full-time the few times we saw him last season with the junior squad. In the National Teams, it's usual to see players evolve off their ideal positions, as the talent pools are usually limited, and while some positions lack good players others suffer overload, so a positional redistribution is needed in order to keep a highly talented squad on the court.
Chen was surrounded by a number of nice players, although none of them are in his league potential-wise. The best is probably Zhou Peng, his teammate in Guangdong, who is likely bound to become a very good player for the CBA, even perhaps for the national team a few years down the road.
Zhou is a 6-9, skinny and fundamentally sound power forward born in 1989. He stands out in the shooting department, showing range out to the three-point line and great accuracy from the mid-range area. But he can also run the court very well, put the ball on the floor displaying good mobility and, a bit unexpectedly, he significantly produced in the low post in this tournament-- although he took advantage of the very poor size and strength of his rivals with moves that, for the most part, wouldn't make the cut against serious competition. Despite his skill set, his average athleticism and ball-handling don't seem to fit well with the small forward position, even if it's a possibility that can't be ruled out.
The Chinese frontcourt featured some nicely athletic big guys, like Delehei, who enjoys a decent shooting stroke, or Li Xiaoxu (both are born in 1990 and stand around 6-9), role players that produced in transition by running the court very well and in favorable situations in the set offense, taking advantage of their size superiority. Still no one was anywhere near Zhou in terms of skills.
The backcourt brought some intrigue beyond Chen Jianghua. Especially because of Han Shuo, a 6-6 shooting guard born in 1989 who sporadically played some point guard while displaying an interesting skill-set.
An incisive ball-handler, he impressed with his ability to take his matchups off the dribble and slash towards the basket while showing a good first step, nice quickness and the ability to easily drive in traffic and finish with both hands. He's also a solid passer and likes to play in transition, like most Chinese players. The biggest question mark for him is the shooting; he shot with range only very few times, although it didn't really look very bad. Anyway, his skills would likely be pretty much useless at a high competition level if he didn't manage to feature a consistent jumper in his repertoire.
From other teams that we had a chance to see, only one guy really captured our attention: Jin Soo Kim, a skinny South Korean forward born in 1989 who stands somewhere between 6-8 and 6-9. He shows excellent mobility and solid athleticism in general, some nice ball-handling skills, promising albeit unpolished moves, either facing his man or eventually in the post, a decent mid-range shot and a good feel for the game. He's quite raw and might be able to play small forward, although that's something which he will need a lot of work on. For the moment, he already played with the senior National Team this summer, facing the US Team in an exhibition game. Unfortunately, he couldn't score even one single point, as he missed a couple of three-pointers and didn't materialize another couple of clear opportunities. During the season he plays for South Kent High School in Connecticut.
Tiago Splitter Cashing in on Scola's Absence
We'd been saying it again and again: if Argentinean superstar Luis Scola left Tau for the NBA, Tiago Splitter could easily blossom into a major force in European competition. Well, it didn't happen, but a two-month injury is working well enough to illustrate us on the matter. The first outcome: Splitter grabs the MVP award in the opening tournament of the ACB League, the SuperCopa, played this past weekend.
Despite being an official competition that everybody takes seriously, the SuperCopa is still more of a preseason tournament where teams are still out of rhythm, just gearing up for a long and demanding season. Played in a Final Four format, the four teams featured were all the semifinalists in the last ACB League, and all also happen to play in the Euroleague this upcoming season: Tau Vitoria, Unicaja Málaga, DKV Joventut and Winterthur FC Barcelona.
Tau rolled over Barcelona in a semifinal where Splitter almost matched Barça's big-men scoring by himself, finishing with 16 points, 5 rebounds and 2 assists. Actually he felt rather comfortable playing against a team that hardly delivered any kind of consistent defense. The final against Unicaja Málaga was certainly a lot tougher, but Splitter found his options to amass 19 points, 5 rebounds and 2 blocks.
The foundations of his game stayed pretty much the same in this tournament. He's still doing a lot of work off the ball, and particularly, insisted on setting plenty of picks for the point guard (working well with either Pablo Prigioni or Zoran Planinic) in the very high post (at the three-point line) to break the rival's defense with that pick-and-roll move and operate from there. He was obviously replacing Luis Scola in this duty. Also quite usual was to see him moving on the baseline through screens and picks to receive the ball open under the basket.
Still, Splitter worked with the ball too. Far from the basket, we could see him at various times putting the ball on the floor to take advantage of his superior quickness. Near the basket, he looked for low-post scoring, showing some effectiveness and nice soft touch, although his moves could still gain some polish. Anyway, whenever he didn't see a clear option, he quickly passed the ball, usually back to the perimeter, getting as a result great accuracy from the field (66.7%).
All in all, he was the continuous inside reference of the team. Whenever he wasn't on the court, Tau's offensive game suffered, as the team's game is based on a dialogue between the point guards and big guys, and the other inside players didn't show nearly as much of a good sense for taking decisions. On defense, he stayed solid, even if he had some forgetfulness, but struggled a little bit rebounding the ball. He definitely can improve his effort boxing-out.
Anyway, a well-deserved MVP award for him that only increases our expectations regarding his performances… at least until Luis Scola comes back from his injury.
We could also see Tau's newcomer Mirza Teletovic having some action. We saw him playing closer to the basket than he's been used to in the last few years. After all, Tau is one of the few teams in Europe that hasn't used a perimeter-oriented power forward with some consistency in the last years. Teletovic looks very strong, perhaps stronger than ever. Indeed, if there was the least chance that he could become a small forward, it is gone already. Anyway, he didn't show much, some off-the-ball work, some hustle, and that's it. He had 2 points and 4 rebounds in the semifinal and scored 5 points in the final. We'll have to wait until he gets into the team's rhythm, although he will have to battle to crack the regular rotation.
The draft intrigue didn't finish with Tau Vitoria; DKV Joventut featured a couple of highly regarded youngsters: Rudy Fernández and Ricky Rubio.
Joventut gave Unicaja Málaga a run for their money, displaying excellent defense and an offensive game where Rudy seems to have definitely taken a step ahead. Although losing shooting accuracy (1/6 beyond the three-point line; his percentages drop significantly when he's not open), Rudy took over the offense asking for the ball, taking decisions, trying to create game off the dribble.
Perhaps the results weren't particularly brilliant (he finished the game with 10 points, 3 rebounds, 2 assists and 4 steals) but this is the right direction for him; it's time to grow as a player and assume more responsibilities.
On defense, he did just fine, like Ricky. Both took part in the pressure defense that tried to drown the opponent's game even before half court. As Rudy did, Rubio had 4 steals, showing once again his ridiculous ability to come away with the ball.
Staying rather cool as usual, Rubio struggled trying to perform his point guard duties, as coach Scariolo ordered a close defense to deny him the ball in his own court. It wasn't his most brilliant day, not being able to significantly produce off the dribble (he scored only 4 points in the game). Still, coach Reneses kept him almost 20 minutes on court, sometimes as a shooting guard, which only follows the pattern seen in preseason.
Rubio has been getting consistent playing time, even starting in a few games. He stole the show early this month against Etosa Alicante, leading Joventut in scoring with 18 points and surprisingly hitting 4 three-pointers (the perimeter shooting is his biggest weakness). Everything points towards Rubio continuing to get some minutes once the real season starts in the ACB League, and perhaps even in the Euroleague.
Chen Jianghua PG
Tiago Splitter PF/C
Luis Scola PF
Zoran Planinic G
Mirza Teletovic PF
Rudy Fernandez SG


text:
Ramco Systems bulks up spending on sales & marketing to compete with US firms
Ramco, which earlier sold mainly in India and the Middle East, is putting in place a plan to expand to the US – the most challenging market for its product.
Jochelle Mendonca
February 24, 2015, 09:11 IST
Ramco, which earlier sold mainly in India and the Middle East, is putting in place a plan to expand to the US - the most challenging market for its product.
MUMBAI: Ramco Systems, a homegrown cloud-based software products company, is taking its human resources offerings to the US and bulking up spending on sales and marketing to compete with firms such as Workday on their own turf.
Chennai-based Ramco suffered huge losses for a long time, but following the appointment of a new CEO three years ago and a fresh strategy, the company managed a profit of $530,000 in the second quarter of financial year 2015.
Now, Ramco, which earlier sold mainly in India and the Middle East, is putting in place a plan to expand to the US – the most challenging market for its product.
"Our human capital management product needs some work to make it ready for the US market. We are working with a small consultancy to make those changes. We hope to launch by June or July," Virender Aggarwal, CEO of Ramco Systems, told ET. Ramco would then look at taking the product to English-speaking markets in Europe by 2016, he said. "We would have to increase our sales and marketing spend initially in the US market. So that should be an uptick.
We spend about 15-20% of our revenues on sales and marketing, whereas our competitors spend more than 50%," Aggarwal said.
The company also expects to double down on working with system integrators to break into the US market. Ramco currently counts Accenture, CSS Corp, Dell, Infosys and Tech Mahindra as integrator partners. The company, which was demerged from Ramco Industries in 1999, is one of a small breed of software product companies in the country that grew up and went public before the startup boom made large amounts of funding available. QuickHeal, an anti-virus firm, and aviation software provider IBS Software Services are preparing for initial public offerings later this year.
Ramco needed to go public because of a lack of venture capital funding and was punished by stock market investors when it changed its business model to the cloud. Experts on the software product industry expect the company to do better going forward.
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SEEKING WORK.—George L----, of Andover, was brought up in custody charged with neglecting to maintain his wife and family, who had become chargeable to the common fund of the Andover Union.—Prisoner said he had been away trying to get work at Stratford, and failing had come back to go into the workhouse. He had 3s. when he left and he had borrowed 1s. from sister to bring him back.—John Coster, relieving officer, said the man and wife disagreed. There were six children, and the wife and the children came into the workhouse the same day he left, the 16th January.—Prisoner, who said he was going into the workhouse, was discharged with a caution that if he left his wife and family again he would be sent to prison, and he was told he must not discharge himself from the workhouse till he had got work and could take his wife and children out with him.
Elections for County and District Councils will shortly take place, and there will be more contested seats than has been the custom in Hampshire. In the case of the county body it is felt that as they have practically to control agriculture in view of some of the orders sent out the time has arrived for some farmers to be on that body. Regarding District Councils, the contest is likely to turn on rural housing, and sitting members will be called upon to show what they have done in the matter. In the case of the parish of Andover there will be Guardians to be elected, but up to the present there have been no names of fresh candidates mentioned, and most of the Andover representatives can claim a double figures innings.
The Hero of the George Cross Island of Malta to visit Andover.
On Monday, 21st Feb., at 7.45 p.m.
Supported by Lt.-General E.F.Norton, C.B., D.S.O., M.C., Colonel A.Lethbridge, C.B.C, D.L., Lt.-Colonel G.E.Millner, D.S.O., O.B.E., M.C., and Air Vice-Marshall E.W.Havers, C.B.E.
There will be a COLLECTION on behalf of the Re-equipment Fund of the King George V. Memorial Hospital for Merchant Seamen, Malta.
ADMISSION FREE. Doors open at 7 o'clock.
A limited number of Tickets for Reserved Seats can be obtained from Messrs.Pond, 70, High Street. These Tickets will not be available after 7.30.
The Meeting will be relayed to an overflow gathering in the Town Hall, presided over by the Deputy-Mayor (Councillor S.R.Bell). General Dobbie will also attend and give a short closing address.
General Dobbie will also address a YOUTH MEETING at 2.15 on February 21st in the DRILL HALL, when His Worship the Mayor will preside. All Young People from 10 to 19 are invited. No Tickets required.
PETER CYCLES FROM WALLOP TO WEST BROMWICH AND BUYS AN F.A. CUP-TIE TICKET!
Peter Davis, the Advertiser's junior reporter (19) can certainly be described as a soccer fanatic, for on Saturday, he cycled from Wallop, where he lives to West Bromwich and back-just to purchase a ticket for tomorrow's F.A. CUP 5th round clash between W.B.A. and Arsenal.
He started out at one o'clock Saturday afternoon and stayed with his aunt at Birmingham overnight. On Sunday, he nipped over to the Hawthorns and then took his place in the queue for cup tickets.
His route took him from Wallop to Swindon, over the Cotswolds to Stour-on-the-Wold and then to Birmingham via Stratford-on-Avon.
Altogether he cycled 220 miles in 16 hours.
But cycling is not a new experience for this energetic Albion-mad young man.
"Last autumn, I cycled around France and Germany," he said.
"I had to wait two hours before I bought mine," said Peter, smiling as he clutched the yellow-coloured 3in. x 3in. card which is his passport to see the Throstles* defend the trophy they won at Wembley last year.
Having purchased his ticket, Peter set off again on the return trip, cycling through snow as he neared Hampshire.
*Compiler's note: The Throstles was the early nickname of WBA — today known as The Baggies.
Like King Canute trying to hold back the waves, the men from the National Rivers Authority battled bravely to stem the flooding River Swift in Hurstbourne Tarrant.
"We clean this river every year, and I've never seen anything like this," said Bernie Chubb, waist deep in water as he pulled weeds from the Swift in an attempt to prevent further flooding.
The previous week, the river, which has run dry for three years, was too deep to wade into some places, and had spilled over on to the Hurstbourne Tarrant to Vernham Dean road, making it impassable to traffic.


I'm in Tennessee now and it's stinkbug season…I used to think I could be a naturalist, but one problem always prevented me: INSECTS.
I wrote an essay about this problem during graduate school. We were discussing nature writing, and I decided I would try my hand at it. My mentor loved this piece entitled "Insect Armageddon." I hope you enjoy.
I can attest to the fact that such a place already exists, where men are tormented for their sins and insects have dominion: the state of Florida. Many northerners have discovered this punishment at the time of their retirement, having thought they were moving south to tropical paradise and Jimmy Buffet songs.
I will not even embark upon issues such as the relentless heat and no seasons, the hurricanes and power outages that follow every storm, the wharf rats, the stinging jellyfish, the rabid raccoons, or the water moccasins that lurk in lakes, awaiting some brazen tourist who might decide to skinny-dip. I will tell only of that which I despise the most: the bugs. I have always despised bugs and regard them with a mixture of contempt and dread. Every autumn, I begin to pray for a winter harsh enough to send them all into early graves.
One summer my sons and I moved to Oregon, because most of our relatives live on the west coast and the weather is milder. After about two months there, I asked my young sons what they missed the most about Florida. My six-year-old quickly replied, "I miss the giant rhinoceros beetles that crawl around the parking lots, and those big locusts that are green and yellow and orange with zebra stripes on them." His big blue eyes were glowing with purity.
"You miss those?" I asked, trying not to look disgusted. "Not me." I mumbled a prayer that we would never go back, but we unfortunately did.
As we drove back into Florida, I opened the car window and could hear the cicadas chirping loudly in the trees. They've been waiting for me, I thought with horror. They are like giant flies that are naturally attracted to long hair, and nothing is worse than trying to shake one out while it rattles like madness in your ear, and you shriek and do a nerve dance until it falls out.
But the great demon of the south is the roach. Some of them fly, such as the giant palmetto bug. Once I lived in an old two-story house with a group of friends, and a man was cooking spaghetti and garlic bread in the kitchen. He had a neat stack of bread on a corner of the table and we noticed a huge roach on the ceiling several feet away. Its antennae were shaking excitably, and it suddenly did a sky dive with no parachute and landed perfectly on top of that tall bread castle, where it seemed to be quite content with its plunder. I did not eat that night.
Most roaches crawl with wriggling hungry antennae in garbage cans, on kitchen counters, and through windowsills and crevices. In the middle of the night, when you go to the kitchen for a cookie and milk and you turn on the light, they flee like desperate soldiers behind the fortress of the stove. When you open a cupboard in the daytime, one might rustle behind the sugar bag, or you might spy their eggs like tiny white bullets in the corner.
Once I was lying in my bed, and I heard a sound as soft as silk slippers on the venetian blinds over my head. I leapt from my bed and cut on the light, and was amazed that I had even been able to hear it. The roach, I mean. My ears are ultra-sensitive to insects, especially roaches. I wake up everyone in the house for such occasions, and won't let anyone rest until the skirmish is finished and the culprit has met his demise.
The pest control man can't stand me. I laugh with victorious delight whenever his Ghostbuster truck pulls into the driveway with its giant canisters of poison and ammunition. I call him any time I see one bug, and I make him spray the whole house again, since it is included in my service agreement. Though most people have switched to annual pest service, I expect my house to be sprayed once per month inside and out. I let him know when I think it's time for more bait behind the kitchen drawers and under the sinks. I know he gets sick of dealing with me.
I can't leave out the termites and giant ants. I called the termite man to come and tell me about a tree that looked like it was dissolving to sawdust all by itself. He looked at it and said, "I can't do anything about that tree, because it is within three feet of your house, and we don't do indoor service for you." So I called the pest control man, and he says, "I can't touch that tree because it's not part of the house. So the bugs have all figured out where the no-kill zone is, and they continue to prosper there and raise their families. I once thought it would be funny to put up a "roach crossing" sign in front of our house.
Should I embark upon the subject of mosquitoes carrying diseases like malaria, yellow fever, encephalitis? Or have you ever awakened to find a tick burrowing in your flesh? How about those wasps with great stingers and long legs that hover around the eaves looking for a victim?
Once I had a crazy dream that I was looking with curious disdain at a display of insects in some laboratory. As I analyzed one big furry bug with wings pinned to a board resembling an insect Hellraiser, the bug suddenly squirmed and opened its eyes and started talking. I jumped back in horror, as it told me about the injustice and misfortune of its life and how it ended up being nailed by some entomologist. It was like a horror movie scene and I woke up sweating and feverish. I wondered if I was like Hannibal Lechter to the bug world.
As I sat shaking on the edge of my bed, I thought: Perhaps I have misjudged these little creatures. Perhaps they are only innocent civilians. Perhaps they are really cute and cuddly if you get to know them.
One tiny baby roach wriggled on my dresser. I grabbed my hairbrush and smacked it into eternal bliss. No, even my Quaker beliefs must be suspended for this war, this enmity. I cannot love these hellions in paradise.


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Abel Ferrara, Toronto, Sept. 1995
REPUTATION IS A USEFUL THING IN A PORTRAIT SHOOT. When a subject arrives for a sitting with a measure of fame and an established persona, a photographer can choose to either work with that or try to push against it, not quite subverting their subject's reputation as much as underscoring it with a theatrical contradiction.
Abel Ferrara's reputation definitely proceeded him when I took his photo during the 1995 film festival, where he was doing interviews to promote The Addiction, his latest film, alongside Lili Taylor, the films' star. Ferrara had started his career with low budget grindhouse films like Driller Killer, Fear City and Ms. 45. He was a New York City director, setting most of his films there in whta looked like a endless loop of the sleazy, '70s "Ford To City: Drop Dead" era, but there was always some simmering philosophical edge to his characters that finally took over with King of New York and, especially, Bad Lieutenant.
Ferrara didn't take off his shades for the whole shoot. He was dressed in the head-to-toe black uniform of the New York artist, punk rock brigade. None of that was surprising. If I'd had more time or an inkling that he had any inclination to shed the sunglasses at least I might have pushed for him to take them off, but my focus was on Taylor, so I decided to just document Ferrara and his persona with a full length portrait.
I have friends who have infinite patience for gritty, nasty films like Ms. 45, but I've never acquired the taste, so my interest in Ferrara began with Bad Lieutenant (which I saw after hearing a lot of good things about King of New York.) Bad Lieutenant was an angry, even ugly film, but it might be one of the most Catholic films I've ever seen, and my interest in its director isn't surprising since I have a lot of time for conflicted Catholics. (Ferrara later converted to Buddhism, but admits that he's a lapsed Buddhist as much as he's a lapsed Catholic.)
Lili Taylor & Abel Ferrara, Toronto, Sept. 1995
Ferrara is a poster boy for American independent cinema, going so far as to move from New York to Rome to be closer to funding for his films. He has also shed the black uniform for open neck shirts and summerweight suits, so much more appropriate to late middle-aged men living in Mediterranean countries.
I'll probably always be interested in whatever Ferrara does, though for my own mental health I tend to think hard before sitting down with his latest film. Along with directors like Paul Schrader, he's a survivor of a brief era when movies didn't plead for us to like them, and puts interesting actors in front of his camera. Needless to say, I'm itching for him to make another film with Christopher Walken, though some perverse part of me hopes that it will finally be the musical that I think Walken needs to make while he's still limber. That Fatboy Slim video simply wasn't enough.
Labels: analog wall, celebrity, movies, portraits, Toronto International Film Festival
Lili Taylor, Toronto, Sept.1995
WE MUST HAVE REALLY LIKED LILI TAYLOR A LOT AT NOW MAGAZINE because I seem to have photographed her for the cover twice in two years. Both shoots took place at the film festival, which was where I shot most of my really high profile portraits every year, and probably the reason why, long after I had left school, I still had the feeling that a new year really began in September and not January.
Taylor was having a good career back then. After supporting roles in Mystic Pizza and Born on the Fourth of July, she had her breakthrough in Nancy Savoca's Dogfight, co-starring with River Phoenix. My first shoot with her was probably when she was at the Festival promoting Savoca's follow-up, Household Saints, which seems to have disappeared into obscurity, as there's no DVD release and only VHS copies for sale online.
I met her at the Sutton Place Hotel and took her to a little park just north, next to St. Basil's church, and posed her in front of a stainless steel sculpture that's still there. The paper was obviously still in thrall to the "two-thirds blank space" cover template, so imagine the NOW logo at the top of the frame and type running down the right side of a cropped rectangle. It was challenging but never rewarding, and tended to suck the creative life out of a portrait shoot.
And yes, I know I'm making excuses.
The second shoot, two festivals later, was probably at the Sutton Place again, where Taylor was in a hotel room with director Abel Ferrara promoting The Addiction, a vampire story. By now the 2/3 template was history, and I could no longer be bothered trying to disguise the hotel rooms where I did so much shooting.
By the mid-'90s I was making the curtains, wallpaper and faux-antique furniture in hotels like the Sutton Place, Four Seasons and Park Plaza features in my photos; since I couldn't get all these people to come to my studio, it seemed more productive to treat the hotel rooms as studios, and turn their luxurious blandness into a feature.
Lili Taylor & Abel Ferrara, Toronto, Sept.1995
With the second Taylor shoot, I'd also decided to try something counterintuitive. Photographers are taught that one thing that separates amateurs from professionals is composition, and more specifically filling the shot with your subject instead of putting their face beneath the focusing grid in the centre of the frame. I'd diligently done this for years, but ten years into my career I thought it was time I tried to break learned habits and go against rules that were starting to seem arbitrary.
Taylor's defining role would come a year later when she played Valerie Solanis in Mary Harron's I Shot Andy Warhol. It was the sort of role that an actress more concerned about sex appeal and prolonging her ingenue status would never have taken. Taylor was a lot more interesting than that, and she's continued working regularly to this day, shifting between movies and regular TV roles in shows like Six Feet Under and American Crime.
It's probably worth noting that Taylor, a striking and photogenic person, is the sort of actor Hollywood calls on when they need to cast a character that the script might call plain or even unattractive. This is one of the reasons why I don't think the word "realistic" should ever be used to describe a movie.
Labels: analog wall, celebrity, cross-processing, movies, portraits, Toronto International Film Festival
David Thewlis, Toronto, Dec. 1993
MY MEMORY OF THE NINETIES IS THAT IT WAS A TIME WHEN MUSIC GOT WORSE AND MOVIES GOT BETTER. Going through my archives, it's obvious that shooting musicians gave way to photographing actors and directors during the heyday of the independent film and the last gasp of the art house cinema. I was certainly spending far more time in movie theatres than clubs, but this might be entirely subjective - the memories of someone slipping out of their twenties and into the treeless flatlands of early middle age.
Looking through the files, though, I keep finding portraits of actors who seem more interesting to me than their youthful counterparts today. Most of them are still working, a testament (I like to think) to their craft and personality and, most of all, enduring personas that keep them relevant to casting directors and audiences. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, they had faces then.
David Thewlis was thirty, just a year older than me, when I took these photos in a Toronto hotel room while he was doing press for Mike Leigh's latest film, Naked. He'd been in a few films in Britain, and after Leigh cast him as Jane Horrock's mopey boyfriend in Life is Sweet, he got his breakthrough role as the sourly confrontational Johnny, on the run and spoiling for a good argument in a dreary London suburb.
The film made me a huge fan of both Leigh and Thewlis, and I took the assignment with real excitement. It's obvious now that I wanted to get as much out of this session as possible, as I shot two rolls of medium format and one of 35mm film, moving my subject around the dim hotel room to get as many options as possible - as much work as I'd normally have done for a cover shoot.
This was still a time when shoot times were luxurious - a whole fifteen minutes before or after the interview, which allowed me to take my time finding a few good spots in or outside the room, metering carefully and setting up the Rolleis on a tripod. Toronto's downtown hotel rooms became my studio, and I memorized their layouts, usually heading for the corner near the window where ductwork created a tight little spot that caught the light.
I didn't know it at the time, but these hotel shoots would comprise most of the best work I did in the '90s - a first mature period in my portrait shooting which mostly ended up on newsprint in NOW's movie section, where I would never have been able to print these photos with the rich blacks and shadows they have here, given the limitations of cheap paper stock and print technology.
Thewlis had an angular elegance in front of my camera, and was a very amenable subject - I think he knew that this was his first big role, and he was happy to cooperate. I really liked the film - I was single and lonely and a little bitter and a lifelong impatience with small talk in social situations meant that I relished a good argument and a bit of confrontation. Long nighttime walks often presented me with street dramas and random encounters with other insomniac misfits. Leigh's film might have been more violent and desperate, but the setting wasn't unfamiliar.
Making small talk while we shot, I told Thewlis how much I liked the film, and how much I identified with Johnny.
"Oh," he said, a bit of concern and surprise in his voice. "I'm sorry to hear that."
Labels: analog wall, celebrity, movies, portraits
SOMEONE ASKED ME IF I'D WRITE A POST talking about major moments or shifts in my career. At first I was reluctant - it's the kind of thing I was saving for a summing up, near the end of this whole project of excavating my old work. Then I looked at what I have scheduled to post here and realized that I am very nearly approaching the home stretch, and decided that now is as good a time as any.
I was able to pin down quite a few photos that sum up these milestones. At first they were significant points on the steep learning curve that began when I bought my first real camera in 1985. It has to be understood that photography was very much in a mature phase when I began shooting seriously - film and camera technology were only seeing the most minor advances, and whatever big steps forward I was taking had to do with mastering basic skills and not adapting to big changes in the medium and the industry.
The changes would come much later, and they would be massive.
John Waters, Toronto, 1987
I shot John Waters for the first time when he came to Toronto for a signing at a bookstore at the end of my street. He was still an underground icon at the time, and I did the shoot without a client, strictly as a fan. I had been taking pictures of people to go with my interviews for many months, but this is really the first portrait I ever shot - an attempt to capture something about the subject's persona and not just a record of how they looked that day.
It was shot on a Mamiya C330, my first medium format camera, and a sign that I was becoming serious about this photography thing. The lighting could not have been more basic - a flash held just off to the left while I triggered the shutter with my right hand. I had spent the day thinking about what I would do if Waters agreed to sit for a picture, and ended up taking the little rubber puppet face home from the toy shop where I worked, on a whim. I remember my amazement when the photo came up in the darkroom tray - it looked like something that actually belonged in a magazine somewhere. Did I actually take that?
Anton Corbijn, Toronto, 1988
I was a big fan of Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, and when we discovered that he would be in town, Chris Buck and I cornered him outside a Tom Waits concert and convinced him to let us interview/photograph him for Nerve magazine. We did the shoot in his room at a downtown motel, and when we we'd finished the interview and were scoping the room for a place to shoot him, he suggested that we move away from the big windows by the door and further into the room. Corbijn sat down on the edge of the bed; I picked up my Pentax Spotmatic and looked through the viewfinder and a light went on in my head.
He was showing us the sort of light he preferred to use in his own work - the sort of shadowless light you get on an overcast day, which can be made dramatic and more richly textured when you boost the contrast in printing. I had always been anxious about exposure, and inevitably placed my subjects near the strongest light source I could find; Corbijn taught us that light has a range of qualities, and that you could change the mood of a shot by choosing carefully. It's more of an homage than a portrait, really, but this photo is a record of a eureka moment in my career.
Henry Rollins, Toronto, 1988
The success of my John Waters portrait made me ambitious, and within a year I had put together a portable studio that I carried around with me - my Mamiya, a flash, umbrella and light stand, and a big white painter's tarp in a gym bag with a roll of gaffer tape to fix it to walls. I was learning about light and composition and trying to gain more control over my portraits by trying not to rely on available light sources.
That single flash bounced into an umbrella could change the look of a photo depending on simple adjustments of a few inches either up, down, near or far from the subject. Without a modeling light or a way to make Polaroid tests I was always shooting blind with this set-up, and watching the contact sheets come up in the developer was an anxious moment.
The Rollins portrait was clearly a product of my love of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon's work in the '50s and '60s - the anxiety of influence would linger for years - but it was clean and simple and captured something about its subject. Taken just a few months before Nerve magazine finally folded, it's also a record of the moment when I decided to make photography and not writing the focus of my energies.
Roses, Parkdale, 1991
By the turn of the '90s I had moved into a big loft space in Parkdale, and had bought my first serious gear, which included a Zenza Bronica SQ-a medium format camera and a kit of Profoto strobe lights. I could take Polaroids and work with modeling lights and had far more control over my images than I could have imagined with the Mamiya and the darkroom in the bathroom of my bachelorette apartment.
These roses were delivered to the space one day, and on a Sunday morning I began setting up my white backdrop and the lights. I had been playing around with still lifes but hadn't done anything really worthwhile; I'm not sure if I even knew to call this a "high key" lighting setup at the time, but I'd seen this sort of thing before, had striven to get the effect in my portraits, and decided to work all day until I got something that looked like what I had in my mind.
After countless Polaroid tests I finally hit somewhere near the mark and began shooting slide film for cross-processing, to wring as much contrast from the shot as I could. After much fumbling and failing, I'd climbed up the first rung of still-life photography, and a bit more confident about calling myself a professional.
James Tenney, Parkdale, 1991
In the days before Photoshop, making really big changes to the look of a photo began in the camera, and cross-processing colour film - slide film developed in negative chemistry or vice versa - was one way of really pulling away from a realistic, technically "correct" image. It was also a big risk that required lots of testing and careful records of darkroom enlarger settings to compensate for the wild colour shifts from this experimental process.
I'd been playing around with cross-processing privately, but when I was assigned to shoot avant-garde classical composer James Tenney for the cover of a New York music magazine, I wanted to take a big risk and see what I got in the studio with bright colour gels on my strobes. Cross-processing would turn out to be a creative dead end after many years, but the strong colours and deep contrast of portraits like this one helped me realize that photography could be a graphic art as much as anything else, and taught me that colour balance itself is mostly arbitrary.
Pure, Toronto, 1990
After the first big hurdles of my learning curve were over, it required more work to push forward and make progress - technical and artistic - in my work. I was no longer worried about poor exposure whenever I developed a roll of film, though there was always some aesthetic effect that seemed just out of my reach. By now I was working for NOW magazine and shooting a lot of live music.
Concert photography has never been a focus of my work, but I did a lot of it for many years, and it took real effort to keep it interesting. I ran into Kevin, a guitarist I'd known since the Nerve years, and he invited me to see his new band - an industrial metal outfit that put quite a bit of care into their live show, going so far as to have a regular lighting guy to deal with strobes and smoke machines. I ended up working with them quite a lot over the next couple of years - they loved to strike iconic poses onstage and, frankly, looked fantastic through my lens.
There were a lot of conventions with shooting live photography, where a long lens and a fast shutter speed were key to getting usable shots. I decided to go in the other direction, and shot the band with my medium format Rolleiflex, hand held at low shutter speeds. The smoke would fill in the shadows onstage and the strobe lights provided bursts of sharp action, often in multiple exposures. Every frame was a wild card, but it felt fantastically exciting to shoot, even if no one besides me and the band ever saw most of these shots.
Tilda Swinton, Toronto, 1992
By the early '90s I'd settled into a comfortable method for shooting portraits outside of the studio. I carried two Rolleis in a small case and a compact tripod but no flash or strobes, relying on available light and either a steady hand or a locked-off camera and shutter release. The technology I was using was decades old - my Rolleis were built in the '50s and the Sekonic light meter I relied on hadn't changed it's design since then. In the whole of the first two decades of shooting professionally, the only really new technology I used was my autofocus Canon SLR.
This portrait of actress Tilda Swinton was probably among the best examples of this first "mature" period of my portrait work. With my camera on a tripod and the shutter set to a half second or less, I had to be able to coax my subjects into a calm, quiet space to avoid movement; I had to manifest some brief authority to take control of the shoot. At some point I started wearing suits. The negatives would often look a bit plain and underwhelming, so most of the real work took place in the darkroom.
Forest Whitaker, Toronto, 2005
A decade later I was back shooting celebrities in hotel rooms, but everything had changed. "Luxurious" ten or fifteen minute shoots had been cut down to five minutes, then two minutes, then less. Film photography had given way to digital after the briefest transition, and every new generation of camera saw an improvement in chip technology and image size. My darkroom was replaced by Photoshop - the only change for which I was grateful right from the start.
Shooting for the free national daily, I would plead with the writer for as much time as I could get at the end of our interview slots, but publicists would still pull subjects out of the room after just a couple of dozen frames. (Or less. My Heath Ledger shoot lasted precisely five frames.)
The luxury of a couple of setups had vanished, and I had to find the sweet spot of light in the hotel room fast and shoot as quickly as I could. Most of the time I was back to the start of my career, taking photos of what celebrities looked like on that day instead of real portraits, but sometimes a subject like Forest Whitaker would respond to the occasion and give something like a performance for my camera.
Harbourfront, Toronto, 2011
When I started shooting digitally, I assumed that I was just using any other camera, slapped my old Canon lenses on the new bodies the paper provided for me and worked accordingly. It would take a few years before I understood that a jpeg or RAW file was different than a film negative, and that light hitting a sensor worked in subtly different ways than it did when it hit film in the back of a camera.
The hurlyburly of work at the free national daily - writing several columns a week in addition to shooting - never gave me enough time to appreciate this, but when I was laid off and forced to return to freelance work (in a very different and much harsher economic climate than before) I had time to really think about the peculiar nature of digital photography and the quality of a pixel.
Most of my work in the first year or two after I lost my job was for blogTO, a website devoted to city news and lifestyle reporting with a big visual component. Just before noon on a dim autumn day I was downtown near the lake shooting a story when I came upon this scene - a bunch of boats turned turtle under a low sun that barely burned through the thick clouds.
I had been trying to shoot cityscapes and landscapes on my own for years and falling short of an idea I had in my head, but this photo was where the strangeness I always saw in the world around me finally came into sharp focus in a picture. It was a moment of real inspiration, and without it I don't think that any of the travel work I've done in the last few years would have been possible.
Patti Smith, Toronto, 1995
Photoshop was seven years old when I took this portrait of Patti Smith in a hotel room in the mid-'90s, but almost no photographer I knew used it. Intrigued by what I'd heard about digital image manipulation, I priced out a basic Mac system around this time; it would have cost about as much as a used BMW in really good condition. I wouldn't switch from darkrooms to computers till the end of 2001, when I took a job as the photo editor at the free national daily.
I was never satisfied with these Patti Smith portraits back in the days of film. When Patti asked me what I was trying to do, I mentioned Nadar and the pictorialists working a century earlier, but shooting with a Rollei and modern film, I was never able to achieve the look or feel I was imagining at that time. I probably could have come close with a view camera, but even with a whole fifteen minutes worth of shooting time, I probably wouldn't have provided my editor with more than a handful of frames to choose from, and that would have been irresponsible.
The 75mm/3.5 lens on the Rollei was simply too sharp and the depth of field too deep to get the look I wanted, and it wasn't until I learned to unlock layers and selective focus in Photoshop with my portraits of Spalding Gray and Bjork that I was able to revisit my Patti Smith shoot and complete the job the way I imagined it in my head, twenty years earlier.
Kinky Friedman, Toronto, 2015
I don't know that there's any money to be made doing it any more, but my first love will always be portraits. After years of exploring the peculiarities of digital photography with cityscapes and news photography, I made a tentative return to portrait work with this portrait of Texas country singer and writer Kinky Friedman.
The setup was simple - diffused window light coming from behind me on the landing of a set of stairs in a club, with a collapsible white reflector for a backdrop - and the camera was my new Fujifilm X30, the first digital camera I'd enjoyed using as much as my beloved Rolleis. I was boiling down the setup from the Henry Rollins shoot nearly thirty years earlier to its essence, in the hope that I would be able to reconnect with the photographer I used to be, eager once again to make decent portraits.
I haven't a clue about where photography is going, or if what I'm doing is still a career. I know that my last fifteen years of serious shooting have seen more changes to the technology and market than the first fifteen. The way people take and consume photos is still transforming convulsively, and camera technology like this could prove to be a major game-changer. I don't feel in control of my role as a photographer - I probably never was, but there's no illusions any more, at least. At least I still feel like I'm moving forward, but where this is all going, as either art or business, is anyone's guess.
Labels: analog wall, career, cityscapes, cross-processing, digital, John Waters, movies, music, photography, portraits, still lifes, street photography, studio, Toronto
Gordon Lightfoot
Gordon Lightfoot, Toronto, July 1992
ONE MORNING IN THE SPRING OF 1992 I WAS LYING IN BED in my Parkdale loft thinking about how lonely and broke I was. The phone rang. It was a man who said his name was Barry Harvey; he was Gordon Lightfoot's manager and he wondered if I was available to do some album cover shots. For almost a minute I treated the whole thing as a joke, and tried to figure out which one of my friends was pulling a prank on me.
It soon became obvious, however, that Mr. Harvey was serious, and that I had come recommended by a publicist at WEA Canada. We briefly discussed fees (still imagining the whole thing might be a joke I quoted my full day rate, which almost no one had ever paid up till that point) and availability (I was very available, at any time.) By the time the call ended, my head was swimming. Did this really happen?
I'm not sure how long it was until Barry called me back with a day and a time. I was to show up precisely at 10am at Gord's house in Rosedale with my cameras. There would be a contract giving Gord and Early Morning Productions exclusive rights to the photos, in exchange for my full day rate plus expenses. I arrived at the house early, walked up and down the block a few times to kill time, then rang the doorbell. Gordon Lightfoot answered, shook my hand, then told me to wait in the big sun room, which was filled with guitars and cases.
I looked around for a good spot to shoot, but when Gord came back I asked if there was somewhere outside he found comfortable. He mentioned a spot down in the ravine behind the house, and after he made coffee, I found myself walking a path through the woods behind a guitar-carrying Gordon Lightfoot. It was the most utterly Canadian moment of my life thus far.
If you didn't grow up in Canada in the '70s it's hard to describe the importance of Gordon Lightfoot. His music was literally everywhere, a string of hits ("Early Morning Rain," "Bitter Green," "If You Could Read My Mind," "Summer Side of Life," "Sundown," "Carefree Highway," "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald") that were constantly on the radio, soundtracking the decade with a subtle but persistent melancholy and a peculiarly northern romanticism that was tentative but intense and fully anticipatory of regret and heartbreak.
Did I want to try and capture all of that with my photos in that ravine on a pleasant weekday morning? I'd like to hope that I was that ambitious, somewhere beneath my nervousness. Mostly I wanted to get a really flattering cover shot for a man who'd made seventeen records already and had sat for countless photo shoots. It all felt quite momentous - a few years earlier I was a punk kid shooting hardcore bands in dingy shithole clubs, and now I was doing album photos for a Canadian musical icon.
I mostly shot with my Rolleiflex, trying to frame potential album covers with each shot in the square viewfinder as I worked. Gord seemed relaxed enough, and sang Ramblin' Jack Elliott songs while I snapped. After a while his wife Elizabeth and young son Miles came down and joined us, and Gord started playing and joking around for them.
I'd brought my Canon SLR with me, and took another quick roll near the end of the shoot for insurance. Typically, it was one of these frames that ended up on the cover of the record, Waiting For You, when it came out a year later, while one of the Rollei shots ended up on the back of the CD package.
When we were packing up, just before Gord gave me a ride to the subway station in one of his big '70s Cadillacs, he asked if I thought I had everything I needed. I told him that I might have, but if he was willing, I wanted to do another shoot in my studio to get something different, a bit more formal, for variety. To my surprise he agreed, and a week or two later he showed up with guitar and suit bag at my Parkdale loft, commenting on the colourful street life outside.
I'd stripped the furniture away from by the windows of my studio/bedroom and set up two lights, one bounced into the ceiling for ambient fill, another in a big softbox just to Gord's left. I wanted to bring the daylight outside down to a cool twilight blue, and shot with cross-processed slide film to increase the saturation. I don't know if I played anything on the stereo while I shot, but Gord happily sat and picked while I worked. One of the shots ended up inside the booklet of the record, so I felt like I'd given Gord value for his money.
Gordon Lightfoot, Parkdale, July 1992
A footnote: When Gord arrived, I asked him if he wanted to hear an interesting cover of one of his songs. I pulled out the first album by Clawhammer, a California group I quite liked, and cued up their version of "Sundown." He was visibly amused by the album cover, and listened to their raucous take on his song all the way through. When it was over, he handed the record back to me and said, grinning wryly, "Not bad, not bad. Some tough changes in there."
It would be another four years before I heard from Gord or Barry Harvey again. Once again the phone rang, and Barry asked if I was available to shoot some live photos at Gord's annual concerts at Massey Hall. They were thinking of doing a songbook and needed some fresh live shots.
Of course I agreed, but made one request: I could skulk around at the lip of the stage and get the same sorts of pictures any newspaper photographer on assignment might get, but if they'd let me wander the wings and edge of the stage, I might get some shots with a different perspective. I'd dress in black and try to be as inconspicuous as possible, of course. To my surprise, Barry agreed.
Gordon Lightfoot, Massey Hall, Toronto, Nov. 1996
I began by showing up for the soundcheck, where I tried to get candid shots of Gord and his longtime band - Terry Clements, Rick Haynes, Barry Keane and Mike Heffernan. I was given free access to the stage and the backstage area, and shot roll after roll of mostly black and white before the show, my mind focused on getting something like the work of Columbia Records staff photographer Don Hunstein back in the '60s.
I switched to colour negative film for the show, and did most of my shooting around and behind the band, occasionally darting forward to get shots of Gord as he knelt and shuffled through the fan gifts and song requests that had been left by his mike stand during the show.
I was quite pleased with what I got, and handed in the contact sheets to Barry, but I don't know if the songbook ever happened and ultimately I was never asked to print up any of the shots. That would have been the last I ever heard from Barry or Gord, in any case. Barry Harvey died suddenly before Christmas almost ten years ago, just after Gord had a couple of serious health scares.
Since recovering, Gord has spent long months of every year on the road with his band, playing what amounts to the sort of endless tour that his friend and peer, Bob Dylan, has been doing for over a decade. I would love to get another chance to photograph Gord again, but while asking for permission from his management to post these photos, my request for a quick shoot was turned down. No matter - I had my chance to contribute to the image of a musical icon, and had an altogether happy experience doing it, making for a highlight in the heyday of my professional career.
(Photos reproduced by permission of Early Morning Productions.)
Labels: analog wall, Canada, career, celebrity, live, music, portraits, studio


Sonny Bill Williams' return to Test rugby was put on hold by tonsilitis when the ailing center was ruled out of the All Blacks squad to face South Africa this weekend.
Williams had been penciled in to start on the bench in tomorrow's Rugby Championship fixture in Wellington, but he was scratched from the squad.
Coach Steve Hansen said Williams had been sick all week and, while the plan was to play 20 minutes late in the game, there was risk he may have had to come on early as an injury replacement.
That would flatten him, Hansen said. "He's too valuable to do that to."
Williams, 33, missed the first two Tests against France last June, following knee surgery. He played 58 minutes of the third Test before injuring his shoulder, and has been out of action since.
The two-time World Cup-winner's on-again, off-again return comes as Hansen announced wholesale changes for the Springboks match.
There are 10 changes to the run-on side and five on the bench in a strong All Blacks combination looking to extend their unbeaten record in the tournament.
Hansen opted for Crotty to start in the No 12 jersey, with the center confirming he was suffering no long-term effects from his sixth concussion in 15 months when knocked out playing Australia early in the series.
Aaron Smith and Beauden Barrett are reunited in the halves while Anton Lienert-Brown will play at outside center. Ioane returns to the left wing, while Ben Smith moves to the right wing to make way for Jordie Barrett at full-back.
In the forwards, Sam Whitelock moves into the No 4 jersey, with Brodie Retallick injured, and Patrick Tuipulotu comes on to the bench as lock cover for his first Test of 2018. Liam Squire and Cane return as flankers.
"We'll have to be at our very best in all these areas to counter an opposition we know will be desperate," Hansen said. "You just have to look at our last encounter in Cape Town to understand what kind of beast we will be facing."
Handre Pollard has been restored as South Africa's starting fly-half with coach Rassie Erasmus selecting his strongest available side to face New Zealand.
Meanwhile, Israel Folau will start on the wing for the first time in five years against Argentina this weekend in a surprise tactical shift after the Wallabies' star full-back was declared fit along with flanker David Pocock.
Folau has started 61 Tests at full-back dating back to the 2013 Bledisloe Cup.


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Mosaic / Reviews / April 24, 2013
Monochromatic action in 'Oblivion' does not innovate
New sci-fi model "Oblivion" comes in all colors, just so long as it's pale blue.
But wait! You will see so many different kinds of pale blue. A pale blue sky, the pale blue clouds beneath the sky, the pale blue snowcaps on the mountains beneath the clouds beneath the sky, a pale blue IKEA-made space home extending from the mountains through the clouds and the pale-blue jumpsuit Tom Cruise wears, roaming beneath all of the above in the war-ravaged wastelands of a dead, pale-blue Earth.
Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper — I know, Tom Cruise, as another Jack Something-er, but hold on! — a droid repairman employed by the last vestiges of humanity who have fled Earth for Saturn's moon Titan in the wake of an alien invasion. He patches up robot sentries and fends off the alien "Scavengers" while his live-in girlfriend/pseudo-wife Victoria, played by Andrea Riseborough, provides moral support from home. They're supposed to stick around Earth until the humans have siphoned off enough of a certain mineral to fuel their colonies. Something like that. But don't worry about it! "Oblivion" comes equipped with complementary voice-over cramming all the exposition and world-building and foreign terms into the first five minutes, so you can enjoy the pretty pale blue for the rest of the movie.
If daring, heady science fiction makes you anxious and innovation gives you tachycardia, you have nothing to fear in "Oblivion." You will recognize over the course of Tom Cruise's epic quest to find the emptiest stretch of desert to meander in every major sci-fi trope from every major sci-fi film in cinema. Tom Cruise is Jack is Neo is "2001's" Dave is Luke Sykwalker. He flies around in a bubble spacecraft, a Y-Wing via an Apple product, but really, he loves nature as much as anyone else. "The Earth is my home," he says, which makes him that Special Future Individual destined to lead a rebellion against the evil forces that have ruined the Earth, represented by Melissa Leo on a video screen. If you're still burned over the Bush administration five years later, Leo's Southern charm will have you reaching for pitchforks and laser guns.
Do you retch at the sight of people engaged in genuine conversation? "Oblivion" is considerate enough to downplay such eyesores like human bodies and lively drama in exchange for lifeless tableaus set to faux-majestic scores by the band M83, so even the one shot of a crowd of extras is conducted in the near-dark, the bodies blending together into a motionless muddle. But hold your horses! At least there's Morgan Freeman reciting his Morgan Freeman speech about Roman law, free will and other lofty subjects. We get to see Nikolaj Coster-Waldau re-playing Jaime Lannister, if Jaime Lannister was a grumpy squad leader who hated everything, especially the thought of a personality. These characters are nice side attractions in a plot that wants little to do with them.
Stop right there! You will get Tom Cruise. More than that, order now and you will get one extra Tom Cruise for free, in a plot twist nonsensical enough to keep you watching through the film's Kubrick knockoff ending. Watch the movie today and you will receive as a bonus two actresses, Riseborough and Olga Kurylovich, sacrificing their integrity as human beings to satisfy your desire for passive, brutalized eye candy. This offer comes with a no-thought guarantee. You can call it clever, but you can't call "Oblivion" pretentious, or smart!
"Oblivion" can be found at your local theaters with non-3D pricing. It'll have you saying: "At least it's more coherent than 'Tron: Legacy.'"
Tags: Andrea Riseorough Jaime Lannister Morgan Freeman Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Oblivion Olga Kurylovich sci-fi Tom Cruise
Thoughts from the Embers: In defense of Meatless Mondays
The French-American tourist
Ivan Keta
Ivan Keta is a weekly film columnist for The Knox Student. In 2013, he won first place in Critical Film Review from the Illinois College Press Association, competing in the open division against dozens of other Illinois college newspapers.
If you walked into the Hard Knox Café or the Oak Room on Monday to the startling realization of the Meatless Monday experiment,...


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Mockingjay is a 2010 science fiction novel by. interim President Coin asks the remaining Hunger Games victors to vote on a proposal to hold a final Hunger Games.
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Relive the moments that went down in history from the Atlanta 1996 Summer Olympics.
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text:
El Museo Gardiner es el único museo en Canadá dedicado exclusivamente al arte de la cerámica. Se encuentra en el Parque de la Reina, al sur de la calle Bloor de Toronto, frente al Museo Real de Ontario. La estación de metro más cercana es el Museo.

Historia
Fundada en 1984 por George R. Gardiner y su esposa Helen Gardiner, diseñado por Keith Wagland, el museo ha sido descrito como un "joyero de los tesoros de la cerámica". El Museo Gardiner se sometió a una renovación de $ 20 millones. El propósito de la reciente renovación y ampliación en 2006 fue para mejorar la circulación y aumentar el espacio para exhibir las colecciones permanentes. La estructura se compone de una fachada de piedra caliza revestida con cristal y columnas de granito negro y se extiende hacia la calle por lo que es más visible para la gente.

Colección
Su colección permanente de más de 2900 piezas, incluye obras de la América antigua, del Renacimiento italiano, Inglés Delftware, porcelana china y japonesa, porcelana europea, y una galería de arte contemporáneo. Además de las colecciones permanentes, el museo realiza tres exposiciones temporales al año.

Programas
El museo ofrece programas y conferencias, y en su estudio de la arcilla de barro, clases para adultos y niños.

Afiliaciones
El museo está afiliado a la Asociación de Museos Canadienses, al Patrimonio Canadiense de Información y al Museo Virtual de Canadá.

Galería

Véase también
 Galería de arte
 Exposición

Referencias

Bibliografía

Enlaces externos
 Sitio web oficial
 Imágenes del museo en Commons.

Museos de Canadá
Museos de alfarería y cerámica
Arquitectura moderna en Canadá

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Monday, Feb Monday, March 4, 2019 to Friday, March 8, 2019, from 7:00am to 11:00am PDT each day.
This course covers an overview of Apache Spark, hands-on projects utilizing extract- transform-load operations (ETL), employing exploratory data analysis (EDA), building machine learning models, evaluating models, and performing cross validation.
All hands-on labs are run on Databricks Community Edition, a free cloud based Spark environment. This allows the participants to maximize their time using open source Apache Spark to solve real problems, rather than dealing with the complex issues of setting up Spark cluster installations. Labs can easily be ported to run on open source Apache Spark after class.
Data scientists with experience in machine learning and Scala or Python programming, who want to adapt traditional machine learning tasks to run at scale using Apache Spark.
Troubleshoot slow running DataFrame queries using explain-plan and the Spark UI.
Troubleshoot errors and program crashes using executor logs, driver stack traces, and local-mode runtimes.
Troubleshoot Spark jobs using the administration UIs and logs inside Databricks.
Extract, transform, and load (ETL) data from multiple federated data sources (JSON, relational database, etc.) with DataFrames.
Extract structured data from unstructured data sources by parsing using Datasets (where possible) or RDDs (if not possible with Datasets), with transformations and actions (map, flatMap, filter, reduce, reduceByKey).
Extend the capabilities of DataFrames using user defined functions (UDFs and UDAFs) in Python and Scala.
Resolve missing fields in DataFrame rows using filtering and imputation.
Develop dashboards to provide "at-a-glance" summaries and reports.
Learn to apply various regression and classification models, both supervised and unsupervised.
Train analytical models with Spark ML estimators including: linear regression, decision trees, logistic regression, and k-means.
Use Spark ML transformers to perform pre-processing on a dataset prior to training, including: standardization, normalization, one-hot encoding, and binarization.
Create Spark ML pipelines to create a processing pipeline including transformations, estimations, evaluation of analytical models.
Evaluate model accuracy by dividing data into training and test datasets and computing metrics using Spark ML evaluators.
Tune training hyper-parameters by integrating cross-validation into Spark ML pipelines.
Troubleshoot and tune machine learning algorithms in Spark.
Understand and build a general ML pipeline for Spark.
Databricks' vision is to empower anyone to easily build and deploy advanced analytics solutions. The company was founded by the team who created Apache® Spark™, a powerful open source data processing engine built for sophisticated analytics, ease of use, and speed. Databricks is the largest contributor to the open source Apache Spark project providing 10x more code than any other company. The company has also trained over 40,000 users on Apache Spark, and has the largest number of customers deploying Spark to date. Databricks provides a virtual analytics platform, to simplify data integration, real-time experimentation, and robust deployment of production applications. Databricks is venture-backed by Andreessen Horowitz and NEA. For more information, contact info@databricks.com.