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Tag Archives: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum
Marg Delahunty returns to T.O., Meryl & Julia move to Osage County and Jim makes more Mostel magic
NO BIZ LIKE SHOW BIZ: Savvy scene-stealer Mary Walsh returns to Toronto next month in her new one-woman play, Dancing With Rage. The show, set to run March 6-31 at Theatre Passe Muraille, incorporates both new
WALSH: Marg Delahunty returns to T.O.
and familiar faces, most notably 22 Minutes alumni Dakey Dunn, Connie Bloor and the legendary Marg Delahunty. Walsh's last stage stint here was almost two years ago, at the Panasonic with Andrea Martin and Louise Pitre in Love, Loss and What I Wore, directed by Karen Carpenter. Carpenter is also directing Dancing With Rage and she and Walsh still have to decide if they'll tour the show after it closes here … Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts are set to co-star in the film version of Tracy Letts' Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County. John Wells will direct … the cast of Ghost will perform a sneak peek of the
STREEP & ROBERTS: Osage County gals
show on Jimmy Fallon's late show tonight before the West End musical hit even begins its Broadway previews … and remember Slings & Arrows, the brilliant take-off on Stratford and its oh-so-theatrical inhabitants? Paul Gross, Martha Burns and Stephen Ouimette were sensational, and newcomers Rachel McAdams and Luke Kirby weren't too shabby either. New York Times writer Neil Genzlinger recently suggested that NBC's much-ballyhooed Smash should avoid dumbing down its storylines and aim higher. "The writers," he said, "would also benefit from watching a few seasons of Slings & Arrows, a terrific backstage television series that was smart and proud of it," he advised. Challenging viewers "to keep up, as Slings and Arrows did, is ultimately more rewarding."
UP UP AND AWAY: On a clear you can see --- whaaa??
IF YOU GET CAUGHT BETWEEN THE SUN AND NEW YORK CITY: It was just a publicity stunt for the new sci-fi movie Chronicle, written and directed by director John Landis' chip-off-the-old block Max. But it sure got people talking. To see how they did it, cick here.
A BRIDGE TOO FAR: Unless you're flying over it, of course ...
NOW IS THE HOUR: Finally caught up with Jim Brochu's much acclaimed performance in Zero Hour, and although I didn't see how his one-man show could live up to its advance publicity, it easily surpassed it. In addition to being an
BROCHU as MOSTEL: brilliant
extraordinarily disciplined and gifted actor, Brochu is also a brilliant writer and storyteller who is never less than engaging, so you don't have to be a rabid fan of Zero Mostel to be captivated by his reconstituted presence on stage. I know several long-term admirers of Mostel who have been wowed by Brochu's tour de force, and after seeing him in action, I can certainly understand why. His personal revelations, including Mostel's bitter estrangement from his family, are tough and touching. His backstage stories, from his account of Lucille Ball testifying to the House Committee on Un-American Activities to his palpable loathing for
HANGING OUT: Merman & Brochu at Sardi's
Broadway blabbers Elia Kazan and Jerome Robbins, are unforgettable. The Zero Mostel we prefer to remember is the lovable clown from The Producers, the madcap jester from A Funny Thing Happened Our The Way To The Forum, the Jewish patriarch who wished he was A Rich Man in Fiddler On The Roof. But Brochu is a true creature of the theatre — his caricature hangs next to Ethel Merman's at Sardi's — and accordingly the artist Brochu reincarnates for us has to fight to be in the spotlight. Zero only gets to star in Forum because first choice Milton Berle and second choice Phil Silvers both turn it down. And although his portrayal of Tevye is burned into the heart of Broadway memory, he was third choice for that one too. (First name on the Fiddler producers' wish list was Danny Kaye.)
JIM BROCHU as ZERO MOSTEL in ZERO HOUR at Bathurst Street Theatre
When the curtain finally comes down — all too soon for some of us — the fact that we feel like we've just spent the evening with Zero Mostel, and not a carbon copy, is further testament to Brochu's great skill as an actor. On stage here at the Bathurst Street Theatre through March 11, Zero Hour is a fascinating and formidably funny showcase for both of them. Don't miss it.
Posted in Actors, Authors, Comedy, Gossip, Movies, Music, SHOW BUSINESS, Showbuzz, Stars, Television, Theatre
Tagged A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, ANDREA MARTIN, August: Osage County, Bathurst Street Theatre, BROADWAY, Chronicle, Connie Bloor, Dakey Dunn, Danny Kaye, Elia Kazan, Ethel Merman, Fiddler On The Roof, Ghost, Jerome Robbins, Jim Brochu, JOHN WELLS, John Landis, JULIA ROBERTS, Karen Carpenter, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, LOUISE PITRE, Love Loss And What i Wore, Lucille Ball, Luke Kirby, Marg Delahunty, Martha Burns, Mary Walsh, Max Landis, MERYL STREEP, Milton Berle, NBC, Neil Genzlinger, New York Times, Panasonic Theatre, PAUL GROSS, Phil Silvers, Pulitzer Prize, RACHEL McADAMS, Sardi's, Slings & Arrows, Smash, Stephen Ouimettte, Tevye, The Producers, THEATRE PASSE MURAILLE, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Tracy Letts, Zero Hour, Zero Mostel
Sergio goes to Memphis, Susan comes to T.O. and Mr. Ondaatje gets ready for Theatre Passe Muraille
OUR TOWN: Art director Pat Flood moderates a Theatre Museum Canada free-admission workshop on the state of artistic collaboration in contemporary
HYATT: at Statler's
Canadian theatre tonight at 7 pm at the Design Exchange … filmmaker Omar Majeed is here this week for Q&As after Royal Cinema screenings of his new doc, TAQWACORE: The Birth of Muslim Punk Rock. Novelist and Muslim convert Michael Muhammad Knight, the guy who penned the book that gave birth to underground Muslim bands, will join him in a panel discussion on Saturday … Chicago-based singer and songwriter Susan Werner — she of 'agnostic gospel music' notoriety — is set to perform in her first Toronto concert in three years at Hugh's Room this coming Sunday. To mark the occasion she'll accompany herself on a
BEDFORD: as Lady Bracknell
baby grand loaned to Hugh's Room by Skydiggers member Michael Johnston … and my spies tell me Pam Hyatt has agreed to join piano man Ken Lindsay for another serenade of cocktail hour show tunes this Thursday at Statler's.
STRATFORD ON SALE: They've had a phenomenal season with great ticket sales, but if you still haven't been to the Stratford Festival this year, here's a deal you definitely need to know about. Right now you can buy $29 tickets for plays or $39 tickets for musicals on any of the remaining performances until the Stratford season ends on November 8. See Colm Feore
CULLEN: at the Forum (photo: David Hou)
as Macbeth and Cyrano de Bergerac, catch Brian Bedford's Lady Bracknell in The Importance Of Being Earnest, follow Sean Cullen in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To The Forum, choose from Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream and West Side Story, or choose them all — but don't delay, because this special offer ends tomorrow, October 20! So click here for the Stratford
ONDAATJE: Divisadero workshops
season calendar and order your tickets now.
FOOTLIGHTS: Acclaimed theatre director Daniel Brooks is working with acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje to adapt the latter's most recent novel, Divisadero, for the stage. Ondaatje fans can get to see three workshop productions of When My Name Was Anna, the theatrical adaptation, at Theatre Passe Muraille's Mainspace November 6-8. To order tickets, click here … Sampradaya Dance Creations hosts the world premiere of its newest work, Samvad, collectively
TRUJILLO: opening tonight
created and performed by dancers Meena Murugesan, Nadine Jackson and Shelly Ann McLeod, this weekend at the Enwave Theatre … and one fan who attended a preview performance of Memphis, a new musical about the birth of rock 'n' roll in the '50s, says he was "FLOORED by the choreography! The lighting design was spectacular, and some of the vocal performances were brilliant!" Has choreographer Sergio Trujillo summoned up his Jersey Boys magic to light up New York again? Fingers crossed. Memphis, which also features a brand new score with music by Bon Jovi founding member David Bryan, opens on Broadway tonight at the Shubert Theatre.
MAPLE LEAF JOKES? WE'VE GOT A MILLION OF 'EM:
Q: What do the Leafs and the Titanic have in common?
A: They both look good until they hit the ice.
The good that men do.
(And the women who do it with them.)
Posted in Actors, Authors, BOOKS, Gossip, Jokes, Movies, Music, SHOW BUSINESS, Showbuzz, Stars, Theatre
Tagged A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bon Jovi, Brian Bedford, COLM FEORE, Cyrano de Bergerac, Daniel Brooks, David Bryan, Design Exchange, Divisadero, Hugh's Room, Julius Caesar, KEN LINDSAY, Lady Bracknell, Macbeth, Meena Murugesan, Memphis: The Musical, Michael Johnston, Michael Muhammad Knight, Michael Ondaatje, Nadine Jackson, Omar Majeed, PAM HYATT, Pat Flood, Royal Cinema, Sampradaya Dance Creations, Samvad, SEAN CULLEN, Sergio Trujillo, Shelly Ann McLeod, Skydiggers, Statler's, Stratford Festival, Susan Werner, TAQWACORE: The Birth of Muslim Punk Rock, The Importance Of Being Earnest, Theatre Museum Canada, THEATRE PASSE MURAILLE, Toronto Maple Leafs, West Side Story, When My Name Was Anna
Ms Hathaway & Mr Dow get raves, Ms Alley gets ornery, and Ms Kirshner tells us where to go
NO PEOPLE LIKE SHOW PEOPLE: She was mentored by Margaret Atwood, and talent clearly runs in her family. So I guess we shouldn't be surprised that it was standing room only last week at the Gladstone when
HATHAWAY: on Broadway
Lauren Kirshner launched her first novel, Where We Have To Go. Her big sister, actress Mia Kirshner, was on hand to lead the cheers… your CBC boyfriend George Stroumboulopoulos spent Sunday chilling with Angelo Tsarouchas at the Greek Film Festival at the Egyptian Theatre in L.A., then followed up with a Mexican-Indian fusion feast at Cowboys & Turbans (seriously!) with Russell Peters … count Kirstie Alley as a major non-fan of headline-grabbing cyber-gossip Perez Hilton. "HEY PEREZ," she tweets, "I hear you filed a $25,000 lawsuit against the guy who bopped you. I'll pay you 30 grand if you let me pop you in the other eye! " … latest conquest for skyrocketing screen siren Anne Hathaway: Broadway. She's currently on stage winning raves with four-time Tony winner Audra McDonald and gifted matinee idol Raul Esparza in Daniel Sullivan's new production of
CARD: renaissance man
Twelfth Night … and add Rick Mercer to Bruce Dow's burgeoning list of fans. Mercer caught Dow lighting up the stage at Stratford last week in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum and laughed myself sick. He is one funny guy. Brilliant!"
WILD CARD: Actor-writer Liam Card is currently experiencing a one-man renaissance and enjoying every minute of it. He's currently working with his literary agent Chris Bucci on his first novel, Paradise, Mich., a wonderfully quirky premise that I won't give away here. But he's even more excited about his first screenplay, Textuality, which is tentatively scheduled to shoot this fall under the Strident Films production banner he co-founded with producer Marc Rigaux. In Card's screen scenario Jason Lewis, better known to millions of women as
LEWIS: textually challenged?
Kim Cattrall's boy toy Smith in Sex And The City, will co-star with Carly Pope (so good in Young People Fucking) as a guy who gets romantically detoured by his own text messages. Card has also written a nice supporting part for himself, as Lewis' best friend. Set to direct is another Card player, Warren Sonoda, who made a splash last September at TIFF with Cooper's Camera and who also directed Card in Puck Hogs, a new comedy scheduled to open later this year.
Stay tuned. There's bound to be more to come.
BORAT WAS SO 20006: Yes, that's the tagline on ads for Bruno, the new 'reality comedy' created and relentlessly promoted by Sacha Baron Cohen. Publicity generated by his outlandish premieres in London, Paris and Madrid and the stunningly stunned bogus 'photo shoot' candids has been truly eye-catching and, strategically speaking, among the best we've ever witnessed. The new comedy should have a huge July 10 opening weekend, but it will be interesting to see how it fares after that. Especially when many of us thought we'd already seen Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson do this act in Zoolander. (Hey, I'm just sayin'…) Meanwhile, opening the film in Europe first has provided a big box office cushion for Bruno, just in case the make-believe gay supermodel ends up needing one. And yes, you're right, I shouldn't take liberties with the film by abbreviating its title. The film's full name — in Europe, at least – is Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt. To see the Approved trailer, click here. To see the Restricted trailer – yes, there really is a Restricted trailer for Mature Audiences Only – click here. But be warned: If you thought Borat was outrageous, you ain't seen nothin' yet!
COLOR ME PLAID: Remember when Toronto audiences fell in love with Forever Plaid? Prepare to swoon again, and soon. The critically acclaimed off-Broadway musical will return for one night only at select Cineplex cinemas on Thursday July 9, and Cineplex is making a night of it with a LIVE red carpet appearance, an introduction by the original cast with special celebrity guests, and a pre-taped 20th Anniversary performance of the musical, starring members of the original Off-Broadway cast. The event will conclude with a LIVE performance by The Plaids who will perform numbers never before sung in the show, a mix of swinging standards and more contemporary songs. Can you imagine How Much Is That Doggie In The Window? juxtaposed with Who Let the Dogs Out? Me neither. And there's even a bouncing ball sing-a-long in the works.
Should be quite a night!
Andrea carries a Torch,
Angie conducts (unarmed,)
and three CBC guys we trust,
Tagged A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, Angelo Tsarouchas, Anne Hathaway, Audra McDonald, BEN STILLER, Borat, Bruce Dow, Bruno, CARLY POPE, CHRIS BUCCI, Cineplex, Cooper's Camera, Daniel Sullivan, Egyptian Theatre, Forever Plaid, GEORGE STROUMBOULOPOULOS, Greek Film Festival, How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?, Jason Lewis, Kim Cattrall, KIRSTIE ALLEY, Lauren Kirshner, LIAM CARD, Los Angeles, Marc Rigaux, MARGARET ATWOOD, Mich., OWEN WILSON, Paradise, PEREZ HILTON, Puck Hogs, Raul Esparza, RICK MERCER, RUSSELL PETERS, Sacha Baron Cohen, Sex And The City, Stratford Festival, Strident Films, Textuality, The Plaids, TIFF, Twelfth Night, Warren Sonoda, Where We Have To Go., Who Let the Dogs Out?, Young People Fucking, Zoolander


Life zooms on, meanwhile dad remains stuck in a care home in Oxfordshire after breaking his neck, and cannot venture into the wider world. So I started to make linocuts as a visual diary of my life. These are prints I made to comment on what was happening at the time, to pin on the fridge, or on the walls of his room.
…I put myself into all the prints like a sort of old-fashioned selfie, and added some arms to Venus, with a cell phone, just to bring her back to the present day.
The schools have a fabulous chef called Sephy who feeds everyone til they are rolling with contentment. I will never forget the pork chop that was bigger than my face and reminded me of a map of Africa.
The print room itself has a beautiful old Columbian press that I tried to make an etching of. In fact, as my linocuts are better than my etchings, here is a linocut of me trying to make an etching.
In January I went to Malaysia and Singapore with my mum, who dramatically declared it her last supper.
In reality we had at least 20 last suppers, and ate a lot!
The current mobile phone obsession seems to spill into our daily lives, and I found myself increasingly surrounded by phone zone silence.
Normally I don't mind, but sometimes it seems so ridiculous to see people dripping wet after having been for a swim, standing like statues in front of this portable screen. This is the changing room of the London Fields Lido, my favourite pool in the world.
When I started this series, I was really sad about many things, including how little I can do to change my dad's mobility.
I don't know what the future holds, but I feel that we carry our burdens with us: sometimes they feel heavy, but sometimes they help us fly.


Write a 10-page paper which analyzes ways that the earthquakes in California (1994) impacted society.
Use the three sources listed at the bottom, and use APA format.
(1) Describe the disaster and the events that took place (including the survivor and responder behavior).
(2) Identify the vulnerable populations and the way the disaster affected them.
(3) Discuss ways that the disaster brought about social change (both within EM and within the impacted community).
(4) Analyze a theory or theories that could be connected to this disaster. Your paper could also include detail on the way that the media was used in the disaster, how it affected mental health, and how first responders responded to the event.
Your paper should be in APA format, include a title page and reference list (these may be included in the page count), and should incorporate at least three scholarly sources that you retrieved from the Waldorf library.


This is a used gun I purchased a few years back and had it stripped and lube tuned just to be sure it was working fine and nothing was broken. It shoots the JSB Heavy pellets at 885 to 890 fps, so just over 18 fpe. I bought it with plans to shoot it in Hunter Piston, but have not and probably will not get around to it.
The action is in decent shape and the former owner did have a lot of things attached to the stock. It has repaired holes in a number of places that you will see in the pictures. The scope rail has been somewhat abused by the former owner, but still works fine. It certainly would be a good gun for hunting or for hunter class FT. I shot it a few times with a Williams rear sight attached and the accuracy was very good. Felt recoil is very low with the recoil-less mechanism working fine.
Will sell for $420 Shipped within Canada.


Seeing Other Things | Graphic Design related experiments, examples and ephemera.
Graphic Design related experiments, examples and ephemera.
The CHEESE MAG – ISSUE 1!!!!!
This is a bit of a 'best of' some info graphics jobs I've had recently. Well more the graphics rather than the info. Either way its graphic communication at its purest. I love it!
Here's a couple images that I came up with for a local pubs 2 for 1 meal deal.
Had big plans to create a new image everyday unrelated to work for a year as 2011 ticked over to 2012. The idea was for it to be a daily trip to the creative gym to keep the left side of my brain fighting fit. It lasted for about two months and then a new baby sort of got in the way. Hope to republish some of the better moments, and maybe even get back into 'the gym'. Hope you like them. This one was a picture of 'now'.
Whats this then? Hot new design studio brag book? Latest release from hot new design studio intern's band ? A Nightclub flyer where hot new design studio intern's band hang out? None of the above – Its 'A poem to the Albanian Woman' of course. Get on board kids. Dropping flouro inks 3o years before previously mentioned 'hot new design studio' even bought a pantone book, this 1972 piece of gold ended up in the local Salvos.
Managed to make it as a finalist in last years Australian Graphic Design Associations Poster Annual. Whittled down to forty entrants from like millions, I was quite chuffed to make it. Yes mines the naughty one, but it was in response to the theme of 'music'. Originally a call to action by Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in relation to Art, and revived as a tshirt in the heady days of punk (and intermittently ever since), I've reinvented it for the graphic designer – because sometimes typography is just not enough to say how you feel. Well in this case it is, kerning is the spacing between letters, and the source of much 'tut-tuting' amongst designers if done badly. Seems they let this one through.


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SENShobo
Can Ottawa Build Key Organization & Roster Element This Week?
by SENShobo on 06/22/11 at 12:24 PM ET
Currently, it is inseparable from the Detroit Red Wings organization.
If you have watched some of the Ottawa Senators' road to the draft videos, it is the reason that prospects don't merely ride a bike at the combine until their insides want out; prospects are interviewed, invited to NHL cities, and even dine in the homes of NHL captains, all with the hopes of searching it out.
Character.
Despite being a most coveted quality for any player or organization to possess, it takes the longest development route, and it can disappear in a flash. With so much riding on it this week, can Ottawa handle this key organizational and roster asset well?
The two embodiments of character, the players and the organization, seem inextricably intertwined.
A few years back, Ottawa had an impressive defence corps, and two of its pillars were coming up for renewal. Wade Redden had been a formidable player on the ice, and just as recognizable off the ice during his time at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario. If you saw him lifting the Cup recently, you know that Zdeno Chara was no slouch either. Both wanted to return, and Ottawa was looking for just that.
Instead, negotiations were thought to have been progressing not quickly enough. Instead of the matching deals Ottawa had hoped for, they jumped the gun in signing Redden to a two year, $13 million deal, hoping that Chara would follow suit. The goodwill expunged, Chara followed Peter Chiarelli to Boston, even as it later emerged that he was in tears over having to leave Ottawa. The Senators never again had a beast like Chara on the blue line, and no organization ever saw the best of Redden again. Not only that, but it would not go unnoticed around the League when Marian Hossa was signed and traded in the space of a week. Organizational character was a stock on the downfall in Ottawa.
Fast forward a few years, and while it may go unnoticed to some, the Senators did indeed grant Heatley his trade wish, every element of that dream. Slightly more to fans' liking, in looking for a deal that was needed for Ottawa, Murray took the trade deal that was best for Mike Fisher. Just a week ago now, Murray went at least partly on the advice of his most famous organizational hire, Mike Babcock, and brought MacLean to Ottawa. Watch just a few minutes of any of his introductory interviews, and you are left with no doubt that his character is as impressive as his duster. Bit by bit, the painstaking process to restore prestige to Ottawa's character takes shape.
So why is it that Dave Cameron is jumping the gun and announcing himself as Ottawa's new assistant coach? It's the worst kept secret that Melnyk wanted Murray to take Cameron on as the new head coach. Cameron himself has both the resume — appearances in the World Junior, OHL, and Memorial Cup Finals — as well as the character — stepping down from the Binghamton Senators to coach in the OHL, at the request of Melnyk — to justify his inclusion in both the head and assistant coaching searches, not to mention Murray's familiarity with him. Instead of talking about how his work in the OHL might translate into helping the hefty crop of young Senators make the transition to Ottawa, we are talking about how this feels as forced as the signing of Kovalev, even if the result should be much better.
Character is not an asset that Ottawa should be gambling with at this juncture. Any hockey fan in Buffalo or Atlanta can tell you how lucky you are to have an owner who will put full resources at a team's disposal in pursuit of a championship. Any business manager would just as soon tell you that you need to keep internal discussions in that realm for the good of the organization, and that the man at the top needs to be able to trust his delegation of responsibilities, lest he trip over himself in leaning down to tinker with the lower levels best left to their respective experts.
The next few days also gives Ottawa the challenge of finding character at the organizational level, to solidify the foundation on which their next championship run will be built. You might see Zack Smith bouncing between Ottawa's bottom six and Binghamton's top six, en route to 20 points in 23 AHL playoff games, leading to the organization's first Calder Cup, and decide that that's character Ottawa can build on.
You may also remember a high Senators draft pick meant to capitalize on a shot at top talent, Alexei Yashin. You may find that you feel his tenure did not note itself with examples of character, and only thanks to another team as caught up with numbers rather than intangibles were the Senators able to get assets back for that high risk oversight.
Now Ottawa once again finds itself in its best earned draft position since 1996. Not having the luxury of a troupe of scouts or countless hours of interviews with players, beat writers, and coaches, I can't tell you whether it will be Huberdeau, Couturier, or Strome who will wind up with the best NHL career.
What I can tell you is something about character. I can tell you that it's no small feat to be compared to Mike Richards by the crowd that cheered him on in the years leading up to his draft. I can tell you it's no small feat to be a Europe-born player who came over here to adjust to our game to the point no one recognizes you as a European player anymore, let alone to become captain of an OHL team that nurtured five hall of famers in Bill Barber, Paul Coffey, Al MacInnis, Larry Robinson, and Scott Stevens.
Finally, I can tell you that psychological impacts are one of the hardest areas of a player to find an advantage. One of the few areas where it can spell success is when you tap into a player's existing internal motivators and connectors. In the case of Gabriel Landeskog, an internal allegiance is his childhood favourite team and player: the Ottawa Senators' Daniel Alfredsson.
It may seem no important detail, but that psychological motivator gives a player a step up in his development. He can identify with and integrate with an already established internal bond. It can give the boost needed to accept hard decisions about development, and the motivation needed to excel above what one would expect. You may remember some of the players recently drafted by their childhood teams: Matt Duchene, Drew Doughty, and P.K. Subban. (You may also remember a player who has struggled with his role, drafted by his childhood team's arch rival: Nazem Kadri)
If you are fortunate enough to work for Apple when you grew up worshiping Steve Jobs, or to work for CBC when you can still remember Foster Hewitt calls, or to work for Chevy when you can still remember the first time you took apart a small block, you know this advantage. You may not wind up being the CEO of any of those companies, but you know that you have an advantage over every other employee who was just looking for a job. I don't possess multiple psych degrees, but I am engaged to someone who does, and I'll lean on that expertise when I can.
I can't tell you that Gabriel Landeskog will be the most desirable player available when the Senators' pick comes around — second line center seems to be the need most likely to affect the "best player available" criterion — no matter where their stable of picks slots them or allows them to slot into. I can't tell you that his early maturity won't mean he could be drafted higher than his projections. What I can tell you, and what I hope Ottawa remembers, is that guys like Landeskog don't come around often, nor are they usually available when they do. Those are the guys that become the foundation when properly placed in an organization, and the guys on which an organization can best grow character to root within its roster. I can tell you that if Gabriel Landeskog puts on an Ottawa Senators jersey on Friday, Ottawa will not be disappointed.
Filed in: NHL General, NHL Teams, Ottawa Senators, |	SENShobo | Permalink
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As Fisher's Character Departs, Ottawa's is Revealed
Hockey Blogging Leading to Hockey Engineering
Heatley's "Homecoming" Must Be About The Message As Much As The Man
In Case You Wondered About My Absence
Ottawa Strolls Into Contender's Clutches
Senators Run Out Of Gas Against Canucks
Canucks Offer Ottawa's First Stern Test
First Goals Often Win, But Not When Sens Hit Back With Five
Senators Face Differently Abled, Evenly Matched Thrashers
About SENShobo
Native of Northern California. Hockey fan since 1998... sort of... there's a hiatus in there that I still can't explain.
I want to know about anything and everything related to the sport and the spectacle. I watch, I react, I write it down.
My interest in the Sharks was initially a matter of geographic convenience and regional loyalty because that seemed to be how it worked. I had no prior interest (at all-- AT ALL) in professional sports of any kind. When I met hockey, it might have set off a chain reaction of general sports fandom. It hasn't, I don't think it will. At all.
Since then, that interest developed into full blown (mostly sort of usually almost completely) exclusive loyalty to the Sharks.
I started blogging a couple years ago on wordpress. I still occasionally put things there that I don't think fit here because they are not about the Sharks. Wherever my words wander, here on Kuklas Korner, they will (usually) hang on to a teal thread.
I can be found in cyberspace on Twitter @petshark47, or emailed at talkingstick@petshark.net

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Level three of the program is for those members who want to have the deepest possible engagement with Bittunes, that of equity partner, to have a share in the future of the Company as we grow. This is more significant now that we have decided to create the Independent Rights Portal, because this makes a future Bittunes exit far more likely.
You will also be able to contribute ideas and vote on the suggestions and submissions of other members of the Partner Program. Like level one and two participants, you will be part of an external 'think tank' and will be credited for this work (in a list of contributors) when we launch Bittunes 2.0.
You will be eligible to receive three Channels. This will give you the ability to secure a Channel for the genre relevant to you in your own country, plus secure it in a major market like the US or UK. You will then have one Channel left to extend your reach, or make a speculative bet in another genre and market.
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1. Touch POWER ON/OFF pad.
indicator (HIGH COOL) will light.
not automatically turn back on. The user must touch POWER ON/OFF to resume operation.
light in order as you touch.
Fan and cooling at maximum performance.
Unit is preset to HIGH COOL when first turned on after unit is plugged in.
Fan operates at medium speed; cooling power at medium.
Cooling for sleeping comfort with low fan speed.
This setting can be used to circulate air whenever cooling is not desired.
The fan will operate at medium speed.
When the unit is turned off, the last fan speed will be stored in memory.
The next time the air conditioner is used, the memorized fan speed will start automatically.
1. Touch ENERGY SAVER pad.
• ENERGY SAVER indicator will go off.
NOTE: ENERGY SAVER cannot be set during FAN ONLY mode operation.
Adjust the louvers to change the direction of air flow for uniform and efficient cooling of the room.
CAUTION Do not remove any material (ex.
styrofoam, etc.) from inside the unit.
25" (635mm) (W) x 17 -1/ 4 " (438mm) to 17-3/ 4"
(451mm) (H) x 4" (102mm) minimum (D).
assembly into the top angle and the bottom channels.
2-1. Unscrew the 2 screws at the corners of the front panel.
Keep them as they will be used later.
lower corners towards you about an inch.
Next lift it up and pull it towards you.
lever when removing the front panel.
flow into the room where the air conditioner is installed.
hand hold located at the bottom center of the chassis.
front panel then, hook the cabinet top.
2 screws removed in step 2.
(L=1", 25.4 mm), working from the inside of the cabinet.
the window sash with 3 screws (L=1", 25.4 mm).
window sash and the outside window sash.
8-1. Slide the chassis back into the cabinet.
and side of the cabinet .
8. Unscrew the one screw holding earth wire .
3. Unscrew the four screws holding the cabinet.
Two screws are on top side.
Two screws are on each side.
9. Cut the fixing band holding the wires.
each corner of the base pan.
5. Unscrew the four screws holding the control unit.
Two screws are on front side.
Two screws are on right side.
11.Unscrew the four screws holding control box cover.
6. Unscrew the one screw holding the power supply cord.
7. Unscrew the one screw holding the wire holder.
compressor holding the terminal cover.
clockwise. And remove the propeller fan.
14.Unscrew the five screws holding the connecting stay.
19.Unscrew the three screws holding condenser shroud.
15.Unscrew the two screws holding the shroud cover.
Two screws are on the back side.
Four screws are on the each side.
Unscrew the two screws holding the condenser cover .
20.Unscrew the four screws holding the evaporator.
Two are on left side.
Two are on right side.
pull it toward you and move to right.
22.Unscrew the four screws holding the bulkhead.
Three screws are on the each side.
One screw is on the bottom side.
28.Detach terminals by using long-nose pliers.
Two screws are holding the fan motor capacitors.
One screw is holding the capacitor clamp.
Two screws are holding the transformer.
Unfasten the three spacers of the control box unit.
25.Unscrew the one screw holding the fan motor lead wire.
that have large head holding it with bulkhead.
Note: Torque is 7 - 10 kgf.cm at re-installing.
on copper to copper joints.
not to introduce any flux inside the tubing.
brazing is done. Do not allow it to dry out.
to flow freely into the joint.
solder flows at 1200˚F and silfos flows at 1300˚F.
the surface of the tubing. Figure 3 and 4.
point where it will vaporize and be expelled from the system in the form of vapor.
System parts must be above 110 ˚F.
Halide Torch be sure the room is free from refrigerant vapors. Watch the flame for the slightest change in color.
(3) Set the selector switch of a volt-ohm-meter(or a tester) on the resistance range.
Reading must be more than 10M at DC 500V.
2. Data of Performance Curve is measured between 40RH% and 70RH%.
'02 SHARP CORP. (2S0.85E) Printed in U.S.A.


Euin sweated and walked down the street: he was late and only getting later. The air was hot and humid. He looked at each front door, hoping that he would recognise one. He reached the end of the road. Nothing. He crossed the road, his irritation building. Why didn't I write down the address? He thought. Why did I think I could remember where he lived? He walked. He saw a parking space that had been marked out in white paint. It was a wide, white outline of an oblong. Painted in its' centre was 'JACK'S SPACE: DO NOT PARK HERE'. Euin laughed and felt relieved. He saw two Mini-Coopers on the driveway. Both were black, both had the Union Jack painted on their roofs. He recognised the cars as his late grandfather's and walked towards the front door. He stood in the porch looking overheated. He wrapped his knuckles on the tan coloured front door. He was late.
'O.K.,' Euin said and then breathed in deeply. He could imagine how impatiently they had waited for him.
Mary and Tessa stood in front of Euin, looking irritated. He felt uneasy being here with them. His late grandfather, Jack, had not allowed women in his house and now Tessa, his daughter, was moving in.
'He really only used to use the microwave and then just to heat things up,' Mary said, shaking her head.
Euin nodded in agreement. He remembered the one and only night that he had stayed in this house. They had eaten microwave curries and it was one of only three meals in his entire life that Euin could remember not finishing. Later that night, when he had crept downstairs to sate his hunger, he had found only tinned frankfurters in the cupboards and only UHT milk in the refrigerator.
Tessa walked through the kitchen to the conservatory. It was wide and thin and dark and cold. Piled up on the left were bundles of yellowing newspaper. On the right, stacked haphazardly, were pieces of wood. Euin could identify two chair legs but the purpose of the other pieces mystified him. His own legs felt cold, especially his shins.
'Hopefully we can get rid of this room. Fingers crossed we can extend the kitchen out here,' Tessa said.
They all stepped through a sliding door which led to the garden. Keeping the garden in shade were thin pine trees which grew in rows on the left and the right hand sides. On the right of the garden, below the trees, was a light grey concrete patio. On the left, unplanted flowerbeds and a small patch of green lawn.
'The lawn is so green! You can so tell this was fields a hundred years ago,' Tessa said, wistfully.
'Yes. I suppose.' Tessa said, marching back inside. Euin and Mary followed her. They all walked into the dining room, which was at the back of the house next to the kitchen. This room was dominated by a large oak table which had around it six oak chairs. The only other item of furniture in the room was a heavy looking oak desk. The desk was on the far side of the room from Euin, Mary and Tessa. On the desk was a small blue radio.
'No. No, I don't think so,' he said, trying not to take sides.
They all walked up the stairs. Euin looked to his left and felt anxious when he saw no banister. On his right ran a wooden rail, parallel to the staircase. Above the rail were miniature stills from Disney films; Mickey Mouse, Bambi, Snow White and the Jungle Book. They turned right at the top of the stairs and faced a small bathroom. The door was open. There was a large, deep basin and a single, rusted tap above it. The floor was of worn cork tiles. They walked into the bathroom. Euin looked at the bath. The taps and the plughole were caked in lime scale. The tub was streaked in rings with watermarks. The room was cold.
Next to the sink laid a shaving brush and a lightly rusted disposable razor. Above the sink there was no mirror. Hanging where the mirror should have been was a photograph of two young men in uniform, sitting on motorcycles. One of them was Jack.
'God he loved the army, mum didn't he?' said Euin.
'And we'll have a shower over the bath,' Tessa said, ignoring her mother and pointing to the bathtub.
They backed out of the bathroom and walked into the master bedroom. Facing the door was a lone bookshelf. On it were books about World War Two, Buddhism and London's fire fighters. Below the shelf was a grey chair. It was angular and top heavy and rested improbably on tiny, black, bowlegs. Mary walked slowly to the chair and then sat down on it. She leaned back heavily and looked tired. Next to the chair were all Jack's shoes, laid out in pairs in a long neat line. All were leather and all were polished.
'D'you remember it was his Sunday night tradition to polish those mum?' said Tessa.
'O.K.,' he said and walked over to the shoes. He bent down and picked them up. They were stone cold. He stood up and breathed out. From his mouth and nose he could see his breath trailing out like ever so faint smoke.
Euin walked to the window, clutching the shoes. He put them to rest on the windowsill and opened the window. He leaned out and craned his neck to the left. As far as his eye could see there were gardens and trees and playhouses and expensive wooden lawn furniture. In one garden he saw two boys of roughly eight bouncing rhythmically on a trampoline. They were still dressed in their pyjamas, though it was now mid afternoon. Euin thought it absurd that these two boys would grow into men and that they would have houses and cars and children and marriages (and perhaps divorces) of their own. Leading to what? He thought. Always the same thing: death. And after that? Relatives sweeping through your home and putting everything you owned into two categories: 'worth stealing' and 'for the skip'. He breathed in and out deeply. The boys bounced and a little humidity from outside crept in through the open window.
He stepped back from the window, turned around and noticed a single bed, fast up against the left hand wall. This was neatly made; the ebony black blankets neatly tucked under the mattress and turned down six inches at the head of the bed. There was one, white pillow which lay precisely parallel with the headboard. It was the neatest bed that Euin could recall seeing.
'It was always me who did the beds when we were married, Tessa. Or you children,' Mary said, breathing heavily. She coughed.
Euin walked back over to the window.
'Yes, mum.' Tessa said through gritted teeth. They stood in silence. It seemed, to Euin, that memories fell into similar categories as possessions. Those worth remembering; the incriminating, the irritating, those that had the power to justify keeping a relationship unchanged after death, those would always be kept, treasured even. Memories that failed to fit that pattern; awkwardly presented kindnesses like when Jack had paid for Euin's university tuition without informing Tessa, or feats of great thrift, like how Jack had lived off only half of his pension, investing the remainder- these would be forgotten, eroded slowly by the lapping waves of time or drowned out by the louder voices of criticism: it is not everything of a man that is swallowed up in death: their love, their hate, their envy all lives on, only not in the ratio that it was in life, only in the ratio of those who remember him.
Should he stand up for Jack? No, Euin thought, that was only opening the door for more remembered bitterness from Mary, and he could see that his mother couldn't take much more of that today. Mary would always wait for the naively offered complement 'Wasn't he good at D.I.Y?' and would counter it with the truth, her truth, 'He never once did our guttering. And when he painted our windowsills did he clear up after himself? You can bet he left that to me. Paint all over the carpet!' No, Euin thought, better to not open the door than have it slammed on his fingers.
'Anyway look Euin, if there's anything else you want to take then you can have it!' Tessa said. Mary coughed, and then took a deep breath.
'What about that chair?' Euin said, limply. He looked back at the boys on their trampoline, in their pyjamas, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing.


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Ingredients: fresh Italian Datterino tomato 100%. Concentrated at low temperature.


text:
CRYENGINE-powered 150-player American Civil War FPS Now Available on Steam Early Access
Prepare for combat on historically accurate battlefields in War of Rights
Tuesday, December 4, 2018 — War of Rights from Campfire Games has now launched on Steam Early Access. Powered by CRYENGINE, War of Rights is set during the American Civil War and supports 150 player combat on authentically recreated battlefields from the Maryland Campaign of September 1862. Featuring historically accurate uniforms, weapons, animations, objectives, and drill camps, War of Rights immerses players in the heart of the costliest and deadliest war ever fought on American soil.
The initial Steam Early Access release will include more than 30 different skirmish areas and over 75 accurate regiments. Each map in the game is a period reconstruction of the buildings, farms, forests, roads, and rocks as they were in 1862, so players can fight through the streets of Harper's Ferry or across the cornfields of Antietam, and more. Gamers can choose to play from a range of different perspectives, from a lowly private on the frontlines up to a major general orchestrating the strategy, and carnage, in massive battles where teamwork is essential.
Mads Støjko Larsen, Co-Founder of developer Campfire Games, said: "We originally started the project with no game development experience, just to see how far we'd get. CRYENGINE was the obvious choice for us when having to select an engine. For the first years we had no programmers on our team, so we were naturally drawn to the engine that had vastly superior visual capabilities. Our levels are all as close to a 1:1 scale of the real thing as possible, so having CRYENGINE's amazing vegetation system has been a huge help to us."
For more information on the game please visit https://warofrights.com/, or to find out more about how CRYENGINE helps developers achieve their vision please visit https://www.cryengine.com/.
Jennifer Willis Senior PR Manager, Crytek
jenniferw@crytek.com
www.crytek.com
Official War of Rights Steam Page Link
Official War Of Rights Webpage
About CRYENGINE
Crytek is an independent videogame developer, publisher, and technology provider dedicated to pushing the boundaries of gaming with its cutting-edge 3D game development platform CRYENGINE. With headquarters in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) and studios in Kiev (Ukraine), and Istanbul (Turkey), Crytek has created multiple award-winning titles, including the original Far Cry, the Crysis series, Ryse: Son of Rome, The Climb, Robinson: The Journey and Hunt: Showdown. Crytek delivers fun and innovative gaming experiences for PC, consoles, and VR and continues to grow its reach in the games-as-a-service market. Every Crytek game is created with CRYENGINE, which can be used by anyone to create games.
cryengine.com
press@crytek.com
Prezly: PR Software for Gaming


text:
Karl Kautsky as Architect of the October Revolution
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Lenin remained true to the tactical guidelines of Karl Kautsky after the latter had abandoned them.
Karl Kautsky among the delegates to the Amsterdam Conference of the Second International, August 1904. Cornelius Leenheer / Wikimedia
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Connor Kilpatrick
In recent months, Jacobin has seen an exchange of views on the theme of Kautsky vs. Lenin. Many good points were made, but on the subject of the October Revolution, we are presented with a stark choice: either Kautsky is right and Lenin is wrong, or Lenin is right and Kautsky wrong. But this is a strange and unhelpful debate, because — as Bolsheviks of Lenin's generation knew very well and current research reaffirms — Kautsky and Lenin were on the same page over a whole range of fundamental issues. Indeed, Kautsky served as mentor to the Bolsheviks precisely on the issues that defined them and divided them from their Menshevik rivals.
Karl Kautsky even deserves to be called the architect of the Bolshevik victory in October. Of course, I am not saying that Kautsky was necessarily the first to come up with these ideas or that the Bolsheviks did not arrive at them independently. But Kautsky gave authoritative endorsement to the key tactical ideas of Bolshevism, giving clarity and confidence to the Russians with an impact that is hard to overestimate. These ideas were set forth in specific writings much lauded by the Bolsheviks and used by them in polemics against the Menshevik "opportunists." The same ideas led to their party's victory in October and the ensuing civil war. Lenin and the Bolsheviks never rejected these ideas nor the writings in which Kautsky expressed them.
Getting the Kautsky-Bolshevik relation right is not just an academic exercise, a "fun fact" about the Marxists of yore. As the current debate shows, the Russian and the Bolshevik victory are crucially distorted if we go along with the folklore that the Bolsheviks succeeded because they relied on "insurrection" rather than "electoralism" — folklore perpetuated by friends of October as well as by its foes. Nor did the revolution in 1917 have anything to do with Lenin's argument that "soviet democracy" was a higher type than "parliamentary democracy," as incarnated in the Constituent Assembly that was shut down in January 1918 by the Soviet government (at the time, a coalition of Bolsheviks and Left SRs). During 1917, "soviet power" was not understood in these terms either by the Bolsheviks or the mass soviet constituency.
Therefore, if we want to appreciate the centrality of Kautsky's tactical advice to the October victory, we must first document the concrete links between him and the Bolsheviks. We will then examine what the revolution was not and refute the standard account just mentioned. After looking at the actual political dynamics of 1917, I conclude using Lenin's own account to present a much better idea of what the "Leninists" learned from their victory.
The Love/Hate Relationship Between Kautsky and Lenin
I first began to appreciate the strength of the Kautsky-Lenin link almost two decades ago when writing a long study of Lenin's famous 1902 book What Is to Be Done? (Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, 2006). The young Ulianov (not yet Lenin) paid Kautsky an extravagant compliment when he remarked that his famous formula — "Social Democracy is the merger of socialism and the worker movement" — "reproduced the foundational ideas of the Communist Manifesto."1 This remark is only a symbol for Kautsky's immense impact on Russian Social Democracy and the Bolsheviks in particular. Indeed, his seminal 1892 book, The Erfurt Program, taught young Russian Social Democrats such as Lenin what it meant to be a social democrat.
The Kautsky theme prominent in Lenin Rediscovered upset many otherwise favorable critics. Sure (they argued), the young Lenin had a lot of complimentary things to say about the prestigious popularizer Kautsky. But doesn't Lih realize that, in 1914, when Kautsky failed to call for a revolutionary response to the declaration of war, the scales fell from Lenin's eyes, he rethought Marxism, and denounced "Kautskyism" root and branch?
But did Lenin actually ever reject Kautskyism, if by this term we mean the ideas that he, Lenin, had earlier praised so enthusiastically? What, in fact, did the post-1914 Lenin have to say about the pre-1914 Kautsky? Luckily, Soviet scholars created a research tool that allowed me to answer this question definitively: exhaustive bibliographic references to any literary production mentioned by Lenin in any way. Soviet censors did not allow any really useful commentary on the context of Lenin's works, so scholars compensated by providing the fifth edition of Lenin's complete works that came out in the 1960s with these amazing bibliographies.
What I found stunned me. First of all was the sheer volume of references — not just to the post-1914 Kautsky who became a more and more virulent critic of Bolshevism — but rather to long-ago Kautsky publications from before the war. Lenin's remarks start immediately after the outbreak of war in 1914 and continue right up to the end (Lenin's last article contains one). Clearly Lenin had a Kautsky fixation, even while Kautsky was becoming yesterday's man in the West.
The references are also remarkable for the wide range of Kautsky's pre-1914 writings that Lenin felt called upon to discuss. Indeed, Lenin once answered a party questionnaire by affirming that he had read just about everything by Kautsky. And finally, these references are striking because they are overwhelmingly positive. Taken all in all, they constitute a strong endorsement of Kautsky-when-he-was-a-Marxist (as Lenin expressed it). I have put together a sort of database of these references that I hope to put online soon.2
But if the scales — much to the chagrin of many socialists today — refused to fall from Lenin's eyes, why did he attack Kautsky so relentlessly after 1914? Precisely because he saw Kautsky as a renegade, that is, as someone who renounced or refused to act on his own correct views. This term is prominently displayed in the title of a once-famous book Lenin wrote in late 1918 when recovering from an assassination attempt: The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Legend has it that red-diaper babies in the thirties and forties grew up thinking "Renegade" was Kautsky's first name — thus showing a better sense of Lenin's attitude than many Marxist intellectuals today.
The word translated as "Kautskyism" in Soviet-era editions of Lenin's works is kautskianstvo — that is, not an ism, but a type of political behavior that can be summed up as "talking the talk, but not walking the walk." As such, Lenin hurls the terms at a wide range of opponents who had nothing to do with Kautsky's ideas — for example, before 1917, Lev Trotsky. In the case of Kautsky himself, the accusation of kautskianstvo was an affirmation of Kautskyism, that is, the ideas found in Kautsky's prewar writings that had so thrilled Lenin back in the day.
Lenin's personal relationship to Kautsky and his ideas is not the half of it. Kautsky was an essential mentor to the Bolsheviks as a whole. Lenin's longtime lieutenant, Lev Kamenev, when sitting down to the task of preparing the first edition of Lenin's complete works, lamented the difficulties faced by Lenin before 1917 in getting his ideas to the Russian worker: the short-lived and small-circulation underground newspapers, the censored "Aesopian" language, the need for deceptive pseudonyms, the books pulled off the press by the authorities. In contrast, Bolshevik reading groups had a steady supply of legal and illegal Russian translations of Kautsky's works (some prepared by Lenin himself). I have looked at enough reading lists of such groups to assert that Kautsky was by far the most important author, more so than any Russian Social Democrat. In State and Revolution, Lenin himself made the point:
Undoubtedly, an immeasurably larger number of Kautsky's works have been translated into Russian than into any other language. It is not without justification that German Social Democrats sometimes say jokingly that Kautsky is more read in Russia than in Germany (we may say, in parentheses, that there is deeper historical significance in this joke than those who first made it suspected; for the Russian workers, by making in 1905 an unusually great and unprecedented demand for the best works of the best Social Democratic literature and editions of these works in quantities unheard of in other countries, rapidly transplanted, so to speak, the enormous experience of a neighboring, more advanced country to the young soil of our proletarian movement).3
To convince yourself of Kautsky's centrality, take down your copy of Bukharin and Preobrazhensky's 1918 textbook of Bolshevism, The ABC of Communism, and peruse the reading lists recommended for earnest new recruits to Bolshevism. The prerevolutionary entries from Lenin are mainly about agricultural statistics (What is To be Done? is not included), and they are vastly outnumbered by Kautsky material, with writings covering a wide range of essential topics, from Karl Marx's economic doctrines to antisemitism (including Road to Power discussed below).
Kautsky's Tactical Advice for the Upcoming Revolution
I continue to be amazed at the list of crucial topics about which Kautsky served as a Bolshevik mentor. But I'll concentrate on two items of tactical advice that were undoubtedly crucial to the organization's victory in October and beyond. I will first look at the specific writings where Kautsky put forth these ideas as well as the immediate Bolshevik reaction to them.
The first crucial piece of Kautsky advice is what I call — in order to distinguish it from so many other meanings of the word — "Bolshevik hegemony." According to the Bolsheviks themselves, if there was one word that summed up specifically Bolshevik tactics, it was hegemony. In 1906, Lenin summed up "the fundamental principles of Bolshevik tactics" in this way: "A bourgeois revolution, brought about by the proletariat and the peasantry despite the instability of the bourgeoisie." He then claimed that Kautsky had provided "a brilliant vindication … the essence of this tactic [is] totally affirmed by Kautsky … Kautsky's analysis satisfies us completely."
Lenin was referring to an article entitled "Driving Forces and Prospects of the Russian Revolution." Kautsky's title poised the following questions: what class forces in Russian society are capable of pushing the upcoming revolution "to the end," that is, as far as it can go? What can this revolution maximally hope to accomplish under present social conditions? Kautsky answered both questions by pointing to the Russian peasantry: on the one hand, its unsatisfied needs made it an essential ally for the socialist proletariat, and on the other, this ally set up a barrier to full socialist transformation.
The Bolsheviks were ecstatic about this article. Lenin arranged a translation and wrote detailed commentaries. Down in the Caucasus, the young Bolshevik Iosif Stalin produced his own commentary, using Kautsky's arguments to expose Menshevik errors. Indeed, Kautsky's 1906 article can truly be called a charter document of Bolshevism.
If there was anyone who was even more enthusiastic about this article than the Bolsheviks, it was Lev Trotsky. He asserted in this connection that anyone who had read works such as his own Results and Prospects "will see that I have no reason to reject even a single one of the positions formulated in the article I have translated by Kautsky, because the development of our thinking in these two articles is identical." And, it should be added, Trotsky was if anything more insistent than the Bolsheviks that the Russian peasants were an insuperable barrier to socialist transformation. He argued that immediately after a democratic revolution, conflicts would begin to emerge between socialist workers and the peasant majority, and that these conflicts would likely lead to an armed clash. Barring a successful European revolution, this clash would end in proletarian defeat.
Aha, some will say, Bolshevik hegemony is tied to the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and thus irrelevant to the proletarian-socialist revolution in October. What this objection overlooks is that for all parties to the discussion — Trotsky as well as Lenin and Kautsky — a fully socialist revolution was incompatible with an alliance with a peasantry that itself was not consciously and voluntarily in favor of socialism. And yet, both before and after October, the Bolsheviks were committed to respecting basic peasant interests. During the civil war, the Bolsheviks placed heavy burdens on the peasantry (though hardly more than on workers) in pursuit of common interests as perceived by the peasants, namely, preventing the victory of a landowner/capitalist counterrevolution. Bolshevik leaders stressed many times that victory in 1917, victory in the civil war, and (hopefully) victory via New Economic Policy (NEP) was based on proletarian leadership of the peasants in pursuit of common interests — that is, on Bolshevik hegemony.
In other words, after October the Bolsheviks surprised themselves by deciding that socialist revolution was compatible with proletarian leadership of the peasants. Thus there was continuity in the actual policy of Bolshevik hegemony and there was discontinuity in ideological assumptions about socialist revolution.
In articles written in 1909, Kautsky affirmed the continuing relevance of his analysis — and, as usual, his remarks were energetically circulated by Russian Bolsheviks:
The industrial proletariat of Russia is the bearer of the [democratic] Russian revolution, and this is precisely why it cannot count on the support of the bourgeoisie for the revolution. Only in the peasantry does the Russian proletariat find a class whose economic interests do not contradict its own and who cannot achieve a satisfactory position in society without revolution. … At present the tsarist government itself [because of the Stolypin reforms] is energetically working at broadening the outlook of the Russian peasant beyond the narrow boundaries of his native village … And this in the final analysis will lead to even further intensification of his dissatisfaction.
After the October revolution, both Lenin and Trotsky endorsed the argument of Kautsky's 1906 article and called Kautsky out for abandoning it himself. As Lenin wrote in Renegade Kautsky:
But now Kautsky does not say a single word about the controversies of that time (for fear of being exposed by his own statements!), and thereby makes it utterly impossible for the German reader to understand the essence of the matter. Mr. Kautsky could not tell the German workers in 1918 that in 1905 he had been in favor of an alliance of the workers with the peasants and not with the liberal bourgeoisie, and on what conditions he had advocated this alliance, and what program he had outlined for it.4
Bolshevik hegemony was not the only piece of tactical advice by Kautsky that proved crucial in 1917. In 1909, Kautsky published a small book entitled Road to Power. The Bolsheviks reacted with by now typical enthusiasm. In a glowing book review, Lenin's closest lieutenant, Grigorii Zinoviev, brought out the book's wide range of topics as well as its significance as a weapon of the "orthodox" against the "revisionists" — or, in Russia, the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks:
Kautsky's work, along with its great significance for general politics, has also, of course, large implications specifically for Social Democracy. His book sums up the events of the last five years: revolution in Russia, the awakening of the East, the regrouping of social forces in Germany, the successes of the proletariat in Austria, the sharpening of the class struggle in England, and so forth … This new work of Kautsky's has already sparked off a battle between the orthodox and the revisionists, and this battle is still expanding, providing us with the opportunity once more to judge the respective positions of the two camps as applied to the vital questions of today.
Only a few years later, this 1909 publication came to be viewed as the swan song of the good "Kautsky-when-he-was-a-Marxist." In early 1915, in the first throes of his indignation against Kautsky the sellout, Lenin wrote:
It was none other than Kautsky himself, in a whole series of articles and in his book Road to Power (which came out in 1909), who described with the fullest possible definiteness the basic traits of the approaching third epoch and who pointed out its radical distinctiveness from the second (yesterday's) epoch … But Kautsky now commits to the flame what he once worshipped and he is changing front in the most incredible, most indecent, most shameless fashion.5
Of particular interest to the Bolsheviks was Kautsky's condemnation of any kind of political "agreements" (soglasheniia) with liberal or democrat reformers. I give the Russian translation of "agreement," because in 1917 the rejection of "agreementism" (soglashatelstvo) became central to the Bolshevik message, as we shall see. Zinoviev (undoubtedly speaking for Lenin in this instance) cited Kautsky as an authority on this issue:
The issue of the relation of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie (both liberal and democratic), of possible blocs and agreements [soglasheniia] with it, of the growth or the blunting of contradictions between it and the proletariat, and so forth, has for a long time been the central point of dispute between Marxists and revisionists in all countries … Social Democracy, in Kautsky's opinion, must conduct a purge of its own ranks, it must free itself from petty-bourgeois elements, it must stand out more sharply than ever before against the politics of blocs and agreements with the bourgeoisie.
Kautsky's case for anti-agreementism rested on his perception that the world was entering a new era of revolutionary upheaval. He argued that in this new age of revolutions, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) must not compromise, or go soft on imperialism or even join a coalition government — rather, it must remain true to its heritage of irreconcilable opposition. In Kautsky's words:
The more imperturbable, consistent, and irreconcilable the Social Democratic Party remains, all the more readily will it get the better of its opponents. To demand that the Social Democratic Party participate in a policy of coalition or alliance now … at the very time when those parties have prostituted and utterly compromised themselves; to want the Party to link itself with them in order to further that very prostitution—is to demand that it commit moral suicide.
If the party stands uncompromisingly for a "great idea, a great goal," it will be able to "unleash all the energy and devotion" that lie below the surface in nonrevolutionary periods:
When times of revolutionary ferment come, the tempo of progress all at once becomes rapid. It is quite incredible how swiftly the masses of the population learn in such times and achieve clarity about their class interests. Not only their courage and their desire to fight, but also their political interest is spurred on in the most powerful way by the consciousness that the moment has arrived for them to rise by their efforts out of the darkest night into the bright glory of the sun. Even the most sluggish become industrious; even the most cowardly, bold; even the most intellectually limited acquire a wider mental grasp. In such times, political education of the masses takes place in years, that otherwise would require generations.
Sounds like 1917!
In particular, the tactic of militant anti-agreementism gave the revolutionary Social Democrats a chance to win over the wavering "petty bourgeoisie" (in Russia, this term referred primarily to the peasant majority). The party, Kautsky argued, should not write off the peasant or the member of the urban lower classes because of his present hostility, since an outbreak of war or some other catastrophe might enrage him. "One day, under intolerable pressure from taxation and shaken by a sudden moral collapse of those in power, he might swing over to us en masse and perhaps thereby sweep away our opponents and decide the struggle in our favor."
The description "present hostility" refers to the situation in Germany, but, as we have seen, Kautsky urged the Russian Social Democrats to look upon the Russian peasantry as a revolutionary ally. In 1915, looking ahead to the imminent Russian Revolution, Lenin was quick to make the connection between the two prongs of Kautsky's tactical advice:
To the question of whether it is possible for the proletariat to assume the leadership [rukovodstvo] in the bourgeois Russian revolution, our answer is: yes, it is possible, if the petty bourgeoisie swings to the left at the decisive moment; it is being pushed to the left, not only by our propaganda, but by a number of objective factors, economic, financial (the burden of war), military, political, and others.6
Thus the Bolsheviks came into 1917 with two pieces of Kautsky advice firmly under their belts: enlist the peasantry as a revolutionary ally, and do not deviate from militant anti-agreementism. In order to see how this advice played out in 1917, we need first to dispense with a couple of will-o'-the-wisps about the October Revolution.
What the 1917 Revolution Was Not
In his Jacobin article, Eric Blanc states the following: "Following Lenin's arguments in his 1917 pamphlet State and Revolution, Leninists for decades have hinged their strategy on the need for an insurrection to overthrow the entire parliamentary state and to place all power into the hands of workers' councils." This remark brings together not one, but two, deep-rooted misconceptions about 1917: first, that a clash between two types of democracy — parliamentary vs. soviet — as found in the pages of State and Revolution, had anything to do with the October victory or the politics of the revolutionary year. (State and Revolution was drafted in 1917 but only published in 1918 and it is irrelevant to the events of the previous year.) Second, that the Bolsheviks took power by means of an "insurrection," "armed uprising," or whatever. Let us consider.
"All power to the Soviets!" — this was the rallying cry of 1917. But "soviet" here expresses merely the institutional form of class power. "Soviet power" meant a vlast (sovereign authority or "power") based on the workers and peasants. No one particularly cared about how much more democratic the soviets were as opposed to parliamentary democracy — these concerns were pretty much confined to Lenin, and even he downplayed them in 1917 (compare State and Revolution to writings published in 1917 such as Can the Bolsheviks Hold State Power [vlast]?). The Bolshevik message was based rather on anti-agreementism: the workers and peasants cannot get their basic needs met in league with the elite (more below on anti-agreementism in 1917).
In no way can it be said that the Bolshevik message was based on rejection of the Constituent Assembly as "parliamentary democracy." The opposite is the case: defense of the Constituent Assembly was an integral part of the Bolshevik agitation throughout 1917. This was particularly true in October, when Bolshevik accusations that the Provisional Government would sabotage the elections for the Assembly reached a fever pitch. In fact, fear of such sabotage was a central argument for an immediate takeover of power. After the Constituent Assembly was disbanded, Trotsky affirmed that "when we argued [in October] that the road to the Constituent Assembly lay … through the seizure of power by the Soviets, we were absolutely sincere." (It is no surprise that this statement by Trotsky is met by a scornful laugh from academic historians. What is truly remarkable, however, is that many self-styled Trotsky admirers will also automatically assume that Trotsky is lying for political reasons and that I am naïve for taking him at his word.)
Nor, further, were the alleged defects of parliamentary democracy prominent among the announced motivations for disbanding the Constituent Assembly in January. Witness: Trotsky, who gives a number of pertinent reasons for disbandment at the time but does not mention any contrast between soviet-style government and "bourgeois parliamentarianism." Witness: the Left SRs, who cooperated with disbandment for their own reasons.
In October, when the Second Congress of Soviets voted for soviet power, a Bolshevik-dominated committee arrested members of the Provisional Government and took other actions to prevent armed overthrow of the new government. For a number of reasons, both academic and activist historians come together in exaggerating the importance of a violent "insurrection" in the Bolshevik path to power. Essentially, the academics want to delegitimize the Bolsheviks as a whole, while the Trotsky tradition only wants to delegitimize most of the top Bolshevik leadership.
But any contrast, whether in approval or disapproval, between the Bolshevik takeover and "electoralism" is absurd. The Bolsheviks won in 1917 through winning elections — through acquiring a majority in key soviet bodies as a result of arduous campaigning — campaigning that was based on a message (anti-agreementism) that made sense to people. In fact, the Soviet government set up in October was the only government in 1917 that had any real electoral legitimacy.
The Bolsheviks won majority support for full soviet power (in other words, for anti-agreementism) in the key capital soviets in early September. After that, it was only a matter of time, of making things official. Of course, this process was dramatic and no doubt that Bolsheviks could have screwed it up. But essentially what happened was that the Petrograd Soviet officially set up a body to protect the revolution and this body did so by making a few arrests in order to protect the Second Congress. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that the Second Congress would declare for full soviet power — so that the existing national soviet body, the agreementist TsIK, was already a lame-duck walking corpse.
Throughout 1917, the final say in the composition of the government had always rested with the Soviet, for the simple but profound reason that it commanded the ultimate loyalty of the Petrograd workers and soldiers (that is, "real force"). Thus, the February Revolution and the October Revolution gave rise to a government in essentially the same way: the relevant soviet authority spoke, and that was it. In February, there was indeed a real "insurrection" from below, but in October the so-called uprising was a police action set in motion by duly constituted authorities.
One ill effect of the overintense focus (I might even call it fetishism) on the October "insurrection" is to obscure the real problem with Bolshevik rule, which is neither the rejection of parliamentary forms nor the use of "insurrection." It is, plain and simple, the rapid and complete destruction of political freedom. The Bolsheviks started by outlawing political parties and newspapers (the Kadets were outlawed in December 1917) and ended up squeezing all independent political and civil life out of society. This was done by the time NEP was established in 1921 and the resulting suffocation of independent civil society was never dented until perestroika.
However, it must be strongly emphasized that at no time prior to October did Lenin or the Bolsheviks speak of "insurrection" as a method opposed to majority rule, nor can we find any hint of a project to destroy political freedom. Quite the opposite. The Bolsheviks had long defined themselves as champions of political freedom for Russia, and indeed Russian Social Democracy was key in giving Russia what political freedom it had in the decade before the revolution. But ultimately the significance of this fact fades before the realities of the system created during the civil war.
Whether for good reasons or bad, Lenin and the Bolsheviks defined themselves after October as the destroyers of political freedom in Russia. People in Western Europe had a sense that Communists wanted to use "bourgeois" political freedom to get into power, and then eliminate it for everybody else. Did the Communists give them any reason to think they were wrong?
What the 1917 Revolution Was
In the aftermath of the February Revolution, the Bolshevik party as a whole emerged from the underground with Kautsky's tactical advice in their political DNA: enlist the peasantry as a revolutionary ally, and do not deviate from militant anti-agreementism. From the very beginning of the revolution, the Bolsheviks acted on this advice and as a result they were accurately perceived as distinctive by all actors on the political scene. (Many people want to believe that the Bolsheviks were not anti-agreementist until Lenin presented his April Theses upon his return to Russia. I have documented the problems with this view elsewhere, but the issue has no bearing on the present discussion. Date Bolshevik anti-agreementism from early April if you wish!)
A crucial fact, not sufficiently emphasized, is that the Petrograd Soviet was not a "Soviet of Worker Deputies" (as was the case in 1905) but a "Soviet of Worker and Soldier Deputies." This fact changed the whole political meaning of the soviet and therefore of "soviet power." At first, the preponderance of soldiers caused serious problems for the Bolsheviks and partly explains their original isolation within the Petrograd Soviet. But later, they began to see soldier membership in the Soviet as a great opportunity: win over the soldiers to the Bolshevik message (difficult as that may have been) and it's game over for the Provisional Government. Which is what happened.
For this reason, Eric Blanc's comment that Leninists wanted "to place all power into the hands of workers' councils" leads to a serious distortion of the political dynamics of 1917. The Bolsheviks then and later interpreted the soldier presence in the soviets as a link to the peasantry — that is, as a gateway to carrying out the tactic of Bolshevik hegemony. And also from the very beginning, the Bolsheviks had their eye on the wider peasant constituency. A remark by Bolshevik activist Viktor Nogin in late March succinctly foreshadows one of the principal political dynamics of the following months:
This resolution [by the Moscow Bolsheviks] proposes the organized seizure of the lands without waiting for the Constituent Assembly. The SRs could not bring themselves to propose such a slogan, since they prefer to wait for the Constituent Assembly. When they learned of the decision of the Moscow [Bolsheviks], the SRs said, "too bad for us! Now the peasants are going to elect the Bolsheviks."7
Thus the Bolsheviks quickly became identified with anti-agreementism. At an all-Russian conference of soviets in late March — that is, prior to Lenin's return and his April Theses — the red line between agreementists and anti-agreementists was sharply drawn, with the Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli as the spokesman of agreementism and the Bolshevik Lev Kamenev as the spokesman of anti-agreementism. No one deluded themselves about the reality of this clash. The agreementists wagered their political future on a viable working relationship with the social elites represented in the Provisional Government, while the anti-agreementists wagered their political future on a rapidly growing split between Provisional Government and the soviet constituency.
What was the heart of the message the Bolsheviks addressed to the soviet constituency to convince them of the necessity for all power to the soviets? It wasn't: the soviets are a higher type of democracy, down with parliamentary democracy! It wasn't: we need a socialist revolution in Russia! As noted earlier, the Bolsheviks had previously assumed that "socialist revolution" was incompatible with the peasant ally. After 1917, they changed their mind — not about the peasant ally, but about the meaning of "socialist revolution." The Bolshevik message in 1917 was not even: land, peace, and bread! What political party was against land, peace, and bread?
The question was how to attain goals that everybody accepted as valid. And here the Bolsheviks had a clear if primarily negative answer: we cannot attain these goals through any sort of "agreements," dual power, coalitions, or political understandings with elites! Socialists who insist on these agreements are leading us to disaster. We need a worker/peasant vlast (state power), as expressed through the soviets, that excludes any political voice for the elite.
Thus the Bolsheviks championed a message based directly on Kautsky's advice about hegemony and anti-agreementism, advice of long standing that was familiar to the whole party. Of course, there existed anti-agreementist factions within the other socialist parties — but they remained opposition factions until the very eve of October, when the anti-agreementist faction of the SR party bolted and founded the Left SR party, which promptly joined with the Bolsheviks in an anti-agreementist coalition government. Until October, then, the Bolsheviks remained the only party united around anti-agreementism. This fact determined the dynamics of the party system in 1917.
Full soviet power only became feasible when the two streams of Kautsky's advice came together, that is, when the soldiers and the peasant majority in the country swung over to anti-agreementism. At least, such was the view of Lenin, as expressed in February 1918. (In the following passage, "the opportunists of October" refers to Zinoviev and Kamenev. Too much should not be read into this label, since Lenin is merely adopting the term used by his polemical opponents at the time. What can be legitimately read into Lenin's comment is a challenge to the Trotskyist/Stalinist consensus that Zinoviev and Kamenev were enemies of the revolution and opposed in principle to soviet power. From Lenin's standpoint, the dispute arose rather from different readings of empirical forces by leaders striving for an identical goal.) In Lenin's words:
As matters stood in October, we had made an exact account precisely of mass forces. We not only thought, we knew with certainty, from the experience of the mass elections to the Soviets, that in September and in early October the overwhelming majority of the workers and soldiers had already come over to our side. We knew, even if only from the voting at the Democratic Conference, that support for the coalition [of moderate socialists and "bourgeois" politicians] had also collapsed among the peasantry—and that meant that our cause had already won.
The following were the objective conditions for the October insurrectionary struggle:
(1) there was no longer any bludgeon over the heads of the soldiers—it was overthrown in February 1917 (Germany has not yet reached "its" February);
(2) the soldiers, like the workers, had already experienced enough of the coalition and had completed a purposive, thought-through, heartfelt withdrawal from it.
This, and this alone, determined the correctness of the slogan "for an insurrection" in October (the slogan would have been incorrect in July, when in fact we did not advance it).
The mistake of the opportunists of October was not that they "worried too much" about objective conditions (and only children could think it was) but that they incorrectly evaluated the facts —they focused on details without seeing the main thing: that the Soviets had come over from agreementism [soglashatelstvo] to us.
Both "Leninists" and anti-Leninists should take careful heed to what the man himself says here: only support from an "overwhelming majority" of the mass worker-soldier-peasant soviet constituency made the armed action in October politically meaningful. This support can be measured by electoral success. Rejection of agreementism is equivalent to support for all power to the soviets. These political facts as set out by Lenin are overwhelmingly more significant than whether the "insurrection" took place the day before or the day after the Second Congress of Soviets.
History's Lessons, History's Questions
Alas, history does not always give us usable lessons to apply in the present day. At most, it thrusts upon us some unsettling questions. Here are some that arise from the episode we have just considered.
For Russia in 1917, Kautsky's advice about anti-agreementism was political gold, enabling the Bolsheviks to win power. In Western Europe, Kautsky's advice was political lead, with would-be Bolsheviks never successfully attaining power.
In my view, neither Lenin nor Kautsky really understood why Kautsky's anti-agreementist tactics met such different political fates in Russia and Europe. One key difference, perhaps hard for the Marxist tradition to fully analyze: the complete and sudden collapse of state authority in Russia, which had no equivalent in Western Europe. In any event, this deficient understanding finds expression in both the Bolsheviks' expectations for socialist revolution in Europe and Kautsky's often arid polemics against the Bolsheviks.
Our final question is about the Russian Revolution and its fate. It was best put by Kautsky himself, to whom we should give the last word. In March 1917, immediately after the fall of the tsar, before the political lines of force became clear to outsiders, Kautsky recapitulated his longtime argument that "the new revolutionary regime will be well protected against a counterrevolution, [because] the peasants will join it and remain faithful to it." He then wondered how long the worker-peasant alliance would remain in force, since "the peasantry's dependence on the revolution does not mean that they will support a further revolutionary advance of the proletariat." Therefore, "the peasant is the 'x,' the unknown variable, in the equation of the Russian Revolution. We are still unable to insert a figure for it. And yet we know that this figure is the crucial one, the decisive one. For this reason, the Russian Revolution can and will spring tremendous surprises on us."
Kautsky is right on target: the key question for the revolution and indeed for all of Soviet history, the equation that had to be solved, was always the nature of worker-peasant relations. We know now how tragically that history played out.
End Mark
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Lars T. Lih is a scholar who lives in Montreal. His books include Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 and Lenin Rediscovered: "What is to be Done?" in Context.
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In recent months, Jacobin has seen an exchange of views on the theme of Kautsky vs. Lenin. Many good points were made, but on the subject of the October Revolution, we are presented with a stark choice: either Kautsky is right and Lenin is wrong, or Lenin is right and Kautsky wrong. But this is […]
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Reclaiming the Best of Karl Kautsky
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Motorcyclist Dies After La Mesa Crash: Police
The deadly crash happened at Fletcher Parkway and Dallas Street Wednesday night
By NBC 7 Staff	• Published June 3, 2021 • Updated on June 3, 2021 at 1:33 pm
A motorcyclist died Wednesday night after being involved in a crash in La Mesa, police confirmed.
The crash happened at around 8:20 p.m. at the intersection of Southern Road and Fletcher Parkway, just east of state Route 125.
La Mesa Police Department Lt. Katy Lynch said a motorcyclist collided with another motorist; the motorcyclist suffered severe injuries and died shortly thereafter at a local hospital.
Based on the preliminary investigation, it appears the motorcyclist, a 30-year-old man, was traveling eastbound on Fletcher Parkway at the intersection of Southern Road when he broadsided a Toyota SUV, being driven by an 18-year-old woman, that was turning eastbound onto Fletcher Parkway from westbound Southern Road.
The driver of the SUV was not injured and is not suspected of being impaired. The driver remained on the scene and is cooperating with the investigation, authorities said.
The cause of the crash remains under investigation. Police have not released the name of the man involved pending family notification.
No other injuries were reported. No further details were immediately released by police.
The La Mesa Police Department's Traffic Unit is investigating this incident. Anyone who may have witnessed the crash can call the La Mesa Police Department at (619) 667-1400 or if have any other information regarding this incident.
La MesaLa Mesa Police DepartmentFletcher Parkway


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