With the government shutdown continuing into a second week, there may be a whole lot less bureaucracy in Washington these days. But that actually may be throwing up some roadblocks for the completion of transportation projects around the country. I also have links to some recent reports on performance measurement, transportation funding and why some public-private partnerships fail.
The road construction industry has complained for years about how the environmental impact statement requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 can cause lengthy delays in the completion of transportation projects. With the passage of MAP-21, the federal surface transportation authorization legislation of 2012, efforts were made to streamline and improve the efficiency of the environmental review and approval process.
So it was perhaps somewhat ironic this week when the President and CEO of the American Road & Transportation Builders Association Pete Ruane joined a Capitol Hill news conference to lament one of the many unintended consequences of the government shutdown.
Performance measurement was another key focus of MAP-21 and many state officials believe measuring congestion will be one of the biggest challenges as national performance goals ramp up in the years ahead. As Mara Campbell of the Missouri Department of Transportation said at our recent National Conference in Kansas City: "(The Texas Transportation Institute) puts out a report every year and tells us where congestion is and has defined that. Congress doesn't necessarily like that definition. So again, here we are halfway through the period of MAP-21. It's going to be over in (12) months and we haven't even defined it." Well there is a new report just out from the Eno Center for Transportation, Bipartisan Policy Center and State Smart Transportation Initiative that offers some recommendations for ways to measure congestion and system performance. The report, "Evaluating Potential Performance Measures for Congestion and System Performance," shares the results of a day-long workshop convened this summer to discuss the pending federal rulemaking on performance measures with Senate staffers, U.S. DOT officials and representatives of state DOTs, MPOs, and other public and private groups with an interest in MAP-21 implementation.
Raising motor fuel taxes could provide the highway trust fund with sufficient revenue to fully fund the program in the near term, but it may not be a viable long-term solution due to expected future declines in fuel consumption.
Replacing current motor fuel taxes with a fuel sales tax or a fee based on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) raise a variety of financial and administrative concerns.
The political difficulty of adequately financing the highway trust fund could lead Congress to consider the desirability of changes to maintain the trust fund system or eliminating it altogether. Such changes might involve a reallocation of responsibilities and obligations among federal, state and local governments.
Interest in improving transportation infrastructure with private and non-grant funding sources, such as tolls, public-private partnerships (PPPs), and federal loan programs is increasing, but many projects may not be well suited to alternative financing.
A new report from Fitch Ratings (for which a subscription is required) looks at lessons learned from public-private partnerships around the world and finds that the major causes of P3 failures are the overestimation of traffic and revenue and higher than expected costs. "The probability of over-estimation remains high despite decades of experience with forecasting demand on transport projects," the report said. Tollroadsnews took a look at the report in this piece. Now comes word that when Virginia transportation officials went to the capital markets in 2010 with plans for the 495 Express Lanes, they relied on traffic and revenue forecasting done four and five years earlier, before the economic downturn. The Express Lanes could see a shortfall of $37 million to $38 million for the year, TollroadsNews reported in a separate article. "Of course it is early days but financially the 495 Express Lanes are off to a dismal start," the website publication said.
The Center for Transportation Research at the University of Texas at Austin has issued a report on "Texas Highway Funding Options." Among the options the report considers based on case studies from other states: energy sector infrastructure financing, availability payment public-private partnerships, weight distance charges, and electric vehicle fees.
An independent review of the Washington State Department of Transportation's management of some pricey transportation mega-projects is now complete. Washington Transportation Secretary Lynn Peterson commissioned the report in March seeking recommendations on how the agency can learn from recent miscues, engineering mistakes, project delays and other problems that some say have damaged the credibility of the agency and prompted some state lawmakers to call for reforms before consideration of a fuel tax increase to fund more projects.
Pennsylvania: Transportation Secretary Barry Schoch and others reported progress this week in talks between Republicans and Democrats on a transportation funding bill, according to the Associated Press. Among the issues negotiators must navigate: the total amount of the funding package, how much will go to mass transit, where the money will come from and potential changes to the state's prevailing wage law on public construction projects. A transportation funding bill that relied on gas tax and fee increases passed the state Senate in early June but hit opposition in the House.
Utah: A recent study by the Economic Development Research Group of Boston said the state could nearly double its return on investment by implementing Utah's Unified Transportation Plan 2011-2040. Such an investment could create nearly 183,000 new jobs and a $183.6 billion increase in the state's GDP, the study indicated.


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The Deep End (Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book 15)
by Jeff Kinney
In The Deep End, book 15 of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series from #1 international bestselling author Jeff Kinney, Greg Heffley and his family hit the road for a cross-country camping trip, † ready for the adventure of a lifetime.
But things take an unexpected turn, and they find themselves stranded at an RV park that's not exactly a summertime paradise. When the skies open up and the water starts to rise, the Heffleys wonder if they can save their vacation—or if they're already in too deep.
And don't miss Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Adventure, an all-new fantasy from Greg's best friend—the follow-up to the instant #1 bestseller Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid: Rowley Jefferson's Journal.
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Jeff Kinney is the #1 USA Today, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series and a six-time Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award winner for Favorite Book. The Meltdown, book 13, was published in October 2018, and was a #1 bestselling book. His latest book, Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid: Rowley Jefferson's Journal, was published in April 2019. Jeff has been named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World. He is also the creator of Poptropica, which was named one of Time's 50 Best Websites. He spent his childhood in the Washington, D.C., area and moved to New England in 1995. Jeff lives with his wife and two sons in Massachusetts, where they own a bookstore, An Unlikely Story.
The Wimpy Kid hits the road. The Heffley clan has been stuck living together in Gramma's basement for two months, waiting for the family home to be repaired, and the constant togetherness has been getting on everybody's nerves. Luckily Greg's Uncle Gary has a camper waiting for someone to use it, and so the Heffleys set off on the open road looking for an adventurous vacation, hoping the changing scenery will bring a spark back to the family unit. The winding road leads the Heffleys to a sprawling RV park, a setting teeming with possibilities for Greg to get up to his usual shenanigans. Greg's snarky asides and misadventures continue to entertain. At this point the Wimpy Kid books run like a well-oiled machine, paced perfectly with witty lines, smart gags, and charming cartoons. Kinney knows just where to put a joke, the precise moment to give a character shading, and exactly how to get the narrative rolling, spinning out the oddest plot developments. The appreciation Kinney has for these characters seeps through the novels, endearing the Heffleys to readers even through this title, the 15th installment in a franchise boasting spinoffs, movies, and merchandise. There may come a time when Greg and his family overstay their welcome, but thankfully that day still seems far off. A witty addition to the long-running series. (Humor. 7-12)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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The Hambledown Dream Goes Aural - Part One.
Beginning this week, I will be making chapters of my novel "The Hambledown Dream" available in a high quality audio book, read by me, for you to listen to and enjoy. Readers from all over the world have discovered and fallen in love with the "Dream".
What I hope to achieve from this is to whet those undecided readers appetites for more and encourage them to purchase my novel either digital or printed format.
This week, Part One - the beginning of the story where one life, so full of promise, ends while another's - so far away - hangs in the balance.
(Right click on Download link to save file)
Dean Mayes, author of "The Hambledown Dream" reads his novel for an audio book preview series.
Posted by DeanfromAustralia at 9:15 PM 4 comments:
Labels: audio book, Dean from Australia, Dean Mayes, Hambledown Road Productions, iReadiWrite publishing, Michelle Halket, The Hambledown Dream
Come On Bro - It's The Wars!!
Nestled in the rolling green hills of the Latrobe Valley in Victoria, Australia lies a great big hole in the ground.
It's an open cut mine that, for the better part of a century, has been the source of Australia's largest deposits of brown coal.
This brown coal has been dug up by massive dredges and fed into boilers at the nearby Yallourn Power Station. The electricity from this particular station powers a lot of homes in Victoria and eastern Australia.
It's a dirty job but somebody's gotta do it.
During the halcyon days of the Victorian power industry, a town was conceived and built near the Power Station. The Yallourn township was provided to the workers that toiled in the massive open cut mine and station. It was a fully realized town even before it was built and boasted facilities that were the envy of the district. Beautiful tree lined streets, comfortable housing, a fully functioning shopping precinct, a hospital, school, police station, pub. Yallourn had it all. And for decades it was a bustling hamlet. It truly was a beautiful town. However there was always this catch...
The town was built on the proviso that one day, the State Electricity Commission (SEC), might need to access the rich coal seam that lay underneath it. And that day did come. In the mid 1960's there was a revolt by the towns folk against the SEC and for years they protested against their town being dismantled at the whim of some faceless bureaucrats. Money was raised, campaigns were hatched, people joined in to fight for their township.
"Come on bro - It's the Wars!"
When I was born into this battle in the mid 1970's, it was already a given that the man had won against the workers. There was a hell of a lot of life in the old girl even though she was a dame in decline.
Yallourn township circa 1970's. My first home.
Yallourn's facilities were the gold standard. In particular, the cinema - or 'theater' as it was lovingly referred to - remains in my mind the grandest of Yallourn's architecture.
Built in the 1930's and overlooking the township's central gardens, the Theater was a vibrant social center. Featuring two screens, red leather seating, a plush foyer and concession stand, the theater put on some of the greatest movies of the 20th century beginning with "Gone With The Wind" in 1939 (and, as a nice bookend to it's life, it screened the same film in 1979).
I've shared memories with ex-Yallourn residents as to what films they saw over the years and they are recalled with affection.
The swords and sandals epics of the 1950's - "Ben Hur", "Spartacus". Classics from the 1960's such as "Dr. Zhivago" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid".
I remember my Dad and his next door neighbor Rob Martin recalling how they ran home in the night after seeing the 1973 stunner "The Exorcist" - so shit scared were they.
Yallourn's cinema, 1975.
For me, I had the pleasure and privilege of seeing one movie there. It was only one but it was to have a profound effect on me.
I can still remember the very first time I saw Star Wars.
There are certain events in a father's life that fall into the category of things you must do. Taking your son to his first movie experience is one. Towards the end of 1977, my Dad took me to the Yallourn Theater to see the George Lucas blockbuster.
By the end of 1977, Star Wars had become a world wide phenomenon and on a balmy November evening Dad and I went along to see what all the fuss was about.
I'm sure I didn't actually grasp what a movie actually was. The whole thing was just one big WOW! moment - as in 'I don't know what I'm actually doing right now - but WOW! Just WOW!
The cinema, circa 1941.
Dad's cinematic tastes are quite varied, although in the years since Star Wars he hasn't totally connected with the space fantasy/sci-fi genre in the way that I have. Dad was schooled in the classic political thrillers like "Three Days of The Condor", "The Marathon Man", "The Conversation" - all films that I like very much. But Star Wars was different for him in that, even he could appreciate it was an 'event film'. Everyone was talking about it - even the rough and tough coal miners and power station workers. There was something about Star Wars that crossed boundaries. It was accessible to everyone.
My memories of that first viewing are clear but fractured, fleeting vignettes of movement, color and place, though there are three distinct memories that stand out. First and foremost was the foyer of the cinema. It's lighting was soft but I can remember the old school flashing Hollywood styled lights in the concession area. The carpet in that foyer was deep red, very plush, the kind you could sink up to your knees in. I'm going to take a punt here and say that I had my first taste of popcorn. And I think Dad was a choc top fan - spearmint - but I'll have to confirm that.
The cinema itself. Well - that was simply the most amazingly awesome room I had ever been in. Vast and cavernous and the screen - oh my god - that screen!! I was gobsmacked by it. The seats were dark red - very plush material, the kind that were really low set and you kinda disappeared into them.
Cinema interior.
A celluloid love affair begins, November 1977.
And then there was the film. What can a 35 year old man channeling a (nearly) 4 year old say 32 years after the fact?
Oh my freaking god!!!???
The ubiquitous Star Wars logo erupting onto the screen against the twinkling star field. That opening crawl - though I couldn't read it then. And of course, there is that Star Destroyer passing overhead. I can clearly remember that. I was jumping up and down in my seat - blown away at this brilliant piece of celluloid - one of the most kick arse cinema moments of all time!
Things that make you go - WHOOOOOO!!!
The first appearance of Darth Vader when he boards the crippled blockade runner. The odd-bod Jawas and their towering Sandcrawler, the planet sized Death Star. All of these moments passed into my consciousness and have never left.
There are other significant memories. Scenes that I swear I saw in that original release that I haven't seen in any other since. One example is a scene just after Ben Kenobi appears, having scared the Sand People away from a subdued Luke Skywalker. Kenobi and Skywalker have a conversation about Artoo then Luke is reminded that C-3PO still lies at the bottom of the ravine - the "Where am I? I must have taken a bad step" scene.
Obi Wan and Luke are then seen helping 3PO to his feet. Now, I always remember seeing Obi Wan, Luke and 3PO standing and stepping down from where he has fallen in the film. However I have only ever seen that moment as a still since. I stand to be corrected but, I definitely remember a much longer scene of 3PO, Ben and Luke standing together just after they help the stricken droid to his feet.
In all versions I have seen since, there is a wipe transition that crawls up the screen as they lift 3PO to his feet - a transition used to hide the fact the the film makers were using just a torso of 3PO at that point - before the scene shifts to Ben Kenobi's dwelling.
The last scene that I can recall with clarity was the Millennium Falcon knifing through space, just after they escape from the Death Star. It was brief moment of visual pleasure just watching that beautiful "piece of junk" in full flight before the four TIE fighters rocket in after them while Luke and Han blast their pursuers away with the Falcon's quad canons.
For me, there was only one 'Falcon'.
Dad tells me often that I wouldn't shut up through large chunks of the movie. I was babbling away excitedly. I guess it was the excitement of my first movie experience. I went on to live and breathe Star Wars throughout most of my youth and adolescence - taking a break from it during those dark years between '86 and '95 - and now as a supposedly responsible adult, I can happily declare that I'm still the biggest kid on the block - with the coolest Star Wars collection going around.
Come on Bro - It's The Wars!
Yallourn's destruction was inevitable. By the early 1970's the SEC had begun the process of dismantling the town, moving houses out on trucks in pieces so that they could be rebuilt elsewhere. The lure of the rich brown coal seam underneath the town ship was just too overpowering. The irony of that is that today the State Electricity Commission itself is now extinct - having passed into private/foreign hands in the mid 90's by a government hell bent on privatizing anything it could get it's hands on.
You can still find many examples of Yallourn's architecture in existence today around the Latrobe Valley. By the mid 1970's Yallourn early spirit had been routed. Though many held out, continuing to live and work there, the writing was on the wall. My family had moved by late '77 to the nearby township of Yallourn North.
Today, though the vista of the township is gone, I have discovered that the land upon which my first house was situated is actually still there - it hasn't been swallowed by the Cut. In places evidence of the town's streets still exist, complete with lines of trees.
The screen that opened the door onto that galaxy far, far away is bulldozed.
Following the final film presentation - Gone With The Wind - the cinema was demolished in 1979. A 40 year old cinematic era was ground to dust. The Yallourn Theater lives on in a comprehensive collection of stories, photographs and images that are shared by former residents of Yallourn among whom I count myself. I cherish that first movie experience with my father. Because in a small way it influenced the person who I am today. I love story telling, I love the escapism of cinema and I love the toys! I can't allow myself to give up on them, as much as my serioso would like me to I am sure. Fortunately, my love of all things Star Wars lives on...and my son is now getting in the action too.
My serioso doesn't really approve but - to quote the character of Chaz Bottler in Kyle Newman's 2008 love letter to Star Wars fans (aka Fanboys)...
Labels: A New Hope, Ben Kenobi, C-3PO, Childhood, cinema, Dean from Australia, Dean Mayes, Episode 4, father and son relationship, George Lucas, Luke Skywalker, movies, Star Wars, Yallourn
The Politics Of A Circus
(I apologize in advance for this article...but...well...build a bridge).
I'm going to take risk here and step outside of my comfort zone to talk about politics.
I know, I know - you're probably rolling your eyes and preparing to close off your browser window and look, I can't blame you. But if you'll just stick with me for a couple of paragraphs at least, I'll try to give you some insight into what is going on down here in Australia right now.
Quite frankly, it's an Alice in Wonderland styled tea party.
The contest for the Australian Federal Election 2010, essentially, is being fought by two sides. There is a third party and a couple of minor players but essentially what the Australian populace has got to choose between is two parties who both sit on the center right.
Let me try and illustrate this for you.
The Australian Labor Party is led by the incumbent Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. Already I can hear you say - hang on! Wasn't there a man in there?? Well, the answer is yes - there was. Kevin Rudd was the Prime Minister up until June 24th this year. However, in an act that has been roundly described as being akin to political lunacy - several machine men within the ALP panicked over some poll results that showed they were taking a beating and decided that they must move against him. In a coup that had outwardly, had the look of being beaten with a wet newspaper, Julia Gillard was installed as the Prime Minister and Kevin Rudd was dumped.
Newly installed Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard.
This was a man who won the 2007 Federal Election in a stunning land slide against the Conservative Liberal/National Coalition - lead by old war horse John Winston Howard. There is no denying that, in the lead up to this fairy floss coup, the ALP was in a fair bit of trouble poll wise. However in all of this confected nail biting one thing stood out plainly in the polling - Kevin Rudd was still polling strongly as preferred Prime Minister over the conservative candidate/opposition leader, Tony Abbott. Since June 24th and more recently since the announcement of the Federal Election campaign, the ALP has lurched from one embarrassing media gaffe to another in a breathless effort to try and raise the profile of it's newly installed leader, Julia Gillard. It has been difficult to do so, especially since Gillard has been viewed as the woman who knifed a perfectly adequate leader in the back.
Dumped Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd.
The Liberal/National Coalition were utterly decimated in the aftermath of the 2007 Federal Election. Their own Prime Minister, John Howard - a man considered unbeatable up until the early months of 2007 - lost his own seat and there was a massive swing against the Conservative Government. The carnage was palpable. Since that time, the Coalition has gone through three leaders, two of whom polled poorly right from the time they were elevated. Currently they are being lead by an avowed Catholic (and former aspirant to the priesthood) Tony Abbott - a man who wears his conservative heart on his sleeve and who has been roundly viewed as one of the most ruthless operators in Australian politics. Since the 2010 Federal Election campaign was announced the Abbott lead Coalition has gone on the attack, criticizing the incumbent ALP government for knifing their leader in the back, for wasting bucket loads of tax payers money, for being incapable of stopping the (refugee) boats and for imposing great big new taxes on the populace.
Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott.
The Greens - well they are the "third force" and as their name implies they are a party of the Left. Lead by perhaps, the only honest sounding politician in Australia right now, Bob Brown - the Greens platform is...well...green. They have been given a kick or two for preferencing the ALP in this election (we have a preferential voting system in Australia - Compulsory! - but preferential), but they have preferenced the ALP in most elections in years gone by.
The only other party of any note in this upcoming election is perhaps the Family First Party, a party that has been bankrolled by cashed up evangelical churches here in Australia and outwardly portrays itself as being the party for "families" - nuclear, white bread, middle class families. They caused a minor shit storm this year when it was revealed just recently that they were negotiating a preference deal with the Australian Sex Party!!
(WHOOO - HOOOO!!).
So there you have it. A very brief overview of the Australian Political landscape in my country - from my point of view. Now, you may ask - why would I devote a post to talking about mind numbing, potentially divisive politics. Well, we have an election coming up on August 21st and at this point in the game some two weeks out from polling day...
I have no friggin' idea who to vote for.
The ALP, in my opinion have behaved atrociously since the dumping of Kevin Rudd as PM just a few short weeks ago. There was never any need to dump him, no matter how bad the whispers against him were. Sure, he was a rather bookish fellow, renowned as a micro-managing control freak but his team steered Australia through the worst crisis to hit global financial markets since the Great Depression and Australia's economy is doing relatively well. Most knowledgeable commentators out there believe that the Federal Budget will return to surplus inside three years or so and the ALP's strategy will have strong legitimacy into the future. What has happened however, is that a group of faceless, factional warlords in Sydney have experienced the mother of all brain farts and moved against him, replacing him with a woman who has made no secret of her ambition in the past. It is now becoming increasingly clear, however that Julia Gillard is manifestly inadequate as a Prime Minister. She rushed forth, claiming victory in negotiating a way out of a potentially disastrous spat with the mining industry here in Australia over a Resource Super Profits Tax that the Government wanted to impose on the big miners - never mind that it was revealed that former PM Kevin Rudd had pretty much sorted it all out at the eleventh hour before he was knifed in the back by his own people. Julia Gillard was also summarily trotted (one assumes by the same dickheads who installed her) into a studio of a major Australian womens magazine to doll herself up for a windswept and lippy photo shoot (which actually made her look dumb rather than dynamic). And, since the announcement of the campaign, she has made an art form out of saying a lot but saying nothing all at the same time. So much so that just a week ago, Julia Gillard fronted the media to declare that she was "throwing out the campaign rule book and from now on she would give Australia the real Julia".
Double U Tee Eff!?!?!??
The Abbott led Coalition are just an appalling parody of a wannabe neo-conservative mickey mouse club. I make no secret of the fact the traditionally, I have despised this side of politics and everything they stand for. However since I reached my...thirties...my cynicism has caught up with me and dammit - I can actually find myself agreeing with certain aspects of conservative politics. I mean - shite - I find myself classing myself as a small L liberal at times rather than an old fashioned working class Labor/Union man. But Tony Abbott is fucking scary. Where does one start??
An avowed Catholic who is bitterly opposed to abortion for any reason whatsoever, anti-gay marriage, anti-refugees (If I hear "Stop the Boats" one more time I will reach through the television screen and rip his tongue out), let's all lick big business' arse as much as we can and screw everybody else, WORK CHOICES, chums in the H.R. Nicholls Society, "I know politicians are going to be judged on everything they say, but sometimes in the heat of discussion you go a little bit further than you would if it was an absolutely calm, considered, prepared, scripted remark.Which is one of the reasons why the statements that need to be taken absolutely as gospel truth are those carefully prepared, scripted remarks." That is a dead-set quote from the horses' mouth!!!
I mean - this was a man who launched his conservative party's formal election campaign in Queensland this past weekend and spent his entire speech ripping the shit out of the ALP - if there was any presentation of Coalition Policy for the next term of whatever Government, I didn't hear it. This is not to excuse the ALP mind you. I haven't been able to interpret anything remotely comprehensible from them either. But I'm just sayin'
We have witnessed a procession of former leaders, party hacks parading as personalities and a multitude of other dickheads from both sides of the political divide popping their heads up and having their two cents worth like media tarts desperately grabbing for that one last 15 minutes of fame and the Australian Media - which is overly represented by Rupert Murdoch's News Limited stable - has worked themselves into a lather over the personalities of Australian Politics. The debate about Australia's future has gotten severely lost in all of it. The media is as culpable as all sides of politics in it's neglect of comprehensive and detailed coverage in favor of headline grabbing shit storms that have absolutely no relevance at all to the task that all Australian citizens - by law - must acquit themselves to in a few short weeks.
A Selection of former political identities who really should learn the meaning of the word FORMER!
Many people who would traditionally vote on either side Labor or Liberal/National quite conscientiously are indicating that this time they will instead vote Australian Greens as a form of protest against the major parties. The Greens are considered the lesser of three evils. Many Australians have no idea who they will vote for at this late stage and are still making up their minds. They live with some flicker of hope that something, anything will happen in the next couple of weeks that will have them sway towards their party of choice, or either of the majors.
This election has been quite literally, the weirdest election campaign in living memory. A kind of Australian Idol styled personality contest where neither of the personalities on offer have remotely any appeal. From where I stand - both majors are utterly desolate when it comes to any sort of policy. Oh sure they have announced some...thing! But I haven't been able to grasp much of it at all...and I know I'm not stupid.
Like...neither party has offered up anything, ANYTHING to address the health and social problems of indigenous Australians. I have heard nothing. And, just as my own home State Government here in South Australia is gearing up to slash something like $450million dollars from health in this state alone, the ALP is talking about some half arsed Federal take over of health across the nation while the Liberal/National's are off in fairy land. I think the best thing they have come up with is hospital boards...whatever the f*** that is???
All the grand gestures that Kevin Rudd tried to put forward about addressing climate change and the environment came to nothing basically because he got rolled by the same miserable hatchet men that tapped him on the shoulder sometime around June 24th. As for the Coalition...well...Tony Abbott has been quoted as saying that "climate change is crap" so any chance of the Coalition doing anything remotely responsible to address the environmental challenges we face as a nation are about as strong as...oh, I dunno, the Pope entering "Dancing With The Stars"...
The economy...
Well the economy is beyond me. I'm flat out trying to balance my own home budget much less try to grapple with a purported $1trillion dollar national economy. I mean, am I supposed to understand it???
At this point I am seriously considering not voting at all. Given that it's a compulsory voting system and I risk being fined for not voting - my inaction would be a significant one...But none of these idiots deserve my vote. None of them deserve to be in government - OR opposition. They have prostituted the Australian Parliamentary Process that is based in part on the Westminster System of Democracy and have turned it into a slutty side show. I actually turn the television off now whenever the news comes on or Julia or Tony pop up and I grimace and yelp like a frightened child. I no longer give any credence to anything the journalists say because they seem more intent to bang on about what some politician's latest gaff was rather than present the arguments presented by both sides so that I can carefully consider what is on offer. Journalism in Australia is lazy, intellectually bankrupt and asinine.
A Toad...and Federal Deputy Opposition Leader Julie Bishop (She's the one on the left).
That democracy has degenerated into the sort of B-grade reality television spectacle shown on late night TV makes me feel actually a little desolate. Not so much because they have abandoned me and my future...
...It's because they have abandoned my children and their's...
Posted by DeanfromAustralia at 7:05 AM 2 comments:
Labels: Australian Federal Election 2010, Australian Politics, Dancing With The Stars, Politics
Scenario...
Twice in the past 10 days, I have had two similar and disturbing dreams wherein, in both cases I miss a flight that is apparently an important one.
The first dream has me racing through traffic - in my father's utility vehicle - in a desperate attempt to get to the airport and I am panicky the whole way because I am running late and I fear that I will miss the flight. There is a sense of dire inevitability about it. I get to the airport and I am running through the terminal searching desperately for my gate. It is then that I hear a scream. I turn around in time to see a small figure, a child, falling from a mezzanine level above me and hit the floor a few feet away. I rush to the child's aid and desperately try to lend aid to it. It is an Indian child, maybe two or three years old.
As a crowd mills about I call out for someone to call an ambulance. A couple emerge from the crowd - I think it's the child's parents but I am not sure. I look into the eyes of the father and right away, a chill passes through me. I suspect right away that the child has not fallen from the mezzanine. Rather, he/she has been pitched or pushed. Paramedics arrive and I urge them to take over as the panic of my previous feelings of dread about missing my flight begin to take over once more. This time however an airline representative assists me by leading me to the departure gate. However the hallway is like a maze. We cannot find our way, my panic escalates. The corridor twists and turns on itself - it is so maddening. Then, finally we make it to a glass door that leads out onto the tarmac...
...just in time to see the plane taxi-ing away from the departure gate. I have missed my flight. I am beside myself and I scream No!! But there is nothing I can do. The airline staffer is gone and I am alone, watching the plane disappear from view.
I wake up at that point and I was disturbed for a long time after-wards.
The second dream has me trying to catch a transit bus from some kind of hotel or lodge where there are a lot of athletes about...it's some kind of tournament but I am not participating in it. I have to bluff my way onto a mini bus that is taking people to the airport. I am in a similar state of rising panic - I have to get to my flight and once again, the clock is against me. There is delay after delay as the bus stops to pick up more passengers on route but before too long, I can see the airport up ahead and, for a brief moment I feel a flicker of relief.
However the bus eventually stops in a field some few kilometers from where I have to go and the driver declares that this is as far as he can take me. I have to walk the rest of the way. A series of foot bridges that weave and curve like spaghetti lay between me and the terminal in the distance. Panic returns and I grab my bag and run as fast as I can towards the terminal. I fight against an insane amount of human traffic that have seemingly flooded onto the foot bridge that I am on.
Suddenly, from behind me I hear the sounds of whistles being blown shrilly and I turn to see a group of security guards - again these people are Indian - running towards me, pointing at me. They bail me up and issue me with a fine for running on the foot bridge. They then demand to see the contents of my bag but I refuse, telling them that I am going to miss my flight. I lurch away from them and they begin to pursue me but then they disappear into the crowd and again I am hopelessly lost on the foot bridge, unsure of which way to go.
The dream becomes fractured at this point and I can't remember specifically what happens next but I can remember being in a shopping precinct looking for a public phone. And I remember that same feeling of dread that lingered within me long after I shook myself from the dream and lay awake disturbed by the imagery.
They were two separate dreams, dealing with identical states of mind and they both dealt with my struggle to get to a flight that I ultimately missed. I woke from both of them feeling disturbed for a long time afterward. I have spent the past few days trying to comprehend their meaning but until now I have drawn a blank.
My subconscious mind scares the shit out of me sometimes.
Posted by DeanfromAustralia at 11:51 AM 8 comments:
Labels: Dean from Australia, Dean Mayes, dreams and their meaning, Self Reflection


text:
August 31, 2010 Daniel Waugh devotional, Schlatter
>No Return to the Temple
>Jesus left the temple and was going away, when his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. But he answered them, "You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down."
(Matthew 24:1-2 ESV)
Adolf Schlatter: "When Jewish forces manned the temple walls to turn back the attack of Roman legions, there had to be a partial devastation of the temple. Then a portion of the temple courts was burned down. Such damage to the temple was a bitter blow to Jewish authorities, but it did not leave them without hope. When the battle was over, the people quickly used their resources to restore the temple to its earlier perfection, and the damage was quickly repaired.
Were these events comparable to what would take place after Jesus left the temple? Did he now leave the temple with his followers so as later to lead them back into it? Might they expect, first, judgment to be rendered that would bring woe even to the temple but disrupt it only temporarily, because it would be restored when the day of Christ comes?
With thoughts like these, did the disciples understand what Jesus was doing when he left the temple? No! He leaves nothing standing; every stone will be ripped out of its setting; all that will remain is a pile of rubble. There is no restoration for the temple and the worship ceremonies it housed and the Jerusalem of old… But with this verdict Jesus by no means proclaimed only unrelenting wrath and the absolute validity of the judgment that punishes irredeemable guilt with unending death. He simultaneously sets forth deeply religious testimony to the sanctity of the new covenant. The new covenant truly makes the old one old. The old has passed away, and there is no way back to it…Jesus used such strong language to disengage the disciples entirely from the temple, so that they would not pour new wine into old wineskins but rather learn from him how God's grace visits them. (Do We Know Jesus?: Daily Insights for the Mind and Soul , pg. 394)
This short devotional by Schlatter is packed with insight. First, for Christianity as a whole, we must beware of anything that would take us back to operating under the auspices of the old covenant. Second, and more personally, what Schlatter says of the temple is, in many ways, true of the Christians new life in Christ. How do Jesus and the apostles talk about coming to Christ? Jesus talks of a new birth (John 3:3). He speaks of taking up one's cross and following him (Mark 8:34). The apostles speak of dying to the old self, allowing it to be buried, and being raised to newness of life with Christ (Romans 6:1-5, Colossians 2:12, 3:3, 1 Peter 2:24). Why such decisive, even harsh, language. To show us that we can't expect a mere reformation of a slightly flawed character when we come to Christ. Or, in Schlatter's words, 'to disengage us entirely from self'. Once you come to Christ there is no return to the autonomy of self. God's grace is more radical. Thank God.
>Song of the Week
>Catechism Question #6


text:
"Not" and its many permutations
"That's My Chair, That Is : The Welsh Game of Thrones"
Now the King is dead, the Houses of Jones and Llewelyn have both eyes set on The Great Chair, meanwhile Cerys-Leigh spends her first day with Carl, and a new threat looms over Wales...
Someone Saved My Life Tonight
The 30 Best Elton John Songs, Ranked, in Esquire puts Someone Saved My Life Tonight first. I remember thinking it was great and trying to work it out on the piano, but I didn't know a lot about it before reading:
In terms of story alone, this is John and Taupin's greatest. "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" is the brave autobiographical story of John's attempted suicide. If there's a single that offers a testament to the bond that John and Bernie Taupin share, it's this one. John entrusted his story to Taupin and the result is a breathtaking cut that combines the heady vibes of '70s pop rock and the deepest vulnerability a human can expose. The song clocks in at well over six minutes, but John reportedly wouldn't allow any to be cut. That move proved to be beneficial, with the 1975 single peaking at No. 4 on the Billboard charts. The song is more than a pop hit—it's an anthem of survival, resilience, and being able to throw a finger to the vices that nearly ruin our souls. There are bigger Elton songs that people know every word to, but no song in his songbook captures his range as an artist like "Someone Saved My Life Tonight."
The feeder
Wales Online
A canal which once ran through the middle of Cardiff would be brought back to life under new plans revealed for the city.
A proposed 'Canal Quarter' scheme in the capital would form part of a larger project which would also see much loved threatened buildings in the city's Guildford Crescent saved.
If approved the old canal buried under Churchill Way will be reinstated.
Unless I miss my guess this will be the old feeder canal in which my Dad (who lived just round the corner in Adam Street opposite the Vulcan) learned to swim.
I met up with old friend Kevin (who went to infant, primary and secondary school with me) in the West End last night. His dad sank or swam in the feeder as well. Small, wet world.
Yesterday's papers
When Michael Gove chooses to announce that he is running for Prime Minister in a podcast recorded at the Hay Festival, the media landscape is certainly changing.
I think they take the occasional pot shot to relieve the monotony
Mad props, to the Goggly algoriddles that You-Tube-Can-Have-A Body-Like-Mine'd the Munchies episode above to yours truly.
J.J. Johnson, the James Beard award-winning chef on the African (and particularly Ghanaian) diaspora's effects on global cuisine. What with Red Red, Paapa and the Hudson-Odois I am beyond ready for this.
WINNER OF THE JAMES BEARD AWARD: BEST AMERICAN COOKBOOK "This is more than just a cookbook. Alexander and JJ take us on a culinary journey through space and time that started more than 400 years ago, on the shores of West Africa. Through inspiring recipes that have survived the Middle Passage to seamlessly embrace Asian influences, this book is a testimony to the fact that food transcends borders. Alexander Smalls and JJ Johnson have elevated the cuisines of West Africa and its diaspora without losing any of its essence. Afro-Asian cuisine is a new concept and it works beautifully!"
Last night at the Hideaway, the bass was so gooey it was sticking to the walls and glooping down like gel. I cut some off with my pen knife and brought it home in a jam jar.
Clare Balding joins singer Feargal Sharkey for a river walk on the south London/Surrey border along the River Hogsmill one of just 200 chalk streams in the world. He's always been a rambler and is currently walking all of the river routes of London. He is often dismayed and pleased in equal measure at the state of our rivers as he is a passionate advocate for water health and quality.
The walk is part of the London Loop and starts from Ewell West Station and ends at Kingston upon Thames passing through Old Malden.
I found this offering from Radio 4 rather soothing just after six this morning as I surfaced from the blackness, hot and fidgety, fuss, bother and itch, conscious mind coming up too fast for the bends, through pack-ice thrubbing seas, boom-sounders, blow-holes, harsh-croak Blind Pews tip-tap-tocking for escape from my pressing skull.
You may fill your boots here if you fancy it. I had never previously heard of the London Loop. The section that they did is not too far from me.
Robinson Road
Wimbledon Guardian.
A woman has been taken to hospital after she was attacked with a bottle in Colliers Wood.
Scotland Yard say they are treating the incident as an assault, but no arrests have been made, after they were called to Robinson Road at 4.30pm (May 23) this afternoon.
Feck! Robinson Road is where I say goodnight to Frankie on Mondays after the quiz. I turn right onto Park Road while she carries on up to Devonshire.
Too much perspective, that's the problem.
No meat in this sandwich
I finished reading Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left by Roger Scruton yesterday.
I cast my vote in the surreal European elections on the way to work today.
I will start reading Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee by John Bew next.
Books notwithstanding, the workaday centre cannot hold. God help us modern politics furnishes but thin gruel:
We are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven
Though much is taken, sod all abides.
Huawei you? Who, who, who, who?
I seem to remember that Android is based on the, famously, open-source Linux operating system.
Does this open-source bedrock have any implications for Google restricting Huawei's use of Android in the light of Donald Trump adding the Chinese company to a list of organisations that US firms cannot trade with if they don't have a licence?
The question just popped into my mind. I imagine attempting to answer it would involve plummeting down the rabbit hole, so I will just leave it hanging for today.
El Jefe Rides Again
Coming to Netflix June 7.
In The Chef Show actor/director Jon Favreau and award-winning Chef Roy Choi reunite after their critically acclaimed film Chef to embark on a new adventure. The two friends experiment with their favorite recipes and techniques, baking, cooking, exploring and collaborating with some of the biggest names in the entertainment and culinary world. From sharing a meal with the Avengers cast in Atlanta, to smoking brisket in Texas with world-renowned pitmaster Aaron Franklin, to honoring the legendary food critic Jonathan Gold in Los Angeles.
Love the movie and have Roy Choi's book on my wish-list. I will be all over this show like a cheap suit next month.
Tooting's finest
Mail (originally The Times but behind a firewall there)
Britain was today accused of giving ministers the chance of sharing intelligence with allies even if it leads to torture, it was claimed.
An internal Ministry of Defence policy document from just before Christmas reportedly allows the Government to pass tips to foreign spies if the benefits to Britain outweigh the risk of a detainee being abused.
Former Brexit Minister David Davis believes this is illegal and called on new Defence Secretary Penny Mordaunt to tear up the policy because it has 'betrayed' British values.
Mr Davis and human rights campaigners claim that the document allows ministers to circumvent a Cabinet Office document that says that in 'no circumstance will UK personnel ever take action amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment'.
David Davis (Icons passim) has always been sound on this sort of thing.
Concerning Andy and Ollie's joint 50th birthday party yesterday.
Myself: I'm not presently disposed to discuss these operations, sir.
Prodnose: Did you not work for the CIA in I Corps?
Myself: No, sir.
Prodnose: Did you not assassinate a government tax collector in Quang Tri province, June 19th, 1968 ? Captain?
Myself: Sir, I am unaware of any such activity or operation - nor would I be disposed to discuss such an operation if it did in fact exist, sir.
Tennessee Ernie Williams
We've got tickets already for Clive Owens in Night of the Iguana. Scarce time to take a breath and a Menier Chocolate and Theatr Clwyd co-production of Orpheus Descending has landed.
Consider the movies: if you prayed we'd moved beyond my Richard Burton impersonation or my Marlon Brando, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Ben and I went to Odeon last night to see the deliriously entertaining John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum. Both judoka from an early age we were amazed at just how well executed and authentic the judo elements of Keanu Reeves' hybrid fighting style were.
Nomura Tadahiro presents honorary black belt to Keanu Reeves, may cast some light on this. Nomura Tadahiro being the only person in history to have won three consecutive Olympic gold medals in judo.
Open AI
I was half listening to this podcast on AnyPod last night as I was pottering around.
I must listen again and to the end with more attention. I am intrigued by the perceptron. And by GPT-2 which has led me to Talk to Transformer.
Doris Day wasn't just a great actress – she was one of most expressive jazz singers of her generation, says the Torygraph and I agree.
The article signs off with
Sarah Vaughan, when asked to name her favourite singer, replied "I dig Doris Day!"
Sarah Vaughn is my favourite singer. Two degrees of separation from me to Doris then.
I just dialled 911 rather than 901 by mistake trying to get my O2 voicemail messages and got the emergency services.
I thought 911 was a US only equivalent of our 999.
Possibly it is not the greatest idea in the history of the world to have such similar numbers with such disparate purposes.
at 9:20 am 2 comments:
Manchester United 0 - 2 Cardiff City
I thought my home town football team was called "Cardiff City Nil" until I was well into my teens.
If you had told me that one day I would be able to roll "Manchester United 0 - 2 Cardiff City" round my mouth I would have thought you should be carted off to the funny farm.
My Name's Not Prince
My name's not Prince and I'm not funky
My name's not Prince the one and only
I did not come to funk around
'Till I get your daughter I won't leave this town
We're not going to see Wall to Wall Prince at the Hideaway on Friday because it is sold out.
I was the mob until the mob came for me
As l'affaire Danny Baker seems to divide me from all the "good Germans," there are always those who ask, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know "where it's at," this:
I drive food delivery for an online app to make rent and support myself and my young family. This is my new life. I once had a well paid job in what might be described as the social justice industry. Then I upset the wrong person, and within a short window of time, I was considered too toxic for my employer's taste. I was publicly shamed, mobbed, and reduced to a symbol of male privilege. I was cast out of my career and my professional community. Writing anything under my own byline now would invite a renewal of this mobbing—which is why, with my editor's permission, I am writing this under a pseudonym. He knows who I am.
In my previous life, I was a self-righteous social justice crusader. I would use my mid-sized Twitter and Facebook platforms to signal my wokeness on topics such as LGBT rights, rape culture, and racial injustice. Many of the opinions I held then are still opinions that I hold today. But I now realize that my social-media hyperactivity was, in reality, doing more harm than good.
Within the world created by the various apps I used, I got plenty of shares and retweets. But this masked how ineffective I had become outside, in the real world. The only causes I was actually contributing to were the causes of mobbing and public shaming. Real change does not stem from these tactics. They only cause division, alienation, and bitterness.
How did I become that person? It happened because it was exhilarating. Every time I would call someone racist or sexist, I would get a rush. That rush would then be reaffirmed and sustained by the stars, hearts, and thumbs-up that constitute the nickels and dimes of social media validation. The people giving me these stars, hearts, and thumbs-up were engaging in their own cynical game: A fear of being targeted by the mob induces us to signal publicly that we are part of it.
Just a few years ago, many of my friends and peers who self-identify as liberals or progressives were open fans of provocative standup comedians such as Sarah Silverman, and shows like South Park. Today, such material is seen as deeply "problematic," or even labeled as hate speech. I went from minding my own business when people told risqué jokes to practically fainting when they used the wrong pronoun or expressed a right-of-center view. I went from making fun of the guy who took edgy jokes too seriously, to becoming that guy.
When my callouts were met with approval and admiration, I was lavished with praise: "Thank you so much for speaking out!" "You're so brave!" "We need more men like you!"
Then one day, suddenly, I was accused of some of the very transgressions I'd called out in others. I was guilty, of course: There's no such thing as due process in this world. And once judgment has been rendered against you, the mob starts combing through your past, looking for similar transgressions that might have been missed at the time. I was now told that I'd been creating a toxic environment for years at my workplace; that I'd been making the space around me unsafe through microaggressions and macroaggressions alike.
Social justice is a surveillance culture, a snitch culture. The constant vigilance on the part of my colleagues and friends did me in. That's why I'm delivering sushi and pizza. Not that I'm complaining. It's honest work, and it's led me to rediscover how to interact with people in the real world. I am a kinder and more respectful person now that I'm not regularly on social media attacking people for not being "kind" and "respectful."
I mobbed and shamed people for incidents that became front page news. But when they were vindicated or exonerated by some real-world investigation, it was treated as a footnote by my online community. If someone survives a social justice callout, it simply means that the mob has moved on to someone new. No one ever apologizes for a false accusation, and everyone has a selective memory regarding what they've done.
Upon reading Jon Ronson's 2015 book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, I recently went back into my Twitter archives to study my own behavior. I was shocked to discover that I had actually participated quite enthusiastically in the public shaming of Justine Sacco, whose 2013 saga following a bad AIDS joke on Twitter forms one of the book's central case studies.
My memory had told me different. In my mind, I didn't really participate. It was others who took things too far. In reality, the evidence showed that I was among the most vicious of Sacco's mobbers. Ronson describes a central problem with Twitter shaming: There is a "disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment." For years, I was blind to my own gleeful savagery.
I recently had a dream that played out in the cartoon universe of my food-delivery app, the dashboard software that guides my daily work life. The dream turned my workaday drive into a third-person video game, with my cartoon car standing in for me as protagonist. At some point, I started missing some of the streets, and the little line that marks my trail with blue pixels indicated where I'd gone off-road. My path got erratic, and the dream became other-worldly, as dreams eventually do. I drove over cartoon sidewalks, through cartoon buildings and cartoon parks. It's a two-dimensional world in the app, so everything was flat. Through the unique logic of dreams, I survived all of this, all the while picking up and dropping off deliveries and making money. In my dream, I was making progress.
As my REM cycle intensified, my dream concluded. I was jolted from my two-dimensional app world and thrust back into the reality of the living world—where I could understand the suffering, carnage and death I would have caused by my in-app actions. There were bodies strewn along the streets, screaming bystanders, destroyed lives, chaos. My car, by contrast, was indestructible while I was living in the app.
The social justice vigilantism I was living on Twitter and Facebook was like the app in my dream. Aggressive online virtue signaling is a fundamentally two-dimensional act. It has no human depth. It's only when we snap out of it, see the world as it really is, and people as they really are, that we appreciate the destruction and human suffering we caused when we were trapped inside.
Note on method
I have taken this whole thing from https://quillette.com/2019/05/08/i-was-the-mob-until-the-mob-came-for-me-by-barrett-wilson/ where it is free, but I dropped a donation into https://quillette.com/helpfreethoughtlive/ which I hope squares things.
Touch of Velvet
Why (you may well ask as I did) is Nicholas being plagued with adverts for sex toys, cannabis balm and virility tablets as he innocently trawls the interwebs? I defy anyone to give of his best scrabbling Words with Friends when another part of the screen is pulling on his sleeve with "thrill to the magic Velvet bullet - silky smooth, with 10 powerful stimulation modes".
The explanation appears to lie on the right hand side of the image above. When I went to see Mum at Ty Enfys on Wednesday she was saying she had lost special gloves that soothe her arthritis. She couldn't remember a brand or name but said she ordered them from a magazine. When I got back to Bronwydd I found a catalogue called easylife, and WhatsApped my sibling group to see if the gloves were this pair that I found leafing thought its pages.
After that I couldn't help but rib them about pages 92 and 93 of the publication along the lines of:
They start with https://www.easylifegroup.com/product/kegal-trainer-set/3558 then just get saucier and saucier. I forbid you to read it. To think my parents had it in the house.
Two days later kegal balls are being thrown in my face every working hour. Serves me right.
Hands free, as free as the wind blows
I arranged client meetings yesterday so that I could get to Cardiff in the late afternoon and visit mum and dad. It meant (lest you raise an eyebrow) that I had to leave the house before six and visit three towns in the Midlands before heading back home down the M50. (O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee!)
Duty done, I returned to spend the night in Bronwydd. Curious as to how Spurs were getting on I launched "Alexa, play Radio 5 Live" in to the ether. "No answer!" came the stern reply; "You'll get no help from me!"
There are no native Alexa devices in Browne Acres, but it did lead me to revisit the limp-wristed Alexa app on my Surface Pro. Alexa is now hands-free on every Windows 10 device, and has been since yesterday. I can talk to it. Order is restored to the universe.
What can be in this for Amazon I wonder? There is no income stream. It must be to do with making the platform ubiquitous.
six impossible things before breakfast
Yesterday Liverpool overturned a three goal deficit in the second leg of the semi-final, to beat Barcelona 4-3 on aggregate and qualify for the Champions League final.
On the same day the government confirmed that the European elections will go ahead on 23 May, despite the fact that the country voted to leave the EU nearly three years ago in June 2016.
If you ask me, the latter is the crazier.
INCREASINGLY LESS SURE WAYS TO GET BOB SEGER TO GO
Stop playing old-time rock and roll.
Try to take him to a disco. (see also: "tango, go to hear them play a…")
Fail to stifle a yawn when he reminisces about the days of old.
Leap into the room and shout, "Who wants to go to Fire Lake!"
Instigate a debate about alternative energy sources and obstinately come out against the wind.
Subtly remind Bob Seger that Betty Lou's gettin' out tonight.
Tell Bob Seger that he's still the same, but in a tone that's not necessarily a compliment.
Call Bob Seger "a relic," call him what you will.
Continue playing rock and roll that is not old-time but nonetheless recognized as a classic of the genre.
Start humming a tune from 1962.
Suggestively tell Bob Seger that you know it's late, you know he's weary, you know his plans don't include you…
Just take those old records off the shelf. (see also: "old records, proper storage of")
Whip out the sax.
Night moves.
Crocodile Park
All this is filmed yards from my house. O brave new world, that has such people in it.
Emotional scenes as Cardiff City relegated from Premier League after loss to Crystal Palace
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
The Ruler of the Queen's Navee
Penny Mordaunt - Wikipedia
When receiving The Spectator magazine's Parliamentarian of the Year award in November 2014, Mordaunt said that she had delivered a speech in the House of Commons just before the Easter recess in 2013 on poultry welfare so as to use the word "cock", as a forfeit for a misdemeanour during Naval Reserve training. Mordaunt used the word "cock" six times and "lay" or "laid" five times. Following her comments, she was accused by Labour MP Kate Hoey of trivialising parliament.
In 2014, Mordaunt appeared on reality television programme Splash!. Although some[who?] criticised the media appearance, in terms of questioning whether her focus should have been on her constituency work, Mordaunt stated that the response was overwhelmingly positive and defended her appearance.
On 1 May 2019, Mordaunt was appointed as the first ever female Defence Secretary.
You don't have to brush your teeth - just the ones you want to keep
The Bomber had a tooth out this morning. His orthodontic treatment that has now been going on since October 2014, but I think we are in the home straight.
His suffering in the car on the way back triggered a flash back. I seem to remember my father removing a wobbly milk tooth of mine by tying a slender cord (cotton?) around it and attaching the other end to the handle of a door which he then slammed shut. Thus effecting the extraction.
Can this be right or have I imagined it? It seems almost inconceivable in 2019, for all that it has left me with a famously winning smile.
I got this message from my brother Vince via WhatsApp:
I quite clearly remember dad removing your tooth (eventually) just as you have described!
Take that Generation Snowflake!
Fan (the flames?) Club (the seals?)
Rory Stewart was named cabinet secretary for international development on Wednesday in a reshuffle sparked by the firing of Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson over the leak of information about Chinese telecoms company Huawei.
I approve of Rory Stewart. I first approved on September 15 2011.
Subsequent approvals:
Last night, Kevin and Frankie were talking about starting to serve jackfruit at Coffee in the Wood.
On my way home I popped into the Co-Op, spied and picked up pulled jackfruit in a sweet and smoky BBQ sauce served with seasoned wedges and red cabbage slaw from the reduced price shelf.
There could definitely be room in my life for this.
While we are on the subject of grub, I am also currently two episodes into Netflx's new Street Food series.
"That's My Chair, That Is : The Welsh Game of Thro...
I think they take the occasional pot shot to relie...
Emotional scenes as Cardiff City relegated from Pr...
You don't have to brush your teeth - just the ones...


text:
Q: Is it possible to make a pure CSS Tree diagram? I've made an attempt here. However, it has two problems:

*

*IE

*Last element of a list being a sublist

Is there a better way of doing this?

A: You didn't really go into detail on what your criteria are, but from what you have said, I'd suggest taking a look at SlickMap CSS.
Update: Got it! I just remembered where I'd seen what you're looking for:
jsTree is a jQuery plugin which creates a tree widget with the kind of styling you want and uses
 internally to represent it.

A: Try the code below, it's pure CSS and no JS/jQuery (which IMO is way more compatible), works by manipulating borders and spacing.
Works on FF/Chrome & IE. Enjoy  :-)

.parent a,

li {

  font-size: 22px;

  color: #000;

  font-family: "Source Sans Pro", sans-serif;

}

.child a,

li {

  font-size: 18px;

  color: #000;

}

.subchild a,

li {

  font-size: 18px;

  color: #888888;

}

.s2child a,

li {

  font-size: 16px;

  color: #ccc;

}

.tree,

.tree ul {

  list-style-type: none;

  margin-left: 0 0 0 10px;

  padding: 0;

  position: relative;

  overflow: hidden;

}

.tree li {

  margin: 0 0 0 15px;

  padding: 0 12px 0 20px;

  position: relative;

}

.tree li::before,

.tree li::after {

  content: '';

  position: absolute;

  left: 0;

}

/* horizontal line on inner list items */

.tree li::before {

  border-top: 2px solid #000;

  top: 14px;

  width: 15px;

  height: 0;

}

/* vertical line on list items */

.tree li:after {

  border-left: 2px solid #000;

  height: 100%;

  width: 0px;

  top: -5px;

}

/* lower line on list items from the first level because they don't have parents */

.tree > li::after {

  top: 15px;

}

/* hide line from the last of the first level list items */

.tree > li:last-child::after {

  display: none;

}

/* hide line from before the Home or starting page or first element */

.tree > li:first-child::before {

  display: none;

}

.tree ul:last-child li:last-child:after {

  height: 20px;

}

.tree a:hover {

  color: red;

  font-weight: 500;

  text-shadow: 1px 2px 2px #F3F3F3;

}
<!doctype html>

  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title>Pure CSS Tree</title>
  <link href="tree.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

Grand Parent

Parent

Parent

Child

Grand Child

Grand Child

Grand Child

Grand Child

Grand Child

Child

Grand Child

Grand Child

Parent

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
On Domesticity
What happens when a labor of love does double duty as plain old labor?
"I am not a fancy cook or an ambitious one," writes Laurie Colwin in her book of essays and recipes Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen. "I am a plain old cook."
By the fact of this line having been published in her book of essays and recipes, one can safely say that despite her protestations, she is not a plain old cook. I understand her, though. Those of us who make work of our domestic labors (a very privileged position) often want to be thought of as just simple guides to better, easier, tastier living and not gods ruling from on high about just the right way to make a basic vinaigrette. "You can balance the following ingredients to suit yourself," she writes in another chapter. It's your tongue, she seems to say, and I am one-hundred percent on board with this approach. I can provide guidelines but I can't teach you what you like. You have to trust yourself there, and that's I think the most important lesson for the home cook.
I have been having the experience of my domestic labor and labor-labor being too much lately, and I have been (perhaps unfairly) blaming my gender. While I was growing up, I did not sit at my mother's side in the kitchen and learn a goddam thing. I was fed well, and I loved food, but she told me not to learn how to cook because then I'd spend my life cooking for a man. When I finally came to cooking in my twenties (a necessity when I gave up eating animal products), I did so with the intensity and enthusiasm I'd always hoped to bring to literary projects—and I did so as an enthusiast, as I thought a man might, not as care-taking. I had wanted to be a writer of strange fiction, yet what really lit a fire under my ass was baking cake and figuring out how to make a bean-based version of the meaty empanadas my mom had raised me on. We're over a decade on from that moment now. Food, cooking, and baking gave my life meaning. Simple as that.
I'm a woman, though. Married now. A wife. Food is my thing, my passion—where I feel happiest and most creative, as opposed to when I'm writing, like now, when I feel happy enough and most challenged—as well as my work, and it's also a necessity, and it also has all these annoying patriarchal connotations. This is no longer pure intellectual pursuit, and I relish that about it while it also makes me uneasy. Who am I if I'm doing domesticity, as work and as an expression of love?
I rarely burn out on cooking, but I do burn out on it, and because it's all of these things at once—life, love, labor—that collapse of my energy feels like a failure on all fronts. Would I feel this way were I a man? I wonder. I want entitlement to exhaustion; I want to state it firmly, assertively: "I don't want to cook today." Instead, I swan about, a bit depressed and endlessly agitated, and push myself until I really can't cook today because there's a nagging pain in my back from hours of standing barefoot on tile floor.
Even then, I feel ridiculous. Domestic labor is a tale as old as time, and those who came before us by a century or so never had the ability to say, "Fuck it, let's order a pizza." While food slowly but surely became outsourced—no longer was every loaf of bread baked in the house—it also eventually morphed into a site of individual satisfaction, which is where I found it and picked it up, professionalized it.
When you chronicle the domestic, as a food writer, you're telling everyone your ideals and your failures. Making it all foible and learning experience, though the very act of chronicling, of being able to narrate it, means you've got a grip on it. I'm a plain old cook. But I'm also a control freak, and I don't want to eat a mediocre meal for the sake of taking it easy. Herein lies the rub!
I love Rachel Cusk's essay "Making House: Notes on Domesticity," because she sees the way the domestic life is a zero-sum game for a woman: You're defined by partaking as well as rejecting.
The suburban housewife with her Valium and her compulsive, doomed perfectionism has been the butt of a decades-long cultural joke. Yet there are other imperatives that bedevil the contemporary heirs of traditional female identity, for whom insouciance in the face of the domestic can seem a sort of political requirement, as though by ceasing to care about our homes we could prove our lack of triviality, our busyness, our equality.
God, and this part:
The artist in me wanted to disdain the material world, while the woman couldn't: In my fantasy of the orderly writer's room I would have to serve myself, be my own devoted housewife. It would require two identities, two consciousnesses, two sets of minutes and hours.
When I was watching the HBO Max show Julia to write about it for Gawker, I found myself wondering to whom she was really a hero for freeing from the tyranny of meatloaf and frozen foods. As writer John Birdsall explained in a Twitter thread, the french omelet of episode one was an obsession for well-to-do women. What about everyone else? The ones who couldn't send away for the proper pan from Williams-Sonoma? What were they cooking and eating? Did they enjoy the work? Would they have called it work? When can domesticity simply be life, for whom?
In the documentary Julia, there are clips of her talking about her love for men, her love for feeding her husband. Was that performance? If anyone ever asks me, could I reply without irony? Can I ever decouple my cooking from care again? Would I want to—what would it give me if I could?
I mean: Does all food media exist to keep mainly women inspired around what is actually a dull task that needs to be suffused with novelty? Would I love to cook if I'd come to it out of duty rather than desire?
The uproariously funny The Taste of America by John L. and Karen Hess has a chapter on cookbooks that really tears into American women who aren't curious about cooking—who want things quick, easy, extremely American-ized—and how that was capitalized upon by publishers and editors. I mean, it's funny to me, but I don't really think everyone has to care about food. Most people, probably, do not, and there is enough on people's plates (so to speak) without project cooking or dinner parties being regarded as moral hygiene.
Domesticity is a luxury. I work from home, for myself: I get to dawdle over a pot of beans, mix up tortilla dough, and mop during my downtime. When my husband gets home, I often ask him to make a martini for me to sip on while I cook. It's all a beautiful little fantasy, until sometimes it isn't. Until I no longer wish to have a mental inventory of the pantry and the fridge, to always know when we need garlic before we're out. This mood tends to strike when I have had an especially arduous week of writing or editing work, or when I've done five Zooms on different topics—that's when getting into the kitchen makes me want to cry. This is a burden I've placed upon myself, though, because I made love and labor one.
What makes me lucky and grateful is that I've learned to see it coming: When the domestic goddess morphs into a domestic beast, I just have to give myself some space from the kitchen and let my husband cook. Inevitably, I wake up the next day gasping for air, struck by a new recipe idea, eager to throw on my apron and sweat in front of the stove. To be a plain old cook, with a wink. To assume the work of care, and make a nice job of it. Food, my love; food, my labor.
Note: In this piece, I set my terms on domesticity—had to get it off my chest! In a future piece, I will be taking a broader, more systemic look at gender and labor in the kitchen.
Last week, I tried to catch people up on the podcast. This week's episode will feature author Jami Attenberg, discussing her latest book, the memoir I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or adjust your settings to receive an email when it's out.
Friday's From the Kitchen dispatch for paid subscribers will include a recipe for guava barbecue sauce to put on mushroom pinchos! An excellent meatless summer dish. See the recipe index for all past recipes available to paid subscribers.
A conversation with Siobhan Phillips, author of the new novel Benefit, about food writing, kitchen labor, and sugar for Bellevue Literary Press. An interview with Topia.
The books mentioned in the above essay, of course, as well as the forthcoming The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin by Kirsty Bell. I ordered and am really looking forward to books by Lauren Elkin and Caren Beilin. Beilin I am excited about after listening to her on "Between the Covers," a podcast I'm newly very obsessed with—luckily there are years' worth of conversations to listen to!
The reason I wrote this essay is that I'm not into cooking at the moment, though I did spend a very good day recipe testing for next week's pincho recipe, made a lemon-coconut cake with a matcha swirl that I'll publish soon, and made jackfruit and mushroom tacos. For a friend who got a new job, eggplant parm and a chocolate mousse.
Wendy Nevett Bazil
Apr 25, 2022Liked by Alicia Kennedy
Yes! Yes! Yes! Day to day, at home, I've likewise chosen this role and have these moments, but worst when visiting with family and they've presumptively determined that I should be the cook for the night—not because this job must be done and we should all share the burden—but because "you love to cook!" I want to scream at them not to tarnish my love this way.
May 1, 2022Liked by Alicia Kennedy
First, I really enjoy your writing. It's snappy and literate at the same time. Second, as a man who cooks a lot, I can tell you that I, too, sometimes do not want to cook. Just order a pizza or get a taco. I am a teacher. Every Sunday I bake bread to take to school and hand out to colleagues and students. Sometimes I just don't feel like it, but I do it anyway because the delight that people have with a simple boule of sourdough or a slice of focaccia is quite rewarding.
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Building the New Job Detail Page
Jiuling Wang
Editor's note: This blog has been updated.
When we recently launched the new job detail page, we introduced new insights for job seekers to know their "In," meet the team, and get the inside scoop about working at the company. Since launch, the page is driving a double-digit lift in job applications. While it is exciting to see the page's popularity and its rich features, it is also a challenge to transform the design and deliver it to our members. All these changes gave our engineering team an opportunity to adopt the new technologies and rebuild the architecture for the sake of improving both members' and developers' experiences. In this blog, we will go into the details of how we built and delivered this page.
At LinkedIn Engineering, we try to use existing technologies as much as we can, which enables us to move fast. In the last few years, the company has developed many new technologies for scaling at LinkedIn. For the new jobs page, we redesigned the frontend architecture using Marionette and Play frameworks, and leveraged existing Rest.li framework and various data storage solution for mid-tier and backend services.
At LinkedIn, we are using Apache Traffic Server (ATS) to proxy to all requests and responses to the site. In other words, when a request to view the job detail page is fired from the browser, ATS will forward the request to our Play application based on the URL pattern.
The key functionality of Play app is fetching dynamic data. The page is organized as a standard header, footer, and multiple modules inside the body. In the Play frontend, we have a component called ModuleFactory, which is responsible for creating all modules shown on the page. Each module will process and get desired data by talking to various downstream Rest.li services. The page template is also defined at Play frontend, for which we are using Scala base page template. The Scala template engine aggregates all the module data with templates and renders them as a barebone HTML.
After the HTML being sent back to ATS, a plugin called Fizzy developed within LinkedIn is responsible for fetching the standard page header and footer, inserting them into the existing HTML, and flushing them to the browser.
In order to provide a fluent user experience for members to navigate across the jobs ecosystem, we decided to build a single page application using Marionette, a backbone framework that simplifies the application code with robust views and architecture solutions. When the browser receives the HTML content from the server side, Marionette application will bootstrap and start to render the page.
In 2015, LinkedIn set a new goal for having every page load in under four seconds for 90 percent of members. The motivation is the clear correlation between site speed and user engagement. Despite adding many new features and providing a more media-rich page, the team was able to render the page in just three seconds in the 90th percentile, over 40 percent faster than the old page. Below, we will share both the technical optimizations we made to the page, and the analytical approach we had from the beginning of the project.
Technical Optimizations
Play Streaming: Streaming is a nice feature in the Play framework that enables the server to start transferring data before knowing the content length of the whole response. The response data is sent in a series of chunks, which means as long as one part of the page is available, it could be streamed to the client. This is not only a win for user experience to see the page earlier, but also key in reducing the page loading time. As long as the header of the page is flushed into client side, the browser will start to parse and download all necessary JavaScript and CSS files. When the HTML document transfer finishes, the related JavaScript and CSS are also almost ready, which shortens the critical path of page load significantly.
Precomputing: A lot of valuable insights in the new design – for example who are your connections or past coworkers currently working at the company you are viewing – are not necessarily unique to every member or time-sensitive. For this reason, we decided to precompute and store key-value pair into read-only Voldemort stores after confirming that the data size of all potential insights is manageable. Since the insights are not time-sensitive, the Hadoop jobs we created to compute insights are scheduled to run every day to keep the data fresh.
Parallelism of downstream call: In addition to Time To First Byte (TTFB), another key factor at server side is the critical path length of getting all data needed. Given the service-oriented architecture of LinkedIn, it is common to talk to multiple backend services before finishing computation data for a product feature. Identifying the best parallelism strategy would improve the overall latency significantly.
Redirect removal: Removing unnecessary redirects is a low hanging fruit for the site speed improvement. The data shows one extra redirect may add around 800ms latency in the 90th percentile of the page loading time. Once we cleaned up legacy code, which points to old URLs, and mapped some URLs in ATS, we observed a significant win for the time to first byte.
Page weight reduction: In the development cycle, we made a tremendous amount of effort to reduce the page weight in all aspects. This include minifying related scripts together into a single script, inlining CSS files, and lazy loading images. We also paid special attention to the mobile page. In order to hit a performance comparable to desktop, we simplified the content on mobile devices to deliver the most important information to members.
Data-driven development
In order to deliver the brand new job detail page, we had to make many feature iterations, which often takes a long time in software engineering. We are exploring possible optimizations to site speed almost every day, so we needed an analytics framework to guide our technical decisions.
In the early stage of the development cycle, the page was not available to external members and we were lacking the direct tracking data to understand the performance of our page. As a result, we used Catchpoint as our initial monitoring platform. On Catchpoint, we could ask machines in different locations to hit our new page periodically, and report key site speed metrics, such as TTFB, document loading time, JavaScript and CSS file size, among others.
LiX is an online experimentation platform developed at LinkedIn that manages the lifecycle of all tests and experiments. We made each optimization change guarded by LiX to ensure it will not break the existing functionality. After verifying that, we ramped the feature to a segment, for example 50 percent of all members. By doing A/B testing using the LiX framework, we got a precise measurement of the improvements we made with each optimization, which would serve as lessons for the future development of other pages.
By monitoring key metrics in Catchpoint and through LiX experiments, and by reporting site speed analysis week over week, we ensured that the page would be on the right track to hit the service-level-agreement and that no new iteration on the page would significantly hurt the performance. This pure data-driven approach helps the team prioritize between developing new feature and optimizing performance of existing page.
Rolling out
Shipping a high-volume page from scratch takes a lot of synchronization. We needed to ensure services at all levels were well-prepared for the potential change of usage pattern.
The first step was to have an estimation of queries per second (QPS) ahead of time, and to sync up with the right teams, like the Site Reliability Engineer team for traffic shift in frontend service, and the application team for downstream Rest.li services. At this point, we might make certain tradeoffs if some appealing features are causing too much QPS to achieve.
We used the LiX experiment framework to make the ramping process as smooth as possible. We began with a target group of certain members, to a small segment of members that began at one percent and gradually increased in increments of 10 until we reached 100 percent of all members. This gave us the chance to fix bugs, collect feedback for iterations, and most importantly, validate business impact and make decisions based on results.
For each ramp, we needed to manually verify that the system was still running properly, which quickly became a nuisance. This motivated us to set up an auto-alert dashboard using InGraph, the framework that visualizes LinkedIn's site performance. The dashboard contains all key metrics in real-time: QPS to the page, Time to First and Last Byte from frontend services, latency and error rates for generating each module of the page, and outbound QPS to downstream services. Absolute and week-over-week thresholds also fired auto-alert messages.
Thanks to the great partnership from other teams, and the excellent tools LinkedIn built, we were able ship the page comfortably.
As one of the most viewed pages on LinkedIn, the new job detail page brings many more insights to members and is also much faster when compared to the previous page. We are super proud of how far we have come, but this is not the end. There are many more features on the way, for example, finding more recommended reasons to curate the job for you and turning all job pages into one single page application for a seamless experience for our members.
site speed,
rest.li,
Accelerating the LinkedIn Experience with Azure Front Door
Site Speed Monitoring in A/B Testing and Feature Ramp-up


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Thousands of Nigerian girls celebrate graduation from Basic Literacy programme
nigerian-girls-celebrate-graduation-drupal.jpg
Girls using ICTs in Basic Literacy programme class, Nigeria
7,500 girls were jubilant as they received their awards for having completed their Basic Literacy programme under a UNESCO-Always project, at a ceremony held in Abuja.
The event on Friday 5 May saw the first students graduate from a programme to empower women and girls in Nigeria. In all, 60,000 learners are set to benefit from this first phase of the programme. UNESCO has partnered with Proctor & Gamble, the producer of Always, on the Revitalizing Adults and Youth Literacy (RAYL) project in Nigeria which uses e-Learning through mobile phones and laptop computers.
''Before I used to feel ashamed when I went out with my friends because some of them are graduates but now I can also read, write and talk well with my friends," said Helen Ukubi, one of the graduates. The incorporation of ICT training was also appreciated by Asabe Ishaya, another graduate, ''Now, I can read and write on my own and even send and receive text messages.''
Launched in March 2014 for five years, the project aims to accelerate national efforts to bring education to children and adults. During the several phases of the project, it will especially target a total of 110,000 illiterate girls and women to acquire basic literacy, numeracy and life and vocational skills in Rivers State, the Federal Capital Territory and Bauchi State. The methodology is to reach girls through non-formal education, outside the mainstream school system, as well as strenghening the capacity of girls who are having difficulties in some subject areas so as to avoid the risk that they drop out of school. As part of the project, 200 Universal Basic Education teachers received training and 30 media personnel were trained on the production of e-lessons for delivery by radio, television and mobile phone applications.
Highest number of out-of-school children
According to the UNESCO Global EFA Monitoring Report 2015, Nigeria has 10.5 million out-of-school children - the highest number in the world. 60 per cent, of them live in the northern part of the country and of this figure over 71 per cent are girls and women.
UNESCO Regional Director, Mr. Benoit Sossou, thanked Procter & Gamble for giving back to the society especially to their first line customers, women and girls through its collaboration. "Together we can eventually wipe out illiteracy in Nigeria and other parts of the world if we continue to invest in education, especially for women and girls", he said. This project builds on a 2012 UNESCO literacy project for girls and women in Senegal whose innovative teaching methods and approaches have inspired programmes in other countries struggling with high illiteracy rates.
Women's and Girls' Education
Literacy for all
Education transforms lives, Partnerships, ICT in education, Literacy , Education and gender equality, Private Sector


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Lodges with Hot Tubs Discounted June 2019 Holidays. Book Hot Tub Holidays in June and Save.
June is a lovely time of year for a hot tub holiday. With the weather hotting up, it's the ideal time of year to make the most of the outdoors and blow those cobwebs away.
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Lodges with hot tubs make fantastic breaks for special occasions so if you have an anniversary or birthday coming up in June, why not consider celebrating with a memorable lodge getaway.
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You can check availability in other regions all over the UK too!