text:
Sell-side Advisory
Exit Review
Media & Digital Technology
Oaklins
The Definitive Guide to Selling Your Business
bfinance / Baird Capital
Client : bfinance
Activity : Provides investment advisory solutions to institutional investors worldwide.
Sector : Financial Services
Acquired by: Baird Capital
What our client said
"This is an exciting deal for our business. Baird Capital's experience and resources will be invaluable as we seek to further enhance our services and global reach. Baird's deep understanding of the financial services industry and its global network will be valuable as we look to drive our growth both domestically and abroad. Our improved capabilities will also help us better serve our institutional clients who now, more than ever, need excellent advice to help them in their search for yield and to protect their portfolios in today's highly volatile markets.
We are building bfinance's next phase of growth on very strong foundations, with our client base of blue-chip institutions and clearly differentiated advisory services winning an increasing number of adherents globally. When looking for an advisor we wanted someone with an international network and experience of working with Private Equity firms. Cavendish had the expertise to facilitate the transaction and the support they provided was invaluable."
David Vafai, Founder and CEO of bfinance
Cavendish Corporate Finance, the UK's leading sell-side mid-market M&A firm, is delighted to announce that it has advised on the investment in bfinance Holdings Limited ("bfinance"), a leading investment advisory business, by Baird Capital ("Baird"), a leading private equity firm focussed on mid-market buyouts. The sale price was not disclosed.
Founded in 1999 by David Vafai, bfinance offers investment advisory solutions to institutional investors worldwide. bfinance specialises in investment implementation, spanning a range of services from investment strategy design, to manager selection, portfolio risk solutions and investment monitoring. A clear differentiator for bfinance is that when conducting manager search and selection, it maintains no subjective manager buy lists and conducts a review of the entire universe of managers before implementing its proprietary, in-depth manager due diligence and selection. Every assignment is modelled and tailored to each individual client's specific requirements, risk tolerance and return objectives.
Headquartered in London, with offices in Amsterdam, Munich, Montreal, Paris and Sydney, bfinance has advised on investments for over 300 clients on more than 700 engagements, involving investments totalling over $140 billion. Its clients have an average assets under management of c.$12 billion and include some of the world's largest institutional investors. Client coverage is in over 30 countries.
Given the strong projected growth of the global asset management industry there are significant expansion opportunities for bfinance. Global assets under management are estimated at USD64 trillion and this is forecast to increase significantly over the next five years, with pension assets in particular projected to grow by 6.6 per cent per annum to reach USD56.5 trillion by 2020.
As the landscape of asset classes continues to evolve and become more complex, with institutions turning to emerging and more exotic asset classes such as European private debt or African equities, in the search for yield, investment consultants such as bfinance will play a major role in helping to reshape allocations and protect portfolios in volatile markets.
The transaction will facilitate more growth in the US and Australia, where bfinance have recently won a number of new engagements. It also recently opened a Sydney office to cover the Australian region. David Vafai will continue to run the business, while Baird's managing director Andrew Ferguson and CFO Mark Brownlie will also join the board, alongside new chairman and Citywire founder Tim Trotter.
Nick Jones, Partner at Cavendish Corporate Finance who led on the transaction, commented:
"We are delighted to have advised bfinance on this transaction allowing David and the team to crystalise significant value that has been created over the last few years. With a high quality board and an investor with Baird's credentials in the sector and international reach, bfinance has a partner that will support an exciting future for the business."
Other deals in Financial Services
Latest News within This Sector
Selling Your Business: How to time your exit
Beauty is in the eye of the acquiror
Selling Your Business: How do I find my exit?
2019 Business Highlights
Helping ambitious companies grow finnCap advises ambitious growth companies, accesses capital and promotes their stories across public and private markets.
© 2019 Cavendish Corporate Finance LLP


The next day we decided to take a day trip to see some of the nearby sites. We arranged for a driver, Dewa, to pick us up with a minivan, and our family, plus Justine and Steve all piled in and we took off. Driving in Bali is best done with a local driver - the roads are a confusing warren of narrow country roads with few signposts and no streetlighting at night. Dewa turned out to be a great driver, and we took many other trips with him and became good friends during the time we were in Bali.
Our first stop was at the village of Mas, near Ubud, which is famous for its woodcarvers. Dewa had not gotten to know us yet and assumed we should be taken on the normal tourist route of overpriced souvenir shops. Still, the carving was quite spectacular.
This was a huge sculpture carved out of a tree, with deer and other animals, Balinese spirits, and so on.


As part of its plan to whittle down its portfolio of stores nationwide, department store operator J.C. Penney Co. also plans to vacate a Lakeland distribution center it has occupied for more than 25 years.
The Plano, Texas-based retailer says supply chain operations will be shifted from 6800 State Road 33 N., in Lakeland, to Atlanta by the end of June.
Joey Thomas, a J.C. Penney spokesman, says Atlanta will be one of 13 remaining U.S. supply chain centers operated by the company going forward.
Earlier this month J.C. Penney announced plans to close 138 additional stores — or about 14% of its store count -- to boost profitability. Only two stores in Florida, in Jacksonville and Palatka, will be affected by the downsizing, the company says.
The 360,000-square-foot Lakeland distribution center has been owned since December 2015 by Philadelphia-based Exeter Property Group. Exeter bought the property for $23.4 million, according to Polk County property records.
In addition to the J.C. Penney-occupied building, Exeter also owns industrial real estate in Tampa, Orlando and Lake Mary. Last fall, the company acquired a 374,850-square-foot property occupied by Amazon.com in Davenport, also in Polk County, for $24.6 million, records show.
In all, Exeter's portfolio is valued at more than $3.5 billion nationwide.
"This building is as close to Interstate 4 as one can get to Interstate 4 without being on Interstate 4 itself," says Todd Dantzler, a principal in the commercial real estate brokerage firm CBC Saunders Ralston Dantzler Realty, in Lakeland.
Even so, Dantzler adds that it's been roughly a decade since an industrial building of the size of Exeter's that wasn't a build-to-suit project came on the market for lease.


Apostrophe's schemas are a powerful way to add fields to any type of piece or page. But sometimes you'll have a field you want to add to every type of piece. Here's how to do that.
As explained in the tutorials, the apostrophe-pieces module is a great way to create reusable content that appears all over the site — both on apostrophe-pieces-pages and in apostrophe-pieces-widgets.
We've seen how we can add fields to these by using the addFields option when configuring each module. But sometimes we want to add a field to every type of piece. We can do that by configuring the apostrophe-pieces module itself.
Any configuration we set for apostrophe-pieces becomes part of the configuration for all of the modules that extend it.
This won't quite work. The reason is that the addFields option set for each subclass overrides it.
Another problem is that we wind up with "Pieces" on the admin bar. If we configure a module in app.js, Apostrophe assumes we want to use that module, not just extend it to create new modules.
If one of your subclasses of pieces doesn't need the author field, just use the removeFields option in that module.


text:
FROM ubuntu:jammy

# Install packages
RUN apt-get update
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y \
        sudo vim htop jq rsync sysstat curl \
        libdbd-pg-perl libxml-checker-perl libyaml-perl \
        devscripts build-essential lintian git cloc txt2man debhelper libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libperl-dev libxml2-dev liblz4-dev \
        liblz4-tool libpq-dev lcov autoconf-archive zstd libzstd-dev bzip2 libbz2-dev pkg-config libyaml-dev libc6-dbg wget meson \
        ccache valgrind tzdata

# Install Docker
RUN groupadd -g5000 docker
RUN curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh

# Create vagrant user
RUN adduser --ingroup=docker -uid=5000 --disabled-password --gecos \"\" vagrant

# Mark git path as safe
RUN sudo -u vagrant git config --global --add safe.directory /home/vagrant/pgbackrest

# Configure sudo
RUN echo '%docker ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL' >> /etc/sudoers

# Mount tmpfs at /home/vagrant/test for faster testing
RUN sudo -u vagrant mkdir -m 770 /home/vagrant/test
RUN echo 'tmpfs /home/vagrant/test tmpfs size=4096M 0 1' >> /etc/fstab

USER vagrant
WORKDIR /home/vagrant

ENTRYPOINT sudo rm -f /var/run/docker.pid && sudo mount -a && sudo dockerd

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
John Gilbert Timbs – Tasmania	admin	2017-12-05T11:33:22+10:00
John Gilbert Timbs – Tasmania
D.O.B. – 12/02/1941
Born at New Norfolk to Edward and Minnie Timbs, in a family of eight, he commenced woodchopping in 1964 at the Elwick Hotel, along with his brother Baden, they teamed up quite often in double handed sawing events, and took out first place at the Royal Sydney Show in the early 1970's.
John had broken records in several World Marathon woodchopping events, in 1979 he broke a world record in a 60cm (2 foot) underhand log, a record which has been set un 1898 – 1900 by J. Brain, John's cutting time was 2 mins and 56.6 seconds this was 1 min and 4 second faster than that set by Brain.
Again in 1984 he broke two world marathon records, first on New Years day at the Busy Park Show he cut against Garry Hewitt of QLD. in the Ironman event, which consisted of 300mm standing, 300mm underhand, 375mm single sawing and 300mm tree-felling, he set a new record of 3 mins and 37 seconds cutting 1 mins 52 seconds off the time set previously by Geoff Sweetman of NSW.
In early April of the same year he competed against Martin O'Toole of Vic. Slicing through 5 x 350mm (14 inch) underhand logs in 3minutes and 30.7 seconds cutting 1 minute and 13.2 seconds form the previous record.
John was also a very strong teams cutter and would really excel when the chips were down, during the 1970s the Southern team were almost certain to lose but he was switched from the first to last standing bock and the South were the victors by almost half a block.
He was a very strong competitor in tree-felling events and several times was only beaten in Championships by one of two blows. He competed at all the major shows throughout Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, he was the only Tasmanian Axeman to compete in Jakarta at the Highland Games in 1984 along with Terry Kennedy N.S.W, John Goodwin and Mark Hughes N.Z.
John was a committee member of the Bushy Park Show Society for a number of years and also the Maydena Axemen's Club for 23 years where he was always a very dedicated and willing working member, helping with organising logs for both these carnivals.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Iowa House Republicans are proposing a 1 percent increase in per-pupil funding to public schools next year, roughly a $32 million increase.
Iowa House Republicans are proposing a 1 percent increase in per-pupil funding to K-12 public schools next year, roughly a $32 million increase.
That's less than the $54 million Gov. Kim Reynolds proposed in her Condition of the State address, and it's less than the $40 million they approved for schools last year.
Public school advocates said they were grateful to see any increase as the state continues to face sluggish revenue growth, though they said it does not do enough to address their own budget concerns.
"While we continue to have concerns about funding for schools, 1 percent is certainly far above what we thought we would receive going into the start of this legislative session," said Emily Piper, a lobbyist with Iowa Association of School Boards. "No doubt it will still cause stress for many of our districts in terms of putting these budgets together. But we're also very cognizant of the fact that K-12 education is being held harmless for a second year (as the state makes budget cuts)."
For the second year in a row, lawmakers are having to make mid-year spending cuts that will affect state programs and services. Those will affect the current 2018 budget year, which ends June 30.
Senate Republicans have proposed $52 million in cuts, with the bulk of those affecting higher education, the justice system and state human services. However, Republican leaders have said they do not intend to make cuts to the funding already promised to Iowa's public schools for the current year.
Rep. Cecil Dolecheck, a Republican from Mount Ayr who led the subcommittee meeting, said that given those cuts, some of his colleagues would have preferred to give schools no funding increase next year.
"If we fund zero (percent), it falls on the backs of my property taxpayers," he said. "And my job up here as an elected official is also to protect my constituents' pocketbook. I would rather, when it comes to school funding, shift that over to the state as much as possible and not let it fall back on the property taxes."
Rep. Sharon Steckman, a Democrat from Mason City and a member of the subcommittee, said Republicans can't call education a priority while under-funding schools but continuing to provide "tax giveaways."
"I appreciate you trying to give it 1 percent, I really do," she said. "But don't tell me it's a priority, because it's not."
Dolecheck said the House plans to unveil additional efforts to provide targeted funding to schools this year.
He said House Republicans hope to up to allocate up to another $10 million to address inequities associated with transportation issues.
Public school advocates have lobbied for more equitable funding of transportation, with rural school districts arguing a disproportionate share of their budget is consumed by transporting kids to and from school compared with their urban counterparts.
Also on the table is an extension of a statewide one-penny sales tax, which benefits school infrastructure projects. The tax, also known as SAVE, is set to expire in 2029. It allows school school districts to bond against the tax revenue to fund building repairs, new construction and classroom technology.
The increase in funding was unveiled at a midday subcommittee meeting and was fast-tracked into a full committee meeting immediately afterward. Dolecheck said House members hope to have a bill passed within the first 30 days of the legislative session.
In the Senate, Republicans advanced a "shell bill" that includes a funding structure but does not include specific funding numbers out of a subcommittee meeting Wednesday evening.
That bill will allow them to address school aid in a timely manner in cooperation with the House, they said. It is expected to advance through a full committee Thursday.
However, Dolecheck said he does not know whether the Senate would propose a matching increase.
"The Senate has taken the lead on a couple of things that the House hasn't necessarily agreed with on the (budget cuts) side, so we'll have to work though that," he said. "... I have not seen any direction from them yet on where they would be."


text:
Q: OSGi Kafka client fail to load OAuthBearerLoginCallbackHandler because of cast exception I'm adding a Kafka Producer to a legacy OSGi application and I could configure the Kafka Client v3.2.1 as a bundle. It worked well, but when I tried to set up OAuth SASL it failed because OAuthBearerLoginCallbackHandler cannot be cast to AuthenticateCallbackHandler.
As I can see on the code OAuthBearerLoginCallbackHandler implements AuthenticateCallbackHandler. I know that this error can happen when both classes belong to different classloaders, I saw this error happening without OSGi. But how can I fix this error packaging Kafka Client as an OSGi bundle?
Error activating Kafka Producer Component: javax.security.auth.login.LoginException: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Callback handler must be castable to org.apache.kafka.common.security.auth.AuthenticateCallbackHandler: org.apache.kafka.common.security.oauthbearer.secured.OAuthBearerLoginCallbackHandler
        at org.apache.kafka.common.security.oauthbearer.OAuthBearerLoginModule.initialize(OAuthBearerLoginModule.java:278)
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:62)
        at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
        at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:498)
        at javax.security.auth.login.LoginContext.invoke(LoginContext.java:736)
        at javax.security.auth.login.LoginContext.access$000(LoginContext.java:195)
        at javax.security.auth.login.LoginContext$4.run(LoginContext.java:682)
        at javax.security.auth.login.LoginContext$4.run(LoginContext.java:680)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at javax.security.auth.login.LoginContext.invokePriv(LoginContext.java:680)
        at javax.security.auth.login.LoginContext.login(LoginContext.java:587)
        at org.apache.kafka.common.security.oauthbearer.internals.expiring.ExpiringCredentialRefreshingLogin.login(ExpiringCredentialRefreshingLogin.java:204)
        at org.apache.kafka.common.security.oauthbearer.internals.OAuthBearerRefreshingLogin.login(OAuthBearerRefreshingLogin.java:150)
        at org.apache.kafka.common.security.authenticator.LoginManager.<init>(LoginManager.java:62)
        at org.apache.kafka.common.security.authenticator.LoginManager.acquireLoginManager(LoginManager.java:105)
        at org.apache.kafka.common.network.SaslChannelBuilder.configure(SaslChannelBuilder.java:170)
        at org.apache.kafka.common.network.ChannelBuilders.create(ChannelBuilders.java:192)
        at org.apache.kafka.common.network.ChannelBuilders.clientChannelBuilder(ChannelBuilders.java:81)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.ClientUtils.createChannelBuilder(ClientUtils.java:105)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.producer.KafkaProducer.newSender(KafkaProducer.java:484)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.producer.KafkaProducer.<init>(KafkaProducer.java:428)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.producer.KafkaProducer.<init>(KafkaProducer.java:289)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.producer.KafkaProducer.<init>(KafkaProducer.java:316)
        at org.apache.kafka.clients.producer.KafkaProducer.<init>(KafkaProducer.java:301)

This is what I'm using as export/import packages:
    <servicemix.osgi.export.pkg>
        org.apache.kafka,
        org.apache.kafka.clients,
        org.apache.kafka.clients.*,
        org.apache.kafka.common,
        org.apache.kafka.common.*
    </servicemix.osgi.export.pkg>
    <servicemix.osgi.import.pkg>
        javax.management.*,
        javax.security.*,
        javax.net.ssl.*,
        javax.crypto.*,
        org.ietf.jgss.*,
        org.slf4j.*,
        net.jpountz.*;resolution:=optional,
        javax.xml.bind;resolution:=optional,
        org.xerial.snappy;resolution:=optional;version="[1.1,2)",
        sun.misc;resolution:=optional,
        sun.nio.ch;resolution:=optional,
        sun.security.krb5;resolution:=optional,
        com.ibm.security.krb5.internal;resolution:=optional,
        com.github.luben.zstd;resolution:=optional,
        io.confluent.kafka.serializers;resolution:=optional,
        io.confluent.kafka.serializers.context;resolution:=optional,
        io.confluent.kafka.serializers.subject;resolution:=optional
    </servicemix.osgi.import.pkg>

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Learn about your skin and how to take care of it with the perfect products.
Perfect for groups of 5 or more. These workshops are performed at your location and dive into skincare basics and makeup application that lasts.
You will be taught how to use makeup for your skin, discuss the ideal skin regiments, and receive personal recommendations.
A one-on-one makeup lesson. Learn how to apply a full face of makeup, customized to your skin type.
Bring your makeup and brushes for a beauty-bag makeover! We can determine which products to continue using, which need to be eliminated, and how to properly care for your beauty tools with sanitation instruction.
Let's get digital together! Schedule a 30 minute time slot with me to have a virtual makeover session and assessment. There is no charge for this service. We will do a similar step-by-step walkthrough as the in-person "Beautiful You" makeover!
Make your makeup and brushes available for a beauty-bag makeover! We will determine which products to continue using, which need to be eliminated, and how to properly care for your beauty tools with sanitation instruction.
Professional products are now available to the public consumer for the first time! As an Independent Beauty Guide, I am able to consult and provide this line of makeup on my LimeLight website. Click the button to be directed to my makeup page!


This is how the flag appears at a page that covers the entire history of Gr�mio flags. The star represents the sole Gr�mio player on the 1970 World Cup team. I believe this is the official flag.
This is a very good page with the four flags Gr�mio had over history. It can also be reached by going to this Gr�mio home page, then click on Cultura Tricolor on the left menu. Now on Bandeiras on the menu on the left.
The direct URL is www.gremiosite.com/bandeiras.htm.
Another version of this flag is at this unofficial fan's site; both are more or less consistent with what's described in the club statute at the official club site (drag over Conselho deliberativo and click Estatuto e Regimento Interno. Article 3 can be summarized as "Two triangles, a red one based on the left and a white one on the right, with the club's initials interlaced in the upper left corner in white and the date of the club's foundation below them."
E.C. Juventude of Caxias do Sul (Rio Grande do Sul), played in the national second division this year. Eleven green and white stripes with the club logo in the center. This is from a photo of a large flag in the stands at the club website, so is possibly unofficial. The logo is also from the same site, heavily retouched.


text:
Saboteur in Texas
Sin Killer
by Larry McMurtry
Simon and Schuster, 300 pp., $ 25.00
The Wandering Hill
By Sorrow's River
Folly and Glory
Larry McMurtry; drawing by David Levine
In his 1968 book of essays on Texas, In a Narrow Grave, Larry McMurtry wrote:
The Texas writer who really wants to get famous has only to work up his autobiography in such a way that it will (1) explain the assassination and (2) make it possible for President Johnson to be impeached. If he can do that, his name is made. The New York Review of Books will beat a path to his door, particularly if his door happens to be somewhere in Manhattan. Should his door be in Anarene, Texas, they will probably rely on the mails, but in any event he can put obscurity behind him. If he ever gets to New York he may even meet Susan Sontag.
Replace the words "the assassination" with "Enron," and "Johnson" with "Bush," and it becomes clear how little the Texas literary scene has changed. Yet the self-described "minor regional novelist" Larry McMurtry, whose work betrays no concern for presidential politics, has now published twenty-seven novels, three collections of essays, three memoirs, a biography, and more than thirty screenplays, all while working full-time as a bookseller. It is a display of energy worthy of his pioneer ancestors, and with this enormous output he has put obscurity behind him. He dominates the literature of his marginal place as completely as Faulkner dominates Mississippi.
By another measure—the fulfillment of the youthful dreams mockingly outlined above—McMurtry's success has been just as dramatic. He appears regularly in these pages; and Susan Sontag has even put in an appearance in Archer City, Texas. Perhaps the most remarkable testament to his fame is that by returning there to found an enormous antiquarian bookstore, he has managed to turn Archer City, once a stranger to fashion, into a chic destination. His rising tide has lifted many local boats: to accommodate the overflow from the Spur Hotel, until recently open only three nights a week, the town added a second hotel, the Lonesome Dove Inn, where guests can unwind in the Last Picture Show Common Room or the Terms of Endearment Suite. Visitors come to Archer City in hopes of catching a glimpse of McMurtry: Thomas Swick devoted a chapter of his travel collection, A Way to See the World, to a trip to Archer City. It begins in disappointment: McMurtry has left for Los Angeles the morning of Swick's arrival. The woman behind the counter at the general store tells him: "We get a lot of people from Texas. They come out on the weekends." Swick takes in the sights:
I had never approached a Dairy Queen with reverence before, but this was the most glorified, most literarily significant Dairy Queen in the world. It was London's Café Royal, Paris's Closerie des Lilas, transported to Texas, with a table for one.1
Thus is Larry McMurtry, like Paul Bowles in Tangiers, or Goethe in Weimar, one of those rare writers who become tourist attractions in their own lifetimes. In this guise, and not as a writer, Larry McMurtry is an authentic part of the contemporary culture of Texas, a culture that has always had difficulty distinguishing kitsch from art.
My first encounter with him was as a figure in a landscape. In Houston, where I grew up, people took refuge from the petrochemical haze in the hills to the west of the city. My family's country house was in Austin County, where I remember a friend of my mother's propped up in a hammock, reading Lonesome Dove while sipping whisky and soda out of a red plastic cup. The title, rendered in a font best described as "saloon," leered out from the cheap paperback cover, which also featured a tepee, a cowboy, and a herd of cattle. This tacky, overwrought western-ness complemented the rest of the ruburban scene—with the immense, unused barbecue pit; with the cows, almost certainly rented; with the ladies in denim shirts and silver wildflower jewelry up for a weekend of "antiquing." McMurtry seemed to belong to all those people, trying idly to reconnect with a past they couldn't quite recall and weren't all that interested in anyway.
I instinctively rejected the book, and its author, as just another folksy fraud. In Texas, art was not made but bought, and as the bluebonnet paintings and Limited Edition Frederic Remington Bronzes piled up, it seemed increasingly unlikely that we would ever be able to analyze our real experience. What artists we had belonged somewhere else. Donald Judd could have gone back to SoHo, and Georgia O'Keeffe moved on to New Mexico, which, with its turquoise and sunsets, made more sense.
Our strengths were elsewhere. We had invented the silicone breast implant.
For a place of its size and importance, Texas has a remarkably thin literary résumé. Yet it has never been virgin territory. Any writer who wished to deal with Texas seriously encountered a range of lively stereotypes. These were generated more by films (Giant, Written on the Wind) than by books, reaching a glorious apotheosis in the television series Dallas. These louche fictions encouraged Texans—churchgoing, conservative, unshakably conventional—to believe that they were, in fact, flamboyant playboy millionaires.
The Dallas mythology was so easy, so internationally credible, that it became inseparable from real experience. It offered urban Texans, who had never had one, a self-image, a standard to measure themselves against. The Ewing model was flattering—few people dislike being thought of as rich—and it had little competition. Our mythological figures—the cowboys, the oilmen, the Alamo heroes—were, in the urban context, unimaginably distant. But Texans, inhabiting what McMurtry has called a "context of no context," were just as likely to accept one cheesy concept as another. Real estate fraud being the one great constant in Texas history, Texans had never much resisted false advertising. And visitors, eager to spot rich people or oil wells, arrived, found what they were looking for, and declared the investigation at an end: John Bainbridge's The Super-Americans (1961) is one remarkable example of this distortion.
Eventually, of course, Texans became curious about our origins, only to find that what we had mistaken for history was really only marketing. Any flicker of authentic experience was immediately doused in a syrup of hyperbole and sentimentalism:
Mr. Rawlins looked at him as if he were a child. "No," he said, "you can't find act-ual relics no more. At least you can't find enough of them, and what you do find's sky high. Lot more profitable to make them. You know there's six thousand antique stores in Texas alone, not to mention Arkansas and Louisiana? Where you gonna find that many kerosene lamps and wagon wheels?"
So wrote Larry McMurtry in Moving On (1970). As I learned when I shed my initial resistance and began reading him, McMurtry—himself a celebrated antiquarian—has devoted much of his life to clearing out the fake wagon wheels and kerosene lamps and tracing the real history of Texas. He has written about the countryside and the small towns, as well as the cities. His Houston series—Moving On, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), Terms of Endearment (1975), and The Evening Star (1993)—was the first recognizable novelistic portrait of Houston.
Why such a portrait had not been created before, and why it has not really been attempted since, remains something of a mystery. When McMurtry started working, Houston, like other Texas cities, was an established and influential place, but it lacked even a rudimentary literature. Its idea of itself was derived entirely from advertising copy, which encouraged people to "think of Houston as a cluster of mud huts around the Shamrock Hotel, in the cellars of which people hide from the sticky climate, emerging at long intervals to scatter $1000 bills to the four winds."2
McMurtry avoided the local tendency toward boosterism: and though living at the time outside the state, he displayed no sign of the equally unfortunate tendency of displaced Texans to vilify or caricature the place they came from. He did not shy away from typical Texas images—his books feature rodeo stars speeding through the desert in hearses; hicks firing away in honky-tonks; scheming, horny River Oaks widows—but he balanced them with moving and convincing portraits of more typical people: impoverished grad students, lovelorn bankers, nice girls in disappointing marriages.
His picture was convincing. He arrived in Houston in the same way millions of other rural people did: in search of broader horizons. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen (1999), he remembers that Houston, where he went for college, was "my first city, my Alexandria, my Paris, my Oxford." For those determined to escape the loneliness and poverty of the countryside, Houston and Dallas and Austin and San Antonio meant possibility.
Yet the movement of those rural people did not create a literature, in part because their migration had no distinctive character, and the huge cities that resulted were scattered and piecemeal. It lacked excitement, as epic movements go: the Texas migrants were less oppressed than bored, and their story had none of the sentimental glamour of the shtetl Jews arriving in America, or the Southern blacks moving north. The story of these cities had gone unrecorded.
As some places were being born, others were dying. In The Last Picture Show (1966) and its sequels, set in the fictional town of Thalia, McMurtry showed the effect the new cities had on the places they drained. Early on,
I realized I was witnessing the dying of a way of life—the rural, pastoral way of life. In the Southwest the best energies were no longer to be found in the homeplace, or in the small towns…. The kids who stayed in the country tended to be dull, lazy, cautious, or all three.
McMurtry showed why the heartland, an abstraction most urbanites suspected to be the true repository of hominess and warmth, was rotten. Middle America, he suggested, was more about bestiality than needlepoint, and The Last Picture Show was scandalous when first published. Read today, the book is more depressing than titillating. Once even the pic-ture show closes down, an abandoned people find a last refuge in a joyless sexuality.
However pathetic their descendants' fates, the founders of towns like Thalia were extraordinarily dynamic. Of his grandparents, McMurtry writes:
I spent every day of my young life with William Jefferson and Louisa Francis McMurtry and, consequently, am one of the few writers who can still claim to have had prolonged and intimate contact with first-generation American pioneers, men and women who came to a nearly absolute emptiness and began the filling of it themselves.
The mythical West was palpable to him in a way that it can never be again: McMurtry's uncle knew the last great Indian warlords, Geronimo and Quanah Parker; and McMurtry has said that his epic western Lonesome Dove was "about my grandfather's time, and my uncles', none of whom seemed like men of another time to me."
It is astonishing enough that one person could be on a first-name basis with so much of the historical experience of Texas—the original conquest; the destruction of the Indians; the rise of the ranching economy; the end of the open range; the birth of the small towns; their subsequent decline; the emigration from the countryside; the rise of cities. Just one of these themes could have kept a lesser writer busy for a whole career. McMurtry has mapped them all.
In El "Martín Fierro," published in 1953, Jorge Luis Borges wrote:
Gaucho poetry is one of the most singular events recorded in the history of literature. It is not, as its name seems to suggest, poetry written by gauchos; educated people, gentlemen from Buenos Aires or Montevideo, composed it.
Borges was, like McMurtry, a famous bibliophile and one of the most erudite men of his day. Yet both balanced their intellectualism with a nostalgia for the lives of their fierce, earthy ancestors, people who had no use for airy literary preoccupations. Borges revered the generals who fought Argentina's wars; McMurtry the sinewy pioneers "who came to a nearly absolute emptiness and began the filling of it themselves."
There is an important difference between the two. Borges was born in a posh neighborhood in a settled capital. His distance from the heroic phase of his nation's history allowed him to see Argentina aesthetically—and made it difficult for him to apprehend its ghastly realities. (When at last he did, he departed, disgusted, to die abroad.) Borges's reflections on the South American western are warm and celebratory, which McMurtry's writings on the North American West can never be. Like the story of the gauchos, and despite the existence of a few literary cowboys, the story of the West was mainly told by señores de Dallas o de Los Angeles. And Larry McMurtry has never been a señor. He was too close to the rural past to romanticize it, and he saw the inconsistencies inherent in westerns too clearly to write them with a straight face.
He has seemed determined to sabotage the genre that has made his name, describing the western as "a mode of entertainment" and lamenting that "in this day and age everything is taken seriously, even the Western." He was not inclined to take Louis L'Amour and John Wayne as representatives of real experience; his westerns were more about the genre than the West. Anything for Billy (1988), a novel about Billy the Kid, is a "parody" of the dime-store novels of his youth, he has said; and Lonesome Dove is an effort "to subvert the Western myth with irony and parody"—an effort that he regrets his readers have missed.
But there was more to the western than irony. The experience it commemorated was tragic. McMurtry knew without having to be told that conquering that "nearly absolute emptiness" was tedious and barbarous and hot, less a matter of ringing verses than of generations of thankless labor. He also knew, from his fathers and uncles, how powerful the nostalgia was for that life after it had vanished. He saw the heartbreak of cowboys vegetating in seedy suburbs or plumping up behind the wheels of Cadillacs. He understood that for such people the western was an essential, living connection to an extinct way of life.
How to resolve this struggle, so typical of Texas, between a core of real experience and an asphyxiating cushion of fraud? McMurtry seems to have wrestled with this problem throughout his career, and the attempt to unite pulp farce and grand tragedy animates his new western, The Berrybender Narratives. In four volumes—Sin Killer (2002), The Wandering Hill (2003), By Sorrow's River (2003), and Folly and Glory (2004)—McMurtry follows the rich English Berrybender family as they careen through the West, tripping from disaster to disaster, between 1832 and 1836.
But what are these English grandees doing there in the first place? McMurtry first suggests that the lecherous Lord Berrybender was beginning to feel put upon by his many bastards; but in the first novel in the series, Sin Killer, there seems to be another motivation: boredom.
Whim alone was their lodestar and guide—whim it was that caused them to pack up and leave their great house in Northamptonshire; whim had brought them through America to their present resting place on a sandbar in the Missouri River—and only so that Lord Berrybender could shoot different animals from those he shot at home.
As implausible as this sounds, the West really was, in those years, packed with would-be Humboldts. The American West represented a great unknown that fascinated sedentary Europeans (and Easterners) just as Africa and the polar regions would later. The West attracted artists and scientists, but it also attracted a kind of tourist familiar from India and South Africa: the jaded rich man who wanted to "shoot different animals from those he shot at home."
Such recreational swashbucklers rarely traveled on a shoestring. Lord Berrybender brings along what seem like hundreds of other people, including a large part of his large family, commensurate staff, and lots of assorted hangers-on. His entourage fills a luxurious steamboat heading up the Missouri River. Setting this menagerie loose in the wild, wild West gives McMurtry—a writer, remember, who has lamented that the western is taken seriously—ample opportunity to work in the tradition of the writers whose work fills drugstores and Wal-Marts. His sex scenes are pure camp—one has a leggy cellist tickling the old Lord's balls with her bow—and feature saucy exchanges like the following:
Jim continued to sniff her neck. "I expect you've been missing our ruts," he said, after a moment.
"I have…of course I have," she said, startled that he had put it so baldly. "I have been missing our ruts."
The English cast seems to have spent a lot of time paging through thesauruses—
"A baby?" Tasmin said again, convinced suddenly it was true. "But what will we do? We have no domicile—not even a cabin."
—and the Indians hearken to an age before political correctness:
"How many men does it take to row it?" he asked.
"No one rows it—it is a steamboat," Draga said. "It eats wood. If there is no wood it eats coal."
The Bad Eye didn't like the sound of that at all. A boat that ate wood could not be a normal boat.
"It sounds like a god," he said.
A series of mishaps places Tasmin, Lord Berrybender's randy, headstrong daughter, at the head of the chaotic group. She is initially enraptured by the physical glory of the New World, marveling at its emptiness and grandeur. She falls in love with the man who seems the personification of this landscape: the rough frontiersman Jim Snow, known as the "Sin Killer" for his terrifying, Old Testament theology. His fundamentalism has not prevented him from taking two Indian wives prior to Tasmin, who is undaunted by his past and convinced she will soon whip him into shape. But despite her best efforts at domestication, Jim cannot be made fit for society. He is strong, silent, and sexy, but unable to experience or even to comprehend any complex emotion. He is, McMurtry suggests, an American, a westerner, a creature too hardened by the extreme conditions of life in the wilderness to understand an educated, civilized person like Tasmin. She, in turn, feels rejected, and, in her bemusement, seeks sexual gratification elsewhere.
At the beginning of the second book, The Wandering Hill, the party is stranded by the harsh winter in a fort along the Yellowstone River. Lord Berrybender, who has by now lost several body parts and a good bit of his mind, is outraged to discover the German Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied breathing down his neck. The Lord had assumed that the entire Missouri Basin was his private preserve. He cannot conceive "by what right a German prince had wandered out of the forests of Europe and invaded the rich hunting range which he supposed would be wholly his to plunder."
The prince (1782–1867) was a real historical figure, a naturalist and explorer who wrote an important account of Brazil. He wanders through these pages alongside a whole panoply of other figures from western history. There are the artists Karl Bodmer and George Catlin. There is Sacagawea's son Pomp Charbonneau, whom Tasmin eventually deflowers; and the young Kit Carson, a blushing frontier Cherubino. Only a few of these fascinating people will be known to readers, McMurtry has done little to distinguish them from the many other purely fictional characters, who appear and then vanish with unsettling frequency.
"Our help has dropped like flies already, but what is that to Papa? He'll just hire more help," one young Berrybender notes after a spate of appalling deaths.
A happy consequence of unloading the cabbages was the discovery of their missing sister Ten, aged four years; little Ten had evidently been living happily among the cabbages for some weeks, missed by no one.
The characters don't seem to care if their fellow travelers live or die. Is this a reflection of the author's attitude toward his own manufactures? The reader can be wary of getting involved with people whose own creator hesitates not at all to misplace, dismember, and murder them. Is it just indifference?
It is, of course, possible that McMurtry is using these mounds of corpses to debunk the Western myth promoted by the dime-store western. There was a real human cost to the American expansion:
The plains, the hills, the West were far stronger than any strength they had to set against it. It had already crushed two of [Tasmin's] brothers: Bobbety and the mysterious Seven. It had killed most of their servants: Fraulein Pfretzskaner, Gladwyn, Señor Yanez, Milly, Tim, Master Jeremy Thaw, and good George Aitken, the steamship captain. And of course it had taken Pomp, a man adept in its ways.
The stunning body count (of which the above catalog is but a small sample) certainly magnifies the achievement of the survivors, like Tasmin, who remain to build the new West. The obstacles they must overcome are spectacular and spectacularly rendered; the descriptions of natural disasters—buffalo stampedes, blizzards, plagues—are the strongest passages in the series. In Sin Killer, a French priest says: "Snow is so much more a thing to be welcomed when it falls on cobblestones…or ancient walls…or lamplighters…or the shawls of prostitutes." In the wilderness, nature, spectacular from the deck of the steamboat, is merely terrifying. McMurtry likewise resists romanticizing that wilderness's human inhabitants: many of the Indians are so monstrous, especially in the glee with which they torture captives, that a reader can hardly mourn their collective passing.
But what is the alternative? The strength that carries the survivors through, the vigor that subdues the West, is blunt; it has nothing to do with the newcomers' superior refinements. The very few who do survive are, quite simply, more physically powerful, luckier, and more skillful with weapons than the people they displace. The least of their advantages is a deluded belief in their frou-frou "civilization": the steamship, representing modern science, is reduced to a pitiable wreck; Jim Snow's religion is coarse and barbarous; and Tasmin's library of libertine books, salvaged from repeated disasters, is repeatedly decimated. After one calamity she rushes desperately around, gathering "every page she saw—there a page of Byron, here one of Mrs. Edgeworth's, there several pages of Father Geoffrin's beloved Marmontel."
Argentina's other great writer, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, saw his nation's dilemma plainly, as the subtitle of Facundo (1845) makes clear: "Civilization and Barbarism on the Argentine Plains." But few Argentines—even those, like Borges, who so badly wanted to be—have been convinced that civilization is triumphantly or permanently established there.
Americans, on the other hand, see their own history as one glorious march toward progress, onward and upward, from sea to shining sea. We are serenely confident that our civilization bestows benefits on everything it touches. Texas—that vast repository of every American extreme—does not so much reject criticism as ignore it. "Nothing short of insult moves people in Texas," McMurtry has written. Even that seems charitable. After darkening thousands of pages, trying to provoke Texans into thinking less of themselves and more about themselves, the brambly McMurtry now finds himself a tourist attraction. But the role of the traditional Texas writer has always been to be a team player, to show up for the chamber of commerce meetings and paint lovely pictures of the bluebonnets: to be a uniter, not a divider.
To see Larry McMurtry as a heartwarming object of local pride is to do a shocking disservice to his daring and tragic vision. His great theme, he has written, is "the contrast between old and new, province and capital, wild and settled." This is, of course, the great theme of all New World literature, from Melville and Henry James to Euclides da Cunha and Sarmiento. Unlike Sarmiento, however, McMurtry still hasn't decided which side deserved to win—or even which side was which. Was capital better than province, new better than old, settled better than wild? He has chronicled them all. But McMurtry has yet to deify his culture, like the naive young Borges, who proclaimed that "the plains and the suburb are gods."3
In the last Berrybender novel, Folly and Glory, McMurtry shows Captain William Clark, veteran of the first great western expedition, in retirement at St. Louis. "One wall of his office was covered with a huge map of the trans-Mississippi regions; the Captain loved nothing more than augmenting his map, adding a stream here or a pass there, whenever he was brought information that he considered reliable." McMurtry places sad, nagging doubts in the mind of the heroic explorer:
Had it been glory, or had it been folly, the unrelenting American push? Were town and farm better than red men and buffalo? Bill Clark didn't know, but he could not but feel bittersweet about the changes he himself had helped bring.
Years ago, McMurtry put it another way: "One sometimes wonders if Bowie and Travis and the rest would have fought so hard for this land if they had known how many ugly motels and shopping centers would eventually stand on it." One smiles; but this is perhaps the most serious question that can be posed in America. To doubt the value of the western conquest is to question the value of progress, the country's essential faith. Joan Didion's recent masterpiece Where I Was From raises the same question about the founding of California: "For what exactly, and at what cost, had one been redeemed?"
Larry McMurtry still isn't sure.
More by Benjamin Moser
Desperately Not Seeking Susan
Sarajevo Revisited
Sontag in Sarajevo
Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (2009). For his work in bringing Lispector's writing to a wider international audience, he was awarded Brazil's first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. His latest book, Sontag: Her Life and Work (2019), won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2020.
Lyons Press, 2003, pp. 169–172. ↩
George Fuermann, Houston: The Feast Years (Premier, 1962), p. 10. ↩
Borges later—and with great good sense—renounced the entire book, El tamaño de mi esperanza (1926), in which this alarming statement appears. Despite his determination to suppress the work, his widow has authorized its republication, and it is now easily available. ↩
'Animal Farm': What Orwell Really Meant
Midge Decter
New Novels
February 1, 1963 issue
Sandra Lim
Maureen N. McLane
Sylvia Legris
Corn Crowfoot, Corn Buttercup
Jan Zábrana, translated from the Czech by Justin Quinn
Evening Trains
Jason Epstein
V. S. Pritchett, 1900–1997
April 24, 1997 issue


text:
Q: Calculate the bounding box from a body extraction mask I ve got a binary mat file, which contain only black and white pixel. Basically is a body extraction mask and I want to calculate the bounding box. How can I calculate the min and max white value from that binary image in order to calculate the bouding box of the shapped calculated? My code:
Mat bodyEx(string filename){

cv::Mat matInput=cv::imread(filename);

//Set mask
cv::Mat matMask = cv::Mat::ones(matInput.size(), CV_8U) * cv::GC_BGD;
cv::Rect area;
area.x=int(matInput.cols*0.1);  area.y=int(matInput.rows*0.05);
area.width=int(matInput.cols-2*area.x);
area.height=int(matInput.rows-2*area.y);
rectangle(matMask, area , cv::Scalar(cv::GC_PR_FGD),-1,8,0);
area.x=int(matInput.cols*0.35); area.y=int(matInput.rows*0.25);
area.width=matInput.cols-2*area.x;
area.height=matInput.rows-2*area.y;
rectangle(matMask, area , cv::Scalar(cv::GC_FGD),-1,8,0);

//Segmentation
cv::Mat bgd,fgd;
cv::grabCut(matInput, matMask, area, bgd, fgd, 1, cv::GC_INIT_WITH_MASK);
matMask= matMask&1;
cv::compare(matMask,cv::GC_FGD,matMask,cv::CMP_EQ);
cv::Mat matSegmented=cv::Mat::zeros(matInput.size(),CV_8UC3);
matInput.copyTo(matSegmented,matMask);

int lowestWhite_x;  int lowestWhite_y;
cout << "Rows " << matMask.rows << " and cols: "<< matMask.cols << endl;
for (int row=0;row<matMask.rows;row++)
    {
       for (int col=0;col<matMask.cols;col++)
        {
            if(matMask.at<uchar>(row,col) != 0){lowestWhite_x = row; lowestWhite_y = col;}
        }
    }

cout << "Rows " << lowestWhite_x << " and cols: "<< lowestWhite_y << endl;
//Display
/*cv::imshow("InputImage",matInput);
cv::imshow("mask",matMask);
cv::imshow("Segmented",matSegmented);
cvWaitKey();*/

return matSegmented;

}
EDIT:
Rect faceRect, brect;
std::vector<std::vector<cv::Point> > contours;
std::vector<cv::Vec4i> hierarchy;
cv::findContours( matMask, contours, hierarchy, cv::RETR_CCOMP, cv::CHAIN_APPROX_TC89_KCOS);
for ( size_t i=0; i<contours.size(); ++i )
{
    cv::drawContours( matInput, contours, i, Scalar(0,255,0), 1, 8, hierarchy, 0, Point() );
    cv::Rect brect = cv::boundingRect(contours[i]);
    cv::rectangle(matInput, brect, Scalar(0,255,0));
    cout << brect.size() << endl;
}

It calculates all the contours. Finally I want to keep the bb. 4 points not all the contours of the image. How can I do so?

A: Find the contours on the binary image using findContours function and find the bounding rectangle using boundingRect function.
An example of the usage can be found here: How to draw a rectangle around the contours?
Response to your edit:
Try Rect myRect =  boundingRect(contours[i]); instead of Rect myRect =  boundingRect(contours); is wrong.


Ahlcon International School in Mayur Vihar awarded 40 points to those applicants who live within the radius of 3 km, however their lottery cut-off was 65 points.
Admission to nursery schools has various criteria and being residing near the schools simply cannot fetch you admission for your ward.
As reported by The Indian express, applicants who have siblings in the intended schools, who is the first child, or applicants whose parents are alumni of the same schools, are some of the admission criterions and the neighbourhood norms alone cannot be guaranteed admission.
It is widely accepted that nursery admission across Delhi's schools is based on points system, according to which the cut-off points are determined.
The lottery cut-off was 55 points.
Almost every school follows the same pattern or a similar system. Ahlcon International School in Mayur Vihar awarded 40 points to those applicants who live within the radius of 3 km, however their lottery cut-off was 65 points.
"If parents have points only for distance, they will not make the cut for the lottery," said Ahlcon International School principal Ashok Pandey.
Several other schools such as the Mother's International School, Springdales School, and Vasant Valley School follow a similar system.
Springdales School at Pusa Road reserved 10 seats of every 50 for alumni wards.


It has been established up under the Film Division of the Ministry of Culture.
It is located in FTII Campus, Pune.
It will showcase the journey of over a hundred years of Indian cinema.
It is a coalition of developing countries under the United Nations.
It has 77 developing countries as members across the globe in all.
China is a fulltime member of the G77.


text:
Q: replace comma with whitespace my input:(((text(text here))) AND (test3) Near (test4) NOT (test5) NOT (Test6)),((tttt,tttt)),((and,lol)),((hbhbhbhbhbh))
my ouput:(((text(text here))) AND (test3) Near (test4) NOT (test5) NOT (Test6) (tttt,tttt) (and,lol) (hbhbhbhbhbh))
the result that I expected:(((text(text here))) AND (test3) Near (test4) NOT (test5) NOT (Test6) ((tttt,tttt)) ((and,lol)) ((hbhbhbhbhbh))
I want to replace the comma with whitespace when I have this string ),(
DEMO:

 var txt="(((text(text here))) AND (test3) Near (test4) NOT (test5) NOT (Test6)),((tttt,tttt)),((and,lol)),((hbhbhbhbhbh))"
  var finalResult=txt.replace(/[)],[(]/g," ");

console.log("Result:",finalResult);

A: You should be including the )( in your result:

var txt = "(((text(text here))) AND (test3) Near (test4) NOT (test5) NOT (Test6)),((tttt,tttt)),((and,lol)),((hbhbhbhbhbh))"
var finalResult = txt.replace(/[)],[(]/g, ") (");

console.log("Result:", finalResult);

I am getting the following output:
Result: (((text(text here))) AND (test3) Near (test4) NOT (test5) NOT (Test6)) ((tttt,tttt)) ((and,lol)) ((hbhbhbhbhbh))

Also, note that you don't need a .toString() function here as the original txt is a type of String.


text:
Crooked cop heist 'Triple 9' a good thriller
Bob Mahoney / Open Road Films
Kate Winslet in a scene from "Triple 9."
Anthony Mackie, left, and Casey Affleck in a scene from "Triple 9."
By Colorado Daily | coloradodaily@dfmdev.com |
'Triple 9'
Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Kate Winslet, Anthony Mackie, Clifton Collins, Jr., Aaron Paul, Norman Reedus, Teresa Palmer
Director: John Hillcoat
Rated: R for strong violence and language, drug use and some nudity
Red light dimly illuminates the inhabitants of a parked car, discussing "Russians," "this job" and "inside three minutes." It's a scene that sparks instant genre recognition, and as the opening to John Hillcoat's "Triple 9," is an effective expository piece for this twisted tale of dirty cops, mobsters and thieves. Set in Atlanta, the film has a steamy, humid quality; sweat glistens on the skin of morally corrupt men as they do dirty work for others, and themselves.
With a screenplay by up-and-coming writer Matt Cook, "Triple 9" imagines a world where vets of the war in Iraq, whether private security contractors or official military personnel, become cops and crooks, sometimes putting their tactical training to use for nefarious, profit-driven purposes. But they aren't the ones pulling the strings — that would be the mafia led by Irina (Kate Winslet), the Machiavellian wife of an imprisoned mob boss, her hair teased to the heavens.
The heist crew is Mike (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Marcus (Anthony Mackie), Franco (Clifton Collins Jr.), Russell (Norman Reedus) and his brother Gabe (Aaron Paul). Before the opening credits have finished, they've pulled off a shockingly bold bank robbery, but though they make off with the bounty, turns out they need one more thing before they can get paid by Irina. It's a file of some sort to unlock another file, but that's of no consequence to the story. What matters is that they decide the only way to pull off the task is to trigger a 999 — in police parlance, that's an officer down.
While the band of cops and robbers make their plans, Marcus and Franco still have to do their detective day jobs. Within "Triple 9," there's a subplot reminiscent of "Training Day," as Marcus takes on a new partner Chris (Casey Affleck), teaching him that the rules of the streets are far from police protocol. The newbie and streetwise detective tangle with Latino gangs and drug dealers, to bloody and violent consequences. The role of Marcus is a role worthy of Mackie's talents — a morally complex cop balancing his base instincts and outward persona.
Chris, with a wife and son, and family connections to the force — Woody Harrelson plays his uncle Jeff, a senior officer, giving a totally compelling "Bad Lieutenant" by way of "True Detective" performance — is positioned as the rule follower, the moral compass. But Ejiofor's Mike is the emotional center of the story, struggling to keep his crew from imploding, trying to retain contact with a son he has with Irina's sister Yelena (Gal Gadot), a convenient pawn for Irina.
Hillcoat directs with a sense of immediacy and grimy realism, bringing the audience into the shootouts and bloodshed on the streets. Atlanta becomes another war zone for the men who have seen war, battling an enemy of a different race and culture. Simultaneously, Hillcoat infuses the story with a sense of epic, nearly Greek, tragedy and symbolism. Red light bathes the characters when they're touched by evil, an effective narrative harbinger.
With so much drama and tension developed from minute one, "Triple 9" loses steam as it attempts to wrap up the complicated character arcs. But with a stacked cast and skillful filmmaking, "Triple 9" proves to be a satisfying crooked cop heist thriller, imbued with complicated topical issues that last long after the adrenaline rush.


The "dead lake" of Penza is one of the scaries location of Russia: perfectly round, it seems that it has been used during the cold war to bury overdue chemical munitions, by means of underwater explosions at a depth of 4-6 meters. But on the origins of the lake other voices circulate involving an UFO.
There is a creepy location in Russia and is not the Molebka's triangle, but the dead lake of Penza, near the remains of the toxic weapon desctruction facility of Leonidovka, by now disarmed, a closed and with no drainage lake, so currently it doesn't expose to danger nearby environment, also because the banks are strengthened with protective embankments and sandbags. But Penza's inhabitants tell different and much more disturbing story: the perfectly round shape of the lake would be due to the landing and following take-off of an alien UFO.
Witnesses interviewed by the local newspaper, the Penza Post, referred that in the '50s one night was heard a terrible noise and a blinding shine expanded from all directions. They thought to the explosion of the nearby military chemichal plant, but it was seen to come down from the sky above the forest an enormous spaceship, with incandescent throws from the inferior part. The forest caught fire and underlying earth transformed it in a strange mass of dust or ash.
The giant flying saucer landed without any problems, while the time seemed to freeze. Nobody was seen to go out anybody of the mysterious object untill the spaceship, perfectly smooth, come back to eject what seemed to be throws of plasma from the inferior unloadings, quickly regaining altitude to then disappear in the dark sky.
Many years Penza's inhabitants have gone to see the deep hole that was formed where the flying saucer was landed, perfectly round shaped and with absolutely smooth edges, which with the time began to be filled with water. Then the Soviet authorities began to send away the people, recommending to everybody not to visit the place anymore and not to speak of it, while started to circulate rumors regaring high levels of radioactivity in the area, perhpaps because of a nuclear engine used by the UFO.
Storis regarding the dead lake of Penza are fed by the fact that it is almost impossible to reach the lake's shore: all the roads and the forest paths are covered by trees and bushes, while the banks of the road Penza-Zolotarevka are boarded up by military barriers. The lake has surely an artificial origin, btw officially it is not due to an UFO but to the extraction of peat in the first half of 20th century.
The aerial vision of the lake by Google Earth shows black water, without any traces of life. The few that succeeded in venturing through the forest surrounding the dead lake in these year reported to have experienced an "inexplicable and animal" fear, perceiving the proximity to a mysterious and worrying artificial object. Who knows if and when we will be able to get some official informations more regarding the story of this tenebrous dead lake.